life

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I can’t think of a good Shakespeare quote, but there’s a little Milton below

Hello and good morning.  Welcome to another Thursday.  Please wipe your feet on your way in.

Just kidding.  It’s all crap here, anyway; don’t worry about wiping your feet.

I don’t have much to say today.  I don’t think I do, anyway.  Not that such a thing has tended to stop me in the past, but I don’t know.  I feel that maybe it’s at least slightly different this time.

Let’s see…updates.  I took my third small-dose of lithium this morning.  We’ll see how it goes.  I don’t think one would expect to see any major effects already, so be patient.  I tend to be patient, at least about some things.  What’s a doctor without patience, right?

Oh, yesterday afternoon, I had a near episode of esophageal spasm.  I’ve had that before‒the first big time it got me to the ER (I was already working in the hospital, so it wasn’t far to go), where I was checked for potential heart attack, which it was not, of course.

It wasn’t one yesterday, either, in case you’re worried.  It responded, albeit somewhat stubbornly, to drinking warmish water (and finally some Coke) to help soothe and relax my esophagus.  I don’t think anyone else in the office even noticed.

If it had been like the first time they would have noticed!  That time I had an apparent vaso-vagal response and my blood pressure went down way low, and I almost fainted.  That was part of why they brought me downstairs:  a BP of 80 over 40 in a 29 year old man who did have a history of heart surgery is somewhat concerning, and when you’re a medical resident at the hospital, they tend to treat you with urgency.

Okay, well, I think my esophagus yesterday had been irritated by my recent upper GI illness.  It’s not impossible, I guess, that lithium could have been involved.  I have noticed that, if I accidentally take too many multivitamins‒i.e., more than one in a day‒I am prone to esophageal spasm.  Perhaps electrolytes (etc.) are involved in at least increasing the chances of it happening.

I doubt they would be enough to trigger it all by themselves, though in severely misadjusted amounts they could cause severe pathologies of various kinds.  I wouldn’t be at all surprised if I found out electrolyte “imbalances” had caused such a thing all by themselves if they were off enough.  I don’t think that’s the case with me, though.  I have no other signs or symptoms of electrolyte dysfunction that I have noticed.

Okay, that’s enough discussion of that for the moment.  I don’t want to trigger an event by thinking about it too much, but since my upper GI tract is still a bit sensitive, it’s not impossible that I could accidentally do that.  “The mind is its own place, and of itself / can make a Hell of Heaven, a Heaven of Hell”, as someone said.

I think I may try to do another audio post today.  The few that I did recently seemed surprisingly popular, and conversely, my readership numbers have been going down pretty steadily since the last time I did one.  Maybe doing them in the first place was a bad idea, like giving a dog a taste of human food so that now it doesn’t want to eat its usual stuff.

Of course, dogs are practical, about food at least.  They rarely avoid their usual meals because they get treats.  They just eat them both.  At least, that’s how the dogs I have known have behaved.

Cats are a little more persnickety.  There are situations in which cats really will go dangerously hungry because the food on offer is not their favorite.  I would do that with eggplant.  It’s not the only food about which I could say that, but it’s the worst.

Anyway, again, I may do an audio today, partly as an experiment.  That may even become the subject of the audio, but I don’t think I’ll leave it at that (knowing me, which I do, at least a bit).  That would be kind of lame.  I guess we’ll see.

I might as well do something though.  I haven’t played or sang (or really listened to) any music in nearly two weeks, and I haven’t been reading, and I certainly haven’t been writing fiction.  I haven’t even been doing any exercises on Brilliant dot org.  And I’m possibly writing worse blog posts lately, and it’s causing people to stop reading.

I don’t know, maybe the declining readership numbers are related to the fact that I’ve been posting a bit earlier in the morning.  My insomnia has been generally increasing, and I’m getting up earlier and earlier, and so going to the office earlier and earlier.  Some people might just miss the posts because they’re arriving before they look at their notices (or email, or what have you) and other things follow and drown my little whimpers out.

So, if you’re interested, keep your eyes (and ears) open today for my possible audio thingy.  I’ll try not to disappoint, even though that’s something I just tend to do ceteris paribus.

Whatever the case, I hope you all have a truly good day.

TTFN

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Blog post after being out sick

I’m sorry about yesterday, everyone*.  I had some kind of stomach bug or had eaten something that was a bit off, something like that, and I stayed out of work, so I didn’t write a post.  Anyway, it was the sort of thing associated with nausea and vomiting, not really with much “lower GI” trouble, thankfully, but now it’s mostly worked its way out.  Certainly, I don’t feel like I’m going to throw up any more, at least not imminently.

It would be nice to be able to say confidently that I don’t think I will ever throw up again in my life‒if I could say so with good reasons‒but I don’t think it’s very likely that I’ll be able to say that honestly.

I need to stop “talking” about this, because it’s making me feel queasy again.

Anyway, I’m going to the office today, because I need to do payroll, and there will also be a bunch of crap on which I will need to catch up from yesterday.  That’s part of the reason I hate staying at the house from work even when I don’t feel well.  There’s always so much catch-up work after even one missed day.  And catch-up is too sweet and acidic for someone who has an icky tummy (ha ha).

I’m really not doing well, overall, in case you haven’t been able to tell, or in case you’re just new here, which is not impossible.  In my ongoing quest to try to correct some of this, I recently began encountering videos and some articles about low-dose lithium‒which, in non-low doses is used to treat bipolar disorder among other things**, as you may already know‒being beneficial for things like depression and even for preventing or curtailing certain forms of dementia (and, potentially, slowing aging, though that seems more speculative).

You can’t get the medical form of lithium without a prescription, which is probably good, since in those strong doses it can have significant toxicity, and people using it need to be monitored.  But there are other forms that one can get as supplements, and I ordered some recently (from a supposedly reputable brand).  They arrived yesterday evening, so I took one dose before bed‒thankfully they don’t appear to be irritating to my stomach‒and then one this morning.

It’s no big surprise that lithium is available in many forms.  It is the third most abundant element in the universe, having been created (in comparatively tiny amounts) when hydrogen and helium*** were made, in the aftermath of the Big Bang (technically we are in the aftermath of the Big Bang, and we could even say that we are in the ongoing process of the Big Bang).

But the lithium atom (the ion, really) is the active part in those various available compounds.  It is chemically quite similar to sodium and potassium (having that one electron in its outer shell, like they have) which are ubiquitous and essential electrolytes for numerous bodily processes.  Like them, in elemental form, lithium is a soft, light metal (indeed, the lightest metal), and like them it is highly reactive.

Anyway, enough of the chemistry trivia.  The point here is that I am trying to use it to treat my chronic dysthymia/depression if I can, which has been a difficult and long task at which I have been far from successful.

Probably part of that, or maybe even all of it, is related to my ASD, and so it may not be amenable to the same kinds of treatments that often work for others, and can be quite intractable by ordinary means, since the root problem is very different.  I don’t know how often I’ve had severe depressive episodes in the past in which it’s actually been autistic burnout or shutdown or related stuff.

There is growing data that things like cognitive behavioral therapy, which has relatively good results for neurotypical sufferers of depression, may actually be counterproductive in those with autism.  Autistic people tend already to analyze their thoughts, often too much, and to be disconnected from their feelings, though they have them and they can be overwhelming.  Analyzing it all just seems to increase that disconnect.

So, yeah, I’ve had very limited benefit from therapy, and similarly limited response to various kinds of antidepressants.  But maybe lithium will help.  I guess I will find out.

I would really like to try therapeutic psilocybin therapy, because based on the state of the science as I understand it so far, it works via entirely different mechanisms involving the “default mode network”, a series of brain areas/modules that are associated with self reference and the like.  But there is no legal use of psilocybin in Florida except in clinical studies.  (Thank you, Tricky Dick et al; may you and your ilk rot in Hell for as long a consecutive time as the length of misery to which you’ve contributed in so many others.)

The only places psilocybin therapy is legal in the US include Oregon (a very long way from me) and, ironically, DC.  So I don’t see how I would be able to avail myself of it in the current state of things.  And my brain is not my friend, so I am very leery of using psychedelics without supervision.

But I have to do something, or I’m pretty sure that pretty soon I am going to kill myself.  There is very little that holds me here day to day, and the very kind and good people who remain in my life are people I feel‒indeed, I am all but convinced‒would be at least as well off without me around, and probably better.

Have a good day, though.

*However many that may be.  It’s probably not a huge number.  Then again “everyone” can refer even to one person, so I guess it’s a tolerable pronoun, even if it might be slightly misleading in its usual connotations.

**It’s also pretty good for rechargeable batteries, and when added in the right proportions to deuterium/tritium can enhance the yield of thermonuclear weapons, because neutron capture leads to it decaying into tritium and…something else, another fusion product or some such; I need to review the specifics.  It’s never been my primary field of interest.

***Most helium currently on Earth is not helium from that early “elementogenesis” or whatever the official term is.  Rather, it is the product of radioactive decay of heavy elements, which often produces “alpha particles” which are just helium nuclei‒two protons and two neutrons‒and which can pretty readily grab electrons from the world about them and turn them into atoms.  This is why‒so I understand‒helium gas pockets are often found near concentrations of uranium ore and the like.

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Monday, Thursday, Doomsday, Workday, let’s call the whole thing off

It’s Monday, but for some unclear reason, I felt the strong urge to write that today was Thursday when I was titling this file to be saved.  It took a moment of concentration to correct that urge.

Probably it goes back to the long stretch of time when I did my blog posting only on Thursdays, because I worked on my fiction every other workday.  That paid off, in a sense, because I did write quite a lot of fiction in that time.  Though, to be clear, it did not pay off in any material sense; I’ve spent more by far on copies of my books to give away to coworkers and such than I am likely ever to make back.

It was an awful lot of work for things that, as far as I know, only two other people have actually read at all.  My music has done better, honestly, though not in the sense of bringing in any income.  But at least some people have listened to it, my originals as well as my covers.  I guess songs are quicker and easier to consume than novels or even short stories (especially my short stories).

So, yeah, even though it’s been years since I was following that Thursday blogging practice, the etchings of that habit are still not completely effaced from my brain.  This is the way of habits, as I think I mentioned not too long ago.

Speaking of music, by the way, I want to share a really cool bit of music that came up in my YouTube feed, and which I think deserves a listen (and a like and a share if you can) from all of you.  It’s very good, as is the artist’s other work.

YouTube is basically all I did this weekend.  I did not read nor write, nor did I play any music (either on a stream or from a recording or on guitar or keyboard or cello).  I haven’t done any of those things in several weeks, barring a few one-time exceptions.  I mean, I went for walks on Saturday and Sunday, though I was careful not to go too far, and I used sunscreen this time.  This was because I had a few errands to run; it was too hot and humid to walk for fun.

But, yeah, I watched videos and vegged out rather pathetically pretty much the entire weekend.  I mostly watched various reactors reacting to either Backrooms or Fantastic Four First Steps.  Meaning, I watched multiple different people and groups of people reacting to each movie, more or less at random.

It’s almost like watching a movie with someone, though not quite*.  Movies are a way of socializing for me; they are one of the few ways I can connect with people.  TV shows are similar.  I don’t really like to watch things by myself.  I do it sometimes, of course, and I even went to see a movie by myself once, when I went to the theater to see the last Guardians of the Galaxy movie, because I just didn’t want to miss that.

I considered going to see the new Spider-Man movie this weekend, but it just felt…I don’t know, like something that would highlight my solitude even more than does watching oodles of different people reacting to movies that I’ve liked.

Mind you, I did watch a few more worthwhile videos.  The Science Asylum guy put out a couple of new videos about basic circuit theory topics, and I watched Tyler Folse reacting to a Veritasium video.  That tends to be fun.  He (Tyler, I mean) frequently speaks my own thoughts** when he’s watching such videos, which is refreshing.

Anyway, that’s as good as it gets, and I don’t know if it will ever get that good again.  But I am still going to work, though it is often difficult for me clearly to say why I do it, even to myself.  I’m just bringing in income to sustain an existence that is almost without anything to recommend it.

I don’t like it here in Florida, for one thing.  It’s naturally an amazing state, quite unique and with many, many interesting life forms.  Unfortunately, humans are not one of the interesting ones.  They are an infestation that has turned this state into a wellspring of the stupidity that is so rampant in the US.  It’s no coincidence that Taco Piggy took up residence here.

So, I’m working to sustain an existence I hate, in a location that is largely repellent‒but with a few very lovely oases in time, such as my youngest, who is enough to counterbalance many, many negative things, but who would almost certainly be well served by not having me in their life any more than necessary.  That’s certainly the general consensus at which most other people have arrived regarding my presence in their lives.

It gets harder and harder all the time for me to get up and get into the office every day.  It’s not because there’s anything particularly bad about the office; I mean, the noise can be really irritating, and if I don’t watch myself it can get the best of me, but the people are okay.  They’re actually quite nice.  I’m without a doubt the least pleasant person at the office.

That alone is enough to make life subtly and pathetically dreadful.

*I also watched a few more people reacting to the “special look” trailer for Avengers:  Doomsday, but I think I’ve seen most of them by now.  Doom is, as I’ve noted, my favorite villain and one of my favorite characters overall in fiction, so the special look is nice because it focuses more on him.  Here it is, in case you missed it.

**Not literally.  He’s not like Tyler Durden.  I just mean that he seems to have similar thoughts in response to the things he’s watching to the ones I have.

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Each paragraph in this post begins with a vowel. This pattern STARTED as an an accident…

Ugh.  I don’t feel quite well this morning.  I woke up in the middle of the night almost throwing up, which was also associated with almost choking on my near-vomit and coughing for quite some time while still feeling queasy.  I think I ate something that didn’t agree with me, as they say.

Either that, or it could have been one (or more) of my medications (all OTC) that gave me trouble, because I took more of them than usual yesterday; it was quite a bad pain day for me.

Oh, yeah, and my coworker was out sick as well, and therefore I was a bit more run around than usual despite having a bad pain day.  So, that wasn’t very good.  It hasn’t been a very good week either, overall, even by my standards, which are not exactly stellar.

On the other hand (he said with uncharacteristic optimism), at least that means that next week is likely to be better than this week.  This is yet another example of the phenomenon of regression to the mean, which I discussed here recently.

Anyway, at least today is Friday, and I am not working tomorrow.  Having the weekend off is something of a mixed blessing, of course.  It’s definitely good for me to get the extra bit of rest, which I need mentally even more than physically.  But the increased isolation that is an inescapable part of me being off work can have a bad impact on my mood.

And as I think I’ve noted here before recently, my various distractions are losing their capacity to distract.  I haven’t been reading or playing music/singing or listening to songs or to podcasts or to audio books.  And I need to search increasingly widely to find YouTube videos that grab my attention even briefly.

Of course, I have whole playlists of videos related to science and to mathematics and to autism and what have you, full of videos I thought looked interesting at the time, and which would probably be interesting, at least in principle, if I were to start watching them now.  But I cannot seem presently to summon up the energy, the interest, even to start a single one of them.

Again, it’s been a particularly bad week for me.  Maybe it was triggered, or influenced, by my long walk in the high heat and my associated sunburn from Sunday.  I suspect that took more out of me than I realized at the time.  I particularly wonder if the sunburn might have been worse than I thought.  Certainly my skin is peeling all over my forehead, nose, and neck.

Alas, there’s not much I can do about it now other than, potentially, to learn from it.  For instance, this weekend, since I don’t work, I can do my things that require walking quite a bit earlier, when it’s cooler, and I can also make sure to wear sunscreen when I do.  At least I do tend always to remember to bring water, and even if I don’t bring it, there are dozens of places where I can buy some along my routes.

Okay, here’s a little aside that occurred to me as I contemplated my own frustration at having to use the stupid smartphone (ha ha) keyboard.  It seems, from what I have heard, that Steve Jobs et al were inspired to try to create the touchpad for the iPhone and related products by watching Star Trek:  The Next Generation when he was younger.

I watched that show, too, after initially being prudishly defiant about it because I loved and supported “original” Trek.  Before long I loved the new show.  But even back then, I thought the concept of their various screens, which had no fixed controls and no actual keys to press and so on, looked revolting.  I hated the idea.  I likewise hated the notion of reading from the flat computer screens, or the handheld screens as was often the case; I thought it looked terrible.

I could see that it would be quite useful, however, and that it would be only too handy not only to be able to bring up whatever pages or diagrams or whatever one needed on the screen but to have variability of controls on a screen, so the same surface could fulfill many purposes.  I could tell how useful it might be, and I could sort of feel the inescapability of it at some level, and aesthetically, it kind of turned my stomach.

And I thought to myself (just now) that if I could avert the existence of the stupid touch-screen crap, but to do so I would have to allow TNG never to have come into existence…

…I think I might choose to let Star Trek go.

Admittedly, some of this verdict is probably related to the fact that I spent a lot of time watching NextGen with my (now-ex) wife, starting from quite early in our relationship.  So, I don’t watch it anymore, not on reruns or whatever else, because that pain outweighs the pleasure by quite a bit.

In addition, there are many songs and shows and movies and musicals and even books in which I do not partake anymore, because they remind me of my ex and all things associated with my ex, and they make me feel very sad and lonely.

Unbelievable:  that “aside” took up more info-space than the rest of this post entirely!

I suppose that happened with Shakespeare sometimes, too, so I shouldn’t feel too bad.  But, of course, I do.  Hey…it’s me after all.

Anyway, I hope you all have a good weekend, and if you like, you can probably rather safely look forward to next week’s blogs being better than this week’s.

I know I do.

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I haven’t found a good Shakespeare-based headline

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, and there is no lapcom involved in writing this post, at least not on my part.

Maybe “involved” is too broad a word.  One could argue that all the posts I’ve written before on my lapcom(s), of which there are many (posts, not lapcoms), set the stage and set the pace and set the precedent for this post.  And so, in a sense, they are involved in this post, and thus so is it.  However, that is reaching a bit.

So, I will clarify.  I am writing this post on my smartphone, not on my lapcom, which is still at the office, which is not where I am writing this.

I feel very groggy this morning, perhaps even more so than I have the previous three mornings, though the residua of my migraine pain appear mostly to have gone.  Between that* and the fact that I am writing on my smartphone, I may not write much today.

I appear to be very tired.  Actually, I say “appear”, but it is my own state to which “very tired” refers, and it is a subjective sensation (though it is also an objective fact), so if I appear tired to myself, then the odds are good that I really am tired.

Speaking of being tired to myself, it feels like I’m being so very tedious here lately.  Perhaps I am no more tedious than I’ve ever been.  I don’t know.  For all I can tell, I have always been tedious, my entire life, starting long before blogs (BB if you prefer).

Certainly, no one has wanted to stick around me for any very long period of time, not my parents, not my (former) spouse, not my children.  I seem to be an unpleasant fact and presence eventually to those around me.  Maybe it’s time I took the hint and got gone.

I still haven’t been able to read.  I think I’ve spent less than twenty minutes reading over the last two weeks or more.  I don’t know if you quite realize what a departure that is for me.  I haven’t even been reading audio books‒which would count for me, since I always read auditorially, meaning that I “hear” the words I am reading.

I also haven’t played guitar (and sang) for more than maybe half an hour in that same time.  That happened when I started watching a video of “Groovy Grace” reacting to the Pink Floyd album Animals, which is one of my favorites.

As the album began, with Pigs on the Wing Part 1, I could not resist pausing the video, picking up my own black Strat, and playing and singing that song.  I played the combined song, parts one and two, including my own tortured** version of the guitar solo by Snowy White, which was the version one could hear on the old 8-track tape, or so I’m told.

After that, I played and sang a few more songs, including Wish You Were Here, which starts and ends on the same chord (G) as Pigs on the Wing.  I might have also played the Radiohead song Lucky, and probably The Man Who Sold the World.  That was it.  I didn’t even do Nothing Compares 2U.

Other than that, I’ve just mainly been distracting myself.  But I’m a bit foggy even for that right now.  You can’t tell (probably) because I edit these posts, but I’ve been making a lot of typos again.  That’s more likely to happen when I use the smartphone just at baseline, but today’s rate is still an outlier from the mean (see my post from the other day).

All right, let’s wrap this up.  I don’t have anything more to say (not for the moment, at least), so I will emulate the habit of Talking Heads’ Psycho Killer and seal my lips.

TTFN

*How groggy am I?  Well, I initially wrote “between that…” (by which I meant, my level of grogginess) “…and how groggy I am, I…”.  So, yeah, pretty groggy.

**I nevertheless actually like my version of the solo better than Snowy’s.  Go figure.

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Foundations tend to have a lot in common

Hey there, everybody.  I hereby wish you all a good Tuesday morning, by whatever criteria you might use to judge the goodness of a day of the week, which are not necessarily the ones I might use.  Different people can have quite different priorities.

Although, when you get down to it, such differences exist only in the periphery of our value judgments, and they can only become powerfully pertinent in a population the basic needs of which are by and large met.  For nearly all of us, nearly all of the fundamental requirements of a good day are going to be very similar, albeit generally unspoken (because they are so obvious, I guess).

For instance, most of us would like the day not to include any serious dangers to life and to health*.  Most people would prefer a day without serious illness, without significant pain, without acute fear.  Most of us would prefer a day on which we do not go (completely) hungry, except perhaps by deliberate choice.  Most of us would prefer to have access to adequate clean water, and to shelter from heat and cold and rain and so on.

I’m sure I could think of other things that lie at the base of Maslow’s famous hierarchy of needs.  Up a level or so would be slightly more abstract desires that are nevertheless common to most humans.  These include being among peers that one likes, and who like one as well.  It includes, for many of us, the (unfulfilled?) desire to share one’s day with actual loved ones:  parents, siblings, children, partners, close friends, etc.

These are things that begin to be more unreliable in the modern world, despite the advances that make the basal needs less commonly thwarted.  Perhaps this is partly related to the fact that, in the ancestral world, one’s social group was very much essential to one’s basic needs.  Now that those basic needs are less frequently thwarted, it is possible for us to lose track of and allow to slip away those social connections upon which we evolved to depend.

Also, our societies no longer really have much built-in scaffolding around such needs.  This appears to be because there are few forces at work that reinforce that scaffolding, and so it slips into disrepair, to everyone’s cost.

To be clear, this is not the result of some conspiracy of evil-doing, selfish billionaires or government operatives or whatever other presumed enemy of the good one childishly imagines.  It is a result of stochastic, chaotic, complex forces in a civilization that is very far from any kind of stable equilibrium‒a civilization that has seen world-changing discoveries and innovations and ideas multiple times in nearly every decade, let alone over any person’s lifetime.

Civilization is a spontaneously self-assembled system, but its existing patterns keep getting disrupted in multiple places, in multiple ways, all the time, and so it must recrystallize in some new, local frost-pattern‒one that will, in turn, most likely be disrupted again, and soon.  There’s way too much going on everywhere for any mere human or group of humans to have actual control over even their own personal circumstances for very long or very well.

Any external locus of goodness is going to be unreliable, not just in practice but in principle.  This is a fact that Siddhartha Gautama recognized many centuries ago, as did Lao Tzu (or whatever the proper name is), and the various stoic philosophers of Greece and Rome.  I suspect there were similar insights among thinkers in the ancient western hemisphere as well, but I don’t think we have access to good records of their specific thoughts, alas.

It’s questionable, of course, whether any internal locus of goodness can be reliable in any way, either, since we are no more the authors of our brains/minds than we are of the external world.  I can tell you plainly, and with very little fear of contradiction, that I am not the author of my mood disorder(s), and I am not the author of my ASD any more than I am of the septum pellucidum “cyst” in my brain or the hole that was in my heart.  Neither is anyone else.

Okay, that’s enough mindless philosophy**.  I doubt that I’ve said anything particularly useful or even interesting.  For that I apologize; I’m not at my best, I fear.  I mean that not just in the trivial sense, that one is surely only at one’s overall “best” on very rare occasions throughout one’s so-called life.

I am still off NSAIDs, though at least my concerns that prompted that moratorium appear to be improving.  But I am quite stiff and sore, obviously.  My sleep has, if anything, been somewhat worse than usual.  I have not read any books, fiction or otherwise, in over a week.  I also haven’t done any exercises on Brilliant dot org in well over a week.

I played guitar a little on Sunday (and sang) but considering the noise in my room, with fan and air-conditioning going, and with my cheap little practice amp, it was a bit unsatisfying.  I played my Gibson SG (special edition, I think this one is called, with three pickups and so on).  It’s nice, but I think I like the Strats and the Les Paul style guitar a bit more (though the SG is beautifully lightweight).

I often think I’d like to have a telecaster, because some of the people whom I’ve heard playing them get some quite interesting sounds.  But that’s an idle sort of notion; it’s not really important.

Anyway, that’s it for me for today, at least‒though I admit, with some regret, that I will probably be back tomorrow, exclusis improvisis.  

I again wish you all the best of days, as measured from the base to the summit of Maslow’s pyramid.  If anyone deserves it, you do.

*Although people delude themselves about such dangers when it comes to, for instance, driving.

**“Don’t call me a mindless philosopher, you overweight glob of grease!”

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My morose, meandering Monday musings

It’s Monday again, of course.  I won’t get into any of the usual stuff I discuss about Mondays, except to note that, outside of the minds and artifacts of humans*, Monday doesn’t exist.  It’s just another day, and each day is not fundamentally different from another day.  Wild creatures do not get the weekend off, for they have no such concept.  On the other hand, they don’t exactly have enforced workdays or work weeks and all the many artificial but very real stressors that humans have created.

I am still off NSAIDs except for some limited aspirin, and I am quite stiff and sore, a fact which is particularly difficult to ignore in my thumbs as I write this.  My urinary signs may be improving; certainly I’ve been working on intervening in the issues, not least of which intervention is the aforementioned curtailment of NSAIDs.  I’m not sure how this will go, but I guess I will find out, one way or another.

I haven’t read any books of any kind‒including audio books‒in almost a week now.  There are several processes behind this fact, but a big part of it seems to be a general anhedonia.  Nothing is very interesting to me.  I don’t even feel any particular interest in the new Spider-Man movie, which would normally engender excitement.

Heck, I honestly don’t even feel much about Avengers: Doomsday, and Doctor Doom is probably my very favorite villain (and one of my favorite overall characters).  Podcasts also seem boring, and so do various videos and shows, educational, fictional, or anywhere in between.

I don’t really do anything in my spare time, to be honest, other than try to distract myself, and that’s becoming more difficult.

My boss, on Saturday, suggested that maybe after work, before I go “home”, I should stop somewhere and get the urinary stuff checked out, and I said, “Yeah, I don’t see that happening.”  The prospect of taking care of such things in my “spare” time is about as natural a feeling as the prospect of spontaneously levitating.

It’s not in my nature to be much good at taking care of myself.  I’m not really inclined to take care of much of anything administrative in my life, to be honest**.  I pay rent and electric and water and cable/internet bills, because not doing so would be a great and immediate inconvenience, but other things are not in my wheelhouse.  They are not salient to me, and I don’t know how to make them salient without them already being salient.

So, yeah, if the issues I’m having are precursors to, or symptoms and signs of, some more serious problem, well…that’ll be that, won’t it?  As I said to my boss a few sentences after my above reply about seeking help, “Basically, I’m just waiting for something to kill me, anyway.”

That’s the state of my life now, and it has been that way to varying degrees for quite some time.  I believe this qualifies for the term “passive suicidal ideation”.  I don’t just experience the passive form, of course, but it is more common, or more frequent, and slightly more persistent than the active version.

Make no mistake, though:  for the last dozen years or so, not a day has gone by, as far as I can remember, that I didn’t have at least some moments of active SI.  And, of course, I have many methods available; I make sure to keep things that way.

So, yeah, one of these days my blog may just stop, and if it does, there’s a good probability that it will have been because I stopped being so passive.

I make no predictions, and I certainly don’t engage in threats or warnings.  I’m just trying to clear the air, and explain why, left to my own devices, I’m not liable to seek any medical help for anything unless it is so acutely painful as to be impossible to ignore, like a kidney stone.

I figure that sooner or later, some infection or maybe some malignancy will come along and take everything out of my hands‒at least unless I take matters into my own hands before that time, which is eminently possible.  I’ve said before that it would be nice if I got some kind of final crisis that at least allowed me to say goodbye to the people I love, but I recognize that nature doesn’t promise nor owe me any such convenience.

It doesn’t matter.  Quite possibly‒probably‒no one would want to come say goodbye to me anyway.  It would not surprise me, I’ll admit.  It would be sad, but I would probably consider it entirely appropriate.  Why should anyone care if I am going to die, anyway?

Okay, well, on that chipper, cheery note, I’ll bring this post to a close.  It’s already too long, honestly.  But I do hope that you all have a good week collectively and good weeks individually.

*And humanoids, I suppose.

**That’s a weird expression, isn’t it?  Does it imply that if I don’t say it, you cannot assume that I am ever honest?  But surely, claims of honesty are just the sorts of things that liars would make, just as religious texts will claim to be true and infallible.  “You have to be trusted by the people that you lie to, so that when they turn their backs on you, you’ll get the chance to put the knife in.”

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The Emperor of Silence reaps no relief from pain…or something like that

Welcome to August, everyone.  For today is August 1st, 2026 (AD/CE).  How exciting.  Huzzah.  Yippee ki yay motherf…

…or goodness sake, we certainly have a rather Roman day today, don’t we?  The month is named after a Roman emperor (the first “official” one, though I wish he’d just kept the name Octavian, since Augustus has too much of a try-hard vibe), and the day is named after the Roman god, Saturn.  Sailor Saturn is also my favorite sailor soldier*.  Though, that last thing doesn’t have anything to do with Rome.

I’m working today, just to confirm what would probably be your conclusion if you were even thinking about the question.

It’s not an absolute correlation, by any means; it’s possible, and not even unreasonably unlikely, that I might write a blog post but not go to work, or that I might go to work but not write a blog post.  The latter has happened more times than not (by far) throughout my life, but we need not worry about that likelihood, since it is ruled out by the fact that I am indeed writing a blog post.  You can tell, because you’re reading it (albeit not while I’m writing, as far as I know).

I am still quite sore all over, especially in my thumbs, back, hips, knees, ankles, shoulders, middle back and right side and flank***.  So, yeah, I don’t feel very great.  I also still have some residua of my apparent middle respiratory inflammation, but I think that’s improving.

Maybe it will be good for me to go through a bit of time with basically no NSAIDs in my system‒they’ve been there a lot, for a long time, and cannot fail to have had unintended effects.  We’ll see how the lack thereof even for a few days impacts my health.

On the other hand, NSAIDs can reduce some kinds of depression, and I think they did at least some of that for me.   Still, I am using Tylenol, and that seems possibly to help not merely with physical pain, but also with psychical pain (a little bit).

Weird, right?  And it doesn’t do that by decreasing inflammation in the brain, as NSAIDs appear to do.  It definitely works differently than NSAIDs, though it is not entirely unrelated.

It’s interesting how modules in the nervous system became repurposed (or added-purposed) for later mental functions in larger brains and especially in social animals.  The mental processes associated with physical revulsion and disgust/avoidance toward potential toxins and infectious materials became tied to our moral emotions of judgement, condemnation, and contempt.

Physical processes of fear became connected with anxiety about social opprobrium‒though, in a species like humans, social ostracism really was a serious danger to one’s life in the ancestral environment, to say nothing of being a rather obvious impediment to reproduction.

Anyway, the point is, it shouldn’t be too very surprising that a substance that attenuates physical pain can also ease psychological torment, at least a bit.  We know that opioids do this as well, and to a much greater degree than acetaminophen.

That’s one issue they have.  If a person has a lot of psychic pain‒and many of us do, which is predictable given that we are creatures adapted to hunting and gathering in the savannahs of Africa but are now living in the nightmare/fever dream/bad acid trip that is the modern world‒and has no better, more available, way to assuage it, they’re going to be tempted to reach for the tools they have, however blunt.

If we can figure out better ways of easing those pains, ones that are available and usable by everyone who needs them and which have acceptably few side-effects, that would be nice.

Okay, well, I don’t know if I’ve written anything coherent here, but I’m going to keep this relatively short, because I am still feeling poorly.  I hope you all have a good day and a good remainder of the weekend.

*Not counting Sailor Moon, who has the same unfair advantage over the others that the Beatles have over other bands.  Sailor Saturn is my Radiohead**/Pink Floyd sailor soldier.

**Heck, on one of my favorite songs by Radiohead, No Surprises, the chorus is followed by the invocation, “Silent.  Silent.”  And Sailor Saturn is the sailor soldier of silence, wielding the Glaive of Silence, with the power to end the world and bring about…well…silence.

***This makes me nervous considering my urinalysis strangeness, but I haven’t yet checked that today.  It feels like it is improving.

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You’re in analysis, or something like that

I apologize for not writing a post yesterday.  As you may have guessed, I did not work yesterday, because I was out sick.

I think I mentioned the apparent URI I’ve had.  Really, it’s more of a middle respiratory infection, like bronchi to bronchiole level, but the acronym for that would be MRI and that might be confusing.  This is one of those issues with acronyms; when you shorten things enough, the code becomes ambiguous.

Anyway, I also had some weird urinary signs (not symptoms) that made me nervous that all the NSAIDS I’ve been taking have been starting to catch up with my kidneys.  So, I’ve taken a temporary NSAID sabbatical apart from aspirin.  I’m still taking some Tylenol (and CBD, which does at least some good).  Unfortunately, my pain level overall has predictably increased, and that certainly contributed to the fact that I stayed at the house yesterday.

Anyway, I’m trying to make sure to get lots of fluids and whatnot, and that process at least seems to be doing its thing.  I’ll do another UA today‒I have my own test strip bottle*.

Okay, enough of all that stuff.  I’m sure that nearly no one has any interest in reading about my adventures in analyzing my own bodily fluids.

Of course, I don’t have a lot else clawing its way out of me at the moment‒oh, those lazy xenomorph embryos!‒so I don’t know what I’ll use to fill the rest of this blog post.  But I do expect to be writing a post tomorrow, since the office should be open tomorrow, so maybe that will contain something interesting.

I guess today is the last day of July‒at least the last one in 2026 AD/CE.  Tomorrow will therefore be the first day of August in 2026 (AD or CE).  We go from one month named after the nominal first “emperor” of Rome to a month named after the first “official” emperor of Rome.  After that we start up with the ordinally named months, but they’ve all been pushed back two months because of the two dead Romans, so the nominal seventh month‒September‒is our official ninth month.

It would be slightly interesting if, when the calendar was changed from the Julian to the Gregorian, the month had also been changed.  Imagine if the months went May, June, Gregory, August, September…  That might be kind of funny.  Certainly there’s no less of a reason to give old Pope Gregory the Peccary (or whatever his official indicator was) a month named after him than Julius Caesar.

Okay, admittedly, Caesar was a more pivotal historical figure, but one feels (at least, this one does) that he was more a vessel for things that were happening through him and others rather than being the true author of any change.  And Shakespeare didn’t write any plays about the Pope, but then, he lived in Elizabethan England, so that was just a non-starter.  Imagine trying to write a play about a Pope during the reign of Henry VIII’s daughter.

Also, Shakespeare and Gregory the Nocturnal Gregarious Wild Swine were more or less contemporaries.  It’s hard to write popular plays about people who are still or were very recently alive, especially when they were part of a religious schism with one’s own country.  Whereas Julius Caesar was all but the stuff of legend by the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century CE/AD.

It’s too bad Shakespeare didn’t really know anything about ancient Egypt or any of the other ancient civilizations (some of which were as ancient to the Romans as the Romans were to the British of Shakespeare’s time).  He wrote about Antony and Cleopatra, of course, but imagine William Shakespeare’s Ramses the Second (the Great).  Or perhaps consider The Tragedy of Xerxes, Emperor of Persia.

Well, I’m not going to write any plays about them.  I’ve written plays (of sorts) before and have started others, and I have written some (very bad) screenplays and such, but it’s not my area of best creative work.  I’ll just make passing reference to historical figures here, more or less randomly, and maybe someone out there will write a play or show or movie about them, inspired by the reference.

Hey, they keep making movies based on the works of Homer (the Greek poet, not the Simpson).  Mind you, those works are highly fictionalized, if not entirely fictional; you can tell by the presence of things like gods and sirens and nearly invulnerable warriors who gained their protection by being dipped in the river Styx.  Achilles might as well have been bitten by a radioactive spider, for how realistic a figure he is.

Anyway, that’s enough for today.  Sorry if it’s weirder than usual.  Or, on the other hand, I’m sorry if it’s not weirder, but my blog is always this erratic.  I’m not sure about which of the two I ought to be sorrier.

Oh, well.  Please have a good day and a good weekend and a good month of August (but only once August starts‒if you try to have a good month of August on the last day of July, I think you’re setting yourself up for failure).

*It’s really more of a screw-top can, since it’s a cylinder, but because of the association with preserved food, it feels weird to say that I have a can of urinalysis test strips.

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The good, the bad, and the ugh-ly

Ugh, again (I think I began a blog post with that word* earlier this week or some time last week, but I might be misremembering).  It’s Wednesday, and it’s just after 4 am as I start writing this, but I’ve already been awake for two or three hours.  I’m pretty tired (but not sleepy) and I’m feeling under the weather.  I mentioned that I think I have some manner of virus over the last few days, and my throat and upper lungs** feel raw.

Also, yesterday I started having some signs and symptoms that made it appear that I was either dehydrated or having kidney or liver issues, or perhaps an infection.  This was quite surprising and developed rather suddenly, and it really unnerved me because of all the NSAIDS and so on that I use.

So, I haven’t taken anything but plain Tylenol since my main dose of Naproxen yesterday morning.  I don’t know how badly this will affect my pain overall; so far I feel generally achey, and my thumbs are stiffer than before.  But given my kidney stone history, I want to be particularly careful‒at least, for me.

Again, I’m a bit under the weather (as are all non-astronauts at the moment) but I need to go to work, because we’re starting some new processes at the office, and today is also payroll day.  We’ll see how it goes after that.  I’m drinking lots of water, at least, and I haven’t done much wandering around outside in the heat and humidity, to try to avoid sweating too much.

I’m mildly nervous about what, if anything, is going to happen regarding my health in the near future, but I’m too tired to be very nervous, honestly.  I just want some rest.

At least I did play guitar some on Monday and Tuesday morning.  I rather foolishly also did some singing while playing, which has not helped my slightly sore throat, but I have a very hard time not singing when I play.

Anyway, I don’t have any science or philosophy or even psychology subjects chewing their way out of my brain this morning.  They’re in there, but maybe they’re like lazy xenomorph embryos, ones that have decided that they like the warmth and safety of where they are inside a humanoid torso, and so they’re just going to stick around.  It’s probably a bit like just chilling in a sensory deprivation tank, which seems like a nice thing to me.

Okay, that was a weird stream of thought.

Oh, here’s another weird thing:  I’m finding it really hard to find any book to read to keep my interest.  Fiction, nonfiction, books I’ve read before and books I haven’t read, it doesn’t seem to matter.  I even went to the crazy extreme of getting the book Damage after having mentioned the movie the other day.  That is not my usual genre of book.  I’ve read about five chapters (they are very short) but I don’t think I’ll continue.

The YouTube algorithm is falling down on its job as well.

Maybe I should really do a pseudo-sensory-deprivation thing and just stop reading or watching videos or anything of the sort.  I’ve done it before, of course, albeit against my will****, and it wasn’t as horrible as one might expect.  Anyway, I can generally, when my mind is quiet, replay movies and books and shows and whatnot that I know well.  That’s good, because even reading my own stories is getting lame.

Oh, well.  I’m going to call this enough for today.  I suppose I’ll write a post tomorrow, if I go to work, exclusis improvisis.  I hope you all have a good day.

*Is it a “word”, really?  I guess it’s really more of just a syllable of disgust or frustrated exhaustion.

**By which I mean “the upper portions of my lungs”, not “the highest set of what are presumably at least two sets of lungs”, because that latter one wouldn’t make sense.  I have only one*** set of lungs, like all other vertebrates of which I am aware.

***I suppose if one were really pushing it, one could argue that each lobe could be counted as a lung, in which case almost everyone would have three right lungs and two left lungs.  But that’s a rather unnatural division, or at least an asymmetrical one.

****Jail and prison, don’t you know.