mental health

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“Try to hide your hand, forget how to feel”

Well, guess what?  Yep, you’re right.  I’m working today.  Heavy sigh.

It’s not as though I can opt out, since my coworker who shares some of my responsibilities is not able to come in‒he and his wife have a newborn and a toddler, and he’s doing some bartending work on the weekends, so it’s on me, even though I worked last Saturday and even though, honestly, my mental reserves are dipping lower and lower, and I need‒or, well, at least I could really use‒at least one night a week where I can knock myself unconscious and so at least get a form of mental rest.

Alas, that’s not going to happen this week.  I cannot sleep in on Sundays, because I do my laundry on Sunday mornings, and I need to get it done before everyone in the other, main part of the house wakes up and starts doing their things.

So, I’m pretty unhappy this morning, but that’s nothing particularly new.  I don’t have any whimsical musings about infinity to share today.  Also, I did not write this post the night before, as is probably obvious; I’m writing it in the morning.  And, of course, I’ve written no fiction, unless you count the fact that yesterday’s post misleadingly seemed full of pep and vim and spark and pizzazz.  That was a lie.

I feel very just generally hateful toward reality as a whole, to be honest.  There are things and people here and there that I don’t hate, and even a few people I love, but they are far away and far between.  Seeing or interacting with even one of them is a sort of special occasion.

I did try meditating the other day, as I discussed, and though, yeah, I did get depressed, with intrusive thoughts about, for instance, going and lying on the railroad tracks* troubling me.  But I got through the day‒as I guess you could tell, since I’m here.  I wondered if maybe that meditation contributed to my weird but lighthearted digression on infinities and related topics yesterday.

Unfortunately, though yesterday started okay, it didn’t continue as well, and I had a fair amount of pain (and other things happened).  And then, of course, I found out that we’re working today.  Also, I slept terribly last night, but that’s true almost every night.

I wish there was a real “The Force”, including the dark side, because I think at least it would be some compensation for my depression and tension to be able to use force lightning and to be able to choke people out from a distance without needing to touch them.  Though, I like to think I’d use more creative attacks, like squeezing someone’s heart or brain with the Force.  That would be quicker, and they would have less time to know they were being killed, but honestly I’m not interested in causing suffering to people who are intolerable.  I just want them gone.

Yeah, I’m not a good person, I know, though that does depend a bit on specific answers to the questions “good for what purpose?” and “good by what criteria?”, and probably on others.

I’ve said it before, but I do often feel some regret about not “winning” when I played Russian roulette way back near the end of 2012.  Nearly everything in the years since has been of questionable value, and much of it has honestly been rotten.  And it’s not as though the years immediately preceding 2012 were great‒chronic pain/injury, divorce, disability and the like colored a lot of it, but at least I was part of my kids’ life back then.

Again, I’m not going to engage in foolish overgeneralizing if I can help it; there have been moments of joy and even a few achievements in the years between, though the latter have often been causative of reflective reproach, like someone who grew roses but found that the “thorns” were vastly more prominent than the few little misshapen and mutated flowers that were produced.

I occasionally wish I could be like Lord Foul** and just hate everything and everyone except myself, as opposed to the way things are, in which a big chunk of my hate is directed inwardly.  Don’t get me wrong, I know that Lord Foul’s “ethos” is astonishingly pathological and also astonishingly illogical and irrational.  But it has its attractions.  Madness in general often has such seeming advantages, though I suspect that, in reality, they are largely illusory.

I’m tired, and I’m hostile and even hateful, unfortunately.  Events in the world aren’t helping, and though some may counsel just staying away from “the news”, I consider that bad advice.  As Gildor said to Frodo, you can shut yourself in, but you cannot forever shut the world out.  It will impinge upon you, and by being aware of it you can best protect yourself and mitigate possible harm.  “Arm yourself, because no one else here will save you.”

The only ways completely to prevent the world from interfering with you are to destroy the world, to destroy yourself, or to do both.

Am I speaking metaphorically here, or am I speaking physically?  I think the idea can be considered both ways.

Anyway, that’s enough for today.  I hope all of you who read this have a good weekend.  As for everyone else, well, it would certainly be nice if the kind people in the world had good days.

What are the odds of that happening?***

*Incidentally, I would not actually do that.  I would find it far too rude to disrupt the commute of at least hundreds of people and possibly thousands.

**He’s the big bad in the various Thomas Covenant books, and he is one of my favorite villains.

***I’m speaking rhetorically.  I don’t expect that there’s any way for anyone to know the accurate probabilities involved.

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For the blog sees not itself, but by reflection, by some other things.

Hello and good morning.

It’s Thursday, of course, and so I began with my customary Thursday greeting, which takes some form of “Hello and good morning”.  I have occasionally varied the specifics of that a bit—at least once going so far as to write “Goodo and hell morning”—but it tends to stay the same.  Likewise, on Thursdays, I end my blog post with a farewell that I took from Tigger (not from the A. A. Milne stories but from the Disney adaptations):  TTFN, which stands for “Ta-ta for now”.

Anyone who has followed my blog for a while probably knows all this already.  Still, since I can at least have a little hope that maybe some new people will come to read my blog, it’s nice occasionally to let them know about some of the relatively consistent things I tend to do.

Speaking thereof, on Thursdays I also tend to title my blog with some quote from Shakespeare, altered to replace one of the words in the quote with some form of the word “blog”.  Sometimes I have to squeeze the word in pretty brutally, but other times it works really well.  Fortunately, Shakespeare had more quotable lines than pretty much anyone else or even any other relatively circumscribed collection of people, at least in English.

Now that we’re past that introduction of sorts, I should try to write about something more interesting.  I don’t know what that might be or whether I will succeed, but I will try.

I’m still not feeling very well, though I think I may be on an upward swing; I still have a bit of a sore throat and a bit of a cough and all that.  Also, my hearing is persistently hosed in the left ear as it has long been in the right*, with associated tinnitus.  I fear that may be permanent.  There’s not much to do about that.

Because of those issues, I’ve recently been avoiding using my earphones, so I haven’t listened to any podcasts, let alone audio books.  It’s possible I’ll avoid them for good, but I may return to them, or I may elect to go for headphones rather than insertable ear phones.  I prefer the wired kind to any possible wireless ear phones, partly because they tend to stay in place much better than free-floating little ear inserts, but more because they don’t have to be charged all the time.  It’s bad enough to have to keep recharging the stupid phone.

I really wish I could be less tense than I normally am without regressing into depression or having to rely on some manner of pharmaceutical.  I mean to try to get back into regular, daily (or more frequent) meditation.  I know that I’ve said—truthfully—that it often tends to make my depression flare when I start to meditate again, even as it truly helps my anxiety and the erratic, chaotic nature of my thoughts and emotions.  But perhaps I should just accept that and go with it.  I rarely find depression completely debilitating, though it is often life-threatening.  But that’s as may be.  Life is life-threatening.

But I do want to clarify my concentration back to earlier, better levels.  I’m full of ideas for things to do in my immediate future, such as meditating and working on my stories and adjusting my diet and walking more and learning more about all things, all that stuff.  They are good ideas.  But I almost always get distracted by some new thing from even a good preceding thing, much as I used to do when writing stories.

It’s been said that wisdom is the ability to follow the advice you would give yourself if you were someone else.  It’s not nearly as easy as it seems it ought to be.  That’s because humans—and humanoids—are still very much biological organisms with billions of years of potent evolutionary heritage that shapes the moment-to-moment states of the nervous system, rough hew them how we may.

But there are ways to have more control.  I used to do self-hypnotism/meditation every day, a couple of times a day, starting from when I was in junior high.  It was also starting at around that time that I began to do very well in school (to be fair, I was never a bad student, but my performance improved significantly after that).

Once I left that practice behind, becoming distracted by things like college and my soon-to-be-wife, I think my mental discipline and my ability to bring my mind to task as desired deteriorated.  I suppose it’s analogous to an athlete who stops exercising and gets out of shape.

But it’s possible to get back into shape, and the brain is more amenable to improvements—more “plastic” to use the biological/medical term—than are the muscles and connective tissues of the body; you’re never really too old to improve your mind until you’re dead.

So, I mean at least to try to get back into some habits that have been useful to me in the past.  And it cannot hurt to explore the reaches of my mind—though as I make clear in Outlaw’s Mind, this is not always guaranteed not to come with dangers.  Of course, that’s a fantasy/horror story, so there are occurrences in it that, as far as we know, cannot be encountered in real life.  But that doesn’t mean there are no dangers.  For instance, as I just pointed out, mediation sometimes triggers worsening depression for me, and that depression is dangerous (to me).

It’s not as though I’m doing great otherwise, however.  And though it is true to say “all improvement is change, but most possible change is not improvement”, there are situations in which one is in the negative so far that there may be a greater chance of improvement that deterioration.  If one does a “drunkard’s walk” with a barrier preventing motion in one direction, like a figurative large brick wall one cannot get through or around or over or under, and one is already near that wall, random motion is unlikely to get one much closer to it, but can readily take one farther away.

That’s a ham-handed metaphor, I guess, but I suspect you know what I mean.  I’ll try to keep you all posted on whatever I do and what effects those actions have.  In the meantime, I hope you have a good day.

TTFN

*That sounds almost biblical, doesn’t it?

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“In an interstellar burst, I’m back…”

I wish that I could honestly tell you that the reason I didn’t post a post yesterday was because I had been working on The Dark Fairy and the Desperado and so I decided to leave the blog dormant.  Alas, that was not the reason for my absence yesterday.  Instead, it was something far more prosaic:  I was out sick.  The cold I’d been fighting for days worsened, and I was very worn out after going to work Monday, and my voice was pretty rough, and I was coughing a bit, and, well…you know, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria, all that.

I’m not feeling a whole lot better today, to be fully forthcoming, but I need to do payroll, and of course, when I’m gone for a day or longer, things pile up that I take care of gradually most days, and it can be that much more overwhelming to catch up with everything.  I suppose none of it really matters much.  It probably wouldn’t matter very much if I didn’t do any of the things I do at work.

Also, honestly, I still haven’t been paid last week’s pay.  I think it’s probably just an oversight on my boss’s part because of the chaos of recent weeks.  It’s unlikely that it’s a deliberate tactic to make me want to go away.  Nevertheless, the irrational, paranoid part of me—the part that assumes everyone else will eventually come to hate me, since I hate myself, and I know me better than anyone else does—is hyper alert for possible hostility.

Anyway, I haven’t actually gotten much done on my return to DFandD.  It was only in the evening yesterday that I started rereading it, but I’ve only gotten as far as the point where the Desperado looks into the well and suddenly hears the sound of rushing water.  If you don’t know what I mean, that’s just because you haven’t read any of what I’ve put up for you to read of that story, though it’s been available for months and months.

I wonder if anyone (other than my sister) has actually read it or any other fiction I’ve posted here.  I don’t recall getting any (non-sibling) feedback on any of it.

Maybe that’s to do with the short attention spans we all seem to have now, thanks to the overabundance of easy-to-consume-without-much-mental-effort-media.  Not only do we have all the easily consumable content on YouTube, which at least includes some very high-quality material, but we have little snippet “shorts” and “reels” on almost all sites now that are often heavily manipulative, but which perforce do not contain much information.

And the algorithms that try to steer us to things that will keep us on-site, or to steer those things toward us, seem to have become rather clunky and ham-handed, and they now push us (or at least me) away from things that would have been useful and interesting toward just boring shit that’s often absurd or stupid or at least just vapid.

Probably the lack of feedback on my stories is just because my stories are not that interesting to many people, or at least not to the sort of people who come to read my blog; I may be selecting for a group of readers who prefer nonfiction to fantastical fiction.

Wouldn’t that be ironic?  I started this blog as a way to promote my fiction writing by having a point of interaction with potential readers of my fiction, to give them some ”inside information” if they were interested in it.  Iterations of Zero was supposed to be the separate blog where I talked about my interests or concerns or issues related to science, mathematics, philosophy, politics, or what have you.

Of course, the phenomenon of such things evolving and changing in ways unforeseen during their inception is not unusual, online or in life.  Just look at early Peanuts or Calvin and Hobbes (or even Dilbert) comics compared to later ones.  But it’s frustrating to see, in real time as it were, things evolving away from usefulness, evolving toward senescence.  I suppose, in a way, that’s the story of almost everything that evolves—most changes in any RNA world that predated what we would call true life, for instance, were prone to make things less useful.  And by “useful” here I mean just “liable to make many and good copies of itself”.

One would like to imagine that human society, or at least human technology, would be less prone toward changes that make things worse, since it’s guided by actual minds, and in the case of technology, some of these minds are quite high-quality.

And I think, when the technology was actual hardware and needed to compete against other hardware, the changes would tend to be good—not universally so, but pretty impressively so.  It was such technological advance guided by effective minds that led from Kitty Hawk to the Moon in about 60 years.

However, computers have developed—and they have been prone to impressive improvement guided by some very fine minds indeed—and their products have become easier and more thoughtless to use, such that it required almost no mental skill or ability to interact with and consume those products.  And thus the tendency for things to head in good directions became less potent.

Even the finest associated minds, such as they are, don’t fully understand the specific inner workings of things like LLMs and other deep learning computer systems, which we loosely call AI.  And, of course, the computers don’t know how they work, either.  And the complex interactions of the millions and even billions of people who use social media every day and/or constantly is a complex system the dynamics of which can only be modeled for gross tendencies.  Chaos will always apply.

I don’t know what point I’m trying to make, other than that there seems to be no point, and that indeed there seem to be mostly anti-points, to so much of what happens in the world.  It’s terribly frustrating and pushes me toward full-on despair.  And I cannot seem to find interest in or derive joy from the things that used to make me at least temporarily joyous.  And that doesn’t really matter to anyone, to be honest.  Probably that’s appropriate.  I am probably not worth any effort from anyone at any level (though I would welcome it).

Or maybe I unconsciously drive people away, and that’s the problem.  Who knows?  I don’t.  And we can be sure that Socrates doesn’t and didn’t know, since reputedly the only thing he knew was that he knew nothing, and this marked him as the wisest person in the world.

As for me, I am not wise, or at least not very wise.  But I am about done, at least for today.  I feel almost done in general.  I’m very tired of going through these motions of pretending to be alive when really I am just a crude mockery of life.

As evidence of my mental stupidity:  When I wrote that last line, I could not help thinking of one of the female leads from Young Frankenstein singing, “Oh…crude mockery of life, at last I’ve found you!”

I hope you readers of my blog all have a good day, but that everyone who doesn’t read my blog has a bad day.  I don’t want them to have too bad a day—nothing tragic—but just enough for them to realize their mistake and come read my blog.

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Not much to report, but that never stops me

I’m writing this post on my mini lapcom today, because I brought it back to the house with me over the weekend.  The idea was to have it with me so I can work on The Dark Fairy and the Desperado.  I have that file open—I had originally saved it with the Word app on my phone, I think, so I had to download the latest version of it and adjust the settings, which had a ridiculously large indentation.  Still, I haven’t started rereading and/or editing what I have yet, nor have I yet written anything new on it.

It’s funny that I think of it as a little bit of a story so far when it’s over 100 Microsoft pages (in Calibri, font size 11, no spaces between paragraphs) and over 70,000 words long.  I know of some complete “novels” that are not much longer than that.  I think it might already be longer than Extra Body, which I consider a novella.  Let me look…

Okay, it’s not longer, since Extra Body is almost 77,000 words long, but it’s getting close.  I had intended to publish the latter as a novella, in Kindle and paperback versions, but I got burned out by other things and didn’t have the energy to edit it.  It is posted on this blog (see the link above) in case you want to read it.  I think it appears in reverse order thanks to the way my blog lists things newest first then going backward.  There may be a way to reverse that—I would suspect there should be—but I don’t have the mental energy to look into how to do it.  I don’t have the mental energy for very much lately.

Actually, my physical energy is lagging a bit as well, at the moment.  I am still fighting that cold I had a few days ago, and I have partly lost my voice.  But I don’t think I have a fever nor other hallmarks of systemic infection, and though I’m coughing up some goo, there’s no evidence of any life-threatening pneumonia, unfortunately.  I’m going to work, nevertheless.  I will be masking* today, and I don’t think I’ll be talking on the phone at all, but I can still do all my clerical and computer and office management stuff.

I don’t really do any sales myself, but that’s not because I wasn’t able to do it.  That’s how I started here.  I just am better at other aspects of the office work, so I do those.  Also, I have a very hard time hearing things on some of the phones, and I doubt that’s gotten better with the tinnitus now in both ears (yes, of course, it persists, like the horrors do and like I do).

During the latest part of last week, I meant to try to look at and work on DFandD in the office, but though I did get it set up and corrected the tabs, I didn’t so much as look at it afterwards, though there were moments when I could have done so.  I’m going to need to work on that, or else do my writing on it in the morning and perhaps put aside this blog most days.  I’d rather not do that; this blog is nearly my only connection with the outside world.

I don’t know what is going to happen, of course.  I really ought to publish Extra Body formally—though that would require removing it from this blog—before I even do more work on DFandD.  Heck, if I’m doing things in order, I really should finish Outlaw’s Mind first, which started out as a short story but has become a novel, one that ties into other parts of my already-written and not-yet-written universes.

But almost all of the wind has been taken from my sails over the years.  I have no real support of any kind, not anywhere near me, anyway.  And I have been diagnosed with level 2 ASD, which entails “moderate support needs”.  But just because you have “needs” doesn’t mean they’re going to be met.  That’s just the way things are, unfortunately.

I don’t know.  I’m even starting to feel like my boss wishes I would go, but that he’s too nice to be too open about it.  There are some things that have recently led me to wonder, though I’m probably being paranoid.  Anyway, we’ve been making some adjustments relating to the consolidation of things and people in our two offices, and I think those changes are positive and productive.  But I fear that I am just in the way of such things, since change makes me grumpy and stressed out.

The office, after a momentary bit of confusion, would probably be better off if I were gone and/or dead.  But that’s not unique to the office.  Everything in the world would probably be (at least slightly) better off if I were gone and/or dead.  If I were being sensible, that’s probably what I would be focused on making happen rather than trying to write more fiction again.

I thought about doing it last week, on New Year’s Eve or Day, but I decided that the thing I was thinking of doing would be too expensive if I didn’t have the nerve to go through with it.  I’m glad I didn’t spend that money—assuming there is any long-term need for it—because I haven’t been paid my latest pay yet.  I don’t know why.  It may be because I’m not worth the money or effort; that certainly wouldn’t surprise me.

Anyway, that’s it for this morning.  If I suddenly develop full-blown, life-threatening pneumonia or similar, this’ll be it.  That wouldn’t be such a tragedy, at least not from my point of view.  And it’s not like anyone else’s life would change in any noticeable way.  They certainly wouldn’t change in any significant way.  There might be a few ripples on the surface of a few ponds, but those would fade almost before it would be possible to notice them.

Enjoy your day.

*Physically, literally, I mean.  I probably do at least some metaphorical masking every day.  It’s hard for me to tell.  I don’t know if I’ve ever not been masking my whole life.

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I have no title for this post. Oh, wait…

Well, it’s Friday, the end of the “traditional” work week, though I suspect many people have today off.  A traditional workplace at this time of year would have had people take yesterday (and possibly the day before) off, and one might as well make it a four-day (or five-day) weekend.  Heck, if I remember correctly, it was typical for schools in my youth to take the equivalent of a four-day weekend two weeks in a row.  Though, come to think of it, maybe we just had winter break around then.  I’m not sure now; I think it was the latter situation, actually.

Anyway, in the modern environment, which has been allowed to become very skewed between businesses and employees, competition for scarce resources has led to a kind of mission creep in which people are led to feel that it is good and impressive and necessary to work as much as one can physically (and mentally) work, even to one’s net detriment.

Yes, we are meant to think it is impressive, but there is only very little marginal reward (and almost no true thankfulness and appreciation) for the extra work.  At the higher levels of the economic food chain, of course, the accumulation of even minor incremental wealth at each level of the pyramid adds up to seemingly large amounts, like the proverbial accumulation of DDT in birds’ bones and eggs, or mercury sequestering in certain kinds of tuna.

There’s not actually all that much of it, that extra scavenged wealth, and everyone, including the very rich, would enjoy a much healthier economy, a healthier world, if more money were in circulation‒buying, selling, making more things‒rather than accumulated into the hands of a few individuals who are not nearly as impressive as their hoarded wealth makes them imagine they are.

Hoarded wealth is useless, because money does not have any inherent value.  It is a tool of exchange, one that allows economic interactions to be both more efficient and broader and more productive, more fecund if you will.

If only “home economics” courses taught young people about actual economics‒supply and demand, markets, the effects of various regulations for better and worse, all that.

And if only we had Civics class again, or the equivalent, so people could actually learn about the Constitution, so they could recognize when elected public servants are violating it and hold them accountable.  Why, just the act of reading the second part of the Declaration of Independence (the part that begins “We hold these truths to be self evident…”) might reorient the attitude some people have toward their government and the people they hire (by electing them) to serve what are supposed to be the interests of the members of the public.

Perhaps after whatever horrendous upheaval occurs in the imminent future, when society is trying to repair itself, we will improve our metaphorical infrastructure, much as we did after the last world war (though the situation then was very different).  Perhaps we will try to find new safeguards for the systems, to decrease the risk of gross unfairness and economic stagnation, as well as of government corruption.

I don’t know.  I don’t have high hopes.  Humans‒or humanity, really‒forget the lessons of their past so easily.  And though nearly all of human knowledge is so easily available to nearly anyone, the low barriers to entry for putting things online mean that the noise on the internet is prone quite strongly to wash out any signals.  It’s like some weird grand ballroom full of “scholars” of wildly varying quality, all of them talking at once as loudly as they can about whatever topic strikes their fancy.

It’s a bit like this blog, huh?  Pot, meet kettle.  Oh, well.  On to other matters.

I’m feeling slightly better this morning than I did yesterday, though I’m still under the weather, and my (now) maddeningly bilateral tinnitus persists.  But a fortuitous thing did happen:  I was looking for something on a shelf and found a bunch of old papers, including the only remaining bit of my first novel, Ends of the Maelstrom.  It’s only the first chapter, which I had typed into an oldish computer and printed on that good old continuous feed printer paper back in the late eighties or early nineties.  It’s not much, but it’s kind of nostalgic, and it fed into thoughts I’d already been having.

I had been thinking about rereading and maybe starting again to write one of my unfinished stories‒Outlaw’s Mind, or The Dark Fairy and the Desperado, or HELIOS, or perhaps something else entirely.  I wouldn’t have to give up blogging at least to begin that process.  I can read and edit the stories on my mini lapcom at the office during downtime, instead of doing that ADHD-style thing of skimming through various news sites and social media and online manga and so on when things are slow at work.  It would honestly be more productive, and probably more ego syntonic.

What do you all think?  Maybe I should run one of those polls that people can do here on WordPress.  I’ve never really looked into how to do them, and it probably wouldn’t be very useful to do one‒indeed it might be depressing‒because I would probably get one response, if that, and that’s not a good statistical sample of pretty much anything.

Okay, well, I’m not going to do one of those.  I don’t have the spare mental energy to look into how it’s done.  However, if anyone reading would care just to say in the comments (in addition to anything else you want to say, if there is anything else) whether you think I should reread and then get to work on finishing one of the above-mentioned books, or perhaps on some other story I’ve mentioned at some time, or perhaps some older story…or even just to do something completely new.  I would truly welcome your input, but please at least try to be specific.

If you need guilt to compel you, I think your input might really help my mental state, which is extremely prone to negativity and self-hatred and self-destruction.  See, I can manipulate people, at least in principle.  I just find it “low key” repulsive.

But, heck, if you want, you can tell me I’m better off not writing any new fiction, or that my writing sucks in general and you wish I’d just stop writing, or even that I should just die already.

You’re unlikely to say anything to me that’s worse than the things I say to myself pretty much every day.  And if you can say some such thing, I’m honestly curious what it could be.  But you could easily say nicer and more productive things than I have ever probably said to myself, or at least better than I’ve said in a long time.  If that’s your preference, have at you!

I’ll be back tomorrow, I think.  Have a good weekend.

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There’s hope a great blog’s memory may outlive his life half a year.

Hello and good morning.

First of all, 

Actually, that was second of all, wasn’t it, following my traditional Thursday blog post salutation?  I would almost count that greeting as not being a first thing, however; it is practically automatic, requiring no new knowledge and very little in the way of thought.

Still, there clearly is some caloric expenditure in my nervous system related to doing it, and obviously there are impacts upon the world immediately around me.  And once the post is posted, that impact expands, at least a little.

After a very short while, I suspect, any impact that my writing that particular opening had will be entirely washed out by noise‒even thermal noise at some point.  Like the man said, “The world will little note nor long remember what we say here”.

Of course, the irony is that Lincoln’s speech is what we do remember most from Gettysburg.  By “we”, I mean Americans in general.  I don’t know if anyone in the rest of the world ever reads Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address (though it is a very well written, concise, and moving speech).

And yet, his point is that we ought to remember the battle, and the lives of the soldiers involved in it, and (to my mind) we ought to try to understand the causes of the Civil War and to wonder to what degree the soldiers on each side really were committed to the arguments and ideas supporting their group, or if, deep down, they were just fighting for “our group” against “their group”.*  Yet we most remember, ironically, the words of the man who said that the world would little note nor long remember what he said there.  That was the point I was making.

Anyway, it’s January 1st, the first day of 2026.  Huzzah.  Rah.  Yippee Kiy Yay.

I don’t think it bodes well for the year to start on a Thursday, since this is the day that DentArthurDent had such trouble getting the hang of.  On the other hand, maybe it’s a good thing, since Thursday is and has been my blog day for quite some time, even when I was writing fiction every other weekday.  Probably neither fact matters.

Of course, I am going to work today, despite it being such a universal holiday, and I am not at all happy about it.  I did no celebrating overnight, of course; what on Earth would I celebrate?  But my sleep was not good, anyway, because of all the fireworks and nonsense.  Also, the people with whom I share a house had a big family get together that had barely ended by the time I started writing this.  And, of course, I have chronic insomnia anyway.

It’s actually rather cold here in south Florida‒in the mid-forties right now‒and that makes getting to work slightly less pleasant than usual.  Also, the transit systems are on holiday schedules, and I have a long commute, especially since I have no vehicle.

I also feel that I might be coming down with a cold, but I’m not going to call in sick, because then it would look like I was pretending to be sick so I wouldn’t have to come in on New Year’s Day.  Still, my ears are plugged and my throat is a bit raw, and what might be just my allergies is acting up more than usual.  I’m not really coughing or sneezing, though.  Still, maybe I’ll develop pneumonia and die.  Fingers crossed!

Speaking of ears (I was, you can go back and check), all of a sudden in the middle of the night last night persistent tinnitus began in my left ear.  I have had chronic tinnitus in my right ear for about 18 years now, probably largely due to recurrent ear infections, which have tended to localize to the right side more often than the left.  When you have chronic tinnitus for so long, you get to the point where you…almost…don’t notice it anymore, though I do notice how bad the hearing is in my right ear.

And now my left ear feels very much like the right, with the high, sharp, intense pitch constantly sounding.  Mercifully, it seems to be roughly the same pitch as the noise on the right, a very high D note.  But it is quite annoying, and I fear my hearing is going to be too reduced for me to enjoy music, which is not so much terrifying as horrifying.

Ah, what are you gonna do?  This is life‒it’s a load of crap, but at least you get to die at the end.

I suppose I’ll be writing another post tomorrow, and probably Saturday as well, so you have that (those?) to which to look forward if nothing else.  I don’t know how many people will even read this post today, to be honest.  Will it be fewer than usual?  Will it be more?  Does it matter?

I know the answer to the last question at least.

Again, Happy New Year.  I’ll leave an optimistic-seeming GIF here below for you.  I don’t necessarily share the sentiments, but to be fair, as the Doctor knows full well, great isn’t necessarily good.

TTFN

*I’m reminded of Faramir’s words (in the movie) regarding the fallen soldier on the field:  “The enemy?  His sense of duty was no less than yours, I deem.  You wonder what his name is, where he came from.  And if he was really evil at heart.  What lies or threats led him on this long march from home.  If he would not rather have stayed there in peace.  War will make corpses of us all.”

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“For years and years I roamed.”

Well, I might as well stick to the same pattern, so…ahem.  It’s New Year’s Eve Eve today, which means tomorrow will be New Year’s Eve and Thursday will be New Year’s Day.  At that point, if we wanted, we could just start counting days down or up‒i.e., Day 1, Day 2…or Day 365, Day 364…and so on.

Of course, if we were going to do such numbering, I guess it would make sense to divide things up into months for easier “local” day-keeping, which is what we’ve done as a civilization.  But those months are irregular and rather haphazardly named.  This can occasionally be irritating, though of course I have a sentimental fondness for at least some of the month names.

Unfortunately for the goal of making months of uniform length, the number of days in the year isn’t evenly divisible by any number larger than 5, unless I’m mistaken…

Yes, I was correct, unless you want to divide the year into 5 groups of 73 days.  That might be kind of fun, since 73 is one of those overlooked prime numbers, and it has the slight extra fun that its digits add up to 10, the base of our usual number system.

Still, especially considering the necessity of leap years (with the convoluted adding of days, removing of seconds, not adding a day when it’s the turn of a century unless it’s also the turn of a millennium and so on) it seems cumbersome to divide the year evenly.

I rather like the solution of making 12 months that are each 30 days long and having the remaining 5 (or 6) days be a period of celebration.  It could be held around one of the equinoxes or the solstices, or it could even be split up between two of them.  I’m inclined to put them at the end of the year, when the Winter Solstice in the northern hemisphere happens, because it’s long been a holiday time anyway.

Of course, this all biases against those in the southern hemisphere, but there are significantly fewer people in the southern hemisphere, or at least there were the last time I looked into it…

Yes, I was correct again, it seems.  According to my quick and dirty check, there are on the order of about a billion people in the southern hemisphere, as opposed to the remaining roughly seven billion people in the northern hemisphere.  I guess that means the winter solstice would be a good time for those separate days.  And I’ve not heard many Aussies complain about being able to go to the beach on Christmas or New Year.

Mind you, one could do that down where I live anyway, if one were so inclined.  I am not.  The beaches on the east coast of Florida are mostly annoying, and the Atlantic is not much fun for swimming.  The west coast of Florida, where one swims in the Gulf of Mexico, is much more pleasant.

I’m not a very big beach person at the best of times (or the worst of times) but I have quite a few pleasant memories of being on one or another beach on the Gulf (of Mexico).  They all date back to at least 33 years ago, though, so maybe it was just due to the nature of youth that I enjoyed them.

Alas, I’m not truly young anymore by most standards; I’m 954 years old.

Ha ha, just kidding.  Or, wait, maybe not.  I know that exoplanets have been discovered that orbit very close to their stars, and so have orbits that can be as short as a few Earth days (possibly fewer).  So, if the universe is infinite in spatial extent, which it so far looks as though it is, and if there is no lower constraint due to the laws of physics on the length of possible “years”, then there exists, somewhere in spacetime, a planet by the years of which I would be 954 years old.

Actually, if spacetime is infinite, there should be an infinite number of such planets even if they happen only once within any cosmic horizon.  But let’s not get into that right now.

Let’s do the math; it’s simple and easy, so why not?  56 years old x 365.25 days in an Earth year makes me 20,454 days old, at least on my latest birthday.  Dividing that by 954, which is almost a thousand, should give a year length of roughly 20 days per year…okay, well, the “exact” number of 21 and 70/159 days per planetary year is what is required to make me 954 years old.

Actually, though, since the number of days in that hypothetical year is smaller than the time since my last Earthday birthday, I will have to adjust my days’ old age number to the precise one:  20,525 days, which if divided by 954 gives us a year length of 21 and 491/954 days, or 21.51 days (playing slightly free and loose with significant figures).  There will be a range of possibilities, of course, since I could be anywhere in the 21-ish day course of my 955th year and still be able to call myself 954 years old, if we go by similar conventions to those followed by humans on Earth.

Okay, well…that was sort of a weird digression.  I know, I’m weird, so maybe given that, a weird digression is, in a sense, not weird.  But given other considerations, it still is.

I am an odd person, I know (though I don’t know if I’m prime).  Sometimes‒rather often‒I think I’m losing my mind.  At other times, though, I think my mind is functioning within parameters, but it is contemplating things that are vast and potentially troubling to the feeble mortal ego if one does not drape oneself in the obscuring veil and cloak of delusion.  But my fabric sensitivity doesn’t allow me to tolerate such garments for long; you could say I lack PPE for such things.  Perhaps the secret is to destroy the ego (which may well just be an illusion, anyway), but that is more easily said than done.

Who knows?  Not I.

And yes, it’s “Not I” not “Not me”.  You wouldn’t say, “Me don’t know”, so you shouldn’t say “Not me” in response to the question “Who knows?”  Apologies to David Bowie and Nirvana‒but The Man Who Sold the World is a song, and so they are allowed poetic license.

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A shorter and slightly less negative post

Okay, well, I’m back writing this on the smartphone again today.  I decided not to take the lapcom back to the house with me yesterday, because it was annoying to deal with even the minor extra weight, and also because I fear that writing using the lapcom leads me to get a bit too wordy and carried away.  I’ve mentioned this before more than once, though I cannot immediately give you links to the earliest or the most recent mention of the issue.

Anyway, the point is that I can type on a regular keyboard almost as fast as I can talk*, so I kind of run off at the mouth…so to speak.

It’s not necessarily a bad thing‒though given that we’re discussing me, it probably is‒but I think it can cause a bit of an aversion in some people when they see that a blog post is longer than usual.  I don’t know how many of my readers actually do read to the end of the average post, but surely it’s less likely to happen if the post is 1400 words long than if it is merely 900 words long.

Of course, I set my target nowadays at 700 words, but that just means I am less likely to go over 1000.  I almost never stop at or before 700 words.

I tend not to write as much, as fast, on the smartphone. This is partly because it’s just not a good way to write things; it’s clunky and prone to induce errors, and the lack of real keys makes it so there is less sensory feedback about what one is typing.  Also, my thumbs get sore from writing on the phone.

Now, though, I’ve had a few days off, so my thumbs are less painful.  I’ve also been taking strong doses of NSAIDs over the past few days, and that may be helping them.  It’s not helping my stomach, though.  I already feel nauseated right now, and it’s not even 5 am as I write this.

My life is so glamorous, isn’t it?  And I share most of the best aspects of it here, with you readers.  There are many things about which I feel too dreary even to bring them up.  I don’t want even people who are quite nonjudgmental and positive about me to see the squalor in which I live.  I am not very good at taking care of myself.

Sorry, I’m sure this is all very boring.

Sometimes I must admit that I envy people with unreasonably high self-esteem.  I mean, past a certain point, overinflated self-esteem makes one prone to do harm to other people.  But at least such people spend their time, day in and day out, with someone they love, right?  They tend to disgust me (and many other people too) but the kicker is:  they don’t care!

This is not to confuse such people with the pathologically narcissistic, who seem clearly to be motivated by some deep insecurities that they chase like a heroin addict needing a fix.  They are pathetic and do not seem comfortable with themselves, though they can come across as shameless.  I wish I could think of a good, well-known public example of such a person, but for the life of me, no one comes to mind.

Ha.

Ha.

Anyway, my problems lie in the other direction.  I have a pathological self-hatred.  When I’m calm and objective, I know that there are at least some aspects of myself that are not horrible, and some that are even arguably good.  I’m reasonably smart and rather creative, for instance.  But I just annoy the hell out of myself, and it’s very hard to get a break.

I know it’s possible to love someone without really liking them (in the sense of just enjoying spending time with them), but after a while, if you’re forced to spend every moment, waking or otherwise, with this person you had loved but whose personality you found annoying, you can become prone to hate them, or at least to hate their presence.

I’ve never felt this way about another person, but it’s how I tend to feel about myself.  I’m like a chronic, itchy, burning rash somewhere between the lower edges of my shoulder blades, just where it’s hardest to reach.  And though I can briefly mitigate the problem, it doesn’t go away.  There’s only one cure, and unfortunately it involves killing the patient.

Oh, well, whatever.  I need just to get over myself, so to speak.  I think I take life too seriously.  I would be able to do better if not for my chronic, really annoying pain.  I might even be able to enjoy life with or without loving myself.  But, as I often say, if wishes were horses, we’d all be neck deep in horse shit.

I don’t know if I’m working tomorrow, but if I do, I’ll probably write a blog post, and you’ll see it here.  If not, you won’t.  Either way, I hope you all have a good day and a good weekend.

*And not the sort of hesitant speech that happens when I don’t really know the people with whom I’m conversing, but rather my speech when I’m talking to someone about something in which I’m interested.  That probably only happens regularly with my sister, once every week or two, nowadays.

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Please don’t take this post to heart; it’s not aimed at you.

Hello and good morning.  There’s no Shakespearean quote-based title today.  My apologies for that and for what follows.  I’m just having a rough time right now.

It’s Thursday again, and I’m writing this on the stupid mini lapcom again.  It’s “stupid” because I have to deal with changing the base font and type size every time I create a new post now, because Microsoft Word changed its defaults to the shitty little font Aptos Narrow, which sucks hugely, and they now want to start the font size automatically at 12, when for ages it’s been 11, which works just fine and is a prime number.

I swear, it’s almost enough to make me want to buy an Apple computer.  But I’d really rather not buy any more computers, nor any new smartphone, nor any more clothes or shoes or cups or silverware or shampoo or deodorant or any of it.  I hate having to get new things that have to do with the present bleeding into the future, when I don’t even want to be here in the present.

But, of course, one is not supposed to want not to keep living.  That’s taboo.  One tends to get shamed and cajoled about it if one even mentions it.  One is offered no help, of course.  It’s rather reminiscent of the “pro-life” movement, who want to make sure that babies are born if conceived (and many of them want to eliminate contraception) but have no intention to take responsibility for the lives they are forcing to continue.

Well, fuck them in the neck until they are “aborted” is how I feel about that, and when I’m feeling very uncharitable, I’m inclined that way about the other.  I mean, people don’t want you to die, but they don’t offer any actual help, and they don’t offer any serious reasons to stay alive.  At the very least, they don’t offer any convincing ones.

I’ve been dealing on and off with suicidal thoughts and hatred of myself starting when I was in my teens.  It has waxed and waned over my lifetime, and is resistant to the various and sundry treatments I have tried.  At least, they never have seemed to work for very long.

I have learned rather recently that this is common in people with ASD, particularly relatively “high functioning” ones, because of the exhaustion and ego-dystonic effects of constant masking, pretending to be human, pretending not to be seriously bothered by the things that bother us, trying to make our quirky habits of thought into jokes so people aren’t bothered too much by them.

It is at least good information to have, that one is autistic, but it points to no solution.  Indeed, data appears to suggest that ordinary treatments for depression that work reasonably well on NTs are often not useful in people with ASD.  But of course, it’s not as though one can cease to have ASD, any more than one can decide to be no longer right handed.

Anyway, the point toward which I was moving is one I’ve mentioned before:  I have been dealing with depression and self-hatred for more than three quarters of my life, and I am a bookish, rather studious sort of person who likes to try to understand things as much as he can.  I am also a trained medical doctor, who obviously has given special attention to such matters when he was/is studying, since it’s of real personal interest.

I’m not saying that no one out there could possibly find some answer or treatment that I haven’t encountered or tried or whatever; that would be astonishing hubris.  But if one is going to go for obvious or stereotypical things (or worse, to try to give religious reasons for one not to take one’s own life) it’s unlikely to be successful.  Indeed, the fact that it just reiterates things that have been tried and have failed already, makes everything all that much more depressing.

Sorry.  I don’t mean to demean or disparage or denigrate or dismiss (or any other d-word) people who want to help those who are in distress.  But it gets frustrating when, for instance, one logs onto Instagram or whatever and a pop-up message says “Someone out there thinks you need help” and it directs you either to—wait for it!—the suicide help line* or to suggestions for seeking therapy or suggestions for how to help oneself that include things like “talking to friends” or such like.

It’s almost as if it were taunting you.  It’s almost as if it were saying, “Aw, are you not doing too well?  Well, here, take a look at these various things that you have tried and found unsuccessful in the past.  Or you can talk to your family or friends, though you live alone and have no local friends**, and your nearest family members are more than a thousand miles away and have their own shit with which to deal.”

Sorry, everyone.  I’m angry and grumpy and gloomy and unpleasant today—more so than usual, I mean.  And yet, other people still come to me with their problems, and I do my best to help when I can, and I even expend my own resources to help.  But no one even asks me if I have any problems, and if I start to mention any, people just get awkward or make some joke or dismissive comment about it all.  If I had a drug problem, there would be available resources, but I don’t have one***, alas.

I get it.  Everyone has their own things happening.  That’s definitely true.  I don’t have any right to impose my troubles on anyone.  But if people aren’t going to do anything, then they should shut the fuck up.

Anyway, again, I’m sorry.  Really.  Forget about that crap from me, please.  I know that none of you out there are doing anything to try to cause me consternation.  I’m the one with the bad hardware and software.  You’re all just curious, literate people reading the blog of someone who occasionally has something mildly interesting to say and being as supportive as its practicable to be, often more so.  It’s my problem or set of problems, and it’s my fault (in the sense that “I am the faulty one” not in the sense of “I have done wrong”).

It doesn’t help that it’s near the solstice, so the daytime is getting shorter and shorter—I tend to be seasonally affected—and also that it’s the holiday time of year, and that the US is in a political state reminiscent of the single available port-o-john after a major rock festival.

I’m overwhelmed and I’m very tired, and I don’t see any reason to expect things to tend to get any better than they are now.  Just as all political and regulatory and economic forces are in place to make the stock market tend to go up in the long run, despite many local ups and downs, my system seems set up to deteriorate over time.  I don’t just mean that in the sense involved in the second law of thermodynamics, though that obviously comes into play.  I mean that so many events of life seem prone to knock me downward, mentally, often in big steps, but my attempts to crawl back upward are plodding and scrabbling, like someone trying to reach the summit of a mountain of loose gravel.

Anyway, geez, sorry again.  I shouldn’t even post this, really, but I don’t have the energy to start over and write a different post, so I’ll stick with this, apologizing yet another time.  If I write a post tomorrow and/or Saturday, it/they will appear here.  If not, it/they won’t.

I hope you all are doing well.

TTFN

*With which I’ve had a particularly bad result in the past, and toward which I am therefore quite wary.

**This is only appropriate or at least predictable.  Believe me, no one wants to be around me much anymore.  I don’t even want to be around myself.

***I know, I know, that’s just what a person with a drug problem might say.  But while that may be true, nevertheless, among the number of people who would say that they don’t have a drug problem when asked, the vast majority really would be people who don’t have a drug problem, because most people don’t have a drug problem.  Bayes saves the day again.

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Here we go again. Heavy sigh.

It’s Tuesday now, in case you didn’t know, though of course you might not be reading this on a Tuesday.  If by some bizarre set of circumstances my writing is still being read in the far future‒or even more improbably that it goes backward in time somehow or tunnels across to some other part of the universe that nevertheless has people who can read English‒there may not even be Tuesdays where and when you exist.

In case that’s the case, I will just say that in the 20th and 21st centuries‒and actually for quite some time before‒we divided the days into groups of 7, which we called weeks*.  There were roughly 52 of these in a year (52 x 7 = 364, one day and some change less than a full year).

In the English-speaking world we called these days Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday.  I could go into the etymology of those names, but that’s a bit of a pain.  Anyway, you’re the ones who are in some future, presumably advanced civilization; why can’t you look that stuff up for yourselves?

Anyway, our “official work week” ran from Monday through Friday, with Saturday and Sunday off.  However, that was far from the only schedule people followed, and in a form of evolution due to mutual competition, people vied with each other to work more days and longer hours for less pay, because other people were willing to do it.  Not to participate would lead one to be less likely to get or keep a job, and that could lead to destitution‒at least somewhat more quickly than does steadily working longer and longer for less and less, which is a kind of creeping but pernicious societal malaise.

Of course, other, parallel forces led to decreasing regulation of companies’ ability to “encourage” their workers to work more for less, and since in the short term** everyone works in response to their local incentives, people tended to allow these things to happen.  And lawmakers and regulators, subject to the inherently woefully dysfunctional political party system, became less and less incentivized to care about the needs and worries of those they nominally represented, and to whom they had sworn their service***.

They were happy to allow the fortunate wealthy and powerful to take advantage of the foolishly earnest and mutually (and self-destructively) competitive citizens, because they were rewarded for allowing it.

Everyone responds to local forces, of course.  Even spacetime itself responds to the spacetime immediately adjacent to it, as the electromagnetic field responds to the state of the field immediately adjacent to it, as demonstrated by the implications of Maxwell’s famous equations, which I’m sure jump right out at you:

Of course, the meaning of “local” is circular here, almost tautological, since the definition of local is merely “something that can affect another thing directly” more or less.

So it’s only too possible for a system to evolve itself into a state that is overall detrimental to those within the system.  Everyone, even the most seemingly successful, can be in a worse situation than they would be in otherwise, but it’s very difficult to see the way out, to get a “bird’s eye view” of the landscape, if you will.

One can therefore get stuck in situations where, despite the overall equilibrium being detrimental to everyone, any one individual taking action to try to move things in a better direction would make their local situation worse for them.

How is one to respond to such a situation?  Well, one can simply go along with it and try to do what’s best for oneself locally, and that is what most people do most of the time‒understandably enough, even though the overall situation may be evolving toward its own miserable destruction.

Or, of course, one could do what family therapists are often said to do:  effectively setting off a bomb***** in the middle of a difficult situation and seeing what happens when the dust settles, figuring that nothing is likely to be much worse than things are at a given present.  At least this allows for a new system to form, like the biosphere after the various mass extinctions.  Maybe it will become better than the previous one.

Maybe they all will always evolve toward catastrophe, to collapse and then be replaced by a new system.

It would be better if people could learn, and could deliberately change local incentives in careful and measured ways, adjusting settings to correct for and steer things away from poorer outcomes and so on, in ways that are not too disruptive at any given place or time.  That’s nominally what many of our systems are meant to be doing, but they don’t do a very good job at it.

Probably it would be better to do a hard reset.  But I’m not sure.  And it’s probably not worth the effort.  The odds of humanity surviving to become cosmically significant seem very low to me, and I’m not sure it would be good for the universe‒whatever that might mean‒if they do.

It’s probably all pointless, and I’m tired of it, anyway.  I don’t want to be part of this equilibrium or lack thereof anymore.  I want to make my own quietus.  Maybe “civilization” should do the same.

*Not to be confused with “weak”, which sounds the same but means more or less “the opposite of strong” and has little or nothing to do with divisions of time.

**And that’s pretty much the only term that comes naturally and easily to humans, for sound biological but horrible psychological and sociological reasons.

***If they were Klingons, they would surely be slain for their dishonor.  I don’t necessarily disagree with such an outcome morally, but practically, it would probably lead to increasing chaos****, so we understandably avoid it most of the time.

****It’s an open question whether such chaos is inherently bad.

*****Metaphorically, of course. At least, it’s usually metaphorical.