mental health

by

The universe is rounded at the tip–i.e., it’s pointless

Well, here I am again.  It’s Friday, and I’m writing another blog post.  I don’t know what, if anything, I have to say, but there it is.

Oh, but I do want to give some follow-up that I forgot to give yesterday:  Dorian, the gray cat I’ve fed for quite a while, has not come back again since that one night he returned last week as I mentioned.  I haven’t seen any trace of him.  If I were a superstitious person, I might imagine it was a ghost that came back that one evening to say goodbye.  However, he was quite solid; I gave him a pat, and he even ate some food.

Also, it would take quite a bit of evidence and logical argument to make me even seriously consider the possibility that ghosts are real.

Other than that, nothing much is new with me.  Of course, there are things going on in the world, but there always are.  It’s a little bit like saying that there are molecules always moving in a still glass of water.  It’s true, of course, and it is part of why water has the properties that it has, but the behavior of any particular molecule is inconsequential.  The things that are happening in the world are parochially interesting, but H. G. Wells’s Martians wouldn’t give a shit, nor would anyone else in the universe.  And, of course, the universe itself really doesn’t notice.

So much has happened in the world since it began, and the number of details that are available after even a hundred years is tiny.  It’s also very difficult to know what historical events actually affected the shape of subsequent happenings.  Sometimes, people just notice things and people and events that are loud.  But loud does not equal important, though they can overlap.

I’m almost done‒87% according to Kindle‒with the last light novel in that series I mentioned before*.  Once it’s done, I’m not sure what I’m going to read, or what I’m going to do if I can’t find anything to read.  I imagine doing my random flipping and reading a section at a time in my various science books, or just getting on the various preprint servers and skimming through random recent scientific papers, or of course using Brilliant to review and improve my science and math, or getting on Babbel and actually starting to learn some more languages.  But though these things ought to be interesting, they just aren’t.  Everything is boring.  Of course, such boredom is in the eye of the beholder, and is probably more symptomatic of dysfunction in the mind behind that eye than in the things being seen.

So, I don’t know what I’m going to do with myself in the short term.  I mean, if the office is open, I am going to work tomorrow, so I suppose I’ll write a blog post then, though I make no promises.  Maybe I’ll start sharing links to my books on Threads and Blue Sky and all that, like I used to do a long time ago.  I doubt anyone will buy them, but who knows?

I don’t know.  Nothing really means anything to me.  Everything is pointless, but I am especially and particularly pointless.  I guess that’s that for today.  I hope you all have a good day and then a good weekend.  You’ve earned it, after reading my morose musings.

*Actually, after writing the first draft of this post I finished it.

by

Detritus

Well, I’m getting ready to go to the office this morning.  It’s payroll day, which means I’ll be more stressed out than even I usually am.  It’s really gotten to be more complex over time, with different people being paid in different ways and rates and with different incentives, and people in our new, other office.  Oh, and now we’re getting yet a new “product” to sell which is going to require more differentiation and so on.  Huzzah!

I don’t know why I keep writing this blog.  I feel like I’m just continually rehashing the same things, saying the same things over and over again, not even really expecting different results.

Incidentally, there’s no actual (reliable) record anywhere of Einstein saying words to the effect of “the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”.  Frankly, it doesn’t even seem like anything he would have said.  It doesn’t make sense, either‒it flies completely in the face of the idea that someone can improve with practice at something, or that in some circumstances retrying something over and over again occasionally brings about different outcomes.

Einstein apparently did say that there are two things that are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and he wasn’t sure about the universe.  Of course, as a Jewish scientist, he left Germany in the 30s (I think) because he saw the products of the breed of human stupidity that arose there at around that time, so you can understand why he might take a dim view of human intelligence.  I wonder what he would think of us now.

Anyway, I’m still taking my “antidepressant” and also trying to adjust things better to control my chronic* pain.  I can feel the immediate effects of the St. John’s Wort, which I always do when I take it.  Dry mouth, slightly less reactive, and feeling a bit stiffer (metaphorically) and more socially withdrawn in the morning for a while after I take it.  It’s not making a difference for my sleep, that’s for sure.  But, again, maybe it will at least give me enough of a boost finally to act on my desire just to stop existing.

It would be nice if it at least gave me more will or drive to exercise, which it has done in the past, though not every time I’ve taken it.  At least it doesn’t tend to give me the asthenia that I would get with SSRIs, and it doesn’t give me the rampant and intolerable tension and anxiety that Wellbutrin and Effexor gave me.  It’s closest in character to the old tricyclics‒amitriptyline and nortriptyline‒but not as groggifiying.  Anyway, hopefully it does something to help me make some changes.

I think of depression as being at least partly a disease of gumption, a disease of the will, where the sense of motivation is impaired.  Or perhaps it’s more of a psychological autoimmune disorder, where the mind turns upon itself.  That’s an oversimplification, and there are certainly more aspects to it than that, but that is at least part of it.

Of course, there may be other factors at play in my brain.  I’ve encountered a place online that does reasonably priced autism assessments (I found it through Threads) and I may avail myself of that.  It is slightly worrying, of course.  It sometimes feels nearly certain that, if assessed, I would be told, “No, you don’t have ASD or anything related to it.  You’re just fucking out there like Vega, you don’t even count as human.”  Which would come as no real surprise, but it would be somewhat disheartening.  How does one treat, or at least accommodate, someone who is an alien?

I don’t know what I will do with any knowledge I gain through that process, if I do it.  Maybe I won’t do anything.  Maybe I’ll just flush it all away with every other bit of information I’ve ever taken in.  I guess that’s what’s going to happen one way or another, anyway, right?

Whatever.  I hope you all have a good day, or have good days, if that should be plural to match the subject.  I suppose I’ll probably write another blog post tomorrow.  I’m sure you can hardly wait.

In the meantime, here’s a little “video” (really more of a slide show) that I threw together this morning, to the tune of Another Brick in the Wall Part 3.

*I originally made a typo there and wrote “chromic” pain, which sounds like something from which a synesthete might suffer‒a chronic discomfort that they experience with all the colors of the rainbow.

by

And I looked, and behold a pale cat

Well, I have some relatively good news, which is why I decided to write a post today instead of just leaving it:  Dorian, the light gray cat, has returned.  Well…he was back last night, at least, though this morning he was nowhere to be seen once again, which is itself somewhat unusual.

He was a bit scraggly, with some traces of dried blood around his fur on the side of his head and neck, but it didn’t look like it was his blood.  He actually looked lean and healthy, moving very much like the hard-ass stray cat that he is.

I’m guessing that he got into a pretty big fight at some point‒he seems prone to them‒and then hid away somewhere while he recovered his strength.  Then, that pale grey shadow took a new shape* and grew again.

I think stray cats, like defective and damaged people, don’t like to show any weakness to those around them.  Perhaps it’s more accurate to say that they are unable to show their weakness, even though they may crave acceptance and support.  There are good, sound biological motivations for this in stray cats and other mammals; showing weakness or injury can invite further aggression from other cats and even encourage predators.

Of course, human males (or anthropoid creatures living among humans, such as I) are no exceptions to that tendency.

It’s also been said that, in many ways, people on the autism spectrum are like cats, at least in some ways, and I can see the point, though it is an oversimplification.  Still, it leads me to speculate that, sometime in the relatively deep past, perhaps two separate subspecies of humans (maybe the legendary Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons) existed, one being more naturally ultrasocial, the other more constrained but with other capacities that aided their survival.  We know that Neanderthals, for instance, had bigger brains than so-called modern humans, but the structure appears to have been slightly different.

Perhaps it’s the genes from such a separate subspecies that led to some people having ASD or other versions of “neurodivergence”.  To be clear, I don’t know that there’s any good evidence that this is the case.  I did encounter at least one study that looked for markers known to be associated with the autism spectrum and the DNA residua of Neanderthals present in people of European descent.  There seemed to be some correlation, but I didn’t think it was particularly impressive.  So there’s not a lot of data to support the hypothesis.

It would be nice‒in some ways‒to think of oneself as just a different kind of human, not as something alien.  But I think that’s probably a silly dream for me.  I do not belong here in any serious sense; I am an alien, a mutant, a replicant, a stranger.  And to humans, of course, a stranger is presumptively an enemy unless and until proven otherwise.

Anyway, Dorian was back last night, but gone again this morning.  We’ll see if he returns.  There are other cats who come around.  But, of course, there is no real affection from most of them.  They come to me opportunistically, because I put food out for them.  I am useful to them.  Similarly, I am often useful to humans in the world.  I have many skills and abilities, so I have frequently found that people like to have me around to help them get things done.  But eventually, the negatives of my presence outweigh the positives, and people go away (or send me away).

I don’t blame them.  I want to go away from myself, though I have never had any desire to be anyone else.  I would prefer oblivion.  Or maybe I would just prefer rest.

Speaking thereof, I slept almost four hours last night, and of course, I awakened and couldn’t go back to sleep in the wee hours of the night, and I am now at the office finishing this post.  I don’t look forward to the weekend‒there’s nothing good about it‒but at least I can collapse and try to recuperate.  I don’t know if I’ll write anything next week, or just leave everything be.

I feel perched on the borderland between life and death, and the Undiscovered Country beckons.  It must be really great there, because no one who goes ever comes back.

*To be honest, it’s pretty much exactly the same as the old shape.

by

…since brevity is the soul of wit, and tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes, I will be brief: your noble blogger is mad.

Hello and good morning.

It’s Thursday.  That’s why I did the whole “hello and good morning” thing.  I started doing that, not thinking much about it, when I first started my weekly blog as a would-be promotion for my fiction.  Then, when I started doing posts every workday, I still made it a point to use that phrase on Thursdays.  That’s the kind of odd person I am:  I keep traditions and habits that absolutely no one cares about, because really, nothing I do is actually consequential to anyone, including me.

I seriously think I may just stop doing this now.  In fact, yesterday, my tentative plan was to come on today and do a post with the title “I’m not doing this anymore”, and with content consisting of “It’s just a waste of my time and that of anyone who reads it.  Oh, well.  Whatever. Never mind.”  And that was going to be that.

But I figured maybe I would give a slightly more polite sendoff, so here it is.  Who knows, maybe I’ll change my mind.  I can’t readily make or maintain any commitments right now‒except, it seems, for the commitment to use some version of “Hello and good morning” on any Thursday blog post, for what that’s worth.

All sorts of little ideas and thoughts come into my head about what I want to do.  I want to learn more quantum mechanics and relativity.  I want to start to learn Russian, or learn more Japanese, or bone up on my Spanish.  I want to start “audio book” recordings for Son of Man.  I want to make video recordings of me playing and singing various songs, like Ashes to Ashes, The Man Who Sold the World, or One Headlight, or Nothing Compares 2 U, or any of a number of other songs I can play and sing reasonably well.  I want to get a new acoustic guitar.

I want to finish my started and planned works of fiction. I want to draw.  I want to paint.

I want to try to get an “official” diagnosis of ASD (or not).

I want to wipe out the whole human race and all other life on Earth.

(None of these things is likely to happen.)

More than anything else, I want…well, I don’t know how to put it but that I want to be able to rest.  But I can’t seem to do it, not unless I’m deathly ill.  I’ve already been awake today since 1 am‒no slipping in and out of a doze this time‒and that was after only maybe two and a half hours of sleep.  I’m so tired.  But I’m not sleepy.

TTFN

P.S. – The picture above is an original work.

by

Pulling a trigger warning

[Seriously, I talk about suicidal thoughts and ideas of methods, as well as self-harm here, and I don’t want to trouble anyone who might be “triggered” by this…I do enough damage to people who are even figuratively close to me, and I don’t want to do that even more, so if this will, or even might, upset or worsen your mental state, please don’t read any more of it.]

I was a bit hypo-manic yesterday morning or something; sorry about my little tangent fest.  Today I mean to keep things shorter.

Work has been hectic and too up-and-down for easy tolerance lately.  Today is payroll day, so I’m going in early to get that done, but it will be chaotic and urusai and stressful no matter what.

I used to be able to deal with stress, not by avoiding stressful things but by not letting things bother me, by keeping things in perspective, by having good enough personal support systems in place, by having a good philosophical outlook, by meditating, what have you.  No longer.  The person I used to be is dead.  His remains are just sitting here and rotting, as you would expect from an unburied, unpreserved corpse in a hot, humid climate.

I hate my life.  Honestly.  Seriously.  I am trapped in this idiotic universe full of even more idiotic creatures and things, of which I am a prime example.  There is, of course, a way to escape, but to avail oneself of it requires courage, and I haven’t yet been able to work that courage up.  I’m trying.  I’ve come close.  It’s only a matter of time.  A natural 20 may be a relatively hard “saving throw”, but it will happen eventually.

It’s funny, but it occurred to me lately‒thinking frequently about such matters, as I am‒that it would be easier for me to shoot myself in the gut, sort of Van Gogh style, than to shoot myself in the head.  It’s hard to say why, exactly.  I have “played” Russian roulette once, and though I did pull the trigger (barrel in mouth, aimed as carefully as I could), I didn’t go for a second turn.  I just cried by myself in my stupid old apartment.  And that was before I even went to jail or prison for trying (cluelessly, it must be said) to help relieve the suffering of other people experiencing chronic pain.

I came to a realization when I responded to something someone on Threads said‒about just wanting to be shot in the head‒by saying that I would rather take it in the gut, because it would be slower and more painful.  I realized that I really would find it easier to shoot myself in the belly than the head.  Perhaps it’s because I could then experience the process and the pain.  Maybe it’s because it would give me a sort of chance to change my mind at the last minute or something.  I don’t know.  I suppose at some level I’m still a coward.  Anyway, I don’t own any guns anymore, so it’s a bit moot.

Weirdly enough, I doubt that I would be able to stab myself in the gut, let alone do anything like seppuku.  This is probably at least partly because one has to apply the force oneself, whereas with a gun, the bullet rockets out quickly and without hesitation once the trigger is pulled.

Using fire would be hard, too.  I know that I’m able to burn myself deliberately, because I do it from time to time (twice, yesterday) but it’s always at least a little startling how much it hurts, at least for an instant.  It can actually be almost invigorating, especially when some surprising little phenomenon happens, such as something in your skin giving a little “pop” when hot metal touches it.

A whole body process would be quite intimidating, though.  I have enough flammable liquids to do it, but I think that would be most appropriate for some sort of public statement of a death.  I’ve thought of going to sit out in front of the Palm Beach County courthouse (where the finishing blows to my life were delivered) and immolating myself, but you want to make sure you’re committed completely before trying something like that.  Otherwise it would be very embarrassing.

Maybe the best way, by some measures‒other than actual medically provided euthanasia, perhaps with some combination of high-dose valium, fentanyl, and digoxin‒would be hypoxemic asphyxiation, when you would just sort of go lightheaded and “faint” and, if you’ve done it right, just drift away.  I gathered the equipment for this not too long ago.

But of course, if you’re interrupted, or you accidentally dislodge your apparatus while losing consciousness, you could just get brain damage from hypoxemia and not even die.  To be honest, I don’t know how much worse my brain could possibly even be than it is now, but it’s a fact of reality that things can always get worse, even if it’s not true that they can always get better.

It would be good if something (not someone) else took it out of my hands.  Every time I start getting better from a respiratory infection I feel disappointed.  Where is the pneumonia that will develop over top of my URI and usher me away from this shit hole of a universe?

It’s a cliché that if you want something done right, you need to do it yourself.  It isn’t easy.  But I’m working on it.

by

The noonday demon lurks everywhere

It’s Monday morning and, yes, I’m writing another blog post.  Isn’t it exciting?

I’m basically doing this because I have nothing else to do.  By which I mean I have no other real outlet on any kind of regular basis.  I don’t write fiction anymore, I don’t draw (or paint…nor do I do any sculpting, for that matter, but I haven’t done that in nearly 35 years).  I haven’t even diddled around on the guitar in about two weeks, and I haven’t played any kind of keyboard in far longer than that.  I certainly haven’t played any video games in I don’t know how long (unless you count the Euchre app on my phone).

I tried to download a chess app.  Well, actually, I did download one; it’s not as though that’s challenging.  What I tried to do was get interested in chess.  However, before I’d even gotten through one game against the computer, I’d remembered just how boring I find chess, even though I won that game.  It didn’t help that, because it was a free app, ads would pop up that would supersede the game now and then.  I uninstalled it.

Similarly, I tried again to get on Brilliant dot org and learn and/or review some stuff, and that was fine as far as it went, but the stupid Brilliant people (somewhat of an oxymoron, I guess) have the app set up so that it sends all sorts of irritating emails and (if you let it) cell phone notifications about how your “streak” is going to come to an end, so you should go and do a couple of review problems to continue it…it’s so annoying that I don’t go back on the app, and if it weren’t for the fact that I’m supporting Sabine Hossenfelder by using it, I would unsubscribe, so I would no longer be tempted to annoy myself.  People at Brilliant take note:  my loyalty to Sabine goes only so far.

It’s a shame, because I kind of like doing the stuff on Brilliant when I’m doing it, but the last thing I want is to trigger all those intrusive proddings that make me want to find where Brilliant is headquartered and burn the building to the ground.

I also have the Babbel app, and though I had briefly started learning a bit of conversational German, I fell off that (again, after irritating emails and push notifications).  Still, I think now I may try to start learning some Russian.  There’s nothing political in this, it’s just an interesting language.  It’s different enough from English to be engaging, and Mila Kunis speaks Russian.  So do many of the people in Ukraine (they don’t offer Ukrainian on Babbel, but I figure Russian would be a start) and as the Beatles sang, “The Ukraine girls really knock me out, they leave the West behind.”  Ha ha.

Anyway, I like languages, generally.  I’ve often said that language (especially written language) is the greatest invention of the human race, the one that made nearly every other invention possible.  Learning another language helps you understand your own language more deeply, and to get a sense of the nature of language itself, how it varies, what things are constant, and so on.

So, I set myself up to start Russian, but I didn’t actually start it yet.  Is that what they call “executive dysfunction” nowadays?  In my case it might be better called “middle-management dysfunction”, or perhaps even “janitorial dysfunction”…though that latter sounds like it might be a euphemism for incontinence.

I don’t know what to do.  Nothing is really interesting.  Certainly nothing is fun.  Nothing really even gives me any relief from anhedonia; I can only distract myself through autogenous damage, if that’s a term.  Cuts are best, but burns are less obtrusive‒people tend to freak out about blood too much, whereas no one can see burns at the moment they occur.  Burns leave deeper and more damaging scars, also, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

I’m trying to read an old, previously abandoned light novel series that I’d started because I liked the anime.  When I’m done with that‒which will be soon‒I think I’m going to be out of anything I can even force myself to read.

All of this is trivia, of course; it doesn’t matter‒because I don’t matter.  I don’t do any good for anyone, including myself.  I don’t really interact with anyone, except a weekly (ish) phone call with my sister.  I don’t have any friends to talk to or with whom to hang out; everyone I love has at some point decided they no longer want to be around me, so I don’t intend to fall into that trap ever again.  My memory is too damn good for me to forget how much that shit hurts.  It all still hurts.

“Life is pain, Highness,” the Dread Pirate Roberts said.  But it is not mandatory.  One can opt out if one so wishes.

I hope you all have a good day.

by

No more Shakespeare quotes for now – they’re just pretentious and irritating, anyway

Hello and good morning.  I don’t really know what I’m going to write about today—even more so than usual.  As you may be aware, I don’t tend to begin my blog posts with any clear subject matter in mind; I just start writing.

This is not, by the way, how I write my fiction.  There, I tend to have the basic plot in my head from the start, but I don’t outline or anything along those lines, except in my head.  I just write the story as it comes to me, but it’s clear that it develops below the surface when I do it.

I must say, I’ve become very frustrated recently with the process of trying to share my books and/or music with different people via, for instance, Instagram and Threads, which I mentioned earlier this week (I think).  I briefly even rather liked interacting on Threads, because it seemed like there were a lot of interesting but otherwise “normal” people there—normal to me, anyway.  I left occasional comments here and there that got shared and “liked” and to which people responded more positively than negatively.  I even had one person comment, on something I’d written:  “Nicest.  Reply.  Ever.”  Really.

Well, now I’m blocked (temporarily) from posting and replying or anything on Instagram and Threads, but when I was shown that there was some kind of suspension and I “appealed”, it said something along the lines of “Oh, so sorry, that was a mistake.  You haven’t done anything wrong.”  I don’t know if something had been flagged because I sometimes had the page open on a computer still when I looked at it on my phone or something and commented from more than one machine in quick succession, or what.

Anyway, I’m still blocked from sharing or commenting—supposedly through the 17th, though it’s unclear whether that means the beginning of the 17th or the end thereof.  And it’s kind of taking the wind out of my sails.  I don’t actually think that the universe “sends messages” to people, but nevertheless, it is possible to learn about the nature of things from the consistent pattern of events.  Once bitten, twice shy, they say, and I’ve been bitten too often.

There’s the old saying about the fact that a cat that walks once on a hot stove will never do so again, but will also never walk on a cold stove.  Often this is presented in a derogatory fashion—oh, those poor, simple-minded, overly risk-averse creatures who cannot understand how stoves work!

But cats are no more foolish for avoiding stovetops than a human would be for looking both ways before running into a usually non-busy street.  You might rush into such a road a thousand times without incident, but that doesn’t matter if on the thousand-and-first time you’re killed or maimed for life.

There are some things in the world, of course, that are well worth at least some risk of burning your feet or getting hit by a car, but being able to interact on Instagram and Threads with people who seem interesting or, at least, seem to be members of a species distantly related to mine, is not one of those things.  And it’s certainly not worth it just to try vainly to spread word about my books and music.  The world will little note nor long remember much of anything, and it will certainly not remember anything about me.

So, anyway, it was a stupid idea, but it was briefly slightly exciting, at least on the level that something counts as “exciting” for me—meaning that I’ve had a few quiet chuckles here and there, encountered some people who shared some potentially useful resources (I doubt I’ll be taking advantage of them, given how that inquiry has worked out) and even looked forward to people’s responses on the few occasions they happen.

Most of the people who “liked” my shared songs* and books and whatnot are probably bots, anyway.

Oh, and by the way, to the “brilliant” people who run Brilliant dot org—when a person comes back to your site to study and learn about things, and then is immediately afterward bombarded with emailed warnings and pop-up alerts about “your streak is about to end” in clear attempt to cajole them to come on more frequently, for people like me, it makes me want to avoid the fucking thing, which is what I’ve ended up doing for long stretches several times now.  That’s particularly frustrating, because otherwise I like Brilliant.org a lot, and think it is a good learning venue, at least a supplemental one.

I also just finished the latest volume of a light novel series I’ve been reading that was pretty good, and that’s frustrating, because there’s not even a scheduled release date for the next volume, and I can’t seem to find anything else interesting to read.  So, life continues to be a quiet, subtle, understated Hell, that burns not with open flame but with slow, steady friction as if one were constantly being rubbed by burlap and sandpaper.

Oh, well.

TTFN

*One of which, ironically, was “Like and Share”.

by

There is no title–just a lease. Ha ha.

Well, it’s Saturday, and I’m on my way into the office again, since we are open today.  And therefore, as I warned you, I am writing a blog post.

I have no idea what I’m hoping to gain by doing this.  I have no clear notion even of what in principle could be gained from this.  However, I am a creature of habit, as well as of compulsion and desperation, so, well, I’m doing this.  I also try very hard to be a man of my word, though I probably fail as much as anyone does at that.

I don’t really have much news to discuss.  There’s little percentage in discussing the actual news, i.e., events from around the globe, since in the modern world saying something online that someone disagrees with is tantamount to being a revolutionary religious heretic in their eyes, endangering not only the world but the souls of the unborn.

Of course, one of the expressions that most irks me in this vein is when people say that someone is “destroying their existence” or something along those lines, by what they’ve said.  This is obviously nonsense.  I try very hard not to say unkind or hurtful things to people‒courtesy is the lubricant of civilization, after all‒but mate, if I wanted to destroy your existence (and acted on that want) you would not be complaining about it; you would not exist.

This is part of the stupid conflation of words with violence, an idea that can only really be held by those who have little experience with real violence*.   I’m sure I’ve discussed that here before, and it doesn’t really bear repeating.

Yesterday morning, I had a little bump up in my mood and energy level, which I didn’t understand, but I also didn’t really question at the time.  Maybe it was because the holidays are over or something, I don’t know.  Maybe it was because a reply I made on threads got hundreds of likes‒which surprised me‒or because a deliberately stupid joke I made in response to another thread got a decent number of likes and no fewer than two people posting gifs of famous scenes of people saying “Boo”.  That made me chuckle, because it was more or less exactly the response for which I was hoping.

I don’t like to think I’m that shallow, for such things to significantly give me a boost, but who knows?  This stupid human body and limbic system with which they saddled me has all sorts of bugs and hacks and workarounds that just piss me off.

Anyway, such online responses are very temporary and shallow for me, enjoyment wise.  And yet, alternatively, when other people actually contact me directly via social media, in most cases, my immediate response is stress, tension, hyperalertness, anxiety, etc.  And in me, any form of fear quickly sublimates into hostility and battle-readiness, usually in a very literal sense.

I often have to take hours and hours before I can reply to a simple greeting through one of the various messengers (even ones that aren’t obviously bots trying to sell something or other, which I ignore) and sometimes it takes me days.  Even ordinary SMS messages can be stressful.  When I hear the text alert on my phone, my usual reaction is either “What do you want!?” or “Oh, shut up, will you?” before I even know who sent the text.

Even positive texts from friends and family, perhaps in response to my own holiday greeting texts sent to them, cause tension, even though I’m glad to receive them.

I suppose one could call it anxiety, but that’s not exactly the way it feels‒though maybe I’m splitting hairs.  Anyway, I just feel at a loss whenever anyone tries to communicate with me, especially if I’m mentally engaged in something else.  I feel as though I’ve forgotten entirely what one is supposed to do in such situations, but I know that I’m inclined to say or do stupid things.

So, I have to pause and think and give my brain time to digest the fact that someone has messaged me.  Somehow, it always feels as though it is a threat‒ironically, it can be more threatening to receive messages from someone I like than from someone I don’t, because those are people whose opinions about me matter to me, at least in principle.  And I know I always screw up relationships with people who matter to me.

It’s even stressful to see when I have comments here‒but please don’t let that dissuade you!  I want comments, I appreciate them, just don’t take it personally if I take a long time before responding to them.  I won’t say preparing to respond is as bad as trying to work up one’s nerve to walk across hot coals, but maybe it’s analogous to preparing to jump into a very cold lake.  Even if you know that, once you get used to it, you’re probably going to enjoy it, every time there is a kind of “stage fright”.

It’s analogous with physical contact for me.  I have no skill with how and when to initiate physical contact with someone, whether comradely or romantic or whatever.  This skill I have never been able even to begin to acquire, let alone to master, though back in the day I got pretty good at faking my way through seeming to feel natural with verbal interactions at least.

This probably has been a large contributing factor in my dolorous and limited romantic history.  Even when with someone with whom I wanted to be intimate, and who I knew wanted to be intimate with me, I have near-paralytic difficulty starting anything, even something minor like a touch on a shoulder.

Part of that is an automatic warning in my head that says, “Danger, danger, you are making a mistake.  There is no way that anyone, least of all this very special person, could want you to touch them in any way, let alone to do anything further.  You are disgusting!  Don’t inflict your slimy touch on someone else, especially not someone about whom you really care.”  Well, it’s words to that effect‒it’s rarely thought out explicitly, it’s just the uncrystallized, supersaturated feeling those words convey that tends to get in my way.

Oh, and I also tend to get pretty tense when someone touches me‒even if it’s a significant other, sometimes, and even though, in the right situation, even a minor touch can be soothing‒because I feel like I don’t know how to react and I’m sure I’ll screw it up, and anyway, they’ll be in danger of catching cooties** if they touch me.  And, of course, a lot of the time I don’t really want to be touched.

I don’t know how I got onto this topic, but anyway, my temporary boost yesterday lasted only a few hours.  I didn’t sink to as low as I had been on Thursday, but after all, if you’re treading water, it may seem for a moment, due to the chaotic action of the waves and maybe a random burst of extreme effort from you, that you have risen higher above the surface of the sea…but you will not stay elevated.  You will sink back down to the level of whatever passes for neutral buoyancy, after briefly dipping lower.  And, of course, unless you reach shore or a passing boat finds you, sooner or later, you will drown.

That is, unless you’re lucky enough to be eaten by sharks.

*Or perhaps those who have suffered brain damage due to real violence, but those people can be cut a lot of slack.

**Figuratively speaking.  I don’t have lice (which is what I am led to understand the term “cooties” originally meant) nor any other literal contagious infestation or infection.

by

Oh what a tangled web weaves itself

Good day, everyone.  It’s now the last Saturday before both Christmas and Hanukkah in 2024.  The office is open today, and I am on my way to work (quite early, because, you know, it’s me, and I don’t sleep very well).

Sometimes I wonder if writing this blog, in which I basically share my random thoughts, is somehow narcissistic.  Maybe it’s just because narcissism is in the news so much lately, especially with regard to politics*, but I do worry about it.  After all, when one is as gifted and skilled and brilliant and creative as I am, there’s always a danger of losing one’s truly exceptional humility.

I’m kidding, sort of to make a point and sort of just because I like to screw around with things that way.  Don’t worry, an overabundance of self-love has rarely been an issue for me.  Sometimes I pretend to be egotistical, mostly for amusement, and in my teenage years, it also helped stave off my already developing self-loathing and depression a bit**.

Still, with all the people on Instagram and TikTok and YouTube, etc., to say nothing of podcasts, and blogs such as this one, and so forth, one might think that the modern world is beset by a pandemic of narcissism.  I think this is not correct, however.  Although there are divas out there, I think there are more innocent reasons for a lot of what we see.

Humans‒bless ‘em‒are extremely social critters.  They are by far the most social of primates, and really, given the power of language and shared “fictions”, they are the most social species the planet has seen.  They are highly interdependent, and they must not merely cultivate but tend to and nurture many relationships.

When a creature’s survival is strongly dependent on certain behaviors, those behaviors tend over time to become pleasurable; they can even become part of play, and creatures will engage in them purely for their own enjoyment.  Many predators, for instance, will hunt and kill even when they don’t need to do it.  (That’s right, plenty of other animals in the world kill for pleasure, sorry to break anyone’s illusion that this is a feature (or a bug) solely of humans.)

Of course, with ultra-social creatures who need constantly to reinforce existing interpersonal threads as well as to cultivate new beneficial ones and to prune detrimental ones, the exchange of goods or even favors cannot possibly be enough to satisfy.  There’s just not enough time and only one body each to go around.

But when one can share information (even seemingly pointless or banal information) with multiple others, one can develop and strengthen numerous threads, cultivating them even from afar, and one can make oneself seem a useful potential connection for others who are themselves useful, and with minimal cost.  After all, information shared is not lost from its source, it is merely reproduced.

Take a moment to ponder that last sentence‒that fact is a big part of what makes life possible at all.

Anyway, now people can share thoughts and jokes and amusing pictures and helpful tips and even serious, high-level expertise, with millions and even billions of other people, and they can get rapid feedback as well.  Of course people are going to do it, especially since it can even be “monetized” in an almost baroque/rococo**** arrangement of fictions and networks, real and virtual, all interacting in astonishingly complex ways, each entity operating entirely under “local” pressures, which change from instant to instant depending on all the other forces at work, spontaneously forming into a structure of tremendous complexity, a thing not merely unplanned but probably unplannable.

So, although narcissists can thrive online, I think they are a minority, and they seem often to self-destruct.  I think most of the various personae telarum are just humans (and other somewhat similar creatures, like me) responding to instinctual drives and enjoying the process.  One should not think of them in the same way one does those dangerously insecure narcissists who seek great political power.

*Though politics has always been a great bastion of narcissistic pathology.  Not everyone who wants to try to contribute to governing their community, state, nation, etc., is a flagrant narcissist; some are surely well-meaning and even humble.  Nevertheless, the field of politics attracts narcissists like the priesthood attracts pedophiles.

**I don’t remember how old I was when I first experienced true depression, but I know that I first started having suicidal thoughts no later than my first trip to music camp (which I loved, by the way, but the separation from all my usual settings didn’t help my depression, which makes sense if I truly do have the second version of ASD***).

***The first ASD, which I definitely had, was an Atrial Septal Defect, a congenital heart defect that required surgical correction when I was 18.  The second, rather amusingly to me, is Autism Spectrum Disorder, the criteria of which I very likely meet, though I have no official diagnosis.  This overlapping of acronyms‒because there are far fewer combinations of, say, 3 letters than of 3 words‒is an example of a problem inherent in all forms of data compression.

****Barococo?

by

No one is to blame

Well, as often happens on the day immediately following a Monday, it is now Tuesday.  Congratulations.

I don’t know why I wrote “congratulations” there.  I felt as if I were saying that the fact that Tuesday has arrived was some manner of accomplishment and not merely the universe continuing to do what it does and work through its laws as always.

Maybe the thought was to congratulate those of you who consider it a positive thing to live another day for succeeding at doing so.  Maybe it’s a supportive statement to those who really don’t want to go on, but who continue to endure because they don’t want to bring pain to their loved ones.  Making it through another day for a person in that situation is no joke, and those people should be recognized.

It would be nice if they could be recognized in a non-judgmental way by those loved ones for whom the people in question endure.  Not that I expect that the loved ones of the suffering have any better calibration than the people who love them.  Nothing finite is without imperfections (and I’m agnostic about the situation with infinite things, but I have my doubts).

So, it is hard for a person with depression to endure, even when they’re doing it for their family and friends and are suffering because of it, and those depressed people are worthy of sympathy and non-judgmental support from their loved ones and the world in general.  But the people around them are worthy of sympathy, too, and should not be regarded judgmentally for not being able to recognize or even help their loved ones’ suffering.

Here’s where we come to the concept of blame, and how utterly unjustified it is, in every single case.  And to be clear, I don’t mean to say we shouldn’t hold people responsible for their actions in the sense that they are the proximate causes of those actions, and their behavior can be adjusted and improved.  But they are not the ultimate cause‒not of what they are, not of their strengths and weaknesses, not of their limits and their experiences and their sensory acuities and their social skills 

If you have car trouble and your cousin, with whom you are hanging out, doesn’t know the first thing about cars‒doesn’t own one, doesn’t drive, never has‒you may well be disappointed that this cousin can’t help you and doesn’t even recognize that there is a problem until and unless your car completely breaks down.  But you don’t get self-righteously angry at your cousin for that lack of knowledge and skill‒not if you’re even remotely reasonable.  You don’t fully understand what’s wrong with your car, yourself, and you certainly don’t know how to fix it.  And it’s your car.  How can you expect others to be both able and willing to fix your car for you?  They have their own vehicular maintenance issues.

I’m pushing the metaphor, I know.  But I think it’s a good one.  We can all, of course, try to be there for those we love, and to be worthy of having others be there for us, and sometimes that’ll work out and sometimes it won’t.  It can be quite natural to feel resentful and wounded by the people who fail to see your suffering, even though they care about you and are important to you.  But, as Radiohead sang, “Just ‘cause you feel it doesn’t mean it’s there.”  So cut other people slack; and cut yourself some if you can, too.

You didn’t build the universe, or the world, or your nation, or your community.  Neither did anyone else, living or dead.  These things just happened, rarely with any kind of coherent, before-the-fact plan of any kind.  And on the rare occasion when people did try to plan things, those plans essentially always went aglee‒the stricter and more regimented and more dogmatic the plan, the greater the apparent tendency to veer wildly astray, as though there were some manner of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle that applies at the scale of societies.

Civilization is a spontaneously self-assembled and self-assembling system, and like frost on a window, different parts of it carry different orientations and patterns that are not the product of any of the individual constituent water molecules.  The molecules can only line up in the crystal where there is a spot and only in particular orientations, based entirely upon where it is in the system and what the surrounding dynamics are‒and what came before.

This may be the case for the entire universe, as well.  The underlying quantum fields may just all “crystallize” out in particular ways that are highly stochastic and ultimately local, with different kinds of complexity in different places.

Anyway, I’m veering off topic.  The point is, there’s no call for and no use in blaming people for not knowing about your suffering and how they might have done differently and it might have helped you.  And don’t blame yourself, either‒unless you invented the universe.  If you did, well, you’ got some ‘splaining to do.