Pain

by

“Like”, “comment”, and “share” (if you feel like it)

I’m very tired this morning.  By which I mean I’m more tired even than usual.  My head is a bit foggy—more so than usual, again—and I feel like I just belong lying down inert, perhaps in an open-topped coffin.  I’ve occasionally thought that they looked like good places to sleep.  It seems a shame to waste them on people who are already dead.

It’s Wednesday today, and I don’t think I’m going to have anything nearly as thoughtful to say as what I wrote yesterday, which was at least rather “deep” if not particularly useful or helpful or interesting to any of my readers.  I did get an interested comment on my take on one of the reasons mindfulness is useful, and that’s always nice.  I’d love to encourage greater feedback from more of my readers, here on the site in the comments, but I don’t know what to do to encourage them [I decided just to do a little cajoling in the headline, in case that works].

Probably there is just some percentage of people who tend to comment, no matter the situation.  It’s a bit like the long-known “fact” (which may or may not be a true fact) that every advertisement, from flyers/mailings to commercials, actually elicit a response in only about two percent of people who interact with it.  I suspect it’s probably similar with things related to blogging and social media and the like.

One sees it most readily on places like YouTube.  The number of views of a video is almost always something like an order of magnitude greater than the number of likes (and often it’s larger than the number of subscribers), and that’s still larger, though by a ratio that’s not as clear to me, than the number of people who comment (let alone share).

My own YouTube videos (and those of my published songs) are poor examples, or perhaps one might say “poor samples”, not representative of the phenomenon as a whole.  I have a number of “views” on my music videos that is generally a couple of orders of magnitude larger than the number of “likes”, but I know why that is.

Almost all of those views are from me, because I put my songs in my YouTube music playlist, and so I have listened to them often, back when I used to ride my scooter to work and back.  I had a lovely Bluetooth enabled helmet.  I like to listen to songs and sing along in a car, or similar, when I’m on my way places*.  So I’ve listened to my own songs probably orders of magnitude more times than everyone else put together has listened to any of my songs.

It’s kind of pathetic, isn’t it?  I’m also the one who has bought more copies of my books—because I gave copies to the people in the office—than everyone else put together, I’m fairly sure.

As for this blog, well, I get a higher number of likes relative to number of readers than I do with anything else, and I even recently have been getting a comment or so most days, which is very nice.  There’s at least some interaction.  It would be nice if I could reach a larger audience, but I’m not terribly good at self-promotion.  I am pretty good at self-denigration, though.  In fact, I’m one of the best there is at it!

Ha ha.

Well, like the song says, it’s all just a drop of water in an endless sea.  Or, it’s all just spit in the ocean** as more people probably say.  My spit may be more purulent than average, but it’s all still just spit.

Anyway, I don’t know what else to discuss today.  I’m very tired and worn out and I’m in ongoing pain that only responds somewhat to all the mitigating things I try to do, at least so far.  I’ve been through a quarter of a century of trying, and I have not been passive nor uncreative nor ignorant in my attempts.  As those reading might notice, I’ve thought about this matter a lot.  You probably would also if you were in chronic pain for nearly half of your life (so far).  It has a way of garnering your attention.  It’s built that way.

It’s interesting to note that shortly after I’m sixty, if I’m still alive***, I will have been in essentially constant pain for half my life.  After that it will become a majority (unless I’m cured at some point along the way, of course).

I occasionally (not often, though, because it’s too disheartening) wonder what my life would be like, what I would be like, if not for my chronic pain.

Things would almost certainly be vastly different.  I cannot be certain that they would be better—there are probably at least a few things that would be worse.  But it seems likely that my life would be much better overall, if only because I wouldn’t have a huge chunk of my will and energy stolen by being in pain all the time.  That constant pain really does make everything else harder.

But no matter the state of the rest of my life, at least one thing would be true (by “definition” in this case), and that is that I would not be in pain every fucking day of my stupid useless life.

Surely that must be worth something.  It would not be worth not having my children exist, but almost everything else would be worth trading.  I sometimes think of it as parallel to a line from Me and Bobby McGee:  “I’d give all of my tomorrows for a single yesterday, holding Bobby’s body next to mine.”  It’s nice poetry, albeit a bit weird to think about temporally.  But in my case, I think of it as basically saying I would gladly give up some significant fraction of what would otherwise have been my future if I could be out of pain.

But, of course, my future is less valuable to me now at least partly because I am in pain.  If I were not in pain, ironically, the future would be much more valuable, since it would be at least somewhat less uncomfortable.  If I could be free of depression, and the tendency thereto, that would make things better still.  That might even constitute a future worth having.

Yeah, yeah, I know, wishes, horses, manure, beggars riding, dogs and cats living together, watermelon, cantaloupe, rutabaga, yada, yada, yada.  I’m wasting my time and yours.  And I’m writing too much, because I’m using the lapcom, and I’m not saying or doing (or being) anything at all worth saying or doing or being.  This is all just stupid.

I hope you all at least have a good day.  I would not mind if this were my last one.

*I can’t do it anymore because I don’t ride or drive anywhere anymore, so I am not “alone” when commuting anymore.  I’m also not alone at the house.  It’s really quite disappointing.  I like to sing.

**This is a bit amusing:  I made a typo when I first wrote that phrase, and it was rendered as “spit is the ocean”, which seems almost like some vaguely deep thought about how oceans are lived in, swum in, excreted in, and bled in by numerous living creatures.

***Right now that seems a horrifying prospect.

by

May the slope of your pain function always be negative

I’ve been thinking about something I wrote in my blog post yesterday.  I had thrown out the thought, in passing, about how it seemed as though all the things in my life that I still do are not things I necessarily do for joy or out of desire to achieve some goal, but rather they are things which are more painful not to do than to do, and so I do them.

There isn’t really a positive motivation—not the pursuit of happiness or improvement or fulfillment or enrichment.  It’s just that the feeling of stress and tension and anxiety (or whatever) regarding the prospect of, for instance, not going to work rapidly becomes worse than the equivalent feelings about going to work.

That’s not a great state of affairs.  Don’t get me wrong; it’s entirely natural.  I’ve written about this many times, this recognition of the fact that the negative experiences—fear, pain, revulsion, disgust, and so on—are the biologically most important ones.  Creatures that don’t run from danger, that don’t avoid injury, that don’t shy away from potential infection and poison, are far less likely to survive to reproduce than creatures that do those things.

We see clinical examples of people lacking some of these faculties—such as those with congenital insensitivity to pain—and while we might envy them a life without agony, it tends to be quite a short life.  Also, they tend to become immobile and deformed due to damage they do to their joints by not shifting position to improve blood flow.

In case you didn’t know, that’s one of the reasons you can’t stand completely still for very long; it’s not good for you.

But many of us, especially in the modern world, have some things that we do for positive experience.  Some of them are dubious, but food, sex, companionship/conversation, singing, dancing, all that stuff, are positive things.  Unfortunately, positive experience cannot be allowed—by biology—to last too long.

As Yuval Harari noted, a squirrel that got truly lasting satisfaction from eating a nut would be a squirrel that lived a very short—albeit fairly happy—life, and would be unlikely to leave too many offspring.

Maybe this is what happens to some drug addicts.  Maybe they really do get satisfaction or at least pleasure from drugs—and maybe that is what ends up destroying them.  At some level, that’s not truly in question, is it?  People who are addicted to drugs forego other pleasures and other positive things, but perhaps more importantly, they fail to avoid many sources of pain and fear and injury.

The reality is probably a bit of an amalgam, I suppose.  I would not say it’s a quantum superposition, though, except in the sense that everything is a quantum superposition (or, rather, a whole bunch of them).

This is one situation in which I think I’m right and Roger Penrose is wrong—a bold claim, but I think a fair one—in that I see no reason to suspect that the nature of consciousness either requires or even allows quantum processes, other than in the trivial sense that everything* involves quantum processes.  But there’s no reason seriously to think that (for instance) neurotubules can even sustain a quantum superposition internally, let alone that such a process can somehow affect the other processes of the neuron, many of which are well understood and show no sign of input from weird states of neurotubules, which act mainly structurally in neurons.

If deep learning systems—LLMs and the like—have demonstrated anything, it’s that intuitive thought** does not require anything magical, but rather can be a product of carefully curated, pruned, and adjusted networks of individual data processing units, feeding backward and forward and sideways in specific (but not necessarily preplanned or even well understood) ways.  No quantum magic or neurological voodoo need be involved.

I think too many people, even really smart people like Penrose, really want human intelligence to be something “special”, to be something that cannot be achieved except within human heads, and maybe in the heads of similar creatures.  Surely (they seem to believe) the human mind must have some pseudo-divine spark.  Otherwise, we oh-so-clever humans are just…just creatures in the world, evolved organisms, mortal and evanescent like everyone and everything else.

Which, of course, all the evidence and reasoning seems to suggest is the case.

Maybe, deep down, there isn’t much more to life than trying to choose the path from moment to moment that steers you toward the least “painful” thing you can find.

Please note, I’m not speaking here about some metaphorical continuum, some number line that points toward pleasure in one direction and pain in the other.  That’s at best a toy model.  In the actual body, in the actual nervous system, pain and fear and pleasure and motivation are literally separate systems, though clearly they interact.  Pleasure is not merely the absence of pain, nor is pain merely the absence of pleasure.  Even peripherally, the nerves that carry painful sensations (which include itching, as I noted yesterday!) use different paths and different neurotransmitters than the ones that deal in pleasure and positive sensation.

Within the brain, the amygdala and the nucleus accumbens (for instances) are separate structures—and more importantly, they perform different functions.  There’s nothing magical about their locations in the brain or the particular neurotransmitters they use.  Those things are accidents of evolutionary past.

There’s nothing inherently stimulating about epinephrine, and there’s nothing inherently soothing about endorphins or oxytocin, and there’s nothing inherently motivating or joyful about dopamine and serotonin.  They are all just molecular keys that have been forged to open specific “locks” or activate (or inactivate) specific processes in parts of other nerve cells (and some other types of cells).  It’s the process that does the work, Neo, not the neurotransmitter.

This brings up a slight pet peeve I have about people discussing “dopamine seeking” (often when talking about ADHD).  I know, the professionals probably use this as a mere shorthand, but that can be misleading to the relatively numerous nonprofessionals in the world.  The brain is not just a chemical vat.  Depression and the like are not just “chemical imbalances” in some ongoing multi-level redux reaction or something, they are malfunctions of complicated processes.  Improving them should be at least as involved as training an AI to recognize cat faces, wouldn’t you think?

But one can do the latter without really knowing the specifics of what is going on in the system.  It’s just sometimes difficult, and the things you think you need to train toward or with often end up giving you what you didn’t really want, or at least what you didn’t expect.

Maybe this is part of why mindfulness is useful (it’s not the only part).  With mindfulness, one actually engages in internal monitoring, not so much of the mechanical processes happening—no amount of mere meditation can reveal the structure of a neuron—but of the higher-scale, “emergent” processes happening, and one can learn from them and be better aware.  This can be an end in and of itself, of course.  But it can also at least sometimes help people decrease the amount of suffering they experience in their lives.

Speaking of that, I hope that reading this post has been at least slightly less painful for you than not reading it would have been.  Writing it has been less painful than I imagine not writing it would have been.  That doesn’t help my other chronic pain, of course, which continues to act up.

*With the possible exception of gravity.

**I.e., nonlinear processing and pattern recognition, the kind many people including Penrose think cannot be explained by ordinary computation, a la Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem, etc.

 

by

Pain, pain, go away…and don’t come back some other day

I’m writing this post on my smartphone today, because I decided not to bring the lapcom back with me on Saturday.  I was very tired and sore and worn down from the week and felt that even that small extra weight was more than I cared to carry.

I got at least a bit of physical rest yesterday, but my mental rest was poor, and was somewhat disrupted by a few seemingly minor things that happened.  Worse, though, is the fact that I tried to sedate myself on Saturday night somewhat, but still woke up by two in the morning, after maybe four hours’ sleep.

It’s quite frustrating, as I’m sure you can well imagine.  I suppose it’s better than being one of those people who never seems to be able to wake up on time or to get places on time.  I don’t know how such people would have survived in the ancestral environment.  I suppose it’s just as well for them that they don’t live in such an environment.

So, anyway, I was both rather stressed out and unrested on my “day off” and now I’m no better rested, because I slept even less last night.  Also, my pain, which doesn’t like to become too boring (except in describing the character of the pain), has shifted its focus, and now it is my entire lower half (umbilicus down) that is achy and sore and doesn’t want to move.  Neither side is worse, but neither side is better*.  Although my left middle back and side are way more tight and sore than the right, and my left shoulder still has that weird, seemingly neurological, stiffness and pain.

It would be nice to be able to walk to the train this morning; the weather is not bad for it, and it would be a slight money-saver, though a time loser (but my time is mostly wasted time, anyway).  Unfortunately, I don’t know that I am physically up to the task, and I fear it might exacerbate my pain.  That’s never a good thing.

I wish I still had a scooter, or one of those electric scooters or bikes‒or better yet, that I could ride the bike(s) I have without having to fix their tires and such.  Maintenance of such things is really difficult for me, though; it’s not difficult to do as it were, i.e., the tasks are not in themselves particularly challenging physically or with respect to knowledge or dexterity.

It’s a matter of will in a sense.  Also, these kinds of tasks seem to do something akin to or analogous to creating an allergic reaction:  they make my mind itch horribly, and itching is, of course, a kind of pain, and my mind only has the reserves to deal with so much pain at any given time.

I seem able to regenerate less and less of that reserve each day‒either that or just my reserves are constantly being depleted at a rate faster than they can recover and so there are no “reserves”, just a base rate process that is in the net negative on average every day, and which will eventually run out and that will be that.

I don’t know what will happen then.  I’m honestly surprised that it hasn’t happened already.  Maybe it has.  Maybe this is me without any actual capacity to deal with anything other than those things which are more painful for me not to do.  Hmm.  That’s a vaguely interesting thought.

Whatever the best description is, I am very worn out.  More and more‒or so it seems right now‒I have no sense of any future for me.  I can’t even readily imagine my own future; I can’t see how a future can possibly happen that entails anything but quietly catastrophic dissolution.  And, of course, my pain doesn’t help my mood disorder(s) and my mood disorder doesn’t help it.  It’s another one of those cycles that has a vicious streak a mile wide.

Whenever I mention a vicious cycle, part of me nearly always thinks of the words “viscous cycle”, and I think vaguely about what might constitute a viscous cycle.  If any of you have any amusing thoughts about that, I would be delighted to hear them.  I could use a bit of a laugh today.

I’m really worn out, and it’s only Monday.  I don’t know why I bother.  I mean, I could give causal explanations, of course‒all things that happen in the ordinary world have causes‒and my descriptions would probably be fairly accurate and correct, though probably incomplete.  But as for reasons, that’s another matter.  Coming up with those is more difficult, and some of them are quite tortured.

In Man’s Search for Meaning, the author and psychologist Viktor Frankl points out the notion, not original to him but poignantly and painfully rediscovered by him in a profoundly visceral way in the concentration camps of Nazi Germany, that a person can endure nearly anything if they have a purpose, a reason, a meaning.  But such meaning is not always there to be found, and I don’t want to try to embrace a false one; and though it is possible for people to make meaning for themselves, my knack for that has worsened over time.

Again, the pain wears away so many things, as it has also stripped away so many people and so much property and so many accomplishments in my life.  I think I would be quite a different person, or at least there would be a real difference in balance in my personality, if I could be free of anything but more ordinary pain.

I wouldn’t even complain about being “comfortably numb”.  I know pain is biologically important, of course, but mine has gone well into the region of diminishing marginal returns, then rounded into negative marginal returns, and its net value crossed the x-axis downward a long time ago.  It might be nice to experience at least a brief period of having pathologically too little pain.  Even if it would make me vulnerable to injury and illness, I wouldn’t mind much.  It’s not as though I don’t crash up against illness and injury (in some sense) every day anyway.

Oh, what’s the point?  I’m sorry to bore you all with this nonsense.  I really should just call it quits, because this is at least as pointless as anything else I do, and that’s saying a lot.  It almost certainly does not do the world any net good, and I’m not sure whether it does me any good.

I guess I’ll keep doing it until it becomes more painful to do it than not to do it.  Or until I die, I guess.

*I sometimes like to indulge a clever paradoxical descriptive trick I picked up from Piers Anthony by saying something like “each leg hurt worse than the other one”.

by

[Insert blog post headline here]

I really feel horrible today.  That’s not intended to mean that I feel that I am horrible today, though it doesn’t preclude that, either.  I more often than not think that I am horrible.  But today, in addition to that, I feel rotten.

And that word I mean almost literally.  If someone told me‒with at least a colorable claim to knowledge‒that the pain I have is because parts of my body are decomposing while I am still alive, I would not immediately dismiss the possibility (though I consider it quite unlikely).

We had a bad (and weird) day at the office on Saturday, then I had some things I had to do afterwards that required a great deal of walking.  It was a bright day but still cool out, though, so that was not so bad; it reminded me of walking places with my friends when I was young, though I have no such friends now.

Anyway, I had to do something Sunday morning that required a bit of walking, too‒not as much, but significant.  I was feeling okay up until that point.

Well, I don’t know for sure what happened, but by early afternoon, it all hit me, and the entire lower half of my body, and to some degree my left shoulder and arm, were in increasing pain.  My left hand was also cold, which demonstrates some autonomic aspect to the pain, which is not too surprising.  I have tried to medicate it with the resources I have available, while trying to avoid permanent liver and/or kidney and/or stomach damage.  Alas, my success has been limited.  Because of my pain, among other things, I hardly slept at all last night; it was a bad sleep even for me.

Sorry.  I’m sure this is all hideously boring.  Believe me*, it’s even more boring to be the one describing it.  I don’t really know what I’m going to do about it, though.

At this stage of my life, all I wanted and expected was to be able to come home after work or on the weekends and just be with my family‒my wife and kids and such.  But largely due to my chronic pain, that is all a long-vanished fantasy.  Nobody wants me to come home to them, and no one certainly wants to come home to me.  I don’t even want to come home to me.

In some ways I don’t have to come home to me, since I don’t consider where I live now to be home.  It’s just a shit-hole in which I exist when I’m not at work or en route to or from work or going to the store or the bank or whatever.  I haven’t felt like I was home anywhere for at least the last 13 years, and probably really for some years before that.

And I’m not very good at taking care of myself, so my life tends to be a mess when I’m left to my own devices, and that tends to get worse over time‒it’s like my very own, personal, bespoke version of the second law of thermodynamics.

So, yeah, I’m not feeling well at all, but there’s not a whole hell of a lot that I can do about it.  And my depression and the other mental/neurodivergent shit doesn’t help.  It’s not like there are any programs or anything available near me.  I couldn’t afford one if there were, and I have no insurance, and as far as I know I have no secret inheritance anywhere.

I mean, come on, who’s going to leave an inheritance to me?  I tend to drive away anyone I care about (not deliberately).  I think you can grasp why that might be just from reading the smattering of my thoughts that I share here.  Believe it or not, I do not share the worst, most self-hating (or world-hating**) thoughts that go through my mind.

Okay, well, that’s enough for today.  I will go to work because there’s really nothing better for me to do; I was at the house all day yesterday and it has not made me feel better, so I don’t see why another day there would improve things.

I hope this is the start of a good week for you, at least.

*Or don’t if you don’t want to, I don’t really give a flying fuck at a rat’s ass whether you believe me.

**To be fair to the world‒which probably deserves better than my judgment‒one of the main things I hate about it is that I am in it.  I suspect I would find it much more pleasant if this were not so***.

***Well, okay, I wouldn’t find it better if I were not in it, since I wouldn’t be there to find it better.  But my projection of my perception into the world as it would be without me in it certainly seems no worse than the world as it is now, and it would have the relative benefit of my absence.  I think my conclusion is therefore reasonable.

by

My way of life is blogg’d into the sere, the yellow leaf

Hello and good morning.

TTFN

Ha.  Ha.  Sorry about that.  Just, honestly, I don’t really feel much like writing right now.  There are no other twos here today (at least, I’m not going to be talking about them, except to the extent that saying that I’m not talking about them constitutes talking about them).

Actually, wait.  I will make a relatively fun note that includes the number two, since it just occurred to me that today is the fifth:  If you add (or if anyone else adds) the first two prime numbers together, they give you the third one.  2 + 3 = 5.

This is the only place in all the infinite realm of the prime numbers in which you will be able to add two consecutive primes to get the next prime, because all prime numbers except two are odd, and if you add (or anyone else adds) two odd numbers together, you (or they or he or she) will get an even number.  And the only even prime is two.

Actually, it’s worth noting that one can add two primes that are not consecutive to get a third prime.  If one takes any of the first member of a set of twin primes* and adds two (that solitary even prime) to it, one will get the second of the pair of twin primes.  This may be able to be done in an infinite number of cases; it’s thought that there are an infinite number of twin primes, i.e., that there is no largest twin primes set.

However, this has not been proven yet (as far as I know) though work has been done on it and progress has been made.  I won’t get much more into it than this, except to say that apparently a lot of the work has been done by large, decentralized groups of mathematicians (professionals and amateurs) through a site called “polymath”, if my memory is correct.

Now that is an excellent name for a collaborative mathematics website.

Oy, there I go again, talking about trivia about prime numbers and so on.  Maybe it would make sense for me to get into these things if I were truly involved, but I’m a spectator of mathematics (apart from my truly useless invention of the gleeb**, a number which, when multiplied by 0 gives you 1).  So my interest is entirely esoteric and reflected.  I apologize to those of you who find it tiring.  To those of you who like it, I’ll say “You’re welcome”.

You’re welcome.

See, I told you I would say it.  And then I said it.  I guess that’s one point in my favor.

I’m not sure there are any others.  At least, none of them appear to me to be in my favor.  I am all but completely worn out.  I’m running on fumes, or whatever other metaphor one might want to apply that is applicable (since applying inapplicable ones is stupid) and my incessant pain continues to wear me down, adding to my depression, and eroding what little joy I have left.

I really have wanted so often just to hang it up.  I came relatively close yesterday afternoon and considered leaving a “post” that just said, “I don’t think I can do this anymore.”  The would be the title and the content.

I didn’t do it, of course, which you can tell by looking, if you are so inclined***.  But I came closer than I’ve come before, at least subjectively speaking.  Last week—I think it was—I posted a similar sentence on most of my social media, just the line “I don’t know if I can do all this much longer.”  I’ll embed a screen shot here:

 

So, fair warning is being given, here and elsewhere.  The fire alarm is giving off little warning beeps.  The readout dial is high in the yellow range, perhaps already inching into the red.  Creaking sounds and little wisps of steel and concrete dust are issuing from the support beams of the bridge.  Small tremors and puffs of escaping steam are increasing in frequency near the hitherto dormant volcano.  There’s a red sky in the morning, today****.

But, I appear not to be able to stop yet.  I’m not yet able to escape.  I’m still pushing the stupid boulder up the stupid hill, like the stupid idiot that I am.  I’m even writing this blog post on my lapcom for the first time in two weeks (well, this is the first time at all that I’m writing this blog post, but hopefully you know what I mean), just because I felt mildly nostalgic.

One of these days, though, I’ll be able to end my blog post with just “TT” instead of “TTFN”, and it won’t be over just for now but finally and for good—not just the blog but everything.  And I don’t know if that will be sad or a relief for anyone out there, but I hardly think it will be a tragedy, nor will it be more than little noted, and it will certainly not be long remembered.

But for now, I must needs sign off with the annoyingly non-climactic

TTFN

*Primes that are two apart from each other, such as 29 and 31, or 137 and 139.

**Seriously, I worked out a lot of the algebra that involves it and everything (for instance, it turns out that a gleeb squared is still a gleeb, and 1 over a gleeb equals 0).  I’m sure I discussed it in a previous blog post.  If I can find which one without much trouble, I’ll leave the link here.

***In principle, you can tell by looking even if you are not so inclined, but you simply will not tell because you won’t look.  Should that count, then, as a “can” situation if it’s not physical impossibility but mental disinterest that leads one never to do a thing?  If it simply will not ever happen, can one not just then say that it cannot happen?  Are “cannot” and “shall not” synonymous here, as when Ian McKellen misspoke his most famous line when facing the balrog in The Fellowship of the Ring?

****This may be true somewhere—it probably is, come to think of it—but it’s not true for me, because it’s still fully dark as I write this; the sun is not even lightening the eastern horizon yet.  I’m just being melodramatic.

by

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.

by

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.

by

“Well…I’m back.”

First off, I apologize for not writing a post yesterday.  I did not go to work because I was not feeling at all well.  And, of course, the office was not open on Saturday, so I didn’t do a post then.  I ought to have been well rested, at least, but I wasn’t.  Being alone at the house is not conducive to restfulness and recharging for me, though it’s better than not getting days off.  But I have only my own company, and I hate that guy, so it’s not pleasant.

One of my main weaknesses in the realm of the physical is my GI tract, and that was the main problem over the past few days.  I’ve taken a lot of meds for my chronic pain‒aspirin, acetaminophen, ibuprofen, naproxen, all that stuff‒over the last 20+ years (and more, day per day, over the past 10 years or so), so there are no doubt chronic toxic effects on my stomach and even intestines (and possibly liver and kidneys).

Also, I have to take proton pump inhibitors or at least H2 blockers to prevent myself from getting gastritis and ulcers from all the NSAIDs I take.  That’s probably interfering with the absorption of at least some nutrients, such as perhaps calcium and iron, for instance.  I try to counter that with supplements, but it only can go so far.  Also, they tend to cause their own troubles.

Why do I do it?  Well, chronic pain really sucks, I can tell you.  I actually have told you, many a time and oft, probably to the point of making you feel nauseated*.  So I have to make choices about what I value more at any given moment.  And future selves of me don’t always agree with the past selves about these things‒that’s how brains/minds work, I’m afraid.

So, there’s the added frustration of trying to tell myself not to overdo it on aspirin, say, and to cut back on the omeprazole and maybe replace it with famotidine, but failing and becoming physically ill when pain is too much and then stomach upset is too much.  But nothing is ever just right.  And pain is never-ending but not constant, in the sense that it waxes and wanes at least a bit, and some days it is harder to keep to a manageable level than others.

Sometimes it helps if I do things that hurt myself, deliberately, to distract me at least a bit.  That’s difficult to grasp, maybe, for someone who hasn’t experienced such things, but it’s the way it is.  Also, hurting oneself physically can help distract from psychological pain, and give one a sense of at least some control of one’s pain.

Unfortunately, and perhaps strangely, chronic pain does not distract from psychological pain; it makes it worse.  No wonder Darth Vader was always so grumpy‒he was in chronic pain that must have been horrible (which he brought upon himself, of course).  Mind you, the “dark side” of the Force probably didn’t help.

I often think it’s very strange for something like the Force to have a “light side” and a “dark side”.  It feels very much that the sentient beings are projecting their own values onto something that is, finally, a natural phenomenon.  Also, I don’t get why someone would pick a part of the Force to “use” or to follow, but try to avoid the other “side”, if one is truly trying to discern and follow the “will” of the Force.

Oh, well, the metaphysics and metaethics of fictional universes can sometimes be entertaining, I guess, but this is not one such time.

In some ways, it’s just as well that I didn’t write a post yesterday, since it was the 45th “anniversary”** of the murder of John Lennon.  I might have dwelt on that a bit much, since it’s a horrible event that still grinds away at my sense of whether the human race has any net value whatsoever.

John Lennon has now been dead for five years longer than he lived, while his murderer turned 70 this year, alive and at least somewhat healthy.  Well, that little purulent exudate can at least count himself lucky that he has not found himself in my power in the time since 1980.  I would use all my knowledge and all of my quite active and very dark imagination to keep him alive and begging for death as long as I possibly could.  The Spanish Inquisition were pussies.

Anyway, that’s enough of that.

In closing, I just want to share a notion and question that came to me (and has done so on and off):  I wonder if I would get more, or at least second-level, response to my words if I did a sort of vlog in which I read out loud some of my prior posts.  What do my readers think?  Would it be worth it?

Anyway, try to have a good day.  Remember, “do” or “do not” is never fully in your control; there is only “try”.  Or as the Japanese say, you are responsible for the effort, not the outcome.

Yoda’s a moron.

*Ad nauseam, in other words.

**It seems almost disgusting to use that word here, since often anniversaries are celebrated, and this is not something worthy of celebration, but I had a hard time coming up with another word that worked.  And etymologically, the word “anniversary” doesn’t carry value judgments, it just means something that comes every year.

by

“Shadows of the evening crawl across the years”

Well, it’s Wednesday morning‒insert your joke of choice related to the Beatles song She’s Leaving Home here‒and here is my blog post for the day.  I will not be posting tomorrow (barring the very much unforeseen), since today is Thanksgiving Eve* here in the US, and therefore tomorrow will be Thanksgiving.  I will not be working on Thanksgiving, so there is to be no “traditional” Thursday post.  I’m sure you’re all devastated, but hopefully you can eat yourself into a stupor tomorrow to flee from your sorrow and loss.

Speaking of stupors, I slept a bit better‒or at least a bit longer‒last night than the night before.  This is because, despite it being a weeknight/worknight, I knocked myself out a bit with an OTC sleep aid.  So, if I seem a bit odd today‒for me, I mean‒that’s probably why.

Of course, I’m well aware that the sleep induced by such medications is not proper sleep.  That’s a very interesting fact for someone who gets proper sleep on their own, but it’s pretty theoretical to me.  It’s a bit like quibbling by saying, “going through a wormhole to get to a distant part of spacetime quickly isn’t really going faster than the speed of light”.  Well, okay, if I can find ways to break the laws of causality** I will, but in the meantime, I’ll use the wormhole.

Likewise, sometimes I just want to be unconscious, and I have a hard time achieving it on my own.  Oblivion is such a relief when and if it happens (so to speak).  Yet, even when I do sleep, there’s always a background watchfulness in my head, a feeling that where I am is not safe in some sense, so I cannot completely relax.

I almost never wake up without some manner of start, i.e., a bit of a jump in place.  I don’t know why***.  Maybe this is just the way it is when you’re nominally a member of a species of pack hunters but you’re functionally completely alone, separated from whatever group(s) there were to which you belonged and surviving on your own as best you can.  The world is never fully safe for such a creature.

Well, the world is never fully safe, period, full stop.  No one here gets out alive, after all.  Nevertheless, natural selection tends to lead to the state where the only surviving organisms are descendants of those who feel fear and who feel pain and who try to stay alive indefinitely, even when that survival is pointless (biologically speaking, I mean‒I won’t get into the deeper philosophical questions that can apply, because that would take too much time and energy).

I’m going to bring this to a close here pretty soon, if I can.  My thumb arthritis is acting up, today, and writing this is more painful than it usually is.  Well, actually, I don’t know that “arthritis” is the proper word, since that implies a process that is primarily inflammatory.  It’s probably more precise to say “arthropathy”, which just means “something wrong with a joint”.  “Arthralgia” works quite well here, also, meaning just “joint pain”, but it’s pretty darn vague in its implications of any possible cause.

I suppose it doesn’t make a great deal of difference.

Anyway, I hope everyone who is celebrating has a truly wonderful Thanksgiving Day tomorrow, and that you spend a pleasant time with friends and family (and maybe some football).  I will be back on Friday, barring (as always) the unforeseen.  I work at a sales office, after all, and Friday is “Black Friday”, traditionally the biggest sales day of the year in the US.  Though, there has been a significant degree of “feature creep” or whatever the best term might be regarding that, so now the whole of this time of year is becoming an extended “Black Friday”.  Natural selection tends to encourage such things.

Anyway, I expect to write a post on Friday, so I will “see you” then.  Or at least you will see me.

*There is no such holiday, official or unofficial, as Thanksgiving Eve, but it’s still obvious what I mean by it.  Isn’t it?

**The speed of light in a vacuum being the speed of causality.  This appears to be a large part of why nothing can travel faster.  How could something move more quickly than causality?

***As far as I can tell, it’s not because of having gone to prison.  For one thing, my sleep problems started way before that pleasant interlude.  For another, I didn’t have any real problems with people starting shit with me in prison.  Apparently, I looked (look?) a bit nuts or something.  Also, honestly, I got along okay with people there, all things considered.

by

“They tumble blindly as they make their way…”

It’s Tuesday morning and I’m beginning the process of making my way to the office.  By the time I finish writing this, and certainly by the time it’s posted, I will be there.

I thought I might stay out sick today, because yesterday at the office I felt pretty crummy and almost as if I had a fever.  I checked, and my temperature was normal, but that’s hard to interpret, because I almost never don’t have NSAIDS and other analgesic/antipyretics on board*.  So I could pretty easily have something brewing that would cause a fever, but my fever response is too suppressed.

That’s not an ideal situation, I know, but the alternative is to try to ignore the chronic pain I have.  That’s not so easy, for good, sound, biological reasons.  I’m not saying it’s impossible, and with the proper motivation I could probably do it, but I have no such motivation.

What would I be trying to achieve by not treating my pain as best I can?  Increased longevity?  Hah!  What would be the point of that?  This life that I have is not really something worth prolonging.

If one has a delicious meal one may want to eat slowly, to relish** it.  If one is spending time with a good friend or spouse or other beloved family member, certainly that’s worth making things last as long as one reasonably can do.  But even people who consider themselves masochists don’t really want to prolong their own suffering.  They tend only to want the pain that gets them excited, which is not really “suffering” as most people would think of it.  In any case, I am no masochist; my inclinations are, if anything, in the opposite direction.

I don’t mean to imply that my own suffering is particularly odious or anything.  I’m sure there are many people who suffer much more than I do.  Some of them have to suffer with being moral and intellectual imbeciles, and that’s pretty horrifying to contemplate; many such people are involved in government, even though these are probably the last people one would reasonably want to have the job of keeping the machinery of the state functioning.

I mean, we can all see how badly that works, though some are deluded enough that they would claim not to know whereof I speak.  Still, what are you going to do?  Force the more competent, moral, disciplined, intellectually humble but rigorous people to be governors and legislators and administrators?  What if they got really pissed off about it and decided just to wreck everything as much as they could because they’ve been forced to work in positions of governance?

You think things are bad now?  Beware the wrath of smart, patient, disciplined, creative people.

Anyway, that’s just a tangential thought, something in which I seem to specialize, though it is not deliberate.  I just tend to let my thoughts meander***.

Speaking of which, yesterday, in recognition of that tendency, I titled my post by paraphrasing the catchphrase of the old cartoon character Ricochet Rabbit.  Since then, I had a related memory pop up of the old toy “Ricochet Racers”.  I never actually owned one of those, but I can vaguely recall the jingle that went with their ads:  “Ricochet Racers on target!  Have a real play [or was it a great play?] with a ricochet.”  Something like that.  That second line may be slightly off, but it gets the gist.

I wish I could convey the tune in writing.  Instead, here’s a video with a later version of the toy, and the guy sings a bit of the original theme, but with a changed second line.  He’s not a great singer, though, and these aren’t exactly the original words.

Thinking about it, I realize that the rhythm of that jingle is at least a little bit interesting.  The song appears to be in some version of 4/4 time, but the first line is sung in a set of slow-ish triplets, each triplet being equivalent to 4 quarter notes.  That’s mildly impressive for a jingle written to sell a long-defunct kids’ toy.

I wonder how many truly skilled composers end up doing such less-than-glorified work because they’ve got to make a living somehow.

We know that many movie composers are truly brilliant, from John Williams and Hans Zimmer through to people who primarily work in other genres but sometimes do films, such as Jonny Greenwood.  But those are large scale, respectable composing jobs.  What of the could-be Mozart who must write songs for McDonalds commercials?

I guess if such a person finds joy and satisfaction in that work, then there’s nothing to lament****.  Perhaps they can do enough composing to make a living that way, and otherwise compose things of their own in their spare time, which might one day be played by fancier musicians for more high-falutin’ purposes.  That seems okay, too.

That might be analogous to what I do here, except that none of my writing makes me any money at all, so it’s a bit less rewarding.  Still, if anyone reading wants to send me money, we could probably figure out a way to do it.

I won’t hold my breath.  But, whatever.  I hope at least some of you, some of the time, enjoy my posts.  And heck, if you like them, you could certainly share them, if you can think about someone who might be interested in reading them.

Here, I wrote a song about such liking and sharing.  It’s no “Ricochet Racers” theme, but I think it’s pretty good.

Have a nice day.

*That means “in my system”, in typical medical jargon, in case that wasn’t clear.  It probably was clear, though, wasn’t it?

**Or whatever garnish or condiment one might like on one’s food.

***Like a restless wind inside a letter box, if you will.

****Imagine a lament for a writer of jingles.  Rather “meta” isn’t it?