Pain

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“A distant ship smoke on the horizon”

Well, it’s here at last:  the final day of June in 2026 AD/CE.  You might say it’s the hospice day for the first half of this year.  Let us try to make its passing as peaceful and comfortable as we can.  I recommend high doses of opioids.

I’m kidding.  I don’t actually recommend such a thing unless one is in severe pain that’s simply not responding to anything else, or unless all the other stuff is simply too toxic.

That’s a big part of the conundrum of opioids.  All the other types of pain medications‒aspirin, other NSAIDs, acetaminophen, lidocaine injections, steroid injections and so on‒have significant systemic toxicities, even at relatively moderate doses.  They affect the stomach, the kidneys, the liver, the local tissues, the endocrine system, etc.  Quite often, one cannot adequately control significant pain for long using them without causing actual, serious, perilous damage to some of the most essential parts of the body.

On the other hand, opioids work.  They directly hit the pain centers/processors, and they actually can relieve pain, even very severe pain.  But they don’t just relieve physical pain.

Somewhat ironically, that’s one of the big drawbacks.  Though they do not cause systemic or organ toxicity, and they will not trigger diabetes, and they will not cause you ulcers (though they may well constipate you), they can affect your behavior and even your character.  Their relief of psychical pain‒sometimes the only such relief some people have felt in a long, long time‒is like their relief of more visceral pain:  it doesn’t actually correct any underlying disorders.

Well, I suppose if the disorder is simply a neurological misfiring such as that which leads to chronic pain, you could say they do at least act on the area that is dysfunctional.  But they don’t cure it.  They almost never correct even neuropathic pain; they simply squelch the alarm for a bit.  And the successful squelching of the alarms tends to require increasing doses, and can lead to dependence and various other issues.

So, there are no very good, relatively simple corrections for significant pain.  This is probably not a surprise, if you think about it.  In some form, at least, pain is among the oldest things in nature and among the most crucial (ha ha)* functions of nervous systems‒and even things that aren’t quite nervous systems, like the internal communication systems in hydra and jellyfish or the analogous systems of plants.

Living bodies don’t readily give up on pain, and they have good reasons.  Pleasure is nice, and is useful, of course, but it’s like having a pretty picture on your wall or having nice, scented candles in your living room or what have you.  No matter how pretty your decorations, you want to have your fire alarms in good working order.  You want them sensitive enough to go off even in situations without real fires‒the classic case of burnt toast, say‒rather than take the chance that they will not to go off in the case of a real fire.  The first error causes annoyance, perhaps requiring you to wave towels at the sensors and open a lot of windows and so on.  The second error can lead to your house burning down, perhaps with you in it.

Of course, these weighted preferences are not absolute.  If one’s smoke alarms were always going off‒or even going off a significant fraction of the time‒one might very well want to wipe out the whole system, to pull all the plugs, to remove all the batteries,  to flip all the breakers to “off”.  Or, indeed, one might simply want to abandon the house entirely, if there were no way to get the alarms to shut the f*ck up.  One might even be tempted to burn the stupid place down, just as a form of petty revenge against it.

There’s a metaphor in all this, I would imagine.  I’ll leave it as an exercise for you to discern it.  I won’t say it’s particularly clever, but it’s not terrible, and it works pretty well.  Anyway, I’ve dealt with this subject before, many times, I’m sure.  It’s fairly tedious, but it does seem to stick in my mind for some inexplicable reason.  I don’t, however, know how to solve the associated problems.

Ah, well.  There are some things humans aren’t meant to know.

Ha ha ha ha!  Sorry, I couldn’t keep a straight “face” while writing something so very stupid.  Humans aren’t “meant” to know (or not to know) anything, anymore than any particular foodstuff “belongs” on a pizza.  People can try to learn and understand anything, even everything, and ultimately, in the long run, as far as I can tell, the more one knows and understands, the better.

If you want to do your best in a game, you would do well to learn the rules as well as you can.  Because, to quote an old car commercial, in real life there is no reset button.  You are the avatar and you are the player, and when you get blasted into nothingness by the depredations of the game’s limitless antagonists, then for the character and for the player, the game is done.  There is no respawning, there are no experience points, there is no starting again at the last save point.

Game over.

*I say “ha ha” because the word “crucial”, related to the Latin for cross (apparently evolving into its modern usage from a metaphor for arriving at a crossroads), is also related to the word “excruciating” which derives from the Latin use of torturing as if crucifying someone.  And that, of course, relates pretty clearly to the topic of pain.

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Sleep! Sleep like your life depended on it!

Well, it’s Friday, and it’s a slightly fun date to write out:  6-26-2026 or (slightly more fun) 6-26-26 or, in the European way, 26-6-2026 or 26-6-26 (which sounds a bit like a quarterback calling plays in American football, which is slightly ironic for the European format).

I’m writing this post on the lapcom, by the way, because I decided I didn’t want to let an entire week go by without using it, and it just feels better, more “natural” for me to write with it.

I wonder how many words I’ve written on this mini lapcom or one nearly identical to it.  Unanimity (books 1 and 2) was more than half a million words just by itself, and I don’t know how many words I’ve written in all my blog posts that I’ve done on one or another mini lapcom.  I suppose I could figure it out, but it seems like tedious work.  If anyone wants to check it for themselves, you can try, but don’t ask for access to my smartphone or lapcom.

I have a small bit of what is, for me, momentous news:  I slept almost five and a half hours last night!  That was more or less uninterrupted sleep, as far as I know.  If I woke up during the night, I don’t remember it, and I certainly needed to rush to the euphemism as if I had not gotten up during the night.

This may not seem like a big deal, but it’s the most sleep—certainly the longest uninterrupted sleep—that I’ve had in a long, long time without significant use of things that make me sleepy*, like Benadryl®.  However, though I have tried to use the aforementioned antihistamine on non-weekend days in the past, I’ve learned that it actually does me more harm than good the next day if I need to work.

The hangover/persistent effects of that stuff make me slow and stupid (even more so than usual!) and I don’t feel mentally very rested after it.  This makes sense, neurologically, given that sleep is not merely a lack of consciousness but a very involved, active, and utterly crucial** process we still understand only somewhat, and almost all sedatives disrupt it.

I have some hypotheses about why last night’s exceptional sleep happened.  Of course, it could well be just a random outlier—they happen if you wait long enough in pretty much all intrinsically variable systems that produce bell-curve distributions of outcomes—but there are a few contenders for possible, more causal, reasons.

I am always trying various things to see if they improve my health, my sleep, my pain, my mood, etc.  I don’t tend to be as scientific as I would prefer to be about such things, alas.  I tend to be in a constant state of low-level desperation (rather like the “low-flying panic attack” in Radiohead’s Burn the Witch), because I feel so uncomfortable in so many ways so much of the time, and so it’s all but impossible not to try as many things as one can try at any given time.

When you have a bad itch in the middle of your back that you cannot reach directly, and there is no one around to help, you can probably be pretty clever (and desperate) in how you’ll scratch that itch.  Well, itches are a kind of pain—they’re mediated similarly but not identically in the nervous system—they’re just a low-level kind.  That’s part of why scratching works to provide temporary relief:  the local receptors get drowned out by the surrounding inputs.

Now, if itching in your back can be so impossible to ignore that it drives you to scramble madly for a pencil or the corner of a wall or a tree trunk or whatever, no matter what you’re doing—and yet it can be countered by just locally running your fingernails over the surrounding area—well, just think how much more difficult it is to ignore a serious, deep and persistent pain, as well as general, persistent (largely social) anxiety, and depression.  Even when it’s been going on for years, for decades, the very hardware of your nervous system does not let you simply ignore it.

So, yeah, I’m cautiously glad about my night’s sleep.  I don’t want to get too excited.  It may not ever happen again.  What follows the vast majority of outliers in statistical distributions is a subsequent regression toward the mean.  This applies not just to good outliers but also to bad ones, though, so it’s not all bleak.

Anyway, maybe I’ll sleep well this weekend.  I’ll certainly sleep longer, because notwithstanding my above admissions about the drawbacks of antihistamines, it’s nice to be unconscious and physically resting for longer than usual, if the consequences are not significant.  So, long live diphenhydramine (so to speak).

I will not be working this weekend, so I don’t expect to produce another blog post before Monday.  I hope you all have a good weekend.

*It does make me sleepy—very much so.  I found that out the first time I had to take it in response to an attack of hives I got (apparently) from using Irish Spring™ soap.

**How crucial?  As far as we can tell, every animal with a nervous system needs to sleep a significant portion of its time.  This includes aquatic and marine mammals and reptiles, a fact that engenders some amazing adaptive creativity, such as creatures sleeping in one half of their brains at a time.  Evolution may be the true blind, idiot god, but it has a lot of time (much of it in parallel to itself) to explore innovation-space, and it does produce some amazing things.  But it does not seem able to select for simply not sleeping in any creature.  But sleep makes an animal vulnerable, tremendously so.  So, it must be really crucial—life and death crucial—for there to be no yet-discovered alternative.

 

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I’m back, but not to save the universe

It’s Friday now and I’m writing this post on the lapcom*.  According to the list of my saved blog posts that auto-fills as I write in the new file name, I wrote a post using the lapcom on this date last year, though that was a Thursday and this is a Friday.  That day mismatch by one is the sort of thing that tends to happen, since the “normal” year is 365 days, which gives 52 with a remainder of 1 if you divide it by 7 (the number of days in a week, in case that was unclear).

That’s a bit interesting (though only just) because of my tendency in recent time to write mostly on my smartphone; it’s relatively uncommon for the same dates to appear on the smartphone’s saved list two years in a row.  I think my smartphone-writing tendency was well in place since at least last year, but I am far from sure.  I have not been keeping track of that development precisely over time, so I’d be building my impression de novo if I were trying to recall the specifics.

Of course, I could just look through my list of “blog post for x-x-xxxx Xday” from the last years, sorted by date, and I would see how many posts I wrote on the lapcom in 2025 versus the number I wrote on the smartphone, which are saved to Google Drive.  That’s not exactly a difficult task, but it’s also not very interesting, so I don’t intend to do it.

I’m sure it’s also not very interesting for you all to read about, presumably**, so I’ll drop that topic now.

I did not write a post yesterday, in case you were wondering, because I did not go to work.  I was not “ill” in the sense of having a contagious disease; rather, I was in very severe pain and the meds I was taking to try to combat it were making me feel physically ill at various levels, so I tried to stay back at the house and rest.

It’s not very comfortable there, and I don’t especially like being there, but at least I don’t have to try to do work while feeling crappy, and I can lie down to rest my back and try to nap a bit.  I can also try to pass time doing some distracting things, though nothing really entertains me or even catches much of my interest anymore.  I’m just passing time all the time.

I haven’t played guitar or keyboard (nor sang) in over a week, maybe almost two weeks.  My left hand fingertip calluses haven’t significantly faded, but if this goes on too long, they will.  Of course, guitar calluses aren’t as impressive as cello-related ones, which I had for probably nearly twenty years back in the day.  Sometimes you could see those without even having to look too closely.

My cello calluses are long gone—though there’s a “ship of Theseus” style question of whether one should consider my current calluses to be anything but the same ones, or on the other hand (no pun intended) if one can consider any calluses the same ones over time, since the skin cells turn over and so do the very atoms in the underlying living cells.

It doesn’t matter, but sometimes such philosophical questions can stimulate thought and train one to be careful and rigorous in the way one thinks, and so perhaps make one less prone to certain kinds of mental errors.  They are probably worth your time if you’re interested.

Anyway, I’m going to work today, and I should also be working tomorrow, so you’ll get probably five posts this week, at least, though not contiguously.  You also won’t be getting one of my altered Shakespeare quote headlines.  I do those on Thursdays, out of a sense of…nostalgia, I guess, for the times when my blog was only posted on Thursdays, and was meant as a promotion/author’s note on what was going on with my fiction writing.  I’m not doing any fiction writing now—and I don’t just mean “at this very moment” because that’s all too obvious—and I don’t know whether I will ever again, any more than whether I’ll ever sing or play an instrument or anything like that again.

Oh, but I did come up with and write down a rather silly story idea yesterday, for the first time in a while.  It concerned the expression “time flies when you’re having fun”, but takes the point of view that “time flies” could be some form of supernatural insect.  The main character could be someone who is cursed such that, whenever he was becoming joyful or satisfied with his life, these supernatural insects would begin to swarm him and eventually transport him through time to some random place whence he’d have to start all over.

It’s a goofy notion, I know.

I actually prefer the idea I had apparently written down most recently before that.  It concerned a scientist who invents a truth serum or device or combination thereof that makes a person under its influence always tell the truth—even truths that they did not know before.  For instance, you can ask them what the weather is like in Kuala Lumpur at the moment and they will tell you and it will be correct, even if they are in Jakarta or Tannu Tuva or Massachusetts or Poughkeepsie or some other entertainingly named place.

But the more rarefied the information is, the greater toll it takes on the mind being questioned.  I proposed the possibility of asking someone what the next day’s winning lottery numbers would be, but the sheer improbability of specific answers and the fact that they are in the future overstrains and severely damages the brain of the person involved.  But they would get the numbers right if they survived the process.  I wonder what might come of such an invention.

I am not, by the way, giving anyone permission to use those ideas by sharing them here.  You do not have permission, and I might well be inclined to bring down truly horrific vengeance upon you if you steal them in any sense.  However, if I should die without ever writing either story, then after that, you should feel absolutely free to use them.  You don’t even have to give me credit; I’ll be dead, I won’t care (though the present person I am thinks it pleasant to imagine being given such credit, so do with that what you will).

Anyway, that’s enough for today.  As I said, I expect to write a post tomorrow, barring (as always) the unforeseen***.  I hope you all have a good day today, and that you have a good weekend and so on.  Heck, carry that forward as far as you can.

*I wrote Tuesday’s post on the smartphone, by the way, for those who took up my challenge to try to see if they could tell whether that had been the case or I had written on my lapcom.

**Though we must be careful with such presumption, because as we all know, “when you presume, you make a pres out of u and me”.  In the past, being a “pres” could have been a good thing, at least to some degree, but that time is gone.  Nowadays, I’d rather assume than presume, since I’m often an ass entirely on my own, anyway.

***I tried to find a pithy Latin phrase that would encapsulate that expression, since I use it so often—you know, something like ceteris paribus for “all other things being equal”—but the attempts I have made so far produced cumbersome phrases that didn’t quite truly mean what I had intended when I reversed the translation process.  Alas.

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“Please could you stop the noise, I’m trying to get some rest…”

I’m writing this blog post on my mini lapcom today.  It’s the first time I’ve written one on the lapcom in over a month—since May 1st, in fact.  I’m not entirely sure why I decided to bring the lapcom with me when I left the office on Saturday, but bring it with me I did.  I think partly I just wanted to spare my thumbs, which are not as bad as they were, but are still quite sore a lot of the time when and after I write.

Also—and this is stupid—I wonder if people who see me writing my posts on my smartphone imagine that I’m just playing some game or scrolling through one of the social media all the while.  It certainly shouldn’t matter to me whether anyone thinks that, but I’m a somewhat mature-looking man (so to speak) and I don’t want to set a bad example.  I also don’t want to leave my lapcom feeling too lonely and neglected for too long.

I know, that’s very silly.  I have no reason to suspect that my lapcom experiences anything at all—it’s not that kind of computer and it’s not running any of that kind of programming (largely because no one knows how to write such a program).  But still, I often feel a weird, imaginary empathy for things that I know pretty well don’t have any qualia, as the philosophers of mind call it.

I even used to feel bad if I accidentally mistreated one of my stuffed animals when I was little, such as by sitting on it or something.  I guess that’s not really that unusual for a young child, is it?  Still, I have retained something of that all my life.

Don’t even get me started on actual other people’s feelings.  Those are cacophonic!  That’s part of why being around a lot of people is just a bit overwhelming.

Of course, real, physical noise also is irritating, especially something like background music when you’re trying to work.  That’s one thing that’s annoying at the office.  There is constant overhead music playing, just to keep people from overhearing each other on the phone and becoming distracted.  But to me it’s like listening to the sounds of the world beyond the gateway in Event Horizon, or the noises in that recovered record they deciphered.  Ugh.  I’ve sometimes thought of just playing construction noises for them so they can see what it feels like to me.

Oh, I also brought the lapcom in case I felt the urge to write some fiction.  But that’s a pipe dream, I suspect.  Also, I don’t see how I could manage the time to write fiction and still do my daily blog.  There are only so many spoons (as they say) that I can bring to bear on anything at any time, and the supply is largely used up just grinding through days in pain and whatnot, to say nothing of the sensory and social stresses that also accumulate.

Even so, I honestly feel quite sad being alone a lot of the time, though I do my best to distract myself.  I would like to have good friends, someone to hang out with and so on, but unfortunately, the sorts of people at work, while perfectly nice and tolerable people, are not really the kinds of people I think I could hang out with much.  I don’t think anyone in the office, including the boss, reads more than a book a year or so.  I think I would have a hard time being a close friend of someone who doesn’t really read, at least at this point in my life.

And that’s also something that I would definitely find a deal-breaker in any kind of “significant other” kind of relationship.  Obviously such a thing would be nice, but again, I don’t think I could be very close to someone who didn’t read a reasonably significant amount.

All this is moot, of course.  Most of these possibilities and wishes are irrelevant, because no one really wants to be friends with me, let alone any kind of romantic thingy.  I don’t blame them.  Why would they want to do or be such a thing?

Even when I’m at the office, I’m basically alone.  I mean, I have a few “work friends”, of course, some of whom are quite good work friends.  But we do not ever do anything together outside of work.  I probably wouldn’t be able to have fun doing such a thing, even if anyone wanted to do it; we tend to have office holiday dinner parties of sorts at restaurants around Christmas/New Years time, and those get me so stressed out that I have to start drinking as soon as I arrive.  It’s not good.

Anyway, that’s over 700 words already, and I’ve just been moaning the whole time.  I apologize.  But I do spend a good deal of my time hating the world, hating my life, and especially hating myself.  Of course, the “hating the world” part is really projection—I hate the world because I hate my life and myself.

It’s a low-flying, subacute kind of hate, though, nothing florid.  I don’t spend as much time deliberately damaging myself as I used to, unless you count all the OTC meds I take for pain.  But, of course, those aren’t intended as self harm; quite the opposite.  But I have no doubt they are doing their thing on my kidneys and stomach and liver and so on.

Oh, well.  Whataya gonna do?  The universe was not made for me, and it was certainly not made by me.  It never promised but one thing, so to speak.

All right, that’s enough of me bringing you guys down—and on a Monday morning of all things, when you probably want something to boost your spirits.  So here, if you have spirits that need boosting, wait till they’re haunting you and feeling miserable and come out with, “Don’t feel too bad.  If you need a boost, well…here, use this, it’s my stepladder.”  Then, put on a wistful expression and add, “I never knew my real ladder.  And my mother left us before I was even born.”

Ba-dump-bump.

That ought to make them glad to be dead.

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Tir’d with all these, for restful death I cry, as, to behold desert a blogger born

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday.  Further bulletins as events warrant.

I don’t know what to write today.  I’m really, really mentally fatigued.  I feel as if I’ve been working for forty days straight instead of just four.

I guess that’s at least slightly biblical, if you care about such things.  You know, raining forty days (and forty nights) or wandering in the desert for forty days while occasionally getting tempted by the devil and whatnot.

It’s all rather silly, of course, but it is memorable.  Anyway, I write stories about supernatural entities attacking college towns or trapping the spirit of a dead addict in a train station or about whole universes potentially colliding or teenagers becoming demi-vampires.  I can hardly complain if other people’s stories aren’t realistic.  Though, at least I don’t claim, let alone believe, that mine really happened.

Anyway, I haven’t written any new fiction in quite a while, and that is severely demoralizing.  I also haven’t played my guitar or even listened to any music this week.

I have listened to/am listening to Sean Carroll’s Mindscape podcast, because the first one of every month is his “Ask Me Anything” podcast, which lasts over 3 hours and is almost always very interesting.  If you like physics with a bit of philosophy thrown in, you might enjoy it.

Of course, what I should be doing‒or, rather, what I want to want fervently to be doing‒is reading Professor Carroll’s General Relativity textbook, Spacetime and Geometry, as well as other similar sources.  Or I want to wish to go on Brilliant dot org and work through their mathematics and physics and CS courses as completely as I can.  Or I want to yearn to get to work on the Babbel app, learning some German or some Russian or some French‒it doesn’t seem to have any Asian languages (last time I checked), so I can’t use it to bone up on my Japanese, nor to try to learn Cantonese or Mandarin or what have you.

But my mind is so tired.  I don’t even do any singing, let alone playing, like I said.

I know why I’m so tired, or at least, I know a big part of it:  chronic pain.  For just about a quarter of a century‒nearly half of my life‒I have been in pain every day, all day, except for those brief moments when I have had enough medications on board to do their own damage to my mind and my body (depending on which of the many medications it is that I’ve taken).

I’m also always grumpy nowadays, which is really disappointing.  This probably goes back to when my chronic pain really became chronic and exacerbated my depression and everything, but it’s become more persistent over time, and now it seems to be my default state.

The people who know me now just think of me as a grumpy and ornery person by nature; it’s even a bit of a joke, since I know that I am grumpy* and at least retain the capacity to be self-deprecating and not to hold it against people.

But that’s not the way I used to be!  That’s not who I was before my chronic pain started.  I did have trouble with depression (and I was, apparently, always autistic), and that probably sometimes made me irritable, but not like now.  I think‒I recall‒that I was usually a fairly upbeat and enthusiastic person, reasonably friendly and kind whenever I could be.

Anyone reading who knew me in the past, feel free to disabuse me of that notion if it’s wrong.  In some weird way, it might be comforting to learn that I’ve always been just an asshole, I simply didn’t know it back then.

Oh, and teeth; I used to have great teeth.  I took good care of them, flossed all the time and everything.  I had dentists tell me that I was a very boring patient.  But various of the meds I’ve taken (and the mental states into which I’ve fallen, to say nothing of the state prisons into which I’ve fallen) since my chronic pain started have more than decimated my oral hygiene, despite regular, frequent brushing and flossing.

I am a shambles.  I’m a twisted wreck of what I used to be, with only just enough in common with that self to remind me of it.  Or so it seems to me.

I don’t think I’m going to last much longer.  I do not want to last much longer‒not like this.  Every day is a trial by endurance, like the stupid “touch the truck” thing, but as far as I can see, there’s no prize…not even a stupid truck.

It’s more like Space Invaders:  see how long you can keep shooting down all the things that are trying to destroy you, but as you succeed, the onslaught becomes more and more difficult, and it never lets up except for brief seconds when it’s about to send a new, harder wave at you.

And then, once you finally, inevitably fail, it’s just…game over.  It might as well not have happened.  Maybe you can put your initials up if you lasted unusually long (thereby scoring more points than others), but no one really cares, and your mark will be displaced very soon anyway.

It reminds me of the final words of my story Solitaire, which you can get as a stand-alone story or in Kindle format or hard cover in Dr. Elessar’s Cabinet of Curiosities.  Now that’s a story that’s not silly, but it is very dark and horrifying.  It’s also short, so if you’re interested, it won’t take much of your time.

Okay, well, that’s it for now.  Unless you’re lucky, I’ll write a post tomorrow and also on Saturday.

TTFN

*I sometimes say that I am an amalgam of the Seven Dwarves:  I’m occasionally happy, I am sometimes sneezy, I’m quite bashful in many situations, I’m frequently sleepy but rarely enough to stay asleep for long, I’m definitely often dopey, I’m usually grumpy…but I’m always Doc.

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“Shell smashed, juices flowing, wings twitch, legs are going…”

It’s Tuesday now, and I’m going to work again, despite‒as the Beatles song puts it‒feeling low down.  My trouble is, I more or less feel low down almost every day.  What am I supposed to do about it by staying at the house?  That’s likely just to make me feel worse, because then I’ll just be alone with one of my least favorite people‒me‒and feeling non-productive and useless.

At least I wouldn’t feel “hysterical and useless”.  I don’t know if I’ve ever been what would be called “hysterical” in my life‒I tend to bottle things up and slash and burn my own figurative innards (and sometimes my literal skin) rather than outwardly flipping out‒but if I have, it’s been quite a long time.

I guess I was probably close to hysterical the time I called the old version of “the hotline” and got picked up by a few undertrained Palm Beach County deputies who did nerve damage to my left wrist with a poorly applied handcuff before dropping me at a clearly underfunded emergency mental health facility.  But I think my hysteria was at least somewhat justified at the time.

That was when I was out on bail, had already lost everything, was effectively homeless, and had very few hopes for much good happening ever again in my life.

I wasn’t wrong, either.  Even the psychiatrist whom I saw for the follow up to that 24-hour hold admitted that he thought there was no way someone wouldn’t be depressed if they were going through what I was experiencing.  He knew I was a doctor, as was he, of course, so he had a certain amount more personal sympathy than he might have had for someone else, but I think it was the shape of the situation, not the specifics, that he thought worthy of despondency if not outright despair.

Anyway, that was a horrible stretch of time, and when I was offered a plea bargain I took it, not because I was actually guilty, but because I saw no way of fighting the whole stupid thing with no money and no real allies in the process.  I hoped at least to have it done in a relatively short amount of time (three years minus gain time) so I would be able to see my kids again before I had missed too much of their lives*.

This highlights how utterly, damnably inadequate our criminal “justice” system is.  The fact that a person who can afford a private attorney can consistently expect fewer convictions, lighter sentences for lesser “crimes”, and even often doesn’t serve time despite having been convicted (see The Donald) than people who don’t have the capacity to hire private lawyers is an absolute and inexcusable travesty.

The word “justice” should not be allowed within a hundred lightyears of that system.  I would say it’s a joke, but jokes are more worthy of respect.  It is, instead, a low-flying, long-term catastrophe, and no one who would like to live in a just society should support it as it is.  No one should be allowed to have private representation in criminal trials unless everyone gets it.  Otherwise those with more money are effectively not subject to the same laws as everyone else, and that includes everything from petty shit up to murder (see OJ), which at the very least in practice violates the Constitutional guarantee of equal protection under the law.

Don’t even get started on sex crimes.  I think we all know how rarely and haphazardly they are punished, let alone prevented.

It would be amusing if someone set up a service whereby they would provide assistance to women (and, yes, men) who were the victims of unpunished sexual assault by helping to get rid of the bodies of their assailants (if they killed them themselves) or just helping to delete the perpetrators from start to finish.  Of course, this could easily run afoul of the crucially important notion of due process, without which laws might as well not really exist, but our government(s) are failing miserably in that crucial area anyway.

Enough fantasizing.  I barely have the energy to get up and live my own so-called life, let alone to set up illicit vigilante services.  I am very tired and I am in continuous pain, and I have very little notion of anything good happening in my future.  A few things in my life now are wonderful, of course‒my youngest, my sister, my brother, and yes, my son, since at least I know that he is doing well, and of course, you readers are pretty darn great‒but I know that I am not wonderful.

I am not much more charming or beneficial than a growth of black mold or a teratoma (or even a less benign tumor).  Maybe tumors and mold growths have rights of some sort in an idealized world, if any living thing does.  But they cannot expect to be welcomed or loved or supported.  They are generally only worthy of removal and destruction if anything at all.

I don’t know what the point of this post is, but then again, I don’t know what the point of much of anything is, least of all the point of me.

Whatever.  Never mind.

*That turned out to be a pipe dream.  I also stayed in Florida instead of remaining with my parents up north after getting out of prison for basically the same reason.  I was severely and devastatingly disappointed when my kids themselves asked me not to pursue my legal right to visitation once I was out, because it would be too disruptive of their lives.  I could not in good conscience selfishly force myself upon their time‒not after I had screwed everything up so much and hurt them thereby‒so I acquiesced.  I can easily sympathize when people don’t want me around.  Anyway, now at least I am interacting regularly with my youngest, and that’s a wonderful thing‒it’s better than I surely deserve‒but my oldest still doesn’t want to have anything to do with me.  Most of you reading this blog post have read my stuff before and have some acquaintance with my mind; can you blame my son for not wanting me around?

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“Nothing to do to save his life, call his wife in.”

What a strange night and morning it has been.  I had a terribly disjointed sleep, which itself is not surprising‒in fact it’s more or less par for the course‒but then I dozed off for a bit just after 3.  Then I almost overslept for my reserved Uber to the train station.  I reserved the ride to make sure I wouldn’t be tempted to walk any part of the way to the train, since my knees and hips and everything else are still bad, and I have taken significantly less naproxen than usual, so I am very stiff and sore.  But I didn’t set my alarm, because I’m almost always awake anyway.

I was able to scramble and even to shower and then make it for my ride without any penalties, though that wouldn’t have been too horrible an outcome if it had happened.  Indeed, I might have then bit the bullet and gotten an Uber all the way to the office.  That would cost a lot more, though.

Anyway, I hate the very notion of being late for something, even if it’s not really important and was a deadline/time semi-arbitrarily chosen by me.  There’s no one really in my life for me to disappoint, other than myself, of course, and I’m already almost always disappointed in and by me.  Still, the notion of being late is mortifying to me, and I really need to struggle to resist as much self-loathing as possible, so it’s best not to fail at one of the few things at which I usually succeed.

So, here I am.  I made it to the station and I’m writing this post.  To that degree, at least, I am successful.  I am, of course, a failure at pretty much everything else.  Certainly I have failed at nearly all the things that have been truly important to me.

C’est la vie, I suppose.  Some people succeed through no credit of their own, and can thereby develop a sense that they are special and divinely protected or some such stupidity, when in fact they are some of the least impressive humans around.  Other people‒many more, it seems‒fail and fall despite having done everything they could, in the ways they were told they ought to do things.

They keep trying to be and do good, trying to achieve success and stability, maybe even trying to have a family and a career.  But they end up seeing everything fall apart, feeling it crumble in their hands even as they try to hold it together.  Indeed, often their attempts to buttress and repair things seem merely to speed up the destruction and exacerbate the decay.  Then, finally, they die alone, surrounded by no one (or at least by no one they know, no one who loves them, if such people even exist).

C’est la mort as well, I guess.  The universe makes no special deals.  It makes no promises, either, other than its implicit “promise” always and only to proceed by its own rules, though we only incompletely know what all those rules are.  It certainly never said, “If you do everything right according to these very human-invented and evolved and imagined rules of behavior, I will ensure that you have something at least approximating the good life you have been told to seek and to expect.”

The universe doesn’t actually say anything at all, come to think of it.  Well, it “says” stuff in the sense that people are part of it, and they say various things, but they in no sense represent the intentions and thoughts of the universe (these do not appear to exist, so people could not represent them).

The universe, as far as we can tell, has no larger scale intelligence and intentions.  It merely is, if the concept of “mere” applies to something that may well be infinite in spatial and temporal extent, and at the very least is much, much larger than anything humans evolved to grasp directly, and also much, much smaller and more finely grained than humans ever evolved to grasp directly.

I guess “mere” is in the eye of the beholder.  And joy is in the ears that hear, not in the mouth that speaks, as Foamfollower often said.  Though I doubt there is much, if any, joy for anyone anywhere in “hearing” my words.

It’s hard for me even to say that I have joy in writing them.  I certainly feel internal pressure to write them, and going with it does relieve some of that tension, and that relief could be called joy, I suppose.  But I don’t think that’s what poets and plasterers and everyone in between really imagines when they speak of “joy”.

Still, we can only take what the universe gives us.  It’s not offering any exchanges.  And it’s not as though we can just go somewhere else to see if they have a better deal.

So, I guess we do what we can with what we have where we are and try not to let ourselves get distracted by foolish notions that the universe owes us some reward.  As far as I can see, the universe “promises” us only one thing, and‒also as far as I can see‒it never fails to deliver this, sooner or later.

Anyway, I hope your weekends are starting off more auspiciously than mine is.  Of course, my weekends always have the major drawback that I am there, and so far, it is certainly a drawback today.

Please take care of yourselves.  I hope you have some joy this weekend that isn’t just a dishwashing liquid.

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“You look so tired, unhappy…”

I don’t think I’m going to write anything interesting or thought provoking today, as I sort of did deliberately earlier this week (Monday more than Tuesday).  I certainly don’t expect to write anything profound.  I’m actually just very mentally and emotionally* tired right now, which is nothing new, but which is more onerous sometimes than others.  Such is the case with all things, I guess.

Yesterday, for most of the day, I felt extremely grumpy, by which I mean that basically everything was bothering me.  Part of this is no doubt due to my recent exacerbation and complication of my chronic pain:  I did something to injure my right knee, and it’s still very stiff and sore, especially when I first try to rise after being seated for a while.

It eases a bit after I walk a little; the stiffness seems to work itself out some.  But then it just re-seizes up as I sit, and it’s quite painful once I move again.  It certainly isn’t enough to distract from my chronic pain, but it does add extra highlights to it.  I guess at least it keeps things from being too dull (though the pain still often feels extremely boring‒in the “drill bit” sense, not the “tedious” sense**).

I’m sure it’s all plenty boring for you to read, probably in more than one sense.  I apologize.  You come to my blog in good faith, expecting to find something at least tolerably worth reading, and I keep spewing my vitriol and discomfort all over your minds.  Again, I am sorry.

I’m so tired of my life, though.  Yesterday, I don’t know how many times, or in how many ways, I fantasized about…well, you know.  I’m just very drained, and I feel as though there are always new setbacks.  I suppose that’s true, in a sense.  It’s probably true for almost everyone, in some fashion or other.  That doesn’t make it better or easier to bear, though.  If anything, it just reinforces my sense of despondency about the world and the universe.

Ordinarily, I can be philosophical about such things, embracing the apparent lack of meaning partly because it means that people can create and choose the meanings of their own lives.  But chronic pain and chronic insomnia just chew away at one’s sense of optimism or even one’s sense of acceptance.  Chronic pain tends to make one hostile and even spiteful, especially when one is dealing with it all by oneself.

Also, my thumbs are sore, despite the fact that I’m trying to find ways to give them a rest.  And the stupid rash on my right hand that seems to have started (years ago) due to some kind of contact hypersensitivity to something in the “rubberized” grip of those Pilot® gel-roller pens (which I love but, alas, must avoid) continues to act up, and as a consequence the skin near the crook of my right thumb is dry and splitting open, which can sting quite a bit.

Oh, and I’d also like to register a complaint about this parrot what I bought not half an hour ago from this very boutique.

You want to complain?  Look at these shoes!  I’ve only had them three weeks, and the heels are worn right through.  If you complain, nothing happens, you might as well not bother.

Something like that, anyway.  It is terribly annoying.  O that this too, too solid flesh would melt, thaw, and resolve itself into a dew.  Fie on’t!  O fie! ‘Tis an unweeded garden that grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature possess it merely.

And if the cloudbursts thunder in your ear‒you shout and no one seems to hear‒and if the band you’re in starts playing different tunes, I’ll see you on the dark side of the moon.

Sorry about that hodgepodge of quotes from various brilliant British artists from different times and very different genres.  Such are my go-tos, as they say.

What is it about Britain that has led to everyone from Shakespeare to Newton, to Darwin, to Maxwell, to Monty Python, to Tolkien, to Orwell, To Kipling and Wells, to Byron and both Shelleys, to the Beatles and the Stones and Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin and Radiohead and the Police and so on and so on?  Maybe it’s the chronic emotional repression, which leads to the build-up of thoughts and feelings that have to burst out somewhere?

Except I don’t think that’s how such things as feelings actually work.  Maybe it’s just that it’s not culturally “acceptable” there to express one’s deepest feelings and concerns except through formal art.  Keep a stiff upper lip, everyone‒unless you’re making an embouchure to play an instrument.  Then you can blow away!

Speaking of which, that’s probably what many of you wish you could do to me right now.  With that in mind, and since I don’t think I’ve something more to say, I will draw to a close.  I hope you all have a very good day.

*Aren’t those really just part of the same thing, though?  I think so.  Emotions are a kind of thought, or at least a state of mind.

**Though it is all but unbearably tedious, believe me.

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“Perfect” IS the enemy of the good

I would like to propose that we eliminate or at least strongly curtail the use of the word and concept of “perfect”.  And since there is no reason for me not to propose it, I will do so:

Let us eliminate or at least strongly curtail the use of the word and concept “perfect”.

I wrote those two short paragraphs‒really, a short paragraph and a single sentence‒yesterday afternoon, starting this blog post much earlier than I usually do, because it’s a subject that’s a bit of a pet peeve, but which is also, I think, important.

People have this word, “perfect”, and they think it means something, so they try to behave as if it means something.  But for all but the most trivial cases‒one’s score on a straightforward test, the answer to a well-defined problem in mathematics, et cetera‒it’s a word with no serious meaning in actual reality.

What would a perfect person be?  What would that even mean?  Perfect by what criteria?

What could it mean to say that a work of art is perfect, that a song is perfect?  One can say an interval of notes is “perfect”, e.g., a perfect fifth, but that is because it is a concept with a precise definition in a very limited bailiwick.

In the real world, so to speak, “perfection” is a will-o-the-wisp, an illusion without underlying substance that will tend to lure one into a treacherous (metaphorical) bog.  I think it’s fairly widely recognized that perfectionism is a dangerous and usually detrimental habit or attribute.  One can almost never achieve perfection, even by relatively serious criteria, in the real world; reality is too complex and unpredictable.

But the notion of perfection can certainly succeed at taking most of the joy out of one’s accomplishments.  No matter how good one already is, or how much one improves from one’s previous state, one can never just feel pretty good about it if one is always measuring oneself against an unrealistic and unachievable standard, so one is always failing.

The desire for perfection can also lead to misplaced notions of idealism, which can engender well-meaning atrocities, as one strives to achieve some imaginary, impossible, invented notion of a perfect world.  I’ve written before about the fact that all ideologies are wrong.

The world is simply too complicated (har) for any relatively simple and concise set of ideas* to apply all over, unless you’re counting quantum field theory and general relativity as a relatively simple set of ideas.  They are simple in a certain sense, of course, but that’s a rarefied kind of “simple”.  And we also know they are not complete and do not apply everywhere in their present form as we understand them; they conflict with each other in regions where gravity must be quantized, e.g., the Big Bang or the inside of black holes.

Having the notion of “perfection” also does us the disservice of implying that there is some upper bound on improvement, whether personal or societal or anything in between.  It’s as if there were some analog of the speed of light, an ultimate limit that can only be approached asymptotically.

But, as far as we can tell, there is no upper limit on improvement, at least not by anything other than trivial measures.  A person can, on average, continue to improve over an entire lifetime, never reaching a limit, always able to get better and better, however they might reasonably define “better”.  So can a city, or a nation, or a civilization.

It can be quite discouraging and enervating to compare oneself always to an ideal that is impossible to achieve, at least partly because it is not sensibly defined and cannot be so defined.  And then, as Hamlet said, enterprises of great pitch and moment with this regard their courses turn awry and lose the name of action.  Or something like that.  If you are always falling short because your measure of worth is unattainable, you’re liable to become quite discouraged.

Even in fiction, there are no interesting “perfect” heroes.  Sir Galahad is just boring, for example, while Sir Lancelot is interesting, because he has flaws.  He’s still a good guy, though, even though he may consider himself a failure in the end.

Anyway, there’s more that I could say, and I’m not at all sure that I’ve made my point very well.  This has just been a minor rant about a personal pet peeve, but one that I think has actual detrimental consequences for the world at large.

Speaking of imperfection, my pain persists (of course) and my insomnia has been horrible, particularly last night.  I hope you all have a good week.  I just want to rest.

*Such as the notion that unregulated, truly free markets are the most ideal and efficient way to run an economy for all purposes, or the contrapuntal idea of “from each according to his ability to each according to his need”, or even the seemingly decent “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one”.  For the “many” consists entirely and always of a collection of “ones”, and if some larger group can violate the rights of a smaller group or an individual simply because their “needs” are those of a greater number of people, then there are no rights, and no consistent argument for why anyone’s needs should matter at all.  Even the Golden Rule is far from straightforward in its application.

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A brief post for the end of the week

First off, I’m sorry about not writing a post yesterday, in case anyone was significantly disappointed.  I had a very bad night on Wednesday night, both with respect to pain and with respect to sleep‒the latter having been at least somewhat influenced by the former, of course.  In any case, come yesterday morning, I was too wiped out to be able to get up and go to the office.  In fact, I was still in pretty bad pain all day, even though I stayed at the house, and on through last night.

I’m actually still in pain now, of course.  But at least I’ve been physically and mentally resting as much as I can, so I can make it through today‒though I have been maxing out on my medications pretty much across the board, so hopefully at least things don’t get worse.  I don’t really know what I’ll do if they do.

That, I’m afraid, about as interesting as my life tends to get at this point, and I’m sure it’s quite boring to read.  That’s got to be one of the ultimate insults:  your experiences are unpleasant enough to be worthy of the proverbial curse, “may you live in interesting times”, and yet they’re still not interesting.  I guess that’s sort of ironic, at least.  Irony is perhaps the last, desperate refuge for squeezing some narrative value out of pointless events.

I don’t remember what my posts from earlier this week entailed.  I do recall freaking out not long ago about the changes WordPress had made, without warning and without option.  That was really frustrating, let there be no doubt about that.  Peculiarly, I’ve tended to be much better at handling matters of life and death‒and I’ve dealt with quite a few‒than with changes to my routine and to things to which I’ve become accustomed.

I haven’t been reading much this week, not nearly as much as I usually do.  I even have a couple of new hard copy books‒by which I mean they are physical, printed books instead of e-books, not that they have anything to do with that idiotic old tabloid TV show‒but I haven’t taken one out of its package, and I’ve read about a paragraph of the other.  I also haven’t read any of the several hundred Kindle books I have.  I’m just finding it very difficult to concentrate even on my greatest lifelong pleasure/pastime* (reading).  I certainly haven’t written any fiction.

I did play a bit of guitar and sang on Wednesday morning, for the first time in over a week (I think).  My heart wasn’t really in it, though, and I made a lot of mistakes I don’t usually make.  My singing was okay, though.

At least I am off this weekend.  I wish that meant I would be likely to get a good rest, but at least I’ll get some relative rest.  That’s got to be worth something.  All rest is relative rest in some sense, anyway; one could, in principle, always have rested even better than one really did.  So I certainly don’t wish to  belittle or disrespect the amount of rest I am going to be getting.  I just know that it’s going to be inadequate to make me ready to face the week next week.  And I know from experience that whatever little mental energy I restore will be gone by the end of Monday, let alone the rest of the week.

Obviously, I’ll be able to get through the week literally‒or, well, I expect to be able to, though I suppose I could be wrong‒but that’s merely because it’s a matter of habit.  It can be harder to break a habit than to continue it, even when the habit requires energy.  That just seems to be how these nervous system things are set up.

Okay, I think I’m going to call it good now, for today and for this week.  I don’t have any interesting thoughts at the moment, and so I’m just wasting my readers’ time shuffling through my moans and complaints.  I’m sure you have better things to do.  I hope you have a very good day and a very good weekend.

*I originally wrote the typo “pastome” which I think is pretty great as typos go, especially given the subject.