Pain

by

I have a plan, though I have no dream

It’s Wednesday, which is payroll day.  This means that today at the office will be relatively stressful, especially since the largest of the relevant weekly reports didn’t arrive until just before closing time yesterday, so I didn’t get the chance to start to work through it.  Still, that’s okay.  It’s been a weirdly slow week at the office, all things considered (even on Monday, when I wasn’t there), so it won’t be as bad as it might be.

In the meantime, I’ve come to a tentative‒well, not all that tentative, really, but like all rational conclusions it is in principle provisional‒plan or goal set or determination or whatever the most appropriate term might be.

Here it is:

Within a fairly short period of time (I don’t have a specific amount laid aside, but it will certainly be well before my next birthday*) one of three things will have happened.

1)  I will have lost a significant amount of weight and it will help reduce my chronic pain.

2)  I will have lost a significant amount of weight and it will not help reduce my chronic pain.

3)  I will fail to lose a significant amount of weight.

It’s not that I’m horribly overweight, but I am nearly the heaviest I have ever been, and that’s not cool, so to speak.  It certainly isn’t likely to be helping my chronic pain.

Anyway, the upshot of the plan is, if the first thing happens, I will then try to reassess my depression and anxiety and my lifestyle and my ASD and see where to go from there.

If one of the latter two outcomes occurs, I will kill myself.

I’m not sure by what means I will do so, and whether I will make it public or not, or if I will try to make it some kind of statement; I just don’t know.  I try not to box myself in with too many specifics about things I’m going to do, because to do so would limit me; the best means and methods might reveal themselves only in the future.

I think this plan makes good sense.  At the very least, I would like to try to reduce my chronic pain, and though I doubt that all of it would go away with a significant reduction in weight, I expect at least some of it will improve.  Whatever else is the case, if I lose a significant amount of weight and it doesn’t help my pain, well, at least I will have lost weight and will not die as quite the disgusting creature that I currently am.

I intend at least tacitly to inform some of the people at the office of this plan‒at least the people who are smart enough to take it seriously.  That way I can hopefully avoid anyone unwittingly sabotaging my goals by offering me food of various kinds that will get in the way of weight loss; it can be very difficult to resist temptation in any given moment.  And, of course, people who know my intention and who for whatever reason are willing to sabotage it, will be thereby revealed to be my enemies.

Now, enemies are not as troubling a thing for someone who is depressed and suicidal (Oh, what are you going to do to me, keep me alive?) but I do not promise that, if I fail and have just to kill myself, that I will not take the opportunity to take vengeance on those who deserve it.

Of course, I also do not promise that I will take vengeance upon anyone at all.  For the most part, in my life, the opinions, nature, state of being, and other aspects of people I don’t like (or who don’t like me) are not very important.  I suppose that’s one positive aspect of autism spectrum disorder:  no one really lives in my head rent-free, as the saying goes.

People who are literally in my presence impinge upon my consciousness, but I don’t actually ever really even imagine what other people are thinking or doing when I’m not with them**.  As long as they just leave me alone and don’t bother me, I generally don’t tend to hold grudges.  Just because I consider someone my enemy, doesn’t mean I consider myself their enemy.

That may be a subtle distinction, but it’s significant.  If someone is my enemy, it’s something I may need to take into account in my dealings, depending on the situation, but then, so is infectious disease and shower mildew.  It’s not personally significant to me.

But if I declare myself someone else’s enemy, then I will do my best to merit the title “The Enemy” like Sauron and Morgoth, like Doom and Lord Foul (and worse than Voldemort).

Well, I would be worse than the wizard formerly known as Tom Riddle in general, but like him, and less like the others, I would not tend to want to torment my enemies.  There would be no clever deathtraps and torture chambers (physical or psychological) from which one’s targets can potentially escape.  I prefer the style of the Terminator or The Accountant; just wipe the subject from existence as completely and efficiently as possible.

Anyway, that’s a digression.  I wouldn’t do to others what I’m not willing to do to myself, and the only person I’m at all likely to kill is me, which seems fair.  So, that’s the plan:  Try to do something that has at least some chance of reducing my chronic pain, and if I fail, die in short order.

I’m not completely sure which outcome I prefer.

*I’m thinking of setting it at no later than what would have been my next wedding anniversary if I were still married.

**This is probably related to deficits in the so-called theory of mind that are a frequent part of ASD.

by

Pi and the sky

It’s Friday and it’s Pi Day (i.e., in the American way of writing dates, it is 3-14, the first 3 digits of pi, the mathematical constant).  There was also a full moon last night, as well as a lunar eclipse.  Incidentally, lunar eclipses only happen during full moons (and solar eclipses only happen during “new” moons).

Okay, that’s probably the only even arguably interesting thing I have to say, so if you want, you can stop reading now.

I’m not really feeling any better today than yesterday.  I’ve had really bad pain, and walking is making things worse rather than better at the moment.  I’m not sure what to do about all of it.  Maybe there’s nothing to do about any of it.  Not all problems are solvable in the short term, with locally available knowledge and resources.

I do know that my general misanthropy, and indeed, my panantipathy, has been strengthened in recent months and weeks and days and even hours.  This is not meant to imply that every bit of incoming information has been confirmatory of my general disgust with humans and with reality in general.  That would be extraordinarily improbable.  If that were to appear to be the case, it would more likely indicate severe biases on my part than that reality is entirely negative.  Still the state of the world is overall pretty rancid, and so many people behave so stupidly.

Now, I would never expect anyone to be free from stupidity‒I’ve said before that intelligence and knowledge are always finite, while ignorance is always infinite.  Batman knows I’m plenty stupid, myself, and indeed, I berate myself more in a single average day (often combined with literal physical abuse) than I’ve probably berated other people in any given week, and possibly months or longer.  Also, I rarely berate other people as viciously or nastily as I do myself.  But that’s because I spend every waking moment with myself, so I have no respite from my own stupidity.

I don’t think I have much to say, otherwise.  The world is shit, overall, or at least that’s my provisional conclusion.  I’m open to countervailing evidence and argument, but I’m not seeking it out or asking for it.  I’ve spent a lot of my life looking for and trying to focus on the good things about reality, trying to find the arguments for optimism and reasons to continue, with far less success than I might have hoped*.  So please don’t try to persuade me unless you have something you think is original to say.

That’s enough for today.  I have nothing new to add at the moment.  I don’t know whether I’ll be working tomorrow‒there aren’t very many people available to come in, so I don’t know what the decision will be‒so I don’t know whether I will even consider writing a blog post.  Even if I do work, I don’t know if I will write a post.  I probably shouldn’t have bothered writing this one.  It’s not very good, and it’s certainly not uplifting or inspiring or edifying in any reasonable sense.

Oh, well, that’s pretty much a good description of reality, and it comes full circle to my point.  Whatever the case, whether it’s meaningless or not, I hope you have a good day and a good weekend.

*One might say that the search for reasons to be optimistic is itself a sign of optimism, and it’s not an entirely meritless point, but it’s not enough.  The desire to desire to live is not the same as the actual desire to live.  The wish to see if there is any worthwhile purpose to anything is not the same as having a worthwhile purpose.

by

I’m sorry, I don’t have the energy for a Shakespeare based title

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, and though I don’t particularly feel like it, I’m writing a blog post because it’s Thursday.  This doesn’t necessarily mean I’m going to write one tomorrow or Saturday (assuming we* are open, which we probably will be, since it’s rare to be closed two weekends in a row).  As far as I know, I will not.

I don’t really have any energy or impetus to write much.  I’m trying.  I’ve been rereading my fiction to try to stimulate myself, but so far it’s obviously not doing the trick.  I reread first The Chasm and the Collision, then Son of Man, then The Vagabond, and just yesterday finished rereading Mark Red.  I’ve also reread a few of my short stories.  But, though I’ve enjoyed rereading my stuff as far as it goes, it’s not really doing anything as far as catalyzing any desire to write, whether fiction or nonfiction.

I think things would be much more positive if I were able to get a good sleep (at least one night) and especially if I weren’t in daily, increasing pain.  I’d be tempted even to try ketamine if I thought it would really help, though there are some cautionary examples in the mainstream media that would give me pause.  Heck, I’d practically be willing to try full-on PCP if I had good reason to think it would provide lasting relief without causing worse problems.

Of course, there’s the rub.  All of these things that can provide even temporary, real relief have a range of side-effects that would make my situation even worse than it is.  Yes, I freely admit that my life could get worse.  It’s almost always true that things could be worse than they actually are.  But that doesn’t mean they’re good.

I’m just so weary, so tired of every day being dominated by both physical and psychological pain.

Actually, I feel that the last adjective there should be “psychical” not “psychological”, since the latter term refers to the study of the psyche, and I don’t have pain or suffering that involves the study of my psyche, just pain in my psyche itself.  Still, the common usage, for what it’s worth, seems to lean toward “psychological”.  Then again, current common parlance refers to psychological problems as “mental health”, as in “Are you suffering from mental health?” which makes little sense.

I wish I could wrap myself in some kind of life-support cocoon and undergo some form of metamorphosis, like Adam Warlock in the comic books.  Hell, just being able to sleep for a while seems like it’s a ridiculous, superstitiously foolish notion, on a par with the expectations of the Heaven’s Gate cultists, who thought a space ship was coming to gather their souls (and was supposedly hiding in, I think, the tail of the Hale-Bopp comet).

I want to rest.  I want to stop being in constant pain.  It’s been going on for more than twenty years, and it’s tainted every aspect my existence.  It has contributed to everything from the breakup of my marriage, to my arrest and incarceration, and to my inability to sustain or create any kind of close relationship of any kind.

The people “closest” to me are hundreds to thousands of miles away, and I have no doubt that if they were physically closer, a kind of Uncertainty Principle-like process would occur, such as what makes the momentum/energy of, say, an electron greater and greater the more tightly you try to pin it down, until more and more of its wave function leaks out and the probability of it being elsewhere‒even on the other side of the universe, so to speak‒dominates over any local presence.

I’m probably not explaining that very well, I’m sorry.  But I don’t even have any will to watch science videos or to read science books or what have you, let alone to go into any rigorous discussions thereof.  I’m just making the point that I’m much better for other people from a distance than from up close, with the function approaching a singularity (of negative infinity) as the distance from me shrinks toward zero, rather like some logarithmic function.  This graph (of log base 2) demonstrates why, from a certain distance, it can start even to be pleasant to interact with me, though with diminishing returns…but woe betide anyone who drops below one unit of distance.

Okay, that’s enough for today.  It’s probably much more than enough.  I’m sorry to be so tedious; believe me, no one gets more tired of me than I do of myself.  At least all of you can just go read something else by someone else, or do something else entirely.  Not I.  I am stuck with being and enduring the miserable git that I am every waking moment.  And waking moments make up far too great a proportion of the times of my life.

Have a good day, if you can.

TT…FN, I guess.

*By we, I mean the office at which I work.  While I have no problem joining with you, my readers, into a collective, first person plural pronoun, I simply have no idea what y’all’s work schedules are.

by

Anyway, here’s my Friday blog post

Well, it’s Friday, the official end to another work week‒though I am scheduled to work tomorrow‒and I am here writing yet another blog post.  Today, I’m writing on my phone, since the few days’ rest seems to have eased my thumbs at least a little.  Also, I feel that my last few posts, which were written on my mini laptop computer, sucked and went on too long*, so using the smartphone might improve things.  I don’t imagine it could readily make things much worse.

I’ve been having a great deal of pain over the last several days, as I think I’ve mentioned.  I mean, I’m in pain every day, pretty much all the time, but it does vary from day to day and even from moment to moment.  When it’s at its baseline, I can almost ignore it for a while.  But when it’s acting up, it’s very hard for me to put in the background.  It dominates whatever else might be happening.  It makes everything harder‒and things are often not easy for me in the first place because of my chronic depression and (apparently) due to my hitherto undiagnosed autism.

Anyway, I’ve felt very stiff and grumpy and above all pretty miserable over the past several days, but apparently, it doesn’t quite show on the outside.  I’ve occasionally quoted the song Brain Damage by Pink Floyd as representing the way I often feel:  “And if the cloud bursts thunder in your ear / You shout and no one seems to hear / And if the band you’re in starts playin’ different tunes / I’ll see you on the dark side of the moon.”

I guess the inability to make others aware of my distress‒and often my own inability to recognize it in myself‒is probably at least partly related to ASD.  I suppose it’s just as well that this aspect of it keeps me from being too irritating to the people around me (at least in this way).  I know that I’m plenty annoying in numerous other ways, though, and I spend a lot of time berating myself for having been an idiot in many situations and interactions.

I also find myself spending a lot of time being severely irritated by people and occurrences in the world around me.  Sometimes the irritation is perfectly well-deserved, and sometimes it is thoroughly irrational and unfair on my part.

I don’t know what to do with any of it.  I don’t know what to do with my life, other than to wad it up and throw it in the figurative dumpster.  I’m already like a plate of leftovers that’s been left in a not-quite-cool-enough refrigerator for many months.  I’m a putrid, fungus-and-bacteria-riddled mass of something that was (maybe) once fit for human consumption.

Now, even the most robust person‒or even a dog or a pig or a flipping billy goat‒would vomit if they thought to bring me into their lives.

If you look closely, you might even be able to make out the shape of what I used to be, but that old outline is obscured by alien clouds of hyphae and fruiting bodies, by oozing purulent liquid, and by the scent of mildew and gangrene.

The things I am and which remain to me are merely reminders and mockeries of what I used to be and what I used to have.  But even back then, in my “heyday”, I was a mess, never worthy of the good that existed in my life.  At least I’m more self-aware of my shortcomings now than I used to be.

But literally every step I take is painful.  Everything I do is uncomfortable.  And though I have never had an inherent belief or thought that I have any right to be comfortable, it all does old.  It’s something that can be endured if there is a compensatory reward of some kind; if one has love, if one has friendship, if one has companionship and purpose, then one can tolerate a great deal.  Otherwise, it’s just a parade of painful, pointless moments.

Of course, I would never say that I have more pain or discomfort than any other person.  I’m quite sure that there are many, many, many people whose lives are more painful and whose existence is less positive, less valuable or beneficial to themselves than mine is to me.  I don’t know why such people bother.  I don’t know why I bother.

I find myself disgusting.  I’m pathetic and weak and unimpressive, and I need to stop deluding myself that some day I might once again become otherwise (if I ever have been).  The return on the daily invested effort of existence is tiny, and it’s shrinking all the time.

That’s enough for today.  Honestly, with as much pain as I’ve been in, and as unpleasant as I find my own company, I would not complain if I don’t live to post tomorrow**.  I doubt anyone else would, either.

In the meantime, please try to have a good day, if you can.  You might as well.

*Reminiscent of my life, in that sense.

**That’s trivially true in a sense, of course.  If I’m not alive, how can I complain?  Nevertheless, I do mean it more deeply here.

by

Udaimonic so-and-so, U.

It’s the last day of February, everyone.  It’s also Friday, the last day of the “typical” work week, and it is also the last day of my work week, since I am not working tomorrow.  It’s not as though I have anything particular to which to look forward this weekend, but I do need the rest.  I’ve been feeling exceptionally exhausted lately.

Alas, as you know, exhaustion does not translate into sleepiness for me, just weariness.  Somewhere in the neurologic centers and relays that connect such things as fatigue and sleep, I have a short circuit, or at least one that doesn’t perform up to spec.

Of course, my pain continues, though as always, I have tried to adapt my activity, my posture, my exercise, my shoes…even my underclothes to try to decrease my pain.  I have put a tremendous amount of mental energy into this over the years.  If I had devoted that time/energy/effort to the study of any abstract problem‒say, the dynamics of an accelerating near-light-speed spacecraft approaching its local Schwarzschild “radius” as length contraction and “relativistic mass” take effect and bring GR into play‒then I would have made significant, possibly really important, advances.

Alas, when one’s problem is chronic pain (coupled, causally or otherwise, with insomnia), it is very difficult to focus enough mental acuity upon other things.  The very nature of pain as a neurological process in animal systems does not allow it to be easily ignored, or indeed to be ignored at all for any length of time.

Those creatures which can readily ignore pain for long, or who don’t experience pain*, don’t tend to leave as many offspring as those for whom pain is both present and urgent.

It’s a similar problem for those rare people who don’t experience fear, though clinically this seems more likely to happen as a result of damage to the brain rather than being congenital, possibly because children without fear really don’t tend to reach adulthood.

It’s interesting to note that, anecdotally at least, people who don’t feel fear tend to be quite frightening to would-be bullies and predators.  They don’t behave like others do in response to potential threats, and predators tend to rely on fear in others.  A person who looks at them with no more fear than they would at a tree or a rock can be quite disconcerting for someone who has become dependent upon the fear of others.

This is one of the reasons it can be good to have dogs present if you’re guarding something.  They don’t fear guns (generally) so one can’t exactly threaten them with firearms.  And if they attack, they don’t hold back.

That was quite a series of little tangents, wasn’t it?  I think they were interesting, but then again, I was the one who brought them up, so that shouldn’t be surprising.  Whether or not anyone else is interested is difficult to guess.  It’s rather akin to the way things are with humor‒it can be very hard to know consistently what other people will find funny, or for them to know what you find funny, so you might as well amuse yourself.  Then, at least, you can watch to see who enjoys your humor, and those people are the ones with whom you can enjoy such things in the future, at least in principle.

I am horribly tired, and I’m in a great deal of pain as I write this, though for the moment at least I don’t notice any fear that might be present.  Time’s been my way when I’ve been so tired and depressed and in pain that I had no reaction to and felt no fear toward things that would normally have made me quite afraid, from minor things like wasps and bees all the way up to oncoming cars and trucks.  I don’t tend to be afraid of people much, never have been‒at least, I’m not afraid of them physically.  Socially, they can make me quite tense.  In that case, though, the tension is not the same as fear, though I guess it qualifies as anxiety.

Speaking of fear, I fear this is it for this week.  I truly hope that you all have a wonderful day and a wonderful weekend and that you are healthy and safe and eudaimonic**.

*There are people who have a genetic disorder called CIPA:  congenital insensitivity to pain with anhidrosis (i.e., they don’t sweat), and they basically don’t experience pain.  They also don’t live very long, and before they die their bodies tend to be quite damaged, often by such simple things as standing in one position for too long, since it doesn’t feel uncomfortable to do so for them.  They also don’t notice infections, and they don’t tend to get fevers.  It occurs to me, however, that though their lives are short, people with CIPA might well have significantly longer pain-free lifespans than, say, I have had.  I had pain issues starting at a pretty young age, after all.  Still, if I could be cured of all pain at this stage of my life, when I am hardly worried about my longevity anyway, I think it would be worth it.

**It’s interesting to consider the prefixes “eu” and “u” in words of Greek origin.  “Utopia”, for instance, literally means “no place”, making it clear that an imagined perfect society does not exist and may be impossible.  Whereas, if one were to write “Eutopia”, one would mean “true place” or “good place”.  Thus, my middle name “Eugene” means “true born” and is etymologically related to the term “eugenics”.  Mind you, only a fool would believe that I was actually the product of some eugenics program, that I am some true-life Khan Noonien Singh***.  “Eugene” was just my paternal grandfather’s name.  On the other hand, while eudaimonia means “good spirit” and refers to a state of general emotional and mental well-being, “udaimonia” would mean “no spirit”.  That sounds more pertinent to me, don’t you think? 

***Though I suppose one could speculate that I was a failure of such a program.

by

It’s not the size of the blog post, it’s what you do with it

Well, it’s Saturday, and here I am writing a post of sorts, which means I am working today and‒of course‒I am still alive, at least by some definitions of the word.  I don’t think I could write if I were not alive.

I’m not going to make this very long today, since I’m quite fatigued.  I had my assessment yesterday.  It wasn’t any kind of ordeal or anything, but I was quite nervous.  I don’t have any idea what my results will be.  Well, okay, at some level they’re just going to be either positive or negative, but I can’t give any kind of objective assessment of the probabilities.  I’m too much in the middle of it, so I’m disrupted by my emotions.

I guess I’ll have to wait and see what the outcome is.  I don’t know what I’ll do (if anything) if it’s positive and I really don’t know what I will do if it’s negative.

As for other things, I don’t know.  I haven’t been walking really in the last couple of days, except of course basic getting around a room or something.  I’ve been having a lot of pain in my joints and as always my back.  I also haven’t played guitar in a while.  I guess it’s good that I didn’t buy a new acoustic, huh?  Anyway, with the evaluation, I spent more money than I usually do, so I don’t need the added expense.

I don’t really have much else to say right now, I think.  Maybe I’ll add some more in the edit, but as far as I’m concerned, the first draft is over.  Have a good weekend if you can.

by

I want this all to end

It’s Tuesday now, and I’m writing this blog post on my laptop computer (the little one, not the regular sized one).  The laptop is slightly more awkward for typing on when there are bumps and shakes in a vehicle, but the vastly greater speed with which I’m able to type on it more than makes up for that—though it does not assuage the frustration.

I’m already exhausted (mentally) after only one day of work.  I don’t think it’s the work per se that’s so exhausting, it’s the environment, the people, the noise, the frustrations, the fact that other people arrive late or not at all, so many little frustrations.  There’s so little predictability in their behavior, and what there is is so often illogical.

I have, in general, identified more with Melkor than with Sauron in Tolkien’s universe—largely because he’s the Big Boss—but sometimes I can understand Sauron’s desire for order, and for forcing other creatures to be more orderly.  Of course, the way he goes about that is pretty stupid, but whataya gonna do?  As Gandalf said, he is a “wise fool” (a great expression).

Anyway, I like Lord Foul better than either of those two, and I like Doctor Doom most of all.  Doctor Doom is the sort of character about whom Christopher Nolan could make a movie trilogy, presenting him in a more down-to-earth fashion in a nearly realistic story, as he did with Batman, because Doom is not the product of radioactive spider bites, nor is he the last survivor of a star faring people with powers because of his alien nature, nor is he otherwise enhanced.  He is a human, but with a brilliant, inventive intellect and an obsessive drive.

Why am I writing about this stuff right now?  I have now idea.  This is all stream of consciousness, and that stream flows faster when I’m typing.  I’ve written all this so far in less than ten minutes (first draft), and I’m already almost halfway to my target word count.  I have to set a target, not so that I don’t go below it, but so that I don’t go too far over it.  I could probably gabble on here interminably.

But I want it to end.  I’m so very, very tired, and I have very little joy in my life.  I mean, I’m pleased that The Chasm and the Collision is still an enjoyable read even now.  But of course, I’m probably one of two people in the world who has actually read it.  My mother died just days after it was published—I tried to read some of it to her in her hospice bed, from her own miniature Kindle, but it was clear she wasn’t even following.  That’s too bad.  I think she really would have liked it.  I think she had been looking forward to reading it.

It’s such a me fact that my most wholesome, family-friendly story involves a threat of destruction to two universes and a villain who is unknowingly in the thrall of a much greater, larger scale “villain” or destructive force that threatens all universes, potentially.  That’s my meta-level villain; its influence is felt in many of my other stories, though I don’t always make that explicit.  I have so many ideas for my large-scale omniverse (formerly thought of as a “metaverse” before Schmuckerberg stole my term), so much backstory and intersections and connections and so on, but none of that is ever going to happen or be revealed or anything.  It’s sad, but, as a character in my darkest ever story says, “Life’s like that, I suppose.”

I wish I could sleep for a really long time, just to rest and recreate myself, but that’s not an available option.  I don’t simply long for “suspended animation” because that’s just like pausing a game; you wake up in the same state you were in when you laid down.  The only point to that would be living to see a future you wouldn’t otherwise have seen.  It’s not any kind of a cocoon, a chrysalis, an Adam Warlock kind of thing, where you change and grow and heal.

I don’t know why I’m writing about comic books and other wildly fictional characters.  Perhaps it’s because the real world is not only so stressful but is also so stupid.  This emergent system that is the whole human race interacting with itself is just an astonishing example of idiocy on performance enhancers.  I really am sick of them.

If I were Doom, I would decide to commit myself to saving them, correcting them, trying to make the world as good as I know it could be.  But of course, that leads Doom to be thought of as a villain (he has other psychopathology that contributes to that, of course).

Okay, well, I’m approaching my target, and obviously I have nothing to say, but that doesn’t stop me.  I’m really tired and depressed and discouraged.  I cannot go on like this for long.  Right now, I’m trying to hold on until at least next Friday, when I’m finally getting an autism assessment, but I don’t even know if that’s enough to cling to even for so short a time.

We shall see.

by

And thus the native hue of resolution is sicklied o’er with the pale blog of thought

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday again—the first Thursday of the new year, the first Thursday of the month, and the second day of 2025 (AD or CE depending upon your preference).

I’m heading in to the office already this morning.  It’s not the first day back to work in the new year, though; we worked yesterday, as well, and it was quite a longish day.  We also worked on New Year’s Eve, though we got out an hour earlier than we would have because I shook my head and expressed some outrage (I was in an even more foul mood than usual) that we were not getting off early.  I didn’t have any celebration to attend nor anyone waiting for me, but I thought others might want to get to something of the sort, and anyway, I just really wanted to escape the noise.

It was ridiculous that we worked yesterday (though unfortunately it turned out to be a successful business day).  In the plaza in which our office sits, we were the only business open, and this is a full-scale strip mall with dozens of shops and restaurants and offices.  The people at work who wanted vapes or to get something from the bakery or from the nearby restaurant were all out of luck.  The only places open were gas stations and our office.

Oh, and also my coworker, the one with whom I share various duties, was out sick Tuesday and left early yesterday.  This is not his fault, obviously, unless you mean it’s a design fault, but that fault is true of everyone, and my coworker certainly didn’t design himself.  But it meant that, especially on Tuesday, when I had to do payroll in addition to the other stuff, I was particularly frazzled.

It didn’t help that I knew, quite painfully, that I was not going to be “celebrating” the new year.  Why would I celebrate it when I had wished or yearned throughout the year for 2024 to be my last year?

In fact, on Tuesday—that was New Year’s Eve, in case you didn’t put that together and/or you’re reading this well after it was written—when I was feeling more horrible and stressed out and angry and sad than even I have felt in a long time, I developed a plan, if it merits that term.  I was not hungry during the day, and so I did not eat anything at all.  It occurred to me that I had a half a bottle of Jack Daniels at the house and about half a bottle of vodka as well.  They have both been there for quite some time, since I rarely drink.

My thought was this:  I’ve been on a relatively low carb diet for a few weeks, so I have relatively little stored glycogen relative to the usual amount; what glucose was in my system was probably largely the product of gluconeogenesis, which is the creation of sugar from various amino acids, mainly by the liver.  I figured on stopping at a gas station near the train station when I was heading back to the house and picking up some bottles of Diet Coke (which also has no sugar, of course) and then that evening drinking vodka and Diet Coke and Jack and Diet Coke, all on an empty stomach.  This would have not only the obvious effects of alcohol in disinhibiting behavior, but ethanol also suppresses gluconeogenesis—this fact is responsible for at least some of the typical effects of a hangover.

My thought process, if it merits those words, was basically to hope to get drunk enough and hypoglycemic enough either maybe to have a seizure (unlikely) or just to loosen my inhibitions enough that I would have the courage to use one of the means of suicide that I keep always nearby nowadays*.

When I thought about my plan, though, as the day went on and I finally headed back to the house, it seemed like a pain to stop in the gas station.  I was already exhausted.  I figured, okay, well, I can just drink liquor straight.  Once you get started, once the alcohol begins to take effect, drinking it becomes easier.  However, the thought of being drunk felt very unpleasant, and more importantly, I knew that if I did not work up the strength to go through with my “plan”, drinking the alcohol, especially with no food, would probably lead to a severe exacerbation of my chronic pain.

So, instead, I watched some stupid videos, feeling regretful but not willing to risk worse pain in an attempt to do an end run around the bastard urge for self-preservation and escape my constant physical and psychical pain.  I took something to help me go to sleep (which I don’t usually do on work nights), and I puttered around listening to the sound of all the amateur fireworks going off, feeling annoyed by them, for several hours, and I did not die—not even of natural causes.  And despite my attempts, I slept less than usual, largely because of the noise, but also partly due to my (very inner and apparently unrecognizable to others) turmoil.

And here I am, writing the first blog post of the new year.  I’m alive, and I’m not happy.  I have no friends, my family is far away, and I certainly have no capacity to try to upend and alter where I am, anyway, not on my own—the very prospect of trying to change my life, to move, to go somewhere else, these things are horribly stressful inherently, and I have no strong reason to think any of them would make any difference for me.  I am fundamentally alone, and I probably have always been so, despite past temporary delusions to the contrary.

Of course, so is everyone else, I guess, depending on how you mean it.

Anyway, here we are.  I’m working this Saturday, so I guess I’ll probably write a post then, too.  How lucky for you and for me, right?

yippee.

Well, my train’s about to arrive.  I hope you enjoyed this little, shitty blog post, and that you’re having just a wonderful new year already.  Yeah, right.

TTFN

*I have no fewer than two good lengths of rope, both tied into quite good nooses; a goodly supply of flammable liquids (more than three gallons) with which I could self-immolate; of course I have numerous blades, including very sharp razors and scalpels and box cutters and the like, with which I could open up some arteries; and I have various OTC medications that, especially in combination, could be toxic enough to be lethal.  Also, I’ve been scouting the area for easily accessible high places without closed-in roofs (mainly parking structures) which are high enough that, if I jumped, it would probably be fatal.  I have no guns anymore, alas, but there’s always the nearby Atlantic Ocean, always within sensible walking distance, and then again, there’s always just the long, open road.

by

By medicine life may be prolong’d, yet death will blog the doctor too.

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, and so—as I mentioned yesterday that I would—I’m writing a standard blog post.

I’m writing in the back of an Uber right now, but I’m using my laptop, and that combination is a first for me, I think.  I know that taking Ubers is probably an unjustifiable expense, and I mean to cut back on them, but this week I’ve had very little useful energy*, and anyway, I’m only too happy just to burn through the quite small amount of money that I have, since I have no reason to save for the future.

I was briefly puzzled as I did the initial “save” for this document, since I save my blogs by date and day of the week, when I saw that last year the 23rd of May fell on a Tuesday, not a Wednesday.  Each year generally shifts the day (of the week) of any given date one day later than the previous year, since a standard year is one day longer than a multiple of 7: [52 x 7 = 364].  I think that the official mathematical term is “modulo” when you’re just looking at the remainder.  And I vaguely recall noting, earlier this year, that the dates this year were one day later.

But, of course, this is a leap year, in which we “add” a day to the year, specifically on February 29th.  So it makes sense:  early in the year, this year’s dates are one weekday later than they were last year, but after the end of February, they are two days later.  I suppose that means that next January and February will be two days later than they were this year, but after that things will revert to one day later.

Hold on to your hats, folks!  If the whole blog post is this exciting, goodness knows how you’re going to be able to stand it.

It’s a bit tricky writing in the back seat here, because my laptop computer doesn’t have illuminated keys.  When the bouncing around of the car throws me off too much, I have to re-find my typing location by trial and error.  Once I do, I don’t really need to be able to see; I know my way around the keyboard pretty much by proprioception.  After all, I’ve been typing at least since I was eleven.

Not to say that I don’t make plenty of typos.  My coordination isn’t all that great, and I often get ahead of myself.  But at least with modern word processors, it’s so easy to correct for errors that it’s not a big deal.

Actually, I suspect that if I’d been forced to keep using my grandmother’s typewriter, which is what I used to start my typing career, and on which I needed to use correction film to erase mistakes, I would probably be a better, or at least cleaner, typist than I am now.  Once word processing programs came into play, there was no longer as much of a price to pay for minor errors, and so there was less pressure to be more accurate.  As I’ve noted many times, everything responds to local pressures and incentives and disincentives.

I warned you that this might be exciting, didn’t I?

I almost didn’t go in to work today.  That was why I let myself get the Uber:  to help me to clear that activation energy barrier.  I am not particularly physically sick, though I feel a bit of a tickle in the back of my throat.  I just didn’t want to go in.  Yesterday, all day, I was extremely tense and stressed out, and the noise was particularly irksome, and I had payroll to do, and I was always just sliding along what felt like the razor edge of a true breakdown or explosion.  Yet no one seems to have noticed.

I banged my head on the wall quite hard at one point, and did several other things to cause myself pain throughout the day.  I don’t want to go into specifics too much; I don’t want people to think I’m a weirdo or something.

Ha.  Ha.  Ha.  Ha.  Ha.

Anyway, I’ve actually just arrived at the office.  I hope my hands and thumbs won’t feel too sore, today.  Yesterday, my thumb bases were painfully tight, and most of the rest of my finger joints were sore and stiff, albeit to a lesser degree than the thumbs.  It made it quite difficult to try to play guitar, so I didn’t do much of that.

Actually, because of the trouble with my hands, and my shoulders, and of course, the ongoing issues with my back and hips and knees and ankles—especially with my back—I decided to buy a huge bottle of Ibuprofen, and I’ve taken some of them starting yesterday afternoon.

I have been “off” Ibuprofen for quite some time, now, though it was my go-to anti-inflammatory for many years.  I started to avoid it when its use was associated on two or three occasions—possibly just by coincidence—with a relatively high occurrence of what I presume were premature atrial contractions, with associated palpitations.  It was nothing terribly severe, of course, but at the time, I wanted to live, so I switched mainly to naproxen.

I also use some aspirin, as well as acetaminophen for headaches and other things that don’t benefit from any suppression of cyclooxygenase.  But, despite its longer action, naproxen has never worked quite as well as ibuprofen seemed to work, though perhaps that’s been confounded by other variables.  It’s hard to do a double-blind test on oneself.

In any case, at this point, I don’t much care if I get palpitations, although if they happen, maybe I’ll find them unpleasant enough that I’ll change my mind.  Frankly, I don’t mind if I have a full-fledged arrhythmia.  Sudden cardiac death due to ventricular fibrillation, for instance, is probably one of the best ways to die.  You basically just faint, since your brain is no longer getting blood flow, and that’s that.  If no one defibrillates you, and if the arrhythmia doesn’t spontaneously resolve, you’re done.

It’s probably not quite as quick a death as being at ground zero of a thermonuclear explosion, and it’s certainly not as quick as being obliterated when the vacuum energy of the universe quantum tunnels down to a lower level**, since that process would spread throughout the cosmos at the speed of light, and no information within spacetime can exceed the speed of light, so it’s fundamentally impossible to know such an event is happening before it arrives.  It’s also impossible to know about it once it arrives, since everything currently existing in our universe, right down to fundamental particles, would by obliterated by the vacuum state decay—again, at the speed of light, which is far faster than the rate at which the nervous system can experience anything.

Unfortunately, even more than the thermonuclear explosion possibility, vacuum decay would involve taking other, “innocent” people along with me, at least some of whom both wish and deserve to continue living.  That seems a bit unethical—or at least rude, which I sometimes think is worse—and anyway, it’s not as though anyone knows how to make it happen.

It’s better to keep things confined to my person.

I guess even a hemorrhagic stroke wouldn’t be too bad, to be honest, and given my tendency to bang my head against the wall when I get too frazzled and stressed, it seems immensely more likely than vacuum state collapse.  I suppose I could even tolerate death by bleeding ulcer, though I really don’t like nausea***.

Probably, though, in the end, I’m going to have to take a more active and deliberate hand in things.  I suppose we’ll see.  It’s hard to work up the courage to face the discomfort and even frank pain associated with most such interventions, but practice makes better, and I already have a fair amount of experience deliberately causing myself pain, as noted above.

That’s enough blog post for now.  I’ve already droned on and on.  My tentative plan is to do some fiction writing tomorrow morning, and if I do (or even if I don’t) I plan to leave a little report about it here.  I am off work this weekend, so I won’t be writing anything on Saturday (barring, as always, the unforeseen).

I truly, honestly, and fervently hope that each and every one of you feels better than I do right now, and I mean substantially better.  You probably do; it seems likely that, in the phase space of physical and emotional states, there are many more possibilities in that direction than in the other.  But I could be wrong.

TTFN

Addendum:  While editing, I found that MS Word had underlined a sentence in the draft above, in which I wrote, “I think that the official mathematical term is….”  The editor gave the comment that “expressing opinions with certainty adds formality”.  I don’t think I could possibly disagree more than I do with that sentence. 

Bad advice in editor marked up

 PLEASE DON’T DO THAT, PEOPLE!!!!!!!!  Opinions are opinions.  Expressing them with certainty when you are not certain is tantamount to outright lying, and is a huge problem with human discourse!  I’m ashamed of MS Word for making that suggestion.  What a horrible, horrible recommendation!  What a nightmarish thing to say!

*And yet, my level of tension has been exceptionally high.  That’s a frustrating bit of irony, as I probably don’t need to tell you.

**This is purely a hypothetical possibility.  The vacuum energy of the universe may well be at its lowest/ground state, though it is patently not quite zero.  If it were, cosmic expansion would not be accelerating.  Indeed, I often say that cosmic inflation is happening now, based on all the data we have.  That’s what “dark energy” is doing, albeit at a slower rate than what is proposed to have happened 13.7 billion years ago.

***Weird, right?  I don’t like nausea?  How unusual!

by

This is not an altered Shakespearean quote, in case you couldn’t tell

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, and for the first time in quite a while, this is my weekly blog post, the way I used to do things.

I’ve not been very well lately, even by my standards.  By which I do not mean that I haven’t been writing.  Monday morning I wrote just under 1400 words on Extra Body, which I guess is a good thing.

Then, Tuesday I did not go into the office.

I’ve had a particularly bad time lately regarding my insomnia.  Since Friday night, I haven’t had a single night with as much as four hours of sleep, and many of the nights have seen significantly less.  On Tuesday morning, I just stayed home and took some Benadryl, which only made me doze off for about two hours.  Then, Tuesday night I got another few hours, and went to work Wednesday.  I felt a little loopy during the day yesterday, to be honest, and occasionally I even acted a bit silly.  I suppose everyone at the office thought I was feeling better.

But even my pain has been worse than usual, too, probably largely because of the sleep deprivation.  I don’t think that the causality works in the other direction, because it’s usually not pain that wakes me up; it’s the semi-panicked feeling that I must have overslept by hours and hours, even though it’s only been about five minutes or so since I dropped off.

In any case, I have some kind of feeling of anxiety or vulnerability while I’m asleep.  You’d think I was a Vietnam veteran or something, except I was born in 1969, so I would have been very young indeed to serve.  Whatever it is, I don’t feel safe, or at least secure, when I’m asleep.

Still, it’s not as though I’m safe when I’m awake.  The thing is, no one is safe, not entirely, and no one ever has been (as evidence, note that almost all people who have ever lived are currently dead).  And I frankly find life mostly painful and stressful and exhausting and lonely and dreary, so I don’t know what exactly I’m afraid of such that I’d feel worried about having anything taken away from me.  It’s weird.

Anyway, I didn’t even bring the little laptop computer with me on Monday when I left the office, so I didn’t have it when I was on my way to the office (extremely early) on Wednesday morning.  Instead, I decided to use the Word app, which I’ve mentioned before, and I started to write the beginning of HELIOS.  I did not plan to go far, and I didn’t, writing just over five hundred words‒just beginning to introduce the setting, really.  Then I got to the office and wrote a bit over 800 words on Extra Body, bringing my total new words that day up to nearly the same as on Monday.

On Monday morning, I even strummed the guitar just a little bit.

Unfortunately, there has been no joy in writing fiction‒nor in playing guitar, come to think of it‒since I’ve restarted doing it.  I don’t blame the fiction, of course.  Nor do I blame the guitar.  The problem is my own faulty hardware and/or software, my operating system or particular programs or I don’t know what.  To quote C3PO, “He’s faulty!  Malfunctioning!”

I wish I could get some kind of system update that would fix some of the bugs.  Or at the very least, I wish I could reboot from time to time‒in other words, that I could just get a restful night’s sleep.  I feel that if I could get just a good night’s sleep, it might be almost like a little resurrection.  I still recall how good it felt on that day in the nineties when I had my last (or at least my most recent) good night of sleep, from which I awoke refreshed and rested the next day.  I don’t recall what I did that day, but I felt amazing.

I don’t know how I could accomplish that, though.  I’ve tried medications of various kinds, but they’ve tended just to make things worse.  I can force myself unconscious with Benadryl, for instance, but I awaken feeling groggy and confused and more out of it than when I went to sleep.  I’ve tried getting massages of various kinds, from real massage therapists and so on, but I guess I can’t really relax with a stranger.  And massage chairs, unfortunately, just don’t do it.

So it sucks, and I’m tired, and I’m in pain, and I see no light at the end of the tunnel, not even a glimmer, not even a glint.  All I see is a vague sort of swamp-light haze, a sort of sickly phosphorescence.  There’s just enough light to be able to take in the dreariness of my surroundings.

Blackness would be better, honestly.  Black, silent, empty oblivion seems quite preferable to my life, in which the only joys I know are the guilty (and steadily diminishing) reward of food, and‒as Steve Martin said‒a dishwashing liquid.

I need just to opt out.  I need just to work up my nerve.  That’s the hard part.  Fighting against those ingrained drives to stay alive even though it’s not merely utterly pointless but almost entirely without joy (yet almost never without pain, both physical and psychological).

It’s been getting old for a long time.  I’m sure you’ll all agree.  From within, I feel about a thousand years old, or a million, or a billion‒but I’m not an organism built to live that long.  So, again, I’m faulty and malfunctioning, held together by gaffer tape and twine and mud and twigs and clothes-hanger wire and paper clips, with modeling clay stuck in some of the holes to keep the damp from getting in.

Anyway, that’s my status for now, which is nothing new, just more (and gradually worse) of the same.  I hope you’re all feeling much better than I am.  At the very least, you deserve it for being patient enough to read my blog.  That’s a definite trial by ordeal.

I will do my best to keep writing fiction tomorrow, and I plan to do next week what I planned to do this week, though hopefully with at least a little bit more sleep.  By which I mean, I want to try to write fiction every day but Thursday.

If you see a post go up on some other day, it means I lost my resolve for that plan, at least temporarily.

If you don’t see a blog post at all, not even next Thursday, then either I’ve gotten sick, or I’m dead.  The longer time passes with no posts, the more likely it is to be the latter.  We can always hope, right?  I don’t know, maybe you think it would be a negative thing for me to die.  I’ll even admit that I am afraid of dying, by which I mean the process.  I don’t so much want to die as I want, most days, to be dead.

Silence.  Oblivion.  These things so often seem so much better than the noise and stress and tension and pain of awareness.  If I could just become “comfortably numb” it would be a vast improvement.  But that’s not likely.

TTFN