Pain

by

Dogmas are a disease, a cancer of the mind. Avoid carcinogenic thinking if you can.

I’m going to try to keep this brief this morning, so even though I brought the mini laptop computer with me when I left work on Friday*, I am writing this on my smartphone.  It does make my thumbs sore, or at least it highlights their inherent soreness and stiffness, but that’s part of what makes me tend to write less.  Or at least, I write more slowly; it is not always easy to get me to write less.

I’m choosing this partly because I am just very tired.  On Friday nights and Saturday nights, I can take a couple of Benadryl and so on to help me sleep‒I know it’s not truly good sleep, but just being unconscious for more than an hour or two at a time is such a relief‒but on work nights that’s no good.  So, especially after the artificially extended sleep on the weekend, I tend to have a bad sleep on…well, on every other night, really, but Sunday is the first such night in the work week.

Another problem, and part of my reason for worse sleep, is that I am having a bit of a flare-up of my back/hip pain, and that makes nearly every effort feel that much harder, including simply trying to sleep‒although that’s a somewhat different type of effort than many others.

So, yeah, if there’s anything noticeably different in my writing style today than in my last handful of blog posts, it may be because of the fact that I’m writing on the smartphone.  It may also be something else entirely, of course, or even a combination of things (this seems most likely).  Just because one idea seems to provide a good explanation‒a good story, if you will‒doesn’t mean it’s right.

That’s a common trap into which I frequently see people fall, and it always annoys me (especially when I’m the person).  Some situation will happen, some occurrence will occur, and someone will propose‒perhaps just to themselves‒some reason, some explanation for the event(s), and it will seem at least somewhat plausible, and at least physically possible, and it doesn’t have any glaring logical inconsistencies.  And that’s where they stop.  In their heads, that will be what they think of as the actual explanation for whatever it is they’re explaining.

Unfortunately, this is actually‒at best‒a hypothesis.

Now, if people just recognized that fact and kept the notion in their heads as a hypothesis, then this would be no problem.  All knowledge about the world is, in principle, provisional**.  There’s nothing wrong with having a hypothesis that you recognize as such.  All good science proceeds from speculation (first triggered and then confirmed or denied by observation and testing).

If one has relatively non-crucial concepts to address, one need not even be particularly bothered about confirming or denying one’s little hypothesis.  One can simply have it, tacitly implied, sitting there in potentia in the process of one’s mind.  Then if, quite by chance, one should encounter data or concepts or arguments that bear on the likelihood of that hypothesis, one can‒sometimes quite unconsciously‒adjust one’s hypothesis, or one can discard or replace it or even find oneself more confident in it.

This is all well and good.  But all too often, humans take their first plausible seeming notion and decide that they must now have the answer.  And then, depending on their emotional connection to the idea, if they encounter disconfirming evidence or argument, they twist away from it, dismiss it, seek out only pseudo-confirming ideas and evidence or even (shudder) just the company of other people who share their epistemologically suspect ideas.

These are such things as conspiracy theories are made on, or even religions (literal or figurative ones, including cultish forms of economic theories and philosophical ideas).  And when one does not update one’s ideas, when one is not aligned with reality, sooner or later, one will collide with it.  When one collides with reality, it’s never reality that is damaged.

If it were only the person who persisted in self deception that got hurt in the crash, it would still be tragic but at least at least it would be tolerable.  But as with literal crashes, the innocent are all too often harmed and made to suffer as a consequence of someone else’s poor judgment.

This is part of why I despise all dogmatic thinking.  I even coined an expression in relation to it:  Spay and neuter your dogmas!

Do not let them propagate.  Dogmas are among the most perilous of meme-plexes because they are so stiff and brittle and they tend to have sharp edges.  But even when they don’t, there is still the problem of going against reality.  One can imagine the real nature of the world as a kind of tunnel or pipe or tube‒in places it is very wide and in places very narrow.  In some regions, a fair amount of variability in course is tolerable within it, but sooner or later, if one is not moving parallel to the course of reality, one will hit a wall.

How bad the collision will be can depend on many factors; one can have a mere scrape, or a glancing blow, or one can have a true “crash and burn” situation.

Those are generally worth avoiding.

Okay, that’s it for today.  I feel a bit grumpy and curmudgeonly right now, largely because of my pain and poor sleep, but sometimes it leads to decent writing.  Whether that’s been the case today, I’ll let you be the judge.  I am not impartial.

Have a good one.

*In case it wasn’t clear, I did not work on Saturday.

**Even the old cogito ergo sum.  And don’t get me started on cogitum ergot hatto.

by

Another very brief Monday blog post

It’s Monday again.  In fact, it’s the last Monday in May of 2025, the end of a very small and arbitrary era.  It’s also Memorial Day, a day on which I don’t like to say, “Happy Memorial Day,” since it’s a day of remembrance of the fallen, but I do wish you well on this holiday.

I don’t really have anything to write about today.  My brain is borderline completely fried, not least because no matter how often I use the bathroom, I still feel like I have to go, and urgently.  So, I haven’t been getting much sleep, even for me, and what little I get is interrupted every half an hour to an hour.

This is all nothing new, and I’m sure it’s terribly boring for all of you readers.  I do apologize.  I’m basically a boring person.

I have my appointment with the urologist tomorrow, and hopefully that will spell the end of this current situation, at least.  If not, I don’t know what I’m going to do.

Actually, I don’t know what I’m going to do either way.  I am fairly clueless and at a loss.  I don’t know what to do about the future or whatever.  Life is just so uncomfortable all the time.  The Buddhists underestimated things when they said merely that life is inherently unsatisfactory.  Life is frequently quite a bit more than unsatisfactory.

That’s not exactly a rip-roaring insight, is it?  My brain is so foggy and fatigued.  I’m glad that work has at least been productive over these past two weeks, given how uncomfortable and worn out I am.  I’m glad that the discomfort isn’t a necessary prerequisite for work being productive.  If it were, I’m afraid that I would be forced to withdraw my services, so to speak.

Ugh, I’m tired of writing these posts on my smartphone.  It continues to irritate my thumb joints, and I make so many typos because the “keys” are not suited to adult male hands, and probably not to adult female hands, either.  I should just bring my little laptop computer again instead of being lazy.

Of course, that computer is getting on a bit, and frankly, so is this phone.  But I really don’t feel like replacing either of them.  I’ve had the thought, and the intention, that they, like everything else, should be the last of such things that I own.

I don’t know.  I can’t think of anything else to say.  Move along, folks, nothing left to see here today, you know?

Anyway, try to have a good day and a good week.

by

A nameless Friday blog post

It’s hard to believe, but something truly obvious didn’t even occur to me until yesterday afternoon as I was getting ready to leave the office.  I was really worn out and tired and grumpy, and I said to my coworker, who was very kindly giving me a ride to the train station, “If I were a sane person in a civilized world, I wouldn’t even have come to work at all this week.”

That’s when I thought: the people at the hospital probably didn’t expect me to go back to work this week.

Meanwhile, this has been one of our busiest weeks in a very long time at the office, and the office is in the process of moving to our new location, and I had to iron out the details of the records from Monday and Tuesday, which were a bit off, and then I had to do the payroll on Wednesday all while having the busiest day of this very busy week so far.

Yesterday was not quite as hectic as Wednesday for me, but on Wednesday I had kind of maxxed the pain med dose so I could get done what I needed to do.  Not so on Thursday.  I want to make sure not to overuse the meds in the short term, since I don’t know when a really bad spasm might happen.  Of course, I’m not taking my usual aspirin either, per recommendation, nor any other go-to NSAIDS, so things are complicated.

Anyway, the meds situation wasn’t what I wanted to discuss.  I just wanted to note how pathological I must be to have not only come right back to work after being discharged from the hospital, but to have applied pressure to get me discharged Tuesday afternoon.  I can’t believe that I even said I would sign out AMA* if I had to do so.

But I am basically on my own; if I don’t work, I don’t eat, so to speak.  Even that is misleading, though, and is not my real reason, which is that I have to be productive or useful to someone, in a way that I accept, or else there is no point to the fact of my continued existence.

I mean, I know no one wants to be around me or to have me around them for fun and pleasure; the copious evidence for that is glaring and even blinding.  But I am capable of being useful in quite a few different ways; even my misautonomy doesn’t force me to deny that I have gifts that can be productive and useful and even sometimes beautiful.

So, if I can’t be useful, well…what’s the use of me?  If I were not at work, what would I be doing but lying around in my one room (plus bathroom) with a malfunctioning AC unit?  

Meanwhile, I still haven’t made my follow-up appointments or any of that.  My sister has offered to help, and I think I’m going to have to take her up on that, though she’ll have to be doing stuff from long distance and second-hand and I still find the process daunting.  It’s really quite pathetic.

And if not being useful is a feeling like being in an intergalactic void, it’s even more horrible to feel like I’m a burden or even an inconvenience to someone else, especially someone who really matters to me.  That’s a failure worthy of fire.

Also, I am tired of being in pain.  Everything in my life centers around pain.  I suppose it should have been obvious for quite a while, but at least since the time I was sent to be a guest at FSP West, pain has been the central fact, the only consistent thing, about my existence.  Now I’ve just added another color, another flavor, another timbre and type of pain to my usual mix.

I suppose one could almost call it refreshing as a change, or one might if it weren’t just absolutely overwhelming at its peak, and none too pleasant when it’s at a lower level.  And while, if one’s pain is in one’s back and legs, it is possible to rest them to some degree, you can’t really rest your urinary tract when it is where the pain is focused.  If you try to drink less, you’ll only make the primary problem worse, but of course, drinking more (hopefully to get the stone to pass) does mean more of the acute discomfort in the meantime.

Why am I doing any of this?  Why am I continuing?  It’s certainly not out of any sense of my personal value.  I’m just a maggot-ridden turd lying by a dirt path in a humid, stagnant, pollen laden drizzle that doesn’t refresh anything or allow anything but mold and fungi and coprophagic organisms to grow.  I’m so tired.  I have no purpose, and I am so tired.

Anyway, this ought to be it for this week.  I don’t think there’s a plan for the office to be open tomorrow.  If it is, by rights I ought not to come in anyway.  But since the alternative is just lying around by myself, and since I’m stupid, and I don’t live in a civilized world, and I am certainly not sane, if they open the office, I will probably be here.  If so, I’ll probably write a blog post.

Until my next post, whenever it is, I truly and sincerely and urgently hope you all have objectively good days and nights and everything else.  If my words have the power to make anything real, that is what I would want.

*Against medical advice.

by

Morose, meandering musings of a misautonomous moron

Every time I write a blog post on a Wednesday morning, I feel the urge to include a reference to the Beatles song She’s Leaving Home, as in “Wednesday morning at five o’clock as the day begins…”

There, see, I just did it again.  At least it was self consciously done, not some quote put in as if it were my own words, intended only for those “in the know” to recognize.  I guess that’s a way for me to feel vaguely clever‒and sometimes funny‒while actually just following the often irresistible compulsion to quote shit* at every turn.

In high school, when I was a senior (and maybe when I was a junior?) I was pretty confident in my place as one of the “leaders” of our school orchestra, and I used to go to the orchestra room first thing in the morning before school, usually arriving before the teacher, and then I hung out there (with other orchestra members and friends who arrived a bit later) until time for classes to start.  While there, pretty much every day, I would write a quote from something‒Shakespeare**, Tolkien, Stephen R. Donaldson, Poe, etc.‒on the board.  I even won the “Dusty Cello Award” at our end of the year orchestra party because of it.

I’ve always had that habit of quoting books and movies and plays and shows and so on, and even doing the voices of people when I could.

I think reading fiction in particular was very good for helping me to understand what goes on in other people’s minds, at least in principle.  But I also just liked being able to go to those other worlds and other lives.  It’s better in general than watching TV or movies, though the latter are easier and also easier to enjoy with other people, if you have other people with whom to enjoy them.

Anyway, that’s neither here nor there.  My past and my thoughts about it are of no moment to anyone but me, and even I find them boring.  It’s just that they’re all I really have.

I’ve tried to interact with people to some degree online, but that just gets me weird feedback, like getting almost 3,000 “likes” in less than 24 hours for pointing out in a comment that the biblical Jesus would not approve of a particular, supposedly religion-based, exclusion reported in a thread about a shopkeeper toward a trans woman (ironic for a nonbeliever to be pointing out Jesus’s very clear attitudes, but I am one who remembers characters and quotes).

On the other hand, when I noted yesterday on the same site that the office where I work was 3.4 miles from the nearest “beach” (and a fishing pier) and I thought it might be good to walk down to the shore, kick off my shoes and socks, and just start swimming east into the Atlantic and not come back (pointing out that it would leave no need for cleanup, and it wouldn’t mess up anyone’s day, or anything of that sort) I got 3 likes (after quite a while) and only one comment by a person saying she doesn’t like to dwell on such thoughts.

This is, supposedly, Mental Health Awareness month, but I don’t know what good such a thing does, especially if such is the response to someone expressing suicidal ideation.  I’m aware of mental health in general, but it’s been a long time since I had any personal experience of mental health (if I ever have).  It’s been at least 13 years since I’ve had even moments of mental pseudo-health.  That was the last time I saw my kids in person, for one afternoon.

I’ve only recently realized that it’s now been a longer time since I saw my children than how old they were when I last saw them.  So, I’ve missed more than half of their lives now, and that fraction is only going to get bigger.

What would I possibly know about mental health?

Physical health is not my biggest attribute either (not many people had open-heart surgery at age 18).  But I know it gets very boring for people to hear about‒for instance‒the fact that I feel right now as if my entire right side from the lower ribs on down to the ball of my foot feels as though it’s filled with molten lead, which is quite painful, in case you were wondering.  But that’s always the way it is, for much longer than 13 years (more than 20, actually) and though it waxes and wanes and shifts locations, pain never fully goes away while I’m conscious (and probably contributes to the worsening of my insomnia).

Anyway, I know, Waah, waah, waah, shut the fuck up, Robert, no one wants to hear all this shit*** over and over again!  It’s tiresome to face nothing but complaints.  I’m sorry.  I’m very, very sorry.  I really am.  To everybody.

I really should just try that swim.  There isn’t much to prevent it.  I’m not particularly afraid of drowning (other than in an instinctive sense) though I do have misgivings about sharks and other sea creatures.  That’s probably silly, since, even in shark infested waters, statistically people are far more likely to drown than to be attacked by a shark.

I have to do something, or at least to have something done to me.  I don’t have the will or the wherewithal to take action to save myself in any way (and wouldn’t know where to start if I could) but I don’t have the strength to keep living, not for much longer.  And I don’t have any good reason to keep living.

But that same problem with “executive function” or whatever it is makes it hard for me to take action to kill myself.  So, for the moment, I just hurt myself to try to distract myself from other pain and to punish myself for being such a lame and shitty person, but weirdly, I have a hard time making such things hurt very much anymore.  Maybe I’ve always got too much pain medication in me, but I just don’t realize it because it doesn’t do all that much for my back and joint pains.  It’s weird.

Then again, I’m weird, so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.  Like the song says, “I’m a creep.  I’m a weirdo.  What the hell am I doing here?  I don’t belong here.”

I don’t belong here.

*This is the nonjudgmental version of the word “shit”.  It’s more or less synonymous with “stuff” but it flows better (so to speak).  I don’t mean to imply that the song to which I refer is in any way shit.  It’s one of the most beautiful songs I know.

**Yes, I loved Shakespeare even back then.

***Here, the use of “shit” is much more in the derogatory, excrement-related vein.  Though if someone had excrement in their veins, they would be in big trouble, because that excrement would be carried to the lungs and then heart and could cause horrible endocarditis and pneumonias and so on.

by

*Or as title

It’s another Wednesday morning, and I’m not walking to the train again this morning, because my feet blisters are still quite irritated.  It’s so frustrating; why were they okay on Saturday and Sunday but not on Monday?  Did I overdo it?  Or‒as I suspect‒did my socks influence things?

I wore a different type of sock on Monday than I had on the weekend.  I also wore that preventative ankle brace on my right foot, and that is the foot on which the majority of my blister problems developed.  Is that a coincidence?  Quite possibly, of course.  Don’t let Sherlock and Mycroft tell you otherwise with their apparently clever but illogical and quasi-magical notion that the universe rarely indulges in coincidence.  Except for things that are literally causally related, there is nothing that isn’t coincidence.

Of course, from another point of view, nothing is coincidence.  Everything follows the laws of physics‒or the laws of nature, or however you wish to characterize it‒and can do nothing but what it does when it does it.  That doesn’t mean it has any meaning beyond that, from the human point of view.  For instance, the idea that the universe is “sending you a message” is absurd, unless some specific person, who is of course a part of the universe, literally sends you a message.

I’ve often said that while everything has a cause or causes, many things‒almost everything, as far as I can see‒has nothing that a human would call a reason.  This is the old teleology error that goes at least as far back as Aristotle*.

I had no intention to write about all that today, but often the only way for me to know what I’m going to write at any given time is to start writing.

You might have noticed‒well, I doubt anyone was really paying attention, but now that I’m telling you it’s going to be much easier to catch‒that I have not indented my paragraphs today.  Before, I was trying to see how pleasing it was to indent manually while writing in Google Docs, in case I might decide to try again to write fiction, and to do it on Google Docs.  I’m sorry to say, I’ve felt no urge nor even any real willingness to write fiction.  I’ll probably never write any fiction again.  I’m getting pretty close to the point of not writing anything anymore.

I’m really just exhausted, in more than one sense of the word.  I hurt every fucking day, and have to dose myself with various things to keep it at least under control enough that I can carry out reasonably normal functions (for me, anyway).  I haven’t read for more than about twenty minutes total in the last week or week and a half.  I haven’t played my guitar in weeks, maybe more than a month.  I barely even listen to music**.  In fact, I tried to give my black Strat away, but that wasn’t really workable, and the person to whom I offered it was just confused.

Every little thing feels overwhelming.  The only thing I do in spare time is wander through things like Instagram and Threads, which are already starting to get boring.  Occasionally I will see things that are funny or interesting or frustrating, and sometimes I’ll even make comments that other people find interesting or funny or whatever.  But what’s the point?  I don’t feel a scintilla of any connection there; it’s not even an awkward conversation.  Not that it hasn’t been useful and sometimes enjoyable‒it has.  But I don’t have any friends there.

I also don’t really have any friends anywhere else (except if you count quite old friends, far away, with whom I rarely interact anymore).  I have “work friends” who are really more work acquaintances.  There’s no one with whom I share any time or interests outside of work.  I certainly don’t talk to my neighbors, nor to anyone on the train.

It’s been more than twenty years since I had a day without feeling constant pain (except rare moments of high-medication, which provides its own “fun”) and probably thirty years since I had a good night’s sleep without the use of heavy doses of sleep aids of one kind or another.  I’ve tried to get healthy during this time, don’t get me wrong.  I’m stubborn; I do not give up easily.  That’s probably the only reason I’m still alive, but it has other drawbacks as well.

What I ought to do is give up even trying to be healthy, even trying to get stronger or to thrive or even to survive.  Of course, knowing me, unrestrained self-indulgence in self-destructive practices would probably lead me to become unreasonably healthy and successful.

Nah, that’s not going to happen.  It would make a funny story, but the universe doesn’t seem particularly predisposed to irony, even if humans seem to love it and “find” it even where it is not.

I’m done for today, I think.  I wonder, if I didn’t ever write another blog post, how many people would notice, and then for how long they would keep wondering if I would return and how long it would be before they forgot about me entirely.  I suspect it would be a very short time.

*Anagrams include “a tit loser” and “tater silo”.  Also, see the top of this post.

**And when I do, it’s usually “reaction” videos to songs I know, because watching these feels almost like sharing a beloved song with a friend.

by

Please eschew sour grapes, or at least don’t chew them…they’re sour.

I don’t really remember what I wrote yesterday; I remember that I was angry, but it wasn’t really about anything solid or sharp, more just a general sense of frustration and despair.  I really felt and feel at a loss, with no sense of meaning or purpose or deep value.

I can’t claim to think that feeling is unreasonable; the world provides plenty of evidence for the pointlessness of all things.  I suspect that most people just try to avoid thinking about it.  They distract themselves with religions and other ideologies and with social interactions, whiling away their time until everything finally breaks down and they die.

Some surely die in a state of bewilderment and fear, never having accepted or even having truly contemplated their own mortality.  Some probably find comfort in the aforementioned religious ideas or just in community.  Having the love of family and friends, especially if such people are with them near the end, must help relieve at least some of the dread and pain as things wind down.

It must be at least some comfort if, when one is dying, one has loved ones nearby, helping to provide reassurance or at least just company.  If one has loved ones who willingly and lovingly attend to them while they are dying, or even just want to be there with them, one must at least be able to think that one has done something right in life.

Anyway, I’m on my way into the office, still rather sick but definitely improving.  I’m coughing, but not as badly, and the goo I’m bringing up is thinning out and looking less like some weird, opaque resin made from peas.  I’m still far from optimal, but then, I only started getting sick about six days ago.  If I’m substantially over it by, say, Friday, well that will have been a decently circumscribed illness, especially considering just how badly I’ve been feeling.

Somewhat ironically, my illness at least distracted me‒temporarily‒from the degree of my back, hip, ankle, and shoulder/arm pains, and those are becoming more prominent again as the illness recedes.  This leads me to wonder to what degree interferons or “tumor necrosis factors” and other aspects of the immune response can have beneficial effects on chronic pain, or if indeed they can do so at all.

It might be interesting to do a retrospective study involving, say, people who were treated with strong doses of interferon (with ribavirin) for Hepatitis C, or even for cancers such as melanomas, and who came out the other end healthy, then to try to learn whether any of them had chronic pain before starting treatment, and how the pain responded to the treatment.  We could compare them to age (and otherwise) matched cohorts who did not receive any such interferon treatments but who had similar amounts of chronic pain and see if their courses differed in a statistically significant way.

Of course, those high-dose interferon treatments for Hep C had their own serious complications and side-effects.  For instance, they could trigger serious depression even in people with no previously known disposition to have mood disorders.  These outcomes were generally worth the risk, if one could thereby eliminate chronic Hepatitis C, which is associated with significant morbidities and pathologies, not the least of which are potential liver cancer and sclerosis.

Still, if I could go through, say, a six week course of such treatment and thereby reduce (or eliminate) my chronic pain, I think it would probably be worth it.  I’m depressed and suicidal anyway.

Of course, we’re a long way from such a study outcome, even if we had unlimited funding and could start the study tomorrow.  Money can help make a lot of things easier to do, but as Kansas pointed out in Dust in the Wind, money has no effect on time*, and some things just take time.

I don’t expect to see such a study done, let alone to be able to benefit from the results, and honestly, I don’t have a high credence that it would show clinically useful effects.  After all, my own pain is not diminished now as I’m getting over my illness; it’s just changing back to baseline.  And, unfortunately, taking a vacation from one pain to another only to come back to the original one is probably not something anyone would really seek out***.

That’s enough for today.  I hope you all have a decent one‒do please try, at least.  Someone should, and it would be nice if most such people were reader-types who like blogs rather than wealthy assholes who don’t give much of a shit about anyone else, though those are the people who seem most likely to have happy days most often.

Not that wealth means someone is undeserving of happiness; that’s a non sequitur, really‒sour grapes projected onto the world by those who resent and envy the wealthy (sometimes with good reason, sometimes without).

Do your best.

*Okay, if you had enough money, all in one place**, you might form a massive enough object that it would measurably slow the local passage of time.  Heck, you could make a “money black hole” if you could get enough of it together and compress it enough, and at the event horizon, time would stop (to an outside observer, anyway).  Of course, according to GR, a black hole is a black hole is a black hole, with only mass, angular momentum, and charge differentiating one from another, so it wouldn’t matter if the black hole was made out of money.  Quantum mechanics demands otherwise, though, and thus we have the famous “black hole information paradox”, which isn’t really a paradox, anymore than is the “Fermi paradox” (When you come to an apparent paradox or contradiction, that’s just an alert, saying “something you’re doing here is incorrect or incomplete.”)

**Even if you’re just storing that money as information, with no bills or coins, there is still energy associated with the information, always.  So enough information about enough money could still have gravitational effects.

***Then again, there is the phenomenon of deliberate self-harm, and I can tell you from experience, it is sometimes a way of diverting oneself from a pre-existing, chronic pain to another pain, one deliberately and personally chosen.  Does that count as a pain vacation?

by

I can’t think of a Shakespeare based title right now

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, and I’m writing this blog post on my laptop computer instead of on my smartphone, because yesterday when leaving the office, I felt like carrying my laptop computer with me.  That’s it.  There’s no better reason than that.  I was still in a lot of pain, but since trying to be careful with my back wasn’t making any difference, I figured the extra load of a pound or two couldn’t matter much.  It didn’t, as far as I can tell.

I don’t have any subject about which to write at the moment, and that’s beginning to get troubling, though I’m not entirely sure why that should be; certainly, it’s never slowed me down before.  I can always seem to write, the way some people can always seem to talk, and the good thing about writing is that I can go on and on about whatever subject I choose, just indulging myself, and I don’t have to stammer to a stop at some point because I realize that no one nearby has any interest in—and often no idea about—whatever I’m trying to discuss.

For the most part, people try to be patient with me, and for the most part, I try to pay attention to when people are obviously getting bored.  But it’s nice not to have to worry about it.  Anyone who isn’t interested in what I’m writing simply doesn’t have to read.

My pain is slightly less intrusive this morning.  I can move a bit more easily than yesterday without having to stop and hold still for a bit every time as if I’ve been stabbed or something.  It still hurts, but then, it always hurts.

I kept having an idea go through my head yesterday—it’s not a new idea—about possibly trying to write a new story, starting and finishing entirely on my smartphone using Google Docs.  I don’t know whether I would enjoy it or not, or if I would even do it; currently I don’t so much as have a candidate idea for a new story.  And, of course, those of you who have followed this blog for a while will recall that I recently wrote a new novella, called Extra Body, but that after an edit or two I lost interest in it and just published it here.  If you haven’t already, you can read it here.  If you like it, maybe you’ll look into some of my other stories.  Heck, maybe you can share and maybe tell some friends and followers.

Still, the prospect of writing a new story, which ought to be at least a little exciting, is just a dull and even an unpleasant thought to me, because I would expect to put in the effort of writing and then have barely anyone read what I wrote and have to watch it just sit out there, pointless and inert.

So, I don’t know if I’m going to write anything.  I guess I could look through my old story ideas and see if anything jumps out at me.  I haven’t had any new story ideas in a while, or at least, I haven’t written any down that come to me (they still do come).  There doesn’t seem to be much point in doing it.

My coworker is going to be away tomorrow and Monday because it’s his wife’s birthday and they’re going on a short trip, so it’s going to be slightly more stressful than usual at work.

I don’t understand it, really.  Who, as an adult, goes on a trip when they have a birthday?  I don’t recall ever going on a trip for my birthday, to be honest.  I don’t think I would want to do so, but even if I did, I don’t think it would happen.

I don’t have anyone with whom to go on a trip nowadays, or frankly, even with whom to go to see a movie or watch a TV show or whatever.  I’m actually very lonely, but it’s not as though I’m just able to make friends with just anyone and just start hanging out with someone.  The process of meeting someone new and getting used to someone and being comfortable making plans with another person is very difficult and ridiculously anxiety-provoking even to contemplate.

It’s very much a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situation.  And so, I’m just blah, just a dust mote floating in nothingness.  Unfortunately, it’s not a free-fall kind of nothingness, so there is net gravitational force on me at all times, and that causes my various pains to continue to act up.

I’m sure it’s probably nothing that I don’t deserve.  Goodness knows that I’m hard for other people to get close to, or even to tolerate, since I get so awkward around other people and have such a hard time feeling any common ground.  Also, I’m pretty fucking weird.

Anyway, that’s about it for today.  I don’t think I’ve said anything that’s of any use to anyone, except perhaps as a way to pass a few moments’ time on our mutual path to oblivion—or, as David Mitchell put it, “Whiling away our finite time before the grave.”

He says this at approximate time stamp 10:15 in the linked video.  It’s worth watching; it’s quite funny.

I don’t know if I’ll put a picture here or do a Shakespeare-based title.  I guess you’ll already know the answer long before you read this part of the post, won’t you?  I envy you.  I wish I’d already decided.

I guess beggars can’t be choosers.  And we’re all beggars here, when you get right down to it.  No one was born because they deserved to be born, so to speak; you can’t earn your existence before you exist.  You can’t choose your parents/genes, your place of origin, your time of origin, or your developmental influences.  And if you could choose, the odds of you (or anyone else) choosing wisely seem pretty low.

In the meantime, just…try to have a good day if you can.

TTFN

by

“…the only thing that’s real.”

It’s Wednesday morning, and I’m writing this on my smartphone instead of the laptop computer.  There’s no important rationale for this choice, it’s just the way it turned out.  There are causes for everything that happens, but there aren’t necessarily reasons.

I was terribly stressed out yesterday, though arguably nothing too Earth-shattering happened.  Just quite a few unexpected and frustrating but relatively little things occurred that led me to want to hurt myself, and I wanted just to give away my black Strat at the office as well as a very cool piece of hiking equipment that I have that my boss really admires*.  I just wanted to divest myself of everything and go off and, I don’t know, try to swim to Morocco or something**.

I don’t feel much better this morning, but at least it’s been going reasonably “according to plan”.  I’m still in stupid amounts of pain, since right when I woke up.  Nevertheless, I did my morning exercises and got ready for work, though I feel almost as though my upper body and my lower body are hanging by a thread from each other.  Only nerves seem to connect the two sometimes; otherwise it feels as though my upper half is merely balanced atop my lower half, and as I sit, stand, lie down, walk, and so on, it wants to fall off its perch, and that process hurts.

I haven’t actually played guitar in weeks.  I’ve “wanted” to, intellectually.  I even got the red Strat out at the house, putting away the SG, because the Strat is my second favorite***.  However, that hasn’t led to me playing it, though I came close at least once over the weekend.

I of course also haven’t played piano/keyboards, partly because my keyboard is covered with superfluous clothes and other things that just need a place to be.  It’s shameful, I know, but I have little room for storage.

I also haven’t written any fiction or done any drawing, and I don’t even have any modeling clay, though the discussion of my pain made me think of when I used to play with clay every day (hey hey!).  Occasionally, one would get a single hair mixed in with the clay by accident, and then if you were splitting the clay, the two bits would sometimes be held together only by that hair; that’s how my back feels a lot of the time.

When I shift a little, at the wrong moment, in the wrong way, it feels as though my upper and lower halves want to separate, but they’re held together by the collected nerve fibers that carry all that lovely pain and spasm and electrical sensation back and forth to and from my brain.

I won’t say I wouldn’t wish this pain on anyone‒there are quite a few people in the world who merit such pain and much, much more, and yet they live with impunity.  Many of them have been doing their dirty deeds for quite a long time, and even if they were to die violent deaths tomorrow, they would already have gotten away with nearly a lifetime of successful villainy and will suffer no more than most people are near the end of their lives.  Indeed, these people will probably have better, more attentive health care in their final moments than most people who have done no willing harm to anyone.

Lovely universe you’ve got here.  (It wouldn’t) be a shame if something happened to it.

Also, you can’t threaten such people with stupid points like “history will judge you”, because such people don’t tend to give a shit about that kind of thing.  Many of them probably secretly believe themselves to be immortal; they certainly don’t care about what the milling masses think of them after they’re dead.  And any concept they may have of an afterlife is clearly not worrisome to them, or not enough so to deter their foul deeds.

And here I am, feeling like I am slipping very painfully off my lower half even as I write this, despite aspirin and naproxen and Tylenol and heating pads and Icy Hot and Voltaren cream and CBD and Delta-9 gummies and all that.

It’s too much.  If I cannot get this to improve soon, I may move up the deadline of my plan, because I am tired of being not only depressed and anxious and autistic (with all that that entails) but also just in chronic fucking pain every fucking second of every fucking day for more than 20 fucking years!!!  There is no sign of it abating.

Have a good day if you can, and thank you for reading.

*It’s a machete; I don’t know why I’m being coy.  It’s a beautifully designed and made machete, no cheap throw-away crap.  This is the sort of tool one could see being handed down with pride from generation to generation.  I bought it because of the aesthetics; I rarely need a machete for practical purposes.

**I would not succeed.  I am not that good of a swimmer, but even if I were, I don’t think any human or humanoid swimmer ever could swim across the Atlantic Ocean.

***My favorite is my Les Paul (see above), which was also, like my red Strat, made by my former housemate.  That guitar has such a beautiful sound, but it is very heavy.  It’s what I used for all the guitar parts, including the little arpeggios and whatnot, on Like and Share, and also for my cover of Something, with no pedals and only a little delay.  I used the red Strat almost entirely for Schrodinger’s Head and for much of Catechism, including the solos.  I used the black Strat for the solo in the middle of Breaking Me Down.  I have not recorded anything using the SG.  That’s no criticism of it; the timing was just wrong.

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.