suicide

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“Through early morning fog I see visions of the things to be…”

It’s Wednesday, the so-called hump day, which supposedly implies that after this day, the following weekdays become borderline effortless.  Of course, that’s bullshit.  There is no force‒unlike when cresting the top of an actual hill (or hump)‒that would tend to add impetus to the rest of your week.

No, there is only the accumulation of stress and tension and fatigue that continues to accrue.  This is, supposedly, worse for people like me than for NTs as they say, but I’m not sure, at least relatively speaking.  I think it’s wearing for everyone, but some people have more support and shared lives, allowing for sharing a diversity of strengths and the effacement of weaknesses.

That’s my hypothesis for now, anyway.

I’ve been having a bad few days energy-wise and pain-wise, and that’s frustrating, as I’m sure you can well imagine.  I’ve been trying to get into better exercise routines and so on, as you may know, but lately every time I make an attempt, it causes exacerbations of one kind or another in my chronic pain, and that lasts a long time; it’s very discouraging.  I’m also trying to cut back on my eating, so I can try to lose weight, which will almost certainly at least make exercising easier and less painful.

It’s difficult, though.  Food is the one and only reliable source for me of feelings of…well, joy is not quite the right word, and euphoria or eudaemonia are both way off the mark, but it is a positive feeling, neurophysiologically.  For good, sound, biological reasons, eating is one of the most reliable ways of activating the nervous system’s reward circuitry.  Unfortunately, when it’s the only reliable source you have, you tend to overdo it.

Of course, resisting such urges and controlling one’s impulses can be very ego-syntonic, but that’s much more diffuse and delayed.  Also, my ego is shriveled bordering on cachectic, and not in a good, meditational/spiritual way.  My mind is largely my enemy, or the enemy of itself, or at least I’m not my friend.  I certainly do not love myself.  As I’ve said before, I am generally my own least favorite person, and that’s the person with whom I have to spend my time‒24/7 as they say.

It’s not that I’m the person of whom I think least highly.  There are many well-known people of whom I would not hesitate to say that they are far worse people than I am.  But I don’t have to be around those people.  If I did, at least one of us would probably already be dead.

Oh, speaking of that, today is World Suicide Prevention Day, which is in the midst of Suicide Awareness and Prevention Month (or whatever the specific official term is).  So, I guess, if you have the opportunity today, you should prevent a suicide if you can?  On every other day, especially in every other month, I guess you can just let shit happen however it happens.  That’s pretty much what almost everyone does, almost every day, anyway.  Why would that change?

I would offer to provide a listening and supportive ear for anyone who is struggling with such issues; I have tried to be there for people often in the past.  I mean, I was a practicing physician for quite a while, and based on the nearly unanimous feedback from my patients, I was a good doctor*.  However, now I don’t think I could provide sincere arguments to try to convince someone out of suicide.

I veer toward pro-mortalism a lot of the time, though that’s not as much a considered philosophical stance as it is an emotional proclivity.  It’s part of my overall dysthymia I suppose.  Though you have to be careful when you suppose‒sometimes you make a supp out of o and se.

I know that last bit doesn’t make any sense, but it’s my way of making fun of the old ass/u/me cliché.  I also like to use a slight variation of the traditional one, saying, “When you presume, you make a pres out of u and me.”  Nowadays, given the current “pres”, that’s almost certainly something most people would like to avoid.

I don’t know what to do about my state of mind and my state of body (and my state of residence, with which I’m getting steadily more disgusted).  Maybe I should fast for a bit, and potentially address more than one bird with one stone.  Yom Kippur is coming up in about three weeks, and I often fast on that day anyway, but I don’t think I want to wait until then.  Of course, if I could fast from now until then, I’m sure I would see remarkable results, and I might feel them as well.  But I’m far from sure that I have the willpower to do that.

Oh, well‒as the man sang‒whatever, never mind.

Now, there was a suicide that I wish could have been prevented.  I wonder what music we would have if not for that terrible event.  Then again, I wish even more that Mark David Chapman had offed himself sometime before December of 1980.  Imagine** what music we might have had in that case!

Such speculations are only disheartening, though, and I certainly don’t need that, and I doubt that you all do, either.  So, please, try to have a good day, and if you do have dark and even suicidal thoughts, try to get help if you can.  It’s much harder to do than people might think, but hopefully, for most people, it’s worth the effort.  I can’t speak for myself in that, but I’m not objective about me.  I’m living inside the acidic, toxic cloud, so I can’t see out of it and certainly can’t clearly see myself from within it.

That’s probably just as well.

*I’m still a doctor, of course, and I always will be, since I earned my degree fair and square.  But since I’m not in practice anymore, it’s hard to think of myself as a “good” doctor.

**That was not meant to be a joke, and I was tempted to change the word, since I am not able to take the murder of John Lennon lightly.  But I figured, this is in the spirit of his music, so I’ll let it be***.

***That was a deliberate joke, because of course, Let It Be was Paul’s song, inspired by a reassuring dream of his dead mother.

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Missing AC units and one man’s lack of mental health

Well, it’s Tuesday morning, and that’s better than it still being Monday evening, which wasn’t so fun.  I got the notice that my AC unit had been delivered yesterday afternoon, but when I got back to the house, it was nowhere to be seen, and my housemates had not seen it let alone brought it in out of the rain.

It was raining, in case I hadn’t told you.  It still is.

Anyway, I looked around the nearby houses and then I checked with Amazon, and I called FedEx, who said that their info was that it was delivered.  I went to the website with them and saw the delivery picture‒which was not of the house where I live.

I got pretty frustrated, because it was raining a fair amount, but I looked at the picture and thought it might be the neighbor’s house.  But it had not been there when I’d looked around.

I was already wet, so I went to their house and knocked on the door, so irritated by the whole process that I was willing to interact with other people.  It turned out they had brought it inside because of the rain.  They graciously (and with some difficulty, since it was both heavy and awkward) brought it out for me.

Then I had to lug this 50 pound box, with no real handles, back to the house.  I’m feeling the effects of that in my back quite a bit, and I hold FedEx responsible.

In the end, at least I got it set up and started using it last night.  I won’t say it was miraculous, but I was able to use a blanket part of the night last night for the first time in a long while.

I guess it can’t expect it to make a life-changing difference, but it’s better to be at least a little cooler than I was.  It can’t be a bad thing‒or, well, it’s always possible in principle for it to be a bad thing, but I would give that quite a low likelihood.

As for everything else, well…I’m still at a loss.  I don’t know what to do, and I feel no why to do anything.  I guess it’s appropriate that June is (among other things) Men’s Mental Health Awareness Month, though it might better be called Men’s Mental Lack of Health Awareness Month.

Apparently, according to the statistics I have recently seen (this was on social media, so the precision and accuracy must be considered at least potentially lacking) men die from suicide three times as often as women.  And, of course, people with autism spectrum disorder die from suicide a similar multiple compared with those who do not have it (and the proportion may be as high as 25 times that in non-autistic people, but I’ll stick with 3 times for the moment).

So, if those variables are independent, which they probably are not completely, then I would be nine times as likely to die from suicide as a neurotypical woman.

That sounds alarming, doesn’t it?  Nine times the risk?  Like corduroy pillows, that’s the sort of thing that makes headlines.  But if you think about it, those statistics and probability ratios give you almost no information.  Before you can decide to act on that risk multiplier, you need to understand the baseline risk/rate of occurrence.

If 10% of neurotypical women die from suicide (an absurdly large and entirely imaginary percentage) then with my relative risk of 9 x the baseline, it would seem that I would have a 90% risk of suicide.  If the women’s rate were a bit higher, my risk might even seem to be more than 100%, which is a mathematical absurdity.

On the other hand, if neurotypical women committed suicide at a rate of .000001, or one in a million, then my risk would seem to be .000009, or just shy of one in a hundred thousand*.  That wouldn’t be too terrible.

This is why you should not get alarmed if you hear some statistic such as “people with red hair have a hundred times the chance to spontaneously combust as non redheads”.  You need to know what the baseline chance is to know if there’s anything worth worrying about**.

As for my personal risk of suicide, well, that’s not vanishingly small.  I have numerous risk factors, including the single biggest predictive risk factor.  As a rough estimate, I would say that, despite the fact that I’m a 55 year old white male with some pertinent family history, I think my risk of death by suicide is significantly higher than my risk of death due to heart attack; it’s probably bigger than my chance of having a heart attack, even a relatively minor one.  That’s not a fixed number, of course.  Many things can change all these relative risks.

Unfortunately, I don’t honestly expect my own risk of suicide to go down significantly, or even at all, as time goes on.  My internal life seems to be steadily growing slightly bleaker, and even blanker, every day, and none of the things that used to bring me comfort or at least engage me seem to be of any interest.  If anything, I feel my likelihood is increasing over time, though maybe it’s staying the same but each day is a new roll of the dice, so over time, the likelihood increases.

Oh, well.  What are you going to do?  I don’t have the wherewithal to change the situation myself; if I did, I wouldn’t be in this situation.  I’ve already tried a great many things.

Anyway, I hope the weather is more pleasant wherever you are, and that you have a very good day.

*The actual rates, while apparently difficult to tease out with great precision, are quite a bit more alarming than my second scenario.  In the UK, for instance, it seems that about 1% of people are autistic, but 11% of suicides are by autistic people.  The rate of suicidal ideation among people with ASD is way higher than that in the general population, starting in childhood (which I can confirm in my case), when the rates of ideation and attempt are reported as high as 25 times that of the general population.  Also, overall, the expected lifespan of autistic people has been measured at about 54 years.  Even given typical statistical variance, I’m about due.

**Since there is not a single confirmed case of spontaneous human combustion, despite what you may have heard, even a multiplier of a hundred may leave one so close to a zero probability that being hit by an asteroid might be a more realistic concern.

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Step up or STFU

Here I go again, writing another blog post.  It seems like just yesterday that I wrote a previous one‒but of course, it was two days ago, not just one.  Wow, what a spooky difference.

I’m getting ready to be at work, or rather, am in the process of being on my way to work as I begin to write this.  I’m not actually currently moving relative to the surface of the Earth, but that happens a lot during commutes, especially when you don’t have your own vehicle anymore.

I don’t really have “my own” much of anything anymore.  I mean, I have a small amount of stuff, as George Carlin might say, though I’m quite sure I have waaaaaay less stuff than he had when he performed that particular routine.  Not that that’s bad; he certainly earned his stuff.  I mean, he’s still making loads of people laugh and think even after he’s been dead for a while.  I don’t know how long that will go on‒contrary to delusional claims by people who like a cool-sounding expression, online is not forever‒but he will, I suspect, be remembered fondly far longer than most.

The average day, on the other hand, feels like it is forever.  I don’t think I really look forward (in the positive sense) to anything nowadays.  There are two movies in theaters right now that I ought to want to go see, but if you presented me with free tickets, free concessions, and a ride to and from a theater of my choice, I think I’d say, “Thanks, but I’m not interested.”  And that would be true.

Likewise, though I watched the first episode of the latest series of Doctor Who a few weeks ago, two more have come out since then, and I have no desire to watch them, or anything else.  There are no books to which I look forward.  I’ve had to force myself to read at all, and even that’s probably a mistake*.  I occasionally look at my guitars and at the keyboard and they almost feel alien to me.  Like, what is that even used for?  I can’t really even imagine picking one up and playing it (or sitting down and playing, in the case of the keyboard).

I can’t really imagine writing any fiction.  The only thing(s) I anticipate at all anymore is something to eat, and that’s just so, so pathetic.  Thankfully, even my favorite snacks are starting to feel and taste and smell very dull lately.  I don’t know if perhaps I had my sense of smell altered back when I got Covid, or if this is born of the fact that all pleasures have backfired on me at least one time or another, and more so than ever, lately.

I really think I’m just about done.  I should’ve been done already.  I should’ve been done a long time ago.  But we’re always told to hold on, to stay alive, that we’re wanted and needed here on this stupid planet.  It’s a bit of a similar situation to what happens with “pro-life” people:  They don’t want there to be abortions, they want all those potential people born, but they aren’t helping to take care of them, and they don’t even want there to be public services available for them or for education or what have you.

So it is with the people who don’t want other people to commit suicide.  They don’t want you to kill yourself, but they’re not offering to help you be alive, not in any meaningful sense of helping.  And so, of course, when people do reach the end of their rope (sorry, no pun intended, but the expression is doubly appropriate so I’m leaving it) they have to choose the analogue of “back alley abortions”, killing themselves (or trying to do so) in messy, unreliable, disruptive ways that often don’t succeed but can lead to permanent damage and social opprobrium.

In some civilized countries, it’s possible for people to go to places like Dignitas and get physician-supervised ways to end their lives with minimal pain and with some peace.  Of course, even in such places, the service seems to be available mainly for people with terminal cancer and similar incurable illnesses.  But depression is often a terminal illness, and it is certainly incurable as far as I can see.  And, of course, ASD is not a disease, it’s a neurodevelopmental difference, so there’s no curing that, short of a brain transplant (which would really be a body transplant for the donor brain).

But if no one is going to give serious help to a person who has severe difficulty even wanting to live, and who has no capacity to lift himself out of the whirlpool of self-loathing and chronic pain, then why is there all the verbiage about how “depression is a liar” and other bullshit like that.  As if optimism weren’t a liar.  As if all the ideals and isms and dogmae and “good” things weren’t lies or liars or both.

So, fuck that noise.  Don’t tell a woman not to have an abortion if you’re not going to care for her and the child, and don’t cajole and guilt-trip a suicidal person about not killing themselves if you’re not gonna come in and help them in some real, tangible, serious way, God damn it.  A person on the verge of suicide is already admitting that they don’t think they can survive under their own steam.  They can’t swim anywhere, but you want them to keep treading water, or at least floating‒indefinitely‒just so you don’t have to be aware of the fact that they drowned while you were out boating.

All right, that’s enough for now.  I hope you all have a good day.  Autism Awareness Month ends this week and Mental Health Awareness Month begins.  Fat lot of good they’ve done or do.

*Interesting aside:  I accidentally typed “provably” when I tried to write “probably” right there.  The words are, so I understand, etymologically** related‒probe, prove, proof, probable, etc.

**Etymology and entomology are however (apart from the “ology” bit) unrelated.

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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.

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O Caesar! These blogs are beyond all use…

Hello, and yes, good morning.  It’s the 1st Thursday of December in 2024, and so it is time for another edition of my weekly blog post.

I’m writing this on my miniature laptop* on the way in to the office, because I figured it would be a shame to let the device go to waste.  I haven’t used it at all since the last blog post I wrote on it, which would have been…looks like it was November 20, 2024.

Other than the little post I wrote on Monday—which I wrote on my smartphone—I haven’t written anything this week.  I haven’t played any music this week, by which I mean neither have I played it on a device for me to hear, nor have I played the guitar or the keyboard, though I guess I’ve tapped drumbeats on walls and desktops and door jambs and the like from time to time.

I am reading a Japanese light novel series, one that I’ve chosen because the characters are at least reasonably likeable, the story is more or less upbeat and decently written and translated, and there are enough volumes out to keep me busy for a week or two.

I haven’t read any science or math or philosophy in quite a while.  I certainly haven’t written on any books of my own.  I haven’t even watched any science-related videos, to be honest.  The only math I’ve done was when I saw a Facebook post of a sign in Taiwan or China that had an infinite series in sigma form written on it.  I thought I recognized the series, but I wasn’t at all sure, so I worked out the first seven or so terms and summed them up, and it became clear that this was the series that summed to Pi.  It was indicating, apparently, that there were 3.14 kilometers left in what I think was a marathon route.

You wouldn’t see a sign like that in the USA.  Though we have some truly brilliant people in mathematics and science and whatnot, they are a rarefied bunch, and the vast majority of the population is borderline mathematically illiterate, and some of them are stupid enough to be proud of that fact.

I did have one slightly interesting occurrence yesterday—from my point of view.  I was scrolling through “reels” on Facebook and saw one with a woman sitting in a room and giving a sort of strained, tiny smile, and the caption read something like, “I guess the fact that it’s holiday decorations that are hanging now, and not yourself, makes it a successful year.”  That’s not quite right; it was better written, but that was the gist.

I recall thinking, not entirely seriously, “That’s easy for you to say.  I don’t consider it a good result that I’m not the one hanging.  I even have two ropes already prepared for that possibility, but I don’t have any decorations or ornaments, and I have no one with whom to share the holiday season or anything anyway.”

I intended to write that (more or less) as a comment, which required going to the original post on Instagram; I was going to try to be at least a bit jokey about it, so as not to make the poster think was angry at her.  But when I got to the post, I saw that there were people who were complaining about it, saying that jokes about suicide were in bad taste or something, that they had lost relatives or friends or whatever to suicide, and such posts made them feel sad or something.  They had a long string of comments.

A few people wrote in response that such “jokes” or posts, even if seemingly morbid, were often a good way for people to deal with the emotions that overwhelm them, and knowing that other people feel that way and can speak about it was helpful.

But the Puritans were all too stuck in scolding mode.

I wanted to write more, but ended up just saying, “Surely no one has been forced to read this posting.”  The original poster, apparently, replied to my comment, saying that I was wrong, that she was sorry to have been insensitive to people, and wanted to try to be more careful in the future.  I had to bite my figurative tongue to keep from replying, “I was wrong?  You mean people were forced to read the post?”

And then I wanted to add something along the following lines:

“As someone who thinks about suicide daily, ever more so over time, and who feels the urge particularly strongly at this time of year, what with the waning sunlight and the holiday environment, it can be kind of nice to know that other people are thinking similarly, and are even able to be somewhat lighthearted about it–even going so far as to give a slight joke, to try to be positive.  I think all the people who are scolding and berating should be turning their scorn on themselves, if anything.  Maybe if they’d spent less time being so eager to shut other people down when talking about uncomfortable things, they might have encouraged a situation in which their own loved ones might have felt able to talk about their depression and despair.  Maybe these commenters are feeling defensive about the fact that, for all that they’re willing to berate strangers for talking about suicide (in a comparatively light hearted way) what they really need to do is berate themselves for not having done anything of significance to try to help their relatives or friends or acquaintances who were in such pain that they ended their lives.  Maybe if they tried to encourage a climate in which people felt able to talk about the despair that so many people experience—especially people who are “different”, who are, for instance, “neurodivergent” or who just feel weird and alien compared to everyone else on this waste of a planet—then fewer people would feel utterly alone and at a loss and with no apparent answer to their pain and loneliness other than destroying themselves.”

Of course, I didn’t leave that comment.  But it is terribly irritating that people go out of their way to comment negatively about someone who is trying to put out at least a slightly uplifting or relieving thought, but I doubt they went to any trouble at all to support their “loved ones” who were suffering.  Fuck all of them, I say, and in all the most inappropriate and uncomfortable orifices.  They’re making the world worse, not better, with their “Waah, look at how this all affects me, everyone, I don’t like to be reminded about sad things, because I did nothing to prevent or ameliorate the sadness, so now I want to make sure no one else admits that it exists”.

Well, the maker of that reel apologized, but I don’t think she should have, and I am certainly not doing so, though I restrained myself from hurling my ire at those people in the comments section, and only left my original one.  But if I could, I would like to give those people a brief taste of the despair and solitude and emptiness and pain that a person feels when they are severely depressed and suicidal but don’t have anyone they can really talk to about it, no support, since our society still doesn’t deal with mental health issues almost at all.

Even if I could do that, it probably wouldn’t help.  Once that temporary pain went away, those people would almost certainly go back to the way they were before.

That’s enough for now.  I’ve written too much, and the editing process is daunting.  I think I’m only going to give it two go-throughs before posting, instead of three.

I hope most of you—well, all of you—feel better than I do.  If I were convincingly told (by some being who could guarantee it) that by my death I could eliminate depression and despair in the world in everyone else, or even that I could just foster an environment in which people could be open about it and help could be provided at least to the same degree we provide it for heart disease and cancer and infectious disease, then that would be a pretty east decision.

But, of course, reality doesn’t work that way, and there’s no reason to think it ever will.  That still doesn’t mean that there aren’t other, legitimate, valid reasons for a person like me to feel that he and everyone else would be better off—or at least no worse off—if I were dead already.

“Oh well, whatever.  Never mind.”

TTFN

*The miniature laptop is a computer.  The top of my own literal lap, though slightly reduced due to my paunch, in certainly not miniature.

**In English, of course—I’m not partaking of my old ambition to practice reading Japanese until I got truly good at it.  What’s the point?  They would never allow me in the country, anyway, thanks to my “criminal” record***.

***That’s actually kind of funny…what if nations didn’t allow President-elect Trump into their countries because of his felony record?  Of course, that’s not going to happen, it would be a diplomatic disaster.   Once again, the Donald shows that he can successfully be separated from the enforcement of the law, thus sending what ought to be a message to the American people:  Why should you bother obeying any inconvenient laws?  The President doesn’t!  Screw paying taxes or following through on contracts!  It’s every person for itself, in the most short-sighted, opportunistic, petty ways possible.

****Who would ever choose such a thing?  Its very nature is learned helplessness, self-hatred, emotional and physical pain that doesn’t seem to let up, that feels eternal when it’s happening.  It is a metaphorical and sometimes nearly literal version of Hell.

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On the eighth day of Hanukkah…nothing much happened

It’s Friday morning, December 15th, and I’m waiting at the train station for the second train of the day, again.  It’s really quite windy this morning, even more so than it has been the past few days, but it’s not as rainy.  There’s just a slight bit of drizzle around, and some of even that is probably just the wind blowing former rain off the trees.

I’m not sure what I should write about today that won’t just be rehashing all the other crap I’ve been writing nearly every day.  It doesn’t seem to do me any good as therapy, and it certainly doesn’t seem to do you people any good as readers.

It also hasn’t really seemed to garner me any real help, other than perhaps being at some level the trigger for my ex-wife to ask me to sign up for health insurance.  That was, of course, a nice impulse on her part, although it’s very stressful for me, and I haven’t yet done it, though I’m supposed to try to get it done by today.  I keep hoping there will be a car accident or some health catastrophe that will take it all out of my hands before I have to go through with it, because I find the prospect ridiculously stressful.

I don’t trust “the government” if they’re involved in the process, but I also don’t trust private industry.  You may say that I have only myself to blame for my issues, then, to which I would reply…well, blame isn’t a very useful concept most of the time, but it’s definitely because of my own psychopathology that I am in my situation.  The only person who’s ever been able really to beat me is me, but that guy really is quite dedicated to the task.  I’m probably not too unusual in this.  I suspect it’s the case for a great many people.

My sister has also offered to help with getting the insurance together.  I’m not sure what she might be able to do from where she is.  She may know, but I’m not sure.  I’m hoping to go through a person who got a good deal on insurance for a work friend, and presumably that can be done over the phone.  I hate talking on the phone most of the time, partly because I have difficulty hearing, but also just because I am quite awkward, socially.  Still, I hope I can do it.

I really need some help, and with a lot of things.  It’s sad and painful to say it, but there are many aspects of life in human civilization that I find very uncomfortable and alien and anathema to me.  And though I have work friends, I have no real other friends of any kind, and as I’ve said, my family is scattered hundreds to thousands of miles away.  I don’t do online relationships very well, other than my ongoing relationship with the likes of Amazon.  Ha ha.

Incidentally, I have the weekend “off”, so I won’t be writing my blog either tomorrow or the next day.  The Sunday thing is nothing new; I almost never write a blog on Sunday, and when I was writing fiction, I never wrote fiction on Sunday.  I had to give myself some mental break, and it made sense to do it on the day when I never did have to work.

Today is the last day of Hanukkah, of course.  I’ve been neglecting lighting the candles at work, though I have a nice little menorah there.  After the first two days, it just felt sad.  Actually, it felt sad the first few days, too, since it’s the sort of thing one does with one’s family, especially with one’s kids.

It’s a weird thing to think of wanting to have medical care for myself.  Having been on the delivering end of much life-prolonging care, I know only too well how much we tend to strain to stretch out the latter portion of our days, even when all it really does is compound misery, or at least make it last longer.

Pediatric medicine makes more sense—we should prevent kids from suffering and/or dying young and from falling victim to illnesses that might harm their later life and joy.  But why do wasted, washed-up, older people like me*, who are alone and sad and depressed even want to stay alive, other than due to persistent but pointless biological drives?

I’m not saying that I’m drain on the world or anything; I earn a living and pay my rent and electricity and water and cable and food and everything.  But I have a chronic illness from which I’ve been suffering most of my life**, and though there are treatments for it, there is no known cure.  It has a fatality rate—just counting suicides, not addressing the manifold ways in which it wears away at general health—that is worse than many cancers.  And I possess several of the attributes that are associated with increased risk of suicide, including age, solitude, probable “neurodivergence”, chronic pain, all that good stuff.

Why is there no physician-assisted suicide available anywhere for chronic depression?  It’s certainly as miserable as just about any disease can be—it turns one into the spiteful Satan of one’s own personal Hell.  Of course, the real trouble with a physician-assisted suicide for depression is that, by definition (if you will) the person involved is suffering from mental illness that affects that person’s judgment about the process, so legitimate consent is troublesome.  I guess I can’t blame “the powers that be” for wanting to keep their fingers out of that particular pie.

Perhaps that’s evidence that they’re not entirely unethical.  Mostly, they’re just largely nonethical.

My train is going to be arriving in a few moments, so I’ll wrap up for the day, feeling no closer to any improvement in my situation than I was at the beginning of the week.  I am giving up on the dietary changes I recently began; my GI tract has gotten no better with it over several days, and it’s just not worth the suffering to try to sustain it.  I’ll try to go back to a more workable healthy solution.

What I really want is to be able to rest and to feel rested.  Obviously I didn’t do that last night, or the night before, or pretty much all the way back to the mid-nineties.  And then, there was only one night I can remember on which I slept and awoke refreshed.

It stands out because it was such a departure from the norm.

Oh, well.  Life is hard.  It’s also a cereal and a game and a magazine.  Time is just a magazine, as far as I know.  And Scientific American has become an ironic, contradictory insult to its former self.

Have a good day and a nice weekend, please.

Happy-Hanukkah-

*Yes, I’m “only” 54, but I have felt much older for quite a long time.  My subjective age has been increasing on an exponential growth curve for years.  Sadly, my wisdom does not appear to have been growing similarly, and it may actually be diminishing.

**Dysthymia/depression, in case that isn’t clear.