Hello and good morning.

As anyone who has read my recent posts will know, I have not been doing well, depression-wise*.  Yesterday afternoon, after sharing a “memory” on Facebook (a picture of my son from one of the last times I was with him) and explaining in the comments that the reason I hadn’t seen him was that he didn’t want to see me, I felt particularly low, and had to fight to keep from crying openly in the office.  Thankfully, it was a slow afternoon (as opposed to a very stressful morning, in which I was working on payroll among other things), or I wouldn’t have been involved with Facebook, anyway.

I was so low that I started Googling (on my phone) the lethal doses of everything from CBD gummies** to aspirin to Benadryl to a combination of fentanyl and Valium.

That latter combo, of course, is the only reliably life-threatening thing among the many that I searched, but honestly, I knew all that already.  I am a trained medical doctor, after all, and I have a long-standing interest in ways to make one’s quietus‒including, but not limited to, a bare bodkin.  I was mostly reviewing things like the mg/kg dosage needed to be more or less certain one would die.

The biggest downside of the opiate/benzodiazepine combination is that they are controlled substances.  Just try to get a prescription for the two of them without a terminal cancer diagnosis or something similar.  Go ahead, try.  If you succeed, please get in touch with me.

Of course, there are illicit sources of both classes of medicine, and I even know some people who might know where to get them.  But such people, and such illicit medicines, are supremely untrustworthy, so that’s not great.  I probably wouldn’t accept anything that wasn’t a name-brand pill, like the Valium tablets that at least used to have a big V stamped in them.

I suppose one could try to con one’s way into getting a veterinary cocktail such as might be used to euthanize a large dog or something similar.  I can do injections, obviously, even to myself.  But I am not good at conning people, and I certainly wouldn’t want to deceive a kindhearted veterinarian.  That seems very uncool.

Alas, most OTC medicines are unreliable for many reasons, including limited absorption, nausea/vomiting, and other rather unpleasant symptoms that would precede death by quite some time, and might be awful enough to cause even the most committed would-be suicide to seek relief.  It’s very hard to fight deep-seated biological survival drives, believe me.

Oh well, there are always many options, I guess, and I have the necessaries for many of them.  I even used to have some helium tanks and a nonrebreather mask, but I gave the helium to people making balloons for parties‒they didn’t have the right kind of connectors for the regulator and mask I have, and I wasn’t confident of my ability to jury-rig something.

I don’t want any of you to think I simply wallow in depression, and my chronic pain, and my horrible sleep issues, and possible neurodevelopmental difficulties.  I am constantly attempting new exercises, new habits, autosuggestion, self-hypnosis, meditation, dietary adjustments, postures, medicines, and so forth to try to help my problems.  I don’t ever stop doing all that, which is exhausting in and of itself.

It’s likewise exhausting to keep trying to act as normal as I possibly can, because I don’t like to cause other people more trouble than I absolutely must.  Also, it’s just my lifelong habit to try to act upbeat or to try to be funny, at least during direct interaction.  But it’s very tiring, and over the years, my grumpy side has definitely gained more ascendance, particularly at work.

Not that I’m an asshole at work, at least not any more than I’m just an asshole in general.  But the noise in the office and people making really unreasonable, sloppy mistakes, stress me out quite a bit, and the frustration bleeds through more than it used to.

Sometimes that happens literally.

Anyway, more and more I’ve been just working and struggling merely to survive.  I haven’t been working anymore on Outlaw’s Mind since the last time I mentioned it here; I haven’t even been taking my little laptop back and forth with me, though I type much more quickly on it than I can on my phone.  The closest thing to any creativity I’ve done recently is as follows:

On Tuesday morning, something I read (I don’t recall what) made me think of infrasound and low-pitched noises that are reputed*** to be able to instill a sense of fear or dread in people.  There was some indication that a 7 Hertz noise would be troubling in some way‒I don’t recall how‒but one needs a serious sub-woofer to be able to generate such a pitch at all, let alone with useful volume.

However, the low range of the human audible threshold starts around 40 Hertz, so I thought I would do something at least mildly interesting.  I pulled up Audacity and generated two tones:  one at 47 Hertz and one at, I think, 73 Hertz, and merged them.  I chose those frequencies because, since they are both prime numbers, their waveforms would not tend to overlap very much, and so their constructive/destructive interference would tend to be relatively chaotic, producing a pleasing (so to speak) deep and unsteady rumble.

Then, I recorded myself doing an impromptu recitation of Hamlet’s soliloquy****, which (of course) I know from memory.  I first lowered the pitch of that recording a bit, but not using the optional maximum quality pitch change (I didn’t want it to sound normal) after filtering out background noise and even breath sounds*****.

Then, I copied that track and shifted its pitch a step and a half, then copied that and did the same again.  This produced three simultaneous recordings of the same thing, but with pitches at intervals that make it into a constant diminished chord (that’s where the third and fifth tones of a major triad are each reduced by a half step, making an eerie, haunting, somewhat dissonant chord).

Then I combined those three vocal tracks into one, put a bit of reverb on it, lowered the pitch again until it was at least close to that of my background tones, and combined them all after trying to adjust the balance to make sure that the vocal stuff was not quite clearly present against the background sound.

I then turned it into an MP3 file and put it on loop on the big TV we use as our room sales board, starting it once people came in, and only very slowly increasing the volume from too low to hear to just audible.

One coworker noticed it, and she kept trying to figure out what it was saying, or if anything was being said at all.  I explained what I had done, to her and to my “main” coworker, who also sort of heard the noise and looked puzzled.  They both thought it was odd but funny, but it was apparently also mildly irritating (almost the point of it, really), so once they said that, I stopped the playback.

I’ll embed the audio file here, below, in case you want to listen.  Feel free to use it to annoy or unnerve other people, if you wish.

And that’s it, that’s all I have for now, from the most creative to the most wishfully self-destructive (not in that order).  I hope each and every one of you is feeling better than I feel.  On any given day, at any given time, I think my odds of that being the case are good.  If I were able to bet even money on it even once an hour, I think I’d pretty quickly have an excellent return on investment.  Though, that might improve my mood and so alter the expected payoff rate of my investment…damn those economic feedback loops.

TTFN

*Though my depression, if considered as an entity with a “life” of its own, is thriving, thank you very much.

**There more or less is no practical lethal dose, it seems.  The sugar in a gummy would probably kill you before the CBD would.

***Almost certainly untruthfully.

****The most famous one, “To be or not to be…”

*****Removing these throughout a recording has a curious way of deadening it, and it’s rather unpleasant if you’re trying to produce something that sounds good, so was ideal for my pseudo-purposes.