work

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Work, pain, fear, compassion…let’s call the whole week off

Well, it’s Friday, and this will be the last blog post of this week, exclusis improvisis.  By which I mean, I am not scheduled to work tomorrow, and I will not work tomorrow.  I suspect even if I were threatened with rather severe consequences‒which is extraordinarily unlikely to happen‒I would not work.

After all, I have lost most of what mattered to me already, and though some things (people), important things, have indeed come back, and are cherished, I know that I can either survive whatever might be used to threaten me, or that I am not too frightened of death in such circumstances.

As the line from the famous movie (and book) Damage goes, “Damaged people are dangerous; they know they can survive.”

Of course, that does depend on the type of damage and the nature of the person in question, but still, it is a valid point.  Indeed, as all of you who read this regularly may know, my biggest question is not “How can I survive?” or “Can I survive?” but rather, “Should I survive, and why?”  I’ll avoid getting into the whole Myth of Sisyphus discussion, since I think I’ve done it nearly to death, but I suspect you get the point.

I don’t mean to imply by the above that I think I am immune to threat and pain and torture and so on.  That would be quite unrealistic.  If nothing else, my experience with a kidney stone made clear the fact that, despite chronic pain for roughly a quarter of a century, it is entirely possible to visit upon me further pain so severe that I literally can think of nothing else but trying to get help and to stop it.

Actually, despite those 25ish years, it’s not as though my chronic pain isn’t gripping and debilitating in and of itself.  There are many days in which a lot of my time in the office is spent trying to do my work while writhing and contorting, trying to stretch, banging on my thighs with my fists to try to loosen their tension, sometimes even deliberately hurting myself (sometimes in ways that would frighten other people, I suspect, and that can involve very sharp things and/or very hot things) to distract from the other pain.

I’ve said it before, and I’ve encountered no convincing counterargument so far, but pain is not evolved for one to be able simply to ignore it.  And while I am admittedly rather weird and atypical, and often have felt that I was not the same species as the people around me, I am by no means a different enough organism not to share such a fundamental characteristic.  Pain‒at least, the capacity for it‒is a necessity for long-term survival.  And fear, as the 12th Doctor pointed out, is a superpower.

Of course, we must be careful to distinguish true and useful fear from pathological fear states.  As Gavin deBecker points out in The Gift of Fear, if your fear is of something real, you will be able to discern its cause eventually, and it will be fairly focused and reasonably specific:  a particular person makes you feel uncomfortable, something about a particular car or driver seems erratic or reckless, that sort of thing.  Whereas just general anxiety is often vague and nonspecific.

I know of people who felt afraid to take a bath after they saw Jaws!  Now that doesn’t make much sense.  If your bathtub is big enough and deep enough to have a great white shark in it, then you’re probably ultra-wealthy and the shark is your pet.  Probably you keep it well-fed on captured British Secret Service agents, so it is unlikely to bother you.

Anyway, what was I talking about?  Oh, yeah, not working and being unsusceptible to most ordinary threats.

Certainly, it would be rather ridiculous for someone to say they would ruin my future prospects, that they would put a black mark on my resume or some such.  How hilarious.  A major point on my current CV would be “Three years, Florida State Prison, West Unit, working as an inmate in the Education Department”.  I’m already not competitive for many positions I would have the skill to fill, just as I would no longer be allowed into many nations I would like to visit.

I am, actually, far more susceptible to cajolery and appeals to kindness, or rather “niceness”, than to threats.  I guess it’s because I want to try to be a good person, a kind person, a compassionate person*, despite my tendency toward darkness of various kinds.

It’s an area of insecurity and conflict on my part, because there’s always part of me saying, “You don’t know the power of the Dark Side.”  And I am not always sure, especially when my pain and my depression and my sense of otherness are at their peaks, that it would not be preferable.

But when I am clearest and calmest, I recognize that compassion and at least attempted kindness are better.  They not only may help other people, but they tend to be better for one’s own sense of well-being.  It’s an almost archetypal win-win scenario.

I guess that’s probably a good and somewhat positive place to end this post and this blog week.  I hope you all have a nice day and a good weekend and a good beginning of next week.  I will probably be back on Monday‒again, exclusis improvisis**.

*These are not three different people.  I’m not trying to be like Eddie Murphy in The Nutty Professor.

**Yes, I am trying to apply that expression frequently to see if I can get it into (relatively) common use.  So, please, do feel free to use it when it’s appropriate, and tell people what it means.  And, what they heck, tell ‘em where you first encountered it.

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A brief and weary Monday blog post

Welcome to Monday‒if that makes any sense to say.  I’m writing this on my smartphone and I am at the train station as I begin it, because I decided to walk to the train this morning.  I figure, if I’m going to be in pain anyway, I might as well get something out of it.  And, of course, it’s slightly more pleasant to walk 5 miles in the morning than in the evening at this time of year.

Mind you, I’m still so sweaty that my shirt looks as if I had just fallen into a swimming pool.  My pants are less soaked but still noticeably wet.  Nevertheless, I’m not too worried.  I have sprayed myself with “Scent Bomb” spray, so mostly I smell like artificial mango odor, which is not half bad.

I will make this short today.  I’m really in a very poor mood in general.  I had to get called into the office on Saturday*, which is terribly annoying, because I was truly looking forward to being able to relax after my week of exceptional pain.  I was even thinking of ordering a steak from Outback.  I did not do that or anything else that was fun on Saturday, and of course, Sunday was mainly just laundry day‒though I did have a nice phone conversation with my sister on Sunday evening.  Most of it consisted of me talking about esoteric things in which I’m interested, while she listened politely.  I used to be better about giving other people the floor, so to speak.  Now I’m just a nearly insufferable droner on about my interests.

I’m so tired of everything, and I’m tired of myself most of all.  I just can’t seem to like myself.

Can you blame me?

Anyway, I don’t really have anything interesting to discuss, not even an answer to the question “What is the deal with that round flat thing they throw in the Olympics?”

I guess the days are getting noticeably shorter, in the sense that sunrise is noticeably later than it was a month ago.  But that should come as no surprise.  We’re more than a month after the solstice, after all.  It’s not getting any cooler or breezier or less humid around here, however.  In fact, the fifteen day forecast, when last I checked it, basically showed the same predicted highs and lows and precipitation chances marching forward like a line of disciplined but unimaginative soldiers.  It’s so dreary.

Oh, well.  Whataya gonna do?  I don’t have any new ideas, but I’m still keeping the old one‒basically, just leaving, leaving everything and everyone and never being seen again.  I’m so tired.

Speaking of being tired, this is all I’m going to write today.  I hope, at least, that it hasn’t been boring.

*I had worried on Friday that I might be asked to do so, but by the end of the day I had been assured that it would not be necessary.  Then, at 9:38 on Saturday morning, just an hour and 22 minutes before the office was due to open, I was texted to ask if I could please go in, because my coworker simply could not, because most of his family was ill.  Being the idiot I am, I not only went in, but took an Uber in since there was no way, especially on Saturday, for me to get to the office before about noon otherwise.  I was not reimbursed for it, at least so far.

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When birds do sing, hey ding a ding, ding; Sweet bloggers love the spring.

It's spring!

Hello everyone, and welcome to another Thursday.  I hope you’re all doing and feeling well, and also that you’re doing and feeling good.  Here in the northern hemisphere, it’s now Spring!  For those most powerfully affected by the relative duration of the daylight (such as sufferers from seasonal affective disorder), there is ample reason for celebration of these next six months.

As you may have noticed, I’ve been moving steadily ahead with my audio blog on “Iterations of Zero”.  I just finished recording and editing another entry, which I’ll post later today, and which I’ll probably turn into a “video” and put on my YouTube channel by tomorrow at the latest.

I’m enjoying this process, which shouldn’t really surprise me…but it kinda does.  Obviously, I hope that people will listen to these posts and will occasionally find them thought-provoking, and that they’ll perhaps even respond.  But I think even if no one were ever to respond or react, it would still be good for me to get these posts out.  I don’t know if it’s just an odd form of talk therapy, or if it’s something else entirely.  But I do think that speaking one’s thoughts aloud tends to crystallize and clarify them, which is unquestionably beneficial.  Writing does this as well, and in an even more precise and orderly fashion, but that very precision and order makes it at times a greater burden and a more daunting task.  Thus, for the time being at least, I shall continue my experiment in audio blogs.

Of course, I will also continue to write my fiction, which is my oldest and greatest love (not counting love for specific people).

Speaking of fiction—as I was—my novella is coming along well.  Earlier this week I did have to take a day off from everything after I ate what I think was a bad egg roll and found my system rebelling.  It made its displeasure known by sabotaging certain essential services, including fuel intake and waste management.  After much negotiation, though, I think we’re finally approaching a settlement, and my writing has already resumed after only one day of full disruption.

On the editing front, I’m speeding up a bit.  That’s good, because editing Unanimity is no small task.  I haven’t yet done any tidying up of Free-Range Meat (yes, that’s the title of my latest short story), because I wanted to make some good headway on Unanimity first.  Still, before long I will rewrite/edit my short story, and it will soon be published.

The novella will take longer, of course, since I need to finish writing it and then edit it before it can be published.  I may also change its title before I’m done.  The working title, Safety Valve, is fine as far as it goes, but the aspect of the story to which it refers is becoming less prominent as the world of the story takes on greater depth and scope.  There’s much more to it than I expected when I started the story.  It may well tie in with other persons, places, and events in the universe(s) of my fiction, including a planned future work called Changeling in a Shadow World…which in turn will have at least a distant connection to The Chasm and the Collision, and farther back will link to my first completed novel, Ends of the Maelstrom…now lost, alas, to the whips and scorns of time.

Perhaps I’ll find it in my head again someday.

Come to think of it, this novella even bears a distant connection to my horror novel Vagabond, which is also (partially) lost, but which would be easier to reclaim.  We’ll have to see what happens with that.

Bottom line:  there’s so much to do and so little time.  It would all be quicker and easier if I were able truly to write full-time, but I need to make a living and cannot yet do so with my writing alone.

(Hint, hint)

In the meantime, I shall nevertheless continue to write, because it’s the only real reason I bother to make a living in the first place.  I do hope that you enjoy reading my work even a fraction as much as I enjoy writing it.  If so, I shall have done at least some good in the world.

TTFN