Not Enough Time, Not Enough Self-Discipline

 So much music and art. so many books and films. So many nice and fascinating and talented people. I am getting the feeling I will run out of time sooner than later, that I have used my time unwisely. Thank you all, and I am profoundly sorry. I feel like a very selfish Burgess Meredith at the end of "Time Enough At Last" (The Twilight Zone).

Inconvenient Articles of Faith

We live in a time of great division, where the simplest of personal truths must be explained and justified.  This is particularly true regarding matters of faith.  Traditional faiths are out of fashion, and thus must be justified, explained, excused and forgiven, to avoid condemnation, and many dominant belief systems are not even recognized as belief systems at this point in time.

I recognize my adherence to specific traditional articles of faith to be completely without objective merit, if such a thing exists. Further, I recognize that my adherence to specific traditional articles of faith to be, and please take careful note of this, involuntary.  I consider my psyche to have been so deeply programmed at a very early age with very specific notions of faith that I could not remove these beliefs from my being with any effort I can imagine.  They are often inconvenient, frequently painful, and not something about which I like to speak or write.

Yet, for reasons mysterious to me, after all of my careful preamble, I feel compelled to share the following email exchange between myself and my Mother:

Mother:

Love you and think of you all the time.  I struggle with all this covid stuff...and find it helpful, even essential to read the 91st Psalm daily and to meditate on other scriptures.  I am doing well.

Me:

I hope you are well, but know that with age, my age and yours, comes many forms of unwell.  I just read the 91st Psalm and am unsure of its relevance to me or now.  Everything from the Old Testament, I believe, needs to be viewed through the lens of the New Testament, but I am not familiar enough with either to promote any specific opinions.  I have been thinking about this a lot, given all that is happening, and all of the history I have been reading lately.  I do not want to believe in a God who has a hand in this world, as that would truly be a cruel God, so those who have fortunate experiences and attribute all the good to God, should necessarily accept that all of the bad that surrounds us, and has for millennia, is also the hand of God either acting, or choosing not to act.  I do not wish to pass into, or now live within, an eternity ruled by such a cruel God.  I choose to believe that we are living in a time when we are on our own, that God has given us the opportunity to prove our worth through our actions and inaction.  I want to believe in a God who looks on this world and weeps.  But is leaving us, for any time, to our own devices, the act of a benevolent God?   I can't claim the wisdom to answer that, but the question remains.  When my own logic leads me into these dark corners of doubt, I remind myself of my smallness, my ignorance, the brevity of my existence on Earth.  I seek humility before God.  I don't always dwell in that place, but I know, with certainty, in the end, it is all I will have left.

Learning

This, for me, is a new kind of depression.  A wasting away of motivation.  Feeling anything, even sadness, is slipping away.  I can no longer differentiate between real physical pain and psychic pain, but simple pain is all I have left.

The Irony of Easter

As far as I know, I have never used this blog to make any substantive comments or implications regarding members of my family.  That changes today, and I may never know if it was a good idea or not.

If the date associated with this is not adequate context, the world is in the midst of a global pandemic of a virus called Covid-19.  Or, at least that is what I believe. There are many different viewpoints on this subject.  My only son, the father of my only grandchild, as far as I can tell, considers this to be far from a serious health crisis.  He has at least one regular outside visitor to his house with no discernible attempt to avoid disease transmission between his visitor and the rest of the household.  I consider it a safe presumption that this visitor has a similarly lax approach to disease transmission interventions in other aspects of their activities outside of my son's home.

My wife wants a traditional Easter ham dinner.  We have been trying for many days to arrange for either delivery or pickup of the ingredients needed to prepare such a dinner, to no avail.

I feel compelled to interject here that I realize that even now people in other regions, and probably some people in my own region, are literally starving, or nearly so, due to food access issues that are a direct result of this pandemic.

With no safer way to acquire the requisite ham, I tried going to purchase one in-person in a store today, but had too late of a start for the now-shortened business hours and access control procedures of local grocery stores.  This gave me some time to think, not that I hadn't been already.

How do I quantify my relative risk of going into a grocery store with nothing more than a makeshift face mask, vs. having Easter dinner, as invited, at my son's house?  My son has offered to shop for me, but that makes me responsible for his exposure on my behalf, the exposure of others to him on my behalf, and not much safer myself in the end.

To clarify my personal risk: I have advanced congestive heart failure which is barely managed to a survivable degree under the best of circumstances.  A simple cold put me in the hospital two years ago, and the treatment I received put me into temporary acute renal failure. The seasonal flu would almost certainly kill me.  This new virus would almost beyond any reasonable doubt, kill me.  I also have type 2 diabetes, which I think is also a risk factor, but I'm not sure how.

Ethically speaking, my primary concern isn't even regarding my own survival, but more whether I become another vector for this disease to affect others, or another patient drawing resources which could help others with a better chance of survival, and frankly more value to society after the fact than I could ever have.

So why am I even writing this?

Seriously, I can't remember.

I guess this is just my transitory trail of digital breadcrumbs which for all I know could be my last futile grumblings about life.

I have made my decision.  If my wife wants to go to my son's house for Easter dinner, I will go and attempt to refrain from any further complaint.  I will do all I can to avoid being in close proximity with anyone, especially my granddaughter, but I won't make an issue of it because I know there are too many factors out of my control.  If anyone present at this dinner has the virus, ultimately everyone will.  What saddens me most is that my son has medical conditions which make him very nearly as at risk of non-survival as I am.

I hope that youth and health will get my granddaughter through this alive.

I don't need to explain the many layers of meaning to the title of this post, do I?

Which things have I already done for the last time?

This kind of isolate suffering and dread was mine.  Now it belongs to everyone.
I feel cheated, unaccountably responsible, and terribly sorry.
There is no way to be careful enough to save myself.
I am doing all I can to not be a part of this thing hurting others, but I can't control anyone but me.
I am so sick of anecdotal happy news about how wonderful people are being while this is happening.  None of that wonderful stuff will stop this from happening.  There will be very few left when it is over, and I will not be among them, but I didn't have long to go anyway. 
I am well past "somedays".
I am well into wondering which things I have already done for the last time.

Another "Re-Purpoused" Email

This started as what was to be a short email note to my youngest daughter, but it went so far off the rails, I am pasting it here, and cutting the email down to it's original intent.

Here we go:

Reading this over, obsessively and too late to fix anything, my favorite typo is "Hope Depot".  I would definitely shop at "Hope Depot", and have an irrational urge to photo-fake a storefront and try to make some kind of meme-ish thing out of it.  Too lazy to do that, but not too lazy to spend three nights meticulously remastering an extremely obscure David Sylvian track, featuring Robert Fripp (Approaching Silence, 1994), to make it less dominated by white noise, and to make the many layers of other sounds and voices easier to hear, while introducing a minimum of noise-reduction artifacts.  The trick in such cases is to spectrally divide the audio into separate files for each carefully-selected frequency band, and to meticulously edit each file before mixing them all back together again.  I think I did a good job of it, but I don't know who would be pleased by, or even interested in, the result other than myself. This is the kind of thing I do all of the time.  I can't let anybody else's work, if it is of interest to me, stand as-is, as presented.  I always have to mess with it and make it some kind of unintended, by the originator, collaboration with me that interests no-one but me.  When the pain of sitting in this chair was too much, I couldn't do this, and it nearly killed me. Fortunately I can do this stuff again, because I am not sure how I would live if I could not.  I hope there isn't a name for this disorder, other than "obsessive-compulsive disorder' which is way too general, because I want it to be my lonely little corner of the world of madness.  It would be wonderful perhaps to live in a world where such meddling as mine is appreciated by others, but I'm fine in my lonely universe of insanity just so long as I can keep working on these pointless projects.  This has long since passed from a legitimate email into the sort of thing that can only exist as a blog post, so I may cut-and-paste it into my blog as well...

[Hey, my first ever holy shit what did I write last night self-censored blog, let your imagination fill in the blanks, or not. Really not, please.]

Damn, I need to stop drinking.  I need to give that treatment another try so I can reduce my insanity to a more manageable level.  Or not.  Bring on the Electro-Convulsive Therapy, I have nothing left to lose!

Too Real For Facebook

 Warning: the following is pretty much a remix of the immediately previous post here.  I had originally posted it to Facebook late one night, and woke up a few hours later regretting it.  So I hid it on FB, but here it is, for no good reason.  Pointless update follows.

[begin deleted FB post]
Depression, if that is what this is, is a confusing thing. I never thought that I would not feel like singing, but that is where I am now. Singing had been the best medicine for most of my life, especially when I discovered how much better it was with an audience, and even better with the support of a live band. The last time I tried I was terrible, and it was humiliating. I keep intending to try again, but I am reaching the point of accepting that I should never try again. I have tried pretty much literally every purported treatment, both conventional and unconventional, except ECT, Ketamine, Psilocybin, and LSD. I have been trying self-acceptance instead of escalating to yet another treatment, but it isn't working. I am so broken inside in so many ways, and I always have been, but now I am also old and tired, physically weak and in pain. All I want to do is to believe that I can sing again, but I can neither sing nor believe.
 [end deleted FB post]

And now the pointless update and inevitable reiterations.

Given that the choices are suffering, suicide and treatment, I choose to suffer through the remaining untried treatments, of which the above post omits one highly dubious option: MDMA.  There is a legal Ketamine treatment facility in the area, but it is very expensive and very likely not covered by insurance.  I don't know of a reliable source for correctly synthesized LSD or MDMA, and outside of clinical trials or eventual legal treatment, finding either seems hazardous and unlikely.  Besides, my experience with big-pharma anti-depressants makes me more than a little wary of synthetic psychoactive compounds.  Anybody wondering why I'm not talking about CBD or THC, I have already eliminated those from further consideration. CBD is very likely at best a placebo, and THC has no history of efficacy in treatment of depression. Similarly, narcotics are not under consideration, as they are at best distractions from, but certainly not direct treatments for my problems, and pose numerous obvious risks. 

So, there is both clinical and anecdotal evidence that Psilocybin is a possible effective treatment, often compared to LSD in both efficacy and theorized mechanism, but has the advantages of not requiring complex synthesis and being readily available.   Positive results have been reported from a single substantial dose providing sustainable improvement after the initial experience, and positive results have also been reported from periodic "micro-dosing".   I propose that I might try the first, and if later deemed worthwhile, the second method. 

If that doesn't work, I think I will skip Ketamine, all known risks and possible benefits considered, which leaves me with ECT (Electroconvulsive Therapy), if it is considered safe enough given my compromised cardiac condition.  ECT has a bad popular perception, but a surprisingly good clinical history of safety and efficacy.  Nonetheless, I hope Psilocybin will "magically" improve my condition so that I no longer have to consider either ECT or suicide.  

Suicide remains extremely unlikely, as I perceive my condition and prognosis at present.  Life will end soon enough one way or another without my assistance.  Bringing it about abruptly by my own action would selfishly impose considerable temporary distress and inconvenience on my immediate family.

I may have mentioned earlier, but just to make it clear here, after the failure of TMS (Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation, likely just a very elaborate placebo), I resolved to try simple acceptance, and to relieve myself of the debilitating cycle of hope and disappointment.  For long stretches of mere numb existence it works, but then there are days and nights when it doesn't.  My emotional landscape consists of alternating absence*, sadness, and anger.  Of these, I find anger the most intolerable, not just because it is pointless but more because it is unpleasant for those with whom I interact.  I have no right to subject anyone to my irrational, unproductive anger.  Being merely useless is bad enough.  I consider the pursuit of any available reasonable further treatment to be something of a duty, more towards others than myself.

*"absence" as I use it here is a difficult state of being to describe.  Time passes, I perform the bare minimum of daily required functions, and I am in many ways not entirely conscious.  I may putter about ineffectually on various projects, gleaning no actual progress or results, frequently leaving one effort in scattered pieces and simply taking up another new or previously abandoned effort.  Most of my time is actually spent trying to remember what I had been doing, or trying to find the fragments of unfinished work I had previously abandoned.