Black Sheep: A week in my life, on the sidelines.
"Occurring at the same time as something else"
Tuesday, August 16th:
I'm struggling with an abscess for a fortnight now and fed up of the frequency it happens to me, I have bad ones every other week but I guess that's just what happens when you have no teeth left in tact.
I often resort to ridiculous late-night, home-made attempts to make it better, which inevitably makes it worse. Tried to burst through the bottom gum with a sewing needle and ended up slicing my gums open and getting a worse infection instead, not advisable (if you were considering it).
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I saw CSO released "Accompanying Conditions of Deaths from COVID-19, March 2020 – February 2022" and the instant Twitter reaction was predictably dominated by Covid-denying, Anti-vax muppetry, as they're ironically among the few people still highly invested in Covid.
"Only 183 people died solely from Covid" they cried, as if the presence of multiple conditions on a death cert renders the Underlying Cause of Death moot.
That the most common accompanying condition in those 5,384 deaths was Pneumonia - often a consequence of Covid - didn't seem to avert any of their 1 + 1 = 3 arguments, suggesting "ah but you see 'Covid alone' hardly killed anyone".
That you can use this very same brainless logic to dismiss (probably) 60% of cancer deaths too, didn't prove a logical fallacy nor bridge too far for them. A single entry in the causal chain of death is very rare, even in the examples you might intuitively suspect constitute a single entry.
In the case of falling off a ladder, you could have a causal chain of events in Part 1 of the death cert that lists intracranial hemorrhage or cerebral infarction - both of which have ICD-10 codes and would have made any list of accompanying medical conditions for "accidents", despite being consequences of the accident.
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The key word in the CSO's analysis was "Accompanying", a word with a specific meaning, one that was immediately lost on disingenuous people, seeking to push disingenuous narratives.
It was not an analysis of 'preexisting' conditions, nor 'underlying' conditions, nor 'chronic' conditions and there was no chicken-and-the-egg differentiation, of which came first.
It was an analysis of all conditions on a Covid death certificate, including the myriad of complications and consequences, directly and indirectly caused by Covid.
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That the CSO analysis focused on 5,384 deaths, where Covid was the Underlying Cause of Death, is the first indication, to any reasonable person, that Covid killed those people.
That almost all (5,297 out of the 5,384 deaths) had an Accompanying Condition coded "J00-J99 Diseases of the Respiratory System", a broad group ICD-10 classification that includes Pneumonia and Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ARDS), immediately tells you Covid killed those people.
That 591 deaths were coded with an Accompanying Condition of "R00-R99 Symptoms, signs and abnormal clinical and laboratory findings n.e.c. (not elsewhere classified)", which includes "Abnormalilites of breathing" and "Abnormal findings on diagnostic imaging of lung" probably reinforces it.
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The diminishing of so many Covid deaths - rationalising away preventable deaths with indifference - is one of the saddest by-products of the pandemic.
It coincided with a simultaneous rise of "utterly misplaced confidence, in your own ignorance".
Covid was no joke; it killed all kinds of people, including "previously healthy" and "previously unhealthy", not that either of those distinctions mean fucking anything.
No parents sit around the ICU bed of their son thinking "listen sure no need to worry ourselves, as he was healthy last week". Last week is gone - doesn't mean a thing anymore, doesn't provide any solace nor reduce the sleepless nights ahead.
Nobody stands around a grave, at their mother's funeral, thinking "Mam dying from Covid doesn't really count, as she had high blood pressure last week". Not least because that preexisting medical condition meant little to the family to begin with.
Just something she took a few tablets for.
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The only real point I took from CSO's report is Covid killed a lot of human beings and subsequent analysis reduced their accompanying medical conditions, to numbers and statistics.
Their accompanying human conditions and what made them who they were - their sense of humour, their eyes, their smile, their laugh, their capacity for compassion, empathy, forgiveness, friendship, hope, their ability to be loved and make others feel loved - those didn't get counted by the CSO.
Those were present in 5,384 out of 5,384 Covid deaths.
Go tell their family they didn't count.
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It's about me, even on your day.
Wednesday, August 17th:
Mam's birthday today, she's 63.
I've been struggling badly lately. I haven't gone outside the house in 10 days, so didn't buy her a card, but she knew that and didn't expect one. I was outwardly positive and upbeat for the entire day, even though I'm in agony physically with these stupid abscesses, lung problems and mentally struggling with the usual negative thoughts.
I faked it and hoped that might give her a day off worrying about me, though I doubt she ever takes a day off from that.
I feel like I make everything about me - everything - at least in my own mind, even when I don't, outwardly.
I spent the day feeling sorry for myself, for the state of my health and state of my life.
It's days like today that underscore in my mind just how little I have to offer the few people still left in my life, materially and emotionally. The nearest shop that sells cards is maybe half a mile, it's a walk I used to do regularly and easily. These days I have anxiety attacks before I get 10 meters and have to hold on to the nearest wall. I could and should have pushed through and got it done but I didn't.
What hurt is she knew I wouldn't be able to and didn't expect me to, she'd rather no card than see me in a state again.
It's very easy to feel undeserving of unconditional love.
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I could even have spent today grateful she's still here, grateful to everyone in Beaumont for her successful brain aneurysm surgery, grateful she's doing ok, grateful I at least have painkillers for my teeth and antidepressants for my mind but, nope, spent it obsessing over a card.
She got lots of cards, which in some ways made me feel better and in other ways highlighted there was none from me.
I didn't allow even a faint breeze of gratitude to penetrate these walls of self-pity, spent the day fenced in by anxiety, fear, and regret, trapped by my own thoughts.
I just can't get out of my own way.
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Even 'Port of the Moon' casts a shadow.
Thursday, August 18th:
I didn't sleep very well last night, cried a little more than usual and feel like everything hurts. I'm still coughing up dark phlegm but at least there's no blood at the moment. I don't want to go back on those steroids again, if I can help it, but I also can't let my oxygen saturation drop so dangerously low again, so I have to monitor it better.
I spend so much of my time reading about Covid - illness and death - so it's good when I find something less gloomy and macabre to throw myself into. I spent my entire day today researching the history of Bordeaux's tram network, in order to try defend Dublin against a slightly unfair social media comparison I saw.
I've been to Bordeaux when I was in my 20's and used the tram dozens of times when I was there, so I knew instinctively there's lots of very pretty sections and some not-so-pretty sections, like the Luas network. Dublin will never be Bordeaux, architecturally, but it has its own charm, if you have your eyes open to it.
I went on such a deep dive through this topic, starting by downloading all of UNESCO PDF's of Bordeaux's original World Heritage application, for Port of the Moon.
I also somehow found the original plans, in French, for the tramway (dated 1995, though there was other iterations in years pre-1995) and went through the entire process of how Alstom came up with APS ground-powered sections of the inner city in the late 90's, early 00's.
My French is reasonably good, I can read newspapers and PDF's that don't have auto-translation, though I didn't even have the confidence to say 'Oui', in the times I was in France.
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I read, in total, 93 articles on Bordeaux's tramway.
Dozens of articles on the problems that come with prioritising aesthetics over functionality.
A dozen interviews with the operator of the network, Keolis.
A dozen interviews with former Mayor Alain Juppé (also former French Prime Minister) from the late 1980's, all the way to 2019.
I downloaded the annual tram reports from 2008 to 2019, which give statistics like "Breakdowns per 10,000km travelled", went through them to see if I could illustrate the reliability issues of the older-APS technology.
After 16 hours reading, taking notes and editing, I finally got sleep at 5am, feeling I knew enough about Bordeaux's tramway for one lifetime.
It kept my mind busy, off Covid, off death - and off myself.
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"Hello again, friend of a friend, I knew you when..."
Friday, August 19th:
I spent most of the afternoon internally debating whether to post my Bordeaux thread, as it would involve QT'ing someone. I probably spent an hour with my finger hovering over 'tweet' and kept talking myself into it and out of it. It's a self-inflicted paralysis; the internal monologues and anguished debates, all of them absurd obviously. Just press fucking tweet, nobody cares.
I try not to engage with anyone on Twitter, especially if I'm unsure if they'll view it as a personal criticism or respond with a pile-on. It's a bizarre way to use Twitter but I almost died from internet harassment and after experiencing that, I'm hesitant to write anything that precipitates others experiencing dark thoughts.
I decided I'd put too much effort in, to just throw it all in the bin, so I posted it.
I checked back a few hours later and it got 0 RT's, which is always disappointing when you invest so much time into something and not one person found it interesting enough to share.
But that's my own fault.
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I theoretically have 20,000 followers but not really, not anymore, in practice it's more like 100 active followers, if that. When you turn comments off for 2 years and rarely comment on other peoples tweets, you place yourself into an algorithmic Twitter non-engagement wilderness.
If you use Twitter on Desktop, you'll notice when you Comment or Like a tweet of someone you don't follow, Twitter will suggest that person on "Who to Follow". If you like a tweet about an actress doing something great, say Emilia Clarke, your "You Might Like This" will be Emilia Clarke-related for the rest of the week, even if you've no discernable interest in any of it.
The all-seeing algorithm can make you disappear if you neither comment on nor like tweets, which is how I often use the website. I asked a few of my old Twitter friends from 2018, who said my tweets don't appear in their feeds anymore and were a little surprised to discover I've been tweeting this entire time.
And the people who do see my tweets can't comment on them, so most figure it's a waste of time RT'ing any of them to begin with, so I get pushed further into this self-induced wilderness.
I don't know why I expected any RT's on my Bordeaux thread but I thought it might have got 1, with the level of detail in the information presented.
---------------------------------
I dejectedly closed Twitter and put on Scott Pilgrim vs The World.
I wouldn't say it's solely a comfort film, as I've watched it even on my few good days, but it can be nostalgia therapy for me and improve my mood, on the many bad days.
I first saw it in 2010; I had a few close friends, at the time, we went to the cinema. Having friends to do things with is something I haven't had in many years, so it's good to recall the days when I had people to do things with. I haven't 'done something' in over 4 years. No walk, no cinema, no pub, nothing, I've nobody to ask even if I wanted to, all my own fault.
I try to remember normal, through film, music and memory, to remind myself how I live now isn't it.
Scott Pilgrim is not my favourite film, and many argue it's not a good film, but it does feature phenomenal casting, editing and a good soundtrack. The casting is the stuff of legend at this stage, with so many going on to bigger and better things, on TV and Film.
Michael Cera (Arrested Development), Mary Elizabeth Winstead (Fargo), Brie Larson (Captain Marvel), Chris Evans (Captain America), Kieran Culkin (Succession), Aubrey Plaza (Parks and Recreation), Brandon Routh (Superman), Anna Kendrick (Pitch Perfect), Alison Pill (Star Trek: Picard).
Brie's version of the Metric song 'Black Sheep' from the film is the 2nd most-listened song on my playlist, comfortably ahead of The Beatles 'In My Life' and Phoebe Bridgers 'Sidelines'.
I've apparently listened to 'Black Sheep' for 11,351 minutes in 2022 alone - 189 hours - the embarrassing part of that is it's not even my most-listened to song of the year.
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I rack up such long listen-times because I put a single song on loop, for hours-on-end, when I'm playing chess or researching Covid.
It didn't start as a conscious choice; my laptop is on its last legs, fan not working and overheating, so many crashes and video/audio rendering issues on Youtube and Spotify, and it seemed to function better when not skipping between tracks.
Brie's vocal on the song isn't objectively "great" - or even good, compared to Emily Haines more polished original lead vocal - so it shouldn't really work and yet it's probably my favourite alternative-rock vocal performance ever.
I'm instinctively drawn to songs that appear in movies, quite fond of Justin Timberlake/Carey Mulligan's '500 Miles' from the film Inside Llewyn Davis and Eddie Vedder's 'No Ceiling' from the film Into the Wild.
Most of my favourite songs, like Brie's version of Black Sheep, aren't sung very well from a technical standpoint.
John Lennon, as typical, double tracked his lead vocal on 'In My Life', probably through irrational insecurity that he sounded shite, without that added depth and layers.
My mind is a chaotic place, I consciously try to not over-think my way into under-appreciating a song.
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Under-thinking into over-counting.
Saturday, August 20th:
I talked to the Samaritans, they're, as usual, very nice and, as usual, I felt it didn't change much of anything. I called the Dental Hospital again and got nowhere, again. I don't know why I even fucking bother, I need to reset my expectations all the way down to having none.
I'm on a waiting list for Student Dentists to take out the teeth I have left and maybe see if I can finally get some false teeth but I've been on that list for what feels like forever. I've been eating with no teeth for years and, though I'm used to it, it doesn't actually ever get any easier.
I'm on so many waiting lists but I never seem to move up any of these lists.
I sometimes wonder if they all just placed me on the "Ignore" list.
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I saw a Gript article circulating on Twitter, headline:
"Why is Ireland still dramatically overcounting Covid deaths?"
I knew a) we aren't and b) reading it would make me want to pull my hair out, but I read it anyway.
As expected, it should have been titled "I don't have the slightest clue what I'm talking about", at least if the headline was seeking to accurately reflect the mind-numbing stupidity of what followed. The writer argued, with the utmost misplaced confidence, that Ireland is over-counting Covid deaths "by several thousand" and cited 2 distinct and somewhat unrelated arguments to "justify" that assertion.
1. CSO count of deaths being lower than HPSC's count
2. Excess deaths being lower than HPSC's count.
It's nonsense, in whichever order you try to tackle it, I'll go in reverse.
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Excess deaths is a completely different metric and is indeed several thousand lower than Covid deaths in Ireland but that doesn't automatically mean Covid deaths were over-counted.
Some Covid deaths were offset in the first 2 years of pandemic, from the long-term disappearances/reductions of bacterial and viral illnesses (e.g. Influenza, RSV, Streptococcus Pneumoniae) and from lower road/workplace accidents etc.
Moreover, a Covid death is not by definition an excess death, that's especially true in the case of an old, terminal cancer patient who picks up Covid.
Excess deaths seek to measure how many additional people died above expected.
In their case, they may have died 2 months sooner, due to Covid, which means it's for sure a Covid death but they were likely to die in the calendar year, so not necessarily an excess death.
Conflating Covid deaths with Excess deaths demonstrates ignorance of the topic, yet people display this ignorance with such confidence, that people assume they must be right.
As someone who spent an adult lifetime convincing my family up is down, to try hide my addictions, I know how potent baseless confidence be.
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As for the main premise of his argument, that HPSC's count is "several thousand" higher than CSO's count, this is yet more ignorance, masquerading as facts.
Firstly, these are the accurate counts, as at midnight December 31st, 2021:
HPSC: 5,912
CSO: 5,345
That's a disparity of several hundred and hopefully a hundred is still less than a thousand.
Secondly, the disparity in the figures is not due to HPSC "over-counting" - nor CSO "under-counting", in the corollary - it's actually due to the varying speed, in methods of counting.
CSO for their analysis solely count death certificates registered with the General Register Office (GRO), with mentions of Covid, as either the UCoD (Underlying Cause of Death) or mentioned in the narrative of the death certificate (Multiple Cause).
This is a very slow, unwieldy process.
HPSC also receive daily updates from the GRO but they have other sources too; primarily CIDR - Ireland's infectious disease surveillance system. They receive clinical information, in the course of outbreak management, such as whether Covid patients involved in an open outbreak are still alive or not.
If there's sad news, HPSC will often know about that a lot sooner than the GRO or CSO will find out.
Thirdly, tangentially, CSO count will always lag hundreds behind HPSC's count because of late death registrations.
There was 956 late registered deaths in 2019 and 51.6% of those were aged over 60 years old.
-6 of the deaths registered late in 2019, occurred in 2008!! 11 years is a mild understatement of the word 'late'.
-61 of the deaths registered late in 2019, occurred in 2015.
-622 of the deaths registered late in 2019, occurred in 2017.
There will probably be a few hundred Covid deaths, that occurred in 2020, registered late in 2023 or 2024 - and a little more than that again, occurring in 2021.
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Unless there's sweeping reform of death registration procedures in Ireland (which is in the works, apparently), CSO's count of Covid deaths will never catch up to HPSC's, it will always lag months - and hundreds - behind.
The current 90 day death registration period is a peculiarly Irish thing, with plenty of upsides to it, such as allowing families a long time to grieve. It's also a nightmare for Public Health because in a pandemic you want to know precisely how many people are dying, in as close to real time as possible.
There's no conspiracy here, that the CSO count of deaths is lower and slower, not even for those who think everything is a conspiracy.
The real-time disparity between Covid death totals doesn't mean HPSC is over-counting.
It just means they can count quicker.
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Scepticism.
That Gript article also contains this truly incredible quote. It's quotes like this that cement a feeling in my mind that I need to throw my laptop out of the window, to retain the few parts of my mind that remain stable.
"Some vaccine sceptics repeatedly point to the fact that deaths in Ireland in general this year are up – and that appears to be true. "
Just incredible.
What does "appears to be true" even mean? Nothing, in this regard, it's either true or it isn't.
There's publically available excess mortality percentages, provided to Eurostat by CSO, that rely on RIP.ie as a data source - thereby cutting out all the "registering a death 11 years later" nonsense I discussed above.
Those percentages tell you this, for the first 6 months of the year (January 1st - June 30th):
Deaths occurring (RIP.ie data source), 2021: 17,356
Deaths occurring (RIP.ie data source), 2022: 17,306 (-50)
CSO even went to the trouble of putting the 2021 numbers in a handy table (Table 3) and giving the baseline 2016-19 monthly average, to allow anyone to calculate the figures for 2022.
20 lousy minutes with a calculator and you can show deaths are still slightly lower than last year.
That's if you're willing to put in some work, before spreading misinformation far and wide.
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Deaths being slightly lower than last year, means the age-specific rate of death aged 65+ years old is a fair bit lower than last year, as there's been another year of population ageing.
In short, there's tens of thousands more over 65's in 2022, than there was in 2021 (probably more than 24,000) due to post-war baby booms and people living longer lives. People aged 65+ die at higher rates than those aged 0-65, so if 65+ deaths are level on the previous year, it means the rate of death declined (more people alive than last year but a lower proportion of them died).
Instead of a discussion on all of that, there's a paragraph on "well, vaccine sceptics say deaths are up" and a journalist taking it on blind faith that these "sceptics" on social media are not talking utter shite (which they are).
And 'vaccine sceptic' itself is implying some sort of rational debate as to whether vaccines work or not?
I lost a piece of my soul reading this shite.
I listened to Eddie Vedder's 1:34 mini-masterpiece, to restore some of it.
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Australia has the answers? Did you ask the right questions...
Sunday, August 21st:
Last night was difficult for me, I'm finding it increasingly difficult to open my mouth at all, which is fine in the respect I rarely talk to anyone outside mam or Samaritans but it's not so good for trying to eat. I'm not in a good place in my life, at the moment, and I need to figure it out.
Not a lot is happening on Irish Twitter but I saw a tweet from a 29-year-old man, saying he was heading off from Ireland to Australia to work as a staff nurse, while slating Ireland's health system and praising Australia's.
In his words, quote, "Australia has 8hr days, 10hr nights, 1:4 nurse/patient ratios & an Emergency Department pathway that works!"
I read it, greatly admired his enthusiasm and felt slightly jealous of his capacity to feel excited about anything in life.
I also felt sorry for him, at the same time.
He's in for a massive land when he gets there, if he truly believes what he wrote accurately reflects the current state of the health system in Australia.
Which is in fucking ribbons.
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Horror stories, every day, all over the place, of a health system collapsing under the weight of winter pandemic pressure.
They're quite literally treating people in tents, in the car park, in dozens of hospitals in Australia, all winter, because Emergency Departments are overwhelmed.
Nurses in 2 Western Sydney hospitals went on strike at the end of July, to protest understaffing, long hours and unsafe conditions for both staff and patients.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/07/22/zkth-j22.html
14-week-old baby Amelia in Melbourne had her life-saving heart surgery postponed 4 times in July, the most recent postponement due to "no ICU beds available" and the one before that due to "no ICU nurses available".
I have a news alert set up and I check on her every day, over the last month, to make sure she's still alive.
I haven't heard anything to the contrary.
A 96-year-old woman in Adelaide fell on her way to the toilet at 5am, her daughter called an ambulance.
The ambulance arrived 22 hours later, while offering an apology for the delay and also a few excuses.
22 hours.
Multiple women in labour were turned away from a maternity unit in Queensland, due to "no obstetricians available".
One of them, Mariana, was more than 4cm dilated and contractions 4 minutes apart.
She was promised an ambulance to another hospital but there was comically no ambulances actually available to promise her one, so she had to wait well over an hour for an ambulance to return and then another hour and a half to get there.
"I felt my life and my baby's life were at risk", she said.
Who can blame her when you arrive at a hospital in labour and get told to kindly fuck off somewhere else.
A mother called an ambulance for her 13-year-old child in breathing difficulties in Tasmania in July and she was incredibly told "sorry, there won't be an ambulance coming, none available".
She got into a taxi and her child stopped breathing, the taxi driver stopped and members of the public performed successful CPR on the footpath.
If not for those heroes, he'd probably have died and for what?
A teenage cancer patient in Melbourne was forced to wait 27 hours last week, from his time arriving in the Emergency Department to getting a bed, poor young fella sleeping in the hallway for over a day.
A woman in her 70's was rushed to hospital in Tasmania at midnight on Friday, August 5th.
There was no beds and not enough doctors in the Emergency Department so she had to "ramp", i.e. wait in the tent all night, with the ambulance crew.
She died at 9am, totally senseless.
A 47-year-old man was having chest pains in Adelaide a fortnight ago and called an ambulance. The ambulance never arrived and he died on the side of the road, over 40 minutes later.
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I consume a lot of Covid content and much of it is international, though I'm trying to do less of that. I don't ever read books, rarely watch new or original TV series or movies, though I'm trying to do more of that.
I still read about Covid a lot, despite most people moving on, if for no other ongoing reason than I have a good grasp on the topic and it's nice not to feel completely stupid, like I often do when I read about inflation or problems in building more houses.
One thing I noticed from reading so much about Covid internationally, is almost all of the public hospital problems you see in Ireland, are pretty much universal.
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Acute public hospitals and emergency departments are in fucking bits, all over the world.
Australia, Canada, Japan, New Zealand, UK basically everywhere.
Shortage of nurses, shortage of doctors, healthcare workers sometimes getting screamed at - or even assaulted by irate patients - all of this happening while being underpaid, underappreciated, overworked and overwhelmed.
Chaotic and unsafe 24 - 36 hour waiting times in Emergency Departments in Australia and Canada.
Ambulance services stretched towards and beyond breaking point.
People dying while ambulances take hours to arrive.
Elective surgery waiting lists as long as your arm and somehow still growing.
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Things are so bad in Japan that 14 hospitals in Kyoto put out a joint-statement saying, quote:
"Kyoto Prefecture is in a state of medical collapse. Lives that could have been saved, cannot be saved."
It was one of the most succinct tell it like it fucking is statements I've ever read; one I can't imagine being released in Ireland or UK, well not without a complete social media meltdown and call for elections.
Elsewhere, a 37 year-old nurse collapsed in work in South Korea, with a brain hemorrhage. She worked in a 2,700-bed general hospital, the biggest hospital in Seoul, but incredibly there wasn't one neurosurgeon available to perform a craniotomy.
They missed the Golden Hour and she sadly died but the fact they couldn't save their own staff from a hemorrhage, tells you how dangerous that situation was for patients.
https://www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20220802000436
Crazy waiting times reported in Emergency Departments, all across Canada, leading to preventable deaths. As bad as things are in Australia, there's just as many horror stories up and down Canada in recent weeks.
This poor 79-year-old woman waited 26 hours to be seen in the ED, in pure agony, in Fredericton, New Brunswick, in the days before she died from a ruptured bowel.
I can't think of many worse ways to die, than what this woman endured in her final days, the amount of pain she was in and nobody had time to help her.
She deserved better.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/new-brunswick/new-brunswick-health-care-wait-times-1.6556275
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I wish anyone well heading abroad to Australia, Canada, New Zealand to work in public hospitals and there's obviously a lot more to any emigration decision, than just work considerations.
Some people want to live in a warmer climate or live in a city with cheaper rent or a lower cost of living, others just want to go and see what happens. I had no gripe with Ireland when I went to America for a year, when I was young, I just wanted to experience the world, make new friends, see new places.
I often see people discuss emigration as people 'being forced to go', with little discussion on how innately human a desire it is to want to go, irrespective of how it's going for them. There's a big world outside Ireland and many want to experience it.
My worry is nurses like that guy, heading off to Australia, Canada etc. are setting themselves up for disappointment, if they think those countries have it all figured out in public hospitals.
It'll probably be tough in work for him when he gets Down Under; stress, long hours, nurse shortages, bed shortages, ambulance service at rock bottom, an Australian health system breaking under intolerable pressure, exacerbated by winter and the pandemic.
I guess it'll feel like home.
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No room for sympathy, in the Online Inn.
Monday, August 22nd:
My weekend was one of the worst ones in recent memory but they're all varying degrees of bad and it's sometimes difficult to rank them, objectively. I barely ate anything substantial and I'm not sleeping too well, so I feel very run down and generally miserable.
I got through it, so there's that, in the plus column.
I tried 6 times today to call the doctor and arrange an appointment but nobody picked up the phone, which is typical in recent months. More chance of getting put through to the Pentagon than my GP, which is very much not her fault. Even when I rarely get through, I'm offered an appointment so far into the future that it's hard to feel like I even secured one.
I live one day at a time and rarely think past today - living in the present is difficult and tomorrow isn't promised.
"We've an appointment for you in October", may as well be offering me a free flight to the Bahamas in 6 weeks time.
Sounds wonderful, if I'm still here.
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I've been closely following the search for missing 16-year-old teenager Kiely Rodni in California for the last few weeks and desperately hoping for good news but sadly her body was just found in the reservoir.
It's difficult to know why some missing persons cases go viral on Twitter and why countless other disappearances are met with ghost-like apathy.
Some people are so far out of sight to be never in mind.
In Kiely's case; there was an understandably strong suspicion of abduction, given they couldn't find the car she drove to the party in and no trace of the car being found in recent weeks.
US media reported "20,000 man hours" went into the police search effort but it allegedly only took a Youtube-famous volunteer dive team - called Adventures with Purpose, with over 2 million subscribers - around 35 minutes of searching the reservoir, to find both her car and body inside, in just 14 feet of water.
It raises more questions than it answers, given the reservoir is less than half a mile from the campsite where the party was held and a mere 50 feet away from where her phone was last pinged.
I'm sure the story will develop but at this juncture it's unfathomable why the police didn't start their search right there and, if it turns out they did do that, how did their own specialist divers not find the car, in such shallow waters?
It's incredulous that so many thousands of people were out looking for her, scouring far and wide, while she was a stone's throw from her last known location, all along.
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One sad element of the online discussion, surrounding both her disappearance and discovery of her body, is the defiant and unapologetic lack of empathy on display, in many quarters.
That she was drinking underage, at a party where allegedly copious amounts of alcohol and drugs were consumed by teenagers, was used as a stick to beat the search with. Almost as if she didn't even fucking deserve the resources invested in the search effort - or as if police shouldn't go looking for a missing 16-year-old because she shouldn't have been "up to no good" in the first place?
I don't get it.
For one thing, we'd all want the police to search for someone we love, irrespective of what they were up to, before going missing. Moreover, drinking alcohol at a party aged 16 is surely just a teenager being a teenager, a fairly normal thing, semi-rebellious at worst, that normal teenagers do.
Now there's people saying things like "ZERO sympathy. NONE. Play stupid games like driving home drunk, win stupid prizes like drowning at 16!!".
I can understand some level of judgement, I can also imagine it working out very differently on another night.
Maybe she drives home drunk and gets pulled over by police. Maybe she gets home in one piece and realizes what a huge mistake she just made and vows to never do that again. Maybe in that alternate timeline, she never does it ever again and looks back on the time, when she was learning to drive, with regret.
That she paid for this mistake with her life, with no room to learn or grow from it, I find desperately sad.
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The more I read on Twitter, the more I understand dearth of forgiveness is a feature of the website, neither an anomaly nor a minority.
Highly-online people seem to view the world in binary terms, right or wrong, often leaping to judgement so fast and so high, they clear right over the space for contrition and compassion.
She was still a child, a teenager, who went to a party with her friends - and will never come home - and you've strangers on the internet saying they're actually glad she's dead, as it's one more drunk driver off the roads.
Glad a child is dead, just unbelievable.
That her behaviour was "bad" shouldn't close the door on sympathy for her, for her family and friends. That she could have theoretically hurt someone else by driving drunk is obviously true but she didn't, she apparently took the first wrong turn available, not even on a real road, and drove straight into the water, hurting only herself.
I hope she was unconscious, when she hit the water.
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It gets cold in my bedroom, at night.
Tuesday, August 23rd:
It's 2am, much of still-awake Irish Twitter is talking about Manchester United unexpectedly beating Liverpool and also Michael Collins, still, for some reason. I saw a bunch of that Collins discussion in recent days, I couldn't relate to it though.
Seems a bit odd to argue over who long-since-dead people may have voted for in 2022, especially someone who would be 131 years old and breaking Guinness World Records for longevity.
The counter-factual debate of "well who would he have voted for if he was alive today at 31 years old", forgets that entails him being born in 1990 and being raised in more peaceful times.
Who knows what a Millennial version of the man might have been like, maybe he'd be more interested in Netflix than Revolution, by 2022.
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I sometimes see similar hypotheticals about whether John Lennon would have preferred Starmer or Corbyn and don't understand those either.
He sang the word 'in' after 'out' in 1968, equally unsure of what type of Revolution he was even advocating for.
"But when you talk about destruction,
Don't you know you can count me out (in)"
Debating what way he would have leaned politically in 2022, presupposes an 81-year-old Lennon wouldn't still contradict himself, by the time he finished every other sentence.
"Always, no sometimes, think it's me
But you know I know when it's a dream
I think I know...."
Strawberry Fields For... A Week At Least, Maybe Less, Maybe More, Fuck Knows may not have stood the test of time but it may have accurately reflected his unpredictable personality, more than the clarity of Forever did.
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It's 4am. I'm still thinking about Kiely and getting increasingly agitated at the overall tone of some of the discussion on Twitter, with many now suggesting it's an obvious case of suicide, something I hadn't even considered. That's a subject I try my best to avoid reading about, given my own history of attempts, so I closed the tab.
I just took my antidepressant; 30mg of Mirtazapine, though occasionally take 2 of them or valium alongside. My doctor doesn't give me too many valium and the time between appointments is growing ever-longer, so I try keep the few she does give me in reserve. My bedroom is a perpetual mess but those tablets are pristinely stowed, in case of emergency. I'm trying to take my antidepressant at a more consistent time, near 2am, rather than 5am half the time and midnight the other half.
I'm listening to my most-listened song of the year, while I wait for those to work or not work, it's a bit pot luck. Sometimes I fall asleep quickly, most times I don't.
I listened to this song for 14,771 minutes - 246 hours - in 2022, which seems a little on the high side but again it's partly due to the state of my laptop. I actually didn't know the song, at all, when it first came out in 1995, I was 12 years old and still way more into East 17 and Oasis, than anything more complex or 'adult sounding'.
I'd never heard of the session vocalist, Mimi Goese, and I'd only a passing interest in the artist who released it, Moby, in the years since. It was The Sopranos that introduced me to this song and started making my early playlists but that was a different time in my life, before music became my only friend.
Stranger Things used it in the Season 1 Finale in 2016 and beyond shamelessly again in the Season 4 Finale in 2022, in the most beautiful and haunting scene.
I won't spoil that on anyone but I cry every time I watch it.
--------------------------------
It's a deeply melancholic song, one I suspect many depressed people relate to and, no doubt, a few considered ending things, while listening to it. In some ways it articulates the bitterness of loneliness.
The opening lyric speaks to the emotional complexity of isolation. In my experience, loneliness can't be separated from a gamut of negative emotions.
"Where were you when I was lonesome?
Locked away with freezing cold"
I'm isolated, lonely - alone - but it wasn't always this way. So where are they? Where's my brother who hasn't talked to me in years? Where are the friends I once had?
I pushed them away with my descent into addiction and depression but some of them didn't take much of a push.
To get better, I have to reconcile in my mind that I am the sole architect of my own isolation; yet accepting your shortcomings and failures, without resentment and regret seeping in, is easier said than done.
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Moby's song speaks to a forlorn world weariness - and the desire to leave it.
I think about dying daily but it's been almost 2 full years since I tried to act upon those pervasive negative feelings. Once you've been to the precipice, the brink of an 'easy way out' - itself nothing more than an illusion - you always have a part of your brain telling you it's ok to go back there.
I have to invest a lot of conscious time and effort, into not going back to that place.
His song keeps me company when I'm awake and sometimes helps me remember better days, before I felt like this. I didn't always sit in bed 23 hours a day, listening to music and feeling cut adrift in a lonely existence.
It evokes, by omission and contrast, better days.
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Mostly though, the song comforts me.
These are the last words I hear most nights, before I finally drift off to sleep, sang beautifully by Mimi.
There's a defeatist hope they will be the last words I hear. Maybe my heart will stop working in my sleep and I won't have to summon the strength to just exist again tomorrow.
"I can't hear you through the fog
If I holler, let me go
If I falter, let me know
I don't wanna swim the ocean
I don't wanna fight the tide
I don't wanna swim forever
When it's cold, I'd like to die"
Rather than try end my journey, when I feel at my lowest, I remind myself it will end one day.
I know it won't always be like this; maybe I'll get better and have a breakthrough or epiphany - stop existing, start living - but ok, if that doesn't happen for me, if I have to live many decades more feeling this way, at least I know one day it will end and I won't feel anything.
Any coping mechanism that helps me get through the night is a good one, for now, no matter how self-pitying or counter-productive to long term change.
The night is the hardest time to be alone with my thoughts.
By making it through the night, I leave open possibilities for the dawn, many of them good.
Tomorrow is another day and maybe that one will be better.
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I should probably get off Twitter for a while.
