The Man Who Died of Overthinking
cat survives
The man lived deep in the guts of New York City. He hadn’t had sex in six years. It was early. Sometimes in the morning he had to think too much before he could do basic things like go to the bathroom and eat breakfast. He scratched absentmindedly at a fresh scab with a gnarled hand that had once been very graceful and finely formed.
The cat could not decide whether to ask the man for food or just check for mice behind the refrigerator. There had been mice there recently and would be again soon. The man had dropped part of a grilled cheese sandwich back there and it was trapped under some coils that went just about down to the floor and the mice could not yet jar the piece of sandwich loose or break it but they’d come back a few times at least to nibble at it. Sometimes the man left messes and didn’t clean up for a long time. The cat didn’t mind because the cat liked eating big bugs and hunting for mice and rats but by human standards the man lived in a state of squalor that most people would find disgusting.
The man was just waking up. He’d dreamed he’d gone back to playing stand up bass in jazz bands in New York City. But he could not do that. He’d had his hands broken over some unpaid drug and gambling debts and he could not play the bass like he used to. But he dreamed of it. He was overthinking himself to death now that he could no longer play music. He dreamed of becoming an angel himself. But he was overthinking himself to death.
Most mornings he just woke up and obsessed over things and that was how he got started this morning. He put off doing personal hygiene and preparing breakfast and just sat on the edge of his bed. He seemed to stare into space but he was really staring inward with his mind. His eyes were just hanging around doing nothing as he lived intensely within himself. He did not feel that he had a bit of a fever.
He thought about the I/O errors involved in the problem of the internet having way too many bad vibes. It wasn’t just that it was uncool, it made no sense at the level of mathematical vibrational physics! It made no sense as computer science! I wonder if she still thinks about me I wonder if she ever talks to her friends about me I stopped being weird but she’s still being shy. Why can’t I stop thinking about being in love and the Middle East and why do other people always seem so crazy and why do other people make me feel so crazy?
Without noticing he was doing it he began scratching at an itchy scab on his forearm. Soon it began to bleed but he paid it no mind. Just as it really began to bleed profusely he thought to himself, oblivious in the intensity of his obsessive focus:
I wonder if she ever talks to her friends about me I can’t believe the situation in the Middle East but also I wish my family liked me and I can’t stop thinking about the transfinite input-output problem where Online seems a more manageable order of infinity than the greater world (I) in which it occurs. We define IRL as I. It has the essential quality of being infinitely more infinite than Online, which is countably infinite. We define Online as O. It has an essential quality of discrete infinity which is to say it is digital and composed of countable bits. O’s infinity is actually a subset that exists within a greater infinity of I (IRL.) The transformation always requires the reduction of continuous infinity (as seen in the real numbers and the continuum/continua of real life) to the discrete infinity of the computable. There is no one to one correspondence, no bijection, no isomorphic homology, between the cardinality of the discrete numbers and the cardinality of the real numbers….
(…Faint smell of burning in the air, bright blood running down his arm, no awareness of his own growing body odor…)
…There is no smallest real number, you can generate an infinite number of real numbers between whichever smallest real number you decide on and zero. Sadly all too often we might see how the nations and the militaries involved in the situation in the Middle East should act whether she still talks to her friends about me or not but as we are essentially powerless in our roles as spectators makes our knowledge of how to conduct a polyvalent conflict involving light, heavy, asymmetric and symmetric conflicts with a complex backstory going back thousands of years, but then I can’s stop thinking about how the reduction to digits and a lower order of infinity works against the continuity of things and the general unity of the greater fabric of existence in which life takes place. It’s like trying to replace people with dolls and idols and words. There is a morbidity involved in the futile attempt to escape the insane complexities of real life by way of believing that the internet is the same thing. It is similar to irrational compulsive behavior seen in people with neurological abnormalities, complex post traumatic stress disorder, anxiety disorders and schizophrenia. People superstitiously engage in magical thinking that tends to compound the very problems they pretend to try to solve. It’s a terrible substitute for the real world but people seek refuge in it because it’s less uncertain in a way similar to how the integers are less uncertain than the real numbers. People would rather re enact the same misery every day than strike out into the unknown where they might find something even worse than the shadows and echoes of the platonic cave online which are, for all their morbidities and pathologies, actually very predictable and easy to conform to without having to think too hard for yourself. Freedom is more frightening than death sometimes. I wonder what she is doing right now. But so the very reduced model would include set I within which set O is a subset with I providing all the input values which O reduces and transforms to output values, with the set O being discretely infinite while the set I is continuously infinite. I don’t know what this has to do with the situation in the Middle East and I’m still upset that Snackvampirewinemom called me “thirsty” online!!
His own thoughts sounded very loud in his head to him now. He blew hot breath out through clenched teeth in an angry hiss. Thin wispy ribbons of dark smoke rose out of his ears but he was not aware of them. He was feverish but too oblivious to his body to feel it yet, he would not feel it until it was too late. It was as if he was in a powerful trance state and could not stop thinking about what was on his mind.
The cat appeared and let out a series of loud, demanding rapid-fire meows, causing the man to snap out of it as it were and get up and go to the bathroom and go through his morning hygiene routine before cooking himself some breakfast and then eating and drinking coffee and then more coffee as he eased into spending hours online obsessing over how mentally ill everyone else was before suddenly realizing that he was probably even more mentally ill than everyone else. He obsessed over that and drove himself more and more crazy and his thoughts grew so very loud in his own head.
After a few hours fused to his phone he had a serious acute I/O error and he got excited and stood up suddenly but then he got stuck in place in the position he was standing in. He trembled for ten seconds or so until smoke started coming out of his ears. After about ten seconds of that —the smoke in dark ribbons rising, a foul smell like burning wires filling the air— his eyes rolled back and a dark spot appeared and grew at the crotch of his pants as he swayed and finally fell down to the floor and died.
It had been the overthinking that did him in. That had been happening to more and more people in the guts of New York City lately. It was a new thing, the first recorded fatalities had occurred in 2020 and deaths from overthinking have been linked to “Long Covid” though the results from the handful of studies showing the link, were much more suggestive than conclusive. In truth nobody knew why it had been happening but certain segments of society like emergency first responders were learning about it all very quickly.
The cat knew that more meowing would do no good and went into the kitchen to check for mice behind the refrigerator. One of the neighbors called the fire department about the smell and the firemen discovered the body.
“Not again,” one of the firemen said, shaking his head.
“Overthinking is the new fentanyl,” another one said.
“Really makes you think,” the one among them named Randy said. Randy was new and nobody could tell if he was stupid or a genius yet.
“Don’t overthink it!” the first one said, and they all laughed.
One of them radio’d dispatch to send the medical examiner for a dead body just as the cops arrived and the cat slipped out the front door with a comatose mouse in its mouth and fled off into the wild city night never to look back. The cat could tell the man had overthought himself to death but the cat did not know that overthinking is the new fentanyl.
The sun set on the guts of New York City. That night the cat found a new home in a bodega a few blocks away among people who were more cheerful and less doomed than his previous owner had been. And the mice were even bigger, so that he could begin his exciting new life with a feast of fresh meat.