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My morose, meandering Monday musings

It’s Monday again, of course.  I won’t get into any of the usual stuff I discuss about Mondays, except to note that, outside of the minds and artifacts of humans*, Monday doesn’t exist.  It’s just another day, and each day is not fundamentally different from another day.  Wild creatures do not get the weekend off, for they have no such concept.  On the other hand, they don’t exactly have enforced workdays or work weeks and all the many artificial but very real stressors that humans have created.

I am still off NSAIDs except for some limited aspirin, and I am quite stiff and sore, a fact which is particularly difficult to ignore in my thumbs as I write this.  My urinary signs may be improving; certainly I’ve been working on intervening in the issues, not least of which intervention is the aforementioned curtailment of NSAIDs.  I’m not sure how this will go, but I guess I will find out, one way or another.

I haven’t read any books of any kind‒including audio books‒in almost a week now.  There are several processes behind this fact, but a big part of it seems to be a general anhedonia.  Nothing is very interesting to me.  I don’t even feel any particular interest in the new Spider-Man movie, which would normally engender excitement.

Heck, I honestly don’t even feel much about Avengers: Doomsday, and Doctor Doom is probably my very favorite villain (and one of my favorite overall characters).  Podcasts also seem boring, and so do various videos and shows, educational, fictional, or anywhere in between.

I don’t really do anything in my spare time, to be honest, other than try to distract myself, and that’s becoming more difficult.

My boss, on Saturday, suggested that maybe after work, before I go “home”, I should stop somewhere and get the urinary stuff checked out, and I said, “Yeah, I don’t see that happening.”  The prospect of taking care of such things in my “spare” time is about as natural a feeling as the prospect of spontaneously levitating.

It’s not in my nature to be much good at taking care of myself.  I’m not really inclined to take care of much of anything administrative in my life, to be honest**.  I pay rent and electric and water and cable/internet bills, because not doing so would be a great and immediate inconvenience, but other things are not in my wheelhouse.  They are not salient to me, and I don’t know how to make them salient without them already being salient.

So, yeah, if the issues I’m having are precursors to, or symptoms and signs of, some more serious problem, well…that’ll be that, won’t it?  As I said to my boss a few sentences after my above reply about seeking help, “Basically, I’m just waiting for something to kill me, anyway.”

That’s the state of my life now, and it has been that way to varying degrees for quite some time.  I believe this qualifies for the term “passive suicidal ideation”.  I don’t just experience the passive form, of course, but it is more common, or more frequent, and slightly more persistent than the active version.

Make no mistake, though:  for the last dozen years or so, not a day has gone by, as far as I can remember, that I didn’t have at least some moments of active SI.  And, of course, I have many methods available; I make sure to keep things that way.

So, yeah, one of these days my blog may just stop, and if it does, there’s a good probability that it will have been because I stopped being so passive.

I make no predictions, and I certainly don’t engage in threats or warnings.  I’m just trying to clear the air, and explain why, left to my own devices, I’m not liable to seek any medical help for anything unless it is so acutely painful as to be impossible to ignore, like a kidney stone.

I figure that sooner or later, some infection or maybe some malignancy will come along and take everything out of my hands‒at least unless I take matters into my own hands before that time, which is eminently possible.  I’ve said before that it would be nice if I got some kind of final crisis that at least allowed me to say goodbye to the people I love, but I recognize that nature doesn’t promise nor owe me any such convenience.

It doesn’t matter.  Quite possibly‒probably‒no one would want to come say goodbye to me anyway.  It would not surprise me, I’ll admit.  It would be sad, but I would probably consider it entirely appropriate.  Why should anyone care if I am going to die, anyway?

Okay, well, on that chipper, cheery note, I’ll bring this post to a close.  It’s already too long, honestly.  But I do hope that you all have a good week collectively and good weeks individually.

*And humanoids, I suppose.

**That’s a weird expression, isn’t it?  Does it imply that if I don’t say it, you cannot assume that I am ever honest?  But surely, claims of honesty are just the sorts of things that liars would make, just as religious texts will claim to be true and infallible.  “You have to be trusted by the people that you lie to, so that when they turn their backs on you, you’ll get the chance to put the knife in.”

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The Emperor of Silence reaps no relief from pain…or something like that

Welcome to August, everyone.  For today is August 1st, 2026 (AD/CE).  How exciting.  Huzzah.  Yippee ki yay motherf…

…or goodness sake, we certainly have a rather Roman day today, don’t we?  The month is named after a Roman emperor (the first “official” one, though I wish he’d just kept the name Octavian, since Augustus has too much of a try-hard vibe), and the day is named after the Roman god, Saturn.  Sailor Saturn is also my favorite sailor soldier*.  Though, that last thing doesn’t have anything to do with Rome.

I’m working today, just to confirm what would probably be your conclusion if you were even thinking about the question.

It’s not an absolute correlation, by any means; it’s possible, and not even unreasonably unlikely, that I might write a blog post but not go to work, or that I might go to work but not write a blog post.  The latter has happened more times than not (by far) throughout my life, but we need not worry about that likelihood, since it is ruled out by the fact that I am indeed writing a blog post.  You can tell, because you’re reading it (albeit not while I’m writing, as far as I know).

I am still quite sore all over, especially in my thumbs, back, hips, knees, ankles, shoulders, middle back and right side and flank***.  So, yeah, I don’t feel very great.  I also still have some residua of my apparent middle respiratory inflammation, but I think that’s improving.

Maybe it will be good for me to go through a bit of time with basically no NSAIDs in my system‒they’ve been there a lot, for a long time, and cannot fail to have had unintended effects.  We’ll see how the lack thereof even for a few days impacts my health.

On the other hand, NSAIDs can reduce some kinds of depression, and I think they did at least some of that for me.   Still, I am using Tylenol, and that seems possibly to help not merely with physical pain, but also with psychical pain (a little bit).

Weird, right?  And it doesn’t do that by decreasing inflammation in the brain, as NSAIDs appear to do.  It definitely works differently than NSAIDs, though it is not entirely unrelated.

It’s interesting how modules in the nervous system became repurposed (or added-purposed) for later mental functions in larger brains and especially in social animals.  The mental processes associated with physical revulsion and disgust/avoidance toward potential toxins and infectious materials became tied to our moral emotions of judgement, condemnation, and contempt.

Physical processes of fear became connected with anxiety about social opprobrium‒though, in a species like humans, social ostracism really was a serious danger to one’s life in the ancestral environment, to say nothing of being a rather obvious impediment to reproduction.

Anyway, the point is, it shouldn’t be too very surprising that a substance that attenuates physical pain can also ease psychological torment, at least a bit.  We know that opioids do this as well, and to a much greater degree than acetaminophen.

That’s one issue they have.  If a person has a lot of psychic pain‒and many of us do, which is predictable given that we are creatures adapted to hunting and gathering in the savannahs of Africa but are now living in the nightmare/fever dream/bad acid trip that is the modern world‒and has no better, more available, way to assuage it, they’re going to be tempted to reach for the tools they have, however blunt.

If we can figure out better ways of easing those pains, ones that are available and usable by everyone who needs them and which have acceptably few side-effects, that would be nice.

Okay, well, I don’t know if I’ve written anything coherent here, but I’m going to keep this relatively short, because I am still feeling poorly.  I hope you all have a good day and a good remainder of the weekend.

*Not counting Sailor Moon, who has the same unfair advantage over the others that the Beatles have over other bands.  Sailor Saturn is my Radiohead**/Pink Floyd sailor soldier.

**Heck, on one of my favorite songs by Radiohead, No Surprises, the chorus is followed by the invocation, “Silent.  Silent.”  And Sailor Saturn is the sailor soldier of silence, wielding the Glaive of Silence, with the power to end the world and bring about…well…silence.

***This makes me nervous considering my urinalysis strangeness, but I haven’t yet checked that today.  It feels like it is improving.

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You’re in analysis, or something like that

I apologize for not writing a post yesterday.  As you may have guessed, I did not work yesterday, because I was out sick.

I think I mentioned the apparent URI I’ve had.  Really, it’s more of a middle respiratory infection, like bronchi to bronchiole level, but the acronym for that would be MRI and that might be confusing.  This is one of those issues with acronyms; when you shorten things enough, the code becomes ambiguous.

Anyway, I also had some weird urinary signs (not symptoms) that made me nervous that all the NSAIDS I’ve been taking have been starting to catch up with my kidneys.  So, I’ve taken a temporary NSAID sabbatical apart from aspirin.  I’m still taking some Tylenol (and CBD, which does at least some good).  Unfortunately, my pain level overall has predictably increased, and that certainly contributed to the fact that I stayed at the house yesterday.

Anyway, I’m trying to make sure to get lots of fluids and whatnot, and that process at least seems to be doing its thing.  I’ll do another UA today‒I have my own test strip bottle*.

Okay, enough of all that stuff.  I’m sure that nearly no one has any interest in reading about my adventures in analyzing my own bodily fluids.

Of course, I don’t have a lot else clawing its way out of me at the moment‒oh, those lazy xenomorph embryos!‒so I don’t know what I’ll use to fill the rest of this blog post.  But I do expect to be writing a post tomorrow, since the office should be open tomorrow, so maybe that will contain something interesting.

I guess today is the last day of July‒at least the last one in 2026 AD/CE.  Tomorrow will therefore be the first day of August in 2026 (AD or CE).  We go from one month named after the nominal first “emperor” of Rome to a month named after the first “official” emperor of Rome.  After that we start up with the ordinally named months, but they’ve all been pushed back two months because of the two dead Romans, so the nominal seventh month‒September‒is our official ninth month.

It would be slightly interesting if, when the calendar was changed from the Julian to the Gregorian, the month had also been changed.  Imagine if the months went May, June, Gregory, August, September…  That might be kind of funny.  Certainly there’s no less of a reason to give old Pope Gregory the Peccary (or whatever his official indicator was) a month named after him than Julius Caesar.

Okay, admittedly, Caesar was a more pivotal historical figure, but one feels (at least, this one does) that he was more a vessel for things that were happening through him and others rather than being the true author of any change.  And Shakespeare didn’t write any plays about the Pope, but then, he lived in Elizabethan England, so that was just a non-starter.  Imagine trying to write a play about a Pope during the reign of Henry VIII’s daughter.

Also, Shakespeare and Gregory the Nocturnal Gregarious Wild Swine were more or less contemporaries.  It’s hard to write popular plays about people who are still or were very recently alive, especially when they were part of a religious schism with one’s own country.  Whereas Julius Caesar was all but the stuff of legend by the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century CE/AD.

It’s too bad Shakespeare didn’t really know anything about ancient Egypt or any of the other ancient civilizations (some of which were as ancient to the Romans as the Romans were to the British of Shakespeare’s time).  He wrote about Antony and Cleopatra, of course, but imagine William Shakespeare’s Ramses the Second (the Great).  Or perhaps consider The Tragedy of Xerxes, Emperor of Persia.

Well, I’m not going to write any plays about them.  I’ve written plays (of sorts) before and have started others, and I have written some (very bad) screenplays and such, but it’s not my area of best creative work.  I’ll just make passing reference to historical figures here, more or less randomly, and maybe someone out there will write a play or show or movie about them, inspired by the reference.

Hey, they keep making movies based on the works of Homer (the Greek poet, not the Simpson).  Mind you, those works are highly fictionalized, if not entirely fictional; you can tell by the presence of things like gods and sirens and nearly invulnerable warriors who gained their protection by being dipped in the river Styx.  Achilles might as well have been bitten by a radioactive spider, for how realistic a figure he is.

Anyway, that’s enough for today.  Sorry if it’s weirder than usual.  Or, on the other hand, I’m sorry if it’s not weirder, but my blog is always this erratic.  I’m not sure about which of the two I ought to be sorrier.

Oh, well.  Please have a good day and a good weekend and a good month of August (but only once August starts‒if you try to have a good month of August on the last day of July, I think you’re setting yourself up for failure).

*It’s really more of a screw-top can, since it’s a cylinder, but because of the association with preserved food, it feels weird to say that I have a can of urinalysis test strips.

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The good, the bad, and the ugh-ly

Ugh, again (I think I began a blog post with that word* earlier this week or some time last week, but I might be misremembering).  It’s Wednesday, and it’s just after 4 am as I start writing this, but I’ve already been awake for two or three hours.  I’m pretty tired (but not sleepy) and I’m feeling under the weather.  I mentioned that I think I have some manner of virus over the last few days, and my throat and upper lungs** feel raw.

Also, yesterday I started having some signs and symptoms that made it appear that I was either dehydrated or having kidney or liver issues, or perhaps an infection.  This was quite surprising and developed rather suddenly, and it really unnerved me because of all the NSAIDS and so on that I use.

So, I haven’t taken anything but plain Tylenol since my main dose of Naproxen yesterday morning.  I don’t know how badly this will affect my pain overall; so far I feel generally achey, and my thumbs are stiffer than before.  But given my kidney stone history, I want to be particularly careful‒at least, for me.

Again, I’m a bit under the weather (as are all non-astronauts at the moment) but I need to go to work, because we’re starting some new processes at the office, and today is also payroll day.  We’ll see how it goes after that.  I’m drinking lots of water, at least, and I haven’t done much wandering around outside in the heat and humidity, to try to avoid sweating too much.

I’m mildly nervous about what, if anything, is going to happen regarding my health in the near future, but I’m too tired to be very nervous, honestly.  I just want some rest.

At least I did play guitar some on Monday and Tuesday morning.  I rather foolishly also did some singing while playing, which has not helped my slightly sore throat, but I have a very hard time not singing when I play.

Anyway, I don’t have any science or philosophy or even psychology subjects chewing their way out of my brain this morning.  They’re in there, but maybe they’re like lazy xenomorph embryos, ones that have decided that they like the warmth and safety of where they are inside a humanoid torso, and so they’re just going to stick around.  It’s probably a bit like just chilling in a sensory deprivation tank, which seems like a nice thing to me.

Okay, that was a weird stream of thought.

Oh, here’s another weird thing:  I’m finding it really hard to find any book to read to keep my interest.  Fiction, nonfiction, books I’ve read before and books I haven’t read, it doesn’t seem to matter.  I even went to the crazy extreme of getting the book Damage after having mentioned the movie the other day.  That is not my usual genre of book.  I’ve read about five chapters (they are very short) but I don’t think I’ll continue.

The YouTube algorithm is falling down on its job as well.

Maybe I should really do a pseudo-sensory-deprivation thing and just stop reading or watching videos or anything of the sort.  I’ve done it before, of course, albeit against my will****, and it wasn’t as horrible as one might expect.  Anyway, I can generally, when my mind is quiet, replay movies and books and shows and whatnot that I know well.  That’s good, because even reading my own stories is getting lame.

Oh, well.  I’m going to call this enough for today.  I suppose I’ll write a post tomorrow, if I go to work, exclusis improvisis.  I hope you all have a good day.

*Is it a “word”, really?  I guess it’s really more of just a syllable of disgust or frustrated exhaustion.

**By which I mean “the upper portions of my lungs”, not “the highest set of what are presumably at least two sets of lungs”, because that latter one wouldn’t make sense.  I have only one*** set of lungs, like all other vertebrates of which I am aware.

***I suppose if one were really pushing it, one could argue that each lobe could be counted as a lung, in which case almost everyone would have three right lungs and two left lungs.  But that’s a rather unnatural division, or at least an asymmetrical one.

****Jail and prison, don’t you know.

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“Every year is getting shorter; never seem to find the time…”

It is time, once again, for me to write another blog post‒though, actually, for you reading this, that time has already passed; for you, it is time to read another blog post.  That temporal disjunction is mildly interesting, and I have probably long since dwelt on it beyond the level of anyone’s but my own interest.

Still, it does illustrate some of the weird directionality of time, for while the time between when I write and when you read can be, in principle, limitless, it is always and only in one direction.  You will never read one of my blog posts so much as a single Planck time before I write it.

This is the character of causality, and its speed is the real speed limit that we narrowly think of as “the speed of light”.  It is actually the speed limit of causal influence, and that’s a fundamental part of the restrictions entailed in special relativity.

There is, though, the longstanding question of why time is not merely one-dimensional but unidirectional, since at local scales, the laws of physics don’t appear to have an inherent directionality but are time-symmetric.

Spatial dimensions don’t work that way.  You can go up or down, back or forth, left or right, however you please, with equal ease (don’t be a tease).  At least…you can do all that provided there are no strong influences nearby.

One such influence might be, for instance, a planet.  I just happen to have such a planet, right here.  It’s called Earth, and it is quite dense and so produces quite significant curvature of spacetime (time more than space, interestingly enough) in its vicinity.

This has the effect of making space asymmetric locally.

So, near a strongly gravitating object, space acquires directionality.  That directionality is actually spherical, so it’s not a simple kind of one-dimensional directionality, but in local regions it looks linearly directional.  Wherever you may be on Earth, odds are you can move any combination of left-right and forward-backward with equal ease (more or less).  But the difference between up and down is quite another matter.

That difference would be even more pronounced near a much stronger gravitational source.  If you were near the surface of a neutron star, your capacity to go any direction but down (i.e. toward the surface of the neutron star) would be more or less nonexistent.  Space would have a profound and irresistible directionality.  Things seem to become even more inevitably directional beneath the event horizon of a black hole.

And, analogously, when one is not far from a highly energetic, very low-entropy region of spacetime, like our Big Bang, time is forcibly constrained to be directional, since change can only really happen in the direction of lower entropy in such a region, as dictated by sheer mathematics, if nothing else.

I’ve written about this before, about how, in principle time could have more than one dimension, like space, but be so forcibly constrained by the very strong local effects of the Big Bang to be pseudo-linear, just as space is pseudo-planar at the surface of the Earth or a neutron star, with free movement in only two of its three dimensions.

I won’t get into it too much now; I think there are posts both here and on Iterations of Zero that address it.  I will just quickly point out that, in the distant future‒much like when one is much farther from the surface of a gravitating body‒as entropy approaches local maxima, time will lose its directionality and forward and backward will be identical.

The fact that it takes so long for that to happen may point toward the geometry of time being less than three dimensional.  Three dimensional influences fall off as the square of the distance.  So, twice as far from a source, the influence is one quarter as strong, and ten times as far away, it is one one hundredth as strong.

The directionality of time doesn’t seem to be falling off at any notable rate since the Big Bang*.  It doesn’t even seem to be falling off linearly, as would be the case for a two-dimensional process (the circumference of a circle increases linearly with the radius, whereas a sphere’s surface area increases as the square of the radius).  Based on a fairly straightforward interpretation of this, it does seem to point to time being one-dimensional.

But we don’t know the scale of the thing.  We may be, compared to the scope of any higher dimensionality of time, vanishingly close to the Big Bang, still.  We may be like tiny, tiny mites on Earth’s surface (or that of a neutron star), unable to sense or travel a significant height to be able to detect even the local curvature of the planet, let alone the drop-off in the directionality of space (i.e., gravity).

Maybe the nature of time is similar.  Maybe we are too small, moving through time too slowly, too close to its local source of directionality, to be able to discern that it has more dimensions.  Certainly, spacetime around us appears “flat” as best we can measure.  But we recognize that, at much bigger scales, it may be curved.  And time, at those scales, may have more than one dimension.

Or maybe:

Maybe if we can wait long enough, it will be obvious.  Or maybe not.

Have a good bit of time over these next 24 hours if you can, please.

*Though there is the current significant question of the nature of the “Hubble tension”.  Maybe it’s a subtle change in the strength of the directionality of time itself that leads to the seeming disparity in the Hubble “constant” when measured by CMB as opposed to by supernova data.  Hmmm.

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It is a far, far better thing I did than anything I did that was far, far worse

Heavy sigh.  Here we go again.

It’s Monday.  I am heading in to the office very early because I hardly slept last night and don’t feel that I could sleep.

As you probably guessed‒if you thought about it at all, which may be unlikely‒I did not work this weekend.  Instead, I finally got to hang out with my youngest, and we went to a big arcade kind of place whose name I forget, where we played a lot of crane grab style games.  Then we ate at Sbarro and wandered around the mall for a bit before seeking out a comic book store I had recently found out about.

So, all in all, it was one of the best days in more than thirteen years.

Unfortunately, it can be rather dispiriting to return to my illusory life after enjoying most of a day with my child.  Not that I’m complaining about spending that time; I most certainly am not!  But apparently this is one of those ASD* things that happens, when even very positive and uplifting interactions take a toll, especially if they involve a lot of noise and people and such.

Though I must say, in the comic book store, I felt almost instantly at home, and didn’t feel any of my usual awkwardness in asking if they had anything related to the role-playing game Gamma World.  These were my people, after all.  And it was a good comic store, not one that overly caters to “normies”.  Though I daresay all were surely welcome there.

Anyway, the usual friendless and familyless (that’s not really a word…might “afamilial” be better?  Apparently not, based on Google Docs’s reaction to it) days of my peudo-life from day to day don’t seem even as good as usual after such a day.  Also, I think I’m fighting a mild cold, which probably is something that happens fairly easily after playing games that many other people have played.

Though, come to think of it, I don’t remember that being a big deal back in the day when arcades were much more common.  At least I never remember tending to get sick after going to one.  But honestly, I did not go to them very often, so my sample size is very small.

I suspect I am often low-grade inoculated by very small doses of many pathogenic viruses because (among other stims) I bite my nails almost constantly.  I used to bite them more, and even picked at the skin around the base of my thumbnails until it peeled off a long way; my thumbs would sometimes bleed from the picking and get quite inflamed and irritated.  Occasionally, that still happens, but I am able to resist picking at the skin so much.  I have other things that I can do with my fidgeting fingers that are less painful.

Anyway, the nail biting may help prime my immune system against a lot of things.  I occasionally wonder whether it’s a trait or tendency that has been‒or can be‒selected for by evolution.  If it does happen to give one’s immune system a leg up, it would make sense for those with the tendency to have selective advantages.

This may also relate to the tendency of very small children to put a lot of things in their mouths.  I don’t mean to suggest that habit developed because it was good for exposing the immune system to very small doses of things.  I suspect it has more to do with the mouth being highly sensitive and having multiple modalities and more dexterity at an early age than the hands, and so it is a useful primary means of exploring much of the world for an infant.

Still, I think the immune priming is a useful side-effect.  Also, the modern tendency for people to be hyper-fastidious about not allowing their young children to touch things and taste things and expose themselves to tiny amounts of pathogens probably contributes to the surge in (hitherto almost unheard-of) allergies to rather ordinary things in the latter few decades.

I’m going to draw to a close now, because I’m having trouble focusing on my screen.  I don’t think it’s anything related to a sudden worsening of my vision, and I am wearing reading glasses.  It’s more as if my ciliary muscles are just tired, and they don’t want to do the work to make my lenses (the ones in my eyes) focus.

It is what it is.  Hopefully they will recover a bit of their endurance soon.  In the meantime, I hope you all have as good a day and week as you possibly can (which, as I’ve pointed out previously, you will, because whatever happens, once it has happened, is immutable, and was inevitable, and so you have the best‒and worst‒days you could have, every single day).

Dickens wasn’t just playing around with words in the beginning of A Tale of Two Cities, I guess.  No, he was writing floridly because he got paid by the word.  But that’s another story.

*I will indulge in a little sophomoric (and accidental) humor here:  because the S and the D are so close together, especially on the smartphone, I at first wrote “one of those ASS things”.

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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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These our bloggers, as I foretold you, were all spirits and are melted into air, into thin air

Hello and good morning.  As you probably know, it is Thursday.  If you’re reading this later, however, I guess it might be useful for you to know that the 23rd of July in 2026 CE was a Thursday.  Maybe you’re an anthropologist or an archaeologist, and it’s a thousand years from now, or more.  If you’ve forgotten how to convert your year-numbering system to CE (AKA AD) then I am sorry, but I cannot help you.

Oh, wait, maybe I can:  the last time comet Halley passed through the inner solar system was 1986 CE, so 40 years ago from the year in which I write this.  Does that help?

Maybe you need a better description of comet Halley.  Well, it’s a big ball of ice and some rock, and when it gets close to the sun, the heat causes a lot of the ice to sublimate and become vaporous, and the vapor, which scatters light well, turns into a sort of aura and a “tail”, trailing away from the sun in a direction caused by the solar wind…

Oh, so you know what a comet is and looks like, you just want to know about this specific comet.  You want to know things to help you determine which comet it is so that you can get a clear guide to what I mean by “1986 CE/AD”.

Well, I can only tell you a little more than I already have.  It’s a short period comet, orbiting eccentrically (as comets tend to do) from well inside the Oort Cloud or even the Kuiper Belt*.  It is quite regular, as things in orbits that are not frequently significantly perturbed tend to be.  The period of its orbit is, if memory serves, about 76 years.  That ought to help you a lot, at least if you have astronomical records and keep track of such things at any level.

Years, of course, are a natural time increment, being the length of time it takes the Earth to go around the sun once “exactly”, returning to the precise spot in its orbit relative to the sun.  Mind you, the solar system, and the galaxy, and the local group, and all that other stuff are constantly moving, so in fact neither Earth nor comet Halley ever truly returns to where it was before.  But the solar system moves as a whole, more or less consistent in its internal motions despite the fact that its all orbiting the center of the Milky Way** about once every quarter billion years.

Of course, far enough in the future, the period of comet Halley will change, and eventually it will basically evaporate.  Also, the Earth’s orbital period will change over time (though much more slowly, since it is much more massive and its orbit less open to perturbation by other quite massive objects).

And, of course, in about five billion years‒about twenty turns ‘round the Milky Way‒the sun will become a red giant.  It won’t be like flipping a switch or something, where the sun is just the sun one day, 4,999,999,999 years and 364 days (or whatever) from now, then the next day, boom, it’ll swell up and devour the inner solar system.

No, it will be a pretty gradual process, for as the sun fuses more and more hydrogen, there will be proportionally less available, and the outward pressure caused by fusion will decrease, and so the the sun’s core will contract and it will get hotter so that helium will begin to fuse, but that won’t last nearly as long as the hydrogen did.

Also, as the core of the sun contracts and gets hotter, the outer portions of the sun will swell due to the increased heat within.  Well before the sun is a full-on red giant, its increasing temperature will have made conditions impossible on Earth for life as we know it.

But if you’re still around, five billion years from now, I hope your technological advances will make my help utterly irrelevant.  You might even have made the natural life cycle*** of the sun as much a matter of historical trivia as will presumably be the natural lifespan of an average modern human.

Anyway, by five billion years from now, you’ll be seeing the close-encounter/merger/collision of the Andromeda galaxy with the Milky Way, and that’s likely to be quite a spectacle.  That is, unless you’ve developed technology to intervene in that scenario.  It seems implausible, but five billion years is a long time for scientific and technological advancement.

In closing‒just in case you’re even farther in the future even than that and cosmic expansion has caused all but the local galaxy to pass over the cosmic horizon‒I want to tell you that this is not the only galaxy in the universe.  At the time of this writing, within the visible universe, there were between a hundred billion and a trillion extant galaxies.

But the universe, which “began” much more compactly, has been expanding since nearly 14 billion years ago, and if that expansion is continuously accelerating, as currently seems to be the case, the distance to all other galaxies will have eventually become too great and the recession too rapid for light ever to reach the Milky Way from any of them again.  But they did and do exist, even if there’s no trace left of them that you can see.

I thought you might like to know.

TTFN

*Do you need me to explain what these are?  Let me know.  Oh, wait, I’m in your past.  You can’t let me know without time travel (unless I’m still alive in your time), and if you had that, you wouldn’t need me to try to give you clues to the date system used in my time.

**Other candy bars are available.

***Other personal exercise devices are available.

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Fictional birthdays, date misassignments, and the calendars of Caesar and the Pope

Hi, everybody.  It’s Wednesday, July 22nd, which means there are only two months left for you to buy something for Bilbo and Frodo’s birthday.  Though, actually, they’re pretty well-to-do hobbits, so it seems unlikely that you’ll be able to get them something they want that they don’t already have.

Oh, and also, hobbits give other people presents on their own birthdays, not the other way around.  This always struck me as odd, but kind of cool.  It’s almost like saying, “Here’s a little gift for you in celebration of my birth, just to remind you what a gift it is that I was born and that you know me.”

Well, at least that’s one way of looking at it.  Anyway, I don’t think you’re likely to receive a gift from Bilbo and/or Frodo, even on their birthday, apart from being able to read and/or watch The Hobbit and/or The Lord of the Rings.  That’s a lucky break for us all, when you think about it, and you don’t need to wait for September 22nd to partake of it.

I know, I know, why would one celebrate the birthday of a fictional character, anyway?  Well, it’s not as though mainstream culture doesn’t do it already, in oodles of major religious holidays.

Even if you’re convinced that Jesus really existed, biblical scholars agree (so I’m told) that he was not born on December 25th, but sometime in the summer, probably.  The later Church, never shy about playing free and loose with facts of reality (as religions tend to do), reset the date in order to appropriate the typical winter solstice-related festivals heavily celebrated by many cultures.  Such celebrations included Saturnalia (Roman culture‒you can tell because it’s got Saturn in it) and Yule (Norse, with the evergreens and mistletoe and holly and such like).  There were probably others.

The earlier Church cared more about Easter anyway, which makes a bit of internal sense.  That’s the purported miraculous day, when Jesus regenerated and flew to the heavens in his TARDIS.  Or whatever happened, if anything.

Of course, if we all wanted to avoid mislabeling Jeshua’s birthday, we could just celebrate Newtonmas on the previously celebrated day, since Isaac Newton was born on December 25th.  And he definitely did things that, while not literally miraculous, boggle the mind of nearly every mortal with knowledge enough to understand those contributions.

Mind you, he was, by all accounts, a serious dick and a born curmudgeon.  But he was effing smart, and his scientific accomplishments surely compensate for, say, his bloodthirsty reign as Warden of the Royal Mint, and even his really petty and childish vendettas against other scientists.

“‘A was a man.  Take him for all in all.  I shall not look upon his like again.”

Ah, but there’s a catch (or a rub, since we’re quoting Shakespeare):  Newton was born on December 25th according to the Julian calendar.  The Gregorian calendar* did already exist, but England did not adopt it until sometime after Newton’s birth.  They were sort of stubborn about going along with Catholic innovations, and it held them back.  I blame Oliver Cromwell.

Anyway, by the modern, “Gregorian” calendar, Newton would have been born sometime in about…January, something like the 7th, I think, but I’ll look it up (see below).

Why the disparity?  Well, as you may know, the Julian calendar does have leap years.  Earth’s trip around the sun takes 365 and about a quarter days, so the extra full day builds up and is added onto every 4th year.  Except…

…well, it’s not quite a full quarter of an extra day there in that orbital period.  So, over time, the Julian calendar gets ahead of the literal year a bit.  It’s a small bit, but it’s there, and it accumulates.  To correct for this, one of the things the Gregorian calendar does is to skip the leap day on any year divisible by 100**.  It also adds the leap day back on every year divisible by 1000, but I think that’s only applied once since the Gregorian calendar was created.

Anyway, by the time the Gregorian calendar was put in place in England, the Julian calendar had accumulated something like 11 extra leap days.  Maybe it was 12.  If January 7th was the Gregorian date of the 25th of December, Julian, that would be, let’s see…I think 14 days.  I suspect I’m off a bit in my recollection, so I’ll look it up and add a footnote***.

Wow, that was a weird, discursive post, wasn’t it?  I guess it’s probably more entertaining than hearing me talk about my problems with my mental health, at least.  Indeed, one might say that I am instead hereby demonstrating my problems with my mental health‒some of them, at least.  Anyway, I hope this was at least mildly entertaining and possibly informative.  It’s at least probably better than my previous two posts.  In any case, I hope you have a very good day.

*Named for Pope Gregory Peccary the Nocturnal Gregarious Wild Swine.

**I mean “evenly divisible”, of course.  Every number is divisible by 100.  Pi is divisible by 100:  ℼ/100.  “i” is divisible by 100:  i/100.  See?  But they don’t give integer quotients.

***Here goes:  Newton’s birthday would have been January 4th of the following year according to the Gregorian calendar.  This is ten days that needed to be skipped by the Gregorian calendar, or a thousand years worth of Julian calendar mismatch.  By now there would have been about five more extra days in the Julian calendar, so your birthday would be officially labelled as whatever day is 15 days before what it is, Gregorian Style.

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Is this blog good for MY mental health?

For the first time in quite a while, I’m using my mini lapcom to write this blog post.  The main reason for doing this is that my thumbs have really been bugging me lately.  Also, as I’ve often said, it feels more natural to type on the lapcom than on the smartphone, at least so far.  This shouldn’t be a surprise, since I have been typing far longer than I’ve been using a smartphone; indeed, I’ve been typing far, far longer than smartphones have existed.

How do you like them, Apple™?

Who knows, maybe someday I might get to the point where typing on the phone is at least as natural as on the lapcom.  I suppose if I wrote an entire book on one, that probably would make quite a bit of progress toward making it feel more natural.  But it isn’t as natural, and I don’t think it’s likely ever to be, at least for something like typing, because the scale is wrong; it’s too small*.  And of necessity, it either doesn’t have as many available functions as the desktop programs, or they are more difficult to access with any decent speed.

Okay, enough of that topic and/or subject.

I have, as you may know, been having somewhat worse than usual trouble lately with my chronic mood disorder(s).  I’ve been trying various personal interventions (nothing pharmacological at the moment), because it’s getting fairly bad and potentially very dangerous (to me).  Regarding those personal attempts, though, one thing I’ve noticed over time is a kind of internal barrier to certain specific interventions, and it’s kind of puzzling and a bit disturbing.

A long time ago—when our own galaxy was far, far away from where it is now**—I read a lot of various kinds of self-help and psychology books, trying to figure out, among other things, why I was so weird and how to get along despite that fact and such like.  In them, I learned about autosuggestion.  I also learned about a famous case of a proponent thereof who was ridiculed for encouraging people to try repeating to themselves on a few occasions throughout the day:  “Every day, in every way, I am getting better and better.”

Now, I’ve always thought that sounded quite interesting and potentially beneficial, especially since I tend to ruminate on and repeat things in my head anyway, and if I could make it something useful, then I might as well do so.  So, I applied it.

I never applied it in its original form, though.  I used to give myself messages about my mind getting stronger every day, or my will getting stronger, or my power (whatever that meant) growing, or me getting smarter, or me getting stronger in all senses of that word, those sorts of things.  But somehow, I always balked at telling myself that I was getting “better”.

I have tried doing the auto-suggestion thing again lately in various forms.  I think it at least gives me some mental focus, and at times at least makes me feel that maybe I’m getting stronger, or my will is improving, or whatever.  It’s a little silly but not without merit.  However, when I try to do the “better and better” version, it’s as if someone had cast one of those “langlock” jinxes on my mental tongue, and the phrase doesn’t want to come out.

It’s similar to the resistance I have to telling myself that “I love my life and I love myself”.

Interestingly, I was able to do that one while in prison, which feels sort of ironic, since I wasn’t loving life then.  But I knew that my situation was temporary—more so than life itself is, even—and I was able to keep looking forward to getting out and being part of my children’s lives again***.  Having something in the future toward which to look really helps keep your spirits up, or at least your fortitude.

I sometimes wonder if I fear getting better—not morally, I don’t think I have any issue with that.  But I do worry that some aspects of my personality could be quite harmful if I were to think too highly of myself.  I also have real internal revulsion (bordering on literal nausea) toward the idea of being delusional, especially about my own abilities and nature.

I guess it wouldn’t be too big a stretch to say that I fear it.  So many of the ills that I see in the world—current, past, and potentially in the future—are born of people who are too sure of themselves, too convinced they are right, too sure that they are exceptional, too convinced they know “better”.  I would hate to fall into such a banal and pathetic personality trap.  It’s all very silly, probably.  It might even make some of you laugh, or roll your eyes, or throw your hands up at my melodrama.

I suppose if I had anyone around with whom I could just talk about these things, I wouldn’t bother sharing them here on my blog.  They are, after all, quite personal.  But if I don’t share any of the thoughts I have, they are merely evanescent fluff inside my head that will never have any contact with other, external ideas, but merely have autologous impacts.  Of course, everything is like that (as far as we can tell), but I’d like to have some beneficial local impact on myself, at least.

And who knows, it may be possible, in the fullness of time, for the descendants of humanity, or similar beings, to break free of the nature of the transient and vanishing, and become, like the virtual particles near the event horizon of a black hole, real particles, things that endure indefinitely, and actually gain some degree of control over not only their own future but that of the universe itself.

When I’m being somewhat fanciful, I imagine myself contributing to such progress, and even being able to see it to its fruition.

See what I mean by getting egotistical?  I fear that tendency toward grandiosity, because it can be toxic all by itself, and because it is a frequent hallmark of more serious mental illness.  I’m more than a little afraid of that, because I often feel that manic magma of grandiosity rising up inside my mind.  I think it would be all too easy for me to lose my grip on myself entirely.  My mind, such as it is, is pretty much all that I have going for me; I’d rather not lose it if I can help it.

But the more time I spend on my own, the more likely it feels that it’s going to happen.  And I am not enthusiastic about it.

*That’s what she said.  Ha.  Ha.

**On a cosmic scale that doesn’t really mean anything, but time has passed, and the Earth, the Sun, the Milky Way, the local group, and so on are all moving.  From a cosmic scale they don’t seem to change much, but if you zoom in, even the surface of the Earth moves at nearly a thousand miles per hour (depending on your latitude) in its daily rotation alone.  Here’s The Galaxy Song to put it into context.

***It turns out that was overly optimistic and did not come to pass, but there was no good way for me to know this at the time.