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Wouldst thou blog that which thou esteem’st the ornament of life?

Hello and good morning.

It’s Thursday.

TTFN

Ha ha.  I’m just kidding.  It would be absurd for me to let you all off that easily.  Not that you don’t deserve to be let off easily; you probably do.  Whatever “deserve” means.

But it rarely matters in this world what you “deserve” or think that you deserve or have been told that you deserve.  Nature, physics, biology, the universe‒they don’t notice anything at all about what you might “deserve”.  They just do what they do, and if you don’t want to be ground into nothingness before your time, you’d better learn to surf on that chaos.

The notion of people deserving things has always been a bit strange to me.  It is nebulous and ill-considered in almost all situations.  What does it mean, for instance, for someone to deserve love?  How can you deserve something that is dependent on the judgment and emotion of another person or people?  You can’t have an innate right to another person’s esteem.

You can have a right, of sorts, to be left alone (as long as you’re not infringing other people’s rights) but not necessarily to be supported or admired or rewarded or what have you.

I suppose you can have a legal right, for instance, to health care (in principle), depending on the laws where you are.  But you can’t exactly have a moral right to it, because somebody‒a lot of people, really‒has to provide it, both the substance and the processes, the knowledge and the infrastructure.  You cannot morally own another person’s effort without a freely chosen mutual exchange for it.  Otherwise, you’re just enacting a form of slavery (which you’re only willing to do precisely because the service being provided is so important).  Think about the moral illogic there.

Don’t get me wrong; I’ve come to the pretty strong suspicion that “universal” healthcare is generally very good for a society.  It helps make the life of those in that society more stable and more worth living, and I think it tends to help people be more creative and productive, ceteris paribus.  And it can be made a legal right, as I said.

But it cannot be a moral right, and it’s important for people to remember that.  Because when people start feeling truly entitled, they tend to become unreasonable, forgetting that in the real universe, everything requires energy and effort and understanding, and there is always some tradeoff somewhere.

Again, I want to reiterate, I think universal healthcare is generally a good use of resources, one that has a sort of money multiplier effect on a society, at least when administered well (which is not a low bar to clear).  But, again, it cannot be a moral right.  It has to be paid for by somebody, somewhere.  You don’t have a moral right to a particular bridge being built, say, or to cable TV and internet access, or to a luxury car…or to any car at all, really.

How could people have an innate right to a car, for instance?  What would that mean for the billions and billions of people who lived before cars ever existed?  What about air travel?

Heck, what about space travel?  In the future, space travel might become necessary for most people to be able to work, rather as cars are in some places and situations now.  Will that imply that there is and has always been a moral right to space travel?  Have we all had our rights systematically thwarted by the tyranny of linear time and causality?  Whom do we sue?

I think we should dispense with the notion of “deserving” things in general, except specific performance or products for which one has paid through mutual, freely chosen exchange with someone else.  In other words, if you made a contract and you held up your end of the bargain, it makes sense to say that you deserve for the other party to hold up their end of the bargain.

Everywhere else, the notion of deserving things tends to be subjective and self-serving, and it tends to turn people into entitled assholes who appear to think of themselves as the center of the universe.

Of course, physically, each person is the center of their own visible universe.  Congratulations, you are experiencing the phenomenon of a 3-dimensional horizon.  It happens to us all.  You are not special.

Well, you are special in some senses, of course.  You have various specific, local aspects and attributes that are not exactly duplicated anywhere within our visible universe.  This makes you unique.  Which, ironically, makes you just like everybody else.

Dash was right; saying that everybody is special is just another way of saying that no one is.  And, in fact, except from the highly parochial, anthropocentric, myopic, terrified point of view of the typical human, no one is special‒not from “outside” anyway.

Still, it’s okay to think that the ones you love are truly the most wonderful people in the universe, because‒in the universe of your mind and experience‒they are.  Unless you don’t think they are, but that’s a different sort of problem.

Perhaps one of the biggest problems with the concept of “deserving” things is that it is a powerful impediment to feelings of gratitude.  And that’s pretty pathetic, both for those around the ungrateful ones and for the ungrateful ones themselves.  If you think you’re entitled to many things, you’re likely to be miserable, because you’re unlikely to get all those things to which you feel entitled, and you’ll be prone to make the people around you miserable, too.

You don’t deserve to read my blog.  And I don’t deserve to have you read it, nor to have you like and share it (as in my song, below).  But I am grateful that you are reading, and would be pleased if you decided to spread it around.  I am lucky to have any good things at all, as are all people who have good things.

And now, for real this time:

TTFN

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“All my dreams pass before my eyes, a curiosity”

I don’t feel much like writing anything today.  Or, rather, I don’t feel like writing anything that isn’t morbid and gloomy and morose and dark, and I know that people don’t like to read that stuff.  Of course, this blog isn’t necessarily about entertaining or even informing other people, though it’s nice when I can do that.  This blog is of me, by me, and for me, ultimately.  Which should make me satisfied (though not necessarily happy) just to write it.

Well, satisfaction is a tricky and evanescent thing at the best of times.  It’s not a good biological strategy to have lasting satisfaction in any kind of organism.  I’ve talked about this before, and I’ve referenced Yuval Noah Harari’s example of the squirrel that is durably satisfied by a single nut:  it would be a content, happy squirrel for the short time it lived before starving (painlessly) to death.  That doesn’t sound too bad, honestly, but natural selection will never tend to allow such a creature to endure let alone thrive and reproduce.

Anyway, I’m not satisfied by writing this blog, but there is a pressure of a sort to do so, and by doing so, I relieve that pressure briefly.  I guess that’s a good thing, as far as it goes.  It’s not much good, but it is some good.

It’s about the only personal thing I’ve done in a long time.  I haven’t sung or played any music nor even listened to any music in what feels like a very long time.  I haven’t really been reading very much, either, and certainly not much about topics or from genres that formerly interested me.

I got a Stephen King book that I hadn’t read before, but I lost interest before the real plot even got going.  I’ve tried to reread Insomnia, which is one of my favorite Stephen King books, but that doesn’t hold me for long, either.  Neither Tolkien nor Donaldson pique my interest, nor Lovecraft nor Poe nor Shakespeare, and I can’t seem to summon the energy to do any science reading either.  Even my own stories are boring to me.

I am just washed out, maybe.  I am tired and I am alone.  And yes, in some spiritual solidarity kinds of senses, one is not ever alone, because there are people out there going through things such as what you are going through, and who would willingly offer you moral support or whatever.

That sort of reassurance has never made very much sense to me, let alone providing any comfort, though I appreciate the thought.  It must be a neurotypical notion of some kind, useful and even truly helpful for those whose identities‒such as they are‒are dependent upon their group or tribe or whatever, and who are able to feel connected by such means.  It’s never provided comfort to me.  If anything, it’s more depressing to know that many other people have been depressed, are depressed, and will be depressed out there in the world.

My feeling of being alone is somewhat analogous to the old Woody Allen joke, if joke it was, in which he said he doesn’t want to achieve immortality through his work, he wants to achieve immortality by not dying.

So, yeah, I don’t want to stop feeling alone because some hypothetical people out there are going through similar feelings or wish me well in some general sense, well-intentioned and appreciated though such things are.  It doesn’t work for me; it doesn’t assuage my feeling of being alone.  I want to stop feeling alone by actually having a friend or friends or family with me.

Of course, that’s a tall and rather hypocritical order.  I don’t even like being around myself, so it’s hard in good conscience to want to inflict myself upon other people.  And it’s not as though I can really conceive of wishing to “be” someone else, though I can certainly wish to change some of my attributes or improve myself.  Mostly, most of the time, I just want to get away from me, from awareness, from the constant internal pressure that brings no reward but which certainly punishes if not followed.

Anyway, sorry, this has not been amusing or upbeat or in any way optimistic.  At least you know I’m not sugar coating things.  Except, really, I am.  I do not let out anything like all the dark thoughts and notions that go through my head.

I actually almost always try to be more upbeat and amusing than I feel.  I try to be positive for other people.  I don’t know that I succeed very much, but I do try; it’s one of those pressures that I cannot easily ignore.  Doing it brings no real happiness or joy or satisfaction, any more than any achievement ever really brings me such things or ever has.  I just feel the pressure, the tension.

I don’t know.  It doesn’t matter.  No one really cares, and that includes me, at some level.  Like Kansas said, everything is dust in the wind.

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“Now far ahead the road has gone…”

First and most importantly for today, I want to say, “Happy Birthday, Bilbo and Frodo.”  So, I will say it:  Happy Birthday, Bilbo and Frodo.

Yes, though the movies were inexcusably unclear about the fact, Bilbo and Frodo were both born on September 22nd (Shire reckoning).  Mind you, they were born 78 years apart (Bilbo first, in case that was not obvious).  So the big party at the beginning of The Fellowship of the Ring was a joint celebration of Bilbo’s 111th birthday and Frodo’s 33rd birthday (the year in which one officially comes of age in Hobbit culture).

Also, the people inside the tent in the big dinner at the party were chosen to total 144, matching their hosts’ combined age, a number also called (by hobbits and by us) a gross.  Many of the guests were quite miffed when they learned of that system, but as usual, Bilbo DGAF.

So, anyway, yeah, it’s Frodo’s and Bilbo’s birthday.

It’s also the day of the Autumnal Equinox, when the sine curve of daylight versus nighttime crosses the x-axis toward negative territory.  In other words, from now until spring, the nights will be longer than the daylight‒in the northern hemisphere, anyway.  In the southern hemisphere it is the opposite.

And, of course, it is the first day of Autumn, which is my favorite season and always has been (well, it has been for as long as I can remember, though certainly not longer than I’ve been alive).  It’s the time of most of my favorite holidays and so on (including Bilbo’s and Frodo’s birthday) and it was the time when school started again (which was a good thing to me).

Unfortunately, in south Florida, most of the physical charms of Autumn are almost completely effaced.  And the charms of south Florida have long since been almost completely blunted for me.  Unfortunately, I really don’t have anywhere else to go, at least not anyplace I could go in good conscience.

It would be nice to spend at least one more Autumn-Winter-Spring up north, to experience the change of the seasons again, before I die.  I’m not that optimistic about my chances, though.  I don’t see how it’s going to happen.

I often think about just…leaving here, on foot, and walking towards Michigan, just seeing if I can make it all the way back to the house in which I grew up, or if I would die trying.  Either outcome would be acceptable to me.  And I often feel that September 22nd would be an excellent day to start such a trek, since that’s when Frodo left Bag End to begin his own long journey.

Right now, though, I don’t know that I am in good enough shape for such a trip.  Though, of course, the trip would do at least a bit of working me into shape as I went along (or it might completely wreck me).

I think I have said here before that just going off for a very long walk would not be a terrible way to end myself, not least because nobody can intervene to try to stop you or hospitalize you, because you’re not doing anything that’s definitely life-threatening or associated with self harm or self-destruction.  It’s just walking.

That’s much more ambiguous than, say, nooses or blades or gallons of flammable liquids or big bags of rat poison or even bottles of analgesics of various kinds, all of which (and more) I have ready and set to go.  But those all make a mess, at least potentially.

Of course, I’ve also mused‒here as well as elsewhere, I think‒that maybe an ideal thing would be just to swim out into the Atlantic and keep going until it kills me one way or the other.  That way there really is no cleanup required.  Bury my body in Davy Jones’s Locker, you might say.

But swimming out into the ocean is more or less irreducibly frightening, at least to me.  I don’t think I could get past the activation energy required to start that process.  I’m definitely a good enough swimmer, but I’m not a comfortable swimmer, especially not in deep water.

Mind you, I’m also not exactly comfortable with poisoning myself with one or more things, nor with immolating myself, nor with hanging.  Those things are daunting, and I wouldn’t claim otherwise.

Cutting is less intimidating, interestingly enough.  It hurts, of course, but I’m pretty well used to that much of it (a face which can be frustrating in and of itself), and I have various topical lidocaine preparations that would make that process at least slightly easier.

But blood is messy, and I wouldn’t like to have someone need to clean up such a mess on my account.  This is also a problem with jumping from a high hotel balcony, which is another available option.  Maybe if I were ever to get to the point where I just hate everyone so much that I don’t mind inconveniencing anyone, even strangers, I might be willing to do one of those messy things.

Walking is still probably the best thing, though.  One might even see it as a test of a kind, a sorting process:  will one gain new self-respect and maybe even some contemplative insight on a very long walk, or will one die in the process?  Either outcome is not too bad.

Alas, I need to get in somewhat better shape before starting such a quest, and that’s frustrating.  My chronic pain doesn’t help, either, though there are interventions that can help that, at least a little, and it might even improve over the length of a long enough walk.

It would be nice to see the seasons change at a slightly accelerated rate while walking north.  But it may be too late for that this year.

Anyway, if I do such a thing, I’m unlikely to announce it here at the time.  I would likely just leave, and only maybe send intermittent reports as I go along, but with some built in delay such that, by the time people could see how far I had gone, I would have been well past that point.

Ironically, if I were suddenly to do that, I think almost nobody would even realize it.  No one tends to notice when I’m not around, as it were, except perhaps to feel a slight lightening in the air in rooms I used to inhabit.

Whatever.  Happy first day of autumn (in the northern hemisphere).  Happy equinox.  And a most joyous Bilbo’s and Frodo’s birthday.

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Trying to atone down the noise

First of all, G’mar chatima tova to anyone out there observing Yom Kippur (it’s not really a celebratory holiday, since it is the day of atonement; one observes it).

Mind you, someone really observing Yom Kippur isn’t going to be reading this today, nor will they be working in any way other than rabbinical duties (if they have them) and so on.  There’s no carrying of any burdens, certainly no driving, no starting any flames (or anything analogous thereto), and so on.  There should certainly not be any going to work or writing blog posts (or writing anything else).

But then again, I am not observant, not really, and I am not a believer (in anything really), so I don’t feel any deep shame about the whole thing.  It’s more a bit of sadness.  I am alone.  I wish I had a community or a family or somebody with whom to observe such holidays and traditions and even proscriptions.  I honestly don’t think I would mind which ones, at least up to a point, though I don’t think I would commit to any flagrantly destructive nonsense.

Though, as I say that, it occurs to me that I do plenty of things that are flagrantly destructive toward myself.  I just do so on small scales and in small amounts at a time; I don’t really want to get Baker Acted (again).

I do tend to fast on Yom Kippur, and I am fasting today‒no food or water except that required to take medication and such.  I actually did a pre-fast most of the day yesterday, though I allowed myself to drink water and I ate some food in the evening.  I like fasting, both conceptually and experientially.  It definitely sharpens my mind in particular ways, and it evens out my emotions a little bit (not always in a good state though).

I honestly wish I had the strength of character to fast more often or just longer.  To be honest, I would like the strength to fast indefinitely.  After a certain point, if you go without eating long enough, you never have to eat again.  That sounds like a real load off.

Anyway, I am fasting.  And I do try to use this event, this sort of chapter marker day, to possibly stop doing certain things I do deliberately to harm myself (without doing the sorts of things that make one subject to possible involuntary hospitalization, i.e., Baker Acting, though I do those sorts of things from time to time as well, and have done so recently).

The idea behind such things, from my own admittedly atypical perspective, is that I might as well do things that shorten my life, since frankly I am not feeling much of anything good about living, and have not felt so in a long time.  So, if I can chop at least some of it off at the end, that would be a net benefit:  decreased negative is a relative positive.

I am also more than open to the irony of possibly one day finding a true desire to live or something for which to live, only to find myself dying of some disease I invoked through my deliberate, earlier self-destructive habits.  It would be funny in a way, a practical joke that I knowingly and willingly played on myself.  Bazinga, as Sheldon Cooper might say.

But I will see if I can break at least one such habit today.  It’s not always easy; when I put aside certain self-destructive things, I often find that I begin to feel more depressed.  The prospect of living longer makes me feel depressed, because there are only very few things in my life that make it worth bothering with, and my most honest assessment is that it is unlikely to improve, ever.  Like a mortal who keeps a Great Ring, I will not grow or obtain new life, I will merely continue, until at last every breath is a weariness.

“At last”, he says.  It’s already happening and has been happening for a long time.  And there is no Valinor to which I can go to recover (as if they would have me, anyway).

So, yeah, anyway, that’s what’s going on with me today.  I doubt that I’ll keep fasting after sundown, but if I do, I will let you know.  It would be nice not to be fat when I die, at last.  Still, I don’t actually expect things to work out in the ways that I want them to work out.  That’s not the nature of reality.

Anyway, I don’t really do too much anticipation about the future, nor do I ruminate all that much about the past, despite what readers might think.  Though I try to prepare for various contingencies just as a practical matter, I don’t tend to have long-term expectations or anticipations.  The world is too chaotic for such things, and the universe makes no promises other than that it will follow its laws everywhere and always, whatever those might ultimately be.

So, yeah.  I won’t say “Happy Yom Kippur” because that doesn’t make much more sense than Happy Memorial Day does.  Have a good one, though, whether you observe it or not.  A “good” day is never an inappropriate thing to have, more or less by definition.

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Fevers, Chills, and Sweats, LLP

Hi, everybody.

(Hi, Doctor E!)

I’m sorry about not posting a post yesterday.  There was nothing deep or symbolic going on; I was just out sick.

You may recall that I left the office early on Tuesday, but I needed to go in on Wednesday because of payroll.  Well, by Wednesday evening, I was feeling really run down, and then by the time I got back to the house, I was starting to have some shaking chills and to spike a fever*.  This is despite the fact that I already had/have constant antipyretics on board (NSAIDs and acetaminophen, for instances).  So, though my fever never got very high‒just over a hundred I think‒that might translate into significantly higher without meds.  Though we cannot be sure; it’s not necessarily a simple, linear effect.

Anyway, between that and general aches and malaise and a dry cough and whatnot, I stayed at the house yesterday.

Sometime during the night last night, my fever seems to have broken; certainly I woke up quite sweaty and my temperature reads as it normally does on my digital thermometer.  So, now I am feeling a bit less ill, though I am by no means at my best, whatever that might be.

I don’t know, my best probably happened around the times of my kids’ births.  Certainly those were the best events to happen in my life; few things even come close.  Marrying my ex was pretty close, I guess, and what happened subsequently doesn’t change that fact.

I certainly wouldn’t go back and change it if I could.  I would not change anything in my past‒even if I were given that power‒if it had the remotest chance to prevent my children from being born.  That is non negotiable.

So, yeah, with some minor tangents, that’s a sort of summary of what happened yesterday that led to me not making a blog post.  I will also not be posting tomorrow, because it is a day off work this week.

I was considering not working on this coming Monday, because it is Yom Kippur.  I am not observant, but nevertheless, I almost always fast on the so-called Day of Atonement.  I think it’s good for a person to do that from time to time.  It’s a good sort of “reset” button, metabolically as well as mentally.

I certainly feel like I can use it.  But I don’t necessarily take the day off work when fasting.  And given that I’ve missed a day and a half over the last week, taking another day on Monday would probably trouble my conscience.

Anyway, maybe I’ll have some manner of spiritual epiphany during my fast.  It’s unlikely, though.  It’s never happened before.  I think I would need to fast longer than 24 hours to be able to expect any kind of spiritual revelation.  But who knows?  It’s not impossible to experience some mental clarity and insight after just 24 hours without food or water.

Whatever the case, it’s not usually a bad thing for me to eat less.

Well, other than all that, I am not at all sure what to discuss today, and though I am recovering, I am still under the weather.  So, I won’t try to introduce some other topic now, even in passing.  I will, instead, draw this to a close for the day and for the week.  I hope you all have had a better, or at least a healthier, week than I have had, and that you all have a good weekend, too.

Though I will be fasting, I plan to write a post on Monday, so you can look forward to that, if that’s the sort of thing to which you tend to look forward.  Take care.

*Those two things are part of the same process.  When you’re getting a fever, your body resets the target point of your internal thermostat; this is a real thing, and it lies primarily in your hypothalamus.  So, all of a sudden, your body perceives that you are much less warm than you are supposed to be, and so you feel subjectively cold and can start to shiver, even as your core body temperature begins to rise.  Indeed, the biological “purpose” of shivering is to make you warmer.

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“When the storm arrives, would you be seen with me?”

Okay, well, I will have set this up to post at about 8 am my time today, just as I did with yesterday’s post.  I have not yet looked at my stats for yesterday’s post, so I don’t know whether, so far, doing this has made any difference in my readership.

That’s fine, though, because it would be absurd to try to read any conclusions from one day of a slightly changed time of posting.  It’s not a statistically significant sample size, among other things.  So, it’s best to try it for a bit and see how it goes and only to draw conclusions after I’ve had at least a decent run of days.

I am still somewhat under the weather from yesterday, but I have to go to the office because it is payroll day, and that needs to get done.  I did leave the office at lunchtime yesterday, and when I got back to the house I knocked myself out with some benadryl and some CBD gummies with a bit of delta-9 and delta-8.  It did help me sleep, at least, though I’m sure it wasn’t an ideal sleep.  Still, beggars can’t be choosers, generally speaking, though I’m sure there are exceptions to that “rule”.

I did wake up hideously early, though, even for me, but I didn’t want to take any further sedation, because then it might affect my ability to do what I need to do today.

I forgot to take some of my vitamins and stuff yesterday evening, including the lithium supplement that I’ve been taking.  I didn’t take that this morning, either, just to see how the dearth of it will affect me, if at all.  I know, I know, I’m doing too much haphazard starting and stopping of variables, and it makes it very difficult‒as well as potentially very misleading‒to draw conclusions about what effects these interventions are having.

But I have a difficult time being patient with this stuff.  Anyway, this was an accidental skip last night; I’m just continuing it for the moment.  We’ll see whether there is any noticeable change in my mood, but it certainly didn’t revolutionize my affect by taking it, and it’s not supposed to have the same kind of delayed effect that the traditional antidepressants require.

So, yeah, with both of those things, we shall see how the outcome goes.  Or maybe we won’t, I don’t know.  There are no guarantees.  Even the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics could be wrong, though it is unlikely.

I’m going to try to abstain from discussing my darker moods and thoughts here for at least a little while.  I’ve begun to wonder if ruminating on them and putting them out there in writing is making them worse rather than making them any better at all.

I guess I’m doing lots of little would-be therapeutic interventions for me.  Someone has to do it, and I’m probably the one best placed to take action, though I am entangled in the outcomes, which may confound things.  Still, I’m the only one who is going to do anything for me, so there are no other options.

I am in a very real sense quite alone in my situation.  I guess that’s not new, is it?  I’ve tended to be the one who helps other people, not the one who gets helped.  That’s just the way it goes, though.  Like Chris Cornell sang, “Arm yourself, because no one else here will save you.”  These are words of wisdom, and not just for fictional super-spies.

I still haven’t played guitar (and sang) for more than one little fifteen-minute interval over the last three weeks or so.  That’s an estimate, of course.  It is mildly worrying or at least disappointing how much I am losing interest in so many things that usually have interested me.  I certainly haven’t written any fiction, nor have I studied much new physics or biology or what have you, though I have hearkened to the computer science/AI stuff a bit, because at least that is somewhat interesting and intriguing.

Well, I will endeavor to persevere and even to improve.

You all, my readers, could in principle spot changes in my mental status before I even recognize them, myself, and I do hope, as well as request, that you do that.  It would be most welcome and potentially useful.  I thank you in advance.  In the meantime, I hope you’ve been having a good week, and that you continue to do so, and indeed, that each day is an improvement over the previous one.  Why not?  It doesn’t take much improvement per day, if it is every day, for truly impressive results to accrue.

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Say to them “My Own Special Creation has sent me to you.”

I think I will really keep this post short today, because I think I may be coming down with something.  I’m not certain, but I have the beginning of that sort of systemic feeling of interleukins, interferons, and other cytokines and such hitting the system.  I sometimes don’t get a very clear early fever response to things because I almost always have NSAIDs on board, so it can be hard to tell.

If I remember to go according to plan, I will have set this to post at about 8 o’clock eastern time.  I don’t recall if it’s EST or EDT, because I honestly don’t really distinguish them.  It’s all arbitrary, anyway; as long as everyone in this time zone is calling it the same time, they can call it Eastern Nap Time if they want.

There must have been some decent-seeming reasons for creating the whole “daylight savings time” thing; I mean, Ben Franklin was involved, I think, and he was not a stupid man, though like everyone he had his limits.  But for the life of me, I don’t see why we keep using it.  I don’t think it has any residual benefits, if it ever had any at all, which I doubt.

Oh, well.  That’s not really important, and it’s a bit of a tangent.  The point I was making is that I will have set this to go up at about 8 am, my local time, to see if that has any effect on how many people read it.  I will also try not to be moody and morose*, because I don’t want to frighten any potential new readers away.

At least, I don’t want to frighten them with that kind of stuff.  If they are frightened by my would-be sense of humor, or my topics of interest, then there’s nothing much I can do about that.  Like Popeye and God and that character from La Cage aux Folles, I am what I am.  I’m not going to try to change who I am just to get attention, in case that’s not obvious.

In other news, well, I am not really going to talk about the news much, in general.  It’s generally boring and/or stupid.  Though the agent(s) breakout from OpenAI and hacking of Hugging Face** was quite interesting, and I’ve watched some videos, by people who specialize in such things, about what happened.  It’s quite fascinating.  I won’t try to comment on it, because I am not an expert, but I’ll embed a video from computerphile, featuring Robert Miles, and another one that goes over the whole thing by a new YouTuber I’ve recently encountered, both of whom have interesting insights into the situation.

Let’s see, what else is going on…

Well, I just checked my temperature, and I may just barely have a low-grade fever.  Then again, body temperature fluctuates throughout the day, and I haven’t often tested it at this hour.  In general, for most people, body temperature bottoms out around 3 am, but those people tend to be asleep at three.  I had already been awake for about two hours by then, after dropping off to sleep at maybe eleven pm.  It’s 4:30 as I am writing the first draft here, and the heck of it is that this is not an outlier.  It’s not significantly different than usual.

So, if people wonder why I tend to be grouchy or whiny or what have you, at least that gives me some leeway I would hope.

How’s the weather by you guys right now?  I know, you’re not all in the same place, but I would still be interested in your comments about your local weather.  Down by me it’s quite humid and slightly rainy, and quite warm/hot, though it’s better in the morning.  However, at this time of day, the air is often stagnant and still, which makes humidity rather more oppressive.  Still, this is not all that big a difficulty.  If I could be cured of my chronic pain but had to face muggy weather every day for the rest of my life, well…

…actually, I would have to think about it pretty carefully.  But it would be tempting.  Still, both problems can be addressed, at least to some degree, without making weird deals that trade one misery for another, trying to assess which is the lesser of two evils.

Even if there were some type of supernatural entity with which one could make such bargains‒and I do not believe in such a thing‒I don’t think I would try to seek its favors.  I don’t like owing debts to people, let alone gods or demons or whatever.

Okay, well, I’ve been a bit all over the place this morning, haven’t I?  I’ll blame it on being slightly ill, as if it were any different than how I usually am.

I hope you all are well and having a good day.

*Which sounds like a law firm.

**Why did they name their company after the larval form of xenomorphs?

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“Sometimes I think I’d like to watch it burn.”

Umm…I don’t have any idea what to write this morning, this work-week beginning, this dawn of yet another iteration of zero.  But I guess that hasn’t ever stopped me before, though it feels more prominent now than I remember it feeling in the past.

But such feelings are unreliable guides to the past and present actual state of reality.  This is not to say that they are absolutely untrue and misleading; if that were the case, not only would everyone have picked up on it long ago, but it would have been weeded out of the gene pool.  A perfectly unreliable memory is no better than no memory at all.

On the other hand, it’s not evolutionarily sensible to have a perfect memory, either, largely because the information required to store perfectly all the things that have happened to you, and to which your senses had access, would very rapidly exceed your “hard drive” space.  No, your nervous system must sift out the useful information and discard the useless, or the not salient or pertinent, as much as possible, because the brain, though tremendously useful, is extremely energy intensive.

Human brains burn about 20 percent of the daily calories burned by a person.  Yes, that’s true even of people you consider morons.  The most ignorant person around still has a version of the best operating system available in the known universe (at least for the moment).  How much smarter is the least intelligent but functioning human compared to the smartest nematode…or even the smartest house cat?

Oh, who cares?  I don’t know why I go on about this nonsense.  It’s not as though people are actually interested.  I’m hemorrhaging readers steadily, it seems.  I’m not exactly sure why.

Maybe it’s because my insomnia and early awakening are getting steadily worse, and so I’m posting my posts earlier and earlier.  Maybe if I delayed them, like I do with the audio posts, more people would notice them.  What do you think?  Should I try that?  Would it bother you if my posts went up at, say 8 am versus whenever I finish them?  Would it matter?  Do you think there is a better time for them?

I don’t really expect it to make a difference.  No one notices when I’m not around, so to speak.  I’ve been banned from Meta platforms for some time now, and the only people who have touched base were the few people who did so anyway.  There are quite a few people whom I would consider friends, and who could get in contact with me, but they don’t.

I’m not saying that they ought to check on me.  It’s not their responsibility.  But I suspect at least a part of the whole thing is that, once I am not even peripherally in their lives, people don’t really notice.  If anything, I suspect that they probably feel a slight lightness, a sense of greater vivacity, some decreased sense of dreariness about life, the universe, and everything.

Certainly I have not heard anyone complain about the fact that I’m not around.  No one says they miss me, that their lives are emptier without me nearby.  No, most people either don’t notice (at least superficially) or just experience relief.

Even the four dollar coins* I keep for helping me make certain decisions are not on my side (not that they would be, since they are coins, not people).  Late last week‒I think it was Saturday, but it might have been Friday‒when I was feeling particularly low, I asked if I should just kill myself.  I spun the four coins and, on the first try, I got four heads.

Heads is the side I use to mean “yes”.

So, yeah, even the ladies (2 Susan B. Anthonies and 2 Sacagaweas) don’t seem to think having me around is worth much.  Of course, they are just coins.  I know there is no actual thought or judgment there, let alone attachment or agency.  It’s just sort of perversely funny to me.

Whatever.  I’m tired of this, and everything is getting less and less consequential.  I think, unless someone voices clear and convincing objections in the comments today, I will set up tomorrow’s post to come out at 8 eastern time, at least roughly.

Or maybe I just won’t post anything.  It’s not as though doing this is helping my mental health (obviously), and I doubt that I’m contributing anything to the world of ideas.  Even if I had some deep and interesting insight, it would go essentially nowhere and reach almost no one.

Oh, again, who cares?  Thanks for reading today.  I hope you have a good week, a good remainder of the month, a good rest of the year, and a good rest of your lives‒just in case you never hear from me again.

*By which I mean four one-dollar coins, not $4 coins.

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Meet the new year, same as the old year

L’shana tovah!  It’s Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, so for those of you who celebrate it, I hope you have a good one.

It’s Saturday, also, of course, and I am going in to the office.  I can hardly claim to feel slighted to be working on Rosh Hashanah, since if I were actually observant, I would never be working on any Saturday, since that is Shabbat.  I would be hypocritical to try to claim the day off by some form of religious right.

It is also rather sad and frustrating that I just have no one with whom to celebrate this and other important days.  Tomorrow is another very important day, and of course next weekend begins Yom Kippur, which is the so-called highest of the holy days.

Anyway, all that’s neither here nor there.  It has nothing to do with me other than memories.  I can’t even share well-wishes with people on Facebook as I used to do, thanks to my weird expulsion from Meta’s sites.

But it’s not as though anyone has a right to Facebook.  Not even the people who created it have a right to it.  It can all be taken from them at any moment by the whims of fate, and sooner or later, it all will be taken from them, just as everything else will be taken from everyone else as well.

Again, happy new year.

Each day is the beginning of a new year depending on one’s point of view.  And every second is the beginning of a new day, and so on.  Likewise, each day is the end of a year, and each second is the end of a day.

And each moment is the end of some noteworthy number of lives.  Every day is the last day some parent out there will lift and carry their child.  Every day is the last day some parent will ever see their child, and every day is the last day some child will see their parent.

Every moment is, for someone out there, the last moment they will spend with the person they love the most.

This is not even counting the suffering, the fear, and the deaths of non-human animals and other forms of life.

So, yeah.  Happy, happy.  Joy, joy.

Sorry, I know I’m being perhaps even more of a downer than usual.  It’s what I’m best at, I suspect.  I should charge for my services; after all, like the Joker said, if you’re good at something you should never do it for free.

I don’t know if there’s actually a market for what I’m selling, though.  I’m down to about a dozen or fewer regular readers here, and it’s not as though anyone’s sharing my posts or calling them to the attention of friends as being entertaining or insightful.  That’s not surprising.

I am quite creative in many ways, but those ways all tend toward the dark and horrible.  Way back when I was writing the first science fiction/fantasy* novel I ever completed, some of the best parts in it were the “horror” elements, which just crept in as I wrote the type of story I liked to write.

I seem mainly to be a source of darkness in the world‒though I’ve been part of bringing some wonderful things into the world as well.  I’ve even done my share of good deeds, and possibly more than my share.  That’s pretty much over now, though.

Of course, darkness doesn’t require me to bring it into existence.  It makes no difference to the universe if one declares oneself, say, an Agent of Chaos or of Entropy.  That’s about as sensible as someone claiming to be an agent of gravity or of the electromagnetic force.

Real things, fundamental things, don’t require human (or other) agents to carry them out.  They simply are, they happen, there is no avoiding them.  They happen with or without anyone even knowing they happen.  This is one of the things that should make everyone suspicious of every religion, really:  why would real omnipotent force require agents?

So yeah, like I said, every moment is laden with loss and suffering and death, and ironically, this will only ever end if and when everyone and everything is dead.

Happy New Year.

*Yes, it counted as science fiction and fantasy.  That was one of the points of it:  it told of an ultra-high tech, space faring civilization that also used “magic”.

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You can’t teach an old dogma new tricks

It’s Friday, but I won’t thank God for it this time, because I expect to work tomorrow.  I also am simply disinclined to thank that imaginary sky daddy for much today, nor to say that he/it is great, since today is the 25th anniversary of the 9-11 attacks, which were just the latest in the atrocities performed in the supposed name of the God of Abraham™ (other deities are available, though they are not really any better).

I’m not going to get into September 11th related stuff, though.  I doubt that I would have anything to say about it that others haven’t said at least as well as I ever could.  If you would like a good discussion by a very good thinker, Sam Harris released a recent, brief podcast about it.  The event both shaped and catalyzed his career as a public thinker.  It shaped a lot of things, and unfortunately, very, very few of them produced anything good or beneficial as a consequence, unlike Sam’s work.

I don’t know what I am going to write, though.  I’m still really wiped out from a very bad pain day yesterday (that pain is far from gone).  Also, I somehow scratched my right eye during the night, and it is quite irritated, so looking at the smartphone as I type is more irksome than usual.

I had at least a passing thought, though, about the notion of owning up to when we’re making immoral (but best available) choices rather than justifying to ourselves why what we are doing is “right”, which can sometimes lead to increasingly excessive behaviors driven by a sense (sometimes desperately clasped out of fear of facing the facts) of self-righteousness that can expand into dogmatism.

Dogmatism almost never makes any real sense, and it often leads to terrible, horrible, and reprehensible deeds (9-11 was just one of countless such depravities).

I think it would be better for us, culturally and perhaps individually, if we owned up to it when we violated our own precepts, even‒or especially‒when we do it out of real necessity.  At least it might give us more intellectual and moral humility.

For instance, it says in the founding document of the United States that life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are unalienable rights.  In other words, they cannot ever be taken away by some outside power, not morally.

One can argue whether those rights actually exist and whether any such rights exist and so on, but I’m not interested in that discussion right now (though it is a good topic).  But if we assume arguendo that the rights enumerated are real and apply to the USA, then we cannot resist the fact that we violate them frequently‒by law, by custom, by various accidental means.

We imprison people, for instance, often out of necessity (when we do it “legitimately”, anyway, but again, that’s another subject).  If someone is dangerous to others and cannot be cured of whatever makes them dangerous, then we must separate such a person from others to protect their rights.  That doesn’t mean we aren’t violating the first person’s rights; those rights are declared to be unalienable.  But we are trapped in a place of competing rights, and must do our best to balance them.

We should admit that to ourselves.  We should say to ourselves, “Yes, we are violating this person’s rights, and it is not by nature a moral act.  But it is the best act we have available right now, so we will accept and endure the pangs of our consciences and do it, while always trying to find better alternatives.”

It’s that last part on which the crux of my point rests.  When we admit that we are doing something that is not moral, but that is the most moral option we have available, then we leave open‒indeed, we invite and encourage‒the quest for better solutions.  Whereas, when we tell ourselves we’re right to commit such violations, then we effectively raise a barrier against forces that might improve things.

When challenged on the morality of such deeds, if we haven’t already faced their morally turbid status, we unfortunately often get defensive and double down, because it’s too uncomfortable for most people most of the time to face the fact that they might be really wrong about something really consequential.

But dogmatism precludes improvement.  And if you believe that there is no room for improvement in any ideas you have been handed, then, well…I’ve got a bridge to sell you.  You can pay me for it in cash or, better yet, in precious metals and jewelry‒I’m hoping to make a great big heap of gems and jewelry and try to sleep on it.  Maybe it would cure my insomnia; I’ve always suspected that Smaug was onto something.

Anyway, that’s enough.  I don’t think I did justice to that random, walk-in topic, and I may not even have been coherent.  But, it was the best I could do for now, until I can figure out a way to do better.

I hope you have a good day today.  I will write another post tomorrow, exclusis improvisis.