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I am near the end of my rope with this

Well, here we are again.  It’s Saturday, and as I warned you, I am writing/have written/will have written a blog post.

Is this a good thing?  Is it a bad thing?  I suppose that’s all in the mind of the reader (or the avoider as the case may be).  I don’t think there’s any final, objective assessment of the goodness or badness of me writing (or having written) this blog post.  Everything happens as it must, I suppose.

There’s nothing deep about that.  I’m not saying that everything happens for a reason, as if there is some telos to reality; as far as I can see, there’s no reason (ha!) to suspect that there’s any deep meaning to things other than simply that they are.  The universe does what it does, physics does what it does, and once it’s done, it doesn’t change and could not in any sensible way have been otherwise.  Thus, everything happens as it must, in the sense that it had no choice.

I’ve gone over this ground many times before, I’m sure.  There must be figurative ruts in this thought path deep enough to be able to fit the Loch Ness monster, if you flooded the ruts with water, and if there were a real monster (other than humans) associated with Loch Ness.

Sorry.  I had a very bad sleep last night, even for me, and here I think we can bring an objective measure of badness to bear.  Sleep that doesn’t last and doesn’t bring any refreshment is sleep that’s not doing what is expected of it, and that’s bad.

I don’t think I got a single uninterrupted hour of sleep last night.  That doesn’t mean I slept only less than an hour overall; I slept in fits and starts, as it were, but the total was probably a few hours.  I have been fully awake for about three or so hours already as I write this‒since a little after one in the morning.  So, it’s been quite a poor night, because I certainly didn’t go to sleep very early.

[Aside:  doesn’t the word “manifesto” sound like something a stage magician might say when apparently conjuring something out of midair?  Alternatively, perhaps it could be the name of a breakfast cereal:  Try new Manifest-Os!  Part of this complete breakfast!  Sorry, that thought came to me as I was briefly recalling a video I watched last night.]

Such is my life now, or my “life” as I ought to write, with scare quotes (or should that be “scare” quotes?).  Of course, life is life; it is what it is, like Popeye and the God of Exodus.  My life is no more meaningless than that of the dead “palmetto bug” I flushed down the toilet this morning.

It’s not all that much more meaningful either.  Yes, I write a blog and I go to work, and I’ve written books and songs and such like, and most importantly, I have two children who are awesome*.  But maybe that giant cockroach had done the equivalent in its own millicosm**.  For all I know, its importance to the world of coprophages is unparalleled, and will be remembered for many generations, perhaps forever.

Well…“forever” is quite a heavy lift, as they say.  But maybe its memory will live as long as cockroaches endure, which is likely to be longer than humans endure, unless humans proceed very carefully.  Of course, human records and so on tend to deteriorate over time, being recopied, adjusted, edited, lost and found, reinterpreted through the lens of later ideas that did not exist when original events took place, and gradually just eroded by entropy.

Perhaps palmetto bugs have more relatively durable means of keeping records‒it seems quite unlikely, but it’s not literally impossible.  Even so, they cannot be exempted from the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics.  As Saruman said (in the movie, not the book) to Gandalf about the prospect of anyone standing against Sauron:  “There are none who can.”

Okay, well, I’m veering from the imagined lives and memories of the good and great among cockroaches to quoting the movie version of The Fellowship of the Ring.  My chronic and acute lack of sleep is definitely having its effects.

I truly don’t know whether this post has been worth writing, let alone reading.  I guess that latter part will be for each of you to judge.  But, to make your judgement, you must actually read the post‒if you want your judgement to have any reasonable basis‒and then it’s too late for you to decide it wasn’t worth it, except perhaps as a lamentation.

Well, I hope the rest of your weekend has no further causes of potential rue.  Thank you for reading my blog.

Addendum: I have discovered that WordPress has changed their shit again, and I cannot access the editor I used to use. I don’t know why, and they cannot seem to figure out how to reactivate it, but it is TOO MUCH RIGHT NOW. I don’t know if I am going to keep doing this. They call themselves “Happiness Engineers”, but if so, they’re rather comparable to the engineers that made the Tay Bridge in Scotland. It all comes crashing down. I’m already at my wits’ end this morning, as you can probably tell. This blog is one of the only little bits of satisfaction I have on a regular day, and they’ve screwed that up. Fuck WordPress, fuck this blog, and fuck this whole stupid planet.

*They got the “awe” part from my “aw(e)ful” nature, and the “some” part from their mother’s “fearsome” character.  Thank goodness they didn’t inherit the full “awful” (the full aw?) from me, nor did they inherit the other two half-words and end up just fearful.

**This is a new word I just made up.  I thought “microcosm” isn’t the right term‒a roach is not on a millionth of the scale on which I live.  I don’t think even its mass is that relatively small, but I’ll look it up***.  So, I thought, “A thousandth scale seems better, and we have micro and nano and pico scales, so why not ‘millicosm’?”

***Its mass is nearly that small relative to me, but its other dimensions are nowhere close, and since the “micro” in “microscopic” generally refers to one-dimensional measures, my choice still can apply.

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Let airplanes circle screaming overhead

After my little test yesterday of the “writing a blog post directly on the app related to my WordPress account”, I considered writing this morning’s post directly on that app, just to see how it went.  However, I don’t yet know how to keep track of my word count on that app*, and I don’t feel like doing any trial and error exploration this morning‒not of that, anyway.

So, I’m writing this instead on the usual Google Docs app.  Google Docs has the advantage that when I write this document on my phone, it automatically saves to my Google Drive, and I can then readily open it up on any computer that has an internet connection.  That’s fairly handy.

Of course, it means that I’m putting many eggs in the Google basket, but for these purposes, I’m okay with that.  Also, when it comes to phone apps, Google Docs is so far the best word processor I’ve tried, as far as interface quality goes.  The same cannot be said for the desktop app, but it’s perhaps better than it used to be.

I don’t really like to leave my fiction in Google’s hands if I can help it.  I like having a hard copy, so to speak, of my fiction writing.  So far, except for those which were written with pen and paper for the first draft, all my fiction has been written on MSWord (and even the handwritten ones were completed on Word).  I used to recopy each file onto a thumb drive after a day’s writing, in addition to keeping it saved on my mini lapcom, so I knew I had at least two up to date copies.  Then‒once it became a thing‒it would also auto-save onto my Microsoft OneDrive.

The inception of the latter made me think that maybe I could write everything on the Word app for smartphones.  It auto-updates in a fashion similar to Google Docs.  Alas, it’s not nearly as fluid and seamless as the Google app.  If it were, I would probably use it, although‒the nature of Microsoft accounts being what they are‒I wouldn’t be able just to pull it up on the work computer, since it uses a different (boss-related) Microsoft account.  So, I would have to send a file as an email or something no matter what.

I’m sure there are ways around that‒or, well, there may be ways around that‒but the phone app for Word just is too cumbersome for now.  It’s not worth the effort.

Sorry, I know this is probably dreadfully dull to all of you.  I’m impressed that you’ve read this far.  You may know, I guess, that I don’t plan these posts out ahead of time, I just spew out whatever comes into my head.  If you find it tedious or infuriating, just imagine how I feel!  You, at least, could always navigate to another website.  What am I supposed to do?  I can’t even get away from myself by sleeping most of the time.

Anyway…

I’ve been doing a little bit of rereading of some of my fiction recently.  For instance, yesterday afternoon, while waiting for my train, I finished rereading The Chasm and the Collision.

I still like it.

I have a hard time feeling good about things that I do (and am) but I think CatC is a good story, and I think its world is interesting and that the characters are good and so on.  I think there are probably a lot of people out there who would like it.  And, like I mentioned sometime earlier this week, it would be really cool to encounter fanfiction based on it.

Alas, I am not good at self-promotion.  I don’t like myself, so it’s hard to find the will to promote my work, even when I like the work.  It’s quite dispiriting, and the fact that I can only hold myself, and my nature, responsible for it doesn’t make it any easier to swallow that bitter pill.

Now I’m rereading Unanimity: Book 2, though I’m not sure if I’ll read it all the way through to the end.  That’s another book that I think is good, though it is long, and some of the characters aren’t as likeable as in CatC.  Of course, they’re not supposed to be likeable, when they’re not.  It is a horror story, after all, and in many ways it is one of my two most horrifying stories.  Weirdly enough, those two most horrifying stories are my longest and my shortest works.

On the other hand, my sister recently pointed out to me that‒ironically‒my most lighthearted story is The Vagabond, which is a sort of old-school, gonzo horror story.  She’s right.  I guess that lightness shows that I wrote it (originally) while in college and med school.

The heck with it, all of my stories are good.  Some are better than others, and different people would surely prefer different ones, but I think they’re all pretty good.  Even the stuff only published here like Extra Body (which is complete) and Outlaw’s Mind and The Dark Fairy and the Desperado (those two are not complete) are good.  So read them.  Read all of my stories.  Tell your friends and families and even your enemies and strangers about them.  Spread the word far and wide across the land.  “Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone, prevent the dog from barking with a juice bone”.  Okay, well, maybe not that last bit, but do get the word out.

Thanks.

Okay, well, tomorrow I work, so expect a blog post tomorrow, whether you like it or not.  I may do another test post this afternoon if I get a bit bored, mainly to see if I can sort out the word count stuff on the app for WordPress.  If so, I’ll post it.  If not, of course, I won’t.  It’s funny how that works, isn’t it?

I hope you have a good day.

*I need to keep track of that because I can sometimes get quite carried away.

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O Caesar, these blogs are beyond all use and I do fear them

Hello and good morning.

I thought of a good opening sentence and line for this blog post today, but unfortunately, I thought of it at around one in the morning, during one of my earlier mid-night* awakenings.  These happen more or less every night, at various times.  Sometimes I will start** awake thinking I’ve badly overslept, only to find that I’ve been asleep for less than an hour.  Sometimes the opposite sort of thing happens.  Anyway, one of the hallmarks of things I think during those early midnight awakenings is that I don’t remember their specifics very well.

In other words, I don’t recall what the opening sentence that came to me was.  Given the nature of nocturnal, half-awake thoughts, it might well have been an idiotic starting sentence.  It might have been utter gibberish.  I might not even really have thought of any sentence at all; I might just have had one of those curious activations of certain brain modules without the usual stimulus (such as thinking of an actual sentence) that engenders them.

I suppose it’s somewhat similar to déjà vu, that free-floating feeling of familiarity and recollection that isn’t actually triggered by something familiar but by stochastic activation of areas of the brain that register familiarity and memory.

So, I might have had the feeling that I had just thought of a good sentence to start this blog post, but it was triggered by something that wasn’t related to any actual sentence.  Like Scrooge said to Marley’s ghost, “There’s more of gravy than grave about you.”

The quote was something close to that, anyway; I don’t feel like going to look it up and check.

All this highlights how important it can be not to trust your feelings.  As Radiohead sang, “Just ‘cause you feel it doesn’t mean it’s there.”

Please don’t take this to mean that I think you should repress or ignore your feelings.  Feelings exist for good, sound, biological reasons.  But while they can be good sources of motivation‒indeed, one might argue that any motivation is a feeling‒emotions are unreliable guides for action, especially in the complex modern human world.  It is still certainly worth attending to them, however, rather than merely ignoring them or trying to push them down.

I think fear, in particular, is usually worth noticing and inspecting.  Just because you feel afraid doesn’t necessarily mean that there is some threat or danger nearby, even a merely social one, but nature has clearly arrived at the provisional conclusion that it’s better to be afraid of something that turns out not to be a danger than not to feel afraid of something that is a danger.

Of course, ideally, one would like to feel fear only for real dangers, and only to the degree that they are dangerous, and otherwise to feel fine.  It would similarly be nice to desire to eat and to enjoy eating only those foods that will be most healthy for us at that moment, at that time, and to desire only just as much as we need, and not to want those foods that will be bad for us in the short and long term.

Such perfect accuracy is not even close to being possible, not even for deliberately designed systems, let alone for evolved biological organisms.  And when survival and reproduction are the means by which genes go on into the future, it’s far better (up to a point) to make a type 1 error‒sensing or fearing nonexistent danger‒than a type 2 error‒not recognizing actual danger.

Modern society has discouraged us somewhat from listening to such fears, sometimes out of a desire to be polite, but again, though one should not take such fear, or other emotions, at simple face value, one should listen to them.  One should inspect the feeling and one’s surroundings and circumstances and try to discern why one feels that fear.

If it becomes clear after honest internal and external inquiry that it is a baseless anxiety, a fear without focus, then one can try to shrug to oneself and simply go about one’s business as best one can.  But if there’s a colorable explanation for your fear‒such as a possibly dangerous or certainly unknown person nearby during moments of potential vulnerability‒one should pay attention and act appropriately.  This is especially true for women (and girls), but it applies to men as well.  Gavin deBecker wrote a powerful book about this subject called The Gift of Fear, and I recommend it (this is one of those rare instances in which Oprah and I agree on a book recommendation).

Fear is not the mind killer.  Fear can be the mind sharpener.  The only people who don’t feel fear are fools and corpses.

On the other hand, to go back to the earlier point, emotions are still very blunt and fuzzy instruments, so don’t just let them push you around willy-nilly.  Just because you feel angry, for instance, doesn’t mean that anyone actually did anything to deserve it.  You might be hypoglycemic, you might have had too much caffeine, you might be in pain and/or have had chronic bad sleep***, you might be feeling residual emotional upheaval from something you saw on the news.

The feelings you have can be misleading, but they are not merely random nor are they completely irrelevant or unreliable.  Some of them are positive in and of themselves:  Joy and love are certainly worth not avoiding, for instance.

And middle-of-the-night feelings related to the nebulous impression that one has thought of a good start for a blog post can sometimes be without substance entirely.  And yet, even then, they might sometimes lead more or less directly to a blog post.

TTFN

*As opposed to “midnight”, which would usually mean 12 am.

**I.e., “a sudden, jerky motion, usually a response to some alarming and/or unexpected stimulus” not as in “begin”.

***This can happen, or so I’m led to understand.

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Wotan can KEEP this day as far as I’m concerned

Okay, first off, to begin with‒or should it be “with which to begin”?‒it is the 6th of May today (a Wednesday, though that fact is not terribly relevant) and to continue the Star Wars related references, I will note that today is the date of the Revenge of the Sixth.

Get it?  It’s a bit tortured, I’m afraid.  I don’t think anyone would have come up with the notion had it not been for “May the 4th be with you”.  That, at least, is a more straightforward play on words, and is specific to this month and that day.  “Revenge of the Sixth” doesn’t specify the month; one could, in principle, use that line on any 6th of a month.  But one would not, because this day is “celebrated” only in reaction to Star Wars Day on May 4th.

It’s sort of funny and fun, but it reduces the Sith to merely a perverse notion, existing only in reaction to the Jedi, like a whole order of Force users acting out the parts of rebellious teenagers.

Of course, probably that was sort of what happened in George Lucas’s mind when he came up with the Sith:  They were the anti-Jedi, a parity-violating, distorted reflection of the “good guys”.  But, of course, a whole philosophical movement that sprang up only as an enemy to another is intellectually and narratively vacuous.

It’s somewhat reminiscent of the moronic religious people who seem to think that if one does not believe in God, then one must worship Satan.  It can be very hard for some people to get around the whole “if you’re not with me, then you’re my enemy” notion.  Only in this case it’s not even a philosophical enmity, but is merely a reactive enmity.  Also, it doesn’t take too much thought to realize that such a situation would seem to imply that whichever of the two sides came first would be assumed to be the “good guys”.

But one doesn’t look at any random patch of spacetime and think, “if there’s no electron in this spot then there must instead be a positron”, or vice versa.  As a matter of physics and of logic, this is a pretty glaring error.  Just as indifference, not hate, is the complete absence of love, the default state of reality is not the opposite of some particular presence, it is simple absence.  In physics, that means all the quantum fields being in their vacuum states, with minimal energy (it’s not zero because of the uncertainty principle).

In the Star Wars extended universe, the Sith have a background that is separate in origin (I think) from the Jedi.  I think they began as a race of Force users.  I could be wrong about this; I’m not all that much of a Star Wars nerd.

Ask me questions about the backgrounds of things in the universe(s) of my stories and I could share some serious lore with you.  But no one is going to ask me about those because essentially no one has read them.

Boy, it would be cool to have someone write fanfiction based in the worlds of my stories.  I remember reading a lot of Harry Potter fanfiction while waiting for the next book(s) to come out, back in the day.  Some of it was bad, of course, but not much of it, and some of it was really quite good.  People who love to read and feel the urge to write an homage out of love for a work and its characters tend to be at least somewhat okay at it.

Some of it was downright brilliant.

Of course, humans being what humans are, some of it was smut.  There’s nothing really wrong with that, when you get right down to it.  Members (ha ha) of a sexually reproducing species are going to tend to find sex…engaging, to say the least.  Every human alive (and that has ever lived) comes from a long, unbroken line of ancestors who had sex at least once*.  That includes your parents and your grandparents, by the way.  You’re welcome.

In a species like humans, those who are more into sex and more driven toward it and obsessed with it are, ceteris paribus, going to have more offspring.  It won’t take very many generations for any genes that make one less interested in sex to fade out of the gene pool‒again, and very importantly, ceteris paribus.

All other things are essentially never equal, of course, and there are complex tradeoffs in all such behavioral tendencies, but that’s a can of bees I really don’t have the energy to open right at this moment.

I’m in a truly terrible amount of pain this morning, I’m afraid, continuing from last night and yesterday and so on. and it’s making it a bit hard to write, though that somehow doesn’t keep me from running off at the figurative mouth.

I think it would be harder for me not to write right now, though.  I don’t know for sure.  I haven’t tried.

Even thinking about not writing at all makes me feel squirmy and cringey and quite strange.  It’s not quite as bad not to play or listen to or sing any music‒which I haven’t done for weeks now, alas‒but that does also feel bad.

But I think if I were to stop writing, and at least every week sharing my writing‒particularly now that I don’t have access to Facebook or Threads‒I would pretty rapidly feel that I didn’t even exist.

I have no real life here from day to day.  There is no joy, there is only (attempted) distraction.  Other than my episodic interactions with my youngest child (which are distinctly good and real and joyful to me, a real oasis in the desert) everything in my life from day to day feels less real than the events of the most banal video game.

Yesterday, I started searching eBay and other online sources for used ECT devices (they are out there) and looking up whether one can legally buy insulin over the counter (one can, to some degree), or what medications are prone to produce seizures.  The idea was to see if it would be possible for me to induce a seizure in myself and hopefully treat my depression.

I know it can’t help my underlying ASD, but ECT and other kinds of induced seizures have consistently been shown to work against even highly treatment-resistant depression.  I have tried every class of (legal) medication and many different types of therapy for my dysthymia/depression.  I think most regular readers can tell just how well that arsenal has worked.

Of course, pain complicates everything.  It taints everything, it erodes everything, it corrodes everything, it corrupts and desecrates everything.  I really want it to stop.  Sometimes I want it to stop at nearly any cost (at least to me, though I can’t in good conscience invoke avoidable costs upon other people).

If I thought inducing seizures would help my pain, I would probably just do it.  I know how to make such things happen‒the research I did yesterday was just to indulge myself so I could more realistically fantasize about the outcome if it were to work.  It was one of those distractions I mentioned above.  But having seizures would probably make my physical pain worse, since seizures are not easy on the body.

They could also kill me, but that would be far from the worst outcome.

Death‒not necessarily seizure-related death, but death generally‒will probably be the only thing that relieves my pain.  Well, “relieves” is not really the right word.  But could death be what ends it?  Yes.  And thankfully, no one is dependent upon me or is very close to me or is really used to having me around, so the collateral damage would be minimal, no matter what all the simple-minded (but well-meaning) Instagram videos try to tell you.

Maybe I’m just as well off not to be able to go to that site anymore.  Everything there would be irritating.  Though, that’s just like more or less everything else in the world, to be fair.  Right now, I could almost wish for everything else in reality to cease to exist so I could just enjoy some silence.  But that would be unkind and terribly presumptuous.  It would be better to go back to the nidus of the pain and pluck that out.

Have a good day.

Though I suspect Mr. Smear would disagree with me:

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“I too have sailed the world and seen its wonders…”

I almost started this post by writing “Hello and good morning,” but I can’t really do that, or future readers‒and possibly even some current readers‒might think this was a Thursday blog post.  But this isn’t a Thursday post.  It’s a Tuesday post.  It’s a “Taco Tuesday post”, really, since Taco Tuesday is a thing (an advertising thing, mostly, but still a thing I like).  Pertinent to that, today is also, of course, Cinco de Mayo.

It’s not a terribly clever name for a holiday.  It’s about as bland as “The 4th of July”.  At least that’s not the official name for that holiday; the official name is “Independence Day”, which has specific significance, since it is the date of the signing and release of the Declaration of Independence.  I try never to wish someone a happy 4th of July, but say, “Happy Independence Day”, because it’s an important thing to know and recall (for an American).

Of course, there may be an actual, official title to Cinco de Mayo, but if there is, I don’t know it (if there isn’t, I still don’t know it).  I don’t even recall what the day commemorates.  I know it’s not the Mexican Independence Day equivalent.  If anyone out there knows what it is off the top of his or her or their head, please let me know in the comments below.

“Please let me know in the comments below” could be a nice part of some rap, couldn’t it?  It’s got a good rhythm and an internal rhyme.  If you’re a rapper and want to use that phrase, please do.  But let me know about the final product, please.  I’d be interested to see what grows up around it.

I could, in principle, write such a rap myself‒I’m reasonably good at rhythmic rhyming‒but just try to imagine me producing and performing a rap song!  I’m almost certain that would be one of the worst signs of the end of the world.

Though, if that’s the case, maybe I should do a rap, come to think of it.  If by doing so I really could engender the end of the world*, it could be worth doing it.  I could put everyone out of their misery.  As for those who aren’t miserable, well, we have Sweeney Todd’s words to address that:

 

“They all deserve to die

Tell you why, Mrs. Lovett, tell you why.

Because

In all of the whole human race, Mrs. Lovett

There are two kinds of men and only two:

There’s the one staying put in his proper place

And the one with his foot in the other one’s face

Look at me, Mrs. Lovett, look at you.

No, we all deserve to die!

Even you, Mrs. Lovett, even I

Because

the lives of the wicked should be

made brief

For the rest of us death will be a relief

We all deserve to die!

 

And I’ll never see Johanna…”

 

Okay, well, that last bit is the beginning of another segment of the song, in which Sweeney laments his lost daughter.  I won’t get into the plot more than that right now, but it’s a great musical.

The film version with Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, Alan Rickman, and so on was excellent, though apparently Johnny Depp didn’t know whether he could sing (adequately for the role) when Tim Burton asked him to play Sweeney Todd.  He knew he could play music, but singing “lead” was just not something he had done.  So, according to what I’ve heard, before accepting the role he went off in solitude and practiced singing (to confirm he could do it) before coming back and saying okay.

I’m glad he did it.

As an aside, I suspect that anyone who can do various voices and accents and who also can play and hear music almost has to be able to sing reasonably well, if they practice.  The tools required to make alternate voices and accents are more or less the same as the tools for singing specific tones and notes.  You also have to be able to hear tunes and to hear yourself and adjust to hit the proper note, but as I said, Depp was already a serious musician.

Okay, well, that’s a lot of erratic stuff, isn’t it?  Clearly I have no specific agenda here (trendy or otherwise) at least not any conscious one.  As for what goes on in my unconscious mind, well, I don’t know what that is, more or less by definition.  If I knew what it was thinking, it wouldn’t be unconscious.

Of course, there’s always a legitimate question whether the unconscious mind actually has its own internal self-awareness, or even more than one, but this is pretty much speculative for now, so I’m not going to get into it or its implications.

Boy, wow.  I’m really feeling pretty incoherent right now.  As you might have guessed, I didn’t sleep well last night, even for me.  As for pain, well, large portions of my body feel somewhat as if they have already been embalmed, but the sensory nerves‒the nociceptors, at least‒are still working.  If anything, they’re working too well.

Ah, well.  I’ll wrap up now with these almost kindly but ominous words, again from Sweeney Todd:  “You are young.  Life has been kind to you.  You will learn.”

Please have a good day if you’re able.

*“Engender the end of” also has a good cadence or rhythm or whatever as well as a bit of an internal rhyme.  You could go on with something like, “Engender the end of the trendy agenda,” or similar.  “No rapper can rap quite like I can”, eh?  That’s a fact for which all rap fans can be grateful.

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May the 4th be yadda, yadda, yadda

First, let me get the irresistible, nerdly, liturgical invocation (or whatever you should call it) out of the way:

There, that’s that.

Yes, it’s “Star Wars Day”‒because of the play on words, y’know?  So, I give a nod to it, since I like Star Wars and I like plays on words (with some exceptions here and there for both “likes”).

I think I’m going to keep this short today if I can.  My back and hips and ankles and knee and hands/thumbs and shoulder and all are really uncomfortable, and they have been so despite my attempts at various interventions and despite the fact that I rested this weekend.

Well, I didn’t merely rest.  I did go for a couple of moderate walks over the weekend, one about 5 miles, one about 4 miles.  But I took my time, I wore good shoes, I walked on nice, level pavement and so on.  In between, I tried to take it easy on my back and whatnot; I even took a short break or two during my walks.

It’s probably not logically sensible for me to say that my interventions did no good; after all, I don’t know what the outcome(s) would have been had I done differently than I did.  It could have been better, it could have been worse, it could have been the same*.

Anyway, it’s all very frustrating, and it doesn’t help my sleep, either.  I was going to say that it doesn’t help my insomnia, but of course, it does help my insomnia, making it a much more effective (and affective, ha ha) disorder.

I probably shouldn’t even talk about the pain’s effects on my actual affective disorder(s), dysthymia and depression.  In my experience, when you talk to people about depression, it doesn’t bring out the best in them, and it tends to drive them away‒sometimes permanently.  It’s one of those gifts that keeps on giving, I guess.

One slight “benefit” about being in enough pain, is that it blunts, or perhaps overshadows, some forms of social anxiety.  When you’re in enough pain, for long enough, you sometimes get to where you really don’t give a flying fuck at a rat’s ass what other people think of you.  Sometimes you just start to hate everything and everyone, but especially yourself and your life.

I say “your”, but of course I mean “my”.  I don’t know for certain what happens in your mind.

Oh, and by the way, chronic pain doesn’t seem to blunt other anxieties, unfortunately.  If anything, it makes one jumpier, and OCD-style anxieties and insecurities are sometimes amplified.  They seem to be with me.

This reminds me (somehow) of my metaphor about navigating through reality being like driving along a narrow road between two infinitely tall, indestructible walls**.  Rationality consists, ultimately, of keeping one’s course parallel to those walls.

If you’re driving on that road and your heading deviates from parallel by even a millionth of a degree, sooner or later you will crash into one of the walls***.  That’s you, colliding with reality.  And when anyone collides with reality, reality does not break, the one colliding does.  In a way, that’s what reveals reality to be reality.

But of course, it’s functionally impossible to pick your course perfectly along the parallel path (this is much like my point about the unlikelihood of hitting zero on the number line, see the first footnote below).  So what can one do?  One can keep one’s hands on the wheel and adjust course as one goes along, watching the walls to see if they are staying safely away from your vehicle.

This is one reason dogmatism is a bad thing (i.e., a worse than useless thing).  The odds of you picking the right direction (or right beliefs) on, say, the first try, are functionally zero.  What’s more, the odds that you have achieved the perfect direction on the 2nd or the 3rd or the 42nd or 1729th try are also functionally zero.

You will never come to the single, final answer‒at least your odds of doing so are vanishingly small‒and so you will never get to rest steering, to stop course-correction.  Sorry.  Drivers just don’t get to sleep, and you’re driving if anyone is.  The only way to rest from steering is to stop moving or to crash into the wall.

When I (or you) fight reality, reality always wins.  Again:  that’s kind of how you know it’s reality.

Anyway, I hope you all have a good day and a good week.  Drive carefully and safely.  Don’t forget to check your mirrors and your blind spots; and don’t just trust the AI (or drivers of other cars) to steer you.

 

*It’s vanishingly unlikely to have been exactly the same, though.  There’s only one zero point on a number line, for instance, though there are infinitely many points arbitrarily close to zero (in the Real numbers, anyway).  Mathematically, your odds of hitting zero if, for instance, you throw an infinitely pointy (no pun intended) dart at a number line are, well…zero.  And yet it can happen, in principle.  That’s just thinking in one dimension, though.  The phase space describing what could have changed in my experience is probably quite high-dimensional, and things are identical if and only if you hit the point where the change along all those dimensions is zero.

**I don’t know why this thought was triggered; I wasn’t paying close enough attention to my own thoughts to see what led them there.

***If you start in the middle of the (perfectly straight) road, and it’s 25 meters to each wall, if you’re off by one millionth of a degree in your course, you will collide with the wall in roughly 1.4 billion meters, or 1.4 million kilometers, or (for those in the US) about 860,000 miles.  The fact that it can take so long should highlight the fact that you cannot assume, just because you haven’t crashed into a wall yet, that you have chosen the perfect heading.  You will still need to course-correct, or you will crash.

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What’s that distress call that pilots use again?

It’s Friday again, at long last, and I should have tomorrow off.  I think I might take tomorrow off, even if they asked us to come in.  I barely wanted even to move at all today.

Of course, “want” is a tricky word in this case.  I don’t ever want to go to work in any kind of “terminal goal” sense.  But in an “instrumental goal” sense, I do want to go to work.  However, there are many conflicting pressures within the system that is I, and the vector magnitude of the “go to work” sum is sometimes not very large at all.

I’m going, though.  I’m not yet literally on my way, but I will be soon (and as I edit this for the last time, I am at the office).

Oh, I almost forgot to note, today is May 1st, 2026 (AD or CE).  Happy May Day, or whatever that holiday is, if it is one.  According to Camelot, May is a lusty month, a time for every frivolous whim, proper or im.  I’m not too terribly sure of the truth of all that, but it’s an amusing song.

Oh (again), I almost forgot (again) to note, I’m writing this on my mini lapcom today.  I haven’t done that in a while, but then again, I haven’t even picked up a guitar in over a week.  Of course, I haven’t played any keyboard (other than computer ones) in a longer time than that.  I also haven’t drawn, nor have I written any fiction.  I haven’t gone on Brilliant dot org this week, either, though I did do some last week, if memory serves.

I’m just very tired.  My various bits (ha ha) of literal hardware that constitute part of my extended phenotype are also getting a bit sluggish and erratic.  My lapcom here, and the lapcom I use at the house, and my smartphone, are all showing a bit of lagginess, a bit of evidence that they are past their prime.  Hey, they’re not alone in that, at least.  I’m so far past my prime you could call me a super-composite number, like 60 squared or something*.

There is an impetus—and there almost certainly would be recommendations, if I were to ask someone—to get a new lapcom and a new mini lapcom and of course a new smartphone.  But I really don’t wanna.  I look at the lapcoms available on Amazon just for fun, and there is a bit of enticement in looking at them, but honestly, I feel like I want to let them go the way of motor vehicles for me:  just to be gone when they’re no longer workable.

I have the vague hope that I will die before I am forced to replace any of these, my three main personal computing devices, which are my only local friends (of sorts).  It’s not so much that I actually feel a personal, sentimental sense of connection with them.  It’s more that I cannot conceive of finding the energy to go through the process of getting new ones, since that seems especially futile in this case.

I currently have no plan and no desire to live long enough to be forced to replace my personal electronic devices.  It just seems valueless, without any reward other than the things that I would buy, themselves, and these really don’t appeal to me.  Maybe someday they might start to appeal again, and I might feel the desire to get new ones.  I don’t know.  But there’s certainly no logic in trying to invest in my life right now.

Okay, sorry about being melodramatic.  I wasn’t trying to do that, honestly.  I don’t feel dramatic about this stuff.  I just feel resigned and tired and even kind of bored.  Nothing is gripping enough to distract me for long from pain and depression.

Though, I have to admit that I’ve recently discovered the YouTube channel “Yee Yee Life”, which basically is just this guy and his cameraman in Texas who (more or less in their own words) take various things, shoot them with various types of bullets, and see what happens.  The shooting part is mildly interesting in itself, but really the draw is the hilarious deadpan comedy of their interactions and the apparent idiocy/lunacy of the host.  This is all clearly deliberate, by the way.  I am not watching people unwittingly make fools of themselves—they are doing it on purpose, and they do it very well.

But, of course, one can only get limited value out of such things at any given time.  It ain’t exactly Carl Sagan’s Cosmos or the BBC’s Planet Earth.

I still do at times watch the YouTube channel PBS Space Time, which has great videos that are nicely informative, but they lot are less interactive with mere YouTube watchers than they used to be, focusing now on their Patreon supporters.  This makes sense for them, of course, since they get more money from them.

I used to support them on Patreon myself—briefly—but I had to let that lapse, since I never really took advantage of the Patreon perks, if there were any.  Why would I want to go to yet another website to be able to enjoy learning the stuff they discuss?  Also, I had to get off the slippery slope of supporting Patreon accounts of people I followed elsewhere.  It ended up threatening to be a serious combination of monthly expenses.

I already subscribe to YouTube premium, which means I am giving money to the people whose videos I watch (the ones that are monetized), and I cannot simply lavish even more money on these various informative and thought-provoking channels.  I would love to be able simply to do so without worry, but I cannot.

Anyway, that’s enough for today, and for this week—but presumably not for this month, since the month has just begun.  I hope you all have a very good weekend, and then a very good week next week, and I hope you then repeat the same pattern but with each new iteration being incrementally better than the last.  If anyone deserves such a thing, surely you do.

Of course, the whole notion of “deserves” is very much an artificial, orthogonal-to-nature concept.  It’s a human invention.  That doesn’t make it not “real”.  But it is not essential, and it is not necessarily even coherent.

Whatever.  Take it easy.  Don’t let the sound of your own wheels drive you crazy.

*60 squared, or 3600, may be one of the “anti-prime” numbers.  It has 45 (!) positive factors!!!  That’s not as cool as being a prime number, but it’s pretty close in the coolness measure.

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Let Hercules himself do what he may, The cat will mew, and blog will have his day.

Hello and good morning.

It’s Thursday, the last day of April in 2026.  Tomorrow we meet a new month, same (more or less) as the old month.

I’m very tired, despite the fact that it’s the first thing (or nearly so) in the morning.  Of course, morning doesn’t necessarily mean you got any rest last night, not if you’ve got chronic pain and chronic insomnia.

The latter problem started for me several years or more before the former.  It has not escaped my consideration that my insomnia may have contributed to my chronic pain.  I am, after all, a trained physician and scientist with a fervent desire to understand…well, everything, ultimately.  So, I know a lot about both chronic pain and insomnia since in addition to my education and my curiosity, I actually am afflicted with the two things.

Don’t get me started on depression.

Actually, it’s a bit too late for that.  I am feeling the gravity well dip of worsening dysthymia that seems to be heading toward a full depressive episode, though predicting these things is unreliable.  But this morning, I felt I didn’t even want to sit up in bed (well, in futon) let alone get up and do anything at all.

That’s unusual for me.  Usually even when I’m in a bad way, the stress‒the anxiety, I guess‒associated with possibly not doing what I’m “supposed” to do, of letting people down, is too strong to let me just lie around, even though I am frequently exhausted (in the figurative sense, at least).  But today, even that almost didn’t show up, not enough to do what it usually does.  It was only really my sense of routine, of habit, that gave me the energy to get moving.

It helped that I wanted to feed the cats, but I know that they can handle themselves, at least for a few hours.  Still, it’s a positive.  I even did five pull-ups, which is not as many as I usually do, but at least I didn’t just not do them at all.

I often wish I could hibernate, or perhaps more precisely, to have a long sleep such as what some bears do during cold months.  I don’t want to go into true suspended animation, because that really doesn’t do anything for you except to let you skip forward in time.  Any period of true oblivion, however long it is, feels instantaneous from the inside.

If you pause a game, for instance, you can (in principle) come back a year later and pick it back up, and for the character, no time has passed at all.  If you were to experience things from their point of view, you would experience an uninterrupted flow of time.

What if you pause the game but never restart it?  Then the character’s experience just stops.  It’s a kind of death, of course, but it’s not a death caused by anything within that game universe.  It’s just, in a sense, that universe coming to an end.  No wailing, no moaning, no gnashing of teeth.

If you stop playing a Blu-ray in the middle of a movie, and then you break the Blu-ray disc, the characters don’t “die”, but for the purposes of that iteration of that movie, they might as well have died.  They certainly cannot continue to perform their parts.

It’s a bit like what it would be like for our universe to undergo vacuum collapse.  The wavefront of collapse would progress at essentially the speed of light.  Everything you know‒everything you are‒would cease to be at all, and it would happen far too quickly for you to experience the process.  The stuff with which you experience things would be deleted before it could begin to experience its own erasure.

It doesn’t seem like a bad way for an individual to die, but it seems a shame to lose everything in a whole universe.  Also, it’s just kind of daunting to think that everything in existence would get wiped out and turned into a hot soup of elementary fields and their “particles”, much like what happened near the beginning of “our” universe when the inflaton field (if inflation happened) collapsed.  It feels worse in some ways than other manners of death because there is literally nothing you can do to avoid it or to flee it or even to know that it’s happening.

It’s deucedly unlikely, though, so don’t fret about it.  And, anyway, if it happens, there’s literally nothing you can do about it.

That’s enough for now.  I won’t get into the news of me falling out of my seat yesterday afternoon (really, it sort of rolled out from under me as I was trying to sit down, but I ended up on the floor on my back no matter how one characterizes it) except to say that it happened, and that I have worsened stiffness today at least partly because of it.

I hope you all have good days.

TTFN

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What should I title this post?

Well.  Wednesday.  Okay.  What in the world should I write today?

I don’t know.  I have very little energy at the moment; I feel quite exhausted.  That’s not terribly atypical for me, but it feels worse than usual.  However, since I don’t have any kind of objective, consistent gauge of precisely how exhausted I am (or feel) and certainly have no records of the past gauge readings to which to compare things, I don’t know for sure how my current state compares to my typical state.

 Nor do I know what the distribution of such states is.  Is it a smooth “bell” curve, a Gaussian distribution?  Is it bimodal?  Is it trimodal?  Is it some more weirdly shaped curve, like a function in several different exponential orders of a variable or in more than one variable?  That last one seems most likely.

I guess the specifics don’t really matter, though it would be at least interesting to have an objective, graphical measure of things.

Anyway, I’m tired, my pain continues (as always) and the present “flare” has not significantly died down.  And, unfortunately, there’s nothing in my life to provide any counterbalance to the horrible stuff.

Well, okay, that’s not entirely true, and I should try to avoid being overdramatic.  There are clearly some good things in my life, and particularly, some very good people.  But they are few and far between (in time and space) and/or far away.  I sometimes interacted with some of them through Facebook or Instagram, but I’ve been kicked off those platforms, as you know, for no particular reason I can discern.

Well, it’s their platform, they own it, and I wasn’t paying, so I guess they have the right to do as they please.  But I do hope they all crash and burn and suffer and then cease to exist (I mean Meta/Fuckerberg* and his cronies, not the people with whom I had nominal, distant connections).

I’ve been fairly grumpy lately, as you can probably tell.  Nearly everyone and everything pisses me off at least a little (and I don’t exclude myself from that “everyone”).  This is one of the things that can happen when you’re in pain a lot.  If you also have social difficulties and insomnia and the like, they can contribute, too.  Anxiety really doesn’t help, though its outcome depends upon how one experiences anxiety and how one reacts to it.

This is one of the things that gets me irritated at Yoda™ and the fact that people think his character is very wise, when he really isn’t.  I feel that fact should be called out more often than it is, lest the impressionable populace, particularly young people, get exposed to his trite homilies and think them words by which to live.

For instance, the whole stupid “Fear leads to anger; anger leads to hate; hate leads to suffering” shit he pulled on the child Anakin in Episode 1 pissed me off and continues to do so.  He seems to imply that fear => anger => hate => suffering as a mathematical theorem, some kind of Jedi syllogism**, which is not necessarily true in any simplistic kind of sense.

It would have been much more useful for him to say “Fear can lead to anger, anger can lead to hate.  Hate itself is a form of suffering, and it’s a contagious one with many potential side effects, so you should learn, not to repress your fear or to deny it, nor to be ashamed of it, but to recognize it, to understand it, and to use it when it is useful rather than allow it to rule you, as it does if you merely give in to it but also if you refuse to let yourself feel it.”

If the Jedi had a sensible approach to such things, I think Anakin would never have fallen to “the dark side”.  That term itself‒the dark side‒betrays bigotry and judgmentalism and arrogance and narrow-mindedness.  Anytime someone defines their side as the light side and their opponents’ as the dark side, you’re in the presence of people who may well be capable of committing self-righteous atrocities, on whatever scale they think serves the “light”, the “good”.

Ironically (perhaps), the attitude toward fear held by the League of Shadows in Batman Begins is healthier than that of the Jedi in at least the prequels of Star Wars***.  They encourage you to embrace your fear, to become it.  They recognize its power, and try to harness it rather than flee from it in the rather ironic fear of fear that the Jedi have.

They have a lot of stupid ideas in the League, of course, including their simple-minded and illogical notions of justice.  And even their ideas about fear are not ideal, just in case you think I endorse them.

But fear, along with pain, boredom, dissatisfaction, and so on, are things that exist and persist because they are useful (at least enough to make them evolutionarily stable).  But they are only so in specific times, places, and situations.  If you have a good reason to be afraid, then you want that fear****, believe me, and you want to listen to it.  And if you feel new-onset pain in your right lower abdominal quadrant, and it doesn’t go away, you want to look into it; something life threatening may be going on.

But when such states‒pain, fear, boredom, dissatisfaction, etc.‒pull free of specific reactive causality and become self-sustaining, free-floating, bootstrap-levitated things that exist merely because they exist, then there is a problem.

I am such a problem.  And as with the majority of even slightly complex problems in (for instance) mathematics, we don’t know how to solve it (or even if there is a possible solution).

Sometimes, eventually, there’s not much to do but to wipe the chalkboard clean.

*Actually, I think their company would be better named Dukha than Meta.  Get it?

**This despite the comically self-contradictory and stupid (and thus out of character) line that Obi-Wan says in episode 3:  “Only a Sith deals in absolutes”.  Obi-Wan!  Are you listening to yourself?  Do you know what an “own goal” is?  You literally just spoke an absolute.  And, oddly enough, though the Jedi love throwing such statements around, I don’t recall any Sith character making such an “absolute” statement.

***Actually, in Episode 5, despite his long exile and his recognized failure due to his arrogance, Yoda© still says some stupid shit to Luke, especially the whole “Do or do not, there is no ‘try’” bullshit.  No, Yoda®, the “do or do not” is only determined by trying.

****To no reasonable surprise, the attitude of the 12th Doctor toward fear, or at least the one he wants to have, is much more logical, and was expressed best in series 8, episode 4 of Doctor Who:  Listen.