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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.

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Painfully to pore upon a blog to seek the light of truth

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, which you might be able to tell by my traditional, Thursday-associated “Hello and good morning” style opening.  But, of course, if you’re new to this blog‒I wonder if there are any new people reading this blog today‒then you might not know.

But I’ve been writing a Thursday-based blog for at least 10 years, I think, in case anyone wants to go back and check it out.  It then expanded into an “every workday” blog after my last fiction publication, which I think was my collection, Dr. Elessar’s Cabinet of Curiosities.  Though my last novel ended up being Unanimity Book 1 and Unanimity Book 2.

I have written a novella since then (Extra Body) that’s published here, and I’ve made beginnings on Outlaw’s Mind and The Dark Fairy and the Desperado, which are also available here as far as they’ve gone.

But for the most part, I’ve just been doing this blog.  I initially imagined it to be a kind of promotional entity, intended to help people hear about my books.  As far as I can tell, it utterly failed at that purpose, but whataya gonna do?

Then I decided to try to turn the blog into a sort of mental health thing (for me, not for my readers‒it cannot be good for my readers’ mental health), a kind of talk therapy, to try to help with my ongoing dysthymia and depression.

Well, it’s difficult to assess an intervention’s effectiveness without being able to know how things would be without that intervention, but if this is me with a successful method of intervention, I shudder to imagine what I would be like without it.  Possibly, I would be dead, but that’s really not such a bad thought, to be fair.

I’ve had a few very bad days of pain lately, which is not unusual, but it is frustrating.  For a few days before this, my pain abated a bit, to just a sort of low, background thing, and when that happens, I start to feel stupidly optimistic for a time.  Of course, so far, that optimism has been profoundly misplaced, but what do you want from something as stupid as optimism?

The pain really doesn’t help things, though.  It’s been going on for nearly a quarter of a century so far, and that’s too long for my taste (in case you wondered).  In a few years, I will have reached the halfway point, i.e., I will have been in chronic pain for half my life.  From there, the fraction just gets bigger.  Indeed, if I were to live forever, the limit of the fraction of my life in which I’ve been in chronic pain would be 1.

That’s a pretty horrible thought.

So, yeah, that hasn’t helped with my mental health either.  It’s difficult to know what my mental health would have been like without chronic pain; it’s possible it could have been worse.  But there are decent reasons to doubt that to be the likely case.

Insomnia doesn’t help, either.  I will say one thing about Paxil, for all that it wasn’t great for my depression:  it made me enjoy sleeping, even though it didn’t make a big impact on how long I slept.  I have never really enjoyed sleep, either before or since.  I am not one who eagerly anticipates getting into bed and drifting off.

I know there are people who do seem to enjoy it, quite apart from its necessary function.  Not I.  My need to sleep, as with so many other things, is one purely of necessity; I need to rest, if I can.  And I certainly long for the feeling of actually having adequately rested, though I don’t know if I will ever experience that again.

Anyway, I’m tired‒from lack of sleep, from pain, from depression, presumably from ASD, from being alone with only my own miserable and annoying self all the time, from the fact that the world is so stupid and so pointless*, from general social awkwardness, from innumerable things.  And I have no apparent capacity to do anything creative now, which used to be one of my saving graces.  I haven’t even played guitar (or sang) for weeks now, if I recall correctly.  The black Strat just leans against my desk in the office, gathering dust.

Oh, well.  Like I said (or asked), whataya gonna do?  Although, there is always something I can do, but people don’t like it when I talk about that.  It makes them uncomfortable.  It doesn’t make anyone uncomfortable enough to act, but they don’t like it, and it doesn’t seem to do me any good except to make me feel slightly more hopeless, as well as somewhat guilty for bothering other people with my issues.

Anyway, it’s not like I can blame anyone for not wanting to have anything to do with a creature like me.

Enough.  This is idiotic, like so much else in the universe.  I hope you’re all doing well.

TTFN

*But especially the “stupid” part.  Pointlessness is tolerable, and it can even be rather freeing, but everyone and everything is just so idiotic.  I do not exclude myself from that judgement.

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Complex clocks, misleading DNA, and signs (not sines) of support

Well, it’s Wednesday, which follows Tuesday, which follows Monday, which follows Sunday, which follows Saturday, which follows Friday, which follows Thursday, which follows…

…that’s right, it brings us right back to Wednesday again.  It’s a little bit reminiscent of the Doe, a Deer song from The Sound of Music.  Or, maybe you could say it’s a little like Rock Around the Clock.  All these cyclical things are amusing in that each member of the closed, recursive group both precedes and follows itself.

That gives me an interesting idea.  At least, it’s interesting to me.  I’ve seen clocks (dial style clocks obviously, not digital ones) that designate the hours with radians, such that in place of the 12, for instance, there would be π/2, since the whole circumference of any circle is 2 π radians.

Six o’clock is then 3 π/2, nine o’clock is then π, and three o’clock is just 0 (or 2π).  The order of these numbers uses the tradition of beginning counting radians (or degrees) at the 3 o’clock position as it were.  The other numbers (1, 2, 4, 5, etc.) are various ratios of π, using the trig functions that give us the results for what we would think of (typically) as 30 degrees, 60 degrees, and so on.

Well, why not do a novelty clock with the hour markings represented by complex numbers?  In engineering and in physics, they are very frequently used because they are excellent ways of calculating cyclical things, using a unit circle (in this case, a circle with radius 1, centered on the origin of the complex plane).  Using such an arrangement, multiplying any complex number by i results in a 90 degree rotation (counterclockwise).

In the case of a complex number clock, the 3 o’clock position is just 1 + 0i, 6 o’clock is 0 – i, 9 o’clock is -1 + 0i, and 12 o’clock is 0 + i.  I’ll work out the specific complex numbers for the other hours, and I’ll put them in a footnote* below, but I don’t think I can do it off the top of my head while commuting.  For one thing, I don’t recall the sine and cosine of 30 degrees…

Wait!  The sine of 30 degrees (aka pi over 6 radians) is just ½.  And since we can take that as a leg of a right triangle with hypotenuse length 1 (since it’s a unit circle) then the Pythagorean theorem tells us 1^2  = ½^2  plus the cosine^2 of 30 degrees, so the cosine equals the square root of 1 – ¼ or the square root of ¾, in other words √3/2.  So 2 o’clock would be √3/2 + (½)i.

One o’clock (or 60 degrees) just reverses the ordering of the parts of the complex number:  ½ + (√3/2)i.  Then 4 o’clock is √3/2 – i, five o’clock is ½ – (√3/2)i, 7 o’clock is -½ – (√3/2)i, 8 o’clock is -√3/2 – (½)i, 10 o’clock is then -√3/2 + (½)i, and and 11 o’clock is -½ + (√3/2)i.  Neat and tidy!

I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader to work out the complex numbers for the various minutes of the clock face**.  And, of course, if I’ve made any errors above, please let me know.

But anyway, I think you can see that this might make for a novelty clock every bit as exciting as the ones that just show you the hours as radians.  It might be slightly more rarefied than the other, but then again, engineers might prefer it (though they tend to use j rather than i to represent √-1, because i already stands for electrical current****, if memory serves.

Wow, how’s that been for some weird digressing?

Is “digressing” a word?  Google Docs seems to “think” it is.

Hopefully those quotation marks don’t offend Google Docs if it really does actually think.  If it’s any consolation (and even if it isn’t), I would be inclined to use such “scare” quotes when referring to the hypothetical thought processes of many a human.

On to another digression:  I had a weird thought just now, while my mind briefly wandered to imagining a potential crime thriller, maybe about a serial killer.  What if the killer, anticipating the potential for DNA evidence to be used to try to catch him*****, makes it a habit to pick up strands of hair, discarded tissues, used Band-aids, and various other things from various places such as public (pubic?) restrooms, barber shops, and so on.  He then leaves them randomly chosen and scattered at his various crime scenes to throw off investigators.

Of course, he’d want to be careful to get his DNA samples from widely chosen and semi-random places, such as maybe rest areas on major highways.  Otherwise the very pattern of those sources might give investigators something with which to work.  The FBI, for instance, can be impressively clever about such things.  At least, well, they were under previous administrations.

Jeez Louise, I’m really losing my mind, am I not?  Certainly it seems to have slipped its leash.  My apologies for this chaotic brain sneezing; I hope you don’t catch any mental viruses from me.

With that, I’ll bring this to a close.  I hope I end up feeling better today than I did yesterday, though so far it doesn’t seem promising.  More importantly, as always, I hope all of you have very good days.

*Well, there’s no point in doing this in a footnote now; I worked it out in the main body of the post.  See above.

**Just kidding.  Seriously, please don’t feel obligated to do this***.  I’m not going to do it (or might I say, “i is not going to do it”?)

***On the other hand, if one of you feels compelled to do the figuring, please share your results with me.

****That could almost be like someone’s protest sign, perhaps one that is held up and shaken outside a courthouse:

*****The vast majority of serial killers are men.  It’s a travesty, this wild gender/sex disparity; it’s the last bastion of unrepentant, unapologetic misogyny!  We need social programs to try to get more women out there serial killing!  Maybe we should provide subsidized child care services, so single moms won’t have as hard a time getting into the field…or wherever they might want to dump the bodies of their victims.

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“…the emptiest of feelings…”

Ugh, boy, wow, do I feel wiped out this morning, which seems mildly peculiar after a night’s sleep, however inadequate.  I didn’t have the energy to do my usual morning pull-ups today, even, and that’s rare.  Well, I say “usual”, but I actually alternate:  on even days I do pull-ups in the morning, on odd days I do dips, and on Sundays and on those Saturdays on which I don’t work, I do neither.

<sarcasm> Isn’t that exciting to learn?  I know that I can barely contain myself; I can’t imagine how it must be for all of you! </sarcasm>

Anyway, I don’t know why I am so enervated this morning.  I mean, I slept an entirely inadequate amount, but that’s not atypical or unusual for me.

Yesterday was even a decent day as far as it went.  We only worked a half day at the office, but sales were nevertheless pretty good.  Then afterward, I had a discord call with my youngest and we watched two excellent episodes of Doctor Who.  This is their first time watching, and it’s nice to be able to introduce someone to the show, especially one of my two favorite people ever.  The show is being quite well-received.  This is not a surprise.

Of course, I went back to the house later than I would have if I had not watched the Doctor, but not as late as usual.  Then I went to bed pretty sensibly.  That doesn’t translate into a good night’s sleep‒not by a long way‒but I did what was within my power.

It’s not as though I can do anything that’s not within my power.

So, yeah, I don’t know why I feel so beat this morning.  I don’t feel like I am coming down with some infectious illness (unfortunately), and I don’t have the symptoms that would go along with some rather severe medical process that could cause acutely worsening fatigue, like a GI bleed or something.  There’s no faintness/lightheadedness, no rapid heart beat, nothing of that sort.  I also have no new pains that I have so far noticed, and as far as I can tell I am not jaundiced, so my liver is probably okay.

Well, whatever.  The point is I feel a lot like crap.  But, unfortunately, I don’t feel sick enough not to go to work (or to write this blog post).  And I am not allowed to take breaks of any kind unless I am legitimately incapacitated.

“Not allowed” you ask?  Not allowed by whom?

By me’m, is the answer, albeit a deliberately ungrammatical one.  I cannot seem to let myself stop trying to do shit unless I am actually ill enough that I cannot really do anything.

I have been like this for as long as I can remember.  Even back in my early grade school days, I remember fantasizing about getting seriously hurt so that I would be able just to lie about and rest for a bit.  Honestly.

When I had open heart surgery‒it was August 7th or 8th, 1988, 2 weeks before I was to go back to university‒it was quite unpleasant of course, and quite painful.  Indeed, I remember that my first thought upon beginning to regain consciousness was more or less “damn it, I survived”.

It’s not great when you’re 18 (or probably any other age) to get your chest sawed open and your blood artificially circulated and oxygenated for a while, then to wake up restrained and intubated and cortically blind (I didn’t put that last thing together completely until quite some time later).

But it was, nevertheless, freeing.  I didn’t feel the need always to be doing something, to be accomplishing something, because I couldn’t.  That was kind of amazing, and it felt so at the time.

I wasn’t even afraid when I was going to get my heart surgery (or the catheterization before that).  It’s not that I was brave; it was nothing like that.  I was just too intrigued by the whole process, which was admittedly pretty cool and amazing, and I was almost unconsciously looking forward to having everything taken out of my hands for a while, whether I liked it or not.

Of course, in a sense, everything is always mostly out of our hands.  Our own agency, such as it is, is something we don’t choose, and we don’t choose our nature and our “specs”* and our talents and capacities.  Even our will is something that starts as it is without our input, as does the universe itself.  The best you can do is try to surf on the chaos.

But I’ve always felt the need to do something whenever I’m conscious and able to act.  Even if the “something” is a fun thing, or just a distracting thing, there’s always a pressure to do it, and it’s been there for as long as I can remember.  And it’s just a relief to have it taken off line temporarily, to have it rendered moot for a while.

When I had my heart surgery, I knew that it might kill me.  I certainly knew it intellectually, just as I also knew that the odds were very small‒roughly one in a thousand according to the statistics my cardiologist had shared with me.  Even back then, I had a good enough intuitive grasp of probability and statistics to know that, though immensely higher than the chance of winning the lottery, these were odds about which it was not worth worrying.

But I also just wasn’t horrified by the prospect of dying.  Even then I didn’t really believe in any kind of afterlife.  And I experienced (or, rather, I did not experience) more or less as complete a simulacrum of death as it was possible to undergo, one far more closely approximating it than mere dreamless sleep:  deep general anesthesia including hypothermia and cardioplegia, and the non-pulsatile cerebral blood flow that heart-lung bypass entailed.

If I had died on the operating table, there would have been no experiential transition for me.  That’s rather fascinating.

Anyway, sorry to bother you with my fantasies about, and my missed opportunities for, a painless death (or just for the chance to rest because there was nothing I could do).  Maybe I’ll feel better by tomorrow.  Maybe I’ll feel deader by tomorrow.  I could even be wetter by tomorrow, this being Florida.

I hope all of you are feeling and doing better than I.  I mean, come on, it’s not a very high bar to clear.

*By which I mean “specifications”, as of a machine or process, not “spectacles”.

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It’s serious Labor just to get through each Day

Good day to you all.  It’s Monday, the 7th of September, and for those in the USA, it is Labor Day.  That’s sort of the government holiday antipode of Memorial Day.  The latter marks the unofficial beginning of summer, and the former marks the unofficial end of summer.  In south Florida, I can fairly and reasonably say about the supposed end of summer, “Would that it were.”

That’s because the weather in autumn‒late autumn, anyway‒is much more pleasant than it is in summer here.  This is a large part of the reason for the “snow bird” phenomenon:  people who live up north during the warmer half (roughly) of the year and then come down to Florida during the cooler half of the year.

I say “cooler” in the meteorological, thermodynamic sense, not the social sense.  Contrary to what many people here seem to believe, there are not many cool people per capita in Florida.  It just doesn’t tend to fit the regional identity in any sense; “The Florida Man” is not celebrated for his coolness.

Just to give you an idea of how bad it is:  I am probably only barely below the mean level of coolness in Florida, at least based on the usual criteria of greater society.  Even well-known people from Florida are rarely noted for being cool.

Not that it really matters, of course.  Coolness is an epiphenomenon that accreted like pipe scale on the surface of primate dominance and reproductive hierarchical behavior patterns; that’s all fairly obvious looking at humans from the outside as it were.  But it all becomes self-referential after a while, building on and/or reacting in support of or opposition to prior standards of “coolness”, until it’s long since become a sort of autoerotic death spiral, a precursor to AI slop.

That doesn’t mean I don’t sometimes appreciate cool things and people; I just recognize “coolness” as entirely parochial.  What octopuses think is cool and what spiders think is cool and what albatrosses think is cool are going to be very different from each other and from what humans think is cool*.

Speaking of coolness, I went to the movie theater (by myself) this weekend to see the new Spider-Man movie.  The movie was certainly reasonably cool as far as it went; I thought it was well made and well acted and fun and so on.  It was at a theater that has a full bar, which is also pretty cool, so while I waited I had a Jack and Coke (to help with some social anxiety).  It was tasty, but it made me need to use the restroom four times before the movie started.  That was annoying.  But I rarely drink alcohol, anyway, so it’s an effect I need not dread.

The popcorn was pretty good, I guess, and so on, and the seats were comfy, but by the end of the movie I just felt more alone than I had before, despite coming out and joining the throng (then going into Target for some cat food and then to Walgreens for some sparkling water before ordering an Uber back to the house).

It was an expensive day, though.  The concessions were even more expensive than the ticket (and that’s not counting the Jack and Coke).  And the Uber to and from the theater was not cheap, either.  So, I don’t think I’m going to be doing that very often.  I may not do it ever again, maybe not even for Doomsday.

Though, when it comes to money, it’s not as though I’m saving for retirement.  I don’t expect to retire.  As of right now, I just expect to keep moving until I fall apart and then just basically die.  I mean, in the end that’s what everyone does, but my situation is likely to have less bric-a-brac cluttering up the works than many.

Honestly, I wish I could skip to the end a lot of the time.  Which I guess I can, of course, but it requires gumption and willpower to do it, and I am generally low on spoons, as the metaphor goes nowadays; I’m not sure how that figure of speech became prominent, nor why, but it feels somehow apropos.

Many things that I am doing to try to improve my willpower and my mental reserves and so on are at least partly to try to build the will to overcome my instinctive but annoying resistance to self-destruction.  I’m getting there, I think.  I’m making progress.  Maybe I’ll get there soon.

Honestly, I don’t really even mind that much if I don’t get to see Avengers: Doomsday.  I’m just sick of all of this shit.

I hope you all are doing better than I am.

*Of course, the thought processes as such are likely only to be very roughly analogous to what humans think about coolness, especially for non-social species.  There may also be overlap; I imagine many humans might think certain examples of flying skill shown by an albatross are very cool, and so might another albatross.

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“I said he’ll flip ya…flip ya for real.”

It’s Friday today, and though I am not a believer (and, more or less as I say in the meme below, I don’t want to be one, since I’m not impressed by “belief”) I will thank anyone and everyone who might be responsible for the fact that this is the end of my work week this week.  So, thank God it’s Friday, thank Cat it’s Friday, thank Frigg it’s Friday (thank Tony for his “Friggin’ Friday” comment), thank Cthulhu it’s Friday, thank Doom it’s Friday, thank Eru it’s Friday, thank Brahma it’s Friday…

I suspect that you get the idea.

Anyway, I’m very tired and need some rest.  It’s not that it’s been a particularly onerous week; it hasn’t really been.  If anything, it is I who has been more onerous than usual this week even than I usually am.  But I don’t think I’ve been much more onerous than usual.

I suppose that it’s up to those around me to say how much of a burden I’ve been, but I know their answers would be inconsistent and pretty confabulated.  This is not intended to insult them; it’s just the nature of human accounts of things that have happened to them when they are asked without having been paying attention to those things (in particular) in the first place.

Nature didn’t create a brain that keeps a running measure of its mood in relation to each individual around them, like some endless EEG plot.  What would be the use of such a function in the natural world?  Even if useful, would the use be worth the inevitable cost?  And could the drunken walk of the blind idiot god Evolution ever stumble upon such a process even if it were useful?

Well, given infinite time, it probably could, but we haven’t had infinite time to explore the space of possible biological innovations, and we probably will not have it.

Anyway, the point is, as Louis C K pointed out, it’s not up to me whether I’m being an asshole, at least not according to the impressions of others.  And I guess it’s not up to me whether others feel I am onerous or not.

Then again, it’s not up to them whether I consider myself to be a burden or not.  And I have the only front-row seats to me.  I am the one (and only) who is with me all the time*.

And consider something else:  all my meandering oddness (oddity?) that is on display here is me when I am tired, slowed down by literal decades of insufficient sleep.  Imagine how irritating I might be if I were fully rested and energetic!

Don’t make the mistake of imagining that it would necessarily make me calmer and more sedate.  I knew me back in the years when I used to get much more adequate sleep (though I have always slept less than most anyone else in my family).  I was not particularly sedate or calm then.

In closing, I’ll mention a weird thought that occurred to me when I was looking in the mirror (another daily burden) after my shower.  In principle, if one were picked up out of 3D space into 4D space, rotated in the proper way while there, then set down in 3D space again, one would be physically mirror-reversed***.

This would be a big problem, and not just because other people would be freaked out in subtle ways.  Every chiral molecule in one’s body would also be flipped from ortho to sinister, left to right (and vice versa).  That means you would need to eat similarly flipped food****, because your biological molecules only work on one version of most molecules.

Also, your DNA (which has chirality in spades) would be rotated in the other direction, so you certainly couldn’t reproduce.  But you couldn’t build new cells anyway, because many of the requisite molecules in that process are chiral.

Even your neutrinos/W and Z particles would behave differently, because this is one force/process in nature that is not parity-symmetric.  Meaning there is in a sense a handedness to the way the weak force acts.

Of course, that’s also the case with electromagnetism, come to think of it.  There is the famous “right hand rule” for how magnetic fields occur in response to changing electric fields/moving currents, and how electric fields respond to changing magnetic fields (see Maxwell’s equations).

So, heck, if you were so flipped, you might not even be able to interact with the electroweak sector of the quantum fields of our universe, and you might fall apart immediately at the subatomic level.  It would depend very much on whether such constraints are carried along with the stuff of one’s body or if they are imposed (and reimposed) by the fields in the universe around it.

I don’t even know what would happen with electric charge or hypercharge or spin or whatnot.  It almost makes me want to write Changeling in a Shadow World.  But I doubt that will happen.

With that weird stream of consciousness, I will let you go for the week.  I won’t be writing any new posts before Monday, exclusis improvisis.

*At least I’m the only one with a nervous system.  I suppose my skin and gut flora are with me all the time, but as far as I know, they don’t think in any reasonable sense.  Also, can any of them really be said to be with me always?  Their dividing/reproducing rates are very high compared to a human (or humanoid) lifetime, after all.  I guess it depends upon whether I consider a bacterium that undergoes mitosis to be two new organisms or just one increased organism that is continuous**.  Both options are reasonable and plausible, and nature doesn’t appear to care, outside the minds of humans, how such things are considered.

**This implies, in a sense, that all life on Earth could honestly be considered one organism, since there appears to have been one ultimate common ancestor to us all.  Thus, Life would really be a (so far) immortal organism.  I think that’s actually a pretty reasonable way to look at things, and it’s very much a sort of larger-scale, fractally self-similar pattern to how a human body is initiated with one cell−the “ensouled zygote” as I once mockingly made a meme about, after deciding it would be a good name for a band.

***If this is difficult to imagine, consider it in lower-dimensions.  Imagine an asymmetrical trapezoid in Abbot’s Flatland, with one of its two “legs” different than the other.  If it were picked up into three dimensions, flipped over, and then put back down, its asymmetry would now be in the other direction, and other Flatlanders might no longer even recognize it.

****This is part of why the possibility of being eaten by aliens, or of them eating us, makes little sense.  If you tried to eat food from an alien ecosystem, it would at best just go through you unabsorbed, and at worst would give you potentially fatal indigestion.  All your digestive processes are honed to work on other biological substances that occur within the ecosystem that evolved on Earth.  And this entails many lock-and-key enzymes and molecules that digest depending on chirality.  This was part of the motivation behind creating left-handed sugar and left-handed fat, which might physically behave similarly and perhaps even smell or taste somewhat the same, but would not be absorbed.  But such products almost inevitably lead to digestive troubles at best.

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A jest’s prosperity lies in the ear of him that hears it, never in the blog of him that makes it

Hello and good morning.

It’s Thursday again and time for another of my traditional Thursday blog posts*, though nowadays that’s embedded among the blog posts I write on all the other work days.  I haven’t written fiction in quite a long time, and the original reason for this (Thursday) blog was to promote my fiction.

But heck, it’s been a couple of weeks since I’ve even so much as picked up a guitar‒though I keep looking online at these parlor style acoustics, because they look like they’d be a good size for convenience and such.  But it’s just a bit of a pipe dream and a distraction to look at them.

There is no lapcom involved in this post today.  I didn’t take it with me when I left the office last night, but there was no more “reason” for that decision than there had been for the fact that I brought it the day before.  There were causes, as there always are, but not reasons.

Although, now that I consider it, I did feel that yesterday’s post was a bit too long.  That didn’t consciously enter into my decision-making when I chose not to bring the lapcom, but I did think about it earlier in the day, after posting.  Most, if not all, of what happens in most decisions we make is unconscious, or subconscious**, or whatever word you might want to choose.  So I can’t rule out that there were actual reasons for me not bringing my lapcom last night, but whatever the facts of that matter might be, there were, and always are, causes.

In any case, yesterday I fell prey to my tendency to write quite a lot when typing on a lapcom or other regular keyboard, because it’s so fast and easy for me.  It’s faster than speaking for me, and it’s certainly faster than using the “smartphone”, even not counting all the typos that occur when using the latter***.

I continue to toy, from time to time, with trying to type a tome using Google Docs.  But its interfaces, while okay for writing blog posts, don’t feel quite right for writing fiction, at least not for me.  It’s probably a stupid notion anyway.  I don’t really expect ever to write any more fiction.  That’s not a good thing, but then again, very little is.

I’m actually getting irritated that my lapcoms and my desktop computer at work are beginning to show some signs of their ages, and I fear that they may need to be replaced soon.  Worse, my smartphone is getting a bit laggy, and I cannot upgrade it to the latest operating system so I can no longer use my banking app on it.

But I really don’t want to go through the hassle of getting and setting up a new phone (or computer).  It’s so irritating and so uninteresting.  I actually had the general, vague hope that I would not live long enough to need to upgrade my computer(s) or phone again.

Honestly, the constant displacement of entropy that comprises the process of staying alive at so many levels is just dreary and almost laughable.

Speaking of laughable, I’ve been thinking about trying a personal experiment:  I’ve been thinking about trying to go without laughing for a day or a week or something along those lines****.  I just wonder what effect that would have on my experiences.

I tend to overdo it with jokiness, and I tend to partake in a lot of comedy of various kinds, almost in a desperate way.  It could even be be considered an addiction, or at least like a substance abuse problem, including its own abstinence syndrome:  I used to have the experience that, after reading a Dave Barry book, I would crash and feel quite depressed and morose for a while, as if in withdrawal from laughing so much.

Perhaps laughter is one of my means to try to hide from reality, to hide from the present, to try to hide from me.  I haven’t committed to the idea, yet, but it does intrigue me.  Most of my literary heroes do not spend a lot of time laughing.  And I have few, if any, real world heroes, but such as I have, though far from agelastic, are not prone to joke about a lot or get giggly or silly, like I do.

Those facts may be irrelevant for me, of course.  I am a unique snowflake (just like all the other snowflakes), and I don’t necessarily have the same attributes as those I admire, especially fictional characters.   But it is intriguing as almost a kind of fast, but one in which I would abstain from laughing rather than from food or water.

I’ll keep you posted on my effort (probably).  If you want to give me your input, you’re welcome to do so.  In the meantime, I hope you have a very good day.  Don’t stop laughing on my account.

TTFN

[P.S., a thought just occurred to me, because the words of an old ABBA song (misheard, as I just realized) started going through my head:  If you think that there’s nothing you can’t do, that anything is possible, then all the troubles that continue in the world are implicitly your fault, because you could have solved them.  After all, there’s nothing you can’t do.  To be fair to them, ABBA was actually singing “there is nothing we can do”, which I had misheard and misremembered as “can’t” for decades.  Indeed, their song goes pretty well with parts of this post, especially the song’s first few lines.  Who would have guessed?]

*I almost said “my traditional Thursday podcast”.  How’s that for a weird mistake?  I’ve certainly toyed with the idea of a podcast at times, but that requires more time and editing and so on than my little five-minute or so snippets of audio.  But I do like to listen to podcasts, at least about topics that interest me.  Perhaps it was a Freudian slip.

**I accidentally typed “sunconscious” here, originally, and it seems like kind of a charming word, so it’s a shame it doesn’t really mean anything.  But one certainly doesn’t want a conscious sun, as the dubious Doctor Who episode “42” tried to warn us…or something like that.

***You might almost think that word means “one who lats”, but of course it’s not that kind of word and has close kinship with “later” and its ilk.

****I.e., a period of time.