Hello, good morning, and welcome to another Thursday.  It’s 4-11, the day of information!  You could say it’s the first of the middle two Thursdays of April 2019.  Although, let’s see…yes, since April has only thirty days (things would be different if it had thirty-two), there will be only four Thursdays this month, the outer two and the inner two (if you will).  Maybe I’m trying too hard to split things into binary parts, but I am listening to a biography of Claude Shannon, so perhaps such a desire can be excused; I’m not just a nut.  I am a nut, of course, but I’m not just a nut.

I’ve recently released another audio blog on Iterations of Zero, about the importance of trying to disprove one’s own theorems, and I have another audio blog already being edited, which I’ll probably put out before the end of the week.

No one could ever honestly say of me that I don’t put out.

I’m also going to be turning both of those audio blog postings into YouTube “videos” for those who prefer to use that platform to get their fix of audio material.  But whether those videos will happen before the end of the work week is far from certain.

I’m sad to have to report that I must put my novella on hold for the time being.  I’m just not making progress nearly quickly enough on editing/rewriting Unanimity, and that’s a long book…I need to speed it up because it would be nice to be able to publish it—and Free-Range Meat as well—sometime before I die.  At the rate I’ve been going, that seems not only far from guaranteed (as no such thing is ever guaranteed) but frankly improbable.  So, I’m going to have to put new writing on hold, with the specific exception of these weekly blogs, in order to focus on editing and rewriting my previously written work.  It’s a bit of a wrench, since I do like the new novella.  I also thought of a funny new short story idea this morning, but…well, that idea is now jotted, nicely alongside its colleagues, in the note-taking app on my smartphone.  There it can wait.  As for the novella, I’ll be able to pick up on it where I left off with minimal trouble.  I’ve always been lucky, or blessed, or whatever you want to call it, in that regard.

Of course, I’d prefer to do my new writing and my editing full-time, which I suspect is quite a common sort of lament among authors and writers and musicians and artists of all stripes.  The need to pay the bills, and therefore to work, and therefore to commute, and therefore to burn up precious and unrecoverable chunks of one’s lifetime doing things that have absolutely no deep value to oneself, and probably none to anyone else, is maddening.  I suppose everything is trivial at some level, so I shouldn’t be too despondent.  Or maybe it’s okay to be despondent as long as one recognizes that such despondence as the inescapable nature of life.  It’s overrated, that’s all I can say.

Well, okay, that’s clearly not all I can say.  Anyone who’s read anything of this very blog entry, let alone previous ones, and/or my audio blogs and other entries on Iterations of Zero, and/or any of my books and Facebook and Twitter postings knows that’s not all I can say.  I talk and write far, far too much to be able to make such a claim with any degree of honesty.  If I were that self-deluded, I might as well be a solipsist, which is something I just don’t see myself being able to do.

Solipsism could seem sort of lonely, if one were seriously to entertain it, but given how lonely life is anyway, it might be a comfort to imagine that such is the fundamental nature of reality.  I don’t know.  I’m probably overthinking this.

And since I’ve come to the point where I’m sharing my random thoughts on loneliness and solipsism, I suppose that’s as good a hint as any that I’ve reached the end of any productive value to this week’s blog entry.  I hope you all have a wonderful week and a good remainder of the month, and in general as good a future as can possibly be managed.  If I find myself in a position to pull strings to make it happen, I’ll be sure to pull them.  In the meantime…

TTFN