Okay, well, hello and good morning, everyone—everyone who’s reading this, anyway.  It’s Thursday again, and so it’s time for my weekly blog post.  It’s March, also, but I don’t think there’s any such thing as “Marchly” blog posts.  March is the month in which Spring begins (in the northern hemisphere), so that’s nice.  It is if you like Spring, anyway, and most people do…for good, sound, biological reasons.

I’ve been slightly less productive on Outlaw’s Mind this week than I was last week, having written only a little over 4000 words this week…4153, to be exact.  This is mainly because I didn’t work last Saturday, so I didn’t write anything in the morning that day.  It turns out I’ve been writing about a thousand words a day, lately (plus some additional fractional number on average, which can’t apply to real words per se, so I won’t figure it exactly…readers can feel free to do the division for themselves if they like).

The story is progressing nicely.  Or, rather, it’s progressing well.  It’s not very “nice” right now; in fact, Timothy is going through what will probably end up being the worst thing to happen to him so far.  That’s the way it goes with stories; you have to torment the protagonist.  Ease and comfort don’t exactly make for gripping reading, unfortunately.

It’s probably a universal fact of life—again, for good, sound, biological reasons—that fear and suffering and discomfort are much more engaging than any achieved joy or experienced satisfaction.  The Buddhists are probably right, that life is fundamentally characterized by suffering, and it’s not unreasonable just to want to get off the ride—by meditation or by other means.

Though, of course, there is in most creatures most of the time a terribly strong drive not to get off the ride—yet again, for good, sound, biological reasons.  That’s even without Hamlet’s lamented dread of what dreams may come.  Even if you’re convinced that the reason no traveler ever returns from the bourne of that undiscovered country is that there’s no place from which to return and there’s no one to do the returning once you go there—and certainly no suffering—nevertheless the dread of it remains, as does the addictive clinging to the maladaptive habit that is life.  It’s terribly frustrating.

I’m being slightly melodramatic here.  I apologize.  I’m frustrated by a great many things—stupidity (my own and that of others), events in the outside world, events in my life, events in my inside world, the nature of my inside world, and so on—and this blog is pretty much my only venue for expressing those frustrations.  It’s not like I can talk to anyone about them.

I mean, it’s physically possible to talk about them, don’t get me wrong, but physical possibility is not a dispositive fact.  After all, it’s physically possible for a person to run full tilt at a brick wall and quantum tunnel through it.  But that’s so improbable that you’re probably waaaaay more likely to win every lottery in the world on the same day…without even playing any of them deliberately*.  But, in principle, it could happen the next time you don’t look where you’re going.

If such tunneling became, somehow, much more likely, perhaps because some omnipotent being had tweaked the nature of quantum interactions, I suspect that the universe as we know it would fall apart.  For one thing, fusion reactions would happen way too easily (I think) if tunneling were so much more likely, and maybe every form of “ordinary” matter would accumulate locally into massive atomic nuclei—little bits of neutron-star matter everywhere, accompanied by all the local equivalents of supernova explosions that would happen as protons converted into neutrons, and positrons and neutrinos went flying everywhere…dogs and cats living together…mass hysteria!  But, again, this is just speculation and silliness.  The point is, there are easier ways to get through walls.

Actually, I don’t think that was the point.  Oh, well.

Anyway—as you could probably guess—I have a very difficult time having normal conversations.  I have a pretty difficult time having even abnormal conversations.  So please forgive me if I express myself here, at least a little bit.  You’re the one reading it.  No one’s forcing you to do so**.

I did post the third part of Outlaw’s Mind here earlier this week, and if you’re reading it, I hope you’re enjoying it.  I guess I’ll probably continue to post it for now.  It astonishes me that I ever thought this was going to be a short story, or even just a novella.

I’m trying to force myself to read fiction again, so I’ve again gotten the Kindle versions of a few “light novels”, such as are popular—so I gather—with young people in Japan.  They tend to be short books, which helps, but they’re often too short…they’re almost always serial stories, and that gets frustrating, because there’s no resolution in any given volume.  It’s also somewhat dispiriting to get to the end of a story, or the end of a volume, anyway, and have to face the fact that, no, I’m not some Japanese high school student who has friends and romances and interactions and peculiar occurrences in his or her life.  I’m just still me, which is surely not something for which anyone would wish.

Oh, well, whataya gonna do?  I hope you’re all doing well, and feeling well, and minimizing your suffering and all that stuff.  If so, keep it up.

TTFN

*I haven’t worked the numbers at all—I’m not sure how one would even determine the odds of accidentally winning lotteries without having deliberately played them, and I don’t have the necessary skills to calculate the rough rates of macroscopic quantum tunneling, though that, at least, can be done—so I may be wrong about the comparison.  But I don’t think I am.

**I hope.  Please, if someone is threatening you or otherwise coercing you to read my blog, try to find a way to alert the “authorities”, or leave a message in the comments below.  It doesn’t have to be an obvious message, in case you’re being monitored.  Goodness knows I’ve sent coded messages in blog posts, apparently ones that are so obscure that no one even notices that they exist, like last week.