Hello and good morning.

It’s Thursday, the long-standing day of what was my weekly blog, back when I was writing fiction that almost no one but my family members would ever read on the other days of the week.

I’m writing this at the house, because I decided to take the bus in to the train this morning, because I already feel over-hot and sweaty and, most importantly, quite mentally fatigued.  I thought I’d give myself a short break and do my walking in the evening today.  That way, at least, I don’t have to carry a change of clothes with me to the office and have it drying out in front of my little desktop fan most of the day.  Not that anyone complained—they didn’t.  But it’s mildly irritating.

I’m getting tired of doing this blog, especially the Thursday one, in which I use a Shakespearean quote that I’ve altered to squeeze in some form of the word “blog”.  Then again, I’m getting tired of doing pretty much everything.

I haven’t read anything at all this week, apart from the occasional snippet of a news article.  I have listened to some podcasts—mainly Sean Carroll’s Mindscape—so far this week.  His solo “AMA” podcasts are often better than the ones in which he interviews someone, though I’ve encountered some interesting people through the latter podcasts, and have bought books by them.  Still, I did that far more often for people on the Sam Harris podcast.  I’m not sure why that is.  Maybe I just have more in common thought-wise with Harris, or I tend to find his guests more interesting.

Still, I like the AMA’s for both of them, the ones for Carroll because he is a physicist, and so people ask him many physics-related questions.  He has more than enough expertise to address them, and he’s a good explainer and thinker.  I think in some ways that Sam Harris is a more careful thinker, a more methodical and cautious one; his long-standing meditation practice seems to serve him well in this.  He strikes me as almost Vulcan in character, though not in any straightforward, simplistic, “emotionless” sense.  In any case, I admire both men and like to listen to their thoughts and listen to their interactions with other intelligent people about interesting topics.

I have Sean Carroll’s textbook on General Relativity, Spacetime and Geometry, but I haven’t read very far in it.  It’s not that it’s too difficult; it’s well written, and everything so far makes good sense and seems clear.  But I just have a hard time forcing myself to go through it, or anything else, really.  I have the book at the office, like I have Zee’s Quantum Field Theory, As Simply As Possible, but I have to sit and actually read them, and there is no good time period during which to sit uninterrupted, even during my supposed lunch time.  And by the time I get back to the house—or early in the morning—I’m all but completely out of mental energy.

I also have Stephen Hawking’s book Euclidean Quantum Gravity (co-written with G.W. Gibbons) that supposedly goes into more detail on some ideas he mentioned in A Brief History of Time, and I’ve also hardly read any of that.  But, again, this week I really haven’t read anything, fiction or nonfiction.  I’m really running out of steam.  Nothing is very interesting.  Nothing is very fun.  I feel mentally exhausted, even though I’m getting more physically fit.  It’s just all very boring.

Maybe it would be better if I weren’t in pain every day, or if I had someone with whom I could really talk about things like physics and whatnot, on a regular basis.

I don’t know where I’m going with this.  Well, I’m going nowhere, of course, but that’s more long term.

Maybe I should just Uber to the office, so I don’t even need to walk to the bus stop.  Why not?  It’s not as though there’s any reason for me to save money.  I have no future for which to plan or prepare.

I feel a bit like Colonel Slade (I think that was his name) in Scent of a Woman, in that I might as well just spend whatever I have on minor diversions.  I have no interest in most of things in which he was interested, of course—no interest in Ferraris or escorts or fancy restaurants in Manhattan, or the Waldorf-Astoria.  I also have no interest in or expectation to find some high school student to walk me around—thankfully, I am not blind—nor to save my life in dramatic and touching movie-style fashion.

Also, of course, though I do appreciate and enjoy Jack Daniels whiskey from time to time—it’s probably my favorite hard liquor—I do not have a drinking problem, unlike the good Colonel, and I rather quickly get tired of alcohol on the occasions when I do drink it.  I could see myself getting habituated to Valium, in principle—the two times I actually took it, for medical reasons, are the only times in my life when I recall feeling “normal” and at ease in my skin—but I understand the nature of that process, and that such habituation would lead to feeling even worse in between doses.

In any case, I have no access to Valium (or any of its relatives), and have no intention to seek it out.  I wouldn’t trust “black market” Valium even if I knew where to look for it.

Of course, one might well ask, if I don’t really care if I live or die, what does it matter if I take something that isn’t actually Valium?  Well, if I were to be seeking Valium, it would be to try to experience that sense of feeling normal, perhaps for a third and final time in my life, and it would be terribly disappointing to get the wrong thing.  This is a situation in which it is better never to have loved at all than to have loved and lost, so to speak.

Anyway, I’m tired, and this blog post is already longer than I meant it to be.  This week has felt like a million years already.  So much for Pink Floyd’s line “every year is getting shorter”.  Of course, I understand that phenomenon, and I have experienced what is being described in the song.  But lately, time is moving more and more slowly, from a subjective point of view.  I’m dragging my feet, but the sun still just doesn’t keep up, and it certainly doesn’t feel as if it’s racing around to come up behind me again.

Of course, unless I’m secretly immortal, which seems ridiculously unlikely, it is certainly true that I am “one day closer to death” every day, as are we all.  But it still could be a comparatively long way off, at least if I leave it to its own devices.  If I do that, and experience life as I have been for so long, and if I live even only twenty more years (which would still have me die younger than either my mother or father, neither of whom had exercise habits or practices such as I do), it would seem a horrible semi-eternity.

I know, “semi-eternity” doesn’t actually make sense.  It’s akin to multiplying infinity times zero—it’s not a well-defined operation, mathematically.

I did invent a “number” in the past, which I called a “gleeb” for no particular reason, that when multiplied by zero would produce 1, making it, in a sense, “bigger” than infinity, or at least different.  I even worked out a little of the implicit algebra of the gleeb, during some down-time in the education department at FSP West.  It was silly, and it certainly wasn’t useful for any mathematical purposes, but when you realize that it implies that 1/0=gleeb, or 1/gleeb=0, and then start putting those identities into equations and the like, you can get some surprising and amusing results, such as that a gleeb raised to any positive power is just still a gleeb, and that the gleeb is, in a sense, the reciprocal of zero—though again, there’s no use or rigor to it.

Anyway, that’s that.  I want to go back to bed and try to go to sleep, but I’m not going to do that.  I work today, tomorrow, and Saturday, and it’s my coworker’s daughter’s first birthday tomorrow, so I wouldn’t want to interfere with his family’s enjoyment of that.  So, there it is.  I will need to survive until next week at least.  I don’t know if I’ll make it until next Thursday, but I expect I’ll at least write a post a day for the next two days, because that’s just me doing what I do every day.  I hope you have a good remainder of your week, whoever you are that is reading this.

TTFN