It’s Tuesday morning, and I’m writing this on my laptop computer at the train station.  I brought the computer back with me last night because the bases of my thumbs have been—like so much of the rest of my body—really killing me (albeit slowly) lately, more so even than usual.  I guess writing the blog post yesterday on my smartphone didn’t help soothe them any.

It’s the last day of January in 2024, if that’s important to anyone.  Actually, it’s the last day in January in 2024 even if that’s not important to anyone at all, anywhere.  It’s just a fact of reality, one of those things that is so whether anyone even notices that it is.  Of course, the names of the months and the numbering of the days and years and all that are “made up” and effectively arbitrary, but once the system is in place, it is a fixed thing.  It is what it is.

This is the nature of reality, of course.  Despite political disinformation, or ideologies, or beliefs, or wishes, or fads, or “political correctness”, or whatever subjective, parochial notion people might have, reality is nevertheless “out there”, and it does not bend to anyone’s desires except through concerted effort and thought and will.  Even then, the laws of nature, whatever they may be in their ultimate form, are clearly not optional.  The old saying goes, “Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed,” but there is no option not to obey nature.  It might be better to say, “Nature, to be commanded, must be understood.”

Even if the world were to turn out to be an illusion—some version of the Matrix, or a deceit of some other kind, perhaps some manner of hallucination—this would not undermine the existence of reality.  It would merely create relative barriers to our understanding of it.  Even if our universe were to turn out to be a simulation in a simulation in a simulation, on and on, as far as one arbitrarily might extend the chain, there would still have to be some underlying, ground-state reality in which the simulators and the simulations can exist.  A dream is not a free-floating thing, able to dream of other dreams that can then dream of it.  It requires some foundational place in which at least the first dream can occur.

All that’s pretty self-evident, I guess, so I’m sorry to bore you with the rehashing of such ideas.  It’s just that I encounter notions such as the whole “perception is reality” and its relatives too often, and they are maddening.

Then again, many things are maddening to me, especially lately, especially when my pain is flaring up.  Much of the world that I perceive is maddening.  I feel angry toward almost everything in the universe, and I have fewer and fewer respites in the form of distractions that make me at least temporarily joyful.  Pain doesn’t help, obviously.  Being in pain makes everything darker in general, and I’ve been in pain for roughly two decades, with no single day’s break from it.

The Dread Pirate Roberts said life is pain.  This is a simplification, of course; it would be more accurate to say that pain is a ubiquitous and necessary part of life.  That’s one of the reasons I hate it in general.

I particularly hate my own life, especially as it is now and as it feels to be more and more becoming over time.  There are so many things in the office, for instance, that increasingly drive me to want to lash out, physically—against the inconsistencies, and the idiocy, and the counterproductive chaos.  The noise also doesn’t help, frankly, and my pain makes things that I would normally at least be able to tolerate difficult even to endure.

I’m tired pretty much all the time.  I have no desire to play music, let alone to write any, and no desire to read fiction, let alone write any.  It’s harder and harder to find even YouTube videos that are transiently interesting, or that cover science topics in which I’m interested in ways that I didn’t already know.  “Mainstream” movies and shows, and the fodder on the various streaming services, all seem so utterly banal and trite and submoronic.

The last movie I watched all the way through was No One Will Save You, on Hulu.  I enjoyed that because the outsider main character fought off the invaders and the humans alike until finally the aliens accepted her and left her to her usual nature while taking over all the humans in the town.  At the end of the movie, the young woman dances happily with the alien-infested townsfolk, finally accepted into a community, finally having come to a place where she belongs—among the aliens, if you will.  As the last scene pulls out from the dancing, we see green forests and pleasant scenery, with alien ships hovering overhead*, perhaps supervising everything.  Perhaps this is the state of the whole world at the end of the movie.  I didn’t find it in any way horrifying.  It was actually quite beautiful.

Of course, it is a silly conceit that an alien species would look so like humans (only slightly stretched and bent here and there), or that they would have any interest in us, or that they were only slightly more advanced than we are (presumably) such that they would have any difficulty securing the dominance of any group, let alone an individual.  It’s a bit like a scientist finding it difficult to keep a yeast culture in a petri dish because some single yeast cell is fighting back.

Perhaps I’m being unkind.  Perhaps the aliens could simply have overwhelmed the Earth (which in the end it seems they did) but they wanted to do some manner of experiment or more subtle control, and were sworn not simply to wipe out individual humans who resisted, even when one of those humans killed several of them.

I guess human naturalists wouldn’t necessarily kill a grizzly bear or a lion or a shark or whatever that had killed people who were trying to interfere with it in some way as part of their research.  Perhaps they would consider it lamentable but accept—just an inherent risk involved in what they were doing.  I don’t know.  I’m probably overthinking it.

Anyway, that’s the most interesting new movie or fiction I’ve encountered recently (not counting Doctor Who, which isn’t really new), but I don’t plan to watch it again.  I should cancel my subscription.  I should probably cancel all of my subscriptions.  What is the point of having them when nothing is interesting?

I’m very tired, and I’m very sore—it hurts to sit, and it hurts to stand and walk, and it hurts to lie down, just in slightly different ways—and I’m exasperated.  Also, my train will be here in a moment.  So that’s it for today.

*Are they “making home movies for the folks back home”, as in Radiohead’s Subterranean Homesick Alien?  Possibly.