Hello and good morning on this Thursday‒a day of the week on which those in the know have been able, these last several years, to indulge in reading my weekly blog posts.  And this is, of course, another iteration thereof; not to be confused with Iterations of Zero, my other, far less prolific blog, which I had originally created to be a place where I could discuss things unrelated to my fiction writing.

Of course, the notion that this blog was supposed to focus on my fiction has long since mostly gone by the wayside.  It never seems to have made much difference for that, in any case.  And of course, as many of you will know, for quite a while I wrote here almost daily, and I didn’t write any fiction at all during that time.

Plans or dreams or hopes are whatever they are, I guess (there’s a hunk of logic, right?).  I suspect that, even for the most successful and fulfilled of all people, their plans bear only vague resemblance to the specifics of their outcomes.  Probably, the most successful, the most fulfilled people, are able to make general plans but also to adapt to and optimize based upon the various comparatively unpredictable events that actually happen 

Your host, not fulfilled*, has had a bad week.

This weekend was so hot and humid that I had to sleep with the AC off on Saturday and Sunday nights.  Wait, you may ask, why would it be that high heat and humidity led me to turn off the air conditioning?  Because the unit‒imperfectly but permanently placed in the wall‒leaked so much condensation that, despite tupperware-style buckets put down to try to catch it and old clothes to soak it up, the water seeped into my futon.  It was better to go old school and just let the fan blow on me.

Then, after the week started, on Monday night I literally did not sleep at all.  I got not one moment of sleep, just spent the night lying around, trying not to do anything that would awaken me more.  Because of that, on Tuesday evening, having no energy to face my commute, I just slept at the office.  I got at least a few hours of broken sleep there, on the floor, with my head on my backpack for a pillow.  It was more restful than the previous three nights, which may not be saying much, but is nevertheless true.

I have not worked on Extra Body at all this week.  I just don’t have the energy, even though I’m nearly done with the third edit.  I just don’t have the energy.  I’ve also hardly played anything on the guitar, though yesterday morning I did a little, but my singing was rough and my voice got hoarse very quickly.  I haven’t even been bringing my little laptop computer with me.  I’m writing this on my phone, using Google Docs.

Tomorrow, at least, is a positive day.  I don’t mean that in the general, Annie sort of way**.  Cat forbid I should ever attempt such sickening pseudo-optimism.  No, it’s specific to this particular, non-fungible tomorrow.  Not only is it Friday the 13th, a day I always like when it happens (largely because some people stupidstitiously think it’s “unlucky”) but it’s also a day to celebrate one of the two most important events ever in my existence.  I won’t get into more specifics, but historically, for me, it more than made up for what happened two days earlier.

Anyway, after that, I’ve got nothing.  I don’t even know if I’ll actually get back to work on Extra Body or if I’ll just say “fuck it” to that and to any other attempt to do anything creative or positive or productive.  I suspect that I’ve already done all the good that I’m ever going to do in the world, unimpressive though it may be.

I guess futility is really a characteristic of everything that happens in the universe, ever, at least on a large enough scale.  The universe itself‒our universe, this instantiation or region or whatever you want to call it of whatever possible larger multiverse or metaverse or omniverse may be‒is itself the very physical instantiation of something immense beyond reckoning (possibly infinite in spatial extent) and yet ultimately trending simply toward some version of “heat death” if our understanding of physics and cosmology are even vaguely correct

Of course, there is certainly much we don’t know about the nature and structure of the cosmos.  And if our civilization persists in whatever form and continues to grow and create more knowledge, it may even someday be that cosmic engineering could be possible, or even the creation of new cosmoses.

But the second law of thermodynamics seems pretty inescapable in the long run‒it’s not just physics, it’s the raw mathematics that seems to imply it.  I think I wrote a post on IoZ a long time ago about that.  If I find it, I’ll have included the link.

Anyway, let us draw this particular local instantiation of futility to a close for now.  I hope you have all been having a much better week than I, and that your days and weeks and so on improve consistently, as much as is reasonably possible.  I would really like that.

TTFN

*To paraphrase Shirley Jackson’s description of Hill House.

**“The sun’ll come ooouuut…tomorrow…”