Well, I did something rather unusual (for me) yesterday, and I’m doing something rather unusual (for me) now.  I bought tickets for the Powerball lottery yesterday.  And this morning I’m composing at least part of this blog post by using voice to text on my phone.

Apparently, when using voice to text. just saying the word “paragraph” doesn’t cause the text to begin a new paragraph.  This is in contrast to what happens when you use the names of ordinary punctuation, and the voice to text turns it into that punctuation, which is actually reasonably impressive.

Okay, well apparently you have to say “new paragraph” to get it to do a new paragraph, but that makes it challenging to describe in writing what you have to say to make it do that.

As for the Powerball ticket thing, well, yesterday we had a customer who didn’t seem to understand how their credit card worked, and we had difficulty getting their purchase to go through.  When they had spoken with their credit card company (supposedly) and told us that it should be clear (for the second time), as I was proceeding to run the card, I said aloud “if this goes through I’m going to buy a lottery ticket”.  It went through.

Then, later in the day, a similar thing happened, and one of my co-workers heard me say what I had said earlier. He said that he would be happy to go in with me on lottery tickets.  I said I don’t know how you even buy them*, but I want to get one of the big ones, the Powerball ticket.  So we said he would chip in $10 and I would chip in $10 and we would buy $20 worth of Powerball picks.

Then, as I was heading out, the boss asked what we were doing.  I told him, and he said he wanted to chip in 10.  So, I bought $30 worth of quick pick Powerball tickets for the drawing that apparently happened last night.  I did not bring them with me to the house, they are waiting at the office.  I do not by any stretch of the imagination expect to win.

Okay, well, to say by any stretch of the imagination is a bit of an exaggeration.  However, as I said to my co-worker, I am probably more likely to survive jumping off the Empire State building than I am to have one of these lottery tickets win.  As he replied, it’s not impossible, though.  He knew he was being silly, but it definitely was a “you go first” moment.

This was a one time thing, done both out of a sense of ennui and a sense of pointlessness; it was just a silly, frivolous thing to do.

Okay, enough with the voice to text stuff.  It’s irritating.  I won’t say that it doesn’t have its charms, but they are limited.  I also don’t like the way it auto-punctuates.  It also doesn’t even seem to know the word “ennui”, if you can stomach that fact (and even if you cannot).

In other news, or “olds” as the case may be, I continue to try to mitigate my chronic pain, with erratic (at best) results.  But I’m still trying.  It’s a profoundly unsatisfying thing to which to have to dedicate a substantial portion of one’s mind and life, but it’s very difficult to ignore or to take in stride.  Even Mr. Spock couldn’t just ignore his pain after he got infested by that flying fried egg thing.

Of course, that makes sense.  Biologically, as I’ve said possibly hundreds of times, it does not make sense for an organism to be able to ignore pain.  Oh, sure, it can be suppressed briefly in emergency situations, and we know that happens.  You can also squelch alarms of various kinds in the industrial world, as you can silence alarms on heart monitors (temporarily) when you know why it’s going off or you know that it’s an artifact.

But important alarms do not bear complete silencing or disconnection‒not without creating significant danger.  That is, unless the alarm is a holdover, a remnant of something that used to be relevant but no longer is so.

Imagine a carbon monoxide alarm, put into a house in the days when they had gas heat and cooking and so on.  This was a reasonable precaution.  But then imagine that it started going off because it detected CO, and in response, the homeowner replaced the gas heat and gas cooking with electric alternatives.  Now there are not even any connections to the gas supply, and as an extra precaution, the owner bought an electric car, so no danger exists of CO poisoning other than some deliberate chemical attack.

And yet…the carbon monoxide alarm keeps going off.  And it doesn’t just do so intermittently; it is constant, though the volume varies a bit.  And by design, it is intrinsic to the very structure and function of all else in the house, so to remove it is either impossible or would disable numerous other, still important systems and still relevant alarms.

That’s a bit like what chronic pain entails.  It ruins some things and taints all things.  After a while, it’s hard to remember what it was like not to be in pain.  And after it has helped drive away everyone important to one‒for no one wants to spend much time around a lost cause‒it can be very difficult to maintain even any semblance of optimism.  You just want to shut that bloody alarm off, even if you have to blow up the house to do it.

Oh, well.  Whataya gonna do?  Maybe if I have won the lottery, I’ll be able to find some newer answers.  I’ll look into that right after I catch the flying pig back from my celebratory skiing trip in Hell.

If I were to win the lottery, I don’t think I would stop working, at least not immediately, and I certainly would not reveal it here‒again, at least not immediately.  Possibly there would be ways to tell, but don’t spend too much effort thinking about them; the chances of winning are almost nanoscopic.

Actually, the chances are much higher of me choosing to jump off the Empire State Building than of winning the lottery.  And the chances of me choosing to jump from a much nearer tall building are higher still.  I even have a building chosen for the purpose, just in case.

Whatever.  It doesn’t matter.  I don’t matter, certainly not in any larger sense, and barely even to myself.

You all matter to me more than that, though, so I hope you do well and have a good day today and a consistently improving set of days hereafter.

*It turns out to be quite easy, of course.  When you’re trying to encourage people to give you their money for nothing, you don’t want to make the process too difficult.