Author: Robert Elessar

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Is this my eigenstate? If so, I fear it makes me LESS coherent.

It’s Monday, and I really am going to try to keep this short.  The only reason I’m writing this post at all is because I don’t want anyone to worry about me in any unnecessary way.  I suppose it’s okay for people to worry about me in general‒I think I would, if I were someone else and if I cared what happens to me.  I’m certainly not in good shape, just as a general matter, and I don’t seem to be getting better at all, so who knows what to say?

But today, I am not taking off work or anything.  I am however in a significant amount of pain, above my usual baseline, and I have been so since last week.  It’s quite frustrating, and it takes the wind out of my sails for getting anything done but the bare minimum.  Certainly I have done no walking or biking.

I did have a lovely day on Saturday, because I got to spend time with my youngest.  That was, of course, quite wonderful.  So you will hear (or read) no complaints from me about that.  It was officially one of the two best days I have had since 2012, at least.

I wish that could make my chronic pain go away, but alas, it does not.  It does take the edge off my depression for a while‒certainly while spending time together‒and that’s obviously good.  If only there were something that could be done in addition to that.

Unfortunately, I’m currently in the state* that I tend to refer to as feeling as if I have already been embalmed despite the fact that I am nominally still alive.  This is meant to convey how stiff and constricted I feel, and how every motion is difficult and painful.  I at least did my dips this morning, despite feeling wiped out already upon awakening.  Yay, me, right?  Huzzah.

It probably comes as no surprise that I continue to have insomnia, and the pain exacerbation doesn’t help that.  Well, in a certain sense one could say it helps the insomnia.  It impairs the somnia, if you will.

I’m writing this on my smartphone, by the way.  I have the mini lapcom with me, but it’s too much trouble to use right now.  So I am using the smartphone.  Using it is, however, also somewhat painful for the bases of my thumbs, but almost nothing I do does not hurt, so there’s little hope of avoiding pain entirely no matter what I’m doing.

It looks like Chrome and Google Docs and everything have updated themselves again, and now it’s causing trouble with the way the computer starts and the way I write this on my smartphone as well.  It’s terribly annoying; they change things that don’t need changing and that seem to work fine, apparently for cosmetic reasons, because they think they need to…I don’t know, keep up with the other software giants?  Anyway, it’s terribly annoying.

Are they really continuously releasing a product that has so many deficiencies that they need to keep updating every other week (or so it seems)?  Perhaps they’re hiding nefarious changes behind these seemingly pointless ones.  How would we know if they were?  How can we know this isn’t the work of some AI that got out of the box, for that matter?

Though, honestly, I think such an AI would do a better job of not requiring so many pointless-seeming updates.  But maybe that would be the perfect camouflage:  artificial intelligence masquerading as human stupidity.

Heavy sigh, as Justine would say**.

Anyway, that’s gonna be enough for me today.  It’s 5:30 in the morning and I’m already exhausted.  I am not, however, sleepy.  Talk about a system that needs an update!

Well, have a good day if you can.

*Not to be confused with the state of Florida, though the two states have things in common.

**A character in The Accountant and its sequel.

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Is it a sine of the (space)times that we are where we are in the week?

TBIF* or TDIF**, either way, it’s Friday.  It’s the last day of the work week.  I started writing “It’s the end of the work week” (emphasis added), but I realized that, since it is early in the morning, and I am just on my way to work, this time could not accurately be called the end of the work week.  One could, in fact, say that 20% of the work week yet remains; that can hardly be called an end, any more than a B minus can be considered a perfect score (unless one radically changes the grading system one is using).

Such are the random things that spring forth from my brain via my fingers when I am writing my blog posts in the mornings (in this case on my laptop computer, which is literally on my lap***).  I’m sure you’re well aware of that, if you’ve read this blog for any length of time.  I don’t really know ahead of time what I’m going to write, unless I have a specific subject to address.  Even then I often address subjects in ways that surprise me.  This is because when I write I am really “thinking out loud”, although in this case, “out loud” is figurative.

Do my thoughts meander like a restless wind inside a letter box?  Well, they’re probably more like a restless discarded Cheetos® wrapper in the wind of a nearby tornado; one should almost certainly use a junk food metaphor when describing the way my thoughts spontaneously arise.  Not that I think my thoughts are “junk”, no more so than anyone else’s are.  I just think it’s rather appropriate to consider many of them as having a bit of a temporary amusing effect, but without any real nutritional substance.  Junk food has its place****, after all.

I don’t know what else to write today, but I’ve only written about 450 words so far, including the first four footnotes below.  I would say that I don’t want to shortchange you, the reader, but you’re not actually paying for this in any sense other than spending your time.  And since time cannot be used as legal tender—when you “spend” it, I don’t receive any from you—I guess I shouldn’t consider it to be shortchanging you.

In any case, whether you spend your time reading my blog or doing something else, your time passes all the same.  You could slow it down relative the those around you by accelerating to relativistic speeds, but you would still require the same amount of your “proper time” to read a blog post.  And to those watching you pass at some substantial fraction of the speed of light, it would seem to take you longer than it would take us.

Remember, from a particular, mathematically precise, point of view, you’re always moving at the speed of light—it’s just that most of your motion is through time.  This is part of why you cannot ever reach the speed of light through space:  As you tilt your motion vector toward faster motion through space, less of your motion is through time, until it would stop for you completely.

It’s a bit analogous to moving (say, driving or flying) in particular compass directions.  Imagine your default motion is all northwards, so there is no east or west component to your momentum, but that your momentum vector is always the same length, i.e., you speed in your direction of travel is constant.  If you start to veer eastward a bit, going at that same fixed speed now in a north-northeast direction (for instance) the component of your motion that is northward is smaller than it was*****.

As you veer more through northeast toward east-northeast and beyond, staying at your same speed but in your new direction, the component of your motion that is northward becomes smaller and smaller.  Finally, of course, if you go due east, there is no longer any component of your motion in the northerly direction.

This is close to being the same thing that would happen if you could somehow achieve the speed of light through space, except that the geometry of spacetime is (if memory serves) hyperbolic.  This means “relating to or described by hyperbolas”, it doesn’t mean that the geometry of spacetime exaggerates things all the time.

In any case, though, an object or person traveling at the speed of light (through space, so to speak) would cease to experience any “proper time”.

And with that, I think we’ve come to the proper time to bring this week of blog posts to a close, even if the work week still has a fifth of its time remaining.  I hope you all have a good day (whatever day on which you may read this) and then a good weekend (whenever the next one is for you) and a good week and so on and so on and so on.

*Thank Batman it’s Friday.

**Thank Doom it’s Friday (I suppose one could use TDDIF, Thank Doctor Doom it’s Friday, but that would eliminate the parallel with the more traditional version of the acronym).

***Does the term “laptop computer” imply that there could be a “lapbottom computer”?  What would the bottom of a lap look like?  Would it just be the “bottom”, in which case it really has nothing to do with the lap, since your lap disappears when you stand up, but your ass doesn’t?  If there is no lapbottom (i.e., if laps are instead bottomless) then why use the term laptop?  Why not just call it a “lap computer”?  If people wanted a foreshortened version of that, they could just call it their lapcom.

****That place is 7-11™.

*****By how much?  Why, one only need apply the Pythagorean Theorem to the components of your momentum vector.  It’s dead simple.  If you prefer, you can use trigonometric functions, such as the cosine of the angle of your motion relative to full north, but mathematically there is no difference.

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The blog and baseness of our natures would conduct us to most prepost’rous conclusions

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday again, and I’m writing my Thursdaily blog post.  There’s not much more to say about it than that.  It’s terribly boring, isn’t it?  Honestly, I don’t know what I’m going on about, here or in the rest of my daily life.

I do, though, have one thing to ask out into the ether (not to be confused with the ethernet):  Does anyone know how to disable (permanently) the default “Aptos” font in the Microsoft Office applications?

I’m not asking merely to find out if there is such a person.  Presumably, someone at Microsoft will know how to disable that moronic and ugly font.  I’m more interested to know if someone among my readers can give me specific and clear instructions about how to do it.  Because if I never see Aptos again, that would be the only satisfying outcome with respect to that font for me.

Oh, also, can we find out how to disable their stupid AI “copilot” until someone asks for it, not make its irritating icon just pop up until you tell it “dismiss until next time I open this document” or whatever?  I don’t want it dismissed until next time.  I want it dismissed until sent for, which is unlikely to happen (but not impossible, which is why I say just to disable it until called for rather than, as with Aptos, permanently deleting it).

All that, noble readers*, is about as interesting as my life gets for the most part.  I am not walking/have not walked today, because I still feel worn out and terribly stiff and uncomfortable, and my left knee is still sore.  All of this does not help my chronic pain, either (other than helping it to persist and to become more prominent).  At least I have a tighter brace on my left knee today, as well as on the other knee (that would be my right knee, which hopefully is obvious).

I wear a brace on the right knee both to prophylax against it developing pain and to keep things even.  I’ve noticed that if I do that, I get fewer blisters on my right foot than if I walk with a brace only on my left, problematic knee.  This implies (to me) that the brace on the left knee shifts the way I walk overall enough to change the pressure points on my right foot when I’m stepping, and thus there develops increased abrasion in between my first two toes on that foot.

Exciting stuff, isn’t it?

I’m being facetious, of course, but maybe that isn’t clear.  Maybe this is all dull** and it’s hard even to tell when I’m not being serious.  I don’t know what to say, though.  Obviously.  But just as obviously, I will keeping saying things despite not having anything of merit to say.  I’ll even allow myself to use one-word sentence fragments for emphasis, because I suspect my subject matter is too dull to allow merely usual written language to keep the reader engaged, so I must resort to cheap rhetorical tricks of writing to imitate verbal communication in some ways.

I wish I had something more to discuss, some interesting subject, some curious conundrum—or even a conundrum that doesn’t have any interest in learning about anything.  Alas, as far as I can tell, I have no such thing.  I’m very frustrated by the pain that makes exercising so difficult, and by the fact that I have so much trouble with bicycles—though at least part of those difficulties would probably be better if I weighed less.

Okay, here’s a mildly interesting thing:  at the end of that last paragraph (1st draft only, I fear), I had written exactly 666 words.  Those of you embedded in a culture that has historically been influenced by Christian mysticism will know that number to be the one supposedly given by “St. John the Divine”*** as the number of “The Beast”, the so-called antichrist.

Now, Sinjun there made it clear he wasn’t writing blatantly and obviously but giving some kind of cryptic hint—I suppose it’s a good way to keep readers engaged and imagining silly things for at least a few millennia so far.  He wrote something along the lines of, “Here is wisdom.  Let him who hath understanding count the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man, and the number is six hundred, three-score, and six.”  (This is the English translation, of course.  It was apparently originally written in Greek, which I neither read nor speak.)

However, much to what ought to be the embarrassment of all those credulous bumpkins who have been frightened of that rather banal number for so long, it’s my understanding that in the oldest surviving version of the text of Synjon’s apocalypse****, the number of the beast was actually 616!

How did the beast manipulate the process of translation and get the scholars to mis-record the number as 666?

Okay, well, I don’t think any “beast” actually did that, but it’s a funny fact that so many people have it wrong, considering how susceptible people are to numerology.  At least I can have some sympathy for such a thing, for I love numbers in general, and 666 does have a nice symmetry and charm to it.  It’s not as symmetric as 888 or 000, but maybe that subtle lack of symmetry adds to its grip on the mind.

And, of course, “1 and 1 and 1 is three…got to be good lookin’, ‘cause he’s so hard to see”.

Come together?  Well, don’t do it over me.  And there’s no urgency, so feel free to do it right now or not.  Otherwise, try to have a good day.

TTFN

*I think reading is noble, if the what we call nobility matters at all and is based on anything of real worth.

**It’s a bit weird how “all” and “dull” are almost, but not quite, rhyming words.

***Not the author of the Gospel of John.  I guess “John” has just always been a common name.  Every Tom, Dick, and Harry is named either John or Robert, it seems.

****That’s just a synonym for “revelation”, by the way.  It doesn’t specifically mean the end of the world, it’s just become associated with the notion.  And Armageddon is named after a neighborhood near Jerusalem, I think:  Megiddo (I’ve probably misspelled it).  And “holocaust”, which apparently comes from middle English through French and Latin and Greek and even Hebrew, has a meaning that’s fairly plain when you break it down:  “holo-“, meaning everything, as in “hologram”, and “-caust”, relating to burning, as in “caustic”.  So, “burning everything”.  Nifty, huh?

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“For he will lose the best part of the strength that was native to him in his beginning”

It’s Odin’s day now, so…well, have a good day, Odin, or Wotan, or however you prefer to refer to yourself.

I’m on my way to work, but I did not walk today.  Yesterday was a horrible day, pain-wise*, focused on my left knee, which is still sore, so I’m not going to try to do much walking.  I have knee braces and so on, but they only do so much.  I was wearing them on Monday during my walk, and they probably helped.  Maybe the alternate shoes that avoided bothering my blisters made the stresses and tensions produced by the way I walk different than usual, and that’s why everything was irritated.

Oy, I seem to have a hard time discussing anything interesting, don’t I?  It’s just all boring nonsense.  I suppose some of this is the sort of stuff I might talk about with a spouse or a partner or a close friend if I had one.  I guess that makes the blog behave as a kind of talk therapy.

I actually have intended for it to be thus in the past, but I can’t say that I’ve seen any serious positive results.  Of course, I can’t see what I would have been like if I had not been writing this blog.  Perhaps I would have been much worse  Or maybe I would have been healthier, but no one would ever know, and my thoughts would forever be lost to the world.

What a tragedy.  Ha ha.

It’s a weird thought, but what if putting my thoughts out into the world actually makes me worse, but it makes me someone who will, to however small an extent, be remembered in some way (since I don’t have a family with whom I live or spend time to remember my thoughts and my day-to-day foibles).  It’s a bit like Melkor putting his power into Arda, leaving it suffused with traces of him until its end, though he was weakened thereby, and he was defeated at least partly because he had weakened himself so much.  And, to a lesser extent, it’s like Sauron, putting his will and power and spirit into the One Ring.

None of that has any true bearing on reality, of course, there being no real Melkor or Sauron.  There is also no real spiritual “power” of that nature.  At least, there’s nothing that anyone can demonstrate convincingly in a way that makes it clear that it’s not just the wishful thinking of frightened naked house apes who want to believe that they have power and consequence in what is, after all, a very large universe.  At best it’s smoke and mirrors and placebo effects and the happy coincidence (with applicable confirmation bias) of some real processes that humans can influence, albeit not by mere will and vague thought and heart but by actions, by choices, by real thoughts guiding real deeds.

The current state of the world—or at least of the US—makes it clear how rare real thoughts are among the primates here.  One need only study chimpanzees and orangutans and, for that matter, capuchin monkeys and the like to get a basic grasp on most of human behaviors.  Humans just have other notions cluttering up things, and those can sometimes distract one from recognizing what’s really happening—monkey-work from top to bottom, all but unmitigated.

I guess there’s nothing particularly bad about monkeys.  It’s just that humans think they are somehow fundamentally different than monkeys and other primates and other animals.  They are different in more or less trivial ways, of course, as all species, and indeed all individuals, are different.  But they are not a different fundamental type of being.  They just have more memory and processing power in their brains, and their social hierarchies are able to take place at much higher removes.  Thus they need ideas, stories, that bind them together to get things done.

Ants and termites use pheromones and/or other chemical signals, which they produce and use instinctively.  Humans use stories and songs.  But it’s all just spontaneously self-organizing behavior, with little to no deep thought above or behind the scenes, however people like to delude themselves about their puissance and their importance.

Oh, well.  Let them delude themselves and grope through their shallow pseudo-mysteries.  The universe will deliver whatever it delivers to them, and their most fervent beliefs will not change anything in and of themselves.  And most people will probably never even realize that they were shown to be misguided and even deluded.  They will go to their graves proclaiming desperately that they are not in fact even dying.

As I’m fond of saying, whataya gonna do?  I hope though that, for today at least, you’re gonna have a good day.  As for me, well, I’m sure you can believe that no day that someone spends with me is likely to be a very good day, not anymore anyway, and unfortunately, I have to spend every day with me.  So, at least spare me a little sympathy.

*In that I had a horrible day because I was in pain, not that pain had a horrible day.  I don’t know whether some personification of pain would have had a good day or a bad one.  I might imagine that the personification of pain would dislike chronic pain because it’s not useful.  It’s not helping to protect against any injuries; the injuries are already done.  It has become, instead of a protective process, an erosive one, something that worsens the status of its bearer.

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A 2sday blog post 4 U

Okay, well, it’s Tuesday now, which often happens immediately after the end of Monday, at least when one is using the ordering of days that we use here in the modern, technological world, agreed upon just by general convention, since there’s no particular real meaning to any such ordering.  Also, of course, the specific names of the days varies from language to language.  But somehow, the seven-day week became the generally accepted one worldwide—possibly partly because it’s a prime number, and of course, partly related to the number of “non-fixed” celestial bodies visible before the invention of the telescope.

Not that any of that is very interesting, but it’s not as though I make it my business to write interesting blog posts.  I just…write blog posts.  Whether they’re interesting or not is pretty much in the eye of the beholder, as it were.

I think maybe I will embed the audio of my recent recording of Nothing Compares 2 U below, which I mentioned last week some time.  The audio is not ideal, of course, but it’s better than one might expect.  Whether the playing and singing is any good is, again, up to the aesthetic taste of each individual who happens to listen.  I make no promises or guarantees or representations about it being particularly good.  It’s okay, I would say.

As for other things, well, this morning I did not walk to the train station, nor did I bike here.  I’m still at the stage of working on my fitness in which I have to take a day off in between walks.  That’s not so disappointing, I guess; I did walk about seven or so miles total yesterday.  The biggest impediment so far to walking two or more days in a row is that my left knee is a bit sore from yesterday’s walk.

You might think I would be used to pain by now; I haven’t had a day free of significant pain in a quarter of a century now.  Unfortunately, biology mandates that pain is not something with which a living thing can easily become “comfortable”.

At least the blisters on my right foot are not acting up.  I wore a different pair of shoes than usual yesterday, a make and model I haven’t worn in a while, and it seems they were kinder to my heel and Achilles tendon than the others.

It’s rather frustrating.  I like the other kind because they are very lightweight and “breathable” if you want to call it that.  That’s important in south Florida, where merely standing still for more than five minutes is likely to lead to the growth of various fungi and algae on your skin*.

At least there’s always Lysol.  It helps if you pretend you work for a bowling alley and have to spray each pair of shoes after it’s been used to make sure no one catches a fungus from the previous wearer.  Even when that wearer is you, you don’t want to have a foot fungus if you can help it.

Ugh, all this is so boring, isn’t it?  Life is almost entirely composed of boredom interspersed with stress and tension anymore.  When I meditate, which I do, it helps my tension and stress and hostility a bit, but I find myself feeling very depressed instead.  It’s quite annoying.  Is tension and stress my only alternative to profound depression anymore?  Perhaps.  The world is overall so utterly idiotic and frustrating, this is just par for the course, as they say.

Despite the fact that I’m sharing a bit of singing here today, I haven’t played my guitar or sang even for a moment in over a week.  I haven’t really done anything creative or expressive in a long time, unless you count this blog (which I don’t, honestly).

I am rereading The Lord of the Rings, which is always good, at least.  I’m in The Two Towers now, at the point where Pippin and Merry have just met Treebeard.

It occurs to me that I tend to write (and think of) that pair of hobbits as “Pippin and Merry” rather than “Merry and Pippin”, despite the fact that Merry is the first alphabetically and in the stories Merry is slightly older.  It’s peculiar.  It’s not important or anything, but it is odd.

I also tend to write “off” accidentally nearly every time I’m trying to write the word “odd”, but that’s not so peculiar (ha ha).  The “d” and “f” keys are right next to each other on the keyboard, and both words (“odd” and “off”) are legitimate words.  They also can both often be workable in the same context.  Calling something “a little off” can be synonymous with calling something “a little odd”.  Curious.

My train will be arriving soon.  I am sorry to have to admit that I have provided nothing of value here.  That’s not too unusual for me, though.  I’m not sure that I’ve ever contributed anything of value to the world other than my children.  They are valuable, of course, so I’m not unhappy about that.  I’m just unhappy by nature, and I’m unhappy about that fact, and that further fact is something about which I am, again, unhappy.  It’s like an infinite series**, and the question is, does it converge to some finite limit, or does it diverge to negative infinity?  I don’t know.

And sometimes—most days, maybe—I share that unhappiness with you, my all-too-generous readers.  It seems grossly unfair to you.  And it is.  I admire your optimism, though.  I don’t understand it.  But I do admire it.

Have a good day,  You might as well.  Somebody ought to do it.

*I’m exaggerating, of course.  It usually takes as much as ten minutes.

**Mathematically, I mean, not like, say, The Simpsons, or Superman comics.

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Rockin’, rockin’ and rollin’. Down to the train I’m strollin’.

Well, it’s Monday again.  Yippee.  I’m writing this post on my “smartphone”* today because I didn’t feel like taking my miniature laptop computer with me when I left the office on Friday.  Perhaps that was shortsighted of me, but hopefully at least this way I will avoid writing too much today.

Of course, as usual, I have no particular subject or topic to address with this blog post.  I just started writing and, well, we’ll all find out what comes forth, won’t we?  It may be a lame-ass way to run a blog, but whataya gonna do?

I did walk to the train this morning, five miles (the same distance as before, of course‒it would be weird if the distance changed from day to day).  It was, perhaps, slightly easier than the last time, which is good.  It would be troubling if it were getting harder every time, though blisters can sometimes make that happen.

I rode my new bike around on Saturday and on Sunday, but I didn’t have the heart to try to ride it this morning.  For one thing, riding it is still just exhausting relative to walking or to riding my other bike.  Also, I cannot help but fear getting a flat tire while on the way to the train (or on the way back), and that possibility makes me too nervous to want to use it.

If I get a flat on the weekend, then I merely need to walk the bike back to the house‒or to a bicycle repair shop, if there’s one nearby, which there pretty much isn’t.  But if I get a flat on the way to the train, then I have to deal with a bike with a flat and with getting to work.

Perhaps I’m just a wimp for not wanting to deal with such things, but I have only so many “spoons” to go around, and they get used up by so many little things throughout every single work day (and other days as well) that I don’t feel that I have any reserves.  For many years now, I’ve felt that I’m in imminent danger of complete collapse; I still feel that way.

One of these times, I’ll be correct in that estimate, but that’s a bit of a cop-out.  It’s like someone stating that the world will end tomorrow, then when it doesn’t (if it doesn’t) they just roll it over to the next day.  Sooner or later, they will be right.  It may take over a trillion tries‒let’s imagine they’re immortal as well as absurdly bloody-minded‒but they will eventually be correct.

Anyway, though, for me it’s not the fact of getting flat tires that’s the exhausting part (though it is exhausting when it happens).  It is, rather, the tension of worrying about it every single time I ride.  You might say that I simply shouldn’t let myself worry about it, should not let that imagined possibility interfere with the “now”.  To which I might reply that you shouldn’t fear cancer and/or heart disease and/or Alzheimer’s, etc., because sooner or later something is going to get you, and your fear is just causing you stress in the here and now.

Or perhaps it would be better, or more analogous, to tell you that you shouldn’t fear running across a busy road, because either a car will hit you or it won’t, and you won’t change that by worrying.  Except, of course, you can change that by worrying, if you act on your worry and therefore don’t recklessly run into the street.

I know, I’m being fairly silly.  I’m not trying very hard to be rigorous right now, so some of my logic may be strained.  But I hope I’m not being fundamentally or thoroughly irrational.  I don’t think I am, but just as it’s not up to you whether or not you’re appropriately considered an asshole, it’s not necessarily reliable for me to judge my own rationality.  I do judge myself, and I am fairly harsh about it, but if I were to start losing my mind, I would be an unreliable witness to what was happening.

Anyway, that’s enough for now.  I hope you’ve enjoyed this post, if that’s even possible.

Oh, and by the way, though I have not set up a Patreon or anything, if any of you would like to request that I write a post about some specific subject or topic, by all means, please let me know in the comments.  I don’t promise to fulfill any and/or all such requests, but I do promise to read and consider them.

In the meanwhile, please have a good day.

*I don’t mean to denigrate the phone by putting that term in scare quotes.  It’s a fine piece of technology, and for the most part, it does what it’s meant to do.  I just think the expression “smartphone” is a poor term.  It’s mainly a marketing gimmick, like “organic” and “gluten free” and “non-GMO”:  designed to lure in the insecure and get them to buy particular products to try to counter their…I don’t know, their existential angst or summat.

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Is it possible to choose not to care, if you do?

It’s Friday again.  I won’t say “Thank God it’s Friday” or “Thank Batman it’s Friday” or anything of that sort.  Of course, I’m glad that we’re ending what has been a terribly long work week, which has provided only a few moments of accomplishment, apart from the trivial and the usual (i.e., working).  But that’s not saying much.  In general, for me, the weekend is just another two empty, lonely days coming up before the start of another work week.

I’ll be glad to get some rest, of course, since on the weekend I can knock myself out because I don’t have to worry about being able to do anything that requires mental effort the next day.  I find that terribly useful.  Also, I intend to try to get used to riding my new bicycle more over the weekend, especially since my right heel and the ball of my right foot now have new blisters from walking yesterday, and these will make further walking painful and somewhat counterproductive for the immediate future.

Other than that, though, there’s really nothing else going on.  I had thought—earlier in the week, when lack of foreknowledge allowed me to be stupidly optimistic—that maybe this weekend I would ride my new bike to the movie theater and see the new Fantastic Four movie, since I’ve always been a fan of the FF, and of course, I hear that the new Doctor Doom makes a post-credit appearance.  I’m an even bigger fan of Doctor Doom than of the FF.

I have mixed feelings about how they’re doing Doom.  He is (usually) my favorite villain across all fictional universes, and I’ve been very disappointed—mostly—by the way the movies have failed to portray him.

To be clear, I thought Julian McMahon (RIP) was a very good cast as Doom.  But the script of that first FF movie all but completely ruined his character, though it and he were still enjoyable.  I’ve long said, if someone wants to see a movie with a nearly perfect portrayal of how Doom should be, they should watch Star Trek II:  The Wrath of Khan.  Ricardo Montalban’s performance as Khan, and the way Khan is written, is almost perfect for Doom.

Anyway, all this is really neither here nor there.  I’m almost certain that the MCU is going to fuck up in trying to bring Doom to the screen—not least because they’re using RDJ to play him.  The means they’re going to somehow link Tony Stark and Victor von Doom.

While I admire Downey’s portrayal of Iron Man, which made him much more interesting in the movies than he ever was in the comic books, Tony Stark does not so much as deserve to polish Doom’s boots, let alone be somehow incarnated as Doom.  RDJ could have played Doom de novo, probably—he’s a very good actor—but to link those characters annoys me.

I don’t know why it matters to me.  It really shouldn’t.  I don’t know why much of anything matters to me.  I don’t know why I bother writing this stupid blog or doing anything else.

I want to rest.  I feel like I can never just clear the tension from my system.  Maybe if I actually stopped caring at all, I could do it.  But it’s very difficult to make yourself stop caring, because you already do care, and to be able to reprogram that particular function of your being, you would have to be able not to care about the fact that you would no longer care.

This is a conundrum that has long haunted or at least worried AI researchers.  If you program an AI with a particular terminal goal—the one that motivates it above all, to which all other goals are instrumental, subordinate goals—it becomes nigh impossible to make it voluntarily submit to changing that terminal goal.

If this seems obscure and abstract, consider a man (for instance) who deeply loves and cares about his family, more than he cares about anything else, or even everything else, in the world.  And then imagine asking him to submit voluntarily to some procedure by which he will be made to stop caring at all for his family.  Can you imagine such a person agreeing to that?  Would you agree to that?

If you don’t love or care about your family, try to think of something else you dearly love and feel justified in loving, like, I don’t know, Nascar or some particular political movement or some such.  Then imagine submitting yourself to some procedure or medicine or whatever that changes that, not because you have come to think that it’s a bad thing to love, but just because not caring about it would be simpler.

I’m not sure what point there is to this post.  Probably there is none.  I just need to shut it down for now, and hopefully over the weekend I’ll at least get some rest.  I don’t know what to say about anything else.  But please, do have a good weekend.

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That small model of the barren earth which serves as paste and cover to our blogs

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, and I’m sitting at the train station as I begin to write this, having walked the five miles here from the house.

I’d intended either to walk or ride the bike today, having taken a rest break yesterday, but riding the new bike was just a little too intimidating.  I think I’ll need to get a bit of practice in over the weekend—a longish ride or two each on Saturday and Sunday—in order to get really used to it, so I don’t feel daunted when I arise in the morning.

I don’t have anything against walking, of course.  It’s actually rather enjoyable.  But it does take quite a bit longer than biking does, and it’s much more likely to cause me blisters, as well as irritation in my right ankle and left knee (though I have a spandex brace on for the latter issue, and it helps).

How’s that for a boring beginning?  Still, at least it’s a form of “good” news, in the sense that I have accomplished something useful already today.  That’s one reason it’s nice to get your exercise in before work—or whatever constitutes the morning for you—because then you begin the rest of your day with an accomplishment already under your belt, so to speak.  And, of course, over time you’ll be able tighten that belt, or so it is to be hoped, if you keep up the good habits.

In any case, I’m starting this post off much more positively than I did yesterday’s post, though that’s admittedly a very low bar to clear.  Hopefully there will be no minor catastrophes today involving the train as there were on Tuesday after I walked.  The announcement proclaims the train is on its way in ten minutes, which will make it right on time, so that’s a hopeful fact.

It’s not as though I don’t have plenty of time before work officially starts; I can’t seem to sleep past about three in the morning, and I wake up more than once before then, no matter when I go to sleep.  I might as well use that time to get some things done, and exercise can be one of those things.

Okay, well—what should I talk about now?  I don’t know.  I never plan these things out, as you know, and though sometimes I think I write better when I feel angry in general, I don’t feel especially so at the moment.  I keep trying to give myself positive “self-talk” as they call it, but it’s difficult for me to do, because I find that I don’t believe it.  I want to be able to say to myself that “I love my life and I love myself” but I really don’t.  Maybe if I said something like, “I deserve to love myself” or similar I might find that easier to stomach.

I doubt it, though.  Perhaps if I’m able to get into better condition, as I am trying to do, I’ll feel better about feeling better about myself.

***

Well, I’m on the train now, and we appear to be moving on time and on schedule and other redundant expressions meaning that things are going according to plan.  It’s quite chilly on the train, after the tropical mugginess of the very early south Florida morning.  Fortunately, I brought an extra tee-shirt to put on over my fancy one, the latter of which is supposed to allow perspiration to evaporate quickly.  I’m not sure that it really does that, but it at least doesn’t tend to sag as it sticks to your skin with your sweat.

Well, it doesn’t actually do anything to your skin or in response to your sweat.  As far as I know, no one else but I has worn any of my shirts.  That’s good.  I don’t really want anyone else to be in my shirts, and I certainly wouldn’t recommend to anyone that they try being in my shoes.

Ha.

Ha.

So, now, what to do otherwise for today?  Of course, I will go to the office, and I will work, which makes good sense, since that is the point of getting up and leaving in the morning.  It all does get quite drab and repetitive, though, and it is certainly pointless from any objective point of view.  Unfortunately, it’s also pretty pointless from my subjective point of view, and over time that view has become more and more definitively that my days are without a point.

Do most people have a subjective sense that their daily lives have some meaning?  I suppose if they live with a spouse and/or children and/or have a group of friends with whom they spend their time, they might not even have to acknowledge any subjective sense of meaning; they will simply instantiate it.  That’s probably nice.

And so it goes, and so it goes, and the train is also going, and there seem to be no untoward complications.  It’s still dark, but dawn is in the east, gradually drowning out the lovely morning spectacle of Jupiter floating a degree or so above Venus in the eastern sky.  Venus, of course, is far brighter than Jupiter, belying the actual relative sizes of the planets, since it is much farther away and light intensity falls off as the square of the distance, due to the geometry of space.

It’s interesting how many names Venus has, and how contradictory they are.  In middle-earth, of course, it is Eärendil, and we call it Venus, but it was also the original Lucifer, the morning star—and it’s also the evening star, depending on where in its orbit it is relative to the Earth.  And it is, of course, the most transitory of planets.

With that really stupid and bad astronomy joke I’ll end for the day, and none too soon.  I hope you all are feeling well and are accomplishing your own little or not-so-little successes.  Sometimes just living to the next day can feel like a heroic accomplishment.  And sometimes it can feel like a terrible mistake.

TTFN

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What title would be appropriate?

I’m writing this on my mini laptop computer, because I have a new backpack (the old one was really starting to fail, and has been for quite some time—I can relate, and I wish I could replace myself so easily) and it does a better job with the weight, however minor, of the little computer than the old one did.  Also, I just didn’t feel like dealing with the stupid little engine of distraction that is the “smartphone” today.

Ugh, it’s so stupidly muggy already here in south Florida at a quarter to five in the morning that the sweat around my eyes is fogging up my reading glasses while I just sit here and try to type.  Why do people live here?

Okay, well, I know why I live here, and it was because I was trying to accommodate others in the past—people I love, not just anyone—and so I was willing to go with their flow and go away from anywhere where I had long-term connections and such like.  So, I came here to America’s syphilitic dong, which harbors, or has harbored, such parasitic animalcules as Donald Trump, Pam Bondi, Dickless Scott, Michael McAuliffe, Ron DeSantis, and who knows how many others.  What a shit hole.

Mind you, the neighborhood in which I currently live is quite pleasant in many ways, though I cannot consider it home.  It’s extremely multi-ethnic and very community spirited, at least as far as I can see.  People keep out of each other’s business, they take care of their stuff, they take out their garbage, they mow their lawns, all that.  And the houses, though they and the yards tend to be quite small, were clearly built in a time when it was considered normal to construct dwellings that more or less laugh at hurricanes.  Full cinder-block walls on smallish scales make for structures that do not readily move in response to anything but a direct-hit nuclear attack.

I’m really exhausted, and it’s only just the beginning of the day.  I’ve been exhausted for so long now that I can’t readily remember a time when I did not feel exhausted.  I can remember that I have experienced times in the past when I was not exhausted, but I don’t remember what it feels like.  So often, it seems that I surely cannot endure much longer, that I surely must collapse at any moment, that I must just crumble to the ground, unconscious.

But biology is my enemy here.  Living organisms are selected to be prone to continue, since there’s very little natural selection based benefit in being able to choose to shut down at will.  Any being with such a capacity would be less likely to leave behind offspring than those whose bodies simply continued until there was no way for them to do so, or until something else killed them.

I hate it here.  And I don’t mean just where I am right now, though it does apply.  I hate it in south Florida, I hate it in America (a shocking and new realization to me), I hate it on Earth, I hate being in this stupid universe.  I cannot say that I hate everything about it, of course.  I love my children, I love my sister and brother, and I even have a few distant friends who matter to me.  But for the most part—the overwhelmingly “most” part—things here are nauseatingly pathetic.

I don’t just mean humans, by the way.  I’m not one of those idiots who romanticizes animals as innocent and pure and lovely, imagining that they would live in harmony with each other if not for humans.  That’s puerile nonsense.  Anyone who thinks that is mistaken and/or delusional.  This, to me, is the most annoying flaw in The Matrix:  the fact that Agent Smith says and seems to believe that other animals achieve some form of self-imposed equilibrium with their environments.  I think a sentient AI would not be prone to make such an idiotic mistake, but maybe I’m wrong.  It’s not as though I’m not an idiot, too.

But animals don’t choose to be in equilibrium with their ecosystems.  The equilibria are forced upon them (when they happen at all) by death, by disease, by starvation and predation, by famine, by pestilence.  They no more choose to be in equilibrium than the various atoms and molecules in a complex chemical chain reaction choose to be in their equilibria.

Humans are merely more competent than all other creatures (on Earth) have ever been, and so are capable of pushing their environments farther than any others.  That is, unless you count the earliest photosynthesizing organisms, which probably produced the greatest environmental catastrophe the world has ever known—the release of free oxygen in vast quantities, changing the atmosphere and the very crust of the very planet, killing off the majority of life forms until those that remained adapted and became addicted to this new atmospheric drug.

Okay, that last bit of that last sentence was highly melodramatic and judgmental.  I was trying to make a point about how non-innocent natural things are*, but I fell into rhetoric, and that actually cheapens one’s arguments if one is dealing with dispassionate interlocutors.  Then again, when does one ever actually deal with such creatures?

Anyway, life is dominated by suffering and by aggression of one kind or another, because nature overall does not tend to reward indiscriminate kindness.  Humans are, ironically, the only species that seems even capable of the “outside” view, of a compassion and thought for the future and for the suffering of others that goes beyond their local, personal, and even species-specific circumstances.  And they are also the only species that can be seen to vilify itself.

Weirdly enough, it is the “good guys”, or those who try to be good guys, those who consider that worthy of aspiration, who are most often subject to criticism, including self-criticism; certainly they are the only ones responsive to it.  If you criticize narcissistic assholes, they really don’t care.  They’re not trying to be “good” in anyone else’s eyes.  They are already great in their own minds.  They already love themselves.  Just imagine trying to get your average cat to do something by appealing to its guilt, and you will get an inkling of what I mean.

Self-esteem is overrated.  I’m not saying it’s valueless, but it is selling at a much higher price than it is worth, like a vastly overinflated stock for a corporation so leveraged that it could move the Earth if it could find a fulcrum and a place to stand.  A little self-criticism is good for everyone, at least if they want to be anything other than a force for destruction, decay, and patheticness**.

I don’t know.  Maybe destruction is the better way.  Creation, and creativity in general, certainly hasn’t served me very well.

Now, in closing:  I didn’t walk or bike to the station today.  I needed a physical rest.  Hopefully, if I can muster the energy, I will do one of the two things tomorrow.  But even thinking about it right now makes me feel out of breath.  I don’t feel short of breath; I’m not anxious, I’m not tremulous.  I’m just without vigor and cannot readily imagine having any.

Oh, well.  Life sucks.  Have a good day.

*Either everything and everyone is innocent, or nothing and no one is.  I mean this on a general scale, not regarding specific uses of the term relating to legal and criminal concepts.  I’m using the term from a fundamental, ethical/moral underpinning kind of way.  No one made themselves or their circumstances or their nature or their environments, and “free will” is a childish chimera.  As Eric Draven said, “Victims…aren’t we all?”

**Apparently that’s not a word, but “pathos” doesn’t carry the connotations I desired here.  Maybe “contemptibility” would be better?

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Into and out of training

Well, yesterday after work I finally rode my new bike to the train and then from the train back to the house.  I don’t know if it’s because it’s a single gear bike or because of the smaller tires or both, or if some other factors might be involved, but it was a lot of work to ride compared to my other bike.  It’s just five miles from the train station to the house where I live, but I had to get off and walk the bike for a while twice.

Still, it was doable.  This morning, however, I decided to take a slower mode and I walked to the train.  It certainly takes quite a bit longer to walk five miles than to bike, but at least I’m not completely wiped out.  Also, I don’t think I have any new blisters, which is always preferable to the alternative.  I also don’t have any old blisters, just to be clear.  I do have a slight cut on my right outer heel near the Achilles tendon, but I have that nicely protected with one of those big fat Band-Aids.

I love those big fat Band-Aids.

Anyway, I have a slight further walk when I get to my destination, but it’s only about three-quarters of a mile.  Also, I will rest on the train for a while.  And it will be good to have already gotten in some relatively serious exercise at the beginning of the day.  The figurative momentum will probably not last for long, but at least I have a bit for the moment.

I tried very hard to force myself to do something yesterday, so I got out my office guitar and strummed and sang Nothing Compares 2 U , recording it with two different devices, then merged them into a single Audacity file (though I have not merged the tracks, just aligned them to play simultaneously).  I had to do a lot of background noise reduction, and that made the sound a little dead, but I can try to tweak it a bit.  If it becomes anything worth hearing, I may share it here.

I used to have a pretty decent USB condenser mic, and sound recording was better with that, but I threw it away when we were getting ready to move office a while back.  I hadn’t used it in a long time, and also, I more than half intended to die around that time, so I didn’t see the point in keeping it.  I threw away some other things then, and “gave” my black Strat to my boss, and really was not excited about keeping much of anything.  It just goes to show you, I guess‒though I’m not sure what it just goes to show.

***

I’m on the train now.  As I suspected would be the case, this car is quite chilly, but I brought a second shirt to put on over the sweaty one (and I have done so) so I don’t get too cold.  We’re currently sitting at the station while, apparently, they deal with an “unruly passenger”.

I don’t blame this on the fact that I’m on a later train than usual‒that would be ridiculous.  It’s the sort of thing that can happen at any time, given how utterly pathetic so many humans are.  Honestly, I wish that I (or someone) had the power Michael had in Stranger in a Strange Land, just to send people sideways in spacetime, or whatever he did, so we could just make such unruly passengers go away if they refused to stop being unruly and/or to exit the train.  Maybe that might seem a bit extreme, but it was, according to the book, a painless cessation of existence.

***

Okay, well…now we just got started moving and suddenly the train stopped and the lights and everything all went out.  I wonder if the unruly passenger had some supernatural powers that he (I consider a male to be more likely to be unruly in such cases) used to get his vengeance.  I know, that’s not what happened.  But at least it would be more interesting that this merely being a case of incompetent maintenance of equipment.

***

And the train is dead, and the following train is now stuck on the tracks approaching the station, so I’m getting an Uber to work.  It was that or go back to the house, but honestly, I’m no more comfortable there than at the office.  I might as well be productive.  At least I’m not stuck, like the people on the following train.

If I were inclined toward magical thinking, I might imagine that “the universe is sending me a message not to walk to the train in the morning” but that is, of course, stupid.  The only message the universe is sending (and it’s by no means sending that message to me specifically) is that sometimes things break down, largely because of the second law of thermodynamics, and they don’t do so with regards to anyone’s convenience.  

To be fair, though, my Uber driver was a very lovely and pleasant lady, and though traffic was pretty bad, when we were getting off the freeway, I saw a rainbow.  So there are pleasant surprises as well.

Anyway, that’s enough for now.  I know this has probably been terribly boring, even though there is misfortune involved.  I guess that’s necessary but not sufficient to make for a gripping tale.

I hope you all (or y’all if you prefer) are having a more convenient day so far than I am, and that you continue to do so.