Author: Robert Elessar

by

“Is this the region, this the soil, the clime…?”

First of all, Happy Birthday to Bilbo and Frodo Baggins, who shared the same birthday (albeit 78 years apart) in Tolkien’s world, September 22nd by Shire reckoning.  I’m not absolutely sure that Shire reckoning would align its dates exactly with ours, but it’s not really necessary to nitpick.

Also, it is the day of the Autumnal Equinox, the beginning of Fall/Autumn in the northern hemisphere (and Spring in the southern hemisphere, but I don’t think they call it the Vernal Equinox down there).   From now until the next equinox, the nights will be longer than the days (in the northern hemisphere‒in the southern hemisphere the days will dominate).

It’s also the beginning of a new work week, which ought to be auspicious given that it’s the beginning of Autumn, but honestly, there’s nothing to which to look forward, whether in the short term or the long term.  It’s just the persistence of pointlessness and futility, like every day has been for the last 12 years (at least!) for me.

I’m writing this on my smartphone today, by the way.  This was not a surprise or a mistake this time; I deliberately did not bring the lapcom back to the house with me on Friday.  I didn’t have the energy.

It was a sloppy, crappy weekend, weather-wise.  It felt very much like a tropical rainforest down by me, and not in a good way.  It’s been a pretty lame hurricane season around here so far this year, and hitherto we’ve had much less rain than usual, but it seems to be trying to make up for lost time now these past few weeks.

Perhaps climate change has led to a slight shifting of the weather patterns, making the rainy season come slightly later here than usual.  In any case, it’s muggy and hot and wet and fairly disgusting in Florida…and that’s just the politics!!

Ha ha.  I’m kidding.  It’s not just the politics that’s disgusting here.  Still, if it weren’t for the fact that my youngest was born here in Florida, I would be inclined to say that, overall, Florida has been a worse than worthless place for me to live, and I wish I had never moved here.

For all I know, being in Florida could have been the trigger for my chronic pain problem.  I doubt it‒it was a physical, structural, fairly severe injury in my L5-S1 disk that started the problem, and it’s not too easy to conjure a Florida-specific explanation for that.  But I’m nearly certain that I wouldn’t have foolishly gotten into the medical practice that led to my legal troubles in New York, say.  They take better care of both patients and doctors in New York.  Indeed, in most states‒certainly in the ones in which I’ve lived‒they seem to have better healthcare systems than Florida.

That’s not a very high bar to clear, of course.  Just look at the corrupt politics and the sorts of disgusting worms we’ve sent to the Senate and the House, and to the Governor’s mansion, for that matter.  I don’t know why Florida is so fertile for self-serving shit-heads on a scale that dwarfs even the overrepresented shit-heads involved in politics in most states.  But it surely must be telling that Donna Tramp’s main house is down here.  Florida is America’s syphilitic penis, and the Palm Beach Cheeto is a genital wart on its upper surface.  If only Florida had embraced the HPV vaccine early enough…

I came to Florida because my then-wife was tired of living in cold climates.  She is uniquely susceptible to the cold for unclear reasons; her body does not seem to hold in heat but instead radiates it away.  She always kept the thermostat set at something like 78 Fahrenheit, even in the summer.

I wish she’d wanted to go to Arizona or something along those lines, but I guess politically it has its issues, too.  New Mexico might’ve been better‒the Santa Fe Institute is there, at least.  It might have been nice to be able to be near that, and to perhaps even take in a lecture or two from time to time.  Florida is certainly not a hotspot for cutting edge science and philosophy, despite Cape Canaveral.  We barely even have a space program anymore; we need Russia or Elon Musk to get us into low Earth orbit nowadays.  Look how the mighty have fallen.

Once I got done with work release, I could’ve lived with my parents and my sister; my father invited me to stay when I went to visit upon my release, making it clear he was happy with me working on my writing there.  I elected to come back here, though, because my children live here, and I was hoping to be able to see them on the regular and be a real part of their life again before I had missed the rest of their childhoods entirely.

Boy was that a miscalculation.  What a joke.  I might as well have hoped to capture a wild panther with my bare hands.

Well, one cannot change what has already happened.  And one cannot change what will happen or what is happening once it is happening.  One can only try to surf on the chaos as best one can.  But it loses its charm, that chaos surfing, over time, at least when there are very few good moments involved, and no positive outcomes to which to look forward, and nothing productive or creative to do anymore that grabs one’s attention.

I can’t seem to motivate myself to write fiction or to write music or to draw or to work on honing my physics and math skills and knowledge.  Being in chronic pain and having ASD level 2, but without actually having any social or other supports of significance*, really takes the wind out of one’s sails, more so every day.  I need something‒a break, an escape, rescue, relief, or just for everything to be over.

What else is new, right?  And on top of everything else, my train is running late.  It’s par for the crookedly run course down here.

It doesn’t matter, I guess.  Nothing does.  So, you might as well have a good first day of Autumn.  And, of course, enjoy celebrating Bilbo’s and Frodo’s birthdays.

*I don’t mean to be dismissive about my sister or my youngest child; they are wonderful and I love them and appreciate my connection with them.  But I am referring to regular, daily, local, literal support, of which I have none.  I don’t even have any friends (other than “work friends”) within a thousand miles.

by

Near the bottom of the week there lies…this blog post

It’s Friday, in case you’re fairly out of it, or in case you’re reading this some day other than the day on which I’m writing it.  I’m surprised, actually, how many people who first start to follow my blog go back and read earlier posts, and even “like” them (which may or may not indicate that they actually like them).

It’s quite heartening, when it happens, even if it’s only because suddenly my blog gets a lot more views and I get lots of notifications when I get on the site.  I also feel impressed, because there is a rather intimidating—or so I would imagine—number of my blog posts on here.  There probably aren’t all  that many people who don’t write for a living who have written more than I have on this blog, going back almost 10 years.

Of course, when I say things like “how many” in the first paragraph, that’s a relative term.  I only get a few dozen or so people coming to my blog on a regular basis, even though I share it on pretty much all my social media (other than Instagram, which isn’t well suited to sharing links to blog posts, and TikTok, which I simply don’t have or use).  It would be great, of course, if I could get the sorts of visits and views and shares as some of the young women who just dance around a bit in cosplay, lip-syncing to snippets of songs and so on.  It’s charming sometimes, of course—I like to see the costumes, and some of the little skits can be funny—but it gets to be very much the same thing over and over again after a while.

It can be more fun seeing some of the compilations of people’s antics while they’re playing a game and streaming on Twitch.  That’s another social media platform with which I have no connection, since I don’t spend a great deal of time playing, let alone watching, many games (more’s the pity, since I do tend to like video games, all other things being equal).

Still, the best (to me) non-written material on the various social media are the ones where people discuss new findings in science or who discuss economic issues and international relations and so on, from professional points of view.  It’s not as good as reading a good blog post about a topic in which I’m interested, or better yet a book, but it can be hard to find blog posts about things in which I’m interested.  Podcasts are more reliable in this region, but I really only regularly listen to two of those:  Sean Carroll’s Mindscape and Sam Harris’s Making Sense.

I do subscribe to several people on Substack, but it’s hard even to see notifications of articles being posted by people in whom I’m interested.  And, of course, there are a number of blogs here on WordPress that I follow, but that number is so large that I miss quite a lot of them a lot of the time.

Of course, my interests aren’t necessarily like a lot of other people’s.  Science (especially but by no means exclusively physics), mathematics, a bit of economics, a bit of political philosophy and other philosophy, those sorts of topics and subjects are what interest me mostly.

I like movies and shows of certain kinds, though I watch fewer and fewer of them nowadays since I have no one with whom to watch them, and that takes a lot of the fun out of them.  I don’t have much interest in reading about shows and movies, though watching reaction videos for movies I’ve seen can be fun—it’s almost like sharing a movie one likes with a friend or friends who haven’t seen it.  Of course, it’s not fully like that, since one certainly can’t interact with those people, and in all honesty, most of them would probably find hanging out with me tedious to unpleasant.

I don’t know why I’m writing about this stuff, today.  As you probably know, I don’t plan these posts out in advance; they are very much stream-of-consciousness.  I hope they’re easier to follow than the first section of The Sound and the Fury, or something by James Joyce, but they still are very much just a sample of what comes out of my mind, which I am discovering with almost as much surprise as any of you are.

I started doing this every work day since I stopped writing fiction—which has been a while now—and I thought perhaps to use it as a form of therapy, but one for which I don’t have to pay nearly as much as the therapists I have seen in the past.  I don’t know if it’s doing me any good or not, but at least it lets me feel that I exist in something other than a purely local, ephemeral, and virtual sense.  That’s worth something at least.

With that, I’ll call this good for today and for toweek*.  I truly hope you all have a great day and a great weekend, and that you can look forward both to the arrival of autumn and to Bilbo and Frodo’s birthday next Monday.  I’m sure I’ll mention those things in my next post, but it shouldn’t hurt to prepare you.

*This is one of my neologisms, emulating the pattern from the word “today”, which means more or less “this day”.  That’s probably obvious, but just in case it wasn’t, I figured I’d leave a little explainer.

by

I’ll have blogs more relative than this

Hello and good morning.

It’s Thursday again, if you can believe it.  It feels like it was just seven or eight days ago that it was Thursday last time, and here it is again.  I don’t know how this keeps happening.  Weirdly enough, though, from within, this week has felt as though it’s moving very slowly, and yet, it also feels as though Thursday has come again sooner than I expected.

The mind’s time sense is clearly not entirely objective and consistent.  Then again, why would it be?  Extremely precise long-term time-keeping would not have been a particular evolutionary advantage in the ancestral environment, certainly not one worth the inescapable biological (metabolic) cost of maintaining such a thing.

In any case, now we have incredibly precise time-keeping mechanisms which rely on some fundamental and consistent physical laws.  And though time does pass (so to speak) at different rates depending upon one’s relative velocity and the local curvature of spacetime (i.e., gravity), thanks to Einstein, we know how to adjust our disparate measurements of time with enough precision that we can maintain contact with a bunch of satellites in orbit, and they with each other, and use them to “triangulate” our precise position on the surface of the Earth to within a few meters (there’s generally more than one such triangle, thus the scare quotes—there is probably something more like a tetrahedron).

Of course, we don’t quite know completely just what time is, or at least, we don’t know for sure whether it’s fundamental or emergent from a deeper underlying set of physical laws.  We do know, based on General Relativity alone, that time would be in many ways “an illusion”, because simultaneity is not a consistent thing, and what counts as “now” relative to you depends very much on the direction and speed of your travel compared to other people.

From that point of view, all of spacetime in a sense “already” exists, and our experience of change is an illusion produced by the fact that we are within the block of spacetime.  Like characters and events in a movie on a DVD (or in any other stored medium) the events of the future are already laid out for us, and the end of the movie is as real and as permanent as the beginning, even when we watch the movie for the first time and don’t know what’s going to happen.

I think I talked a bit about this phenomenon in a post on Iterations of Zero called “Playing with spacetime blocks”.  If you want a better introduction to the ideas than anything I could give you, Brian Greene described it really nicely in either The Fabric of the Cosmos or The Hidden Reality.  I’m sorry that I don’t recall for certain which of the two books it is, but they’re both really great and are well worth your time.

Now, as it often does, quantum mechanics puts a bit of an onion in the ointment of fixed 4-D spacetime blocks, and the questions it raises depend—or so it seems to me—on which “interpretation” of quantum mechanics one applies.  In the standard version(s), in which there is such a thing as the collapse of the wavefunction when a quantum interaction occurs that leads to decoherence, there is a fundamental unpredictability to the outcome of such interactions when “measured”.

But if the permanence of spacetime as a whole that appears to be implied by General Relativity is correct, even those seemingly unpredictable events, countless numbers of which happen every second of every day in Dorset alone, are actually fixed and unchangeable.  This implies a mechanism of sorts for “superdeterminism”, or so it seems to me.

Of course, the Everettian “many worlds” version of quantum mechanics—which doesn’t require a deus ex machina wavefunction “collapse” that has to be added “by hand” to the calculations—seems to imply that, if spacetime is fixed in the GR sense then the state of being so fixed includes a fixed set of every outcome of every quantum interaction that would lead to so-called branching of the wavefunction of the universe.  That can be put into the works of GR, and it would give spacetime an added dimensionality of sorts—the dimension in which those “branched” paths exist.

But it would leave in the reality that we ourselves could not say which future “we” would experience, because every possible one actually happens; we just experience one at a time, so to speak*.  It would still be deterministic, just not as a “local” experience for those within spacetime.  Reality would be more like a “choose your own adventure” story than a fixed, scripted movie, but as with those books, all outcomes of any path are still fixed ahead of time.

I think I’ve rehashed a lot of the stuff I discussed in that blog post from IoZ, though I haven’t the will and patience right now to go check.  The specifics of my take on things are probably different this time; certainly, I think I understand all of the pertinent subject matter better than I did when I wrote about it before.  So, hopefully, this has given you at least something new.

Whatever the case, I cannot have done any differently than I have—unless I cannot help but do every possible different thing, but each branch of me, being a branch, only experiences its subset of the universe.  Even if, in a sense, you go both left and right at every metaphorical turn, you still only experience one direction.  It’s just that there is more than one of you, in a sense, experiencing each direction itself but unable to experience the other(s).

It’s really wild and cool stuff, isn’t it?  Science is amazing and awesome and fun.  Thomas Dolby sang that She Blinded Me With Science, but it’s really a way of removing blinders, of wiping the lenses of one’s glasses (and eyes) and focusing more precisely and rigorously on what’s really there, i.e., what’s happening whether anyone believes it or is there to experience it or not.

That’s probably enough for now.  I hope every possible version of you—even if there is only one—has a wonderful day today.

TTFN

*Please don’t make the mistake of thinking that it is human (or other creatures’) choices that determine the branching points of Everettian many-worlds, as seems to be implied by the movie Sliding Doors among other things.  It is quantum interactions resulting in decoherence that lead to the “splitting” of the wavefunction, and they are rarely the result of human choices, at least outside of places where experimental physics is done.

by

Tear down the wall(s)!

I saw a video on YouTube yesterday in which a neuroscientist was being interviewed and asked to “grade” the danger level of various drugs—obviously not all of them since that would have taken far longer than the hour the video lasted.  Mind you, the video ran much more quickly for me, because this is one of those that I watch at 1.5 times speed, which I can get away with if I have the subtitles on and the speaker doesn’t speak too quickly.  I don’t do this for reaction videos or comedy videos, of course, and I certainly don’t do it with music or music reaction videos.  That would be absurd.

Anyway, watching the video, in which the scientist discussed the effects and mechanisms of action of the various drugs, made me think of something that has occurred to me before in recent months and years:  What if someone slipped MDMA (aka Ecstasy) into the food and/or water of all the members of the Senate and House of Representatives* before every legislative session?

This drug has the tendency to lower psychological barriers between people, to encourage a feeling of acceptance and a kind of “unconditional love”, without many other serious untoward effects in most cases (I have never tried it, but I have never tried most non-prescription drugs).  It would be rather interesting to see what legislatures could accomplish if they felt real warmth toward each other rather than seeing each other as opponents and even frank enemies**.  I wonder what might happen.

Alternatively, or similarly, it would be interesting to see a similar experiment involving the UN.  Heck, it would be great just to infuse every water-supply throughout the middle-east with MDMA.  I would not want to use any true hallucinogens in that region of the world, though—we don’t need new religions or spiritual notions popping up in a region that is already the wellspring of the western world’s absurd religious conflicts.

It would be great just to calm the overactive amygdalae of the people in the various legislatures and international organizations, to encourage their prefrontal cortices to be more active, so they can work together for the good of the people they have chosen (and competed) to represent—and whom they fail every time they put partisan hostility above the best interests of the people of the country.  Maybe it would be simpler just to fit all legislators and similar officials with shock collars that activate any time that individual’s voice goes above a certain decibel level, or when a localized EEG detects too much activity in the limbic system and not enough in the frontal lobes.

This is all pipe dreaming, of course, though there’s nothing in the laws of physics that prevents either of these notions from being brought to bear.  Still, it’s probably refreshing to see me thinking of plots and plans intended to work to help people get along better rather than just to obliterate them from the face of the cosmos***.  Though that may well be more likely to happen, considering the warnings of a recent book I just got.

This book is If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, a warning book about the dangers of superintelligent AI, written by one of my favorite thinkers, Eliezer Yudkowsky, and his coauthor, Nate Soares.  They appeared (so to speak) on Sam Harris’s podcast that came out yesterday.  Now, I have not listened to the entire podcast yet, and I certainly haven’t read the book yet, but I have little doubt that the authors are at least not far wrong in their warnings.

I’m not going to go into those arguments now, because you can (and should) read the book or at least look into Eliezer Yudkowsky’s work and ideas.  His book Rationality:  From AI to Zombies is a masterpiece, and though it is long, it is divided into easily ingested chunks, since it started out as a long series of blog posts.

I occasionally toy with the idea of doing podcast type stuff like Sam Harris and so many others—indeed, I have done several of what I call “audio blogs” since I don’t know if they would technically count as podcasts—because people really seem to prefer listening to people talk more than they prefer reading.  This is despite the fact that reading is faster and requires less data to convey the same number of ideas.

I don’t know.  It’s probably better for the world if my thoughts and ideas achieve the least penetration into the zeitgeist as possible.  Still, maybe I’ll embed a few examples of my “audio blogs” here for anyone interested in listening, to see if you think it would be worth it for me to do more.

Please have a good day.

On fatigue, depression, general relativity, and spaceships becoming discoid black holes:

___

Morgoth, Arda, redemption, morality, and blame:

___

The Cosmic Perspective:

*If you live in a country other than the US—as most people do—then substitute your own legislative bodies for these.

**It astonishes me how people in the same legislature, in the same country, see each other as opponents and even as “evil” based almost entirely upon the arbitrary and absurd notion of political party.  It’s ridiculous enough when people arbitrarily choose to be loyal to some specific sports team and then hate other ones based purely on that arbitrary self-identification, but when it involves people who are supposed to be trying to manage the governance of the nation, or state, or county, or what have you, it smacks of a complete lack of seriousness and maturity, of childishness.

***Though I still like my idea of getting someone to engineer the mumps virus to make it more likely to cause orchitis****, especially if it can be encouraged to make males more likely to be sterile.  That way we would decrease the population of those who are prone to avoid vaccinations.  But that’s me in my mad scientist mode.

****Inflammation of the testes, a relatively rare complication of mumps.

by

“…the mystery which binds me still…”

I’m using the “lapcom” to write this today, so I clearly remembered to bring it back to the house with me yesterday.  It’s definitely better overall for typing upon than the smartphone is.

I wish it had backlit keys; you don’t see that very often on mini-lapcoms, unfortunately, and it does mean that the smartphone has an advantage over this computer in truly dark conditions, since its entire working surface is lit.   With the lapcom, only the screen is lit, which makes it slightly harder to see the keys, since the eyes adjust to the light level from the screen.  Still, I don’t really need to see the keyboard to be able to type; I’ve been doing it for a really long time.

By the way, in case anyone is curious and in case I think I haven’t explained it before—I think I might have, but I’m far from certain—it may seem odd that I say things like “bring it back to the house with me” instead of, for instance, “bring it back home with me”.  The reason is that I don’t consider the place where I live to be home.

I certainly don’t consider the previous place I lived to be home, nor the one before that.  In fact, ever since I’ve stopped living in any dwelling where my kids ever stayed, I consider myself homeless.  For a certain amount of that time, I was literally homeless.  I survived (obviously) but there have been quite a few unpleasant years since I last saw my children regularly; it’s been about 13 years since I’ve seen or spoken with my son.  I guess I really am difficult to endure.

I don’t try to be, of course.  Honestly, I don’t, especially not for the people I love.  You could even say that I try not to be difficult.  But I guess I am atypical to enough of a degree that I’m hard to endure for too long at a stretch.  According to my autism evaluation, I have ASD level 2, which means I have “moderate support needs” (as opposed to level 1, minimal support needs, and level 3, significant support needs).  So I’m not just “entry level” but pretty advanced, as it were.

My evaluator gave me the level 2 assessment because though I have a full-time job, it is clear that I am not thriving nor keeping up with many typical requirements of living (there’s more to it than just that, but that’s a summation).  I guess that probably means that sooner or later, my ad hoc, slipshod edifice will crumble.  But this is no surprise to me.  I’ve been crumbling for a long time.

I’m one of those houses built on sand, so to speak, without a foundation, and so it is fundamentally unstable and prone to breakage.  I don’t really have the wherewithal to repair it myself, though.  I’ve never been very good at taking care of myself.  I can take care of other people quite well, or at least I can take care of other people in certain ways.  But I’m not very good for me.

This poor self-care is not something I can correct with just an attitude or perspective adjustment; believe me, I’ve tried for decades in a great number of ways.  It appears just to be part of how my mind works.

So, don’t be surprised if, at some point, I just completely fall apart and implode or explode and am gone.  I know that I don’t have it in me to save myself; if I did, I would have done so long ago.  I’m smart and capable and have many abilities, but I do not have much of a capacity to bring them to bear on practical matters—or, well, on certain kinds of practical matters.  There are some such things I’m quite good at, but other important things have no hold in my mind.

I’m not sure what to do about all this.  Maybe I should start playing the Powerball™ or whatever it is.  I have never done so other than on occasion in the distant past as part of a group purchase of a ticket or some such.  I’ve always known that the math is such that there is essentially zero chance of any person winning the lottery, at least the big ones.

I used to tell my patients, if you’re in the store anyway, and you’ve got a couple of bucks that you might otherwise spent on candy or chips, then sure, go ahead, play the lottery.  It’s a bit of fun, and supposedly the proceeds or profits go to educational purposes (I have my doubts, but never mind).  But I always said to them that they should never take a special trip driving to the store to get a lottery ticket, because they were more likely to die in a car crash on the trip to get their ticket than they were to win.

Of course, if dying is a kind of winning for you, that may not be too much of a disincentive.  Anyway, I don’t have a vehicle of any kind, so I’m unlikely to get in a car crash on such a trip; I’m more likely to twist my ankle.

I’m sorry, I know there’s been no real reason or rhyme to this blog post.  I’m just allowing randomly firing neurons to express themselves.  I don’t know for sure if this is even intelligible to anyone but me (though I would give high credence that it is, based on past experience and as objective an assessment of my writing as I can make).  Thanks for reading, in any case.  I hope you have a good day.

by

“I have seen the writing on the wall…”

It’s Monday again, unfortunately, and‒also unfortunately, certainly for you‒I am writing another blog post.  I thought that I had brought the mini lapcom back to the house with me on Friday, but apparently I didn’t do that.  I remember thinking about bringing it, but evidently that’s as far as I got.  I guess it’s not too important except for the fact that writing on the smartphone really seems to be exacerbating the arthropathy in my thumbs.

As far as I know, no one can tell any difference between my writing on the phone versus the computer anyway.  Maybe that shit’s all in my head, like all the rest of the shit of which my head is full.  Still, if I want my thumbs to recover, I should probably give myself a break from writing on the smartphone.

Of course, what I probably should do is stop wasting everyone’s time with this stupid blog.  I’m quite sure that some if not all of the people who read my posts do so out of politeness.  If I stop writing them, there will probably be a few people who will feel at least a small‒perhaps unnoticed but nevertheless real‒sense of relief.  I know that many of the things we all regularly do are pretty much pointless and are pursued out of a sense of duty or just politeness.

Not that I’m against politeness in general.  I have a few general attitudes toward things that I express as aphorisms, and two of them are:  Written language is the lifeblood of civilization, and courtesy is the lubricant of civilization.  But some things we are trained to think of as courtesy‒like where the utensils go in a place setting, or to greet other people with false* questions about their health and wellbeing‒are just customs, not really ways of avoiding abrasion in one’s interactions.

Anyway, the pointless that I’m making is, I suspect that not only am I doing something here that’s literally futile, it’s probably actually detrimental, as with so many of the things I do when I try to be positive.  I’m chewing up at least a little bit of my readers’ necessarily finite bandwidth, or RAM, or whatever metaphor you prefer, with my personal chaos.  I’m injecting negativity into the worldviews of anyone who reads my stuff seriously, and though I don’t think I’m wrong in my negative outlook, I know there are other perspectives that are more uplifting while nevertheless not being entirely delusional.

How’s that for a left-handed compliment?

Okay, well, what else do I have to say?  Not very much, I fear.  I am quite tempted just to stop doing this‒in case you can’t tell‒but not in order to free up my time or energy to write fiction or do music or art or anything creative.  I just sometimes feel that I ought to go quiet, just shut up and stop inflicting myself upon the world, in however small a way.  It’s often been the case that when I try to do good things, or creative things, in the long term it ends up blowing up in my and everyone else’s face(s).

If I just stop writing this‒if I just stop everything‒I wonder how long it would take for anyone really to notice.  I don’t ever seem to be good at getting attention when I’m hoping to do so.  Would the converse happen if I were to try not to get attention?  Or would it be more of the same?

Or am I, by speculating on such things, recognizing that I am trying to get attention by trying not to get attention, if that makes sense?

Who knows?  Who cares?  Why bother?

Not me.  I don’t know.  And I don’t have any good reason.

I hope you have a good day.

*I say “false” because, when people ask you how you’re doing or what have you, they don’t really want to know if you’re feeling any way but fine or great, and they certainly aren’t interested in hearing about any problems you might have, especially if you could actually use some help.

by

“Don’t ask for favors. Don’t talk to strangers. Don’t axe me why.”

I’m going to try to keep this brief today.  I had a particularly bad night’s sleep, even for me, and I am in a significant amount of pain even after taking what I have for it (without massively overdosing).  Thankfully‒so far‒my thumbs aren’t acting up too much as I write this.

It certainly does get old, this chronic pain bit.  I don’t know if anyone out there is considering trying it as a way of being, but I can tell you that, after more than twenty years, I’ve decided it’s not a good lifestyle choice.  So please, if you’re considering it, then reconsider.

I know, I know, no one‒as far as I’m aware‒chooses to have chronic pain, not as such, anyway.  I suppose one might say that anyone who becomes a professional football player (American football, I mean, though all competitive sports have at least some tendency in the same direction) is in a sense choosing a life of chronic pain.

But at least there are compensations, and one receives them more or less up front.  The bill, however, almost inevitably comes due for those who play any kind of serious competitive sports.  Don’t get me wrong; I’m glad they do what they do.  I enjoy watching football, and to a lesser degree several other sports.  But even golf (which I also enjoy watching the pros play) gives its practitioners accumulated damage.

Is there any sport that does not exact a toll on those who take part in it seriously?  I don’t know.  Maybe free solo rock climbing doesn’t tend to give people quite the same kind of chronic, post-high-impact injury problems, because high impacts in that sport tend to be fatal.  Other than those, though, it appears to be a practice associated with great care and deliberation.  There is little to no tackling involved (they don’t even use other kinds of tackle, thus the “free solo” part).

I don’t know why I’m going into such things.  I was just speaking tongue in cheek about the idea of people actually choosing to have chronic pain, which was an absurd notion.  Then I realized that, in a way, people often do choose things that will almost inescapably lead to chronic pain.  But, of course, they aren’t consciously choosing the pain, and many of them probably don’t seriously think it’s something that can happen to them, not when they’re young and feel unstoppable.

Then, by the time they’ve come to recognize their own susceptibility, their own mortality and morbidity, it’s too late.

I suspect that chronic pain was much less common for our ancestors, at least if you go back far enough.  This is not because they were hardier or healthier than we are necessarily, though they probably had less occasion to be indolent.  But we are exposed to injuries they might not have been‒even minor traffic accidents can cause damage that accumulates and persists‒and also, we survive many things that would simply have killed them, thanks to modern science and technology.

Just because we survive them doesn’t mean they are harmless, though.  As Billy Joel sang, “You are still the victim of the accidents you leave.”  That which does not kill you can still leave damage; it does not necessarily make you stronger, any more than syphilis made Nietzsche healthier.

On that cheery note, I think I will wrap up this week and put it in the fridge for leftovers, where it will eventually go bad and will have to be thrown out anyway.  I know, that particular metaphor doesn’t really make sense.  I didn’t have anything in mind when I wrote it, I was just following the automatic thought that was initiated by the words “wrap up”.  If any of you have a good potential meaning for the metaphor that I just frivolously threw out there, please, feel free to share it with us.

Also, please have a good day and a good weekend if you can.

by

And blogged with restless violence round about the pendant world

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday of course, which is why I opened with that greeting.  I appear to have survived World Suicide Prevention Day.  I suppose one could argue that this fact is a good thing, though it can also be argued the other way.  I’m of more than one mind on this subject, so I’ll perforce withhold my own judgment.

Of course, it is now the 11th of September in 2025 (AD or CE), the 24th “anniversary” of 9-11-2001.  That was a bad day, there’s no doubt about it, and it heralded more bad days to come‒though two days later was, for me, one of the two best days of my life.

Anyway, there was big news yesterday, with more than one violent and newsworthy event happening in the western US.  I’m not going to get into my specific takes on things, since I don’t really do that sort of thing here.  I’ll just say that I was annoyed by the senators and representatives on the democrat side (probably there were some on the republican side) who immediately sent their “thoughts and prayers” (i.e., nothing whatsoever) and then said things like “political violence is never acceptable in a democratic society”, some of them being broader and saying political violence is never acceptable, period.

I just had to point out that our country (the US) was founded via political violence‒the American Revolution, you know.  I also pointed out that, when government no longer respects the Constitution and the rule of law, and legislators (and law enforcement personnel) are not stepping up to hold people accountable to their freely sworn duties, and the judiciary is biased in favor of those who ignore the judiciary, then sometimes violence becomes the only recourse, just as was the case when this country was founded.

I will make one judgment-type statement and say, when someone has only engaged in speech of one kind or another‒even if that speech ironically seems to endorse or at least express acceptance of certain kinds of violence‒then the proper response is more speech or counter speech (by which I do not mean trying to shout someone down).  Speech is not the same as violence in nearly any situation‒unless you’re one of the Fremen of Arrakis in the older movie version of Dune‒and should not be countered with violence.

It is, however, less scary to use violence against someone who is not immediately threatening violence than against those who actually are threatening or ordering or enacting violence.  That, though, is the path of cowardice.

Naked house apes are, finally, just apes.  If they recognized and accepted that fact, then they could be on guard against the baser primate drives and habits and instincts that no longer serve them well in the modern world.  But so many of them seem, either implicitly or explicitly, to consider themselves something other than animals, and that delusion lays the groundwork for much error, which can be catastrophic and tragic.

It’s a bit like someone believing for no good reason that their car is partly self-steering, and that once the cruise control is on, they don’t even need to watch traffic or steer for themselves.  Things are not going to turn out well for such a person.  And unfortunately, things are likely to go badly for other, perhaps more sensible, people who just happen to be near the first person.

“Heavy sigh,” to quote Justine from The Accountant (and The Accountant squared, which is what the name of the sequel is, apparently*).

In other, less momentous news, I practiced the guitar (and sang) a bit yesterday.  Among other things, I looked up the form of the “Blues” scale (and the major and minor pentatonic scales and the so-called Japanese scale, a slightly different pentatonic scale) and fiddled around with them.  Well, I guess I guitared around with them, actually, since a guitar is not a fiddle (though Jonny Greenwood has been known to use a bow on his guitar from time to time).

I did this because of a suggestion in the comments a bit ago by one of my old friends who is also a stellar guitarist.  He suggested that I might use a blues guitar bit for the possible lead on my song Come Back Again.  Unfortunately, I had to admit that I didn’t know specifically what that entailed.

I have a sensitive ego for such a self-hating person, so I ended up looking it up and playing with it to correct my shame.  I must admit, the blues scale is a real blast and sounds great for something so simple.  The pentatonic scales are a bit more boring, but I sort of already knew that.  I don’t expect that I’ll ever be an improvisational player; I tend to have to plan things out and lay them out and think them through and do trial and error.  But still, it never hurts to practice one’s scales.

Well, actually, when one’s arthropathy is acting up, it can hurt to practice, and it often does.  But that’s not exactly what I meant, as I suspect you already knew.

I hope you all have a good day, and don’t dwell too much on political violence, recent or older.

TTFN

*One could expand out The Accountant2 to be The AAccccoouunnttaanntt, and we could then group like variables together, which would get us The AAaaccccoouunnnntttt, or The A2a2c4o2u2n4t4.  It’s probably not as catchy that way, but I suspect the title character of the movies would appreciate it.  Of course, the preceding presumes that the “squared” bit on the original title applies to all the letters in the word “Accountant”, since it’s one word.  Otherwise, in traditional mathematical notation, it would end up being The Ac2ouan2t3.

by

“Through early morning fog I see visions of the things to be…”

It’s Wednesday, the so-called hump day, which supposedly implies that after this day, the following weekdays become borderline effortless.  Of course, that’s bullshit.  There is no force‒unlike when cresting the top of an actual hill (or hump)‒that would tend to add impetus to the rest of your week.

No, there is only the accumulation of stress and tension and fatigue that continues to accrue.  This is, supposedly, worse for people like me than for NTs as they say, but I’m not sure, at least relatively speaking.  I think it’s wearing for everyone, but some people have more support and shared lives, allowing for sharing a diversity of strengths and the effacement of weaknesses.

That’s my hypothesis for now, anyway.

I’ve been having a bad few days energy-wise and pain-wise, and that’s frustrating, as I’m sure you can well imagine.  I’ve been trying to get into better exercise routines and so on, as you may know, but lately every time I make an attempt, it causes exacerbations of one kind or another in my chronic pain, and that lasts a long time; it’s very discouraging.  I’m also trying to cut back on my eating, so I can try to lose weight, which will almost certainly at least make exercising easier and less painful.

It’s difficult, though.  Food is the one and only reliable source for me of feelings of…well, joy is not quite the right word, and euphoria or eudaemonia are both way off the mark, but it is a positive feeling, neurophysiologically.  For good, sound, biological reasons, eating is one of the most reliable ways of activating the nervous system’s reward circuitry.  Unfortunately, when it’s the only reliable source you have, you tend to overdo it.

Of course, resisting such urges and controlling one’s impulses can be very ego-syntonic, but that’s much more diffuse and delayed.  Also, my ego is shriveled bordering on cachectic, and not in a good, meditational/spiritual way.  My mind is largely my enemy, or the enemy of itself, or at least I’m not my friend.  I certainly do not love myself.  As I’ve said before, I am generally my own least favorite person, and that’s the person with whom I have to spend my time‒24/7 as they say.

It’s not that I’m the person of whom I think least highly.  There are many well-known people of whom I would not hesitate to say that they are far worse people than I am.  But I don’t have to be around those people.  If I did, at least one of us would probably already be dead.

Oh, speaking of that, today is World Suicide Prevention Day, which is in the midst of Suicide Awareness and Prevention Month (or whatever the specific official term is).  So, I guess, if you have the opportunity today, you should prevent a suicide if you can?  On every other day, especially in every other month, I guess you can just let shit happen however it happens.  That’s pretty much what almost everyone does, almost every day, anyway.  Why would that change?

I would offer to provide a listening and supportive ear for anyone who is struggling with such issues; I have tried to be there for people often in the past.  I mean, I was a practicing physician for quite a while, and based on the nearly unanimous feedback from my patients, I was a good doctor*.  However, now I don’t think I could provide sincere arguments to try to convince someone out of suicide.

I veer toward pro-mortalism a lot of the time, though that’s not as much a considered philosophical stance as it is an emotional proclivity.  It’s part of my overall dysthymia I suppose.  Though you have to be careful when you suppose‒sometimes you make a supp out of o and se.

I know that last bit doesn’t make any sense, but it’s my way of making fun of the old ass/u/me cliché.  I also like to use a slight variation of the traditional one, saying, “When you presume, you make a pres out of u and me.”  Nowadays, given the current “pres”, that’s almost certainly something most people would like to avoid.

I don’t know what to do about my state of mind and my state of body (and my state of residence, with which I’m getting steadily more disgusted).  Maybe I should fast for a bit, and potentially address more than one bird with one stone.  Yom Kippur is coming up in about three weeks, and I often fast on that day anyway, but I don’t think I want to wait until then.  Of course, if I could fast from now until then, I’m sure I would see remarkable results, and I might feel them as well.  But I’m far from sure that I have the willpower to do that.

Oh, well‒as the man sang‒whatever, never mind.

Now, there was a suicide that I wish could have been prevented.  I wonder what music we would have if not for that terrible event.  Then again, I wish even more that Mark David Chapman had offed himself sometime before December of 1980.  Imagine** what music we might have had in that case!

Such speculations are only disheartening, though, and I certainly don’t need that, and I doubt that you all do, either.  So, please, try to have a good day, and if you do have dark and even suicidal thoughts, try to get help if you can.  It’s much harder to do than people might think, but hopefully, for most people, it’s worth the effort.  I can’t speak for myself in that, but I’m not objective about me.  I’m living inside the acidic, toxic cloud, so I can’t see out of it and certainly can’t clearly see myself from within it.

That’s probably just as well.

*I’m still a doctor, of course, and I always will be, since I earned my degree fair and square.  But since I’m not in practice anymore, it’s hard to think of myself as a “good” doctor.

**That was not meant to be a joke, and I was tempted to change the word, since I am not able to take the murder of John Lennon lightly.  But I figured, this is in the spirit of his music, so I’ll let it be***.

***That was a deliberate joke, because of course, Let It Be was Paul’s song, inspired by a reassuring dream of his dead mother.

by

Discussions of my “first draft” styles and a bit of shameful self-promotion

I wrote yesterday’s post on my miniature laptop computer‒what I call a “lapcom” if you remember, and even if you don’t‒and today I am writing this on my smartphone, because I didn’t feel like lugging the lapcom when I left the office.  It’s not done deliberately (by me), but I am curious about something.

You see, to my surprise, yesterday’s post appears to have been rather popular and successful.  I say “to my surprise” because to me it felt rather disjointed and erratic and like it didn’t go anywhere.  I’m not sure why that is or to what it is in response, or indeed, whether it was merely a fluctuation in a chaotic system and had nothing whatsoever to do with any particular thing I had done.

Still, as you may know, I do feel that I write differently when using different tools for doing it.  On the lapcom, I tend more easily to run off at the page, if you will, because typing on a word processor is just so easy and natural for me.  That doesn’t necessarily make the writing better, though.  I fear that I get too verbose sometimes.

And, of course, writing on the smartphone is less fluid, more cumbersome.  It also tends to exacerbate the arthropathy in my thumbs, for what are probably obvious reasons.

Pen and paper‒for first drafts, anyway‒ is certainly my most long-standing method of writing, and I don’t think I tend to get quite as carried away with that as with typing.  I suspect, but don’t by any means know for certain, that the things I write by pen and paper‒the fiction, at least‒are somewhat better, or at least more fun, than what I write on either a phone or a computer.

Here’s a bit of a rundown.  The following stories I wrote by hand in the first draft, having no other options:  Mark Red, The Chasm and the Collision, and my long short story Paradox City.  I also wrote my stories House Guest and Solitaire with paper and pen, the latter in one sitting, the former way back in high school.

I wrote the first draft of Son of Man at least partly on a very small smartphone that I really liked.

The Vagabond is a bit of a mixed bag.  I started it while at university, and finished the first draft while in med school.  Part of the first draft was written by hand (i.e., with pen on paper) but most of it was written on a Mac SE using the good old word processing program WriteNow.  Does anyone out there remember that one?

The rest of my stories, at least the published ones, were written on mini laptop computers (well, some here and there would have been on full-sized ones) from the beginning.  Most notable of these, perhaps, is Unanimity, which is very long.  But many of my “short stories” were written on regular keyboards, including the other two stories in Welcome to Paradox City, and my “short” stories, Prometheus and Chiron, “I for one welcome our new computer overlords”, Hole for a Heart, Penal Colony, Free Range Meat, and In the Shade, the latter of which‒like House Guest‒appears only in my collection Dr. Elessar’s Cabinet of Curiosities.

Oh, right, and of course Outlaw’s Mind, Extra Body, and The Dark Fairy and the Desperado have all been written (so far) on the lapcom.

If anyone out there has read a sampling of some of these, or all of them, and can give me any considered feedback on any overall difference in quality between the means of writing, pros and cons, I would certainly appreciate it.

And if any of you haven’t read any of the above, well…what are you waiting for?  If you’re a fan of fantasy/sci-fi/horror, you might like some or all of my stuff.  If you’re not sure where to start, by all means, I’ll give you recommendations based on your personal preferences, if I can.

I suspect that The Chasm and the Collision would have the broadest popular appeal, especially for people who like the Harry Potter books and similar stories.  Son of Man is probably my purest science fiction story, but this is not “space opera” type science fiction.  “I for one welcome my new computer overlords” is basically science fiction*, too, in case the title didn’t clue you in.

Everything else is horror of one kind or another.  Most of my horror is supernatural in one sense or another, and I veer into the borders of Lovecraft’s universes in at least two stories**.  Mark Red is supernatural and in some senses horror-adjacent, since it involves vampires and so on, but it’s really more a teen/young-adult supernatural adventure, a story originally intended to be a manga.

My darkest story has no supernatural elements in it at all.  That’s Solitaire; it can be had in stand-alone form for Kindle, and it also appears in the middle of Dr. Elessar’s Cabinet of Curiosities.

Well, that’s been about as much self-promotion as I think I’ve ever done here before.  I didn’t really intend to do it, but once I got going on discussing my various story drafts, it just seemed to go that way.  I hope I haven’t been too insufferable.  I’m really not a raving egomaniac, though I may be some other type of raving maniac.

I hope you all have a good day.

*And I guess Extra Body is sort of light-hearted sci-fi.  It’s even somewhat comical, as my story If the Spirit Moves You is a sort of supernatural comedy (expect no laugh-out-loud moments, though, since they are dry comedy at most).

**The Death Sentence, which appears in Welcome to Paradox City, and In the Shade, mentioned above and in my other collection.