Author: Robert Elessar

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Monday morning nonsense

     It’s Monday again; aren’t you all just delighted?  I’m writing this on my smartphone, starting at the train station, after having walked here from the house.

     I did a lot of walking this weekend:  about ten and a half miles on Saturday, then a little over six on Sunday, then just about six so far today.  My new shoes seem to be a good choice so far.  Of course, I have some modest blistering on my right foot (I’m not entirely sure why it’s only on the right, though I have a hypothesis or two) but not enough to cause serious trouble.  The goal is to try just to do more and more of my traveling on foot and to get in better condition‒not just because of the sort of things that filled me with rage on Friday morning, but also just to try to get myself healthier, or at least stronger.

     Of course, the popular wisdom is that regular exercise like walking can help with depression, though I’ve never been completely convinced by the data I’ve seen on that.  Also, to be honest, I had some of my worst trouble with depression in college when I was doing pretty serious exercise.  I was running six plus miles and doing ridiculous numbers of push ups and so on at the time.  Perhaps my episodes of depression had (and still have) more to do with burnout, possibly from masking and related ASD based issues than with more garden-variety depression.  Who knows?

     This was a momentous weekend, holiday-wise.  It was the end of Passover and yesterday was also Easter (they tend to fall around the same time of year and that’s no mere coincidence‒remember that Jesus’s “last supper” was a Passover Seder).  And for those for whom marijuana is a bit of a modern sacrament, yesterday was 4/20, which for some reason is the number related to marijuana use.  I’ve heard some rather dubious explanations for that association, but since I don’t have any convincing reasons to believe any given one, I won’t get into it.

     Yesterday was also a day of very important remembrance for me, and for some modicum of hope related to that remembrance.  But that hope was unfulfilled, which unfortunately comes as no surprise.  I really need to stop with any and all “hope” nonsense.  What’s the line from A Christmas Carol about comfort?  It comes from other regions and is conveyed by other ministers to other kinds of men.  That about sums up the notion of “hope” when it comes to me.

     I really don’t have any hope for anything good at all in the world, and particularly not for me.  Look at the state of things, and the degree to which reason and ethics seem to have deteriorated.  Is human civilization even worth saving?  I suppose there are many innocent people among the throng of humans, and it would be a shame for them to suffer unnecessarily just because a vocal, moronic minority causes so much trouble.  But good grief, it can be frustrating.

     As for me and my life, well…there’s nothing much to say.  I suppose we’ll see if, after enough time doing it, my walking will help my outlook and my mood.  At the very least, it might help my physical condition.  That’s a positive thing, assuming all other things are equal.

     I’m not going to get into political discussion right now, though I will say that I would rather hear the thoughts of the dead worm in RFK, Jr’s head than whatever nonsense he voices with his own minimally functioning brain.  He’s just pathetic.

     Of course, pathetic is the typical order of things, and I certainly match that adjective, myself…but not in the way he does.

     Anyway, I’m a bit sleepy, probably from the long walk, and I’m on the train now.  I’m going to make this blog post short today; maybe tomorrow I’ll write more and something of greater interest or consequence.  Or, maybe I’ll get hit by a truck while crossing a street or something.  That wouldn’t be such a tragedy, though it would be a shame to screw up an honest truck driver’s workday.

     In any case, I hope you all had a very good weekend and that you also have a very good week.  Actually, even if you didn’t have a good weekend, I hope you have a good week.  You might as well.  You are readers, and readers are the people who embrace the greatest invention of the human race.  Please do your best to encourage and spread that love.  Written language is still the best thing we have.

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“But when the blast of war blows in our ears…”

     It’s Friday, and it may, once again, be a true end of the week for me, though if it’s’n’t*, I’m sure I’ll write a new post tomorrow, barring‒as is always implicit‒the unforeseen.

     I’m in a bad mood this morning, though not in the usual sense.  Of course, I’m often, perhaps even usually, in a mood that others would consider bad; they certainly wouldn’t want it for themselves.  Although, I would never say “I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy”, because that’s just not true.

     If someone were indeed my “worst enemy”, then I would wish to visit upon them just about any form of pain and suffering and other synonyms for torment that you can name, and I would be more than capable, psychologically, of delivering that torment personally.

     As a doctor, when I was in practice, there were innumerable times when I had to cause pain to people I was trying to help (e.g., phlebotomy, lumbar punctures, paracentesis, incision and drainage of abscesses, etc.).  I did it without hesitation when it was indicated, though I always strove to keep any pain as minimal as possible.

     Also, I’ve been in places and in situations where violence was always waiting, and you needed to be capable of violence to protect yourself from potential violence from others.

     So, yeah, I would be more than emotionally capable of delivering any suffering I’ve ever known to someone who merited it.

     Of course, in reality, I wouldn’t really waste time delivering torment to someone who was somehow my “worst enemy”.  I’ve learned at least some lessons from fictional and real world situations of that kind:  don’t put your enemies in death traps, don’t gloat over them (while they’re alive), don’t draw things out.  Just delete them, as quickly and efficiently as possible.  Surely that’s the only sensible way to deal with someone who is truly your enemy.  The world will be a much less stressful place for you with any true enemies erased from it.

     Of course, you don’t want to be mistaken about that.  One shouldn’t use force unless it is legitimately necessary, and only against those who merit it‒ideally only against those who initiated or threatened it.  If they call the tune, so to speak, then there can be no legitimate moral complaints about the fact that they need to pay the piper.

     So, yeah, that’s the kind of bad mood I’m in this morning.  I’ve learned of something terrible that happened to someone I (distantly) know and like, at the hands of someone who had apparently been trusted by the person I know, and who was much bigger and stronger.

     I am, of course, in no way involved other than being aware of it, and of course, such acts occur all over the world, every day.  That doesn’t make accepting them any easier, nor does it make me any less angry.  If anything, knowing that one act of violence by a bigger person against a smaller, weaker person is just a tiny sample of a much larger statistic is ever more maddening the longer one contemplates the fact.

     However, the “madness” that can seize one in the event of an injustice, especially a violent one‒and the examples committed by those who are supposed to be in positions of protection and service are particularly common and especially egregious of late‒raises and reinforces the all-important issue of proving guilt beyond reasonable doubt.

     This is why the concept of due process is even more important than the concept of punishment.  The tendency toward the feud, toward vendetta, is very strong in humans, and it can become a self-perpetuating and self-justifying process that leads to terrible injustice and unnecessary suffering.

     That being said, though, anger can be quite motivating, at least if it is anger unmarred by too much self-loathing.  So, though I am in pain this morning, and did not sleep well at all, I have a bit more physical energy than usual, at least for the moment, because when one becomes angry at an injustice, one wants to be able to do something about it, even if it is not within the reach of one’s arm at the moment.

     For instance, it’s much easier to motivate oneself to workout when one thinks of it as getting into shape to be best able to deal with unjust physical violence if it should become necessary.

     I’ve certainly let myself become softer than I ever used to be.  I do still work out nearly every day (with appropriate rest sessions) because when I don’t, my chronic pain becomes worse.  But I’ve left behind the martial arts practice I used to do, and I stopped learning new stuff along those lines quite some time ago.  I’ve also not been watching/reading things that motivated me along those lines in quite a while, but I may want to indulge in them a bit more, now.  If nothing else, they can get me motivated to get in better shape, and that’s almost certainly going to be a benefit.

    If it should ever become necessary and useful to use better conditioning to protect someone from harm, or to take action against those who commit harm against the innocent, well…I suspect it would probably be a better world if more people became more ready, willing, and able to use violence against those who initiate or threaten it.

     There’s always the critical rub of people being prone to bias and mistake, to rush to judgment, and to scapegoat.  Which brings us back to why the rule of law, and due process, is so important.

     But what does one do when those who are supposed to be part of the rule of law and to enforce and to bow to due process choose to betray their oaths and their duties, and do not submit to the rule of law themselves?

     The answer is probably obvious, but feel free to write your guesses in the comments below.

     Have a good day.

*In case it’sn’t clear, I combined the contractions “it’s” for “it is” and the contraction “isn’t” for “is not” into a next-order contraction.

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With purpose to be blogged in an opinion of wisdom, gravity, profound conceit

     Hello and good morning.

     Yes, I am continuing to indent the beginnings of my paragraphs, and it still is not a whim.  I’m not ready to reveal why I’m doing it; that’ll depend on how it works out for me.  But if any readers are interested enough to speculate, I will let you know if you get it right.  It’s not really important or consequential, but neither is anything else from a sufficiently broad perspective.

     I was awakened very early this morning, even for me (I’ve noticed that a lot of the time I do a quick gasp or exclamation when I wake up, as if startled that I still exist or that the world does), by a combination of needing to use the bathroom* and a particularly severe exacerbation of pain, which continues even now.  I have no idea what made this exacerbation happen.  Yesterday, my pain was just at its baseline level, and while that’s not pleasant, it was basically that to which I have become‒out of necessity‒accustomed over the course of more than twenty years.  With adequate, slightly higher than recommended, doses of combined OTC pain medications, I can keep it to the point where I’m reasonably functional.

     Then shit like this happens and I start hoping that they’ll stop the flow of illegal fentanyl by making OTC fentanyl legal.  I’m being unrealistic there, of course; I was on a prescription fentanyl patch for years, and though it did keep my pain suppressed enough for me to function, it never eliminated it, and it had various long-term side effects on hormones and on neuropsychological function, so I stopped it unilaterally.

     Anyway, that’s all boring ancient history.  The bottom line of the point I was making is that I am not likely to be as chipper today as I was yesterday.  Yesterday I even tried to make some intellectually stimulating use of social media by going back and starting to watch/rewatch the videos on Numberphile from the oldest one on.  I got to the second video before I saw that Veritaseum had released his own new video about “the biggest misconception in physics”, discussing Emmy Noether’s theorems on symmetries and conversation laws, showing how, and why, on cosmologic scales, there is no conservation of energy.

     It’s a fascinating video.  Veritaseum always does good work and explains things very well, and of course, the more airtime Emmy Noether gets, the better.  Part of the substance of her story is how she showed where Einstein and Hilbert were missing some things, and it’s not just anyone who could understand let alone correct the insights of those great minds.  Watch that video, if you have any interest in the subject.

     From there I jumped to a guest lecture he (Derek Muller, who created Veritaseum) was giving at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics about AI and education and prior predicted revolutions in education.  I haven’t quite finished this because work and other things interfered and intervened.

     I have to admit that sometimes I think about trying to set this blog up as a subscription-option-available site, or to open a Patreon associated with it, or to start a Substack or something, so that I could try to make a living learning and thinking and writing and discussing and educating about various things**.

     Some people have been able to do it.  I doubt anyone would even be willing to pay tuppence (figuratively speaking) for my stuff, though.

    Anyway, by watching educational videos I was trying to avoid getting caught up in interacting with Threads (and to a lesser extent other social media) because while I’ve certainly had enjoyable interactions there and have found useful services, like the place I got evaluated for ASD, I never really feel like I have or am interacting with friends there.  When I do feel like I’m getting some degree of connection, I suddenly become awkward and feel I’m overstepping or being cringeworthy or just being too weird, which I probably am.

     I should give up on ever having any new actual friends, let alone any kind of relationship or pseudo-family or any such thing.  I just don’t seem to have the knack, though that fact makes me almost unbearably sad.  And, of course, my pain is showing no sign of diminishing, at least none that I can detect.

     If any of you think it could be doable‒in a practical sense, not just in a “physically possible” sense‒for me to make money on my nonfiction writing (or even audio or video), since the fiction writing hasn’t worked out, let me know, please.  In the meantime, I guess I’ll keep writing this, like this, as this, until either I am able to get my pain under better control or I give up on that possibility.  Also in the meantime, my “social” interactions with almost everyone will continue to be a bit like being in orbit around Mars or Jupiter and trying to make friends back on Earth.  Actually, those interactions could happen with as little as 3 minutes lag time due to the finite speed of light, so maybe Saturn or even Neptune would be a better metaphor.

     TTFN

*This is not a BPH thing; it has been this way all my life.

**I could name it after my short story collection, Dr. Elessar’s Cabinet of Curiosities, since it would probably be pretty eclectic.

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The paragraph indentations below are not merely done on a whim

     Wow, okay, yesterday was one heckuva day, and not in a good sense for the most part; it was a real cluster-fudge*, so to speak.  This is not meant to imply that yesterday was all bad or anything; that would be absurd.  I may be a madman (without a box, alas), but I am not so irrational as to think that there were no positive things in any given twenty-four hour period, even if I restrict the universe being evaluated down to only things that happen to me.

     I have never been one of those depressed people who interprets himself or his life as “all bad”.  That would make things easier, probably‒I would either have destroyed myself long ago or I would have embraced my identity as a pure villain**.  But I am capable of nuance, an attribute that seems often to be missing in our political discourse.

     Mind you, that latter happens largely because it’s what people seem to want to consume, or at least what enough people want, and to which enough people respond, that it becomes a stable and often successful strategy for politicians to use.  So, at least some of the “blame” for the vacuity of news and politics is that humans tend to run toward misleading simplicities rather than dealing with a complex world in which even people with whom they disagree can have good points and do good things and have their own pain and loss and fear and love and memory and dreams.  And even people with whom they agree on most things can nevertheless sometimes behave like complete assholes.

     The world is complicated.  How could it not be?  Almost everything of which we are aware and of which our reality consists is constructed from incomprehensibly vast numbers of interactions between quantum fields on tiny, tiny scales, with causality propagating at the speed of light, with behaviors and properties requiring complex numbers*** to describe mathematically.  If you’re an electrical engineer, you might use complex numbers in real life, because they are very useful for modeling cyclical processes like alternating current, but most macroscopic, emergent processes don’t require complex numbers to describe.

     Or maybe they would be best described, mathematically at least, using complex numbers, but most macroscopic, emergent phenomena have too many things going on‒too many moving parts, if you will‒to be efficiently described by any remotely practical mathematical formalism.  Even computer algorithms might be inadequate to describe the functioning of large scale matters in sufficient detail.

     It may be that natural language really is the best tool for describing such aspects of reality, since it allows one to vary one’s level of intricacy and complexity to suit the needs of any given situation.  But of course, to do so requires one to be rigorous to the point of being a martinet about one’s language usage.  If a word or term can have more than one meaning, it is crucial to specify which meaning one intends so as to avoid apparent disagreements that actually just come down to semantic confusion.

     I don’t necessarily mind semantic discussions‒I like words and language and logic and poetry and puns and all that stuff‒but if one is trying to share an explanation for something, and really to share understanding, precise word meaning is going to be necessary.  You can’t use html to write a program that runs in Pascal.  Okay that’s not a great analogy.  Let’s say…you can’t win a game of Texas hold ’em poker by following the strategy you would use for euchre.  It’s not just that you won’t win; your moves won’t even make sense.

     Okay, well, that’s probably enough for today.  I’ve been trying not to be as negative as I was yesterday, and I think I’ve succeeded reasonably well.  I do this sort of back and forth thing so often that some people have said they wonder if I am literally bipolar with a rapid cycling rate.  I can only respond by saying that this possibility has been considered by me and by several different mental health professionals, and it is thought not to be the case.  Of course, I’ve never been tried on a course of, say, lithium****, nor really on any of the other, less tricky mood stabilizers (other than as would-be adjuncts for chronic pain treatment).  But if I were occasionally waxing manic, I would imagine that sometimes I would feel really good about myself, and I rarely do.  Also, antidepressants have never triggered a manic or hypomanic event for me, and I’ve taken many different ones at different times.

     All right, well, there was a whole paragraph after I’d already said I’d written enough.  My apologies.  I do go on, don’t I?  Have a good day, if you can.

*If no one has used that euphemism as the name of a brand of candy, I’ll be even more disappointed in humanity than I was already.

**Knowing me, I would probably accidentally do good for the world every time I tried to do evil.  At least it would be funny.

***Complex numbers are numbers with one “real” part, i.e., some number on the usual, continuous number line, and one “imaginary” part, which is a real number multiplied by i, the square root of -1, which is no more truly imaginary than is any other number.

****I like the song a lot, though.

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I don’t know what to title this post

Hi, y’all.

There, that’s me officially and in writing endorsing the contraction “y’all” as a very clear, useful, and effective term of address, a 2nd person plural pronoun, which the English language seems otherwise to lack.  I might have mentioned previously that I like the word, but I nevertheless rarely use it.  I rarely talk even to a single other person, let alone to a group, so it doesn’t come up much.

That’s it.  That’s about as positive a thought as I have right now, and I doubt it’s going to get that positive again.  I feel truly burnt out.  I mean, I’m still writing my stupid fucking blog, because I am more or less internally compelled to do so.  And I’m going to work, because it’s not as if I can rest when I’m back at the shit-hole of a house, and I can’t sleep without sedating myself‒not for long, anyway.  I don’t really know what to do.

The world is going to shit, but it doesn’t really matter to me‒or it shouldn’t‒because my life went to shit a long time ago, and since then I’ve just been trying to swim through an ocean of raw sewage, trying to keep my head above “water”, but there’s no shore or pool edge or whatever in sight, and frankly, I’m tired.  I’m very stubborn about not giving up in general, but look where that has gotten me.  To paraphrase Fiona Apple, I am steadily going nowhere.

So, fuck the world.  All you humans had such opportunities to build something better, especially after the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War.  That was an amazing series of events that I could barely believe, having grown up expecting global thermonuclear war to happen sometime.  Things seemed honestly on the verge of real progress.

But no, always after a defeat and a respite, the shadow takes a new shape and grows again.  And people allow it to grow, people encourage it, people water and fertilize it, and indeed, people are that shadow.  There’s no Sauron or Morgoth or Satan or Ahriman or whatever other incarnation of evil you might conjure.  It’s all just the weakness and mental softness of the human race*, and alas, despite those seeming signs of improvement (which happened in the very year that I got married, coincidentally‒and that ended up falling apart as well), it seems that humans overall have little capacity for growth.

The true improvements made in the world, in life, are the products of a tiny, tiny fraction of people, while the others just take and use the products of that progress without any real understanding.  Perhaps they see them as miracles provided by their fictional (and not very clever) deities.

Meanwhile, if it were up to most people, humans would still be figuratively living in caves.

I hate the world, as well as almost all of its people (as a general feeling, anyway).  I honestly would like to burn it all, to erase it, to delete it.  There are ways that could be accomplished, if one were to put one’s whole effort into it.  If I had Elon Musk’s resources, I could initiate several such processes at once (for all I know, he might be doing so).  I’ve spent a very disturbing fraction of my time of life thinking of ways civilization can be destroyed, but then again, I am a Destroyer by nature.  I think I always have been.

But I don’t really feel I have the right‒though “rights” are one of those things made up by the smartish humans, and which are underappreciated by the rest‒to wipe everyone else out, and also, there are a few people here and there whom I actually like.  And I don’t think there is zero chance that humans will save themselves and the world, I just think the chances are tiny.

Maybe the world looks disgusting to me because I can only see it through my own eyes, and I myself am disgusting.

But there is a way for me to make the rest of the universe go away from my point of view, and for myself to go away as well, and it’s much more efficient than the many schemes I have dreamt up for obliterating the world.

It’s a very alluring thought, to escape from internal and external sources of pain and horror.  Oblivion, obliterate‒related words, from the Latin for forgetting.  I want to rest, but that doesn’t seem to be an option for me, so I probably will just have to settle for erasure.

*I do not refer here to kindness or generosity or compassion as softness‒those traits are strong, and only those with real strength have the capacity to show them.  I mean softheadedness, that pathetic need to imagine oneself to be, for instance, the favorite species (or people) of some imaginary almighty deity, or to believe one is somehow superior simply because of one’s ethnicity or sex or skin color.  But of course, that “belief” is itself evidence of the most profound weakness, insecurity, and inferiority.  Such people are nevertheless worthy of compassion‒as is everyone really, given that no one made themselves or the world‒but they are frustratingly capable of doing tremendous harm.

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Eddies in the flow of reality (but that’s not his sofa)

It’s Monday, in case anyone didn’t realize it.  Actually, whether or not anyone out there realized the fact, it’s still Monday.  Not that nature recognizes anything “Mondayish” about this day; the divisions of the days into weeks and months is all just human convention*.  Years, on the other hand, are natural cycles, as are days.

You can probably tell that I have no interesting ideas about which to write today, so I’m trading in banalities.  I try to get interested in discussing economics and politics and all that stuff, but except in rare instances‒though I lament and bemoan the seemingly indelible stupidity of human “civilization”‒it’s mostly just obviously futile and pathetic.  The people seeking and gaining “power” seem fundamentally deluded about their own importance, as is nearly everyone else.  Yet, if the everyday person’s grasp of even recent history is any evidence, almost nothing is even going to be remembered even a few months into the future.

I don’t quite understand how people live in their world without even a sense of context beyond their immediate environs.  I suppose that’s the natural state of humans.  In prehistoric times it was probably more than adequate, and certainly there’s been little time for evolution to alter the fundamental workings of the human brain to make them more suitable for dealing with the realities of the very large, complex, spontaneously self-assembled system that they call civilization.

Or maybe neurodivergence is the evolution of the brain to adapt to such systems, and the only reason so-called normal humans even still exist is that there were a lot more of them in the beginning.  Sometimes I think that people with ASD and ADHD and so on should do a Magneto kind of movement and rise up, throwing off the yoke of humans.  After all, if modern resurgence of authoritarianism and xenophobia/rights violations even in the US demonstrates anything, it is that the notion of “never again” which refers to the ideal of ensuring that the holocaust (or something like it) never recurs, is a pipe dream.

And yet, to revile and try to overthrow so-called normal humans could perhaps be just such an expression of bigotry, or at least prejudice, as I am bemoaning.  Would that be hypocritical and/or unjust?  If so, could it still be a necessary evil?  Is there any such thing as “necessary evil” or is that always just a cop-out?  (I’m interested in readers’ thoughts on that last question.)

From a physics point of view, humanity itself is not necessary, and there seems to be a pretty good likelihood that humanity is not even consequential, but that the whole of civilization is just a transient, highly local phenomenon, that will flash out of existence leaving no more remnants behind than do the little whorls and eddies of beautiful shapes that happen with you first pour cream into coffee.

In the long run, as far as we can see, the universe will be not just dead but mostly empty.  And though there are theoretical bases for everything starting over again (e.g., a Poincaré Recurrence) almost all of the intervening time‒which is so vast compared to the piddling age of the universe so far as to make 13 billion years like a single flap of a bee’s wing in the history of life on Earth‒will be lifeless.  So, looking at what appears to be nearly irrefutable physics, lifelessness is the natural, usual state of reality.

Of course, in principle, people could get beyond that, as David Deutsch has pointed out in The Beginning of Infinity.  Of course, as he has also pointed out, there is nothing that guarantees that people will become cosmically significant; it’s entirely possible for civilization to stagnate and decay or to self-destruct.

There is, mind you, plenty of time left in the lifespan of “habitability” of the Earth, so there might be time for another species to develop a civilization if humans die out, but there’s no good reason to suspect that they would be any more prepared to develop a cosmically significant culture than humans have been.

Maybe what we should do is split the human race into neurotypical and neurodivergent populations sort of like the Vulcans and Romulans in Star Trek.  Obviously (I think) the neurodivergent people would  be the Vulcans and the “typical” humans would be the Romulans‒you know, warlike, cruel, spiteful, duplicitous, and without honor.

I don’t know what point I’m trying to make this morning.  Maybe the point is that there is no point, that all meaning is internal and provincial and ultimately solipsistic or at least narcissistic.  But I am not enthusiastic about any of it, really.  I’m tired already, and it’s only Monday morning.

Oh, well.  Welcome to the new week.  I hope you all are doing well and feeling well as well.

*Which sounds a bit like some weird fan expo by aliens pretending to be and/or celebrating humanity.

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Curse us and crush us, my Precious

It’s Friday, and even though I brought my mini laptop computer back to the house with me yesterday, I’m writing this on my smartphone.  This is partly just because I don’t feel like getting the computer out, and partly because I feel no one really likes my longer posts, which are more likely to happen when I write using a real keyboard.  I also get the feeling that people, weirdly enough, don’t seem to like it when I write non-introverted things about external, real-world matters and ideas like I did yesterday.

I may be misinterpreting things, of course.  Goodness knows that my readership is a small enough sample size that drawing any kind of overall conclusions is fraught with danger (epistemologically sparking).  A regional storm that draws a few people’s attention away from reading blogs might well be enough to cut my usual number of readers in half.

I wish I could find the energy to read more science, like I used to do.  I’ve been saying that I would like to bone up on the latest neuroscience and to learn more about neural networks and deep learning programs.  I suppose I could learn more about quantum computing, but though it is largely the brainchild of one of my favorite minds (David Deutsch) it just doesn’t seem like as much of a big deal as it might be.  I get the concepts, broadly speaking, but it seems like a cumbersome and very fiddly kind of thing‒maintaining states of quantum superposition long enough to carry out a quantum algorithm is difficult even for only a few qubits at a time.

I also haven’t done any kind of music in quite a while.  This is partly because of my still-lingering respiratory illness, which makes it hard to sing, and I don’t enjoy playing guitar without singing*. 

Maybe I could work on playing guitar without singing and it would make me a better guitar player.  But even when I’m practicing the lead guitar part for Knives Out (the song by Radiohead, not the fun and funny murder mystery movie that was named after it) I like to sing along.  I don’t know how many of you have ever tried, but it can be very hard to play lead and sing simultaneously; I’m no Mark Knopfler.  As for piano, I don’t know how people like Elton John and Billy Joel do it, but I’ve never really tried.

Ha ha, I was just mentioning Billy Joel and his song The Longest Time came on the radio.  Of course, ironically, that song is almost completely a cappella, with no accompaniment by either guitar or piano.

I don’t know what to do, about anything.  I have no goal, no expectations of anything good happening in my life, nor of any future achievements.  Also, of course, even if I do something and create something, like a new song or a new book/story, it’s pretty much spitting in a high wind to try to water a flower bed that’s somewhere behind me.  I’m not likely to have any effect on anyone or even to be noticed.

Maybe I should send some of my songs or stories to some of the people currently screwing up the world’s economies and politics and environment.  Then, perhaps, some of them will really like my work, and that will then lead them to personal catastrophes and illnesses and death, as seems to happen to people who like my stuff (other than actual family members, though there is some precedent for that).

It would be wild to have a power like that, wouldn’t it?  It might make a good, weird story:  someone finds that the things he loves to do most, creatively, always end up causing harm to those who enjoy them, and so, despite himself, he decides to start using his gifts in a sort of Death Note kind of way, to eliminate dangerous people from the world.  He could almost be a very strange kind of superhero, perhaps called The Bard or The Minstrel.  He would do good, but he would also be chronically sad that he can’t just play music (or sing or write or whatever) and have people safely enjoy it.

It’s a bit reminiscent of the Monty Python sketch about the funniest joke in the world, which contains what I think is one of the funniest (but most underrated) lines ever:  Terry Jones as a TV reporter, standing outside the house where the deadly joke was written, opens with something along the lines of “Comedy struck this quiet, suburban neighborhood this morning…sudden, violent comedy.”

With that, I’ll draw this, my own pointless escapade, to a close, probably for the week.  I hope all of you have a good day and a good weekend and a good whatever comes after.  At least, I hope they are all as good as they can possibly be.  Which they will be, since everything cannot but be what it is once it is, quantum mechanics notwithstanding.

Bye.

*I can play piano without feeling the urge to sing, but I have no keyboard at the office‒I gave my cheapish one to a former coworker who used to be a serious professional musician, but he subsequently died of a heart attack, which is the sort of thing that happens to people to whom I try to give support, or to people who really like my singing/music.  I appear to be some type of curse.

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“But more when envy breeds unkind division: There comes the ruin, there begins confusion.”

Hello.  Good morning.  It’s Thursday, which you could have guessed from my salutation if you’re familiar with my ways.

I’m sorry I’ve been such a downer lately (though anyone who reads my stuff regularly should not be surprised).  I started the week on a relatively optimistic note, or at least on an energetic one.  I suspect that was because I basically sedated myself on Friday night and Saturday night, and thereby got as much as five or so hours of uninterrupted sleep on those nights.  I also pretty much vegetated during the day on the weekend (other than doing my laundry) which was made all but obligatory by the residual effects of the sedation.  But the benefits didn’t last long.

I don’t know what to write, today.  I feel rudderless and with very little wind in my sails (to combine pleasingly nautical metaphors).  Maybe I’ll discuss a little bit about current events.  It’s been another weird week, as has almost every week since the beginning of the year.

Of course, the weirdness didn’t start there.  In the US at least, a lot of the weirdness really got going after 9-11, when everyone became overly paranoid about potential terrorism (especially involving planes) and security theater made everyone feel more afraid rather than less*.  Yet, as far as we know, most of it has saved no lives and it has immiserated countless people.

As part of the consequences of our neurotic response to the 9-11 attacks, what had been the longest unpatrolled border in the world (between the US and Canada, which did not even require passports to go between the two countries) became less amicable, marking the beginning of a feeling of separateness between what had been possibly the two closest allies and friendliest neighbors in the world.

Newt Gingrich helped with the radicalization of the Republican Party even before that, and through his slimy, slippery, poikilothermic mentality, he took what had been a party with principles down the beginning of its road to being the mockery of its former self that it has become.  Don’t get me wrong, the Democrats have responded in kind, in their own way, though their approaches are different**.

I think one of the biggest weaknesses that has led to the decline of global politics and especially of politics in the US is the indulgence of the tendency to demonize those who disagree with one, especially about anything that comprises a tenet of one’s political (and other) faith.  Speaking as a non-human, this is one of the attributes that makes humans so mutually self-destructive, and it is a tragedy.

This is the process that leads to the dehumanization of the “other”, which frees one to commit atrocities, because one does not see the other as having the same rights, or even the same consciousness, the same “soul”, as oneself.

It’s a particularly pathetic, utterly blinkered and myopic view, since all humans are infinitely ignorant and impotent in the final analysis.  While I do agree with Ayn Rand that humility—in the sense of presuming oneself inherently and inescapably worthless and valueless—is not a virtue, intellectual humility is always appropriate, because every person, every mind, no matter how brilliant, is as far from being infinite—and thus as far being incapable of error—as is the simplest flatworm, or indeed, the crudest virus.

One can only work on self-improvement if one actually recognizes and owns the fact that one has room for it.  This is one of the best lessons taught by Jesus in the Gospels (which I have read often, though I am no Christian).  It’s the one where he says, “Why lookest thou to the mote in thy neighbor’s eye, but considerest not the beam in thine own?  Thou hypocrite.  First take out the beam from out thine own eye, and then thou wilt see clearly to help thy neighbor with the mote in his eye.”  It goes something like that, anyway; I’m paraphrasing, but then again, so was King James’s editorial staff, since the original writing is, I think, in Greek, and if Jesus was a real person, he probably spoke Aramaic or something along those lines.

Anyway, his message was good.  If it were told in the modern world, it would probably be something like “the parable of the airplane oxygen masks”, i.e., make sure to secure your own mask before helping those who have difficulty securing theirs, because if you pass out and are incapacitated because you were focused only on others’ failings, then you’re no use to anyone.

This is plainly nothing new—after all, even though all the words attributed to Jesus were written decades to centuries after his crucifixion (if even that happened) and he may be entirely fictional, this message was considered important at least two millennia ago.

And warnings of the dangers of nationalism and blind loyalty to an “ethos” based largely on xenophobia and other rather pathetic fears have not been heeded by modern humans, though there were ample and terrible lessons about it throughout the last century.

Of course, Rupert Murdoch and his spawn helped spur this deterioration of discourse along—not out of any apparent sense of even misplaced idealism, but rather out of a seeming desire for ever greater profit and power.

Barnum’s Law still applies:  There’s a sucker born every minute, and two to take him.

This would seem to imply twice as many “takers” as “suckers”, but the two categories are not mutually exclusive (and of course, we have no word on the nature and character of all the other people born every minute).  Suckers can also be grifters; humans (and other people) don’t come neatly sorted and compartmentalized.  Even truly great people can have terrible flaws, but that doesn’t erase their greatness.  And seemingly unremarkable people can be (and do deeds that are) utterly inspiring.

The only time anyone goes beyond potential improvement or redemption is when they die.  That’s also the only time anyone becomes free of error.  It’s all very unsatisfactory, of course, but then, the Buddha long ago recognized that such is the nature of life itself.

All suffering is born of desire—but then again, so is all action.

I don’t know what my final point is; perhaps there can never be any single ultimate point, no “terminal goal” to use AI/decision theory terminology, not in minds that evolved with many, often competing, drives.  But at least I’ve been able to avoid just talking about my pain and depression and desire for self-erasure today.  You’re welcome.

TTFN

*Congratulations, Osama bin Laden and the rest of Al Qaeda.  You won.

**For instance, those on the “left” are big proponents of (and self-congratulators about their own) empathy.  For the most part empathy is useful, though Paul Bloom has quite reasonably pointed out some of its shortcomings.  Still, one place where the “left’s” empathy conspicuously and consistently fails them is in trying to empathize with or even to consider the points of view of those on the “right”, of “conservatives”.  It’s worth a bit of reflection.

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I am a detriment…goo goo ga choob

I’m feeling very grumpy this morning, which isn’t anything new; grumpiness is a common part of chronic depression (AKA dysthymia).

I have known some people who find anger/grumpiness preferable to being simply down and discouraged, but I really don’t like being angry.  I feel wrong and evil and ashamed when I get angry.

My inherent instinct when angry is to want to act on my anger physically; I’m not a big verbal arguer.  At least, if I am arguing verbally, it’s generally not in anger, but entails me trying to explore the truth (or otherwise) of a particular topic and to spread or gain better understanding of it.  But when actually feeling anger, what I want to do is to destroy the object of my anger, literally, so that I don’t ever have to worry about it again, whatever it might be.

I guess I’ll just have to deal.  Or maybe I’ll finally just lose my temper and get into serious and severe trouble.  More likely, I’ll just take my anger out physically on myself, as I usually do.

I have excellent “self-denial subroutines” to keep me from hurting other people (though not so much to keep me from hurting myself).  As I’ve said before, I have an instinctive sense that I do not have any right to comfort or satisfaction with pretty much anything.  So, I don’t usually even try, because as often as not, at least when I notice, trying makes things blow up in my face.

This relates, at least tangentially, to an interaction I had yesterday on Threads.  Someone there had posted something along the lines of “my therapist told me she was proud of me today”.  I thought that seemed quite nice, and I answered, honestly but with a bit of self-deprecation, that I didn’t think I had ever had a therapist say they were proud of me.  I added a little ^_^ emoticon to make it clear that I wasn’t moaning about it, just trying to take a light-hearted approach and reinforce the fact that this person’s therapist’s words were positive and nice and unfortunately rare.

Then, a little while later, the original poster replied to my comment, saying she was proud of me that at least I was going.

That’s a little saddening and embarrassing, because I am not currently going to therapy.  I’ve gone to therapy quite a lot in the past; my comment was not a fictional one.  But I haven’t gone in a long while.  The last time I felt desperate enough and tried to do therapy through BetterHelp—which I chose because I could not find a way to go to a therapist’s office and work it into my schedule—I had just gotten started working with a therapist there and feeling relatively comfortable when she had to go on extended maternity leave.

I don’t hold that against her, obviously, but it was frustrating, verging on heartbreaking, if you don’t mind me seeming a bit melodramatic.  I had really needed to force myself to try to go through with that and to start with a therapist*; to have it suddenly vanish was both frustrating and deflating.

It’s a bit similar to my catastrophic interaction with the suicide hotline years ago, when morons from the PBSO came and got me and handcuffed me and took me to a shithole mental health place, where I was for all of twenty-four hours.  At least I got a brief referral through that place, but I didn’t really stick with it, and of course, I ended up going to FSP before too long, anyway.

Since then, I have been particularly nervous about using the hotline, though there have been many times when I’ve looked at it online, and even more times when my search engines have recommended it to me based on some web search I’ve been doing.  I did give up and use it once, a year or two ago, refusing to divulge my location to them.  But even with that, it’s very nerve-racking to seek help in a time of crisis and to have to worry about some Barney Fife type coming and taking you away.

If I wanted to be hospitalized for my mental illness**, I would go to a hospital.  I know how to do that.  I’m not afraid of hospitals.  I just don’t think they would actually do me any good.  I’m not convinced that anything will do me any good.

This is not mere pessimism (though that surely enters into my figuring).  It’s just that the human race has not understood the mind and brain well enough to have reliable treatments for certain things.  It’s a bit analogous to the plague, which is caused by infection with the bacteria Yersinia pestis, if memory serves, and which is easily treatable (nowadays) with simple, common antibiotics such as ciprofloxacin.  But if you got the plague before antibiotics were invented, going to a hospital for treatment would be pointless, useless, and probably counter-productive.

Anyway, I’m going on and on about nothing, and using more words than necessary to do so.  In case you couldn’t tell, I’m writing this on my mini laptop computer, so the words flow more easily.  But it’s all just me flailing about like a paranoid, feral cat.  When you can’t know what you can trust or upon what or whom you can rely, the natural reaction can be just to keep your distance from everyone and everything, because some things that seem like they might be helpful will end up hurting you more—and yes, it seems always possible for one to suffer more than one already is.

So, though I’m chagrined to have been told by someone that they were proud of me for doing something I’m no longer doing, I don’t necessarily think I’m wrong not to do it—though I recognize that I may be fooling myself or even that my thinking may be frankly distorted.  Maybe I would do better with therapy now that I know I have ASD (the brain kind, not the heart kind).  I don’t know.

Sorry for this post going nowhere.  I apologize for wasting your time, and for wasting the time of everyone else who’s ever had to interact with me.  I’m sure all my former therapists could have used their time better by seeing someone else during the hours they saw me.

There’s little doubt in my mind that if I had actually killed myself in the past, on one of the occasions on which I almost did so, the world would probably be at least a slightly less miserable place where I currently sit.  And while all possibilities of happiness would have been foreclosed for me, at least I would no longer be lonely and in pain and overflowing with self-loathing.

*I tried to get in touch with the therapist I had seen most recently (before my whole debacle).  Actually, “try” is misleading; I did get in touch with her, but she was no longer seeing patients, and in any case, she didn’t have any offices that would have been reachable from where I now live and work without a car.  I asked for recommendations in the area, which she provided, but that still would have required driving, so I had to resort to online help.

**I hate that people euphemistically refer to psychological/psychiatric troubles as “mental health” as in the rather absurd statement “suffering from or dealing with mental health”.  That’s like saying someone is troubled by physical fitness.  No, I suffer from mental illness.  It’s not mental health.  It’s the opposite of mental health.  I wouldn’t even know what it would mean to suffer from mental health, but it doesn’t matter, because mental health is something with which I am not burdened.  Likewise, I do not bear the burden of physical comfort, I suffer from chronic pain.  These pathetic, touchy-feelie euphemisms seem counter-productive to me.

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“Try to kill it all away, but I remember everything.”

It’s Tuesday morning, and I’m writing this blog post on my laptop computer because I wanted to write in a way that felt more natural (to me) than does poking away at the stupid smartphone (oxymoron?) with my sore thumbs.

I’m still on the recovery arc of my respiratory infection; I’m coughing somewhat less, and I’m not really bringing much phlegm up anymore, but the cough is still there and is more than slightly annoying.

I sometimes wonder if I could have some fungal infestation in my lungs that won’t go away on its own*, or even if I could be developing lung cancer or laryngeal cancer.  To be honest, that latter two possibilities aren’t entirely negative.  They feel more wholesome than a fungus, since I really dislike even the smell of mushrooms or mildew, and cancer would be a good, relatively slow death sentence, since I have neither the health insurance nor the inclination to seek any treatment if I were to develop cancer.

This is on my mind rather prominently because, starting last night, rather out of the blue, and for the first time ever, I thought what is truly and literally the most horrible thought that I’ve ever had in my life:  I wished that I would simply forget that I had ever met my ex-wife, and thus that we had ever gotten married and, of course, that we had ever had any children.

I cannot wish never to have actually met her and had children—I would not wish for anything that would imply their nonexistence, even though all such wishes are trivial and powerless.  I just wish I could forget all of it, because it’s all just a source of pain for me now, and it’s indisputably the case that I provide no benefit to my children (let alone my ex-wife) anymore.

I guess it’s a little like that movie The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which I’ve never seen** and never intend to see.  Make no mistake, if I could eliminate my memories of my ex-wife and my kids, I don’t think it would solve any problems.  I doubt it would make me any less depressed.  But at least I wouldn’t just keep missing them and thinking about them and about what a failure I am at the things that matter by far the most to me, and how the people I’ve loved most in my life have all left of their own accord sooner or later, because being around me for too long is literally detrimental.

Of course, the fact that I am living in Florida would require some kind of retroactive justification.  Though I could surely confabulate some manner of explanation—I’m nothing if not good at conjuring stories—it would probably nag at me, and I’d try to look into what really happened in all the missing time between when I first met my ex and when I last saw any of my former family in person, about twelve years ago.

When I first got out of prison and went up to visit my parents and sister, my Dad specifically said that I was welcome to stay with them.  He knew that I was writing my books, and my parents both supported the idea of me being an author (they were avid readers).  But at the time, though I was grateful for the offer—I’m not sure I adequately expressed that gratitude, but I felt it—I wanted to come back down to Florida, to live where I live now, because my kids were here and I wanted to be close to them so I could be part of their lives.

Of course, it was they who didn’t really want me to be part of their lives, and indeed, my son didn’t/doesn’t even want to interact with me at all.  So, I’ve been completely wasting my time down here.  Sure, I’ve written stories and wrote and played some music, and I’ve been writing this stupid, pointless, useless, valueless*** blog most days—but all of that, when added to a buck fifty, won’t even buy you the cheapest cup of coffee at Starbuck’s.

I wonder how my writing and stories would have been different if I forgot my family.  I wonder how my life would be different.  Almost certainly, it would be no better; the tendency to fuck everything up is inherent in me, so it probably doesn’t matter what my circumstances are.

I hate my life and I hate myself, and the only person from whom I cannot be separated is myself, the person I hate most in all the universe.  I guess what I really want to have erased is not just my memory of my ex-wife and my children, but me.

Unfortunately, though I do not consider suicide immoral, I do find it difficult, due to powerful biological drives that cannot simply be voluntarily overcome by effort of will, any more than I can choose not to digest food or not to breathe.  Thus, not conscience, but an evolutionarily selected drive, makes a coward of me.

Come on, cancer!  Heck, I’d be willing to embrace the fungus****, I think.  I’ll even settle for just an accident, as long as it doesn’t get innocent people hurt.  This whole continued existence thing was ill-advised from the first, and now I’m just throwing good money after bad, one of the classic logical and behavioral fallacies.  Something needs to be done.

Oh, well.  I hope all of you, at least, have a good day.

*I know, I know, it hasn’t been very long, it’s just that these are the sorts of things that go through my excuse for a mind.

**As far as I can recall, anyway.

***To say nothing of “redundant”.

****”Embrace the fungus” almost sounds like a catchphrase, but I don’t think it’ll ever become popular.