Author: Robert Elessar

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Very brief report: Monday, June 3rd, 2024 AD/CE

I only wrote a little bit this morning, because somehow I was moving quite slowly, even though I woke up plenty early.

Actually, that reminds me of a mildly amusing fact.  On Saturday, I got up and got ready and went into the office, since it was my weekend to work, and only after I was up and on my way did I realize:  I had completely forgotten to turn on my alarm for Saturday morning, which I had turned off for the previous, non-working weekend.  It’s pretty funny, in a rather sardonic way.  I almost never even hear my morning alarm, because I am almost never still asleep when its time for it to go off, so I shut it off preemptively.  I’ve been awakened by my alarm just once this year (so far) unless I am grossly misremembering.  And that was because I had such difficult getting to sleep that night that I had finally dropped off only barely before it was time to awaken.

Enough about that for now.  I’m sure you’ve all “heard” about my chronic insomnia ad nauseam, so I won’t bore you more with it now.

My block words today were only 751, but my net words were 763, so I must have added a net of 12 words to previously written portions of the story as I was editing it.  That’s about a 1.6% difference between the two measures, so much lower than the peak difference, but much higher than the nadir, which, of course, most individual samples in any data set will tend to be.

The total story length is currently 51,558 words.  I should be finished with the first draft sometime relatively soon, but I don’t think it will happen this week.

I hope you are all having a good month of June so far.  And I hope that you have a good day and a good week.  If my wishes have any effect–which seems unlikely–then you will.

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June 1st writing report

It’s the beginning of June, and a day that, by rights, should be a global holiday.  Perhaps someday it will.

Today I wrote 1,227 “block”* words on Extra Body, and the “Net” word count was almost identical:  1,228.  That’s less than a tenth of a percent difference, which is kind of cool, since I did make quite a few changes as I reread the previous 3 pages of writing to get me into the swing of writing today.

The total word count of the story is now 50,798, so it’s no one’s idea of a short story.  I don’t know, I just am not great at making stories short.  I increased the line spacing from 1 to 1.15 yesterday (or perhaps it was on Wednesday), because it’s easier to look at.  At the time, this changed the total page number from 71 to 74, which is nothing like a 15% increase, as one might expect from a naïve formula for how the page number relates to the line spacing.  I’m not sure what makes it so different, though.

Of course, the type size doesn’t change, only the space between lines of type, and that’s relatively small, to start with, so perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised that it makes such a relative small difference.  It’s like the universe expanding overall but galaxies and galaxy clusters, being gravitationally bound, do not expand, only the space between them does.  When they are still close together, the change is relatively minor.  Of course, if the line spacing in my work were to increase exponentially, the space between lines would very soon come to dominate completely the fractional change in size, as is so with the universe, and then the page number change would track more closely with the spacing change.  But it would be pretty nuts to decide to increase the line spacing in a story.  Who would want to witness the heat death of the novella, after all?

Ah, well, all that doesn’t matter much.  But it does mean that, now, the story is over 80 pages long, and I think it may reach (or even exceed) a hundred before I’m through with the first draft.  It’s not quite going the way of Outlaw’s Mind (which started as a short story idea and became way more than expected) but it’s still really something.  I can’t make myself feel bad about it, though.  I mean, I’m frustrated that it’s taking so long, but the story has to be what it is, and I can’t make it otherwise.

I hope you all have a good weekend.  I should return on Monday, barring–as always–the unforeseen.  

 

 

*If you would like to see the definition of this term as I use it, I describe it in my reply to a comment on yesterday’s post.

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Writing report and some talk of the peaks and drop-offs of June, and of me

Report on today’s fiction writing:

Block words: 1,103

Net Words:  1,140

So there was a difference of roughly 3.3% between the two, which is consistent with the first couple of checks I did, and less of a difference than there was on Wednesday.  It is consistent with my experience today, because I know I added a few sentences to my previous writing to clarify some moments and make the flow of a conversation feel more natural.  That happens all the time when rereading/editing, of course, but I guess it doesn’t generally end up making more than a few percent difference in total writing for the day, based on what I’ve measured so far.

This all probably doesn’t matter in the slightest to anyone but me, but once I’ve started paying attention to such a thing, it’s very difficult for me not to note it.  I doubt that it adds any significant insight even for me, but who knows?  More knowledge is usually at least not detrimental, and can often be beneficial, unless the cost of obtaining the knowledge it a loss of energy or knowledge or some opportunity cost in some other area that produces a greater detriment than the new knowledge is a benefit.

Anyway…

June begins tomorrow, as I noted previously.  It’s a month that begins with a good and important event, for me and my family, so that’s a double-plus-good, to steal a term from Newspeak.

After that, things get much more dicey.

Of course, the summer solstice (June 20th this year) is when the days reach their peak length (in the northern hemisphere, anyway) and then begin getting shorter, so if the winter solstice is a time for celebration as days begin to lengthen, one would imagine the summer one would be a day of mourning.  This doesn’t seem, generally, to be the case, but it’s definitely the harbinger of increasing heat and humidity here in south Florida, which is not great and is apparently getting worse as the years pass.  To paraphrase Porgy and Bess, it’s summertime, and the living is…oozy.

June is also the month of both Father’s Day and my former wedding anniversary.  These are melancholy commemorations for me.  This year would have been my 33rd wedding anniversary, but I now will have been divorced 3 years longer than I was married.  I’ve also now been away from both my children–physically away, neither having been in their presence nor seen them directly–for as many or more years than they were old when last I was truly a part of their lives.

I’ve always been able to do some things quite a bit more easily than most other people seem able to do.  But all those things are trivial, and none of them have ever come to much of anything, anyway.  At almost all of the things which have been most important to me, I am an abject and abysmal failure.

I have apparently been at least a decent brother, so I didn’t fuck that up too royally.  Not yet, anyway.  I think I was a pretty good doctor; my patients always said so.  But I have been a failure as a son, and as a husband, and as a father, the roles which have mattered by far the most to me, in increasing order.  So, June starts on a very high peak, but it goes downhill rapidly, like the graph of 1 over (x-1):

graph of 1 over x minus

Probably there’s some other, more elaborate formula that would describe things better, but you get the idea, I think.  Actually, I should probably make it ((1/(1-x))-x or something similar.  But it’s not that important.  Nothing I do is important, except in a negative sense, which is the whole point.

I’ll work tomorrow, barring the unforeseen, so I’ll be writing some fiction and giving a report (also barring the unforeseen).  I hope you all have a good weekend.

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My thoughts are minutes; and with sighs they blog their watches on unto mine eyes

Hello and good morning.

It’s Thursday again—indeed, it is the last Thursday in May of 2024, common era, and this day will never come again.  That is, it will not come again unless time turns out to be cyclical, in which case, I guess this day will come again over and over, an infinite number of times, though it would never feel that way from inside.

Certainly, in at least some sense, this day is permanent.  For instance, this is so if, based on Special and General Relativity, one can consider the universe to be a “block universe”, i.e., one in which each event and moment or whatever you want to call it in all of space and time is simply what it is and is “always” there, like a cosmic Blu-ray® that plays itself.  Except it doesn’t play itself.  Again, it simply is, and the sense of time passing is simply something experienced by tiny beings that comprise little four-dimensional braids of energy because of the way they are put together or rather the way they exist in local spacetime.

I’ve written about this before, considering the question, if we (and everything else) are permanent and unchanging local patterns in spacetime from the beginnings of our lives to the ends, might it be that, when we die, from an experiential point of view, we merely start over at the beginning, with everything in our lives happening over and over.  Or perhaps it’s more accurate to think that, in such a case, there is still a “me” that is living yesterday, experiencing it, and the day before and the year before and the decade before, and so on, in a possibly infinite continuum of moments.

If that were to be the case, then the best general advice would probably be to try to make your life such that, if you are going to live it over and over again for eternity, that will not be the equivalent to being condemned to Hell.  I think Nietzsche talked about something like this, but I may be misremembering.

Of course, each time one lives one’s life again is restarted from a local blank slate.  It’s not as though you would ever have any memory of having gone through all this before, any more than a character in a movie learns from the fact that you’ve played the movie before and behaves differently next time.  Anakin Skywalker will never avoid becoming Darth Vader, no matter how much we see that he suffered horribly and did horrific things that he regretted, all while failing to achieve what he had meant to achieve by going to the dark side in the first place.

So, however you were going to live your life is how you were going to live your life—from the outside perspective—and you should just try to do the best you can in any case, because…well, why would you do anything else?

Of course, whatever you end up doing is literally doing the best you can, since you cannot change what you do once it’s done.  See above regarding the permanence of time and so on.  Even if quantum mechanics in some way derails the “simple” spacetime block notion*, that doesn’t make the past any more amenable to adjustment.

Whatever the nature of reality ultimately is, it is, and we are not going to change that.  We can learn more and more about it and use that knowledge to our benefit, but we cannot ever escape whatever the meta-level rules of reality are, any more than a pawn can make any legal move that allows it then to change the rules of the game of chess.

Anyway, that was all good fun and we all had a jolly good laugh, but I feel that perhaps I’ve trodden such areas too often, and I’m probably boring my readers.  Apologies.

Junes is coming in two days, and it’s a relatively eventful month.  A close family member of mine has an important birthday; the Solstice will be here (Summer in the north, Winter in the south); and of course, Father’s Day comes in June.  That’s a bitter holiday for me, unfortunately, but there’s nothing I can do to change that preexisting fact; again, see above.

As for other things, well, I think I got a slightly better sleep last night than I’ve been getting lately.  I still began waking up at about 1:30 in the morning, but I was able to go back to sleep again until a little after 2 and then about 2:30 or so, and 3, and then started just giving up and fully waking up at about 3:20.  Even so, at least I was able to get to sleep somewhat earlier than I usually do, and that’s saying a lot.  It may be quite tragic that three and a half hours of uninterrupted sleep feels so much better than usual, but it does.

It’s not simply happening randomly, just to be clear.  I am making interventions and trials and seeing what helps and what doesn’t.  I’m not going to get into them for the moment, lest I cloud my own mind with the discussion.  But it’s not just that, hey, wow, I’m sleeping slightly better these last two nights, gosh I wish I knew why.  It’s the product of my always ongoing attempts to improve things when I can.

I’ve also been reading a bit for that past few days on and off—mainly Sean Carroll’s new book—but, while this is a good thing, it’s not an unadulterated good.  I won’t get into the reasons for that caveat, and in any case, from my perspective, it’s overall a positive.

Tomorrow I’ll go back to writing my one page (or possibly more) on Extra Body, and I will give a brief report on that (probably), though my brief reports are somewhat prone to digression into not-so-brief discussions of tangentially related subjects.  I am also going to be working Saturday, barring any changes, so I’ll probably rinse and repeat then.

In the meantime, I hope you all have a great rest of the week as May draws to an end and June arrives.

TTFN

*It need not do so.  The spacetime block might merely be more complex than our first, naïve notion of it, and actually be a spacetime block made of the universal wavefunction, with “branches” at every quantum decoherence and a level of splitting that may be as fine as the divisions of the real numbers, uncountably infinite.  Taken as a whole, though, these could all still be fixed and “permanent”; there would just be more of a fractal sort of character to it at the level of quantum interactions and the like.

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Brief Wednesday writing report and digressions

Today’s writing on Extra Body:

“Block” words:  738

Net words: 698

Evidently, I cut a fair few words (40 overall) in my rereading/editing of previous writing, making the difference about 5.7% today, an unusually large disparity, at least since I’ve started keeping track.  The total number of words in the story as of today is 48,422, and it is 71 pages long (single-spaced on Word in Calibri 11-point).

As I wrote today, I came to worry that I had given my character a work-week that was now almost eight days long, because I had the character mention that the weekend was coming, but it seemed a long time since the previous weekend.  So, I scrolled back up through the story, noting the day of the week in any given scene, and realized that in the moment of the story that I wrote today, it was Thursday evening.  The weekend was indeed just about to arrive.

Apparently, somewhere in my mind, I had kept track of the days in the story better than I thought I had.

This sort of thing happens to me a lot.  I seem underdeveloped in the usual tendency toward mental self-confidence, and so I frequently check and recheck things to make sure they are as I thought they were.  I check my pockets to make sure my keys are there probably several dozen times a day or more, for instance.  I’m pretty good at mental arithmetic–I do it as part of my job, for one thing, and I can total up the sales numbers as they happen faster than other people can when they use calculators, but then I always recheck the totals three different ways using Excel, and when they are all the same and agree with my numbers, I consider it tolerably likely that I’m correct.  But I never feel certain.  Even though mathematics is the realm of theorems, and once proven, such theorem-laden information should be epistemologically final, I don’t ever feel final about it.  Perhaps this is part of why I am incapable of being religious; faith doesn’t even make any sense to me.

I also find that confidence, as expressed by other people, especially strong confidence, is almost always distasteful, in a powerful, visceral way.  I have severe contempt for people who make declarative statements about things they cannot know for sure, especially about the states of mind of other people, and about other people’s intentions.  Observing discourse about politics is almost always nauseating and infuriating.

The more confident someone is, the less I trust them, because I’ve noted that most people are far more confident than they are justified in being about most things.  And yet, many humans respond to the confident people positively, granting them pseudo-authority, even when–perhaps especially when–their confidence is not based upon anything testable or peer-reviewed or reliable.  This is part of why I hate thinking of those who hold political office as “leaders”.  They are almost always not leaders in any meaningful sense of the term, or they should not be.  I think it would be much better to think of them as employees, and to treat them accordingly.

Oh, well.  Perhaps this sense of uncertainty and the lack of reliability of people who nevertheless have outsized impacts on the lives of others is part of why I have trouble sleeping (though I think it’s mainly inherent and neuro-humoral, and related to what I suspect is ASD).

I slept a little better last night than the night before or the night before that, though it’s not saying much.  I felt vague and punchy all day yesterday, and I pseudo-jokingly said to my coworker that I wondered if anyone knows how to get in touch with Michael Jackson’s former doctor, because I could really use some Propofol.  It’s a pseudo-joke because, while I said it as if it were a joke, if someone offered me the option of being put under with it, even given the risk of death, I might take that offer.  I would certainly consider it.  Though I would have to feel reasonably confident that I was getting what I thought I was getting.  I suppose that’s part of why I wouldn’t really ever want to use illicit drugs–I would never feel comfortable that I was actually getting what I thought I was getting, let alone in any kind of reliable dose.

I hope you all feel vastly better than I feel.  It would be at least some crumb of comfort to be reasonably convinced that the large majority of people in the world tend to be much happier and healthier than I am.  If not, then what’s the point of bothering with the world?

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If Tuesday morning is like this, and Tuesday afternoon is never-ending…

It is Tuesday morning, the 28th of May in 2024 AD or CE, depending on how you prefer to write it.  I suppose it doesn’t really matter much to me; I’m okay either way.  I only first encountered the designation “CE” by the time I was in college (or “university”‒again depending on your preference), but I get why people use it.

I guess it’s probably silly to think that anyone should care whether I indicate what calendar era it is in which I’m writing.  I don’t suppose anyone would think I was writing a blog post in 2024 BC (aka “BCE”).  How would one even know toward which year one was counting down, if one were writing such dates?  Still, who knows how dates may change in the future, and whether someone might stumble across my blog posts in some unguessed age, on some weird, digital archaeological expedition.

How will such searches of the past even happen in the future?  If we advance beyond our current kind of online and personal storage, what would even happen to the data presently on the Internet and web and cloud and whatnot?  Heck, if all power went out for a significant amount of time in the near future, I would suspect that much of the stored data on the net might be lost.

Of course, quantum information will be conserved, if we understand that part of nature as well as we seem to understand it.  But the fact that it exists is not the same as being able to recover it.

Online is not forever.  Even if the actual data related to something sticks around, there will be so much other data that it will be as invisible as a single leaf in the Amazon rainforest as seen from space.  Perhaps far more so.  Very little that happens online is salient to anyone even as it happens, let alone after much time has passed.

Anyway…I’m writing this post on my phone in the back of an Uber heading to the office, because I again slept horribly last night, despite taking melatonin early in the evening.  I don’t know what to do about this sleep problem.  As John at the bar said to Bill*, I believe this is killing me.  And I don’t think I’m being melodramatic or hyperbolic**.

I mean to write at least a little bit of fiction this morning, but my last experience using the laptop computer in the backseat of an Uber was unpleasant.  To be honest, though, just about everything is unpleasant now.  There’s little if anything that brings me even transient joy.  There is occasional, momentary escape in the form of humor, for instance, but even that is becoming more and more difficult.  Mainly, I just feel ridiculously tense and guarded and tired and in pain pretty much all the time, or at least the vast majority of it.

I don’t want to keep doing this.  It’s just not worth it.  Nothing I do and nothing about me is worthwhile.

<sigh>  I’ll add an addendum about my fiction writing before I post this.

***

Well, I wrote 798 “block” words and 799 net words, which means that when I reread stuff today I added a word relative to the previous state of the story.  Still, like yesterday, it seems the difference is only one word, so I’m well below the roughly 3% difference seen in the past.  I don’t know if that’s good or bad or merely a neutral fact.

I could feel how foggy and vague I was while writing, so I forced myself to keep it short.  Actually, I had to force myself to write as much as I did, which was one page.  I’m not sure what my average page number per day has been since I started.  Most days that I write, I write well over one page and usually over two pages, but there have been many non-writing days, so it may average about one a day.  It’s a bit over 45 pages long so far, if memory serves.

No, that’s dead wrong.  It’s actually 70 pages long (I just checked).  That can’t be just a page a day, can it?  Have I been working on this story for more than two months?  I can’t remember.  If anyone out there has been paying attention, please let me know.

Okay, well, that’s enough of that.  I’m done for the day, at least on this stuff.  I feel like I’m done for everything else, too, but of course, the workday hasn’t even really gotten started.  I’m so tired.  This has to end soon.  Everything hurts, and nothing is beautiful, to reverse Vonnegut’s famous quote, as I like to do (I think I’ve done this recently, haven’t I?).  I only even keep moving at all out of habit.  I need just to lie down, figuratively, and let the elements*** take me.

I guess we’ll see if I’m strong enough to do that.  Meanwhile, all of you please have a good day.

*In the song Piano Man by Billy Joel

**As far as I know, I’m Euclidean.

***Or the elephants.  I’m not picky.

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Monday report, 5-27-2024

I did not write or go to work on Friday.  I started to develop a “classic migraine”, i.e., one that begins with a visual “aura”, on Thursday while on my way back to the house, and despite three Ibuprofen and a caffeine pill, it developed and lasted well into the following evening.  I achieved nothing of worth nor of any real enjoyment over the weekend, so there’s nothing to report regarding that.  I was very much lying about, punctuated by a few short walks to the store (and a malfunction of the clothes washing machine on Sunday morning in the middle of my second load, forcing me to wring out those clothes before putting them in the dryer), because my back was acting up something fierce–possibly because I’d been lying around (in the dark) in a funny way due to my migraine.

Anyway, this morning I wrote some on Extra Body:  1,262 “block” words, but with a net 1,261 total new words, which means that, in my rereading and editing, I took out one more word than I added.

Since I have no life, there is nothing else to report other than that, as usual, there was a bunch of catch-up stuff to do at the office this morning, but I’m awake early in the morning, anyway.  It’s Memorial Day in the US, of course, but our office is open.  We would probably be open on Christmas if anyone would come in, and we are usually open on New Year’s Day.

I hope those of you who observe it have a good Memorial Day, and that those of you who don’t observe it nevertheless have a good day.

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By medicine life may be prolong’d, yet death will blog the doctor too.

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, and so—as I mentioned yesterday that I would—I’m writing a standard blog post.

I’m writing in the back of an Uber right now, but I’m using my laptop, and that combination is a first for me, I think.  I know that taking Ubers is probably an unjustifiable expense, and I mean to cut back on them, but this week I’ve had very little useful energy*, and anyway, I’m only too happy just to burn through the quite small amount of money that I have, since I have no reason to save for the future.

I was briefly puzzled as I did the initial “save” for this document, since I save my blogs by date and day of the week, when I saw that last year the 23rd of May fell on a Tuesday, not a Wednesday.  Each year generally shifts the day (of the week) of any given date one day later than the previous year, since a standard year is one day longer than a multiple of 7: [52 x 7 = 364].  I think that the official mathematical term is “modulo” when you’re just looking at the remainder.  And I vaguely recall noting, earlier this year, that the dates this year were one day later.

But, of course, this is a leap year, in which we “add” a day to the year, specifically on February 29th.  So it makes sense:  early in the year, this year’s dates are one weekday later than they were last year, but after the end of February, they are two days later.  I suppose that means that next January and February will be two days later than they were this year, but after that things will revert to one day later.

Hold on to your hats, folks!  If the whole blog post is this exciting, goodness knows how you’re going to be able to stand it.

It’s a bit tricky writing in the back seat here, because my laptop computer doesn’t have illuminated keys.  When the bouncing around of the car throws me off too much, I have to re-find my typing location by trial and error.  Once I do, I don’t really need to be able to see; I know my way around the keyboard pretty much by proprioception.  After all, I’ve been typing at least since I was eleven.

Not to say that I don’t make plenty of typos.  My coordination isn’t all that great, and I often get ahead of myself.  But at least with modern word processors, it’s so easy to correct for errors that it’s not a big deal.

Actually, I suspect that if I’d been forced to keep using my grandmother’s typewriter, which is what I used to start my typing career, and on which I needed to use correction film to erase mistakes, I would probably be a better, or at least cleaner, typist than I am now.  Once word processing programs came into play, there was no longer as much of a price to pay for minor errors, and so there was less pressure to be more accurate.  As I’ve noted many times, everything responds to local pressures and incentives and disincentives.

I warned you that this might be exciting, didn’t I?

I almost didn’t go in to work today.  That was why I let myself get the Uber:  to help me to clear that activation energy barrier.  I am not particularly physically sick, though I feel a bit of a tickle in the back of my throat.  I just didn’t want to go in.  Yesterday, all day, I was extremely tense and stressed out, and the noise was particularly irksome, and I had payroll to do, and I was always just sliding along what felt like the razor edge of a true breakdown or explosion.  Yet no one seems to have noticed.

I banged my head on the wall quite hard at one point, and did several other things to cause myself pain throughout the day.  I don’t want to go into specifics too much; I don’t want people to think I’m a weirdo or something.

Ha.  Ha.  Ha.  Ha.  Ha.

Anyway, I’ve actually just arrived at the office.  I hope my hands and thumbs won’t feel too sore, today.  Yesterday, my thumb bases were painfully tight, and most of the rest of my finger joints were sore and stiff, albeit to a lesser degree than the thumbs.  It made it quite difficult to try to play guitar, so I didn’t do much of that.

Actually, because of the trouble with my hands, and my shoulders, and of course, the ongoing issues with my back and hips and knees and ankles—especially with my back—I decided to buy a huge bottle of Ibuprofen, and I’ve taken some of them starting yesterday afternoon.

I have been “off” Ibuprofen for quite some time, now, though it was my go-to anti-inflammatory for many years.  I started to avoid it when its use was associated on two or three occasions—possibly just by coincidence—with a relatively high occurrence of what I presume were premature atrial contractions, with associated palpitations.  It was nothing terribly severe, of course, but at the time, I wanted to live, so I switched mainly to naproxen.

I also use some aspirin, as well as acetaminophen for headaches and other things that don’t benefit from any suppression of cyclooxygenase.  But, despite its longer action, naproxen has never worked quite as well as ibuprofen seemed to work, though perhaps that’s been confounded by other variables.  It’s hard to do a double-blind test on oneself.

In any case, at this point, I don’t much care if I get palpitations, although if they happen, maybe I’ll find them unpleasant enough that I’ll change my mind.  Frankly, I don’t mind if I have a full-fledged arrhythmia.  Sudden cardiac death due to ventricular fibrillation, for instance, is probably one of the best ways to die.  You basically just faint, since your brain is no longer getting blood flow, and that’s that.  If no one defibrillates you, and if the arrhythmia doesn’t spontaneously resolve, you’re done.

It’s probably not quite as quick a death as being at ground zero of a thermonuclear explosion, and it’s certainly not as quick as being obliterated when the vacuum energy of the universe quantum tunnels down to a lower level**, since that process would spread throughout the cosmos at the speed of light, and no information within spacetime can exceed the speed of light, so it’s fundamentally impossible to know such an event is happening before it arrives.  It’s also impossible to know about it once it arrives, since everything currently existing in our universe, right down to fundamental particles, would by obliterated by the vacuum state decay—again, at the speed of light, which is far faster than the rate at which the nervous system can experience anything.

Unfortunately, even more than the thermonuclear explosion possibility, vacuum decay would involve taking other, “innocent” people along with me, at least some of whom both wish and deserve to continue living.  That seems a bit unethical—or at least rude, which I sometimes think is worse—and anyway, it’s not as though anyone knows how to make it happen.

It’s better to keep things confined to my person.

I guess even a hemorrhagic stroke wouldn’t be too bad, to be honest, and given my tendency to bang my head against the wall when I get too frazzled and stressed, it seems immensely more likely than vacuum state collapse.  I suppose I could even tolerate death by bleeding ulcer, though I really don’t like nausea***.

Probably, though, in the end, I’m going to have to take a more active and deliberate hand in things.  I suppose we’ll see.  It’s hard to work up the courage to face the discomfort and even frank pain associated with most such interventions, but practice makes better, and I already have a fair amount of experience deliberately causing myself pain, as noted above.

That’s enough blog post for now.  I’ve already droned on and on.  My tentative plan is to do some fiction writing tomorrow morning, and if I do (or even if I don’t) I plan to leave a little report about it here.  I am off work this weekend, so I won’t be writing anything on Saturday (barring, as always, the unforeseen).

I truly, honestly, and fervently hope that each and every one of you feels better than I do right now, and I mean substantially better.  You probably do; it seems likely that, in the phase space of physical and emotional states, there are many more possibilities in that direction than in the other.  But I could be wrong.

TTFN

Addendum:  While editing, I found that MS Word had underlined a sentence in the draft above, in which I wrote, “I think that the official mathematical term is….”  The editor gave the comment that “expressing opinions with certainty adds formality”.  I don’t think I could possibly disagree more than I do with that sentence. 

Bad advice in editor marked up

 PLEASE DON’T DO THAT, PEOPLE!!!!!!!!  Opinions are opinions.  Expressing them with certainty when you are not certain is tantamount to outright lying, and is a huge problem with human discourse!  I’m ashamed of MS Word for making that suggestion.  What a horrible, horrible recommendation!  What a nightmarish thing to say!

*And yet, my level of tension has been exceptionally high.  That’s a frustrating bit of irony, as I probably don’t need to tell you.

**This is purely a hypothetical possibility.  The vacuum energy of the universe may well be at its lowest/ground state, though it is patently not quite zero.  If it were, cosmic expansion would not be accelerating.  Indeed, I often say that cosmic inflation is happening now, based on all the data we have.  That’s what “dark energy” is doing, albeit at a slower rate than what is proposed to have happened 13.7 billion years ago.

***Weird, right?  I don’t like nausea?  How unusual!

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Brief-ish report on Wednesday morning, May 22, 2024 AD/CE

Well, I slept somewhat better last night than the night before; it would not have been easy to sleep worse.  I took a full Benadryl (actually, a generic version of it), and two extra-strength Tylenol (also generic), and I slept a total of perhaps four and a half hours.  That’s not much, but it’s enough to make me feel better than I did yesterday.

Again, that’s not a high bar to clear.  I spent the entire day yesterday wishing I were dead, feeling like some Earth-bound phantom of some unimportant, nameless soul who had died alone a long, long time ago (to quote David Bowie).

Not one person in the office asked if I was okay or if I needed anything, or if I was having trouble.  I guess my emotions and state really are hard for other people to see from my appearance.  It’s too bad, because if someone had asked, I really was going to tell them, “I wish I were dead.”  Unfortunately, no one asked, so that was a missed opportunity.  Of course, even if I had said that, people probably would have thought I was joking, or that I was exaggerating, and certainly no one would have tried to help me in any way.

I suppose that’s par for the course.  I’ve needed help for a long time, honestly, and I’ve tried to be worthy of help; I have helped other people when I could, though I don’t think I’ve done very much good for anyone, in the long run.  I think I’m probably a lost cause, anyway.  I guess that’s okay.  Honestly, I’m so freaking tired that I don’t know if I’d be able to help anyone who was trying to help me, if you take my meaning.  I just want to rest.

Anyway, this morning I did write some on Extra Body.  As is often the case, I started just telling myself that I was only going to write one page, no more, but once I got started, I kept going.  It helped that there was a guy on the train asking people to fill out surveys about the train service, and I told him, “Sorry, I’m working on something.”  I did have my laptop computer open and was typing when he approached me.  Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate and approve of the organization trying to get feedback to help improve its operations, but I don’t like being talked to in the morning.  So, that impelled me to keep typing until it was time to get ready to get off the train, so the guy wouldn’t feel tempted to come back and ask me again.

In the end, the word count of the block of new writing was 2,079, but the net word count gain was 2,008.  So, this time, unlike Monday, I edited out words in the stuff I was rereading instead of adding some–a total of 71, evidently.  That’s good to know, somehow.  That’s about a 3.5% difference between the two counts, a little more than Monday, but not much.  Of course, my sample size is only two days, so we’ll have to wait and see if there’s a clearer statistical trend.

And that’s all I have for you this morning.  I’m planning to write my traditional Thursday post tomorrow, which is good, since tomorrow is Thursday.  It is, isn’t it?  Yes, it is, I just checked.  Anyway, I hope you all have a good day.

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Mishegas from a misanthropic, moribund, misbegotten former Michigander

It’s very early on Tuesday morning, and I’m already at the office.  I’m not going to be writing any fiction today, unless you count any pretense I make at coherence here in this blog post.

I had a very bad sleep last night, despite taking some diphenhydramine*.  I felt relatively optimistic at the beginning of the week (yesterday), with thoughts of reading some science and/or mathematics and/or other books when there was occasional downtime.  But then, of course, people arrived at the office and started talking and making other noise, and then the “music” was started, and I could not concentrate.

And, back at the house, the air conditioning and fan were, perforce, churning, since it’s quite hot and humid around here.  That’s better than the office noise, because at least it’s steady and sort of “white noise”, but it’s still physically irritating in the small, confined space of my room, especially accompanying, as it does, my now-bilateral tinnitus.

“‘Is this the region, this the soil, the clime,’ spake then the apostate angel, ‘this the site, that we must change for Heav’n, this mournful gloom for that eternal light?'”

Nah, I’ll pass.

I’m trying to be optimistic, or at least to be upbeat.  I’m trying very hard to act as if I’m doing better–playing guitar, writing fiction–in hopes that it will become real.  “Dream that what is dreamed will be.”  I know that I can physically endure, if necessary…but for what purpose, to what end?  It’s just a cycle from dreary to noisy to lonely to turbulent to idiotic to angry to absurd back to dreary and so on, all set against a landscape of chronic pain and self-loathing, accompanied by a constant, high-pitched whine (and no, I don’t mean the fact that I’m whining about it, though I am).

I know, I know:  “Shut up, no one wants to hear about it, everyone has their own issues, just suck it up and walk it off and lather, rinse, repeat.  Everyone suffers, everyone has problems, everybody hurts, yada yada yada.”  This is supposed to, what…make a person want to stick around in the world?  Or is it a somewhat subtle way of encouraging someone just to get gone already, to leave the world to the vapid troglodytes?

I’m so tired.  I don’t have anything to which to look forward.  The only advantage of weekends, even, is that I don’t have to deal with the foolishness and the overhead noise in the office…but then I don’t really do anything on the weekends, either.  I can’t even seem to read, now.  My brain is frazzled and fried and other words beginning with “f”.

Hmm…let’s see…

Fudge’s face froze, feeling forsaken from fair freedom’s fiefdom, foundering forlornly, foully fettered, finding few facts, fearing fundamental farragoes, fleeting facets fabricated from Facebook**.

Oh, for fuck’s fake***!  I need to stop.  Is it any wonder I don’t have people with whom to hang out?  Is it any wonder that eventually even people who love me find it better to do so from a distance?  I, at least, don’t find it surprising.  I don’t even like my own company, honestly, and I’m often driven to punish myself in various ways when I get too wound up…that way, at least, I don’t go off on other people.

I don’t have any idea what I’m trying to accomplish here today, other than perhaps to convey the message, “Look, I wrote a blog post today, even though I didn’t write any fiction!”  Also, I suppose, to try to let people know that I’m slowly, and perhaps subtly, crashing.  It’s a bit (I imagine) like trying to stay above the surface of a vast body of a very viscous liquid that nevertheless has a specific gravity much lower than water.  One cannot float on it, anymore than one could float on the surface of gasoline, but the process of sinking is a slow one (because of the viscosity), so one can “swim” or “tread liquid” to stay on the surface, but it requires constant effort, and the stickiness makes it harder, and there’s no land in sight.

Oh, well.  Life doesn’t promise anyone a rose garden.  Even if one gets a rose garden, there are always thorns (or, technically, according to botanists, “prickles”, but “Every rose has its prickle” doesn’t work as well as a lyric).

A hemlock garden would be better.  If the umbels are tall and fair, one might even encounter Tinúviel dancing among them to a pipe unseen.  And I hear the plant can be used to make an interesting tea, though no man (or plucked chicken) tends to drink it more than once.

All right, all right, that’s enough nonsense.  Sorry.  Have a good day.

*I originally wrote that as “diphenhydrazine”, which is a peculiar typo to make–would that be rocket fuel with a benzyl ring attached at each end of every molecule?

**Sorry.  The ending of the previous comment made me want to see if I could write an entire long sentence in which every word begins with “f” and that nevertheless at least makes some form of sense, grammatically if in no other way.

***Use this last “f” as an archaically written “s”, such as one can sometimes see in old English documents, e.g., “feveral”.