Author: Robert Elessar

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Boy, do I wish I didn’t have to go to work today.

I had a truly horrible night, pain-wise, starting more on my right side, where it had been all day, then moving to the left, which is rather annoying.  It’s a bit like when you’ve got a slight cold and one nostril is stuffed up, then you lay with the other side down, and gradually, the upper side clears…but then the lower side gets stuffed up.  I suppose it’s better than both sides hurting equally, at least in some ways, but in other ways, it feels like being turned over so that both of your sides can be pan seared from the inside out.

I’ve said it before, but in any truly civilized world, one would not need to go to work in such a state.  However, yesterday, my coworker did not come in because he had trouble with his own, relatively recent onset back trouble, and I can’t be sure he won’t also be out today.  He has a lot less distance to travel than I do, and he has a car, but he also has an infant daughter.  Anyway, it would be hypocritical of me just to tell him to suck it up and come to work.  But man, it makes a day really feel bad from the start, and I was already pretty glum.

I did at least use the bus(es) to get back to the house from the train last night, and I ended up walking a total of slightly over three miles yesterday without even trying.  I guess that’s good.

This morning, I entertained the notion of taking the buses all the way in to the office, instead of taking the bus to the train and so on.  It’s not an unpleasant trip, though it’s a bit long, but unfortunately, buses don’t have restrooms, while the trains do, and even in the humid heat of summer, I have a hard time going very long without using the restroom.

I’ve always been like that.  It’s very annoying.

Anyway, I started off the morning thinking of just going to the bus and thence to the train, as “usual”, but my back and hips and legs hurt so much‒and I’m so tired from having had so much pain all night‒that I may in fact take an Uber again, to the train or perhaps all the way to the office.  I just hate this all so much.

It just now occurred to me that I want to give a bit of unsolicited advice:  If someone is in pain (or having some similarly unpleasant state) and they tell you about it, don’t tell them you know how they feel, even if you’re just trying to empathize.  Most particularly, don’t tell them about your own relatively recent onset of back pain when they’ve been living with back pain for more than 20 years, and it’s been a large part of causing them to lose everything they ever had.  I say this to you because that coworker does that to me sometimes, and it kind of pisses me off.

I want to say to him, “Look, if your pain is as bad as mine and you think it has a good chance of lasting as long as mine has (so far) then you need to get yourself a life insurance policy, wait until its requisite time period has passed*, and then kill yourself as soon as you can arrange to do it without causing your wife and daughter too much distress.  Because this is no way to live.”

Of course, that’s terrible advice, and much of it is a sort of projection on my part.  I still often wish I had died when I played Russian Roulette, way back before I was ever arrested or anything.  But, of course, that would have been more traumatic for my kids, I think, so it’s probably good that I didn’t win that round.  Now, though, if I die, it will have almost no effect on my kids whatsoever.

That is, except for the fact that I know that my ex-wife has very shrewdly maintained the old life insurance policy she had on me, so if I die before I’m 65, the kids will get a significant payout.  It’s definitely a George Bailey kind of situation, but I don’t think there will be any Clarence the angel-in-training to come save me.  Besides, with the exception of my kids, if I were shown the way the world would have been if I had never existed, I don’t imagine it would be any worse, and probably it would be better.

Of course, as I often say, I would never want to change anything that would make my children not have existed, no matter what.  But once they were alive and well and doing fine‒say, if I had died in 2012, but perhaps by natural causes, instead of, say, blowing my brains out‒it might have been a better world and a better life, certainly from my point of view.

It’s too late to change the past, of course.  That’s more or less true by definition.  But I can try to work my way to following my own advice about the future.  I absolutely don’t want twenty more years of my life as it is now.  I don’t want even one more year of my life as it is now.

I don’t really want one more day of my life as it is now.  But it’s very hard to fight biological programming that has hardwired in a fear of death (or of the pain thereof, anyway) and a drive to stay alive even when there is no prospect for self or offspring benefiting from it.  It’s just a fact that creatures without a drive to survive don’t tend to leave behind as many offspring as those with a strong one, and we are all descended from the latter organisms.

Fuck you, Biology!

All right, that’s enough for now.  Maybe I will just get an Uber in to work, and to hell with dealing with the train.  At least that way I won’t be standing and sweating on the train platform.  And, though I don’t want to wish ill luck on an Uber driver who is trying to make a living, one is far more likely to get in a fatal accident on a car trip than on a train or even a bus.  I honestly consider that a silver lining; that’s how much my life hurts.  Even if I got in a non-fatal crash, even if I were severely injured, at least then I would get some degree of medical help and pain help and I wouldn’t need to work while in the hospital.

It’s pathetic, isn’t it, to think that way?  Sorry.  I’m no fucking good, and I haven’t been for a long time.

Try to have a better day, readers.  Try to make the most of things, and try to help out the people in your life who are suffering, and try to show compassion and to be worthy of compassion and respect.  Try not to get in a position where you have chronic pain and/or depression and are a burden to other people.  Try to be a support.

And try the spinach and artichoke dip while you’re at it.  It’s delicious.

*Most of them won’t pay off for suicide in too short a time frame, for what are probably obvious reasons.  Yes, I have looked into this.

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It’s Mon the Day, callooh, callay.

I think I misspelled those borrowed words from Jabberwocky, but since they were just nonsense words anyway, I suppose it doesn’t matter.  I’m being sarcastic, anyway.  It’s certainly not any kind of frabjous day for me, or if it turns out to be, I’ll be very surprised.

I had the weekend off, as you know‒which unfortunately means I’m going to be working six days this week‒and now I’m getting ready to head in to the office.  I’m strongly tempted to get an Uber to the train station rather than waiting for the bus.  It’s wasteful, of course, but it’s easier, and the heat outside means even walking to the bus stop would leave me disgustingly sweaty.  Maybe I will take an Uber.

***

Well, I didn’t take an Uber, I took a Lyft, because when I first looked at the Uber app, it was reading a price that was more than twice the usual rate.  I don’t know why; perhaps all their drivers were engaged already and the app automatically adjusts for supply and demand.

Anyway, it was a decent ride, but even waiting for the few minutes in front of the house for the Lyft left me copiously sweating, and I still am doing so at the train station, just sitting here on the platform.  I sometimes wonder if I’m profoundly ill in some way‒physically, I mean‒to be sweating so much at relative rest.  But if I’m that sick, why don’t I have more trouble on those days when I walk eight miles and whatnot?

I do feel physically quite a bit like crap, but a lot of that is just because of all my chronic pains.  Hips, knees, back, ankles, plantar fascia, belly‒when all these things hurt most days, it’s hard to muster a lot of energy.  It wears me out.

I wish I could go home.  By that, I don’t just mean going back to the house and skipping work.  I don’t consider that house “home”.  It’s just a place I go to sleep (a little) because I have to go somewhere.  I mean, I wish I could go back to where I grew up, where I had family and friends.

Of course, someone else lives in the house in which I grew up, and the city in which I grew up‒Pontiac‒is not in terrific economic shape.  The junior high and high school and at least one of the elementary schools I attended are closed, and are more or less abandoned.  Their likenesses live on in Mark Red and in The Chasm and the Collision, but only in my mind, really.

You probably couldn’t guess from reading those books that the schools were based on the ones I attended.  That’s fine, of course, from a narrative perspective; I’d prefer people to think of their own schools when reading the stories.  That’s more fun.  So the descriptions are at least a bit vague.

Anyway, I’ve veered off my point (how unusual!), which was just basically that there’s really nothing left of my home for me.  Nearly all the people I knew there are long gone, and even the company Pontiac Motors (a subsidiary of GM) is no longer in business.  The Pontiac Silverdome is also gone.

I’d still like to go back there, of course, though I know it would be bittersweet, and I entertain a fantasy of doing so in a fairly radical fashion.  But I don’t see myself being able to, for instance, go on a vacation there.

No, I would have to uproot and abandon my present life, more or less, and I don’t know how I would be able to start anything new elsewhere.  I don’t think I would be able to make any new connections, and I’m unsure of my ability to reestablish any old ones‒I’m very unpleasant and asocial, and I’m weirder even than I used to be, so I don’t think I’d be able to live with anyone else…or rather, I don’t think that anyone else would be able to live with me.

I really don’t see any available exit or escape, and I can’t really imagine any kind of rescue or help.  I also don’t expect that I’ll ever see my kids in person again.  That is the worst thought.  But I have no capacity to try to push the issue.  I don’t deserve them, anyway.

I wish I would collapse and just fall apart, do you know what I mean?  It will happen to everyone (and everything) sooner or later, anyway.  It would be nice if it were sooner, because I am tired of trying to continue, but I’m not built well for doing much of anything else.

I’m really, really tired.  And it’s just Monday morning.  The work week is just getting started.  I hate my life, I hate the world, I hate myself.  At least, I hate aspects of the world, and my life is a shambles, and I’m extremely tired of myself.  He’s such an annoying person.

All right, that’s pretty much enough for today.  I’m about two and a half stops from my destination, and I have nothing very interesting or useful to say, so I’ll start wrapping things up.  I feel very much that the world is inundated with some kind of caustic, disgusting effluvium, everywhere I go, so that everything in the world is tainted and not worth enduring.  But of course, no matter where I go, there I am, so it’s most parsimonious to think that the effluvium of disgust I find wherever I go is so seemingly ubiquitous only because I carry it with me; I am its source.  I’m not being saturated by the stink of the world, I’m saturating the world with my own stench.  It’s repulsive.

This is metaphorical, of course.  I bathe regularly and wash my clothes and all that.  As far as I can tell, I don’t literally smell bad.  It’s more of a spiritual fume of some noxious variety that I exude.  Unfortunately, I don’t seem prone to getting used to it.

Enough.  On that cheerful note and thought, I bid you farewell, and wish you a happy day and a happy week.  For goodness sake, look out for your family and friends.  And hopefully they will look out for you.

silverdome old photo

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There’s got to be some kind of kvetch

It’s Friday, and I’m standing at the train platform, writing this post on my smartphone, waiting for the second train of the day to arrive (I’m hoping it’s not delayed).  It’s a very exciting, jet-setting sort of life that I live, I know.

It’s unbearably humid this morning, and once again, I’ve started sweating copiously just from standing still outside.  I don’t think it was ever this bad up North where I grew up, except perhaps a few days of the summer every now and then.  Down here in south Florida, it’s like this for a good chunk of the year.

I had a particularly rough night last night, sleep-wise; by which I mean it was worse and more fragmented than usual, even for me.  I don’t think I got so much as a single hour of uninterrupted sleep, though over the course of the night, if you string all my sleep together, I probably got a few hours in total.  So, I’m a bit despondent to start the day today.  What else is new?

I had a bad day, mood-wise yesterday.  It was somewhat worse than usual, in the sense that I felt almost completely shut down inside, empty except for malignant self-hate.  Yet, I think all that showed on my face was a blank expression.  I’ve often, in the past, wondered how it is that people cannot see how horrible I feel, when it feels like it’s screaming out of my every pore.  But I guess my emotions don’t show on my face or in my voice.  I try to make them show here, but that doesn’t seem to do me much good, either.  It feels a bit like trying to use active sonar from inside a whirlpool; no recognizable message seems to get out to anyone, even though one is screaming and shouting and about to be dragged into the abyss.

That’s consistent with a “meme” I saw on Facebook yesterday that I downloaded.  I’ve made a slight adjustment to it, and I’ll share that version below, but it reads, “This is what depression looks like”.  Below this, there’s a gridwork of nine black and white pictures of smiling faces…but they’re all faces of well known people‒such as Robin Williams, Kurt Cobain, Chris Cornell, etc.‒who have killed themselves or died in ways more indirectly related to depression.  I didn’t recognize every face on it, but the gist was obvious to me.

The train was five minutes late, again.  This is not horrible, of course, but it is still symptomatic of the slipshod ways in which our society functions.  It would be one thing if it happened only comparatively rarely‒even once or twice in a week might be tolerable‒but it’s running late more often than it’s on time.  When one considers that trains were one of the reasons that coordinated times from place to place were put in place, leading to GMT and ever more careful chronometry, the people running the system should really be ashamed of themselves.  The fact that they are not‒if they are not‒is something for which they should be doubly ashamed.

Oh, well.  What are you going to do?  (I have my ideas, but most people probably wouldn’t endorse them.)

I had a halfway decent day pain-wise yesterday, but my back seems to be trying to make up for le temps perdu this morning, so far;  my right lower back and hip feel like they’re full of broken glass at the moment.  Again, what else is new, right?

Oh, by the way, if anyone out there is affiliated with Google or Microsoft or any of the other software companies, could you send them the message from me that they should please stop doing updates on their systems which make cosmetic changes that don’t improve functionality but that, if anything, make their systems more awkward and clunky and kindergarten-like?

For instance, the new download process on Chrome on desktop is not better; it’s actually worse than before, keeping track of downloads at the top of the screen and showing progress with a weird little twirling symbol that looks like a casino chip.  It makes me feel like I’m gambling about whether my download is actually going to work.  The old system had downloads showing at the bottom of the screen, which made sense.  You could see the things you had downloaded there, at the bottom, until you were ready to clear them or open them.

Also, this irritating tendency to round all the corners of search bars and input areas and all that bullshit is just pathetic.  It’s inefficient.  You don’t see rounded corners on books and the like, because in media that use print, those shapes don’t make sense!  They’re wasteful of space, they’re inefficient, and they look dopey.  The only books with rounded corners are ones with thick, cardboard pages that are made for babies and toddlers, who might be prone to poke themselves slightly with a hard corner of a book.  But you cannot poke yourself with the corner of a search bar on a computer or phone screen.

If the average person needs such daycare center style safety corners on digital material, then maybe the average person has no business using digital material.  Maybe such people should try to work their way up to Little Golden Books before trying to get online.

But, of course, I don’t think the average person actually does want or prefer such nonsense.  I think the average user is quite practical and hardheaded (in a good way).  I think these idiotic changes are produced by lazy software engineers who want to be seen to be doing something to justify their pay, so they do visually obvious things that they imagine are aesthetically pleasing.

It would be better if they could improve real bugs*, of which there are always plenty.  But that would require serious mental effort and work, and when updates would happen…no one would notice any obvious difference most of the time.

Of course, that really is the way updates ought to be.  Functions that work shouldn’t change.  The update should be more like an effective vaccine or other preventive medicine:  you don’t notice its effect really, because the main effect is that you don’t get sick when you might otherwise have done so.  All that people will experience when using a well-updated system of software will be a normal period of use, but with fewer occasions of frustrating dysfunction.

Speaking of frustrating dysfunction, that’s it for me, today.  Regrettably, I can’t say that’s it for me forever, though I guess that’s possible.  I don’t work tomorrow‒I won’t work tomorrow‒so at earliest, I’ll be back on Monday.  Have a good weekend.

depression2

*Perhaps some of them are, of course; I should give credit if it’s due.  Perhaps most of their work produces results as I describe which are invisible because they simply correct former dysfunction, but then the developers and engineers feel that they have to do something to show that they really did update the system, so they make cosmetic changes as well.  Maybe it’s the equivalent of people getting stickers and pins and stuff when they’ve been vaccinated.  But, oy, it’s annoying.

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If thou hast no name to be blogged by, let us call thee devil.

Hello and good morning. It’s Thursday, the day of the week on which I wrote blog posts even when I was spending my other days writing fiction.  I tended to start those posts with some variation of “Hello and good morning”, and the title was always a slightly altered quote from Shakespeare.  I’ve kept up that Thursday template even now that I blog daily, because I like to stick to a pattern or routine once I’ve established it.

The above information is provided for the sake* of any new readers of this blog.  Apologies to any long-time readers for the redundancy.

I walked to the train station this morning, after having rested a bit yesterday (I only walked a total of about 3 miles overall), since I’d walked almost 16 miles over the previous 2 days.  Thus far, including this morning’s walk, I’ve done about 24 miles this week.  That’s not too bad.

It would be faster if I could jog the distance; maybe I’ll eventually be able to do that.  I used to really like jogging/running, and even when I was in residency I used to run on the treadmill in the mornings.  I had to stop eventually, as I went into practice and had a growing family; time just wasn’t really available.  And since my back problem began, running has tended to exacerbate it.  Maybe, if I were to get back into shape and lose a bit of weight, that wouldn’t be an issue.

(And maybe if we all wish hard enough, there will be world peace and happiness, and unicorns will appear that poop ice cream that provides all nutrients humans need without any health detriments, and they’ll also pee sweet tea with the disinhibiting effects of alcohol but none of the negative toxicity.)

I’m sorry that my posts have been such downers lately (if they don’t come across that way to you readers, then I’m really not expressing myself well).  I’ve just been feeling steadily and persistently more despondent as time has proceeded.  My optimism, such as it ever was, has declined and declined, and my hope even of the possibility of any rescue or revitalization is diminishing.  I don’t see how my life is ever going to turn around and improve.

I’m just tired, you know?  I’m really quite worn down and nearly out.  Admittedly, that doesn’t necessarily keep me from walking to the train despite the heat, and sometimes walking back from the train in the heat, but some of that fact is because I’m able to think of it as a kind of self-harm.

Of course, it’s self-harm that could backfire and end up doing me good, but that’s the chance a person takes when doing such things.  The best laid plans of mice and men gang aft agley.  Which just goes to show that it’s really not a great idea to try to get mice and men together to make plans for things.  Their priorities just don’t mesh.

As for my own plans, I guess I don’t really have any.

I’m getting close to my train stop, and I haven’t written much yet today, and I certainly haven’t written anything of consequence.  I haven’t even reached 600 words yet, let alone 800 or 1000.  Should I try to push for more?  Or is this enough?  Is it already too much?

My life has almost certainly already been “too much”, by any reasonable, objective measure.  I really should do something about that.  But, of course, I don’t really want to make too big a mess for other people to clean up‒though why I should be so considerate is sometimes beyond me.

Also, I have the faintest, residual hope that somewhere out there, someone has some answers, some purpose or meaning that I can learn, or that I can discover.  But it is a faint hope.  I’ve sampled most of the popular, ready-made suggestions and ideas, from religion to philosophy to psychology and psychiatry, and so far have been thoroughly disappointed.  But, as I’ve said before, I don’t want to want to die.  But I also don’t want facile, delusional, banal pseudo-motivation.

Oh, well.  The universe wasn’t made for me‒nor was it made for you, or for any or all of us put together, as far as anyone can tell‒so I don’t expect it necessarily to fit my preferences.  Honestly, I don’t know what I would ask of a universe if I were given the opportunity to special-order one.  Any change I might request would likely have unexpected consequences, much in the way that any pharmaceutical intervention in the human body brings side-effects that can be quite unpredictable.

Now, take that to a cosmic scale.  Everything in the universe has to fit with everything else without producing any actual contradictions.  No part can contradict the whole, nor can it contradict other, actual parts.  You can speak a contradiction‒the rules of grammar allow it‒but you cannot instantiate one.  It’s analogous to the way you can write a computer program with a syntax error or an endless loop or an old “return without gosub” error, but the program will not run.

I guess that’s enough for today.  I don’t know what I’ll title this, or what picture I’ll add to it, but of course, if you’re reading this, you know, which is kind of cool in its way, showing as it does a form of temporal relativity and multidimensionality that has nothing to do with Einstein.  I hope you all are feeling reasonably well and trying not to get too overheated (in any sense).  With that in mind, I’ll close with a rather “chilling” but pithy statement I heard from a climate scientist in a WIRED YouTube video:  “On average, this is the hottest summer you’ve ever experienced.  It’s also the coolest summer for the rest of your life.”***

TTFN

for your own sake

*That’s “sake” with a long A and a silent E, not the transliteration of the Japanese word  酒, which means, in Japan, more or less any alcoholic beverage, but which in the West is how we think of Nihon-shu (日本酒), the Japanese so-called rice “wine”…which would actually be more a kind of a beer, since it’s made of grain, whereas wines are made from fruit (interesting side note:  originally the fermentation was begun after the rice was chewed and then spit into a container, because salivary amylase starts breaking the starches into sugar**).  “Sake” is one of the few Japanese things that doesn’t really do much for me.  I’ve yet to try Japanese whiskey, but since it’s based on Scotch whiskey, and produced with typical Japanese attention to detail, it’s probably pretty darn good.

**You can test this for yourself.  If you take an unsweetened white cracker (no pun intended) or, say, a bit of potato in your mouth and just kind of keep it there, perhaps chewing it, it will eventually start to become noticeably sweet…unless you’re so overexposed to sugary foods that your taste buds are too insensitive to notice.  Don’t do this experiment around other people, though‒you’re likely to get some odd looks.

***Of course, he is basing his predictions on current technology.  And though, as he pointed out during the video, our current carbon capture technology is woefully inadequate to turn things around on any reasonable scale, one must not underestimate the power of human ingenuity when Mother Necessity is standing over the world with a ruler, ready to rap everyone on the knuckles until they bleed.  The next Manhattan Project may well be geared toward developing newer, much more potent, means of carbon capture that could be effective on a scale big enough to correct climate change in a sensible time frame.  This won’t happen on its own and it won’t be cheap, but as more and more‒and richer and more powerful‒people start suffering from the effects of climate change, distractions will tend to fall by the wayside.  If they don’t, then I guess the human race will get what it deserves.

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Quietly turning the backdoor key

Here I am at the train station again this morning, early.  Hopefully that won’t backfire today like it did yesterday.  I guess if it does, that will be a data point telling me I should consider giving up on taking the train, at least in the morning.  I don’t know.  It’s hard to draw too far-reaching a conclusion based on the limited data of one person’s experience.

And now for a little, tangential aside:  It’s frankly absurd how much I’m sweating just from sitting at the train station at five in the morning.  The sweat is dripping into my eyes as I look down at my phone to type, as if I’d just been out for a long jog.

I had a nice conversation with my sister while I walked back from the train station to the house yesterday evening, and that’s a good thing in my life.  Also, that walking brings me to a total of about sixteen miles, between Monday and Tuesday, which is decent.  The shoes I’m wearing seem to be doing what they are supposed to do‒meaning they don’t seem to exacerbate my back pain with long walking, which unfortunately, the hiking boots seemed to do.  I’m still quite sad about that.

I’m sad and frustrated in general, of course.  This will probably come as no surprise, unless this is your first time reading my blog.  Even though I walked so much yesterday, and went to “bed” slightly later than usual, I still started waking up less than two hours later.  This is also despite continuing to take melatonin every evening (since I started it a few weeks ago).  I don’t know why I bother with the melatonin, but I feel as though maybe it’s doing something, though I’m not sure what that might be.

Maybe all it’s doing is letting me get the energy together to take some kind of action, possibly drastic.  I need to do something.  Yesterday at work, in the middle of the day, I shut the door to my office and lay down on the floor (I do this to rest my back a few times a day), and felt like I wanted to cry.  Nothing in particular set it off, but there it was.

I’m sick of everything, physically, mentally, emotionally, however you want to box up and pigeon hole the aspects of personal experience.  I’m tired of being in pain, I’m tired of not being able to sleep, I’m tired of feeling utterly disconnected from almost everyone I have ever cared about, and largely disconnected from those who remain.  Nothing is very interesting.  I get back to the house and watch YouTube videos of British comedy panel shows as I try to get to sleep, which I usually can do, but then I wake up all too soon, way before I’ve had even half of a good night’s rest.  I want to go to sleep.

It looks like my train is only a few minutes late; it’s arriving now.  For most people in this pathetic world, that probably even counts as “on time”, which slackness of mind surely goes at least part way to explaining the pathetic state of so much of our culture.  No wonder I want to escape.

It’s remarkable how cold it feels in the train when one is wet and sweaty from sitting at the station early in the morning.  I hate to complain about it, but it might be more environmentally and energetically sound to have the thermostat set a few degrees higher.  I’ve mentioned all this before.

I just keep going on and on about the same boring subjects‒pain, insomnia, depression, loneliness, nihilism, anxiety, all that‒and for that I apologize.  It seems I have little more to say about anything.

I’ve got to do something.  I can’t keep going on like this.  I don’t want to keep going on like this.  As I think I said yesterday, I have no hope or prospect of anything better in the future.  I have nothing to which I look forward.  I have no goals or dreams or aspirations.  I certainly have no right to feel optimistic, and I certainly don’t deserve to feel good about life.  I’ve disappointed, let down, hurt, failed, etc., nearly all the people I’ve ever cared about.

I really have no strong connection to anything in the world, certainly not to anything local.  I don’t belong anywhere, and I don’t really want to belong.  I want to rest, or at least just to have oblivion if that’s the best I can do.

I’m just about done.  Not just for today, I mean, though that’s also the case.  I’ve been venting and shouting into the void, hoping that it might help, that some insight might be forthcoming, either from my own mind or from someone else, but it’s no good.  It’s just a waste.  Everything is a waste.  I, myself, am certainly a waste.

I’ve done all the good in the world that I’m ever likely to do…and some of it really has been good, I think.  But that’s over, almost certainly.  Every aspect of meaning in my life has been steadily eroding and dissolving and decomposing for a long time, and now there are just ragged strands of residual connective tissue loosely holding together the bleached bones of what used to be my life.

I need just to get on with it and get out of here.  I’m spoiling the party for people around me who are trying to enjoy themselves.

Well, that’s more than enough for today, anyway, and really, it’s more than enough in general.  I hope you all are doing better than I am.  At least you’re reading; that’s good, all other things being held constant.  Keep reading.

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Numbers and trains and colicky pains, those are of what this blog post is made

It’s Tuesday morning, August 8th, 2023.  I was writing out the numerical date combination as I saved this post draft, and of course writing that date, 8-8, is a tiny bit of fun, not least because it is the same whether in European or American configuration.

What’s also interesting‒to weirdos like me, anyway‒is that if you write 8-8-23, you can consider the fact that 2 to the 3rd power is also 8, giving you three 8s in a row, in a sense*.  It requires a bit of twisting to make it work, obviously, and just as obviously, you have to ignore the first two digits of the full year to make it even come close to working, but it can be done.

Such is the way with all such numerology (and bible codes and the like); they all involve tortured logic to the degree that you can find almost any sort of pattern you might want to create if you’re dedicated enough.  But those patterns are clearly all in the eye of the beholder.

There’s nothing wrong with seeing and finding patterns in things and being amused by them, but don’t imagine that those patterns are actually “real” in the sense that they are put there deliberately by someone or something other than the one who finds them.  To imagine that some other power is trying to communicate with, or about, you is called, if I remember correctly, “ideas of reference”, and can be a hallmark of delusional psychopathology.

People are prone to self importance, unfortunately.  Perhaps it’s a defense mechanism against the heartless meaninglessness of existence, but it is rather amusing and often pathetic.  Even Heath Ledger’s Joker in The Dark Knight falls prey to this, though he is fictional and certainly not sane in any ordinary sense.  He says that he is an “agent of chaos”…as if chaos would need an agent.  Trust me, it gets plenty of work without any help.

Especially in fantastical literature, from myths, to heroic epics, to horror novels, to comic books and the like, people are often claimed to be “agents of…” various things, such as Death, Evil, Good, “The Balance”, that sort of thing.  In the real world, though, forces of nature and philosophical ideas do not operate through nor do they require “agents”.  Just imagine someone claiming to be “an agent of Gravity”, or “an agent of Electromagnetism” or “an agent of the Fine Structure Constant”.  It’s rather laughable.

Anyway, I’m not writing this on the night before posting‒that would have been the 7th‒but am sitting at the train station to write it.  I got to the station for an early train, but it is in fact delayed almost to the scheduled time of the next train, which is absurd and pathetic.

They’ve only just now begun an announcement that it’s going to be late, now that it’s already five minutes past its due time, and they say it will be delayed 15 to 20 minutes (currently the tracker estimate is actually 22 to 23 minutes late).  Then they say, “stand by for more information”.  They always say that.  But more information never arrives.  It’s just some kind of boilerplate that sounds quasi-military or official and impressive but means nothing.

I don’t understand why there are delays so often.  It’s their own schedule.  In Germany or Japan the people running this show would have been fired long ago.  And this is one of the best run things I know in this part of the world.  It would be enough to make me fall into despair-oh, if I weren’t already there**.

I had a bad day yesterday.  Though I did walk to the train, and that was fine, by the time I got to the office, I started having worse, and new, pain in my left mid to lower back.  It was very spasmodic and squeezy in nature, and quite severe.  I suspect I might have been passing a small kidney stone, given the character and location of the pain.

At my request, my boss tried to get me some urinalysis stuff from the local drug store so I could see if there was any microscopic blood in my urine, but all they had was UTI tests.  I didn’t have a UTI, to no one’s surprise.  Though maybe, just maybe, there was a trace of leukocyte esterase, which might indicate a tiny few white blood cells such as might accompany slight bleeding.

Anyway, the only thing I could do was drink lots of liquids, which I tried to do, and take lots of OTC pain meds, which I did.  It seemed gradually to progress and decrease, and now mostly there’s just a small remnant ache, overlying my usual pain.  It’s too bad I didn’t hurt enough for me to go to the hospital, but all they would have done at most would have been to give me IV fluids and maybe some pain meds.  Probably not.  There’s nothing much to be done.  Life is pain, as the Dread Pirate Roberts said.

Well, they have canceled that late train‒apparently due to mechanical troubles‒and now it’s started to rain heavily.  The 540 train is going to be doubly crowded now.

I hate crowded stuff.

Then again, basically, I hate my life and I hate myself, which is the ironic, opposite counterpart of the mantra which, as I mentioned yesterday, I formerly tried to train into myself.  In the morning, I feel miserable about going to the office, and in the evening, I feel just as miserable about heading back to the house.  There’s nothing in either place that gives me joy, and sleep for me is neither very long nor unbroken nor restful.  I don’t remember the last time I slept more than 2 hours before I started waking up repeatedly, not at all refreshed.

At least at the office there are people with whom I can talk, though not really about anything in which I have any interest.  I can call my sister sometimes in the evenings, when she’s off work and I’m not too tired and I get off early enough.  Or on a weekend.  That’s good.  It’s infrequent, though, and my poor hearing is annoying when using cell phones.

Otherwise, my life is empty, as you all know by now, I’m sure, and there’s no prospect of anything new or good or interesting in the future.  What does one do with something once it’s empty?  Well, if it’s recyclable, I guess one can recycle it.  I am not a recyclable container, as far as I know, or if I am, I’ve already been recycled a few times, if you can call major, sometimes catastrophic life changes to be “recycling”.  The usual practice after recycling is done, I think, would be to throw the empty container away.

That’s enough blogging for today, I think.  It’s probably more than enough for any day or any lifetime.  I’m really sore, and I’m really tired.

*By the way, 8 to the 3rd power is 512, which astute readers will note is also 2 to the 9th.  This makes sense because 2 to the third is 8 (as noted), and taking 2 to the 3rd to the third is the same as taking 2 to the 9th.  It’s some minor fun with exponents, and with powers of 2 and 8, which certainly is pertinent to bits and bytes in computer science.  On the other hand, 8-8-8 is just negative 8, and 8-8-23 is just  negative 23, which is at least a negative prime number (so to speak), but otherwise, it’s all rather dull.  In any straight arithmetic process, 8-8 is always going to be zero.

**Here’s a bit of an amusing note: the 515 train is now expected to arrive 5 minutes later than the 540 train, which appears to be moving steadily and on time.  Did that train pass the other?  Did they switch official route numbers?  Why is the other one having trouble?***

***As we now know, it had mechanical problems.  Perhaps they need more, better, and newer cars and engines.  They could increase local gasoline taxes to fund them, thus providing disincentives for driving and encouraging more use of public transportation at the same time, all of which would be at least a bit good for the climate.  But people would whine about that, wouldn’t they, and no one likes to hear babies crying, so we give them pacifiers.

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This post was written on Sunday night. That may be the most interesting thing about it.

I’m starting this blog post on Sunday evening, which is obviously not when I usually write my blog posts.  I’m writing it on my phone, because I didn’t bring the mini laptop with me when I left work early on Thursday, and though I could use my full-size laptop, I have no desire to bring it along with me tomorrow.  I tentatively plan to walk to the train in the morning.  I’ve given up on the boots; I think they do exacerbate my back pain.  It’s very sad, because I like them, but there’s not much that can be done about that.

I still have a bit of a low-grade fever this evening, but that’s okay.  I’m not particularly interested in trying to protect my health.  I’ve been here in my room‒with some outings to the store of course‒since Thursday evening.  I’m not very good company, not even for myself, I’m afraid.

It’s rather amusing; I have recently gotten suggestions for videos on YouTube about dealing with trauma from being in relationships with someone with Narcissistic Personality Disorder, and probably also because I liked a video by a self proclaimed NPD person who did a good video about the Doctor, especially the 12th Doctor, as an example of someone with autistic characteristics.

Anyway, I don’t think I’ve been in any relationships with anyone with NPD,  and I certainly don’t have anything akin to NPD myself.  Quite the contrary.  When I was younger, I used to sort of pretend to be an egotist and to have a huge self-image and I (jokingly) pretended to think I was great and wonderful.  I’m pretty sure no one who knew me really took me seriously.  I’ve certainly never acted like a real narcissist or psychopath or anything, but there have been times when I envied them their self-love.  I’ve even tried‒especially when I was in prison‒to do auto-suggestion with a mantra saying, “I love my life and I love myself.”

After a while, though, I couldn’t even think the words in my head, not while trying to mean them, not while trying to believe them.  It feels like telling a foul and terrible lie.  I am often amused by people and literature and the like that speak of the (supposedly) ubiquitous sin of self-love.

I don’t think I have ever loved myself, not in my entire life.  Not in my oldest memories do I have any sense of feeling that I liked or loved myself.  It almost feels like a category error.  I never thought of myself as the kind of entity or being or concept such as that to which love might pertain.  I don’t think of myself as some identity, really.  Who am I?  I’m just the specific being that is asking that question, that’s all, whatever that is.

I’m a weird, complex four-dimensional braid in spacetime, comprised of the swirling patterns of all the particles that come together and form this long time-space tornado, bits coming into it and going out of it, everywhere, all the time, the pattern changing as one moves from past toward future, but only gradually.  And the overall pattern is continuous, and presumably will last for a bit longer before it can no longer be self-sustaining, and then it will fray and scatter and dissolve, the former bits going to be temporary parts of various other spacetime braids.

L’dor v’dor.  Amayn.

I certainly feel continuous with the kid crying in bed with his leg aches when he was little, and who always kind of was watching everything from outside.  Don’t get me wrong, I’ve had a good upbringing and a loving family.  I had good friends in school, and we did fun and interesting things together.  And I loved learning things, and I still do love that.  But I’ve always been weird, I know that.

I’ve felt…well, I wouldn’t say I felt different because it wasn’t really about any comparison.  Again, it feels almost like a category error.  I recently coined a term unsane as a contrast to the term “insane”, to mean something, someone, to whom the very concept of sanity doesn’t really apply.  I’ve often sort of thrown that (in my head) as an epithet at the deeds and behaviors of so many people and things around out there in the world.  But maybe it really applies to me.

I feel like maybe I’ve always been at right angles to every dimension of all the people around me.  But I don’t think I’ve ever loved myself, not even for a moment, though there are plenty of other people and things I love.

I think the person I’m most like, in raw aspects, is my Dad.  I had the advantage of being the youngest of three children, and so had support and people I could watch to see how things were done (and sometimes to see what not to do, what sorts of things didn’t tend to work).  My Dad was the eldest child in his family, so I guess he had to pick up a lot of things on his own.  But to his credit (and to hers) my Mom was with my Dad from when they were married until the day he died.

But he was often the one who in many ways made sense to me, even when I was really mad at him.  He was the only one who ever wanted to spend as much time at an exhibit in a museum or a zoo as I do.  Everyone else always moves along way too fast.  But somehow it’s not as much fun to see such things alone.  

I don’t know that for certain, actually.  I don’t think I’ve ever tried to go to a museum or library by myself.  The closest I’ve come is going to a bookstore by myself, and even that is just blah.  When I’m by myself, I have no will to get out and do much of anything at all.  I don’t do things for myself.  I have no desire to do things for myself.  I wish I didn’t have to obey the urge to eat or drink or breathe for myself.  It’s all quite boring.  I don’t even like to look at myself in the mirror*.

I don’t know why I’m writing this.  It’s just what this entity does at this point in spacetime, because of the various internal and external interactions among the various forces and “particles” in this particular spacetime weather pattern.  Why does that eddy in that river swirl about in that particular way at that point in a stream?  Because of physics.  There’s nothing deeper as far as I know.

That doesn’t mean I think it’s simple.  It’s ridiculously complex.  No system‒as I think I’ve said before‒can ever be complex enough to understand itself completely, for that would require an infinite expansion of complexity.

Anyway, this is already long enough for a full blog post.  If this is not the last paragraph**, it will mean that I’ve added something tomorrow morning.  I don’t know whether that will happen, but if you’re reading this, you will know the answer, but it’s further down the braid than where I am now.  I’m planning to walk to the train in the morning.  If I get hit by a car (or a bus or a truck, I’m not picky), or if I have a heart attack or a stroke, or if I’m sicker than I feel and collapse because of it‒none of which would break my heart, except perhaps literally‒I’m unlikely to add to it.  Maybe I’ll put this up on WordPress and set it to auto-post in the morning.  That way it will go up whether I’m alive or dead or something in between, and some mystery will remain.  I guess you all will see.

[Addendum:  I made it to the train station, and I did walk.  Better luck next time.]

*Though, curiously, I find listening to my own songs and covers relaxing.  Damned if I know why.

**Not counting footnotes.

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Write till your ink be dry, and with your tears moist it again, and frame some feeling blog

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, as you may already know, though if you’re reading this later, you may not.  But now you do know, just in case you care.

I’m writing this at the train station, where I just missed a late previous train because the elevator was slow.  I would think they might have been willing to hold the train for the 5 extra seconds it would have taken for me to board‒certainly, the conductor saw me getting off the elevator.  I would respect their desire not to delay if it were not for the fact that they were the ones already running late, according to a schedule that they had promulgated.

They certainly have no leg to stand on with regard to other people taking an extra moment to get on the train, when they are late almost every day.  If they ran consistently and reliably on time, I would respect their demands for punctuality from passengers.  But it is not so.  They are merely hypocrites.

Anyway, I wasn’t planning to get on that train in the first place, because I wasn’t on time for its scheduled departure.  I’m just irritable.

I’m also getting sick‒and not just in my usual, everyday way.  I have a low-grade fever (about 99.7 or so by core temperature) and feel achy and crappy and have a bit of a dry cough.  It could be Covid, I suppose, but I don’t give a f*ck.  Covid was disappointing in that both times I had it‒before and after vaccination‒it didn’t even come close to killing me.

Boo, I say.

Anyway, I probably ought not to go into work today, but I don’t know if my coworker will be there.  Supposedly he is going to be coming in, but then again, supposedly he was going to be there on Saturday, and I ended up getting a last minute Uber to the office (for which the boss has not offered to compensate me, by the way).  So, I’d rather go in and, if my coworker comes, perhaps leave early.

Ideally, I should have taken a 4-day weekend of sorts.  I should just have rested.  Unfortunately, we are not very civilized about such things here in this part of the world.  If I were like so many other people at work‒having a poor time sense and less than ideal work ethic‒I guess I would just indulge myself and give a mental “up yours” to everyone else.

For reasons of which I am far from certain, however, I don’t seem to be built that way.  This has led to me being taken advantage of quite a few times, sometimes continuously, in my life.  That’s probably a large part of what landed me in prison‒being used as a target and a dupe because I wanted to help people with chronic pain, since I suffer from it myself and knew the prejudice such people face.

I guess I was and am stupid, huh?  I don’t see myself changing this characteristic, except to the extent that avoiding it underlies my unwillingness to get very close to anyone.  I sure as Hell* don’t want any romantic entanglements.  They tend to cause me nothing but heartache and heartbreak, though I am at least truly thankful for my children.  I could never regret anything that led to their existence.  After that, though‒especially after 2013, which was when I last actually saw my kids‒all bets are off, and everything is pretty pointless.

Yes, I know, I wrote my books and stories and have done this blog since then.  Again, I say, everything is pretty pointless.  I’m not persuaded that those things‒this thing‒never having happened would be any loss to the world whatsoever.

Whenever I get sick these days, I hope that it will turn into something like pneumonia and perhaps kill me.  I’d prefer not to die of dysentery, but that would be tolerable.  And I’d rather not get meningitis or encephalitis, just because if I survive I might have brain damage that I wouldn’t like.

Reality rarely seeks one’s opinion of course‒a case in point is that I am still alive even after all those opportunities for pneumonia, and my open heart surgery and my back surgery and all the rest.

I just got on the next train, which was 6 minutes late from its scheduled time.  It’s so irritating.  Why is it difficult for trains to keep a schedule?  Buses sometimes have some excuse, but why trains?

It’s also a bit over air conditioned on board, at least relative to the platform, where I was literally sweating like a human despite just sitting still.  I’ve mentioned how the extreme air conditioning is just making the world slightly worse overall, and it seems obvious to me, but what are you going to do with the stupid humans?

Don’t answer that.  I have plenty of ideas of my own.  Only some of them involve the Hobbesian** point that humans can provide some important protein.

Anyway, if I do stay out of the office sick tomorrow, I won’t be writing a post before Monday.  And if this URI converts into an LRI or something equally serious and kills me, or at least puts me in the hospital, I might not be writing a post Monday…or indeed, perhaps I might not write one ever again.

If that’s a prospect that excites you‒and why would it not?‒just imagine how exciting it is for me to consider!  And yet, so far, I keep recovering every time.  Dammit.  F*ck you, Biology!

So, in case I’m not here tomorrow writing a post, I hope you all are happy and well and that you collectively have a very good weekend.  Try to stay safe and healthy; I don’t wish the negative things for others that I wish for myself.

TTFN

best-anime-about-illness

*Surer than Hell, really.  Hell is quite unlikely actually to exist, even if there is a God.  What sort of benevolent deity would punish for eternity the souls of people It created because they were imperfect?  How about doing some teaching and training and corrective maintenance, instead?  How about doing a better job at creating people?  I’ve often said, if even one person‒no matter how horrible‒is consigned to Hell for eternity for the deeds of a human lifetime, then a God that arranged such a thing is unworthy of worship.

**From Calvin and Hobbes, not the author of The Leviathan.

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There is no gravity–the universe is just warped

Here I am again, at the train station, waiting for the train, writing a blog post on my smartphone.  I didn’t walk this time, because by yesterday afternoon, I was getting extra stiff and sore again, and that could well have been because I walked the 7 miles I walked yesterday in my hiking boots.  Ironically, they may well have been causing me more trouble when “hiking” longer distances.  It’s rather discouraging; I like those boots.

Today, I’m wearing the new shoes of my other type that were supposed to have arrived the day before but only got there yesterday during the day while I was at work.  I didn’t walk in them yet because I’m still in a bit of exacerbated pain.  I’ll physically rest for today, then walk again tomorrow.  The good thing is I seem to be mostly past any tendency to blister.  Thank goodness for small favors.

So, basically, the thing I look forward to‒practically the only thing‒is doing more walking.  I guess that’s a reasonably good thing as far as it goes; it’s better than looking forward only to one’s next martini or one’s next hit of heroin.  But it’s still pretty dissatisfying.  I really hate my life.  Everything stressed me out.  I’m tired.  I want simply to stop.

It doesn’t help that my coworker who shares some of my duties is still out of the office, though I don’t know if he will be out today (I hope not, since it’s payroll day).  What I mean is, he was out yesterday and Monday.  So, I got called in on Saturday and since then (actually, since Friday) have been doing more work than usual‒while in more pain than usual‒for the last 4 work days.  Even before that, I was already at the threshold of cashing it all in.  So, I’m not exactly working toward a more positive outlook.

There’s a defective announcement sign (that I wrote about the other day then deleted from the final draft of the day’s post) cycling away with a moderately distorted message obviously meant to be the same as all the other boards.  I recognize the similarity of its garbled stuff with the intended message.  If I knew the system and its programming, I could probably figure out what’s wrong and possibly even fix it.  But it will likely take the Tri Rail people a while to get to it.  Only yesterday did they apparently fix a malfunctioning check-in kiosk, the one I used to use regularly, that’s been just off, without power, for well over a month.

I guess all these things take effort and money, but it’s frustrating.  I look around at our society and see the deterioration of infrastructure, and the diminution of what little pride we seem to take in running things well.  Even with a reasonably well-rounded system like the Tri Rail, it seems the trains are late almost as often as they are on time.  And, indeed, my train was supposed to have arrived by now, but it has not, and there’s no sign of its light approaching.  On the tracking software website they offer, there’s not even any indication that the train is coming.

Okay, just now its light is becoming visible.  So it’s not too very late…only about 5 minutes.

I don’t understand how it happens that, when they make their own schedule, they can’t seem to keep to it even the majority of the time.  It’s like at work‒our hours have been the same for years, but people can’t seem to get them right.  Of course, it doesn’t help that the boss doesn’t enforce them, or apply any penalty for being late or for staying late.  I can’t understand it, and I don’t want to understand it.  Of course, everyone encounters unexpected things from time to time.  But if it happens regularly, frequently, then probably the person to whom it is happening is partly causing it.

I can’t, of course, hold it against my coworker that everyone in his household is sick‒including his one year old daughter.  It happens, and there is only so much people can do to avoid it.  But people who are late to work nearly every day are just getting up and/or leaving their houses too late.  The correction to this is obvious, and one should really be encouraged to enact it, rather than be indulged.

Oh, well, the world is shit, or at least the human world is.  And the average person is going to get more and more mentally lazy as LLMs and the like do more of their “thinking” for them.  I’m not convinced that these things in any sense actually think or create, but then again, there are plenty of humans who don’t convince me that they think.

I guess I can’t hold it against the computers.  They didn’t make themselves.  Neither did the humans, of course, but at least many of them have access to resources with which they could make themselves better.  The fact that, for the most part, they do not make themselves better I hold as a defect or failure on their part.

I can say what I want about them, in any case.  They don’t read, so they’re unlikely to ever encounter my criticism.

Well, that’s eight hundred plus words, now, so I’ll start drawing to a close.  I wish I could do that overall, honestly.  I wish I could just lay me down to sleep, as the old nursery rhyme prayer says.  And if I should die before I wake, well…that wouldn’t be so bad either.  It wouldn’t break my heart.  And I doubt it would break anyone else’s heart, though a handful of people might be temporarily slightly sad.  And people at work would be in a bit of extra stick for a while.  But for them, in that, I have only a little sympathy.

And the rest of the world can go to Hell, which is what it’s steadily doing to itself, anyway.

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Bouncing tangents on walking, boots, pain, technology, science, politics, and probably other random stuff

Well, here I am again, writing this blog post at the train station after having walked here this morning.  I had intended to do this wearing a new pair of shoes of the same make and model (so to speak) as the pair I wore yesterday, but that pair, which was supposed to have been delivered yesterday evening, is instead delayed until this morning, after 8 am, which doesn’t do me any good whatsoever.  Anyway, it forced me to do an experiment walking in my boots this morning, which is what I did.

I had switched from my boots because I feared that they might have been responsible for last week’s rather extreme flare-up of my pain.  However, as I changed from them, I also changed chairs in my office.  That’s not a good way to do science, obviously:  varying two parameters at the same time.  It makes it hard to tell which one‒if either‒is having the dominant effect, if indeed there is one.  However, when dealing with severe exacerbations of already-maddening chronic pain, one can easily become impatient.

I’m not excusing it, but I am explaining it.

Anyway, I have come to the suspicion that, just maybe, it wasn’t the footwear at all but mainly the chair that was making things worse.  And now I’ve been forced into doing a better experiment.  If, after today, my pain gets significantly worse, that increases the credence that the boots are the problem.  However, if my pain level is stable‒and certainly yesterday’s walking didn’t seem to exacerbate it‒then maybe the boots aren’t causing any trouble.

I will say one thing about how quickly I’ve gotten into a state of readiness:  though I wore boots, which are heavier than the shoes I wore yesterday, I made slightly better time on my walk today.

Oh, I forgot to note that today is the first day of August‒named for Caesar Augustus (Née Octavian) who followed Julius Caesar (after whom July was named).  Welcome.  Summer is almost half over, at least by dates.  There’s nothing particularly interesting about the start of this month, other than rent and other bills being due, and the prospect of facing another long, dreary month with nothing interesting happening, other than bad things out in the world, which always seem to happen, anyway.

Of course, the US is more and more comically and tragically stupid than it used to be, but that’s been happening for a long time.  I remember when they canceled the Superconducting Supercollider in the late nineties, and I thought to myself, “That’s it, the United States’ days of being an intellectual and scientific and progress-oriented world leader are coming to an end.”

It wasn’t just my physics bias that led me to that conclusion, though that had its impact.  It was mainly the idea that, before, a large part of the ethos of the country seemed focused on constant improvement and leadership, in the sciences, in the arts, in technology, and in prosperity in general, including the traditional “American dream”.  But it turns out‒or so it seems‒that all of that seemingly intrinsic love of education and innovation and hard work was simply born of the post WWII era Cold War competition with the USSR.  We didn’t love these things for their own sake, not in general, not on average.  We just wanted to outcompete the “Godless Communists”.

Indeed, after the Soviet Union fell, the religious right poisoned the Republican Party more and more‒or so it seemed to me‒and turned their hostility inward on their own nation.  And some of the people on the left, without having to worry about being compared to the US’ enemies, became more leftish and pseudo-religious in their own Orwellian ideas.

Of course, most people were, and probably still are, much more centrist/moderate than you would guess, based on people in the news.  But now that we have no opponent against whom to unite, ideologically and physically, we can turn on ourselves more and more, and the most extreme voices aren’t curtailed out of the necessity of unity against a serious enemy.

China doesn’t present the same kind of opposition as the Soviets did, at least in our collective mind, probably because they’re far away and also they are our trading partners, and aren’t of European descent and are culturally different enough to avoid a metaphorical uncanny valley problem.  Also, they’ve not really openly declared any ideologically motivated intention to “take over the world” or to “bury the West”, at least not as far as I’ve heard.

That’s good, as far as it goes, of course.  The Cold War was dreadful;  I honestly grew up thinking that civilization was going to be destroyed by nuclear war at any moment.  When I was a teenager, my friends and I honestly and seriously thought about what we might do to survive after WWIII.  It wasn’t a joke.  And in my late teens, as part of a youth orchestra, I traveled to Lübeck, on the East/West German border, and got to see the fence line, the barbed wire, the mined “no man’s land” area and the machine-gun towers on the Eastern side‒not for keeping people out, but for preventing people from leaving.

That was pretty scary.

I don’t have high hopes for the future of the USA, but I don’t have high hopes for the rest of the world, either.  Our greater technology and abilities haven’t left the average person more respectful of science, because they don’t even understand the basics of the science that dominates almost every aspect of their lives.  Clarke’s Third Law states that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, but I wouldn’t have thought it would apply to the technology we have today.  Yet many people seem as incurious about real science‒and mathematics, and philosophy, and other fields of intellect‒as they would be about a world run by wizards.

There are flat-Earthers out there, for crying out loud, even though the refutations of that hypothesis are trivially easy to recognize, and many have been known for thousands of years!  There are people who have been so protected from deadly diseases by successful programs of vaccination (and sanitation and so on) that they actually think vaccines, and those who create them, are the enemy.

It really is depressing.  It’s like the fall of Camelot‒and I don’t refer to the JFK White House culture that people called Camelot, but the mythological Camelot related to the legend of King Arthur.  Though, come to think of it, RFK, Jr is a worthy spiritual heir of Mordred, in being the nephew of the man who declared the intention to have America land on the moon and yet who himself is now working toward the corruption and downfall of all for which his progenitors stood.

Oh, well.  I guess if the people in America and the rest of the world don’t wake up and drink some strong, black coffee and take responsibility for knowledge and growth and improvement, they will get what they deserve.  If they don’t change direction, they will end up where they’re going.  Unfortunately, they will take helpless innocents in vast numbers along with them.

Anyway, that’s my series of tangents for today, like a random plot of the scattering of elementary particles.  I hope it’s been worth your time.  Have a good day.