Author: Robert Elessar

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“…and the worms ate into his brain.”

It’s Tuesday morning.

It’s odd how a night can seem to last for a thousand years, and yet, nevertheless, the morning can come far too soon.  That’s the situation in which I find myself, today.  It’s nothing particularly new, but it has been a night that’s tending toward the bad tail of the bell curve, by which I mean, it was worse than most of my nights.

I keep wanting to write some form of the present tense, as in “it is” a worse night than most, because there has been no real boundary between last night and now.  My back and leg pain has been more or less continuous, and though my consciousness has been waxing and waning, there has been no real rest.

There’s a rather famous philosophical notion that, as far as one knows, after one has gone to sleep, when one wakes up, one might have died and been replaced during the night, and one could be a completely new being in the morning, with just some implanted memories from the person who came before.  Of course, this could also be true in any given waking moment, since all we know of our personal past is our memories of it, but there’s a definite feeling of continuity during a given day—sometimes there’s too much continuity—that is interrupted when we have a true night’s sleep.

Well, I definitely feel a rather strong continuity now with yesterday; I have no sense of having been significantly unconscious overnight, though I know I wasn’t fully conscious the whole time.  And now I have to go to work, where my only regular, pseudo-social interaction happens, but which also tends to make me stressed much more than it makes me feel good, mainly because of noise and irregular interruptions.

There are exceptions, of course.  There are many people at the office whom I like, and even one or two with whom I can have enjoyable conversations, at least about some things, though not about very much.  I know, it’s my own fault that I have no friends anymore.  And by “fault” I mean, I know that I am faulty.  I’m a bad product, a lemon.  Any sensible consumer protection agency probably would have demanded I be recalled to the factory if there were such a thing.  I was born with both cardiac and (apparently) neurological defects.  These things should have been covered under the warranty.

I know, I know, melodrama, right?  It’s curious that I express myself so over-much here in this blog.  Apparently, in person, I’m rather wooden, and don’t smile very much—though I get the impression that when I talk about music I like or about math or science or things of that nature, I light up a bit.  Certainly, I get more energetic.  And then people’s faces soon tend to glaze over and look either confused or bored or whatever.

I used to wake up with leg aches a lot when I was little.  I don’t know what the cause was, really; they used to think they were “growing pains” or something along those lines.  I just know they hurt an awful lot, and they often woke me up.  When I started having my “new” onset of pain—it turns out almost certainly to have been related to a back injury—as an adult, I thought that it was some kind of recrudescence of the problem I had as a kid.

I underwent all sorts of tests to see if there was a neurological/myological problem of chronic, perhaps congenital, nature.  I even went through electromyography, which is a lot like getting a protracted series of intramuscular injections in which the needle is just left in the large muscle group and then you’re told to flex the muscle while it’s in there.  I don’t recommend it as something fun to do, even if you think you’re something of a masochist, which I am not.

Anyway, they didn’t find anything like that, at least nothing obvious, and I eventually learned I had a seriously ruptured/torn L5-S1 disc, and ultimately had surgery on it.  To be fair, the surgery reduced my pain, but it clearly has not eliminated it.

Sorry, I know this is all boring and repetitive.  Such is life, though, isn’t it?  It’s boring and repetitive.  At least, it’s repetitive.  I guess when one has family and friends and loved ones, people with whom one can spend time doing nothing in particular in each other’s company, the repetitive doesn’t feel boring.  I’ve been in that situation before, and for long periods of time.  I had a good, close family, with good parents, brother, sister, cousins, uncles, aunts, grandparents, and so on.  I had friends growing up, in school, and in college.  I was married for fifteen years, and that wasn’t boring, certainly.  I had friends in med school and residency, and I had my kids.  That was all truly great and wonderful.

I am now tired and worn down, and quite alone/lonely, but I don’t necessarily want to want to die, though I often do feel that I want to die.  I want to want to live, which is not quite the same things as wanting to live, unfortunately.  I need help.

I feel like the narrator of the song Hey, you, asking if people can feel him, if they can touch him, if they would help him to carry the stone.  But, of course, it was only fantasy, as the song goes on to note.  The wall was too high, and no matter how he tried, he could not break free.  And so on (see above).

Pink Floyd does seem to resonate for me, and it has since I first started listening to them, especially their big four albums, Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here, Animals, and of course, The Wall.  I’m clearly not alone in this, which is actually somewhat ironic. Isn’t it?

Oh, by the way, based on the way I save my blog posts in the computer, I’ve just realized that the day of the week for the current date is one day later than it was last year.  In other words, July 18th (today) is on a Tuesday this year and was on a Monday last year.  This means that every seven years it should come around to the same day, except that leap years make the cycle irregular.

It will be five or six years instead of seven between returns to a given day, depending on whether there is only one leap year embedded in the course or if there are two.  There can’t be more than two, because leap years are every four years, but there are only seven days in a week.  I guess that could mean, though, that it could be more than seven years before a return to the same day, if the year when one would be returning to it is a leap year, and then that day might be skipped over again, leading to a longer course of time between.  I could try to work out the potential maximum length of time between when one date falls on one day of the week next time, but I’m already getting bored of this.  In any case, in the long run, it ought to be on average that the date falls on the same day of the week one out of every seven years.

Except February 29th, of course.  There are more than seven years between any repeated day for February 29th.

Anyway, I’m going to go.  I’m in so much pain, despite what meds I have available, that I think I’ll call a Lyft or something to get to the train station.  I hate doing that, but I’m just worn out.  Also, it’s not as though I’m saving money for some possible, imagined future retirement; I don’t see how it’s possible that I have a future of significance.

I would like to have a future.  I would like someone, somewhere, to find me some kind of answers or help or something.  But that’s pretty unreasonable to ask of other people, all of whom have their own problems and pains and troubles.

I guess the show must go on, at least for now.  Have a good day, if you can.

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“I thought you died alone a long, long time ago”

Happy Day of the Moon, everyone.

A weird thing happened when I began this blog post.  As I was trying to write a footnote to explain that by writing “Day of the Moon” I simply meant “Monday”, the little spell-checker in the footnote marked Monday as a misspelled word.  Now, I have in the past temporarily forgotten how to spell a common word, for causes unknown—the last time I clearly recall such an instance was when I could not for the life of me remember how to spell “sure” when I was a kid—but Monday?

I tried to figure out how I could have messed that up.  And when I right-clicked on the word all the options offered to replace it were French.  It turned out that somehow, the proofing language in that section of the post had flipped to French, and I had to reset it and start the post over.

That seems truly bizarre to me.  It’s not because of anything I did, at least nothing obvious, because I have never used French in writing anything, as far as I can recall.  I know only a very limited number of words in French.  Unlike many people, I don’t find it a particularly beautiful language, and the very fact that the French government tries strictly to control the language’s grammar and lexicon by law is frankly (Ha ha) laughable.

Anyway, that’s all a weird, contingent tangent* that had nothing to do with anything I was planning to write.  That’s okay, though, since I didn’t really have anything planned to write.  That’s how I usually begin these posts.  When I do deliberately try to write about something, it’s usually a subject that not many people seem interested in.

My post from last Thursday was a good example—when I pondered whether reality is more truly described by continuous functions or by stepwise changes iterated at such a minute level and in such short intervals that we, the macroscopic, cannot tell the difference between them and the truly continuous, and how one could tell the difference.  It seems like an interesting question to me, but I don’t appear to have anyone with whom to interact who has any particular thoughts about it, or has anything to add to the conversation.

I did talk to my sister on the phone last night (not about that subject), and that was really nice.  It’s hard to find the time to do it when we’re both available, so the frequency of those interactions has been lower than I wish, but then again, a great many things in the world are quite different from what I would wish them to be.

I took melatonin and Benadryl in the evening on both Friday and Saturday nights.  I don’t know how well it helped me rest—I certainly woke up several times during both nights, but at least on Saturday morning I let myself stay in bed, though awake, until comparatively late in the morning.

Last night was rough for sleep, mainly because I got spasms and pains alternating down first my right side from my lower back to my hip and knee and ankle and foot, then switching over to my left side a little later.  It’s rather maddening, but I’m probably “mad” anyway, so it’s not like it’s going to make me insane in any new or different way.  It will just pound away at the gravel that’s all that remains of any monolith of sanity I used to possess, until it’s eventually turned into sand.

Related to that pounding, a rather odd thing happened yesterday, or it seemed odd to me.  I often watch “reaction” videos, especially to songs that I like, because it’s neat to see someone apparently experiencing a piece of good music for the first time.  It’s almost (but not quite) like listening to a song with a friend who hasn’t heard it before.  Anyway, after the second or third one I watched, the YouTube algorithm offered me an actual song, not a reaction.  In this case it was the original, David Bowie version of The Man Who Sold the World, and I played it and sang along with it, then with Ashes to Ashes, then with Karma Police, by Radiohead.

The weird part was that, as I sang these songs—none of which are especially sad, though they’re not especially happy, either—I started to cry.  With each one, there were several places in the course of the song in which I had to catch myself and hold back tears and even sobs, and I’m not at all sure why.  I haven’t done any singing in quite a while, really, other than rare and brief moments, just as I’ve only played guitar once or twice in the last six months or so.  But I don’t know why it felt so horribly sad and despair-inducting to be singing.

I stopped playing songs after that.  It was too weird and disquieting; I’m not sure what it signifies, if anything.  But I do feel more sad and hopeless as time goes by.  This blog—in its current form, anyway—was meant in part to be a cry for help, in the hope that someone, somewhere, might have the desire and the ability to do or say something that would rescue or at least assist me out of my downward depression spiral and my thoroughly empty life, which is devoid of anything deeper than work “friends”, commuting, and YouTube videos.

I get the impression that people don’t think I’m savable, which I guess I can understand.  Or maybe I make arguments that are too convincing, or at least too persistent, about my own lack of hope, so much that people think they could never talk me out of despair.  Maybe they couldn’t.  Maybe talk isn’t what’s needed.  I certainly think I would need something more than just talk, but my judgement is far from sound.  Still, I really feel like I’m wasting time, more and more, if what I was doing was trying to ask for, or to seek, or to wish for, help.

As far as I can see, help is not forthcoming.  And while it may seem, from the other side of the blog post, that this is something with which I’m sanguine and of which I’m coldly accepting, this is not the case.  I am not quite dead yet, even internally.

Time’s been my way when I’ve rescued other people—actually, I’ve done it quite often, and I did it for quite a while.  Still, apparently there’s no counterbalance for my having saved other people’s lives and relieved other people’s suffering—or else maybe I’m even more reprehensible than I often feel I am.  Whatever the case, I don’t seem to be eliciting any assistance from anyone who can do much of anything.

Maybe I need to be in situation where there’s immediate danger to life and limb before I can actually get anyone to help me.  Maybe I just am not going to get any help.  I’m certainly not able to help myself.  I’ve been doing it and trying to do it for years or decades, depending on how you draw boundaries and define your terms.  I’m at the end of my psychological resources.  I’m also caught in some kind of mental block, where I can’t seem to reach out (directly) to anyone in any way, or to explain how badly I’m doing, or even to call 988, which I often want to do.  I just feel like I’d be wasting their time.

Anyway, that’s already too much for today.  I’m going to head to the bus stop.  Maybe something will happen on the way to work that will bring things to a head, and I’ll either get help or get gone.

Almost certainly that won’t be the case.

*Which might be a good name for a band.

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Something for the rag and bone man

It’s Friday morning, July 14th.  I strongly considered walking to the train station this morning to try to get back into that habit, since I’ve been sick this week, but then last night I had an especially horrible night’s sleep.  I think I got maybe an hour or an hour and a half total of sleep, not continuously, but spread out over the time between 10 and 3.  Now I feel surreal and slightly hallucinatory.  I really don’t even want to go into the office, but I’ve already missed one day this week (Monday), and I’m off this weekend, so I’ll try to trudge through today.

I don’t know what to do about this.  My sleep and other issues seem to be worsening, and it’s getting to the point where fewer and fewer things keep me wanting to do anything.  Most days, honestly, I half-wish I were dead, but today it’s more than half.  I’m so tired; I don’t know what to do.  But I’m not sleepy.

I think tonight, even though it gave me some trouble last time, I’m going to take one of those melatonin, as well as two Benadryl, just to see if it helps at all.  The research apparently shows that melatonin doesn’t do much other than to reset one’s sleep clock if one is off kilter, but maybe in some people—maybe in people with weird brains to begin with—it might help.  I don’t know.  Anyway, I don’t work tomorrow, so if I have a bad reaction and get a headache and all that, it won’t matter much.

It’s not as if I have any plans for Saturday.  I don’t see anyone or spend time with anyone, though I’m going to call my sister this weekend, and that’s a good thing.  I don’t go out or do anything interesting.  I’ve sort of half-decided I want to try to replace the inner tube in my bike and retry that again, maybe go for a ride.  That might be worth doing.  I have the necessary equipment, at least.  I don’t know if I’ll have the will to do it, but I’ll wait and see.

I had plans to talk about that second topic I raised at the end of yesterday’s lengthy post.  I’m referring here to my thought that, perhaps, having big jackpot lotteries and the like for people to play legally has actually done harm to the overall work ethic and productivity of the nation, because at least some people will console and delude themselves with the dream—and yes, it is a dream, since to a good, five-sigma approximation, no one wins the lottery—that they might get a windfall and never have to work again, and then they could get and have all the joys and comforts they envision.

I imagine—and this is conjectural—that when there is no lottery available, people can’t even dream of getting ahead or getting more comfortable other than through working hard and saving their money.

Like I mentioned yesterday, this is not something I would imagine is to blame for all, or even a lion’s share, of the diminishment of the middle class and the work ethic and whatnot.  There are many factors in the equation or the program or whatever you might call it that determines the economic and sociological structure and function of a society.

But I don’t think the lottery has been a good thing in any sense.  It doesn’t appear to have benefited public education at all, which was one of the things for which lotteries were supposed to raise money.  If anything, it might have given those in government an excuse to be able to cut some of the tax-based funding for education.

Certainly the public schools appear to have gone downhill even since I was in school, and I don’t think I’m just being a typical curmudgeon who thinks the younger generation is stupider than the youth of my generation were.  In fact, I don’t think they are stupider.  Probably they’re overall somewhat smarter—they certainly have less exposure to environmental lead than people did when I was a kid, and the general knowledge base of civilization has definitely increased.  But the education system in general appears to be much worse than it used to be, and what’s more troubling is that people seem not to care as much about education as in the past.  The respect for teachers and for schools and for getting an education in general seem to have declined significantly.

That doesn’t seem like a good way to run a society with an eye toward the future.  In fact, the future seems more and more bleak by the year.  Thankfully, of course, there are smart people out there, and some of them will be able to get educated in spite of the schools they attend, and when push comes to shove, these individuals will do their best to come up with new solutions to new and old problems, and they will carry the rest of the human infestation along with them, for better or for worse.

But if people in general were better educated—if they were taught even basic probability and statistics in high school, or even junior high, for instance—there would be much less of a market for con games such as state lotteries.  One sees people lining up almost every day in the convenience stores, spending absurd amounts of money (which they cannot afford) on slips of paper that they might as well use to blow their noses or wipe their asses.

I always told my patients that they should never make a special trip to buy a lottery ticket, because they were far more likely to be killed in a traffic accident on the way to the store than they were to win the jackpot.  I suspect this might be true even if they walk to the store, though at least then they would be getting exercise.  The odds of them getting injured are even greater than the odds of them getting killed, and in the USA, people with injuries that cause persistent diminishment of ability are going to have extra expenses and decreased productivity and lower quality of life for a long time, and our healthcare system is woefully inadequate.

And make no mistake, injuries that you have do cause chronic diminishment of your capacity—“you are still the victim of the accidents you leave”.

Nietzsche’s famous quote about “whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger” is just a load of bullshit.  Remember, the man died of neurosyphilis, but syphilis doesn’t progress to the nervous system very rapidly.  It didn’t kill him quickly, but it certainly didn’t make him stronger, neither physically nor mentally.  Exercise, practice, education, deliberate self-improvement—these things can make one stronger.  Accident and injury don’t tend to do that.

Not to say that a person can’t find wisdom and lessons even from horrible events, but to do that, one needs to be primed to look for such lessons in the first place.

Anyway, I probably could go on and on and off on tangents of various kinds related to this.  It’s frustrating to see people make excuses for why they don’t think they need to worry about educating their children, and at the same time to see people wasting their money on absurd gambles.  Gambling is only a winning industry for those who own the casinos or the lotteries (if them).  It is true that a very good poker player can make a living at the game, but only if there are worse poker players against whom they can play.  It’s a zero sum game.  There are no lions unless there are hinds; there are no wolves unless there are sheep.

Better to get educated, because knowledge can be shared and gained without real loss to the sharer.  Information can be reproduced now at very low cost—lower than it’s ever been before.  Education can be a positive-sum game, a mutual exchange to mutual benefit, which is the type of interaction at the heart of any functioning, productive economy.  If you get smarter, it doesn’t make me stupider; indeed, it often makes me smarter by feedback, for if you learn or create some truly new knowledge, then I can subsequently learn it.  More knowledge, more information, can benefit everyone.

But I doubt that it will.  I don’t have high hopes for the vast majority of humans.  As David Deutsch has pointed out, it certainly seems possible for the future of humanity to be a cosmically significant one, in the long term.  But there’s nothing that guarantees it.  It can easily go wrong, and most times throughout history, the production of knowledge has gone wrong, and has ground to a halt for centuries at a time and more.

Oh, well.  I’m too tired to do much but feel pessimistic about everything, anyway.  This blog is the closest thing to contribution to society that I do anymore.  I don’t know that it does me any good, though.

Anyway, I’m off to head to the train station now, for another depressing day of pretending that there is any point at all to continuing to strive to make a living.  I hope you all feel better, or at least better rested, than I do.

karloff-monster so tired

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Nor can I fortune to brief minutes tell, blogging to each his thunder, rain and wind

Hello and good morning.

I decided yesterday afternoon that I would try to write something a bit different for today’s post, rather than just another litany of my depression and despair, since I’m sure any dedicated readers are probably getting almost as tired of reading them as I am of experiencing them.  I cannot directly alter the fact that I experience them—if I could, I would—but I don’t have to make it an uninterrupted trail of goo for you all to slog through on a daily basis.

I came up with two, more or less unrelated, ideas, but I’m only going to focus on the first, which is nearer and dearer to my heart and mind, in any case.  It’s also been something I’ve thought about on and off for some time.  I do wonder what pertinent quote from Shakespeare I’ll find to alter to make the title, but of course, you who are reading will already know the answer.

Don’t spoil it for me, okay?  I want to be surprised.

Anyway, the idea I wanted to bounce around today has to do with the question of the discontinuity of reality at a mathematical level.

I’m sure many of you are aware that, from the perspective of quantum mechanics, there is no sensible differentiation in, for instance, location at any scale smaller than the Planck length, which is about 1.6 x 10-35 meters, or in time below the Planck time, which is roughly 10-43 seconds.

There are various reasons for this, and I won’t try to get into them, but this is generally agreed upon by all the scientists who work in the field.  It’s part of why there is an upper limit to the number of possible quantum states within any given region of spacetime, defined, thanks to Bekenstein and Hawking, as the surface area of an event horizon surrounding that region as measured in units of square Planck length.

Thus, based on the best current understanding of the micro-world, the universe is not so much pixelated as blurry at the smallest scales.  Admittedly, these are very small scales—far smaller than we can probe currently, so we may, in principle, be wrong about some of it, and quantum gravity might change our understanding, but there are strong reasons for this assessment.

Now, mathematics—thanks to work threshed out by Newton and Leibniz, building on ground first broken (though no one quite realized it at the time) by Archimedes about two millennia earlier*—can deal with things that are truly continuously divisible.

Those of you who took high school level calculus (or higher) probably recall that a derivative involves finding the instantaneous slope, or rate of change, of a curve describing some function, such as the instantaneous acceleration being the rate of change of the “speed”.  The idea of it had to do with taking the slope of a line connecting any two nearby points on the curve and bringing them closer and closer together, taking the limit as that distance goes toward zero.

Analogously, integrating a function involves finding the area under a curve, and is in a way the opposite of a derivative.  This involves splitting the area under the curve into rectangles of fixed width at any given point along the curve (the height defined by the value of the curve at that point) and adding them together, then taking the width between the points to be smaller and smaller, until one approaches the limit of an infinite sum of “infinitesimally” narrow rectangles.

These processes are tremendously useful, and can describe the orbits of astronomical objects and the trajectories of ballistic materials, just to take two simple examples.  They are good for describing the universe in many ways, and they often produce useful and accurate answers and predictions to the best of anyone’s ability to measure.

But that raises my question.  Do we currently have the capacity to tell the difference between processes in the universe—say, for instance, acceleration due to gravity—being truly continuous or them being in a sense discontinuous?

We know that the Real Numbers are uncountably infinite, as a matter of pure mathematics.  Between any two nonidentical real numbers, however arbitrarily close together, exists an uncountably infinite number of more real numbers, as large—so to speak—as the number of real numbers themselves, a Russian doll in which every new doll revealed by opening the previous one has just as many dolls inside it as there were inside the original Russian doll…but even more unlimited than that.

This is, however, not necessarily relevant to reality**.  Just to demonstrate that fact:  we can calculate Pi (π), the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter, to any number of decimal points we might choose, but it will never come to an end—it’s an infinite, non-repeating decimal number, one of the “transcendental” numbers.  Pi has been calculated to 62.8 trillion digits (as of 2021) but that’s not a number we could ever measure as the ratio of the circumference of any actual circle to its diameter.

I’ve read (from a reliable source) that only 39 digits of Pi are necessary to calculate the circumference of the visible universe*** to the fineness of a single hydrogen atom.  Now, a hydrogen atom is about 1033 Planck lengths across, according to a quick search, so that means, in principle, we’d only need Pi to 72 digits or so to calculate the diameter of the universe to the nearest Planck length.  That’s a fairly large number of digits, but it’s smaller than the order of magnitude of, for instance, the estimated number of baryons in the visible universe, and is smaller than the entropy “contained” in even a solar mass black hole****, unless I’m seriously misremembering.

So, finally, my question is, how well have mathematicians ascertained that aspects of reality can in truth be described by equations that are actually continuously variable, or whether we could ever tell the difference?

A computer, for instance, could simulate some model of a continuously varying system to a high degree of precision by taking each current state and then applying an approximation of the applicable equations to the next state, iterating each step in sequence, as if recapitulating the steps that led to the limit defining the derivative or the integral of a function.  This would be considered an approximation of the true function, of course, but one could, in principle, get arbitrarily close to the true function by taking one’s intervals to be arbitrarily small—solving, for instance, or at least simulating, the three (or more) body gravitational problem, by calculating, at each instant, the net effect of each object on all the others, calculating the acceleration, applying it, moving each thing a tiny step, then recalculating.

But what if it’s not the step-wise approach that’s the approximation?  What if the continuously differentiable functions we use to describe things like gravity and electromagnetism and the various quantum mechanical matters are the approximations?  What if reality is more Δx/Δt than dx/dt?

Obviously this is a simple enough concept to come up with, and I’m far from the first one to think of it.

My more immediate question is, has anyone demonstrated mathematically just how fine our measurements would have to be to tell whether, for instance, the orbit of a planet around a star follow a truly continuously differentiable path, or if it is just a step-wise, iterated process?  If one were able, for instance, to simulate the orbit of a planet, say, by iterating an approximation each Planck time, and reconfiguring the system at each step to the nearest Planck length, how long, in principle, would it take to be able to tell the difference between that simulation and a truly continuously differentiable motion?  Could there, given the constraints upon the nature of reality applied by our best understanding of quantum mechanics and the like, ever be any measurable difference?

I don’t know if this has been addressed by mathematicians.  It may not have any practical implications, since we’re a long way from being able to measure reality precisely enough—or so I suspect—to tell that difference.  But I wonder if it’s been worked out just how finely we would need to be able to measure to tell if reality is truly continuously differentiable.

If anyone reading is a mathematician familiar enough with this sort of question to give me an answer, I would love to hear it.  Or if you know a mathematician with appropriate expertise, or a physicist of similar expertise, I would dearly like to know if anyone has done any explorations from the mathematical (not simply the practical) point of view regarding this.

That’s it, that’s my subject for the day.  I feel that I’ve been very ham handed and brutally quick in the way I’ve gotten into the subject, and for that, I apologize.  I only have the time to write this between my shower and when I leave to go to the train station, so it’s a bit quick and dirty, as they say.

Obviously, I don’t have time or space today to address my other, unrelated question, which is about whether the legality and ubiquity of large-jackpot lotteries of various kinds has changed the general psychology of, for instance, the American people in a way that has decreased “average” ambition and work ethic, providing “bread and circuses” to the masses in a way that has at least contributed to the greater economic disparity between socio-economic levels in the nation (and the world) and the gradual dissolution of the middle class?

I wouldn’t dream of thinking it the only or even the dispositive factor, but I wonder if it might have contributed.

Maybe I’ll write about that tomorrow.  Weirdly enough, we may have a harder time coming up with definitive answers for that question than the one I tried to discuss today.  Mathematics and physics are easy, in a sense.  Biology, psychology, sociology, economics…these things are truly hard to model and describe in useful, predictive ways, because the systems are so complex, with so many variables, both dependent and independent.  Even weather, the quintessentially chaotic system, may be more tractable.

I hope this has been more interesting than my usual reflections and projections of gloom.  I also hope you all have a very good day, and maybe that you think a bit about what I’ve written.

TTFN

Domenico-Fetti_Archimedes fractal tiles

*What a Mary-Sue that guy was!  I mean, forget the whole acrimonious debate on priority between Newton and Leibniz regarding calculus, these guys were about two thousand years behind the Eureka Man!

**Though it could be, even if distance and time and not limitlessly divisible.  For instance, if the Everettian “Many Worlds” description of quantum mechanics is correct, the overall “space” of “universes” created at points of decoherence/branching could be infinitely and continuously divisible, making it a no-brainer as to how many potentially different worlds there might be in that space—not “real” space, but the orthogonal space that contains all the branches of the many worlds.  However, that might not be infinitely divisible, either.

***That’s everything that can, even in principle, be seen given the finite time light has had to reach us since the Big Bang.

****The Entropy is about 1077, but Entropy is proportional to the natural log (basically, taking a log is the opposite of raising something to a power) of the number of possible microstates in a system, so that number of states is e to the 1077 power, or e multiplied by itself 100000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 times.

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3 billion heartbeats, and what do you get?

Well, it’s Wednesday morning now, as one might expect, if one lives life linearly and ordinally, which is how I do it.  I’m writing this on my little laptop computer today, because my thumbs have been getting sore from the use of the smartphone for blogging—more precisely, the base of my thumbs and my first MCP joints on both sides hurt quite a bit.  Also, I just type faster on the laptop, and It’s easier for me to express myself, though why I ever bother doing that is not quite entirely clear to me.

I feel pretty rotten still—physically, I mean.  I still have body aches and soreness and weakness (or at least asthenia) and a general feeling of being slightly breathless.  I still had a very low-grade fever as of last night, but I checked my oxygen, which was 95-96% saturation, occasionally pushing up to 97%, and my pulse rate was in the high-90s to low 100s, a bit variable with respiration.  That’s actually slightly low for me.  All my life I’ve tended to have a rapid pulse, possibly related to the atrial septal defect with which I was born, which can affect the heart’s inherent pacemaker and conduction system because of its location.

Apparently, the average number of heartbeats in a lifetime for a human (or closely related alien) is about 3 billion.  This is more than that of most mammals, which hover a little below two-thirds that many, if memory serves.  That number is roughly consistent from shrews to blue whales.  Geoffrey West discusses some of this in his book Scale, which is really interesting, and I recommend it.  As for me, I haven’t read anything in over a week, really, other than a few blog posts.

I just did a quick calculation regarding my chronic, diagnosed “sinus tachycardia”*.  If my average heart rate were 110—which my pulse can hover near, at least some of the time—I should have lived to about 51.8 years.  I’m already slightly past that, but within the realm of rough experimental error.  If 105 were closer to my average, my expected lifespan would be about 54.3 years, which would mean I have less than a year to go.  I figured the first number by dividing 3 billion by 110, then by 60, then by 24, then by 365.25.  I then did the second one by replacing the 110 with 105 and repeating the whole thing, but it occurs to me that I could just have taken 51.8 x 110/105 and gotten the same answer more easily.

So, basically, if my pulse has been steadily tachycardic—which I can only infer roughly based on the moments in which I’ve actually measured it, since I obviously didn’t measure it in between—then I’ve already lived just about as many heartbeats as I’m expected to live, on average.

Of course, there are some big “ifs” there.  There have certainly been times when I’ve been more fit, and that has tended to slow my resting heart rate somewhat.  Also, let’s not be too quasi-mystical about all this; it’s not as though there is some ethereal hourglass that measures out not seconds but heartbeats in the platonic space of life and death.  It’s just a rough average.

If the world is deterministic, then of course, one does, in a sense, have a pre-programmed number of heartbeats before one dies, but there’s nothing about that number that would determine the length of one’s life; it would, indeed, be a consequence of the various things that determine the length of one’s life, just as would the length of that life in seconds.  It wouldn’t be a dispositive fact, merely an epiphenomenon.  It would be casual rather than causal, one might say.

This is all a bit silly, but in many ways it’s reassuring to me that, just maybe, I really have come to what will be the natural end of my expected life.  I’ve read that people on the autism spectrum have shorter expected lifespans than people not on the spectrum (the range is wide, apparently anywhere from 36 to 61 years, which seems pretty imprecise) supposedly largely due to the various difficulties with self-care and social support and the like.

One reads plenty of reported evidence that a key determinant of a long and “happy” life is the degree of one’s social support network—not necessarily its size, but certainly its quality.  Well, when one of the fundamental aspects of a dysfunction is difficulty with ordinary social communication and connection, one can expect a group to tend to have a poorer social support network and ability to self-advocate.  And, of course, the three major proximate causes of death are apparently—according to a quick Bing search—epilepsy, heart disease, and suicide.

As far as I know, I don’t have any form of epilepsy.  I do have a cavum septum pellucidum cyst in my brain, which was discovered by chance on an MRI done for other reasons.  It’s a benign finding, in and of itself, but it turns out to be slightly more common in people with ASD (the neurologic one, not the cardiac one) as does ASD itself (the cardiac one, this time, which I also had).

So, I do/did have at least one form of heart disease, though I don’t know whether it counts in the measure of what they’re describing as such causes.  I think the third thing in the list is by far the most likely cause of premature death for me, if “premature” is really the right word.  After all, my “social support network” is locally all but nonexistent, and is very limited on a distant scale.

Of course, sleep disorders—also apparently very prevalent in those “on the spectrum”—are significant impediments to a long and happy life for anyone, and my sleep has been disordered for a very long time.  As a case in point, yesterday I was so physically wiped out from work and feeling ill that I just took a ride from the train station to the house and tried just to shut off the light, take half a Benadryl, and go to sleep.  Then—to no one’s surprise, but to my frustration—I could not get to sleep until after midnight, and then I started waking up by no later than two in the morning, awakening on and off every ten to twenty minutes until finally there was no point in delaying anymore.

I don’t know why I’m discussing all this trivia.  Maybe I’m just to try to get the message out that, if I do die “young”** in the near-future, which doesn’t seem terribly unlikely, you shouldn’t think of it as something sad, as some kind of tragedy.  My life is pathetically empty, and rather unpleasant most of the time.

I would never say there aren’t people who have it much worse than I do.  Of course there are.  That will almost certainly always be true, by any set of criteria one might choose.  It’s also irrelevant.  There are people who die young who, based on the quality of their lives, would have been better off having died even younger.  And there are those who live very long lives who still could have lived even longer with great happiness and well-being, and so even after a century, such a death could be considered premature by some criteria.  Futility is in the eye of the beholder.

Anyway, I’m dragging this out, as I tend to do.  I just feel very tired, and very uncomfortable, and I don’t have any particular joy, or prospect of future joy, that makes me want to keep going and live longer.  I’m lonely and sad and uncomfortable and awkward and weird, living in a world in which I feel like an alien or a changeling or a mutant, or whatever.

Well, lets call that good for now, so to speak.  I’m going to get a Lyft to the train again today, because I’ve taken longer than I’d like to catch the bus, and anyway, I’m still just wiped out.  I’m going to try to time the train I take so that I get to my destination after the nearest CVS is open, so I can pick up some cold medicine***.  Maybe a decongestant will help me feel like I can breathe a little better.  Who knows?  But I need to do the payroll today, so at least it might help me stay awake for the time being, even if the decongestant effect doesn’t make much difference.  After that, I don’t think it really matters much.

*Nothing to do with the sinuses in one’s head, but with the sino-atrial node in the heart, the intrinsic pacemaker.  It means that one has a fast heart rate—tachycardia—but that its origin is at the usual source of the heartbeat.  It’s not an aberrant source or a reentrant tachycardia such as might occur when the conduction system of the heart develops a loop that keeps feeding rapidly back into itself and generating a truly and significantly over-fast heartbeat.  That can degenerate into more dangerous arrhythmias, whereas sinus tachycardia does not tend to do so.

**Scare quotes added because I do not feel young in almost any way, other than, perhaps, my ability to remain curious about various things in a way that seems unusual in other people somehow.  Many days I feel as if I’ve lived for centuries, but not in a cool, Anne Rice vampire kind of way.  Rather, I feel more like a mortal who has kept one of the Great Rings.  I’ve discussed that metaphor before and won’t bother going into it now.

***I did time it correctly, and the CVS was open…but the pharmacy was not, and will not be until 9 am.  Unfortunately, one cannot get real Sudafed—the decongestant that actually works without causing dangerous elevations in blood pressure—except at the pharmacy counter, and only in limited amounts, because some people have used it to make amphetamines.

This is a truly absurd and sub-moronic standard.  It’s harder for a law-abiding citizen in Florida to get a product containing pseudoephedrine than it is to get a gun, and all so the state can prevent a small minority of people from willingly taking a substance into their own bodies that no one is forcing them to use, just as some other people use beer or potato chips or Big Macs or ice cream…or tobacco.

And, of course, they aren’t actually preventing anything.  If they wanted to prevent drug use, they’d have to try to find out why life is bleak and empty enough for some people that they seek artificial sources of transient mood elevation (even though those sources are dangerous) and perhaps try to remedy or at least remediate the causes.  But, no, the same sort of people who would decry government overreach if corporate or upper-echelon income taxes were raised slightly, or if the government tried to ensure that people are vaccinated to curtail the spread of actual contagion to millions, and who would take up arms in open rebellion against any attempt to restrict gun ownership at any level, are willing to have the state keep people from using a comparatively safe medication for congestion and force them to use more dangerous ones—like oxymetazoline, which I am going to have to use, today.

The law truly is “a ass” and “a idiot”, and it’s written by people who are—and who are voted into power by—cretins and troglodytes who cannot even comprehend the nature of and the science behind the comforts and technologies which keep them alive and relatively safe.  If any readers here have any influence in this particular issue, please try to do something about it.  If necessary, just burn it all—the whole stupid planet—and let nature start over in some new state.  There are still a billion or so habitable years on Earth in which hopefully to bring an actually intelligent species into existence for the first time.

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“I wonder why I’m shivering in such infernal heat.”

Happy Tuesday, everyone.  I guess this is, traditionally, the day of Mars, since the Spanish word for the day is “Martes”, which I think harkens back to the Latin name for the god of war (Mars…duh).

At times, I find it strange that there even ever was a god of war (mythically, I mean‒I know that there never was an actual god of war).  I guess, given the human race, it shouldn’t really surprise me.  Heck, I’ve even been led to understand that the good ol’ god o’ Abraham was originally a war god, but I have less provenance for that conclusion, so take it with a pillar of salt.

Incidentally, it’s also 7-11 in the American dating system, and that’s mildly amusing, given the name of the ubiquitous, quintessential “convenience store”.

As you might have noticed, I did not write a blog post yesterday.  Unfortunately, that’s not because I was dead, in case you were wondering.  I suspect death is, if not pleasant, at least not as unpleasant as the way I felt yesterday and the few days before (and is much how I feel today, though somewhat less so).

I started feeling ill on Saturday during the day, with that general achy soreness one feels when fighting an infection.  Then by Sunday I started having a modest fever, and yesterday I was just wiped out and in pain and my back pain was also acting up worse than usual.

I still don’t feel great today, but I need to go into the office before too much stuff gets backed up with which for me up to catch.  I’m not completely sure about the grammar of that last sentence, but I think you probably get my meaning.  I suppose it doesn’t much matter.

Anyway, I’m still under the weather, but I don’t have any symptoms that suggest contagion, so I’m going in.  I may have some low-level bacterial infection somewhere, but if so, it’s difficult to tell where without more localizing symptoms.  I suppose it’s possible I could have an infection in and around the hardware in my lower back, but I would expect the character of my back pain to change at least subtly in such a case, and it has not.

Maybe I just overdid things with my walking in the morning last week‒if my calculations are correct, I walked about 40 miles total, and in the reputedly hottest week on record, or something along those lines.  Maybe I just overexerted myself enough on too short notice to have given my body time to adjust.

If that’s the case, I may regret taking the days off yesterday and the day before.  But then again, it would be rather disappointing to walk myself into oblivion just locally.  How drab and dreary that would be.

I suppose, in a sense, such a thing would be appropriate for me.

So, all that and other lifestyle changes may have affected my resistance to some ailment, and maybe I’ve just been fighting some low-level virus or something.  If so, it doesn’t seem to be too horrible a one, or at least it’s not acutely too virulent.

It’s a bit sad to think, but I probably will die alone, when it happens.  Of course, in a sense, everyone dies alone.  Even if you die at the same time as lots of other people, perhaps in some massive catastrophe, you die alone, since it’s not as though you can share the experience with anyone else.

Of course, by that logic, everyone lives alone too.  But maybe that’s just an impression formed by someone who is probably on the autism spectrum and who has gone through a series of reversals* that have left him sundered, at least physically, from the people with whom he used to be able to connect.

Anyway, the point I guess I’m making is that there is something non-futile, or so it seems to me, in dying with your loved ones nearby, for you and sometimes even for them.  I was very disheartened to have arrived too late for my final visit with my father, and could only say goodbye to him after he had died.  I was at least there for my mother’s final day or so, and I think she was aware that I had come.  She was quite out of it, but she interacted with me some.  I tried to start reading The Chasm and the Collision to her, which I had just published not long before…I think.  My recollection may be faulty here.  I have the impression that she just missed reading that, and I think it would have been her favorite of my books.

I don’t think I would have wanted my parents ever to read Unanimity.  It’s just too dark.

I think I may take an Uber to the train this morning.  It’s a bad habit, I know, but I’m still a little wiped, and the prospect of walking to the bus and then from the bus to the train is mildly unpleasant.  If so, I’d better leave soon.  I may write more of this once I get there.

And that’s what I’m doing, just for a short while.  I don’t want to make the post too long, but I figured I’ll let you all know that I got to the train station, and that I even got on an earlier train than I was expecting given that fact, because that earlier train was running late.  That’s a slightly amusing bit of irony, I think.  But I have a weird sense of humor.

Anyway, I’m glad I took the Lyft (not an Uber; my apologies to the branding and marketing people at Lyft) because even walking down the stairs from the bridge over the tracks kind of wiped me out and made me feel a bit breathless.  I wonder if I could have a low-grade lower respiratory infection without having a cough.  It does happen.  A low enough respiratory infection often doesn’t trigger the cough reflex; that tends to involve the upper airways.

Oh, well, who cares?  I’m probably fine, and if I’m not, well, it’s not the worst thing that could happen.  The only people really relying on me are doing so for business purposes, and those purposes can all be fairly easily adjusted.  I’m certainly not crucial or essential for anyone or anything.

Anyway, that’s enough for now.  I have over a thousand words of gibberish down so far, written on my phone.  I think for tomorrow I’ll try to remember to bring the laptop with me; my thumbs are getting sore.

Again, I hope you all have a happy “day of the god of war”, contradictory though that may seem.  Contradictions can be okay.  And at the same time, they can’t actually exist; they can only be spoken (or written, etc.) they can never be instantiated.

*I suppose it must have been an odd number of reversals, since an even number would have left me going in the original direction, and that’s clearly not the case.

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A short but sour post

Well, here I am again, sitting at the train station after having walked 5 miles to get here, and I’m writing a blog post using my smartphone.  Today, of course, it being Saturday, the trains run less frequently, and also, for unclear reasons, the train I’m taking is boarding on the opposite side from its usual one, the announcement of which is being repeated at rather excessive frequency.  Still, I guess it’s better for it to be overstated than under-announced; that way all those taking the train will be well-informed of the change.

Yesterday at work ended on a frustrating note, in which I just left about half an hour early, because someone had lit sage and wafted that horrible, disgusting scent around.  Now, I’ve tried to make it clear that the smell of sage gives me a headache and actually makes me nauseated; and it’s not as though it’s a necessity for doing business.  So, I was already feeling my usual stress from the noise of all the voices, and the overhead “music”, and I had a very bad day with respect to back pain.  Once I suddenly smelled that crap, and there was even some joking about the fact that it bothered me, I essentially said, “fuck this shit”, and even though it had been raining like crazy, I packed up my backpack and left.

Honestly, I’m just so tired.  If someone lights that shit today, I think I will leave when it happens.  I have to endure the noise of the people all talking and it’s at least arguable that the “music” is necessary or at least useful for business, but the sage is just a disgusting pollutant.  And, no, it doesn’t have any mystical or supernatural properties‒nothing does.  But it can invoke a metaphorical demon in me.

I hate people doing crap like that, at least once they know it is a scent that nauseates me (or anyone else).  But then, I’ve become pretty misanthropic over time, so to a good first approximation, I hate everyone, at least part of the time.  I don’t think I used to be this way.  What’s more, I don’t just have antipathy toward humans, but often tend toward pan-antipathy, which is not hatred of bread (though it includes it) but hatred of everything.

When one hates everything, one can either work to try to destroy everything‒which is a bit of a tall order if one does not have the Infinity Gauntlet‒or one can simply try to escape from everything, either temporarily or permanently.  Admittedly, the notion of “escape” can make it seem like something cowardly to some people who are insecure in their own courage, or who worry what other people think despite hating them.  But that isn’t terribly consistent, logically.

I’m tired.  It’s early morning, and I’m just now on the way to the office, and I’m already so very tired.  I don’t know what to do.  Every day it feels harder to continue.  What’s the point of it?  One thing or another is always frustrating, and very little is rewarding anymore.  I even tried to tempt myself with ice cream or cookies or Pop tarts at the convenience store on the way back to the house last night, but I couldn’t get interested.  I forced myself to get a candy bar in hopes of getting some indulgent, good feeling, but it was just disappointing.

Oh, well.  Life is inherently unsatisfying, as the Buddhists say.  I’m tired of it.

Maybe I’ll get hit by a car or get hit by lightning or something along those lines.  Or maybe I’ll get severely ill, or have a heart attack or a stroke.  It would be nice to have it all taken out of my hands so I don’t have to keep trying.

I don’t know what to do.  And I’m tired, so I’m stopping this post now.  Have a good day.

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Phoning in yet another blog post

Well, here it is, Friday, and I’m writing another blog post.  I’m doing this one on my phone, because I didn’t feel like bringing the laptop with me when I left the office yesterday.  I had to leave late, because all of a sudden, at the end of the day, three different people got deals, and of course they all had to be processed and recorded‒and fixed, when the first 3 credit cards didn’t go through.  Of course, the people who got those deals were long gone well before things were finished; Cat forbid that they should have to leave late just because they waited until the end of the day to actually put in serious effort.  Cat forbid they should worry about inconveniencing other people.

I had hoped to get the 6:15 pm train and then walk back to the house from the train station while talking to my sister on the phone, but that didn’t work out.  By the time I even left the office it was already well past that train’s time, and the next one is 45 minutes later.  I was too tired and stressed out to talk then, and it was too late to start walking.  I didn’t really do any walking yesterday.

This morning, though, I awoke too early, and after putting it off for a while I finally got up and showered and walked the 5 miles to the station.  And now, I’m on the train.  It would be nice to get to the point where I get an endorphin surge from the walk, but evidently I’m not at that stage yet.

I wish I had something more interesting to write about, so you kind readers could have something interesting to read.  Alas, my creativity seems to be at a local nadir.  As mentioned, I haven’t really read anything this week so far, whether fiction or nonfiction, except a few short blog posts and news stories, though I didn’t get to the end even of most of those.  Likewise, I don’t think I’ve listened to a complete podcast nor finished a full YouTube video, though I’ve started quite a few.  Maybe I finished some on Tuesday in the evening, when I got off work early, but I’m not certain.

Anyway, I’m sorry to be such a drag.  I’m not a good or pleasant person, and I doubt that I ever have been.  Certainly most people who know me have voted with their feet in one way or another.  I ought to follow suit, and just walk away from everything, forever, and for good.

I didn’t even listen to any music or podcasts this morning, other than songs that were running through my head‒mainly The Man Who Sold the World and Ashes to Ashes today, though some others probably peeped in here and there.  Nevertheless, I kept my earphones in.  They’re good to have in place so that other people will understand if you don’t speak or listen to them.  You can even bob and sway a bit, if such is your habit, and people might just assume that you’re listening to music.  I don’t know for sure.  It’s hard to say what, if anything, goes through other people’s minds much of the time.

Oh, by the way, I apologize for not putting in hyperlinks to the sites or locations of the books I mentioned yesterday, which I usually do.  I didn’t really do any of my final usual edit on the site, because I just didn’t care.  I apologize, but I probably will behave similarly today.

Also, by the way, there seems to be some issue with the embedded Twitter sidebar on my site.  It claims I haven’t tweeted anything, which is a damned lie.  Evidently, the twit who now owns Twitter, and the twits he has running it, have fucked it up and made it difficult to connect to it.  If it gets annoying enough for me, I might explore how to fix the embedding, but I’m irritated enough at WordPress themselves for changing their input system for the worse.  This is the problem with constantly trying to update and change everything out of a sense of worry over competition:  while all improvement is change, most change is not an improvement.

Oh, well.  People are stupid.  They probably always will be stupid.  Even the very wealthy and successful are generally idiots, as we see demonstrated all too often.  Even bloggers (such as I) are often idiots, if you can believe such a thing!  No matter how smart someone may be, relative to, say, insects or baboons, or their fellow naked house apes, ignorance is always infinite.

And, on that uplifting note, I’ll stop for today.  It’s at least a shortish post, right?  I hope you all have a nice Friday, and a good weekend.  I expect to be writing a post tomorrow, since I work tomorrow.  I will try not to die before then, since my coworker’s daughter’s first birthday party is tomorrow, and I wouldn’t like to inconvenience him.

Still, there’s only so long I can keep staying alive so as not to cause problems for others.  Goodness knows, most other people don’t seem to have many qualms about inconveniencing me, or anyone else.

Is it any wonder I’m tired of the world?

Anyway, please try to have a nice day.

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Though woe be heavy, yet it seldom sleeps, and they that blog see time how slow it creeps

Hello and good morning.

It’s Thursday, the long-standing day of what was my weekly blog, back when I was writing fiction that almost no one but my family members would ever read on the other days of the week.

I’m writing this at the house, because I decided to take the bus in to the train this morning, because I already feel over-hot and sweaty and, most importantly, quite mentally fatigued.  I thought I’d give myself a short break and do my walking in the evening today.  That way, at least, I don’t have to carry a change of clothes with me to the office and have it drying out in front of my little desktop fan most of the day.  Not that anyone complained—they didn’t.  But it’s mildly irritating.

I’m getting tired of doing this blog, especially the Thursday one, in which I use a Shakespearean quote that I’ve altered to squeeze in some form of the word “blog”.  Then again, I’m getting tired of doing pretty much everything.

I haven’t read anything at all this week, apart from the occasional snippet of a news article.  I have listened to some podcasts—mainly Sean Carroll’s Mindscape—so far this week.  His solo “AMA” podcasts are often better than the ones in which he interviews someone, though I’ve encountered some interesting people through the latter podcasts, and have bought books by them.  Still, I did that far more often for people on the Sam Harris podcast.  I’m not sure why that is.  Maybe I just have more in common thought-wise with Harris, or I tend to find his guests more interesting.

Still, I like the AMA’s for both of them, the ones for Carroll because he is a physicist, and so people ask him many physics-related questions.  He has more than enough expertise to address them, and he’s a good explainer and thinker.  I think in some ways that Sam Harris is a more careful thinker, a more methodical and cautious one; his long-standing meditation practice seems to serve him well in this.  He strikes me as almost Vulcan in character, though not in any straightforward, simplistic, “emotionless” sense.  In any case, I admire both men and like to listen to their thoughts and listen to their interactions with other intelligent people about interesting topics.

I have Sean Carroll’s textbook on General Relativity, Spacetime and Geometry, but I haven’t read very far in it.  It’s not that it’s too difficult; it’s well written, and everything so far makes good sense and seems clear.  But I just have a hard time forcing myself to go through it, or anything else, really.  I have the book at the office, like I have Zee’s Quantum Field Theory, As Simply As Possible, but I have to sit and actually read them, and there is no good time period during which to sit uninterrupted, even during my supposed lunch time.  And by the time I get back to the house—or early in the morning—I’m all but completely out of mental energy.

I also have Stephen Hawking’s book Euclidean Quantum Gravity (co-written with G.W. Gibbons) that supposedly goes into more detail on some ideas he mentioned in A Brief History of Time, and I’ve also hardly read any of that.  But, again, this week I really haven’t read anything, fiction or nonfiction.  I’m really running out of steam.  Nothing is very interesting.  Nothing is very fun.  I feel mentally exhausted, even though I’m getting more physically fit.  It’s just all very boring.

Maybe it would be better if I weren’t in pain every day, or if I had someone with whom I could really talk about things like physics and whatnot, on a regular basis.

I don’t know where I’m going with this.  Well, I’m going nowhere, of course, but that’s more long term.

Maybe I should just Uber to the office, so I don’t even need to walk to the bus stop.  Why not?  It’s not as though there’s any reason for me to save money.  I have no future for which to plan or prepare.

I feel a bit like Colonel Slade (I think that was his name) in Scent of a Woman, in that I might as well just spend whatever I have on minor diversions.  I have no interest in most of things in which he was interested, of course—no interest in Ferraris or escorts or fancy restaurants in Manhattan, or the Waldorf-Astoria.  I also have no interest in or expectation to find some high school student to walk me around—thankfully, I am not blind—nor to save my life in dramatic and touching movie-style fashion.

Also, of course, though I do appreciate and enjoy Jack Daniels whiskey from time to time—it’s probably my favorite hard liquor—I do not have a drinking problem, unlike the good Colonel, and I rather quickly get tired of alcohol on the occasions when I do drink it.  I could see myself getting habituated to Valium, in principle—the two times I actually took it, for medical reasons, are the only times in my life when I recall feeling “normal” and at ease in my skin—but I understand the nature of that process, and that such habituation would lead to feeling even worse in between doses.

In any case, I have no access to Valium (or any of its relatives), and have no intention to seek it out.  I wouldn’t trust “black market” Valium even if I knew where to look for it.

Of course, one might well ask, if I don’t really care if I live or die, what does it matter if I take something that isn’t actually Valium?  Well, if I were to be seeking Valium, it would be to try to experience that sense of feeling normal, perhaps for a third and final time in my life, and it would be terribly disappointing to get the wrong thing.  This is a situation in which it is better never to have loved at all than to have loved and lost, so to speak.

Anyway, I’m tired, and this blog post is already longer than I meant it to be.  This week has felt like a million years already.  So much for Pink Floyd’s line “every year is getting shorter”.  Of course, I understand that phenomenon, and I have experienced what is being described in the song.  But lately, time is moving more and more slowly, from a subjective point of view.  I’m dragging my feet, but the sun still just doesn’t keep up, and it certainly doesn’t feel as if it’s racing around to come up behind me again.

Of course, unless I’m secretly immortal, which seems ridiculously unlikely, it is certainly true that I am “one day closer to death” every day, as are we all.  But it still could be a comparatively long way off, at least if I leave it to its own devices.  If I do that, and experience life as I have been for so long, and if I live even only twenty more years (which would still have me die younger than either my mother or father, neither of whom had exercise habits or practices such as I do), it would seem a horrible semi-eternity.

I know, “semi-eternity” doesn’t actually make sense.  It’s akin to multiplying infinity times zero—it’s not a well-defined operation, mathematically.

I did invent a “number” in the past, which I called a “gleeb” for no particular reason, that when multiplied by zero would produce 1, making it, in a sense, “bigger” than infinity, or at least different.  I even worked out a little of the implicit algebra of the gleeb, during some down-time in the education department at FSP West.  It was silly, and it certainly wasn’t useful for any mathematical purposes, but when you realize that it implies that 1/0=gleeb, or 1/gleeb=0, and then start putting those identities into equations and the like, you can get some surprising and amusing results, such as that a gleeb raised to any positive power is just still a gleeb, and that the gleeb is, in a sense, the reciprocal of zero—though again, there’s no use or rigor to it.

Anyway, that’s that.  I want to go back to bed and try to go to sleep, but I’m not going to do that.  I work today, tomorrow, and Saturday, and it’s my coworker’s daughter’s first birthday tomorrow, so I wouldn’t want to interfere with his family’s enjoyment of that.  So, there it is.  I will need to survive until next week at least.  I don’t know if I’ll make it until next Thursday, but I expect I’ll at least write a post a day for the next two days, because that’s just me doing what I do every day.  I hope you have a good remainder of your week, whoever you are that is reading this.

TTFN

tardis-doctor-who

by

I’m not tiptoeing but I’m walking a fair amount

Okay, well, it’s Wednesday morning, and I’m sitting at the train station, having timed my walk nicely to make me just miss the 6:10 train, so that I wouldn’t feel compelled to try to rush to catch it.  When I saw it arrive at the station, which I did, I was a bit too far away to have been able to catch it even had I sprinted.  So, my timing was good.

I’ve been walking to the station every morning this week, including yesterday*, which means that, as of now, I’ve walked roughly thirty miles since Saturday.  That’s no world record or anything, of course—a person in excellent condition could probably walk about thirty miles a day, if that were all they were doing, leaving plenty of time for rest breaks and sleep.  But it’s an improvement for me, at least.  Though I’ve had to adjust my wardrobe, bringing a full change of clothes with me, because by the time I get to the office, I look as though I’ve been swimming, I’ve sweated** so much.  As I think I mentioned before, I carry those little “scent bomb” sprays so I don’t offend anyone around me with my smell, and I’m reliably told that, at least in the short term, my sweat doesn’t actually smell too bad, which is not exactly high praise.

I changed the high E-string on my black Strat on Monday afternoon***, and I even played a little after that.  Nothing serious, it was just nice to hear the sound of the new string, and it was good to feel the stupid sense of pride in accomplishment in having changed it.  That’s rather pathetic, but I guess that should surprise no one, least of all me.

I’ve been wearing bilateral spandex supports both on my knees and my ankles, as I think I mentioned earlier this week.  This seems to be helping to minimize the degree to which the walking exacerbates my back pain, which is a hugely important consideration.  The fact that it helps also raises questions about the specific things that have caused the triggering of worsening back pain at other times when I did not use bilateral supports.

I’m not using back supports, of course—when I was first dealing with my back problems, I rapidly concluded that back braces are worse than useless, at least for me.  But certainly, having a side-to-side differential in the way one walks can produce an irregular torque on one’s lower back that could easily stimulate worsening pain, especially when repeated over a five to six mile walk, which is, after all, about 13,000 steps.

Anyway, that’s about all that’s going on with me.  I didn’t do anything to celebrate the holiday yesterday, other than to write my related post and to get off work early.  I didn’t sleep particularly well, even for me, because I kept waking up throughout the night thinking that someone was knocking at my door, only to realize quickly that it was just the sound of moderately distant fireworks going off.  There were even people still setting off fireworks when I got up this morning and when I was walking to the train station.

I remember when I was very young that fireworks and related loud noises terrified me horribly, or maybe not so much terrified as just elicited a profound displeasure.  Some of my earliest memories are of being overwhelmed by the noise of fireworks, and of having to be carried (screaming) out of the showing of The Three Caballeros cartoon at Disney World once they started shooting their guns.  I’m still not a big fan of noise, especially chaotic noise (though I like fireworks now for their appearance), and if it were not for the fact that I love music, I think I would happily try to make myself deaf.

Of course, I am enjoying listening to podcasts and audio books while walking, so I would lose that if I were deaf, but it’s not as though such things are crucial.  On Saturday, during my 6.7 mile walk back from the movie theater, I didn’t listen to anything, and that wasn’t a problem.  In fact, thinking back to my above comment about someone walking thirty miles a day, I don’t see how one could listen to something for such a long time without their battery running out quite early in the process.  Walking thirty miles has to take on the order of ten hours (or more), and I’m not sure that anyone’s cell phone could play e-books or podcasts or music for that long, or even close.

Maybe silence is just better.

Anyway, it’s never truly silent, because I’m always listening to tinnitus in my right ear.  But that’s just one of those things.  Even if I were to develop full hearing loss I might still have that tinnitus, like an amputee with phantom limb pain.  If that were the only sound, and I didn’t hear all the stupid noise of people talking at the office and so on, I think it might be worth it.

Well, that’s enough for today.  I don’t think I’ve said or written anything of any use to anyone, but that’s pretty much par for the course for me.  I’m not looking forward to work today, nor am I looking forward to leaving work at the end of the day, nor to much of anything else.

I hope you feel otherwise than I do, though.  I wouldn’t want to try to convince anyone else to feel dysthymic or depressed or to be in despair.  I don’t admire foolish or delusional optimism, of course, but reasonable positivity is hard to denigrate if one is being honest.  I wish I were built to be that way, but it just doesn’t seem to be the case, though it can be quite irritating when one feels rotten.

Oh, well.  There’s no place to ask for a refund or replacement for the suboptimal product that I am.  All I can do is lodge my complaint, as I’m doing here, in case someone out there might be able to fix me, or at least so that no one out there is too surprised if I finally succumb to my mental issues, which could happen pretty much any day, honestly.  I’m more or less always seriously mentally uncomfortable, and it wears me out, and there’s really nothing happening in my life that compensates for it.

I want rest, or at least I want oblivion.  I guess we all have that waiting at some point.

*We worked yesterday for half a day, in case I didn’t mention that during my post.

**That doesn’t feel like a proper word.  The past tense of “sweat” feels like it should be just “sweat”.  However, Word’s spell-checking function is not highlighting “sweated”, so that probably means it’s the standard past tense of that verb.  Weird.

***That was the string I broke when I kicked the guitar in intense frustration (not related to the guitar) a few weeks or so earlier.  I tend to take my frustration out on things that I’ve created or that are important to me, largely because I feel that I have a right to do so, but also because I tend to direct my anger inwardly.  Whenever I get angry, I tend to divert much of it to myself in response to the simple fact that I’ve allowed myself to be angry.  It makes me feel pathetic and weak and that I’m a horrible person.  So I’ll tear up music that I’ve written, or drawings, or other similar personal expressions of creativity, and if I can’t do that, I’ll break things that have some importance to me, and if that doesn’t work, I may just directly hurt myself.  Of course, in kicking the Strat, I covered both of the latter—my right big toe was almost certainly fractured, because it’s still sore even weeks later.  That’s okay.  Fractured toes are just things that need time to heal (not heel).