Author: Robert Elessar

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The deep of night is crept upon our blog, and Nature must obey necessity.

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, the 27th of April, the week after my son’s birthday, and I’m already in the office as I write this blog post‒because I never left the office last night.  It got to be late enough that, if I caught the next train, I probably wouldn’t have reached the house before nine, whether I took the bus(es) from the train station or walked.  That is what happened Monday night and Tuesday night.

Of course, If I’d had the bike at the train station I might have reached the house earlier, but I didn’t, and I don’t regret that.  Given that every time I ride that bike, it triggers a flare and a new (but not improved) alteration of my back and leg and foot pain, I think I’m going to keep it for “special occasions” or something like that, even though I’ll be paying for it for three or four more months or something like that.

Pretty pathetic, isn’t it?

Even if I’d caught an earlier train, I don’t think I would have had the energy to get back to the house from the train station, and had I reached the house, I don’t think I would’ve had the energy to come back to the office this morning.  I had sort of planned all along to stay here, because if I went back to the house, I didn’t think I’d be coming in today, and I wasn’t sure if I would be coming in ever again (if you know what I mean).  I guess maybe it was a kind of semi-conscious self-preservation thing, in a way.  But, of course, that can’t work forever.

It’s not a big deal if I stay one night in the office.  It’s not like it will produce a noticeable effect, outwardly.  I always wear one of 2 kinds of black shirts, the same kind of black pants (or trousers if you prefer), the same brand of black socks and one of three brands of black shoes.  Once you find something that’s comfortable for you, I say, you might as well wear that.

I prefer black because you don’t have to worry about matching anything; black goes with everything, particularly other black things.  It’s also a nice, outward representation of my character, my heart, my outlook, what have you.  And if I ever have to pass as a Sith Lord, I can do that.  I only wear black nowadays.  Even my underwear(!).

In any case, though, I don’t mean to stay at the office tonight, though if there were a shower here I might be tempted.  I feel very grimy and sticky, and that’s a particularly unpleasant feeling for me.  But it is dreary to have the daily ritual of going back to a place that feels no more like home than does the office or the train, and not much more like home than the bus, frankly.

Nothing feels like home, anymore.  The planet Earth doesn’t feel like home‒not that it ever really has, to be honest.

I find myself strangely envying my former coworker who just died.  That may seem insensitive, but it’s simply true.  He didn’t die instantly, with the initial heart attack, which sometimes happens.  He had a few weeks or more of being ill and having all other responsibilities taken away, and his family (and friends), aware of his ill health, got to come and be near him for one last time.  That might be nice.  I sometimes think that, if I were known to be dying of cancer (for instance), maybe my children would come and see me.

I don’t know what other sort of thing might engender that outcome, and I certainly don’t want to try to force my way into their lives.  They deserve autonomy and to be free from my odious self, who already screwed up everything in his own life, and caused them pain in the process.  But I would dearly love to spend time with them.

Of course, I do have a potentially terminal condition, and I don’t just mean “life itself” which is uniformly terminal as far as we can see.  I mean depression.  Depression has a direct lifetime mortality rate of about 15%, or at least that was the statistic the last time I checked.  That’s not counting the many things depression makes one more likely to have‒people with depression are more prone to various kinds of physical illnesses and to worse outcomes if they get those illnesses, and they are also more prone than others to drug and alcohol problems.

But I’m talking here about direct self-destruction: suicide, from the Latin “sui” meaning self, and the “cide” part that always means killing, as in fungicide, herbicide, insecticide, anthropocide, etc.  “Suicide” almost feels like it ought to be the opposite of “sui generis” but that’s not correct, and in fact they probably often go together, subjectively speaking.  Maybe it would be the opposite of “sui genesis”.  Could it also be called “sui exodus”?

Anyway, my point is that depression has mortality rates comparable to many cancers, but there are no Ronald McDonald houses for it (as far as I know).  It’s not a sexy/tragic/dramatic disorder worthy of Hallmark movies and that kind of twaddle.  It just sucks all around, because its very nature is to suck and to make everything in the universe feel like it sucks.  Maybe in this it’s like the very curvature of spacetime; tending to bend inward on itself and collapse, unless it is infused with a uniform, positive energy, in which case there will be a tendency to expand.

Believe me, I don’t have a uniform positive energy.  Maybe I used to, but my cosmological constant has long since quantum tunneled into a vacuum state so close to zero that it makes that of the universe, tiny as it is, appear flipping gargantuan.  I don’t know if I have a negative cosmological constant, which would make a kind of human anti de Sitter space.  Then I would collapse rapidly, which might be nice in and of itself.  Also, you could mathematically demonstrate the holographic principle on me using certain areas of string theory.

Maybe the state of suffering from depression is rather like being a human anti de Sitter space.  And the speed of collapse depends on how large the negative lambda is, but collapse is inevitable unless it changes signs.

Incidentally, it appears that people on the autism spectrum‒which I suspect I am, though I don’t have an “official”* diagnosis‒suffer from depression, including chronic depression AKA persistent depressive disorder AKA dysthymia (which I do have), at a significantly higher rate than the general population, are harder to treat, and also, if I recall, are more likely to commit suicide, and certainly to engage in self-harm.

I could have told you that.  Wait, I just did!

Okay, well, that’s more than enough for this Thursday.  I don’t know what I’ll do tomorrow or the next day.  I’m scheduled to work on those days, and I suppose I will, since I don’t like to inconvenience the people around me.  But as I told a coworker yesterday, I’ve been staying alive for quite a long time mainly just not to inconvenience other people, and there’s only so much longer I’m going to be able to do it.  I don’t have any other drive to stay alive; there is nothing to which I look forward.  I’m tired.  Sleeping on the floor in the office is no worse than sleeping at the house, but that’s not saying much at all.

Someday, perhaps soon, my sign off on a Thursday will be “TT” rather than TTFN, because I won’t expect to return.  But for now, the expression remains:

TTFN

ads space ish

*It’s an odd notion, the “official” diagnosis of anything.  I mean, it’s useful for things like insurance and statistics and science, and certainly there is some value in the judgment of experts on such matters, but it is not something handed down from Mount Sinai (the medical school or the Ten Commandments place).  No one can speak ex cathedra on medical diagnoses, or on any fact of nature, frankly.  So don’t put too much stock in them**.

**Unless it’s good chicken stock.  Good chicken stock is tasty.

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“…and we sang dirges in the dark…”

I’m writing this on my phone again, today, because it’s still a relief not to have to carry the laptop.  I wouldn’t have thought it would make such a big difference, since the computer really is quite light, but the subjective experience is a notably easier feeling‒physically, at least.

I had to run a bit across some major roads to try to catch a connecting bus last night, because the first one was 35 minutes late, and it was good not to have the minor bit of weight in my back when doing that.  Of course, now, today, my back and hips and legs are aching more than usual, probably as a consequence* of that running.  It’s not the muscles that are the problem, though they do spasm up in response to the pain.  It’s the joints and the nerves.

Speaking of that, I’m not sure why typing on the phone isn’t giving me more trouble than it is.  Maybe my thumb joints have adapted after the initial use back a few months ago, or maybe I’ve adapted my typing style.  Or perhaps the problem is still coming, and I just haven’t been doing this often enough for long enough yet to trigger the inevitable flare-up.  I guess I’ll soon find out if it’s the latter, though even if I don’t get an exacerbation, it’ll be hard to differentiate between those first two hypotheses.

It’s not really important, I guess.

I haven’t been riding my bike, as I’ve said before, and I don’t think I’m probably going to be riding it.  It’s been too clear from the timing and the specificity of outcomes that it was triggering both pain exacerbations and postural adjustments that interfered with my sleep.  I can’t lose more sleep than I already do, and I already have enough pain** every day.

I literally feel fear at the thought of riding the bike because of the clarity and certainty of those outcomes.  It’s a shame and a waste…but then again, so am I, so I guess that’s fair enough.  I’ll just walk and take the bus until something kills me.

Speaking of that, it seems one of the people who used to work at our office, and who had recently had a heart attack at a rather young age, died yesterday, in the hospital.  One of the people at the office rents a room from him and he was devastated by the news.

I won’t give names, but the former worker was an electro-pop musician in slightly earlier days, and though his stuff isn’t really my kind of music, it was really quite good.  He wrote and performed it, and had albums and everything.  One of his songs was used in a movie.  So, he was the real deal, if not truly a big star or anything.

He said he really liked my song Breaking Me Down, and that if a slightly shorter version of it had been released in the 70s, it might have been a hit.  He also said he was impressed with my guitar playing on my “baddish” cover of Street Spirit (Fade Out), but that the vocals didn’t sound great***.

It’s very sad that he died so young, particularly for the guy who rented from him, because they were friends in addition to being “landlord/tenant”.

We’ve had a surprising number of people die who worked in or used to work in the office since I’ve been there.  It’s not my fault (I think) nor the fault of the business.  Of course, when I was in medical practice I saw a lot more people die, but that’s the nature of adult medical care.  Still, it’s also kind of sad.

Well, it’s very sad.  These are people who‒as far as I know‒did not actually want to die, and yet they did.  And here I am, ironically relatively healthy apart from my chronic pain and my mood disorder(s) and whatnot.

I would say that it’s hard to make sense of it, but that’s not really true.  It’s just that the universe isn’t set up such that the laws of mortality apply relative to one’s desire to live.  Biology leads us to tend to want to stay alive and have offspring, and after that, whatever happens is really just stochastic and erratic, and an adult human body is like an empty seed pod that lingers on a branch past all use once the age of reproduction has gone.

And I think to myself, “What a wonderful world.”****

I really don’t think I’m going to be able to go on much longer.  By which I don’t mean this blog, though of course that is subsumed in the larger subject matter; I mean I don’t know how much longer I’ll be able to continue living.  There’s really nothing to which I look forward, short or long term.  I don’t look forward to getting up and going to work, I don’t look forward to coming back to the house and going to bed.  I don’t look forward to meals or drinks.  There are no shows or movies I’m awaiting‒I’ve become more or less indifferent to the Doctor Who specials and new series that are coming later this year, and the new Guardians of the Galaxy movie also doesn’t particularly spark my interest.  All the new Star Wars related crap seems just to be blah at best.

I wish there were some book series I was reading that was enticing, whether new or old, but I still can’t seem to read fiction anymore, which is a truly hellish turn of events for me.  Reading fiction was always my refuge, my joy, my escape.  Not anymore.

There is some interesting nonfiction, which I usually tend to seek out after hearing someone on a podcast with Sam Harris or Sean Carroll, but the podcasts are getting boring, and I haven’t finished the last 3 books I’ve gotten under those circumstances.

It’s like the line in the Beatles song I Don’t Want to Spoil the Party: “There’s nothing for me here, so I will disappear.”  She’s not going to turn up while I’m gone‒whoever the metaphorical “she” is‒so there’s no need to worry about letting me know.

I’m so tired and in pain and depressed and I really, really hate myself.  I wish I would have a heart attack, or develop cancer, or catch pneumonia, or something like that.  In my case, it would have no serious, life-altering repercussions for anyone, though I’m sure there are those who might find it sad.

There are sweet, kindly, compassionate people out there, after all, and my family members and some of the people who know me are among their number.  They would be sad over the deaths of anyone they know, and particularly family members‒as I am sad over the death of my former coworker‒and it’s good that people feel that way, I guess.  But death is the guaranteed payoff of life, after all, for everyone. It really feels like it would be better just to skip to the end.

*If you can have a consequence, why is there no sinquesence or perhaps sansquesence?

**One might even be inclined to say that I have too much pain every day, but let’s not be reckless.

***He wasn’t wrong, though I’m not sure if he meant my voice itself didn’t sound great, which it didn’t‒I had recently had Covid, and was not fully recovered‒or just that the recording of it was not great, which is fair enough, since I don’t have a studio or high quality recording equipment or mixing equipment or anything.  Possibly he meant both.

****Sarcasm.

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Can one exaggerate the dangers of “mental health”?

Well, here I am again, writing a blog post on my phone, because I didn’t feel like toting my mini* laptop around.

It was really rather pleasant not to have to carry it at all yesterday.  Even after I picked up a seltzer and some minor dinner items at a convenience store between two buses on the way back to the house last night, the load was minor.  Despite my light burden, however, I didn’t walk from the train station, as should be obvious from the fact that I mentioned two buses; it was simply too late in the evening.  As it was, I didn’t get back to the house until just before nine.

It’s a glitzy, glamorous life I lead, I know, but don’t envy it.  You don’t see the struggles I face when out of the limelight.

Actually, I guess you do “see” a lot about them if you read my blog regularly.  You don’t see all of them, of course.  Even I am not quite so indiscreet as all that.  But you certainly know about some of my difficulties with depression.

With that in mind, I must (and do) apologize to StephenB for my extra-gloomy reply to his comment yesterday.  I think he was trying to perk me up with a little good-natured humor, playing on my words in a way that skillfully echoed how I played on them, but I just doubled down on the doom and gloom.  That’s one of my greatest skills.  It might be innate enough for me to consider it a talent, or even a fundamental attribute of my being.  Maybe it’s just my nature, my design (or design flaw) always to feel self-hateful.  I don’t know.

I do wonder what it would feel like to love myself.  Much is made in literature and spiritual inquiry and religious teaching about the danger of self-love**.  Certainly, in public discourse we see frequent reminders of the perils of narcissism.  The generally believed notion seems to be that everyone loves his or her own person more than they do anyone else.

But the Judeo-Christian admonition to love one’s neighbor as oneself is very bad advice for me.  I’ve always tended to feel more positive and generous in spirit toward other people than toward myself.  Cat forbid I should view other people as dimly and darkly as I view myself.

I’m reminded of a line from a Monty Python sketch in which some TV criminologist, played (if memory serves) by Graham Chapman, says, “After all, a murderer is only an extroverted suicide.”  It would be very bad, or at least not very positive, for my “neighbors” if I started to “love” them as I do myself.  I have become more prone to misanthropy over the years, and even edge toward pro-mortalism, but I recognize this as probably irrational and born of my mental illness, as it were.

Incidentally, I’m puzzled by a recent apparent shift toward referring not to mental illness but rather to using “mental health” when one is actually referring to what would previously have been called “mental illness”.  We live in a world in which people say things along the lines of “we have a growing problem of mental health” or “if you’re troubled with mental health…”*** or similar phrases.  I wish I could think of a specific example.  But it’s weird because mental health is not a problem, it’s the lack thereof.

Tiptoeing around words to avoid upsetting people by naming the fact that an illness is an illness and a problem does not seem like a healthy thing to do, as far as I can see.  If you’re afraid of words, how are going to deal with actual illness, actual pain, actual, physical danger?  Not too well, I would guess.

Speaking of actual pain, I’m at least somewhat pleased to note that my thumb pain doesn’t seem to have been too badly exacerbated by writing my post on my phone yesterday.  This obviously influenced my decision to do it again today.  I may come to regret this choice, but my future selves often get pissed at my past selves.  My past selves don’t really have to trouble with that fact, though, because they aren’t around to have to face the consequences of their actions.

Bastards.

I guess I’ll just have to wait to find out if I have troubles from doing this.  Some form of trouble will always come, of course; that’s the nature of the universe.  But I may or may not avoid this specific one.

Meanwhile, I’m having a hard time staying motivated or disciplined even to go to work.  I won’t just slack off, because I don’t want to cause unnecessary trouble for the people at the office, and for my boss, and so on.  I’ve never been any good at doing things for me, really, but I do find it distasteful to be rude to other people or to let them down.

I’ve always tried to live for other people in some sense, but it’s left me prone to real problems when either other people get fed up with me‒which tends to happen‒or when other people take advantage of me because I like to work hard and be productive and be appreciated, and try to relieve suffering when I can.  Sometimes that ends up landing me in prison, while people who took advantage stay free and clear and go on about their lives.  Certainly I was the one who bore the brunt of that situation, the one to which I am not-so-obliquely referring.  I still am bearing it.

Apparently, this sort of thing happens to people with ASD with some frequency.  This is another clue that’s caused me to sneak myself toward the suspicion that I might be “on the spectrum”.  I doubt that I’ll ever get an official diagnoses****‒the process is expensive and not easily entered by adults, especially ones who are, on paper, successful, or who at least have been in the past.

Also, frankly, there doesn’t seem to be much benefit in America, certainly in Florida, to receiving a diagnosis of ASD as an adult.  It’s not as if I’d be able to get disability benefits, and even if I could, such benefits are laughably inadequate.  So, what would be the point?  Better our nation should spend its cultural energy arguing about what terms are harmful and should be avoided at universities or should never be mentioned in a public school or whatever, right?

That was sarcasm, just to be clear.  Yes, my self-hatred is beginning to leak out onto my “neighbors”.  Should it ever fully escape containment, that would be a direr catastrophe than Fukushima and Chernobyl combined.

Okay, that was wildly hyperbolic, I admit it.  But who doesn’t appreciate equations like y=1/x?

And with that very bad, very nerdy joke, I’ll begin to end this blog post.  If I’m still alive and still able to do it, I’ll write more tomorrow.  Don’t get your hopes up: I probably won’t die today.  More’s the pity, right?

hyperbolic speech

This is the most important diagram of all time in the entire universe.

*This has nothing to do with the Mini Cooper or Cooper Mini car, or whatever the proper way to name it is.  Although, I think it would be rather cool if they made a small laptop with their logo and design or something, as a promotional thing.  Though that would probably have a very limited market.

**People even used to think it could make you go blind or grow hair on your palms.  Ha.  Ha.

***I’m quite sure I’ve literally heard that phrase.  “Troubled with mental health”?  I wish I were so troubled.  I’m troubled by a lack of mental health.

****Though I do carry “official” diagnoses of depression and dysthymia, from more than once source.

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Enter freely and of your own will. No need to wipe your shoes.

Well, it’s Monday morning again, and here I am, writing yet another blog post for unclear reasons (though at least they are not nuclear reasons).  I’m writing this on my phone today, because I didn’t bring my mini laptop back to the house this weekend.  I want to say that I forgot it, but that’s not true.  I didn’t forget it.  I willfully chose not to bring it back with me because I just didn’t feel like dealing with it.

It’s not as though it weighs a lot or anything, though I can tell the difference when it’s not in my backpack.  I just didn’t want to bother, either with carrying it or with opening it and using it on my lap in the train (and at the bus stop).  It puts an irritating strain on my knees, because of the way I have to sit to prop it up.  Also, honestly, I’m kind of sick of toting it around.  It’s not as though I’m likely to write any more fiction on it, or on anything else, ever again (and I don’t exactly hear anyone complaining about that).

There are many more stories I could write, the ideas for which I wrote in long note entries on prior cellphones.  And I still find story ideas occurring to me with noticeable frequency, especially when curious coincidences occur.  But I don’t write those ideas down anymore.

I don’t write blog post ideas down, either, because I don’t bother with any coherent, unified theme or context when I write a blog post.  It is a “web log”, so it’s a log, a journal of sorts, and in its purest form, it’s just a recording of thoughts.

Sorry, everyone.  It must be, at best, a mixed blessing to read my thoughts.

Anyway, I’m writing this on my phone, on Google Docs, and I hope it doesn’t cause too much pain in my thumbs, but if it does…oh, well.  It’s better than the flare-up of back pain I have just from riding my bike to 7-11 yesterday (a total of 3 miles), my first time riding it in several days, because of the rain.

I think I’m going to have to give up on using even this comparatively comfortable bike.  It’s been pretty stress-inducing right from the start and every time I use it my pain increases.  I never should have bothered with it.  I probably shouldn’t buy any new things ever again.  They’re all more stressful than beneficial.

I’m barely able to cope with day-to-day minor tasks like brushing my teeth or changing my clothes or any of that‒though I do those things because I have to do them.  And going to work is a pain, too, but as long as I can’t eliminate the drive to eat and drink to stay alive (I am working to try to get over that) I have to go to work.

Speaking of that, I’ve been writing the beginning of this at the house, still, so I don’t have to dilly-dally at the bus stop (and maybe need to use the restroom while waiting, and have to wait until I’m on the train).  So, I’ll pause here, and put in a little gap marker, and resume this at the bus stop.  See you there.

***

Okay, here I am at the bus stop, and I’m still half an hour early, because I misjudged how long it would take me to get here and so forth.  Also, to be more precise, or more complete, I’m not at the usual bus stop, but at the one up the street from it.  Coming later than usual had at least one noticeable effect, and that’s that someone was sitting at the other stop already.  The bench there isn’t very big, and I didn’t want to sit too close to some stranger while writing, but I definitely wanted to sit, because my back is really annoying me.

Sorry to complain so much all the time.  I feel as though the only thoughts I have and the only words I can say‒the only truth about me in general‒is a collection of negative opinions, negative thoughts, negative feelings, and pains.  It’s really frustrating, and I’m sure it must be frustrating to those of you who read this blog.  Then again, I guess you choose to read it, so maybe there’s something interesting in it.

Perhaps it’s a bit like looking at a car crash beside the road as you’re driving.  I’ll grant that, for a long time, my life has definitely been a prolonged and catastrophic wreck.  And the accident is not over yet.  I keep hoping for the gasoline to leak and for a spark to make it catch fire and explode.

I really hate my life, in case you couldn’t tell.  I hate it.  I’m so tired and in pain, and worn down and alone, and lonely but unable to reach out to people because I seem to have lost my social skills, such as they were, and anyway, I don’t feel I have any right to burden anyone else with my heaping pile of shit.

That’s a metaphor, by the way, in case it wasn’t clear.  I don’t literally have a heaping pile of shit.  I use toilets just like pretty much everybody else.  I just mean, more or less, that my life is a heaping pile of shit, that I am a heaping pile of shit.  You get the idea, I guess.  You probably didn’t need me to explain it to you.

I don’t even like to listen to music much anymore, and I certainly don’t play any music.  I tried reading some fiction this weekend, but I couldn’t even make it through a Stephen King short story‒I tried several.  I also didn’t make it through a single movie, though I got through one or two comedy panel shows on YouTube and some “reaction” videos to Doctor Who episodes, though I had seen the episodes and the reaction videos before.

I should wrap this up, now.  I mean the blog post, of course…but I also mean my life.  I should wrap it up.  Put it in a take-away bag and give it to the stray cats and raccoons and opossums.  I’m so tired.  I don’t expect any rest, but cessation seems enticing.  After all, zero is greater than any negative number, and my overall state is definitely in the negative, and has been so for a long time.  The area under my curve is really the area over my curve, and the integral result just keeps getting to be a larger negative number with every passing moment, for both the experiencing self and the remembering self.

Anyway, the bus will be here soon.  Better go 

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800 words, not including the title

It’s Friday morning.  Those of you reading this first thing after it comes out will already know that, but for any future people* who might be reading, it is the morning of Friday, April 21, 2023, as I’m writing.  Since I don’t work this weekend, I guess it really is one of those “TGIF” days, at least in principle, for me.

I’m not really doing anything this weekend, apart from doing my laundry on Sunday.  I do it every Sunday, because I must.  Other than that, it would be quite nice if I could simply rest.  I would so love to get a good night’s sleep.  It feels as though the time since I had a good night’s rest is longer than the time I’ve been alive, which is, of course, a contradiction, but that just shows how fucking tired I am.  I can’t even convey how tired I am, not really.  Nothing really does it justice.

I’m so tired I feel almost out of breath just walking to the bus stop in the morning.  Of course, there’s always, in principle, the possibility that something more is physically wrong with me than “mere” insomnia**.  But I did walk back to the house from the train station yesterday afternoon, which is five miles, and I had no physical difficulties doing that (other than joint and limb aches and so on), so I don’t think there’s anything significant wrong with my heart and/or lungs.

That’s almost too bad, really.  If it turned out I did have something serious wrong with my heart and/or lungs, I don’t think I would try to get help for it.  What would be the point?  I can’t afford it, anyway.  And why would I be trying to prolong a life that has lost nearly every source of joy and is steadily losing the few such things that remain.

Well, I say “steadily”, but that’s probably not accurate.  I don’t really think that there’s a consistent, gradual process occurring.  There may be sudden drop-offs, and there may be plateaus, and there may be momentary, teasing, cruel bumps upward that serve only to get one’s hopes up in order to take sadistic glee in dashing them.  At least, that would be the case if there were any malicious mind behind the fact that I am losing any interest in anything.  But as far as I can tell, though, there really isn’t any such mind—though one could, I suppose, say that my own mind’s dysfunction is causing it, and that wouldn’t be without justification.

Anyway, the point is, it’s not really a smooth descent curve.  There are bumps and spikes and fractal things, like any graph of measures that have local variance overlying general trends, like stock prices or global temperatures or what have you.

I’m tired.  Have I mentioned that already?  I’m seriously so very tired.  I want to lie down and just stay that way.  I want to be able to sleep.

I think I’m repeating myself here, but honestly, I don’t really care.  I don’t have the energy to care.  So fuck off if you want to try to make me feel guilty or something.

I don’t really have much of anything else to talk about today.  I don’t have any pastimes anymore, I don’t have any nearby friends—I don’t even know if I have any long-distance friends, to be honest.  I don’t have anyone with whom to spend my spare time.  You might think that would give me plenty of time to rest, and I suppose it does give me plenty of time to rest.  Unfortunately, I cannot seem to carry out the process of resting.  I can be idle, but I cannot seem to rest, or at least, I haven’t been able to do so, not for a long time.

I’m so tired of my life.  It’s just not worth the effort to continue it.  It’s mostly pain and stress and loneliness (and yet, in counterpoint, an ironic revulsion toward socializing) and a general feeling of being lost and of having ruined every good thing of which I’ve ever been a part.  Above all, though, there’s just fatigue.  I am just so very tired.

In fifty words, I’ll have reached 800 words in the first draft of this post, and I don’t think I’m going to try for any more, nor will I find it difficult to stop before going beyond that number.  Twelve more words.  Please do have a good weekend.  Bye for now.

words

*Are there flying cars and jet packs yet?  Are you cyborgs or purely artificial beings?  Or are you just the same old naked house apes?

**Is that when a body of water cannot sleep, or when a person cannot sleep near, or on, a lake?  I don’t know.

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Doom’d for a certain term to blog the night and, for the day, confin’d to fast in fires

Hello and good morning.

It’s Thursday, the 20th of April in 2023 (AD or CE, whichever you prefer), and so, here I am at the bus stop, writing my usual blog post.  It’s very exciting, isn’t it?  You can almost feel that paint drying!

I think there is a certain subgroup of people who celebrate this as “420” day, a reference to marijuana, though the origins of that reference are unclear to me*.  Though I find it silly, I guess such a day may as well exist.  There are holidays for every other stupid thing in the world, from various kinds of foods and snacks to alcoholic beverages and all sorts of other things.  I doubt there is a heroin day, but if I were to find out there is, I wouldn’t be surprised.  And, of course, there are geeky, nerdy holidays for people like me, such as Pi Day** and Star Wars Day***.

Much more importantly, it’s my son’s birthday, as I mentioned yesterday.  I sent him a present, of course, though it’s not particularly clever, because honestly, I don’t know what he’s into now or what he would like.  It’s been more than ten years since I’ve seen him in person or even heard his voice.

I’ve sent presents in the past (that’s not an intentional play on words) that matched what I knew his long-term interests were, and they apparently went over well.  But I’ve pretty much emptied my quiver on that front, at least for now, without simply rehashing things I’ve already sent, which seems lamer than sending something broad and generic, at least to me.  But what do I know?  I’m terrible at things like this.

I’m also terrible at things like just getting people to keep wanting to be around me for long.  People don’t end up hating me or anything, at least as far as I can tell; they just don’t ever stick too close to me for very long.  And, of course, I’ve screwed up everything in my life with respect to my children (and their mother) and my career and all that other stuff.

I’m quite good at useless things like teaching myself how to draw and to compose and play music and writing books that almost no one will ever read, and understanding complicated ideas of physics and math and biology and astronomy and medicine and all that stuff.  But regarding the things that have really, deeply mattered to me—being a good son, a good friend, a good husband, a good father—I’ve almost uniformly failed.

The fault is almost certainly all mine.  At the very least, it’s my fault in the sense that “I am a faulty machine”.  There’s definitely some fundamental flaw—and nothing limits the count to only one such flaw—in the way I try to live with the people I love the most, because at various times I’ve lost relationships with my parents, with my wife, with my kids, with friends, all that.  And I’m not the sort of person who can just pick up and restart his life, a so-called new life, with new people.

Even if I were such a person, given my track record, why would I be willing to submit to the risk with new people?  That would definitely be a masochistic choice.

All of my old friends are quite far away, and even with the use of social media, I’m not good at doing long-distance friendships very well.  I don’t quite even know what the protocols are, and I always feel awkward**** about intruding on the lives of other people at any level.  I’ve tended to make my friends in school and university and at work, from among people who had similar interests and tastes and so forth to me, and who were nearby.

I’ve been very lucky in the friends I made in middle-school to high school and in university.  But once I was married, and of course, going to med school and all that, my focus was on those closest by, as it tends to be.  I put a lot of effort into my marriage and my career, which makes sense, of course, and until my own health deteriorated because of my back injury, I handled it pretty well.

But I certainly couldn’t maintain any kind of extended social circle.  That’s not how I’m designed, it seems.  Thankfully, my wife’s family were always very welcoming and warm, and my own extended family has always been wonderful, and my wife had friends with whom we socialized.  But my family is a long way away now—those that remain—and when my wife divorced me, I couldn’t exactly maintain close ties with her family, though they were important to me.  Their loyalty belongs to her, not to me, which makes perfect sense.

Anyway, sorry about all that trivia.  I just feel the emptiness of life particularly strongly today, which is probably understandable.  I have a notion of a metaphorical creature or situation that matches the sense of how I feel and am, but I can’t quite grasp it and put it into words, because I can’t quite think of the life form that fits.  Maybe I’m like a wandering, free-living amoeba that used to be—and ought to be—part of a slime mold?

No, that doesn’t quite work, nor does it really make sense.

I was trying to think of a metaphorical herd animal or pack animal that got separated from its group—a deer, a wolf, a lion, an impala—or maybe an ant or a bee or a termite separated from its swarm, or whatever.  But of course, it’s really just that I’m a simulacrum of a human, a replicant, who is inherently separate from the humans to whom he was supposed to be assigned, still living in a parallel “space” so to speak, but unable to interact directly; and they certainly don’t seem to grok me.

It’s almost like a Star Trek episode, isn’t it?  Or maybe it’s like an X-files or a Supernatural or something:  there’s a poltergeist that’s terrifying or at least horrifying to people, that they want to avoid it or if necessary eliminate it, even though the entity causing the weirdness doesn’t mean any harm.

I wish there were someone who could exorcise me and send me on to the next plane or—better yet—to peaceful oblivion.  But, of course, even more so, I wish that I were able to be part of my kids’ lives, to spend time with them, to be close to them, and to have friends around me, and not to be in pain every day.

While I’m at it, I might as well ask for a pony and for world peace and harmony.

Enough of this.  I’m sorry to subject you all to my morosity.  Then again, no one’s forcing you to read it, I guess*****.  I hope, after reading this post, your day improves.  It’s unlikely to go downhill from here, right?  That, at the very least, is something I can offer you in my daily blog posts:  once you’ve hit rock bottom (i.e. by reading this) the only way to go is up.

TTFN

hamlet and dad

*And, to be fair, I don’t care enough to look into it very vigorously.

**March 14th, because in the US date system it shows up as 3-14.  Seven years ago, it would have been 3-14-16, which would have been especially good, though I don’t recall noting it at the time.

***“May the 4th be with you,” in case you don’t know.  It’s a stretch, but it’s doubly nerdy because of the pun.

****I think it’s particularly appropriate the the spelling of the word “awkward” is so awkward.  W-K-W?  What a peculiar progression of letters!

*****Though I am very, deeply grateful to you for doing so.

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“Ashes and dust and thirst there is, and pits, pits, pits.”

I’m at the bus stop today, because I didn’t feel up to riding the bike this morning.  I almost didn’t feel like riding the bike back from the train station at the end of the day, yesterday, even though that would have meant leaving it in the proven-to-be-unsafe location of the station.  I wouldn’t have worried about that too much, though.  I’ve got two thick cables and a U-lock securing it when it’s there, including one threading through the seat, so vandalism seems more likely than theft.

I did end up riding back to the house last night, but I just didn’t want to ride this morning.  I’m feeling some extra strain and pain in my hips and lower back that may be from riding, and I also just feel like I’m not up to the intensity of exertion it entails.  Walking is more my speed at the moment, and it’s cool enough out—for south Florida, anyway—that certainly the walk to the bus stop isn’t bad.

I may walk back from the train station today rather than take the bus, depending on how I feel.  I know I’ve written before about how much time it uses up, but it’s not as though I do anything better with my time than walk.  Honestly, if I could just avoid my feet feeling sore so often, I’d be fine with walking every day, everywhere.

I didn’t just feel tired yesterday afternoon.  I also felt extremely—I don’t know…stressed, anxious, tense, some word along those lines?  All afternoon, I felt as if I were going to fly apart.  I don’t mean I felt as though I would explode in anger, just perhaps that I might collapse into a ball or something.  I told my coworker, quietly, amidst another conversation, that I felt like I was going to have a nervous breakdown.  I know this is sort of a vague and antiquated term, but it seemed to capture what I felt.  My mind (and body) felt on the verge of shaking apart at the seams.

I still feel like that this morning, though not to as high a level, and it’s probably the main reason I didn’t want to ride my bike.  I also just feel fatigued, mentally and physically.  I’m even sort of out of breath, though that’s mainly a subjective feeling.  I just feel uncomfortable.

I’m very tired of all these negative feelings all the time, but I can’t seem to find many positive ones.  It might help if I had a pet, but I don’t have the wherewithal to take care of a dog because of my schedule, and I’m quite allergic to cats, so that’s not going to work.  I’ve already had the long experience of having a cat, and I had to take allergy meds and decongestants every day for seventeen years.  When I first got the cat, I didn’t know I was allergic, and once I had her, I wasn’t going to get rid of her.  But I can’t put myself in that position again.

Plus, honestly, I can barely take care of myself, and that meager ability is deteriorating day by day.  I don’t have any business trying to bring in and care for any other life form.

Oh, by the way, I didn’t realize it at the time, but yesterday was apparently Adult Autism Awareness Day, though I have no idea in what way it’s celebrated or promulgated or whatever.  Certainly in Florida there are no clear public health resources or supports of any kind for anyone with any kind of chronic, neurodevelopmental issues.

They will happily put you in prison, though.  Our benighted governor even jokes about putting another one of these prisons—as if we were not already overflowing with the shit-holes—on land near where Disney World is, as part of his process of antagonizing and threatening the state’s biggest employer and single biggest bringer of money into the state.  This is in response to the corporation merely making a public statement—you know, exercising a First Amendment right, that thing that even corporations can do, and which the Supreme Court said is why it’s okay for corporations and such to spend oodles of money in support of specific candidates, because that’s a form of speech, and is protected by the First Amendment.

He’s just so interested in the needs and concerns of the people of Florida.  He’s plainly trying to make himself attractive to the hardcore Trump supporters in case he has a run for President, and he’s perfectly willing to sacrifice the interests of the state for which he ran for governor, and to which he has sworn allegiance, willingly, voluntarily, to do it.  These are not the actions of an honorable man (unless I’m reading the situation incorrectly).

So, he fits right in in Tallahassee.  But not in the legitimate workings of the United States of America, as I’ve thought of it most of my life.  And it’s not as though he has the excuse of being ignorant of the US Constitution or the Florida Constitution; he’s an effing lawyer.  He graduated from an elite law school, and he worked for the JAG corps, I think, if memory serves.

Oh, well, I really shouldn’t care.  The people of Florida—at least the ones who are allowed to vote—apparently chose him and the legislators who write these various imbecilic laws.  I rather hope that he either causes the state to be subject to a multi-billion dollar lawsuit from Disney and that then the company leaves the state and the state goes bankrupt and everyone in the future ties its final decline to his idiotic actions.  He’s antagonizing a very large company that brings jobs and income to the state, and he has the temerity to call himself a Republican?

Anyway, that’s neither here nor there, I guess.  It certainly doesn’t have much effect on my non-life.  Everyone on both sides of the thing could burst into flames and die for all I care; the world would probably be a better place.  Then again, the world would probably be a better place if all humans burst into flames and died.  It would briefly raise carbon dioxide levels, but in the long-term, things would improve.

I should probably just put my money where my mouth is and lead by example.  It would be comparatively difficult to get gasoline right now, given recent flooding, but I think I have enough lighter fluid to douse myself quite thoroughly.

I doubt I’d have the courage to do that, though.  I need to find a better way.

In other news, tomorrow is my son’s twenty-third birthday.  It’s been more than ten years since I’ve seen him in person, or spoken with him, though we exchanged one email, more or less.  But he does always send along thanks for his birthday presents and other holiday presents, via his sister.  It’s been just as long since I’ve seen her in person, but I’ve spoken with her briefly on the phone, and we exchange texts and sometimes emails.

I doubt that I’ll ever see either of them again, or hear their voices, let alone spend any real time with them, which is the thing I would most like to do in the world.  They don’t want to do it, it seems, particularly my son, who doesn’t really want any kind of relationship with me.  How could I blame him?  I’ve surely fucked up everything important in my life, and they are the most important part of my life.  I’m no good at taking care of myself, either.

I’m really stressed out and tired and uncomfortable and lonely and confused and overwhelmed—the latter is ironic, because my life is thoroughly empty, so I don’t understand what feels so overwhelming.  But, it is what it is, as they say.  I used to want to conquer the world, and then sometimes I just wanted to destroy it.  Now, though, I just wish to be able to go to sleep and rest.  Why is chronic depression/dysthymia not considered a terminal illness for which one can avail oneself of physician-assisted suicide (not including oneself if one happens to be a physician)?

Well, okay, I guess the answer to that is fairly obvious.  Among other things, the whole nature of the disease calls the possibility of informed consent into question.  But goodness, sometimes the notion of a friendly IV mixture of opiates and benzodiazepines and barbiturates and digitalis sounds like the best, most delicious, most refreshing cocktail I’ve ever imagined.

Oh, well.  I guess I’ll wait a little longer.  It wouldn’t do to have anything happen that might taint the happiness of my son’s future birthday celebrations.  I want nothing but the very best possible life for him and for my daughter.  I wish that included my prominent presence, but maybe no one’s life would or will be made better by having me in it to anything more than a peripheral extent.  I know my life isn’t made better by having me in it.

Well, okay, that doesn’t make sense, does it?  My life is whatever it is, and no matter what state it might be in, it will be that way with me in it, more or less by definition.  But I do suspect that, given my neuropsychiatric characteristics, I am not prone to be a benefit to myself—certainly not when by myself.

Again, “Oh, well.”  I am what I am, I’m my own special…cremation?  Probably not.

ashes and dust

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No less than Moore’s Law

I’m writing today’s post on the train and on my laptop*, though I doubt that’s obvious to anyone at first glance**.  Yesterday’s voice-to-text experiment was not a complete failure, but neither was it a success, at least from my point of view.  Also, correcting the weirdness created by the voice-to-text process exacerbated the arthropathy in the base of my thumbs, and I’ve been fumbling and nearly dropping more things than usual since then.  Also, writing on various paperwork at the office has been more painful than usual.  So, I don’t think I’m going to be doing that again any time soon—at least until the technology improves significantly.

Not that I ought to besmirch that technology too much.  It’s a bit like the old bit about the dog that walks on its hind legs (or talks, in an alternate version):  it’s not that it does it well, it’s that it does it at all that should impress you.

I can still remember when my Dad—who worked with computers his entire career, going back to when they were huge, gym-room-sized megaliths—got our family an Apple II+.  We were the first people I knew who had a computer at home (I grew up in a factory town, after all).  I remember my friend Andy saying he was so “ennnvious” of me.  He said it with a grin, though***, and he and I would soon spend many hours learning to program in Basic and writing games to generate characters for Gamma World, for instance, or calculating the conversion of mass to energy via E=mc2 or getting on BBS services with our 600 or 1200 baud modems.

That computer, which was state-of-the-art for home machines, had the expansion to 64K of RAM!  That was a big deal back then.  As far as I know, there wasn’t a home computer with more RAM than that, though I could be wrong.

By comparison, the little mini-laptop on which I’m writing this has RAM that’s just shy of a hundred thousand times larger.  It almost certainly cost a LOT less, even in non-adjusted dollars.  I don’t know what my Dad paid for our Apple, but I’m pretty sure it cost more than $30, which is about what the one I’m working on would cost in roughly-calibrated 1980ish dollars, assuming a constant annual inflation rate of 5%.

The hard drive in this device—and it is far from the state of the art—is a million times larger than the RAM was on that Apple II+, though comparing RAM with a disk drive isn’t really a legitimate comparison.  It’s like comparing Apples and Verbatims.

Speaking of drives, I’m often kind of blown away by some other effects of Moore’s Law.  I sometimes call people’s attention—when I am able to keep them from falling asleep—to the fact that, when I had finished undergrad in 1992, my then-wife and I had a Mac SE, and we bought an external hard drive for it.  She was going to law school and I was doing post-bacc work to get my med school requirements (having decided to go to med school at the last minute, so to speak), and working at the same time, and it was handy not to have juggle all those old, not-so-floppy 3.5” floppy drives.  It cost us a few hundred dollars, if I remember correctly, and it had its own plug for a power supply, and it had a capacity of—wait for it—one megabyte!  And it was amazing!  I still think fondly of it.

Yet now, I can get on Amazon—or go to an appropriate shop, even sometimes a convenience store, certainly many drug stores—and for twenty to forty dollars buy something that has 256,000 times as much memory as that plug-in device that was as big as the base of the computer—and the working portion of the modern memory device is as small as a fingernail.  Also, its memory is much more durable.

And, of course, for well under a hundred dollars—in modern money—I got an external SD drive for the office that has the memory of my old desktop hard drive squared.  A million million bytes (not square bytes, so I was being a little sloppy there), or a terabyte****.  And let’s not even get into processing speed.

Seriously, let’s not.  At least, I really shouldn’t.  I don’t know that subject well enough to have a very good discussion of it.  I know that FLOP is a “floating point operation”.  Also, apparently the Apple II+ could reach processor speeds of up to 8 Megahertz, whereas my current processor is 1.1 Gigahertz, so about 125,000 times faster.  Again, I’m sure there is nuance here, by it’s the rough idea with which I’m dealing.

The point I’m making, overall, is that I shouldn’t be too dismissive or disrespectful of the failings of voice-to-text technology.  It didn’t exist, as such, even ten or so years ago, at least not in any commercially available form.  Now it’s an automatic, included thing in texting and writing functions on the smartphone in my pocket—which is far from top of the line, but is vastly more powerful than even my Mac SE, let alone the Apple II+.

It’s also not an Apple, because I’ve long since become disenchanted with Apple as a company, though their products are surely still good ones.

Nevertheless, typing is still a more effective way to write a blog post, and that’s what I have done and am doing today.  Oh, and by the way, I did in fact record a little five-minute audio tidbit yesterday after finishing my first draft of the “written” post, before someone else arrived at the bus stop and it became a bit too awkward to keep talking out loud to myself in a way that—to me at least—was obviously not a phone conversation.

However, when I went to edit the audio, the traffic noise was just too intrusive.  It was still possible to hear and understand me, mostly, since I was much closer to the microphone, but the noise of cars and the occasional truck was just too much.  I did my best to reduce that noise using various functions of the program, but to make it tolerable, at least to me, led to my voice sounding as though I were speaking through a tight respiratory mask made of cardboard and papier-mâché.

It wouldn’t have made good listening, even though it was only five minutes long, and I certainly didn’t say anything profound enough to make it worth anyone’s while to muscle through it.  So, I don’t plan to upload that.  If I’m going to do audio blogs—or podcasts, if you will—I’ll do them indoors, or in an outdoor setting where I’m away from the noises of traffic and from passers-by who might hear me talking.

With that meandering, weird, tangential bit of fluff, I’ll call today’s blog post to a close.  I hope you all have a good day and a good remainder of the week.  Take care of yourselves, and if you’re fortunate enough to be sharing your lives with people who love you and whom you love, make the most of that.  I don’t seem to be very good at such things over the long term.  Being bad at and awkward and uncomfortable about connecting with people and keeping relationships working doesn’t mean someone doesn’t want to do so, of course—though there probably are such people.  But for those who do want to but are abysmally poor at the process, it can be very unpleasant.  So, if that doesn’t describe you, try to enjoy it.

*I’m sitting on a seat in the train and I’m using my laptop, to be more precise.  I’m not sitting on my laptop, though in the original meaning, a lap is sometimes an appropriate place on which, or in which, to sit.  Still, how could I sit atop my own lap?  Nor am I sitting atop the train, though I understand there are (or have been) places in India where that happens.

**Which is why I’m telling you.

***And it wasn’t terribly long before his family got an Apple III, if I recall, which was also great.

****A terabyte is a trillion bytes, and a trillion (1,000,000,000,000) is a million time a million.  Just count the zeroes.  Now, I’m sure that there are fine points to the comparison, and the literal multiples are not exactly correct, and I’m sure some computer scientist out there could point out the subtleties, and that would be welcome, of course—learning is always a good thing.  But it wouldn’t really change my point.

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Voice-to-text is ill-advised for ready-to-publish blogging

What follows is an attempt to see if I can write a blog post using voice-to-text technology.  Paragraph.

Okay, “paragraph” doesn’t work; one has to start a new paragraph manually.  Anyway, I wanted to try to write on my phone today, but my thumbs still have not fully recovered from whatever dsmage caused them trouble previously.  Therefore, I am going to see how well I can initially “type” this out simply by speaking into the voice to text and then fixing up the incongruities and failures to make paragraphs when I edit it.  Return.

“Return” doesn’t work as a command, either.  Can I say “period” without it making a period?  Apparently, if I continue to the end of a sentence and the word period is in the middle, it does correct things eventually.

Today it’s raining, so I am going to be walking to the bus stop, taking the bus to the train station, the train to Deerfield, and taking a walk from Deerfield train station to the office.

I’m really not sure how good a technique this is for writing a blog post. It may have more in common with a podcast or personal reflection or what I call audio blogs then my typical blog post.  I don’t know how well it will come across but I will be editing it, so we’ll see.

I have just manually inserted a paragraph break then restarted the audio portion of the input.  We will see how that goes.  I’m going to have to be inserting a lot of punctuation and spacing after the initial draft.  It may not be worth it in the long run.  But it’s an interesting experiment for Monday morning when there if they’re already thunderstorms. (That should read, when there are already thunderstorms”).

I’m going to take a brief break now, because I haven’t yet left the house.  I want to give myself plenty of time so that I’m not going to wait at the bus stop any more than necessary.  It’s raining out, which is another reason I decided I wanted to try to write this on my phone.  I figured the phone is less vulnerable to the depredations of stray rain than the laptop is.

***

Okay, I’m at the bus stop now.  I’m a little worried about how traffic noise is going to affect this, but at least there’s not that much traffic at this hour.  It’s 5:00 in the morning, now.

I’m not sure what to discuss, since I’m doing this in a different way than I usually do.  I just cleared my throat, and it didn’t pick that up; that’s mildly interesting.  But it also didn’t pick up the first time that I attempted to speak that sentence after the throat clearing.  I had to backtrack manually, and then restart the sentence I had intended to speak.

I suppose the system has a propensity to miss hear, and to put the wrong words down, such as writing the words “miss” and then “here” instead of writing miss here…miss here…as in, to hear badly!  I can’t seem to say that word* in a way that makes it clear to voice-to-text technology what word I’m trying to produce.  That’s a bit annoying.

It does seem that when a car is driving by while I’m speaking it interferes with the function’s accuracy.  I suppose using this technology might be useful to improve one’s enunciation, at least.  After all, it can be quite frustrating when you have to backtrack manually and correct a computer-based error that doesn’t make much sense, so you might get in the habit of speaking very clearly.

I don’t know how many words I’ve spoken in this blog post yet.  It doesn’t seem very interesting to me, but then, most of my blog posts don’t seems terribly interesting to me anyway.

I’m not very good at judging what will be interesting to other people.  Many of the things that many people find interesting are utterly dull to me, and apparently many of the things that I find interesting are opaque to others.  I guess this explains my lifelong fondness for the Edgar Allan Poe poem alone.

I’m going to have to edit that last sentence so make it clear that the word “Alone” is the title of the poem.  There seems to be no easy way to cue the computer vocally that I’m trying to put quotation marks in.  Open quote quote quote.  Close quote.  See what I mean?  This is frankly more frustrating than I expected it to be.

There was a big flash of lightning just now but only distant and late following thunder.  So it was quite a long way away.  That was a random, interjected, spoken-aloud thought, but this sentence is not; it has been typed in later.

This technology is still far too stupid to be practically useful on a regular basis.  The time and effort put into editing and correcting it are going to be larger than the time and effort I probably usually use to break the whole thing.  To write the whole thing, I said.  Start to finish.

Maybe I should just stick to writing when I want to write, and if I wish to do audio, simply do an audio blog.  Right now there might be some trouble with that because of traffic noise, but that at least can either be edited out or recognized as background sounds, and I can resay something if it was scrambled up by a car.  That would just be part of the process.  It could even add color to an audio blog.

Anyway, life is frustrating.  For instance, the first thing the computer put in when I started “life is” was to end it with the word “good”, which sounds nothing like the word “frustrating”!  Then it kept writing “frustrated”.  I finally had to finish the sentence manually.

Enough of this nonsense.  This is an idea whose time has not yet come, or never was or will be.  Maybe speech is speech, and writing is writing, and never the tween shall meet.  Twain.

The voice-to-text can’t seem to recognize the word “Twain” except as a proper noun with a capital t as in Mark Twain.  But that name was a pseudonym based on an expression (supposedly) from navigating on the Mississippi River, and referred to a measured depth of two fathoms.  So when someone called out “mark twain” they meant the river at that point was two fathoms deep (12 feet).  It’s not quite full fathom five, as thy father lies‒I guess that might be “mark quint”.  Anyway, this is stupid.  But then again pretty much everything I do is stupid.  So what else is new?

I think I’m going to do a brief audio blog just to follow up on this. I may post it or leave it for my ears only.  Have a good day.

Voice stuffaltered

*Mishear.

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There are many different sos to speak, as it were

Well, it’s Saturday, and I’m at the train station instead of the bus stop, because I was able to ride my bike this morning.  I’m not going to have time to finish this post’s first draft before the train gets here, because I took a little too long getting ready at the house, dilly-dallying and puttering around because the first train on Saturday comes thirty-five minutes later than the one I would catch—if riding my bike—during the week.

Still, I had time to park and lock up my bike with two cables, one of them through the seat, and my U-lock thing, or whatever the proper term is.  I don’t see how someone could easily or readily steal the bike or any of its parts, including the front tire.  If such a thing nevertheless happens, I think I’m probably going to give up on the bike.  Then again, I’ve thought that way before.

***

I’m on the train now, and it’s not too crowded, which is one of the nice things about riding on a Saturday.  The horrible rain and consequent flooding seem largely to have tapered off, though I don’t imagine they are entirely gone.  Still, I was able to walk back to the house from the train station last night, and though I encountered about three minutes of very modest rainfall—prompting me to get my umbrella out, which I then carried, uselessly, the rest of the way to the house—I had much more irritation from gnats, which appear to have been given a boost by the rain.

I was quite nervous about termites swarming, honestly.  They tend to do that after the first big, heavy rain, when it’s followed by more pleasant, warmish weather.  Well, there were definitely termites in the air in the neighborhood near the house, and even a few of them around the outside lights, but it wasn’t a too-irritating and annoying batch, and none of them seemed to be swarming inside the house.

That happened a year or two ago, and at least once before that, though it was when I lived in a different room.  It was horrible, mainly because you certainly couldn’t ignore it, and they got into everything, and we literally had to suck them up with a Shop-Vac and find their holes and seal them up.  It is rather disgusting.  It’s not as big a problem for the house structure as it might be up north, because, like many slightly older houses in south Florida, the one in which I live is basically cinderblock with aluminum framing.

There are wood parts of some of the structures, I think, but nothing load-bearing in any sense.  This is a house that barely notices anything short of a category five hurricane.  If civilization ended, and assuming the sea level doesn’t rise too much, I could imagine much of the basic outline of the structure enduring for thousands of years, perhaps to be discovered by some future archeologist.  Cinderblock is tough stuff.

Of course, everything will fall apart eventually; but perhaps everything will then happen again.  The laws of nature (even discounting cyclical cosmologies like “the big bounce” or Conformal Cyclic Cosmology) seem to allow  for random fluctuations to lead, perhaps, to the spontaneous ne occurrence of concentrated inflaton field* and thus to a new period of inflation and a new universe in our future.

And if that universe has the same constants of nature that we have now, and infinite space—as we seem to have—then we will all happen again, and do so in infinite profusion, because in any given region of space, there are only a finite number of possible quantum states, and with any finite number of configurations happening in an infinite range of available slots, they will eventually repeat—and repeat infinitely.

I’m sure I’ve talked about this before.  I’ve probably even talked about my notion that the inflationary burst could go in both “directions” in time, and that our own inflationary burst could also have happened in the other (so to speak) direction even “when” it happened with us (so to speak), and that the future history of our universe could be peppered with “big bangs” coming and going, analogous to the way the present universe is mostly empty space, but there are pockets of places where matter has condensed into local regions where gravity makes the concept of an “up” direction and a “down” direction locally relevant, unlike everywhere in between.

And just as our kind of life can only really apparently happen on the surface of particularly hospitable local globs of heavy matter that we call planets, using the very up/down, purely local dichotomy as one of the facts that makes it possible, so life may also only be able to come into existence near the “surface” of these regions in time in which there is a gradient in entropy that makes “past” and “future” meaningful, though globally (so to speak) time may be nondirectional.

This last bit is all, by the way, my own speculation.  Inflationary cosmology is mainstream physics, but my own thoughts on the omnidirectionality of time are just that—my own thoughts.  I’ve encountered at least one real physicist who discusses something somewhat similar, but I get the impression that the idea is not generally paid much attention.

Still, it’s interesting to speculate.  And now, I have to draw to a close, because my stop is approaching, or we are approaching my stop—either description can be valid.  I hope you have a good remainder of your weekend, and I hope that Monday morning I’ll again be able to ride my bike.

cyclic cosmos

*This is, of course, if inflationary cosmology is the correct description of the universe.  That is by no means certain, but the theoretical structure of inflationary cosmologies answers many questions about the large scale structure of the universe, the horizon problem, cosmic uniformity as evidenced by the nearly completely smooth CMB, where the “bang” part came from, the power spectrum in the tiny variations in the CMB, and so on.  But it’s not the only dog in the race, and there is much that isn’t well known about the nature of, for instance, the inflaton field, whatever it may be.

But that state of not knowing is part of what makes science enjoyable and gratifying.  I may have mentioned this before, but the most exciting non-personal thing I’ve encountered in my life was when Perlmutter et al’s work showed that the universe’s expansion was accelerating.  No one had really even considered such a thing seriously, and so it radically changed the cosmological picture, at least regarding the future.  It was amazing and thrilling—the discovery of our time—and I felt privileged simply to be able to witness it.