Author: Robert Elessar

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“Don’t ask for favors. Don’t talk to strangers. Don’t axe me why.”

I’m going to try to keep this brief today.  I had a particularly bad night’s sleep, even for me, and I am in a significant amount of pain even after taking what I have for it (without massively overdosing).  Thankfully‒so far‒my thumbs aren’t acting up too much as I write this.

It certainly does get old, this chronic pain bit.  I don’t know if anyone out there is considering trying it as a way of being, but I can tell you that, after more than twenty years, I’ve decided it’s not a good lifestyle choice.  So please, if you’re considering it, then reconsider.

I know, I know, no one‒as far as I’m aware‒chooses to have chronic pain, not as such, anyway.  I suppose one might say that anyone who becomes a professional football player (American football, I mean, though all competitive sports have at least some tendency in the same direction) is in a sense choosing a life of chronic pain.

But at least there are compensations, and one receives them more or less up front.  The bill, however, almost inevitably comes due for those who play any kind of serious competitive sports.  Don’t get me wrong; I’m glad they do what they do.  I enjoy watching football, and to a lesser degree several other sports.  But even golf (which I also enjoy watching the pros play) gives its practitioners accumulated damage.

Is there any sport that does not exact a toll on those who take part in it seriously?  I don’t know.  Maybe free solo rock climbing doesn’t tend to give people quite the same kind of chronic, post-high-impact injury problems, because high impacts in that sport tend to be fatal.  Other than those, though, it appears to be a practice associated with great care and deliberation.  There is little to no tackling involved (they don’t even use other kinds of tackle, thus the “free solo” part).

I don’t know why I’m going into such things.  I was just speaking tongue in cheek about the idea of people actually choosing to have chronic pain, which was an absurd notion.  Then I realized that, in a way, people often do choose things that will almost inescapably lead to chronic pain.  But, of course, they aren’t consciously choosing the pain, and many of them probably don’t seriously think it’s something that can happen to them, not when they’re young and feel unstoppable.

Then, by the time they’ve come to recognize their own susceptibility, their own mortality and morbidity, it’s too late.

I suspect that chronic pain was much less common for our ancestors, at least if you go back far enough.  This is not because they were hardier or healthier than we are necessarily, though they probably had less occasion to be indolent.  But we are exposed to injuries they might not have been‒even minor traffic accidents can cause damage that accumulates and persists‒and also, we survive many things that would simply have killed them, thanks to modern science and technology.

Just because we survive them doesn’t mean they are harmless, though.  As Billy Joel sang, “You are still the victim of the accidents you leave.”  That which does not kill you can still leave damage; it does not necessarily make you stronger, any more than syphilis made Nietzsche healthier.

On that cheery note, I think I will wrap up this week and put it in the fridge for leftovers, where it will eventually go bad and will have to be thrown out anyway.  I know, that particular metaphor doesn’t really make sense.  I didn’t have anything in mind when I wrote it, I was just following the automatic thought that was initiated by the words “wrap up”.  If any of you have a good potential meaning for the metaphor that I just frivolously threw out there, please, feel free to share it with us.

Also, please have a good day and a good weekend if you can.

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And blogged with restless violence round about the pendant world

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday of course, which is why I opened with that greeting.  I appear to have survived World Suicide Prevention Day.  I suppose one could argue that this fact is a good thing, though it can also be argued the other way.  I’m of more than one mind on this subject, so I’ll perforce withhold my own judgment.

Of course, it is now the 11th of September in 2025 (AD or CE), the 24th “anniversary” of 9-11-2001.  That was a bad day, there’s no doubt about it, and it heralded more bad days to come‒though two days later was, for me, one of the two best days of my life.

Anyway, there was big news yesterday, with more than one violent and newsworthy event happening in the western US.  I’m not going to get into my specific takes on things, since I don’t really do that sort of thing here.  I’ll just say that I was annoyed by the senators and representatives on the democrat side (probably there were some on the republican side) who immediately sent their “thoughts and prayers” (i.e., nothing whatsoever) and then said things like “political violence is never acceptable in a democratic society”, some of them being broader and saying political violence is never acceptable, period.

I just had to point out that our country (the US) was founded via political violence‒the American Revolution, you know.  I also pointed out that, when government no longer respects the Constitution and the rule of law, and legislators (and law enforcement personnel) are not stepping up to hold people accountable to their freely sworn duties, and the judiciary is biased in favor of those who ignore the judiciary, then sometimes violence becomes the only recourse, just as was the case when this country was founded.

I will make one judgment-type statement and say, when someone has only engaged in speech of one kind or another‒even if that speech ironically seems to endorse or at least express acceptance of certain kinds of violence‒then the proper response is more speech or counter speech (by which I do not mean trying to shout someone down).  Speech is not the same as violence in nearly any situation‒unless you’re one of the Fremen of Arrakis in the older movie version of Dune‒and should not be countered with violence.

It is, however, less scary to use violence against someone who is not immediately threatening violence than against those who actually are threatening or ordering or enacting violence.  That, though, is the path of cowardice.

Naked house apes are, finally, just apes.  If they recognized and accepted that fact, then they could be on guard against the baser primate drives and habits and instincts that no longer serve them well in the modern world.  But so many of them seem, either implicitly or explicitly, to consider themselves something other than animals, and that delusion lays the groundwork for much error, which can be catastrophic and tragic.

It’s a bit like someone believing for no good reason that their car is partly self-steering, and that once the cruise control is on, they don’t even need to watch traffic or steer for themselves.  Things are not going to turn out well for such a person.  And unfortunately, things are likely to go badly for other, perhaps more sensible, people who just happen to be near the first person.

“Heavy sigh,” to quote Justine from The Accountant (and The Accountant squared, which is what the name of the sequel is, apparently*).

In other, less momentous news, I practiced the guitar (and sang) a bit yesterday.  Among other things, I looked up the form of the “Blues” scale (and the major and minor pentatonic scales and the so-called Japanese scale, a slightly different pentatonic scale) and fiddled around with them.  Well, I guess I guitared around with them, actually, since a guitar is not a fiddle (though Jonny Greenwood has been known to use a bow on his guitar from time to time).

I did this because of a suggestion in the comments a bit ago by one of my old friends who is also a stellar guitarist.  He suggested that I might use a blues guitar bit for the possible lead on my song Come Back Again.  Unfortunately, I had to admit that I didn’t know specifically what that entailed.

I have a sensitive ego for such a self-hating person, so I ended up looking it up and playing with it to correct my shame.  I must admit, the blues scale is a real blast and sounds great for something so simple.  The pentatonic scales are a bit more boring, but I sort of already knew that.  I don’t expect that I’ll ever be an improvisational player; I tend to have to plan things out and lay them out and think them through and do trial and error.  But still, it never hurts to practice one’s scales.

Well, actually, when one’s arthropathy is acting up, it can hurt to practice, and it often does.  But that’s not exactly what I meant, as I suspect you already knew.

I hope you all have a good day, and don’t dwell too much on political violence, recent or older.

TTFN

*One could expand out The Accountant2 to be The AAccccoouunnttaanntt, and we could then group like variables together, which would get us The AAaaccccoouunnnntttt, or The A2a2c4o2u2n4t4.  It’s probably not as catchy that way, but I suspect the title character of the movies would appreciate it.  Of course, the preceding presumes that the “squared” bit on the original title applies to all the letters in the word “Accountant”, since it’s one word.  Otherwise, in traditional mathematical notation, it would end up being The Ac2ouan2t3.

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“Through early morning fog I see visions of the things to be…”

It’s Wednesday, the so-called hump day, which supposedly implies that after this day, the following weekdays become borderline effortless.  Of course, that’s bullshit.  There is no force‒unlike when cresting the top of an actual hill (or hump)‒that would tend to add impetus to the rest of your week.

No, there is only the accumulation of stress and tension and fatigue that continues to accrue.  This is, supposedly, worse for people like me than for NTs as they say, but I’m not sure, at least relatively speaking.  I think it’s wearing for everyone, but some people have more support and shared lives, allowing for sharing a diversity of strengths and the effacement of weaknesses.

That’s my hypothesis for now, anyway.

I’ve been having a bad few days energy-wise and pain-wise, and that’s frustrating, as I’m sure you can well imagine.  I’ve been trying to get into better exercise routines and so on, as you may know, but lately every time I make an attempt, it causes exacerbations of one kind or another in my chronic pain, and that lasts a long time; it’s very discouraging.  I’m also trying to cut back on my eating, so I can try to lose weight, which will almost certainly at least make exercising easier and less painful.

It’s difficult, though.  Food is the one and only reliable source for me of feelings of…well, joy is not quite the right word, and euphoria or eudaemonia are both way off the mark, but it is a positive feeling, neurophysiologically.  For good, sound, biological reasons, eating is one of the most reliable ways of activating the nervous system’s reward circuitry.  Unfortunately, when it’s the only reliable source you have, you tend to overdo it.

Of course, resisting such urges and controlling one’s impulses can be very ego-syntonic, but that’s much more diffuse and delayed.  Also, my ego is shriveled bordering on cachectic, and not in a good, meditational/spiritual way.  My mind is largely my enemy, or the enemy of itself, or at least I’m not my friend.  I certainly do not love myself.  As I’ve said before, I am generally my own least favorite person, and that’s the person with whom I have to spend my time‒24/7 as they say.

It’s not that I’m the person of whom I think least highly.  There are many well-known people of whom I would not hesitate to say that they are far worse people than I am.  But I don’t have to be around those people.  If I did, at least one of us would probably already be dead.

Oh, speaking of that, today is World Suicide Prevention Day, which is in the midst of Suicide Awareness and Prevention Month (or whatever the specific official term is).  So, I guess, if you have the opportunity today, you should prevent a suicide if you can?  On every other day, especially in every other month, I guess you can just let shit happen however it happens.  That’s pretty much what almost everyone does, almost every day, anyway.  Why would that change?

I would offer to provide a listening and supportive ear for anyone who is struggling with such issues; I have tried to be there for people often in the past.  I mean, I was a practicing physician for quite a while, and based on the nearly unanimous feedback from my patients, I was a good doctor*.  However, now I don’t think I could provide sincere arguments to try to convince someone out of suicide.

I veer toward pro-mortalism a lot of the time, though that’s not as much a considered philosophical stance as it is an emotional proclivity.  It’s part of my overall dysthymia I suppose.  Though you have to be careful when you suppose‒sometimes you make a supp out of o and se.

I know that last bit doesn’t make any sense, but it’s my way of making fun of the old ass/u/me cliché.  I also like to use a slight variation of the traditional one, saying, “When you presume, you make a pres out of u and me.”  Nowadays, given the current “pres”, that’s almost certainly something most people would like to avoid.

I don’t know what to do about my state of mind and my state of body (and my state of residence, with which I’m getting steadily more disgusted).  Maybe I should fast for a bit, and potentially address more than one bird with one stone.  Yom Kippur is coming up in about three weeks, and I often fast on that day anyway, but I don’t think I want to wait until then.  Of course, if I could fast from now until then, I’m sure I would see remarkable results, and I might feel them as well.  But I’m far from sure that I have the willpower to do that.

Oh, well‒as the man sang‒whatever, never mind.

Now, there was a suicide that I wish could have been prevented.  I wonder what music we would have if not for that terrible event.  Then again, I wish even more that Mark David Chapman had offed himself sometime before December of 1980.  Imagine** what music we might have had in that case!

Such speculations are only disheartening, though, and I certainly don’t need that, and I doubt that you all do, either.  So, please, try to have a good day, and if you do have dark and even suicidal thoughts, try to get help if you can.  It’s much harder to do than people might think, but hopefully, for most people, it’s worth the effort.  I can’t speak for myself in that, but I’m not objective about me.  I’m living inside the acidic, toxic cloud, so I can’t see out of it and certainly can’t clearly see myself from within it.

That’s probably just as well.

*I’m still a doctor, of course, and I always will be, since I earned my degree fair and square.  But since I’m not in practice anymore, it’s hard to think of myself as a “good” doctor.

**That was not meant to be a joke, and I was tempted to change the word, since I am not able to take the murder of John Lennon lightly.  But I figured, this is in the spirit of his music, so I’ll let it be***.

***That was a deliberate joke, because of course, Let It Be was Paul’s song, inspired by a reassuring dream of his dead mother.

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Discussions of my “first draft” styles and a bit of shameful self-promotion

I wrote yesterday’s post on my miniature laptop computer‒what I call a “lapcom” if you remember, and even if you don’t‒and today I am writing this on my smartphone, because I didn’t feel like lugging the lapcom when I left the office.  It’s not done deliberately (by me), but I am curious about something.

You see, to my surprise, yesterday’s post appears to have been rather popular and successful.  I say “to my surprise” because to me it felt rather disjointed and erratic and like it didn’t go anywhere.  I’m not sure why that is or to what it is in response, or indeed, whether it was merely a fluctuation in a chaotic system and had nothing whatsoever to do with any particular thing I had done.

Still, as you may know, I do feel that I write differently when using different tools for doing it.  On the lapcom, I tend more easily to run off at the page, if you will, because typing on a word processor is just so easy and natural for me.  That doesn’t necessarily make the writing better, though.  I fear that I get too verbose sometimes.

And, of course, writing on the smartphone is less fluid, more cumbersome.  It also tends to exacerbate the arthropathy in my thumbs, for what are probably obvious reasons.

Pen and paper‒for first drafts, anyway‒ is certainly my most long-standing method of writing, and I don’t think I tend to get quite as carried away with that as with typing.  I suspect, but don’t by any means know for certain, that the things I write by pen and paper‒the fiction, at least‒are somewhat better, or at least more fun, than what I write on either a phone or a computer.

Here’s a bit of a rundown.  The following stories I wrote by hand in the first draft, having no other options:  Mark Red, The Chasm and the Collision, and my long short story Paradox City.  I also wrote my stories House Guest and Solitaire with paper and pen, the latter in one sitting, the former way back in high school.

I wrote the first draft of Son of Man at least partly on a very small smartphone that I really liked.

The Vagabond is a bit of a mixed bag.  I started it while at university, and finished the first draft while in med school.  Part of the first draft was written by hand (i.e., with pen on paper) but most of it was written on a Mac SE using the good old word processing program WriteNow.  Does anyone out there remember that one?

The rest of my stories, at least the published ones, were written on mini laptop computers (well, some here and there would have been on full-sized ones) from the beginning.  Most notable of these, perhaps, is Unanimity, which is very long.  But many of my “short stories” were written on regular keyboards, including the other two stories in Welcome to Paradox City, and my “short” stories, Prometheus and Chiron, “I for one welcome our new computer overlords”, Hole for a Heart, Penal Colony, Free Range Meat, and In the Shade, the latter of which‒like House Guest‒appears only in my collection Dr. Elessar’s Cabinet of Curiosities.

Oh, right, and of course Outlaw’s Mind, Extra Body, and The Dark Fairy and the Desperado have all been written (so far) on the lapcom.

If anyone out there has read a sampling of some of these, or all of them, and can give me any considered feedback on any overall difference in quality between the means of writing, pros and cons, I would certainly appreciate it.

And if any of you haven’t read any of the above, well…what are you waiting for?  If you’re a fan of fantasy/sci-fi/horror, you might like some or all of my stuff.  If you’re not sure where to start, by all means, I’ll give you recommendations based on your personal preferences, if I can.

I suspect that The Chasm and the Collision would have the broadest popular appeal, especially for people who like the Harry Potter books and similar stories.  Son of Man is probably my purest science fiction story, but this is not “space opera” type science fiction.  “I for one welcome my new computer overlords” is basically science fiction*, too, in case the title didn’t clue you in.

Everything else is horror of one kind or another.  Most of my horror is supernatural in one sense or another, and I veer into the borders of Lovecraft’s universes in at least two stories**.  Mark Red is supernatural and in some senses horror-adjacent, since it involves vampires and so on, but it’s really more a teen/young-adult supernatural adventure, a story originally intended to be a manga.

My darkest story has no supernatural elements in it at all.  That’s Solitaire; it can be had in stand-alone form for Kindle, and it also appears in the middle of Dr. Elessar’s Cabinet of Curiosities.

Well, that’s been about as much self-promotion as I think I’ve ever done here before.  I didn’t really intend to do it, but once I got going on discussing my various story drafts, it just seemed to go that way.  I hope I haven’t been too insufferable.  I’m really not a raving egomaniac, though I may be some other type of raving maniac.

I hope you all have a good day.

*And I guess Extra Body is sort of light-hearted sci-fi.  It’s even somewhat comical, as my story If the Spirit Moves You is a sort of supernatural comedy (expect no laugh-out-loud moments, though, since they are dry comedy at most).

**The Death Sentence, which appears in Welcome to Paradox City, and In the Shade, mentioned above and in my other collection.

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“Vast forms that move fantastically to a discordant melody”

There may come a week when I will start the work week of blog posts off without mentioning that the day is Monday.  But it is not this week.

And yes, indeed, it is now Monday, the beginning of another “traditional” work week, and I am writing my first blog post of the week, and I have no idea what I’m going to write other than that I knew I would almost certainly mention the fact that it is Monday.  For future reference, this particular Monday is September 8, 2025 (AD or CE) and is thus the second Monday in September.  Isn’t that all just riveting information?

Well, it’s not much, but it may very well be the best I have for you—and it may not even get this good again for the rest of the post.  Then again, maybe I’ll come up with something brilliant or at least amusing before the end of the next several hundred words.  And that will have made it all worthwhile, you wagering your precious, irreplaceable time on this blog post being interesting, let alone informative.  I’d advise against you wagering a lot of money on it, but you do you, as they say nowadays*.

What else should I talk** about now?  I don’t really know.  I don’t think I have anything interesting to say.  Nothing new or interesting has happened in my life, nor would any such thing be expected to happen.  I was in too much pain even to go for much of a walk on either Saturday or Sunday—just a half-mile stroll to the local convenience store.

I’ve tried mainly to rest and watch interesting and occasionally even educational videos on YouTube, and to read a little bit here and there.  On Sunday afternoon I started watching a bit of football (after I did my laundry), but I lost interest in that pretty quickly.  Really, the only good thing about this weekend, other than getting some rest, was that I had a nice phone conversation with my sister.

Of course, there are certainly things going on in the nation and in the world that could be discussed, but there are plenty of other people discussing those things, and they tend to stress me out too much; it’s sometimes hard to accept the flagrant stupidity of so many members of the human race.  But then I recall that they are all just naked house apes, only a tiny fraction of whom ever truly rise above their broad primate natures, bringing other apes along for the ride.

But, hey, being called a primate is not an insult (and if it is, too bad for you, because odds are you are one).  They’re some of the smartest creatures on this planet.  They also have the capacity to work together in immense and intricate ways in order to survive and thrive, to help each other, to defend each other against the elements and predators and all sorts of other things.

On the other hand, they can also be a#sholes sometimes.  Humans have the disadvantage that their relative competence gives them the power to do great damage when they’re being as#holes—often largely to themselves,  both personally and collectively.  It’s certainly rare when someone does damage that doesn’t at least partly damage them, though the damage may be of a sort that they disdain, not knowing how it will impair them in the future, and possibly—often—not even recognizing, when it becomes clear that the damage has consequences, that it is of their own making.

What the hell am I talking about?  I’m not thinking of any specific cases or examples here, just in case you were wondering if I was.  I’m actually thinking of this in an abstract, almost mathematical way:  a formula, the characteristics of which one can see even when there are multiple unknowns.  It’s hard to say how generalizable the formula might be, and of course details would remain unknown until the thing is actually worked out.  Nevertheless, patterns can be seen ahead of time to some degree.

Jeez Louise, I’m kind of all over the place and still going nowhere right now, am I not?  I don’t know what to do but apologize.  So, here goes:  I’m sorry this post is incoherent and without any point.  I wish I had some brilliant thoughts and insights to share, but genius is as genius does, and by that measure, I am certainly no genius.

I wish I could become some kind of Surak for the human race, to help engender the worldwide embrace of and commitment to rationalism, to reason, to “logic”.  Alas, I doubt that I have it in me to be such a benefactor.  My natural inclination has always been to be a malefactor, but reason tells me I have no right to do harm to innocent people and things.

I wish I felt like writing fiction.  I can channel my dark self in fiction.  And it would be nice, so to speak, to finish telling the story of Timothy Outlaw, most of which is unknown to anyone but me, and some of which would be a revelation even to me if I were to continue to write it.  And that’s just one of several stories that lie fallow in my mind.

Oh, well.  None of it matters, anyway.  Still, I hope you all have a good day, one that presages a very good week.

*And they don’t even mean it as a clever euphemism for “go f#ck yourself”!

**I am using the term “talk” rather than “write” here deliberately, though pedants might insist that what I am doing now is not talking.  I disagree with such people, plainly, and if they say that writing on a word processor is not talking, then what about a nonverbal person who has only that means by which to communicate?  Are they not talking when they do their written communication?

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“With your feet on the air and your head on the ground…”

TBIF*!

Unusually for me, I am looking forward to this weekend, even though I don’t have any wonderful outings with my youngest in the offing.  I just need to rest, because in case you can’t tell, I’ve really been all over the place mentally this week.  I guess that’s not so unusual for me, at least not from outside (but it’s been atypically bad from the inside).  I’m sure it’s quite tedious and repetitive and depressing for you to keep reading about it.  Honestly, why in the world are you wasting your time with this bullshit?!?!?

I’m being a bit facetious just now‒or, rather, I was being a bit facetious.  I don’t really want you all to stop “wasting your time” with my blog.  No, indeed, I would rather you not only read all of my posts but also all of my books, and to spread the word and “like” and “share” them with everyone you know (and even those you don’t) on social media and elsewhere.

Speaking of liking and sharing, hey, why not share all of my songs and shit?  Put ‘em on your Spotify playlist or your iTunes or YouTubeMusic or Pandora or whatnot.  They’re there on all of those, supposedly.  Actually, I know they’re on YouTube and I know they’re on Spotify.  I have them on my own playlists, and I even occasionally sneak them into the background music playlist at work, though it’s slightly embarrassing.

Actually, come to think of it, the hold music for our office VOIP phones is a slightly edited version of Like and Share with a shorter intro.  We’ve even received compliments from people about it from time to time, and these are people who were on hold during discussions with salespeople!

All that bouncing around above of things I would want to promote can serve to highlight one of the big problems I have with myself:  I have too many “special interests”.

If I only had one focus, or just one main focus, I think I could become really good at it and maybe even contribute significant things.  If I were a full-time musician, for instance, I think I would become very good at that.  If I were able to focus on physics/mathematics I think I could really learn a lot of it quite deeply, and maybe even make contributions to science.

And we know that, when I committed to writing just for an hour or so a day, I wrote a lot of stories over the course of a few years, even while in stir.

Unfortunately, after focusing on one thing or mostly one thing for a while, I start missing the other stuff, or I just get distracted by the other stuff.  Every minute is an opportunity cost.  Of course, that’s true for everyone‒we all have to choose one path, and in choosing it, we must therefore not choose others, and that chosen path will determine future options that might have been otherwise.

I think maybe I just dwell on such facts more than most people do.  I suppose that’s one side-effect of having difficulty socializing:  I spend a lot of time with my own thoughts (or reading the thoughts of others, of course).

I also have a tendency to move back and forth between many books at one time.  Back when I was married, it used to irritate my (now ex) wife because I’d have seven or eight books at a time on my bedside table, many with more than one bookmark stuck in them.  To be fair to her, she was never very critical of it; she was (and still is, presumably) a very avid reader herself.  Anyway, that’s the sort of stuff I do.

It all means that I do know at least superficially about an awful lot of stuff, and of widely varying genres and contexts and subjects and topics and various other synonyms and near-synonyms**.  Currently, my non-fiction reading is bouncing between Lisa Randall’s Warped Passages, a physics book, which I mentioned before, and Cass Sunstein’s new book On Liberalism: In Defense of Freedom.

In my recent books alone (on Kindle) I have Japanese light novels, a book on political philosophy (see above), two physics books, a book about geometry applied to the real world in surprising ways***, a book about autism, a book about the Beatles and the recording of their songs, a book on a current issue in sociology/psychology, and so on.  This should give you a locally scaled example of how my mind goes all over the place.

For the most part, I cannot complain about having many interests.  It would be nice if I had someone with whom to share at least some of them, as used to be the case, but if wishes were horses we’d all need to carry manure shovels with us everywhere we go (and not just metaphorically, as we already do).

So, anyway, my mind is all over the place, but this week there have been several stretches in which I had no interest in any subject.  When that happens to me, I know I’m really spiraling down deep into the depression thing.  Hopefully, though, if I can truly get some extra mental rest this weekend, it will regress a bit.

I hope you all have as good a weekend as it’s possible for you to have‒and if you’ve been here for a while, you know that my take is that you always have the best weekend you could possibly have, because as soon as things happen, they become inevitable, since you cannot undo events that have already taken place.

This also means you always have the worst weekend possible, of course, by logical necessity.  But that’s not horrible‒after all, if you consider most weekends, you can realize, “Hey, if this really has been the worst my weekend could possibly have been, well that’s pretty cool, because it hasn’t really been that bad.”

I’ll talk to you on Monday, barring (as always) the unforeseen.

*Thank Batman it’s Friday, for those of you who have not yet seen this from me.

**Could you call those “perisynonyms”?  Well, I know you could call them that, but I mean, does anyone think it might catch on, and is the meaning fairly obvious?

***Jordan Ellenberg’s Shape.  I strongly recommend this and his previous book How Not To Be Wrong if you want to kindle (no pun intended) or rekindle a love of mathematics.  He narrates the audiobook versions of his books, and he is an excellent teacher.

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Poor venomous blog, be angry and dispatch.

Hello and good morning.

I think it’s Thursday, so I used my traditional Thursday opening here, but honestly, I had such a bad night’s sleep that I don’t feel confident in my reckoning of days.  I’ve been awake since shortly after midnight, and it’s not as though I fell asleep early.  Also, the internet was down locally for most of the night‒I figured that out pretty quickly once I woke up and couldn’t get back to sleep‒so it’s not as though the internet was what kept me awake.

It’s the 4th of September, with only a few weeks until the autumnal equinox.  It’s interesting‒at least to me, though probably not to anyone else‒that though the seasons are opposite in the northern versus the southern hemisphere*, and the solstices are opposites, the equinoxes are all always the same for everybody.

After my blog post about songs and music yesterday, I did play a little guitar and sang.  I didn’t work on any new songs or any of my own old songs, but at least I did a little practicing.

Oh, I also recently watched someone reacting to the Pulse concert version of Wish You Were Here (the song, not the album) and I noted that David Gilmour played a nice, compact acoustic guitar with a somewhat narrow neck that looked like it would be good for me, since I find bigger acoustics too bulky (partly because I myself am too bulky, but that’s a separate issue).

I looked online to try to find which make and model guitar he was using, and I found at least some credible answers, though many of them discussed the 12-string he used on the album, which was definitely not what he used in the concert**.  After I determined the most likely correct candidate, I decided to look up that guitar online to see how much they cost.

The average price was about 5 grand, and many cost more.  So, yeah, I’m not going to be buying one of those any time soon, unless I win the lottery (which is even more unlikely for me than for many other people, since I don’t play it).  It would be wonderful, but if I were going to spend that much money on something, I would rather buy one of those big, CW “cleaning” laser systems, because…well, of course I would.  Talk about fun!

I definitely have even more destruction in my nature than creation.  I sometimes refer to myself with the reverse of Nebula’s kind words to Drax in the last Guardians of the Galaxy movie:  I wasn’t born to be a dad; I was born to be a destroyer***.

Not that I think it makes any real sense to say that anyone was “born to be” anything.  As far as we can tell, the concept of telos doesn’t actually apply to anything outside the human mind (or humanoid minds, as in my case).

Maybe I should really get back into a regular, daily practice of meditation.  I’ve done it before, sometimes for a long time, but though it does calm my tension somewhat and helps decrease my distraction, I’ve noticed that it tends to make me quite a bit more depressed, as though depression and anxiety are my yin and yang‒or my quantum mechanical position and momentum if you will‒and as one shrinks, the other must grow.

Perhaps I should just muscle on through and see if I can come out the other side in some sense.  Of course, it’s entirely possible that the other side is the sooey side (ha ha), but that’s not such a bad thing.  Still, worsening depression along the way is really horrible.  At least I don’t have anyone else around me to make miserable as a side-effect, unless you count coworkers.

I don’t know.  I’m just writing, sampling what comes out of my mind, which I guess means you lot are sampling what comes out of my mind, as well.  Admit it:  this is one sample that does not make you want to buy the product!  Am I right?

I strongly suspect that I am.  Certainly I’ve seen no evidence of interested shoppers.  Those who have actually “bought the product” have all ended up returning it eventually.  Who can blame them?

Okay, that’s enough for now.  I hope you all have a very good day.

TTFN

*I don’t know what tortured sophistry so-called flat-Earthers use to try to explain such facts, and honestly, I don’t really want to know.  If I had infinite time and patience, it might be worth exploring their notions, if only for the sake of better understanding human psychopathology, but unless and until I become an immortal being with unlimited bandwidth, I won’t waste my limited resources of time and mind.

**Because he plainly was using a 6-string.

***To be clear, Nebula said, “You weren’t born to be a destroyer.  You were born to be a dad.”  It was a beautiful moment.

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“Remember: All you’ll be is all you’ve been”

It’s Wednesday morning, quite early, and as is the case nearly every Wednesday, I am struggling not to incorporate some version of the first line from She’s Leaving Home by the Beatles* into my writing.  Oops, it looks like I failed in that struggle.  Well, at least I put the actual line in a footnote instead of quoting it in the main body of the post.

Speaking of songs and lyrics, I want to apologize to anyone who feels disappointed by the fact that I still have yet to start writing a song based on the trigger “humility”, and also that I haven’t done anything more with my previous tentative song, Native Alien.  I’m not sure I’m satisfied with the melody I have for it so far‒at some time in the future, I may redo it.  Or I may go back to it and find that I like the melody and chords, after all.  For that, we can all only wait and see; I don’t know much more about what will happen than you all do.

As for other incomplete songs, I have no fewer than two “videos” of such critters on my YouTube channel:  Mercury Lamp, which is really just a kind of demo, but which I like, though I haven’t felt like expanding it yet, and Come Back Again, which is actually mixed and produced, after a fashion, but is far from being in releasable form.

The lyrics of the latter song are quite old‒I wrote them (with more recent slight modifications) while I was in college, and reproduced them from memory when I decided to record the tune.  I had a little spiral notebook** that I sometimes wrote “poems” in, and this song was one of them, or a combination of such poems, originally.  Though it was a long time after writing the words that I ever formally wrote down the tune, the tune was in my head since not long after I wrote the poem.

Actually, there was somewhat more to the poem(s) than appears in the song now.  There’s a sort of prelude of three couplet lines, which I recorded and sang, but I decided it was too stilted and moany/whiny to start out the song.  I replaced it with a collection of “Aah, ah ah ahh…” singing, which I think works better, though I secretly*** left one faint track with the initial singing, which one can here and there just faintly detect in the background.

Anyway, as I said, I’m fond of the lyrics and the melody, and though I always just wing it on my harmonies****, I like the ones here.  I also like my little bass riff and my looped, reversed drum beat pattern.  The whole thing has many elements that I like.

[As an aside, here is a fun fact:  I was relistening to this song a few times recently, since it has obviously been on my mind.  On the side bar on YouTube where it gives further video suggestions/options when you’re watching something, it also gives you little buttons by which you can narrow down the available recommendations.  The first of these was fairly unsurprising, as it read “More from Robert Elessar”.  But the next one allowed me to choose to narrow my suggestions to “Progressive Rock”.

Evidently, the YouTube algorithm considers my unfinished song to be most consistent with the genre of progressive rock.  I’m not at all disappointed by that.  By all means, group me in with people like Pink Floyd and Yes and Kansas.  I’ll take that designation without any complaint at all.]

But of course, this song is really not in any kind of shape to be held up against any of those bands’ works.  The mix is uneven/unbalanced and still quite messy and blurry; the timing is at least slightly off in a great many places*****; and there are other technical issues.  Also, the arrangement is not quite to my liking.  For one thing, I’d like to add a bit of lead guitar to it; it feels too low in pitch overall to me, without any real bright sounds.  It’s not a song with a bright atmosphere, perhaps, but a range of pitches and timbres and so on is still desirable (at least to me).

Anyway, I’m mildly frustrated because I still don’t have any decent thoughts on a lead guitar part nor do I have the gumption to try to clean up the mix.

I will, however, embed the “video” here, and I would be delighted to receive any feedback or ideas you want to share.  Try not to be too cruel, if you can help it, please; I’m sometimes surprisingly fragile and also sometimes horribly spiteful, though I try not to act on or express any of those reactions.

Thank you very much.

*”Wednesday morning at five o’clock as the day begins…”

**Not precisely “a little black book with my poems in”, but not too far from that, either.

***Well, it was a secret.  I guess it’s not really a secret now, though the words still are.

****In Like and Share, I even just spontaneously did the whistling that appears in the bridge while I was recording my (also improvised) harmonies, and I liked that outcome quite a lot.  There was only one take on them, and that’s what you hear in the song.

*****To cut me a bit of slack, I did have to record all the parts separately, with just inexpensive,  USB-based mics and basic computer recording programs, in the back room of an office that used to be a store in a strip mall, with no MIDI or anything of the sort, and only a little Katana practice amp for the guitar.  Then I mixed it using the “free” program Audacity, which doesn’t have a “beat finder” function like the notorious Pro Tools does.  All things considered, I think I made pretty good use of what I had.

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This is my title; there are many others like it, but this one is mine

It’s Tuesday now, and we begin to commence the rest of what is now a brace of braces of regular work days.  I guess those of you to whom that applies probably already know it, so I’m giving you no new information, unless you count as information the particular way in which I convey it.  Meanwhile, for those to whom this information does not apply, it’s probably just tedious trivia, if even that.

That’s not my fault; at least it’s not entirely my fault.  Of course, I’m the one who’s writing this drivel, but you’re reading it, and no one’s forcing you to do so.  There are two parts to the freedom of speech:  the freedom to speak (or not to do so) and the freedom to hear and listen (or not to hear/listen).  So there is mutual responsibility—or a lack of mutual responsibility if the notion of responsibility doesn’t apply.

I’m pretty sure that no one is ultimately responsible for anything let alone everything.  That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t try to hold people accountable when they do bad things, or reward people for good things; it’s good to discourage the negative and encourage the positive, I would think.

But none of us made the world or the universe, and none of us made ourselves, despite the popular notion of the “self-made man” (or woman).  We all happened, like everything else happens, and we didn’t get to pick which universe into which we’re born, if there are choices of such things.  Or, if we were given a choice in some bizarre, pre-conception, pre-birth sorting ceremony, our memories of such things have been erased pretty thoroughly.

I’m pretty convinced that there is no such pre-birth, and I’m nearly as sure that there’s no post-death, either.  My slightly less certain attitude toward the latter is probably just an artifact of self-bias that comes with being a biological organism whose ancestors were selected for (among other thing) a tendency to want to stay alive.  And, of course, it is influenced by the simple inability for anyone to imagine themselves not existing, since the minute you’re imagining anything, you’re very much not modeling a lack of existence.

If you’ve ever been under general anesthesia, such as during major surgery, and if there were no mishaps, such as a failure of the anesthesia, then you could say that whatever you experienced while you were under general anesthesia is the closest living simulacrum to what you’ll experience when you’re dead.  But of course, the point is, you didn’t experience anything.  Anesthesia means “without sensation” or “without feeling”, and it is pretty well named.

A tangent to this notion:  who the hell first came up with the term “lived experience”?  Speaking of punishment to discourage things, if we can find that person, they should be subject to serious public shaming.  Why do we need to add a modifier to the word “experience”?  Speaking of words that convey no information (which I did earlier), this literally is redundant.  One cannot have “non-lived experience” or “dead experience”.  It’s experience.  If you experience it, you’re alive.  Experience is an individual, personal, conscious thing that happens only to living things, almost by definition.

Even if you’re “learning from someone else’s experience”, you’re really learning from your awareness and intake of the information regarding that person’s experience.  That is the experience from which you are learning, and it is your experience, not that of some other person from whom you might be learning a lesson.

There are so many stupid things in the world.  I have no doubt that I am a prominent one of these things.  Still, some things are so stupid that they feel like personal attacks on, not my sanity exactly, but certainly on my equanimity.  Some human habits and words and deeds are like mosquito bites or poison ivy, like itching, burning rashes.  They make me want to snarl and lash out in irritation.

Oh, well.  I guess it’s hard to blame the stupid for being stupid—and we’re all stupid more than we are smart.  I guess all we can do is to try to become a little smarter every day, like the YouTube channel says.

In other news, it turns out that September is suicide prevention month (or some term to that effect).  I’m not sure why this particular month has been chosen for that designation.  Is it because it’s a time when kids go back to school, and so might need such support?  I don’t know; I always liked it when school started up again.  Is it because it’s the month when autumn begins?  Again, I wouldn’t get it, because autumn has always been my favorite season, though here in the sweaty intertriginous regions of south Florida, autumn is indistinguishable from most of the rest of the year.

Anyway, I’m the last person one should seek to try to help prevent suicide in someone else.  If anything, I would be more able to provide arguments in support of self-destruction, though I would not ever try to talk anyone else into taking their own life.

Well…I can think of a few people I might be willing to so encourage, but the people I might be willing to encourage to kill themselves are usually the sorts of people who would never even consider doing such a thing.  They think far too highly of themselves.

But hey, as for the rest of you, why not go out there and, if the opportunity occurs, prevent a suicide or something?  Batman knows I spend a lot of my time looking at support sites and information and posts and accounts and reading books and so on that are related to this.  Unfortunately, every argument I’ve encountered hitherto has been just repetition of the same old trite vomitus that people tend to spew about such things, and it often just makes me feel even less like I want to stay alive.

Unfortunately, Hamlet is much more convincing than the cast majority of the people who counsel others not to die.  Is that simply because Shakespeare was such a brilliant writer?  Or is it because he has the best arguments?  I guess it could be a combination—a superposition, if you will—of the two.

Whatever.  Try to have a good day.

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Gravid questions of time and gravity (and labor)

It’s Monday, the first of September, which was “originally” the seventh month, but which is now pushed back to the ninth by the two “caesarean” months.  Speaking of such things, it’s also Labor Day in the US (I’m not sure about other countries) a day on which we celebrate labor by giving most people the day off.  This isn’t quite as perverse as it might sound.  After all, what woman would want to work while in labor?

Ha ha.

Anyway, my workplace is open today, though only for half a day.  It has become more and more common for nearly everything to be open even on huge holidays like New Years and so on, let alone “ordinary” federal holidays.  The reasons are fairly straightforward, and they have nothing to do with any kind of formal, deliberate, corporate conspiracy such as is imagined by so many naïve people on social media.

It’s just the same problem‒or situation‒that leads trees to grow tall when it would make much more sense for them all to stay closer to the ground and not waste so many resources on trunks and xylem and phloem, on getting water and nutrients from the ground up to their highest leaves*.  The trouble is, if all the trees were low but then one variant appeared that was slightly higher, it would have a significant advantage over its species-mates (and other species), so it would be more effective at reproduction, ceteris paribus.  Its offspring would come to dominate, unless and until yet other variants occurred that tended to grow even higher.  And thus the “arms race” would begin.

So in the human world:  if everyone else worked four days a week, but one worker was willing/able to work more days or longer days, especially if for the same or only slightly higher pay, then that worker would have a job advantage, (again, ceteris paribus).  And so competition leads at least some workers to strive to outdo each other to the extent they can, and so on, working for local, individual advantage that inexorably leads to less pleasant outcomes for everyone.  It’s just game theory applied to economics.

Anyway, that wasn’t what I wanted to discuss this morning.  I wanted to discuss two physics-related ideas I’ve had in the last few days.  The later one is just a bit of silly fun, but the other is more interesting to me.

The second one happened this morning (at about 2 am, when I was awake, because of course I was).  I put on a YouTube video of Star Talk in which a string theorist was the guest, and Professor Tyson asked her about the possibility of more than one dimension of time, and she said most such theoretical possibilities fall afoul of paradoxes and trouble with causality.

But it occurred to me, if there were a situation with time travel involving, for instance, the “grandfather paradox”, maybe the fact that preventing one’s grandparents from meeting makes one no longer there to prevent the meeting doesn’t necessarily unravel the universe, but maybe the paths and events correct and change each other in a closed, repetitive loop of time, interfering with each other** until only one, complete resonant spacetime line is there.

It’s analogous to a plucked string*** in which all sorts of vibrations and waves go back and forth between the fixed ends, but most waves/vibrations end up canceling each other out except the ones that fit an even number of times within the confines of the fixed string.  So maybe the actual events of reality could thus only be the ones that are resonant within that spacetime…whatever the hell that might mean.

Anyway, that’s the frivolous question; though it’s a bit fun, it probably doesn’t really have anything to do with our actual world (though it could…remember my thought a bit ago about forces traveling backward and forward in time and interfering until only a fixed number of outcomes resonate****?).

More interesting to me, really, was a question that occurred to me while I was reading Lisa Randall’s Warped Passages, a physics book (of course) and a particularly good one.  It was not really discussing the question that popped into my mind, other than that Professor Randall was reviewing the particles in the Standard Model.

We know that fermions cannot pile up one on another (cannot share quantum states), and that bosons can (e.g., in lasers).  We also know that massless force-carrying bosons such as gluons and photons travel at c, the “speed of light”.  The W+ and W- and Z bosons of the weak force do not because they interact with the Higgs field and so have “rest mass”.

Anyway, that’s not really the point.  The point is that gravitons, the hypothetical force-carrying particle of the gravitational field, are also massless bosons, and gravity travels at the speed of light*****.  But something popped into my head that had never occurred to me before and I’m not sure why:  do gravitons come in different frequencies?

We know that light has a limitless number of possible frequencies, across a very wide range, and that higher frequencies/shorter wavelengths are associated with higher energies per photon.  We also know that all matter radiates photons at a spectrum of frequencies that depends on temperature‒the so-called black body radiation.  Well, we also know that all matter “radiates” gravitons, or at the very least it all interacts with the gravitational field.  What if matter gives out gravitons in a spectrum that depends on total mass?

What would it mean for a graviton to have higher frequency or lower frequency?  Would that entail a stronger (and weaker) gravity?  Or would it correspond to something else entirely?

Of course, I know that gravitational waves are of varying frequencies depending upon the source‒that frequency and intensity (amplitude) increase as, for instance, two mutually orbiting black holes get closer and closer, orbiting faster and faster, before they coalesce.  Is that analogous to them producing large numbers of gravitons of those increasing frequencies?  Or are gravitational waves different types of things than “ordinary” gravitons?  Is ordinary gravity propagated by “virtual gravitons” much as the electromagnetic force is carried by “virtual photons”, which are really just mathematical shorthand for perturbations in the quantum field of electromagnetism?

I suspect that, because we don’t really have anything like a good quantum theory of gravity, there would be few clear answers to my questions about gravitons, but there may be constraints based on what we already know that would make my questions answerable or moot.

I mean, I know that “we” know that gravitons would be spin-2 particles, meaning that to rotate them 180 degrees would leave them unchanged******.  I don’t know how this or other aspects of gravitons would affect possible frequencies, though.  Also, can gravitons be polarized in a manner analogous to light?  I’m not sure whether my graviton questions are sensible or pertinent or utterly off the mark.  If anyone out there is a physicist specializing in such things, please, if you can spare a moment, let me know?

This post has gone on for a long time, I know.  I could meander around much longer on these subjects, probably for pages and pages and pages, but that would be a bit much for a daily blog post, if it isn’t already.  Maybe because it’s a holiday, at least some of you will have the time and interest in reading such thoughts, but I don’t want to push my luck.

However, I welcome any comments on the above subjects if you have an interest, and especially if you have relevant expertise (though I welcome all interested thoughts).

In any case, please try to have a good day.

*A fascinating physical process that’s only possible because continuous liquids can actually have negative pressures.

**Not in any inappropriate way, just that they interact and waves can cancel out.

***Not a “superstring” or heterotic string or what have you, just for instance a guitar string or a cello string.

****This is not unlike Feynman’s path integral/sum over histories notion, really.

*****We know this is so because there was a neutron star merger detected by LIGO and VIRGO that was quickly looked at using “light” telescopes as well, and the timing matched up (As a silly aside, since gravitons are bosons and could thus in principle share quantum states, one might, in principle, be able to create a coherent beam of them…a GRASER or GASER if you will).

******Spin-1 particles basically return to their identical state if you rotate them 360 degrees.  And for spin ½ particles, you need to rotate them 720 degrees (!) for them to return to their prior configuration.  Once you’ve rotated them 360 degrees they’re kind of the opposite of their prior configuration.  If that’s hard to think about, just imagine traversing a Mobius strip laid out in a “circle”:  once you’ve gone 360 degrees, you’re on the opposite “side” of the strip than that on which you began, and you have to go another 360 degrees (so to speak) to get back where you started.  Neat, huh?