Author: Robert Elessar

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Nothing of worth can ever truly be “unconditional”

It’s Friday now, and for many it is the last day of the work week.  If you are one of those people, congratulations.  If you expect to work tomorrow, as I do, then, well, congratulations on having gainful employment.  It’s not a contradiction to consider both cases worthy of celebration.

I’m writing on my phone today because I didn’t want to take my laptop to the house with me‒I took my Radiohead guitar chords book home with the notion that I might actually get the acoustic guitar out and do some strumming, and the book and laptop together seemed likely to make my backpack unpleasantly heavy to carry.  Alas, the strumming part didn’t happen, but I couldn’t retroactively choose to take the laptop with me.

Because of that, I’m not going to write about Alzheimer’s and/or Parkinson’s disease today; I feel that I can deal with them better when I can type more naturally, and so I’ll address those things perhaps tomorrow.  Today, I’ll try to address a random, walk-in set of topics that crowded my head this morning for unclear causes.  The things that popped into my mind as I headed to the train station included the notions of healthcare as a human right, unconditional love, and free education (free anything, really), all loosely linked to something a coworker of mine said yesterday.

I’ll start with the middle one, because it presents itself (rather intrusively) in my mind in the form of the old song, Unconditional Love, performed way back when by Donna Summer and Musical Youth.  The chorus goes, “Give me your unconditional love; the kind of love I deserve; the kind I want to return.”

I may have written about this notion before, but do you spot the logical flaws there?  First of all, the notion that one can (apparently) demand another’s love, conditional or otherwise, is rather obscene and also unworkable.  But that’s a separate issue from the notion of “unconditional love”.  One big problem with this is revealed in the second line of the chorus:  that such love is the kind the singer deserves.  But if it’s unconditional, then‒to quote the movie Unforgiven‒”deserve’s got nothing to do with it”.  If love is unconditional, then everyone and anyone (and presumably anything) deserves it.  That’s what unconditional means!

Perhaps they might have meant something along the lines of “non transactional” love, but if so, they reveal hypocrisy in the next line, “the kind I want to return”, because they’re saying, openly, that their own love is not merely conditional but also transactional…I’ll love you if and only if you love me unconditionally.  Maybe that was supposed to be the message of the song, to ridicule such words and thoughts and attitudes toward love by revealing their absurdity, but it certainly didn’t come across that way.

On we go to the notion of healthcare as a human right.  This is something one sees at times brought up and bandied about by activists of various stripes, and I can readily understand and sympathize with the urge, but it is illogical.  One cannot have a right to anyone else’s skill or work or abilities or resources, and the provision of healthcare requires these in spades.

True rights are and can really only be rights to be free from things‒free from coercion, free from threats and violence, free from theft, free from censorship and from unjust imprisonment, that sort of thing.  To claim a right to the work of other people, especially if one claims that right precisely because that work is so important, is the opposite of any kind of right or freedom; it is coercion in and of itself.

Now, it may be that a society could decide that it is best for everyone, as a whole and as individuals, to provide (and therefore to pay for) healthcare for all its citizens without any at-the-time-of-service charge, since illnesses and injuries are often unpredictable, and they do not choose convenient times to strike.  A society may decide that taking away some of that danger, that threat, that uncertainty, will be better for everyone and anyone.  It’s not an unreasonable idea.  But that doesn’t describe any kind of right, even if one is a citizen of a society that has chosen that path.  Give it the credit it deserves and call it a privilege, and one that should be cherished, not a right.

This ties in nicely with the notion of other “free” programs or privileges, the main one that comes to my mind being that of “free college education”.  As with most positive, physical things, the notion of “free” simply doesn’t apply.  Air is free (for now), because it’s pretty much everywhere, and it doesn’t require any work apart from the effort of breathing.  But education requires many resources, including the information gleaned by the innumerable predecessors who worked to develop the knowledge that is being shared, and the time and effort of the scholars and teachers who are sharing it.

Some of this is getting cheaper and easier thanks to advancing computer and communications technology, but those things also required the efforts and resources of numerous people before they became available to so many others, most of whom do not have the knowledge or skill to recreate such resources on their own.

Again, this is not to say that it is not worth considering whether a society might be well-served by making education available without local charge to all citizens who wish to participate.  It may be well worth the expense and effort involved for the society, in the long or even the short term.  I’m a big fan of public primary and secondary schools, and I wish they were better funded and in a more egalitarian way, because there are untold numbers of people with great potential who have not been able to realize it because they had effectively no local resources available to do so.

This is truly a shame and a tragedy.  Who knows what scientists or artists or innovative business people (and so on) we have lost without knowing that we lost them?  But calling for there to be “free” education is silly.  Someone, somewhere, has to “pay” for every good thing that requires effort in transforming the world into a desired form, decreasing local entropy by expending energy and producing compensatory entropy increase through the efforts made.

This all ties in‒in spirit‒with the complaint by a coworker yesterday, who moans frequently about lack of money and a fear of being unable to pay rent, etc., but when the boss asked her to come in this Saturday to work, so she could make more money, said she just can’t work six days a week.  Of course, she doesn’t work six days a week, she hasn’t worked six days a week that I can remember.  I work six days every other week; if I don’t, things don’t happen for the many people who come in on Saturdays voluntarily, to try to make a little extra money for their own expenses.

The problem was not with her choosing not to come in on any Saturday‒that’s her decision, and she is the one who loses the opportunity to make more money‒but with her complaint to me that it’s just “not fair” to have to work six days, which is truly nonsensical given to whom she was speaking, and given the number of people who voluntarily come in and work more Saturdays than not.

My response was pretty unsympathetic.  I told her that “fairness” is a fiction, at least as she’s apparently imagining it.  There’s no injustice in her being encouraged to work an extra day once in a while to make extra money, if she’s truly worried about her expenses.  If anything, it would be unfair for her to expect to make more money without doing extra work.

In a sense, nature is always fair; the laws of physics apply everywhere and for all time, as far as we can tell.  They make no exceptions and provide no “get out of jail free” cards or cheat codes to anyone regarding their application.

Other than this, any notion of fairness is purely a human invention.  It may, in some senses and cases, be very good to seek and to create, for a society and for the individuals within it.  Indeed, I would say that it is worthwhile.  But it too is not free; it requires effort, and it requires ownership of one’s responsibility for one’s share of the effort.  It is not unconditional.  To expect unconditional anything from anyone or anything is not fair, but is in many ways quite the opposite.

Education is very good and beneficial, and probably the more of it we have, the better, all other things being equal.  Reasonable pay for good work is certainly a good thing.  Healthcare is an almost miraculous good that we take for granted at our peril, but which would almost certainly benefit all of society more if it were more efficiently and evenly available.  And love is, quite possibly, the most wonderful and beautiful thing the universe has ever brought into existence.  We should show these things the respect they deserve by not taking them for granted in any way.

deserve

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But if you blog it, as many of your players do, I had as lief the town-crier spoke my lines.

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday again, and it’s time to resume my traditional, weekly blog posting day after a brief hiatus last week due to a rather lackluster tropical storm.  I expect there will be another hiatus next Thursday, since it will be Thanksgiving here in the USA, and that’s probably a more universally observed holiday here than anything but New Year’s Day (the latter being mainly observed because many people tend to be much the worse for wear after New Year’s Eve).

I’m not going to pick up the discussion of Alzheimer’s and/or Parkinson’s disease today, largely because I’m writing this post on my phone*.  Also, Thursday has traditionally been a day for blog posts about writing, especially fiction.  This makes it a good opportunity to address something raised by the same reader, StephenB, in a comment after yesterday’s blog, in which he asked what my thoughts or approaches were to writing good dialogue.

It’s an interesting topic, not least because I’ve never really thought about trying to write good, let alone great, dialogue.  I have, however, always (as long as I can remember, anyway) enjoyed reading both good/great dialogue and good/great narration.  But the greatness of such writing was always measured by how much I enjoyed it or the story in which it took place, and was from my point of view, never in deference to what anyone else said was good or great.

I’ve always tended to notice passages of writing that I find moving or eloquent, and I read and reread them, and often involuntarily memorize them.  In high school, almost every day, I would write some quote or other on the little-used blackboard of the orchestra room**.  I’ve also always loved characters who used words well‒they’re usually villains for some unclear reason‒in various books and movies and comic books and whatnot.  A big part of the reason Lord Foul is one of my favorite villains is because of his way with words (as well as the fact that, despite being a Sauron-style “big bad”, he actually speaks in the stories)***.

I’ve also always watched people around me and listened to them, mostly to try to discern how ordinary people talk and interact and communicate, which has often been far from intuitive for me.  If someone has peculiar habits of speech or sayings, especially funny ones, I’ll tend to remember them, and sometimes these will appear in my characters’ speech.

But when I’m writing dialogue, whether in a story or a play or whatever (it’s been a long time since I’ve written a play or a screenplay, but I did write them, once upon a time), I’m not really trying to make the dialogue good.  I’m not even really thinking about it as “dialogue”.  To me, the characters in my stories are just people‒real people in a sense.  I don’t do any formal process of, for instance, deciding someone’s background or motivations or nature, partly because, as far as I can see, no real people have such clearly defined backgrounds or motivations‒real people are messy and fuzzy‒and partly because it seems boring.

So, when my characters are speaking, they’re just talking to each other, as people talk to each other, and the subjects and words depend on the situations and the vague tendencies of the person talking.  I will have people try to be funny, when the character wants to try to be funny, but I can’t always tell if they’ve succeeded (and it’s often, ironically, funnier when they haven’t).  Sometimes characters get the right words out and make what they’re trying to say clear on the first attempt, and other times the other characters don’t quite get what they were saying, and they’ll have to clarify their point, sometimes with exasperation.

But real people, as far as I can see, don’t do “dialogue”.  They just talk to each other, and it’s very free-form and impromptu and usually quite messy, but sometimes fun.  And, as I said, the people in my stories aren’t anything but people to me, even the “bad guys”, and so they are prone to say whatever they say in any given situation, and succeed or fail at communicating depending on their luck, skill, or circumstances.

Of course, I do a lot of editing as I finalize stories, but I suspect that I edit dialogue far less than I do narration.  I certainly don’t bother trying to be grammatically correct when people are speaking, unless that character is someone who likes to try to do that, because most people‒even I‒don’t speak in grammatically correct sentences.  Occasionally I’ll tweak something if it’s said in an awkward way that’s not a natural kind of awkwardness, or I’ll add something if it occurs to me that this character really wants to say a bit more about a particular subject than was written originally.

And, of course, in The Chasm and the Collision, the characters sometimes deliberately choose not to swear when they definitely wanted to swear, and would have done so, if not for my decision, on my father’s recommendation, not to have any swearing in the book (since it was “kid” oriented).

So I fear I have little advice to give about writing “good dialogue”, but personally, I wouldn’t worry too much about trying to do that.  I doubt Shakespeare ever tried to write good dialogue specifically; he probably just had his characters say what he thought they would say, both to have fun and to advance the plot (and often tweaked into iambic pentameter).  He ended up making some truly great dialogue, but I think his goal was just to write an enjoyable, moving play that people would be willing to pay to go and see.  The man had to make a living.

I’m no Shakespeare (clearly), but I basically just read what I enjoy and try to write what I enjoy, and my characters aren’t Characters, they’re just people.  They don’t do dialogue, they just talk, like people do, often saying stupid things, and interrupting each other, talking way too much, too loudly, and in singularly unflattering ways.  I don’t know if that counts as any kind of advice or insight; these are just my thoughts on the subject.

That’s my own “dialogue” for the day.  I hope you got some fun out of it, and that you have a good day, and a good week, and have whatever conversations you have with your friends/loved ones that seem to fit.  And, of course, please comment here with suggestions for subjects and topics or inquiries regarding matters about which you’d like me to write.

TTFN

socrates dialogue bubble

*I didn’t bring my laptop when I left work early yesterday, exhausted beyond belief by Monday and Tuesday nights.  I wish I could say I’d gone on some kind of binge on those evenings, but alas, I can’t even usually finish a single glass of wine, and apart from caffeine, allergy medicine, and OTC analgesics, I don’t use any drugs.

**The orchestra teachers were pretty easy-going about this, presumably because I was a good student and the process was nominally educational and occasionally interesting or amusing.  They did give me the “dusty cello award” in my senior year, near graduation, for my idiosyncratic habit, and that very much caught me off guard.  I never really realized it was odd or funny.

***He’s the second person we “meet” from the Land, in the chapter “Invitation to a Betrayal”, and I doubt I will ever forget the final paragraph of his warning to Thomas Covenant:  “One more word.  A final caution.  Do not forget whom to fear at the last.  I have had to be content with killing and torment, but now my plans are laid, and I have begun.  I shall not rest until I have eradicated hope from the Earth.  Think on that, and be dismayed.”

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Some discussion of cancer–not the zodiac sign

Yesterday, reader StephenB suggested that I write about what I thought might be the next big medical cure coming our way—he suggested cancer, Alzheimer’s, and Parkinson’s diseases as possible contenders—and what I thought the “shape” of such a cure might be.  I thought this was an interesting point of departure for a discussion blog, and I appreciate the response to my request for topics.

[I’ll give a quick “disclaimer” at the beginning:  I’ve had another poor night.  Either from the stress of Monday night or something I ate yesterday (or both, or something else entirely) I was up a lot of last night with reflux, nausea, and vomiting.  So I hope I’m reasonably coherent as I write, and I apologize if my skills suffer.]

One hears often of the notion of a “cure for cancer”, for understandable reasons; cancer is a terrifying and horrible thing, and most people would like to see it gone.  However, my prediction is that there will never be “a” cure for cancer, except perhaps if we develop nanotechnology of sufficient complexity and reliability that we are able to program nanomachines unerringly to tell the difference between malignant and non-malignant cells, then destroy the malignant ones and remove their remains neatly from the body without causing local complications.  That’s a tall order, but it’s really the only “one” way to target and cure, in principle, all cancers.

Though “cancer” is one word, and there are commonalities in the diseases that word represents, most people know that there are many types of cancers—e.g., skin, colon, lung, breast, brain, liver, pancreatic, and so on—and at least some people know that, even within the broader categories there are numerous subtypes.  But every case of cancer is literally a different disease in a very real sense, and indeed, within one person, a single cancer can become, effectively, more than one disease.

We each* start out as a single fertilized egg cell, but by adulthood, our bodies have tens of trillions of cells, a clear demonstration of the power of exponential expansion.  Even as adults, of course, we do not have a static population of cells; there is ongoing growth, cell division/reproduction, and of course, cell death.  This varies from tissue to tissue, from moment to moment, from cell type to cell type, under the influence of various local and distant messengers, ultimately controlled by the body’s DNA.

Whenever a cell replicates, it makes a copy of its DNA, and one of each copy is sent into each daughter cell.  There are billions of base pairs in the human genome, so there are lots of opportunities for copying errors.  Thankfully, the cell’s proofreading “technology” is amazingly good, and errors are few and far between.  But they are not nonexistent.  Cosmic rays, toxins, other forms of radiation, prolonged inflammation, and simple chance, can all lead to errors in the replication of a precursor cell’s DNA, giving rise to a daughter cell with mutations, and when there are trillions of cells dividing, there are bound to be a number of them.

The consequences of such errors are highly variable.  Many of them do absolutely nothing, since they happen in portions of the genome that are not active in that daughter cell’s tissue type, or are in areas of “junk” DNA in the cell, or in some other way are inconsequential to the subsequent population of cells.  Others, if in just the wrong location, can be rapidly lethal to a daughter cell.  Most, though, are somewhere in between these two extremes.

The rate of cell division/reproduction in the body is intricately controlled, by the proteins and receptors in that cell, and the genes that code for them, and that code for factors that influence other portions of the genome of a given cell, and that make it sensitive or insensitive to hormonal or other factors that promote or inhibit cell division.  If a mutation in one of the regions of the cell that is involved in this regulatory process—either increasing the tendency to grow and divide or diminishing the sensitivity to signals that inhibit division—a cell can become prone to grow and divide more rapidly than would be ideal or normal for that tissue.  Any given error is likely to have a relatively minor effect, but it doesn’t take much of an effect to lead to a significant increase in the number of cells in a given cell type eventually—again, this is the power of exponential processes.

A cell line that is reproducing more rapidly will have more opportunities for errors in the DNA reproduction of its many daughter cells.  These new errors are no more likely to be positive, negative, or neutral generally than any other replication errors anywhere else in the body, but increased rate of growth means more opportunities** for mistakes.

If a second mistake in one of the potentially millions (or more) of daughter cells of the initial cell makes it yet more prone to divide rapidly than even the first population of mutated cells, then that population will grow and outpace the parent cells.  There can be more than one such daughter populations of cells.  And as the rate of replication/growth/division increases in a given population of cells, we have an increased chance of more errors occurring.  Those that become too deleterious will be weeded out.  Those that are neutral will not change anything in the short term (though some can make subsequent mutations more prone to cause increased growth rates).  But the ones that increase the rate of growth and division will rapidly come to dominate.

This is very much a microcosm of evolution by natural selection, and is a demonstration of the fact that such evolution is blind to the future.  In a sense, the mutated, rapidly dividing cells are more successful than their more well-behaved, non-mutated—non-malignant—sister cells.  They outcompete for resources*** against “healthy” cells in many cases, and when they gather into large enough masses, they can cause direct physical impairments to the normal function of an organism.  They can also produce hormones and proteins themselves, and can thus cause dysregulation of the body in which they reside in many ways.

Because they tend to accumulate more and more errors, they tend to become more dysfunctional over time.  And, of course, any new mutations in a subset of tumor cells that makes it more prone to divide unchecked, or that makes it more prone to break loose from its place of origin and spread through the blood and/or lymph of the body will rapidly become overrepresented.

This is the general story of the occurrence of a cancer.  The body is not without its defenses against malignant cells—the immune system will attack and destroy mutated cells if it recognizes them as such—but they are not perfect, nor would it behoove evolution (on the large scale) to select for such a strictly effective immune system, since all resources are always finite, and overactive immunity can cause disease in its own right.

But the specific nature of any given cancer is unique in many ways.  First of all, cancers arise in the body and genes of a human being, each of which is thoroughly unique in its specific genotype from every other human who has ever lived (other than identical twins).  Then, of course, more changes develop as more mutations occur in daughter cells.  Each tumor, each cancer, is truly a singular, unique disease in all the history of life.  Of course, tumors from specific tissues will have characteristics born of those tissues, at least at the start.  Leukemias tend to present quite differently from a glioblastoma or a hepatoma.

Because of these differences, the best treatments for specific cancers, even of classes of cancers, is different.  The fundamental difficulty in treating cancer is that you are trying to stop the growth and division—to kill—cells that are more or less just altered human cells, not all that different from their source cells.  So any chemical or other intervention that is toxic to a cancer cell is likely to be toxic to many other cells in the body.  This is why chemotherapy, and radiation therapy, and other therapies are often so debilitating, and can be life-threatening in their own right.  Of course, if one finds a tumor early enough, when it is quite localized, before any cells have broken loose—“metastasized”—to the rest of the body, then surgical removal can be literally curative.

Other than in such circumstances, the treatment of cancer is perilous, though not treating it is usually more so.  Everything from toxic chemicals to immune boosters, to blockers of hormones to which some cancers are responsive, to local radiation are used, but it is difficult to target mutated cells without harming the native cells to at least some degree.

In certain cases of leukemia, one can literally give a lethal dose of chemo and/or radiation that kills the bone marrow of a person whose system has been overwhelmed by malignant white blood cells, then giving a “bone marrow transplant”, which nowadays can sometimes come from purified bone marrow from the patient—thus avoiding graft-versus-host diseases—and there can be cures.  But it is obviously still a traumatic process, and is not without risk, even with auto-grafts.

So, as I said at the beginning, there is not likely to be any one “cure” for cancer, ever, or at least until we have developed technology that can, more or less inerrantly, recognize and directly remove malignant cells.  This is probably still quite a long way off, though progress can occasionally be surprising.

One useful thing cancer does is give us an object lesson, on a single-body scale, that it is entirely possible for cell lines—and for organisms—to evolve, via apparent extreme success, completely into extinction.  It’s worth pondering, because it happens often, in untreated cancers, and it has happened on the scale of species at various times in natural history.  Evolution doesn’t think ahead, either at the cellular level, the organismal level, or the species/ecosystem level.  Humans, on the other hand, can think ahead, and would be well served to take a cue from the tragedy of cancer that human continuation is not guaranteed merely because the species has been so successful so far.

Anyway, that’s a long enough post for today.  I won’t address matters of Parkinson’s Disease or Alzheimer’s now, though they are interesting, and quite different sorts of diseases than cancers are.  I may discuss them tomorrow, though I might skip to Friday.  But I am again thankful to StephenB for the suggestion/request, and I encourage others to share their recommendations and curiosities.  Topics don’t have to be about medicine or biology, though those are my areas of greatest professional expertise.  I’m pretty well versed in many areas of physics, and some areas of mathematics, and I enjoy some philosophy and psychology, and—of course—the reading and writing of fiction.

Thanks again.

*I’m excluding the vanishingly rare, and possibly apocryphal, cases of fused fraternal twins.

**There are also people who have, at baseline, certain genes that make them more prone to such rapid replication, or to errors in DNA replication, or to increased sensitivity to growth factors of various kinds, and so on.  These are people who have higher risks of various kinds of cancer, but even in them, it is not an absolute matter.

***Most tissues in the body have the inherent capacity and tendency to stimulate the development of blood vessels to provide their nutrients and take away their wastes.  Cancer cells are no exception, or rather, the ones that are do not tend to survive.  Again, it is a case of natural selection for those cell lines that are most prone to multiply and grow and gain local resources.

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The Monday misadventures of a moribund moron

I’m writing this blog post under rather unusual—but not entirely unprecedented—circumstances:  I’m already in the office (and using my laptop!) as I write this because I never returned to the house last night.

I had boarded the usual southbound train, but even as I did, I felt a vague sense of foreboding.  Well—it wasn’t all that vague, come to think of it, because there had been an announcement flashed up that one of the northbound trains was delayed thirty to sixty minutes due to an accident involving the train.  This never bodes well.  The Amtrak heading southbound had already dilly-dallied in the station about fifteen minutes longer than it ought to have, delaying the train for which I was waiting.  Still, the southbound train came, only about twenty minutes later than usual, and I got on it, foolish child that I am.

Two stops along, the train came to a station and the conductor and guards came around saying that everyone had to get off the train, that there would be shuttles coming to bring us down south to the next station or something along those lines.  I didn’t have much choice but to join the crowd, heading for the rough bus-boarding area of the station, but the noises from the nearby engine, and the crowd, and the tightly packed, noisy bodies—as well as the unexpected change in routine—were all quite stressful.

I waited for a while, texting my sister and a coworker, mainly to try to relieve my tension, trying to figure out if either the house or the office were in reasonable walking distance.  The office was ten miles north (workable in a pinch) but the house was twenty-one miles south.  By the time I reached it on foot, it would have been almost time to get up and leave for work.

A few city buses came and went—these weren’t the shuttles, but some people got on them, desperate just to get moving, I suppose.  I couldn’t really tell what anyone was saying or doing, because the tinnitus in my right ear had been acting up ferociously all day, and I could (and can) hear even less on that side than usual.  In any case, I wasn’t going to get on the bus, because based on my web search, it would take two and a half hours to get to my destination by bus, if they were even still running down my way by the time I used them.

Soon, though, there was an announcement that a northbound train was coming—going back the way I came—and it was coming on the side of the track that I was on.  The fact that I also had to use the restroom, and there are none of these in the train stations (nor on shuttles, which still hadn’t arrived after nearly an hour) made my decision for me.  I got on the train and rode the two stops back north, got off, and walked to the office, stopping for some unhealthy fast food on the way, because why the hell not?  It’s not as though I particularly want to be healthy (though I do want to be thinner—I’m putting myself on a strict calorie count/restriction now, since it would be nice not to be so fat when I die).

And that’s where I spent the night:  at the office.  My sleep was probably as good as I ever get at the house, though that’s not saying much, and the industrial-carpeted floor is as good for my back as the futon/floor I sleep on at the house.  The only real issue is that I don’t have a shower, and I can’t wear my usual Tuesday clothes today, which is a little distressing.  I also have to wear the same pair of shoes two days in a row, which is quite annoying.  And, of course, I can’t change my socks and underwear.

At least, as I commented to my sister, there’s no one waiting for and/or worrying about me.  There’s never anyone waiting for me to worry about me.  My presence or absence has no impact upon anyone in the world, beyond the immediate and superficial.

So, anyway, here I am at the office already/still, and I don’t have anything else to write about today but the stupid events that happened yesterday evening, which would be far more tolerable if there were any good reason to bother doing any of it.  But there really isn’t.  There’s no point at all to anything I do.

No one has offered me any ideas for topics about which to write; so far there’s apparently nothing about which anyone is interested in my point of view, nothing of worth or of note in my life anymore.  I don’t have any place that I consider—or that feels at all like—home anymore.  I’m lonely and I’m empty, but I find other people stressful and frustrating and their behaviors borderline inexplicable and irrational.  And they’re too loud and chaotic.

On top of that inherent noisiness, of course, there’s that constant, very high D half-sharp* in my right ear, 24 hours a day, that’s been going on for about 15 years or so now, and which has gotten worse recently.  Every now and then, I get a brief run of tinnitus that suddenly pops up in my left ear**, and when it does, I’m horrified that it might be the onset of a permanent noise such as exists in my right ear.

The right ear tinnitus started suddenly, while I was working at the Treasure Coast Forensic Treatment Center, where the heavy metal doors were controlled remotely via a buzzing electromagnetic lock system, and they all had to be slammed shut.  One day while I was there, a shriek suddenly started in my right ear, that piercing, steady, banshee sound vaguely reminiscent of the background noise of an old video monitor that only very young people can hear.  It’s been going on ever since.

Thankfully, it’s only ever lasted less than a minute at a time so far in my left ear.  I don’t know what I would do if it persisted.  I’d be inclined to shove pens and/or pencils into my inner ears bilaterally, but I know that, since tinnitus is related to damage to nerves and closely related structures, such interventions might just do harm without helping stop the noise.

Medical education can be useful sometimes.

Anyway, that’s that.  I’m at the office already, and I’ve told you my dull and dreary, but nevertheless very stressful, tale from last evening to this morning.  If you want me to write about something else, than give me suggestions, as I mentioned yesterday.  Ask me questions.  Ask me anything.  I can’t promise I’ll be able to write about any and/or everything anyone might ask, but I do have a pretty broad knowledge base, and I’m good at learning new things as well.  I would really be interested in your inquiries or suggestions.

Later.

*There seem to be some other notes mixed in, but it’s hard to tease them out, and the D half-sharp is definitely the most prominent one.

**It’s never the same pitch as in my right ear, of course—this is only to be expected, since the nature of tinnitus and the damage that causes it involve processes that are utterly unlikely to coincide, pitch-wise, between the two ears.

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A call for topics

It’s Monday morning yet again, despite my best efforts‒the beginning of yet another pointless work week in the dreary tail bit of the year, when the sun sets at 5:31 pm local time, thanks to the outmoded “daylight savings time”, making people like me, who are already dysthymic/depressive and are also subject to some seasonal affective problems that much more unstable.  Spread the word: daylight savings time causes significant morbidity and mortality* and does no one much, if any, good.

I’m writing this on my cell phone again, or “smartphone” if you will (though dumbphone seems like a better term given the way most humans use theirs).  I deliberately didn’t bring my laptop to the house with me over the weekend.  It’s not as though I’m writing stories anymore; I’m just writing this ridiculous blog.  So there’s no particular impetus to make the writing process easier for me, as using the laptop does.  I might as well use the smaller, lighter device when I don’t feel like carrying the heavier one.

I had a reasonably boring weekend, which I guess is a good thing.  I watched a few movies, and I went on some comparatively long walks‒I think I totaled about 12 miles over the course of the two days.  I also spoke with my sister on the phone on Sunday, and that was good.

That’s about it.  That’s the extent of my non-work life.  It’s the best I have to offer, and it’s as like as not just to get worse as time passes.  But I was able to force myself to get almost eight hours of sleep on Friday night and Saturday night, thanks to Benadryl and melatonin.  Oh, and of course, I did my laundry on Sunday, as I always do.

Sorry, I know this is really boring so far.  I don’t know what to tell you.  I didn’t really have any subject in mind for today, other than my brief diatribe about daylight savings time and depression/seasonal affective disorder.  Obviously, it’s a topic that affects me significantly (no pun intended), but there’s otherwise not much for me to say about it.

Eliezer Yudkowsky has an interesting bit of insight into it that he gives as an illustrative case in his excellent book Inadequate Equilibria, dealing with, among other things, the reasons why no one has done research on much stronger light-based treatments for SAD.  But you can’t expect depressed people to take initiative to do remarkable things to help themselves, since a major part of the problem with depressive disorders is comparative inability to take positive action.

If anyone out there has any requests for subjects or topics for me to discuss in a blog post, I’d be more than willing to consider them, though if it’s not a subject about which I have any expertise, I may not be able to do anything worthwhile with it.  Still, I have a fairly broad knowledge base regarding general science, especially biology and physics.  I like mathematics, though I’m not that deeply knowledgeable about esoterica thereof‒a regretted failure of my youthful imagination when I was in college.  Similar things could be said about the deep aspects of computer science; I wish I had known how interesting the subjects were back then and so had pursued them more than I did.

Of course, I have a fair amount of personal knowledge in the reading and writing of fantasy/science fiction/horror, though I haven’t read any new stuff in a while.  I haven’t even read any of my own books in a long time.  I think the most recent horror I’ve read was Revival by Stephen King, which was pretty good.  I haven’t read much if anything in the way of new fantasy since Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.  I’m reasonably well versed in slightly older comic book lore, especially Marvel.  And of course, The Silmarillion, The Hobbit, and The Lord of the Rings are among my favorite books.

I enjoy Shakespeare, but I don’t consider myself any kind of scholar of the Bard.  I like his works and his words in a fairly straightforward fashion.  I also like Poe quite a lot, as you might have guessed from my recitation videos of some of his poems.

Anyway, that’s a quick summary of some of the subjects upon which I might at least feel justified in opining.  So, if anyone has any suggestions or requests in these or even other, tangentially related subjects, I would appreciate them.  I like to feel useful or productive in at least some way, so I can justify my existence to myself.  It isn’t easy.  I’m a much harsher judge of my usefulness or worth than Scrooge at his worst, and I expect no ghosts of past, present, and/or future to visit me to give me some epiphany that changes my character.

It would be nice if some rescue mission were to happen to save my soul, but I don’t see it as plausible, and I don’t think anyone thinks it’s in their interest‒or anyone else’s‒to save me, in any case.  So in the meantime I’m just stumbling along like a wind up robot that’s been forgotten by the child that wound it up, legs moving and shifting until the mechanism breaks or the spring finishes untightening.  And damn, that’s an annoyingly efficient spring.

*I don’t have the data for this, but I strongly suspect that, if the sun set at least a little later‒say an hour later, even‒things would be slightly easier for people with SAD.  It might be difficult to tease out the statistics, but SAD doesn’t just kill by increasing rates of suicide, though I’m pretty sure it does that.  People experiencing exacerbations of depression have higher rates of numerous other illnesses and accidents beyond the obvious. 

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When Friday night arrives, will it or will it not have a suitcase?

It’s Friday, and the trains are back up and running, and I’m heading in to work, so I am also writing a blog post for today.  Callooh.  Callay.

I’m writing this post on my cell phone, if that term is still strictly accurate to describe the modern “smartphone”, because I didn’t bring my laptop with me when I left the office early on Wednesday.  This was not an accident; I decided that, even though I had a raincoat and an umbrella, it was possible rain might get into my backpack and damage the laptop if the rain was heavy enough.

That turns out to have been a thoroughly unnecessary precaution.  I don’t want to make light of the travails of those who had a worse time of it, but around here, the recent subtropical storm was not that intimidating.  Neither power nor internet went out, I didn’t even come close to needing to close the storm shutters, and the rainfall wasn’t all that impressive.  We’ve had far deeper puddles from a typical summer afternoon storm.

I guess that’s all good, though the trains didn’t run yesterday, nevertheless.  It was probably possible for them to do so, but I respect the decision of those responsible.  They can’t know ahead of time how debris and damage might affect the tracks, putting those riding the trains in danger and potentially derailing‒pardon the expression‒operations on longer and larger scales due to mishaps.  It was a sensible precaution to suspend service for the day.

I could have made it to the office by bus, but that’s a very long ride, and my boss basically told me just to enjoy the day off.  He has commented, in other contexts, on the fact that I’ve never taken a vacation in all the years I’ve been working for him, and that’s true.  The only time I’ve taken off has been on the two occasions when first my father and then my mother died.

As I said to him, though, what would I even do with a vacation?  I don’t have anyone with whom to go anywhere, and to me, vacations are things one does with other people.  I don’t even watch TV or movies with anyone, anymore, nor do I tend to watch shows that anyone else around me watches.  The closest I come to watching something with someone else is watching one of the many YouTube “reaction videos” for shows that I have watched.  I suppose that sort of situation is probably one of the reasons people like these kinds of videos; it feels like sharing a show you love with a friend who hasn’t seen it before.

Yesterday, during my “day off”, I decided to make use of it by going for a nice long walk (I even jogged about 40 paces during it) and then watching some movies of the sort that always used to get me motivated to get/stay in shape.  These tend to be specific kinds of action movies, and the ones I watched yesterday were Hit Man, Man on Fire, and The Equalizer.  Good, clean, violent, revenge-type fun where the strength of the hero is at least as much his cleverness as his physical prowess.

These were the kinds of characters I admired most‒of those in action movies, anyway.  And though the main character in Hit Man is a sort of born-and-raised, brutally trained and modified to be what he is kind of person, he’s still basically a relatively believable, and very clever protagonist.  And of course, both of the latter two movies were made when Denzel Washington was probably as old as I am now, or nearly so, and he’s never been an action star type.

I don’t think any of these movies are realistic, of course, but they tap into a sort of primal motivation that gets me going, and works far better than any thoughts of simply being healthy.  The whole “to live a long and healthy life” thing doesn’t push you much if you don’t even want to have lived as long as you already have lived.  But the feeling of wanting to be able to be a badass, to be able to carry out necessary violence in appropriate circumstances‒even if it kills you‒that can get even a person like me motivated.

So, I did some extra push ups of three different kinds‒it was appalling to me how few I could readily do at once, especially since I can do 35 dips at a time (and that despite being a fat pig).  I guess they really don’t work quite the same muscle groups.  I also did extra ab exercises and lunges and some other stuff.

It’s all silliness, of course, but as the writer of Ecclesiastes put it, all is vanity.  Still, vanity that gets one up and moving and trying to get in better shape is at least a locally useful kind of vanity.

Anyway, that’s how I used my “day off” which was one of the first I’ve had in a while that wasn’t just because I was sick, not counting alternate Saturdays.  Of course, in a few weeks I’ll have Thanksgiving off, but I don’t do anything on Thanksgiving.  I don’t have nearby family or close friends with whom to spend it, and if I were invited to join someone’s family’s celebration, I would probably feel too awkward and tense at the prospect to take them up on it.

It’s a bit of a depressing situation, but I don’t really know what to do about it.  I used to have family and loved ones around me (these are not mutually exclusive groups), but some members of those groups have ended up distancing themselves from me often enough‒and causing a great deal of non-intended pain in the process for me‒that I find that the sense of risk is greater than the urge to try to connect with anyone new.

Also, it’s led me to the provisional conclusion that I’m simply not beneficial to have as a family member or loved one or close friend, since I am the common denominator in all these situations.  So I also don’t want to inflict myself upon other people, least of all the sorts of people who would be kind enough and patient enough to want to be close to me, and to whom I would want to be close.  So, I’m not liable to change things on my own.

Most of the close friends and loved ones I’ve had in the past were either family, who were forced by blood to have me as part of their “in group”, or people with whom I’ve been almost randomly and fortuitously (for me) put together in school or university or work, or who, in a way, sought me out because they found me interesting.  I’m not as interesting as I used to be, though, and even those who most thought me interesting, such as my now-ex-wife, eventually found me intolerable.  She’s a smart woman; I have a hard time faulting her judgment in this.

Anyway, speaking of Saturdays‒and I did mention them not long ago‒I am apparently going to have this Saturday off; my coworker with whom I alternate Saturdays asked to switch and take this one over the next one, so I said yes.  Thus, I won’t be expecting to write a post tomorrow.  If something changes, well…you’ll know because I will have written a blog post.

In the meantime, I hope you have all had pretty good weeks, and that things are going well for you, and that all your potential disasters have turned out no worse than tropical storm Nicole turned out for me/us in south Florida.  Thanks for reading.

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“When comes the storm?”

I brought my laptop with me yesterday after work, and I’m using it to write this post.  I was afraid this morning that I would need to avoid its use.  I was worried that there would be heavy rain and high winds at the train station thanks to the “subtropical storm” morphing into a hurricane that’s bearing straight at the east coast of Florida.  However, this morning it’s just a bit breezy, and the rain is not very impressive—more a drizzle than anything else, though it is steadier than rain tends to be down here.

I have my raincoat on, just in case.

As of yesterday, the announcement was that today the trains would stop running after about 5 pm, so I’m going to need to leave work early if that’s still the case.  In addition, the announcement was that there would be no train service on Thursday, since the storm is predicted to make landfall at around 1 am Thursday morning.  So, I may not be going to work on Thursday, since if the trains aren’t running, the buses aren’t likely to be running, and I have no other reliable way to get to the office.  If that’s the case, I probably won’t be writing my traditional Thursday blog post.

I doubt anyone will mourn.

Maybe I should take this as a sign from the universe that I should just give up on this blog post, as I’ve given up writing fiction or playing guitar or even really listening to any music, let alone singing along.  I get the impression that my post yesterday—which was on a subject I find interesting, and thus about which I tend to go on and on and on, even when writing on my phone—wasn’t particularly interesting to anyone but me.  There’s nothing terribly wrong with that, but it’s a lot of work just to spew my random thoughts into the void, when for the most part, I already know what those thoughts are.

I’ve given myself plenty of such potential “signs” to look out for, that I would take to mean that the universe wants me to stick around.  Not that I really believe in any such nonsense; it’s just a bit of frivolity.  Most of the potential signs I’ve chosen center on my love of numbers; they relate to certain automatically generated codes that happen when processing things at work.

I gave myself more than 10 opportunities over the last several months, and they’ve all failed, which was predictable.  I knew that they weren’t likely—I was looking for palindromic sequences of eight digits in an eight-digit code that turns over very rapidly, since numerous offices and businesses use the service—but I figured, since I’m a fan of numbers, and especially such numbers, if one of them came up honestly, in the normal course of business, I would take it as an indicator to reorient myself somehow, at least for the time being.

I don’t actually imagine that the universe cares one way or another whether I live or die, or indeed, whether anyone or anything lives or dies, except to the extent that the universe contains minds instantiated in flesh.  All of those that might have any pertinent opinion have shown the general tendency to find their lives more comfortable when I am not around them much, as I’m sure I’ve noted ad nauseam in the past.  So, there really is nothing significant holding me here.

Even those distant people with whom I keep in occasional contact, and who would probably be sad for a bit if I were gone, would not experience any true upheaval in their lives.  I’m disconnected from nearly everyone, beyond tenuous cobwebs; the people at the office are the ones who would have the greatest adjustments to make, but these would be rapidly achieved, and some people there would no doubt get raises as they took over some of my duties.

I’m tired, in so many ways.  I’ve slept worse than average even for me this week, probably partly because of the change in the clocks over the weekend.  And the fact that it gets so dark so early in the evening this time of year has never been good for me.  I’m on the first train of the day here, now, but I was up for hours already before I left the house.

I kind of wish for something to take the whole issue out of my hands.  I don’t tend to cross streets against lights deliberately—that would feel utterly impolite and inappropriate to me—but I have been willfully walking into the road even when right turners are approaching the intersections, hoping that someone will be reckless and run into me.  It’s a silly little thing, but if someone caused such an accident, they would be the ones disobeying traffic laws, so the fact that my “gain” would inconvenience them would be appropriate.

So far, I’ve had no luck.  I don’t really expect to have any in this sense—even if someone were to hit me, the speeds are too slow to be likely to be lethal.  Still, I have channeled the Joker (from The Dark Knight) a few times while crossing the street recently, saying, “Hit me, hit me, I want you to do it, I want you to do it,” under my breath as drivers approach the intersections.  Of course—rather obviously—no one has hit me so far.

Wusses.

Oh, they’ve just confirmed with announcements on the train that, yes indeed, there will be no service tomorrow (and today it will stop early) so I don’t plan to write a post tomorrow.  If you’re looking forward to my bastardized Shakespearean quote for the week, I can only apologize, but I’m not going to go out of my way to do it.  It’s not as thought there would be any point, to it or to anything else that I do.

Every day, more and more, I feel like someone lost in a Lovecraftian landscape full of creatures that make little sense to me, and with whom I cannot effectively communicate or interact.  I know that I make no sense to them, also, or at least very little.  I suppose, in a way, I’m the alien, I’m the mutant, so I have no “right” to expect them to try to understand me.

But surely, to Cthulhu or to Yog-Sothoth or to Shub-niggurath, humans and other mortal creatures must look as horrifying and alien as those creatures do to the hapless humans who encounter them in the stories.  Cthulhu may find the presence of humans to be as repulsive (and even frightening) as humans would find an encounter with cockroaches, ants, and mice or rats in their kitchens, in their food.  If it’s evil for Cthulhu to want to destroy humans, then it’s surely just as evil for humans to want to fumigate their homes when they are infested with “pests”.

I know, I know, Cthulhu isn’t real*, but that doesn’t change the point I’m making.  The monster, the outsider—the stranger—can be just as innocent, just as horrified, just as frightened as any human in any scary story.

Fear is not the mind killer, despite what they say in Dune, but prolonged fear is erosive, corrosive, and a burden that can become too great to bear.  And being a stranger in a strange land may be a low-level kind of fear—often more of a stress and tension, really—but it is real.

And even a monster, a stranger, might hope or dream or wish that somewhere, somehow, someone would rescue it, would reach out and try to help it, so that it doesn’t have to feel so lost and alone and afraid.  But it might recognize that it has no actual right to expect that anyone would ever do such a thing, and—seeing as it is a monster, a stranger—that its nature is to be alone until it finally succumbs to its local increasing entropy.

Anyway, that’s nearly all for today.  I won’t be writing anything tomorrow.  As for Friday, well, whether I write anything then will depend on factors such as whether the trains are running again by then so that I’ll be able to get to the office okay, and of course, whether I’m even alive—but, then, it always depends on that latter variable.

In closing, I’ll refer to a different topic.  Many of you are probably aware of the very large Powerball jackpot that was recently won (or so I understand) by some human somewhere.  If you’re interested in reading a story about someone who wins a similarly large jackpot and tries to do good with it, leading to unexpected and earthshaking consequences, you could read my short story, “I for one welcome our new computer overlords” which is available as a standalone story through Kindle, and also as part of my collection Dr. Elessar’s Cabinet of Curiosities, which is available on Kindle and in both paperback and hardcover editions.  I think it’s a pretty good story.  If you read it, I hope you enjoy it, and I’d be grateful for any feedback I’m able to receive.

Stay dry and safe, wherever you are.

*As far as we know.

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Never seem to find the time…

It’s Tuesday now, and I’m writing this post on my smartphone, because I couldn’t be arsed to bring my laptop back from work with me last night.  Perhaps this entry will therefore be more concise than usual, but I wouldn’t lay heavy money on it.  It’s more likely than winning the $1.9 billion Powerball Con Game, but that’s not saying much.  Getting struck by lightning during a shark attack is probably more likely than that.

There’s a full lunar eclipse in progress as I write this, and the umbra has about halfway covered the moon.  I took a snap with my smartphone as I left the house and then more when I got here to the train platform.  I’ll share some of them below.  They are not of very good quality‒and the first one is just streaks of light, because apparently I was too excited to keep my phone still while taking the picture‒but then again, in the days before smartphones, I wouldn’t have been able to take such a picture at all.

The last time I recall watching a lunar eclipse with any degree of attention was back when I was in either junior high or high school, and I had a very cheap telescope on our back deck (This was quite a bit later than the reminiscence I described yesterday).  I have to say, the one happening now is quite a bit more impressive than the one I remember.  The shadowed portion of the moon is almost completely black, and the encroaching edge of the Earth’s shadow is quite, quite different than the usual arc of the moon’s own phases.  It’s fascinating.

I forgot again to work on editing my audio recording of thoughts about time yesterday.  I feel like I want to make some excuse, and there are surely reasons, or at least causes, but it doesn’t really matter what they are.  So, now I’m going to try to rehash those verbal thoughts to give you all either a preview or‒more likely‒a replacement for the posting of those spoken words.

I was triggered to talk about time when watching a science video in which someone pointed out, as people often do, that we are able to travel rather freely in any of the three dimensions of space, but that our direction in time seems entirely one dimensional, and we don’t seem able to choose our direction or speed through it.  But this is a slightly misleading characterization of the situation, I thought, and that thought is not entirely original nor unique to me, but this is my way of thinking about it.

It’s true that, if we were in deep space, especially in one of the gargantuan intergalactic voids (where light from all the surrounding galaxies would be too faint to be visible), there would literally be nothing to differentiate up from down, left from right, forward from backward, or indeed, any of these axes of motion from the others.  But that’s not the situation in which we find ourselves.  We are on the surface of a planet, in the presence of a rather strong gravity “well”, and that changes very much the way we experience the three dimensions of space.

Ignoring the facts of terrain, and thinking back to before we had modern technology, it’s clear that, while we are basically free to move forward and back and left and right‒and indeed, we can swap those axes out arbitrarily‒we are not free to move up and down at will.

Even birds and insects and bats cannot freely move through the up-down dimension, not in the way they can move along the curved plane of the surface of the Earth.  It requires great effort for them to change their height, and they are limited by that effort and by the density of the air through which they swim.  Because we are near a source of strong gravity, there is a clear directionality to one of the dimensions of space, and the only reason we don’t keep falling down is that there’s a planet in the way, but if it weren’t there would be nothing pulling us in one direction.

In a somewhat analogous sense, the only reason there seems to be a directionality to time is that we are near (in time) the presence of a region of very low entropy:  The Big Bang.  Since that time, about 13.8 billion years ago, entropy has been steadily increasing, as is its tendency, for fairly simple, mathematical reasons that make the 2nd law of thermodynamics among the most unassailable of all principles of physics.

All the processes that cause us to experience a directionality to time are driven by the tendency for entropy to increase, and that includes the clumping of matter under gravity, the growth of biological organisms, the accumulation of memory, and the development of technology.  Increasing entropy‒on the largest scales‒is all that allows temporary decreases of entropy locally.  Put poetically, it is only the inevitability of death that allows life to exist at all.

But of course, in the future, as entropy increases, life and local order will be no more possible than they would be in intergalactic space.  Once entropy increases enough‒and the vast majority of the existence of our universe will be in such a state, just as most of space is not near the surface of a planet‒there will be no way even to know which direction of time would have corresponded to what we now think of as past and future, because the laws of physics are locally time-reversible.  Time in that epoch would be no more uni-directional than space is in the vastness of an intergalactic void.

What’s more, it’s clear based on special and general relativity that time is not purely one dimensional.  Time and space bleed into each other depending on relative motion and local spacetime curvature.  That which can curve is not, strictly speaking, entirely one-dimensional in a Euclidean sense.

All this makes me wonder if, perhaps, the Big Bang era is not strictly a “plane” orthogonal to the time dimension, but might in fact be the surface of a sphere…or, well, some manner of hypersphere in space time, the surface of which is all at one “moment” just as the surface of a planet is all‒more or less‒the same distance from its center.

If so, then the Big Bang need not have happened merely in one direction in time.  Others have toyed with ideas like this*, with the thought that there might be a sort of mirror image universe to ours, extending the other direction in time from us, its future analogous to our past.  I’ve even occasionally wondered if the (very slight) relative abundance of matter over antimatter in our direction of time would be mirrored by a relative abundance of antimatter in that universe**.

But on further thought, I’m led to wonder if there need be merely two mirror universes, delineated by the Big Bang, heading in opposite directions.  Perhaps there is a continuum of such directions, just as there is a continuum of “up” directions from the surface of the Earth.  Perhaps our expanding universe has more in common with the expanding size of a sphere around the Earth’s center, which gets larger and larger as one moves away from it, and the Big Bang is not so much a beginning of time or the universe as it is a local area of low entropy in time, allowing the existence of phenomena‒including life‒near its surface that experience a difference locally between past and future only because they exist in an entropy gradient.

Perhaps, far out in the “future” of the universe, there might exist other local entropy minima, in any direction in time from us‒directly ahead or even at right angles in time to us, or any combination thereof.  Of course, “reaching” them would be harder than traveling out into intergalactic space, given that they would probably exist across unguessable gulfs of timeless “time”***.

How would we even measure or pass through time in a region in which entropy was near-maximal and time was without any inherent direction?  Perhaps if it were possible to accelerate continuously to near enough the speed of light that one’s personal time slowed ever more and more, one could survive to arrive at a place where entropy would begin to decrease.  But what would that even be like?  Would one enter such a realm as if a traveler from its future, moving‒to any local residents‒backward through time?

I could go on and on about these ideas, and maybe I’ll explore them more in future (ha) posts, but for now, I’ve taken enough time (ha ha).  This was certainly not a concise blog post, but I hope it was at least intriguing.  I’d be interested to hear your own thoughts on such matters.

In closing, I’ll just ask the following thoroughly fanciful question that just popped into my head:  What would happen to a werewolf during a lunar eclipse?

*For instance, The Janus Point by Julian Barbour, deals with some similar concepts.  I haven’t finished reading the book, but I thought of the ideas I’m discussing before I’d encountered it, and my ideas are somewhat different, though far less expert than his.

**Though they would surely switch the terms, calling our antimatter their matter.

***And reaching the portion of our universe that heads in the opposite direction in time would seem to require exceeding the speed of light, which appears to be impossible‒though perhaps wormholes might lead to such places, if they in fact exist.

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A personal brush with being nonverbal

It’s Monday morning, the beginning of the first full work week in November.  I had the weekend off, so that’s why there was no post on Saturday.  I wish I could say that I had an enjoyable, restful weekend—I did at least rest some, though I don’t feel rested—but I didn’t do anything of value to me or to anyone else this weekend, except perhaps for my minimal contribution to the economy that entailed buying things to eat and some cleaning supplies.  I certainly did not socialize in any way.

I did not edit that recording of mine on the nature of time, so my apologies to anyone who was looking forward to it*.  I did do another very brief recording to myself last night, but this was mainly a reminder to me to try to write or think about something, and since it did work to remind me, I’ll mention what it was about here, now.

I was watching a video by a young woman who was diagnosed with ASD in adulthood speaking and thinking about “selective mutism”.  The kind she was discussing was that where someone apparently loses the power of speech only in specific circumstances, and for her it seemed related to social anxiety.  There are, however, instances of prolonged apparent mutism, or nonverbal state, among people with autism spectrum disorder.  Thinking about that from time to time had made me recall a rather disturbing event from my own childhood, one that I don’t think anyone else has ever known about.

I was very young when this happened.  Possibly it was shortly before I started kindergarten, but more likely it was in the first year or two of elementary school, but I remember one day I was frustrated about something I had tried to say.  Perhaps someone had laughed about my inability to get something out, perhaps someone had told me to be quiet; I don’t recall what or who the specific trigger was.  In any case, I recall deciding to myself, in an almost spiteful way, that I would just not talk anymore.  So, I made myself be silent, and for the next few hours, I did indeed remain silent, not speaking.

Then, a little later, something rather frightening happened:  I decided that I wanted to say something**, and realized that I could not speak.  There was nothing wrong with my mouth or my vocal cords or my lungs.  I simply felt that the part of my mind that produced the spoken word had been flipped into the “off” position; Broca’s area had been taken offline.  It was a bit like having taken in a post-hypnotic suggestion that one would be unable to speak; I learned years later that I was a pretty good hypnotic subject, and I did daily self-hypnosis for years starting in junior high or so***.

But that was years later.  At this age, all I knew was that, having decided earlier in anger that I was not going to speak anymore, I found that, indeed, I could not seem to speak.  I remember—I think—being in the dining room near the back of the house, where the deck door would eventually be put in, though I’m not sure if it was there yet.  I felt very frightened that I would never be able to speak again.

It occurred to me, or it felt to me—if I remember correctly—that if I let this go on, it would only be harder to break over time, and it might become permanent****.  I don’t recall exactly what I finally was able to force myself to say, after several moments or minutes of trying; I think it was something like “Hello”, or some rhyme or something along those lines, something very easy to remember and automatic.  But it was difficult.  I really had to force myself, as hard as I had told myself not to talk anymore, to do it.  I was finally able to do so.

It’s a very strange event, but I’ve never really forgotten it, thought the details are plainly fuzzy.  But I wonder if the fact that I was so close to being able to shut my speech down is related to my (apparent) ASD—according to the many tests and explorations that I’ve done—or if it’s simply that I am, as I noted, a good hypnotic subject and was able inadvertently to hypnotize myself in a moment of frustration and anger.

Perhaps “hypnotizability” is related to some aspects of autism spectrum disorders, such as the tendency to become obsessed with certain subjects or interests, to “zone out” when focused on things, ignoring the world around, and even to do various fidgety stims (I’ve always tended to fiddle with things in my hands in one way or another, from dice, to coins, to pens or pencils, to my fingers themselves, and so on).

I don’t know, and I don’t know that anyone has done much research on such things.  There seems to be a relative paucity of functional and structural neuroscience research on autism spectrum disorders, at least based on my own searches—though perhaps I’m just not deep enough in it to know where to look.  But it is interesting and somewhat disconcerting.  Still, maybe my flirtation with being nonverbal, albeit only for a few hours, is related to the phenomenon overall.

More likely, it’s just me being exceptionally weird, as usual.  I don’t know that I’ll ever find out.  In any case, no matter what, I’ve always been decent at writing, and me being nonverbal would not have spared any of you the existence of this blog.

*As if there were any such person.

**Again, I cannot recall at all what I wanted to say or why.

***I got a book about it from my father, because I had a second-hand book from the same author as his book.  My father is probably the person I’ve known whose mind was most similar to mine in many ways, so I guess it made sense that he and I had books from the same author about influencing one’s own mind.

****I’m sure there are people out there who wish it could have been so.

by

It’s Time for a Title

Okay, well, it’s Friday now, and to those of you who have the weekend off—as I do—I hope you’re looking forward to a good one.

It’s November 4th, 2022, and it would have been my mother’s 81st birthday, were she still alive.  I guess, technically, we can still call it her 81st birthday, since we can certainly celebrate the day of her birth readily enough, even if she can’t appreciate the celebration.  The time since her birth is what it is, no matter what, since no one we know is traveling near the speed of light.  Also, probably more people are happy to celebrate the fact that she was born than celebrated my birthday, which was only a few weeks ago, and I’m still alive…in a manner of speaking, anyway.

I have yet to edit and prepare to upload/share my recording of my thoughts about time, and for that, I apologize to those of you who feel that it’s taking too long.  My head has not been as clear as it might usually be this week.  Sleep has been particularly bad, as I think I’ve mentioned before.

This morning, I woke up waaaay before time to get up, and I’m now waiting for the first train of the day.  I didn’t go through the whole prime number evaluation of the time as I did the other day—see my post here—since I had already sorted that problem, but I did get on Amazon and flip through their Kindle book recommendations to see if anything looked interesting.  I put a few on my “list” but didn’t buy any.

I did get a couple of Kindle Unlimited books yesterday about things like signal processing and circuits and some other areas I wish I had learned more about earlier in life, but it remains to be seen whether I’ll get very far in any of them.  Perhaps I will.

I won’t hold my breath, though.  That would be silly.  If I tried to hold my breath until I had read any given book, I would not get far.  Even if it were possible for me to hold my breath indefinitely, I would be dead long before I got into any book; but of course, it’s simply not possible for a person to hold its breath long enough to kill itself.  The breath is controlled by the brainstem, etc., and it can only be briefly squelched by the conscious mind, not deactivated.  It’s not quite as fully outside conscious control as the heartbeat, or the peristalsis of the GI tract, but it’s not up for veto, either, not without pharmaceutical interventions that would certainly interfere with one’s ability to read…and would kill one.

Heck, even the fact of being awake is not something over which a person has conscious control, believe me on that.  You might say that this goes without saying, since to have conscious control of something, one must be conscious, and to be conscious is to be awake.  But it would be nice to be able simply to choose to go to sleep and to stay asleep until some pre-chosen amount of time had passed.  If it could be done, and I could thereby sleep until well-rested, I would do so.

Alas, most of the things we have to try to make our minds do are not as much in our control as we like to imagine they are.  Even our very thoughts are not really ours to choose, for how could we choose what to think without first thinking about what the thing to think would be, and thinking about thinking about what to think, and so on, ad infinitum?  Our thoughts happen to us.  We can try to encourage certain kinds of thoughts and habits of thoughts, of course, by exposing ourselves to certain ideas, putting ourselves in certain situations, rewarding ourselves in some sense when we think about things we like to think about.  But even that is quite tricky and fiddly.

I like Jonathan Haidt’s metaphor of the mind as being a person riding an elephant, with the tiny little person being the conscious mind, but all the real workings of the brain—the motive power, the strength, and ultimately, the decision power—being the elephant.  The conscious mind cannot pick up and move the elephant wherever it wants, nor, apparently, can the mind simply climb off the elephant*.  It is the role of the conscious mind to try to train, to steer, to reward the elephant when it does what the rider wants, to try to discourage it from doing what the rider doesn’t want, and to try to keep it from going on rampages that can be harmful to it and its rider.

My elephant has a very hard time staying still for very long, and it’s always getting me up and wandering around (figuratively and sometimes literally) when I’d rather be resting.  It is a powerful elephant; I’ll give it that.  But it’s a very grumpy, gloomy elephant, and it and the rider have frequent trouble sticking to pleasant pathways.  Somehow, we seem to be inclined toward darkness and coldness, with occasional flames and smoke.

Anyway, I’m pushing that metaphor beyond all bounds of tolerability.  My apologies.

I will try to remember to work on that audio file for thoughts about time, and perhaps to post it on YouTube this weekend if I remember to do so.  I got a decent response to my more recent one on the fact that perception is not reality, and I even got a comment on YouTube, which is a pleasant surprise.  The sound quality on this recording should be better than at least the first part of the sound quality on the last one, though I obviously haven’t really listened through it yet.

I hope again that you all have a good weekend, and that things go well for you in every way they can—which they will, since anything that happens is the only thing that could have happened, once it happens.  Even if we had a rewind button, it wouldn’t necessarily let us change anything, since by rewinding, we would make ourselves the same person, in the same state, as we were the first time things happened to us.  Unless what happened was literally random, it seems unlikely that things would be different on a replay without prior knowledge.

Until next time.

time or not cropped png

*In this, I guess, the metaphor makes the mind almost like a centaur with an elephant body instead of a horse.  But it is just a metaphor, it’s not meant to be a literal, precise model of exactly how things work.  And it’s a good metaphor.