Author: Robert Elessar

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“Now…what shall we talk about?”

It’s Friday, the end of the work week, and thankfully, I feel somewhat better than I did at the beginning of the week.  That’s rather unusual for me, and it has little (but not nothing) to do with the fact that the weekend begins tomorrow; it’s more about how badly I felt earlier.

Of course, many people look forward to the weekend; Loverboy even had a song about it.  And why not?  People look forward to spending time with friends and family, to being able to sleep late and relax.  It’s even possible to look forward to things like grocery shopping and yard work if it’s with and/or for one’s loved ones.

A lot of that doesn’t apply to me, since I’m almost always just by myself on the weekends (last weekend being a blessed exception).  And though it is quite nice to be able to rest, and even to sleep longer with the aid of OTC pharmaceuticals and natural supplements, I have a very difficult time loving or even liking myself, so I’m not spending the weekend with anyone whom I love.

I’m trying, though.  Those of you who regularly read this blog may understandably think that I have given up on myself, on ever being happy or having significant wellbeing or whatever you want to call it‒some state that could be described as one of “noncontradictory joy”.  But I do try.

One might say that I am always trying, really, though one may quibble with the definitions and whether they apply even when I am sleeping or engaged in other tasks.  But I arrange the place, the time, the surroundings, and even the posture of my sleep to try to improve my chronic pain (and of course my insomnia).

I also try to arrange the way I sit at work, the types of socks and shoes and other clothes that I wear to improve my state of being.  I take carefully chosen vitamins at particular times of day, and I alternate OTC pain meds to try to decrease, at least somewhat, the chance of negative side-effects and interactions.  So, I haven’t given up, though I often wonder why I have not.

I think one of the hardest things, for me, is to follow the (quite good) advice that one should treat oneself with the care and support one would any other person for whom one is responsible and whom they love.  I have a hard time loving myself.  I certainly quite often don’t even like myself, but that’s a lesser problem; it’s entirely possible to love someone but not like them in most senses.

Okay, well, this is getting dull, and I have just been distracted by one of those silly “provocative” questions one often finds on social media, specifically, “Is a hot dog a sandwich?”  These questions are apparently meant to start discussions (or even arguments) online or in person, and they are much of a type with questions such as “Does pineapple belong on pizza?”

To me, such questions are basically category errors, or something closely adjacent.  My first reaction to such questions is to want to give them a sneer worthy of Billy Idol.  A hot dog is a hot dog; who cares if it’s a “sandwich”?  And nothing “belongs” on pizza.  Pizza is an invented concoction, people can put on it what they want.  In any case, to make such questions in any way useful and amenable to reasonable discussion, the questioners need to define their terms.

What do they mean by “hot dog”?  If they just mean the meat-cylinder, then no, that’s not a sandwich by most definitions, but that would need to be defined too.  If one defines each of the terms precisely and specifically, then one could sensibly address questions such as “Is a hot dog a sandwich?” or “Does pineapple belong on pizza?”

But of course, deciding the question based on those rigorous terms and applications doesn’t answer it when other definitions and terms are applied.  The vast majority of words don’t really have definitions, they have usages.  The vast majority of words just happened, they were not invented by one person who could thereby define the meaning of the word as they invented it.

I could give you the definition of the word “orcerterlolet”* from my book The Chasm and the Collision, and this would be one of those rare situations in life where I actually have authority over the meaning of the word, because I am the author.  I invented the word and its meaning.

Except in such rare cases, though, there are no final and definitive definitions of words, at least not prior to mutual agreement for specific purposes.  Also, there are no authorities about anything that wasn’t specifically and entirely invented by the person claiming authority.  There are experts, but there are no authorities.

For instance, the police are not “the authorities”, and elected officials are not our “leaders”.  They are all public servants, employees hired (in various senses) by the people of a given nation, and they should be treated as such.  But that’s a whole ‘nother subject, and I’m not going to get started on that now.

I hope you all have a good day and a good weekend.

*I’m not going to give you the definition, though.  If you want to find out what it is, you should read the book.

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Doff thy name; and for thy name, which is no part of thee, take all my blog.

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday again, and I’m going to try to be more upbeat today in my writing.  So, given my track record, I’ll simply now say…

TTFN

Ha ha, just kidding.  I would never let you off that easily.  I don’t, though, really know what I’m going to write today.  Of course, I never really know ahead of time, as you know (ahead of time) if you’ve read this blog for long.  But now we’re doubly ignorant*, because I have to choose from a much narrower realm of things about which to speak:  the Positive (or at least the Non-negative).

I suppose we could talk about electric charge‒that can be positive, if you’ll pardon the pun (and even if you won’t).  But of course, charge, and specifically positive charge, has interesting historical contingencies.  Because, of course, positive and negative are merely chosen terms; there’s nothing inherently “negative” about the charge of an electron, nor is there anything inherently “positive” about a proton.

As I understand it, Benjamin Franklin was the one who named the two charges and who began the convention that current moves from positive to negative along, for instance, a wire supplied by a voltaic pile (or “battery”, another term Franklin coined, according to what I have read and heard).

Of course, it was quite a long time before people discovered that‒oops!‒the moving particle carrying the charge in a flowing current is the electron, the “negatively” charged particle.  So, based on the already widespread convention, current, as described by physicists and engineers (and electricians I presume), flows in the opposite direction from the actual charge carrier that’s moving.

It’s a bit like relating stars’ intensity by describing how dark they aren’t.  And it turns out, given that the magnitude scale for stars indicates brighter stars by smaller/more negative logarithmic numbers, that’s actually‒in a sense‒how it’s done.  This is also due to historical contingencies.

These sorts of things happen a fair amount.  Remember when VHS beat out Betamax because it was basically first to the market, even though pretty much all reputable experts agreed that Beta was the better, more reliable, clearer, lighter-weight format?  Once people get used to something, they often don’t want something new, even if it’s better.  I get it, of course‒unnecessary change stresses me out severely‒but it’s definitely unfortunate.

It occurs to me now that the “demotion” (really just the redesignation) of Pluto from planet to “dwarf planet” was a rare exception to this, when humans, recognizing that the terminology they had been using was not ideal, changed it.  Of course, this was the work of an international astronomical society, a group of scientists, so certainly it wasn’t a typical situation or decision.

It also was basically a matter of necessity**.  Several other Kuiper Belt objects similar to Pluto had been discovered, some more massive than Pluto, and all with very elongated, non-circularish orbits (like Pluto’s), so either there were going to be a slew of highly irregular planets with highly eccentric orbits, outnumbering the “older” and more orderly planets, or we were going to have to call these things something else.

It’s useful to remember that the names and categories that we put on things are just our names and categories.  They are not arbitrary, at least not if they are useful; but they are our designations, like the little bits of code that let operating systems know where to find programs and files on a computer’s disk memory.  They let us talk to each other about things and address them with consistency and rigor, so that we can better understand them.

But Pluto doesn’t care whether we call it the ninth planet or a dwarf planet or a cartoon dog.  It doesn’t care if we call it Pluto or Hades or Osiris or Hel or Mandos.  It doesn’t have any idea what we call it or how we “define” it.  It doesn’t have any ideas at all, as far as anyone can tell.  It’s not the sort of thing that has ideas or cares about things.  To quote Mister Spock (who was not speaking about Pluto) “It is, essentially, a great rock in space”***.

For nearly 4.5 billion years, Pluto‒like Jupiter’s moons, like Ceres, like the Kuiper Belt and the Oort Cloud and so on‒was just there, and no one knew it was there, no one had seen it, no one was aware of it (as far as we know, anyway).  Intelligent awareness does not cause things in the universe to be; rather, things in the universe being and doing what they do sometimes, rarely, cause intelligent awareness, at least in one tiny place in the cosmos.

BTW, you are in that place and you are one of those intelligent awarenesses, in case you didn’t know that.  But I suspect you already did know that.

It’s quite the rarefied club to which to belong.  Even if there are countless intelligent species in the universe (however one might reasonably define intelligence) they must nevertheless be a tiny, petite, and wee part of all the stuff in the universe, at least for now.  In principle, that could change eventually, and intelligence could come to dominate the universe, but that’s probably a long way off, if it’s going to happen at all.

It can be hard to be optimistic about that possibility sometimes, given the state of humanity, which always seems abysmally stupid.  But remember, the smarter ones among humans have an advantage, the greatest advantage we have seen in our world:  they are smart.

And with that, for real this time:

TTFN

*I know, if there are fewer things from which to choose, one is in principle less ignorant, since there are fewer unknowns, the entropy is smaller, etc.  However, sampling from these spaces is not random; the negative concept-space is more well known and thus less random (and more likely to be chosen) than the positive space, about which I know but little.

**Not to be confused with the question of the necessity of matter.  That’s a whole sort of “metacosmological” notion.

***I know, I know, Pluto is largely made of water ice.  Trust me (or not), at the temperatures of Pluto, water is a rock.  And at the temperatures and pressures of Titan, methane is the stuff of lakes and streams (i.e., it is a liquid).  And at the temperature of the interior of the sun, tungsten is a plasma…or so I suspect.

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I’m back, despite my back holding me back

I apologize for not writing a post yesterday.  I did not go in to the office, because the pain I was having on Monday just continued and worsened, and by yesterday morning I was just exhausted.  I’m frankly not feeling a whole lot better today, to be honest (and to be redundant, since I already said “frankly” which means essentially the same thing as “to be honest”).

In case any of you don’t already know, I have a thing called “failed back surgery syndrome”, which seems a bit unfair to the surgeon, who was a colleague of mine.  He did as good a job as science and technology allowed.  I just had a fairly bad lower back injury:  specifically, a ruptured L5-S1 intervertebral disk.

That’s not a bulging disk, that’s a rupture‒it was torn all the way down into the nucleus pulposus of the disk, which is the delicious jelly center from which the bouncability arises.  I had all sorts of investigations after the pain began, because it didn’t first present as back pain but with pain in my legs.  And then once the disk issue was confirmed, I tried a lot of less invasive interventions to treat my pain, none of which did anything much.

Even after the surgery, I tried and was on various medications, of various classes‒including opioids‒which helped some but which caused their own issues over time.  But the pain has never gone away since its onset, over twenty years ago, and which has contributed greatly to things like the failure of my marriage and the ruination of my career.  Still, the surgery did reduce the pain at least to some degree.

But of course, these last several days have been worse than usual, probably partly because I was exercising (low impact) to try to improve my condition and help my pain.  Irony can be pretty ironic sometimes, can’t it?

Anyway, I have to go to work today because it’s payroll day.  That was the same reason I kind of pushed to be let out of the hospital early with my recent kidney stone:  I had to do the payroll the next day.  That was unpleasant, I can tell you.

Such is my life now, it seems:  Chronic pain with varying intensity, insomnia, tension/anxiety and depression‒both at least partly (probably) related to ASD‒and work, then going back to the house to lie down to try to recover for the next day.  The only real bright spots are seeing my youngest child now and then (this was started by the kidney stone, curiously enough, so that at least paid for itself) and talking to my sister on the phone once every week or so.

In case anyone wonders why I have suicidal ideation, well, all the above should explain at least some of it.  Of course, I’ve had such thoughts since I was a teenager, long before my chronic pain developed, but I did have chronic depression (AKA dysthymia) starting at that time.  Looking back, this was probably at least partly because of my long-undiagnosed ASD (level 2).

I also had the other kind of ASD‒an atrial septal defect‒until I was 18 and had heart surgery for it.  Interestingly enough, there is a higher incidence of the heart-based ASD in people with the other kind of ASD, according to some studies I have read.  There’s also some increased prevalence of spina bifida occulta, which often has its effects very low down the spine.  I sometimes wonder if I might have had a very slight version of this that made me prone to have the back injury I had, but I may be going through “second year medical student syndrome” again with respect to that possibility.

Okay, well, sorry about annoying you with my medical history and medical/psychiatric complaints.  For the most part, it’s all I have to talk about anymore.  I don’t do anything interesting; I don’t do anything much at all other than work and trying to rest and distract myself.  It’s really quite pathetic and pointless.

I keep hoping that all the aspirin I take (among the other strictly OTC meds I now use) will lead me to have some form of hemorrhage and take this all away from me, but I have had no luck so far.  I guess it’s true what they say, that if you want something done “right” you need to do it yourself.

I don’t know if that’s always true, though.  I think what really happens is that people want to do something in a particular way for personal, often aesthetic, reasons, and want to be able to have some control over something, so they do it themselves.  Then, no matter how badly they fuck it up or how much better someone else might have done the job, they convince themselves that what they did was best, since confirmation bias is one of the easiest fallacies of reasoning into which people can fall.

Anyway, that’s enough for today.  I hope you feel better than I do, since that would at least be some comfort for me.  I’ll probably be back to write a post tomorrow, Batman knows why.  But he’s not telling.

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Is this my eigenstate? If so, I fear it makes me LESS coherent.

It’s Monday, and I really am going to try to keep this short.  The only reason I’m writing this post at all is because I don’t want anyone to worry about me in any unnecessary way.  I suppose it’s okay for people to worry about me in general‒I think I would, if I were someone else and if I cared what happens to me.  I’m certainly not in good shape, just as a general matter, and I don’t seem to be getting better at all, so who knows what to say?

But today, I am not taking off work or anything.  I am however in a significant amount of pain, above my usual baseline, and I have been so since last week.  It’s quite frustrating, and it takes the wind out of my sails for getting anything done but the bare minimum.  Certainly I have done no walking or biking.

I did have a lovely day on Saturday, because I got to spend time with my youngest.  That was, of course, quite wonderful.  So you will hear (or read) no complaints from me about that.  It was officially one of the two best days I have had since 2012, at least.

I wish that could make my chronic pain go away, but alas, it does not.  It does take the edge off my depression for a while‒certainly while spending time together‒and that’s obviously good.  If only there were something that could be done in addition to that.

Unfortunately, I’m currently in the state* that I tend to refer to as feeling as if I have already been embalmed despite the fact that I am nominally still alive.  This is meant to convey how stiff and constricted I feel, and how every motion is difficult and painful.  I at least did my dips this morning, despite feeling wiped out already upon awakening.  Yay, me, right?  Huzzah.

It probably comes as no surprise that I continue to have insomnia, and the pain exacerbation doesn’t help that.  Well, in a certain sense one could say it helps the insomnia.  It impairs the somnia, if you will.

I’m writing this on my smartphone, by the way.  I have the mini lapcom with me, but it’s too much trouble to use right now.  So I am using the smartphone.  Using it is, however, also somewhat painful for the bases of my thumbs, but almost nothing I do does not hurt, so there’s little hope of avoiding pain entirely no matter what I’m doing.

It looks like Chrome and Google Docs and everything have updated themselves again, and now it’s causing trouble with the way the computer starts and the way I write this on my smartphone as well.  It’s terribly annoying; they change things that don’t need changing and that seem to work fine, apparently for cosmetic reasons, because they think they need to…I don’t know, keep up with the other software giants?  Anyway, it’s terribly annoying.

Are they really continuously releasing a product that has so many deficiencies that they need to keep updating every other week (or so it seems)?  Perhaps they’re hiding nefarious changes behind these seemingly pointless ones.  How would we know if they were?  How can we know this isn’t the work of some AI that got out of the box, for that matter?

Though, honestly, I think such an AI would do a better job of not requiring so many pointless-seeming updates.  But maybe that would be the perfect camouflage:  artificial intelligence masquerading as human stupidity.

Heavy sigh, as Justine would say**.

Anyway, that’s gonna be enough for me today.  It’s 5:30 in the morning and I’m already exhausted.  I am not, however, sleepy.  Talk about a system that needs an update!

Well, have a good day if you can.

*Not to be confused with the state of Florida, though the two states have things in common.

**A character in The Accountant and its sequel.

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Is it a sine of the (space)times that we are where we are in the week?

TBIF* or TDIF**, either way, it’s Friday.  It’s the last day of the work week.  I started writing “It’s the end of the work week” (emphasis added), but I realized that, since it is early in the morning, and I am just on my way to work, this time could not accurately be called the end of the work week.  One could, in fact, say that 20% of the work week yet remains; that can hardly be called an end, any more than a B minus can be considered a perfect score (unless one radically changes the grading system one is using).

Such are the random things that spring forth from my brain via my fingers when I am writing my blog posts in the mornings (in this case on my laptop computer, which is literally on my lap***).  I’m sure you’re well aware of that, if you’ve read this blog for any length of time.  I don’t really know ahead of time what I’m going to write, unless I have a specific subject to address.  Even then I often address subjects in ways that surprise me.  This is because when I write I am really “thinking out loud”, although in this case, “out loud” is figurative.

Do my thoughts meander like a restless wind inside a letter box?  Well, they’re probably more like a restless discarded Cheetos® wrapper in the wind of a nearby tornado; one should almost certainly use a junk food metaphor when describing the way my thoughts spontaneously arise.  Not that I think my thoughts are “junk”, no more so than anyone else’s are.  I just think it’s rather appropriate to consider many of them as having a bit of a temporary amusing effect, but without any real nutritional substance.  Junk food has its place****, after all.

I don’t know what else to write today, but I’ve only written about 450 words so far, including the first four footnotes below.  I would say that I don’t want to shortchange you, the reader, but you’re not actually paying for this in any sense other than spending your time.  And since time cannot be used as legal tender—when you “spend” it, I don’t receive any from you—I guess I shouldn’t consider it to be shortchanging you.

In any case, whether you spend your time reading my blog or doing something else, your time passes all the same.  You could slow it down relative the those around you by accelerating to relativistic speeds, but you would still require the same amount of your “proper time” to read a blog post.  And to those watching you pass at some substantial fraction of the speed of light, it would seem to take you longer than it would take us.

Remember, from a particular, mathematically precise, point of view, you’re always moving at the speed of light—it’s just that most of your motion is through time.  This is part of why you cannot ever reach the speed of light through space:  As you tilt your motion vector toward faster motion through space, less of your motion is through time, until it would stop for you completely.

It’s a bit analogous to moving (say, driving or flying) in particular compass directions.  Imagine your default motion is all northwards, so there is no east or west component to your momentum, but that your momentum vector is always the same length, i.e., you speed in your direction of travel is constant.  If you start to veer eastward a bit, going at that same fixed speed now in a north-northeast direction (for instance) the component of your motion that is northward is smaller than it was*****.

As you veer more through northeast toward east-northeast and beyond, staying at your same speed but in your new direction, the component of your motion that is northward becomes smaller and smaller.  Finally, of course, if you go due east, there is no longer any component of your motion in the northerly direction.

This is close to being the same thing that would happen if you could somehow achieve the speed of light through space, except that the geometry of spacetime is (if memory serves) hyperbolic.  This means “relating to or described by hyperbolas”, it doesn’t mean that the geometry of spacetime exaggerates things all the time.

In any case, though, an object or person traveling at the speed of light (through space, so to speak) would cease to experience any “proper time”.

And with that, I think we’ve come to the proper time to bring this week of blog posts to a close, even if the work week still has a fifth of its time remaining.  I hope you all have a good day (whatever day on which you may read this) and then a good weekend (whenever the next one is for you) and a good week and so on and so on and so on.

*Thank Batman it’s Friday.

**Thank Doom it’s Friday (I suppose one could use TDDIF, Thank Doctor Doom it’s Friday, but that would eliminate the parallel with the more traditional version of the acronym).

***Does the term “laptop computer” imply that there could be a “lapbottom computer”?  What would the bottom of a lap look like?  Would it just be the “bottom”, in which case it really has nothing to do with the lap, since your lap disappears when you stand up, but your ass doesn’t?  If there is no lapbottom (i.e., if laps are instead bottomless) then why use the term laptop?  Why not just call it a “lap computer”?  If people wanted a foreshortened version of that, they could just call it their lapcom.

****That place is 7-11™.

*****By how much?  Why, one only need apply the Pythagorean Theorem to the components of your momentum vector.  It’s dead simple.  If you prefer, you can use trigonometric functions, such as the cosine of the angle of your motion relative to full north, but mathematically there is no difference.

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The blog and baseness of our natures would conduct us to most prepost’rous conclusions

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday again, and I’m writing my Thursdaily blog post.  There’s not much more to say about it than that.  It’s terribly boring, isn’t it?  Honestly, I don’t know what I’m going on about, here or in the rest of my daily life.

I do, though, have one thing to ask out into the ether (not to be confused with the ethernet):  Does anyone know how to disable (permanently) the default “Aptos” font in the Microsoft Office applications?

I’m not asking merely to find out if there is such a person.  Presumably, someone at Microsoft will know how to disable that moronic and ugly font.  I’m more interested to know if someone among my readers can give me specific and clear instructions about how to do it.  Because if I never see Aptos again, that would be the only satisfying outcome with respect to that font for me.

Oh, also, can we find out how to disable their stupid AI “copilot” until someone asks for it, not make its irritating icon just pop up until you tell it “dismiss until next time I open this document” or whatever?  I don’t want it dismissed until next time.  I want it dismissed until sent for, which is unlikely to happen (but not impossible, which is why I say just to disable it until called for rather than, as with Aptos, permanently deleting it).

All that, noble readers*, is about as interesting as my life gets for the most part.  I am not walking/have not walked today, because I still feel worn out and terribly stiff and uncomfortable, and my left knee is still sore.  All of this does not help my chronic pain, either (other than helping it to persist and to become more prominent).  At least I have a tighter brace on my left knee today, as well as on the other knee (that would be my right knee, which hopefully is obvious).

I wear a brace on the right knee both to prophylax against it developing pain and to keep things even.  I’ve noticed that if I do that, I get fewer blisters on my right foot than if I walk with a brace only on my left, problematic knee.  This implies (to me) that the brace on the left knee shifts the way I walk overall enough to change the pressure points on my right foot when I’m stepping, and thus there develops increased abrasion in between my first two toes on that foot.

Exciting stuff, isn’t it?

I’m being facetious, of course, but maybe that isn’t clear.  Maybe this is all dull** and it’s hard even to tell when I’m not being serious.  I don’t know what to say, though.  Obviously.  But just as obviously, I will keeping saying things despite not having anything of merit to say.  I’ll even allow myself to use one-word sentence fragments for emphasis, because I suspect my subject matter is too dull to allow merely usual written language to keep the reader engaged, so I must resort to cheap rhetorical tricks of writing to imitate verbal communication in some ways.

I wish I had something more to discuss, some interesting subject, some curious conundrum—or even a conundrum that doesn’t have any interest in learning about anything.  Alas, as far as I can tell, I have no such thing.  I’m very frustrated by the pain that makes exercising so difficult, and by the fact that I have so much trouble with bicycles—though at least part of those difficulties would probably be better if I weighed less.

Okay, here’s a mildly interesting thing:  at the end of that last paragraph (1st draft only, I fear), I had written exactly 666 words.  Those of you embedded in a culture that has historically been influenced by Christian mysticism will know that number to be the one supposedly given by “St. John the Divine”*** as the number of “The Beast”, the so-called antichrist.

Now, Sinjun there made it clear he wasn’t writing blatantly and obviously but giving some kind of cryptic hint—I suppose it’s a good way to keep readers engaged and imagining silly things for at least a few millennia so far.  He wrote something along the lines of, “Here is wisdom.  Let him who hath understanding count the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man, and the number is six hundred, three-score, and six.”  (This is the English translation, of course.  It was apparently originally written in Greek, which I neither read nor speak.)

However, much to what ought to be the embarrassment of all those credulous bumpkins who have been frightened of that rather banal number for so long, it’s my understanding that in the oldest surviving version of the text of Synjon’s apocalypse****, the number of the beast was actually 616!

How did the beast manipulate the process of translation and get the scholars to mis-record the number as 666?

Okay, well, I don’t think any “beast” actually did that, but it’s a funny fact that so many people have it wrong, considering how susceptible people are to numerology.  At least I can have some sympathy for such a thing, for I love numbers in general, and 666 does have a nice symmetry and charm to it.  It’s not as symmetric as 888 or 000, but maybe that subtle lack of symmetry adds to its grip on the mind.

And, of course, “1 and 1 and 1 is three…got to be good lookin’, ‘cause he’s so hard to see”.

Come together?  Well, don’t do it over me.  And there’s no urgency, so feel free to do it right now or not.  Otherwise, try to have a good day.

TTFN

*I think reading is noble, if the what we call nobility matters at all and is based on anything of real worth.

**It’s a bit weird how “all” and “dull” are almost, but not quite, rhyming words.

***Not the author of the Gospel of John.  I guess “John” has just always been a common name.  Every Tom, Dick, and Harry is named either John or Robert, it seems.

****That’s just a synonym for “revelation”, by the way.  It doesn’t specifically mean the end of the world, it’s just become associated with the notion.  And Armageddon is named after a neighborhood near Jerusalem, I think:  Megiddo (I’ve probably misspelled it).  And “holocaust”, which apparently comes from middle English through French and Latin and Greek and even Hebrew, has a meaning that’s fairly plain when you break it down:  “holo-“, meaning everything, as in “hologram”, and “-caust”, relating to burning, as in “caustic”.  So, “burning everything”.  Nifty, huh?

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“For he will lose the best part of the strength that was native to him in his beginning”

It’s Odin’s day now, so…well, have a good day, Odin, or Wotan, or however you prefer to refer to yourself.

I’m on my way to work, but I did not walk today.  Yesterday was a horrible day, pain-wise*, focused on my left knee, which is still sore, so I’m not going to try to do much walking.  I have knee braces and so on, but they only do so much.  I was wearing them on Monday during my walk, and they probably helped.  Maybe the alternate shoes that avoided bothering my blisters made the stresses and tensions produced by the way I walk different than usual, and that’s why everything was irritated.

Oy, I seem to have a hard time discussing anything interesting, don’t I?  It’s just all boring nonsense.  I suppose some of this is the sort of stuff I might talk about with a spouse or a partner or a close friend if I had one.  I guess that makes the blog behave as a kind of talk therapy.

I actually have intended for it to be thus in the past, but I can’t say that I’ve seen any serious positive results.  Of course, I can’t see what I would have been like if I had not been writing this blog.  Perhaps I would have been much worse  Or maybe I would have been healthier, but no one would ever know, and my thoughts would forever be lost to the world.

What a tragedy.  Ha ha.

It’s a weird thought, but what if putting my thoughts out into the world actually makes me worse, but it makes me someone who will, to however small an extent, be remembered in some way (since I don’t have a family with whom I live or spend time to remember my thoughts and my day-to-day foibles).  It’s a bit like Melkor putting his power into Arda, leaving it suffused with traces of him until its end, though he was weakened thereby, and he was defeated at least partly because he had weakened himself so much.  And, to a lesser extent, it’s like Sauron, putting his will and power and spirit into the One Ring.

None of that has any true bearing on reality, of course, there being no real Melkor or Sauron.  There is also no real spiritual “power” of that nature.  At least, there’s nothing that anyone can demonstrate convincingly in a way that makes it clear that it’s not just the wishful thinking of frightened naked house apes who want to believe that they have power and consequence in what is, after all, a very large universe.  At best it’s smoke and mirrors and placebo effects and the happy coincidence (with applicable confirmation bias) of some real processes that humans can influence, albeit not by mere will and vague thought and heart but by actions, by choices, by real thoughts guiding real deeds.

The current state of the world—or at least of the US—makes it clear how rare real thoughts are among the primates here.  One need only study chimpanzees and orangutans and, for that matter, capuchin monkeys and the like to get a basic grasp on most of human behaviors.  Humans just have other notions cluttering up things, and those can sometimes distract one from recognizing what’s really happening—monkey-work from top to bottom, all but unmitigated.

I guess there’s nothing particularly bad about monkeys.  It’s just that humans think they are somehow fundamentally different than monkeys and other primates and other animals.  They are different in more or less trivial ways, of course, as all species, and indeed all individuals, are different.  But they are not a different fundamental type of being.  They just have more memory and processing power in their brains, and their social hierarchies are able to take place at much higher removes.  Thus they need ideas, stories, that bind them together to get things done.

Ants and termites use pheromones and/or other chemical signals, which they produce and use instinctively.  Humans use stories and songs.  But it’s all just spontaneously self-organizing behavior, with little to no deep thought above or behind the scenes, however people like to delude themselves about their puissance and their importance.

Oh, well.  Let them delude themselves and grope through their shallow pseudo-mysteries.  The universe will deliver whatever it delivers to them, and their most fervent beliefs will not change anything in and of themselves.  And most people will probably never even realize that they were shown to be misguided and even deluded.  They will go to their graves proclaiming desperately that they are not in fact even dying.

As I’m fond of saying, whataya gonna do?  I hope though that, for today at least, you’re gonna have a good day.  As for me, well, I’m sure you can believe that no day that someone spends with me is likely to be a very good day, not anymore anyway, and unfortunately, I have to spend every day with me.  So, at least spare me a little sympathy.

*In that I had a horrible day because I was in pain, not that pain had a horrible day.  I don’t know whether some personification of pain would have had a good day or a bad one.  I might imagine that the personification of pain would dislike chronic pain because it’s not useful.  It’s not helping to protect against any injuries; the injuries are already done.  It has become, instead of a protective process, an erosive one, something that worsens the status of its bearer.

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A 2sday blog post 4 U

Okay, well, it’s Tuesday now, which often happens immediately after the end of Monday, at least when one is using the ordering of days that we use here in the modern, technological world, agreed upon just by general convention, since there’s no particular real meaning to any such ordering.  Also, of course, the specific names of the days varies from language to language.  But somehow, the seven-day week became the generally accepted one worldwide—possibly partly because it’s a prime number, and of course, partly related to the number of “non-fixed” celestial bodies visible before the invention of the telescope.

Not that any of that is very interesting, but it’s not as though I make it my business to write interesting blog posts.  I just…write blog posts.  Whether they’re interesting or not is pretty much in the eye of the beholder, as it were.

I think maybe I will embed the audio of my recent recording of Nothing Compares 2 U below, which I mentioned last week some time.  The audio is not ideal, of course, but it’s better than one might expect.  Whether the playing and singing is any good is, again, up to the aesthetic taste of each individual who happens to listen.  I make no promises or guarantees or representations about it being particularly good.  It’s okay, I would say.

As for other things, well, this morning I did not walk to the train station, nor did I bike here.  I’m still at the stage of working on my fitness in which I have to take a day off in between walks.  That’s not so disappointing, I guess; I did walk about seven or so miles total yesterday.  The biggest impediment so far to walking two or more days in a row is that my left knee is a bit sore from yesterday’s walk.

You might think I would be used to pain by now; I haven’t had a day free of significant pain in a quarter of a century now.  Unfortunately, biology mandates that pain is not something with which a living thing can easily become “comfortable”.

At least the blisters on my right foot are not acting up.  I wore a different pair of shoes than usual yesterday, a make and model I haven’t worn in a while, and it seems they were kinder to my heel and Achilles tendon than the others.

It’s rather frustrating.  I like the other kind because they are very lightweight and “breathable” if you want to call it that.  That’s important in south Florida, where merely standing still for more than five minutes is likely to lead to the growth of various fungi and algae on your skin*.

At least there’s always Lysol.  It helps if you pretend you work for a bowling alley and have to spray each pair of shoes after it’s been used to make sure no one catches a fungus from the previous wearer.  Even when that wearer is you, you don’t want to have a foot fungus if you can help it.

Ugh, all this is so boring, isn’t it?  Life is almost entirely composed of boredom interspersed with stress and tension anymore.  When I meditate, which I do, it helps my tension and stress and hostility a bit, but I find myself feeling very depressed instead.  It’s quite annoying.  Is tension and stress my only alternative to profound depression anymore?  Perhaps.  The world is overall so utterly idiotic and frustrating, this is just par for the course, as they say.

Despite the fact that I’m sharing a bit of singing here today, I haven’t played my guitar or sang even for a moment in over a week.  I haven’t really done anything creative or expressive in a long time, unless you count this blog (which I don’t, honestly).

I am rereading The Lord of the Rings, which is always good, at least.  I’m in The Two Towers now, at the point where Pippin and Merry have just met Treebeard.

It occurs to me that I tend to write (and think of) that pair of hobbits as “Pippin and Merry” rather than “Merry and Pippin”, despite the fact that Merry is the first alphabetically and in the stories Merry is slightly older.  It’s peculiar.  It’s not important or anything, but it is odd.

I also tend to write “off” accidentally nearly every time I’m trying to write the word “odd”, but that’s not so peculiar (ha ha).  The “d” and “f” keys are right next to each other on the keyboard, and both words (“odd” and “off”) are legitimate words.  They also can both often be workable in the same context.  Calling something “a little off” can be synonymous with calling something “a little odd”.  Curious.

My train will be arriving soon.  I am sorry to have to admit that I have provided nothing of value here.  That’s not too unusual for me, though.  I’m not sure that I’ve ever contributed anything of value to the world other than my children.  They are valuable, of course, so I’m not unhappy about that.  I’m just unhappy by nature, and I’m unhappy about that fact, and that further fact is something about which I am, again, unhappy.  It’s like an infinite series**, and the question is, does it converge to some finite limit, or does it diverge to negative infinity?  I don’t know.

And sometimes—most days, maybe—I share that unhappiness with you, my all-too-generous readers.  It seems grossly unfair to you.  And it is.  I admire your optimism, though.  I don’t understand it.  But I do admire it.

Have a good day,  You might as well.  Somebody ought to do it.

*I’m exaggerating, of course.  It usually takes as much as ten minutes.

**Mathematically, I mean, not like, say, The Simpsons, or Superman comics.

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Rockin’, rockin’ and rollin’. Down to the train I’m strollin’.

Well, it’s Monday again.  Yippee.  I’m writing this post on my “smartphone”* today because I didn’t feel like taking my miniature laptop computer with me when I left the office on Friday.  Perhaps that was shortsighted of me, but hopefully at least this way I will avoid writing too much today.

Of course, as usual, I have no particular subject or topic to address with this blog post.  I just started writing and, well, we’ll all find out what comes forth, won’t we?  It may be a lame-ass way to run a blog, but whataya gonna do?

I did walk to the train this morning, five miles (the same distance as before, of course‒it would be weird if the distance changed from day to day).  It was, perhaps, slightly easier than the last time, which is good.  It would be troubling if it were getting harder every time, though blisters can sometimes make that happen.

I rode my new bike around on Saturday and on Sunday, but I didn’t have the heart to try to ride it this morning.  For one thing, riding it is still just exhausting relative to walking or to riding my other bike.  Also, I cannot help but fear getting a flat tire while on the way to the train (or on the way back), and that possibility makes me too nervous to want to use it.

If I get a flat on the weekend, then I merely need to walk the bike back to the house‒or to a bicycle repair shop, if there’s one nearby, which there pretty much isn’t.  But if I get a flat on the way to the train, then I have to deal with a bike with a flat and with getting to work.

Perhaps I’m just a wimp for not wanting to deal with such things, but I have only so many “spoons” to go around, and they get used up by so many little things throughout every single work day (and other days as well) that I don’t feel that I have any reserves.  For many years now, I’ve felt that I’m in imminent danger of complete collapse; I still feel that way.

One of these times, I’ll be correct in that estimate, but that’s a bit of a cop-out.  It’s like someone stating that the world will end tomorrow, then when it doesn’t (if it doesn’t) they just roll it over to the next day.  Sooner or later, they will be right.  It may take over a trillion tries‒let’s imagine they’re immortal as well as absurdly bloody-minded‒but they will eventually be correct.

Anyway, though, for me it’s not the fact of getting flat tires that’s the exhausting part (though it is exhausting when it happens).  It is, rather, the tension of worrying about it every single time I ride.  You might say that I simply shouldn’t let myself worry about it, should not let that imagined possibility interfere with the “now”.  To which I might reply that you shouldn’t fear cancer and/or heart disease and/or Alzheimer’s, etc., because sooner or later something is going to get you, and your fear is just causing you stress in the here and now.

Or perhaps it would be better, or more analogous, to tell you that you shouldn’t fear running across a busy road, because either a car will hit you or it won’t, and you won’t change that by worrying.  Except, of course, you can change that by worrying, if you act on your worry and therefore don’t recklessly run into the street.

I know, I’m being fairly silly.  I’m not trying very hard to be rigorous right now, so some of my logic may be strained.  But I hope I’m not being fundamentally or thoroughly irrational.  I don’t think I am, but just as it’s not up to you whether or not you’re appropriately considered an asshole, it’s not necessarily reliable for me to judge my own rationality.  I do judge myself, and I am fairly harsh about it, but if I were to start losing my mind, I would be an unreliable witness to what was happening.

Anyway, that’s enough for now.  I hope you’ve enjoyed this post, if that’s even possible.

Oh, and by the way, though I have not set up a Patreon or anything, if any of you would like to request that I write a post about some specific subject or topic, by all means, please let me know in the comments.  I don’t promise to fulfill any and/or all such requests, but I do promise to read and consider them.

In the meanwhile, please have a good day.

*I don’t mean to denigrate the phone by putting that term in scare quotes.  It’s a fine piece of technology, and for the most part, it does what it’s meant to do.  I just think the expression “smartphone” is a poor term.  It’s mainly a marketing gimmick, like “organic” and “gluten free” and “non-GMO”:  designed to lure in the insecure and get them to buy particular products to try to counter their…I don’t know, their existential angst or summat.

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Is it possible to choose not to care, if you do?

It’s Friday again.  I won’t say “Thank God it’s Friday” or “Thank Batman it’s Friday” or anything of that sort.  Of course, I’m glad that we’re ending what has been a terribly long work week, which has provided only a few moments of accomplishment, apart from the trivial and the usual (i.e., working).  But that’s not saying much.  In general, for me, the weekend is just another two empty, lonely days coming up before the start of another work week.

I’ll be glad to get some rest, of course, since on the weekend I can knock myself out because I don’t have to worry about being able to do anything that requires mental effort the next day.  I find that terribly useful.  Also, I intend to try to get used to riding my new bicycle more over the weekend, especially since my right heel and the ball of my right foot now have new blisters from walking yesterday, and these will make further walking painful and somewhat counterproductive for the immediate future.

Other than that, though, there’s really nothing else going on.  I had thought—earlier in the week, when lack of foreknowledge allowed me to be stupidly optimistic—that maybe this weekend I would ride my new bike to the movie theater and see the new Fantastic Four movie, since I’ve always been a fan of the FF, and of course, I hear that the new Doctor Doom makes a post-credit appearance.  I’m an even bigger fan of Doctor Doom than of the FF.

I have mixed feelings about how they’re doing Doom.  He is (usually) my favorite villain across all fictional universes, and I’ve been very disappointed—mostly—by the way the movies have failed to portray him.

To be clear, I thought Julian McMahon (RIP) was a very good cast as Doom.  But the script of that first FF movie all but completely ruined his character, though it and he were still enjoyable.  I’ve long said, if someone wants to see a movie with a nearly perfect portrayal of how Doom should be, they should watch Star Trek II:  The Wrath of Khan.  Ricardo Montalban’s performance as Khan, and the way Khan is written, is almost perfect for Doom.

Anyway, all this is really neither here nor there.  I’m almost certain that the MCU is going to fuck up in trying to bring Doom to the screen—not least because they’re using RDJ to play him.  The means they’re going to somehow link Tony Stark and Victor von Doom.

While I admire Downey’s portrayal of Iron Man, which made him much more interesting in the movies than he ever was in the comic books, Tony Stark does not so much as deserve to polish Doom’s boots, let alone be somehow incarnated as Doom.  RDJ could have played Doom de novo, probably—he’s a very good actor—but to link those characters annoys me.

I don’t know why it matters to me.  It really shouldn’t.  I don’t know why much of anything matters to me.  I don’t know why I bother writing this stupid blog or doing anything else.

I want to rest.  I feel like I can never just clear the tension from my system.  Maybe if I actually stopped caring at all, I could do it.  But it’s very difficult to make yourself stop caring, because you already do care, and to be able to reprogram that particular function of your being, you would have to be able not to care about the fact that you would no longer care.

This is a conundrum that has long haunted or at least worried AI researchers.  If you program an AI with a particular terminal goal—the one that motivates it above all, to which all other goals are instrumental, subordinate goals—it becomes nigh impossible to make it voluntarily submit to changing that terminal goal.

If this seems obscure and abstract, consider a man (for instance) who deeply loves and cares about his family, more than he cares about anything else, or even everything else, in the world.  And then imagine asking him to submit voluntarily to some procedure by which he will be made to stop caring at all for his family.  Can you imagine such a person agreeing to that?  Would you agree to that?

If you don’t love or care about your family, try to think of something else you dearly love and feel justified in loving, like, I don’t know, Nascar or some particular political movement or some such.  Then imagine submitting yourself to some procedure or medicine or whatever that changes that, not because you have come to think that it’s a bad thing to love, but just because not caring about it would be simpler.

I’m not sure what point there is to this post.  Probably there is none.  I just need to shut it down for now, and hopefully over the weekend I’ll at least get some rest.  I don’t know what to say about anything else.  But please, do have a good weekend.