Author: Robert Elessar

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I can’t think of a good title for this post, but look at the picture and use your imagination

It’s Friday of my first week in a very long time without working at all on my fiction writing.  I guess I’ll round the week out with one more non-fiction bit of blogging, not that I have much new to say.  But we’ll see.  Maybe I’ll say something that’s useful.  Probably not.

Those who don’t live inside my head* won’t know this very clearly, but the fact that I haven’t written any fiction this week is a truly grave fact.  It’s been many years since I’ve gone this long without writing fiction.  Even when I was in prison, I wrote every weekday, right after lights on (which happened at about 3 to 3:30 in the morning), about three to four handwritten pages every day.  And after prison I continued that.  When I didn’t have a portable laptop to use on my then three-bus trip to work in the morning, I actually wrote quite a bit on my tiny little, fifty-dollar smartphone.  That’s how a goodly chunk of Son of Man was written.  I’ve continued some version of that (writing or editing, anyway) basically every weekday when I wasn’t frankly, physically ill since then…up until this week.

I took my miniature laptop home last night thinking maybe I would take the train in to work today and use that time and that setting to try to recapture some feel and the impetus to write on the way, but I couldn’t be bothered to take the train in the end, and if I had, I don’t think I would have written any fiction.

This is not about writer’s block.  I have story ideas and plans and all that; I know where the stories are to go, I know the characters, I know the universes, it’s all up there but for the scratching and scribbling, scribbling and scratching.  This is about “living block” if you will**.

As anyone who follows (and actually reads) my blog regularly, here and/or on Iterations of Zero, knows, I am troubled with chronic depression/dysthymia, and I have been for basically my entire post-pubescent life, though it’s become more common and more persistent over time.  It gets worse at this time of year, even all other things being equal, partly because the days are getting “shorter”***.

Then one can add in the fact that it’s holiday time (Hanukkah is already over, Christmas and New Years are imminent).  I haven’t seen my kids for over eight years, and I don’t expect that I’m ever going to see them again.  And I’m down here in the distal portion of America’s Dong****, like one bacterium in a syphilis chancre…though Treponema pallidum are more community spirited and possibly more intelligent than many Floridians, particularly the government and the courts and the law enforcement community.  They’re certainly better organisms than I am.

And I don’t remember how to make or maintain friendships.  I’m not sure I ever knew.  I think friendships just happened when I was in school and university because I was just there with other people who were also there, and they were good people, and they were okay with my weirdnesses, and we got along well and so they became my friends, because that’s the kind of people they were.  Are.  They were and are all far better than I have ever deserved, certainly.

I’m many hundreds of miles away from my siblings, and from everyone I was ever really able to connect with and be close with, with the exception of my ex-wife and my kids, but again, they are doing their own things, and I don’t ever see them.  My son won’t communicate with me at all, not in any way.  I can’t blame him; I’ve been a very disappointing father.  I do some texting with my daughter, and she’s great, she’s the greatest, but she’s in college now and I have no interest in burdening her in any way.

I can’t practice medicine anymore.

I’m in chronic pain for about the last nineteen years or so, literally every day, every waking minute.  I’ve had tinnitus in my right ear for the last fifteen plus years, roughly.  That’s mainly just annoying, but it means I can’t really take advantage of stereo production stuff for music, because I can only really hear on one side, so anything I record and mix basically sounds mono.

My brain really doesn’t work quite “right”.  I don’t think it ever has, probably, it turns out.

I really want to scream and cry for help, honestly…and not just helpful and supportive words or whatever, however kindly and honestly and generously they are meant, but serious help, like medical emergency kind of help.  But I hate myself too much, and I don’t know how to express myself properly, in any case.  (It’s like the lines from the Radiohead song Street Spirit (Fade Out):  “This machine will…will not communicate these thoughts and the strain I am under.”)  I also don’t even know what I would need, what would be helpful, what would be useful, if anything.

I had signed up for online therapy through BetterHelp, or whatever it’s called, but then my therapist had to go on maternity leave.  And I don’t frankly have the will to try to start again with someone else.  I barely had the will to start in the first place, and I wouldn’t have done that if I hadn’t been trying to find out about the possibility that I have undiagnosed Asperger’s Syndrome*****.  I didn’t get any real help with that, though.  But based on testing of various kinds that I’ve done, my professional opinion is that I do.  But I’m potentially confounded by bias, so who knows?  Maybe I’m just crazy.

My living situation has recently, rather abruptly, changed for the even more isolated…I’m basically now just living alone in a bedroom in a house that’s empty of anyone I know, and literally empty now most of the time.  Even when I’m there, it’s essentially empty, because I only barely exist.  And nothing is really any fun at all anymore.

I’ve long toyed with the idea, off and on, of going up to the Palm Beach County court house, sitting down in front of it, dousing myself in paraffin oil, lighter fluid, and gasoline, and setting myself on fire.  I don’t know, I guess it would be some sort of statement, since that’s where most of what I had was taken from me, or at least where the overt effects took place.  I even bought (and still have) the lighter fluid and paraffin oil.  Gasoline is easy (I have a nicely portable can to put it in).  So are matches and/or lighters.  But I don’t think I have the guts to do that, and honestly, I also don’t really want to inconvenience and traumatize people who just go to work and try to do their jobs there.  Life is hard enough already.

I also bought at least two nonrebreather masks, and three tanks of helium, for possible asphyxiation.  Peaceful, tidy, not too traumatic.  But I had to sort of explain the helium to people, so I donated two of them for parties, one in the office, one for my former housemate’s daughter’s birthday.  I still have a third one, but I don’t think that’s enough, and anyway, I don’t have a good place to use it that wouldn’t be just incredibly rude to a good number of people, which I don’t want to do.  Maybe I’m just making excuses.  Maybe I’m just a coward.  I mean, I know I am a coward, of course, but maybe I’m just a coward and nothing more.

I want to escape.  I want to quantum tunnel into a state of oblivion–or into a better state of existence, if there is such a thing available to someone and something like me, which seems unlikely.

Oh, well.  It doesn’t really matter.  Does it?  I think this will most likely be the last of at least these atypical blog posts.  I guess we’ll have to wait and see whether I bother to write my usual blog post next week.  Maybe I will.  I don’t know what’s going to happen.  I don’t know what to do or what to say or how to act or how to continue, or how not to continue.  I am alone and powerless and pointless.

And above all, there’s nothing else in the world I hate as much as I hate myself…and that’s saying something, believe me.

album cover

*Which is everyone but me and my fictional characters.

**Is it redundant to use scare quotes and then say “if you will”?

***Technically, I think the days are literally getting longer because the rotation of the Earth is slowing down ever so slightly over time, but I guess it’s happening very slowly indeed.  I suppose that, the Earth not being quite a perfectly uniform sphere, it throws off at least a tiny bit of energy as gravitational waves, but I suspect that’s a truly negligible drain…it probably wouldn’t make a measurable change by itself over several times the current age of the universe.  I haven’t done any calculations, I’m just guessing, here, so don’t quote me.

****Homer Simpson’s apt description of Florida.

*****They don’t officially call it that anymore, apparently, but I like it better than the newer designation, and I know that all names are comparatively arbitrary.  They’re all just ways to trigger other people to access their mental files of notions and ideas that have shared meaning in other minds, anyway, and I don’t know how much other people and I have in common.  Not much, I suspect.

 

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Fetter strong madness in a silken thread, charm ache with air and agony with blogs

Good morning and hello*.  It’s Thursday morning, and so of course it’s time for my usual weekly blog post.  I’ve written no fewer than two previous, non-routine blog posts this week, one for Iterations of Zero on Tuesday, and then here yesterday, an impromptu post reacting to YouTube’s celebration of…well, shall we say, a dubious milestone, at least in my view.

As I may have noted in either or both of those posts, I haven’t done any new writing on Outlaw’s Mind since Saturday.  I’ve been in terrible pain this week, far more than usual and far more difficult to manage, despite frankly toxic dose combinations of everything I have available.  I’ve also been having an exacerbation of my dysthymia/depression.  The one is not obviously related to the other as far as I can tell, but the former certainly doesn’t help the latter any.

Thankfully, this morning the pain is at least veering slightly more toward its usual baseline levels, which is good, obviously.  It’s not as good as the pain just going away and not coming back, but I don’t expect that to happen until I die.  As for the dysthymia (I think that the Powers that Be are actually now calling it chronic depression, which is accurate, but somehow more depressing), I don’t think I can readily recall a time in the last near-decade when I haven’t been at least somewhat under its influence.  I know there were times in my life when I wasn’t depressed; I know it very well, and they were wonderful and glorious.  But it’s been quite a while.

It doesn’t help that my living situation has just abruptly changed rather drastically, and now I am even more completely alone than I was before.  That’s always fun.  Of course, Shinji’s father from Neon Genesis Evangelion would say that everyone is always and completely alone, every moment of their lives, anyway, and while he is, in a certain sense, correct, he’s definitely a serious downer, almost certainly suffering from chronic depression himself.

And the Human Instrumentality Project** was not a good solution to the conundrum of human isolation.  Why not just force everyone to practice metta meditation, if you’re going to do something that’s going to affect the whole world anyway?  I mean, I like the character Ayanami Rei, but I don’t really want to have my being and identity subsumed into a big, giant, weird simulacrum of her, and I don’t think I’m alone in this.

But I digress.  I’ll just say in concluding that digression that Ikari Gendou*** is a really rotten father.

Anyway, the holidays and the approaching Solstice (or, rather, its effects, i.e., the shortening of the time of daylight) also don’t improve the dysthymia thing.  I’m no good at asking for help, even when I really, really could use it****.  That’s partly, or perhaps mostly, because I don’t honestly feel like I deserve it, but it’s also because interacting with other people is often extremely stressful and anxiety-producing even when it’s something I’ve asked for or need, even when it’s someone I like and/or love, and that stress and anxiety make me irritable and grumpy and intolerable—which doesn’t help.  It’s not something I can easily get around—it appears to be neurodevelopmental in nature, though I’ve only learned that recently.  That’s my second personal experience of a syndrome with the acronym ASD.

I tell ya, if I were a product that I had purchased, I’d seriously consider asking for my money back.  I mean, there are a lot of nice optional upgrades in this model, including the ability to write reasonably well, and to understand science and math and have a really good memory and to have musical ability and creativity and imagination and all that stuff.  Parts of my nervous system are really excellent.  But often the flaws make the benefits moot and, ironically, the benefits sometimes exacerbate or highlight the defects.  Imagine, for instance, having a superhuman sense of smell (one that doesn’t ever shut off) and being confined to a landfill or a sewer…or a mass graveyard in the era before embalming.

Still, I’ve certainly never wished that I were anyone else, though I’ve often wanted to be like certain characters in certain ways.  Who hasn’t?

I don’t even know what it could possibly mean for a person to become someone else.  I mean, if I’m not me—if I don’t have continuity of memory and experience with the person I was in the past—then the person I was is dead and gone.  If some other person and I swapped every aspect of our beings, each suddenly becoming identical to the other and in the same place the other was, then absolutely nothing would have changed, and neither of us would notice anything different.  Because the person I am would still be thinking and remembering and experiencing the stuff I am experiencing, and likewise for the other person.  Of this I am convinced beyond any reasonable doubt—indeed, beyond nearly any doubt at all, except the doubt that in principle must always remain, the possibility that I could discover that I am incorrect about any or all of my knowledge.  This is possible in principle.  In practice, though, I’m thoroughly satisfied with my provisional conclusions regarding this matter*****.

That’s what’s been going on this week, in rough and disjointed outline.  I don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow and thereafter regarding my fiction writing.  I’ve continued to think about events to come in the story, and even more so in Changeling in a Shadow World, which is somewhat related to Outlaw’s Mind, and distantly related to The Chasm and the Collision, and strongly related to my long-lost book, Ends of the Maelstrom.  So, it’s not as though I don’t have any interest in the stories or can’t think what to do with them.  I just don’t have any will to write them.  What’s the point?

Of course, one could say “What’s the point of anything?” and indeed, I often do.  But there has to at least be some local drive or incentive or motivation or whatever you want to call it to make a person do something that requires effort, and right now, I don’t have it.  I don’t really have any particular, engaging interest in anything at all.  If breathing weren’t automatic, I don’t think I would do that.  Ditto for all the motions of day-to-day life; they are all basically automatic, almost vegetative, for me, and I’m apparently built to be good at doing automatic things****** even when in severe pain or thoroughly depressed.  But if I could just stop and go into standby mode, into some sort of suspended or even aborted animation—perhaps indefinitely, perhaps forever—I would do that.  It’s hard to see any reason to do anything else.

I hope you’re all feeling quite a bit better than I am.  I truly hope that everyone reading this is having a very happy holiday season, or whatever you’re doing, and that you spend time with those you love, and who love you.  Remember, just being aware in some vague, academic sense of the fact that you love them doesn’t do anyone any more actual good than you “sending them your hopes and prayers”.  It’s a bit like telling someone thousands of miles away, who doesn’t have a computer or access to one, that you’ve downloaded a game that they would really enjoy—or perhaps some more functional program that would really be useful to them if they had it—and that you had them in mind when you downloaded it.  It’s nice of you to think of them; don’t get me wrong.  It’s certainly better than not giving a shit.  But it has its limits.

Anyway,

TTFN

end of evangelion

*See how I changed that up a little?

**I think that’s what they called it.

***That’s Shinji’s dad’s name.

****I’ve even gone so far as to try to send “subtle” messages by sharing YouTube “videos” of songs with titles/messages, sometimes several in a row, in an order that, if someone were paying attention, would delineate a slightly coherent message via their titles.  But it’s cryptic and silly, and no one’s paying close enough attention to get the point, even if there were anyone out there who thinks enough like I do to get it.  Anyway, even if anyone got it, I’d probably pretend it was just a joke, or that I didn’t really mean it, and try to act like I didn’t actually want or need anything.  It’s stupid, but I don’t know how to get around it.

*****This reminds me of a quote, attributed to Einstein:  “In principle, principle and practice should be the same, but in practice, they rarely are.”

******This blog is one of them.

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YouTube is >>CELEBRATING<< a trillion views of Minecraft content. Something please kill me now.

Yes, when I inadvertently got on YouTube very early this morning* after my computer restarted itself to install updates so that Microsoft could try to push me to “upgrade” to Windows 11, I saw that there was a big “1000000000000” where the YouTube logo normally goes, along with a some spewed digital confetti:

trillion

I looked more closely a bit later and encountered a little pop-up square that read that YouTube was celebrating one trillion views of Minecraft content.

Think about that.  It’s not celebrating the game, or the number of times people have played that game…which may be more than a trillion, though I suppose it is mathematically possible that it could be fewer, since, after all, YouTube says there have been a trillion views, and the same video can be viewed many, many times.  So, it’s not a trillion times people have played a game that’s being celebrated.  It’s a trillion instances of people watching uploaded videos of OTHER PEOPLE playing the game.

There are about 7.7 billion people in the world, so that makes an average of about 130 views of Minecraft content per living human.  But I haven’t watched a single such video, and I’m pretty sure I’m not the only such person.  I’m probably not even in a minority in that, though perhaps I’m being optimistic–which is out of character for me, I know.  So there must be quite a number of people out there who have watched Minecraft content far more often than 130 times each.  That’s assuming that YouTube is correct in its tally, which I see no reason to doubt.

Surely this is not something to celebrate.  Surely this is something worthy of the most profound shame and of exceedingly doleful lamentation.  Surely this is an event that belongs in the book of Revelations, in the prophecies of Nostradamus, in the Necronomicon, in any and every apocalyptic, eschatological writing in every faith or myth or belief system ever devised.  Surely this signals the release of Fenrir and the waking of the Midgard Serpent!  Surely this is a harbinger of the end of days!

At the very least, it’s a convincing argument that it really is time for another mountain-sized asteroid to hit the Earth.  It’s time for “Chicxulub II:  This Time It’s Personal!“

The human race has had its time, it’s had its chance, and it’s demonstrated unequivocally that it’s just a great big whopping mistake.  It’s time to wipe the slate clean and start again.  It’s a shame that so many other species would have to go as well just to get rid of the human race, but that’s what happened with all the large species of dinosaurs and the majority of other lifeforms at the end of the Cretaceous, and even more devastating losses happened in the Permian extinction.  And none of those lifeforms even had Minecraft or YouTube, let alone the unholy statistic of there being a trillion times in which people played videos so they could watch other people play a video game, probably somewhere far away from them, probably someone they didn’t know, and usually not even in real time.

Educational videos and music videos can be a joy.  Videos of cats are tolerable.  Videos of people falling down while trying to do stupid things are at least mildly comical in a sophomoric sense.

But this is too much.  I can’t stand it any longer.  The world is insane…or more accurately, it’s unsane.  Sanity doesn’t even apply; there’s no evidence that logic or sense has anything to do with anything in the world.

I can’t take it anymore.  I need to get out.  Where is my asteroid?

It’s intolerable.  Hamlet said, “How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world,” and he was just responding to the death of his father and to his mother having married his uncle almost immediately after.  Imagine how he would feel faced with this.  The undiscovered country and what dreams might come when one has shuffled off to it would surely be no impediment to his bare bodkin if he were to see this**.

Where indeed is thy sting, O death?  I’ve laid my ankle bare.  It’s waiting; it’s unprotected.  I’m daring you.  I’m begging you!  I’m begging you a trillion times, then a trillion trillion more.

For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, the oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely, the insolence of office, the law’s delay, the pangs of despis’d love, and the spurns that patient merit of the unworthy takes?  And who–I ask you most sincerely–would bear the fact that there have been a trillion VIEWS of “Minecraft content” and that it is being celebrated?

“Fie on’t!  Ah, fie!”

asteroid hit

*I don’t sleep well at the best of times, and at this time of year with the seasons throwing things off kilter, my early awakening, related to and contributing to other problems, is worse than usual.

**If he were a real person and not merely a character in a play, of course.

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I wrote a post on Iterations of Zero

I haven’t written anything on Outlaw’s Mind this week so far, because what’s the point of that or anything else, after all?  But this morning I got an idea in my head that I decided to write an IoZ post about, and so I did that in the time in which I usually would have written fiction.  Here’s the first few paragraphs of it, followed by a link to the remainder of the post, in case you’re interested:

To really know you’ve created the best possible universe, you’d have to create them all

I was on my way into work this morning and started thinking about a curious question.

You may be aware of the area of theological inquiry called theodicy*. It deals with the “problem of evil”, though I’m sure that’s an oversimplification. In other words, it deals with the issue that, if God exists, and is infinitely powerful, and is omnibenevolent and omnipresent and omni-whatnot, then why is there evil?

We can leave aside arguments based on notions of free will and just desserts; bad things happen to “good” people in the world, whether through the actions of “evil” people or simply through the operations of the forces of nature. Think of childhood cancers and the like, and indeed, most childhood diseases prior to the modern era, as well as the fact that many children, through no fault of their own, are born to parents who are idiots (this probably describes all children, including mine).

One potential solution to the “problem of evil” is the notion that, despite appearances, the universe in which we live is the best possible one there can be. This idea is caricatured by Voltaire in the form of Dr. Pangloss, but it’s a serious point that is seriously made, and there is a certain logic to it. The notion is that, if things were changed, locally, to make some particular situation better, it would overall make more things worse, by whatever criteria you might happen to choose, and so every bad thing that happens, though it may not have any local good to it, is nevertheless necessary to minimize the evil, or maximize the good, of the universe, by whatever measure happens to be used by the one doing the parsing…presumably, God.

But how would such a God know what the best possible universe was? Such a being is assumed to have infinite intelligence**, as well as infinite power and awareness. We could, perhaps, describe it as a sort of “computer” that is infinite in all dimensions (perhaps an infinite number of them) and with limitless processing power, constrained only to the degree that it does not lead to paradoxes and contradictions, since we must assume—or I do, at least—that logic would apply even to an omnipotent being. Even God cannot actually make two plus two equal five without changing definitions, in which case it hasn’t actually been done.

To see the rest, follow this link.

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And meteors fright the fixèd stars of heaven. The pale-faced moon looks bloggy on the earth

Konnichiwa and ohaiyou gozaimasu.  It’s Thursday again, and so it’s time for my weekly blog post.

I don’t really have much to report this week.  Of course, Hanukkah is over, and I hope those of you who observed it had a nice time and got to spend a few celebratory moments with family and/or friends.  Now we have a bit of a watchful peace, so to speak, before the arrival of Christmas and New Year.  I think there are other holidays in there as well, but I don’t know nearly as much about them as the others, and I’m not going to try to pretend that I do.

It all really centers around the coming Winter Solstice*, which even people a long time ago realized was the turning point of the year, when days started getting longer again after shortening for the previous six months.  This seemed like a sensible cause to celebrate.  Also, it was probably good just to try to keep everyone’s spirits up as much as possible, especially for those who lived relatively far north, where many Christmas decorations and customs take origin.

And, of course, for anyone who is seasonally affected, the knowledge that daylight will soon start increasing might provide some modest comfort, though given the lag time in both the onset and the regression of seasonal mood disorders, the turnaround for such people** probably won’t be noticeable for quite a while, assuming they survive.

I wonder if anyone has done a statistical study charting the average mood course of such people across the months.  Presumably, it would be in a sinusoidal pattern, but offset from the sinusoidal pattern of the changing of the length of days.  For someone who is in the throes of the worst of seasonal affective disorder—perhaps complicating other mood disorders—it might be at least some comfort to know that the fact that their mood doesn’t turn around right when the day changes is normal, and to have at least an estimate or a forecast for when the average sufferer tends to notice improvement.  Or maybe that’s just my kind of mindset, and most people wouldn’t really care.

My work on Outlaw’s Mind has been proceeding decently this week—about five thousand words in the last four writing days, though I did not write on Saturday or Sunday.  I just finished a horrifying and possibly frightening dream sequence which presages more momentous things to come.  These will start, perhaps, to make the main character wonder if the matters that trouble him really are merely in his mind, or if they have some reality of their own.  Whether he’ll ever know the truth is not yet clear.  At least my enthusiasm for the story has mostly recovered, and I look forward to its development.

I haven’t done any handwritten work on anything, though my clipboard with notebook paper sits always nearby during the workday.  That’s okay.  I don’t really want to get sidetracked from my main project, not unless I feel the strong urge to write more than one piece.  If I didn’t have a day job, maybe I would do that, but such a job I have and need, so that’s a moot point.  Of course, the argument could be quite convincingly made that all points are moot points.  But there can be interest and intellectual engagement even in moot points, after all.

While walking into a convenience store early this morning, I saw an unusually prominent meteor streak down the sky, much brighter and longer than most that I’ve seen, with a flame trail that also seemed to last longer than the vast majority do.  It was quite striking*** and remarkable.  Despite its relative duration, though, it came and went in a second only, perhaps only a pebble or smaller, burning up upon entering the atmosphere, such as has been used by songwriters and other artists, quite aptly, as a metaphor for any individual life.

But on the Planck scale, of course, the process of a meteor entering and burning up in the atmosphere contains a ridiculous number of moments, and an indescribable number of interactions between uncountably many elementary particles.  A human life is vastly greater still, astonishingly and mind-bogglingly complex and intricate.  And on a logarithmic scale, from the Planck time on up, a typical human lifespan is nearly as long as the life of our universe so far.

Of course, on the scale of the expected “lifespan” of a supermassive black hole****, the duration of time since the Big Bang is as vanishingly evanescent as the light of any meteor…or the light of, say, a spark rising from a burning log in a fireplace around which a family might sit, sipping warm beverages and warding off the winter cold.  It’s all a matter of scale and perspective.  Compared to eternity, any finite length of time is unreasonably close to and all but indistinguishable from zero.

I hope you’re all making the most of it, as best you can.

TTFN

meteor

*In the northern hemisphere, of course.  In the southern hemisphere, the Summer Solstice approaches, and if most civilizations had taken root in that southern realm, I suppose we might have most of our big deal holidays around the end of June and might even start our new year around that time.  And indeed, what is now south might be our “north”.

**He says this as though it is merely theoretical, or as though it’s a clinical assessment of other people, having no personal bearing on him.  He also refers to himself in third person.

***Though it almost certainly did not strike the ground.

****For instance.

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He capers, he dances, he has eyes of youth, he writes blogs, he speaks holiday

Hello, good morning, and welcome.  I’m back to my usual schedule at last, so once again it is Thursday, and it is time for the next edition of my weekly blog post.  Huzzah!

I’ve been under the weather this week, fighting a reasonably severe cold (which is still better than a relatively mild case of Covid-19 or a mild flu).  It really took the wind out of my sails.  I think I’m finally at the tail end of the thing, so I feel a surge of physical energy, and that’s always nice.  It helps counteract the melancholy of a holiday season in which long, dark nights exacerbate underlying mood disorders and when merry gatherings among others highlight the fact that one cannot spend any time with one’s loved ones, for about the dozenth year in a row.  Hypothetically.

Speaking of holidays, Happy Hanukkah to those of you who celebrate it!  It snuck up on me this year, since it came right on the heels of Thanksgiving, and in fact began before the end of November.  Such are the joys of holidays based upon an ancient, lunar calendar in a society that uses the much more sensible modern update of the Gregorian calendar.  At least it keeps things from being too dull and repetitive.

I’ve mentioned that I’ve had some difficulty writing recently; I worried that I’d gotten too tired of Outlaw’s Mind thanks to numerous interruptions.  Last week my work on it was sparse indeed, and this Monday morning, still reeling from the worst of my upper respiratory infection, I didn’t write anything at all.  In desperation, I decided to try again to revert to handwriting, and I bought some nice quality, loose-leaf notebook paper, with the thought that I would either continue Outlaw’s Mind on it or switch over to Changeling in a Shadow World.  I entertained visions of myself reclining in my narrow bed with clipboard on lap, pen in hand, making real progress on either story.  It was a pleasant notion and helped lift my spirits when I was under the weather.

Then, Tuesday morning, I took a direction that surprised me by working quite well—I switched back over from writing on my desktop, “work” computer* to using my little, portable laptop, originally purchased to use while commuting.  It, or its predecessor, is what I’ve used to write almost all of my recent work, and I was quite surprised to learn that this change made a real difference.  Writing on the little laptop has been so much smoother, so much more natural, that I would not have credited the difference before.

Other factors could be involved.  I’ve been steadily trying to get back into the story fully, and perhaps I simply finally crossed some mental threshold.  I’ve gotten past at least one major, depressing, (formerly) family holiday, and that’s a relief.  I’ve begun to recover from my recent virus, and that can’t hurt.  Also, I’ve been counting my calories rather severely and successfully since last Friday (the day after Thanksgiving) and have succeeded so far in keeping to my draconian limitation, which certainly improves my sense of power over myself.  Any or all of these things could contribute to improved outcomes, and most or all of them probably do.  I’m not that interested in knowing the relative contributions of each factor, certainly not enough to try to vary only one thing at a time, to see which is really dispositive.  I just want to be able to write.

And I’ve been so able.  Tuesday and Wednesday mornings combined, in less than 45 minutes each morning**, I’ve written about three thousand words.  That’s not a record for me for two days’ work, probably not even close, but it’s a significant improvement over recent output.  I’ve also been more excited about both Outlaw’s Mind and Changeling in a Shadow World*** than I’ve been for a long time, thinking about things that will happen in both stories, going through dialogue in my mind, or out loud to myself while commuting, and so on.  I’ll finish Outlaw’s Mind first, but as a bit of a bone thrown to myself, I put my new notebook paper on my clipboard and at the top of the first page wrote:  “Changeling in a Shadow World by Robert Elessar”.  It’s readily available and visible in the office, so if I get some down time during the day, and feel so motivated, I can grab it and start writing.

Other than all that, there’s not much worth talking about.  I won’t comment here on new Covid-19 variants, though I made a video more generally about viruses, bacteria, etc.  I might have mentioned that last week; I can’t be bothered to check, nor have I really begun editing it yet.  Ironically, I’ve been too much suffering from the effects of a virus myself.

In any case, welcome to December, welcome back to Thursday, Happy Hanukkah and a happy holiday season in general.  Whether you’re generally a “Joy to the World” type or, like me, an “Oy! to the World” type, I hope you’re doing well, and that you have a wonderful week, month, and remainder of the year.

TTFN

Hanukkah 2

*That’s the desktop computer associated with my “day job”; I’ve been writing on it recently since I use it every day anyway, saving my daily work on a thumb drive.  I figured, why not?  It’s all the same program.  But it seems my psychology is quirkier than I would have predicted, at least in this realm.

**I’ve had to nap a bit before working each time after getting to the office.  I am still technically sick.

***I’ve pretty much decided that will be the next book I write.  It was the only one for which I got any real requests, and the fact that my sister was the source didn’t hurt, either.

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You great benefactors, sprinkle our society with thankfulness. For your own blogs, make yourselves praised.

Hello and good morning.  Once again, it’s not Thursday but Friday, this time the 26th of November in 2021.  I intended to write a blog post yesterday, though it was Thanksgiving here in the US.  However, I’ve come down with a moderate cold this week—nothing horrific, not Covid-19 or the flu, but an irritating and enervating process that includes sneezing, coughing, runny nose, some laryngitis, a bit of achiness, and just generally feeling blah.  So, I decided that I’d take the whole day off yesterday and sleep in, then sleep quite a bit off and on throughout the day.  I have done so, and now here I am, in the office on so-called Black Friday*, writing this week’s blog post.

I did try to make the fact of being sick productive—I recorded a roughly twenty or so minute video reviewing the differences between viruses and bacteria, the different types of illnesses they cause, and the differences in treatment for which they call.  It’s the sort of thing that I would have thought was common knowledge that most people learned and pretty well mastered by the time they were in middle school, at least on a broad level, but this is plainly not the case.  I haven’t edited and posted that video yet, but I will, probably this weekend, unless I’m too under the weather still.

Being sick and so on has seriously diverted me from my work on Outlaw’s Mind.  Between Monday and Tuesday, I only wrote 2450 words, and I wrote nothing at all on Wednesday (nor yesterday).  Part of this is due to the respiratory infection, but another portion is due to the ennui I continue to feel regarding writing any story.  I’m far more stubborn than the day is long, but even I can have difficulty staying motivated.  It’s not that I don’t like the story.  I wouldn’t say it’s my favorite ever story idea, but it’s also far from my least favorite, and no other story that I have waiting in the wings seems eager to push it aside.

Some of my apathy is probably due to the diminishing day length, which leads to worsening of my dysthymia—which has itself been persistent, more or less, in this iteration, for at least a dozen years and probably more.  In fact, the last time I can remember being truly free from it must be from roughly 1996 or 1997 through sometime in 2002 or 2003.  I was well-nigh unstoppable then, though I was in late med school then residency then the beginning of medical practice, and moved states, and became a father to two children.

After that time, especially after my back injury, I’ve been under the pall of depression/dysthymia, overlaid with personal catastrophes of several kinds.  The external stuff is comparably tolerable, however, though that might be hard to believe, since it includes injury, chronic pain, illness, loss of career, imprisonment, loss of family, isolation, etc.  But it’s true.

I liken it very much and quite seriously to being undead, and not in a cool, darkly sexy, Anne Rice vampire chronicles way.  One of the best literary quotes that describes, for me, what dysthymia is like is when Gandalf speaks of the Rings of Power to Frodo, describing what happens to someone (such as Bilbo or the Nazgul) who keeps one of the Great Rings:

“A mortal, Frodo, who keeps one of the Great Rings, does not die, but he does not grow or obtain more life, he merely continues, until at last every minute is a weariness.”

I’m pretty sure Tolkien didn’t intend this to be a metaphor for dysthymia, but it really resonates with me.  Interestingly, as I looked up the specific quote above, I realized that I had subtly altered it in my head to read:  “A mortal, Frodo, who keeps a Great Ring does not die, but neither does he grow or obtain new life.  He merely continues, until at last each breath is a weariness.”  The gist is the same, and I don’t know how to account for the differences.  Do those two wordings strike any of you differently, or are they basically indistinguishable?  I would honestly be fascinated to know.

Writing new stories has often been a source of some relief from depression; I’m not the only author to have noted this fact.  But rather like the notion that exercise is good for depression, it doesn’t do you much good if your depression keeps you from doing the thing that helps.  I’ve often wondered whether the causality was misconstrued in the studies of exercise and depression; perhaps the people who were able to do the exercising were already experiencing improvement in their depression, and so they were able to participate fully.  I’m pretty sure that the various study designers thought of that issue, and randomized as best they could to counter it, but it’s not always completely doable.

Anyway, that’s a summary of my status.  Maybe I’ll review all my old story ideas and see if any of them really grabs me and makes me want to write more than Outlaw’s Mind does.  I have this weekend off (after having worked the last two Saturdays), so perhaps the extra rest will help.

I hope all of you in the US had a lovely Thanksgiving, and that everyone else just had a lovely week and a nice Thursday.  Christmas approaches for those who celebrate it, and even those who don’t can’t avoid its presence in the West.  Best wishes of the solstice season to all of you out there, no matter which one you’re approaching.

TTFN

Thankschristmassy

*Though they’ve started with “Black Friday” sales right after Halloween, frankly, so they’ve rather spoiled the whole mystique of the Day After Thanksgiving being the biggest Christmas shopping day.  There’s no good and interesting phenomenon that we in America—and probably the rest of the world—can’t squeeze and overuse until it’s lost all sense of fun and use that it previously had.

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Give me to drink mandragora…that I might sleep out this great blog of time

Goodo and hell morning.  It’s not Thursday—it’s Friday, November 19th, 2021—but this is an edition of my weekly blog post.  I did not write anything at all yesterday, neither blog post nor new fiction nor letters nor emails nor notes to self nor any other kind of writing.  I was lying in bed pretty much all day (getting up to obtain meals and to use the bathroom—which, interestingly, doesn’t have a bathtub, just a shower, a sink, and a euphemism, yet we call it a bathroom).  Despite having gotten nicely into a walking routine over the last several weeks—which seemed to be doing good for my back and other joints—somehow, at the beginning of this week, or the end of the last, something triggered a significant exacerbation.  I’ve had pain and stiffness not just in my back but markedly so in my hips and shoulders, wrists and hands, ankles, knees, and so on.  I wondered if I’d started to develop polymyalgia rheumatica, frankly, given the symptoms.

It’s interesting to note that something called polymyalgia* entails such prominent arthralgia**.  But nomenclature isn’t always accurate, even in medicine; it’s often riddled with historical artifacts.  Take the source of the word “vaccination”, for instance.  How many people know that its origin comes from exposing people to Vaccinia (related to smallpox and formerly thought to be cowpox but apparently more like horsepox***) to engender immunologic protection against Variola, aka Smallpox?

So, anyway, I didn’t write my usual weekly blog post on Thursday this week, and I suppose I could’ve just given the whole thing a miss, but I figured I’d try to be better late than never if I could.  I’m more motivated to write this blog than I am to write my new fiction, anyway, which is a bit sad to me, though I doubt I shall hear any wailing and gnashing of teeth from the general public.  Also, it’s just barely possible that I won’t be writing a blog post next week (though I think I usually do) on Thanksgiving.  It will probably be shorter than usual, anyway.  So, it would be a shame to leave this space blank, intentionally or otherwise.

This is not to say that I haven’t been working on Outlaw’s Mind.  I have.  Even when I’ve had trouble getting going in the morning, and I putter around rereading and—this week at least—spending about twenty minutes each morning lying on the floor to try to ease my back a bit, I still have written eight hundred to fourteen hundred words each on the days I’ve written, which is to say Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday.  I’m just not feeling the same drive and motivation for writing that I normally feel.

I wonder if that ambivalence is because this story has been interrupted more than once.  Part of me wants to put it back on the back burner and just start to write something new that I haven’t started before.  But then, of course, that would mean that there would be yet another interruption in Outlaw’s Mind, and it might never get written.  This is not exactly an epic tragedy, obviously—there are many stories waiting in my head that have not yet been, and may never be, written.  But it would be a minor shame.  Had I but world enough and time—or particularly, had I but a time unmarred by chronic pain with exacerbations and free from chronic depression, or at least with all those things under reasonable control—I could write more and faster even than I already do.

And if wishes were horses, we’d all be neck deep in horseshit.

Anyway, that’s nearly it for this week, I’m afraid.  I apologize for the lateness and for the less-than-optimal post that this is.  It’s a day late and, though not a dollar short, I feel it’s not up to my usual standards.  I’m back at the office, but I am still far from physically comfortable, and that takes its toll.  I hope you’ll all understand.

In the meantime, though, in America we have Thanksgiving coming up next week, and I hope most of you are looking forward to a nice meal with family if you’re able.  Though, of course, be careful if you travel, and do your best not to contribute to a new wave of Covid-19, as well as flu and other respiratory viruses—they all tend to have significant upticks here in the US after Thanksgiving, since it’s the biggest travel holiday of the year.

Please, everyone, have a good time with those you love.  And do something, if you’re able, for people who are alone.  Even if it seems that’s the way they want to be, it’s worth checking if they need anything.

But for goodness’ sake, don’t tell them that they ought to be thankful and appreciative and not feel too bad, perhaps because other people have it “worse”.  That doesn’t help anybody; it’s just self-serving crap designed to absolve the speaker of any need to be compassionate.  There’s presumably only one person on Earth at any given time about whom it couldn’t be said that there are those who have it worse****.  What good does it do anyone to be told that, at this moment, they aren’t that person, by someone else who also isn’t that person and isn’t doing anything to make a difference for that person or for anyone else?  If you can’t say anything useful and/or nice, don’t say nothin’ at all.  Silence is preferable to insulting, counterproductive stupidity.

TTFN

desert

*Which refers to muscle pain.

**Which refers to joint pain.

***So many farm animal poxes!  Chicken pox, by the way, is Varicella.  Imagine if our inoculation process had started with chicken pox.  We might refer to the process as varicellation.

****I think we can safely assume that the title changes hands rapidly and often, since such a person probably has a foreshortened lifespan.

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What fond blogger, but to touch the crown, would with the sceptre straight be strucken down?

Hello.  Good morning.  It’s Thursday, November 11th, 2021, the second Thursday of November this year, and it’s time for another edition of my weekly blog post.  I won’t mention the fact that, had the feature continued, this would have been the occasion for an instance of “My Heroes Have Always Been Villains,” since I’m the only one who cares.  Oops!  I’ve mentioned it, now!  Oh, well.  If you’re interested in seeing what that was about, follow the link above.

There’s not that much new going on this week.  The only newish thing is that, just before starting to write this post, I did a quick recording, trying to recapitulate some thoughts that I’d been thinking (sometimes out loud) on my way into the office.  By recording I mean “voice recording”.  I am considering trying to start/continue an idea I’ve had more than once, which is to do a regular “audio blog”* feature over at Iterations of Zero, which I’ll hopefully also turn into “videos” on my YouTube channel.  I put that word in scare quotes because the visual portion is likely just to be my Iterations of Zero symbol; nothing is ever added to any thoughtful process by requiring people to look at my face.

The thoughts I had this morning concerned a method of figuring probabilities, which I had previously not thought of in this simple way, and so I had needed to do unnecessarily laborious figuring when and if it came up for me.  Then I read a book that pointed out an easier way to do it and to think of it, and I realized I’d been making things much harder for myself than was necessary.

I would like to try to do regular, five-minute-long recordings of my random thoughts in the morning(s), and then perhaps accumulate them over the course of each week into something to be shared on IoZ.  We’ll see if this comes to fruition, but I plan at least to share the thoughts from this morning (properly edited) on my other blog.

As for other matters, of course, the main project on which I continue to work is Outlaw’s Mind.  As I said last week, I’ve reverted to type by reverting to typing the first draft, because I was getting joint pain in the base of my right thumb, and that was slowing me down.  It’s also a fair pain to rewrite the stuff I’d written by hand into the computer—I only just caught up with that yesterday morning.  Also, having considered it while typing it in, writing with pen on paper doesn’t seem to have improved my writing style in any appreciable way.  I know that’s an unscientific evaluation, but there it is.  The story goes well, and my ideas of what is to happen in it are adjusting—it’s expanding in some ways, contracting in others, and in general becoming a larger-scale story, since I’ve decided to allow it to be a novel.

This leads me to wonder how many of my numerous short story ideas would/will expand into something larger once I start writing them, if I ever do.  Particularly in more recent works, as contrasted with things I wrote many years ago, my stories tend to become longish, hopefully in good ways, even when they are “short stories”, as anyone who has read Dr. Elessar’s Cabinet of Curiosities, or any of the isolated short stories, will know.  Some of them, like “Ifowonco” and Hole for a Heart are borderline novellas, as is the title story from Welcome to Paradox City.  And In the Shade, the last story in The Cabinet (and in fact the last complete story I have written thus far**) could probably count as a novella if it were published alone.  I think it has nearly as many words as Of Mice and Men, though in all other senses there is little comparison, the latter being one of the finest things I’ve ever read.  I was so moved by it that I read it twice in a row in one day, the first time I read it.  I don’t think I’ve done that before or since with any other story.

I don’t have much else to discuss today.  It’s either just after the beginning of daylight savings time or its just after the end of it for this year, however it’s reckoned, but that’s not really worth getting into much.  I’m not a huge fan of the practice, though I relished the extra hour last weekend, and quite irrationally, as I always do.  Of course, hours actually pass just as they would in any case, no matter how we label them, and none of us gain or lose them*** at a different rate just by fiddling with our clocks.  To think that would be a bit like imagining that, by looking through a microscope, you can actually make miniscule structures physically bigger.

Humans have some peculiar ideas.

With that, I’ll wish all you humans—and any non-humans who might be reading—a good week, and encourage you to be kind to yourselves and to each other, and to remember, while it’s worth trying to figure out how to solve (or better yet, to avoid) problems, the notion of blame is probably almost always counterproductive.

TTFN

watchwork

*It could, I suppose, be considered a podcast, but that seems too highfalutin’ a term for what I do.

**For all we know, it could well be the last story I’ll ever complete, given the vicissitudes of fate, not to mention my own chronic depression and chronic pain and the like, which leave me at increased daily risk of death, even—apparently—from things like Covid-19 (at least according to the CDC website).  I’ll admit to having been mildly disappointed that my run-in with the virus was not fatal and, given that I’m fully vaccinated and have already had the infection, my odds of being released by this particular disease are not high.  Oh, well, sooner or later something will kill me.  I only hope when it happens it’s not too inconvenient for anyone that I care about…though I’d be delighted (in principle) if it greatly inconvenienced any of quite a large chunk of humanity, since so many of them are irritating.

***Except for those who succumb to the increased rates of heart attacks and strokes and accidents and the like, which I’ve read are associated with the change in time both in the spring and the fall.  I cannot vouch for how true those claims are, but the uptick in morbidity and mortality seems plausible.

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Have you not love enough to blog with me, when that rash humor which my mother gave me makes me forgetful?

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, November 4th*, the first Thursday of the new month, and—of course—it’s time for another edition of my weekly blog post.

Halloween has passed, alas, and now we enter the weird time wherein Thanksgiving symbols—at least in the US—struggle to hold onto at least a brief period of prominence before they are overtaken, no later than November 25th this year, by Christmas decorations**.

I’m slightly sorry to have to admit that yesterday I flipped back to writing Outlaw’s Mind on computer.  I’ve been getting quite a bit of minor but irritating arthrotic*** pain at the base of my thumb, and where the metacarpal meets the wrist.  I’d forgotten this.  It probably feels worse than it really is, since it’s been a while; also, the last time I experienced much of it, I was in wretched circumstances.  But I’ve felt it plenty of times before, even going back to my teenage years.  I think I tend just to get really focused when I’m writing and use those joints to a greater than ideal degree, causing wear and tear.  That damage no doubt accumulates, since healing is rarely complete in any region of the body, unless you’re a spiny mouse, so the discomfort starts earlier each time.  But it’s not primarily inflammatory, because there’s never even a hint of heat, redness, or noticeable swelling, and it only flares up with use, so arthrosis it is.

Because of that, and the minor inconvenience of storing my writing when not in use, and of flipping back to reread what I’d written yesterday instead of merely scrolling up, and, of course, because computer writing is easier to read, even for me, I’ve switched back.  I’m occasionally troubled by the spirit of the great Harlan Ellison, who (so I’ve read) thought that one can’t write decently or effectively on a word processor/computer because it’s too easy.  He supposedly disdained anything beyond the typewriter.  Ellison-sensei could be an opinionated curmudgeon by all accounts, but such an argument clearly doesn’t stand up on its face****, or Ellison should have committed to writing every one of his first drafts on stone with a chisel.

I can’t say I would completely have put it past him.

But I don’t think writing with a modern computer is necessarily worse, or that it changes anything all that much in any given writer’s style.  I wrote a good deal of the first draft of Son of Man on a very small smartphone using its note-taking app.  That wasn’t easy on my thumbs, but at the time I didn’t have a portable computer, and I was riding busses about three hours a day, so I was able to do a lot of writing that way.  I don’t think it was any easier than writing by hand at a desk would have been, and I don’t think my writing suffered or improved noticeably for it.

If you’d like to check, you can read Son of Man and compare it with Mark Red or The Chasm and the Collision or the short stories Paradox City and Solitaire, the first and often second drafts of all of which were written with pen on paper, and you can compare it also with Unanimity or any of my short stories starting with “I for one welcome our new computer overlords”, which are straight computer-written.  You can also compare it with The Vagabond, which was originally written partly as pen on paper but mostly on a Mac SE using WriteNow.  Or you can read all the tales in Dr. Elessar’s Cabinet of Curiosities, which begins with a story part of the first draft of which was typed, if memory serves, and ends with a story that was written partly by hand and partly (first draft and all) in Microsoft Word™.  Unfortunately, now that I’ve told you the difference, your experiment will be hopelessly confounded by bias.

Oh, well.  Read them all anyway, what the heck.  You can buy extra copies for friends and ask them what they think without revealing the above information.  If you want to make things double blind, you can ask a third party to ask your friends what they think.  Or you can just read the stories.  I know that a lot of them are horror of one sort or another, but remember, just as a puppy isn’t only for Christmas*****, a horror story isn’t just for Halloween.  The darkness of night continues to grow, at least here in the northern hemisphere.  The time of daylight is in full retreat, and it will be weeks and weeks before it even begins to take back ground, let alone before it comes to dominate again, revealing all the stark unpleasantness of the world in its cold, bitter glare.  In the dark, it is easier to pretend.  And sometimes, if you’re lucky, your imagination can run away with you.

Which brings me back to Outlaw’s Mind, for which I’m gradually regaining my momentum, which was no small task since it’s been interrupted more than once.  Maybe the handwriting thing was just a way to trick myself around my resistance to getting going on the story again.  If so, it seems to have worked reasonably well, and Outlaw’s Mind will perhaps be all the better for its disjointed history.  I’ll do my best to make it so.

In the meantime, Happy November to you all.  It’s generally a month I like, even though it exists in the lee of my favorite holiday.  It evokes memories of still-falling autumn leaves blowing about in briskly cold (but not yet bitter) winds, and the anticipation of two big family holidays, each associated with feasts and TV specials and games and long weekends and so on and on.  And though many of those things are no longer mine to enjoy, alone here in south Florida, I can at least say that it’s a time of year where one can enjoy walks outside without obscene layers of sunscreen and emergency water rations to replace all the bodily fluids that have soaked one’s clothes.

I don’t know what it’s all like in the southern hemisphere but considering that summer’s on its way for them, it’s probably great.

TTFN

Happy Birthday

*It’s my mother’s birthday.  She would be turning eighty, if my memory is correct.  Happy Birthday, Mom, wherever you are!  Knowing her, if she’s anywhere, it’s someplace good.  She certainly would deserve it.  As would my father, of course, who would have turned eighty-two precisely a month ago.  He was a bit of a curmudgeon—I take after him in many ways—but a good person.  So, belated Happy Birthday, Dad.

**And to a far lesser extent, Hanukkah and other solstice-related holiday decorations.  You rarely see any Saturnalia symbols, though.  I’m not even sure what those would look like.  Oh, well.  We get plenty of the Norse decorations.

***The auto-correct thingy tried to change this word to “arthritic”, without even asking me, but that was an incorrect correction.  The suffix “-itis” indicates inflammation, usually as a primary component of a given disorder.  Though there may well be secondary inflammation in the root structures of my thumb, this is clearly a wear-and-tear phenomenon, and so is an “-osis”, not an “-itis”…the latter suffix which the program keeps changing to “it is”, which is again wrong, and again, it’s not asking me.  I wouldn’t mind a little red wavy underline to bring it to my attention—asking me if I was sure about writing that—but especially if I enclose something in quotes, the program should not presume to correct what I write.

****Which sounds both difficult and painful.

*****It’s also delicious in a sandwich on Boxing Day.