Anxiety

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You don’t prolong a vowel sound by repeating a silent “e” doggone it!

Well, here we go.  It’s Monday.  It’s the start of another “traditional” work week, and I am participating in that tradition.

I don’t really know why I am doing so‒though, on a reasoning kind of level, I could probably figure out at least some of the proximate causes‒since there is nothing of value for me to sustain by getting an income, and I feel less and less a member of society or civilization with every passing day (or so it seems).  And whatever I am (metaphorically), I don’t like me.

I also don’t know whether the WordPress people were able to fix my site or not*, so I don’t know if I’m going to load this onto it in the usual way or not.  That almost threw me into a nervous breakdown the other day (I suppose the official term would be a “meltdown”, which is apparently what they call it for people with ASD, and though that’s somewhat insulting, it’s not an inappropriate comparison for one to invoke a nuclear catastrophe).

It makes me feel the urge to try to write on Substack or some such similar site.  But I’ve been on WordPress for a decade and a half now‒that’s wild to realize‒and I don’t really want to have to change.  I’d rather just delete.

I’m also having issues with my ride this morning.  I reserved a ride to the station well in advance, which ought to make it more reliable, not less, but evidently that isn’t the case.  Despite the irregularity, I have not been offered a discount, even though if I were late, I would be penalized.  Somehow that doesn’t seem right, and it fills me with at least a slight wish for vengeance.

I know, I know, this isn’t a major deal.  But it feels major to me, relatively speaking, and it makes me want less and less to bother participating in anything at all.  I’m already jogging along the edge of a canyon with unstable sides.  Even little gusts of wind could be enough to push me over the edge, if it comes at a time when I am already unsteady and have taken a bad step.

I take a lot of bad steps.

Speaking of bad steps, I would like to make a public service announcement, aimed mainly at younger folks online.  Here it comes:

It makes no sense to try to convey the impression of an elongated spoken vowel sound in a word that ends in a silent “e” by repeating the e!

The most common use (that I have noticed) of this idiocy is to prolong the word “love” to provide emphasis.  They write things such as “I loveeeeee this restaurant” or whatever.  But “loveeeeeee” would be pronounced “luv-eeeeeee”, as if Thurston Howell from Gilligan’s Island were wailing for his wife as they became separated on a failing getaway raft, like in Castaway.  (Think the analogue of yelling, “Wiiiiiiilsooooooon!”)

If one wants to prolong the main vowel sound of the word “love” then it makes more sense to repeat that vowel, for instance, “I looooove the show Gilligan’s Island.”  The “e” is silent in the original word; it doesn’t make sense to multiply it.  That changes the word’s pronunciation entirely.  It bothers me every time when I see such blatant, if not terribly important, idiocy.  I haaaaaaaaate it!

See how that works better than “hateeeeee” would?  That sounds like someone greeting their beloved head covering, to which they refer by the nickname, “Hatty”.

I think I will make that subject the headline topic of this post (I did).  Maybe someone out there will see it and apply it.

Ugh.  I already feel overwhelmed, and it’s just Monday morning, and work hasn’t even started.  We also have supremely Florida weather here today, very hot but even more humid.  I’m sweating copiously just sitting still.

And now my train is going to be delayed, it turns out.  I really ought just to go back to the house and lie down and not ever get up.  That might be hard to do, of course‒not going back to the house, I mean the “never getting up” part.  For one thing, even though it’s stupidly humid and so I’m probably somewhat dehydrated, I would eventually have to get up to go to the bathroom.  I have no desire to lie in my own urine.

Of course, if I took enough of the right medicine or combinations of medicine, I wouldn’t have to worry about that.  At least, I wouldn’t worry about it.

I don’t know what to say.  I really don’t feel well.  I don’t feel any sense of belonging or connection with the life I have (and am), but I don’t see any change that’s within my power that would do anything but make things even harder and more stressful.

I can’t just throw myself on someone else’s mercy and beg for help.  No one I know has the resources to be able to help me, even if they knew how to do so.  And I don’t have any insurance of any kind, nor any other such things.

I don’t even use my bicycle because the rear tire is punctured and I don’t have any bike stores within bike-pushing distance, and I don’t know how to fix the rear tire myself.  I guess I could learn, but I know that I probably never would do it.  I don’t handle maintenance tasks very well, especially when they’re geared (no pun intended) toward me.  I don’t really have any reserves of will and energy.

Things would be easier if not for chronic pain and the consequences of taking lots of medicine for a long time to try to control it as best I can.  It would also be nice to be able to have an actual, restful night’s sleep.

I want to say that I cannot remember the last time I woke up feeling rested, because that sounds rhetorically impressive, but I do remember:  it was a night/morning in the mid-nineties (I do not recall the exact day and year, because at the time it didn’t seem so noteworthy, though it was wonderful).  As far as I can tell, that was the last time I felt well-rested.

Speaking of rest, I’m going to give this post one for now.  I hope, I truly hope‒and if I thought it was any use, I would pray‒that each and every one of you is feeling much better than I am right now.

*They hadn’t completely, but I am able to do something at least more like classic writing on it than it looked to be as of last week.

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Let airplanes circle screaming overhead

After my little test yesterday of the “writing a blog post directly on the app related to my WordPress account”, I considered writing this morning’s post directly on that app, just to see how it went.  However, I don’t yet know how to keep track of my word count on that app*, and I don’t feel like doing any trial and error exploration this morning‒not of that, anyway.

So, I’m writing this instead on the usual Google Docs app.  Google Docs has the advantage that when I write this document on my phone, it automatically saves to my Google Drive, and I can then readily open it up on any computer that has an internet connection.  That’s fairly handy.

Of course, it means that I’m putting many eggs in the Google basket, but for these purposes, I’m okay with that.  Also, when it comes to phone apps, Google Docs is so far the best word processor I’ve tried, as far as interface quality goes.  The same cannot be said for the desktop app, but it’s perhaps better than it used to be.

I don’t really like to leave my fiction in Google’s hands if I can help it.  I like having a hard copy, so to speak, of my fiction writing.  So far, except for those which were written with pen and paper for the first draft, all my fiction has been written on MSWord (and even the handwritten ones were completed on Word).  I used to recopy each file onto a thumb drive after a day’s writing, in addition to keeping it saved on my mini lapcom, so I knew I had at least two up to date copies.  Then‒once it became a thing‒it would also auto-save onto my Microsoft OneDrive.

The inception of the latter made me think that maybe I could write everything on the Word app for smartphones.  It auto-updates in a fashion similar to Google Docs.  Alas, it’s not nearly as fluid and seamless as the Google app.  If it were, I would probably use it, although‒the nature of Microsoft accounts being what they are‒I wouldn’t be able just to pull it up on the work computer, since it uses a different (boss-related) Microsoft account.  So, I would have to send a file as an email or something no matter what.

I’m sure there are ways around that‒or, well, there may be ways around that‒but the phone app for Word just is too cumbersome for now.  It’s not worth the effort.

Sorry, I know this is probably dreadfully dull to all of you.  I’m impressed that you’ve read this far.  You may know, I guess, that I don’t plan these posts out ahead of time, I just spew out whatever comes into my head.  If you find it tedious or infuriating, just imagine how I feel!  You, at least, could always navigate to another website.  What am I supposed to do?  I can’t even get away from myself by sleeping most of the time.

Anyway…

I’ve been doing a little bit of rereading of some of my fiction recently.  For instance, yesterday afternoon, while waiting for my train, I finished rereading The Chasm and the Collision.

I still like it.

I have a hard time feeling good about things that I do (and am) but I think CatC is a good story, and I think its world is interesting and that the characters are good and so on.  I think there are probably a lot of people out there who would like it.  And, like I mentioned sometime earlier this week, it would be really cool to encounter fanfiction based on it.

Alas, I am not good at self-promotion.  I don’t like myself, so it’s hard to find the will to promote my work, even when I like the work.  It’s quite dispiriting, and the fact that I can only hold myself, and my nature, responsible for it doesn’t make it any easier to swallow that bitter pill.

Now I’m rereading Unanimity: Book 2, though I’m not sure if I’ll read it all the way through to the end.  That’s another book that I think is good, though it is long, and some of the characters aren’t as likeable as in CatC.  Of course, they’re not supposed to be likeable, when they’re not.  It is a horror story, after all, and in many ways it is one of my two most horrifying stories.  Weirdly enough, those two most horrifying stories are my longest and my shortest works.

On the other hand, my sister recently pointed out to me that‒ironically‒my most lighthearted story is The Vagabond, which is a sort of old-school, gonzo horror story.  She’s right.  I guess that lightness shows that I wrote it (originally) while in college and med school.

The heck with it, all of my stories are good.  Some are better than others, and different people would surely prefer different ones, but I think they’re all pretty good.  Even the stuff only published here like Extra Body (which is complete) and Outlaw’s Mind and The Dark Fairy and the Desperado (those two are not complete) are good.  So read them.  Read all of my stories.  Tell your friends and families and even your enemies and strangers about them.  Spread the word far and wide across the land.  “Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone, prevent the dog from barking with a juice bone”.  Okay, well, maybe not that last bit, but do get the word out.

Thanks.

Okay, well, tomorrow I work, so expect a blog post tomorrow, whether you like it or not.  I may do another test post this afternoon if I get a bit bored, mainly to see if I can sort out the word count stuff on the app for WordPress.  If so, I’ll post it.  If not, of course, I won’t.  It’s funny how that works, isn’t it?

I hope you have a good day.

*I need to keep track of that because I can sometimes get quite carried away.

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O Caesar, these blogs are beyond all use and I do fear them

Hello and good morning.

I thought of a good opening sentence and line for this blog post today, but unfortunately, I thought of it at around one in the morning, during one of my earlier mid-night* awakenings.  These happen more or less every night, at various times.  Sometimes I will start** awake thinking I’ve badly overslept, only to find that I’ve been asleep for less than an hour.  Sometimes the opposite sort of thing happens.  Anyway, one of the hallmarks of things I think during those early midnight awakenings is that I don’t remember their specifics very well.

In other words, I don’t recall what the opening sentence that came to me was.  Given the nature of nocturnal, half-awake thoughts, it might well have been an idiotic starting sentence.  It might have been utter gibberish.  I might not even really have thought of any sentence at all; I might just have had one of those curious activations of certain brain modules without the usual stimulus (such as thinking of an actual sentence) that engenders them.

I suppose it’s somewhat similar to déjà vu, that free-floating feeling of familiarity and recollection that isn’t actually triggered by something familiar but by stochastic activation of areas of the brain that register familiarity and memory.

So, I might have had the feeling that I had just thought of a good sentence to start this blog post, but it was triggered by something that wasn’t related to any actual sentence.  Like Scrooge said to Marley’s ghost, “There’s more of gravy than grave about you.”

The quote was something close to that, anyway; I don’t feel like going to look it up and check.

All this highlights how important it can be not to trust your feelings.  As Radiohead sang, “Just ‘cause you feel it doesn’t mean it’s there.”

Please don’t take this to mean that I think you should repress or ignore your feelings.  Feelings exist for good, sound, biological reasons.  But while they can be good sources of motivation‒indeed, one might argue that any motivation is a feeling‒emotions are unreliable guides for action, especially in the complex modern human world.  It is still certainly worth attending to them, however, rather than merely ignoring them or trying to push them down.

I think fear, in particular, is usually worth noticing and inspecting.  Just because you feel afraid doesn’t necessarily mean that there is some threat or danger nearby, even a merely social one, but nature has clearly arrived at the provisional conclusion that it’s better to be afraid of something that turns out not to be a danger than not to feel afraid of something that is a danger.

Of course, ideally, one would like to feel fear only for real dangers, and only to the degree that they are dangerous, and otherwise to feel fine.  It would similarly be nice to desire to eat and to enjoy eating only those foods that will be most healthy for us at that moment, at that time, and to desire only just as much as we need, and not to want those foods that will be bad for us in the short and long term.

Such perfect accuracy is not even close to being possible, not even for deliberately designed systems, let alone for evolved biological organisms.  And when survival and reproduction are the means by which genes go on into the future, it’s far better (up to a point) to make a type 1 error‒sensing or fearing nonexistent danger‒than a type 2 error‒not recognizing actual danger.

Modern society has discouraged us somewhat from listening to such fears, sometimes out of a desire to be polite, but again, though one should not take such fear, or other emotions, at simple face value, one should listen to them.  One should inspect the feeling and one’s surroundings and circumstances and try to discern why one feels that fear.

If it becomes clear after honest internal and external inquiry that it is a baseless anxiety, a fear without focus, then one can try to shrug to oneself and simply go about one’s business as best one can.  But if there’s a colorable explanation for your fear‒such as a possibly dangerous or certainly unknown person nearby during moments of potential vulnerability‒one should pay attention and act appropriately.  This is especially true for women (and girls), but it applies to men as well.  Gavin deBecker wrote a powerful book about this subject called The Gift of Fear, and I recommend it (this is one of those rare instances in which Oprah and I agree on a book recommendation).

Fear is not the mind killer.  Fear can be the mind sharpener.  The only people who don’t feel fear are fools and corpses.

On the other hand, to go back to the earlier point, emotions are still very blunt and fuzzy instruments, so don’t just let them push you around willy-nilly.  Just because you feel angry, for instance, doesn’t mean that anyone actually did anything to deserve it.  You might be hypoglycemic, you might have had too much caffeine, you might be in pain and/or have had chronic bad sleep***, you might be feeling residual emotional upheaval from something you saw on the news.

The feelings you have can be misleading, but they are not merely random nor are they completely irrelevant or unreliable.  Some of them are positive in and of themselves:  Joy and love are certainly worth not avoiding, for instance.

And middle-of-the-night feelings related to the nebulous impression that one has thought of a good start for a blog post can sometimes be without substance entirely.  And yet, even then, they might sometimes lead more or less directly to a blog post.

TTFN

*As opposed to “midnight”, which would usually mean 12 am.

**I.e., “a sudden, jerky motion, usually a response to some alarming and/or unexpected stimulus” not as in “begin”.

***This can happen, or so I’m led to understand.

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May the 4th be yadda, yadda, yadda

First, let me get the irresistible, nerdly, liturgical invocation (or whatever you should call it) out of the way:

There, that’s that.

Yes, it’s “Star Wars Day”‒because of the play on words, y’know?  So, I give a nod to it, since I like Star Wars and I like plays on words (with some exceptions here and there for both “likes”).

I think I’m going to keep this short today if I can.  My back and hips and ankles and knee and hands/thumbs and shoulder and all are really uncomfortable, and they have been so despite my attempts at various interventions and despite the fact that I rested this weekend.

Well, I didn’t merely rest.  I did go for a couple of moderate walks over the weekend, one about 5 miles, one about 4 miles.  But I took my time, I wore good shoes, I walked on nice, level pavement and so on.  In between, I tried to take it easy on my back and whatnot; I even took a short break or two during my walks.

It’s probably not logically sensible for me to say that my interventions did no good; after all, I don’t know what the outcome(s) would have been had I done differently than I did.  It could have been better, it could have been worse, it could have been the same*.

Anyway, it’s all very frustrating, and it doesn’t help my sleep, either.  I was going to say that it doesn’t help my insomnia, but of course, it does help my insomnia, making it a much more effective (and affective, ha ha) disorder.

I probably shouldn’t even talk about the pain’s effects on my actual affective disorder(s), dysthymia and depression.  In my experience, when you talk to people about depression, it doesn’t bring out the best in them, and it tends to drive them away‒sometimes permanently.  It’s one of those gifts that keeps on giving, I guess.

One slight “benefit” about being in enough pain, is that it blunts, or perhaps overshadows, some forms of social anxiety.  When you’re in enough pain, for long enough, you sometimes get to where you really don’t give a flying fuck at a rat’s ass what other people think of you.  Sometimes you just start to hate everything and everyone, but especially yourself and your life.

I say “your”, but of course I mean “my”.  I don’t know for certain what happens in your mind.

Oh, and by the way, chronic pain doesn’t seem to blunt other anxieties, unfortunately.  If anything, it makes one jumpier, and OCD-style anxieties and insecurities are sometimes amplified.  They seem to be with me.

This reminds me (somehow) of my metaphor about navigating through reality being like driving along a narrow road between two infinitely tall, indestructible walls**.  Rationality consists, ultimately, of keeping one’s course parallel to those walls.

If you’re driving on that road and your heading deviates from parallel by even a millionth of a degree, sooner or later you will crash into one of the walls***.  That’s you, colliding with reality.  And when anyone collides with reality, reality does not break, the one colliding does.  In a way, that’s what reveals reality to be reality.

But of course, it’s functionally impossible to pick your course perfectly along the parallel path (this is much like my point about the unlikelihood of hitting zero on the number line, see the first footnote below).  So what can one do?  One can keep one’s hands on the wheel and adjust course as one goes along, watching the walls to see if they are staying safely away from your vehicle.

This is one reason dogmatism is a bad thing (i.e., a worse than useless thing).  The odds of you picking the right direction (or right beliefs) on, say, the first try, are functionally zero.  What’s more, the odds that you have achieved the perfect direction on the 2nd or the 3rd or the 42nd or 1729th try are also functionally zero.

You will never come to the single, final answer‒at least your odds of doing so are vanishingly small‒and so you will never get to rest steering, to stop course-correction.  Sorry.  Drivers just don’t get to sleep, and you’re driving if anyone is.  The only way to rest from steering is to stop moving or to crash into the wall.

When I (or you) fight reality, reality always wins.  Again:  that’s kind of how you know it’s reality.

Anyway, I hope you all have a good day and a good week.  Drive carefully and safely.  Don’t forget to check your mirrors and your blind spots; and don’t just trust the AI (or drivers of other cars) to steer you.

 

*It’s vanishingly unlikely to have been exactly the same, though.  There’s only one zero point on a number line, for instance, though there are infinitely many points arbitrarily close to zero (in the Real numbers, anyway).  Mathematically, your odds of hitting zero if, for instance, you throw an infinitely pointy (no pun intended) dart at a number line are, well…zero.  And yet it can happen, in principle.  That’s just thinking in one dimension, though.  The phase space describing what could have changed in my experience is probably quite high-dimensional, and things are identical if and only if you hit the point where the change along all those dimensions is zero.

**I don’t know why this thought was triggered; I wasn’t paying close enough attention to my own thoughts to see what led them there.

***If you start in the middle of the (perfectly straight) road, and it’s 25 meters to each wall, if you’re off by one millionth of a degree in your course, you will collide with the wall in roughly 1.4 billion meters, or 1.4 million kilometers, or (for those in the US) about 860,000 miles.  The fact that it can take so long should highlight the fact that you cannot assume, just because you haven’t crashed into a wall yet, that you have chosen the perfect heading.  You will still need to course-correct, or you will crash.

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Let Hercules himself do what he may, The cat will mew, and blog will have his day.

Hello and good morning.

It’s Thursday, the last day of April in 2026.  Tomorrow we meet a new month, same (more or less) as the old month.

I’m very tired, despite the fact that it’s the first thing (or nearly so) in the morning.  Of course, morning doesn’t necessarily mean you got any rest last night, not if you’ve got chronic pain and chronic insomnia.

The latter problem started for me several years or more before the former.  It has not escaped my consideration that my insomnia may have contributed to my chronic pain.  I am, after all, a trained physician and scientist with a fervent desire to understand…well, everything, ultimately.  So, I know a lot about both chronic pain and insomnia since in addition to my education and my curiosity, I actually am afflicted with the two things.

Don’t get me started on depression.

Actually, it’s a bit too late for that.  I am feeling the gravity well dip of worsening dysthymia that seems to be heading toward a full depressive episode, though predicting these things is unreliable.  But this morning, I felt I didn’t even want to sit up in bed (well, in futon) let alone get up and do anything at all.

That’s unusual for me.  Usually even when I’m in a bad way, the stress‒the anxiety, I guess‒associated with possibly not doing what I’m “supposed” to do, of letting people down, is too strong to let me just lie around, even though I am frequently exhausted (in the figurative sense, at least).  But today, even that almost didn’t show up, not enough to do what it usually does.  It was only really my sense of routine, of habit, that gave me the energy to get moving.

It helped that I wanted to feed the cats, but I know that they can handle themselves, at least for a few hours.  Still, it’s a positive.  I even did five pull-ups, which is not as many as I usually do, but at least I didn’t just not do them at all.

I often wish I could hibernate, or perhaps more precisely, to have a long sleep such as what some bears do during cold months.  I don’t want to go into true suspended animation, because that really doesn’t do anything for you except to let you skip forward in time.  Any period of true oblivion, however long it is, feels instantaneous from the inside.

If you pause a game, for instance, you can (in principle) come back a year later and pick it back up, and for the character, no time has passed at all.  If you were to experience things from their point of view, you would experience an uninterrupted flow of time.

What if you pause the game but never restart it?  Then the character’s experience just stops.  It’s a kind of death, of course, but it’s not a death caused by anything within that game universe.  It’s just, in a sense, that universe coming to an end.  No wailing, no moaning, no gnashing of teeth.

If you stop playing a Blu-ray in the middle of a movie, and then you break the Blu-ray disc, the characters don’t “die”, but for the purposes of that iteration of that movie, they might as well have died.  They certainly cannot continue to perform their parts.

It’s a bit like what it would be like for our universe to undergo vacuum collapse.  The wavefront of collapse would progress at essentially the speed of light.  Everything you know‒everything you are‒would cease to be at all, and it would happen far too quickly for you to experience the process.  The stuff with which you experience things would be deleted before it could begin to experience its own erasure.

It doesn’t seem like a bad way for an individual to die, but it seems a shame to lose everything in a whole universe.  Also, it’s just kind of daunting to think that everything in existence would get wiped out and turned into a hot soup of elementary fields and their “particles”, much like what happened near the beginning of “our” universe when the inflaton field (if inflation happened) collapsed.  It feels worse in some ways than other manners of death because there is literally nothing you can do to avoid it or to flee it or even to know that it’s happening.

It’s deucedly unlikely, though, so don’t fret about it.  And, anyway, if it happens, there’s literally nothing you can do about it.

That’s enough for now.  I won’t get into the news of me falling out of my seat yesterday afternoon (really, it sort of rolled out from under me as I was trying to sit down, but I ended up on the floor on my back no matter how one characterizes it) except to say that it happened, and that I have worsened stiffness today at least partly because of it.

I hope you all have good days.

TTFN

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What should I title this post?

Well.  Wednesday.  Okay.  What in the world should I write today?

I don’t know.  I have very little energy at the moment; I feel quite exhausted.  That’s not terribly atypical for me, but it feels worse than usual.  However, since I don’t have any kind of objective, consistent gauge of precisely how exhausted I am (or feel) and certainly have no records of the past gauge readings to which to compare things, I don’t know for sure how my current state compares to my typical state.

 Nor do I know what the distribution of such states is.  Is it a smooth “bell” curve, a Gaussian distribution?  Is it bimodal?  Is it trimodal?  Is it some more weirdly shaped curve, like a function in several different exponential orders of a variable or in more than one variable?  That last one seems most likely.

I guess the specifics don’t really matter, though it would be at least interesting to have an objective, graphical measure of things.

Anyway, I’m tired, my pain continues (as always) and the present “flare” has not significantly died down.  And, unfortunately, there’s nothing in my life to provide any counterbalance to the horrible stuff.

Well, okay, that’s not entirely true, and I should try to avoid being overdramatic.  There are clearly some good things in my life, and particularly, some very good people.  But they are few and far between (in time and space) and/or far away.  I sometimes interacted with some of them through Facebook or Instagram, but I’ve been kicked off those platforms, as you know, for no particular reason I can discern.

Well, it’s their platform, they own it, and I wasn’t paying, so I guess they have the right to do as they please.  But I do hope they all crash and burn and suffer and then cease to exist (I mean Meta/Fuckerberg* and his cronies, not the people with whom I had nominal, distant connections).

I’ve been fairly grumpy lately, as you can probably tell.  Nearly everyone and everything pisses me off at least a little (and I don’t exclude myself from that “everyone”).  This is one of the things that can happen when you’re in pain a lot.  If you also have social difficulties and insomnia and the like, they can contribute, too.  Anxiety really doesn’t help, though its outcome depends upon how one experiences anxiety and how one reacts to it.

This is one of the things that gets me irritated at Yoda™ and the fact that people think his character is very wise, when he really isn’t.  I feel that fact should be called out more often than it is, lest the impressionable populace, particularly young people, get exposed to his trite homilies and think them words by which to live.

For instance, the whole stupid “Fear leads to anger; anger leads to hate; hate leads to suffering” shit he pulled on the child Anakin in Episode 1 pissed me off and continues to do so.  He seems to imply that fear => anger => hate => suffering as a mathematical theorem, some kind of Jedi syllogism**, which is not necessarily true in any simplistic kind of sense.

It would have been much more useful for him to say “Fear can lead to anger, anger can lead to hate.  Hate itself is a form of suffering, and it’s a contagious one with many potential side effects, so you should learn, not to repress your fear or to deny it, nor to be ashamed of it, but to recognize it, to understand it, and to use it when it is useful rather than allow it to rule you, as it does if you merely give in to it but also if you refuse to let yourself feel it.”

If the Jedi had a sensible approach to such things, I think Anakin would never have fallen to “the dark side”.  That term itself‒the dark side‒betrays bigotry and judgmentalism and arrogance and narrow-mindedness.  Anytime someone defines their side as the light side and their opponents’ as the dark side, you’re in the presence of people who may well be capable of committing self-righteous atrocities, on whatever scale they think serves the “light”, the “good”.

Ironically (perhaps), the attitude toward fear held by the League of Shadows in Batman Begins is healthier than that of the Jedi in at least the prequels of Star Wars***.  They encourage you to embrace your fear, to become it.  They recognize its power, and try to harness it rather than flee from it in the rather ironic fear of fear that the Jedi have.

They have a lot of stupid ideas in the League, of course, including their simple-minded and illogical notions of justice.  And even their ideas about fear are not ideal, just in case you think I endorse them.

But fear, along with pain, boredom, dissatisfaction, and so on, are things that exist and persist because they are useful (at least enough to make them evolutionarily stable).  But they are only so in specific times, places, and situations.  If you have a good reason to be afraid, then you want that fear****, believe me, and you want to listen to it.  And if you feel new-onset pain in your right lower abdominal quadrant, and it doesn’t go away, you want to look into it; something life threatening may be going on.

But when such states‒pain, fear, boredom, dissatisfaction, etc.‒pull free of specific reactive causality and become self-sustaining, free-floating, bootstrap-levitated things that exist merely because they exist, then there is a problem.

I am such a problem.  And as with the majority of even slightly complex problems in (for instance) mathematics, we don’t know how to solve it (or even if there is a possible solution).

Sometimes, eventually, there’s not much to do but to wipe the chalkboard clean.

*Actually, I think their company would be better named Dukha than Meta.  Get it?

**This despite the comically self-contradictory and stupid (and thus out of character) line that Obi-Wan says in episode 3:  “Only a Sith deals in absolutes”.  Obi-Wan!  Are you listening to yourself?  Do you know what an “own goal” is?  You literally just spoke an absolute.  And, oddly enough, though the Jedi love throwing such statements around, I don’t recall any Sith character making such an “absolute” statement.

***Actually, in Episode 5, despite his long exile and his recognized failure due to his arrogance, Yoda© still says some stupid shit to Luke, especially the whole “Do or do not, there is no ‘try’” bullshit.  No, Yoda®, the “do or do not” is only determined by trying.

****To no reasonable surprise, the attitude of the 12th Doctor toward fear, or at least the one he wants to have, is much more logical, and was expressed best in series 8, episode 4 of Doctor Who:  Listen.

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We have met the cosmic horror, and…

Well, here I go again (on my own, like the song says) writing another blog post.  As for why I am doing so, well, there is surely a set of causes‒potentially tracing all the way back to the Big Bang, or at least the period just during and/or after inflation, assuming that happened, which seems more likely than not‒there may not be any good reason for it.

Oh, of course, I could come up with reasons.  I could “justify” myself.  Indeed, there is reason (har) to think that justification and persuasion to bolster one’s status and identity in a tribe against others with opposed motives may have been one of the driving forces behind the development of the human reasoning capacity.  This is apart from, and perhaps almost orthogonal to, the basic power of reasoning to understand and thus best navigate the territory of reality.

Once it got started, reasoning would have accelerated thanks to biological arms races between those competing for survival and reproduction, and then it would have turned out serendipitously to have been more broadly and powerfully useful than merely for securing status and food and mates.

Imagine if the peacock’s tail had turned out not only to be ostentatious and beautiful and sexy (to peahens, anyway) but tremendously useful and broadly powerful, especially once it reached a certain level.  Imagine if the peacock’s tail had allowed peacocks to build skyscrapers and boats and trains and planes and cars, if peacocks’ tails helped peacocks build a global civilization, quite apart from their ability to secure one’s status and acquire good mates.

That’s quite possibly more or less what happened with human brains.

Of course, like the peacock’s tail, the human brain is not without its drawbacks.  I suspect that things like depression and anxiety, and perhaps even neurodivergence, are simply potential (and statistically inevitable) outcomes for a brain that has grown powerful enough to assess the world deeply and uncover the almost Lovecraftian terror of our tiny little existence when placed against the scope and scale of the cosmos.

I say “Lovecraftian”, but even with Lovecraft, though the beings in the mythos are thoroughly inhuman and incomprehensible‒unsane, as I like to say‒they are still beings.  The true cosmic horror is surely that beings of any kind are almost nonexistent; indeed, to a very good approximation, they are nonexistent.

In some senses, this can at least be morally reassuring.  If we do go and spread out through the universe‒or even just the galaxy or even just our local family of stars‒and there are indeed no other life forms, then at least we need not worry about violating implicit rights.  Uninhabited asteroids (for instance) don’t have goals or wishes and, as far as we can tell, they cannot suffer.

Of course, we may have aesthetic concerns about such things, but aesthetics are not as urgent as ethics.  And, of course, we will still have moral/ethical concerns toward each other; that almost goes without saying.

Whether or not we will exist long enough for the ethics (or lack thereof) of changing the state of uninhabited other places in the galaxy to be pertinent is quite uncertain.  I see nothing in the laws of physics that makes it impossible, so in that sense, I am optimistic.  But I see nothing in the laws of physics, nor more specifically in human nature, that makes it certain or even likely that we will survive to spread out from our native planet to any significant degree.  And I see nothing in the laws of nature that seems to imply that, if we don’t succeed and spread through the cosmos, anyone else will do so, or indeed that anyone else even exists.

Don’t get me wrong; physics clearly and undeniably allows life to exist, and it allows (human-like) intelligence and civilization to exist.  But those are two different scales of allowance.

The molecules and principles of life as we know it, with long-chain molecules capable of carrying information and of replicating themselves, leading to “competition” and “improvement” and increasing complexity and so on, seem so straightforward as to be happening potentially (but far from certainly) in a good many places in the universe.  This is straightforward enough.  The equivalents of viruses and prokaryotes may exist in many regions.  It’s even possible that there may be such life in other places in our solar system (Europa and Enceladus being possible contenders).

But multicellular, “eukaryotic” life, seems likely to be much rarer.  Basic life started on Earth, as far as we can see, very shortly after the Earth formed and cooled enough for complex molecules to endure (nearly 4 billion years ago).  Eukaryotes, especially multicellular ones, didn’t really arrive until about 500 million years ago.  So, seven eighths into the time of life on Earth, it was basically just “bacteria” and some viruses.

Then, for significant, interpersonal, symbolic and technological intelligence to develop took another…well, basically another 500 million years.  And as far as we can tell, it’s only happened once.

That doesn’t give us a good, clear picture of how rare or common such a thing is‒one is a difficult number of experimental subjects from which to draw too many conclusions‒but it’s possible that the existence of technologically intelligent life is so rare as to occur only once per, on average, every chunk of spacetime as large as our visible universe.  It could even be rarer than that.

In an infinite cosmos, of course, even such exceedingly rare events would happen an infinite number of times (so to speak).  But that doesn’t necessarily make things less lonesome.  If you have an infinite number of decks of cards (with no jokers), all thoroughly shuffled together, there are literally just as many Aces of Spades as there are red-suited cards in total (ℵ₀, the “smallest” infinity).  Nevertheless, if you draw cards randomly, you will only get an Ace of Spades one twenty-sixth as often as you will get a red-suited card.

Similarly, there are as many whole multiples of a trillion as there are integers in general (again, ℵ₀), but if you pick a random integer, you’re still only going to pull such a multiple one out of a trillion times (on average).

So, maybe the takeaway is that the real cosmic horror may be that we are the only entities haunting the abyss, and there are no (other) mad idiot gods bubbling away at the center of celestial existence.  Maybe it’s just us.  And if our lights go out, then nobody is home.

It’s worth considering, not least because it has every chance of being true, whether literally or just practically.  For if the nearest other technological life form is in another galactic cluster, for instance, then we are, for all reasonable purposes, alone in the universe.

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“Something knocked me out the trees – now I’m on my knees”

Okay.  So.  I don’t know what to write today, even more so than usual.

It’s Tuesday, of course.  Though I guess there’s really no “of course” about it; I mean, it could be any day in principle, but it happens to be Tuesday, and I’m up and about, going through various stages of heading to the office as I write this.

At the end of the work day, I will head back to the house and prepare to do it all over again.  Lather, rinse, repeat.  I won’t say “as needed”, because I think it’s probably rather nebulous just how necessary these daily repetitions really are.  Certainly neither the universe nor civilization depends upon me doing any of the things I do.

I suppose that “work” is weakly dependent upon me, in that if I suddenly just stopped coming, they would have to find someone else to do what I do, or divide things up among those already there or something.  That’s not such a big deal, of course.  It happens all the time.

There may be a few people who look forward to my blog every day, though it would be pretty arrogant to consider them “dependent” upon it.  I would much prefer for people to be “dependent” upon, or at least to look forward to, my fiction.  It would be easier to keep writing it if I thought more than one person would actually read my stories, and that maybe people would even tell me what they thought of them*.

I suppose that sort of thing might seem fairly trivial in the face of various events happening in the nation and the world, but on the other hand, those things are trivial in themselves.  There is certainly no good reason for any of them other than that human nature‒while possessing functionally limitless potential‒is almost always prone to default to the level of screaming monkeys.

Each political moment of the world feels so…well…momentous to the people going through it, but these kinds of things have arisen and passed away over and over throughout history.  Probably most such happenings are even outside of history, parallel to it if you will, because many of them are not even noticed beyond their immediate time and place, even by some of the people who experience them.

They are all rather laughable in their self-important yet ephemeral character.

I don’t know why I even notice, let alone care.  I guess maybe it’s because the human race does have such potential for greatness, for the creation of beauty‒by whatever criteria you might measure beauty‒and for making the world a place that’s better than it is in every reasonable way.  Yet, they do not have the intellectual and moral humility to realize how great they could make things.  Ironically, if people were able to stop thinking of everything as being about them, whoever they are, they could participate in a world that could easily be better not just for everyone else, but for them as well.

Of course, it’s honestly difficult not to knee jerk one’s responses to reality as if it were about oneself.  Meditation can help, if only by dissolving the “ego” and decreasing the tendency toward reflexive belief in the inner homunculus.

It would be nice if Earth had its own Surak who succeeded in convincing humanity that calmness, mindfulness, and rationality are not merely options but probably among the best ways to secure a beneficent future for Earth and life and intelligence.  That’s assuming that this is indeed true, which I strongly suspect it is, but do not know for certain.

Wouldn’t it be remarkable if, instead of training our children to believe in the literal truth of fairy tales that are hundreds to thousands of years old (and benighted even for their times of origin), extorting their behavior and “belief” with threats of Hell (or the equivalent), we encouraged our children to be mindful, to be curious, to be patient, to recognize their fallibility, but at the same time, as part of that, to recognize their potential to do truly remarkable and wonderful things.

But left to their own devices‒as they all always are, since even the Powers That Be are just other naked house apes, not significantly different than themselves‒people tend to choose the monkey way.  Or, rather, they go that way by default, never recognizing that they have a choice.

Only if you recognize that you are a monkey can you really, deliberately choose to become something greater.

Only by recognizing your fallibility can you begin to succeed at deliberately chosen and often amazing things.

Only by recognizing that you are not special can you truly steer yourself toward doing things that are special.

Okay, all those “only” beginnings to the above homilies are presumptuous in the extreme, but they make for better quotables than more restrained language would provide.

I’m not a fan of rhetoric‒if you need clever wordplay to convince others of your points, perhaps your points aren’t all that good‒and one of the reasons I’m not a fan is that it is just so damn tempting.

Oh, well.  This is all stupid anyway.  Sorry.

*No trolling though.  I don’t mind reasonable criticism, especially if I find it convincing, but when people are assholes just for the “fun” of it, I see no problem with them being dealt with as one would a troll in an RPG or a book or a movie.  Imagine how much more pleasant the world would be if all people prone to trollish behavior were turned to stone, or barring that, turned to worm food and ash.

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Who calls me “villain”? Breaks my pate across? Plucks off my blog and blows it in my face?

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday again.

I had to check the date on my phone a few times in a row to confirm that, yes, not only is it really Thursday, but it is also the 19th of March (in 2026 AD/CE).

It’s not that I thought I must have gotten the day and date wrong.  I keep track of these things and recheck these things all the time, often coming from different directions; I usually have at least a couple of methods by which I am able to reconstruct what day it currently is.  But I always feel‒a bit more strongly than is warranted‒that not only could I be wrong in principle (as is always the case) but that I am not likely to be right.

A similar thing occurs when I do the mental addition to update the various totals on “the board” when people get deals at work.  Intellectually, I know that I’m good at it, and that I’m rarely incorrect.  But “emotionally”, I don’t feel like I’m right.

Even after I check my numbers 3 different ways using Excel (there are 3 totals that should match, and if they do, it’s much more unlikely that I’m wrong), I don’t feel like I’m sure that it’s right, even though intellectually, it’s all but a certainty.  I mean, this is mathematics here, one of the few areas in which we can obtain answers with logical certainty.  And I’m pretty good at it.

I even occasionally deliberately say to myself, after confirming in those 3 ways that I got all the mental arithmetic correct, “Yes!  I am the king!”  It’s an attempt to feel good about myself in a slightly silly way, which is the only way I allow myself to feel good about myself.  But it doesn’t work much, if at all.  It feels like what it is:  a scripted, fictional remark.

This may be part of the problem I have long had with self-affirmation, autosuggestion type things.  If I say good things to myself about myself, I don’t believe them.  in fact, I feel very squirmy and uncomfortable inside when I try to say good things about myself, or to tell myself that I like or love myself.  It’s as though I’m committing some grotesque violation of ordinary decency.

I don’t feel as though I’ve done something truly horrible mind you; I don’t feel as though I’ve harmed some helpless person or otherwise victimized the innocent.  It’s more akin to sticking one’s bare hands into a big bowl full of maggots.  I just feel that I’m disgusting and pathetic and that I make myself more so by saying things that sound as though I’m pretending I’m not disgusting and pathetic.

I recognize these as emotions that are not good guides to the empirical world; intellectually, I can handle them, assess them, recognize their irrationality, and call the judgment made.  But I have not yet been able to shake those feelings, and they are not fun.

I cannot convince myself, down to my bones, that 2 plus 2 equals 4…at least not when I’m doing the figuring.  I know I’m right in a logical sense.  I’ve perceived no reason to doubt my answer, other than the stupid fact that I am the one making it.  But I cannot seem to shake‒or I have not yet been able to do so‒the idea that I may very well have the whole thing fundamentally wrong, and that this is not just a remote, theoretical possibility.

It’s quite frustrating.  I might even say that it’s maddening, except that it seems to be the madness, itself.  It doesn’t matter how well I know and understand something intellectually, how much I know, empirically, that I’m right about something.  Somehow, I always just seem to feel that I, in and of myself, am wrong.  And so must be most of the things I do, unless I am ridiculously careful and check and recheck and triple check* everything.  And even then, I just reduce my anxiety about things a bit.

I have real sympathy for Hamlet, who didn’t want to take vengeance upon his uncle for the murder of his father without being able to convince himself beyond all reasonable doubt that he was not being misled by the apparent ghost of his father.  It makes sense to “have grounds more relative than this” when it comes to killing the king of Denmark, even if you’re the prince.  You don’t want to kill someone in the name of justice or revenge unless you’re really darned sure that they deserve it, otherwise you are committing an irrevocable crime.

Doing arithmetic, on the other hand, is rarely so consequential**.  Neither is failing to turn off a bedside lamp before leaving my room in the morning.  Nor is even the possibility of having failed to lock one of my locks when leaving the house.

But these things often lead me to feel that squirmy misgiving, almost a kind of deep formication.  It’s very annoying.

Oh, I’m also never quite sure‒emotionally‒that no one is going to push me off the platform onto the tracks in front of an oncoming train at the station***, so I’m always glancing around to make sure no one’s right behind me or coming too close, and if they are, I pay significant attention to them, preparing to dodge or fight back if attacked.

You’d think, given how often I think about the benefits of being dead, that I would be less worried about being randomly murdered at the train station.  But there’s something infuriating about the prospect that someone else could choose to kill me.  That would really tick me off (so to speak).

Anyway, it’s weird, and it’s quite frustrating.  It’s also exhausting.

They say there shall be no rest for the wicked.  I know that’s just part of a prophecy, and therefore bullshit, but in the real world, there shall often be no rest for those who feel that they are wicked.  The actual wicked, of course, probably often sleep the deep, deep sleep of the innocent (as Radiohead sang), because they do not see themselves as wicked.

They probably see themselves as perfectly fine, even great.  Some of them even seem to imagine that they are the greatest (whatever) of all time, and they often suffer no serious consequences for that intellectual failure.

Justice is not a natural force, unfortunately (despite all the bullshit, misguided, popular talk about “karma”); it’s something that has to be forced, if you will, that has to be constructed.  And the people who are most careful about trying to get things right are generally the sorts of people less likely to want to be “in charge” of things.

“And enterprises of great pitch and moment / With this regard their courses turn awry / And lose the name of Action.”

TTFN

*Not to be confused with Triple Sec or whatever that liqueur is.  I’ve often wondered if there was ever a Double Sec or even a Mono Sec/Uni Sec.  Probably not.  I suspect the true etymology is based on something that does not mean “threefold” in any sense.  But I could be wrong about this.

**Even the failure of that Climate Orbiter that famously broke up in the atmosphere of Mars was due not to an arithmetic error, but an error of units:  One group involved in the project was using metric units, the other was using so-called imperial units, and nobody seems to have checked.  I cannot imagine what I would have felt if I had made that error.  Seppuku would probably feel too generous.

***This occurred to me because, as I was writing, I was on the train platform getting ready to board the oncoming train and I experienced that minor paranoia, as I nearly always do.

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I had a good headline idea, but it slipped my mind

I was surprised by how much response I’ve received to yesterday’s blog (and that of the day before) as well as the number of comments.  It’s very gratifying, and I appreciate it very much.  Thank you.

As for today, well, I am really not sure what to write, because yesterday’s blog was‒from my viewpoint, anyway‒about as free-form and chaotic and tangential and stochastic (not to say redundant) as anything I’ve written.  But maybe that’s just the experience I had while writing it; maybe it doesn’t actually come across that way to the reader(s).  It’s difficult for me to know, because even more than reading, writing is a solitary thing.

That’s not to say that people can’t write together.  Back when I was a teenager, I co-wrote some partial stories with one of my best friends, and we did it sitting next to each other and talking things through aloud as we typed.  That was a pretty active and interactive collaboration.

Unfortunately, I don’t think we got very far with it.  We made much more progress writing silly computer programs in Basic on the Apple II+ my father had bought.  This was in the days before there were any ISPs as far as I know, though we did dial onto a couple of local “billboard” services from time to time with my dad’s old modem (I think it was 600 baud*, but it may be some even divisor or even a very small multiple of that number).

One time, I even had a conversation with a girl (!) who was helping run one of the billboards.  She was (supposedly) about my age, and obviously she was much more into computers than I was for the time.  There was never (in my regretful mind) any possibility of an ongoing interaction, let alone a physical meetup or anything, however.  Even then, though I was reasonably confident when within my local group of friends and teachers, I was painfully shy and awkward, and could never make conversation other than about specific topics.

Goal-directed interactions are okay, as they tend to flow naturally from the process involved.  This is why I’ve made nearly all my friends at school or at work.  Purely social interactions were never really an option for me, except with people I already knew quite well.  And having a successful romantic relationship was unfortunately not in the cards for me.

It still isn’t, as far as I can tell.  I suspect the problem is that there’s no other member of my true species on this planet.  I did come reasonably close, or so I thought for a long time, but I’ve been divorced now about five years longer than I was married, so I apparently wasn’t all that successful.

Okay, well, sorry about the weird, ancient info-dump.  It’s not nearly as cool as the data that’s coming in from the recently-activated Vera Rubin observatory.  That, at least, is the sort of thing that helps restore my faith in humanity.  Or, well, maybe it would be more accurate to say that it shifts my Bayesian credence slightly away from the “humans are without net redeeming value” end and toward the “humans may not be all that bad in the end” end.

The credence is still quite low, though.  By which I mean I’m closer to the first end than the second most of the time.

Things might be a little bit better if the sort of people who do things like setting up the Vera Rubin telescope, and who set up and launched and now use the James Webb telescope, and the members of the former human genome project, and the people who study cognitive neuroscience, were the sort of people working in government, writing and administering laws.  Generally speaking, though, the first type of people don’t tend to want to do the governing nonsense, probably not least because a lot of that business is not about everyone trying to do the best they can for the people they represent.

The people who want to do astronomy and mathematics and biology and geology and neuroscience and meteorology and so on are probably some of the best people to do those things‒not just from their point of view but also from the viewpoint of civilizational benefit.  Unfortunately, many of the people who want to go into government and politics tend to be some of the worst people for those jobs, from the point of view of civilization.

I can’t say they are the worst possible group for the job.  The truly disaffected and uninterested or the misanthropic and nihilistic might well do a worse job even than the lot who do it now.  This is despite the fact that most of those latter people act on shallow and immediate self-interest.  Self-interest can do the job adequately when the incentives are structured such that one’s self-interest is served by serving the interests of the people of one’s community/city/nation/species.

Those incentives are very tricky to manage, unfortunately.  It would be much better if we could find people who had real enthusiasm and curiosity and an actually somewhat scientific approach to government.  If only we could find a group as committed to seeing a truly and objectively well-run society‒in which everyone was better off than they would have been in nearly any other‒as the group who set up the Vera Rubin observatory was committed to actually getting the observatory done so they and we could learn ever more about the universe on the largest scales, things might be quite a bit better than they are.  Maybe not, but my credence leans more toward the “maybe so” end.

Alas, politics and government were not born of human curiosity and creativity‒the things almost entirely unique to the species‒but of the old, stupid primate dominance hierarchy/mating drives, which are evolutionarily understandable, but which don’t make for pretty, let alone beneficial, government.  Think about it.  Would you want to put a bunch of self-serving apes doing the jobs of government?

Oh, wait!  That is the group doing the jobs of the government!  Of course, it’s also the group being governed.  Uh-oh.  This could be boding better**.

Not that being recognized as an ape is an insult per se; apes are all that we’ve had available, and they’re the best that’s come along so far.  Some of them are really not so bad.  Some of them figure out ways to launch immense telescopes into space, not so very long after one of them first created the telescope.  Some of them figure out ways to cure and even prevent unnecessary disease.  Some of them figure out ways to turn simple manipulations of base-two arithmetic into information processing that can be scaled up to any kind of logic and information that can be codified.

Some of them just write blogs and sometimes write stories and songs and such***.  But hopefully, that’s not too detrimental an endeavor.

*A baud is a bit per second being sent over the phone lines.  Not a meg, not a K, not even a byte, but rather a bit‒a binary digit, a one versus a zero, on or off.  If you listened to the sound of the modem, you could imagine you could almost hear the individual bits.

**Tip of the hat to Dave Barry’s “Mister Language Person”.

***Though I have done my very small part in advancing human scientific knowledge, in that I am a co-author and co-investigator on an actual published scientific paper.