First off, I’m sorry about not writing a post yesterday, in case anyone was significantly disappointed. I had a very bad night on Wednesday night, both with respect to pain and with respect to sleep‒the latter having been at least somewhat influenced by the former, of course. In any case, come yesterday morning, I was too wiped out to be able to get up and go to the office. In fact, I was still in pretty bad pain all day, even though I stayed at the house, and on through last night.
I’m actually still in pain now, of course. But at least I’ve been physically and mentally resting as much as I can, so I can make it through today‒though I have been maxing out on my medications pretty much across the board, so hopefully at least things don’t get worse. I don’t really know what I’ll do if they do.
That, I’m afraid, about as interesting as my life tends to get at this point, and I’m sure it’s quite boring to read. That’s got to be one of the ultimate insults: your experiences are unpleasant enough to be worthy of the proverbial curse, “may you live in interesting times”, and yet they’re still not interesting. I guess that’s sort of ironic, at least. Irony is perhaps the last, desperate refuge for squeezing some narrative value out of pointless events.
I don’t remember what my posts from earlier this week entailed. I do recall freaking out not long ago about the changes WordPress had made, without warning and without option. That was really frustrating, let there be no doubt about that. Peculiarly, I’ve tended to be much better at handling matters of life and death‒and I’ve dealt with quite a few‒than with changes to my routine and to things to which I’ve become accustomed.
I haven’t been reading much this week, not nearly as much as I usually do. I even have a couple of new hard copy books‒by which I mean they are physical, printed books instead of e-books, not that they have anything to do with that idiotic old tabloid TV show‒but I haven’t taken one out of its package, and I’ve read about a paragraph of the other. I also haven’t read any of the several hundred Kindle books I have. I’m just finding it very difficult to concentrate even on my greatest lifelong pleasure/pastime* (reading). I certainly haven’t written any fiction.
I did play a bit of guitar and sang on Wednesday morning, for the first time in over a week (I think). My heart wasn’t really in it, though, and I made a lot of mistakes I don’t usually make. My singing was okay, though.
At least I am off this weekend. I wish that meant I would be likely to get a good rest, but at least I’ll get some relative rest. That’s got to be worth something. All rest is relative rest in some sense, anyway; one could, in principle, always have rested even better than one really did. So I certainly don’t wish to belittle or disrespect the amount of rest I am going to be getting. I just know that it’s going to be inadequate to make me ready to face the week next week. And I know from experience that whatever little mental energy I restore will be gone by the end of Monday, let alone the rest of the week.
Obviously, I’ll be able to get through the week literally‒or, well, I expect to be able to, though I suppose I could be wrong‒but that’s merely because it’s a matter of habit. It can be harder to break a habit than to continue it, even when the habit requires energy. That just seems to be how these nervous system things are set up.
Okay, I think I’m going to call it good now, for today and for this week. I don’t have any interesting thoughts at the moment, and so I’m just wasting my readers’ time shuffling through my moans and complaints. I’m sure you have better things to do. I hope you have a very good day and a very good weekend.
*I originally wrote the typo “pastome” which I think is pretty great as typos go, especially given the subject.
Here we all are on another Wednesday, the middle day of the “traditional” modern work week. This week, it’s also the middle of my work week; I do not work on this Saturday*.
I’m going to try to keep this post a bit short, just to see if I can conserve some personal energy. I’m very tired, but somehow that rarely seems to prevent me from continuing to drive myself into the ground. I did have a slightly better sleep last night than the previous few nights, which is relatively nice but still inadequate.
Also, though yesterday morning had relatively low amounts of pain**, at least for me, starting in mid-afternoon, it flared severely, especially on my right side/hip/knee/ankle and back. I also had some neuropathic trouble with my left hand, but I think that was unrelated, and was likely due to an arthropod bite.
So, that all made the day quite frustrating; it followed something of the pattern of the “peak-end rule” as first described relating to old school colonoscopies, but it occurred in the reverse of the desired approach for colonoscopies without conscious sedation. This would be expected to discourage someone from wanting to do another one, whether it be a colonoscopy or just another day.
Alas, I have relatively few options when it comes to “not wanting to do another one”. There are only a few available ways to avoid another day. One is to remain unconscious throughout that day, but remaining unconscious is something with which I seem to have difficulty. The other form of evasive action is more drastic. It remains, as always, an option.
Anyway, as I said, I mean to try to keep this short today, though I’ve intended that before and have failed many times. Still, I’m very mentally fatigued at the moment, so I might find it relatively easy to keep things to reasonable lengths.
On an unrelated note, I’ve been thinking of doing some recordings of my writings again, like I did for several of my short stories and for the first several chapters of The Chasm and the Collision. I would probably start with the next CatC chapter, but before doing that, it would be nice to know whether anyone out there has listened to any of my audio, whether on YouTube or here.
It’s a relatively large amount of work to read a chapter out loud and to edit the audio (and to make it into a “video”). I enjoy it, to some degree, but a large part of that enjoyment depends upon the expectation that someone might listen to it and enjoy it themselves. In an amazing, almost impossible world, someone might even tell me that they liked it (if they liked it).
A trouble I have, and which I have had for a long time, is that people will compliment me (from time to time) for certain things, but mainly for things that are easy for me and not terribly important to me. Whereas the things that do feel personal to me, my creative output‒the rare things that have to do with me about which I feel good‒mostly don’t even get noticed.
Say whatever else you might*** about my ex-wife, she honestly liked and praised my music playing and writing (and singing), my drawing/painting, my sculpting (rare though it was), and most particularly, my fiction. Even when she was pissed at me, she would not denigrate nor allow the denigration of my creative and intellectual output.
No one else in my life, before or since, has been as supportive in that way as she and her family, though of course others (e.g., my own family) have far surpassed that in relative and absolute terms in different ways. My family, including myself, have difficulty with praise and emotional expressiveness, at least in direct communication. Heck, in my family, we’re probably all on the spectrum at some level, so it’s neither surprising nor deliberate nor unkind if we have a difficult time showing (and frequently, knowing) how we feel.
Okay, that’s enough. I suspect this has been quite boring for you, and for that I apologize. I would appreciate feedback on the “audio of my stories” question, though, so if any of you have any of it to give, it would be welcome.
Thanks.
*Barring, as always, the unforeseen. I really ought to feel fine with just leaving this caveat unsaid, since it is always the case that any predictions we make do not apply in the case of the unforeseen. That’s more or less true “by definition” if anything is. Unfortunately, I feel compelled to say it explicitly, lest I be unclear or misunderstood.
**By which I mean that I was in relatively low amounts of pain. I don’t have any idea how much pain the day itself experienced; I honestly doubt that it can experience pain, or anything else.
***No, you really shouldn’t. If you think I’ll enjoy hearing you badmouth the mother of my children, the woman I married, then I want to disabuse you of that notion.
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.
Okay, first off, to begin with‒or should it be “with which to begin”?‒it is the 6th of May today (a Wednesday, though that fact is not terribly relevant) and to continue the Star Wars related references, I will note that today is the date of the Revenge of the Sixth.
Get it? It’s a bit tortured, I’m afraid. I don’t think anyone would have come up with the notion had it not been for “May the 4th be with you”. That, at least, is a more straightforward play on words, and is specific to this month and that day. “Revenge of the Sixth” doesn’t specify the month; one could, in principle, use that line on any 6th of a month. But one would not, because this day is “celebrated” only in reaction to Star Wars Day on May 4th.
It’s sort of funny and fun, but it reduces the Sith to merely a perverse notion, existing only in reaction to the Jedi, like a whole order of Force users acting out the parts of rebellious teenagers.
Of course, probably that was sort of what happened in George Lucas’s mind when he came up with the Sith: They were the anti-Jedi, a parity-violating, distorted reflection of the “good guys”. But, of course, a whole philosophical movement that sprang up only as an enemy to another is intellectually and narratively vacuous.
It’s somewhat reminiscent of the moronic religious people who seem to think that if one does not believe in God, then one must worship Satan. It can be very hard for some people to get around the whole “if you’re not with me, then you’re my enemy” notion. Only in this case it’s not even a philosophical enmity, but is merely a reactive enmity. Also, it doesn’t take too much thought to realize that such a situation would seem to imply that whichever of the two sides came first would be assumed to be the “good guys”.
But one doesn’t look at any random patch of spacetime and think, “if there’s no electron in this spot then there must instead be a positron”, or vice versa. As a matter of physics and of logic, this is a pretty glaring error. Just as indifference, not hate, is the complete absence of love, the default state of reality is not the opposite of some particular presence, it is simple absence. In physics, that means all the quantum fields being in their vacuum states, with minimal energy (it’s not zero because of the uncertainty principle).
In the Star Wars extended universe, the Sith have a background that is separate in origin (I think) from the Jedi. I think they began as a race of Force users. I could be wrong about this; I’m not all that much of a Star Wars nerd.
Ask me questions about the backgrounds of things in the universe(s) of my stories and I could share some serious lore with you. But no one is going to ask me about those because essentially no one has read them.
Boy, it would be cool to have someone write fanfiction based in the worlds of my stories. I remember reading a lot of Harry Potter fanfiction while waiting for the next book(s) to come out, back in the day. Some of it was bad, of course, but not much of it, and some of it was really quite good. People who love to read and feel the urge to write an homage out of love for a work and its characters tend to be at least somewhat okay at it.
Some of it was downright brilliant.
Of course, humans being what humans are, some of it was smut. There’s nothing really wrong with that, when you get right down to it. Members (ha ha) of a sexually reproducing species are going to tend to find sex…engaging, to say the least. Every human alive (and that has ever lived) comes from a long, unbroken line of ancestors who had sex at least once*. That includes your parents and your grandparents, by the way. You’re welcome.
In a species like humans, those who are more into sex and more driven toward it and obsessed with it are, ceteris paribus, going to have more offspring. It won’t take very many generations for any genes that make one less interested in sex to fade out of the gene pool‒again, and very importantly, ceteris paribus.
All other things are essentially never equal, of course, and there are complex tradeoffs in all such behavioral tendencies, but that’s a can of bees I really don’t have the energy to open right at this moment.
I’m in a truly terrible amount of pain this morning, I’m afraid, continuing from last night and yesterday and so on. and it’s making it a bit hard to write, though that somehow doesn’t keep me from running off at the figurative mouth.
I think it would be harder for me not to write right now, though. I don’t know for sure. I haven’t tried.
Even thinking about not writing at all makes me feel squirmy and cringey and quite strange. It’s not quite as bad not to play or listen to or sing any music‒which I haven’t done for weeks now, alas‒but that does also feel bad.
But I think if I were to stop writing, and at least every week sharing my writing‒particularly now that I don’t have access to Facebook or Threads‒I would pretty rapidly feel that I didn’t even exist.
I have no real life here from day to day. There is no joy, there is only (attempted) distraction. Other than my episodic interactions with my youngest child (which are distinctly good and real and joyful to me, a real oasis in the desert) everything in my life from day to day feels less real than the events of the most banal video game.
Yesterday, I started searching eBay and other online sources for used ECT devices (they are out there) and looking up whether one can legally buy insulin over the counter (one can, to some degree), or what medications are prone to produce seizures. The idea was to see if it would be possible for me to induce a seizure in myself and hopefully treat my depression.
I know it can’t help my underlying ASD, but ECT and other kinds of induced seizures have consistently been shown to work against even highly treatment-resistant depression. I have tried every class of (legal) medication and many different types of therapy for my dysthymia/depression. I think most regular readers can tell just how well that arsenal has worked.
Of course, pain complicates everything. It taints everything, it erodes everything, it corrodes everything, it corrupts and desecrates everything. I really want it to stop. Sometimes I want it to stop at nearly any cost (at least to me, though I can’t in good conscience invoke avoidable costs upon other people).
If I thought inducing seizures would help my pain, I would probably just do it. I know how to make such things happen‒the research I did yesterday was just to indulge myself so I could more realistically fantasize about the outcome if it were to work. It was one of those distractions I mentioned above. But having seizures would probably make my physical pain worse, since seizures are not easy on the body.
They could also kill me, but that would be far from the worst outcome.
Death‒not necessarily seizure-related death, but death generally‒will probably be the only thing that relieves my pain. Well, “relieves” is not really the right word. But could death be what ends it? Yes. And thankfully, no one is dependent upon me or is very close to me or is really used to having me around, so the collateral damage would be minimal, no matter what all the simple-minded (but well-meaning) Instagram videos try to tell you.
Maybe I’m just as well off not to be able to go to that site anymore. Everything there would be irritating. Though, that’s just like more or less everything else in the world, to be fair. Right now, I could almost wish for everything else in reality to cease to exist so I could just enjoy some silence. But that would be unkind and terribly presumptuous. It would be better to go back to the nidus of the pain and pluck that out.
Have a good day.
Though I suspect Mr. Smear would disagree with me:
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.
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.
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 abilityto 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.
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.
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.
Well, in case some of you were starting to feel lighthearted and optimistic‒just a little more at ease with yourselves and the world after two whole days without reading my work‒here I am to write another blog post that will probably bring you down and make you inclined to wonder whether anything at all is really worth anything, or if you should just give it all up, especially the habit of reading this blog.
Congratulations. It’s Monday again, the start of another work week. Also, Daylight Savings Time has ended (or is it “begun”?) over this last weekend, so for a bit, a lot of people’s circadian rhythms are going to be slightly off. That will contribute to an increased number of accidents, both minor and major. There will also be increased rates of illness (again, both major and minor), and I believe there is even some evidence that men at least will suffer more heart attacks after the time changes.
And what are the other advantages of Daylight Savings Time? I’m not aware of any actual other benefits.
Of course, like most of you, I’m starting my own work week today, and it’s going to be a long one; the office is scheduled to be open this Saturday. By then, the shifted time measure will be mostly adjusted in everyone’s heads. I’m speaking of things here in the US, of course; I honestly don’t know off the top of my head whether other cultures have adopted this weird custom.
Whence did it originate? I’ve heard explanations and excuses at various times in my life, but they are not very convincing. If you know‒with reasonably good credence‒please share that information in the comments below. And like and share it if you’re so inclined, especially if you have a strong sense of irony. Heck, like and share the song itself if you want to immerse yourself in a kind of meta-level irony, or something like that:
I don’t know what to discuss today, even more so than usual. I’ve committed to trying not to dwell on, or at least to share, my negative thoughts and emotions and so on, since I’m sure they do very little other than make other people feel depressed (yes, certain kinds of mental illness can be rather contagious, in a sense at least).
I won’t say I would never wish depression on anyone; that’s ridiculous. For instance, I would feel much safer in the world if this Presidential administration, and indeed most of its equivalents around the globe, suffered from enough depression to make them second-guess themselves and doubt themselves from time to time. It almost ought to be a requirement for office that someone be prone to dysthymia at the very least, so they would feel less confident that their shit doesn’t stink, so to speak.
And no, I am not suggesting that the people of the world ought to put me in charge for the best chance to make the world better. I used to dream of such things, and I had a very Sauron-like wish to control events in the world for the greater good. It might still not be too horrible a notion.
But my inclination over time has become more negative, more Melkor/Morgoth like. So if anyone is inclined to encourage and engender acts of chaos and destruction on a hitherto unseen scale, by all means, give me immense power. I make no warranties or guarantees or even assurances that I will use such power wisely.
I’ll try, of course. No one can be expected (fairly) to do anything more than that, no matter what Yoda said.
Goodness knows I’ve tried a lot, in a lot of ways, all throughout my life, literally for as long as I can remember. By which I mean, I’ve tried to do my best to do good things and to be a good person‒a good friend, a good son, a good husband, a good father, a good doctor, all that. You can probably tell by my current state‒solitary, lonely, divorced, professionally ostracized, in bad physical health, in horrible mental health, alone*‒how well I’ve done at all those things.
I’m not exaggerating when I say I’ve tried hard. I’m not one to big myself up very much, but I have worked hard all my life, trying to be a good son, a good friend, a good brother, a good husband, a good doctor, a good father. Yet despite my sincere efforts and my reasonably high intelligence, here I am.
I suppose a lot of the disappointing outcome(s) is/are related to my ASD, both the heart-based one and the brain-based one, as well as my tendency (probably related to the preceding) to depression and some degree of low-grade paranoia.
By “low-grade” there, I mean that I don’t literally suspect that there are malicious forces plotting against me or trying to control me; I honestly don’t think highly enough of humans (or any other beings) to expect them to be capable of such things. It would almost be reassuring if they were.
No, I mean I just have a general, global sense‒not just intellectually, but in my bones as it were, in my deep intuitions‒that I cannot rely upon anyone or upon anything, other than the laws of nature themselves (whatever their final version might be). I don’t “trust” anyone or anything, including (one might even say “especially”) myself. Everything is a calculated risk.
This is of course literally true for everyone, but I think most people hide from that fact most of the time, usually (but definitely not always) without terrible consequences. I don’t know if that’s worse or better. It may be more pleasant, but I suspect it’s misleading, and has been responsible for, or at least it has contributed to, many ills the human race has brought upon itself and upon others.
Whataya gonna do? I guess you’re gonna do whatever you must, as they say, since it’s not as though you can do anything other than what you do once you’ve done it, and so it was all along what you were going to do, and so it was what you must do (or must have done).
I hope you have a good day and a good week. I’ve tried to withhold my depression and negativity, with at least some degree of success‒trust me, I’ve withheld‒and I will continue to do so, because sharing it is pointless, and asking for help is laughable.
*Now, that phrase had some redundant notions, didn’t it?
