ASD

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Cats, raccoons, spiders, furniture…sometimes even humans

It’s Friday, now, and I’m writing what should be the final blog post of the week, since exclusis improvisis I will not be working tomorrow—which usually means that I will not write a blog post tomorrow.

I am writing this post today on my lapcom, again.  That’s because I am still at the office from yesterday; I did not go back to the house last night.  I had called my sister on the phone after work, in the office, and by the time we were done, it was quite late.  It was too late for the train, so I would have needed to get an Uber back to the house, which would have been expensive, and by the time I got there, I would basically just need to go to bed and then get up and come back in.

What a waste that would have been.

Of course, the neighborhood (nayborhood?) cats will have had another evening and morning without food, but they are stray cats, after all.  They can handle themselves pretty well.  Actually, maybe this hiatus will discourage the stupid little family of raccoons that keeps coming in and eating the cat food after the cats have the eaten their initial amount.

They are cute, of course, bordering on adorable—the raccoons, I mean, though so are the cats—but I do not buy cat food to feed to raccoons, who can do an even better job of taking care of themselves than cats can.  They just get annoying, and although I have learned that silly string and silly foam do kind of freak them out (fire doesn’t seem to, not when it’s just seen, and I don’t want actually to burn them) it’s not enough to discourage them for long*.

I will occasionally lob a coconut (there are scores of them on the ground) in the raccoons’ general direction, which does freak them out some, but it also freaks out some of the cats.  I have even more harmful means at my disposal, but I would have a hard time using them.

It can be quite inconvenient and irritating sometimes, how much I empathize with things like raccoons and opossums (and stray cats) and even with lizards and spiders**, and even with ants and stuffed animals and—occasionally–furniture.  Heck, when I’m in the right state of mind, I can even empathize with palmetto bugs.

But it’s not a deliberate kind of empathy.  It’s certainly not done consciously.  It’s not the kind of empathy termed “cognitive empathy”, in which one can sort of tease apart and understand how the emotions are unfolding in another person’s mind, without necessarily sharing those emotions***.  I can do that if and when I put my mind to it, at least to a point.  But my issue is the sort of automatic, emotional empathy, in which it’s almost possible to feel what the other being (or thing) is experiencing, or at least to imagine that one does.

I experience that with humans, too, at least to some degree.  Actually, it’s often rather overwhelming, especially if there are significant numbers of people around.  I don’t think that it’s a literal sense, like sight or hearing or smell or touch, but those mirror neurons—or whatever other functions in the brain turn other creature’s reactions into literal feelings in one’s own mind—seem to want to try to take in as much of everyone’s percussive passions as they can, and that process cannot readily be shut off, as it wasn’t consciously shut on.

This can be, and has been, useful, such as when dealing with patients one on one as a doctor.  One person at a time is just about manageable, though even that can wear you down when it’s many “one persons” throughout every day.

But still, it can be done.  However, being around many people, especially ones who are not necessarily regulating themselves much, can be damnably irritating and overwhelming.  It’s a bit like being at a rock concert in which every individual crowd member’s favorite band is playing at the same time, all different songs and genres and everything, and the members of the crowd are each and all trying to sing along with their band.

It’s not a pleasant situation, as I’m sure you would agree.  That’s at least part of why being in social gatherings can be quite daunting.  It probably also at least partly explains why things like arcades, which are certainly noisier than most parties, are not nearly as overwhelming as even a small party can be.  Plus, video games can be much more entertaining than trying to talk to various people you’ve only just met, who may or may not have any shared interests with you.

A key indicator or barometer or highlighter of the comparison between the two is the fact that, if you drink alcohol in an arcade, your performance on the games is likely to suffer.  On the other hand, alcohol is all but an absolute necessity at a party just filled with milling humans.

Why do humans insist upon repeatedly arranging activities for which even they, the arrangers, need pharmacotherapy (e.g., ethanol) to enjoy?  I would ask one, but I am almost sure that none of them would have a well thought out answer to the question.

Okay, well, don’t mind me, I’m in an atypical state, for me (which doesn’t necessarily mean that one has become more “typical”, as I discussed yesterday, using the entropy diagram).  I’ll draw this post to a close now, and I wish you all a very good weekend.  I will next return here neither before nor after Monday…

…yet again, exclusis improvisis.

*I’ve read somewhere recently that raccoons are starting to show signs of early pre-domestication toward humans, much as dogs probably did way back in the day.  Cats, on the other hand, mostly domesticated people.

**Okay, I could leave them out of this list.  I like spiders quite a bit, and I more or less always have, so I don’t feel bad about empathizing with them.  In fact, as I’ve said here before (I think) when I accidentally wreck a spider web because it’s too effective at not being seen, I tend to feel really bad.  That is, after all, their extended phenotype, as Richard Dawkins coined the term, and they put a lot of effort and literal bodily resources into it.

***Psychopaths are, apparently, often quite good at this.

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A belated first post of the work week

I hope nobody was worried about me yesterday when I didn’t write a post.  I was out sick.  I had some kind of gastrointestinal bug, or perhaps some type of bad reaction to something I ate.  I’m not sure.  Anyway, it was unpleasant, as such things tend to be.

I often find myself wishing, in such situations and even less severe ones, that I didn’t ever have to eat at all.  Of course, if you see me, you’d know that I’ve tended to err in the other direction, but I would very much like to lose my sense of hunger, or perhaps more my sense of pleasure in food.  My current life is almost completely devoid of any real, reliable joy of any kind, and I am chronically depressed, so I unfortunately tend to go for biologically reliable sources of “feeling good”, however minor and evanescent, such as eating.

I suppose it’s a good thing that I don’t have any kind of drug problem, since I’d probably be stuck going to that for my diminishing returns of transient joy.  I suspect many people with drug problems do just that.  Actually, I often kind of wish that I did have a drug problem, because then I would be (a) more likely to be thinner than I am, and (b) might die of a drug overdose, which is comparatively faster and less painful than dying of a food “overdose” over time.  It’s a moot point, though.  I’m not the sort of person who could really manage an illicit drug habit; I would find the whole process stressful and irritating.  I didn’t even like taking opioids legally when I was given them for my chronic pain.

Alcohol, which is legal, has many drawbacks, not the least being that beyond a certain point, it doesn’t really do anything for me and exacerbates my chronic pain.  It can be useful as a social lubricant, and in that it can be very useful, considering how socially awkward I am.

But alcohol doesn’t make me feel much euphoria past the initial relaxation stage, which is definitely pretty good for short times.  However, one trouble with alcohol is that it impairs one’s judgement—it certainly impairs mine—and so when one feels a little relief from anxiety and a consequent bit of euphoria because of it, one falls into the cliché, “if some is good, more must be better, and a lot more must be great”.  Most of you probably have direct or indirect experience with how that line of “thinking” turns out.

Now, I will say that I took one medication a few times, in medical circumstances, that could probably become a problem for me, and that was diazepam (brand name Valium®).  I’ve written before about how, when I was given diazepam, even though the circumstances were far from pleasant ones—wisdom teeth extraction in one case, and a heart catheterization in the other—I felt tremendous.  I felt normal, if you understand the sense of what I mean by that—and even if you don’t.

Anyway, that’s a prescription med, and I’m not really interested in taking it.  I know too much about how rapidly diminishing are its returns, and about its long-term effects on cognition, and worst, about how tolerance to it tends to lead to increased anxiety between doses, so it pretty quickly becomes counter-productive.

This leads me to wonder if it might be somewhat useful to people with chronic anxiety to take medications or similar that increase their anxiety, and to stay on them for a while, then to stop.  It wouldn’t address any underlying issues, of course, but not all such chronic states are due to Freudian-ish causes in experience and upbringing.  Some of them are genetic or at least congenital.  Sometimes, a person’s biology can just give them an anxiety set-point that is significantly higher than average.  Some other people, of course, will have the opposite.  And most people will be somewhere in between.

This is the nature of traits in populations of sexually reproducing species (e.g., humans):  there is variability in nearly every attribute, as genes get shuffled and reshuffled, paired up with different alleles and other genes in the genome, reacting in highly complex ways, and providing the broad variation on which natural selection does its ruthless work.

This is what is largely behind the famous phenomenon of the moths that changed coloration in industrial age England compared to their pre-industrial age colors, matching the new soot-encrusted bark of trees.  They did not develop the trait or attribute de novo; there was always a variability in that physical aspect (color).  But in different circumstances, different colors were more likely to survive to reproductive age, and so they began to predominate when a persistent change in circumstances happened.

The same sort of thing surely has happened with humans many times, over and over, as civilization changes, and our own effects feed back on our natures and alter their own causes.  If people could step out of their little, provincial world-views, this would likely be obvious to all but the most benighted of souls.

How did I get to this subject/topic*?  I don’t know, though maybe it will become obvious while I’m editing.  Anyway, I’m going to draw this to a close just with the revelation that I’m writing this post on the lapcom.  Was there any difference between its style and that of one written on the smartphone, now that I reveal the fact to you only at the end?  Inquiring minds want to know.

I truly hope you have a good day.  And I really wish I could actually hang out with some of you or with someone today with whom I could have a comfortable interaction.  But I am not good company anymore, if I ever was.  So I will probably, and appropriately, continue to be alone, and will die alone, and hopefully fairly soon.

*I never really have been able to discern a consistent and sensible difference between these two terms, but people often use them as if they are two different things, rather than simply synonyms.  Possibly that’s just a function of pretentiousness.  But maybe I’m just ignorant.

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‘Tis not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a blog-door; but ’tis enough, ’twill serve.

Well, hello and good morning to you, too.  It’s Thursday, and so I have used a version of my “traditional” Thursday blog post opening, and I will use a traditional Thursday ending.  Further bulletins as events warrant.

I’m glad that at least some people liked my rather atypical* blog post yesterday, in which I basically just described what I had played (and sung) the morning before.  Somewhat ironically, I did not play, nor did I sing, yesterday morning, and I don’t expect that I will do so today.  This is mainly, or at least pivotally, due to my chronic pain.

I don’t tend to talk that much about my chronic pain anymore, or at least not as often as I think I used to talk about it.  I don’t know, maybe I talk about it roughly just as much as I have all along, at least in the time since this stopped being a Thursday-only blog.  Still, it feels to me that I’ve been discussing it less, because I fear it’s not only boring for people but also depressing, and I am depressing enough without talking about pain.

But my chronic pain has not diminished, though it is variable from day to day and moment to moment.  There are times when I feel that something I’m doing is making it improve, but it usually ends up just to have been a normal part of whatever complicated cycle the pain intensity and character undergoes.

There are cyclical and periodic phenomena at nearly all levels of the cosmos, it seems.  Biological processes, which often involve thermostat-style feedback controls, are far from being an exception.  So, chronic pain goes up and down‒in a complex pattern that has differing periods and amplitudes overlapping** each other‒in ways that can be particularly misleading if you’re also trying to reduce it by various means.  Also, the things you try, even if they don’t truly work, can nevertheless affect the periods and amplitudes of one’s pain cycles.

Anyway, so, yeah, I’ve been having a lot of pain over the last several days‒more than average, though I am almost never not in pain.  I have also been eating an unusual number of legal CBD/delta 9 gummies.  They don’t seem to make the pain go away, but they change how I respond to it a bit, decreasing the amount of spasm and disordered walking and posture and tension and grumpiness that I experience, at least a bit.

But they make me groggy, if that’s the right word.  They also make my time sense rather weird, though that’s rather interesting, since it calls attention to the subjectivity of the experience of time*** which I discussed the other day, I think.  They also engender some minor perceptual illusions, especially auditory ones, possibly because of my poor hearing, but that is also rather interesting.

So, they make my pain experience a bit less intense and maddening, and they make it feel less as though one or the other side of my body is being forcibly twisted and contorted as I move, which is often how this shit feels.  At least, they make that sensation less stressful, and they seem to decrease some of the muscle spasms.

They also make my mathematical figuring and other mental processes feel less reliable.  I already have a seemingly deficient sense of being right‒for instance, no matter how often my mental figuring of sales amounts and so on is shown to be correct, I never for a moment feel secure enough about it not to check a few times using the computer.

Even then, I feel somewhat worried and uncomfortable, but sooner or later, I have just to go on to the next thing, because I will never be able to convince myself that I am correct beyond even a reasonable doubt, let alone to mathematical certainty.  It’s like the classic OCD thing where one has to keep going back to the house to check that one hasn’t left the stove on even though one empirically knows they have, or things along those lines.

To be clear, the gummies don’t appear to affect the quality of my mental work‒as far as I can tell, I can do mental figuring and other, similar processes as quickly and as accurately with it as without it.  But it makes me feel less sure, if anything, than without it, though I guess it also makes me slightly less anxious about being wrong.

It also takes away some of my mental focus, and also generally makes me feel a bit less motivated.  Perhaps, if I were able fully to embrace that lack of motivation, I might eventually come out the other side of the phenomenon and have a new, purer kind of motivation, one not born of constant tension and anxiety (and even some paranoia).  But I don’t know how to accomplish that, and even if I did, my credence in the possibility of it working is not nearly high enough to make me willing to try it.

Anyway, so, these are some of my thoughts on why I didn’t play or sing yesterday, and why I almost certainly won’t play or sing today.  It’s also part of why I don’t write fiction or draw or paint, and also part of why I don’t finish teaching myself professional level general relativity and quantum mechanics.  Yes, my interests tend to go all over the place and get in each other’s way even when I am at my best.  But even I know that I could accomplish so much more, so many more interesting things, if I were not in significant pain every fucking day.

So, yeah.  I’m out of it more than usual, which I don’t like, since mental acuity is my primary strength, and the thing I like most about myself.  That may not be a high bar to clear, but still, it’s what I have.  And I’m enervated and discouraged, and I’m tired of bothering to do anything, but I can’t seem to convince myself that, no, the stove is not still on, it doesn’t need to keep being checked.

What a pain.

TTFN

*I’m not sure if there really is a typical blog post type for me, so maybe “atypical” isn’t a very useful adjective here.

**Fourier (I think he was the one) famously showed how any kind of waveform can be produced by the superposition of sine waves of various periods and amplitudes, and this insight has tremendous impact on the nature of quantum mechanics and its particular types of superpositions.  It’s also the deeper explanation of the Uncertainty Principle.

***This has no effect on actual time itself, of course, at least based on all the best information we have about such things.  It’s just a perfectly understandable product of the nature of a biological computer’s (multiple) means of keeping track of time and reporting on that process to the rest of that biological computer (i.e., the brain).  It’s simply not true that experience is reality.  One’s experience is part of reality, of course, and need not be treated dismissively, but while toilets are necessary in any office skyscraper, it would be absurd to say “toilets are skyscrapers”.  Unless, of course, one built a toilet 50 stories tall.  Even then, that’s just one edifice.  So one could say, “that toilet is a skyscraper” legitimately, but that doesn’t make it any more sensible to speak categorically about toilets being skyscrapers.

This is not about buildings and plumbing.

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“When I try to get through on the telephone to you…”

Well, it’s Monday again, and as I foresaw and predicted, I am writing a blog post.  Yes, indeed, as Pink said, I’ve got electric light, and I’ve got second sight‒I’ve got amazing powers of observation.

It’s not all that impressive when you stop and think about the fact that I’m predicting (after foreseeing) my own actions, over which I presumably have some degree of control.  Such control is far from complete, but for stuff like this, it’s fairly effective.

I’m going to try to keep this post short today, mainly because I know people don’t seem to like it when I get too negative and depressed and morbid, but that’s very much how I feel this morning.  So, I can’t really express my feelings without bringing discomfort to my readers.  That feels churlish to me, and anyway, it doesn’t seem to do me or anyone else any good at all.

That’s no real surprise.  It doesn’t seem to be in my nature to do or to be good; it requires specific effort for me to do good in the world.  It certainly doesn’t appear to be my natural inclination.

Then again, the argument could be made that, because I choose to try to do good (at least sometimes) that means I am good by nature.  After all, if one is simply inclined to do good, or at least to try to do good, then one will simply tend to do so.  That’s good, of course, and such people are welcome.  But it’s not that impressive.  Like a very tall person easily getting something down from a high shelf for a shorter compatriot, it’s good and helpful, but it’s not that impressive, and it’s certainly not heroic.

Whereas if a person has a tendency to be angry and to wish people ill and to become easily frustrated and to desire to lash out, but they don’t do those things because they feel it would be wrong…well, that’s got a certain degree of admirability, since it requires conscious effort to restrain one’s impulses.  I’m not saying that it’s particularly impressive; almost everyone restrains a great many impulses in order to exist in society.  But it is something that requires at least a modicum of effort.

Okay, well, enough of that nonsense.

The point is, I’m going to try not to dwell too much on my depression and self-destructive thoughts, because it doesn’t do anyone any good, including me.  I’ve yet to receive any significant help from anyone or anything because of it, and though certainly I receive some well-meaning suggestions or thoughts or what have you, most of them are things I’ve already considered or tried.

So, it’s not doing me any good, and it’s not doing anyone else any good, as far as I can tell.  I’m just getting steadily worse over time, though that may not be obvious from the outside.  But the fact that I neither do music nor write any fiction any more is telling.  In fact, I don’t really do anything creative or artistic or scientific or whatever.  I just exist most of the time.  And it’s hard to see why I bother.

Ah, well, it probably doesn’t help that I had a particularly poor night’s sleep last night, even for me.  I’m already mentally exhausted, and I’m just starting the work week.

I did get some decent walking in yesterday‒about five and a half miles total.  Fortunately, I’m not having any negative consequences from that so far, and I would have expected to have them by now if they were coming.

Of course, my various chronic problems continue, including my chronic pain, my chronic depression and I guess my ASD (it’s congenital, so I guess that makes it chronic, in a sense).

Anyway, again, enough of this.  Even though I said I would try not to do so, I am dwelling on negative things, not just in my head but here on my blog.  I can only apologize.  I guess that’s one of the dangers of “stream of consciousness” writing.

It doesn’t really matter.  I hope you all have a good day and a good week.  October starts this week already, and it’s normally my favorite month, but there’s nothing really to which I look forward this time around.  It’s just blah.

Meh, whataya gonna do?

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Painfully to pore upon a blog to seek the light of truth

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, which you might be able to tell by my traditional, Thursday-associated “Hello and good morning” style opening.  But, of course, if you’re new to this blog‒I wonder if there are any new people reading this blog today‒then you might not know.

But I’ve been writing a Thursday-based blog for at least 10 years, I think, in case anyone wants to go back and check it out.  It then expanded into an “every workday” blog after my last fiction publication, which I think was my collection, Dr. Elessar’s Cabinet of Curiosities.  Though my last novel ended up being Unanimity Book 1 and Unanimity Book 2.

I have written a novella since then (Extra Body) that’s published here, and I’ve made beginnings on Outlaw’s Mind and The Dark Fairy and the Desperado, which are also available here as far as they’ve gone.

But for the most part, I’ve just been doing this blog.  I initially imagined it to be a kind of promotional entity, intended to help people hear about my books.  As far as I can tell, it utterly failed at that purpose, but whataya gonna do?

Then I decided to try to turn the blog into a sort of mental health thing (for me, not for my readers‒it cannot be good for my readers’ mental health), a kind of talk therapy, to try to help with my ongoing dysthymia and depression.

Well, it’s difficult to assess an intervention’s effectiveness without being able to know how things would be without that intervention, but if this is me with a successful method of intervention, I shudder to imagine what I would be like without it.  Possibly, I would be dead, but that’s really not such a bad thought, to be fair.

I’ve had a few very bad days of pain lately, which is not unusual, but it is frustrating.  For a few days before this, my pain abated a bit, to just a sort of low, background thing, and when that happens, I start to feel stupidly optimistic for a time.  Of course, so far, that optimism has been profoundly misplaced, but what do you want from something as stupid as optimism?

The pain really doesn’t help things, though.  It’s been going on for nearly a quarter of a century so far, and that’s too long for my taste (in case you wondered).  In a few years, I will have reached the halfway point, i.e., I will have been in chronic pain for half my life.  From there, the fraction just gets bigger.  Indeed, if I were to live forever, the limit of the fraction of my life in which I’ve been in chronic pain would be 1.

That’s a pretty horrible thought.

So, yeah, that hasn’t helped with my mental health either.  It’s difficult to know what my mental health would have been like without chronic pain; it’s possible it could have been worse.  But there are decent reasons to doubt that to be the likely case.

Insomnia doesn’t help, either.  I will say one thing about Paxil, for all that it wasn’t great for my depression:  it made me enjoy sleeping, even though it didn’t make a big impact on how long I slept.  I have never really enjoyed sleep, either before or since.  I am not one who eagerly anticipates getting into bed and drifting off.

I know there are people who do seem to enjoy it, quite apart from its necessary function.  Not I.  My need to sleep, as with so many other things, is one purely of necessity; I need to rest, if I can.  And I certainly long for the feeling of actually having adequately rested, though I don’t know if I will ever experience that again.

Anyway, I’m tired‒from lack of sleep, from pain, from depression, presumably from ASD, from being alone with only my own miserable and annoying self all the time, from the fact that the world is so stupid and so pointless*, from general social awkwardness, from innumerable things.  And I have no apparent capacity to do anything creative now, which used to be one of my saving graces.  I haven’t even played guitar (or sang) for weeks now, if I recall correctly.  The black Strat just leans against my desk in the office, gathering dust.

Oh, well.  Like I said (or asked), whataya gonna do?  Although, there is always something I can do, but people don’t like it when I talk about that.  It makes them uncomfortable.  It doesn’t make anyone uncomfortable enough to act, but they don’t like it, and it doesn’t seem to do me any good except to make me feel slightly more hopeless, as well as somewhat guilty for bothering other people with my issues.

Anyway, it’s not like I can blame anyone for not wanting to have anything to do with a creature like me.

Enough.  This is idiotic, like so much else in the universe.  I hope you’re all doing well.

TTFN

*But especially the “stupid” part.  Pointlessness is tolerable, and it can even be rather freeing, but everyone and everything is just so idiotic.  I do not exclude myself from that judgement.

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“…the emptiest of feelings…”

Ugh, boy, wow, do I feel wiped out this morning, which seems mildly peculiar after a night’s sleep, however inadequate.  I didn’t have the energy to do my usual morning pull-ups today, even, and that’s rare.  Well, I say “usual”, but I actually alternate:  on even days I do pull-ups in the morning, on odd days I do dips, and on Sundays and on those Saturdays on which I don’t work, I do neither.

<sarcasm> Isn’t that exciting to learn?  I know that I can barely contain myself; I can’t imagine how it must be for all of you! </sarcasm>

Anyway, I don’t know why I am so enervated this morning.  I mean, I slept an entirely inadequate amount, but that’s not atypical or unusual for me.

Yesterday was even a decent day as far as it went.  We only worked a half day at the office, but sales were nevertheless pretty good.  Then afterward, I had a discord call with my youngest and we watched two excellent episodes of Doctor Who.  This is their first time watching, and it’s nice to be able to introduce someone to the show, especially one of my two favorite people ever.  The show is being quite well-received.  This is not a surprise.

Of course, I went back to the house later than I would have if I had not watched the Doctor, but not as late as usual.  Then I went to bed pretty sensibly.  That doesn’t translate into a good night’s sleep‒not by a long way‒but I did what was within my power.

It’s not as though I can do anything that’s not within my power.

So, yeah, I don’t know why I feel so beat this morning.  I don’t feel like I am coming down with some infectious illness (unfortunately), and I don’t have the symptoms that would go along with some rather severe medical process that could cause acutely worsening fatigue, like a GI bleed or something.  There’s no faintness/lightheadedness, no rapid heart beat, nothing of that sort.  I also have no new pains that I have so far noticed, and as far as I can tell I am not jaundiced, so my liver is probably okay.

Well, whatever.  The point is I feel a lot like crap.  But, unfortunately, I don’t feel sick enough not to go to work (or to write this blog post).  And I am not allowed to take breaks of any kind unless I am legitimately incapacitated.

“Not allowed” you ask?  Not allowed by whom?

By me’m, is the answer, albeit a deliberately ungrammatical one.  I cannot seem to let myself stop trying to do shit unless I am actually ill enough that I cannot really do anything.

I have been like this for as long as I can remember.  Even back in my early grade school days, I remember fantasizing about getting seriously hurt so that I would be able just to lie about and rest for a bit.  Honestly.

When I had open heart surgery‒it was August 7th or 8th, 1988, 2 weeks before I was to go back to university‒it was quite unpleasant of course, and quite painful.  Indeed, I remember that my first thought upon beginning to regain consciousness was more or less “damn it, I survived”.

It’s not great when you’re 18 (or probably any other age) to get your chest sawed open and your blood artificially circulated and oxygenated for a while, then to wake up restrained and intubated and cortically blind (I didn’t put that last thing together completely until quite some time later).

But it was, nevertheless, freeing.  I didn’t feel the need always to be doing something, to be accomplishing something, because I couldn’t.  That was kind of amazing, and it felt so at the time.

I wasn’t even afraid when I was going to get my heart surgery (or the catheterization before that).  It’s not that I was brave; it was nothing like that.  I was just too intrigued by the whole process, which was admittedly pretty cool and amazing, and I was almost unconsciously looking forward to having everything taken out of my hands for a while, whether I liked it or not.

Of course, in a sense, everything is always mostly out of our hands.  Our own agency, such as it is, is something we don’t choose, and we don’t choose our nature and our “specs”* and our talents and capacities.  Even our will is something that starts as it is without our input, as does the universe itself.  The best you can do is try to surf on the chaos.

But I’ve always felt the need to do something whenever I’m conscious and able to act.  Even if the “something” is a fun thing, or just a distracting thing, there’s always a pressure to do it, and it’s been there for as long as I can remember.  And it’s just a relief to have it taken off line temporarily, to have it rendered moot for a while.

When I had my heart surgery, I knew that it might kill me.  I certainly knew it intellectually, just as I also knew that the odds were very small‒roughly one in a thousand according to the statistics my cardiologist had shared with me.  Even back then, I had a good enough intuitive grasp of probability and statistics to know that, though immensely higher than the chance of winning the lottery, these were odds about which it was not worth worrying.

But I also just wasn’t horrified by the prospect of dying.  Even then I didn’t really believe in any kind of afterlife.  And I experienced (or, rather, I did not experience) more or less as complete a simulacrum of death as it was possible to undergo, one far more closely approximating it than mere dreamless sleep:  deep general anesthesia including hypothermia and cardioplegia, and the non-pulsatile cerebral blood flow that heart-lung bypass entailed.

If I had died on the operating table, there would have been no experiential transition for me.  That’s rather fascinating.

Anyway, sorry to bother you with my fantasies about, and my missed opportunities for, a painless death (or just for the chance to rest because there was nothing I could do).  Maybe I’ll feel better by tomorrow.  Maybe I’ll feel deader by tomorrow.  I could even be wetter by tomorrow, this being Florida.

I hope all of you are feeling and doing better than I.  I mean, come on, it’s not a very high bar to clear.

*By which I mean “specifications”, as of a machine or process, not “spectacles”.

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It’s serious Labor just to get through each Day

Good day to you all.  It’s Monday, the 7th of September, and for those in the USA, it is Labor Day.  That’s sort of the government holiday antipode of Memorial Day.  The latter marks the unofficial beginning of summer, and the former marks the unofficial end of summer.  In south Florida, I can fairly and reasonably say about the supposed end of summer, “Would that it were.”

That’s because the weather in autumn‒late autumn, anyway‒is much more pleasant than it is in summer here.  This is a large part of the reason for the “snow bird” phenomenon:  people who live up north during the warmer half (roughly) of the year and then come down to Florida during the cooler half of the year.

I say “cooler” in the meteorological, thermodynamic sense, not the social sense.  Contrary to what many people here seem to believe, there are not many cool people per capita in Florida.  It just doesn’t tend to fit the regional identity in any sense; “The Florida Man” is not celebrated for his coolness.

Just to give you an idea of how bad it is:  I am probably only barely below the mean level of coolness in Florida, at least based on the usual criteria of greater society.  Even well-known people from Florida are rarely noted for being cool.

Not that it really matters, of course.  Coolness is an epiphenomenon that accreted like pipe scale on the surface of primate dominance and reproductive hierarchical behavior patterns; that’s all fairly obvious looking at humans from the outside as it were.  But it all becomes self-referential after a while, building on and/or reacting in support of or opposition to prior standards of “coolness”, until it’s long since become a sort of autoerotic death spiral, a precursor to AI slop.

That doesn’t mean I don’t sometimes appreciate cool things and people; I just recognize “coolness” as entirely parochial.  What octopuses think is cool and what spiders think is cool and what albatrosses think is cool are going to be very different from each other and from what humans think is cool*.

Speaking of coolness, I went to the movie theater (by myself) this weekend to see the new Spider-Man movie.  The movie was certainly reasonably cool as far as it went; I thought it was well made and well acted and fun and so on.  It was at a theater that has a full bar, which is also pretty cool, so while I waited I had a Jack and Coke (to help with some social anxiety).  It was tasty, but it made me need to use the restroom four times before the movie started.  That was annoying.  But I rarely drink alcohol, anyway, so it’s an effect I need not dread.

The popcorn was pretty good, I guess, and so on, and the seats were comfy, but by the end of the movie I just felt more alone than I had before, despite coming out and joining the throng (then going into Target for some cat food and then to Walgreens for some sparkling water before ordering an Uber back to the house).

It was an expensive day, though.  The concessions were even more expensive than the ticket (and that’s not counting the Jack and Coke).  And the Uber to and from the theater was not cheap, either.  So, I don’t think I’m going to be doing that very often.  I may not do it ever again, maybe not even for Doomsday.

Though, when it comes to money, it’s not as though I’m saving for retirement.  I don’t expect to retire.  As of right now, I just expect to keep moving until I fall apart and then just basically die.  I mean, in the end that’s what everyone does, but my situation is likely to have less bric-a-brac cluttering up the works than many.

Honestly, I wish I could skip to the end a lot of the time.  Which I guess I can, of course, but it requires gumption and willpower to do it, and I am generally low on spoons, as the metaphor goes nowadays; I’m not sure how that figure of speech became prominent, nor why, but it feels somehow apropos.

Many things that I am doing to try to improve my willpower and my mental reserves and so on are at least partly to try to build the will to overcome my instinctive but annoying resistance to self-destruction.  I’m getting there, I think.  I’m making progress.  Maybe I’ll get there soon.

Honestly, I don’t really even mind that much if I don’t get to see Avengers: Doomsday.  I’m just sick of all of this shit.

I hope you all are doing better than I am.

*Of course, the thought processes as such are likely only to be very roughly analogous to what humans think about coolness, especially for non-social species.  There may also be overlap; I imagine many humans might think certain examples of flying skill shown by an albatross are very cool, and so might another albatross.

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“I said he’ll flip ya…flip ya for real.”

It’s Friday today, and though I am not a believer (and, more or less as I say in the meme below, I don’t want to be one, since I’m not impressed by “belief”) I will thank anyone and everyone who might be responsible for the fact that this is the end of my work week this week.  So, thank God it’s Friday, thank Cat it’s Friday, thank Frigg it’s Friday (thank Tony for his “Friggin’ Friday” comment), thank Cthulhu it’s Friday, thank Doom it’s Friday, thank Eru it’s Friday, thank Brahma it’s Friday…

I suspect that you get the idea.

Anyway, I’m very tired and need some rest.  It’s not that it’s been a particularly onerous week; it hasn’t really been.  If anything, it is I who has been more onerous than usual this week even than I usually am.  But I don’t think I’ve been much more onerous than usual.

I suppose that it’s up to those around me to say how much of a burden I’ve been, but I know their answers would be inconsistent and pretty confabulated.  This is not intended to insult them; it’s just the nature of human accounts of things that have happened to them when they are asked without having been paying attention to those things (in particular) in the first place.

Nature didn’t create a brain that keeps a running measure of its mood in relation to each individual around them, like some endless EEG plot.  What would be the use of such a function in the natural world?  Even if useful, would the use be worth the inevitable cost?  And could the drunken walk of the blind idiot god Evolution ever stumble upon such a process even if it were useful?

Well, given infinite time, it probably could, but we haven’t had infinite time to explore the space of possible biological innovations, and we probably will not have it.

Anyway, the point is, as Louis C K pointed out, it’s not up to me whether I’m being an asshole, at least not according to the impressions of others.  And I guess it’s not up to me whether others feel I am onerous or not.

Then again, it’s not up to them whether I consider myself to be a burden or not.  And I have the only front-row seats to me.  I am the one (and only) who is with me all the time*.

And consider something else:  all my meandering oddness (oddity?) that is on display here is me when I am tired, slowed down by literal decades of insufficient sleep.  Imagine how irritating I might be if I were fully rested and energetic!

Don’t make the mistake of imagining that it would necessarily make me calmer and more sedate.  I knew me back in the years when I used to get much more adequate sleep (though I have always slept less than most anyone else in my family).  I was not particularly sedate or calm then.

In closing, I’ll mention a weird thought that occurred to me when I was looking in the mirror (another daily burden) after my shower.  In principle, if one were picked up out of 3D space into 4D space, rotated in the proper way while there, then set down in 3D space again, one would be physically mirror-reversed***.

This would be a big problem, and not just because other people would be freaked out in subtle ways.  Every chiral molecule in one’s body would also be flipped from ortho to sinister, left to right (and vice versa).  That means you would need to eat similarly flipped food****, because your biological molecules only work on one version of most molecules.

Also, your DNA (which has chirality in spades) would be rotated in the other direction, so you certainly couldn’t reproduce.  But you couldn’t build new cells anyway, because many of the requisite molecules in that process are chiral.

Even your neutrinos/W and Z particles would behave differently, because this is one force/process in nature that is not parity-symmetric.  Meaning there is in a sense a handedness to the way the weak force acts.

Of course, that’s also the case with electromagnetism, come to think of it.  There is the famous “right hand rule” for how magnetic fields occur in response to changing electric fields/moving currents, and how electric fields respond to changing magnetic fields (see Maxwell’s equations).

So, heck, if you were so flipped, you might not even be able to interact with the electroweak sector of the quantum fields of our universe, and you might fall apart immediately at the subatomic level.  It would depend very much on whether such constraints are carried along with the stuff of one’s body or if they are imposed (and reimposed) by the fields in the universe around it.

I don’t even know what would happen with electric charge or hypercharge or spin or whatnot.  It almost makes me want to write Changeling in a Shadow World.  But I doubt that will happen.

With that weird stream of consciousness, I will let you go for the week.  I won’t be writing any new posts before Monday, exclusis improvisis.

*At least I’m the only one with a nervous system.  I suppose my skin and gut flora are with me all the time, but as far as I know, they don’t think in any reasonable sense.  Also, can any of them really be said to be with me always?  Their dividing/reproducing rates are very high compared to a human (or humanoid) lifetime, after all.  I guess it depends upon whether I consider a bacterium that undergoes mitosis to be two new organisms or just one increased organism that is continuous**.  Both options are reasonable and plausible, and nature doesn’t appear to care, outside the minds of humans, how such things are considered.

**This implies, in a sense, that all life on Earth could honestly be considered one organism, since there appears to have been one ultimate common ancestor to us all.  Thus, Life would really be a (so far) immortal organism.  I think that’s actually a pretty reasonable way to look at things, and it’s very much a sort of larger-scale, fractally self-similar pattern to how a human body is initiated with one cell−the “ensouled zygote” as I once mockingly made a meme about, after deciding it would be a good name for a band.

***If this is difficult to imagine, consider it in lower-dimensions.  Imagine an asymmetrical trapezoid in Abbot’s Flatland, with one of its two “legs” different than the other.  If it were picked up into three dimensions, flipped over, and then put back down, its asymmetry would now be in the other direction, and other Flatlanders might no longer even recognize it.

****This is part of why the possibility of being eaten by aliens, or of them eating us, makes little sense.  If you tried to eat food from an alien ecosystem, it would at best just go through you unabsorbed, and at worst would give you potentially fatal indigestion.  All your digestive processes are honed to work on other biological substances that occur within the ecosystem that evolved on Earth.  And this entails many lock-and-key enzymes and molecules that digest depending on chirality.  This was part of the motivation behind creating left-handed sugar and left-handed fat, which might physically behave similarly and perhaps even smell or taste somewhat the same, but would not be absorbed.  But such products almost inevitably lead to digestive troubles at best.

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A jest’s prosperity lies in the ear of him that hears it, never in the blog of him that makes it

Hello and good morning.

It’s Thursday again and time for another of my traditional Thursday blog posts*, though nowadays that’s embedded among the blog posts I write on all the other work days.  I haven’t written fiction in quite a long time, and the original reason for this (Thursday) blog was to promote my fiction.

But heck, it’s been a couple of weeks since I’ve even so much as picked up a guitar‒though I keep looking online at these parlor style acoustics, because they look like they’d be a good size for convenience and such.  But it’s just a bit of a pipe dream and a distraction to look at them.

There is no lapcom involved in this post today.  I didn’t take it with me when I left the office last night, but there was no more “reason” for that decision than there had been for the fact that I brought it the day before.  There were causes, as there always are, but not reasons.

Although, now that I consider it, I did feel that yesterday’s post was a bit too long.  That didn’t consciously enter into my decision-making when I chose not to bring the lapcom, but I did think about it earlier in the day, after posting.  Most, if not all, of what happens in most decisions we make is unconscious, or subconscious**, or whatever word you might want to choose.  So I can’t rule out that there were actual reasons for me not bringing my lapcom last night, but whatever the facts of that matter might be, there were, and always are, causes.

In any case, yesterday I fell prey to my tendency to write quite a lot when typing on a lapcom or other regular keyboard, because it’s so fast and easy for me.  It’s faster than speaking for me, and it’s certainly faster than using the “smartphone”, even not counting all the typos that occur when using the latter***.

I continue to toy, from time to time, with trying to type a tome using Google Docs.  But its interfaces, while okay for writing blog posts, don’t feel quite right for writing fiction, at least not for me.  It’s probably a stupid notion anyway.  I don’t really expect ever to write any more fiction.  That’s not a good thing, but then again, very little is.

I’m actually getting irritated that my lapcoms and my desktop computer at work are beginning to show some signs of their ages, and I fear that they may need to be replaced soon.  Worse, my smartphone is getting a bit laggy, and I cannot upgrade it to the latest operating system so I can no longer use my banking app on it.

But I really don’t want to go through the hassle of getting and setting up a new phone (or computer).  It’s so irritating and so uninteresting.  I actually had the general, vague hope that I would not live long enough to need to upgrade my computer(s) or phone again.

Honestly, the constant displacement of entropy that comprises the process of staying alive at so many levels is just dreary and almost laughable.

Speaking of laughable, I’ve been thinking about trying a personal experiment:  I’ve been thinking about trying to go without laughing for a day or a week or something along those lines****.  I just wonder what effect that would have on my experiences.

I tend to overdo it with jokiness, and I tend to partake in a lot of comedy of various kinds, almost in a desperate way.  It could even be be considered an addiction, or at least like a substance abuse problem, including its own abstinence syndrome:  I used to have the experience that, after reading a Dave Barry book, I would crash and feel quite depressed and morose for a while, as if in withdrawal from laughing so much.

Perhaps laughter is one of my means to try to hide from reality, to hide from the present, to try to hide from me.  I haven’t committed to the idea, yet, but it does intrigue me.  Most of my literary heroes do not spend a lot of time laughing.  And I have few, if any, real world heroes, but such as I have, though far from agelastic, are not prone to joke about a lot or get giggly or silly, like I do.

Those facts may be irrelevant for me, of course.  I am a unique snowflake (just like all the other snowflakes), and I don’t necessarily have the same attributes as those I admire, especially fictional characters.   But it is intriguing as almost a kind of fast, but one in which I would abstain from laughing rather than from food or water.

I’ll keep you posted on my effort (probably).  If you want to give me your input, you’re welcome to do so.  In the meantime, I hope you have a very good day.  Don’t stop laughing on my account.

TTFN

[P.S., a thought just occurred to me, because the words of an old ABBA song (misheard, as I just realized) started going through my head:  If you think that there’s nothing you can’t do, that anything is possible, then all the troubles that continue in the world are implicitly your fault, because you could have solved them.  After all, there’s nothing you can’t do.  To be fair to them, ABBA was actually singing “there is nothing we can do”, which I had misheard and misremembered as “can’t” for decades.  Indeed, their song goes pretty well with parts of this post, especially the song’s first few lines.  Who would have guessed?]

*I almost said “my traditional Thursday podcast”.  How’s that for a weird mistake?  I’ve certainly toyed with the idea of a podcast at times, but that requires more time and editing and so on than my little five-minute or so snippets of audio.  But I do like to listen to podcasts, at least about topics that interest me.  Perhaps it was a Freudian slip.

**I accidentally typed “sunconscious” here, originally, and it seems like kind of a charming word, so it’s a shame it doesn’t really mean anything.  But one certainly doesn’t want a conscious sun, as the dubious Doctor Who episode “42” tried to warn us…or something like that.

***You might almost think that word means “one who lats”, but of course it’s not that kind of word and has close kinship with “later” and its ilk.

****I.e., a period of time.

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“He had gone often alone into the void places seeking the Imperishable Flame”

It’s the day of the moon today.  By which I am not referring to Doctor Who, series 6, episode 2 (the second part of a two-parter) which was called The Day of the Moon, if memory serves.  That was a good episode, and it tied into a long arc of a storyline that Stephen Moffat had put into motion in series 4, when he wasn’t even the show runner yet.  But it has nothing to do with my first sentence, today.

No, I am simply referring to the fact that this is Monday, the weekday named (in English and some other languages) for the moon.  It’s also the last day of August in 2026.

I occasionally wonder, what if Tsukino Usagi, AKA Sailor Moon, recognized that her name was associated with the first day of the work week (and of the school week).  I wonder this because Usagi is notoriously not fond of having to go to school.  She’s also something of a crybaby, and I can just imagine her lamenting the fact that her Sailor Senshi name is linked to the start of the work week.  I can also imagine her being jealous of Sailor Venus, since in Spanish at least, that is associated with Friday (Viernes).  Sailor Venus probably wouldn’t care.

And it also only just occurred to me to wonder what had happened to Sailor Pluto once Pluto was reclassified as a dwarf planet*.  I mean, if she’s really more associated with the God of the Underworld than with the now-dwarf planet, as does seem to be the case in the manga and anime, then I guess it’s fine.

Perhaps Sailor Pluto wryly smiled and shook her head indulgently upon learning that the humans had named a very small, very icy object among countless other similar objects, with a highly eccentric orbit that isn’t even in the same plane as that of the planets, after her namesake.  And she might indulgently shrug upon hearing of the more recent reclassification.  She probably didn’t care much, but she might well have known.  She was one of the Sailor Senshi who never seemed really to revert to a truly mortal form nor to have been reincarnated as a normal human.

Okay, well, that was a weird little discursion that handily demonstrates some aspects of my rather niche nerd status.  I went from Doctor Who right over to Sailor Moon (while making passing references to planetary astronomy).  That’s fine, though.  I really like both…series, sagas, stories?  I’m not sure the best word to use to encompass them both.  Perhaps “universes” is good.

It does annoy me that we now use the word “universe” when referring to things that might be merely one of many, of perhaps infinite, things, when “uni” means one**, with the implication that it is the only one.  I wish we could find a better term, so we could go back to using Universe, with the inherent capital “U”, to refer to whatever encompasses everything.

I had intended to use the term “metaverse” in my own stories, such as The Dark Fairy and the Desperado, that dealt with many planes and subsections of existence, but then Fuckerberg stole the term.  And I did start thinking about it and using it way before he arrogated it to his pathetic little virtual empire.  Then I had to switch to “Omniverse”, which may actually be a more accurate term than Metaverse, but it doesn’t sound as good in my opinion.

So, yeah, now (even in legitimate physics) there is the general use of (small u) universes, which is almost inherently contradictory.  Many Worlds may be better, but its a little nonspecific.  There are, many worlds, many worlds just in our solar system.

Maybe the term “polyverse” might work?  Perhaps “facets”?  I don’t know.  I suppose it doesn’t matter much.  It’s just me dwelling on and being bothered by things that don’t really even register to most other people.  Thoughts unlike those of my brethren, indeed.

I hope you have a great day.

*I was resistant to the notion when I first heard about it, from my kids as it turns out.  But I looked into it, and I heard the arguments‒perhaps most accessibly addressed by Neil DeGrasse Tyson‒and I was convinced.  It turns out that the international astronomical community doesn’t lightly go and change the designation of something, knowing there will be many pissed off Boomers and Gen-Xers (Hello!), but does so only with very well thought-out reasons.

**Though, to refer to cartoons again, Uni was also the name of the little unicorn on which the barbarian character doted in the cartoon Dungeons and Dragons from way back when.