ASD

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It might be the pate of a politician, which this blog now o’erreaches

Hello and good morning, o dedicated reader(s).

I honestly don’t feel very much like writing today‒I feel extremely low even for me, very gloomy, very pain-riddled and dysthymic, my mood made worse by the diminishing daytime in the northern hemisphere‒but since I did my little throw-away non-blog last Thursday, I figured I might as well do something today.  I don’t know if anyone truly looks forward to my blogs‒it’s hard to imagine someone’s day being worse because they didn’t get any input from my thoughts‒but just in case someone does, I will write.  Or, rather, I am writing.

I don’t want anyone to think that my depression is unusually bad due to political events, and certainly not for anything parochial, provincial, local in time and space.  Cat forbid!

I’m sure that people throughout history have thought that whatever local politics was happening just then, at that moment, was Earth-shattering and of monumental importance.  But, of course, as Ozymandius reminds us, all the great people and events of the past, all the presidents and emperors and warlords and whatnots, are but headless, trunkless, disintegrating statues in a featureless desert.

Actually, most of them are never even that.  During the Cold War, admittedly, especially the latter part during maximum arms race and belligerence between the US and the USSR, it was possible for politics to engender the destruction of much of civilization (and I truly didn’t think the odds were good that we would avoid thermonuclear war for very long*) but even then the moment-to-moment politics was almost incidental.

The Cold War and its existential dangers lasted through numerous presidents and premiers, the former of various political parties‒Truman (D), Eisenhower (R), Kennedy (D), Johnson (D), Nixon (R), Ford (R), Carter (D), Reagan (R), all the way up to George H. W. Bush (R).  And, of course, on the other side, we had Stalin (C), Khrushchev (C), Brezhnev (C), Chernenko et al (C), and Gorbachev (C).  One might imagine that Bush, Sr. and Gorbachev would be truly celebrated historical figures, given their leadership positions at the end of the Cold War, but I don’t see a lot of evidence thereof.

Now, political stupidity** has, of course, caused havoc locally on many an occasion.  More people were killed thanks to the ideological idiocy of Stalin and Mao, for instance, than were killed in wars in the 20th century, despite the immensity of those wars.

But, of course, nearly all the people who died in and around the first world war at least (and most of those alive during the second) would have been dead by now, anyway.  And certainly, everyone who died unnecessarily during the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars would definitely be dead by now, whatever might have happened.  And all the people slaughtered by the hordes of Genghis Khan would be dead now, no matter what.  And certainly anyone killed due to the mismanagement of even the worst of the Caesars would be dead now‒as dead as Julius Caesar, as they say.  And the people of Greece and Macedon and “Asia Minor” and Egypt and Persia and all those other areas would be dead now whether Alexander the Great had conquered his known world or not.

I recall a column that Michael Shermer wrote in Scientific American (back when it used to be worthy of his writing) called “Remember the 6 billion” (roughly the population of the world at that time).  His point was that, within the following 120 years at most, every single person then alive would die…and for the most part it would go entirely unnoticed, because new people are constantly sporulating to take the place of the ones that fall by the wayside.

The “Great Men” (and women) of history are mostly just names and caricatures; they have no effect on the long term structure of civilization.  We recall that Alexander was a brilliant military leader‒an artist in that realm, perhaps‒but his contributions to that field have no major bearing on modern life.

The ideas of Archimedes, for instance, have had much more durable effects, but that’s because they are discoveries about the nature of the universe, of reality and its underlying rules or tendencies, and so they are, in a sense, universal and universally discoverable by any intelligent civilization anywhere in the cosmos.  Ditto for Galileo and Newton, for Maxwell and Einstein and Schrodinger and Planck and their compatriots.

Not that we should not celebrate those achievements and discoveries, but they are in some senses nonspecific to any individual.  Even the work of Darwin, which may seem both specific (har!) and provincial, since it refers to life on Earth, is probably at least as universal as the work of Newton or Dirac or even Emmy Noether.  Natural selection applies to numerous things even within the higher orders of civilization‒languages, political systems, forms of transportation, the durability and character of bureaucracies, etc.  A form of it may apply to the formation of planetary systems and the potential origin of life therein, and even to the possible bubble universes of the hypothetical inflationary multiverse (or more specifically in Lee Smolin’s speculative notion of universe natural selection through black hole related cosmogenesis).

But politics‒well, it’s provincial in pretty much every way.  Can you imagine any truly alien race caring who got elected president or which party ran the poorer campaign, why one did better or the other worse?  Go canvas the dolphins for their opinions, or the octopuses, or the corvids, or ask a beehive or a termite mound or an ant colony.  Try to get them to give flying fuck at a tiny little that’s ass*** about the minutiae of human politics.

No, my depression, like my pain, is endogenous, or at least it is not trivially reactive.  It is always with me, a truly dark passenger (who often takes the wheel).  It’s probably a product of my atypical, alien neurology, but of course, I’m not anything like as alien as a cephalopod or hymenopteran or a cetacean.  I’m just humanlike enough to exist in the uncanny valley:  weird enough to be unsettling, but not weird enough to be interesting or cute or “beautiful” because of it.

So go ahead, catastrophize or hyper-celebrate about the latest political farce, not recognizing that a lot of what went wrong on all sides was that very tendency to demonize, to catastrophize, to overreact and to be self-righteous.

There is a saying that came into prominence sometime in my teens to twenties (I don’t recall the first time I heard it).  I initially found it irritating just because it was such a “new thing”, but I think its message has endured and even grown in value:  get over yourself.

Everyone needs to take this admonition to heart.  We are all just virtual particles, not-quite-really-real bosons that can carry some degree of information or “force” when there are enough of us around, but which all ultimately pop back out of existence before our presence can even really be noticed by any outside observer.

That’s okay.  It had better be okay, because it’s not optional****.  And if that state of the world, that nature of reality, is unnerving to you, don’t mind it too much.  It won’t trouble you for very long.  No one here gets out alive.

TTFN

*We still haven’t avoided it for very long.  It’s only been a danger for about, what, 70 years?  Really, it’s a little less than that since we’ve had truly civilization-ending amounts of sufficiently powerful nuclear weapons.  So, since I’m just now 55 years old, the threat of global thermonuclear war is only about a decade-ish older than I am.  It could almost be thought of as my eldest sibling.

**Redundant?

***I would not put it past dolphins to try such a thing.

****It’s a bit like free will:  You either have it or you don’t, but you don’t have any choice in the matter.

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From the wisdom of beer commercials to the gibberings of Azathoth

It’s Friday.  I guess many people express the notion of gratefulness for the end of the work week by saying, “Thank God it’s Friday”, and I suppose that’s a positive and healthy attitude.  It’s good to enjoy your work and to be productive, of course‒though merely human levels of productivity are creeping ever closer to obsolescence‒but it’s also good to enjoy being nonproductive, to being able to divert oneself into other matters.  It’s like the guy sang in the old Michelob Light commercial:  “Who says you can’t love your job and leave it, too?”

Who’d have thought that one could find even small nuggets of real wisdom in beer commercials?  Then again, the making of beer may have been one of the early drivers of the development of agriculture, even more so than bread, so beer has been with us as long as civilization has existed.  It’s also one of the rewards that wheat gave us when it domesticated us.

I’m working tomorrow, so this is not the end of the work week for me.  I don’t know whether I will write a blog post tomorrow or not.  I didn’t plan specifically to write this one (but neither did I plan not to write a blog post).

Yesterday, though, I read a quick snippet from a young autistic woman on “Threads”, which is Zuckerberg’s competitor for the website formerly known as Twitter, and which is run as a sort of strangler fig on the tree trunk of Instagram.  This young woman commented on how she sometimes had the intense desire to write copious journals because that way, if she died alone and utterly separate and friendless‒as she seems to think might happen‒at least it was possible that someday someone might really know her and who she had been.

I’m paraphrasing, of course.  But this was the gist of her comment as I understood it, and it was brief and clear enough that I don’t think I could have misunderstood too badly.  Anyway, it struck a resonance within me, and made me think that such a drive might be at least part of my impetus to write my blog.

Of course, the retrospectoscope always distorts what one sees through it, so even though I trust my memory of my own internal states as much as I trust anything, I know it cannot be perfect.  How could it be?  The state of the mind in any instant encompasses all the memories and thoughts it contains about prior states, however limited or exhaustive that memory might be.  If the brain had then to remember that full state as part of its memory in the next state, then the required storage and processing would double with each passing instant.  And while I think it would be quite a treat to have exponentially growing intelligence, if it was mostly used to remember itself in every successive moment, that would be a bit of a waste.

Still, whether my prior motivations had any trace of the above notion or if it is a newly added interpretation, it doesn’t really matter.  It is here now, and I think it’s operational.  I used to have friends with whom I could talk on a daily basis about matters of mutual interest and so on, and with whom I could experience new things and take in new ideas.  But that was a long time ago.  And even then, I think I was weirder than my friends, and weirder than my wife once I was married.  And then, of course, I was divorced and then more, worse things happened, and well…it’s been roughly 2 decades since I had anyone with whom I could connect on anything like a daily basis.

So, though my blog never did really seem to help much as a form of psychotherapy (then again, my many, many hours of actual psychotherapy didn’t do very much but make me at least feel that I was communicating with someone) maybe it at least gave me some form of record, some sense in which I could know that, at least in principle, my thoughts (some of them, anyway) were out there in the world and discoverable, as are my so-far published books and my so-far released songs.

In the long run, this may well not matter even in a trivial sense.  On the scale of infinity, everything is negligible, and even on the “mere” scale of our cosmic horizon‒a sphere about 96 billion light years across‒everything that has ever happened or probably ever will happen on Earth is entirely unnoticeable.  Hell, even on the scale of the solar system, the Earth is not easily seen as any more striking than any other structures present.  And on the scale of the galaxy, again, we don’t even really exist in any meaningful way.  Not yet, anyway.

But on the scale of the Planck length and the Planck time, we are vast and ancient.  And on that scale, my thoughts may seem as potent (and perhaps as nonsensical) as the gibberings of Azathoth.  Nevertheless, they are here.  They are now.  I’m not sure whether I am glad of that fact, or embarrassed, or bemused, or what.  But these are those thoughts for this morning, for today.

Have a good one if you can.

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You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout till you have drench’d our steeples, drown’d the blogs!

Hello and good morning.

I’m going in to the office today, since down my way, Hurricane Milton has not been very impressive so far.  This is not a surprise.  We were always going to be only on the periphery of the system, and on the leeward side of the state (so to speak).  There wasn’t even any rain of significance down by where I live; just a bit of relatively high wind.

We are going through a bit of rain as I ride in my Lyft to work, but for south Florida, it’s a piddling amount so far.  The wind is mildly interesting, but I’ve ridden a 650 cc scooter (basically a motorcycle with automatic transmission) through wind and rain much worse than this.  I don’t think that was a wise thing to do for anyone who cared about his or her life and health much, but for me, it was just fine.

I’m in a Lyft, by the way, because the train service is suspended today, as it was yesterday.  This was probably not absolutely necessary, but I respect the abundance of caution.

Traffic, at least, seems very light, which is also not surprising.  Most people in the area are not working today, I suspect.  We shall see how many people come to the office today.

I’ve been a bit frustrated lately, as an infection of some kind (possibly a few different ones) has afflicted quite a few people at the office, but I have not gotten sick.  Not only would such an illness give me the opportunity for rest for which I am able to excuse myself (and might even allow me to sleep, given the physiology of the immune response), but it’s also an opportunity potentially to develop some more severe, life-threatening superinfection*.

Apparently, some people used to call pneumonia “the old man’s friend”.  Well, I’m not that old (and I wouldn’t recommend my friendship to anyone, even a pulmonary infection) but apparently the average lifespan for people on the autism spectrum‒assuming that I am, which I give very high likelihood‒is somewhere in the mid-50s.  So, it wouldn’t be unreasonable for something to kill me sometime soon.

Of course, such averages are strongly affected by outliers.  People with the highest support needs are probably more likely to die at significantly younger ages, and that will tend to bring the average down.  It’s a bit like how the very high infant mortality rate strongly skewed the average lifespan in pre-modern times.  People who did reach adulthood probably didn’t live much shorter lives than we do now.

Actually, modern people in the west may be backsliding lifespan-wise, at least in America, as we eat more refined carbs and are less active and so are more prone to hyperinsulinemia, which brings with it not just increased risks of diabetes and elevated lipids, but even increased risks of high blood pressure, heart disease, stroke, and many cancers, as well as infections.

The infant mortality issue illustrates one way in which reported average lifespans and similar statistics can be misleading, at least for people who don’t understand what’s behind the numbers.  It reminds me of something I may have discussed here before:  people (rightly enough) make fun of the fact that (to make up a statistic that’s probably not too far from reality) ninety percent of people think they are above average drivers.

Now, it is almost certainly true that ninety percent of people are not above average drivers; it’s just that so-called neurotypical people tend to have overinflated (and undeserved) senses of self-esteem.  But the notion that seems to be implied in most discussions of such statistics is that it’s impossible for 90% of people to be above the average.  This is not the case, at least not if “average” refers to the arithmetic mean, as it usually does.

If ninety people out of a hundred each scored exactly 51 (out of a 100, say) on some test of driving ability, and the remaining ten only scored 1 point each, then the average score would be ((90 x 51) + (10 x 1))/100, which is 46.  So, ninety percent of people would not only all be above average, but would be five points above average.  It’s not a very impressive score, but it is true.

Now, if it were said that ninety percent of people think they are above the median, then that would be erroneous by definition, because of the meaning of the term “median”.

Most people don’t seem to understand these and other mathematical concepts, and yet those concepts and related ones of many and varied kinds can have significant impacts on the lives of billions.  I once wrote a blog post on Iterations of Zero recommending that probability and statistics be more aggressively emphasized in secondary school education, because I think understanding them would give people far greater insight and even agency in the world.

And yet, we see “humorous” memes such as the one below, of which there are numerous iterations and variations:

pythagorean meme

I say the fault for that lack of use lies with the individual, not with their education.  Just because they don’t use the Pythagorean Theorem doesn’t mean it isn’t and couldn’t be useful**, and even if the specific theorem wasn’t useful then the capacity to do it and other, related things, is useful.

I feel I may have mentioned it here recently, but even when one doesn’t use mathematics*** in one’s profession, working with them strengthens the mind and makes it more fit for many other purposes.  Usually, one doesn’t do push-ups to become really good at doing push-ups, and one doesn’t jog in order to become a really good jogger.  One exercises to become stronger and healthier, more capable.  The mind is even more responsive to exercise than is the body, and if there are limits to how strong it can become‒in whatever sense‒I don’t think anyone has come close to reaching them****.

That’s that for today.  I hope you’re all weathering your personal storms reasonably well.  The one down here hasn’t done much to me; I probably could have slept outside in the rear of the house last night without any trouble.  The wind might have been soothing.  It might even have helped me get a better sleep.  It’s not as though it could have been much worse.

TTFN

*By which I mean an infection that opportunistically occurs due to the body’s weakened defenses caused by an initial infection, not an infection with exceptional nature or virulence.

**Understanding geometry is so potentially useful in so many ways that it’s said that the only time in his life that Isaac Newton laughed was when someone asked him what the point was in studying Euclid.  Newton is universally reputed to have been quite arrogant, vindictive, and impatient, to say the least.  One can only imagine the sheer amount of vitriol and scorn that would have been conveyed by that solitary gelastic moment.

***Or philosophy, or physics, or chemistry, or biology, or history, or literature, etc.

****Not even Newton or Von Neumann.

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O madam, my old blog is cracked, it’s cracked!

“Hello and good morning,” he said with a sigh.

Here I am, doing this again, or still doing it, or however you want to characterize it.  Words cannot give an absolutely complete picture of things that happen, not without being as dense in information as the literal reality itself, and if one is going to do that, one is going to have to double the information density of every real thing in order fully to describe it, which cannot be done at scale.  As I’ve said before, the only thing with computing power adequate to completely simulate the universe IS the universe, at least as far as I can tell.

I had meant to be done with all of this, or at least on my way to being done with all of this, or on my way toward something better or at least different starting on Sunday, the first day of Autumn, Bilbo and Frodo’s birthday.  Unfortunately, I had rather severe problems with my feet‒my left heel/plantar fascia and my right Achilles tendon‒that made it unworkable to carry things out the way I had intended.

I’ve been doing my best to calm these foot problems down, and they both are improving‒being a trained MD with 15 years of clinical experience is good for something* it seems‒but it may just be necessary to choose some other path to my destination.  There are many from which to choose, and I am prepared for several of them.  This is not a new or frivolous idea of which I speak, and I have put thought and preparation into it for a long time, all while foolishly hoping for some answer, some rescue, some epiphany, but ultimately finding such hopes to be chimeras or will-o-the-wisps**…or maybe even balrogs.

Anyway, as you probably already know, I posted all of Extra Body here last week over the course of four days.  If you read and enjoyed it, please take a look at my books on Amazon and consider buying and reading one or more of them.  Though I should warn you, most of my stories are much darker than Extra Body.

If you’re not good with dark stories, may I suggest The Chasm and the Collision?  My sister has rightly pointed out that it’s my only story with as upbeat an ending as Extra Body.  I would say Son of Man and Mark Red are somewhere in between, and a few of my stories, like If the Spirit Moves You (found in Welcome to Paradox City) and, to a lesser extent, “I for one welcome our new computer overlords” have some lightness to them.  The former could even be called a comedy of sorts.  But both stories center around fairly dark concepts or situations.  Many of my other stories are horror stories…though there’s not a single “supernatural” thing in my darkest ever story, Solitaire, which is available solo and also appears in Dr. Elessar’s Cabinet of Curiosities.

Anyway, I doubt very many people will ever read any of my stories, which I think is too bad, but I certainly have no right to have my stories read.  I think there might be a lot of people who might get at least some joy out of some of them, though.  I think it would also be very satisfying to know that many people read my stories and some fraction of them enjoyed them.  Even if they read them without knowing who the author was, I might not mind.  But maybe I would.  I’m not quite so egoless as all that.

Despite that aside, I have not started writing anything new since publishing Extra Body.  I did open up and look at Outlaw’s Mind and I remade a version of it with the whole first in media res scene taken out, since the story ended up going in directions that I think were better than that original idea.  But I have no will to work more on it.  Likewise, when I even contemplate working on HELIOS, I feel an almost visceral revulsion or intimidation.  And roughly the same thing applies for DFandD, or any of my other potential stories, like Changeling in a Shadow World and Orion Rising and so on.

The various drawing materials I bought upon being briefly inspired by Facebook “reels” of people drawing have laid fallow since I got them.  I can’t imagine drawing something now.  Nor can I really focus enough to read books or watch lectures on serious treatments of General Relativity or Quantum Mechanics, though I dabble here and there throughout most days.

I did read a new book:  Annihilation.  I had seen the movie, starring (a thoroughly misused) Natalie Portman, and wasn’t very impressed.  But then I stumbled across a video page by a young woman who is a Star Wars fan and an author and who said she had loved the book but then had seen and hated the movie, so I got the book (for Kindle).  It was hypnotic and disturbing and bizarre, and definitely far better than the movie.

Unfortunately, it’s told in first person, and when I read first person books I tend to lose a bit of my own sense of self and start thinking with the narrator’s thoughts, even about my real life, at least for a time.  It’s the closest I come, in a way, to having a real “theory of mind” in the ordinary sense.  Otherwise, I don’t tend to have a concept in my mind of what other people might be thinking or doing or feeling when I’m not in their presence.  I think reading fiction from a young age helped save me from being utterly confused by humans in general.

People are observable phenomena, and can be fascinating and fun and engaging, and I like less than half of them half as well as they deserve.  But other than through their own words, or through fiction, I don’t really have an “image”*** of other people’s thoughts or minds.  I’ve never even for a moment wanted to be someone else (though pretending to be‒i.e., acting‒can be enjoyable), because I can’t really imagine what it would be like to be someone else‒not from a subjective point of view, anyway.

I have been playing guitar and singing a bit in the mornings at the office some days, when I know I am by myself and can feel relatively uninhibited.  That’s sometimes enjoyable and sometimes painful (though in a strangely addictive way), and I occasionally think about making a video like some I’ve made previously, of me playing and singing Nothing Compares 2U, or Fake Plastic Trees, or Lucky, or The Man Who Sold the World, or even Karma Police or Ashes to Ashes or Weird Fishes (though I can’t so far do the “arpeggi” part of that latter song), all of which I can play and sing reasonably well.  But the thought of doing the work is too intimidating, and anyway, I can’t really bear the notion of putting my disgusting face out there for people to see.

Okay, well, that was a meandering bit of nonsense.  Unfortunately, here I am, still here, alive and writing this blog‒if nothing else for the moment.  I hope something will change about all that, and soon.  I cannot continue as I am, but I cannot see any better path other then no path at all.  Still, of all things, writing this blog is probably the most ego-syntonic thing I do, and I greatly appreciate everyone who reads and likes and “likes” it, even if I cannot comprehend why you do.  Just, thank you.  I surely cannot thank you as much as you deserve.

TTFN

*Though, like everything else about me, it turned out not to be good for very much for very long.

**Or should that be “wills-o-the-wisp”?

***Not really the right term.  Perhaps “model” might be better?

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Nor steel nor poison, malice domestic, foreign levy, nothing can blog him further.

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, the 27th of June (I’ll reluctantly presume that you know the year and the era), and it’s time for another edition of what is now my weekly blog post.  I’m on my way to the office and writing this on Google Docs on my phone.  I will have to use my little laptop computer to confirm the specific stats on my fiction writing over the last week, but I’ve done significantly more than the previous week, adding more nearly 5,000 words, bringing the total to over 66,000, and the current page count to 101*.

There were even a few mornings this week on which I felt the urge to write more than a page, and so I did.  The story is very nearly done‒the first draft, anyway.  Of course, there will be many changes to be made during editing, or at least much shaping of its rough-hewn ends.  And though, obviously, this will never be a short story, I do plan to shave a good 10,000 words off the final product.  That may sound arbitrary, but I’m almost always wordier than necessary, and there are frequent little thoughts and comments from the characters that don’t really add much to a tale other than perhaps giving a little color.

In any case, I should be able to publish it as a novella, in paperback in addition to the Kindle version, assuming I live long enough.

That is far from certain.  Just yesterday, I had to leave work shortly before lunch, because in the morning, while writing fiction and then getting an early start on payroll and other office-related stuff, I was having a lot of back and hip pain, and I was slightly more sleep-deprived than usual, so I was not clear-headed.  As a consequence, I think I took a double dose of aspirin and possibly Tylenol as well.  And I take 3 aspirin at once normally, so 975 mg instead of the usual 650.  Even as I took the (presumed) second 975 mg dose, I thought that maybe I had already taken some, but I decided that I didn’t really care.  I was miserable and in a lot of pain, and I didn’t much mind if I poisoned myself, a bit or a lot.  I’ve been courting and investigating (and even investing in) far more potent and nasty toxins; aspirin is frankly mild.  The addition of Tylenol (when my pain didn’t lessen) was just a little icing on the analgesic cake, even if I did take 4 extra-strength tablets in relatively quick succession.

Anyway, by the time I got done with the payroll, I was feeling extremely foggy and sleepy, and also mildly queasy, and I could not easily focus my mind on anything.  It was an interesting experience, especially the part about actually feeling sleepy(!), so I told my boss that I wasn’t feeling well and asked if he minded if I left after half a day.  He was fine with it, as was the coworker who shares some of my tasks.

I also told my boss why I felt ill:  that it was because I had more or less accidentally taken more than double the recommended dose of aspirin and possibly of acetaminophen.  I think I was kind of hoping that he might recognize that there’s more going on than a one-off mistake in my bigger picture…or that someone would.  But alas, no such luck has prevailed so far.

I get it; no one wants to deal with me saying anything about how I feel‒present company excluded, I guess.  They certainly don’t want to take it seriously.  I mean, earlier this week, I was trying to stretch sideways in my chair to relieve some serious tightness and pain in my back, and two coworkers/friends‒my two closest office friends‒were walking past.  They asked me, “You okay, Doc?”  I gave the simple and honest answer, “No.”  I meant it on practically all levels, and tried, at least a little, to make that general fact evident.  But the response from both of them was to say, almost dismissively, “Yeah, I know how you feel.”

No.  No, you obviously don’t.

So many times in recent years and especially in recent weeks and months, I’ve felt that I was sending out painfully loud signals that I was in distress.  I’ve felt that it all must be written all over my face, and in my body language, and even in the actual words I say, such as, “I hate my life, I wish I were dead.”  But somehow, no one seems to notice, or perhaps they think I’m joking, or that I’m exaggerating.

It certainly seems clear that I at least have the attribute (associated with ASD) of not being readily able to express or communicate my emotions‒often I don’t even recognize them.  But it’s terribly frustrating, especially when one tries to put not-too-subtle signs up, such as buying two different ropes and tying them into nooses, then leaving them that way where people can see them, or buying a whole plastic “can” of sodium hydroxide (lye), or breaking up a cheesy old shot glass into little shards and splinters of glass.

Each of those latter two substances can be (and has been) put into gel capsules from which the psyllium they originally contained has been emptied.  Then the new handful of capsules can be put in an easily accessible place, in case an emergency exit (or just a gamble on a possible emergency exit) might be necessary, severely painful though it would probably be.

But nobody takes very strong notice of such things; it’s just Doc being weird, like he’s always been his whole life (though the people at work haven’t known me nearly so long, it’s nevertheless true that I have been weird my whole life).  It’s just Doc’s dark sense of humor‒which is apparently often quite funny, and certainly catches people off-guard, especially since my delivery of jokes is often dead-pan, appropriately enough.

I guess a part of me‒not a small part‒doesn’t want anyone to grasp the urgency of the situation until it’s too late.  Goodness knows I don’t like the idea of being a burden to other people, especially people I like, and I’m already such a burden on them and on the world at large that it’s hard to justify.  And I certainly don’t think there’s any sense in which I deserve help of any kind.  I’m a pretty vile and horrifying creature.

Maybe it’s good that my thoughts don’t show on my face, because often my thoughts are just urges or wishes to enact stunningly violent retribution on idiots.  As I noted in my meme from last week (playing on the line from The Guardians of the Galaxy, Volume 3) it seems that I was not born to be a dad, but that I was born to be a destroyer.

Maybe it’s just as well that no one recognizes the danger I pose to myself.  Maybe it’s best if finally, someday very soon, the structure of me fails catastrophically and I vanish.  This will cause some minor, very slight and localized disruption here and there, but it’ll be like ripping off a Band-Aid.  It’ll certainly be better for everyone than anyone wasting their time and energy trying to help me.

Anyway, I hope at least to finish the first draft of Extra Body, but after that, I’m making no predictions, and I’m certainly not making any promises.  Maybe, if nothing else, if I don’t get it published myself, someone else can clean it up and publish it.  As “my little green friend” said, “Always in motion is the future.”  That is, until it comes to a halt, of course.

TTFN

*The exact numbers are: 4,877 net new words since last blog, and a current word count of 66,494.  101 pages is correct.

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Doom’d for a certain term to walk the night and, for the day, confin’d to blog in fires

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, and so I am writing my traditional Thursday morning blog post.  This is my first post this week—which feels odd, I have to admit—and should also be my last post for the week, barring (as I always say) the unforeseen.

It’s the Summer Solstice in the northern hemisphere (the Winter Solstice in the southern hemisphere), and so it is the “longest” (“shortest”) day of the year.  It’s also the official beginning of summer in the northern hemisphere (winter in the south), though nature doesn’t give a flying f*ck at a tiny little rat’s ass about how humans label the days.

Speaking of labeling the days, the Tri-rail system is making a repeated, official announcement that on July 4th it will be operating on a weekend/holiday schedule, which is not a surprise.  What is irritating—to me, though probably not to anyone else—is the fact that they have set it up to say that this schedule will occur on “the 4th of July, July 4th”, which they repeat in Spanish and Creole.

It’s irritating because, if they’re going to name the holiday and then give the date, why don’t they refer to it as “Independence Day”, which is after all the original name and point of the holiday?  I mean, it’s worth recalling the ideas included in the Declaration of Independence, aspirational though many have always been and not yet quite fully instantiated.  You know, the whole right to life, “liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”, the fact that all (people)* are created equal, and the fact that governments only legitimately exist in order to secure the rights of the people, “deriving their just power from the consent of the governed”, and that when government fails to perform its fundamental duty, it is the right of the people to change it, with the caveat that one should not change governments lightly or frivolously.

It’s absurd to say that the 4th of July is on July 4th, because it’s redundant, quite apart from failing to acknowledge the point of the holiday.  It’s a bit like making an announcement, “El tren funcionará según el horario de los domingos el Cinco de Mayo, el quinto día de mayo.”  The fact that the announcement is in the form it takes is further evidence that humans don’t think either about the significance of the day nor the logic and concision of the language they use to convey information.

It sometimes gets to the point where one doesn’t bother trying to determine why a particular person is a misanthrope but rather one wonders why anyone is not a misanthrope.  I’m not a bigot, though; I don’t just hate humans.  I don’t think the other animals are any better that humans are (and I’m no great admirer of fungi, plants, protozoa, and prokaryotes).  They’re just less competent (in the broad sense of the word), and so their blind self-interest and response to entirely “local”** influences tends to cause less damage and create fewer absurdities and stupidities.

That’s enough of me griping about train announcements.  In other news, I have been writing this week (though I did not work on Saturday after all, because the office was closed, so I didn’t write any on that day).  Since last post, I’ve written a total of 3,731 words on Extra Body.  It would have been more—it probably should have been more—but I’ve really been writing only a page a day, and I’ve had to force myself to do that.

I’m incredibly exhausted.  My sleep has been consistently poor, even for me, and if anything it seems to be deteriorating steadily.  I can’t even rest when I have down time; I’m extremely tired but I don’t feel sleepy.

To quote John at the bar in the song Piano Man, “I believe this is killing me”.  I’m not speaking metaphorically.  Every day I feel vague and separate, like a very faintly received and poorly rendered analog television signal, dominated by static.  My dysthymia/depression is very bad, my tinnitus is just awful, making my sensory sensitivity to sound (or “SSS” for short) all the worse.  I can’t even tell if I’m writing coherently, or if I’m speaking coherently at any given day or time.  Thankfully—I guess—I speak to nearly no one, other than a few people at work, and that’s pretty limited, because I feel like I have nothing to say that isn’t inane or repetitive.

Of course, it doesn’t help that Sunday was Father’s Day, which is at best a bittersweet holiday for me; I haven’t physically been in the presence of my children since about 2013, and though I’ve exchanged emails, texts, and a few phone calls with my daughter (and she sent me a cool gift for Father’s Day), I’ve had all of one e-mail exchange with my son since 2013 (unless I’m forgetting something).  Clearly, I’m unsatisfactory and/or unpleasant even to the people I love most in the world.  You can just imagine how irritating I am to people who hate me (of which group I am the chief member).

And, of course, two Saturdays from now, June 29th would have been my 33rd wedding anniversary.  Thirty-three is, of course, the age at which hobbits “come of age”, and was Frodo’s age at the beginning of The Lord of the Rings, though it was seventeen years later that he left the Shire to begin his great journey.

Okay, well, I’m rambling now.  I’ve probably been rambling all along, but it’s becoming impossible not to see it at this point, even for me.  I’ll try to get a little more done on Extra Body this week if I can.  It really is almost finished, but that’s a rather nebulous status.  I could conceivably finish the first draft by next Thursday, but I would not recommend placing any bets on it.  I also wouldn’t recommend placing any bets on me living to see it published, let alone to writing and finishing HELIOS, or anything else, for that matter.

I’m just too damn tired and discouraged, and whatever my species actually is, they seem to have forgotten about me, if they ever realized that they left me here***.  I’ve been investigating high, open parking garages in the area—they’re not as common as I would wish in this part of Florida—and experimenting with replacing the psyllium with other substances in these generic Metamucil capsules I have, just to try to figure out promising techniques or ideas.  I don’t know what’s going to happen, of course.  But I’m damn near sure that there will be no epiphany or miraculous rescue.  As far as I can tell, that’s just not how my life works.

Anyway, I hope you all have a good week, and a good beginning of summer, though of course the heat in the American east and northeast is supposedly pretty bad.  It’s rough down here, too, but that’s not anything new.

TTFN

destroyer

*Even Star Trek only fixed their androcentric version of things with the start of The Next Generation in the eighties, so we shouldn’t be too hard on Jefferson et al for unthinking sexism (they had other moral errors that were at least as egregious).  Even in Greece, the birthplace of democracy, women only got the right to vote in 1952, so the US had them beat by over 30 years.  And, of course, there are plenty of countries throughout the world where women still do not have equal rights…or often any rights.

**I’m using “local” in a relatively technical sense, here.  Obviously in these days of global communication networks of various kinds, one can be influenced by ideas and forces not merely from across the planet but also—given the information from history—from the past.  However, all these influences only come to bear upon individuals when they actually receive the information that influences them, when any incoming influence actually impinges on their nervous systems.  And, of course, no organism can help but respond to the forces that operate directly upon and within it, anymore than one can choose to waive one’s compliance with the laws of physics.  So, local, national, and international news are in this sense nevertheless all local forces.  Even gravity is really a local force in this sense—each portion of the gravitational field responds not literally to distant objects, but rather to the state of the field right next to it.  This is especially obvious in the phenomenon of gravitational waves, but is true of all gravitational effects.  And, of course, like all influences in this, our universe, the transmission of those influences cannot go faster than the fundamental speed of causality, which is the speed of light.  There is some possibility that, at least in some sense, quantum mechanics is a non-local process (or set of processes) but I have my doubts about even that.

***This is metaphorical—well, usually—and I am not literally delusional.  It merely captures how I feel about myself in relation to all the other people in the world.

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Morose and morbid, but alas, not morphean

This is getting truly intolerable.

I woke up and got up even earlier today than I have most days recently, though I went to sleep no earlier last night.  I finished my fiction writing already by 6:30 am, after having come to the office, though I only wrote a single page:  Block words 784, net words 778, percent difference about 7.7%, total words now 55,105 and total pages 84.  I didn’t have the mental energy to do more.

I don’t know what I’m going to do about this.  I am tired and stressed and borderline angry nearly all the time, and almost everything is unpleasant.  I’m trying to do healthy things, with diet and exercise and even footwear and screen time and all that, but the things I do seem only to make things either stay the same or get worse.  I’m trying very hard to pretend to be as upbeat and positive as I can be–I don’t know, have I been pulling it off here on my blog?–but I spend a substantial part of every day wishing I would die and thinking about optimal ways to make it happen without inconveniencing anyone much, or getting me locked up for trying.

I want to make something clear:  I don’t want to want to die, if you take my meaning.  It’s not a philosophical position, like promortalism or antinatalism*.  At an intellectual level, at a personality level, I would much prefer simply to be reasonably healthy and to like myself and to have a sense of a future and to have joy in the things that have reliably given me joy in the past.  I try.  I really do.  After all, I’m still here.  But to keep trying simply for the sake of “keeping trying”, simply for the sake of “not giving up”, just feels more and more pointless.  To whom am I proving anything?  For whose benefit am I lathering, rinsing, and repeating**?

Oh, well.  What does it matter?  Over 150,000 people in the world die every day.  That’s already more–every single day–than the number of people the Jehovah’s Witnesses believe will be resurrected to reign with Jesus (and yet they keep trying to recruit more people).  At that rate of death, it would take 146 years for all the people presently on Earth to die.  This seems unworkable given that humans rarely live longer than 100 years.  Only a handful reach 120, and as far as we know, no one lives significantly longer than that, as simple fact of biological “design”.  The world is a conveyer belt, transferring countless creatures from birth to the grave, but the people on it think the conveyer belt is eternal–and, in a sense, of course, conveyer belts are.  At least, they are finite but unbounded along the length of their motion, “a circle that ever returneth in to the selfsame spot“.

Oy.  Never mind me.  I don’t think I’m making sense.  I hope you’re all doing well, and that you’ve been getting much more sleep than I’ve been getting.  For goodness’s sake, don’t take it for granted!  Enjoy it.  Luxuriate in it.  Be like Shakespeare, not like Poe, with regard to your attitude toward sleep!

And pay no attention to this man behind the keyboard.  He’s not a bad wizard, he’s just a very bad man.

*Oddly enough, the Wikipedia entries I found for these subjects when looking for a link (so the curious could pursue the subjects further) I found only Swedish language entries that had to be translated.  I’m not going to bother with the links.  The meanings of the terms should be pretty obvious.

*Figuratively speaking.  I only shampoo once on any given day.

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Glory is like a circle in the water, which never ceaseth to enlarge itself, till, by broad blogging, it disperse to naught.

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, as you probably know if you’re reading this on the day it’s posted (if not, there’s only about a 1 in 7 chance* that it’s Thursday when you’re reading it).  This is to be a “typical” blog post, in the “old” style, but I don’t know how much difference that will make compared to other days‒except that I will not be giving you a report on today’s fiction writing, since there has been none.

I’m writing this post on my smartphone.  There are reasons I’m doing it thusly rather than on my laptop computer, but I won’t get into them right now.  I did bring my computer with me, intending to write this on it, but doing so can be mildly cumbersome at times.  It also doesn’t have illuminated keys‒those would have cost a lot more when I bought it‒whereas a smartphone perforce has luminous keys, since all its keys and other features are virtual.

Speaking of smartphones, I’ve recently been thinking about trying my hand at Instagram.  I don’t have the app on my phone, but of course I have an account (since Facebook gave everyone on Facebook an account).  I’ve even recently started following a few people on it.  I’m not particularly photogenic or anything, but I guess Instagram has wider reach than, for instance, blogs on WordPress.  This might give it an advantage as a way to promote my writing and maybe as a way to express other things.  I have no interest in TikTok, but maybe, since Instagram is already part of the Facebook platform, I could try it.

Of course, I have a YouTube channel, but that has never garnered me many views, and the process of making (and editing) videos for it is cumbersome.  I get the impression that there is in-app video production and editing via Instagram.  I know, giving my daily writing reports (for instance) via Instagram may seem like a betrayal of my commitment to the written word as the lifeblood of civilization, but it would be an attempt to promote my blog and more importantly my fiction, so perhaps it would be tolerable.  My soul is worthless anyway, so if I can sell it and get something out of it, maybe I should (METAphorically speaking…get it?).

I think you have to download the Instagram app into your phone to be able to upload videos, or at least I haven’t seen how to do it from a desktop.  But I haven’t looked very hard, either.  I think you can upload photos from the desktop.

Of course, I’m no fun to look at, so no one would come to my account because of my physical beauty…but I do look a little bit like the guy who reads all the signs in funny voices and inflections**, and that guy is hilarious and apparently quite popular (I would add a link, but I don’t know his account name).

I’ve occasionally thought of linking this account to Patreon, but it’s hard to imagine anyone paying even a dollar a month for my blog.  Likewise, I’ve thought about getting on Substack, but if I were to do that, I’d need to make a commitment to putting out more serious, or at least more thoughtful, material.  Also, long-term plans seem frankly comical for me, since I neither expect nor desire a long term.  I can barely get through a day, and I certainly cannot sleep through a night.

For instance, yesterday I had to leave work after lunch because everything from just below my diaphragm on down was in spasm and I was unable to make it resolve despite excessive aspirin and acetaminophen and so on.  Obviously, I did not get a good sleep last night, despite getting back to the house early.  At least the pain has been moderated a bit by my physical rest.

I guess even if I were to die today, given how bad my sleep has been for so many years, I’ve probably had as much “awake” time as a typical American man who dies when he’s 76.  Perhaps more.  I’d have to do the math.  Maybe I will.  Hang on a minute…

Okay, quickly and dirtily, and assuming that sleep change is lifelong and daily, a person who sleeps only 4 hours a day (which is often more than I sleep) will have reached as many waking hours as an 8-hours-a-day 76 year old person by the time the 4-hour person is 60.8 years old.  Of course, those years will be comparatively miserable and groggy and filled with the many consequences of sleep deprivation.  Frankly, 60 years is way too many.  I am not going to put up with 6 more years of this.  I don’t want to put up with 6 more days, and honestly, six hours is often barely achievable.  One of these days it won’t be.

In lighter news, I finally ordered some 6 x 9 spiral-bound “5 Star” notebooks and they arrived yesterday.  My plan is to transcribe into one of them what I’ve written on HELIOS and then continue writing the first draft there.  The ballooning size of Extra Body, and before that Outlaw’s Mind, has made me think I really need to do that.

Don’t get me wrong, neither of those stories could ever have been true “short stories” and I like what’s developed from them.  But I’m sure that my concision has suffered because it’s just so easy to write on the computer, and I get carried away, like someone with ASD who starts talking about a “special interest”.  Maybe that’s why I do it.

I wrote the first drafts of Mark Red, The Chasm and the Collision, and the borderline novella Paradox City on notebook paper, perched on my bunk, on a photo album-style book on my footlocker at just after lights-on (about 3:30 am) every morning at FSP West, and CatC is my sister’s favorite of my stories.  And you may already know that I wrote Solitaire all in one sitting, in a 6 x 9 spiral-bound notebook, while keeping my not-yet-girlfriend (also not-yet-fiancée, not-yet-wife, not-yet-ex-wife) company all night while she worked on a project for her summer job.  Also, parts of the original draft for The Vagabond were written by hand while I was in college and med school.  I finished it on a Mac SE, but those weren’t quite as handy and quick as modern laptop computers.

Anyway, I have this stupidly optimistic (and thus unrealistic) notion that I might actually write HELIOS in such a fashion.  We’ll see, but I wouldn’t hold your breath if I were you.

As always, I would welcome feedback in the comments below about any of the topics mentioned above‒especially about Instagram and the like.  Feedback here works best, in general, but obviously I don’t get very much of it whether here or in other venues, so I suppose I should be grateful for whatever I can get.

This blog post has felt quite long, but it’s actually not too terribly lengthy, so I guess writing on my smartphone has made a difference.  Imagine if I had to write this by hand before entering it into WordPress!  That’s not going to happen, of course, but it’s interesting to contemplate what it would be like.

I hope you all have a good day, and a good week, and month, and year, and so on.  Please take care of yourselves and of those you love and those who love you.

TTFN

*I say “about”, even though days of the week are evenly distributed, because there may be factors that influence the likelihood of someone reading something on any given day.  People may be more likely to read an “old” blog post on, say, the weekend than during the week, or on particular weekdays rather than others, and this distribution is likely to be multifactorial, so I cannot, in good faith, say the chance is exactly 1 in 7.

**I know this because once, I was watching one of that guy’s “reels” and someone came up behind me and asked if that was me in the video, or perhaps someone to whom I was related.

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Brief Wednesday writing report and digressions

Today’s writing on Extra Body:

“Block” words:  738

Net words: 698

Evidently, I cut a fair few words (40 overall) in my rereading/editing of previous writing, making the difference about 5.7% today, an unusually large disparity, at least since I’ve started keeping track.  The total number of words in the story as of today is 48,422, and it is 71 pages long (single-spaced on Word in Calibri 11-point).

As I wrote today, I came to worry that I had given my character a work-week that was now almost eight days long, because I had the character mention that the weekend was coming, but it seemed a long time since the previous weekend.  So, I scrolled back up through the story, noting the day of the week in any given scene, and realized that in the moment of the story that I wrote today, it was Thursday evening.  The weekend was indeed just about to arrive.

Apparently, somewhere in my mind, I had kept track of the days in the story better than I thought I had.

This sort of thing happens to me a lot.  I seem underdeveloped in the usual tendency toward mental self-confidence, and so I frequently check and recheck things to make sure they are as I thought they were.  I check my pockets to make sure my keys are there probably several dozen times a day or more, for instance.  I’m pretty good at mental arithmetic–I do it as part of my job, for one thing, and I can total up the sales numbers as they happen faster than other people can when they use calculators, but then I always recheck the totals three different ways using Excel, and when they are all the same and agree with my numbers, I consider it tolerably likely that I’m correct.  But I never feel certain.  Even though mathematics is the realm of theorems, and once proven, such theorem-laden information should be epistemologically final, I don’t ever feel final about it.  Perhaps this is part of why I am incapable of being religious; faith doesn’t even make any sense to me.

I also find that confidence, as expressed by other people, especially strong confidence, is almost always distasteful, in a powerful, visceral way.  I have severe contempt for people who make declarative statements about things they cannot know for sure, especially about the states of mind of other people, and about other people’s intentions.  Observing discourse about politics is almost always nauseating and infuriating.

The more confident someone is, the less I trust them, because I’ve noted that most people are far more confident than they are justified in being about most things.  And yet, many humans respond to the confident people positively, granting them pseudo-authority, even when–perhaps especially when–their confidence is not based upon anything testable or peer-reviewed or reliable.  This is part of why I hate thinking of those who hold political office as “leaders”.  They are almost always not leaders in any meaningful sense of the term, or they should not be.  I think it would be much better to think of them as employees, and to treat them accordingly.

Oh, well.  Perhaps this sense of uncertainty and the lack of reliability of people who nevertheless have outsized impacts on the lives of others is part of why I have trouble sleeping (though I think it’s mainly inherent and neuro-humoral, and related to what I suspect is ASD).

I slept a little better last night than the night before or the night before that, though it’s not saying much.  I felt vague and punchy all day yesterday, and I pseudo-jokingly said to my coworker that I wondered if anyone knows how to get in touch with Michael Jackson’s former doctor, because I could really use some Propofol.  It’s a pseudo-joke because, while I said it as if it were a joke, if someone offered me the option of being put under with it, even given the risk of death, I might take that offer.  I would certainly consider it.  Though I would have to feel reasonably confident that I was getting what I thought I was getting.  I suppose that’s part of why I wouldn’t really ever want to use illicit drugs–I would never feel comfortable that I was actually getting what I thought I was getting, let alone in any kind of reliable dose.

I hope you all feel vastly better than I feel.  It would be at least some crumb of comfort to be reasonably convinced that the large majority of people in the world tend to be much happier and healthier than I am.  If not, then what’s the point of bothering with the world?

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If Tuesday morning is like this, and Tuesday afternoon is never-ending…

It is Tuesday morning, the 28th of May in 2024 AD or CE, depending on how you prefer to write it.  I suppose it doesn’t really matter much to me; I’m okay either way.  I only first encountered the designation “CE” by the time I was in college (or “university”‒again depending on your preference), but I get why people use it.

I guess it’s probably silly to think that anyone should care whether I indicate what calendar era it is in which I’m writing.  I don’t suppose anyone would think I was writing a blog post in 2024 BC (aka “BCE”).  How would one even know toward which year one was counting down, if one were writing such dates?  Still, who knows how dates may change in the future, and whether someone might stumble across my blog posts in some unguessed age, on some weird, digital archaeological expedition.

How will such searches of the past even happen in the future?  If we advance beyond our current kind of online and personal storage, what would even happen to the data presently on the Internet and web and cloud and whatnot?  Heck, if all power went out for a significant amount of time in the near future, I would suspect that much of the stored data on the net might be lost.

Of course, quantum information will be conserved, if we understand that part of nature as well as we seem to understand it.  But the fact that it exists is not the same as being able to recover it.

Online is not forever.  Even if the actual data related to something sticks around, there will be so much other data that it will be as invisible as a single leaf in the Amazon rainforest as seen from space.  Perhaps far more so.  Very little that happens online is salient to anyone even as it happens, let alone after much time has passed.

Anyway…I’m writing this post on my phone in the back of an Uber heading to the office, because I again slept horribly last night, despite taking melatonin early in the evening.  I don’t know what to do about this sleep problem.  As John at the bar said to Bill*, I believe this is killing me.  And I don’t think I’m being melodramatic or hyperbolic**.

I mean to write at least a little bit of fiction this morning, but my last experience using the laptop computer in the backseat of an Uber was unpleasant.  To be honest, though, just about everything is unpleasant now.  There’s little if anything that brings me even transient joy.  There is occasional, momentary escape in the form of humor, for instance, but even that is becoming more and more difficult.  Mainly, I just feel ridiculously tense and guarded and tired and in pain pretty much all the time, or at least the vast majority of it.

I don’t want to keep doing this.  It’s just not worth it.  Nothing I do and nothing about me is worthwhile.

<sigh>  I’ll add an addendum about my fiction writing before I post this.

***

Well, I wrote 798 “block” words and 799 net words, which means that when I reread stuff today I added a word relative to the previous state of the story.  Still, like yesterday, it seems the difference is only one word, so I’m well below the roughly 3% difference seen in the past.  I don’t know if that’s good or bad or merely a neutral fact.

I could feel how foggy and vague I was while writing, so I forced myself to keep it short.  Actually, I had to force myself to write as much as I did, which was one page.  I’m not sure what my average page number per day has been since I started.  Most days that I write, I write well over one page and usually over two pages, but there have been many non-writing days, so it may average about one a day.  It’s a bit over 45 pages long so far, if memory serves.

No, that’s dead wrong.  It’s actually 70 pages long (I just checked).  That can’t be just a page a day, can it?  Have I been working on this story for more than two months?  I can’t remember.  If anyone out there has been paying attention, please let me know.

Okay, well, that’s enough of that.  I’m done for the day, at least on this stuff.  I feel like I’m done for everything else, too, but of course, the workday hasn’t even really gotten started.  I’m so tired.  This has to end soon.  Everything hurts, and nothing is beautiful, to reverse Vonnegut’s famous quote, as I like to do (I think I’ve done this recently, haven’t I?).  I only even keep moving at all out of habit.  I need just to lie down, figuratively, and let the elements*** take me.

I guess we’ll see if I’m strong enough to do that.  Meanwhile, all of you please have a good day.

*In the song Piano Man by Billy Joel

**As far as I know, I’m Euclidean.

***Or the elephants.  I’m not picky.