autumn

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“Walk this way…THIS way.”

Well, for the first time in a few weeks, I walked to the train station today.  The weather is perhaps ever so slightly better for such things because it’s been raining a lot and it’s slightly cooler.  Maybe.

I’m sure that all the people up north are unimpressed by my grousing, thinking such sardonic things as, “Oh, poor baby, is it too hot for you in the first week of October?”  But I’ve said before, as someone who grew up in Michigan, I like the cooling off that happens in Autumn.  One can always put on a jacket and so on, or wear a sweater (or both) when it gets cool out.  Down here, even if it were okay to go around with no clothes, there are times this would not keep you cool enough to avoid potential overheating and dehydration.

Also, during the day, you could be prone to some truly unfortunate sunburns.

Anyway, I had a pretty decent walk this morning.  I must have been going at a good pace in my new boots, because I arrived in plenty of time for a train twenty minutes earlier than the one I had intended to take.  I’m writing this on that earlier train, since I only had a few minutes to wait before the train I usually just miss arrives.

While I walked, I listened to the Audible version of Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari.  But here’s a surprise:  I was listening to the Spanish version!

I used to speak Spanish pretty well, after taking a couple of years of it in college, including a literature course, and when I was in residency, I had a fair few times to use it, since the Bronx has a large Spanish-speaking population (like most of the Western Hemisphere).  However, it has now been ages since I’ve used it regularly, and I find that when people speak to me in Spanish, I have a hard time understanding much of it.  That seems like such a shame, especially since, by the time of my last college course, I was thinking partly in Spanish.

So, I decided to get that book in Spanish (audio), and listen to it to try to reinvigorate that part of my brain.  I’ve read the book in English, so that makes it a bit easier.  I can’t say that I was honestly following everything that was being said (or read) but I caught quite a few words and sentences and concepts, and I think that will get easier as I go along.

I also recently got an audio book of a Japanese light novel in Japanese (I had to go looking for it on Amazon), and even recorded the audio‒or rather, imported the audio‒for several anime I have watched many times, figuring to do something similar with Japanese, of which I have only a smattering.  But it seems better to focus on Spanish first.  Spanish is all but ubiquitous where I currently live.

But I also want to go for the Nihongo on some of my walks.  I think that learning and using foreign languages helps one understand one’s own native tongue better, and also to recognize the nature and importance of grammar and careful communication.  I’ve said before that language is crystallized thought, and having more ways to crystallize it may at least give one different and more sophisticated ways to think.  Seeing the differences (and commonalities) of language is very interesting, also.

All European languages (as far as I know) have lots of evolutionary history in common.  Some, of course, are more directly related than others; Spanish and Italian are obviously close cousins, while English and Russian are less so.  But when one gets to the “Far East” things are much more divergent from the West (and vice versa), and though there are words imported from Europe (e.g., the Japanese for “bread” is “pan”, as the Portuguese introduced bread to Japan), the roots of the languages appear to be almost completely separate.  This makes it all the more interesting when one finds grammatical structures in common, especially when they do the same thing, but in different ways.  It makes one think Chomsky really was onto something with his notion of a universal, inherent human grammar.

I learn by hearing pretty well, almost as well as I do by reading.  In fact, when I read, I always subvocalize‒i.e., I say the words in my head.  It makes my reading slower, but I read more deeply than most people I know, and I tend to remember what I read better than many.

So, I’ll do some Spanish for now, but maybe I’ll intersperse it with Japanese as well.  It should be interesting, at least.  We’ll see how long this intention lasts.

Before I close, I figured I’d share with you a bit of what might be interesting trivia regarding my walk.  Before starting off, rather than using an “energy drink” replete with high fructose corn syrup or other carbohydrates (which I’m trying to minimize overall and even completely avoid when I can), I drank a few swigs of olive oil!

Ha ha!  That surprises you, I’ll bet.  But it makes sense.  At aerobic exertion levels, the muscles (like most of the rest of the body) “prefer” to run on fatty acids, not glucose, at least when insulin levels are normal.  And, of course, olive oil is all fat, which is a much more efficient form of energy than carbs.  One can’t drink much olive oil in a swig or two (and I did not try) but at least it doesn’t lead to any rebound drop in blood sugar and consequent fatigue.

I don’t know if I will continue to do that, or even if it had any effect on the speed of my walking (there were too many variables to make any credible determination of specific causation), but it certainly doesn’t seem to have impaired my abilities.

That’s enough for now.  I hope you all have a good day, and a good week, and what the heck, have a good month.  It’s one of the best ones of the year.

walk this way

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“Who knows? Not me.”

I didn’t walk the full five miles from the train to the house yesterday afternoon‒I walked about three or three and a half‒because I didn’t want to give myself any blisters or abrasions from walking too far for the first time in a new pair of boots.  But I seem to have stopped well in time for that, since there are no blisters or even sore spots on my feet now, and my ankles and right Achilles tendon appear to be in good nick.  Also, and most importantly, though I had a bit of tension in my right side along my back upon returning to the house, that went away nicely with a bit of stretching and replenishment, so that’s pretty good.

Anyway, lesson learned:  it matters if the boots you wear are even a little bit oversized if you’re going to be walking any very long distances in them.  It looks like these new, half-downsized ones will work well.

It’s been sloppy and wet here in south Florida these last several days, but there does seem to be a slight increase in morning breeziness.  And, of course, since Saturday, the time of darkness has been slightly greater than the time of daylight, and its dominance is increasing at the most rapid pace at which that will happen.  This is because, for a sinusoidal curve, the fastest rate of change is when it crosses the x-axis (at the equinoxes in this case), and the slowest rates of change are at the peak and at the nadir (the solstices in this case).  So, for a little while now, the nighttime will be growing rapidly before it settles out, steadily and gradually, as we barrel toward the end of the year.

After mentioning the fact that I don’t play the guitar in the morning anymore, yesterday I decided to fire up the axe for a bit.  Remarkably, it was still almost perfectly in tune!  Probably it helps that the office is kept pretty much at a constant temperature.  Also, I had left the capo on the fourth fret the last time I played.  That was for playing the chords and stuff from the Nirvana version of The Man Who Sold the World.  I didn’t start with that yesterday, instead playing through a few iterations of Nothing Compares 2 U.  It’s a lovely song.  I like the Chris Cornell version best.  Of course, now Prince (the songwriter and original performer) and Chris Cornell and Sinead O’Conner (who had a big hit with her cover of it) are all dead.

Then I did play some of The Man Who Sold the World, and then Ashes to Ashes, both Bowie tunes, at least originally.  And, of course, Bowie and Kobain are also both dead, though they died under very different circumstances.  Then I got my guitar book out and played a little Just the Way You Are, and Sorry Seems To Be the Hardest Word, and Here, There, and Everywhere, by Billy Joel, Elton John, and Paul McCartney‒all of whom are still alive!  That’s just weird, isn’t it?  Imagine that!

Of course, the latter song is credited to Lennon and McCartney, but that was a formality according to their agreement for all Beatles songs they wrote.  It was a McCartney song, and it was apparently the only song of his for which Lennon directly complimented him.

Considering the quality of Sir Paul’s work overall, that’s a hell of a statement, in more than one way.  First off, it must have really impressed John (rightly so) for him to make a point of telling Paul that it was a good song.  But it seems harsh that John never complimented any others, at least to Paul’s face.

Then again, he was British, and emotional expressiveness (other than through song and theater and literature) is a major national deficit by most accounts.  Maybe that’s why they do so much good music and poetry and drama and comedy and the like.  I often get the feeling that part of the reason Thom Yorke’s singing is so powerful and conveys and evokes such emotion in the listener is that this is Thom’s only real way of expressing himself deeply.  And, of course, he does seem almost possessed when he’s performing.

As a YouTube reactor (I cannot recall which one, for which I apologize) said of his singing, “He’s feelin’ it when he’s singing…and he makes you feel it, too!”

Now, John Lennon did compliment Paul to other people‒during interviews, for instance.  Though even then, he was far from effusive.  That was just his way, I think.  He had a very troubled childhood, and emotional expression was probably difficult for him, even for a Brit.

Then again, he wrote some incredibly expressive songs, from If I Fell to In My Life to Julia to Across the Universe, all the way up to Starting Over and Woman, with scads of others thrown in for good measure.  If being closed off and repressed helped lead to the creation of those truly great works of art, the world at least can hardly feel too horrible about it.  Though it would be nice if a person could be well-adjusted and have the ability to express and receive affection easily and still produce great art (and ideally, of course, not be murdered by a slimy little worm of a creature who claimed to be a fan).

Alas, though it seems possible in principle, it doesn’t seem to happen often, if at all, in practice*.  Shakespeare supposedly wrote Hamlet, and some of his other great tragedies, partly in response to the death of his son, Hamnet.  And of course, I, his much later and far inferior admirer, only really started to write and publish stories that have always been in my head once my life, my family, and my career had been wrecked, and I was in prison.

We can be thankful, if saddened, for the great art that was born of Shakespeare’s sorrow, and of Lennon’s.  In my case, on the other hand, it was almost certainly not worth it, particularly for me.  But I can’t change any of that stuff, either.

Life’s like that, I suppose‒to quite the end of one of my own short stories, possibly the darkest one I’ve ever written…which, weirdly enough, first came out of me years ago, while I was happily passing the time keeping my then-friend and soon-to-be fiancée company while she did some overnight work for a summer job.  I don’t know where it came from, except that I did often like to play solitaire (with real cards).

Anyway, that’s enough for now.  Have a good Wednesday.

*As Einstein is reputed to have said, “In principle, principle and practice should be the same, but in practice, they often are not”, or something like that.  He was a clever fellow.

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G’mar chatimah tovah

It’s Monday, and it’s Yom Kippur, but I am not only going to work, I am actually writing this on Monday morning, because I have a hard time breaking these sorts of patterns.  It’s as difficult for me to force myself to write a post a day early‒on Sunday in this case‒as it is for me not to write a post (or, previously, not to write 3 to 4 pages on a draft of fiction) on a workday morning.  I don’t know whether to feel proud or embarrassed by this attribute, but it can be frustrating at times, and at other times, it can be useful.  Those two things aren’t mutually exclusive.

I am fasting today, however, and I began the fast probably shortly after sundown last night.  I wasn’t paying close attention to the time.  As I’ve discussed previously, the fast entails abstinence from food as well as anything to drink.  That latter bit is in some ways nice, because I tend to have to use the bathroom frequently*, and often have to do so while en route to work.

This is one advantage the trains have over buses: they have bathrooms.  But using them is often a frustrating process, because it’s frequently the case that one or more of the bathrooms is in use (or locked for staff use, as I suspect, though that seems very inappropriate) and I have to go from car to car to find one that’s free.  Of course there are other issues with any public lavatory, but those go without saying.

Anyway, with minimal PO liquid intake, other than what is needed to accompany aspirin and other daily meds and whatnot, I shouldn’t spend nearly as much time running back and forth to the bathroom.  That’s not the main purpose of the fast, of course; it’s merely a silver lining.

It will also be nice not to have to buy anything for lunch today, and not to buy any beverages as well.  Sometimes when I fast, I feel like I don’t know what to do with myself.  I often eat and drink during most days just to pass the time, just to give myself something to do, and to give myself a brief, reliable prod to the reward circuits in my brain.  I certainly almost never eat out of true hunger.  In fact, often, the longer it’s been since I’ve eaten, the less hungry I feel.  I also tend to feel sharper, and a bit more alert.  But I get bored, or tense, or something, and food (and water) is a momentary relief switch.

Whatever.  The point is, I’ll be doing without food and water today, but I am working, though I shouldn’t be.  I shouldn’t be doing anything that I’m going to be doing.  Saturday was the first day of autumn, and Friday was September 22nd**, as I’ve discussed, and I wanted to at least try to use those facts as impetus to take some kind of action…but I don’t want to screw up my coworker’s planned family outing this coming weekend.  At least I didn’t have to work this last Saturday.

If there were a longer time span between now and when he was going, I think I would have been forced to ignore the fact; after all, there’s only so much I can keep putting things off just to avoid the inconvenience of others.  Two weeks extra may at least give me time to make more preparations‒and who knows, maybe it’ll allow time for some superhero to come and save me, or at least to change my mind.

Ha ha.  I’m joking.  That’s extremely unlikely to happen in any form or sense.  If that were going to happen, it’s had plenty of time to do so.

There has been a slight, coincidentally autumnal, turn in the weather this weekend, in that Saturday it was overcast and rainy, and it rained overnight, and there was a bit more wind.  It’s still hot, but a few degrees less so that it has been.  Sunday was warmer and brighter than Saturday, but there was at least still a bit of wind.

My back/hip/leg pain has been flaring these last few days, unfortunately.  It’s always there to some degree, but it’s annoying when it acts up.  Maybe the fast will help reduce it a bit by the end of the day.  I can’t remember if it’s done that in the past‒which probably means it has not.  If it did, if it does, I might be inclined to fast much longer.  Of course, that would be a fast related to food, not to water.  A water fast isn’t going to make one feel better for very long.  It might have other benefits, of course, but that’s not directly related to my pain level…though it is indirectly related.

In any case, I don’t expect anything to give me very much benefit.  But I may try to extend the food fast at least a little bit, even past today.  I could save some money.  And it’s nice not to have to clean dishes or throw away packaging or things like that.  Life is full of so many stupid little inconveniences, all of which add up to a truly miserable experience unless there’s something to counter-balance them.  For me, unfortunately, there is little to no such counter-weight anymore, and there hasn’t been for quite a long time.

All right, well…that’s enough for now.  If any of you are fasting for Yom Kippur, you probably are reading this after the holiday, so I hope you had a good one.  It’s not a happy holiday necessarily, but it’s not sad or mournful, either.  In some ways, it’s an attempt to make a fresh start in a new year, and that’s probably a good thing for anyone.

I don’t expect a fresh start for myself.  I’m not even sure what such a thing would entail.  But it would be nice just to stop feeling rotten (physically, mentally, socially, morally, and so on).  I don’t have high hopes…but then, I wouldn’t, would I?yom kippur

*You can ask my brother and sister; I was a real trial on long-distance road trips of any kind, because I needed to go to the bathroom so often…sometimes more often than there were available bathroom facilities, so I spent a certain portion of my youth relieving myself near the shoulder of many a road.

**Among other things, the night Frodo left Bag End in The Lord of the Rings.

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But if of ships I now should sing, what ship would come to me?

It’s Friday, September 22nd (in 2023 AD or CE…I don’t know what year it might be by Shire reckoning), and that day is the birthday of both Bilbo and Frodo Baggins, the primary characters of The Hobbit and of The Lord of the Rings*, respectively.  They are not close in age, though Bilbo had adopted Frodo as his heir.  In the first chapter of LotR, we find the two celebrating their mutual birthday, when Frodo is turning 33 and Bilbo is turning 111 (eleventy-one, as hobbits apparently say) with their combined ages coming to 144, a “gross”.  So, the age gap is 78 years, but it seems smaller because Bilbo’s life has been stretched by his ownership of the Ring.

An interesting thing to note (for me, at least) is as follows:  since 33 is clearly divisible by 3, and so is 111 (its digits certainly add up to a multiple of 3), then the difference between them, 78, must also be divisible by 3.  Which it is, of course.  78 is 3 times 26, 111 is 3 times 37, and of course 33 is 3 times 11 (which is, of course, 37 minus 26).  This also means that the combined total of 144 is 3 times 48, which it is.

That doesn’t work the same way in reverse, of course.  Just because the difference between two numbers is a multiple of 3 doesn’t mean the numbers themselves are (though if one is, the other is).  As a relatively extreme example, 137 and 149 are both prime, but their difference (12) is a multiple of three.  Obviously, no prime numbers (other than 3 itself) are multiples of 3, by definition.

On the other hand, the difference between any two primes, as long as neither of them is 2, is an even number, since all prime numbers larger than 2 are odd numbers (the even numbers all being divisible evenly by 2), and the difference of any two odd numbers is always going to be even.

Okay, sorry to bore you with all that.  I like trivia about numbers, and especially prime numbers.  I particularly like those primes that others disrespect, or at least I want to show them respect, as it were.  I think I’ve mentioned here before that I used to always try to put 13 gallons in my gas tank whenever I “filled it up”, back in the day.  It didn’t mean anything‒I have no suspicion that there are any mystical qualities to any numbers‒I just thought it was fun, to the point of my being disappointed when I couldn’t do it.

Anyway, today is a memorable day, at least for Tolkien fans (of which there are many), and tomorrow is the equinox, the start of Autumn in the northern hemisphere, and of Spring in the southern hemisphere.  Then, starting Sunday night at sundown, as I mentioned recently, is Yom Kippur.

So, this should be an auspicious weekend for embarking on momentous “journeys” of one kind of another.  But I’m stupidly going to have to wait, out of deference to my coworker.  He went home sick after lunch yesterday, but hopefully he will be in today**.  This is his weekend to work, and I have no desire to cover for him, because he obviously won’t be working next weekend, which would make three weekends in a row for me.

I’ve worked worse and harder schedules, of course, but I was younger then, and I had actual reasons for working and staying alive.  I was literally saving other people’s lives as well, and I was also relieving suffering, to the degree that I could.  Now, I’m a few decades older, and I have no particular reason to work even just to keep myself alive.  I’m not doing any good for anyone, least of all myself.  I’m almost certainly a net detriment to the people who have to interact with me‒this seems a fairly firm conclusion, given that most people have eventually wanted to get away from me, even people who love me, like parents and spouse and children.  I’m definitely not of much benefit to the world at large, either.

I plan to fast on Yom Kippur, which I usually do, though I’m not observant in any other way, anymore.  I think the fast is a useful, or at least interesting, thing.  Since it’s only 24 hours, it’s a full fast, meaning no food or water or anything else, though one is expected to take any medicine one usually takes.  The preservation of life supersedes all competing mitzvot.

Anyway, sorry, I’m being boring again, I think.  I meant to say that I may not write a blog post on Monday morning‒just as a little nod to the day‒or I may write one early, on Sunday, and put it up with a delayed publication time, so it will show up Monday morning.  Or I may just write one on Monday as usual.  It’s not as though I have any true, deep connection to any form of ritual or observance.  Why should I fool myself or anyone else?  I certainly don’t think any external, let alone supernal, aspect of the universe cares about my actions in any sense, or even about my existence itself.

I guess we’ll all have to wait and see what I do.  Maybe something will happen and take it all out of my hands.  That would be okay.  Or maybe I’ll lose my tenuous grip on what remains of my will to live and decide that I don’t care about inconveniencing anyone anymore.  I’ve spent a lot of time and energy in my life trying to make things as easy as possible for other people, and (as I said) to relieve suffering when I could.  It wears me out.  It has worn me out.  And it’s not as though it’s had much in the way of compensatory positive effects on my own life, though I guess I should never have expected to be rewarded or admired for things that were, in the end, my decisions carried out because they were what I thought I should do at any given moment.

The universe is uncaring, and humanity as a whole often instantiates that fact quite glaringly, though they do‒occasionally‒display behavior of a nicer, kinder type.  There often doesn’t seem to be enough of that aspect to go around, even on Earth, let alone on a universal scale, but then again, benevolence and beneficence are not substances, and there are no conservation laws concerning them.  They can, in principle, increase without limit.  They can also diminish and even vanish utterly.

If I had to bet on which I thought was more likely, all things considered, I would probably bet on the latter, but I would hope to lose.  I’m okay with losing things like that.  Hey, as the theme song from MASH notes, I’m going to lose at this game anyway.  So there’s not too much point, in and of itself, of trying to drag it out for its own sake.  It’s one thing if there are other variables, other pressures, other forces, other fields, other considerations‒those can make the game worth playing for as long as one is able.  But the game, in and of itself, is not necessarily an inherent good.

That was slightly cryptic, I guess.  Sorry.  I have a hard time saying clearly what I mean, partly because I’m often unsure, myself, and at other times because I simply can’t seem to express my feelings well.  Occasionally, I think I’ve done it reasonably well in my songs, like in this one, or this one, or cover songs like this one and this one and this one and this one.  But those don’t garner much of an audience***, so it doesn’t really matter, as anyone can see.

Enough!  I’ve already wasted too much of your time.  Have a good first day of Autumn tomorrow, enjoy your celebrations of Bilbo’s and Frodo’s birthday (you do celebrate it, don’t you?), and if you observe Yom Kippur, then g’mar chatima tovah and good Yom Tov.

bilbo frodo birthday adjusted

*Though, of course, while the title character of The Hobbit is indeed Bilbo Baggins, the title character of The Lord of the Rings is the villain, Sauron.  Just imagine if the Harry Potter books had been titled, for instance, He Who Must Not Be Named and the Goblet of Fire.  Actually, that’s not bad, is it?

**It turns out he will not.  He has some form of sinus infection.  When I got his text I actually started to cry a little; I hope he doesn’t call out sick tomorrow.

***Certainly nothing close to the size of the audience for The Rockford Files in its heyday.  Get it?  Garner?  Rockford Files?  Never mind.

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Yet I, a dull and muddy-mettled rascal, blog, like John-a-dreams, unpregnant of my cause, and can say nothing

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday again.  I thought this might be the last Thursday blog post I was going to do, but because of my coworker’s vacation plans, I may do one or two more.  Or, of course, this could be the last one I do after all, depending upon the vicissitudes of fate and any tendency I may have to give in to (rather frequent) momentary impulses.  I suppose, as with all things, we will only know what really is going to happen when it arrives.  And then, it will be too late to change it.

Yesterday I had a slightly embarrassing moment when commenting on a website that I read pretty much every day.  The site owner had posted about a particular incidence of the bastardization of science teaching, and had embedded a PowerPoint show (with the voice) that had been made by the people responsible.  He invited the readers to watch the slide show, though he did an excellent job of summarizing things and pointing out errors of reasoning and of fundamental science.

I commented that I admired and thanked him for doing such things, and liked his description‒I think I said that last part‒but that I couldn’t bear to subject myself to the actual slide show, because my outlook on the world is too negative and discouraged already.

To my surprise, he replied, asking if I was being serious or if it was just a jokey way of saying that I didn’t have time to do it.

I don’t know if he was irritated by what might have seemed to be snark, or if he was concerned, or what, but I decided to make it clear that, while my tongue had been slightly in my cheek, I really did suffer from depression and that my outlook was fragile as it was, and too much exposure to such things could really make me despair‒or do so to a greater degree than I do already.  Then I added that, on the other hand, it was reassuring and encouraging that he (and implicitly, other people like him) did such a great job bringing such issues to attention and pointing out the problems they entail, and that fact bolstered me, if anything…and that was why I read his website every day.

I hope I got my point across, but I’ve been feeling embarrassed and stressed about those interactions since then.  I fear that my comments only ever serve to irritate this person, though I can’t be sure, and anyway, I don’t ever seem quite to get my points across, whether in such comments or here, for that matter.

I shouldn’t feel too bad about that, I guess, since even in person I’m apparently opaque to other people, as far as my meaning goes.  I sometimes don’t even know what I’m feeling‒when people ask me, I’m nearly always caught off guard and usually experience a very low-key panic.  One of my first therapists pointed out that I seemed quite disconnected from my own emotions and from that to which they were a response‒but even when I do know, and when I desperately want someone to notice, it never seems to work.

The train’s running twelve minutes late today, it seems; I’m standing on the platform waiting for it*.  Of course, more people than usual are gathering, and so it’s going to be more crowded, but I guess I’ll just tough it out.  It is frustrating, but I’ve gone into that fact many times before.

I see its headlights coming around the last bend now, anyway.

And now I’m on the train and we’re heading north.  That ought to be a very cool thing, oughtn’t it?  To any humans who lived before, say, 1800 and were transported to the modern world, it would surely be a miraculous and possibly terrifying phenomenon**.  Yet, as with all such things, or at least nearly all, it has become just another aspect of drudgery and bleak sameness and pointlessness, carrying people to jobs that don’t in any way fulfill or inspire them, then back to houses full merely of devices and foods and processes and whatnot that serve merely to distract them rather than fill or fulfill them.

Maybe that’s just me.

I’ve continued to throw out some more of my useless crap, which is a good thing.  I gave a bunch of colored pencils I had at the office to a coworker who has a young son yesterday***.  Did I mention that already?  I think I did, but I might be misremembering.  Possibly I just intended to mention it, and that intention remained vivid enough to seem to have happened.  It doesn’t really matter, of course; otherwise I could easily just go and look.

I threw out two bicycle pumps this morning, because I don’t think I’ll ever use them again, and they were just cluttering things up.  I think I may put the bicycle out in front of the house, by the street, and perhaps put a sign on it saying, “Free to any taker‒needs a new front inner tube.”  I’m not going to be riding that bike, or probably any bike, again.  It’s a bit of a shame, but whataya gonna do?

And now, well, I don’t know, is there anything left to say today?  I probably have nothing to share that is worth sharing.  It seems quite possible that I’ve never had anything to say that was worth saying, or anything to write that was worth writing, or anything to draw that was worth drawing, or what have you.

I certainly don’t seem to connect with anyone in any kind of truly deep or significant way; certainly not one single connection I’ve ever made at a close-up, strong level, has lasted.  It seems that I’m just not good at such things, or am simply not a good candidate for connections from other people’s point of view.  Matters have come to such a pass that I think if someone tried to make friends with me now, I would probably feel panicky and threatened, and even hostile, like the feral cats you see in videos, who are in terrible shape, and whom people are trying to rescue, but who resist with vicious fervor sometimes, because they are quite rationally suspicious of the intentions of these huge, weird creatures that are accosting them.

Sorry, I don’t know what I’m really going on about.  Apologies if it’s too incoherent.  I’ll draw to a close, now, and I guess I’ll be able to use my usual Thursday morning sign-off, since it will still pertain (barring accidents and impulses).  I certainly hope you all feel better than I do.  It would be just too horrible a thing indeed, if it were not so, at least most of the time.

Please take care of yourselves and of each other.  Tomorrow is Bilbo’s and Frodo’s birthday, and the day after that Autumn begins.  Then, Sunday night, Yom Kippur arrives, the Day of Atonement™.  It’s a big weekend, or it ought to be.  Probably almost no one around me will know or notice or care.

TTFN

hamlet statue old photo look

*One useful thing about writing this on the smartphone is that I can even write while standing up.

**Of course, the time travel technology used to transport such a person to the modern world would be even more amazing, but never mind.

***That is, I gave him the pencils yesterday.  His son has existed for quite some time.

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Songs, weather, depression/pain, AI, the subjectivity of time, and the apparent inevitability of entropy

It’s Monday, Monday, like the Mama’s and the Papa’s sang.  I’ve never quite known what that song was about in any deep sense, since I’ve never paid too much attention to the lyrics, other than “Monday morning couldn’t guarantee / that Monday evening you would still be here with me.”  Could it be about the tenuousness of joy or something?  Maybe it’s a sort of Buddhist message.  Of course, no morning can guarantee (so to speak) that by the evening anything at all will be the same, apart from the fundamental laws of physics (whatever they may ultimately be).

One wonders:  has Monday morning, in some anthropomorphic sense, ever guaranteed anything to anyone?  It’s a weird notion.  Maybe I’m thinking too much about this.

Anyway, I’ve always thought the song had a pleasant melody, and the harmonies were good, as tended to be the case with that group.  I like California Dreamin’ better, and not just because the meaning is a little less opaque.  However, I do have sort of the opposite feeling to the singer(s) of the latter song.

In that song, they lament the fact that all the leaves are brown and the sky is gray, and they dream of being in California, “safe and warm”, even on a winter’s day.  Well, I’ve been for plenty of winter walks here in south Florida when I didn’t need to wear a jacket or long sleeves, and could go barefoot, and could even have worn shorts if it weren’t for the fact that my lower legs are kind of scarred up and embarrassing.

But growing up, I’ve always liked autumn best of all the seasons.  Halloween is my favorite holiday, and winter, frankly, was never too hard a problem.  At least I could enjoy a hot cup of coffee in a way that I just can’t here in Florida.  Here, I’m sitting motionless at the train station and literally dripping with sweat just from…I don’t know, just from being alive, I guess (I don’t recommend it).  And then, most of the time, trains and buses and stores are all over air conditioned, so when you’re sweaty from being outdoors you feel seriously chilly when you enter them.  And then, when you go back outside, your glasses instantly mist up, because their surfaces are so cold and the air is so humid.

I know, I know, these are not exactly the trials of Hercules.  But they are annoyances to which I wish I had never chosen to subject myself.  Now, however, as the man said, “I am in blood, stepped in so far that, should I wade no more, to turn back would be as difficult as go o’er”.  Mind you, I have never done anything as horrible as Macbeth did in the play, but that doesn’t mean the metaphor can’t still apply.  One of the brilliant aspects of Shakespeare’s writing is that his lines can be used not merely in context, but to examine, explore, and describe so many things in life.

Anyway, knowing me, I probably would be just as unhappy had I stayed up north somewhere.  I think the fundamental problem is an internal one‒well, I mean, that’s clear and plain, since I started having trouble with dysthymia and depression long before I ever moved south.  The problem is with me.  I am faulty.  And when the problem is fundamental to oneself, one cannot avoid it by going elsewhere, because, as many have pointed out, from Ralph Waldo Emerson* on, “No matter where you go, there you are.”

If one’s own nature is the problem‒or some aspect of it, anyway, or some damage that is permanent, a wound that goes too deep, that has taken hold‒there is little that one can do about it.  If there is no therapy that seems to help, whether medical or psychological, and there are no lands to the west in which to seek healing, what is one to do?

Of course, if one is convinced that the odds are, in the long run, that the good things in life will outweigh the pain (of all kinds), then one can choose simply to bear it as best one can.  After all, pain, of all kinds, is an inevitable (or at least inevitably potential) part of life, for good, sound biological and ecological and statistical reasons.  Pain keeps organisms alive, when it’s working best.  But it can reach a point where it’s not functioning optimally, where it’s not producing a net gain‒physically, psychologically, “spiritually”, or in any other clear way.  Then, what does one do?

I’m speaking mostly rhetorically here, but I guess if anyone thinks they have an idea I haven’t discovered, they are welcome to share.  I have thought long and hard about these issues, and I’ve read a lot of related material, and have tried many forms of treatment, but I can’t claim to have learned everything that could possibly be known about them.  I’m reasonably smart, but I have had finite time and finite energy and finite intelligence with which to explore.

Even a “deep learning” AI can often only “learn” so much, so quickly, because it trains on immense streams of data, beyond any human bandwidth.  And adversarial systems like Alpha Zero learned to play Go even better than previous systems by playing millions or billions of games against itself to develop its skills.  A human who was capable of that concentration and memory and above all, who had the time might well become just as good.

But human experiential time takes much more real time than does that of an electronic system**.  Also, humans were not built to be able to focus solely on one thing for such scales of time and experience.  There’s no net survival or reproductive advantage to it on any kind of ordinary, biological level.

AI’s have to be built and actively maintained.  They cannot yet sustain themselves.  Perhaps, when they can, there will occur an evolutionary arms race between and among such AIs, happening much more quickly than human biological or even cultural evolution.  But it seems difficult to speculate about what the outcome of such evolution might be, once it took the bit in its teeth and ran where it “wanted” to go.

Well, it’s fairly easy to speculate, but that speculation is probably going to be fruitless.  The phase space of possible states is too big to explore easily.  Even an AI evolution that proceeded at maximal possible speed might only explore the tiniest fraction of all possible forms and functions of intelligence before entropy led it to fall apart, like the rest of the universe.

Of course, it’s not in principle impossible that an AI (or other intelligence) could figure out ways around even the heat death of the universe, or the Big Crunch, or a Big Bounce, or whatever the future of the universe ends up being.  Even if the universe turns out to have been simulated (which I doubt mightily but don’t rule out completely), the simulation has to exist in some outer reality, and the mathematics of entropy seems likely to apply in all possible realities.  There are simply more ways, in general***, for a set of things to be put together in such a way that they do not achieve any given function or meet any given criteria of order, than for them to be put together in ways that do.

Anyway, I don’t know how I got on that topic.  I tend toward entropy in the subject of my thoughts as well as in reality, it seems.  (This is not ironic, by the way, lest someone mislabel it as such.  This is actually quite appropriate, and is a rather pleasing concordance.)

That’s enough for me for Monday morning.  I hope the morning is very good to you, and that Monday evening is even better.

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*He didn’t put it in those exact words, but he certainly criticized his friend, Henry David Thoreau, for going into the woods to find himself.

**Which leads to potentially horrifying speculations about what it might be like for an artificial general intelligence trying to have interactions with biological intelligences and having to wait between interactions‒times that could be the subjective equivalent of a human waiting for decades or centuries or even millennia‒just to “hear” what the human says next at normal human speed.  Orson Scott Card explored a little of this notion in the interactions between Ender and “Jane” in the brilliant Speaker for the Dead, the first sequel to Ender’s Game.

***Here I’m using “in general” mainly in the physicist’s sense, meaning something that applies to every situation of a given kind, everywhere, as opposed to the more common, colloquial meaning which is roughly synonymous with “usually”.

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I’ll rack thee with old cramps, fill all thy bones with aches, make thee roar that beasts shall tremble at thy blog.

Hello and good morning.

It’s Thursday again, and I’m writing one of my old “Thursday-style” blog posts, or at least I’m trying to do that.  I’m not sure how well it’ll come out, since I’m feeling rather poorly right now, but that’s mainly pain-related.

Yesterday afternoon, I had a brief respite from pain, or at least a significant reduction in it.  It got to the point where my spirits rose, and I joked a bit with coworkers, that sort of thing.  Nothing major, of course, but in the morning I had been thoroughly anti-social, wanting to snap on everyone from my boss to the few particularly irritating people in the office.  One of these latter had the gall to pat me on the shoulder from behind—while I was working on something—and I snarled at him not to touch me.

Mind you, that’s not new; I feel very awkward about people touching me, especially when they’re being irritating yet are trying to display some kind of manufactured camaraderie, and I’m trying to work on something important at my desk.  Also, this person had arrived late, as he frequently does, yet suffered not so much as a rebuke, and even got paid his “spiff” which is supposed to be forfeited when someone is late with good excuse.

As he walked away, I grumbled, “I’ll cut your fucking hand off.”  At the time, I meant it, but I’m not sure he heard.  Apparently, I don’t have a good sense of how to speak up so that people can hear me, even though I feel like I’m speaking just fine.

Anyway, in the afternoon I had less pain than usual, for unclear reasons, and that was good.  As I walked to the train station after work, it was cloudy and a bit drizzly and windy, but far from being displeased, I felt almost as if someone somewhere had decided to give me weather that felt at least a bit autumnal—which it did—as if in response to my blog post yesterday.  It was quite nice.  And I started thinking about getting back into long walking, and maybe some hiking and whatnot.  I was absurdly optimistic for a brief time.

I even brought my little laptop with me when I left the office.  That’s what I’m using to write this.

Overnight, however, my pain has resurged with a vengeance.  First my low back and down my left hip and knee and calf and thigh and foot and ankle flared up, waking me in the night, and I applied my little massage gun as best I could—after taking some analgesics, of course.  I soothed it enough to go back to sleep, but shortly thereafter woke up with my right side doing the same thing.  Now they’re both acting up, and it’s hard to stand up from a seated position because both of my hips hurt a lot when I do.  I’ve tried all along to exercise and stretch and adjust, and to do all the other interventions I can bring to mind, all the time, over and over, but it’s difficult to tell what, if anything, makes a difference.

I don’t know what led to my brief lull of pain yesterday afternoon.  I don’t know what made it act up again last night and through to now.  I don’t know if weather changes affect it, I don’t know if that’s just a bias or a random, illusory correlation.  I try very hard to be objective, but I can’t figure out what to do.

Of course, my hands—especially my thumbs—and my shoulders and my neck are also sore and stiff, but compared to the chronic pain in the entire lower half of my body, they’re almost pleasant by comparison.

I’m sorry to keep boring you all with this.  I would love to discuss something interesting and likely to incite wonder or at least curiosity.  But evolution has shaped pain to be difficult to ignore, unfortunately.  If you find it tedious and irritating, just imagine how it is for me.  You already have preemptive revenge upon me, for I have to live with it, and can’t even walk away to get a break, at least not in any predictable fashion.  Right now, on both sides, my entire body from about umbilicus level or so on down is one contiguous, 7 out of 10 ache, and my hands and my shoulders are stiff and sore.  And I can’t take anything else in the way of meds at the moment without it being frankly toxic, and also probably making me want to throw up again.

I have had various epidurals and other more invasive interventions in the past—including surgery, as you may recall—and yet here I am.  I have no desire to be put on prescription pain medicine again.  I’ve been through that, and I think the way it affected my thought processes didn’t help with the whole crash and burn through which my career and my life have gone.

The weather is so hot that it’s hard to deal with going for walks because I get so sweaty, but maybe what I really should do is just do what I’ve so often thought of doing:  go out and start walking, and keep walking (with rests as necessary) until it kills me or until I feel better—or both, I suppose, that’s not out of the realm of possibility.  I really don’t know what to do.  But, of course, I’m still doing this blog post, so I haven’t headed off into the sunrise yet, and right now, the process of even walking to the bus stop is daunting.

I may order a Lyft to get to the train station, or an Uber, whichever is cheaper.  I hate to waste the money, but I haven’t the energy to do other things.  By now, I could have bought an electric-assist bike or one of those electric scooters, and it probably wouldn’t have been much more expensive than car services.

I honestly and strongly hope that every last one of the people reading this feels much better than I do right now.  That would at least be some consolation for me, and not a small consolation at that.  I want you to have good lives and be happy, and to have friends and family around you, and to live among people who make at least a modicum of sense to you.  I hope you don’t feel like aliens in your own environments.

It doesn’t feel like too much to ask.  Maybe it is.  Anyway, I’m done with the blog post today, but there will very likely be one tomorrow.  Why would I stop rolling this boulder, after all?

TTFN

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Not feeling at all well today

I wish I had something clever to say to start the blog post for today, but nothing is coming to mind.  Maybe this is one of those Socratic type moments in which the recognition that one is not clever is the cleverest thing possible.  I doubt it.  Probably it’s just a failure of creativity and writing ability.

     I really had a rough day yesterday, with respect to pain and tension and alienation.  First off, the pain‒it was particularly intense and persistent.  No matter what I took for it or did for it, it didn’t want to diminish, let alone go away.  I couldn’t relax at all, all day, and no matter what anyone else was doing or saying, I just wanted everyone to shut up.  I even took to saying “shut up, shut up, shut up” under my breath when things particularly annoyed me.

     Not that people were doing anything bad or inappropriate or unreasonable.  They were just interacting, being friendly with each other, talking about stupid, unimportant, frivolous things, like people do.  They were not knowingly harming anyone.  I was the one full of malice and negativity, as usual.  Perhaps I should say “as always”.

     I think that I’ve been a negative, evil person‒at heart, anyway‒for nearly as long as I can remember.  It seems to be my natural inclination.  I’ve always resisted it, though, I’ll give myself credit for that.  I’ve tried not to be cruel or spiteful or nasty, even when I want to be, even when I feel so irked and irritated by every aspect of the world.  I’ve tried to do good in the world, going so far as becoming a doctor even though that had not been my dream.  I tried to do good by doing that, but I’m not sure how much good I ever accomplished, whether through that or through anything else I’ve ever done.  I think I’m pretty much rotten at the core, to be honest, and it’s just gradually spread outward as my life has progressed.

     Speaking of rotten, I feel kind of rotten right now, in that I feel pretty nauseated.  I took a lot of OTC pain medicine yesterday, even for me, combining Naproxen and Aspirin and Tylenol, oh my (no name brands, though) to the point where I’ve reordered a new bottle of acetaminophen for me to use at the office because the other one was getting low*.  Now, this morning, I already had to take something, because I woke up no less sore than I went to bed, and indeed, I spent a fair fraction of the night applying my massage gun to my foot and hip and lower back and so on.  When one side improves, the other side starts hurting more, as if in compensation.

     I think I may not go in to the office today.  I need to see if the nausea passes or not.  I don’t want to throw up on myself while walking to the bus stop, but even more so, I don’t want to do it while on the bus or the train.  I guess people might assume I was a drinker or that I was withdrawing from drugs if that happened; not that I really care what other people think in such circumstances, but the inconvenience of having to deal with getting sick in public is something I’d like to avoid.

     Of course, I have gotten up and gotten showered and gotten dressed, as I do pretty much every day, but I may change my mind.  The combination of being in pain and being nauseated is a bit much.  I don’t like to let myself give in to weakness too much, but it may be necessary.

     It’s too bad this isn’t the pain and nausea associated with a heart attack.  It seems unlikely, given how much aspirin I take, and how much exercise I get, though of course, neither of those things is perfect protection.  I do have some degree of family history, but again, my symptoms don’t seem to fit the usual presentation.  I think I’m just in a lot of pain and chronically sleep deprived and have some gastric toxicity due to the amount of pain medicine I take.

     If I don’t go in today, there will be that much more to take care of tomorrow, on payroll day.  But I guess I could try just to get in early in that case.  I don’t know.

     I also don’t know why I bother doing any of it.  There’s no point.  I have no long-term goals or plans or hopes or even dreams, anymore.  Well, I guess I would like to see autumn one more time before I die, if that’s possible.  And I mean real autumn, where the leaves change and the weather gets cool and people put up Halloween decorations and things like that.  I do like the semi-tropical aspects of Florida’s ecology‒the reptiles and (occasionally) amphibians and the birds and the spiders and even some of the insects…dragonflies are big down here, in more than one sense.  But as the time comes nearer for my birthday and for Halloween and so on, I always miss the northern Fall.  It has always been my favorite season.

     I don’t think I have the will or energy to get back up North, though.  I’m not good at vacations, certainly not by or for myself.  And goodness knows I barely feel like I want to survive to the end of the week, let alone until the end of the summer.  I don’t know what I’ll do.  Probably keep continuing, which is what I’ve been doing.

     I think I am going to stay at the house today‒I can’t call it “staying home” because this is not a home for me‒and try to rest a little.  I’ll post this, since I’ve written it.  I have to go in tomorrow, though.  So I guess I’ll write another post then.

     Sorry for the melodrama; I know it’s pathetic, but I guess that’s just the way I am.  I’ll try to keep it under wraps more tomorrow if I can.  It can’t be very much fun to read.  Thank you for toughing it out, those of you who do so.  It’s much more than I deserve.

*And there are so few remaining that, if I impulsively swallowed them all, it probably wouldn’t kill me, though I would surely get quite sick.  Once, in college, I got so stressed out by something‒I don’t remember what‒that I took all the remains of a little bottle of Tylenol at once.  It was either 7 or 11 pills, I know it was a prime number, that probably contributed to my decision.  Anyway, I got sick, but not severely so.  Still, the effects were apparently obvious enough that when I went to a music class the next day, they said I should go home, because I didn’t look well.  I’ve never spoken or written about that before, to anyone.  You’re welcome.  See, I’ve been fucked up for decades, at least.

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どうもありがとう(Doumo arigatou) from Mr. ロバート (Robaato, i.e. Robert)

Good morning and hello.  It’s Wednesday, the 23rd of November in 2022, which is the day before Thanksgiving in the USA.  I suppose one could call it Thanksgiving Eve, though somehow that’s never seemed to catch on.  I’m writing this on my phone, because I didn’t take my laptop when I left the office yesterday; I didn’t forget to bring it; I just didn’t feel like it.  Honestly, I don’t have a lot of enthusiasm for writing a post today, but since I definitely am not going to write one tomorrow, I guess I’d better bite the bullet and write the blogget.

I’m at the train station as I begin this post, and of course, the iterated announcement continues, reminding us that tomorrow, Thanksgiving Day, they will be operating on a Sunday schedule.  This announcement has been repeating since the day after Labor Day.  Presumably, starting Friday, they’ll be reminding us that they will follow a Sunday schedule on Christmas and New Year’s.

It’s very foggy down here by me today, which is unusual.  In fact, when I left the house, my first notion was that something big must be on fire nearby.  But, thankfully, it quickly became obvious (when I took a sniff) that it was merely fog.  It’s surprisingly rare to see fog down here, probably because, even though it’s more than humid enough, the air is almost always too warm to cause the humidity to begin to precipitate out so close to the ground.  Not that it’s cold today; it’s 73 degrees Fahrenheit, according to the weather app when I left the house, and that seems pretty consistent with what the feeling of the temperature is.

Yes, that’s right‒I’m writing about the weather.  I told you I didn’t really feel up to writing much, didn’t I?  I’m certainly not up to trying to write the follow-up to my neuropathology post from the other day, and I don’t think I would try doing that on my phone if I were, as I think I’ve mentioned previously.  I occasionally toy with the notion, when writing blog posts on the phone, of trying to write a new short story this way.  I wrote a good portion of Son of Man on a previous phone, and I think it came out well.

But honestly, though I think about the idea, I know I won’t do it.  I may not ever write any more fiction for the rest of my life.  I can barely get myself to do non-fiction such as this.

I did listen to some music last night, both on the way to the train and as I lay down trying to get sleepy.  I also ended up watching a fair few “reaction videos” to songs I know.  That’s a rather entertaining genre of YouTube videos in which youngish people, who presumably grew up listening to the latest modern music‒an ever-moving definition in any case‒listen to some classic bands and songs, usually for the first time, and we all get to see their initial reactions.  It’s a fun genre, because these are obviously people who are interested in being exposed to prior hits, and their enthusiasm for the process is often quite moving.

It’s charming (if startling) to see a youngish couple who have never even heard of the Eagles listen to Hotel California…or to see anyone who doesn’t know what’s coming to experience, for the first time, the saxophone solo from Gerry Rafferty’s Baker Street.  It’s also quite a surprise for people to see the young lead singer from the Animals start growling out The House of the Rising Sun.  It still honestly surprises me every time I see it.  It’s as if some teenager has been possessed by the spirit of a cursed man from New Orleans who squandered his life like his father before him, and who must find a body willing to express his torment and his warning before he can ever rest in peace.

It’s also fun to see and hear songs I haven’t thought of in a long time as if for the first time, like The Heart of Rock and Roll, which was huge back in the 80’s.  I saw Huey Lewis and the News in concert, and they put on a terrific show…though he teased the Detroit audience by pretending to forget the last city name in the aforementioned song.  He was a good showman.  He also went to my alma mater, so you know he’s special.

And I’ve yet to see any one of the reactors watch the “best live version” of Radiohead’s Creep and not be in or near tears in response to Thom Yorke’s performance, and commenting about how this is clearly something personal for him, he’s not just singing the song, he’s experiencing it.  Which is surely true, since apparently Thom wrote the song in his late teens, and it was autobiographical.  It certainly conveys sentiments many people have shared at one time or another.

It’s all the next best thing, I guess, to sharing one’s favorite music with a friend, or listening to some new, great song for the first time with one’s peers back in high school or college or what have you.  I guess that’s similar to the reason I watch Doctor Who reaction videos; I have no local person or people with whom to watch it, and it’s definitely the sort of show I would have watched with my wife and/or kids.  I don’t feel too heartbroken to see it now, alone, since I’ve only ever actually watched it by myself, unlike many other shows that I can no longer enjoy.

Not that that makes it unemotional.  I’ve never encountered a show that more frequently evokes teariness than Doctor Who.  It’s really quite remarkable and impressive.  As fans say, it’s a show that’s bigger on the inside.

Anyway, that’s enough writing about nothing.  I hope all of you reading in the US have a truly wonderful Thanksgiving tomorrow, and get to spend time with your loved ones and enjoy some delicious food.  For all those outside the US…well…have a good Thursday‒hopefully not one such as DentArthurDent was prone to have‒and you might as well have some nice food and time with your loved ones, too.  I’ll be back on Friday, barring the unforeseen.

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If “November” is the 11th month, then is the “second” day number 4?

It’s 4:35 on Wednesday morning, November 2nd, 2022, and it’s already 80 degrees (Fahrenheit) at the Hollywood train station and very muggy.  I’m dripping with sweat just from walking as far as the bench to wait for the earliest morning train*.  It’s ridiculous.  For this reason and others, I wish I had never moved to Florida.  In my opinion, it’s overall a “nice place to visit, but you wouldn’t want to live there”.  Or as many locals say: “Come on vacation, leave on probation”.  It really is a shame, because there is a tremendous amount of natural beauty here, but much of even that has been ruined by invasive species, the main one being Homo sapiens.

It’s on hot and muggy early November mornings such as this that I truly miss being in Michigan, where I grew up.  Say what you will about the Detroit area, at least there are fewer humans there now than there were in the past.  It can be somewhat depressing to see that, but boy, in Autumn all the trees along the side streets in my hometown looked spectacular, and you could walk from your door to the street without sweating.

If the Detroit area is too sad for you‒or too flat‒then you could go to upstate New York, where I went to university.  That was amazing in the Fall.  Walking back to the dorm down Libe Slope after class at this time of year was like seeing a fifty mile wide fireworks display happening in slow motion, spread out over many weeks.  Of course Winter was quite cold, bitter, and snowy there, but if you were adventurous, you could take a tray from the dining hall and “tray” down Libe Slope.  I never did that, myself; there was a road right at the bottom of the hill, and though it was not busy, it was hard not to think about careening uncontrollably into some passing salt truck.

Actually, they really did an amazing job keeping the roads clear in Ithaca in the winter.  They had to keep them clear.  There were many slopes in town that could have served as ski jumps if you’d put an upcurve at the bottom, so these had to be cleared pretty much as fast as the snow could fall.

Of course, while I have my complaints about Florida, I did come here of my own free will**, and have had many good times and good life events here, the most outstanding of which was the birth of my daughter.  I can’t ever complain about that.

My son was born in New York (not Ithaca) but we left before he was old enough really to remember it.  Both of my children are Florida kids, effectively.  I wonder how they would feel if someday they moved up North and experienced Autumn there for the first time, beginning to end.  Would they be as wowed by its beauty as I always have been, or would they feel a homesickness for the heat of the Sunshine State as the weather cooled and the days shortened?

Of course, the days don’t literally shorten, just daylight hours.  There are subtle variations and even occasional tiny diminutions of the day, as happened recently, but overall, the rotation rate of the Earth is going very steadily and gradually to slow, barring other inputs, so days will become longer.  If nothing else, since the planet’s mass is not perfectly symmetrical, as it turns it must radiate some miniscule amount of energy away in the form of gravitational waves, and the Moon/Earth orbital pairing will radiate some, too.

When I say “miniscule”, I’m guilty of severe (and ironic) understatement.  The sun will surely long since have gone through red giant and on to white dwarf status before there would be any appreciable loss of rotational energy from gravitational waves alone.  I can’t give you the numbers‒if anyone out there can, please share‒but it’s tiny, it’s wee, it’s verging on infinitesimal.

Speaking of small things and their opposites, yesterday’s post ended up being unusually long and exceptionally dreary***, so I’ll bring this one to a close now.  Thank you for your patience, thank you for reading, and if you have any comments about reactions to autumn, or to major changes of local climate due to moves throughout life, I would be interested to know about them.  No pressure.

*Yes, I came for the 4:45 am train, but only because there wasn’t an earlier one.  I couldn’t sleep.

**So to speak.  I’m provisionally convinced that there is no such thing as free will.  I could be wrong, of course, but it doesn’t really matter all that much.  As I like to say, I either have free will or I don’t, but it’s not like I have any choice in the matter.

***But nonetheless true.  I can’t pretend that it was an exaggeration nor that really, my mental health is just fine.  It is not.  It’s horrible.