Birthdays

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“For years and years I roamed.”

Well, I might as well stick to the same pattern, so…ahem.  It’s New Year’s Eve Eve today, which means tomorrow will be New Year’s Eve and Thursday will be New Year’s Day.  At that point, if we wanted, we could just start counting days down or up‒i.e., Day 1, Day 2…or Day 365, Day 364…and so on.

Of course, if we were going to do such numbering, I guess it would make sense to divide things up into months for easier “local” day-keeping, which is what we’ve done as a civilization.  But those months are irregular and rather haphazardly named.  This can occasionally be irritating, though of course I have a sentimental fondness for at least some of the month names.

Unfortunately for the goal of making months of uniform length, the number of days in the year isn’t evenly divisible by any number larger than 5, unless I’m mistaken…

Yes, I was correct, unless you want to divide the year into 5 groups of 73 days.  That might be kind of fun, since 73 is one of those overlooked prime numbers, and it has the slight extra fun that its digits add up to 10, the base of our usual number system.

Still, especially considering the necessity of leap years (with the convoluted adding of days, removing of seconds, not adding a day when it’s the turn of a century unless it’s also the turn of a millennium and so on) it seems cumbersome to divide the year evenly.

I rather like the solution of making 12 months that are each 30 days long and having the remaining 5 (or 6) days be a period of celebration.  It could be held around one of the equinoxes or the solstices, or it could even be split up between two of them.  I’m inclined to put them at the end of the year, when the Winter Solstice in the northern hemisphere happens, because it’s long been a holiday time anyway.

Of course, this all biases against those in the southern hemisphere, but there are significantly fewer people in the southern hemisphere, or at least there were the last time I looked into it…

Yes, I was correct again, it seems.  According to my quick and dirty check, there are on the order of about a billion people in the southern hemisphere, as opposed to the remaining roughly seven billion people in the northern hemisphere.  I guess that means the winter solstice would be a good time for those separate days.  And I’ve not heard many Aussies complain about being able to go to the beach on Christmas or New Year.

Mind you, one could do that down where I live anyway, if one were so inclined.  I am not.  The beaches on the east coast of Florida are mostly annoying, and the Atlantic is not much fun for swimming.  The west coast of Florida, where one swims in the Gulf of Mexico, is much more pleasant.

I’m not a very big beach person at the best of times (or the worst of times) but I have quite a few pleasant memories of being on one or another beach on the Gulf (of Mexico).  They all date back to at least 33 years ago, though, so maybe it was just due to the nature of youth that I enjoyed them.

Alas, I’m not truly young anymore by most standards; I’m 954 years old.

Ha ha, just kidding.  Or, wait, maybe not.  I know that exoplanets have been discovered that orbit very close to their stars, and so have orbits that can be as short as a few Earth days (possibly fewer).  So, if the universe is infinite in spatial extent, which it so far looks as though it is, and if there is no lower constraint due to the laws of physics on the length of possible “years”, then there exists, somewhere in spacetime, a planet by the years of which I would be 954 years old.

Actually, if spacetime is infinite, there should be an infinite number of such planets even if they happen only once within any cosmic horizon.  But let’s not get into that right now.

Let’s do the math; it’s simple and easy, so why not?  56 years old x 365.25 days in an Earth year makes me 20,454 days old, at least on my latest birthday.  Dividing that by 954, which is almost a thousand, should give a year length of roughly 20 days per year…okay, well, the “exact” number of 21 and 70/159 days per planetary year is what is required to make me 954 years old.

Actually, though, since the number of days in that hypothetical year is smaller than the time since my last Earthday birthday, I will have to adjust my days’ old age number to the precise one:  20,525 days, which if divided by 954 gives us a year length of 21 and 491/954 days, or 21.51 days (playing slightly free and loose with significant figures).  There will be a range of possibilities, of course, since I could be anywhere in the 21-ish day course of my 955th year and still be able to call myself 954 years old, if we go by similar conventions to those followed by humans on Earth.

Okay, well…that was sort of a weird digression.  I know, I’m weird, so maybe given that, a weird digression is, in a sense, not weird.  But given other considerations, it still is.

I am an odd person, I know (though I don’t know if I’m prime).  Sometimes‒rather often‒I think I’m losing my mind.  At other times, though, I think my mind is functioning within parameters, but it is contemplating things that are vast and potentially troubling to the feeble mortal ego if one does not drape oneself in the obscuring veil and cloak of delusion.  But my fabric sensitivity doesn’t allow me to tolerate such garments for long; you could say I lack PPE for such things.  Perhaps the secret is to destroy the ego (which may well just be an illusion, anyway), but that is more easily said than done.

Who knows?  Not I.

And yes, it’s “Not I” not “Not me”.  You wouldn’t say, “Me don’t know”, so you shouldn’t say “Not me” in response to the question “Who knows?”  Apologies to David Bowie and Nirvana‒but The Man Who Sold the World is a song, and so they are allowed poetic license.

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Wee are the champignons, but I still won’t eat them

First of all, I want to say, “Happy birthday, Mom, wherever you may be.”  So, here goes:

Happy birthday, Mom, wherever you may be.

My mother would have appreciated that joke, so if anyone out there is inclined to be offended on her behalf, well…you’d better check yourself before you wreck yourself, like the song said.  My mother’s sense of humor was very goofy and giggly and rather silly.  I got a goodly fraction of my sense of humor from her; she had extra, and no one else wanted it, so I got a very good deal.

Oh, on an unrelated note, I would like to note that, today, I am wearing cologne (or, well, aftershave, but I see no serious difference between the two things–one is named after a German city* and the other is just named for when you use it, as long as you’re not averse to the sting of alcohol on a freshly shaved face, which I am not, depending on whose face it is).  I felt awkward having yesterday used the misheard lyric from Whitesnake which says that I was born to wear cologne, when I wasn’t wearing cologne.

Of course, I’ve never really been like a drifter, either.

I do, unfortunately, drift and meander in my writing, at least when it’s nonfiction (broadly speaking) and when I’m trying not to write about my negative thoughts and feelings so I don’t bring people down too much.  That’s not as easy as it might seem, because those thoughts and feelings are always there, and they’ve been there for nearly as long as I can remember.

I’m not sure why they are there; presumably, and apparently, a lot of it has to do with my until-recently-undiagnosed ASD, but there’s also just something of a tendency toward dysthymia/depression in especially my Dad’s side of the family.

Though, honestly, there was almost certainly ASD on that side of the family, too**.  I would be very surprised if my father could not have been so diagnosed, though he was surely “Level 1”, whereas I am said to be “Level 2”.

Speaking of my Dad‒which I was‒I guess I should wish him a belated Happy Birthday, wherever he may be.  His birthday was a month ago today (it was a Saturday, so I wrote no blog post).

My own birthday is exactly in between my parents’ birthdays, which was something of a choice on their part; I was born by elective c-section, which was the usual practice in that era if one had previously had a c-section, which my mother had.  So they had at least some choice about the specific day on which I would be born.

They couldn’t just pick willy-nilly, of course.  If they had tried to wait until December, it would not have worked, and September would have been disastrous.  Probably even early November wouldn’t have panned out.  Still, I think they had at least a few days’ window in either direction, so‒it’s my understanding‒they picked my birthday to be right between theirs.

It’s the sort of thing I might have done, myself, so I appreciate it.

Let’s see now, what else is going on?  Of course, there are many things happening in the world, as is always the case, and many of those things seem and feel quite momentous to the people who see them or experience them.  From a certain point of view, they are indeed important, of course.  But I imagine that the average Roman citizen often thought that the momentary political happenings in their world were the be-all and end-all, and now we don’t even know what those concerns (or who those citizens) might have been.

Mind you, if their concerns related to the incoming Vandals and Visigoths and Huns and so on, I suppose they might have been at least somewhat justified in their belief that pivotal events were taking place.  But such times were narrow and few, relative to the “uninteresting times” in between.

Nowadays, of course, there are no actual external invaders coming in (though various propagandists might say there are).  Alas, in the modern world, we have met the Vandals, and they are us.

I almost feel that should have read “they are we”, but it might be taken as implying they are tiny, as in “they are wee”***.  Also, I wanted to throw a little homage to the famous Pogo cartoon in which Pogo originally said, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

With that, I will call this blog post to a close today.  I hope you all remember and embrace what we’ve accomplished here (basically nothing, as far as I can tell).  I also continue to hope that you all have an objectively good day.

*Weirdly enough, the full term is “eau de cologne” which I think is French for “water of Cologne”.  This is a curious term which must be quite historically contingent.  It must also be quite exaggerated, because I very much doubt that the water in the city of Cologne has any particularly attractive and pleasant odor.  Perhaps I’m wrong.

**There was even ASD, meaning Atrial Septal Defect, on that side of the family, which I had too, requiring open-heart surgery when I was 18.  It is an interesting fact that the cardiac ASD is more common in people with the neurodevelopmental ASD, as is cavum septum pellucidum, a benign atypia in the space between cerebral hemispheres, which was found in me incidentally while I was being worked up for, I think, the cause of some then-occurring pituitary dysfunction.

***Or that they are urine, I guess, which would be a more acceptable misunderstanding.

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“Turning and turning in the widening gyre…”

Well, isn’t this a surprise?

I’m writing a blog post on a Saturday for the first time in quite a while, because at the last minute, the boss sprang on us the notion that he needs us to start coming in on Saturdays again.  Things have been a bit slow the last few weeks, and a company with whom we had made a recent contract has apparently stiffed us a bit.  This is hardly our fault, of course—we had no input in the decision-making process—but we are going to be bearing the brunt of it.

Unfortunately, the coworker with whom I used to alternate Saturdays has already been picking up some shifts at his bartending job on Saturdays, so he cannot work, at least for the foreseeable relatively near future.  So, I’m going to be coming in on Saturdays, it seems.  Because, of course, he has a wife and young daughter to care for and with whom to spend time, whereas I have absolutely no one, so I am expendable.

I admit that I don’t do very much on weekends at the house, but if there was one good thing, it was that on Friday nights I could at least take some Benadryl and force myself to sleep in a little bit on Saturdays.  It’s not ideal rest, of course, if it’s achieved via well-known side-effects of antihistamines.  But it was the best I’ve been able to do, and that extra rest, however far from ideal, did me some good.

I can’t sleep in on Sundays, because I need to do my laundry on Sunday mornings, and I don’t want to have to go traipsing through the other parts of the house while the other renters are up and about.  That’s more stressful than getting up early.

I swear, there are times when I suspect that my boss wants me to kill myself.  If so, I wish he would just say so.  I’m amenable to the idea, especially if I could get some help to make it go easier.

This has not been a very good birthday week for me.  In fact, I don’t think I exaggerate by saying that the birthdays that passed while I was in PRISON were better than this week.  At least then, I could hold on to the delusional idea that, once I got out, life would be better.

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!!

I think more and more often—or, well, it feels as though that’s the case—that I ought just to embrace my innate nature as a destroyer and commit myself to the destruction of the entire human race.  We have no business contaminating the rest of the universe with our presence, or with the presence of our emissaries, if we create some AI-based self-replicating robots or whatever to send out.  We can’t even manage the minor issues of our current “civilization”; what business have we trying to colonize the galaxy, let alone the universe?

We could wipe out everyone—and probably lots of other species—with another mass extinction, and then nature has plenty of time to develop another technological civilization if it’s so inclined before the sun goes red giant.  Of course, whatever they might be could be no better than humans are.  There’s no reason, for instance, to imagine that any kind of animal currently alive on Earth would manage things better if they were suddenly granted the capacity to have a technological civilization.  But at least it would be out of our hands.  We would be laid to sleep like the children in the nursery rhyme prayer, dying before we wake.

We certainly are not awake now.  Look around you.  The most powerful nations (ever) on Earth are in the hands of collections of moral imbeciles.  As always, as Yeats pointed out, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / are full of passionate intensity.”  There are logical, causal reasons for this fact, but they do not make it easier to stomach.

I hate this fucking planet.  I hate this fucking species.  In fact, I’m not fond of the universe overall, at the moment.  If I could imagine a way to trigger a vacuum collapse that would wipe out everything, I would consider doing it.  But that’s at best a hypothetical possibility.

I guess I have to start somewhat smaller.

Contrary to popular imagining, there is no danger in creating, for instance, a small black hole in a particle accelerator, even if we had an accelerator with that capability.  Small black holes disappear almost instantly, vanishing in flashes of Hawking radiation.  Even if they didn’t, a miniature black hole would almost certainly just sink to the center of gravity of the Earth and perhaps do a bit of extra heating of the core.

Black holes don’t magically suck things into themselves, they merely gravitate just like anything else of equivalent mass (which would be tiny indeed for one produced from a particle accelerator).  Yes, anything that passes the event horizon cannot escape, but for a subatomic black hole, that horizon would be unimaginably tiny.  Even a black hole with the mass of the whole Earth would only be the (outer) size of a pea.

One could and can, of course, create thermonuclear reactions without requiring a fission explosion (which requires rarer materials) to trigger it.  A network of lasers triggering local fusion in appropriately placed samples could direct that energy toward a lithium deuteride* core and generate enough heat to trigger a growing chain of explosions.  But such a “bomb” would need to be large and stationary.

Still, one could set up a dummy corporation with branches in numerous large cities throughout the world and build those bombs, maybe also setting them up in “research outposts” in Antarctica and/or the Arctic, to melt the polar ice caps.  Possibly putting some similar “research facilities” near the thin-points of various volcanoes and super volcanoes would also enhance the outcome.

Alternatively, one could use a particle accelerator to generate anti-matter and store it.  Now this would be quite a technical challenge, since one cannot store neutral antimatter easily—it annihilates if it touches any normal matter, and so it is generally stored in electrically charged forms such as positrons and antiprotons, in evacuated chambers, contained by powerful magnetic fields.  It’s not an efficient way to do things, but one could, possibly, store enough of it that, once one released the magnetic containment, one could unleash an explosion that would make the Tsar Bomba look like one of those little paper poppers we used to play with when we were kids.

There are other ways, of course, to do things.  I’ve mentioned before that it wouldn’t be all that hard to use rockets to redirect the orbits of large asteroids so they were more likely to collide with the Earth.  Or one could genetically engineer and mass-produce a more hardy and virulent form of anthrax (for instance) and disperse it aerially over major cities.

I guess the point is I’m not in a good mood, and it would probably be better for all of humanity, as well as for me, if I were to cease to exist.  I’m so tired of everything.

I hope you’re having a nice weekend.

*Although, for the lithium to be converted to tritium most efficiently, on needs a source of neutrons, which are handily provided by primary fission explosions in usual thermonuclear weapons.  I suspect one could arrange alternate sources with only minimal effort.

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Decoherence–but nothing overtly quantum mechanical

You might be interested to know that I am not writing this blog post on my smartphone on the way to the office.  Neither am I writing it on the mini lapcom on the way to the office.  I am actually writing this while already at the office, because I did not go back to the house last night.

The trains were running late, and when they run late, they also run crowded, because of the pileup of people for what would have been later trains, at least until you get to the first on-time train after all the late ones.  That one tends to be nice and light.  But goodness knows when that train would have come, and it occurred to me that…well, no one was waiting for me at the house (no one ever is), and there was no point in getting there late only to have to get up and come in to the office today.

So, I walked back to the office and just stayed here.  I ordered a mildly “celebratory” dinner from Outback to mark the day.  It was okay‒not great, not bad.  It certainly beat, say, a bag of chips or something along those lines.  It almost certainly was not worth what it cost, but I could have ordered something from Morton’s, which has steaks starting at over $70.  And that was not the most expensive place available on Uber Eats for steak!!

Anyway, I watched some music videos and reaction videos and sat around and‒well, I won’t get into my thought processes and whatnot.  There are some things that are negative enough and worrisome enough for people that I don’t really want to share them.  I’m sure people who read this regularly probably would find that difficult to believe, but it’s true; I have thoughts that are dark enough or weird enough or negative enough that I don’t talk about them, here or pretty much anywhere else.

I feel very beat up* overall, as I’m sure is not a surprise.  That’s not because I slept on the floor; that actually tends to be beneficial for my back, at least a little**.  But I certainly didn’t sleep as much as I might have, especially considering the fact that I spared myself the time of my commute.  But my insomnia has never been particularly well-attuned to usefulness, though at times it has been useful.  It certainly was handy during residency, in its way.

It is quite unpleasant, though, even when it is useful.  I haven’t felt well-rested in a very, very, very long time.

As for anything else, well, I certainly didn’t write any fiction yesterday, to no one’s real surprise.  I did feel the urge to play my guitar and sing a bit very late at night, but I decided that would be a little weird‒even for me‒and just in case anyone was near enough to hear and be disturbed***, I decided not to do it.

I worried most of yesterday about some trouble that I suddenly started having with my right shoulder, which is usually not a source of difficulty for me.  My right forearm and elbow have been giving me a lot of trouble lately, and maybe that’s working its way up the arm, who knows?  But I don’t mean to imply literally that I think it’s some form of creeping arm malaise that’s working its way up.  Rather, something that affects distal joints can create atypical tensions that hurt the body more proximally; think of how, when your ankle is acting up, it can affect your knee and hip and even back, triggering them also to have exacerbations.

Maybe that doesn’t happen to you.  But I assure you, it happens to me, and I think something like it has probably caused this new irritation and feeling of decreased mobility and new soreness and weakness (from tenderness, not actual loss of strength) in my right shoulder.

That’s about it, really.  There’s nothing else going on, not in my “life” anyway.  This is as good as it gets, and I doubt it will get this good again.  I’m very tired.  I wish I were sick with something more acute, something that would kill me or at least knock me out of commission for a while.  Unfortunately, one of the detrifits of being so socially uncomfortable is that I don’t get exposed to as many communicable pathogens as I otherwise might.

Oh, well, you know what they say:  If you want something done right…

Enough.  It’s been a blog post.  I hope you’ve found at least a moment’s interest in reading it, if you’ve read it.  I know people like to rubber-neck at roadside traffic accidents, so maybe my absurdity and distaste can at least engender some prurient interest.

I hope you have a good day, in any case.

*It’s slightly amusing that “beat up” has such a different meaning from “upbeat”.

**In any case, I always sleep on the floor, though at the house I have a modest futon.

***Or any other relatively high-end heavy metal band.

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Celebrate good times? Come ON.

I had a notion this weekend that I would write this blog post on Sunday afternoon/evening and set it up to publish itself‒so to speak‒this morning.  Then, I would use this morning to perhaps review an/or rebegin HELIOS, or maybe to work on Outlaw’s Mind or DFandD.  I even thought I could write any of those‒especially HELIOS‒on my smartphone, since I have them on Google Docs as well as MS Word.

So I thought, anyway.  When I looked, though, I found that I don’t actually appear to have any version of HELIOS on my Google drive, so it must either be on Word or I never typed in the little bit I had of it.  Of course, I could have just decided to restart and bring one of my spiral bound notebooks and write in that.  The only trouble with doing it that way, if I write during my morning commute, is that I eventually have to retype everything into one of my computers or smartphones.

Now, I have never done the thing* of handwriting a first draft and then copying it into a phone, but I have done that with handwriting and computer word processors.  That method has produced some of my best stuff (by some measures), including Mark Red, The Chasm and the Collision, Paradox City, and even part of The Vagabond, though that last one was written mainly on WriteNow on a Mac SE.  So, maybe the handwritten-to-smartphone idea could actually work pretty well, now that I think about it.

Anyway, all that’s fairly moot, because I did not in fact write this blog post on Sunday afternoon nor yet on Sunday evening.  I am writing it, as I usually do, in the morning, in the midst of my commute to the office, which is so effing early, but which is nevertheless far later than when I woke up.

I’m more than a bit disappointed in myself for failing to carry through with that idea, but it’s easy to think of ideas that seem so doable when you first think of them.  And they are doable, of course.  Not only is it physically possible for me to have written this post yesterday evening and to set a precedent of doing the blog posts in the evening and writing fiction in the morning, it’s banal.  If you told someone that had happened, they would be unlikely to do much more than shrug and say something like a noncommittal “cool”, before going on their way.

But as we all know‒or should know‒it’s much easier to intend to do things in the future than it is to muster the motivation to do them in the moment when one was hoping to do them.  There are many shifting, often conflicting, drives in the human** psyche, and our actions are born of a kind of vector sum of all those “forces” in any given moment.

But not only do those forces shift due to things as seemingly mundane as one’s current state of appetite or fatigue, but they are also affected by what one has done immediately before; for the outcome of that vector sum in one instant feeds back on the system in numerous places, changing the sum (I was going to write “changing the calculus” but I thought that might be mathematically confusing and even misleading, since I am not discussing calculus) with every new iteration.  These iterations and changes aren’t quite happening on the scale of the Planck time***, but they happen quickly‒certainly at least at the “speed of thought”, whatever that might be.

Even the physiological, hormonal, energy state of the body from moment to moment changes those vectors, sometimes a great deal.  If you find yourself needing to use the bathroom while you’re trying to accomplish some task, it can certainly change the state of your concentration.  And if you should suddenly begin to have difficulty breathing, it will distract you from pretty much anything else.

That’s why on airplanes they tell you that, in case of cabin depressurization, if you’re traveling with someone who needs help putting on the oxygen mask, put yours on first, before you help your companion.  If you can’t breathe, your ability to help anyone else is going to tank very rapidly.  We can live weeks to months without food, days without water, but only minutes without air.

On a less extreme angle, if one is hypoglycemic (for whatever reason), it strongly affects all the functions of one’s body, particularly one’s neuroendocrine system.  Less extreme but more persistent issues can sabotage one’s focus upon much else.

I don’t need to tell you, probably, that pain makes it much harder to focus and bring effort to bear on other things.  This is one of the most annoying aspects of chronic pain:  one does not quite ever become accustomed to it, because that would miss the whole biological point of pain.  Making pain something you could ignore would be a bit like making a fire alarm that plays soft, easy-listening elevator music at unobtrusive decibel levels.  It would be less annoying, but being burned to death in a fire is a bigger issue, even if it isn’t very likely.

Of course, if your (typical) fire alarm is stuck on, you may not ever be able completely to ignore it.  You also will not know when there is a real fire. Or at least you will be less likely to know.  And since that can potentially be a matter of life and death, the chronic alarm, like chronic pain, is in its own manifold ways life-threatening.

All that is very tangential to my original point, which was that I am writing this blog today, not writing fiction (at least not this morning on my commute).

Oh, well.  If there’s one day I can let myself get away with slacking a bit, I guess it’s today.  I hope you all have a good one.

*How’s that for clever, descriptive writing?

**Or whatever I am.

***Though the processes that underlie them do.

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I can’t think of an appropriate Shakespeare-based title I haven’t already used

Hello and good morning.

Actually, though, I’m at least starting this blog post on Wednesday evening as I wait for my train.  I will have edited it Thursday morning, however.  I know this for a definitive fact, because this very sentence, and the immediately preceding one, is being/has been written on Thursday morning, while I’m editing.

Right now, though—that being Wednesday evening—I feel like I won’t have the energy for anything tomorrow.  I don’t think I would have the energy to breathe if it were not an automatic process.

All of this is getting too tedious; everything is getting tedious.  It’s the same old stupid thing after the previous same old stupid thing before the next same old stupid thing, and there’s no point and no joy in almost any of it.  It’s just compulsion; it’s just habit.  It’s just the fear that, if I stop doing this, I don’t think I’ll do anything else.

But why should I do anything else?  Why not just stop everything?

It would have no significant impact on anyone or anything.  It’s certainly unlikely to make things worse overall.  The world is as shitty as it’s ever yet been in my lifetime.  Humans have become ever more disappointing—not all of them mind you, but so many have become so disappointing that the good ones seem fewer and further between.

Of course, I’m pretty disappointing myself, albeit for somewhat different reasons than most.  So I don’t really have much right to complain.  It’s not as though I’m not a loser, after all.

Yeah, I think maybe I’m pretty much close to done—with everything.  I certainly don’t have any desire to celebrate having lived yet another pointless year in which I produce nothing of value and just wallow in the fact that biological existence has a tendency to continue—at least up to a point—if it’s not actively curtailed.

I’m so tired all the time, and I’m in pain all the time.

Just earlier today (Wednesday), it occurred to me—though I’ve probably said this before—that I feel as though I’ve already been embalmed, because just moving around in any way, just kicking any of my joints into flexion or extension, is difficult and often painful.  I feel stiff and sore; I also feel like my limbs are somewhat out of place, though it may be hard to convey that sense adequately.

I’m uncomfortable in my body and uncomfortable in my mind.  There are very few compensations.

I’m not saying there are none, and they are definitely nice when they happen, but they are few and far between, like tiny oases in a desert.  They are also bits of relief that I certainly do not deserve.

I’m also tired of complaining all the time.  I feel that it has to get really old for the people who read this blog.  But I don’t have much that’s more upbeat or uplifting to say.  I certainly don’t have much positive to say about myself.  I’ve failed at everything that actually matters to me, and at quite a few things that don’t, despite my supposed gifts and abilities.

It’s enough.  I really just ought to die soon.  My birthday is coming up; it would be appropriate for that to be the day I died.  At least it would have a nice faux symmetry.  It doesn’t really matter, of course, but I like symbols and symmetries and timing and so forth.  I just feel…well, I don’t feel like continuing, I don’t feel like putting in any more effort.  It’s useless and pointless and irritating.

Maybe I’ll feel different in the morning.  Maybe I’ll feel worse*.  Maybe I’ll develop enough resolve to take final action of some kind—I certainly have plenty of methods and means available.  I’ve been collecting and preparing such means of egress for a long time—I have nooses, and blades, and flammable liquids, and nonrebreather masks and tubing and regulator valves that could be used to deliver inert gases, and I have rat poison and various other potential toxins, for instance.

Or maybe I’ll develop enough energy to continue for a bit longer, however pointless it may be.

But I don’t know what to do.  I’m not sure what I’m going to do.  The only thing I have to which to look forward is occasionally seeing my youngest child, which started recently.  That’s always very nice, of course; that’s wonderful beyond easy explication.  But I feel—I must admit this may just be my mental illness speaking—that it’s an unkind obligation I’m putting on them, though I do not want to denigrate them or cast aspersions on their character.  That would be most unjust.

So it’s probably in my mind.  Nevertheless, I feel that I am causing undue trouble for them, and that I am not worth that trouble, not in the slightest.

I don’t know what to do.  I am so exhausted by everything, and I feel that I am nothing but pathetic.  I just want to exit, to escape, to be able to stop trying, even if it’s not truly what one could call “rest”.  I just need to let go—or something.

Whatever.  We’ll see.  I may not even post this post tomorrow morning.  I may just write something else**.  I don’t know.

TTFN

*This is a morning footnote, and it’s hard to say whether I feel different.  I feel slightly more rested, of course; I’m probably not rested enough, since my body doesn’t seem to like to indulge itself in getting enough rest.  I’m certainly still stiff and in pain, but I also nevertheless did my pull-ups this morning, so I have a bit more energy.  Also, I am a creature of habit, but I am not a nun, though I am worth none.

**I have not.  This is just the edited version of the post I wrote yesterday evening.

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“Is this the region, this the soil, the clime…?”

First of all, Happy Birthday to Bilbo and Frodo Baggins, who shared the same birthday (albeit 78 years apart) in Tolkien’s world, September 22nd by Shire reckoning.  I’m not absolutely sure that Shire reckoning would align its dates exactly with ours, but it’s not really necessary to nitpick.

Also, it is the day of the Autumnal Equinox, the beginning of Fall/Autumn in the northern hemisphere (and Spring in the southern hemisphere, but I don’t think they call it the Vernal Equinox down there).   From now until the next equinox, the nights will be longer than the days (in the northern hemisphere‒in the southern hemisphere the days will dominate).

It’s also the beginning of a new work week, which ought to be auspicious given that it’s the beginning of Autumn, but honestly, there’s nothing to which to look forward, whether in the short term or the long term.  It’s just the persistence of pointlessness and futility, like every day has been for the last 12 years (at least!) for me.

I’m writing this on my smartphone today, by the way.  This was not a surprise or a mistake this time; I deliberately did not bring the lapcom back to the house with me on Friday.  I didn’t have the energy.

It was a sloppy, crappy weekend, weather-wise.  It felt very much like a tropical rainforest down by me, and not in a good way.  It’s been a pretty lame hurricane season around here so far this year, and hitherto we’ve had much less rain than usual, but it seems to be trying to make up for lost time now these past few weeks.

Perhaps climate change has led to a slight shifting of the weather patterns, making the rainy season come slightly later here than usual.  In any case, it’s muggy and hot and wet and fairly disgusting in Florida…and that’s just the politics!!

Ha ha.  I’m kidding.  It’s not just the politics that’s disgusting here.  Still, if it weren’t for the fact that my youngest was born here in Florida, I would be inclined to say that, overall, Florida has been a worse than worthless place for me to live, and I wish I had never moved here.

For all I know, being in Florida could have been the trigger for my chronic pain problem.  I doubt it‒it was a physical, structural, fairly severe injury in my L5-S1 disk that started the problem, and it’s not too easy to conjure a Florida-specific explanation for that.  But I’m nearly certain that I wouldn’t have foolishly gotten into the medical practice that led to my legal troubles in New York, say.  They take better care of both patients and doctors in New York.  Indeed, in most states‒certainly in the ones in which I’ve lived‒they seem to have better healthcare systems than Florida.

That’s not a very high bar to clear, of course.  Just look at the corrupt politics and the sorts of disgusting worms we’ve sent to the Senate and the House, and to the Governor’s mansion, for that matter.  I don’t know why Florida is so fertile for self-serving shit-heads on a scale that dwarfs even the overrepresented shit-heads involved in politics in most states.  But it surely must be telling that Donna Tramp’s main house is down here.  Florida is America’s syphilitic penis, and the Palm Beach Cheeto is a genital wart on its upper surface.  If only Florida had embraced the HPV vaccine early enough…

I came to Florida because my then-wife was tired of living in cold climates.  She is uniquely susceptible to the cold for unclear reasons; her body does not seem to hold in heat but instead radiates it away.  She always kept the thermostat set at something like 78 Fahrenheit, even in the summer.

I wish she’d wanted to go to Arizona or something along those lines, but I guess politically it has its issues, too.  New Mexico might’ve been better‒the Santa Fe Institute is there, at least.  It might have been nice to be able to be near that, and to perhaps even take in a lecture or two from time to time.  Florida is certainly not a hotspot for cutting edge science and philosophy, despite Cape Canaveral.  We barely even have a space program anymore; we need Russia or Elon Musk to get us into low Earth orbit nowadays.  Look how the mighty have fallen.

Once I got done with work release, I could’ve lived with my parents and my sister; my father invited me to stay when I went to visit upon my release, making it clear he was happy with me working on my writing there.  I elected to come back here, though, because my children live here, and I was hoping to be able to see them on the regular and be a real part of their life again before I had missed the rest of their childhoods entirely.

Boy was that a miscalculation.  What a joke.  I might as well have hoped to capture a wild panther with my bare hands.

Well, one cannot change what has already happened.  And one cannot change what will happen or what is happening once it is happening.  One can only try to surf on the chaos as best one can.  But it loses its charm, that chaos surfing, over time, at least when there are very few good moments involved, and no positive outcomes to which to look forward, and nothing productive or creative to do anymore that grabs one’s attention.

I can’t seem to motivate myself to write fiction or to write music or to draw or to work on honing my physics and math skills and knowledge.  Being in chronic pain and having ASD level 2, but without actually having any social or other supports of significance*, really takes the wind out of one’s sails, more so every day.  I need something‒a break, an escape, rescue, relief, or just for everything to be over.

What else is new, right?  And on top of everything else, my train is running late.  It’s par for the crookedly run course down here.

It doesn’t matter, I guess.  Nothing does.  So, you might as well have a good first day of Autumn.  And, of course, enjoy celebrating Bilbo’s and Frodo’s birthdays.

*I don’t mean to be dismissive about my sister or my youngest child; they are wonderful and I love them and appreciate my connection with them.  But I am referring to regular, daily, local, literal support, of which I have none.  I don’t even have any friends (other than “work friends”) within a thousand miles.

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Year-long quanta and Planck exercises for your core

Well, it’s Monday again.  Huzzah.

I don’t have much new to say.  I still do not have my air conditioner, thanks to the frustratingly poor delivery logistics of FedEx®.  I also have to blame the seller, of course (though I find the concept of blame mostly valueless) since they were the ones who advertised the unit as arriving between the 28th and the 30th of May (this year), and they failed to ensure that it would in fact arrive within their predicted time range.

Hopefully it will arrive today, and hopefully by the time I get back to the house I will have the energy to set it up.  Usually at the end of the day I barely have the energy to change my clothes.

In other news, it was my sister’s birthday recently.  That’s a good thing, and I’m glad she’s doing well.  It would have been nice to spend it with her, but that wasn’t doable given my recent life events.  Of course, I’ve said before that it’s a bit funny that we think of a person as one year older on their birthday, as though time applied to human age in quanta the size of one Earth year.

At the Planck scale time may in fact be quantized, but that’s a very, very tiny scale‒if memory serves, it’s the time it takes light to travel one Planck length*‒and for ordinary experience, the flow of time is continuous, though it is variable thanks to Relativity.

That got me thinking what it might be like if time did apply to humans all at once, one day a year.  I think that would have some curious consequences.  For kids, of course, it might be quite a cool thing, and they might look forward to each birthday enthusiastically‒especially around the time of puberty.

But for adults past their twenties, say, birthdays might become a thing of fear, or at least anxiety, and more so every year.  Imagine that even the long-term consequences of illnesses and injuries only accrued on one’s birthday‒possibly at the exact anniversary of the time one was born.  If you knew you’d been injured that year, you’d surely be dreading the birthday on which the consequences of that injury first fully applied.

Or what if you knew you were predisposed to some chronic complaint, or had a risk for some form of cancer, or of dementia, but you wouldn’t know if anything had happened until the time of your birthday?  I imagine everyone would plan to go to the doctor the day after every birthday, at least once they had passed their twenties.

It’s an interesting idea for a story, perhaps.  You could see people having birthday parties and the like, partly to celebrate and partly to offer support for their friends who were aging.  There could be whole special rituals surrounding the process, especially as people got old enough to perhaps die when the year accrued.

And then there could be a weird, truly bizarre occurrence.  Maybe one person would be found who, after aging “normally” his whole life, suddenly got younger at one year’s birthday, and then again at subsequent birthdays, as if there were some type of glitch.

Heck, even a person who aged continuously would be a freak of nature in such a world.

Anyway, that’s what I found myself thinking about.  It seemed mildly amusing.  I’m not going to write such a story or anything.  At least I don’t expect to write it.

Indeed, I’m basically finished writing this for today.  I hope you have a good day and a good week.

*Which is on the order of ten to the negative 35th meters.  That means that there will be thirty-four zeros after the decimal point before there is any other numeral, so…a very small distance across which causality may act at the “speed of light”.  Since the Planck length is 1.6 x 10-35 meters and the speed of light is about 3 x 108 meters per second, the Planck time would be 1.6/3 times (10-35 over 108) or .5 x 10-43 or just 5 x 10-44 seconds**.  That’s way, way too small for us to measure.

**Or .00000000000000000000000000000000000000000005 seconds.

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The Day of the Moon and Guy Fawkes Eve

It’s Monday morning‒the first Monday in November.  It’s also my mother’s birthday, though since she’s no longer with us here, I doubt that she celebrates it any more.  Nevertheless, it’s still worth celebrating.  The world is a better place, I think, for having had my mother in it.  True, she did give birth to me, but you can’t hold that against her too much; nobody’s perfect, and the positive things she did (including my brother and sister) outweigh the negatives, both literally and figuratively.

I felt really horrible last week, physically and mentally (and not just because of my ongoing acute viral illness).  That’s part of why I just did my little sarcastic, blah-heavy blog post.  I had no interest in doing anything more.  What, indeed, would have been the point?  I doubt that I have anything useful or entertaining to say, even today.

Of course, the big election is tomorrow, but honestly, that whole shit show is thoroughly contemptible at nearly every level, and it’s hard to feel good about it in any way.  Of course, one of the presidential candidates is clearly the ethically superior person, but neither is particularly impressive.  I look back with real nostalgia on the Romney-Obama election.

Oh, well.  It’s probably appropriate that it’s Guy Fawkes Day tomorrow.  Penny for the Guy?  Remember, remember the fifth of November, the gunpowder, treason, and plot.  Let’s set this thing alight.

I have been rereading (and even editing) Outlaw’s Mind after removing the opening scene, thus making it into a story without that constraining ending.  I think it’s a good story; better and more involved than I would have expected when I started it, with a tone that reminds me, oddly, of Stephen King’s Revival, though I’m not at all sure why.

It seems very unlikely that I will finish it, though.  I would need to find some new lease on life, somehow, and right now my life credit score is abysmal, and the only existence I seem able to afford is metaphorically even more dreary and gross than the room in which I spend my evenings and weekends.  I live alone in a single, cluttered, old place, but my mental and “spiritual” existence makes the physical location seem like an all-inclusive paradise vacation with one’s closest and dearest friends and family.

It’s all I deserve, really.  I don’t want you to think I pity myself.  I mean, I guess in a way I do, but it’s a contemptuous sort of self-pity, a kind of “look at that pathetic, pitiful, putrid excuse for a person” feeling.

I really could use some help‒some serious help, some professional help, probably some emergency help.  But I know that I don’t deserve any help, I’m not worthy of help, I don’t merit any help.  It would almost certainly be a waste of resources.

I’ve also had a huge back and leg pain flare-up this weekend, of the cause of which I’m far from certain.  It has, however, made this last weekend almost anti-restful, even though I had Saturday off.

I did nothing to celebrate Halloween this year, despite the fact that it’s generally my favorite holiday.  Then again, I did nothing to celebrate my birthday, either.  As I said in a post on Facebook, I have no interest in anything.  Everything is uninteresting.  I would just like to stop being in pain, to stop feeling like I have to keep pushing forward, to keep moving and doing, just because that’s what one is “supposed” to do.

I can see, more and more, that the current shape of my life is the shape of the rest of my life.  This is the landscape of my continued existence:  doing an okay job that doesn’t involve my medical or scientific skills, working with people with whom I can’t really have conversations about anything that interests me, leaving work to commute to a dreary old room where I try (and fail) to get a decent night’s sleep, then spend the weekend basically doing nothing because there’s nothing interesting to do, and if there were, I would be too tired and in too much pain to do it.

This is all some of why I didn’t really write a post last Thursday.  I don’t know if I will write one this week.  But no matter what, one of these days (and it probably won’t be very long) there will just stop being any blog posts from me, and none of you will ever hear from me again.  And your lives will probably be somewhat happier because of that.

Most people seem to be happier when I’m not around.  Most things tend to go better.

Meanwhile, I can only try to distract myself from my chronic pain by inflicting other, more immediate pain upon myself.  Nothing else does an adequate job, but even so, it’s not really enough.

That’s it for today, I guess

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And nature, as it blogs again toward earth, is fashioned for the journey

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, and so:  here’s another blog post—meaning another regular, weekly, Thursday morning blog post.  Of course, people who receive notifications about my blog posts will have seen already that not only did I publish an impromptu entry on Monday, but also that, starting on Tuesday, I’ve been sharing a chapter at a time, three times a day, of Extra Body.

I finished the third editing run-through of that story by Tuesday morning, and I decided, “that’s good enough, I’m done with that, I’m tired of working on it, or on anything else”.  I considered just publishing it through Amazon, but that would have involved designing a cover and getting the formatting right for the paperback and e-book versions, and even then it would have been far from likely that anyone (except my sister) would read any of it, ever.  At least this way, maybe someone who is idly curious but wouldn’t go to the trouble of actually buying the book from Amazon (or other sources) might idly start reading it and even might read the whole thing.

Speaking of the whole thing, it will be completely published by Friday afternoon, which is when Chapter 12 is scheduled to go up.

I don’t know whether the story is any good or not.  I suppose that would depend upon the criteria one uses to judge the “goodness” of a story, and no two people would probably have precisely the same implicit criteria.  I say “implicit” because I doubt most people (or anyone, really) would actually apply any formal judgement criteria to such things.  I think it’s a much more “analog” process, a weighted neural network/high-dimension vector addition (or possibly vector calculus) sort of problem.  As such, it probably changes from day to day and even from moment to moment for every person.

It may be mathematically possible in principle for two people to have exactly the same judgment criteria about fiction*, but I suspect that there aren’t anything like enough people in all the universe—not just spatially but temporally, past and future—to have exactly the same mental state regarding how they judge and react to fiction at any given time, or even in their entire lifetimes (this discounts the potential “quilted multiverse”, if the universe is spatially infinite, in which all states would recur an infinite number of times).

I’m giving this more thought than it probably deserves.  I tend to do that.

On to other matters, or at least, let’s move away from that subject.

This Sunday will be the day of the Autumnal Equinox, the official beginning of Autumn in the northern hemisphere.  It’s also September 22nd (this is often the case with the Autumnal Equinox) and is thus the date of Bilbo and Frodo Baggins’s birthdays (according to Shire reckoning, anyway—I’m not sure precisely how that lines up with the Gregorian calendar, but I suspect Tolkien just kind of took them as roughly aligning, though the hobbits apparently took the 5 (and a quarter-ish) extra days of the year as a non-month in midsummer and had 30-day months for all the rest of the year).  That was also the day on which Frodo left Bag End to begin his long and arduous and torturous path to destroy the One Ring.

So it is an auspicious day in more than one sense, a day on which momentous or portentous things may begin or end or begin to end.

Though Frodo survived, of course, he never was quite the same after his journey, having suffered from the stab of the Morgul blade on Weathertop, and the bite of Shelob, and—most of all—the terrible effects of the Ring itself when it was at its most perilous, its most awake, and its most desperate.

The voice-over near the end of the movie The Return of the King really expresses Frodo’s sense of enduring damage and suffering:  “How do you pick up the threads of an old life?  How do you go on when you begin to understand there is no going back?  There are some things that time cannot mend.  Some hurts that go too deep, that have taken hold.”  How, indeed?

Nietzsche is famously quoted as having said that whatever doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.  In response to that, I would simply say to him, “syphilis”**.

There are many things that do not kill us that nevertheless wear us down, leave scars and damage and dysfunction in their wake.  Of course, one could reply that such things are killing us, they are merely doing it slowly, in a cumulative and collective fashion.  But if one is going to reach for that linguistic/semantic escape clause from the dichotomy of Nietzsche’s statement, then one is merely engaging in tautology.  If one says that anything that doesn’t make us stronger is, by our definition, killing us (even if only slowly), then saying that whatever doesn’t kill us makes us stronger is just saying the same thing.  No insight is gained.

In any case, things wear out and fall apart no matter what.  As far as we can see, that is a fundamental aspect of the nature of reality.  New things do arise, lives are born, stars form, perhaps new “universes” are constantly emerging in an eternal inflationary universe.  But mathematics dictates that all things eventually seek out the most entropic states—not out of any desire, any “telos”, just out of the tendency of the math of complex systems.

Things fall apart.  The center cannot hold.  And Darkness and Decay and the Second Law of Thermodynamics hold illimitable dominion over all***.

TTFN

*Though if the process is truly continuous, in the “real numbers” sense of continuous (quantum mechanics suggests this cannot be so), then there would be literally, uncountably infinite possible arrangements, and so it would be “infinitely improbable” for any two people ever to match exactly.  That seems appropriate, given the story being discussed.

**Perhaps the real “Montezuma’s Revenge”.

***This is a mashup of and paraphrasing of separate literary works, so I’m not surrounding it with quotation marks, but:  credit to Yeats and to Poe****.

****No, NOT the heroic pilot from the newer, Disney-Star-Wars films.  You Philistines*****.

*****This is, ultimately, a reference to the fact that the Philistines, according to legend, stole the Ark of the Covenant from the Temple of Solomon, and thus their name is used as an epithet referring to those who show no respect for sacred or artistic or cultural worth.