Birthdays

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June 1st writing report

It’s the beginning of June, and a day that, by rights, should be a global holiday.  Perhaps someday it will.

Today I wrote 1,227 “block”* words on Extra Body, and the “Net” word count was almost identical:  1,228.  That’s less than a tenth of a percent difference, which is kind of cool, since I did make quite a few changes as I reread the previous 3 pages of writing to get me into the swing of writing today.

The total word count of the story is now 50,798, so it’s no one’s idea of a short story.  I don’t know, I just am not great at making stories short.  I increased the line spacing from 1 to 1.15 yesterday (or perhaps it was on Wednesday), because it’s easier to look at.  At the time, this changed the total page number from 71 to 74, which is nothing like a 15% increase, as one might expect from a naïve formula for how the page number relates to the line spacing.  I’m not sure what makes it so different, though.

Of course, the type size doesn’t change, only the space between lines of type, and that’s relatively small, to start with, so perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised that it makes such a relative small difference.  It’s like the universe expanding overall but galaxies and galaxy clusters, being gravitationally bound, do not expand, only the space between them does.  When they are still close together, the change is relatively minor.  Of course, if the line spacing in my work were to increase exponentially, the space between lines would very soon come to dominate completely the fractional change in size, as is so with the universe, and then the page number change would track more closely with the spacing change.  But it would be pretty nuts to decide to increase the line spacing in a story.  Who would want to witness the heat death of the novella, after all?

Ah, well, all that doesn’t matter much.  But it does mean that, now, the story is over 80 pages long, and I think it may reach (or even exceed) a hundred before I’m through with the first draft.  It’s not quite going the way of Outlaw’s Mind (which started as a short story idea and became way more than expected) but it’s still really something.  I can’t make myself feel bad about it, though.  I mean, I’m frustrated that it’s taking so long, but the story has to be what it is, and I can’t make it otherwise.

I hope you all have a good weekend.  I should return on Monday, barring–as always–the unforeseen.  

 

 

*If you would like to see the definition of this term as I use it, I describe it in my reply to a comment on yesterday’s post.

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There’s a divinity that shapes our blogs, rough-hew them how we will

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, and as I promised‒or threatened, depending on your point of view‒here I am, writing my weekly blog post as before, back when I was regularly writing and publishing my fiction.

I’m not sure what topic(s) I should cover here, today.  I rarely seem able to plan these posts in advance, and when I do plan them, I don’t think they often come out very well.  That’s from my point of view, of course; maybe other people have found my planned posts excellent and wish I would write them more often, but if so, they haven’t given any clear feedback.  So, I don’t really know what will happen from now until the end of this blog post.

Of course, if the universe is deterministic, then whether I or anyone else knows it or not, what I will write is already a certain thing, as is the fact that I don’t know it‒indeed one could legitimately claim that it “already” exists in a sense, particularly if one is invoking the picture of Special and General Relativity and the “block” spacetime concept.

However, the Copenhagen interpretation (if that’s the correct term) of quantum mechanics states that wave-function collapse is truly “random”, and so the future is not determined, at least at the smallest level.  But if the wave function truly collapses, then that would be the only fundamentally irreversible temporal process known in physics so far, and that seems suspicious to me.

I’ve been reading the original EPR paper and thinking about this subject at least a little bit lately.

Of course, in a way, the Everettian “many worlds” interpretation of quantum mechanics would say that the future really is determined, but that at every instance of decoherence, the wavefunction becomes subdivided into waves that no longer interact with each other directly.  People interpret this as if new universes were coming into existence each time, and that’s a decent way to conceptualize it, but to me it seems misleading.

To my mind, it’s just waves that are traveling along in “parallel” and not influencing each other.  But that’s not really any different from the sounds of two separate conversations happening in a crowded room‒maybe one involves a group of people discussing a recent sporting event and another gaggle is talking about some new show on Netflix.  Maybe the conversations are even in different languages.  The sound waves propagate from each conversation independently, and though there may be places where troughs and crests pass and add or subtract for an instant, locally, they are very much different processes.  But there is no mystical invocation of “new universes” such as what troubles some people about Everettian quantum mechanics because of a misunderstanding of Occam’s Razor.  There are just separate, “parallel” things happening within the same overall universe.

That’s not a perfect analogy, of course.  The “waves” of the quantum mechanics are more complex* than sound waves, and are more fundamental, and once they decohere, it seems they are far less likely to interact with their other “branches” than are even sound waves of parallel conversations in different languages.  But even those are more separable than we think.

We have an exquisitely evolved capacity to parse the information out of human conversation, decoding the waves without thought, and so we don’t think very often about how astonishing that process is.  If aliens who communicated only by light flashes were trying to interpret such a set of conversations, they would have a daunting task, indeed.

Just think about how hard it has been even to decode the communications of dolphins and whales‒highly intelligent and social creatures that clearly communicate with each other.  And these are our fellow mammals from the same planet, who also use sound for communication!  We vastly underestimate the complexity of what we’re doing when we understand conversation and other noises, because our auditory processing systems do it without our conscious intervention, and they have been honed over hundreds of millions of years by the brutal and pitiless sieve** of natural selection.

Likewise, we thoroughly underestimate the complexity involved in catching a pop-up fly ball, or a thrown football, or the process of walking, or of throwing a ball, or of finding a specific item on a cluttered desk.  It shouldn’t surprise us that even if the future “division” of the universal wave function seems random, it can be utterly deterministic, and in that sense each branch “already” exists.  But each “branch” that no longer interacts with others after an instance of decoherence will “feel” to given humans*** as if it were the one and only “universe” and that all others have collapsed out of existence somehow, when they’re really just there but not interacting anymore with the person in question.

Maybe I’m wrong, of course.  I mean, I’ve been right before, but not often enough to make it my default presumption.

Anyway, there you have it, the stuff about which I was “destined” to write, though I had no specific plans.  That’s fair enough.  “Life is what happens while you’re making other plans,” as the saying goes.

Speaking of plans, though, I plan to write tomorrow and Saturday**** on my fiction (probably just on Extra Body).  I may take my laptop with me to do it; the experiment with my smartphone seems to be working okay (see my reports from Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday), but it doesn’t feel quite as “natural” to me, still.  Who knows, though?

Only Laplace’s Demon® (Quantum Version™) knows.  But of course, that entity would feel, if anything, less “free” than those of us who know not yet what is to be and know not fully what has been.  For an entity that can see every detail of the past and the future laid out deterministically and in full detail is utterly incapable of taking any action on such knowledge‒for its own actions are as determined as all others, and it “knows” this.  Indeed, it cannot but know it.

Ignorance is not bliss, but it does at least give you room to improve, and that can be ego syntonic.

Have a good week, if such is your destiny.

TTFN

*Ha ha, that’s a little physics joke there, when you think of how quantum wave functions involve complex numbers.

**Mixed metaphor alert!  How would a sieve hone anything?  Oh, well, I’m not going to change it; it works too well to communicate my meaning.

***And the very process of “feeling like something” is extraordinarily complex, and we only really understand the bare rudiments of how this happens.  This relative ignorance engenders the propagation of nonsensical, conceptually vacuous ideas like panpsychism and the like, and the pseudo-mystery of the “hard problem” of consciousness.  Well, it is a hard problem in a sense, but not the way philosophers of consciousness seem to express it, as far as I can see.

****I think I will be working Saturday, but I’m not certain, because of the highly atypical thing that happened last Saturday, with the office being closed.  This coming Saturday will be my son’s 24th birthday, and I will now literally have missed half of his life more or less completely.  That’s his preference, not mine, though it started as a consequence of my own misadventures‒our personal wavefunction decoherence if you will.  Still, when enough people repeatedly decide they don’t really like having you around or interacting with you too much, you have to think there must be some powerful causes for the consistency, especially when you don’t even really want to be around yourself.  So, I am profoundly sad about the state of things, and I miss my children terribly, but I have to conclude provisionally that they’re making a reasonable decision.  At least I “talk” to my daughter from time to time, and that’s not a small consolation.

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“Merry Christmas, you filthy animals!”

It is Saturday, the 23rd of December in 2023 (AD), and I am writing this while already at the office; I did not go back to the house last night.  It occurred to me yesterday that, even if the workday were to be called off, I needed to be here, since I had several deliveries—unimaginative Christmas gifts for coworkers—arriving today.  With that thought came the realization that I did not want to commute to the house and then back overnight, and that I would be just as comfortable, or nearly so, sleeping at the office.  It’s not as though there was anyone waiting for me at “home”.

To be fair, I probably did not quite sleep as well as I would have at the house.  Then again, sleep is a fickle friend for me at any time, in any place.  And Saturdays are rather slow workdays at the best of times, so I’ll be able to meditate and/or nod off during the day as needs may have it.  I really ought to do that more, anyway—meditating, I mean.  I used to either meditate or self-hypnotize every day, and over quite a long stretch of time during my teenage years.  I would say that I was more together and mentally stable at that time, but I cannot give all—or possibly any—of the credit for that to my introspective states.  It may be enough that I was also in my hometown, and had a core group of long-term friends, and of course, I was living at home with my family.

In any case, I think it would be good for me to engage in some form of mental practice or meditation practice regularly, just to try to calm my mind a bit.  I’m extremely tense very much of the time, and I think it contributes to my sleep troubles and to overeating.  I rarely eat from hunger—when I’m doing something in which I’m interested, I rarely even feel hunger.  Instead, I eat as a sort of self-soothing behavior, something that becomes less of a problem when I’m less depressed and unhappy.  So, as you can imagine, it’s been pretty bad for quite a while.

Of course, it’s hard to avoid indulging at this time of year, since there are holiday treats and goodies everywhere.  I think since around Halloween I’ve been going back and forth trying to do better with diet and exercise, with highly inconsistent results.  I think that, after Monday at the latest, I should be able at least to avoid most temptations, since even at the office people won’t be bringing or receiving sweets or special foods and people won’t be talking about them as much anymore.  Not that I can use such things as an excuse; the weakness is all mine, of course.  But I must strive to become stronger if I can, and this will at least be somewhat easier with the holidays over.

Speaking of holidays, though, let me use this as my opportunity to wish all of you who celebrate it a Merry Christmas!  It’s a good holiday, a family-oriented and uplifting holiday, whether you focus on religious observation or purely secular observation, and even if you go so far as to use it as a day to celebrate the birth of Newton (whose birthday was December 25th, albeit on the Julian calendar not the Gregorian calendar used in the modern world).

As far as religious observation goes, it should be noted that—as I understand it—Christmas wasn’t even a holiday in Christendom until the late Middle Ages or some such time, when it was more or less engineered to take over from other popular solstice-related celebrations such as Yule and Saturnalia and all that stuff.

It’s fair enough that they didn’t celebrate the birth of Jesus in December, because apparently most biblical scholars agree that he was born sometime in the summer (and that wasn’t in the southern hemisphere—see my post recently that discusses seasons and the solstice and such).  Still, I doubt he’d be too worried about the date of the celebration of his birth being moved.  After all, there’d been a hiatus of about one and a half millennia during which it wasn’t really celebrated at all, though the story—two different versions of it—is there in two of the Gospels (Matthew and Luke*).  He was probably only too willing to take what he could get, as long as it wasn’t frankincense or myrrh.

Sorry, I don’t mean to be disrespectful.  When I was giving the year above, I deliberately only put in the Anno Domini contraction as a show of respect and courtesy, and I did not do so ironically.  Though I don’t think Jesus was perfect as a moral teacher—C.S. Lewis himself admitted that much in an oblique way—even if you’re thoroughly areligious, there are a fair few good things in his sermons.  He certainly was no advocate of war or avarice or nepotism or xenophobia, and hypocrisy really ticked him off.

He did tend to teach in parables a great deal, and he got rather exasperated when people didn’t quite get the points he was making.  I don’t see how any Christian could read the gospels and then take the whole Bible as literal truth.  Jesus was practically screaming in everyone’s face that a lot this was metaphor, and if you take him as an incarnation of God, then surely this can apply to the whole shebang.

Anyway, I won’t get into all that anymore for now.  Belief is tricky.  I’m not good at it in general—I have to check and make sure I have my keys with me about 200 times a day—and I don’t really advocate it; I prefer to be provisionally convinced by evidence and argument and to remain open to have my conclusions updated by new evidence and argument to whatever degree is appropriate.  But I do believe there’s nothing wrong with wishing all of you a Very Merry Christmas (and with words borrowed from my favorite Doctor, at that).

santa-whoand merry

The Happy New Year stuff will come next week.

*Am I the only one who wants to say the gospels as “Matthew, Mark, Luke, and Leia”, or perhaps, “Matthew, Mark, Luke, and Han”, which would at least sound nearly the same?  Best not to read from the book of Boba Fett, though, or so I’ve heard.

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Trivial nonsense on a pseudo-ominous day

I’d intended to walk to the train this morning, so of course I didn’t bring my portable, foldable computer designed to be suitable for use resting upon one’s lap with me yesterday.  Therefore, I am writing this blog post on my smartphone*.  However, I did not walk to the train.

I just felt really wiped out still this morning; my sleep wasn’t quite as bad as it had been the night before, but it still was rotten, and I feel rotten.  Also, this morning it’s three degrees (Fahrenheit…so one and two thirds degrees Celsius) hotter than it was two days ago.  I’m sweating even more than usual even though I’m just sitting at the train station right now.  There’s also, again, no breeze of which to speak, so everything is stagnant, and sweat doesn’t really do any work toward cooling one down.

I hope that, by this evening, it’s either cooler or at least breezier, and that I’ll have a bit more energy, so I might feel up to walking back from the train.  At least then I wouldn’t have to worry about sweating on train seats.

My coworker did come to the office yesterday, bearing pictures and stories of his brief family trip, mainly focused on his very young daughter.  It was quite charming.  Another person I know is currently on a trip as well‒two of them together, really‒and all these reports got me nostalgic about trips I had taken to (or times I had lived in) their various destinations.  I fear to talk too much about my own experiences in such circumstances, though I feel the urge‒I suspect that I’m just being horribly obnoxious when I catch myself doing it, and internally rebuke myself with things like, “No one gives a shit about all your stupid stories” and so on.

To be fair, no one has complained to me about it, so I evidently haven’t overstepped the bounds of good taste too much.  I probably do so overstep here, on my blog, but if anyone here doesn’t want to “hear” my stupid stories, they have only themselves to blame for reading them.

Today is Friday the 13th, isn’t it?  Back in the old days, some local network station would probably have used today‒and the fact that we are in the month of October, to boot‒as an excuse to show some highly edited versions of the slasher films named after the day.  For all I know, some of them still do.  Anyway, I tend to like Friday the 13th, largely because 13 is a prime number, and it’s one for which I feel a special affection precisely because it is so reviled by so many other people, for silly, superstitious reasons.  I myself am not superstitious.  I’m just a little bit stitious.  Ba-dump-bump.

I will be working tomorrow, so maybe I’ll walk to the train in the morning.  Timing things like that can be a bit awkward on the weekend, because the trains only run every hour, and none of the departure times is roughly comparable to the place in the hour that I usually catch them.  So if I get up at the same time as usual, whether walking or otherwise, I’m either “too early” or “too late” compared to my preference.  Of course “too early” is VASTLY preferable to the alternative, so I will err in that direction.  It’s not as though I can choose just to sleep in‒not without the use of pharmaceuticals‒so I might as well just get going.

I had a rather abrupt surge in my lower back pain this morning, above the usual baseline (to which I’ve almost become accustomed).  It may be because I didn’t put on my spandex knee and ankle support thingies**, since I had chosen not to walk.  It seems a bit much to think, though, that just the very small amount of walking I’ve done without them, wearing boots that give decent ankle support, would trigger an exacerbation.  It’s possible, I guess, but it seems unlikely.  It’s also possible that I slept in an unusual position, or just that fatigue and relative dehydration and whatnot are taking a bit of a toll.

Ah, well.  I brought my knee and ankle specialty spandex bits of supplemental clothing with me, in case I walk this evening, so I can always slip them on during the day.

I already gave away my folding massage chair.  It wasn’t doing me any good anymore, and it’s one less thing to have around or to leave behind.  I’m trying to farm off or just eliminate as much useless junk as I can.  The less clutter, the better.

That last sentence makes me wish I could legitimately say “and the less butter, the cletter”, but that last word, alas, has no meaning of which I am aware.  I suppose I could make up a meaning for it, but if you have to invent a word to make a pseudo-spoonerism work, then you’re really reaching.

One of the security guys on the train just walked by, and as he did, he muttered, “Damn, it’s hot.”  He’s far from overstating the situation.  The A/C on the train appears to be running***, based on the noise, but it doesn’t seem to be cooling the car much if at all.  I guess that at least means that my glasses (and my phone) won’t fog up when I exit the train, and that’s worth avoiding, so it’s a good thing.  See?  Who says I can’t find the positive in seemingly negative situations?

Some do say that cynics are really just frustrated idealists.  I don’t know that I am or ever have been an idealist, but I certainly am frustrated.

With that, I’ll draw (or write) this post to a close.  I hope you all have a good and lucky Friday the 13th, and that you have a good weekend to follow.  I expect to be writing a post for tomorrow morning, so if you like that sort of thing, come to this space then‒figuratively speaking‒at about the usual time.

*I don’t have any urge to clarify the word “smartphone” because it really doesn’t refer to any other entity in the universe of which I know, and‒certainly compared to any phones I used prior to the last ten years‒it is a very smart phone indeed.

**I’m not sure what the best term for these is.  “Brace” feels most typical, but that, to me, somehow implies hard, hinged, moving parts, which are lacking in the products I use.  “Support” seems reasonable, but it feels a bit vague.  Perhaps “compression sleeve” would work, but that feels a bit confusing.

***I would guess that it’s probably powered by alternating current created by an alternator (duh!) attached to the engine, but it could be run from batteries that receive their charge via rectified current initially generated in the engine.  If that is the case, then we have the rather pleasing situation of an A/C running on DC.  That’s better than butter and cletter than clutter.

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“Father snores as his wife gets into her dressing gown”

It’s Wednesday now, in case you were wondering.  Yesterday during the day I felt very much as grim and gloomy as my blog post in the morning, if a bit less angry.  In the evening, though, I stuck to my plan to walk back from the train to the house, and I talked to my sister on the phone while I did.  That’s more than seventeen miles of walking in the past few days.  It helped that it wasn’t raining at all, and the evening temperature, while far from cool, was not as hot as it has been.  Also, there was something of a breeze blowing.

My new boots are working well; I had no blistering or worsening of pain or anything of that sort.  Only after I took them off did I feel that there was a very slight irritation in a spot on the ball of my left foot.  There’s no visible sign of anything, and since I’m going to be resting from long walking today, it should have ample time to recover from whatever minor issues it has.  I seem to be having, just maybe, a tiny bit less back pain‒or at least fewer bad exacerbations‒than usual, as I get in better condition and (I think) lose a bit of weight.

It’s a good start, but I’m a long way from being the way I wish I were, in either direction.

We had a heck of a day in the office yesterday, being very busy and with many successful events, so to speak.  That’s always a good thing, at least ceteris paribus.  There were, however, several times when I got stressed out* because of people not following the protocols or leaving out stupid things‒like a customer’s zip code, for instance!  Sometimes they don’t even put down the state, or they’ll write down what’s supposed to be the email address, but it seems to be only whatever must have come before the @ symbol.  It’s as if they imagine there’s really only one email server.  I know Gmail is big, but there are many others.

These people are almost all younger than I am.  They have grown up with this technology firmly in place all around them.  How is it that they can fail to know the basics of email?  It’s frankly astonishing.

I just realized it’s my father’s birthday today.  He knew more about computers than I, right up until the day he died, probably, but then again, that was his profession.  He certainly used email before anyone else I know.

He was a smart guy, and he worked hard.  If he had grown up somewhere other than a blue collar factory town, he probably would have done even more than he did with computers.  Of course, it’s hard to tell for sure; when you change one thing, usually many other things change as well.

He did all right, anyway.  He and my Mom, who had known each other since well before they were married, stayed together until he died.  I think it must be really nice to have one constant, steady and reliable companion for a lifetime.  Of course, in such situations, it’s often the case that, once one dies, the other soon follows‒which was the case with my parents.  That’s not a horrible thing, really, to be able to wind down and cash out, once one’s spouse is gone, because life just isn’t worth nearly as much without them.  In some ways it’s touching.

Living alone, and not having any good skill or ability at making new friends or new connections, is not touching.  Then again, most people are just frustrating and bizarre.  I don’t exclude myself from this judgment, even from my own point of view.  I usually find myself terribly unpleasant.  At least I’m familiar with myself, but that doesn’t necessarily mean I like me.  Most of the time I don’t.  And yet, as I’ve said before, there’s certainly no one else I’d rather be.  So I’m in a difficult circumstance.

There are, it seems, ways around all that.  But they require some courage, so it’s taking me time and effort to work my way up to it.  I certainly have no interest in trying to maintain the status quo in the absurd and pointless game of my daily existence.

People follow all these rules and customs and mores, but they’re all just ad hoc inventions, just crap that fell together all on its own.  And yet, people treat them as if they are important, just as they seem to think of the people in government as somehow different from themselves.  Would that it were the case.  But the people in government‒making laws, making decisions, making judgments, participating in bureaucracies and the like‒are all just flesh and blood creatures that eat and excrete like every other living thing.

Don’t be in too much awe of any human, or frankly of any other kind of creature, real or imaginary.  You would be a fool, in general, to revere any government figure much.  Most of them are narcissists and opportunists of one stripe or another, because that’s the sort of person for whom roles in government tend to select.  Often they are also self-righteous and hypocritical.  And yet, other humans beings who are no brighter (or dimmer) than their so-called leaders will follow and sometimes come near to worshiping such people.  It’s all rather pathetic.

Humans‒you can’t live with ’em, you can’t eat ’em (too many germs and toxins).

Anyway, that’s enough for now.  I’ll give you a break after yesterday’s quite long post.  All bitterness aside, I honestly wish you well, and I hope you have a good day.

And Happy Birthday, Dad, wherever you may be, even if you are nowhere but in the past.  You did a pretty good job, and you certainly took what you did seriously, seeing fatherhood as a duty, not as a privilege.  Would that more people would have that sort of attitude.  It wouldn’t solve all the world’s problems, but I suspect it would make many things better.

*I even had minor chest pains at one point.

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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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Despite some personal and global grumbles, today is a day worth celebrating

Well, it’s another morning, as usually happens at this time of day, and I’m sitting at the train station.

I did not walk to the station this morning.  I get too washed out if I do that too often in a row while it’s this hot and muggy.  If it were a bit cooler, I could walk back and forth, to and from the train station, and as long as I gave my ankle(s) and Achilles tendon a rest when needed, I think I wouldn’t bat an eye*.  But, as is generally the case at this time of year, the weather in south Florida is disgusting.

Don’t get me wrong; in winter, and especially in late fall and early spring, it’s quite pleasant here.  But at this time of year, it’s sticky and rather gross.

Enough of all that.  I’m here at the train station now, and I’m writing this on my miniature laptop computer.  I needed to give the base of my thumbs a rest—speaking of resting sore parts of one’s body—because they have really been acting up lately.

It also just feels so much more natural to write this on the computer.  This computer—most any such computer, really—feels like an extension of me when I’m using it, much more so than my phone ever feels.  I’m not a huge fan of the smartphones, though I would never deny that they are tremendously useful in many ways, and I do make such use of them.

But I don’t find them handy for talking on the phone; I cannot hear properly using the inbuilt speaker, unless it’s absolutely quiet around me, and even then I have to focus.  So I use earphones, which take care of that, but regular office phones are still easier.  Anyway, the only person I talk to on the phone is my sister, so I guess that’s only an issue in that circumstance.

I do find texting reasonably convenient, but of course, when my thumb bases are suffering from arthralgia**, texting is uncomfortable.  It’s also terribly irritating when one is part of a texting group and there are texts going back and forth and back and forth, so there are text alerts every few seconds, preventing one from doing anything that one is trying to do, because one can’t just ignore the texts—they might be important.

Usually they aren’t.  They’re often just the cyber equivalent of moronic small talk.  It’s maddening.

I do like being able to listen to podcasts and audiobooks on my phone—using the aforementioned headphones—so I can hardly complain about that.  And few people have used a phone for reading Kindle books more than I have.  I also play Sudoku or Euchre when I need to kill a bit of time.

Maybe I’m actually a big fan of the smartphone.  Or perhaps I’ve merely been ensnared, put under a spell, forced to become dependent upon a nefarious technology.  It is a tad annoying that there are more things I can readily do on the phone than on the laptop, when the latter really ought to be more versatile and useful.

The computer certainly has, for me, a much better user interface.  But it doesn’t have the ability to connect to any “phone” networks in and of itself, and using public Wi-Fi makes me slightly nervous, at least in principle.  Of course, I can set up my phone as a mobile hotspot to which the computer can link.  I have done that before, but it uses up a fair amount of phone data and—appropriately—makes the phone get literally quite hot.  After all, processing information generates quite a lot of high-entropy waste heat.

This is, of course, part of the reason why crypto-currency mining is more harmful for the environment than automobile exhaust (if I understand correctly).  “The cloud” is far from carbon-neutral, also.  All those servers running the internet and web, and all those GPUs running all the time to do the “mining” and so on use tremendous amounts of energy, and that has to be generated somehow.

And as far as alternatives to burning stuff:  people are illogically afraid of nuclear power***, and solar is not yet at full efficiency, though there are no big and obvious reasons that it cannot become so in reasonable time.  Mind you, solar power is just a form of fusion power—natural fusion, but fusion nonetheless—when you get right down to it.  But we obviously can only harness the tiniest fragment of the fusion power from the sun.

Still, there’s so much power coming from the sun that even getting a tiny amount is pretty good.

I don’t know why I’m writing about these particular random things at the moment.  I have to write about something though****.  So I just write whatever comes to mind, and since it’s my mind, it’s often rather peculiar.

It is an important, good day globally today, though I won’t get into the specifics.  I’ll just say that one of the two most positive events in the history of the universe happened on this date, twenty-two years ago.  So, if anyone out there has the opportunity to celebrate, you should certainly do so, in whatever way gives you greatest and most durable joy (without causing physical harm to others).  You have ample reason, even if you don’t know what it is.  It’s that good.

You can also celebrate the fact that I am now drawing this blog post to a close, since it’s getting a bit long by now, counting the footnotes.  Please, really, do have a very good day if you can manage it.  Thank you.

celebration scaled

*And I certainly wouldn’t eye a bat.

**Which literally just means “joint pain”.

***Not realizing, perhaps, that probably more people die every year from simple air-pollution-related causes due to traditional power generation than have died from nuclear events since nuclear power has existed.  I’m only guessing, but I do guess, that’s probably even counting the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  But the deaths due to air pollution are covert deaths.  They happen in the background, they exist as an uptick in baseline mortality across populations, and each individual untimely death is all but unnoticeable, so it’s hard to recognize that large-scale tragedies are caused—or worsened—by pollution.  People aren’t good at statistics and probability, and they aren’t trained to become better, by and large.

****I really do.  It’s a compulsion.  Not to write on a given morning before work would be extremely stressful for me.  Imagine being forced to watch one of your loved ones (who perhaps has a bit of dyspraxia) trying for the very first time to snow-board, and doing so on a high mountain course with canyons and cliffs and numerous trees and very steep, treacherous paths, after having gotten quite drunk the night before.  It’s that kind of tension.  Or so I imagine.  I’m probably exaggerating.  But it isn’t good, that for certain.  Even thinking about not doing it makes me feel as if I’m in the presence of hostile others.

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“Although I laugh, and I act like a clown…”

It’s Friday, and I’m sitting at the train station, writing this on my laptop—by which I mean I’m writing it on my laptop computer.

I’m pretty sure that everyone reading this knows that, when I say I’m writing on my laptop, I mean I’m using my laptop computer, not that I’m doing some bizarre form of self-decoration by writing on my actual lap, and then—presumably—recopying it onto the web sometime later.  That makes little to no sense.  Nevertheless, I feel compelled to clarify that when I say “laptop” I mean “laptop computer”.  I try to make it into a joke—I do this with a lot of things that I find it impossible not initially to take literally—and it is indeed funny sometimes.  However, it is not simply my choice to try to be jokey.  I cannot resist thinking that way, it seems.  At least, I don’t tend to be able to resist it.

I brought my computer with me because I didn’t walk back to the house (which is not my home) from the train after work, and I knew I wasn’t going to walk to the train this morning.  I was a bit physically wiped out yesterday by noon.  I was also psychologically wiped out, even more than usual, to be honest.  I started the day ever so slightly giddy after having walked to the train station—I’m a person who responds well to accomplishments, and I also tend to get good endorphin rushes (apparently) from endurance exercise.

I guess in a way my “crashing” is probably like coming down from any kind of drug—you get a rebound effect.  So, even if the endorphins and enkephalins or whatever are endogenous, if you get in a state where you have a high concentration of them—or, rather, a high degree of activity in nerve cell groups that are associated with those neurotransmitters—when it stops, the overstimulated postsynaptic nerves are going to become more inactive than they were at baseline.

I’ve noticed that I often have this sort of experience with comedy.  If I’ve been watching lots of funny videos, for instance, afterwards I’ll often have a powerful come-down feeling, and actually get depressed—more so than I am at baseline, I mean, which is pretty flipping low.  This used to happen to me especially badly when I would read through my former Dave Barry collection.  He was so funny, so consistently, that by the time I’d read very much of his stuff, I was apparently strongly prone to shift the other way, and sometimes got very depressed afterwards.

Maybe the opposite of this phenomenon is why so many people like sad stories and sad songs.  If you listen to a particularly heartbreaking song—it would probably have to be a good one, of course, if it’s going to elicit particular emotions—and feel very sad for the duration of the song, maybe afterward you get the equivalent of an upward rebound.

This doesn’t seem as persistent or prolonged in most cases—the sadness from a song or similar, I mean—as does the potential for laughter from good comedy.  Maybe that’s why I’ve never noticed any tendency to get happier after feeling sadder from a song (or a story).  Then again, I don’t tend to be happy in the first place.  Once my brain gets depressed, that tends to be a self-reinforcing process, like a hurricane forming over the ocean when it’s hot at the end of the summer, which becomes a self-sustaining cycle.

I’ve used that metaphor for depression before, and I’ve even mentioned it here, I think.  In a sense, I could just characterize my tendency toward depression by thinking that I’m just a tropical ocean late in the summer.  How lovely.

I don’t know what I’m trying to accomplish by writing that stuff, honestly.  I guess I’m probably not actually trying to accomplish anything other than “writing today’s blog post”, which is what I am usually setting out to accomplish when I start writing every day.  I won’t be writing tomorrow, though.  I have the weekend off, and that’s good.

So many little things stress me out, and I don’t know why.  I have a present for my daughter’s birthday—really, a collection of presents—and I need to write out the card I have and finish boxing things in the box I have, and tape it up and address it and bring it to the nearby post-office and send it away, but even the thought of writing the card—deciding what to “say” and how to put things, even though I’ve written millions upon millions of words in my time, and my daughter is not a harshly critical audience—and then of actually going to the post office and going up to send the package are just so inducing of anxiety that I tend to put it off.

It’s weird because I know it’s not a big deal.  I’ve done many much harder, more stressful things in my life.  Yet, even thinking about it and writing about it fills me with tension and stress.  It’s really quite pathetic.  I hate that part of myself.  Which makes it pretty much like every other part of myself, come to think of it.

Anyway, I haven’t started writing any new fiction, of course.  I idly searched through Amazon for spiral-bound, top-flipping writing pads, imagining that, if I got something handy and convenient in which I could write with pen on paper, the “old-fashioned” way, maybe I’d start writing some new fiction.  I’ve tried to do analogous things to myself many, many times in the past.

It doesn’t work; I don’t think it ever has, for me.  I write fiction if and when I’ve decided I’m going to write fiction, and when that’s the case, it doesn’t need to be on any particular, special device or surface.  I wrote two novels and a novella while I was in prison, for crying out loud.

Maybe I’ve stopped writing (fiction) just because I’m mentally and emotionally exhausted.  I don’t sleep well at all—it’s so bad that I hardly even talk about it, because it’s just the same fucking thing all the time, anyway.

I don’t have any real joy in the work I do, I don’t have any real friendships, certainly not with anyone with whom I spend any time other than at work.  There’s nothing that I do for “fun” other than watching YouTube videos and—to a steadily diminishing degree—reading nonfiction (a rapidly shrinking pursuit) and fiction (all but completely gone).

I found a meme yesterday that I guess I’ll share here, showing the difference in what it looks like from outside to be reading, and what it feels like from inside, to be reading.  That used to be abundantly true for me.  Reading was probably my single favorite thing ever—and not just reading fiction, obviously.  I’ve always said that the written language is by far the single greatest invention of the human race.  I have encountered no reason to change that assessment.

reading

But now, steadily, I’m losing the joy of reading, and I have been for a while.  There are no dragons or rainbows or other mystical and mythical things going on in my head, like in the picture.  Reading, for me, is just a desert (but not a dessert, alas) for the most part.  Even nonfiction isn’t that interesting—the good stuff I liked I’ve read quite a lot about, and I have reread my favorite books on various subjects over and over.  None of it is engaging any more.  I force myself to do it, because without it, I don’t even know what I am, let alone who I am.

But I can’t really seem to read fiction of any kind anymore.

I don’t know how I’m going to make it to the end of this month.  I don’t truly expect to make it to the end of this month.  And I honestly don’t very much want to make it to the end of this month.  I’m reminded of the lines from a Beatles song:  “I don’t want to spoil the party, so I’ll go.  I would hate my disappointment to show.  There’s nothing for me here, so I will disappear…”

Several people in the office—or, well, three of them at least—are on vacation at the moment, and I guess that’s good for them.  I honestly wish them the best of times.  But I don’t know what I would even do or want to do if I took time off.  I can’t think of anything fun that I would want to accomplish or experience.  And, frankly, the prospect of trying to make arrangements for going somewhere and doing something is so stressful and intimidating that even thinking vaguely and nebulously about such a non-specific trip or vacation makes me feels so tense I’m surprised you cannot hear me vibrating.  Maybe you can.

What I need is a dirt vacation*, I think.

Oh, well.  It’ll come quite soon, I suspect.  I can’t say I’m looking forward to it, necessarily, except that it would be worth feeling nothing simply not to feel so stressed and depressed and lonely and so bloody tired all the time.  It’s just a regression to the mean, if you will—and the mean is zero, or vanishingly close to zero**.

Have a good weekend.

*That’s like the proverbial “dirt nap”, but it lasts longer.  Ha.  Ha.

**This is somewhat related to the fact of why perturbation theory can work in things like quantum electrodynamics.  Most positives are canceled out by negatives, leaving finite answers to things like path integrals and so on—a converging, rather than a diverging, infinite series.

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Independence Day is worth celebrating

Well, it’s Tuesday, the 4th of July, and in the United States, it’s Independence Day.  It’s often just referred to by the people of America as “The 4th of July”, rather like the holiday “Cinco de Mayo” in Mexico, but I strongly prefer to refer to it as Independence Day, because that way we are more likely to remember what is being celebrated:  The official beginning of the United States of America as an independent nation, as announced in the Declaration of Independence.

I’m a fan of the Declaration of Independence, and I encourage Americans at least to read it every year.  It isn’t very long, and if you want, you can sort of skim through the list of grievances.  But the idea of the Declaration is important.  To my knowledge, it was the first founding document of a nation that explicitly states that governments are not ends in themselves, but are means for the protection and support of the rights and well-being of the people of the nation.

I know these ideas weren’t original to the founders of the United States, but as far as I know, it was the first time they were declared, in an official document, as the reason for existence of a nation, of a government.  Not God, not kings, not some “greater good” that supersedes a person, but the rights of each individual person, and of all of them in total, are the point of a government.

And, of course, the stated “self-evident” truths are interesting:  “That all men* are created equal; that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these** are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”  Then follows the statement that people make—or tolerate—governments as a means to an end or ends; they are not ends in and of themselves, and if they’re not doing what they’re meant to do, or not doing their job well, it’s within the rights of the various people to change those governments and try to make something better, though this should not be done lightly.

Many people, quite correctly, point out that there is hypocrisy in the writing of the Declaration of Independence.  Many of the founders were slave-holders, and they all clearly had less-than-ideal attitudes toward women, and toward the rights of native Americans and so on.  This does not invalidate the Declaration of Independence, because the ideas expressed within it are bigger than any individuals of any given era or of any given outlook and set of prejudices.

The ideas in the Declaration of Independence are aspirational.  It’s not saying “this is what we are,” but “this is what we strive to become, what we think we should be.”

One does not hold it against someone if, on the day they begin a new diet and exercise regimen, they are not already paragons of physical heath and beauty.  The whole point of the regimen is to become better than one already is, and this, I think, is the spirit in which one should take the Declaration of Independence, (and the American Constitution)***.

We were not perfect then (the “we” is a bit presumptuous, since none of my ancestors, as far as I know, were in the US before the end of the 19th century) and we are not perfect now, but there is little room reasonably to doubt that we are better now than we were then, as individuals, as societies, as a civilization.

It’s going to require continuing effort, with strict rigor, to continue getting better, by whatever measure of “better” we might choose.  There is much work yet to be done.  Maybe civilization will never be perfect.  Perfection is a rather woolly concept anyway.

So it’s not unreasonable to celebrate Independence Day (though we now are quite close allies with Britain, from which nation we declared independence).  It’s not a celebration of enmity, but perhaps more analogous to the celebration of a child having left home and having become an adult in its own right.  Maybe that’s a condescending attitude, I don’t know.

But I’m a fan of the United States in terms of ideas and approaches, though there are many things about it that are imperfect.  I have no sympathy with anyone who would say, “My country, right or wrong”; that’s no better than saying, “My street gang, right or wrong.”  Loyalty should be earned, and I think that, at its root, the idea and practice of the United States, for all its faults and its continuing need for improvement, is worth at least provisional loyalty.

The USA has the capacity, and the inherent goal, to get better.  It doesn’t—at least when we are honest—claim to be perfect or divine (or even divinely inspired) or the best possible government that could ever be.  It carries, however, an implicit intent always to continue improving.  And that’s something worth celebrating.

So, Happy Birthday, USA (in the words of The Bears’ Almanac)!  Happy Independence Day.

happy independence day

*Note that here, of course, is an example of the greatest injustice in human history, the ages-long failure to recognize that the majority of humans (i.e., women) are fully human.  When I think of how many Emmy Noethers and Ada Lovelaces and Marie Curies and how many George Eliots and Brontës sisters and Mary Shelleys and so on were out there but never had the chance to become what they might have been, I want to weep.  It doesn’t seem unreasonable to suppose that the human race might be twice as scientifically and mathematically advanced and have twice as much great art and literature, if only women had not been repressed throughout the ages.  Nevertheless, we can’t hold the writers (mainly Jefferson) of the Declaration of Independence too blame-worthy, at least relative to others, in this failure.  As late as the 1960s, and in as forward-thinking a show as Star Trek, the opening invocation still said, “…to boldly go where no man has gone before.”  It took until the 1980s with TNG to correct that to “…to boldly go where no one has gone before.”  They continued to split the infinitive, however, so some progress still remains to be achieved.

**Please note the clear implication that these are not the only rights that are considered unalienable or self-evident.  Of course, George Carlin, in a famous routine, pointed out that, at least in a certain way of looking at things, you have no rights, because those rights can be withdrawn and are allowed to you by those in power.  However, this isn’t necessarily logically correct.  Just because rights are infringed, even for decades or centuries or millennia, does not mean that those rights might not exist.  From a certain point of view, all rights are human inventions, are “fictions” of a sort, but based on many reasonable foundations of morality, rights are implicit, and they accrue to individuals.

***Which, after all, contains the power to amend itself, like an AGI that can change its own code, and that power has been used more than two dozen times since the thing was created.  Inherent in its writing is the recognition that it is not a perfect document as it is, but it is an improvable document, and it can, in principle, work toward better and better government asymptotically.

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

Hello and good morning.

It’s Thursday, the 20th of April in 2023 (AD or CE, whichever you prefer), and so, here I am at the bus stop, writing my usual blog post.  It’s very exciting, isn’t it?  You can almost feel that paint drying!

I think there is a certain subgroup of people who celebrate this as “420” day, a reference to marijuana, though the origins of that reference are unclear to me*.  Though I find it silly, I guess such a day may as well exist.  There are holidays for every other stupid thing in the world, from various kinds of foods and snacks to alcoholic beverages and all sorts of other things.  I doubt there is a heroin day, but if I were to find out there is, I wouldn’t be surprised.  And, of course, there are geeky, nerdy holidays for people like me, such as Pi Day** and Star Wars Day***.

Much more importantly, it’s my son’s birthday, as I mentioned yesterday.  I sent him a present, of course, though it’s not particularly clever, because honestly, I don’t know what he’s into now or what he would like.  It’s been more than ten years since I’ve seen him in person or even heard his voice.

I’ve sent presents in the past (that’s not an intentional play on words) that matched what I knew his long-term interests were, and they apparently went over well.  But I’ve pretty much emptied my quiver on that front, at least for now, without simply rehashing things I’ve already sent, which seems lamer than sending something broad and generic, at least to me.  But what do I know?  I’m terrible at things like this.

I’m also terrible at things like just getting people to keep wanting to be around me for long.  People don’t end up hating me or anything, at least as far as I can tell; they just don’t ever stick too close to me for very long.  And, of course, I’ve screwed up everything in my life with respect to my children (and their mother) and my career and all that other stuff.

I’m quite good at useless things like teaching myself how to draw and to compose and play music and writing books that almost no one will ever read, and understanding complicated ideas of physics and math and biology and astronomy and medicine and all that stuff.  But regarding the things that have really, deeply mattered to me—being a good son, a good friend, a good husband, a good father—I’ve almost uniformly failed.

The fault is almost certainly all mine.  At the very least, it’s my fault in the sense that “I am a faulty machine”.  There’s definitely some fundamental flaw—and nothing limits the count to only one such flaw—in the way I try to live with the people I love the most, because at various times I’ve lost relationships with my parents, with my wife, with my kids, with friends, all that.  And I’m not the sort of person who can just pick up and restart his life, a so-called new life, with new people.

Even if I were such a person, given my track record, why would I be willing to submit to the risk with new people?  That would definitely be a masochistic choice.

All of my old friends are quite far away, and even with the use of social media, I’m not good at doing long-distance friendships very well.  I don’t quite even know what the protocols are, and I always feel awkward**** about intruding on the lives of other people at any level.  I’ve tended to make my friends in school and university and at work, from among people who had similar interests and tastes and so forth to me, and who were nearby.

I’ve been very lucky in the friends I made in middle-school to high school and in university.  But once I was married, and of course, going to med school and all that, my focus was on those closest by, as it tends to be.  I put a lot of effort into my marriage and my career, which makes sense, of course, and until my own health deteriorated because of my back injury, I handled it pretty well.

But I certainly couldn’t maintain any kind of extended social circle.  That’s not how I’m designed, it seems.  Thankfully, my wife’s family were always very welcoming and warm, and my own extended family has always been wonderful, and my wife had friends with whom we socialized.  But my family is a long way away now—those that remain—and when my wife divorced me, I couldn’t exactly maintain close ties with her family, though they were important to me.  Their loyalty belongs to her, not to me, which makes perfect sense.

Anyway, sorry about all that trivia.  I just feel the emptiness of life particularly strongly today, which is probably understandable.  I have a notion of a metaphorical creature or situation that matches the sense of how I feel and am, but I can’t quite grasp it and put it into words, because I can’t quite think of the life form that fits.  Maybe I’m like a wandering, free-living amoeba that used to be—and ought to be—part of a slime mold?

No, that doesn’t quite work, nor does it really make sense.

I was trying to think of a metaphorical herd animal or pack animal that got separated from its group—a deer, a wolf, a lion, an impala—or maybe an ant or a bee or a termite separated from its swarm, or whatever.  But of course, it’s really just that I’m a simulacrum of a human, a replicant, who is inherently separate from the humans to whom he was supposed to be assigned, still living in a parallel “space” so to speak, but unable to interact directly; and they certainly don’t seem to grok me.

It’s almost like a Star Trek episode, isn’t it?  Or maybe it’s like an X-files or a Supernatural or something:  there’s a poltergeist that’s terrifying or at least horrifying to people, that they want to avoid it or if necessary eliminate it, even though the entity causing the weirdness doesn’t mean any harm.

I wish there were someone who could exorcise me and send me on to the next plane or—better yet—to peaceful oblivion.  But, of course, even more so, I wish that I were able to be part of my kids’ lives, to spend time with them, to be close to them, and to have friends around me, and not to be in pain every day.

While I’m at it, I might as well ask for a pony and for world peace and harmony.

Enough of this.  I’m sorry to subject you all to my morosity.  Then again, no one’s forcing you to read it, I guess*****.  I hope, after reading this post, your day improves.  It’s unlikely to go downhill from here, right?  That, at the very least, is something I can offer you in my daily blog posts:  once you’ve hit rock bottom (i.e. by reading this) the only way to go is up.

TTFN

hamlet and dad

*And, to be fair, I don’t care enough to look into it very vigorously.

**March 14th, because in the US date system it shows up as 3-14.  Seven years ago, it would have been 3-14-16, which would have been especially good, though I don’t recall noting it at the time.

***“May the 4th be with you,” in case you don’t know.  It’s a stretch, but it’s doubly nerdy because of the pun.

****I think it’s particularly appropriate the the spelling of the word “awkward” is so awkward.  W-K-W?  What a peculiar progression of letters!

*****Though I am very, deeply grateful to you for doing so.