Birthdays

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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.

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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.