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“‘Cause I’m your superhero. We are standing on the edge…”

Well, it’s Friday the 13th.  That’s at least one good thing about today.  And, of course, next month will also have a Friday the 13th, as I’ve noted previously (I don’t know specifically in which post I noted it, and I don’t really have the urge to go figure it out, so I’ll leave that to you to do if you’re interested).

It is slightly interesting to think about the fact that, on average, one of every seven Februarys will have a Friday the 13th, but not all of those will then lead to a subsequent Friday the 13th in March, because every 4th February will have 29 days*, by the Gregorian calendar, which is the one the world uses overall.

So, the total fraction of years with dual Fridays the 13th would be something like 1/7 minus a further ¼ of that one seventh—so 4/28 (i.e., 1/7) minus 1/28 (1/4 x 1/7), which leads us to the rough conclusion that only three out of 28 years will entail February and March each having a Friday the 13th.  That’s slightly less than one out of every nine years.  And since I’m 56, which is twice 28, I should have experienced about 6 such years in my life (perhaps counting this year).

Mind you, the numbers aren’t quite right overall.  The Gregorian calendar waives the extra day in February on years that are divisible by 100, i.e., the turns of centuries.  However, there’s a further exception to that:  the turn of a millennium, like what we all just had in the year 2000, does keep its 29 days in February.  So that brings the average closer to the raw number, but doesn’t account for the extra  ones that happen at more ordinary turns of centuries.

Of course, the only turn of a century through which I have lived—and through which I am likely to live**—was indeed the turn of a millennium, so I guess for me, the fraction 3/28 should be fairly accurate.

I could, if I were so inclined, go back to the first year in which I experienced a February—that would be 1970 (AD or CE)—and work through them to find out just how many dual Fridays the 13th I’ve experienced.  With modern computer-based calendars it would even be relatively easy.  But I don’t think I am so inclined.

Okay, that’s enough of that for now.  Actually, it’s probably too much of that, at least from any normal person’s (i.e., not my) perspective.  On to other things.

I’m writing this post on my mini lapcom, and I wrote yesterday’s post on the lapcom as well; I am doing this partly to spare my thumbs, but also to try to encourage myself to use the lapcom more and maybe even to write fiction again.  I don’t know whether or not that will happen, but it’s also just more natural for me to use the lapcom.  I’ve been typing, in one way or another, since I was 11 years old, if memory serves.  Clearly I have not been using a smartphone nearly that long, because they have not existed for that long.

Also, even when I saw the imagined future tech on Start Trek:  The Next Generation of tablets with virtual keyboards, I thought they looked like a terrible idea.  How lame, how unaesthetic, just to tap at a flat screen with no real keys.  Also, the “keys” on such devices in the real world are too effing small to be used to type in any traditional way.  Not but what one can get to be pretty speedy with them—I can zip along pretty well on my smartphone—but it’s nothing compared to being able to use one’s whole set of fingers to write.

Although, I’ve often touted the value of writing things longhand before retyping them into the computer, especially for fiction, because it can slow one down beneficially.  I did that—because I had no choice, being at the time a guest of the Florida DOC—with Mark Red, with The Chasm and the Collision, and with the “short” story Paradox City.  I don’t know whether they come across as better or worse or indistinguishable from the stories I have written directly onto the computer.

I would say that they might tend to be shorter, but Paradox City is a nominally short story that was about 60 hand-written pages long, so that didn’t make things much shorter.  Also, I think The Chasm and the Collision is longer than Son of Man, but that may just be a function of the nature of those stories.

Certainly Unanimity is longer than anything else I’ve written, by quite a margin, but that surprised me as much as it might anyone else.  I just started writing the story and it ended up taking that long to tell it.  That happens.  Outlaw’s Mind began as an idea for a short story, but there was definitely a lot there implicitly, even in the original idea, that made it unreasonable to plan to make it “short”.

Anyway, if any readers of this blog have also read my stories and have noticed any tendency toward difference between the initially handwritten and the entirely computer written (meaning written on a computer, not by a computer, unless one is referring to me as a computer) ones, I’d be pleased to get your feedback.

In other personal news, well…my pain is leveling off a bit, though my leg joints still feel loose and floppy and unstable, so I have to be careful, and I have my general persistent tension and neuropathic discomfort in my lower body.  I’ve tried to adjust (and decrease) my workout a bit to compensate, and that seems to be doing some good, but I cannot go without working out, because that tends to make my pain worse.

My mood is pretty much as it usually is, but I’ll spare you that hellscape out of courtesy.

Tomorrow is Saturday, and I am not supposed to be working this weekend.  If that changes—in other words, if I do work—I guess I’ll write a post.  Though, really, I should try to get back into Outlaw’s Mind and finish what I had started earliest so I could then get on to newer things.  And if wishes were horses, we’d all be drowning in manure***.

Tomorrow is also Valentine’s Day, but this is of no relevance to me, and that holiday hasn’t been relevant to me for more than 15 years, possibly quite a bit more.  It is not likely to be relevant to me again this side of the grave (and even less likely to be relevant on the other side).

I hope you all have a good weekend, even those of you who have loved ones with whom you can revel in the romance of the holiday.  It’s not your fault that you piss me off.

*This means, of course, that there will be some March Fridays the 13th in years where there was no February Friday the 13th.  If my figuring is correct, those will be the leap-year Februarys in which the 13th falls on a Thursday.

**If I were to be alive in 2100, I would be 130 years old, which would make me even with the Old Took, and which would be substantially older than any human is known to have lived.

***And ironically, any wishes for the manure to go away would just make things worse!

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An angry and probably unpleasant rant

It’s Friday.  yay.

Today’s date (February 6, 2026 CE or AD) has a mildly amusing coincidence/repetition of digits, 2-6-26 in the shortened American version of the date layout.  In the European system, the date would be almost palindromic (6-2-26) but that’s leaving out the zeroes in front of the day and month digits and ignoring the number of the millennium.  So it’s not quite as cool as it could be.

Some might say that such numbers and the arrangements and the noticing thereof can never be “cool”, but such people are troglodytic idiots.  They live in a world full of and shaped by complex ideas, by innovation and technology they could not have invented themselves, and which they don’t bother to try to understand because other people take care of and do all that stuff.

I’ve said before, many times (with sadness and regret and yes, quite a lot of anger) that if it were up to most people, we would all still be living in caves (the few who remain alive, at least).  That’s metaphorical, mind you; very few humans actually ever lived in caves as far as we can tell.  It’s just that the remains of those who died in caves (and their artifacts) are much more likely to endure to be discovered than the tools and remains of those who lived on the savannahs and such.

Anyway, the troglodytes have a quite common attribute, one that might explain a good deal about them:  even though they may have the capacity to read, even though they may have been taught to read, they don’t choose to do it.  It’s both sad and quietly horrifying.

Even those who claim to read just one book (e.g., the Bible, the Koran, etc.) don’t even really read those books.  You can tell, because they clearly don’t live their lives respecting all the precepts of those books.

This fact can sometimes be bad, but more often than that, it’s just as well.  Those books are horrific (and often just horrible, aesthetically).  They also tend to be rather stupid by modern standards, but it’s hard to hold them too much to task for that.  They were, after all, written from depths of profound ignorance about the universe.  One cannot know a truth before it has been discovered.

Of course, if those books really had been written, or at least inspired, by an omniscient being or beings, they could reasonably be expected to be very smart books by any standards.  Alas, they are not.  Trust me, I’ve read many of them, as well as many other books that don’t claim to be the products of omniscience, but which would be far more convincing* if they did than those ancient compilations of legend and myth and mental illness that are the so-called holy books.

Ironically, the Tao te Ching is much wiser than the aforementioned holy books, and it was never said to be written by anything other than a man.  It’s not perfect, of course, but it doesn’t really claim to be so.  Perhaps some of its adherents think it’s somehow “perfect”, but that doesn’t really matter.  After all, there are probably those who “think” Mein Kampf and The Art of the Deal are perfect.

Weirdly enough, some of these people would probably also say the Bible is perfect [Disappointed shrug and heavy sigh].  People are stupid.  And there are none so stupid as those who refuse to think.

Sorry, I don’t even know how I got to dealing with this set of subjects today.  It certainly was not planned.  Then again, nothing here was planned, other than that I would write a blog post as usual, which is not surprising.

It’s not as though I have anything better to do with my life‒that is, nothing better other than to shut it off, I suppose.  But so far, I am too much of a coward to do that.

I know, I know, there are those who (with truly very good intentions) will call continuing to be alive a “brave” choice, but though I appreciate such people’s kindness, that “choice” is very much the default.  In a similar vein, it’s not brave to hunt, or to fish, or to farm, if hunting or fishing or farming  is what you must do to survive.  It’s just pragmatic.

I am not brave for still being alive.  This is not to say that it would be brave for me to kill myself, either.  But it also would not necessarily be cowardly.

Bravery in the usual sense is overrated, anyway.  We can (and should) all be glad, of course, that there are people like firefighters, as well as honorable soldiers and honorable police officers.  But if one stops to think about it, one can see that we should all very much wish to live in a world in which bravery was not required, a world where heroes are not merely not needed but are not useful.

It’s likewise with so-called leaders.  If a society were functioning well, it would not need (or want) heroes or leaders, at least not in the traditional sense.  In a well-functioning civilization, people would see their elected officials as their employees, as the public servants that they are.  They are not, and should not be thought of as, leaders.  That’s just a troglodytic way of thinking.

Alas, we are far from such a well-functioning civilization yet.  Who knows if we ever shall achieve it?

I do know, however, that I will probably be working tomorrow, which means I will write a blog post, barring (as always) the unforeseen.  Until then, I hope you each and all have a very good day by any reasonable criteria.

*Especially modern science books.

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Minding primes and priming minds

It’s Monday the 19th of January (in 2026 CA or AD).  19 is a nice prime number, but it’s one people don’t think about very often.  Stephen King turned it into an “evil” number in his extended universe, which is much less obvious and predictable than using the unjustly maligned number 13.  I’ve always* liked that he did that.  It was clearly chosen at least partly because it was (and remains, and always will be) a prime number.  But it’s not an obvious one.  So, nice job King-sensei (not that he needs my moral support, though I would welcome such support from him).

I occasionally think about mailing Stephen King a copy of one of my books just on the off chance that he might read it some day when he’s bored.  If I were to develop the chutzpah to do such a thing, what do those of you who have read my stories think would be the best one to send him?

Take your time, and don’t be shy.  I’d love to hear from all…what, one of you?  Two?

I don’t think there could be three, but I could be wrong.

Returning to the topic of prime numbers, I had a cool thing happen on Friday:  I bought some stuff at the local convenience store, and my total was $19.07.  I looked at it for a moment and thought that it was a cool-seeming number.  I know 19 and 7 are both prime, and the digits don’t add up to a multiple of 3, nor is the total number a multiple of 4 or 5, obviously.  I wondered if it might be prime.

Back in the day, I would have had to check that more or less manually, but nowadays, I was able just to type into the search bar “Is 1907 prime?”

It is!  Or so claims Google.  If necessary, I could check it myself, by hand, though that would be laborious.  I suppose it wouldn’t be hard to write a quick computer program to check all the possible factors (among numbers less than 954**).  I doubt that I will do either thing, though.  I’m pretty confident in Google on this point.

And now, having said that, I’m starting to feel uncertain.  Could Google be wrong about this?  Am I really going to have to check for myself?

I remember when I realized I had never seen the Pythagorean Theorem proven mathematically (I grew up in a declining school system, sorry).  So, I had to prove it to myself to my own satisfaction, which I did.  Thankfully, it’s easier to prove something like that when the answer (so to speak) is well known.

Okay, enough numeracy, or whatever the best term for the preceding matters might be.

I did not work on Saturday, which is why I didn’t write a blog post on Saturday.  The office was open, but my coworker was able to come in, and the boss specifically told me to take the day off.  Apparently, my exhaustion really was beginning to show, even to other people, which seems not to be the usual case.

Of course, having one day of actual rest doesn’t cure my situation, but it is a minor respite.  I have more fundamental issues than mere rest or lack thereof, but I am not sure there is any way to fix them, at least not in practice.

In principle, of course, it must be possible at least to improve the settings in my brain‒tweak this set of synapses and adjust sensitivity to this or that neurotransmitter, increase (or decrease) the blood flow to this and that region of the brain, etc.  That sort of thing, done precisely and judiciously, could in principle correct or adjust any parameter of brain function one might want, in whatever ways lie within the realm of the brain’s potential.

We’re a long way from being able to carry out such manipulations, and it’s by no means certain that we will exist long enough for neuroscience to achieve such things.  But there’s no principle of nature that precludes it.

Of course, people might be quite leery of even researching such things, even when we finally know enough to do so.  After all, if we can adjust the brain specifically and precisely to make it less depressed or less anxious or less forgetful, we can adjust it in other ways, too.  One could adjust someone’s brain to make them fall in love with a particular other person, like the mythical old magic love potion.  I think most people would rather not fall in love that way (though there’s no reason to think such love would be any less delightful to experience than ordinary, clumsy, stochastic love such as what we have now).

Indeed, one could adjust human minds to make them happy, no matter what the circumstances.  Of course, this could well be used to dominate whole populations of people; one could keep them under constant control because they would be happy, and you could keep them motivated and loyal and satisfied with whatever their lot might be.  I think most people would find that notion repugnant, but it is at least somewhat morally ambiguous, because such people would be as legitimately happy as anyone who becomes happy “on their own”.  Indeed, they might well be happier than any person had ever been before, and more “well-adjusted”, and more creative, and more psychologically healthy.

I get near some of these concerns in my book(s) Unanimity:  Book 1 and Unanimity:  Book 2.  I wouldn’t say those specific ideas figure centrally, though matters of mind and free will and the nature of a person’s character and how it can be changed by physical events are a big part of it.  Also, all sorts of horrible things happen, since it is a horror novel.  And there’s a lot of room for all of it, since it’s as long (total) as the unabridged The Stand and It, to bring us back to Stephen King.

With that, I guess I’ll draw today’s post to a close.  Hopefully, I won’t already be exhausted by tomorrow.  I hope you have a good day.  And if any of you know Stephen King, please ask him which of my books he might think he would want to read.  I’d really appreciate it.

*Well, not always.  I didn’t like it before it happened or before I knew about it.

**Incidentally, 953, which is the rounded-down answer to 1907 divided by 2, is also a prime number.  That’s kind of nice.

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“You’ve been out ridin’ fences for so long now.”

As you can see, I followed through on my threat and did indeed write a post today (Saturday the 3rd of January in 2026) because I am going to the office today.  My new (and old) tinnitus persists, which is annoying, and I’ve still got some minor cold symptoms.  There’s no real coughing or sneezing, though, so I don’t think I’m terribly contagious.  If I am, well, I’ve spent a lot of time tilting at the windmill of getting people to take disease prevention and so on seriously, but things continue to get worse, so to hell with the world, I guess.  But it doesn’t really matter much.

I initially thought that I had only received feedback from one person here‒as I suspected might happen‒in response to my request for feedback on what I should try to restart writing.  That person made a recommendation/expressed his preference for what he thought sounded most interesting for me to work on.  But, alas, that’s only one person, so I couldn’t draw too many conclusions from that feedback.

However, it turns out that on Facebook I also received a comment from someone who probably didn’t see the comments here on my actual blog, so the comment was probably unbiased.  The interesting thing is that both people, in two separate spaces, said they were interested in the same story:  The Dark Fairy and the Desperado.

So, needless to say, I intend to start working again on Outlaw’s Mind.

I’m kidding.  I’m not that perverse.  I feel a bit disappointed that no one could really even consider my other story HELIOS, but no one else but me really knows anything about it.  That story was originally‒way back in the depths of time‒a comic book superhero story that I invented and for which I even drew some comic book style drawings when I was in grade school and maybe into junior high.  But the modern version of the story, though arguably still a kind of superhero, or at least superhuman, story, is much more sophisticated than the inevitably derivative character I had invented as a child.

Anyway, HELIOS is probably my oldest story notion that I’m considering writing again nowadays, even older than Ends of the Maelstrom.  That doesn’t mean it’s my favorite or anything, it just means there’s a wee bit of nostalgia in it.

So, I shall begin rereading and editing and then, hopefully, writing more on The Dark Fairy and the Desperado.  This story was conceived as a manga, and so it is not a single-book notion, but is planned as a series of some form or another*.  That might be very good, actually, because it would mean I can publish it in smaller chunks, so to speak.

Unanimity took forever first to write and then to edit, but it was one self-contained story with a beginning, middle, and end (half a million words long overall).  I can make the first volume of DFandD end with the ending of the “heroes’” first quest, which has already begun so far in what I’ve already written.  Maybe that will be good.  I can even put some illustrations in the book (maybe) since I have done some of them**.

Anyway, that is currently my plan, if it merits the term.  I’ll try to work my work on that work into lull times at work***, and make some progress on it.  Then maybe it will take off and become hugely, internationally popular, and I’ll become rich, famous, and powerful.

Stranger things have happened, after all‒and that series has done quite well, I understand, though I lost interest in it not even halfway through the first series.  I think it’s the sort of show that I could only enjoy if I were watching it with someone.  In many cases, watching shows or movies or similar is my only way to connect with other people and with the shows or movies.  I have to have some means to connect; I cannot seem to do it on my own, and I don’t know if I ever have been able to do so.

Anyway, I guess that’s my plan for the moment.  It will always be dependent upon my physical and especially my mental health.  But that goes for everything.

Anyway, I hope you all have a good weekend.  Here, in closing, is a recording of me trying to practice the song, Desperado, which would make a lovely theme to a TV series based on my stories, I think.  I’ve gotten better since I recorded this.

*This was the idea for Mark Red as well, for which I have at least two more books lying fallow.  Unfortunately, no one loves that story apart from me, so it doesn’t look like the other two volumes will be written anytime soon, if at all.  It probably suffers from the fact that it was the first book I published, and so there were rough edges.  Qué lástima.

**As an aside, I wish I still had an illustration of the Vagabond that I did years ago, because I wanted to use that as the cover picture when I published the novel, but alas, it is gone with almost everything else I used to own.

***Yes, that was deliberate.  Sorry if it comes across as awkward, but I tend to like to play with words.

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Wednesday woes of a weary worrier who wishes he would write more worlds

It’s Wednesday now, and I’m writing this on my mini lapcom for the first time in 12 days.  Well, actually, I’m writing this for the first time, full stop.  I’ve never written this particular blog post before.  But I haven’t written anything at all using the lapcom—the mini one, anyway—since December 5th, twelve days ago.  I know because that was the last time I wrote a blog post on the lapcom, a fact easy to discern since I save all the files with the date as part of the title and list them in order from most recent to oldest in my blog post saves file.

Am I ruining the magic?  I work with this stuff, you know.

Anyway, I’m not going to get into explorations of the nature of days or human interactions and inadequate equilibria like I did yesterday.  At least, I don’t think I’m going to do that.  I wasn’t planning  to do it yesterday, though—it just sort of spewed out when I opened my figurative mouth, as much to my surprise as to yours—so I cannot rule out the possibility entirely.  Still, it would be a strange thing indeed for me to start writing about the same subject(s).  I don’t even remember very clearly what I wrote yesterday.  That’s one of the side-effects of writing it all down:  I don’t need to use my own disk space to store it in my head.

But I don’t feel like writing anything about external reality on any kind of large scale today.  I don’t really feel like writing anything at all; I’m just doing this out of habit, which has tremendous power over me.  Of course, it’s my habit, initiated by me, so in a way I’m saying that I have tremendous power over me.  Unfortunately, that power is not something readily consciously seized.

I had a good habit going when I was writing fiction for a long time there.  Starting when I was up at FSP West I wrote three to four pages of fiction every day, and kept that up for nearly ten years, I think, writing or editing on every work morning but Thursdays, and I produced a lot of material given that time frame.  Here, just take a look on Amazon at my list of author’s works*.  There are many titles there.  Mind you, there is some redundancy, in that my short stories that are available individually only for Kindle are also collected into Dr. Elessar’s Cabinet of Curiosities** along with two stories that don’t appear elsewhere.

I was “triggered” to think about such things yesterday afternoon when my coworker was telling me about watching It: Welcome to Derry, and discussing how other things from the Stephen King universe are involved in it, as well as other characters.  It sounded pretty nifty, though I don’t know that I’ll ever watch it.  What it made me think most, though, was how my fictional universe(s) is/are interconnected in many ways, and that they’re all also connected back to the first full-length novel I ever wrote back in high school, called Ends of the Maelstrom.

I lost the original draft of that when I lost nearly everything else I owned—and things far more important even than all that—back in 2012.  But I know the story, of course, and I could probably rewrite it more or less as it was, if I just chose to do it.

But I bemoaned the fact—as I said to my coworker—that I don’t seem able to write fiction anymore, even though thinking about that combined universe writing makes me think about my many unwritten stories.  As I said to my coworker, I really wish I could finish Outlaw’s Mind, though it will end quite sadly, and is already very sad.  I gave him some minor spoilers, which I felt were fine, since he’s unlikely to read any of it, ever.

Of course, not too long ago I wrote my little sci-fi story Extra Body, which is really meant to be kind of funny, in a way, but I couldn’t even get to the point of editing that very much, let alone publishing it.  And I haven’t made any further progress on DFandD.

I wish I had the energy to write new fiction, but all my energy reserves seem to be used up, or at least I am trying to get the dregs out of the container every day.  But every day it gets harder just to make it to the next day.  I’m exhausted, I’m always in pain, I have no real rest and nothing to which I look forward.  If I had a simple “off” switch, I might just flip it.

The trouble with that, of course, is that if it literally just stopped me, it might be possible for someone else to flip it back on and I would have to resume just as I had been when I flipped it off (so to speak).  It might be better to go into a cocoon like Adam Warlock and metamorphose into the next stage of my existence, but I don’t appear to have that option.

I’m very tired.  So very tired.  Indeed, I’m so tired that I’m writing sentence fragments.

Maybe I’ll try to share my various works on social media, to see if anyone picks up on any of them.  I doubt they will, but it’s possible.  After that, I don’t know.  It’s nearly the end of another pointless year, albeit one with one saving grace, perhaps two.  I don’t really look forward to seeing the next year.

But I probably will see myself to writing tomorrow’s blog post.  In the meantime, I hope you’re all doing okay.

*There’s some book in there by someone else that has a sort of similar title to one of my books (Son of Man), but the author’s name is nothing like mine, so I don’t know what the heck is up with Amazon’s software that it put that there.  It’s sort of annoying, but it’s not worth the effort to try to get them to fix it.  They didn’t even carry any Hanukkah-themed gift card boxes or envelopes this year, which really makes me feel a bit disinclined to buy from them as much as I have in the past.

**That one is available in hardcover, and it ought to arrive before Christmas for most people if you wanted to order it as a gift for someone.

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“Vainly I had sought to borrow from my books surcease of sorrow…”

Well, it’s Friday at last, and the day I mentioned earlier this week—you know, 11-14-25.  I’m sure you all “got” the slight fun I found in this date, and I’m not going to go into it any farther.  If you’re interested, you could go back and look at that earlier post.

I’m writing this on my lapcom today, for the first time since last week.  It will—or should—be the last post before Monday, because I don’t think we’re going to be working tomorrow.  At least one of our best closers who comes in on weekends when we’re open has a family crisis, and it’s a serious one, so he won’t be coming in, and that means the rest probably wouldn’t find it worthwhile.  If that situation changes, I might write a post, but I doubt it.  The boss himself suggested we won’t be working tomorrow, so there’s a pretty strong inclination in that direction.

I hope to be doing something rather enjoyable at the office after work this evening, but I won’t get into it now.  It’s nothing most of you would probably care about, and many of you might not find it interesting, but I’m looking forward to it.  Hopefully it all goes well.

I did not read any Principles of Neural Science yesterday, nor indeed any of my other science books.  I’m afraid my stomach (or, really, my whole GI tract) was giving me quite a bit of trouble during the day, and so I didn’t really do anything that required any significant focus or imagination.  I hope to read something today—my GI tract appears to be responding to my attempts at remediation—but we shall see.

The GI tract has its own, dedicated sub-nervous system, which by some measures is reputedly at least as sophisticated as a cat’s brain, and mine is pretty clearly about as stubborn and willful as any cat.  I guess I don’t have much right to complain, since I am also rather stubborn and willful, and in some senses catlike*; I’ve got little leg to stand on for complaining.

Let’s see, let’s see, what else should I write about…or, rather, about what else should I write?  I’m really not sure.  I’m trying very hard not to share too many too negative thoughts here, but it’s hard, since that’s a lot of my thoughts.  It also hasn’t seemed to do anything to improve the circulation of this blog.  I have returned to the old numbers of typical daily readers—roughly a few dozen—and if anything the number seems to have shrunk slightly.  I don’t really know what to make of it.

It would be nice to have a wider audience, and especially one that was widening, but I am not good at self-promotion.  It makes me feel very uncomfortable.  That’s largely because of poor self-esteem, I guess.  Or maybe it’s just social anxiety/awkwardness, or just a general sense of rudeness, or ASD, I don’t know for sure.

It would be nice if more people read my blog, though, or listened to my music, or read my books.  I would really love to have people enjoy my creations, and maybe even have a few of them tell me so and tell me what they liked about them—especially the books, of course.

Maybe my work will become popular after I die.  I guess I’ll never know whether that happens, but it’s something onto which I can hold to console myself when next to no one reads anything I write, especially fiction, or listens to my music, or whatever.

I’m at least still trying to keep my posts somewhat short, setting my target now for 701 words as I have for the last week or so.  Indeed, I’m getting pretty close to that number now, already.  I don’t know whether my readers are grateful for the slightly shorter posts, or if they dislike them, or if they are thoroughly indifferent.

I frequently wrestle with just giving up the whole process as a bad bet.  Writing this blog never did seem to improve the sales of my books, which was the whole reason I first started doing it.  It certainly hasn’t helped my mental illnesses; or if it has, I don’t even want to consider what they would have been like without it.

And it certainly hasn’t made my life into anything anyone sane would want to have.  I don’t think even Hill House would want it, and it’s not sane**.  Hell, I’m not entirely sane, myself—whatever that means—and I don’t really want my life, either.

Oh, well, there’s probably nothing I can do.  Maybe I should just stop trying.  I wish I were able simply to give up and let go.  Maybe someday soon I will be so able.  That would be a relief, certainly for me, and maybe for all of you.

I guess it doesn’t really much matter to anyone but me, though, certainly in the relatively long term.

Oh, well.  I hope you all have a very good day and a very good weekend and a very good week after that, and so on and on.

*Not my agility, though.  That’s not horrible, but it’s far from catlike.  And my dexterity leaves even more to be desired, unless I’m paying close attention.  My default state seems to leave me rather disconnected from my body in certain senses, and that tends to lead to a bit of clumsiness.

**So said Shirley Jackson, the author of The Haunting of Hill House, and she has authority.

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“Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t”

Well, first let me apologize for yesterday’s blog that largely concerned the weather, and in a trivial sense at that.  It was rather lamentable, I know, with emphasis on the first four letters of that adjective.

On the other hand, I don’t apologize for having had my little bit of fun with the date.  That may have been even less interesting to most of you than my jabbering on about the weather, but I like it.  I fully expect that I will do such things again.  For instance, in a similar vein, today is a bit fun because it is 11-12*, so the numbers are in appropriate ordinal sequence with no gaps.

That’s not very fun.  More fun will be had (by me, anyway) on Friday, when it will be 11-14-25.  If you don’t immediately see the fun there, it may help that a similar fun date next month will be available on 12-13-25.  This fun also works with the European date order (but in both you have to leave out the digits that denote the century).  Also, there were no equivalently fun dates in any month before October.

This is the most fun I’ve had on any kind of date in at least 16 years, I would guess.  That’s an easy call, because I haven’t been on any date at all in at least that long.  See what I did there with the multiple meanings of the word “date”?  Of course you did.  What do I think you are, a moron?

No, I do not think that.  You are reading a blog post, so you are a reader, which gives you a serious leg-up, moronia-wise.  You draw from the well of that greatest of all human inventions:  written language.  Your taste in reading material may be somewhat questionable, but I cannot legitimately complain about that.

Wow, I feel like I ought to be almost done with this post, but I’ve barely passed 300 words.

On to other things.  I’m going to try to do a better job about science reading during my downtime in the office.  It’s not that I’m completely slacking; I’m reading Shape by mathematician Jordan Ellenberg, and I just read his earlier book How Not to Be Wrong.  I’ve read both before and/or listened to the audio books, but they are well worth rereading.  He’s a great math professor, and has a gift for explaining potentially abstract concepts.  I think he’s slightly better at this than Steven Strogatz, the author of The Joy of X and Infinite Powers, but they’re all good.

I also just yesterday gave in to an urge I’ve had for some time:  I ordered a textbook I liked in med school but which we didn’t really get into as deeply as I would like:  Principles of Neural Science, by Kandel et al.  The edition I had was by Kandel and Schwartz, if memory serves, but Dr. Schwartz is no longer involved, it seems.

It’s a textbook, so it’s pricey, even in paperback, but I discovered that I could put it on a payment plan through Amazon, so that’s what I did.  It arrives today.

I’ve also resolved, at least tentatively, to try to take the heat off my reading of my science books‒including the above newcomer‒by doing something I did when reviewing/studying in med school:  I would get a text that I was reviewing, and I would pick a section to read/review by flipping a coin.

Actually, it was a series of flips, each one dividing the “remaining” part of the book in half.  In other words, for the first flip, heads would mean I would look in the front half of the book, tails would mean the back half.  Then the next flip would decide to which half of that half I would narrow things down further.

Anyone who has spent any time dealing with computers and/or binary numbers can readily recognize that, with 10 flips of the coin, one could choose a specific page in a 1024 page book.  I guess every flip would count as a kind of “half-life” for the book’s pages.  If one wanted, one could even choose one’s pages not with a coin flip, which is not truly random, but with a quantum event that has a 50-50 chance, like measuring whether a given electron’s spin is up or down.

Of course, I don’t have a Stern-Gerlach gate, so I would have to “farm out” that process.  But I understand that there are apps that you can use that have their sources at labs where each decision is truly made by a quantum measurement.

It’s not terribly practical nor more useful for pickling book pages than is a coin flip, but if you’re a convinced advocate of the Everettian, “many worlds” version of quantum mechanics, it has the added “benefit” that each “flip” will divide the universe into two “worlds”, one where you choose from the earlier half, another where you choose from the latter.

Coin flips do not enact such splitting, not in anything but the trivial sense that every quantum level interaction potentially does so.  The experience will be the same for you, though, except whatever glee you might derive from splitting the universe to choose a section to read.

Anyway, I’ll be trying to read my books, random section by random section.  Believe it or not, this works for me.  I don’t have to learn things in order, usually, and this method avoids me feeling bored while trying to trudge through a text in order.

Perhaps I do have some aspects of ADHD up in there in my brain.

Well, I’ve now passed my target length for this post by some margin, so I’ll call this enough for today.  I expect to be writing another post tomorrow, but like everything else**, it is not absolutely certain.  I hope you have a very good day.

*Only in the American style Month-Day-Year format, though.  It is less fun in the European Day-Month-Year format.

**Yes, even death and taxes, in principle.

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“I turn the trouble of my countenance merely upon myself.”

I would like to apologize to anyone who was worried about me* on Saturday (and possibly through the rest of the weekend) because I did not post on that day.  One of our two weekend closers was unable to make it in because of serious personal things happening, and our newest fronter‒the only remaining active one‒also could not make it.  If we had opened the office, there would have been very little to accomplish, so the office did not open.

Thus, I had the weekend “off”, for whatever that’s worth.  I was at least able to get some rest and to get some walking in (trying to be careful not to overdo it).  It was all very boring, though.

I’ve chewed up and digested (and passed) a lot of the things that I do for distraction, like YouTube videos, and the Algorithm** cannot seem to grasp my desires and interests as well as it used to do.  It’s quite frustrating at times.  But I suspect the fault lies not in my algorithms but in myself.  I am running out of capacity to divert myself adequately.  To quote the Pink Floyd song One of My Turns, “nothing is very much fun anymore.”

It shouldn’t be so, of course (though what “should” be anything is quite debatable).  I have oodles of books in my Kindle and even a fair few “real” books.  I have a stack of science books above my desk including Spacetime and Geometry by Sean Carroll, and the whole “Theoretical Minimum” series by Leonard Susskind et al, and Quantum Field Theory As Simply As Possible by Anthony Zee, and even a text coauthored by Stephen Hawking called Euclidean Quantum Gravity.

These are all books I chose and in which I have real, serious interest, but I cannot seem to muster the focus to take them down and read them during breaks and down time.  I could even be using my membership to Brilliant to review things and to learn new things‒it’s a lovely service/site/app.  I also have a lifetime membership to Babbel that was surprisingly cheap, which I have hardly used at all.

This is all stuff in which I am seriously interested; no one is asking me to study this material, let alone making me do it.  But I cannot seem to focus on any of it.

I guess I’ve always done better, academically, when I was in a formal program, with quizzes and tests and discussions and so on.  But even in those situations, I often got distracted and sometimes had to forbid myself to do anything but classwork during the week.  Even then, my approach was never typical.

My ex-wife used to say that I was the only medical student she knew that never studied but still passed everything.  Now, that was a serious exaggeration; I studied in my way, but not when she was around.  Also, how many medical students had she known other than me?

Still, I don’t and didn’t study the way other people seem to tend to study.  I don’t memorize things, generally.  I make a sort of model or mechanism of the subject in my head, putting the pieces together, and though this might make me slower to learn initially, it keeps the knowledge in my head, because it’s not rote memorization, it’s more of a system or a construct.  I have a kind of picture or shape or edifice, and if I “look at it”, the answers are almost implicit.

It sounds sexier than it is, probably.

In any case, I’m fortunate that I can learn that way, because cranking through things has always been…well, not quite anathema to me, but I do have a hard time.

According to what I have read, between 30% and 70% of people with autism spectrum disorder also have diagnosable ADHD.  Now, I don’t know whether this might be behind some issues for me, but my studying, though relatively successful for me in the past, has never been very sensible.

For instance, the one thing common to pretty much all my notebooks in undergrad and in med school is that nearly every page was packed, not with notes from whatever the lecture was, but with doodles of varying kinds, some quite intricate.

Many of these doodles were dark (it’s me, after all) but there were also a lot of whimsical things.  For instance, in a lecture in anatomy class that included descriptions of the lactiferous duct, I drew an elaborate cartoon of a “lactiferous duck” which was a caricature of a mallard swimming along with a bottle of milk slung around its neck in the fashion of the stereotypical rescue Saint Bernard’s bottle of booze.

My friend Chivano thought it was pretty funny.  He was sitting next to me while I drew it.

Well…this has been a weird blog post, has it not?  And I’ve passed the 701 word target, so it’s time to draw this weirdness to a close.  Also, I’m not really interested in writing more at the moment.  It, like everything else, is in a superposition of boring and irritating.  It probably gets that from me.

I hope you all have a good day and a good week, and so on, and so on, and so on…

*See, I still occasionally write some fiction.

**As if there were only one.

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The return of the Desperado?

Well, it’s Friday, and I’m glad to be able to tell you that I don’t feel as overwhelmed as I did yesterday/Wednesday evening.  I’m not sure what has made the difference‒I have a hard time recognizing my own emotions, let alone decoding them‒but I got some good advice from an old* friend yesterday.  First, there was just the blunt confirmation that, yes, this stuff was in my head (which I knew in principle, but sometimes it pays to get it from outside oneself, particularly from someone who knew me since before I had even met my now-ex wife).

This friend also gave me the good advice that, if I don’t know what to do, I should just do nothing, and not worry about it too much.  Those are my words; he put it better.  He also gave me a meditation reference/link that was helpful.  I like meditation in general, though I have to be careful with it, since sometimes it can soothe anxiety but make my depression worse.  I strongly suspect that, if I could just stick with it, that side-effect would fade, but it’s quite intimidating, since my depression is often literally life-threatening.

I also want to apologize in general, and in spirit, for the implicit (but not intended) disparagement of my youngest child in yesterday’s post.  They definitely don’t deserve anything but praise and affection and love from me, and I mean the word ”deserve” here, despite it being a word I think often has no useful meaning in the contexts in which it is used.  I could not be prouder and more delighted than I am with my child (and my other child as well, except that I would be much more delighted if he would “speak” with me).

Okay, let’s not dwell too much on that stuff.  That’s the kind of rumination that can start a spiral.

In other news, I decided yesterday to start reading what I have written so far of The Dark Fairy and the Desperado, just to see if I liked it and maybe, perchance, if I would want to pick it up and work on it again.  It’s one of three stories on which I have at least a beginning (the other two are Outlaw’s Mind and HELIOS, though the latter is only barely begun).  It’s hard for me to tell if it’s any good, because as far as I can recall, I haven’t received any feedback on DFandD or Outlaw’s Mind, though I have posted them here.

If someone out there did give me feedback and I have forgotten, I do apologize.

Anyway, so far I quite like The Dark Fairy and the Desperado.  It’s got some subtle, meta-level humor in it, and the two characters therein are figures I’ve probably drawn more pictures of than any other, even Mark Red.  I’ll embed a few of them here, below.

I don’t know if I’ll pick back up on any of these stories, but I welcome any input from readers, though I cannot promise I will follow your recommendations.

Part of me thinks it would be most fun to write HELIOS.  Some of that feeling is because he/it began as my idea for a comic book superhero waaaay back when I was little**.  Also, since I’ve barely made a start on that story, I could in principle try to write it on Google Docs on my smartphone, but overlapping to a larger computer when desired.

Although, that latter plan suffers from the drawback that my mini-lapcom doesn’t really get internet access when I’m commuting, so access to Google Docs is limited.  Also, to be honest, I can write MSWord documents from my smartphone as well; it’s just that the phone app for that word processor is much more cumbersome and less fluid than is Google Docs, though the latter is not as good a word processor overall.

We’ll see what happens, I guess.  I don’t have to do anything, as my friend said, though it’s so hard for me to internalize that, when I’ve spent my whole life doing goal-directed behavior, and thinking that I really had to do things, to be productive, to achieve, in order to justify my continued existence.

But what if my continued existence isn’t justified?  What if no one’s is?  That seems reasonable and consistent with observed facts.   Perhaps it is merely the case that those things that exist do exist and that’s really all there is to it.  If you exist, then you are a fact in the universe.  It cannot have been any other way than to have you in it, once you are there.  If you were not in it, it would not be the same universe.  And it is the same universe.

That all doesn’t quite merit a QED (unless one refers to quantum electrodynamics), but I think it’s pretty definitive, nevertheless.

So, for now, I’ll just exist and not worry too much about doing anything.  This is reminiscent of the wu wei advice of the Tao te Ching, which I like, and other great old eastern philosophical traditions.  Not that I like them because of their age or where they arose; that would be silly.  I like them because they make sense.

Anyway, below are those pictures with which I threatened you.  Some of them are pretty good, I think, for a truly self-taught amateur.  I still would definitely appreciate any feedback about my partly-begun stories and what your thoughts are on which you might be most inclined to want to read.  No matter what I do, if I start writing fiction again, I think I will nevertheless keep writing this daily blog.  I would hate to leave all my countless readers (heh) high and dry.

Please have a good weekend!

*By “old friend” I mean he’s a friend I’ve known for a long time (almost 40 years!) not that he’s old.  He’s more or less the same age I am, give or take a few months.  I guess that’s “old” from a certain point of view, but it’s not old enough to start collecting retirement benefits.

**This may mean that, overall, I’ve drawn the most pictures of that character, but the pictures are of very different quality to one’s I’ve drawn as an adult.

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“What hears with their ear? The abyss between the stars.”

Well, I did bring the mini lapcom with me when I left work yesterday.  Nevertheless, I am writing this blog post on my smartphone.  There are specific, calculated reasons for this, but I’m not going to bore you with them, because they are only relevant to me.  But please, do tell me if you notice that this change has affected the quality of my writing, for better or for worse.

Okay, that’s that out of the way.  Now, on to more interesting things.  It’s the first day of October, my favorite month, although the reasons it has always been my favorite month are almost all effaced here in south Florida, in the current state of my “life”.  Still, it is the month of Halloween, and of Cooger and Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show, and all of that, so it still holds its position as number one month, as well as being the eighth and the tenth.

A few years ago‒it feels longer‒I set myself the task of writing a “short” story to honor the month of October (though the story didn’t have to be set in the month of October).  That led to Hole for a Heart, which is not my darkest story*, but my sister says it’s my scariest story.  I’m sure that’s pretty subjective, but it warms my own heart-shaped hole at least a bit to have written a quite scary story.

I wish I had the gumption to write something new again for this month.  If I did, the lapcom would be better for writing fiction than the smartphone, though the latter might keep me from going too ham on the whole thing, i.e., writing too much.

But I have a sort of feeling of learned helplessness about writing fiction, as well as about music (writing it and even just playing it) and art and science and everything else I do.  I put a lot of energy into things with almost no return, certainly not one commensurate to the effort involved.  Eventually, I just feel like an exhausted rat lying in the bottom of his cage, knowing that no matter what choice he makes or action he takes, he will be randomly shocked and otherwise tormented.

It’s not that he doesn’t care about the pain or the other stuff, he just knows the pain will come no matter what, and that has taken almost all the possible joy from being creative.  This is especially so when the creativity goes almost entirely unnoticed, like a sculpture made on the ISS and then promptly launched from there into deep space without anyone having seen it but a handful of astronauts.

I don’t know what it might take to rekindle (no pun intended) my writing or other creative sparks.  Maybe if I just had less pain it would do.  Unfortunately, the pain seems just to add new flavors and textures to itself over time; it doesn’t diminish.

I guess maybe that could be considered creative in a sense.

It’s a curious sort of irony, but I know that writing fiction seemed to stave off my depression, at least a little.  One might think it would be exhausting, writing 1400 to 2000 words every workday (except when editing/rewriting, which was its own grind).  Maybe eventually it was, and that was what led me to stop finally, since there was no real reward to it after a while, since almost nobody buys the books and/or reads them.

I don’t regret having written my stories, of course, nor my songs, nor any drawings I’ve made, nor my blog(s).  But over time I’ve had rapidly diminishing relative returns on the fiction writing and on the music and such.  The returns on this blog, relative to the effort, are shrinking more slowly, and occasionally there seems even to be an uptick, but the overall trend of basically everything except my personal knowledge** is downward.

I don’t know when the y-axis overall will cross the origin‒for many particular things, I think it has long since done so‒but I suspect it’s a finite distance, and I’m not decelerating, so I will cross it eventually.

Sometimes‒indeed, pretty much every day and twice on Sundays, ha ha‒I think to myself the metaphorical equivalent of “Where is that fucking x-axis?  It’s time for this to be finished already.”  If I had a goal, or anything significant toward which to look forward, things would probably be different.  But I don’t, and they aren’t.  That’s logic for you.

Well, anyway, this evening begins Yom Kippur and my fast.  Whatever you all are doing, I hope you have a good day.  I expect that I will be writing to you again tomorrow.

*That would be Solitaire.  I’ve told the story of that tale’s origin here before, I think, so I won’t get into it now.  If I am misremembering, let me know, and I’ll try to tell you the curious but not very exciting tale of a very dark tale indeed.  Oh, and if you want to read either of those stories but don’t want to do the Kindle thing, they are both featured in Dr. Elessar’s Cabinet of Curiosities, which is so far my only work you can get in Kindle, paperback, and even hardback!

**I do think that I am always learning new things and improving my understanding of things I knew from before, and I have a good memory, especially for things in which I’m interested.  That’s all well and good, and I’m glad of it, but knowledge in my head is only as good and as durable as my head is.  Eventually, as Roy Baty said, all these moments will be lost in time like tears in the rain.