books

by

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.

by

“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.

by

“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.

by

“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.

by

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.

by

“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.

by

“With your feet on the air and your head on the ground…”

TBIF*!

Unusually for me, I am looking forward to this weekend, even though I don’t have any wonderful outings with my youngest in the offing.  I just need to rest, because in case you can’t tell, I’ve really been all over the place mentally this week.  I guess that’s not so unusual for me, at least not from outside (but it’s been atypically bad from the inside).  I’m sure it’s quite tedious and repetitive and depressing for you to keep reading about it.  Honestly, why in the world are you wasting your time with this bullshit?!?!?

I’m being a bit facetious just now‒or, rather, I was being a bit facetious.  I don’t really want you all to stop “wasting your time” with my blog.  No, indeed, I would rather you not only read all of my posts but also all of my books, and to spread the word and “like” and “share” them with everyone you know (and even those you don’t) on social media and elsewhere.

Speaking of liking and sharing, hey, why not share all of my songs and shit?  Put ‘em on your Spotify playlist or your iTunes or YouTubeMusic or Pandora or whatnot.  They’re there on all of those, supposedly.  Actually, I know they’re on YouTube and I know they’re on Spotify.  I have them on my own playlists, and I even occasionally sneak them into the background music playlist at work, though it’s slightly embarrassing.

Actually, come to think of it, the hold music for our office VOIP phones is a slightly edited version of Like and Share with a shorter intro.  We’ve even received compliments from people about it from time to time, and these are people who were on hold during discussions with salespeople!

All that bouncing around above of things I would want to promote can serve to highlight one of the big problems I have with myself:  I have too many “special interests”.

If I only had one focus, or just one main focus, I think I could become really good at it and maybe even contribute significant things.  If I were a full-time musician, for instance, I think I would become very good at that.  If I were able to focus on physics/mathematics I think I could really learn a lot of it quite deeply, and maybe even make contributions to science.

And we know that, when I committed to writing just for an hour or so a day, I wrote a lot of stories over the course of a few years, even while in stir.

Unfortunately, after focusing on one thing or mostly one thing for a while, I start missing the other stuff, or I just get distracted by the other stuff.  Every minute is an opportunity cost.  Of course, that’s true for everyone‒we all have to choose one path, and in choosing it, we must therefore not choose others, and that chosen path will determine future options that might have been otherwise.

I think maybe I just dwell on such facts more than most people do.  I suppose that’s one side-effect of having difficulty socializing:  I spend a lot of time with my own thoughts (or reading the thoughts of others, of course).

I also have a tendency to move back and forth between many books at one time.  Back when I was married, it used to irritate my (now ex) wife because I’d have seven or eight books at a time on my bedside table, many with more than one bookmark stuck in them.  To be fair to her, she was never very critical of it; she was (and still is, presumably) a very avid reader herself.  Anyway, that’s the sort of stuff I do.

It all means that I do know at least superficially about an awful lot of stuff, and of widely varying genres and contexts and subjects and topics and various other synonyms and near-synonyms**.  Currently, my non-fiction reading is bouncing between Lisa Randall’s Warped Passages, a physics book, which I mentioned before, and Cass Sunstein’s new book On Liberalism: In Defense of Freedom.

In my recent books alone (on Kindle) I have Japanese light novels, a book on political philosophy (see above), two physics books, a book about geometry applied to the real world in surprising ways***, a book about autism, a book about the Beatles and the recording of their songs, a book on a current issue in sociology/psychology, and so on.  This should give you a locally scaled example of how my mind goes all over the place.

For the most part, I cannot complain about having many interests.  It would be nice if I had someone with whom to share at least some of them, as used to be the case, but if wishes were horses we’d all need to carry manure shovels with us everywhere we go (and not just metaphorically, as we already do).

So, anyway, my mind is all over the place, but this week there have been several stretches in which I had no interest in any subject.  When that happens to me, I know I’m really spiraling down deep into the depression thing.  Hopefully, though, if I can truly get some extra mental rest this weekend, it will regress a bit.

I hope you all have as good a weekend as it’s possible for you to have‒and if you’ve been here for a while, you know that my take is that you always have the best weekend you could possibly have, because as soon as things happen, they become inevitable, since you cannot undo events that have already taken place.

This also means you always have the worst weekend possible, of course, by logical necessity.  But that’s not horrible‒after all, if you consider most weekends, you can realize, “Hey, if this really has been the worst my weekend could possibly have been, well that’s pretty cool, because it hasn’t really been that bad.”

I’ll talk to you on Monday, barring (as always) the unforeseen.

*Thank Batman it’s Friday, for those of you who have not yet seen this from me.

**Could you call those “perisynonyms”?  Well, I know you could call them that, but I mean, does anyone think it might catch on, and is the meaning fairly obvious?

***Jordan Ellenberg’s Shape.  I strongly recommend this and his previous book How Not To Be Wrong if you want to kindle (no pun intended) or rekindle a love of mathematics.  He narrates the audiobook versions of his books, and he is an excellent teacher.

by

Viewing his progress through, what perils past, what crosses to ensue, would shut the blog

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, and so it’s time for my “usual” weekly Thursday blog post.  Aren’t you lucky?

I was a bit surprised that yesterday’s post seemed to be rather successful, at least in that people commented on it, here and on social media (where I share it).  I don’t know if anyone else shared it—I encourage anyone who enjoys any of my posts to share it to your own social media, and of course, I encourage you to “like” it if you like it, though I’m falling afoul of my own cautionary song Like and Share by encouraging such activities.

Still, it would be nice if people could share my stuff or comment on it.  I’ll say again:  comments on social media aren’t as useful to me as comments here, on my main page.  Here is where all* the readers come together (over me, so to speak).  So, if one person makes a comment, it might be something that another person finds interesting or insightful, and they might comment back and even get a conversation going.

I don’t know.  I’m probably being unreasonable.  I usually am.  I just have a bit of a hard time sustaining conversation, myself, so I’m always hoping that other people will do so in response to the prompts of my random thoughts, like the ones from yesterday.

Here I’m using a rather constrained version of the term “random”; my thoughts are not random in any true, nondeterministic, quantum mechanical kind of way.  They’re just stochastic, as well as being occasionally sarcastic**, as in my third sentence above.  So, while in practice they are unpredictable, in principle, each follows directly from some individual cause or set of causes.

Of course, nowadays, many people creating “content” on the various social media ask for “likes” or “thumbs up” or whatever the specific equivalent on their site is, as well as sharing and subscribing when that applies.  They also often have things like Patreon accounts, or Ko-fi accounts or whatever (those latter ones allow people to send them small amounts—the price of a cup of coffee, for instance—to help support them), so that some of them can make an actual living by making their “content”.

Of course, it would be nice to make a living by making content, i.e., by these blog posts.  I suppose one can also write posts on Substack nowadays; they are set up to allow people to give paid subscriptions in addition to free subscriptions.

Actually, I think WordPress has instituted something along those lines as well; I’ve gotten notifications of some such things at some point, but I haven’t paid that much attention to them.  All the social media and search engine companies and streaming services are all changing things far too often, so I don’t even try to keep up.

This constant updating gives one (this one, anyway) the impression that the companies really don’t know what they’re doing, and that they haven’t made a good product before they put it out to the public, so they have to keep tweaking it.

I suspect, though, that it’s more that they think they have to keep changing things to keep up with all the competition.  It’s a bit as if seals and sea lions tried to grow tentacles because they saw that squid and octopuses have a fair amount of success using them.

It might be worth it to remind them (the software companies and the pinnipeds) that, while all improvement is change, not all change is improvement.  In fact, most potential change is at best neutral, and more often detrimental, especially in situations in which something is working at least reasonably well.

This is the root of the admission in the Declaration of Independence that prudence dictates that established governments should not be changed due to light or transient causes (something like that, anyway).  It’s also part of why I hate when organizations or people call for “change” without being more specific.  I have more patience with the label “progressive”, because at least it gives tacit recognition to the notion that progress (by whatever definition) is what we want, not mere random change.

It’s true that evolution by natural selection happens with random mutations and non-random survival, and that over time, progress can be made that way, but it is a grim, ungainly, blundering, low, ghastly, ominous, wasteful, and horribly cruel process (here I’m combining words from Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Darwin).  It’s better to use engineering principles rather than random trial and error if one wants to head more swiftly and surely in better directions***.

Anyway, I don’t have any direct way to monetize this blog, though there are probably ways it can be done.  And so, I keep going to work every day, as I am doing now.  If people want to support me, of course, giving “likes” and commenting and (if such a thing ever happens) sharing the link to the posts is also very nice.

Of course, if anyone wants to support me monetarily, they can certainly do so—in principle—by buying my published books and talking about them to other people (and rating and reviewing them on Amazon, for instance).  And, of course, they can play/stream my music on Spotify and YouTube Music and iTunes and so on.  Some of my songs are even available to use as background music for reels on Instagram and TikTok and Facebook.

But I am more or less certain that I’ve made a staggering**** net loss on my music.  That’s okay.  People have listened to my songs, and some people have said that they really like them.  I even had one work friend who was a former professional musician/singer/songwriter say that he thought if my song Breaking Me Down had been released (in a professionally produced version shortened for radio) in the seventies, it would have been a hit.

So, if you so desire, please do listen to my music, share my posts, buy and read my books, all that stuff.  I would be grateful.  And hey, if any of you out there think I ought to try to monetize this blog, please let me know.

It seems unlikely that anyone actually reads far enough even to let me know their response, but if that’s the case, well, I guess I don’t mind being a voice crying out in the wilderness—I’ve always felt that way no matter what.

TTFN

*Though it may be a bit much to use the word “all”, considering that I don’t exactly have that many regular readers—a few dozen at most, most days.

**Oh, noooo, I would never be sarcastic.  Batman forbid!

***Of course, there are many possible ways to think of something as “better”, so making that judgment should also be an important part of the process if one wants actually to make things improve in a way upon which most, if not all, can agree.

****As a matter of percentage in versus percentage out.  The actual amounts are not great in either direction.

by

Thoughts on real versus virtual keyboards, books, and quantum teleportation

It’s Friday, and I’m writing this post on my mini laptop computer, because although yesterday I forgot it and had to use the smartphone, it was really quite nice the other day to be able to type for real and not tap around on some simulated keyboard with no aesthetic appeal, on which one cannot feel the keys responding to one’s touch (and which gives this one arthritic pain in the base of his thumbs).

I remember when the notion of such a virtual keyboard first appeared to me—this was in Star Trek: The Next Generation.  I thought the idea seemed terribly unsatisfactory despite being very clever.  I mean, I recognized the efficiency of it, but when the characters would read books and such things on their little portable “tablets”, it seemed almost heartbreaking.

Obviously, in a star ship in deep space, they’re not going to have room for a vast physical library such as the virtual one they clearly have in the ship’s computer.  It’s much like the fact that I have many more books in my Kindle library than I have in my physical living space (though I used to have way more physical books than I have current Kindle books).  But something is lost a bit, nevertheless, at least for me, with such virtual collections.

Actually, it just occurred to me:  in Star Trek, they use replicators to make their food and so on, applying the transporter technology to reproduce scanned items that include food.  Why could they not use that to replicate books as needed, then scan them away when they were done?

Of course, the quantum mechanics of potential real world transporter-type technology is such that you couldn’t mass produce anything from “scanning” any one particular item; as part of the required entanglement process for quantum teleportation, one destroys the quantum states of the particles in the original item (or person, if it’s a person, so Dr. McCoy was right to be leery of the transporter).

Also, the entangled particles used to reconstruct the item by creating a new set of particles in identical quantum states to the original, could not be kept in their transitional states indefinitely; such states are not inherently stable.  Even if they could be maintained thanks to advanced technology, once they were used to recreate the original item or person, those entangled particles would also have their own quantum states irreparably altered, and could not be used to make another copy.

You can never make more than one copy of a thing sent by quantum teleportation, The Enemy Within notwithstanding*.

Still, maybe the people in TNG could “scan” a bunch of real books, as if about to transport them using the ship’s transporters, and just…save them for later.  You couldn’t make multiple copies, again because the originals would not still exist after being scanned—as I noted before, such scanning destroys the initial quantum states of all the constituents of the scanned item (or person).  But they could just be singly stored in the “buffer”, saving the quantum state of the entangled particles used to apply quantum teleportation.

But wait, I hear you say, storing all those books “in transition” would entail a tremendous amount of stored quantum information that would need to be maintained in its entangled state indefinitely, at presumably great cost in data and energy.  Not only that, one would have to have the equivalent of the mass of those items in the ship at all times, no matter** what.

You are very clever, and you are, of course, correct; it wouldn’t be efficient in any sense, and would add to the power requirements of the ship.  Also, in any serious disruption of the ship’s stability and power—such as happens in nearly every episode, so more than twenty times a year on average—much of that quantum information would probably be lost.

Maybe it really doesn’t make practical sense to try to do such a thing.  After all, I’m the person who has bemoaned the incredible data wastage necessary to store audio, let alone video, files rather than the much more efficient written word.  And I have not changed my mind on that set of subjects.  I could record a video, or even an audio, of me reading the words of this blog post, and it would have a file size in the hundreds of K at least; for a video, it would probably be many megabytes in size.

Meanwhile, my average blog posts, as stored in Word, are 16 to 20 K in size.  It’s quite a difference.  Even just using the RAM of this small computer (4 gigabytes) I could load up as many as a quarter of a million blog posts (assuming nothing else were in the random-access memory, which in not the way things work).  That’s about 250 million words.  Even I am unlikely to write that much during my lifetime.

More importantly, with the written word no one has to look at my ugly mug (though I will admit that my voice is absolutely lovely, so it might be worth hearing any audio file I produce…Ha-ha, just kidding).

Anyway, as I noted, it’s Friday, and I’m almost certain we’re not working tomorrow—I’m inclined to say that, even if the office is open, I’m not working tomorrow, but I tend not to follow through on such ultimata, because I’m a pushover—so there won’t be another post until Monday, at the earliest (barring, as always, the unforeseen).

I hope you all have a good weekend, but at least I know, as I pointed out yesterday, that you will have the best weekend you possibly can, since whatever happens becomes inevitable as soon as it happens, and it may have always been so (if quantum superdeterminism is correct).  Of course, that means you will also have the worst weekend possible.  But for most weekends, that’s a comfort.  For most such weekends, you could honestly say, “Well, if that was the worst weekend I could possibly have had, it’s not so bad.”

Usually, you could honestly say and feel that.  And it’s very likely that this weekend will be one such usual weekend.

Have a good one.

*In any case, that episode is really more of a fable than anything truly science fiction.  It assumes a bizarre kind of dualism between body and mind and a further, cleanly divisible dualism even in the mind itself, which in the episode is split into discrete but very broad personality aspects that can be separated out into different bodies.  It’s an interesting exploration of the tension between aspects of a person’s character, and engages speculation about whether a dark/violent side is a necessary aspect for a good leader.

**No pun intended, but I’m leaving it.

by

Let him that hath understanding count the numbers of the words

It’s Friday, and I’ve already heard, from the boss’s own mouth, that we are not going to be open tomorrow.  I think everyone at the office (including the boss!) has been working quite hard this week, and they’ve been doing things they wouldn’t usually be doing in addition to their regular duties, which they’ve all (well, almost all) been doing quite well.  Everyone could use a break, and I am certainly no exception.

I’m planning to make this post pretty short, today, because I am under the influence of steadily accruing fatigue.  Of course, I’ve said such things before, haven’t I?  And then I often go on and on and make quite a long post.

I wonder how many words I’ve written on this (and my other) blog since I returned to the outskirts of this world in about 2015.  I can do a little “back of the envelope” calculating, I guess.  I’ll slightly overestimate the daily word count as an average of about 1000, then balance that by underestimating the number of days I write per week at just 5 even, so that would be 5000 words a week or 260,000 words in a given year if I were only writing the blog, not working on (or counting) fiction.  So, that would make probably something over a million words since I started blogging, probably more (there were long stretches when I only wrote one post a week).

Of course, just one of my fiction works was half a million words long (though I had to split it into Book 1 and Book 2 to be able to publish it).  I wish I could have kept writing fiction, but it gets so dispiriting just to fire your fiction out into the void, and I am not good at promoting myself.  I think if I had just one actual fan, someone who liked my stuff for its own sake and wanted to read more just because they like my writing (even though they don’t know me or owe me) then I would probably be motivated and keep writing fiction.

Speaking of fans and promotion and all that sort of stuff, there was a weird thing that happened on Wednesday.  WordPress gives you daily statistics bar graphs when you sign into the account, and normally, my blog gets in the high 20s or 30s of visitors every day, but on Wednesday there were over 900 views or visits or whatever they call them.  I have no idea how that happened or what it might signify.

Possibly it’s a glitch, or perhaps there’s some form of LLM searching through blog posts.  Who knows?  It’s curious, though.  So, if any of you has any ideas that seem plausible, I would be interested in hearing your thoughts; please leave a comment below.

Okay, well, I guess that’s about it.  This work week has not been as horrible as the last one, but it has not been easy.  I really look forward to being at least able to sedate myself with Benadryl and the like this weekend so I can try to recover as much as possible.  I wish the AC in my room were working, but at least I have a good quality, powerful floor fan.  Unfortunately, it’s not a fan of my fiction, ha ha, but it is good at what it does.  Still, I have to be careful, because there’s somewhat more of a risk for dehydration with a fan.  That’s okay.  I mean to keep myself aggressively hydrated.

I hope you all have a very good weekend, whether there are 900 of you or 90 or 9.  Heck, if there were 9 billion of you, I’d still want you all to have a good weekend.  Imagine that, if the entire human race (and then some) all had a very good weekend.

Maybe someday.