It’s Friday at last! I get the impression that a lot of people feel an “at last” feeling when Friday arrives, so I am simulating that response, though it doesn’t really pertain to me this week. There are only 22 shopping days left until Halloween. Then the year goes a bit downhill. I guess everyone can watch and see what happens then, if anything.
I don’t know why, but that last sentence sounds like a sort of hinted threat or worry about the future. Yet all I really meant, if anything, was just that we can only wait to see what the future holds, though we can make predictions to some degree. Also, I just like to hear myself talk, as it were. I’m damned if I know why (and apparently, I’m damned even if I don’t know why).
I’m going to try to keep this a bit short today, despite the preceding statement about hearing myself talk. Yesterday’s post was too long. Yet, despite its length, it accomplished nothing that did me any good whatsoever as far as I can tell. It’s all just me oversharing online, because I have no one with whom I can overshare in person.
And while there is some degree of a chance that such oversharing might be used to harm me by someone in the future, nevertheless, as far as I can tell, there’s almost no chance that it will be used by anyone anywhere ever to help me. That’s just the way it goes, I guess. Or maybe it just goes that way for me, because I’m particularly…I don’t know, particularly weird, particularly unpleasant, particularly disgusting, something like that.
Anyway, I believe I’m going to be working tomorrow, exclusis improvisis, so you can feel justified in expecting that I will write another post tomorrow. As for today, I already feel exhausted. I wish that meant that, if I tried, I would be able to sleep, perhaps for quite a long time, but I experience leads me away from expecting that to happen.
I think I’m going to try a more concerted, formal bit of meditating again, at least for a bit. I have to try to do something. If it makes me more depressed, as meditation often does, and therefore more actively self-destructive, then let those chips fall where they may…and any other trite figure of speech that might apply here.
I don’t know if I’ll play any guitar or sing today, but I guess I might. If so, I will probably play many of the same things I did on Tuesday, and about which I spoke on Wednesday. I might throw in Pigs on the Wing, or One Headlight, or Ashes to Ashes, or even play A Space Oddity again. I haven’t played that in a long time, probably not since I made the video of me playing it. It’s weird, but once I’ve made a video of something, I rarely play it personally anymore.
It’s like, “Well, ‘me performing that song’ is out there in the world, so I don’t need to do it anymore”. It’s strange. I can’t even recall the chords and stuff from my own original songs since I released them; I would need to relearn them if I were to try to play them again. It may sound strange, but I don’t think it has anything to do with ego, whether good or bad. It is more that, whatever force created the pressure to write and then record the song(s) was released by doing them, and the pressure has not reaccumulated.
It’s weird, yeah. There is more ego involved in my fiction writing, I think‒I want people to read and enjoy my stories and to appreciate me for them‒and maybe that failure is part of why I don’t feel capable of writing fiction anymore.
I don’t know, probably most of my troubles spring from my chronic pain. I’m quite sure that many, many things would be easier and would go better if I were just able to get the pain under control.
Maybe meditation will help that. It never has before, but “past performance is no guarantee of future results”, despite the supposed pop culture idiotic “definition of insanity” falsely attributed to Einstein.
Hello and good morning. It’s Thursday, which you might be able to tell by my traditional, Thursday-associated “Hello and good morning” style opening. But, of course, if you’re new to this blog‒I wonder if there are any new people reading this blog today‒then you might not know.
But I’ve been writing a Thursday-based blog for at least 10 years, I think, in case anyone wants to go back and check it out. It then expanded into an “every workday” blog after my last fiction publication, which I think was my collection, Dr. Elessar’s Cabinet of Curiosities. Though my last novel ended up being Unanimity Book 1 and Unanimity Book 2.
But for the most part, I’ve just been doing this blog. I initially imagined it to be a kind of promotional entity, intended to help people hear about my books. As far as I can tell, it utterly failed at that purpose, but whataya gonna do?
Then I decided to try to turn the blog into a sort of mental health thing (for me, not for my readers‒it cannot be good for my readers’ mental health), a kind of talk therapy, to try to help with my ongoing dysthymia and depression.
Well, it’s difficult to assess an intervention’s effectiveness without being able to know how things would be without that intervention, but if this is me with a successful method of intervention, I shudder to imagine what I would be like without it. Possibly, I would be dead, but that’s really not such a bad thought, to be fair.
I’ve had a few very bad days of pain lately, which is not unusual, but it is frustrating. For a few days before this, my pain abated a bit, to just a sort of low, background thing, and when that happens, I start to feel stupidly optimistic for a time. Of course, so far, that optimism has been profoundly misplaced, but what do you want from something as stupid as optimism?
The pain really doesn’t help things, though. It’s been going on for nearly a quarter of a century so far, and that’s too long for my taste (in case you wondered). In a few years, I will have reached the halfway point, i.e., I will have been in chronic pain for half my life. From there, the fraction just gets bigger. Indeed, if I were to live forever, the limit of the fraction of my life in which I’ve been in chronic pain would be 1.
That’s a pretty horrible thought.
So, yeah, that hasn’t helped with my mental health either. It’s difficult to know what my mental health would have been like without chronic pain; it’s possible it could have been worse. But there are decent reasons to doubt that to be the likely case.
Insomnia doesn’t help, either. I will say one thing about Paxil, for all that it wasn’t great for my depression: it made me enjoy sleeping, even though it didn’t make a big impact on how long I slept. I have never really enjoyed sleep, either before or since. I am not one who eagerly anticipates getting into bed and drifting off.
I know there are people who do seem to enjoy it, quite apart from its necessary function. Not I. My need to sleep, as with so many other things, is one purely of necessity; I need to rest, if I can. And I certainly long for the feeling of actually having adequately rested, though I don’t know if I will ever experience that again.
Anyway, I’m tired‒from lack of sleep, from pain, from depression, presumably from ASD, from being alone with only my own miserable and annoying self all the time, from the fact that the world is so stupid and so pointless*, from general social awkwardness, from innumerable things. And I have no apparent capacity to do anything creative now, which used to be one of my saving graces. I haven’t even played guitar (or sang) for weeks now, if I recall correctly. The black Strat just leans against my desk in the office, gathering dust.
Oh, well. Like I said (or asked), whataya gonna do? Although, there is always something I can do, but people don’t like it when I talk about that. It makes them uncomfortable. It doesn’t make anyone uncomfortable enough to act, but they don’t like it, and it doesn’t seem to do me any good except to make me feel slightly more hopeless, as well as somewhat guilty for bothering other people with my issues.
Anyway, it’s not like I can blame anyone for not wanting to have anything to do with a creature like me.
Enough. This is idiotic, like so much else in the universe. I hope you’re all doing well.
TTFN
*But especially the “stupid” part. Pointlessness is tolerable, and it can even be rather freeing, but everyone and everything is just so idiotic. I do not exclude myself from that judgement.
It’s Thursday again and time for another of my traditional Thursday blog posts*, though nowadays that’s embedded among the blog posts I write on all the other work days. I haven’t written fiction in quite a long time, and the original reason for this (Thursday) blog was to promote my fiction.
But heck, it’s been a couple of weeks since I’ve even so much as picked up a guitar‒though I keep looking online at these parlor style acoustics, because they look like they’d be a good size for convenience and such. But it’s just a bit of a pipe dream and a distraction to look at them.
There is no lapcom involved in this post today. I didn’t take it with me when I left the office last night, but there was no more “reason” for that decision than there had been for the fact that I brought it the day before. There were causes, as there always are, but not reasons.
Although, now that I consider it, I did feel that yesterday’s post was a bit too long. That didn’t consciously enter into my decision-making when I chose not to bring the lapcom, but I did think about it earlier in the day, after posting. Most, if not all, of what happens in most decisions we make is unconscious, or subconscious**, or whatever word you might want to choose. So I can’t rule out that there were actual reasons for me not bringing my lapcom last night, but whatever the facts of that matter might be, there were, and always are, causes.
In any case, yesterday I fell prey to my tendency to write quite a lot when typing on a lapcom or other regular keyboard, because it’s so fast and easy for me. It’s faster than speaking for me, and it’s certainly faster than using the “smartphone”, even not counting all the typos that occur when using the latter***.
I continue to toy, from time to time, with trying to type a tome using Google Docs. But its interfaces, while okay for writing blog posts, don’t feel quite right for writing fiction, at least not for me. It’s probably a stupid notion anyway. I don’t really expect ever to write any more fiction. That’s not a good thing, but then again, very little is.
I’m actually getting irritated that my lapcoms and my desktop computer at work are beginning to show some signs of their ages, and I fear that they may need to be replaced soon. Worse, my smartphone is getting a bit laggy, and I cannot upgrade it to the latest operating system so I can no longer use my banking app on it.
But I really don’t want to go through the hassle of getting and setting up a new phone (or computer). It’s so irritating and so uninteresting. I actually had the general, vague hope that I would not live long enough to need to upgrade my computer(s) or phone again.
Honestly, the constant displacement of entropy that comprises the process of staying alive at so many levels is just dreary and almost laughable.
Speaking of laughable, I’ve been thinking about trying a personal experiment: I’ve been thinking about trying to go without laughing for a day or a week or something along those lines****. I just wonder what effect that would have on my experiences.
I tend to overdo it with jokiness, and I tend to partake in a lot of comedy of various kinds, almost in a desperate way. It could even be be considered an addiction, or at least like a substance abuse problem, including its own abstinence syndrome: I used to have the experience that, after reading a Dave Barry book, I would crash and feel quite depressed and morose for a while, as if in withdrawal from laughing so much.
Perhaps laughter is one of my means to try to hide from reality, to hide from the present, to try to hide from me. I haven’t committed to the idea, yet, but it does intrigue me. Most of my literary heroes do not spend a lot of time laughing. And I have few, if any, real world heroes, but such as I have, though far from agelastic, are not prone to joke about a lot or get giggly or silly, like I do.
Those facts may be irrelevant for me, of course. I am a unique snowflake (just like all the other snowflakes), and I don’t necessarily have the same attributes as those I admire, especially fictional characters. But it is intriguing as almost a kind of fast, but one in which I would abstain from laughing rather than from food or water.
I’ll keep you posted on my effort (probably). If you want to give me your input, you’re welcome to do so. In the meantime, I hope you have a very good day. Don’t stop laughing on my account.
TTFN
[P.S., a thought just occurred to me, because the words of an old ABBA song (misheard, as I just realized) started going through my head: If you think that there’s nothing you can’t do, that anything is possible, then all the troubles that continue in the world are implicitly your fault, because you could have solved them. After all, there’s nothingyou can’t do. To be fair to them, ABBA was actually singing “there is nothing we can do”, which I had misheard and misremembered as “can’t” for decades. Indeed, their song goes pretty well with parts of this post, especially the song’s first few lines. Who would have guessed?]
*I almost said “my traditional Thursday podcast”. How’s that for a weird mistake? I’ve certainly toyed with the idea of a podcast at times, but that requires more time and editing and so on than my little five-minute or so snippets of audio. But I do like to listen to podcasts, at least about topics that interest me. Perhaps it was a Freudian slip.
**I accidentally typed “sunconscious” here, originally, and it seems like kind of a charming word, so it’s a shame it doesn’t really mean anything. But one certainly doesn’t want a conscious sun, as the dubious Doctor Who episode “42” tried to warn us…or something like that.
***You might almost think that word means “one who lats”, but of course it’s not that kind of word and has close kinship with “later” and its ilk.
I’m back on the smartphone again today, so hopefully I can at least avoid going on and on and on like I did yesterday. That ought to be easy enough, but apparently, it is not. I don’t know why I get so “talkative” here all the time, but it doesn’t seem to be because I have anything important to say.
As I’ve noted before, typing on a QWERTY keyboard feels almost more natural than speaking to me (and I do it far more often now) but that’s definitely not true for using the smartphone, and it probably never will be.
For one thing, I haven’t stopped having arthralgia/tendinopathy in and around the bases of my thumbs related to such use. It’s not severe discomfort, certainly not compared to my chronic pain, but it is there and it is annoying. It seems, however, to interfere with playing guitar more than with using my smartphone (or anyone else’s, I would guess).
Yesterday, I wasn’t sure I wanted to play any, so I figured I’d give fate a hand in things. I carry four dollar coins with me every day‒two Susan B. Anthonys and two Sacagaweas‒and I use them to help make decisions when I feel no particular pull in a given direction. I also use them to clarify my own inclinations: if I get a result and dislike it, I know that I really want to do the alternate thing. I’m told that my son has adopted this sort of habit as well.
Anyway, I flipped all four coins and got a unanimous set of heads*, so I played guitar and sang some. I did it somewhat reluctantly, but when all four ladies agree, I find it hard to ignore them.
It wasn’t anything fancy, I just mainly went through a series of songs I know by heart, plus I think I played through Desperado using the pdf I have of a printout of the chords. There were a lot of twinges in both thumbs/wrists while I was playing, though. Still, I’ve come to realize that I have a decent repertoire of songs that I can do off the cuff, so if I needed to do some busking, I could probably do it.
I also recently realized that the Radiohead song(s) Polyethylene (Parts 1 & 2) ends with the same chord on which their song Fake Plastic Trees begins. That was too funny a coincidence (given the subject matter/titles of the songs, especially), so I’ve taken to playing them as one combined song, a sort of mini-medley.
Several days ago, I even tried taking a video of me playing and singing (not those songs), using the desktop’s camera, and I discovered something: if I ever do want to record myself doing music again, then I need a new microphone, probably more than one. The sound quality was terrible, full of clipping and distortion and such. Also, I need a new face, but that’s a separate matter.
I have also been working on learning Bach’s Two Part Invention number 13 for the guitar (mainly the right hand part so far‒the left hand had to be restranscribed and brought up an octave and I don’t enjoy it quite as much). This has long been one of my favorite piano pieces to play, though I am way too rusty to play it now on a keyboard. I used to like it so much that, whenever I was antsy, I would find a surface with an edge and “play” that Bach piece. I guess I have always been a “stimmer”.
Anyway, all this crap isn’t really here or there, it’s just silly trivia that I’m spouting in lieu of having anything substantive to say. I’m sorry if it’s boring or all over the place. My mind has not been doing well lately, in case you haven’t noticed (or just haven’t read my blog lately).
I was just thinking recently about whether it would be workable for me to start going back to writing fiction maybe say two or three days a week (Monday, Wednesday, Friday for instance) and blogging only on the other days. I don’t know if that would lose me readers on the blog or perhaps bring more people in, but it’s not as though I ever have more than a few dozen people coming to the blog in the first place.
Then again, no one’s exactly champing at the bit to read any of my fiction, either. This is mainly just a self-indulgent, foolish exercise, a lab sample of concentrated futility. Come to think of it, that could actually be said about pretty much my entire life since roughly 2013 (at the latest). Trying to find any meaningfulness in my life since then is like wandering through the ruins of an ancient Egyptian city, looking for a 7-11.
Anyway, that’s enough of my stupidity for now. Not that my stupidity will stop, but at least I won’t spew any more of it on you for the moment. I hope you have a day that improves after you finish reading this; it’s unlikely to be much worse, right?
TTFN
*This is not terribly improbable; it will happen in one out of 2 to the 4th, or 1 in 16, runs of four coin flips.
It’s Friday now and I’m writing this post on the lapcom*. According to the list of my saved blog posts that auto-fills as I write in the new file name, I wrote a post using the lapcom on this date last year, though that was a Thursday and this is a Friday. That day mismatch by one is the sort of thing that tends to happen, since the “normal” year is 365 days, which gives 52 with a remainder of 1 if you divide it by 7 (the number of days in a week, in case that was unclear).
That’s a bit interesting (though only just) because of my tendency in recent time to write mostly on my smartphone; it’s relatively uncommon for the same dates to appear on the smartphone’s saved list two years in a row. I think my smartphone-writing tendency was well in place since at least last year, but I am far from sure. I have not been keeping track of that development precisely over time, so I’d be building my impression de novo if I were trying to recall the specifics.
Of course, I could just look through my list of “blog post for x-x-xxxx Xday” from the last years, sorted by date, and I would see how many posts I wrote on the lapcom in 2025 versus the number I wrote on the smartphone, which are saved to Google Drive. That’s not exactly a difficult task, but it’s also not very interesting, so I don’t intend to do it.
I’m sure it’s also not very interesting for you all to read about, presumably**, so I’ll drop that topic now.
I did not write a post yesterday, in case you were wondering, because I did not go to work. I was not “ill” in the sense of having a contagious disease; rather, I was in very severe pain and the meds I was taking to try to combat it were making me feel physically ill at various levels, so I tried to stay back at the house and rest.
It’s not very comfortable there, and I don’t especially like being there, but at least I don’t have to try to do work while feeling crappy, and I can lie down to rest my back and try to nap a bit. I can also try to pass time doing some distracting things, though nothing really entertains me or even catches much of my interest anymore. I’m just passing time all the time.
I haven’t played guitar or keyboard (nor sang) in over a week, maybe almost two weeks. My left hand fingertip calluses haven’t significantly faded, but if this goes on too long, they will. Of course, guitar calluses aren’t as impressive as cello-related ones, which I had for probably nearly twenty years back in the day. Sometimes you could see those without even having to look too closely.
My cello calluses are long gone—though there’s a “ship of Theseus” style question of whether one should consider my current calluses to be anything but the same ones, or on the other hand (no pun intended) if one can consider any calluses the same ones over time, since the skin cells turn over and so do the very atoms in the underlying living cells.
It doesn’t matter, but sometimes such philosophical questions can stimulate thought and train one to be careful and rigorous in the way one thinks, and so perhaps make one less prone to certain kinds of mental errors. They are probably worth your time if you’re interested.
Anyway, I’m going to work today, and I should also be working tomorrow, so you’ll get probably five posts this week, at least, though not contiguously. You also won’t be getting one of my altered Shakespeare quote headlines. I do those on Thursdays, out of a sense of…nostalgia, I guess, for the times when my blog was only posted on Thursdays, and was meant as a promotion/author’s note on what was going on with my fiction writing. I’m not doing any fiction writing now—and I don’t just mean “at this very moment” because that’s all too obvious—and I don’t know whether I will ever again, any more than whether I’ll ever sing or play an instrument or anything like that again.
Oh, but I did come up with and write down a rather silly story idea yesterday, for the first time in a while. It concerned the expression “time flies when you’re having fun”, but takes the point of view that “time flies” could be some form of supernatural insect. The main character could be someone who is cursed such that, whenever he was becoming joyful or satisfied with his life, these supernatural insects would begin to swarm him and eventually transport him through time to some random place whence he’d have to start all over.
It’s a goofy notion, I know.
I actually prefer the idea I had apparently written down most recently before that. It concerned a scientist who invents a truth serum or device or combination thereof that makes a person under its influence always tell the truth—even truths that they did not know before. For instance, you can ask them what the weather is like in Kuala Lumpur at the moment and they will tell you and it will be correct, even if they are in Jakarta or Tannu Tuva or Massachusetts or Poughkeepsie or some other entertainingly named place.
But the more rarefied the information is, the greater toll it takes on the mind being questioned. I proposed the possibility of asking someone what the next day’s winning lottery numbers would be, but the sheer improbability of specific answers and the fact that they are in the future overstrains and severely damages the brain of the person involved. But they would get the numbers right if they survived the process. I wonder what might come of such an invention.
I am not, by the way, giving anyone permission to use those ideas by sharing them here. You do not have permission, and I might well be inclined to bring down truly horrific vengeance upon you if you steal them in any sense. However, if I should die without ever writing either story, then after that, you should feel absolutely free to use them. You don’t even have to give me credit; I’ll be dead, I won’t care (though the present person I am thinks it pleasant to imagine being given such credit, so do with that what you will).
Anyway, that’s enough for today. As I said, I expect to write a post tomorrow, barring (as always) the unforeseen***. I hope you all have a good day today, and that you have a good weekend and so on. Heck, carry that forward as far as you can.
*I wrote Tuesday’s post on the smartphone, by the way, for those who took up my challenge to try to see if they could tell whether that had been the case or I had written on my lapcom.
**Though we must be careful with such presumption, because as we all know, “when you presume, you make a pres out of u and me”. In the past, being a “pres” could have been a good thing, at least to some degree, but that time is gone. Nowadays, I’d rather assume than presume, since I’m often an ass entirely on my own, anyway.
***I tried to find a pithy Latin phrase that would encapsulate that expression, since I use it so often—you know, something like ceteris paribus for “all other things being equal”—but the attempts I have made so far produced cumbersome phrases that didn’t quite truly mean what I had intended when I reversed the translation process. Alas.
Well, I feel a bit better than I did yesterday, at least. I guess that’s not necessarily all that impressive, when you consider how grumpy and gloomy I was yesterday. Honestly, I can barely remember what I wrote then or what thought process was going through my mind.
I think maybe some of the difference today (which can’t be due to pain levels, because they are pretty steady) is because I got a few hours’ continuous sleep last night‒maybe 2 or even a little more before any stirring started to happen. I don’t want to get too excited about this; after all, it’s possible that I’ll never sleep that well again for the rest of my life. That may not be likely, but it remains possible, at least until I do have a better night’s sleep in the future.
Still, you take what you can get, right?
I find myself quite chagrined‒quite often‒by how grumpy and angry I have become. This is largely due to my chronic pain, of course. Even the most loyal and lovable family dog may growl and sometimes snap if it’s hurt and someone seems to mean to touch it.
Not that people seem to mean to touch me. I’m not drawing that tight an analogy. Nobody touches me, and for the most part I’m okay with that. I really dislike it when, for instance, acquaintances want to pat me on the shoulder or what have you. I can tolerate handshakes, but I like fist bumps better. They feel almost like something Klingons might do.
Though, more often, I prefer the Vulcan salute, which I use to greet people who know me (and sometimes, without thinking, people who don’t know me). I even use the emoji for it when texting: 🖖
In addition to the preceding, I created my own Vulcan-salute-based flip-off (there’s no associated emoji), and that is basically to do the Vulcan salute but with the back of my hand outward instead of the palm. In my mind, the meaning is pretty clear and harsh: Since the usual Vulcan salute means “Live long and prosper”‒at least, those words accompany the salute*‒then the Vulcan flip-off means roughly “suffer, and die young/soon”.
I know, that’s not a sentiment the Vulcans would be likely to endorse, but in case it wasn’t clear to anyone, I am not a Vulcan. Quite apart from the obvious physical characteristics, Vulcans are a fictional species, and I am not. At least, as far as I know, I am not.
I suppose I could be a work of fiction in a sense, as could you: we could be simulated in some fashion, including being simulated within the mind of some truly vast intelligence, one powerful enough to imagine even all the thoughts of the things they imagine.
But, of course, if you simulate someone right down to their mind, their thoughts, their feelings, then they are not a simulation. Or, rather, even if they are a simulation, they are nevertheless thinking, feeling, experiencing beings.
It’s possible, of course, to simulate a person without simulating an inner mind. You could put the whole range of responses you want them to give to most situations in a very large lookup table, and you would have something like the NPCs in computer games (or older-fashioned role-playing games). Then you are not actually simulating a mind, you are only simulating external behaviors. It would be something like a very advanced animatronic.
But once you actually simulate a mind, you have created a mind, something with (in principle) moral valence. Then, even if you are the creator, you still have moral obligations toward your creations, at least if you have them toward anyone.
Maybe this is why God** doesn’t try to anticipate what humans will do, but gives them “free will”, because to know what they will do, God must simulate what they will do, in all detail, in various versions of all possible situations, so God could choose the best outcome. But to do that would be to create all those versions, including ones that suffer horribly, and God may not be keen to create‒of necessity‒the worst possible versions of these lives and make its creations live them.
So, God leaves them to their devices with the intent to steer events to a very limited degree, and to make things up to them when they die.
It’s an amusing thought, isn’t it? Maybe not. If nothing else, this bit of mind play should demonstrate why you shouldn’t really pay too much attention to religious apologetics, especially to theodicy. Any reasonably good writer of sci-fi and/or fantasy can come up with oodles of scenarios that can explain almost anything; these don’t have any bearing on external reality.
Huh. How the hell did I get to that line of thought? I guess I’ll see as I edit this. In any case, I think that’s enough of my weirdness for the moment. I hope this was better to read than yesterday’s post must have been. Who knows what state of mind I will be in tomorrow?
Well, probably, it will be the state of Florida. And as everyone probably knows (unlike the New York state of mind) Florida is a state of mind reminiscent of the “killer on the road” in Riders on the Storm: it’s a mind that is squirming like a toad. Or perhaps it squirms like a snake, or an alligator, or‒worse‒like a Florida politician.
Whatever. I hope you have a good day.
*The usual, formal response is to return the gesture and say “Peace and long life.” It is not always done with the right hand; I’ve seen responses to a right-hand Vulcan salute given with left-hand Vulcan salutes. I don’t know if this was deliberate or just an “acting choice”.
**I’m assuming arguendo, and only arguendo, that this God exists. So, then I am imagining God, including God’s thoughts. Does that mean, in this sense at least, that God exists, if only in my mind? I suppose one could say that, but only in a trivial sense. I don’t have the processing power to simulate God very well. And any God simulated by my mind would probably welcome its own rapid dissolution.
I’m not sure what to say now. I have probably already used all the potential plays on words based on the fact that Tuesday sounds like “twos-day” or similar. I suppose I could invoke something like a “too’s” day, suggesting the notion that this is too many days in the work week already, or that there are too many weeks, or other similar ideas. But that doesn’t seem too clever, let alone funny. It’s certainly neither insightful nor thought-provoking.
So, I’ll leave that be for now.
I was thinking this morning about the time when I used to write my fiction in the morning, back before I did this blog every day (it used to be something I did only on Thursdays, partly in homage to DentArthurDent). One of the things that made that process perhaps a bit more streamlined‒or less clunky or however you want to characterize it‒than this blog was that I was either editing or I was writing first draft stuff, but I wasn’t publishing what I wrote every day. So, I would either write my four pages (roughly) of new stuff or edit for a certain period of time, and then I would just save my work (in two places) and then close the lapcom and get on with something else‒often working on music or summat.
This blog is not as seamless to produce as writing fiction was day-to-day. I have to edit every post and then post it and share it every day*. That can involve a fair bit of extra time. On the other hand, at least some people actually read this blog. It’s not as good as my stories (in my judgment) but it comes in smaller chunks, which allows it to fit into the stunted attention span of the modern adult human.
I don’t refer just to the latter generations in that statement. Attention span seems to be a bit like muscle tone; it’s not a fixed thing, it’s a neurological habit (or, well, its set-point is influenceable through neurological habit). It can be made stronger with exercise, and a lack thereof will tend to lead it to atrophy**. On average, I suspect that everyone’s attention span is not what it would have been in the past.
I don’t know what I’m trying to do or what point I’m trying to make right now, with this post. It feels like it’s just all over the place, though perhaps that’s merely me projecting the experience of my own attention-fatigued state onto the experience of other people reading my blog. I don’t know.
I’m having difficulty deciding what to write. And yet, I’ve already written more than 500 words (counting footnotes). I feel, as I said, very much all over the place, and pretty stressed out‒not by anything in particular, just as a kind of baseline. I’m also tired, of course, since nothing about my insomnia or my chronic pain has changed. And other than talking to people at work, this blog is the only social interaction I have during the week, so I guess I have some pent up conversational or interactional urge in me.
I do feed some neighborhood cats‒so that’s a bit of social interaction of a sort‒but the ones who seemed to like me and let me pet them and sometimes even sat on my lap are all long gone. The ones who hang around now are just self-serving opportunists. That’s not a surprise; they are cats. They are all unabashed, self-serving opportunists. It is, as they say, the nature of the beast.
They are not solely self-serving opportunists, of course. But it is always at least part of their character. Probably, it’s also always part of ours.
The world is complicated. The fundamental building blocks are‒duh!‒fundamental, but if simple water molecules stacking together stochastically, following precise, local laws can produce all the variegations*** of frost on a window pane, think what the possibilities are for all of reality, with its Planck-scale interactions happening at astonishing rates and in inconceivable numbers. The possibilities include all that is around you, but also (almost certainly) much, much more.
What if our reality were a simulation, but a fully simulated one, down to the quantum state. Perhaps it could merely be simulated as those quantum states, with no eye to any larger patterns. To calculate each next Planck time “frame” of that simulation could require a billion years of processing time in the simulators’ world, and so to them their simulation would plod at a ridiculously slow rate. And yet, for us‒the simulated‒time would proceed as it always has and does, since our experience of time is internal to our universe and based on interaction rates within our universe.
Okay, that was a severe tangent, sorry. I don’t know that it actually made sense relative to what I was trying to discuss (if such a thing really exists). So, I think I’ll wrap this up for today. I hope you all have a good one.
*I can no longer share it to Meta♣-based platforms, so a fair few people who occasionally stumbled upon it before (and people I knew from back in the day) won’t see it now. That’s frustrating. If anyone out there wants to share my posts to those platforms, I would be grateful. I know it won’t reach the same specific people, but that’s okay. I don’t have much choice, anyway.
**This is the general tendency of most biological traits or functions or attributes. In the sieve of natural selection, if one wastes one’s energy and other resources maintaining functions at peak strength that are not actively used, one uses resources that could go to things that are actively useful, and resources are always finite. Genes that tend to create bodies that tend to do such things will be less likely to get through the filter to the next generation.
***That’s not quite the right word, but it sounds so nice that I’m leaving it.
After my little test yesterday of the “writing a blog post directly on the app related to my WordPress account”, I considered writing this morning’s post directly on that app, just to see how it went. However, I don’t yet know how to keep track of my word count on that app*, and I don’t feel like doing any trial and error exploration this morning‒not of that, anyway.
So, I’m writing this instead on the usual Google Docs app. Google Docs has the advantage that when I write this document on my phone, it automatically saves to my Google Drive, and I can then readily open it up on any computer that has an internet connection. That’s fairly handy.
Of course, it means that I’m putting many eggs in the Google basket, but for these purposes, I’m okay with that. Also, when it comes to phone apps, Google Docs is so far the best word processor I’ve tried, as far as interface quality goes. The same cannot be said for the desktop app, but it’s perhaps better than it used to be.
I don’t really like to leave my fiction in Google’s hands if I can help it. I like having a hard copy, so to speak, of my fiction writing. So far, except for those which were written with pen and paper for the first draft, all my fiction has been written on MSWord (and even the handwritten ones were completed on Word). I used to recopy each file onto a thumb drive after a day’s writing, in addition to keeping it saved on my mini lapcom, so I knew I had at least two up to date copies. Then‒once it became a thing‒it would also auto-save onto my Microsoft OneDrive.
The inception of the latter made me think that maybe I could write everything on the Word app for smartphones. It auto-updates in a fashion similar to Google Docs. Alas, it’s not nearly as fluid and seamless as the Google app. If it were, I would probably use it, although‒the nature of Microsoft accounts being what they are‒I wouldn’t be able just to pull it up on the work computer, since it uses a different (boss-related) Microsoft account. So, I would have to send a file as an email or something no matter what.
I’m sure there are ways around that‒or, well, there may be ways around that‒but the phone app for Word just is too cumbersome for now. It’s not worth the effort.
Sorry, I know this is probably dreadfully dull to all of you. I’m impressed that you’ve read this far. You may know, I guess, that I don’t plan these posts out ahead of time, I just spew out whatever comes into my head. If you find it tedious or infuriating, just imagine how I feel! You, at least, could always navigate to another website. What am I supposed to do? I can’t even get away from myself by sleeping most of the time.
Anyway…
I’ve been doing a little bit of rereading of some of my fiction recently. For instance, yesterday afternoon, while waiting for my train, I finished rereading The Chasm and the Collision.
I still like it.
I have a hard time feeling good about things that I do (and am) but I think CatC is a good story, and I think its world is interesting and that the characters are good and so on. I think there are probably a lot of people out there who would like it. And, like I mentioned sometime earlier this week, it would be really cool to encounter fanfiction based on it.
Alas, I am not good at self-promotion. I don’t like myself, so it’s hard to find the will to promote my work, even when I like the work. It’s quite dispiriting, and the fact that I can only hold myself, and my nature, responsible for it doesn’t make it any easier to swallow that bitter pill.
Now I’m rereading Unanimity: Book 2, though I’m not sure if I’ll read it all the way through to the end. That’s another book that I think is good, though it is long, and some of the characters aren’t as likeable as in CatC. Of course, they’re not supposed to be likeable, when they’re not. It is a horror story, after all, and in many ways it is one of my two most horrifying stories. Weirdly enough, those two most horrifying stories are my longest and my shortest works.
On the other hand, my sister recently pointed out to me that‒ironically‒my most lighthearted story is The Vagabond, which is a sort of old-school, gonzo horror story. She’s right. I guess that lightness shows that I wrote it (originally) while in college and med school.
The heck with it, all of my stories are good. Some are better than others, and different people would surely prefer different ones, but I think they’re all pretty good. Even the stuff only published here like Extra Body (which is complete) and Outlaw’s Mind and The Dark Fairy and the Desperado (those two are not complete) are good. So read them. Read all of my stories. Tell your friends and families and even your enemies and strangers about them. Spread the word far and wide across the land. “Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone, prevent the dog from barking with a juice bone”. Okay, well, maybe not that last bit, but do get the word out.
Thanks.
Okay, well, tomorrow I work, so expect a blog post tomorrow, whether you like it or not. I may do another test post this afternoon if I get a bit bored, mainly to see if I can sort out the word count stuff on the app for WordPress. If so, I’ll post it. If not, of course, I won’t. It’s funny how that works, isn’t it?
I hope you have a good day.
*I need to keep track of that because I can sometimes get quite carried away.
Okay, first off, to begin with‒or should it be “with which to begin”?‒it is the 6th of May today (a Wednesday, though that fact is not terribly relevant) and to continue the Star Wars related references, I will note that today is the date of the Revenge of the Sixth.
Get it? It’s a bit tortured, I’m afraid. I don’t think anyone would have come up with the notion had it not been for “May the 4th be with you”. That, at least, is a more straightforward play on words, and is specific to this month and that day. “Revenge of the Sixth” doesn’t specify the month; one could, in principle, use that line on any 6th of a month. But one would not, because this day is “celebrated” only in reaction to Star Wars Day on May 4th.
It’s sort of funny and fun, but it reduces the Sith to merely a perverse notion, existing only in reaction to the Jedi, like a whole order of Force users acting out the parts of rebellious teenagers.
Of course, probably that was sort of what happened in George Lucas’s mind when he came up with the Sith: They were the anti-Jedi, a parity-violating, distorted reflection of the “good guys”. But, of course, a whole philosophical movement that sprang up only as an enemy to another is intellectually and narratively vacuous.
It’s somewhat reminiscent of the moronic religious people who seem to think that if one does not believe in God, then one must worship Satan. It can be very hard for some people to get around the whole “if you’re not with me, then you’re my enemy” notion. Only in this case it’s not even a philosophical enmity, but is merely a reactive enmity. Also, it doesn’t take too much thought to realize that such a situation would seem to imply that whichever of the two sides came first would be assumed to be the “good guys”.
But one doesn’t look at any random patch of spacetime and think, “if there’s no electron in this spot then there must instead be a positron”, or vice versa. As a matter of physics and of logic, this is a pretty glaring error. Just as indifference, not hate, is the complete absence of love, the default state of reality is not the opposite of some particular presence, it is simple absence. In physics, that means all the quantum fields being in their vacuum states, with minimal energy (it’s not zero because of the uncertainty principle).
In the Star Wars extended universe, the Sith have a background that is separate in origin (I think) from the Jedi. I think they began as a race of Force users. I could be wrong about this; I’m not all that much of a Star Wars nerd.
Ask me questions about the backgrounds of things in the universe(s) of my stories and I could share some serious lore with you. But no one is going to ask me about those because essentially no one has read them.
Boy, it would be cool to have someone write fanfiction based in the worlds of my stories. I remember reading a lot of Harry Potter fanfiction while waiting for the next book(s) to come out, back in the day. Some of it was bad, of course, but not much of it, and some of it was really quite good. People who love to read and feel the urge to write an homage out of love for a work and its characters tend to be at least somewhat okay at it.
Some of it was downright brilliant.
Of course, humans being what humans are, some of it was smut. There’s nothing really wrong with that, when you get right down to it. Members (ha ha) of a sexually reproducing species are going to tend to find sex…engaging, to say the least. Every human alive (and that has ever lived) comes from a long, unbroken line of ancestors who had sex at least once*. That includes your parents and your grandparents, by the way. You’re welcome.
In a species like humans, those who are more into sex and more driven toward it and obsessed with it are, ceteris paribus, going to have more offspring. It won’t take very many generations for any genes that make one less interested in sex to fade out of the gene pool‒again, and very importantly, ceteris paribus.
All other things are essentially never equal, of course, and there are complex tradeoffs in all such behavioral tendencies, but that’s a can of bees I really don’t have the energy to open right at this moment.
I’m in a truly terrible amount of pain this morning, I’m afraid, continuing from last night and yesterday and so on. and it’s making it a bit hard to write, though that somehow doesn’t keep me from running off at the figurative mouth.
I think it would be harder for me not to write right now, though. I don’t know for sure. I haven’t tried.
Even thinking about not writing at all makes me feel squirmy and cringey and quite strange. It’s not quite as bad not to play or listen to or sing any music‒which I haven’t done for weeks now, alas‒but that does also feel bad.
But I think if I were to stop writing, and at least every week sharing my writing‒particularly now that I don’t have access to Facebook or Threads‒I would pretty rapidly feel that I didn’t even exist.
I have no real life here from day to day. There is no joy, there is only (attempted) distraction. Other than my episodic interactions with my youngest child (which are distinctly good and real and joyful to me, a real oasis in the desert) everything in my life from day to day feels less real than the events of the most banal video game.
Yesterday, I started searching eBay and other online sources for used ECT devices (they are out there) and looking up whether one can legally buy insulin over the counter (one can, to some degree), or what medications are prone to produce seizures. The idea was to see if it would be possible for me to induce a seizure in myself and hopefully treat my depression.
I know it can’t help my underlying ASD, but ECT and other kinds of induced seizures have consistently been shown to work against even highly treatment-resistant depression. I have tried every class of (legal) medication and many different types of therapy for my dysthymia/depression. I think most regular readers can tell just how well that arsenal has worked.
Of course, pain complicates everything. It taints everything, it erodes everything, it corrodes everything, it corrupts and desecrates everything. I really want it to stop. Sometimes I want it to stop at nearly any cost (at least to me, though I can’t in good conscience invoke avoidable costs upon other people).
If I thought inducing seizures would help my pain, I would probably just do it. I know how to make such things happen‒the research I did yesterday was just to indulge myself so I could more realistically fantasize about the outcome if it were to work. It was one of those distractions I mentioned above. But having seizures would probably make my physical pain worse, since seizures are not easy on the body.
They could also kill me, but that would be far from the worst outcome.
Death‒not necessarily seizure-related death, but death generally‒will probably be the only thing that relieves my pain. Well, “relieves” is not really the right word. But could death be what ends it? Yes. And thankfully, no one is dependent upon me or is very close to me or is really used to having me around, so the collateral damage would be minimal, no matter what all the simple-minded (but well-meaning) Instagram videos try to tell you.
Maybe I’m just as well off not to be able to go to that site anymore. Everything there would be irritating. Though, that’s just like more or less everything else in the world, to be fair. Right now, I could almost wish for everything else in reality to cease to exist so I could just enjoy some silence. But that would be unkind and terribly presumptuous. It would be better to go back to the nidus of the pain and pluck that out.
Have a good day.
Though I suspect Mr. Smear would disagree with me:
Here we go again, again. It’s Monday‒the last one in April this year‒and I’m writing another effing blog post.
I keep trying weird little things in the hope that they engender or otherwise encourage something positive in my life. For instance, after briefly using a blue Bic® Round Stic™ pen on Friday, I realized that I had on some level missed writing with them.
I wrote Mark Red and The Chasm and the Collision, and the “short story” Paradox City all with blue and/or black medium Bic™ Round Stic® pens. These were the only ones available through commissary up at FSP. After a while, the guys who did tattoos would just give me new ones to use as long as I gave them back when empty/traded an empty one for the new one, so they could use them to make tattoo guns, and I went through such pens pretty quickly.
I thought to myself (since I have trouble thinking to anyone else*) that maybe if I started using these pens regularly again, I might help give myself the energy to start doing some new fiction writing. So, I ordered a box of them, which is at least quite inexpensive, and I have one in my pocket now.
It’s a fairly childish notion, perhaps, but just because something is childish does not mean it’s wrong or bad. Adults get rid of too many childish things‒sometimes on the advice of effing Saul of Tarsus of all the pathetic losers to whom to listen‒and adopt too many “adultish” things that are no more sensible, not as rewarding, and are reliably productive of negative outcomes.
Of course, some childish things do need to be left behind. Ideally, one does not want to keep believing in Santa Claus or monsters in the closet or that stepping on a crack will break your mother’s back any longer than one must. Wetting the bed is also worth stopping as early as one can.
But it can be good for one to keep asking questions about how things work and what they are and what they do and how they got to be the way they are, and being delighted in seeing and learning new things, and enjoying simple games and going outside and stuff like that.
Anyway, I doubt this particular choice of pens will actually get me to write any fiction again, but maybe it will at least feel good to use them again for a while.
As you know, I have at least a few stories, such as Outlaw’s Mind and The Dark Fairy and the Desperado that I have started that I’d like to finish, and I have some other stories on the back burner that I’d like to start and write. If I could just find a patron to support me while I write, so I didn’t have to do anything else, I could probably do it. But despite its name, even Patreon doesn’t really work that way.
People who support “creators” on Patreon pay regular, specified amounts and expect regular, piecemeal output (like daily blogs, for instance, though being the intellectually stunted populace that we are, people more often seem to want video stuff). If I put up a Patreon, or a “Go fund me” thing (whatever the proper term for that is) I doubt that I would get a lot of people supporting me and just waiting while I work on a long form writing project.
If anyone wants to do that, and is able to do it, let me know. Just remember, I’m slightly paranoid, so I will probably suspect some scam at first if you approach me‒unless I already know you, of course.
All of this is really just fantasizing, obviously. I might as well request that the person who wants to be my patron for writing fiction is also a beautiful woman who is just my type (whatever that might be) and who wants to be in a long-term relationship with me. Oh, and also, she owns a dragon, as well as an FTL spaceship. Hey, maybe she’s a Time Lord and has her own TARDIS!
Actually, if I had the use of a TARDIS, it would probably distract me completely from writing fiction. But I probably wouldn’t spend as much time (har) just traveling and having adventures as most of, for instance, the Doctor’s companions do. I would want to learn how this technology works!
I don’t understand why none of the people who enter the TARDISand gape at the whole “bigger on the inside” thing don’t right then and there ask how it works! (Occasionally some do so, rather halfheartedly).
And when the trite little, dismissive answers such as Nardole gives are offered, they should say, “No, no, I mean how does it actually work? What is the science and technology involved, how is it carried out and maintained? What is the physics underlying it, how was it discovered, how was it harnessed? Do you have any primers on that, any online courses, any textbooks, even any ‘how does it work’ for kids books? And for that matter, how does the time stream and everything work, how is it traversed, what is the physics behind the functioning of the TARDIS? We’ll get to the biology of regeneration in due time, but I want to understand all this. To Hell with going and fighting Daleks or whatever, you can literally do that whenever you feel like, because you have a time machine!”
I guess it wouldn’t be a very fun show, just to watch someone studying Time Lord science and technology, but in real life, if I had access, I like to think that’s how I would spend a lot of my time. And I think I think correctly.
All right, that’s enough stupid fantasizing for today, wouldn’t you say? None of those or any other good things are likely to happen to me (some are far more probable than others, but none are worth betting on).
I am much more likely to keep developing new and harder to control pain and more frequently recurring and persistent pain and greater and greater frustration and despondency and depression until finally, at long last, it kills me. Then, at least, everyone in the universe overall will be just a little bit happier. On average, anyway.
*Though in a certain sense, this blog is an instance of me thinking to other people. But that requires the other people to be active participants, and it certainly cannot be done all day every day or any such thing.
