Creative Writing

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My gruntlement is low today

It’s Tuesday morning.  I wasn’t actually planning to write anything when I got up today, but then I remembered that, more or less on a whim, I had brought my little laptop computer with me, so I figured I might as well write something.

For one thing, I’ll embed the “video” of my last audio blog—the one about Morgoth and whatnot—below, so if anyone prefers to do their listening via YouTube, they can do so.  Evidently, the Google podcast app is going to be phased out, and one is going to have to listen to podcasts via YouTube Music at some point in the future (or use some other service/app).  That’s a bit frustrating, because there’s at least one podcast that I get via subscription that one cannot get in its entirety on YouTube, but can get through the app.  I guess they’ll figure out a way to deliver that, but it’s irritating to have to change my settings once again.

I guess it shouldn’t matter.  I should just cancel all my subscriptions and services and platforms and even cable and internet.  They’re not really doing me any good, and they cost money, and honestly, I really would expect not to be alive starting sometime soon.  I’ve been expecting that for a long time, now, though, and I haven’t really been able to work up the gumption to bring it about.

I have at least been creeping my way in that direction.  I have flammable liquids for potential immolation—useful for other, more traditional things as well, of course.  I have scalpels and utility knives, useful for cutting various things, including oneself, but of course, they’re also generally useful for many things.  And recently I bought a nice length of rope—too long, really—and learned how to tie a hangman’s knot.  That last bit is rather surprisingly easy, and it’s a pleasant and useful knot, it turns out, especially to someone who used to be in the Boy Scouts a lifetime ago.  Ironically, it has many similarities to an informal necktie knot.

But, I’m still alive for the moment, though I’m very uncomfortable and unhappy in general, and I still haven’t gotten health insurance.  I get a near-panic feeling when I even think seriously about getting insurance.  I’m not entirely sure why that is.

Yesterday morning I felt really horrible, and I think it’s because I was trying to reintroduce some things I like into my diet to see if I can tolerate them.  I guess I can’t, at least not in the state I’m in (Florida).  It seems I can’t even enjoy the things I like to eat, but then again, I can’t expect nature to be there for my convenience.

I could try to work against nature’s convenience, in return, I guess.  At the very least, I could do my best to add to global warming and disrupt the biosphere and cause toxins and pollutants to accumulate, as a silly sort of revenge.  It might be fun.

I did feel less bad as the afternoon wore on and I avoided any indulgences, to the point where, near the end of the day, in idle moments, I got out Spacetime and Geometry, Gravitation, Euclidean Quantum Gravity, and even the old Thomas and Finney calculus text—the latter because sometimes I feel like I want to re-hone and improve my skills with mathematics, and Brilliant, for all that it’s a wonderful site, just doesn’t seem to work for me for some things.

I did find the two physics texts (which I opened in the middle, since I was looking for rather specific information relating to Λ, the cosmological constant) much more accessible and relatively easy to follow compared to what I was expecting.  Gravitation, in particular, is an intimidatingly large tome, but is nevertheless a bit of a “my first reader” in overall impression when compared to Harrison’s Principles of Internal Medicine.  I didn’t get very far in any of them in the time I had yesterday, but it was nice to realize that—though some mathematical formalisms are beyond my current expertise (thus the Thomas and Finney)—all of it made sense to me.  Credit the writers as much as my own cleverness, but I do give myself some credit.

Maybe I should get a biology textbook, just to reinvigorate my interest in that general subject as well.  I’m more of a literal expert in that subject than I am in GR or quantum mechanics or mathematics, though, so maybe a basic college text would be too repetitive?  I don’t know.

I’m having a bit of trouble with my laptop today; Word has frozen up on me twice this morning, which is a bit frustrating.  I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised.  I’m not sure how long I’ve had this laptop, but it’s been a few years, at least.  Ordinarily, I would think of getting a new one to replace it, but that seems like entirely too much work, and is rather pointless.  I don’t expect to write any more fiction.

The thing that led me to bring the laptop computer back with me last night was the thought of maybe at least rereading what I have so far of Outlaw’s Mind and maybe even DFandD.  I talked to my sister on Sunday and gave her a bit of a (probably rather tedious) rundown of how those stories, especially the former, interconnect with the larger universe of my books, including particularly The Chasm and the Collision, and the potential novel Changeling in a Shadow World, and other stories, all going back to the first novel I ever “finished”, back in high school—Ends of the Maelstrom—which I could probably recreate* if I had the gumption.  I certainly still know all the main characters’ names and stories and arcs and all.  I even remember my opening line:  “Horraban was happy now.”  I also remember my rather ominous ending, though not the precise words.

Many of the universes of my stories are connected to each other.  In effect, I suppose, they’re all connected via what the wizard in DFandD refers to as the “omniverse”.  I had long thought of it as the metaverse, but then Mark Fuckerberg arrogated that term to his pathetic attempt at virtual reality, and so I had to find another term.  I guess “omniverse” is actually more accurate and descriptive, but I thought the other sounded cooler.  Now it doesn’t.

Anyway, I have scads of potential stories I could write, some interconnected and some stand-alone, but I doubt that I will ever write any of them.  I just don’t have the energy nor do I have the motivation.  Merely going to work and getting back to the house uses up all the mental energy I have, and then some; much of my mental energy I need is sucked from my future, shortening my potential span of mental life as I go.

I suppose if some wealthy benefactor were to show up and offer to pay my expenses in return for getting me to write full time, I might do so.  Perhaps that could happen, but I won’t hold my breath, and I don’t encourage you to do so either.

In the meantime, though, here is the “video” from my last audio blog.  If you watch it on YouTube, please give a thumbs up, and subscribe, and share, and all that, if you’re at all willing to do so.  Thanks.

*It was 574 pages (and roughly 250,000 words, I think), handwritten on thin-ruled notebook paper, with many additions that ran into the margins, though some of these were tattered because I habitually ate paper from the edges of notebook sheets back then.  Anyway, I lost that original book when I lost all my belongings thanks to the depredations of the counties and state of Florida.  For that, I hold at least something of a grudge.

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And the mazèd blog, by their increase, now knows not which is which.

Hello and good morning.

I’m writing today’s blog post on my smartphone, because I walked to the train this morning.  That’s not quite the non sequitur it might seem to be.  Given the new train schedule, I arrived here only a few minutes before the 6:20 train is due to arrive, whereas on the old schedule, I would have just missed the 6:10 and sat down to wait for the 6:30.  Of course, I could simply let the 6:20 pass and wait for the 6:50 and pull out my laptop to write my post while I wait.  Perhaps, in the future, I will do that.  Today, though, I don’t want to push back my departure any further.

I’m now on (actually, in) the train, and I was surprised to find my preferred, relatively isolated seat on the older style car free.  Combined with the feeling of achievement from already having walked about five miles today, that’s pretty nice.

Today is the Winter Solstice, at least for those of us in the northern hemisphere, meaning it’s the day of longest night, if you will.  Going forward, now, the nights will become shorter, though the change will be hard to notice at first, since, near their maxima and minima, the derivative of sine and cosine curves (well, any smooth curve, really) is around zero, meaning the rate of change of the function is very small.  For one brief instant‒one infinitesimal moment of time‒during this 24-hour period, that rate of change will be exactly zero.

But, of course, the rate of change itself is constantly changing.  This isn’t true of all functions, obviously.  The rate of change in a linear function is a constant, and the rate of change of a constant is zero.  That’s why it’s called a “constant”.  And the rate of change of zero is still zero, no matter how many times you would like to take that derivative.

Sine waves, however, are cyclical, and their derivatives are also cyclical.  The derivative (i.e., the rate of change) of a sine is a cosine…and the derivative of a cosine is a sine (inverted, I think, if memory serves, but that changes nothing fundamental).  So, even the derivatives of such cyclical functions are eternally cyclical.  There’s something very pleasing about that, at least to me.

Oh, by the way, it is the Summer Solstice today for those who live in the southern hemisphere.  This has been a smaller number of people than live in the northern hemisphere for as long as human civilization has existed, I think, largely because there simply is more land in the northern hemisphere.  Nevertheless, there are now many millions of people south of the equator, and so there are oodles of those for whom Christmas and New Year’s are summer holidays.

Summer ought to be slightly warmer for those in the southern hemisphere than for those in the north, since technically the Earth is at its closest approach to the sun in January.  However, the Earth’s orbit is very nearly circular, so the difference between aphelion and perihelion is tiny, fortunately for us.  Also, there is much less land in the south, and land heats up much more rapidly and noticeably than water, so that may completely swamp the effects of slightly different nearness to the sun.  I’m not sure.  If anyone out there has that information, please let me know.

It’s a bit interesting to think of those people who have grown up in the southern hemisphere, seeing all the movies and shows (and before that, books and legends) that associate snow and cold and the like with Christmas time and New Year’s.  Of course, the reasons would not be a mystery, but it still might feel peculiar, just as it might feel rather alien for a northerner to hear of someone going to the beach to celebrate Christmas.

Instead of building a snowman, maybe such people might build a sandman.  Actually, given the old horror short story about the Sandman‒not to be mistaken for Neil Gaiman’s admittedly also quite dark creation‒it might not be great to make a sandman as part of a joyous celebration.

Although, being rather dark myself, I consider the notion somewhat amusing.  Maybe there could be a kids’ story called Gritty the Sandman, instead of Frosty the Snowman (Anakin Skywalker would hate that).  But Gritty would be much harder to destroy than Frosty.  It takes serious heat to cause sand to melt, and even then it just becomes glass.  Imagine that:  they try to kill Gritty with heat and fire, and he just turns into a misshapen blob of living glass, with razor sharp shards for fingers‒more deadly even than he was before!

Wait, that was supposed to be a kids’ story, wasn’t it?  Sorry, I got distracted.  Still it would be fun to hear a song with the lyric, “There must have been some madness in that old silk hat they found.  For when they placed it on his head, he began to…”

…who knows what?

Anyway, I’ve reached the office now.  My pedometer seems to have accidentally reset while I was on the train, as it’s only showing one mile of walking, which is the distance between the station and the office.  That’s a bit frustrating, but I know that the distance to the station from the house is almost exactly five miles, so I’ve walked six miles so far, and I’ve now reset the little bastard, so we’ll see what I’ll do for the rest of the day.  Maybe I’ll have the gumption to walk back to the house from the train in the evening.  I feel okay now, from my walk, but I don’t want to overdo things and set myself back.

I’ll sign off for the moment.  Have a lovely solstice if you can, be it your summer or your winter.  But if you’re in the south, and you make a sandman, try not to bring it to life.  Quite apart from it having the nefarious power to put you to sleep at will, remember that sand is basically just ground glass, and that can have dreadful effects on bare skin or on your mucus membranes.  And you certainly don’t want it in your eyes!

I think I’m imagining a new kind of horror story here, albeit a spoofy more than spooky one.  We’ll see what comes of it.

TTFN

stonehenge solstice merged

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Would YOU want to visit Cape October or Murder Beach?

I’m back at the train station this morning, writing as I wait.  There seem to be fewer people waiting at this time than at comparable times earlier this week and last week.  I cannot say anything more broadly, though, since the new train schedule has thrown any generalizations awry, and made the detection of legitimate patterns (as opposed to constellation-style perceived patterns in the random) tricky at best.  It will require more time and observation to learn if there really are tendencies to be seen in the number of people waiting for the train at a given time in the morning.

I left work early yesterday, because I was really starting to crash.  I ate and then fell asleep by about 5:30 pm.  I then woke up around 9:30 thanks to some irritating noises from outside, and I decided to watch some music reactions to songs from OK Computer.

At that time, I carried out a notion that I’d considered in the past:  I got up and, in addition to singing, “danced” along with the songs.  I use “scare quotes” because my dancing is never going to be considered an art form, though it is at least a bit of exercise.

Since I was alone, I was more than able to “dance like no one is watching”.  If anyone was watching—spying on me, perhaps, for some inscrutable reason—well, they got what they richly deserved.  Possibly they suffered the fate of those who have dared to glimpse Yog-Sothoth or one of the worse forms of Nyarlathotep:  horror and madness.  At the very least, they would be at risk for PTSD.

“Dance like you’re listening to the cosmic flutists that eternally entertain Azathoth” might not be a catchy expression, but in my case, it probably applies.

Still, it was kind of fun—I got somewhat melodramatic because I was singing along to the music as I danced.  I also tend to air drum at various points while dancing, because it’s all part of the rhythm.  Anyway, I went back to sleep not too much after midnight, and actually woke up to my alarm playing Good Morning Good Morning by the Beatles.  That’s a remarkably rare occurrence.

In the morning yesterday, I saw a Readers Wildlife Photos post on WEIT in which the pictures were taken in Cape May, New Jersey.  My thoughts traveled down peculiar lines, as they are wont to do, and it occurred to me that there could be “capes” named after various months—if indeed Cape May is named after the month and not something else entirely.

I ran through several months and they worked to varying degrees, but of course, once I got to “Cape October”, it occurred to me that this would be an excellent name for a horror story, or maybe even a murder mystery.  Perhaps it was a long spit of land with a hill at the end that had been first been discovered and colonized by those who went on to become Ray Bradbury’s “Autumn People”.

It could even be the beginning of a two-parter, paired with another title that occurred to me a long time ago:  Murder Beach.  That one’s easy, because I’ve often thought that Myrtle Beach sounds almost like “murder beach”, and I was amazed that no one—as far as I could find—had written anything with that title.

I do this sort of thing rather often:  I think of fun titles that sometimes lead me to write stories.  I won’t say it’s my usual way—normally I think of the story first—but it does happen.

Of course, I haven’t begun writing nor even plotting any of these stories, and I haven’t gone any further than a sort of plot summary for last week’s rom-com idea of Up-dating.  As I think I mentioned last week, I see the latter story as more of a screenplay than a book, but I haven’t written a screenplay since high school, and the one I wrote then wasn’t really in official screenplay format.  It was just a “play” with some thrown-in camera and other descriptive directions in parentheses.

It was, according to my friend Joe, a movie that was not worthy of its excellent title—Night Vision.  He was far from wrong, as was usually the case with Joe, but I had tried to write a screenplay that I could actually produce with the equipment at hand:  a VHS camera belonging to the father of my friend Jim Leone.

It never went very far, because it turned out that wasn’t really enough equipment to make and then edit even such a cheap movie.  It could be done now, I’m quite sure, with the readily available and cheap-to-free video and audio mixing software, to say nothing of the ubiquitous, high-quality video cameras, many of which we carry around in our pockets.

I did write some music for Night Vision, including a main theme that I still know by heart, and which is quite pretty, I think.  Oh, and I did a horror/bad guy’s theme for it that was grown from the kernel of Chopin’s Funeral March played backwards*.  That’s pretty good, too.

So, I still have no complete dearth of creative ideas.  I just lack the will to make them, including to write the many stories that still lie waiting in my head.  Maybe, if I were regularly able to get a total of nearly eight hours’ sleep, like I did last night, I would do better.  Certainly I feel a bit more chipper today than I normally do in the morning.

I suppose if there were some wealthy patron who commissioned some or all of these works from me, I might be able just to sit down and crank them out, since the actual process of writing isn’t that difficult.  But I sincerely doubt that’s going to happen.  The only thing making it more likely than winning the lottery is the fact that I don’t play the lottery, and any probability at all is greater than zero**.

Anyway, we’re getting close to my stop, and I’ve already written quite a lot this morning, so I’ll wrap this up.  I hope you’re all having a decent run-up to the oncoming holiday storm of Christmas and New Year’s and various other solstice-adjacent celebrations.

If there are any wealthy people out there interested in sponsoring me to write any of the above-mentioned stories or screenplays or whatnot, please, get in touch.

*This was, supposedly, what the carousel from Something Wicked This Way Comes played when it was running in reverse and thus making people younger, and that’s where I got the idea of using this as a theme for my villain, Jameson Summers, who was in a sense returning from the dead.

**I suppose that, in principle, one could win the lottery without even playing it, if for instance someone bought a ticket and gave it to another person as a surprise or to pay a debt or something along those lines.  That is an extremely unlikely event, and when layered atop another independently extremely unlikely event—the ticket actually winning—it seems still perhaps less likely than a wealthy patron deciding to sponsor my writing.

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Weird pegs hammered into “normal” holes and spiders living in beehives

It’s Saturday morning, and I’m sitting at the train station very early—quite a bit too early for the first train—because I was awake anyway, and there was no point in waiting around at the house.  The train station (like the office) in many ways feels more hospitable than the house does.  That’s not saying much, but there it is.

There seem not to have been very many people reading my blog these last few days.  Evidently, when I’m not focused on my mental illness—and it is mental illness, it is not mental health—people don’t seem very interested.  Or maybe there’s a change to the WordPress Reader algorithm so that people don’t see my blog pop up.  I know something has changed, because I can no longer directly comment (or see the comments of others) on my favorite website through WordPress Reader.  That may be because the person who runs that website finds me annoying.  It’s easy enough for me to imagine that other people find me annoying.  I find myself annoying, so it’s not exactly a new notion.  Still, it’s very disheartening to be ostracized, deliberately or accidentally, from my usual interaction at that blog.

I don’t have much heart from the start.

I was approached—figuratively speaking—by someone yesterday morning asking me to please get health insurance, and making suggestions about how to do so affordably.  I listened, because of who it was and, even more importantly, because of on whose behalf they were probably partly speaking (though I am convinced of the caller’s true personal good intentions as well).  I agreed, fine, I’ll get health insurance of some kind.

It’s not the money, mainly, that’s been in the way of me getting insurance.  It’s my self-loathing that mainly gets in the way.  Why would I want to maintain my health and try to live longer or healthier?  What is the point of such an endeavor?  I’m personally extremely unhappy, and in pain, and sleepless, and alone, for one thing (I guess that’s more than one thing, but you probably know what I mean).

At this stage I’m just a net drain on the world, anyway.  Surely, the whole planet would probably cheer up slightly—but noticeably—if I were gone, like a pond that’s been muddied by heavy rainfall finally clearing after the silt settles out.  Most people wouldn’t know why the world felt a little more positive, a little more hopeful, a little more pleasant, but it would still be the case.

Anyway, I said I would do it, so I will, unless something kills me first.

I was in a weirdly upbeat mood part of yesterday morning before that event, although my blog post was rather angry.  To give you an idea of how weirdly upbeat I was, I had finished writing the draft of my post and was getting ready to lie down on the floor of the office (I do this a few times a day to help my back) and I set my computer to install updates in the meantime.  And as I saw the computer message that informed me that it was “updating”, I thought, “‘Updating’…that needs to be the title of a rom-com.”

Immediately, I thought up and quickly wrote out the plot synopsis for the romantic comedy in question and emailed it via my smartphone to myself.  Later, I told my boss about it, conveying the basic story line, and he said—with some enthusiasm—that it was quite good and he thought people would really like that story, and would read such a book.

I had thought of it more as a screenplay sort of thing, to be honest.  I considered getting on Skillshare or something similar and doing a quick course on screenwriting, to write it up.

Of course, I’m not in such a good mood as yesterday morning—it went away by early afternoon, when I suddenly felt a burst of severe tension, as if someone had injected me with epinephrine while I wasn’t looking.  It’s not a good feeling, but I have it a lot of the time.  Anyway, I’ve pretty rapidly and persistently gone downhill since then.

So, I guess I’ll sign up for some form of health insurance.  I have some degree of inherent resistance to the idea, of course, a big one being just my honest difficulty dealing with bureaucratic matters, with paperwork and personal records and trying to fit my weird and distorted metaphorical pegs into the square and round holes laid out—quite unthinkingly—by the world.

That latter comment about things being laid out unthinkingly is important.  No one should imagine that the world as it is was ever truly planned or designed by anyone, whether out of beneficence or malice or otherwise.  Individual people and so forth have had plans and goals and ideas, but no one is big enough actually to design a society or a government or an economy or whatever.  It all just falls together, like salt crystallizing out of a strong saline solution, or rock candy forming on a string in a cooling bath of saturated sugar water.

There are tendencies to form certain kinds of patterns, of course, because of the nature of the constituents and their interactions, but if one were to arrange ten million such rock candy baths, no two of the products would be the same.

Rock candy is simple, of course, and its point and purpose are simple.  So, it doesn’t really matter what specific shapes might be formed when making it.  Societies and civilizations, on the other hand, can take all manner of forms, and these can be truly better or worse by any criteria one might choose to use to measure them.  But they are not inherently real, they are not inherently good, they are not inherently stable or ethical or fair or just, and maybe they never will be.

Justice (however one may want to define the term) does not happen on its own.  Even if one tries to achieve it, one must constantly reevaluate, reassess, tweak, and adjust how one approaches it, because it is not a simple problem, and each local solution will engender new problems.  Problems are solvable, of course, but that doesn’t guarantee that they will be solved.  Wanting to solve them is not enough, and even trying to solve them is not enough.

To achieve justice, or at least to optimize it, for even a group of a hundred people would probably be computationally impossible even using a physically maximal computer.  Even assuming one had a fully agreed-upon definition of the term, the adjustments needed to get everyone in the best possible place seem fit make the traveling salesman problem trivial by comparison.

As for achieving optimal justice for 8 billion people, well…that’s not even a pipe dream.  It’s not even laughable.  At best it could only really be achieved at individual levels or perhaps in small groups, but then again, there’s not even an agreed-upon definition of the term.  This is one of the reasons to be suspicious of people who claim to have all the answers or a “real solution” or whatever, especially if you think they are sincere.

True believers are dangerous, far more dangerous than psychopaths or the mentally ill, and they have done vastly more harm throughout history than all the most self-centered of sociopathic villains could ever do, even if given absolute power (or so I predict).  This is at least partly because anyone who thinks they absolutely have the answers for civilization or even a society is simply wrong.  They always have been, they always will be.  Finite entities cannot even fully understand themselves, let alone ultimate, complex aspects of the world around them, so they can never be mathematically certain that they have the final word on any question.  It is always necessary, in principle, to be open to criticism and testing, to updating beliefs, even if one is very close to being sure.

Anyway, I have trouble dealing with bureaucracies and forms and paperwork and everything.  It feels utterly unnatural and uncomfortable.  It always has, but when I was younger and had people in my life, I was more able to put in the effort.  But it’s always felt unnatural to me, and deeply so.

It’s a bit like a spider trying to become a member of a beehive—seeking nectar and pollen and tending larvae and warding off invaders to the hive and all.  Some of the spider’s attributes may be useful—silk and venom and potent things—but a spider does not live on honey and pollen, and it will not thrive in a hive (if it even stays alive).  A spider is an alien in a hive; it can no more live like a bee than it can grow wheat and thresh it and grind it and then bake and live on bread.  However long it lives, it will simply be suffering.

That’s how I feel about a lot of this shit.  But I’ll do it.  Maybe I’ll even try to write that rom-com.  I can write pretty easily.  Of course, knowing me, the rom-com would probably devolve into a horror story, but maybe that would be good in a way.  After all, I’ve had romance of one kind or another in all my horror stories, and there’s usually at least a little bit of joking.  Sauce for the romantic comedy goose…

At bottom, though, I really don’t want to be healthy and alive.  I mean, it’d be nice not to feel physically miserable as long as I am alive, but that desire is preprogrammed into the organism, and I cannot rewrite that programming.  I can, however, shut it down, or let it come to a shutdown on its own, since I cannot update it, despite the title of my potential romantic comedy.  Life is shit—and if you’re a cockroach, shit is life, but that doesn’t mean you can make high art with it.

Anyway, here comes my train.  Have a nice weekend.

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“A hideous throng rush out forever, and laugh—but smile no more.”

It’s Wednesday morning—quite a bit before five o’clock and well before when the day “begins”, at least if the day begins at sunrise.  That will come…let’s see…at 6:49 am.  So says the weather app on my smartphone.  I’m at the train station today even earlier than yesterday because I woke up even earlier than yesterday and the day before.

I occasionally entertain the whimsical—and clearly untrue—notion that a person’s lifespan is limited by the time they spend awake, and so I expect to die quite a bit earlier than most other people (on average) because I’ve spent more of my time not asleep than most people have.  I’d say I get on average at least two fewer hours of sleep a night than most people I know.

Many nights, it’s quite a bit worse than that.

In a year, that’s 730.5 hours (roughly, ha ha) of sleep deficit, which is just over 30 days.  Although, come to think of it, if we’re counting awake time as a day, and the “usual” waking day is about sixteen hours, it’s more like 45 days—which makes sense, since 24 is one and a half times 16, and 45 is one and a half times 30.

Yes, I did that figuring in my head.  It’s terribly impressive, I know*.  I did not, however, calculate the sunrise on my own, as I noted.  I don’t really know how to go about that.  I’m sure it could be done, but probably not with the data available to me this morning at the train station.  Clearly, when people started tracking and plotting the days and seasons and sunrise and sunset and all that stuff, they did not have smartphones or the internet.  Those were days even before Commodore 64s and TRS-80s!

Anyway, the point I was making is that with all those matters taken into account, if I average only two hours dearth of sleep (a conservative amount, since the deficit is often larger), given my notion of a fixed amount of time awake determining the length of a life, I’m chewing a month and half extra off my life every year.  That’s one eighth of a year per year.  Which would mean that, just since I was in my teens, when I already slept less than the other people in my family and the other people I knew, I’ve lost five or more years of my life.  And every year that I get older in real time, my ultimate lifespan shrinks another eighth of a year.  Eventually, those time fronts will collide, and that will be the end.

This raises an interesting coincidence**:  Autistic individuals are known to have a much higher incidence of sleep disturbance than the general population, and recent studies found that, in the UK specifically, the average lifespan of an autistic male is about 8 years shorter than that of the general male population.  That’s in the UK, where they have a National Health System and actual programs and support services in place to help people with autism, imperfect though those systems are.  I shudder to think what the expected lifespan reduction is in the United States; I think I have encountered estimates of ten and more years’ reduction in healthy lifespan.

Still, it would be silly (and foolish) to attribute that decreased lifespan to number of hours of sleep loss.  There are many ways in which people on the autism spectrum have difficulty optimizing their health, even when they are otherwise “high functioning”, as the term goes.

If you don’t think those difficulties really matter, consider my circumstance (and I’m not even sure that I have ASD; it’s very difficult for me even to seek out, let alone avail myself of, resources to get evaluated).

I have strengths and talents of various kinds, but I’m living in a single, modest room in an old, cinderblock house in south Florida where I sleep on the floor on a futon and eat only microwave or order-in food; I work as a sort of office manager/record keeper/verifier in a phone sales office; I don’t have a driver’s license or any of that stuff anymore, nor do I do anything socially or spend any time with friends or family.  I supposedly have an IQ in the low 160s, I graduated with honors*** from an Ivy League university (which I attended on a full scholarship), I won a National Council of Teachers of English Award in high school, I went to medical school almost as an afterthought, became a doctor and did that job pretty well while I was doing it (though the record keeping and management functions were anathema to me).

But I could not thrive in the human world for long.  My back injury and chronic pain contributed to my specific failure, but I’d already had many instances in which depression and difficulty with certain kinds of administrative and record-keeping tasks caused me to land in personal crises.

I’ve written six novels and (self) published five, as well as several “short” stories (published individually and/or in two collections).  I’ve recorded and released four original songs (poorly produced, by me, on free software and with cheap, cheap recording equipment), and have written and shared a few others.  I can draw (and paint a bit), I can sculpt (with clay), I play piano and cello and guitar, I can sing, and I can even act reasonably well (how else do you think I pretended to be human for such long periods of time?  I even fooled myself).

All these abilities just make me even more of a failure, don’t they?  “How the mighty have fallen!”

Enough.  I’m almost at my stop (the train arrived just as I mentioned the TRS-80, which sounds like an omen…but an omen of what?), so I’ll wrap it up.  I guess I’ll write another post tomorrow, for what it’s worth.  Have a good day.

1427235137816

*I know, I know, it’s not actually impressive.  It’s easy enough to figure with multiples of 2, and 2 hours a day times 365.25 days per year is simply enough 730.5.  I left the extra digit just to be silly; it’s not significant, especially since, in the very next operation, I needed to divide that number by 24 hours in a day.  Since 3 times 24 is 72, I know that 730.5 hours is just ten and a half hours more than 30 days.  I could then simply have applied the 24 = 1.5 x 16 to do the next calculation, but that only occurred to me afterwards.  Anyway, it’s more fun to note that since 9 time 8 is 72, 16 goes into 72 four and a half times, and then multiply by ten, since 730 is ten times 73.  The remainder there is the same as with twenty-four—ten hours and a half—but that’s a bigger fraction of a sixteen hour day than a twenty-four hour day.  All this silliness at least can serve to remind us that the Phoenicians or Babylonians (I forget which) were not foolish to do things in 60s and 24s and 360s and so on—all these numbers are so readily divisible into fractions that they’re terribly useful.

**And yes, it is all coincidence.  Please don’t take my “lifespan limited by time awake” notion seriously.  Though it is certain that chronic sleep loss diminishes one’s health and can reduce one’s lifespan, it is not a simple arithmetic process, and there’s not the slightest reason to think that human lifespans are determined specifically by number of hours awake.  That’s even sillier than the notion of a lifespan being determined by the number of heartbeats one has.  I’ve had sinus tachycardia all my life; I would have been dead years ago if a lifespan were determined by numbers of heartbeats.

***I wrote my 50-page honors thesis in one weekend after it was revealed to me that I had misremembered the due date as being a month later than it was, and having been grudgingly given that one weekend extension to get it done if I wanted to get honors.  It turned out decently, because even then I could write very quickly tolerably well under pressure, and I knew my subject.  But this demonstrates all the more how, despite having talents (and some skills), I am rotten at navigating the ins and outs of human society (I’ve only gotten worse since then, because I’m just more and more worn out).  It wasn’t even my idea to try for honors; that was my then-fiancée’s idea.  It was something that looked good on resumes and applications.  Such thoughts, about self-promotion and seeking advancement in that fashion, have never been natural to me.  They are, if anything, worse now that I am on my own.

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I almost forgot to give this a title

I seriously considered walking to the train station today, but after I finally arose—I’d been awake for hours, already—I realized that I just wasn’t up to doing it, physically.  Or maybe I wasn’t up to doing it, mentally.  In any case, it’s not as though there’s any actual difference or separation between the two things, despite the wishes of dualists* of many stripes throughout the ages.

I simply am this thing that is writing this, and it’s all instantiated in this body—though I store aspects of my persona and records of various things and highlights of information in external media, as people have done for quite some time to greater and lesser degrees.

In any case, I really don’t feel very well, and I don’t mean just my usual depression/dysthymia, though it may be related to those things.  Perhaps it’s just an exacerbation.  After all, dysthymia (now officially called persistent depressive disorder or some such boring name, because that’s what really matters, making sure that things have optimal names, right?) can episodically increase into a full blown episode of major depression.

Also, it’s that time of the year for those whose symptoms are affected by the seasons—in the northern hemisphere, at least—to feel the detriment of longer nights and shorter days (so to speak).  I am at least somewhat “seasonally affected”, though I’ve always loved autumn.  This may seem superficially contradictory, but in my youth, autumn was a time that brought birthdays and holidays and the start of school and all that good stuff that I liked.  Also, probably when I was quite young, I didn’t have any real evidence of depressive disorders to come, at least as far as I recall right now.  Although, if I do have ASD, it was present then.  There is some evidence in my recollections that it was.

In addition, of course—speaking of holidays—this is a rough time of year for people who are already depressed and who are also socially isolated**.  Thanksgiving is in two days, and that is a traditional, very positive and social family holiday, which I will not be celebrating again this year.  I will have the day off work, though—all the better to drive home the fact of being alone in a single room (with attached bath) and having no one with whom one shares life at pretty much any level.  Then of course, the Hanukkah season (and Christmas season) and New Years and all that is coming up—extremely family-and-friends-oriented holidays.  I again am not planning on trying to spend any of them with anyone else.

The weird irony is, when I imagine actually trying to spend holidays with other people—yes, even when I merely imagine it—I feel tremendous tension.  I guess it’s what one could call significant anxiety.  It’s a strange kind of…not exactly a contradiction, but a conflict, a tension of ideas.  I am depressed and gloomy when alone, which is my usual way to be, but I feel almost terrified at the thought of being around other people socially.

I particularly wouldn’t want to have a group of people just bring me into their celebrations of holidays just so that I could have someone with whom to celebrate.  It’s not that I dislike people I don’t know.  How could I dislike them if I don’t know them?  I just don’t feel a sense of camaraderie with most people; I don’t feel like a member of the same species.

The guy, Paul Micaleff from the YouTube channel “Asperger’s from the Inside” (well, now it’s “Autism from the Insode”) made a great analogy that struck home with me about that kind of thing.  He said that, if he goes to a pond and sees a lot of ducklings playing around and swimming and all that, he might really think they were great and enjoy watching them, but it would never occur to him to try to join them in their pond.  That would make no sense.  He wouldn’t know how to act, they would be terrified of his presence, and he would never be able to fit in or enjoy trying to pretend to be like them, in any case.

I think it’s a really good analogy.  One doesn’t have to hate a group of people or even think them uninteresting not to feel that one has any business trying to join the group or attempting to act as if one were like them.

I don’t know what my species is.  Even though I find people like Paul more relatable than most, I still don’t really feel like I could connect even with the people in those communities.  I think the closest guy online I feel like could be my kind of person is Dave, from Dave’s Garage (his book was also very good and extremely relatable).  But I don’t think that he would find me very interesting, partly because our backgrounds are so dissimilar.  Anyway, he’s doing his thing and putting up nice educational videos about computers and stuff, and that’s good enough for me.

Actually, I don’t know that there’s anyone I might possibly want to spend time with who would truly want to spend time with me, except for family of course.  Even more so, I would not feel comfortable imposing myself upon anyone, even if I wanted to spend time with them and they were interested.  I’m just not selfish and cruel enough to inflict myself upon people I like.

I’m very tired and just utterly pointless—in the sense that I have no particular reason to do much of anything; I just have biological drives and habits, none of which provide any purpose or sense of satisfaction.

I have been thinking about using this month’s Audible credit to get Stephen King’s On Writing in audiobook format.  It’s read by King-sensei himself and his two author sons (Owen King and Joe Hill).  I’ve read the print version before, of course—more than once—and it was certainly inspiring in its way.  Stephen King’s nonfiction is sometimes even better than his fiction.  His style and substance and personality are quite engaging.  So, maybe if I get that audiobook, I’ll listen to it, and maybe just feel inspired to start writing fiction again.

Possibly, it’s worth a try.  If it doesn’t work, well, I don’t know what will happen.  That’s not new, though.  No one knows the specifics of the future in other than trivial senses until it happens.  And then it’s no longer the future.  We’re falling through time, in that sense, facing backwards, only seeing where we’re going once we’re past it.

It seems like a weird way to run things, but of course, it’s the only way that makes sense, given that complexity and life and memory are all driven by processes that harness increasing entropy.  And being fairly close to the surface of an extremely low-entropy state in space-time (AKA “The Big Bang”) explains why things like life and mind exist at all.  You wouldn’t see stalactites and stalagmites form in a place without a local strong gravity differential providing a sensible “up” and “down”, and you wouldn’t see life or consciousness forming in a spacetime with already uniform entropy, thus leaving no local “past” or “future”.

All right, let’s stop before I go off on a tangent, even a sine or a secant.  Have a good day.

*Not to be confused with “duelists”, a group or set that could certainly overlap with dualists, but need not do so, and which is defined by quite unrelated characteristics.

**Not in the sense of avoiding spreading disease, but just in general lack of social contacts or supports.  I am very “challenged” in that area.

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Annotations Pending

Well, against my prior intention, I’m writing this on my laptop today—meaning the laptop computer.

God, why can’t I just accept the fact that “laptop” is obviously a word referring to the computer on which I’m writing this, not the top of my personal lap as part of my body when in a particular configuration?  Surely, every person with the savvy to read this online knows what I mean when I say that I’m writing this on my laptop.  At the very least, it is extremely unlikely that they don’t.

And if, by bizarre chance, people are reading this some decades or centuries after it was written, and laptop computers are no longer a common item, or no longer exist at all, there will probably be scholars who will put little annotations in to tell those future readers what we meant back in this era by “laptop” when we’re referring to writing on something.  It’ll be like those side notes when one is reading Shakespeare, notes that let everyone know—who doesn’t already—that “bodkin” for instance, as used in Hamlet’s soliloquy, means dagger, and thus, someone making his quietus with a bare bodkin is killing himself with a dagger.

Somehow, though, I have a terrible time not clarifying that I mean “the computer” when I refer to my laptop.  There’s an actual tension, a feeling of significant stress involved.  I suppose some might call it an anxiety, but that doesn’t feel quite like the correct term.  I don’t really feel worried or in any sense scared or threatened, not even at a social level or whatever it might be.  I feel as though it would be wrong not to clarify when there are multiple meanings of the word “laptop”, in case someone might have the bizarre misunderstanding that I’m writing on the top of my actual lap.

It’s pretty stupid, and it really gets to me sometimes.  It makes me want to peel the skin off my head by grabbing my hair and pulling my scalp apart, it’s so frustrating.

To be clear, I don’t really want to do that.  I don’t know, frankly, that I would even have the strength to do it, since skin is tougher than it seems, and also the skin of the face, at least, is pinned down to the underlying tissue by an intricate and interwoven network of tough fibrous tissue*, causing it to follow the movements of the facial muscles, allowing expression (a resource often wasted on me).

Though, of course, the scalp is much more loosely held to the skull and tissue under it, so that part would be peelable if one were strong enough to make the initial split.

I’m not really that tempted to try, but when I get so tense and stressed out (I almost wrote “sense and tressed out”) I can imagine myself reaching up to grab the sides of my head by the hair and yanking steadily, and it feels as though it would be some form of release.

It’s a bit like slapping oneself in the face when one does something stupid—though in that case, I do actually slap myself in the face.  The trick is to do it hard enough that you actually get a real punishment for your own stupidity and thus might actually learn something.  It’s not quite as intense as banging one’s head against a wall or against one’s desk (which I also do when I’m stressed out enough), but the latter is not really so much a punishment as it is just a way of trying to overwhelm stress with pain.

Or, well, it’s something like that.  Even as I wrote that, I realized it didn’t quite seem like an accurate description, or at least not the full answer.  Sometimes I think it’s just a form of giving in to my desire to lash out when I’m very stressed, but to do so against the only person I have a right to harm.  I’ve at times given myself actual swollen, black and blue (initially subcutaneously red with extravasated blood) marks on my forehead, but usually it’s not that bad.

I don’t want to give myself a concussion or anything, after all.  My brain is dysfunctional enough, and I don’t want to lose the few good things it can do.  There are other ways I can hurt myself when necessary.

Speaking of the good things, I keep trying to get myself back into writing fiction or something, maybe, just to see if it makes me feel any better, which it had a tendency to do in the past.  That’s a minor part of why I decided to bring my laptop today (the other laptop is with me whenever I sit down, so it requires no effort to bring it).  But I don’t know; I can’t feel any excitement or anticipation about HELIOS or Changeling in a Shadow World, or DFandD, or Outlaw’s Mind, or any other stories, and I certainly don’t think anyone else is excited about the prospect of those stories being written, either.

I don’t know what to do**.

As usual, of course, I have written much more quickly on the laptop computer than on the smartphone, which should come as no surprise.  But I don’t know if it has any effect on my style, or on how good a post comes of it.  I would welcome your evaluations, of course, but I know it’s hard to judge from one instance.  It may be a better or worse post than usual for reasons that have nothing to do at all with my choice of tools for writing it.  There are too many variables at play.

A reasonably controlled experiment could be done, with me writing a long series of posts, randomly (perhaps) alternating between smartphone and laptop and asking readers to evaluate each post for quality without knowing which kind the post was.  But that would be far more trouble than it’s worth, and I don’t mind subjective and non-rigorous impressions, if anyone wants to give them in the comments below.

I don’t really have much more to say today.  I just feel stressed and tense and frustrated and angry and just…squeezed by reality.  I feel almost as if there’s some metaphorical, inverted mountain suspended above me that I have to hold up or it will crash down and, I don’t know, bury me, crush me, impale me on its peak…something like that.  I don’t think it will harm anyone else; there’s no one else for my collapse to harm, really, certainly not in any deep way.  So far, I’m just holding it up out of habit, and because people will say that “you’ve got to try to hold on” or things along those lines.  But it’s tiring and it’s stressful and it’s wearing me out at the same time that it’s pissing me off.

Anyway, this is all pointless.  Sorry to waste your time.  I hope you haven’t been too disappointed.  And I also hope you have a good day.

*The skin of the palms of the hand and the working surface of the fingers is even more tightly and intricately bound to the underlying tissue; this contributes to the way one’s fingers wrinkle up when your hands soak in water for a while.  The soles of your feet and bottoms of your toes are similarly tacked down, though it serves a slightly different “purpose” there.  Dissection of the palms to look at the underlying muscle and tendons and so on is a laborious process in Gross Anatomy class.  Ditto with the face.

**Am I always in the dark, living in a powder keg and giving off sparks?  Probably not.  That was a pretty good song, though, wasn’t it?

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“Who knows? Not me.”

I didn’t walk the full five miles from the train to the house yesterday afternoon‒I walked about three or three and a half‒because I didn’t want to give myself any blisters or abrasions from walking too far for the first time in a new pair of boots.  But I seem to have stopped well in time for that, since there are no blisters or even sore spots on my feet now, and my ankles and right Achilles tendon appear to be in good nick.  Also, and most importantly, though I had a bit of tension in my right side along my back upon returning to the house, that went away nicely with a bit of stretching and replenishment, so that’s pretty good.

Anyway, lesson learned:  it matters if the boots you wear are even a little bit oversized if you’re going to be walking any very long distances in them.  It looks like these new, half-downsized ones will work well.

It’s been sloppy and wet here in south Florida these last several days, but there does seem to be a slight increase in morning breeziness.  And, of course, since Saturday, the time of darkness has been slightly greater than the time of daylight, and its dominance is increasing at the most rapid pace at which that will happen.  This is because, for a sinusoidal curve, the fastest rate of change is when it crosses the x-axis (at the equinoxes in this case), and the slowest rates of change are at the peak and at the nadir (the solstices in this case).  So, for a little while now, the nighttime will be growing rapidly before it settles out, steadily and gradually, as we barrel toward the end of the year.

After mentioning the fact that I don’t play the guitar in the morning anymore, yesterday I decided to fire up the axe for a bit.  Remarkably, it was still almost perfectly in tune!  Probably it helps that the office is kept pretty much at a constant temperature.  Also, I had left the capo on the fourth fret the last time I played.  That was for playing the chords and stuff from the Nirvana version of The Man Who Sold the World.  I didn’t start with that yesterday, instead playing through a few iterations of Nothing Compares 2 U.  It’s a lovely song.  I like the Chris Cornell version best.  Of course, now Prince (the songwriter and original performer) and Chris Cornell and Sinead O’Conner (who had a big hit with her cover of it) are all dead.

Then I did play some of The Man Who Sold the World, and then Ashes to Ashes, both Bowie tunes, at least originally.  And, of course, Bowie and Kobain are also both dead, though they died under very different circumstances.  Then I got my guitar book out and played a little Just the Way You Are, and Sorry Seems To Be the Hardest Word, and Here, There, and Everywhere, by Billy Joel, Elton John, and Paul McCartney‒all of whom are still alive!  That’s just weird, isn’t it?  Imagine that!

Of course, the latter song is credited to Lennon and McCartney, but that was a formality according to their agreement for all Beatles songs they wrote.  It was a McCartney song, and it was apparently the only song of his for which Lennon directly complimented him.

Considering the quality of Sir Paul’s work overall, that’s a hell of a statement, in more than one way.  First off, it must have really impressed John (rightly so) for him to make a point of telling Paul that it was a good song.  But it seems harsh that John never complimented any others, at least to Paul’s face.

Then again, he was British, and emotional expressiveness (other than through song and theater and literature) is a major national deficit by most accounts.  Maybe that’s why they do so much good music and poetry and drama and comedy and the like.  I often get the feeling that part of the reason Thom Yorke’s singing is so powerful and conveys and evokes such emotion in the listener is that this is Thom’s only real way of expressing himself deeply.  And, of course, he does seem almost possessed when he’s performing.

As a YouTube reactor (I cannot recall which one, for which I apologize) said of his singing, “He’s feelin’ it when he’s singing…and he makes you feel it, too!”

Now, John Lennon did compliment Paul to other people‒during interviews, for instance.  Though even then, he was far from effusive.  That was just his way, I think.  He had a very troubled childhood, and emotional expression was probably difficult for him, even for a Brit.

Then again, he wrote some incredibly expressive songs, from If I Fell to In My Life to Julia to Across the Universe, all the way up to Starting Over and Woman, with scads of others thrown in for good measure.  If being closed off and repressed helped lead to the creation of those truly great works of art, the world at least can hardly feel too horrible about it.  Though it would be nice if a person could be well-adjusted and have the ability to express and receive affection easily and still produce great art (and ideally, of course, not be murdered by a slimy little worm of a creature who claimed to be a fan).

Alas, though it seems possible in principle, it doesn’t seem to happen often, if at all, in practice*.  Shakespeare supposedly wrote Hamlet, and some of his other great tragedies, partly in response to the death of his son, Hamnet.  And of course, I, his much later and far inferior admirer, only really started to write and publish stories that have always been in my head once my life, my family, and my career had been wrecked, and I was in prison.

We can be thankful, if saddened, for the great art that was born of Shakespeare’s sorrow, and of Lennon’s.  In my case, on the other hand, it was almost certainly not worth it, particularly for me.  But I can’t change any of that stuff, either.

Life’s like that, I suppose‒to quite the end of one of my own short stories, possibly the darkest one I’ve ever written…which, weirdly enough, first came out of me years ago, while I was happily passing the time keeping my then-friend and soon-to-be fiancée company while she did some overnight work for a summer job.  I don’t know where it came from, except that I did often like to play solitaire (with real cards).

Anyway, that’s enough for now.  Have a good Wednesday.

*As Einstein is reputed to have said, “In principle, principle and practice should be the same, but in practice, they often are not”, or something like that.  He was a clever fellow.

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Now let it work. Mischief, thou art afoot. Take thou what blog thou wilt.

Hello and good morning.

It’s Thursday, and I walked to the train station this morning, but I did not walk back to the house from the train station last night.  It had just gotten so late, and I was tired, and I wanted to get back to the house early enough that I could relax and at least try to get to bed at a reasonable hour, even if I never do sleep through the night.  But I committed to walking this morning, and I fulfilled that commitment.  Bully for me!

I must be getting in better shape, or maybe I just left earlier or summat, because even though I stopped to get a beverage* and tried to take my time after that, I still arrived in time to catch the train that leaves twenty minutes earlier than the one I usually get when I walk.

My feet and knees and ankles are doing tolerably well, so the shoes I did choose seem unlikely to lose when it comes to my long-distance walking.  I also find‒curiously enough‒that wearing spandex knee braces helps keep my ankles, especially my right ankle, from acting up.  It seems that something in the way I move (ha ha) when my knee stability is not optimal is adding torsional, irregular forces to my right ankle and Achilles tendon.

It’s often quite surprising just how non-straightforward the source of damage or pain is in the body compared to where one feels the discomfort.  Spandex helps with some of this because it adds one’s sense of surface touch to one’s ongoing awareness of the position of one’s joints from within**.  The sense of surface touch is much more precise than many of our other senses, which makes sense***, since it has much more of a role to play in guiding our targeted moment to moment actions regarding injury, obstacles, insects that might bite, and so on.  It may also be that spandex helps decrease excess fluid accumulation in a joint by providing counter-pressure in a fairly uniform way, and this can certainly be expected to improve a joint’s stability.

I’m sure that’s all quite boring.  Apologies.  I don’t mean to be tedious; it’s just a talent I have.

Switching topics:  I like listening to good podcasts (or audiobooks) while I walk, and this morning I listened to the AMA (ask me anything) podcast for the month on Sean Carroll’s Mindscape.  Well…I listened to part of it.  His AMAs are usually three or four hours long, because he tries to get through as many questions as he can, and he tries to answer them as carefully as he can.  It makes for some very interesting listening, because he is a theoretical physicist who also works in philosophy.  Formerly at CalTech, he is now at Johns Hopkins and also works with the Santa Fe Institute and is just in general broadly interested and interesting and quite thoughtful.

I still like Sam Harris’s podcast (and his guests) a little bit better, but that’s not particularly important.  I like them both, and I learn a lot from them and their interlocutors.  I have noted that I like long podcasts but prefer short videos, which is interesting and seems on its face odd to me.  Perhaps it’s simply that one can listen to a podcast while doing any of a number of other things, but not so with videos.

Anyway, it’s nice to be able to hear about and potentially learn about interesting things while walking.  It’s also occasionally fun, in a rather silly way, when someone asks a reasonably complicated question to which I know the answer and then to hear Sean Carroll say the same thing I would have said (this is far from common, but it does happen).  Of course, people rarely ask him questions about medicine or biology, because he is not a specialist in those areas.  If they did, I would probably usually be able to give better answers than he, but that would hardly be particularly impressive.

It’s also hardly important.  I’d rather be listening to someone talking about things I know less about than they, because that’s how one learns.  I sometimes try to do brief “podcasts” or “audio blogs” of my own, but I don’t get the impression anyone ever really listens to any of them.  I don’t know.  Maybe they do.

Oh, I wanted to address the very nice comment left by a reader yesterday, in which‒among other things‒he said that he liked the idea of the manga that I had mentioned.  I just want to make clear, although HELIOS started out as a comic book idea, and then became a manga idea later (at around the same time I thought of mangas for Mark Red and for The Dark Fairy and the Desperado) I don’t see myself ever actually doing a manga now.

I think that the work involved in making a manga‒from the initial script to the storyboarding to the penciling to the inking to the screen tone‒would all be just too much and it would be difficult to work into my schedule.  Perhaps if someone were paying me to do it full time, I might try.  But I don’t think that’s very likely.

I really only have the notion of perhaps writing a “light novel” of HELIOS, rather akin to the light novels that are popular in Japan which are often turned into manga and or anime.  Mark Red and DFandD and HELIOS are probably stories that lend themselves more to manga/anime style settings, but I am much more of a prose fiction writer, even though I do draw sometimes.

Anyway, I think that’s probably enough for today.  I intend to keep doing my walking and hopefully that’ll help me be healthier overall.  I’m also trying very hard to completely eliminate sugar and most starches or refined carbohydrates from my diet; that certainly helps me feel physically better.  We’ll see how everything goes.

Maybe, if I do well and my mood starts to improve consistently, I will start to write fiction again, on HELIOS or on DFandD or on Outlaws Mind or on Changeling in a Shadow World or even on Neko/Neneko****.  Who knows?

I hope you have a good day.

TTFN

*The water fountains at the Hollywood Tri-Rail station have been “temporarily out of service” for, I don’t know, it must be most of a year.  I would very much like to be able to get a drink of water when I get to the station after walking 5 miles, but I think the people who run the place are happy to try to coerce people into buying something from the ridiculously overpriced vending machines at the station.  I would not seriously consider doing that unless my life depended on it, and I might not do it then.  I’d even rather pay twice as much somewhere else than buy something to drink at the station when they have water fountains but just haven’t fixed them.

**This is called proprioception, as most of you probably know.  It’s not a very precise or reliable sense, being quite coarse grained, and it also seems to deteriorate with age and with damage to joints.

***Sorry, that wasn’t meant to be any form of pun, but it is the best way I can find to put it right now, so I won’t change it.

****The story of a cat (named Neko, the Japanese word for cat) who is devoted to her human, a lonely but upbeat and gainfully employed young man (who is fond of anime and manga and light novels, among other things).  When the man buys an odd, exotic fish, the cat intends to eat it, being a bit jealous and also just having the instinctive desire to do so.  But then, the fish reveals to the cat that it is magical (evidenced well by the fact that it can talk and that the cat can understand it), and if the cat spares its life, it will grant her a wish.  She agrees, and chooses to be able to become a human woman (at will) to be a potential companion for her human.  Surprised when she first encounters him, he asks her name, and she stammers, Ne…Neko.  He takes this as her having the Japanese name Neneko, and she accepts that.  Thus, the title.

Neko/Neneko

[The above is a concept drawing of a potential scene from Neko/Neneko]

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Wayward versus prodigal suns, negative integrals, and mildew

Well, it’s Tuesday now, and I’m sitting at the train and writing this blog post on my laptop.  Apparently, the last time I wrote using it was August 21st, but it feels as if it were longer ago than that.  I brought the laptop back to the house with me last night because I knew I wasn’t going to walk back from the train in the evening, having already walked to the train (and then some) in the morning.  And I knew I wasn’t going to walk to the train this morning, because I plan to walk back from the train this evening.  I figured that made it a good evening to carry the computer.

It’s curious how heavy this little thing feels when it’s in the backpack, compared to what I usually keep in there.  When I pick up the laptop in my hands, it feels almost miraculously light, given that I know what it is and what it does, and I know how much computers used to weigh and all that trivia.  But then after I put it in the backpack and later go to pick up and sling the backpack, it’s just so much heavier, subjectively speaking, than it ought to feel.

It’s quite annoying.  I dislike being subject to such subjective impressions from the world.  It’s inescapable, I suppose, since certainly this body was never shaped by nature accurately to assess the weight of a backpack with or without a laptop in it.  I guess the fact that our impressions are so inexact and inconsistent can be useful as a way to keep from feeling overconfident in our assessments of various facts and opinions about the world.

But then again, I tend to hold my judgments and opinions and abilities to be extremely unreliable, anyway.  I think the most common thing I say to myself is, “Robert, you fucking moron!”  That happens at least several times a day, pretty much every day (and I make that estimate without any willful exaggeration).  Just ask some of my coworkers if you don’t believe me*.  I really hold myself in contempt; I hate how weak and pathetic and idiotic I am so much of the time.  Trust me, if you were inside my head, you’d probably feel the same way.

Speaking of me being an idiot, I had slight passing thoughts on and off yesterday of trying to start writing a story I had considered writing before.  It involves a character I invented waaaaay long ago, back when I was maybe about 10 years old.  It was intended then as a comic book.  I even drew the beginnings of one or two comics about the character, one featuring the origin of his arch-enemy and all that.

Then, years later, I started thinking of an idea for a manga featuring the character, but with a much less comic-book style origin and story.  Indeed, it would become a tale about a teenager (not a grown-up, unlike the original notion) who has gone through some form of trauma and has lost his memories and whatnot, but discovers that—apparently as part of the thing that caused him the trauma and memory loss—he has developed incredible powers.

These powers are not psychic abilities or anything, but entail the ability to convert his own matter, and the matter around him directly into energy, which obviously means a lot of energy, given E=mc2  and all that.  It’s a silly-ish story, one for which I’ve drawn a picture or two, and it’s called HELIOS, with a rather silly and whimsical subtitle, “the wayward sun”.  Although maybe it should be “the prodigal sun” or something along those lines.

MS Word has underlined the word “sun” in that last sentence.  Apparently, it’s able to recognize the original phrase well enough to think that the word following “prodigal” should be “son”, not “sun”.  Curiously, it did not underline the word “sun” after “wayward”.  Apparently the song by Kansas isn’t as ubiquitous as the term from that horrible, perverse parable in the gospels.  Who would’ve thought it?  Admittedly, the one from the New Testament has a two millennia head start, so I guess we can cut Kansas a little bit of slack.

Anyway, obviously I know the whole back story regarding HELIOS, and of course there is a reason the title is spelled in capital letters.  I think it could be a decent light-novel type story.  It might even be worth trying to write it on the smartphone, just to see how well I can write stories like that using that tool.

But this is all a pipe dream, of course.  I don’t think anyone would be interested in reading it, even if I were able to force myself to start writing fiction again and do it.  It’s just my little personal fantasy (about writing another science fiction story**).  I doubt that I’d be able to summon the energy to write about that character (which is mildly ironic), but even if I did, there would be no point.

I don’t think I’m going to be able to summon the energy for much of anything, anymore.  I mean, obviously, I’m currently still writing this blog, and I’m sometimes walking to and/or from the train station, and of course I’m working at work.  But there’s no percentage in any of it.  I’m just slowly eroding whatever’s left of me.  I don’t really, honestly expect to make it to the end of this month, not without some major catastrophe or departure or whatever.

Maybe it’s just that I don’t want to make it to the end of this month.  It’s an annoying version of the old notion of “feeling that you can’t go on”.  Unfortunately, I know that I can go on, in the sense that I’m at least physically capable of doing it.  I just don’t want to go on.  I see no good reason to do it.  I want to escape.

Also, even though I didn’t walk to the train today, and the only walking I did so far was up to the end of the station to sit down, I’m already sweaty and my shirt and I smell like mildew!  I doubt anyone else can smell it, but I can, and it’s disgusting.  I just washed this shirt, and did so thoroughly, and dried my clothes thoroughly afterwards.  I don’t know how much Lysol I’m going to have to spray on it and me to kill that horrible smell, but unfortunately, I don’t have a change of shirt with me, and believe me, no one wants to see me topless!

It’s a minor frustration, I know—hardly a tragedy.  But there are so few, if any, compensatory joys in the world anymore.  Even if the function’s y-output isn’t terribly negative, if it just is negative at all, overall, then as time goes on, the integral, the area under the curve (or, well, over the curve) is going to be negative, and that negative integral will only get more and more negative as long as the function continues.  Better just to return the thing to zero and cut one’s losses.

That’s a bit of an obscure metaphor, I suppose, but hopefully it makes sense to people who know a little calculus.

I’m just so tired and worn out.  I feel angry all the time, but the vast majority of that anger is always directed at myself, and rightly so.  I need to escape.  But I probably can’t do it on my own.  At least, I only see one general way to do so on my own.

Oh, well, what are you gonna do?  The universe is a horrible place.  No wonder every little bit of spacetime is trying to push away from every other little bit.  Maybe so-called Dark Energy is just an expression of cosmic self-disgust.

Intergalactic space would certainly not be too distant a place for someone to want me to be from them.  I wish I could be so far away from myself a lot of the time.  But I don’t want to be someone else, either.  That’s another conundrum.

All right, this has gotten too long.  Have a good day, please, and thank you for reading.

helios sharper

[P.S.  Upon looking up this old drawing, it appears that I did think of making the subtitle “the prodigal sun”.  Now I like “wayward” better.  Maybe I’m just being perverse.]

*I don’t know how you might go about that, though, and I don’t really expect you to try.

**It would not be hard sci fi in any way, since of course it leans toward the comic book style of things, but the idea behind some of it is based in a bit of real science, including particle physics, especially relating to the Higgs field (where the H in HELIOS comes from), all that kind of stuff.  But I never thought of it as a serious science fiction thing, like Son of Man.