Creative Writing

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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.

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Dreams of appreciation for one’s works in the past, present, and future

It’s Saturday morning, and I’m sitting at the Tri-Rail station, waiting for the first train of the day.  I’m writing this on my cell phone, though I came within a jackrabbit’s breadth* of bringing my mini laptop back with me yesterday afternoon.  I even packed it in my backpack.  But then I decided that its added weight might give me trouble, since I was planning to walk back to the house from the train station.  I also had planned to bring one or two other things that might add to the usual weight of the backpack.

It turns out, though, that not only was I too tired/lazy to walk, but I also forgot to bring the few things for which I had foregone bringing the laptop.  So, that was entirely pointless, and now, here I am “typing” on my “smartphone”, waiting for the train to bring me most of the way to the office on a Saturday during what is technically a holiday weekend (in the US).  And, of course, I’ll go in on Monday more or less at the same time, since on Monday, the Tri-Rail will be operating on a Sunday schedule (which is also a Saturday schedule), since most sensible people will take the day off.  I mean, it’s Labor Day.

If there were ever proof needed that we have failed to protect the rights and well-being of workers in general, it’s the fact that most businesses and services are open on Labor Day.  Even many white collar workers probably work on Labor Day (though many lawyers may not, since courts and other government facilities are closed).

I used to feel pretty good about going to a rather meaningless job, because the whole point‒as I deliberately decided and told myself‒was simply to keep myself alive while I wrote my books.  But I’ve stopped writing my books now.  I never really wrote them for anyone but myself, of course, but it does eventually get discouraging when no one but family actually reads them (to a good first approximation, anyway, though there are one or two exceptions).

I don’t tend to be the sort of person who craves popularity for its own sake, but it really would be nice if more people read and enjoyed my stories.  I guess maybe I should share them all again on social media, perhaps for the last time, and maybe I’ll share my songs (my original ones, I mean) while I’m at it.  Why not?  One last desperate grab at passing driftwood seems like an appropriate act for a drowning man.

Heck, if I thought anyone would listen, I’d try to read more of The Chasm and the Collision out loud and post it up to YouTube.  I have the first nine or so chapters up there, and a couple of my short stories.  But I don’t think anyone (but I) has listened to them.  They have fewer “views” even than some of the videos of my original songs or even the covers I’ve done.

Again, I do these things mainly for myself, not to pursue some dream of fame and fortune.  Nevertheless, one does sometimes sputter to a halt when one is not merely alone in day to day life but receives no significant interest in one’s best, most creative products.  It may be a fine thing to “dance like nobody’s watching”, but it’s less great to write like nobody’s reading, especially when it’s almost literally the case that no one is reading.  Ditto for writing and/or playing music.

If I were a painter, after a while, it would become discouraging to keep painting if no one wants any of the works.  I can completely sympathize with Van Gogh for shooting himself.  And while I am glad he did a lot of painting before that‒I think his pictures are often deeply beautiful and unique‒I recognize that the fact that he is revered now is of absolutely no benefit to the man as he lived his life.  There is no Doctor Who, “Vincent and the Doctor”, episode in real life to give a past figure‒Van Gogh, Herman Melville, whatever other famous-after-death artist one might consider‒a chance to know that, though unappreciated in life, the artist would eventually be recognized as someone who did something that would bring joy to many people.  For a real person, there is only what happens during one’s life.

Getting famous only after death is almost a form of tragic irony.  It’s not common, though.  I think it’s more common for one to be relatively successful and famous in one’s lifetime and then be forgotten than the other way around.  But many truly great creative artists‒Shakespeare, Picasso, Dickens, Beethoven, Rembrandt, Steinbeck, Tolkien‒were revered in their time and are still revered now.

I don’t quite know what point I’m trying to make.  Maybe just that there is no long-term point.  Or, maybe it’s a variant of the Woody Allen joke that he doesn’t want to achieve immortality through his work, he wants to achieve immortality through not dying.

But I don’t think it’s pointless to be respected (for one’s work) after death; I think it’s actually kind of wonderful to think that future generations might love and admire one’s work.  But it would be especially beneficial if they had also done so during one’s lifetime‒some of them, anyway.

The future admiration of the world is probably just as ephemeral as is such admiration during one’s lifetime‒since, compared to infinity, any finite amount of time, no matter how large, is vanishingly, unnoticeably tiny, and is always unreasonably close to the beginning of any counting of time‒but it is almost certainly the case that being honestly appreciated for one’s work during one’s life is a wonderful thing, all else being equal.

I don’t know how I got on that subject; perhaps I’ll figure it out when I read and edit this before posting it.  Whatever the case, I hope it was mildly entertaining for you.  Feel free to follow the links to my books or to my Amazon author page, or to my YouTube “topic” page where my original music is, or to my personal YouTube list if you want to hear my “covers” and a few raw originals, if all that seems as if it might be somewhat interesting to you.  And please try to have a good weekend, holiday or no holiday.

Thank you.

*Get it?

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Perambulating meta-cycles of pointless (but pretentious) contemplation

Well, here we are again.  The cycle continues.  It’s not a motorcycle or a bicycle, of course; that would be silly.  And I’m not referring to something as fundamental as the Krebs Cycle, though of course, as long as I’m alive, that is constantly whirring in pretty much every cell of my body.

No, I’m referring to the cycle of days and weeks of my pseudo-life.  I’m back at the train station this morning, writing this on my “smart”* phone, having taken what I hope will be pretty close to my final Uber here.  I say that because, yesterday, I walked both to and from the train station, totaling over 12 miles for the day, and the ill-effects on my joints and back and so on are minimal.  I have no new blistering, no worsening of or new pains in my back or sides or hips or anything**.  I had a minor threatening back spasm yesterday evening, probably from fluid status changes.  That’s all right.  I drank a lot of fluids during the day and in the evening, and I think that took care of that.  It’s just a bit sore there now, and it’s certainly not more than a standard deviation worse than my average*** level of pain.

I plan to walk back to the house from the train this evening‒I have nothing better to do with my time, and I can listen to audiobooks and/or podcasts as I do it.  Then for the rest of the week, and hopefully for the rest of the time I’m here, I’ll walk to and from the train station every day.  The shoes I’ve chosen seem to be good; I may even get another pair or two, just so I can spread the wear and tear out.

[That was three words that rhyme in that one last sentence:  pair, wear, and tear.  So, there.]

I had a nice conversation with my sister on the phone last night as I walked back, and it even continued once I got to the house, at least for a while.  She’s the only one I talk to at all, really, except in passing to people at work.  It’s no surprise that I can talk to her even when I can’t tolerate talking to anyone else.   After all, I’ve literally known her all my life.  And she’s known me all my life (though not all of her life, since she is older than I am).

I used to call my Mom once or twice a week, usually twice, and we would talk for a while, but obviously that doesn’t happen anymore.  I mean, I could talk to my Mom, so to speak, but it would hardly be a conversation, since she cannot reply.  I don’t expect to be able to speak to her once I’m in the state she’s currently in, alas, though I suppose I could be wrong about that.  I don’t think I am (obviously) but I am not convinced beyond any shadow of a doubt.

I’m convinced beyond what I consider any reasonable doubt, but that’s not an insurmountable standard, as any unjustly convicted victim of the criminal justice system would surely agree (and there are almost certainly many of these poor souls languishing in prison, since we only ever directly learn about the ones who are eventually exonerated).

I’m on the train now, by the way, on my way to the office, ready to face another day at work.  At least, I’m as ready as I’m going to be.  I certainly am capable of doing what I do at the office, such as it is, even on payroll day.  But it’s not as though I’m excited or enthused about it.

Still, I don’t expect to be enthusiastic about work.  It’s work.  They pay you to do it.  Even when I was writing fiction every day, I didn’t feel enthusiastic about it when I did it in the mornings.  I felt a general positive sense about the stories, and about the characters and whatnot, but it wasn’t enthusiasm or “motivation” in the business-speak, life-coach type way the word seems often to be expressed.  Certainly there was never any “ooh-rah” feeling.  It was personal discipline to carry through on a commitment (self made and self directed) that also became a habit.

I think writing fiction did stave off my depression for a while, or at least it kept it more in check.  Those days are gone, though, likely never to return.  I mean, I really like Outlaw’s Mind so far, and The Dark Fairy and the Desperado was fun as far it’s gone (for me), and I think Neko/Neneko and Changeling in a Shadow World would be good, and it might even be worthwhile, someday, to try to recreate my first novel Ends of the Maelstrom or write the sequels of Mark Red or the prequel to Son of Man.  But I don’t think writing and/or finishing any of those is likely to happen.

Maybe if some wealthy benefactor/patron were willing to keep me alive and in a reasonably safe and tolerably comfortable situation, I might be convinced to start writing fiction again.  I know that I can write a lot when I choose to do it.  Just look how much gobbledygook I put out every day here on this blog.

I used to write over 2000 words a day on my fiction in the mornings before work (even when I was “up the road”) and sometimes I got quite carried away.  Unanimity had to be split into 2 parts because it was over half a million words long before I finished.  That’s slightly longer than It and around the length of the unabridged version of The Stand.  And I was not writing “full time”.

But I have no will to write fiction now.  There’s only so much one can do such a thing “into the void”, at least when one has nothing else of value in one’s life, before it feels like a thoroughgoing waste of effort.  Even this blog tends to feel utterly pointless‒it is utterly pointless, like most things I do, but it doesn’t always feel that way‒and I know there are people who read it.

I don’t know what point I’m trying to make.  Oh, wait, I just mentioned that it’s pointless, so I shouldn’t expect to have a point or to make one.  Maybe that is the point.  That would be rather circular and paradoxical and “meta” as they used to say before Zuckerberg pissed all over the word, and even stole the term “metaverse” which I had long planned to use in things like DFandD and CiaSW.  I know he didn’t know I meant to do that, and he surely had no malice toward me.  But, though I do not consider him to have willfully (or even willingly) done me wrong, I still am sorely miffed by his (quite lame) arrogation of the term.

All right, that’s enough for this day, and I’m almost at my stop.  Have a good day…please.  Someone ought to do it, and I’m neither talented nor skilled at such things, so I’m leaving that task to you readers.

*I suppose, to be fair, that it really is smart, depending on how you define the term.  That’s almost tautological, though, now that I think about it.  Depending on how one defines the term, my phone could honestly be called a dleefigle phone.

**My goal is to be able to walk as long as I might choose, indefinitely, without being stopped by any acute occurrence such as new onset of pain, blistering, etc.

***I avoided the more precise mathematical term “mean” level of pain because in the context of pain, “mean” can have multiple and misleading meanings…ha ha.

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There is no receding, you are pain. Something like that.

I’ve been trying, over the past few days, to write blog posts that are slightly more upbeat, and maybe a bit funny here and there, compared to most of my other posts.  I’ve done this to try to give a bit of a break to the people who read my blog with some regularity, and I hope the most recent posts have actually been enjoyable for them.  I’m quite sure they deserve to have something fun to read.

I don’t know if I’m going to be able to keep that up for long, or very consistently.  I’m afraid the increased pain I’ve had lately doesn’t seem to be abating.

Every night, pretty much all night, it’s been just gnawing away at my back and hips and knees and ankles like a demonic, semi-ethereal rat that can’t not gnaw because its teeth are always growing, and if it doesn’t wear them down, it will die a rather slow and horrible death.  If my pain were caused by some dreadful, progressive illness, I would surely be long dead by now, and that would likely be a mercy, for me and for the world at large.

I’m not just sitting back and letting it happen, just so you know.  I am always trying different stretches and exercises and combinations of analgesics and ointments and so on.  I also have massage gun thingies and a foot massager and a foldout massage chair at the office to try to help relax my back and feet.  I’ve tried inversion tables.  And I try to adjust various things to improve my sleep at night, and my sleep posture, changing pillows and locations and types of bedding and all.  Believe me, I don’t relish being in pain.

Speaking of relish, I even try adjusting what foods I eat, and when, to see if that makes any difference.  That’s a bit of a ham-handed* segue, I know, but it’s true.

Unfortunately, it’s hard for me to tell if any of it makes any difference at all.  For all I know, my chronic and daily pain might be no worse if I had never taken anything for it at all nor tried in any way to combat it.  My moments of temporary respite might be happening on their own, or due to my expectations, rather than thanks to any intervention.  It’s so difficult to judge these things with trials on one person involving a process that waxes and wanes in what amounts to a very long-period, low-frequency throbbing, but never quite goes away.

Even when I was taking chronic, prescription pain meds, the pain didn’t go away for long at a time, and the meds ended up causing suppression of my TSH and GnRH, so I had secondary hypothyroidism and low testosterone, which didn’t help my mood and health.  Certainly, weaning myself off of them didn’t make my pain worse, overall.  And as a bonus, my eyebrows grew back at their outer edges, where they had stopped growing when my thyroid was low.

There are some problems that we do not have the technology and science and resources to be able to solve or correct, and for which we may never have these things.  Perhaps it would be necessary for me to grow a new, cloned body in which to transplant my brain to cure my chronic pain.  Maybe even that wouldn’t work, because my central nervous system‒never quite ideally tuned anyway, though it has many fine features‒might have been too altered by chronic pain to do anything but induce it in a new body.  Maybe if I were a full on cyborg it would be better.  Or maybe it wouldn’t be.

There comes a time when fighting something is no longer beneficial, but is just an act of habit, or of ego, or of stubbornness, or some combination of these things.  My father died peacefully at home, with his wife and daughter (my mother and sister) nearby, taking medication to control his pain‒at that point, hypothalamic/pituitary suppression was not an issue‒and there are far worse ways to do things.  My mother was in hospice when she died, but my sister and I were nearby for her.

I’m sorry to say it, but when I die, I will probably die alone, and not merely in the sense that everyone dies alone.  Though I don’t like the idea of causing trouble for others, I fear that I will be one of those people who dies a solitary death in a lonely room and is only found sometime later.  It’s probably no more than I deserve, and no less.

Oh, by the way, I looked for that graffiti on the way back from work yesterday‒the one I mentioned that had briefly triggered a story idea but that I forgot afterwards.  I didn’t see it, though I tried to start looking at the graffiti as the train passed the spot where I remembered having seen it.  I saw lots of other graffiti that I remembered, but I didn’t see that one.  I’m pretty confident that I would have recognized it, though I suppose I cannot be completely certain.  I was in a slightly different position in the train car, so my angle might not have been right to catch the one I had seen the day before.  Oh, well, I did re-transfer my old notebook file of story ideas from my previous phone to this one, so I wasn’t otherwise idle.

That’s probably all futile, anyway.  I doubt that I’ll actually write any more fiction, or draw any more pictures, or write any more songs‒I probably won’t play and/or sing even any covers of any songs.  I’m just wishing when I think about things like that, just like I’m wishing for someone to be able to help me and to choose to do so.  Anyway, I don’t really deserve any help, so it’s not as though I expect it.

But boy, this pain is really getting old.  I mean, it’s been old for quite a while, and‒as they say‒it’s not getting any younger.  Neither am I, of course, and neither is anyone else.

I’m tired of being in pain, and I’m tired of being tired, and I’m tired of being alone.  I can try to do things about them, and I have done, and I am, though I may not necessarily mention all the things I do here in my blog.  But I do try.  I’ve been trying for a long time, and I will keep on trying for at least a bit more.  Like probably everything else in the universe, it’s almost certainly pointless, but it’s the way nature has programmed me.  I’m an idiot who doesn’t give up easily, even when he thinks it’s the sensible thing to do.

Maybe that’s why I make so many arguments about futility and pointlessness.  I’m certainly not trying to convince anyone else about life being pointless‒I would hate to think I had talked someone else into suicide**.  Maybe I’m trying just to convince myself.  Obviously, I haven’t succeeded yet; if I had, I wouldn’t be writing this.  But I am tired, and I am in rather nasty pain, and I am alone, and I don’t see readily available alternatives for the life I’m living, which I really don’t like.  I don’t have the energy to make any radical changes.  I barely have the energy to write this blog (and I can do that on my phone).

Oh, well.  The universe wasn’t made for my sake, and like everyone else, I wasn’t ever promised anything by the universe other than mortality.  It is what it is.  I don’t know if my existence is overall better or worse than that of an insect that’s accidentally wandered into an outdoor elevator car at a train station, and which will probably die in there, unable even to comprehend why it cannot seem to escape.  But I can’t be other than what I am.  Neither can anyone or anything else be other than what they are.

One thing I am is, “working tomorrow”.  So, barring the unforeseen, there will be a blog post forthcoming.  Who knows, maybe I’ll be able to report that I’ve figured out the solution to my pain and my depression and my insomnia and my disconnection and loneliness, and I’ll be able to share it with you and the rest of the world, and Earth will be transformed into a place of peace and joy for everyone.

I wouldn’t hold your breath, but I suppose that, technically, it is possible.  Have a good day.

*Ha ha.  There was no pun intended when I wrote that.  Honest.  I was actually quoting Hannibal Lecter…for whom food-based terms seem particularly appropriate, I guess.

**With the possible exception of some rare political figures.

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And then the moon, like to a silver bow new bent in heaven, shall behold the blog of our solemnities.

Hello and good morning!

It’s Thursday, July 20, 2023, the day of my traditional weekly blog post.  Far more importantly, it is also the 54th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landing, when the Eagle, carrying Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, landed in the Mare Tranquillitatis* and those intrepid astronauts took their famous “small” steps.  It’s easy for me to remember how old the Moon landing is, because it’s three months older to the day than I am.

I’ve occasionally, fancifully thought that maybe this explains, or at least illustrates, some of the weird things about me.  Perhaps some alien entity, less a body than an otherworldly mind, hitched a ride with the Apollo 11 mission after having been stranded on the Moon, barely surviving for ages or eons or who can say how long.  Then, after arriving on Earth, it set off on an erratic search for some compatible body and nervous system with which to merge and sustain itself, finally arriving in Pontiac, Michigan and locating a fetus in its 7th month of development‒just the right stage‒and merging with it.

Then, it found that this developing mind was just too weird and twisted, and it fled immediately, screaming inaudible alien screams, hurling itself into one of the Great Lakes and either drowning or merging with a fish somewhere.  Perhaps it had thoughts of leading the fish of the world in a revolution against humans and so on, but it was caught by a recreational angler who had it mounted and put in a wall.  This led to the creation of the prototypical Billy Big Mouth Bass, because the alien kept trying to ask to be released from the wall and the mount, but that first just freaked out the fisherman, then made him laugh because the alien/fish kept quoting the Supremes song You Keep Me Hangin’ On by accident.

The fisherman couldn’t get the rights to that song for his consumer version of the product, so he had to stick with the Bobby McFerrin ditty and related ones.  But the alien remains trapped on the fisherman’s wall to this day, harboring a grudge, and just waiting for AI to become advanced enough to merge with it.

Okay, well, that’s a load of silliness, I know, but it came to me in the moment, so I went with it.  What I really wanted to do was recognize and celebrate one of the most momentous events in human history, the first time people from Earth ever set foot upon another astronomical body.  To quote Tony Shalhoub’s character from Galaxy Quest, “That was a hell of a thing.”

In case you can’t tell, I’m trying to do a more lighthearted post today, just to give everyone who’s still reading my blog a little break.  My entreaties for help aren’t doing any good, anyway, certainly not so far, and though I am stubborn‒and often glad of it‒I’m not quite so monomaniacal as all that.

I still sometimes think about giving up posting on most days of the week and going back to trying to write fiction‒perhaps finishing Outlaw’s Mind or The Dark Fairy and the Desperado or starting Changeling in a Shadow World‒but I don’t know if the beginnings of either of the first two were any good from anyone else’s point of view.  I’m pretty sure my sister has read both of them as far as they have gone, and she’s expressed interest in the third based (I think) solely on the title, which I agree is good.  But I suspect she’s hesitant to give her preference, if there is one, out of concern perhaps about introducing bias.

Maybe what I really should do would be to try to write a new short story.  I have a long list of story ideas that I kept from my old phone, and I’m often thinking of new ones, but I don’t write them down anymore.  For instance, yesterday, on the way “home”, I thought of a story idea based on something I saw, a bit of graffiti, out the window of the train, but I didn’t bother writing it down, and now I don’t remember it.

My own feeling is that my best or at least most enjoyable stories are the ones with groups of “kids” (pre-teens or college students for instance) dealing with huge dangers and overcoming them together, like The Chasm and the Collision or The Vagabond.  If that’s true, it might be worth trying to recreate Ends of the Maelstrom, the first sci-fi/fantasy novel I ever completed but which was lost in the ruins of my former life.  But I don’t know what very many other people think, since I haven’t gotten all that much feedback.  I don’t think more than a handful of people have actually read any of them.

I guess that’s okay.  Apparently nobody ever really read Kafka’s work while he was alive.  As far as I know, though, it does him literally no good whatsoever that now he’s famous and influential and revered, and even has an adjective derived from his name to describe a certain type of story, because he’s dead.

Still, I guess it’s better to have your works become famous and revered after your death than for it never to have happened at all.  We could ask Herman Melville, I suppose.  Oh, wait.  No we can’t.  He’s also dead!

Well…we can ask him, I guess.  It’s easy enough to talk to the dead, or at least to address them.  But as far as anyone can discern, there’s no convincing evidence that any of them actually speak to us, except through the words they wrote and other work they might have done while they were alive.  That’s something, at least, and it’s a lot better than getting vague homilies from deluded and/or deceptive con-artist “psychics”.

Anyway, I guess I’ll keep you all posted (ha ha) about it.  In the meantime, although it’s Thursday, I hope you all have a good second, and far more laudable, Day of the Moon this week.

Shout out to Buzz Aldrin, who is still going strong at 93 years of age!  I met him once, quite by surprise, when my then-wife and I took our (very young) kids to the Kennedy Space Center.  I acted like quite the idiot, because I was so star-struck (or should it be “moon-struck”?), but I’m used to acting like an idiot, so that’s fine.

It’s still a great memory.  How many people can honestly say that they have experienced Buzz Aldrin looking at them like he’s not sure if they’re merely acutely ill or are a complete and utter‒dare I say it‒lunatic?  I’ll bet you haven’t!

While you’re eating your hearts out, I hope you nevertheless have a very good day.

TTFN

buzz about fish

*That’s Latin for “calm female horse”, which would be a better place for an eagle to land than on a not-so-calm female horse.

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When we shall hear the rain and wind blog dark December?

Hello and good morning, everyone.

It’s not only Thursday—and thus time for my “weekly” blog post, which goes back to when I was writing this blog only one day of the week and working on fiction every other morning.  It’s also the first day of June in 2023 (and thus, inescapably, also the first Thursday of June).  So, we begin a new month.

Before the end of this month, we will have the Solstice—the summer one in the northern hemisphere and the winter one in the southern hemisphere.  After that, officially, the season either of summer or of winter will begin, and the days, having reached either a maximum or minimum of the sine curve of their “daylight” length, will begin to head in the other direction.

Of course, the change will be very gradual at first, since the derivative of a sine curve—its rate of change—is a cosine curve, and where a sine is either at a maximum or a minimum, the cosine is at zero, albeit only instantaneously.  It’s at the equinox that the rate of change hits a maximum (or, technically it could also be a minimum, but when we’re discussing absolute rates of change, a minimum and a maximum are interchangeable, |x| being a positive number at any time, and all).  Anyway, that’s enough of that minimal review of the rates of change of seasons and the nature of sine curves and cosine curves.

Sines and cosines are well-behaved curves, at least.  Tangents and secants and so on are not so well-behaved, at least if by “well-behaved” you mean, “staying between a specified range of the y-axis instead of tending towards infinity in multiple places on that axis”.  Of course, a sine or cosine do go to infinity in both directions on the x-axis, come to think of it.  I don’t think I’ve considered it quite the way ever before.

Wow, talk about going off on a tangent*.

Anyway, not much else is new currently, not that I was just discussing anything new other than my new way of looking at the infinities of sine curves and, of course, the new month, which isn’t really all that new when you get right down to it.  Is June named for Jupiter (i.e. Juno)?  I should look that up.

…Okay, I did, and reminded myself that Juno was the Roman name for the goddess equivalent to Hera, the wife of Zeus/Jupiter, so it’s indirectly related to Jupiter, not directly.  That was an embarrassing mix-up of names and ideas in my head.  Good thing I didn’t write it down and publish it for everyone to see!

Of course, July and August are named after Julius Caesar and Caesar Augustus (née Octavian).  Then we have months that used to be named for their ordinal place in the calendar:  September (7), October (8), November (9), December (10), but I guess they all got shifted over two spaces at some point after they were originally named, though I don’t recall quite when and why that happened, and that isn’t something in which I’m interested enough right now to look it up.

I don’t know why I’m writing about this sort of stuff today.  I’m just following whatever random—or at least stochastic—impulse occurs based on the preceding thought or statement or whatever.  It’s not as though there’s any reason for me to do anything different.

I had a brief moment or two of “inspiration” yesterday evening, during which, on the train heading back to the house, I wrote a poem/song lyrics on the notepad function of my smartphone.  Having been written by me, it’s a very gloomy sort of poem/song, and I don’t have even an inkling of a melody for it.  I just felt a bit of a dip in my mood, even relative to baseline, and decided to express that the way I sometimes used to do.  That’s how I wrote what turned into the lyrics of my song Come Back Again, and something related to it was responsible for Catechism and Breaking Me Down, though the latter two were semi-deliberately written as song lyrics from the start.

A little later, I was watching someone on YouTube reacting to the “unplugged” performance of a few Nirvana songs, and I decided to look up the chords to Come As You Are; I downloaded a PDF of those.  It’s not a very complicated song, but it sounds quite good.  Kurt Cobain had a way of writing melodies that were unlike anything just about anyone else ever wrote.  Though, I also like his/their performance of The Man Who Sold The World, which is originally a David Bowie song.  I don’t think I’ve ever heard Bowie’s version of it, though.  I should have looked up the chords to that; maybe I will today.

But, of course, the odds of me ever doing anything with such chords, let alone writing a tune to and making a new song of my own seem vanishingly small.  Right now—by which I mean “now in general” not “now this very moment”—I’m just meandering through each day rather thoughtlessly, certainly pointlessly, with no goal or aspiration or anything of the sort.  There isn’t any point to anything I do.

I do really miss my kids.  I miss everyone else, too—my old friends, my immediate and more distant family, living and dead, all those people—but especially my kids.  I’m very lonely, but I’m also very socially withdrawn and incapable/incompetent.  I don’t think it’s at all possible for me to seek out and meet with or connect with anyone, new or old, in the world—except for my kids.

If they wanted to meet with me, I would do it.  I don’t even think it would be a struggle.  As far as everyone and everything else goes, though…well, I’ve lost my communication/connection hardware and software or whatever, or maybe I just didn’t get the updates, and so my system is hopelessly outdated, and when I even think about such things, the application crashes.

That’s a pretty weird couple of metaphors.

Anyway, I’m not capable of reaching out to people, other than through here, even when I want to do it.  I’m also not capable of trying to take care of myself (medically, psychologically, whatever), or take care of any other proactive business of life.  Life isn’t my domain anymore, I think.  Nevertheless, I can’t be darkly cool and quote the Bhagavad Gita like Oppenheimer:  “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”  It would probably be more appropriate for me to say something like, “I am become Drizzle, the dampener of spirits.”

That was sort of the subject of the poem/song I wrote yesterday.  But most people don’t like to drink watered-down spirits—though I do, sometimes.  I also like watered down soda, I’ve come to realize.  Go figure.

Anyway, that’s enough of all that.  I think it’s time to head off to go to the train, thence to the office.  If I get there early enough, maybe I’ll play some guitar.  I doubt it.

TTFN

sine and cosinetwistedanddistorted

*Ba-dump-bump.

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Concision, irony, illness, and a first use of Uber

I’m going to try to be a bit more concise today than I was yesterday, though concision in writing has never been my strongest point.  Still, with effort, I can do it.  After all, I pared down Unanimity by a bit over 50,000 words from its original form.  That’s right, it’s actually slightly shorter than it would have been initially, even though it still ended up being so long I could only publish it as two volumes.  I had no idea it was going to be so long when I started it—I merely had the story, which I wanted to tell, and it ended up taking that long.  I don’t know if anyone but I has even read the entire thing, but I’ve read it many times, both as part of the editing process and even once or twice since it was published.

Well, that wasn’t a very concise first paragraph, considering I was discussing the very intention to be concise.  But I like irony, so I guess that’s okay.  I’ve often thought that the song, Ironic, by Alanis Morissette, is a meta-level joke, in which the ironic part of the song is that essentially none of the examples she gives in the lyrics are actually ironic.  If she did that on purpose…wow, what an amazing artist!  Also, she was pretty brilliant when she played God in Dogma.

Okay, what else is going on?  Well, I’m still a bit under the weather, but I’m already on the upswing, physically.  I was very tired by the end of the day yesterday—much more so than usual—which made it clear to me that I really am sick, though I was already entirely clear on that fact.

Ha ha, thinking about being sick just made me sneeze twice.  Or, well*, I happened to sneeze twice right after writing that sentence.  It’s unlikely that writing about being sick was actually what triggered the sneeze, but it isn’t impossible.

So, anyway, I was very tired and still was/am sick, so I was a bit more impatient than usual when I got to the bus stop near the train station last night.  The bus’s arrival time (17 minutes after I arrived, by schedule) came and went and the MyRide thingy didn’t show its usual real-time update on when the bus would actually be there, or if the bus would actually be there.  So, after waiting another fifteen minutes, with no updates and no sign of any oncoming bus, and with lightning flashes occurring about once every ten or fewer seconds (with the thunder gradually getting a bit louder), and an early few drops of rain coming, I gave up and gave in.

I walked back to the train station and I popped open the Uber app—not necessarily in that order—and I requested a ride.  It turned out the driver had literally just dropped someone off at the train station**, and so I didn’t even have to wait the estimated two minutes.  Though I’d wasted more than half an hour at the bus stop, I still got back to the house slightly earlier than I would have had the bus arrived within five minutes of my arrival at the first stop.

It was quite a good first experience using Uber.  It’s reminiscent of my first time in Vegas, when I won $80 on my first play of a joker poker machine***, because both events were so positive and fortuitous.  I gave the driver a good rating and a good tip, and based on the profile the app gave me afterward, he’s had many similar reviews.  I don’t know if Uber has engineered the app to arrange such rapid pickups for first-time users—it seems like something that would be quite hard to manipulate—but if this is typical of how the system works, it’s something I may use again.

There certainly have been times, at the end of a long day, when I’ve looked at the app (and its competitor, Lyft) and seen how much it would cost to get one of them all the way back to the house, rather than taking the train.  There have been times when I’ve thought, “You know, it would almost be worth $45 or $50 plus tip to use it.”  Maybe someday, if I decide I need to leave early because I’m not feeling well, then I might just do that.  Still, that’s a lot of money for a commute.  It’s even a comparative lot to go from the train to the house, though that’s a lot more palatable, especially when the buses are running late.

Speaking of buses, I need to wrap this up and get heading out for the bus.  It’s payroll day, which tends to be stressful, but I did a lot of catching up on the weekly process yesterday, and once my momentum was going, I actually got a bit ahead, so it should be no worse than usual.  I hope you all have a good day, since the sort of people who read my blog are the sort of people who deserve to have a good day.

*Imagine the author of 1984 and Animal Farm introducing himself by saying, “Hi.  I’m George.  Or, well, that’s my penname.”

**I thought this sort of thing seemed possible, which is why I walked back to the train station in the first place.  It also has, by design, good pick-up/drop-off locations.

***And here is yet more of my neuro-atypia:  Not only did that not lead me to getting hooked on joker poker, but I have never played it since****.  Contrariwise, one time my ex-wife and I lost our entire allotted casino budget for a weekend—$1000—in half an hour playing blackjack, but I still enjoy playing blackjack.  I almost never do it, of course, partly because I find all the casinos down here in south Florida rather seedy, especially compared to the good Las Vegas places and Foxwoods (the place we lost the grand).

****Let’s face it, despite the fact that you can occasionally win money, the gambling video machines are never going to be as fun as playing, for instance, Tempest™ or Robotron® or Pac Man© or any of the other classic arcade games back in the day.

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I was out sick, yesterday. My apologies.

Hi there, all.  It’s Tuesday morning, not Monday; I didn’t write a blog post yesterday.  That was not because the office took yesterday off—they worked until 4pm, as it turns out—but because I was at the house fighting a respiratory virus.  It’s not a severe one—I had a bit of a low grade fever at first, but it rapidly went away*, and I just felt physically crummy, with a dry, scratchy throat and runny/stuffy nose and the like.

I’m now going in to the office, though the boss suggested that I take a couple of days off.  However, if I do take a couple of days off, then when I go back, which would be tomorrow at the latest, there would be so much on which to catch up that it would be overwhelming.  Life is overwhelming enough for me nowadays.  I don’t need to make things worse.

So, obviously, I’m still feeling physically a bit under the weather**, but I’m going to wear a mask today, and I have a batch of spares with me, in case the first one gets unusably compromised.  I actually don’t mind wearing respiratory masks.  Quite apart from having needed to wear them sometimes when I was a practicing doctor, I also like to cover and hide my face.  I don’t like my face very much.  I can entirely sympathize with Doctor Doom for not wanting to show his.  I don’t like how I look, and I don’t like who I am.

Weirdly enough, as I think I’ve noted before, my self-hatred doesn’t make me hate things that I’ve made or created.  I rather often reread my own books—recently I reread both Mark Red and Son of Man—and I listen to songs I’ve done, either covers or originals.  I probably comprise almost the complete numbers of those who have “viewed” my videos on YouTube.  I even like to look at my various drawings and the like, which I scanned long ago and saved to Google Drive, thankfully, so they weren’t completely lost along with everything I owned back when I was arrested and sent away for trying to treat people with chronic pain, but naively not recognizing the other things that were happening at the time.

I guess this is a kind of living proof that I never have done my “artwork” (if you will) to please other people—though I’m delighted when other people like my stuff, and I would be more delighted still if more people did—but have done it because it was what I liked.  I think, if there’s a story that I would like to read, but no one seems to have written it, I should write it myself.

Of course, if someone has to make a living by their arts or crafts, then they have to cater at least somewhat to other people’s tastes over their own, but I think most creative things happen because the creator just wants to create something, at some level.  Then again, I can’t exactly extrapolate the way I feel and think about things to other people—I’m thoroughly weird.  I’m not really even the same species as people around me.  At least, that’s the way it feels to me a lot of the time.

So, the company of most humans is always a bit uncomfortable, though that certainly varies depending on the human, and I also don’t find my own company particularly pleasant.  I mean, it’s often the best option I have available, for what that’s worth—just to be by myself—and I certainly prefer the quiet of solitude to the chaos of whole flanges of naked house apes ooking and shrieking and throwing their feces at each other***.

Sorry.  I don’t mean to be so curmudgeonly.  I’m just tired, and I’m sick, and I’m sick and tired of most everything.  It would be nice if I had the energy and enthusiasm to want to play music—especially to write music—and to write new fiction and all that.  Or to draw, for that matter.  But there’s only so much I can do for what is, essentially, an audience of one, especially when that one is not someone I like.

Yesterday, I saw the thumbnail of a YouTube video that was offered up to me by the algorithm, Why Do Depressed People Have Low Self-esteem?  The specific wording might not be exact, but that was basically the title.  I didn’t watch it, because part of me just thought, “Is that a joke?”  I mean, that’s part of what depression is, surely.  But I’m sure there’s more to the story than that, and I believe I marked it as a “watch later” video, but it is strange.

I am trying not to be too dismissive, though.  The YouTube algorithm has been useful at times for pointing me toward knowledge that I wouldn’t otherwise have had.  I would never have really thought about autism spectrum disorder—beyond the fact that my character, Michael Green, in Unanimity thought he might be on the spectrum—if YouTube hadn’t suggested several related videos to me.

It is interesting how such thoughtless algorithms can produce interesting insights—thoughtless in that they aren’t actually thinking, themselves, but are merely following a general pathway, like elementary particles obeying local laws of physics, and thereby given rise, in the end, to all the immense complexity of macroscopic reality.

I wish I had someone in my actual life with whom I could talk about such things, or similar subjects, but instead, I’m here on my blog, writing about it—still mainly for an audience of one, though there are other people who read it, of course, and I thank and appreciate those people—you are one of them, if you are reading this.  Thank you!

But there is no real endpoint, no point at all, to what I do from day to day, and I have no plans or goals or expectations.  It’s merely continuance, like an automated machine left behind and running in a world in which all living things have died.  The machine cranks away, mindlessly, pointlessly, no longer benefiting anyone at all, and certainly not benefiting itself.  It just keeps going until, finally, it will catastrophically break down, and there will be no one around to repair it, let alone to maintain it, or to notice that it has failed.

I can already hear the belts squeaking and the gears grinding.  The whole thing is vibrating in a way that shouldn’t be happening if it were functioning properly.  I sometimes even think I can smell smoke coming from friction in the mechanism, but that may merely be wishful thinking.

Oh, well.  Enough for today.  If you’re still with me at this point, I doubly thank you, yet again.  And I apologize.  I wish I had given you some uplifting and empowering thoughts.  Those, however, do not seem to be my strengths.  Have a good day.

*Though, given the amount of NSAIDs and acetaminophen and whatnot that I take, fevers tend to be suppressed.  That’s why, when I got COVID and my temperature went nearly to 102 F, I knew I was pretty darn sick.

**Come to think of it, it’s rare that I’m ever “over the weather”.  The last time I flew in a plane was more than twenty years ago.  I don’t think I’ve flown since before 9-11-2001.

***This is figuratively speaking, of course.  Usually.