dysthymia

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Let’s put the day in a box, or something

It’s Tuesday morning, the day after Christmas‒called Boxing Day in the UK and related places, though I’ve encountered no consistent, good explanation for that name‒and I’m sitting at the train station, waiting for the 2nd train of the day to bring me toward the office.

I’m writing this post on my smartphone because I semi-accidentally left my laptop computer at the office on Saturday.  I say “semi-accidentally” because although I realized that I hadn’t packed it in plenty of time to correct that oversight, I decided to give myself a wee break from carrying it.  It’s not that much of a chore, but considering how unenthusiastic I am regarding doing anything at all, I think it’s a tolerable reduction in load.

I haven’t yet signed up for health insurance.  I really ought to try to do it sometime this week.  My sister has offered to help me with it, since such processes are so unpleasant for me that I usually honestly feel I would rather sicken and die than do them‒I’m predisposed that way, anyway, so it’s not that big a leap‒but when I spoke with her on the phone yesterday, I completely forgot to ask how she might do that.  She’s over 1000 miles away, so I’m not sure what the help would entail.  I should check with her.

I certainly don’t want to go through any government services.  Quite apart from my own experiences of injustice at the hands of state and county and federal levels of government, the disgusting spectacle of how our government has run itself, and how our politics have become so moronically fractured, gives me not merely a lack of faith in their ability to carry out their roles, but a kind of anti-faith.  I believe, or at least suspect, that they will not merely fail to ensure justice and order but that they will actually engender and even enforce injustice and will, over time, make all things worse.

This is not a partisan position.  Though the specifics of their degeneracy and dysfunction differ, both political parties in the US have attributes ranging from the pathetic to the disgusting (and almost no remaining redeeming features).  They are mere mockeries of political parties that are supposed to represent the interests of the people of their communities and states and the nation.  Watching the misbegotten antics of the cretins in positions of power, it is only too obvious how much each and every one of them is but a baboon with delusions of grandeur, trying to work a machine which it has not even the capacity to understand.

All three branches of the federal government have become little better than frat boys from opposing universities at a college football game, chanting idiotic, drunken slogans at each other, getting into brawls, trying to show off for each other, painting their faces, going topless in below zero weather…not doing anything productive at all but definitely doing their best to prevent the “other side” from doing anything productive.  Meanwhile, the actual work that is supposed to be done by these people‒whose chosen and sought-after role was nominally to work for the good of the people they represent, regardless of party affiliation‒is not even addressed in anything but sound bite form.

Oh, asteroids and alien invaders, where are you?  We need a catastrophe that cannot be “blamed” on any other political affiliate to remind everyone of how government is a tool, not a fundamental entity, and that political parties are not-so-necessary evil.

The people in our local, state, and national governments are NOT our “leaders”.  They never have been.  Leaders create innovation, they march in front, they accept responsibility, and they put their personal well-being on the line in service of some (hopefully beneficial) goal.  We do not elect leaders‒that’s practically a contradictory notion.  At best, we elect managers.  These people are our servants, our employees, and we should treat them as such.  When they do a crappy job‒as almost all of them do‒we should fire them, not invent excuses to blame their poor performance on the “other side” or whatever.

It’s not really about “blame”.  It’s about actually getting the job done.  I don’t necessarily blame a person for being a bad carpenter, for instance‒maybe that person tries really hard but just doesn’t have the knack.  But once I realize they aren’t very good, I’m not going to use their services.  And even if I don’t know for certain how good a new person is going to be, if the current carpenter has less than a 20% approval rating, most random alternatives are likely to be better.  And we can keep trying new people until we find good ones.

I fear the system is going to have to burn itself down across the board before any better setup occurs.  That’s a shame, because at its root, the US Constitution has some pretty good ideas.  It’s a decent operating system*, and it has a built-in ability to be updated.  It’s certainly a better system than nearly all the people involved in elected positions based upon it, and that is the advantage of rule of law versus rule of person.

But of course, all laws have to be created and then carried out by naked house apes who are more driven by personal dominance hierarchy jockeying that serves inbuilt reproductive urges than by any higher brain functions.  Their cortexes** appear to be used almost entirely for making excuses, for post-hoc justification of actions they took on whims and urges of personal indulgence, instead of assessing reality and deciding what is honestly best to do.

As Eliezer Yudkowsky pointed out, if you enter the final balance in the ledger (or list of pros and cons) before you begin to do any figuring, all your figuring is irrelevant.  It does not provide any information.  At most, it’s there to deceive, and the fact that it serves to deceive the deceiver as well provides no absolution for the deceiver.  Reality gives no free passes.

Anyway, I don’t know how that got started.  I certainly didn’t plan to write about it.  But there it is.  I guess it wasn’t far from the front of my mind.  Honestly, if it weren’t for my children, and the children of my sister and some of my friends, I would just as soon see the whole world literally burn.  It’s going to happen someday, in any case, and if humans are just going to be carrying out their dumbshow over and over, with rises and falls of cultural intelligence, but with the lowest common denominator always thoughtlessly sabotaging the higher, it may well be a net gain simply to head off decades or centuries or millennia or eons of net misery with a return to zero.

Hope you’re having a happy holiday season!

*Maybe part of the problem is that, though the operating system is good, there’s never been any chance to reboot or even “sleep” the system.  So, it has continued to accumulate errors, inefficiencies, conflicting bits of data, until they make every program unable to run efficiently, or at all.  We don’t need to change the Constitution, and probably not even the laws (at least not to start); we need to change all the people (and the political parties).  We should just sweep them away, clearing the browser history and the cookies and the RAM and all that, and restart with the operating system unchanged, but without all the baggage.

**Should that be “cortices”?

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Peculiar thoughts prior to the 1st of 2 holiday weekends

It’s Friday morning, and I did not walk to the train today.  Neither did I walk back from the train yesterday evening.  I didn’t really think I was going to do the “yesterday evening” thing, and I didn’t really intend to do the “this morning” thing, because I didn’t want to push it after having taken a long time off since doing any longish walking.

I don’t feel fatigued or sore or anything, but there is some chafing here and there that tends to happen when I restart walking seriously, but which I somehow forget every time until it happens again.  There’s some flaw there in the code I’m running in my brain, it seems.  Then again, there are many flaws in my brain code, so I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised.

I’m scheduled to work tomorrow, so I will be writing a blog post unless they cancel the work day because no one is going to show up.  As far as I know, though, I will be working, so keep a weather eye on the horizon.  If the workday is canceled, then I guess the next blog post I will write will be on Tuesday morning, since I think even our office is going to be closed on Monday.

I’m writing on my laptop computer today, since I have the time before the train comes, and I’m not sweaty and there are plenty of seats.  I’ve been trying to be upbeat and whimsical and so on in my recent blog posts, but I don’t think I’m going to do that today.  For one thing, those posts don’t seem to garner as much attention and readership as my despondent and despairing and hateful blog posts.

I’m not sure why that is.  Perhaps the things which I find interesting and entertaining and “positive” to discuss are not what most readers find engaging.  If one is to base one’s assessment on the “reels” that are shown on Facebook, which I’ve been sort of auditing lately out of (rapidly dwindling) curiosity, then people’s interests are very silly and rather pathetic, though they can often be quite funny.  Of course, it’s probably rather silly and very pathetic that I’m even indulging my morbid curiosity by looking at them.

I haven’t been reading any books at all for some time.  Just ask Kindle; it apparently keeps track of my “streaks” and “records” and whatnot.  That is ever-so-slightly disconcerting, but I know there are essentially no humans involved in keeping track of me personally—at least not with respect to my reading.  It’s all mindless, algorithmic stuff, and the algorithms aren’t all that good, it seems, because Amazon is pretty bad at recommending books in which I’m interested*.

Sean Carroll and Sam Harris are much better at finding people with ideas I want to explore; a good many of the books I’ve read in recent years have been by people I’ve first encountered in one of both of their podcasts.  I guess that’s not too surprising.  I’m interested in their thoughts, so I’m likely to be interested in people they find interesting.

I still haven’t set up my health insurance.  I have a real mental block about this, or an emotional block, or whatever.  I don’t know how much it’s going to cost, for one thing, but the real barrier is, I think, my self-hatred.  I worry that, if I get health insurance, I’m going to feel obligated in some strange way to take care of myself and try to maintain and then improve my overall health and lifespan.  But that’s only going to prolong my existence, which I don’t consider a win.

I’ve probably mentioned this before, but I have almost a fantasy of being diagnosed with some sort of inevitably terminal illness that will give me a short bit of time at least to try to connect with and say goodbye to people I love, and which will then kill me with relatively little mess.  It’s the sort of thing I think many people would want at the end of their lives (though they probably would want to put it off as long as possible) if the symptoms weren’t too unpleasant and could be palliated at reasonably low cost, so one wasn’t absolutely miserable in the time approaching one’s death.

Unfortunately, we usually do not get to choose, and we often get no warnings.

Well, actually, in a sense, we all get very long-term warnings.  Any sensible person is on constructive notice from an early age that someday death will come for them.  I suppose most people try to avoid thinking about it, but that doesn’t make it go away.

It’s interesting occasionally to think of the various other animals in the world and wonder how many of them ever recognize, at anything other than a rudimentary, acute, fight-or-flight response level, that they are going to die.  I think very few of them do.  Perhaps the cetaceans do, since many of them are both very intelligent and social, and they appear to communicate to some significant degree.  I’m not sure how much even the other great apes (apart from humans) actually recognize their own individual mortality.  I sometimes suspect that elephants know, but I’m not sure what gives me that impression.

If there are birds that are aware of mortality, I suppose it would probably be the corvids.  I guess it would be appropriate if ravens knew about death.

Huh.  That may end up being the substance of my pre-holiday message, ironically enough, though there really isn’t any substance or any point to what I’ve written today.  Of course, that’s probably entirely appropriate, since there is no apparent teleological substance to life itself.  It just happens, and then it stops.  This may be true even of the universe as a whole.

That’s okay.  Something doesn’t have to have some external purpose to be worth happening.  Just as one can enjoy reading a book or watching a movie or show, or listening to a song, that has no deep message or purpose or meaning other than itself, one can—potentially—enjoy a life without any meaning other than its own existence.

If only I could put that set of ideas into practice.  Alas, we here return to the faulty code I’m running.  If only I could update that more readily.  Goodness knows I’d do something more useful than Google and Microsoft and all the others do with most of their updates.  I may despise myself, but I do think comparatively highly of at least some of my capacities.

You would think that would give me at least some sense of satisfaction, but unfortunately it makes me feel worse about my character and nature.  And that seeming contradiction bring me back to lamenting my buggy code, and thus I appear to be stuck in a meta-level loop, or a perhaps in an old, Basic-style “Return without Gosub” error.

Oh, well.  Have a good day please, and if I don’t write anything else before then, I hope those of you who celebrate it have a Merry Christmas.

*YouTube has a better track record with video recommendations, but that’s deteriorating gradually, or I am, or both.

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Causality, relativity, uncertainty, and attractive versus repulsive gravity–these are worth celebrating

Okay, well, I’m writing this blog post from the office, because this is where I slept last night after the holiday party.  We did not have the party at the office, just to be clear.  We had it at a very decent restaurant called Maggiano’s, which may be part of a chain to some extent, I think.  It was a nice enough restaurant, food-wise, and the building and the outside lights were quite beautiful (see below).  However, inside, it was way too crowded and noisy, and we were seated at a very long, narrow table against a wall.

I felt incredibly stressed when we first arrived; I can hardly hear out of my right ear for one, and I have had tinnitus in it since about 2007 or so, and everything else was a tumult and commotion.  There was too much visual sensory overload also, and way too many people in too close quarters.  I miss the social mores of the pandemic, honestly.  I was barely able to endure long enough for our server to get me a drink so I could calm down a little.  I almost left and just walked back to the office.

My difficulties with such things have gotten worse over time, probably at least partly because I only ever used to go to restaurants and whatnot with people with whom I felt quite comfortable—my family, near and extended, then my wife, her family, our family, and so on—so there was always someone on whom I could focus, and with whom I could speak.

The drinks were rather weak, which may be good, since it was a work night, but I had to drink several to keep from tensing up.  Even so, at the end of the night, when they wanted to take a big group photo, I just walked away.  I had been dodging pictures all night already; there was a terribly annoying number of them, because everyone has their own little cameras in their smartphones, so instead of conversation—which was very difficult with anyone more than one seat away, and pretty hard even with those neighbors—people just took their little, instant, digital snaps, which I suspect will never really be used for recalling memories.

I’ve said it before, it’s not the case that things on the internet (or smartphones or whatever) are forever, as is sometimes claimed.  There is such a cacophony of data and images and whatnot, a good portion of it now not even being “real”, that most things will be swiftly lost like a drop of ink in a roiling, stormy ocean, or the quantum information of something that’s fallen in a black hole.  In principle it’s all there, but in practice it’s as lost as the echoes of Julius Caesar’s death rattle.

I guess it was a pretty nice evening, and the food was pretty good.  The salad was above average, and the broccoli I had on the side with my ziti dish was good.  It was all certainly well above the level of, for instance, the Olive Garden, but it was terribly noisy, literally and figuratively.  By the end, when we were the last party in the restaurant, it was still noisy, because our group was terribly noisy, and it was embarrassing and unpleasant.

I think I mostly at least prevented anyone from capturing my disgusting current face and form on camera in anything other than, perhaps, an oblique angle.  I really don’t like how I look, or how I feel, and certainly don’t want it memorialized, even if it’s evanescent and ephemeral*.

After the party, I was brought back to the office, which is only about four miles from the restaurant.  I could have walked, since the night was reasonably cool, but since I knew I wouldn’t be taking a shower, I decided not to do that.  I have washed up this morning and applied antiperspirant and aftershave (or whatever you call it when you haven’t actually shaved) and I brushed my teeth and everything.  I slept on the floor, with my backpack as my pillow, and it was about as comfortable as sleeping at the house, and I got about 3 hours of sleep.

This is the state in which my life is and has been for years now:  sleeping at the office and spending time here (by myself) is just as pleasant as being at the place where I nominally live.  That’s because I have no life, and I don’t expect one to occur again for me.  I’m really absolutely dismal and morose and unpleasant, even to myself.

I’ve hardly even read anything in over three weeks now, which is very weird and rare for me.  The single thing to which I’m now looking forward is the Doctor Who Christmas special, and that’s not a huge draw, just a pleasant one.  It’s not as though I’m actually watching it with anyone or can talk about it with a friend or anything.

I got out the hardcover books Spacetime and Geometry and Quantum Field Theory, As Simply as Possible at the office.  I have them resting on the desk, hoping to entice myself during any downtime I might have at work.  So far it hasn’t paid off, but I would like to master the mathematics of GR well enough that I can understand intuitively why a uniform energy field permeating space generates “repulsive gravity”.  I understand that it does, but I don’t have a good picture of it in my head, whereas I do have a much clearer intuitive sense of why the curvature of spacetime (especially the time part) leads to the apparent force of attractive gravity.

In a way, that’s my only remaining unaccomplished (and reasonably achievable) goal.  Quantum field theory is interesting and all, but the basic concepts of it seem fairly straightforward to me**.  Contrary to what people often say, quantum mechanics (et al) are only really counter-intuitive if you insist upon trying to apply macroscopic and mesoscopic intuitions to phenomena that happen at much smaller scales.  It’s a bit like expecting one of your bathroom tiles to behave just like the Burj Khalifa, only the scale is much more disparate between the quantum and the macroscopic.

People seem somehow puzzled by the notion of how complementary pairs of one’s measurements of quantum “particles” can never be more accurate than a certain level, as if this is truly different from measurements of macroscopic phenomena.  I’m quite sure that the errors when measuring, say, the mass or velocity of something as large as an elephant, or a car, or what have you, are waaaaaay huger than the absolute uncertainty in measurement of the position and/or momentum of a particle.  They’re just not as noticeable because the thing itself is big, and so the percentage of the error might be smaller and less consequential.

But we know things change with scale, like surface to volume ratios and whatnot.  An uncertainty of a millimeter when measuring a blue whale is hardly relevant, but if you’re measuring an ant, it could easily be crucial, and if you’re measuring a dust mite that error would be larger than the organism.

I also don’t get the objection to the possible “many worlds” description of quantum mechanics that derives from the fact that we only ever see and experience one world.  I don’t know why that puzzles people.  It’s not as if you can see both the outside and the inside of all the solid objects around you.  If you touch the near surface of a basketball with one finger, you can’t feel the opposite side of the ball with the same finger at the same time.

Yet, there’s no real doubt that the inside and the other side of physical objects really exist.  We just can’t sense the whole of any given thing at once.  Any part of space that will never enter our future light cones is something we will never, ever see at all***, but we don’t have any good reason to doubt that far distant regions of spacetime exist.  Internal consistency of reality and logical coherence of the world seem to demand many things existing with which we will not, and sometimes cannot, ever interact.

Okay, that was a weird tangent.  My apologies.  Anyway, I doubt that I’m going to achieve my “dream” of getting an intuitive, mathematical understanding, something I can feel, about why spacetime expands in the presence of a uniform energy.  After all, it’s something about which I honestly care, and my track record with such things is abysmal.  I don’t expect to achieve anything else of value, even to me, in my life.

I’m tired, I’m sad, I’m depressed, I’m alone; the only person in whose presence I always find myself is a person I despise (me).  My catharsis via this blog isn’t working.  I’m getting no help, though I wish for it, but I’m not sure how well I would respond if some were to come.  Maybe, like the wonderful simile Sting used in Be Still My Beating Heart, I would wriggle like a fish caught on dry land, unable to tell the difference between help and danger, between an offer of comfort and a warning of pain.

Whatever.  Sorry, that’s all pathetic, isn’t it?

In closing, I wonder if anyone listened to my little audio snippet yesterday, and if anyone thought it was worth it for me to try to do such a thing more often.  Let me know in the comments (on WordPress) if you have any feedback to offer.  Thanks.

maggianos

*Performing together live, for the first time.

**Straightforward for quantum field theory type things, anyway, to be fair.  I don’t mean that it’s not complex (ha ha! it uses complex numbers all the time, get it?) but I have a sort of picture of how the processes work, and it makes sense.  The rest would just be building details and specifics on top of the basic framework, which is a lot, of course, but there’s no real intellectual hurdle to be cleared.

***Assuming we do not discover any exceptions or workarounds to special relativity and the speed-of-causality limit.  There could in principle be workarounds, but it seems unlikely that there are local exceptions to the cosmic speed limit.  In any case, even such exceptions shouldn’t violate chains of causality.

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On the eighth day of Hanukkah…nothing much happened

It’s Friday morning, December 15th, and I’m waiting at the train station for the second train of the day, again.  It’s really quite windy this morning, even more so than it has been the past few days, but it’s not as rainy.  There’s just a slight bit of drizzle around, and some of even that is probably just the wind blowing former rain off the trees.

I’m not sure what I should write about today that won’t just be rehashing all the other crap I’ve been writing nearly every day.  It doesn’t seem to do me any good as therapy, and it certainly doesn’t seem to do you people any good as readers.

It also hasn’t really seemed to garner me any real help, other than perhaps being at some level the trigger for my ex-wife to ask me to sign up for health insurance.  That was, of course, a nice impulse on her part, although it’s very stressful for me, and I haven’t yet done it, though I’m supposed to try to get it done by today.  I keep hoping there will be a car accident or some health catastrophe that will take it all out of my hands before I have to go through with it, because I find the prospect ridiculously stressful.

I don’t trust “the government” if they’re involved in the process, but I also don’t trust private industry.  You may say that I have only myself to blame for my issues, then, to which I would reply…well, blame isn’t a very useful concept most of the time, but it’s definitely because of my own psychopathology that I am in my situation.  The only person who’s ever been able really to beat me is me, but that guy really is quite dedicated to the task.  I’m probably not too unusual in this.  I suspect it’s the case for a great many people.

My sister has also offered to help with getting the insurance together.  I’m not sure what she might be able to do from where she is.  She may know, but I’m not sure.  I’m hoping to go through a person who got a good deal on insurance for a work friend, and presumably that can be done over the phone.  I hate talking on the phone most of the time, partly because I have difficulty hearing, but also just because I am quite awkward, socially.  Still, I hope I can do it.

I really need some help, and with a lot of things.  It’s sad and painful to say it, but there are many aspects of life in human civilization that I find very uncomfortable and alien and anathema to me.  And though I have work friends, I have no real other friends of any kind, and as I’ve said, my family is scattered hundreds to thousands of miles away.  I don’t do online relationships very well, other than my ongoing relationship with the likes of Amazon.  Ha ha.

Incidentally, I have the weekend “off”, so I won’t be writing my blog either tomorrow or the next day.  The Sunday thing is nothing new; I almost never write a blog on Sunday, and when I was writing fiction, I never wrote fiction on Sunday.  I had to give myself some mental break, and it made sense to do it on the day when I never did have to work.

Today is the last day of Hanukkah, of course.  I’ve been neglecting lighting the candles at work, though I have a nice little menorah there.  After the first two days, it just felt sad.  Actually, it felt sad the first few days, too, since it’s the sort of thing one does with one’s family, especially with one’s kids.

It’s a weird thing to think of wanting to have medical care for myself.  Having been on the delivering end of much life-prolonging care, I know only too well how much we tend to strain to stretch out the latter portion of our days, even when all it really does is compound misery, or at least make it last longer.

Pediatric medicine makes more sense—we should prevent kids from suffering and/or dying young and from falling victim to illnesses that might harm their later life and joy.  But why do wasted, washed-up, older people like me*, who are alone and sad and depressed even want to stay alive, other than due to persistent but pointless biological drives?

I’m not saying that I’m drain on the world or anything; I earn a living and pay my rent and electricity and water and cable and food and everything.  But I have a chronic illness from which I’ve been suffering most of my life**, and though there are treatments for it, there is no known cure.  It has a fatality rate—just counting suicides, not addressing the manifold ways in which it wears away at general health—that is worse than many cancers.  And I possess several of the attributes that are associated with increased risk of suicide, including age, solitude, probable “neurodivergence”, chronic pain, all that good stuff.

Why is there no physician-assisted suicide available anywhere for chronic depression?  It’s certainly as miserable as just about any disease can be—it turns one into the spiteful Satan of one’s own personal Hell.  Of course, the real trouble with a physician-assisted suicide for depression is that, by definition (if you will) the person involved is suffering from mental illness that affects that person’s judgment about the process, so legitimate consent is troublesome.  I guess I can’t blame “the powers that be” for wanting to keep their fingers out of that particular pie.

Perhaps that’s evidence that they’re not entirely unethical.  Mostly, they’re just largely nonethical.

My train is going to be arriving in a few moments, so I’ll wrap up for the day, feeling no closer to any improvement in my situation than I was at the beginning of the week.  I am giving up on the dietary changes I recently began; my GI tract has gotten no better with it over several days, and it’s just not worth the suffering to try to sustain it.  I’ll try to go back to a more workable healthy solution.

What I really want is to be able to rest and to feel rested.  Obviously I didn’t do that last night, or the night before, or pretty much all the way back to the mid-nineties.  And then, there was only one night I can remember on which I slept and awoke refreshed.

It stands out because it was such a departure from the norm.

Oh, well.  Life is hard.  It’s also a cereal and a game and a magazine.  Time is just a magazine, as far as I know.  And Scientific American has become an ironic, contradictory insult to its former self.

Have a good day and a nice weekend, please.

Happy-Hanukkah-

*Yes, I’m “only” 54, but I have felt much older for quite a long time.  My subjective age has been increasing on an exponential growth curve for years.  Sadly, my wisdom does not appear to have been growing similarly, and it may actually be diminishing.

**Dysthymia/depression, in case that isn’t clear.

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They will eat like wolves and blog like devils

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, the 14th of December in 2023 (AD or CE), and it’s the second to last day of Hanukkah.  Not that such a thing matters to me, really.  I don’t have anyone with whom I’m celebrating this or any other holiday.

I’m not really celebrating anything at all, come to think of it.  That seems appropriate.  What, really, is there in this world for me to celebrate that isn’t drowned out by all the noise and idiocy and spitefulness and pettiness?

I’m waiting for the second train today, not the first.  I was awake well in time for the first train, but there was not really any point in trying to get to that one.  It was at least as crowded as the second train has been, and getting to the office an hour earlier just left me puttering around there.  Also, it may have contributed to me writing quite a long blog post, yesterday.

I’m not sure if anyone actually read yesterday’s post all the way through.  Certainly, no one appears to have left any comments, even on “social” media—although I guess someone might have commented since yesterday afternoon, which was the last time I checked.

I’ve decided to go back to wearing my slightly larger Timberland boots, which—obviously enough—I have neither given away nor discarded.  They are simply more comfortable and feel more protective than most of my other shoes or boots.

I haven’t been doing any long-distance walking for a while, but I’ve walked in total 2 to 3 miles a day each day this week, and there doesn’t seem to be any particular problem with the boots.  Of course, my back and my legs hurt—a lot—but they almost always hurt, so it’s difficult to attribute that to the boots.  I’ve also not been wearing knee or ankle braces at all this week, because they’re irritating me.  They probably give me some benefits, of course, but sometimes I just don’t care.

I’ve been trying to eat a somewhat healthier diet this week—heavy on legumes and beans and nuts and stuff and light on breads and cheeses and all that.  I haven’t even had any meat at all.  So far, it’s given me terrible gastrointestinal discomfort and has made me feel unwell, but I’m hopeful that this is just because of the shift in diet, and that my system will adjust itself.  If it doesn’t do so soon, I may give up on the notion.

Basically, I’m trying to do something, almost anything, to improve my overall daily mood and energy and motivation.  Because I really don’t feel any interest in or joy regarding much of anything anymore.  I haven’t read more than three or four pages of any book this week (in aggregate), fiction or nonfiction.  That’s weird for me, and it’s not a good sign.  But I cannot seem to conjure any interest.

If you’ve been reading my blog so far this week, you know I said that I would try to find health insurance for which I could sign up and which I could afford, and I have today and tomorrow left to try to meet my deadline.

That’s a good word, “deadline”.  But I guess it may be somewhat ironic when discussing health insurance.

Having that task before me really stresses me out; I don’t like it hanging over me, but I also don’t want to do it, particularly when I don’t even want to take care of myself.  The only possible silver lining might be that, just maybe, I might be able to check myself into some mental health facility that’s slightly better than some Florida county or state level shit-holes.  I doubt it.

I probably ought to be in some mental health place.  I’m almost certainly a “danger to myself”, at least for some portion of most days.  Not that I have imminent plans, mind you; don’t get all excited and call the local police.  I’m cleverer than that.

It’s quite windy and a bit rainy around these parts today, as it was yesterday afternoon.  That probably contributes to my back and legs flaring up above their usual baseline.  I’m still keeping up with my pull-ups and dips, though I need to get back into doing more crunches.  Maybe that would help my GI and back trouble.  It might make it worse.  It might have no effect whatsoever.

That’s the conundrum, and I cannot really do a case/control, double-blind sort of test to find out clearly what the reality is.  It may be that the boots I’m wearing now have never actually caused me any trouble, and that it was merely coincidence that I had flares-up before when wearing them.  Or my assessment may have been accurate.

None of it really matters, anyway.  I should just walk and walk, as much as I can, and to hell with the pain.  It’s not as though resting makes it go away, though pain does make one not want to do much.  That’s a biological, organismal thing, though, and it doesn’t necessarily make for the local best decision.

The train will be here in a few minutes, so I’ll wrap up this waste of your time for today.  If you’re celebrating Hanukkah, please have a good last few days thereof.  Please have a good day and good days in general if you can.  If you feel like commenting, please do so.  If you are able to “like” a post and wish to do so, please do.  If not, it won’t hurt my feelings.  I won’t even know it didn’t happen, not in any specific sense.  Eight billion people fail to “like” my posts every day, and I hardly even notice most of them.

TTFN

red eyed wolf smaller

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Don’t offer any spare change for my sake

It’s Monday morning, December 11th (2023), and they’re starting the new Tri-Rail schedule today.  The first train of the day was moved much earlier—to 4:20—but then the second one was moved back to 5:20, so now I’m waiting for that, since the earlier one is long gone; I didn’t think to leave the house early enough to get here for it.

I thought that the second train was at 4:50, because during peak hours they’ve set them to be every half hour, but apparently this early it isn’t “peak hours”.  I could have made it for the earlier one; it’s not as though I slept more than about half an hour to an hour all of last night.

I know, this is all really boring and pathetic stuff about which to write.  Sorry I can’t be one of those bloggers who writes about would-be helpful subjects, or about travels—those can be interesting—or be like WEIT, the website I like to follow, where PCC(E) writes about all manner of interesting things, because he’s actually an interesting person.

I’ve found myself inadvertently given various obstacles to following that website the way I normally had for years.  If I follow it on Reader, I cannot comment, but I can “like” the post…but I cannot see or like any of the other comments at all.  And if I follow it on the regular site directly, I don’t get updates in the Reader like I prefer to do, and writing comments, while possible, is unwieldy.

I think I’m going to give up.  It’s very sad for me, but I don’t like all these changes.  Websites and apps and everything else are all always changing and updating—usually in utterly useless and barely even cosmetic ways—once a month or more, or so it feels.  I guess they imagine that to remain static is to fall behind, but their changes are not usually improvements.

This is a predictable outcome, since while all improvement is change, most change is not improvement.  Even on a one-dimensional setting, things are more likely to worsen or stay the same than to improve (although, admittedly, that’s only a difference of one point on the line).  When things are more complicated, it’s far more likely for things to be worse than to be better if they are changed randomly.

For people like me, all these stupid little changes, even if only cosmetic, are just stress-inducing.  In some ways, it was better when you had to buy new editions of software and the like every now and then in order to get updates and upgrades.  Then, the updates were worthwhile, and were vetted and tweaked and all sorts, because there was some cost to putting them out there and to getting them.  Now, who gives a crap at the various software companies?  If the latest update turns out to be detrimental or irritating to people, they can just “fix” it in next week’s update.

Case in point:  the Uber app has changed its main page for when one is awaiting a driver, but not in any way that improves the substance—they’ve just altered the way the window looks and made the whole thing more unwieldy and childish-looking than it was before.  Why?  I don’t know*.  Possibly some software writer had to justify his or her continuing employment, and doing something substantive would have taken more mental effort.  Better just to take formerly clear data and put it inside a rectangle with rounded corners—wouldn’t want anyone to poke themselves on those purely graphical, sharp right angles—with only part of the data showing and in a big, ugly font.

And humans are so stupid, they’ll think they’re getting something new and be excited about the updates, as they are with the new phones that come out every other day.

The world is so stress-inducing, I really cannot tolerate it much longer.  I’ve said that I would get myself signed up for some form of health insurance, and I don’t want to break my word, but the very prospect—and the fact that I was asked to do it—almost feels as if I’m being set up for something.  I know that’s crazy, but it’s a feeling that exists.  I feel as if I’m being herded into some metaphorical abattoir.

I feel so overwhelmed by the very prospect of doing the insurance, though, that I feel like I want to die this week, before my unofficial deadline for signing up for it.  It’s ridiculous, I know, but the pressure is getting overwhelming, and I have no source of relief, no personal support, no tidings of comfort or joy.

I suspect the train is going to be more crowded than usual, and that’s pretty stress-inducing, too.  There are definitely more people waiting at the track than there usually were for either the former 4:45 or the former 5:15 trains.

I don’t think I can stand all this much longer.  I have a semi-serious of going to the sidewalk in front of the courthouse in West Palm Beach and immolating myself, so I can at least become some kind of protest or something.  I have collected enough flammable liquids to make it workable, and I have a backpack big enough to carry them.

But, of course, that’s a somewhat scary way to die—fire and all, I mean.  Even for a former Boy Scout who has a bit of fire bug in him, like so many of us did, it’s an intimidating thought.  Still, I tested out the backpack for its carrying capacity yesterday, just to see, because I was feeling particularly low at that time.  It could do the job.

I don’t know what to do.  I wish I could calm my mind.  I wish I could sleep.  I wish the world were not so stupid, and that I were not so stupid, also.  I don’t think I can do this much longer…maybe not very much longer at all.  I feel like I have a shorter remaining time to figure something out than I had thought I had…a lot shorter.

Just the thought of getting on the newly scheduled, overcrowded train feels like it’s going to be more than I’m prepared to handle.  I really hate this.  I hate my life.  I really, really hate it.

I don’t know what I’m going to do.  I guess, as long as I’m around, I’ll keep doing these blog posts.  Aren’t you all lucky?

Have a good day.

*He’s on third.

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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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Candles and tears and songs and memories of the late, great “Johnny Ace”*

It’s Friday morning, the end of the work week for many—though not for me, this week—and it’s also the first full day of Hanukkah.  I won’t post any more pictures of dreidels and so on, but I may still remind my readers daily while the holiday lasts.

It’s not as though the world is politely restrained about the other upcoming major festival, after all.  Though, of course, Hanukkah isn’t really that major a festival in Judaism, compared to things like Passover or Yom Kippur and such.  It’s just become major in competition, if you will, with Christmas, as a children’s holiday.

I don’t have any issue with that.  The more reasons one can find to celebrate with friends and family and encourage joy in the darker days of the year, the better, as far as I can see.  That growth curve might level off and even dip downward eventually as one piles on more and more such reasons for celebration; reality is rarely governed by truly linear equations, after all.  But I don’t think we’re anywhere near the peak of the curve, so have at it.

Today is also the anniversary of what was, in my memory, the most horrifying news event in my young life:  the murder of John Lennon**.

I’ve said it before, the Beatles were my first true religion, in a sense.  I cannot recall ever not knowing almost all of their songs by heart.  I was the youngest of three children, I was born in 1969, and my sister and brother were big fans (for as long as I can remember, anyway, which is of course, not as far back as they can).  So the Beatles were ever-present.

The number two spot in my list of favorite bands has varied over the years—the Police, Pink Floyd, now Radiohead—but the number one position has never been seriously challenged, even as I’ve heard more bands, even as I’ve heard and played more music of all kinds, from “ancient” to modern, from western to middle-eastern and eastern and so on.

Of course, the Beatles have recently had their latest new number one single, Now and Then, which was grown from the root of a recording John had done on a cheap cassette tape*** in the late ‘70s.  I won’t say it’s on a par with In My Life or I Feel Fine or Come Together, but since John Lennon was stolen from us by an insect—as it’s put in Elton John’s song, Hey, Hey, Johnny—it’s what we have, and it’s not bad at all.

Still, it’s terribly sad to think of what the world may have missed.  Not long before he was murdered, John had gotten back into the recording studio after a long hiatus, releasing his album, Double Fantasy.  Who knows what might have happened had he lived?  A true Beatles reunion of some kind or another might have been in the offing, and in any case, it’s almost certain that John Lennon would have created much more music in the four plus decades since 1980.

One often sees memes with clichés about how, if one has left one person’s life better before one dies, then one’s life has been worth living.  Imagine then the massively negative weighting of the life of the person that stole from the world potentially forty years’ worth of John Lennon’s music.  And that suppurating rectal fistula that did it—who, as far as I know, has never contributed anything to anyone, least of all himself—is still alive.

If I found myself responsible for his medical care, I probably would do my duty and care for him to the best of my ability, since a shit-stain such as he would not be worth violating my medical principles.  But goodness, it would be tempting to give him an IV infusion laced with fluid from a campsite outhouse.

I imagine (sorry, that wasn’t intentional, but I’m leaving it in) that John himself would probably counsel against even the notion of revenge.  Then again, in his cautionary song, Revolution 1—the first version, that is, on the “White Album”—he seemed conflicted, singing, “But when you talk about destruction, don’t you know that you can count me out…in.”  That little second thought doesn’t appear in the more rocking single version of the song, but remember, this is the guy who wrote Norwegian Wood, with shades of perhaps not-entirely-figurative arson, and even Run For Your Life, for crying out loud.  Still, I suspect that he would have wanted to be the sort of person who would not wish to seek revenge, even against his own murderer.

Then again, that snotty-faced heap of parrot droppings that killed him also robbed Sean Lennon of years and years with his father, and robbed John of such years with his wife and his children, and all because that endometrial teratoma that had been mistaken for a human child was so pathetic that he wanted to kill celebrities as a way of becoming famous.

Anyway, that’s enough of that.  I remember John Lennon, and enjoy his music, far more often than I indulge in violent fantasies about what to do with the “man” who killed him, and that’s certainly as it should be.  I will listen to some of that music today.  And I will have a peaceful Friday (probably), and I will work tomorrow.  So I will write a post tomorrow.

Until then, have a good day, if you can.

johnlennon-RIP without words

*This refers to the song by Paul Simon, which commemorated the deaths of blues musician Johnny Ace, and of JFK, and of course of John Lennon.

**I consider the murder of an artist such as John Lennon to be much more repulsive and distasteful than, say, the murder of a political figure or instigator of social change, or even a religious figure (depending on the religion).  The latter types of people are, to borrow a phrase from The Godfather, “in the muscle end of the family”.  Artists are creators, sometimes of breathtaking beauty.  To seek out and deliberately kill an artist (without some extraordinarily good reason) is an insult against the very value of joy and beauty and existence itself.

***It’s quite interesting to remember that my brother and sister and I used to make various recordings of various things, also on standard cassette tapes.  Sometimes we sang, sometimes we did little shows, sometimes we recorded the sound of TV shows such as The Incredible Hulk so we could listen to them when going to bed.

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Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blog

Hello and good morning.

It’s Thursday, and so of course, it’s a day for my “traditional” blog post format.  I’m probably not going to be terribly creative with it today, though, because I am rather unwell.  I think I ate some bad chicken salad in a sandwich from a convenience store yesterday, and I’ve had a rough evening and night.  I won’t go into too much detail except to say, “Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my colonoscopy.”

Today is December 7th, a day that is commemorated or mourned or however you would want to characterize it as the anniversary of the day that Pearl Harbor was attacked and the United States entered World War II.

Tonight will also mark the beginning of Hanukkah at sundown.  I sent out rather lame—in the sense of being unimaginative—gifts to my kids, since I don’t know what specific things they might prefer to receive.  It’s horrible—maybe the most horrible thing that could have happened to me, as far as my personal life is concerned—that I don’t even really know my children anymore, and haven’t seen them in more than ten years.  Of course, it would be far more horrible if something bad were to happen to them; I would rather suffer and be lonely and reviled and diseased for decades than to have anything significantly bad happen to either of them.

Of course, reality doesn’t really make bargains of that sort, but thankfully my kids seem to be healthy and relatively happy, and that’s good.  I miss them a lot, but I know I have no right to impose myself upon them if they don’t wish to see me.  At least I communicate with my daughter.

I can’t really think of any scientific or philosophical or mathematical topic of any interest to discuss today.  My brain is quite foggy, and I did not sleep continuously for more than half an hour at a time last night.  I wouldn’t have even come into the office, except that I know that my coworker is off today—he has to watch his very young daughter while his wife goes and does some kind of makeover or some such to prepare for family holiday photos this weekend.

I don’t understand the point of going through all that.  I guess the family photos are a nice thing, but in the modern era, with social media platforms of various kinds and digital cameras in smartphones that are superior to any camera most any of us used to own back in the day, why not just take regular, candid family photos?  You can print them out, if that’s what you want to do.  You can turn them into cards.  You can use various app filters and whatnot to adjust your appearance, if you think you don’t look good enough.

It’s almost all silly, to me.  I mean, I like seeing pictures of people I care about, to see how they’re doing, to remind me of them, all that good stuff.  But I don’t have much interest in seeing people posed and dressed up in front of a fake background in some photo studio such as they used to have in malls all over the place.

When my kids were very little, we took a few photos like that of them, to send out to more distant family members who hadn’t seen them yet.  But it was just pictures of them, and honestly, I probably wouldn’t have done those if it had been me.  Even back in the early 2000’s, we had digital cameras and stuff to take pictures with, and we had email.

Oh, well.  Mostly I’m complaining because it’s inconvenient to have to be at the office today, which is where I already am, as I write this.  I took an Uber in very early, because I didn’t want to take any more time in the commute than necessary, given that I am still not completely over my gastrointestinal distress.  Also, my former housemate was going to try to come by the house to work on some things, and I was going to ask him to look at my air conditioning unit if I had been able to take at least part of the day off work.  Now that won’t happen.

I suppose it doesn’t really matter.  Maintenance of anything for me is basically a waste of time and effort.  I honestly don’t really want to maintain anything at all.  I wish I could just give up even eating and drinking, let alone working or showering or paying rent or other bills or having to wash clothes and get new ones when old ones wear out (I put this part off as much as I can, though).  I don’t see any point in it—not for me.

Hopefully, I won’t be doing it all for too much longer.

Right now, though, I’m spacing out and even dozing off as I write—heck, I drooled on myself a little, which at least means I’m not too dehydrated—so I’m going to wrap it up for today.

But before I do, for tonight:

hanukkah pic-jpg

TTFN

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Probing train and work schedule inconsistencies and galaxy-scale “natural” selection

It’s midway through the week now—or it will be sometime today—and I don’t think I have anything intellectually interesting or challenging (or whatever) to write today like I did yesterday.  That’s probably a relief to most of my readers.  I don’t think those posts go over particularly well.

The train is supposed to be arriving on the proper side of the track, according to the tracker site, but we shall see.  It was also supposed to be here at 4:44 am, and it’s now two minutes behind that time, which was already one minute behind it’s programmed schedule.  Supposedly, there’s going to be some overall schedule change next week.  I hope it’s not too radical; I hate the notion of having to reset the whole system in my head.

Okay, well, this morning’s train arrived on the correct side, at least, though it was a total of six minutes late.  I know that’s not too bad—it certainly won’t change my day much—but it does boggle my mind how the very first train of the day can already be running behind schedule.  I mean, they promulgate the schedule themselves, so they know it in advance.  It’s the same every Monday through Friday.

Of course, I know that unexpected thing happen that engender delays, but if the unexpected happens and causes delays nearly every day, nearly every time, then it’s not the unexpected that’s to blame.  It’s the planning and preparation of the organization which is clearly inadequate and leads to too many things being unexpected that ought to be expected.

It’s a bit like what happens at the office.  There are people who are never there by the official time for work, and they keep being late because they face no consequences, not even embarrassment, for doing so.

I would be happy to offer some suggestions for such consequences.

Likewise with ordinary office maintenance.  I’ve announced and posted notes and signs repeatedly about, for instance, turning off the coffee pot (or brewing a new pot) if one drinks the last cup—the post-it note is literally at eye level just above the coffee maker.  But still, yesterday afternoon before I left, I had to shut off the coffee maker and put the pot in the sink to soak because someone left it on with less than a cup in it, and the residue baked into a crust of black, dehydrated coffee.

There are so many maddening things about the human world.

There are plenty of horrible things about the non-human world too, of course.  Nature does have its up-side, but it is also “red in tooth and claw” as the cliché says.  Darwin wasn’t crazy when he described that it is because of the war of nature, of famine and death, that we have the wonderful diversity of life and its beautiful and marvelous (and terrible) forms and functions.

The Buddhists were also right that suffering* is a key hallmark of life.  In any form of evolved life that I can seriously conceive, that’s going to need to be the case, since fear and pain are essential for staying alive in any world with competition for resources influencing survival and reproduction.  Genes that create bodies that don’t have pain and fear and disgust and so on don’t tend to get replicated nearly as much as genes that do, and when there is competition for scarce resources, ultimately such genes will fade away.

It seems possible, in principle, to design a life form—however loosely you want to use that term—that would not actually be capable of any kind of suffering, and if it were a stand-alone being or machine or what have you, it could very well continue to be that way, at least until it broke down.  But if it’s any kind of self-replicating “organism”, such as a Von Neumann probe or similar, there are inevitably** going to be slight errors in reproduction in each generation.  And that sets the stage for evolution via natural selection, even if it is the evolution of self-reproducing robot probes.

If there is differential survival and reproduction of variants, the ones that reproduce and/or survive better will come to dominate, even if there’s no inherent competitiveness between the probes.  If they go out into the galaxy in opposite directions, their evolution could diverge, and when and if they later encounter each other, they might have diverged enough to be in true competition for resources and/or space or what have you.

Eventually, especially as easily obtainable resources are used up by earlier generations of such probes, the ones that develop a certain degree of aggressiveness relative to others might have an advantage.  Ones that came to recognize other probe “species” as handy, localized sources of material that are easier to use than mining planets and asteroids and whatnot might become a sort of predatory or parasitic species of probe relative to the more autotrophic ones.

There might then follow a vast Darwinian evolution by natural selection of numerous species of what used to be Von Neumann probes, originating initially just from one source, and becoming a galaxy-scale ecosystem of self-replicating robots, just as life on Earth is a planet-scale ecosystem of self-replicating robots.  And maybe there might evolve some manner of multi-“cellular” “life”, and even a higher-scale form of intelligent, or meta-intelligent, “life”, that might begin to think about exploring other galaxies, and making new forms of probes, perhaps, to do that…

I don’t know if the universe would be “habitable” long enough for any further steps to occur.  It depends how long the steps would take.  But at all levels, some manner of drives and urges inherent to the system would exist, and deprivation and damage and danger to those urges’ ends would also engender some form of what would be fear and disgust and pain.

Always.  World without end.  Amen.

*duhkha is the official Sanskrit word, apparently translated as everything from “suffering” to “unease” to “unsatisfactoriness”.

**By which I mean, it is literally impossible to copy any complex structure or information perfectly and repetitively without infinite precision and infinite checking and awareness, which is not achievable in reality, as far as anyone can tell.