dysthymia

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What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba, that he should blog for her?

Hello and good morning.  By no one’s demand, it’s time for another Thursday blog post.  On the other hand, it’s also not as though anyone has demanded that I not write a blog post.  This combination of facts suggests more or less complete, tacit indifference to my posting.

That’s okay, I guess.  And it’s not as though I could just arbitrarily change things on a whim even if it were not okay.  I suppose it might be doable for me to become unpopular, and to have people at least suggesting that I should stop.  I’d just have to start writing truly deplorable things.  Of course, it would be a challenge to be so deplorable as to engender bipartisan hatred.

It sounds somewhat intriguing, I must be honest, but it also sounds like a lot of work.  And I am just increasingly exhausted all the time, mentally.  I’ve used the following analogy before, and I don’t want to run it into the ground, but I feel very much as Gandalf described the Nazgul or any mortal who keeps a great ring of power:  they do not die, but neither do they grow or obtain new life; they merely continue, until at last every breath is a weariness.  Or, as Bilbo described what he was experiencing:  he felt thin and stretched out, like butter that’s been scraped over too much bread.  And as Bilbo concluded about himself, I need a change.

Alas, I have no friends among the high elves, so I can expect no welcome in Rivendell, nor am I friends with dwarves, so Erebor is not available to me.  I don’t seem to be good at maintaining connections with any people who are not nearby (whether they are real or not).  I didn’t quite realize this while I was growing up, because I was the youngest of three kids, and I lived in the same house and so stayed in the same school system until I was 18 (or very nearly).  The people around me were relatively constant for a long time.

As it is, though, I have a difficult time imagining what other people are doing‒even people I know very well‒when they’re not with me, or even that they’re doing anything at all, let alone what they might be thinking.  I think fiction at least helped train me to imagine other people’s thoughts in many ways, and I think that’s invaluable; I think reading* fiction should be encouraged in all autistic children if possible.

But it requires effort to imagine what someone might be thinking or even that they’re thinking or doing anything at all when they’re not with me.  This doesn’t mean I don’t care about them, or about other people; that’s orthogonal to the question.  The people who are important to me are very important.  But I can’t feel them from a distance, so to speak.

This, unfortunately, is why it’s not much use if someone says that there are people out there who care about you, to whom you matter, or words to that effect.  It’s certainly well-intentioned, and it is no doubt sincere.  But however true it is, the emotional valence is low.  I cannot feel that those people, whoever they may be, care about me unless I’m interacting with them, though I may know it to a high degree of intellectual credence.

Maybe this is part of why I find it difficult to believe in ghosts, or any kind of afterlife, or any of the many invisible cosmic imaginary friends that people call gods.  Not that I think that I’m missing out in this case; intellectually as well as emotionally, empathically, I have found no reason to believe in any such things (though I have enjoyed writing fiction about them).

Indeed, the more I look, the less likely they seem.  But I do not give them zero credence, though it may come vanishingly close to zero over time.  But to give something an actual credence of zero, in Bayesian terms at least, means to say that there is no evidence or reasoning that could make you consider the proposition even possibly true.  That sounds terribly irrational to me, I don’t know about you.  It sounds like dogmatism, like blind belief, and I have no desire for such things.  I have very little tolerance for them.

What was I writing about?  Oh, yeah, that feeling of separateness and loneliness, of being almost cosmically, solipsistically alone, even though there are people out there (mostly far away) who care.

I have probably used this analogy before, but it’s a bit like being adrift in a small open boat on the ocean, and you have a radio that can only send in Morse code, but you can receive audio messages that there are ships out there, and they care about you, they feel bad that you are floating out there alone in an open boat, they support you.  And you believe them.  And the moral support is nice as far as it goes, but it doesn’t rescue you from being adrift at sea, with only the resources in your little boat, and you don’t actually know how long those supplies are able to last.  But they are finite.

Oh, who knows?  And why should anyone care?  I don’t know.  I have a hard time making good arguments for caring about me.

TTFN

*Reading is, I think, far superior to taking in TV shows, videos, movies, etc., though those things can be great fun.  With written fiction, one can literally get inside the minds of the characters and be given insight into what and how they are thinking and feeling.  With TV and movies, those feelings can only be inferred at best, and only when the acting is tolerably clear and those emotions are definitive.  For people with difficulty judging other people’s faces at times, that can be less useful than reading.

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“The numbers don’t decide”

I don’t have any fun numerical trivia to notice about the numbers of the date today, which is Wednesday (1-14-2026), by the way.  It’s not that I’m saying there are no potential fun numerical comparisons or patterns or what have you in the numbers of the date today, just that there aren’t any that stuck out for me, which probably means that there aren’t any which I would think are fun.

Prime numbers and palindromic numbers are probably my favorites of these kinds of things.  But although the primes are considered the “atoms” of the number world by those who study such things specifically—I guess those would be number theorists—there are many situations in which there are no obvious prime numbers.  I suppose the same is true of actual atoms, come to think of it.  When was the last time you encountered a single, naked atom in the wild, so to speak?

Anyway, I’m not really interested in “talking” about that right now.  I’m not really all that interested in much of anything.  I know, I know, this is getting ridiculous, I keep writing one relatively upbeat or at least engaged* post, and then I turn somber and negative on the next one.  Well, rest assured, in case you weren’t already, I feel generally glum and somber during the day even on those days when I write posts in which I’m truly interested, like yesterday’s.  You just have the good fortune not to be around me.

Even among those who are around me, such as the people at work—actually, there’s no “such as”, these are the only people around me except on truly rare occasions—there’s probably not much of a clue as to my glumness.  Apparently, my moods and feelings don’t show on my face, even when I become aware of them consciously, which can tend to be rare (I appear to have a degree of alexithymia).

So, even when I feel that I’m not sure I can make it through the rest of a given day, let alone through any more significant time, no one seems to notice.  There are and have been people at the office who have dealt with drug and alcohol problems, legal issues, erratic life choices, sporadic attendance, stuff like that, and they get at least tacit moral support and even help; there are various resources in the community to assist them that are readily available, and our culture lionizes those who recover from drug problems, even as often as they might backslide.

I just have a dysfunctional brain, or so it seems, and the useful resources to help that (without insurance) are about as prevalent as icicles in Death Valley.  And unless you’ve truly gone down the tubes with those inherent mental health issues, no one gives seems to give you much moral support or encouragement, let alone congratulations, if you’re working on them.

By the way, speaking of drug problems, I was on constant opioids (including the dreaded fentanyl, the patch, in my case) for chronic pain for several years, .  I weaned myself off of them by myself, by my own choice, because I decided they were doing me more harm than good.  This is, of course, different from kicking an actual addiction—very different—but still, I have to try to find something about which I can brag.  Or wait, do I really have to do that?  Probably not.

I’m trying to do things to help myself mentally.  I’ve been reading a new (to me) book that deals with Adlerian psychology and philosophy, for instance.  So far it’s pretty good, but it’s not as insightful or useful (again, so far) as are things like Stoicism and Vipassana and the Tao Te Ching and so on.

I’m also trying to do more with brilliant dot org, which is a truly lovely app that can be used to study various STEM fields.  I did some problems on it in circuits yesterday—I had started that course months ago—but they are so far very basic.  There’s a lot of “drilling” on this app, but when it’s simple stuff it can get a bit tedious.  I guess that might be good.  Doing scales for piano practice is boring but very useful.

I want to get back into the math and science on the site.  I would love to complete every course they offer.  I would love to read every last bit of the textbooks and similar that I have in my mini-library at the office (I’ve added a few things since taking the latest picture).

I would love to learn everything that is learnable, to be honest, but to focus on the scientific before getting to things like literary and other criticism and such like.  As for political “science”, well…I think it’s probably still about at the stage of alchemy right now, and it may never get beyond that.

Unfortunately, my attention span is troublesome.  I get interested in one thing and/or idea and try to immerse myself in it, but then something distracts me soon enough, and some other interest draws me.  I do end up learning about a lot of esoteric subjects that way, though in bits and pieces**.  My ex-wife was always at least mildly annoyed by the number of books I had sitting on my bedside table, most either laid open or with numerous bookmarks.

Still, it would be good to do something until the “end” before moving on to the next thing.  At the very least, it would give me a sense of accomplishment.  I was doing that pretty well with my fiction, starting while I was a guest of the Florida DOC—I would finish a given book (or short story) completely, including editing and, once I was out, publishing before starting the next one.  This was a big deal, because my fiction writing used to suffer from the same issues of my scattered brain described above.

I have veered off that trajectory in recent years, alas.  I now have no fewer than three “begun” stories that I haven’t yet finished.  And no, I haven’t gotten any work done on any of them recently.  I’m too stressed out and worn out, and I am, at bottom, thoroughly alone here.  It’s really very difficult many days just to force myself to continue at all.  Also, disappointing and stupid events throughout the country and the world make that all the more difficult.

I hope you all are having a better time than I am.  I wish for you to be well, however useless such wishes may be.

P.S. Okay, well, if you look at (01-14-2026), you can make each of the digits of the year by adding digits of the month and date, without reusing any given month-date digit for any given year digit.  1 + 1 gives you the 2s, 0 gives you the 0, 4 + 1 + 1 gets you the 6.  That’s pretty lame though, even to me.

*I don’t know whether or not they are engaging posts (a phrase that sounds like an alternative expression for “hitching post”).

**Perhaps the fact that I seem to have to do things this way at least contributes to durability in my understanding, because I keep having to pick up where I left off months and even years ago.  Over time, I have gotten pretty good at being able to do that, and to be able very quickly, usually within the space of a paragraph or at most a page, to remember what was “going on” when I last was reading the book.  Yay, me.

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“Try to hide your hand, forget how to feel”

Well, guess what?  Yep, you’re right.  I’m working today.  Heavy sigh.

It’s not as though I can opt out, since my coworker who shares some of my responsibilities is not able to come in‒he and his wife have a newborn and a toddler, and he’s doing some bartending work on the weekends, so it’s on me, even though I worked last Saturday and even though, honestly, my mental reserves are dipping lower and lower, and I need‒or, well, at least I could really use‒at least one night a week where I can knock myself unconscious and so at least get a form of mental rest.

Alas, that’s not going to happen this week.  I cannot sleep in on Sundays, because I do my laundry on Sunday mornings, and I need to get it done before everyone in the other, main part of the house wakes up and starts doing their things.

So, I’m pretty unhappy this morning, but that’s nothing particularly new.  I don’t have any whimsical musings about infinity to share today.  Also, I did not write this post the night before, as is probably obvious; I’m writing it in the morning.  And, of course, I’ve written no fiction, unless you count the fact that yesterday’s post misleadingly seemed full of pep and vim and spark and pizzazz.  That was a lie.

I feel very just generally hateful toward reality as a whole, to be honest.  There are things and people here and there that I don’t hate, and even a few people I love, but they are far away and far between.  Seeing or interacting with even one of them is a sort of special occasion.

I did try meditating the other day, as I discussed, and though, yeah, I did get depressed, with intrusive thoughts about, for instance, going and lying on the railroad tracks* troubling me.  But I got through the day‒as I guess you could tell, since I’m here.  I wondered if maybe that meditation contributed to my weird but lighthearted digression on infinities and related topics yesterday.

Unfortunately, though yesterday started okay, it didn’t continue as well, and I had a fair amount of pain (and other things happened).  And then, of course, I found out that we’re working today.  Also, I slept terribly last night, but that’s true almost every night.

I wish there was a real “The Force”, including the dark side, because I think at least it would be some compensation for my depression and tension to be able to use force lightning and to be able to choke people out from a distance without needing to touch them.  Though, I like to think I’d use more creative attacks, like squeezing someone’s heart or brain with the Force.  That would be quicker, and they would have less time to know they were being killed, but honestly I’m not interested in causing suffering to people who are intolerable.  I just want them gone.

Yeah, I’m not a good person, I know, though that does depend a bit on specific answers to the questions “good for what purpose?” and “good by what criteria?”, and probably on others.

I’ve said it before, but I do often feel some regret about not “winning” when I played Russian roulette way back near the end of 2012.  Nearly everything in the years since has been of questionable value, and much of it has honestly been rotten.  And it’s not as though the years immediately preceding 2012 were great‒chronic pain/injury, divorce, disability and the like colored a lot of it, but at least I was part of my kids’ life back then.

Again, I’m not going to engage in foolish overgeneralizing if I can help it; there have been moments of joy and even a few achievements in the years between, though the latter have often been causative of reflective reproach, like someone who grew roses but found that the “thorns” were vastly more prominent than the few little misshapen and mutated flowers that were produced.

I occasionally wish I could be like Lord Foul** and just hate everything and everyone except myself, as opposed to the way things are, in which a big chunk of my hate is directed inwardly.  Don’t get me wrong, I know that Lord Foul’s “ethos” is astonishingly pathological and also astonishingly illogical and irrational.  But it has its attractions.  Madness in general often has such seeming advantages, though I suspect that, in reality, they are largely illusory.

I’m tired, and I’m hostile and even hateful, unfortunately.  Events in the world aren’t helping, and though some may counsel just staying away from “the news”, I consider that bad advice.  As Gildor said to Frodo, you can shut yourself in, but you cannot forever shut the world out.  It will impinge upon you, and by being aware of it you can best protect yourself and mitigate possible harm.  “Arm yourself, because no one else here will save you.”

The only ways completely to prevent the world from interfering with you are to destroy the world, to destroy yourself, or to do both.

Am I speaking metaphorically here, or am I speaking physically?  I think the idea can be considered both ways.

Anyway, that’s enough for today.  I hope all of you who read this have a good weekend.  As for everyone else, well, it would certainly be nice if the kind people in the world had good days.

What are the odds of that happening?***

*Incidentally, I would not actually do that.  I would find it far too rude to disrupt the commute of at least hundreds of people and possibly thousands.

**He’s the big bad in the various Thomas Covenant books, and he is one of my favorite villains.

***I’m speaking rhetorically.  I don’t expect that there’s any way for anyone to know the accurate probabilities involved.

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“In an interstellar burst, I’m back…”

I wish that I could honestly tell you that the reason I didn’t post a post yesterday was because I had been working on The Dark Fairy and the Desperado and so I decided to leave the blog dormant.  Alas, that was not the reason for my absence yesterday.  Instead, it was something far more prosaic:  I was out sick.  The cold I’d been fighting for days worsened, and I was very worn out after going to work Monday, and my voice was pretty rough, and I was coughing a bit, and, well…you know, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria, all that.

I’m not feeling a whole lot better today, to be fully forthcoming, but I need to do payroll, and of course, when I’m gone for a day or longer, things pile up that I take care of gradually most days, and it can be that much more overwhelming to catch up with everything.  I suppose none of it really matters much.  It probably wouldn’t matter very much if I didn’t do any of the things I do at work.

Also, honestly, I still haven’t been paid last week’s pay.  I think it’s probably just an oversight on my boss’s part because of the chaos of recent weeks.  It’s unlikely that it’s a deliberate tactic to make me want to go away.  Nevertheless, the irrational, paranoid part of me—the part that assumes everyone else will eventually come to hate me, since I hate myself, and I know me better than anyone else does—is hyper alert for possible hostility.

Anyway, I haven’t actually gotten much done on my return to DFandD.  It was only in the evening yesterday that I started rereading it, but I’ve only gotten as far as the point where the Desperado looks into the well and suddenly hears the sound of rushing water.  If you don’t know what I mean, that’s just because you haven’t read any of what I’ve put up for you to read of that story, though it’s been available for months and months.

I wonder if anyone (other than my sister) has actually read it or any other fiction I’ve posted here.  I don’t recall getting any (non-sibling) feedback on any of it.

Maybe that’s to do with the short attention spans we all seem to have now, thanks to the overabundance of easy-to-consume-without-much-mental-effort-media.  Not only do we have all the easily consumable content on YouTube, which at least includes some very high-quality material, but we have little snippet “shorts” and “reels” on almost all sites now that are often heavily manipulative, but which perforce do not contain much information.

And the algorithms that try to steer us to things that will keep us on-site, or to steer those things toward us, seem to have become rather clunky and ham-handed, and they now push us (or at least me) away from things that would have been useful and interesting toward just boring shit that’s often absurd or stupid or at least just vapid.

Probably the lack of feedback on my stories is just because my stories are not that interesting to many people, or at least not to the sort of people who come to read my blog; I may be selecting for a group of readers who prefer nonfiction to fantastical fiction.

Wouldn’t that be ironic?  I started this blog as a way to promote my fiction writing by having a point of interaction with potential readers of my fiction, to give them some ”inside information” if they were interested in it.  Iterations of Zero was supposed to be the separate blog where I talked about my interests or concerns or issues related to science, mathematics, philosophy, politics, or what have you.

Of course, the phenomenon of such things evolving and changing in ways unforeseen during their inception is not unusual, online or in life.  Just look at early Peanuts or Calvin and Hobbes (or even Dilbert) comics compared to later ones.  But it’s frustrating to see, in real time as it were, things evolving away from usefulness, evolving toward senescence.  I suppose, in a way, that’s the story of almost everything that evolves—most changes in any RNA world that predated what we would call true life, for instance, were prone to make things less useful.  And by “useful” here I mean just “liable to make many and good copies of itself”.

One would like to imagine that human society, or at least human technology, would be less prone toward changes that make things worse, since it’s guided by actual minds, and in the case of technology, some of these minds are quite high-quality.

And I think, when the technology was actual hardware and needed to compete against other hardware, the changes would tend to be good—not universally so, but pretty impressively so.  It was such technological advance guided by effective minds that led from Kitty Hawk to the Moon in about 60 years.

However, computers have developed—and they have been prone to impressive improvement guided by some very fine minds indeed—and their products have become easier and more thoughtless to use, such that it required almost no mental skill or ability to interact with and consume those products.  And thus the tendency for things to head in good directions became less potent.

Even the finest associated minds, such as they are, don’t fully understand the specific inner workings of things like LLMs and other deep learning computer systems, which we loosely call AI.  And, of course, the computers don’t know how they work, either.  And the complex interactions of the millions and even billions of people who use social media every day and/or constantly is a complex system the dynamics of which can only be modeled for gross tendencies.  Chaos will always apply.

I don’t know what point I’m trying to make, other than that there seems to be no point, and that indeed there seem to be mostly anti-points, to so much of what happens in the world.  It’s terribly frustrating and pushes me toward full-on despair.  And I cannot seem to find interest in or derive joy from the things that used to make me at least temporarily joyous.  And that doesn’t really matter to anyone, to be honest.  Probably that’s appropriate.  I am probably not worth any effort from anyone at any level (though I would welcome it).

Or maybe I unconsciously drive people away, and that’s the problem.  Who knows?  I don’t.  And we can be sure that Socrates doesn’t and didn’t know, since reputedly the only thing he knew was that he knew nothing, and this marked him as the wisest person in the world.

As for me, I am not wise, or at least not very wise.  But I am about done, at least for today.  I feel almost done in general.  I’m very tired of going through these motions of pretending to be alive when really I am just a crude mockery of life.

As evidence of my mental stupidity:  When I wrote that last line, I could not help thinking of one of the female leads from Young Frankenstein singing, “Oh…crude mockery of life, at last I’ve found you!”

I hope you readers of my blog all have a good day, but that everyone who doesn’t read my blog has a bad day.  I don’t want them to have too bad a day—nothing tragic—but just enough for them to realize their mistake and come read my blog.

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Not much to report, but that never stops me

I’m writing this post on my mini lapcom today, because I brought it back to the house with me over the weekend.  The idea was to have it with me so I can work on The Dark Fairy and the Desperado.  I have that file open—I had originally saved it with the Word app on my phone, I think, so I had to download the latest version of it and adjust the settings, which had a ridiculously large indentation.  Still, I haven’t started rereading and/or editing what I have yet, nor have I yet written anything new on it.

It’s funny that I think of it as a little bit of a story so far when it’s over 100 Microsoft pages (in Calibri, font size 11, no spaces between paragraphs) and over 70,000 words long.  I know of some complete “novels” that are not much longer than that.  I think it might already be longer than Extra Body, which I consider a novella.  Let me look…

Okay, it’s not longer, since Extra Body is almost 77,000 words long, but it’s getting close.  I had intended to publish the latter as a novella, in Kindle and paperback versions, but I got burned out by other things and didn’t have the energy to edit it.  It is posted on this blog (see the link above) in case you want to read it.  I think it appears in reverse order thanks to the way my blog lists things newest first then going backward.  There may be a way to reverse that—I would suspect there should be—but I don’t have the mental energy to look into how to do it.  I don’t have the mental energy for very much lately.

Actually, my physical energy is lagging a bit as well, at the moment.  I am still fighting that cold I had a few days ago, and I have partly lost my voice.  But I don’t think I have a fever nor other hallmarks of systemic infection, and though I’m coughing up some goo, there’s no evidence of any life-threatening pneumonia, unfortunately.  I’m going to work, nevertheless.  I will be masking* today, and I don’t think I’ll be talking on the phone at all, but I can still do all my clerical and computer and office management stuff.

I don’t really do any sales myself, but that’s not because I wasn’t able to do it.  That’s how I started here.  I just am better at other aspects of the office work, so I do those.  Also, I have a very hard time hearing things on some of the phones, and I doubt that’s gotten better with the tinnitus now in both ears (yes, of course, it persists, like the horrors do and like I do).

During the latest part of last week, I meant to try to look at and work on DFandD in the office, but though I did get it set up and corrected the tabs, I didn’t so much as look at it afterwards, though there were moments when I could have done so.  I’m going to need to work on that, or else do my writing on it in the morning and perhaps put aside this blog most days.  I’d rather not do that; this blog is nearly my only connection with the outside world.

I don’t know what is going to happen, of course.  I really ought to publish Extra Body formally—though that would require removing it from this blog—before I even do more work on DFandD.  Heck, if I’m doing things in order, I really should finish Outlaw’s Mind first, which started out as a short story but has become a novel, one that ties into other parts of my already-written and not-yet-written universes.

But almost all of the wind has been taken from my sails over the years.  I have no real support of any kind, not anywhere near me, anyway.  And I have been diagnosed with level 2 ASD, which entails “moderate support needs”.  But just because you have “needs” doesn’t mean they’re going to be met.  That’s just the way things are, unfortunately.

I don’t know.  I’m even starting to feel like my boss wishes I would go, but that he’s too nice to be too open about it.  There are some things that have recently led me to wonder, though I’m probably being paranoid.  Anyway, we’ve been making some adjustments relating to the consolidation of things and people in our two offices, and I think those changes are positive and productive.  But I fear that I am just in the way of such things, since change makes me grumpy and stressed out.

The office, after a momentary bit of confusion, would probably be better off if I were gone and/or dead.  But that’s not unique to the office.  Everything in the world would probably be (at least slightly) better off if I were gone and/or dead.  If I were being sensible, that’s probably what I would be focused on making happen rather than trying to write more fiction again.

I thought about doing it last week, on New Year’s Eve or Day, but I decided that the thing I was thinking of doing would be too expensive if I didn’t have the nerve to go through with it.  I’m glad I didn’t spend that money—assuming there is any long-term need for it—because I haven’t been paid my latest pay yet.  I don’t know why.  It may be because I’m not worth the money or effort; that certainly wouldn’t surprise me.

Anyway, that’s it for this morning.  If I suddenly develop full-blown, life-threatening pneumonia or similar, this’ll be it.  That wouldn’t be such a tragedy, at least not from my point of view.  And it’s not like anyone else’s life would change in any noticeable way.  They certainly wouldn’t change in any significant way.  There might be a few ripples on the surface of a few ponds, but those would fade almost before it would be possible to notice them.

Enjoy your day.

*Physically, literally, I mean.  I probably do at least some metaphorical masking every day.  It’s hard for me to tell.  I don’t know if I’ve ever not been masking my whole life.

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I have no title for this post. Oh, wait…

Well, it’s Friday, the end of the “traditional” work week, though I suspect many people have today off.  A traditional workplace at this time of year would have had people take yesterday (and possibly the day before) off, and one might as well make it a four-day (or five-day) weekend.  Heck, if I remember correctly, it was typical for schools in my youth to take the equivalent of a four-day weekend two weeks in a row.  Though, come to think of it, maybe we just had winter break around then.  I’m not sure now; I think it was the latter situation, actually.

Anyway, in the modern environment, which has been allowed to become very skewed between businesses and employees, competition for scarce resources has led to a kind of mission creep in which people are led to feel that it is good and impressive and necessary to work as much as one can physically (and mentally) work, even to one’s net detriment.

Yes, we are meant to think it is impressive, but there is only very little marginal reward (and almost no true thankfulness and appreciation) for the extra work.  At the higher levels of the economic food chain, of course, the accumulation of even minor incremental wealth at each level of the pyramid adds up to seemingly large amounts, like the proverbial accumulation of DDT in birds’ bones and eggs, or mercury sequestering in certain kinds of tuna.

There’s not actually all that much of it, that extra scavenged wealth, and everyone, including the very rich, would enjoy a much healthier economy, a healthier world, if more money were in circulation‒buying, selling, making more things‒rather than accumulated into the hands of a few individuals who are not nearly as impressive as their hoarded wealth makes them imagine they are.

Hoarded wealth is useless, because money does not have any inherent value.  It is a tool of exchange, one that allows economic interactions to be both more efficient and broader and more productive, more fecund if you will.

If only “home economics” courses taught young people about actual economics‒supply and demand, markets, the effects of various regulations for better and worse, all that.

And if only we had Civics class again, or the equivalent, so people could actually learn about the Constitution, so they could recognize when elected public servants are violating it and hold them accountable.  Why, just the act of reading the second part of the Declaration of Independence (the part that begins “We hold these truths to be self evident…”) might reorient the attitude some people have toward their government and the people they hire (by electing them) to serve what are supposed to be the interests of the members of the public.

Perhaps after whatever horrendous upheaval occurs in the imminent future, when society is trying to repair itself, we will improve our metaphorical infrastructure, much as we did after the last world war (though the situation then was very different).  Perhaps we will try to find new safeguards for the systems, to decrease the risk of gross unfairness and economic stagnation, as well as of government corruption.

I don’t know.  I don’t have high hopes.  Humans‒or humanity, really‒forget the lessons of their past so easily.  And though nearly all of human knowledge is so easily available to nearly anyone, the low barriers to entry for putting things online mean that the noise on the internet is prone quite strongly to wash out any signals.  It’s like some weird grand ballroom full of “scholars” of wildly varying quality, all of them talking at once as loudly as they can about whatever topic strikes their fancy.

It’s a bit like this blog, huh?  Pot, meet kettle.  Oh, well.  On to other matters.

I’m feeling slightly better this morning than I did yesterday, though I’m still under the weather, and my (now) maddeningly bilateral tinnitus persists.  But a fortuitous thing did happen:  I was looking for something on a shelf and found a bunch of old papers, including the only remaining bit of my first novel, Ends of the Maelstrom.  It’s only the first chapter, which I had typed into an oldish computer and printed on that good old continuous feed printer paper back in the late eighties or early nineties.  It’s not much, but it’s kind of nostalgic, and it fed into thoughts I’d already been having.

I had been thinking about rereading and maybe starting again to write one of my unfinished stories‒Outlaw’s Mind, or The Dark Fairy and the Desperado, or HELIOS, or perhaps something else entirely.  I wouldn’t have to give up blogging at least to begin that process.  I can read and edit the stories on my mini lapcom at the office during downtime, instead of doing that ADHD-style thing of skimming through various news sites and social media and online manga and so on when things are slow at work.  It would honestly be more productive, and probably more ego syntonic.

What do you all think?  Maybe I should run one of those polls that people can do here on WordPress.  I’ve never really looked into how to do them, and it probably wouldn’t be very useful to do one‒indeed it might be depressing‒because I would probably get one response, if that, and that’s not a good statistical sample of pretty much anything.

Okay, well, I’m not going to do one of those.  I don’t have the spare mental energy to look into how it’s done.  However, if anyone reading would care just to say in the comments (in addition to anything else you want to say, if there is anything else) whether you think I should reread and then get to work on finishing one of the above-mentioned books, or perhaps on some other story I’ve mentioned at some time, or perhaps some older story…or even just to do something completely new.  I would truly welcome your input, but please at least try to be specific.

If you need guilt to compel you, I think your input might really help my mental state, which is extremely prone to negativity and self-hatred and self-destruction.  See, I can manipulate people, at least in principle.  I just find it “low key” repulsive.

But, heck, if you want, you can tell me I’m better off not writing any new fiction, or that my writing sucks in general and you wish I’d just stop writing, or even that I should just die already.

You’re unlikely to say anything to me that’s worse than the things I say to myself pretty much every day.  And if you can say some such thing, I’m honestly curious what it could be.  But you could easily say nicer and more productive things than I have ever probably said to myself, or at least better than I’ve said in a long time.  If that’s your preference, have at you!

I’ll be back tomorrow, I think.  Have a good weekend.

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“…cold as a razor blade, tight as a tourniquet…”

Heavy sigh.  Here we go again.  It’s a new week, and the last beginning of a work week in 2025.  I guess last week was the last full work week, though honestly, it barely could be counted as that at my office since everything was so topsy turvy and weird and so many people had issues keeping them out of the office.  It felt almost post-apocalyptic, and not in a good way.

It was still better to be at the office than at the house (that’s the only place I do anything that resembles socializing) but unfortunately, we left very early and didn’t do much on Wednesday or on Friday, so I commuted in pointlessly‒it’s no joke of a commute, either, and I do not have a vehicle.

So basically, I was by myself nearly all day on Wednesday and Friday, and was literally by myself Thursday, Saturday, and Sunday.

I was also in an especially large amount of pain on Saturday and Sunday, though I am not sure why (and it persists today, though not quite as badly).  I often have difficulty teasing out what triggers an exacerbation.  Sometimes I can see it with a fair amount of confidence.  Other times it is opaque and therefore all the more annoying.

Of course, I did not choose to get a room in that high rise hotel on Christmas Eve and/or Day, though it would have been surprisingly affordable.  If I were to get a room for New Year’s Eve, it would be slightly pricier, but that’s not a surprise.  New Year is definitely more of a “get a fancy hotel room” kind of holiday.  Anyway, if I decide to book a room there on New Year’s Eve or whatever, I’m not worried about the expense.

I’ve occasionally said (with tongue in cheek), “The one who dies in the most debt wins.”  That’s not really my ethos in general, of course, but when one has tried hard (albeit far from perfectly) to live an ethical and beneficent life, and one reaps mainly mutant, deformed, and vaguely toxic crops despite what one has tried to sow, one can become quite disillusioned about various ethical guidelines, including one’s own bespoke ethics.

Not that the reason to be good is because one expects to be rewarded; that’s the tragic situation of most of the big monotheistic religions.  Their people can never do a good deed that isn’t tainted by the fact that they believe they will be somehow rewarded in “Heaven” for being good.

So, I instinctively take a slightly more deontological attitude toward deeds than a utilitarian or consequentialist one, but that probably has a lot to do with my ASD.  I’m still probably mainly consequentialist in my ideas, but I’m not dogmatic about being in one camp or another.

I don’t think we have a convincing final answer on such things; if we did, its reasoning could probably be followed by any rational person and would be convincing to anyone inquiring with intellectual honesty.  This is one of the reasons that I’m dubious of all the “revealed” religions and their texts.

I mean, humans can make a convincing proof that the square root of 2 is irrational and that there is no highest prime number, and anyone who pays attention to the argument (and understands the terms) will find it convincing.  Surely an omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, and (omni)benevolent god could author a book that would be at least as convincing as the proof by contradiction that there is no highest prime number, or a demonstration that the Pythagorean Theorem is correct.  But no such book appears to be on offer.

Written language of one form or another was invented, to varying degrees, on both sides of the Atlantic before those civilizations encountered each other.  The Mayans had the number zero and a system of manipulating numbers, as well as a highly accurate calendar that would, with appropriate translation, match any such things from the “old world”.

Universal facts will be discovered to be the same by anyone looking.  And yet no two cultures long separated from each other have come up with the same religions.  No, for some reason, the deity/deities require(s) men (and I do mean men for the most part) to spread their religion, often “by the sword”.

It’s odd. You don’t tend to have to force people to obey the laws of gravity or of thermodynamics or of quantum mechanics.  You also don’t tend to have to convince people (who are not actively suicidal) to jump out of the way of an oncoming truck, or not to jump from a balcony that’s many stories up.

I don’t know if there’s any interesting point being made here.  I apologize.  This is just me spewing metaphorical fluid from the leaky, crumbling mechanism of my mind.  It’s boring, even to me.  I can’t really imagine what it must be to all of you reading (if the word “all” is even appropriate).

Pretty much everything is boring.  I’m running out of successful distractions, and nothing new has presented itself.  No new shows or movies or even books seem interesting.  The next Doctor Who episode and the next Avengers movie (which should have my very favorite villain if they do it right) won’t be out until this time next year.  Honestly, though, I’m not even interested in them.  “Nothing is very much fun anymore”, like the song* said.

Anyway, that’s enough of this shit for today.  I’m so tired already and it’s just the start of the week.  I don’t know how I’m going to make it to next year, but I’ll probably be posting tomorrow, at least.

*One of my Turns from The Wall, by Pink Floyd.

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Free will with any purchase of $100 or more

Happy Boxing Day, everyone.

For those of you in the US who don’t have much interaction with Great Britain or Canada (or the “antipodes”, where I think the day is also “celebrated”), Boxing Day is the official name for the day after Christmas, and since Christmas was yesterday, today is Boxing Day.  QED.

There is, no doubt, a thorough and accurate explanation for why this day is called Boxing Day, but I have not yet encountered it, despite occasional half-assed searches.  I also, honestly, don’t care very much.  I have a vague set of notions for possible explanations, existing in a sort of quantum superposition/probability cloud in my head, and that’s good enough for me.

On the other hand, if anyone out there knows the definitive, accurate, appropriately cited and replicated explanation for the source of the term Boxing Day…just keep it to yourself.  I’m not interested in reading any comments about it.

I am also not interested in reading any comments about Christmas, but I hope those of you who celebrate that holiday had a very lovely day, and enjoyed it in the best possible way with the best possible company.

By “best possible” please don’t take me to refer to some idealized, perfect*, eutopian** day.  I mean, the best possible day you could have given the circumstances of all the people and events in your life and around you.  I don’t expect it was without any unpleasantness or drama or minor irritations.  At the very least, most of us have to use the toilet several times a day, and those who don’t are generally worse off, not better off, than those who do.

But if you got to spend the day (or a significant chunk of it) with at least one person you love and who hopefully loves you, then you have at least some reason to think of it as a good day.  I did not have a good day, but hey, this is me, right?  When do I ever have a good day?

The next big holiday coming up is New Year.  Of course, if the universe overall is a closed loop of time (I have no real reason to suspect that it is, but no strong reason to be convinced that it is not) then this year is not new, nor is it old, it is just fixed.  From within any kind of deterministic spacetime, loop or otherwise, it can feel as though time has passed, but as Einstein pointed out, this would be an illusion (albeit a persistent one).

If things are nondeterministic, then all bets are off with respect to whether time is an illusion or not.  But please, don’t fall for the notion that the facts of quantum mechanics mean that the universe is non-deterministic.  They can mean that, depending on the truth underlying the mathematical descriptions, but quantum mechanics can be just as deterministic‒in a slightly more complicated way‒as Newtonian or Einsteinian classical physics.  Two examples are “superdeterminism” and the Everettian, many-worlds description of quantum mechanics.  There are probably others.

The point being, if the universe is deterministic, then each moment, each year, each Planck time is in a way permanent and “eternal”.  Each event is not only implied in the prior state of the universe, but it is also implied in the future state of the universe.

Some might complain that this would imply that there is no such thing as free will.  I think you are correct.  But so what?  Your will is patently less free than you imagine even in simpler, more straightforward terms.  Can you quickly drink a fifth of Wild Turkey 151 on an empty stomach (with no regurgitation) and choose not to become intoxicated (and possibly dead)?  Can you choose just not to feel tired after being awake for 36 hours?  Can you choose not to feel acute or chronic pain?  If you can do that last thing, I’d be interested in knowing how, so feel free to put that in the comments, but don’t waste my time with nonsense, please.

Anyway, as I like to say, I either have free will or I don’t, but I don’t have any choice in the matter.

It’s a bit like when people say absurd things such as “I wouldn’t want to live in a world without a God”.  My response, usually internal, to such statements is, “I don’t recall being given a choice about which kind of universe I would live in.  Did I miss some prenatal, preconceptual meeting where people were given the various options regarding into which universe they would be born?”

Anyway, it is whatever it is.  In a certain sense, it can of course be useful to consider what the nature of reality most truly and completely is, so we can navigate it in the best available way.  But in another sense, the ability to learn about a deterministic universe is just baked in.  And like everything else, it is permanent, albeit not in the usual, prosaic sense of enduring through time unchanging, since time itself is one of the permanent things.  Does this imply some “meta-time”***?  Not necessarily, but it could in principle.

I don’t think we know enough about the deep roots of reality to do more than speculate about such things.  The speculation can be fun, though, and occasionally it can briefly distract one from the unbearable shittiness of being.  Alas, that distraction never lasts for long; mine is fading rapidly even now, and I don’t feel like writing or even breathing any more.  I can’t do much about the latter process without causing a big to-do, but the writing I can stop any…

*Whatever that even means.

**This is not a typo or a misunderstanding or misspelling.  This is my (apparent) neologism for a truly and realistically ideal place.  The word “utopia” means essentially “no place”, highlighting the fact that such a place does not exist, even potentially.  Whereas my term uses the prefix “eu-” which means “true or good or well” as in eukaryote or eugenics or my middle name “Eugene”.

***This term has nothing to do with Facebook or Instagram or whatever else to which Z*ckerberg has tried to arrogate the term “meta”.

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“Is there anybody out there?”

Here we are again, I guess.  I told you it wasn’t likely that yesterday was my final bellyache, didn’t I?  Anyway, I wrote words to that effect.  And I was right, though many might think that’s a pity and a shame.

It’s Christmas Eve Eve, a silly designation involving iterated “Eves” which would become unworkable pretty quickly.  You’ll notice that I didn’t call yesterday “Christmas Eve Eve Eve”, even (ha) though that would have worked and been accurate.  Still, if one keeps up that process, then “Boxing Day” (aka the day after Christmas in the US) would be “Christmas (Eve364)” or some such notation.

I suppose if one wanted, one could keep track of the days of the year in that fashion, but it seems quite clunky.  Also, if one were inclined just to count the days of the year, or to count them down, it would make more sense to use counting numbers and to start with New Year’s Day.  So the first day would be just Day 1, or Day 365 (or 366) if one were counting down.

Sorry, I know I’m being pretty bizarre.  Maybe that’s just some kind of hallmark of genius or something (though I doubt it).

It’s been a strange several days, including some atypical days at work.  Everyone else in the office has various things happening with their (sometimes growing) families, not all of it joyous and positive, but much of it disruptive.  And sales are always a bit slower at this time of year; people are busy buying presents for loved ones and the like in the latter part of December, even when the political and economic situation isn’t a category 5 shit storm.  But, of course, they are, collectively, just such a shit storm now, so things are more erratic than usual.

I was going to say “chaotic”, but at this stage in the universe’s evolution, chaos is almost always in play‒the mathematical kind, I mean.

Wow, I’ve written about 320 words so far, and I don’t think I’ve actually said anything.  Or, at least, I haven’t said much.  As a method of conveying useful information, this post (and perhaps this whole blog) has been highly inefficient, hasn’t it?  Of course, if I had specific information I was trying to convey, I might do better.

Though, honestly, I have a truly hard time being honest and clear when I’m trying to convey certain kinds of information.  I will often attempt to express what I think are highly urgent messages‒in person sometimes, but much more often in this blog‒yet it seems I am too esoteric or awkward in my attempts to express myself.  Certainly, those attempts have yet to achieve anything like my desired aims.

Yesterday was no exception.  I thought I was being rather ham-handed, to be honest, but clearly I was not.  I cannot, in good conscience, blame my reader(s).  If a pitcher throws a wild enough pitch, the catcher cannot reasonably be expected to catch it, though that’s the catcher’s expertise.  How much more unreasonable would it be to blame other people for not getting points my unconscious or awkward or habit-driven and “neurodivergent” mind is forcing me to make in very awkward ways?

I am far from a professional pitcher in this metaphor, and no one has ever volunteered to be my catcher.  Most people who end up trying to do it, out of chance or kindness or whatever, get sick of the work after a very short while.

I cannot justly blame them; that’s one villain trope I find intolerable, blaming other people and taking out one’s frustration on them instead of assessing how one’s own choices can be improved.  It’s small wonder these bad guys, who have secured all the advantages through diligent villainy, fail in the end.  It’s not just because of plot armor.

Another bad villain habit is gloating over a still-living arch-enemy.  In Revenge of the Sith, Palpatine (aka Darth Sidious) had caught Yoda off-guard with force lightning.  Yoda was down!  And Palpatine allowed him to get up because he had “been waiting for this for a long time”.

Moron!  If he had pressed his advantage with more force lightning or even just rushed up and cut the little bugger in half with his lightsaber, he would have had time to head to Mustafar (remember, he sensed that Lord Vader was in danger).  Even if Obi wan got away, he wouldn’t have Yoda’s backup or anything.  Palpatine could have won much more thoroughly, and Vader might never have needed his breathing armor and could have achieved his full potential, and he might even have had Luke and Leia with him.

That was a hell of a nerdy tangent, wasn’t it?  Sorry.  It’s a pet peeve of mine.  But I guess tripping over one’s ego is a natural hazard for the sorts of people who become arch villains.

Maybe I dwell on such things too much.  Perhaps that’s what started me down the road to being habitually hyper self-critical, which evolved into self-hatred and a desire for self-destruction.  It’s a bit of a conundrum, but I would still rather not become cocky and arrogant in anything but a comedic way.  I don’t like seeing it; I really don’t want to do it.

Well, this has been another sort of bipolar-pattern post, hasn’t it?  It really does seem to me that I often produce a vaguely sinusoidal pattern of posts veering from very gloomy and morose and thoroughly nihilistic and moribund to weirdly hyperactive, almost hypomanic posts.  Yet even such latter type posts, of which this is one, really feel pressured to me most of the time, in the psychiatric/psychological usage of the term as applied to speech.

There’s nothing really that I can do with these sorts of insights, though, and certainly no one else is using them for any benevolent purpose toward me.  I guess that shouldn’t surprise me.  As Gendo Ikari pointed out, everyone is ultimately alone, and we certainly die alone.

On that cheery note:  Happy Holidays, everyone!

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Is this my final fit, my final bellyache? I doubt it.

I don’t think I’m going to write very much today.  It’s Monday morning, Hanukkah is basically over, Christmas is coming in three days, and the world‒as always‒is just a dried out, crusty piece of crap.  Perhaps that’s good if you’re a dung beetle.  But I am not one of those.

Come to think of it, maybe that’s a good way to regard the people who want to claim as much of the world for themselves as they can without care for whether they deserve it from any point of view, and who don’t care what condition it’s in, since everything is shit anyway, and they are fond of shit.

Yeah, let’s call those people dung beetles.

This is not intended as a slight against actual dung beetles, though, which are honorable creatures which play an important part in the general ecosystem.

Anyway, it probably doesn’t matter.  Of course, whether or not something matters is very dependent upon one’s point of view.  What matters to an architect who specializes in skyscrapers might be of very little even trivial interest to a beet farmer.

That’s just a pair of examples‒or an example of a pair.  This is not to be confused with the worries of a pear farmer (Ha ha); they might yet have a third set of priorities, mightn’t they?  Though I suspect the concerns of the pear farmer would probably have more in common with those of the beet farmer than those of the architect.  And, of course, assuming they are all human, their overall concerns share much more in common than those any of them might share with sea anemone…or just ordinary anemones.

I don’t know what the hell I’m going on about right now.  I was thinking of just embedding some YouTube “videos” of some music that I’ve done‒some original, some covers‒that sort of convey the way I feel today, since none of my blogging seems to work.  Maybe I’ll do some of that, anyway.  I don’t know that there’s any point in it, but then, I don’t know that there’s any point in anything, do I?  I have my suspicions, but I don’t know, and I have no interest in believing in much of anything, at least in certain senses of the word.  Indeed, I have real contempt for people who think believing is a good enough way to approach reality.

Sorry, I suspect I’m not making much sense here.  I guess it doesn’t matter.  Here, take a look at a few pieces of music, some original, some covers.  Then I’ll shut up and spare you lot the nonsense.

Actually, I don’t know if I’m even going to do that.  I guess you will know, if you’re reading this.  But I hate what I’ve written so far here today.  Though, perhaps it’s a work of unparalleled genius.  The odds are far from great, but they are not zero.

Ugh.  I don’t know what I’m doing.  This season of the year has really exacerbated my already not insignificant neuropsychiatric issues.

I’ve learned that there’s a nice high-rise Hyatt hotel in downtown Fort Lauderdale with surprisingly reasonable room rates, and I was thinking of maybe getting a balcony room there either on Christmas Eve or on New Year’s Eve or something.  It sounds like it might be a good place from which to watch fireworks.

I’ll keep you posted about that.  Or maybe I won’t, I don’t know.  I know I have a cover of No Surprises as one of my favorite songs‒in a way, my theme song‒but that doesn’t mean I’m dogmatic about it.  Anyway, something could be a surprise to all of you (though goodness knows it shouldn’t be) and not so much of one to me.

I’m not a big fan of surprises, because most of the surprises in my life have been unpleasant to horrible.  And almost all of them occurred slowly, almost creepily.  They aren’t the sorts of surprises to make you jump, though they sometimes can leave you with your jaw hanging open and your breath bated.

Enough.  This blog is done for today.