dysthymia

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Winding down at the end of the week

It’s Friday as I write this (and as I intend to publish it), and I do not expect to work tomorrow, exclusis improvisis*.  There had been some sort of slight possibility of doing something with my youngest one of these weekends, but I’m not sure if that is ever going to pan out.  There certainly hasn’t been any finalization of anything, nor really any tentativization (which is probably not a legitimate word).  I guess I’ll find out.

I don’t like to try to push things from my end, because I don’t want to elicit any sense of obligation or guilt in my child.  While I definitely want to spend time with them (with both of them, ideally, but that’s another matter), it would be horrifying to discover that such time was spent only because of a sense of remorse and duty, not because they wanted to spend time with me.

Then again, I have a hard time imagining that anyone ever wants to spend time with me, at least not anymore.  In the past, I would say that I used to be at least some degree of “fun” as a person with whom to hang out.  But I don’t know that I am capable of being that way anymore‒actually, based on many people who have spent time with me perforce, I think it’s pretty clear that I am not pleasant company.  Maybe I never really was.  Maybe most people just put up with me in the past.

Given such facts, on my current weekends off, such as this coming weekend, I basically just spend time by myself.  That’s good for getting rest from the effort of interpersonal relations, and it also lets me rest my back some, but I do feel quite isolated and gloomy and, yes, lonely.

Waah.  Poor baby.

I’m running out of interesting YouTube videos to watch, despite there being many billions of such videos available.  I do enjoy going for walks when I’m able, usually, and they are good for me overall.  Except, right now, at this time of year, the heat index gets well above 100 Fahrenheit here starting quite early in the morning, meaning my body’s cooling mechanisms cannot adequately function to maintain a healthy temperature, so I’m in danger of heat stroke if I push much at all.

It turns taking a long walk into a possibly suicidal gesture (even potentially a deliberate one).  That’s a bit fascinating, because they can’t Baker Act you for taking a walk, at least not readily.  But overheating and dehydration can put one at risk for kidney stones, and that is something well worth avoiding, believe me.  Well, you don’t have to believe me, but if you end up having kidney stones yourself, I’d be willing to bet that you would agree.

Anyway, I don’t know what I’m trying to discuss.  My mental health has not been good lately, even for me.   By which I mean it isn’t just not good on average, which is true, but that it’s worse than my typical, average, poor state.  I don’t know if that’s obvious to people around me‒as far as I can tell, no one can ever see when I feel truly horrible‒but I can certainly tell, even if no one else can.

Oh!  This brings up a personal pet peeve of mine (I guess all “pet peeves” are personal, but you probably get what I mean):  I despise the recent tendency to use the term “mental health” as a euphemism for mental illness, as in “that person suffered from mental health”.

I don’t understand what people think they are accomplishing‒or avoiding‒by attempting such linguistic gymnastics, but it’s maddeningly absurd and idiotic.  “Health” and “illness” are antonyms, dammit.  One doesn’t suffer from mental health (though I have seen that exact expression used unironically), one suffers due to a relative lack thereof.  It’s as if you said someone went bankrupt from a surfeit of goods and money.

I don’t know why people feel that avoiding words that describe unpleasant things will make those things somehow less difficult, but it doesn’t work, as far as I can see.  It just obfuscates the issues and makes it more difficult to improve things.  You can’t get your mechanic to look at the part of your car that’s having trouble just by saying that your car is really driving lately.  That may not be the best absurd parallel, but that’s okay; the thing itself is so stupid and absurd and insane that it stands alone.

You don’t say of someone who is dying of metastatic cancer that they are suffering from physical health.  They are suffering from a terrible illness.

Likewise, depression (and its various related issues), chronic or otherwise, is a mental illness, and it has mortality rates comparable to many cancers, and worse than some.  There is also much more stigma associated with it than with such ailments as cancer, which doesn’t help.  I’m not sure what can be done about all that.

One thing I can say is that my mental health is poor.  That’s nothing new overall, obviously, but it gets just more and more tedious all the time, even as it continues to have its usual effects.  It becomes harder and harder to see any point in trying to fight it.  What would I gain?  What do I have to which to look forward in my life?

Nothing.  I anticipate no new revelations or relationships or creations or friendships or companionship (redundant list entries, I know).  I anticipate no new accomplishments.  I expect only gradual and rather pathetic decay and dissolution, unless I’m lucky enough to have something take me out more precipitously, or to arrange some such thing for myself.

Well, whatever.  Sorry.  I hope you have a good weekend.

*Barring the unforeseen.

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‘Tis all men’s office to speak patience to those that blog under the load of sorrow

Hello and good morning.

I’m back on the smartphone again today, so hopefully I can at least avoid going on and on and on like I did yesterday.  That ought to be easy enough, but apparently, it is not.  I don’t know why I get so “talkative” here all the time, but it doesn’t seem to be because I have anything important to say.

As I’ve noted before, typing on a QWERTY keyboard feels almost more natural than speaking to me (and I do it far more often now) but that’s definitely not true for using the smartphone, and it probably never will be.

For one thing, I haven’t stopped having arthralgia/tendinopathy in and around the bases of my thumbs related to such use.  It’s not severe discomfort, certainly not compared to my chronic pain, but it is there and it is annoying.  It seems, however, to interfere with playing guitar more than with using my smartphone (or anyone else’s, I would guess).

Yesterday, I wasn’t sure I wanted to play any, so I figured I’d give fate a hand in things.  I carry four dollar coins with me every day‒two Susan B. Anthonys and two Sacagaweas‒and I use them to help make decisions when I feel no particular pull in a given direction.  I also use them to clarify my own inclinations:  if I get a result and dislike it, I know that I really want to do the alternate thing.  I’m told that my son has adopted this sort of habit as well.

Anyway, I flipped all four coins and got a unanimous set of heads*, so I played guitar and sang some.  I did it somewhat reluctantly, but when all four ladies agree, I find it hard to ignore them.

It wasn’t anything fancy, I just mainly went through a series of songs I know by heart, plus I think I played through Desperado using the pdf I have of a printout of the chords.  There were a lot of twinges in both thumbs/wrists while I was playing, though.  Still, I’ve come to realize that I have a decent repertoire of songs that I can do off the cuff, so if I needed to do some busking, I could probably do it.

I also recently realized that the Radiohead song(s) Polyethylene (Parts 1 & 2) ends with the same chord on which their song Fake Plastic Trees begins.  That was too funny a coincidence (given the subject matter/titles of the songs, especially), so I’ve taken to playing them as one combined song, a sort of mini-medley.

Several days ago, I even tried taking a video of me playing and singing (not those songs), using the desktop’s camera, and I discovered something:  if I ever do want to record myself doing music again, then I need a new microphone, probably more than one.  The sound quality was terrible, full of clipping and distortion and such.  Also, I need a new face, but that’s a separate matter.

I have also been working on learning Bach’s Two Part Invention number 13 for the guitar (mainly the right hand part so far‒the left hand had to be restranscribed and brought up an octave and I don’t enjoy it quite as much).  This has long been one of my favorite piano pieces to play, though I am way too rusty to play it now on a keyboard.  I used to like it so much that, whenever I was antsy, I would find a surface with an edge and “play” that Bach piece.  I guess I have always been a “stimmer”.

Anyway, all this crap isn’t really here or there, it’s just silly trivia that I’m spouting in lieu of having anything substantive to say.  I’m sorry if it’s boring or all over the place.  My mind has not been doing well lately, in case you haven’t noticed (or just haven’t read my blog lately).

I was just thinking recently about whether it would be workable for me to start going back to writing fiction maybe say two or three days a week (Monday, Wednesday, Friday for instance) and blogging only on the other days.  I don’t know if that would lose me readers on the blog or perhaps bring more people in, but it’s not as though I ever have more than a few dozen people coming to the blog in the first place.

Then again, no one’s exactly champing at the bit to read any of my fiction, either.  This is mainly just a self-indulgent, foolish exercise, a lab sample of concentrated futility.  Come to think of it, that could actually be said about pretty much my entire life since roughly 2013 (at the latest).  Trying to find any meaningfulness in my life since then is like wandering through the ruins of an ancient Egyptian city, looking for a 7-11.

Anyway, that’s enough of my stupidity for now.  Not that my stupidity will stop, but at least I won’t spew any more of it on you for the moment.  I hope you have a day that improves after you finish reading this; it’s unlikely to be much worse, right?

TTFN

*This is not terribly improbable; it will happen in one out of 2 to the 4th, or 1 in 16, runs of four coin flips.

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“With the lights out, it’s less dangerous”

Well, I’m writing today on the lapcom, not for any particular specific reason, but just because, as of yesterday afternoon when I was preparing to leave the office, the various strengths (or magnitudes) and directions of the vectors in my brain came together and produced enough impetus for me to pack and then carry the lapcom with me.  After that, there’s much less of an energy barrier in the way of actually writing using the lapcom in the morning.  If I have it with me, I prefer to write using the lapcom rather than the smartphone.

As for the subject/topic of this blog post, well…I don’t know.  I have no idea what to write or what to say, other than to say whatever comes out of my (figurative) mouth here.  I don’t know what I’m going to write ahead of the actual writing any more than you know what my next word will be before you read it.

I guess that’s how conversation happens in real life as well.  People (at least, neurotypical people) don’t tend to script their conversations.  They just start talking, and the process of talking is identical with (or at least part of) the process of forming the ideas in the first place.

You don’t think about that to say before you think and say it, nor do your think about what to think about and say before you think about thinking about and saying things.  One cannot in any literal sense fully plan ahead what one says or thinks, because it would imply an infinite regress.

No, most of the time, expressing one’s thoughts is the first circumstance in which one formulates those thoughts (though of course it might well not be the first time one has had the same or similar ones).  Ideas, and even memories, do not exist fully formed within the brain, as if on some SSD drive; they must be reformed every time they are brought up.

This is part of why memory in humans is so malleable.  All memories bring out not just information from the past, but also color it with whatever information is leading to the memory being recalled at a particular moment.  This feeds back on and can alter the memory over time.

The things that happen with neural nets/deep learning systems/LLMs is teaching us at least some things about how thoughts and minds work in non-linear ways, though it’s important not to draw too many or too literal parallels to actual brains.  For one thing, brains are vastly more efficient than any kind of software/hardware we have.

Though your brain is certainly the most energy-hungry portion of your body, using about 20% of all the calories you burn, this still is only about 20 watts or so.  That’s less than your typical lapcom uses, and far, far less than any LLM or similar system uses.

The brain is also more complex on many levels.  Synapses are not simple binary switches, like transistors; they are more or less continuously variable in the amount of neurotransmitter they release into a synapse, and the number of receptors in the receiving synapse, and the degree to which activation (or inhibition) of those receptors affects the functions of the postsynaptic neuron and how that interacts with other inputs and the basic metabolism and chemistry of the next level of nerve cells.

Those functions are also affected by hormones of various kinds, from peptides to steroid hormones to things like histamine and glutamate that are neurotransmitters and hormones and (some of them) even amino acids.

Then, of course, there are the inputs from the many and various “glial” cells, which are not neurons, but which “support” neurons in the brain, and which (among other things) create the myelin sheaths that allow nerve transmission to happen much more quickly in “white matter”, and so on.  These things can alter and tweak the “weights” in any particular neuron “node” in ways that are more complicated than the nodes and weights in neural nets.

And of course, the scale is daunting.  You have about a hundred billion neurons in your brain (give or take), and each one has connections with 1,000 to 10,000 other neurons, making the total number of synaptic connections in the brain on the order of a hundred trillion to a quadrillion.

Just imagine if every star in the Milky Way galaxy had some kind of hyperspace links to 1,000 to 10,000 other stars.  That would be a complex galactic network.  The brain is this scale of network.  And the synapses, again, are not binary switches like transistors, but are more or less continuously variable within a given range.  Likewise, the impulses traveling down an axon, though binary in a sense (each nerve impulse either happens or does not), actually vary continuously, because it’s the rate of impulses arriving that affects the release of neurotransmitters.  But it’s not the only thing that affects it.

Anyway, this is all interesting stuff, I guess.  Learning about neural nets is fascinating, and is yet another use of linear algebra, matrices and the like (which are also good for General Relativity).  And learning about how gradient descent works in machine learning and so on is interesting and thought-provoking (an amusing coincidence, not an irony).

I’m reading some things about this and trying to pick up on it, just for general understanding.  I doubt that I’ll ever do anything with any of it other than maybe “talk” about it here (which is nearly the only place I talk about much of anything).  But at least it’s interesting.

It’s futile, of course.  But nearly everything I do or have done is or has been futile.  And that’s not just on a cosmic scale, but on a human, day-to-day, interpersonal scale.  Almost all my efforts are either wasted or fully counter-productive.  This is the outcome of something like me trying to do and be good as much as he can; it just tends to be pointless or worse.

None of it matters, though.

Anyway, as often happens with the lapcom, I’ve written too much of nothing today, and that’s irritating to me.  I can’t imagine how annoying it must be to my readers.  At least, the rest of your day will probably be less annoying by comparison with this post, right?

Right?

I guess maybe it doesn’t really work that way.  It’s all just irritating, isn’t it?  It’s irritating that I don’t catch a terminal illness, some kind of deadly but not-too-quick infection or cancer or something.  It would be good to be able to have people know that I was dying, so that if anyone out there is mad enough to want to see me or greet me or say goodbye to me before I die, they could.  I think I would appreciate that.

Odds are, though, I’ll just disappear and be gone someday, perhaps very soon, and almost no one in the world will notice.  Those who do notice will only do so vaguely, because there is practically no one to whom my life is integral or even very strongly connected.  I’m just background static for the most part.  When I go, it will just be good riddance to bad rubbish, as they say.  There’s really no sensibly available better alternative of which I am able to avail myself.

As Kurt Cobain sang, “Oh, well, whatever, never mind.”  He had some good ideas, did Cobain-sensei, and he carried them out.

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What do you call an infinite number of finite and separate beings? Maybe just “reality”.

I don’t really have much to say today.  Not that such a thing usually prevents me from running off at the keyboard (or the smartphone in this case) for stupid lengths on any given day.  But I think it may do so today, because my energy is flagging, and it’s only just very early in the morning.

I suppose today’s date is mildly entertaining:  it’s 7-7-2026, and that is the same in either the USian or the European way of ordering the day and the month.  But that’s pretty unremarkable.  Any day of a month in which the ordinal* number for the day is the same as the ordinal number for the month will produce this.  There are, thus, 12 such days every year, and they are the same days every year.  So, they are not very exciting.

I guess it would have been better back in 2007 (07-07-07), or even better, in 1977 (7-7-77).  But then it would only be fun if you drop the two digits for the century (i.e., 20… or 19…).  It’s not great, is it?

I don’t know.  What should I talk about, here with my shouting into the void and gazing into the abyss and jumping into the conclusion?

That latter expression almost sounds like a euphemism for dying, doesn’t it?  Is it like skipping to the end of a mystery novel?  Probably not, because I’m very close to being certain that, unlike the end of a mystery novel, nothing will be revealed when one dies.

By that, I don’t mean that the truth will be revealed and it will be that there is nothing.  It’s more subtle than that.  I mean nothing of any kind will be revealed to you, because that to which the revelation might occur is what will cease entirely‒in a way, that happens every moment, but not in quite the same way as it will (I suspect) at the time of death.

Of course, I could be wrong about this, in principle.  But I am not “agnostic” in the usual sense of simply not having any inkling one way or another about a question.  I think there are good, strong reasons‒based on all we know of physics and biology and mathematics, and on how many different mythologies there are about “life after death” and how much they stink of desperate human fear and wish-fulfillment, how anthropocentric they are, when clearly the universe is not anthropocentric‒to think that death is simply the dissolution of the four-dimensional pattern that was a person, a sort of re-annihilation of “virtual particles” back to the vacuum state of the quantum field.

In a spatially infinite universe (or in some other version of a multiverse) it seems to be that there will exist other versions of you, both identical ones and nearly-identical ones, as well as quite different ones, including ones that inexplicably have all the memories of being other versions of you.  But they will not literally have been you, and there will be a much higher proportion of “you” that will have random memories of every possible kind of nonsense.

Of course, none of these versions of you can violate the laws of physics**.

And they aren’t really you, are they?  If they were, you might be experiencing everything any version of you is experiencing now, and you are not.  There are strong impediments to such a simultaneous experience of infinite lives, not the least of which is the relativistic impossibility of information traveling at infinite speed, as well as the incoherence of the concept of “simultaneity” for objects with spatial separation (if this is not obvious, I encourage you to look into special relativity).

So, yeah.  You are the state of your being right now, and that state is always changing (not randomly, though a lot of it does seem to be stochastic).  There is not a much better description of “you” for accuracy, though there can be more precise and thorough descriptions of the details.

There could be a billion or a googol or Tree-3 number of “identical” copies of you, but each one would be just a separate “you”, no more a literal part of your being than would be your former womb-mate if you were one of a pair of identical twins.

Reality can be disappointing, though that’s really only if you think you have any right to expect it to be otherwise than it is.  And you don’t have any such right.

Have a good day if you can.

*I think it’s ordinal, not cardinal, in this case, but I’m not too sure.  I’ll look it up.

**I truly despise expressions, usually found in clickbait headlines, such as “this or that finding breaks physics” or “this shouldn’t happen, according to physics”.  No.  Nothing breaks physics.  Nothing that happens “should not” happen according to physics, because physics is what describes what is out there in reality.  If something seems to defy physics, that just shows that we don’t understand physics well enough.  Such things are not generally frightening or worrisome to physicists (and other scientists); these things get them motivated, for they reveal places where we can learn new things about the universe.  Scientists, ceteris paribus, love finding things no one understands.  Science knows it doesn’t know everything***, and what’s more, science kind of loves that it doesn’t know everything.  That’s part of the excitement, the challenge, the possibility of growth.

***If it thought it knew everything, it would cease.

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Imagine whatever headline you want; I don’t care

Welcome to the Monday of the first full week of July in 2026 CE (or AD if you must).  I hope that those of you in the USA had a nice Independence Day weekend.  There are no more significant holidays (that I recall) until at least September, now.

I didn’t do anything to celebrate the holiday‒unless you count trying to burn some kudzu‒because holiday celebrations generally involve other people, family and friends and such like, and I did not have any such group with whom to celebrate.

It’s probably just as well for such groups that I am not a part of them; I’m a serious downer and an unpleasant person* to be around for very long.  This used not to be the case; in my default or older settings, I’m naturally more hyper and sometimes rather silly (that too can be irritating, I fear).  Since my chronic pain began, however, I have become a much grumpier, angrier, more irritable person.  Things that I would have laughed off in the past, or about which I would have been more “philosophical”, easily get my ire up, even tiny little, minor, innocent things.

Using the seven dwarfs as personal descriptions, I spend most of my time these days Grumpy, rarely if ever Happy, frequently Dopey, quite Bashful almost always, from time to time Sneezy, not Sleepy nearly as often as I would prefer.  But I’m always Doc.  Take that for what it’s worth, which is probably nothing.

Anyway, yeah, I didn’t do anything pleasant on Saturday, nor much on Sunday, though at least I did talk on the phone to my sister.

I toyed with the notion of “celebrating” the 4th by making my way to the front of the Palm Beach County courthouse and making a fireworks display in the style of Thích Quảng Đức.  However, it was not only a Saturday, but it was a federal holiday; no one would have been there.  Also, I don’t know that I would have the courage to go through with it.

I need to do something though.  I cannot keep doing what I’m doing.  But I don’t see many options which I’m capable of embracing, given my dearth of personal energy and motivation.

I’m sorry I’m not being more positive or interesting, or at least quirky and strange in a less negative way, today.  Actually, I don’t really know if I’m ever interesting.  But, anyway, I just don’t have the energy right now to pretend not to be depressed, like I often do.  Maybe I’ve been pretending all my life that way**.  They do talk a lot about “masking” in neurodivergent people, and it has struck me as a very accurate and apposite notion since the first time I encountered it.

But, of course, there’s not necessarily any identity underneath such masks.  There’s certainly nothing very consistent, since “who we are” at any given moment or stage of our lives is but a three-dimensional slice of what is actually a four-dimensional being.

In case that sounds weird, I just mean that who we are at any given moment is true for just a point in time, a snapshot of a being that has not only spatial extent but also has a beginning and an end in time and which changes with every moment of that time, taking in and losing particles, maintaining that roughly constant but always altering configuration from frame to frame of of the movie that is a person’s life.

So, a question like “Who am I, really?” is perhaps best answered by saying, “I am the being who is asking that question.”  There is probably no deeper answer, at least not any much more specific one.  There is no “character description” in some Platonic realm that lays out who we really are, or if there is, I’ve encountered not the slightest intimation of it, and I would be very surprised if it existed.

Anyway, enough gobbledegook.  I’m just tired already, and it’s only the very beginning of Monday morning.  I’m so very tired.  I really ought to go before I spoil the party, to paraphrase a good Beatles song (see below).  I fear that I will just be a black cloud for everyone around me today, and probably in general.

I can’t even seem to find a book I can stick with reading right now; I shuffled through several different genres, let alone books, in my Kindle library a few dozen times in recent days, weeks, whatever, trying to find something interesting.  But after a brief time reading each thing I lose momentum and interest.  Even The Noonday Demon, a well-written book about depression, loses me after a bit.  Even Physics isn’t interesting to me, and that’s a bad sign.  Ditto for music, or movies (or shows) or what have you.

Everything is just a drizzly, insipid gray‒metaphorically, and sometimes also literally.  And I sometimes don’t have the energy to keep pretending that I can see anything else.

Like Ed Deepneau said in Stephen King’s Insomnia, “…sometimes the world is full of colors…but now all the colors are turning black.”

Enough, this has gone on too long already.  I apologize.  I hope you have a good day and a good week and a good remainder of your lives.

*More than one person has told me this, and they did not compare notes.

**Probably not.  It would be very bizarre indeed to be born depressed, though the tendency thereto can certainly be congenital, much like both forms of ASD that I have/had.

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Sleep! Sleep like your life depended on it!

Well, it’s Friday, and it’s a slightly fun date to write out:  6-26-2026 or (slightly more fun) 6-26-26 or, in the European way, 26-6-2026 or 26-6-26 (which sounds a bit like a quarterback calling plays in American football, which is slightly ironic for the European format).

I’m writing this post on the lapcom, by the way, because I decided I didn’t want to let an entire week go by without using it, and it just feels better, more “natural” for me to write with it.

I wonder how many words I’ve written on this mini lapcom or one nearly identical to it.  Unanimity (books 1 and 2) was more than half a million words just by itself, and I don’t know how many words I’ve written in all my blog posts that I’ve done on one or another mini lapcom.  I suppose I could figure it out, but it seems like tedious work.  If anyone wants to check it for themselves, you can try, but don’t ask for access to my smartphone or lapcom.

I have a small bit of what is, for me, momentous news:  I slept almost five and a half hours last night!  That was more or less uninterrupted sleep, as far as I know.  If I woke up during the night, I don’t remember it, and I certainly needed to rush to the euphemism as if I had not gotten up during the night.

This may not seem like a big deal, but it’s the most sleep—certainly the longest uninterrupted sleep—that I’ve had in a long, long time without significant use of things that make me sleepy*, like Benadryl®.  However, though I have tried to use the aforementioned antihistamine on non-weekend days in the past, I’ve learned that it actually does me more harm than good the next day if I need to work.

The hangover/persistent effects of that stuff make me slow and stupid (even more so than usual!) and I don’t feel mentally very rested after it.  This makes sense, neurologically, given that sleep is not merely a lack of consciousness but a very involved, active, and utterly crucial** process we still understand only somewhat, and almost all sedatives disrupt it.

I have some hypotheses about why last night’s exceptional sleep happened.  Of course, it could well be just a random outlier—they happen if you wait long enough in pretty much all intrinsically variable systems that produce bell-curve distributions of outcomes—but there are a few contenders for possible, more causal, reasons.

I am always trying various things to see if they improve my health, my sleep, my pain, my mood, etc.  I don’t tend to be as scientific as I would prefer to be about such things, alas.  I tend to be in a constant state of low-level desperation (rather like the “low-flying panic attack” in Radiohead’s Burn the Witch), because I feel so uncomfortable in so many ways so much of the time, and so it’s all but impossible not to try as many things as one can try at any given time.

When you have a bad itch in the middle of your back that you cannot reach directly, and there is no one around to help, you can probably be pretty clever (and desperate) in how you’ll scratch that itch.  Well, itches are a kind of pain—they’re mediated similarly but not identically in the nervous system—they’re just a low-level kind.  That’s part of why scratching works to provide temporary relief:  the local receptors get drowned out by the surrounding inputs.

Now, if itching in your back can be so impossible to ignore that it drives you to scramble madly for a pencil or the corner of a wall or a tree trunk or whatever, no matter what you’re doing—and yet it can be countered by just locally running your fingernails over the surrounding area—well, just think how much more difficult it is to ignore a serious, deep and persistent pain, as well as general, persistent (largely social) anxiety, and depression.  Even when it’s been going on for years, for decades, the very hardware of your nervous system does not let you simply ignore it.

So, yeah, I’m cautiously glad about my night’s sleep.  I don’t want to get too excited.  It may not ever happen again.  What follows the vast majority of outliers in statistical distributions is a subsequent regression toward the mean.  This applies not just to good outliers but also to bad ones, though, so it’s not all bleak.

Anyway, maybe I’ll sleep well this weekend.  I’ll certainly sleep longer, because notwithstanding my above admissions about the drawbacks of antihistamines, it’s nice to be unconscious and physically resting for longer than usual, if the consequences are not significant.  So, long live diphenhydramine (so to speak).

I will not be working this weekend, so I don’t expect to produce another blog post before Monday.  I hope you all have a good weekend.

*It does make me sleepy—very much so.  I found that out the first time I had to take it in response to an attack of hives I got (apparently) from using Irish Spring™ soap.

**How crucial?  As far as we can tell, every animal with a nervous system needs to sleep a significant portion of its time.  This includes aquatic and marine mammals and reptiles, a fact that engenders some amazing adaptive creativity, such as creatures sleeping in one half of their brains at a time.  Evolution may be the true blind, idiot god, but it has a lot of time (much of it in parallel to itself) to explore innovation-space, and it does produce some amazing things.  But it does not seem able to select for simply not sleeping in any creature.  But sleep makes an animal vulnerable, tremendously so.  So, it must be really crucial—life and death crucial—for there to be no yet-discovered alternative.

 

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Awe, for self-pity’s sake!

Well, it’s Tuesday, the 23rd of June in 2026, in case any of you aren’t aware of that fact (or if you’re reading this post later…but not earlier, because I strongly suspect that it’s impossible for you to read it earlier).  It’s the third day of summer and the third full day of what I rather jokingly refer to as “The Days of Awfulness” or even “The Days of Aw, Shit!”*.

The number of days in that stretch is not constant, because one of the bookends on them changes a bit every year.  My Days stretch between Father’s Day and the date of my wedding “anniversary”, on June 29th.  Heck, one of the regular readers here was at my wedding on that day.  How cool is that?  Anyway, those two days highlight and commemorate, or lament, or what have you the two greatest and most terrible of my personal failures, about the two things that have mattered most to me in all my life.  They weren’t my only failures, obviously enough.  But they were, have been, and are the most devastating and heartbreaking ones.

I shouldn’t dwell on them, I know.  It’s not healthy.  But my nervous system (i.e., me) is prone to latch onto numbers and dates and patterns and cycles and all that kind of stuff.  This is part of why I tend to be so skeptical and even sometimes disdainful of people’s tendency to feel significance in truly absurd notions, like the zodiac signs and imagined alien interlopers and other such things.  I recognize my own tendency to find and latch onto patterns even when they are only in my mind.

I’m fine with enjoying those patterns and even playing with them, in a sense, but I don’t want to attach some imagined significance to them.  Even Newton fell into that trap, though he had more of an excuse‒you can’t be the founder of mathematical physics and at the same time know all the stuff that will only be discovered by building on your insights.  That’s related to the whole “you can’t be reading my blog post before it was written” thing.

Anyway, I tend to feel pretty despondent around this time of year, because I cannot seem easily to stop thinking about those things at which I failed and which I lost.  I know it’s contrary to the recommendations of the Stoics and the Taoists and the Buddhists, but I’ve never sworn loyalty or fealty to any of those -isms, I just think some of their ideas are good (and some are not, though these three are way above average in terms of signal-to-noise ratio).

I do, however, have to call attention to the fact that I am having semi-regular interactions with my youngest child, starting since after I was hospitalized with my kidney stone.  We watch Doctor Who together over Discord™ and have gone to a couple of movies together, the most recent of which was Backrooms**.  So, that’s very good, indeed, and those moments are the happiest ones I’ve had in well over a decade.

Mind you, my son (my eldest) still won’t interact with me at all.  And I get it.  Though he knows (I hope) that I didn’t do anything willfully or even willingly that caused him (emotional) pain, he still felt the pain, and that’s a hard thing to get past, especially since it’s the more recent of things (see The Peak-End Rule).  Also, he’s got a stable and (presumably) comfortable and happy life, and disrupting it would be unpleasant and very stressful.

I cannot really blame anyone for not wanting me around.  I know I don’t, a lot of the time.  It’s been a bit of a tendency over my lifetime, for others and for me.  I feel like so many people who have been around me would readily sing along with a Beatles parody called Got to Get You Out of My Life.

Ugh.  Can self-hate and self-pity go together?  Apparently so, and it must be a nauseating spectacle for you to take in.  I apologize.  I guess it’s sort of akin to Gollum hating and loving the Ring, as he hated and loved himself.

People are complicated‒brains being the most complicated local things in the universe known by us (though that could soon change).  Internal contradictions don’t necessarily cause the program to freeze in people, like an old “return without gosub” error**, but there are consequences…probably.

Anyway, thank you for reading.  I forgot to publish the post I had prepared with that audio file I mentioned yesterday, so I’ll do that sometime today.  In the meantime, I hope you all have a good day, then double that, then double it again, and so on.

*This is a reference to or parody of the stretch of days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur in the Jewish tradition, which are sometimes referred to as The Days of Awe.

**I highly recommend both the movie and the earlier YouTube channel series by Kane Parsons, the now-twenty-year-old (!) who directed the movie.

***I don’t know what more recent error messages are.  I haven’t done any real programming since college.

 

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Don’t make such a phus, you Sisy

Well, it’s Saturday and, as I predicted, I am writing a blog post.  I’m writing it on my smartphone, because I felt lazy about bringing the mini lapcom along with me when I left the office yesterday.

I’m still in pain, of course, but it’s not as bad as it was Thursday, and combinations of NSAIDs and Tylenol and some cbd related medicine makes me able to tolerate it‒though the latter leaves me a bit loopy and slightly foggy.

Anyway, it’s Saturday, and I won’t be working as late today as during the week, so that’s good as far as it goes.  It’s not much good, though, because the day is pretty much still used up, especially given my commute.  One certainly cannot rest very well.  Then, of course, tomorrow is the one day in which I can get things done around the house‒or around the room, as I should say, since I live in one room with an attached bathroom.  So, Sunday is laundry day, among other things, and then it’s back to work on Monday.

What a lovely boulder that is, Mr. Sisyphus‒but what on Earth do you mean to do with it?  It’s not actually doing anyone any good, you know.  Initially, constantly rolling it up that hill made your body stronger, but you’ve long since passed the point of diminishing marginal returns and entered full-tilt into the negative returns stage, where you’re wearing yourself down.

It’s sort of like a ballistic arc:  for a bit of time it goes up nicely, but it slows and slows, then it goes around the point of zero velocity and starts going down at an ever-accelerating rate.  We all know the eventual outcome.  As Radiohead sang, gravity always wins.

Forget Atlas Shrugged.  What about Sisyphus Shrugged?  It could be a story about what happens when people give up on just rolling their daily boulders to the top of the hill only for them to roll back down again, to start everything over again.

Of course, what’s-his-name‒Camus, that’s his name‒would argue, indeed he did argue, that though Sisyphus’s actions are ultimately futile as well as futile from moment to moment, Sisyphus is okay.  I think his (translated) words are “we must imagine Sisyphus happy*”

Must we?  I don’t know, maybe.  Certainly he has a felt purpose.  He has been given some drive to push the boulder up, over and over, and it’s clearly an overwhelming drive.  I suppose acting on such an impulse can at least give one the satisfaction of being able to act on one’s drives**, which is almost certainly better than having strong drives and being unable to act on them.  See Harlan Ellison’s classic, I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream.

Have pity indeed for a truly celibate priest, though at least he imagines he will be rewarded for his abstinence (though I’m pretty darn sure his only reward will be oblivion…which is not without its charms).  Have even more compassion for those who are truly starving.

Or, if you want the personal experience, turned up to eleven, you can try having someone waterboard you.  Cutting off one’s ability to follow the urge to breathe, even for a few seconds, is (empirically) the most terrifying and stressful situation for humans.  Trust me, if you ever want to have all other concerns vanish from your mind, just start suffocating*** for a few seconds‒true perspective fall on you like a very massive boulder indeed.

Anyway, even if Sisyphus does have this drive, this motivation, and can act on it, that doesn’t guarantee any form of happiness.  If you’ve ever known anyone with bad OCD, you know that having irresistible and pointless drives does not tend to make someone happy.  It’s not joy such people are feeling, it’s profound anxiety, which let’s face it, is just a comparatively pretty term we use to try to polish the turd, fear.

And fear is, by nature‒I almost could say by design‒unpleasant.  It’s not evolved for you to be able to ignore it.

But people with OCD don’t get any lasting satisfaction by carrying out their rituals; they just get a brief lessening of their fear.  That is undoubtedly better than non-lessening fear, or worsening fear, but that isn’t saying much.  Losing a toe is better than losing a whole foot, but you would rather avoid both if you could.

I don’t know what point I’m making; these are just my random, stochastic thoughts.  But they do seem focused on the fact that people are somehow able to keep going and doing like Sisyphus does, despite there being no evident point or benefit, and indeed, despite their existence and actions seeming like an almost comedic curse from the non-existent gods.

Some people console themselves with fairy tales about Heaven (and Hell, of course, because humans always want a “bad guy” in their stories), and maybe that’s not horrible, as long as they don’t fuck around with other peoples’ lives as part of their delusion.  As far as the afterlife stuff, well, if they’re right, and it’s a good one, then hey, that’s great for them.  Thumbs up.  And if they’re wrong, they’ll never know it, so “whatevs”.

But it would be nice if people overall could reassess the nature of our existence, now that we’re not solely constrained by the blind idiot god, Evolution.  Maybe we can develop actual, real purposes that will make people feel joyful but won’t be driven by fear‒though I suspect this will not be an “evolutionarily stable strategy”, whether for biologically evolved minds or even other kinds of minds one finds.

Humans will probably be replaced by AI, anyway, and it’s looking like it’s going to happen sooner than expected.  Even if AI ends up being entirely aligned with human interests‒a very tiny region in the space of possible or even likely AGIs‒it will still be doing the thinking, the designing, the making, the growing.  Humans, previously the cleverest things they knew, will become little more than pets in such a scenario.  They could be beloved pets, maybe‒pampered and even spoiled‒but still just pets.

Maybe some people would be okay with that.  It’s certainly not the worst possible outcome.  Most other possibilities are not nearly so nice, and we don’t even really know how to steer the future toward which kind of AGI we want because we don’t know how to know what kind of AGI we want.  We don’t even know how to make our own**** wants align with each other’s wants, and we don’t really know in detail what’s happening inside these minds we’re growing so aggressively and haphazardly (not much more than we know our own or others’ more typical minds).

Oh, well.  Whataya gonna do?  Civilization:  it wasn’t very nice while it lasted, but it was probably better than what preceded it and what’s to come, at least for those not running on huge banks of GPUs.  But by all means, old Sisyphumans, let that boulder roll.

*I originally made the typo “we must imagine Sisyphus bappy”, which is a whole ‘nother way of thinking about Sisyphus.

**Utterly unrelated parenthetical:  I had a weird thought just while writing this sentence about whether there are any raps in a true 3 / 4 time signature, since it occurred to me that even the ones that had patterns of three syllables repeated ended up being something like three beats and a rest beat or two beats then a half note (a held double beat), but remained in 4 / 4 time.  It turns out that there are a few, but it’s said (by Google’s AI) that such a time signature is not as popular because it produces difficult songs to which to dance.  Evidently, rap fans don’t like the waltz.

***A crucial part of this is the inability to blow off CO2, since that is the primary and almost sole driver of respiration, not the absence of oxygen.  This is why, in a pure nitrogen atmosphere, people don’t even realize that they’re suffocating, or asphyxiating, or whatever the official term is.  All their CO2 is getting breathed out nicely, so they feel no panic or horror as they merely get lightheaded and lose consciousness and…well, that’s it, unless they are rescued.  It doesn’t sound all that bad, does it?

****I know, I know.  I’m speaking, just for the sake of argument, as if I were human.

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I’m back, but not to save the universe

It’s Friday now and I’m writing this post on the lapcom*.  According to the list of my saved blog posts that auto-fills as I write in the new file name, I wrote a post using the lapcom on this date last year, though that was a Thursday and this is a Friday.  That day mismatch by one is the sort of thing that tends to happen, since the “normal” year is 365 days, which gives 52 with a remainder of 1 if you divide it by 7 (the number of days in a week, in case that was unclear).

That’s a bit interesting (though only just) because of my tendency in recent time to write mostly on my smartphone; it’s relatively uncommon for the same dates to appear on the smartphone’s saved list two years in a row.  I think my smartphone-writing tendency was well in place since at least last year, but I am far from sure.  I have not been keeping track of that development precisely over time, so I’d be building my impression de novo if I were trying to recall the specifics.

Of course, I could just look through my list of “blog post for x-x-xxxx Xday” from the last years, sorted by date, and I would see how many posts I wrote on the lapcom in 2025 versus the number I wrote on the smartphone, which are saved to Google Drive.  That’s not exactly a difficult task, but it’s also not very interesting, so I don’t intend to do it.

I’m sure it’s also not very interesting for you all to read about, presumably**, so I’ll drop that topic now.

I did not write a post yesterday, in case you were wondering, because I did not go to work.  I was not “ill” in the sense of having a contagious disease; rather, I was in very severe pain and the meds I was taking to try to combat it were making me feel physically ill at various levels, so I tried to stay back at the house and rest.

It’s not very comfortable there, and I don’t especially like being there, but at least I don’t have to try to do work while feeling crappy, and I can lie down to rest my back and try to nap a bit.  I can also try to pass time doing some distracting things, though nothing really entertains me or even catches much of my interest anymore.  I’m just passing time all the time.

I haven’t played guitar or keyboard (nor sang) in over a week, maybe almost two weeks.  My left hand fingertip calluses haven’t significantly faded, but if this goes on too long, they will.  Of course, guitar calluses aren’t as impressive as cello-related ones, which I had for probably nearly twenty years back in the day.  Sometimes you could see those without even having to look too closely.

My cello calluses are long gone—though there’s a “ship of Theseus” style question of whether one should consider my current calluses to be anything but the same ones, or on the other hand (no pun intended) if one can consider any calluses the same ones over time, since the skin cells turn over and so do the very atoms in the underlying living cells.

It doesn’t matter, but sometimes such philosophical questions can stimulate thought and train one to be careful and rigorous in the way one thinks, and so perhaps make one less prone to certain kinds of mental errors.  They are probably worth your time if you’re interested.

Anyway, I’m going to work today, and I should also be working tomorrow, so you’ll get probably five posts this week, at least, though not contiguously.  You also won’t be getting one of my altered Shakespeare quote headlines.  I do those on Thursdays, out of a sense of…nostalgia, I guess, for the times when my blog was only posted on Thursdays, and was meant as a promotion/author’s note on what was going on with my fiction writing.  I’m not doing any fiction writing now—and I don’t just mean “at this very moment” because that’s all too obvious—and I don’t know whether I will ever again, any more than whether I’ll ever sing or play an instrument or anything like that again.

Oh, but I did come up with and write down a rather silly story idea yesterday, for the first time in a while.  It concerned the expression “time flies when you’re having fun”, but takes the point of view that “time flies” could be some form of supernatural insect.  The main character could be someone who is cursed such that, whenever he was becoming joyful or satisfied with his life, these supernatural insects would begin to swarm him and eventually transport him through time to some random place whence he’d have to start all over.

It’s a goofy notion, I know.

I actually prefer the idea I had apparently written down most recently before that.  It concerned a scientist who invents a truth serum or device or combination thereof that makes a person under its influence always tell the truth—even truths that they did not know before.  For instance, you can ask them what the weather is like in Kuala Lumpur at the moment and they will tell you and it will be correct, even if they are in Jakarta or Tannu Tuva or Massachusetts or Poughkeepsie or some other entertainingly named place.

But the more rarefied the information is, the greater toll it takes on the mind being questioned.  I proposed the possibility of asking someone what the next day’s winning lottery numbers would be, but the sheer improbability of specific answers and the fact that they are in the future overstrains and severely damages the brain of the person involved.  But they would get the numbers right if they survived the process.  I wonder what might come of such an invention.

I am not, by the way, giving anyone permission to use those ideas by sharing them here.  You do not have permission, and I might well be inclined to bring down truly horrific vengeance upon you if you steal them in any sense.  However, if I should die without ever writing either story, then after that, you should feel absolutely free to use them.  You don’t even have to give me credit; I’ll be dead, I won’t care (though the present person I am thinks it pleasant to imagine being given such credit, so do with that what you will).

Anyway, that’s enough for today.  As I said, I expect to write a post tomorrow, barring (as always) the unforeseen***.  I hope you all have a good day today, and that you have a good weekend and so on.  Heck, carry that forward as far as you can.

*I wrote Tuesday’s post on the smartphone, by the way, for those who took up my challenge to try to see if they could tell whether that had been the case or I had written on my lapcom.

**Though we must be careful with such presumption, because as we all know, “when you presume, you make a pres out of u and me”.  In the past, being a “pres” could have been a good thing, at least to some degree, but that time is gone.  Nowadays, I’d rather assume than presume, since I’m often an ass entirely on my own, anyway.

***I tried to find a pithy Latin phrase that would encapsulate that expression, since I use it so often—you know, something like ceteris paribus for “all other things being equal”—but the attempts I have made so far produced cumbersome phrases that didn’t quite truly mean what I had intended when I reversed the translation process.  Alas.

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Since “Evian” is “naive” spelled backwards, are its drinkers wise and sophisticated?

(This post has nothing to do with the headline, just in case you’re wondering.)

I’m not quite ready to reveal the truth about yesterday’s blog post; I’m kind of hoping that someone who doesn’t usually comment might throw their hat into the ring* and make a guess.  I don’t know who such a person might be, but it would be nice to have ever more comments.

For this post, though, I will reveal that it is being written on my smartphone.  I didn’t bring along the lapcom because I was very fatigued by the end of the day yesterday.  This was mainly mental fatigue, but that translates into low physical energy as well, since it’s the functions of the brain that largely determine the movement of the body.

Which is not meant to imply that the brain is not part of the body; it very much is.  I am no dualist in any sense of the word.  The brain is an organ, and like all other organs, it has its attributes and vulnerabilities and dysfunctions.  Trust me on that last score.

Or don’t trust me, that’s entirely up to you.  I wouldn’t be inclined to try to cajole someone into trusting me.  I’m not a huge fan of presumptive trust anymore than of giving someone presumptive “respect”.  To me, respect, like trust, has to be earned, through the outcomes of interactions, and it can never really, reasonably, be complete.

Everything is always a calculated risk, including trust, even if the calculations are…not very rigorous or conscious, and even if people claim to have it absolutely.  Those who make such claims are wrong or lying or both.  One cannot even trust oneself absolutely.  Trust me on that.  Ha ha.

Anyway…

That’s just some typical nonsense or bullshit or whatever you want to call it from me.  I don’t have any intention here‒not one of which I am aware‒other than just “to write another blog post”.  How’s that for a positive, beneficial purpose or undertaking?  How’s that for something to try to give oneself a sense of purpose or meaning or belonging?  It’s pretty unimpressive, really.

As for belonging, in particular, it’s a fairly laughable notion for me.  I don’t belong anywhere.  Maybe no one does.  Maybe the very notion of “belonging” in the social sense is and has always been a cognitive and emotional illusion.

Like individual atoms that exist within water molecules in the ocean, a person can technically be part of something bigger without any actual real involvement in that bigger thing, and without losing any nature of separateness.

Any electron in the outer portion of any atom, or anywhere else, is just an electron and‒barring highly energetic interactions‒is going to remain an electron** forever, as far as we can tell.  And it is literally identical in characteristics to every other electron that exists, and they are all entirely fungible, just like the individual cents in your electronically recorded and maintained bank account.

Of course, people, despite being composed of countless numbers of such tiny, fungible particles, are not fungible.  They are too complicated, there are too many ways to put electrons and quarks together to make a person for any two to have even a nanoscopically tiny chance to be identical in all pertinent senses.

Okay, I don’t know what point, if any, I’m trying to make here.  Probably there is none.  Or if there is, it is probably some desperate, quietly terrified attempt to connect somehow with some kindred spirit(s) somewhere.  However, I am getting weirder and weirder all the time, or so it seems to me, so it seems ever more unlikely that kindred spirits exist for me, if they ever did.

Like Melkor, I’m looking to find something or someone in the Void, but alas, it is just…void.  And my thoughts continue to be unlike those of my brethren, and, like Melkor, I become ever more dispirited and spiteful, though at least I’m not trying to conquer or destroy Arda.  I went through that phase back when I was a preteen and teenager.

I’m not saying I was necessarily wrong when I recognized that people are absolutely shit at trying to create and run civilization well.  I just don’t think it’s probably worth the effort to correct things, because it would be a neverending effort.

Oh, well.  That’s enough of my spewing words for the moment.  There seem to be brush fires down in south Florida‒we can all smell the smoke‒but it seems unlikely that they will contribute much to the destruction of current human society.

Is that good?  Is it bad?

I don’t know.

I hope you have a good day.

*Would such a hat become invisible?  Would it, if it were strong enough, gain the power to sense and dominate the wearers of all the other rings?  Would it inevitably become evil?

**The same cannot be said for muons, let alone taus, the two higher mass “species” in the electron family.  They are unstable and rapidly decay to smaller particles, but they have the same charge and spin as an electron.  Electrons, on the other hand, appear to be at some manner of ground state; they are too “light” to decay into anything smaller spontaneously, and any changes they do undergo cannot violate the conservation of charge, so they are limited.