dysthymia

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So we profess ourselves to be the slaves of chance, and flies of every wind that blogs

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday again, against almost everyone’s better judgment.  Indeed, it’s the first Thursday (and the second day) of March, which is a new month (though the name is, of course, not new).

It being Thursday, it’s time once again for my traditional weekly blog post, which differs from my now-daily blog post only in that it follows the old pattern of a Shakespearean title and usually a picture…and, of course, this little introduction in which I note all these points, which is frankly rather tedious.  I should probably just quit doing it.

The trains were having severe troubles yesterday morning and yesterday evening.  In the morning, there was temporary suspension of the trains northbound from my usual station, due to what the fellow at the station referred to as a “train versus vehicle* event”.  The RTA was supposedly providing a “bus bridge” from that station to the next one north of the accident, and indeed, at long last, two full buses arrived bringing passengers from the station north of the event so they could continue south.  However, only one of the buses was heading back north, oddly enough, and that bus got full literally just as I was about to get on it.  I was the very one at whom the driver held out his hand, palm forward, and said, “No more passengers.”

So, grumbling, I stepped back, and I and the other remnants waited, asking when the next bus would be.  The fellow at the station did not know, though he guessed about ten minutes (ha ha).  After a while, he received notice that normal service was resuming.  This probably means no one had died in the “train versus vehicle event”, which I suppose is a good thing**.  I ended up being about an hour late to the office, and this was on Wednesday, which means there was payroll to do.  Also, we’re setting up and putting into practice a new program that I am heavily involved in, and we had two new people starting on a trial basis, who needed to be processed…and of course, meanwhile, we had at least three people out sick.  I was pretty stressed out, even relative to a normal day.

Then, last night, as I waited at the train station, the southbound train was announced to be late, and then announced to be later, and then that train was cancelled, and then the next one was announced to be late, and then later…

Eventually, it got to the point that, even if that next train got there at its announced later time, by the time I took it, then the two buses***, then walked from the stop to the house, it would be quite late.  And, honestly, I didn’t have anything (and certainly not anyone) waiting for me at the house, so it didn’t seem worth it to bother going.  I walked back to the office, and I slept here overnight.  And here I am writing this.

Such is my life—if you can call it that.  I hate it.  There’s nothing in it that’s of any real worth.  I’m still in chronic pain, I still have insomnia.  Obviously, I still have my dysthymia/depression, and of course, if I do have any neurodevelopmental difficulties that have hitherto gone undiagnosed, they certainly haven’t gone away.  I remain at least slightly uncertain in that latter category, because though I think the evidence is good, I do not quite trust my own judgment.

Can you blame me?

So, anyway, again, here I am, though metaphorically I am nowhere.  I also have a headache, which is probably at least partly tension related.  And I’m tired.  I’m not sleepy, but I am tired, almost all of the time.  I honestly don’t know what to do.  I mean, I know what I think I ought to do.  But it’s hard to get an “is” from an “ought”—though all “oughts” come from “ises****” contrary to what humeans seem to think—and I don’t have quite the will yet to overcome the activation energy wall created by biological drives/resistances to get to the other side.

I’m working on a way around.  There are things one can do to reduce one’s resistance in the short term, to lower that activation energy barrier.  But I’m not really interested in drugs, nor am I willing to deal with people who deal in illicit ones, and alcohol just tends to make me sleepy (and yet not to stay asleep or feel rested).  I do step swiftly into crosswalks when the lights change, hoping someone will not pay attention to traffic signals and will just hit me; they would deserve to have to deal with it, since pedestrians in the crosswalk have the right of way when obeying signals.  But so far—though many seem tempted—even when I tell them to hit me, none of them have.  I don’t know whether to feel irked about that or to be slightly pleased that so many people are more careful than one might expect.

Oh, well.  It doesn’t matter.  I suspect I’ll find a way to get back where I came from one way or another before too long, blisters and biological drives notwithstanding.  There must be some kind of quantum tunneling that can eventually get me through that mental barrier*****.

There’s no reason to expect things to head in the opposite direction, though, so I don’t really have any sense of optimism or even of possibility.  But in the meantime, I’ll keep writing these daily posts on days when I work, which will include Saturday this week.  You can continue to look forward to them, if you do, but for a limited time only.

TTFN

tri rail

Golden Glades Tri Rail Station – no trains present

*Is a train not a type of vehicle, though?

**Although, honestly, given the trouble the driver of said vehicle had caused—presuming that it was that driver’s fault, which is not certain but seems more likely than not—I can’t help but wish that they at least could have been injured badly, and if you had asked me at the time, I would almost certainly have said they ought to have been killed (but not their passengers, of course, unless the accident was caused by such a passenger).  After all, given the number of people whom they inconvenienced, and the economic, social, and psychological losses they thereby engendered, and the physical stress they created among many people (me included) it seems likely that their escapade led to diminished health and even premature death in one or more than one person.  But they probably didn’t do it on purpose, so perhaps the death penalty would be excessive.  Still, I don’t hear about such accidents happening in countries where commuter trains are much more common than here in the US, whereas something of the sort happens almost monthly just during the times of my commutes.

***I probably wouldn’t have walked.  I’m trying to rest the healing blister on my right foot, at least from more than a mile of walking at a time.  It seems to be doing well.

****That’s a plural that doesn’t want to be spelled.

*****I think this was Dylan’s original first line of All Along the Watchtower, but it just didn’t scan.  It turned out fine when fixed, though, and Jimi’s version was even better, as Dylan himself is said to have admitted.

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What? Were you thinking?

Ugh.  It’s a new day—and a Wednesday, at that, so I have to do the payroll.  It’s a new month, too, so there’s rent and water and electric bills and eventually cable bills and all that coming soon.

I suppose it’s nice that the vernal equinox is this month, and thus the beginning of Spring in the northern hemisphere.  And of course it’s nice that my brother’s birthday is also coming up this month (and one of my best friends from back home has her birthday before that, but we haven’t interacted in a long time).  But other than that, I have no interest in any of it.  Frankly, I don’t have much interest in anything at all.

I spent about ten minutes scrolling through my Audible app this morning, trying to find something I wanted to listen to on my way to the bus stop.  I didn’t find anything, though I have a fair few Audible books—not as many as I have Kindle books, but still, there are quite a few.

I eventually just returned to a podcast that I had started yesterday—an old one with Anil Seth on Sam Harris’s podcast, two interesting people talking about interesting things.  I get a bit frustrated when Sam betrays some of his bias toward the “hard problem of consciousness” being a legitimate, persistent thing, which I think is just a notion he holds onto as a meditator and thinker about consciousness—the notion that there’s something pseudo-mysterious about the fact that neural processes give rise to actual subjective experience.

I don’t understand what he thinks the alternative is.  The so-called philosophical zombie thought experiment is self-contradictory and incoherent when you look at it closely*.  How would a self-monitoring and flexible, self-directing, agentic, information-processing system that’s part of a biological organism with problems to solve and a not-completely-predictable world in which to live be expected to function?  It monitors itself internally and externally, including monitoring at least some of the contents of that processing, because that’s a useful thing for an organism to do to survive and reproduce in a complicated world that includes other beings like itself in addition to predators and prey and whatnot.  Why is it a hard problem that all this produces “subjective” experience?  What do you expect it to do?

It’s not any more sensible than asking why there is something rather than nothing.  What do you expect?  Obviously, there are only people asking that question if there is something.  And why would there be “nothing”, anyway?  Why do people assume that’s the default state?  Of course, I don’t think any actual, conscious being can truly imagine “nothing”, anymore than any conscious being can really imagine or contemplate the experience of ceasing to exist.

If you’ve been under general anesthesia—particularly really deep general anesthesia like you have for open heart surgery and the like—you’ve experienced the temporary cessation of pretty much all of your brain functions.  Try to remember what it was like when you were under complete general anesthesia**.  If there’s something for you to remember, then you were still conscious, and that means you weren’t under complete general anesthesia.

Alternatively, try to remember what it was like (for you) long before you were born, before even your parents were born***.  That’s what it was like not to be conscious.

From within its own realm, consciousness is, in a sense, endless, because it doesn’t feel itself begin and it doesn’t feel itself end—it’s almost like one of those Penrose/Escher diagrams of infinite hyperbolic spaces contained within another, finite space.  And this, of course, may very well describe the configuration of our own universe, since GR allows for spaces that look finite from the outside but are infinite from within, and mathematics can deal with them rigorously and consistently and thoroughly.  It’s not readily intuitive without a bit of thought and practice, but why would one expect it to be****?

Anyway, that’s the sort of irritated but at least engaging argument I get into within my skull with people who are not actually present with me, and with whom I’ll never interact.

When I try to talk to people at work about such things, I just get blank looks and confusion.  I tried to bring up my discussion from a week or so ago—regarding the M-theory related notion I had of a potential explanation for “dark matter”—with the smartest person I know in the office.  It was disappointing.  I was actually enthusiastic—I get that way about science and math, still, sometimes—but though he listened intently and politely, he said that it all really just went over his head.

It’s very frustrating, and quite disheartening.  I really do feel like a stranded alien castaway, sometimes, and in many ways, I always have.  This is part of why I always liked the villains in stories, not because they were bad guys—who cares about that?—but because they were always different, but strong and confident nevertheless.  They were people who got things done and changed the world, and who, by the way, also didn’t let other people fuck with them without cost.  They were strange, they were weird, but they were powerful and capable, though often not in productive ways.  And they’re fun, at least, or they used to be.

Nothing is very much fun, anymore, to quote the Pink Floyd song One of My Turns.

The next few songs on that album are Don’t Leave Me Now (too late for that) then Another Brick in the Wall, Part III, which definitely resonates with me, and finally Goodbye, Cruel World, to end the first half of The Wall, one of the greatest concept albums ever made.

The very fact that Pink Floyd’s only number one single was Another Brick in the Wall, Part II, the least good song on that album (though it’s got a great guitar solo…of course), is just another example of how unutterably stupid and worthless the world is.

Goodbye, cruel world, indeed.  And good riddance.

hyperbola hyperbole

*Just because one can utter the words of a “description” of what a philosophical zombie is and make it syntactically correct doesn’t mean the idea makes sense.  I can write 2+3=12, or say it, or whatever, but given what we mean by those symbols or words, it’s not a coherent mathematical statement.

**Not what it was like when you were just going under or gradually coming around.  Don’t be an idiot.

***Not any nonsense about past lives/reincarnation.  Don’t be an idiot.

****I think people tend to exaggerate, quite severely, just how complicated hyperbolic geometry really is.  (Get it?)

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“What the hell am I doin’ here? I don’t belong here.”

I apologize for my rather boring blog posts over the past few (or several) working days.  I was trying to be as upbeat as I could, and to stop dwelling quite so much on my mood disorder and my otherwise disordered mental state, such as it is, because I feared that I would end up just turning readers off.  So, instead, I’ve focused on walking and blisters and silly things like that which, upon occasion, and in passing, would give a glancing blow at some interesting (in my opinion) subject matter like yesterday.

The fact is, I’m having severe, ongoing, worsening problems with my depression, and I feel like nothing I’ve done here or said here has been of any benefit to it or to me.  Or, well, what I’ve said and done might benefit the depression in and of itself, i.e., it might have made it stronger.  But that’s not necessarily good for the larger organism (me).

This is referring to the depression as if it were a being or entity in and of itself, with a separate nature and goals and criteria for thriving and so on.  It’s not, of course.  It’s a state of my own brain/body, a sort of self-sustaining but destructive pattern of internal and external interactions in a brain that’s already not exactly functioning in quite what might be considered a normal, or at least normative, way.

I’ve previously likened depression, as a state or an “attack”, to a hurricane—a self-sustaining pattern that forms and grows when conditions are right and is very difficult to break once it gets going.  I think that’s actually a decent analogy.  It’s certainly vastly better than the popular “chemical imbalance” notion upon which I’ve spat my vitriol more than once in the past.

As with hurricanes, I think it’s not entirely unreasonable to think of depression as if it were an entity of its own that tends to act to sustain and strengthen itself, as if it had intentions and a will, as long as one maintains the implicit awareness that this is a metaphor.  It’s easy to get into the habit of using metaphors so often that they stop behaving like metaphors in one’s head and start being, effectively, literal interpretations of things that are fundamentally otherwise, and it’s important to try to avoid doing that.  That way madness lies, as they say.

And madness does lie—almost always.  That’s one of the big problems with it.

Anyway, the point I’m trying to make and to which I’m struggling to stick, is that depression acts as if it has a life of its own, rather as a tumor more or less literally acts as an entity in and of itself within the body, with its own “agenda” of self-sustenance and growth.

I’ve said to others, and to myself, that my mind is not my friend.  This is one of the reasons, for instance, that though I’m intrigued by them, I don’t think I would ever seek out an experience with any form of psychedelic.  My mental state often already has the feel of a bad trip of sorts, as I’ve heard them described.  I don’t want to pour gasoline onto that fire.

But I’ve fought with this entity in my head for almost as long as I can remember.  My brain, my mind, has always been weird—to me, relative to the people around me, and to many of them as well—though others also often seem inscrutable and inexplicable to me, at least in the sense of feeling things “in my bones”, though I’ve read and learned many things that give me at least an academic, intellectual understanding of things people do.  But I can’t say I grok them.

I’ve often said that basic primatology—particularly that which applies to primates that live in large groups—provides a sufficient framework on which to hang the vast majority of human behavior.  I suppose this should not be too surprising, since humans are primates, after all.  But it’s disheartening how rarely humans fully depart from the simple, chest-thumping, fang-baring, hierarchy-climbing, mate-seeking, dominance-submission behavior patterns that could with only a little simplification be transplanted onto the average baboon flange.

I cannot claim any superiority, of course.  My own, apparently “neurodivergent”, brain* is erratic and irrational even by its own—my own—standards, and I certainly cannot claim to be a well-adjusted machine running in optimal condition.  There are aspects to my machine that really are well put-together, and I’m glad for those, of course.  But they don’t seem to be enough to keep the whole thing operational.

I decided to give up even trying to look for help or improvement or to expect myself ever to get any better, and I tried not even talking—or writing—about it.  But that didn’t make for very good blog posts, apparently.  So maybe this one will at least be more interesting.  It’s truer to my inner state, if nothing else.

So, welcome to Hell, population one—I would like to say welcome to Purgatory, but there is no process of cleansing or improvement—of purgation—going on here.  There is only malicious, sadistic, hateful torment meted out by the demonic overlord of a realm repurposed for the eternal excoriation of a lost soul that is also the demon itself.

Okay, well, that paragraph was gratuitously melodramatic and misleading.  Sorry.  It makes the whole thing sound more exciting and impressive than it actually is.  Oh, well.  At least it’s not boring.  Except when it is, which is actually quite a lot of the time, come to think of it.  That’s one of the many forms of torture it entails.  Actually, that’s one of the big issues about it; even things that ought to be interesting are utterly mind-numbing, or seem so because the mind itself is numb (not comfortably) in the first place.

This is all a bit of mess here.  Again, sorry.  Returning to an earlier point, I’ll say that though the hurricane analogy is good as far as it goes, hurricanes have a tendency to peter out, eventually, as they move through the atmosphere, certainly once they go over land and lose the source of their water and heat, and then they kind of just fade away.  Certainly, no hurricane is going to destroy the Earth itself.

Depression, on the other hand, can absolutely do the equivalent of such planetary destruction.  In this, it’s much more like a tumor than a hurricane.  It’s a slow-growing tumor, perhaps like an indolent prostate cancer—the sort of thing you can have, and not treat, and yet you still might die of something else before the cancer ever would kill you (though kill you it may).  But even if it doesn’t kill you, it certainly doesn’t make you stronger.  It affects everything else in the system.  It steals energy from all the “good” things, when there even are any, and it further whittles away at those few good things by making a person intolerable to the people and things that are good in that person’s life, until nearly all of them are gone.

I don’t have any answers to this problem.  I know of ways to end the problem, but not to cure it.  Unfortunately, I don’t see any evidence that anyone else out there has any good answers.  Believe me, I’ve looked, and I’m “qualified” to evaluate such matters, in more than one sense.

The world was not made for us; it was not made for anyone; as far as we can tell, it just happened.  Ditto with human beings and other forms of life—even weirdo, alien, replicant, robot, changeling, mutants like me.  Ditto with culture and civilization.  There’s no reason to expect them to work flawlessly or efficiently.  They just have to work “well” enough to be self-sustaining.  That’s natural selection, and it’s not pretty.

Well, it can be quite beautiful, depending on your point of view, but even Darwin noted how slow, cruel, wasteful, and harsh it all is.  Nevertheless, it’s the only game there is, as far as I can see.

I so just want to fold and walk away from the table.  Right now the blister on my foot is inhibiting that somewhat, but it’ll heal**.  Then maybe I can finally take a long walk off a short planet.  I don’t see any better options.

*Every time I take new or repeated tests to check on whether it’s accurate to describe it that way, I keep getting results pretty resoundingly supportive of that hypothesis.  I recognize that I am not performing scientifically rigorous evaluations, since the one administering and the one to whom the tests are being administered is the same, and it’s only too easy to introduce bias.  But I don’t have ready access, nor the mental wherewithal to take advantage of it, to resources to get a more objective assessment.  And when I go online and watch videos and when I read books and articles, when I go to social media and look at available resources and groups there, and so on, I find that, while these people all make somewhat more sense to me than most other people do, I still feel severely weird even in comparison to them, and I could not feel comfortable among them or interacting with them.  I feel no sense that I could connect to the related communities—to any communities, really.  I feel like a creep and a weirdo relative to every potential group or person with whom I could consider engaging.

**I almost accidentally wrote “it’ll heel”, which would be funny, but the blister is on the ball of my foot, not the heel, so as a joke, even an unintentional one, it just wouldn’t work.

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Oh, yeah, Happy Presidents Day, by the way

It’s Monday morning, again—a fact for which surely we must all have cause to celebrate.

I’m beginning this blog post sitting at the train station instead of at the bus stop, in the fashion in which I always used to write it, waiting for the second train of the day*.  I feel quite weird and tense, almost anxious, interloping back into my old venue.  I worry that I’m going to be taking someone’s seat at the station by taking the seat I always used to take, or taking someone’s newly usual seat on the train by—hopefully—taking the seat I always prefer to take.

I don’t like things that disrupt my routines, and by extension and logical coherence, I don’t like to disrupt other people’s routines.  I also feel nervous about possible social interactions, e.g., someone saying something equivalent to “long time, no see,” and asking where I’ve been and what happened.  Thankfully, I’ve never been publicly sociable, so there’s no real precedent for anyone to say much, but it’s not impossible.

The base of my right thumb is really acting up today (and it was yesterday) and that’s frustrating because I have been doing my blog posts on my laptop—as I am doing this one—and that definitely gives my thumb comparative rest.  Also, I’ve done something to irritate my right shoulder rather badly, probably the supraspinatus and/or related structures, and raising my arm laterally (aka abducting it), even a little, is quite painful.

It’s frustrating to have all these new pains occurring.  They distract me from my usual, chronic back pain, with which I’m at least familiar.  Unfortunately, they don’t make it go away; they just add to it and sap the energy I usually have to be able to deal with it.

I’m not sure what to write about today, which is somewhat ironic given that I’ve written over three hundred words so far.  Perhaps this is my writing equivalent of small talk?  I’ve never been very good at doing small talk in real time, or at least in being able to understand the point, or endure it when nearly anyone is doing it.  But maybe this is my version of that, and maybe other people find it just as mind-numbing as usual small talk is for me.  In my ethical defense, though, I will say that no one is socially pressured** to read my blogs.  No one corners anyone at a party or in an office or whatever and shoves a computer or phone or tablet under that person’s face and insists that the person read this blog.

Do they?  Has that happened to anyone out there?  If it has, I want to extend my thanks to the person who did that to you—they’re really helping me out!

I’m kidding.  That would be a horrible thing, and I would feel guilty-by-proxy for their deeds.  Or, rather, not “guilty”—since one cannot even in principle actually be guilty or responsible for the deeds of other minds that one has not forced or otherwise caused them to commit—but I would feel chagrined, embarrassed, and just generally bad.

That raises a little tangent point I would like to emphasize:  No person, human or otherwise, can be held morally culpable for the deeds of others, especially for the deeds of the dead, because one cannot be morally culpable for anything over which one did not have even the possibility of control***.  This is why the insanity defense exists in criminal law, for instance, and in this case, the law in neither a ass nor a idiot.  You won’t find me all too often praising the law and its general practices, so enjoy that little aberration.  In most cases, I come not to praise the law but to bury it.

Well, no, burying the law would probably be a mistake.  Even a somewhat dysfunctional legal system is probably better than no laws at all.  Indeed, I suspect that, were the governments of the world to be suddenly abolished and all their power stripped completely away—perhaps as a practical joke or experiment done by immensely powerful extraterrestrials—after a period of horrible violence and instability, with mass starvation, disease, and infrastructure collapse, new systems of laws would come into place.  Even in places where there is gang rule, the gangs (as the previous term suggests) tend to institute “rules” of their own.  It just happens.  It’s an evolutionarily and game theoretically stable strategy, and it works for tyrants as well as for egalitarians.

One big trouble is that the individual people who want to set up and control governments are rarely the ones best suited to do so.  It would probably be better for us, in general, only to elect to our higher offices individuals who saw government—legislative, executive, judicial, what have you—as an unpleasant but necessary chore, like cleaning toilets, mopping floors, or mucking out horse stalls, rather than as a personally desirable thing to do, a means by which to achieve social status and the like.

Becoming president, in particular, should be done almost like jury duty.  No one who wants to do the job, for personal reasons, should probably be allowed to do it.

Perhaps we could arrange it so that no one could be nominated by anyone in their family or whom they knew personally, but could only be nominated by other people, people to whom they were not beholden and who were not beholden to them.  States could each go through a mass nomination process, by which a certain minimum number of people are suggested by those around them, and then strangers look into their character and nature and a public debate among people in general takes place, pro and con, but in which the nominated people cannot take part.

Then, at some point, a state holds a vote among nominated candidates, and the top twenty (or whatever) candidates are then put again before a public debate, in which, again, they cannot participate.  Only others can promote or detract from them, stating their qualifications and shortcomings.  Then, there would be a newer vote, and the recipient of the most votes would be that state’s candidate.

Then their would be a nationwide equivalent to select the office-holder.  No one would be allowed to refuse the job except based on legitimate and confirmed severe health difficulties.  But that would probably all shake out in the initial nomination and election process.  I suppose, to make it worthwhile, it would be best to have slightly longer terms of office, maybe with the new term overlapping the previous, so the new incomer could learn from the predecessor.  And only one term would be allowed****.

Anyway, that’s all silly fantasy stuff, so don’t worry about it.  I’m just tired and mentally unstable.  I really don’t think I can do this very much longer.  By “do this” I mean “exist on this planet”, not “write this blog”, though the former subsumes the latter.  Unfortunately, as far as I know, there’s no one coming to take me back to my home-world, or to the mother ship, or whatever, so I’ll need to figure out some other way.

I’m working on it.

hollywood train

*The irony of the bus-to-train schedule I’ve been doing recently is that it actually all but forces me to get up a little later than I used to, because the buses simply don’t start to arrive as early as trains do.

**Except by me, within my blog, of course.  But that’s a very nebulous kind of social pressure, and comes from someone who, while not anti-social, is surely dis-social.  I’m not sociopathic by any means, but I am “patho-social”, i.e., there seems to be some dysfunction in my ability to socialize, even with people I like.  It’s not pleasant.

***Thus, the notion of “original sin”, for instance, is pure ethical bullshit.

****This makes me imagine another contrafactual scenario, in which candidates for office hold an anti-debate, in which each one is required to denigrate themselves and their own party and give convincing reasons why the other party’s candidate is better, to argue with the other against themselves and their party’s positions.  It would at least be amusing.

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They have blogged at a great feast of languages, and stolen the scraps.

Hello and good morning.

It’s Thursday, so I’m writing my traditional blog post, which I used to write between writing fiction (or editing it) on every other working day of the week.  I suppose it’s possible that now I’m still writing my daily blog between writing fiction, but if so, it’s a very long between, and I see no hint of a far end of that break, at least not one that involves me starting to write fiction again.

Practically no one—perhaps literally no one—has shown any real interest in that possibility, nor is anyone outside my family really reading any of my fiction.  Perhaps few people read fiction at all anymore.  I do have to wonder, how many of the people who buy even the big best-selling fiction works actually read them?

I recall back when Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time was a huge best-seller* that many people just bought it to have it on their coffee table or book shelf, as a social status symbol, just as they might wear Nike shoes or drive a particular make and model of car, or frequent a particular restaurant where they could be seen with other people who were going there to be seen.  They were peacocking, so to speak—it wasn’t just males, of course, because humans have different social structures than birds as a general rule.  But the status, hierarchy, and symbolic drives are all quite reminiscent.  One could say similar things about Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel.

Hell, back in the day, there were probably oodles of people who had sets of high-quality encyclopedias on their bookshelves, that they never used or expected to use.  This is a true shame, because I can tell you that just picking a random volume of an old-school encyclopedia and thumbing one’s way through it, stopping and reading when one encounters something interesting, can be quite a wonderful experience, and lets one learn about things one might never have thought to explore.  Wikipedia does have a sort of “random article” feature, but it’s just not the same.

Anyway, that was a bit of a tangent.  The point I’m making is that I think almost no one reads at all, or at least few people read anything longer than a few hundred words at a time**.  People seem to prefer to watch people speaking in order to get their news, which is far less efficient than reading actual words, which are a comparatively concise and precise means of conveying information.

There are some things for which video is especially well-suited, of course.  Conveying complex scientific ideas can be boosted tremendously with high-quality animation of concepts, especially in physics.  Also, of course, explorations of the natural world as undertaken by the likes of David Attenborough can be used to give people a more direct exposure to things they never would have been able to see for themselves.

But still, words have their power, the written word especially (or so I think).  When you come down to it, every aspect of the internet runs on written words—computer programs and commands—which convey literal, step-by-step instructions from one place to another about what pixel to put where and when, how and when and with what power to vibrate a computer’s speaker, and of course, what ASCII or similar character to call up and put where on what screen.

It happens very fast, of course, but it happens that way.  The very reason video signals can be so high-fidelity but low power—phone signals as well—is that they are transmitted as languages, with redundancy and error-correction implicitly (and deliberately) built in, so that even when part of a signal is lost, the rest can “easily” be reconstructed.

I put “easily” in scare quotes because while it happens readily once everything is set up, it took some of the most brilliant minds ever in the world to figure out how that sort of thing works and what to do to make use of it, and others to figure out how to bring it to the available use of so many of the billions of humans worldwide.

Meanwhile, most of those humans don’t think about the exquisite and astonishing machinery involved in their smartphones, or their “smart” TVs, or their GPS (which requires Special and General Relativity to function!).  Most people use their phones as distractions and—perhaps primarily—as yet another instance of peacocking, of status demonstration.  How else can one explain the push to buy the latest iteration of the latest smartphone, when one hasn’t even taken full advantage of the features of the phone one currently has?

Humans very rarely seem actually to think for themselves.  I’d say almost all of them do it some of the time—occasionally—and some few of them do it much of the time.  But that last population is vanishingly small.  Yet they, I suspect, are the ones who drive most advances in most fields, and produce the improvement of science and technology and art and society.  What a shame that they’re usually just making precious ceramic sculptures to be tossed about by troglodytes.

Oh, well.  Obviously I’m not in an upbeat and optimistic frame of mind today, if ever I am.  And it’s because of facts and thoughts such as these that I think I’m not writing this blog between writing fiction but rather after having written all the fiction I’m going to write in my life.  That’s okay, I suppose.  It doesn’t actually matter much to much of anyone, anyway.

It’s just as well, I guess.  The one person I met at work who actually talked to me about the substance and the ideas in one of my books—Son of Man, in this case—was also a person who died of a drug overdose not long afterward.  It wasn’t the fault of my book; he had a drug problem already.  But he was smart and curious, and he actually read the book and thought about it and asked me questions related to it, and debated points with me.  That was kind of cool.  Small wonder that he died a self-inflicted death; he was too much a kindred spirit to me.  What else could one expect?

So, with that in mind, I—who, regrettably, cannot seem to develop a life-threatening addiction to drugs or alcohol—don’t expect to do much more creative shit in my life.  I could be wrong, of course; I make no claims to absolute epistemic certainty about anything.  I’m not even entirely convinced by cogito ergo sum argument.  I can vaguely conceive of the possibility of myself being a figment of someone else’s dreams, albeit someone with a very vivid (if somewhat dreary) imagination.  Of course, in a sense, an imagined being, if the imagined nature of that being is instantiated in the imagining of independent thought, does exist.  So I guess Descartes’s conclusion, in sum, was still correct as far as it went.

I don’t know.  I’m tired.  If someone is dreaming me, I wish they would have a better dream.  Maybe I wish they would wake up.  Presumably I wouldn’t know that the dream that I was in ended when it ended, anymore than any of us would know if the vacuum state of the universe tunneled to a lower energy level and wiped out everything preceding it, because the wave front of the phase change would progress at the speed of light, which would mean that the first hint of its existence for anyone would be their instantaneous obliteration, faster than they could even potentially know it was happening.

Swift, painless, without the possibility of fear because fear cannot move faster than light—it’s not too bad a way for the universe to go.  To read more about it, please look into The End of the Everything (Astrophysically Speaking), by­­­­­­­ Katie Mack***.  It’s an excellent book, and quite fun.  Buy it even if you’re just going to put it on your coffee table to impress the Joneses.  At least the author would get a bit of money.  And some day, you or someone in your family might accidentally pick it up and learn something.  There are worse accidents than that!

TTFN

Pieter_Bruegel_the_Elder_-_The_Tower_of_Babel_(Vienna)_-_Google_Art_Project

*Admittedly, that is nonfiction, but it serves my point more generally.

**Though, to my surprise, on the train this morning I saw no fewer than three people actually, actively reading paperback books.  Perhaps I’m too pessimistic.  That would surprise almost no one.

***You need not worry about the possibility of such a phase change much.  It’s far from certain that it even could happen, and even if it can, the best science indicates that it’s vanishingly unlikely over anything like the current lifespan of the universe.  Dr. Mack explains it far better than I could.

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The sound and the fury of sore thumbs

I’m writing this on my laptop today because my thumb joints (especially in my right thumb) are severely painful and inflamed.  Okay, technically it’s the base where my thumb attaches to the wrist and palm, not the actual interphalangeal joint within the thumb, but I’m not going to split hairs or phalanges right now.  Although I guess I just did that, didn’t I?

I’ve tried to cut out any other activities that cause my thumb(s) to hurt—other than handwriting things at the office to fix incorrect or missing information on paperwork, and even that hurts—but it has been to no avail.  It seems extremely likely that it’s the writing of blog posts on my phone that is making things—thumbs—act up.  I wouldn’t give it a 100% estimate, but it’s mightily close.

Fortunately for me—though perhaps not for you—I hardly use my thumbs at all when typing on a laptop keyboard.  So this gives them a bit of rest.

I guess it’s just as well that I haven’t gotten any feedback encouraging me to complete either of my partly completed stories or to start a new one, because if I had done so on the phone, I probably would have needed to give up on that.  Ditto for if I had decided to write it out long-hand, since the use of pen and paper even a few dozen times a day seems at least to cause the joint to flare up, and writing a book by hand again would probably have caused similar problems or worse ones.

I did listen to and begin editing that voice recording I made while walking to the bus stop on Monday, but I’ve decided not to post it.  Quite apart from the fact that I merely said inane things—which was, after all, as expected—the fact that I walk pretty quickly gave my voice a peculiar wobble that reminded me just a bit of Katherine Hepburn, though with a lower frequency of wobble.  No disrespect intended to the great, great actor that she was, but I just felt weird about the recording, as if I were doing a disrespectful impression.

I’ll try to make a sedentary audio recording sometime soon to upload here and as a “video”, if I can keep up my motivation to do anything at all.  No promises!

I’ve noticed that my readership, as well as my “liker” ship has gone down recently, possibly because my writing has become more depressing as I’ve become more depressed, though I feel as though my writing has been pretty depressing all along.  Also, I haven’t been reading (and liking, when it’s accurate) other blogs as much as I used to do, largely because I haven’t been reading (or liking in any sense) much of anything lately.

I’ve been forcing myself to reread some things that I know I’ve liked in the past, so I read a bit of Brian Greene’s The Hidden Reality—he’s as good as it gets for entertaining and reasonably deep science explanation—and then skipped over to reread Max Tegmark’s Our Mathematical Universe, which is also a great book.  Tegmark even refers readers to Greene’s book for a discussion on the possibility of making new universes deliberately if inflationary cosmology is correct*.

Anyway, I’ve gotten somewhat tired of even those two excellent books, and was going to switch to Brian Greene’s Until the End of Time, which is not better (or worse) but at least discusses things like the eventual end of our universe as we know it, and so seems more appropriate to my mindset.  However, I did receive a pre-ordered Japanese light novel yesterday that I hadn’t recalled was coming, so I’m reading that first.  I will probably be done with it by midday today, even only reading it during breaks and lunch, and even though today is payroll day.

It’s a pleasant enough story, but of course, even though it’s about a “loner”, it entails the loner having friends and a girlfriend and doing various activities, and anyway, he was never a loner because of awkwardness or rejection of or by others—he’s one of the most self-assured characters in the story—but simply because that was what he preferred, no sour grapes required.

This is the second, and apparently last, of the “light novels” of this series.  The characters are nice, and their interactions are free of the usual stupid melodrama that so often infects fiction about “normal” people when there are no deadly forces facing them, just the idiocies of other humans, so that’s pleasant.  I hate when stories create “drama” out of nowhere by introducing unrealistic misunderstandings and conflicts.  If you just gave your characters supernatural enemies to fight, you wouldn’t have to invent personal difficulties that make them look like kindergarteners on a playground, but with less sense of fairness and personal responsibility!

That book won’t last me more than about half a day, probably.  I always get weird when I read those stories, anyway.  I feel almost as if I am the characters, and I begin to think and even talk to myself as if I were—heck I even find myself thinking that way when playing phone-app euchre immediately after, in my thoughts toward my “partner” and the other two “players”**.  It’s very strange, and it doesn’t last long, but it’s quite melancholy, and tends to make me feel worse about myself once I return to myself, and no one needs that.  Just being me is bad enough as it is.

Not that I would prefer to be anyone else.  It’s a bit like Winston Churchill’s purported quote about democracy—I am the worst person in the word for me to be…except for all the other people I could be.  Something like that.  It doesn’t quite work, but you probably get the idea.

Anyway, I’ve already written more, and well before the bus has arrived, than I usually write at all using the phone; there’s no doubt that I write quickly on my laptop.  I should probably wrap this up soon.  I don’t know what I’m going to do tomorrow if my thumbs are still killing me.  I’ve tried various treatments, both topical and systemic, and even tried wrapping my thumb up a bit, but so far to little avail.  It hurts like a son of a bitch***, and the joint is getting unstable, so that when I shook my hand in the air—briefly—trying to distract myself or loosen it up somewhat, I could feel it pop out of joint slightly, and that didn’t help with the pain, as I’m sure you can guess.

I suppose, if I write at all, I’ll write tomorrow’s post on the laptop.  I honestly feel like wrapping this whole thing up, along with everything else, not just for the day, but for good, so to speak.  There’s no point to any of it.  It’s not helping my depression, that’s clear.  It’s not eliciting any good recommendations about help or insights, or any mythical, heroic rescue of any kind.  It’s not providing any kind of therapy.  And it’s not getting me started back to writing fiction again.  So what’s the point?  It’s just the proverbial, Shakespearean tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

I’m in pain all the time, I’m alone, and I have no capacity to act on my own behalf, which means that frankly I deserve it if I crash and burn—literally or figuratively—and just die without any revelation or meaning or recognition.  But I’ve always really known that I deserve that, anyway.  I’ve never even really been in denial about it, or at least not for quite a long time.

I don’t know.  If I write tomorrow, I guess you’ll see it here on my blog.  If not, I don’t know what I’ll be doing, if anything.  I can’t make any promises one way or the other, honestly.  Sorry about that, Chief.

would i lie to you

*Greene points out that it would likely be quite disappointing, since, based on General Relativity and the best of the rest of our theoretical understanding, in the original universe, the new universe would just turn into a tiny black hole, and the creators would have no access to their new universe.  Of course, this presumes they don’t discover some means by which to access other universes semi-directly, but if you can do that, why do you need to make a new one?  In any case, as far as I can see, a very small black hole is going to become an immediate, violent source of Hawking radiation that would fry anything around it with tremendous force before it fully and rapidly evaporates, but presumably such an advanced technological civilization could shield themselves from such things.  A bigger question is, when the black hole evaporates, what, if any, effect does it have on the nascent universe?

**They’re all just computer generated.  I have no interest in playing any kind of game online with strangers.  I can’t even deal with interacting with the other people on online support groups or subject-matter groups about things in which I’m interested; I surely don’t want to play card games with strangers.  Anyway, I have more in common with simulated, computer-generated people than with “real” humans.  I even talk to them sometimes.

***This expression, presumably, refers to a puppy.  Do puppies tend to hurt a lot?  Well, they do when they bite you with those tiny little, needle-sharp teeth!  Ba-dump-bump, crash!  Waka, waka, waka.

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Walking words, a bad “life” habit, and cheapened love

I don’t recall if I already mentioned it, but yesterday I did a little trial recording, using my headphone mic, while I was walking to the bus stop.  I said nothing of significance, of course, but then, the argument could be made that there is nothing that of real significance.  But let’s not venture down that path of inquiry for the moment.

I just wanted to let you know that I had done this recording, and that I am probably going to edit it (for noise reduction, at least) and post it here and probably as a YouTube video, unless it’s really just too embarrassingly dull or stupid.  Maybe there are those who will find interesting the words I self-consciously mumbled to myself on the way to the bus stop.  Maybe they really are interesting.  Perhaps I have world-changing insights when I do my walking, and I just haven’t realized it because no other person has hitherto heard them.

I wouldn’t recommend betting much money on that, but I cannot say that it has a literal zero probability.  I can just say that it’s probably close enough to zero for all practical purposes.

If I were following usual human protocols, I would tell you that I uploaded the recording to my Google Drive and then downloaded it to the desktop‒both of which are true statements‒but that I didn’t have the chance to edit it yet.  This last bit is a cop-out fiction, one of a type to which it seems almost everyone from toddlers to centenarians turn.  If I were to say I hadn’t had the chance to edit it, that would be not merely an error, but technically a lie.

I had chances to edit it; I even had times when I was relatively idle and could readily have edited it, but did not.  I simply had no will to edit it‒it’s that “executive function” thing, or whatever the current jargon is.  For most of the day yesterday, if I’d had to use mental effort to breathe, I would have suffocated.  And I would not have felt disappointed to do so, though I guess it would have been uncomfortable…for a short while, anyway.

My life is really uninteresting to me‒not in its specifics, necessarily, but in its mere fact.  It doesn’t hold any inherent interest.  It’s just a matter of habit, and I don’t know that it’s a very good habit.  It might, in fact, be a bad habit, though I guess you couldn’t call it a self-destructive one, at least not by the usual meaning of that term.

I can’t quite kick that habit yet, but I am working on it, and it is my intention to do so.  It’s just not good for me or for those around me, this life business.  Every illness and pain and sorrow that exists comes as a consequence of being alive.  I can’t recommend it as a habit.  It’s uniformly fatal, for one thing.

At the very least, we should protect the children from exposure to it‒in media, in toys, in advertising and so on.  Although…protecting the children would eventually become a moot point if one does that.

Obviously I haven’t yet thought this through fully, and also, my tongue has been in my cheek for the part where I was making recommendations for others.  I’ve no business doing that about such matters.  On the other hand, the preceding description of my personal attitude and intentions is not at all untrue; for me it’s just a matter of preparation and a bit of working up my courage.

Switching gears to other matters, but returning to notions of usual protocols among humans: is it just me, or is it just in south Florida, or is it something else, or are people saying “I love you” to coworkers and other non-family members a lot more often than people used to say it?

I don’t like it.  I could sometimes say that I hate it.

I think it’s perfectly okay for spouses and siblings and parents and children to say they love each other‒these are people one knows well, deeply, intimately, people who are integral, important parts of one’s life.  Loving them is natural, it’s good; they are in a sense part of one’s identity.

But when I hear people at work telling each other they love them, as while saying goodbye for the day or whatever, it cheapens the concept, it seems disgusting and disingenuous.  Sometimes it even seems manipulative, as though it’s an attempt to invoke a familial level of fealty and benefit by invoking such a powerful term.

To me, love is serious and important, maybe the most important non-survival-related thing in the human world, though it’s certainly not all you need*.  I don’t want co-workers telling me they love me, but sometimes they do say it.  My internal process when this happens‒in addition just to feeling squirmy and tense and uncomfortable and almost grossed-out‒is to think, “You don’t even really know me, you don’t share any common interests and experiences with me other than work, you certainly don’t seem interested in anything in which I am interested, you haven’t read my books or my blog or anything else I’ve written…you simply can’t love me, not in any sense that means anything.  You’re lying to me, to yourself, or to both.”

I suppose these people might think they are fulfilling some kind of Judeo-Christian edict of loving their neighbor as themselves or summat, but I don’t think that’s actually what they’re doing.  I think the words are a mere verbal ritual without meaning, and people throw them around haphazardly, as though giving their pre-school children plastic explosives and arc-welders as toys.

I even had a coworker‒who had requested feedback about something for the eighteen thousandth time and to whom I gave a rather sharp and impatient response‒who laughingly said, “I love you, too.”

I know it was a sarcastic, jokey remark, but I simply had to say, “I don’t love you.  I don’t hate you, either.  You’re fine.  I love my brother and sister, and I love my kids more than I knew I could love anything, and I loved my mother and father and my ex-wife and my extended family.  You are a coworker.”

It’s one thing if you’re honestly committed to the philosophy of lovingkindness, if you practice metta meditation, if you live your life not just saying the words but acting on them.  Then I think I wouldn’t be bothered by someone saying they love me, because it would not be some personal claim, or some attempt to achieve a claim upon me.  But otherwise, it’s almost insulting.  I don’t even love myself; I don’t need some person who barely knows me to claim to love me.  It’s not helpful to someone who hates himself for other people to fakely say that they love him; if anything, it merely highlights the notion that no honest person ever could really love me.

Him, I mean.  Him.

*With apologies to the Beatles.  No disrespect intended.

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She told me to walk this way…

It’s Saturday.

I say that just in case you didn’t know.  I hope most of you are relaxing at home with your family and/or loved ones as you read this.  As I write it, I am of course sitting at the bus stop.

You may recall that yesterday my back was acting up especially badly.  It did so all day, pretty much without relent, despite copious use (probably to toxic levels) of OTC meds.

In the evening, after I had ridden the train back down south, I was waiting for the bus and watching the app that tracks arrival times at any given stop, with real time updates on delays or earliness.  The timing of the train’s arrival had been such that there was a bit of a wait (about twenty minutes or so) before the next bus.

But the bus didn’t show at the predicted time, and when I looked back at the app, it had just skipped ahead to the next bus time, half an hour later.  It seemed they had simply canceled that bus without notifying anyone.

I waited about five more minutes before getting fed up.  My patience was far from its peak in the first place, after a day of significantly elevated pain, and the lack of notification‒much more so than the apparent bus cancellation‒irked me mightily.  I figured, “You know what, I don’t feel like waiting for the next bus,”  So, I started walking.

Of course, as I’m sure you could have predicted, within another five minutes, the bus on which I had given up went rolling past me.  I guess it had just been ten minutes late, but its transponder, or telemetry, or whatever they call them, wasn’t connecting with the system that updates the app.  That’s irritating, but I suppose it sometimes happens when you put naked house apes (i.e. humans) in charge of technology.

It wasn’t too bad, though.  I decided I would just continue my walk for the 4.5 to 5 miles back to the house.  I took a route through the neighborhoods, some of which I had never passed before, though I knew the way.  It was just after sunset when I started; there was a fairly stiff breeze, and the temperature was in the sixties, so it was a pleasant walk.  It felt almost reminiscent of being out trick-or-treating back up north in my childhood.

Regrettably, of course, there were no Halloween decorations, and no kids in costumes‒I was mainly by myself on the sidewalks, listening to my shuffled “favorite songs” list on YouTube Music‒but I did see, through the large picture window of a third-ish floor “luxury” apartment building, that someone still had their Christmas tree up, and it was fully lit.

That was actually rather nice, although slightly odd and certainly unexpected.  I can understand why someone would want to keep a festive, brightly lit item around even after its traditional moment had passed, especially during the comparative holiday desert that follows New Year.  Sorry, Valentine’s Day does not count as a festive holiday!  And Saint Patrick’s Day, in America at least, is mainly a drinking holiday‒though corned beef and cabbage can be a quite wonderful dinner if one has it!

Returning to the original topic, though, I found that, as I walked, my back began to relax a bit, and before a few miles had passed, the pain had reduced to a much vaguer sensation, then finally it became insignificant relative to my normal tendency even to notice it.  My right Achilles tendon began complaining slightly* by the end of the walk, but it tends to do that anyway, almost since college, after I badly sprained my right ankle while playing catch.

Sorry, I know, this is all rather boring for a blog post, but I felt like having a mild celebration of the fact that I had soothed my back some by walking.  It hurts more again, now, starting as soon as I woke up, but it’s not as bad as it was yesterday, and hopefully it won’t become so.  If it does, I guess I know what to do about it at least.  Just having that degree of available control makes things a little better, even if one doesn’t use it.

I keep thinking about better types of subjects about which to blog‒as you know‒including medical topics and physics and philosophy and psychology and whatnot.  I still owe you all a blog post or audio blog/podcast about sugar.  I haven’t forgotten.  I just have to decide to buckle down and do it.

But motivation, or executive function, or whatever they call it, is apparently often difficult for people with ASD, as I suspect I am, and also, of course, for people with dysthymia/depression, as I know I am.  That’s not an excuse, so to speak, though both are things I certainly didn’t choose.

Who would willingly choose to be depressed?  It’s truly a thing of horror, but it’s not even exciting or interesting or even disgusting horror.  It’s just a lack of any connection, a sense of learned helplessness that precedes any learning.  And, of course, it includes an inability to be optimistic or to feel certain of anything other than how horrible a person one is.

Maybe everyone, if they could see themselves without filter, without excuse, without delusion, would grow weary of themselves, would be disgusted, would end up hating themselves, and hating the world by reflection or projection.

I’ve read that the modern Catholic conception of Hell is not Fire and Brimstone, but merely a state without any connection to God, a complete removal from God’s presence, cut off from the source of life and light.  It’s rather like the Void in Tolkien’s universe, where Melkor wandered and first began having thoughts unlike those of his brethren, and to which he was consigned after the War of Wrath.  Anyway, that Catholic notion feels like a good metaphor for depression.  It’s not fire and brimstone; that’s all too dramatic, even melodramatic, and interesting in its own way.  Dysthymia and depression are much drearier and more dismal than that.  And yet there is pain.

Oh, well.  Maybe even in the Void, a good long walk can help temporarily ease some kinds of pain.  That would be nice, wouldn’t it?

*You wouldn’t think that something named for the mightiest warrior of the Iliad would be prone to whine, would you.  Then again, he was a bit of a snotty character, and he was invulnerable other than his heel in the original story, so he probably would have moaned a lot when in pain.

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This is a virtual, placeholder title that has become “real”. Can an event horizon be far away?

Yesterday, as I noted when I started my post, I wasn’t sure if I was going to bother to find a Shakespearean quote to alter to make my title, nor to find a picture to add to the post, both as I usually do on Thursdays.  Then, near the end of the post, after I had spontaneously quoted King Lear, it just felt appropriate to find something a little later in that same speech to use for my title.  So, I did.

Once I did that, I figured I might as well find some picture of King Lear in the storm to use at the bottom of the post.  But most of the ones I found had the Jester there next to him, and various other sorts of bric-a-brac, so none of them suited.  Therefore, I did what I often do, which was to find bits and pieces of images that I could throw together and manipulate with the GIMP program to turn into what roughly suited my purpose.

My pictorial version of Lear, if you will, got transplanted to what looks like south Florida, based on the palm trees and the apparent hurricane.  This seemed appropriate, since I was channeling King Lear by quoting him.

I don’t know why I’ve decided to go into the mechanics of those processes, but it was a pretty good way to jump start today’s post.

I forgot to mention yesterday that it was Groundhog’s Day.  Or should that be Groundhogs’ Day?  Is it the day of some Platonic ideal of a groundhog?  Or is it a day named for‒and belonging to‒all groundhogs collectively?  Or is there some other apostrophe convention that applies?  Also, how much ground would a groundhog hog if a groundhog could hog ground?*

Who knows?  Who cares?  Why bother?

Anyway, it’s Friday, but I’m working tomorrow, so it’s not as though today is anything to celebrate or feel particularly good about for me.  On the other hand, it’s not as though time off is any more engaging for me than work time‒actually, it’s less so, though the physical rest can be useful.

As long as I can remember, I’ve always only socialized, if that’s the right word, with people in places where I was present for some other, underlying purpose, like school or work.  I liked my school friends a lot‒and then to a lesser extent my work friends‒but I’ve never been able to socialize with people purely for socialization’s sake.

I don’t think I’ve ever made a friend just for the sake of making a friend, though I’ve had friends who were very important to me.  But when I’m not local to them, not seeing them semi-automatically, I don’t know how to keep in contact or maintain friendships; I don’t even know how to try, really.  It feels awkward, and I feel intrusive and idiotic; I can’t seem to figure out what to say or do.  Also, I don’t really have anything to add to anyone else’s life, particularly from a distance, so I feel like I would just be a taker, or at least a beggar, even if I were able to reach out to people.

I’ve also never had a romantic relationship with someone who hadn’t approached me, really, and again, someone from “school” or work.  I have no confidence along those lines, frankly‒and no real impetus, either.  I wouldn’t even want a relationship with someone with whom I didn’t share a lot of interests and attributes in common, and whom I didn’t know well.  What would be the point?

My attitude is, generally, that having sex with someone with whom you’re not truly close, and whom you don’t know and care about a good deal, is just complicated masturbation.  And most of the time, I think people can do that better alone, and without risk of STDs and arguments and heartbreak and infidelity and all the potential nightmares that can come with a relationship.

I don’t know, I guess that’s one of the areas in which I’m particularly weird.  I am lonely, of course, but I’m not really able to do anything about it.  And I don’t think it’s that irrational to be “once bitten, twice shy” about romantic relationships, especially when one is neurologically ill-equipped for making such relationships work, and when the previous instance(s) in which one was “bitten” were severely painful, with deep and chronic ill-effects.

Better to die alone than to try to seek out a life partner when one is constitutionally ill-equipped to bring anyone joy, and when one’s previous attempts have all exploded catastrophically in the long run.  Who needs that extra-spicy, sour and caustic pain, enhanced by the fact that you thought your significant other would be as loyal to you as you were and would be to them?

Speaking of pain, my back is really killing me this morning.  Just in case you were wondering.  I’m not really sure what made it flare up.  I mean, it hurts pretty nearly all the time, but the amount isn’t constant, and I’m always trying to discern patterns in things that make it worsen or improve.  It’s the single most consistent aspect of my life, but I certainly wouldn’t miss it if I could cure it.

Still, I think there’s ultimately going to be only one escape from my pain, and though it couldn’t be called a cure, at least it’s an erasure.  Pain can be endured when one has reasons to endure it, or things that counterbalance it.  I’ve lost most of those, however, if not all of them.  All that’s left are attempts at distraction, and those are rapidly losing efficacy.  All the while I’m stuck between the poles of trying to find the courage to end it all and wondering if it’s even conceivable, let alone possible, for me to find any convincing reason to continue.

Oh, well.  I’ve got nothing on either pole right now, though I think I’m much closer to the former than the latter.  I guess I’ll “talk to you” tomorrow.

*Credit to James Acaster for that joke.  He’s very funny, in a purposely bizarre way.  His version of Pinocchio is priceless.

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A brief return to the laptop, but without any dancing

I’m writing this on my laptop for the first time in quite a while, though I am still doing it at the bus stop.  I’m using the laptop because I’ve been getting significant stiffness and pain in the carpometacarpal and metacarpophalangeal joints in my thumbs.  The right is worse than left, but it’s symmetrical enough that I’m fairly sure it’s from my phone, since I use both hands to write on that.  So, I’m giving them a break (but hopefully not a fracture).

I know, it’s all so exciting, isn’t it?  Just wait until I write a blog post about watching paint dry.  You’ll barely be able to contain yourself.

Oh, right, I forgot to note that today is February 1st, the first day of the second month of 2023.  It’s time to pay rent and other bills, and then, only twenty-eight days later, it will be time to pay rent and other bills yet again.

Time flies when you’re having…I don’t know, certainly not fun, but when you’re just grinding through each day with absolutely nothing that’s of any interest or importance happening, and with only stressful things happening at work.  Or, well, the only things of note at work are stressful.  For instance, we had two of our most prominent employees leave this week under dicey circumstances; by that I mean, they’re probably now going to go on either to be arrested or to overdose or to go back into rehab.  My boss is very forgiving, at least, but there’s only so many games of Russian roulette they can play before they get a loaded chamber.  Nature doesn’t tend to make exceptions.

As for everything else, well, I still haven’t figured out how to check the poll results from my story poll.  I’m not sure anyone has responded or even noticed, other than a family member.  I don’t mean to disparage family.  Cat forbid!  I’m very glad that some of my family members read this.  But I’m not sure if more than two or three people (two of them family) ever actually read all the way through any of my blog posts.

Maybe what I should do is, sometime later this week, find one of those samples of pseudo-Latin writing that looks like normal paragraphs and copy and paste it after one or two short introductory sentences, and at the end leave an exhortation to comment but not to “like” if you have seen or recognized the nonsense.

That seems like a lot of work, though, so I probably won’t do it.  But it is frustrating to wonder how many people actually read my blog, even among the ones that “like” it.  Not that I want to discourage the likers!  I enjoy the little hit of reward that generates as much as anyone.

It’s interesting, also, to see new likes for older posts, some of them getting into quite high number counts (for me, anyway).  I have to think that those, at least, really must be among my more enjoyable posts.  One of my most popular ones is the one where I announced that I was going to be beginning to write The Dark Fairy and the Desperado, in which I included quite a few of the illustrations that I’ve included in the posting of the story itself.

But I still don’t have any real feedback on ongoing writing, or on whether or which story I should continue to, or start to, write.  I suppose that’s just as well, since right now, I don’t feel much creative impulse at all.  I haven’t played guitar more than twice this whole year, short though it has been.  I have occasionally thought of short story ideas as one or more curious little event impinged on my awareness, and I interpreted it in my usual, bizarre fashion, similar to what I described yesterday about things like “Deerfield”.  But none of the ideas stuck in my head, and I certainly didn’t write any of them down.

I haven’t even copied my old “notebook” entry in which I had jotted down lots of story ideas into my new phone.  It’s still just in an email I sent to myself  when I got the new phone.

I’m circling the drain, anyway, orbiting just outside the event horizon of a black hole.  It must be a large one, because though the tidal forces are palpable, and are quite uncomfortable, they haven’t spaghettified me yet.  I can look out and see—because of gravitational time dilation—all the lives of the people around me proceeding speedily, with some perceptual distortion but otherwise normally, while I’m just slowly creeping through time, every second lasting an eternity on the scale of the outside world, with less and less chance of ever escaping, and greater and greater difficulty interacting in any real way with any of the people in the outer universe.

I don’t know when something will nudge me over the horizon, but the singularity awaits, and it ain’t the one Kurtzweil envisioned.  I wonder what it will be like.  I probably will never know; that’s the irony of such things.

Anyway, I’ve reached what should be the end of my first draft, and it’s definitely been faster, or wordier, than it would have been via the phone.  I’m not sure if readers can discern any difference, other than the fancy quotation marks that Word automatically applies, and which get copied and pasted to WordPress when I do the copying and pasting, but which don’t appear when writing directly on WordPress or through Google Docs.  It’s not really important, though I do like the fancy quotation marks.

Any comments—about this blog entry, or about previous topics, or about anything remotely related to this blog—would be welcome.  And do feel free to “like” and share.

Oh, and with that in  mind, why not listen to some of my music, which is on YouTube, but also on Spotify, iTunes, and so on.  I would like not to be the only one who ever listens to it.  It’s not great stuff, but it’s not too bad, either.  Given that it’s all done by me, and recorded using USB mics, and mixed using the free program Audacity, I think the songs came out pretty well.  Except for the keyboards*, I had to teach myself how to do everything I did in them, and I had no studio, just the back room of an office** and a bedroom.

I’m probably tilting at windmills, but whatever.  It doesn’t really matter.  Who knows how much further I’ll go on?  It’s already truly felt like the longest time***.

*I took piano lessons starting when I was about nine years old, so I already knew how to play piano.

**You can see it in my videos of me playing guitar and singing and so on.  That’s where I work.

***This is a very oblique reference to the Billy Joel song The Longest Time.