dysthymia

by

Yet another blog post without a real title. What do you expect?

It’s Monday morning, and I’m at the train station ever-so-slightly later than usual*, because I slept a tiny bit later, having stayed up quite a lot later than usual last night.  That was because The Power of the Doctor was on BBC America starting at 8pm, and I was quite wide awake even after it was over.

It was pretty good, though not as good as The Day of the Doctor, but then again, that was hard to beat.  The ending was a real surprise…but I don’t want to give any spoilers, except to note that I like the fact that the thirteenth doctor stepped outside the Tardis to regenerate so she didn’t trash it.  I’ve already given spoilers for the presumed heat death of the universe, that’s more than enough.  And that’s okay because the chances of anyone alive today in the universe being around to see it and having their surprise ruined are so small as to make winning every lottery in the world seem a near-certainty.  At least, that’s my intuitive estimate.

Also, I could be wrong about the heat death of the universe.  It could end in some far more horrific fashion.

I just noticed something curious, speaking of time travel-related shows:  In the little Microsoft search bar at the left of the toolbar on the screen, just after the Windows symbol, there’s a little stylized jacket and skateboard from Back to the Future II, the least good of the three movies (in my opinion).  I wonder what that’s about.  But I don’t wonder enough to look into it.  If anyone reading this happens to know and cares to leave a comment about it, I’d be grateful, but it’s not important.

Nothing is important, really.  Or everything is.  Either one is the same statement, when you get down to it, or at least they’re equivalent statements.

Of course, importance is a relative measure.  There’s no absolute importance scale like we have for temperature.  Importance is also subjective.  What’s important to one person is different from any (and probably all) others.  Importance is also variable, it being an estimate in the mind of the beholder that varies from day to day, year to year, decade to decade, and so on, for any given person.  If you’re not convinced, try to think of the things that were most important to you when you were five, then when you were fifteen, then twenty-five, and see how your priorities have changed.

Hell, when you’re old enough, just being able to sleep through the night without having to get up to go to the bathroom several times can be amazingly important.  I have a head start on that, in that I wake up anyway, so I sometimes get up to go to the bathroom preemptively.  I’m clever that way.

Oh, speaking of being old enough, I want to send out a (belated) Happy Birthday to my cousin, Lance, who apparently reads this blog with some regularity.  I didn’t write any posts over the weekend because I didn’t go to work, but I hope he had a good birthday and enjoyed himself.

My own weekend was basically rather frustrating and annoying, but a lot of that was just because I was there.  Of course, that’s rather trivial when you think about it.  Any given person cannot be frustrated or annoyed unless that person exists and is “present”, whatever that might mean in any given circumstance.

I did do something rather funny, yesterday.  I made a note using my phone’s video feature about something that I have realized before but had never recorded:  microwave popcorn tastes quite nice, and is a pleasantly easy snack to eat while watching (for instance) the sixtieth anniversary Doctor Who special, but it leaves a smell that lingers in the air for hours, and that smell is rather reminiscent of nether bodily effluvia.

I think it’s funny that I used the video function to record me commenting about that.  I would normally** have used a voice recorder app rather than wasting video, which has the unfortunate effect of recording pictures of my face, but my new phone doesn’t have an easily used voice recorder app.  It has a recording app.  There’s an app simply called “recorder” and it has a waveform of sorts as its icon.

I don’t think it has anything to do with those wooden (or plastic) flutes they have you try to play in grade-school level music classes before you’re ready to use real instruments, but when I tried to use it, once, to record a quick note to myself, it asked me for all sorts of permissions and things, and I decided, “You know what?  If it needs to get clearance for all sorts of things that I have to give it clearance to do, then I don’t want to record my notes on this app.”  Honestly, why can’t it just be like the previous app, which recorded what you said, just like an old-fashioned Dictaphone, and stored it as a file named based on the date and time of the recording?

Apparently, the camera function doesn’t require any permissions of that sort, though it’s recording presumably just as much audio information, and a ridiculously unnecessary (in this case) amount of video information.

Oh, well, what are you going to do?  The world is stupid.  But, well, it would be, wouldn’t it?  It’s just a planet, after all, how smart could it be?  And so is human civilization stupid, or at least human society on the local, daily level.  I suppose that, taken as a whole, human civilization is the smartest thing that we know of in the universe, but that’s not saying very much.  Most of the universe is vacuum, filled (slightly) with whatever “dark energy” is, and that’s getting bigger all the time.

Dark energy really is bringing down the average cosmic intelligence, but it’s not as if it was high to begin with.  Or even to middle with.  As far as we can tell, right now, it’s as smart as it’s ever been, and that’s just because of human civilization*** is smarter than, say, the moon, or a star or a black hole or a nebula or “dark matter****”, or anything else.

Anyway, before I bring down your overall intelligence too much, or at least your mood, I’ll call it done for today.  I’m not that happy even still to be around for another week, if I’m honest with you (which, in that, I am*****).  Hopefully that won’t happen too many more times.  Some promising signs have occurred recently, but I’ve been disappointed before, as I was particularly for the last five days.

I hope you all feel more upbeat than I do.  It’s not a high bar to clear.

*By which I mean, I got here at my self-scheduled time, in time for the usual, second train.

**So to speak, anyway.  I don’t know what I’ve ever done “normally” in my life.

***You can watch my video about there being no life in the universe, effectively, if you want to explore these thoughts further.

****As far as we know.  We know so little about the substance of dark matter than I guess it could be amazingly intelligent.  But there are good reasons not to think that’s the case, so far.

*****Though I can make no promises about honesty at any other time.  How could I?  If I’m honest, the promise would be true by default, and if I’m dishonest, then the promise might be dishonest.  It’s a pointless promise to make, as are all too many promises.

by

There was a star blogged, and under that was I born.

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday again—October 20, 2022—and thus it’s time for my weekly blog post, though I’ve been writing my near-daily blog post all along this week and for many preceding weeks.

I posted yesterday about the two videos I’d uploaded to YouTube with my readings of two of my favorite poems, and I hope those of you who are interested in such things enjoyed them.  The only comments I’ve received were on Facebook, and those were actually on the sharings of the videos themselves, not on my blog post, or on YouTube proper.  I guess it’s something.

I did a first draft, so to speak, of a recitation of The Raven yesterday, and I started to work on editing the audio for it.  I realized that I cannot use that video, since I made a few errors—a wrong word in at least two places that doesn’t even make sense.  I honestly cannot understand how that happened, since it’s an error I’ve never made before, as far as I can recall, when reciting the poem.  Anyway, I’ll have to re-record the video.

At least working on the audio led me to decide what I was going to do for the background music for this, and I’ve prepared that (it’s remarkable what I can get done since I no longer write fiction or play guitar in the morning).  It didn’t involve me actually playing and recording any new versions of music, but I did work with my own recorded music to produce it, and it’s suitably eerie, I think.  I’ll let you all be the judges of such things.

On a less cheery note, I had a terrible night’s sleep last night, waking up at around one thirty, struggling to try to get back to sleep, but only succeeding for a total of about fifteen minutes by my clock.  I did at least have a dream during that fifteen minutes, but it was one of those typical, semi-mundane but still bizarre dreams, and it involved some annoying scheme that took over computers and cell phones, but in a fashion such that I can’t see what the point would have been, other than pranking.

I don’t understand computer pranking and hacking, or why someone would think it was funny.  I guess there’s no accounting for one’s sense of humor.  I, for instance, think it would be funny to castrate all saboteur-type hackers* without anesthesia or antibiotics and to use fire to stop the bleeding.  I think it would be hilarious.  But that’s just me.  I’ve always had an odd sense of humor.

That’s pretty much all I have for you today.  I’ll work on redoing the video for The Raven, possibly even this morning.  If I get a take that I like, I could be finished and post the video by this evening, but the takes are about ten and a half minutes in length—that’s the time it takes me to recite the poem with a bit of voice-acting thrown in—so if I screw it up, I probably won’t do another take.

Still, if I do post it to YouTube today or tonight, I’ll probably share about it here on my blog tomorrow, assuming I’m still alive and sharing, which is not necessarily my preference.  Honestly, I don’t know what most people see in staying alive; I imagine most of it truly has to do with innate biological drives, a fundamental, “terminal” goal, in AI-speak (though it’s ironic to use it here), and people just make excuses for it, confabulating justifications and motivations for staying alive when it’s really just animal programming due to natural selection that impels them to continue.

Oh, well.  That’s life.  I hope yours is enjoyable, at least for today, and hopefully from now on, for as long as it can be for you.

TTFN

Raven

*Other than, perhaps, those who are legitimately and honestly taking part in some form of political protest, but that should be a very strict set of criteria and very limited in application.  Hackers can potentially cost a society millions and even billions of dollars with minimal effort or risk on their parts, and when society loses such amounts of money, there are people, somewhere, who because of that, go without enough good food, without medicine or mental health care; there are people who suffer in general and who die prematurely.  It’s not obvious to see, not as straightforward in proximate cause as most homicides, but its effectively a mathematical certainty.  These are petty and cowardly murders committed anonymously and at a distance, for no good reason but to assuage weak egos.  If that’s the sort of thing you’re into, you should go into politics; at least then you might accidentally do some good.

by

“What have we here, laddie? Mysterious scribblings? A secret code? No! Poems, no less. Poems, everybody!”

It’s Wednesday morning, and I’m at the train station, but it’s more than half an hour before five o’clock.  Officially, the train station isn’t even open yet—in the sense that the payment kiosks and the bridge and elevator access portals are all closed off.  I suspect there’s at least a bit of dereliction involved on the part of the person tasked with opening them, since the first train arrives in roughly fifteen minutes, and it seems reasonable for the station to be open at least fifteen minutes before the first train.

I couldn’t stay asleep this morning, as is probably obvious, having awakened at around two.  After rolling around a bit and ruing the fact that I never can seem to get any real rest, I gave up, got up, took a shower, got dressed, and headed for the trains.  I’m certainly busted flat in a figurative sense, and I would say that I was feeling nearly faded as my jeans, but I don’t wear jeans, anymore.  The sentiment still applies, nevertheless.  I feel not only faded but frayed and, in places, rather tattered and torn.  I wonder if there’s anything that can be done about it, apart from the obvious.

I did recite the two poems I mentioned yesterday on video, and I uploaded them to YouTube.  I’ll also embed them here.  I decided to make two videos instead of just one with two poems, because the two poems have quite different general ambience.  I also decided to do a little reverb and stuff to my voice in addition to eliminating background noise, and while I was editing the sound for the first, it occurred to me that it might be nice to add a little music.

I didn’t want a copyright strike from YouTube, though for a non-monetized channel like mine these are mostly harmless.  Still it’s a minor irritation, and I happen to have music of my own to use, so for The Second Coming, I took the opening and closing music from my song Come Back Again, which I’ve never “released” but for which I have a “video”, which I had made private.  I guess I’ll make it public again, and will have added a link for it just above.

Anyway, I slowed the combined music down just enough to make it last until it faded out at the end of the poem, then lowered its pitch by three semitones to make it more ominous, and put it through a couple of reverb filters in a row to make it sound distant and hollow, then adjusted the balance and added it to my video before doing just the barest bit of trimming on the ends.  I think it came out nicely.  Here it is:

For the second poem, Alone, I used the opening, the bridge, and some of the final fadeout from my song “Like and Share”, which I slowed, again, reduced in pitch, and put through three different reverb processes, so it’s quite echoey and distant.  I wanted to do that because it’s slightly less somber to start with than the other song, and I needed it to be a little more hollow to make it match the poem.  This is one of my very favorite poems, and since the first time I read it* I felt not just that it had been written for me, but almost as if it had been written by me.  Of course, I cleaned up the audio for my voice as well, taking out background noise and so on.  Thankfully, I’ve done that sort of thing so often now that it’s speedy work.  And here is that video:

I hope, if you enjoy them, that you’ll give them a “thumbs up” and maybe subscribe and possibly even share them.  If you feel like it, please comment on them, either here or on YouTube.  Of course, I’ll always give you the out that the man selling a broken barometer gave to potential buyers:  No pressure.

I’m thinking of doing a video of The Raven, as I think I mentioned yesterday.  For this, I may dispense with the mask, and possibly even with the sunglasses.  Though I strongly dislike seeing my unimpeded face, for that poem such a horrific sight may even be beneficial, and in any case, I want to have full expressivity, not just of voice, but of face, to recite it.

I want to use some background music for it as well, I think, but I don’t know whether I’ll use just one song or multiple ones for different sections.  The latter notion sounds like an awful lot of work.  I do have an old piano piece I wrote as the theme for a really crappy horror screenplay I wrote in high school, and for which I dreamed of making the movie; the music is way better than the script was, as even my most generous friends agreed.  Maybe I’ll do some of that, and also the bad guy’s theme that I wrote for it, on my keyboard at home (maybe using a pipe organ setting, that might be good), and of course, do various things with the audio to make it more suitably ominous for the background of The Raven.

We’ll see.  It’s a lot of work, all that, but it might be engaging enough to keep me at it for a few hours, which is probably all it would take overall.  It’s not like I have anything better to do with my time.  So, if I do anything at all, I’ll probably do that, but I can make no guarantees.  It’s entirely possible that I’ll crash and burn before then, possibly even before tomorrow; but I’m rarely that lucky.

Oh, as an aside, by the time the first train arrived, this morning, they had not yet opened the train station at Hollywood.  If anyone involved with the Tri-rail system reads this, please note that fact, if you haven’t been made aware of it already.  It’s not cool, to make people with chronic pain and other, similar disabilities have to walk all the way down to the nearest crossing and back to get onto the other side of the tracks.  I don’t much mind the exercise myself—I’m self-hateful to an astonishing degree—but there are people I see regularly at the station for whom this seems an onerous and unkind imposition.

That’s about that for today.  I hope you enjoy the poetry recitations a bit, including my original background music.  Have a good day if you can.

*In an Edgar Allan Poe collection I got as a holiday gift when I was about twelve or thirteen, I think, but I may be one year early or late on that.

by

“I’ve got electric light, and I’ve got second sight”

Well.  It’s Tuesday morning now, the second day of the work week.  Yippee.

I don’t have any idea what to write.  It’s not at all unusual for me not to have an idea what to write about, but that’s not really what I mean right now, though it is related.  I just feel a near-complete lack of motivation even to try to find something interesting to “say”.

Of course, it’s possible that you all think that I never find anything interesting to write or say at any time, and that’s fair enough.  Interest is basically in the mind of the beholder, anyway.  I’m well used to people not being interested in things in which I’m interested.  It’s not quite true to say, as Poe wrote in his poem, that “all I loved, I loved alone,” but it certainly feels that way quite a lot of the time.

I think maybe I’ll read a couple of Edgar Allen Poe poems and maybe some others as my next few videos.  With Halloween coming up, it might be good, next week, to do a reading of The Raven.  I can still do it from memory, though I occasionally have to stop and fuddle around to find all the words to the verse that ends with, “but whose velvet, violet lining she shall press, ah, nevermore.”

I enjoy reciting those poems, as far as it goes, and it might, therefore, be a good thing to make a video about it, so to speak.  I don’t know how much, or if, people liked either of my last few videos.  I think I may be the only one who actually clicked the thumbs up for either video.  That wouldn’t surprise me, nor would I necessarily think it inappropriate.  No one has a right for their work to be liked, though they have a right to be able to produce it and share it if they are able.  But you cannot demand fans, you can only try to entice them by creating work that someone, somewhere out there might like.

Yes, I think perhaps I will do a few videos of me reading poems.  Perhaps the first one will be a two-poem video, in which I’ll read The Second Coming by Yeats, and Alone, by Poe, which I quoted above.  Actually, I won’t read them, I’ll recite them; I know them both from memory, since they are both short.  They are also two of my favorite poems.  I don’t know if anyone really reads any “classic” poems anymore, even in school, except of course to the extent that songs and raps can be considered poetry.  Some of them certainly can, without reservation (though many of them, not so much*).

Dylan won the Nobel Prize for literature, taking his work as poetry; and who could deny that Bohemian Rhapsody, or much of the album The Dark Side of the Moon, or The Wall, or a substantial proportion of the Beatles’ songs are legitimate poetry even without the music?  And there are many raps which, whether you like the subject matter or not, are clearly poems of a particular sort.

Indeed, Edgar Allan Poe anticipated modern hip-hop when he mentioned that he heard the sound of “someone gently rapping, rapping at [his] chamber door**.”  It would be fun to hear some top-tier hip-hop artist doing his or her version of the full poem The Raven with a beat behind it.  For Halloween, you know?  Snoop?  Your birthday is coming up***; you could do it to celebrate.  It could be brilliant.  The Simpsons did it (albeit in abridged form) in an early “Treehouse of Horrors” episode.  If Homer Simpson can recite The Raven for comedic effect, surely Snoop could achieve real ominous intensity.

Okay, maybe it’s not a great idea.  But it’s an idea, and it might be fun.

With that, I think I’m about out of ideas for the day; possibly I’m out of ideas for good.  Possibly I’ve been out of ideas for many years now, but I’m too low on ideas to be able to recognize the fact.  It may even be the case that I’ve never had an idea in my life.  How would one know?  And—let’s be honest—would it even matter?  The universe is the way it is, the experience is what it is, there is some underlying reality, whatever its nature ultimately is, and I was not consulted when it began, if it began.  Neither were you, most likely.

*And this includes some very big hits; I won’t get started.

**Ha ha.

***I know this because Snoop, Viggo Mortensen, and I are triplets from separate mothers in separate years.

by

The borogroves sure are mimsy today, aren’t they?

It’s Friday again, and another weekend approaches.

Yippee.  Huzzah.  O frabjous day.

I think I don’t work tomorrow—at least, I’m not supposed to—so there probably won’t be any blog post then (which will be Saturday, unless some hitherto unimagined catastrophe literally throws the days of the week out of order).

I may be posting a new video on my YouTube channel this weekend, though.  I haven’t made one yet, so there’s no guarantee that something won’t stop me from doing so.  I’m unlikely to be lucky enough to be involved in an asteroid impact between now and tomorrow, but there’s a functionally limitless number of things that could, in principle, stop me from recording a video.

Nevertheless, it is my intention to make a video, so I probably will.  This is a different type of thing than fasting; no physiological processes and neurological feedback loops are likely to interfere with my commitment to making a video.  Evolution is, so far, utterly blind even to the existence of videos…though that could change.

I’m still not sure what topic I want to address in the video, unlike last time.  I may literally just start my timer, start my video, start to talk, and see what happens.  If that sounds like an inauspicious way to start a video, well, you’re reading the written equivalent of it right now.  If you enjoy this, you’re proof that it can work.  If you don’t enjoy it, that’s not proof that it cannot work, since your lack of enjoyment doesn’t preclude anyone else from enjoying it.

People do seem to have trouble understanding that others can like things that they themselves find disgusting.  I can sympathize with that, and fall prey to the failing myself, but that doesn’t make it reasonable.

It’s true that all mammals, let alone all humans, have more in common than they have differences, but nevertheless, the potential differences just within a given species, given sexual recombination of genes and the sheer number of genes each individual has, is well worthy of the adjective “astronomical”, so we shouldn’t be surprised that others like things we find repugnant.  In fact, given that the number of possible combinations of gene pairs in human DNA alone is vastly larger than the number of (for instance) light years the visible universe is across*, maybe we should switch our use of the terms “biological” and “astronomical” to describe very large numbers.  Unfortunately, I think most people wouldn’t catch onto the nuance of saying that something was “biologically large”.

Oh, well.  It was a brief dream, swiftly shattered by the one who dreamed it.  Typical.

Anyway, so, I’m back on food again, more’s the pity.  I’m tired of having all these biological urges and needs and drives.  They’re very irritating.

Also, I’m tired of how stressed and angry I get about things people do at work.  Don’t get me wrong—the specific things I’m thinking about are worthy of anger.  But the problem is that I get so stressed, and so angry, and it just makes me hate myself more and more all the time, without any evident upper bound to the process.

I wish it were true to say, “I can’t stand it anymore”, but unfortunately, I’m able in principle to continue standing things for who knows how long.  I wish I would just collapse into a heap, and literally, physically, not be able to go on.  It would take so much out of my hands and would be such a relief.  Unfortunately, there’s no clear sign of that happening, though I try to sabotage my own health as much as feasible without being Baker Acted.

And here is another maddening thing that just happened:  the trains this morning, it turns out, were all shifted to one side of the track, as was the case last week once.  But this wasn’t announced early, unlike last time, so I went to my usual spot to start writing this while waiting.  Then, when the “announcement” was made, it was just posted on the overhead light board; there was no verbal announcement, though they give recorded verbal reminders about such things usually—they’ve been informing us, ever since Labor Day, that the system will be running on a Sunday schedule on Thanksgiving, which is in November, for those of you who don’t know.  Labor Day was in the beginning of September.

I only failed to miss my train because I always start getting ready to board five minutes early, and I looked up from my writing to notice that there was no one on my side of the tracks.  Only then did I see the notice that trains were all boarding on the other side.  I was able to take the elevator up to the bridge, but I had to rush down the stairs on the other side because my train was approaching, and my knees and hips and ankle were miffed about that.

It would have been nice for one of the people who always gets on the same train I get on to have said something to me, rather than just letting me sit there typing on one side of the track by myself.  I’d like to think I would have said something to them, were the situation reversed.  Maybe I wouldn’t.  Maybe it’s an instance of the bystander effect.  Maybe it’s one of those rare circumstances in which my reticence to interact with strangers is obvious to everyone, and I seem so unpleasant that no one wants to interact with me even enough to say, “Hey, all the trains are boarding on the other side for some reason…better cross over.”

Better cross over.  That’s the best idea I’ve heard today, that’s for sure.

Okay, well, that’s it for today’s disjointed meandering.  I hope you’ve found some modicum of joy in it.  It would be nice to be able to do at least something positive for the world, even if it’s small.  It would be far better than what I usually do.

*Using the particle horizon as the measured “distance across”. **

**Actually, since there are four bases in human DNA (guanine, cytosine, adenine, and thymine), if they were assigned randomly, then even a string of 1000 base pairs has 1.15 x 10602 possible combinations.  If memory serves, this is larger than the String Theory landscape, which number is already so vast as to lead many physicists to say it can predict anything and therefore it can predict nothing.  And human DNA is on the order of a billion nucleotides long.  My computer calculator can’t deal with billionth powers of four, but a billion is a thousand times a thousand times a thousand, so 41000 cubed should be about 101806 unless I’m missing something.  The diameter of the visible universe in Planck lengths is only 5 x 1061, which is not even close to the same order of magnitude.  Of course, the maximal information within a horizon the size of the visible universe is larger still, but then again, that’s a measure of the maximum entropy possible within that region, so that’s almost a given.  I think it’s 210^123 or something along those lines.  I may be getting at least some of this wrong.

by

Get up get over and turn the tape off

Well, it’s a shitty, shitty day today already.  I realize that’s redundant, of course.  I could simply say that it’s a day today.  They’re all pretty shitty a lot of the time, which is a phrase, at least, that sort of rhymes.  Pretty shitty is kind of pretty; one could use it in a ditty.

That’s enough of that nonsense.

I awoke very early, even for me, with worsening pain than usual in my right lower back and hip, radiating down into my foot and calf, with spasm and tenderness in most of the muscles.  I’d had a decent pain day the day before—which I guess would be yesterday, duh—partly because I took larger than normal doses of naproxen, in addition to aspirin and acetaminophen, and as always I was trying some behavioral interventions such as those with which I constantly experiment.

But I think I was lured into a false sense of security; probably the relative decrease in pain was as much a random fluctuation as anything else.  Also, I realized by the end of the day that I had started to develop edema—accumulation of fluid, that is—in my legs, especially the right one.  I suspect that’s partly due to the effects of the high-dose NSAIDs and other meds on my kidneys’ clearance functions.  So, last night I held off on the naproxen.

While trying to massage out some of my pain, I noted that my son, to whom I had sent an email a few weeks ago, had replied at last to that apologetic note.  But though his email was polite and kind, he basically said that he didn’t want to pursue any relationship with me, at least for the time being, and that he hoped I would respect that.  I can do so, of course; if I didn’t have to have a relationship with me, I wouldn’t do it, either.  He even said he didn’t hold what had happened, what with my arrest and time in prison, against me, which is nice, and that he had fond memories of me and of his childhood with me.  He’s a good person, he works hard and is smart, and all that, like his sister.  I want him to be happy, and I would never try to force my presence on him.  I’m just not built that way.  So, that’s that.  Not a great thing for me, but probably the wise choice for him.

I did record the video I mentioned yesterday, and I already started editing it, which is basically just removing long pauses and umms and coughs and the like.  If I finish and upload it today, I’ll share it as part of the post for tomorrow—I’m scheduled to work—and you’ll be able to see and watch it if you wish.  In case you do, I’ll add now the request that most YouTubers give (which I neglected to do during the recording) which is please, if you’re so inclined, like the video, share it if you’re willing, subscribe if you’re interested, and do please feel free to comment.  All those requests apply here as well, though I guess most of my readers are already subscribed, now that I think about it.

And here I am, at the office already and writing this, quite a bit earlier than I usually arrive, because there was no point just lying around in my room and watching random YouTube videos, some about science, some of British comedy panel shows, and occasionally some about autism/Asperger’s.

It’s the last day of September in 2022, and tomorrow begins the month of October—the month of my birthday, and of Halloween (my favorite holiday), though honestly, right now, I couldn’t give a shit about either one.  Next week is both Yom Kippur and my father’s birthday (I think they’re both on the same day this year, though I may be off on that).

I wish I could see my father, and my mother, but of course, they have both “passed on” as the euphemism goes.  I’m afraid I was probably a very disappointing son for them, not least because I had seemed so promising.  I’ve basically let down all the people who are most important to me in life, regularly and consistently.  Consistency is good, I guess, as far as it goes.  I just wish I had a drug or alcohol problem to hang it all on, so that I could have hope of conquering the problem and receiving minor accolades for the success, a la the famous Christian parable of the prodigal son*, or just succumb to an overdose or something if not.

Unfortunately, my problems are basically internal and inherent.  I’m just not very good at humaning, it turns out, if you’ll pardon me for using the au courant contrivance of turning a noun into a seeming gerund of a verb, as in the expression “adulting”.  Adulting, by the way, does not get a red squiggly underline in MS Word, but humaning does.  I guess that means I really did just make it up.

I’ve been trying to do it all my life, of course, and I have put a lot of effort into it.  But my return on investment has gone deeply in the negative, I’m afraid, though that’s only if you discount the fact of my two children.  Anything I went through up until they were born was repaid at an unimaginable rate, so I can’t complain about that.  But that’s all past, now, and they are alive and well, and they’re doing their thing and living their lives and that’s good, that’s outstanding.

I wish I could have been there to witness more of it.  But if wishes were horses, we’d all be waist-deep in horseshit.  Which we may be in a metaphorical sense—more than waist-deep, I would say—but obviously that’s not literal.

Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for today, and it’s nearly all I’ve got, period, full stop.  I don’t see how I can possibly go on much longer.  I hate the world, I hate my life, but most of all, I hate myself.  I’ve got to find a way to escape.

Which word makes me think of the Radiohead song, Weird Fishes/Arpeggi.  Here, I’ll embed some version of it in “video” form below, so those of you who are interested can listen.  It’s a beautiful song.

*Which I’ve always hated as a clear case of injustice and even cruelty.

by

Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks…yadda, yadda, yadda

Well, it’s Wednesday morning, and it’s sloppy and wet, but the trains are running on time and so is most everything else here in southeast Florida, though the wind is a bit irritating.  Because of it, I was only able to write that first sentence while at the train station, then I had to close up the laptop to protect it from water damage, even though the train stations have roofs.

I’m sure it was a sensible decision for them to make the Tri-rail stations basically open-air with only an overhead covering.  This is south Florida, where it’s rarely so cold that heating is an issue, but on days like today—when it’s wet and windy because a hurricane is approaching the other side of the state*—I do curse the decision.  But I only curse it half-heartedly, because I can’t in good conscience really hold it against someone for doing something efficient and long-term sensible.

There are almost no courses of action, even ones that are clearly the best choices in the long term, that don’t have occasional drawbacks.  Life is complicated.  The universe is complicated, at least if you look at it very closely.  Actually, I guess you don’t have to look all that closely.

I thought about not riding the train today, but I couldn’t justify it.  The Tri-rail is running, and at a normal schedule, so I could hardly give myself an excuse for slacking off in any way.  Also, given the weather, there are a certain percentage of other people who will not go to work today, and that means the trains will be less crowded than usual—which, so far, mine is—and that’s kind of nice.  It’s not as though one gets any kind of extra service, since there is no “service”, but there’s less worry about not getting one’s usual seat, and it’s just generally less crowded.  I don’t know if this will be the case on the way home, but it is right now.

I was weirdly pleased to have a reason to get out my rain jacket, which is designed to be worn while riding on a motorcycle, and so is quite snug and water-repellant.  I don’t wear it much anymore.  I came close to wearing my long, black duster, which is also quite good against the rain (contrary to its name).  But the duster is cloth, and it’s heavier, so it’s likely to have been hotter to wear.  It is a very nifty coat, though, and I’m slightly sad that I don’t get to use it more often.

I got a slightly better sleep last night than the night before—maybe as much as four hours, though not continuous.  There were no issues with power or with cable, but then again, I didn’t honestly expect any.  This is south Florida.  The state and its utilities are far from beyond criticism, but rainy, windy weather—yeah, they’re pretty well used to handling that.

It’s a bit like Houghton, Michigan, which is on the upper peninsula of the upper peninsula of Michigan, and is where Michigan Tech is located.  They get absurd amounts of snow and cold every year, jutting as they do out into Lake Superior, but I’m told that Michigan Tech never closes for snowy weather, despite a reputed more than 16 feet of snowfall every year on average.

I can only imagine what would happen if any significant snow fell down here in the Miami area.  If any snow at all fell, it would be remarkable, but if it was a lot, well, it would be stunning in many ways.  One thing it would also be would be a problem for heating, since, basically, houses down here don’t have furnaces of any kind.  There are a few days early in most years where that actually becomes an issue, and it honestly gets too cold at night.  This is made worse by the fact that many of us don’t really have extra-warm blankets or the like.

And, again, here I am “talking about the weather” like the absolute cretin that I am.  I suppose that it can be excused a bit, given that there’s a hurricane passing near, but I’m embarrassed.  Still, embarrassment is a fairly normal state for me.  I’m almost always tense and anxious and uptight.

Twice in my life, while I was still a teen, I was given Valium, the actual name-brand pharmaceutical, for medical procedures—once for a heart catheterization, once when I had my wisdom teeth taken out.  I remember feeling ever so remarkably at ease and comfortable, even with my mouth full of gauze and blood, or with a wire going into my femoral artery and snaking up to my heart.  I wondered—and still wonder—if this is how some people feel all the time, or more of the time.  I basically have never felt anything like that way except on those two occasions.

I almost hit on the hygienist at the dentist’s office after my procedure.  I didn’t, but the fact that I even had the urge and would have been able to do it if I had so chosen is so unlike me that it’s astonishing.  And while I was having my catheterization, apparently the catheter bumped against some part of the conduction system of my heart and I had a very powerful double-beat, one so strong I could literally feel it up into my neck.  The cardiologist was plainly mortified and apologized sincerely, but I just smiled and said, “That was cool!”

This is how I knew I must never, ever get a prescription for Valium, despite chronic anxiety and stress.  It would simply be too easy for me to become psychologically dependent on it, for one thing, and for another, I know it would inevitably have diminishing returns, and stopping it would then make me feel worse than before.  That would be a true, ironic Hell.  No, thank you!

Drugs in general seem to affect me differently than most people, which may be a good thing.  I took opioids for chronic pain for some time, and they definitely worked to help the pain, but never for as long as hoped, and the side-effects were trouble, so eventually I had to wean myself off them, though not without some regret for the worsening pain.

I also do enjoy a rare alcoholic beverage—someone as tense as I am would be prone to, wouldn’t he?  However, I tend to feel rather unpleasant almost immediately after, and since my back problem, I’ve noticed that alcohol intake makes my pain flare up afterwards.

And I think I’ve mentioned the time I tried a hit of a friend’s marijuana hoping it would help my pain, but instead it left me vomiting for about two hours (and still in pain, though I was at least distracted).  THC is supposed to suppress nausea most of the time, for most people.  I really am alien, it seems.  At least, I’m atypical.

I will admit that mindfulness meditation does help my tension and anxiety in the short-term, but it seems to make my dysthymia and depression worse.  Maybe being too aware of my own thought processes makes me realize how unlikeable I really am, I don’t know.  It’s weird, but apparently there is some literature about Vipassana not being too useful for actual depression, though it may decrease the risk of relapse in people who are in remission.  I’m not up to date on the latest research, but it does disappoint me, because I’m fairly natural at meditation and self-hypnosis and the like.

Anyway, that’s enough for today, I think.  I’m getting close to my stop, and that seems like a good indicator that I should stop writing.  No, not for good—don’t get your hopes up—but for today, anyway.  I’m also, by the way, going to try to stop commenting at all on other people’s blogs and websites, after something that happened yesterday.  Apparently, I give minor offense or am rude, even when I certainly don’t mean to be, and then I feel both stressed and mortified as well as angry about being misunderstood.  Oh well.  Life is hard, but there are alternatives.  At least there’s one.  It becomes more enticing by the day.

*I added this footnote later to note that, as I walked from the train to the office, the clouds overhead were all moving consistently and rapidly west-northwest, which seems to indicate, if my reasoning is correct, that the center of the hurricane is still southwest of here, probably out in Gulf of Mexico for the moment, though I haven’t checked the reports yet this morning.

[Added note:  Since there’s a hurricane a-blowing, I decided to embed my cover of the Radiohead song “How to Disappear Completely” below, because the third verse includes the words, “Fireworks and blown speakers, strobe lights and hurricanes.”  I’ll also embed the original below that; it’s one of Radiohead’s most beautiful songs.]

by

Shana Tovah

[When I started writing this, I had completely forgotten that it was Rosh Hashanah today.  I figured I’d at least make the title give a reference to it, though it doesn’t have anything to do with the post, nor am I going to celebrate it, since I am not part of any community or family that does so anymore.  I also added the 10th Doctor GIF about the New Year, since it’s a shame not to waste it, even though it’s a day late.]

Just in case anyone was worried (though that seems unlikely) I ended up not working this last Saturday, and that was the reason I didn’t write a blog post.  I’m not dead or anything*.

I’m writing this post on my phone, today, but it’s not because there’s anything wrong with my laptop.  It’s just that the first train of the morning is delayed due to mechanical trouble–of course it is–and so the benches that have usually been emptied by that train’s arrival are overfilled, and I’m standing to wait.  It’s hard to use a laptop when one’s lap is in vertical mode.

I may actually wait for my “usual” train to arrive rather than getting on the late one, because delayed trains tend to be more crowded, as they pick up some early passengers from the next train.  And, for similar reasons, the trains that follow are often relatively less crowded than usual.  That’s a nice thing to enjoy, and it’s not as though I’m cutting it close on time.

As you may know, I always go to work early–very early–in the morning, because I can’t sleep anyway.  This weekend, I didn’t work, and I took 2 Benadryl before bed both Friday and Saturday nights.  It doesn’t completely stop me from waking up early, but it usually lets me go back to sleep when I do.  I can tell by the effects on my mental acuity that it’s not really doing me good overall, but at least my body gets a bit of rest, which doesn’t happen most other nights.

I’m really starting to get tired of doing this blog; at least I feel that way right now.  I began writing the Thursday posts, initially, as a way to connect with potential readers of my books, to talk about my fiction writing, and potentially to promote it.  As far as I can tell, it has had none of those effects, or at least they have been negligible.

I’m not really socially adept enough to use Facebook or Twitter for self promotion, though I have tried, and I don’t have the money to buy promotions for my posts or to advertise using the Amazon algorithm.  As far as I can tell, thanks to the way these automatic “auctions” for advertising go, I’m effectively just flushing money down the toilet on the occasions when I’ve paid for promotions.

There are networks of mutually promoting authors on Twitter and other “social” media, but they are all far more pro-social than I am from what I can tell.  I can’t even schmooze online.  I get embarrassed when I leave comments on other blogs and on YouTube videos let alone trying to talk myself up to strangers.  More and more, I feel embarrassed even when talking to people I’ve known for years, or for my entire life. I always feel like I’m such a weirdo and a dork.

As for these now-daily, or semi-daily posts, they were meant to be an experiment that was hopefully going to be useful for my mental health, or at the very least to act as a “cry for help”.  I think we can all tell just how wonderfully they’ve fulfilled either or both of those functions (not at all, in case that’s not clear).  I would laugh maniacally if I had that skill, and if I were not in the train.

I did get on the train, by the way, because it looks like they simply cancelled the previous one and ran the one I ride at its usual time.  This is despite the fact that the announcement said that the earlier train was just running 15 to 20 minutes late, which turns out to have been either a deliberate lie or an idiotic error.  I’m not sure which is better.  Probably neither.  I think it would be nice if the world had a greater preponderance of non-idiotic, non-mistaken non-lies.  They seem so few and far between.

Oh, I did mean to say, I at least got some useful walking in this weekend.  On Saturday I walked for about one and three quarters hours, and on Sunday for almost exactly two hours.  So, about 5-ish miles on Saturday and 6 on Sunday.  I’m actually rather stiff today because of it, but I’ve got to get into training if I’m going to go on an epic journey.  Bilbo and Frodo, though both were affluent hobbits, nevertheless were active, going on regular, long walks all the time.  So the sudden beginning of their lengthy quests was mainly felt in their decreased food intake, and of course, their exposure to deadly danger.  I won’t be so foolish as to say that sounds like fun, but at least it wouldn’t be meaningless and dreary and lonely…not for very long, anyway.

And there’s one true thing (at least one) about walking instead of riding or driving, and that is that you take in much more of the details of your surroundings.  Our ancestors all walked pretty much all the time.  Our bodies are built for it, more or less.  Yet the modern world has turned our natural mode into an inconvenience or a luxury.  That doesn’t seem like a recipe for good outcomes, all else being equal**.

Well, then…it’s hard for me to judge the length of my writing when I’m doing it on the phone, but this amount feels good enough for right now.  I’ll spare any dedicated readers the chore of dealing with more of my imbecilic thoughts, especially since you might have thought you were off the hook completely and for good when I didn’t write on Saturday.  No such luck for you, yet!  But don’t worry, that time is surely coming, and hopefully it won’t be long.

New Year

*Whether that’s good news or bad news depends on the recipient and his or her point of view, and also on my mood.  I veer between feeling it to be just neutral or frankly bad news.

**Which all else never is, to be fair.

by

“Where is the Power that protects beauty from the decay of life?”

It’s Friday, now, something which many people in our culture celebrate, since they’re about to enter the weekend, in which they can spend time with family and/or friends, and at least not have to work.

I’m not sure whether I’ll have to work tomorrow or not; my coworker is supposedly coming to the office today for the first time after his surgery, but it may be too much to ask of him to work on Saturday as well.  In any case, I think tomorrow would have been one of my scheduled days, but I could easily be wrong about that, and it’s not worth my trouble to try to figure it out.  I haven’t been trying to keep track.  I honestly hoped for it to be a moot point by now.

As you might have noticed, I’m still here and writing my blog today, the day after September 22nd.  It’s disappointing, I know.  I’m disappointed, myself.  But I did at least do some walking yesterday; more than usual, I mean.  I walked a total of about six miles, which is a halfway decent amount, though nothing like my target.

After writing about and thinking about the books I had read when I was younger, focusing yesterday specifically on Tolkien’s work, I nevertheless decided to go and start rereading Stephen R. Donaldson’s works, the ones I had read even more often than The Lord of the Rings by the time I had gone to college.  Somehow, I identified with Donaldson’s books much more than I did with Tolkien’s, though I think it’s clear that I love Tolkien’s work more.

But Thomas Covenant is definitely an anti-hero.  He’s no Frodo or Sam or Aragorn.  He defines himself by his disease (leprosy) because it is what he must keep in the forefront of his mind in order to prevent its progression.  Also, it’s what cost him his wife and child.  Then he gets brought to the Land, and he’s sure that he’s going insane, and that he can’t afford to let himself believe what’s happening, or he’s going to lose control of his life and his disease and truly go mad.

He does terrible things in the course of all this, but finally learns to find the center of the paradox of thinking that he’s dreaming and still believing in the Land, and ends up defeating Lord Foul.  I guess you would say, on the balance, he did much more good than evil.  But if you still hated him, I don’t think even he would have felt you were unjustified or wrong in it.  He doesn’t think of himself as any kind of hero, that’s for sure, and he doesn’t want other people to think that way, not least because it’s an overwhelming amount of pressure for any person but a narcissist to experience, which I suppose makes sense.

Anyway, when I first started reading Donaldson’s work, I remember feeling a weird kind of rebelliousness against the popularity of the first chronicles, and since the second chronicles had just started coming out, I began reading The Wounded Land, the first book of the second chronicles, before I had read the first.  It was an odd decision, and even I can’t quite recreate the mental state that led to it.  I don’t know if I wanted to get a head start or what exactly it was.  My friend Cindy had read, or was reading, the first chronicles and recommended them, if I recall, and maybe I wanted to get a head start on her?

That doesn’t feel quite right.

In any case, it wasn’t a terrible choice, because it gave me a sympathetic point of view with Linden Avery, the new co-hero of the second chronicles, who is a doctor who finds herself brought to the Land with Thomas Covenant this second time around, and she has no prior experience with it.  Also, The Wounded Land is one of the two best books in the whole series, from my point of view (the other one being The Power That Preserves, the last book of the first chronicles).

So, yesterday, I decided to start reading it again, and I got pretty far.  It’s as good, and as dark, as I remembered.  I have more awareness and familiarity with some of the things in it, like the fact that Linden is a doctor, but also with bitterness and loss and the like.  Somehow, though, I already felt connected with those parts of the books even when I was younger.  I don’t know why for sure.  Maybe it’s because I always felt like I was weird, even when I was exceptionally “successful”, in school and so on.

I certainly didn’t feel that I was like the other people around me; I’ve always felt like I was crazy in some way or other, and maybe that’s part of why I always was drawn to villains.  They were different, but they were powerful; people were afraid of them and didn’t want to mess with them if they could help it.  They were outsiders who worked to change the world to fit them, instead of having to change themselves to fit into it.

And Lord Foul was also the most eloquent villain I’d ever read, which appealed to my love of words.  He had curious turns of speech, though, saying things like, “Do you mislike the title I have given you?” to Thomas Covenant.  It’s almost as though English was not his first language, and he was putting words together in ways that made sense to him because they conveyed his ideas the way he wanted to convey them.  But he was also an actual character, unlike Sauron in LOTR, though he was only personally in the books for a few scenes, at the very beginning and the very end of both chronicles.

He’s also, as I mentioned yesterday, the purest villain, in that he simply hates all life and love, as it is put in the books.  It’s the core of his being, it’s the sum of his character.  It’s hard, at first, to understand how this might be so, how anything or person could simply be defined by hate that way.

Unlike with Tolkien, who has Morgoth and Sauron falling into evil and becoming hateful, it seems that Lord Foul was, in fact, fundamentally the dark side, or the dark counterpart, of the Creator of the Land.  He was cast into the Land when the Creator became enraged upon realizing that his “brother” or counterpart or dark side had tampered with the creation.  So Lord Foul is trapped in the Land, imprisoned with all the Creator’s stuff, unable to die, unable to escape except by destroying the “arch of time”, and so he hates everything about the Land and its world and everyone in it.  If he can’t get out, then he’s going to make the Creator suffer by hurting his creations, and ultimately by destroying them and escaping if he can.

I can sympathize more with that plight as time goes by.  I’ve certainly had many moments in which I feel that I literally hate everything and everyone in the world, the universe, and wish I could destroy all of it.  But, unlike Lord Foul, I don’t feel like I should do such a thing, that I have anything like the right to do such a thing, even though I tend toward nihilism.

But, of course, I can escape, unlike Lord Foul, if it comes to it, and it seems unfair to punish everything else just because I’m unhappy.  It might occasionally seem like it would be satisfying, but ultimately I’d feel it was unimpressive.  It would display a lack of self-control.  It would, in a way, be embarrassing, but I’d be embarrassed with myself more than in the eyes of anyone else.

It’s a weird state of mind (what a surprise).  But it’s one of the reasons I have no patience or sympathy with people who commit mass violence and the like, because—though I can certainly get inside the mindset that must have led them to want to destroy these people by whom they feel they can never feel accepted—I see it as a childish urge, the indulgence of a tantrum.  I have no respect for such lack of self-control, in others or in myself.  I find it more disgusting than I do the various other things that make me feel so outside and alien.  There is no excuse for it.

But Lord Foul’s situation is different, and anyway, he’s a fictional character.  Most of all, any good epic adventure needs a bad guy, the worse the better (so to speak) and he’s as bad as any I’ve read, while still being a real person in the books.  And I can sympathize with the Creator, too, who is clearly not some perfect, all-seeing, all-knowing being, but just an artist of sorts, who made something beautiful, and was frustrated that he couldn’t do so without there being evil within it.

Of course, there is also now a “last” Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, and I have read only a part of the first book of those, while I was away in Raiford, when only one or two of them had come out.  I think.  But now they’re all out, and I may, just possibly, skip back ahead to those to find out what happens.  I think, from hints I’ve gathered, that we get more understanding of the nature of Lord Foul, and the Creator, and all that in these books, which would be interesting.

Further bulletins as events warrant.  Assuming the Arch of Time doesn’t get broken in the meantime.  If it does, though, at least you’ll know that I was able to escape, and so it won’t be entirely sad.

[By the way, the title of this post is the first line of a song the Lords sing in the second book of the original Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever.]

by

No alarms and no surprises. Silent. Silent.

[To avoid confusion, at the bottom of this post I’ll embed the official video of the song from which this title comes, and then an old video of me doing a version of it.  Enjoy.]

Yesterday afternoon, I wrote a pre-made blog post, in case I was too tired this morning to write one, or too enervated, or too unmotivated, or however you want to characterize such a state.  As it turns out, this is not the blog post I pre-wrote.  This is me writing on Wednesday morning, but I may share that other blog post later today.

If I do, you’ll see that it was written as though it might be my last blog post, because—rather obviously—I felt that I was approaching the end of my endurance.  Though I am, in fact, writing this post this morning, that doesn’t change the fact that I still feel that I’m very near the end of my strength; it’s just that I’m a creature of habit, and I’m very stubborn, so I tend to keep on going longer than I suspected that I would be able to do so.

Or maybe it’s just that I feel too rude to change things suddenly in ways that affect other people.  For instance, today is the day that I do payroll at the office, so it would be very unkind of me not to go in, since no one else does the payroll, and it has to be done to make sure people get their paychecks.  After today, though, there’s another week before payroll needs to be done again.  That would be time enough for the boss to figure out some other alternatives.

Heck, knowing him, he is probably already prepared for other alternatives.  He’s very sharp.  I’m probably flattering myself to think that I’m actually important and not immediately replaceable.  The world will little note, nor long remember the fact that I was ever anywhere at all.

Just as a bit of trivia, and to give evidence to support the previous sentence, my daily life consists of getting up in the morning, showering, getting dressed, coming to the train station, writing my blog posts, and riding the train in to Deerfield Beach.  Then, on the way from the train station to the office, I stop in the Chevron convenience store and get some sandwiches and chips and something to drink, which will be my nutrition for the day.  Then I go to the office and do what I do there (including actually posting my blog posts before the start of business).  Then, after everyone else leaves, I lock up the office and set the alarm, walk back to the train station, ride the train back to Hollywood (Florida), go to the house, go to my room, read a few online manga, watch some YouTube videos and go to sleep and try to stay asleep, which I fail at pretty much always, until the cycle repeats.

On days when I’m off, I will go out to 7-11 or similar and get some food to eat for the day.  On Sundays I also do my laundry.

That’s it.  There are obviously many little details involved, but that’s it.  I don’t have any friends.  I don’t have any family nearby, not anyone who sees me or talks to me, anyway, though I talk to my sister on the phone when I feel non-disgusting enough to inflict myself on her.  I don’t have anywhere that I go for fun, because the sorts of places that people tend to go for fun are not places I find enjoyable unless I’m with someone I care about who enjoys going to such places.  If it’s me, crowds and noise and all that are stressful and intrusive, almost painful.  Anyway, going to most of the sorts of places I used to go—even malls or grocery stores or what have you—makes me feel sad, and even more alone and lonely than I do when I don’t go to them.

To a very good first approximation, I don’t drink—the bottles of liquor I bought for New Years 2020-2021 are still mostly full, almost two years later.  I don’t do drugs—the time I tried to see if marijuana helped my pain just left me vomiting for hours after the attempt—though I have in the past been on prescription pain meds that ultimately caused me as many problems as they solved, and I weaned myself off them.  Yuck.  I occasionally smoke cigars, but I don’t really like them and they make me feel kind of crummy…it’s mostly just what I call “self-harm without the danger of being Baker Acted”, but it’s too slow and unreliable a form of self-destruction to be satisfying.

I don’t write fiction anymore, and I don’t play music.  I barely even listen to music anymore.  My life is nothing and it is nothingness.

On top of all that, my new housemates have dogs—which is nice, I like dogs, actually—but last night one of them was agitated about something and kept barking on and off throughout the night.  I got the impression that its owner just gave up on trying to control it.  Most people don’t train or govern their pets very well, as far as I can see.  So that made my sleep even worse than usual.

I know, I’m whining and complaining and it’s tiresome.  Have we met before?  Allow me to introduce myself:  I’m Robert Elessar, and I’m tiresome.  Trust me, no one else is more tired of me than I am.

I think that’s nearly it, at least for right now.  If I decide to share it this afternoon, I guess you’ll see the blog post I wrote yesterday.  I may actually just preload it to post tomorrow, instead of my usual Thursday blog post.  I don’t know.  I haven’t decided.  I don’t like to deal in threats or promises, because I don’t know what I’ll feel like at any given point in the future.  At best I can make predictions, but as some famous scientist said, prediction is tricky business, especially about the future.

Anyway, that’s that.  I’m done, at least for today.  I wish I were just done entirely, so I could rest.  They say there shall be no rest for the wicked, and I guess I must be particularly wicked.  Or maybe that’s just my own bias.  Whatever.  Never mind.