Exercise

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Monday morning meandering moaning

Well, it’s the start of a new work week, which means it’s the end of a weekend off, at least for me.  I’m sure many people are on various different schedules, but this one (Monday through Friday working and Saturday and Sunday off) is still probably the modal one, if I had to guess.  Though, I wouldn’t be surprised if the situation has more than one mode, or perhaps one mode but a very broadly tapering and irregular slope for the rest of the schedules.

Anyway, it was just now the weekend, and I did not work during that time‒not in the sense of “employment for compensation”, anyway.  I did do some walking, though.  On Saturday, when it was overcast (and looked like it was going to rain, but never did), I walked a bit over 6 miles, umbrella in hand but forlornly unused the whole time.  On Sunday, when it was appropriately (not ironically) sunny, I walked just about 4 miles.  That’s still not too bad, but it was a bit more unpleasant because of the heat.

I guess I like walking in cloudy, gloomy weather (and at night) more than when it’s bright and sunny.  Of course, bright and sunny days in autumn‒real autumn, not this Florida bullshit‒can be delightful things in which to walk around, when the sky looks like a giant, freshly and expertly painted watercolor.  Even bright winter days (again, do not count south Florida, there is no winter here) can be truly uplifting and enjoyable.  At least, they are if you’re wrapped up warm.

Other than the walking, though, my weekend was completely without substance.  I did not read anything new (and precious little old), I did not watch any sports/games or regular TV of any kind‒no, not even any football.  I think the only person with whom I spoke, other than a delivery person, was an older guy whose phone had died and asked me the time while I was walking on Saturday.

Oh, and on my Sunday walk, I passed by a guy who might have been homeless‒perhaps he was just odd‒who held his arms out wide as I came nearer, as if looking for a hug.  I don’t think he was actually looking for a hug, though.  It was probably a gesture intended to intimidate, perhaps so I wouldn’t try to steal his stuff or something.

Anyway, I don’t give a shit about those kinds of things, so I just nodded, said, “What’s up?” and walked on.  He said nothing.  I suppose he could even have been a figment of my imagination, but that seems unlikely.

I didn’t speak at all otherwise.  Well, no, that’s probably not quite accurate.  I probably spoke “to” some of the reactors on some YouTube videos.  These are pretty much the closest thing I have to friends with whom I do things.  It’s rather pathetic.

I didn’t even watch many new videos, and I certainly didn’t watch any that were informative or useful or even interesting in any deep, novel sense.  Of course, if something catches one’s attention, it is “interesting” per se*.  But it’s not necessarily a durable kind of interest.  If you see movement out of the corner of your eye, you turn to look, but if it’s just a rustling of a curtain (purple or otherwise) or if when you turn to look it’s gone, as happened in Comfortably Numb, then that interest is basically spent.

I did notice, just this morning‒while I was pretending to try to be able to go back to sleep right up until it was time for me just to get up‒a video titled “There is no hard problem of consciousness”.  Now that seems at least somewhat interesting, and it’s a statement with which I’m inclined to agree, but I am curious to hear what this person’s arguments are, though I have not yet watched it.

Usually‒almost always‒such videos are rather disappointing; they just rehash basic ideas that I’ve dealt with long ago.  But sometimes someone says something actually thought-provoking.  Anyway, it’s nice to know that people are at least thinking about such questions (I think, again, that our culture’s mental health might be better if instead of going to therapists so often we sometimes went to philosophers instead).

I, on the other hand, have been having more and more difficulty finding any depth or interest.  I must have watched dozens (literally) of reactions to the Avengers: Doomsday “special look” trailer, because that actually got me excited.  Doom is my favorite villain, after all, and it looks as though the MCU might actually be doing him justice.  Unfortunately, the movie doesn’t come out until December, and I’m losing interest already.

Like the Pink Floyd song says**, “Nothing is very much fun anymore”.  I haven’t played any music on any instrument in weeks now, and I sang for all of two minutes or so while watching somebody react to Baker Street.

I think I might try to do a personal “try not to laugh” challenge today.  I think I tend to joke too much and make light of things to much, probably as a defense mechanism, but it’s a bit of a distraction.  Maybe I would be able to do more if I took things more seriously.

I don’t know.  Maybe I won’t even make it through the first work conversation without joking.  I certainly can’t seem to write a blog post without some kind of joke in it.  But it would be nice not to feel anything much at all:  No fear, no regret, no pain, and no joy or hope or optimism.  What’s that Vulcan practice on Star Trek?  Kolinahr?  Something like that.

I suppose it doesn’t matter.  It’s all fiction, anyway.  Meanwhile, I hope you all have very good, real-world days*** today.

*Is that the correct usage of “per se”?  Somehow it looks not-quite-right to me, but I am far from sure why that’s the case.

**One of My Turns, this time.

***I’m conflicted about whether that should be singular or plural.  There are arguments for both choices, or should I say, for each choice.

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Maybe DON’T wake me up when September ends

I wish that I had brought the lapcom back with me to the house yesterday evening after work.  Alas, I did not, and so I am writing this post on the “smart”phone like some Zillennial.  It’s annoying.

Although, I want to be clear, putting the word “smart” in “scare quotes” as I did just now is merely rhetorical.  It’s snarkiness.  It is a true fact that modern cellular phones are indeed quite smart compared to all prior generations of phones.

They’re smart compared to most prior generations of home computers.  They’re smart compared to many prior iterations of the operating computers on board real space ships, for crying out loud.

And if rumors are correct, they’re smarter than our current strategic defense computers.  Though that could be false intelligence, just a negative rumor about the military, because such rumors are enticing and so spread easily.  I don’t know.

I’m just annoyed to be so susceptible to using the phone to write, simply because its presence is convenient, even though I very much prefer to write on the lapcom, or on any other real (as opposed to virtual) keyboard.

Of course, I use the phone for many other things that I previously would have done with something else.  Calculator functions are one of those things, and I have no complaints about being able to use the smartphone for them.

It’s quite convenient, though I can do relatively simple mental arithmetic pretty well without any calculator at all.  Still, it doesn’t take much for it just to make more sense to use a calculator, because the way it processes arithmetic is more direct and logical than repurposing a general biological intelligence to be able to do arithmetic via relatively elaborate algorithms.

You can use an LLM to multiply two three-digit numbers together, and it may even do better than most people would do at the task‒I don’t honestly know‒but it would be a waste of that machine’s capabilities, when you could just tap on your calculator app, or even just use an old-fashioned physical calculator.

You don’t use a VTOL fighter jet to go to the corner store for a candy bar, after all.  I mean, it would be pretty cool to see someone do it once, just for a stunt, but it’s not a sensible way to go for a snack.  Heck, it’s not really sensible to drive to the corner store, unless you have some physical infirmity that makes it necessary.  In general, walking is better.  You’ll not only get there nearly as fast as (and sometimes faster than) by driving, you’ll also be making yourself ever so slightly stronger and healthier because of the exercise.

A bicycle would probably also be a sensible way to go.  But it has the disadvantage that you need to park your bike and chain it up (unless you live somewhere far less petty-theft-prone than where I live), and in general bikes require more maintenance than feet do, or at least they require additional maintenance.

Anyway, I’ve had my troubles with bicycles, so I have a hard time talking them up, though I recognize that they have many advantages over motor vehicles and over plain ambulation.  My difficulty with bicycles is one of the many things about myself that frustrates me.  Still, there are many places that one can walk where bicycles or other wheeled vehicles are not going to work.  There are reasons why the Incas, for instance. didn’t really use any wheeled vehicles.

Well, enough of that weird little set of mutual tangents.  It’s the last day of September today, which means tomorrow will be the first day of October.  That’s just the way that works.  I’ve noted before, recently, that October is my favorite month, but the reasons for that favoritism have eroded over time.

Birthdays and holidays become just reminders of the fact that things are worse for me than they’ve ever been in the past; I have no one with whom to share any of them.  And the notion of changing leaves and bright autumn colors is just a cruel joke in south Florida, as is the notion of weather cool enough to require a windbreaker.

Whatever.  It doesn’t matter.  I’m sick of all this bullshit, anyway.  I would say it’s a waste of my time, but my time is wasted no matter what I do, so that’s not a good point.  But it’s also a waste of mental energy and effort, for something that does almost nothing for anyone, if it does that much.

I need just to shut all this shit down, and I don’t just mean the blog.  I’ve been gradually phasing out most of the relatively productive and creative things I do, though that hasn’t been deliberate or conscious.  It’s just happened, like I’m petering out.

Of course, given that “peter” is a word derived from the Greek for rock*, saying I’m petering out could be construed as meaning that I’m rocking out (dude).  But, of course, I am doing no such thing.

No, I’m just winding down, I think.  It can’t happen too soon, can it?

*Thus Jesus’s famous play on words when he said to Peter, “Upon this rock I shall build my church” or whatever the specific wording was.

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“Now far ahead the road has gone…”

First and most importantly for today, I want to say, “Happy Birthday, Bilbo and Frodo.”  So, I will say it:  Happy Birthday, Bilbo and Frodo.

Yes, though the movies were inexcusably unclear about the fact, Bilbo and Frodo were both born on September 22nd (Shire reckoning).  Mind you, they were born 78 years apart (Bilbo first, in case that was not obvious).  So the big party at the beginning of The Fellowship of the Ring was a joint celebration of Bilbo’s 111th birthday and Frodo’s 33rd birthday (the year in which one officially comes of age in Hobbit culture).

Also, the people inside the tent in the big dinner at the party were chosen to total 144, matching their hosts’ combined age, a number also called (by hobbits and by us) a gross.  Many of the guests were quite miffed when they learned of that system, but as usual, Bilbo DGAF.

So, anyway, yeah, it’s Frodo’s and Bilbo’s birthday.

It’s also the day of the Autumnal Equinox, when the sine curve of daylight versus nighttime crosses the x-axis toward negative territory.  In other words, from now until spring, the nights will be longer than the daylight‒in the northern hemisphere, anyway.  In the southern hemisphere it is the opposite.

And, of course, it is the first day of Autumn, which is my favorite season and always has been (well, it has been for as long as I can remember, though certainly not longer than I’ve been alive).  It’s the time of most of my favorite holidays and so on (including Bilbo’s and Frodo’s birthday) and it was the time when school started again (which was a good thing to me).

Unfortunately, in south Florida, most of the physical charms of Autumn are almost completely effaced.  And the charms of south Florida have long since been almost completely blunted for me.  Unfortunately, I really don’t have anywhere else to go, at least not anyplace I could go in good conscience.

It would be nice to spend at least one more Autumn-Winter-Spring up north, to experience the change of the seasons again, before I die.  I’m not that optimistic about my chances, though.  I don’t see how it’s going to happen.

I often think about just…leaving here, on foot, and walking towards Michigan, just seeing if I can make it all the way back to the house in which I grew up, or if I would die trying.  Either outcome would be acceptable to me.  And I often feel that September 22nd would be an excellent day to start such a trek, since that’s when Frodo left Bag End to begin his own long journey.

Right now, though, I don’t know that I am in good enough shape for such a trip.  Though, of course, the trip would do at least a bit of working me into shape as I went along (or it might completely wreck me).

I think I have said here before that just going off for a very long walk would not be a terrible way to end myself, not least because nobody can intervene to try to stop you or hospitalize you, because you’re not doing anything that’s definitely life-threatening or associated with self harm or self-destruction.  It’s just walking.

That’s much more ambiguous than, say, nooses or blades or gallons of flammable liquids or big bags of rat poison or even bottles of analgesics of various kinds, all of which (and more) I have ready and set to go.  But those all make a mess, at least potentially.

Of course, I’ve also mused‒here as well as elsewhere, I think‒that maybe an ideal thing would be just to swim out into the Atlantic and keep going until it kills me one way or the other.  That way there really is no cleanup required.  Bury my body in Davy Jones’s Locker, you might say.

But swimming out into the ocean is more or less irreducibly frightening, at least to me.  I don’t think I could get past the activation energy required to start that process.  I’m definitely a good enough swimmer, but I’m not a comfortable swimmer, especially not in deep water.

Mind you, I’m also not exactly comfortable with poisoning myself with one or more things, nor with immolating myself, nor with hanging.  Those things are daunting, and I wouldn’t claim otherwise.

Cutting is less intimidating, interestingly enough.  It hurts, of course, but I’m pretty well used to that much of it (a face which can be frustrating in and of itself), and I have various topical lidocaine preparations that would make that process at least slightly easier.

But blood is messy, and I wouldn’t like to have someone need to clean up such a mess on my account.  This is also a problem with jumping from a high hotel balcony, which is another available option.  Maybe if I were ever to get to the point where I just hate everyone so much that I don’t mind inconveniencing anyone, even strangers, I might be willing to do one of those messy things.

Walking is still probably the best thing, though.  One might even see it as a test of a kind, a sorting process:  will one gain new self-respect and maybe even some contemplative insight on a very long walk, or will one die in the process?  Either outcome is not too bad.

Alas, I need to get in somewhat better shape before starting such a quest, and that’s frustrating.  My chronic pain doesn’t help, either, though there are interventions that can help that, at least a little, and it might even improve over the length of a long enough walk.

It would be nice to see the seasons change at a slightly accelerated rate while walking north.  But it may be too late for that this year.

Anyway, if I do such a thing, I’m unlikely to announce it here at the time.  I would likely just leave, and only maybe send intermittent reports as I go along, but with some built in delay such that, by the time people could see how far I had gone, I would have been well past that point.

Ironically, if I were suddenly to do that, I think almost nobody would even realize it.  No one tends to notice when I’m not around, as it were, except perhaps to feel a slight lightening in the air in rooms I used to inhabit.

Whatever.  Happy first day of autumn (in the northern hemisphere).  Happy equinox.  And a most joyous Bilbo’s and Frodo’s birthday.

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The title of this blog post is wrong

Well, to quote Emperor Palpatine (in Return of the Jedi), “Everything is proceeding as I have foreseen.”

Now, admittedly, I haven’t specifically foreseen very much, other than trivial things that are foreseen without any conscious thought.  But I did foresee (and did predict*) that I would go to the office today and that I would write a blog post today, which is what seems to be happening.  Hopefully, the Death Star will not be blown up around me.

Anyway, yeah, I’m going in to the office today.  Huzzah.

Okay, with reference to the preceding sentences:  Someone needs to tell all the word processor programs that just because we have a compound word “into” does not mean we cannot use the expression “in to” without it being a mistake!  The two things do not have precisely the same meaning, and the split words are in any case more fundamental than the compound word.

You’d think the editing software was worried that “in” and “to” were like neutrons or something, and that if you separate the compound words from each other they’ll just…decay with a half-life of about ten minutes, like free neutrons do.  Therefore, it’s got to keep them bound, because neutrons in a nucleus are really stable and can last until, I don’t know, the protons decay, if that even happens**.

Perhaps I’m overly impatient, but I get frustrated by the fact that a lot of the time, perhaps most of the time, when Google Docs gives me its grammatical suggestions, I have to choose the option “Suggestion is wrong”.

What bothers me about this‒one of the things‒is that I am pretty sure that I have more grammatical expertise than most people around me, and maybe more than most of the people who use Google Docs.  So, out there in the world where people are using it, mostly they are not correcting it, but are allowing it to correct them without even critically evaluating it.

And so, far from such grammar checkers improving people’s grammatical skill and knowledge, they weaken it.  One does not, simply by driving 26 miles every day, get in shape to run a marathon****.  If anything, one’s physical fitness tends to atrophy, and if one only gets around by motor vehicle, one tends to become far less fit, less healthy, weaker.

Of course, training too much can damage a person’s fitness as well.  Like the Laffer curve, we find our peak benefit somewhere in the middle of the arc.

Well, it looks like my footnotes today are even longer than the main body of this post.  I suspect that they are also somewhat more interesting than the main body of the post, but interestingness (interest?) is in the mind of the beholder, so only you can judge that.

I hope you all have a very good day today and a very good day tomorrow.  You should rest and prepare yourselves, because come Monday, I will be writing another blog post…as always, exclusis improvisis.

*It’s interesting that this word, which has a similar compound structure to “foresee”, is clearly of at least slightly different origin or evolution, linguistically.  Fore see:  to see before, to see ahead of time.  Pre dict:  to speak before, to speak the thing before it happens.  We pre dict but we don’t fore dict.  Likewise, we fore see, but we don’t pre see.  Curious.

**There are various theoretical reasons many physicists think protons should decay eventually, but that the half life is predicted to be something like 10 to the 35th or 10 to the 40th years or some such.  Now that’s a long half life, obviously.  But…there are a loooooot of protons.  There are so many protons (they’re everywhere, believe me, you just can’t seem to get away from them) that even if it will take 10 to the 40th years before half of them would decay, we should still be detecting some of them decaying now and then, if we look***.  But “we” have been looking for quite a while, and we haven’t been able to detect any instances of proton decay whatsoever so far.

***Think of it this way.  If there were a lottery in which to win you had to match 10 numbers, each of which could be between 1 and 100 (nonrepeating), the odds of matching one ticket would be roughly one in 6.28 times 10 to the 19th power, or one in 62,800,000,000,000,000,000 (sixty-two quintillion, 800 quadrillion).  Even so, if you had 10 to the 20th people (a hundred quintillion) playing it every week, you’d expect to have fairly frequent winners despite the long odds.  The chances of winning for one individual are so slight that they might almost as well be waiting to quantum tunnel through their front door, and yet the odds of there being no winner may be only about a coin flip in any given running of the lottery (I could work out the precise odds, but I don’t know that it’s worth the time and effort).  This is not a contradiction.  It’s a good reason to remind people not to be fooled by the fact that they may see on the news that someone often ends up winning the slightly more sane lotteries that we actually run.  Your own odds of winning are so close to zero that you’re almost certainly far more likely to die in a car accident on the way to buy your lottery ticket than you are to win the lottery, but when someone does win, it’s big news.  It’s somewhat analogous to the situation with airline crashes.

***Simply walking into Mordor, on the other hand, might be good for one’s fitness, if only there were not so many…environmental health risks.

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Each paragraph in this post begins with a vowel. This pattern STARTED as an an accident…

Ugh.  I don’t feel quite well this morning.  I woke up in the middle of the night almost throwing up, which was also associated with almost choking on my near-vomit and coughing for quite some time while still feeling queasy.  I think I ate something that didn’t agree with me, as they say.

Either that, or it could have been one (or more) of my medications (all OTC) that gave me trouble, because I took more of them than usual yesterday; it was quite a bad pain day for me.

Oh, yeah, and my coworker was out sick as well, and therefore I was a bit more run around than usual despite having a bad pain day.  So, that wasn’t very good.  It hasn’t been a very good week either, overall, even by my standards, which are not exactly stellar.

On the other hand (he said with uncharacteristic optimism), at least that means that next week is likely to be better than this week.  This is yet another example of the phenomenon of regression to the mean, which I discussed here recently.

Anyway, at least today is Friday, and I am not working tomorrow.  Having the weekend off is something of a mixed blessing, of course.  It’s definitely good for me to get the extra bit of rest, which I need mentally even more than physically.  But the increased isolation that is an inescapable part of me being off work can have a bad impact on my mood.

And as I think I’ve noted here before recently, my various distractions are losing their capacity to distract.  I haven’t been reading or playing music/singing or listening to songs or to podcasts or to audio books.  And I need to search increasingly widely to find YouTube videos that grab my attention even briefly.

Of course, I have whole playlists of videos related to science and to mathematics and to autism and what have you, full of videos I thought looked interesting at the time, and which would probably be interesting, at least in principle, if I were to start watching them now.  But I cannot seem presently to summon up the energy, the interest, even to start a single one of them.

Again, it’s been a particularly bad week for me.  Maybe it was triggered, or influenced, by my long walk in the high heat and my associated sunburn from Sunday.  I suspect that took more out of me than I realized at the time.  I particularly wonder if the sunburn might have been worse than I thought.  Certainly my skin is peeling all over my forehead, nose, and neck.

Alas, there’s not much I can do about it now other than, potentially, to learn from it.  For instance, this weekend, since I don’t work, I can do my things that require walking quite a bit earlier, when it’s cooler, and I can also make sure to wear sunscreen when I do.  At least I do tend always to remember to bring water, and even if I don’t bring it, there are dozens of places where I can buy some along my routes.

Okay, here’s a little aside that occurred to me as I contemplated my own frustration at having to use the stupid smartphone (ha ha) keyboard.  It seems, from what I have heard, that Steve Jobs et al were inspired to try to create the touchpad for the iPhone and related products by watching Star Trek:  The Next Generation when he was younger.

I watched that show, too, after initially being prudishly defiant about it because I loved and supported “original” Trek.  Before long I loved the new show.  But even back then, I thought the concept of their various screens, which had no fixed controls and no actual keys to press and so on, looked revolting.  I hated the idea.  I likewise hated the notion of reading from the flat computer screens, or the handheld screens as was often the case; I thought it looked terrible.

I could see that it would be quite useful, however, and that it would be only too handy not only to be able to bring up whatever pages or diagrams or whatever one needed on the screen but to have variability of controls on a screen, so the same surface could fulfill many purposes.  I could tell how useful it might be, and I could sort of feel the inescapability of it at some level, and aesthetically, it kind of turned my stomach.

And I thought to myself (just now) that if I could avert the existence of the stupid touch-screen crap, but to do so I would have to allow TNG never to have come into existence…

…I think I might choose to let Star Trek go.

Admittedly, some of this verdict is probably related to the fact that I spent a lot of time watching NextGen with my (now-ex) wife, starting from quite early in our relationship.  So, I don’t watch it anymore, not on reruns or whatever else, because that pain outweighs the pleasure by quite a bit.

In addition, there are many songs and shows and movies and musicals and even books in which I do not partake anymore, because they remind me of my ex and all things associated with my ex, and they make me feel very sad and lonely.

Unbelievable:  that “aside” took up more info-space than the rest of this post entirely!

I suppose that happened with Shakespeare sometimes, too, so I shouldn’t feel too bad.  But, of course, I do.  Hey…it’s me after all.

Anyway, I hope you all have a good weekend, and if you like, you can probably rather safely look forward to next week’s blogs being better than this week’s.

I know I do.

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You can’t CURE a headache by banging your head, but you CAN make it all go away…

I am writing this post on my lapcom for the first time in quite a while*, but I couldn’t honestly say why I’m doing it.  I just decided yesterday afternoon that I wanted to bring my lapcom with me when I left the office, and since I have it with me, it would be a minor shame not to use it to write today’s post.  As far as I can tell, there’s nothing more to it than that.  I certainly don’t care much anymore.

I continued to feel pretty rotten all day yesterday, and I became quite stressed out and frustrated, even snapping at a coworker with whom I normally get along very well—actually, it was somewhat more than “snapping”, and it was not justified—before repeatedly banging my head on my desk.

This, of course, did not help my residual migraine discomfort, which was partly responsible for my horrible mood.

It also hurt my neck.  I wasn’t surprised by this fact, though, since I’ve done this before, alas.  Indeed, I can tell you this tiny bit of potentially useful information:  banging one’s head on one’s desk is uncomfortable and somewhat injurious (I’ve been known to raise visible lumps on my forehead in addition to causing neck pain), while banging your head on a sheetrock wall is not as bad.  However, banging your head on a concrete wall is quite unpleasant.

And I really don’t recommend hitting your head on the top of a door (or “hatch”) in an aircraft carrier, but that was purely accidental, born of overenthusiasm**.  I’ll just add, for emphasis, that an aircraft carrier does not notice that you hit it; it does not give in any measurable way***, only your head and body do.

By the way, head-butting a human is comparatively laughable.  But mind their teeth; you can get cuts from them that are prone to bad infections because of the nasty bacteria that often live in the human mouth.

Anyway, all this nonsense is just to emphasize that I am not doing well.  I feel physically quite uncomfortable, from my head to my tail as it were, and down into my legs, too.  And my mood is worse than the rest of me****.

Some of this may be related to the weather.  The heat and humidity down here are utterly oppressive, and they make it all but impossible to exercise outdoors (such as by walking) unless one is committed to possibly dying or becoming quite ill in the process.  I am not entirely averse to dying in that process, and I contemplate trying to walk from the office to the house almost every day.  But I’m not committed to it yet, so it’ll have to wait.  It would be just too pathetic to start it and not carry through.

It’s also been very sunny lately, which just adds sunburn (which I have from Sunday) to the mix, but that doesn’t bother me as much; for unclear reasons, I don’t get as uncomfortable from sunburns as most people seem to get.  This is probably not a good thing, especially when you have an inherent fish-belly complexion like I have.  It might also have contributed to my migraine.

I’m coming to hate nearly everything about Florida.  Of course, it’s the state where my youngest was born (and where my kids still live), so it will always have that going for it, and that’s hard to overpower.  But even my kids unfortunately didn’t have the greatest scholastic experiences in Florida—which is no surprise, since Florida is known to have subpar educational system overall (though it has definite bright spots at the university level).  Just look at who our governors have been and are, let alone our legislators.  If Tallahassee were wiped off the map by an asteroid impact, the average IQ of the state would rise by 10 points, at least.

The trouble is, it’s entirely possible that I would hate things wherever I happened to be, because really, it’s myself I hate.  And yes, I know about the self being nonpermanent and really an illusion and not a consistent thing from moment to moment let alone from day to day or from one part of the brain to another.  That’s true but trivial, and it doesn’t change the fact that I hate myself, whatever you want to call my self.

And while the self does change from moment to moment, it still has way more in common with its past and future states than it has with, say, the state of a different person, or with a dog or cat, or with a slug or with a tree or with a fucking rock.  There is a four-dimensional continuity of structure and identity to what I call my self, as there is with all of you, unless I am greatly mistaken.

Okay, sorry for that little diatribe, if that’s the correct word (“diatribe” I mean, not “sorry”).  I’m just frustrated with and angry at more or less everything.  Which, of course, implies that I am the problem, since I am the common factor in all the things that frustrate me.

Unfortunately, I cannot swap me out for some other person, and I don’t think I would if I could.  I’ve often wanted to be like certain other people in certain aspects, but I’ve never actually wanted to be another person.  In fact, I think the very concept is vacuous; I could explain why that’s so, but it may well be obvious already.

Anyway, I’m sorry.  You should all probably just stop bothering with me, to be honest.  I am only going to bore you at best and more likely cause you pain of one kind or another.  It’s what I do.  I’m not a good person by nature, though I try to act as if I am when I have the energy to do so.  But my energy is lagging and seeming to get worse all the time.

Honestly, I wish I could just sleep until I feel truly rested, or forever, whichever comes first.  Of course, the universe is not set up in such a way as to make the first thing necessarily achievable, but at least I know I can achieve the second.  It just takes commitment—or time, I suppose.

All right, that’s enough of that.  I hope you all have a good day.

*Actually, of course, this is the only time I have ever written this post, and it is the only time that I will write this post.  I apologize for the somewhat misleading language, but I suspect you know what meant.

**I’m not likely to experience that again.

***Yes, yes, physics shows that it does indeed movie a little.  I suppose I could do some math to try to figure out just how much, but it won’t be much more impressive than how far the Earth movies in the other direction when you jump straight up in the air.

****Those of you who saw the movie version of The Silence of the Lambs might recall that “the rest of me” in an anagram for Hester Mofet.

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I’m too worn out to make up a decent headline

I’m going to try to make this a shortish blog post today, because honestly, I’m pretty worn out (see above).  I haven’t brought it up that much this week, but it’s been a very bad time for pain‒in the sense of being good for pain, bad for those experiencing the pain.  Well, it’s been bad for the one experiencing it here, anyway.

I’m not aware of anyone else actually experiencing my pain, though there are those around me this week who have sympathized, since my pain has been rather obvious.  I’ve spent an unusual amount of time (even for me) lying on the floor, or trying to thump on my legs and sides until they stop hurting as much, or trying to do various exercises, from lunges to squats to steps and so on to try to improve my back, sides, hips, etc., all during the workday.

These interventions have been less than perfectly effective, alas, though the exercise is probably good in and of itself, ceteris paribus.  My pain might have been worse if I had done differently, which seems plausible, but it might even have been better.  I doubt it, of course, but if I had not doubted it in that way, it would have been absurdly masochistic for me to try these various exercises to see if they helped.

My thumb bases have also been particularly sore, which was at least part of my motivation to try my little audio posts.  I have to say, the audio stuff appears to have increased my “readership” slightly, though the before and after numbers are both so small that it’s difficult to draw too many inferences.  Still, they haven’t diminished anything, so far.

I don’t know if I’ll do an audio post today or not.  I’m really wiped.  But in any case, I should work tomorrow, exclusis improvisis, so if I don’t do one today, maybe I’ll do one then.

Mind you, psychology has shown that semi-random, intermittent rewards tend to garner greater capture (of an audience, of gamblers, of addicts, whatever) than any steady amounts of reward…again, ceteris paribus.  This does not appear to be one of the lamentably numerous findings in psychology that have failed to replicate over the years; it seems fairly robust.  Certainly it is working for the casinos and for the various lotteries.

I have restarted taking naproxen since yesterday morning, and at near-maximum dose, because the pain is just too much right now.  I’ve been so uncomfortable that I’ve been getting Ubers to and from the office (the whole way) all week; this is how I heard the song about which I complained (in audio) a couple of days ago.  But this is not a sustainable practice.  It’s costing me quite a lot of money, certainly relative to my income, such as it is.

So, I’m taking more NSAIDs and hopefully it will help and won’t box my kidneys (to use typical medical slang, in which “to box” some organ is basically to kill it, i.e., to put it in a box or a coffin or whatever).  And if it does box my kidneys, well, we’ll probably just call that good for this life.

How much longer do you think I want to live with chronic pain that I can’t even partially control without taking toxic amounts of one or more medications, especially while being almost completely alone, living in a one-room dwelling with only a camp bed and my piano stool for furniture*?

I haven’t even seen the new Spider-Man movie, nor have I felt like looking to see it.  I have watched the trailer for Avengers: Doomsday, as well as reactions to it, because Doom is my favorite, but even that is not encouraging or exciting or motivating enough for 4 months of waiting.

If I were to have to face four months feeling as bad as I do this week, I think I would just buy a huge amount of ice cream and Jack Daniels and Coke and Tylenol and laxatives and every other thing I could think of and try to dissolve myself away, as literally as possible.  Okay, well, that’s not very practical, I know; I would probably have to do something else.

Anyway, that’s already about as much as I feel like writing today.  Maybe I’ll do a little audio about how we have no right or reason to imagine that there will always be a satisfactory answer to every problem, like chronic pain.  The universe is allowed to suck, and it is allowed to produce misery that doesn’t have the slightest shred of any silver lining.

Nevertheless, I hope you have a good day.

*That’s where I’m “sitting” at the moment of this writing.  I used “scare quotes” because I’m really almost leaning more than sitting, pressing the middle of my back against the edge of the keyboard to try to decrease local pain.  It’s less sexy than you might imagine.

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Blog, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage! Blog!

Hello. Also, good morning.  It’s Thursday, the 6th of August in 2026 AD (or CE if you prefer).  As you can see, I am writing (or I will have written) a blog post today.  This is only really noteworthy because last Thursday I didn’t write a post.  I stayed at the house and did not go to work.

I would say that I’m not completely recovered yet.  My respiratory symptoms are improving, but are not entirely back to normal (I guess “normal” for such symptoms means “nonexistent”).  My urinary issues appear mostly resolved, which may be because I have continued not to use any NSAIDs other than aspirin (in modest amounts), making up what difference I can with Tylenol.  It’s not ideal, and my thumbs and back and hips and cetera are having more stiffness and discomfort than usual.  Partly because of that, I have not been walking much this week.

I don’t really have anything interesting or uplifting to discuss today.  I appear usually only to be able to sustain an upbeat impression for about one day’s worth of posting, and then I’m exhausted and unable to maintain a normal or positive attitude.  It takes quite a bit of effort for me to pretend to be normal and human.  I used to be better at it‒I think‒but my endurance for such things has worn away.  Maybe there is some psychic equivalent of repetitive stress injury that grinds down that capacity over time.  Maybe I just never really had such a capacity and I was merely fooling myself.

I do know that I had longer stretches of positive mood in the past‒sometimes too positive, I suspect.  But that’s gone the way of the great white whale, as far as I can tell.  I certainly don’t feel positive.  Maybe I come across occasionally as positive, though.

Who knows?  Not me.  I never lost control.  You’re face to face with the man who sold the world.

Oh, wait, those are the lyrics to a David Bowie song that was covered brilliantly by Nirvana:

Sorry, I think I’m being a bit incoherent.  Perhaps I should try more to be on guard against madness, or at least to fear it like Lear did (that almost rhymes).  But I don’t, at least not really, because my type of madness is mainly mood related, not a cognitive dysfunction.

***

Sorry for that little discontinuity, there.  I got to the train station in the interim and lost my train of thought…ouch, no pun intended, sorry about that.

As I was approaching the northbound side of the station, I had to stop because the express train was coming through, and the gates were going down.  Actually, the gate just started going down as I approached; I could have rushed across, but it would have been a bit obnoxious, and there was nothing to gain by it.

I like being near the express train as it passes, anyway, because its slipstream creates a really nice breeze.

Does anyone else out there see such express trains go by and wonder what it would feel like if one threw oneself in front of it as it approached?  By which I mean, do you wonder if it would hurt, or if the concussive force would be too great and too fast for pain?  Would there even be time and nervous system input enough for one to register impact, let alone to suffer?

I wouldn’t do that sort of thing, of course (I think).  It would be very rude; it would spoil the commute for thousands of people at least, and it could traumatize the poor people who work on the train.  I suppose if I were to be fully hateful enough as well as self-destructive, I might stop caring about such things.  But that hasn’t happened yet.

It’s that wish to avoid discourtesy which makes things like self-immolation or jumping from high windows/balconies problematic to consider, too.  Similarly for just opening up some arteries in a bathroom (mine or that of a hotel or similar).  I would dislike causing such trauma (and mess) for other people.

This is one reason why the notion of just swimming out into the Atlantic seems appealing.  It’s a big old ocean, it’s right nearby, and if one can find the discipline to swim far enough out, there is unlikely to be much mess for anyone to clean up, other than fish and other marine life, who would get a bit of extra food.

However, the ocean is very frightening.  It is not my natural habitat.  I can swim well enough, and it’s easier to do so in salt water than in fresh water, but that vast, deep darkness is daunting.  Weirdly enough, immolation might be less frightening than swimming out into the sea.

On the other hand, there is the notion of just walking.  It’s summer in south Florida; walking more than a certain amount can and will kill you.  When the heat index is higher than body temperature (as it is most days for a substantial portion of the day at this time of year), it can kill you with surprising speed.

I suppose if one were hoping to be particularly fastidious, one could make sure to walk toward the Everglades‒they are never too far away around here, and there are a goodly number of organisms there that would not complain about disposing of one’s body.  They’re generous that way.

Okay, well, that’s enough of that subject for the moment, at least here in my blog.  It’s never very far from the front of my mind, but that’s my problem, not yours.

I work tomorrow, but not Saturday, so there should be one more post this week, exclusis improvisis.  I hope you all have a good day in the meantime.

TTFN

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May the 4th be yadda, yadda, yadda

First, let me get the irresistible, nerdly, liturgical invocation (or whatever you should call it) out of the way:

There, that’s that.

Yes, it’s “Star Wars Day”‒because of the play on words, y’know?  So, I give a nod to it, since I like Star Wars and I like plays on words (with some exceptions here and there for both “likes”).

I think I’m going to keep this short today if I can.  My back and hips and ankles and knee and hands/thumbs and shoulder and all are really uncomfortable, and they have been so despite my attempts at various interventions and despite the fact that I rested this weekend.

Well, I didn’t merely rest.  I did go for a couple of moderate walks over the weekend, one about 5 miles, one about 4 miles.  But I took my time, I wore good shoes, I walked on nice, level pavement and so on.  In between, I tried to take it easy on my back and whatnot; I even took a short break or two during my walks.

It’s probably not logically sensible for me to say that my interventions did no good; after all, I don’t know what the outcome(s) would have been had I done differently than I did.  It could have been better, it could have been worse, it could have been the same*.

Anyway, it’s all very frustrating, and it doesn’t help my sleep, either.  I was going to say that it doesn’t help my insomnia, but of course, it does help my insomnia, making it a much more effective (and affective, ha ha) disorder.

I probably shouldn’t even talk about the pain’s effects on my actual affective disorder(s), dysthymia and depression.  In my experience, when you talk to people about depression, it doesn’t bring out the best in them, and it tends to drive them away‒sometimes permanently.  It’s one of those gifts that keeps on giving, I guess.

One slight “benefit” about being in enough pain, is that it blunts, or perhaps overshadows, some forms of social anxiety.  When you’re in enough pain, for long enough, you sometimes get to where you really don’t give a flying fuck at a rat’s ass what other people think of you.  Sometimes you just start to hate everything and everyone, but especially yourself and your life.

I say “your”, but of course I mean “my”.  I don’t know for certain what happens in your mind.

Oh, and by the way, chronic pain doesn’t seem to blunt other anxieties, unfortunately.  If anything, it makes one jumpier, and OCD-style anxieties and insecurities are sometimes amplified.  They seem to be with me.

This reminds me (somehow) of my metaphor about navigating through reality being like driving along a narrow road between two infinitely tall, indestructible walls**.  Rationality consists, ultimately, of keeping one’s course parallel to those walls.

If you’re driving on that road and your heading deviates from parallel by even a millionth of a degree, sooner or later you will crash into one of the walls***.  That’s you, colliding with reality.  And when anyone collides with reality, reality does not break, the one colliding does.  In a way, that’s what reveals reality to be reality.

But of course, it’s functionally impossible to pick your course perfectly along the parallel path (this is much like my point about the unlikelihood of hitting zero on the number line, see the first footnote below).  So what can one do?  One can keep one’s hands on the wheel and adjust course as one goes along, watching the walls to see if they are staying safely away from your vehicle.

This is one reason dogmatism is a bad thing (i.e., a worse than useless thing).  The odds of you picking the right direction (or right beliefs) on, say, the first try, are functionally zero.  What’s more, the odds that you have achieved the perfect direction on the 2nd or the 3rd or the 42nd or 1729th try are also functionally zero.

You will never come to the single, final answer‒at least your odds of doing so are vanishingly small‒and so you will never get to rest steering, to stop course-correction.  Sorry.  Drivers just don’t get to sleep, and you’re driving if anyone is.  The only way to rest from steering is to stop moving or to crash into the wall.

When I (or you) fight reality, reality always wins.  Again:  that’s kind of how you know it’s reality.

Anyway, I hope you all have a good day and a good week.  Drive carefully and safely.  Don’t forget to check your mirrors and your blind spots; and don’t just trust the AI (or drivers of other cars) to steer you.

 

*It’s vanishingly unlikely to have been exactly the same, though.  There’s only one zero point on a number line, for instance, though there are infinitely many points arbitrarily close to zero (in the Real numbers, anyway).  Mathematically, your odds of hitting zero if, for instance, you throw an infinitely pointy (no pun intended) dart at a number line are, well…zero.  And yet it can happen, in principle.  That’s just thinking in one dimension, though.  The phase space describing what could have changed in my experience is probably quite high-dimensional, and things are identical if and only if you hit the point where the change along all those dimensions is zero.

**I don’t know why this thought was triggered; I wasn’t paying close enough attention to my own thoughts to see what led them there.

***If you start in the middle of the (perfectly straight) road, and it’s 25 meters to each wall, if you’re off by one millionth of a degree in your course, you will collide with the wall in roughly 1.4 billion meters, or 1.4 million kilometers, or (for those in the US) about 860,000 miles.  The fact that it can take so long should highlight the fact that you cannot assume, just because you haven’t crashed into a wall yet, that you have chosen the perfect heading.  You will still need to course-correct, or you will crash.