Exercise

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“This is the moooorning report…”

Well, it’s Monday, and you’ve all had a brief respite since Saturday, but now here I am with a new blog post to torment you.  I’m cruel that way.

Yesterday was Super Bowl Sunday here in the US.  I watched most of the 1st half of the game, but it got boring because it was pretty obvious that Philadelphia’s defense was all but impregnable.  I was certainly impressed, and I admired their skills, but a blowout is never as exciting as a close game.

I tried to get in a little walking this morning, and I got in roughly 2.5 miles before heading in to work.  I don’t know whether it will do me any good, but I’m trying to begin a new regimen*.

I often like to paraphrase‒in my own head‒the last words of Doc Ock from Spider-Man II:  “I will not die a monster”.  Well, I try to say to myself, “I will not die a fatty.”  That may sound bad according to modern, politically correct social mores, but I certainly intend no body shaming for anyone else.  The only reason I might suggest weight control to another person (if asked) would be with respect to health, not aesthetics.

For myself, however, I have always been a sadistic, judgmental asshole of a martinet, psychologically and often physically self-abusive, and I hate how I look now.  I am objective enough about myself to admit that, at times in the past, I was reasonably good-looking**.  But that is not the case anymore, not for quite a while now.  I’ve been through and seen some serious shit since the last time I looked my “local” best, so I have some legitimate excuses, but that doesn’t satisfy me.

Fortunately, I’ve been changing my dietary patterns, and that has apparently been altering my appetite, and the decrease in certain kinds of foods has increased my physical energy at least a bit.  So I hope to be able to ratchet that up into regular walking, using time with which I don’t have anything better to do so that at least I can leave behind a decent looking corpse.

We’ll see what happens, but it can’t be too bad a thing to want to try to get more exercise.

I’m also rereading The Chasm and the Collision, just to see if I can get back into the mood to write.  I doubt it, but at least I’m still finding it enjoyable.  You should all buy it and read it.  You can get it for someone for Valentine’s Day if you want.  It’s got a little bit of innocent romance in it (the main characters are middle-schoolers, so there’s nothing very steamy).

If you want a sample, I recorded myself reading the first nine chapters, and that’s up on my YouTube channel, here.

Also, I decided to use the time while I was walking to begin listening to and using the Audible version of the Pimsleur beginning Russian course.  I’ve always thought Russian sounds nice, as a language‒at least when women speak it.  I have no particular interest in interacting with Russian-speaking men (though I have nothing against them) so I leave them out of my calculations.

I probably would have seemed peculiar, walking along the streets of south Florida at 4:30 in the morning, periodically trying to match Russian phrases and words out loud, but no one was really around.  I’m a pretty good mimic, so I hope to get decent results.  It’s a productive use of the time, at least.

That’s about it for today, I think.  I hope you all are at least not too unenthusiastic about the new work week.  Do your best.  I don’t know how to say that in Russian yet, so here it is in Japanese:  Ganbatte! [頑張って]

*And it’s “regimen” for something like a disciplined and planned program of activity, not “regime”, which refers to the reign of some sovereign, either literally or metaphorically.

**I had a girl friend (not girlfriend, at least not at the time) in high school who once told me I was just as cute as [redacted], who was one of my three best friends.  This was a generous exaggeration, as far as I can see.  Even when my (then) fiancee met [redacted], she told me that he was “every girl’s dream”.  Based on my experience as his best friend, I think she was probably right, but that’s something not even she ever said of me.  That’s okay, [redacted] is a good dude.

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Blog Post for 1-10-2025, Friday

I’m going to write a very brief post today, just since I didn’t write anything yesterday.  I was out from work with a rather severe exacerbation of pain, from head to toe.  I actually thought about just sharing here an embedded or linked connection to my “bad cover” of Hurt, by NIN/Trent Reznor (and which was so achingly covered by Johnny Cash).  I shared it directly on Instagram, partly just to see if it was possible to share whole longish “videos” there, and it was.  So I shared from there to Threads and Facebook, TWFKAT*, and BlueSky and so on.

I think I’ll embed that video here below, or rather, I’ll link to the YouTube video.

Anyway, then I just tried to lay down and rest, and I dosed myself up with stuff to try to help diminish the pain and to help me sleep (I didn’t really get any more sleep than usual, unfortunately).

You know what, I think I’m also gonna link to one of my own original songs on all these various new social media sites with which I’ve been halfheartedly dabbling.  I’ll link that here, too.

As for why I’m in so much pain, well, the abrupt shifts in weather haven’t helped.  Also, I tried a new form for my ab exercises, since I’m always trying to find ones that reduce my pain, but this one backfired.

Then, I had such a stressful day at the office (payroll, loud and chaotic noise, tinnitus acting up like a diamond tipped drill driving from one side of my head to the other, people acting like idiotic children) that at one point I beat myself in the forehead with my fist so often and so hard that I gave myself a mild case of whiplash and possibly a mild concussion.  I certainly felt loopy afterward.

Unfortunately, there was nothing immediately life-threatening, so, as Bob Seger put it, “here I am, on the road again”.

Anyway, I’m off work this weekend, and I’m still quite sore and whatnot, so hopefully I’ll get some rest but will also have the gumption to walk some.

Meanwhile…I guess I hope you all have a good weekend.  “Like and Share if you agree.”

*The Website Formerly Known As Twitter.  Presumably because of an overabundance of musk, my feed on that site is no longer showing any posts here on my site.  Right now, I can’t be arsed to try to figure out how to fix it.

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A surprise Monday post

It’s Monday morning, and I didn’t bring my little laptop computer back to the house with me this weekend‒mainly just because I hadn’t brought it all week last week, and so I was just sort of “in that mode” when I left the office on Saturday‒and so I’m not doing any editing this morning on Extra Body.  It’s possible, of course, for me to edit it via the smartphone based Word app, but the few times I’ve used that, I found it cumbersome and unpleasant.  So, I decided I would write a random blog post on my smartphone, using Google Docs, for “old times’ sake”.

I’m already somewhat tired of editing and working on Extra Body, and I haven’t even finished the third edit (I’m about 20 pages from the end of that).  I will try to complete at least that much this week, but after that, I don’t know.  I just don’t feel that interested in it anymore.  I honestly don’t feel that interested in anything anymore.  Everything is boring or irritating or frustrating or some combination thereof.  Even reading nonfiction about topics in which I have long-standing interest is basically almost more of a chore than a pleasure.  If you know me at all, you know that’s a true departure, and is surely atypical.  I just have no interest in things in general.  That fact doesn’t even feel sad, to me.  It doesn’t feel like anything that’s being or been lost.  It feels like something that’s long since gone, if it ever existed in the first place.

This week will see the Autumnal equinox and the beginning of Fall/Autumn (in the northern hemisphere), but here in South Florida, it’s still so hot and muggy that I’m sweating just from sitting here and waiting for the train.  And I’m not talking about a little dampness in the armpits.  I’m talking about needing to wipe my eyes frequently because of the sweat dripping down into them, and sometimes dripping onto the inside surface of my reading glasses.  I’m wearing a shirt designed for athletes, with that cooling, “wicking” nature, and I have a change of shirt for the office.  Honestly, I wonder if I shouldn’t have brought a change of underwear.

I know, I complain about the hot, muggy weather here quite a lot, but it really is annoying.  There are long stretches of the year in which it is not just unpleasant to do any kind of exercise outdoors, but it is actually dangerous, because one overheats and dehydrates so quickly.  Presumably, it’s only going to get worse down here over the years, but at least that won’t apply to me.

In other weather related stuff, I’ve been trying to initiate the habit of riding my bicycle.  I’ve adjusted the seat to a better height for me (it required buying and using a pipe cutter, but that worked and it is much better now), and I got some new, high quality headlights and taillights, and I was all set to ride it some yesterday…and then, just as I was finishing up my laundry, thunderstorms rolled in, and they dominated the weather for the rest of the day.

It may take one much longer to get anywhere when walking‒or even jogging‒compared to biking, but at least it is less impacted by rain.  You can always carry an umbrella when walking, and you can avoid the worst puddles and such by stepping carefully.  And parkas work much better when on foot (at least in my experience) than when biking.  If you have a computer in your backpack and you’re caught in a serious rainfall, it’s much easier to protect that computer when on foot than when riding a bicycle.

Not that I have any experience with this.

Of course, walking has its own issues.  I did a bit of fairly serious walking last week, and I’m having some surprising and quite uncomfortable left heel/plantar fascia pain.  That’s extremely annoying, and it is probably the result of some relative postural mismatch on the length and/or configuration of my walking.  Certainly, based on the pattern of wear on my shoes, I put pressure on the outer ball of my right foot much more than the rest of that foot, and the heel of my left more than the ball.  This is a long-standing pattern, and may be produced by even very mild anatomic and/or gait-related asymmetry.

Still, I already had/have heel inserts for shoes, specifically intended to counter issues with the plantar fascia, and I have them in, today.  We shall see if and to what degree they soothe that problem.  If they do not, then I may have to revert to not wearing socks, which (to my surprise) seems to ease many of my foot and even leg problems, though it entails a significant temporary increase in blisters and, of course, given the heat and humidity of south Florida, makes shoes wear out quite a bit faster.  If you do it, I encourage generous use of Lysol; just pretend you’re a bowling alley attendant every time you take off your shoes.

We’ll see what ends up being the best option, at least for the time being.

And now, it’s almost time for my train to arrive, so I’ll call this all good for the day.

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And writers say, the most forward bud is eaten by the canker ere it blog

Hello and good morning.

It’s Thursday, so it’s time for my Thursday blog post.  There will be no fiction from me today, other than such ordinary, day-to-day fiction as pretending to be doing better than I really am, as well as using money to buy things*.

I’m writing this on my phone, since I didn’t bring the laptop computer back to the house yesterday.  I was wiped out, and stressed out, and I didn’t feel like carrying any more than necessary.  I did get a bit of walking in, since I had to stop at the store on the way back.  I guess that was good, though something in the way I moved caused a blister on the medial side of my right big toe.  It’s not too bad, but I’ll probably not do any serious walking today.

It’s often questionable why I bother.  Of course, I would like to lose weight and whatnot; I would rather not die the physical travesty that I currently am.  But the best way to do that would be to stop eating completely.  That would be a win-win situation, as the cliché goes.  But that is very difficult to do in ordinary, day-to-day life in the modern United States.

I got a terrible night’s sleep again last night.  It wasn’t as bad as my one-hour night earlier in the week, but it wasn’t a whole lot better.  I’ve been trying to restrict my caffeine intake to the relatively early morning, just to make sure that doesn’t interfere with my sleep, but it doesn’t seem to make much difference.

I haven’t read anything much in quite a while.  I think it’s been over a month since I read any book, fiction or nonfiction.  I have been doing some stuff on Brilliant dot org, as I’ve mentioned here, but yesterday I didn’t even feel like extending my “streak” by doing some simple work in their computer programming course.  For one thing, the constant prods to “extend one’s streak” are thoroughly irritating.

I really despise all the manipulative tactics undertaken by these companies to get people to keep using their sites.  Even Kindle does it.  I had a “streak” of something like 170 or more weeks of reading pretty much every day on my Kindle app, but that’s now been broken, and already Amazon isn’t even recommending any e-books to me.

Still, it’s not as though I ever read to maintain a “streak”.  I read because I want to read.  Except right now I don’t.  I don’t even want to read my own stuff.

I did practice a little on the guitar yesterday.  I guess that’s something.  And, as you all know, I’ve been writing fiction now for a total of over twenty days (counting only writing days).  But it feels almost disloyal to be writing without reading, though it’s only myself that I’m betraying, and I don’t like myself, anyway.  Still, reading has been a fundamental part of my identity for literally as long as I can remember, and not being able to do it makes me feel very much adrift and puzzled.

It’s getting seriously hot and muggy down here in Florida.  I’m sweating significantly and quite visibly just sitting at the train station.  I suppose, if climate change persists, Florida will at least reap what it has politically sown, since both the heat and the sea levels are likely to drive quite a lot of people out of the state, and make much of the coveted ocean-front property into literal and figurative underwater real estate.

I’m not the sort to laugh in malicious glee when people get their comeuppances; I’m much more the type to tighten my lips grimly and nod in affirmative contempt.  But that doesn’t mean it’s not ego-syntonic for me when people get fucked over because of their own arrogant stupidity.

I don’t expect to be around to see any of it happen.  And, honestly, I would not be disappointed if people actually make headway at fixing the problems and correct them in time to save even people who don’t necessarily deserve to be saved, because innocent and beneficent people will be saved along with them.

Human ingenuity is much rarer than people probably think; however, it is so incredibly powerful that it doesn’t take much of it to accomplish wonders.  I guess it’s worth it for there to be so much arrogant stupidity if that’s necessary or unavoidable in order for the occasional sparks of cleverness and even genius to be found.  But it would be nice if stupidity were more sexually unappealing than it is.  Regrettably, though, stupid people seem more likely to breed than smart ones, especially since the smart ones understand about planning and delaying reproduction, or even choosing not to reproduce at all.

Oh, well.  This is the tragic farce of life.  It can be funny if you like lowbrow slapstick in the vein of the Three Stooges.  Unfortunately, I’m not really a big fan of such things, so I don’t think I’m going to keep watching much longer.

All right.  Time to call this to an end.  My back is flaring up quite a lot, probably from yesterday’s walk, and it’s distracting me.  Please try to nurture cleverness and creativity at all levels, and please don’t feed the trolls in any sense.  They’re not worth it.

TTFN

*Yuval Harari famously pointed out that money is a “fiction”, though it is a useful and important one.  So is law and government and the very existence of rights and stuff like that.  Such things exist only in the minds and works of people.  Nature certainly recognizes no rights, unless you want to count the right to be wiped out if you don’t do what you need to survive.  Indeed, the world seems to promise only one thing:  eventually, you (as well as everything you would recognize as the universe) will die.  That’s probably a truly unalienable right.

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A brief report from Monday morning 5-13-2024

I intended to force myself to write a single page this morning while waiting for and then while on the train.  As often happens, once I got started, the whole thing took care of itself, and I wrote 2,103 words on Extra Body.  I can’t believe how long this story is already getting, though it is drawing to its conclusion fairly soon.  Then will come the editing and paring down and shortening (and other synonyms).

I think I may indeed publish this story in a paperback version in addition to the Kindle version, since it really does qualify as a novella.  Which makes me consider re-publishing some of my longer, old “short stories” as stand-alone novellas.  I have long had the thought that people would be more likely to buy a short-ish story in Kindle format than in a small paperback format (which would, perforce, be more expensive than the e-book version).  However, maybe there are still enough people out there who prefer a physical book to an e-book that I would make more sales that way.

I’d be interested in hearing from you, if you have any thoughts about this.  Please, leave a comment below on my blog page on WordPress if you have input to give.

In other matters, the new tinnitus in my left ear continues, though it waxes and wanes, and the right ear is currently louder.  I got some walking and some biking in this weekend, but it’s been very hot for this early in the year around here–in the mid 90s on Saturday and the low 90s on Sunday–so it really wiped me out.  Still, I remembered at least to put on a little sunblock, so I didn’t get as sunburned as I usually do, if at all.

I hope all you mothers* out there had a good Mother’s Day yesterday.  And I hope all of you have a good week.

*And, no, I don’t mean that as half a word.

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The great blog itself, yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, and even though I’ve been writing blog posts nearly all this week so far—since I haven’t been writing fiction—this is now my more “traditional” blog post for the week.

I apologize for not writing fiction yesterday and the day before.  I’ve been feeling terrible and horrible and no good and very bad and all that other stuff.  My coworker is still out, though he’ll probably be back sometime today, or possibly tomorrow at the latest, and anyway, that’s not the main problem.  The main problem is that I have been just terribly tense and anxious and have had terrible nights’ sleep even for me, despite trying to sedate myself and optimize my bedtime habits and so on.

Last night I got almost six hours of sleep, which for me is quite good, though it doesn’t feel close to enough.  It would be one thing if I slept six hours and awoke feeling refreshed and healthy; then I would know that I had gotten enough sleep, that six hours was just how much sleep my body needed.

Alas, things are not that simple.  My body’s optimal sleep time is probably pretty typical at around eight hours, but that particular “pressure” in the system is countered by whatever the various sources are of tension and stress and pain and depression.  When the sleep need gets too strong, it overpowers those other vectors, but as soon as it dips below some threshold, those other vectors dominate enough to push me into unpleasant wakefulness again.

I can literally remember the last time I got a good night’s sleep; I’ve probably mentioned it here, before.  I don’t know the specific date, but it was in the mid-1990s*.  (I’m being completely serious about this—as serious as a bloodcurdling scream for help.)

Last night, I walked about three-fifths of the way back from the train station in the evening—about three miles.  It was quite warm out, certainly in the high 80s, so I think I sweated a lot.  At least that meant I didn’t need to wake up to use the bathroom!  Also, I was physically fatigued enough to rest, and I’d been careful to try to balance my walking so that my left knee wasn’t acting up, which seems to have worked reasonably well for the time being.

I know that’s all very boring.  I just don’t have anyone else to whom to talk about these things, so I share them with all of you.  Aren’t you lucky?  I guess you can always just skim over the boring stuff.  I’m not sure how it is that we can tell what’s going to be boring before we literally read it, but people do seem able to do that, and it works.  I’ve done it myself.

I apologize for not writing any fiction since Monday morning.  I don’t know if any of you were angry at me for that, but I feel that I owe an apology.  I guess I really owe an apology for being a big annoyance and a downer, but I don’t know what to do to change those things.

I don’t want to be a blind optimist, of course.  I want to understand the world as clearly as I can, as objectively as I can, and as deeply and broadly as I can.  Maybe there’s no way to do that without being tense and depressive.  The universe is, after all, vast beyond intuitive understanding, and the realms at which fundamental physics applies are tiny and intricate, also beyond ready intuitive understanding, and time is old in the past and so much longer in the future than a person with a finite lifespan can truly take on board.

But I don’t think that must be despair-inducing.  I’m much more stressed out by how little humans seem even to contemplate how small they are, both individually and collectively, than I am by my own smallness.  As I learn more about how the world really works at deep levels, I don’t feel frightened or overwhelmed by it, like some Lovecraft protagonist who goes mad when confronted with the Great Old Ones or whatever.  I feel that I have grown larger—not literally, of course, but the phase space in which my mind exists takes more and more of reality into itself, and it’s really quite cool, if that’s the right word.

I think at least one thing that makes me feel despair is that so few other people seem even to want to understand the greater universe in any depth or breadth.  They would much rather imagine that the universe is very small and brief, as long as they are somewhere near the center of it.

But of course, to paraphrase Gandalf, they can shut themselves into their tiny little world, but they cannot shut the universe out.  And this in turn invokes not merely the old saw that nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed (for indeed, one cannot do anything but obey nature).  But I would say, far more strongly, that nature, to be survived—even to have a chance of being survived—must be understood as well as possible.

If you don’t know the rules of chess, you’re unlikely to be able to win a game.  Likewise with any other game, including even simple video games.  But those games have rules that humans invented.  The rules of nature have to be probed and unlocked and discovered, and they are much more fine-grained and large and complex than any human-made game could be.  They must be so, for the entire human world is but a tiny little part of that game, one of the innumerable things it allows to come into being.

Oh, well.  What are you going to do?

I guess you’re going to write a blog about it, and in the meantime, try to learn as much about the world as you can, because it is interesting at many levels.  And, of course, you can write a bit of fiction, to which I’ll try to return tomorrow morning.

In the meantime, I hope the vast majority of you are getting better rest than I have been getting.  I hope you have a very good day.  And I hope you have friends and family with whom to spend your finite and precious time.

TTFN

*I remember waking up feeling absolutely refreshed, and though I was too young to think about feeling “ten years younger”, I did feel more alive than I had in some time, almost as if I’d gotten superpowers**.  I’ve known people who seem almost addicted to sleep, and if that’s how they tend to feel when they’ve slept, I can hardly blame them.

**Speaking of which, I have a stupid, joke superhero idea that I’ve been too embarrassed to share with anyone in person (I’m sure you’ll understand why):  “Bitten by a radioactive wildebeest, Anthony Edward Lopez finds himself with slightly-greater-than-human powers of strength and speed.  Deciding to use his new powers to fight crime, he becomes:  Gnu-man.”

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Monday report from 5-6-2024

Well, I got a pretty good amount of writing in this morning:  2.,088 words on Extra Body.  It helps when I’m writing conversations; the character just say what they want to say, and the conversation goes on more or less naturally.  I don’t even feel like I’m doing any work, half the time, nor that it’s coming from me.  Actually, writing fiction in general doesn’t ever really feel like it’s anything I’m doing, in a sense.  Whatever part of my brain does it, it’s not really accessible to the conscious portion until it goes down on the page.  I don’t know what I’m going to write until I read it as I write it.

As far as other matters go, I tried to ride my bike some this weekend, after getting a new seat and post that I hoped would sit lower than the other does.  Alas, there’s something in the post hole of the bike that prevents it from going lower.  I guess I could chop off an inch or so of the seat post, but I would need proper equipment to do that, and I don’t have it.  Maybe I’ll get it.

I’m not too unusually stiff and sore from biking, though I realized how out of shape I’ve allowed myself to become.  Also, my left arm and leg are notably fatigued relative to my right, as is the base of my left thumb more sore and stiff than my right.  Somehow when I ride, I put more strain on my left side, including where I’m holding the handlebars.  It’s weird.  If I didn’t know the cause, I might worry that I’d had a stroke.

Anyway, that’s about it for today.  I hope that you all had a good weekend, including a good “Star Wars Day.”  But don’t forget, today is:

revenge of the sixth

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Writing Update for Wednesday, April 17, 2024

Once again, I wrote just shy of 1800 words (1795 unless my figuring is off) on Extra Body today.  Nothing on HELIOS, but I had no real intention to go far on that until Extra Body is done.

I did no real exercise between yesterday and today, but I did play a little guitar yesterday and today in the morning. “Play” is the right word, because it was not very serious, and I’m rather rusty and my hands are a bit stiff.  Still, it’s somewhat fun.  I need some new picks, though.

Anyway, further bulletins as events warrant, and of course, I plan to write my traditional blog post tomorrow.  This seems like a good decision, since tomorrow is Thursday, and it would be odd to write a Thursday blog post on some other day of the week.

Have a nice day if you are able.

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The moon may be a harsh mistress, but her eyes are nothing like the sun

I was going to write this post on my laptop computer, since I had brought it with me back from the office on Friday, thinking to write fiction this morning.  However, I am waiting for fares to go down to normal levels for Uber or Lyft this morning, so while I wait, I figured I might as well write this post on my smartphone.  It’s inconvenient to write on the laptop computer while waiting at the house, because to do so I need to set up a TV tray table type thing.  That’s not hard, of course, but it’s still more effort than I mean to put forth for something that will hopefully only entail a few minutes’ delay.

I should just have gotten up when I was awake‒well, okay, not when I was first awake.  There would be no point in going to the office in the literal middle of the night.  But if I had gone to the Tri-Rail station early enough, I might have gotten on the 4:20 train.  Still, who knows?  Maybe Uber rates were twice as high as usual even then.  I don’t know why the ride services are so busy at this hour on a Monday morning.

Whatever it is, I don’t see how it could have anything to do with the eclipse that will be coming today.  That phenomenon is cutting a line from the southwest to the northeast across the country, including up by my sister’s house.  I won’t be seeing it, of course, since I’m down here in south Florida, and there won’t be another opportunity to watch one in my lifetime from anywhere readily accessible to me.

I could have gone; I was invited to visit by my sister.  The people at work thought I should go.  But when I started looking into booking either buses or trains or planes‒even though I did renew my state ID to make things easier‒I felt tension bordering on dread at the prospect of traveling in any of those ways.  So I didn’t go.  And here I am.

***

Ride rates have now dropped to normal, and I’m outside waiting for my Uber.  I was hoping to be able to ride my bike to the train station; I changed up my upper body workout a bit last week, and it felt different enough that I thought I might be able to use the bike without issue.  I rode it a decent distance on Saturday, with minimal trouble, though I felt a bit stiff overnight.  Then I rode it some more yesterday, and while riding I felt fine.  I even felt rather good, if slightly breathless.  But then, overnight, the stiffness and splinting and spasms started up again, so I fear that’s just not going to work.  I also have soreness in my right Achilles tendon and significant pain in my left knee, and my left side feels like it’s been infused with hot metal.

***

I’m at the train station now, still in pain (of course) and seated on the ground because I was too late because of the Uber delays to get a good seat where I prefer to sit.  It’s annoying, but I guess I would have been even later if I had ridden my bicycle.  Then again, at least I would have had the good feeling of having gotten some exercise.

Oh, well.  I don’t know whom I think I’m fooling.  I don’t expect to get back in good shape any time before I die.  Every time I try to exercise (so far) it screws me up with worsening of my chronic pain.  I wish I could just shut the pain off, but biology is not readily amenable to compromises in that area.  Pain, like fear, is too essential.  All things that suppress either of them‒even when the pain and/or fear have become thoroughly dysfunctional‒cause terrible side effects.

I can’t go on much longer like this.  It’s almost too bad that the solar eclipse is not some harbinger of disaster, but of course, it is not.  It’s merely a consequence of the geometry of three bodies whose mutual orbits lie nearly in the same plane.  If the moon’s orbital plane were identical to the Earth’s around the sun, there would be a lunar eclipse and a solar eclipse with each orbit of the moon, and predicting such things would have been far less impressive to the native peoples of Hispaniola when Columbus used his knowledge thereof to dupe them into going along with his plans.

Some modern people seem barely less credulous, despite being avid users of the Internet and World Wide Web.  Why, the leading independent candidate for president is full of ideas so absurd that they would have been rejected as plot points in the later seasons of the X-files.  If you caught him at the right time, you could probably convince him that early vaccines had been used to mind-control him and that he had assassinated both his uncle and his father.

Sorry.  I’m grumpy.  My apologies.  I’m in a lot of pain‒more so than usual‒and of course my sleep has been horrible, though at least I napped some over the weekend.  I also replaced the shower-head in the bathroom, but that’s not very impressive, and I had the cable people out to replace the modem for the Wi-Fi, but though that was absurdly nerve-wracking, it’s hardly a big accomplishment.

I feel horrible and rotten and disgusting.  I wouldn’t give myself 5 stars even on an Uber or Lyft scale (in which, if someone doesn’t get 5 stars the app asks you what went wrong, but only gives you pre-programmed, simplistic options for explanation, eliminating the whole point of a 5 star rating system‒3 stars should be the average, but instead it’s something like 4.9).  I wouldn’t give myself an A even on the Yale grading scale (in which, it seems, the vast majority of students get As in the vast majority of their classes‒again, destroying the whole point of the grading system and eliminating any incentives to excel).

Maybe I should write a whole post about that issue, how (among other things) grade inflation makes the prestige of elite educational institutions evaporate, since in the real world, business is competitive, and a 4.0 from a school where everyone gets a 4.0 and there is no merit-based admission will gradually (but not necessarily slowly) come to be not worth the virtual paper on which it is written.

Again, I’m sorry.  I really don’t feel well at all, and I don’t feel good at all, either*.  I hope you all feel significantly better than I do, physically, emotionally, morally and otherwise.  I’m sure you all deserve it more than I do, though “deserves” is for the most part a vacuous term.

I hope you all have a very good day.  If you get a chance, and are in its path, observe the eclipse (but don’t do it directly, not with unprotected eyes).  It’s not an especially impressive cosmic phenomenon, but it’s still pretty cool.  It’s particularly cool that the human race understands the universe well enough that these phenomena, which confused our ancestors so mightily, are almost banal to us, and we can predict and plot them out centuries in advance.

It’s particularly uncool that despite how much is known and understood, there are people who live in the modern world and who constantly use devices that rely on quantum field theory and general relativity yet still think a solar eclipse might be some supernatural sign.

Heavy sigh.  What can you do?  The world is tragically comical and comically tragic.  It’s probably not worth the effort.  And I’m darn near sure that I am not.

*Yes, I mean two different things by those two words.

by

“I can see you’re out of aces”

Well, it’s Saturday morning and I’m on my way to the office in the back seat of an Uber, against my better judgment, for various reasons, into some of which I may (or may not) get during this post.

The day has not started auspiciously.  I got up and got ready to shower, selecting my clothes for matched colors* and all that, and then turned the shower on…and the shower head popped right off, and water shot all over the place.  I tried an impromptu fix, but there’s cracked plastic in the portion that grips the actual shower head in place, and I’m going to need to provide a stronger repair for that.  I have some things in mind, but in the meantime, I had to wash my hair in the sink and write an IOU to my body in the form of antiperspirant and aftershave.

Of course, I could either get in touch with the owner/landlord or my former housemate to get it fixed (or replaced), but that would entail having one of them come into my room at some point, and I’d rather avoid that if I can.  I think I’ll watch some videos about how to put in a new shower head and/or go to wikiHow for an eventual fuller fix.

That’s if I don’t just die before it becomes relevant, which doesn’t necessarily seem like the worst option.

I had abdominal pain yesterday during the day similar to what I had on Wednesday, which I think I wrote about here.  It may be because I’ve been trying to institute a form of daily exercise that I used to do, but which I haven’t done in a long time, and it’s putting strain on my mesentery or something.

I suppose it could be an abdominal aortic aneurysm that’s getting close to rupturing, but that seems unlikely‒I’ve had MRIs and such of the area in the past and there’s never been any sign of such a thing, and they don’t just happen overnight.  It’s kind of a shame in a way; if one of those ruptures and you’re not in very close proximity to an operating room, you’re in for a probable quick death.

That wouldn’t be too bad.

It’s also very unlikely to be appendicitis; although it is similar in character to the initial stages of that disease, if it were that, it would have progressed by now.  Appendicitis doesn’t come and go.  At least, I have never heard of a case in which it does 

It’s probably just a combination of something I have been eating and my attempt to do new exercise.

Anyway, it doesn’t matter.  It’s just one more of the numerous forms of pain, both literal and figurative, that one can experience in life.  I’ve also been getting some threatening esophageal spasm, something I know and recognize from doleful experience, and that is a very unpleasant sensation.

I guess I shouldn’t restart that exercise, after all.  I had tried it as an alternative to walking because of the irritation of my left knee, but I guess I’ll have to find some way simply to adapt and ease that knee’s trouble.  It would be nice to use my bike, but I’ve had trouble with that due to my back.  Still, maybe if I commit to it, I can make biking something to which my body will adapt.

Sorry, I know all this is probably incredibly boring.  It’s also probably just silly fantasizing, since I don’t think I’m ever going to get back into any kind of good shape.  I want to lose weight, because I find myself disgusting, but I keep falling back into bad dietary habits, or developing new bad dietary habits.

It might be easier if I could think of any good purpose for getting healthier other than just living longer in the profoundly unsatisfactory state in which I currently live**.  Pink Floyd may be right when they say that hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way, but though I revere much of their work, I am not, in fact, English, so I don’t want to do it.

If I have any English blood, it’s very dilute, so to speak (though I am an anglophile nevertheless).  Most of my ancestry is Irish, with some Scottish here and there, unless I am very mistaken.  I never did the “23 and Me” thing, but others in my family have, and though there were little surprises here and there, as far as I know I have few direct genetic connections to the Angles (or, presumably, the Saxons).  Mainly it’s the Celts.

That was another weird little tangent, or digression, or however else you might prefer to refer to such deferrals of main ideas.  I don’t really have much more to say today, anyway.  Don’t expect a blog post on Monday or on Tuesday or on Wednesday.  I may succumb and write a post on any or all of those days, but my intention remains to do fiction writing on those mornings.  I also intend to go back to taking the bus at least on the way back to the house, unless or until I can get used to walking without causing too much exacerbation of my left knee, or to biking without exacerbating my back.

Of course, we could all get lucky and I could have something fairly severe going on in my belly, and I might never write any blog posts or fiction again.  If not now, something like it will happen eventually.  “The losing card I’ll someday lay,” as the song says.  In the end‒as it was so beautifully put in the Kenny Rogers song, The Gambler‒we all break even.

In the meantime, for those of you who celebrate it, please have a Happy Easter tomorrow.  I hope you get a chance to enjoy some time with friends and/or family, and that you all feel at least a little bit personally resurrected.

*That’s a minor joke; I only wear one “color”, top to bottom, inside and out.  It makes everything less stressful.

**I don’t mean Florida, though that would make for a reasonably funny joke.  I mean “state” in one of its other standard uses:  the specific condition that someone or something is in at a given time.