Exercise

by

Trivial nonsense on a pseudo-ominous day

I’d intended to walk to the train this morning, so of course I didn’t bring my portable, foldable computer designed to be suitable for use resting upon one’s lap with me yesterday.  Therefore, I am writing this blog post on my smartphone*.  However, I did not walk to the train.

I just felt really wiped out still this morning; my sleep wasn’t quite as bad as it had been the night before, but it still was rotten, and I feel rotten.  Also, this morning it’s three degrees (Fahrenheit…so one and two thirds degrees Celsius) hotter than it was two days ago.  I’m sweating even more than usual even though I’m just sitting at the train station right now.  There’s also, again, no breeze of which to speak, so everything is stagnant, and sweat doesn’t really do any work toward cooling one down.

I hope that, by this evening, it’s either cooler or at least breezier, and that I’ll have a bit more energy, so I might feel up to walking back from the train.  At least then I wouldn’t have to worry about sweating on train seats.

My coworker did come to the office yesterday, bearing pictures and stories of his brief family trip, mainly focused on his very young daughter.  It was quite charming.  Another person I know is currently on a trip as well‒two of them together, really‒and all these reports got me nostalgic about trips I had taken to (or times I had lived in) their various destinations.  I fear to talk too much about my own experiences in such circumstances, though I feel the urge‒I suspect that I’m just being horribly obnoxious when I catch myself doing it, and internally rebuke myself with things like, “No one gives a shit about all your stupid stories” and so on.

To be fair, no one has complained to me about it, so I evidently haven’t overstepped the bounds of good taste too much.  I probably do so overstep here, on my blog, but if anyone here doesn’t want to “hear” my stupid stories, they have only themselves to blame for reading them.

Today is Friday the 13th, isn’t it?  Back in the old days, some local network station would probably have used today‒and the fact that we are in the month of October, to boot‒as an excuse to show some highly edited versions of the slasher films named after the day.  For all I know, some of them still do.  Anyway, I tend to like Friday the 13th, largely because 13 is a prime number, and it’s one for which I feel a special affection precisely because it is so reviled by so many other people, for silly, superstitious reasons.  I myself am not superstitious.  I’m just a little bit stitious.  Ba-dump-bump.

I will be working tomorrow, so maybe I’ll walk to the train in the morning.  Timing things like that can be a bit awkward on the weekend, because the trains only run every hour, and none of the departure times is roughly comparable to the place in the hour that I usually catch them.  So if I get up at the same time as usual, whether walking or otherwise, I’m either “too early” or “too late” compared to my preference.  Of course “too early” is VASTLY preferable to the alternative, so I will err in that direction.  It’s not as though I can choose just to sleep in‒not without the use of pharmaceuticals‒so I might as well just get going.

I had a rather abrupt surge in my lower back pain this morning, above the usual baseline (to which I’ve almost become accustomed).  It may be because I didn’t put on my spandex knee and ankle support thingies**, since I had chosen not to walk.  It seems a bit much to think, though, that just the very small amount of walking I’ve done without them, wearing boots that give decent ankle support, would trigger an exacerbation.  It’s possible, I guess, but it seems unlikely.  It’s also possible that I slept in an unusual position, or just that fatigue and relative dehydration and whatnot are taking a bit of a toll.

Ah, well.  I brought my knee and ankle specialty spandex bits of supplemental clothing with me, in case I walk this evening, so I can always slip them on during the day.

I already gave away my folding massage chair.  It wasn’t doing me any good anymore, and it’s one less thing to have around or to leave behind.  I’m trying to farm off or just eliminate as much useless junk as I can.  The less clutter, the better.

That last sentence makes me wish I could legitimately say “and the less butter, the cletter”, but that last word, alas, has no meaning of which I am aware.  I suppose I could make up a meaning for it, but if you have to invent a word to make a pseudo-spoonerism work, then you’re really reaching.

One of the security guys on the train just walked by, and as he did, he muttered, “Damn, it’s hot.”  He’s far from overstating the situation.  The A/C on the train appears to be running***, based on the noise, but it doesn’t seem to be cooling the car much if at all.  I guess that at least means that my glasses (and my phone) won’t fog up when I exit the train, and that’s worth avoiding, so it’s a good thing.  See?  Who says I can’t find the positive in seemingly negative situations?

Some do say that cynics are really just frustrated idealists.  I don’t know that I am or ever have been an idealist, but I certainly am frustrated.

With that, I’ll draw (or write) this post to a close.  I hope you all have a good and lucky Friday the 13th, and that you have a good weekend to follow.  I expect to be writing a post for tomorrow morning, so if you like that sort of thing, come to this space then‒figuratively speaking‒at about the usual time.

*I don’t have any urge to clarify the word “smartphone” because it really doesn’t refer to any other entity in the universe of which I know, and‒certainly compared to any phones I used prior to the last ten years‒it is a very smart phone indeed.

**I’m not sure what the best term for these is.  “Brace” feels most typical, but that, to me, somehow implies hard, hinged, moving parts, which are lacking in the products I use.  “Support” seems reasonable, but it feels a bit vague.  Perhaps “compression sleeve” would work, but that feels a bit confusing.

***I would guess that it’s probably powered by alternating current created by an alternator (duh!) attached to the engine, but it could be run from batteries that receive their charge via rectified current initially generated in the engine.  If that is the case, then we have the rather pleasing situation of an A/C running on DC.  That’s better than butter and cletter than clutter.

by

Vamonos a escuchar mientras caminamos

I am writing this post on my smartphone today, as opposed to my computer.  Though, of course, a smartphone is a computer, and indeed, is far more advanced a computer than any I’d used prior to the turn of the millennium.  It’s a lot more advanced than the computers that ran the Space Shuttle™ and vastly more advanced than the ones used in the Apollo moon landings.  Thankfully, Newtonian mechanics is straightforward enough to be computable using quite simple systems and some smart humans, of which there were many involved in that program, and Newtonian mechanics is all one really needs to get to the Moon and back.

Anyway, I walked to the train station this morning, as was my plan, which was why I did not bring my…my folding computer back to the house with me yesterday afternoon.  I plan to bring it with me this evening, and to take tomorrow morning off from walking, just to avoid overdoing things in the short term. There will be plenty of time for overdoing things; I need to pace myself at least a little bit.

I feel that my sleep has been getting even worse recently than it usually is, and it’s really quite frustrating.  Yet, even though I’m deeply tired, I can’t seem to get sleepy.  I’m not sure what I can do about this, but it’s quite frustrating.

I do have one rather fun thing to report:  this morning on the walk to the train, I listened to a new audio-book I’d ordered with this month’s Audible credit (which hit my account yesterday).  That book was the first Harry Potter book…but in Spanish!  If there’s one set of books I know well enough to be able to fill in the gaps in Spanish, it’s that set.  The only potentially better one would be The Lord of the Rings; all in good time for that!  So, my tentative thought is that I can listen to the whole Harry Potter series in Spanish and this should help me improve my spoken (and heard) Spanish skills.

Audible also has the Harry Potter books in Japanese, and I almost started with that, but I figured Spanish would probably be the one in which it would be more useful to improve my skills.  I am in south Florida, after all.  The other people who share the house in which I live are primarily Spanish speaking, for goodness sake.

There’s nothing that says I can’t do both, of course, and that is my tentative plan.  I mean to do a lot of walking, so there will be plenty of time to listen.  Even in my hour and a half walk so far this morning, I only got to chapter 4 of the first book, and it’s the shortest of the Harry Potter books.  Just wait till I get to book 6!  I read that one seven times between when it came out and when book 7 was released, because I was impatient.  By the time I finish that, maybe, the audio will feel completely natural.

Once again today, I let the 610 train go while waiting for the 630.  I’m glad I did.  Today’s weather was warmer and muggier than Monday, and there is essentially no wind to cool one down, so that time is well used.  The wait is only somewhat effective, of course.  I brought along a second shirt to put over my “athletic” one, just so that I’m not sweating all over the back of the seat on the train.  My shorts are designed to be very good at letting go of sweat, but even so, given the pattern of accumulation, I look almost as though I had wet myself‒though only if I had done so while lying on my belly.

It’s not that bad, I guess, and I have my little “scent bomb” spray to hide any bad odor…and I’ve been told that my initial sweaty smell isn’t too bad.  Far worse (to me) is the odor of mildew.  If it gets going, I feel nauseated.  I hate that smell.

This is probably why I can’t stand to eat pretty much any kind of mushroom; they all smell vaguely like mildew.  Also, their texture is gross.  I suppose if I were to eat a magic mushroom in order to try to treat my depression, I could probably just force a bit down.  But it would have to be in specific, deliberate, and controlled circumstances.  At least I’m highly unlikely to eat poisonous mushrooms accidentally, which is good, because by all accounts of which I’m aware, they bring about a slow, painful, and horrifying death when they kill, and there are generally no known antidotes.

I don’t have much more to report.  It’s been a weird few days at the office, because my colleague is out of town, on his delayed vacation.  It’s a bit hectic and I am slightly behind schedule on payroll, but that is largely due to a region-wide Internet outage we had yesterday afternoon.  The phones in our office are VOIP, and of course, the reports we get, from which I render the payroll, come through email.  We left the office not long after lunch, after waiting a bit to see if the Internet would return.

The irony is that, after everyone had left and I was just getting ready to lock up, the internet connection came back (earlier than predicted by Comcast, who I suspect use a sort of Mister Scot technique when estimating repair times).  It was too late to do anything about it, and I was practically heading out the door already, but it’s both mildly frustrating and rather amusing.

That’s about enough for today.  Tomorrow, I plan to write using my laptop computer, so the flow might be better.  It seems appropriate for what may be one of my final traditional Thursday blog posts.  In the meantime, please have a good day, today.

by

“Father snores as his wife gets into her dressing gown”

It’s Wednesday now, in case you were wondering.  Yesterday during the day I felt very much as grim and gloomy as my blog post in the morning, if a bit less angry.  In the evening, though, I stuck to my plan to walk back from the train to the house, and I talked to my sister on the phone while I did.  That’s more than seventeen miles of walking in the past few days.  It helped that it wasn’t raining at all, and the evening temperature, while far from cool, was not as hot as it has been.  Also, there was something of a breeze blowing.

My new boots are working well; I had no blistering or worsening of pain or anything of that sort.  Only after I took them off did I feel that there was a very slight irritation in a spot on the ball of my left foot.  There’s no visible sign of anything, and since I’m going to be resting from long walking today, it should have ample time to recover from whatever minor issues it has.  I seem to be having, just maybe, a tiny bit less back pain‒or at least fewer bad exacerbations‒than usual, as I get in better condition and (I think) lose a bit of weight.

It’s a good start, but I’m a long way from being the way I wish I were, in either direction.

We had a heck of a day in the office yesterday, being very busy and with many successful events, so to speak.  That’s always a good thing, at least ceteris paribus.  There were, however, several times when I got stressed out* because of people not following the protocols or leaving out stupid things‒like a customer’s zip code, for instance!  Sometimes they don’t even put down the state, or they’ll write down what’s supposed to be the email address, but it seems to be only whatever must have come before the @ symbol.  It’s as if they imagine there’s really only one email server.  I know Gmail is big, but there are many others.

These people are almost all younger than I am.  They have grown up with this technology firmly in place all around them.  How is it that they can fail to know the basics of email?  It’s frankly astonishing.

I just realized it’s my father’s birthday today.  He knew more about computers than I, right up until the day he died, probably, but then again, that was his profession.  He certainly used email before anyone else I know.

He was a smart guy, and he worked hard.  If he had grown up somewhere other than a blue collar factory town, he probably would have done even more than he did with computers.  Of course, it’s hard to tell for sure; when you change one thing, usually many other things change as well.

He did all right, anyway.  He and my Mom, who had known each other since well before they were married, stayed together until he died.  I think it must be really nice to have one constant, steady and reliable companion for a lifetime.  Of course, in such situations, it’s often the case that, once one dies, the other soon follows‒which was the case with my parents.  That’s not a horrible thing, really, to be able to wind down and cash out, once one’s spouse is gone, because life just isn’t worth nearly as much without them.  In some ways it’s touching.

Living alone, and not having any good skill or ability at making new friends or new connections, is not touching.  Then again, most people are just frustrating and bizarre.  I don’t exclude myself from this judgment, even from my own point of view.  I usually find myself terribly unpleasant.  At least I’m familiar with myself, but that doesn’t necessarily mean I like me.  Most of the time I don’t.  And yet, as I’ve said before, there’s certainly no one else I’d rather be.  So I’m in a difficult circumstance.

There are, it seems, ways around all that.  But they require some courage, so it’s taking me time and effort to work my way up to it.  I certainly have no interest in trying to maintain the status quo in the absurd and pointless game of my daily existence.

People follow all these rules and customs and mores, but they’re all just ad hoc inventions, just crap that fell together all on its own.  And yet, people treat them as if they are important, just as they seem to think of the people in government as somehow different from themselves.  Would that it were the case.  But the people in government‒making laws, making decisions, making judgments, participating in bureaucracies and the like‒are all just flesh and blood creatures that eat and excrete like every other living thing.

Don’t be in too much awe of any human, or frankly of any other kind of creature, real or imaginary.  You would be a fool, in general, to revere any government figure much.  Most of them are narcissists and opportunists of one stripe or another, because that’s the sort of person for whom roles in government tend to select.  Often they are also self-righteous and hypocritical.  And yet, other humans beings who are no brighter (or dimmer) than their so-called leaders will follow and sometimes come near to worshiping such people.  It’s all rather pathetic.

Humans‒you can’t live with ’em, you can’t eat ’em (too many germs and toxins).

Anyway, that’s enough for now.  I’ll give you a break after yesterday’s quite long post.  All bitterness aside, I honestly wish you well, and I hope you have a good day.

And Happy Birthday, Dad, wherever you may be, even if you are nowhere but in the past.  You did a pretty good job, and you certainly took what you did seriously, seeing fatherhood as a duty, not as a privilege.  Would that more people would have that sort of attitude.  It wouldn’t solve all the world’s problems, but I suspect it would make many things better.

*I even had minor chest pains at one point.

by

Apologies, but this is a much darker and more erratic post than yesterday’s

I did not walk to the train this morning, because I’m planning to walk again this evening, on the way back to the house from the train station, and I don’t want to push things too fast and give myself frustrating negative outcomes.  Of course, I’m quite pleased to note that I’ve appeared to suffer no negative physical outcomes from yesterday’s walk at all.  My body appears to be adapting.

My body, that is, by which I mean everything outside the blood-brain barrier.  I guess I had a sort of negative outcome in that I got a slightly giddy feeling after my walk‒I think you could probably recognize that fact in my post yesterday, which was written starting right after the end of the walk.  It was a low-grade version of a runner’s high, which I used to get quite wonderfully when I was running regularly.  How is that a negative outcome, you ask?  Well, it’s quite temporary, unfortunately.  It lasted a few hours, but then, by the time work had been underway for a short time, it faded and disappeared, and I was left feeling thoroughly down and grumpy and gloomy.

I know that if I had eaten or drunk something with sugar or starch or whatever, it probably would have perked me up briefly‒probably more briefly than the exercise high‒and then I would have felt physically much worse afterward, and my energy would be lower, and I wouldn’t have the capacity to do my walks or anything of the sort for a while.  I know this; I’ve done those experiments, with as much rigor as I could bring to bear.  So, all the good feelings I have at ready disposal are short lived and have rotten side effects or withdrawal symptoms.

It’s quite frustrating.  But then again, nearly everything in my day to day life is frustrating.

For instance:  I’m almost due to renew my state ID card, and I tried to access the online system to do so, but it’s different than it was when I did it last (several years ago).  Though technology has advanced a great deal since then, the website for renewing IDs and driver’s licenses in Florida has become shit.  Anyone out there with any inside input with the people responsible for such things, let them know:  that website is shit.  SquareSpace could’ve done a better website for you 12 years ago, and I know because I used them.

Anyway, it also asked various questions to try to confirm one’s identity, but they were bizarrely worded, making it unclear what the correct answer should be, and also asked about things like what previous address was associated with this ID.  I think my previous address was at the work release center‒I certainly haven’t moved since then except to the house where I am now, because if I move (at least within Florida) I’m supposed to register my new address with the state, since, you know, I’m an ex-felon and they need to know where I am in case I’m prone to further felonies and all that bouncing bullshit.  But I wasn’t sure about the correct address, or the right answer to some other questions, and so wasn’t able to log into the system.

I swear, I am often tempted just to buy a bunch of bottles of charcoal lighter fluid and go to the Palm Beach courthouse, sit in front of it like a good Buddhist monk, pour the fluid over myself and set myself on fire.  Maybe I could livestream it with a message and a protest about things like the extortionate nature of the plea bargain system, and the absurdity of a criminal justice system that allows private lawyers of any kind‒which means that the affluent-to-wealthy will always have a better chance of being found not guilty, while the more or less indigent* are given to the hands of competent and hard-working but overworked and underpaid public defenders**.  Then, to save themselves the trouble of actually having to prove a case in court, the prosecutors offer some “plea bargain”, which includes the threat (yes, of course it is a threat) that if it’s not accepted they’ll pursue the greatest possible charges with the greatest possible penalties they can achieve.

And, of course, if the prosecutor loses this game of chicken, and they somehow fail to convince a jury that even one of their thirty or forty dubious-to-confected charges is true, then what?  They lose a case.  Part of the job.  You win some, you lose some.  Next!

But if the poor (in multiple senses) defendant loses****, well, he could face a minimum of fifteen years, by statute.  He would have no chance to see his kids before they were in their twenties!*****  So, though he has never willfully or willingly attempted to traffic in controlled substances in any sense, but was honestly (if naively and possibly “neurodivergently”) trying to help other people suffering from chronic pain, he decides to take the plea bargain, which will include the extensive time he has already served, and fuck what the legal system or society at large thinks of him.

He knows he’s innocent, that he had no mens rea whatsoever.  He knows when he was in that pain management practice that he even asked the PBSO officer who did inspections if there was anything that the practice for which he was working was doing wrong or what have you, because he didn’t want that.  He just wanted to try to help people who were in pain.  The deputy made no mention of anything.

So he took the plea.  He did it because he was threatened…by the prosecutor.  And prosecutors have terrible power, a great deal of it‒they also work with the police, as colleagues‒and in the course of their business, they destroy countless lives, with little to no risk to themselves.  The only saving grace for them is that, for the most part, I think most of them really do mean well and want to do good.

But meaning well‒believing you are right‒can still be dangerous, often far more dangerous than psychopathic malevolence and selfishness (My own failures while meaning well, as described here, at least mainly blew up in my own face and didn’t do too much collateral damage).

Psychopaths tend to try not to cause themselves too much harm or pain.  It’s people who are moral and tend to moralize, who believe that they are right, who are willing to sacrifice the lives and comfort of others for some imagined “greater good”.  Assholes.  Idiots.  Pathetic, delusional, driverless semi-trucks full of explosives and rotting garbage is what they are.

Anyway, that’s enough for today.  I’m sorry it’s swerved so far from yesterday‒but yesterday’s post doesn’t seem to have been too popular, anyway.  No one much likes to read about relatively pleasant times or thoughts (me included); the dark stuff is much more gripping, and that’s true for good, sound, biological reasons.

So, just to keep my options open, I am ordering and buying a decent supply of charcoal lighter fluid.  It wouldn’t take very much to get the job done.

Have a good day.  Please, if you can’t do anything else for me, please, at least have a good day.  Somebody should have one.  Why not you?

*Which I was, certainly after waiting in jail 8 months before being bailed out.  Remember, I had been working locum tenens after “temporary disability” and chronic pain and failing to be able to keep up with a few other positions, due to my back injury/surgery and pretty bad depression, even for me.  I’d been off work for more than a year and a half, maybe longer, before restarting, and I ended up giving away a fair amount of whatever I brought in.  I was never great at managing my life and finances and stuff like that.  This may be related to my possible ASD, I don’t know.  I’ve never been very good at caring for myself, though I’m okay at doing it for other people.

**Prosecutor’s offices also tend to have much higher budgets than public defender’s offices, a fact which certainly does seem to fly in the face of the supposed “presumption of innocence” hypocritically spouted by Americans who have never had the experience of a misfiring justice system***.  Imbeciles.

***The fact that private defense attorneys are allowed in the criminal justice system, by the way, contributes to  the fact that there are far more black men in prison than is predictable by population rates.  It is well known that the mean and median wealth (not to be confused with income) of black people in America is much lower than that of white people, for clear and obvious historical reasons.  Well, wealth is what you dip into if you need to hire a top-notch defense attorney‒very few people have the income to afford such things.  So, the criminal justice system, by allowing private defense attorneys, stacks the deck even further against the economically impaired, which disproportionately includes all minorities, and particularly black people on average, even if there is no active racism in any of the people or in the system itself.

****Because when a prosecutor throws all sorts of counts of things at the defendant, charging any prescription someone writes, for instance, as a count of “trafficking”, then jurors are going to be inclined to think that, if there’s so much smoke, there must be at least a little fire, no matter how much it flies in the face of the character the defendant has shown his entire life (jurors don’t know about the stage-effect smoke machines working behind the scenes).  And when the defendant has a bit of a wooden face and a monotone voice and isn’t good at expressing his emotions or even recognizing them in real time, but tends to be analytic and logical and rather esoteric, he’s unlikely to elicit sympathy from jurors.  So I was told even by my own attorney and her supervisor, among other things.

*****The idiotic irony here is that, despite the plea bargain, he still hasn’t seen his children so far since then, anyway‒by their wish and request.  So, he (I) might as well have just gone to trial, even if it might have meant spending fifteen or more years in prison.  What’s the difference?  Prison was not significantly worse than my current life.  I might even have written more books and stories there.  Maybe they wouldn’t ever be published, but that wouldn’t do much to change the number of people who have read them.  It would be no loss to the world, certainly.

by

“Walk this way…THIS way.”

Well, for the first time in a few weeks, I walked to the train station today.  The weather is perhaps ever so slightly better for such things because it’s been raining a lot and it’s slightly cooler.  Maybe.

I’m sure that all the people up north are unimpressed by my grousing, thinking such sardonic things as, “Oh, poor baby, is it too hot for you in the first week of October?”  But I’ve said before, as someone who grew up in Michigan, I like the cooling off that happens in Autumn.  One can always put on a jacket and so on, or wear a sweater (or both) when it gets cool out.  Down here, even if it were okay to go around with no clothes, there are times this would not keep you cool enough to avoid potential overheating and dehydration.

Also, during the day, you could be prone to some truly unfortunate sunburns.

Anyway, I had a pretty decent walk this morning.  I must have been going at a good pace in my new boots, because I arrived in plenty of time for a train twenty minutes earlier than the one I had intended to take.  I’m writing this on that earlier train, since I only had a few minutes to wait before the train I usually just miss arrives.

While I walked, I listened to the Audible version of Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari.  But here’s a surprise:  I was listening to the Spanish version!

I used to speak Spanish pretty well, after taking a couple of years of it in college, including a literature course, and when I was in residency, I had a fair few times to use it, since the Bronx has a large Spanish-speaking population (like most of the Western Hemisphere).  However, it has now been ages since I’ve used it regularly, and I find that when people speak to me in Spanish, I have a hard time understanding much of it.  That seems like such a shame, especially since, by the time of my last college course, I was thinking partly in Spanish.

So, I decided to get that book in Spanish (audio), and listen to it to try to reinvigorate that part of my brain.  I’ve read the book in English, so that makes it a bit easier.  I can’t say that I was honestly following everything that was being said (or read) but I caught quite a few words and sentences and concepts, and I think that will get easier as I go along.

I also recently got an audio book of a Japanese light novel in Japanese (I had to go looking for it on Amazon), and even recorded the audio‒or rather, imported the audio‒for several anime I have watched many times, figuring to do something similar with Japanese, of which I have only a smattering.  But it seems better to focus on Spanish first.  Spanish is all but ubiquitous where I currently live.

But I also want to go for the Nihongo on some of my walks.  I think that learning and using foreign languages helps one understand one’s own native tongue better, and also to recognize the nature and importance of grammar and careful communication.  I’ve said before that language is crystallized thought, and having more ways to crystallize it may at least give one different and more sophisticated ways to think.  Seeing the differences (and commonalities) of language is very interesting, also.

All European languages (as far as I know) have lots of evolutionary history in common.  Some, of course, are more directly related than others; Spanish and Italian are obviously close cousins, while English and Russian are less so.  But when one gets to the “Far East” things are much more divergent from the West (and vice versa), and though there are words imported from Europe (e.g., the Japanese for “bread” is “pan”, as the Portuguese introduced bread to Japan), the roots of the languages appear to be almost completely separate.  This makes it all the more interesting when one finds grammatical structures in common, especially when they do the same thing, but in different ways.  It makes one think Chomsky really was onto something with his notion of a universal, inherent human grammar.

I learn by hearing pretty well, almost as well as I do by reading.  In fact, when I read, I always subvocalize‒i.e., I say the words in my head.  It makes my reading slower, but I read more deeply than most people I know, and I tend to remember what I read better than many.

So, I’ll do some Spanish for now, but maybe I’ll intersperse it with Japanese as well.  It should be interesting, at least.  We’ll see how long this intention lasts.

Before I close, I figured I’d share with you a bit of what might be interesting trivia regarding my walk.  Before starting off, rather than using an “energy drink” replete with high fructose corn syrup or other carbohydrates (which I’m trying to minimize overall and even completely avoid when I can), I drank a few swigs of olive oil!

Ha ha!  That surprises you, I’ll bet.  But it makes sense.  At aerobic exertion levels, the muscles (like most of the rest of the body) “prefer” to run on fatty acids, not glucose, at least when insulin levels are normal.  And, of course, olive oil is all fat, which is a much more efficient form of energy than carbs.  One can’t drink much olive oil in a swig or two (and I did not try) but at least it doesn’t lead to any rebound drop in blood sugar and consequent fatigue.

I don’t know if I will continue to do that, or even if it had any effect on the speed of my walking (there were too many variables to make any credible determination of specific causation), but it certainly doesn’t seem to have impaired my abilities.

That’s enough for now.  I hope you all have a good day, and a good week, and what the heck, have a good month.  It’s one of the best ones of the year.

walk this way

by

“Who knows? Not me.”

I didn’t walk the full five miles from the train to the house yesterday afternoon‒I walked about three or three and a half‒because I didn’t want to give myself any blisters or abrasions from walking too far for the first time in a new pair of boots.  But I seem to have stopped well in time for that, since there are no blisters or even sore spots on my feet now, and my ankles and right Achilles tendon appear to be in good nick.  Also, and most importantly, though I had a bit of tension in my right side along my back upon returning to the house, that went away nicely with a bit of stretching and replenishment, so that’s pretty good.

Anyway, lesson learned:  it matters if the boots you wear are even a little bit oversized if you’re going to be walking any very long distances in them.  It looks like these new, half-downsized ones will work well.

It’s been sloppy and wet here in south Florida these last several days, but there does seem to be a slight increase in morning breeziness.  And, of course, since Saturday, the time of darkness has been slightly greater than the time of daylight, and its dominance is increasing at the most rapid pace at which that will happen.  This is because, for a sinusoidal curve, the fastest rate of change is when it crosses the x-axis (at the equinoxes in this case), and the slowest rates of change are at the peak and at the nadir (the solstices in this case).  So, for a little while now, the nighttime will be growing rapidly before it settles out, steadily and gradually, as we barrel toward the end of the year.

After mentioning the fact that I don’t play the guitar in the morning anymore, yesterday I decided to fire up the axe for a bit.  Remarkably, it was still almost perfectly in tune!  Probably it helps that the office is kept pretty much at a constant temperature.  Also, I had left the capo on the fourth fret the last time I played.  That was for playing the chords and stuff from the Nirvana version of The Man Who Sold the World.  I didn’t start with that yesterday, instead playing through a few iterations of Nothing Compares 2 U.  It’s a lovely song.  I like the Chris Cornell version best.  Of course, now Prince (the songwriter and original performer) and Chris Cornell and Sinead O’Conner (who had a big hit with her cover of it) are all dead.

Then I did play some of The Man Who Sold the World, and then Ashes to Ashes, both Bowie tunes, at least originally.  And, of course, Bowie and Kobain are also both dead, though they died under very different circumstances.  Then I got my guitar book out and played a little Just the Way You Are, and Sorry Seems To Be the Hardest Word, and Here, There, and Everywhere, by Billy Joel, Elton John, and Paul McCartney‒all of whom are still alive!  That’s just weird, isn’t it?  Imagine that!

Of course, the latter song is credited to Lennon and McCartney, but that was a formality according to their agreement for all Beatles songs they wrote.  It was a McCartney song, and it was apparently the only song of his for which Lennon directly complimented him.

Considering the quality of Sir Paul’s work overall, that’s a hell of a statement, in more than one way.  First off, it must have really impressed John (rightly so) for him to make a point of telling Paul that it was a good song.  But it seems harsh that John never complimented any others, at least to Paul’s face.

Then again, he was British, and emotional expressiveness (other than through song and theater and literature) is a major national deficit by most accounts.  Maybe that’s why they do so much good music and poetry and drama and comedy and the like.  I often get the feeling that part of the reason Thom Yorke’s singing is so powerful and conveys and evokes such emotion in the listener is that this is Thom’s only real way of expressing himself deeply.  And, of course, he does seem almost possessed when he’s performing.

As a YouTube reactor (I cannot recall which one, for which I apologize) said of his singing, “He’s feelin’ it when he’s singing…and he makes you feel it, too!”

Now, John Lennon did compliment Paul to other people‒during interviews, for instance.  Though even then, he was far from effusive.  That was just his way, I think.  He had a very troubled childhood, and emotional expression was probably difficult for him, even for a Brit.

Then again, he wrote some incredibly expressive songs, from If I Fell to In My Life to Julia to Across the Universe, all the way up to Starting Over and Woman, with scads of others thrown in for good measure.  If being closed off and repressed helped lead to the creation of those truly great works of art, the world at least can hardly feel too horrible about it.  Though it would be nice if a person could be well-adjusted and have the ability to express and receive affection easily and still produce great art (and ideally, of course, not be murdered by a slimy little worm of a creature who claimed to be a fan).

Alas, though it seems possible in principle, it doesn’t seem to happen often, if at all, in practice*.  Shakespeare supposedly wrote Hamlet, and some of his other great tragedies, partly in response to the death of his son, Hamnet.  And of course, I, his much later and far inferior admirer, only really started to write and publish stories that have always been in my head once my life, my family, and my career had been wrecked, and I was in prison.

We can be thankful, if saddened, for the great art that was born of Shakespeare’s sorrow, and of Lennon’s.  In my case, on the other hand, it was almost certainly not worth it, particularly for me.  But I can’t change any of that stuff, either.

Life’s like that, I suppose‒to quite the end of one of my own short stories, possibly the darkest one I’ve ever written…which, weirdly enough, first came out of me years ago, while I was happily passing the time keeping my then-friend and soon-to-be fiancée company while she did some overnight work for a summer job.  I don’t know where it came from, except that I did often like to play solitaire (with real cards).

Anyway, that’s enough for now.  Have a good Wednesday.

*As Einstein is reputed to have said, “In principle, principle and practice should be the same, but in practice, they often are not”, or something like that.  He was a clever fellow.

by

Please imagine a clever title here

Well, after once again awakening hours before I could even have caught any trains, today I arrived at the station just as the first northbound one of the morning was arriving.  This time, to avoid temptation, I didn’t cross over, but stayed on the near side and took the elevator to the bridge.  I also hoped that I would sweat less by walking a slightly shorter distance (with a stop in the middle).  I think I am sweating a bit less, but it’s still annoying and relatively ridiculous.  I mean, it’s not even five in the morning now, and the weather app claims that it’s only about 75 degrees out!  Why am I sweating so much?

It would be nice if this were a sign of some underlying terminal disease*, but I don’t really have that kind of luck‒whether you want to consider it good or bad or whatever.

I did some pretty good walking yesterday evening, while talking to my sister on the phone.  I can tell it’s been several days at least since I’ve done long walking, because I developed a slight broken blister overlying my right Achilles tendon, where the rear of the shoe rubs it.  They aren’t brand new shoes‒I’ve walked good distances in them before‒so I know it’s just that my skin has gotten more sensitive, and probably, my walking posture has gotten a bit more slack.  Anyway, the blister is disinfected and taped up now.

You may ask:  if I claim to consider the possibility of a terminal illness a good thing, why would I bother to treat a blister on my “heel” and protect against infection?  It’s a good question; I wish I had thought of it, myself.  Well, the answer is, I want to be able to walk potentially quite long distances, without blisters and the like stopping me.  I wouldn’t greatly mind collapsing due to heat exhaustion and dehydration/volume depletion and electrolyte imbalances and kidney failure, but simply being unable to walk because of blisters and similar injuries‒that would be galling.

We’ll see what happens, I guess.  I already mentioned yesterday that I have to push my potential plans back about two weeks, anyway, out of deference to my coworker’s family vacation.  I don’t know why I trouble myself, really.  I guess I just really dislike causing more inconvenience to other people‒ones I know, at least‒than I must.

Still, eventually, one must reach a breaking point.  I think that, mentally, I’ve already reached that point, to be honest.  I no longer truly hope for, let alone expect, anything or anyone to “save” me, if you will.  I don’t expect to “recover”, or to rebuild any semblance of a life or career.

I don’t really do anything for enjoyment or fulfillment.  Even this blog is mainly just a habit.  I suppose there is some trace or modicum of the notion that it might end up being useful to me in some way, or might even garner help from some unexpected quarter, but that’s sort of akin to imagining one might win a big Powerball jackpot.  It’s possible, but one shouldn’t make any serious plans about it actually happening.

It is rather nice to be throwing away some things that I have kept for a while just out of inertia or habit or a tendency to be a packrat.  Not that I have a great many possessions; I certainly don’t.  Everything I own fits in a single bedroom with attached shower and “walk-in” closet, plus a few things at the office.  I’ve thrown out or given away some of those latter things already, and packed others away.  I hope to pare it all down further still.

I started listening to an Audible version of The War of the Worlds yesterday.  Of course, it’s a heck of a story, the first ever alien invasion story, and still one of the best.  I must say, though‒and I feel slightly bad about having to say it‒that the narrator is a bit disappointing.  I don’t mean the character who tells the story, I mean the guy who read the book for the recording.  This is a dramatic and scary tale, but he’s done only a bit more than reading it straight.  Even the iconic opening paragraphs came out rather lackluster.

I wonder how people find my reading of my stories, like The Chasm and the Collision and my short stories.  They’re up on YouTube, and they’ve been uploaded here as well.  Maybe I’ll embed one or two below, in this post, and anyone who wishes can listen.  I would very much welcome feedback on both the stories and my reading of them.  I tried to do the reading well, but I don’t know whether the effort produced the desired results or not.

I guess it doesn’t really matter much.  “The world will little** note, nor long remember…” yadda yadda yadda.

I’ve always thought those were truly ironic words that Lincoln wrote/said there:  that the world would not long remember what he was saying at the time, but that they cannot forget what the soldiers had done there at Gettysburg.  Meanwhile, there are many of us who can recite part or all of the Gettysburg Address***, but I don’t know how much high school history classes even teach the American Civil War nowadays, let alone any of the specifics of that battle.

Of course, if you believe some YouTube videos, many young Americans don’t even know what continent the US is on, or how many states there are, or from which nation the US declared its independence and when.  Goodness knows most Americans can’t even recognize the opening of the Declaration of Independence, and despite so many claiming to revere the US Constitution, I doubt many of them have read through the whole thing, even once.

It’s really not very long.

I doubt that many of them have even read the Bill of Rights, or would even have a rough idea of what they are (with the possible exception of the 2nd Amendment, which is concise at least, although it’s apparently difficult to interpret unambiguously).

Oh, well.  Individual, actual knowledge of any particular subject is often inversely proportional to the strength of one’s opinions/convictions on the matter.  I guess that’s nothing new, but it continues to sting nevertheless‒rather like a new, recurrent blister in a bodily location one thought had become inured to abrasive forces.

With that, here are some audio recordings of me reading some parts of some of my stories.  The first is my story Hole for a Heart, and the second is Chapter 1 of CatC  If you listen, I hope you enjoy them.

standing on ledge

*Apart from being alive in and of itself, which appears to be uniformly fatal as far as we can tell.

**Rather ironically, Google is suggesting I change “will little note” to “will have little note”, offering a (flawed) correction to what is widely considered one of the most grammatically perfect speeches in American history.  Heavy sigh.

***1863 Lincoln Park Lane, Gettysburg, PA  24601.

by

Despite some personal and global grumbles, today is a day worth celebrating

Well, it’s another morning, as usually happens at this time of day, and I’m sitting at the train station.

I did not walk to the station this morning.  I get too washed out if I do that too often in a row while it’s this hot and muggy.  If it were a bit cooler, I could walk back and forth, to and from the train station, and as long as I gave my ankle(s) and Achilles tendon a rest when needed, I think I wouldn’t bat an eye*.  But, as is generally the case at this time of year, the weather in south Florida is disgusting.

Don’t get me wrong; in winter, and especially in late fall and early spring, it’s quite pleasant here.  But at this time of year, it’s sticky and rather gross.

Enough of all that.  I’m here at the train station now, and I’m writing this on my miniature laptop computer.  I needed to give the base of my thumbs a rest—speaking of resting sore parts of one’s body—because they have really been acting up lately.

It also just feels so much more natural to write this on the computer.  This computer—most any such computer, really—feels like an extension of me when I’m using it, much more so than my phone ever feels.  I’m not a huge fan of the smartphones, though I would never deny that they are tremendously useful in many ways, and I do make such use of them.

But I don’t find them handy for talking on the phone; I cannot hear properly using the inbuilt speaker, unless it’s absolutely quiet around me, and even then I have to focus.  So I use earphones, which take care of that, but regular office phones are still easier.  Anyway, the only person I talk to on the phone is my sister, so I guess that’s only an issue in that circumstance.

I do find texting reasonably convenient, but of course, when my thumb bases are suffering from arthralgia**, texting is uncomfortable.  It’s also terribly irritating when one is part of a texting group and there are texts going back and forth and back and forth, so there are text alerts every few seconds, preventing one from doing anything that one is trying to do, because one can’t just ignore the texts—they might be important.

Usually they aren’t.  They’re often just the cyber equivalent of moronic small talk.  It’s maddening.

I do like being able to listen to podcasts and audiobooks on my phone—using the aforementioned headphones—so I can hardly complain about that.  And few people have used a phone for reading Kindle books more than I have.  I also play Sudoku or Euchre when I need to kill a bit of time.

Maybe I’m actually a big fan of the smartphone.  Or perhaps I’ve merely been ensnared, put under a spell, forced to become dependent upon a nefarious technology.  It is a tad annoying that there are more things I can readily do on the phone than on the laptop, when the latter really ought to be more versatile and useful.

The computer certainly has, for me, a much better user interface.  But it doesn’t have the ability to connect to any “phone” networks in and of itself, and using public Wi-Fi makes me slightly nervous, at least in principle.  Of course, I can set up my phone as a mobile hotspot to which the computer can link.  I have done that before, but it uses up a fair amount of phone data and—appropriately—makes the phone get literally quite hot.  After all, processing information generates quite a lot of high-entropy waste heat.

This is, of course, part of the reason why crypto-currency mining is more harmful for the environment than automobile exhaust (if I understand correctly).  “The cloud” is far from carbon-neutral, also.  All those servers running the internet and web, and all those GPUs running all the time to do the “mining” and so on use tremendous amounts of energy, and that has to be generated somehow.

And as far as alternatives to burning stuff:  people are illogically afraid of nuclear power***, and solar is not yet at full efficiency, though there are no big and obvious reasons that it cannot become so in reasonable time.  Mind you, solar power is just a form of fusion power—natural fusion, but fusion nonetheless—when you get right down to it.  But we obviously can only harness the tiniest fragment of the fusion power from the sun.

Still, there’s so much power coming from the sun that even getting a tiny amount is pretty good.

I don’t know why I’m writing about these particular random things at the moment.  I have to write about something though****.  So I just write whatever comes to mind, and since it’s my mind, it’s often rather peculiar.

It is an important, good day globally today, though I won’t get into the specifics.  I’ll just say that one of the two most positive events in the history of the universe happened on this date, twenty-two years ago.  So, if anyone out there has the opportunity to celebrate, you should certainly do so, in whatever way gives you greatest and most durable joy (without causing physical harm to others).  You have ample reason, even if you don’t know what it is.  It’s that good.

You can also celebrate the fact that I am now drawing this blog post to a close, since it’s getting a bit long by now, counting the footnotes.  Please, really, do have a very good day if you can manage it.  Thank you.

celebration scaled

*And I certainly wouldn’t eye a bat.

**Which literally just means “joint pain”.

***Not realizing, perhaps, that probably more people die every year from simple air-pollution-related causes due to traditional power generation than have died from nuclear events since nuclear power has existed.  I’m only guessing, but I do guess, that’s probably even counting the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  But the deaths due to air pollution are covert deaths.  They happen in the background, they exist as an uptick in baseline mortality across populations, and each individual untimely death is all but unnoticeable, so it’s hard to recognize that large-scale tragedies are caused—or worsened—by pollution.  People aren’t good at statistics and probability, and they aren’t trained to become better, by and large.

****I really do.  It’s a compulsion.  Not to write on a given morning before work would be extremely stressful for me.  Imagine being forced to watch one of your loved ones (who perhaps has a bit of dyspraxia) trying for the very first time to snow-board, and doing so on a high mountain course with canyons and cliffs and numerous trees and very steep, treacherous paths, after having gotten quite drunk the night before.  It’s that kind of tension.  Or so I imagine.  I’m probably exaggerating.  But it isn’t good, that for certain.  Even thinking about not doing it makes me feel as if I’m in the presence of hostile others.

by

Would there be fewer late trains if we were less willing to accept sloppy language?

I did not walk back to the house from the train yesterday‒it was late and I felt quite low on energy and enthusiasm‒but I did walk to the train station this morning.  It’s muggy and hot still, but it’s cooler than it is when the sun is shining (especially if you just wear black clothes like I do, since, like Wednesday Addams, I’ve developed an allergy to colors).

The biggest drawback to walking in the morning is that, down where I currently live, at this time of year, at this time of day, the air is abysmally still and lifeless.  Now, at the train station, it seems there is at least some breeze, which I suspect is at least partly due to traffic on I-95, just behind me, not more than twenty or so meters away.

Of course, the station is also quite a bit closer to the ocean than is the house in which I currently dwell.  This can make floods more likely here, as I have witnessed first-hand, but the temperature differentials above the ocean and above the land seems to generate a more or less constant wind at or near the beach.

I’ve long suspected that such a breeze should be coming into shore during the day‒because land is heated more rapidly by the sun than the sea is, and the air above it heats and rises, and cooler air from the ocean flows in to replace it‒and then heading out to sea at night, because the water temperature doesn’t change as readily it stays warmer at night and so the process would reverse.  I am by no means sure that this describes the actual dynamics of the situation, and I suspect matters are more complicated than this, but this is how I hypothesize about it.

Aaaaaand, guess what.  They’ve just announced that the train for which I am waiting is delayed 15 to 20 minutes.  They then say “stand by for more information”, but no more information is ever shared over the speakers.

It’s infuriating just how often the trains are delayed.  If I had an employee who came in late this frequently, I would have to consider firing that person.  It’s unprofessional and disruptive; people make plans based on the expected, published schedules.  And while, of course, there are occasional, unforeseen things that happen anywhere and everywhere, the frequency at which it happens on the Tri-Rail ought to be embarrassing to those who work in the system.

I’ll give it some time, but I really hate riding trains that are late, because they’re usually more crowded than they would be if they were on time.  It’s rather infuriating that I deliberately dragged my feet to miss the previous train‒which was on time‒by just a minute or so, so that I would have time to cool down a bit before the next one arrived.

The next next train, which is almost on time, will be expected to arrive only 8 minutes after the train for which I was waiting.  I think I may sit out the first train and wait for the second one, which should be less crowded.  Right now it feels as though there are a few hundred people waiting for the next train.  I already wish I could just send them away, and this is while they’re just spread out on the platform.

I think I will wait.  The difference in arrival time will be negligible.

It will be a somewhat busy office day today, because I’m going to be doing payroll early, like I did last week.  But that’s not something for which I need to be in the office particularly early; it’s dependent upon two different weekly reports that will arrive today, during the day, so I can’t do it too early.

Yeah, the train platform is packed.  The train is coming now, but I’m not getting on it.  My days are stressful enough without having to squeeze into an over-crowded train car.  It’s not that I’m not capable of tolerating it; I’ve been through worse things, of course.  But it’s just so unpleasant, and too many things in my life are unpleasant, and I don’t have more than a brace or so of pleasant things with which to counteract them, so they wear me out much more than they might have in the past.

I’m not sure I properly used the term “brace” there‒I know it can mean two things, as in “a brace of coneys”, but I’m not sure it really applies to the concept to which I was applying it.

I guess I should cut myself a little slack, considering that even professional news organizations and publications seem to have‒for instance‒lost the conceptual difference between “fewer” and “less”.  Sloppiness of language may seem trivial, and of course, language does evolve, but these irritations are not changes due to legitimate adaptations and pressures that produce a more effective tool of communication.  This is a case in which language, which I see as a kind of crystallized thought, is mushy because the thoughts involved in using it are mushy, as is much of the “information” being conveyed.

Sloppiness of language is a symptom of sloppy thought, and I think it also engenders further sloppiness of thought.  The process feeds upon itself, and people understand each other, and the world, less and less and less over time, until finally, darkness and decay and the Red Death hold absolute dominion and sway over all (to paraphrase Poe).

Okay, well, I am now on the next train, which was indeed only about 8 minutes later than the previous, overcrowded one.  I’ll get about another mile of walking in between the station and the office, so by the time I get there, I will already have walked nearly twice as far already today as I walked the entire day yesterday (according to my pedometer).  The train car is over-air-conditioned, particularly since I’m still a bit sweaty despite a second shirt and my cool-down at the station.  Ah, well, it’s not a terribly big deal.  I’ve had worse, as the Black Knight said after getting his arm chopped off by King Arthur.

I guess I’ll call this good for today.  I hope you have a nice day, and especially that you have a nice day tomorrow.

by

Now let it work. Mischief, thou art afoot. Take thou what blog thou wilt.

Hello and good morning.

It’s Thursday, and I walked to the train station this morning, but I did not walk back to the house from the train station last night.  It had just gotten so late, and I was tired, and I wanted to get back to the house early enough that I could relax and at least try to get to bed at a reasonable hour, even if I never do sleep through the night.  But I committed to walking this morning, and I fulfilled that commitment.  Bully for me!

I must be getting in better shape, or maybe I just left earlier or summat, because even though I stopped to get a beverage* and tried to take my time after that, I still arrived in time to catch the train that leaves twenty minutes earlier than the one I usually get when I walk.

My feet and knees and ankles are doing tolerably well, so the shoes I did choose seem unlikely to lose when it comes to my long-distance walking.  I also find‒curiously enough‒that wearing spandex knee braces helps keep my ankles, especially my right ankle, from acting up.  It seems that something in the way I move (ha ha) when my knee stability is not optimal is adding torsional, irregular forces to my right ankle and Achilles tendon.

It’s often quite surprising just how non-straightforward the source of damage or pain is in the body compared to where one feels the discomfort.  Spandex helps with some of this because it adds one’s sense of surface touch to one’s ongoing awareness of the position of one’s joints from within**.  The sense of surface touch is much more precise than many of our other senses, which makes sense***, since it has much more of a role to play in guiding our targeted moment to moment actions regarding injury, obstacles, insects that might bite, and so on.  It may also be that spandex helps decrease excess fluid accumulation in a joint by providing counter-pressure in a fairly uniform way, and this can certainly be expected to improve a joint’s stability.

I’m sure that’s all quite boring.  Apologies.  I don’t mean to be tedious; it’s just a talent I have.

Switching topics:  I like listening to good podcasts (or audiobooks) while I walk, and this morning I listened to the AMA (ask me anything) podcast for the month on Sean Carroll’s Mindscape.  Well…I listened to part of it.  His AMAs are usually three or four hours long, because he tries to get through as many questions as he can, and he tries to answer them as carefully as he can.  It makes for some very interesting listening, because he is a theoretical physicist who also works in philosophy.  Formerly at CalTech, he is now at Johns Hopkins and also works with the Santa Fe Institute and is just in general broadly interested and interesting and quite thoughtful.

I still like Sam Harris’s podcast (and his guests) a little bit better, but that’s not particularly important.  I like them both, and I learn a lot from them and their interlocutors.  I have noted that I like long podcasts but prefer short videos, which is interesting and seems on its face odd to me.  Perhaps it’s simply that one can listen to a podcast while doing any of a number of other things, but not so with videos.

Anyway, it’s nice to be able to hear about and potentially learn about interesting things while walking.  It’s also occasionally fun, in a rather silly way, when someone asks a reasonably complicated question to which I know the answer and then to hear Sean Carroll say the same thing I would have said (this is far from common, but it does happen).  Of course, people rarely ask him questions about medicine or biology, because he is not a specialist in those areas.  If they did, I would probably usually be able to give better answers than he, but that would hardly be particularly impressive.

It’s also hardly important.  I’d rather be listening to someone talking about things I know less about than they, because that’s how one learns.  I sometimes try to do brief “podcasts” or “audio blogs” of my own, but I don’t get the impression anyone ever really listens to any of them.  I don’t know.  Maybe they do.

Oh, I wanted to address the very nice comment left by a reader yesterday, in which‒among other things‒he said that he liked the idea of the manga that I had mentioned.  I just want to make clear, although HELIOS started out as a comic book idea, and then became a manga idea later (at around the same time I thought of mangas for Mark Red and for The Dark Fairy and the Desperado) I don’t see myself ever actually doing a manga now.

I think that the work involved in making a manga‒from the initial script to the storyboarding to the penciling to the inking to the screen tone‒would all be just too much and it would be difficult to work into my schedule.  Perhaps if someone were paying me to do it full time, I might try.  But I don’t think that’s very likely.

I really only have the notion of perhaps writing a “light novel” of HELIOS, rather akin to the light novels that are popular in Japan which are often turned into manga and or anime.  Mark Red and DFandD and HELIOS are probably stories that lend themselves more to manga/anime style settings, but I am much more of a prose fiction writer, even though I do draw sometimes.

Anyway, I think that’s probably enough for today.  I intend to keep doing my walking and hopefully that’ll help me be healthier overall.  I’m also trying very hard to completely eliminate sugar and most starches or refined carbohydrates from my diet; that certainly helps me feel physically better.  We’ll see how everything goes.

Maybe, if I do well and my mood starts to improve consistently, I will start to write fiction again, on HELIOS or on DFandD or on Outlaws Mind or on Changeling in a Shadow World or even on Neko/Neneko****.  Who knows?

I hope you have a good day.

TTFN

*The water fountains at the Hollywood Tri-Rail station have been “temporarily out of service” for, I don’t know, it must be most of a year.  I would very much like to be able to get a drink of water when I get to the station after walking 5 miles, but I think the people who run the place are happy to try to coerce people into buying something from the ridiculously overpriced vending machines at the station.  I would not seriously consider doing that unless my life depended on it, and I might not do it then.  I’d even rather pay twice as much somewhere else than buy something to drink at the station when they have water fountains but just haven’t fixed them.

**This is called proprioception, as most of you probably know.  It’s not a very precise or reliable sense, being quite coarse grained, and it also seems to deteriorate with age and with damage to joints.

***Sorry, that wasn’t meant to be any form of pun, but it is the best way I can find to put it right now, so I won’t change it.

****The story of a cat (named Neko, the Japanese word for cat) who is devoted to her human, a lonely but upbeat and gainfully employed young man (who is fond of anime and manga and light novels, among other things).  When the man buys an odd, exotic fish, the cat intends to eat it, being a bit jealous and also just having the instinctive desire to do so.  But then, the fish reveals to the cat that it is magical (evidenced well by the fact that it can talk and that the cat can understand it), and if the cat spares its life, it will grant her a wish.  She agrees, and chooses to be able to become a human woman (at will) to be a potential companion for her human.  Surprised when she first encounters him, he asks her name, and she stammers, Ne…Neko.  He takes this as her having the Japanese name Neneko, and she accepts that.  Thus, the title.

Neko/Neneko

[The above is a concept drawing of a potential scene from Neko/Neneko]