Exercise

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Bouncing tangents on walking, boots, pain, technology, science, politics, and probably other random stuff

Well, here I am again, writing this blog post at the train station after having walked here this morning.  I had intended to do this wearing a new pair of shoes of the same make and model (so to speak) as the pair I wore yesterday, but that pair, which was supposed to have been delivered yesterday evening, is instead delayed until this morning, after 8 am, which doesn’t do me any good whatsoever.  Anyway, it forced me to do an experiment walking in my boots this morning, which is what I did.

I had switched from my boots because I feared that they might have been responsible for last week’s rather extreme flare-up of my pain.  However, as I changed from them, I also changed chairs in my office.  That’s not a good way to do science, obviously:  varying two parameters at the same time.  It makes it hard to tell which one‒if either‒is having the dominant effect, if indeed there is one.  However, when dealing with severe exacerbations of already-maddening chronic pain, one can easily become impatient.

I’m not excusing it, but I am explaining it.

Anyway, I have come to the suspicion that, just maybe, it wasn’t the footwear at all but mainly the chair that was making things worse.  And now I’ve been forced into doing a better experiment.  If, after today, my pain gets significantly worse, that increases the credence that the boots are the problem.  However, if my pain level is stable‒and certainly yesterday’s walking didn’t seem to exacerbate it‒then maybe the boots aren’t causing any trouble.

I will say one thing about how quickly I’ve gotten into a state of readiness:  though I wore boots, which are heavier than the shoes I wore yesterday, I made slightly better time on my walk today.

Oh, I forgot to note that today is the first day of August‒named for Caesar Augustus (Née Octavian) who followed Julius Caesar (after whom July was named).  Welcome.  Summer is almost half over, at least by dates.  There’s nothing particularly interesting about the start of this month, other than rent and other bills being due, and the prospect of facing another long, dreary month with nothing interesting happening, other than bad things out in the world, which always seem to happen, anyway.

Of course, the US is more and more comically and tragically stupid than it used to be, but that’s been happening for a long time.  I remember when they canceled the Superconducting Supercollider in the late nineties, and I thought to myself, “That’s it, the United States’ days of being an intellectual and scientific and progress-oriented world leader are coming to an end.”

It wasn’t just my physics bias that led me to that conclusion, though that had its impact.  It was mainly the idea that, before, a large part of the ethos of the country seemed focused on constant improvement and leadership, in the sciences, in the arts, in technology, and in prosperity in general, including the traditional “American dream”.  But it turns out‒or so it seems‒that all of that seemingly intrinsic love of education and innovation and hard work was simply born of the post WWII era Cold War competition with the USSR.  We didn’t love these things for their own sake, not in general, not on average.  We just wanted to outcompete the “Godless Communists”.

Indeed, after the Soviet Union fell, the religious right poisoned the Republican Party more and more‒or so it seemed to me‒and turned their hostility inward on their own nation.  And some of the people on the left, without having to worry about being compared to the US’ enemies, became more leftish and pseudo-religious in their own Orwellian ideas.

Of course, most people were, and probably still are, much more centrist/moderate than you would guess, based on people in the news.  But now that we have no opponent against whom to unite, ideologically and physically, we can turn on ourselves more and more, and the most extreme voices aren’t curtailed out of the necessity of unity against a serious enemy.

China doesn’t present the same kind of opposition as the Soviets did, at least in our collective mind, probably because they’re far away and also they are our trading partners, and aren’t of European descent and are culturally different enough to avoid a metaphorical uncanny valley problem.  Also, they’ve not really openly declared any ideologically motivated intention to “take over the world” or to “bury the West”, at least not as far as I’ve heard.

That’s good, as far as it goes, of course.  The Cold War was dreadful;  I honestly grew up thinking that civilization was going to be destroyed by nuclear war at any moment.  When I was a teenager, my friends and I honestly and seriously thought about what we might do to survive after WWIII.  It wasn’t a joke.  And in my late teens, as part of a youth orchestra, I traveled to Lübeck, on the East/West German border, and got to see the fence line, the barbed wire, the mined “no man’s land” area and the machine-gun towers on the Eastern side‒not for keeping people out, but for preventing people from leaving.

That was pretty scary.

I don’t have high hopes for the future of the USA, but I don’t have high hopes for the rest of the world, either.  Our greater technology and abilities haven’t left the average person more respectful of science, because they don’t even understand the basics of the science that dominates almost every aspect of their lives.  Clarke’s Third Law states that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, but I wouldn’t have thought it would apply to the technology we have today.  Yet many people seem as incurious about real science‒and mathematics, and philosophy, and other fields of intellect‒as they would be about a world run by wizards.

There are flat-Earthers out there, for crying out loud, even though the refutations of that hypothesis are trivially easy to recognize, and many have been known for thousands of years!  There are people who have been so protected from deadly diseases by successful programs of vaccination (and sanitation and so on) that they actually think vaccines, and those who create them, are the enemy.

It really is depressing.  It’s like the fall of Camelot‒and I don’t refer to the JFK White House culture that people called Camelot, but the mythological Camelot related to the legend of King Arthur.  Though, come to think of it, RFK, Jr is a worthy spiritual heir of Mordred, in being the nephew of the man who declared the intention to have America land on the moon and yet who himself is now working toward the corruption and downfall of all for which his progenitors stood.

Oh, well.  I guess if the people in America and the rest of the world don’t wake up and drink some strong, black coffee and take responsibility for knowledge and growth and improvement, they will get what they deserve.  If they don’t change direction, they will end up where they’re going.  Unfortunately, they will take helpless innocents in vast numbers along with them.

Anyway, that’s my series of tangents for today, like a random plot of the scattering of elementary particles.  I hope it’s been worth your time.  Have a good day.

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A brief and weary Monday blog post

Welcome to Monday‒if that makes any sense to say.  I’m writing this on my smartphone and I am at the train station as I begin it, because I decided to walk to the train this morning.  I figure, if I’m going to be in pain anyway, I might as well get something out of it.  And, of course, it’s slightly more pleasant to walk 5 miles in the morning than in the evening at this time of year.

Mind you, I’m still so sweaty that my shirt looks as if I had just fallen into a swimming pool.  My pants are less soaked but still noticeably wet.  Nevertheless, I’m not too worried.  I have sprayed myself with “Scent Bomb” spray, so mostly I smell like artificial mango odor, which is not half bad.

I will make this short today.  I’m really in a very poor mood in general.  I had to get called into the office on Saturday*, which is terribly annoying, because I was truly looking forward to being able to relax after my week of exceptional pain.  I was even thinking of ordering a steak from Outback.  I did not do that or anything else that was fun on Saturday, and of course, Sunday was mainly just laundry day‒though I did have a nice phone conversation with my sister on Sunday evening.  Most of it consisted of me talking about esoteric things in which I’m interested, while she listened politely.  I used to be better about giving other people the floor, so to speak.  Now I’m just a nearly insufferable droner on about my interests.

I’m so tired of everything, and I’m tired of myself most of all.  I just can’t seem to like myself.

Can you blame me?

Anyway, I don’t really have anything interesting to discuss, not even an answer to the question “What is the deal with that round flat thing they throw in the Olympics?”

I guess the days are getting noticeably shorter, in the sense that sunrise is noticeably later than it was a month ago.  But that should come as no surprise.  We’re more than a month after the solstice, after all.  It’s not getting any cooler or breezier or less humid around here, however.  In fact, the fifteen day forecast, when last I checked it, basically showed the same predicted highs and lows and precipitation chances marching forward like a line of disciplined but unimaginative soldiers.  It’s so dreary.

Oh, well.  Whataya gonna do?  I don’t have any new ideas, but I’m still keeping the old one‒basically, just leaving, leaving everything and everyone and never being seen again.  I’m so tired.

Speaking of being tired, this is all I’m going to write today.  I hope, at least, that it hasn’t been boring.

*I had worried on Friday that I might be asked to do so, but by the end of the day I had been assured that it would not be necessary.  Then, at 9:38 on Saturday morning, just an hour and 22 minutes before the office was due to open, I was texted to ask if I could please go in, because my coworker simply could not, because most of his family was ill.  Being the idiot I am, I not only went in, but took an Uber in since there was no way, especially on Saturday, for me to get to the office before about noon otherwise.  I was not reimbursed for it, at least so far.

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Phoning in yet another blog post

Well, here it is, Friday, and I’m writing another blog post.  I’m doing this one on my phone, because I didn’t feel like bringing the laptop with me when I left the office yesterday.  I had to leave late, because all of a sudden, at the end of the day, three different people got deals, and of course they all had to be processed and recorded‒and fixed, when the first 3 credit cards didn’t go through.  Of course, the people who got those deals were long gone well before things were finished; Cat forbid that they should have to leave late just because they waited until the end of the day to actually put in serious effort.  Cat forbid they should worry about inconveniencing other people.

I had hoped to get the 6:15 pm train and then walk back to the house from the train station while talking to my sister on the phone, but that didn’t work out.  By the time I even left the office it was already well past that train’s time, and the next one is 45 minutes later.  I was too tired and stressed out to talk then, and it was too late to start walking.  I didn’t really do any walking yesterday.

This morning, though, I awoke too early, and after putting it off for a while I finally got up and showered and walked the 5 miles to the station.  And now, I’m on the train.  It would be nice to get to the point where I get an endorphin surge from the walk, but evidently I’m not at that stage yet.

I wish I had something more interesting to write about, so you kind readers could have something interesting to read.  Alas, my creativity seems to be at a local nadir.  As mentioned, I haven’t really read anything this week so far, whether fiction or nonfiction, except a few short blog posts and news stories, though I didn’t get to the end even of most of those.  Likewise, I don’t think I’ve listened to a complete podcast nor finished a full YouTube video, though I’ve started quite a few.  Maybe I finished some on Tuesday in the evening, when I got off work early, but I’m not certain.

Anyway, I’m sorry to be such a drag.  I’m not a good or pleasant person, and I doubt that I ever have been.  Certainly most people who know me have voted with their feet in one way or another.  I ought to follow suit, and just walk away from everything, forever, and for good.

I didn’t even listen to any music or podcasts this morning, other than songs that were running through my head‒mainly The Man Who Sold the World and Ashes to Ashes today, though some others probably peeped in here and there.  Nevertheless, I kept my earphones in.  They’re good to have in place so that other people will understand if you don’t speak or listen to them.  You can even bob and sway a bit, if such is your habit, and people might just assume that you’re listening to music.  I don’t know for sure.  It’s hard to say what, if anything, goes through other people’s minds much of the time.

Oh, by the way, I apologize for not putting in hyperlinks to the sites or locations of the books I mentioned yesterday, which I usually do.  I didn’t really do any of my final usual edit on the site, because I just didn’t care.  I apologize, but I probably will behave similarly today.

Also, by the way, there seems to be some issue with the embedded Twitter sidebar on my site.  It claims I haven’t tweeted anything, which is a damned lie.  Evidently, the twit who now owns Twitter, and the twits he has running it, have fucked it up and made it difficult to connect to it.  If it gets annoying enough for me, I might explore how to fix the embedding, but I’m irritated enough at WordPress themselves for changing their input system for the worse.  This is the problem with constantly trying to update and change everything out of a sense of worry over competition:  while all improvement is change, most change is not an improvement.

Oh, well.  People are stupid.  They probably always will be stupid.  Even the very wealthy and successful are generally idiots, as we see demonstrated all too often.  Even bloggers (such as I) are often idiots, if you can believe such a thing!  No matter how smart someone may be, relative to, say, insects or baboons, or their fellow naked house apes, ignorance is always infinite.

And, on that uplifting note, I’ll stop for today.  It’s at least a shortish post, right?  I hope you all have a nice Friday, and a good weekend.  I expect to be writing a post tomorrow, since I work tomorrow.  I will try not to die before then, since my coworker’s daughter’s first birthday party is tomorrow, and I wouldn’t like to inconvenience him.

Still, there’s only so long I can keep staying alive so as not to cause problems for others.  Goodness knows, most other people don’t seem to have many qualms about inconveniencing me, or anyone else.

Is it any wonder I’m tired of the world?

Anyway, please try to have a nice day.

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I’m not tiptoeing but I’m walking a fair amount

Okay, well, it’s Wednesday morning, and I’m sitting at the train station, having timed my walk nicely to make me just miss the 6:10 train, so that I wouldn’t feel compelled to try to rush to catch it.  When I saw it arrive at the station, which I did, I was a bit too far away to have been able to catch it even had I sprinted.  So, my timing was good.

I’ve been walking to the station every morning this week, including yesterday*, which means that, as of now, I’ve walked roughly thirty miles since Saturday.  That’s no world record or anything, of course—a person in excellent condition could probably walk about thirty miles a day, if that were all they were doing, leaving plenty of time for rest breaks and sleep.  But it’s an improvement for me, at least.  Though I’ve had to adjust my wardrobe, bringing a full change of clothes with me, because by the time I get to the office, I look as though I’ve been swimming, I’ve sweated** so much.  As I think I mentioned before, I carry those little “scent bomb” sprays so I don’t offend anyone around me with my smell, and I’m reliably told that, at least in the short term, my sweat doesn’t actually smell too bad, which is not exactly high praise.

I changed the high E-string on my black Strat on Monday afternoon***, and I even played a little after that.  Nothing serious, it was just nice to hear the sound of the new string, and it was good to feel the stupid sense of pride in accomplishment in having changed it.  That’s rather pathetic, but I guess that should surprise no one, least of all me.

I’ve been wearing bilateral spandex supports both on my knees and my ankles, as I think I mentioned earlier this week.  This seems to be helping to minimize the degree to which the walking exacerbates my back pain, which is a hugely important consideration.  The fact that it helps also raises questions about the specific things that have caused the triggering of worsening back pain at other times when I did not use bilateral supports.

I’m not using back supports, of course—when I was first dealing with my back problems, I rapidly concluded that back braces are worse than useless, at least for me.  But certainly, having a side-to-side differential in the way one walks can produce an irregular torque on one’s lower back that could easily stimulate worsening pain, especially when repeated over a five to six mile walk, which is, after all, about 13,000 steps.

Anyway, that’s about all that’s going on with me.  I didn’t do anything to celebrate the holiday yesterday, other than to write my related post and to get off work early.  I didn’t sleep particularly well, even for me, because I kept waking up throughout the night thinking that someone was knocking at my door, only to realize quickly that it was just the sound of moderately distant fireworks going off.  There were even people still setting off fireworks when I got up this morning and when I was walking to the train station.

I remember when I was very young that fireworks and related loud noises terrified me horribly, or maybe not so much terrified as just elicited a profound displeasure.  Some of my earliest memories are of being overwhelmed by the noise of fireworks, and of having to be carried (screaming) out of the showing of The Three Caballeros cartoon at Disney World once they started shooting their guns.  I’m still not a big fan of noise, especially chaotic noise (though I like fireworks now for their appearance), and if it were not for the fact that I love music, I think I would happily try to make myself deaf.

Of course, I am enjoying listening to podcasts and audio books while walking, so I would lose that if I were deaf, but it’s not as though such things are crucial.  On Saturday, during my 6.7 mile walk back from the movie theater, I didn’t listen to anything, and that wasn’t a problem.  In fact, thinking back to my above comment about someone walking thirty miles a day, I don’t see how one could listen to something for such a long time without their battery running out quite early in the process.  Walking thirty miles has to take on the order of ten hours (or more), and I’m not sure that anyone’s cell phone could play e-books or podcasts or music for that long, or even close.

Maybe silence is just better.

Anyway, it’s never truly silent, because I’m always listening to tinnitus in my right ear.  But that’s just one of those things.  Even if I were to develop full hearing loss I might still have that tinnitus, like an amputee with phantom limb pain.  If that were the only sound, and I didn’t hear all the stupid noise of people talking at the office and so on, I think it might be worth it.

Well, that’s enough for today.  I don’t think I’ve said or written anything of any use to anyone, but that’s pretty much par for the course for me.  I’m not looking forward to work today, nor am I looking forward to leaving work at the end of the day, nor to much of anything else.

I hope you feel otherwise than I do, though.  I wouldn’t want to try to convince anyone else to feel dysthymic or depressed or to be in despair.  I don’t admire foolish or delusional optimism, of course, but reasonable positivity is hard to denigrate if one is being honest.  I wish I were built to be that way, but it just doesn’t seem to be the case, though it can be quite irritating when one feels rotten.

Oh, well.  There’s no place to ask for a refund or replacement for the suboptimal product that I am.  All I can do is lodge my complaint, as I’m doing here, in case someone out there might be able to fix me, or at least so that no one out there is too surprised if I finally succumb to my mental issues, which could happen pretty much any day, honestly.  I’m more or less always seriously mentally uncomfortable, and it wears me out, and there’s really nothing happening in my life that compensates for it.

I want rest, or at least I want oblivion.  I guess we all have that waiting at some point.

*We worked yesterday for half a day, in case I didn’t mention that during my post.

**That doesn’t feel like a proper word.  The past tense of “sweat” feels like it should be just “sweat”.  However, Word’s spell-checking function is not highlighting “sweated”, so that probably means it’s the standard past tense of that verb.  Weird.

***That was the string I broke when I kicked the guitar in intense frustration (not related to the guitar) a few weeks or so earlier.  I tend to take my frustration out on things that I’ve created or that are important to me, largely because I feel that I have a right to do so, but also because I tend to direct my anger inwardly.  Whenever I get angry, I tend to divert much of it to myself in response to the simple fact that I’ve allowed myself to be angry.  It makes me feel pathetic and weak and that I’m a horrible person.  So I’ll tear up music that I’ve written, or drawings, or other similar personal expressions of creativity, and if I can’t do that, I’ll break things that have some importance to me, and if that doesn’t work, I may just directly hurt myself.  Of course, in kicking the Strat, I covered both of the latter—my right big toe was almost certainly fractured, because it’s still sore even weeks later.  That’s okay.  Fractured toes are just things that need time to heal (not heel).

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Viewing, walking, carrying, and planning

Well, it’s Monday again, the start of a new work week and also the first blog post of a new month.  It’s also what I refer to as Independence Eve (in the US).  Why not?  We have Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve.  Why not an “Eve” for the national holiday celebrating the official founding of the country?  I encourage you all the read (or reread) the Declaration of Independence tomorrow.  It’s not very long.

I’m writing this post at the train station for the moment, though I will probably be finishing it on the train, or even at the office, since there are only about eight minutes until the arrival of the next train.  The reason for all this will become clear shortly, for those who are interested.

It was a relatively eventful weekend for me.  I decided to force myself to go to the movie theater* on Saturday morning for a matinee showing (not to be confused with a manatee showing) of The Guardians of the Galaxy 3.  I allowed myself to do this—or negotiated it and gave myself added incentive, since I wasn’t exactly keen on going to the theater per se—on the agreement that I would have some movie theater popcorn while there**, and then would walk back to the house after the movie (I took an Uber to get there…I thought it would be unkind to arrive at the theater sweaty, in case it was crowded).

I did do that walk, about 6.7 miles, in the afternoon heat and humidity of south Florida.  It was not easy, but that wasn’t unexpected.  I did take two twenty-ish minute breaks, one at a bus stop and one in a very lovely little park, where I meditated a bit in the shade to relax.  That was useful both because of the heat and the walking and because of the stress of having gone to the theater.

I enjoyed the movie, but even though there was very low attendance, I still had to deal with someone sitting in my assigned/purchased seat.  As if I need that kind of trouble.  The person/family was gracious about moving, but I don’t understand why it should have been an issue!  In modern movie theaters, the seats are assigned.  Why would one sit in any seat other than the one for which one had paid?

So, I felt very tense and stressed out by even the modest number of people around me at the movie, but at least while the movie was playing I was fine.  I even laughed out loud two or three times, since it was a funny movie.  I also thought that the guy playing the High Evolutionary looked really familiar, and then last night while re-watching a video of clips about how “The 11th Doctor is a Bad-ass”, I realized that the actor who played the High Evolutionary had played a secret service agent in Doctor Who series 6 episodes 1 and 2 (The Impossible Astronaut and Day of the Moon).  I didn’t just trust myself, though I was fairly convinced, but I looked the actor up on IMDB, and confirmed it.

That’s kind of fun.  He was excellent in his role as the HE, and that should at least help encourage actors who are, at present, in supporting or even “background” roles.  Of course, Karen Gillan had major roles in both things, but she herself had also appeared previously in the 4th series of Doctor Who (The Fires of Pompeii) in truly a bit part, where she was so heavily made up that you wouldn’t recognize her if you didn’t know it was she***.

Anyway, it was a hell of a walk back from the theater, but my choice of boots seems to have been quite good, and I wore knee and ankle spandex supports on both sides, and I think that helped make sure I didn’t have too much of a problem with recovery.  I took it comparatively easy on Sunday (my laundry day, in any case), but overall I still walked about four miles total over the course of the day.  Then, this morning, I’ve already walked to the train station, which is about five miles, and I have another mile to walk from the station to the office.  So, I’m getting a fair amount of walking in since the start of July.

I want to get to the point where I can walk more or less indefinitely, because I have a challenge I dream of undertaking, at which I would either succeed or die trying.  I’ve mentioned it before, though I don’t recall how much detail I gave, and I won’t go too much into it now, but I will say that part of my walking yesterday involved going to buy some groceries—not many, but some—and bringing a hiking-type backpack to carry them, in order to test it out.  I’m pleased to say that it worked very nicely—if anything, it’s better and easier than my day-to-day backpack, which I guess makes sense, since it’s meant for carrying rather significant amounts of weight in challenging circumstances.

Supposedly, exercise such as walking is supposed to be beneficial for depression.  I’m not so sure it’s the case with me.  In the past, I usually only exercised thoroughly (which I often did) when I had already been recovering from depression.  It seems very clear, in my case, that the exercise was a consequence of the abating depression, not its cause, because I’ve long since been in the habit of exercising, and even now, at my worst, I still do dips and pull-ups and things five to six days a week.  Anyway, if I can push myself to walk and walk and go longer distances and maybe even undertake a great challenge, such as I have in mind, I might either succeed at treating—and maybe even curing—my depression, or otherwise, perhaps, at dying in the process.

Of course, it has not escaped my notice that I might succeed at treating my depression and then end up mortally harming myself.  That wouldn’t be so horrible.  I enjoy irony like that, and it wouldn’t trouble me to die ironically—or, at least it wouldn’t trouble me any worse than would dying in most other possible ways.  In any case, I think it’s almost certainly better to die while wanting to live than to live while wanting to die.

*I don’t think I’ll go the movies alone again in this life.  It’s just not enough fun to warrant the stress.

**I wanted to put Goobers® or Reese’s Pieces® in the popcorn, which was my personal tradition for movie theater popcorn, but alas, they did not have either of those candies available.  I was forced to make do with peanut M&Ms®, which is a worthy candy but, unfortunately, just not quite the same.  I did have a nice, “small” Mug® root beer, though.

***That’s the same episode in which Peter Capaldi first appeared in Doctor Who before returning as the 12th Doctor.

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It’s the end of the week as I know it, and I feel…

It’s Friday.  This week, that means that I have the next two days off work.  I wish I had something fun to do tomorrow or Sunday, but really, my only goal is getting my laundry done on Sunday morning and trying to get a little bit of extra sleep if I can.

I don’t have any friends with whom to do anything fun, and I don’t want to try to achieve anything interesting or useful with anyone.  And if someone were to surprise me with anything other than, for instance, a trip to some kind of inpatient psychiatric facility (pre-paid), I would not be terribly happy about it, though I guess if it were someone I haven’t seen in a long time I might be happy, depending on who the person is.  But that’s not going to happen, anyway.  Actually, neither of those things is going to happen.  As far as I can see, I’m just going to continue as before.

I guess it’s somewhat noteworthy that this is the last day of June in 2023.  Tomorrow begins a new month, the month of Julius Caesar, huzzah (If June had 31 days, then July would begin on Sunday, and we would have a Friday the 13th in July, but alas, this is not to be).  Rent and power and water and other bills are all coming due.  I don’t really care about all that.  It’s not like I have anything else to do with my money, other than get new Kindle books or what have you.

Even that’s getting harder as time passes.  There just aren’t really any new books in which I’m interested.  I still can’t seem to read any new fiction—or old fiction for that matter, not even my old favorites.  There are no shows I want to watch, and no shows that I really want to rewatch, and very few movies.

I suppose I wouldn’t mind seeing The Guardians of the Galaxy 3, but I don’t want to tempt myself with movie theater popcorn and whatnot.  Going to the movies and not getting popcorn and maybe Goobers and such would just feel terribly sad, quite apart from going alone.  Anyway, I’m trying to avoid such foods.  They tend to make my overall energy and health feel worse, and that’s not something I need, obviously.

I rather wish I had been familiar with Uber and Lyft on that first weekend, when I was considering going to the theater to see GotG, and before I had made my current dietary changes.  At that time, I meant to ride my bike there.  However, I had increasing trouble with my back when using my bike, and then the front tire went flat and everything, and now it’s just sitting there upside down under the overhang, a little way outside my door.  It was yet another waste of money and time and effort.  And it’s too far to walk to any theater to see the movie without arriving sweaty and gross—and, again, right now I’m avoiding movie theater type foods.

I was thinking of walking to the train this morning, but I’m really not up to it.  I’m getting a better handle on shoes for walking—or, technically, boots in this case—at least, and I now have three pairs of identical black lightweight hiking boots, which are good for the ankle support and for the general feeling of having my feet in armor.

But walking is a bit unpleasant just because it’s so very hot and humid right now in south Florida.  This probably comes as no surprise to anyone out there.

I regret coming to Florida, to be honest, though I think the state is quite beautiful, physically, in a great many ways.  I like all the plants and the reptiles and birds and amphibians, and even some of the arthropods (I like spiders, and dragonflies are also very nifty).  But most of the worst things that have happened in my entire life have happened since I’ve come here.

Not to say that there aren’t compensations, of course.  My daughter was born in Florida, and I wouldn’t change her existence or nature for anything.  But it would have been nice, once she was born, to have gone back north.  Imagine if my kids had been able to be in White Plains (where I lived before moving to Florida) and so had been able to go to one of the best public school systems around.

Actually, they’ve both done quite well with respect to their education, as they desire it, and maybe the added pressure of being in a more competitive system would have been unpleasant.  I don’t know.

Anyway, the past is done, so it’s pointless to dwell on changes to it.  And I cannot change the present, obviously, since it’s actually already happened/happening in each given moment.  And the best anyone can do is try to steer toward preferred futures, but it may be, as a matter of physical law, that the future is set and inevitable and/or partially random and unpredictable.

As far as the experience of limited minds and beings such as we are, though, the future feels like something over which we have at least some degree of control, or at least through which we have some ability to steer.  It’s limited steering, of course.  It’s not as if we were in a car and driving; it’s not even as though we’re in a sailboat with a rudder.  It’s more as if we’re surfing, and if we do it as skillfully as we can, we might be able to surf in the direction we more or less would prefer to go.

Me, I think those reefs up ahead look inviting.  There are lots of sharks in the surrounding waters, too.  It would at least be a bit exciting, though perhaps painful and frightening at the time, to go there.  Then again, there’s also that whirlpool over yonder; that might be interesting, too, and probably a bit quicker.

I’m not much of a surfer, however, even metaphorically (non-metaphorically, I’m not a surfer at all).  I don’t think I’m surfing on the chaos of reality anymore, anyway, and I don’t think I have been for a long time.  I think I’m just treading water.  And it’s not as though I can just build myself a surf board, or a raft, or a boat or a ship, or anything else, out of the water in which I’m floundering.  And there are no vessels on the (admittedly quite limited*) horizon (though I do keep trying to send up flares).  So, I’m kind of just stuck here, treading away, until I finally tire out and go under.  I don’t know what else to do, but I’m already terribly fatigued.  I guess it’s “good” that the ocean water is salty**, or else it would be harder work to stay afloat.  Or maybe it would be better if it weren’t, so I could tire out more quickly and just have everything done.

Anyway, that’s enough of all that.  I’m sorry, it’s not an interesting blog post.  I think I’ll head out now.  Maybe I’ll get an Uber or Lyft to the train station.  I feel too lazy even for the bus.  We’ll see.

Have a good weekend, please, if you’re able.  If you’re with friends and family, for goodness sake, don’t take them for granted.  Not that you probably do.  Anyway, thanks for reading.

*I say this because, if one were treading water, one’s head would only be a foot or so above sea level, and so the horizon is very short, being a function of the height above the surface and the radius of the Earth.  Thus, as your height above the surface goes to infinity, your horizon asymptotically approaches half of the planet, though of course you would be having trouble with the limits of angular resolution and the amount of light dropping off as the distance squared and so on.  If the Earth were flat—which it is not—the horizon, even from a foot above the ocean, would be indefinitely large, limited only by structures that got in the way, and any haziness that attenuates light.  If the Earth were flat, then from the top of Mount Everest, with a good enough telescope, you could see everywhere on the planet.  You can’t, of course.  The world is round.  This has been understood for thousands of years, contrary to popular conceptions about the ignorance of people in the past.  Eratosthenes knew it 2200 years ago, and even used clever geometry to measure the Earth’s circumference, to within a few percent of the modern best measurement.

**Oh, by the way, did you see the recent reports about the shifting of Earth’s axis (a very small one, but real and measurable) that’s been caused by redistribution both from melting of glaciers and from the extensive pumping of ground water and the redistribution of that and the glacier water into the ocean?  It’s interesting that I was just talking about the changing angular momentum of the Earth by such things shortly before that report came out.  It makes me feel almost clever, though I did have a bit of a self-deprecating (though far from unhappy) head-slap moment when they mentioned the changes due to depletion and redistribution of ground water.  That had not occurred to me.  It’s always nice to have new facts and notions pointed out that make such sense.

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Why can’t I just let the train go?

Well, I walked to the train again this morning.  I tried to dilly-dally, expecting to get to the station just after the 6:10 train had arrived and gone; I took it a little slower getting up and showered and dressed than usual.  However, as I walked along, not trying to be fast, after coming to the last turn before the station, I foolishly looked at the clock on my phone and saw that it was 6:04, and I was in striking distance of the station.

Now, a sane and well-adjusted person would probably choose, in light of that information, to slow down more, to stroll toward the station, to watch the 6:10 come and go and revel in the fact of being among the first people there waiting for the 6:30 train.  Such a person might even start writing a blog post in the 20 minutes before the next train was due to come.

Clearly‒as you probably already know‒I am not a sane and well-adjusted person.

I increased my pace and my stride length, and got to the train station crossing just as the lights began flashing.  I sprinted across the tracks before the gate came down and then up along the platform, tapped in with my train card, and was able to get on the train just as it came to a halt.  I was already sweaty, of course, so the sprint had little effect on that, and anyway, I brought deodorant spray to take the edge off.  I simply couldn’t force myself to let the train go, since it was possible for me to catch it.  I’m not happy about it, but I don’t seem to have much control over the situation.

I’m writing this on my phone again, by the way.  I didn’t even bother bringing the laptop with me yesterday, and I probably won’t bring it today, either.  I mean to keep doing this procedure:  walking in the morning before work, and deciding later in the day if I feel like walking on the way back.  I never should have thought about trying to get a bike, and I certainly shouldn’t be thinking of electric scooters or electric-assisted bikes or any such thing.  I don’t need to buy new things.  Indeed, I would say that I need not to buy new things.  Ever.  I wish I didn’t have to buy food, but that’s going to be a difficult habit to break.  One step at a time, so to speak.

I have tomorrow off; I won’t be writing a post, so you’ll get a bit of a reprieve, if you read my posts out of some sense of obligation.  I’m going to try to get up and walk in the morning nevertheless, though, because I really want to try to get used to longer and longer distances.  I hope to walk either until it kills me or until it corrects my depression.  Regular exercise is supposed to be good for depression, though it’s never really seemed to help me much; I had bad depression even when I was running six miles at a time.  But maybe it’ll make a difference this time.  Anyway, it would be nice to be a bit thinner when I die, at least, so it can help with that, at the very least.

Yesterday was a somewhat stressful day at work, because my coworker was out with back pain.  Thankfully it wasn’t particularly busy, though it was a decent day for business.  I worry about him not being there today.  I’m barely able to scrape by on any given day as it is.  I don’t think I can make it for too many days in a row with added work.  If he can’t come in tomorrow, I’m not going to fill in.  I’m just going to say “no”, which is unusual for me, but there it is.  If I get pressured into coming in, I don’t know if I’ll come in again after that, ever.  Sunday is “Father’s Day”, and that would be as good a day to die for me as any other, and better than the vast majority of them.

Anyway, I’m borrowing trouble, I guess.  I have no good reason to think my coworker won’t be there today or will ask me to fill in tomorrow.  In fact, it’s rather unlikely.

Oh, speaking of unlikely things, just this week I passed two milestones on the potential palindromic recording number path.  I passed them, but I did not actually achieve those milestones.  I missed them.  They were close together, because we were in the situation where the 4th digit was a 9, which would be palindromic only when the 5th digit is also 9, and then, of course, it soon rolls up to the 4th digit being 0, and the 5th digit is also 0 at that point.  So only the first and last 3 digits of the 8 digit number needed to line up (in reverse).  It didn’t happen, which is not surprising, of course.  Only once in 10,000 times will the last 4 digits be the reverse of the first 4.  I don’t expect to see it happen.

I also can’t tell anyone at work that I’m watching for it, or my coworker might pretend he had gotten such a number.  I don’t want to seem to get a personally chosen message to endure and have it be a lie.  That would really piss me off.

Anyway, enough of that.  My stop is coming up soon (in more ways than one).  I hope you all have a good weekend, and if you’re fortunate enough to have your father around, or to be a father who is loved and spends time with his family, please do enjoy your day Sunday.

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And blogged with restless violence round about the pendant world.

Hello, good morning, and all that happy horseshit.  I’m writing at least the first draft of this post on my phone, even though I have my laptop with me, because I just arrived at the train station after walking the five miles from the house, and the next train will be here in about 5 minutes.  It seemed silly to bother getting the laptop out, starting it up, making a file and whatnot, only to close it and put it in my bag, then get it out again on the train, etc.  Also, I don’t know how crowded this train is likely to be‒it’s earlier than the one I usually take (kind of impressive considering I’ve already walked 5 miles), and it’s easier to write on one’s phone in close quarters than on a laptop.

Of course, I pity the fool who has to sit next to me this morning, as sweaty as I am*.  I have been told by reliable sources that my sweat, in general, doesn’t smell too bad, since my hygiene in general is good.  Still, it’s June in Florida, so I’m not just lightly sprinkled with a tiny amount of perspiration.  I sprayed myself with one of those “scent bomb” sprays when I got to the station, just to minimize the offensiveness‒unless one finds those scents offensive, of course.

Still, no one has a right not to be offended (not usually, anyway).

That calls to mind my own tendency, that I’ve only recently recognized, that I implicitly don’t consider myself to have a right to be comfortable.  It’s a sort of fascinating thing to come to understand.  I realize that I really don’t like loud and chaotic noises (of most varieties) or crowds, or certain smells or textures or whatnot, but I’ve never thought that my disliking these things was relevant to my behavior, or at least not primarily relevant.  I suppose, all else being equal, if I saw an easy way to avoid things that were irritating, I would do so, but it was never my primary concern.

Evidently, though, effacing one’s aversions and just letting them wash over one can, over time, wear one down.  I wonder, sometimes, if this has contributed to my depression and related issues.  It’s hard to be sure, but maybe it has something to do with that thing that happened to me on Tuesday, where I just lost all impetus, as I think I put it.

I remember, as early as the beginning of high school, and maybe earlier, that occasionally I would get these episodes of profound emptiness, just a feeling of being all used up, rather similar to what happened to me the other day, but with less physical disability.  Sometimes‒often, really, and perhaps most times‒I would also feel like I wanted to die, or at least to be dead in those moments**.  Sometimes I would address these attacks by going for long walks, and sometimes it even helped.  The episodes were not infrequent, but they didn’t happen as often or last as long back then.  I spoke to very few people about them, and was probably not all that clear when I did, since I didn’t have even the faintest understanding of what they were or why they were happening***.

The walk this morning wasn’t really to try to counter such things‒which is just as well, since I would have been disappointed.  I just want to try to get into walking longer and longer distances.  I meant to walk from the train to the house last night, but the office once again didn’t finish in time for me to be able to do so and get back at a reasonable hour.  Don’t get me wrong, almost everyone else was gone.  But I can’t leave until the last person is done, whether at the end of the day or during lunch.  So, other people only stay late occasionally, whereas I stay as late as the latest person on any given day.  I open the office, too.  But the prospect of doing some different job, meeting new people, learning new duties, perhaps going someplace different and moving my stuff, is frankly horrifying.  I can’t see any point in finding a different job.  If I leave this one, I think it will be to leave the world.

I would like to be able just to walk and walk and see what happens, if my body can be conditioned to tolerate it.  Maybe I could achieve something worthwhile, call attention to something important, and perhaps achieve some manner of spiritual insight.  Otherwise, I’d be just as happy (so to speak) to walk until it kills me.  In fact, to keep myself committed to walking this morning, I reminded myself, “I’m trying to hurt myself, so it’s fine if I’m uncomfortable or in pain while doing it.”  It’s the pain which sometimes  follows that’s most annoying, but at least I seem to have avoided any serious recurrence of blisters so far.

We’ll see what happens.  Maybe, if I can arrange it, someday I’ll just wander off, and no one will ever see me or hear from me again.  That wouldn’t be so bad.

In the meantime, I’ll probably be back writing a post tomorrow, but not on Saturday.  I hope you all, at least, have a good day.

TTFN

wanderer-in-a-storm redo

*It turns out that’s no one; this train isn’t very crowded at all, despite the apparently large number of people at the station.  Curious.

**Do you get the distinction?  Dying is a process, an event, one that, by nature, for good, sound, biological reasons, usually involves pain and fear‒it’s the potential energy wall of the metaphorical chemical or physical reaction‒whereas being dead is just a state, or a lack of states, perhaps…the equilibrium of the completed chemical reaction.  It’s a state essentially identical to the one before we were ever conceived.  Permanent oblivion can be intimidating and perhaps even impossible truly to contemplate, but the painful processes leading to it are often the real impediment to the transition.

***Heck, when I started having migraines, I had no idea what they were, and I didn’t know, until I was in medical school, that my horrible, queasy, light-phobia-inducing headaches, presaged by a growing patch of twinkling light in my eyes that didn’t go away when I closed them, were migraines, and indeed were what are called “classic” migraines.  Thankfully, those don’t happen all that often now.

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This title has nothing to do with this post, other than the inevitable fact that it is the title of this post

It’s Monday again, and I’m using my laptop to write this post, after having used my phone all last week*.  It’s much faster and more natural for me to write on the laptop, of course, and it doesn’t tend to cause soreness in the base of my thumbs (since I hardly use them when I’m typing).  But of course, it has its disadvantages, too, the biggest being the computer’s weight.  Although it is a slender, small, 11 inch laptop, it’s still heavier than my smartphone—and I carry my smartphone with me even when I have my laptop.

Nevertheless, it’s not that heavy, and I would like to be in decent enough shape that simply carrying my laptop in my backpack along with other stuff makes no real difference.  If I ever mean to go on any long hikes, with a backpack full of clothes and supplies, I would hope the laptop would seem negligible.

Also, when I’m writing on the laptop, using Word, at least the autocorrect function of my phone doesn’t keep changing “its” to “it’s”.  I try to catch them all—like Pokémon, I guess, but much more irritating—but I’m not certain that I succeed.  It would be frustrating to find that I’d allowed a grammatical slip caused by the “smartphone” to go out when I was just using it out of laziness.  I guess it would be just deserts**, but still, I’d rather be hoist by my own petard for something I did myself, not something that was a poor consequence of an automatic, would-be spelling assistant.

Speaking of malfunctioning technology, I had a stressful morning yesterday.  I put my laundry in the washing machine, with soap and fabric softener as usual, and then…the machine didn’t turn on.  There was not so much as a flicker or blink of its lights.

I have to admit that I freaked out much more than was probably warranted, though I doubt that any outside observer would have been able to tell.  Evidently, my emotions don’t show much on my face, and apparently also not in my voice or my choice of words.  Inside my mind, I felt like I was going to rip into pieces from tension and stress.

Sunday is the only day of the week on which I do laundry, since it’s the only day of the week I’m certain to be at the house, and I’ve done it that way for years, now.  I also start my washing early, because I get up early, and the sooner I get it done, the sooner I can stop having to go out into the rest of the house where I might encounter my—perfectly pleasant—housemates and have to interact with them.

Anyway, I texted my former housemate and the owner each (knowing I would have to wait a while for their replies), while trying to brainstorm ideas for what might be the issue.  Of course, I checked (and reset) all the circuit breakers, and checked the locking mechanism on the machine, and all sorts of other obvious things.  I’m not sure any of that improved anything.  In the meantime I ordered a few new shirts and a new pair of pants and some underwear (I accidentally ordered the wrong size, though), and so on, just in case.

Meanwhile, faced with the prospect of not being able to do my laundry, I honestly wished that I would have a heart attack or a stroke or something like that, and that it would all become moot.

I didn’t, of course, have either of those things, as far as I can tell.  In the long run, between me and my former housemate and the landlord, texting back and forth in parallel conversations, I got the washer to work by stretching a very long combo of extension cords to an outside socket and doing what I think was a hard reset of the washing machine—after having left it unplugged for quite some time, starting it on rinse, then stopping, turning it up to “normal” wash while it was running.

Anyway, I got my laundry done, thank goodness.  I honestly think that, in my current state of semi-life, I would rather die than have to find a way to go and use a laundromat.  I’m not speaking hyperbolically, except perhaps in the mathematical sense in which I’m at the long tail of a hyperbolic function (such as y=1/x), asymptotically approaching zero.

Wouldn’t it be horrible to find oneself steadily and slowly getting closer and closer to zero, but at a slower and slower rate, so that actually to reach zero would literally take an infinite amount of time?  The horror of getting weaker and more depressed and more decrepit, and yet never being able to die, would be…well, quite obviously, a fate worse than death.  Of course, it’s entirely possible that such will be the fate of the universe itself on the longest of time scales, if the cosmological constant really is a constant and whatnot.  But that’s in a truly, very long time.  Hyperbole aside, I don’t imagine I’ll live long enough for that to be relevant, except as a matter of scientific curiosity.

Speaking of decrepitude, I’ve been trying to do some wider spaced pull-ups recently, rather than my usual, shoulder-width ones, because I thought it might help my back.  I think it actually may have been helping my back a bit, but unfortunately, an old injury to my left shoulder began acting up by the second iteration of those pull-ups, and has gotten worse, and that pain and soreness radiates down the whole arm in a sort of electrical feeling (not the good kind), reminiscent of “causalgia” which is a term that might not be in current use anymore.

In any case, this morning I went back to more usual width, but my shoulder is still acting up.  This isn’t too surprising; once triggered, that kind of thing can take a while to calm down.

In conclusion, my life is definitely not worth the effort.  It’s just a bad habit for me, at this point.  I don’t contribute anything of substance to anyone, probably not even to myself.  I’m stressed out to the point of near-suicidality by even minor things—like having to get up and go into the office.  But, as is often the case, bad habits are hard to break.  I mean to try, though.  I’ve been hoping for some way to wean myself off, and I still have hope for that, but I may need simply to go cold turkey***.

*Imagine what someone perhaps a century or so ago would have thought upon reading that sentence:  What?  You used your laptop to write something…a post?  And…sometimes you used a phone to write?  WHAT?

**There must be plenty of bakeries or ice cream shops or similar places that call themselves “Just Desserts”.  The sorts of people who make and sell sweets are definitely the sort to enjoy a nice pun.  I mean that as a compliment.

***Homer Simpson:  Mmmmm…turrrrkeyyy.

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What would a moribundt cake taste like?

It’s Tuesday now, in case you weren’t aware of that fact.  I’m feeling less perky this morning than I was yesterday, which I guess isn’t all that odd.  I’m also not sure what to write today—even more so than usual.

I’m rather tired, both mentally and physically.  Yesterday during the early part of the day I had a fair amount of energy, but then in the afternoon, sometime a bit after three, I think, my mood just crashed.  I felt physically fine; my pain wasn’t worse than usual, and was probably slightly better than average.  But I just felt the wind go out of my sails and lost nearly all my motivation.  I’m not sure why.  It was while I was drinking a Coke Zero®, which I don’t usually drink, but I doubt that it was the cause.

Possibly part of it was that my coworker had shown me some pictures from his daughter’s christening, and it reminded me of some baby pictures of my daughter and son, and so I pulled those up on my phone and showed a few to him.  Then, having opened that particular Pandora Brand™ can of worms, I looked through a lot of other pictures of my kids on my phone, and was reminded how much I have missed of their lives and how much I miss them, and how I’m probably never going to see them in person again.

I’m a surprisingly sentimental person, but I don’t think anyone else at the office is ever able to tell when I’m feeling so.  I’m not sure much of anyone around me is ever able to tell when I’m feeling down.  It’s frustrating, as I’ve written here before.

It’s rather as if one were in the process of drowning, coughing up water, waving, hoarsely calling out for help, and all people from the shore or the pool-side—very nearby, more than capable of tossing a life preserver or something similar—do is say thing things like, “That’s a good sidestroke you have”, and they mean it with complete sincerity.  They’re not teasing or taunting.  They’re not trying to be cruel, and they’re not knowingly being callous.  They honestly don’t seem able to tell that I’m about to drown…even people who’ve known me all my life.

Or perhaps they figure I just want to drown, and they don’t think it’s their place, or their right, to intervene.  I certainly sometimes make arguments and diatribes that might make it seem as if I’ve arrived at a desire to die because of some philosophical thought process; I’m well-read and I’m good at making sophistic arguments, so apparently it comes across as convincing, as a well-thought-out and definitive personal statement of rational, or at least reasoned, intent.  But all I’m really doing is trying to express how absolutely morose and hopeless I feel.  Such moods, however, are apparently rather opaque, whether on my face or in my speech or my behavior, and perhaps even in my writing.

Honestly, yesterday afternoon, I fantasized about finding the nearest pawn shop, of which there are many near where I live, and buying a gun and shooting myself.  I tried to imagine the process of doing it, and I didn’t feel hesitant.  I was very depersonalized, as I think the term is.  I felt that I could have cut off some of my own fingers with minimal difficulty.  I also felt that, even in the office, if someone had handed me a loaded pistol—especially if it were a nice, single-action revolver—I could have put it in my mouth, pointed it toward my soft palate, and pulled the trigger.

At that stage, what would have stopped me would have been mostly the issues of mess and rudeness.  It would be better to go find one of the areas of south Florida—there are many—where there basically are just lots of plants growing (and oodles of arthropods), such as along the train tracks but between stops, and do it there.

Anyway, obviously I didn’t have a gun, and I didn’t do that stuff yesterday, unless I’m a ghost who is able to write a blog.  I do sometimes feel like I’m undead, as I’ve said before on this blog, but that’s not a literal thing.  I don’t think ghosts or zombies or any of the rest of such things actually exist, at least not in any supernatural sense.

I wish I could find some situation or circumstance where I could readily do something that would be good, that would maybe save some people’s lives or something, but would kill me.  Stepping in front of a child that was about to be shot or something like that might be good.  And, of course, I would wish that I would have the will, the courage, to carry out the act.

That’s always a worry.  Oh, well.  Life sucks.

I at least got a relatively good walk in last night.  I arrived at the destination train station and walked to the nearby bus stop and waited for the bus to arrive, but the app didn’t even show the usual real-time update on its position.  How quickly we become spoiled by such things!  So I watched as the arrival time of the bus came and passed and then five more minutes, and then five minutes after that, with no sign—in person or on the app—of the bus.  So I gave up, after wasting half an hour, and walked the five miles back to the house.

I considered stopping at McDonald’s© on the way, but decided I didn’t want anything from that particular fast food shoppe.  One of the great things about not eating during the day is that, by the time it’s time to eat for dinner, I don’t really feel hungry.  And, weirdly enough, walking the five miles back to the house was easier after not having eaten than it ever was after I had eaten, in the past.  This makes sense, biologically.  All my system’s resources were available for moving and walking; none were diverted to digestion, and I certainly have more than enough stored energy for the trek.

Unfortunately, since I’d foregone the fast food€, I needed to stop at a convenience store¥ and get something for dinner, but the one I chose didn’t have much that I wanted, so I had to settle, and had a relatively small and not terribly good dinner, at about ten o’clock at night.  Oh well.  Life, as I say, sucks∞.  Frankly, I think it would be nice just to stop eating entirely.  I may see if I can work my way toward that.

Anyway, this morning, my dips—the exercise, I mean—were noticeably easier than just a few days ago, which is always nice.  It would be nice to die with a lean but toned body, though I suppose it hardly matters.

And, now, I’m really going to have to head toward the bus stop, because I hate getting there when other people are already there if I can help it.  I hope you have a better day than I have, no matter how good a day I may be surprised to haveΩ.

[P.S.  Later in the morning:  The train announcement by the conductor includes the sentence, “We would like to remind you that safety and security are our top priorities.”  This is clearly false.  If those were their top priorities, the train would never run at all, and no one would be allowed on it.  Thus it would be as safe and secure as was possible…and the train would be utterly useless.  Safety and security can never truly be top priorities, at least not in any simple-minded sense, and even sensible safety is often not prioritized in any rational way.  I know people who fret over whether someone with a minor cold touched something of theirs, but who habitually drive over the speed limit, fail to signal, fail to come to complete stops, and not don’t pay full attention to what they are doing when driving.  It’s maddening.  People are idiots; life is idiotic.  I do not hold myself as an exception to those last two statements.]