Fireworks and Hurricanes

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No one else here will save you

It’s Saturday, and I’m writing another blog post.  You can’t say I didn’t warn you.

Well, actually, you can say that‒nothing is stopping you from enunciating those words‒but if you do, you’ll either be mistaken or lying.  And it would be hard to excuse you making that mistake, since I’m right here, reminding you that I did warn you, and I’m even putting a link in* to the post in which I warned you.

As for topics about which to write, well, I don’t know.  The world is such a boring place right now.  There’s nothing interesting or troubling or unusual happening at all.

I was being tongue-in-cheek there, as I hope was obvious (though social media and the internet more generally have shown us that this can never be taken for granted).  However, it’s also true that the tragicomedy of current politics is not really very interesting, any more than is any other set of primate dominance conflicts.  To the primates themselves, and perhaps to those who study them, it might be interesting, but to everything else in the universe‒including yours truly‒it’s just a bunch of noisy, smelly, stupid animals making a mess while jockeying for positions in a contest that only matters to them (and not even to all of them).

But it is still a potentially violent process, and there tend to be brutal injuries and fatalities, so I’ll repeat my admonition:  it’s fun to repeat the slogan “punch a Nazi” but it’s important to recognize that that is just a slogan, like “catch the wave:  Coke” or “nobody doesn’t like Sara Lee”**.

The actual Nazis‒you know, the real ones from 30s-40s Germany, not just the people you call Nazis the same way some might say “your mama”‒were stopped by people with real weapons, and it required real violence and personal danger.  Passive or verbal (or even fist-based) resistance works against relatively civilized opponents, like the colonial British in India, but would not work against actual Nazis, actual fascists, or against other actual totalitarians like the Soviets or Pol Pot or Chairman Mao and his successors, or the various smaller-scale dictators, authoritarians, totalitarians, and just generally other bully types throughout history.

Such people are not civilized‒not completely‒and they will use force against those who oppose them, or just against those whom they don’t like, or of whom they don’t approve 

You can say “punch a Nazi” when you’re talking about people who just act like Nazis, or who seem to sympathize with such ideologies, but when it comes to actual “Nazis”, the slogan should be more along the lines of the Joker’s three favorite things‒dynamite, and gunpowder, and gasoline.

Or, as Chris Cornell sang in his Casino Royale Bond song:  “Arm yourself, because no one else here will save you.”

The political right in the US has long been the group of people who are most fervent about defending the 2nd Amendment, but the right has betrayed so many of its former ideals already, and totalitarians (and would-be ones) will generally do their best to disarm a populace they want to control or oppress or simply to kill.  So, if you’re at all serious in thinking that those on the current “right” are akin to Nazis‒and this is not necessarily wrong‒I say again, get weapons and train yourself to use them well.  Learn the arts of sabotage and improvised munitions.  Take a bartending class and learn to make a Molotov Cocktail***.  Heck, buy a flamethrower; they’re legal (and ironically, they don’t count as firearms).

Of course, in fighting against oppressors, it is essential to remember Nietzsche’s admonition about fighting monsters and gazing into abysses.  Learn from the examples of the French Revolution, the Bolshevik Revolution, and the Chinese Communist Revolution; “revolutionary” ideologies tend to turn into paranoid self-policers, but not necessarily in a good way.  Remember, many of the initiators of the French Revolution ended up meeting the Guillotine themselves at the hands of their own co-revolutionaries.

Remember Robespierre.  Remember Trotsky.  Don’t become just as evil as the people you oppose.  Also, remember the presumption of innocence (even for people you hate) except in true, immediate danger to life and limb.  Just because you don’t like someone doesn’t mean they are evil (and just because you like them doesn’t mean they are not).  Just because you are fighting against “bad guys” doesn’t mean you are necessarily a “good guy”.  To be a “good guy” requires self-reflection and self-criticism and devotion to the concept of fallibilism.  Remember, Stalin fought against Hitler and helped defeat him, but he was most assuredly not a good guy.

On that cheery set of notes, I wish you a happy weekend.  Wishes may be useless, of course, as ineffectual as “thoughts and prayers”, but they are real, nonetheless.

*Not referring to the website/social media platform LinkedIn.

**I know these slogans are really old, but none that were more recent popped into my head, and I couldn’t be bothered to try to think of one.

***Yes, I know, it’s not a real drink.

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I don’t have the energy to do a Shakespeare quote title

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, and this is technically the 4th blog post of the week, though yesterday’s post felt a bit disjointed and erratic.  I didn’t edit it much, and frankly, I’m not sure I had anything to say 

I did, though, get the “inspiration”, or perhaps the geas, to throw together that little slide-show-style video to the tune of Another Brick in the Wall Part 3 that I shared yesterday.  I did the whole thing in the morning before I posted, and threw it up on here and on Instagram.  I didn’t share a version of it to YouTube, because I figured it might get blocked.  I know it wouldn’t be monetized, but my channel isn’t monetized, anyway.

I don’t know if anyone really caught the meaning I was conveying.  Basically it’s a montage of pictures from my former life, of the people I love whom I no longer see, some of whom are dead, and basically all of whom are gone from my life.  Early on, the pictures are dominated by, or at least include, people who are dead.  Then there are loads of shots of my kids, some including my ex-wife and even me, then some of my coworkers and so on, switching from one to the next to the beat of the song.  Then, at the end, there’s a massively altered picture of me that looks just a bit like I’m made out of bricks:

The point is that, as the song sings, “I don’t need no arms around me…”  It’s showing all the people whose arms are not around me* and probably never will be again, and so on.  It’s appropriate and it is just, though; I’m not a person who is worth embracing.

Anyway, those last two songs on the first album of The Wall have always meant a lot to me, albeit in a very dark way.  They’re basically about giving up, about recognizing that you’re alone and you’re always going to be alone, and that’s just the way it is.  Also, relationships are perilous, especially if you’re the sort of person people tend to end up leaving.  To quote a different song that I’ve already covered, “Everyone I know goes away in the end.”  How can you not want to build a wall?

Some of us come with some sort of pre-built wall that requires active and sustained effort to lower, and which spontaneously regenerates even as you try to break it down.  It gets terribly exhausting.

Of course, it’s the following song from The Wall that’s most prominent to me, and I am going to start working on a video for that, but it won’t be a one morning thing made in a sort of compulsive fever dream state like this last one was.

Yesterday I was so wound up by the time I posted my “video” I had to close my little office door before work because I couldn’t stop crying for a while.  It wasn’t anything extravagant; I wasn’t sobbing or anything.  I was just sort of quietly crying, but it didn’t want to stop, and I didn’t want the people in the office to see me when they arrived.

I’m beginning the final novel of the light novel series I mentioned before, after which I’ll be pretty much done with every book I can find any interest in reading.  I cannot even sustain my interest in the e-book version I found of Susan Kay’s Phantom, which is one of my favorite books.

None of the hundreds of fiction or nonfiction books in my Kindle library catch my attention; they all seem boring.  And none of the books on Amazon seem interesting at all.  Many of them seem just frankly moronic.  To quote another song from The Wall, “…nothing is very much fun anymore.  And I…can…feel…one of my turns coming on.”

I haven’t played any guitar so far this week.  I certainly haven’t written any fiction.  I haven’t drawn anything apart from a weird doodle of a sort of demonic cartoon caterpillar on the top of one of our deal sheets.

I used to do that sort of thing all the time.  In undergrad and in med school, though I always brought a notebook and tried to take notes, that’s never really been the way I learn things.  So, my college and medical school notebooks are a smorgasbord of doodles‒some comical, some dark, some frankly horrifying, some very rough and some rather artistic.  I don’t know what has happened to any of them.

I feel as though I’m approaching the end of all this.  And so, I intend to make a sort of video to the song Goodbye, Cruel World, the last song on the first album of The Wall, and maybe release it as a message.  It’s not an iff** sort of statement.  For instance, I might not finish or post a video and yet still kill myself.  I came pretty close yesterday.  But no one seems to have noticed.

And, of course, even if I post it, it doesn’t necessarily mean that I will kill myself or have killed myself.  I might fail, even if I try.  And someone might even stop me.

Ha ha, just kidding.  That last scenario is definitely not gonna happen.

Anyway, that’s it for today.  I hope (and trust) that almost all of you are feeling much better than I am.

TTFN

*Actually, technically, if I were to show pictures of everyone whose arms are not around me and will not be, I’d have to show pictures of everyone in the world, which would take too much time.

**That’s mathematics-speak for “if and only if”.

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Sticks and stones…

I don’t really know what to write about that’s personal at the moment, so I thought I’d weigh in on a matter that’s occasionally been popping to my mind.

Those who believe that we are marching toward fascism in the United State—and I’m not saying they are necessarily wrong—need to start availing themselves of their 2nd Amendment Constitutional rights, if they haven’t already done so.

Many have long held that the 2nd Amendment did not secure the right to keep and bear arms as protection against ordinary criminals or terrorists or even mad people like school shooters and the like.  They maintain that it is a measure put in place to protect the citizens against the potential depredations of an oppressive government (such as the one against which the founders had recently revolted).

I’m not Constitutional scholar enough to know for certain what the definitive intention of the writers of the 2nd Amendment was, and given how disparate the interpretations thereof are, I would suspect that no one is.  But we don’t really need to dwell too much on that, since we are the ones interpreting the Constitution now.  Here are the words:  “A well regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.”

The argument can be made that the 2nd Amendment is a straightforward compound sentence with two separate subjects.  The first part basically says that we all know that any free state of any kind is going to have to have some kind of military.  It’s a necessity.  But the second half says that because of the fact stated in the first part, the right of the people—not the militia— to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

The point, I am led to understand, of this interpretation of the 2nd Amendment is that since the government is always going to have a militia—and since over time, governments may become tempted to use those militias against their own citizens—the citizens should be armed, so that they can at least fight back.

In any case, whether you buy that interpretation of the 2nd Amendment or not, it’s a good point to consider now.  If you honestly think that the current government is really striving to enact a form of fascism in the United States, and that it will oppress innocent people and use force against them—and how are laws enforced other than through the threat of literal violence by the police or the military?—then you need to be prepared for active resistance, not just rhetoric.  When name-calling fails (impossible as that might seem), what are you going to do to resist unlawful encroachment by those who seek to use the offices of government to further their own selfish ends?

Thomas Jefferson had his faults, of course, some of which are difficult to understand, but he did almost solely write the founding document of the United States of America*.  He was also, based on some of his writings, a bit of a radical recurrent revolutionary, at least in principle.  He famously wrote that he thought there should be an armed revolution as often as every twenty years if people wanted to remain free.  “What country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance?  Let them take arms…the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.  It is it’s natural manure.”

I don’t know how tongue-in-cheek he might have been when he wrote that, but it doesn’t really matter, because the message is the message, and it stands or falls on its own, regardless of who said it or why.

If you hate oppressive, authoritarian, or totalitarian regimes, it’s hard to blame you.  But while the slogan “punch a Nazi” is funny, and seems vaguely tough and “cool” to people who’ve never been in a serious fight in their lives, the Nazis—the real Nazis, the originals—were not defeated by people punching them.  They were not defeated by protests.  And though words helped, they were not finally defeated with words, certainly not the sort of words we find tossed about on social media.  They were fought, they were captured—and when nothing else could be done, they were killed—by other armed people.

I cannot recommend going out and killing people you don’t like just based on political differences.  That’s catastrophic, cosmic-level idiocy.  But if life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are actually under immediate threat carried out by armed individuals, then such people must be resisted with arms, if one wants to have any chance of success.

Imagine how hard the Warsaw Ghetto would have been even to make happen, let alone for the people there to be gradually massacred, if most or even just some of the original 400,000 Jews who had been put there had been armed and had recognized that their lives were in danger.

Imagine if all the Jews and Gypsies and gay and handicapped people in Germany and Austria and Poland and France and Czechoslovakia and so on had all possessed personal firearms.

There are, last I heard, more guns in private hands than there are citizens in the US.  Whether or not one sees this as a good thing depends very much upon one’s criteria for goodness in this matter, but it is true that it is much harder for the Thought Police to kick in people’s doors to enforce conformity if a good percentage of those people are armed and know how to use their weapons to fight** in defense of their lives and those of their families.

Anyway, I thought this was an important point to make; at least it’s one that nags at me.  It’s very easy, and relatively safe, to argue with people on social media, calling them names from the other side of the country or the other side of the planet.  But when would-be oppressors from any part of the political spectrum come to enforce their ideas violently upon others, clever online memes are unlikely to stop them.

I don’t condone armed attacks against people who aren’t in the muscle end of the family, so to speak, and in any case, such things often backfire.  But if the SS or the KGB or the DHS or any other manner of secret police are coming for you and those you love, though you have committed no actual crime, and if you aren’t sure what they’re going to do if they capture you/them, it seems perfectly reasonable to shoot as many of them in the head as you can.  You can at least make their job both difficult and dangerous.

Words may never hurt me, but sticks and stones can break my bones, even if I don’t choose to use them.  So, if I honestly think such things are coming, I really should pick up my own sticks and stones.  It’s vastly better to use reason and discussion and politics to settle differences, to arrive at compromise, to make things work as well and as honorably as we can for everyone, but when faced with a literal and immediate threat of deadly force, it is perfectly moral to defend oneself with deadly force.

*That’s the Declaration of Independence, in case you were wondering.

**This is crucial.  Guns are not magic talismans, and if you’re going to get one, you should learn how to use it.  You should train and indoctrinate yourself in gun safety, and—equally important—you should practice so that, when necessary, you can use your weapon very unsafely.

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Pulling a trigger warning

[Seriously, I talk about suicidal thoughts and ideas of methods, as well as self-harm here, and I don’t want to trouble anyone who might be “triggered” by this…I do enough damage to people who are even figuratively close to me, and I don’t want to do that even more, so if this will, or even might, upset or worsen your mental state, please don’t read any more of it.]

I was a bit hypo-manic yesterday morning or something; sorry about my little tangent fest.  Today I mean to keep things shorter.

Work has been hectic and too up-and-down for easy tolerance lately.  Today is payroll day, so I’m going in early to get that done, but it will be chaotic and urusai and stressful no matter what.

I used to be able to deal with stress, not by avoiding stressful things but by not letting things bother me, by keeping things in perspective, by having good enough personal support systems in place, by having a good philosophical outlook, by meditating, what have you.  No longer.  The person I used to be is dead.  His remains are just sitting here and rotting, as you would expect from an unburied, unpreserved corpse in a hot, humid climate.

I hate my life.  Honestly.  Seriously.  I am trapped in this idiotic universe full of even more idiotic creatures and things, of which I am a prime example.  There is, of course, a way to escape, but to avail oneself of it requires courage, and I haven’t yet been able to work that courage up.  I’m trying.  I’ve come close.  It’s only a matter of time.  A natural 20 may be a relatively hard “saving throw”, but it will happen eventually.

It’s funny, but it occurred to me lately‒thinking frequently about such matters, as I am‒that it would be easier for me to shoot myself in the gut, sort of Van Gogh style, than to shoot myself in the head.  It’s hard to say why, exactly.  I have “played” Russian roulette once, and though I did pull the trigger (barrel in mouth, aimed as carefully as I could), I didn’t go for a second turn.  I just cried by myself in my stupid old apartment.  And that was before I even went to jail or prison for trying (cluelessly, it must be said) to help relieve the suffering of other people experiencing chronic pain.

I came to a realization when I responded to something someone on Threads said‒about just wanting to be shot in the head‒by saying that I would rather take it in the gut, because it would be slower and more painful.  I realized that I really would find it easier to shoot myself in the belly than the head.  Perhaps it’s because I could then experience the process and the pain.  Maybe it’s because it would give me a sort of chance to change my mind at the last minute or something.  I don’t know.  I suppose at some level I’m still a coward.  Anyway, I don’t own any guns anymore, so it’s a bit moot.

Weirdly enough, I doubt that I would be able to stab myself in the gut, let alone do anything like seppuku.  This is probably at least partly because one has to apply the force oneself, whereas with a gun, the bullet rockets out quickly and without hesitation once the trigger is pulled.

Using fire would be hard, too.  I know that I’m able to burn myself deliberately, because I do it from time to time (twice, yesterday) but it’s always at least a little startling how much it hurts, at least for an instant.  It can actually be almost invigorating, especially when some surprising little phenomenon happens, such as something in your skin giving a little “pop” when hot metal touches it.

A whole body process would be quite intimidating, though.  I have enough flammable liquids to do it, but I think that would be most appropriate for some sort of public statement of a death.  I’ve thought of going to sit out in front of the Palm Beach County courthouse (where the finishing blows to my life were delivered) and immolating myself, but you want to make sure you’re committed completely before trying something like that.  Otherwise it would be very embarrassing.

Maybe the best way, by some measures‒other than actual medically provided euthanasia, perhaps with some combination of high-dose valium, fentanyl, and digoxin‒would be hypoxemic asphyxiation, when you would just sort of go lightheaded and “faint” and, if you’ve done it right, just drift away.  I gathered the equipment for this not too long ago.

But of course, if you’re interrupted, or you accidentally dislodge your apparatus while losing consciousness, you could just get brain damage from hypoxemia and not even die.  To be honest, I don’t know how much worse my brain could possibly even be than it is now, but it’s a fact of reality that things can always get worse, even if it’s not true that they can always get better.

It would be good if something (not someone) else took it out of my hands.  Every time I start getting better from a respiratory infection I feel disappointed.  Where is the pneumonia that will develop over top of my URI and usher me away from this shit hole of a universe?

It’s a cliché that if you want something done right, you need to do it yourself.  It isn’t easy.  But I’m working on it.

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You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout till you have drench’d our steeples, drown’d the blogs!

Hello and good morning.

I’m going in to the office today, since down my way, Hurricane Milton has not been very impressive so far.  This is not a surprise.  We were always going to be only on the periphery of the system, and on the leeward side of the state (so to speak).  There wasn’t even any rain of significance down by where I live; just a bit of relatively high wind.

We are going through a bit of rain as I ride in my Lyft to work, but for south Florida, it’s a piddling amount so far.  The wind is mildly interesting, but I’ve ridden a 650 cc scooter (basically a motorcycle with automatic transmission) through wind and rain much worse than this.  I don’t think that was a wise thing to do for anyone who cared about his or her life and health much, but for me, it was just fine.

I’m in a Lyft, by the way, because the train service is suspended today, as it was yesterday.  This was probably not absolutely necessary, but I respect the abundance of caution.

Traffic, at least, seems very light, which is also not surprising.  Most people in the area are not working today, I suspect.  We shall see how many people come to the office today.

I’ve been a bit frustrated lately, as an infection of some kind (possibly a few different ones) has afflicted quite a few people at the office, but I have not gotten sick.  Not only would such an illness give me the opportunity for rest for which I am able to excuse myself (and might even allow me to sleep, given the physiology of the immune response), but it’s also an opportunity potentially to develop some more severe, life-threatening superinfection*.

Apparently, some people used to call pneumonia “the old man’s friend”.  Well, I’m not that old (and I wouldn’t recommend my friendship to anyone, even a pulmonary infection) but apparently the average lifespan for people on the autism spectrum‒assuming that I am, which I give very high likelihood‒is somewhere in the mid-50s.  So, it wouldn’t be unreasonable for something to kill me sometime soon.

Of course, such averages are strongly affected by outliers.  People with the highest support needs are probably more likely to die at significantly younger ages, and that will tend to bring the average down.  It’s a bit like how the very high infant mortality rate strongly skewed the average lifespan in pre-modern times.  People who did reach adulthood probably didn’t live much shorter lives than we do now.

Actually, modern people in the west may be backsliding lifespan-wise, at least in America, as we eat more refined carbs and are less active and so are more prone to hyperinsulinemia, which brings with it not just increased risks of diabetes and elevated lipids, but even increased risks of high blood pressure, heart disease, stroke, and many cancers, as well as infections.

The infant mortality issue illustrates one way in which reported average lifespans and similar statistics can be misleading, at least for people who don’t understand what’s behind the numbers.  It reminds me of something I may have discussed here before:  people (rightly enough) make fun of the fact that (to make up a statistic that’s probably not too far from reality) ninety percent of people think they are above average drivers.

Now, it is almost certainly true that ninety percent of people are not above average drivers; it’s just that so-called neurotypical people tend to have overinflated (and undeserved) senses of self-esteem.  But the notion that seems to be implied in most discussions of such statistics is that it’s impossible for 90% of people to be above the average.  This is not the case, at least not if “average” refers to the arithmetic mean, as it usually does.

If ninety people out of a hundred each scored exactly 51 (out of a 100, say) on some test of driving ability, and the remaining ten only scored 1 point each, then the average score would be ((90 x 51) + (10 x 1))/100, which is 46.  So, ninety percent of people would not only all be above average, but would be five points above average.  It’s not a very impressive score, but it is true.

Now, if it were said that ninety percent of people think they are above the median, then that would be erroneous by definition, because of the meaning of the term “median”.

Most people don’t seem to understand these and other mathematical concepts, and yet those concepts and related ones of many and varied kinds can have significant impacts on the lives of billions.  I once wrote a blog post on Iterations of Zero recommending that probability and statistics be more aggressively emphasized in secondary school education, because I think understanding them would give people far greater insight and even agency in the world.

And yet, we see “humorous” memes such as the one below, of which there are numerous iterations and variations:

pythagorean meme

I say the fault for that lack of use lies with the individual, not with their education.  Just because they don’t use the Pythagorean Theorem doesn’t mean it isn’t and couldn’t be useful**, and even if the specific theorem wasn’t useful then the capacity to do it and other, related things, is useful.

I feel I may have mentioned it here recently, but even when one doesn’t use mathematics*** in one’s profession, working with them strengthens the mind and makes it more fit for many other purposes.  Usually, one doesn’t do push-ups to become really good at doing push-ups, and one doesn’t jog in order to become a really good jogger.  One exercises to become stronger and healthier, more capable.  The mind is even more responsive to exercise than is the body, and if there are limits to how strong it can become‒in whatever sense‒I don’t think anyone has come close to reaching them****.

That’s that for today.  I hope you’re all weathering your personal storms reasonably well.  The one down here hasn’t done much to me; I probably could have slept outside in the rear of the house last night without any trouble.  The wind might have been soothing.  It might even have helped me get a better sleep.  It’s not as though it could have been much worse.

TTFN

*By which I mean an infection that opportunistically occurs due to the body’s weakened defenses caused by an initial infection, not an infection with exceptional nature or virulence.

**Understanding geometry is so potentially useful in so many ways that it’s said that the only time in his life that Isaac Newton laughed was when someone asked him what the point was in studying Euclid.  Newton is universally reputed to have been quite arrogant, vindictive, and impatient, to say the least.  One can only imagine the sheer amount of vitriol and scorn that would have been conveyed by that solitary gelastic moment.

***Or philosophy, or physics, or chemistry, or biology, or history, or literature, etc.

****Not even Newton or Von Neumann.

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Regarding tomorrow

Depending on how the power and internet are, I may NOT be making a post tomorrow.  There’s no particular danger where I am in Florida, but there could be downed lines and cable outages.  If I don’t post, that’s probably why, so don’t worry.

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O madam, my old blog is cracked, it’s cracked!

“Hello and good morning,” he said with a sigh.

Here I am, doing this again, or still doing it, or however you want to characterize it.  Words cannot give an absolutely complete picture of things that happen, not without being as dense in information as the literal reality itself, and if one is going to do that, one is going to have to double the information density of every real thing in order fully to describe it, which cannot be done at scale.  As I’ve said before, the only thing with computing power adequate to completely simulate the universe IS the universe, at least as far as I can tell.

I had meant to be done with all of this, or at least on my way to being done with all of this, or on my way toward something better or at least different starting on Sunday, the first day of Autumn, Bilbo and Frodo’s birthday.  Unfortunately, I had rather severe problems with my feet‒my left heel/plantar fascia and my right Achilles tendon‒that made it unworkable to carry things out the way I had intended.

I’ve been doing my best to calm these foot problems down, and they both are improving‒being a trained MD with 15 years of clinical experience is good for something* it seems‒but it may just be necessary to choose some other path to my destination.  There are many from which to choose, and I am prepared for several of them.  This is not a new or frivolous idea of which I speak, and I have put thought and preparation into it for a long time, all while foolishly hoping for some answer, some rescue, some epiphany, but ultimately finding such hopes to be chimeras or will-o-the-wisps**…or maybe even balrogs.

Anyway, as you probably already know, I posted all of Extra Body here last week over the course of four days.  If you read and enjoyed it, please take a look at my books on Amazon and consider buying and reading one or more of them.  Though I should warn you, most of my stories are much darker than Extra Body.

If you’re not good with dark stories, may I suggest The Chasm and the Collision?  My sister has rightly pointed out that it’s my only story with as upbeat an ending as Extra Body.  I would say Son of Man and Mark Red are somewhere in between, and a few of my stories, like If the Spirit Moves You (found in Welcome to Paradox City) and, to a lesser extent, “I for one welcome our new computer overlords” have some lightness to them.  The former could even be called a comedy of sorts.  But both stories center around fairly dark concepts or situations.  Many of my other stories are horror stories…though there’s not a single “supernatural” thing in my darkest ever story, Solitaire, which is available solo and also appears in Dr. Elessar’s Cabinet of Curiosities.

Anyway, I doubt very many people will ever read any of my stories, which I think is too bad, but I certainly have no right to have my stories read.  I think there might be a lot of people who might get at least some joy out of some of them, though.  I think it would also be very satisfying to know that many people read my stories and some fraction of them enjoyed them.  Even if they read them without knowing who the author was, I might not mind.  But maybe I would.  I’m not quite so egoless as all that.

Despite that aside, I have not started writing anything new since publishing Extra Body.  I did open up and look at Outlaw’s Mind and I remade a version of it with the whole first in media res scene taken out, since the story ended up going in directions that I think were better than that original idea.  But I have no will to work more on it.  Likewise, when I even contemplate working on HELIOS, I feel an almost visceral revulsion or intimidation.  And roughly the same thing applies for DFandD, or any of my other potential stories, like Changeling in a Shadow World and Orion Rising and so on.

The various drawing materials I bought upon being briefly inspired by Facebook “reels” of people drawing have laid fallow since I got them.  I can’t imagine drawing something now.  Nor can I really focus enough to read books or watch lectures on serious treatments of General Relativity or Quantum Mechanics, though I dabble here and there throughout most days.

I did read a new book:  Annihilation.  I had seen the movie, starring (a thoroughly misused) Natalie Portman, and wasn’t very impressed.  But then I stumbled across a video page by a young woman who is a Star Wars fan and an author and who said she had loved the book but then had seen and hated the movie, so I got the book (for Kindle).  It was hypnotic and disturbing and bizarre, and definitely far better than the movie.

Unfortunately, it’s told in first person, and when I read first person books I tend to lose a bit of my own sense of self and start thinking with the narrator’s thoughts, even about my real life, at least for a time.  It’s the closest I come, in a way, to having a real “theory of mind” in the ordinary sense.  Otherwise, I don’t tend to have a concept in my mind of what other people might be thinking or doing or feeling when I’m not in their presence.  I think reading fiction from a young age helped save me from being utterly confused by humans in general.

People are observable phenomena, and can be fascinating and fun and engaging, and I like less than half of them half as well as they deserve.  But other than through their own words, or through fiction, I don’t really have an “image”*** of other people’s thoughts or minds.  I’ve never even for a moment wanted to be someone else (though pretending to be‒i.e., acting‒can be enjoyable), because I can’t really imagine what it would be like to be someone else‒not from a subjective point of view, anyway.

I have been playing guitar and singing a bit in the mornings at the office some days, when I know I am by myself and can feel relatively uninhibited.  That’s sometimes enjoyable and sometimes painful (though in a strangely addictive way), and I occasionally think about making a video like some I’ve made previously, of me playing and singing Nothing Compares 2U, or Fake Plastic Trees, or Lucky, or The Man Who Sold the World, or even Karma Police or Ashes to Ashes or Weird Fishes (though I can’t so far do the “arpeggi” part of that latter song), all of which I can play and sing reasonably well.  But the thought of doing the work is too intimidating, and anyway, I can’t really bear the notion of putting my disgusting face out there for people to see.

Okay, well, that was a meandering bit of nonsense.  Unfortunately, here I am, still here, alive and writing this blog‒if nothing else for the moment.  I hope something will change about all that, and soon.  I cannot continue as I am, but I cannot see any better path other then no path at all.  Still, of all things, writing this blog is probably the most ego-syntonic thing I do, and I greatly appreciate everyone who reads and likes and “likes” it, even if I cannot comprehend why you do.  Just, thank you.  I surely cannot thank you as much as you deserve.

TTFN

*Though, like everything else about me, it turned out not to be good for very much for very long.

**Or should that be “wills-o-the-wisp”?

***Not really the right term.  Perhaps “model” might be better?

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A post triggered by an ongoing problem with WordPress comments

I’m writing this on Monday morning, on my smartphone, on the heels of an issue relating to WordPress*.  Apparently, there are people trying to leave comments on this blog on WordPress, and many of those comments are not actually appearing, which I know from experience can be very frustrating‒especially if it was a comment behind which there was any care and thought‒and which can lead commenters to wonder if they are being blocked.

Just to address that last point, I want to assure all you readers that I am not blocking comments.  I don’t know if I have ever blocked any comment on this blog.  If I have, it was quite a long time ago, and I don’t remember it.

The problem seems to be some manner of ongoing glitch in WordPress, one of which I think I too have been a victim on other sites.  You’d think they’d try to do a bit better for long-term, paying customers, but they appear to be too busy trying to add flashy, unwanted new things to keep up with the various brain-dead social media out there, but not paying enough attention just to keeping their basic functions running as smoothly as possible.

They call their workers “happiness engineers”, which is a cheesy enough title, but at least they could take that job title seriously and try to do what they can to engineer, effectively, the happiness of their customers.

If a bridge over a gorge had been built by civil engineers as reliable as these happiness engineers (to be fair, perhaps it’s really more of a management problem), I think I would be inclined to rappel down, then swim across, and then climb up to get to the other side, rather than driving or walking.  The Tay Bridge itself, subject of one of the worst disasters (and reputedly one of the worst poems) in early rail history, was not much more poorly engineered.

Or perhaps I should say “poorly executed”; again, I cannot be sure that it’s actually a problem with the happiness engineers so much as with the people making decisions at “higher” levels.  All the engineers I’ve known‒and all but one of my roommates at college and many of my other friends at the time were engineers or were at least in the engineering school at Cornell‒have been people who did not like solving a problem poorly if it could be avoided.

Of course, I don’t know how many of the people at WordPress have actual engineering degrees.  Presumably, there are at least some people with degrees in computer science and engineering at the company.  Then again, perhaps I shouldn’t so presume.  After all, “when you presume, you make a pres out of u and me”.

Anyway, I will at least put an inquiry in to WordPress about what might be happening, and it would be good if any of you who are account holders might inquire as well.

I hope you all had a decent (or better than decent) weekend.  Mine was not great; I’m still not feeling too well physically, and mentally I almost never feel very well for very long at a time.  I had a rather minor but personally large disappointment brought about by circumstance that I won’t get into specifically, but it reinforces the notion, which I make in my story “I for one welcome our new computer overlords”, that hope is dangerous, particularly to a person who has tried to become used to and to embrace despair.

I am trying to do otherwise.  I dwell on the negative a lot, here, but I do try to do otherwise.  I’m damned if I know why I try; it’s probably just those stupid, mindless, biological drives and nothing more.  I wish I could rewrite my base code to blunt or eliminate those urges.

But then again, if I could rewrite my base code that way, I might as well rewrite myself to be happy and healthy, right?  Also, I could rewrite myself to be motivated and ambitious and charismatic, so I could become rich and powerful and immortal and eventually take over the world and even the universe!  I would make everything better than it is now, I can say that with little fear of contradiction.  Also, I want a unicorn pony with dragon wings that gets its sustenance by absorbing all the excess calories that I eat, so I never become overweight.

Anyway, my train will be coming soon, and I want to keep this relatively short.  I just want to apologize to the people who have tried to comment but have had difficulty doing so.  I hope you didn’t think I was ignoring you or that I had blocked you; I was not and had not.  I couldn’t honestly say that discourtesy is unspeakably ugly to me**, but it is unpleasant, and I try to avoid it.  I don’t know if I’ll be writing or doing audio the rest of this week, but I will probably make my latest audio into a “video” at least.  In the meantime, try to keep your spirits up.

*Isn’t it interesting how the same preposition‒“on”‒can be used with reference to time, to things being used, and to metaphorical situations?  It’s interesting to me anyway.  Also, of course, it can literally be used to refer to placement, as in “I’m sitting on a bench.”  It could also be used for metaphorical placement, as in “I’m on top of the world”, but I have only rarely been in that state, and it’s been a very long time since the last occurrence‒the last time was 22 years ago, I think, though there were other good times somewhat more recently, at least up until about eleven years ago.  After that, pretty much everything has been shit.

**For one thing, that very phrase contradicts itself, since it’s speaking about how ugly one finds discourtesy.

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The undiscovered country from whose blog no traveler returns

Hello and good morning and all the rest of that stupid bullshit.

I’m writing a blog post today—obviously—which means I’m going in to the office today, which means that, unfortunately, I am still alive.  I cannot give you any good reasons for these facts.  They simply are the case.

There are explanations, of course, as there are for all things, but they entail nothing more than the mindless churning of physical and, at the next level biological, and, at the next level psychological forces that happen more or less on their own.  They carry a certain metaphorical inertia; to divert them requires a deliberate application of some manner of force.  But since they are not literal, straightforward cases of inertia, it’s not always easy to tell just what the proper application of what “forces” should be to cause them to change their direction into one which one might prefer.

I’m at the train station now, waiting for the 2nd train of the day.  I had a terrible day yesterday, pain-wise.  It let up ever-so-slightly in the afternoon to evening, thanks to lots of Aspirin and Tylenol and Icy-Hot and all that stuff, but it still felt as though I had recently tried to do some fairly serious acrobatics without stretching and had not only failed, but had fallen hard on barely-padded ground.  I still feel stiff and sore.  Also, the bases of my thumbs ache severely; for that reason, among others, I’m typing this on my laptop computer rather than my cell phone.

I don’t have much else to report, and I certainly have nothing positive to relay to you.  As my pain eased slightly yesterday, my mood improved slightly, but it was never very good, and it’s now nearly as low as it was yesterday morning.

I’m also a bit nauseated.  That’s probably partly because of the excessive use of analgesics over the last 24 hours, even beyond my ordinary intake.

I really feel horrible, and I don’t know what to do.  I feel no sense of any future other than one of stress and pain and further alienation, or alternatively, of being a burden to people I have no right to bother.  I wish, I wish I had the strength of will just to stop eating and waste away until I die.  That wouldn’t be so bad.  After a while without food, once one gets into deep ketosis, there is little or no real pain, just lassitude.  And I have lassitude anyway, so I don’t think it would be all that much worse.

But it’s very difficult just to say “no” to food when it is available; billions of years of evolution has sifted things so that not eating when food is available is quite difficult.  I’m probably going to have to find some other way.

I’ve looked into things like hemlock—it seems like it might be nice and “classical” to go the way of Socrates—but although some descriptions of his death involve acceptance and serenity and the like, it seems they are highly fictionalized, which should come as no surprise.  Apparently, actual death caused by hemlock poisoning is quite uncomfortable, and associated with nausea and cramping and neurological symptoms of various kinds that might lead one to seek “help”.

Likewise, unripe ackee fruit—which grows in abundance around the house in which I live—is associated with quite uncomfortable symptoms and is not even close to universally fatal.  And again, the urge to try to relieve one’s symptoms might lead to one aborting the whole project.

Of course, asphyxiation via inhaling pure nitrogen or pure helium (for instance) is actually quite benign, since it is not associated with any feeling of suffocation—especially if one has a non-rebreather mask, so one does not retain carbon dioxide, which is the actual source of the feeling of not being able to breathe, and is indeed the primary driver of respiration.  I have two non-rebreather masks, and tubing, and even a regulator valve, but though I ordered helium tanks, I couldn’t figure out how to hook up the party-type helium tank output valve with the tubing and respirator mask—so I let people use the helium for balloons.

Also, one really needs a decent space and privacy for something like that, and one needs to make sure one’s mask doesn’t slip as one loses consciousness.  If that happens, one could live but have hypoxemic brain injury.

I’ve looked into ordering nitrogen tanks, but you can’t just get them delivered already filled; you have to go to some welding supply place or similar to get the nitrogen, and it’s hard to cart a nitrogen tank around when one does not have a vehicle.  There are similar problems with liquid nitrogen.  You can order a crucible (or whatever the term is) in which to carry it from Amazon (as you can the gas tanks) but to get the liquid you need to go to restaurant supply places or medical supply places or similar.  And, again, it’s hard to carry such things around without a vehicle.

Of course, there’s always simple use of blades—the proverbial bare bodkin—but though I am not afraid of cutting myself, to cause life-threatening bleeding thereby is not easy, and it is also supremely messy, leaving behind a horrible spectacle for some poor slob to find.  It’s likewise not entirely reliable and requires privacy.  I could lay down in my shower with water running and do it, but then my “housemates” and the landlord would eventually have to deal with the situation—at the latest by the time I started smelling—and that would be inconsiderate and traumatic.

When I think of the people I’ve known in recent years who have died of overdoses of narcotics—usually heroin—I again find myself wishing I had a drug problem.  But I don’t like opiates, though I was prescribed them for a few years for my chronic pain.  They didn’t work as well as I would hope, and the side-effects were annoying and unpleasant.  Of course, a goodly dose of an opiate plus a goodly dose of a benzodiazepine has a goodly chance of shutting down one’s respiratory drive, but as with asphyxiation above, that can sometimes just lead to brain damage.

My brain is dysfunctional enough.

A good fall from a high building (or mountain or cliff or bridge) is pretty reliable, of course, if one can muster the courage to throw oneself off.  However, there aren’t very many buildings or similar near me that are aesthetically high enough, and I don’t really have access to any of them, anyway.  Also, again, it leads to one making a mess for innocent passersby, and I would rather not do that.

There’s always the prospect of just swimming out into the Atlantic, which is truly close at hand, until exhaustion leads inevitably to drowning.  There’s not much mess that way, and most of what there is might be cleaned up by ocean life.  If I were more comfortable in the water, that might be a good option, and I still do consider it.  But it requires real determination, and I am not all that strong a swimmer.  I mean, I’m a good enough swimmer to swim out far enough to drown, but there’s enough stupid animal fear built into this operating system that I worry I wouldn’t be able to force my way through it.

I really don’t know what to do, or what I should do.  I’m still brainstorming ideas.  Meanwhile, I’ve really got loads of physical pain…but the psychological pain is worse.  The former wears down and eradicates one’s resistance to the latter, and the latter makes it difficult to keep a useful attitude about the former.  And I have so much trouble sleeping.  I’m really very tired all the time.

TTFN

standing on ledge newer

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“Merry Christmas, you filthy animals!”

It is Saturday, the 23rd of December in 2023 (AD), and I am writing this while already at the office; I did not go back to the house last night.  It occurred to me yesterday that, even if the workday were to be called off, I needed to be here, since I had several deliveries—unimaginative Christmas gifts for coworkers—arriving today.  With that thought came the realization that I did not want to commute to the house and then back overnight, and that I would be just as comfortable, or nearly so, sleeping at the office.  It’s not as though there was anyone waiting for me at “home”.

To be fair, I probably did not quite sleep as well as I would have at the house.  Then again, sleep is a fickle friend for me at any time, in any place.  And Saturdays are rather slow workdays at the best of times, so I’ll be able to meditate and/or nod off during the day as needs may have it.  I really ought to do that more, anyway—meditating, I mean.  I used to either meditate or self-hypnotize every day, and over quite a long stretch of time during my teenage years.  I would say that I was more together and mentally stable at that time, but I cannot give all—or possibly any—of the credit for that to my introspective states.  It may be enough that I was also in my hometown, and had a core group of long-term friends, and of course, I was living at home with my family.

In any case, I think it would be good for me to engage in some form of mental practice or meditation practice regularly, just to try to calm my mind a bit.  I’m extremely tense very much of the time, and I think it contributes to my sleep troubles and to overeating.  I rarely eat from hunger—when I’m doing something in which I’m interested, I rarely even feel hunger.  Instead, I eat as a sort of self-soothing behavior, something that becomes less of a problem when I’m less depressed and unhappy.  So, as you can imagine, it’s been pretty bad for quite a while.

Of course, it’s hard to avoid indulging at this time of year, since there are holiday treats and goodies everywhere.  I think since around Halloween I’ve been going back and forth trying to do better with diet and exercise, with highly inconsistent results.  I think that, after Monday at the latest, I should be able at least to avoid most temptations, since even at the office people won’t be bringing or receiving sweets or special foods and people won’t be talking about them as much anymore.  Not that I can use such things as an excuse; the weakness is all mine, of course.  But I must strive to become stronger if I can, and this will at least be somewhat easier with the holidays over.

Speaking of holidays, though, let me use this as my opportunity to wish all of you who celebrate it a Merry Christmas!  It’s a good holiday, a family-oriented and uplifting holiday, whether you focus on religious observation or purely secular observation, and even if you go so far as to use it as a day to celebrate the birth of Newton (whose birthday was December 25th, albeit on the Julian calendar not the Gregorian calendar used in the modern world).

As far as religious observation goes, it should be noted that—as I understand it—Christmas wasn’t even a holiday in Christendom until the late Middle Ages or some such time, when it was more or less engineered to take over from other popular solstice-related celebrations such as Yule and Saturnalia and all that stuff.

It’s fair enough that they didn’t celebrate the birth of Jesus in December, because apparently most biblical scholars agree that he was born sometime in the summer (and that wasn’t in the southern hemisphere—see my post recently that discusses seasons and the solstice and such).  Still, I doubt he’d be too worried about the date of the celebration of his birth being moved.  After all, there’d been a hiatus of about one and a half millennia during which it wasn’t really celebrated at all, though the story—two different versions of it—is there in two of the Gospels (Matthew and Luke*).  He was probably only too willing to take what he could get, as long as it wasn’t frankincense or myrrh.

Sorry, I don’t mean to be disrespectful.  When I was giving the year above, I deliberately only put in the Anno Domini contraction as a show of respect and courtesy, and I did not do so ironically.  Though I don’t think Jesus was perfect as a moral teacher—C.S. Lewis himself admitted that much in an oblique way—even if you’re thoroughly areligious, there are a fair few good things in his sermons.  He certainly was no advocate of war or avarice or nepotism or xenophobia, and hypocrisy really ticked him off.

He did tend to teach in parables a great deal, and he got rather exasperated when people didn’t quite get the points he was making.  I don’t see how any Christian could read the gospels and then take the whole Bible as literal truth.  Jesus was practically screaming in everyone’s face that a lot this was metaphor, and if you take him as an incarnation of God, then surely this can apply to the whole shebang.

Anyway, I won’t get into all that anymore for now.  Belief is tricky.  I’m not good at it in general—I have to check and make sure I have my keys with me about 200 times a day—and I don’t really advocate it; I prefer to be provisionally convinced by evidence and argument and to remain open to have my conclusions updated by new evidence and argument to whatever degree is appropriate.  But I do believe there’s nothing wrong with wishing all of you a Very Merry Christmas (and with words borrowed from my favorite Doctor, at that).

santa-whoand merry

The Happy New Year stuff will come next week.

*Am I the only one who wants to say the gospels as “Matthew, Mark, Luke, and Leia”, or perhaps, “Matthew, Mark, Luke, and Han”, which would at least sound nearly the same?  Best not to read from the book of Boba Fett, though, or so I’ve heard.