Health

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Sleep that knits up the ravell’d blog of care

Hello and good morning.

As those of you who read this blog regularly know, I’ve been ill for almost two weeks now.  I can’t say that I’m fully recovered yet, but‒unfortunately‒I am getting better.  In the early stages of the illness, when I stayed at the house for two of the days of last week, I was at least able to get a bit of extra sleep, thanks to that tendency of the body’s response to illness.  Since then, though, I seem to have rebounded into worse than usual insomnia.  I feel truly horrible, and I also have a persistent cough that’s irritating.

I wonder if there’s anyone out there from my past who truly hates me.  If so, I hope they stumble across this blog, or have already done so, so that they can at least experience a bit of schadenfreude.  It would be nice to think that my pathetic discomfort and self-hatred were at least bringing some joy to the world.  It might be spiteful joy, but I’ll take what I can get.  It’s not as though I’m very good at bringing joy to people I care about and who care about me for very long, at least when they are in regular, close proximity.

My subconscious mind gave me a slight birthday present on Sunday, in that I woke up with a little tune in my head that I’d heard in a dream.  I wasn’t sure if it was something I’ve heard before, but I didn’t and don’t think so.  Anyway, I felt compelled to work out the tune and then put chords to it on Sunday.  Then, Monday morning, I very quickly worked out the guitar melody and chords and did a quick little production of that.  It’s only 16 bars long, so that was easy enough.

I posted the audio here on Monday.  I also made a weird little video with it on my phone; I’ve tried to play with Instagram lately, just because I have a default account since I have a Facebook account.  I posted the combined video there and on YouTube (see below).

I think it was too much of a distraction making my strange introduction and then adding the weird effects.  That was me just playing around with the Clip Champ app from Microsoft, just to see what I could do with it.  But my intro is longer than the song, and I don’t think it adds much.

Anyway, if anyone recognizes the tune from somewhere, please let me know.  If not, I guess this was my personal Yesterday* kind of moment, though my tune is much more banal than Sir Paul’s.  There’s no real shame in that, though.  The vast majority of all songs ever written are not as good as Yesterday.

On a whim, I worked out the tune of another (pre-existing) song on an online keyboard yesterday‒I don’t even recall what song‒but it was interesting that I ended up “singing” it in my head in C Major/A minor.  It wasn’t deliberate, and I only realized it as I finished working out the whole melody.

This was striking because that was the key signature that the above, dream-based song came out in, and in which it is played, above.  However, I know that is not the key in which I originally dreamed it, because as soon as I woke up with it in my head on Sunday, I opened my phone’s voice recorder and tried to sort of hum the tune into it.  I’ll put that recording right here, as evidence (or whatever).

As I knew my voice was hoarse, and I wasn’t sure how well it would come across later (even to me) it wasn’t long before I opened up the online virtual keyboard (it was too early to use the real one) and worked out and wrote down the tune.

Anyway, the point is, between the time I had hummed the tune directly after my dream, which I’m pretty sure was in the key in which I dreamed it, and when I worked it out on the virtual keyboard, I’d taken it from G-sharp major/F minor (which I think is roughly the key in which I hummed it) to C major/A minor.  I don’t know why this happened, but it does make nearly all the black key notes go away.  C major is the simplest, most basic key‒in a sense, anyway‒whereas G-sharp major has its root on a black key.

I’d like to imagine that my subconscious mind corrected it to an easier key signature for me, and that’s not entirely beyond the realm of possibility.  I’ve been playing piano since I was nine (not continuously) and cello since I was ten (ditto), if only at a very flippant and superficial level, never developing any real skill with either instrument (and I do not have perfect pitch in the sense of being able to tell you what note is being played when I hear it, but I can certainly tell if something it out of tune with itself and otherwise deal with relative pitch).  Still, my subconscious might very well have enough imprinted memory of notes and scales to steer me toward easier keys when I’m writing something or sounding out something by ear.

All of this, though, is just a meandering distraction.  I’m not likely to do anything more with my dream-based tune, even if I become more firmly convinced that it’s mine.  I’ve occasionally found myself humming some impromptu lyrics to it in my head, but they are horrifyingly bad and stupid.  Compared to them, McCartney’s first lyrics to Yesterday‒“scambled eggs…dah dah dah dah dah, I love your legs”‒are worthy of Shakespeare or Milton.

So I’m not going to tell anyone what those are.  Anyway, sixteen bars do not a song make, as Yoda might say, so if I were going to turn it into something, I’d need to extrapolate.  That’s not hard to do once you’ve got a basic melody, but it requires you to have the drive to make a song.

I have no such drive for anything, really.  I can barely write this blog, and I am only doing it because I am a creature of habit and routine.  I am thoroughly exhausted by my worsening sleep, and I feel as though I’m experiencing the world through a multi-dimensional haze.  I’m also very depressed and I miss my kids and all the various other people for whom I’ve been too unpleasant for them to want to stay around anymore.

From day to day, and for a very long time, I have been thoroughly alone, and I fear that serves the greater good of the people who matter to me.  Even this week at work, since I’ve been here every day, has been far less successful than the days when I was out of the office.  Everything tends to be better when I’m not around.

I’m not living; I’m just waiting to die.  It’s taking a long frikking time, though, and I’m running out of patience and energy.  But I still can’t seem to sleep.  As the Ramones sang, “I wanna be sedated”.  I wonder if Michael Jackson’s old doctor is making house calls**.

TTFN

*Every Breath You Take had a similar origin.

**Is it too soon to be joking about him?  I have long been personally affronted by the fact that he spent less time in prison than I did.  Then again, he wasn’t in Florida.

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Performance is a kind of will or testament which argues a great sickness in his judgment that blogs it.

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday (of course) and so it’s time for my weekly blog post.

There have been no interim posts this week because I have been quite under the weather since Saturday night.  This doesn’t necessarily imply that if I had not been sick, I would definitely have written any extra posts, but the illness made that possibility all but zero.  And, of course, now that the potential extra-post days have passed, we can say that, at least in this part of the Everettian multiverse, it did not happen.

I was off work on Monday and Wednesday.  I sort of had to go in on Tuesday, because I needed to prepare the payroll, and most of that data comes back on Tuesday.  It was no mean task, because we have more people working than in the past, and we have two offices now, so I was somewhat stressed out, in addition to being sick.  I was able to finish the job from the house yesterday morning, because I had prepared everything adequately.

Anyway, I’m heading back in today‒though in a truly civilized society which the US is not, I would probably stay in the house until I was more recovered than I am.  Still, I really don’t like lying around there.  It’s crowded (with my own clutter of stuff) and it’s dim, and it’s not as though there’s anyone around to take care of me, so I have to do everything for myself anyway.  That limits my rest a bit.  In any case, it’s not a restful environment.  Though I don’t quite know what would constitute a restful environment for me, honestly.

Of course, yesterday, when I was at the house, they had a tremendously successful day at the office, perhaps the most successful day that we’ve ever had, doing as much business in one day as we used to do in a whole week.  This is yet more evidence supporting a hypothesis that I have long suspected to be true:  everything tends to go better when I am not around.

Probably, even those of you who read this blog regularly would have slightly better lives if you did not read it.

It’s pretty clear that things got easier for my parents after we had a falling out (for a while) and I took over my room and board and everything else for myself during the latter half of college*; they were finally able to get on with their freer lifestyle now that the last of their kids was truly out of the house (I do not mean to imply that this was in any way their aim or desire; that would be so far beneath them as to be indiscernible).  The next time my parents and I saw each other was when I graduated from medical school.

Also, of course, my ex-wife divorced me specifically because she wasn’t happy, and I think she has been much happier since she did so.  My kids certainly seem to have done well, especially since the time I was more or less completely excised from their lives by the State of Florida (it nothing to do with any kind of DCF parental problem finding, it was just me being sent away to be a guest at the FSP, securing the final nail in the coffin of my prior life).  Not having me around is certainly not acting to their detriment, at least, which is usually what having me around does to people.

In fact, non-family members** who feel the most affinity with me, or with whom I feel the most affinity, tend not to turn out well.  No fewer than two of the friends of my ex-wife’s parents who heard me sing*** for the first time and were enthusiastically and convincingly complimentary‒one of them even asked for a tape‒died within a year.  And two of the people at the office with whom I got along well and felt affinity, and one of whom could have become a close friend (he was the one who read Son of Man and liked it and was a techy sort of person) died of drug overdoses.

I’m not positing any kind of supernatural process, here; I don’t think there is such a thing as a real curse or anything along those lines.  But I think that there are aspects of my personality and nature and character which, when they resonate with people strongly in the wrong way, tend to reinforce bad outlooks and bad health, and can even lead to untimely death.

This is just a hypothesis, of course.  But it does seem potentially true that even the world itself would be slightly, but noticeably, happier, healthier, more prosperous, and in general better off, if I were not around.

It’s the ironic turnaround of the song Creep, in which Thom Yorke sings, “I want you to notice / when I’m not around.”  Well, people do tend to notice when I’m not around, and what they notice is that everything is at least a little bit better.

Like the fella once said, “Ain’t that a kick in the head?” to quote another, older song, also ironically****.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like my present illness is going to be lethal, though I suppose it could surprise me.  It is possible to seem to be improving and then to worsen or to experience complications or to have a superinfection that becomes life-threatening.  But the world is not usually so fair or just.  Jim Henson died in his prime of what would ordinarily have been a treatable infection, while slow-growing, purulent tumors such as I persist long past even their potential usefulness or value.

Ain’t that a hole in the boat?

TTFN

*I had a full scholarship, thankfully, otherwise I never could have gone there in the first place.

**Relatives appear to have some manner of immunity.

***I used to be better than I am currently, because I practiced more, and sang more “formal” stuff.

****I will not quote Alanis Morisette.

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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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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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…what dreams may come, when we have shuffled off this mortal blog…

Hello and good morning on this Thursday‒a day of the week on which those in the know have been able, these last several years, to indulge in reading my weekly blog posts.  And this is, of course, another iteration thereof; not to be confused with Iterations of Zero, my other, far less prolific blog, which I had originally created to be a place where I could discuss things unrelated to my fiction writing.

Of course, the notion that this blog was supposed to focus on my fiction has long since mostly gone by the wayside.  It never seems to have made much difference for that, in any case.  And of course, as many of you will know, for quite a while I wrote here almost daily, and I didn’t write any fiction at all during that time.

Plans or dreams or hopes are whatever they are, I guess (there’s a hunk of logic, right?).  I suspect that, even for the most successful and fulfilled of all people, their plans bear only vague resemblance to the specifics of their outcomes.  Probably, the most successful, the most fulfilled people, are able to make general plans but also to adapt to and optimize based upon the various comparatively unpredictable events that actually happen 

Your host, not fulfilled*, has had a bad week.

This weekend was so hot and humid that I had to sleep with the AC off on Saturday and Sunday nights.  Wait, you may ask, why would it be that high heat and humidity led me to turn off the air conditioning?  Because the unit‒imperfectly but permanently placed in the wall‒leaked so much condensation that, despite tupperware-style buckets put down to try to catch it and old clothes to soak it up, the water seeped into my futon.  It was better to go old school and just let the fan blow on me.

Then, after the week started, on Monday night I literally did not sleep at all.  I got not one moment of sleep, just spent the night lying around, trying not to do anything that would awaken me more.  Because of that, on Tuesday evening, having no energy to face my commute, I just slept at the office.  I got at least a few hours of broken sleep there, on the floor, with my head on my backpack for a pillow.  It was more restful than the previous three nights, which may not be saying much, but is nevertheless true.

I have not worked on Extra Body at all this week.  I just don’t have the energy, even though I’m nearly done with the third edit.  I just don’t have the energy.  I’ve also hardly played anything on the guitar, though yesterday morning I did a little, but my singing was rough and my voice got hoarse very quickly.  I haven’t even been bringing my little laptop computer with me.  I’m writing this on my phone, using Google Docs.

Tomorrow, at least, is a positive day.  I don’t mean that in the general, Annie sort of way**.  Cat forbid I should ever attempt such sickening pseudo-optimism.  No, it’s specific to this particular, non-fungible tomorrow.  Not only is it Friday the 13th, a day I always like when it happens (largely because some people stupidstitiously think it’s “unlucky”) but it’s also a day to celebrate one of the two most important events ever in my existence.  I won’t get into more specifics, but historically, for me, it more than made up for what happened two days earlier.

Anyway, after that, I’ve got nothing.  I don’t even know if I’ll actually get back to work on Extra Body or if I’ll just say “fuck it” to that and to any other attempt to do anything creative or positive or productive.  I suspect that I’ve already done all the good that I’m ever going to do in the world, unimpressive though it may be.

I guess futility is really a characteristic of everything that happens in the universe, ever, at least on a large enough scale.  The universe itself‒our universe, this instantiation or region or whatever you want to call it of whatever possible larger multiverse or metaverse or omniverse may be‒is itself the very physical instantiation of something immense beyond reckoning (possibly infinite in spatial extent) and yet ultimately trending simply toward some version of “heat death” if our understanding of physics and cosmology are even vaguely correct

Of course, there is certainly much we don’t know about the nature and structure of the cosmos.  And if our civilization persists in whatever form and continues to grow and create more knowledge, it may even someday be that cosmic engineering could be possible, or even the creation of new cosmoses.

But the second law of thermodynamics seems pretty inescapable in the long run‒it’s not just physics, it’s the raw mathematics that seems to imply it.  I think I wrote a post on IoZ a long time ago about that.  If I find it, I’ll have included the link.

Anyway, let us draw this particular local instantiation of futility to a close for now.  I hope you have all been having a much better week than I, and that your days and weeks and so on improve consistently, as much as is reasonably possible.  I would really like that.

TTFN

*To paraphrase Shirley Jackson’s description of Hill House.

**“The sun’ll come ooouuut…tomorrow…”

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For thy part, I do wish thou wert a blog, that I might love thee something.

Hello.  Good morning.

I’m not actually sure what’s supposed to be good about it, though.  There’s certainly almost nothing of noteworthy “goodness” in my day-to-day life.  Perhaps there are some of you out there who have “good” things happening in your lives.

I have to guess, or to suspect, that there are at least some such people among those who read my blog.  The distribution of such “goodness” is probably statistical, so even if that distribution is heavily skewed toward the “not good” end of the axis, there are likely to be at least some people who fall toward the better end as opposed to the bitter end.

I’ve been having a lot of severe pain recently, more than usual, though I’ve tried to adjust various things and habits and exercises and practices and so on to see if I can make it less severe.  Nothing has made much of a difference so far.

My boss gave me the information for a doctor he went to see when he was having trouble with his own back, and apparently this doctor did him some significant good.  I am considering going, but of course, I don’t actually have medical insurance.  Still, most offices have an uninsured rate of payment, and it’s usually not as crazy an amount as people might think, especially for routine visits and such.

It’s only when things like hospitalizations happen that healthcare becomes ruinously expensive.  That’s really what I suspect should be the only stuff covered by insurance, since that would probably drive down the price of routine care.

The fact that health insurance—for those who have it—aspires to cover every little thing (or at least began that way) encourages increases in the prices of every little thing, not least because the administration of insurance introduces new steps into the whole payment process, and that inevitably carries inefficiencies and other costs.

Anyway, I could go on and on into speculation and discussion of the economics of healthcare, but it’s a subject about which one hears so little of intelligence that even bringing it up engenders frustration.

I don’t think it will probably do me any good to go to my boss’s doctor, though I’m sure he’s good, based on what my boss says.  The problem is, I went through that whole cycle ad nauseam, for more than ten years—trying to treat my pain through interventions, through various different medications, through exercise, and of course, through surgery.

I even had a trial of one of those implanted cortical stimulators, where they thread a wire along your spinal cord that produces an electrical wave that’s supposed to interfere with pain signals.  I felt like I had been turned into some form of Black & Decker™ drill or jackhammer, since it seemed as though half my body was vibrating violently.  But in order to suppress the pain, the power level had to be turned up so high that I could barely walk.

Ultimately, nothing made a huge difference in my pain, including the laminectomy and fusion of my badly damaged (torn all the way to the middle, not just bulging) L5-S1 intervertebral disc.  The surgery did reduce my pain to some degree, and made it somewhat more stable, but it certainly did not come close to making it go away.

I’m not aware of any new breakthroughs in pain management, let along pain cure, and I do keep at least a weather eye out for such things, and I have the expertise and knowledge to recognize them.  There aren’t even really any new pain medications, whether NSAIDs or otherwise.

On the other hand, it seems one can always find the would-be curtailment of people’s access to pain treatment by those who think they have some form of moral obligation to tell other people how to live their lives, despite their own existences being about as enviable as that of a hippo’s rectal leech.  Now there’s a group (the people, not the leeches) I would happily subject to steadily and inescapably increasing daily levels of pain until they finally beg for death.

Actually, they probably aren’t worth all that effort.  They should just be disintegrated so that everyone else can get on with their lives.

Back to the earlier point:  I know enough about the treatment of chronic pain, and about interventions such as epidurals and the like, to know that they are very far from panaceas.  I’ve tried them, more than once, and they have had little to no benefit.  I’ve tried a lot of things.  And yet, my pain not only continues, it spreads.  Most days, most regions of my body are in pain most of the time.  It’s exhausting, and there is almost nothing positive in my life to counterbalance it.

Ironically though, Extra Body is apparently quite a cheerful story.  I’m now well into my second edit-through of the piece, and my sister, who has read the first draft, says she thinks it has the most positive or upbeat (I don’t recall the specific words she used) ending of anything I’ve written since The Chasm and the Collision.

I don’t know where such upbeat writing comes from, other than that it’s simply the nature of this particular story, and it has been since I first thought of the idea.  It’s just not the sort of tale that has a dark or grim ending; I can’t really claim credit for that.  It’s like wondering why a romantic comedy ends with a couple getting together and not with the Great Old Ones rising from the depths to destroy the world*.  That’s just what happens (and what doesn’t happen) in those kinds of stories.

Still, at least maybe it means that someday people will actually read my story, and if they do, they will finish it with a positive feeling, and so perhaps be inclined to read more of my stuff.  (The fools!  Bwa-ha-haaah!)

Oh, well, it’s not important, and this is getting boring, just like everything else.  Almost everything is either boring or is actively unpleasant and painful.

There’s a line from the Pink Floyd song One of My Turns that goes “…and nothing is very much fun anymore”, but I would add that almost nothing is fun at all anymore.  Or, to twist the words of Kurt Vonnegut, “nothing was beautiful and everything hurt”.  Physics is getting boring, as are mathematics, computer science, biology, philosophy, psychology, fantasy and science fiction and horror, books and movies and TV shows and streaming stuff and YouTube videos…all of it is more or less unpleasant.  Human civilization overall is almost entirely moronic.

And there’s certainly nobody who particularly wants to spend time with me.  You’ve read my blog posts; at least you’ve read this one.  Can you blame people for not wanting me around?

I didn’t think so.

Anyway, that’s more than enough of my bullshit for now.  I hope you have as good a day as possible with your own bullshit, whatever form it might take.

TTFN

*Though it might be funny to write a romcom with that sort of ending, e.g., When Harry Met Sally in the Cabin in the Woods.

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There’s the respect that makes calamity of so long blogs

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, and so it’s time for another weekly blog post.  Last Thursday I was out sick, so I only posted a very brief, almost telegraphic announcement of the fact that I wasn’t going to write a “true” post that day, and I said that I might write a true post on Friday if I was feeling better.  Of course, I was not feeling better by Friday, so there was no such post.

I’ve nearly recovered from my acute illness—probably some respiratory virus, but nothing too terribly severe—and now I am more or less back on my normal schedule.

Speaking of being “back”, though, my back has been acting up severely this week, and in an atypical fashion.  I’m not sure what triggered it.  Possibly it’s just due to being sick, with the coughing and the lying around more than usual and so on.  Possibly it’s something else.  Anyway, I’ve had to go to a combination of near-overdoses on my various OTC pain medications, and that’s not wonderful.  It got so severe yesterday that I was actually saying out loud that, if it didn’t improve, I was going to have to find some relatively high parking garage nearby and jump off it.  I was not exaggerating, as I think was obvious to those around me.

It’s easy enough to wonder why I don’t do that anyway, given that there is very little in my life that’s positive, and what positivity exists is episodic, and it can’t make up for the constant negatives of pain and illness and sleeplessness and depression and so on.  The closest I come to any comradely activity is streaming YouTube videos of people reacting to songs or movies that I like.  It’s almost, but not quite, exactly unlike watching a movie with a friend who has never seen it before.

Speaking of paraphrasing or otherwise referring to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, I’m most of the way through the first run of editing Extra Body.  There’s a long way to go, since I usually do as many as seven such iterations before considering my editing done.  I figure by that time I’ll usually have lost any proprietary affection for a story and it will begin to bore me, so it’ll be easier to cut out extraneous material.

That’s the principle, at least.  I don’t know how well it’s worked hitherto; I’m too deep inside the process to trust my evaluation.  I did at least transcribe the material I had written so far, in passing, on HELIOS, so that if/when I’m ready, I’ll be able to pick up writing that by hand in its first draft.

Extra Body is my first non-horror story in a while (unless you count the beginning I made on writing The Dark Fairy and the Desperado, which is certainly not horror, but is also certainly nowhere near done, if it ever will be).  It’s hard for me to tell if it’s a good choice to have reverted to a sort of lighthearted science fiction story set in the modern world, but at least I was able to squeeze the first draft out.

Of course, I’m paring down the word count as I go.  As I’m sure is obvious to all of you, I get rather wordy when I write, especially when I’m using the computer keyboard, since I type quickly and usually can do so more readily even than I can speak out loud.

I’ve been reading some more books about quantum field theory (and related subjects) lately.  It’s still very intro level stuff, of course, but either because recurrent exposure to increasingly technical material is gradually sinking into my head, or because I’m just getting a tiny bit “smarter” overall over time, I’m actually finding some of it more familiar and understandable than before.

I must say that I was a little bit proud of myself not too long ago when I was thinking about how complex numbers are represented using a two-dimensional plane, with internally consistent mathematics and whatnot, and I wondered if one could have three-part complex numbers.  I soon realized that only even-numbered ones would work, and then I learned that these were indeed a thing (i.e., quaternions) and that indeed only even-numbered versions of such things can work.  Of course, it’s very difficult to visualize something that has four dimensions, so you just have to do the math, and I haven’t started to work on or learn that seriously, but I played with some “higher order” complex-number multiplications a few times, which was how I saw that only even-numbered ones, with separate “imaginary” roots would work.

On a vaguely related note:  I was listening to Sean Carroll’s podcast yesterday evening.  He was speaking to Doris Tsao, a neuroscientist who specializes in facial recognition and processing centers of the brain, and she mentioned that the attributes of a face can be thought of as many-dimensional, in the sense that there are numerous “variables” that can be represented about any given face, and that they effectively comprise a higher-dimensional space.

Then she turned the matter around and noted that there are apparently those who consider using such things as faces as ways of intuiting mathematical or related systems with higher dimensions, thus representing them in ways that the human mind is capable of visualizing.  I though that was a fascinating notion*.

It reminds me little bit of the concept of the “memory palace”, a mnemonic/rhetorical tool that originated in ancient Greece (so I understand) in which one associates the aspects of, say, a speech one is going to give with imagined artifacts or decorations in some imagined hall or room, so that the aspects of that speech can more readily be remembered and brought to mind when needed.

There are several fictional characters, most notably Hannibal Lecter and the BBC’s Sherlock, who use rather exaggerated versions of these memory palaces.  The one described in Hannibal is more coherent than the one in Sherlock, but they both take great liberties with how the concept was originally used.  Nevertheless, for the longest time, thanks to the amusing tableau** Thomas Harris described for how Hannibal Lecter had “stored” Clarice Starling’s (fictional) home address, I could readily reconstruct her address at will.  I think I may still be able to do it.  It should be something like “#33 Tindall Ave, Arlington, Virginia, 22308”.  If anyone wants to check my recollection, that would be welcome.  I’m not certain I got it right.

I’ve usually found such mnemonics more trouble than they’re worth.  It’s easier for me to connect concepts in the real world, building mental models of the way things work rather than trying to memorize.  This means I probably don’t learn as quickly as some do, but I learn deeply when I do, and it’s easier to connect one model to another and to spot analogies and similarities and possible connections between systems that might at first seem unrelated.  That was quite useful in medical practice, as I’m sure you can imagine.

Oh, I almost forgot:  Welcome to the first day of August in 2024!

That’s all I have to say about that.

Apparently the summer Olympics are currently taking place, but I’ve been unable to muster any interest in them, though I used to love them, and I find that the manufactured controversies about some apparent misconstrual of the opening ceremony or some such (and the juvenile ripostes by political antagonists of the original misconstruers responding to the supposed offense) all serves simply to reinforce my feeling that not just the human race, but indeed all life of any kind, is a bad idea.  Thank goodness for the apparent inescapability of the second law of thermodynamics.

Anyway, I feel I’ve been meandering about here, randomly bouncing from topic to topic, without any consistency or coherency, so I’ll bring this to a close soon.  I fear that this once-weekly blog posting suffers from the fact that there are topics I probably would have brought up as solitary daily blog posts when I was doing them, but that I now want to try to squeeze in here.

I just can’t write (or edit) new fiction and write daily blog posts too, not while I’m forced to keep my day job.  If anyone out there wants to pay for my living expenses and support me so I can both write new fiction and write daily blog posts while still studying physics and programming and the like in the meantime, please, let yourself be known!  I’d be pleased to hear from you.

Otherwise, I’m pretty sure none of this is going to last very much longer.  My pain and dysthymia and alienation and insomnia are increasingly unpleasant, and there are fewer and fewer things in my life that compensate.

Here’s to Macbeth’s proverbial last syllable of recorded time.  L’mavet!***

TTFN

*It does come up against difficulties when considering the notion of orthogonal axes of vector spaces being able to be rotated into one-another.  It’s hard to see how one could intuitively consider rotating the variables of, say, eye size and cheek color into one another, or what an inner (or “dot”) product or cross product of two such variables could mean…though with the latter, it makes the use of the “right hand rule” an amusing invocation of a slap in the face…or at least poking someone’s cheek.

**Involving Jesus (age 33) marching along with a .308 Enfield rifle at shoulder arms, followed by J. Edgar Hoover in a tutu, followed by Clarice driving a “Tin Lizzy” model T Ford, going past Arlington National Cemetery.  Something like that, anyway.

***This is an expression I invented this morning, the counter-toast to the famous L’chaim, which in Hebrew means “to life”.  Then, being me, I jotted down some words for the first verse of a parody song of “To Life” from Fiddler on the Roof:


“To death!  To death!  L’mavet!

L’mavet, L’mavet, to death!

Here’s to the father I tried to be

Here’s to that travesty

Drink L’mavet, to death,

To death, L’mavet.

L’mavet, L’mavet, to death.

Death has a way of releasing us

Luring and teasing us

Drink L’mavet, to deeeeeaaaath…”

That’s as far as I got, but I did only work on it for about five minutes, so, it’s not too bad.

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No regular post today…

I’m out sick from work, and so I’m not writing the typical weekly post.  Assuming I go to work tomorrow, I will try to write a post then.  Otherwise, I will “see” you all next week…meaning, of course, you’ll see my blog post, not that I’ll actually see any of you.

Why did I bother with scare quotes and the word “see” if I was just going to explain the obvious figure speech anyway?  I’m even weird to myself.

Oh, well.  Have a good day.

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My charity is outrage, life my shame, and in that shame still blog my sorrows’ rage.

Hello and good morning.

It’s Thursday, and it’s thus time for my now once again weekly blog post.  I hope you’re all pleased.

Before I go any further, does anyone out there know any way to reset the default font in Microsoft Word back to Calibri?  As I have mentioned before, I cannot stand the new Aptos font.  If I could send a terminator* back in time to kill the mother of the person who designed that font, I would be strongly tempted to do so.

But, wait, you might say.  Surely if I have access to terminator and time travel technologies, there must be other, less homicidal ways to change the basic font of a word processing program.  That may well be so, but violent matricide is all such a person deserves, I’m afraid.  Anything less would not convey the degree of my antipathy.  I’m inclined to say the entire family tree should be eliminated, but eventually the line of any living person intersects with the line of all people alive on the planet, so to wipe out the oldest ancestor would be to wipe out a common ancestor to all living humans, thus wiping out the whole human race.

Hey, wait, maybe that’s not such a bad thought.

While we’re at it, maybe we can go back over three billion years ago, to that warm pool about which Darwin spoke, and spray some Lysol, thus aborting all life on this planet.  I suppose life might start randomly again somewhere else, even if one did such a thing.  After all, it happened pretty quickly once conditions became conducive, implying that it might not do just to wipe out the spot where the ancestors of all actual modern life began, but might instead be necessary literally to sterilize the whole planet.  But how do you do that if even the collision with Theia that is the presumed origin of the moon didn’t do it?

Still, while the origin of basic life seems to have been a strong or at least a rapid tendency, the formation of eukaryotes and then multicellular life seems to have been much harder, taking another two and a half to three billion years after the earliest life to evolve on the planet.  So maybe, if a different proto-life had formed, life would never have progressed beyond something like bacteria.

Okay, well, I think I’ve made it clear that I don’t like Aptos.  And now that I’ve finished the first draft of Extra Body, I think I may in future switch over to using Google Docs for my word processing.  I hate unnecessary change in the first place—such as all the tweaks and upgrades and nonsense that all the apps and systems are constantly enacting, and the changes in WordPress that nearly always make the platform less convenient—but when they are changes for the worse, I really cannot abide them.

What misguided notions led Microsoft to think that their weird little new font with its curlicues and malformations of letters would be an improvement?  Can entire software companies develop global degenerative neurological conditions?  Or is it just a matter of the second law of thermodynamics, ensuring that any local cleverness is an ephemeral exception?

Just look what’s happened to the United States.

Anyway, as I mentioned above, I have completed the first draft of Extra Body as of yesterday morning.  I did not write on Friday, because I really felt like crap, mentally.  I honestly suspected that my brain was crashing, experiencing a burgeoning system failure (speaking of degenerative neurological conditions).  But then, on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday mornings, I wrote a total of 5,599 words, bringing the final first-draft tally to 80,676 words, at 123 pages.

I don’t know if the tale is any good, but it’s certainly impressively long for something that was imagined as a short story.  I’m going to take a very brief break before I begin my intended draconian editing process, during which time I mean to transcribe what I’ve typed so far of HELIOS** into a spiral bound notebook so that when I get to the appropriate stage, I can just continue writing that first draft by hand.

Of course, this is all extremely speculative.  I don’t expect that it will come to fruition, because I know that I simply cannot survive as my life is and—more importantly—as I am.  In case you can’t tell, I’m constantly almost completely defined by tension and hostility (though I do my best never to allow them actually to be released unjustly; I may almost always wish to wipe out all life in the universe, but I almost never do it).  The world, the planet, the biosphere, what have you:  none of it seems natural to me, none of it seems good or beautiful or welcoming.

I feel like I’m already in some Lovecraftian otherverse, not just a stranger in a strange land but an alien entity in an alien universe, where there are not even an integer number of spatial or time dimensions.  I truly sympathize with Agent Smith in the original The Matrix, when he says, “I hate this place, this zoo, this prison, this reality, whatever you want to call it, I can’t stand it any longer.  It’s the smell—if there is such a thing—I feel saturated by it…”

Of course, I don’t think he was literally saying that it was solely the smell that bothered him.  This was merely the metaphor, the shorthand, the figurative focus of his antipathy.  The sense of smell is merely the most elemental, the oldest, the most direct sense, and it tends to elicit the most visceral responses.  Even bacteria can be said to “smell” the world.

Lest anyone be fooled, I want to make clear that it’s not politics and social dysfunction and the like that make me so antipathic toward the world, though politics is pathetic and contemptible.  But politics—including dishonesty, hypocrisy, willful stupidity, delusion, political violence, and all such manifestations of primate dominance hierarchical jockeying—has always been pathetic and juvenile and worthy of sneers and nausea (as well as occasional mordant, contemptuous laughter).

Anyway, that’s about a thousand words in this post already.  I could go on and on spewing vitriol, but I don’t think it would make much difference.  I don’t know how I can possibly survive as I am, as things are.  More to the point, I don’t know why I would possibly survive as I am, as things are.

The world is disgusting, my life is almost entirely uncomfortable and frankly painful, and above all, I find myself disgusting.  I try to distract myself with writing, and with some music, and with studying physics and mathematics and languages, using various books and apps and so on.  I even pretend I have friends by watching YouTube videos of people reacting to songs movies I like.  But nothing is fun.  And none of my chronic pain and sensory issues have improved.  And don’t even get me started on insomnia!

Oddly enough, I think I would feel less alone if I were truly the only person on the planet, or if I were a castaway on an island.  Perhaps I’m wrong, of course; that is purely speculation.  But it feels like it would be the case, and that’s not a good feeling.

Well, I hope (and suspect) that most of you are doing and feeling better than I am.  That almost has to be a good thing.  Please take care of each other and yourselves.  Despite all the people and things I feel that I might wish didn’t exist, or that could be obliterated, you are among the rare few to whom that doesn’t apply.

TTFN

*As in the movies created by James Cameron, not the line that separates night and day on an astronomical body illuminated by a star.

**A little less than 3,000 words.

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I must have liberty withal, as large a charter as the wind, to blog on whom I please

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, and so it’s time for another of my weekly blog posts.

It’s also the 4th of July, which in the USA is Independence Day, the day on which we celebrate the official founding of the country, the date on which the Declaration of Independence was signed and “published”.

I’m often led to wonder how many—or should I say, how few—people in the US have actually read the Declaration of Independence even once.  It’s really not a very long document.  It’s not.  There are, so I’m told, 1320 words in the document proper, which goes up to 1458 words if you count the title and all the signatures*.  I’ve written many blog posts longer than that!  And yet, I wonder how many of the most vociferous “patriots” have actually read it.  There are even YouTube videos of someone else reading it to you, if that’s easier than reading it yourself.

Most of the loud and proud advocates of one or another political affiliation aren’t really people who have first evaluated and then adopted a particular set of ideals.  They are sports fans, rooting for their arbitrarily chosen team, angry when a coach or player they don’t like is seeing prominence, happy when their team is winning for the moment, imagining that they have some effect on the game—and perhaps they do have some effect—deluding themselves that they really understand or intuit their sport well.

Ironically, of course, many actual sports fans really do have deep knowledge of their sport.  They know a bit about its history, they study actual statistics, they recognize hidden complexities, all in fields where there is almost literally nothing important at stake—beyond the salaries and careers of athletes, coaches, and commentators, and the joy of fans.

But in areas where it can potentially, truly matter to them, most people accept random streams of noise from various websites and social media platforms and pundits and—Cat help them—Fox News as more than enough data for them to use to choose political candidates.  Except, they don’t really, actually even  use any of that information, at least not any pertinent information, to pick and choose candidates.  That would require effort.

Cat forbid any of them read the Constitution.  That’s a little longer than the Declaration of Independence**, but unlike the Declaration, it is an actual, legal document—the operating system of the United States of America, if you will.  To read the whole thing, once a year—or even once in a lifetime—doesn’t seem too high a bar even for the average person to clear.  Again, I believe there are YouTube videos that basically consist of someone reading the document aloud.

And Schoolhouse Rock did such a lovely and catchy song version of the preamble to the Constitution when I was young that I don’t think I’ll ever forget it while I am alive.  Indeed, it may be that, if I ever haunt some location after death, unlucky visitors to that place after midnight on moonless nights will hear a hollow, chilling voice singing, “We the people…in order to form a more perfect union…”

Given that people read all sorts of stupidities and absurdities on social media, one might think that familiarizing themselves with the documents that underlie the society in which they live might be not just useful but doable.  It might even be useful to study something of the political and moral philosophy behind these documents, and the jurisprudence that has grown up around them since the country began.

I’m tilting at windmills, I guess.  Still, if you live in the US and haven’t read the Declaration of Independence in a while, I encourage you to do so.  Even atheists often sing carols on Christmas; if they can do that, how hard can the other thing be?

Remaining in nation-level politics:  today is also the day of a General Election in the UK.  It’s apparently expected that the Labor Party will win the majority of seats in parliament and that the Tories will be ousted from power after quite a long time “in charge”***.  I suspect it will just be another instance of “meet the new boss, same as the old boss”, but we shall see.  While no one actually runs or controls anything, there are actions and laws that can have effects on patterns and outcomes in the short and long-term.

It’s not as straightforward to achieve any given end as politicians and pundits would like to believe, or would like you to believe, but it does happen.  This is one reason I think we should treat all new laws and regulations literally as experiments, with pre-chosen measures of outcomes upon which to evaluate the successes and/or failures, as well as side-effects, of any given act of legislature.

It’s simply not enough to have good intentions.  It never has been, and it never will be.  Good intentions are merely the beginning of actually doing good, and they are barely even that.  They are more akin to the very first, mild early pangs of hunger that eventually must be turned into actions such as hunting and gathering and starting fires and cooking food and then chewing and eating it, or the modern equivalents thereof.

In other news, I wrote only 3,752 net new words on Extra Body this week, since I had last Saturday off.  It’s now 107 pages long (in current format), and yes, it really, honestly, is nearly done—at least the first draft is nearly done.

I’m not sure why it’s taking me so long to finish.  Maybe it’s because it’s not in any sense a horror story, so I can’t bring my darker self to bear upon it; darkness is, after all, my dominant aspect.  I don’t think that’s really the cause, though.  I think it’s really just because I am nearly out of gas, with no thoughts or hopes for any future worth having for myself.

I’ve had very bad pain this week, and my insomnia continues, and my tinnitus and disequilibria continue, and the noise and not-infrequent idiocy is no more bearable than before.  And I have very little in my life to counterbalance the negatives, to make up for the minor tortures of daily life, not least among which is the willful human stupidity to which I alluded above.

I probably ought to expunge myself from the world before I decide to try to expunge the world itself.  It’s always a temptation.  I frequently brainstorm ideas for relatively modest interventions that could destabilize the world, both politically and physically, just to try to put it out of its misery and mine.

Speaking of misery:  does anyone actually like the new Aptos font that Microsoft has made its current default?  I find it repulsive, and it makes me lean toward preferring Google’s alternatives to the Microsoft word processing and spreadsheet programs.  To whomever designed this font, I say:  I’m sorry, I’m sure you put significant effort into it, and that you did your best given the circumstances and your innate abilities and all the various vectors impinging on your state at the time…but you fucked up.

Oh, well.  That’s enough for now.  I hope you all have a good day and a good week.  In the UK, I hope you have a good General Election, with outcomes that are overall beneficial or at least not detrimental.  Keir Starmer may be a bit lackluster, but it’s not as though Sunak and his eighty-three or so immediate predecessors over the last several years have been all that impressive.

In the US, I hope you all have a nice holiday, and I encourage you to take a moment to read at the least the beginning and ending of the Declaration of Independence—you can skip the list of grievances if you must.  If nothing else, you’ll encounter compound complex sentences that would be daunting even for me to write.

TTFN

happy independence day

*I haven’t counted them myself, so I make no guarantee, but those numbers certainly seem about right, so I don’t really doubt them.

**Excluding the Amendments, it is apparently 4,543 words long—or 334 words fewer than the net new words I wrote on Extra Body before last week’s blog.  That’s far from an insurmountable task to read.  With the Amendments included, it’s still only 7,591 words.  That’s only twice as long as my shortest short story, Solitaire, and it’s far less dark and horrifying.

***No one is ever really in charge of anything, not on any significant scale.  Also, queen ants don’t actually organize ant hills, and queen bees don’t run their hives, and queen termites don’t design and manage the construction of termite mounds.  Get over it.