Health

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Nor steel nor poison, malice domestic, foreign levy, nothing can blog him further.

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, the 27th of June (I’ll reluctantly presume that you know the year and the era), and it’s time for another edition of what is now my weekly blog post.  I’m on my way to the office and writing this on Google Docs on my phone.  I will have to use my little laptop computer to confirm the specific stats on my fiction writing over the last week, but I’ve done significantly more than the previous week, adding more nearly 5,000 words, bringing the total to over 66,000, and the current page count to 101*.

There were even a few mornings this week on which I felt the urge to write more than a page, and so I did.  The story is very nearly done‒the first draft, anyway.  Of course, there will be many changes to be made during editing, or at least much shaping of its rough-hewn ends.  And though, obviously, this will never be a short story, I do plan to shave a good 10,000 words off the final product.  That may sound arbitrary, but I’m almost always wordier than necessary, and there are frequent little thoughts and comments from the characters that don’t really add much to a tale other than perhaps giving a little color.

In any case, I should be able to publish it as a novella, in paperback in addition to the Kindle version, assuming I live long enough.

That is far from certain.  Just yesterday, I had to leave work shortly before lunch, because in the morning, while writing fiction and then getting an early start on payroll and other office-related stuff, I was having a lot of back and hip pain, and I was slightly more sleep-deprived than usual, so I was not clear-headed.  As a consequence, I think I took a double dose of aspirin and possibly Tylenol as well.  And I take 3 aspirin at once normally, so 975 mg instead of the usual 650.  Even as I took the (presumed) second 975 mg dose, I thought that maybe I had already taken some, but I decided that I didn’t really care.  I was miserable and in a lot of pain, and I didn’t much mind if I poisoned myself, a bit or a lot.  I’ve been courting and investigating (and even investing in) far more potent and nasty toxins; aspirin is frankly mild.  The addition of Tylenol (when my pain didn’t lessen) was just a little icing on the analgesic cake, even if I did take 4 extra-strength tablets in relatively quick succession.

Anyway, by the time I got done with the payroll, I was feeling extremely foggy and sleepy, and also mildly queasy, and I could not easily focus my mind on anything.  It was an interesting experience, especially the part about actually feeling sleepy(!), so I told my boss that I wasn’t feeling well and asked if he minded if I left after half a day.  He was fine with it, as was the coworker who shares some of my tasks.

I also told my boss why I felt ill:  that it was because I had more or less accidentally taken more than double the recommended dose of aspirin and possibly of acetaminophen.  I think I was kind of hoping that he might recognize that there’s more going on than a one-off mistake in my bigger picture…or that someone would.  But alas, no such luck has prevailed so far.

I get it; no one wants to deal with me saying anything about how I feel‒present company excluded, I guess.  They certainly don’t want to take it seriously.  I mean, earlier this week, I was trying to stretch sideways in my chair to relieve some serious tightness and pain in my back, and two coworkers/friends‒my two closest office friends‒were walking past.  They asked me, “You okay, Doc?”  I gave the simple and honest answer, “No.”  I meant it on practically all levels, and tried, at least a little, to make that general fact evident.  But the response from both of them was to say, almost dismissively, “Yeah, I know how you feel.”

No.  No, you obviously don’t.

So many times in recent years and especially in recent weeks and months, I’ve felt that I was sending out painfully loud signals that I was in distress.  I’ve felt that it all must be written all over my face, and in my body language, and even in the actual words I say, such as, “I hate my life, I wish I were dead.”  But somehow, no one seems to notice, or perhaps they think I’m joking, or that I’m exaggerating.

It certainly seems clear that I at least have the attribute (associated with ASD) of not being readily able to express or communicate my emotions‒often I don’t even recognize them.  But it’s terribly frustrating, especially when one tries to put not-too-subtle signs up, such as buying two different ropes and tying them into nooses, then leaving them that way where people can see them, or buying a whole plastic “can” of sodium hydroxide (lye), or breaking up a cheesy old shot glass into little shards and splinters of glass.

Each of those latter two substances can be (and has been) put into gel capsules from which the psyllium they originally contained has been emptied.  Then the new handful of capsules can be put in an easily accessible place, in case an emergency exit (or just a gamble on a possible emergency exit) might be necessary, severely painful though it would probably be.

But nobody takes very strong notice of such things; it’s just Doc being weird, like he’s always been his whole life (though the people at work haven’t known me nearly so long, it’s nevertheless true that I have been weird my whole life).  It’s just Doc’s dark sense of humor‒which is apparently often quite funny, and certainly catches people off-guard, especially since my delivery of jokes is often dead-pan, appropriately enough.

I guess a part of me‒not a small part‒doesn’t want anyone to grasp the urgency of the situation until it’s too late.  Goodness knows I don’t like the idea of being a burden to other people, especially people I like, and I’m already such a burden on them and on the world at large that it’s hard to justify.  And I certainly don’t think there’s any sense in which I deserve help of any kind.  I’m a pretty vile and horrifying creature.

Maybe it’s good that my thoughts don’t show on my face, because often my thoughts are just urges or wishes to enact stunningly violent retribution on idiots.  As I noted in my meme from last week (playing on the line from The Guardians of the Galaxy, Volume 3) it seems that I was not born to be a dad, but that I was born to be a destroyer.

Maybe it’s just as well that no one recognizes the danger I pose to myself.  Maybe it’s best if finally, someday very soon, the structure of me fails catastrophically and I vanish.  This will cause some minor, very slight and localized disruption here and there, but it’ll be like ripping off a Band-Aid.  It’ll certainly be better for everyone than anyone wasting their time and energy trying to help me.

Anyway, I hope at least to finish the first draft of Extra Body, but after that, I’m making no predictions, and I’m certainly not making any promises.  Maybe, if nothing else, if I don’t get it published myself, someone else can clean it up and publish it.  As “my little green friend” said, “Always in motion is the future.”  That is, until it comes to a halt, of course.

TTFN

*The exact numbers are: 4,877 net new words since last blog, and a current word count of 66,494.  101 pages is correct.

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Morose and morbid, but alas, not morphean

This is getting truly intolerable.

I woke up and got up even earlier today than I have most days recently, though I went to sleep no earlier last night.  I finished my fiction writing already by 6:30 am, after having come to the office, though I only wrote a single page:  Block words 784, net words 778, percent difference about 7.7%, total words now 55,105 and total pages 84.  I didn’t have the mental energy to do more.

I don’t know what I’m going to do about this.  I am tired and stressed and borderline angry nearly all the time, and almost everything is unpleasant.  I’m trying to do healthy things, with diet and exercise and even footwear and screen time and all that, but the things I do seem only to make things either stay the same or get worse.  I’m trying very hard to pretend to be as upbeat and positive as I can be–I don’t know, have I been pulling it off here on my blog?–but I spend a substantial part of every day wishing I would die and thinking about optimal ways to make it happen without inconveniencing anyone much, or getting me locked up for trying.

I want to make something clear:  I don’t want to want to die, if you take my meaning.  It’s not a philosophical position, like promortalism or antinatalism*.  At an intellectual level, at a personality level, I would much prefer simply to be reasonably healthy and to like myself and to have a sense of a future and to have joy in the things that have reliably given me joy in the past.  I try.  I really do.  After all, I’m still here.  But to keep trying simply for the sake of “keeping trying”, simply for the sake of “not giving up”, just feels more and more pointless.  To whom am I proving anything?  For whose benefit am I lathering, rinsing, and repeating**?

Oh, well.  What does it matter?  Over 150,000 people in the world die every day.  That’s already more–every single day–than the number of people the Jehovah’s Witnesses believe will be resurrected to reign with Jesus (and yet they keep trying to recruit more people).  At that rate of death, it would take 146 years for all the people presently on Earth to die.  This seems unworkable given that humans rarely live longer than 100 years.  Only a handful reach 120, and as far as we know, no one lives significantly longer than that, as simple fact of biological “design”.  The world is a conveyer belt, transferring countless creatures from birth to the grave, but the people on it think the conveyer belt is eternal–and, in a sense, of course, conveyer belts are.  At least, they are finite but unbounded along the length of their motion, “a circle that ever returneth in to the selfsame spot“.

Oy.  Never mind me.  I don’t think I’m making sense.  I hope you’re all doing well, and that you’ve been getting much more sleep than I’ve been getting.  For goodness’s sake, don’t take it for granted!  Enjoy it.  Luxuriate in it.  Be like Shakespeare, not like Poe, with regard to your attitude toward sleep!

And pay no attention to this man behind the keyboard.  He’s not a bad wizard, he’s just a very bad man.

*Oddly enough, the Wikipedia entries I found for these subjects when looking for a link (so the curious could pursue the subjects further) I found only Swedish language entries that had to be translated.  I’m not going to bother with the links.  The meanings of the terms should be pretty obvious.

*Figuratively speaking.  I only shampoo once on any given day.

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Glory is like a circle in the water, which never ceaseth to enlarge itself, till, by broad blogging, it disperse to naught.

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, as you probably know if you’re reading this on the day it’s posted (if not, there’s only about a 1 in 7 chance* that it’s Thursday when you’re reading it).  This is to be a “typical” blog post, in the “old” style, but I don’t know how much difference that will make compared to other days‒except that I will not be giving you a report on today’s fiction writing, since there has been none.

I’m writing this post on my smartphone.  There are reasons I’m doing it thusly rather than on my laptop computer, but I won’t get into them right now.  I did bring my computer with me, intending to write this on it, but doing so can be mildly cumbersome at times.  It also doesn’t have illuminated keys‒those would have cost a lot more when I bought it‒whereas a smartphone perforce has luminous keys, since all its keys and other features are virtual.

Speaking of smartphones, I’ve recently been thinking about trying my hand at Instagram.  I don’t have the app on my phone, but of course I have an account (since Facebook gave everyone on Facebook an account).  I’ve even recently started following a few people on it.  I’m not particularly photogenic or anything, but I guess Instagram has wider reach than, for instance, blogs on WordPress.  This might give it an advantage as a way to promote my writing and maybe as a way to express other things.  I have no interest in TikTok, but maybe, since Instagram is already part of the Facebook platform, I could try it.

Of course, I have a YouTube channel, but that has never garnered me many views, and the process of making (and editing) videos for it is cumbersome.  I get the impression that there is in-app video production and editing via Instagram.  I know, giving my daily writing reports (for instance) via Instagram may seem like a betrayal of my commitment to the written word as the lifeblood of civilization, but it would be an attempt to promote my blog and more importantly my fiction, so perhaps it would be tolerable.  My soul is worthless anyway, so if I can sell it and get something out of it, maybe I should (METAphorically speaking…get it?).

I think you have to download the Instagram app into your phone to be able to upload videos, or at least I haven’t seen how to do it from a desktop.  But I haven’t looked very hard, either.  I think you can upload photos from the desktop.

Of course, I’m no fun to look at, so no one would come to my account because of my physical beauty…but I do look a little bit like the guy who reads all the signs in funny voices and inflections**, and that guy is hilarious and apparently quite popular (I would add a link, but I don’t know his account name).

I’ve occasionally thought of linking this account to Patreon, but it’s hard to imagine anyone paying even a dollar a month for my blog.  Likewise, I’ve thought about getting on Substack, but if I were to do that, I’d need to make a commitment to putting out more serious, or at least more thoughtful, material.  Also, long-term plans seem frankly comical for me, since I neither expect nor desire a long term.  I can barely get through a day, and I certainly cannot sleep through a night.

For instance, yesterday I had to leave work after lunch because everything from just below my diaphragm on down was in spasm and I was unable to make it resolve despite excessive aspirin and acetaminophen and so on.  Obviously, I did not get a good sleep last night, despite getting back to the house early.  At least the pain has been moderated a bit by my physical rest.

I guess even if I were to die today, given how bad my sleep has been for so many years, I’ve probably had as much “awake” time as a typical American man who dies when he’s 76.  Perhaps more.  I’d have to do the math.  Maybe I will.  Hang on a minute…

Okay, quickly and dirtily, and assuming that sleep change is lifelong and daily, a person who sleeps only 4 hours a day (which is often more than I sleep) will have reached as many waking hours as an 8-hours-a-day 76 year old person by the time the 4-hour person is 60.8 years old.  Of course, those years will be comparatively miserable and groggy and filled with the many consequences of sleep deprivation.  Frankly, 60 years is way too many.  I am not going to put up with 6 more years of this.  I don’t want to put up with 6 more days, and honestly, six hours is often barely achievable.  One of these days it won’t be.

In lighter news, I finally ordered some 6 x 9 spiral-bound “5 Star” notebooks and they arrived yesterday.  My plan is to transcribe into one of them what I’ve written on HELIOS and then continue writing the first draft there.  The ballooning size of Extra Body, and before that Outlaw’s Mind, has made me think I really need to do that.

Don’t get me wrong, neither of those stories could ever have been true “short stories” and I like what’s developed from them.  But I’m sure that my concision has suffered because it’s just so easy to write on the computer, and I get carried away, like someone with ASD who starts talking about a “special interest”.  Maybe that’s why I do it.

I wrote the first drafts of Mark Red, The Chasm and the Collision, and the borderline novella Paradox City on notebook paper, perched on my bunk, on a photo album-style book on my footlocker at just after lights-on (about 3:30 am) every morning at FSP West, and CatC is my sister’s favorite of my stories.  And you may already know that I wrote Solitaire all in one sitting, in a 6 x 9 spiral-bound notebook, while keeping my not-yet-girlfriend (also not-yet-fiancée, not-yet-wife, not-yet-ex-wife) company all night while she worked on a project for her summer job.  Also, parts of the original draft for The Vagabond were written by hand while I was in college and med school.  I finished it on a Mac SE, but those weren’t quite as handy and quick as modern laptop computers.

Anyway, I have this stupidly optimistic (and thus unrealistic) notion that I might actually write HELIOS in such a fashion.  We’ll see, but I wouldn’t hold your breath if I were you.

As always, I would welcome feedback in the comments below about any of the topics mentioned above‒especially about Instagram and the like.  Feedback here works best, in general, but obviously I don’t get very much of it whether here or in other venues, so I suppose I should be grateful for whatever I can get.

This blog post has felt quite long, but it’s actually not too terribly lengthy, so I guess writing on my smartphone has made a difference.  Imagine if I had to write this by hand before entering it into WordPress!  That’s not going to happen, of course, but it’s interesting to contemplate what it would be like.

I hope you all have a good day, and a good week, and month, and year, and so on.  Please take care of yourselves and of those you love and those who love you.

TTFN

*I say “about”, even though days of the week are evenly distributed, because there may be factors that influence the likelihood of someone reading something on any given day.  People may be more likely to read an “old” blog post on, say, the weekend than during the week, or on particular weekdays rather than others, and this distribution is likely to be multifactorial, so I cannot, in good faith, say the chance is exactly 1 in 7.

**I know this because once, I was watching one of that guy’s “reels” and someone came up behind me and asked if that was me in the video, or perhaps someone to whom I was related.

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Monday report, 5-27-2024

I did not write or go to work on Friday.  I started to develop a “classic migraine”, i.e., one that begins with a visual “aura”, on Thursday while on my way back to the house, and despite three Ibuprofen and a caffeine pill, it developed and lasted well into the following evening.  I achieved nothing of worth nor of any real enjoyment over the weekend, so there’s nothing to report regarding that.  I was very much lying about, punctuated by a few short walks to the store (and a malfunction of the clothes washing machine on Sunday morning in the middle of my second load, forcing me to wring out those clothes before putting them in the dryer), because my back was acting up something fierce–possibly because I’d been lying around (in the dark) in a funny way due to my migraine.

Anyway, this morning I wrote some on Extra Body:  1,262 “block” words, but with a net 1,261 total new words, which means that, in my rereading and editing, I took out one more word than I added.

Since I have no life, there is nothing else to report other than that, as usual, there was a bunch of catch-up stuff to do at the office this morning, but I’m awake early in the morning, anyway.  It’s Memorial Day in the US, of course, but our office is open.  We would probably be open on Christmas if anyone would come in, and we are usually open on New Year’s Day.

I hope those of you who observe it have a good Memorial Day, and that those of you who don’t observe it nevertheless have a good day.

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By medicine life may be prolong’d, yet death will blog the doctor too.

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, and so—as I mentioned yesterday that I would—I’m writing a standard blog post.

I’m writing in the back of an Uber right now, but I’m using my laptop, and that combination is a first for me, I think.  I know that taking Ubers is probably an unjustifiable expense, and I mean to cut back on them, but this week I’ve had very little useful energy*, and anyway, I’m only too happy just to burn through the quite small amount of money that I have, since I have no reason to save for the future.

I was briefly puzzled as I did the initial “save” for this document, since I save my blogs by date and day of the week, when I saw that last year the 23rd of May fell on a Tuesday, not a Wednesday.  Each year generally shifts the day (of the week) of any given date one day later than the previous year, since a standard year is one day longer than a multiple of 7: [52 x 7 = 364].  I think that the official mathematical term is “modulo” when you’re just looking at the remainder.  And I vaguely recall noting, earlier this year, that the dates this year were one day later.

But, of course, this is a leap year, in which we “add” a day to the year, specifically on February 29th.  So it makes sense:  early in the year, this year’s dates are one weekday later than they were last year, but after the end of February, they are two days later.  I suppose that means that next January and February will be two days later than they were this year, but after that things will revert to one day later.

Hold on to your hats, folks!  If the whole blog post is this exciting, goodness knows how you’re going to be able to stand it.

It’s a bit tricky writing in the back seat here, because my laptop computer doesn’t have illuminated keys.  When the bouncing around of the car throws me off too much, I have to re-find my typing location by trial and error.  Once I do, I don’t really need to be able to see; I know my way around the keyboard pretty much by proprioception.  After all, I’ve been typing at least since I was eleven.

Not to say that I don’t make plenty of typos.  My coordination isn’t all that great, and I often get ahead of myself.  But at least with modern word processors, it’s so easy to correct for errors that it’s not a big deal.

Actually, I suspect that if I’d been forced to keep using my grandmother’s typewriter, which is what I used to start my typing career, and on which I needed to use correction film to erase mistakes, I would probably be a better, or at least cleaner, typist than I am now.  Once word processing programs came into play, there was no longer as much of a price to pay for minor errors, and so there was less pressure to be more accurate.  As I’ve noted many times, everything responds to local pressures and incentives and disincentives.

I warned you that this might be exciting, didn’t I?

I almost didn’t go in to work today.  That was why I let myself get the Uber:  to help me to clear that activation energy barrier.  I am not particularly physically sick, though I feel a bit of a tickle in the back of my throat.  I just didn’t want to go in.  Yesterday, all day, I was extremely tense and stressed out, and the noise was particularly irksome, and I had payroll to do, and I was always just sliding along what felt like the razor edge of a true breakdown or explosion.  Yet no one seems to have noticed.

I banged my head on the wall quite hard at one point, and did several other things to cause myself pain throughout the day.  I don’t want to go into specifics too much; I don’t want people to think I’m a weirdo or something.

Ha.  Ha.  Ha.  Ha.  Ha.

Anyway, I’ve actually just arrived at the office.  I hope my hands and thumbs won’t feel too sore, today.  Yesterday, my thumb bases were painfully tight, and most of the rest of my finger joints were sore and stiff, albeit to a lesser degree than the thumbs.  It made it quite difficult to try to play guitar, so I didn’t do much of that.

Actually, because of the trouble with my hands, and my shoulders, and of course, the ongoing issues with my back and hips and knees and ankles—especially with my back—I decided to buy a huge bottle of Ibuprofen, and I’ve taken some of them starting yesterday afternoon.

I have been “off” Ibuprofen for quite some time, now, though it was my go-to anti-inflammatory for many years.  I started to avoid it when its use was associated on two or three occasions—possibly just by coincidence—with a relatively high occurrence of what I presume were premature atrial contractions, with associated palpitations.  It was nothing terribly severe, of course, but at the time, I wanted to live, so I switched mainly to naproxen.

I also use some aspirin, as well as acetaminophen for headaches and other things that don’t benefit from any suppression of cyclooxygenase.  But, despite its longer action, naproxen has never worked quite as well as ibuprofen seemed to work, though perhaps that’s been confounded by other variables.  It’s hard to do a double-blind test on oneself.

In any case, at this point, I don’t much care if I get palpitations, although if they happen, maybe I’ll find them unpleasant enough that I’ll change my mind.  Frankly, I don’t mind if I have a full-fledged arrhythmia.  Sudden cardiac death due to ventricular fibrillation, for instance, is probably one of the best ways to die.  You basically just faint, since your brain is no longer getting blood flow, and that’s that.  If no one defibrillates you, and if the arrhythmia doesn’t spontaneously resolve, you’re done.

It’s probably not quite as quick a death as being at ground zero of a thermonuclear explosion, and it’s certainly not as quick as being obliterated when the vacuum energy of the universe quantum tunnels down to a lower level**, since that process would spread throughout the cosmos at the speed of light, and no information within spacetime can exceed the speed of light, so it’s fundamentally impossible to know such an event is happening before it arrives.  It’s also impossible to know about it once it arrives, since everything currently existing in our universe, right down to fundamental particles, would by obliterated by the vacuum state decay—again, at the speed of light, which is far faster than the rate at which the nervous system can experience anything.

Unfortunately, even more than the thermonuclear explosion possibility, vacuum decay would involve taking other, “innocent” people along with me, at least some of whom both wish and deserve to continue living.  That seems a bit unethical—or at least rude, which I sometimes think is worse—and anyway, it’s not as though anyone knows how to make it happen.

It’s better to keep things confined to my person.

I guess even a hemorrhagic stroke wouldn’t be too bad, to be honest, and given my tendency to bang my head against the wall when I get too frazzled and stressed, it seems immensely more likely than vacuum state collapse.  I suppose I could even tolerate death by bleeding ulcer, though I really don’t like nausea***.

Probably, though, in the end, I’m going to have to take a more active and deliberate hand in things.  I suppose we’ll see.  It’s hard to work up the courage to face the discomfort and even frank pain associated with most such interventions, but practice makes better, and I already have a fair amount of experience deliberately causing myself pain, as noted above.

That’s enough blog post for now.  I’ve already droned on and on.  My tentative plan is to do some fiction writing tomorrow morning, and if I do (or even if I don’t) I plan to leave a little report about it here.  I am off work this weekend, so I won’t be writing anything on Saturday (barring, as always, the unforeseen).

I truly, honestly, and fervently hope that each and every one of you feels better than I do right now, and I mean substantially better.  You probably do; it seems likely that, in the phase space of physical and emotional states, there are many more possibilities in that direction than in the other.  But I could be wrong.

TTFN

Addendum:  While editing, I found that MS Word had underlined a sentence in the draft above, in which I wrote, “I think that the official mathematical term is….”  The editor gave the comment that “expressing opinions with certainty adds formality”.  I don’t think I could possibly disagree more than I do with that sentence. 

Bad advice in editor marked up

 PLEASE DON’T DO THAT, PEOPLE!!!!!!!!  Opinions are opinions.  Expressing them with certainty when you are not certain is tantamount to outright lying, and is a huge problem with human discourse!  I’m ashamed of MS Word for making that suggestion.  What a horrible, horrible recommendation!  What a nightmarish thing to say!

*And yet, my level of tension has been exceptionally high.  That’s a frustrating bit of irony, as I probably don’t need to tell you.

**This is purely a hypothetical possibility.  The vacuum energy of the universe may well be at its lowest/ground state, though it is patently not quite zero.  If it were, cosmic expansion would not be accelerating.  Indeed, I often say that cosmic inflation is happening now, based on all the data we have.  That’s what “dark energy” is doing, albeit at a slower rate than what is proposed to have happened 13.7 billion years ago.

***Weird, right?  I don’t like nausea?  How unusual!

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Very brief report

I did write a bit of fiction this morning — 783 words to be exact and precise.  I wish it were a prime number, but it’s divisible by 3 and 9 at least, since the digits add to 18.  Oh, well, it can’t always work out.

I’m feeling quite unwell; yesterday I left the office early (not by much) and yet I still didn’t get any good sleep.  But I’ve felt queasy and weak and just kind of under the weather for the last 18 hours or more.  So, I didn’t really have the energy to write more.  I did play a little guitar and sang some this morning, but it was sub-par, probably because of feeling poorly.

I am scheduled to work tomorrow, though, so maybe I’ll feel a little better then and will write some more.  I guess we’ll see.  Have a good day.

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

Hello and good morning.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TTFN

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

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No fiction again today

It’s only Wednesday morning, not Thursday, but again I’m writing a blog post.  I’m on my way into the office even earlier than yesterday, since my sleep and my tension level has been exceptionally bad, even for me.

I was going to work on Extra Body while riding in, but though I opened it in the Word app and started reading through what I wrote Monday, it was too difficult to follow and felt awkward on the phone.  Anyway, I should get to the office in plenty of time to work on it on the mini-laptop computer, which I did not bring with me from the office last night.  I left the quite late, yesterday, because we had things happen right at the end of the day, and I took an Uber back to the house, just as I’m taking an Uber in this morning 

I’m burning a fair amount of money on these Ubers, but it’s not as though I’m saving for retirement or anything.  I don’t expect to live long enough to retire, even if that were an option.

Another thing that added to my tension yesterday (and today) is that my coworker had to get some medical testing done yesterday, and so he was out after lunch and will probably be out at least this morning if not the entire day.  I don’t begrudge him his healthcare, of course.  I want him to be healthy, for his own sake and that of his family.  But it does make me more stressed out, especially on Wednesday (today), when I have to do payroll.  That’s a big part of why I’m going in so early, apart from the fact that I was awake anyway and just felt confined and disgusted in my room.  It’s much easier to do work that requires concentration when I’m the only one in the office.

It’s a strange thing, and it’s pretty contemptible, but I know a few people with serious health issues and several with moderate ones, and of course, as a doctor, I saw many people with serious and even terminal health problems‒and I sometimes envy these people.  I know, they suffer and/or suffered, obviously, and I don’t think that is enviable in and of itself.  But if I could take their illness into me, curing them and sickening myself, I think that would be a real multiple boon.  They could get their health back and decrease their expenses.  I in turn would be able to let myself stop trying; I would not be a big burden on society, because I would only want palliative care, just enough to control the pain as much as possible and bide the end.

It would be nice to be able to do some good by taking someone else’s illness, especially if that someone has close friends and family who would miss them.

Of course, that’s very silly and fanciful, and of course, it’s contemptible, but then I hold myself in contempt, anyway.  And I don’t think much better of the world at large, so it’s not like there’s much motivation to stay in it.  On an individual level, or a few at a time, people can be interesting and quite admirable, but when they come together in very large numbers, they rapidly reduce to the lowest level present in each aspect‒a higher-dimensional chain that is only as strong as its weakest link in each dimension of character, so to speak.  And there are so many people in the world that the lowest level on any given axis is very low indeed.

Anyway, I’m tired of the world, and of being tired, and of being in pain, and of not being able to rest.  It would be nice to see my kids again and be part of their lives, but I don’t believe that’s going to happen.  Maybe if I did have some terminal illness, that might trigger something, some final meeting or other, I don’t know.  But that’s a stupid and contemptible thought, as I said, and though I do find myself contemptible, I don’t like it.

***

I’m at the office now, but I don’t feel like writing any fiction.  I guess I should make sure to take home my laptop computer tonight, if I really plan to do any fiction writing tomorrow‒although, come to think of it, tomorrow is Thursday, so I should probably write my traditional blog post.  I guess I’ll do that.  But I can write it on the laptop computer, anyway.  That’s what I always used to do.

I was thinking of ordering some of those smaller spiral-bound notebooks, the six by nine ones, or whatever their specific measurements might be.  I have two of the bigger five-star notebooks, but I found that those were unwieldy, especially for the commute.  However, I did write Solitaire originally in a smaller spiral-bound notebook, and though it’s quite a dark tale, I think it’s one of my best-written stories.

Also, my thumb bases are hurting a lot even though I’m trying not to use the phone to write too much; they’re even hurting when using the regular computer keyboard to some degree, and my left thumb, hand, arm, and shoulder are particularly stiff and sore.  So maybe writing some things by (right) hand in a smaller spiral-bound notebook would be good.  I don’t know.

Sorry, I know this is all exceptionally lame and boring.  What I really ought to do is just stop writing anything at all, and stop doing anything at all, and just give up.  I make even myself sick; goodness knows how other people can tolerate me.

Anyway, I don’t think there’s much else to say today, though that doesn’t usually stop me.  If I do end up writing any fiction today, maybe I’ll make an addendum, but I don’t think I will.  I did doodle an anime style face yesterday, so I accomplished something at least mildly creative.  Huzzah for me, right?

I’m very tired.  But I’m not sleepy.  It’s a frustrating conundrum, and there’s no good reason to expect that nature is so arranged as to provide any solution to the problem.  Just ask the dinosaurs.

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Monday report from 5-6-2024

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

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

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

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

revenge of the sixth

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Brief Wednesday Report

I did not write anything at all yesterday – I was out sick, and felt pretty physically miserable.

This morning, still not at my best, but I came to the office early to catchup, and while en route and then while here, wrote a total of 1350 words on Extra Body, which has become not short at all for a short story, as my short stories tend to do.