Health

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Monday morning report for 4-22-2024

I’m writing a quick blog post this morning before I write any fiction, just to pass the time while I ride into the office.  I had a fairly bad stomach bug this weekend, I don’t really feel up to riding the train, and I didn’t bring my laptop computer back to the house with me on Friday.  I also did not work on Saturday, which is good, since I was busy throwing up.  Now I’m kind sore from all that, but the worst seems over, so I’m going to the office.

I mean to do my fiction writing on the laptop computer at the office this morning, mainly for tradition’s sake.  Though the smartphone writing has been pretty successful so far, I still want to write on the computer mostly.

Of course, the smartphone is a computer as well, but its keyboard isn’t nearly as well-designed for human-type hands to use‒thus all the software add-ons like auto-correct that are necessary to make it tolerable for most people to use.  As for me, I don’t like the auto-fill options, especially in word processing, though suggestions are sometimes useful when one is typing a long word.  Still, the fact that these systems seem to learn from the great masses of illiterati using them doesn’t reassure me.  The fact that the system keeps wanting to add an apostrophe when I’m writing the possessive form of “it” shows that it’s not getting its grammar suggestions from any formal guidelines, and so it’s actually miseducating people who are unaware of the apostrophe convention in this circumstance.

Most people probably don’t pay much attention, of course, so I suppose that’s not a very big worry.

I have a bit of a headache from all my queasiness and such this weekend‒at least, I suspect that’s the source‒so I’m not going to make this much longer.  I will come back before I post it and add a summary of the writing I’ve done today on my fiction.  I hope you all have a good day and a good week, and for those who celebrate it, have a good Passover (it starts tonight).

***

Well, even though I’m not feeling well, and had to lie down for a bit in the middle, I wrote 1952 words on Extra Body this morning.  But now I’m quite discouraged, because my coworker with whom I share responsibilities is not going to be in today, since his back is acting up.  I can’t fail to sympathize‒my back has been acting up for just over 20 years, so I know how bad it can get.  But it’s discouraging, since I really still don’t feel well, and was thinking of ducking out early, today.

I guess there will be no rest for the wicked, of which I am surely one.  At least I got some decent writing done.

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Tuesday writing report

I have no real blog post today, but I thought I’d give a follow-up after yesterday’s surprisingly productive use of the smartphone.

Today I decided to open Extra Body in MS Word app and try doing some writing on it.  To avoid temptation*, I didn’t bring my laptop computer with me when I left yesterday.  The “session” seems to have gone well; I wrote approximately 1800 words on the story, and I probably could have done more, but I didn’t want to push it.  I don’t know how good the writing was/is, but that’s a separate question.  In any case, there will be extensive post-draft editing, which I suspect I will do only on the computer.

Otherwise, I’m feeling a bit poorly, with some ongoing GI troubles that are most unpleasant (low-grade nausea is the main symptom, and that’s irritating).  I’m trying to do what I can about it, but I fear it’s mainly the consequences of the large amount of OTC pain meds I take.  We’ll see what I can do.

Have a good day.

*Yeah, that’s the reason…

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Blog post for 4-10-2024 Wednesday

I’m not writing any fiction again today, it seems.  I just don’t have any urge to do it.  The very prospect of it feels almost entirely pointless, though that could be at least partly due to the fact that I’ve felt so gormy these last few days.

I’m not as nauseated as I was yesterday (though I’m probably just as nauseous, ha ha ha), since I took two omeprazole tablets last night, and also I didn’t take any aspirin or naproxen yesterday.  I did take a few acetaminophen, though those don’t tend to work as well on their own as they do in combination with aspirin and so on.  Still, I hate the feeling of nausea*, and would rather have at least a little pain than be nauseated.  It would have been one thing if I were sick enough just to throw up and get it over with, but all I had was just general gastro-intestinal distress and discomfort throughout the day, which really sapped my energy.

I don’t know what I’m going to do about my fiction.  This week I just haven’t had any enthusiasm for it (nor for any other positive thing in life, really).  Maybe I should try to reignite my energy by sharing more of the links to my pre-existing fiction on Twitter and Facebook and the like.  Maybe if I got any feedback of any kind on any of those posts or shares it might stoke the fire of creativity a bit.

Of course, it’s hard to see why anyone other than the people who already read my stuff would respond to my posts, but who knows?  It’s difficult for me to predict what might motivate other people to do something, at least some of the time.

I feel slightly awkward sharing my links and stuff on the various anti-social media, particularly because I’m currently reading Jonathan Haidt’s new book The Anxious Generation, about the detriments of social media and smartphones to younger people.  On the other hand, unless you’re asking an elf or a vampire, I probably would not be considered a younger person.  Also, I developed my neuro-psychiatric issues long before smartphones and even before the Worldwide Web—I come by them naturally, so to speak—so I shouldn’t have to worry too much about them twisting me in some negative way.  My personality, such as it is, is already formed.  Though, as I discussed yesterday, I do seem to be reasonably good at learning new things even though I’m an old geezer.

I guess maybe I will share my stuff on at least X** and Facebook, and maybe even LinkedIn, though I have less interest in the latter, since I don’t do the whole networking thing.  I might as well make those old posts in which I “advertised” my new stories and such work for me.  And I might as well make Zuckerberg’s and Musk’s endeavors serve some useful purpose, since it’s not as though they pay much in taxes or anything.

I don’t knew where I’m going with this today, otherwise.  At least I’m not going off on weird tangents about playing with infinite series that have obvious outcomes once you work them through.  I mean, yes, it’s rather fun to fiddle with such things in the moment, particularly when one has nothing better to do, and it’s even good when it comes back around and you realize it’s revealed something that should have been obvious with much less work***.  That’s okay.  There’s nothing too wrong with coming at something in a complicated way and finally realizing how simple the answer is.  As I mentioned yesterday, at the very least, it’s good mental exercise.

Still, I shouldn’t go off on too many tangents like that too often.  I don’t think people like those posts very much.  Though, for all I know, they might think they’re the greatest thing anyone’s ever done, they’re just too shy to say anything about it.  I simply don’t know.  It’s like firing a photon off in the direction of an intergalactic super-void:  I’m not ever going to get any feedback about what happened to that photon if it doesn’t interact with something relatively nearby very soon****, and even if it does, unless it reflects back, or unless some intelligence sends a signal in response, it’s still going to be lost.

Anyway, that’s enough for now.  I expect to write my usual Thursday post tomorrow, so if you look forward to such things, you can look forward to that.  If I don’t write it, it will be either because I’m not feeling well (more so than is typically the case) or I’m dead, or perhaps that some other, unpredicted alternative possibility has interfered.  I’d give well over 50% odds that I’ll write a post tomorrow.  But for today, this post is already too long and is almost entirely without substance (and I don’t mean that just because it’s written on a word processor and shared online).

I really do hope that you all have a good day.

*I know, how unusual, right?

**Does Mr. Musk realize that by calling his platform “X” and putting its symbol in the upper right corner of the various X-cretions, he makes it look as though one is supposed to click on that symbol to make a “tweet” go away?  I know that’s the way I feel, and I’ve even tried to do it once or twice when I was distracted.

***In this case, for instance, if you add some (single) fraction of an original number to that starting total, the amount that you added is now one integer step smaller fraction of the new total.  In other words, if you start with some number, then add a ninth, say, of the original number, you now have ten of those ninths in your new total, i.e., 1 and 1/9.  But that 1/9 is now 1/10 of your new  total, trivially.  So, if you want to tip, for instance, 20% of the new total (including the tip) then you need to tip 25% of the original amount before the tip.  In other words, to tip one fifth of the total including the tip, you tip one fourth of the original, pre-tip total, since then you will have five fourths.  Anyway, let me stop this now.

****Unless, I suppose, the universe if both closed—i.e., it loops around on itself like a torus or a sphere—and smaller than anyone has any reason to suspect.  It would have to be small because, based on the expansion rate of the universe as currently measured, any photon of reasonable wavelength would probably have red-shifted into undetectability long before the time I could receive it from the other direction if it circumnavigated a closed universe on anything like the minimum scale we think the universe is.  A photon of too tiny a wavelength, i.e., of high enough energy, would have too high a chance to spontaneously decompose into some particle-antiparticle pair somewhere along the way…I think.

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Squaring away a queasy stomach

It’s Tuesday morning, and I’m not writing any fiction today, because I don’t feel terribly well.  I took a lot of pain medicine yesterday, of more than one kind, and I think it upset my stomach.

Indeed, I woke up very early this morning feeling nauseated.  I wasn’t queasy enough to throw up, which is in some ways disappointing, since that always brings at least a bit of relief, but I was certainly unable to rest.  I decided, finally, just to get up and get an Uber in to the office, since I knew if I waited too long I might choose to stay “home” for the day, and that wouldn’t make me feel any better.

So I showered and then ordered an Uber; today the prices were reasonable, even for a ride all the way in to the office, which helped cement my decision.  It’s frivolous, of course, in that it’s an unnecessary expense, and I really need to avoid doing it too often.  But it ended up being interesting.

I decided, while en route, not to do any writing in the car, either on my phone or on my laptop computer, since I was worried about car-sickness.  Instead, I eventually started playing with the notion of the standard Uber tip buttons.  I thought, to myself, if I were to give a 25% tip (the maximum automatic one), that fact would increase the total amount paid, and so the net tip would be less than 25% of the new total.  So, if I added 25% of the extra, that would increase the total even more, but it would then still be less than 25% of the new total, so I would need to add more, and eventually it would converge on a final number.  As I did a quick bit of figuring, I realized that the final amount I was approaching was 33% more than the original amount.

I realized—this is not a terribly impressive mathematical insight, I know, but I was and am queasy and so it was an interesting distraction—that this process effectively entailed an infinite series, in the form of 1 + 1/n + 1/n2 + 1/n3 +… and so on.  The first little ad hoc trial I had done made me realize that, at least that series had taken n as 4, and iterated it, giving a final number that was 1 and 1/3.  That seemed interesting.

I wondered if this was a general pattern.  So, using a calculator this time, I took one then added a fifth, then added 1 over 5 squared, then one of 5 cubed and so on, and pretty clearly arrived at a final total that was one and a quarter.  A few other numbers made it clear that this was general, and it makes sense if you work it backwards.  25 (one quarter) added to 100 gives you 125, and 25 out of 125 is always going to be on fifth of the new total , or 20%.  33 and a third (or a third) added to 100 gives you 133 and a third, and 33 and a third out of 133 and a third will always be a quarter of the total.

And then, of course, there’s the old mathematics joke about an infinite number of mathematicians going into a bar, with the first one ordering a pint of beer, the second ordering a half pint, the third ordering half as much as the second, the fourth ordering half as much as the third and so on, until finally the bartender holds up a hand and says, “Gentlemen!  Know your limits!” before drawing two pints of beer and putting them out on the table.  This is because 1 + ½ + ¼ + … goes to 2 in the limit as iterations go to infinity.

So, the series 1 + 1/n + 1/n2 + 1/n3 +…converges to 1 + 1/(n-1), which is (n-1)/(n-1) + 1/(n-1), which is n-1+1/(n-1) or just n/(n-1).  I’ve tried to start working the algebra of the infinite series to produce this result (just for fun), but didn’t put much time into it, and it’s not really necessary, since I can see the result clearly by working backwards.

Of course, looking at my result, I know this is really basic stuff, and at some level I already “knew” it, at least formally.  But there’s nothing like working out a thing for yourself to make it sink in and make true sense to you.

This is a bit like something I did when I was in the Education Department at FSP West during my involuntary vacation with the Florida DOC.  I was helping inmates try to get their GEDs, which was rewarding work given the circumstances.  But at one point it occurred to me that I didn’t think I’d ever seen the Pythagorean Theorem proven*.  So, I set out to prove it for myself, just for a laugh.  It looked something like this:

pytho

I didn’t use any of the standard, purely geometrical proofs that one often sees, but instead applied a combination of geometry and algebra that I kind of fiddled together on the spot.  I don’t know if what I did was perfectly rigorous; probably not.  Nevertheless, after I’d worked things through and simplified my algebra and indeed came out with c2 = b2 + a2, I was more convinced than ever before that the Pythagorean Theorem was not merely a well-supported hypothesis, but was indeed a theorem, and that given Euclidean geometry and so on, it was absolutely true.

All this is frivolous, or trivial, or whatever the term you might want to apply.  It certainly has little bearing on my day to day life.  But it is reassuring to think that, contrary to popular belief, it is possible to have new insights into fundamental ideas and things, however basic they might be, even at an older age (in my forties and fifties in these cases).  The human brain does not stop “growing” or improving after one reaches one’s twenties or thirties or after one has left one’s teens (or at least, whatever kind of brain I have doesn’t stop).  Even old dogs can be taught new tricks; and how much more amenable to teaching are naked house apes!

I’ve often been frustrated when people complain that they learned things like the Pythagorean Theorem in high school (or whenever) and had never had to use them at any point in their lives.  That may well be true in a simple sense, though I think the usefulness of that theorem might surprise people (it appears often in the workings of advanced physics, for instance, including in the Lorentz transformations in Special Relativity, and also in calculating the probabilities of outcomes from the magnitudes of the wave equation when makings measurements of a quantum system).

But ultimately, I feel like asking such complainers, “Do you do push-ups in order to become better at doing push-ups?  Do you do bench presses and squats to become competitive squatters and pressers of benches?  Do you jog to become professional joggers?  Do you do yoga to become a champion yogi?  No, the vast majority of people who do such things do them to make themselves fitter overall, stronger, with better endurance and flexibility, to be better able to do the many things in the world for which it will be an advantage for them to improve their strength and their flexibility and their endurance, and to be healthier overall!”

So it is with exercise of the mind, except the mind is far more plastic, far more able to be improved and trained, than the structures and strengths of the muscles and bones and ligaments and cardiovascular system.  Learning some of the methods of geometry and algebra and calculus, learning basic physics, including Newtonian physics and thermodynamics, learning some Boolean logic, some probability and statistics, some basic biology and chemistry…all these things are both inherently useful, and also give you skills and tools and abilities that are adaptable to hitherto unguessed situations and problems in the world, and give you insight into how much commonality there is to the structure of reality.

Understanding a bit about Chaos and Complexity theory can help you recognize why the specifics of the weather are fundamentally unpredictable but nevertheless the climate can be amendable to explanation and broad prediction.  Understanding a bit about Bayesian reasoning can give you the comfort of knowing that, even if you have a positive mammogram, and that test has an 80% sensitivity, you probably have nothing like an 80% chance of having cancer.  Indeed, you could be an order of magnitude or so less likely than that, depending on base rates and false positive rates and the like.

And in a somewhat orthogonal area of inquiry, if you want to understand something about the human condition, it wouldn’t hurt to expose yourself to the works of Shakespeare, who wrote about that subject as well as or better than practically anyone else ever has, and who did it in remarkable and beautiful language, coining figures of speech we in the “Anglosphere” still use, regularly, in daily life, four hundred years after he created them.

Also, if you live your whole life without ever having read book one of Paradise Lost, I think you will have sadly missed out on a great experience.  It’s not really a very long read.  Milton made his Satan a relatable and charismatic, almost heroic, character, and seeing how he did this can help you understand the power and persuasion demagogues and ideologues can bring to bear in the world, and how dangerous and yet enticing they can be.  Also, Milton’s writing is just beautiful, sometimes better even than Shakespeare.

And in To His Coy Mistress, Andrew Marvell prefigures the works of Billy Joel’s Only the Good Die Young by over 300 years.  And I’m pretty sure Pink Floyd referenced the work in Time.

Anyway, that’s what I did this morning to distract myself from an upset stomach, showing that these pursuits and skills can have wildly unpredictable uses.  So, until and unless you have actual organic illness that prevents your brain from learning, you can still grow, and can take more and more of the universe into your mind.  And, as Milton’s big bad himself said, “What is else not to be overcome?”

*It probably was at some point in my education, but I didn’t recall the proof, so it had clearly never really sunk in for me.  I didn’t doubt the theorem—all the greatest mathematical minds of antiquity and modernity were convinced of it, and it has always worked in practice.  But that’s not quite the same thing.

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This is not an altered Shakespearean quote, in case you couldn’t tell

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, and for the first time in quite a while, this is my weekly blog post, the way I used to do things.

I’ve not been very well lately, even by my standards.  By which I do not mean that I haven’t been writing.  Monday morning I wrote just under 1400 words on Extra Body, which I guess is a good thing.

Then, Tuesday I did not go into the office.

I’ve had a particularly bad time lately regarding my insomnia.  Since Friday night, I haven’t had a single night with as much as four hours of sleep, and many of the nights have seen significantly less.  On Tuesday morning, I just stayed home and took some Benadryl, which only made me doze off for about two hours.  Then, Tuesday night I got another few hours, and went to work Wednesday.  I felt a little loopy during the day yesterday, to be honest, and occasionally I even acted a bit silly.  I suppose everyone at the office thought I was feeling better.

But even my pain has been worse than usual, too, probably largely because of the sleep deprivation.  I don’t think that the causality works in the other direction, because it’s usually not pain that wakes me up; it’s the semi-panicked feeling that I must have overslept by hours and hours, even though it’s only been about five minutes or so since I dropped off.

In any case, I have some kind of feeling of anxiety or vulnerability while I’m asleep.  You’d think I was a Vietnam veteran or something, except I was born in 1969, so I would have been very young indeed to serve.  Whatever it is, I don’t feel safe, or at least secure, when I’m asleep.

Still, it’s not as though I’m safe when I’m awake.  The thing is, no one is safe, not entirely, and no one ever has been (as evidence, note that almost all people who have ever lived are currently dead).  And I frankly find life mostly painful and stressful and exhausting and lonely and dreary, so I don’t know what exactly I’m afraid of such that I’d feel worried about having anything taken away from me.  It’s weird.

Anyway, I didn’t even bring the little laptop computer with me on Monday when I left the office, so I didn’t have it when I was on my way to the office (extremely early) on Wednesday morning.  Instead, I decided to use the Word app, which I’ve mentioned before, and I started to write the beginning of HELIOS.  I did not plan to go far, and I didn’t, writing just over five hundred words‒just beginning to introduce the setting, really.  Then I got to the office and wrote a bit over 800 words on Extra Body, bringing my total new words that day up to nearly the same as on Monday.

On Monday morning, I even strummed the guitar just a little bit.

Unfortunately, there has been no joy in writing fiction‒nor in playing guitar, come to think of it‒since I’ve restarted doing it.  I don’t blame the fiction, of course.  Nor do I blame the guitar.  The problem is my own faulty hardware and/or software, my operating system or particular programs or I don’t know what.  To quote C3PO, “He’s faulty!  Malfunctioning!”

I wish I could get some kind of system update that would fix some of the bugs.  Or at the very least, I wish I could reboot from time to time‒in other words, that I could just get a restful night’s sleep.  I feel that if I could get just a good night’s sleep, it might be almost like a little resurrection.  I still recall how good it felt on that day in the nineties when I had my last (or at least my most recent) good night of sleep, from which I awoke refreshed and rested the next day.  I don’t recall what I did that day, but I felt amazing.

I don’t know how I could accomplish that, though.  I’ve tried medications of various kinds, but they’ve tended just to make things worse.  I can force myself unconscious with Benadryl, for instance, but I awaken feeling groggy and confused and more out of it than when I went to sleep.  I’ve tried getting massages of various kinds, from real massage therapists and so on, but I guess I can’t really relax with a stranger.  And massage chairs, unfortunately, just don’t do it.

So it sucks, and I’m tired, and I’m in pain, and I see no light at the end of the tunnel, not even a glimmer, not even a glint.  All I see is a vague sort of swamp-light haze, a sort of sickly phosphorescence.  There’s just enough light to be able to take in the dreariness of my surroundings.

Blackness would be better, honestly.  Black, silent, empty oblivion seems quite preferable to my life, in which the only joys I know are the guilty (and steadily diminishing) reward of food, and‒as Steve Martin said‒a dishwashing liquid.

I need just to opt out.  I need just to work up my nerve.  That’s the hard part.  Fighting against those ingrained drives to stay alive even though it’s not merely utterly pointless but almost entirely without joy (yet almost never without pain, both physical and psychological).

It’s been getting old for a long time.  I’m sure you’ll all agree.  From within, I feel about a thousand years old, or a million, or a billion‒but I’m not an organism built to live that long.  So, again, I’m faulty and malfunctioning, held together by gaffer tape and twine and mud and twigs and clothes-hanger wire and paper clips, with modeling clay stuck in some of the holes to keep the damp from getting in.

Anyway, that’s my status for now, which is nothing new, just more (and gradually worse) of the same.  I hope you’re all feeling much better than I am.  At the very least, you deserve it for being patient enough to read my blog.  That’s a definite trial by ordeal.

I will do my best to keep writing fiction tomorrow, and I plan to do next week what I planned to do this week, though hopefully with at least a little bit more sleep.  By which I mean, I want to try to write fiction every day but Thursday.

If you see a post go up on some other day, it means I lost my resolve for that plan, at least temporarily.

If you don’t see a blog post at all, not even next Thursday, then either I’ve gotten sick, or I’m dead.  The longer time passes with no posts, the more likely it is to be the latter.  We can always hope, right?  I don’t know, maybe you think it would be a negative thing for me to die.  I’ll even admit that I am afraid of dying, by which I mean the process.  I don’t so much want to die as I want, most days, to be dead.

Silence.  Oblivion.  These things so often seem so much better than the noise and stress and tension and pain of awareness.  If I could just become “comfortably numb” it would be a vast improvement.  But that’s not likely.

TTFN

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“I can see you’re out of aces”

Well, it’s Saturday morning and I’m on my way to the office in the back seat of an Uber, against my better judgment, for various reasons, into some of which I may (or may not) get during this post.

The day has not started auspiciously.  I got up and got ready to shower, selecting my clothes for matched colors* and all that, and then turned the shower on…and the shower head popped right off, and water shot all over the place.  I tried an impromptu fix, but there’s cracked plastic in the portion that grips the actual shower head in place, and I’m going to need to provide a stronger repair for that.  I have some things in mind, but in the meantime, I had to wash my hair in the sink and write an IOU to my body in the form of antiperspirant and aftershave.

Of course, I could either get in touch with the owner/landlord or my former housemate to get it fixed (or replaced), but that would entail having one of them come into my room at some point, and I’d rather avoid that if I can.  I think I’ll watch some videos about how to put in a new shower head and/or go to wikiHow for an eventual fuller fix.

That’s if I don’t just die before it becomes relevant, which doesn’t necessarily seem like the worst option.

I had abdominal pain yesterday during the day similar to what I had on Wednesday, which I think I wrote about here.  It may be because I’ve been trying to institute a form of daily exercise that I used to do, but which I haven’t done in a long time, and it’s putting strain on my mesentery or something.

I suppose it could be an abdominal aortic aneurysm that’s getting close to rupturing, but that seems unlikely‒I’ve had MRIs and such of the area in the past and there’s never been any sign of such a thing, and they don’t just happen overnight.  It’s kind of a shame in a way; if one of those ruptures and you’re not in very close proximity to an operating room, you’re in for a probable quick death.

That wouldn’t be too bad.

It’s also very unlikely to be appendicitis; although it is similar in character to the initial stages of that disease, if it were that, it would have progressed by now.  Appendicitis doesn’t come and go.  At least, I have never heard of a case in which it does 

It’s probably just a combination of something I have been eating and my attempt to do new exercise.

Anyway, it doesn’t matter.  It’s just one more of the numerous forms of pain, both literal and figurative, that one can experience in life.  I’ve also been getting some threatening esophageal spasm, something I know and recognize from doleful experience, and that is a very unpleasant sensation.

I guess I shouldn’t restart that exercise, after all.  I had tried it as an alternative to walking because of the irritation of my left knee, but I guess I’ll have to find some way simply to adapt and ease that knee’s trouble.  It would be nice to use my bike, but I’ve had trouble with that due to my back.  Still, maybe if I commit to it, I can make biking something to which my body will adapt.

Sorry, I know all this is probably incredibly boring.  It’s also probably just silly fantasizing, since I don’t think I’m ever going to get back into any kind of good shape.  I want to lose weight, because I find myself disgusting, but I keep falling back into bad dietary habits, or developing new bad dietary habits.

It might be easier if I could think of any good purpose for getting healthier other than just living longer in the profoundly unsatisfactory state in which I currently live**.  Pink Floyd may be right when they say that hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way, but though I revere much of their work, I am not, in fact, English, so I don’t want to do it.

If I have any English blood, it’s very dilute, so to speak (though I am an anglophile nevertheless).  Most of my ancestry is Irish, with some Scottish here and there, unless I am very mistaken.  I never did the “23 and Me” thing, but others in my family have, and though there were little surprises here and there, as far as I know I have few direct genetic connections to the Angles (or, presumably, the Saxons).  Mainly it’s the Celts.

That was another weird little tangent, or digression, or however else you might prefer to refer to such deferrals of main ideas.  I don’t really have much more to say today, anyway.  Don’t expect a blog post on Monday or on Tuesday or on Wednesday.  I may succumb and write a post on any or all of those days, but my intention remains to do fiction writing on those mornings.  I also intend to go back to taking the bus at least on the way back to the house, unless or until I can get used to walking without causing too much exacerbation of my left knee, or to biking without exacerbating my back.

Of course, we could all get lucky and I could have something fairly severe going on in my belly, and I might never write any blog posts or fiction again.  If not now, something like it will happen eventually.  “The losing card I’ll someday lay,” as the song says.  In the end‒as it was so beautifully put in the Kenny Rogers song, The Gambler‒we all break even.

In the meantime, for those of you who celebrate it, please have a Happy Easter tomorrow.  I hope you get a chance to enjoy some time with friends and/or family, and that you all feel at least a little bit personally resurrected.

*That’s a minor joke; I only wear one “color”, top to bottom, inside and out.  It makes everything less stressful.

**I don’t mean Florida, though that would make for a reasonably funny joke.  I mean “state” in one of its other standard uses:  the specific condition that someone or something is in at a given time.

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If you prick us, do we not blog?

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday again.  At least, I think it’s Thursday.  I’m fairly sure it’s Thursday.  I have on my Thursday trousers*, at least.

Yep, it’s Thursday; I checked my phone’s readout.  I was pretty sure anyway, but when my memory jibes with an external measure of which I have no current reason to be suspicious, that drives my credence even higher than it already was.  Most days I don’t need to double-check.  Most days, my internal experience of reality is persistent and consistent enough that I’m well aware of what day it is, usually even when I “first” wake up, to such a degree that if my smartphone’s readout gainsaid that, I would suspect that the phone was malfunctioning.

Today, though, I am mildly fuzzy-headed, relative to how I usually am.  I spent most of yesterday with some manner of persistent and non-peristaltic abdominal pain that left me very grumpy; it was good that I got started on payroll early and finished it early.

I didn’t leave the office early.  No, no.  I didn’t leave until nearly 7 pm, though it was different people who kept me late this time.

That’s part of the problem with things being so lax for my coworkers:  I have to be at the office first every morning (I do get there earlier than absolutely necessary, since I can’t sleep in the morning, anyway, and it’s better to travel before rush hour).  And I am also the last to leave at night, since I lock up the office.  Yet I live farther away than almost everyone else who works there, and I don’t drive.  So I am subject to the vagaries of each day’s least time-sensitive person, whoever it might be on any given day.  Often, the people who stay late do not arrive on time in the morning.  They are often also the people who work into and sometimes through lunch.

I ought to find a way to punish these people.  I ought to take extreme vengeance upon them, “in this life or the next”.  But I probably will do no such thing.

Anyway, that’s that.  I’m a bit fuzzier than usual because I didn’t even start eating any dinner or winding down until 9 o’clock or so last night.  And here I am at the train station slightly less than eight hours later.  So, plainly I did not have a full night’s sleep‒but that never happens, anyway.

On to other matters.

I still don’t know what to do about my fiction writing.  Writing this blog every day increases the daily readership by a significant margin, such that, in the few weeks in which I was doing 2 days a week, there were only about two thirds as many visits per day that I posted.  But, of course, it’s not as though I reach very many people even on my best days.

I am probably wasting my time doing this, both in potentially boosting the reach of my fiction, and in trying to improve my mental health by talking about it (there’s no sign of that making any difference, is there?).

I don’t know.  I suspect that if I suddenly just stopped writing this blog, there are only maybe two people in the world who would notice quickly, and they are both family members.  A few others might eventually vaguely realize that they were no longer getting posts from that weird guy who has insomnia and depression and goes on and on and on about it all the time.  Perhaps they’d wonder whether I just stopped blogging, or if I died, and if so, whether that was due to accident or illness or suicide

Actually, it’s reasonable in many‒perhaps most‒cases to call suicide a death due to illness.  It’s just a kind of illness that hasn’t been recognized as such throughout most of history, and still is not met with the attitude that would be useful from most people who interact with its sufferers.  Of course, it isn’t caused by any virus or bacteria (as far as we know) and so is not contagious in any straightforward sense (though memetic contagion cannot be ruled out in all cases).

Then again, people have only known about the contagious nature of things like smallpox and typhoid fever and the black death and the flu and various other infectious and parasitic diseases for a very short time.  But those are the comparative low-hanging fruit of illnesses, prevention and treatment-wise.  When a disease is caused by a definitive pathogen, an invader, there is a target that can be eliminated, if possible, to the unmitigated benefit of the one invaded.  It was a clear and definitive good for people when, for instance, smallpox was eradicated.

Problems related to malfunction or dysfunction or conflicting function of the organism itself, on the other hand, are much trickier.  The structure and function of a biological organism is akin to a vast and vastly complicated Rube Goldberg machine, where interventions in one region can have hard-to-predict effects elsewhere.  And, of course, once we’ve eliminated or at least significantly curtailed all the “easier” targets, then only harder ones remain.

Then people will complain about the slow pace of medical progress and the fact that some people must take lifelong medications to treat things like diabetes and high blood pressure, imagining that this fact is only and entirely due to, say, profiteering on the part of pharmaceutical companies.  Meanwhile, some of them will actually complain about and even resist the use of such things as vaccines, which have given them the luxury of being able to worry about things other than, say, how many of their children will die of measles encephalitis or will be crippled by polio.

It’s enough to make one want to paraphrase Colonel Jessup from A Few Good Men, and remind people that they rise and sleep under the blanket of the health and longevity provided by medical science and then question the manner in which it has been provided**.

I don’t know how I got onto that tangent.  Neither do I know why I got onto that tangent.  It’s all pointless, anyway.  I hope this hasn’t been too disjointed a blog post.  I also hope that you all have a good day, and a good rest of the week, and a good upcoming month, and a good rest of the year, and a good rest of your lives, and a good rest of eternity.

As for me, I’d be pleased just to get a good rest.  But I don’t expect that to happen any time before I die.

TTFN

*Yes, I have a pair that I wear specifically and only on Thursdays.

**But they don’t question it in any honest, serious, intellectual sense, such as would entail actually studying and deeply understanding even basic undergraduate level biology (to pick up a  weapon and stand a post, so to speak).  It’s remarkable how many problems seem so simple to those who don’t really, actually know Jack Shit about them.

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Be sure to warm up before kipling

Here I am at the train station, to which I arrived quite a bit later than I ought to have done, because Uber switched drivers on me twice, meaning I was assigned to 3 different people, resetting the waiting clock each time.  Then the last driver didn’t follow the route recommended by his own company’s app, apparently thinking that taking the interstate would be faster.  Long experience with the area leaves me with the knowledge that the route that the app recommended really is the fastest route, especially at this time of day.  I was very tempted to give the driver a low tip and a low rating, but since I recognized that some of my animosity is due to matters outside his control‒specifically, the changed drivers‒I would not let him bear the brunt of the consequences.

I need to quit taking Uber.  I’ve curtailed my morning walk for now‒working on a different form of exercise‒because it’s been causing my left knee to act up with greater and greater severity.  But taking the bus to the other train station adds nearly an hour to my commute, or at least it makes me get to the office an hour later.  It’s very frustrating.

Obviously, I’m not writing any fiction today.  I’m not really doing much of anything that matters at all to me today (except, perhaps to a small extent, this blog).  I don’t think I’ll write fiction or play guitar or sing or study any interesting subject today.  By yesterday already, I was too drained and distracted to be able to consider focusing on studying any mathematics or physics or whatever, even just by watching videos.  Ear plugs and hearing protectors don’t help noticeably.

Today, I think I’m going to use double ear plugs in each ear.  They’re the little squishy, compressible, throw-away earplugs, so they can be rolled down to small enough size to insert even when doubled, I’ll wager.  I’m not terribly fond of having crap stuck in my ear canals, but it’s better than being exposed to all the loud voices and noises.  At least, I suspect it is.

You’re probably wondering why I keep going to the office and back and all that.  It’s a fair question, but the answer is neither profound nor very interesting:  it’s just all I have.  I can’t see myself trying to find a different job.  At least I know the people at this job, and I even like most of them.  And I’m at least used to the place where I live.  It’s decent.

I am frustrated about the fiction writing thing, though.  I haven’t even bothered taking the laptop computer back with me at the end of the day so far this week.  I know I’m not going to use it.

I sometimes wish I’d never started doing this daily blog, but it seems I don’t want not to do it.  It’s my pathetic little scent-marking on the world, I guess, though it’s probably not very interesting most of the time.  For instance, I doubt many people enjoyed my weird asides about cosmology yesterday.

It’s hard to remember writing much of Son of Man on my tiny old smartphone back in the day, but I know I did.  I think I didn’t do indenting, but instead just did double line breaks for paragraphs and then corrected the layout after the draft was done.  I suppose, in principle, I could do that here also, but I fiddled with it last week at one point using the Word mobile app, and found it very unsatisfying.

Of course, I did not use Word to write the initial part of Son of Man.  I used the notepad function on my smartphone at the time, which is reasonably impressive, even to me.  But it would seem a shame not to use my laptop computer, now that I have it.  I suppose I could bring it with me and write fiction in the morning before even leaving the house, and take the southbound bus to catch the northbound train‒that bus route doesn’t begin until far too late for the early trains.  I hate the idea of arriving so late, though, especially since I’m awake anyway in the very early morning, no matter how much trouble I have falling and staying asleep.

I really hate my life, to be honest.  I’m sure you picked that up by now; it’s not as though I’m being particularly subtle.  I’m just so tired.  I’ve lost almost everything that ever mattered to me.  What is it Kipling wrote, “If you can bear to hear the truths you’ve spoken / twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools / or watch the things you gave your life to, broken / and stoop build ’em up with worn-out tools…”?

If so, then…well, you’re probably just a stubborn idiot, I don’t know.  Don’t get me wrong, it’s a nice poem, very stirring and well-written, and obviously quite memorable.  But at the end, your big reward for all the listed attributes is, “you’ll be a man, my son”.  That’s it?  You get to be “a man” according to the criteria set by Rudyard Kipling?  Well, bully for you, I guess.  I don’t even feel human, let alone that I’m a man according to a nineteenth century author and poet’s* judgment.  I frankly feel dishonest when I have to check the Captcha box that says I’m not a robot, for crying out loud.

Anyway, that’s enough of my shit for today.  Unless we’re all lucky and something kills me or severely injures me between now and then, I guess I’ll write another blog post tomorrow, and I’ll probably be no closer to solving my difficulty with fiction writing than I am today.

I hope you’re all doing as well as you can do.

*He was a good one, though.  Gunga Din, The Jungle Book, all that kind of stuff was not half bad.

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I’m too tired to think of a good title for this post

I’m writing today’s blog post on my phone in the back of an Uber.  I could not sleep and figured I’d just head into the office, since it feels slightly more like home to me, at least when no one else is there, than does the house in which I sleep, .  I have my laptop (computer) with me, so I could write this post on it, but I think I would feel more awkward doing that.  It can be trying enough writing on it when riding the train, and the shifts and bumps and other minor accelerations in a regular car tend to be more irregular and pronounced than those in a railroad car.  There’s no track, for one thing, and also a car is much less massive, so it is more prone to lurch noticeably than a train is.

It’s a stupid waste of money to take an Uber, of course, but it’s not as though I’m saving up for the future.  I don’t expect any significant future, and to be honest, I don’t really want one, at least the way I feel most of the time lately.  Even the present is barely worth it, moment to moment.

I’ve recently learned that, in the UK at least, the average lifespan (the arithmetic mean, remember?) is only 55 years for people with autism spectrum disorder.  This average is no doubt weighted down by those who die quite young, but still, this is the UK, where there is a National Health Service.  Here in the US, where the average lifespan, at least for men, has actually recently begun to fall for the first time in any of our lifetimes, the average autistic lifespan is very likely to be lower than in the UK.  I’m 54 now.

I realize that there’s nothing magical about a statistical average when applied to an individual instance of a circumstance, but numbers mean a lot to me at least, and frankly, right now, the idea that there is a maximum predicted cutoff for my lifespan‒and that it is arriving soon‒is more of a relief and even a comfort than it is a horror.

Of course, I don’t carry an “official” diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder, but as one who has, as part of his now-dead career, given who-knows-how-many thousands of “official diagnoses”, I know there’s nothing magical about them.  They are educated, best-available descriptions of what’s happening in particular instances in a medical situation.  They are useful for steering thought and decision making, but because they cannot address all details of an individual case, they can also shackle one’s thought processes and lead one astray.

One thing is clear:  I have some manner of atypical neurology.  I certainly have trouble with dysthymia and depression; I have little doubt about those diagnoses.  I have rotten chronic insomnia, which may be a symptom/sign of that probable neurodevelopmental disorder.  I also had a secundum atrial septal defect, and I have a slight cavum septum pellucidum cyst in my brain, and these things both occur more frequently in people with the neurodevelopmental version of ASD (as opposed to the cardiac Atrial Septal Defect, see above).  They are far from diagnostic thereof, but their presence does shift my Bayesian estimates.  They can also be associated with other diagnoses as well, of course, but I don’t have nearly as many hallmarks of those disorders…at least as far as I’m aware.

Of course, each thing can also happen and stand on its own, being indicative of nothing but itself.  But I think we can all agree that there’s something atypical and dysfunctional happening in my brain, even if it doesn’t actually connect causally in any way to those other findings.

I did write a bit more than a page yesterday on Extra Body, which I guess is a worthwhile accomplishment.  I know it hasn’t been all that long, but I feel as if this only-one-page-a-day pattern is not giving me the benefit that I used to get from writing fiction.  Maybe it’s that I just get my juices going and then shut them down.  Maybe it’s that the story is taking so long to get on with itself.  I don’t know.  Maybe I’m just hoping for too much.  Hope is dangerous stuff.

I don’t know how to adjust my behavior, though.  I already tried to cut back on doing this daily blog, but found that not doing it made me very tense and stressed, since I’ve gotten into the habit of doing it.  It’s almost an OCD-like pattern.

I wouldn’t call it exactly anxiety that I feel if I think about not writing the blog (or doing any of a number of other things that I do by habit). It’s more of a kind of tension, a stress, and it can rapidly escalate into hostility.  Of course, all of these are associated with the sympathetic nervous system, the whole fight-or-flight mode, so maybe one could call my experiences anxiety.  Certainly, the physiological responses are related and quite similar.  But my mental state doesn’t feel fearful as much as angry, and even hateful.

Maybe that’s all just part of Yoda’s cliché little response to young Anakin admitting he was afraid in The Phantom Menace:  “Fear leads to anger; anger leads to hate; hate leads to suffering.”  I always wished Anakin would reply, “Yeah…the suffering of the people who made me afraid and angry.”  Oh, well, much of the Jedi philosophy in the prequels is kind of stupid, and it contributed to their downfall, but they’re fictional anyway.

Speaking of fiction, I’m not sure what I’m going to do about my fiction writing.  I intend to keep writing at least a page a day, but writing it after I write my blog is stressful.  But not writing my blog is stressful.  And writing only one page a day of fiction is stressful.  And dealing with people being late to work and the noise and nonsense and the internally created rules that are not enforced when it’s inconvenient is stressful.  And commuting is stressful, and neither of the places between which I commute are places of comfort to me.

A large contributor to these problems is that, no matter where I go, there I am, and I am not comforting to me.

The Buddhists are supposed to have said that life is suffering‒or was that the Dread Pirate Roberts?  I suppose they might have agreed on that statement.  Still, you’d think that would be enough to counter Yoda’s little admonition, with the reply, “Everything leads to suffering.  What’s your pointy-eared point?”

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Monday morning…looking up?

It’s Monday morning again, as tends to happen around this time of week.  I hope you all had a good weekend.

I’m starting this blog post at the house, where I’m waiting to see if the Uber prices come down a bit before deciding to take one.  If they don’t, I may decide to walk to the train; it’s relatively cool out, and I feel physically rather energetic.  I may even take the bus, though that’s a circuitous and irritating path.  I’ll keep you posted about what happens.

…

Okay, well, the price dropped an acceptable amount, so I booked an Uber, but the estimated wait is 15 minutes, which is unusually long for this time of day.  That further cements my plan to try to make sure to walk back from the train on the way “home” this evening.  Yes, it will take longer even than waiting for an Uber, but it will cost less, it will have a lower carbon footprint‒though I will make many more actual footprints‒and it will also get me some good exercise.  I hope you can all help keep me honest and maybe even spare some words of encouragement.

I have some good news to share with you today.  It’s not momentous, but it means a lot to me.  I did not start on HELIOS, but I’m happy to report that I’ve started something else.  The prospect of beginning a new novel, even a “light novel” sci-fi story, was a bit intimidating, so on the other spiral-bound notebook, the one on which my cousin recommended I write a zombie story, I thought maybe I would write a short story.  I didn’t intend to write a zombie story (sorry, Lance) since I don’t even really enjoy reading or watching such stories, but it’s still a good basic idea.

I opened up my old collection of story ideas, from which came more than one of my existing works, and scrolled down.  Most of the ideas weren’t that gripping for the moment, but quite a way down the list I found an idea whose time, it turns out, had come.

I won’t tell you much about the story idea here, partly because I don’t have the full thing sketched out, but mostly because I don’t want to diminish my drive to write it.  It’s called Extra Body, and no, it’s not a horror story.  If anything, it’s a sort of lighthearted sci-fi short story, but set in the ordinary, modern world.

I wrote one page of it at work on Friday, and then yesterday‒yes, Sunday‒I wrote another page and a half.  It’s almost, but not quite, unheard of for me to write fiction on a Sunday, simply because I habitually mandate that as a mental break day from writing fiction.  However, since I’ve been on quite a prolonged mental break from writing fiction anyway, I decided to get in an extra day.

Also, instead of setting my usual daily goal of 3 to 4 pages of writing, I just set my goal to at least 1 page.  That takes a lot longer when I’m writing “by hand” than it does when typing‒I can type a full 400 to 500 word page in a very short period of time‒but that’s okay.  I’m hoping this pressure will keep me more concise than I often tend to be.

I must say, it’s good that I’m keeping the target low when writing by hand, because my hand muscles are deconditioned for writing much on pen and paper.  Of course, my writing is also terribly messy, but that is nothing new.  As I rediscovered yesterday, I can always read my own handwriting at least.

This shouldn’t be too long a short story, especially not for me.  It’s not going to be terribly deep or thought provoking, just a bit of fun.  Then, maybe, once I’m done with that, if I’m still around, I can start HELIOS.

Another thing, in closing for the day:  I did in fact look up the chords and tabs for All Apologies only to find that, though it was originally played in a form of the “drop D tuning”, it’s just a 3-chord song (not counting sus-2 and 7th chords, which one usually does not).  I decided to learn it using standard tuning, because I don’t like having to twiddle with the tuning of my guitar so much.  This meant I had to figure out the main riff for myself, since the tabs are not really any help, being all in the original tuning.  That wasn’t much work, though.  It’s a nice sounding riff, but it’s actually quite simple.

So, since I had the guitar out anyway, I decided to look up the chords to Close to You, in preparation for possibly recording my parody, Antichrist.  This song has slightly more chords than the other one, but unless you count the “truck driver” key change in the middle, it’s also really a pretty simple song.

I guess most popular songs are not all that complex.  One can get spoiled when playing around with Radiohead and the Beatles, let alone with having played Bach on the piano (and cello), or having been in pit orchestras playing West Side Story and the like.

Anyway, as may be obvious, I’ve gotten a slight boost in my overall energy, partly from better allergy control, I think, so that’s good.  I hope it continues.  We shall see, I guess.  For now, at least I’m being slightly productive.  I hope all of you are feeling at least as well as I, and that you have a good week.