Health

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“Monday morning turning back…”

“…yellow lorry slow, nowhere to go.”

To my surprise, I am writing this blog post on my smartphone today.  I say “to my surprise” because I did not bring my mini laptop computer back to the house with me on Thursday evening, but I did not recall that fact until I unzipped my backpack and started looking for the computer.  It’s a tad frustrating to have allowed that to slip my mind, but then again, it has been four days.

I don’t feel well this morning, though it’s not because of any weekend debauchery of any kind.  I did essentially nothing this weekend.  Of course, that’s always an inaccurate statement if taken literally, but it catches the gist, the impression, of what I mean to convey.  Obviously, I breathed, and my heart pumped blood, and my bone marrow presumably kept on making blood, and I ate and excreted and so on.  And I did walk to the bank and to the convenience store and so on, and I watched a few videos on YouTube and on “Prime Video”.  But that’s about it.

Despite having rested quite a lot, my entire body just aches and is sore‒especially my back and left hip and knee and ankle and my left shoulder and arm and hand.  Both my thumbs are stiff and sore, making the process of writing this post on the smartphone particularly annoying.  I feel almost as if I were fighting some systemic infection, but I have no other localizing or specifying symptoms or signs.

Of course, I’m on my way to the office right now, to start another thoroughly pointless week of work.  I say “pointless” because I’m not going anywhere, metaphorically or literally.  I see no future other than the pointless repetition of today, with its utter lack of anything fulfilling and its ample sampling of pain and tension and frustration and anxiety and loneliness and depression.

If I had some purpose, some desired goal, something toward which I was working, it would be okay, I suspect.  Or if I just had someone with whom to legitimately share my time, with whom I could have anything more than a superficial connection, it might be tolerable.

Alas, I don’t have those things, and I strongly suspect that I never will have them.  I have had good friends (and excellent family) in my life, but I seem to have lost my ability to make friends, at least to make anything other than work friends.  And I am certainly not a dating kind of person, unfortunately.

I don’t know what point I’m getting at (yet again).  Maybe the point is that there is no point.

I don’t know if any of you stopped in on Friday and read the Declaration of Independence.  Ironically, anyone who bothered to stop and read it is likely not the sort of person who would need to be reminded of the principles involved.  So who knows whether anyone really got anything out of the fact that I shared the text of the document here?

Who knows?  Who cares?  Why bother?

What else is there to say today?  Not very much.  Again, I just don’t feel very well at all, this morning, even for me.  (And when was the last time I felt reasonably healthy in the morning?  It probably long predates the origin of this blog.)

All right, well, I’ll leave it here for today, pretty much.  I feel quite discouraged and despondent and just physically rather beat up.  I’ve taken two extra-strength acetaminophen and three aspirin today so far already, but I don’t yet detect any sign of them making anything better.  Perhaps I haven’t given them a fair day in court, so to speak.  We shall see.

In the meantime, I hope that all of you have a good day and a good week, and a good month on top of that.  And so on, and so on, and so on…

In the meantime, here’s my cover of the song from which this blog post’s title comes.

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Dogmas are a disease, a cancer of the mind. Avoid carcinogenic thinking if you can.

I’m going to try to keep this brief this morning, so even though I brought the mini laptop computer with me when I left work on Friday*, I am writing this on my smartphone.  It does make my thumbs sore, or at least it highlights their inherent soreness and stiffness, but that’s part of what makes me tend to write less.  Or at least, I write more slowly; it is not always easy to get me to write less.

I’m choosing this partly because I am just very tired.  On Friday nights and Saturday nights, I can take a couple of Benadryl and so on to help me sleep‒I know it’s not truly good sleep, but just being unconscious for more than an hour or two at a time is such a relief‒but on work nights that’s no good.  So, especially after the artificially extended sleep on the weekend, I tend to have a bad sleep on…well, on every other night, really, but Sunday is the first such night in the work week.

Another problem, and part of my reason for worse sleep, is that I am having a bit of a flare-up of my back/hip pain, and that makes nearly every effort feel that much harder, including simply trying to sleep‒although that’s a somewhat different type of effort than many others.

So, yeah, if there’s anything noticeably different in my writing style today than in my last handful of blog posts, it may be because of the fact that I’m writing on the smartphone.  It may also be something else entirely, of course, or even a combination of things (this seems most likely).  Just because one idea seems to provide a good explanation‒a good story, if you will‒doesn’t mean it’s right.

That’s a common trap into which I frequently see people fall, and it always annoys me (especially when I’m the person).  Some situation will happen, some occurrence will occur, and someone will propose‒perhaps just to themselves‒some reason, some explanation for the event(s), and it will seem at least somewhat plausible, and at least physically possible, and it doesn’t have any glaring logical inconsistencies.  And that’s where they stop.  In their heads, that will be what they think of as the actual explanation for whatever it is they’re explaining.

Unfortunately, this is actually‒at best‒a hypothesis.

Now, if people just recognized that fact and kept the notion in their heads as a hypothesis, then this would be no problem.  All knowledge about the world is, in principle, provisional**.  There’s nothing wrong with having a hypothesis that you recognize as such.  All good science proceeds from speculation (first triggered and then confirmed or denied by observation and testing).

If one has relatively non-crucial concepts to address, one need not even be particularly bothered about confirming or denying one’s little hypothesis.  One can simply have it, tacitly implied, sitting there in potentia in the process of one’s mind.  Then if, quite by chance, one should encounter data or concepts or arguments that bear on the likelihood of that hypothesis, one can‒sometimes quite unconsciously‒adjust one’s hypothesis, or one can discard or replace it or even find oneself more confident in it.

This is all well and good.  But all too often, humans take their first plausible seeming notion and decide that they must now have the answer.  And then, depending on their emotional connection to the idea, if they encounter disconfirming evidence or argument, they twist away from it, dismiss it, seek out only pseudo-confirming ideas and evidence or even (shudder) just the company of other people who share their epistemologically suspect ideas.

These are such things as conspiracy theories are made on, or even religions (literal or figurative ones, including cultish forms of economic theories and philosophical ideas).  And when one does not update one’s ideas, when one is not aligned with reality, sooner or later, one will collide with it.  When one collides with reality, it’s never reality that is damaged.

If it were only the person who persisted in self deception that got hurt in the crash, it would still be tragic but at least at least it would be tolerable.  But as with literal crashes, the innocent are all too often harmed and made to suffer as a consequence of someone else’s poor judgment.

This is part of why I despise all dogmatic thinking.  I even coined an expression in relation to it:  Spay and neuter your dogmas!

Do not let them propagate.  Dogmas are among the most perilous of meme-plexes because they are so stiff and brittle and they tend to have sharp edges.  But even when they don’t, there is still the problem of going against reality.  One can imagine the real nature of the world as a kind of tunnel or pipe or tube‒in places it is very wide and in places very narrow.  In some regions, a fair amount of variability in course is tolerable within it, but sooner or later, if one is not moving parallel to the course of reality, one will hit a wall.

How bad the collision will be can depend on many factors; one can have a mere scrape, or a glancing blow, or one can have a true “crash and burn” situation.

Those are generally worth avoiding.

Okay, that’s it for today.  I feel a bit grumpy and curmudgeonly right now, largely because of my pain and poor sleep, but sometimes it leads to decent writing.  Whether that’s been the case today, I’ll let you be the judge.  I am not impartial.

Have a good one.

*In case it wasn’t clear, I did not work on Saturday.

**Even the old cogito ergo sum.  And don’t get me started on cogitum ergot hatto.

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A brief rundown of my events since last I wrote

I hope nobody’s been too worried about me since I haven’t written a post since Friday.

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!

I know, I know, that’s ridiculous.  I doubt anyone really even noticed that I hadn’t written.  But I haven’t in fact written since Friday (the 13th).

We ended up not working Saturday, partly because it was Father’s (Fathers’?) Day weekend.  That was good, because my youngest came to visit me on Saturday in celebration of that holiday, and as I said to them on Saturday, it was my favorite day in at least 12 years.

Sunday, of course, I don’t write blog posts, so that was nothing unusual; I did laundry and so on.  Then, yesterday, as I got up to get ready for work and to start writing my post, I realized that I really didn’t feel well.  I almost threw up before even getting my shoes on, then things progressed to more dire regions of state-space, and, well…I ended up staying at the house with GI distress and a low-grade fever.  As I told my boss, I think I ate something that disagreed with me strongly and in no uncertain terms.

Still, now I’m feeling a bit better, although I am still washed out.  The biggest worry for me about it at the time, though, was fear that I would dehydrate and might be at risk for having a kidney stone again.  Despite that fear, though, for the most part I didn’t want to take anything in by mouth.  And it’s not as though I have the capacity to take in anything by any other route.  I don’t have the equipment at the house to give myself IV fluids, though I suppose I could get some to have around in case of emergencies.

Anyway, sorry, that’s pretty boring.  I’m feeling at least like I’m heading in the right direction now.  And I can’t really miss more than the one day at work, because then there’s just too much on which to catch up.  Therefore, here I am on my way in, but I’m not fully at my usual capacity‒so please cut me a bit of slack if I’m not as coherent as I might usually be.

Saturday was quite nice, though.  We went first to a gaming/arcade kind of place.  It was a bit loud, but still, it was a lot of fun.  For the first time in my life, I was able to grab a prize with a claw game on my first try.  That was pretty much my only real triumph, but as I said, it was still very enjoyable.

Then we went to lunch at Talkin’ Tacos because, of course, I wanted to have tacos on that Saturday in particular.  After that, we went to a local farmer’s market that I’ve wandered through a few times before (but such places are really not much fun alone).  It was fun this Saturday, though.  It would probably have been more fun if it hadn’t been quite so hot and sunny and humid, but it was still cool‒just not in the literal, physical sense.

Other than that, well…I don’t know.  I don’t really have much more about which to write today, and I’m a bit washed out, as I think I mentioned.  So for now, I guess I’ll draw this to a close.  I hope all you fathers out there had a lovely holiday, and that everyone else also had a nice weekend and a nice day yesterday.  Hopefully, by tomorrow, I’ll be back up to snuff and can write something a bit more interesting.

Thank you for reading.

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Lost then found thoughts about lost connections

While I was getting ready to go this morning, I thought about writing this blog post.  I thought about my usual starting point of saying something like, “Well, it’s Wednesday morning again,” or some other such inanity.  But then, as I was thinking about that, another, more interesting beginning and an actual, rather interesting, topic occurred to me.

Then, by the time I got ready to start writing—i.e., now—I had completely forgotten what I meant to write.

That’s terribly frustrating, but it is par for the course.

Oh, wait!  Maybe what I was going to write was about my realization regarding the effects of having a very uncomfortable crisis, but one that is inherently finite*.  It’s probably pretty obvious to you that what made me think of this was my recent adventure with a kidney stone.

Of course, while it was happening, it drowned out everything else, especially in the acute stages.  If that had been something without an endpoint, and if there were not sufficient medication to control the pain, then death would have been the only feasible alternative.  Even later, with the stent in place and the literal, constant, burning feeling that I needed to urinate for two weeks, things were pretty harsh.  But though it did not truly drown out my depression, and it was thoroughly exhausting, it did rather overshadow much of my chronic pain.

The day the stent was taken out I felt a fair amount of relief, of course.  But before long my usual existence asserted itself, with all its emptiness, and of course, with all its chronic pain.  And I remembered that, really, I have nothing going on in my life at all, nothing to which I look forward in any kind of long-term sense, and I have no further clue about or hope for my future.

It’s a bit reminiscent, on a shorter time scale, of what happened when I was a “guest” of the Florida Department of Corrections.  Though I was/am innocent of the charges that were created against me, I took a plea bargain for three years (toward which time served applied) because it was tolerably short and I didn’t want to risk the possibility of the much longer sentence with which the prosecution threatened to try to get, risking the outcome on the potential of a jury of my peers to see past my (apparently) not terribly endearing personality and the simple fact that I was a doctor and thus, to those who might be in a typical jury, a generally hated “elite”**.

I think it was the best available choice at the time.  And while I was “up the road” I was able to console myself with looking forward to seeing my children again once I got out—and to see them before they were adults, which would not have been the case otherwise—and that gave me the optimism to write first Mark Red and then The Chasm and the Collision and then Paradox City while I was at FSP West.

But then, of course, once I got out, it turned out that my kids didn’t really want the discombobulation of me having visitation or anything of that sort.  While I was heartbroken, I didn’t feel that I had a right forcibly to disrupt their lives when I had already fucked everything up, first with my personal health problems, then with my misguided attempts to help other people with chronic pain that led me to be arrested.

So, I bit the bullet and kept on writing at least, on my own, though I think my stories grew steadily bleaker and darker over time.  And I learned to play guitar and wrote and recorded a few songs, and did some covers and everything.  But I still didn’t see my kids, and haven’t even communicated with my son other than to receive his email stating that he didn’t really want to have a relationship with me (“right now”).

At least I got to see my youngest when I was visited in the hospital with my kidney stone.  That was a gift that was well worth even that much pain.  But now I’m back to my nosferatu existence, and like Vermithrax***, though I don’t feel pain as severe as the kidney stone, I still feel constant pain.

There may be people who can have chronic pain without getting depressed about it, and indeed, without losing their zest for life, but I fear I’m only left with the squeezed dry pulp of mine.  It seems to be just the way I’m built neurologically.

I suspect that most people who keep their spirits up despite chronic pain and disability do so because they are surrounded by a local support system of some sort****, and they probably do better at connecting with and getting along with other people than I do.

I’ve only ever really been close to specific, core groups of people, and with ones nearby, that I saw nearly every day.  I’ve never been good at connecting over long distances, and I have a hard time even picturing people when they’re far away.  I mean, I can “picture” them in the sense that I know what they look like, and I will be able to interact with them if and when I see them, but I cannot in any intuitive sense “model” their existence elsewhere.  I cannot really get a feel for what they might be doing and certainly not for what they might be thinking.

When even the people I love are far away from me, they really exist more as concepts than as people whose reality I can feel.  They are missing in a bleak and rather horrible way.  I feel terrible about that fact, and I hope it doesn’t come across as insulting—though it has probably hurt the feelings of people about whom I care on more than one occasion—but it seems to be just the way my brain works.  It’s also probably related to the fact that I never have for an instant imagined wanting to be someone other than myself, even though I hate myself; I just cannot even conceive of what that would mean, let alone wish for it.

Oh well, whatever, never mind.  I’m back on the train, yeah, and here I go again, on my own…alone again, naturally.

(I do like to quote things, don’t I?)

I hope you have a good day.

*Of course, as far as we can tell, pretty much everything is inherently finite, but some things are much more constrained and contained in time than others.

**This is based on what my attorney, and my attorney’s supervisor, said to me.  I don’t think they were trying to be unkind, and though their judgement was and is fallible, it was likely better than mine would have been.

***I know, I’m mixing fantasy metaphors and similes.  That’s okay; I like them.

****And most of them are probably not “ex-cons”.

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Missing AC units and one man’s lack of mental health

Well, it’s Tuesday morning, and that’s better than it still being Monday evening, which wasn’t so fun.  I got the notice that my AC unit had been delivered yesterday afternoon, but when I got back to the house, it was nowhere to be seen, and my housemates had not seen it let alone brought it in out of the rain.

It was raining, in case I hadn’t told you.  It still is.

Anyway, I looked around the nearby houses and then I checked with Amazon, and I called FedEx, who said that their info was that it was delivered.  I went to the website with them and saw the delivery picture‒which was not of the house where I live.

I got pretty frustrated, because it was raining a fair amount, but I looked at the picture and thought it might be the neighbor’s house.  But it had not been there when I’d looked around.

I was already wet, so I went to their house and knocked on the door, so irritated by the whole process that I was willing to interact with other people.  It turned out they had brought it inside because of the rain.  They graciously (and with some difficulty, since it was both heavy and awkward) brought it out for me.

Then I had to lug this 50 pound box, with no real handles, back to the house.  I’m feeling the effects of that in my back quite a bit, and I hold FedEx responsible.

In the end, at least I got it set up and started using it last night.  I won’t say it was miraculous, but I was able to use a blanket part of the night last night for the first time in a long while.

I guess it can’t expect it to make a life-changing difference, but it’s better to be at least a little cooler than I was.  It can’t be a bad thing‒or, well, it’s always possible in principle for it to be a bad thing, but I would give that quite a low likelihood.

As for everything else, well…I’m still at a loss.  I don’t know what to do, and I feel no why to do anything.  I guess it’s appropriate that June is (among other things) Men’s Mental Health Awareness Month, though it might better be called Men’s Mental Lack of Health Awareness Month.

Apparently, according to the statistics I have recently seen (this was on social media, so the precision and accuracy must be considered at least potentially lacking) men die from suicide three times as often as women.  And, of course, people with autism spectrum disorder die from suicide a similar multiple compared with those who do not have it (and the proportion may be as high as 25 times that in non-autistic people, but I’ll stick with 3 times for the moment).

So, if those variables are independent, which they probably are not completely, then I would be nine times as likely to die from suicide as a neurotypical woman.

That sounds alarming, doesn’t it?  Nine times the risk?  Like corduroy pillows, that’s the sort of thing that makes headlines.  But if you think about it, those statistics and probability ratios give you almost no information.  Before you can decide to act on that risk multiplier, you need to understand the baseline risk/rate of occurrence.

If 10% of neurotypical women die from suicide (an absurdly large and entirely imaginary percentage) then with my relative risk of 9 x the baseline, it would seem that I would have a 90% risk of suicide.  If the women’s rate were a bit higher, my risk might even seem to be more than 100%, which is a mathematical absurdity.

On the other hand, if neurotypical women committed suicide at a rate of .000001, or one in a million, then my risk would seem to be .000009, or just shy of one in a hundred thousand*.  That wouldn’t be too terrible.

This is why you should not get alarmed if you hear some statistic such as “people with red hair have a hundred times the chance to spontaneously combust as non redheads”.  You need to know what the baseline chance is to know if there’s anything worth worrying about**.

As for my personal risk of suicide, well, that’s not vanishingly small.  I have numerous risk factors, including the single biggest predictive risk factor.  As a rough estimate, I would say that, despite the fact that I’m a 55 year old white male with some pertinent family history, I think my risk of death by suicide is significantly higher than my risk of death due to heart attack; it’s probably bigger than my chance of having a heart attack, even a relatively minor one.  That’s not a fixed number, of course.  Many things can change all these relative risks.

Unfortunately, I don’t honestly expect my own risk of suicide to go down significantly, or even at all, as time goes on.  My internal life seems to be steadily growing slightly bleaker, and even blanker, every day, and none of the things that used to bring me comfort or at least engage me seem to be of any interest.  If anything, I feel my likelihood is increasing over time, though maybe it’s staying the same but each day is a new roll of the dice, so over time, the likelihood increases.

Oh, well.  What are you going to do?  I don’t have the wherewithal to change the situation myself; if I did, I wouldn’t be in this situation.  I’ve already tried a great many things.

Anyway, I hope the weather is more pleasant wherever you are, and that you have a very good day.

*The actual rates, while apparently difficult to tease out with great precision, are quite a bit more alarming than my second scenario.  In the UK, for instance, it seems that about 1% of people are autistic, but 11% of suicides are by autistic people.  The rate of suicidal ideation among people with ASD is way higher than that in the general population, starting in childhood (which I can confirm in my case), when the rates of ideation and attempt are reported as high as 25 times that of the general population.  Also, overall, the expected lifespan of autistic people has been measured at about 54 years.  Even given typical statistical variance, I’m about due.

**Since there is not a single confirmed case of spontaneous human combustion, despite what you may have heard, even a multiplier of a hundred may leave one so close to a zero probability that being hit by an asteroid might be a more realistic concern.

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Year-long quanta and Planck exercises for your core

Well, it’s Monday again.  Huzzah.

I don’t have much new to say.  I still do not have my air conditioner, thanks to the frustratingly poor delivery logistics of FedEx®.  I also have to blame the seller, of course (though I find the concept of blame mostly valueless) since they were the ones who advertised the unit as arriving between the 28th and the 30th of May (this year), and they failed to ensure that it would in fact arrive within their predicted time range.

Hopefully it will arrive today, and hopefully by the time I get back to the house I will have the energy to set it up.  Usually at the end of the day I barely have the energy to change my clothes.

In other news, it was my sister’s birthday recently.  That’s a good thing, and I’m glad she’s doing well.  It would have been nice to spend it with her, but that wasn’t doable given my recent life events.  Of course, I’ve said before that it’s a bit funny that we think of a person as one year older on their birthday, as though time applied to human age in quanta the size of one Earth year.

At the Planck scale time may in fact be quantized, but that’s a very, very tiny scale‒if memory serves, it’s the time it takes light to travel one Planck length*‒and for ordinary experience, the flow of time is continuous, though it is variable thanks to Relativity.

That got me thinking what it might be like if time did apply to humans all at once, one day a year.  I think that would have some curious consequences.  For kids, of course, it might be quite a cool thing, and they might look forward to each birthday enthusiastically‒especially around the time of puberty.

But for adults past their twenties, say, birthdays might become a thing of fear, or at least anxiety, and more so every year.  Imagine that even the long-term consequences of illnesses and injuries only accrued on one’s birthday‒possibly at the exact anniversary of the time one was born.  If you knew you’d been injured that year, you’d surely be dreading the birthday on which the consequences of that injury first fully applied.

Or what if you knew you were predisposed to some chronic complaint, or had a risk for some form of cancer, or of dementia, but you wouldn’t know if anything had happened until the time of your birthday?  I imagine everyone would plan to go to the doctor the day after every birthday, at least once they had passed their twenties.

It’s an interesting idea for a story, perhaps.  You could see people having birthday parties and the like, partly to celebrate and partly to offer support for their friends who were aging.  There could be whole special rituals surrounding the process, especially as people got old enough to perhaps die when the year accrued.

And then there could be a weird, truly bizarre occurrence.  Maybe one person would be found who, after aging “normally” his whole life, suddenly got younger at one year’s birthday, and then again at subsequent birthdays, as if there were some type of glitch.

Heck, even a person who aged continuously would be a freak of nature in such a world.

Anyway, that’s what I found myself thinking about.  It seemed mildly amusing.  I’m not going to write such a story or anything.  At least I don’t expect to write it.

Indeed, I’m basically finished writing this for today.  I hope you have a good day and a good week.

*Which is on the order of ten to the negative 35th meters.  That means that there will be thirty-four zeros after the decimal point before there is any other numeral, so…a very small distance across which causality may act at the “speed of light”.  Since the Planck length is 1.6 x 10-35 meters and the speed of light is about 3 x 108 meters per second, the Planck time would be 1.6/3 times (10-35 over 108) or .5 x 10-43 or just 5 x 10-44 seconds**.  That’s way, way too small for us to measure.

**Or .00000000000000000000000000000000000000000005 seconds.

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Crystallized thought and civilizational axle grease

It’s Friday, and I suspect I will be working tomorrow, and if I do, I will probably write a blog post.  Further bulletins on that subject as events warrant.

I’m really, really exhausted.  I think the events of the past few weeks are finally just catching up to me, now that I don’t literally have constant tension and discomfort from the stent, which truly made me unable to rest for more than an hour at a time, maximum.  Yesterday at work was really rough; by the end I was just lying my head back limply in my seat and kind of staring and trying to doze off‒at which I succeeded for a few minutes at a time.  But I certainly haven’t recovered.

I wish I could spend about 24 hours straight just sleeping in a comfortable bed in an air conditioned room with no interruptions.  Oh, and I would want plenty of water and other beverages to drink.

Well, my portable AC unit is supposed to arrive today, and if I’m lucky, maybe I’ll even have the energy to set it up and turn it on this evening.  I hope I will.  It would be a shame not to be able to take advantage of it.

I really hope it works well.

As for everything else, well, I have no idea, really.  I certainly feel no urge or drive to create anything, unless you count this blog as a creative endeavor, which I’m not sure I do.  Maybe if I get the AC in and running I’ll have more creative energy.  I don’t know.  I’m somewhat pessimistic, but that’s more down to my character than to a balanced assessment of the situation.

I still have my overarching plan about either losing weight and diminishing my chronic pain or else…well, you know, but I haven’t made much headway yet on that, because a number of events have gotten in the way.  These last few weeks even my upper body workout in the mornings has been erratic; it’s hard to keep my discipline up.

I wish there were some patron out there, perhaps some manner of “sugar mama” or whatever it would be, to sponsor me in doing some creative endeavors.  On the other hand, I wouldn’t want such a person to have the rights to any intellectual property I produced, so it’s not as though I would just welcome and work for anyone.

It would be nice to have some help, though, on a regular basis.  But, of course, I know I have no right to expect that nor do I in any possible sense deserve it.

Of course, the very concept of “deserving” things is one that I find vague and nebulous, and often without substance.  I can understand it in a situation in which one has been part of a contract and one has fulfilled one’s agreed upon end of the bargain‒then such a person deserves the payment (or whatever) to which they agreed in the contract.

Other than that, though, I think the term is usually vacuous, at least the way most people seem to use it, as in, “You deserve someone who treats you like a queen/king” or some such sentiments.  Really?  Someone deserves that?  How so?  What service did that person perform for the world or what attributes do they embody that make them deserve such treatment?

I don’t think most people actually really ever think about it when they say such things.  And yet, they fill themselves and each other with these concepts of entitlement without basis, and this leads them to a cycle of letting the “perfect”* be the enemy of the good.  It’s a kind of narcissism, in a way, and as usually seems to be the case (to an outside observer such as I am) such attributes almost always bring misery to the person who embodies them, and often to those around them.

I do wish people would be more careful with their words‒even in private, impromptu interactions to some degree.  Language is crystallized thought, and sloppy language doesn’t merely reflect sloppy thought; it engenders it.

But, of course, while language, especially written language, is the lifeblood of civilization, courtesy is the lubricant**, without which the machinery of civilization grinds itself down and rapidly ceases to function well, if at all.  Thus, it’s worth applying the principle of charity to other people when interacting, rather than trying to pounce on any potential cause of offense, or to “pwn” them (as they used to say) or to “destroy” them in a discussion.

Besides being hyperbolic (and inaccurate in other ways) such notions surely miss the whole point of a discussion (or, Batman forbid, a debate) which should be about interacting with others’ thoughts and trying to improve one’s own (and mutual) understanding and to try to achieve an ever-improving understanding of the reality in which everyone exists.

It’s frustrating.  But so are many other things, I suppose.  I wish there were more rewards to compensate for the frustrations, but it’s been a long time since that has been anything approaching a balance for me.

Whatever.  I hope you all have a good day, and a good weekend, whether or not I write a post tomorrow.

*Another word that is almost always vacuous.

**I know, I’m mixing metaphors here, but I’m doing it with full and deliberate awareness, so I hope it’s not too grating.

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That small model of the barren earth which serves as paste and cover to our blogs

Hello and good morning.

Well, I forgot to bring my mini laptop computer back to the house with me last night, so I am writing this post on my smartphone.  At least that should tend to keep the post brief, I guess.

It feels a bit weird not to be discussing my kidney stone, doesn’t it?  Oh, wait, I guess I just brought it up, so to speak, didn’t I?  Although, you don’t want to bring up a kidney stone in any literal way, of course.  But it does seem that mine must have passed, since the symptoms are almost completely resolved.  It feels weird, in a way, to be able to go a long time between trips to the restroom!

There’s still pretty much nothing else going on in my personal news.  No creative endeavors are underway at all.  I thought about asking my boss if he could bring my black Strat back, but I haven’t felt much other than chagrin at the thought.  I imagine it sitting idle by my desk, mocking me with my apparent inability to do anything at all engaging or creative.

I don’t know what to do with what’s left of my life, if anything.  Why would I try to achieve anything of consequence when humans are, overall, so stupidly unable to recognize almost anything sensible about the world and their place in it, such as it is?  They are so small and provincial and tribal‒though perhaps it’s hypocritical of me to characterize them as such when I am expressing general misanthrope toward them, which is a sort of tribalism/xenophobia/prejudice in and of itself.

Still, I wouldn’t say that all human beings are any one thing other than human beings, and that’s just a tautology.  I don’t like to generalize about 8+ billion beings, except in the obvious, trivial ways.  Though humans are, overall, far more alike than they are unalike, there is nevertheless tremendous variation in their specifics*.  No two humans who have ever lived have been exactly the same; even identical twins have different development and local environments that make them diverge, at first subtly, but with growing potential difference, rather like the progression of a chaotic system.

Two first-degree relatives can diverge more, of course, or at least they are more prone to do so.  And two “unrelated”** humans can diverge still more.  Nevertheless, the phase space through which their trajectories may wander, while functionally limitless in certain dimensions, is nevertheless a tiny sliver of the phase space of all mammals, or of all vertebrates, or of all animals, or of all eukaryotes, or of all terrestrial life.  And we don’t even know what other possibilities may be available.

I guess my overall point is that I do not feel like a part of this species, or even of this biosphere.  I feel other.  I do not feel a sense of connection to the people or creatures around me, not in any deep and persistent way.  Maybe I used to feel that; I can’t recall right now.  Maybe I’ve just degenerated over time.

Oh, well.  I guess for the moment I will go through the motions as I have been and try to see if it gets easier.  I don’t expect it will, but I guess it’s technically possible.

TTFN

*Not in the biological sense of the word, though that ends up being a nice coincidence.

**I put the “scare” quotes around the word because of course all humans are related, and not in some absurd, Adam and Eve mythological way.  Indeed, all life on Earth is related‒yes, even octopuses.  It’s very unlikely that a life form that didn’t arise on Earth would be able to digest any form of sustenance here, because biological material, and the enzymes that break it down, are highly specific in their characteristics and interactions***.

***That’s why I currently inhabit this cumbersome, irritating body, despite all its failings****.

****I don’t really think that I’m an extraterrestrial consciousness trapped in a human body, of course.  That’s just a metaphorical way to express how I feel*****.

*****Or is it?

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A hot and muggy morning blog post*

Okay, well, it’s Wednesday morning, and I didn’t write a blog post yesterday.  I didn’t go to work yesterday, either, because yesterday was my appointment to get the stent taken out of my right ureterovesical junction—you can look that up in case you don’t already know to what I refer.  In any case, my thought process was that, since to get to my appointment on time from the office would have taken most of two hours, I would’ve had to leave work very shortly after it started, and I was not feeling well at all on Monday, nor on Tuesday.

Now, I am pleased to report, the stent came out without much trouble, though it was terribly uncomfortable.  Nevertheless, it is a true relief to have it gone.  Now, without the access “thread” from the stent hanging out, I can actually not feel like I have to use the bathroom constantly.  That’s a tremendous relief.

The urologist recommended that I drink lots of liquid every day from now on, and when I suggested “At least three liters?” he shook his head and pointed up with his thumb The Accountant style, and told me “Four or five at least”.

I’m not going to resist that advice, of course.  I already live in south Florida, and the heat and humidity are ridiculous.  I probably need to drink quite a bit more than even that if I can; the threat of recurrent kidney stones is a powerful one.  What’s worse, my room’s air conditioner is on the fritz, and it has been for some time.  I looked this morning at a little digital thermometer that I have and that I had forgotten for a while, and the temperature in my room was 89.5 degrees Fahrenheit.  This was at four in the morning.

Well, I already have a new, portable air conditioning unit on the way, which should arrive no later than Friday.  I look forward to it because, although I have quite a good and powerful floor fan, that leaves me with more of a tendency to dehydrate because it cools by evaporation.

I know, all this is rather boring.  I apologize.  I never told anyone I have an exciting or interesting life, though it carries its share of intense drama and angst, I guess.  Still, I can write about much more interesting things than would ever happen to me, and I can even give people happy endings to their stories, which is something that is almost certainly not going to happen to me.

Oh, I forgot to mention, I am writing this blog post on my mini laptop computer, as I suggested I might on Monday (I think I suggested it then, but I’m not going to check to be sure—I’ll have put a link to it, so anyone out there who so desires can go check on my behalf).  It’s been just over a month since the last time I wrote on the laptop computer.  It is a pleasant change to be able to write so fluidly, and in a way that feels much more natural and easier.

That being said, I don’t really have much about which to write other than my recent medical issues.  I continue not to write fiction, and I continue not to play music, let alone to compose it, and I continue not to draw or paint, and I haven’t been reading anything educational at all, whether about physics or mathematics or neuroscience or biology more generally.

Maybe I should get Richard Dawkins’s recent work about the genetic book of the dead.  His stuff is usually pretty gripping, and I like biology.  It’s harder to find physics books that I want to read, because much of the popular writing about physics is stuff that I already know, and about which I know more than is usually discussed in popular books.

I guess that’s just the way it goes.  The world wasn’t built for any of us or for all of us.  It just happened, as did our so-called civilization.  That doesn’t mean it’s not worth trying to make it a better situation for as many of us as we can and to try to avoid committing injustice to others.  But that requires reflection and calm assessment, and humans in general are not strongly disposed to such things.

We can only try, I suppose.  Meanwhile, at least try to have a good day.

*By which I mean that the morning is hot and muggy, not that the blog post is hot and muggy.  What would that even mean?

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Another very brief Monday blog post

It’s Monday again.  In fact, it’s the last Monday in May of 2025, the end of a very small and arbitrary era.  It’s also Memorial Day, a day on which I don’t like to say, “Happy Memorial Day,” since it’s a day of remembrance of the fallen, but I do wish you well on this holiday.

I don’t really have anything to write about today.  My brain is borderline completely fried, not least because no matter how often I use the bathroom, I still feel like I have to go, and urgently.  So, I haven’t been getting much sleep, even for me, and what little I get is interrupted every half an hour to an hour.

This is all nothing new, and I’m sure it’s terribly boring for all of you readers.  I do apologize.  I’m basically a boring person.

I have my appointment with the urologist tomorrow, and hopefully that will spell the end of this current situation, at least.  If not, I don’t know what I’m going to do.

Actually, I don’t know what I’m going to do either way.  I am fairly clueless and at a loss.  I don’t know what to do about the future or whatever.  Life is just so uncomfortable all the time.  The Buddhists underestimated things when they said merely that life is inherently unsatisfactory.  Life is frequently quite a bit more than unsatisfactory.

That’s not exactly a rip-roaring insight, is it?  My brain is so foggy and fatigued.  I’m glad that work has at least been productive over these past two weeks, given how uncomfortable and worn out I am.  I’m glad that the discomfort isn’t a necessary prerequisite for work being productive.  If it were, I’m afraid that I would be forced to withdraw my services, so to speak.

Ugh, I’m tired of writing these posts on my smartphone.  It continues to irritate my thumb joints, and I make so many typos because the “keys” are not suited to adult male hands, and probably not to adult female hands, either.  I should just bring my little laptop computer again instead of being lazy.

Of course, that computer is getting on a bit, and frankly, so is this phone.  But I really don’t feel like replacing either of them.  I’ve had the thought, and the intention, that they, like everything else, should be the last of such things that I own.

I don’t know.  I can’t think of anything else to say.  Move along, folks, nothing left to see here today, you know?

Anyway, try to have a good day and a good week.