holidays

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“No need to get up-tighter”?

It’s Monday again, and though it is not raining down by me, I’m all but certain that it’s raining somewhere right now, so one could say “it’s raining again” without fear of being entirely wrong.  No matter how you might want to cut up spacetime based on “planes” of “simultaneity”, there is sure to be somewhere in the universe where it is raining now.

Actually, if the universe is infinite in spatial extent, one could probably prove that it is a mathematical certainty that it’s raining somewhere, since there are‒as far as we can tell‒only a finite number* of possible quantum states in any given region of spacetime, and some of these include rain.  Indeed, even if it were not raining on Earth, anywhere, in some given instant (an unlikely eventuality), the fact is that rain can happen in many places in many forms.  I’m led to understand that it sometimes rains neon in the atmosphere of Jupiter.

So, perhaps the song by Supertramp shouldn’t have been It’s Raining Again, but should have been It’s Raining Still.

I don’t know.  Maybe that wouldn’t suit the rhythm of the song.  Then again, it always was a song where the sentiments expressed in the lyrics didn’t quite match the upbeat character of the tune.  This was probably deliberate on the part of the band.

Oh, in case anyone was wondering, the reason there was no post on Saturday was that, indeed, we did not work in the office on Saturday.  We didn’t work out of the office, either, as far as I know.  Well, I know I didn’t work, so even if they worked, we did not work, so I guess I’m right there.

I did a fair amount of walking on Saturday, and nearly as much on Sunday, though Saturday’s walk was more interesting.  I walked in a “park” along a canal in south Florida, and found myself well down into Dade County before I found an exit from the park area that took me to a road on which I could get something to quench my thirst and a place to which to call an Uber (they have a hard time picking one up in a park alongside a canal).  I had walked about seven and a half miles, and I could tell I was getting a bit too much sun**, though my feet and ankles and knees seemed to be holding up okay.

On Sunday I went for another walk, during which I had enough sunscreen.  That was because on Sunday I took my walk solely for the sake of walking, unlike Saturday, on which I had a specific purpose, and my longer walk began on a whim after that purpose was achieved.

It wasn’t an interesting or noteworthy purpose, by the way.  I’m just not discussing it because it cannot have any bearing for anyone but me.

Let’s see, is there anything else going on that’s worth discussing?  Well, of course, there are things going on in the world, and in the universe, and so on, all the time, and probably many of them are worth discussing to someone, or would be, even if no one knows they are happening.  But, of course, pretty much anything that happens, no matter how locally momentous, is historically trivial, let alone cosmically trivial.

Probably there aren’t many things that aren’t cosmically trivial.  I suppose if inflationary cosmology is real and it started at some locus in spacetime, then that would not have been trivial.  But if there is eternal inflation, there’s a real question as to whether it started at all.

Of course, even then, with eternal inflation, the local drop of the inflaton field down to the vacuum state (or a pseudo-vacuum state) here in our bubble universe‒leading to the formation of our universe, all its matter and energy, and possibly the configuration of our natural laws and constants‒would seem to be significant.

But that would only be significant to us, the creatures in this bubble universe.  On the scale of the cosmos overall, it would be just one bubble universe formation in an endless sea of such bubble universes, each one no more striking than the cavitation bubbles that form and then collapse in water that’s starting to boil.  Indeed, if our universe is such that an eventual recollapse will happen, i.e., a “Big Crunch”***, then we really are a lot like a cavitation bubble.

I guess this has been a slightly odd way to start the week‒which is unfortunate, given that today’s date is an even number (24) not an odd one.  But I don’t think I’ve ever claimed not to be an odd person.  I think I’ve known that I was different and a bit peculiar‒perhaps more than “a bit”‒since I was very young.  That’s okay in and of itself.  If most people are “normal”, why the hell would anyone want to be normal?

With that, I wish you all an abnormally good day and week, and if you’re in the US, I hope you have a good holiday coming up, and that you are anticipating it with eagerness.

*It’s big, don’t be mistaken.  But the biggest finite number you can think of‒ever‒is no closer to infinity than is the number 1.  So, in a universe that’s infinite in spatial extent, all possible finite configurations will be instantiated somewhere‒indeed, they will be instantiated an infinite number of times.

**I hadn’t planned on such a long walk, so I was not prepared in that sense.

***Our best information right now seems to indicate that we are not going to recollapse, but that we will continue to expand, at an ever-increasing rate.  I suppose that would make us more akin to a bubble that fully forms and expands in boiling water, escaping from the liquid into the air above.  Such bubbles are no more important than the cavitation bubbles, though.  They’re merely different. 

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“He thrusts his fists against the posts…”

Hey, everybody.  It’s Friday, and I’m not sure if I will be working tomorrow, so I guess just keep your eyes open for a blog post in case there is one.  I suspect that I will not be working, since many of the silly and tragic and chaotic and even the arguably good (but disruptive) things going on in the lives of people at the office persist, flowing and whirling through the phase space of possibilities, forming vortices and other turbulent and chaotic patterns.  Still, I may be wrong.  It would be far from the first time.  So take a peek tomorrow morning, if you’re up and up for it; if I work, I will (probably) write a post.

Anyway, I want to keep this short for today if I can.  I just feel worn out and over-stressed by the various chaotic things happening and by other things in my life.  Some of them should, on their surface, seem good, at least in some aspects, though I think anyone could imagine that they wouldn’t be exclusively good.  And there is a surprising amount of associated stress* and tension and consequent depression and worsened insomnia‒and it all doesn’t help how I feel about myself.

And then, of course, though I don’t very often talk about it, there is always my chronic pain.  Always.

In addition, despite the silliness from yesterday’s post, the holidays do stress me out.  It’s a frustrating kind of stress, because while I feel very lonely, I’m all but certain I would not be able to tolerate being part of someone’s celebration.  I’m too chronically “on my own”, so I can’t even readily imagine myself taking part in any kind of get together unless I was on some kind of powerful anxiolytic or similar.

Maybe I’ve gone too far down the “stranded alien” rabbit hole.  I guess that’s better than going down the “stranded rabbit” alien hole, though neither one sounds inviting.  Anyway, I’ve just gotten too accustomed to being isolated and non-social and paranoid.  Not that I actually think people are out to get me**; I just don’t think people are safe.  They are not trustworthy.  This is not meant to be an aspersion on their characters.  I don’t think they are (necessarily) malicious.  I just think they’re unreliable in too many, too important ways.

So, despite whatever dreams and wishes I have‒and I do have them, though I try not to waste too much energy on them‒I expect that the state I’m in right now (I don’t mean Florida) is the state I’ll be in for the remainder of my existence.  And that is at least part of why I don’t desire my existences persistence.  It’s not great for me and it seems terribly unlikely that it would be any significant good for anyone else.

One benefit of being isolated is surely that at least one’s existence or nonexistence is unlikely to be very disruptive of other people’s lives, one way or another.  And my personal ethos contains a strong aspect of trying not to cause other people trouble, and feeling horrible if I do.

It’s not even about whether those other people actually feel inconvenienced or troubled; even if they reassure me, it probably will not help.  I am the one who experiences the shame of bothering other people.  It’s not as much an empathy-related phenomenon as a sort of Categorical Imperative kind of problem.  Well, no, that’s not the right reference.  I think the term is Deontology.  It’s a rule I have to follow even if it has no impact on anyone in any way.

To be clear, though, this is not a philosophical stance on my part.  I haven’t chosen to do this based on any reasoning or logic; I’m just using those things to explain it.  It’s very much a setting-point, akin to a black-box strategy devised through gradient descent in machine learning.  As such, it is something preceding and overwhelming any potential rational assessment and judgment on my part.

I don’t think I’m expressing this well.  Perhaps that’s partly because I don’t fully understand it in any kind of systematic, algorithmic fashion.  Perhaps it’s not understandable in such terms, but is rather the product of the various nonlinear processes that entail the brain functions of human beings.

Anyway, that’s enough for now.  If I work tomorrow, I’ll probably write a blog post.  If I don’t work tomorrow, I almost certainly will not write a blog post.  This leaves a little gray area in the outcome “no blog post” because it’s not completely impossible that I might work and yet not write a blog post.  So, not working almost certainly implies no blog post, but no blog post does not imply not working with as strong a tendency.  This is a fact of probabilities relating to Bayesian statistics that sometimes throws people off, but it’s important in practical matters, such as in knowing what to make of a “positive” screening test result, say for an infection or cancer.

I leave it as an exercise for you, if you’re interested (also if it’s not just obvious to you), to work out why these things are so.  And I also leave it as an exercise for you to have a good day and a good weekend.

*Not to be confused with the Associated Press, though there are commonalities.

**I don’t rule it out categorically, of course, since it is a physical possibility and thus does not have a truly zero chance of happening.  But it seems unlikely.  Why would anyone be truly out to get me?  Whose priorities could be so out of whack that I would be their focus?  Still, people are stupid (present company included), so I can’t dismiss it completely, and I always have such possibilities at least in the back of my mind.

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The blogger’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, doth glance from heaven to Earth, from Earth to heaven

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday again, so I’m starting this post with my traditional salutation.  Well, actually, I already started it with that salutation, so I’m telling you what I did right after you just saw that I had already done it.  It’s not terribly efficient, but I guess at least I have provided some explanation for the uninitiated.

As of today, there are only eleven shopping months until my birthday, so you might want to start thinking about what you’re going to do to celebrate when the time comes.  Not that there’s any guarantee that I’ll even still be around for my next birthday, but maybe you’ll want to commemorate it in some way after I’m dead.

Heck, maybe I’ll even be famous after I’m dead.  That would be a little bit ironic, right?  I’m not saying it wouldn’t be nice, in a sense, for a lot of people to like my books (and maybe my music and my other writing) after I’m gone, but I won’t know about it, so it’s at best a theoretical niceness.  It would be better if people liked them while I’m alive.

I’m very bad at self-promotion, though, and I’m also bad at connecting with people who do promoting for others.  I have a poor self-image, for one thing (the fact that it’s bad doesn’t mean it’s inaccurate), and I also am just very socially awkward and find it very uncomfortable and even shameful to try to talk myself up, as it were.

I guess I would have been better off if I were a narcissist without shame; then I might be much more successful.  Heck, I might even be elected president, against the better judgment of practically every sane and sensible and moral and situationally aware person in the whole effing world.

At least the shameless don’t tend to be hypocrites.  That’s small consolation for everyone else, I guess, but the truly shameless don’t even pretend to try to follow any moral code that other people follow, and in that tiny way only, it’s mildly refreshing.

Let’s not go down that road, though, shall we?  It’s a depressing insight into human nature.

It’s the holiday season now, so to speak, at least here in the US.  Next Thursday is Thanksgiving, in fact, and the office is more or less certain not to be open, so I won’t be writing a blog post then.  Instead, I’ll be cooking a turkey and making some stuffing and potatoes and cranberry sauce and green beans and some pumpkin pie and apple pie and all that for all the guests who will be coming to celebrate with me.

Actually, though, since all my guests are imaginary, the food can be imaginary as well, which does save on expenses.  If I have nothing else, I have a good imagination.  I can dream up the best Thanksgiving feast you could ever eat.

Mind you, if I’m doing the dreaming, it’s going to conform to my tastes, and I don’t feel too bad about that.  All the above items are, of course, things I’ve always enjoyed at prior Thanksgiving dinners.  There will, however, be no mushrooms of any kind in my feast, nor zucchini, nor eggplant (these latter aren’t really part of most traditional feasts, anyway, unless I’m very mistaken).

Also, though there will be salad—I love a good salad—there will be no cucumbers, no tomatoes*, nothing related to avocados, and no walnuts or pecans or stuff like that.  Still, I don’t need to go into an exhaustive list of banned foods, since I’m the one imagining the feast; I just won’t add them!

When other people are involved, though, it can be useful to have a list of items someone cannot or will not eat.  Then, whatever someone makes to eat should be at least tolerable to everyone.  And after all, even merely tolerable food should be quite a good thing, since food is a fundamental and necessary good.

It’s a bit like sex:  even relatively boring and banal (don’t!) sex is better than almost anything else one might do on a given day, unless there are factors that get in the way**.  Of course, because of all the cultural baggage we have about sex—partly rooted in the idiocy of Saul of Tarsus, but amplified by other various repressive assholes throughout history—sometimes even sex between consenting adults can be associated with lots of hang-ups and discomfort.  It’s a shame, really.

Oh, well, it’s not as though I’m the most well-adjusted and clear-headed of people, so I only have so much of a leg to stand on to criticize other people’s foibles.  I’m so socially awkward and alexithymic that I’ve generally felt uncomfortable ever initiating anything, even in a long-term, committed relationship.  I also have a habit of trying not to impose my feelings or preferences or urges on other people, so I tend to feel ashamed or guilty about even considering making amorous overtures.

Sorry, I don’t know why I’m sharing these embarrassing details.  Maybe I’m dying and this is some kind of subconscious confession or something.  I mean, of course, we’re all dying, all the time.  But it may be more precipitous in my case—I’m not aware of it being so, but I don’t know—and maybe my inner mind could pick up on the fact.  Or maybe it has plans it’s not telling me.

All right, enough.  I hope you have a good Thursday and then a good day on each of the rest of the days of your life.  You’ve slogged through my weird writing; you deserve some type of reward.

TTFN

*I like—often I love—almost everything made from tomatoes, but raw tomatoes gross me out.

**In my case, sex has a lot in common with my Thanksgiving feast, ha ha.

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How now, you secret, black, and midnight blogs!

Hello.  Good morning.

It’s Thursday.  It is, in fact, the 2nd Thursday in November, which means that, from the point of view of Thursdays in November, we are halfway to Thanksgiving (which in the US is the 4th Thursday in November).

Of course, we are not precisely halfway to Thanksgiving from the point of view of the days of the month of November overall.  Thanksgiving falls on the 27th of November this year‒14 days from today, of course‒so we are not quite halfway there as far as the days of November are concerned, but we are close to it.  If the month had started on a Friday, the halfway point in days versus Thursdays would be the same.

I think that the maximum disjunction would happen if the month began on a Thursday.  The 8th would then be the 2nd Thursday, and Thanksgiving would fall on the 22nd, which is quite a bit larger than 2 x 8.

Mind you, all this depends on starting one’s count in November.  That is not too unreasonable, but one could just as sensibly start counting Thursdays right at or after January 1st (let’s see, this year that’s 46/48 Thursdays, or about 95.833%).  If we did that, we would already be practically at Thanksgiving.  If we counted all days, we might be even closer still, percentage-wise.  Let’s see, 317/331, or about 95.770%.  Whataya know?  I was wrong, the Thursday one is “closer”.  I suspect this varies from year to year, but I’m not interested enough to check.

We could also begin our count at the beginning of autumn, which sort of seems appropriate.  Or, perhaps most sensibly still, we could start right after the previous Thanksgiving, beginning our counting on “Black Friday”.

Jeez Louise, I think I’m losing my mind, here.  Why am I writing about such nonsense?  I mean, yes, it’s interesting to notice how arbitrary and artificial human ways of counting days and things and so on are, so I suppose it’s somewhat edifying, and even could be mildly interesting for a moment.  But I nevertheless feel bad for wasting my readers’ time.

Though, I suppose, in a certain sense, one could say that all time is wasted‒“Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines” and all that.

“Where do we come from?  The dust.  Where do we go to?  The grave.”

Of course, that last quote was not meant to be a general description of the human condition, but refers to Ray Bradbury’s “October People” in Something Wicked This Way Comes.  I’ve always thought that I’m an October person, since I was born in October.  Like Macduff, in the play from which Bradbury’s title above is taken, I was a C-section, though it would be a hyperbolic* to say that I was “ripped untimely” from the womb.  (Still, does my manner of birth mean I could defeat Macbeth?)

October is over now, in any case, and who** knows if I shall see another.

I don’t know if anyone has ever written about “November People”, but they don’t sound particularly scary nor particularly inspiring.  This assessment is not meant to refer to people born in November!  Several of my favorite people were born in November.

In other news, I did receive my Principles of Neural Science yesterday.  I used my dollar coins to choose a section, and I read it in the afternoon:  it was about neural firing and muscular activation during locomotion, briefly comparing lamprey with vertebrate, especially mammalian, locomotion patterns.

It may seem trivial, and I didn’t learn much that I didn’t at least implicitly know before, but the specifics are new, and all information has the potential to be useful.  We cannot know for certain ahead of time what knowledge might be most beneficial, just as we cannot predict the specifics of progress and invention.

As I said, I chose the textbook page via my coin-flipping process, using my three Sacagawea coins.  I keep a few dollar coins with Susan B. Anthony and/or the aforementioned Sacagawea with me at all times.

I carry such coins not so much for decision-making but because I like to roll them across my fingers when I want to “stop my hands feeling busy”.  I guess it’s a form of “stimming”, and I’ve been doing that particular one since college.  I taught myself to do it after I saw Val Kilmer, as Chris Knight, doing it in the movie Real Genius, which was one of my favorite movies.

Well, this has been a lot of pointless nonsense today, hasn’t it?  I apologize, and I guess I can try to mitigate my offense by at least trying not to produce too much of nothing***.  So I will draw this post to a close now.  I hope you all have a good day.  I will very likely write a post tomorrow, so you can look forward to that, if it’s the sort of thing to which you look forward.

TTFN

*You know, like non-Euclidean geometry.

**The WHO does not know, though with a bit of background information they could probably make reasonable predictions.

***According to the song, that can make a man feel ill at ease.  It can also, according to the same song, make a man abuse a king, which seems like it would be quite a rare situation.

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Do you remember a Guy that’s been in such an early song?

It’s Guy Fawkes Day in the UK‒also known as Bonfire Night if I’m not mistaken.  “Remember, remember, the 5th of November, the gunpowder, treason, and plot…” and all that.  The holiday isn’t celebrated in the US, which is not surprising, since it has to do with a failed attempt to blow up the Houses of Parliament in 1605, before the future United States was seriously being colonized, let alone officially founded.

Of course, it’s still a good day for civil resistance (though perhaps without the explosives).  It might be a good day for some group to slip powerful laxatives into the food of many, if not all, of the members of the current administration and many of the members of Congress and the Senate and even the Supreme Court.  Our national government could certainly use a serious colon cleanse, metaphorically speaking; it might be amusing for that to become literal*.

I’m not actually endorsing that action or encouraging it, but it’s a rather entertaining thought.

I’m very tired today, even though we’re just coming into the middle of the week.  Of course, I’m almost always tired but very rarely sleepy, which is not a great combination.  I suppose someone who never gets a full night’s sleep does, in a certain sense, live more than someone who sleeps well.  If, say, a person can only sleep 4 hours a night instead of 8, then after 60 years, they will have been awake for the equivalent of another person’s 75 years, if my math is right, and ceteris paribus.

But all other things are very much not equal when one has chronic insomnia.  The early part of Fight Club gives some pretty good descriptions of how insomnia can feel.  I particularly like the line, “…everything is a copy of a copy of a copy…” which does give something of an idea of the feeling of never getting enough sleep.

So the tradeoff would seem to be, in a sense, living more but worse versus living less but better.  But that still doesn’t quite capture matters, because chronic insomnia also increases the occurrence of many chronic and even acute illnesses, thus likely shortening the insomniac’s life relative to good sleepers’ lives.  One’s immune system tends to suffer, for one thing, which not only affects one’s risk of infection but also of cancer.  In addition, one’s metabolism gets thrown askew, probably partly due to chronically elevated stress hormones.

Of course, some of these effects might actually be causes, mightn’t they be?  Chronically elevated stress hormones can, by more than one route, reduce one’s sleep quantity and quality, for instance.  That’s one of the tricky things about the biology of multicellular organisms.  Many questions become “chicken and egg” problems.

Though, the actual question, “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?” is one to which the answer is glaringly obvious.  Eggs have existed, in some form at least, since before backbones happened (paleontologists, please correct me if I’m wrong about that specific ordering).

Even if we focus only on hard-shelled eggs, like those of the proverbial chicken, these date back to the earliest fully land-based vertebrates, which if memory serves showed up at least a few hundred million years ago.  Chickens have only really been around, certainly in their modern form, since no farther back than the dawn of agriculture, say about 10,000 years ago.

These numbers are ballpark figures that I’m pulling out of my…memory.  If I’m off by a significant amount on any of them‒certainly by an order of magnitude or more‒please let me know.

Okay, well, I don’t know what else to write about this morning.  I mean, I could probably nevertheless keep writing indefinitely, pulling various weirdnesses out of my…store room.  But I won’t.

It might be fun to set that challenge for myself some day:  to see how long I can write at one sitting, with only bathroom breaks, and then just share the result on this blog without serious editing.  I think I would want to use the lapcom for such a task, or something similar with a real keyboard, rather than writing on my smartphone as I’ve been doing for most of my posts.

I wonder if there’s any Guinness World Records type entry on something like that.  Not that I’m into trying to make or break world records, but it’s amusing to contemplate.

Maybe someday I’ll do something like that, though I would need some manner of support to do it.  But it probably won’t happen very soon, if it happens.  It will probably have to wait until after I’ve caught the flying pig back from my skiing trip in Hell.

And I don’t know how to ski.

Well, that’s enough for today, I think.  I’ve passed 701 words, and like Major Tom after he passed 100,000 miles, I’m feeling very still.  I wish my spaceship knew which way to go.

But we can’t necessarily trust the good astronaut’s judgment on such matters, for as Bowie said later, in Ashes to Ashes, “We know Major Tom’s a junkie, strung out in Heaven’s high, hitting an all time low.”

Hopefully, you all have a much better day than Major Tom.

*The Dulcolax™ treason and plot, you might say.

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Some Halloween-style pictures among unrelated words

First of all, Happy Halloween to everyone who celebrates this day in any fashion.  Even if you don’t celebrate it, you might as well have a good day.

I don’t discriminate based on Holiday celebrations.  How very admirable of me.

Once again, I mean to keep this post short by making my target 701 words to start with, because I’m very tired this morning.  It was difficult to get up at all, and I still feel as if I’m vaguely sedated.  Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to have been one of those sedatives that’s associated with euphoria.  It would be nice if it were, right?  If they would agree, I would agree.

Unfortunately, I’m just groggy and weak and blurry.  By which I mean I feel that the world seems slightly blurry to me.  I don’t mean that I am blurry if you look at me.  I might imagine that I could be blurry (meaning as a function of me not just poor vision in the observer) but I have looked in a mirror already this morning, and while I am far from easy on the eyes, I seem to be in focus.

Thinking of atypical interpretations of things people say, I was listening to one of the guys on the phones in the office yesterday, and I heard him use the expression “qualified individual”.  Now, I know what he meant, and it’s a perfectly valid term when discussing a promotion with a customer.  But it occurred to me that one could use the term to refer to someone who is an individual…but only from a certain point of view.

For instance, Norman Bates could be thought of as a “qualified” individual.  Yes, he’s a single person in the sense that he is one organism*, but there is more than one distinct personality in his head.  You could also say that the narrator in Fight Club is a “qualified” individual, as is James McAvoy’s character (should that be “characters”?) in Split.

Oops, sorry, I guess I could have given a spoiler alert for those movies.  But if I had done that, it would have ruined the surprise!

Of course, from certain points of view, even your typical unqualified** individuals are not as monolithic or monotonic or monotropic or, well, monopersonic as one might imagine.  We know that in split brain patients, when the corpus callosum is severed to reduce the problem of, for instance, uncontrollable seizures, the two sides of the person’s brain can act and think in some ways like two separate people.  They act like two individuals in other words, though in such circumstances, that word is least applicable, since if anyone is “undivided”, it is not these people.

But they are only a special, more extreme version of that which is true of the rest of us.  Our minds are all divided into many separate modules and centers, often running largely in parallel with each other.  There is no one central, “terminal goal” region of the mind; there are separate and conflicting areas and aspects, and even they are not constant.  Many introspective practices, particularly those associated with Buddhism, recognize that the concept of an individual, homuncular “self” is nebulous at best and is never even close to being real.

It seems the term “individual” is just as incorrectly presumptuous for people as the term “atom”*** is for, well, atoms.  However, if we’re referring to more physical literality, then it’s still pretty accurate, certainly for everything more complex than a flatworm.  If you start splitting people (and other animals) in pieces, what you get, at best, is a creature with missing bits and lots of dead former body parts.  You don’t get more than one being.  Often you get no one, because you will have killed the person with whom you started.

In such a case, one divided by two might in a sense equal zero.

Of course, even in basic mathematics, if you divide one by ever larger numbers, you get closer and closer to zero (it’s the limit as the denominator goes to infinity).

Speaking of going to infinity, the value of 1 / (701 – x), where x is the number of words I’ve written, has now crossed the singularity at infinity and is asymptotically approaching the x-axis from below.  On the positive side of the x-axis, starting from the beginning of a post’s first draft, that number can never be smaller than 1/701, since even I cannot write a negative number of words****.  But once I’ve passed the 701 point, the numbers can become an infinitesimal negative fraction, in principle.

In practice, I’m practically finished here.  I hope you all have a good day.  I will probably write a post tomorrow.

*Not counting skin and intestinal flora and the like.  If we count those, then we can all, like Walt Whitman, truthfully say “I am large, I contain multitudes”.

**Again, this has nothing to do with the person’s skills or résumé or experience or innate abilities, it’s just saying that one wouldn’t normally feel the need to add any caveats when calling a person an individual.

***Which means, basically, “uncuttable”.  And what we call atoms can indeed be “cut”.

****A number of negative words, on the other hand…

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For a charm of powerful trouble, like a hell-blog boil and bubble

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday.  It’s also “Devil’s Night” as it was called back where and when I grew up.  I don’t know if anyone still calls it that.  Nor do I know whether it’s still a night on which some people set fire to things in “celebration”.

I never did quite understand that tendency.  Well, no, actually I completely understand the urge to burn things, but I don’t understand giving oneself license to burn things that belong to other people, just because it’s the day before Halloween.

Of course, one could just call today Halloween Eve, but when you break down the etymology that doesn’t quite work.  Halloween is already “short” for “All Hallows’ Eve”, the day before what I think is called The Feast of All Saints, or just All Saints’ Day.  I guess that must be celebrated on November 1st, since Halloween is October 31st, but I have no idea how it’s traditionally celebrated by those who celebrate it.

Are there people who actually celebrate it?  There probably are such people.

I guess I get the progression:  on Halloween, the ghosts and goblins and vampires and werewolves parade around, before the ascendancy of “good” the next day in the form of all the nutbars who have been declared “saints”.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure there were some fine people who have been made saints, but most of the ones of whom I’ve heard were pretty clearly just people who were mentally ill.  However, their society was not prepared actually to help them in any way, so they called them holy people.  I guess it’s (usually) better than what happened to the people who were mentally ill but were seen to be possessed or to be witches or warlocks or what have you.

Mind you, they’re all dead now, and they would have been dead pretty much no matter what, so I guess it doesn’t matter to them what sorts of nonsense people have imagined about them.

Getting back to the holiday progression, I think the addition of Devil’s Night on the night before Halloween makes some sense and improves the mythology.  By that reading, on October 30th, the Devil is truly ascendant, and there is no flouncing about in silly costumes (well, there is, but not “officially”) just acts of destruction.  Then, on the 31st, regular people dress up as creatures of the night, to turn the tables on beings that live by causing fear (much as Batman is said to do!) and run them out of town—to Hell, presumably*.  And then, once the ordinary people have done the work of driving off evil, the saints can come marching in and pretend to be the source of the goodness, when it’s really just that bad things have been driven off (by ordinary people choosing not to be afraid of them).

That’s my highly editorialized take on things, anyway.  But, whatever.

This is usually my favorite time of year, and Halloween is certainly my favorite big general holiday.  I don’t really have any plans to celebrate it this year, though.  I’m not going to be giving out candy—I live in the rear room of the house, anyway—and I don’t mean to dress up or do anything celebratory otherwise tonight or tomorrow (alas, I plan to set no fires).  Like the rest of the landscape of time before me, this patch is dreary and boggy and gray and a bit smelly.  And there’s just dull mist ahead.

By the way, I think I’m going to do the same thing today that I did yesterday and set my initial goal for this post as 701 words, which I’ve almost reached already as I write this.  I will almost surely pass it, but not by too much.  I think it worked well, yesterday, though not as well as whatever I did the day before, when for unknown reasons I saw a huge spike in the number of people who came and saw my blog.  Perhaps that was because I not only invited people to like it and share it, but actually bolstered that by sharing my song Like and Share**.

What would happen if I shared by song Breaking Me Down?  Let’s see.  I’ll embed it below, and we’ll see how successfully I’ll be digested or otherwise broken down today.

In the meantime, please have a good Devil’s Day or whatever.

TTFN

*As Dave Barry pointed out, that’s in concourse D at O’Hare International Airport, which frequent travelers will know.

**Maybe it was sharing the Ricochet Racers that did it, triggering nostalgia in members of Generation X.  It’s possible.

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The brain may devise laws for the blog, but a hot temper leaps o’er a cold decree.

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, of course, and it is also the 2nd day of October.  Those two things don’t always coincide‒that probably goes without saying‒but in this case (and roughly one seventh of all October 2nds) they do.

It’s also Yom Kippur, and though if I were truly observant of the holiday, I would not be writing this or going to work, I still want to wish anyone out there observing (it’s not really celebrating) the day a very good and positive one (but if you’re observant, so to speak, you’re unlikely to see this until after the holiday ends).

And, of course, I have begun my fast.  That’s not very impressive so far, mind you; I just haven’t eaten anything since yesterday afternoon at about 4:30, which is not too much longer than usual at this time of day.  Of course, I feel fine, energy and hunger-wise, because I don’t usually eat anything by this hour.  I will be drinking water‒fizzy most of the time, but still water, even though it’s not still water, ha ha‒and possibly diet soda, but that’s it.  I have to have water, because I take a fair amount of medicine for my pain and such, and many of those things should not be sitting in an unlubricated stomach.

It’s not really that hard for me to hold off on eating once I commit to it.  Throughout high school at least, and part of college, I never ate breakfast and rarely ate lunch.  I was skinny, but my mind was as sharp as it’s ever been (though of course I am “smarter” now than I was, because I know a lot more, and that’s not just knowledge, but skills and habits as well).

I also had plenty of energy back then.  I’ve spoken before about how this makes biological sense.  In our ancestral environment, a lack of recent food would be associated with the need or urge to seek food out, and that requires alertness and motivation and energy for a hunting species or even a gathering species, and certainly for one that does both.

Anyway, I really hope not only that this fast helps to clear my mind a bit and to calm my “spirit”, but also that it helps reset my body somewhat.  At the very least, it would be good to get back to that high school (and college) tendency of spending less of my time eating.  It’s gotten to the point that what I do in my “spare time” is often just eating, for momentary pleasure, for distraction, for avoiding boredom, for escape, etc.  But, of course, that tends to lead to a negative cycle, and I feel physically worse and worse about myself afterward.

So, hopefully, I will cross the activation-energy barrier today and head on through towards a more stable plane (or plain) of mentality, and of metabolism.  I don’t know for sure how long the journey will last, or where I will end up, but I will probably keep you all posted.  Watch this space, as they say.

It would be very nice if I successfully get some degree of spiritual insight from this fasting process‒whatever that even means*‒but whatever happens, until the end, I will probably continue to post here every work day.

In the meantime, I’ve at least put in some absurd footnotes as tangential thoughts struck me while writing.  I even did one of my footnote-within-a-footnote thingys, which is always fun (for me, anyway).  But you have to be careful with such digressions;  it’s a bit like writing a computer program with lots of subroutines embedded within other subroutines embedded within yet other subroutines.  The potential for errors that confound your logic (and that make your program freeze, in the programming case) is quite high.

Anyway, G’mar chatima tova, everyone.  I hope you have a good day.  I think I will, too.  And if I uncover any special psychic powers though this fasting process, well…I probably wouldn’t say anything about it.  But who knows, I might.

TTFN

*I’m referring to “spiritual insight”, not “this process”.  I’m pretty sure I know what “this process” means in this particular case**.

**Actually, that’s a pretty unambiguous term nearly any time you might use it.  You might not understand what this process is, but you probably understand what “this process” means in most cases, assuming a decent command of English***.

***That’s a command of the English language, not command of the English.  Commanding the English, and the rest of the inhabitants of the British Isles, has historically been a tricky business, including by the English themselves.  Even the Romans had issues with the “English” and when it came to Scotland, well, Emperor Hadrian just said, “Screw it, put a wall up to try to keep them there up North, I don’t wanna have to deal with those crazy bastards”.  He probably said it in Latin**** though.

****I can’t even imagine the nightmare of trying to conjugate all the Latin verbs and so on in my imaginary quote from Hadrian.

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“I’m coming down fast, but don’t let me break you.”

I’m writing this post on my mini lapcom, as I call it, following the lesson of my own reflections yesterday on how my thumbs and whatnot are getting particularly sore and tender while writing on the smartphone, and it’s just easier writing with the “laptop” computer.

Of course, I don’t know what subject on which to write, but that’s typical, even usual for me, though I probably wouldn’t call it “normal”.  It’s just my personal, weird way of approaching this blog.  I suppose my subconscious is probably working on some of it ahead of time.  But I don’t really ever plan the posts, though occasionally I think about a general, vague kind of thing that I will discuss, like “What is that flat, circular thing that they throw in the Olympics called, again?”

Sorry, that was a really stupid joke.

There are some imminently upcoming matters that are of at least personal interest to me.  For instance, this is the last day of September in 2025.  Tomorrow begins October, which is generally my favorite month, though down here you can’t readily tell October from any other month.  But it’s still a good month, and it culminates in my favorite holiday (which is Halloween, in case that wasn’t clear).

Tomorrow at sundown also begins Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement.  Now, I clearly am not “observant” in any serious way, and I have no local (or other) community of any kind, but pretty much every year, unless I am physically sick, I fast for Yom Kippur, from sundown to sundown (at least).  One is supposed to fast from food and water, but since I’ve been in south Florida, I tend to skip the water fasting part; even at this time of year, it’s too easy to get dehydrated, and I sure as hell don’t want any more kidney stones if I can help it.

I may try to extend my fast this year, beyond just one day.  I’ve done it before.  Once I get past a certain point, it becomes comparatively easy just to continue not to eat, and for me, at least, that point of ease arrives pretty quickly.

Clearly one cannot fast indefinitely.  Or rather, if one does it for more than a certain length of time, one is likely to cease to eat permanently (if you take my meaning).  That’s not so bad a thing, really, and it doesn’t seem like a terrible way to die, to me, though I know a lot of people seem to think it especially horrible.

But the thing is, ketosis (which happens when fasting) is fairly pleasant, as I know from personal experience; the brain prefers to run on ketone bodies (in the sense that it runs better on them), and one’s hormonal status, such as one’s bouncing stress hormones related to insulin and glucose zooming up and down, at least become steadier when one has gone without food for a bit.

It’s not a mere coincidence that many religions and spiritual practices make use of fasts.  Up to a certain point, going without food for a while keeps one clear-headed, less emotional and distracted (once one gets over the initial hump of habit).  There are hypothetical biological reasons for this; an animal (such as a human, or even me) needs to be clear and sharp when food has been scarce, because they need to seek it.

I wouldn’t mind achieving some type of epiphany because of a fast.  I also have a (slim) hope that fasting might help some of my pain symptoms, at least the more recent ones.  I have a slight suspicion that maybe I have some form of psoriatic arthritis (though it certainly could be a “second year medical student syndrome” type of thing), since my fingers are particularly getting more painful and swollen lately*, and I have new tendonitis-type symptoms and even a proximal interphalangeal joint in my right middle finger that’s popping in and out as I move it.

The left hand is not as bad, but then again, I am right handed, so the right hand gets more use and stress—not least from controlling a computer mouse.  But I also get a lot of pain that has become more localized to my ileo-sacral region, shifting from side to side (and various other joints, not quite symmetrically) which is a common spot for psoriatic arthritis to affect.  So, it could be a somewhat atypical presentation of psoriatic arthritis (I do have a long-standing psoriasis-like rash).

More likely, though, all of these symptoms are merely part of my chronic pain syndrome, which leads to awkward postural adjustments that cause irregular strain on various joints and tendons, and it’s all made worse by the fact that I am way too fat (because I often eat for “comfort” when the pain is acting up, which is likewise often).  So, whether by one mechanism or another, perhaps fasting would help reset things.

I would not hope to get carried away and fast forever, but at least it would be nice not to die a fatty.  I guess we’ll see how everything goes.  But I am at least going to fast tonight until tomorrow night.  I have plenty of internal reserves on which to live, but I will keep taking my vitamins and pain medicine, of course.

That’s pretty much it for now.  I hope you all have a good day, and by tomorrow night I’ll have begun my fast.  If I keep it up, you’ll be able to follow my progress here.  It probably won’t be very interesting, but it might be.

Talk to you soon.

*That’s discouraged me from playing guitar very often, which is annoying in itself.

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Another holi day.  I’m so tired of all of this.

L’Shana Tova, first of all.  That’s the traditional greeting for Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, which is today.  It’s interesting that it comes right after the Autumnal Equinox, but it changes from year to year, since the Hebrew calendar is a lunar calendar, not a solar one.

I’m slightly embarrassed to admit that, until yesterday during the work day, I didn’t even realize that today was going to be Rosh Hashanah.  Then again, it’s not as though I have any event or get-together to attend for the holiday, nor am I in any form of dialogue with the local Jewish community‒nor with any other community, actually.

I really ought not to be going to work today, but it’s not as though I’ve been observant in any way, so I feel it would be hypocritical to use the holiday as an excuse to take the day off.  I suppose it wouldn’t be too horrible in the scheme of things.  After all, how many nominal Christians who celebrate Christmas and Easter and the like are otherwise observant folk who regularly go to church and whatnot?

How many of even the seemingly devout Christians in the US who claim the identity like a badge of superiority and special privilege are actually aware of, let alone observant of, the ideals presented in their Bible, especially the “gospels”?

Certainly the so-called Christian Nationalists have no apparent familiarity with the ideas and ideals behind Christianity or the United States Constitution.  They seem merely to be a collection of deeply insecure, terrified, woefully and willfully undereducated troglodytes.  This is not my presumption; this is my provisional conclusion based upon the ones I see and hear in the news and on “social” media.  They really are pathetic and pitiable.

But because of their very insecurity and fear and ignorance, they are dangerous, like underage and untrained pre-teens who have somehow stolen an armed and armored military vehicle and are taking it on a joy ride.  Ideally, one should try to stop the vehicle and them and get them out of it and give them a stern lecture to try to educate them.  But above all, it’s important to try to keep them from doing too much damage to the numerous innocent people through whose lives they are driving their foolishly commandeered vehicle.

The preceding was a fairly ham-handed metaphor I know.  But the ham-handedness doesn’t mean it’s wrong.

I won’t get too far into the apparent claim by someone somewhere that today was going to be the day of  the “rapture”.  That’s frankly just the latest in a string of such absurd claims that goes back probably through most of the last two millennia.  It would be amusing if it were not so very sad.

There’s so much real wonder available, so much about the actual, verifiable world that is remarkable and astonishing and inspiring, yet so many waste their time with fairy tales so uninspired and unoriginal that, if someone presented them as ideas for children’s books to a publisher, the publisher would quickly see them to the door.

I suppose the charitable thing to do would be to shrug sadly and say that one should let people believe what they will, as long as they are uninterested in trying to test and improve their beliefs and their understanding.  Indeed, that is my inclination.  Unfortunately, many such people wish to impose their beliefs upon others, and not just by persuasion but by force.

It can sometimes be positively motivated*; if one believes, for whatever reason, that one’s ideology is the only way to guarantee the long-term wellbeing of everyone, both in life and after death, and that the alternative is potentially eternal suffering, then I can understand (in principle) someone trying to spread their faith out of a true sense of beneficence.

However, when one observes the behavior and personalities and choices of such people, they do not come across as ones who are doing what they do out of a sense of kindness and benevolence.  They seem, rather, to be grasping, vindictive, petulant, and defensive–terribly insecure and easily made to feel unsafe.  They seem so fragile and yet so spiteful.

I strongly suspect that there are forces quite different from a true desire to rescue and protect innocent and endangered souls behind almost every action taken by such people.  I suspect most of that stuff is just excuses and pretexts, not any honest beatitude.

I could be wrong, of course.  But such are my provisional conclusions.

How did I get on that unpleasant subject?  I’m not sure.  Still, most subjects and experiences are unpleasant for me anymore, so I guess it doesn’t much matter.  I guess the fact of yet another day that’s supposed to be one of celebration arouses a bit of reactive spite in me, since I don’t exactly have much to celebrate on any kind of sensible basis, nor anyone with whom to do the celebrating (nor the ability to find such a person or people).

To be fair, I never said that I wasn’t pathetic and pitiable and driven by darker thoughts and feelings.  I also don’t claim to have any moral superiority or to be the bringer of any kind of important moral message.

In closing, I’ll say:  it’s worth it to avoid being dominated by people who claim to have some superior insight.  Paternalism is never a safe notion, because‒unfortunately‒all the people who would put themselves in the paternalistic positions are just flesh and blood, ordinary humans like all the people they desire to control, with no greater wisdom, no greater insight, and certainly no greater ability than anyone else.

Beware the sheep that would be a shepherd.  It may well have developed a proclivity for cannibalism.

Happy New Year.

*Though we know where the road paved with good intentions leads.  Good intentions are just the beginning of doing good, and they are barely even that.