holidays

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Doom’d for a certain term to walk the night and, for the day, confin’d to blog in fires

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, and so I am writing my traditional Thursday morning blog post.  This is my first post this week—which feels odd, I have to admit—and should also be my last post for the week, barring (as I always say) the unforeseen.

It’s the Summer Solstice in the northern hemisphere (the Winter Solstice in the southern hemisphere), and so it is the “longest” (“shortest”) day of the year.  It’s also the official beginning of summer in the northern hemisphere (winter in the south), though nature doesn’t give a flying f*ck at a tiny little rat’s ass about how humans label the days.

Speaking of labeling the days, the Tri-rail system is making a repeated, official announcement that on July 4th it will be operating on a weekend/holiday schedule, which is not a surprise.  What is irritating—to me, though probably not to anyone else—is the fact that they have set it up to say that this schedule will occur on “the 4th of July, July 4th”, which they repeat in Spanish and Creole.

It’s irritating because, if they’re going to name the holiday and then give the date, why don’t they refer to it as “Independence Day”, which is after all the original name and point of the holiday?  I mean, it’s worth recalling the ideas included in the Declaration of Independence, aspirational though many have always been and not yet quite fully instantiated.  You know, the whole right to life, “liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”, the fact that all (people)* are created equal, and the fact that governments only legitimately exist in order to secure the rights of the people, “deriving their just power from the consent of the governed”, and that when government fails to perform its fundamental duty, it is the right of the people to change it, with the caveat that one should not change governments lightly or frivolously.

It’s absurd to say that the 4th of July is on July 4th, because it’s redundant, quite apart from failing to acknowledge the point of the holiday.  It’s a bit like making an announcement, “El tren funcionará según el horario de los domingos el Cinco de Mayo, el quinto día de mayo.”  The fact that the announcement is in the form it takes is further evidence that humans don’t think either about the significance of the day nor the logic and concision of the language they use to convey information.

It sometimes gets to the point where one doesn’t bother trying to determine why a particular person is a misanthrope but rather one wonders why anyone is not a misanthrope.  I’m not a bigot, though; I don’t just hate humans.  I don’t think the other animals are any better that humans are (and I’m no great admirer of fungi, plants, protozoa, and prokaryotes).  They’re just less competent (in the broad sense of the word), and so their blind self-interest and response to entirely “local”** influences tends to cause less damage and create fewer absurdities and stupidities.

That’s enough of me griping about train announcements.  In other news, I have been writing this week (though I did not work on Saturday after all, because the office was closed, so I didn’t write any on that day).  Since last post, I’ve written a total of 3,731 words on Extra Body.  It would have been more—it probably should have been more—but I’ve really been writing only a page a day, and I’ve had to force myself to do that.

I’m incredibly exhausted.  My sleep has been consistently poor, even for me, and if anything it seems to be deteriorating steadily.  I can’t even rest when I have down time; I’m extremely tired but I don’t feel sleepy.

To quote John at the bar in the song Piano Man, “I believe this is killing me”.  I’m not speaking metaphorically.  Every day I feel vague and separate, like a very faintly received and poorly rendered analog television signal, dominated by static.  My dysthymia/depression is very bad, my tinnitus is just awful, making my sensory sensitivity to sound (or “SSS” for short) all the worse.  I can’t even tell if I’m writing coherently, or if I’m speaking coherently at any given day or time.  Thankfully—I guess—I speak to nearly no one, other than a few people at work, and that’s pretty limited, because I feel like I have nothing to say that isn’t inane or repetitive.

Of course, it doesn’t help that Sunday was Father’s Day, which is at best a bittersweet holiday for me; I haven’t physically been in the presence of my children since about 2013, and though I’ve exchanged emails, texts, and a few phone calls with my daughter (and she sent me a cool gift for Father’s Day), I’ve had all of one e-mail exchange with my son since 2013 (unless I’m forgetting something).  Clearly, I’m unsatisfactory and/or unpleasant even to the people I love most in the world.  You can just imagine how irritating I am to people who hate me (of which group I am the chief member).

And, of course, two Saturdays from now, June 29th would have been my 33rd wedding anniversary.  Thirty-three is, of course, the age at which hobbits “come of age”, and was Frodo’s age at the beginning of The Lord of the Rings, though it was seventeen years later that he left the Shire to begin his great journey.

Okay, well, I’m rambling now.  I’ve probably been rambling all along, but it’s becoming impossible not to see it at this point, even for me.  I’ll try to get a little more done on Extra Body this week if I can.  It really is almost finished, but that’s a rather nebulous status.  I could conceivably finish the first draft by next Thursday, but I would not recommend placing any bets on it.  I also wouldn’t recommend placing any bets on me living to see it published, let alone to writing and finishing HELIOS, or anything else, for that matter.

I’m just too damn tired and discouraged, and whatever my species actually is, they seem to have forgotten about me, if they ever realized that they left me here***.  I’ve been investigating high, open parking garages in the area—they’re not as common as I would wish in this part of Florida—and experimenting with replacing the psyllium with other substances in these generic Metamucil capsules I have, just to try to figure out promising techniques or ideas.  I don’t know what’s going to happen, of course.  But I’m damn near sure that there will be no epiphany or miraculous rescue.  As far as I can tell, that’s just not how my life works.

Anyway, I hope you all have a good week, and a good beginning of summer, though of course the heat in the American east and northeast is supposedly pretty bad.  It’s rough down here, too, but that’s not anything new.

TTFN

destroyer

*Even Star Trek only fixed their androcentric version of things with the start of The Next Generation in the eighties, so we shouldn’t be too hard on Jefferson et al for unthinking sexism (they had other moral errors that were at least as egregious).  Even in Greece, the birthplace of democracy, women only got the right to vote in 1952, so the US had them beat by over 30 years.  And, of course, there are plenty of countries throughout the world where women still do not have equal rights…or often any rights.

**I’m using “local” in a relatively technical sense, here.  Obviously in these days of global communication networks of various kinds, one can be influenced by ideas and forces not merely from across the planet but also—given the information from history—from the past.  However, all these influences only come to bear upon individuals when they actually receive the information that influences them, when any incoming influence actually impinges on their nervous systems.  And, of course, no organism can help but respond to the forces that operate directly upon and within it, anymore than one can choose to waive one’s compliance with the laws of physics.  So, local, national, and international news are in this sense nevertheless all local forces.  Even gravity is really a local force in this sense—each portion of the gravitational field responds not literally to distant objects, but rather to the state of the field right next to it.  This is especially obvious in the phenomenon of gravitational waves, but is true of all gravitational effects.  And, of course, like all influences in this, our universe, the transmission of those influences cannot go faster than the fundamental speed of causality, which is the speed of light.  There is some possibility that, at least in some sense, quantum mechanics is a non-local process (or set of processes) but I have my doubts about even that.

***This is metaphorical—well, usually—and I am not literally delusional.  It merely captures how I feel about myself in relation to all the other people in the world.

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Writing report and some talk of the peaks and drop-offs of June, and of me

Report on today’s fiction writing:

Block words: 1,103

Net Words:  1,140

So there was a difference of roughly 3.3% between the two, which is consistent with the first couple of checks I did, and less of a difference than there was on Wednesday.  It is consistent with my experience today, because I know I added a few sentences to my previous writing to clarify some moments and make the flow of a conversation feel more natural.  That happens all the time when rereading/editing, of course, but I guess it doesn’t generally end up making more than a few percent difference in total writing for the day, based on what I’ve measured so far.

This all probably doesn’t matter in the slightest to anyone but me, but once I’ve started paying attention to such a thing, it’s very difficult for me not to note it.  I doubt that it adds any significant insight even for me, but who knows?  More knowledge is usually at least not detrimental, and can often be beneficial, unless the cost of obtaining the knowledge it a loss of energy or knowledge or some opportunity cost in some other area that produces a greater detriment than the new knowledge is a benefit.

Anyway…

June begins tomorrow, as I noted previously.  It’s a month that begins with a good and important event, for me and my family, so that’s a double-plus-good, to steal a term from Newspeak.

After that, things get much more dicey.

Of course, the summer solstice (June 20th this year) is when the days reach their peak length (in the northern hemisphere, anyway) and then begin getting shorter, so if the winter solstice is a time for celebration as days begin to lengthen, one would imagine the summer one would be a day of mourning.  This doesn’t seem, generally, to be the case, but it’s definitely the harbinger of increasing heat and humidity here in south Florida, which is not great and is apparently getting worse as the years pass.  To paraphrase Porgy and Bess, it’s summertime, and the living is…oozy.

June is also the month of both Father’s Day and my former wedding anniversary.  These are melancholy commemorations for me.  This year would have been my 33rd wedding anniversary, but I now will have been divorced 3 years longer than I was married.  I’ve also now been away from both my children–physically away, neither having been in their presence nor seen them directly–for as many or more years than they were old when last I was truly a part of their lives.

I’ve always been able to do some things quite a bit more easily than most other people seem able to do.  But all those things are trivial, and none of them have ever come to much of anything, anyway.  At almost all of the things which have been most important to me, I am an abject and abysmal failure.

I have apparently been at least a decent brother, so I didn’t fuck that up too royally.  Not yet, anyway.  I think I was a pretty good doctor; my patients always said so.  But I have been a failure as a son, and as a husband, and as a father, the roles which have mattered by far the most to me, in increasing order.  So, June starts on a very high peak, but it goes downhill rapidly, like the graph of 1 over (x-1):

graph of 1 over x minus

Probably there’s some other, more elaborate formula that would describe things better, but you get the idea, I think.  Actually, I should probably make it ((1/(1-x))-x or something similar.  But it’s not that important.  Nothing I do is important, except in a negative sense, which is the whole point.

I’ll work tomorrow, barring the unforeseen, so I’ll be writing some fiction and giving a report (also barring the unforeseen).  I hope you all have a good weekend.

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Monday report, 5-27-2024

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

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

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

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

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A brief Saturday morning report on May 18, 2024 CE

I just wanted to keep in contact with anyone who is following my progress and to let you know that I wrote about 1,261 words this morning.  I say “about” because, though that is the number of words in the completely new writing I did today, every morning I reread at least a majority of what I wrote the previous day to get myself back into the swing of the story, and I edit as I do this.  This morning, I know that I added at least one decently long sentence during that process, but I probably took some words out, too.  That makes the true number of words added unlikely to be exactly 1,261.

Of course, there is a way to keep track.  I could note the total word count prior to beginning my editing and writing for the day and then, when done, compare the numbers.  This would give the absolute increase in word count for the day.  It might even be mildly interesting to track how this compares to the word count of the new portion written for the day.  Does it tend to be higher?  Does it tend to be lower?  Is there no overall tendency?  However, to do this, I would need to keep notes about the process somewhere, perhaps at the bottom of the file.  That would change the actual word count of the file, though.  Alternatively, I could make a new file the entire purpose of which is to keep notes on such things.  But that would entail the extra effort of dealing with the extra file every day.

So, unless some readers out there in my reader-verse show any interest in getting reports about such minutiae, I probably won’t start keeping track.  But, then again, now that I’ve thought about it, knowing how weirdly obsessive I can get with numbers, maybe I will.  Probably, the only thing that will stop me is my less-than-stellar level of personal energy.

Tomorrow I am off work, of course, but though Monday is a Federal Holiday in the US (Memorial Day, the unofficial “beginning of summer”, and the day we officially remember soldiers who have died in wars for our country), our office will be open and so I will be doing some writing, barring the unforeseen.  Have a good weekend in the meantime, please.

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I hope you all have a good Friday (get it?)

It’s Friday, and for those of you for whom this is the last workday of the week, I hope you have a good weekend; I work tomorrow, so this is not a TGIF sort of Friday for me.  I am obviously writing a blog post today, and I plan to write one tomorrow, as well.  Aren’t you lucky?

However…

…my current plan after that is to bring my small laptop computer with me when I leave the office tomorrow and then, next week, write fiction in the morning every day except Thursday, on which day I will revert to my old, once-weekly blogging.  I don’t know how long this pattern will last; I’m not making promises, merely predictions.  Still, I want to try to finish Extra Body and publish it, and maybe even start writing HELIOS afterwards, though that’s a longer term prediction, and so, like the weather forecast, it becomes inherently less reliable.

I already reverted to the old form of blog title yesterday, that of using a Shakespearean quote, altered to insert some form of the word “blog”.  I hadn’t planned to do so, but since I discussed some matters about which I wished I could take vengeance, I naturally thought of Shylock’s little speech in The Merchant of Venice.  I had to have a title anyway, and it was Thursday, so, to quote Doc Brown**, “I figured…what the hell.”

(Had it been Saturday night, I might have thought it all right to say, “What have I got to lose?”)

I didn’t include a picture, as I often used to do for my Thursday posts (imagining that this would garner me more readers).  That’s because finding a usable picture, then modifying it to suit my needs, was always very effortful.  I could do it pretty quickly, and some of the results were even fairly creative and artistic (in my opinion), but they were not worth the effort.  And if they drew more attention, they drew the attention of people who were more interested in pictures than in words, which is not my intended audience, at least not for this blog.

Oh, my!  I just realized that this is “Good Friday”.  It seems odd to call “good” the day memorializing someone’s crucifixion, especially if it’s the crucifixion of a good person.  Still, “good” is a fairly protean concept in any case, and I understand the reasoning behind it, such as it is, for the day, but it still seems slightly perverse to me.

It first occurred to me to check if it was indeed that traditional Christian holiday because there seem to be slightly fewer people at the train station at this time than there usually are.  As far as I know, the train schedule is a standard weekday one, and on Sunday it will be, as always, on a Sunday schedule, so there’s no need to modify it for Easter.

I don’t think I’ve ever ridden the Tri-Rail on a Sunday, come to think of it.  But I have ridden it on many a “holiday”, when it was on a restricted schedule, because my office, like so many businesses in the modern world, is much less likely to take national holidays off than used to be the case for most organizations a few decades ago.

The businesses of the modern world are stuck in a Nash equilibrium (of sorts) in which were any of them to change and improve their practices (in the sense of being less aggressively competitive and allowing employees more days off), they would be outcompeted, would lose business, might go out of business, in which case their employees would also be harmed by losing jobs, which would affect the overall job market, dogs and cats would live together…mass hysteria!  In such situations, there is no way for individuals to change their practices without harm to themselves and even to the system, even if those practices are plainly not optimal.

It is for these reasons, among others, that governments are instituted among the peoples of the Earth (“deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed”), to try to act upon situations that will not correct themselves.  Unfortunately, governments too can fall into perverse equilibria of various kinds, and once they do, getting them out of it can require significant, sometimes catastrophic, upheavals.

Think of having to pull the power cord on your computer to restart it because it’s gotten bogged down or frozen, and Ctrl-Alt-Del isn’t doing anything at all.  If they haven’t been auto-saved, you might lose some files on which you were working, but at least the computer can be useful again.

That’s a strained metaphor, I know, and I apologize.  But sometimes one does have sympathy (albeit not full agreement) with Jefferson’s notion that, for people to remain free, and presumably for governments to do what they are supposed to do, there should be a literal revolution/rebellion every twenty years or so:  “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.  It is its natural manure.”

That’s a bit extreme, perhaps, but maybe it would be interesting if, say, once every twenty years or so, everyone in government had to be replaced.  This is beyond the concept of term limits, and it would not be a staggered affair but would happen all at once.

I know, I know, there would be many detriments, including harms due to the fact that, ceteris paribus, people tend to get better at jobs the longer they work at them.  There would be real losses and setbacks associated with everyone being new to the government.

But then again, when people do politics as a career, they often learn bad habits, and the system can develop unplanned but subsequently entrenched and self-reinforcing negative patterns, equilibria that cry out for punctuation***.  These lead to losses of opportunity, economic losses, the loss of lives, and the occurrence of needless suffering‒but these costs are usually unnoticed because they are diffuse and scattered.  It’s related to the way we don’t recognize antacids as genuinely life-saving drugs, because we’re not aware of the many people who would have died‒who used to die, and often quite young‒from ulcers and perforations and gastric and esophageal cancers.

It’s also related to the fact that, environmentally and public health wise, nuclear power is orders of magnitude safer than fossil fuels for the world and for people’s health.  The number of illnesses and premature deaths per capita caused by even the worst nuclear disasters, even if they were scaled up to account for the greater preponderance of fossil fuel based power, is probably little more than a rounding error compared to the respiratory illnesses and other causes of suffering and premature death due to airborne particulates and similar problems from fossil fuels.

Well, there I go again, swerving all over the shop from one tangent to another, like a space probe passing near a bunch of unrealistically closely packed planets and having its trajectory repeatedly altered as it does so.

Speaking of such things, I do wish I could find a way to keep the energy I tend to have on Monday mornings for physics and mathematics and make it last through the rest of the week.  But my mental energy and clarity seems to be swiftly diminished by the slings and arrows of outrageous stupidity throughout the working days, so even by Tuesdays, I am usually significantly enervated.

Well, whataya gonna do?  This post has gotten too long already, anyway, and we’re getting close to my train stop.  I hope those of you who celebrate this holiday have a truly good Friday, and the rest of you as well.  Tomorrow, I’ll probably wish you a happy Easter.

*An interesting phrase combining a present tense verb with a future-oriented adverb in a way.

**That’s the one from Back to the Future, not the one who makes the really great canned sodas you can get in good delis and similar places.

***To bastardize a concept from Gould and Eldredge.

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Top o’ the work week to ye!

I was going to title this post “top o’ the week to ye”, but I realize that many people consider the week proper to begin on Sunday; standard calendars in places such as the US and Canada and the rest of the British Commonwealth and so on look at it that way.  In Japan, on the other hand, I’m led to understand that the week officially starts on Monday, since that’s the day work starts, and Saturday and Sunday (Doyōbi and Nichiyōbi) are the weekend.

Though Japan has individually named weekdays referring to esoteric things much as we do in the West, the Japanese months‒at least their current, standard names‒are basically just numbered (though I understand there are older, more traditional names).  It seems pretty sensible just to number the months‒and the days, for that matter‒rather than give them names.

Then again, while there is a certain logic to the number of months‒related both to the length of the year and to the moon’s orbital period, both of which are objective, external facts‒the number of days in a week is pretty much arbitrary.

It seems the sort of thing that, around the time of the Revolution, the French might have wanted to make decimal, with, say, three ten-day periods (decadi?  decamaines?) per month and 36.5 of those a year.  I mean, multiples of ten were justifiably popular with them.  For instance, they defined the units of distance so that a meter was one ten-millionth the distance from the pole to the equator at the arc passing through Greenwich, England.

Thus, there were 10,000 kilometers on that arc, making the Earth’s circumference a relatively easy to remember 40,000 kilometers (with variations depending on which great circle you’re measuring).  Then they defined their measures of volume accordingly (a liter as one cubic decimeter, for instance), and then their standard of mass based upon those volumes of water, which is surely the most “standard” substance for living creatures on the surface of the Earth.

Of course, now the meter is “officially” defined in terms of the speed of light, which is, as far as we can tell, absolutely constant in all reference frames.  So, a meter is defined as the distance light travels in 1 / 299,792,458 seconds exactly.

The second, by the way, is defined as the time taken by 9,192,631,770 cycles of the unperturbed ground-state hyperfine transition in the electrons of Cesium-133, again exactly.

Of course, given General and Special Relativity, how long that takes can vary depending on one’s reference frame relative to other reference frames‒this is why the GPS system has to compensate both for velocity-based time slowing in the satellites relative to the Earth and gravity-based time slowing on the surface of the Earth relative to the satellites.  Ponder that when you use your GPS; it would not work at all without those constant corrections due to Einstein.

The specific numbers used to define the meter and the second are fairly arbitrary, but they are consistent, and so are useful.  They definitely make more sense than the choice of starting the week on “Sunday” in the part of the world formerly known as “Christendom”.

Think about it*.  Sunday is considered the Sabbath day in most Christian and formerly Christian cultures, certainly those influenced by the former British Empire.  But the Sabbath is supposed to be observed in remembrance of the seventh day of Creation, when God rested.

Leave aside the strange notion of an infinite being either reckoning days based on the cycles of one planet around one of hundreds of billions of stars in each of possibly trillions of galaxies.  We can accept that as a non-literal measure of time, since God is supposed to be outside of space and time, anyway**.  But why would an infinite being of infinite power need to rest?

Anyway, the original Sabbath, as observed in Judaism and a few of the sects**** of Christianity, is Saturday, the official end of the week according to that arbitrary choice.  Even the Spanish word for Saturday, for instance‒sábado‒is related to the word “Sabbath” or “Shabbat”, and Spain is traditionally a very Christian place.  I don’t know what’s behind the disjunction between the Sabbath and the end of the week occurred in the realm of “Christendom” when even some of the most Christian languages maintain the vestiges of a recognition that the sabbath day ought to be at the end of the week, according to their own “holy” book.

Oh, well.  It’s all arbitrary or at least stochastic.

Don’t get me wrong‒I like 7 for the number of days in a week.  It’s a prime number, for one thing.  It’s also the number of “non-fixed” celestial bodies known in antiquity because they were visible to the naked eye (the Sun, the Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn), which is probably why we have seven days.  Many of the days of the week in western languages retain traces of having been named for those bodies.

Also, 7 times 52 is 364, which means 7 divides into the days of a year with only one and a quarter days’ remainder, so the same date will fall one day “earlier” on each subsequent year (two days earlier after a “leap year” but not after the turn of three out of every four centuries, because of the adjustments made in the Gregorian calendar).  At least they don’t skip quasi-haphazardly through the days of the week every year.  Such would be the case in a decimal “week”*****, unless one made the 5 (or 6) remainder days of the year entirely separate, not ordinary days at all.

This is, apparently, how the Hobbit calendar works in Tolkien’s world, though they put their extra days in “mid-summer”, around the summer solstice rather than around the winter solstice.

Well, this has been much ado about not much of anything but random trivia about time and measure and the days of the week.  I suppose that’s appropriate for what is the beginning of at least the work week for most of us, depending on how you reckon it.

Try to have a good day, everyone, in any case.

*There must be higher love.

**So says Francis Collins, anyway, and he ought to know***.

***Well…no, he oughtn’t know.  No one ought to know, or has any way to know, or any justifiable claim to know such things.  It’s all conjecture and speculation, unsupported by any evidence that would stand up in even a kangaroo court, and what can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.  But never mind; it can be fun to think about it.

****Christians often seem much more comfortable dealing with sects than dealing with sex.  Ba-dump-bump.

*****Although…on non-leap years, the dates would cycle between two “opposite” days of the “decamaine”, then would ratchet over to the next pair on leap years, so that might be fun.

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Did you know that the official name for February 15th is “Chafing Day”? Now you know.

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, and I’m writing this post on my laptop computer, but I’m already at the office.  I really didn’t feel well when I finally gave up and got up this morning, and I was sorely tempted not to come to work.  So, I forced myself to come in very early—at personal expense—since I didn’t want to leave things hanging for other people at the office.  I hereby send out a “you’re welcome” to those people whose day I will be making slightly easier by my choice.

Yesterday was Valentine’s Day, though I didn’t mention it in my post, since it’s a day with little personal relevance to me.  Now, it’s the day after Valentine’s Day, which as far as I know has no “official” name.

In the UK and, I believe, in the rest of “the Commonwealth”, the day after Christmas is known as Boxing Day.  I have been unable to locate a reliable explanation of that term, but I personally imagine it referring to collecting all the boxes and other discarded packages that are a consequence of Christmas gift-giving.

I therefore now hereby propose that we all call the day after Valentine’s Day “Chafing Day”, because it’s mildly humorous, at least to me, and for some people it may even be accurate.  I doubt it will catch on, but maybe I can post a “tweet” or a Facebook message saying “Happy Chafing Day” to everyone, and see if the idea spreads.  Maybe I’ll title this blog post “Happy Chafing Day!” or similar, just to try to encourage the term.

If I’ve elected to do so, you readers will already know.

I felt pretty low at work, yesterday—even for me, I mean.  I told my coworker, the one with whom I’m closest, that I didn’t think I could keep doing this much longer, that I felt like I was going to hit the skids soon.  He misunderstood me at first, saying that he would miss me if I left for another job, but that I needed to do what I needed to do.  I clarified that I didn’t mean that I was thinking I would need to leave the job, but that I would need to leave—period.  By which I meant “to leave reality”, “to leave the world”, however you prefer to euphemize it.

He expressed his concern and said that he didn’t like to hear me talking that way, but of course, he had plans for the evening with his wife, and I didn’t feel like burdening him too much, so I put on a comparatively cheerful face afterwards.  Weirdly, I felt mildly relieved and more relaxed after that.

People seem not to take such expressions of emotional rock bottom as seriously as they might, but having at least gotten some word of my distress out to someone—other than regular readers of this blog—is something of a minor relief.  That way, if I go through the final exit door relatively soon, it will not be a complete surprise to everyone at the office.

I can’t keep feeling responsible for not causing inconvenience to other people at the expense of my ongoing misery, especially since so few people seem to return the favor.  My relationship with reality is an abusive one, and since reality is unlikely to change, I probably should just get out.

Another coworker, with the best of intentions, gave out some candy to everyone in the office, which was certainly a nice gesture.  However, being the weak-willed fool that I am, I ate mine, and then, after finally leaving the office quite a bit later than our supposed closing time—see my comment above about other people not being worried about inconveniencing their coworkers—I got some junk food on the way back to the house, and I ate it last night.

It was not very satisfying, and it probably contributed strongly to my ill-feeling this morning.  I need to take that as relevant feedback from reality and just avoid all such things from now on.  Snacks used to give me one of my only reliable sources of pleasure, or at least distraction, from the discomfort of life, but even they seem to be losing their power, though their costs are not likewise diminishing.  Today, I mean to put up a sign above my desk reminding others not to offer nor for me to accept such well-meaning “treats” in the future.

This situation is another example of the simple but hard-to-swallow fact that good intentions are not anything like a guarantee of good outcomes.

Often, once a person is secure in their good intentions—and I am provisionally convinced that most people who do such things really do mean well—they cease to assess the likely consequences of their actions.  If they mean well, they presumably think that they cannot do harm.  This, unfortunately but  clearly, is not the case, as anyone who has ever paid any attention to the nature of reality in any serious way will know—which is not very many people, I fear.

So, anyway, I’m physically tired and mentally tired, and I don’t feel well at all in either sense, either; I feel ill, both physically and mentally.  Alas, I have no reason to suspect there is any cure, though for certain aspects of things there may at least be some treatments, even if they are only palliative.

I told another coworker—one who is difficult but without meaning to be, because of his own life-long issues—that I more than half-wished I would get cancer, and that if I did I would not wish to be treated other than with palliative medicine to control pain.  Why would I want to prolong my life?  I’ve been undead for years already, and it’s not pleasant, and I see no reason to think that anything good will come along to change that.

It’s physically possible, in principle, of course.  I’m not so foolishly and superstitiously fatalistic to think that it’s utterly outside the realm of chance for my life to turn around and get better and remain better.  But as far as I can tell, the odds are very low.

I’ve waited things out for a long time, nevertheless, not wishing to be rash in drawing conclusions.  But if one is going to venture the capital of one’s continued time and discomfort and despair on some possible future upturn, one wants odds that justify the investment.  I don’t see any routes that carry such odds.  I have looked, and looked very hard, for them.  That doesn’t guarantee there aren’t some that I’ve missed, of course, but I’m not a stupid or unimaginative person—not in that sense, anyway—and I can only work with what I have and what I am, paltry though such resources may be.

So, anyway, I hope you all had as happy a Valentine’s Day as you could, and that you have a good Chafing Day today.  Spread the word about that title, if you like it.  Make memes and videos about it if you feel so inclined.  It wouldn’t exactly be legacy for the ages, for me, but it would be amusing, nevertheless.

TTFN

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Yeah, yeah, whatever.

It’s early morning and I’m waiting at the train station again.

It’s also relatively cool out, and it looks like it’s going to be so for most of the rest of the week, if the forecast is correct.  I should probably have walked to the train today, but even though I woke up hours ago, I just didn’t feel up to walking.  Actually, I didn’t feel up to much of anything at all, and I still don’t.

I almost just stayed at the house today, even though it’s payroll day, because I didn’t want to get up and move.  I’m really feeling that each and every thing I do or can do is utterly pointless, even taken from the scale of an evanescent mammalian lifetime.

Our boss apparently intends for the office to be open on New Year’s Day, but I am not going to be there.  I think it’s bullshit to make people try to work after New Year’s Eve and also to expect to sell anything.  In past years on those occasions when we have worked on January 1st, we barely made any business, and a good percentage of it was canceled.

I have no interest, and I have no motivation, to do anything at all, and certainly not to come in to the office on New Year’s Day.  Other people had their three-day weekends last weekend, and their family holidays, and you can bet dollars to donuts that most of them will not be coming to work next Monday, anyway.

Of course, it’s not as though I have anything better to do with my time by staying at the house; that’s one of the reasons I’m going to the office today.  I have nothing better to do.

I have nothing.

I had been looking forward to the 60th Anniversary and the Christmas Doctor Who specials, but now they are done.  They were good, and I’m glad I watched them.  But the regular season isn’t starting until May, apparently, and I’m sorry, I can’t wait around for that.  Five months is way too long.

I am tempted not to go to the office the rest of this week, or next Monday…or ever again, really.  I’m tempted not to go anywhere ever again.  What’s the point?  There’s nothing to which I look forward.  Life is just a series of discomforts‒many of them not at all minor.

My whole body has been hurting more than usual lately, despite aspirin and Tylenol and naproxen and icy hot and a massager and ankle and knee braces.  My back, especially, has felt as if the spine is becoming completely disconnected at its base and I am about to split in half.  And I’m getting some new form of sacro-iliac/coccygeal inflammation/arthropathy, too, the source of which I do not know.

I wish I could go into a coma.  I wish I could simply sleep.  No more.  ‘Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished.

I’m tired, and I feel horrible (and horrifying, come to think of it).  I hate my life.  There’s no point to it, and it gives me very little in the way of positive things.  Even thinking of my kids‒the best part of my life, ever‒just makes me miss them.  Since yesterday morning, I feel that I’ve just been fighting back tears most of the time.  It’s pathetic and disgusting.

I really do often wish I had some kind of drug problem (other than OTC analgesics, ha ha), but even alcohol gets unpleasant really quickly.  I bought a few bottles of wine for the holiday weekend and ended up pouring out as much as I drank, or more.  It doesn’t even do a good job of blunting my anxiety and tension, let alone making me feel good.

I don’t really want to see 2024.  I have no optimism about the year, and if anything, I feel that more and more of the little, stupid aspects of my life are falling apart all the time.  I’m just a net detriment to the world‒not that it deserves anything better, but still, I don’t enjoy that fact and process, and I don’t want to keep feeling the guilt and shame of my life.

I don’t know what to do.  I’m useless, even to myself.  I hate this world, I hate the social and political state of things (see yesterday’s post), I hate my body for its chronic pain, and I hate myself above all else.

I think I’m pretty close to being done, here.  I hope you all are having a more pleasant holiday season/experience than I am.  Tomorrow is Thursday, so if I do a post, it will probably be in my old “traditional” format.  If I don’t, you’ll know that I decided not to go in to work.  If I don’t ever do any more posts, I guess that will become evident after a while.  Though, of course, as with the halting problem in computation, you could never truly know that I was never ever going to release another blog post until you had waited until the end of time.

You could pretty sure, though‒sure enough to bet your life on, after not very long.  You could even bet my life, but that’s not worth much, so it’s not much of a bet.  It’s also a bit too self-referential and potentially paradoxical, given the subject matter.

Anyway, I’m sorry.  I know this isn’t pleasant, and you all deserve better.  But, it’s in my nature to disappoint and to bring people down, so that’s what I’m doing.  Have a good day if you can, nevertheless.

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Let’s put the day in a box, or something

It’s Tuesday morning, the day after Christmas‒called Boxing Day in the UK and related places, though I’ve encountered no consistent, good explanation for that name‒and I’m sitting at the train station, waiting for the 2nd train of the day to bring me toward the office.

I’m writing this post on my smartphone because I semi-accidentally left my laptop computer at the office on Saturday.  I say “semi-accidentally” because although I realized that I hadn’t packed it in plenty of time to correct that oversight, I decided to give myself a wee break from carrying it.  It’s not that much of a chore, but considering how unenthusiastic I am regarding doing anything at all, I think it’s a tolerable reduction in load.

I haven’t yet signed up for health insurance.  I really ought to try to do it sometime this week.  My sister has offered to help me with it, since such processes are so unpleasant for me that I usually honestly feel I would rather sicken and die than do them‒I’m predisposed that way, anyway, so it’s not that big a leap‒but when I spoke with her on the phone yesterday, I completely forgot to ask how she might do that.  She’s over 1000 miles away, so I’m not sure what the help would entail.  I should check with her.

I certainly don’t want to go through any government services.  Quite apart from my own experiences of injustice at the hands of state and county and federal levels of government, the disgusting spectacle of how our government has run itself, and how our politics have become so moronically fractured, gives me not merely a lack of faith in their ability to carry out their roles, but a kind of anti-faith.  I believe, or at least suspect, that they will not merely fail to ensure justice and order but that they will actually engender and even enforce injustice and will, over time, make all things worse.

This is not a partisan position.  Though the specifics of their degeneracy and dysfunction differ, both political parties in the US have attributes ranging from the pathetic to the disgusting (and almost no remaining redeeming features).  They are mere mockeries of political parties that are supposed to represent the interests of the people of their communities and states and the nation.  Watching the misbegotten antics of the cretins in positions of power, it is only too obvious how much each and every one of them is but a baboon with delusions of grandeur, trying to work a machine which it has not even the capacity to understand.

All three branches of the federal government have become little better than frat boys from opposing universities at a college football game, chanting idiotic, drunken slogans at each other, getting into brawls, trying to show off for each other, painting their faces, going topless in below zero weather…not doing anything productive at all but definitely doing their best to prevent the “other side” from doing anything productive.  Meanwhile, the actual work that is supposed to be done by these people‒whose chosen and sought-after role was nominally to work for the good of the people they represent, regardless of party affiliation‒is not even addressed in anything but sound bite form.

Oh, asteroids and alien invaders, where are you?  We need a catastrophe that cannot be “blamed” on any other political affiliate to remind everyone of how government is a tool, not a fundamental entity, and that political parties are not-so-necessary evil.

The people in our local, state, and national governments are NOT our “leaders”.  They never have been.  Leaders create innovation, they march in front, they accept responsibility, and they put their personal well-being on the line in service of some (hopefully beneficial) goal.  We do not elect leaders‒that’s practically a contradictory notion.  At best, we elect managers.  These people are our servants, our employees, and we should treat them as such.  When they do a crappy job‒as almost all of them do‒we should fire them, not invent excuses to blame their poor performance on the “other side” or whatever.

It’s not really about “blame”.  It’s about actually getting the job done.  I don’t necessarily blame a person for being a bad carpenter, for instance‒maybe that person tries really hard but just doesn’t have the knack.  But once I realize they aren’t very good, I’m not going to use their services.  And even if I don’t know for certain how good a new person is going to be, if the current carpenter has less than a 20% approval rating, most random alternatives are likely to be better.  And we can keep trying new people until we find good ones.

I fear the system is going to have to burn itself down across the board before any better setup occurs.  That’s a shame, because at its root, the US Constitution has some pretty good ideas.  It’s a decent operating system*, and it has a built-in ability to be updated.  It’s certainly a better system than nearly all the people involved in elected positions based upon it, and that is the advantage of rule of law versus rule of person.

But of course, all laws have to be created and then carried out by naked house apes who are more driven by personal dominance hierarchy jockeying that serves inbuilt reproductive urges than by any higher brain functions.  Their cortexes** appear to be used almost entirely for making excuses, for post-hoc justification of actions they took on whims and urges of personal indulgence, instead of assessing reality and deciding what is honestly best to do.

As Eliezer Yudkowsky pointed out, if you enter the final balance in the ledger (or list of pros and cons) before you begin to do any figuring, all your figuring is irrelevant.  It does not provide any information.  At most, it’s there to deceive, and the fact that it serves to deceive the deceiver as well provides no absolution for the deceiver.  Reality gives no free passes.

Anyway, I don’t know how that got started.  I certainly didn’t plan to write about it.  But there it is.  I guess it wasn’t far from the front of my mind.  Honestly, if it weren’t for my children, and the children of my sister and some of my friends, I would just as soon see the whole world literally burn.  It’s going to happen someday, in any case, and if humans are just going to be carrying out their dumbshow over and over, with rises and falls of cultural intelligence, but with the lowest common denominator always thoughtlessly sabotaging the higher, it may well be a net gain simply to head off decades or centuries or millennia or eons of net misery with a return to zero.

Hope you’re having a happy holiday season!

*Maybe part of the problem is that, though the operating system is good, there’s never been any chance to reboot or even “sleep” the system.  So, it has continued to accumulate errors, inefficiencies, conflicting bits of data, until they make every program unable to run efficiently, or at all.  We don’t need to change the Constitution, and probably not even the laws (at least not to start); we need to change all the people (and the political parties).  We should just sweep them away, clearing the browser history and the cookies and the RAM and all that, and restart with the operating system unchanged, but without all the baggage.

**Should that be “cortices”?

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“Merry Christmas, you filthy animals!”

It is Saturday, the 23rd of December in 2023 (AD), and I am writing this while already at the office; I did not go back to the house last night.  It occurred to me yesterday that, even if the workday were to be called off, I needed to be here, since I had several deliveries—unimaginative Christmas gifts for coworkers—arriving today.  With that thought came the realization that I did not want to commute to the house and then back overnight, and that I would be just as comfortable, or nearly so, sleeping at the office.  It’s not as though there was anyone waiting for me at “home”.

To be fair, I probably did not quite sleep as well as I would have at the house.  Then again, sleep is a fickle friend for me at any time, in any place.  And Saturdays are rather slow workdays at the best of times, so I’ll be able to meditate and/or nod off during the day as needs may have it.  I really ought to do that more, anyway—meditating, I mean.  I used to either meditate or self-hypnotize every day, and over quite a long stretch of time during my teenage years.  I would say that I was more together and mentally stable at that time, but I cannot give all—or possibly any—of the credit for that to my introspective states.  It may be enough that I was also in my hometown, and had a core group of long-term friends, and of course, I was living at home with my family.

In any case, I think it would be good for me to engage in some form of mental practice or meditation practice regularly, just to try to calm my mind a bit.  I’m extremely tense very much of the time, and I think it contributes to my sleep troubles and to overeating.  I rarely eat from hunger—when I’m doing something in which I’m interested, I rarely even feel hunger.  Instead, I eat as a sort of self-soothing behavior, something that becomes less of a problem when I’m less depressed and unhappy.  So, as you can imagine, it’s been pretty bad for quite a while.

Of course, it’s hard to avoid indulging at this time of year, since there are holiday treats and goodies everywhere.  I think since around Halloween I’ve been going back and forth trying to do better with diet and exercise, with highly inconsistent results.  I think that, after Monday at the latest, I should be able at least to avoid most temptations, since even at the office people won’t be bringing or receiving sweets or special foods and people won’t be talking about them as much anymore.  Not that I can use such things as an excuse; the weakness is all mine, of course.  But I must strive to become stronger if I can, and this will at least be somewhat easier with the holidays over.

Speaking of holidays, though, let me use this as my opportunity to wish all of you who celebrate it a Merry Christmas!  It’s a good holiday, a family-oriented and uplifting holiday, whether you focus on religious observation or purely secular observation, and even if you go so far as to use it as a day to celebrate the birth of Newton (whose birthday was December 25th, albeit on the Julian calendar not the Gregorian calendar used in the modern world).

As far as religious observation goes, it should be noted that—as I understand it—Christmas wasn’t even a holiday in Christendom until the late Middle Ages or some such time, when it was more or less engineered to take over from other popular solstice-related celebrations such as Yule and Saturnalia and all that stuff.

It’s fair enough that they didn’t celebrate the birth of Jesus in December, because apparently most biblical scholars agree that he was born sometime in the summer (and that wasn’t in the southern hemisphere—see my post recently that discusses seasons and the solstice and such).  Still, I doubt he’d be too worried about the date of the celebration of his birth being moved.  After all, there’d been a hiatus of about one and a half millennia during which it wasn’t really celebrated at all, though the story—two different versions of it—is there in two of the Gospels (Matthew and Luke*).  He was probably only too willing to take what he could get, as long as it wasn’t frankincense or myrrh.

Sorry, I don’t mean to be disrespectful.  When I was giving the year above, I deliberately only put in the Anno Domini contraction as a show of respect and courtesy, and I did not do so ironically.  Though I don’t think Jesus was perfect as a moral teacher—C.S. Lewis himself admitted that much in an oblique way—even if you’re thoroughly areligious, there are a fair few good things in his sermons.  He certainly was no advocate of war or avarice or nepotism or xenophobia, and hypocrisy really ticked him off.

He did tend to teach in parables a great deal, and he got rather exasperated when people didn’t quite get the points he was making.  I don’t see how any Christian could read the gospels and then take the whole Bible as literal truth.  Jesus was practically screaming in everyone’s face that a lot this was metaphor, and if you take him as an incarnation of God, then surely this can apply to the whole shebang.

Anyway, I won’t get into all that anymore for now.  Belief is tricky.  I’m not good at it in general—I have to check and make sure I have my keys with me about 200 times a day—and I don’t really advocate it; I prefer to be provisionally convinced by evidence and argument and to remain open to have my conclusions updated by new evidence and argument to whatever degree is appropriate.  But I do believe there’s nothing wrong with wishing all of you a Very Merry Christmas (and with words borrowed from my favorite Doctor, at that).

santa-whoand merry

The Happy New Year stuff will come next week.

*Am I the only one who wants to say the gospels as “Matthew, Mark, Luke, and Leia”, or perhaps, “Matthew, Mark, Luke, and Han”, which would at least sound nearly the same?  Best not to read from the book of Boba Fett, though, or so I’ve heard.