holidays

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Despite some personal and global grumbles, today is a day worth celebrating

Well, it’s another morning, as usually happens at this time of day, and I’m sitting at the train station.

I did not walk to the station this morning.  I get too washed out if I do that too often in a row while it’s this hot and muggy.  If it were a bit cooler, I could walk back and forth, to and from the train station, and as long as I gave my ankle(s) and Achilles tendon a rest when needed, I think I wouldn’t bat an eye*.  But, as is generally the case at this time of year, the weather in south Florida is disgusting.

Don’t get me wrong; in winter, and especially in late fall and early spring, it’s quite pleasant here.  But at this time of year, it’s sticky and rather gross.

Enough of all that.  I’m here at the train station now, and I’m writing this on my miniature laptop computer.  I needed to give the base of my thumbs a rest—speaking of resting sore parts of one’s body—because they have really been acting up lately.

It also just feels so much more natural to write this on the computer.  This computer—most any such computer, really—feels like an extension of me when I’m using it, much more so than my phone ever feels.  I’m not a huge fan of the smartphones, though I would never deny that they are tremendously useful in many ways, and I do make such use of them.

But I don’t find them handy for talking on the phone; I cannot hear properly using the inbuilt speaker, unless it’s absolutely quiet around me, and even then I have to focus.  So I use earphones, which take care of that, but regular office phones are still easier.  Anyway, the only person I talk to on the phone is my sister, so I guess that’s only an issue in that circumstance.

I do find texting reasonably convenient, but of course, when my thumb bases are suffering from arthralgia**, texting is uncomfortable.  It’s also terribly irritating when one is part of a texting group and there are texts going back and forth and back and forth, so there are text alerts every few seconds, preventing one from doing anything that one is trying to do, because one can’t just ignore the texts—they might be important.

Usually they aren’t.  They’re often just the cyber equivalent of moronic small talk.  It’s maddening.

I do like being able to listen to podcasts and audiobooks on my phone—using the aforementioned headphones—so I can hardly complain about that.  And few people have used a phone for reading Kindle books more than I have.  I also play Sudoku or Euchre when I need to kill a bit of time.

Maybe I’m actually a big fan of the smartphone.  Or perhaps I’ve merely been ensnared, put under a spell, forced to become dependent upon a nefarious technology.  It is a tad annoying that there are more things I can readily do on the phone than on the laptop, when the latter really ought to be more versatile and useful.

The computer certainly has, for me, a much better user interface.  But it doesn’t have the ability to connect to any “phone” networks in and of itself, and using public Wi-Fi makes me slightly nervous, at least in principle.  Of course, I can set up my phone as a mobile hotspot to which the computer can link.  I have done that before, but it uses up a fair amount of phone data and—appropriately—makes the phone get literally quite hot.  After all, processing information generates quite a lot of high-entropy waste heat.

This is, of course, part of the reason why crypto-currency mining is more harmful for the environment than automobile exhaust (if I understand correctly).  “The cloud” is far from carbon-neutral, also.  All those servers running the internet and web, and all those GPUs running all the time to do the “mining” and so on use tremendous amounts of energy, and that has to be generated somehow.

And as far as alternatives to burning stuff:  people are illogically afraid of nuclear power***, and solar is not yet at full efficiency, though there are no big and obvious reasons that it cannot become so in reasonable time.  Mind you, solar power is just a form of fusion power—natural fusion, but fusion nonetheless—when you get right down to it.  But we obviously can only harness the tiniest fragment of the fusion power from the sun.

Still, there’s so much power coming from the sun that even getting a tiny amount is pretty good.

I don’t know why I’m writing about these particular random things at the moment.  I have to write about something though****.  So I just write whatever comes to mind, and since it’s my mind, it’s often rather peculiar.

It is an important, good day globally today, though I won’t get into the specifics.  I’ll just say that one of the two most positive events in the history of the universe happened on this date, twenty-two years ago.  So, if anyone out there has the opportunity to celebrate, you should certainly do so, in whatever way gives you greatest and most durable joy (without causing physical harm to others).  You have ample reason, even if you don’t know what it is.  It’s that good.

You can also celebrate the fact that I am now drawing this blog post to a close, since it’s getting a bit long by now, counting the footnotes.  Please, really, do have a very good day if you can manage it.  Thank you.

celebration scaled

*And I certainly wouldn’t eye a bat.

**Which literally just means “joint pain”.

***Not realizing, perhaps, that probably more people die every year from simple air-pollution-related causes due to traditional power generation than have died from nuclear events since nuclear power has existed.  I’m only guessing, but I do guess, that’s probably even counting the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  But the deaths due to air pollution are covert deaths.  They happen in the background, they exist as an uptick in baseline mortality across populations, and each individual untimely death is all but unnoticeable, so it’s hard to recognize that large-scale tragedies are caused—or worsened—by pollution.  People aren’t good at statistics and probability, and they aren’t trained to become better, by and large.

****I really do.  It’s a compulsion.  Not to write on a given morning before work would be extremely stressful for me.  Imagine being forced to watch one of your loved ones (who perhaps has a bit of dyspraxia) trying for the very first time to snow-board, and doing so on a high mountain course with canyons and cliffs and numerous trees and very steep, treacherous paths, after having gotten quite drunk the night before.  It’s that kind of tension.  Or so I imagine.  I’m probably exaggerating.  But it isn’t good, that for certain.  Even thinking about not doing it makes me feel as if I’m in the presence of hostile others.

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Le Démon de Laplace, ce n’est pas moi

Happy Labor Day, to those of my readers who live in the United States.  It’s not a terribly big holiday, in a certain sense, but when I was growing up, it was almost always the occasion for a big family get-together, usually with some cooking out on the grill and, when I was little, playing outdoors.  It was a sort of celebration of the end of the summer, if you will, or perhaps rather a last hurrah‒a final weekend of enjoyment before the waning of the seasons.  Anyway, I don’t have the day off today, so I’m at the train station now, waiting for the train (they are running only once an hour due to holiday scheduling).

I walked to the station this morning, and in fact, I went roughly a half a mile (total) out of my way to get something to drink at a Race Track gas station that’s not quite on the route.  I almost badly mis-estimated the time it would take!  I expected to be waiting for quite a while here at the station, but I actually arrived a mere ten minutes before the train.  It’s a good thing I didn’t do that on a regular day, or I would have had to take a later train than that to which I am used, and that would have caused me significant stress.  Actually, just screwing up my schedule would have been what really would have caused me stress and distress.  I get very angry at myself for stupid mistakes.

Anyway, I’m on the train now, and I’m headed in to work, and it’s all very (un)exciting.  I wish we didn’t have work today, honestly.  That’s not because I’m averse to working‒I’m certainly not‒but because I honestly don’t feel like I want to do anything, anymore, as I think you all know.  I keep moving and acting mainly just out of habit and duty and guilt‒mainly preemptive guilt‒but not out of any positive, proactive, beneficent desire.  Well, maybe not wanting to make a certain few people feel sad is a somewhat beneficent impulse, but it’s not all that impressive.

We had a terrible day at the office on Saturday, unfortunately, at least as far as business goes.  We did none, to be specific.  It’s one of those frustrating situations in which, if you knew ahead of time that you were not going to make any sales, you could just have everybody stay home for the day.  But of course, you cannot know ahead of time that you will not do business on any given day.  And if you don’t work on a particular day because you think you might not do any business, it might be that, on that day, you would have done a great deal of business.  So, since we are uncertain about the future, we have to hedge our bets, and sometimes waste effort that would have, in hindsight, been better to conserve.

“Laplace’s Demon” would know when to go and when not to go to the office, but then again, it’s hard to imagine such an all-knowing entity needing to have a regular job.  In fact, a Laplace’s Demon that lived within the reality in which it knew the positions and momenta of all particles (so to speak) would know itself and its own future just as completely and inevitably as it does everything else.  It could not take any action in response to that knowledge though, or so I think, because that would change what it knows about the future.  And if it were a victim of being unable to change its actions in response to its knowledge, it might even be difficult for it to know that its knowledge was correct.  Maybe that’s incorrect; I haven’t thought it through very carefully.

Of course, it could simply be that the Laplace’s Demon can know itself and everything else in a predictive fashion, an “if…then” sort of situation.  Then it might well know what action to take, exactly, to ensure a desired outcome.  This doesn’t avoid the problem of how a mind can know itself completely and entirely, in all aspects.  Is it even possible?  As I’ve conjectured in the past, for a mind to know all of its own workings in full detail would require an exponential, possibly infinite, expansion of that mind.  The capacity to understand everything about, say, a human brain,  would require something much larger and more complex, overall, than that human brain…and then to understand everything about that larger brain, in full detail, would require a larger brain, still*.

Of course, it’s possible to understand the gist of the workings of a brain, and just to say, in a sense, “more of this same kind of thing is added”, but that’s very nonspecific and I don’t think it’s what Laplace had in mind when he imagined his all-knowing entity.

I think he was sort of imagining a being outside of the universe, looking in, though I could be wrong.  At least that would obviate the problem of the recursive acts of its thought and actions on the universe and thence back upon itself.  Such a being might well not have a full, internal understanding of itself in all details, but might be able to understand completely everything happening within the realm it was observing‒like a spectator looking down upon flatland from a three-dimensional perspective.

Anyway, that’s enough stochastic nonsense for today, going from walking to the train to the desire not to do anything, to the fact that work was bad, to the notion of not being able to know a bad day ahead of time, and so on to Laplace’s Demon.  I hope you all have a good day, whether it’s a holiday for you or not, whether you’re working or not.  Thank you for reading.

*This may mean that no so-called deep learning system can ever really know how it makes its decisions and what it understands, just as we don’t know about our own deep systems in precise detail.

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Dreams of appreciation for one’s works in the past, present, and future

It’s Saturday morning, and I’m sitting at the Tri-Rail station, waiting for the first train of the day.  I’m writing this on my cell phone, though I came within a jackrabbit’s breadth* of bringing my mini laptop back with me yesterday afternoon.  I even packed it in my backpack.  But then I decided that its added weight might give me trouble, since I was planning to walk back to the house from the train station.  I also had planned to bring one or two other things that might add to the usual weight of the backpack.

It turns out, though, that not only was I too tired/lazy to walk, but I also forgot to bring the few things for which I had foregone bringing the laptop.  So, that was entirely pointless, and now, here I am “typing” on my “smartphone”, waiting for the train to bring me most of the way to the office on a Saturday during what is technically a holiday weekend (in the US).  And, of course, I’ll go in on Monday more or less at the same time, since on Monday, the Tri-Rail will be operating on a Sunday schedule (which is also a Saturday schedule), since most sensible people will take the day off.  I mean, it’s Labor Day.

If there were ever proof needed that we have failed to protect the rights and well-being of workers in general, it’s the fact that most businesses and services are open on Labor Day.  Even many white collar workers probably work on Labor Day (though many lawyers may not, since courts and other government facilities are closed).

I used to feel pretty good about going to a rather meaningless job, because the whole point‒as I deliberately decided and told myself‒was simply to keep myself alive while I wrote my books.  But I’ve stopped writing my books now.  I never really wrote them for anyone but myself, of course, but it does eventually get discouraging when no one but family actually reads them (to a good first approximation, anyway, though there are one or two exceptions).

I don’t tend to be the sort of person who craves popularity for its own sake, but it really would be nice if more people read and enjoyed my stories.  I guess maybe I should share them all again on social media, perhaps for the last time, and maybe I’ll share my songs (my original ones, I mean) while I’m at it.  Why not?  One last desperate grab at passing driftwood seems like an appropriate act for a drowning man.

Heck, if I thought anyone would listen, I’d try to read more of The Chasm and the Collision out loud and post it up to YouTube.  I have the first nine or so chapters up there, and a couple of my short stories.  But I don’t think anyone (but I) has listened to them.  They have fewer “views” even than some of the videos of my original songs or even the covers I’ve done.

Again, I do these things mainly for myself, not to pursue some dream of fame and fortune.  Nevertheless, one does sometimes sputter to a halt when one is not merely alone in day to day life but receives no significant interest in one’s best, most creative products.  It may be a fine thing to “dance like nobody’s watching”, but it’s less great to write like nobody’s reading, especially when it’s almost literally the case that no one is reading.  Ditto for writing and/or playing music.

If I were a painter, after a while, it would become discouraging to keep painting if no one wants any of the works.  I can completely sympathize with Van Gogh for shooting himself.  And while I am glad he did a lot of painting before that‒I think his pictures are often deeply beautiful and unique‒I recognize that the fact that he is revered now is of absolutely no benefit to the man as he lived his life.  There is no Doctor Who, “Vincent and the Doctor”, episode in real life to give a past figure‒Van Gogh, Herman Melville, whatever other famous-after-death artist one might consider‒a chance to know that, though unappreciated in life, the artist would eventually be recognized as someone who did something that would bring joy to many people.  For a real person, there is only what happens during one’s life.

Getting famous only after death is almost a form of tragic irony.  It’s not common, though.  I think it’s more common for one to be relatively successful and famous in one’s lifetime and then be forgotten than the other way around.  But many truly great creative artists‒Shakespeare, Picasso, Dickens, Beethoven, Rembrandt, Steinbeck, Tolkien‒were revered in their time and are still revered now.

I don’t quite know what point I’m trying to make.  Maybe just that there is no long-term point.  Or, maybe it’s a variant of the Woody Allen joke that he doesn’t want to achieve immortality through his work, he wants to achieve immortality through not dying.

But I don’t think it’s pointless to be respected (for one’s work) after death; I think it’s actually kind of wonderful to think that future generations might love and admire one’s work.  But it would be especially beneficial if they had also done so during one’s lifetime‒some of them, anyway.

The future admiration of the world is probably just as ephemeral as is such admiration during one’s lifetime‒since, compared to infinity, any finite amount of time, no matter how large, is vanishingly, unnoticeably tiny, and is always unreasonably close to the beginning of any counting of time‒but it is almost certainly the case that being honestly appreciated for one’s work during one’s life is a wonderful thing, all else being equal.

I don’t know how I got on that subject; perhaps I’ll figure it out when I read and edit this before posting it.  Whatever the case, I hope it was mildly entertaining for you.  Feel free to follow the links to my books or to my Amazon author page, or to my YouTube “topic” page where my original music is, or to my personal YouTube list if you want to hear my “covers” and a few raw originals, if all that seems as if it might be somewhat interesting to you.  And please try to have a good weekend, holiday or no holiday.

Thank you.

*Get it?

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And then the moon, like to a silver bow new bent in heaven, shall behold the blog of our solemnities.

Hello and good morning!

It’s Thursday, July 20, 2023, the day of my traditional weekly blog post.  Far more importantly, it is also the 54th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landing, when the Eagle, carrying Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, landed in the Mare Tranquillitatis* and those intrepid astronauts took their famous “small” steps.  It’s easy for me to remember how old the Moon landing is, because it’s three months older to the day than I am.

I’ve occasionally, fancifully thought that maybe this explains, or at least illustrates, some of the weird things about me.  Perhaps some alien entity, less a body than an otherworldly mind, hitched a ride with the Apollo 11 mission after having been stranded on the Moon, barely surviving for ages or eons or who can say how long.  Then, after arriving on Earth, it set off on an erratic search for some compatible body and nervous system with which to merge and sustain itself, finally arriving in Pontiac, Michigan and locating a fetus in its 7th month of development‒just the right stage‒and merging with it.

Then, it found that this developing mind was just too weird and twisted, and it fled immediately, screaming inaudible alien screams, hurling itself into one of the Great Lakes and either drowning or merging with a fish somewhere.  Perhaps it had thoughts of leading the fish of the world in a revolution against humans and so on, but it was caught by a recreational angler who had it mounted and put in a wall.  This led to the creation of the prototypical Billy Big Mouth Bass, because the alien kept trying to ask to be released from the wall and the mount, but that first just freaked out the fisherman, then made him laugh because the alien/fish kept quoting the Supremes song You Keep Me Hangin’ On by accident.

The fisherman couldn’t get the rights to that song for his consumer version of the product, so he had to stick with the Bobby McFerrin ditty and related ones.  But the alien remains trapped on the fisherman’s wall to this day, harboring a grudge, and just waiting for AI to become advanced enough to merge with it.

Okay, well, that’s a load of silliness, I know, but it came to me in the moment, so I went with it.  What I really wanted to do was recognize and celebrate one of the most momentous events in human history, the first time people from Earth ever set foot upon another astronomical body.  To quote Tony Shalhoub’s character from Galaxy Quest, “That was a hell of a thing.”

In case you can’t tell, I’m trying to do a more lighthearted post today, just to give everyone who’s still reading my blog a little break.  My entreaties for help aren’t doing any good, anyway, certainly not so far, and though I am stubborn‒and often glad of it‒I’m not quite so monomaniacal as all that.

I still sometimes think about giving up posting on most days of the week and going back to trying to write fiction‒perhaps finishing Outlaw’s Mind or The Dark Fairy and the Desperado or starting Changeling in a Shadow World‒but I don’t know if the beginnings of either of the first two were any good from anyone else’s point of view.  I’m pretty sure my sister has read both of them as far as they have gone, and she’s expressed interest in the third based (I think) solely on the title, which I agree is good.  But I suspect she’s hesitant to give her preference, if there is one, out of concern perhaps about introducing bias.

Maybe what I really should do would be to try to write a new short story.  I have a long list of story ideas that I kept from my old phone, and I’m often thinking of new ones, but I don’t write them down anymore.  For instance, yesterday, on the way “home”, I thought of a story idea based on something I saw, a bit of graffiti, out the window of the train, but I didn’t bother writing it down, and now I don’t remember it.

My own feeling is that my best or at least most enjoyable stories are the ones with groups of “kids” (pre-teens or college students for instance) dealing with huge dangers and overcoming them together, like The Chasm and the Collision or The Vagabond.  If that’s true, it might be worth trying to recreate Ends of the Maelstrom, the first sci-fi/fantasy novel I ever completed but which was lost in the ruins of my former life.  But I don’t know what very many other people think, since I haven’t gotten all that much feedback.  I don’t think more than a handful of people have actually read any of them.

I guess that’s okay.  Apparently nobody ever really read Kafka’s work while he was alive.  As far as I know, though, it does him literally no good whatsoever that now he’s famous and influential and revered, and even has an adjective derived from his name to describe a certain type of story, because he’s dead.

Still, I guess it’s better to have your works become famous and revered after your death than for it never to have happened at all.  We could ask Herman Melville, I suppose.  Oh, wait.  No we can’t.  He’s also dead!

Well…we can ask him, I guess.  It’s easy enough to talk to the dead, or at least to address them.  But as far as anyone can discern, there’s no convincing evidence that any of them actually speak to us, except through the words they wrote and other work they might have done while they were alive.  That’s something, at least, and it’s a lot better than getting vague homilies from deluded and/or deceptive con-artist “psychics”.

Anyway, I guess I’ll keep you all posted (ha ha) about it.  In the meantime, although it’s Thursday, I hope you all have a good second, and far more laudable, Day of the Moon this week.

Shout out to Buzz Aldrin, who is still going strong at 93 years of age!  I met him once, quite by surprise, when my then-wife and I took our (very young) kids to the Kennedy Space Center.  I acted like quite the idiot, because I was so star-struck (or should it be “moon-struck”?), but I’m used to acting like an idiot, so that’s fine.

It’s still a great memory.  How many people can honestly say that they have experienced Buzz Aldrin looking at them like he’s not sure if they’re merely acutely ill or are a complete and utter‒dare I say it‒lunatic?  I’ll bet you haven’t!

While you’re eating your hearts out, I hope you nevertheless have a very good day.

TTFN

buzz about fish

*That’s Latin for “calm female horse”, which would be a better place for an eagle to land than on a not-so-calm female horse.

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Independence Day is worth celebrating

Well, it’s Tuesday, the 4th of July, and in the United States, it’s Independence Day.  It’s often just referred to by the people of America as “The 4th of July”, rather like the holiday “Cinco de Mayo” in Mexico, but I strongly prefer to refer to it as Independence Day, because that way we are more likely to remember what is being celebrated:  The official beginning of the United States of America as an independent nation, as announced in the Declaration of Independence.

I’m a fan of the Declaration of Independence, and I encourage Americans at least to read it every year.  It isn’t very long, and if you want, you can sort of skim through the list of grievances.  But the idea of the Declaration is important.  To my knowledge, it was the first founding document of a nation that explicitly states that governments are not ends in themselves, but are means for the protection and support of the rights and well-being of the people of the nation.

I know these ideas weren’t original to the founders of the United States, but as far as I know, it was the first time they were declared, in an official document, as the reason for existence of a nation, of a government.  Not God, not kings, not some “greater good” that supersedes a person, but the rights of each individual person, and of all of them in total, are the point of a government.

And, of course, the stated “self-evident” truths are interesting:  “That all men* are created equal; that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these** are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”  Then follows the statement that people make—or tolerate—governments as a means to an end or ends; they are not ends in and of themselves, and if they’re not doing what they’re meant to do, or not doing their job well, it’s within the rights of the various people to change those governments and try to make something better, though this should not be done lightly.

Many people, quite correctly, point out that there is hypocrisy in the writing of the Declaration of Independence.  Many of the founders were slave-holders, and they all clearly had less-than-ideal attitudes toward women, and toward the rights of native Americans and so on.  This does not invalidate the Declaration of Independence, because the ideas expressed within it are bigger than any individuals of any given era or of any given outlook and set of prejudices.

The ideas in the Declaration of Independence are aspirational.  It’s not saying “this is what we are,” but “this is what we strive to become, what we think we should be.”

One does not hold it against someone if, on the day they begin a new diet and exercise regimen, they are not already paragons of physical heath and beauty.  The whole point of the regimen is to become better than one already is, and this, I think, is the spirit in which one should take the Declaration of Independence, (and the American Constitution)***.

We were not perfect then (the “we” is a bit presumptuous, since none of my ancestors, as far as I know, were in the US before the end of the 19th century) and we are not perfect now, but there is little room reasonably to doubt that we are better now than we were then, as individuals, as societies, as a civilization.

It’s going to require continuing effort, with strict rigor, to continue getting better, by whatever measure of “better” we might choose.  There is much work yet to be done.  Maybe civilization will never be perfect.  Perfection is a rather woolly concept anyway.

So it’s not unreasonable to celebrate Independence Day (though we now are quite close allies with Britain, from which nation we declared independence).  It’s not a celebration of enmity, but perhaps more analogous to the celebration of a child having left home and having become an adult in its own right.  Maybe that’s a condescending attitude, I don’t know.

But I’m a fan of the United States in terms of ideas and approaches, though there are many things about it that are imperfect.  I have no sympathy with anyone who would say, “My country, right or wrong”; that’s no better than saying, “My street gang, right or wrong.”  Loyalty should be earned, and I think that, at its root, the idea and practice of the United States, for all its faults and its continuing need for improvement, is worth at least provisional loyalty.

The USA has the capacity, and the inherent goal, to get better.  It doesn’t—at least when we are honest—claim to be perfect or divine (or even divinely inspired) or the best possible government that could ever be.  It carries, however, an implicit intent always to continue improving.  And that’s something worth celebrating.

So, Happy Birthday, USA (in the words of The Bears’ Almanac)!  Happy Independence Day.

happy independence day

*Note that here, of course, is an example of the greatest injustice in human history, the ages-long failure to recognize that the majority of humans (i.e., women) are fully human.  When I think of how many Emmy Noethers and Ada Lovelaces and Marie Curies and how many George Eliots and Brontës sisters and Mary Shelleys and so on were out there but never had the chance to become what they might have been, I want to weep.  It doesn’t seem unreasonable to suppose that the human race might be twice as scientifically and mathematically advanced and have twice as much great art and literature, if only women had not been repressed throughout the ages.  Nevertheless, we can’t hold the writers (mainly Jefferson) of the Declaration of Independence too blame-worthy, at least relative to others, in this failure.  As late as the 1960s, and in as forward-thinking a show as Star Trek, the opening invocation still said, “…to boldly go where no man has gone before.”  It took until the 1980s with TNG to correct that to “…to boldly go where no one has gone before.”  They continued to split the infinitive, however, so some progress still remains to be achieved.

**Please note the clear implication that these are not the only rights that are considered unalienable or self-evident.  Of course, George Carlin, in a famous routine, pointed out that, at least in a certain way of looking at things, you have no rights, because those rights can be withdrawn and are allowed to you by those in power.  However, this isn’t necessarily logically correct.  Just because rights are infringed, even for decades or centuries or millennia, does not mean that those rights might not exist.  From a certain point of view, all rights are human inventions, are “fictions” of a sort, but based on many reasonable foundations of morality, rights are implicit, and they accrue to individuals.

***Which, after all, contains the power to amend itself, like an AGI that can change its own code, and that power has been used more than two dozen times since the thing was created.  Inherent in its writing is the recognition that it is not a perfect document as it is, but it is an improvable document, and it can, in principle, work toward better and better government asymptotically.

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Viewing, walking, carrying, and planning

Well, it’s Monday again, the start of a new work week and also the first blog post of a new month.  It’s also what I refer to as Independence Eve (in the US).  Why not?  We have Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve.  Why not an “Eve” for the national holiday celebrating the official founding of the country?  I encourage you all the read (or reread) the Declaration of Independence tomorrow.  It’s not very long.

I’m writing this post at the train station for the moment, though I will probably be finishing it on the train, or even at the office, since there are only about eight minutes until the arrival of the next train.  The reason for all this will become clear shortly, for those who are interested.

It was a relatively eventful weekend for me.  I decided to force myself to go to the movie theater* on Saturday morning for a matinee showing (not to be confused with a manatee showing) of The Guardians of the Galaxy 3.  I allowed myself to do this—or negotiated it and gave myself added incentive, since I wasn’t exactly keen on going to the theater per se—on the agreement that I would have some movie theater popcorn while there**, and then would walk back to the house after the movie (I took an Uber to get there…I thought it would be unkind to arrive at the theater sweaty, in case it was crowded).

I did do that walk, about 6.7 miles, in the afternoon heat and humidity of south Florida.  It was not easy, but that wasn’t unexpected.  I did take two twenty-ish minute breaks, one at a bus stop and one in a very lovely little park, where I meditated a bit in the shade to relax.  That was useful both because of the heat and the walking and because of the stress of having gone to the theater.

I enjoyed the movie, but even though there was very low attendance, I still had to deal with someone sitting in my assigned/purchased seat.  As if I need that kind of trouble.  The person/family was gracious about moving, but I don’t understand why it should have been an issue!  In modern movie theaters, the seats are assigned.  Why would one sit in any seat other than the one for which one had paid?

So, I felt very tense and stressed out by even the modest number of people around me at the movie, but at least while the movie was playing I was fine.  I even laughed out loud two or three times, since it was a funny movie.  I also thought that the guy playing the High Evolutionary looked really familiar, and then last night while re-watching a video of clips about how “The 11th Doctor is a Bad-ass”, I realized that the actor who played the High Evolutionary had played a secret service agent in Doctor Who series 6 episodes 1 and 2 (The Impossible Astronaut and Day of the Moon).  I didn’t just trust myself, though I was fairly convinced, but I looked the actor up on IMDB, and confirmed it.

That’s kind of fun.  He was excellent in his role as the HE, and that should at least help encourage actors who are, at present, in supporting or even “background” roles.  Of course, Karen Gillan had major roles in both things, but she herself had also appeared previously in the 4th series of Doctor Who (The Fires of Pompeii) in truly a bit part, where she was so heavily made up that you wouldn’t recognize her if you didn’t know it was she***.

Anyway, it was a hell of a walk back from the theater, but my choice of boots seems to have been quite good, and I wore knee and ankle spandex supports on both sides, and I think that helped make sure I didn’t have too much of a problem with recovery.  I took it comparatively easy on Sunday (my laundry day, in any case), but overall I still walked about four miles total over the course of the day.  Then, this morning, I’ve already walked to the train station, which is about five miles, and I have another mile to walk from the station to the office.  So, I’m getting a fair amount of walking in since the start of July.

I want to get to the point where I can walk more or less indefinitely, because I have a challenge I dream of undertaking, at which I would either succeed or die trying.  I’ve mentioned it before, though I don’t recall how much detail I gave, and I won’t go too much into it now, but I will say that part of my walking yesterday involved going to buy some groceries—not many, but some—and bringing a hiking-type backpack to carry them, in order to test it out.  I’m pleased to say that it worked very nicely—if anything, it’s better and easier than my day-to-day backpack, which I guess makes sense, since it’s meant for carrying rather significant amounts of weight in challenging circumstances.

Supposedly, exercise such as walking is supposed to be beneficial for depression.  I’m not so sure it’s the case with me.  In the past, I usually only exercised thoroughly (which I often did) when I had already been recovering from depression.  It seems very clear, in my case, that the exercise was a consequence of the abating depression, not its cause, because I’ve long since been in the habit of exercising, and even now, at my worst, I still do dips and pull-ups and things five to six days a week.  Anyway, if I can push myself to walk and walk and go longer distances and maybe even undertake a great challenge, such as I have in mind, I might either succeed at treating—and maybe even curing—my depression, or otherwise, perhaps, at dying in the process.

Of course, it has not escaped my notice that I might succeed at treating my depression and then end up mortally harming myself.  That wouldn’t be so horrible.  I enjoy irony like that, and it wouldn’t trouble me to die ironically—or, at least it wouldn’t trouble me any worse than would dying in most other possible ways.  In any case, I think it’s almost certainly better to die while wanting to live than to live while wanting to die.

*I don’t think I’ll go the movies alone again in this life.  It’s just not enough fun to warrant the stress.

**I wanted to put Goobers® or Reese’s Pieces® in the popcorn, which was my personal tradition for movie theater popcorn, but alas, they did not have either of those candies available.  I was forced to make do with peanut M&Ms®, which is a worthy candy but, unfortunately, just not quite the same.  I did have a nice, “small” Mug® root beer, though.

***That’s the same episode in which Peter Capaldi first appeared in Doctor Who before returning as the 12th Doctor.

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“And everything under the sun is in tune, but…”

It’s Wednesday, June 21, 2023 (AD or CE, as you prefer), and I’m writing this on my laptop, but it’s not on my lap.  It’s resting on my desktop at the office, because I stayed here overnight last night.  I had a bad day—personally, not professionally—at the office, yesterday.  I felt just rotten, partly due to how poor a sleep I had, even for me, the night before.

I considered leaving early, but we were rather busy, and I didn’t feel I could justify cutting out on everyone.  Also, I had the nagging concern that, if I left early, I might never come back, because I really felt at my wits end, and though I had no specific plan in mind, I thought I might take some kind of drastic action to make it impossible for me ever to do anything again.  I just wanted to go to sleep and to sleep and to sleep and perhaps never to wake up.

Anyway, it really started to thunderstorm rather badly near the end of the work day, so I decided I would just stay at the office.  I’ve had a hard time getting up to my usual status on the payroll this week so far, and it has to be finished by today, so eliminating the commute time will better allow me to finish that.

But everything is getting too onerous for me.  I’m so tired, and I have no internal drive or purpose of significance, just habit and stubbornness, which can’t really ever make up for the real thing in the long run.  I don’t know what I’m going to do.  I need help, but I doubt I’ll get any, and I don’t think I’m capable of seeking it.

I can’t make myself believe that I deserve or am worthy of any help.

Speaking of long runs (I was, you can go back and check) today is the Solstice—the summer one in the northern hemisphere, and the winter one in the southern hemisphere.  Thus, it is the “longest” or the “shortest” day of the year, depending on one’s location.  I use scare quotes because it’s not the actual length of the day that varies on this date, or from day to day in any kind of steady way, but the duration of daylight, the time in which the sun is overhead, or at least visible in the sky (barring clouds).

But, of course, the length of a day really does change a bit from time to time, though not in anything like as regular, nor as dramatic, a fashion as daylight does regarding solstices and equinoxes and all that.  The earth is a rotating mass, and is subject to the laws of angular momentum.  Thus, when enough mass changes position on the surface of the planet, it can have an effect on the overall rate of rotation of the planet.

The stereotypical “demonstration” of this process is a skater spinning on the ice, who speeds up when bringing his or her arms close to the body and slows down when extending them.  This is because, crudely, the angular momentum is mvr, the mass times the “tangential” velocity (of the mass), i.e. the speed at which it goes around the center of rotation, times the distance from the center of rotation.  Thus, since angular momentum is conserved, if the radius shortens, the velocity around the center of rotation increases proportionately, and vice versa.

The instantiation of this is somewhat complex, as is usually the case, but this really is the gist of it.  The conservation of angular momentum is related to the rotational symmetry of the universe, as per Noether’s Theorem—i.e., the laws of physics aren’t dependent upon which direction you happen to be facing.  This is similar to how conservation of linear momentum is related to symmetry of translation—i.e., the laws of physics don’t depend upon where you happen to be along any linear direction.  And conservation of energy (locally) has to do with the symmetry of time.  This last one can be tricky when taking the universe as a whole, because conservation of energy doesn’t necessarily apply to the whole cosmos, nor is time fully symmetrical on the largest of scales, or so it seems, but locally it is true.

Physicists, please correct me if I made any gross errors there.

Anyway, back to the rotation of the Earth and the length of days.  Movement of significant amounts of mass on the surface of the planet (or within the planet) can change the rate of rotation of the planet.  I’m led to understand by the program QI* that a massive hydroelectric project in China cause the “elevation” of a large enough mass of water to slow the rotation of the Earth by a measurable—if inconsequential and utterly unnoticeable—amount.

I sometimes wonder if the periodic gathering of millions of people near the mouth of the Ganges has any potentially measurable effect on the momentary rate of the Earth’s rotation.  I’m not aware of anyone having made such a measurement.  Even if it’s true that it changes the rotation rate, it may be too small to detect.

I also wonder whether, as glaciers on mountains and across Greenland and similar melt, with the water thus previously elevated seeking a level closer to the center of the Earth, the planet’s rotation might well speed up.  I wouldn’t expect glacier melt in Antarctica to speed up the rotation in quite the same way, because those glaciers are all far closer to the axis of rotation in the first place, and so might have limited effect in shortening the “lever arm” of rotation.  Indeed, if they raise sea levels significantly enough, I could imagine the “center of mass” of the Earth’s rotation moving slightly outward, especially as the seas bulge more at the equator, thus slowing the motion of the planet down.

The odds of this perfectly balancing seem small, but I imagine it would require very complex calculations and—more importantly—quite fine measurement to ascertain the net balance.  And, of course, the balance is likely to shift over time.

In comparison, it’s relatively** easy to calculate the balance between special and general relativity required to keep GPS satellites in synchrony with the ground.  In this case, the speed of the motion of the GPS satellites slows down their local passage of time relative to the surface of the Earth, by a calculable and quite constant amount, but their greater distance from the center of the “gravity well” makes their time go faster relative to the surface of the Earth, again in a quite calculable and rather constant rate.

It’s the latter effect that predominates, and this is routinely accounted for in the GPS process.  If it were not, GPS would have huge and increasing errors as the timing in the satellites and of ground-based clocks diverged steadily, and the errors would very rapidly become far too great to be useful.  So, your use of smartphones to find where you are and how to get where you’re going depend on both of Einstein’s theories of relativity.

I guess you all already knew all that.  Sorry to be boring.

Anyway, that’s my bit*** of trivia for the day.  It will probably be the most interesting thing to happen to me in this particular Earthy rotation, but I hope all of you are having more interesting days than I am.  I’m just very tired, and discouraged, and worn out…and it’s only a little after five in the morning.

I’ve been in pain for twenty years, and I haven’t seen my kids (in person) nor interacted with my son at all (barring one email) in over ten years, and my last remembered restful night’s sleep happened in the mid-1990s.

If I could just find way to get restful nights’ sleeps, that would be a start.  Everything else would be easier, or so I suspect, if I could find a way to make that happen.  Then again, perhaps it wouldn’t help, and I would simply be faced with the tragic irony of having that wish come true only to find that it didn’t make the other things better, and might even make them worse.

Never underestimate the potential for things to get worse.  Reality has no bottom.

There’s that symmetry of translation that implies, by Noether’s Theorem, that momentum will be conserved.  Which brings me full circle, thus recapitulating the conservation of momentum/symmetry of rotation.  It’s neat, isn’t it?  Time, however, is a trickier bit of possible symmetry, as Pink Floyd recognized only too well.  But at least after Time has passed, when on The Dark Side of the Moon, one can look forward to the beauty of The Great Gig in the Sky.

If you haven’t listened to that album in a while, why not listen to it today?  Or if you’ve never listened to it, treat yourself.  It’s well worth it.  What the hell, it’s the longest day (or night) of the year.  Indulge yourself.  And if the cloudbursts thunder in your ear—you shout and no one seems to hear—and if the band you’re in starts playing different tunes, I’ll see you on the dark side of the moon.

Summer-Solstice-Stonehenge-860x540

*Which has, upon occasion, been incorrect, but it does, in the long run, try to correct prior errors, often in hilarious ways, usually at the expense of Alan Davies, as in the running conflict over the number of moons the Earth actually has.

**Ba-dump-bump.

***Well, actually, probably a few thousand bits, albeit redundantly encoded.

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What should I title this blog post? Wait, I know…

Well, yesterday was seriously painful, in the literal sense and also in a more figurative sense, though the figurative pain was at least partially due to the literal pain.  I tried various postural and furniture-based changes, altered and/or tried some exercises, all sorts of things.  It’s hard to tell whether any of them did any good.  It’s also hard to tell—assuming that some or all of them did any good—which one(s) did the good, and how to tease it out.  This is, of course, why in a proper, scientific exploration of such things, one would try to change only one variable at a time, holding all the others constant.

However, when one is in soul-grinding pain while still trying to do one’s job, one tends to be willing to split away from pure scientific rigor.  At least, I am.  And I’m as committed to the notion of scientific rigor as anyone I know.

I slept reasonably well last night—for me, anyway—only waking up at about two in the morning, and being able to get back to sleep for another 35 minutes or so starting at 3:15.  That may not sound like much, but for me, it’s comparatively restful.

I also went rather off the script with respect to food yesterday.  I decided, since I was feeling so much like crap as to be barely distinguishable, I would just eat what I felt like eating, when I felt like eating it.  So, I did.  Mind you, there wasn’t all that much available, but I did order a pizza and so on, and even got a Mountain Dew® with it, something I haven’t had in certainly over a year, but probably far longer.

I’m likely to relax my dietary restrictions today as well—I really don’t feel great, but I can’t quite tell if I’m going to have another day like the previous few or several—but then, since I have this weekend off, I’m going to go back, much more strictly, to some food regulation, so to speak.  It’s easier when one doesn’t have much to do.

And, yes, I do have tomorrow off, so I won’t be writing a blog post.  I guess, technically, Monday is Memorial Day, which I only realized quite recently, but we generally work on Memorial Day at our office.  It’s a good day for sales and all that, though we often close early.  Of course, the buses and trains will be on a “Sunday” schedule, which is a minor pain, but they are on lower schedules on Saturdays, as well, and I’ve gone in to the office the last two Saturdays without difficulty.  Still, I do find myself tempted just to call out on Monday, at least if I don’t feel much better than I’ve been feeling.

Actually, if I don’t feel much better soon—at least back to my ordinary baseline, however unpleasant that both is and makes me—I feel I should call out from everything, permanently.  I’ve been back on my historically best-working antidepressant for about four or five weeks now, if my reckoning is correct (it’s not very careful, so I could be off).  It doesn’t seem to be making a huge difference, but it’s possible that it’s making some difference.  I certainly did, for a few days, pick up my guitar(s) a bit.  But then—now—I haven’t played or wanted to play for several days.

Some of that is pain related, and a lot of it is depression related, and it’s also just a feeling of pointlessness about playing.  I had thought about working on a cover of Ashes to Ashes, as I’d mentioned here (I think), a sort of sequel to my own cover of A Space Oddity, as Ashes to Ashes was for David Bowie.  But at least for right now, I don’t see that happening.

I don’t see much happening.  The farthest ahead I can really think is laundry on Sunday—will the washer and dryer be clear for me in the morning or not—and then whether or not I’m still going to be in pain on Monday, Memorial Day.  After that, as Paul McCartney sang in You Never Give Me Your Money (and I sang in my “bad cover” thereof), I “see no future…”  Though I will pay rent on the first.  I may even pay it slightly early, because it takes a load of tension away, since then I don’t have to worry that I’m going to forget.  That’s about it.  That’s as exciting as life is for me, which is to say, it’s not very.

I don’t know what would help put the wind back in my sails, or if that’s even possible—what might renew my interest in writing fiction, or playing music, or even writing and making songs.  I don’t really have anyone that I hang out with, since I only really socialize at work—but, then again, I don’t know that I would want to hang out with much of anyone I could possibly encounter near me.  I don’t have much in common with most humans, and that fact seems to become more overpowering all the time.

It would be nice to do some good in the world again, and to have a friend or similar that actually shares interests, but it seems unlikely.  Most people I’ve encountered—or so it feels—seem to want to take advantage, or else find me too unpleasant to stay friends with (I can’t blame them), or have their own stuff going on.  And, frankly, I’m rotten at socializing anyway, even with people I like.

Even on-line socializing, which I briefly did a bit of in the past, has become tense and unpleasant for me most of the time.  Leaving comments—whether on a video or a blog, or whatever, let alone replying to a tweet or a Facebook post—fills me almost immediately with a good deal of tension and anxiety.  I fear that someone will engage with my comment and I’ll have to get involved in some kind of discussion or argument, or else willfully ignore it, which will feel rude.

I know, it’s  a trap of my own making, or at least of my own nature.  I certainly can’t blame the other people.  But that doesn’t make it cease to be a trap.

Ah, well, it really doesn’t matter.  When I’m in a lot of pain, I’m not interested in socializing, anyway.

And now, I need to start heading for the bus stop, so I’m going to wrap this up for today.  I won’t write a post tomorrow, and if I don’t write one Monday, it will mean either that I decided (or needed) to take that day off, or something else has prevented me from writing.  I guess, if I don’t write any more posts at all after that, you’ll be able to infer at least that something relatively drastic happened.

But if I return no later than Tuesday…well, you’ll know that I’ve returned, at least for the moment.  I’m not sure which outcome I prefer.

Anyway, have a good holiday weekend, those of you who live in the US and are celebrating.

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A bland post but with some good music shared along the way

I’ll start by saying, Happy Cinco de Mayo!

cinco dance

I forgot yesterday was Star Wars day, and I don’t want to miss two such things in a row.

I guess, given that it’s Friday, it might be a nice night to have a margarita, or some other tequila-based beverage, if you indulge in alcohol.  But don’t drink and drive, of course.  That’s just playing Russian Roulette with the gun pointed at other people as well as yourself and your loved ones.  If you do drink and drive, certainly if you do it very often, it might be ethical (but not legal, and for good reasons) for someone else to kill you in self-defense, or in the general defense of innocents.  I don’t recommend it, but it would be understandable.

I’m not writing this at the train station today, nor am I writing on the laptop computer.  I am writing this‒to start, anyway‒on my phone, from the house, because I’m taking the bus to the train today.

Yesterday, after only 2 days of riding the bike to and from the train station (one and a half, really), my back and legs and entire left side up to my shoulder were in severe pain all throughout the day, which didn’t help my baseline grumpiness at work.  Well, it helped the grumpiness, I guess you could say; at least, it enhanced or increased it.  But I felt like crap overall.

So, given that, I’m not going to ride my bike today, and I don’t think I’ll ride it tomorrow, which means I doubt that I’ll be going to the movies, since the distance to the nearest theater is longer than the distance to the train station, albeit not by much.  But if the latter causes me so much pain, I’d rather avoid the former.

I don’t think I want to walk to the theater, either.  I haven’t been walking long distances for several weeks, what with weather and trying to use the bike and so on, so I worry that I might exacerbate things, like blisters and joint pain and so on.  Anyway, an eight mile walk is likely to take more than two hours each way.  That’s chewing up a big chunk of a day to see a movie by myself.  Not that I tend to do anything more useful or entertaining otherwise.

I suppose I could activate either the Uber or Lyft app, both of which I downloaded the other day after the bus was 35 minutes late.  But I’ve never used either one before, and I’m leery of getting in a car with a stranger who doesn’t have an official “chauffeur’s” license and a local (also licensed and regulated) company behind them.  That may be silly of me, but it is what it is.  Maybe I’ll work out the public transportation route to the best movie theater.

Or maybe I should just nix the idea of going to the theater at all and just watch the movie on Disney+ when it gets there, assuming I am still alive by then.  As far as I know, it’s hard to watch movies when one is not alive, but there are counterbalancing compensations, the most prominent one being the lack of pain and another being a lack of sadness/loneliness/depression.  These things are not to be taken lightly.  Escaping from them can be strongly appealing, especially when there are few counterbalancing consolations.

Speaking of not being alive, it was quite sad (though not tragic, since he was 84) when, earlier this week, Gordon Lightfoot died.  I may have mentioned this here before, but his song, If You Could Read My Mind is among my favorites; it came out when I was young, and I’ve always thought it was beautiful.

In fact, I did a rhythm guitar “cover” of it, with me singing.  I’ll embed the video for that here, just in case you’re interested, and then‒to get the taste of my playing and singing out of your mouth‒I’ll embed a video of the real, original song by the man himself.

I only ask, out of kindness, for you not to listen to my version too soon after his, if you do it in that order.  You wouldn’t have Phoebe Buffay try to follow Yo Yo Ma on stage at Carnegie Hall, right?

So, here’s my version:

And here’s the way it’s supposed to sound:

He did a lot of other good stuff, too, of course.  No less an artist than Bob Dylan said that, whenever he heard a Gordon Lightfoot song, he wished it would go on forever.  I wouldn’t go quite that all-out, myself; I don’t think there are even any Radiohead, Pink Floyd*, or Beatles songs I wish would go on forever.

Now, Rachmaninoff’s 2nd piano concerto…that could be the background music for the world and I wouldn’t quickly get tired of it.  Or Dvorak’s “New World” symphony would be good, too.

And of course, on the flip side, my own songs, like Breaking Me Down and Like and Share at about six minutes, go on longer than anyone probably wants them to go.  I guess my song writing is a bit like my novel writing‒once I get going, I tend to go on and on, because momentum, or inertia, or whatever, makes it so that I have little capacity or urge to stop.

Ironically, though, I don’t really have much more to say right now.  My leg and back and side and hip hurt a bit less than yesterday, but they do hurt quite a bit, still, and I need to leave soon to go to the bus stop, because I don’t think I’ll be walking as fast as usual.

It’s been a relatively bland blog post, but there are various songs to which I will have linked, to which you can listen if you like.  Most of them are by real, excellent, professional musicians, and have stood the test of decades or longer.  Those ones, at least, are worth a listen.

I won’t be doing a post tomorrow, because I don’t work tomorrow, and hopefully I’ll have rested enough that my pain goes back to baseline.  Have a good weekend if you’re at all able.  And if you see the new Marvel movie, feel free to let me know what you think of it.

*Though Echoes, which is the entire B-side of their album Meddle, goes on for a long time, and it’s not unpleasant.  And then there’s Shine On You Crazy Diamond, the opening and closing parts of the album Wish You Were Here.  

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

Hello and good morning.

It’s Thursday, the 20th of April in 2023 (AD or CE, whichever you prefer), and so, here I am at the bus stop, writing my usual blog post.  It’s very exciting, isn’t it?  You can almost feel that paint drying!

I think there is a certain subgroup of people who celebrate this as “420” day, a reference to marijuana, though the origins of that reference are unclear to me*.  Though I find it silly, I guess such a day may as well exist.  There are holidays for every other stupid thing in the world, from various kinds of foods and snacks to alcoholic beverages and all sorts of other things.  I doubt there is a heroin day, but if I were to find out there is, I wouldn’t be surprised.  And, of course, there are geeky, nerdy holidays for people like me, such as Pi Day** and Star Wars Day***.

Much more importantly, it’s my son’s birthday, as I mentioned yesterday.  I sent him a present, of course, though it’s not particularly clever, because honestly, I don’t know what he’s into now or what he would like.  It’s been more than ten years since I’ve seen him in person or even heard his voice.

I’ve sent presents in the past (that’s not an intentional play on words) that matched what I knew his long-term interests were, and they apparently went over well.  But I’ve pretty much emptied my quiver on that front, at least for now, without simply rehashing things I’ve already sent, which seems lamer than sending something broad and generic, at least to me.  But what do I know?  I’m terrible at things like this.

I’m also terrible at things like just getting people to keep wanting to be around me for long.  People don’t end up hating me or anything, at least as far as I can tell; they just don’t ever stick too close to me for very long.  And, of course, I’ve screwed up everything in my life with respect to my children (and their mother) and my career and all that other stuff.

I’m quite good at useless things like teaching myself how to draw and to compose and play music and writing books that almost no one will ever read, and understanding complicated ideas of physics and math and biology and astronomy and medicine and all that stuff.  But regarding the things that have really, deeply mattered to me—being a good son, a good friend, a good husband, a good father—I’ve almost uniformly failed.

The fault is almost certainly all mine.  At the very least, it’s my fault in the sense that “I am a faulty machine”.  There’s definitely some fundamental flaw—and nothing limits the count to only one such flaw—in the way I try to live with the people I love the most, because at various times I’ve lost relationships with my parents, with my wife, with my kids, with friends, all that.  And I’m not the sort of person who can just pick up and restart his life, a so-called new life, with new people.

Even if I were such a person, given my track record, why would I be willing to submit to the risk with new people?  That would definitely be a masochistic choice.

All of my old friends are quite far away, and even with the use of social media, I’m not good at doing long-distance friendships very well.  I don’t quite even know what the protocols are, and I always feel awkward**** about intruding on the lives of other people at any level.  I’ve tended to make my friends in school and university and at work, from among people who had similar interests and tastes and so forth to me, and who were nearby.

I’ve been very lucky in the friends I made in middle-school to high school and in university.  But once I was married, and of course, going to med school and all that, my focus was on those closest by, as it tends to be.  I put a lot of effort into my marriage and my career, which makes sense, of course, and until my own health deteriorated because of my back injury, I handled it pretty well.

But I certainly couldn’t maintain any kind of extended social circle.  That’s not how I’m designed, it seems.  Thankfully, my wife’s family were always very welcoming and warm, and my own extended family has always been wonderful, and my wife had friends with whom we socialized.  But my family is a long way away now—those that remain—and when my wife divorced me, I couldn’t exactly maintain close ties with her family, though they were important to me.  Their loyalty belongs to her, not to me, which makes perfect sense.

Anyway, sorry about all that trivia.  I just feel the emptiness of life particularly strongly today, which is probably understandable.  I have a notion of a metaphorical creature or situation that matches the sense of how I feel and am, but I can’t quite grasp it and put it into words, because I can’t quite think of the life form that fits.  Maybe I’m like a wandering, free-living amoeba that used to be—and ought to be—part of a slime mold?

No, that doesn’t quite work, nor does it really make sense.

I was trying to think of a metaphorical herd animal or pack animal that got separated from its group—a deer, a wolf, a lion, an impala—or maybe an ant or a bee or a termite separated from its swarm, or whatever.  But of course, it’s really just that I’m a simulacrum of a human, a replicant, who is inherently separate from the humans to whom he was supposed to be assigned, still living in a parallel “space” so to speak, but unable to interact directly; and they certainly don’t seem to grok me.

It’s almost like a Star Trek episode, isn’t it?  Or maybe it’s like an X-files or a Supernatural or something:  there’s a poltergeist that’s terrifying or at least horrifying to people, that they want to avoid it or if necessary eliminate it, even though the entity causing the weirdness doesn’t mean any harm.

I wish there were someone who could exorcise me and send me on to the next plane or—better yet—to peaceful oblivion.  But, of course, even more so, I wish that I were able to be part of my kids’ lives, to spend time with them, to be close to them, and to have friends around me, and not to be in pain every day.

While I’m at it, I might as well ask for a pony and for world peace and harmony.

Enough of this.  I’m sorry to subject you all to my morosity.  Then again, no one’s forcing you to read it, I guess*****.  I hope, after reading this post, your day improves.  It’s unlikely to go downhill from here, right?  That, at the very least, is something I can offer you in my daily blog posts:  once you’ve hit rock bottom (i.e. by reading this) the only way to go is up.

TTFN

hamlet and dad

*And, to be fair, I don’t care enough to look into it very vigorously.

**March 14th, because in the US date system it shows up as 3-14.  Seven years ago, it would have been 3-14-16, which would have been especially good, though I don’t recall noting it at the time.

***“May the 4th be with you,” in case you don’t know.  It’s a stretch, but it’s doubly nerdy because of the pun.

****I think it’s particularly appropriate the the spelling of the word “awkward” is so awkward.  W-K-W?  What a peculiar progression of letters!

*****Though I am very, deeply grateful to you for doing so.