Horror

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Bing-bing-bing! Ricochet Robert.

I’m in a rather unusually bad amount of pain this morning, even for me, so please excuse me if my thoughts are somewhat incoherent or distracted or grumpy-seeming.  Though I don’t know how you would be able to tell if I’m grumpier than usual.

It’s Monday yet again, and it’s only been two days since my last post, not three, because I worked on Saturday, and on that day, I also wrote a very angry blog post.  I think some people might have found the degree of malice I expressed on Saturday disquieting or at least just not good, which I can understand.  I tend to think of such terrible things a lot more often than most people do (though I share them only infrequently); it’s one of the reasons I find my own company unpleasant.

But, of course, I’ve tried to compensate for my dark tendencies by doing as much good in the world as I’ve been able to do, such as by becoming a doctor.  I’ve never actually acted on any of my darkest impulses and dreams, except when I write horror stories, or when I write non-horror stories with horrible elements in them.

I guess maybe that’s one of the things that’s been therapeutic for me about writing fiction.  Maybe the trouble is right now that I don’t have a good outlet for my terrible thoughts.

Of course, I know that the idea of thoughts and emotions as “substances”, as if some manner of fluids, which can build up and need release is not merely incorrect, but is not even a good analogy for how emotions and other neurological states work.  This is part of why meditation is far more effective against stress and tension than is, for instance, the often counterproductive notion of catharsis.

Of course, sometimes things that work well for neurotypicals don’t work nearly as well for those on the autism spectrum*.  For instance, there is apparently some reasonable evidence that cognitive behavioral therapy, which often works quite well for neurotypicals with depression, is not as effective and can even be counterproductive for autistic people; we already tend to over-self-evaluate our cognitions, and so the tricks and workarounds of CBT often are not merely redundant but miss the issues entirely.

Along a line of possibly similar nature, I’ve written before about how meditation often serves to reduce my anxiety but at the same time worsens my depression.

And yes, in case you’re wondering, I think it’s all a matter of neurological states‒or neurohumoral states if you want to be slightly more precise.  I’ve spent nearly my whole life interested in such things; still, I have found neither evidence nor argument that has so far persuaded me that there’s any significant credence to the notion that humans are anything but temporary patterns of matter/energy, “spontaneously” self-assembled like any termite mound/colony or beehive/swarm**.

Once that pattern breaks because it can no longer sustain itself, due to injury or age or what have you, there is nothing more to it; it’s a hurricane that has passed.  There can be records and traces of its passing, and the damage it has done can linger for a long time, but there is no “afterlife” for weather patterns.

People are more complicated than hurricanes, at least in some senses, I will admit that.  But more intricate complexity doesn’t tend to make things more durable; it makes them more fragile, ceteris paribus.

Of course, all else is almost never equal.  Nevertheless, it’s often useful to consider complex matters as partial differential equations in more than one variable***; one explores the equation by holding all but one variable constant and differentiating or integrating along only one variable at a time.  As long as one thinks carefully about such things and never forgets that one is holding the other variables constant‒and by not forgetting, hopefully avoiding the oversimplification of one’s model of reality‒one can penetrate a great deal by recognizing when powerful tendencies persist even given the fact that other variables can influence matters.

For instance, the metallicity**** of stars influences the size at which they undergo certain levels of fusion, which is why it is thought that the earliest stars had different lifespans and luminosities relative to mass than later stars (like our sun).  But they still, overall, behave like stars, and the bigger ones shine brighter and last a shorter time than the less massive ones.  They are more alike than unalike, the narcissism of small differences notwithstanding.

Well…that tangent, or series of tangents, sure took me down unexpected paths!  But I guess that’s the nature of tangents; in any nonlinear but continuous function (even one as simple as a circle), there are a functionally infinite number of possible tangents.

I think that’s the right mathematical metaphor; isn’t it?  I guess it doesn’t much matter.  I’m just expressing my highly stochastic thoughts (I doubt they’re truly random) as they come.  But they would probably follow different courses if I did not express them in this fashion.

I hope your own thoughts are less troublesome to you than mine are to me and that you are at least at some degree of peace with yourselves and with each other.  You might as well be, though I know that’s not enough to guarantee it.  Still, do what you can, okay?

*Which I am, as you may know; I have written at least in passing about my recent, quite late, diagnosis.

**I don’t mean “like” here as “the same as” but rather “in the same fashion as”.

***My terminology is a bit sloppy here, but I’m not trying to be mathematically rigorous, I’m just trying to get my thoughts across with some clarity and accuracy.

****To astronomers/astrophysicists, a “metal” is any other element but hydrogen and helium (this no doubt irks chemists).  The earliest stars would have been almost entirely hydrogen and helium, certainly to start off.  Mind you, even later generation stars like the sun are still by far mostly hydrogen, but seemingly small “contaminants” can have noticeable effects on big systems, as in the fact that water vapor and carbon dioxide markedly affect Earth’s atmosphere and surface temperature despite being present in tiny amounts compared to nitrogen and oxygen.

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“What hears with their ear? The abyss between the stars.”

Well, I did bring the mini lapcom with me when I left work yesterday.  Nevertheless, I am writing this blog post on my smartphone.  There are specific, calculated reasons for this, but I’m not going to bore you with them, because they are only relevant to me.  But please, do tell me if you notice that this change has affected the quality of my writing, for better or for worse.

Okay, that’s that out of the way.  Now, on to more interesting things.  It’s the first day of October, my favorite month, although the reasons it has always been my favorite month are almost all effaced here in south Florida, in the current state of my “life”.  Still, it is the month of Halloween, and of Cooger and Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show, and all of that, so it still holds its position as number one month, as well as being the eighth and the tenth.

A few years ago‒it feels longer‒I set myself the task of writing a “short” story to honor the month of October (though the story didn’t have to be set in the month of October).  That led to Hole for a Heart, which is not my darkest story*, but my sister says it’s my scariest story.  I’m sure that’s pretty subjective, but it warms my own heart-shaped hole at least a bit to have written a quite scary story.

I wish I had the gumption to write something new again for this month.  If I did, the lapcom would be better for writing fiction than the smartphone, though the latter might keep me from going too ham on the whole thing, i.e., writing too much.

But I have a sort of feeling of learned helplessness about writing fiction, as well as about music (writing it and even just playing it) and art and science and everything else I do.  I put a lot of energy into things with almost no return, certainly not one commensurate to the effort involved.  Eventually, I just feel like an exhausted rat lying in the bottom of his cage, knowing that no matter what choice he makes or action he takes, he will be randomly shocked and otherwise tormented.

It’s not that he doesn’t care about the pain or the other stuff, he just knows the pain will come no matter what, and that has taken almost all the possible joy from being creative.  This is especially so when the creativity goes almost entirely unnoticed, like a sculpture made on the ISS and then promptly launched from there into deep space without anyone having seen it but a handful of astronauts.

I don’t know what it might take to rekindle (no pun intended) my writing or other creative sparks.  Maybe if I just had less pain it would do.  Unfortunately, the pain seems just to add new flavors and textures to itself over time; it doesn’t diminish.

I guess maybe that could be considered creative in a sense.

It’s a curious sort of irony, but I know that writing fiction seemed to stave off my depression, at least a little.  One might think it would be exhausting, writing 1400 to 2000 words every workday (except when editing/rewriting, which was its own grind).  Maybe eventually it was, and that was what led me to stop finally, since there was no real reward to it after a while, since almost nobody buys the books and/or reads them.

I don’t regret having written my stories, of course, nor my songs, nor any drawings I’ve made, nor my blog(s).  But over time I’ve had rapidly diminishing relative returns on the fiction writing and on the music and such.  The returns on this blog, relative to the effort, are shrinking more slowly, and occasionally there seems even to be an uptick, but the overall trend of basically everything except my personal knowledge** is downward.

I don’t know when the y-axis overall will cross the origin‒for many particular things, I think it has long since done so‒but I suspect it’s a finite distance, and I’m not decelerating, so I will cross it eventually.

Sometimes‒indeed, pretty much every day and twice on Sundays, ha ha‒I think to myself the metaphorical equivalent of “Where is that fucking x-axis?  It’s time for this to be finished already.”  If I had a goal, or anything significant toward which to look forward, things would probably be different.  But I don’t, and they aren’t.  That’s logic for you.

Well, anyway, this evening begins Yom Kippur and my fast.  Whatever you all are doing, I hope you have a good day.  I expect that I will be writing to you again tomorrow.

*That would be Solitaire.  I’ve told the story of that tale’s origin here before, I think, so I won’t get into it now.  If I am misremembering, let me know, and I’ll try to tell you the curious but not very exciting tale of a very dark tale indeed.  Oh, and if you want to read either of those stories but don’t want to do the Kindle thing, they are both featured in Dr. Elessar’s Cabinet of Curiosities, which is so far my only work you can get in Kindle, paperback, and even hardback!

**I do think that I am always learning new things and improving my understanding of things I knew from before, and I have a good memory, especially for things in which I’m interested.  That’s all well and good, and I’m glad of it, but knowledge in my head is only as good and as durable as my head is.  Eventually, as Roy Baty said, all these moments will be lost in time like tears in the rain.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy New Year.

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

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And blogged with restless violence round about the pendant world

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday of course, which is why I opened with that greeting.  I appear to have survived World Suicide Prevention Day.  I suppose one could argue that this fact is a good thing, though it can also be argued the other way.  I’m of more than one mind on this subject, so I’ll perforce withhold my own judgment.

Of course, it is now the 11th of September in 2025 (AD or CE), the 24th “anniversary” of 9-11-2001.  That was a bad day, there’s no doubt about it, and it heralded more bad days to come‒though two days later was, for me, one of the two best days of my life.

Anyway, there was big news yesterday, with more than one violent and newsworthy event happening in the western US.  I’m not going to get into my specific takes on things, since I don’t really do that sort of thing here.  I’ll just say that I was annoyed by the senators and representatives on the democrat side (probably there were some on the republican side) who immediately sent their “thoughts and prayers” (i.e., nothing whatsoever) and then said things like “political violence is never acceptable in a democratic society”, some of them being broader and saying political violence is never acceptable, period.

I just had to point out that our country (the US) was founded via political violence‒the American Revolution, you know.  I also pointed out that, when government no longer respects the Constitution and the rule of law, and legislators (and law enforcement personnel) are not stepping up to hold people accountable to their freely sworn duties, and the judiciary is biased in favor of those who ignore the judiciary, then sometimes violence becomes the only recourse, just as was the case when this country was founded.

I will make one judgment-type statement and say, when someone has only engaged in speech of one kind or another‒even if that speech ironically seems to endorse or at least express acceptance of certain kinds of violence‒then the proper response is more speech or counter speech (by which I do not mean trying to shout someone down).  Speech is not the same as violence in nearly any situation‒unless you’re one of the Fremen of Arrakis in the older movie version of Dune‒and should not be countered with violence.

It is, however, less scary to use violence against someone who is not immediately threatening violence than against those who actually are threatening or ordering or enacting violence.  That, though, is the path of cowardice.

Naked house apes are, finally, just apes.  If they recognized and accepted that fact, then they could be on guard against the baser primate drives and habits and instincts that no longer serve them well in the modern world.  But so many of them seem, either implicitly or explicitly, to consider themselves something other than animals, and that delusion lays the groundwork for much error, which can be catastrophic and tragic.

It’s a bit like someone believing for no good reason that their car is partly self-steering, and that once the cruise control is on, they don’t even need to watch traffic or steer for themselves.  Things are not going to turn out well for such a person.  And unfortunately, things are likely to go badly for other, perhaps more sensible, people who just happen to be near the first person.

“Heavy sigh,” to quote Justine from The Accountant (and The Accountant squared, which is what the name of the sequel is, apparently*).

In other, less momentous news, I practiced the guitar (and sang) a bit yesterday.  Among other things, I looked up the form of the “Blues” scale (and the major and minor pentatonic scales and the so-called Japanese scale, a slightly different pentatonic scale) and fiddled around with them.  Well, I guess I guitared around with them, actually, since a guitar is not a fiddle (though Jonny Greenwood has been known to use a bow on his guitar from time to time).

I did this because of a suggestion in the comments a bit ago by one of my old friends who is also a stellar guitarist.  He suggested that I might use a blues guitar bit for the possible lead on my song Come Back Again.  Unfortunately, I had to admit that I didn’t know specifically what that entailed.

I have a sensitive ego for such a self-hating person, so I ended up looking it up and playing with it to correct my shame.  I must admit, the blues scale is a real blast and sounds great for something so simple.  The pentatonic scales are a bit more boring, but I sort of already knew that.  I don’t expect that I’ll ever be an improvisational player; I tend to have to plan things out and lay them out and think them through and do trial and error.  But still, it never hurts to practice one’s scales.

Well, actually, when one’s arthropathy is acting up, it can hurt to practice, and it often does.  But that’s not exactly what I meant, as I suspect you already knew.

I hope you all have a good day, and don’t dwell too much on political violence, recent or older.

TTFN

*One could expand out The Accountant2 to be The AAccccoouunnttaanntt, and we could then group like variables together, which would get us The AAaaccccoouunnnntttt, or The A2a2c4o2u2n4t4.  It’s probably not as catchy that way, but I suspect the title character of the movies would appreciate it.  Of course, the preceding presumes that the “squared” bit on the original title applies to all the letters in the word “Accountant”, since it’s one word.  Otherwise, in traditional mathematical notation, it would end up being The Ac2ouan2t3.

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Discussions of my “first draft” styles and a bit of shameful self-promotion

I wrote yesterday’s post on my miniature laptop computer‒what I call a “lapcom” if you remember, and even if you don’t‒and today I am writing this on my smartphone, because I didn’t feel like lugging the lapcom when I left the office.  It’s not done deliberately (by me), but I am curious about something.

You see, to my surprise, yesterday’s post appears to have been rather popular and successful.  I say “to my surprise” because to me it felt rather disjointed and erratic and like it didn’t go anywhere.  I’m not sure why that is or to what it is in response, or indeed, whether it was merely a fluctuation in a chaotic system and had nothing whatsoever to do with any particular thing I had done.

Still, as you may know, I do feel that I write differently when using different tools for doing it.  On the lapcom, I tend more easily to run off at the page, if you will, because typing on a word processor is just so easy and natural for me.  That doesn’t necessarily make the writing better, though.  I fear that I get too verbose sometimes.

And, of course, writing on the smartphone is less fluid, more cumbersome.  It also tends to exacerbate the arthropathy in my thumbs, for what are probably obvious reasons.

Pen and paper‒for first drafts, anyway‒ is certainly my most long-standing method of writing, and I don’t think I tend to get quite as carried away with that as with typing.  I suspect, but don’t by any means know for certain, that the things I write by pen and paper‒the fiction, at least‒are somewhat better, or at least more fun, than what I write on either a phone or a computer.

Here’s a bit of a rundown.  The following stories I wrote by hand in the first draft, having no other options:  Mark Red, The Chasm and the Collision, and my long short story Paradox City.  I also wrote my stories House Guest and Solitaire with paper and pen, the latter in one sitting, the former way back in high school.

I wrote the first draft of Son of Man at least partly on a very small smartphone that I really liked.

The Vagabond is a bit of a mixed bag.  I started it while at university, and finished the first draft while in med school.  Part of the first draft was written by hand (i.e., with pen on paper) but most of it was written on a Mac SE using the good old word processing program WriteNow.  Does anyone out there remember that one?

The rest of my stories, at least the published ones, were written on mini laptop computers (well, some here and there would have been on full-sized ones) from the beginning.  Most notable of these, perhaps, is Unanimity, which is very long.  But many of my “short stories” were written on regular keyboards, including the other two stories in Welcome to Paradox City, and my “short” stories, Prometheus and Chiron, “I for one welcome our new computer overlords”, Hole for a Heart, Penal Colony, Free Range Meat, and In the Shade, the latter of which‒like House Guest‒appears only in my collection Dr. Elessar’s Cabinet of Curiosities.

Oh, right, and of course Outlaw’s Mind, Extra Body, and The Dark Fairy and the Desperado have all been written (so far) on the lapcom.

If anyone out there has read a sampling of some of these, or all of them, and can give me any considered feedback on any overall difference in quality between the means of writing, pros and cons, I would certainly appreciate it.

And if any of you haven’t read any of the above, well…what are you waiting for?  If you’re a fan of fantasy/sci-fi/horror, you might like some or all of my stuff.  If you’re not sure where to start, by all means, I’ll give you recommendations based on your personal preferences, if I can.

I suspect that The Chasm and the Collision would have the broadest popular appeal, especially for people who like the Harry Potter books and similar stories.  Son of Man is probably my purest science fiction story, but this is not “space opera” type science fiction.  “I for one welcome my new computer overlords” is basically science fiction*, too, in case the title didn’t clue you in.

Everything else is horror of one kind or another.  Most of my horror is supernatural in one sense or another, and I veer into the borders of Lovecraft’s universes in at least two stories**.  Mark Red is supernatural and in some senses horror-adjacent, since it involves vampires and so on, but it’s really more a teen/young-adult supernatural adventure, a story originally intended to be a manga.

My darkest story has no supernatural elements in it at all.  That’s Solitaire; it can be had in stand-alone form for Kindle, and it also appears in the middle of Dr. Elessar’s Cabinet of Curiosities.

Well, that’s been about as much self-promotion as I think I’ve ever done here before.  I didn’t really intend to do it, but once I got going on discussing my various story drafts, it just seemed to go that way.  I hope I haven’t been too insufferable.  I’m really not a raving egomaniac, though I may be some other type of raving maniac.

I hope you all have a good day.

*And I guess Extra Body is sort of light-hearted sci-fi.  It’s even somewhat comical, as my story If the Spirit Moves You is a sort of supernatural comedy (expect no laugh-out-loud moments, though, since they are dry comedy at most).

**The Death Sentence, which appears in Welcome to Paradox City, and In the Shade, mentioned above and in my other collection.

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“I don’t think I’ll ever get over the hill; those wounds run…pretty deep.”

It’s the penultimate day of July in 2025, and I can’t honestly say I’ll be sad to see the month go‒nor the year, nor the life, for that matter.

The word “penultimate” does make me wonder if any stationery company ever marketed a writing implement as the “Pen Ultimate”.  If so, I’ve not heard of it.  I guess it’s not a terrific marketing idea, just a mildly amusing play on words.

Anyway, it’s Wednesday, the so-called hump day‒because presumably once one passes the midpoint of the week, one finds it easier to coast through the rest of the week, as if one had reached the top of some hill (or hump) and was now loping, or perhaps sledding or skiing or snowboarding, down the other side.

Of course, that metaphor presumes there’s something akin to gravity applicable here, which is the force that makes it hard to go up a hill and easier to go down it.  But there is no such force applicable to time (though time is affected by gravity).

As far as I can see, no matter what you do, the days of the week proceed at the same monotonous rate, whether one puts any effort into it or not.  Time passes at the same rate (ignoring tiiiiiiiny adjustments for relative speeds and altitudes) for the most active athlete or business tycoon or person in the grip of mania as it does for someone idle or even someone in a coma.  And even if one can slow down one’s time relative to others‒for instance by going some substantial portion of the speed of light relative to them or by going into an area of strong gravity‒one’s own “proper time”, the time one experiences, will still be the same*.

One might effectively travel into the future of the people one left behind on one’s high-speed voyage, but one will also skip and miss all those years that one is “away”, and there’s no way to get that time back.  The nature of causality appears to preclude it.

So, yeah, the concept of hump day is purely psychological, and like so much of human psychology, it is stupid.  I wish I could say that my impression of such things has become less negative as my own proper time has passed, but alas, the young provide no more basis for hope with their presumed energy and creativity than the older ones do with their presumed greater experience and knowledge.

Almost all humans are really quite pathetic and come despair-inducingly far from achieving anything like their potential in wisdom or intelligence or creativity.  They mostly just bounce around like air molecules in a closed chamber, achieving maximal local entropy.

And don’t delude yourself that any other creatures on the planet are any “better” than humans.  Even the relatively smart ones like chimpanzees and porpoises and cephalopods and corvids tend to be often vicious, selfish, and violent.  That’s not all they are, of course, but it’s plenty.  They’re certainly not pure or innocent or fundamentally beneficent creatures.

Neither are dogs or cats or other mammals, or reptiles of any kind, nor fishes, nor birds, nor arthropods, nor annelids, nor protozoa, and so on.  Nothing in the world is inherently beneficent.  Even plants fight and harm and kill each other; trees waste their resources by growing taller to outcompete each other for sunlight, when if they all stayed shorter, at some uniform height, they would all be better off.

And fungi eat everyone, using other life forms for their resources and sometimes for locomotion, and they wage constant war with bacteria and so on.

There’s no good reason to expect any form of alien intelligence to be any better, nor AI either.  No matter how much smarter one being is than another, the most powerful defining factor of each is its limits.  Every finite thing is equally far from infinity.

Unfortunately, beneficence overall is not really an evolutionarily stable strategy.  Even if all beings in a given ecosystem were mutually benevolent, all it would take would be for one mutant to instantiate a degree of selfishness and ruthlessness and it would have a tremendous advantage over its kindly brethren, and its genes would spread and become more and more prevalent.

Of course, universal malevolence and selfishness are not stable, either.  That’s a recipe for overall destruction, as much as anything else is.  Prey are necessary for a predator to survive.  As Porter said in Payback about nice guys:  You’ve gotta have somebody to take advantage of.  The food web has to have a base somewhere.

It seems to me that there will never be any system that doesn’t have some such mixture of predators and prey‒even metaphorically within species and societies.  Of course, it makes sense to prevent and mitigate the depredations of the assholes and, if possible, to discourage them from existing at all.  That’s better for everyone.  But as with the trees**, it doesn’t happen on its own, and it is not self-sustaining.  The price of such freedom really is constant vigilance, and unerring vigilance of that kind is probably impossible in principle.

I’m not really trying to come to some point here.  Mostly I’m just expressing my frustration and despair and cynicism/nihilism.  There is not only horror in the world, but horror is always there and almost certainly always will be, at least until the ultimate (but at least peaceful) horror of universal heat death (or whatever) brings about the elimination of all experience of any kind in the universe.

The only enduring peace and freedom may be simple nonexistence.  But then there’s that damn Poincaré Recurrence!

Ah, well.  Have a day.  You can call it a hump day if it amuses you.  I don’t know why I care.

*And, of course, if one is traveling at a substantial portion of the speed of light, if one doesn’t have adequate shielding, one’s lifespan is liable to be shortened significantly due to exposure to induced cosmic rays:  When you travel at a very high speed through the elementary particles of open space, the elementary particles of open space travel at a very high speed through you.

**Think about it:  those beautiful California redwood trees are possibly the greatest, most glacially persistent testament to the “dog eat dog” nature of the non-human world; a centuries-long spectacle of cutthroat one-upsmanship, each tree fighting maniacally to outcompete the others for sunlight.  They are beautiful, of course, but so is a raging fire.

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Lost then found thoughts about lost connections

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(I do like to quote things, don’t I?)

I hope you have a good day.

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

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

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

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

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It’s Saturday now

And I’m in the office.  I haven’t come to the office this time, of course, I’ve just been here since yesterday, as I noted in my confusing and single-paragraph post yesterday evening.  I slept at the office, on the floor, and it was just as comfortable in many ways as if I had been at the house.  True, I couldn’t shower, but I’ve buzzed my hair down to 1/4 inch after seeing how it looked after I was in the hospital, and so it’s impossible to tell just by looking that I’ve not showered.  I usually have deodorant and other toiletries at the office, but those are already moved to the new office now, so I’m going to need to go over to the convenience store and get some deodorant and mouthwash this morning.

As for the house, well, there’s a reason I don’t refer to it as home.  It’s not a home to me.  I haven’t felt like I have a home since before I went to FSP.  No, it’s just a place I can hide for a while at a time, and not have to interact with anyone, and where it’s just my stuff inside, such as it is.  But I don’t feel at home there, I don’t feel comfortable, it’s just a place I’m existing.  I don’t even have a real chair there, though I have a piano bench and a folding metal chair tucked into a corner.  When I’m at the house, I just recline on a pile of pillows on the futon on the floor.  It’s good for my back in the short term, though after I stay there for a while it tends to backfire*.

Everything in my existence orbits around pain.  I guess it’s no irony that one of the two songs I have had memorized on piano for decades now is the Police’s King of Pain (the other is Eleanor Rigby by the Beatles).  Maybe it’s because I memorized that song that my life took on its current aspect.

I don’t really believe that, of course.  That’s absurd, magical thinking, and there’s no evidence that it’s the way the real world works, except through confirmation bias and the like.

Right now it still hurts to urinate, with spasms up in my right side and flank, which lingers a little even in between.  It’s nothing compared to the acute onset of the issue, but it’s still there.  And my back and hip and leg pains haven’t ceased to exist out of some strange courtesy.

I’m overwhelmed, and not in a good way.  There is too much happening in my head and around me right now, too many stupid little, annoying changes, too many deeply unpleasant surprises, too much chaos and randomness even in the day-to-day routines.  I am overwhelmed.

I used to be a person who could accomplish things, at least partly because I had people around me whom I loved and for whom I wanted to make things good as much as I could.  I cannot do good for myself.  I cannot live for myself.  But I used to be able to do good and make good things and relieve suffering.  I’ve saved people’s lives and even helped ease people’s deaths when it was appropriate.  Some of the most copious thanks I’ve ever received were from the families of patients who had died.  I was told by one family that, before he died, their 96 year old father/grandfather said I was the first doctor he’d had that he felt that he could trust.

Now look at me.  Or rather, don’t look at me.  I’m disgusting to start with, with my teeth that used to be good but have been ravaged by years of pain killers and prison and then just an inability to have the energy to take the very good care of them I used to take.  Also, I’m currently crying, and there’s snot on my face.  I don’t look great at the best of times anymore, and certainly no one is going to want to look at me now.

I’m caught in the pincers of some kind of weird metaphorical tweezer.  I cannot stand the thought of trying to change my situation; the idea of moving, of trying to change jobs, of trying to find something, is literally horrifying–imagine needing to wade through a swimming pool filled with roaches and centipedes and maggots and other larvae, above which soars a nearly-opaque cloud of mosquitoes, all female.

But staying where I am, doing what I’m doing, is just as horrifying, and now there are a bunch of new stressors, not the least of which is my fresh, new pain problem, which hopefully will be temporary, though it isn’t gone yet.  I guess a week is a relatively short time, and maybe I’m expecting too much, but it’s a fucking huge level of discomfort, and I don’t have the mental resources to deal with it, not on top of everything else.  Why I am I continuing to endure my already-existing chronic pain, my anxiety, my depression, all the other things associated with my hitherto undiagnosed ASD, and then now dealing with newly discovered problems?

I’m overwhelmed.  I cannot summon the will to make a change, or even the conviction that I ought to do so, because I cannot really think straight.  I cannot imagine what to do.  I don’t know that there is any way at all to escape, except by dying.  And I am always afraid.

You might think that after having pain every day for decades and having lost basically everything that ever mattered to you and for which you had worked so hard for so long you wouldn’t have any need to be afraid anymore.  What do you have to lose, after all?  But fear is not a rational thing, it’s not the conclusion of a thought process, it’s an emotion, one in which nature has invested heavily, and having pain after pain for a long time, of various kinds, can cause a “learned-helplessness” reaction related to depression, but even then, fear doesn’t go away.  One is always afraid of yet more pain.  One is afraid of facing another day with the same old pain.  One is a afraid that one is going to live a long, long life and never for one day of the rest of it not be in significant pain.  One is afraid that one will also be alone for the rest of that long life, with no comfort and little joy.

I don’t know what’s going on.  I mean, I’m writing this post, of course, that’s going on.  But I don’t know what else.  I’m falling apart, I think.  I’m breaking down.  Like I said yesterday, I can practically smell the melting plastic and circuitry in my mind.

Whatever.  Nothing I do or say matters, nothing I am matters.  I don’t know what I expect to happen because I’ve written about this.  I feel a bit like Frodo crying out for his friends in “Fog on the Barrow Downs” after they’ve been separated, but the only answer I will probably get will be from some foul undead spirits.  There’s no Tom Bombadil out there to come rescue me.  I wish there were.  And I could really use Elrond’s healing power, or even Aragorn’s.

That’s enough.  Go on, go read something else.  No one wants to feel miserable, and that’s how I tend to make people feel, so you should probably find something comical or at least entertaining to explore, and just try to have a good weekend.

*Honestly, no pun intended.  I didn’t even notice it until the editing process.

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No songs or pictures, just pathetic words of despite and destruction and despair

Well, it’s Tuesday.  I think my stunt (or whatever you might call it) yesterday has failed miserably.  I don’t know why I’m surprised, let alone disappointed.  I’m either just not good at that sort of thing, or I’m just not worthy of that sort of thing.

I don’t know if that quite made sense just now.  I’m apparently very bad at getting my feelings across, on top of the fact that, a lot of the time, I’m not quite sure specifically what I’m feeling.  They’re just a bunch of swirling, overpowering sensations that don’t ever seem to show on my face or in my voice.

Anyway, I have no subject on which to speak (so to speak) today, and it doesn’t really matter, because I seem incapable of conveying anything important to anyone for whom it could possibly matter.  It’s fine.  As Thomas Covenant said (before he ever went to the Land) this is what people are like:  futile.  He would change his point of view on that after many grueling and heartbreaking yet inspiring experiences, but I think he was onto something.

I’ve always had a bit of sympathy for Lord Foul in those books.  Part of this was just because he was so eloquent‒I’m a bit of a sucker for a good speaker‒but especially after I learned that he was trapped inside the arch of time, inside the Land, and he literally cannot possibly die or be permanently defeated while trapped there.  He hates everything in the Land and its world not just because it’s his nature to hate, but because he is trapped by and with everything there, potentially forever.  So if he is ever to be free to go anywhere else‒even to die‒he has to destroy the arch of time and thus that world.  It is personal to him, of course‒he’s not called the Despiser for nothing‒but it needn’t be.

Anyway, I am not trapped in the arch of time, or at least I’m not constrained from ever dying within it.  Or maybe my own arch of time is just that span of moments that began at birth (or conception) and will reach its other end at my death.  If that’s the case, I wouldn’t need to destroy the arch, just…complete it.

This is all metaphorical bullshit, I know.  Don’t misunderstand me.  I don’t have any misgiving that any of that could be real.  But the stories were good, at least the first two trilogies; I’ve never finished the last 4 books.  There is no denying that The Lord of the Rings is better, and much more inspiring and uplifting.  But the Thomas Covenant books do a better job of capturing the horror and despair and terror of not just fighting evil, but of being evil.

That’s probably why it appealed to me.  My innate tendency is to be, well, perhaps not evil, but destructive.  I feel terribly angry so much, so often, and I just want to break and burn this world, this life, that is so bloody uncomfortable.  But I know that I don’t have any business hurting other people, almost none of whom are ever deliberately hurting me.  So I bottle it up and try to calm it, and I don’t act on it.

But like I said in my reversal of Nebula’s last line to Drax in Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 3, I wasn’t born to be a dad, I was born to be a destroyer.  I’ve just always tried to fight against that, and I have in some small ways succeeded.  I even swung things in the other direction at times, becoming a doctor and a dad.  Of course, I eventually failed miserably at both of those things, as usual, but I did some good in the meantime.

And there is one being I have a proprietary right to destroy.  I just need to quit the foreplay.

Anyway, this has been weird, I suspect, but what else is new?  I hope you all have a good day.

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I don’t know what to title this post

Hi, y’all.

There, that’s me officially and in writing endorsing the contraction “y’all” as a very clear, useful, and effective term of address, a 2nd person plural pronoun, which the English language seems otherwise to lack.  I might have mentioned previously that I like the word, but I nevertheless rarely use it.  I rarely talk even to a single other person, let alone to a group, so it doesn’t come up much.

That’s it.  That’s about as positive a thought as I have right now, and I doubt it’s going to get that positive again.  I feel truly burnt out.  I mean, I’m still writing my stupid fucking blog, because I am more or less internally compelled to do so.  And I’m going to work, because it’s not as if I can rest when I’m back at the shit-hole of a house, and I can’t sleep without sedating myself‒not for long, anyway.  I don’t really know what to do.

The world is going to shit, but it doesn’t really matter to me‒or it shouldn’t‒because my life went to shit a long time ago, and since then I’ve just been trying to swim through an ocean of raw sewage, trying to keep my head above “water”, but there’s no shore or pool edge or whatever in sight, and frankly, I’m tired.  I’m very stubborn about not giving up in general, but look where that has gotten me.  To paraphrase Fiona Apple, I am steadily going nowhere.

So, fuck the world.  All you humans had such opportunities to build something better, especially after the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War.  That was an amazing series of events that I could barely believe, having grown up expecting global thermonuclear war to happen sometime.  Things seemed honestly on the verge of real progress.

But no, always after a defeat and a respite, the shadow takes a new shape and grows again.  And people allow it to grow, people encourage it, people water and fertilize it, and indeed, people are that shadow.  There’s no Sauron or Morgoth or Satan or Ahriman or whatever other incarnation of evil you might conjure.  It’s all just the weakness and mental softness of the human race*, and alas, despite those seeming signs of improvement (which happened in the very year that I got married, coincidentally‒and that ended up falling apart as well), it seems that humans overall have little capacity for growth.

The true improvements made in the world, in life, are the products of a tiny, tiny fraction of people, while the others just take and use the products of that progress without any real understanding.  Perhaps they see them as miracles provided by their fictional (and not very clever) deities.

Meanwhile, if it were up to most people, humans would still be figuratively living in caves.

I hate the world, as well as almost all of its people (as a general feeling, anyway).  I honestly would like to burn it all, to erase it, to delete it.  There are ways that could be accomplished, if one were to put one’s whole effort into it.  If I had Elon Musk’s resources, I could initiate several such processes at once (for all I know, he might be doing so).  I’ve spent a very disturbing fraction of my time of life thinking of ways civilization can be destroyed, but then again, I am a Destroyer by nature.  I think I always have been.

But I don’t really feel I have the right‒though “rights” are one of those things made up by the smartish humans, and which are underappreciated by the rest‒to wipe everyone else out, and also, there are a few people here and there whom I actually like.  And I don’t think there is zero chance that humans will save themselves and the world, I just think the chances are tiny.

Maybe the world looks disgusting to me because I can only see it through my own eyes, and I myself am disgusting.

But there is a way for me to make the rest of the universe go away from my point of view, and for myself to go away as well, and it’s much more efficient than the many schemes I have dreamt up for obliterating the world.

It’s a very alluring thought, to escape from internal and external sources of pain and horror.  Oblivion, obliterate‒related words, from the Latin for forgetting.  I want to rest, but that doesn’t seem to be an option for me, so I probably will just have to settle for erasure.

*I do not refer here to kindness or generosity or compassion as softness‒those traits are strong, and only those with real strength have the capacity to show them.  I mean softheadedness, that pathetic need to imagine oneself to be, for instance, the favorite species (or people) of some imaginary almighty deity, or to believe one is somehow superior simply because of one’s ethnicity or sex or skin color.  But of course, that “belief” is itself evidence of the most profound weakness, insecurity, and inferiority.  Such people are nevertheless worthy of compassion‒as is everyone really, given that no one made themselves or the world‒but they are frustratingly capable of doing tremendous harm.