insomnia

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Oversharing again on a day on which to be fried

It’s Friday at last!  I get the impression that a lot of people feel an “at last” feeling when Friday arrives, so I am simulating that response, though it doesn’t really pertain to me this week.  There are only 22 shopping days left until Halloween.  Then the year goes a bit downhill.  I guess everyone can watch and see what happens then, if anything.

I don’t know why, but that last sentence sounds like a sort of hinted threat or worry about the future.  Yet all I really meant, if anything, was just that we can only wait to see what the future holds, though we can make predictions to some degree.  Also, I just like to hear myself talk, as it were.  I’m damned if I know why (and apparently, I’m damned even if I don’t know why).

I’m going to try to keep this a bit short today, despite the preceding statement about hearing myself talk.  Yesterday’s post was too long.  Yet, despite its length, it accomplished nothing that did me any good whatsoever as far as I can tell.  It’s all just me oversharing online, because I have no one with whom I can overshare in person.

And while there is some degree of a chance that such oversharing might be used to harm me by someone in the future, nevertheless, as far as I can tell, there’s almost no chance that it will be used by anyone anywhere ever to help me.  That’s just the way it goes, I guess.  Or maybe it just goes that way for me, because I’m particularly…I don’t know, particularly weird, particularly unpleasant, particularly disgusting, something like that.

Anyway, I believe I’m going to be working tomorrow, exclusis improvisis, so you can feel justified in expecting that I will write another post tomorrow.  As for today, I already feel exhausted.  I wish that meant that, if I tried, I would be able to sleep, perhaps for quite a long time, but I experience leads me away from expecting that to happen.

I think I’m going to try a more concerted, formal bit of meditating again, at least for a bit.  I have to try to do something.  If it makes me more depressed, as meditation often does, and therefore more actively self-destructive, then let those chips fall where they may…and any other trite figure of speech that might apply here.

I don’t know if I’ll play any guitar or sing today, but I guess I might.  If so, I will probably play many of the same things I did on Tuesday, and about which I spoke on Wednesday.  I might throw in Pigs on the Wing, or One Headlight, or Ashes to Ashes, or even play A Space Oddity again.  I haven’t played that in a long time, probably not since I made the video of me playing it.  It’s weird, but once I’ve made a video of something, I rarely play it personally anymore.

It’s like, “Well, ‘me performing that song’ is out there in the world, so I don’t need to do it anymore”.  It’s strange.  I can’t even recall the chords and stuff from my own original songs since I released them; I would need to relearn them if I were to try to play them again.  It may sound strange, but I don’t think it has anything to do with ego, whether good or bad.  It is more that, whatever force created the pressure to write and then record the song(s) was released by doing them, and the pressure has not reaccumulated.

It’s weird, yeah.  There is more ego involved in my fiction writing, I think‒I want people to read and enjoy my stories and to appreciate me for them‒and maybe that failure is part of why I don’t feel capable of writing fiction anymore.

I don’t know, probably most of my troubles spring from my chronic pain.  I’m quite sure that many, many things would be easier and would go better if I were just able to get the pain under control.

Maybe meditation will help that.  It never has before, but “past performance is no guarantee of future results”, despite the supposed pop culture idiotic “definition of insanity” falsely attributed to Einstein.

Whatever.  Have a good day.

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“But we don’t reckon time the same way, do we, Clarice?”

Well, ten-six, good buddy, it’s the sixth of October, and we’re already almost a fifth of the way through the month.  It’s curious how, while one is trying to get through things that one must do, one feels real sympathy with Gandalf’s line, “each day was as long as a life-age of the Earth”, and yet the overall passage of days, weeks, and months rockets on so quickly that one is almost unable to keep up.

Pink Floyd really was/were* insightful in their song Time.  And consider how young they were when they did it!  Roger Waters‒arguably the greatest lyricist since, I don’t know, W. S. Gilbert‒was only 29 when he wrote it, and he worried he was getting on in years, I guess.  Poor child, if only he knew.

Still, he was a brilliant child.

Time can feel very flexible and stretchable and squeezable, because the clock rate of our processors (aka brains) varies somewhat.  Maybe someone should study the subjective topology of time, how the experience can be fascinatingly inconsistent, even within the same person, within the same day, and yet the overall thing is fundamentally unchanged‒it has, you might say, the same, unchanging number of holes.

It’s an important thing to recall:  our subjective experience of time can be highly variable intrapersonally and interpersonally, but that’s just a perception.  Time itself is progressing as it always does‒which may well be “not at all” from a 4+ dimensional viewpoint.  Yes, relativity says that time “passes” at differing rates in different situations.  That difference is the main producer of what we experience as gravity, here on Earth.  But the space-time interval between any two events will be the same no matter who is measuring it, like the speed of light itself.

Many things in the universe, in life, are like this.  For instance, we know that our basic color perception, with the semi-arbitrary delineation of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet**, is born of our way of seeing:  with three kinds of cone cells, each of which responds maximally to a certain set of wavelengths, and the measuring and balancing of the degrees of activation of these kinds of cells.  From 3 not-completely-independent measurement types, one can construct an astonishing array of shades as it were.

But the fundamental nature of the electromagnetic spectrum has no inherent blue or red or yellow.  It’s just a long stretch of continuously variable frequencies.

A threefold variable system is also used in describing quark and gluon interactions in quantum chromodynamics.  The guy who does the Highly Entropic Mind YouTube channel did a great video on (the mathematics of) quantum chromodynamics that gets into some of that, and I recommend it if you’ve ever been curious about such things.  I’ll embed it here.

Anyway, our 3-photoreceptor visual system is why any humanly perceived color can be “produced” digitally by using only three different pixels, the RGB (red, green, and blue) ones, and why printers can print (pretty much) any humanly perceived color using CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow, and black).

But some alien race that perceives light using different specific means, even if they see the same visible spectrum, might think our various electronic and printed imagery, even our paintings, look very little like the things they are supposed to represent.  Probably there are even other terrestrial creatures who would think so; eyes have evolved independently dozens of times on Earth.  They are not all exactly the same, and vertebrate eyes are not necessarily the best ones.

Man, I’m all over the place this morning.  I’m so effing tired‒so tired that I’m not bothering to use profanity!‒that I don’t know if I’m making sense.  My sleep last night was particularly bad.

Have you ever been so fatigued from chronic sleeplessness that you honestly wished you would get hit by a (car or similar) just so you could get a break?  Even if the break is in your bones, even if it kills you, because at least you could rest in some sense.  If this is what Brahma feels like when dreaming the universe, it’s no wonder it has to dissolve it all into a dreamless sleep once every few hundred billion years, or however that legend/myth goes.

As for me and my house, I would really like to be able to rest so I can feel refreshed again someday, after what feels like many life ages of the Earth.  So far, though, I have not yet found the method for doing so.

Maybe music will help.  Today, I’m going to try to commit to playing guitar for at least a few minutes this morning.  It’s a shame not to do it for so long, and not just because my calluses are softening.  Maybe I’ll even sing (I have a hard time not singing when playing, honestly).

I hope you all (or “y’all”, a very sensible and useful contraction) are better rested than I am.  Cat forbid that any more people feel this way than necessary.

*This depends on whether you’re using the British plural form‒since it’s a band with multiple people in it‒or the American singular, since a band counts as a single unit despite being composed of multiple subunits, much as anything bigger than an elementary particle is.  It gives a new meaning or implication to e pluribus unum, doesn’t it?

**According to what I’ve read, Newton just threw in “indigo”, which does not actually constitute a separate kind of color like the other six, because he had a mystical notion about the number 7.  He was not alone in that, of course, but his influence was tremendous, so even when he had no real scientific reason for the divisions, his combination has persisted in the public consciousness for more than 300 years.

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Monday morning meandering moaning

Well, it’s the start of a new work week, which means it’s the end of a weekend off, at least for me.  I’m sure many people are on various different schedules, but this one (Monday through Friday working and Saturday and Sunday off) is still probably the modal one, if I had to guess.  Though, I wouldn’t be surprised if the situation has more than one mode, or perhaps one mode but a very broadly tapering and irregular slope for the rest of the schedules.

Anyway, it was just now the weekend, and I did not work during that time‒not in the sense of “employment for compensation”, anyway.  I did do some walking, though.  On Saturday, when it was overcast (and looked like it was going to rain, but never did), I walked a bit over 6 miles, umbrella in hand but forlornly unused the whole time.  On Sunday, when it was appropriately (not ironically) sunny, I walked just about 4 miles.  That’s still not too bad, but it was a bit more unpleasant because of the heat.

I guess I like walking in cloudy, gloomy weather (and at night) more than when it’s bright and sunny.  Of course, bright and sunny days in autumn‒real autumn, not this Florida bullshit‒can be delightful things in which to walk around, when the sky looks like a giant, freshly and expertly painted watercolor.  Even bright winter days (again, do not count south Florida, there is no winter here) can be truly uplifting and enjoyable.  At least, they are if you’re wrapped up warm.

Other than the walking, though, my weekend was completely without substance.  I did not read anything new (and precious little old), I did not watch any sports/games or regular TV of any kind‒no, not even any football.  I think the only person with whom I spoke, other than a delivery person, was an older guy whose phone had died and asked me the time while I was walking on Saturday.

Oh, and on my Sunday walk, I passed by a guy who might have been homeless‒perhaps he was just odd‒who held his arms out wide as I came nearer, as if looking for a hug.  I don’t think he was actually looking for a hug, though.  It was probably a gesture intended to intimidate, perhaps so I wouldn’t try to steal his stuff or something.

Anyway, I don’t give a shit about those kinds of things, so I just nodded, said, “What’s up?” and walked on.  He said nothing.  I suppose he could even have been a figment of my imagination, but that seems unlikely.

I didn’t speak at all otherwise.  Well, no, that’s probably not quite accurate.  I probably spoke “to” some of the reactors on some YouTube videos.  These are pretty much the closest thing I have to friends with whom I do things.  It’s rather pathetic.

I didn’t even watch many new videos, and I certainly didn’t watch any that were informative or useful or even interesting in any deep, novel sense.  Of course, if something catches one’s attention, it is “interesting” per se*.  But it’s not necessarily a durable kind of interest.  If you see movement out of the corner of your eye, you turn to look, but if it’s just a rustling of a curtain (purple or otherwise) or if when you turn to look it’s gone, as happened in Comfortably Numb, then that interest is basically spent.

I did notice, just this morning‒while I was pretending to try to be able to go back to sleep right up until it was time for me just to get up‒a video titled “There is no hard problem of consciousness”.  Now that seems at least somewhat interesting, and it’s a statement with which I’m inclined to agree, but I am curious to hear what this person’s arguments are, though I have not yet watched it.

Usually‒almost always‒such videos are rather disappointing; they just rehash basic ideas that I’ve dealt with long ago.  But sometimes someone says something actually thought-provoking.  Anyway, it’s nice to know that people are at least thinking about such questions (I think, again, that our culture’s mental health might be better if instead of going to therapists so often we sometimes went to philosophers instead).

I, on the other hand, have been having more and more difficulty finding any depth or interest.  I must have watched dozens (literally) of reactions to the Avengers: Doomsday “special look” trailer, because that actually got me excited.  Doom is my favorite villain, after all, and it looks as though the MCU might actually be doing him justice.  Unfortunately, the movie doesn’t come out until December, and I’m losing interest already.

Like the Pink Floyd song says**, “Nothing is very much fun anymore”.  I haven’t played any music on any instrument in weeks now, and I sang for all of two minutes or so while watching somebody react to Baker Street.

I think I might try to do a personal “try not to laugh” challenge today.  I think I tend to joke too much and make light of things to much, probably as a defense mechanism, but it’s a bit of a distraction.  Maybe I would be able to do more if I took things more seriously.

I don’t know.  Maybe I won’t even make it through the first work conversation without joking.  I certainly can’t seem to write a blog post without some kind of joke in it.  But it would be nice not to feel anything much at all:  No fear, no regret, no pain, and no joy or hope or optimism.  What’s that Vulcan practice on Star Trek?  Kolinahr?  Something like that.

I suppose it doesn’t matter.  It’s all fiction, anyway.  Meanwhile, I hope you all have very good, real-world days*** today.

*Is that the correct usage of “per se”?  Somehow it looks not-quite-right to me, but I am far from sure why that’s the case.

**One of My Turns, this time.

***I’m conflicted about whether that should be singular or plural.  There are arguments for both choices, or should I say, for each choice.

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The color of the blog doth come and go, between his purpose and his conscience

Hello and good morning.

It’s the first day of October, but I have very little to say about that other than what I’ve already said recently:  It’s my “official” favorite month, but right now that’s about as impressive as saying it’s…I don’t know, my least disliked form of terminal cancer or something along those lines.

Anyway, it’s a new month, and I guess those of you who have survived to see it can feel good about that, if that’s something you think is good (by whatever criteria you use to mean “good” regarding such things).  For my part, I’m not so sure, but if you’ve been reading this nonsense for any length of time, you probably don’t find that admission surprising.

I really feel wiped out, honestly, almost as if I’m out of breath while just sitting here and writing.  It’s not necessarily purely subjective‒my pulse ox is only about 94 to 95 percent right now, which is a tiny bit low, but it is early in the day.

What, you’re surprised that I have a personal pulse oximeter?  Don’t be.  It’s entirely predictable, given my background and how inexpensive such things have become.  Actually, I have two of them:  one at the house, one at work.

I’m somewhat weirdly hopeful, or perhaps wishful, that this slightly low oxygen saturation is the harbinger of a steady, progressive, terminal illness‒a slow-moving pneumonia or tuberculosis or lung cancer or something, even COPD.  I’m just exhausted with this living crap, and there are only a very few things that make it in any way worthwhile to me.

I’m so tired.  I just woke up‒or at least, I just got up‒about an hour ago, and I’m as tired as if it were already the end of a long, labor-intensive day.  Of course, I’ve been awake on and off for hours already, but that’s unfortunately nothing new.

I really want to be able to rest.  Of course, the famous saying is that there shall be no rest for the wicked, and perhaps I am just wicked.  But perhaps if the wicked were able to rest‒truly to rest‒they would be less prone to be wicked.  I don’t know.  I’m just spouting a bit of nonsense right now, don’t take the specifics too seriously.  I haven’t really given any thought prior to this moment about the possibility that “wickedness” can be at least partially a product of fatigue.

Of course, it does make some sense.  We know what impulse control, mainly through the actions of parts of the frontal lobes, is subject to fatigue.  We know that people are more prone to, say, break their diets or pick up cigarettes again at the end of a long, hard day.  Conscience may make cowards of us all, but conscience itself has only so much charge in its batteries.

Fortunately, the frontal lobes don’t get fatigued in isolation, so by the time one’s impulse control is lagging, one’s impulse creation is also a bit on the slow side.  The brain, like the body, is at least prone to getting tired all at roughly the same time.

I’m sorry.  Everything that crosses my mind right now is just turning into meditations on being tired.  I am tired.  I am sleepy.  I am exhausted.  I am fatigued.  I am run down.  I am worn out.

[Help!  I’m being attacked by that most dreadful, ferocious, frightening, and intimidating of dinosaurs:  Thesaurus rex.]

Ugh, I’m already running out of gas, today.  If I had a cocoon, I’d wrap up in it.  If I had a sensory deprivation chamber, I’d go lie down in it.

Actually, that last possibility sounds lovely.  I wish I had one of those.  I’ve looked around the area, but though apparently there used to be services that offered sensory deprivation chambers near where I live, none remain that are close enough to be useful to me.  It would be good, though, I think.

Some people are bothered by enclosed spaces, but it’s never been much of an issue for me.  I was quite happy to sleep in the little coffin beds in the Navy‒in fact, the night I slept in the pitch black silence in a submarine was one of the most pleasant sleeps I’ve had.  I tend to find MRIs relaxing, and when the noises come on, I pretend I’m watching a gangster movie.

Of course, context is crucial here.  I do not like being restrained or constrained by other people, and if someone tries to do such a thing to me, I am prone to do everything I can to hurt and/or kill them, and I will be very hard pressed to restrain myself.  In these cases, my frontal lobes don’t inhibit the impulses, they egg them on.

My frontal lobes don’t like being pushed around by other, entirely finite and fallible and flesh-and-blood mortals any more than the rest of me does.  Even lawful “authorities” are merely a matter of necessity, and they are certainly prone to error, like everyone else.  No one has true, inherent authority over someone else, though of necessity we can give some people power over others, because the alternatives are worse.

Anarchy is rarely an improvement over having a working government, for instance, but that doesn’t mean we should ever take our eyes off said government; it must always be held to task and kept from becoming too self-important and/or self-serving.

I will close with a quote from a Beatles song, and embed that song below, as a reminder to those who would arrogate authority to themselves:  “Can’t you see, you’re really only very small, and life goes on within you and without you.”

TTFN

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I haven’t had a drink or two, but I don’t care

It’s Tuesday now, the 29th of September—the 2nd to last day of the month—and I am writing this post on my lapcom, for the second time in three days.  Well, okay, it’s four days if you count Sunday, but with respect to blog posts, I don’t count that.

It seems that the last time I wrote a blog post on the lapcom on the 29th of September was back in 2022, based on the saved files on the lapcom.

I know, I know, I need to slow down with all this craziness or some of you readers are going to have trouble with your blood pressure or asthma or generalized anxiety or what have you.  It’s all so very…exciting, isn’t it?  Sometimes you have to step back and take a slow breath, just to keep yourself from feeling overwhelmed.

Anyway, I’m writing this on the lapcom today because I slept in the office last night.  It wasn’t any bad thing, though, don’t worry about that.  I just stayed late in the office doing a Discord call with my youngest so we could watch a couple of episodes of Doctor Who together.  That’s definitely a good thing, at least from my point of view.

But it did get to be late enough that there was no real point in heading back to the house for the night just to come back here in the morning.  It’s expensive, relatively speaking, it’s time-consuming, and frankly there’s nothing very interesting about the house.  It’s only real benefit is the shower (but I’m pretty good at doing “bird baths” in the office bathroom).  It’s not particularly comfortable nor welcoming nor personal.  It certainly doesn’t feel like home to me.

I guess the cats will have to scrounge a bit for their food for the extra 24 hours, but they’re cats.  They’re good at stuff like that, believe me.  They’ll be fine.

So, yeah, anyway, I slept on the floor on the office again, using my hoody as a blanket and the backpack as a pillow, and it was fine.  I slept no worse than I usually do (though admittedly, I didn’t really sleep any better than usual, either).

And that’s about all that can be said about my life.  I go to work, I go back to the house, I write this blog on workdays, I watch YouTube videos which are becoming increasingly uninteresting on average (though there are intermittent ones that are good).  I’m reminded of the line from the Beatles song I Don’t Want to Spoil the Party:  “There’s nothing for me here, so I will disappear.”

There really is nothing in my daily life that’s worth sticking around to experience.  Only things like watching Doctor Who with my youngest over Discord are of any real interest to me.

I suppose writing this blog is somewhat interesting.  Certainly, I keep doing it (so far).  I’m not sure whether that’s particularly good or not terribly good or what.  I suppose that depends very much on one’s criteria, doesn’t it?  After all, for something to be sensibly called “good”, one must first lay out one’s standards, because goodness very much depends on the purpose for which one is evaluating something.

A particular car may be a very good car, but might be lamentably bad at being a paperweight, and even worse at being a dining room centerpiece for a dinner party.  And someone can be quite a good doctor but a terrible administrator of a medical practice.  And of course, one can be a good singer-keyboardist but a terrible physicist.  Or one can be good at both, like Brian Cox (the physicist, not the actor).

Anyway, the point I’m trying to make is that goodness must be good according to some relatively objective and coherent measure, otherwise it’s just a vague adjective (or noun in the case of “goodness”).  As far as I’m aware, there’s no large-scale, global, ultimate measure of Goodness, despite what various religions and other dogmas might claim.

I’ve yet to encounter such a notion that’s even approaching coherence.  And goodness really ought to be coherent, if it’s claiming to be something universal and crucial.  But the real moral world is messy, even when compared to the world of myths and fairy tales, so there are no clear-cut absolute criteria.  Such things are just not terribly useful.

Maybe usefulness is the criterion that should be applied in the real world when speaking of goodness.  And usefulness implies a purpose, which implies some kind of criteria.  Maybe we would all be better off if we stopped worrying about Good and Evil with capital letters as if they were titles or offices or forces of nature.  The laws of physics themselves apply locally; maybe we’d be better off with a slightly utilitarian approach that evaluates goodness versus badness relating to the specific, local circumstances.

I don’t know, I haven’t thought all this through very carefully; I’m just thinking out loud as it were.  So don’t expect me to have arrived at some finished outcome, some theorem or system of thought.  I’m just spit balling as they say, or brainstorming, or…well, thinking out loud, like I said.  Though, of course, this is not literally out loud, unless you count the very faint sound of the keys being pressed as I type.

All right, that’s enough.  I’m tired, so I’m not going to push it too much to try to say anything profound.  I hope you all have a good day today, on this penultimate day in September of 2026 (AD or CE).  You might as well have a good day, by whatever criteria you measure such goodness, if you can.

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“When I try to get through on the telephone to you…”

Well, it’s Monday again, and as I foresaw and predicted, I am writing a blog post.  Yes, indeed, as Pink said, I’ve got electric light, and I’ve got second sight‒I’ve got amazing powers of observation.

It’s not all that impressive when you stop and think about the fact that I’m predicting (after foreseeing) my own actions, over which I presumably have some degree of control.  Such control is far from complete, but for stuff like this, it’s fairly effective.

I’m going to try to keep this post short today, mainly because I know people don’t seem to like it when I get too negative and depressed and morbid, but that’s very much how I feel this morning.  So, I can’t really express my feelings without bringing discomfort to my readers.  That feels churlish to me, and anyway, it doesn’t seem to do me or anyone else any good at all.

That’s no real surprise.  It doesn’t seem to be in my nature to do or to be good; it requires specific effort for me to do good in the world.  It certainly doesn’t appear to be my natural inclination.

Then again, the argument could be made that, because I choose to try to do good (at least sometimes) that means I am good by nature.  After all, if one is simply inclined to do good, or at least to try to do good, then one will simply tend to do so.  That’s good, of course, and such people are welcome.  But it’s not that impressive.  Like a very tall person easily getting something down from a high shelf for a shorter compatriot, it’s good and helpful, but it’s not that impressive, and it’s certainly not heroic.

Whereas if a person has a tendency to be angry and to wish people ill and to become easily frustrated and to desire to lash out, but they don’t do those things because they feel it would be wrong…well, that’s got a certain degree of admirability, since it requires conscious effort to restrain one’s impulses.  I’m not saying that it’s particularly impressive; almost everyone restrains a great many impulses in order to exist in society.  But it is something that requires at least a modicum of effort.

Okay, well, enough of that nonsense.

The point is, I’m going to try not to dwell too much on my depression and self-destructive thoughts, because it doesn’t do anyone any good, including me.  I’ve yet to receive any significant help from anyone or anything because of it, and though certainly I receive some well-meaning suggestions or thoughts or what have you, most of them are things I’ve already considered or tried.

So, it’s not doing me any good, and it’s not doing anyone else any good, as far as I can tell.  I’m just getting steadily worse over time, though that may not be obvious from the outside.  But the fact that I neither do music nor write any fiction any more is telling.  In fact, I don’t really do anything creative or artistic or scientific or whatever.  I just exist most of the time.  And it’s hard to see why I bother.

Ah, well, it probably doesn’t help that I had a particularly poor night’s sleep last night, even for me.  I’m already mentally exhausted, and I’m just starting the work week.

I did get some decent walking in yesterday‒about five and a half miles total.  Fortunately, I’m not having any negative consequences from that so far, and I would have expected to have them by now if they were coming.

Of course, my various chronic problems continue, including my chronic pain, my chronic depression and I guess my ASD (it’s congenital, so I guess that makes it chronic, in a sense).

Anyway, again, enough of this.  Even though I said I would try not to do so, I am dwelling on negative things, not just in my head but here on my blog.  I can only apologize.  I guess that’s one of the dangers of “stream of consciousness” writing.

It doesn’t really matter.  I hope you all have a good day and a good week.  October starts this week already, and it’s normally my favorite month, but there’s nothing really to which I look forward this time around.  It’s just blah.

Meh, whataya gonna do?

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There are more things dreamt of in your philosophy…

Well, you can’t in good faith claim that I didn’t warn you.  I told you yesterday that I would likely be writing a blog post today, because I am working today, which I am.

I am writing this on my mini lapcom, because I happen already to be at the office, and the lapcom is at the office, and I might as well enjoy making use of it, right?  As I’ve often noted, it’s much easier for me to write on the lapcom than on the smartphone.  That often means that I write too much when I use the lapcom, but today I think it less likely than usual, since I’m already quite tired and my energy is not at its best.

As I noted, I’m already in the office this morning.  I spoke with my sister on the phone yesterday evening, from the office, starting nearly right after I finished work.  We spoke for quite a while, and by the time we hung up, it was rather late—not crazily so, but still, it made little sense to go all the way back to the house, to try to get to sleep, to try to stay asleep, then to get up and come to the office again.

It’s not as though I had anything to do at the house other than put out some food for the neighborhood cats, and they’ll be fine until this evening; cats are pretty durable and adaptable.

So, yeah, here I am in the morning in the office, having slept on the floor, using the hoody that I keep in my backpack as a blanket of sorts (and using the backpack as a pillow).  It was a surprisingly good sleep, all things considered, though I wouldn’t call it good overall on an objective level.  I think, relative to what many people do, my sleep was rather poor, but that’s the norm* for me, anyway.

I will not of course be working tomorrow, and I will therefore not be writing a blog post tomorrow, though I expect to write one on Monday (exclusis improvisis).  That time will take of itself, however.  There’s no need to dwell on it at the moment.

I’m not sure on what to dwell, however.  I guess I can note that it’s been 24 days since the last time I wrote a blog post on the lapcom, which I can tell because I save them by date.  That’s a fairly long stretch.  And yet, it’s so much easier and more natural, more pleasant, for me to write using the lapcom.

It feels like an extension of me, like something almost directly connected to my nervous system.  It feel much more a part of me than the phone does, a fact which may be slightly ironic.  After all, I have the phone with me most of the time, and I read books on it—that’s by far its greatest strength—and use it to check the weather, and to send texts that are related to work and other matters.  It’s also my alarm clock, and in a pinch I can use it for emails (though that’s never very wieldy compared to a lapcom or desktop computer).

Okay, whew, I’d better slow down and calm down, so I don’t overexcite all of you with this gripping blog post!  I would hate to cause someone to have an increased risk for a heart attack.

Well…there are people for whom I think a heart attack would be good, for everyone else if not for the one who has the infarction.  There simply are people who cause a great deal of harm and suffering to those around them; even if nonfatal, a heart attack would likely take the wind out of their sails as it were.

I’m sure you could all name political figures and business people and even entertainers—let alone people you know in your own life—who would benefit the world by being significantly sickened or weakened by a health crisis, or even killed by one.

It’s not evil to wish for the ill health of highly detrimental people, but it may not be great for your own psyche to dwell too much on such things.  This is partly because wishes don’t do anything in and of themselves, and also because such negative dwelling is almost certainly not good for your own mental health.

It’s better to approach things with a Stoic sort of attitude:  you cannot directly change other people, and you cannot change the laws of nature nor most of the circumstances therein, so dwelling on them (except when literally, practically useful) is only going to tend to be futile and frustrating.  Instead, work on making yourself better, on not letting things bother you that are deeply unimportant, and focus on those things over which you do have some control.  There are fewer of them than you might imagine.

I’m being fairly vague about that, I know, but I don’t know what the specific thoughts and feelings and focuses are that might be optimal for your life, and it would be foolish of me to pretend that I did know such things.  The onus is on you, unfortunately.  That wasn’t my decision, it’s just the way things are.

In closing, based on the preceding paragraphs, I’ll just note that I suspect that people in general, and younger people more specifically, would do better if instead of all the therapizing that’s being done nowadays, they did more philosophizing.  I think studying and discussing philosophy, especially things like Stoicism and Buddhism and maybe Taoism and Existentialism, would be far more conducive to mental health, and might even enhance mental strength in developing minds.

And all minds are developing, despite what you might think, for as long as the lights are on.  You might as well make the best you can of it, whatever “best” might mean in your case.

Have a good day and a good remainder of your weekend, please.

*Norm!!

by

“When the storm arrives, would you be seen with me?”

Okay, well, I will have set this up to post at about 8 am my time today, just as I did with yesterday’s post.  I have not yet looked at my stats for yesterday’s post, so I don’t know whether, so far, doing this has made any difference in my readership.

That’s fine, though, because it would be absurd to try to read any conclusions from one day of a slightly changed time of posting.  It’s not a statistically significant sample size, among other things.  So, it’s best to try it for a bit and see how it goes and only to draw conclusions after I’ve had at least a decent run of days.

I am still somewhat under the weather from yesterday, but I have to go to the office because it is payroll day, and that needs to get done.  I did leave the office at lunchtime yesterday, and when I got back to the house I knocked myself out with some benadryl and some CBD gummies with a bit of delta-9 and delta-8.  It did help me sleep, at least, though I’m sure it wasn’t an ideal sleep.  Still, beggars can’t be choosers, generally speaking, though I’m sure there are exceptions to that “rule”.

I did wake up hideously early, though, even for me, but I didn’t want to take any further sedation, because then it might affect my ability to do what I need to do today.

I forgot to take some of my vitamins and stuff yesterday evening, including the lithium supplement that I’ve been taking.  I didn’t take that this morning, either, just to see how the dearth of it will affect me, if at all.  I know, I know, I’m doing too much haphazard starting and stopping of variables, and it makes it very difficult‒as well as potentially very misleading‒to draw conclusions about what effects these interventions are having.

But I have a difficult time being patient with this stuff.  Anyway, this was an accidental skip last night; I’m just continuing it for the moment.  We’ll see whether there is any noticeable change in my mood, but it certainly didn’t revolutionize my affect by taking it, and it’s not supposed to have the same kind of delayed effect that the traditional antidepressants require.

So, yeah, with both of those things, we shall see how the outcome goes.  Or maybe we won’t, I don’t know.  There are no guarantees.  Even the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics could be wrong, though it is unlikely.

I’m going to try to abstain from discussing my darker moods and thoughts here for at least a little while.  I’ve begun to wonder if ruminating on them and putting them out there in writing is making them worse rather than making them any better at all.

I guess I’m doing lots of little would-be therapeutic interventions for me.  Someone has to do it, and I’m probably the one best placed to take action, though I am entangled in the outcomes, which may confound things.  Still, I’m the only one who is going to do anything for me, so there are no other options.

I am in a very real sense quite alone in my situation.  I guess that’s not new, is it?  I’ve tended to be the one who helps other people, not the one who gets helped.  That’s just the way it goes, though.  Like Chris Cornell sang, “Arm yourself, because no one else here will save you.”  These are words of wisdom, and not just for fictional super-spies.

I still haven’t played guitar (and sang) for more than one little fifteen-minute interval over the last three weeks or so.  That’s an estimate, of course.  It is mildly worrying or at least disappointing how much I am losing interest in so many things that usually have interested me.  I certainly haven’t written any fiction, nor have I studied much new physics or biology or what have you, though I have hearkened to the computer science/AI stuff a bit, because at least that is somewhat interesting and intriguing.

Well, I will endeavor to persevere and even to improve.

You all, my readers, could in principle spot changes in my mental status before I even recognize them, myself, and I do hope, as well as request, that you do that.  It would be most welcome and potentially useful.  I thank you in advance.  In the meantime, I hope you’ve been having a good week, and that you continue to do so, and indeed, that each day is an improvement over the previous one.  Why not?  It doesn’t take much improvement per day, if it is every day, for truly impressive results to accrue.

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Say to them “My Own Special Creation has sent me to you.”

I think I will really keep this post short today, because I think I may be coming down with something.  I’m not certain, but I have the beginning of that sort of systemic feeling of interleukins, interferons, and other cytokines and such hitting the system.  I sometimes don’t get a very clear early fever response to things because I almost always have NSAIDs on board, so it can be hard to tell.

If I remember to go according to plan, I will have set this to post at about 8 o’clock eastern time.  I don’t recall if it’s EST or EDT, because I honestly don’t really distinguish them.  It’s all arbitrary, anyway; as long as everyone in this time zone is calling it the same time, they can call it Eastern Nap Time if they want.

There must have been some decent-seeming reasons for creating the whole “daylight savings time” thing; I mean, Ben Franklin was involved, I think, and he was not a stupid man, though like everyone he had his limits.  But for the life of me, I don’t see why we keep using it.  I don’t think it has any residual benefits, if it ever had any at all, which I doubt.

Oh, well.  That’s not really important, and it’s a bit of a tangent.  The point I was making is that I will have set this to go up at about 8 am, my local time, to see if that has any effect on how many people read it.  I will also try not to be moody and morose*, because I don’t want to frighten any potential new readers away.

At least, I don’t want to frighten them with that kind of stuff.  If they are frightened by my would-be sense of humor, or my topics of interest, then there’s nothing much I can do about that.  Like Popeye and God and that character from La Cage aux Folles, I am what I am.  I’m not going to try to change who I am just to get attention, in case that’s not obvious.

In other news, well, I am not really going to talk about the news much, in general.  It’s generally boring and/or stupid.  Though the agent(s) breakout from OpenAI and hacking of Hugging Face** was quite interesting, and I’ve watched some videos, by people who specialize in such things, about what happened.  It’s quite fascinating.  I won’t try to comment on it, because I am not an expert, but I’ll embed a video from computerphile, featuring Robert Miles, and another one that goes over the whole thing by a new YouTuber I’ve recently encountered, both of whom have interesting insights into the situation.

Let’s see, what else is going on…

Well, I just checked my temperature, and I may just barely have a low-grade fever.  Then again, body temperature fluctuates throughout the day, and I haven’t often tested it at this hour.  In general, for most people, body temperature bottoms out around 3 am, but those people tend to be asleep at three.  I had already been awake for about two hours by then, after dropping off to sleep at maybe eleven pm.  It’s 4:30 as I am writing the first draft here, and the heck of it is that this is not an outlier.  It’s not significantly different than usual.

So, if people wonder why I tend to be grouchy or whiny or what have you, at least that gives me some leeway I would hope.

How’s the weather by you guys right now?  I know, you’re not all in the same place, but I would still be interested in your comments about your local weather.  Down by me it’s quite humid and slightly rainy, and quite warm/hot, though it’s better in the morning.  However, at this time of day, the air is often stagnant and still, which makes humidity rather more oppressive.  Still, this is not all that big a difficulty.  If I could be cured of my chronic pain but had to face muggy weather every day for the rest of my life, well…

…actually, I would have to think about it pretty carefully.  But it would be tempting.  Still, both problems can be addressed, at least to some degree, without making weird deals that trade one misery for another, trying to assess which is the lesser of two evils.

Even if there were some type of supernatural entity with which one could make such bargains‒and I do not believe in such a thing‒I don’t think I would try to seek its favors.  I don’t like owing debts to people, let alone gods or demons or whatever.

Okay, well, I’ve been a bit all over the place this morning, haven’t I?  I’ll blame it on being slightly ill, as if it were any different than how I usually am.

I hope you all are well and having a good day.

*Which sounds like a law firm.

**Why did they name their company after the larval form of xenomorphs?

by

“Sometimes I think I’d like to watch it burn.”

Umm…I don’t have any idea what to write this morning, this work-week beginning, this dawn of yet another iteration of zero.  But I guess that hasn’t ever stopped me before, though it feels more prominent now than I remember it feeling in the past.

But such feelings are unreliable guides to the past and present actual state of reality.  This is not to say that they are absolutely untrue and misleading; if that were the case, not only would everyone have picked up on it long ago, but it would have been weeded out of the gene pool.  A perfectly unreliable memory is no better than no memory at all.

On the other hand, it’s not evolutionarily sensible to have a perfect memory, either, largely because the information required to store perfectly all the things that have happened to you, and to which your senses had access, would very rapidly exceed your “hard drive” space.  No, your nervous system must sift out the useful information and discard the useless, or the not salient or pertinent, as much as possible, because the brain, though tremendously useful, is extremely energy intensive.

Human brains burn about 20 percent of the daily calories burned by a person.  Yes, that’s true even of people you consider morons.  The most ignorant person around still has a version of the best operating system available in the known universe (at least for the moment).  How much smarter is the least intelligent but functioning human compared to the smartest nematode…or even the smartest house cat?

Oh, who cares?  I don’t know why I go on about this nonsense.  It’s not as though people are actually interested.  I’m hemorrhaging readers steadily, it seems.  I’m not exactly sure why.

Maybe it’s because my insomnia and early awakening are getting steadily worse, and so I’m posting my posts earlier and earlier.  Maybe if I delayed them, like I do with the audio posts, more people would notice them.  What do you think?  Should I try that?  Would it bother you if my posts went up at, say 8 am versus whenever I finish them?  Would it matter?  Do you think there is a better time for them?

I don’t really expect it to make a difference.  No one notices when I’m not around, so to speak.  I’ve been banned from Meta platforms for some time now, and the only people who have touched base were the few people who did so anyway.  There are quite a few people whom I would consider friends, and who could get in contact with me, but they don’t.

I’m not saying that they ought to check on me.  It’s not their responsibility.  But I suspect at least a part of the whole thing is that, once I am not even peripherally in their lives, people don’t really notice.  If anything, I suspect that they probably feel a slight lightness, a sense of greater vivacity, some decreased sense of dreariness about life, the universe, and everything.

Certainly I have not heard anyone complain about the fact that I’m not around.  No one says they miss me, that their lives are emptier without me nearby.  No, most people either don’t notice (at least superficially) or just experience relief.

Even the four dollar coins* I keep for helping me make certain decisions are not on my side (not that they would be, since they are coins, not people).  Late last week‒I think it was Saturday, but it might have been Friday‒when I was feeling particularly low, I asked if I should just kill myself.  I spun the four coins and, on the first try, I got four heads.

Heads is the side I use to mean “yes”.

So, yeah, even the ladies (2 Susan B. Anthonies and 2 Sacagaweas) don’t seem to think having me around is worth much.  Of course, they are just coins.  I know there is no actual thought or judgment there, let alone attachment or agency.  It’s just sort of perversely funny to me.

Whatever.  I’m tired of this, and everything is getting less and less consequential.  I think, unless someone voices clear and convincing objections in the comments today, I will set up tomorrow’s post to come out at 8 eastern time, at least roughly.

Or maybe I just won’t post anything.  It’s not as though doing this is helping my mental health (obviously), and I doubt that I’m contributing anything to the world of ideas.  Even if I had some deep and interesting insight, it would go essentially nowhere and reach almost no one.

Oh, again, who cares?  Thanks for reading today.  I hope you have a good week, a good remainder of the month, a good rest of the year, and a good rest of your lives‒just in case you never hear from me again.

*By which I mean four one-dollar coins, not $4 coins.