insomnia

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Doubt is called the beacon of the wise, the blog that searches to th’ bottom of the worst.

Hello and good morning.

It’s Thursday, and so it’s time for my “regular” weekly blog post.  It’s the first Thursday in October of 2024.  It’s also Rosh Hashanah, so for those of you who celebrate it, L’shana Tovah.

I haven’t been working on any fiction at all since my last report‒unless you count my façade of being a normal person or living a normal life, of course.  That’s doing what it does, and I continue to do it for whatever reason(s)‒perhaps habit, perhaps duty (to whom or what, though?), perhaps out of self-punishment or self-harm, I don’t know.

I wish I had something interesting to discuss.  I’m nearly done with Authority, the second book in the Southern Reach novels.  They are (so far) much better than the movie Annihilation was.  But they are disorienting, as I’ve mentioned before, and given my own chronic and worsening insomnia and pain, they make me feel as though I might not be experiencing my own life as what it really is.  Not that I actually think I’m being fooled or am hallucinating in any serious ways.  But I do feel disconnected, separate, as though I’m not fully within or fully a denizen of this universe, but of some nearby, partly overlapping one.

I’ve long suspected that it would be difficult to “gaslight” me, because I have always found my own memory and understanding (certainly of my experiences) to be better than that of anyone around me.  Yet I don’t “trust” myself, either, which means I tend to keep checking and confirming aspects of reality to test the consistency of my impressions.  It may smack of OCD a bit, but it means that, at least intellectually, I find my own take on reality to be more coherent and consistent than that of most people with whom I interact.  Though there are always things one can learn from others, too.  One just has to be rigorous and strict in assigning credences.

As Descartes pointed out, we can never truly be certain that some powerful enough entity has not pulled the world over our eyes*.  He famously came down to the conclusion, or rather the starting point, of cogito ergo sum‒“I think, therefore I am”, the point being that he knows, to his own satisfaction at least, that he is there and is thinking, because he experiences it even if all else is an illusion.

Of course, even subjectivity could be an “illusion” in some sense, in principle.  The characters in all my stories have thoughts and subjective experiences‒they “think” they exist‒but that subjectivity only exists when they are being read, or when I wrote them.

And of course, we could be within an immensely complex “simulation”, and “merely” be aspects thereof.  Such a simulation could be paused, say, and this could happen frequently or for tremendous periods of time up in the level of reality in which the simulation is being run, and as long as the simulation picks up right where it left off, no one here would ever have any way to notice or to know.

There could be a googol “higher-level” years between every Planck time in our universe** and as long as the simulation wasn’t changed, or was changed in ways that were logically consistent, there would be no way to see it from inside.  This is one of the implications of the “simulation hypothesis” or whatever the “official” term is, put forward by such notables as Nick Bostrum, who apparently has a new book out called Deep Utopia.  I have not read it; I never finished his book Superintelligence, because it dragged on a bit and I didn’t find it as challenging or revelatory as I hoped it would be.  Maybe if I started again, the experience would be different.

I am reading at least two other books, though.  I’m reading Yuval Noah Harari’s new book, Nexus, which is quite good so far, though nothing is likely to surpass his first book, Sapiens, which is one of the best books I’ve read.

I’m also working through Now: The Physics of Time, by Richard A. Muller.  He’s trying to describe his notion of the true source and nature not only of time’s arrow, but of time itself.  It’s reasonably good so far, but his arguments have not been as interesting or as impressive as I’d hoped they might be.  Still, I look forward to getting to the point in which he elaborates on his idea that not merely space is expanding, but time is also doing so, and this is the source of time’s arrow and the nature of “now” and so on.  It’s intriguing, and it’s far from nonsensical, considering that Einstein/Minkowsky showed that space and time are one entity.

I’m sort of on hiatus from Nate Silver’s On the Edge, which is a good book, but is quite long and in-depth, and some things he discusses are more interesting than others, to me.

Other than that, I continue to feel discordant, or hazy or separate, like everything, including me, is “a copy of a copy of a copy of itself”.  Last night, the feeling of being disconnected, rootless, and that I am in the process of disintegrating felt highly distressing***.  I wished I could find a way to feel connected with the daily, normal processes of my life, instead of feeling as though I am, for instance, one of the people exploring Area X and trying to understand it without much chance or hope of success.  Or perhaps it felt more that I am the analogy of Area X, I am the alien thing/environment in the more “ordinary” world, dropped here perhaps by accident, with no idea where I really belong or whence I really came.

Now, this morning, those notions are not gone, but the alarm associated with them is not as intense, replaced more and more by fatigue, a kind of learned helplessness.  As time goes by, I tend more and more toward apathy‒not acceptance but merely giving up, just not having the energy to continue to care.  I would like to connect in some way, to feel as though I belonged somewhere, but I am a Nexus 13 in a world of humans‒a world where, inexplicably, nobody seems ever to have manufactured such replicants, and yet here I am, making everything ever more drearily baffling.

Oh, well.  Maybe as the disjunction progresses, I will reach some turning point, and I will melt, thaw, and resolve myself into a dew.  Or maybe I’ll have to try Hamlet’s next mentioned option and make my own quietus as I intended to do on the 22nd‒I don’t believe in any “Everlasting” being, fixed canons or otherwise, that could prohibit “self-slaughter”.

Or maybe I will find some answers; or if answers don’t already exist, maybe I’ll create some answers.  It seems unlikely, given my personal experience and understanding, but the odds are not zero.  Though they may well be close enough for all practical purposes.

TTFN

rosh-hashanah-merged

*To borrow a lovely expression from The Matrix.

**Ignore Relativity’s problems with simultaneity for…well, for now.

***So many “dis” words.

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An impromptu post I wrote but did not edit

It’s Tuesday, and I’m on my way in to the office, and since I’m not writing any fiction right now, I figured I’d see if I can write a brief blog post.  This is my only real interaction with the outside world, and apart from my sister, this is the only form of conversation I actually have with anyone in any depth.

As you know‒well, maybe not‒I’ve tried using my YouTube channel to express thoughts and ideas, but I get no real feedback or engagement there.  I even posted a little video recently on my hitherto fallow Instagram account, but though I got about two “hearts” on that, I don’t expect much more.  It’s a peculiar venue, anyway.  I enjoy the videos of the guy reading silly signs in a silly fashion‒he’s surprisingly funny‒and the people doing skits and especially the woman who does skits acting as everything from planets to fonts to the brothers Romulus and Remus deciding what to name the city they’re founding.  I also enjoy seeing some of the cosplayers, though the music they tend to put in the background is often terribly irritating.  I guess a lot of that is influenced by TikTok.

It’s the first of October, of course.  The month of the Autumn People (of which I suppose I am one, certainly by birth date). “We are the hungry ones. Your torments call us like dogs in the night. And we do feed, and feed well.” “You stuff yourselves on other people’s nightmares.” “And butter our plain bread with delicious pain.”

Of course, none of that sadistic nonsense really appeals to me.  I’m not a tormentor by nature; I’m a destroyer.  If something (or someone) irritates me, I want to obliterate it, not “punish it” or “hurt it”.  I don’t want my enemies to suffer, I just want them to die.  So I am more sympathetic to Melkor than to Sauron*.

And, of course, my greatest, most enduring‒possibly my only‒enemy is myself, and so…

I think what triggered me to want to write a post today was the fact that yesterday, on Why Evolution is True, Professor Coyne wrote a post about his previous night’s insomnia and his unpleasant dream and experience.  He has intermittent insomnia, it seems, and it causes him real discomfort.  I was one of the oodles of people who shared our own experiences in the comments, noting how I almost never remember my dreams, but haven’t slept well in almost 30 years, and that when I sleep I feel like a soldier in a battle zone, never willing to sleep deeply and always alert as if potentially under attack.  I don’t know exactly what’s behind it.  Maybe it’s just that I don’t ever feel safe, anywhere, at any time.  Which is an accurate feeling, of course.  Safety is an illusion and a delusion, and it always has been.  It’s not safe in the world, and no one here gets out alive.

Anyway, I guess I was perhaps hoping that maybe the erudite readers of PCC(E)’s website might have some new ideas about things that might help my problem, but alas.  Nothing so far.  I think I’ll quote the whole thing here, though:

“I almost never have any dreams that I can remember, because I almost never seem to sleep deeply enough (though that’s probably an illusion). In any case, I can remember (roughly) the last time I had a good night’s sleep: It was in the mid-1990’s. My sleep has never been great, even when I was a child, and it has gotten worse over time.
Even taking Benadryl (or similar medications, OTC or prescription) only gets me about four hours, and then I am groggy–but not SLEEPY–for the rest of the day. Alcohol only makes my sleep and chronic pain worse. Mostly what happens when I wake up–several times a night, usually starting about 1 am–is that I long for something like a V-fib arrest in the middle of the night. I feel like a soldier trying to sleep in a battlefield, always watchful lest some emergency happen. That was useful when on call during residency. It’s not so useful now.
I don’t remember the last time I woke up to my alarm. But I do remember that it used to make me rapidly hyper-alert, as if someone had just called General Quarters, and I would tend to sit up instantly and shut it off as quickly as possible. Nowadays I usually just give up on sleep by about 3:30 in the morning.
I SINCERELY hope that PCC(E)’s insomnia resolves or at least improves. This is no way to live.”

I received one comment reply suggesting Remeron, but I’ve tried that, along with various other antidepressants and sleep medications, prescription and otherwise.  I’m not sure what the issue is with me, but I really do wish I could get a good night’s sleep even just, say, once a month or something.  If I could get one regularly, I’m not even sure what would happen, but I feel that I would be so much better in every way.  I suppose I have a sort of gift of extra time because of the fact that I don’t sleep as long as normal people, but the time I have is miserable.  It’s a bit reminiscent of one version of the “Repugnant Conclusion” regarding utilitarianism.  One gains for or more hours per day of extra time awake, but that leads to all time awake being only barely tolerable‒and sometimes not truly tolerable except through the hope that perhaps the next day might be better, and the brutal biological drives to stay alive, even when life is miserable**.

It’s not clear to me that this is the proper or best or even a good choice, but there are so many pressures upon one to stay alive, even without purpose, without meaning, and without any real hope.  Of course, hope is insidious; even those who would seek ruthlessly to expunge illusion and delusion, at least from myself, cannot seem to embrace the freedom of despair (so to speak).  Again, I attribute this to “pre-programmed” biological drives, ruthlessly honed into us by natural selection.

Anyway, that’s enough.  Including my quote, I’ve given you all more than enough dreariness to imbibe on a Tuesday afternoon.  It’s bad enough that Tuesday afternoon is never-ending***.

Try to have a good day.

*When I began writing that, it autocorrected to “Sharon”, which seems a bit unfair to whomever Sharon is.

**And the desire not to cause pain to those one loves.

***If that were literally true, of course, then once the first Tuesday afternoon arrived, there would never be another day, and we would all, always be living in Tuesday afternoon.  That is, unless perhaps each Tuesday afternoon bifurcates in time, with the initial Tuesday afternoon going off on a higher-dimensional tangent and continuing in its course without end, while the other branch continues to cycle through “normal” time, but every week shooting off new, eternal branches of Tuesday afternoons.  That’s a weird thought.  Sorry.

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O madam, my old blog is cracked, it’s cracked!

“Hello and good morning,” he said with a sigh.

Here I am, doing this again, or still doing it, or however you want to characterize it.  Words cannot give an absolutely complete picture of things that happen, not without being as dense in information as the literal reality itself, and if one is going to do that, one is going to have to double the information density of every real thing in order fully to describe it, which cannot be done at scale.  As I’ve said before, the only thing with computing power adequate to completely simulate the universe IS the universe, at least as far as I can tell.

I had meant to be done with all of this, or at least on my way to being done with all of this, or on my way toward something better or at least different starting on Sunday, the first day of Autumn, Bilbo and Frodo’s birthday.  Unfortunately, I had rather severe problems with my feet‒my left heel/plantar fascia and my right Achilles tendon‒that made it unworkable to carry things out the way I had intended.

I’ve been doing my best to calm these foot problems down, and they both are improving‒being a trained MD with 15 years of clinical experience is good for something* it seems‒but it may just be necessary to choose some other path to my destination.  There are many from which to choose, and I am prepared for several of them.  This is not a new or frivolous idea of which I speak, and I have put thought and preparation into it for a long time, all while foolishly hoping for some answer, some rescue, some epiphany, but ultimately finding such hopes to be chimeras or will-o-the-wisps**…or maybe even balrogs.

Anyway, as you probably already know, I posted all of Extra Body here last week over the course of four days.  If you read and enjoyed it, please take a look at my books on Amazon and consider buying and reading one or more of them.  Though I should warn you, most of my stories are much darker than Extra Body.

If you’re not good with dark stories, may I suggest The Chasm and the Collision?  My sister has rightly pointed out that it’s my only story with as upbeat an ending as Extra Body.  I would say Son of Man and Mark Red are somewhere in between, and a few of my stories, like If the Spirit Moves You (found in Welcome to Paradox City) and, to a lesser extent, “I for one welcome our new computer overlords” have some lightness to them.  The former could even be called a comedy of sorts.  But both stories center around fairly dark concepts or situations.  Many of my other stories are horror stories…though there’s not a single “supernatural” thing in my darkest ever story, Solitaire, which is available solo and also appears in Dr. Elessar’s Cabinet of Curiosities.

Anyway, I doubt very many people will ever read any of my stories, which I think is too bad, but I certainly have no right to have my stories read.  I think there might be a lot of people who might get at least some joy out of some of them, though.  I think it would also be very satisfying to know that many people read my stories and some fraction of them enjoyed them.  Even if they read them without knowing who the author was, I might not mind.  But maybe I would.  I’m not quite so egoless as all that.

Despite that aside, I have not started writing anything new since publishing Extra Body.  I did open up and look at Outlaw’s Mind and I remade a version of it with the whole first in media res scene taken out, since the story ended up going in directions that I think were better than that original idea.  But I have no will to work more on it.  Likewise, when I even contemplate working on HELIOS, I feel an almost visceral revulsion or intimidation.  And roughly the same thing applies for DFandD, or any of my other potential stories, like Changeling in a Shadow World and Orion Rising and so on.

The various drawing materials I bought upon being briefly inspired by Facebook “reels” of people drawing have laid fallow since I got them.  I can’t imagine drawing something now.  Nor can I really focus enough to read books or watch lectures on serious treatments of General Relativity or Quantum Mechanics, though I dabble here and there throughout most days.

I did read a new book:  Annihilation.  I had seen the movie, starring (a thoroughly misused) Natalie Portman, and wasn’t very impressed.  But then I stumbled across a video page by a young woman who is a Star Wars fan and an author and who said she had loved the book but then had seen and hated the movie, so I got the book (for Kindle).  It was hypnotic and disturbing and bizarre, and definitely far better than the movie.

Unfortunately, it’s told in first person, and when I read first person books I tend to lose a bit of my own sense of self and start thinking with the narrator’s thoughts, even about my real life, at least for a time.  It’s the closest I come, in a way, to having a real “theory of mind” in the ordinary sense.  Otherwise, I don’t tend to have a concept in my mind of what other people might be thinking or doing or feeling when I’m not in their presence.  I think reading fiction from a young age helped save me from being utterly confused by humans in general.

People are observable phenomena, and can be fascinating and fun and engaging, and I like less than half of them half as well as they deserve.  But other than through their own words, or through fiction, I don’t really have an “image”*** of other people’s thoughts or minds.  I’ve never even for a moment wanted to be someone else (though pretending to be‒i.e., acting‒can be enjoyable), because I can’t really imagine what it would be like to be someone else‒not from a subjective point of view, anyway.

I have been playing guitar and singing a bit in the mornings at the office some days, when I know I am by myself and can feel relatively uninhibited.  That’s sometimes enjoyable and sometimes painful (though in a strangely addictive way), and I occasionally think about making a video like some I’ve made previously, of me playing and singing Nothing Compares 2U, or Fake Plastic Trees, or Lucky, or The Man Who Sold the World, or even Karma Police or Ashes to Ashes or Weird Fishes (though I can’t so far do the “arpeggi” part of that latter song), all of which I can play and sing reasonably well.  But the thought of doing the work is too intimidating, and anyway, I can’t really bear the notion of putting my disgusting face out there for people to see.

Okay, well, that was a meandering bit of nonsense.  Unfortunately, here I am, still here, alive and writing this blog‒if nothing else for the moment.  I hope something will change about all that, and soon.  I cannot continue as I am, but I cannot see any better path other then no path at all.  Still, of all things, writing this blog is probably the most ego-syntonic thing I do, and I greatly appreciate everyone who reads and likes and “likes” it, even if I cannot comprehend why you do.  Just, thank you.  I surely cannot thank you as much as you deserve.

TTFN

*Though, like everything else about me, it turned out not to be good for very much for very long.

**Or should that be “wills-o-the-wisp”?

***Not really the right term.  Perhaps “model” might be better?

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…what dreams may come, when we have shuffled off this mortal blog…

Hello and good morning on this Thursday‒a day of the week on which those in the know have been able, these last several years, to indulge in reading my weekly blog posts.  And this is, of course, another iteration thereof; not to be confused with Iterations of Zero, my other, far less prolific blog, which I had originally created to be a place where I could discuss things unrelated to my fiction writing.

Of course, the notion that this blog was supposed to focus on my fiction has long since mostly gone by the wayside.  It never seems to have made much difference for that, in any case.  And of course, as many of you will know, for quite a while I wrote here almost daily, and I didn’t write any fiction at all during that time.

Plans or dreams or hopes are whatever they are, I guess (there’s a hunk of logic, right?).  I suspect that, even for the most successful and fulfilled of all people, their plans bear only vague resemblance to the specifics of their outcomes.  Probably, the most successful, the most fulfilled people, are able to make general plans but also to adapt to and optimize based upon the various comparatively unpredictable events that actually happen 

Your host, not fulfilled*, has had a bad week.

This weekend was so hot and humid that I had to sleep with the AC off on Saturday and Sunday nights.  Wait, you may ask, why would it be that high heat and humidity led me to turn off the air conditioning?  Because the unit‒imperfectly but permanently placed in the wall‒leaked so much condensation that, despite tupperware-style buckets put down to try to catch it and old clothes to soak it up, the water seeped into my futon.  It was better to go old school and just let the fan blow on me.

Then, after the week started, on Monday night I literally did not sleep at all.  I got not one moment of sleep, just spent the night lying around, trying not to do anything that would awaken me more.  Because of that, on Tuesday evening, having no energy to face my commute, I just slept at the office.  I got at least a few hours of broken sleep there, on the floor, with my head on my backpack for a pillow.  It was more restful than the previous three nights, which may not be saying much, but is nevertheless true.

I have not worked on Extra Body at all this week.  I just don’t have the energy, even though I’m nearly done with the third edit.  I just don’t have the energy.  I’ve also hardly played anything on the guitar, though yesterday morning I did a little, but my singing was rough and my voice got hoarse very quickly.  I haven’t even been bringing my little laptop computer with me.  I’m writing this on my phone, using Google Docs.

Tomorrow, at least, is a positive day.  I don’t mean that in the general, Annie sort of way**.  Cat forbid I should ever attempt such sickening pseudo-optimism.  No, it’s specific to this particular, non-fungible tomorrow.  Not only is it Friday the 13th, a day I always like when it happens (largely because some people stupidstitiously think it’s “unlucky”) but it’s also a day to celebrate one of the two most important events ever in my existence.  I won’t get into more specifics, but historically, for me, it more than made up for what happened two days earlier.

Anyway, after that, I’ve got nothing.  I don’t even know if I’ll actually get back to work on Extra Body or if I’ll just say “fuck it” to that and to any other attempt to do anything creative or positive or productive.  I suspect that I’ve already done all the good that I’m ever going to do in the world, unimpressive though it may be.

I guess futility is really a characteristic of everything that happens in the universe, ever, at least on a large enough scale.  The universe itself‒our universe, this instantiation or region or whatever you want to call it of whatever possible larger multiverse or metaverse or omniverse may be‒is itself the very physical instantiation of something immense beyond reckoning (possibly infinite in spatial extent) and yet ultimately trending simply toward some version of “heat death” if our understanding of physics and cosmology are even vaguely correct

Of course, there is certainly much we don’t know about the nature and structure of the cosmos.  And if our civilization persists in whatever form and continues to grow and create more knowledge, it may even someday be that cosmic engineering could be possible, or even the creation of new cosmoses.

But the second law of thermodynamics seems pretty inescapable in the long run‒it’s not just physics, it’s the raw mathematics that seems to imply it.  I think I wrote a post on IoZ a long time ago about that.  If I find it, I’ll have included the link.

Anyway, let us draw this particular local instantiation of futility to a close for now.  I hope you have all been having a much better week than I, and that your days and weeks and so on improve consistently, as much as is reasonably possible.  I would really like that.

TTFN

*To paraphrase Shirley Jackson’s description of Hill House.

**“The sun’ll come ooouuut…tomorrow…”

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What’s past and what’s to come is blogged with husks and formless ruin of oblivion

Hello and good morning and all that blather.  It’s Thursday, so it’s time for my weekly blog post, though apart from brute habit I have a hard time finding good reasons to write it.

I finished the second edit-through of Extra Body earlier this week.  That’s not too impressive; I should’ve finished some time last week, but I’ve been going very slowly.  I have no excitement about finishing and publishing the story.  I honestly don’t really care.  I just have nothing better to do.

That’s been the case with pretty much everything these days.  I’ve been trying to find interest in things, but it’s been almost entirely unsuccessful.  I did stumble into some Facebook videos of various people doing drawings and paintings, and that got me interested in doing some of that, myself, so I did some doodling and sketching and stuff.  I even ordered some new pencils and pens and markers and cetera; but there’s a weird sort of desperation involved in these actions, which became evident to me when delivery of a couple of items was delayed and I was absurdly furious about it.

I’m angry most of the time nowadays.  It’s very annoying.

Anyway, I’ve done a few little drawings, including the ones I’m going to include below.  The first is a sketch of Cthulhu which I did on H. P. Lovecraft’s birthday (though I didn’t know it at the time).  I’ve enhanced it a bit, digitally, since it wasn’t finished, but anyway, that’s about as good as anything I’ve done in any sense, which is hardly saying much.

I also made a couple of other doodles, one of which I colored with pencils and the other of which I colored with some delayed-delivery markers (about which one of my internalized fits of rage took place).  I also printed out some old pictures of mine to practice coloring, but they’re only partially done, and I screwed up one by coloring another with it underneath, so the color bled through.  I guess I’ll share them here, for shits and giggles.

I’ve been fiddling on the guitar some, too, but I remain exceptionally mediocre, and I haven’t any urge to write new music.

I’ve taken a sort of impromptu break from studying any physics or mathematics, also.  I have no energy (nor momentum nor charge) for any of it.

Of course, a lot of this trouble surely is complicated by the persistent elevation of my chronic pain, though that’s at least begun to level off slightly‒whether from my personal interventions or from the natural rhythms of physical processes or some combination of the two, it’s difficult to say.  My sleep, on the other hand, seems to be steadily worsening over time.  Last night, for instance, I slept less than three hours.

Oh, I was also out sick Monday, after getting sick on Sunday a bit.  I didn’t really get much rest or benefit from my absence; being at the house is no more pleasant than being at the office*.  At least there’s more space at the office, and when no one else is there, it’s also much quieter.  Honestly, in some ways, jail and prison were both more pleasant than being at the house where I currently live.  Weirdly enough, I had a greater feeling of personal space when incarcerated than I have now, and I also felt like I was occasionally doing some good, since I helped several people get their GEDs and helped some guys who weren’t very good at writing send letters to their families.

At least I wasn’t both bored and distracted, and I had things to which to look forward‒including, ironically, the life I’m living now, though it is not at all what I had anticipated (for instance, I declined to stay with my Mom and Dad and sister because I wanted to be near my kids, but despite that, I haven’t seen either of my children in more than eleven years, now, by their choice).  Now, I’m basically just floating by myself through turbulent, greasy, polluted chop from day to day.

I’ve noticed a clear tendency for people who spend very much time with me for very long to decide that they don’t really want to be around me anymore.  I cannot blame them.  I’m a difficult, unpleasant person, and by nature I’m prone to profound darkness.  I try not to give in to that nature if I can help it**, and I try to be upbeat and positive or at least funny in my expressions and indulgences in gloom and pan-antipathy.  But it wears me out.

I don’t think I’m really capable of doing any good in the world anymore; I don’t have the energy or the drive for it.  And if I don’t want to indulge my nature as a Destroyer‒which I do want to indulge, but you know what I mean‒then I ought just to turn that tendency fully inward.

Anyway, that’s all that.  I don’t know what else to say, and more to the point, I don’t know why I should say or do anything else.  Sorry to be a bummer; it’s just who I am.  I hope you all have a good day, week, month and even year.  I can’t promise “I’ll be there for you”, but probably somebody will be.

TTFN

cthulhu draft

cracked egg

unknown woman

dark fairy and friend partial recoloring with bleed through

Jacob versus alien queen partial recoloring

Gandalf and Balrog partial recoloring

*Especially when, as has been the case this week, we’ve had some chaos and stress involving the personal troubles of some of our long-time workers.

**This explains why one of my favorite lines from Doctor Who is when the eleventh Doctor, in a moment of terrifyingly cold anger, says, “Good men don’t need rules.  Today is not the day to find out why I have so many.”  There is a reason why I created a short-lived series of blog posts entitled My Heroes Have Always Been Villains.

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There’s the respect that makes calamity of so long blogs

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, and so it’s time for another weekly blog post.  Last Thursday I was out sick, so I only posted a very brief, almost telegraphic announcement of the fact that I wasn’t going to write a “true” post that day, and I said that I might write a true post on Friday if I was feeling better.  Of course, I was not feeling better by Friday, so there was no such post.

I’ve nearly recovered from my acute illness—probably some respiratory virus, but nothing too terribly severe—and now I am more or less back on my normal schedule.

Speaking of being “back”, though, my back has been acting up severely this week, and in an atypical fashion.  I’m not sure what triggered it.  Possibly it’s just due to being sick, with the coughing and the lying around more than usual and so on.  Possibly it’s something else.  Anyway, I’ve had to go to a combination of near-overdoses on my various OTC pain medications, and that’s not wonderful.  It got so severe yesterday that I was actually saying out loud that, if it didn’t improve, I was going to have to find some relatively high parking garage nearby and jump off it.  I was not exaggerating, as I think was obvious to those around me.

It’s easy enough to wonder why I don’t do that anyway, given that there is very little in my life that’s positive, and what positivity exists is episodic, and it can’t make up for the constant negatives of pain and illness and sleeplessness and depression and so on.  The closest I come to any comradely activity is streaming YouTube videos of people reacting to songs or movies that I like.  It’s almost, but not quite, exactly unlike watching a movie with a friend who has never seen it before.

Speaking of paraphrasing or otherwise referring to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, I’m most of the way through the first run of editing Extra Body.  There’s a long way to go, since I usually do as many as seven such iterations before considering my editing done.  I figure by that time I’ll usually have lost any proprietary affection for a story and it will begin to bore me, so it’ll be easier to cut out extraneous material.

That’s the principle, at least.  I don’t know how well it’s worked hitherto; I’m too deep inside the process to trust my evaluation.  I did at least transcribe the material I had written so far, in passing, on HELIOS, so that if/when I’m ready, I’ll be able to pick up writing that by hand in its first draft.

Extra Body is my first non-horror story in a while (unless you count the beginning I made on writing The Dark Fairy and the Desperado, which is certainly not horror, but is also certainly nowhere near done, if it ever will be).  It’s hard for me to tell if it’s a good choice to have reverted to a sort of lighthearted science fiction story set in the modern world, but at least I was able to squeeze the first draft out.

Of course, I’m paring down the word count as I go.  As I’m sure is obvious to all of you, I get rather wordy when I write, especially when I’m using the computer keyboard, since I type quickly and usually can do so more readily even than I can speak out loud.

I’ve been reading some more books about quantum field theory (and related subjects) lately.  It’s still very intro level stuff, of course, but either because recurrent exposure to increasingly technical material is gradually sinking into my head, or because I’m just getting a tiny bit “smarter” overall over time, I’m actually finding some of it more familiar and understandable than before.

I must say that I was a little bit proud of myself not too long ago when I was thinking about how complex numbers are represented using a two-dimensional plane, with internally consistent mathematics and whatnot, and I wondered if one could have three-part complex numbers.  I soon realized that only even-numbered ones would work, and then I learned that these were indeed a thing (i.e., quaternions) and that indeed only even-numbered versions of such things can work.  Of course, it’s very difficult to visualize something that has four dimensions, so you just have to do the math, and I haven’t started to work on or learn that seriously, but I played with some “higher order” complex-number multiplications a few times, which was how I saw that only even-numbered ones, with separate “imaginary” roots would work.

On a vaguely related note:  I was listening to Sean Carroll’s podcast yesterday evening.  He was speaking to Doris Tsao, a neuroscientist who specializes in facial recognition and processing centers of the brain, and she mentioned that the attributes of a face can be thought of as many-dimensional, in the sense that there are numerous “variables” that can be represented about any given face, and that they effectively comprise a higher-dimensional space.

Then she turned the matter around and noted that there are apparently those who consider using such things as faces as ways of intuiting mathematical or related systems with higher dimensions, thus representing them in ways that the human mind is capable of visualizing.  I though that was a fascinating notion*.

It reminds me little bit of the concept of the “memory palace”, a mnemonic/rhetorical tool that originated in ancient Greece (so I understand) in which one associates the aspects of, say, a speech one is going to give with imagined artifacts or decorations in some imagined hall or room, so that the aspects of that speech can more readily be remembered and brought to mind when needed.

There are several fictional characters, most notably Hannibal Lecter and the BBC’s Sherlock, who use rather exaggerated versions of these memory palaces.  The one described in Hannibal is more coherent than the one in Sherlock, but they both take great liberties with how the concept was originally used.  Nevertheless, for the longest time, thanks to the amusing tableau** Thomas Harris described for how Hannibal Lecter had “stored” Clarice Starling’s (fictional) home address, I could readily reconstruct her address at will.  I think I may still be able to do it.  It should be something like “#33 Tindall Ave, Arlington, Virginia, 22308”.  If anyone wants to check my recollection, that would be welcome.  I’m not certain I got it right.

I’ve usually found such mnemonics more trouble than they’re worth.  It’s easier for me to connect concepts in the real world, building mental models of the way things work rather than trying to memorize.  This means I probably don’t learn as quickly as some do, but I learn deeply when I do, and it’s easier to connect one model to another and to spot analogies and similarities and possible connections between systems that might at first seem unrelated.  That was quite useful in medical practice, as I’m sure you can imagine.

Oh, I almost forgot:  Welcome to the first day of August in 2024!

That’s all I have to say about that.

Apparently the summer Olympics are currently taking place, but I’ve been unable to muster any interest in them, though I used to love them, and I find that the manufactured controversies about some apparent misconstrual of the opening ceremony or some such (and the juvenile ripostes by political antagonists of the original misconstruers responding to the supposed offense) all serves simply to reinforce my feeling that not just the human race, but indeed all life of any kind, is a bad idea.  Thank goodness for the apparent inescapability of the second law of thermodynamics.

Anyway, I feel I’ve been meandering about here, randomly bouncing from topic to topic, without any consistency or coherency, so I’ll bring this to a close soon.  I fear that this once-weekly blog posting suffers from the fact that there are topics I probably would have brought up as solitary daily blog posts when I was doing them, but that I now want to try to squeeze in here.

I just can’t write (or edit) new fiction and write daily blog posts too, not while I’m forced to keep my day job.  If anyone out there wants to pay for my living expenses and support me so I can both write new fiction and write daily blog posts while still studying physics and programming and the like in the meantime, please, let yourself be known!  I’d be pleased to hear from you.

Otherwise, I’m pretty sure none of this is going to last very much longer.  My pain and dysthymia and alienation and insomnia are increasingly unpleasant, and there are fewer and fewer things in my life that compensate.

Here’s to Macbeth’s proverbial last syllable of recorded time.  L’mavet!***

TTFN

*It does come up against difficulties when considering the notion of orthogonal axes of vector spaces being able to be rotated into one-another.  It’s hard to see how one could intuitively consider rotating the variables of, say, eye size and cheek color into one another, or what an inner (or “dot”) product or cross product of two such variables could mean…though with the latter, it makes the use of the “right hand rule” an amusing invocation of a slap in the face…or at least poking someone’s cheek.

**Involving Jesus (age 33) marching along with a .308 Enfield rifle at shoulder arms, followed by J. Edgar Hoover in a tutu, followed by Clarice driving a “Tin Lizzy” model T Ford, going past Arlington National Cemetery.  Something like that, anyway.

***This is an expression I invented this morning, the counter-toast to the famous L’chaim, which in Hebrew means “to life”.  Then, being me, I jotted down some words for the first verse of a parody song of “To Life” from Fiddler on the Roof:


“To death!  To death!  L’mavet!

L’mavet, L’mavet, to death!

Here’s to the father I tried to be

Here’s to that travesty

Drink L’mavet, to death,

To death, L’mavet.

L’mavet, L’mavet, to death.

Death has a way of releasing us

Luring and teasing us

Drink L’mavet, to deeeeeaaaath…”

That’s as far as I got, but I did only work on it for about five minutes, so, it’s not too bad.

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My charity is outrage, life my shame, and in that shame still blog my sorrows’ rage.

Hello and good morning.

It’s Thursday, and it’s thus time for my now once again weekly blog post.  I hope you’re all pleased.

Before I go any further, does anyone out there know any way to reset the default font in Microsoft Word back to Calibri?  As I have mentioned before, I cannot stand the new Aptos font.  If I could send a terminator* back in time to kill the mother of the person who designed that font, I would be strongly tempted to do so.

But, wait, you might say.  Surely if I have access to terminator and time travel technologies, there must be other, less homicidal ways to change the basic font of a word processing program.  That may well be so, but violent matricide is all such a person deserves, I’m afraid.  Anything less would not convey the degree of my antipathy.  I’m inclined to say the entire family tree should be eliminated, but eventually the line of any living person intersects with the line of all people alive on the planet, so to wipe out the oldest ancestor would be to wipe out a common ancestor to all living humans, thus wiping out the whole human race.

Hey, wait, maybe that’s not such a bad thought.

While we’re at it, maybe we can go back over three billion years ago, to that warm pool about which Darwin spoke, and spray some Lysol, thus aborting all life on this planet.  I suppose life might start randomly again somewhere else, even if one did such a thing.  After all, it happened pretty quickly once conditions became conducive, implying that it might not do just to wipe out the spot where the ancestors of all actual modern life began, but might instead be necessary literally to sterilize the whole planet.  But how do you do that if even the collision with Theia that is the presumed origin of the moon didn’t do it?

Still, while the origin of basic life seems to have been a strong or at least a rapid tendency, the formation of eukaryotes and then multicellular life seems to have been much harder, taking another two and a half to three billion years after the earliest life to evolve on the planet.  So maybe, if a different proto-life had formed, life would never have progressed beyond something like bacteria.

Okay, well, I think I’ve made it clear that I don’t like Aptos.  And now that I’ve finished the first draft of Extra Body, I think I may in future switch over to using Google Docs for my word processing.  I hate unnecessary change in the first place—such as all the tweaks and upgrades and nonsense that all the apps and systems are constantly enacting, and the changes in WordPress that nearly always make the platform less convenient—but when they are changes for the worse, I really cannot abide them.

What misguided notions led Microsoft to think that their weird little new font with its curlicues and malformations of letters would be an improvement?  Can entire software companies develop global degenerative neurological conditions?  Or is it just a matter of the second law of thermodynamics, ensuring that any local cleverness is an ephemeral exception?

Just look what’s happened to the United States.

Anyway, as I mentioned above, I have completed the first draft of Extra Body as of yesterday morning.  I did not write on Friday, because I really felt like crap, mentally.  I honestly suspected that my brain was crashing, experiencing a burgeoning system failure (speaking of degenerative neurological conditions).  But then, on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday mornings, I wrote a total of 5,599 words, bringing the final first-draft tally to 80,676 words, at 123 pages.

I don’t know if the tale is any good, but it’s certainly impressively long for something that was imagined as a short story.  I’m going to take a very brief break before I begin my intended draconian editing process, during which time I mean to transcribe what I’ve typed so far of HELIOS** into a spiral bound notebook so that when I get to the appropriate stage, I can just continue writing that first draft by hand.

Of course, this is all extremely speculative.  I don’t expect that it will come to fruition, because I know that I simply cannot survive as my life is and—more importantly—as I am.  In case you can’t tell, I’m constantly almost completely defined by tension and hostility (though I do my best never to allow them actually to be released unjustly; I may almost always wish to wipe out all life in the universe, but I almost never do it).  The world, the planet, the biosphere, what have you:  none of it seems natural to me, none of it seems good or beautiful or welcoming.

I feel like I’m already in some Lovecraftian otherverse, not just a stranger in a strange land but an alien entity in an alien universe, where there are not even an integer number of spatial or time dimensions.  I truly sympathize with Agent Smith in the original The Matrix, when he says, “I hate this place, this zoo, this prison, this reality, whatever you want to call it, I can’t stand it any longer.  It’s the smell—if there is such a thing—I feel saturated by it…”

Of course, I don’t think he was literally saying that it was solely the smell that bothered him.  This was merely the metaphor, the shorthand, the figurative focus of his antipathy.  The sense of smell is merely the most elemental, the oldest, the most direct sense, and it tends to elicit the most visceral responses.  Even bacteria can be said to “smell” the world.

Lest anyone be fooled, I want to make clear that it’s not politics and social dysfunction and the like that make me so antipathic toward the world, though politics is pathetic and contemptible.  But politics—including dishonesty, hypocrisy, willful stupidity, delusion, political violence, and all such manifestations of primate dominance hierarchical jockeying—has always been pathetic and juvenile and worthy of sneers and nausea (as well as occasional mordant, contemptuous laughter).

Anyway, that’s about a thousand words in this post already.  I could go on and on spewing vitriol, but I don’t think it would make much difference.  I don’t know how I can possibly survive as I am, as things are.  More to the point, I don’t know why I would possibly survive as I am, as things are.

The world is disgusting, my life is almost entirely uncomfortable and frankly painful, and above all, I find myself disgusting.  I try to distract myself with writing, and with some music, and with studying physics and mathematics and languages, using various books and apps and so on.  I even pretend I have friends by watching YouTube videos of people reacting to songs movies I like.  But nothing is fun.  And none of my chronic pain and sensory issues have improved.  And don’t even get me started on insomnia!

Oddly enough, I think I would feel less alone if I were truly the only person on the planet, or if I were a castaway on an island.  Perhaps I’m wrong, of course; that is purely speculation.  But it feels like it would be the case, and that’s not a good feeling.

Well, I hope (and suspect) that most of you are doing and feeling better than I am.  That almost has to be a good thing.  Please take care of each other and yourselves.  Despite all the people and things I feel that I might wish didn’t exist, or that could be obliterated, you are among the rare few to whom that doesn’t apply.

TTFN

*As in the movies created by James Cameron, not the line that separates night and day on an astronomical body illuminated by a star.

**A little less than 3,000 words.

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That but this blog might be the be-all and the end-all here

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, and so it’s time once again for what has become once again my weekly blog post.

I miss doing daily posts, but it’s hard to fit them in along with writing new fiction and the like.  I could probably do it, but that would pack the time before work every day, and probably would overflow into the beginning of my usual work time, and I’m already always so tired from pain and insomnia and anxiety and depression.

I’ve even been doing a very modest amount of guitar playing, though the arthralgia/arthropathy in the base of my thumbs, and in my other fingers as well, has made that frustrating.  There are songs I could play quite well before that I’m having trouble playing now, though I’ve been insistently practicing them out of frustration and stubbornness.  I suppose it doesn’t matter; it’s not as though anyone else is ever likely to hear me play guitar again.

I also don’t really see the point to the daily blogs.  I’ve occasionally used them as rants to express some of my thoughts on things that were irritating me, but though I put those thoughts out into the world, I doubt that they have ever had any impact at all on any issue.  But to a greater degree, I had hoped that the blog would serve as a kind of therapy and a cry for help at the same time.

Perhaps the therapy part worked occasionally.  I am still alive for the moment, though I don’t necessarily call that a success, since I seem to feel steadily more anhedonic with every passing moment.  Every day is dominated by discomfort, physically and mentally, and there are very few compensatory positives in my life.  No change I can envision making on my own seems likely to improve anything…at least no change I have the wherewithal to make.

Obviously, the other, related purpose I mentioned for my daily blog (the “cry for help” part) hasn’t played out.

I guess it’s a bit like those whistles they attach to flotation devices on airlines, for you to use if you have a “water landing” and actually survive.  You can blow them and…I guess, what, alert the coast guard or whomever is searching for you?  But that assumes someone is searching for you and knows where to look for you, and can even hear that pathetic little whistle in the middle of the ocean.  It’s laughable.  I guess it’s more “cry for help theater” than it is a cry that might succeed in summoning help.

That’s the way it is, I suppose.  Everyone is helpless and adrift, some of them are just more deluded than others.  It’s those who are most able to be objective, by choice or by nature, who tend to be more depressed, not just because the universe is vast and civilization so puny, but more because almost all humans imagine that they are important to the universe.  It’s not necessarily bad if they think that they have the potential to become important—that’s not necessarily delusional (as discussed in David Deutsch’s book, The Beginning of Infinity).  No, they imagine that they are currently important.  They imagine that their moment in human history, let alone cosmic history, is the crux of causality, and many of them believe that the very universe itself was created so that they (or those like them) could exist.

Pathetic.

In their self-importance, they cause so many problems.  This in itself is not inexcusable; no one can foresee all possible outcomes of any actions.  But then, instead of seeking the means to fix problems that arise, many of them seek to blame the problems, to find scapegoats, whether among other people or among imagined supernatural devils and demons, because of course, since the universe was made for them, they could not have caused the problems.

Ugh.  Let’s get off that train of thought.  It’s too frustrating.

It’s July 11th today, which in the American date ordering fashion is 7-11, so there are no doubt specials and sales going on in the international convenience store chain 7-Eleven®.  Enjoy them if there are branches near you and if you like that kind of thing.  You can probably get a deal on a Slurpee® or something similar.

Now let’s briefly discuss my fiction writing, going back to the original intended subject of this blog*.  I have written a decent amount this week:  4,824 words since last tally, bringing the total to 75,070 words.  That’s 114 pages long in the current format.

I am within striking distance of the end of the story, though it may seem that I’ve said that before.  But in this case, I am literally on the cusp of the final major event of the tale.  It’s not impossible that I could finish the first draft within this coming week, barring (as always) the unforeseen, and assuming I write some on every workday.  I am not scheduled to work this Saturday, so there will be fewer days for writing than last week, but when stories get near to their climaxes, I tend to write a bit more, daily.  It’s even possible that I’ll write more this week, though there are fewer writing days, than during this last week.

Then will begin the editing process.  I may also start writing HELIOS, which I intend to do with pen and paper, since I think most of my best books have been written in first draft, solely or substantially, by that means.

As for everything else—well, there is nothing else.  I have no friends (other than work acquaintances), no nearby family (at least no nearby family with whom I speak or who want to see me), and no real hobbies other than this writing and my minimal guitar piddling around.

There’s basically nothing I do for fun.  There are a few things I do for distraction, but they end up annoying me because they draw me away from doing things I would feel better about, like learning more physics and mathematics and languages and computer science and so on.

I’m reading a tiny bit of fiction, but I can’t do very much of it, since it often exacerbates my depression.  When I read stories, I tend to be very much pulled into their mindset and worlds, but there are almost always multiple characters in any story, and there are usually friendships and social interactions, and after I stop reading them, I’m left feeling the relative coldness and emptiness of daily life more acutely than before.  That may be a big part of why I haven’t easily been able to read fiction in recent years.

Be that as it may.  I expect I shall probably write another blog post next week, though I make no promises.  I can’t promise ever actually to publish even Extra Body, let alone HELIOS or any other of the dozens of stories for which I have ideas waiting in idea-space.  But I seriously doubt that anyone would be much the worse for that lack, anyway.

I hope you all have a good day and a good week.  I may have a tendency to misanthropy and even pan-antipathy, but the people who read my stuff can’t help but hold a special place in my heart (meaning my mind).  So I do honestly wish you all well; indeed, I wish you the best possible lives and days available to you.

TTFN

[Side note:  I doubt anyone noticed, but last week’s post was exactly the same number of words long as the Declaration of Independence is purported to be, counting signatures and title.  You’re welcome.]

*It was meant as a form of promotion for my fiction.  As someone who is not good at self-promotion, partly due to an essential and apparently inherent self-hatred, it was the best I was able to do to try to get word of my books out into the wider world.  If you’re interested in looking at and considering reading some of my already-published fiction, you can either look at the My Books page of this blog or go to my Amazon author’s page.  Of course, I would welcome anyone who wants to read my fiction, and would also welcome feedback about it.

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Nor steel nor poison, malice domestic, foreign levy, nothing can blog him further.

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, the 27th of June (I’ll reluctantly presume that you know the year and the era), and it’s time for another edition of what is now my weekly blog post.  I’m on my way to the office and writing this on Google Docs on my phone.  I will have to use my little laptop computer to confirm the specific stats on my fiction writing over the last week, but I’ve done significantly more than the previous week, adding more nearly 5,000 words, bringing the total to over 66,000, and the current page count to 101*.

There were even a few mornings this week on which I felt the urge to write more than a page, and so I did.  The story is very nearly done‒the first draft, anyway.  Of course, there will be many changes to be made during editing, or at least much shaping of its rough-hewn ends.  And though, obviously, this will never be a short story, I do plan to shave a good 10,000 words off the final product.  That may sound arbitrary, but I’m almost always wordier than necessary, and there are frequent little thoughts and comments from the characters that don’t really add much to a tale other than perhaps giving a little color.

In any case, I should be able to publish it as a novella, in paperback in addition to the Kindle version, assuming I live long enough.

That is far from certain.  Just yesterday, I had to leave work shortly before lunch, because in the morning, while writing fiction and then getting an early start on payroll and other office-related stuff, I was having a lot of back and hip pain, and I was slightly more sleep-deprived than usual, so I was not clear-headed.  As a consequence, I think I took a double dose of aspirin and possibly Tylenol as well.  And I take 3 aspirin at once normally, so 975 mg instead of the usual 650.  Even as I took the (presumed) second 975 mg dose, I thought that maybe I had already taken some, but I decided that I didn’t really care.  I was miserable and in a lot of pain, and I didn’t much mind if I poisoned myself, a bit or a lot.  I’ve been courting and investigating (and even investing in) far more potent and nasty toxins; aspirin is frankly mild.  The addition of Tylenol (when my pain didn’t lessen) was just a little icing on the analgesic cake, even if I did take 4 extra-strength tablets in relatively quick succession.

Anyway, by the time I got done with the payroll, I was feeling extremely foggy and sleepy, and also mildly queasy, and I could not easily focus my mind on anything.  It was an interesting experience, especially the part about actually feeling sleepy(!), so I told my boss that I wasn’t feeling well and asked if he minded if I left after half a day.  He was fine with it, as was the coworker who shares some of my tasks.

I also told my boss why I felt ill:  that it was because I had more or less accidentally taken more than double the recommended dose of aspirin and possibly of acetaminophen.  I think I was kind of hoping that he might recognize that there’s more going on than a one-off mistake in my bigger picture…or that someone would.  But alas, no such luck has prevailed so far.

I get it; no one wants to deal with me saying anything about how I feel‒present company excluded, I guess.  They certainly don’t want to take it seriously.  I mean, earlier this week, I was trying to stretch sideways in my chair to relieve some serious tightness and pain in my back, and two coworkers/friends‒my two closest office friends‒were walking past.  They asked me, “You okay, Doc?”  I gave the simple and honest answer, “No.”  I meant it on practically all levels, and tried, at least a little, to make that general fact evident.  But the response from both of them was to say, almost dismissively, “Yeah, I know how you feel.”

No.  No, you obviously don’t.

So many times in recent years and especially in recent weeks and months, I’ve felt that I was sending out painfully loud signals that I was in distress.  I’ve felt that it all must be written all over my face, and in my body language, and even in the actual words I say, such as, “I hate my life, I wish I were dead.”  But somehow, no one seems to notice, or perhaps they think I’m joking, or that I’m exaggerating.

It certainly seems clear that I at least have the attribute (associated with ASD) of not being readily able to express or communicate my emotions‒often I don’t even recognize them.  But it’s terribly frustrating, especially when one tries to put not-too-subtle signs up, such as buying two different ropes and tying them into nooses, then leaving them that way where people can see them, or buying a whole plastic “can” of sodium hydroxide (lye), or breaking up a cheesy old shot glass into little shards and splinters of glass.

Each of those latter two substances can be (and has been) put into gel capsules from which the psyllium they originally contained has been emptied.  Then the new handful of capsules can be put in an easily accessible place, in case an emergency exit (or just a gamble on a possible emergency exit) might be necessary, severely painful though it would probably be.

But nobody takes very strong notice of such things; it’s just Doc being weird, like he’s always been his whole life (though the people at work haven’t known me nearly so long, it’s nevertheless true that I have been weird my whole life).  It’s just Doc’s dark sense of humor‒which is apparently often quite funny, and certainly catches people off-guard, especially since my delivery of jokes is often dead-pan, appropriately enough.

I guess a part of me‒not a small part‒doesn’t want anyone to grasp the urgency of the situation until it’s too late.  Goodness knows I don’t like the idea of being a burden to other people, especially people I like, and I’m already such a burden on them and on the world at large that it’s hard to justify.  And I certainly don’t think there’s any sense in which I deserve help of any kind.  I’m a pretty vile and horrifying creature.

Maybe it’s good that my thoughts don’t show on my face, because often my thoughts are just urges or wishes to enact stunningly violent retribution on idiots.  As I noted in my meme from last week (playing on the line from The Guardians of the Galaxy, Volume 3) it seems that I was not born to be a dad, but that I was born to be a destroyer.

Maybe it’s just as well that no one recognizes the danger I pose to myself.  Maybe it’s best if finally, someday very soon, the structure of me fails catastrophically and I vanish.  This will cause some minor, very slight and localized disruption here and there, but it’ll be like ripping off a Band-Aid.  It’ll certainly be better for everyone than anyone wasting their time and energy trying to help me.

Anyway, I hope at least to finish the first draft of Extra Body, but after that, I’m making no predictions, and I’m certainly not making any promises.  Maybe, if nothing else, if I don’t get it published myself, someone else can clean it up and publish it.  As “my little green friend” said, “Always in motion is the future.”  That is, until it comes to a halt, of course.

TTFN

*The exact numbers are: 4,877 net new words since last blog, and a current word count of 66,494.  101 pages is correct.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TTFN

destroyer

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

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

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