insomnia

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Do you remember a Guy that’s been in such an early song?

It’s Guy Fawkes Day in the UK‒also known as Bonfire Night if I’m not mistaken.  “Remember, remember, the 5th of November, the gunpowder, treason, and plot…” and all that.  The holiday isn’t celebrated in the US, which is not surprising, since it has to do with a failed attempt to blow up the Houses of Parliament in 1605, before the future United States was seriously being colonized, let alone officially founded.

Of course, it’s still a good day for civil resistance (though perhaps without the explosives).  It might be a good day for some group to slip powerful laxatives into the food of many, if not all, of the members of the current administration and many of the members of Congress and the Senate and even the Supreme Court.  Our national government could certainly use a serious colon cleanse, metaphorically speaking; it might be amusing for that to become literal*.

I’m not actually endorsing that action or encouraging it, but it’s a rather entertaining thought.

I’m very tired today, even though we’re just coming into the middle of the week.  Of course, I’m almost always tired but very rarely sleepy, which is not a great combination.  I suppose someone who never gets a full night’s sleep does, in a certain sense, live more than someone who sleeps well.  If, say, a person can only sleep 4 hours a night instead of 8, then after 60 years, they will have been awake for the equivalent of another person’s 75 years, if my math is right, and ceteris paribus.

But all other things are very much not equal when one has chronic insomnia.  The early part of Fight Club gives some pretty good descriptions of how insomnia can feel.  I particularly like the line, “…everything is a copy of a copy of a copy…” which does give something of an idea of the feeling of never getting enough sleep.

So the tradeoff would seem to be, in a sense, living more but worse versus living less but better.  But that still doesn’t quite capture matters, because chronic insomnia also increases the occurrence of many chronic and even acute illnesses, thus likely shortening the insomniac’s life relative to good sleepers’ lives.  One’s immune system tends to suffer, for one thing, which not only affects one’s risk of infection but also of cancer.  In addition, one’s metabolism gets thrown askew, probably partly due to chronically elevated stress hormones.

Of course, some of these effects might actually be causes, mightn’t they be?  Chronically elevated stress hormones can, by more than one route, reduce one’s sleep quantity and quality, for instance.  That’s one of the tricky things about the biology of multicellular organisms.  Many questions become “chicken and egg” problems.

Though, the actual question, “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?” is one to which the answer is glaringly obvious.  Eggs have existed, in some form at least, since before backbones happened (paleontologists, please correct me if I’m wrong about that specific ordering).

Even if we focus only on hard-shelled eggs, like those of the proverbial chicken, these date back to the earliest fully land-based vertebrates, which if memory serves showed up at least a few hundred million years ago.  Chickens have only really been around, certainly in their modern form, since no farther back than the dawn of agriculture, say about 10,000 years ago.

These numbers are ballpark figures that I’m pulling out of my…memory.  If I’m off by a significant amount on any of them‒certainly by an order of magnitude or more‒please let me know.

Okay, well, I don’t know what else to write about this morning.  I mean, I could probably nevertheless keep writing indefinitely, pulling various weirdnesses out of my…store room.  But I won’t.

It might be fun to set that challenge for myself some day:  to see how long I can write at one sitting, with only bathroom breaks, and then just share the result on this blog without serious editing.  I think I would want to use the lapcom for such a task, or something similar with a real keyboard, rather than writing on my smartphone as I’ve been doing for most of my posts.

I wonder if there’s any Guinness World Records type entry on something like that.  Not that I’m into trying to make or break world records, but it’s amusing to contemplate.

Maybe someday I’ll do something like that, though I would need some manner of support to do it.  But it probably won’t happen very soon, if it happens.  It will probably have to wait until after I’ve caught the flying pig back from my skiing trip in Hell.

And I don’t know how to ski.

Well, that’s enough for today, I think.  I’ve passed 701 words, and like Major Tom after he passed 100,000 miles, I’m feeling very still.  I wish my spaceship knew which way to go.

But we can’t necessarily trust the good astronaut’s judgment on such matters, for as Bowie said later, in Ashes to Ashes, “We know Major Tom’s a junkie, strung out in Heaven’s high, hitting an all time low.”

Hopefully, you all have a much better day than Major Tom.

*The Dulcolax™ treason and plot, you might say.

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Words about fear and words about words

Well, it’s Saturday again, and for the second week in a row, I am writing a blog post.  I warned you that I probably would:  here, go take a look.  See?  I told you.

Of course, a blog post means I’m going to the office today.  It’s not a full day, but it chews up so much of the middle part that there’s no possibility of getting any extra rest, at least not for me.  For instance, I have awakened well before I would need to go to the office, but my anxiety or tension or whatever it might best be called does not let me sleep‒for fear of oversleeping, I guess.  It’s some manner of fear, anyway.  It’s not a fear of physical attack (I think) but it sort of feels like I have to watch my back, as though someone or something is out to get me.

Fear is not the mind killer, of course, despite the popular mantra from Dune.  Fear (up to a point) can sharpen the mind, if it’s not resisted inappropriately.  I think the 12th Doctor’s take on being scared is far better than that from Dune.  See below:

–

Obviously, too much fear is bad, but as Stephen Fry, playing the unscrupulous tobacconist points out (starting at roughly the 2:45 point here), that’s what the term too much means.

Too much of anything, more or less by definition, is bad.  This is one of those somewhat rare circumstances in which one can say “by definition” and not be relaying a merely semantic point without substance.

This is in contrast to the silly old conundrum “If a tree falls in a forest and there’s no one to hear it, does it make a sound?”  If you simply define your terms precisely, there is not going to be any ambiguity in the answer‒but you have to choose your “definitions”* of each word clearly, especially ones like “hear” and “sound”.

If you’re ever arguing about something (other than etymology and/or usage and/or diction) and you want to go to the dictionary to settle it, then you’ve probably been arguing about something without substance‒arguing past each other, as they say.  I’ve heard such arguments, even between people with seemingly above-average intelligence.

Of course, if they’re arguing for fun, as a sort of mental sport and exercise, and if they both (or all) are enjoying the process, then I have no trouble with it.  It probably sharpens their thinking skills, as long as they don’t let themselves forget that they’re just arguing over misaligned coding and the logical implications thereof.  Even a skilled martial artist who trains purely for exhibitions may be in real trouble in a street fight against serious opponents.

But even the OED doesn’t decide or define what English words mean; it records what words have been used to mean, their origins, their etymology, all that good, interesting stuff.

How did I get on this subject?  I guess I’ll see as I do the editing.  I certainly do bounce and meander in my head, don’t I?  And that process is often inextricably intertwined with writing.

That can be a good thing, sometimes, I suppose.  I would think it’s at least related to the nature of creativity.  But it’s also important to be able to focus and stay on point, to be disciplined, if one is truly to create anything of depth.  One of my biggest problems in the past was that I would come up with, for instance, good story ideas, but I would soon get distracted by some new story idea and get diverted from the first.

One of the best things about having been to prison‒yeah, there were a few good things, though they were strongly overwhelmed by the bad‒was that I was in a situation in which I could discipline myself to write every morning, when lights came on (about 3 am) for 3 to 4 pages, and not go on to a new story until I finished the first.  I mailed the pages out to my Mom, Dad, and sister as I went along, after rewriting them for a bit of legibility**.

In this fashion, I wrote first Mark Red, then CatC, then Paradox City.  Then, after I got out, I continued writing, finishing one story before starting the next, right up until I began Outlaw’s Mind.  That was the last story I started in that pattern, though I’ve since written a bit on The Dark Fairy and the Desperado and even less on HELIOS.

Currently, I just write this every work day.  I cannot explain why in any quick and simple fashion, but it is what it is, as the tautology goes.

I hope you have a good day.  I should be back on Monday.

*I put that in scare quotes because in nearly all cases, words don’t have real, singular, exclusive definitions, but instead have usages.  Now, as the person who coined various words in, for instance, The Chasm and the Collision, I can actually and literally define those words.  I have actual authority over those words; I created those words and I created those worlds.

**I kept my first draft so I would be able to go back and check things if I needed to do so.

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Some Halloween-style pictures among unrelated words

First of all, Happy Halloween to everyone who celebrates this day in any fashion.  Even if you don’t celebrate it, you might as well have a good day.

I don’t discriminate based on Holiday celebrations.  How very admirable of me.

Once again, I mean to keep this post short by making my target 701 words to start with, because I’m very tired this morning.  It was difficult to get up at all, and I still feel as if I’m vaguely sedated.  Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to have been one of those sedatives that’s associated with euphoria.  It would be nice if it were, right?  If they would agree, I would agree.

Unfortunately, I’m just groggy and weak and blurry.  By which I mean I feel that the world seems slightly blurry to me.  I don’t mean that I am blurry if you look at me.  I might imagine that I could be blurry (meaning as a function of me not just poor vision in the observer) but I have looked in a mirror already this morning, and while I am far from easy on the eyes, I seem to be in focus.

Thinking of atypical interpretations of things people say, I was listening to one of the guys on the phones in the office yesterday, and I heard him use the expression “qualified individual”.  Now, I know what he meant, and it’s a perfectly valid term when discussing a promotion with a customer.  But it occurred to me that one could use the term to refer to someone who is an individual…but only from a certain point of view.

For instance, Norman Bates could be thought of as a “qualified” individual.  Yes, he’s a single person in the sense that he is one organism*, but there is more than one distinct personality in his head.  You could also say that the narrator in Fight Club is a “qualified” individual, as is James McAvoy’s character (should that be “characters”?) in Split.

Oops, sorry, I guess I could have given a spoiler alert for those movies.  But if I had done that, it would have ruined the surprise!

Of course, from certain points of view, even your typical unqualified** individuals are not as monolithic or monotonic or monotropic or, well, monopersonic as one might imagine.  We know that in split brain patients, when the corpus callosum is severed to reduce the problem of, for instance, uncontrollable seizures, the two sides of the person’s brain can act and think in some ways like two separate people.  They act like two individuals in other words, though in such circumstances, that word is least applicable, since if anyone is “undivided”, it is not these people.

But they are only a special, more extreme version of that which is true of the rest of us.  Our minds are all divided into many separate modules and centers, often running largely in parallel with each other.  There is no one central, “terminal goal” region of the mind; there are separate and conflicting areas and aspects, and even they are not constant.  Many introspective practices, particularly those associated with Buddhism, recognize that the concept of an individual, homuncular “self” is nebulous at best and is never even close to being real.

It seems the term “individual” is just as incorrectly presumptuous for people as the term “atom”*** is for, well, atoms.  However, if we’re referring to more physical literality, then it’s still pretty accurate, certainly for everything more complex than a flatworm.  If you start splitting people (and other animals) in pieces, what you get, at best, is a creature with missing bits and lots of dead former body parts.  You don’t get more than one being.  Often you get no one, because you will have killed the person with whom you started.

In such a case, one divided by two might in a sense equal zero.

Of course, even in basic mathematics, if you divide one by ever larger numbers, you get closer and closer to zero (it’s the limit as the denominator goes to infinity).

Speaking of going to infinity, the value of 1 / (701 – x), where x is the number of words I’ve written, has now crossed the singularity at infinity and is asymptotically approaching the x-axis from below.  On the positive side of the x-axis, starting from the beginning of a post’s first draft, that number can never be smaller than 1/701, since even I cannot write a negative number of words****.  But once I’ve passed the 701 point, the numbers can become an infinitesimal negative fraction, in principle.

In practice, I’m practically finished here.  I hope you all have a good day.  I will probably write a post tomorrow.

*Not counting skin and intestinal flora and the like.  If we count those, then we can all, like Walt Whitman, truthfully say “I am large, I contain multitudes”.

**Again, this has nothing to do with the person’s skills or résumé or experience or innate abilities, it’s just saying that one wouldn’t normally feel the need to add any caveats when calling a person an individual.

***Which means, basically, “uncuttable”.  And what we call atoms can indeed be “cut”.

****A number of negative words, on the other hand…

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It’s a prime day for a (slightly) shorter blog post

Morning has broken!

Does anyone out there know a good, reasonably priced morning repair service or person?  I really don’t have the money or time to go pick out and buy a new morning.

Ha ha.

Sorry.  I know that’s quite a stupid joke.  Still, it should give you some idea just how tired I am.

I should have been able to get a decent sleep last night, but I did not.  That shouldn’t be anything new to me, but some days the effects of the insomnia seem to pile up far more than on some other days.  And today is one of those “pile up” days, it seems.

Thus, I intend to make this a relatively short blog post today if I can.  To that end, I’m setting my “target” number of words to be 701 instead of the usual 800*.  701 has the added advantage of being a prime number, which always makes things at least a little bit better from my point of view.

It’s funny how, as numbers get bigger, there seem to be fewer primes (they fall off as something like the natural log of the number range at which you’re looking, if memory serves).  And yet, there are an infinite number of them‒the same “countable infinity” as the natural numbers, “aleph nought”:

Also, we have the twin primes conjecture‒which apparently most mathematicians think is correct‒that there are an infinite number of primes that are with 2 of each other.

It has apparently been proven that there are an infinite number of primes separated by no more than about 500 or some such (it’s probably a lower separation now, but I haven’t looked into it in a while).  That may not seem like much of an accomplishment, but remember, we’re talking infinity here.  No matter how big the numbers get** you will never stop finding new sets of prime numbers that are no more than about 500 apart.

That’s not particularly useful to anyone but number theorists, I suppose, but it seems very interesting to me.

Incidentally, 701 is not part of a pair of twin primes, since 703 is not prime (it has four factors) and 699 is obviously divisible by 3.  And of course there is only one even prime (the number 2) because all other even numbers are divisible by 2.

Sorry, I know many people find these things boring, but I’m a fan of prime numbers.  In any case I’m trying not to be so negative in my blog posts, since I think it bothers a lot of people and may even be contagious at times.

It certainly doesn’t appear to do me any more good than does being a voice crying out in the wilderness, so to speak.  And despite the excellent biblical reference***, voices crying out in the wilderness usually are not heard or received by anyone or anything that can even understand them, let alone offer them any help.

I guess I can still talk about “imaginary” and complex numbers, because they just involve the square roots of negatives, but are not necessarily negative themselves****.  As long as I avoid multiplying them together, I should be able to steer relatively clear of negativity.

Ha ha, again.

I’m trying to try to avoid making other people miserable by expressing my own dark thoughts, so instead it seems I will make others miserable with my bad jokes.  You’re welcome.

Thinking about complex numbers makes me start feeling like I want to learn more about quaternions and spinors and so on, which seem truly fascinating, but about which I have only highly superficial knowledge.

It would be nice to learn more about them.  I probably will not, knowing me and my fatigued and distractible mind, but at least I can maybe be on the lookout for Numberphile videos about related subjects.  There’s at least one YouTube channel with a series on spinors.  Unfortunately, PBS Infinite Series stopped making new videos some time ago, but at least PBS Spacetime is still going strong, as are all of Brady Haran’s excellent channels.

And now, I’m over 701 (in the first draft), and so I’m done (for today at least).  I hope you all have a good day, and that your subsequent good days scale as the number of days, not as any logarithm thereof.

*I almost always go over my target, but at least it gives me a noteworthy place to decide it’s “time to wrap this up”.

**And there are described numbers so large that if you could memorize every digit of them, the information would be so concentrated as to turn your head into a black hole.

***It’s from the book of Isaiah.  John the Baptist supposedly quoted it and referred to himself as that voice, but then again, a lot of the writers of the “New Testament” shoehorned in references to supposed prophecy in the “Old Testament” to make the whole thing seem more sexy-cool (I guess).

****I just have to try to keep to the right upper quadrant of the complex plane.

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“Turning and turning in the widening gyre…”

Well, isn’t this a surprise?

I’m writing a blog post on a Saturday for the first time in quite a while, because at the last minute, the boss sprang on us the notion that he needs us to start coming in on Saturdays again.  Things have been a bit slow the last few weeks, and a company with whom we had made a recent contract has apparently stiffed us a bit.  This is hardly our fault, of course—we had no input in the decision-making process—but we are going to be bearing the brunt of it.

Unfortunately, the coworker with whom I used to alternate Saturdays has already been picking up some shifts at his bartending job on Saturdays, so he cannot work, at least for the foreseeable relatively near future.  So, I’m going to be coming in on Saturdays, it seems.  Because, of course, he has a wife and young daughter to care for and with whom to spend time, whereas I have absolutely no one, so I am expendable.

I admit that I don’t do very much on weekends at the house, but if there was one good thing, it was that on Friday nights I could at least take some Benadryl and force myself to sleep in a little bit on Saturdays.  It’s not ideal rest, of course, if it’s achieved via well-known side-effects of antihistamines.  But it was the best I’ve been able to do, and that extra rest, however far from ideal, did me some good.

I can’t sleep in on Sundays, because I need to do my laundry on Sunday mornings, and I don’t want to have to go traipsing through the other parts of the house while the other renters are up and about.  That’s more stressful than getting up early.

I swear, there are times when I suspect that my boss wants me to kill myself.  If so, I wish he would just say so.  I’m amenable to the idea, especially if I could get some help to make it go easier.

This has not been a very good birthday week for me.  In fact, I don’t think I exaggerate by saying that the birthdays that passed while I was in PRISON were better than this week.  At least then, I could hold on to the delusional idea that, once I got out, life would be better.

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!!

I think more and more often—or, well, it feels as though that’s the case—that I ought just to embrace my innate nature as a destroyer and commit myself to the destruction of the entire human race.  We have no business contaminating the rest of the universe with our presence, or with the presence of our emissaries, if we create some AI-based self-replicating robots or whatever to send out.  We can’t even manage the minor issues of our current “civilization”; what business have we trying to colonize the galaxy, let alone the universe?

We could wipe out everyone—and probably lots of other species—with another mass extinction, and then nature has plenty of time to develop another technological civilization if it’s so inclined before the sun goes red giant.  Of course, whatever they might be could be no better than humans are.  There’s no reason, for instance, to imagine that any kind of animal currently alive on Earth would manage things better if they were suddenly granted the capacity to have a technological civilization.  But at least it would be out of our hands.  We would be laid to sleep like the children in the nursery rhyme prayer, dying before we wake.

We certainly are not awake now.  Look around you.  The most powerful nations (ever) on Earth are in the hands of collections of moral imbeciles.  As always, as Yeats pointed out, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / are full of passionate intensity.”  There are logical, causal reasons for this fact, but they do not make it easier to stomach.

I hate this fucking planet.  I hate this fucking species.  In fact, I’m not fond of the universe overall, at the moment.  If I could imagine a way to trigger a vacuum collapse that would wipe out everything, I would consider doing it.  But that’s at best a hypothetical possibility.

I guess I have to start somewhat smaller.

Contrary to popular imagining, there is no danger in creating, for instance, a small black hole in a particle accelerator, even if we had an accelerator with that capability.  Small black holes disappear almost instantly, vanishing in flashes of Hawking radiation.  Even if they didn’t, a miniature black hole would almost certainly just sink to the center of gravity of the Earth and perhaps do a bit of extra heating of the core.

Black holes don’t magically suck things into themselves, they merely gravitate just like anything else of equivalent mass (which would be tiny indeed for one produced from a particle accelerator).  Yes, anything that passes the event horizon cannot escape, but for a subatomic black hole, that horizon would be unimaginably tiny.  Even a black hole with the mass of the whole Earth would only be the (outer) size of a pea.

One could and can, of course, create thermonuclear reactions without requiring a fission explosion (which requires rarer materials) to trigger it.  A network of lasers triggering local fusion in appropriately placed samples could direct that energy toward a lithium deuteride* core and generate enough heat to trigger a growing chain of explosions.  But such a “bomb” would need to be large and stationary.

Still, one could set up a dummy corporation with branches in numerous large cities throughout the world and build those bombs, maybe also setting them up in “research outposts” in Antarctica and/or the Arctic, to melt the polar ice caps.  Possibly putting some similar “research facilities” near the thin-points of various volcanoes and super volcanoes would also enhance the outcome.

Alternatively, one could use a particle accelerator to generate anti-matter and store it.  Now this would be quite a technical challenge, since one cannot store neutral antimatter easily—it annihilates if it touches any normal matter, and so it is generally stored in electrically charged forms such as positrons and antiprotons, in evacuated chambers, contained by powerful magnetic fields.  It’s not an efficient way to do things, but one could, possibly, store enough of it that, once one released the magnetic containment, one could unleash an explosion that would make the Tsar Bomba look like one of those little paper poppers we used to play with when we were kids.

There are other ways, of course, to do things.  I’ve mentioned before that it wouldn’t be all that hard to use rockets to redirect the orbits of large asteroids so they were more likely to collide with the Earth.  Or one could genetically engineer and mass-produce a more hardy and virulent form of anthrax (for instance) and disperse it aerially over major cities.

I guess the point is I’m not in a good mood, and it would probably be better for all of humanity, as well as for me, if I were to cease to exist.  I’m so tired of everything.

I hope you’re having a nice weekend.

*Although, for the lithium to be converted to tritium most efficiently, on needs a source of neutrons, which are handily provided by primary fission explosions in usual thermonuclear weapons.  I suspect one could arrange alternate sources with only minimal effort.

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“What IS real? How do you DEFINE ‘real’?”

Well, it’s Friday again, as happens if one waits long enough, but it wasn’t Thursday here yesterday.  Okay, well, that’s an exaggeration, obviously.  I simply didn’t write a blog post yesterday because I was out sick‒I ate something that chose to take vicious, but thankfully temporary, revenge on me for having eaten it‒and when I don’t go to the office, I don’t usually do a blog post.

It would be a somewhat interesting universe if time were constrained in some fashion by my blog post writing, or even defined by it.  Of course, that’s pretty vanishingly unlikely, since it would not readily be able to explain all of history‒including my own life and memories‒from before I started writing my blog and before blogs even existed.

There are philosophical and mathematical prestidigitations that can be performed that can allow one at least entertain the notion that all those memories and all those historical records are in their present configuration by mere chance, but such arguments tend to bite themselves in the ass by destroying all basis for believing in any specific laws of nature, including the probabilistic/entropic ones that, in principle, allow for such things.

Anyway, here I am, heading to the office on Friday, the first “real”* day after Wednesday, though I’m still a bit beat.

Given that last fact, I hope you’ll excuse me if I’ve nothing profound or even interesting to say today.  It’s the tail end of a week that should or at least could have been one of reasonable celebration, if I were inclined to consider the fact that I have lived another year something to celebrate.  Alas, I don’t have any strong inclination to consider that so, and I guess that’s just as well, because it hasn’t been a very good week for me.  I feel exhausted, and this is only “first thing in the morning”.

I don’t think I actually am literally exhausted, in the sense of being completely and thoroughly used up, because I am, after all, going to work and writing this.  A car with no gasoline does not even start let alone move**.  Whereas I am still moving, and contrary to some popular sayings, one cannot keep moving out of spite or stubbornness or whatever similar notions might be applied.  I don’t mean to dismiss the power of stubbornness, let alone of spite, but they do not (and cannot****) allow one to violate the laws of physics.

I am simply very fatigued‒physically, yes, and also emotionally, mentally, even “spiritually”, however that last word might be defined.  I don’t know how close to the bottom of my personal tank I really am.  Goodness knows, I wouldn’t have been surprised to have died at least twelve years ago, or even twenty.  I did not die (as you might be able to tell), so in a certain sense, my surprise is that I am alive.  But it’s not much of a happy surprise.  I certainly don’t feel any giddy joy over the fact that I have gotten through all the nonsense in my life so far without it killing me.

Still, it would be churlish and pathetic of me (perish the thought!) not to admit that there are still moments and occasions of joy and even happiness (which John Galt described as a state of noncontradictory joy, and I rather like that interpretation of the word).  But it would be nice to have occasional truly pain-free days.

Oh, well.  The universe does not conform to anyone’s wishes nor bend to the best interests of any given individual or even all individuals‒not as far as I can see.  But if the world did bend to my will in such matters, then all my readers would have a wonderful day today, and that would be the start of a long‒perhaps unbroken‒string of wonderful days hereafter.

And heck, everyone else might as well have wonderful days, also.  For it is difficult even for the most prosperous to be reliably and persistently happy in a world where there is gross injustice and undeserved misery.

*If by “real” we mean “days defined by the writing, by me, of one of my blog posts”, and if by “me” we mean the first person objective singular pronoun referring to Robert Elessar, the author of this blog (among other things).  But, of course, we don’t mean such a thing when we use the word “real” and though I define “me” that way, you would probably define it differently, but in very specifically different ways.  This is all just me (the same “me” from earlier) being somewhat silly.

**Well…unless it’s an electric car (or even a diesel*** powered car).  Ideally, one probably doesn’t want any gasoline in an electric car.  Gasoline in an electric engine is just a fire hazard.  It’s not a good conductor, so it probably wouldn’t cause the engine to short out directly, but once ignited, the fire could create local ions/plasmas that could conduct electricity and thus, among other things, short out the workings of the motor.  That would probably be among the least of the problems such fire caused, though.

***I once knew a guy who modified an old diesel Mercedes so that it ran on peanut oil.  Due to economies of scale, it was actually more expensive to drive than other cars, but at least it ran on a renewable fuel, of sorts.

****This is definitional, in my view:  anything that actually happens is, perforce, allowed by the laws of physics.  If you find something that seems to violate the laws of physics as you know them, that’s just an indictment of your understanding‒of the events and/or of the laws of physics.  This isn’t a horrible thing; it’s a chance to learn something new.

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If the vacuum collapses, everything gets messy

It’s Wednesday morning now, and I feel slightly better than I did yesterday, which should probably be no surprise.  I went back to the house last night, and I had a decent sleep‒for me, anyway‒and no major evening issues.  Now I am working my way toward the office.  It’s payroll day, so it should be at least mildly more hectic than most other days, but it shouldn’t be too unbearable.

Well, it shouldn’t be unbearable at all.  I mean, the state of being unbearable or not is a purely binary thing, isn’t it?  Either something is bearable or it is not.  If something is unbearable, then it cannot be borne.  So, saying something is not “too unbearable” is probably almost always nonsensical.  I suppose one could imagine something being only just unbearable, so that one could almost be able to bear it…but not quite, and one would finally be forced to succumb to whatever outcome that entailed, despite one’s possibly heroic struggles.

In some ways that sounds like it could be worse than something being thoroughly and unequivocally unbearable.  If one can see that something is truly unbearable, one will probably be less likely even to try to bear it.  One would not bother attempting to style out the brunt of a supernova; if one could not get far enough away, one would presumably just close one’s eyes and grit one’s teeth and take what comfort one could in knowing that the explosion will probably happen and obliterate one faster than any nerve impulse could propagate.

That’s one of the (tiny) comforts about the possibility of there being a “vacuum collapse” of the universe, in which the present “dark energy” vacuum state could, hypothetically, quantum tunnel down to a lower, truer vacuum state than the present one*, releasing that potential energy drop in such a way that wipes out all currently existing particles/fields.

This would erase everything in our visible universe (the “visible” part is deliberate and crucial; do you see why?**) in a sort of wave of collapse that starts at the site of the first state change, like the propagation of ice crystals forming in hitherto supercooled water.  But though it would be a shame, from our point of view, it would be one we would never experience, since the bubble of state change would expand at the speed of light.  It would thus be literally impossible to see it coming, because once you could see it, it would already be there, and you would be wiped away before you could possibly be aware that it was happening.

By the way, this possibility is “only” hypothetical; we aren’t even sure it could happen, not least because we’re not sure whether the vacuum state of the universe is as low as it can go or not, among other things.  But don’t worry:  if the vacuum collapse of the cosmos doesn’t kill you, something else will.

Even my truly immortal vampires in Mark Red might be wiped out by vacuum collapse.  I suspect they would, which might be a comfort to many of them, so to speak.  Of course, that would depend very much on how the “supernatural” forces in that book’s universe interact with the vacuum state and other quantum fields.  It’s not inconceivable that they might survive even that.  How’s that for horrifying?

These are odd thoughts for a Wednesday morning, aren’t they?  I mean, on a Thursday they wouldn’t be that odd, and even less so on a Friday.  On a Saturday they would be almost boringly predictable.  But on a Wednesday morning?  That’s just, well…odd, as I said.

I’m being silly.  My apologies.

I guess it’s more uplifting than is the prospect of universal Armageddon***.  Though, really, the Tao te Ching (in the version with which I am familiar) encourages us to embrace death with our whole hearts because that will help us to be prepared for most everything else we can encounter.

It does not encourage us to love death or to seek it; quite the contrary.  We are merely encouraged to accept it, not just intellectually but viscerally, to internalize***** it.  This is one of those curious circumstances in which the Tao to Ching and the movie Fight Club give the same advice, which is no indictment of that advice in either direction.

I try not to indulge in the vice of advice, but I will express my hope that every one of you who reads this post today or any of my other posts has a particularly good day, today and every day hereafter.

You’ve suffered enough already.

*This is analogous to what is thought to have happened when the “inflaton” field dropped down to a much lower energy level about 13.8 billion years ago, releasing the differential energy as the very hot soup of elementary particles that eventually became the universe we see.

**Okay, fine, I’ll explain.  It’s not just that the wave is expanding at the speed of light and so one would “see” it only as it hits.  But, given the current, accelerating expansion of the universe, the wave of change could never, even in principle, reach areas of the cosmos that are outside our cosmic horizon, because those places are receding from us faster than the speed of light/causality.  There is no causal influence from us that can ever reach them, or vice versa (assuming no wormholes or warp drives or similar).  Likewise, someplace beyond our horizon****** could be collapsing already, but we need never worry, because that collapse is not going to reach us (unless it changes the rate of overall cosmic expansion or even reverses it, which is not inconceivable.  We might then find ourselves in (or near) an anti-deSitter space, in which case, well…yeah).

***Not to be confused with the often misused**** term “apocalypse” which is basically just synonymous with “revelation”.  It’s become associated with the end of the world (and with lesser catastrophes) because one of the alternative titles of the book of Revelation is “The Apocalypse of Saint John the Divine” or whatever they called that nut bar.

****That rhymed, and it had a good rhythm too, both quite by accident.  I did that in yesterday’s or Monday’s post as well, but I didn’t call attention to it.  Can you find it now?

*****I would love to be able to use the term to grok it as in Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, but much as when Fuckerberg stole the term “metaverse” from me, likewise Elon Musk and the would-be tech boys who idolize him have arrogated the term “grok” and made it embarrassing to use.  Don’t even get me started on the disgusting theft of the word Palantir by Peter Thiel.  He deserves to be tortured interminably for the unmitigated gall he has shown in daring to use that term, but I would accept his immediate, painless disintegration and that of his company.

******Speaking of horizons, it is interesting to wonder what a vacuum state collapse would do to currently existing black holes.  I suspect they would basically be impervious to it, since the vacuum state is something that exists within spacetime, with the gravitational field as the backdrop of other quantum fields, but we don’t necessarily know enough about quantum gravity to feel very sure, as far as I know.  I suspect it might change the specifics of Hawking radiation at the level of the event horizon, and thus change the specific rate of black hole decay.  Also, I think in the first rush of particles generated by such a vacuum decay, most black holes would grow briefly with the influx of newly released energy all around them that had previously been bound up in the vacuum energy.  But that’s just my initial intuition.

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Decoherence–but nothing overtly quantum mechanical

You might be interested to know that I am not writing this blog post on my smartphone on the way to the office.  Neither am I writing it on the mini lapcom on the way to the office.  I am actually writing this while already at the office, because I did not go back to the house last night.

The trains were running late, and when they run late, they also run crowded, because of the pileup of people for what would have been later trains, at least until you get to the first on-time train after all the late ones.  That one tends to be nice and light.  But goodness knows when that train would have come, and it occurred to me that…well, no one was waiting for me at the house (no one ever is), and there was no point in getting there late only to have to get up and come in to the office today.

So, I walked back to the office and just stayed here.  I ordered a mildly “celebratory” dinner from Outback to mark the day.  It was okay‒not great, not bad.  It certainly beat, say, a bag of chips or something along those lines.  It almost certainly was not worth what it cost, but I could have ordered something from Morton’s, which has steaks starting at over $70.  And that was not the most expensive place available on Uber Eats for steak!!

Anyway, I watched some music videos and reaction videos and sat around and‒well, I won’t get into my thought processes and whatnot.  There are some things that are negative enough and worrisome enough for people that I don’t really want to share them.  I’m sure people who read this regularly probably would find that difficult to believe, but it’s true; I have thoughts that are dark enough or weird enough or negative enough that I don’t talk about them, here or pretty much anywhere else.

I feel very beat up* overall, as I’m sure is not a surprise.  That’s not because I slept on the floor; that actually tends to be beneficial for my back, at least a little**.  But I certainly didn’t sleep as much as I might have, especially considering the fact that I spared myself the time of my commute.  But my insomnia has never been particularly well-attuned to usefulness, though at times it has been useful.  It certainly was handy during residency, in its way.

It is quite unpleasant, though, even when it is useful.  I haven’t felt well-rested in a very, very, very long time.

As for anything else, well, I certainly didn’t write any fiction yesterday, to no one’s real surprise.  I did feel the urge to play my guitar and sing a bit very late at night, but I decided that would be a little weird‒even for me‒and just in case anyone was near enough to hear and be disturbed***, I decided not to do it.

I worried most of yesterday about some trouble that I suddenly started having with my right shoulder, which is usually not a source of difficulty for me.  My right forearm and elbow have been giving me a lot of trouble lately, and maybe that’s working its way up the arm, who knows?  But I don’t mean to imply literally that I think it’s some form of creeping arm malaise that’s working its way up.  Rather, something that affects distal joints can create atypical tensions that hurt the body more proximally; think of how, when your ankle is acting up, it can affect your knee and hip and even back, triggering them also to have exacerbations.

Maybe that doesn’t happen to you.  But I assure you, it happens to me, and I think something like it has probably caused this new irritation and feeling of decreased mobility and new soreness and weakness (from tenderness, not actual loss of strength) in my right shoulder.

That’s about it, really.  There’s nothing else going on, not in my “life” anyway.  This is as good as it gets, and I doubt it will get this good again.  I’m very tired.  I wish I were sick with something more acute, something that would kill me or at least knock me out of commission for a while.  Unfortunately, one of the detrifits of being so socially uncomfortable is that I don’t get exposed to as many communicable pathogens as I otherwise might.

Oh, well, you know what they say:  If you want something done right…

Enough.  It’s been a blog post.  I hope you’ve found at least a moment’s interest in reading it, if you’ve read it.  I know people like to rubber-neck at roadside traffic accidents, so maybe my absurdity and distaste can at least engender some prurient interest.

I hope you have a good day, in any case.

*It’s slightly amusing that “beat up” has such a different meaning from “upbeat”.

**In any case, I always sleep on the floor, though at the house I have a modest futon.

***Or any other relatively high-end heavy metal band.

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Celebrate good times? Come ON.

I had a notion this weekend that I would write this blog post on Sunday afternoon/evening and set it up to publish itself‒so to speak‒this morning.  Then, I would use this morning to perhaps review an/or rebegin HELIOS, or maybe to work on Outlaw’s Mind or DFandD.  I even thought I could write any of those‒especially HELIOS‒on my smartphone, since I have them on Google Docs as well as MS Word.

So I thought, anyway.  When I looked, though, I found that I don’t actually appear to have any version of HELIOS on my Google drive, so it must either be on Word or I never typed in the little bit I had of it.  Of course, I could have just decided to restart and bring one of my spiral bound notebooks and write in that.  The only trouble with doing it that way, if I write during my morning commute, is that I eventually have to retype everything into one of my computers or smartphones.

Now, I have never done the thing* of handwriting a first draft and then copying it into a phone, but I have done that with handwriting and computer word processors.  That method has produced some of my best stuff (by some measures), including Mark Red, The Chasm and the Collision, Paradox City, and even part of The Vagabond, though that last one was written mainly on WriteNow on a Mac SE.  So, maybe the handwritten-to-smartphone idea could actually work pretty well, now that I think about it.

Anyway, all that’s fairly moot, because I did not in fact write this blog post on Sunday afternoon nor yet on Sunday evening.  I am writing it, as I usually do, in the morning, in the midst of my commute to the office, which is so effing early, but which is nevertheless far later than when I woke up.

I’m more than a bit disappointed in myself for failing to carry through with that idea, but it’s easy to think of ideas that seem so doable when you first think of them.  And they are doable, of course.  Not only is it physically possible for me to have written this post yesterday evening and to set a precedent of doing the blog posts in the evening and writing fiction in the morning, it’s banal.  If you told someone that had happened, they would be unlikely to do much more than shrug and say something like a noncommittal “cool”, before going on their way.

But as we all know‒or should know‒it’s much easier to intend to do things in the future than it is to muster the motivation to do them in the moment when one was hoping to do them.  There are many shifting, often conflicting, drives in the human** psyche, and our actions are born of a kind of vector sum of all those “forces” in any given moment.

But not only do those forces shift due to things as seemingly mundane as one’s current state of appetite or fatigue, but they are also affected by what one has done immediately before; for the outcome of that vector sum in one instant feeds back on the system in numerous places, changing the sum (I was going to write “changing the calculus” but I thought that might be mathematically confusing and even misleading, since I am not discussing calculus) with every new iteration.  These iterations and changes aren’t quite happening on the scale of the Planck time***, but they happen quickly‒certainly at least at the “speed of thought”, whatever that might be.

Even the physiological, hormonal, energy state of the body from moment to moment changes those vectors, sometimes a great deal.  If you find yourself needing to use the bathroom while you’re trying to accomplish some task, it can certainly change the state of your concentration.  And if you should suddenly begin to have difficulty breathing, it will distract you from pretty much anything else.

That’s why on airplanes they tell you that, in case of cabin depressurization, if you’re traveling with someone who needs help putting on the oxygen mask, put yours on first, before you help your companion.  If you can’t breathe, your ability to help anyone else is going to tank very rapidly.  We can live weeks to months without food, days without water, but only minutes without air.

On a less extreme angle, if one is hypoglycemic (for whatever reason), it strongly affects all the functions of one’s body, particularly one’s neuroendocrine system.  Less extreme but more persistent issues can sabotage one’s focus upon much else.

I don’t need to tell you, probably, that pain makes it much harder to focus and bring effort to bear on other things.  This is one of the most annoying aspects of chronic pain:  one does not quite ever become accustomed to it, because that would miss the whole biological point of pain.  Making pain something you could ignore would be a bit like making a fire alarm that plays soft, easy-listening elevator music at unobtrusive decibel levels.  It would be less annoying, but being burned to death in a fire is a bigger issue, even if it isn’t very likely.

Of course, if your (typical) fire alarm is stuck on, you may not ever be able completely to ignore it.  You also will not know when there is a real fire. Or at least you will be less likely to know.  And since that can potentially be a matter of life and death, the chronic alarm, like chronic pain, is in its own manifold ways life-threatening.

All that is very tangential to my original point, which was that I am writing this blog today, not writing fiction (at least not this morning on my commute).

Oh, well.  If there’s one day I can let myself get away with slacking a bit, I guess it’s today.  I hope you all have a good one.

*How’s that for clever, descriptive writing?

**Or whatever I am.

***Though the processes that underlie them do.

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I can’t think of an appropriate Shakespeare-based title I haven’t already used

Hello and good morning.

Actually, though, I’m at least starting this blog post on Wednesday evening as I wait for my train.  I will have edited it Thursday morning, however.  I know this for a definitive fact, because this very sentence, and the immediately preceding one, is being/has been written on Thursday morning, while I’m editing.

Right now, though—that being Wednesday evening—I feel like I won’t have the energy for anything tomorrow.  I don’t think I would have the energy to breathe if it were not an automatic process.

All of this is getting too tedious; everything is getting tedious.  It’s the same old stupid thing after the previous same old stupid thing before the next same old stupid thing, and there’s no point and no joy in almost any of it.  It’s just compulsion; it’s just habit.  It’s just the fear that, if I stop doing this, I don’t think I’ll do anything else.

But why should I do anything else?  Why not just stop everything?

It would have no significant impact on anyone or anything.  It’s certainly unlikely to make things worse overall.  The world is as shitty as it’s ever yet been in my lifetime.  Humans have become ever more disappointing—not all of them mind you, but so many have become so disappointing that the good ones seem fewer and further between.

Of course, I’m pretty disappointing myself, albeit for somewhat different reasons than most.  So I don’t really have much right to complain.  It’s not as though I’m not a loser, after all.

Yeah, I think maybe I’m pretty much close to done—with everything.  I certainly don’t have any desire to celebrate having lived yet another pointless year in which I produce nothing of value and just wallow in the fact that biological existence has a tendency to continue—at least up to a point—if it’s not actively curtailed.

I’m so tired all the time, and I’m in pain all the time.

Just earlier today (Wednesday), it occurred to me—though I’ve probably said this before—that I feel as though I’ve already been embalmed, because just moving around in any way, just kicking any of my joints into flexion or extension, is difficult and often painful.  I feel stiff and sore; I also feel like my limbs are somewhat out of place, though it may be hard to convey that sense adequately.

I’m uncomfortable in my body and uncomfortable in my mind.  There are very few compensations.

I’m not saying there are none, and they are definitely nice when they happen, but they are few and far between, like tiny oases in a desert.  They are also bits of relief that I certainly do not deserve.

I’m also tired of complaining all the time.  I feel that it has to get really old for the people who read this blog.  But I don’t have much that’s more upbeat or uplifting to say.  I certainly don’t have much positive to say about myself.  I’ve failed at everything that actually matters to me, and at quite a few things that don’t, despite my supposed gifts and abilities.

It’s enough.  I really just ought to die soon.  My birthday is coming up; it would be appropriate for that to be the day I died.  At least it would have a nice faux symmetry.  It doesn’t really matter, of course, but I like symbols and symmetries and timing and so forth.  I just feel…well, I don’t feel like continuing, I don’t feel like putting in any more effort.  It’s useless and pointless and irritating.

Maybe I’ll feel different in the morning.  Maybe I’ll feel worse*.  Maybe I’ll develop enough resolve to take final action of some kind—I certainly have plenty of methods and means available.  I’ve been collecting and preparing such means of egress for a long time—I have nooses, and blades, and flammable liquids, and nonrebreather masks and tubing and regulator valves that could be used to deliver inert gases, and I have rat poison and various other potential toxins, for instance.

Or maybe I’ll develop enough energy to continue for a bit longer, however pointless it may be.

But I don’t know what to do.  I’m not sure what I’m going to do.  The only thing I have to which to look forward is occasionally seeing my youngest child, which started recently.  That’s always very nice, of course; that’s wonderful beyond easy explication.  But I feel—I must admit this may just be my mental illness speaking—that it’s an unkind obligation I’m putting on them, though I do not want to denigrate them or cast aspersions on their character.  That would be most unjust.

So it’s probably in my mind.  Nevertheless, I feel that I am causing undue trouble for them, and that I am not worth that trouble, not in the slightest.

I don’t know what to do.  I am so exhausted by everything, and I feel that I am nothing but pathetic.  I just want to exit, to escape, to be able to stop trying, even if it’s not truly what one could call “rest”.  I just need to let go—or something.

Whatever.  We’ll see.  I may not even post this post tomorrow morning.  I may just write something else**.  I don’t know.

TTFN

*This is a morning footnote, and it’s hard to say whether I feel different.  I feel slightly more rested, of course; I’m probably not rested enough, since my body doesn’t seem to like to indulge itself in getting enough rest.  I’m certainly still stiff and in pain, but I also nevertheless did my pull-ups this morning, so I have a bit more energy.  Also, I am a creature of habit, but I am not a nun, though I am worth none.

**I have not.  This is just the edited version of the post I wrote yesterday evening.