insomnia

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From Cyber Monday to confidence mistakes

Well, it’s Monday now, and we’re “seeing how it goes”, I guess.

This is the last Monday of November in 2022.  The Monday after Thanksgiving is sometimes called “Cyber Monday”, but that’s really just a marketing gimmick* invented by companies that sell electronics and related things, to encourage people—preferably without making them think too much—to buy computers and phones and items in those categories as part of their Christmas (or other holiday) shopping.

I think the term Black Friday was something that happened more or less organically; it’s hard to imagine retailers and marketers deliberately choosing something that sounds similar to the names given to the dates of various stock market crashes and so on.  No, it was a term born of legitimate lamentation about just how unpleasantly busy malls and other commercial establishments become on the day after Thanksgiving, when a good percentage of people in the USA would have the day off, and would be unable to deny that the Big Holiday was coming, and that they hadn’t gotten much, if any, of their shopping for it done.

But, of course, smart marketers still took advantage of the term and began setting Black Friday sales and the like.  When there’s a source of available resources, of one kind or another, and a busy ecosystem, something will eventually arise to exploit the resource.

Although, to give full disclosure, apparently it took millions upon millions of years for fungi (and possibly other types of microorganisms, I’m not sure) to evolve that could break down the wood of the oodles of plants that had grown and died in the “carboniferous era”, and that’s why those wood carcasses just lay around, and got buried, and for quite a few million years sequestered that carbon, but were converted by pressure and time into coal and so on.  There was a lot of it, obviously, but it is finite, and we’ve gone through much of those millions of years of cellulose creation (from the very air), and returned a good chunk of it to the atmosphere from whence it came, in a precipitous fashion.

It’s going to take more than just tree planting, I suspect, to counter that, because we can’t plant (and grow) many millions of years of trees in the space of a human lifetime.  The solutions are going to have to be at least a bit cleverer than brute natural selection, and probably multifarious, or else brute natural selection will do what it usually does and eliminate a great many forms of life.

It remains to be seen whether the human race will be smart enough to survive for much longer.  The various faces of politics and social media and the like don’t exactly fill me with optimism, but it’s difficult to make reasonable predictions about such things, because we don’t have any good prior data from which to draw our conclusions.  There have been no previous technological civilizations on Earth, and we’ve found no evidence of any out in the rest of the galaxy or beyond, so we just don’t really know one way or the other.  Anyone who confidently make claims about the future (without explicit or at least implicit caveats) is overconfident, more or less by logical definition.

I’m not one of those people who is impressed by confidence, by self-assurance, let alone by dogmatism or arrogance—though back when I was a pre-teen and into my teens I held a spot of envy for such attitudes.  Honestly, though, now I think overconfidence is generally reprehensible.  Holding beliefs that do not scale with the evidence has been a source of some of the greatest atrocities the human race has ever committed, against other humans and the rest of the world.

Beware of people who are certain without adequate reasons for certainty.  And by “adequate”, I mean reasons that would convince a disinterested extraterrestrial of good intelligence and emotional restraint without any preconceived notions one way or the other, not that would convince some naïve group of humans, even a lot of them.

Overconfidence is truly dangerous, and most of the confidence that people tend to try to invoke or evoke or project is overconfidence.  It’s not a coincidence, nor is it wrong, that “con artist” is short for “confidence artist”.  I recommend against trusting anyone who wants you to trust them rather than to be convinced by their evidence and argument.  It may do you good to remember that “trust” is really always just another word for “calculated risk”.  Try to make your own risk calculations as accurate as you can make them.

Anyway, that’s my meandering blog post for today.  I don’t really have energy to write much more.  I had a particularly bad week last week, so I haven’t made progress on reviewing Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s Disease, and I want to get a better review in before I write any more about them.  I also have a request—from my sister—to write something about the problems and dangers of sugar.  That’s something that doesn’t require nearly as much review, but I’m not up to doing it today.

I don’t feel much better than I did last week, if any at all; I’ll have to see how the day goes.  But it’s not as though the holiday season is over.  Also, the daylight is getting shorter and shorter, and will be doing so for more than three weeks—although, this being near a local minimum of the sine curve, the rate of change is shrinking, and will reach its minimum absolute value right when the daylight reaches its minimum.  Of course, that also means that even once days start getting longer again, the change is going to be very slow at first, and hardly noticeable.

I honestly don’t know how (or if) I’m going to make it through until Spring.  No one has yet given me any good arguments for doing so, certainly none such as might convince a  disinterested extraterrestrial with no preconceived notions on the matter.  And, as I’m the closest thing to an alien that I’ve ever met, I’m better at making that judgment than many others might be.

But I don’t know for sure.  I do know that I’m tired, and I’m sad, and I’m frustrated, and I’m lonely, and I’m confused, and I don’t feel well.  I also can’t seem to sleep very well at all, even for me.  My world is a miserable place, and it doesn’t seem to be getting better over the course of my life.  I don’t know whether the future is therefore likely to be better, or is more likely to be worse still, or what.

I do have my doubts that it’s worth much effort, though.  Again, I guess we’ll see.  Or, perhaps, we won’t see.  Maybe no actual answers will ever be forthcoming.  If so, that’s okay.  I’d rather be uncertain than have firm beliefs that don’t have good, sound, reasonable bases.  I hope you feel much the same.

*Like “non-GMO” and “organic” and “gluten free” are, for the most part, though for those with actual celiac disease, that last one can be a truly serious matter.

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The Monday misadventures of a moribund moron

I’m writing this blog post under rather unusual—but not entirely unprecedented—circumstances:  I’m already in the office (and using my laptop!) as I write this because I never returned to the house last night.

I had boarded the usual southbound train, but even as I did, I felt a vague sense of foreboding.  Well—it wasn’t all that vague, come to think of it, because there had been an announcement flashed up that one of the northbound trains was delayed thirty to sixty minutes due to an accident involving the train.  This never bodes well.  The Amtrak heading southbound had already dilly-dallied in the station about fifteen minutes longer than it ought to have, delaying the train for which I was waiting.  Still, the southbound train came, only about twenty minutes later than usual, and I got on it, foolish child that I am.

Two stops along, the train came to a station and the conductor and guards came around saying that everyone had to get off the train, that there would be shuttles coming to bring us down south to the next station or something along those lines.  I didn’t have much choice but to join the crowd, heading for the rough bus-boarding area of the station, but the noises from the nearby engine, and the crowd, and the tightly packed, noisy bodies—as well as the unexpected change in routine—were all quite stressful.

I waited for a while, texting my sister and a coworker, mainly to try to relieve my tension, trying to figure out if either the house or the office were in reasonable walking distance.  The office was ten miles north (workable in a pinch) but the house was twenty-one miles south.  By the time I reached it on foot, it would have been almost time to get up and leave for work.

A few city buses came and went—these weren’t the shuttles, but some people got on them, desperate just to get moving, I suppose.  I couldn’t really tell what anyone was saying or doing, because the tinnitus in my right ear had been acting up ferociously all day, and I could (and can) hear even less on that side than usual.  In any case, I wasn’t going to get on the bus, because based on my web search, it would take two and a half hours to get to my destination by bus, if they were even still running down my way by the time I used them.

Soon, though, there was an announcement that a northbound train was coming—going back the way I came—and it was coming on the side of the track that I was on.  The fact that I also had to use the restroom, and there are none of these in the train stations (nor on shuttles, which still hadn’t arrived after nearly an hour) made my decision for me.  I got on the train and rode the two stops back north, got off, and walked to the office, stopping for some unhealthy fast food on the way, because why the hell not?  It’s not as though I particularly want to be healthy (though I do want to be thinner—I’m putting myself on a strict calorie count/restriction now, since it would be nice not to be so fat when I die).

And that’s where I spent the night:  at the office.  My sleep was probably as good as I ever get at the house, though that’s not saying much, and the industrial-carpeted floor is as good for my back as the futon/floor I sleep on at the house.  The only real issue is that I don’t have a shower, and I can’t wear my usual Tuesday clothes today, which is a little distressing.  I also have to wear the same pair of shoes two days in a row, which is quite annoying.  And, of course, I can’t change my socks and underwear.

At least, as I commented to my sister, there’s no one waiting for and/or worrying about me.  There’s never anyone waiting for me to worry about me.  My presence or absence has no impact upon anyone in the world, beyond the immediate and superficial.

So, anyway, here I am at the office already/still, and I don’t have anything else to write about today but the stupid events that happened yesterday evening, which would be far more tolerable if there were any good reason to bother doing any of it.  But there really isn’t.  There’s no point at all to anything I do.

No one has offered me any ideas for topics about which to write; so far there’s apparently nothing about which anyone is interested in my point of view, nothing of worth or of note in my life anymore.  I don’t have any place that I consider—or that feels at all like—home anymore.  I’m lonely and I’m empty, but I find other people stressful and frustrating and their behaviors borderline inexplicable and irrational.  And they’re too loud and chaotic.

On top of that inherent noisiness, of course, there’s that constant, very high D half-sharp* in my right ear, 24 hours a day, that’s been going on for about 15 years or so now, and which has gotten worse recently.  Every now and then, I get a brief run of tinnitus that suddenly pops up in my left ear**, and when it does, I’m horrified that it might be the onset of a permanent noise such as exists in my right ear.

The right ear tinnitus started suddenly, while I was working at the Treasure Coast Forensic Treatment Center, where the heavy metal doors were controlled remotely via a buzzing electromagnetic lock system, and they all had to be slammed shut.  One day while I was there, a shriek suddenly started in my right ear, that piercing, steady, banshee sound vaguely reminiscent of the background noise of an old video monitor that only very young people can hear.  It’s been going on ever since.

Thankfully, it’s only ever lasted less than a minute at a time so far in my left ear.  I don’t know what I would do if it persisted.  I’d be inclined to shove pens and/or pencils into my inner ears bilaterally, but I know that, since tinnitus is related to damage to nerves and closely related structures, such interventions might just do harm without helping stop the noise.

Medical education can be useful sometimes.

Anyway, that’s that.  I’m at the office already, and I’ve told you my dull and dreary, but nevertheless very stressful, tale from last evening to this morning.  If you want me to write about something else, than give me suggestions, as I mentioned yesterday.  Ask me questions.  Ask me anything.  I can’t promise I’ll be able to write about any and/or everything anyone might ask, but I do have a pretty broad knowledge base, and I’m good at learning new things as well.  I would really be interested in your inquiries or suggestions.

Later.

*There seem to be some other notes mixed in, but it’s hard to tease them out, and the D half-sharp is definitely the most prominent one.

**It’s never the same pitch as in my right ear, of course—this is only to be expected, since the nature of tinnitus and the damage that causes it involve processes that are utterly unlikely to coincide, pitch-wise, between the two ears.

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“When comes the storm?”

I brought my laptop with me yesterday after work, and I’m using it to write this post.  I was afraid this morning that I would need to avoid its use.  I was worried that there would be heavy rain and high winds at the train station thanks to the “subtropical storm” morphing into a hurricane that’s bearing straight at the east coast of Florida.  However, this morning it’s just a bit breezy, and the rain is not very impressive—more a drizzle than anything else, though it is steadier than rain tends to be down here.

I have my raincoat on, just in case.

As of yesterday, the announcement was that today the trains would stop running after about 5 pm, so I’m going to need to leave work early if that’s still the case.  In addition, the announcement was that there would be no train service on Thursday, since the storm is predicted to make landfall at around 1 am Thursday morning.  So, I may not be going to work on Thursday, since if the trains aren’t running, the buses aren’t likely to be running, and I have no other reliable way to get to the office.  If that’s the case, I probably won’t be writing my traditional Thursday blog post.

I doubt anyone will mourn.

Maybe I should take this as a sign from the universe that I should just give up on this blog post, as I’ve given up writing fiction or playing guitar or even really listening to any music, let alone singing along.  I get the impression that my post yesterday—which was on a subject I find interesting, and thus about which I tend to go on and on and on, even when writing on my phone—wasn’t particularly interesting to anyone but me.  There’s nothing terribly wrong with that, but it’s a lot of work just to spew my random thoughts into the void, when for the most part, I already know what those thoughts are.

I’ve given myself plenty of such potential “signs” to look out for, that I would take to mean that the universe wants me to stick around.  Not that I really believe in any such nonsense; it’s just a bit of frivolity.  Most of the potential signs I’ve chosen center on my love of numbers; they relate to certain automatically generated codes that happen when processing things at work.

I gave myself more than 10 opportunities over the last several months, and they’ve all failed, which was predictable.  I knew that they weren’t likely—I was looking for palindromic sequences of eight digits in an eight-digit code that turns over very rapidly, since numerous offices and businesses use the service—but I figured, since I’m a fan of numbers, and especially such numbers, if one of them came up honestly, in the normal course of business, I would take it as an indicator to reorient myself somehow, at least for the time being.

I don’t actually imagine that the universe cares one way or another whether I live or die, or indeed, whether anyone or anything lives or dies, except to the extent that the universe contains minds instantiated in flesh.  All of those that might have any pertinent opinion have shown the general tendency to find their lives more comfortable when I am not around them much, as I’m sure I’ve noted ad nauseam in the past.  So, there really is nothing significant holding me here.

Even those distant people with whom I keep in occasional contact, and who would probably be sad for a bit if I were gone, would not experience any true upheaval in their lives.  I’m disconnected from nearly everyone, beyond tenuous cobwebs; the people at the office are the ones who would have the greatest adjustments to make, but these would be rapidly achieved, and some people there would no doubt get raises as they took over some of my duties.

I’m tired, in so many ways.  I’ve slept worse than average even for me this week, probably partly because of the change in the clocks over the weekend.  And the fact that it gets so dark so early in the evening this time of year has never been good for me.  I’m on the first train of the day here, now, but I was up for hours already before I left the house.

I kind of wish for something to take the whole issue out of my hands.  I don’t tend to cross streets against lights deliberately—that would feel utterly impolite and inappropriate to me—but I have been willfully walking into the road even when right turners are approaching the intersections, hoping that someone will be reckless and run into me.  It’s a silly little thing, but if someone caused such an accident, they would be the ones disobeying traffic laws, so the fact that my “gain” would inconvenience them would be appropriate.

So far, I’ve had no luck.  I don’t really expect to have any in this sense—even if someone were to hit me, the speeds are too slow to be likely to be lethal.  Still, I have channeled the Joker (from The Dark Knight) a few times while crossing the street recently, saying, “Hit me, hit me, I want you to do it, I want you to do it,” under my breath as drivers approach the intersections.  Of course—rather obviously—no one has hit me so far.

Wusses.

Oh, they’ve just confirmed with announcements on the train that, yes indeed, there will be no service tomorrow (and today it will stop early) so I don’t plan to write a post tomorrow.  If you’re looking forward to my bastardized Shakespearean quote for the week, I can only apologize, but I’m not going to go out of my way to do it.  It’s not as thought there would be any point, to it or to anything else that I do.

Every day, more and more, I feel like someone lost in a Lovecraftian landscape full of creatures that make little sense to me, and with whom I cannot effectively communicate or interact.  I know that I make no sense to them, also, or at least very little.  I suppose, in a way, I’m the alien, I’m the mutant, so I have no “right” to expect them to try to understand me.

But surely, to Cthulhu or to Yog-Sothoth or to Shub-niggurath, humans and other mortal creatures must look as horrifying and alien as those creatures do to the hapless humans who encounter them in the stories.  Cthulhu may find the presence of humans to be as repulsive (and even frightening) as humans would find an encounter with cockroaches, ants, and mice or rats in their kitchens, in their food.  If it’s evil for Cthulhu to want to destroy humans, then it’s surely just as evil for humans to want to fumigate their homes when they are infested with “pests”.

I know, I know, Cthulhu isn’t real*, but that doesn’t change the point I’m making.  The monster, the outsider—the stranger—can be just as innocent, just as horrified, just as frightened as any human in any scary story.

Fear is not the mind killer, despite what they say in Dune, but prolonged fear is erosive, corrosive, and a burden that can become too great to bear.  And being a stranger in a strange land may be a low-level kind of fear—often more of a stress and tension, really—but it is real.

And even a monster, a stranger, might hope or dream or wish that somewhere, somehow, someone would rescue it, would reach out and try to help it, so that it doesn’t have to feel so lost and alone and afraid.  But it might recognize that it has no actual right to expect that anyone would ever do such a thing, and—seeing as it is a monster, a stranger—that its nature is to be alone until it finally succumbs to its local increasing entropy.

Anyway, that’s nearly all for today.  I won’t be writing anything tomorrow.  As for Friday, well, whether I write anything then will depend on factors such as whether the trains are running again by then so that I’ll be able to get to the office okay, and of course, whether I’m even alive—but, then, it always depends on that latter variable.

In closing, I’ll refer to a different topic.  Many of you are probably aware of the very large Powerball jackpot that was recently won (or so I understand) by some human somewhere.  If you’re interested in reading a story about someone who wins a similarly large jackpot and tries to do good with it, leading to unexpected and earthshaking consequences, you could read my short story, “I for one welcome our new computer overlords” which is available as a standalone story through Kindle, and also as part of my collection Dr. Elessar’s Cabinet of Curiosities, which is available on Kindle and in both paperback and hardcover editions.  I think it’s a pretty good story.  If you read it, I hope you enjoy it, and I’d be grateful for any feedback I’m able to receive.

Stay dry and safe, wherever you are.

*As far as we know.

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It’s Time for a Title

Okay, well, it’s Friday now, and to those of you who have the weekend off—as I do—I hope you’re looking forward to a good one.

It’s November 4th, 2022, and it would have been my mother’s 81st birthday, were she still alive.  I guess, technically, we can still call it her 81st birthday, since we can certainly celebrate the day of her birth readily enough, even if she can’t appreciate the celebration.  The time since her birth is what it is, no matter what, since no one we know is traveling near the speed of light.  Also, probably more people are happy to celebrate the fact that she was born than celebrated my birthday, which was only a few weeks ago, and I’m still alive…in a manner of speaking, anyway.

I have yet to edit and prepare to upload/share my recording of my thoughts about time, and for that, I apologize to those of you who feel that it’s taking too long.  My head has not been as clear as it might usually be this week.  Sleep has been particularly bad, as I think I’ve mentioned before.

This morning, I woke up waaaay before time to get up, and I’m now waiting for the first train of the day.  I didn’t go through the whole prime number evaluation of the time as I did the other day—see my post here—since I had already sorted that problem, but I did get on Amazon and flip through their Kindle book recommendations to see if anything looked interesting.  I put a few on my “list” but didn’t buy any.

I did get a couple of Kindle Unlimited books yesterday about things like signal processing and circuits and some other areas I wish I had learned more about earlier in life, but it remains to be seen whether I’ll get very far in any of them.  Perhaps I will.

I won’t hold my breath, though.  That would be silly.  If I tried to hold my breath until I had read any given book, I would not get far.  Even if it were possible for me to hold my breath indefinitely, I would be dead long before I got into any book; but of course, it’s simply not possible for a person to hold its breath long enough to kill itself.  The breath is controlled by the brainstem, etc., and it can only be briefly squelched by the conscious mind, not deactivated.  It’s not quite as fully outside conscious control as the heartbeat, or the peristalsis of the GI tract, but it’s not up for veto, either, not without pharmaceutical interventions that would certainly interfere with one’s ability to read…and would kill one.

Heck, even the fact of being awake is not something over which a person has conscious control, believe me on that.  You might say that this goes without saying, since to have conscious control of something, one must be conscious, and to be conscious is to be awake.  But it would be nice to be able simply to choose to go to sleep and to stay asleep until some pre-chosen amount of time had passed.  If it could be done, and I could thereby sleep until well-rested, I would do so.

Alas, most of the things we have to try to make our minds do are not as much in our control as we like to imagine they are.  Even our very thoughts are not really ours to choose, for how could we choose what to think without first thinking about what the thing to think would be, and thinking about thinking about what to think, and so on, ad infinitum?  Our thoughts happen to us.  We can try to encourage certain kinds of thoughts and habits of thoughts, of course, by exposing ourselves to certain ideas, putting ourselves in certain situations, rewarding ourselves in some sense when we think about things we like to think about.  But even that is quite tricky and fiddly.

I like Jonathan Haidt’s metaphor of the mind as being a person riding an elephant, with the tiny little person being the conscious mind, but all the real workings of the brain—the motive power, the strength, and ultimately, the decision power—being the elephant.  The conscious mind cannot pick up and move the elephant wherever it wants, nor, apparently, can the mind simply climb off the elephant*.  It is the role of the conscious mind to try to train, to steer, to reward the elephant when it does what the rider wants, to try to discourage it from doing what the rider doesn’t want, and to try to keep it from going on rampages that can be harmful to it and its rider.

My elephant has a very hard time staying still for very long, and it’s always getting me up and wandering around (figuratively and sometimes literally) when I’d rather be resting.  It is a powerful elephant; I’ll give it that.  But it’s a very grumpy, gloomy elephant, and it and the rider have frequent trouble sticking to pleasant pathways.  Somehow, we seem to be inclined toward darkness and coldness, with occasional flames and smoke.

Anyway, I’m pushing that metaphor beyond all bounds of tolerability.  My apologies.

I will try to remember to work on that audio file for thoughts about time, and perhaps to post it on YouTube this weekend if I remember to do so.  I got a decent response to my more recent one on the fact that perception is not reality, and I even got a comment on YouTube, which is a pleasant surprise.  The sound quality on this recording should be better than at least the first part of the sound quality on the last one, though I obviously haven’t really listened through it yet.

I hope again that you all have a good weekend, and that things go well for you in every way they can—which they will, since anything that happens is the only thing that could have happened, once it happens.  Even if we had a rewind button, it wouldn’t necessarily let us change anything, since by rewinding, we would make ourselves the same person, in the same state, as we were the first time things happened to us.  Unless what happened was literally random, it seems unlikely that things would be different on a replay without prior knowledge.

Until next time.

time or not cropped png

*In this, I guess, the metaphor makes the mind almost like a centaur with an elephant body instead of a horse.  But it is just a metaphor, it’s not meant to be a literal, precise model of exactly how things work.  And it’s a good metaphor.

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Fear no more the heat o’ th’ sun Nor the furious winters’ blogs

Hello and good morning.  You should know that it’s Thursday if I use some variant of that greeting.  I got started in that habit early in the course of writing my (then only Thursdays) blog, and got myself locked into the pattern mentally.  Now it would make me very tense and stressed if I were to write a Thursday blog post without that opening.  Likewise with the title being a slightly altered quote from Shakespeare.

I’m writing this on my laptop for the first time this week, because I decided to bring it back from the office yesterday.  It was our first decent business day this week, but I still felt thoroughly rotten, in the sense of being tired and in pain.  I’d been lying awake in “bed” during the night, looking at the clock, deciding when just to give up and get up.  I had seen the time getting to about 3:50 and started thinking about the various three digit numbers coming up.

I knew none of the even numbers were prime, and I knew 351 wasn’t prime, since the sum of its digits is a multiple of three*.  But 353 looked like it might be prime, so I started checking it in my head.  Obviously it wasn’t divisible by any even number, nor by 3, nor by any multiple of 5, so I started trying from 7, then 11, then 13, then 17, then 19, then 23, then 29…by that time I was getting suspicious.  The next prime was 31, and I tried that in my head, but it wasn’t divisible, because after you divide the first two digits by 31, you’re left with 43 remainder, which is clearly not going to be evenly divisible, so I stopped there with that.  And the next prime number was bigger than 35 (it’s 37), which started making it look like 353 might be prime.

I cheated then, turned to my computer and checked with Google if 353 was prime**, and it said it was.  That was good enough for me.  I decided to get up at 3:53, which by that point was about a minute and a half away.

Thus, I got on the first train, and luckily, there were no “trespasser strikes” or any other kind of delays, and my train arrived and left at the scheduled time.  I definitely am not going to kill myself by jumping in front of a commuter train (or probably any other train).  I don’t like hypocrisy, and to be worn out by delays only to cause them oneself would be petty and spiteful in a way that I would prefer not to be in my swansong.  I need to do something less intrusive.

That’s all unless, of course, I give up on trying to be polite and just act on some impulse that comes at the right time in the right place, and fuck all the humans if it causes them problems.

I’m sitting in a different seat on the train than I usually use, because I didn’t feel up to climbing to the top level.  I worry that I’m sitting in someone else’s usual seat, but it’s very non-crowded on the midway level of this train car, so I don’t think I’m causing anyone inconvenience.

It’s probably bothering me more than it would bother anyone else that I’m not in my usual seat, but I just didn’t feel like taking 8 more stairs up.  If it had been a prime number of steps, maybe I would have done it.  Probably not.  I only just now counted the stairs to see, but I hadn’t counted them before deciding I didn’t want to climb them.

It was eighty degrees out and quite muggy when I left the house this morning before five o’clock.  Don’t envy it.  It’s not as though people are going to the beaches or sitting out in the sun and sipping cocktails, or enjoying any other aspects of warm weather.  Everyone is scratching out their livings, going through their daily routines in a grimy, overcrowded urban environment.  One of the only visible effects of the warmth is that you’ll see people wearing things like basketball shorts to work—grownups who are not professional athletes wearing baggy, gaudily colored shorts in places of business.  How is one to take any of them seriously?

At least the people who run the Tri-rail trains all wear uniforms of one kind or another.  They are quite professional and serious—and pleasant and friendly to passengers***—and they do their jobs well and with enthusiasm.  There’s even a conductor who sometimes works in the evening on the train I catch leaving work who, as we approach my station (which is Hollywood) makes the announcement, “Now approaching Hollywood…Hollywood, California, now approaching Hollywood.”

I like this because it’s similar to my own usual thoughts when we approach the station, which is to recite the words of the man on the street in the beginning of the movie Pretty Woman, who calls out to no one in particular, “Welcome to Hollywood!  What’s your dream?” and so on.  That’s a moment or two before we see a young Hank Azaria in a bit part as a detective, investigating the murder of a prostitute, astonished that tourists are taking pictures of the crime scene.  It’s an unusually dark beginning to a classic romantic comedy.

Real romance rarely begins so darkly, though it often ends unpleasantly.  It does always end, eventually, even for those who stay together for the rest of their lives, because life is no more than 120 years (at the extreme maximum) for humans, and usually quite a bit less than that.

Sorry.  That’s dreary, even for me.  I’ll try to turn it around by taking a line from the…I think fifth series of modern Doctor Who, in which the Doctor describes a species of mayfly on some planet I can’t remember, saying that they live only twenty minutes, and they don’t even mate for life!

Time is relative in many senses.  I’ve had more than one day this week that seemed to last far longer than twenty-four hours.  The faster you think, the slower time will seem to pass for you, so it may be worth practicing that, if that appeals to you.  Users of psychedelics sometimes report their trips seeming to last for eons, and meditation and similar states can sometimes produce similar experiences.  We all know that dreams can give that impression.

So, as Tyrell says to Roy, “Revel in your time,” even if all those moments will be eventually be lost like tears in the rain.

TTFN

Hollywood_Amtrak_Tri-Rail smaller

*It’s actually also a multiple of 9, since its digits add to 9, but it’s 9 times 39 (9×40=360, take away a nine and you get 351), and 39 is 3 x 13, so we know that 351 is also 27×13.  The prime factors of 351 are 3x3x3x13.

**I do this sort of thing often enough that when I start typing, by the time I get to “Is 353…”, Google pops up the option (and the answer) for the question “Is 353 a prime number?”

***This is lost on me, I’m afraid, though I admire it.  When the driver waves out of his window toward passengers as he pulls in, I’ve never had the impression that he was waving at me until this morning when, for the first time, I thought it seemed like he might have turned a final wave in my direction after more obvious ones to other regulars—I always stand at the far end of the platform.  I just felt a bit frozen and stressed, like someone who’d been called on in class but hadn’t been paying attention to the lesson.  I tried not to look toward the window, but just kept kind of looking down-ish and toward my entrance to the train, and I felt like a fool.

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Just say “No” to vember

Well, it’s Tuesday morning, and against all my considered advice, a new month has started. That month is November, in case either you’re reading this at some later date or you’re really not paying attention. It’s the year 2022. That’s AD or CE depending on your preferred terminology, though those things, like the number of the year or the month or the day are all arbitrary. For all I know, by the time you’re reading this, you may be using something like stardates from Star Trek or summat.

I’m writing this on my phone again, because I didn’t feel like bothering to bring my laptop home. Yesterday was just about the least enjoyable Halloween I’ve had since I got back from being “up the road”. It was a disappointing October in general. I had an almost unnoticeable birthday, then a pathetic Halloween, which was a particularly rotten day for business, also. I put together a pretty cool costume, in case we did something at the office as usual, but we didn’t. I wish I had that money and effort back.

It’s not a big tragedy to have a disappointing Halloween, obviously, but it is one of the only things to which I look forward, so it hits harder on top of my general deterioration than it might for other people. I also had more trouble with the WIFI last night, and my rest was worse than usual even for me. I didn’t get a single hour of uninterrupted sleep. My back/hips/leg/ankle are really bothering me this morning, but that’s partly from worse-than-usual sleep and probably partly from wearing boots to go with my stupid costume yesterday. That was an ill-considered idea in retrospect, but it’s no one’s fault but my own. I always make a mistake when I approach something optimistically.

I did upload that video about perception not being reality yesterday. The content is literally the same as the audio I posted with my blog yesterday, other than the screen picture, but here’s that video, anyway.

You are certainly encouraged to “give a thumbs up, subscribe, hit the bell, comment, and share” if you are so inclined. It doesn’t really matter, of course. I’m sure my YouTube channel has no future of any note.

Speaking of the future, and also about the past, I didn’t even begin to edit the audio that I recorded with my nocturnal thoughts about time from Sunday night/Monday morning. I anticipated there being…I don’t know, something happening at the office. There was nothing. But I still didn’t get any editing or anything else useful done there. I don’t honestly know if I’ve ever done anything useful. I guess it would depend on one’s definitions of usefulness.

I’ve been trying to find books that are intriguing to me, but no fiction or even non-fiction seems interesting. My favorite blog (or should I say “website”) that I follow is on a near-hiatus, with only minimal posting for the moment. That site is the closest thing I come to socializing, so I’m disappointed. Anyway, I’ve curtailed my commenting on it of late, because most comments I make end up coming across as weird or stupid or irritating to me or to other readers or to the writer of the site, and I don’t want to bother people who are some of the only people, and some of the most rational people, with whom I interact in any way. That would really be mortifying*.

***

We’re currently stopped in the train at the station two up from mine, apparently waiting for clearance from the dispatcher. I have no idea why. They haven’t mentioned anything about any accidents or whatnot. It’s a bit frustrating, because I seriously considered not going in to the office today, since I had such a rotten night’s sleep, and I feel so utterly depressed, and in more pain than usual. But I said to myself that since I wasn’t literally sick**, and especially since it’s the first of the month, when rent is due and all that, it feels irresponsible not to go in. Considering yesterday was such a lame day for business, it seems only right to do my part to be “all hands on deck” today.

I’m so tired of always feeling responsible, though, of always feeling like I have to try, to do my best, to do my part (or more), to try to act cheerful and to be a person who can help other people when they come to him for help, as they always do. Honestly, the times I’ve been in the hospital for surgery or relatively severe illness were such a relief in a weird way. Everything was out of my hands, and I could rest.

***

They just announced that there has apparently been a “trespasser strike” north of Fort Lauderdale station; that’s the cause of our delay. I believe this is a euphemism. A trespasser is someone who wanders into the vicinity of the railroad tracks, which is technically the property of the state of whoever runs the railroad system, and by “strike” I don’t think they mean someone is marching on a picket line holding a sign.

This is why I said it would be rude if I were to throw myself in front of the train or in between cars of a freight train. It leaves everyone on the trains delayed and inconvenienced. Of course, it’s very sad that someone was apparently hurt or possibly killed, but little stressors and inefficiencies and backups accumulate in any society, costing money, time, energy, stress…and these effects do wreak costs upon the health and the lives of numerous people, with consequences that are real and tragic, but are not seen so clearly because they happen via the accumulation of disparate forces and events. What looks like a traffic accident due to driver error is really an externality produced by the increased stressors that accumulated to wear that driver down, until the wrong thing happened at a bad time, with tragic outcomes. It’s happening all the time, it’s as real as the cumulative effects of sun exposure that lead to skin cancer over time, or accumulating atherosclerosis leading to heart attacks and strokes when the system finally fails at some weak point, and it’s even harder to pin down. It’s probably utterly hopeless and pointless for me to even try to do my part not to make things worse by not destroying myself in a disruptive way, but I don’t want to make things worse if I can help it. I probably can’t help it, given my nature.

Oh, well. My foundations and load-bearing walls are creaking and cracking and crumbling day by day, and they will eventually give out somewhere, and the whole edifice will collapse. I can hear the creaking; it’s getting louder and louder, growing slowly but with an exponential trend as time goes on. I don’t know what to do about it. I have no personal resources to apply to it, and I have no right to ask anyone else for help.

Anyway, that’s enough of all that. I’m sure you all wish I would finish off sooner rather than later, and just get it over with. Probably a good idea.

In the meantime, I hope you have a good day and a good month, and a good remainder of the year, and a good next year after that. If you’re patient enough to have read this far, then I’m sure you deserve the best.

***

P.S. We had started to go forward, but halfway between one stop and the next we approached what must have been the scene of the “strike” and now they say we’re going back to the previous station, though currently we’re sitting still. I don’t know what they’re going to do from there. Sometimes they arrange bus services or whatnot, to go around the spot. I don’t know if I can handle that. I may just walk to the nearest regular bus.

P.P.S.  I have gone back to the house.  I cannot wait for the shuttle because it’s not there and I’m in increasing pain and stress and am so very tired.  I went back to the station and back to the house.  I have no reliable means to drive to work and back, and I do not have the wit or will to deal with taking the bus.  I just want to go to sleep and stay asleep.  That would be so nice.

*Unfortunately, not literally so.

**In any infectious, contagious sense, anyway. I am sick in the head, and I’m not being facetious about that. I am very, very ill right now, and I don’t have any good idea what to do about it. I think it’s going to kill me.

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“A weary pilgrim on the road”

It’s Friday morning, and I’m once again on the earliest train heading toward the office, because I woke up way too early and wasn’t able to get back to sleep.

While watching a video to pass some dead, middle-of-the-night time, I heard a casual statement that poked one of my pet peeves, so I made a quick, five minute, audio essay on my voice recorder* responding to this idiotic verbal excretion.  I’m going to edit that a bit and then post the audio here, and also probably turn it into a “video” on YouTube, though there is no actual video involved.  I’ll probably just put up some picture, hopefully of something relatively pertinent, as the video portion.

An “interesting” thing happened in the office yesterday.  Where I work, they play loud background music all throughout the day** because people are on the phones talking to customers and don’t want to be distracted by other people on their phones.  The music is literally just noise to break up any coherent verbal background.  I’ve never worked anywhere else where people felt the need for such things, but apparently this is typical in these settings.  I’m often tempted to play construction noises, or factory floor noises in the background, since—supposedly—this would serve the same purpose.

That’s more or less what the effect of the constant noise is to me.  It’s like jackhammers and drills and traffic and chaos always going on in the background, and it’s overwhelming.  I need to stay relatively aware of things, because my own job requires responding to things happening in the room, recording and processing and checking various things as they happen.  But I do have a pair of good earmuffs or whatever you call them that I put on occasionally.

At other times, when things are a little slower and I can afford minor distractions, I will put in earbuds and watch a video or podcasts or something either on the computer or my tablet or phone during the downtime.

Well, it’s a been a strange and slow week, with very diminished business compared to last week, but with erratic spurts of good activity, and yesterday afternoon, after doing some decent business during the middle of the day, things were slowing, and I put in my earphone*** and was watching some videos.  Then, at some point, I looked up from one of the videos and realized that everyone else was gone.  They had all left early, since things were so slow, but nobody had made sure that I knew.

For a moment, I wondered if everyone had simply stepped outside for a moment for various reasons, and it had just coincidentally all occurred at once.  Such things are possible.  But I doubted it.

I texted my coworker who is closest to me in the office and asked him if everyone had just up and gone.  He texted me back that yes, they had, since all but one person was off the phone already, and there seemed little point in pushing through for the last forty minutes, with no prospects in sight.  I texted that it would have been nice for someone to tell me, and he duly apologized and said that he’d forgotten I had my headphones on.  I did only have the one, but the other ear is obviously even less useful than I thought.  Also, I guess, when I’m focused on something I can become difficult to distract.

I’m already having worse trouble than usual lately with my dysthymia/depression, and my (apparent) ASD, and just generally a non-existent social life, since all the people I’ve ever loved don’t seem to want to be around me.  But this new occurrence certainly didn’t help my mood even as I made sure the coffee was off and shut off the rear and front lights, set the alarm, and left to office to go to the train station.

I know that my problems in general are my “fault”, in the sense that they arise from my less-than-ideal machinery and programming, so to speak, and I don’t think anyone is out to get me or particularly trying to hurt me or anything of that sort.  But it still does hurt to have that glaring reminder of how different and separate I am, even where I work, before leaving to go back to the house in which I live, in a room by myself, where I don’t talk to or interact with anyone but the stray cat in the back who seems to like me.

I’m allergic, unfortunately, so I can’t take him in, but he’s a pleasant cat, and I do give him food.  I know cats can take care of themselves, but he’s a somewhat older male, and there are a lot of stray cats in south Florida, and raccoons and other creatures as well, so it’s nice to make him as stable as he can be, as well as another cat, a female, who is extremely skittish and timid.

Anyway, it further cements my provisional conclusions that I am not really a beneficial organism to the creatures around me—except a few stray cats—and that I have no connection of any depth with other beings.  I feel utterly adrift and alone, like I’m on a raft in a limitless ocean.  It’s a big raft, and there’s enough food and fresh water for an indefinite time, but there’s nothing else about, and no land in sight.  There may be no land anywhere.  I want just to dive into the water and sink, but the delusion that someday I might see land of some kind makes me keep putting it off, despite the fact that the journey is so dreary and pointless.

That’s a pretty ham-handed metaphor, and it’s not very good.  Sorry, I’m sure this is getting tiresome.  I know it’s tiresome for me, like everything else, so I’ll leave it at this for now.  I’m working tomorrow, so I’m sure I’ll write and post something then.  Have a good day, please, if you can.

*Yes, I figured out how to set it up and use it, which was not hard.  What confused me was the fact that it asked permission to be able to save the recordings on my phone’s memory, and even to use the microphone and speakers.  I don’t recall other such apps needing to ask for permissions.  Why would I record something and then save the recording if I didn’t want it saved on my phone?  It still makes me nervous, just ever so slightly.

**I say “music”, but it’s pretty crappy.

***I mainly put only the left earbud in, because my right ear has badly reduced hearing, and constant tinnitus, and it’s also good to keep at least that, rather muffled and hampered, source of sound input active, so I don’t miss too much.

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How strange or odd some’er I blog myself

Hello and good morning.

It may not be morning when you’re reading this, but it is morning when I’m writing it, and since the time any given person reads it is variable—it could be anywhen from noon back round to noon, and in any time zone—the only stable point from which to make departure is that time in which I am writing.  Thus, again:  good morning.

I’m using my laptop today, which is easier and faster, though it may lead to the post being more wordy and rambling than the ones I wrote on my phone.  Perhaps not.  Those who’ve said anything at all have said they can’t tell the difference.  It feels different, of course, but then, it would feel different, wouldn’t it?  A laptop and a smartphone are, despite many common attributes, very different devices with which to work.

I’m waiting for the second train this morning, rather than having gotten up for the first as I did the previous two days.  It’s not that I wasn’t up frequently during the night; I was awake well in time to come for the first train, but somewhat ironically, since I’m not feeling quite as physically ill, I was able at least just to lie there “in bed” and wait until five minutes before my alarm went off before getting up.

Of course, given my traditional greeting, in case you don’t know, it’s Thursday, the day I’ve long reserved for writing my blog posts, even when I didn’t write them any other day.  As with the time, you might be reading this on pretty much any day of the week, but I’m writing it on Thursday, and that’s not going to have changed, unless reality is far more fluid than it seems.  I’m pretty sure it’s not.

I’ll briefly relay an issue I had when I arrived at the office yesterday, already sick and uncomfortable, forcing myself to go in when I should have stayed in bed because it was payroll day.  Suffice it to say that I had to rush to the restroom when I arrived, only to discover that the toilet paper had not been maintained as I’ve always asked people to do, even in my absence, and I was caught rather short.

I decided to enact a temporary, prison-style system of people having to be responsible for their own toilet paper, since they couldn’t be responsible for looking out for each other according to very simple procedures of letting someone know when they take the last replacement roll from the cupboard.

I’ll revert to the old system today, for stability’s sake, but it’s frustrating that grown people don’t take simple steps to be considerate.  I wish I could fit everyone at work—including myself—with a shock collar, to activate when someone does something rude or inappropriate.  Of course, the person I have most complaints about is myself; the very fact that I get so angry about everything, and always feel so tense, just makes me hate myself more every day.

I have an electric stunner at the office—I bought it because in Unanimity, some characters use them for specific purposes, and I needed to know how they sound and look when activated, and how easy it was to get one.  I do various things to hurt myself when I’m either too angry at myself to hold back, or so stressed out by various things people do that I want to lash out, but I can’t allow myself to do such things, so I let it out where I can, at myself.

I’ve destroyed my own writing and art work, I’ve banged my head against desks and walls and tables until I bruise myself, I’ve punched walls—the first two knuckles of both of my hands are slightly bulbous from my having done this often over many years—I’ve thrown away precious items and books, and I’ve hurt myself in more extreme ways than these, but I won’t get too much into that*.  I don’t want to have to title another blog post with a trigger warning, especially not on a day when the title is supposed to be a minced Shakespearean quote.

The point is that I’ve never tried using my stunner on myself, mainly because I’m nervous about how it might interact with my chronic pain, which is at least partly neuropathic in character.  I don’t want to trigger muscle spasms or neural feedback loops or the like.  It probably wouldn’t do any bad or good, though; I’ve used TENS units with no particular benefit, even at very high power.

That’s the character of my life.  Each day is a loosely connected string of things I do to try to distract myself from chronic pain, tension/stress, sleep loss, dysthymia/depression, and deep inability to connect with anyone despite being profoundly lonely.  It’s a shitty ride, I’ve gotta say.  I’m not even going to give it one star on TripAdvisor.

People sometimes say** things like, “Hang on, keep going, there are people who care about you, you’re not alone.”  And that’s nice, and I’m sure there are people who care, at least in the abstract sense.  But it’s at least a bit like saying, “Hang on, keep going, there’s a supermassive black hole in the center of most galaxies!”  It’s true, and it’s interesting.  It’s something I care about.  But it has no apparent impact on my daily existence and the fact that I hate myself and hate my life.

I don’t have any answers for myself, in case that’s not obvious.  But I’m getting wearier and wearier of just plodding along, without any goal, and with no one nearby to talk to, with all the people I’ve cared most about not wanting to be around me.  Who can blame them?  You’ve read my writing; how much time would you want to spend with me?

Anyway, that’s enough for today.  I hope all of you out there are doing well, and have things for which to live, and people around you who love you and care about you and want to spend time with you.  If you do, please be grateful and treasure them.

TTFN

me distorted

*Although I will give a caution about one long-past event:  don’t hit yourself in the kneecap with a ball-peen hammer, even if you’re doing it to distract yourself from chronic pain.  Just…don’t.

**Or, to pick nits, they write such things.

This is an addendum, to be added to today’s blog post at the end.  The train I’m waiting for is delayed, and they keep running an automated announcement overhead that it’s delayed “10…15 minutes”.  But it’s already 25 minutes late, and according to the app that tracks the trains, it’s going to be at least 10 more minutes before it gets here, so the announcement is just wrong, and that grates on my nerves far more than it ought to do.  Of course, as always with delays, the train will be more crowded, because people who would have missed the usual scheduled time, or who arrive early for the next train, will be aboard.  I feel like I’m going to split in half because I’m so tense about it.  When the whole universe, or at least everything related to humans, feels like the Enemy, it doesn’t take all that long to become shell-shocked.  I feel that I have no escape and no comrades, like I’m the only member of my species in a strange, foreign universe.  I think I’m on the verge of some breakdown.  Hell, maybe I’m already in the midst of it.  I don’t know what to do.  I need help, but my need is no claim on anyone else’s abilities; my need is my own problem.  It’s a need I don’t think I’m going to be able to meet, and when one is unable to meet one’s needs, one deteriorates and/or suffers and/or dies.

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I don’t know…trigger warning, I guess? Whatever.

Okay, well, I’m writing this post on my phone on Google Docs like yesterday, because I didn’t take my laptop with me when I left the office.  This time it was more or less deliberate, however.  I left work early due to general, global ill-feeling, both physical and psychological, and I just didn’t feel like bothering to pack up the laptop.

I honestly didn’t feel like doing much of anything.  I didn’t really feel like going back to the house‒and there were frustrations awaiting me when I arrived, but that was mainly a problem with my reaction to the unexpected change in my patterns and the like‒but I had nowhere else to go, and I didn’t want to stay at the office.  I didn’t want to be anywhere, but that wasn’t a readily viable option.

There was a moment, while I waited for my train, when a freight train passed, going in the “wrong” direction, using the commuter train tracks as they occasionally do when necessary‒I’ve written about that before.  It was intriguing to think how powerful the passing cars and the whole train were.  They were so close you could reach out and touch them if you wanted, since they were right there passing through the station.  If I had timed a jump to go between the cars as they passed (they were going no more than maybe twenty-five miles per hour), I would have been shredded to pieces in an instant, possibly before feeling anything but the initial concussion.

Of course, as I thought about it, I realized it was something I would have a hard time working up the gumption to do, and‒more importantly‒it would cause a great big mess, shutting down that train, shutting down at least some local traffic (since the station is right by a road crossing) and of course causing delays for the whole commuter system for hours.  That would be terribly rude, and though of course I would have nothing to fear from Hannibal Lecter at that point, I still don’t like to be rude*.

So, I just waited for the next train and went back to the house.  Someone was parked in my usual spot, which stressed me out as it always does when it happens, but I was able cleverly to third-space that stress by cursing out loud to myself repeatedly and hitting things and hurting my hands and hurting myself in other ways in the room when I got there.

It’s an overreaction, of course, but I do ask for very little from other people.  I pay the power and the water and the cable/internet bills, and I don’t bother trying to negotiate splits of those bills, because that process is more stressful to imagine than is just paying.  So it would be nice if my space and my routines and whatnot were left alone.

Oh, well.  Why would I think the world would be comfortable in any way?  It never has been so far.

Never.

Speaking of cable/internet, the WiFi went out again in the evening as I was sharing some “videos” of some cover and original songs of mine as a zillionth attempt to send a message out**.  This was particularly frustrating because I had a lot of trouble with it last weekend already.  I got so frustrated I went out to 7-11 and got 2 slices of pizza, which were not as good as usual, and two iced teas, which were quite nice.  This was not a positive thing to do, but involved another form of self-harm in a way.  At least when I got back my spot was open and the internet was once again stable after my reset.

I tried to relax and go to sleep after eating and watching a few educational videos, but I woke up starting an hour later, then 2 hours after that, then another hour later, at which point I stopped trying to get back to sleep.  When it was finally late enough, I got up and came to get on the earliest train, and here I am on the way to the office.

Lather, rinse, repeat as needed, until finally‒someday soon I hope‒it will all go down the drain.

*I’ve sometimes thought that a good, polite, unobtrusive way to kill oneself would be to go to the nearby Atlantic Ocean and start swimming eastward and just keep going until exhaustion led one to one’s inevitable end beneath the waves…or until one reached Africa, I suppose.  However, the fear of ocean-going predators (though a rarefied possibility) and a less-than-ideal comfort with swimming makes that process difficult to contemplate for me.  A better one might be simply getting up and going for a walk, and just continuing to walk until dehydration and exhaustion and the like finished one off, though there are plenty of possible caveats there.  At least, though, it would give one time to reconsider, which jumping from a great height would not allow (and which “Russian Roulette” only allows if you lose***) and the process itself might bring some sort of rescuing, spiritual insight or enlightenment‒at least if one believes some religious and spiritual stories and legends.  It’s something to consider.

**It never works; I don’t know why I bother.  I guess I must be more optimistic than I think I am.  I’ve said it before, I wish I had a drug and/or alcohol problem, because there are numerous resources out there that are available and eager to provide help and support for those issues, and one is given social and moral support, often almost lionized, for fighting an addiction.  Failing that, one can always just overdose.  I think high dose fentanyl, probably combined with Valium, would likely be a decent way to die.

***Now that is a tense game, I can tell you from personal experience.

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Yet another blog post without a real title. What do you expect?

It’s Monday morning, and I’m at the train station ever-so-slightly later than usual*, because I slept a tiny bit later, having stayed up quite a lot later than usual last night.  That was because The Power of the Doctor was on BBC America starting at 8pm, and I was quite wide awake even after it was over.

It was pretty good, though not as good as The Day of the Doctor, but then again, that was hard to beat.  The ending was a real surprise…but I don’t want to give any spoilers, except to note that I like the fact that the thirteenth doctor stepped outside the Tardis to regenerate so she didn’t trash it.  I’ve already given spoilers for the presumed heat death of the universe, that’s more than enough.  And that’s okay because the chances of anyone alive today in the universe being around to see it and having their surprise ruined are so small as to make winning every lottery in the world seem a near-certainty.  At least, that’s my intuitive estimate.

Also, I could be wrong about the heat death of the universe.  It could end in some far more horrific fashion.

I just noticed something curious, speaking of time travel-related shows:  In the little Microsoft search bar at the left of the toolbar on the screen, just after the Windows symbol, there’s a little stylized jacket and skateboard from Back to the Future II, the least good of the three movies (in my opinion).  I wonder what that’s about.  But I don’t wonder enough to look into it.  If anyone reading this happens to know and cares to leave a comment about it, I’d be grateful, but it’s not important.

Nothing is important, really.  Or everything is.  Either one is the same statement, when you get down to it, or at least they’re equivalent statements.

Of course, importance is a relative measure.  There’s no absolute importance scale like we have for temperature.  Importance is also subjective.  What’s important to one person is different from any (and probably all) others.  Importance is also variable, it being an estimate in the mind of the beholder that varies from day to day, year to year, decade to decade, and so on, for any given person.  If you’re not convinced, try to think of the things that were most important to you when you were five, then when you were fifteen, then twenty-five, and see how your priorities have changed.

Hell, when you’re old enough, just being able to sleep through the night without having to get up to go to the bathroom several times can be amazingly important.  I have a head start on that, in that I wake up anyway, so I sometimes get up to go to the bathroom preemptively.  I’m clever that way.

Oh, speaking of being old enough, I want to send out a (belated) Happy Birthday to my cousin, Lance, who apparently reads this blog with some regularity.  I didn’t write any posts over the weekend because I didn’t go to work, but I hope he had a good birthday and enjoyed himself.

My own weekend was basically rather frustrating and annoying, but a lot of that was just because I was there.  Of course, that’s rather trivial when you think about it.  Any given person cannot be frustrated or annoyed unless that person exists and is “present”, whatever that might mean in any given circumstance.

I did do something rather funny, yesterday.  I made a note using my phone’s video feature about something that I have realized before but had never recorded:  microwave popcorn tastes quite nice, and is a pleasantly easy snack to eat while watching (for instance) the sixtieth anniversary Doctor Who special, but it leaves a smell that lingers in the air for hours, and that smell is rather reminiscent of nether bodily effluvia.

I think it’s funny that I used the video function to record me commenting about that.  I would normally** have used a voice recorder app rather than wasting video, which has the unfortunate effect of recording pictures of my face, but my new phone doesn’t have an easily used voice recorder app.  It has a recording app.  There’s an app simply called “recorder” and it has a waveform of sorts as its icon.

I don’t think it has anything to do with those wooden (or plastic) flutes they have you try to play in grade-school level music classes before you’re ready to use real instruments, but when I tried to use it, once, to record a quick note to myself, it asked me for all sorts of permissions and things, and I decided, “You know what?  If it needs to get clearance for all sorts of things that I have to give it clearance to do, then I don’t want to record my notes on this app.”  Honestly, why can’t it just be like the previous app, which recorded what you said, just like an old-fashioned Dictaphone, and stored it as a file named based on the date and time of the recording?

Apparently, the camera function doesn’t require any permissions of that sort, though it’s recording presumably just as much audio information, and a ridiculously unnecessary (in this case) amount of video information.

Oh, well, what are you going to do?  The world is stupid.  But, well, it would be, wouldn’t it?  It’s just a planet, after all, how smart could it be?  And so is human civilization stupid, or at least human society on the local, daily level.  I suppose that, taken as a whole, human civilization is the smartest thing that we know of in the universe, but that’s not saying very much.  Most of the universe is vacuum, filled (slightly) with whatever “dark energy” is, and that’s getting bigger all the time.

Dark energy really is bringing down the average cosmic intelligence, but it’s not as if it was high to begin with.  Or even to middle with.  As far as we can tell, right now, it’s as smart as it’s ever been, and that’s just because of human civilization*** is smarter than, say, the moon, or a star or a black hole or a nebula or “dark matter****”, or anything else.

Anyway, before I bring down your overall intelligence too much, or at least your mood, I’ll call it done for today.  I’m not that happy even still to be around for another week, if I’m honest with you (which, in that, I am*****).  Hopefully that won’t happen too many more times.  Some promising signs have occurred recently, but I’ve been disappointed before, as I was particularly for the last five days.

I hope you all feel more upbeat than I do.  It’s not a high bar to clear.

*By which I mean, I got here at my self-scheduled time, in time for the usual, second train.

**So to speak, anyway.  I don’t know what I’ve ever done “normally” in my life.

***You can watch my video about there being no life in the universe, effectively, if you want to explore these thoughts further.

****As far as we know.  We know so little about the substance of dark matter than I guess it could be amazingly intelligent.  But there are good reasons not to think that’s the case, so far.

*****Though I can make no promises about honesty at any other time.  How could I?  If I’m honest, the promise would be true by default, and if I’m dishonest, then the promise might be dishonest.  It’s a pointless promise to make, as are all too many promises.