Justice

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“There is no life in the Void…”

I feel that I ought to write something today, but I don’t really have any idea just what I ought to write.  It seems the only things I have to discuss nowadays are gloomy, depressing, soul-sucking things.  Then again, at least nowadays, gloominess and soul-suckery seem to be the most prominent aspects of who I am.  If I were a character from the Harry Potter books, I would be a dementor.

I know, dementors aren’t really characters, per se.  They’re really just creatures.  We don’t really get the notion of any personalities from them, though they apparently are able to negotiate and make agreements with the Ministry of Magic, or with Voldemort and the Death Eaters*.  We also know that they can reproduce.

Of course, I’ve often compared myself to the Nazgul from The Lord of the Rings, but I think in most cases I’m a bit less malevolent.  Then again, I’m not under the command of any Sauron equivalent, who has malevolent and authoritarian** intentions and is the real proximate cause of the ringwraiths’ bad deeds.

My own stories were much more positive and lighthearted‒such as Mark Red and The Chasm and the Collision‒when I was in prison, oddly enough.  I suspect that’s because, while there, I was able to think that when I got out I would be able to return to some form of life, to be part of my kids’ lives again, maybe to find some new purpose and new friends and so on.  That delusion that didn’t survive long, though; once I learned that my kids didn’t want to go back to seeing me every other week (or even less) and that my son didn’t want to interact with me at all, it became hard to be upbeat.

It sometimes pisses me off when I see people who are less reliable and safe than I am, who care far less about their families and their children, who have various destructive habits that wreak havoc in the lives of their loved ones…and yet who have friends and families, children and loved ones who stick with them, who strive to help them, who actually want their presence, even through catastrophes worse than mine and through harmful deeds that I would never even consider.

I don’t really grok it‒it seems profoundly unjust‒but intellectually I know that it’s only to be expected, and has multivariate causes.  I also know that justice is entirely a human invention, a fiction of you will, like money and the various religions, and that I have no excuse for expecting any reward for the good deeds I’ve done (such as they are) or for the positive character attributes I have tried to embody (however imperfectly).

I don’t expect anything to get better at this point, and my own fiction has trended in that direction ever since I got out of work-release.  Not that it was ever truly lighthearted, mind you‒even CatC presented a universe-destroying threat and put the onus for preventing it on three middle-school students.  But the stories were optimistic in general.

My most recent story, Extra Body, is admittedly rather optimistic and even has a happy ending.  But that was deliberate.  I had to make a conscious effort to write so positively, and you’ll notice I haven’t published the story other than here in this blog.

Oh, well.  Whadaya gonna do?  I’m simply not having a wonderful Christmas time (with apologies to Sir Paul), nor a wonderful Hanukkah time, nor a wonderful week or month or year or decade.  No matter where I go, there I am, and I think you all can at least imagine how unpleasant it is to be around me 24 hours a day, every day, for the rest of my life.  You would want to kill yourself, too, if you had no other means of escape.

*Surely that must be the name of some indie heavy metal or goth or punk band somewhere.  If it’s not, then that’s further proof of the degeneration of the music industry.

**I say authoritarian rather than totalitarian because Sauron does not seem inclined to micromanage the thoughts of those rules.  His orcs certainly don’t seem to worship him exactly, nor be motivated by ideology as such.  They admire and fear his power, of course, and act out of hope for personal gain.  Also, of course, their nature, twisted by Morgoth originally, is such that Sauron, or someone like him, is their only workable authority figure.  You’d think it might be worth the Valar’s time to try to treat and heal the orcs, who are as they are through no fault of their own.  But no, Manwe et al would rather sit in their little paradise, high up on their mountain or in their halls of judgment, all of which isn’t even directly attached to Middle Earth anymore.  Heck, maybe if they had tried to reach out to Melkor in the first place, when he was such an awkward outsider even at the start, things would all have been much less traumatic for all.  But no, Iluvatar wants his entertainment, his ongoing struggle of “good” versus “evil”, all of which is his doing in the first place.  I wonder if he creates his own popcorn to eat while watching.

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No one is to blame

Well, as often happens on the day immediately following a Monday, it is now Tuesday.  Congratulations.

I don’t know why I wrote “congratulations” there.  I felt as if I were saying that the fact that Tuesday has arrived was some manner of accomplishment and not merely the universe continuing to do what it does and work through its laws as always.

Maybe the thought was to congratulate those of you who consider it a positive thing to live another day for succeeding at doing so.  Maybe it’s a supportive statement to those who really don’t want to go on, but who continue to endure because they don’t want to bring pain to their loved ones.  Making it through another day for a person in that situation is no joke, and those people should be recognized.

It would be nice if they could be recognized in a non-judgmental way by those loved ones for whom the people in question endure.  Not that I expect that the loved ones of the suffering have any better calibration than the people who love them.  Nothing finite is without imperfections (and I’m agnostic about the situation with infinite things, but I have my doubts).

So, it is hard for a person with depression to endure, even when they’re doing it for their family and friends and are suffering because of it, and those depressed people are worthy of sympathy and non-judgmental support from their loved ones and the world in general.  But the people around them are worthy of sympathy, too, and should not be regarded judgmentally for not being able to recognize or even help their loved ones’ suffering.

Here’s where we come to the concept of blame, and how utterly unjustified it is, in every single case.  And to be clear, I don’t mean to say we shouldn’t hold people responsible for their actions in the sense that they are the proximate causes of those actions, and their behavior can be adjusted and improved.  But they are not the ultimate cause‒not of what they are, not of their strengths and weaknesses, not of their limits and their experiences and their sensory acuities and their social skills 

If you have car trouble and your cousin, with whom you are hanging out, doesn’t know the first thing about cars‒doesn’t own one, doesn’t drive, never has‒you may well be disappointed that this cousin can’t help you and doesn’t even recognize that there is a problem until and unless your car completely breaks down.  But you don’t get self-righteously angry at your cousin for that lack of knowledge and skill‒not if you’re even remotely reasonable.  You don’t fully understand what’s wrong with your car, yourself, and you certainly don’t know how to fix it.  And it’s your car.  How can you expect others to be both able and willing to fix your car for you?  They have their own vehicular maintenance issues.

I’m pushing the metaphor, I know.  But I think it’s a good one.  We can all, of course, try to be there for those we love, and to be worthy of having others be there for us, and sometimes that’ll work out and sometimes it won’t.  It can be quite natural to feel resentful and wounded by the people who fail to see your suffering, even though they care about you and are important to you.  But, as Radiohead sang, “Just ‘cause you feel it doesn’t mean it’s there.”  So cut other people slack; and cut yourself some if you can, too.

You didn’t build the universe, or the world, or your nation, or your community.  Neither did anyone else, living or dead.  These things just happened, rarely with any kind of coherent, before-the-fact plan of any kind.  And on the rare occasion when people did try to plan things, those plans essentially always went aglee‒the stricter and more regimented and more dogmatic the plan, the greater the apparent tendency to veer wildly astray, as though there were some manner of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle that applies at the scale of societies.

Civilization is a spontaneously self-assembled and self-assembling system, and like frost on a window, different parts of it carry different orientations and patterns that are not the product of any of the individual constituent water molecules.  The molecules can only line up in the crystal where there is a spot and only in particular orientations, based entirely upon where it is in the system and what the surrounding dynamics are‒and what came before.

This may be the case for the entire universe, as well.  The underlying quantum fields may just all “crystallize” out in particular ways that are highly stochastic and ultimately local, with different kinds of complexity in different places.

Anyway, I’m veering off topic.  The point is, there’s no call for and no use in blaming people for not knowing about your suffering and how they might have done differently and it might have helped you.  And don’t blame yourself, either‒unless you invented the universe.  If you did, well, you’ got some ‘splaining to do.

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When will the system crash?

Well, it’s another Monday‒the second one in December of 2024*‒and I decided I’d write a little Monday morning blog post.

I’m writing this on my phone today.  I wrote last Thursday’s blog post on my miniature laptop computer, and it got too long and only a few people apparently read it‒or, well, only a few people went to the page.  I can’t tell if they’ve actually read the thing.  The only real way to tell if someone reads something is if they make a comment that clearly responds to the substance of the post.

It’s rather appalling how rarely people read at all anymore.  The odds of someone both liking and actually sharing any of my blog posts are absolutely miniscule.  I suppose I shouldn’t complain too much, since I wrote an actual song called “Like and Share” about some evils of the social media landscape.  But the evils I was decrying really focused around the people who curate their online presence to seem as though they and their lives are “perfect” while having who knows how many skeletons in their closets, and the other people who, through comparing themselves to the false images of people online, come to hate themselves and their own lives.

I would love it if people shared my blogs or even my songs or my books (well…the links to my books), but I guess the way one grows one’s audience and gets spread and “retweeted” and so on is by sharing politically charged content with some particular stance.  The more vituperative and divisive and snide, the more likely a thing is to be noticed and shared.  Of course, that’s not going to guarantee spread, but it seems to be an almost necessary thing.

The fact that my primary medium is writing doesn’t help.  With that in mind, I made a little vertical video yesterday, intended primarily for Instagram because “Why not?”, and I shared it there and on YouTube and Facebook and even Threads and X and Bluesky just because, again, why not?

I’m terribly frustrated.  Maybe I should take some controversial stance.  Maybe I should say outrageous and hateful things.  It wouldn’t be that hard.  I hate nearly everything in the whole stupid world.  The problem is that my hatred is equal opportunity.  I find the left and the right to be equally sub moronic, though the malady presents slightly differently in the two political directions.

Maybe I should start promoting an all-out war between neurodivergent people and the NT’s, sort of like Magneto against the humans.  Humans screw everything up.  Many if not most of the positive advances in civilization came from people who were probably “neurodivergent”.  The normies just take advantage of those advances and drive the world into the abyss.

Maybe I should start brainstorming and propounding the benefits of initiating a planet-destroying catastrophe.  I mean, it would be easy enough (in principle) to arrange for various asteroids to end up hitting the Earth; all one really needs is a space agency‒perhaps even a private one, a la SpaceX.  After that, Newtonian mechanics is enough to do the job, plus a little trial and error.

I don’t think it would be enough just to wipe out the human race or current civilization.  I’m thinking of complete sterilization.  None of the other life forms on this planet are any more benevolent or kind or positive than humans are; they’re just less competent.  Weirdly enough, humans appear to be by far the most compassionate, the kindest, the most “life-affirming” species on the planet.  All those that seem kinder or less damaging are simply less powerful.  Even things like lichen and bacteria and archaea have caused massive, even global, catastrophes in the past.

The fact that humans, of all things, are the kindest species on the planet is surely the strongest argument that can be made that life on this planet‒and perhaps all life in the universe‒is simply a huge mistake, and one that ought to be rectified.

I’m pretty sure my own life is a huge mistake, with the exception of my kids.  Certainly everything since about 2012, and possibly somewhat earlier, has been one giant error message written across the monitor of my existence.  I should just power down everything; not restart it, just shut it off and throw it in the trash.

Any thoughts?  “Like” and “share” if you feel the urge.

*Geez, that means the year is almost over again, and I’m still here, like a bad outbreak of herpes.

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O Caesar! These blogs are beyond all use…

Hello, and yes, good morning.  It’s the 1st Thursday of December in 2024, and so it is time for another edition of my weekly blog post.

I’m writing this on my miniature laptop* on the way in to the office, because I figured it would be a shame to let the device go to waste.  I haven’t used it at all since the last blog post I wrote on it, which would have been…looks like it was November 20, 2024.

Other than the little post I wrote on Monday—which I wrote on my smartphone—I haven’t written anything this week.  I haven’t played any music this week, by which I mean neither have I played it on a device for me to hear, nor have I played the guitar or the keyboard, though I guess I’ve tapped drumbeats on walls and desktops and door jambs and the like from time to time.

I am reading a Japanese light novel series, one that I’ve chosen because the characters are at least reasonably likeable, the story is more or less upbeat and decently written and translated, and there are enough volumes out to keep me busy for a week or two.

I haven’t read any science or math or philosophy in quite a while.  I certainly haven’t written on any books of my own.  I haven’t even watched any science-related videos, to be honest.  The only math I’ve done was when I saw a Facebook post of a sign in Taiwan or China that had an infinite series in sigma form written on it.  I thought I recognized the series, but I wasn’t at all sure, so I worked out the first seven or so terms and summed them up, and it became clear that this was the series that summed to Pi.  It was indicating, apparently, that there were 3.14 kilometers left in what I think was a marathon route.

You wouldn’t see a sign like that in the USA.  Though we have some truly brilliant people in mathematics and science and whatnot, they are a rarefied bunch, and the vast majority of the population is borderline mathematically illiterate, and some of them are stupid enough to be proud of that fact.

I did have one slightly interesting occurrence yesterday—from my point of view.  I was scrolling through “reels” on Facebook and saw one with a woman sitting in a room and giving a sort of strained, tiny smile, and the caption read something like, “I guess the fact that it’s holiday decorations that are hanging now, and not yourself, makes it a successful year.”  That’s not quite right; it was better written, but that was the gist.

I recall thinking, not entirely seriously, “That’s easy for you to say.  I don’t consider it a good result that I’m not the one hanging.  I even have two ropes already prepared for that possibility, but I don’t have any decorations or ornaments, and I have no one with whom to share the holiday season or anything anyway.”

I intended to write that (more or less) as a comment, which required going to the original post on Instagram; I was going to try to be at least a bit jokey about it, so as not to make the poster think was angry at her.  But when I got to the post, I saw that there were people who were complaining about it, saying that jokes about suicide were in bad taste or something, that they had lost relatives or friends or whatever to suicide, and such posts made them feel sad or something.  They had a long string of comments.

A few people wrote in response that such “jokes” or posts, even if seemingly morbid, were often a good way for people to deal with the emotions that overwhelm them, and knowing that other people feel that way and can speak about it was helpful.

But the Puritans were all too stuck in scolding mode.

I wanted to write more, but ended up just saying, “Surely no one has been forced to read this posting.”  The original poster, apparently, replied to my comment, saying that I was wrong, that she was sorry to have been insensitive to people, and wanted to try to be more careful in the future.  I had to bite my figurative tongue to keep from replying, “I was wrong?  You mean people were forced to read the post?”

And then I wanted to add something along the following lines:

“As someone who thinks about suicide daily, ever more so over time, and who feels the urge particularly strongly at this time of year, what with the waning sunlight and the holiday environment, it can be kind of nice to know that other people are thinking similarly, and are even able to be somewhat lighthearted about it–even going so far as to give a slight joke, to try to be positive.  I think all the people who are scolding and berating should be turning their scorn on themselves, if anything.  Maybe if they’d spent less time being so eager to shut other people down when talking about uncomfortable things, they might have encouraged a situation in which their own loved ones might have felt able to talk about their depression and despair.  Maybe these commenters are feeling defensive about the fact that, for all that they’re willing to berate strangers for talking about suicide (in a comparatively light hearted way) what they really need to do is berate themselves for not having done anything of significance to try to help their relatives or friends or acquaintances who were in such pain that they ended their lives.  Maybe if they tried to encourage a climate in which people felt able to talk about the despair that so many people experience—especially people who are “different”, who are, for instance, “neurodivergent” or who just feel weird and alien compared to everyone else on this waste of a planet—then fewer people would feel utterly alone and at a loss and with no apparent answer to their pain and loneliness other than destroying themselves.”

Of course, I didn’t leave that comment.  But it is terribly irritating that people go out of their way to comment negatively about someone who is trying to put out at least a slightly uplifting or relieving thought, but I doubt they went to any trouble at all to support their “loved ones” who were suffering.  Fuck all of them, I say, and in all the most inappropriate and uncomfortable orifices.  They’re making the world worse, not better, with their “Waah, look at how this all affects me, everyone, I don’t like to be reminded about sad things, because I did nothing to prevent or ameliorate the sadness, so now I want to make sure no one else admits that it exists”.

Well, the maker of that reel apologized, but I don’t think she should have, and I am certainly not doing so, though I restrained myself from hurling my ire at those people in the comments section, and only left my original one.  But if I could, I would like to give those people a brief taste of the despair and solitude and emptiness and pain that a person feels when they are severely depressed and suicidal but don’t have anyone they can really talk to about it, no support, since our society still doesn’t deal with mental health issues almost at all.

Even if I could do that, it probably wouldn’t help.  Once that temporary pain went away, those people would almost certainly go back to the way they were before.

That’s enough for now.  I’ve written too much, and the editing process is daunting.  I think I’m only going to give it two go-throughs before posting, instead of three.

I hope most of you—well, all of you—feel better than I do.  If I were convincingly told (by some being who could guarantee it) that by my death I could eliminate depression and despair in the world in everyone else, or even that I could just foster an environment in which people could be open about it and help could be provided at least to the same degree we provide it for heart disease and cancer and infectious disease, then that would be a pretty east decision.

But, of course, reality doesn’t work that way, and there’s no reason to think it ever will.  That still doesn’t mean that there aren’t other, legitimate, valid reasons for a person like me to feel that he and everyone else would be better off—or at least no worse off—if I were dead already.

“Oh well, whatever.  Never mind.”

TTFN

*The miniature laptop is a computer.  The top of my own literal lap, though slightly reduced due to my paunch, in certainly not miniature.

**In English, of course—I’m not partaking of my old ambition to practice reading Japanese until I got truly good at it.  What’s the point?  They would never allow me in the country, anyway, thanks to my “criminal” record***.

***That’s actually kind of funny…what if nations didn’t allow President-elect Trump into their countries because of his felony record?  Of course, that’s not going to happen, it would be a diplomatic disaster.   Once again, the Donald shows that he can successfully be separated from the enforcement of the law, thus sending what ought to be a message to the American people:  Why should you bother obeying any inconvenient laws?  The President doesn’t!  Screw paying taxes or following through on contracts!  It’s every person for itself, in the most short-sighted, opportunistic, petty ways possible.

****Who would ever choose such a thing?  Its very nature is learned helplessness, self-hatred, emotional and physical pain that doesn’t seem to let up, that feels eternal when it’s happening.  It is a metaphorical and sometimes nearly literal version of Hell.

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Late-arriving, futile “justice” and reminders of a life that has been all but annihilated

I read the news yesterday, oh boy.  And yes, it was about a lucky man‒luckier than I am, anyway, at least in some ways.

There was a doctor in the heartland of America somewhere, I don’t recall where, who had been convicted of, apparently, inappropriately prescribing very large amounts of pain meds, the report quoting the number 500,000* (It seems unlikely that there were 500,000 prescriptions**, so it probably was that number of pills).

Anyway, his conviction was overturned on appeal, because apparently, in 2022, the SCOTUS handed down a ruling that the prosecution had to prove in such cases that there was “intentional or knowing” inappropriate prescription for it to rise to the level of a crime, and the jury hadn’t been appropriately instructed regarding that fact.

I looked up the case, and I’ve even downloaded the PDF of the case.  Although I haven’t read through it yet, the summaries make it clear that, yes indeed, this is a new and specific requirement.

Silly me, I had always thought that mens rea was a crucial requirement for nearly any criminal case, certainly one that rises to the level of a felony charge.  I brought that up with my (public) defense attorney, trying to point out that I shouldn’t be convicted of a crime since I literally had never intended to do anything but treat patients who had chronic pain‒which I did because I had chronic pain, and it had already severely harmed my life.  I knew how hard it was for even a physician, who at the time had good health insurance, to be able to get adequate treatment and even to get his prescriptions filled by often-judgmental pharmacists who looked at him as if he were a criminal just because he wanted to try to mitigate his pain with the most effective medicine that was available.

But no, apparently, according to my attorney, the prosecutor didn’t have to prove any such thing specifically; it could just be inferred.  And apparently I’m not exactly the sort of person to elicit sympathy from a jury in south Florida, because my voice tends to be monotone and my face tends to be expressionless and I don’t look like someone who is frankly worthy of sympathy.

All the charges against me were created by the PBSO, who sent in undercover people with (evidently) faked MRIs and fake complaints, who complained of chronic, severe pain and said they were in pain when I examined them***, and whose own secret recordings and records showed that there were often only one or two other patients in the whole office when they were there‒hardly what one would call a “pill mill” I should think.

Anyway, I was offered a plea bargain and I took it, because unless you’ve got a lot of money or you literally have nothing to lose, you will take a plea bargain in the right circumstances, even though you know you’re innocent.  I’ve written a blog post about how the plea bargain system is an extortionate game slanted against especially the underprivileged.

The statutes involved in my charges were designed by that <sarcasm> bastion of intelligentsia and morality, the Florida State Legislature </sarcasm>, to give judges no leeway, and to grind away maximally at anyone charged with “trafficking”.   If a jury decided that they should convict on at least one charge, since the state had created so many charges against me (each prescription being a charge, and twenty something having been conned out of me by various lying police officers over time) and the number seems impressive, I still could have faced a minimum of fifteen years in prison.

In retrospect, I think I would have been little worse off if I had, given the mockery and shambles my life has become.  But at the time, I hoped to see my kids again, perhaps sometime before they were adults.  Three years was better than fifteen (or potentially the rest of my life), and I had no one else to help me with a legal fight, and certainly no reservoir of money, so I took the deal.

The way things are now, though, I might not have been charged, or might have been offered some misdemeanor plea deal.  Or I might have gone to trial and won with relative ease, since the fact that I never knowingly or intentionally mis-prescribed medicine was a fact I knew for certain, at a Cartesian, cogito ergo sum sort of level, since it was a fact about my own mental state.

I may be naïve, and I often do not understand humans.  I am often easily misled and manipulated and used and misused and probably abused, because I am socially and emotionally very clueless and believe in giving other people the benefit of the doubt (to hold them innocent until proven guilty, in other words).  But I have never been greedy or unscrupulously opportunistic, and I took the practice of medicine and my duty and goal to relieve suffering very seriously.  I was never into making a lot of money, though it was good to be able to buy books I wanted and to take care of my kids.  I lived in a one-bedroom apartment and drove a ten-year-old Toyota Sienna.

Before yesterday, it had been a long time since I’d bothered thinking about what my life might have been like if things had not gone the way they did.  There didn’t seem to be any point.  I was a lost cause and that was that.  But this has made me feel acutely once again the cut of all the lost time with my kids and my lost ability to practice medicine, and all the other losses I’ve experienced as part of this debacle of a life.

What’s more, there’s been salt and vinegar rubbed into the wound by the fact that it took a Supreme Court dominated by many justices who’d been appointed by The Donald to require courts to require prosecutors to prove something that was supposed to be a necessary element of almost any serious criminal charge:  actual criminal intent.

That’s all leaving aside the un-ethics and illogic of the government of the “Land of the Free” dictating what people can put into their own bodies when it doesn’t directly harm other people in the first place.  I won’t get into that because it had no bearing on my medical practice‒I was not in the business of dealing in euphoriants, I was trying to relieve actual suffering.

One cannot really apply new jurisprudence to old cases in which a sentence has already been carried out and finished, and when the consequences thereof are already irrevocable.  I cannot regain the time I have lost with my children or the time I have lost when I could have been practicing medicine, or the time I spent at FSP West or in the Palm Beach County Main Detention Center, where even the people who worked there frequently asked why the hell I was there, or still there (I spent 8 months in the place, on the mental health floor, because I couldn’t make bail, but finally my former girlfriend’s mother helped secure it‒at least she got all her own back after I was sentenced, and I appreciate her very much, though I might as well just have stayed in jail, since at least the whole sentence would have ended earlier given “time served” and I was basically homeless when out on bail, having lost everything I owned and relying on the generosity and kindness of friends/former coworkers).

So I am stuck with a ruined life and a twisted mockery of myself.  The fruits of a considerable number of years of time and effort and thought and creativity on my part**** were all taken away by the mindless grinding of a huge stupid machine of “criminal justice” that has little to nothing to do with the latter part of the term.  I don’t claim not to be stupid or foolish or not to have ever made mistakes in the whole situation.  I make many mistakes.  But it is maddening to see how misapplied the law can be and to experience it for oneself, especially when one is now by oneself, partly thanks to that misapplication, and then to learn that now the law is changed (or correctly applied) such that I could have been in a better situation had that change come sooner.

I often consider the possibility of going to the Palm Beach courthouse, dousing myself in various flammable liquids, and turning myself into a “bonfire of the unsanities and inanities”, to bring attention to some of the costs of misapplied “justice” and to bring an end to my own mis-called life.  I even have two gallons of paraffin lamp oil and six liters of charcoal lighter fluid and a big enough backpack to carry them all, in case I decide to do it.

Death by fire is intimidating, though‒I am no Buddhist monk by any means.  And I also dislike causing inconvenience to other people, even those involved in an institution that had no qualms about recklessly “judging” me and ruining my life.  But it is tempting, and I feel right now even more than usual the utter pointlessness of continuing, even while stupidity in the office in which I work grinds away at me further (though, to give him credit, my boss tries hard to keep things as sane as he can).

I feel rotten enough and alien enough even at baseline, and all this doesn’t help.  I have lost almost all that mattered to me, and I live alone in a stupid one-room (plus bathroom) “in-law” suite that is smaller than many hotel rooms.  All my previous friends are far away, and most are doing much better with their lives than I am and don’t really have much in common with me anymore.  In any case, I don’t really talk or otherwise communicate with them, though it would be nice.

There are also plain few people where I am now who have anything in common with me.  Very few people have much in common with me:  a disgraced physician unable to practice, with a love of math and physics and biology and of Shakespeare and horror fiction and science fiction/fantasy (reading and writing it) and of science and rationality-oriented podcasts and books and videos, who wants to learn or relearn more about modern physics at a deep level and whose brain doesn’t seem to run the same operating system as most of the people around him‒a Linux in a world of iOS, or worse.

So, I don’t know what I’m going to do.  Knowing me, I’ll probably just grind along until I’m worn to a nub and then tumble into the trash can, unmarked and largely unlamented.

I know that I won’t be sorry‒not about that.

*This sounds like an awful lot of pills, but it’s deliberately chosen to sound that way in a manipulative, rhetorical tactic as used by reporters and prosecutors alike.  Let’s run the numbers, as I am wont to do, to see how impressive they really are.

Now, if there were one patient, taking one pill per day‒perhaps the person only takes one prescription, say an antidepressant or a cholesterol med or a long-acting antihypertensive‒it would take nearly 1400 years to use that many pills.  Plain few patients live that long (see my recent blog post), and most pills would long since have expired and become inactive before the end of that time.

Still, the average physician is responsible for the care of 2,000 to 3,000 patients (see here and here), meaning that if, on average, their patients each only took one prescribed pill a day, they would go through 500,000 pills in 6 to 9 months.  But many prescriptions call for more than one pill per day, and uninsured patients cannot tend to afford the long-acting pain meds that claim to allow for steadier doses and thus slightly less risk of rebounds and escalations and all the horrors involved in that.

Now, presently, I take three to nine aspirin a day, sometimes more, and I also take two naproxen and some supplemental Tylenol as well, all of which are more directly toxic to the body than opioids, but are nonetheless over the counter (as they should be).  If I averaged ten total pills a day, then it would take me only 137 years or so to take 500,000 total pills.  That’s longer than I’m likely to be taking pills, but I’m only one person (that, as Dave Barry said, is the law).  An average practice of patients who took only six pills a day would go through 500,000 pills in one to one and a half months.  Many ordinary, non-pain-specific patients, especially those middle-aged and older, take that many and even more prescription meds a day.

In any case, an ordinary general practitioner with a light patient load of two thousand patients, each taking only an average of two pills a day, would prescribe 500,000 pills in 3 to 5 months.  So don’t be too impressed by the carefully curated numbers that prosecutors and media choose to elicit your alarm and disgust.

**Even 500,000 prescriptions, in a modest 2000 patient practice, would require only 250 prescriptions total per patient.  That would certainly take quite a bit longer than 500,000 pills would take, but given an average of only one prescription per patient per month (counting refills) it would only take a bit over 20 years, a decently short length of practice.  Many doctors see more than 2000 total patients and many patients get more than one prescription per month.  And, of course, one cannot even apply refills on “controlled substances”, they have to be literally re-written every month, and patients have to come to the doctor’s office to get them, assuming they can even get them filled.  Monthly doctor’s visits can be hard for someone trying to work a regular job while dealing with chronic pain.  Thus, the whole “mill” part of the “pill mill” trope is created by the law itself, leading to greater costs in time and fees for the patients who are trying to survive after job-related and other injuries or conditions that have caused them chronic pain and make it difficult for them to find consistent, gainful employment or to sustain health insurance.

***Pain is a symptom, not a sign, in medical terms.  We have no reliable ways of testing it, beyond patient report.  We try to find physical correlations when we can, often to see if we can find some treatable cause, but even Harrison’s Principles of Internal Medicine (I think it was on page 80 or 81 of the 14th or 15th edition, whichever one I had at the time) has clearly stated that, for instance, back pain does not correlate well even with specific injuries noted on MRIs and the like.  As large a number of people without pain will have nerve root impingements and bulging discs and the like seen on spinal MRIs as do have pain.  NO ONE KNOWS all the wherefores of this situation, but there is no serious doubt that such pain is quite real.

****It did not all happen during medical school or residency‒one does not coast along from K-12 and undergraduate college and only then start to work hard in med school, especially if one grew up in a blue-collar, factory town outside Detroit.

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Don’t be afraid of “scare quotes”; they are–as am I–here to “help”

It’s Friday at last, the last day of a work week that has lasted at least 12 days already (subjectively speaking).  I am not working tomorrow, so there will be no blog post made again until Monday, barring‒as must always be the case‒the unforeseen.

I will try to remember to send myself the audio files for my last two audio blogs‒or perhaps it was three‒to turn into “videos” over the weekend.  I haven’t downloaded clipchamp or whatever it is to my home computer, but it should be no more difficult to do there than it was at work.  Of course, I may not do that, so don’t make any plans that depend upon my doing it‒goodness knows what such plans might be.

I’m not sure if anyone really likes those “video” versions of my audio blogs or is just as happy with the plain audio.  I’ve noted before that storage on YouTube is functionally limitless (as opposed to WordPress) but if I’m loading them here first, anyway, that’s a moot point at best.

You may have noticed that I tend to put quotation marks around the word “video” when I refer to the above, because though technically they are indeed video files, the visual portion is just a static image.  I’m a big fan of so-called scare quotes.  I think we should use them far more often than we do.  People often arrogate terms to themselves, or use epithets against others, as a means of manipulation, as if invoking some sequence of letters or sounds causes a thing actually to be the case, and I think it’s important to point out when one is unconvinced that the term is being used properly or accurately.

Perhaps the most prominent and pointed such ill-use might be regarding “progressives” and “conservatives”.  Both groups inherited the terms from people who came before, and who perhaps more accurately embodied the general meanings of the words, but they are now simply camouflage uniforms, at least in many cases.  You can call yourself a “freedom fighter” if you want, but using that term doesn’t mean you’re not a terrorist or that you’re actually interested in any legitimate form of freedom.

Of course, real conservatives and progressives being at hostile odds with one another doesn’t make much sense if one is considering the usual meanings of the terms rather than claiming them as team names in some tribal contest of primate dominance.  It makes sense to conserve those things in a society that are effective, that have been tested by time and found to be useful, but it’s just as reasonable that everyone should want to make actual progress whenever possible, to improve life and prosperity for everyone as much as is feasible.

The real, useful discussion would be about which things are working well and should be conserved, and which things require improvement and how to go about it.  There will be substantial disagreement on such questions, of course, and part of the discussion must always be how to decide what best to keep as it is and what is the most fruitful area in which to improve things

People of good will‒who do not think in terms of “us” versus “them” but in terms of usefulness and effectiveness and trying to get the best outcome for as big an “us” as possible‒can work in ways that will be beneficial by whatever measures one might want to use, keeping in mind always that all conclusions are in principle provisional and all processes and people are fallible, but that all problems are in principal soluble.

I’m not sure humans are clever enough primates to achieve such matters for long.  They seem to devolve so readily into conflicting tribes.  I guess this makes sense given the ancestral environment, with groups of only on the order of perhaps about 150 people living together.  But there’s no good excuse for not recognizing that tribal modes cannot function ideally in a setting in which 8 billion people are interacting in a massive and incredibly productive and complex economy and polity.  At higher levels of complexity, newer “rules” are going to tend to be required.

Humans aren’t necessarily all that good at adjusting to such things, though.  I often think that it will require a new and ongoing external threat, such as a supervillain or an alien invasion, to bring humanity together in total.  I’ve often been tempted to volunteer myself for the position, since humanity really can be contemptible and infuriating to me.

It’s not that humans are worse than the other life forms on Earth; I don’t think they are.  Life in general is frequently vicious and cruel and wretched, with all living things riding the knife edge of death and extinction much, perhaps most, of the time.  Nature’s equilibria are not achieved by some beautiful, fairy tale cooperation and self-restraint between forest creatures or what have you.  Equilibria are maintained by disease and death, by starvation and predation.  Agent Smith was just wrong, dead wrong, in his assessment of life’s tendency to form such natural equilibria.  He was too generous in his assessment of non-human forms of life.

Humans, however, are more competent than other animals.  They are also the only ones even capable of seriously planning ahead to strike a flexible and ever-changing balance between conservatism and progress.  It’s that they so often fail even to try to rise above their lizard-monkey minds that is so infuriating, and they themselves are among the worst of their victims.

Sometimes I think just wiping them all out would be a kindness‒not to the rest of the living world, which is certainly no more admirable or worthy of kindness than humans, but to humans themselves.  After all, if a function in time is always negative, then integrating the area “under” the curve will always yield a negative, and a permanent regression to zero would be a gain.  Maybe the universe, or at least the Earth, would be kinder in aggregate if it were sterile.

It’s food for thought, at least, and it is tempting.  What do you all think?  I’m not asking what you feel.  I hate feelings*.  But when you are as close to dispassionate and disinterested as you can make yourself, what do you think?  Does the human race (and by reflection, life itself) require an enemy to bring out its best?  If so, does it not then “deserve” that enemy?  And if it cannot defeat that enemy, does it not “deserve” to be destroyed?

I suspect that might be the case.

*Ha ha, that’s a little joke.

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Morgoth, Arda, redemption, morality, and blame (not the name of a law firm)

I was out sick yesterday, but the following is audio I recorded this morning about ideas of redemption and recreation in the world of J.R.R. Tolkien, especially as goes for beings and characters such as Melkor/Morgoth and Sauron and the like.  It’s a bit meandering, I fear, and it’s longer than other recent stuff has been, but please let me know if you find it interesting, and if you have any comments on the subject(s), or on such audio posts in general, I would be glad to receive your feedback. I’ll probably be turning it into a “video” eventually, for YouTube.  I don’t know, are those easier to partake of than the audio here on the blog?  Certainly the storage availability on YouTube is functionally unlimited, but I’m not yet anywhere near the limits of my personal storage here on WordPress yet, anyway.

This probably almost would count as a podcast, though I don’t know whether I feel comfortable arrogating that status to my measly ponderings.

Let me know what you think, please, and thank you.

Addendum:  Here is the link to In Deep Geek.  

I also highly recommend Nerd of the Rings.

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Let’s put the day in a box, or something

It’s Tuesday morning, the day after Christmas‒called Boxing Day in the UK and related places, though I’ve encountered no consistent, good explanation for that name‒and I’m sitting at the train station, waiting for the 2nd train of the day to bring me toward the office.

I’m writing this post on my smartphone because I semi-accidentally left my laptop computer at the office on Saturday.  I say “semi-accidentally” because although I realized that I hadn’t packed it in plenty of time to correct that oversight, I decided to give myself a wee break from carrying it.  It’s not that much of a chore, but considering how unenthusiastic I am regarding doing anything at all, I think it’s a tolerable reduction in load.

I haven’t yet signed up for health insurance.  I really ought to try to do it sometime this week.  My sister has offered to help me with it, since such processes are so unpleasant for me that I usually honestly feel I would rather sicken and die than do them‒I’m predisposed that way, anyway, so it’s not that big a leap‒but when I spoke with her on the phone yesterday, I completely forgot to ask how she might do that.  She’s over 1000 miles away, so I’m not sure what the help would entail.  I should check with her.

I certainly don’t want to go through any government services.  Quite apart from my own experiences of injustice at the hands of state and county and federal levels of government, the disgusting spectacle of how our government has run itself, and how our politics have become so moronically fractured, gives me not merely a lack of faith in their ability to carry out their roles, but a kind of anti-faith.  I believe, or at least suspect, that they will not merely fail to ensure justice and order but that they will actually engender and even enforce injustice and will, over time, make all things worse.

This is not a partisan position.  Though the specifics of their degeneracy and dysfunction differ, both political parties in the US have attributes ranging from the pathetic to the disgusting (and almost no remaining redeeming features).  They are mere mockeries of political parties that are supposed to represent the interests of the people of their communities and states and the nation.  Watching the misbegotten antics of the cretins in positions of power, it is only too obvious how much each and every one of them is but a baboon with delusions of grandeur, trying to work a machine which it has not even the capacity to understand.

All three branches of the federal government have become little better than frat boys from opposing universities at a college football game, chanting idiotic, drunken slogans at each other, getting into brawls, trying to show off for each other, painting their faces, going topless in below zero weather…not doing anything productive at all but definitely doing their best to prevent the “other side” from doing anything productive.  Meanwhile, the actual work that is supposed to be done by these people‒whose chosen and sought-after role was nominally to work for the good of the people they represent, regardless of party affiliation‒is not even addressed in anything but sound bite form.

Oh, asteroids and alien invaders, where are you?  We need a catastrophe that cannot be “blamed” on any other political affiliate to remind everyone of how government is a tool, not a fundamental entity, and that political parties are not-so-necessary evil.

The people in our local, state, and national governments are NOT our “leaders”.  They never have been.  Leaders create innovation, they march in front, they accept responsibility, and they put their personal well-being on the line in service of some (hopefully beneficial) goal.  We do not elect leaders‒that’s practically a contradictory notion.  At best, we elect managers.  These people are our servants, our employees, and we should treat them as such.  When they do a crappy job‒as almost all of them do‒we should fire them, not invent excuses to blame their poor performance on the “other side” or whatever.

It’s not really about “blame”.  It’s about actually getting the job done.  I don’t necessarily blame a person for being a bad carpenter, for instance‒maybe that person tries really hard but just doesn’t have the knack.  But once I realize they aren’t very good, I’m not going to use their services.  And even if I don’t know for certain how good a new person is going to be, if the current carpenter has less than a 20% approval rating, most random alternatives are likely to be better.  And we can keep trying new people until we find good ones.

I fear the system is going to have to burn itself down across the board before any better setup occurs.  That’s a shame, because at its root, the US Constitution has some pretty good ideas.  It’s a decent operating system*, and it has a built-in ability to be updated.  It’s certainly a better system than nearly all the people involved in elected positions based upon it, and that is the advantage of rule of law versus rule of person.

But of course, all laws have to be created and then carried out by naked house apes who are more driven by personal dominance hierarchy jockeying that serves inbuilt reproductive urges than by any higher brain functions.  Their cortexes** appear to be used almost entirely for making excuses, for post-hoc justification of actions they took on whims and urges of personal indulgence, instead of assessing reality and deciding what is honestly best to do.

As Eliezer Yudkowsky pointed out, if you enter the final balance in the ledger (or list of pros and cons) before you begin to do any figuring, all your figuring is irrelevant.  It does not provide any information.  At most, it’s there to deceive, and the fact that it serves to deceive the deceiver as well provides no absolution for the deceiver.  Reality gives no free passes.

Anyway, I don’t know how that got started.  I certainly didn’t plan to write about it.  But there it is.  I guess it wasn’t far from the front of my mind.  Honestly, if it weren’t for my children, and the children of my sister and some of my friends, I would just as soon see the whole world literally burn.  It’s going to happen someday, in any case, and if humans are just going to be carrying out their dumbshow over and over, with rises and falls of cultural intelligence, but with the lowest common denominator always thoughtlessly sabotaging the higher, it may well be a net gain simply to head off decades or centuries or millennia or eons of net misery with a return to zero.

Hope you’re having a happy holiday season!

*Maybe part of the problem is that, though the operating system is good, there’s never been any chance to reboot or even “sleep” the system.  So, it has continued to accumulate errors, inefficiencies, conflicting bits of data, until they make every program unable to run efficiently, or at all.  We don’t need to change the Constitution, and probably not even the laws (at least not to start); we need to change all the people (and the political parties).  We should just sweep them away, clearing the browser history and the cookies and the RAM and all that, and restart with the operating system unchanged, but without all the baggage.

**Should that be “cortices”?

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It’s all a matter of degrees

It’s Tuesday morning, and I’m waiting for the second train of the day, the one I caught yesterday.  I slept a bit better last night than Sunday night.  That’s not saying much, but beggars can’t be choosers, as the saying goes.  It still feels a bit better, at least.  You know you’re in some weirdness when four or five hours of heavily broken-up sleep feels fairly restful, and you don’t even really consider bothering to go and catch the 4:20 train.

It’s relatively cool here in south Florida, by which I mean the current temperature is 57 degrees* according to my weather app.  This is, rather amusingly, lower than the app’s statement of what the low temperature overnight is supposed to have been.  Anyone paying attention might be excused for feeling that the app, in contradicting itself so flagrantly, should not be considered reliable.

Of course, it’s obvious that the app, or service, or whatever it is, simply doesn’t bother to update its “printed” overnight low prediction just for local minutiae.  It’s not meant to be too precise, and in any case, local temperatures can vary quite a bit.  The predicted low was 60, so it’s only off by 3 degrees.

Those who have not been thoroughly enough educated might think this is a five percent error—small, but not negligible.  That is not correct.  Both Fahrenheit and Centigrade are relative temperature scales, based around the freezing and boiling points of water, which is a useful, but provincial, set of benchmarks.

No, to get the correct error estimate we must work with the absolute temperature scale, or Kelvin, which begins at “absolute zero” the coldest “possible” temperature and goes up to whatever the maximum possible temperature is**.  So, the error in absolute degrees (which are the same size as degrees in Centigrade, by convention) would be 3 degrees times 5/9, or 15/9 degrees Kelvin.

Now, to get the predicted temperature in Kelvin, we first convert to Centigrade—by taking (60-32) x 5/9, or (28 x 5)/9, or 140/9, or about 15 and a half—then add 273 (which is what zero degrees Centigrade is in Kelvin, ignoring the digits after the decimal point).  So, the predicted temperature, in Kelvin, was about 288 degrees.  15/9 is one and two thirds degrees, so 1.67 degrees (taking 3 significant figures).  As a percentage of 288, that’s pretty tiny.

Here, I’m going to go to the calculator program on my laptop, and it gives me…roughly 0.58%.  That’s just over half a percent error.  Not too bad, when you think about it.  How often are your own estimates that accurate?  If you could pick stocks that well, you could rapidly become a billionaire, I would think.

Here’s a funny little aside:  the southbound train just pulled in across the tracks, and I’ve apparently used the Wi-Fi on that specific train before, because my laptop just prompted me to sign in.  The train is pulling away now, and it’s too late, but it must have a pretty good Wi-Fi signal.

Okay, on to other matters, none of which seem nearly as interesting to me.

I think I’m going to try to use the same person who helped my coworker (the one who had a stroke) get new health insurance at what appears to have been a very good rate to sign up for some for me.  I don’t even want to try to use Medicaid or Obamacare if I can help it.

I don’t trust the human government, anymore—as Radiohead sang, “they don’t…they don’t work for us”.  It’s not that I think the government overall is malicious or evil or whatnot.  It’s just that everyone in it is very small and parochial, working for their own local self-interest under local pressures and incentives.  It’s astonishing that they ever accomplish anything useful at all.

Ants and bees (and termites) do a much more impressive job when they build their hills and hives and mounds, but then again, they are individually less self-serving in many ways.  That’s not to their particular credit—it’s the just way nature has shaped them for their lifestyle and reproductive strategies—but it’s true, nevertheless.

Human governments, meanwhile, are made up of individually motivated creatures whose reproductive processes (and thus their drives and fears) are not much different from any other mammals’, but who try to work in ultrasocial settings as if they were some close relatives of Hymenoptera.  It’s a testament to the incredible power of language (particularly written language) that they accomplish anything at all.

When it has dealt with me specifically, “the” government has done far more harm than good, and most unjustly***.  The less I have to do with any level of their power—I will not grant them the word “authority”—the more comfortable I will feel.  I have a learned aversion and probably some form of complex trauma associated with such things.

I don’t see any reason to overcome that aversion, because I don’t see how it would make my life any better.  It certainly would not make local or state or national governments any less likely to grind me—or anyone else who isn’t massively wealthy and unscrupulous, which probably includes you—into bone meal.

With that, I’ll start to wrap things up for today.  It’s the fifth day of Hanukkah, so enjoy it.  Also, there are only a lucky 13 days left until the annual celebration of Newton’s birthday (they also celebrate some other guy’s birth on that day as well, and though he seems to have been a good sort of guy overall, he really wasn’t born on anything like December 25th).

Christmas was, of course, grafted on to a pre-existing solstice festival, and why not?  Heck, Newton’s birthday was only on December 25th according to the Julian calendar, so it’s at least a week or two out from the Gregorian “date of his birth”.  I could figure out the correct Gregorian date, but I can’t be arsed.  It’s a question with no gravity, no momentum, not even any real significant potential energy.  One might say it is of infinitesimal importance.

Have a nice day.

*Fahrenheit, of course.  If it were 57 degrees Centigrade, global warming would indeed have taken an abrupt turn for the very much worse, and we would all be in the express lane to extinction, unless it were a very transient phenomenon.  And, of course, if it were 57 degrees Kelvin, we would all already be frozen to death quite nicely, since even the nitrogen in the atmosphere freezes below 63 Kelvin, and oxygen is a liquid below 90 K (both of these numbers are at “normal” pressures, which would not prevail in these circumstances).  I don’t know quite what it would mean to be at a 57 degree angle outside—would that simply mean that everything in the universe had been rotated by slightly less than a sixth of a full circle?  Given the rotational symmetry of the laws of physics, from which comes the conservation of angular momentum, I don’t think anyone would even notice.  And, of course, the Earth rotates locally 360 degrees a day, by definition.

**If memory serves, it’s called the Planck temperature.  Anyway, this would be the temperature at which each local point in spacetime would be so hot that the local energy would make a black hole, and in any case, the usual laws of physics would break down.  However, of course, if that energy is uniformly spread out, as presumably it would have been in the very early universe, any local spacetime curvature might be entirely effaced, so there would be no such black holes, as all the universe would be full of such energy.  I think inflationary cosmology would imply that there never really was an era of such intense local energy, unless that would be the “inflaton field” itself, but I may be misremembering this.  Anyway, that’s getting well into speculative physics.

***I am, of course, inescapably biased in this assessment, and I honestly could in principle be convinced by argument and evidence that I am wrong.  Nevertheless, I don’t think I’m incorrect in considering that statement to be accurate and true, with a fairly high credence—certainly well into the mid to high 90 percent range.  In other words, if I considered about a hundred assessments in which I was comparably confident as I am to this one, I would expect to be wrong about only a handful of them.

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Weird pegs hammered into “normal” holes and spiders living in beehives

It’s Saturday morning, and I’m sitting at the train station very early—quite a bit too early for the first train—because I was awake anyway, and there was no point in waiting around at the house.  The train station (like the office) in many ways feels more hospitable than the house does.  That’s not saying much, but there it is.

There seem not to have been very many people reading my blog these last few days.  Evidently, when I’m not focused on my mental illness—and it is mental illness, it is not mental health—people don’t seem very interested.  Or maybe there’s a change to the WordPress Reader algorithm so that people don’t see my blog pop up.  I know something has changed, because I can no longer directly comment (or see the comments of others) on my favorite website through WordPress Reader.  That may be because the person who runs that website finds me annoying.  It’s easy enough for me to imagine that other people find me annoying.  I find myself annoying, so it’s not exactly a new notion.  Still, it’s very disheartening to be ostracized, deliberately or accidentally, from my usual interaction at that blog.

I don’t have much heart from the start.

I was approached—figuratively speaking—by someone yesterday morning asking me to please get health insurance, and making suggestions about how to do so affordably.  I listened, because of who it was and, even more importantly, because of on whose behalf they were probably partly speaking (though I am convinced of the caller’s true personal good intentions as well).  I agreed, fine, I’ll get health insurance of some kind.

It’s not the money, mainly, that’s been in the way of me getting insurance.  It’s my self-loathing that mainly gets in the way.  Why would I want to maintain my health and try to live longer or healthier?  What is the point of such an endeavor?  I’m personally extremely unhappy, and in pain, and sleepless, and alone, for one thing (I guess that’s more than one thing, but you probably know what I mean).

At this stage I’m just a net drain on the world, anyway.  Surely, the whole planet would probably cheer up slightly—but noticeably—if I were gone, like a pond that’s been muddied by heavy rainfall finally clearing after the silt settles out.  Most people wouldn’t know why the world felt a little more positive, a little more hopeful, a little more pleasant, but it would still be the case.

Anyway, I said I would do it, so I will, unless something kills me first.

I was in a weirdly upbeat mood part of yesterday morning before that event, although my blog post was rather angry.  To give you an idea of how weirdly upbeat I was, I had finished writing the draft of my post and was getting ready to lie down on the floor of the office (I do this a few times a day to help my back) and I set my computer to install updates in the meantime.  And as I saw the computer message that informed me that it was “updating”, I thought, “‘Updating’…that needs to be the title of a rom-com.”

Immediately, I thought up and quickly wrote out the plot synopsis for the romantic comedy in question and emailed it via my smartphone to myself.  Later, I told my boss about it, conveying the basic story line, and he said—with some enthusiasm—that it was quite good and he thought people would really like that story, and would read such a book.

I had thought of it more as a screenplay sort of thing, to be honest.  I considered getting on Skillshare or something similar and doing a quick course on screenwriting, to write it up.

Of course, I’m not in such a good mood as yesterday morning—it went away by early afternoon, when I suddenly felt a burst of severe tension, as if someone had injected me with epinephrine while I wasn’t looking.  It’s not a good feeling, but I have it a lot of the time.  Anyway, I’ve pretty rapidly and persistently gone downhill since then.

So, I guess I’ll sign up for some form of health insurance.  I have some degree of inherent resistance to the idea, of course, a big one being just my honest difficulty dealing with bureaucratic matters, with paperwork and personal records and trying to fit my weird and distorted metaphorical pegs into the square and round holes laid out—quite unthinkingly—by the world.

That latter comment about things being laid out unthinkingly is important.  No one should imagine that the world as it is was ever truly planned or designed by anyone, whether out of beneficence or malice or otherwise.  Individual people and so forth have had plans and goals and ideas, but no one is big enough actually to design a society or a government or an economy or whatever.  It all just falls together, like salt crystallizing out of a strong saline solution, or rock candy forming on a string in a cooling bath of saturated sugar water.

There are tendencies to form certain kinds of patterns, of course, because of the nature of the constituents and their interactions, but if one were to arrange ten million such rock candy baths, no two of the products would be the same.

Rock candy is simple, of course, and its point and purpose are simple.  So, it doesn’t really matter what specific shapes might be formed when making it.  Societies and civilizations, on the other hand, can take all manner of forms, and these can be truly better or worse by any criteria one might choose to use to measure them.  But they are not inherently real, they are not inherently good, they are not inherently stable or ethical or fair or just, and maybe they never will be.

Justice (however one may want to define the term) does not happen on its own.  Even if one tries to achieve it, one must constantly reevaluate, reassess, tweak, and adjust how one approaches it, because it is not a simple problem, and each local solution will engender new problems.  Problems are solvable, of course, but that doesn’t guarantee that they will be solved.  Wanting to solve them is not enough, and even trying to solve them is not enough.

To achieve justice, or at least to optimize it, for even a group of a hundred people would probably be computationally impossible even using a physically maximal computer.  Even assuming one had a fully agreed-upon definition of the term, the adjustments needed to get everyone in the best possible place seem fit make the traveling salesman problem trivial by comparison.

As for achieving optimal justice for 8 billion people, well…that’s not even a pipe dream.  It’s not even laughable.  At best it could only really be achieved at individual levels or perhaps in small groups, but then again, there’s not even an agreed-upon definition of the term.  This is one of the reasons to be suspicious of people who claim to have all the answers or a “real solution” or whatever, especially if you think they are sincere.

True believers are dangerous, far more dangerous than psychopaths or the mentally ill, and they have done vastly more harm throughout history than all the most self-centered of sociopathic villains could ever do, even if given absolute power (or so I predict).  This is at least partly because anyone who thinks they absolutely have the answers for civilization or even a society is simply wrong.  They always have been, they always will be.  Finite entities cannot even fully understand themselves, let alone ultimate, complex aspects of the world around them, so they can never be mathematically certain that they have the final word on any question.  It is always necessary, in principle, to be open to criticism and testing, to updating beliefs, even if one is very close to being sure.

Anyway, I have trouble dealing with bureaucracies and forms and paperwork and everything.  It feels utterly unnatural and uncomfortable.  It always has, but when I was younger and had people in my life, I was more able to put in the effort.  But it’s always felt unnatural to me, and deeply so.

It’s a bit like a spider trying to become a member of a beehive—seeking nectar and pollen and tending larvae and warding off invaders to the hive and all.  Some of the spider’s attributes may be useful—silk and venom and potent things—but a spider does not live on honey and pollen, and it will not thrive in a hive (if it even stays alive).  A spider is an alien in a hive; it can no more live like a bee than it can grow wheat and thresh it and grind it and then bake and live on bread.  However long it lives, it will simply be suffering.

That’s how I feel about a lot of this shit.  But I’ll do it.  Maybe I’ll even try to write that rom-com.  I can write pretty easily.  Of course, knowing me, the rom-com would probably devolve into a horror story, but maybe that would be good in a way.  After all, I’ve had romance of one kind or another in all my horror stories, and there’s usually at least a little bit of joking.  Sauce for the romantic comedy goose…

At bottom, though, I really don’t want to be healthy and alive.  I mean, it’d be nice not to feel physically miserable as long as I am alive, but that desire is preprogrammed into the organism, and I cannot rewrite that programming.  I can, however, shut it down, or let it come to a shutdown on its own, since I cannot update it, despite the title of my potential romantic comedy.  Life is shit—and if you’re a cockroach, shit is life, but that doesn’t mean you can make high art with it.

Anyway, here comes my train.  Have a nice weekend.