Language

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“The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Welcome to July of 2026 (AD or CE) everyone.  Yes, since yesterday was the last day of June, then it must follow, as the day the previous day, that today is the 1st of July (given the specifications of “our” date-assigning system).

It’s payroll day today, of course, this being Wednesday.  I’m never too enthusiastic about such days.  I am, however, pleased to have learned that we, meaning those in my office, are not working this Saturday, it being Independence Day here in the US.  And we’re not working next Saturday, either, since it is a Saturday we would have had off, anyway.

That will be three Saturdays off in a row.  What will I do if I actually accrue a bit of rest and recover a bit of physiologic reserve?  Huh?  Have you ever thought about that?  Or are you too self-centered to be always and principally concerned about what is going on with me?

I’m kidding.  Even I don’t have much interest in my day to day life…or my life overall, now that you mention it.

Wait, you didn’t mention it; I mentioned it.  Then I projected my feelings onto you, whoever you may be that is reading this.  What pathetic, but very typical of human, behavior that is.

Obviously, I have nothing in mind about which to write today, despite having already written, let’s see…228 words.  I guess that’s not all that many words so far, is it?  Then again, it’s not very few words so far, either.

Speaking of “few” words, do please try to remember the difference between “fewer” and “less”.  If the referent of the adjective is something that comes in discrete, countable units, e.g., people or marbles or books, then the word to use is “fewer”, while if it is something that is continuous, such as some form of fluid or substance, e.g., water, air, sugar, then “less” is the word to use.  If you think* that it does not matter‒that it’s fine to say, “I have less friends than I used to have”**‒then try to realize that it’s just as bizarre as saying, “I’ve been drinking fewer water lately”, or “we only have a few sugar left in the sugar bowl”.

Even the Google Docs grammar checker balks at such uses of “few”, underlining them in blue as possibly incorrect, but it doesn’t highlight the “less friends” disgrace that precedes them.  This is what happens when these programs are “taught” their grammar simply through patterns of usage on‒of all the stupid things‒the internet, rather than by learning the logic behind grammar, and why it matters for clarity of communication.

There are arbitrary and unnecessary “rules” of grammar, of course, but they are fewer*** and farther between than you might expect.

I suppose it probably doesn’t matter, really, not on any kind of large scale.  Not unless it is possible‒allowed by nature, that is‒for humans or their descendants eventually to become cosmically important, to endure for eons, to engineer the shapes of galactic clusters and so on, and perhaps even to solve the problems of the “end” of the universe.

How’s that for a huge and noble quest:  to save the universe from the heat death/big crunch/big rip?  It’s crazily ambitious, but then again, only those who attempt the “impossible” can achieve the unbelievable.  I won’t say it’s the only way to make existence worthwhile‒such judgment is in the mind of each judge, and eternity is not a requirement to make a life a worthwhile thing (though the converse is also not necessarily true).

But for anything about any life to be remembered for any serious duration, then memory itself, conscious memory, must endure.  Simply stored records are not quite enough, not if one wants to leave anything behind that’s even as significant as “trunkless legs of stone” in the desert.

The universe itself seems unlikely to be finite in any larger sense‒the laws of nature that allowed our universe to exist at all seem likely to be, at some level, ever-present and “eternal” (though time is a function within the universe as we know it, so that “eternal” quality is not merely a function of time, but also of the very stuff of which space and time, and whatever else there may be, is made).

But one wants a universe where information from the past can persist, not merely be wiped away inevitably by the whips and scorns of time and big crunches and heat deaths.  If all one seeks is some time capsule that will never be opened, well, then you’re already making that, at least if the conservation of quantum information is correct, which most physicists who work in such areas seem to think it is.

Everything you are and do leaves evidence behind of itself and of you.  But so would a narrow, laser-based optical signal detailing all your thoughts‒something like a blog, say‒that you shine out into the widest void in space you can find, such that it will never so much as encounter a possible recipient before universal expansion has rendered such potential recipients too far away ever to be reached, even in principle.  Would that be satisfying?

I don’t know.  A lot of my writing hasn’t been too far from that situation.  But I do at least have readers here, whose minds become at least a little encoded (infected?) with the memes of my thoughts on a regular basis.  I can only apologize.

*And I use the word “think” here quite wrongly.

**No one should be surprised by your dearth of friends.

***See how weird it would be to think “they are less and farther between”?

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“A distant ship smoke on the horizon”

Well, it’s here at last:  the final day of June in 2026 AD/CE.  You might say it’s the hospice day for the first half of this year.  Let us try to make its passing as peaceful and comfortable as we can.  I recommend high doses of opioids.

I’m kidding.  I don’t actually recommend such a thing unless one is in severe pain that’s simply not responding to anything else, or unless all the other stuff is simply too toxic.

That’s a big part of the conundrum of opioids.  All the other types of pain medications‒aspirin, other NSAIDs, acetaminophen, lidocaine injections, steroid injections and so on‒have significant systemic toxicities, even at relatively moderate doses.  They affect the stomach, the kidneys, the liver, the local tissues, the endocrine system, etc.  Quite often, one cannot adequately control significant pain for long using them without causing actual, serious, perilous damage to some of the most essential parts of the body.

On the other hand, opioids work.  They directly hit the pain centers/processors, and they actually can relieve pain, even very severe pain.  But they don’t just relieve physical pain.

Somewhat ironically, that’s one of the big drawbacks.  Though they do not cause systemic or organ toxicity, and they will not trigger diabetes, and they will not cause you ulcers (though they may well constipate you), they can affect your behavior and even your character.  Their relief of psychical pain‒sometimes the only such relief some people have felt in a long, long time‒is like their relief of more visceral pain:  it doesn’t actually correct any underlying disorders.

Well, I suppose if the disorder is simply a neurological misfiring such as that which leads to chronic pain, you could say they do at least act on the area that is dysfunctional.  But they don’t cure it.  They almost never correct even neuropathic pain; they simply squelch the alarm for a bit.  And the successful squelching of the alarms tends to require increasing doses, and can lead to dependence and various other issues.

So, there are no very good, relatively simple corrections for significant pain.  This is probably not a surprise, if you think about it.  In some form, at least, pain is among the oldest things in nature and among the most crucial (ha ha)* functions of nervous systems‒and even things that aren’t quite nervous systems, like the internal communication systems in hydra and jellyfish or the analogous systems of plants.

Living bodies don’t readily give up on pain, and they have good reasons.  Pleasure is nice, and is useful, of course, but it’s like having a pretty picture on your wall or having nice, scented candles in your living room or what have you.  No matter how pretty your decorations, you want to have your fire alarms in good working order.  You want them sensitive enough to go off even in situations without real fires‒the classic case of burnt toast, say‒rather than take the chance that they will not to go off in the case of a real fire.  The first error causes annoyance, perhaps requiring you to wave towels at the sensors and open a lot of windows and so on.  The second error can lead to your house burning down, perhaps with you in it.

Of course, these weighted preferences are not absolute.  If one’s smoke alarms were always going off‒or even going off a significant fraction of the time‒one might very well want to wipe out the whole system, to pull all the plugs, to remove all the batteries,  to flip all the breakers to “off”.  Or, indeed, one might simply want to abandon the house entirely, if there were no way to get the alarms to shut the f*ck up.  One might even be tempted to burn the stupid place down, just as a form of petty revenge against it.

There’s a metaphor in all this, I would imagine.  I’ll leave it as an exercise for you to discern it.  I won’t say it’s particularly clever, but it’s not terrible, and it works pretty well.  Anyway, I’ve dealt with this subject before, many times, I’m sure.  It’s fairly tedious, but it does seem to stick in my mind for some inexplicable reason.  I don’t, however, know how to solve the associated problems.

Ah, well.  There are some things humans aren’t meant to know.

Ha ha ha ha!  Sorry, I couldn’t keep a straight “face” while writing something so very stupid.  Humans aren’t “meant” to know (or not to know) anything, anymore than any particular foodstuff “belongs” on a pizza.  People can try to learn and understand anything, even everything, and ultimately, in the long run, as far as I can tell, the more one knows and understands, the better.

If you want to do your best in a game, you would do well to learn the rules as well as you can.  Because, to quote an old car commercial, in real life there is no reset button.  You are the avatar and you are the player, and when you get blasted into nothingness by the depredations of the game’s limitless antagonists, then for the character and for the player, the game is done.  There is no respawning, there are no experience points, there is no starting again at the last save point.

Game over.

*I say “ha ha” because the word “crucial”, related to the Latin for cross (apparently evolving into its modern usage from a metaphor for arriving at a crossroads), is also related to the word “excruciating” which derives from the Latin use of torturing as if crucifying someone.  And that, of course, relates pretty clearly to the topic of pain.

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I’m back, but not to save the universe

It’s Friday now and I’m writing this post on the lapcom*.  According to the list of my saved blog posts that auto-fills as I write in the new file name, I wrote a post using the lapcom on this date last year, though that was a Thursday and this is a Friday.  That day mismatch by one is the sort of thing that tends to happen, since the “normal” year is 365 days, which gives 52 with a remainder of 1 if you divide it by 7 (the number of days in a week, in case that was unclear).

That’s a bit interesting (though only just) because of my tendency in recent time to write mostly on my smartphone; it’s relatively uncommon for the same dates to appear on the smartphone’s saved list two years in a row.  I think my smartphone-writing tendency was well in place since at least last year, but I am far from sure.  I have not been keeping track of that development precisely over time, so I’d be building my impression de novo if I were trying to recall the specifics.

Of course, I could just look through my list of “blog post for x-x-xxxx Xday” from the last years, sorted by date, and I would see how many posts I wrote on the lapcom in 2025 versus the number I wrote on the smartphone, which are saved to Google Drive.  That’s not exactly a difficult task, but it’s also not very interesting, so I don’t intend to do it.

I’m sure it’s also not very interesting for you all to read about, presumably**, so I’ll drop that topic now.

I did not write a post yesterday, in case you were wondering, because I did not go to work.  I was not “ill” in the sense of having a contagious disease; rather, I was in very severe pain and the meds I was taking to try to combat it were making me feel physically ill at various levels, so I tried to stay back at the house and rest.

It’s not very comfortable there, and I don’t especially like being there, but at least I don’t have to try to do work while feeling crappy, and I can lie down to rest my back and try to nap a bit.  I can also try to pass time doing some distracting things, though nothing really entertains me or even catches much of my interest anymore.  I’m just passing time all the time.

I haven’t played guitar or keyboard (nor sang) in over a week, maybe almost two weeks.  My left hand fingertip calluses haven’t significantly faded, but if this goes on too long, they will.  Of course, guitar calluses aren’t as impressive as cello-related ones, which I had for probably nearly twenty years back in the day.  Sometimes you could see those without even having to look too closely.

My cello calluses are long gone—though there’s a “ship of Theseus” style question of whether one should consider my current calluses to be anything but the same ones, or on the other hand (no pun intended) if one can consider any calluses the same ones over time, since the skin cells turn over and so do the very atoms in the underlying living cells.

It doesn’t matter, but sometimes such philosophical questions can stimulate thought and train one to be careful and rigorous in the way one thinks, and so perhaps make one less prone to certain kinds of mental errors.  They are probably worth your time if you’re interested.

Anyway, I’m going to work today, and I should also be working tomorrow, so you’ll get probably five posts this week, at least, though not contiguously.  You also won’t be getting one of my altered Shakespeare quote headlines.  I do those on Thursdays, out of a sense of…nostalgia, I guess, for the times when my blog was only posted on Thursdays, and was meant as a promotion/author’s note on what was going on with my fiction writing.  I’m not doing any fiction writing now—and I don’t just mean “at this very moment” because that’s all too obvious—and I don’t know whether I will ever again, any more than whether I’ll ever sing or play an instrument or anything like that again.

Oh, but I did come up with and write down a rather silly story idea yesterday, for the first time in a while.  It concerned the expression “time flies when you’re having fun”, but takes the point of view that “time flies” could be some form of supernatural insect.  The main character could be someone who is cursed such that, whenever he was becoming joyful or satisfied with his life, these supernatural insects would begin to swarm him and eventually transport him through time to some random place whence he’d have to start all over.

It’s a goofy notion, I know.

I actually prefer the idea I had apparently written down most recently before that.  It concerned a scientist who invents a truth serum or device or combination thereof that makes a person under its influence always tell the truth—even truths that they did not know before.  For instance, you can ask them what the weather is like in Kuala Lumpur at the moment and they will tell you and it will be correct, even if they are in Jakarta or Tannu Tuva or Massachusetts or Poughkeepsie or some other entertainingly named place.

But the more rarefied the information is, the greater toll it takes on the mind being questioned.  I proposed the possibility of asking someone what the next day’s winning lottery numbers would be, but the sheer improbability of specific answers and the fact that they are in the future overstrains and severely damages the brain of the person involved.  But they would get the numbers right if they survived the process.  I wonder what might come of such an invention.

I am not, by the way, giving anyone permission to use those ideas by sharing them here.  You do not have permission, and I might well be inclined to bring down truly horrific vengeance upon you if you steal them in any sense.  However, if I should die without ever writing either story, then after that, you should feel absolutely free to use them.  You don’t even have to give me credit; I’ll be dead, I won’t care (though the present person I am thinks it pleasant to imagine being given such credit, so do with that what you will).

Anyway, that’s enough for today.  As I said, I expect to write a post tomorrow, barring (as always) the unforeseen***.  I hope you all have a good day today, and that you have a good weekend and so on.  Heck, carry that forward as far as you can.

*I wrote Tuesday’s post on the smartphone, by the way, for those who took up my challenge to try to see if they could tell whether that had been the case or I had written on my lapcom.

**Though we must be careful with such presumption, because as we all know, “when you presume, you make a pres out of u and me”.  In the past, being a “pres” could have been a good thing, at least to some degree, but that time is gone.  Nowadays, I’d rather assume than presume, since I’m often an ass entirely on my own, anyway.

***I tried to find a pithy Latin phrase that would encapsulate that expression, since I use it so often—you know, something like ceteris paribus for “all other things being equal”—but the attempts I have made so far produced cumbersome phrases that didn’t quite truly mean what I had intended when I reversed the translation process.  Alas.

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Cosmic. Way out. I can relate.

Well, here we are beginning another Monday, and I’m writing this post—again—on the mini lapcom.

I say “again” not because I am writing this very post for a second (or more) time, nor because the last post I did was written on the lapcom, because it was not.  I mean “again” in the sense that last Monday I wrote my blog post on the lapcom.  I also did so on Tuesday and on Wednesday last week, but I cannot yet say that I will do so tomorrow and the next day.  I won’t even say “barring the unforeseen”, because I can rather easily imagine, and therefore foresee, situations in which I will not write those blog posts on the lapcom.

Of course, I also cannot predict whether, like last week, I will write Thursday’s and Friday’s posts on the smartphone.  It’s not that unlikely, but I don’t know ahead of time whether I will write them on the smartphone or the lapcom.  I could make predictions, but I think anything deviating terribly far from 50/50 would probably be very much a rectally sourced prediction.

I will say, though, that if I do write blog posts the rest of the days this week—which will include Saturday, alas—I will almost certainly write them either on the lapcom or the smartphone.  How’s that for a bold prediction?  It’s not a certainty, of course, but then again, pretty much nothing is.  It’s getting into the high 90 percentiles though, I’d guess.  I’m not skilled enough at probability/decision theory to get much finer in my estimation than that.

Anyway, that was about 250 words of utterly pointless drivel, wasn’t it?  It’s quite odd how much and how quickly I can write about more or less nothing of significance.  Mind you, from a certain point of view, nothing is really of significance.  Also nothing is of significance.  I mean two different things by those two different uses of the same words.

The first means that there is almost nothing in the universe that, in itself, is significant (cosmically speaking, of course—on different scales, significance has different requirements).  No individual, localized thing or fact can matter much on the largest scales.  On the other hand, nothing—the vacuum, absence, whatever you want to call it—is significant.  This partly refers to the fact that the universe appears to be expanding at an accelerated rate, and this seems to be due to the vacuum energy, the energy of “empty” space.  A uniform energy density in space creates a negative pressure, which creates “negative gravity” in a sense, and that drives an expansion of spacetime.

The nature of this vacuum energy, or cosmological constant, is definitely significant in that it will determine, almost solely as far as we can tell, the future fate of the universe.

Of course, the term “vacuum” may be somewhat misleading given its ordinary usage (quite apart from when one refers to the household appliance).  The vacuum is never really “empty” despite what the usual meaning of the word is.  It’s full of all sorts of quantum fields as well as the gravitational field that is spacetime itself.  The vacuum is just when these fields are in their lowest possible states/energy levels*.

There’s also the famous Higgs Field, which actually is one of the quantum fields, but it is interesting in that it is a scalar field, meaning that it has magnitude at every point but not direction (like a map demonstrating local temperatures on Earth’s surface, as opposed to one detailing the wind, which will have magnitude and direction).

If this seems a peculiar distinction to you, think of the electromagnetic field, which has both magnitude and direction at every point.  It’s actually a little more complex even than just that, because of course, electricity and magnetism are two aspects of the electromagnetic field, but each one of them is a vector field (with magnitude and direction) which interacts with the other, so the combination of them is something more involved.

Also, when energies are high enough (changing the way the Higgs field interacts with other fields), the weak nuclear force and the electromagnetic force turn out to be part of the same thing, called the electroweak force.  And, of course, there is the question of whether all the fields are really just aspects of some “higher” field or structure.

This would be some form of “unified field theory” (not to be confused with GUTs, or “grand unified theories”, which are less grand and less unified than unified field theories).  Of course, we don’t know that there is a unified field.  There may not be.  There may just be a minimum number of fields that cannot be further reduced.

If M-theory (AKA string theory) is correct, then yes, there is a unified form from which all fields derive their character thanks to the shapes and resonances of their vibrations in high-dimensional spaces.  On the other hand, other versions of quantum gravity such as “loop quantum gravity” leave gravity (AKA spacetime itself) as a separate kind of field, composed of tiny, tiny parts (the “loops”) knitted together.

At least some versions of this theory have been disconfirmed, however, because it predicts a very, very slight difference in the speed of travel of electromagnetic waves depending on wavelength, and light from extremely distant quasars has been tested and found to be uniform in arrival time (based on variability in the quasars and specific catastrophic events, if memory serves) from wavelength the wavelength, even to tiny parts in billions of light years traveled.

Okay, well, that’s surely enough trivia for anyone early on a Monday morning.  I wish I didn’t have to work today, but then again, I wish I didn’t feel like I have to do anything.  But I do feel that way.  I guess it’s probably better than being inert.  Without a goal or goals—terminal, instrumental, or otherwise—there is no action.

You can call it a “drive” instead of a “goal” if you prefer.  That may be a more accurate term, since nature doesn’t act in a teleological way (outside of thinking minds) but instead generates drives/urges/impulses, some of which lead to increased genetic reproduction and some of which lead in the other direction.  Over time, the former are the ones that tend to accumulate, for what are probably obvious reasons.

Enough.  I already said it was enough, didn’t I?  Anyway, I hope you all have a good day.  And remember, if you tend to come to this blog via other social media, you can subscribe to it using your email, and then you’ll get emails sharing every new post with you directly.

Take care.

*There is also a thing called a false vacuum.  Spacetime itself could be in such a state, if the vacuum energy is capable of tunneling to an even lower energy level than the one at which it currently resides.  This would not be a good thing for the current inhabitants of the universe, but at least they would never know it if the drop-down happened, because everything that currently exists would be erased at the speed of light.  The universe as a whole would even be affected, but it wouldn’t be endangered per se.

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Your dates are numbered

Okay.  Well.  It’s Tuesday now, and it is the second day of June in 2026.  That’s a borderline almost mildly fun date to write out:  6-2-2026.  It has sixes and twos, mainly (though there is a zero in there, which I’m not sure my mind will let me discount despite its lack of any magnitude), and it is almost palindromically arranged when in the US format of date writing.  There are even three twos, which add up to six, and that might be cool…except for the fact that there are two sixes, so if we’re thinking that way, we would need six twos.  That would also be a more pleasing number of twos, given everything.  Unfortunately, I don’t know if there will ever be such a date.

Let’s see…2-22-2226 has six twos but only one 6, whereas 2-22-2266 has two sixes but only five twos.  I guess 2-22-22,266 will be good, but that is quite a long way in the future.  I doubt very much that I will be alive 20,000 plus years from now.  I’m not sure of 20,000 minutes!  Actually, again, let’s see…there are 24 x 60 minutes in a day, so that is 1440 minutes in a day, and so 20,000 minutes would be only around two weeks.  Okay, so I will probably still be alive in 20,000 minutes.

Let’s see (a third time)…20,000 hours would be about 833 days, so a bit over two years.  That’s quite a bit more doubtful than two weeks, but still not a crazy possibility.

As for 20,000 days, well that’s getting quite unlikely.  That’s just under 55 years, which would make me almost twice my current age.  Again, that’s quite unlikely, and I’m rather glad that it is.

20,000 weeks is not really worth considering.  If I were to live for centuries, it would only be because of astonishing medical advances* that presumably would have cured or at least ameliorated my many dysfunctions, so I would probably feel much happier than I do now or have felt for many, many years.

Speaking of many, many years, 20,000 months would obviously be well over a thousand years (20 being well over 12, as I’m sure is obvious).  If we’re going to consider that, then we have to invoke the same kinds of pseudo-miracles as we did for 20,000 weeks, we just need around four and a half times more of them, so to speak.

How the hell did I get onto this subject, or topic, or whatever it is?  Oh, right, I was noting the numerals in today’s date and how they came teasingly close to being fun, but don’t quite make it.

For those of you who might be puzzled by my use of the word “fun” when dealing with simply pointless patterns or lack thereof in things like dates, well…I like numbers.  It’s similar to the way I also like words.  I like words when they’re used to convey interesting information, and when they’re used to tell interesting stories, and when they’re combined and juxtaposed in beautiful and/or amusing ways to make poetry‒and I also sometimes like nonsensical wordplay and puns.

Also, of course, while “fun” may or may not have some manner of absolute scale, like temperature, nevertheless, as with temperature, our experience of fun is a relative one.  Tepid water can feel quite cool when you’re coming out of a sauna, but would feel nicely warm if you had just come inside to escape a bitter winter storm.

Fun can be similar.  So, if you’re used to having a goodly amount of fun in your life, then noting patterns and relations within ordinary “numbers”** can seem rather dull, even if you’re fond of numbers.

But if your life is as pathetic and irritating, on a day to day basis, as mine is, why then even simple, stupid, pointless things can seem somewhat positive.  The value of the function at that point is still well below the x-axis, but it’s not as far below, for that brief moment in which one notes an amusing numerical coincidence***.

That’s all theoretical today, though, because as I noted, today’s date doesn’t quite measure up.  It’s somewhat disappointing, but at least I was able to write an idiotic little blog post about it.

*I can, of course, think of various horror story scenarios in which someone could keep living for centuries and yet continue to deteriorate, but not be able to die.  These are probably quite a bit less likely even than the “medical advances” scenario.

**Why did I use the “scare quotes” there?  Because dates, even when expressed numerically, are not really numbers.  They are more of a code or a location marker, just a kind that uses numerals as its digits because they are memorable and at least correlate with some physical externalia.  “Phone numbers” are even less to be thought of as true numbers.  Their digits don’t even signify anything logically or arguably numerical.  “Phone address” would be a more accurate term.

***Yes, yes, I know, the specific placement of the x and y (and z, etc.) axes is arbitrary, so one can shift one’s target axis down‒lowering one’s expectations, perhaps‒and not need to change the shape of the function.  That may be true, but one does change the integral and the absolute value of the function, so it is not the same, unless one throws in a constant that exactly corrects for the shift in the axis.  In which case, what the hell are you doing wasting our time with this crap?

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Are you a Memorial Daypot Dome Gate scandaloholic?

First off, Happy Memorial Day, for those who live in the US (or anyplace else Memorial Day is observed, if there are such places).  I have to admit, it seems slightly weird to wish someone a “happy” Memorial Day, since it’s a day in which we honor and remember fallen soldiers.  At least, that’s the idea behind the holiday.

But of course, when I was quite young, Memorial Day was a happy sort of holiday.  We got a day off school, it was all but summer already, and we always had a big family get-together with grilled hamburgers and hot dogs and all sorts of side dishes like potato salad and chips and such like.  There often tended to be desserts, as well, including (if I recall correctly) popsicles.  I’ve never been a huge popsicle fan, but sometimes, during warm weather, and at such special, family events, they could be quite refreshing.

Still, if I look at a popsicle now, even if it’s a Creamsicle®, I get more of a positive nostalgic feeling than any even slight urge to eat the popsicle.  Would that this were the case with more straightforward ice cream and other such treats.

I know from experience that it is possible to break one’s proclivities for certain junk foods just by overexposure.  I did that‒unintentionally‒with Nutter Butters® and with Pringles®.  I no longer crave either of those things because, for a time, I overindulged in them quite severely, and it wasn’t good for me‒I ended up getting negative associations with eating those things because of the general physical ill-health they engendered.

I guess that means that one way to break a bad food habit may be to give into it in spades‒say, eating only Cheetos® for every meal, three meals a day, nothing else.  I’m not recommending that, by the way; it would not be good for you.  Though, if you were truly starving and had nothing else, it could keep you alive for a time.

Interestingly, I don’t think this aversion therapy works for more fundamentally pathological addictions.  For instance, I wouldn’t recommend trying to quit heroin by doing nothing but heroin for a while‒as I understand it, that’s actually what some people do, and it tends just to lead to tolerance.  Of course, if you die of an overdose, that would eliminate your addiction, but it certainly would not cure it (by any reasonable definition of “cure”).

And of course, severe alcoholics often just drink alcohol almost solely, sometimes as their main source of calories, but even getting sick to their stomachs doesn’t make them quit nor does experiencing the more horrifying effects of alcohol addiction (including alcohol withdrawal, which can kill you).  If these sorts of things don’t trigger an aversion to something, it’s hard to see what would.

This raises (quite tengentially) a pet peeve of mine:  it makes no sense to describe real or figurative addictions by calling oneself, for instance, a “chocoholic” or a “workaholic”.  This would seem to imply that one is addicted to “chocohol” or to “workahol”, whatever such things might be.

If one were following the paradigm that gave us the word “alcoholic” one would be a “chocolatic” or a “workic”.  It’s flagrantly stupid to do the other thing.  If you’ve got a problem with chocolate or with working too much (or whatever), don’t try to use a cutesy, cannibalized term made by cutting and moving something that was never a suffix and then using it as if it were one.  Just call the problem what it is.

This is similar to the fact that people inexplicably want to add “-gate” to the end of every scandal du jour, in reference to the very famous Watergate scandal.  But the Watergate scandal was about a break in at the Watergate Hotel.  That’s where the “gate” part comes from!

If we were to assume current media scandal standards, we would have thought that historic event was a scandal involving water somehow.  It’s as if, because of the old Teapot Dome scandal, people named every scandal a “-pot Dome” scandal.  Then the actual Watergate scandal would have been called the “Watergatepot Dome Scandal”.

It’s submoronic* to call a scandal about pizza, for instance, “pizzagate”.  Is there a Pizzagate Hotel somewhere that had a breakin?  (Though, I must admit, if there isn’t a restaurant that calls itself “Pizzagate” then I’ll be disappointed in the creativity and chutzpah of restaurateurs.)

If my blog achieves only one thing in the world (or two things, in a sense), and if that is to decrease the use of “-holic” and “-gate” in such situations, then I would be pleased enough with having written it.

I don’t have high hopes for that possibility, though.  Then again, I don’t have high hopes for much of anything.  I’m a pretty miserable sort of person, though I think that before the onset of my chronic pain I was less so (though I did already suffer from dysthymia/depression).  Like Kenny Rogers’s gambler, the best I can hope for is to die in my sleep.  Of course, the fact that I sleep horribly makes even that small hope less likely than it might be otherwise.

Whatever.  I’ll simply have to accept the fact of not being asleep when it happens if that’s the way it has to be.  Who knows, maybe it will be better to see it coming, so to speak.

Try to have a good holiday.

*By which I mean “worse than moronic” not “not quite moronic”.

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“Perfect” IS the enemy of the good

I would like to propose that we eliminate or at least strongly curtail the use of the word and concept of “perfect”.  And since there is no reason for me not to propose it, I will do so:

Let us eliminate or at least strongly curtail the use of the word and concept “perfect”.

I wrote those two short paragraphs‒really, a short paragraph and a single sentence‒yesterday afternoon, starting this blog post much earlier than I usually do, because it’s a subject that’s a bit of a pet peeve, but which is also, I think, important.

People have this word, “perfect”, and they think it means something, so they try to behave as if it means something.  But for all but the most trivial cases‒one’s score on a straightforward test, the answer to a well-defined problem in mathematics, et cetera‒it’s a word with no serious meaning in actual reality.

What would a perfect person be?  What would that even mean?  Perfect by what criteria?

What could it mean to say that a work of art is perfect, that a song is perfect?  One can say an interval of notes is “perfect”, e.g., a perfect fifth, but that is because it is a concept with a precise definition in a very limited bailiwick.

In the real world, so to speak, “perfection” is a will-o-the-wisp, an illusion without underlying substance that will tend to lure one into a treacherous (metaphorical) bog.  I think it’s fairly widely recognized that perfectionism is a dangerous and usually detrimental habit or attribute.  One can almost never achieve perfection, even by relatively serious criteria, in the real world; reality is too complex and unpredictable.

But the notion of perfection can certainly succeed at taking most of the joy out of one’s accomplishments.  No matter how good one already is, or how much one improves from one’s previous state, one can never just feel pretty good about it if one is always measuring oneself against an unrealistic and unachievable standard, so one is always failing.

The desire for perfection can also lead to misplaced notions of idealism, which can engender well-meaning atrocities, as one strives to achieve some imaginary, impossible, invented notion of a perfect world.  I’ve written before about the fact that all ideologies are wrong.

The world is simply too complicated (har) for any relatively simple and concise set of ideas* to apply all over, unless you’re counting quantum field theory and general relativity as a relatively simple set of ideas.  They are simple in a certain sense, of course, but that’s a rarefied kind of “simple”.  And we also know they are not complete and do not apply everywhere in their present form as we understand them; they conflict with each other in regions where gravity must be quantized, e.g., the Big Bang or the inside of black holes.

Having the notion of “perfection” also does us the disservice of implying that there is some upper bound on improvement, whether personal or societal or anything in between.  It’s as if there were some analog of the speed of light, an ultimate limit that can only be approached asymptotically.

But, as far as we can tell, there is no upper limit on improvement, at least not by anything other than trivial measures.  A person can, on average, continue to improve over an entire lifetime, never reaching a limit, always able to get better and better, however they might reasonably define “better”.  So can a city, or a nation, or a civilization.

It can be quite discouraging and enervating to compare oneself always to an ideal that is impossible to achieve, at least partly because it is not sensibly defined and cannot be so defined.  And then, as Hamlet said, enterprises of great pitch and moment with this regard their courses turn awry and lose the name of action.  Or something like that.  If you are always falling short because your measure of worth is unattainable, you’re liable to become quite discouraged.

Even in fiction, there are no interesting “perfect” heroes.  Sir Galahad is just boring, for example, while Sir Lancelot is interesting, because he has flaws.  He’s still a good guy, though, even though he may consider himself a failure in the end.

Anyway, there’s more that I could say, and I’m not at all sure that I’ve made my point very well.  This has just been a minor rant about a personal pet peeve, but one that I think has actual detrimental consequences for the world at large.

Speaking of imperfection, my pain persists (of course) and my insomnia has been horrible, particularly last night.  I hope you all have a good week.  I just want to rest.

*Such as the notion that unregulated, truly free markets are the most ideal and efficient way to run an economy for all purposes, or the contrapuntal idea of “from each according to his ability to each according to his need”, or even the seemingly decent “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one”.  For the “many” consists entirely and always of a collection of “ones”, and if some larger group can violate the rights of a smaller group or an individual simply because their “needs” are those of a greater number of people, then there are no rights, and no consistent argument for why anyone’s needs should matter at all.  Even the Golden Rule is far from straightforward in its application.

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You don’t prolong a vowel sound by repeating a silent “e” doggone it!

Well, here we go.  It’s Monday.  It’s the start of another “traditional” work week, and I am participating in that tradition.

I don’t really know why I am doing so‒though, on a reasoning kind of level, I could probably figure out at least some of the proximate causes‒since there is nothing of value for me to sustain by getting an income, and I feel less and less a member of society or civilization with every passing day (or so it seems).  And whatever I am (metaphorically), I don’t like me.

I also don’t know whether the WordPress people were able to fix my site or not*, so I don’t know if I’m going to load this onto it in the usual way or not.  That almost threw me into a nervous breakdown the other day (I suppose the official term would be a “meltdown”, which is apparently what they call it for people with ASD, and though that’s somewhat insulting, it’s not an inappropriate comparison for one to invoke a nuclear catastrophe).

It makes me feel the urge to try to write on Substack or some such similar site.  But I’ve been on WordPress for a decade and a half now‒that’s wild to realize‒and I don’t really want to have to change.  I’d rather just delete.

I’m also having issues with my ride this morning.  I reserved a ride to the station well in advance, which ought to make it more reliable, not less, but evidently that isn’t the case.  Despite the irregularity, I have not been offered a discount, even though if I were late, I would be penalized.  Somehow that doesn’t seem right, and it fills me with at least a slight wish for vengeance.

I know, I know, this isn’t a major deal.  But it feels major to me, relatively speaking, and it makes me want less and less to bother participating in anything at all.  I’m already jogging along the edge of a canyon with unstable sides.  Even little gusts of wind could be enough to push me over the edge, if it comes at a time when I am already unsteady and have taken a bad step.

I take a lot of bad steps.

Speaking of bad steps, I would like to make a public service announcement, aimed mainly at younger folks online.  Here it comes:

It makes no sense to try to convey the impression of an elongated spoken vowel sound in a word that ends in a silent “e” by repeating the e!

The most common use (that I have noticed) of this idiocy is to prolong the word “love” to provide emphasis.  They write things such as “I loveeeeee this restaurant” or whatever.  But “loveeeeeee” would be pronounced “luv-eeeeeee”, as if Thurston Howell from Gilligan’s Island were wailing for his wife as they became separated on a failing getaway raft, like in Castaway.  (Think the analogue of yelling, “Wiiiiiiilsooooooon!”)

If one wants to prolong the main vowel sound of the word “love” then it makes more sense to repeat that vowel, for instance, “I looooove the show Gilligan’s Island.”  The “e” is silent in the original word; it doesn’t make sense to multiply it.  That changes the word’s pronunciation entirely.  It bothers me every time when I see such blatant, if not terribly important, idiocy.  I haaaaaaaaate it!

See how that works better than “hateeeeee” would?  That sounds like someone greeting their beloved head covering, to which they refer by the nickname, “Hatty”.

I think I will make that subject the headline topic of this post (I did).  Maybe someone out there will see it and apply it.

Ugh.  I already feel overwhelmed, and it’s just Monday morning, and work hasn’t even started.  We also have supremely Florida weather here today, very hot but even more humid.  I’m sweating copiously just sitting still.

And now my train is going to be delayed, it turns out.  I really ought just to go back to the house and lie down and not ever get up.  That might be hard to do, of course‒not going back to the house, I mean the “never getting up” part.  For one thing, even though it’s stupidly humid and so I’m probably somewhat dehydrated, I would eventually have to get up to go to the bathroom.  I have no desire to lie in my own urine.

Of course, if I took enough of the right medicine or combinations of medicine, I wouldn’t have to worry about that.  At least, I wouldn’t worry about it.

I don’t know what to say.  I really don’t feel well.  I don’t feel any sense of belonging or connection with the life I have (and am), but I don’t see any change that’s within my power that would do anything but make things even harder and more stressful.

I can’t just throw myself on someone else’s mercy and beg for help.  No one I know has the resources to be able to help me, even if they knew how to do so.  And I don’t have any insurance of any kind, nor any other such things.

I don’t even use my bicycle because the rear tire is punctured and I don’t have any bike stores within bike-pushing distance, and I don’t know how to fix the rear tire myself.  I guess I could learn, but I know that I probably never would do it.  I don’t handle maintenance tasks very well, especially when they’re geared (no pun intended) toward me.  I don’t really have any reserves of will and energy.

Things would be easier if not for chronic pain and the consequences of taking lots of medicine for a long time to try to control it as best I can.  It would also be nice to be able to have an actual, restful night’s sleep.

I want to say that I cannot remember the last time I woke up feeling rested, because that sounds rhetorically impressive, but I do remember:  it was a night/morning in the mid-nineties (I do not recall the exact day and year, because at the time it didn’t seem so noteworthy, though it was wonderful).  As far as I can tell, that was the last time I felt well-rested.

Speaking of rest, I’m going to give this post one for now.  I hope, I truly hope‒and if I thought it was any use, I would pray‒that each and every one of you is feeling much better than I am right now.

*They hadn’t completely, but I am able to do something at least more like classic writing on it than it looked to be as of last week.

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“I too have sailed the world and seen its wonders…”

I almost started this post by writing “Hello and good morning,” but I can’t really do that, or future readers‒and possibly even some current readers‒might think this was a Thursday blog post.  But this isn’t a Thursday post.  It’s a Tuesday post.  It’s a “Taco Tuesday post”, really, since Taco Tuesday is a thing (an advertising thing, mostly, but still a thing I like).  Pertinent to that, today is also, of course, Cinco de Mayo.

It’s not a terribly clever name for a holiday.  It’s about as bland as “The 4th of July”.  At least that’s not the official name for that holiday; the official name is “Independence Day”, which has specific significance, since it is the date of the signing and release of the Declaration of Independence.  I try never to wish someone a happy 4th of July, but say, “Happy Independence Day”, because it’s an important thing to know and recall (for an American).

Of course, there may be an actual, official title to Cinco de Mayo, but if there is, I don’t know it (if there isn’t, I still don’t know it).  I don’t even recall what the day commemorates.  I know it’s not the Mexican Independence Day equivalent.  If anyone out there knows what it is off the top of his or her or their head, please let me know in the comments below.

“Please let me know in the comments below” could be a nice part of some rap, couldn’t it?  It’s got a good rhythm and an internal rhyme.  If you’re a rapper and want to use that phrase, please do.  But let me know about the final product, please.  I’d be interested to see what grows up around it.

I could, in principle, write such a rap myself‒I’m reasonably good at rhythmic rhyming‒but just try to imagine me producing and performing a rap song!  I’m almost certain that would be one of the worst signs of the end of the world.

Though, if that’s the case, maybe I should do a rap, come to think of it.  If by doing so I really could engender the end of the world*, it could be worth doing it.  I could put everyone out of their misery.  As for those who aren’t miserable, well, we have Sweeney Todd’s words to address that:

 

“They all deserve to die

Tell you why, Mrs. Lovett, tell you why.

Because

In all of the whole human race, Mrs. Lovett

There are two kinds of men and only two:

There’s the one staying put in his proper place

And the one with his foot in the other one’s face

Look at me, Mrs. Lovett, look at you.

No, we all deserve to die!

Even you, Mrs. Lovett, even I

Because

the lives of the wicked should be

made brief

For the rest of us death will be a relief

We all deserve to die!

 

And I’ll never see Johanna…”

 

Okay, well, that last bit is the beginning of another segment of the song, in which Sweeney laments his lost daughter.  I won’t get into the plot more than that right now, but it’s a great musical.

The film version with Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, Alan Rickman, and so on was excellent, though apparently Johnny Depp didn’t know whether he could sing (adequately for the role) when Tim Burton asked him to play Sweeney Todd.  He knew he could play music, but singing “lead” was just not something he had done.  So, according to what I’ve heard, before accepting the role he went off in solitude and practiced singing (to confirm he could do it) before coming back and saying okay.

I’m glad he did it.

As an aside, I suspect that anyone who can do various voices and accents and who also can play and hear music almost has to be able to sing reasonably well, if they practice.  The tools required to make alternate voices and accents are more or less the same as the tools for singing specific tones and notes.  You also have to be able to hear tunes and to hear yourself and adjust to hit the proper note, but as I said, Depp was already a serious musician.

Okay, well, that’s a lot of erratic stuff, isn’t it?  Clearly I have no specific agenda here (trendy or otherwise) at least not any conscious one.  As for what goes on in my unconscious mind, well, I don’t know what that is, more or less by definition.  If I knew what it was thinking, it wouldn’t be unconscious.

Of course, there’s always a legitimate question whether the unconscious mind actually has its own internal self-awareness, or even more than one, but this is pretty much speculative for now, so I’m not going to get into it or its implications.

Boy, wow.  I’m really feeling pretty incoherent right now.  As you might have guessed, I didn’t sleep well last night, even for me.  As for pain, well, large portions of my body feel somewhat as if they have already been embalmed, but the sensory nerves‒the nociceptors, at least‒are still working.  If anything, they’re working too well.

Ah, well.  I’ll wrap up now with these almost kindly but ominous words, again from Sweeney Todd:  “You are young.  Life has been kind to you.  You will learn.”

Please have a good day if you’re able.

*“Engender the end of” also has a good cadence or rhythm or whatever as well as a bit of an internal rhyme.  You could go on with something like, “Engender the end of the trendy agenda,” or similar.  “No rapper can rap quite like I can”, eh?  That’s a fact for which all rap fans can be grateful.

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April, come she has. No contradictions allowed.

Well, it’s the first of April, so‒April Fools!  Except that, given that it is April Fools’ (Fool’s?) Day, to say April Fools about the fact that it is April 1st would be contradictory.  It’s rather like the self-paradoxical statement:  “This sentence is a lie”.  Because if that sentence is a lie, then it is not a lie, but that would mean that it is a lie, but that would mean that it isn’t, and so on.

Of course, one can write paradoxical things down any time one wishes.  That doesn’t constrain or harm actual reality in any way whatsoever.  Words‒and written language especially‒are the single greatest human invention, but they are not literally magical.  No matter how much hatred you try to put behind it, or what manner of “wand” you use, shouting Avada kedavra will never kill anyone or anything*.

And while we can imagine that the world would be much more polite if words could directly cause things to manifest‒including paradoxes‒I think we can all feel pretty glad that people can’t kill us just by telling us to drop dead.

So, make up all the paradoxical sentences that you might like; no actual paradoxes can exist.  If you come to a point of cognitive dissonance, you should probably focus on the fact of that discomfort and try to sort it out.  People can “believe” two or more contradictory things (sometimes before breakfast) but they cannot be right about more than one (though they can be wrong about all of them).

Anyway, enough of that nonsense.  It’s mildly engaging, but not terribly durable as a topic, or so it seems to me at this moment.

I am still (as far as I know) unable to use any of Fuckerberg’s apps, and to be honest, I haven’t even tried since before the last time I wrote about it.  It’s annoying, to some degree, to lose access to some entertainment, but it’s not as though I had any right to their use.  I was not the customer, I was the product, as is the case with all of you, too, if you use your social media for free.  Facebook et al sell advertisers access to and information about you.

Now, if I had been kicked off some service for which I had paid and for which I was paying, then I would have a beef**.

Speaking of paid services, what I really should do‒what I want to crave doing‒is to spend those moments that I would spend looking at funny reels on Instagram or whatever doing stuff on Brilliant dot org.  I pay for that service, and it is very good.  I also have a lifetime subscription to Babbel, which I obtained to try to encourage myself to learn more languages (duh!).

So, at some level, at the frontal lobe level, I want to use those sites and their services, to hone and increase my skills.  Otherwise I wouldn’t have contracted the services.  But in any given moment, the activation energy required to begin using them is higher than that for doing other, less beneficial things.

But maybe now that will be a bit different.  Maybe now that differential, that equilibrium, will shift.  I mean, it’s almost certain that it has shifted, or has begun to shift.  It’s all but impossible for one to remove a large factor from a situation that is in dynamic near-equilibrium and to have that near-equilibrium remain unchanged.

I hope that I shall be able to make use of this to improve my mind‒at least to improve my abilities, if not the overall nature of the thing.  At least it would be good if I get some more such use in.

I will miss the sort-of-social-circles one can have and the connection with old friends and distant family members on social media, however tenuous and removed and even occasionally illusory it might be.

I don’t socialize in real life, other than at work during the working day, and that’s a limited thing.  So I feel a little worried about being more disconnected from larger society.  We all know what happened to Melkor when he spent too much time in the Void, away from his brethren, and started to develop thoughts…unlike theirs.

Well, maybe we don’t all know, but read The Silmarillion if you wish to learn more.  It’s really good.

I guess I always have this blog and those who follow it, at least (and that’s no small thing).  I am concerned that some people who only see the blog via Facebook or Threads might not get to interact with it now.  But they are all hereby encouraged to leave a comment or two below.  I welcome them.  Seriously.

That’s all I have to say about that for right now.  I hope you all have an excellent day.

*Unless maybe you swallow a small insect or similar when you open your mouth.  I don’t think that’s how people imagine “the killing curse” working however.

**I’ve been aware of and have occasionally used this expression for as long as I can remember, but it does sound very weird if you listen to it as if from an outsider’s perspective.  “Wait.  You have a…beef?  You have a beef?  What the hell are you talking about?”