Language

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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“I’ve got electric light, and I’ve got second sight”

Well.  It’s Tuesday morning now, the second day of the work week.  Yippee.

I don’t have any idea what to write.  It’s not at all unusual for me not to have an idea what to write about, but that’s not really what I mean right now, though it is related.  I just feel a near-complete lack of motivation even to try to find something interesting to “say”.

Of course, it’s possible that you all think that I never find anything interesting to write or say at any time, and that’s fair enough.  Interest is basically in the mind of the beholder, anyway.  I’m well used to people not being interested in things in which I’m interested.  It’s not quite true to say, as Poe wrote in his poem, that “all I loved, I loved alone,” but it certainly feels that way quite a lot of the time.

I think maybe I’ll read a couple of Edgar Allen Poe poems and maybe some others as my next few videos.  With Halloween coming up, it might be good, next week, to do a reading of The Raven.  I can still do it from memory, though I occasionally have to stop and fuddle around to find all the words to the verse that ends with, “but whose velvet, violet lining she shall press, ah, nevermore.”

I enjoy reciting those poems, as far as it goes, and it might, therefore, be a good thing to make a video about it, so to speak.  I don’t know how much, or if, people liked either of my last few videos.  I think I may be the only one who actually clicked the thumbs up for either video.  That wouldn’t surprise me, nor would I necessarily think it inappropriate.  No one has a right for their work to be liked, though they have a right to be able to produce it and share it if they are able.  But you cannot demand fans, you can only try to entice them by creating work that someone, somewhere out there might like.

Yes, I think perhaps I will do a few videos of me reading poems.  Perhaps the first one will be a two-poem video, in which I’ll read The Second Coming by Yeats, and Alone, by Poe, which I quoted above.  Actually, I won’t read them, I’ll recite them; I know them both from memory, since they are both short.  They are also two of my favorite poems.  I don’t know if anyone really reads any “classic” poems anymore, even in school, except of course to the extent that songs and raps can be considered poetry.  Some of them certainly can, without reservation (though many of them, not so much*).

Dylan won the Nobel Prize for literature, taking his work as poetry; and who could deny that Bohemian Rhapsody, or much of the album The Dark Side of the Moon, or The Wall, or a substantial proportion of the Beatles’ songs are legitimate poetry even without the music?  And there are many raps which, whether you like the subject matter or not, are clearly poems of a particular sort.

Indeed, Edgar Allan Poe anticipated modern hip-hop when he mentioned that he heard the sound of “someone gently rapping, rapping at [his] chamber door**.”  It would be fun to hear some top-tier hip-hop artist doing his or her version of the full poem The Raven with a beat behind it.  For Halloween, you know?  Snoop?  Your birthday is coming up***; you could do it to celebrate.  It could be brilliant.  The Simpsons did it (albeit in abridged form) in an early “Treehouse of Horrors” episode.  If Homer Simpson can recite The Raven for comedic effect, surely Snoop could achieve real ominous intensity.

Okay, maybe it’s not a great idea.  But it’s an idea, and it might be fun.

With that, I think I’m about out of ideas for the day; possibly I’m out of ideas for good.  Possibly I’ve been out of ideas for many years now, but I’m too low on ideas to be able to recognize the fact.  It may even be the case that I’ve never had an idea in my life.  How would one know?  And—let’s be honest—would it even matter?  The universe is the way it is, the experience is what it is, there is some underlying reality, whatever its nature ultimately is, and I was not consulted when it began, if it began.  Neither were you, most likely.

*And this includes some very big hits; I won’t get started.

**Ha ha.

***I know this because Snoop, Viggo Mortensen, and I are triplets from separate mothers in separate years.

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Move over, Bobber…and let Jimi take…obber?

It’s Monday again.  I don’t think I need you to tell me why I don’t like Mondays, and I’m not sure why Bob Geldof thought he needed to be told, either.  Maybe it was because, as a professional musician (and sometimes actor), he wasn’t really on a Monday through Friday work schedule, but he still didn’t like Mondays, and he wasn’t sure why that was the case.

Perhaps he reckoned without the fact that, though perhaps not on such a schedule as an adult, he surely was on it as a youngster, growing up in a country with a school system that ran Monday through Friday.  Perhaps he didn’t realize that, even if he didn’t have to go to work in the morning, other people did, and that might make many of them sullen and unpleasant, particularly on Mondays.  Perhaps it was that pervasive, radiant grumpiness that made him dislike Mondays.

Actually, I don’t remember what his big hit with the Boomtown Rats was really about, other than the title and the basic tune, which was certainly catchy.  When I first heard it—possibly the first of only two times that I’ve heard it all the way through—I thought he was asking why he didn’t like modern days, which to me is more thought-provoking and interesting than the actual title of the song.  That misunderstanding is partly his fault for turning the first syllable of Monday* into two notes/two beats.  But, since he played Pink in the movie version of The Wall, we can forgive him**.

This is sort of the opposite of what Jimi Hendrix did in Purple Haze, where he takes the same bit of music that in the first verse underlies the words, “Scuze me while I kiss the sky,” and on the second verse squeezes in, “Whatever it is, that girl put a spell on me.”  The first iteration has seven syllables; you could sing it to the tune of Old MacDonald Had A Farm (which is a somewhat funny thing to do…try it!).  The second sentence has twelve syllables.  Jimi dealt with that by going full Chopin and subdividing the beat into a series of very quick notes, of which he even varied intonation a bit.

The point is, I think we can all agree that Jimi Hendrix was a greater musician and song writer than Bob Geldof, but Sir Bob has done some very good things in addition to his music.  Though for all we know, if Jimi had not died young, he might have led the way to a lasting world peace of happiness and prosperity***.

Wait, that isn’t really the point.  That was just random nonsense that I was spewing, triggered by my opening sentence as I started writing this blog post.  I guess the real point is that I want to say, Happy Monday, if you can tolerate such sentiments.

I can’t, so don’t say it back, please.

It is the beginning of the Work Week of Awe, the name we**** give to the work week within which lies the birthday of the greatest being ever to live on this planet—or at least the greatest one to write on this blog.  I can’t remember which it is.  I suppose it could be both, since they’re not logically contradictory, and the term “at least” clearly implies that it could be the one thing and the other that are true.  I don’t know for sure about the other thing, but with respect to the blog post writing—to quote Spandau Ballet, now—I know this much is true.  Yes, that’s a quote from yet another song that was a hit more than thirty years ago.

It’s not that I can’t quote more recent songs, it’s just that there aren’t as many that spring to my mind readily.  But I do think one of the greatest song quotes—though it’s not really sung, to be fair—is by the much-lamented DMX, and goes, “Talk is cheap, motherf*cker.”  Those are words of wisdom that millions of people on social media would do well to remember.

That’s mostly about all I have to say on this Monday morning.  Much of it is quoted, and those quotes aren’t even from Shakespeare.  That’s fine, of course.  Shakespeare may be the most quoted writer of all time—many very common figures of speech come from Shakespeare, and most people who use them don’t even realize it—but he’s not the only quotable author.  Call me Ishmael if you must, but I hold out the ridiculous thought that, perhaps, someday, people will quote me, and not just to provide evidence of my mental dysfunction.

***

Whew, I just had a small interlude on the train in which my phone slipped out of my pocket and went down in between the seat frames, atop a duct that must serve AC or something.  It was in a spot that my hand was too fat to reach, but thankfully, the person behind me, who immediately came to my aid without saying a word, was a young, thin construction worker, and after we jimmied the phone around a bit, he was able to reach in where I could not and slide the phone out.

One of the other construction workers lent us a very long screwdriver to help, as well.  It didn’t do much, regrettably, but it was a kind gesture, and much appreciated.  It’s nice to know that there are such helpful and kind people on trains, and since trains are unlikely to be unusually attractive to nice people—compared to other places—there are probably such nice people everywhere.

It’s too bad that the assholes make so much noise; they (perhaps I should say “we”) give a somewhat skewed impression of the character of the world’s people.  Unfortunately, it being easier to destroy than to create, the assholes also do a great deal of damage along their way.  Guarding and supporting the beneficent or at least neutral people from the depredations of the maleficent, detrimental ones is more than a constant job, because entropy helps the latter against the former.

Oh well.  I have my phone back and though I have not always depended on the kindness of strangers—indeed, I try not to need to be so reliant—it’s nice when they are kind.

*Mon

**Yes, yes, he also did Band Aid and Live Aid and all that, but he was knighted for that, so he’s already been rewarded.

***It’s bloody unlikely, but it is possible.

****By which I mean “I”.

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Much ado about what are effectively mere fluctuations in the vacuum states of quantum fields

Okay, it’s the “middle” of the “work week” and this is my next daily “blog post”, in case any of you reading didn’t know these things.

I made a video yesterday, and I even pretty much edited it, but I haven’t yet posted it to YouTube, and so I cannot share/embed it here.  It was a free-form recording, and ended up being essentially a form of minor self-promotion, in which I encourage people to buy my books (and to a lesser extent to listen to my music) if they want to support me—though that raises the question of whether anyone would ever want to support me in the first place.  In my experience, the answer is “no”.  Heck, I don’t even want to support myself.

But it does show, at least, that I have a certain amount of affection, bordering on pride, for my fiction, and indeed, I am reasonably proud of my books and short stories.  I’m even fairly proud of my songs, though I wish I’d had better equipment to record and produce them.  Still, considering I was literally learning as I went along, I think they came out okay.

I will say this, though—I don’t think I’m going to be making many more videos using my Samsung tablet.  In addition to giving me the black sidebar thingies, which I chose to accept, since lateral videos just need to have background edited out, it also records at way too high a definition, and so videos take up an absurd amount of memory.  I suppose this would be useful and good if I were recording fine visuals, so I have no actual complaints about the tablet’s camera quality, but when the picture is basically just me then frankly, the lower the definition the better.

If I could be rendered in 8-bit graphics, it probably wouldn’t be a horrible thing.

Also, upon sending the video to the desktop, via Google Drive, I couldn’t import it directly into DaVinci* Resolve without the video getting all higgledy-piggledy**, so I had first to import it into the Microsoft video editor (I took advantage and adjusted the audio right then and there at an earlier step than usual), then export it to import into Resolve.  But, of course, even after doing that, and adjusting the output for only medium video quality, the file was still huge.

How much impact on the environment is occurring because of all the memory being generated and all the electricity needed to operate and cool all the huge servers which we use to run and store just the videos we use and the documents in Google Drives and the like?  Might it be more ecologically efficient if we literally just recorded the entire internet on old-fashioned paper?

If we get the wood pulp from tree farms, it would not decrease the forests in the world, and in fact, the paper would be, at least for a time, an effective carbon sink.  Interesting, no?  It just goes to show you, real situations are complicated, and your first, instinctive reactions are often inaccurate.  It’s hard to store an actual video on paper of course, but celluloid is another matter…though that is extremely flammable.

I think for my next video, I’m just going to try to use the camera on the little laptop on which I write this blog post.  It’s comparatively low definition, which is fine with me.  If the microphone were better I might use it for everything, except the Resolve parts.  I’ve tried attaching my USB microphone to a mini laptop once and it didn’t work well—but I think that might have been my previous laptop, not this one.  I think I have tried the native microphone for this laptop, and it was good enough for general recording.

Anyway, that’s yet another blog post about nothing, following on a video about nothing after a previous blog post about nothing.  It’s fine, though, since really everything is about nothing.  I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, we’re all just (metaphorical) virtual particles***, popping into existence, sometimes (rarely) having externally felt mass effects, and then vanishing back into the nothingness from which we arose before a Planck time (metaphorically, again) has even passed.  Though, en masse, we can have local effects, any individual virtual particle (it would be pairs of particles, really, if the metaphor were strictly applied) effectively does not exist at all, from the point of view of the outside universe.  Think on that, and…

…have a nice day.

*Which seems to imply that the program comes from the city of Vinci, which is in Tuscany, in Italy.  DaVinci wasn’t Leonardo’s “last name” in the modern use of such things, it was just an indicator of where he was from, like Conan of Cimmeria or Simon of Sheboygan.  When people use “DaVinci” to refer to Leonardo as if it were his last name, it leads to some humorous effects at times, if you’re paying attention and applying the literal meaning of the words.

**Please excuse the technical jargon.

***Strictly speaking, virtual particles are sort of metaphorical even in quantum mechanics, at least according to my best understanding.  They really are a shorthand for a more sophisticated process involving quantum fields, but I guess it’s easier to think of things as virtual particles.  That seems to complicate matters unnecessarily, to me, not make them simpler, but I’m weird.

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Don’t touch that line, it’s hot!

It’s Tuesday morning, which should come as no surprise, since yesterday was Monday.  I am on the earliest train right now—I just got on board less than a minute ago, I’d say, and certainly it only just left the station.  I woke up early, as usual, and just didn’t feel like I could sleep anymore.  On the other hand, although I did wake up early, I can at least report that I didn’t keep waking up over and over again before the final time I woke up, so I seem to have had a few hours’ uninterrupted sleep.  That feels like a major boon*.

Today’s date is a little fun, if you’re using the American ordering of the numbers.  It’s 10-11-2022, which of course is a mini pattern, with a ten and an eleven doubling into a twenty and a twenty-two…all on a “Twosday”!  So, again, a bit of fun with numbers, if you like that sort of thing.  Possibly I’m the only one in the world who finds it amusing.  It wouldn’t be the first time.

I regret to say that I wasn’t able to make a video yesterday, or rather, I wasn’t able to complete one.  I started one, but we had one of our various weird situations at the office, with a potentially returning coworker, who was there quite early, and that interfered with my ability to do a video.  I got less than five minutes of talking done before the interruption came.  I did fiddle around with trying out the video recording on my tablet again a few times during the day, just for experimentation, but that was all.  I ended up knocking the tablet stand over while reaching for something else, and thus knocking over the tablet, but it was not harmed in any visibly detectable*** way.

Hopefully, I’ll get a chance to make a video today.

I think I need to update my “gravitar”, or whatever that term was, that generates the accompanying picture that goes with blog posts, because it shows a picture of me from about ten years ago, in which I was trying to look vaguely amused and whimsical.  It’s a perfectly good picture, of course—“perfectly” not being meant in its literal sense, obviously, since I don’t know what a literally perfectly good picture would even be—but I think it makes readers not quite internalize the blog posts and things that I’m sharing as serious.  I think people read my blog posts in which I try to express my distress and depression, and they see that stupid “gravitar” of me smirking ten years ago, and they think, “Oh, he’s not really all that fucked up right now, he’s just exaggerating for dramatic and/or comedic effect.”

I don’t like the guy in those pictures.  But I guess that probably goes without saying.

It’s been a long time since I updated that picture—I don’t recall even how it’s supposed to be done, frankly, but I’m sure I’ll be able to find it somewhere on the WordPress site, which is where I added it originally.  I need to upload something that’s accurate to how I am now.

I finally have returned to the particular train and the particular seat across from that National Suicide Prevention Hotline poster that I wrote about sometime in the past, and this time, I remembered to take a quick snap of it.  That happened between sentences while writing this blog post.  You probably didn’t even notice it; it was such a swift process that there was nary a hitch in my writing!

I’m not being serious, of course.  Well, I did take a picture, I’m serious about that.  But of course, the time stream of me writing this and the time stream of the final blog post are not the same.  The flow of time is different in the two, and the flow of time in the blog post per anyone reading can be entirely different as well.

That’s kind of curious to think about, at least for me.  I might have mentioned before that if our universe were simulated, down to the Planck scale in space and time, each calculation of interactions could, in principle, take billions of years for some simulating advanced civilizations, but then, after the googols of years it would take to calculate enough of them, we on Earth might still only experience the outcome as the passing of a second, for instance.

I don’t know why an advanced civilization would bother with such things.  But it’s a thought experiment, the domain of spherical inclined planes and frictionless cows, so just go with it.

Anyway, I’ll share the picture of the poster, because one thing that bothers me is that they not only split the infinitive (to be), but they underlined the word with which they split it.  I think it would have been more effective, if anything, to write “It’s OK to be not OK”.  Even the more proper “It’s OK not to be OK” would be preferable to me.

ok not ok scaled down

I truly appreciate and admire the sentiments****, but the split infinitive just makes me more depressed than ever.  The uses of this world and the usages of words seems utterly irrational and pointless to me.  There’s just nobody home.

Might as well shut off the lights.

*Not a reference to Major Boone**.

**I don’t know who “Major Boone” might be, but it would be a good name for a character.

***Nothing I could see, anyway, with or without my reading glasses.  I’m sure there were microscopic scratches and dings, the inevitable hallmarks of entropy, such as will accumulate on even the most durable of substances.  Even diamonds surely lose a carbon atom or two whenever one rubs at them.  The surface atoms, after all, cannot be bonded each to four other carbon atoms, unlike the interior atoms; some must be bonded only to three, and perhaps some even only to two.  And the ones that are bonded to four other atoms in their traditional tetrahedral lattice, are obviously not in an unbreakable arrangement, or there would be no way to cut diamonds.  As far as I know, there is no such thing as an unbreakable arrangement.

****And I don’t want to denigrate the hotline, though my personal experience with them was regrettable because the PBSO came and took me away to a shithole, which I’ve talked about before.  I was only there for less than a day, but it was humiliating and associated with nerve damage to my left wrist, and it did not end up helping me feel better in the long run.  None of this was the hotline’s fault, and I recognize that, but it was quite unpleasant, and is one of the reasons I hesitate to use their services.  I think about calling (or texting) them more days than not, but I don’t think I ever will.  I’m not worth their effort, in any case.  There are many far better uses for their resources than something like me.

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Monday morning, waking up?

Wow, it’s Monday morning already.  It seems like we only just finished last week—which I guess is what actually happened.  I suppose some people do get two days a week off on a regular basis, but as for me and my…self, well, we work most of the time.  I guess that’s probably true for most of the people reading this, too, though, isn’t it?

Anyway, it was an uneventful “weekend” for me, in the sense that I didn’t accomplish much except sleeping a bit later on Sunday under the influence of Benadryl, which is better than not sleeping a bit later.  I also got my laundry done on Sunday, which is nice.

Other than all that, not much of interest has happened.  I did go into a Publix on Sunday morning for the first time in years.  For those of you who don’t know, that’s one of the major supermarket chains in Florida; it’s middlingly upscale, somewhere between Winn Dixie and Whole Foods.

I tend to avoid Publix (and other grocery stores) most of the time, largely because such stores are often crowded, and I don’t really like a lot of people and noise and stuff.  But Sunday mornings, thankfully, are times when people are pretty sparse, so it wasn’t bad.  There were items I wanted to have around, to eat, that just aren’t readily available at 7-11 and other convenience stores—which are pretty much the only places I shop other than Amazon—and so I decided to go in.

It was almost nostalgic, but not necessarily in a good way.  Unfortunately, stores like Publix or Walgreens or Target or similar are the sorts of places that for many years I only used to go with my wife and/or children, so going into them now tends to be somewhat detrimental to my mood.  Between the crowded noisiness, which is irritating, and the mild but present heartache that happens, I tend to avoid them.

I know, that’s all really boring.  Sorry.  I’m not a very exciting person.

I might be more exciting and do more exciting things if I could just get on top of my back and hip and leg and side pain.  They are very irritating, a combination of ache, spasm, grinding, and electro-neural feelings.  Maybe it would be more proper to write “it is very irritating”.  In some senses the pains feel like a large collection, or army, or band, of things attacking me, each with its own identity, but in other senses, it’s all just one wave of algesiac fluid.  I’m not sure if “algesiac” is a proper word, so to speak, but since analgesia is the blocking or the countering of pain, I figure the form of my neologism is at least proper.

As I said*, it’s the start of a new work week, and of course, I’m on my way in to work now, having been sitting at the train station at the beginning of the blog, and then being on the train starting with these last two and a half sentences (and the footnote).  I have my usual seat, so that’s nice, and it’s not too crowded.  Nor is it one of the older train cars, from which one can often smell the oxidized iron in the air after they brake, from the wheels rubbing against the rails (I assume that’s where the smell comes from, but it could be the wheels rubbing against the brakes…and that might in fact be more likely, since wheel and rail contact should be the same no matter which type of car, but brakes may vary).

During the middle of this week, we will have Yom Kippur, which is supposed to be the highest of the High Holy Days (in Judaism).  I’ve never had too much real interest in the “supernatural” aspects of it, but the fasting has often been something I embrace with enthusiasm.  Admittedly, one cannot fast as one is supposed to on Yom Kippur—abjuring food and water—for much longer than the mandated day, but going without food for a longish period has its attractions.

There have been a few years in which I have prolonged that part of the fast for a bit, and actually rather enjoyed it.  It clears my mind in many ways.  But it’s hard to maintain, especially when all the people around one, and with whom one works, are always eating and trying to get one to eat, and of course, it being October, there is Halloween candy out.  But it would be nice if I could find the will to fast, maybe from Yom Kippur to my birthday**, or even beyond.  It might be worth a try.  If I truly decide I want to do it, I think I have the will to pull it off; I just have to decide.

Anyway, that’s enough of my splutterings for today.  Welcome to the new work week, and the first full week of the new month, usually my favorite month of the year.  I hope, wherever you are, things feel more autumnal than they do here in south Florida.  I can understand why “snow birds” come here in the winter, but it is a shame not to be in a deciduous arboreal environment in the autumn, especially if that’s where you grew up.  Oh, well, that’s a minor complaint, I suppose.  But from a certain point of view, all complaints are minor.  And from certain other points of view, all complaints are major.

Maybe I should just stop viewing.

*There are those who say—and write—that one should use the words “as I wrote” when referring to something that had been written, and avoid using “as I said” in such circumstances, but even I think such people are quibbling.  “To say” is a more broadly applicable verb than “to write”, and can convey the notion of having expressed or communicated something in any of a large number of ways, including by writing.  It’s also, in general, more succinct and straightforward just to use “I said” and related forms when trying to convey such sentiments, although the footnotes involved can take up a fair bit of extra time.  They’re fun to write, though, and that takes the sting out of it, for the writer at least.  I don’t know how the reader(s) feel(s).

**My birthday is in October, just so you know.  In case you didn’t already know.  It wouldn’t be a ridiculous amount of time to fast.  Now, if one could fast from, say, Yom Kippur until Thanksgiving, that would be a serious fast.  It would certainly take away any guilt from overindulging at Thanksgiving dinner, not that that is relevant to me, since I’m not likely to have a Thanksgiving dinner.

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Get up get over and turn the tape off

Well, it’s a shitty, shitty day today already.  I realize that’s redundant, of course.  I could simply say that it’s a day today.  They’re all pretty shitty a lot of the time, which is a phrase, at least, that sort of rhymes.  Pretty shitty is kind of pretty; one could use it in a ditty.

That’s enough of that nonsense.

I awoke very early, even for me, with worsening pain than usual in my right lower back and hip, radiating down into my foot and calf, with spasm and tenderness in most of the muscles.  I’d had a decent pain day the day before—which I guess would be yesterday, duh—partly because I took larger than normal doses of naproxen, in addition to aspirin and acetaminophen, and as always I was trying some behavioral interventions such as those with which I constantly experiment.

But I think I was lured into a false sense of security; probably the relative decrease in pain was as much a random fluctuation as anything else.  Also, I realized by the end of the day that I had started to develop edema—accumulation of fluid, that is—in my legs, especially the right one.  I suspect that’s partly due to the effects of the high-dose NSAIDs and other meds on my kidneys’ clearance functions.  So, last night I held off on the naproxen.

While trying to massage out some of my pain, I noted that my son, to whom I had sent an email a few weeks ago, had replied at last to that apologetic note.  But though his email was polite and kind, he basically said that he didn’t want to pursue any relationship with me, at least for the time being, and that he hoped I would respect that.  I can do so, of course; if I didn’t have to have a relationship with me, I wouldn’t do it, either.  He even said he didn’t hold what had happened, what with my arrest and time in prison, against me, which is nice, and that he had fond memories of me and of his childhood with me.  He’s a good person, he works hard and is smart, and all that, like his sister.  I want him to be happy, and I would never try to force my presence on him.  I’m just not built that way.  So, that’s that.  Not a great thing for me, but probably the wise choice for him.

I did record the video I mentioned yesterday, and I already started editing it, which is basically just removing long pauses and umms and coughs and the like.  If I finish and upload it today, I’ll share it as part of the post for tomorrow—I’m scheduled to work—and you’ll be able to see and watch it if you wish.  In case you do, I’ll add now the request that most YouTubers give (which I neglected to do during the recording) which is please, if you’re so inclined, like the video, share it if you’re willing, subscribe if you’re interested, and do please feel free to comment.  All those requests apply here as well, though I guess most of my readers are already subscribed, now that I think about it.

And here I am, at the office already and writing this, quite a bit earlier than I usually arrive, because there was no point just lying around in my room and watching random YouTube videos, some about science, some of British comedy panel shows, and occasionally some about autism/Asperger’s.

It’s the last day of September in 2022, and tomorrow begins the month of October—the month of my birthday, and of Halloween (my favorite holiday), though honestly, right now, I couldn’t give a shit about either one.  Next week is both Yom Kippur and my father’s birthday (I think they’re both on the same day this year, though I may be off on that).

I wish I could see my father, and my mother, but of course, they have both “passed on” as the euphemism goes.  I’m afraid I was probably a very disappointing son for them, not least because I had seemed so promising.  I’ve basically let down all the people who are most important to me in life, regularly and consistently.  Consistency is good, I guess, as far as it goes.  I just wish I had a drug or alcohol problem to hang it all on, so that I could have hope of conquering the problem and receiving minor accolades for the success, a la the famous Christian parable of the prodigal son*, or just succumb to an overdose or something if not.

Unfortunately, my problems are basically internal and inherent.  I’m just not very good at humaning, it turns out, if you’ll pardon me for using the au courant contrivance of turning a noun into a seeming gerund of a verb, as in the expression “adulting”.  Adulting, by the way, does not get a red squiggly underline in MS Word, but humaning does.  I guess that means I really did just make it up.

I’ve been trying to do it all my life, of course, and I have put a lot of effort into it.  But my return on investment has gone deeply in the negative, I’m afraid, though that’s only if you discount the fact of my two children.  Anything I went through up until they were born was repaid at an unimaginable rate, so I can’t complain about that.  But that’s all past, now, and they are alive and well, and they’re doing their thing and living their lives and that’s good, that’s outstanding.

I wish I could have been there to witness more of it.  But if wishes were horses, we’d all be waist-deep in horseshit.  Which we may be in a metaphorical sense—more than waist-deep, I would say—but obviously that’s not literal.

Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for today, and it’s nearly all I’ve got, period, full stop.  I don’t see how I can possibly go on much longer.  I hate the world, I hate my life, but most of all, I hate myself.  I’ve got to find a way to escape.

Which word makes me think of the Radiohead song, Weird Fishes/Arpeggi.  Here, I’ll embed some version of it in “video” form below, so those of you who are interested can listen.  It’s a beautiful song.

*Which I’ve always hated as a clear case of injustice and even cruelty.

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Just Another Tuesday

It’s Tuesday morning again.  Another Tuesday.  This one is the 20th of September, in case anyone in the future is reading and wants to know what day this post was on, and is not reading this on the site proper, where the date is—I think—displayed above the post.  I’ll assume that anyone who cares about the date and is reading it today already knows what the date is, as well as the year.

There’s nothing really new to report, obviously.  As has been the case for a while now, I haven’t written any new fiction, haven’t done more than pick up a guitar, strum at it, and think about how shitty my playing sounds before putting it back down again.  Standard issue things to do, you know?

It continues to be dreary and rainy around here, though we have it easier than Puerto Rico, where the hurricane has knocked out power for the whole island.  That hurricane is not expected to head toward us at all, though it did just now really start to rain rather heavily.  The train stations are all covered though, so the rain doesn’t matter much unless it becomes quite windy, and right now there’s essentially no wind.

I thought it might rain as I was headed toward the train station—not just because this is south Florida and it’s been raining every day, so why should it stop, but because I could see tall, pillar-like clouds looming, even in the night sky, lit by reflected urban lights below.  They look nifty, but the shape of them, and the updrafts that no doubt exist within them, cooling all that airborne water, make it all but inevitable that rain will fall.

And now, as if conjured, the wind arrives, and speckles of rain are appearing on the screen of my laptop.  At least it’s somewhat refreshing.  If it becomes too prominent, I may have to pause and put the computer away to protect it.  But if that happens, none of you will be able to tell unless I tell you about it.  Weird, huh?  Well, no, not really I guess.  I think that’s just me—I’m the weird thing here.

Anyway, the rain is already slacking off some, and there’s only the tiniest of breezes remaining.  Further bulletins as events warrant.

I suspect that nearly all the noteworthy events in my life have already passed, though.  There’s very little else to say, though that doesn’t seem to stop me from saying it.  I “talk” to all of you, because I seem incapable of talking to anyone else.  That’s my fault, not anyone else’s.  I’m a faulty mechanism, what can I say?  I’m faultier than San Andreas.  I’m buggier than the Amazon rainforest*.  I’m not a very good device.  Not to say that I don’t have some remarkable design features, but none of them are really specific to me; they’re standard in the model.  The ways in which I am not standard seem to be associated with problems, which I guess is often the case.

Or maybe that’s all just egotistical in its own way, even though it’s fundamentally a case of self-loathing.  It’s probably just as arrogant to think that one is exceptionally bad or imperfect as to think that one is exceptionally perfect or good.  But there are more ways to be imperfect than to be perfect.  At least, it seems like that would be the case, though frankly, I’m not even sure what it would mean for a person to be perfect, and I’m not sure that anyone else knows what it means when they say it, either.  People use the word without really thinking about it, though to be fair, I don’t hear people referring to other people as perfect very often, and good on them that they don’t, since I don’t think anyone is perfect by whatever standard you might choose**.

Well, the train just arrived, but like yesterday (which I didn’t mention then) whoever is driving it today stopped way “sooner” than any of the other drivers do, and so I had to follow the other people who hadn’t gotten up off their asses early to wait for it to arrive, as I had, because I try to plan ahead.  Also, someone is sitting in my usual seat, which makes me unreasonably frustrated.  I know I have no claim on any particular seat or anything, but I try to do my stuff consistently so there are fewer surprises with which to deal, but that doesn’t seem to work.

Here’s an aside, though.  This is one of the trains that’s running the automated PA announcement system, which tells you which station you’re approaching and reminds you to check for your belongings before you get up and leave.  Then it says, “Please watch your step while you’re exiting the doors.”

Am I the only person who finds that last sentence irritatingly a-sensical?  “Exiting the doors” seems to imply that you were, until that point, inside the doors!  But no one is inside the doors.  The doors are barely three-dimensional; no ordinary, human-scale organism could actually be inside the doors.  Passengers are inside the train cars, they exit through the doorways, they don’t exit the doors!

If the person who wrote and recorded that announcement—which has annoyed me since the first time I heard it—is out there, can you please just come and kill me?  You’re one of the things that makes this planet so intolerable, and it would be just as well if you could help me leave it, since I’m looking to do that anyway.

I want to say that I feel like I’m losing my mind, but the problem, if anything, is that my grasp of reality is too persistent and consistent.  My weakness, if you will, is my relative inability to delude myself.  I can see the chaos (in the mathematical and poetic senses) for what it is, as well as the infinite stupidity*** of everything out there.

It sometimes seems that I can literally feel the yawning emptiness of the cosmos, but I know that’s an illusion.  I’m no more capable of truly conceiving of the infinite than is any other finite being.  But it does sometimes seem that I can feel it, just vaguely, looming above me and above everything, as well as beneath me, since “above” is a relative measure, and we are surrounded in all directions by mostly empty space.  Sometimes that’s even comforting.  You know, like the song says, “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.”

I don’t know what point I’m trying to make.  I don’t think there is a point, either to this post, or to anything else.  It’s just another post, just another Tuesday, just another meaningless instantiation of “atoms and the void”, to quote Democritus.

I wonder if that was his real name, “Democritus”?  It seems too coincidental to be what his parents named him.  I know “Plato” was a nickname; I’m not sure about Aristotle.

Oh, well, what does it matter?  He’s dead, and he’s been dead for a couple of thousand years.  I always knew he was smart****.

*Which I like better than the Microsoft rainforest or the Google rainforest.  Ha ha.

**Unless you choose some cheesy standard such as “perfect at being who you are”, but in that case, everyone is perfect, which is just another way of saying that no one is, so it adds nothing.

***No matter how large an intelligence is, as long as it’s not infinite, then its stupidity, or at least its ignorance, is always infinite.  I know, that’s probably an unreasonable standard against which to measure any intelligence or anything else, really, but I never claimed to be trying to be fair, just that I can recognize the endless abyss of lack that lies beyond the realms of anything finite that exists.

****Well, no I didn’t.  I haven’t existed always, for one thing; I’ve only been around for just shy of 53 years, though sometimes it feels like it’s been millennia.  Also, I hadn’t even heard of Democritus for the first ten years or so of my life, not until Carl Sagan talked about him in Cosmos.  So “I always knew” is just flagrantly inaccurate.  It’s a bit like how people say things like, “that email never came”.  I always want to say, “Never?  You waited until the end of time itself, and the email still hadn’t arrived?  I mean, never is a really long time.  If you wait an infinite amount of time, anything possible that can happen will have happened, so it seems truly impossible that the email never arrived.  EVERY email should have arrived if you waited long enough to legitimately use the word ‘never’.”  But I hold my tongue…usually.  It gets my fingers wet, though.

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Surprisingly (for me) positive thoughts on a Saturday morning

[Note:  At the bottom of the post, below the footnotes, I’m including a thought that occurred to me between the initial writing and the final editing of this post, but which doesn’t directly relate to the post itself.]

Well, it’s Saturday morning (the 17th of September, a nice prime number), and I’m waiting at the station for the first train of the day, because I woke up before my alarm again and there was no point trying to go back to sleep.  I’m working again today, and I may be working again next Saturday as well, since I don’t know how long the coworker with whom I split Saturdays will be out with his recovery from surgery.

I can’t begrudge him the time off—surgery is no small thing, even if it was “minimally invasive”, to say nothing of the problem that required surgery.  I’ve had major surgery myself, open-heart when I was 18 and back surgery when I was about 35 (hopefully I won’t have another when I’m 53!).  I don’t remember how long my own laminectomy and fusion left me hobbled, because at the time I was already on temporary disability because of the injury, but it wasn’t a minor inconvenience.

That whole process contributed to the eventual catastrophic collapse of the life I had built, partly because I technically have “failed back surgery syndrome”, which means that, despite my back surgery, I still have chronic pain.  I think the term “failed” is a bit uncharitable, though, because my pain was reduced, it just didn’t come close to going away completely.  It’s there every day, and it has been for about 20 years (for those of you doing the math, I had the pain a good three years or so before I had the surgery, and I am currently 52).

Speaking of the collapse of my previous life, and the loss of so many things that were important to me, I sent an email to my son not long ago—I might have mentioned this previously—to the email address he had used the thank me for his last birthday present.  It was basically a long apology for all the things I screwed up with him (and his sister), and a reminder that I love him and always will, and of course that I miss him.  I didn’t know if he even regularly checks that email, so I asked his sister to let him know I had sent it.  He apparently does, and he’s seen it.

I don’t know what he thinks about it, since he hasn’t replied so far.  I don’t know if he ever will.  That’s up to him, which I guess is obvious.  What I mean is, that it wouldn’t be fair or right for me to expect, let alone demand, a reply from him.  I at least know that, if he wants to know what his father has been thinking and doing for the last quite some time, he can always come to this blog and read it.  I don’t know what he would think if he did that, but it is whatever it is.

I’ve always felt—at least, for as long as I’ve seriously thought about such things—that it’s important to remember that children don’t belong to their parents.  Parents belong to their children.  This is so for good, sound, biological reasons, and also for deep moral ones.  A parent can make the decision to have a child—or well, two parents can make that decision.  The child literally has no say in the matter, for the child does not even exist when the decision is made.  They cannot be held morally accountable for anything to do with that decision, and they cannot incur any obligation because of it.  Of course, good parenting and good socialization can mean that a child will be naturally grateful to the parents, and that’s nice when it happens, but it isn’t required.  It cannot, ethically, be required.  It cannot, in good conscience, be demanded.

That reminds me tangentially of the concept creep problem our culture has with the terms, “respect” and with “self-esteem”.  People cannot demand respect.  Respect is in the eye of the beholder.  Courtesy is presumptively expectable, since simple politeness is the lubricant of civilization, but respect can only be freely given if it is to be of any value at all.

Likewise with self-esteem.  It doesn’t make sense to encourage people to have just a general, free-form, positive self-image based on nothing; that leads to narcissism and all the problems it entails.  One should not feel “proud” merely of the fact that one exists.

A student who cannot seem to master math well should not necessarily feel proud of his or her math skills, though if that student has worked hard to learn as much as they can learn, they should feel proud about that!  And that person almost certainly has other strengths and abilities that they can feel good about, and of which they should feel proud.

Hard work is worthy of esteem, and thus of self-esteem.  But I don’t need to esteem my own ability to play basketball, for instance, and I shouldn’t, because I’m terrible at basketball.  On the other hand, I write reasonably well, and I write a lot.  I also have good skills at general mathematics and science, and I am deeply curious about the way the universe works, and have learned a lot about what people know about how it works, and how that knowledge has been gained.  I should feel good about that, at least.  I certainly enjoy it.

“Pride” in general is a tricky concept.  Its legitimacy depends on how one uses it, and what one means by it.  None of us made ourselves, obviously; we operate according to the laws of nature*, and we are shaped by our nature—our genes and other physical factors—and our experience, our background, our society, our upbringing, our education, and so on.  And in a sense, all of these things are also part of “our” nature.

A person may have the tenacity to work hard and improve themselves from an otherwise unpromising-seeming background, but even then, they did not create that tenacity—it was their luck, or their blessing, however you want to characterize it, that they had it.  There’s nothing wrong with that.  Use the assets you have to their best effect.

You can’t use assets you don’t have, after all.  It would be much easier, for instance, for me to get to work in the morning if I could teleport, or even if I could fly.  But I cannot, and there are no reasonable technological solutions to that lack right now, so I just don’t have that ability.  It would be the height of silliness for me to feel proud of myself for my ability to fly, since I cannot.  But I’m glad of my ability to learn and use the public transportation system in south Florida, and I’m grateful that it exists; I admire the people who put it into place, and I esteem the people who keep it running every day.

Maybe gratitude is a better notion and virtue than pride or self-esteem.  I know some religious systems place an emphasis on it, and I think that’s far from a bad thing.  It’s good to be grateful for the inherent and learned abilities that you have, and it makes sense to instantiate that gratitude by using those gifts to the best of your ability.  Otherwise, it’s not very impressive gratitude.

It’s the converse** of the situation in which a person apologizes for something, but keeps up the behavior that led to the apology.  That’s not much of an apology.  I often find myself saying to people, “I don’t need your apology, I want you not to do the thing you’re apologizing for.  If you apologize but keep doing the same thing, the apology is useless, and even insulting.”

Okay, I use words to that effect, adjusted to match the situation.  I hope you get the idea.

These are my thoughts for this Saturday morning, such as they are.  I hope most of you are looking forward to an enjoyable weekend, hopefully with some time spent with family and/or friends.  Be grateful for them, certainly, if you have them around.  No one is guaranteed to have them, and even if there were such a guarantee, with whom would you lodge the complaint if the guarantee were not met?  Feel good about the things you are good at, and feel grateful for the good things you have in the world, and show your esteem and gratitude by doing the best you can with both.

Those are good words, I think, and I’m astonished that I am the one who actually just wrote them.  The trick will be to live up to them!

*And of Nature’s God, if you believe in God, to paraphrase the Declaration of Independence.

**Or maybe the obverse—I’ve never yet been able to get those concepts clearly differentiated in my head.  Neither term may actually be the correct one, come to think of it.

[As noted above, here is my thought below the footnotes:  Is it ever possible for any kind of mind, whether natural or artificial, instantiated in hardware or software or both, to be complex enough to accurately model its own workings in detail?  As it becomes more complex, modeling its own function will also become more complex.  I suspect that this complexity will increase more quickly than the ability of the increasingly complex mind to parse it.]

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How many rhetorical questions can one man ask?

Well, it’s Monday again, the start of another work week.  I think it’s a bit unfair that we’ve made the day that we named after the moon—arguably our most unique and interesting and certainly among the most important of nearby astronomical bodies—into a day that’s associated with the return to drudgery after a minor respite.

But that’s not what I mean to write about today.  I’ve been thinking recently about a list I saw of “Greatest Songs of All Time”.  I think it was one of those “WatchMojo” or “WhatCulture” lists, but that doesn’t matter much.  What matters to me is, what had this list declared to be the greatest song of all time?  Well, the answer, my friend, was Blowin’ in the Wind.

There’s nothing particularly wrong with the song.  It’s a simple folk tune, pleasant and catchy enough for what it is.  But the greatest?  Musically, it’s not terribly interesting.  It has only three chords, which change in not terribly imaginative or impressive ways, and the tune itself is also not especially beautiful or catchy.  It just repeats its structure 3 times in a row.  That’s all fine, don’t get me wrong, but…surely it can’t be because of the tune and the chords that they think it’s the greatest song of all time.

It must be the words.  After all, the person who wrote this song was recently given a Nobel Prize for his words (all of them, not just this song), so they must be the reason some people consider this the greatest song of all time.  Presumably the Nobel Committee doesn’t give those awards out just for any old lyric writing.  They haven’t given one to Paul McCartney or Bernie Taupin or (God forbid) Tim Rice.

So, Mr. Dylan—if that is your real name*—let’s examine the lyrics of this supposedly greatest not just of your songs, but of all songs.

With the first line, I already have problems:  “How many roads must a man walk down before you can call him a man?”

It’s internally contradictory.  If a man is walking down any road at all, as the lyric says, you’re already calling him a man.  If the starting point is “a man walking down a road” then he doesn’t need to be a man walking down a road at all before you call him a man.  For a man to walk down a road, he has to be already a man.

Then comes the line “How many seas must a white dove sail before she sleeps in the sand?”

This one just doesn’t make sense.  Do white doves sail?  Aren’t doves land birds?  Does any bird, other than a pirate’s parrot or similar, actually “sail” at all?  Do white doves tend to sleep in the sand?  I thought most dove species nested well above the ground.  Or is this “sleep” a reference to dying?  In which case, maybe a white dove will die if it tries to sail—since they aren’t sea birds—and so it will die at once, and the answer is “one or fewer”.

Next comes “How many times must the cannonballs fly before they’re forever banned?”

Well, I don’t think you need to ban cannonballs.  They’re a long-since obsolete form of military projectile.  What good would “banning” them “forever” do?  Cannonballs are easy enough to make, but again, they are obsolete.

Well, this one I’m willing to accept as a catch-all term referring to all military weapons, but surely banning will not be the way war is ended, since “banning” something requires an implicit threat of force in and of itself.  Surely only by advancing as a civilization to the point where war is no longer in any sense desirable by anyone is the way things will go, if it goes that way at all.

Next comes the title verse, “The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind.  The answer is blowin’ in the wind.”

Now this is clearly just an evocative image (so to speak) showing that the answer is not something that can be grasped, calling to mind poetic queries such as “Who has seen the wind?”  But ever since I were a wee lad, I’ve heard this and thought, “So, maybe the answer is ‘a leaf’.”  Which doesn’t quite make sense, but a leaf is the sort of thing that can be found blowing in the wind.  Or we could go “meta” or whatever, and say, “The answer is, ‘dust’.  Dust in the Wind is the answer.”  And for my money, it’s a much deeper, more evocative, more haunting, and far more beautiful song.

But that’s a digression.

Now, the first lyric of the second verse is one I frequently forget, because it’s partly banal and partly misses any point.  The whole “How many years can a mountain exist before it’s washed to the sea?” is a bit of trivia, and it would differ for every mountain.  Also, I would think that not every mountain is, in the end, washed to the sea.  I don’t really think that’s how geology and plate tectonics work.

As for the third line of the verse, “How many times can a man turn his head and pretend he just doesn’t see?” it’s basically an empirical and uninteresting question***; I suppose one could run a test on a statistically significant number of men and have them turn their heads over and over again, pretending not to see, until they get fed up with the process, or fall asleep, or develop some form of repetitive stress injury, then publish the result with error bars and significance estimates, but why would anyone do such a thing?

The middle line sticks in my craw in a worse way, for moral philosophical reasons:  “How many years can some people exist before they’re allowed to be free?”

Well, if freedom is something that people are “allowed” then they aren’t free at all.  They are being given a privilege, not claiming a right.  Freedom is something that is demanded, that is seized, that is declared.  It is not given nor taken away—ethically, anyway—at the whim of other people.

It is certainly questionable, as a matter of physics, whether anything like “freedom” actually exists, but from a civilizational point of view, if you think you have a right to “freedom”, you don’t ask to be allowed to be free, you insist upon it, and—if it’s important enough to you—you put your life on the line to seize it.

Then comes the little chorus again.

Now for the last verse, which starts, “How many times must a man look up before he can see the sky?”

Well, honestly, we don’t have enough information to answer that question.  If the man is in a closed, windowless room, then it doesn’t matter how many times he looks up.  He’s not going to see the sky.  On the other hand, if he’s in the basket of a high-flying balloon, for instance, or in a plane, he may not need to look up at all to see the sky.  But if he is outdoors, and it’s not cloudy (unless clouds count as “the sky”) then he only has to look up once to see the sky.

The next line is “How many ears must one man have before he can hear people cry?”

The most straightforward answer is, “At least one.”  I would be willing to include in this definition of “ear” anything that transduces sound into decipherable neural impulses reaching the appropriate brain centers for interpretation, including those amazing new devices that have allowed previously deaf people to hear for the first time.  When those are turned on, and you see the recipients’ reactions, anyone with half a soul can’t help but cry.  That’s poetry in real life.

But it’s orthogonal to my point.

Next comes perhaps the silliest line, to me:  “How many deaths will it take till he knows that too many people have died?”

There are a lot of assumptions made in asking this question, such as the notion that death is inherently bad in and of itself.  If that’s so, then we’re all hosed, because as far as we know, every human born will die someday, somehow.  As far as we can tell, the universe itself will eventually reach some stage of “heat death” with the development of maximal entropy and no free energy, where there will no longer be any arrow of time.  But in any case, every human will die eventually, that much is effectively certain.

So, how many is too many?  I suppose if the last mating pair of humans alive in the world die, leaving the human race extinct, then “too many” people would have died…from the human point of view, anyway.  Maybe to other creatures on the planet this would entail “just the right number of deaths”.

This line is part of a general attitude toward which I have antipathy.  It is not death per se that is the evil.  It is premature death, and death that causes or entails unnecessary suffering.  Suffering is the real tragedy, not death.  Everyone who is born will die.  If not—far worse—they’re eventually going to find themselves floating in a featureless, timeless haze at just-above-absolute-zero, and they’re going to be alone there until the next Poincaré recurrence, estimated to be on the order of 10120 billion years, if such a thing even happens at all.

That doesn’t sound fun.  Why not just be content to die and then come back whenever the laws of physics accidentally recreate you, somewhere****, which is going to be more likely to happen sooner than the whole universe recurring, not that you’ll experience the intervening time.  That’s all assuming that the laws of physics don’t contain bigger surprises than anyone expects, which they probably do.

This should all be enough to show my irritation with the notion that Blowin’ In the Wind might be the best song ever.  It’s obviously memorable, of course, and it made me think—but only in the sense of thinking of the ways that it’s awkwardly worded or ham-handedly metaphorical.  All Along the Watchtower is a better song, in my opinion.  Even The Times They Are A-Changin’ is a little better.  Or The Man in the Long Black Coat!

Then again, I’ve written a lot of words picking apart this one, simple song, with a simple chord and verse structure, with many lines that could be considered what Dan Dennett calls “deepities”—words that sound profound, but which are fairly banal and even trivial or nonsensical when you look at them closely.

But I did stop and look at them and pick them apart and think about what they could mean if they were slightly better worded, and they made me think about possibly better questions to be asked.

Maybe it’s a pretty great song after all.  Who would’ve thought it?

*That’s a joke.  I know it’s not his real name.  His real name is Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov**.

**That’s a joke within a joke.  It’s not actually Bob Dylan’s real name.  Anyway, as far as I’m concerned, Dylan is Dylan, just as Muhammed Ali—another famous poet—was Muhammed Ali.

***Though I know it’s really a rhetorical question referring to people’s ability to ignore injustice, and I don’t actually have any issues with it as such.  So I apologize for being picky about this line.

****Possibly as a so-called Boltzmann Brain, which frankly doesn’t sound appealing.