Lifestyle

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But life, being weary of these worldly blogs, never lacks power to dismiss itself.

Hello and good morning.

Well, yesterday was something of a cluster fudge*.  I mentioned that, if not for payroll, I would not have gone to work, but payroll existed, so I needed to go.

I intended to leave as soon as payroll was done.  However, my coworker, with whom I share some of the daily tasks, ended up calling in sick from a stomach bug, so I was going to be stuck.

Then my boss, who is actually very kind, asked the people from our other office to come over to cover for me so I could leave at about 2 at least.  But after that there were numerous messages and questions and issues and the like that I had to witness, though I did not participate in all of them.  Perhaps needless to say, I didn’t get much rest.  I wouldn’t be going to work today, honestly, but I just know there will be a mess to clean up, and it will only accumulate further if I wait**.

I know, it’s my own problem; if I were less uptight about such things I could just leave it for a bit and rest today, which would probably be better for me.  But I would not be able to rest much today from thinking about it, and when I finally went in, I would quietly blow a gasket.  It wouldn’t be obvious on the outside, but I might very well get so stressed as to deliberately harm myself‒that does happen with me more often than I like to admit‒and that’s worth avoiding.

That’s why I started smoking cigars regularly:  it’s a way to self-harm without the risk of being Baker Acted (or whatever the term is nowadays).  That’s definitely worth avoiding.  I once called the help line thingy when I was feeling in a particularly bad way, and I ended up being picked up by the Palm Beach Sheriff’s office, handcuffed (by deputies who were obviously pretty pathetically frightened to deal with someone who was self-destructive) and taken to a little shit-hole mental health place in south Palm Beach County.  It would have been better if I had done something to force them to shoot me.

I was only in the mental health place for 24 hours, but I got nerve damage in my left wrist/hand from poorly applied handcuffs***, and that lasted about a year before I lost the paresthesias.  Anyway, I’ve told that story before‒parts of it, anyway‒and I don’t want to bore you too much.

I do keep getting, every few days, a pop-up message when I get on Threads that says someone thinks I need help or am having a hard time, and it gives links to things like the suicide help line, and to, I don’t know, places with ideas or resources or something that other people have found useful.

Unfortunately, because of the experience I just described, among other things, I generally avoid calling the help line.  It’s not just that I seem ever more with every day to have difficulty interacting with anyone I don’t know well; I really don’t ever want to be arrested, or just “arrested”, again in my life.  I’ve been through way too much of that shit, especially for someone who never even tried marijuana until his mid-forties**** let alone any other drugs or crime.

I do truly appreciate the thought behind these pop-ups.  But I’m not a young man, and I’ve had mental health problems pretty much my whole life (partly because, it turns out, I was an undiagnosed autistic person, with complications thereof, but I didn’t know that until very recently).  I also supposedly have a uselessly high IQ, and in addition I get obsessively curious about things in which I am interested (or about which I am desperate).  There are very few treatments, let alone ideas, that I have not explored and digested, and sometimes tried, to help my chronic depression.

Of course, it turns out that the ASD complicates things, and some treatments and helps that often work well for so-called neurotypical people end up not being as effective for those “on the spectrum” and can even be counter-productive.  Unfortunately, I’m not clear on any alternatives that might be available to me, and I have no community of like-brained people with whom I can seek support‒I’ve really gotten far more socially awkward over time even than I was in the past.

So, I’m not sure that humans are going to be particularly useful sources of mental health information for me.  I need something geared to a Nexus 13 or whatever.  Unfortunately, the Tyrell Corporation very rudely failed to become real by 2019, so they don’t have any useful things to offer a para-human like me.  They can’t even grant me a four-year lifespan.

Anyway, those are my sharable thoughts for this morning.  Imagine what the nonsharable ones must be like!

I hope you all have better days than I have been having and will probably have for the foreseeable future.  And thank you for reading my blog, today and in the past.

TTFN

*Not with pecans, though.  I really hate pecans, and yesterday wasn’t quite so bad that I should compare it to having to eat fudge with pecans.

**There was.

***Yes, I know the difference.  I’ve had a stupid amount of experience with police handcuffs‒and leg irons and shackles‒for someone as boring and well-behaved as I try to be and am.  Sometimes I think my life would have been better if I had been some manner of delinquent.  It probably would have been shorter at least, and that would be an improvement.

****I was trying to help a particularly bad bit of back pain that day, and some coworkers let me try a joint they were smoking.  I proceeded to vomit off and on for the next two hours.  It was not an auspicious trial.

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Rockin’, rockin’ and rollin’. Down to the train I’m strollin’.

Well, it’s Monday again.  Yippee.  I’m writing this post on my “smartphone”* today because I didn’t feel like taking my miniature laptop computer with me when I left the office on Friday.  Perhaps that was shortsighted of me, but hopefully at least this way I will avoid writing too much today.

Of course, as usual, I have no particular subject or topic to address with this blog post.  I just started writing and, well, we’ll all find out what comes forth, won’t we?  It may be a lame-ass way to run a blog, but whataya gonna do?

I did walk to the train this morning, five miles (the same distance as before, of course‒it would be weird if the distance changed from day to day).  It was, perhaps, slightly easier than the last time, which is good.  It would be troubling if it were getting harder every time, though blisters can sometimes make that happen.

I rode my new bike around on Saturday and on Sunday, but I didn’t have the heart to try to ride it this morning.  For one thing, riding it is still just exhausting relative to walking or to riding my other bike.  Also, I cannot help but fear getting a flat tire while on the way to the train (or on the way back), and that possibility makes me too nervous to want to use it.

If I get a flat on the weekend, then I merely need to walk the bike back to the house‒or to a bicycle repair shop, if there’s one nearby, which there pretty much isn’t.  But if I get a flat on the way to the train, then I have to deal with a bike with a flat and with getting to work.

Perhaps I’m just a wimp for not wanting to deal with such things, but I have only so many “spoons” to go around, and they get used up by so many little things throughout every single work day (and other days as well) that I don’t feel that I have any reserves.  For many years now, I’ve felt that I’m in imminent danger of complete collapse; I still feel that way.

One of these times, I’ll be correct in that estimate, but that’s a bit of a cop-out.  It’s like someone stating that the world will end tomorrow, then when it doesn’t (if it doesn’t) they just roll it over to the next day.  Sooner or later, they will be right.  It may take over a trillion tries‒let’s imagine they’re immortal as well as absurdly bloody-minded‒but they will eventually be correct.

Anyway, though, for me it’s not the fact of getting flat tires that’s the exhausting part (though it is exhausting when it happens).  It is, rather, the tension of worrying about it every single time I ride.  You might say that I simply shouldn’t let myself worry about it, should not let that imagined possibility interfere with the “now”.  To which I might reply that you shouldn’t fear cancer and/or heart disease and/or Alzheimer’s, etc., because sooner or later something is going to get you, and your fear is just causing you stress in the here and now.

Or perhaps it would be better, or more analogous, to tell you that you shouldn’t fear running across a busy road, because either a car will hit you or it won’t, and you won’t change that by worrying.  Except, of course, you can change that by worrying, if you act on your worry and therefore don’t recklessly run into the street.

I know, I’m being fairly silly.  I’m not trying very hard to be rigorous right now, so some of my logic may be strained.  But I hope I’m not being fundamentally or thoroughly irrational.  I don’t think I am, but just as it’s not up to you whether or not you’re appropriately considered an asshole, it’s not necessarily reliable for me to judge my own rationality.  I do judge myself, and I am fairly harsh about it, but if I were to start losing my mind, I would be an unreliable witness to what was happening.

Anyway, that’s enough for now.  I hope you’ve enjoyed this post, if that’s even possible.

Oh, and by the way, though I have not set up a Patreon or anything, if any of you would like to request that I write a post about some specific subject or topic, by all means, please let me know in the comments.  I don’t promise to fulfill any and/or all such requests, but I do promise to read and consider them.

In the meanwhile, please have a good day.

*I don’t mean to denigrate the phone by putting that term in scare quotes.  It’s a fine piece of technology, and for the most part, it does what it’s meant to do.  I just think the expression “smartphone” is a poor term.  It’s mainly a marketing gimmick, like “organic” and “gluten free” and “non-GMO”:  designed to lure in the insecure and get them to buy particular products to try to counter their…I don’t know, their existential angst or summat.

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That small model of the barren earth which serves as paste and cover to our blogs

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, and I’m sitting at the train station as I begin to write this, having walked the five miles here from the house.

I’d intended either to walk or ride the bike today, having taken a rest break yesterday, but riding the new bike was just a little too intimidating.  I think I’ll need to get a bit of practice in over the weekend—a longish ride or two each on Saturday and Sunday—in order to get really used to it, so I don’t feel daunted when I arise in the morning.

I don’t have anything against walking, of course.  It’s actually rather enjoyable.  But it does take quite a bit longer than biking does, and it’s much more likely to cause me blisters, as well as irritation in my right ankle and left knee (though I have a spandex brace on for the latter issue, and it helps).

How’s that for a boring beginning?  Still, at least it’s a form of “good” news, in the sense that I have accomplished something useful already today.  That’s one reason it’s nice to get your exercise in before work—or whatever constitutes the morning for you—because then you begin the rest of your day with an accomplishment already under your belt, so to speak.  And, of course, over time you’ll be able tighten that belt, or so it is to be hoped, if you keep up the good habits.

In any case, I’m starting this post off much more positively than I did yesterday’s post, though that’s admittedly a very low bar to clear.  Hopefully there will be no minor catastrophes today involving the train as there were on Tuesday after I walked.  The announcement proclaims the train is on its way in ten minutes, which will make it right on time, so that’s a hopeful fact.

It’s not as though I don’t have plenty of time before work officially starts; I can’t seem to sleep past about three in the morning, and I wake up more than once before then, no matter when I go to sleep.  I might as well use that time to get some things done, and exercise can be one of those things.

Okay, well—what should I talk about now?  I don’t know.  I never plan these things out, as you know, and though sometimes I think I write better when I feel angry in general, I don’t feel especially so at the moment.  I keep trying to give myself positive “self-talk” as they call it, but it’s difficult for me to do, because I find that I don’t believe it.  I want to be able to say to myself that “I love my life and I love myself” but I really don’t.  Maybe if I said something like, “I deserve to love myself” or similar I might find that easier to stomach.

I doubt it, though.  Perhaps if I’m able to get into better condition, as I am trying to do, I’ll feel better about feeling better about myself.

***

Well, I’m on the train now, and we appear to be moving on time and on schedule and other redundant expressions meaning that things are going according to plan.  It’s quite chilly on the train, after the tropical mugginess of the very early south Florida morning.  Fortunately, I brought an extra tee-shirt to put on over my fancy one, the latter of which is supposed to allow perspiration to evaporate quickly.  I’m not sure that it really does that, but it at least doesn’t tend to sag as it sticks to your skin with your sweat.

Well, it doesn’t actually do anything to your skin or in response to your sweat.  As far as I know, no one else but I has worn any of my shirts.  That’s good.  I don’t really want anyone else to be in my shirts, and I certainly wouldn’t recommend to anyone that they try being in my shoes.

Ha.

Ha.

So, now, what to do otherwise for today?  Of course, I will go to the office, and I will work, which makes good sense, since that is the point of getting up and leaving in the morning.  It all does get quite drab and repetitive, though, and it is certainly pointless from any objective point of view.  Unfortunately, it’s also pretty pointless from my subjective point of view, and over time that view has become more and more definitively that my days are without a point.

Do most people have a subjective sense that their daily lives have some meaning?  I suppose if they live with a spouse and/or children and/or have a group of friends with whom they spend their time, they might not even have to acknowledge any subjective sense of meaning; they will simply instantiate it.  That’s probably nice.

And so it goes, and so it goes, and the train is also going, and there seem to be no untoward complications.  It’s still dark, but dawn is in the east, gradually drowning out the lovely morning spectacle of Jupiter floating a degree or so above Venus in the eastern sky.  Venus, of course, is far brighter than Jupiter, belying the actual relative sizes of the planets, since it is much farther away and light intensity falls off as the square of the distance, due to the geometry of space.

It’s interesting how many names Venus has, and how contradictory they are.  In middle-earth, of course, it is Eärendil, and we call it Venus, but it was also the original Lucifer, the morning star—and it’s also the evening star, depending on where in its orbit it is relative to the Earth.  And it is, of course, the most transitory of planets.

With that really stupid and bad astronomy joke I’ll end for the day, and none too soon.  I hope you all are feeling well and are accomplishing your own little or not-so-little successes.  Sometimes just living to the next day can feel like a heroic accomplishment.  And sometimes it can feel like a terrible mistake.

TTFN

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Into and out of training

Well, yesterday after work I finally rode my new bike to the train and then from the train back to the house.  I don’t know if it’s because it’s a single gear bike or because of the smaller tires or both, or if some other factors might be involved, but it was a lot of work to ride compared to my other bike.  It’s just five miles from the train station to the house where I live, but I had to get off and walk the bike for a while twice.

Still, it was doable.  This morning, however, I decided to take a slower mode and I walked to the train.  It certainly takes quite a bit longer to walk five miles than to bike, but at least I’m not completely wiped out.  Also, I don’t think I have any new blisters, which is always preferable to the alternative.  I also don’t have any old blisters, just to be clear.  I do have a slight cut on my right outer heel near the Achilles tendon, but I have that nicely protected with one of those big fat Band-Aids.

I love those big fat Band-Aids.

Anyway, I have a slight further walk when I get to my destination, but it’s only about three-quarters of a mile.  Also, I will rest on the train for a while.  And it will be good to have already gotten in some relatively serious exercise at the beginning of the day.  The figurative momentum will probably not last for long, but at least I have a bit for the moment.

I tried very hard to force myself to do something yesterday, so I got out my office guitar and strummed and sang Nothing Compares 2 U , recording it with two different devices, then merged them into a single Audacity file (though I have not merged the tracks, just aligned them to play simultaneously).  I had to do a lot of background noise reduction, and that made the sound a little dead, but I can try to tweak it a bit.  If it becomes anything worth hearing, I may share it here.

I used to have a pretty decent USB condenser mic, and sound recording was better with that, but I threw it away when we were getting ready to move office a while back.  I hadn’t used it in a long time, and also, I more than half intended to die around that time, so I didn’t see the point in keeping it.  I threw away some other things then, and “gave” my black Strat to my boss, and really was not excited about keeping much of anything.  It just goes to show you, I guess‒though I’m not sure what it just goes to show.

***

I’m on the train now.  As I suspected would be the case, this car is quite chilly, but I brought a second shirt to put on over the sweaty one (and I have done so) so I don’t get too cold.  We’re currently sitting at the station while, apparently, they deal with an “unruly passenger”.

I don’t blame this on the fact that I’m on a later train than usual‒that would be ridiculous.  It’s the sort of thing that can happen at any time, given how utterly pathetic so many humans are.  Honestly, I wish that I (or someone) had the power Michael had in Stranger in a Strange Land, just to send people sideways in spacetime, or whatever he did, so we could just make such unruly passengers go away if they refused to stop being unruly and/or to exit the train.  Maybe that might seem a bit extreme, but it was, according to the book, a painless cessation of existence.

***

Okay, well…now we just got started moving and suddenly the train stopped and the lights and everything all went out.  I wonder if the unruly passenger had some supernatural powers that he (I consider a male to be more likely to be unruly in such cases) used to get his vengeance.  I know, that’s not what happened.  But at least it would be more interesting that this merely being a case of incompetent maintenance of equipment.

***

And the train is dead, and the following train is now stuck on the tracks approaching the station, so I’m getting an Uber to work.  It was that or go back to the house, but honestly, I’m no more comfortable there than at the office.  I might as well be productive.  At least I’m not stuck, like the people on the following train.

If I were inclined toward magical thinking, I might imagine that “the universe is sending me a message not to walk to the train in the morning” but that is, of course, stupid.  The only message the universe is sending (and it’s by no means sending that message to me specifically) is that sometimes things break down, largely because of the second law of thermodynamics, and they don’t do so with regards to anyone’s convenience.  

To be fair, though, my Uber driver was a very lovely and pleasant lady, and though traffic was pretty bad, when we were getting off the freeway, I saw a rainbow.  So there are pleasant surprises as well.

Anyway, that’s enough for now.  I know this has probably been terribly boring, even though there is misfortune involved.  I guess that’s necessary but not sufficient to make for a gripping tale.

I hope you all (or y’all if you prefer) are having a more convenient day so far than I am, and that you continue to do so.

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True hope is swift, and blogs with swallow’s wings: kings it makes gods and meaner creatures kings

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, and against popular demand (or at least orthogonal to it) I am writing another blog post.  I don’t know how you feel about that, but you’re reading it, so I guess you can’t complain too much.

I had a rough day again yesterday, pain-wise.  I basically took everything that was safe to take, and then a bit more, but it did not do a great job of getting the pain under control.  However, I did take delivery of my latest attempt at lifestyle change:  a new, folding bicycle, which is quite a lot smaller (and has a smaller wheel base) than my other one.  It’s also lighter, and so it is easier to transport, and starting this afternoon, I mean to ride it from and to the train in the morning and evening‒or, well, in the evening and morning, to keep the order consistent.

I tried it for a little ride-around in the afternoon, and while the smaller wheels make it feel slightly less stable (thanks to a smaller moment of inertia, proportional to the mass times the square of the radius of rotation, if memory serves), it’s still comfortable, and it is also easier to get on for me, since I can step through it rather than having to raise my stupid, stiff old legs and hip.

Hopefully, it will help me get around faster and get stronger/healthier again.  Even my little test ride yesterday seemed to loosen my back up a bit, which was a bonus.  I think the lower-impact movement of a bicycle is much easier on my joints* than, say, running, which I’ve otherwise always really liked.  It’s also just faster to get around on a bike than by walking, but you don’t completely lose out on the experience of being in the midst of the places through which you are traveling.

So, yeah, that’s my reason for guarded optimism today.  I have a hard time being optimistic even at the best of times, though.  It feels like I’m setting myself up to fall into a trap.

That reminds me, I rather like something I heard David Frum say recently.  I can’t reproduce his exact words at the moment, but he basically said he tries to follow the guideline:  think like a pessimist but act like an optimist.  Or,  as Mel Brooks put it in the theme song** for his early movie The Twelve Chairs, “Hope for the best, expect the worst”.

In some ways, I feel that’s almost become my default setting, because when I’m at my current clearest state of headedness, I am definitely depressive and gloomy and neither expect nor feel that I deserve anything good.  But I still keep moving forward (well, if you’re moving at all, then “forward” can be defined as just going in the direction in which you are, in fact, going) and trying new things.

With respect to everything else, well, because my pain flare has been so distracting this week, I haven’t done any music of any kind (even listening, really) nor have I written any fiction.  I also haven’t worked on any lyrics for a song taking off from the word “humility”.  Hopefully, if I can feel better from riding the new bike, it will help me have more energy to do things.  Of course, it will be physically taxing at first, at least a little bit, but that’s okay.

As for anything else, well, I still occasionally toy with the notion of adding a Patreon account or something to this blog, just to see if it does anything at all.  But one is expected to give perks to one’s patrons, and I’m not sure what I have to offer.  Of course, I could write special posts that are only available to patrons, but I don’t know how exciting that would be.

Maybe I could ask patrons to suggest topics or subjects for blog posts, or do some manner of “ask me anything” posts, open to patrons only.  I don’t really know what on Earth people on Patreon could possibly want to learn from or about me, but maybe there would be interest.  I don’t know what else might entice someone.  If any of you out there have any ideas, I would love to hear them.

See what I mean by “think like a pessimist, act like an optimist”?  It’s hard for me to imagine anyone wanting to pay to read my writing, since I barely want to read my own stuff for free***.  And yet, I would consider trying to start making money from even my non-fiction writing, because what have I got to lose by trying that, other than an expenditure of time and energy?

Well, we’ll see what happens.  I would greatly welcome your input on such things, O Reader of My Blog.  In the meantime, please have a good day.

TTFN

*As long as I can avoid repeating any of my two prior major bike accidents, which each did harm to one of my shoulder joints‒first the left then the right, first a connective tissue injury, then a fracture.

**Which, yes, he wrote himself, both the song and the movie.

***Okay, that’s a lie.  I tend to enjoy rereading my own fiction quite a bit.  Is that narcissistic?  If it is, I’m a very peculiar kind of self-hating narcissist:  I think I’m the most annoying, disgusting being this side of a palmetto bug, and yet I think my stories (and my songs) are pretty good, and I enjoy them even if no one else does.

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O, that my tongue were in the thunder’s mouth! Then with a passion would I blog the world;

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, and if I were still writing fiction, this would be the only day of the week on which I would write a blog post.  On every other workday, I would be either writing or editing my fiction.

I haven’t been doing that for a while.

Part of the issue is that I don’t think very many people had any interest in it.  Apart from my sister, I hardly got any feedback on my books, and very few “ratings” on Amazon.  I know of two people who have given reviews of my books on Amazon, and one of those people subsequently died.

I don’t know that liking my stories had anything to do with that, but I do have a weird history of a surprising number of people dying after expressing the fact that they really liked something I did‒in most prior cases, specifically, my singing.  No fewer than three people who expressed enthusiastic appreciation of my singing died shortly afterward.

Of course, it’s ridiculous to think that people suffered and/or died because they liked something creative that I had done.  It’s not just unscientific, it’s actually verging on frank delusion.  People just die, I know that.  It happens to us all at some point.  Sometimes, by chance, it coincides with certain other things, and that can seem spooky.

But what if…?

As a matter of principle, I cannot rule out with mathematical certainty the possibility that liking my books or my singing or my music or my other creative stuff might be dangerous.  It’s a pretty freaking low probability*.  But is it worth the risk?

I mean, sure, if I thought I had that power and it was reliable, there are certain political (and otherwise) figures I would try to get exposed to my music or writing in hopes that they would love it and so seal their doom.  But that’s a fantasy that’s not even good enough for one of my stories.

Coming back to that topic, even the stories I’ve started (or completed) and shared here** have gotten almost no feedback, and I doubt that anyone other than my sister has read any, let alone all, of them.  If I’m forgetting anyone’s feedback, I do apologize; I did not mean to insult you or dismiss your input.

I don’t know what I’m getting at, here today.  Obviously, I wish more people had read and responded to my stories and/or my songs‒though I no longer sing as well as I used to sing, I think.  But, as you may know, I am not good at promoting myself.  I don’t really like myself, and I certainly don’t love myself.

Anyway, this is all nonsense.  I don’t know what I would do even if I were an international best-selling author or beloved star musician or whatever.  I would probably still hate myself.  Nothing really brings me any durable joy or well-being, let alone anything deeper.  Even the foods that I like seem uninteresting, as do most of the books I could read or programs and videos I could watch.  I can’t sleep (much), and I’m always in pain.

Also, right now, I have a bruise on the inner surface of my right upper arm that looks horrific‒it’s about two inches across‒that just appeared yesterday morning (at least that’s when I noticed it), but I don’t know how it happened.  At least it doesn’t hurt much.  I think I’ve had bruises there before, so perhaps I’m in the habit of slamming things I pick up into that area from time to time.  Or, perhaps I have an AV*** malformation in that region that occasionally bleeds.

It’s almost certainly not a sign of any impending life-threatening illness, unfortunately.

Oh, I also haven’t worked any on either the new song or the last song (Native Alien) so far this week.  I haven’t played any music at all, nor have I listened to any.  And I certainly haven’t been singing.  I haven’t been doing any significant walking, and I haven’t been able to whip myself into a bike-riding habit.

Part of that latter fact is because it’s summer in south Florida, so it’s very hot and very humid.  It’s discouraging, though.

Anyway, sorry about being such a bummer and a downer and all that.  It’s not you; it’s definitely me.  I’ll let you all go and have a hopefully better day for now, I guess.  Meanwhile I’ll go play in traffic or something.

TTFN

*Though I think I would not give it as low an estimated likelihood as I gave the possibility of the Earth and Moon abruptly quantum tunneling to the Andromeda Galaxy.

**Outlaw’s Mind, The Dark Fairy and the Desperado, and of course Extra Body.

***Arterio-venous.

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Progress and (good) regress reports

I’ll start with the good regress:  I’m feeling significantly closer to baseline pain levels today than I was the last few days‒at least so far, though the day has only just begun.  I suppose I could have just said that I feel “better” today, but I fear that could be construed as meaning that I feel “all better”, which is not true and hasn’t been true for many, many years.

Still, I would rather be at my current level of chronic pain than the pain I was in yesterday or the day before.  And it should probably go without saying that I would pick either state over the pain I had while my kidney stone was present (and the irritation from the ureteral stent over the subsequent two weeks was nearly as bad, largely because it persisted for those few weeks).

I didn’t get a lot of work done on Native Alien yesterday, though I did progress a little.  I also don’t have anything down regarding the new song-takeoff word “humility”.  I’m beginning to think that I should stick to a song every two weeks, because I just have too much else going on to be able to achieve a song a week.

I also think I may need to buy a new small keyboard (the piano kind, not the typing kind) to use at the office, because I really have a somewhat difficult time trying to work out chords for a tune when I’m trying to play the tune on the guitar and then to play the chords on the guitar and see how they sound together.  I can’t really do both at once on a guitar, but on a keyboard it’s a piece of piss (as Brits might say).  Also, singing while figuring out the chords is difficult because my pitch in singing can be influenced by the chord I’m playing, and I might mistakenly adjust the tune to the chords instead of the other way around, without realizing that I have done so.

So, we’ll see.  I may order a new, relatively small keyboard for the office.  It would need to be inexpensive, but that should be pretty doable*.

I have continued to do the Brilliant course on circuits, which remains quite basic.  It’s a far cry from when I started doing their course on linear algebra, which I had never formally studied.  Don’t get me wrong; that’s a very cool and good course, and it applies to things in which I’m very interested, such as General Relativity in particular, but I got distracted in the middle of it‒I think I should have started by reviewing the fundamentals first.

I am currently reading a book called Vector, which goes into the history and mathematical theory of vectors and tensors, via quaternions and so on, and that’s pretty cool.  I find that learning the history of science and mathematics really helps get the subjects into my head.

As for other matters, well, there’s not much else going on.  Today is payroll day at work, so it will be somewhat hectic, but there’s no holiday or anything to warp the schedule.  Hopefully that means everything will go pretty smoothly.  At least I won’t have to be in as much pain while doing it as I might be.

I’m trying very hard to get back into doing more regular exercise, but trying to avoid causing exacerbations to my chronic pain while doing so.  It’s a bit of a tightrope walk, so to speak.  If I screw up, while it doesn’t lead to me literally plummeting to my death, it can set me back and make me feel terribly discouraged.

I had intended to try to ride my bike to the train this morning, but starting yesterday afternoon it began to rain quite heavily all throughout the area, so I didn’t get a chance to pump up the tires and whatnot.  This morning it was not raining, but it is supposed to rain on and off throughout the day, so biking isn’t so attractive.  I guess I’ll just wait on that and do some extra walking if I can.

Sorry, I know this is probably really dull and uninspiring reading.  I don’t know what to say about that.  I just spew these blog posts out as they come, so I don’t claim much more responsibility for the quality of the content than you can claim while reading it.

I will keep you updated on progress on my song(s) and of course you will see my writing.  I suppose, if I should try to start writing fiction again, I’ll let you know about that, but I don’t think that’s likely to happen any time soon.  There’s too much other stuff going on, and I’d need to stop doing this blog every day but Thursday.  I doubt that anyone would actually feel bereft if I stopped writing, but I flatter and delude myself that maybe it would be so.

I hope once more that you all have a very good day, and I reiterate that, no matter what, you will have the best day you could possibly have.  Don’t let that stop you from trying to ensure that this particular best day is really a very, very good one.  You might as well try.

*Addendum:  I looked on Amazon and there was a well-rated, small “beginners'” keyboard by Yamaha that can be delivered by tomorrow and was quite inexpensive, so…reader, I ordered it.

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Musings on moving and putting muses to work

It’s the start of another work week, which I guess is good from a certain point of view.  It’s a sign of…I don’t know, economic activity or some such.  I mean, it is good for people to be productive in that sense, though it’s also nice for people to have time and space to rest and to enjoy life.  After all, what’s the point of working to sustain existence if that existence is mainly dominated by discomfort and fear?

The world is complicated, of course, and many things are happening in nearly any place at nearly any time, but ultimately, for each individual, there is merely moment to moment experience.  And if that experience is negative in general, none of the other crap really matters very much.  Or so it seems to me.

You may recall—though it’s unlikely—that my workplace recently changed to a different office location.  It wasn’t a big change; we’re still in the same zip code.  But the new location is more pleasant, and the office is more pleasant as well, though smaller.  Also, in addition to there being a goodly number of apartments right across the road, there is also even a “high-end” trailer park nearby (yes, such a thing does exist).  I haven’t been to the latter, but I can see the former, and they look pretty decent.

My coworker and my boss suggested to me that I should think about moving and renting one of those apartments or—apparently these are nicer—one of the trailers.  When they suggested this, I basically gave a standard reply, with the main thing being that I hate to move.  By which I mean, I hate to change the place where I live, not that I prefer to remain stationary and frozen in person.

I hate the process of moving, I hate the necessary upheavals, the new connections to new landlords and services and so on, all of it.  I also don’t want other people touching and getting into my stuff to move it for me, and I’m not going to be able to do it myself.  Dealing with “paperwork” is another significant headache.

Ultimately, though, as I thought about it after our conversation, I realized that really a big part of the reason I don’t want to move is that I have no desire to go forward, nothing toward which to proceed, so there’s no point to the effort.  There is nothing fulfilling in my life, and I have no hope for improvement, so it seems ridiculous to spin my wheels.

I started my current living situation under the delusion that I would continue to write stories indefinitely, and then that I would make music too, and that I might reunite in a real and meaningful way with those who matter most to me.  A lot of that was a pipe dream, though I have at least made more of a connection with my youngest child.  We’ve actually been in each other’s presence twice since May, which is twice more than any other time since 2013.  That’s very good.

But otherwise, what I’m basically doing right now is waiting to die, just killing time until time kills me.  It’s being a bit of a slacker, I have to say.  I suspect that I’m going to need to take a personal hand in things—if one wants to have something done “right” one should just do it oneself, that sort of cliché.

But that runs afoul of various societal mores (and possibly morays, for all I know).  Not that I’m good at following or even grasping social mores.  I mean, the ones that make sense I have no trouble remembering, but a lot of them are irrational, and I have difficulty even desiring to internalize those.  Eventually, I’ll probably break down and say “to hell with it” and take matters into my own hands, unless something else does it for me, or unless I find some internal or external motivation that changes my status.  I don’t particularly know if I want to hope for that; everything seems to be more work than it’s worth.

In other news—either parallel or orthogonal to the above, I’m not sure which metaphor works better—I was thinking about songwriting, which I think I discussed briefly last week.  I know that at many times, bands (like the Beatles and so on) are tasked with preparing a new album, and will sit down and write songs in quite short order for such an album.

That seems intimidating, but it occurred to me that it’s probably analogous to what Stephen King does, and what Ray Bradbury described doing:  you just sit down and produce something every day.  Worry about making it better in the rewrite/editing stage, but just get something down.  It won’t all be genius—in most cases, anyway—but it will be something.

I thought, you know what, that’s probably a lot like what people like the Beatles (specifically Lennon and McCartney) did.  They knew they had to write songs for their next albums, so they just sat down and produced something, and then worked things out, rejecting some, improving others, and so on.

I thought about trying to do something like that, just out of curiosity, as an exercise, but I always have trouble thinking of topics or subjects for a song (or a poem, as the case may be), and so the poems and songs I’ve written have tended to be highly intermittent and often rather peculiar.

But I nevertheless thought that, maybe, I could set myself the task of writing songs more rapidly, just the way for a long while I wrote fiction every day.  I couldn’t write a song a day, of course.  I thought about trying to maybe write a song a week*, but even that felt intimidating.  But when I thought about writing a song a month, that seemed too slow, somehow.

So maybe I would be able to achieve something in between, maybe a song every two weeks.  But who knows, if I don’t expect myself to produce and record the songs one a week, I might be able to crank out something once a week.

And it occurred to me, also, that for subject matter I could turn to a source that I use (AZ quotes) when I can’t think of a pertinent Shakespearean quote for the title of my Thursday blog posts.  I could flip a coin to narrow it down by halves to pick my subject from among the long list of such subjects for quotes on that page.  It’s probably better than trying to find a subject by picking a random word by flipping through the pages of a book with my eyes closed.

So, who knows, maybe I’ll do that.  Maybe I’ll try to write a new “song” every one to two weeks, at least the words and basic melody.  Who knows, maybe if I’m pleased with any of them, I might do more with them and actually “release” them.  Though I currently have two songs that I wrote and haven’t yet released already:  Mercury Lamp and Come Back Again.

This is getting way too long for a single blog post, isn’t it?  Sorry to keep you, if there is anyone out there who has actually read this entire thing through to the end.  Hey, if you have, and if you feel like doing so, why not leave a comment below on WordPress so I know.  I would ask perhaps for you to leave the first line of Mercury Lamp to prove you’d read that far (and listened) but it seems unfair to ask you to do two things during a busy day.  So maybe just try to write something that makes it clear that you’ve read here.

Now, I let you go, with apologies for being so long-winded.

*I’m not talking about completing a song a week, as in getting all the parts prepared and recording and mixing and all that; that would be utterly unreasonable by myself, even if I weren’t working full-time.  But words and basic melody could be done.

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“Monday morning turning back…”

“…yellow lorry slow, nowhere to go.”

To my surprise, I am writing this blog post on my smartphone today.  I say “to my surprise” because I did not bring my mini laptop computer back to the house with me on Thursday evening, but I did not recall that fact until I unzipped my backpack and started looking for the computer.  It’s a tad frustrating to have allowed that to slip my mind, but then again, it has been four days.

I don’t feel well this morning, though it’s not because of any weekend debauchery of any kind.  I did essentially nothing this weekend.  Of course, that’s always an inaccurate statement if taken literally, but it catches the gist, the impression, of what I mean to convey.  Obviously, I breathed, and my heart pumped blood, and my bone marrow presumably kept on making blood, and I ate and excreted and so on.  And I did walk to the bank and to the convenience store and so on, and I watched a few videos on YouTube and on “Prime Video”.  But that’s about it.

Despite having rested quite a lot, my entire body just aches and is sore‒especially my back and left hip and knee and ankle and my left shoulder and arm and hand.  Both my thumbs are stiff and sore, making the process of writing this post on the smartphone particularly annoying.  I feel almost as if I were fighting some systemic infection, but I have no other localizing or specifying symptoms or signs.

Of course, I’m on my way to the office right now, to start another thoroughly pointless week of work.  I say “pointless” because I’m not going anywhere, metaphorically or literally.  I see no future other than the pointless repetition of today, with its utter lack of anything fulfilling and its ample sampling of pain and tension and frustration and anxiety and loneliness and depression.

If I had some purpose, some desired goal, something toward which I was working, it would be okay, I suspect.  Or if I just had someone with whom to legitimately share my time, with whom I could have anything more than a superficial connection, it might be tolerable.

Alas, I don’t have those things, and I strongly suspect that I never will have them.  I have had good friends (and excellent family) in my life, but I seem to have lost my ability to make friends, at least to make anything other than work friends.  And I am certainly not a dating kind of person, unfortunately.

I don’t know what point I’m getting at (yet again).  Maybe the point is that there is no point.

I don’t know if any of you stopped in on Friday and read the Declaration of Independence.  Ironically, anyone who bothered to stop and read it is likely not the sort of person who would need to be reminded of the principles involved.  So who knows whether anyone really got anything out of the fact that I shared the text of the document here?

Who knows?  Who cares?  Why bother?

What else is there to say today?  Not very much.  Again, I just don’t feel very well at all, this morning, even for me.  (And when was the last time I felt reasonably healthy in the morning?  It probably long predates the origin of this blog.)

All right, well, I’ll leave it here for today, pretty much.  I feel quite discouraged and despondent and just physically rather beat up.  I’ve taken two extra-strength acetaminophen and three aspirin today so far already, but I don’t yet detect any sign of them making anything better.  Perhaps I haven’t given them a fair day in court, so to speak.  We shall see.

In the meantime, I hope that all of you have a good day and a good week, and a good month on top of that.  And so on, and so on, and so on…

In the meantime, here’s my cover of the song from which this blog post’s title comes.

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A hot and muggy morning blog post*

Okay, well, it’s Wednesday morning, and I didn’t write a blog post yesterday.  I didn’t go to work yesterday, either, because yesterday was my appointment to get the stent taken out of my right ureterovesical junction—you can look that up in case you don’t already know to what I refer.  In any case, my thought process was that, since to get to my appointment on time from the office would have taken most of two hours, I would’ve had to leave work very shortly after it started, and I was not feeling well at all on Monday, nor on Tuesday.

Now, I am pleased to report, the stent came out without much trouble, though it was terribly uncomfortable.  Nevertheless, it is a true relief to have it gone.  Now, without the access “thread” from the stent hanging out, I can actually not feel like I have to use the bathroom constantly.  That’s a tremendous relief.

The urologist recommended that I drink lots of liquid every day from now on, and when I suggested “At least three liters?” he shook his head and pointed up with his thumb The Accountant style, and told me “Four or five at least”.

I’m not going to resist that advice, of course.  I already live in south Florida, and the heat and humidity are ridiculous.  I probably need to drink quite a bit more than even that if I can; the threat of recurrent kidney stones is a powerful one.  What’s worse, my room’s air conditioner is on the fritz, and it has been for some time.  I looked this morning at a little digital thermometer that I have and that I had forgotten for a while, and the temperature in my room was 89.5 degrees Fahrenheit.  This was at four in the morning.

Well, I already have a new, portable air conditioning unit on the way, which should arrive no later than Friday.  I look forward to it because, although I have quite a good and powerful floor fan, that leaves me with more of a tendency to dehydrate because it cools by evaporation.

I know, all this is rather boring.  I apologize.  I never told anyone I have an exciting or interesting life, though it carries its share of intense drama and angst, I guess.  Still, I can write about much more interesting things than would ever happen to me, and I can even give people happy endings to their stories, which is something that is almost certainly not going to happen to me.

Oh, I forgot to mention, I am writing this blog post on my mini laptop computer, as I suggested I might on Monday (I think I suggested it then, but I’m not going to check to be sure—I’ll have put a link to it, so anyone out there who so desires can go check on my behalf).  It’s been just over a month since the last time I wrote on the laptop computer.  It is a pleasant change to be able to write so fluidly, and in a way that feels much more natural and easier.

That being said, I don’t really have much about which to write other than my recent medical issues.  I continue not to write fiction, and I continue not to play music, let alone to compose it, and I continue not to draw or paint, and I haven’t been reading anything educational at all, whether about physics or mathematics or neuroscience or biology more generally.

Maybe I should get Richard Dawkins’s recent work about the genetic book of the dead.  His stuff is usually pretty gripping, and I like biology.  It’s harder to find physics books that I want to read, because much of the popular writing about physics is stuff that I already know, and about which I know more than is usually discussed in popular books.

I guess that’s just the way it goes.  The world wasn’t built for any of us or for all of us.  It just happened, as did our so-called civilization.  That doesn’t mean it’s not worth trying to make it a better situation for as many of us as we can and to try to avoid committing injustice to others.  But that requires reflection and calm assessment, and humans in general are not strongly disposed to such things.

We can only try, I suppose.  Meanwhile, at least try to have a good day.

*By which I mean that the morning is hot and muggy, not that the blog post is hot and muggy.  What would that even mean?