It’s the first Monday of December in 2024‒December 2nd, specifically, meaning that the 1st fell on a Sunday, which means that there will be a Friday the 13th in this month*‒and I thought I would write a brief blog post for the day. I don’t know if anyone was hoping for that, but it’s happening.
It’s relatively cool down here for south Florida; it was 55 degrees Fahrenheit when I left the house, which is, let’s see…(55-32) * 5/9, so 23 * 5/9, so 115/9, so just under 13 degrees Centigrade/Celsius. That’s also about 286 Kelvin, but the Kelvin scale is a bit inconvenient for most day-to-day temperature readings.
I could’ve just looked all that up online, but I think it’s good for the mind, and for people in general, to know and remember (and apply) the conversion between Celsius and Fahrenheit, even if only for the mental exercise. If we turn everything over to apps and computers, then eventually no one (or at least very few people) will even remember what such things mean or where they come from, or why.
Anyway, it’s something with which to keep one’s mind occupied.
There’s not much for me to do or to say, anymore. I’m just killing time while waiting for time to kill me, so to speak. That’s all I see myself doing from now on. I have no goals or hopes or dreams or anything. I don’t expect that I’ll ever see my kids again, or that I’ll ever see any of my other family and/or friends, or that I’ll make any new friends, let alone any kind of “new family”.
I’m not cut out for meeting new people or making new friends on my own. I never have been. All my old friends were people I knew from school‒junior high, high school, university, medical school, residency, all that. I’m basically alone, and I think I will be for the rest of my life‒which hopefully won’t be very long, because it’s really quite pointless and stupid, and I’m pointless and stupid, and so is the world as a whole.
Hopefully, some day soon I’ll be able to say to you all, “this is my last ever blog post”, because it will be one of my last ever anything. I’m so tired, and I’m stressed, and I’m in pain, and I’m depressed, and I can’t sleep for shit, and above all, I’m alone. I’m sick of just about everything that I do, and I’m very much sick of myself.
And, frankly, the world as a whole, the universe as a whole, is just irritating and stupid and such a waste of potential. There’s no point to any of it, and it’s not even headed in any kind of positive direction.
As Yeats wrote, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / are full of passionate intensity”. I suspect that’s just the nature of things, since passionate intensity tends to be the habit of those with a dogmatic turn of mind, and those tend to be the people who do the most damage, who commit the most destruction: precisely the people who believe that they are right, that they know what’s morally right, and that belief gives them carte blanche to do what they claim to think is right and fumigates all their deeds from any possibility of wrongdoing (in their own heads, at least).
Dogmatic thinking tends to be profoundly dangerous and destructive. “Certainty” kills. That’s why I say, “Spay and neuter your dogmas.” We don’t need or want them to spread and reproduce.
Anyway, that’s enough for today, enough for a lifetime, enough for eternity, whatever. I hope you all have a pretty good week and month and so on, or even better than pretty good, if possible.
*If you stop and think about it, this will almost certainly be obvious, since the 2nd week of such a month will run, Sunday through Saturday on the 8th through the 14th, which means the 13th is a Friday.
I was about to start this post with “hello and good morning”, but I decided it wouldn’t be quite right to start a post that way on a Tuesday. And it is Tuesday morning as I am writing this, on my phone, while en route to work.
As was the case yesterday, I have no topic in mind to discuss, so in a sense, you’re again reading my thoughts as they happen. Of course, I will edit them before posting‒editing is a very important part of my writing, and the fact that I know that I will be editing extensively (when I’m writing fiction, at least) helps give me the freedom just to write something.
It doesn’t really matter if what you first spew out onto the “page”* is terrible, since you’re going to go over and over it, anyway. It’s like sketching; your first line can be crap, and so can your second and so on, but you’re going to bring them all together into your final line or curve over time.
I sometimes almost wish I were able to say, with near-sincerity, that even what I first “spew out” onto the page is exceptional, is brilliant, is the product of absolute genius. I could even cite some evidence. For instance, when I was in high school I won a national writing award (there were two winners per state‒I was a representative of the solid state) and that was judged using a combination of a pre-written story and an impromptu, hand-written essay. Given the handicap always created by my atrocious handwriting**, what I wrote must have been quite good, but I have no memory of what the subject even was, let alone what I wrote.
In high school, I used to be able to pretend to be a rampant egotist. I could pretend to think I was the greatest, the most brilliant, the most admirable, of anyone anywhere. People took my antics quite well; I guess it was obvious that I was joking, and my pseudo-egotism was never about being better than any particular person or group of people. It was my silly pretense that I thought that I was the most brilliant being anywhere, ever, and there was no shame in being beneath me, since everyone was beneath me.
I have no idea how much my peers even noticed this, to be honest, or how much any of them would remember. Probably not very much. I was probably not as noticeable as I might have thought I was.
In any case, I didn’t quite realize it at the time, but there was a kind of sick desperation in my act, in my outward persona. I knew that I was smart, but I also knew I was pretty weird, and I at least didn’t want anyone to be mistaken about the fact that I was smart. I remember a particular formative event in this arc: I was on my way home from school (I think it was on the way home) in 9th grade, and a random other student some ways away looked at me and yelled, “Look at the reeetard!”***
Now, I don’t think he was even with anyone that he might’ve been trying to impress by being cruel, so it was just the expression of that innate urge to denigrate that humans often have. I didn’t even feel angry at him‒I’ve never taken name-calling personally, as such, particularly not by strangers. However, I was mortified by the possibility that such was the way people judged me when they saw me. I certainly hadn’t ever cared much about my appearance or what have you, though hygiene was never a problem. But I worried that I came across as atypical enough to seem…disabled in some way.
So, I guess that contributed to me trying to improve the impression I gave, overall, with respect to general ability and smarts, and so on. I think I was probably pretty good at that kind of “masking”, especially since I included at least some of my weirdness in my outward persona, more or less deliberately; I didn’t think there was any way I could completely suppress the weirdness. I also tried to be always polite, and that makes up for a lot in the world. If written language is the lifeblood of civilization, then courtesy is the lubricant, if you’ll pardon the mixed metaphor.
Okay, well…I guess that’s what has come out of me today. It feels even more disjointed and weird to me than yesterday’s writing, but what are you gonna do? I’m just desperately trying to establish some kind of contact with the world of humans in some fashion, to try to suppress or diminish my depression and tension and the feeling of imminent and inescapable‒and ongoing, since it has certainly already begun‒disintegration. So, you know, no big deal.
*Conjecture: The “page ranking”, named after Larry Page, of Google, became so powerful a term in information space that the term itself back-propagated through time, and it thereby became the word to apply to a side of a sheet of paper, and related things (eventually including web pages) on which one might imprint information. Thus, all pages are named after Larry Page, it’s just that some of them are named after him…before him.
**I’ve said it before, the horror of my handwriting is the reason they call it curse-ive.
***His term, not mine. I’m just quoting, and I’ve never really used that even as a non-serious epithet between friends. Intellectual disability, or really any kind of mental disability, has never been something I found very funny.
As anyone who has read my recent posts will know, I have not been doing well, depression-wise*. Yesterday afternoon, after sharing a “memory” on Facebook (a picture of my son from one of the last times I was with him) and explaining in the comments that the reason I hadn’t seen him was that he didn’t want to see me, I felt particularly low, and had to fight to keep from crying openly in the office. Thankfully, it was a slow afternoon (as opposed to a very stressful morning, in which I was working on payroll among other things), or I wouldn’t have been involved with Facebook, anyway.
I was so low that I started Googling (on my phone) the lethal doses of everything from CBD gummies** to aspirin to Benadryl to a combination of fentanyl and Valium.
That latter combo, of course, is the only reliably life-threatening thing among the many that I searched, but honestly, I knew all that already. I am a trained medical doctor, after all, and I have a long-standing interest in ways to make one’s quietus‒including, but not limited to, a bare bodkin. I was mostly reviewing things like the mg/kg dosage needed to be more or less certain one would die.
The biggest downside of the opiate/benzodiazepine combination is that they are controlled substances. Just try to get a prescription for the two of them without a terminal cancer diagnosis or something similar. Go ahead, try. If you succeed, please get in touch with me.
Of course, there are illicit sources of both classes of medicine, and I even know some people who might know where to get them. But such people, and such illicit medicines, are supremely untrustworthy, so that’s not great. I probably wouldn’t accept anything that wasn’t a name-brand pill, like the Valium tablets that at least used to have a big V stamped in them.
I suppose one could try to con one’s way into getting a veterinary cocktail such as might be used to euthanize a large dog or something similar. I can do injections, obviously, even to myself. But I am not good at conning people, and I certainly wouldn’t want to deceive a kindhearted veterinarian. That seems very uncool.
Alas, most OTC medicines are unreliable for many reasons, including limited absorption, nausea/vomiting, and other rather unpleasant symptoms that would precede death by quite some time, and might be awful enough to cause even the most committed would-be suicide to seek relief. It’s very hard to fight deep-seated biological survival drives, believe me.
Oh well, there are always many options, I guess, and I have the necessaries for many of them. I even used to have some helium tanks and a nonrebreather mask, but I gave the helium to people making balloons for parties‒they didn’t have the right kind of connectors for the regulator and mask I have, and I wasn’t confident of my ability to jury-rig something.
I don’t want any of you to think I simply wallow in depression, and my chronic pain, and my horrible sleep issues, and possible neurodevelopmental difficulties. I am constantly attempting new exercises, new habits, autosuggestion, self-hypnosis, meditation, dietary adjustments, postures, medicines, and so forth to try to help my problems. I don’t ever stop doing all that, which is exhausting in and of itself.
It’s likewise exhausting to keep trying to act as normal as I possibly can, because I don’t like to cause other people more trouble than I absolutely must. Also, it’s just my lifelong habit to try to act upbeat or to try to be funny, at least during direct interaction. But it’s very tiring, and over the years, my grumpy side has definitely gained more ascendance, particularly at work.
Not that I’m an asshole at work, at least not any more than I’m just an asshole in general. But the noise in the office and people making really unreasonable, sloppy mistakes, stress me out quite a bit, and the frustration bleeds through more than it used to.
Sometimes that happens literally.
Anyway, more and more I’ve been just working and struggling merely to survive. I haven’t been working anymore on Outlaw’s Mind since the last time I mentioned it here; I haven’t even been taking my little laptop back and forth with me, though I type much more quickly on it than I can on my phone. The closest thing to any creativity I’ve done recently is as follows:
On Tuesday morning, something I read (I don’t recall what) made me think of infrasound and low-pitched noises that are reputed*** to be able to instill a sense of fear or dread in people. There was some indication that a 7 Hertz noise would be troubling in some way‒I don’t recall how‒but one needs a serious sub-woofer to be able to generate such a pitch at all, let alone with useful volume.
However, the low range of the human audible threshold starts around 40 Hertz, so I thought I would do something at least mildly interesting. I pulled up Audacity and generated two tones: one at 47 Hertz and one at, I think, 73 Hertz, and merged them. I chose those frequencies because, since they are both prime numbers, their waveforms would not tend to overlap very much, and so their constructive/destructive interference would tend to be relatively chaotic, producing a pleasing (so to speak) deep and unsteady rumble.
Then, I recorded myself doing an impromptu recitation of Hamlet’s soliloquy****, which (of course) I know from memory. I first lowered the pitch of that recording a bit, but not using the optional maximum quality pitch change (I didn’t want it to sound normal) after filtering out background noise and even breath sounds*****.
Then, I copied that track and shifted its pitch a step and a half, then copied that and did the same again. This produced three simultaneous recordings of the same thing, but with pitches at intervals that make it into a constant diminished chord (that’s where the third and fifth tones of a major triad are each reduced by a half step, making an eerie, haunting, somewhat dissonant chord).
Then I combined those three vocal tracks into one, put a bit of reverb on it, lowered the pitch again until it was at least close to that of my background tones, and combined them all after trying to adjust the balance to make sure that the vocal stuff was not quite clearly present against the background sound.
I then turned it into an MP3 file and put it on loop on the big TV we use as our room sales board, starting it once people came in, and only very slowly increasing the volume from too low to hear to just audible.
One coworker noticed it, and she kept trying to figure out what it was saying, or if anything was being said at all. I explained what I had done, to her and to my “main” coworker, who also sort of heard the noise and looked puzzled. They both thought it was odd but funny, but it was apparently also mildly irritating (almost the point of it, really), so once they said that, I stopped the playback.
I’ll embed the audio file here, below, in case you want to listen. Feel free to use it to annoy or unnerve other people, if you wish.
And that’s it, that’s all I have for now, from the most creative to the most wishfully self-destructive (not in that order). I hope each and every one of you is feeling better than I feel. On any given day, at any given time, I think my odds of that being the case are good. If I were able to bet even money on it even once an hour, I think I’d pretty quickly have an excellent return on investment. Though, that might improve my mood and so alter the expected payoff rate of my investment…damn those economic feedback loops.
TTFN
*Though my depression, if considered as an entity with a “life” of its own, is thriving, thank you very much.
**There more or less is no practical lethal dose, it seems. The sugar in a gummy would probably kill you before the CBD would.
***Almost certainly untruthfully.
****The most famous one, “To be or not to be…”
*****Removing these throughout a recording has a curious way of deadening it, and it’s rather unpleasant if you’re trying to produce something that sounds good, so was ideal for my pseudo-purposes.
I already started writing this once, but it seems that Google Drive didn’t save what I had written, even though I had titled it and checked it. This has not happened to me before, as far as I can recall, but it seems to be par for the course for me right now. So, I’m starting over, though I’m not going to try to recreate the beginning of my previously initiated blog post. It was just a bit of nonsense, anyway.
I’m really not doing well, though I seem to have a difficult-to-break habit of acting as normally as I can when interacting with other people‒I don’t want to cause problems or trouble for the people who care about me. But I’m not doing well, even for me. My depression is terrible (or I suppose one could say it’s very good and impressive as depression goes), made worse by the changing of the seasons and the clocks. My chronic pain is as bad as ever and somewhat worse than usual. My overall health is poor.
I’ve had more than one person from back where I grew up, including family members, tell me I should take a break and come to visit them, but when I try to consider it, I cannot see myself being able to work out the logistics of such a thing. My “executive function” is at its lowest ebb.
I’m basically out of gas and coasting along until I crash into or go over the edge of something. Or perhaps it would be better to think that I’m an airplane out of fuel, not a car‒gliding along as best I can and trying to see if there’s any way for me to make a landing. But I cannot apply any power. I can only go along with the air currents through which I am steadily descending.
Also, I’m mortified at the thought of anyone who used to know the person I used to be seeing me as I am now. It reminds me of the stories of Syd Barrett coming to visit the band members of Pink Floyd in the studio after having to leave the band because of his mental health issues and them not even recognizing him. Having seen the various photos, I can understand their confusion, and I can also imagine how horrifying it must have been for him to realize how much he had changed and how he did not belong with them anymore; that he was not the person he used to be.
So many of the lyrics in the greatest Pink Floyd albums refer to Barrett’s oh-so-changed nature, from Brain Damage‒ “and if the cloudbursts thunder in your ear / you shout and no one seems to hear / and if the band you’re in starts playing different tunes / I’ll see you on the dark side of the moon” ‒to Shine On You Crazy Diamond‒ “remember when you were young? / you shone like the sun… / …now there’s a look in your eye / like black holes in the sky” ‒and, of course, Wish You Were Here.
Anyway, I feel like I’m a warped mockery of the person I used to be, like one of the creatures twisted by the Illearth Stone in The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever. It’s unlikely that I’ll be able to land safely on my own, but I cannot bear the thought of trying to ask someone to help me, especially someone who used to know me. I’m ashamed of me.
I’ve also been ill lately, as regular readers will know. I missed work again on Friday, and‒of course‒the office did tremendous sales that day. I fight to avoid superstition, since I don’t think there’s any sort of magical process happening, but I do think it plausible that my presence has a psychological effect on the other people in the office, dampening their spirits.
I feel sickly and sweaty. The AC unit in my room at the house seems to be malfunctioning, but having it repaired or replaced would involve having other people come into my living space, such as it is, and that’s a repulsive thought.
Also, the washing machine doesn’t seem to be working right. It washes, but I don’t think it rinsed properly yesterday, nor did it spin and drain properly. You would think at least that would mean that my clothes should smell of detergent, which is not so bad, and at first that seemed to be the case. Now, though, at the office early in the morning, I feel like I smell of cat urine, or something does. I haven’t yet been able to locate the source, though.
Anyway, I’m just worn out, and I see no future of any kind for myself, other than the obvious and inevitable one. I find myself wishing for something like tuberculosis (like that other infamous “Doc”, Doc Holliday), or even cancer, just so that I could have some inescapable deterioration that could not be denied, but that might afford me a chance to say goodbye to people I love.
I don’t think that’s likely to happen, though. My version of cancer is the disease in my head, frankly‒or perhaps it would be more accurate to call it the disease that is my head. Depression has a rate of premature mortality that is higher than that of many cancers.
Okay, well, that’s enough for now. Sorry to be a bummer on a Monday morning, but then, I’m a bummer every morning, really, so it shouldn’t be too much of a surprise.
It’s Monday morning‒the first Monday in November. It’s also my mother’s birthday, though since she’s no longer with us here, I doubt that she celebrates it any more. Nevertheless, it’s still worth celebrating. The world is a better place, I think, for having had my mother in it. True, she did give birth to me, but you can’t hold that against her too much; nobody’s perfect, and the positive things she did (including my brother and sister) outweigh the negatives, both literally and figuratively.
I felt really horrible last week, physically and mentally (and not just because of my ongoing acute viral illness). That’s part of why I just did my little sarcastic, blah-heavy blog post. I had no interest in doing anything more. What, indeed, would have been the point? I doubt that I have anything useful or entertaining to say, even today.
Of course, the big election is tomorrow, but honestly, that whole shit show is thoroughly contemptible at nearly every level, and it’s hard to feel good about it in any way. Of course, one of the presidential candidates is clearly the ethically superior person, but neither is particularly impressive. I look back with real nostalgia on the Romney-Obama election.
Oh, well. It’s probably appropriate that it’s Guy Fawkes Day tomorrow. Penny for the Guy? Remember, remember the fifth of November, the gunpowder, treason, and plot. Let’s set this thing alight.
I have been rereading (and even editing) Outlaw’s Mind after removing the opening scene, thus making it into a story without that constraining ending. I think it’s a good story; better and more involved than I would have expected when I started it, with a tone that reminds me, oddly, of Stephen King’s Revival, though I’m not at all sure why.
It seems very unlikely that I will finish it, though. I would need to find some new lease on life, somehow, and right now my life credit score is abysmal, and the only existence I seem able to afford is metaphorically even more dreary and gross than the room in which I spend my evenings and weekends. I live alone in a single, cluttered, old place, but my mental and “spiritual” existence makes the physical location seem like an all-inclusive paradise vacation with one’s closest and dearest friends and family.
It’s all I deserve, really. I don’t want you to think I pity myself. I mean, I guess in a way I do, but it’s a contemptuous sort of self-pity, a kind of “look at that pathetic, pitiful, putrid excuse for a person” feeling.
I really could use some help‒some serious help, some professional help, probably some emergency help. But I know that I don’t deserve any help, I’m not worthy of help, I don’t merit any help. It would almost certainly be a waste of resources.
I’ve also had a huge back and leg pain flare-up this weekend, of the cause of which I’m far from certain. It has, however, made this last weekend almost anti-restful, even though I had Saturday off.
I did nothing to celebrate Halloween this year, despite the fact that it’s generally my favorite holiday. Then again, I did nothing to celebrate my birthday, either. As I said in a post on Facebook, I have no interest in anything. Everything is uninteresting. I would just like to stop being in pain, to stop feeling like I have to keep pushing forward, to keep moving and doing, just because that’s what one is “supposed” to do.
I can see, more and more, that the current shape of my life is the shape of the rest of my life. This is the landscape of my continued existence: doing an okay job that doesn’t involve my medical or scientific skills, working with people with whom I can’t really have conversations about anything that interests me, leaving work to commute to a dreary old room where I try (and fail) to get a decent night’s sleep, then spend the weekend basically doing nothing because there’s nothing interesting to do, and if there were, I would be too tired and in too much pain to do it.
This is all some of why I didn’t really write a post last Thursday. I don’t know if I will write one this week. But no matter what, one of these days (and it probably won’t be very long) there will just stop being any blog posts from me, and none of you will ever hear from me again. And your lives will probably be somewhat happier because of that.
Most people seem to be happier when I’m not around. Most things tend to go better.
Meanwhile, I can only try to distract myself from my chronic pain by inflicting other, more immediate pain upon myself. Nothing else does an adequate job, but even so, it’s not really enough.
It’s Thursday, and so it’s time for my “regular” weekly blog post. It’s the first Thursday in October of 2024. It’s also Rosh Hashanah, so for those of you who celebrate it, L’shana Tovah.
I haven’t been working on any fiction at all since my last report‒unless you count my façade of being a normal person or living a normal life, of course. That’s doing what it does, and I continue to do it for whatever reason(s)‒perhaps habit, perhaps duty (to whom or what, though?), perhaps out of self-punishment or self-harm, I don’t know.
I wish I had something interesting to discuss. I’m nearly done with Authority, the second book in the Southern Reach novels. They are (so far) much better than the movie Annihilation was. But they are disorienting, as I’ve mentioned before, and given my own chronic and worsening insomnia and pain, they make me feel as though I might not be experiencing my own life as what it really is. Not that I actually think I’m being fooled or am hallucinating in any serious ways. But I do feel disconnected, separate, as though I’m not fully within or fully a denizen of this universe, but of some nearby, partly overlapping one.
I’ve long suspected that it would be difficult to “gaslight” me, because I have always found my own memory and understanding (certainly of my experiences) to be better than that of anyone around me. Yet I don’t “trust” myself, either, which means I tend to keep checking and confirming aspects of reality to test the consistency of my impressions. It may smack of OCD a bit, but it means that, at least intellectually, I find my own take on reality to be more coherent and consistent than that of most people with whom I interact. Though there are always things one can learn from others, too. One just has to be rigorous and strict in assigning credences.
As Descartes pointed out, we can never truly be certain that some powerful enough entity has not pulled the world over our eyes*. He famously came down to the conclusion, or rather the starting point, of cogito ergo sum‒“I think, therefore I am”, the point being that he knows, to his own satisfaction at least, that he is there and is thinking, because he experiences it even if all else is an illusion.
Of course, even subjectivity could be an “illusion” in some sense, in principle. The characters in all my stories have thoughts and subjective experiences‒they “think” they exist‒but that subjectivity only exists when they are being read, or when I wrote them.
And of course, we could be within an immensely complex “simulation”, and “merely” be aspects thereof. Such a simulation could be paused, say, and this could happen frequently or for tremendous periods of time up in the level of reality in which the simulation is being run, and as long as the simulation picks up right where it left off, no one here would ever have any way to notice or to know.
There could be a googol “higher-level” years between every Planck time in our universe** and as long as the simulation wasn’t changed, or was changed in ways that were logically consistent, there would be no way to see it from inside. This is one of the implications of the “simulation hypothesis” or whatever the “official” term is, put forward by such notables as Nick Bostrum, who apparently has a new book out called DeepUtopia. I have not read it; I never finished his book Superintelligence, because it dragged on a bit and I didn’t find it as challenging or revelatory as I hoped it would be. Maybe if I started again, the experience would be different.
I am reading at least two other books, though. I’m reading Yuval Noah Harari’s new book, Nexus, which is quite good so far, though nothing is likely to surpass his first book, Sapiens, which is one of the best books I’ve read.
I’m also working through Now:ThePhysicsofTime, by Richard A. Muller. He’s trying to describe his notion of the true source and nature not only of time’s arrow, but of time itself. It’s reasonably good so far, but his arguments have not been as interesting or as impressive as I’d hoped they might be. Still, I look forward to getting to the point in which he elaborates on his idea that not merely space is expanding, but time is also doing so, and this is the source of time’s arrow and the nature of “now” and so on. It’s intriguing, and it’s far from nonsensical, considering that Einstein/Minkowsky showed that space and time are one entity.
I’m sort of on hiatus from Nate Silver’s On the Edge, which is a good book, but is quite long and in-depth, and some things he discusses are more interesting than others, to me.
Other than that, I continue to feel discordant, or hazy or separate, like everything, including me, is “a copy of a copy of a copy of itself”. Last night, the feeling of being disconnected, rootless, and that I am in the process of disintegrating felt highly distressing***. I wished I could find a way to feel connected with the daily, normal processes of my life, instead of feeling as though I am, for instance, one of the people exploring Area X and trying to understand it without much chance or hope of success. Or perhaps it felt more that I am the analogy of Area X, I am the alien thing/environment in the more “ordinary” world, dropped here perhaps by accident, with no idea where I really belong or whence I really came.
Now, this morning, those notions are not gone, but the alarm associated with them is not as intense, replaced more and more by fatigue, a kind of learned helplessness. As time goes by, I tend more and more toward apathy‒not acceptance but merely giving up, just not having the energy to continue to care. I would like to connect in some way, to feel as though I belonged somewhere, but I am a Nexus 13 in a world of humans‒a world where, inexplicably, nobody seems ever to have manufactured such replicants, and yet here I am, making everything ever more drearily baffling.
Oh, well. Maybe as the disjunction progresses, I will reach some turning point, and I will melt, thaw, and resolve myself into a dew. Or maybe I’ll have to try Hamlet’s next mentioned option and make my own quietus as I intended to do on the 22nd‒I don’t believe in any “Everlasting” being, fixed canons or otherwise, that could prohibit “self-slaughter”.
Or maybe I will find some answers; or if answers don’t already exist, maybe I’ll create some answers. It seems unlikely, given my personal experience and understanding, but the odds are not zero. Though they may well be close enough for all practical purposes.
TTFN
*To borrow a lovely expression from The Matrix.
**Ignore Relativity’s problems with simultaneity for…well, for now.
Here I am, doing this again, or still doing it, or however you want to characterize it. Words cannot give an absolutely complete picture of things that happen, not without being as dense in information as the literal reality itself, and if one is going to do that, one is going to have to double the information density of every real thing in order fully to describe it, which cannot be done at scale. As I’ve said before, the only thing with computing power adequate to completely simulate the universe IS the universe, at least as far as I can tell.
I had meant to be done with all of this, or at least on my way to being done with all of this, or on my way toward something better or at least different starting on Sunday, the first day of Autumn, Bilbo and Frodo’s birthday. Unfortunately, I had rather severe problems with my feet‒my left heel/plantar fascia and my right Achilles tendon‒that made it unworkable to carry things out the way I had intended.
I’ve been doing my best to calm these foot problems down, and they both are improving‒being a trained MD with 15 years of clinical experience is good for something* it seems‒but it may just be necessary to choose some other path to my destination. There are many from which to choose, and I am prepared for several of them. This is not a new or frivolous idea of which I speak, and I have put thought and preparation into it for a long time, all while foolishly hoping for some answer, some rescue, some epiphany, but ultimately finding such hopes to be chimeras or will-o-the-wisps**…or maybe even balrogs.
Anyway, as you probably already know, I posted all of Extra Body here last week over the course of four days. If you read and enjoyed it, please take a look atmy books on Amazonand consider buying and reading one or more of them. Though I should warn you, most of my stories are much darker than Extra Body.
If you’re not good with dark stories, may I suggest TheChasmandtheCollision? My sister has rightly pointed out that it’s my only story with as upbeat an ending as Extra Body. I would say Son of Man and Mark Red are somewhere in between, and a few of my stories, like If the Spirit Moves You (found in Welcome to Paradox City) and, to a lesser extent, “I for one welcome our new computer overlords” have some lightness to them. The former could even be called a comedy of sorts. But both stories center around fairly dark concepts or situations. Many of my other stories are horror stories…though there’s not a single “supernatural” thing in my darkest ever story, Solitaire, which is available solo and also appears in Dr. Elessar’s Cabinet of Curiosities.
Anyway, I doubt very many people will ever read any of my stories, which I think is too bad, but I certainly have no right to have my stories read. I think there might be a lot of people who might get at least some joy out of some of them, though. I think it would also be very satisfying to know that many people read my stories and some fraction of them enjoyed them. Even if they read them without knowing who the author was, I might not mind. But maybe I would. I’m not quite so egoless as all that.
Despite that aside, I have not started writing anything new since publishing Extra Body. I did open up and look at Outlaw’sMind and I remade a version of it with the whole first in media res scene taken out, since the story ended up going in directions that I think were better than that original idea. But I have no will to work more on it. Likewise, when I even contemplate working on HELIOS, I feel an almost visceral revulsion or intimidation. And roughly the same thing applies for DFandD, or any of my other potential stories, like Changeling in a Shadow World and Orion Rising and so on.
The various drawing materials I bought upon being briefly inspired by Facebook “reels” of people drawing have laid fallow since I got them. I can’t imagine drawing something now. Nor can I really focus enough to read books or watch lectures on serious treatments of General Relativity or Quantum Mechanics, though I dabble here and there throughout most days.
I did read a new book: Annihilation. I had seen the movie, starring (a thoroughly misused) Natalie Portman, and wasn’t very impressed. But then I stumbled across a video page by a young woman who is a Star Wars fan and an author and who said she had loved the book but then had seen and hated the movie, so I got the book (for Kindle). It was hypnotic and disturbing and bizarre, and definitely far better than the movie.
Unfortunately, it’s told in first person, and when I read first person books I tend to lose a bit of my own sense of self and start thinking with the narrator’s thoughts, even about my real life, at least for a time. It’s the closest I come, in a way, to having a real “theory of mind” in the ordinary sense. Otherwise, I don’t tend to have a concept in my mind of what other people might be thinking or doing or feeling when I’m not in their presence. I think reading fiction from a young age helped save me from being utterly confused by humans in general.
People are observable phenomena, and can be fascinating and fun and engaging, and I like less than half of them half as well as they deserve. But other than through their own words, or through fiction, I don’t really have an “image”*** of other people’s thoughts or minds. I’ve never even for a moment wanted to be someone else (though pretending to be‒i.e., acting‒can be enjoyable), because I can’t really imagine what it would be like to be someone else‒not from a subjective point of view, anyway.
I have been playing guitar and singing a bit in the mornings at the office some days, when I know I am by myself and can feel relatively uninhibited. That’s sometimes enjoyable and sometimes painful (though in a strangely addictive way), and I occasionally think about making a video likesome I’ve made previously, of me playing and singing Nothing Compares 2U, or Fake Plastic Trees, or Lucky, or The Man Who Sold the World, or even Karma Police or Ashes to Ashes or Weird Fishes (though I can’t so far do the “arpeggi” part of that latter song), all of which I can play and sing reasonably well. But the thought of doing the work is too intimidating, and anyway, I can’t really bear the notion of putting my disgusting face out there for people to see.
Okay, well, that was a meandering bit of nonsense. Unfortunately, here I am, still here, alive and writing this blog‒if nothing else for the moment. I hope something will change about all that, and soon. I cannot continue as I am, but I cannot see any better path other then no path at all. Still, of all things, writing this blog is probably the most ego-syntonic thing I do, and I greatly appreciate everyone who reads and likes and “likes” it, even if I cannot comprehend why you do. Just, thank you. I surely cannot thank you as much as you deserve.
TTFN
*Though, like everything else about me, it turned out not to be good for very much for very long.
**Or should that be “wills-o-the-wisp”?
***Not really the right term. Perhaps “model” might be better?
Hello and good morning. It’s Thursday, and so: here’s another blog post—meaning another regular, weekly, Thursday morning blog post. Of course, people who receive notifications about my blog posts will have seen already that not only did I publish an impromptu entry on Monday, but also that, starting on Tuesday, I’ve been sharing a chapter at a time, three times a day, of Extra Body.
I finished the third editing run-through of that story by Tuesday morning, and I decided, “that’s good enough, I’m done with that, I’m tired of working on it, or on anything else”. I considered just publishing it through Amazon, but that would have involved designing a cover and getting the formatting right for the paperback and e-book versions, and even then it would have been far from likely that anyone (except my sister) would read any of it, ever. At least this way, maybe someone who is idly curious but wouldn’t go to the trouble of actually buying the book from Amazon (or other sources) might idly start reading it and even might read the whole thing.
Speaking of the whole thing, it will be completely published by Friday afternoon, which is when Chapter 12 is scheduled to go up.
I don’t know whether the story is any good or not. I suppose that would depend upon the criteria one uses to judge the “goodness” of a story, and no two people would probably have precisely the same implicit criteria. I say “implicit” because I doubt most people (or anyone, really) would actually apply any formal judgement criteria to such things. I think it’s a much more “analog” process, a weighted neural network/high-dimension vector addition (or possibly vector calculus) sort of problem. As such, it probably changes from day to day and even from moment to moment for every person.
It may be mathematically possible in principle for two people to have exactly the same judgment criteria about fiction*, but I suspect that there aren’t anything like enough people in all the universe—not just spatially but temporally, past and future—to have exactly the same mental state regarding how they judge and react to fiction at any given time, or even in their entire lifetimes (this discounts the potential “quilted multiverse”, if the universe is spatially infinite, in which all states would recur an infinite number of times).
I’m giving this more thought than it probably deserves. I tend to do that.
On to other matters, or at least, let’s move away from that subject.
This Sunday will be the day of the Autumnal Equinox, the official beginning of Autumn in the northern hemisphere. It’s also September 22nd (this is often the case with the Autumnal Equinox) and is thus the date of Bilbo and Frodo Baggins’s birthdays (according to Shire reckoning, anyway—I’m not sure precisely how that lines up with the Gregorian calendar, but I suspect Tolkien just kind of took them as roughly aligning, though the hobbits apparently took the 5 (and a quarter-ish) extra days of the year as a non-month in midsummer and had 30-day months for all the rest of the year). That was also the day on which Frodo left Bag End to begin his long and arduous and torturous path to destroy the One Ring.
So it is an auspicious day in more than one sense, a day on which momentous or portentous things may begin or end or begin to end.
Though Frodo survived, of course, he never was quite the same after his journey, having suffered from the stab of the Morgul blade on Weathertop, and the bite of Shelob, and—most of all—the terrible effects of the Ring itself when it was at its most perilous, its most awake, and its most desperate.
The voice-over near the end of the movie The Return of the King really expresses Frodo’s sense of enduring damage and suffering: “How do you pick up the threads of an old life? How do you go on when you begin to understand there is no going back? There are some things that time cannot mend. Some hurts that go too deep, that have taken hold.” How, indeed?
Nietzsche is famously quoted as having said that whatever doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. In response to that, I would simply say to him, “syphilis”**.
There are many things that do not kill us that nevertheless wear us down, leave scars and damage and dysfunction in their wake. Of course, one could reply that such things are killing us, they are merely doing it slowly, in a cumulative and collective fashion. But if one is going to reach for that linguistic/semantic escape clause from the dichotomy of Nietzsche’s statement, then one is merely engaging in tautology. If one says that anything that doesn’t make us stronger is, by our definition, killing us (even if only slowly), then saying that whatever doesn’t kill us makes us stronger is just saying the same thing. No insight is gained.
In any case, things wear out and fall apart no matter what. As far as we can see, that is a fundamental aspect of the nature of reality. New things do arise, lives are born, stars form, perhaps new “universes” are constantly emerging in an eternal inflationary universe. But mathematics dictates that all things eventually seek out the most entropic states—not out of any desire, any “telos”, just out of the tendency of the math of complex systems.
Things fall apart. The center cannot hold. And Darkness and Decay and the Second Law of Thermodynamics hold illimitable dominion over all***.
TTFN
*Though if the process is truly continuous, in the “real numbers” sense of continuous (quantum mechanics suggests this cannot be so), then there would be literally, uncountably infinite possible arrangements, and so it would be “infinitely improbable” for any two people ever to match exactly. That seems appropriate, given the story being discussed.
**Perhaps the real “Montezuma’s Revenge”.
***This is a mashup of and paraphrasing of separate literary works, so I’m not surrounding it with quotation marks, but: credit to Yeats and to Poe****.
****No, NOT the heroic pilot from the newer, Disney-Star-Wars films. You Philistines*****.
*****This is, ultimately, a reference to the fact that the Philistines, according to legend, stole the Ark of the Covenant from the Temple of Solomon, and thus their name is used as an epithet referring to those who show no respect for sacred or artistic or cultural worth.
Hello and good morning. It’s Thursday, the 27th of June (I’ll reluctantly presume that you know the year and the era), and it’s time for another edition of what is now my weekly blog post. I’m on my way to the office and writing this on Google Docs on my phone. I will have to use my little laptop computer to confirm the specific stats on my fiction writing over the last week, but I’ve done significantly more than the previous week, adding more nearly 5,000 words, bringing the total to over 66,000, and the current page count to 101*.
There were even a few mornings this week on which I felt the urge to write more than a page, and so I did. The story is very nearly done‒the first draft, anyway. Of course, there will be many changes to be made during editing, or at least much shaping of its rough-hewn ends. And though, obviously, this will never be a short story, I do plan to shave a good 10,000 words off the final product. That may sound arbitrary, but I’m almost always wordier than necessary, and there are frequent little thoughts and comments from the characters that don’t really add much to a tale other than perhaps giving a little color.
In any case, I should be able to publish it as a novella, in paperback in addition to the Kindle version, assuming I live long enough.
That is far from certain. Just yesterday, I had to leave work shortly before lunch, because in the morning, while writing fiction and then getting an early start on payroll and other office-related stuff, I was having a lot of back and hip pain, and I was slightly more sleep-deprived than usual, so I was not clear-headed. As a consequence, I think I took a double dose of aspirin and possibly Tylenol as well. And I take 3 aspirin at once normally, so 975 mg instead of the usual 650. Even as I took the (presumed) second 975 mg dose, I thought that maybe I had already taken some, but I decided that I didn’t really care. I was miserable and in a lot of pain, and I didn’t much mind if I poisoned myself, a bit or a lot. I’ve been courting and investigating (and even investing in) far more potent and nasty toxins; aspirin is frankly mild. The addition of Tylenol (when my pain didn’t lessen) was just a little icing on the analgesic cake, even if I did take 4 extra-strength tablets in relatively quick succession.
Anyway, by the time I got done with the payroll, I was feeling extremely foggy and sleepy, and also mildly queasy, and I could not easily focus my mind on anything. It was an interesting experience, especially the part about actually feeling sleepy(!), so I told my boss that I wasn’t feeling well and asked if he minded if I left after half a day. He was fine with it, as was the coworker who shares some of my tasks.
I also told my boss why I felt ill: that it was because I had more or less accidentally taken more than double the recommended dose of aspirin and possibly of acetaminophen. I think I was kind of hoping that he might recognize that there’s more going on than a one-off mistake in my bigger picture…or that someone would. But alas, no such luck has prevailed so far.
I get it; no one wants to deal with me saying anything about how I feel‒present company excluded, I guess. They certainly don’t want to take it seriously. I mean, earlier this week, I was trying to stretch sideways in my chair to relieve some serious tightness and pain in my back, and two coworkers/friends‒my two closest office friends‒were walking past. They asked me, “You okay, Doc?” I gave the simple and honest answer, “No.” I meant it on practically all levels, and tried, at least a little, to make that general fact evident. But the response from both of them was to say, almost dismissively, “Yeah, I know how you feel.”
No. No, you obviously don’t.
So many times in recent years and especially in recent weeks and months, I’ve felt that I was sending out painfully loud signals that I was in distress. I’ve felt that it all must be written all over my face, and in my body language, and even in the actual words I say, such as, “I hate my life, I wish I were dead.” But somehow, no one seems to notice, or perhaps they think I’m joking, or that I’m exaggerating.
It certainly seems clear that I at least have the attribute (associated with ASD) of not being readily able to express or communicate my emotions‒often I don’t even recognize them. But it’s terribly frustrating, especially when one tries to put not-too-subtle signs up, such as buying two different ropes and tying them into nooses, then leaving them that way where people can see them, or buying a whole plastic “can” of sodium hydroxide (lye), or breaking up a cheesy old shot glass into little shards and splinters of glass.
Each of those latter two substances can be (and has been) put into gel capsules from which the psyllium they originally contained has been emptied. Then the new handful of capsules can be put in an easily accessible place, in case an emergency exit (or just a gamble on a possible emergency exit) might be necessary, severely painful though it would probably be.
But nobody takes very strong notice of such things; it’s just Doc being weird, like he’s always been his whole life (though the people at work haven’t known me nearly so long, it’s nevertheless true that I have been weird my whole life). It’s just Doc’s dark sense of humor‒which is apparently often quite funny, and certainly catches people off-guard, especially since my delivery of jokes is often dead-pan, appropriately enough.
I guess a part of me‒not a small part‒doesn’t want anyone to grasp the urgency of the situation until it’s too late. Goodness knows I don’t like the idea of being a burden to other people, especially people I like, and I’m already such a burden on them and on the world at large that it’s hard to justify. And I certainly don’t think there’s any sense in which I deserve help of any kind. I’m a pretty vile and horrifying creature.
Maybe it’s good that my thoughts don’t show on my face, because often my thoughts are just urges or wishes to enact stunningly violent retribution on idiots. As I noted in my meme from last week (playing on the line from The Guardians of the Galaxy, Volume 3) it seems that I was not born to be a dad, but that I was born to be a destroyer.
Maybe it’s just as well that no one recognizes the danger I pose to myself. Maybe it’s best if finally, someday very soon, the structure of me fails catastrophically and I vanish. This will cause some minor, very slight and localized disruption here and there, but it’ll be like ripping off a Band-Aid. It’ll certainly be better for everyone than anyone wasting their time and energy trying to help me.
Anyway, I hope at least to finish the first draft of Extra Body, but after that, I’m making no predictions, and I’m certainly not making any promises. Maybe, if nothing else, if I don’t get it published myself, someone else can clean it up and publish it. As “my little green friend” said, “Always in motion is the future.” That is, until it comes to a halt, of course.
TTFN
*The exact numbers are: 4,877 net new words since last blog, and a current word count of 66,494. 101 pages is correct.
It’s Thursday, so I’m writing my formerly standard (and potentially newly standard) weekly blog post today. Huzzah. Admittedly, I last wrote a blog post on Monday, so there have only been two blank days since I posted, but it still feels odd. My daily blog posts are almost never worth reading, anyway, though, so it’s not a huge loss.
It was slightly nice to let myself not feel pressured to write a “report” on my progress these last few days. I also didn’t push myself to write more than one page a day. Historically, that has often nevertheless led to me writing quite a bit more per day, but not this time. Over the last two days, I’ve written a total of 1,361 words on Extra Body, bringing it to its current total of 57,886 words (88 pages). I just haven’t had much energy for writing, or for anything at all. That’s even relative to my usual level of energy.
I say that, but I have been trying to study some mathematics and physics. I’ve been doing the Brilliant course on intro to linear algebra, which is quite interesting, and should help prepare me for more in-depth work in quantum mechanics/quantum field theory and (most important to me) General Relativity. I need to review and improve my calculus as well. I also got the e-book (PDF) of Advanced Theoretical Physics by the guy who runs the Science Asylum YouTube channel. He does a really good job explaining things on his channel‒including things I already understand well, so I know he’s rigorous and thorough.
I’ve also been reading Leonard Susskind’s Theoretical Minimum book on Special Relativity, with plans to move toward the subsequent one on General Relativity (and to circle back to the one on quantum mechanics). And, of course, I’ve also been reading Sean Carroll’s two Biggest Ideas in the Universe books. Basically, I want to ground myself in the concepts and renew and improve my mathematics skills before I get into real study of GR, using Sean Carroll’s textbook (I already own it and Gravitation) and possibly some other recommended texts, and also some university level quantum mechanics and quantum field theory.
One reason for this is: I’ve long wondered just what would happen if one were to accelerate a space ship to close enough to the speed of light that its relativistic length contraction and relativistic mass put it below its Schwarzschild radius (at least relative to outside observers), which should mean it should become a black hole. But of course, it’s not a simple spherical mass, so the solutions for the equations might be much more complicated and lead to unexpected outcomes as in the Kerr solution for spinning black holes. This is the most realistic black hole model, since basically all black holes spin, and often do so quite energetically. Conservation of angular momentum applies to collapsed stars just as it does when a spinning skater spins faster as the skater’s arms are pulled in.
I have a secret fantasy that a spaceship situation such as I described above might allow a ship to turn itself into a wormhole instantaneously if everything is done right, and achieve something that is effectively faster-than-light travel. But even if that’s not workable, I’d like to know what would happen in such a situation. I know this is not idle thinking, because there was real curiosity whether, if there really were curled up dimensions that are large enough, particles at the LHC might achieve relativistic mass enough to become tiny black holes*.
This is far from the only question I would like to understand better about GR. I want to understand, deeply, the mathematics that makes a cosmological constant produce “repulsive gravity” and thus expanding spacetime. I’m actually starting to get a little inkling of how that works, but only an inkling**. I need more.
I would like to understand everything, of course, everything that there is to know…but only through the dint of my own work. I would never want just to be given knowledge. How lame and boring that would be!
I also have been able to (re)read some fiction amidst all this‒The Belgariad, by David Eddings. I picked up near the end of Queen of Sorcery and am now in the first half of Enchanter’s Endgame. It’s nice to be able to read at least these fiction books that I haven’t read in a while
Basically, I’m frantically grasping at straws‒panicking in my weird, quietish way‒trying to find something, some reason, to keep me going. I fear it’s not working, though. The downward pull is too strong; I’m orbiting in the inner accretion disk of my personal black hole, and unless I can be pulled out by someone or something‒for I cannot do it on my own‒I will soon enter the “plunging region” where orbit is no longer possible, and nothing remains but to cross the horizon. Every single day I yearn for everything to be over.
It doesn’t help that my sleep has been rotten, even by my own standards. And my chronic pain always interferes with everything. And my tinnitus is just galling, keening away like a permanent near-the-ear mosquito, but higher in pitch, especially now that I have a bit in my left ear as well as the major tinnitus in my right ear. It makes the various other noises of the world feel all the more chaotic. And I’m very much alone in my head, and in my life. I feel like the only member of my species, like that last passenger pigeon that lived, companionless, in the Cincinnati Zoo for a few years before dying.
Meanwhile, the weather down here in south Florida is thoroughly sloppy, with rain and flooding and everything that goes with them‒such as the Internet being out where I live‒leading to my long commute being more unpleasant than usual. At least it’s cooler, though (in temperature, not in fashionableness). There were a few times during the night last night in which, when I started awake‒as I do several times most nights‒I realized that the air conditioner wasn’t even running! That’s rare in June in this part of the world.
Oh, and I mentioned Substack a few days ago. Well, it turns out that, technically, I already have a Substack account, since I follow a few other writers and thinkers thereon. So I guess, if I so chose, I could write stuff there and set it up with a paywall. Of course, actually, I could do that here on WordPress already, I think, and loyalty would suggest that it would be the better choice. Of course, I could set up a Patreon account and link it to my work here and to my YouTube channel and so on.
All these thoughts are pipe dreams, though. I don’t honestly expect any of them to come to fruition‒they’ll just drop to the ground like most of the fifty-six trillion mangos in south Florida, merely to rot there and attract fruit flies.
We’ll see, I guess.
Meanwhile, I’m scheduled to work this weekend, so I’ll have two more days of fiction writing this week and three next week before my next scheduled blog post. It’ll be almost the equinox next Thursday, and of course, this coming Sunday will be Father’s Day. I wish that were a holiday I could enjoy; being a father is the most important and greatest thing I have ever done. But that all went bitterly off-kilter, and I crashed and burned, and right now I’m just surviving in the wasteland near the wreckage, fantasizing about a rescue or an escape, but knowing more and more every day that such a thing is vanishingly unlikely.
Anyway, enough. This is getting too long. I hope you all have a good week and a good weekend. If you’re a father, I hope you have a great day Sunday, and for those of you who have fathers who are still around and who deserve it, I hope you get in touch with them at least and make sure they know that they matter to you. Men are expected to be stoic about love and other feelings…but men also die by suicide in about three or four times as great numbers as women. Correlation does not necessarily imply causation, but it sure doesn’t rule it out, either.
TTFN
*This was never a worry, just to be clear, even if it had happened. A tiny black hole that size would decay almost instantly via Hawking radiation. But that would (or should) produce an essentially random shower of particles, not the usual decay products of the original particle. Alas, no such events (or event horizons) occurred, so if there are curled up extra dimensions, the LHC didn’t get energetic enough to probe them.
**That sounds like the word for a baby pen, doesn’t it?
Robert Elessar 