Music

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Detritus

Well, I’m getting ready to go to the office this morning.  It’s payroll day, which means I’ll be more stressed out than even I usually am.  It’s really gotten to be more complex over time, with different people being paid in different ways and rates and with different incentives, and people in our new, other office.  Oh, and now we’re getting yet a new “product” to sell which is going to require more differentiation and so on.  Huzzah!

I don’t know why I keep writing this blog.  I feel like I’m just continually rehashing the same things, saying the same things over and over again, not even really expecting different results.

Incidentally, there’s no actual (reliable) record anywhere of Einstein saying words to the effect of “the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”.  Frankly, it doesn’t even seem like anything he would have said.  It doesn’t make sense, either‒it flies completely in the face of the idea that someone can improve with practice at something, or that in some circumstances retrying something over and over again occasionally brings about different outcomes.

Einstein apparently did say that there are two things that are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and he wasn’t sure about the universe.  Of course, as a Jewish scientist, he left Germany in the 30s (I think) because he saw the products of the breed of human stupidity that arose there at around that time, so you can understand why he might take a dim view of human intelligence.  I wonder what he would think of us now.

Anyway, I’m still taking my “antidepressant” and also trying to adjust things better to control my chronic* pain.  I can feel the immediate effects of the St. John’s Wort, which I always do when I take it.  Dry mouth, slightly less reactive, and feeling a bit stiffer (metaphorically) and more socially withdrawn in the morning for a while after I take it.  It’s not making a difference for my sleep, that’s for sure.  But, again, maybe it will at least give me enough of a boost finally to act on my desire just to stop existing.

It would be nice if it at least gave me more will or drive to exercise, which it has done in the past, though not every time I’ve taken it.  At least it doesn’t tend to give me the asthenia that I would get with SSRIs, and it doesn’t give me the rampant and intolerable tension and anxiety that Wellbutrin and Effexor gave me.  It’s closest in character to the old tricyclics‒amitriptyline and nortriptyline‒but not as groggifiying.  Anyway, hopefully it does something to help me make some changes.

I think of depression as being at least partly a disease of gumption, a disease of the will, where the sense of motivation is impaired.  Or perhaps it’s more of a psychological autoimmune disorder, where the mind turns upon itself.  That’s an oversimplification, and there are certainly more aspects to it than that, but that is at least part of it.

Of course, there may be other factors at play in my brain.  I’ve encountered a place online that does reasonably priced autism assessments (I found it through Threads) and I may avail myself of that.  It is slightly worrying, of course.  It sometimes feels nearly certain that, if assessed, I would be told, “No, you don’t have ASD or anything related to it.  You’re just fucking out there like Vega, you don’t even count as human.”  Which would come as no real surprise, but it would be somewhat disheartening.  How does one treat, or at least accommodate, someone who is an alien?

I don’t know what I will do with any knowledge I gain through that process, if I do it.  Maybe I won’t do anything.  Maybe I’ll just flush it all away with every other bit of information I’ve ever taken in.  I guess that’s what’s going to happen one way or another, anyway, right?

Whatever.  I hope you all have a good day, or have good days, if that should be plural to match the subject.  I suppose I’ll probably write another blog post tomorrow.  I’m sure you can hardly wait.

In the meantime, here’s a little “video” (really more of a slide show) that I threw together this morning, to the tune of Another Brick in the Wall Part 3.

*I originally made a typo there and wrote “chromic” pain, which sounds like something from which a synesthete might suffer‒a chronic discomfort that they experience with all the colors of the rainbow.

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Same as the oldphemism

It’s Tuesday, the 4th of February, in case you didn’t know or if you are reading this some time in the future.  I think it’s pretty unlikely that future generations will care what I’ve written, but who knows?

I am writing this on my smartphone today.  Yesterday I wrote using my small laptop computer, which is surely part of why it was a longer post than usual.  I just type so much more easily on a real keyboard.  Indeed, I can type faster than I can coherently speak in most cases, and almost as fast as I can think.  This is one of the reasons I am fated to reach out through my writing rather than by making videos or “reels”.

Of course, recently, since I started trying to use Instagram (which is relatively entertaining, at least) I’ve reshared there some videos of me playing music.  I don’t know if they really get heard by many people, but certainly more people seem to interact already with the videos than has happened on YouTube since I first put them up.  Almost all of my “views” on YouTube come from me, listening to my own stuff as part of playlists I’ve made.  I put my stuff among selections from various musicians I like, with the vague notion that it may increase their association in “the algorithm” with such famous musical acts.  This is a very vague notion; I don’t really know if the algorithm works that way at all.  In any case, the strategy hasn’t seemed to increase my exposure.

Sometimes I will also listen to my own music to help me get to sleep, which for some reason it seems to do.  Although, to be fair, getting to sleep is not my main problem.  Staying asleep is my problem, and last night was no better than usual.

I don’t have any serious, large-scale topic today, unlike yesterday, and that’s probably just as well.  I’m sure most people didn’t find it particularly fun to read that post, but I think it’s a serious matter to consider.

Today, probably the most momentous thing I have to report is that for roughly the last five days I’ve restarted taking my antidepressant (Saint John’s Wort, in this case).  I don’t really expect it to change anything significant for me, but I’m hoping it will give me a bit more energy.  Who knows, maybe I’ll become part of that cohort of people who start taking antidepressants* and gain just enough energy and proactivity finally to kill themselves.  I wouldn’t mind.

Oh, wait, sorry, I guess I should have said “unalive themselves”, not “kill themselves”.  That’s one of those stupid newphemisms that social media have led many “content creators” to use to avoid their videos being blocked.  I think this was mainly a Tik Tok based thing, though perhaps there has been some tendency for it on other social media.

In any case, it’s idiotic.  Replacing taboo words with new euphemisms just eventually leads to the newphemisms becoming taboo in turn, and newer, temporarily safe terms being chosen which will become taboo also, and then things shuffle back and forth going nowhere fast, like the linguistic undead**.  This all seems to arise because of the unwholesome tendency of humans to think that words can have magical powers.  They need to stop that.  Words have their own “magic” that is far more powerful and real than any imagined invocation of the devil that might lead to him appearing.

Anyway, that’s just about it.  I think, in closing, I’ll try to see if I can share one of those videos here as it appears on Instagram.  Maybe I’ll do more than one.  Anyway, I guess you guys will know if it worked.

*Not for the first time, of course.

**Would that be “ununalive” in Newspeak?

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No (get) alarms (me) and (out) no (of) surprises (here), please.

It’s Tuesday morning, the last day of the second week of the new year (from which you could rightly conclude that it is January 14th).  I’m on my way to the office and I’m writing a pointless blog post.  I really don’t have anything of interest to write, but the Force (of habit) is strong with this one.

I’ve been modestly exploring new (to me) social media platforms, including Instagram, Blue Sky, and Threads.  The only one on which I actually interact much is Threads, but even there, I don’t really do much, and there’s no sense of any actual connection with anyone.  Still, I decided I would do a belated retry of promoting my books and/or music on these apps.  So I shared a copy of a song on Instagram, and then from there on Facebook, Twitter, BS, and Threads.  Then I shared links to my books on those same venues (well, okay, not Instagram…that doesn’t seem well set up for one to share simple links, or if it is, I haven’t yet figured it out).

And that’s about it.  I’ve been reading a reasonably good Japanese light novel series called Chitose Is in the Ramune Bottle, but I’m just about to finish the latest volume and there won’t be another one for a long time.  I have no interest at all in any other fiction or nonfiction.  I don’t even want to read my current books or old favorites or whatever.

I have 5 credits with Audible, which I think is the maximum they let you carry, but I haven’t been able yet to find even one audio book in which I’m interested.

The world is just a projection onto acrid gray fog.

I guess today I’ll share maybe another song, a link to one of my other books, maybe both.  Maybe I’ll also share a “video” of me reading one of my short stories.  Maybe I’ll even put one or two down here to let WordPress join the party.

And that’s just about all I have to say about that.

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Blog Post for 1-10-2025, Friday

I’m going to write a very brief post today, just since I didn’t write anything yesterday.  I was out from work with a rather severe exacerbation of pain, from head to toe.  I actually thought about just sharing here an embedded or linked connection to my “bad cover” of Hurt, by NIN/Trent Reznor (and which was so achingly covered by Johnny Cash).  I shared it directly on Instagram, partly just to see if it was possible to share whole longish “videos” there, and it was.  So I shared from there to Threads and Facebook, TWFKAT*, and BlueSky and so on.

I think I’ll embed that video here below, or rather, I’ll link to the YouTube video.

Anyway, then I just tried to lay down and rest, and I dosed myself up with stuff to try to help diminish the pain and to help me sleep (I didn’t really get any more sleep than usual, unfortunately).

You know what, I think I’m also gonna link to one of my own original songs on all these various new social media sites with which I’ve been halfheartedly dabbling.  I’ll link that here, too.

As for why I’m in so much pain, well, the abrupt shifts in weather haven’t helped.  Also, I tried a new form for my ab exercises, since I’m always trying to find ones that reduce my pain, but this one backfired.

Then, I had such a stressful day at the office (payroll, loud and chaotic noise, tinnitus acting up like a diamond tipped drill driving from one side of my head to the other, people acting like idiotic children) that at one point I beat myself in the forehead with my fist so often and so hard that I gave myself a mild case of whiplash and possibly a mild concussion.  I certainly felt loopy afterward.

Unfortunately, there was nothing immediately life-threatening, so, as Bob Seger put it, “here I am, on the road again”.

Anyway, I’m off work this weekend, and I’m still quite sore and whatnot, so hopefully I’ll get some rest but will also have the gumption to walk some.

Meanwhile…I guess I hope you all have a good weekend.  “Like and Share if you agree.”

*The Website Formerly Known As Twitter.  Presumably because of an overabundance of musk, my feed on that site is no longer showing any posts here on my site.  Right now, I can’t be arsed to try to figure out how to fix it.

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Sleep that knits up the ravell’d blog of care

Hello and good morning.

As those of you who read this blog regularly know, I’ve been ill for almost two weeks now.  I can’t say that I’m fully recovered yet, but‒unfortunately‒I am getting better.  In the early stages of the illness, when I stayed at the house for two of the days of last week, I was at least able to get a bit of extra sleep, thanks to that tendency of the body’s response to illness.  Since then, though, I seem to have rebounded into worse than usual insomnia.  I feel truly horrible, and I also have a persistent cough that’s irritating.

I wonder if there’s anyone out there from my past who truly hates me.  If so, I hope they stumble across this blog, or have already done so, so that they can at least experience a bit of schadenfreude.  It would be nice to think that my pathetic discomfort and self-hatred were at least bringing some joy to the world.  It might be spiteful joy, but I’ll take what I can get.  It’s not as though I’m very good at bringing joy to people I care about and who care about me for very long, at least when they are in regular, close proximity.

My subconscious mind gave me a slight birthday present on Sunday, in that I woke up with a little tune in my head that I’d heard in a dream.  I wasn’t sure if it was something I’ve heard before, but I didn’t and don’t think so.  Anyway, I felt compelled to work out the tune and then put chords to it on Sunday.  Then, Monday morning, I very quickly worked out the guitar melody and chords and did a quick little production of that.  It’s only 16 bars long, so that was easy enough.

I posted the audio here on Monday.  I also made a weird little video with it on my phone; I’ve tried to play with Instagram lately, just because I have a default account since I have a Facebook account.  I posted the combined video there and on YouTube (see below).

I think it was too much of a distraction making my strange introduction and then adding the weird effects.  That was me just playing around with the Clip Champ app from Microsoft, just to see what I could do with it.  But my intro is longer than the song, and I don’t think it adds much.

Anyway, if anyone recognizes the tune from somewhere, please let me know.  If not, I guess this was my personal Yesterday* kind of moment, though my tune is much more banal than Sir Paul’s.  There’s no real shame in that, though.  The vast majority of all songs ever written are not as good as Yesterday.

On a whim, I worked out the tune of another (pre-existing) song on an online keyboard yesterday‒I don’t even recall what song‒but it was interesting that I ended up “singing” it in my head in C Major/A minor.  It wasn’t deliberate, and I only realized it as I finished working out the whole melody.

This was striking because that was the key signature that the above, dream-based song came out in, and in which it is played, above.  However, I know that is not the key in which I originally dreamed it, because as soon as I woke up with it in my head on Sunday, I opened my phone’s voice recorder and tried to sort of hum the tune into it.  I’ll put that recording right here, as evidence (or whatever).

As I knew my voice was hoarse, and I wasn’t sure how well it would come across later (even to me) it wasn’t long before I opened up the online virtual keyboard (it was too early to use the real one) and worked out and wrote down the tune.

Anyway, the point is, between the time I had hummed the tune directly after my dream, which I’m pretty sure was in the key in which I dreamed it, and when I worked it out on the virtual keyboard, I’d taken it from G-sharp major/F minor (which I think is roughly the key in which I hummed it) to C major/A minor.  I don’t know why this happened, but it does make nearly all the black key notes go away.  C major is the simplest, most basic key‒in a sense, anyway‒whereas G-sharp major has its root on a black key.

I’d like to imagine that my subconscious mind corrected it to an easier key signature for me, and that’s not entirely beyond the realm of possibility.  I’ve been playing piano since I was nine (not continuously) and cello since I was ten (ditto), if only at a very flippant and superficial level, never developing any real skill with either instrument (and I do not have perfect pitch in the sense of being able to tell you what note is being played when I hear it, but I can certainly tell if something it out of tune with itself and otherwise deal with relative pitch).  Still, my subconscious might very well have enough imprinted memory of notes and scales to steer me toward easier keys when I’m writing something or sounding out something by ear.

All of this, though, is just a meandering distraction.  I’m not likely to do anything more with my dream-based tune, even if I become more firmly convinced that it’s mine.  I’ve occasionally found myself humming some impromptu lyrics to it in my head, but they are horrifyingly bad and stupid.  Compared to them, McCartney’s first lyrics to Yesterday‒“scambled eggs…dah dah dah dah dah, I love your legs”‒are worthy of Shakespeare or Milton.

So I’m not going to tell anyone what those are.  Anyway, sixteen bars do not a song make, as Yoda might say, so if I were going to turn it into something, I’d need to extrapolate.  That’s not hard to do once you’ve got a basic melody, but it requires you to have the drive to make a song.

I have no such drive for anything, really.  I can barely write this blog, and I am only doing it because I am a creature of habit and routine.  I am thoroughly exhausted by my worsening sleep, and I feel as though I’m experiencing the world through a multi-dimensional haze.  I’m also very depressed and I miss my kids and all the various other people for whom I’ve been too unpleasant for them to want to stay around anymore.

From day to day, and for a very long time, I have been thoroughly alone, and I fear that serves the greater good of the people who matter to me.  Even this week at work, since I’ve been here every day, has been far less successful than the days when I was out of the office.  Everything tends to be better when I’m not around.

I’m not living; I’m just waiting to die.  It’s taking a long frikking time, though, and I’m running out of patience and energy.  But I still can’t seem to sleep.  As the Ramones sang, “I wanna be sedated”.  I wonder if Michael Jackson’s old doctor is making house calls**.

TTFN

*Every Breath You Take had a similar origin.

**Is it too soon to be joking about him?  I have long been personally affronted by the fact that he spent less time in prison than I did.  Then again, he wasn’t in Florida.

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Song from my dream

I had a bit of a “yesterday” moment‒yesterday morning, appropriately enough‒in that I awakened from a sort of dream in which I heard a song or a tune playing, and it seemed familiar and clear, but I wasn’t sure what it was.  When I awakened, I still couldn’t place the tune, but I wanted to check it out and see if I could find out if it was something I had heard before or if my sleeping mind had made it up.

I first tried to sort of hum the tune into the voice recorder, but my voice is still hoarse.  So for the interim I pulled up an online virtual keyboard to work out the notes and write them down, then later, when it was late enough, got to the real keyboard and worked out the chords that went with it.

It’s a short little thing, only 16 bars long, in ¾ time, but I think it sounds kind of nice.  If anyone recognizes it, please let me know.

Thanks.

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O madam, my old blog is cracked, it’s cracked!

“Hello and good morning,” he said with a sigh.

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 at my books on Amazon and 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 The Chasm and the Collision?  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’s Mind 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 like some 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?

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There would have been a time for such a blog

Hello and good morning.  Yeah, it’s Thursday, so here’s another edition of my now-again-weekly blog.

I actually wrote a little post on my phone at some point in between, while I was in transit last week, because something happened that frustrated me with the irrational things people do.  I haven’t looked at it again, and I certainly haven’t posted it.  Probably I never will.

I sometimes miss writing my near-daily blog posts.  They were a way for me to keep in somewhat frequent contact with people in the human world (or at least to allow the potential for people to be aware of my existence).  But I cannot muster the mental energy both to write/edit fiction and to write a blog while still working.

Actually, this last weekend, for various reasons, I had a three-day weekend for the first time in I don’t know how long—maybe as long as eight years or so, and I’m not being hyperbolic*.  Despite having that time off, I didn’t really do anything.  It basically rained the entire weekend down by me, and it was thoroughly sloppy and disgusting out, but it’s not as though I had anywhere to go even if the weather had been lovely.

Such is my life, if you can call it that:  Go to work Monday through Friday and every other Saturday, commuting quite a long way (which allows me to write while commuting, at least) and then, when off, basically just collapse on my cheap futon on the floor of my one-room dwelling and watch semi-random YouTube videos (and occasional shows on Amazon or Netflix or Hulu or whatnot).

I have, at least, been working on editing Extra Body; I’m almost finished with the third run-through.  I think I’ve done quite a lot of cutting of digressional stuff this time through, which is almost certainly good for the story.  My general practice is/has been to edit my stuff seven times—more if I haven’t been able to cut back to my word number goal—before being willing to publish.  It takes a long time, of course, though it would probably be faster if I had more mental energy and motivation.

It certainly took a long time to edit Unanimity, which was significantly over half a million words long in first draft.  That’s my personal version of what happened with The Stand  and The Lord of the Rings:  I wrote a book too long to be publishable as a single volume because it couldn’t be printed that way.

I’ve still been practicing a little bit of guitar more days than not, I guess; I even played a little bit over the weekend.  I guess I must be getting better to some degree, because a few things that used to be quite difficult for me are not nearly so hard, and I find that I can easily substitute a different version of a particular chord if I don’t like the way it’s been suggested by a given source of tabs and chords.

I guess that’s good, though I don’t know what good it actually does, even for me.  I’m way too self-conscious to play for anyone else, and I certainly haven’t tried to write any new music in a long time.  I have a few little notepad entries with lyrics I’ve come up with here and there, but they’re all just shit, so I don’t feel any desire to work on them further.  Nor do I have any urge to turn either Mercury Lamp or Come Back Again into finished, “produced” works and publish them for any streaming sources or anything.

That’s about it.  I’m basically running on fumes, as people used to say**, and I expect—and kind of hope—to run completely out of gas very soon, one way or another.  I’m actually pretty irritated by my endurance so far.  If there’s no potential light at the end of my tunnel, as there doesn’t seem to be, I wish I would just crash and burn.  I don’t want to have any kind of metaphorical multi-vehicle crash, in which any other people’s lives get ruined in the process of me self-destructing.  That would be rude.  Although, I suppose, if I could somehow manage to arrange it so that I took some true villain, or some significant instance of villainy*** with me, it might be worth it.

Anyway, that’s enough for this week.  I spaced out for a good five minutes just now, which seems to indicate that I don’t have much more to think for the moment, let alone to say.  The weather is horribly muggy here, and I’m sweating just from typing while sitting still, which really shouldn’t generate all that much heat.

I hope you all had a decent holiday weekend (those who actually observed Labor Day, of course).  I hope you’re having a decent beginning of September, which is the current month.  It includes a few important birthdays to me, and of course, Autumn begins in September (in the Northern hemisphere).  But there’s no real Autumn in south Florida, anyway, so that’s just a tease.

Oh, well, to hell with it.

TTFN

*Neither am I being spherical or toroidal; I’m pretty much being strictly Euclidean as far as I can tell.

**Of course, it’s only the vapor of gasoline that ever ignites to provide impetus in the internal combustion engine, but the gasoline is stored as a liquid, at least.

***In my judgement, anyway.  I certainly can’t use anyone else’s judgement, after all, and frankly, I wouldn’t want to do so if I could.

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There’s no art to find the mind’s construction in the blog.

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, so you know the drill:  it’s time for my weekly blog post.

I don’t know what I’m going to write about today.  I don’t have much to say, or if I do, I don’t know what it might be.  I’ve gotten out of practice writing about nothing—or beginning to write about nothing and waiting to see what happens—since I stopped writing near-daily blog posts.  Right now I just feel blank and empty…and nonspecifically angry.

Of course, I’ve been editing Extra Body, and I’m doing a decent job of trimming it down.  I feel that I’m getting more ruthless about removing passages of digression about tangential things in my descriptions and expositions.  Having written the story on the laptop computer, it was only too easy for me to write and write and write a lot, very fast, of whatever came into my mind.

I guess that’s okay, as long as one is careful then to pare away the extraneous after one is done.  It’s analogous to sculpture, I suppose.  One can start with a huge, bulbous lump of clay and make the general shape however involved as one wants, but to get down to final form, one needs to remove the stuff that doesn’t match the vision, even if that vision isn’t necessarily very clear when one begins.

Not that I’m a sculptor.  I did love to play with modeling clay when I was young, though.  I used to get multicolored packs of it and almost immediately mix the colors together, because I knew it was going to happen anyway.  I never had any desire to make something out of clay that had different hues in different parts.

It was interesting to meld and squeeze various different colors together, seeing them form ribbons of shades that got finer and more interdigitated as I folded and  refolded the clay, the fat stripes of various colors turning to thinner, more finely and multi-layered stripes, eventually turning into a sort of purply-gray-brown uniformity.

I thus learned an intuitive notion of the second law of thermodynamics early in life.  There was never any inkling of the possibility of unmixing the colors of modeling clay.  After two colors came into even momentary significant contact, it wasn’t possibly to separate them completely.  And after one interfolding, there was no point to try to keep anything separate.

That never bothered me.  I liked the shade it became, and I liked not having to worry about trying to separate colors.  The shape and feel of the clay, and the squeezing and molding it into various shapes, was enjoyable.

It would probably be useful to let students of topology play with modeling clay, or perhaps with Silly Putty™, just to give them a proprioceptive insight into the deformation of shapes and surfaces and the nature of holes and the like.  You can really get why a donut and a coffee mug are the same shape topologically if you literally start with one and mold it into the other without making any new holes or eliminating preexisting ones.

Maybe it wouldn’t be very useful.  Still, Einstein (so I’ve read) enjoyed playing with blocks when he was young.  He apparently thought that experience influenced his physical intuition; and there have been few physicists with better or more fruitful intuitions about how physics will tend to behave.

That’s enough of that tangent.

Again, I’m about midway through my third edit of Extra Body, and I’m definitely finding that it improves with less digression.  I don’t know if anyone else will agree, but it’s not as though I have some huge audience to whom to cater; audience capture is not my problem, and I’m not sure if it ever would be.  Maybe I should start a political and social and scientific commentary thing on Substack.  And maybe I should make beans into peas*.

I’ve been diddling around on the guitar on and off on most work mornings, but I can’t really play when I’m back at the house, because I’m not really alone there, so I feel too self-conscious.  At the office, early in the morning, I can play and sing and not have to worry about anyone listening or responding.  I’m my own harshest critic, but at least when I’m alone I can express myself.

It’s a weird conundrum, because on the one hand, on the rare occasions when people have enjoyed my singing or playing or writing or academic work or anything else in my life, it’s been tremendously moving and gratifying; even the thought of someone accidentally hearing me playing and saying they think it’s really nice can bring tears to my eyes.  But I don’t really think anything I do is worthy of praise.  I can’t feel proud of something unless it’s literally perfect.

It’s pretty remarkable that I released the songs I did over recent years, given that they are not perfect, since they were produced in very inauspicious circumstances**.  But I think a lot of that was just me seeing, for my own sake, if I could actually do it.  Then I did, and I was, like, “Okay.  I can do that.  That’s that done.”

It’s like in medical school, when I got honors in my first two classes and then I was kind of, “Okay, I can do that, I guess; point proven to myself.”  And after that I didn’t feel motivated to get the top marks in the class or anything, so I didn’t (except on epidemiology and statistics, which felt too gripping and too important not to squeeze as much as I could out of it).

I suppose if I had stumbled upon a significant number of people who really liked my music/my songs and said so, I might’ve felt more impetus to do more, and to do better versions, but who knows?  Anyway, that’s not how such things tend to happen.

I also recently got briefly captivated by Facebook reels related to drawing and painting, and I bought several kinds of pencils and pens and stuff, hoping or imagining that I would start drawing again, but apart from a little doodle or two, it’s not really going anywhere.

I decided to try to play the Radiohead song Reckoner after I rewatched the “from the basement” video and realized that the guitar in that song was entirely played by Thom Yorke (while singing) and everyone else pretty much did various rhythm parts.  I turned to the song chords in my Radiohead guitar chord book and realized that they were straightforward chords (C, E minor, D, A, that sort of thing) but played high up the neck in unusual locations, finger-picked***.

However, I discovered that my low E-string is apparently getting long in the tooth, and the note on the 12th fret—which ought to be an E one octave higher than the open string—is very different than it should be.  It sounded horrible!  So, I ended up just playing and singing the song using more ordinary, “first position” chords, but it wasn’t as satisfying.  Still, it’s good falsetto practice.  I suppose I could just change the E-string, but that involves more “executive function” than I have to spare, especially on a Strat****.

That’s about all that I have to talk about.  I’ll close by noting that the Tri-rail is running late this morning.  Almost every day it runs late at least at some point.  The announcements say, “Train blah-blah is running late however many minutes…stand by for more information”, but there never is any more information.

The whole thing should probably be burned down and started over—as should the entire world.  Actually, maybe leave off the “started over” part.  Just burn everything and let the ashes cool into the microwave background that will eventually become the long radio wave background.  It’s not as though there’s any point to anything.

This blog post has also gone on too long.  Heck, the blog itself has gone on too long.  Everything about me has gone on too long.  So I’ll let you go for today.

TTFN

*That’s a reference from the movie Time Bandits.

**That fact may have given me an escape clause from the rule of perfection.

***On a lovely Gibson SG in his case.

****You have to take the back panel off and such, and it’s a pain.

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Very brief report

I did write a bit of fiction this morning — 783 words to be exact and precise.  I wish it were a prime number, but it’s divisible by 3 and 9 at least, since the digits add to 18.  Oh, well, it can’t always work out.

I’m feeling quite unwell; yesterday I left the office early (not by much) and yet I still didn’t get any good sleep.  But I’ve felt queasy and weak and just kind of under the weather for the last 18 hours or more.  So, I didn’t really have the energy to write more.  I did play a little guitar and sang some this morning, but it was sub-par, probably because of feeling poorly.

I am scheduled to work tomorrow, though, so maybe I’ll feel a little better then and will write some more.  I guess we’ll see.  Have a good day.