Music

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“Who knows? Not me.”

I didn’t walk the full five miles from the train to the house yesterday afternoon‒I walked about three or three and a half‒because I didn’t want to give myself any blisters or abrasions from walking too far for the first time in a new pair of boots.  But I seem to have stopped well in time for that, since there are no blisters or even sore spots on my feet now, and my ankles and right Achilles tendon appear to be in good nick.  Also, and most importantly, though I had a bit of tension in my right side along my back upon returning to the house, that went away nicely with a bit of stretching and replenishment, so that’s pretty good.

Anyway, lesson learned:  it matters if the boots you wear are even a little bit oversized if you’re going to be walking any very long distances in them.  It looks like these new, half-downsized ones will work well.

It’s been sloppy and wet here in south Florida these last several days, but there does seem to be a slight increase in morning breeziness.  And, of course, since Saturday, the time of darkness has been slightly greater than the time of daylight, and its dominance is increasing at the most rapid pace at which that will happen.  This is because, for a sinusoidal curve, the fastest rate of change is when it crosses the x-axis (at the equinoxes in this case), and the slowest rates of change are at the peak and at the nadir (the solstices in this case).  So, for a little while now, the nighttime will be growing rapidly before it settles out, steadily and gradually, as we barrel toward the end of the year.

After mentioning the fact that I don’t play the guitar in the morning anymore, yesterday I decided to fire up the axe for a bit.  Remarkably, it was still almost perfectly in tune!  Probably it helps that the office is kept pretty much at a constant temperature.  Also, I had left the capo on the fourth fret the last time I played.  That was for playing the chords and stuff from the Nirvana version of The Man Who Sold the World.  I didn’t start with that yesterday, instead playing through a few iterations of Nothing Compares 2 U.  It’s a lovely song.  I like the Chris Cornell version best.  Of course, now Prince (the songwriter and original performer) and Chris Cornell and Sinead O’Conner (who had a big hit with her cover of it) are all dead.

Then I did play some of The Man Who Sold the World, and then Ashes to Ashes, both Bowie tunes, at least originally.  And, of course, Bowie and Kobain are also both dead, though they died under very different circumstances.  Then I got my guitar book out and played a little Just the Way You Are, and Sorry Seems To Be the Hardest Word, and Here, There, and Everywhere, by Billy Joel, Elton John, and Paul McCartney‒all of whom are still alive!  That’s just weird, isn’t it?  Imagine that!

Of course, the latter song is credited to Lennon and McCartney, but that was a formality according to their agreement for all Beatles songs they wrote.  It was a McCartney song, and it was apparently the only song of his for which Lennon directly complimented him.

Considering the quality of Sir Paul’s work overall, that’s a hell of a statement, in more than one way.  First off, it must have really impressed John (rightly so) for him to make a point of telling Paul that it was a good song.  But it seems harsh that John never complimented any others, at least to Paul’s face.

Then again, he was British, and emotional expressiveness (other than through song and theater and literature) is a major national deficit by most accounts.  Maybe that’s why they do so much good music and poetry and drama and comedy and the like.  I often get the feeling that part of the reason Thom Yorke’s singing is so powerful and conveys and evokes such emotion in the listener is that this is Thom’s only real way of expressing himself deeply.  And, of course, he does seem almost possessed when he’s performing.

As a YouTube reactor (I cannot recall which one, for which I apologize) said of his singing, “He’s feelin’ it when he’s singing…and he makes you feel it, too!”

Now, John Lennon did compliment Paul to other people‒during interviews, for instance.  Though even then, he was far from effusive.  That was just his way, I think.  He had a very troubled childhood, and emotional expression was probably difficult for him, even for a Brit.

Then again, he wrote some incredibly expressive songs, from If I Fell to In My Life to Julia to Across the Universe, all the way up to Starting Over and Woman, with scads of others thrown in for good measure.  If being closed off and repressed helped lead to the creation of those truly great works of art, the world at least can hardly feel too horrible about it.  Though it would be nice if a person could be well-adjusted and have the ability to express and receive affection easily and still produce great art (and ideally, of course, not be murdered by a slimy little worm of a creature who claimed to be a fan).

Alas, though it seems possible in principle, it doesn’t seem to happen often, if at all, in practice*.  Shakespeare supposedly wrote Hamlet, and some of his other great tragedies, partly in response to the death of his son, Hamnet.  And of course, I, his much later and far inferior admirer, only really started to write and publish stories that have always been in my head once my life, my family, and my career had been wrecked, and I was in prison.

We can be thankful, if saddened, for the great art that was born of Shakespeare’s sorrow, and of Lennon’s.  In my case, on the other hand, it was almost certainly not worth it, particularly for me.  But I can’t change any of that stuff, either.

Life’s like that, I suppose‒to quite the end of one of my own short stories, possibly the darkest one I’ve ever written…which, weirdly enough, first came out of me years ago, while I was happily passing the time keeping my then-friend and soon-to-be fiancée company while she did some overnight work for a summer job.  I don’t know where it came from, except that I did often like to play solitaire (with real cards).

Anyway, that’s enough for now.  Have a good Wednesday.

*As Einstein is reputed to have said, “In principle, principle and practice should be the same, but in practice, they often are not”, or something like that.  He was a clever fellow.

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If wishes would prevail with me, my purpose should not fail with me, but thither would I blog.

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, so I’m beginning this post in the fashion customary for my Thursday blogs, going back to when this blog was intended as a promotional project for my fiction writing.  Now I’m just going through the motions, but I guess that’s what one does with motions—one goes through them.

I half-heartedly intended to walk this morning, but it’s so effing muggy and the air is so dead that it’s intolerable.  Even here at the train station, reasonably near the ocean and the highway, the atmosphere feels utterly immobile; sweat gathers on me everywhere (including behind and beneath my reading glasses) even while I’m sitting still.  It’s quite annoying.

In other news:  yesterday, during what was probably my last “celebratory” day of sorts, I missed another palindromic number sequence in the recording numbers at work.  It was close—we passed the palindromic number by only 26, which is pretty small considering it’s an eight-digit number.  Still, it might as well be ten thousand or a million away.  A miss is a miss.  I did not get a palindromic number, and I don’t intend (or I don’t hope) to stick around to try for another one.  This has all gotten far too terribly old at this point.  There’s little to no expected return on continued investment in this failure of an enterprise that I call my life.

I mean to give things a little space of time.  I don’t want to sully the important day that was yesterday, after all.  But there are always days one doesn’t want to mar; there are always excuses and evasions.  One cannot keep succumbing to them indefinitely, or enterprises of great pitch and moment will their courses turn awry and lose the name of action.  Eventually, one must just take up that bare bodkin and use it on the nearest of all possible targets.

I don’t really know what else there is to write, today, but if I leave it here, this will be an extremely short blog post.  Perhaps everyone would welcome that.  Perhaps it would become my most popular blog post ever.  That would be pretty funny, and perhaps a bit ironic.  But even if it were my most well-read post, I don’t think anyone would take seriously the not-so-subtle subtext, the point I’m trying to make without being frankly out in the open.

I don’t think anyone really cares very much.  I can’t blame them.  If even I don’t like having me around; why would I expect anyone else to want to have me around, or even to share the Earth’s air with me?

I stink to myself, a lot of the time, though I try not to do so.  I wash regularly, and I use antiperspirant and aftershave, and I brush my teeth and so on.  This is part of why I hate the sweating thing.  It just feels so icky, and depending on the shirt I’m wearing, it can trigger that mildew smell.

Today, thankfully, I’m wearing a “new” make and model of shirt, so to speak, and in addition to being more comfortable, this type doesn’t seem as prone to the mildewage.  It doesn’t, however, have a pocket, which is what I liked about the others.  Oh, well.  That’s a tolerable trade-off.  I can tuck my reading glasses into the collar, and anything else I can just put in my other pockets.

Okay, well, that was a few more paragraphs about absolute drivel and pointlessness, wasn’t it?  Yet I’ve still only reached six-hundred words, just a moment ago.  Usually the nonsense just pours out of me, which makes sense, since I’m stuffed to overflowing with it; indeed, I may be made of nonsense entirely.

Really, though, I honestly don’t have much to say.

Which reminds me:  How many of you think the little “reprise” of Breathe from the album Dark Side of the Moon was sort of tacked on at the end of the song Time, just so it didn’t end with the words, “The time is gone; the song is over.  Thought I’d something more to say”?  I think that’s the true end of the song, because it’s the only ending that makes sense given the rest of the song.  It’s also quite a poignant and beautiful ending.

I ask this because, after watching some “reaction” videos on YouTube, especially of people listening to the song without listening to the whole album in a row, it nevertheless surprises me that more people don’t note the incongruous shift in tone, tune, rhythm, melody and whatnot that follows the seeming originally intended ending of the song.

I guess it doesn’t matter.  Most of the song has never really applied to me, anyway, apart from that last line.  I’ve never just kicked around on a piece of ground in my hometown or waited for someone or something to show me the way.  I was always ambitious*, even back when I was quite young.  I went all the way through to pretty impressive achievements, as far as it went.  I certainly didn’t miss the starting gun.  If anything, I was prone to jump it.

I was third-born, like Ender, with whom I felt some kindship the first time I read that book, though my brother and sister are more or less nothing like Peter and Valentine Wiggin, apart from the bipedal, upright posture and bilateral superficial symmetry**.

Of course, as Caesar could have told us, the wages of ambition are death.  But, then again, so are the wages of indolence.  And while ambition can be good, it can also be terribly disappointing.  Plans that come to fruition are little different—in the long run at least—from plans that come to naught.

And now, it’s time for this blog post to come to its end (now that I’ve padded it a bit with further idiocy), even if it isn’t actually going to come to naught, since it’s already written, and has been saved.

I hope you all have a nice day and all that.

TTFN

prism

*So says Brutus, and Brutus is an honorable man.

**I presume they both have the usual internal asymmetry of the organs, like we all have, but I’ve never so much as seen an x-ray of either of them to confirm it.  Nevertheless, I know they have both been to doctors on many occasions for many things, and I suspect, had there been major atypia in their internal anatomy, it would have been noted and made much of already.

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Dreams of appreciation for one’s works in the past, present, and future

It’s Saturday morning, and I’m sitting at the Tri-Rail station, waiting for the first train of the day.  I’m writing this on my cell phone, though I came within a jackrabbit’s breadth* of bringing my mini laptop back with me yesterday afternoon.  I even packed it in my backpack.  But then I decided that its added weight might give me trouble, since I was planning to walk back to the house from the train station.  I also had planned to bring one or two other things that might add to the usual weight of the backpack.

It turns out, though, that not only was I too tired/lazy to walk, but I also forgot to bring the few things for which I had foregone bringing the laptop.  So, that was entirely pointless, and now, here I am “typing” on my “smartphone”, waiting for the train to bring me most of the way to the office on a Saturday during what is technically a holiday weekend (in the US).  And, of course, I’ll go in on Monday more or less at the same time, since on Monday, the Tri-Rail will be operating on a Sunday schedule (which is also a Saturday schedule), since most sensible people will take the day off.  I mean, it’s Labor Day.

If there were ever proof needed that we have failed to protect the rights and well-being of workers in general, it’s the fact that most businesses and services are open on Labor Day.  Even many white collar workers probably work on Labor Day (though many lawyers may not, since courts and other government facilities are closed).

I used to feel pretty good about going to a rather meaningless job, because the whole point‒as I deliberately decided and told myself‒was simply to keep myself alive while I wrote my books.  But I’ve stopped writing my books now.  I never really wrote them for anyone but myself, of course, but it does eventually get discouraging when no one but family actually reads them (to a good first approximation, anyway, though there are one or two exceptions).

I don’t tend to be the sort of person who craves popularity for its own sake, but it really would be nice if more people read and enjoyed my stories.  I guess maybe I should share them all again on social media, perhaps for the last time, and maybe I’ll share my songs (my original ones, I mean) while I’m at it.  Why not?  One last desperate grab at passing driftwood seems like an appropriate act for a drowning man.

Heck, if I thought anyone would listen, I’d try to read more of The Chasm and the Collision out loud and post it up to YouTube.  I have the first nine or so chapters up there, and a couple of my short stories.  But I don’t think anyone (but I) has listened to them.  They have fewer “views” even than some of the videos of my original songs or even the covers I’ve done.

Again, I do these things mainly for myself, not to pursue some dream of fame and fortune.  Nevertheless, one does sometimes sputter to a halt when one is not merely alone in day to day life but receives no significant interest in one’s best, most creative products.  It may be a fine thing to “dance like nobody’s watching”, but it’s less great to write like nobody’s reading, especially when it’s almost literally the case that no one is reading.  Ditto for writing and/or playing music.

If I were a painter, after a while, it would become discouraging to keep painting if no one wants any of the works.  I can completely sympathize with Van Gogh for shooting himself.  And while I am glad he did a lot of painting before that‒I think his pictures are often deeply beautiful and unique‒I recognize that the fact that he is revered now is of absolutely no benefit to the man as he lived his life.  There is no Doctor Who, “Vincent and the Doctor”, episode in real life to give a past figure‒Van Gogh, Herman Melville, whatever other famous-after-death artist one might consider‒a chance to know that, though unappreciated in life, the artist would eventually be recognized as someone who did something that would bring joy to many people.  For a real person, there is only what happens during one’s life.

Getting famous only after death is almost a form of tragic irony.  It’s not common, though.  I think it’s more common for one to be relatively successful and famous in one’s lifetime and then be forgotten than the other way around.  But many truly great creative artists‒Shakespeare, Picasso, Dickens, Beethoven, Rembrandt, Steinbeck, Tolkien‒were revered in their time and are still revered now.

I don’t quite know what point I’m trying to make.  Maybe just that there is no long-term point.  Or, maybe it’s a variant of the Woody Allen joke that he doesn’t want to achieve immortality through his work, he wants to achieve immortality through not dying.

But I don’t think it’s pointless to be respected (for one’s work) after death; I think it’s actually kind of wonderful to think that future generations might love and admire one’s work.  But it would be especially beneficial if they had also done so during one’s lifetime‒some of them, anyway.

The future admiration of the world is probably just as ephemeral as is such admiration during one’s lifetime‒since, compared to infinity, any finite amount of time, no matter how large, is vanishingly, unnoticeably tiny, and is always unreasonably close to the beginning of any counting of time‒but it is almost certainly the case that being honestly appreciated for one’s work during one’s life is a wonderful thing, all else being equal.

I don’t know how I got on that subject; perhaps I’ll figure it out when I read and edit this before posting it.  Whatever the case, I hope it was mildly entertaining for you.  Feel free to follow the links to my books or to my Amazon author page, or to my YouTube “topic” page where my original music is, or to my personal YouTube list if you want to hear my “covers” and a few raw originals, if all that seems as if it might be somewhat interesting to you.  And please try to have a good weekend, holiday or no holiday.

Thank you.

*Get it?

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What could compare 2 A future of cyber super-stupidity?

Well, I’m back on my smartphone to write this blog post, but I’m not going to do the whole indenting thing this time.  It was a cute little indulgence, but it doesn’t really add anything, and it’s a minor pain, and I’m just not going to do it.  So, there.

I didn’t bring the laptop with me yesterday, because I was still in a lot of pain by the end of the day, and didn’t want the extra burden.  Of course, I’m still in a lot of pain now, as I write this, and I’m sweating even as I just stand still outside.  I don’t think I’ll be using the laptop again any time soon.  But I guess I might change my mind again, depending on how I feel and how things go.

I’m certainly changing up my shoes again, trying to find a pair (and a type) that gives me the least trouble.  I don’t know how much, if any, difference it will make, but I have to keep trying things, just in case something works; I’m too stubborn to do otherwise.  I also widened my pull-up stance this morning to see if that helps, and maybe it will, and maybe it won’t throw my left shoulder into a tail-spin like it did the last time I tried it.

I know, I know, all of this is boring.  I’m a boring person, what can I say?

I did get out the guitar just a little yesterday, because one of the new people at work asked me about it, after recognizing that I was listening to a Radiohead song (Climbing up the Walls).  I’ve downloaded the chords for Nothing Compares 2 U again.  I frivolously imagine that I might do a video of me playing and singing it in honor most specifically of Sinead O’Connor, who just died, making her the third and final person I associate with that song to die (the other two, of course, being Prince, who wrote it, and Chris Cornell, who did my favorite version of it).  Hey, maybe if I do a good version, and people enjoy it, I’ll get caught up in that group, so to speak.

Fingers crossed!

I have tomorrow off, so I won’t be doing a blog post.  I’ll have a full weekend by myself to do fuck-all on my own.  I hope at least to be able to go for a walk if my back cooperates.  Other than that, I really have nothing.  I guess I might watch a movie or something.  I’m not going to go to the theater to see Oppenheimer, though it looks like a good movie.  After my last visit to the theater by myself, I just don’t see it being much fun.

Oh, but I do plan on calling my sister this weekend!  That will be good, so there’s something positive, at least.  Sorry, I didn’t mean to disparage her or be dismissive.  Talking on the phone to her is pretty much the only thing to which I look forward.  I still always get anxiety before using the phone, but that’s not her fault; that’s my defect.

Here’s something darkly amusing:  the Google Docs autocorrect is now urging me to add a “to” after the word “forward” at the end of the penultimate sentence of the preceding paragraph.  This is the state to which we’ve fallen; the pseudo-helpful editing software system suggests that I change a perfectly grammatical sentence by adding a preposition (sans object) to the end of that sentence!  Why?  I suspect because that’s what almost everyone else does out there in the trash heap of humanity*, and that’s the source of the system’s recommendations.

This is the crap from which such LLMs as Chat GPT and the like are compiling their informal and inscrutable linguistic rules and predictive language models, and to which they are then going to be adding their shitty, shitty, derivative writings and recursively worsening the deterioration of human reading and writing (and thinking) ability.  Maybe we should burn them all down, along with pretty much everything else.

Don’t get me wrong.  I’m no Luddite by any means.  I’m quite a fan of useful technology, including computers in general, and of course, I love science.  But technology that decreases people’s need to discipline and improve themselves in writing, in reading, in thinking, and in seeking out reliable information makes me nervous, to say the least.

People tend to be mentally lazy much of the time‒thus the current and recent polarized and moronic political climates. The way many people use technology that they don’t even remotely understand is not improving that tendency.  So, what if our future dystopia is not, for instance, the rise of a super intelligent AI that either reduces humans to its dependent pets or eliminates them entirely but an actual artificial stupidity that people think is smart, and which is more efficient and potent at being non-intelligent than humans are, as well as at giving humans what they “want” in the short term?

What if those wants become self-reinforcing and ever more intense, as any supra-normal stimulus can cause to happen?  What if this leads everyone to a mutually dependent culture of stupid eloi and stupid morlocks with neither truly victimizing the other, but both perpetuating a clueless, increasingly incompetent civilization of human and artificial minds that cycles about in increasing ignorance of the greater universe, and is eventually obliterated by some entirely avoidable catastrophe?

In many ways, this scenario seems worse than takeover by truly super-intelligent AGI, because at least with the latter there would be super-intelligence, and it would have the potential to endure and learn and grow and spread and perhaps even become cosmically significant.

(This is all somewhat reminiscent of ideas discussed in the excellent video Dystopias Don’t Go to Heaven from the YouTube channel Highly Entropic Mind.  I encourage you to check out his stuff.)

I think it’s better to use complementary technology to the degree possible, as David Krakauer refers to such things as abacuses and bicycles and actual maps that enhance our abilities.  I think computers in general, and search engines, per se, are complementary in that, to an active mind, they allow much faster access to and use of legitimate information.  But systems that write (and sometimes just make up) stuff for people to consume without ever going anywhere or knowing anything about the quality of the information source, and which can even potentially make fake video and audio, could easily just lead everyone into a virtual world of spiraling, increasing idiocy.

Maybe this is the way the world ends, this is the way the world ends, this is the way the world ends‒not with a bang but with a singularity of self-reinforcing non-intelligence.  It would be ironic at least, and I do appreciate irony.

Anyway, that’s enough for today, and for this week.  I guess I’ll write to you Monday if I’m still doing what I do.  Have a good weekend, please.

*I’ve even read formally published books, released by respected publishing houses, that contain sentences that end in duplicated prepositions, e.g.: “…to which I was looking forward to.” And people wonder why I often just want to die.

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How to Lyft oneself Uber a growing population of frogs and pipe dreams

I’m writing at the train station in Hollywood (Florida, that is) this morning, and then on the train itself, because I decided to take a Lyft to the station before even starting to write.  I used one yesterday morning, but only after the initial draft of the blog post had been written.  I just feel too worn down from this URI to want to bother with the bus, and in fact, if not for the Lyft, I might not have gone in to work yesterday or today.  Thankfully, I should have this weekend completely off, since it is my coworker’s second weekend, making up for the two weekends I took in a row.

Further bulletins as events warrant.

I have to admit, I find those ride apps—Uber and Lyft—rather useful.  I’m not going to make a habit of using them; that would just end up being way too expensive.  But it is nice to have the convenience when I’m not feeling well.  I wish I had tried them before, about three or four weeks ago, because I had been thinking about going to see Guardians of the Galaxy 3 in the theater, but my bike tire had gone flat and I was having trouble with my back whenever I rode it, in any case.  I was feeling pretty discouraged that weekend, and ended up just saying to heck with it, but if I’d been familiar with Uber or Lyft, I might have used one.

You may ask why I couldn’t just go see the movie this weekend, but that urge has more or less passed.  Also, I’ve gone back on a more restrictive food regimen, so I wouldn’t be able to eat popcorn, which was something I anticipated if I went to the theater.  Now I wouldn’t eat any, and that would remove a large part of my enjoyment of the theater, a part which might have overbalanced the discomfort of being alone in a theater surrounded by so many people.  As it is, now, since my initial urge to see the film soon (largely due to the presence of Adam Warlock) has more or less passed, I’ll probably just wait for it to come to Disney+.

It would be nice if I had a good enough metabolism and/or had been able to maintain better fitness habits over time (my back injury/surgery/failure to completely recover has gotten in the way of that a lot).  Then, I wouldn’t have needed to worry about eating popcorn.

Unfortunately, I’m afraid I need to minimize such things not merely for long-term health—about which I have little concern, since in the long term I expect to be dead—but about moment to moment health.  As someone who already feels pretty bad psychologically a lot of the time, I don’t need the added physical weariness and discomfort that comes almost immediately if I eat the wrong things nowadays.

On a more positive note:  I saw a frog (possibly two frogs) this morning.  Indeed, one of them hopped into my room as I was returning from taking out the garbage, and I had to usher it back out as carefully as I could.  This may not seem like much of an event, but it’s nice to me.

Back when I was little, and we used to come to Florida to visit my mother’s parents, after many big rains there would be oodles of frogs and toads out.  We would sometimes try to catch them, and if we did, they would pee in our hands, which was both gross and hilarious when I was a young child, though I imagine it was terrifying for the poor amphibian, which probably thought it was about to be eaten.

Also, when we first moved down to Florida—that’s my now-ex-wife and my then-few-month-old son and I—when we first stopped in a motel in central Florida for the night, it was raining and there was a veritable biblical inundation of frogs of various sizes.  The motel didn’t have those flap things at the bottoms of the doors, and smaller frogs actually came into the room through the gap.  That didn’t bother us.  We thought it was funny and kind of cool to be moving to such a place.

Well, my son probably had no thoughts about it one way or the other.

However, over the intervening years, frog numbers appear to have drastically reduced.  I am under the impression that there was some form of blight or other that hit many frog populations worldwide, though I don’t recall the source of that impression.  In any case, something seemed to have happened to the frogs in Florida, because for many years now, even after a significant rain, there have been none to be seen.

For all I know, the frog I saw this morning may be the last I will ever see in south Florida—though I thought I saw another one as I rolled the garbage out, hopping to get away from me—but I would like for them to be making a comeback.  I am a fan of most insectivores, especially ones that eat things like mosquitoes and flies and—during swarming times—termites.  Of course, there are various lizards and birds that also eat such things, but they don’t seem to be as assertive about their jobs as the frogs and toads are.

Anyway, that’s all a lot of silliness.  It’s an okay way to end the week, though.  Maybe I’ll play a little guitar if I get to the office early enough.  I did a tiny bit of strumming yesterday, when I had some morning free time, though I didn’t know The Man Who Sold the World well enough to be able to appreciate fully the chord progressions as I played them.  They definitely had the David Bowie flair for interesting changes and sounds.

I have not thought about a tune for my dreary little poem from the other day, nor even reread it.  Maybe it would be funny to give it a jaunty, happy, major key tune of some kind.  As I think I’ve said before, I enjoy irony.

Probably nothing will come of it.  It’s not as though I’ve done any more work on the song of which I did a demo on YouTube—I had called it Mercury Lamp based on the inspiration for the song, but I think now I would call it Hollow Doll.  And though I like the tune and stuff for Come Back Again, the trial arrangement and mixing/recording I did was blurry and muddled, and I think it could use some lead guitar.

Again, though, this is all a collection of pipe dreams—or guitar dreams, I guess, though “pipes” can refer to someone’s voice, and I do sing on the songs, so maybe the original term is okay.  Come to think of it, A Collection of Pipe Dreams* might be a good name for an album.  It could be a follow-up to a first album called Iterations of Zero after the title of my other, now more or less unused, blog.

I must be sicker than I thought to be entertaining such things.  Well, it’s a bit of fun to imagine them, at least.

I hope you all have a good first weekend of June.

*Or even A Collection of Guitar Dreams

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What should I title this blog post? Wait, I know…

Well, yesterday was seriously painful, in the literal sense and also in a more figurative sense, though the figurative pain was at least partially due to the literal pain.  I tried various postural and furniture-based changes, altered and/or tried some exercises, all sorts of things.  It’s hard to tell whether any of them did any good.  It’s also hard to tell—assuming that some or all of them did any good—which one(s) did the good, and how to tease it out.  This is, of course, why in a proper, scientific exploration of such things, one would try to change only one variable at a time, holding all the others constant.

However, when one is in soul-grinding pain while still trying to do one’s job, one tends to be willing to split away from pure scientific rigor.  At least, I am.  And I’m as committed to the notion of scientific rigor as anyone I know.

I slept reasonably well last night—for me, anyway—only waking up at about two in the morning, and being able to get back to sleep for another 35 minutes or so starting at 3:15.  That may not sound like much, but for me, it’s comparatively restful.

I also went rather off the script with respect to food yesterday.  I decided, since I was feeling so much like crap as to be barely distinguishable, I would just eat what I felt like eating, when I felt like eating it.  So, I did.  Mind you, there wasn’t all that much available, but I did order a pizza and so on, and even got a Mountain Dew® with it, something I haven’t had in certainly over a year, but probably far longer.

I’m likely to relax my dietary restrictions today as well—I really don’t feel great, but I can’t quite tell if I’m going to have another day like the previous few or several—but then, since I have this weekend off, I’m going to go back, much more strictly, to some food regulation, so to speak.  It’s easier when one doesn’t have much to do.

And, yes, I do have tomorrow off, so I won’t be writing a blog post.  I guess, technically, Monday is Memorial Day, which I only realized quite recently, but we generally work on Memorial Day at our office.  It’s a good day for sales and all that, though we often close early.  Of course, the buses and trains will be on a “Sunday” schedule, which is a minor pain, but they are on lower schedules on Saturdays, as well, and I’ve gone in to the office the last two Saturdays without difficulty.  Still, I do find myself tempted just to call out on Monday, at least if I don’t feel much better than I’ve been feeling.

Actually, if I don’t feel much better soon—at least back to my ordinary baseline, however unpleasant that both is and makes me—I feel I should call out from everything, permanently.  I’ve been back on my historically best-working antidepressant for about four or five weeks now, if my reckoning is correct (it’s not very careful, so I could be off).  It doesn’t seem to be making a huge difference, but it’s possible that it’s making some difference.  I certainly did, for a few days, pick up my guitar(s) a bit.  But then—now—I haven’t played or wanted to play for several days.

Some of that is pain related, and a lot of it is depression related, and it’s also just a feeling of pointlessness about playing.  I had thought about working on a cover of Ashes to Ashes, as I’d mentioned here (I think), a sort of sequel to my own cover of A Space Oddity, as Ashes to Ashes was for David Bowie.  But at least for right now, I don’t see that happening.

I don’t see much happening.  The farthest ahead I can really think is laundry on Sunday—will the washer and dryer be clear for me in the morning or not—and then whether or not I’m still going to be in pain on Monday, Memorial Day.  After that, as Paul McCartney sang in You Never Give Me Your Money (and I sang in my “bad cover” thereof), I “see no future…”  Though I will pay rent on the first.  I may even pay it slightly early, because it takes a load of tension away, since then I don’t have to worry that I’m going to forget.  That’s about it.  That’s as exciting as life is for me, which is to say, it’s not very.

I don’t know what would help put the wind back in my sails, or if that’s even possible—what might renew my interest in writing fiction, or playing music, or even writing and making songs.  I don’t really have anyone that I hang out with, since I only really socialize at work—but, then again, I don’t know that I would want to hang out with much of anyone I could possibly encounter near me.  I don’t have much in common with most humans, and that fact seems to become more overpowering all the time.

It would be nice to do some good in the world again, and to have a friend or similar that actually shares interests, but it seems unlikely.  Most people I’ve encountered—or so it feels—seem to want to take advantage, or else find me too unpleasant to stay friends with (I can’t blame them), or have their own stuff going on.  And, frankly, I’m rotten at socializing anyway, even with people I like.

Even on-line socializing, which I briefly did a bit of in the past, has become tense and unpleasant for me most of the time.  Leaving comments—whether on a video or a blog, or whatever, let alone replying to a tweet or a Facebook post—fills me almost immediately with a good deal of tension and anxiety.  I fear that someone will engage with my comment and I’ll have to get involved in some kind of discussion or argument, or else willfully ignore it, which will feel rude.

I know, it’s  a trap of my own making, or at least of my own nature.  I certainly can’t blame the other people.  But that doesn’t make it cease to be a trap.

Ah, well, it really doesn’t matter.  When I’m in a lot of pain, I’m not interested in socializing, anyway.

And now, I need to start heading for the bus stop, so I’m going to wrap this up for today.  I won’t write a post tomorrow, and if I don’t write one Monday, it will mean either that I decided (or needed) to take that day off, or something else has prevented me from writing.  I guess, if I don’t write any more posts at all after that, you’ll be able to infer at least that something relatively drastic happened.

But if I return no later than Tuesday…well, you’ll know that I’ve returned, at least for the moment.  I’m not sure which outcome I prefer.

Anyway, have a good holiday weekend, those of you who live in the US and are celebrating.

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A session of digression but without a confession

Hello, everyone.  It’s Monday morning, and I’m still at the house, sitting on the piano bench—the only piece of furniture I use for sitting, though I almost never play the keyboard anymore—and writing this blog post on my laptop.  Last week, every post was written on my phone.  Also last week, my posts didn’t get as many views or “likes” as they usually do.  At least, that’s my impression, and I wonder if writing on my phone contributed to the outcome.  I haven’t actually done an empirical, side-by-side comparison of the numbers, so I could easily be wrong about the posts’ popularity.  Perhaps it’s more a sign of my emotional state than the state of the world.  As Radiohead so aptly sang in There There, “Just ‘cause you feel it doesn’t mean it’s there.”  Or, as I like to say, “Just because you inferred it doesn’t mean it was implied”.

Still, this is my own blog, so I suppose I can allow myself to proceed from my subjective point of view.

I’m not looking forward to this week.  My coworker with whom I share some of my duties is out today and tomorrow, and I’m also going to be working this coming Saturday after having worked this last Saturday, since said coworker was/will be out of town.  I had already had a week of terrible sleep, even for me, which didn’t help.  I did take a bit of rest yesterday, though I had to do my laundry.  But a lot of the resting was simply me being wiped out due to the fact that I had some form of (presumably food-borne) enteritis, so I didn’t feel well at all, despite taking some loperamide*.  That illness, at least, appears mostly to have run its course, for which I am grateful.  It’s not pleasant to try to commute while fighting a lower GI issue, but it’s not as though I can stay out of work today with my coworker out.

Sorry, I know all this trivia about my day to day life is probably both boring and depressing.  What can I say?  I’m a depressing and boring person.

Yesterday, between trips to the bathroom, I picked up the Les Paul guitar that my former housemate built, because I wanted to practice some more on that David Bowie song I mentioned last week.  As with most songs, it sounded even better on the Les Paul.  It’s the best sounding instrument—of any kind (which includes cellos, pianos, guitars, violins, and keyboards in general**)—that’s I’ve had the privilege to play.  He did an amazing job with it.  The red Strat he made is also excellent, and I love it, but the Les Paul is almost miraculous in its tone.

It was remarkably dusty, but that didn’t bother me too much.  I’m not one to polish or tweak or maintain things, except when using them, and then only to the extent that it’s necessary in order to use them.  My brain just doesn’t work in such a way that, for instance, I would ever notice or care that a car I owned could use a car wash, or that my room was cluttered, or that my desk was cluttered, or whatever.

Cars and the like are merely things one uses for a purpose, as far as I’m concerned.  And I’m actually quite happy that I seem to have been spared the whole social hierarchy, showing off, keeping up with the Joneses, owning things as status symbols, and so on, kind of mentality.  I’m not intimidated by so-called superiors, and it usually doesn’t occur to me that I ought to be so.  I’m also not disdainful of so-called subordinates, and I am provisionally convinced that this is the correct attitude.

Of course, all this sounds a bit like a species of showing off in its own right, I guess.  I don’t mean it that way (though I am glad of it, as I said).  I just recognize now that perhaps some of the things that have always been true about me, and which I guess are different from the way many other people are, may in fact be related to ASD if I do indeed meet the criteria for that.  I have never been a person who cared about owning the latest popular brand of sneakers when I was a kid, or a particular brand of clothes or jacket or whatnot—I honestly couldn’t even understand why people cared about such things.

I did like some things that I thought looked cool, or neat, or interesting sometimes, and I still do.  I also had a jacket, on the left breast of which were pinned dozens upon dozens of buttons depicting the band, The Police, because I was fairly obsessed with them and bought every such button I encountered.  But I am not and have never been the sort of person who would have put racing stripes or LEDs on a motorcycle, or tried to get bright chrome doo-dads for a car.  A car is just a tool.

So is a guitar (or a piano or a cello).  These are wonderful tools, and I care more about them than I do about cars, because their purpose is to make music, which is much more aesthetically pleasing than just being able to get places quickly and easily while sitting on my fat bottom.  Even so, what matters in a guitar, say, is the sound.  I honestly don’t really give a flying f-ck at a tiny little rat’s a-s if it looks shiny or fancy or whatever***.

I don’t know how I got started on that big and pointless digression.  I suppose I’ll be able to see the route when I go back to edit this, though I still might be mystified by it.  At least it fills the page, so to speak.  And it isn’t even late enough that I would normally have left for the bus stop, which is good, because it’s raining a bit, and even with the bus shelter roof, the rain tends to get little splatters on the laptop screen if I write there.  I definitely write much faster on the laptop, though at least doing the phone stuff last week doesn’t seem to have hurt my thumbs too much.

I have to work up my courage to go in to work, though.  I just need to survive until Saturday, at least, because I don’t want to leave everyone at the office in the lurch.  After that, it’ll be two weeks in a row where I won’t be working on Saturday (to make up for two weekends on), and so there won’t be any time when my presence is essential—well, except for payroll, I guess, but I can’t be too tied down by that.  Having to prepare the payroll for people is not by itself an adequate reason to continue living, not indefinitely.

I’m not sure I’ve ever found an adequate reason, even during the times when I was reasonably mentally stable.  I just didn’t much think about it, not in any serious way.  When you’re not feeling depressed and/or stressed, you don’t really need a reason to continue, you just coast along on the surface of biological drives and follow the local path-of-least-action.  At least, I do.  But it’s been a long time since I’ve had a noteworthy interval of not being depressed and/or stressed, and unfortunately, when depressed, time seems to take much longer to pass than do the times in between.

Probably, reading my blog posts feels like that sometimes.  Meaning that the time is much longer, more wearing, than other times.  Apologies for that.  I hope you have a good week, nonetheless.  And to all you mothers**** out there, I hope you had a wonderful Mother’s Day yesterday.

*Look it up if you don’t know what it is.  It’s an excellent product.

**I’ve also briefly played a saxophone—a cheap one bought from a flea market.  It made a lovely sound, and I enjoyed diddling around on it and making absurdly loud but cool noises, and it was easier to play than I expected it to be, but I lost interest pretty quickly.  I like to sing and play, and you can’t do that with the saxophone.  I do, in retrospect, regret that I had never even thought to try to work out and play the sax riff from Baker Street.  What a missed opportunity!

***Though I do grant that the guitars my former housemate made are lovely.

****And I don’t mean that as “half a word”.

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No dust – not even in the wind – but we’ve got ashes

It’s Friday morning as I write this, in case you’re reading this on a day other than the day it’s posted, or published, or whatever the best term is (if “best” even has any real meaning here).  I expect to be posting tomorrow, since I work tomorrow.  And then, luckily for all of you who can’t get enough of my blog posts*, I will also be working the following Saturday, and thus probably posting then.

You see, the coworker with whom I share some of my responsibilities at work is going away to visit family this weekend (he has a few-months-old daughter who has to make the rounds) and so he couldn’t take this weekend for me in exchange for the following Saturday, when his daughter is getting baptized.  He’s also going to be out of the office Monday and Tuesday and probably at least part of Wednesday, all my most overloaded days as it is.  So, expect me to be rather stressed out during that time.

More so than usual, I mean.

I keep hoping for my increased stress to lead to some catastrophic health collapse‒pneumonia, stroke, heart attack, hemorrhage, something‒to take it all out of my hands, but so far I have had no such luck.

I didn’t get back to the house until well after 9 last night, because the bus just didn’t show.  Instead of trying to use Uber or Lyft, about both of which I still feel reluctant, I just walked.  At least that way I got some exercise.  It didn’t make my back and hip and side pain any worse at the time, but it also didn’t prevent that pain from waking me up at a bit before 2 this morning, unable to fall back to sleep thereafter.

I’m still taking Saint John’s Wort, though it’s certainly not helping my pain or optimism, so far, and I can’t tell if it’s affecting my affect**.  I’m trying to breathe better, mainly through my nose, and work on the rest of my breathing and mouth posture and whatnot.  I don’t know how much difference that all makes, if any, but it’s something for me to do with my energy, such as it is.

Oh, I hadn’t mentioned yesterday, but the day before yesterday we blew past another potential palindromic recording number.  We were coming right toward it, but then we had no deals for a few hours and by the time we had another, the recording numbers had passed the palindrome***.  It looks as though the universe just isn’t going to go out of its way to tell me to stay.

I think that’s not the sort of thing the universe does.  People sometimes tell you that they want you to stay, and that’s very nice of them…but does it really constitute an adequate reason to stay alive, being told that you matter‒in some abstract sense, I guess‒to someone?  What if you don’t matter to yourself, or if you matter in the worst possible way?  What if you “antimatter” to yourself, so to speak?  It’s one thing for other people not to want me to die, but they don’t have to be around me 24/7.  Trust me, it gets old.

You can kind of tell that, can’t you?

I half expect that, someday soon, I will have a healthcare crisis‒perhaps a ruptured aortic aneurysm or summat‒just as a verification is being done, and as I lie dying, I’ll ask what the verification number is…and it will be a palindromic number!  At least that would be funny and ironic.  I could die laughing, or at least smiling, saying, “Good one, universe.  You really got me there.”  I would honestly find that hilarious.

I don’t know, I guess I have an unusual sense of humor.

I did play on the guitar just a bit, yesterday.  I’ve recently become mildly obsessed with the David Bowie song, Ashes to Ashes, which I’ve been aware of since I was maybe 11 or 12 years old, but hadn’t fully appreciated.  I really like the rhythm and the shift in melody from section to section, and the patterns of overlapping four step repetitions of three chords in the intro and outro and everything.

So, I looked up the guitar chords for it and realized that‒as was the case for A Space Oddity‒Bowie didn’t even need to use any esoteric chords to make a brilliant progression and melody structure.  Hell, there’s only one barre chord in the song, and it’s used once in the first half and once in the second.

I also surprised myself by being able to sing the song just fine at first try.  It’s been months, I think, since I sang anything, and I expected my voice to be weak, but maybe the resting time did it good.  It got kind of beat up by Covid for a while, which was evident in a few of my song/videos.  And maybe the walking and biking and the newly started breathing stuff is helping.

Anyway, if I maintain my interest, I may even record a video of me playing and singing it‒there are some fun backup things in the song, and some doubling and mild harmonies that could be fun to dub in after the initial recording, too.  If I do it, I’m going to try to do a sort of stereo recording if I can, with the cell phone recorder for mainly the guitar, and the condenser USB mic for mainly the voice.  We’ll see.  As I said, I’m going to be very busy and stressed in the next few weeks, and that’s potentially going to derail everything.

Further bulletins on that as events warrant.  In the meantime, I guess I’ll embed the official video (which is quite…unusual, and was apparently, at the time, the most expensive video that had yet been made) for Ashes to Ashes, for your delectation.

Until tomorrow, assuming it arrives, please take care of yourselves.

*If there really are such people, they should probably seek medical help, but perhaps I’m not being fair.

**Ha ha.

***Not to be mistaken for passing the dutchie.

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A bland post but with some good music shared along the way

I’ll start by saying, Happy Cinco de Mayo!

cinco dance

I forgot yesterday was Star Wars day, and I don’t want to miss two such things in a row.

I guess, given that it’s Friday, it might be a nice night to have a margarita, or some other tequila-based beverage, if you indulge in alcohol.  But don’t drink and drive, of course.  That’s just playing Russian Roulette with the gun pointed at other people as well as yourself and your loved ones.  If you do drink and drive, certainly if you do it very often, it might be ethical (but not legal, and for good reasons) for someone else to kill you in self-defense, or in the general defense of innocents.  I don’t recommend it, but it would be understandable.

I’m not writing this at the train station today, nor am I writing on the laptop computer.  I am writing this‒to start, anyway‒on my phone, from the house, because I’m taking the bus to the train today.

Yesterday, after only 2 days of riding the bike to and from the train station (one and a half, really), my back and legs and entire left side up to my shoulder were in severe pain all throughout the day, which didn’t help my baseline grumpiness at work.  Well, it helped the grumpiness, I guess you could say; at least, it enhanced or increased it.  But I felt like crap overall.

So, given that, I’m not going to ride my bike today, and I don’t think I’ll ride it tomorrow, which means I doubt that I’ll be going to the movies, since the distance to the nearest theater is longer than the distance to the train station, albeit not by much.  But if the latter causes me so much pain, I’d rather avoid the former.

I don’t think I want to walk to the theater, either.  I haven’t been walking long distances for several weeks, what with weather and trying to use the bike and so on, so I worry that I might exacerbate things, like blisters and joint pain and so on.  Anyway, an eight mile walk is likely to take more than two hours each way.  That’s chewing up a big chunk of a day to see a movie by myself.  Not that I tend to do anything more useful or entertaining otherwise.

I suppose I could activate either the Uber or Lyft app, both of which I downloaded the other day after the bus was 35 minutes late.  But I’ve never used either one before, and I’m leery of getting in a car with a stranger who doesn’t have an official “chauffeur’s” license and a local (also licensed and regulated) company behind them.  That may be silly of me, but it is what it is.  Maybe I’ll work out the public transportation route to the best movie theater.

Or maybe I should just nix the idea of going to the theater at all and just watch the movie on Disney+ when it gets there, assuming I am still alive by then.  As far as I know, it’s hard to watch movies when one is not alive, but there are counterbalancing compensations, the most prominent one being the lack of pain and another being a lack of sadness/loneliness/depression.  These things are not to be taken lightly.  Escaping from them can be strongly appealing, especially when there are few counterbalancing consolations.

Speaking of not being alive, it was quite sad (though not tragic, since he was 84) when, earlier this week, Gordon Lightfoot died.  I may have mentioned this here before, but his song, If You Could Read My Mind is among my favorites; it came out when I was young, and I’ve always thought it was beautiful.

In fact, I did a rhythm guitar “cover” of it, with me singing.  I’ll embed the video for that here, just in case you’re interested, and then‒to get the taste of my playing and singing out of your mouth‒I’ll embed a video of the real, original song by the man himself.

I only ask, out of kindness, for you not to listen to my version too soon after his, if you do it in that order.  You wouldn’t have Phoebe Buffay try to follow Yo Yo Ma on stage at Carnegie Hall, right?

So, here’s my version:

And here’s the way it’s supposed to sound:

He did a lot of other good stuff, too, of course.  No less an artist than Bob Dylan said that, whenever he heard a Gordon Lightfoot song, he wished it would go on forever.  I wouldn’t go quite that all-out, myself; I don’t think there are even any Radiohead, Pink Floyd*, or Beatles songs I wish would go on forever.

Now, Rachmaninoff’s 2nd piano concerto…that could be the background music for the world and I wouldn’t quickly get tired of it.  Or Dvorak’s “New World” symphony would be good, too.

And of course, on the flip side, my own songs, like Breaking Me Down and Like and Share at about six minutes, go on longer than anyone probably wants them to go.  I guess my song writing is a bit like my novel writing‒once I get going, I tend to go on and on, because momentum, or inertia, or whatever, makes it so that I have little capacity or urge to stop.

Ironically, though, I don’t really have much more to say right now.  My leg and back and side and hip hurt a bit less than yesterday, but they do hurt quite a bit, still, and I need to leave soon to go to the bus stop, because I don’t think I’ll be walking as fast as usual.

It’s been a relatively bland blog post, but there are various songs to which I will have linked, to which you can listen if you like.  Most of them are by real, excellent, professional musicians, and have stood the test of decades or longer.  Those ones, at least, are worth a listen.

I won’t be doing a post tomorrow, because I don’t work tomorrow, and hopefully I’ll have rested enough that my pain goes back to baseline.  Have a good weekend if you’re at all able.  And if you see the new Marvel movie, feel free to let me know what you think of it.

*Though Echoes, which is the entire B-side of their album Meddle, goes on for a long time, and it’s not unpleasant.  And then there’s Shine On You Crazy Diamond, the opening and closing parts of the album Wish You Were Here.  

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Then there’s hope a great man’s memory may outlive his blog half a year.

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, the day of the week on which I wrote my blog post even when I was writing fiction every other day of the week—well, apart from Sundays and the Saturdays when I  didn’t work.  I have not been writing any fiction recently.

I toyed with the idea the other day, but there doesn’t seem to be much enthusiasm for the notion, which I suppose is mirrored by my own lack of energy, or perhaps has its source in my lack of energy.  Or maybe they come from disparate but merely coincidentally parallel sources.  I don’t know, and though it’s mildly interesting, I don’t have energy or interest enough to try to figure it out.

I did work a bit on a new song yesterday, the one for which I had jotted down some lyrics a while back.  I have lost utterly the original tune, but I worked out a new one of sorts, and it seems okay.  I then worked out some chords for the first stanza, including some relatively sophisticated major sevenths and then major sixths of a minor chord that sounded nice, and which made me at least feel that I really have learned a little bit about guitar chords.  Then I figured out at least the chords I want for the chorus, which, among other things, throw a little dissonance in briefly, which is nice to up the tension.

I don’t know if I’ll get any further with it or not; I may just stop and let it lie.  It’s only perhaps the third time I’ve even picked up the guitar in months.  I was at least able to show myself that I can still play Julia, and Wish You Were Here, and Pigs on the Wing.  I had to fiddle a little to remind myself how to play Blackbird, but after a brief time I was able to bring it back, too.

So, it’s not all atrophied.  And I can still play the opening riff to my own song, Catechism, which I think is my best stand-alone riff.  My other guitar solos are mainly just recapitulations of the melody of the verse or chorus in their respective songs, but the one for Catechism is a separate little melody.

Actually, it occurs to me that I initially did a voice recording of the lyrics to the newish song as I thought of them, and when I did, I probably sang a bit of the tune that had come to my head.  Maybe I should listen to that and see if I like that melody better than the new one I came up with.  That would be a bit funny, if after the effort from yesterday to do a melody and chords I remembered the old one and just threw the new one away.

I suppose it really doesn’t matter much.  Even if I were to work out and record the song, and do accompanying parts and all that stuff, and publish it, I don’t think anyone is likely ever to listen to it much.  Maybe someday in the distant future, some equivalent of an archaeologist who unearths things lost in the web and internet will find the lost traces of my books or music or something, and they’ll be catalogued in some future equivalent of a virtual museum, among trillions of other collections of data that are recorded on line, but which will never seen by anyone for whom they might mean anything at all.

People sometimes say things like “what happens online is forever”, but as I’ve discussed before (I think), even if it’s true that things stored online remain and avoid simple deterioration of data thanks to the redundancy in the system, it doesn’t matter.  In principle, the sound of every tree falling in every wood has left its trace in the vibrational patterns of the world, and according to quantum mechanics, quantum information is never permanently lost, even if things fall into black holes*.

But of course, all that is irrelevant in practice, and comes back to collide with the nature of entropy and the degree to which most large-scale descriptions of a system are indistinguishable.  That picture of you with a funny face at that event years ago, which you tried to have a friend take down, but which had already been shared to a few other people, may in principle always be out there in the archives of Facebook or Twitter or whatever, but it doesn’t matter.  No one will ever notice it or probably even see it among the deluge of petabytes of data whipping around cyberspace every second.  You might as well worry about people being able to reconstruct the sound waves from when you sang Happy Birthday out of tune at your nephew’s fifth birthday party from the information left over in the state of all the atoms and molecules upon which the sound waves impinged.

It’s one of those seemingly paradoxical situations, rather like being in Manhattan.  There are very few places in New York City, and particularly in Manhattan, where one can actually be alone—even most apartments are tiny, and have windows that look out into dozens to hundreds of other people’s windows.  And yet, in a way, you are more or less always alone in Manhattan, or at least you are unobserved, because you are just one of an incomprehensible mass of indistinguishable humans.

Even “celebrities” and political figures, so-called leaders and statespeople, will all fade from memory with astonishing rapidity.  When was the last time you thought about Tip O’Neill?  And yet, for a while, he was prominent in the news more or less every day.  Do you remember where you were when William McKinley was assassinated?  No, because you were nowhere.  None of you existed in any sense when that happened, let alone when, for instance, Julius Caesar was murdered.

And what of the many millions of other people in the world at the time of McKinley or Caesar or Cyrus the Great or Ramses II?  We know nothing whatsoever of them as individuals.  Even the famous names I’m mentioning are really just names for most people.  There’s no real awareness of identity or contributions, especially for the ones who existed before any current people were born.

Last Thursday, I wrote “RIP John Lennon” and put a picture of him up on the board on which we post ongoing sales and the like.  The youngest member of our group, who is in his twenties, asked, “Who is John Lennon?”

He was not joking.

If John Lennon can be unknown to members of a generation less than fifty years after his death, what are the odds that anything any of us does will ever be remembered?

Kansas (the group, not the state) had it right:  “All we are is dust in the wind.  Everything is dust in the wind.”  The only bit they missed was that even the Earth will not last forever, and as for the sky…well, that depends on what you mean by the sky, I suppose.  The blue sky of the Earth, made so by light scattering off Nitrogen and Oxygen molecules, will not outlast the Earth, though there may be other blue skies on other planets.  But planets will not always exist.

As for the black night sky of space, well, that may well last “forever”, for what it’s worth.  But it will not contain anything worth seeing.

TTFN

Tip

*Leonard Susskind famously convinced Stephen Hawking that this was the case—and even won a bet in the process—though other luminaries were of course involved, including Kip Thorne, I believe, one of the masters of General Relativity.