Pain

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And damn’d be him that first blogs, ‘Hold, enough!’

Hello and good morning yet again.

It’s Thursday, of course, and‒being a bit compulsive, as I am‒I could not fail to start this blog post with some form of “Hello and good morning”.  For those of you who like that consistency, you’re most welcome.

I did not walk to the train this morning, though I am wearing my New Balance walking shoes, because when I awakened for the first time during the night‒sometime between 1230 and 1 am‒I already noticed that, despite a modicum of rest, my right Achilles tendon was sore and burning when I moved it.  It is still a bit sore this morning.  So, apparently, my interventions yesterday, such as they are, were not adequate to stop the boots from causing my weak spot trouble*.  I will at least say that the arch of my left foot seems reasonably okay, but even it has a bit of a twinge.

So, with regret, I fear I need to retire my boots for any serious long walking, which seems ironic, but such is life.  Anyway, the NBs are lighter and easier to carry along in any case.

As for other things, well…I don’t know.  I really don’t have much to report.  The weather is slightly warmer today than it was yesterday‒I’m not wearing a hoodie at the train station right now, but I’m comfortable‒but it’s nowhere near the oppressive heat and humidity we’ve had until recently.  It would’ve been a decent morning for walking, but there’s not much to be done about that.  I don’t want to exacerbate my heel.  “He’ll let the heel heal for a bit,” one might say of me.

I’m not sure if I’ll write a post tomorrow.  I’m not sure if I’ll go to the office tomorrow.  I almost decided not to go today, but I want to bring my laptop computer back from the office, and I forgot to do that yesterday.  But tomorrow, if I still feel like I do this morning‒or worse‒I may not go in.  You’ll know, if there’s no blog post tomorrow, that I haven’t gone to the office.  And, of course, as I have said, I don’t work this weekend.

After that, who knows?  I don’t have any vision of next week, frankly.  I have some vague notions and ideas, but I don’t know what will happen.

I also don’t know what else to write about today.  There’s nothing going on.  I’m still not writing fiction or singing or playing guitar or “piano”.  I haven’t done any drawing in a very long time.

I also haven’t been reading this week, really.  I haven’t made any more progress in Robert Sapolsky’s new book, though I was looking forward to it.  I’m certainly not looking forward to any other books, nonfiction or fiction.  There are no movies or shows of interest to me.  Not even the upcoming Doctor Who specials are of interest, nor the new season.  And though Loki season 2 has been okay so far, I could miss the rest without much regret.  I certainly don’t see anything coming down the movie pike that’s worth anticipating.

I think I’m just about down to the dregs.  I don’t have much to offer but muck and sediment and sand.  There might be people out there who are into that kind of thing, but I’m not sure who they are.  I appreciate all of you reading even when I’m writing absolutely nothing of value.  I wish more people could have read my books; I think there are some decent stories there, and it would be nice to share them with more people.  Oh, well.  I guess most authors feel that way, at some point.

Anyway, that’s enough for today, I think.  It’s a short post, but surely that’s a relief if anything to dedicated and loyal readers.  Have a good day and, in case I don’t write a post tomorrow, have a good weekend.  Please.

TT(FN?)

Welcome Home Medium in prog (2)

*It is, of course, an appropriate location for a weak point.

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[Put some quote from a Pink Floyd song here]

I’m writing this on my smartphone after having walked to the train station this morning.  It’s cool enough weather that I even wore a hoodie for the walk (though if the sun had been up but the temperature the same I probably would not have done so), and I certainly don’t feel dehydrated.  I didn’t walk back from the train last night, but that was only because we got out of the office late, and then the later train I caught was a further 20 minutes behind schedule.  That was really irritating.

The 610 train is just arriving now, but I will catch the next one (and I only feel a little bit of anxiety over that decision).  I made good time, and I also got up a bit earlier than scheduled, because that seems to be the general trend of my life.  If this continues long enough, I might end up getting up in the morning before I go to bed.  I need to do something about this before I arrive at a contradiction and make the World Program™ crash and shut down.

I wore my boots this morning, and as I had intended yesterday, I did not overtighten the laces.  This has helped a little, at least, but I fear it’s not enough.  My right Achilles tendon is burning, and the arch of my left foot, just a bit behind the 1st metatarsophalangeal joint, is already feeling tight and achy.  That’s not too terrible after five miles of walking at a pretty brisk pace, but it didn’t seem to happen with the New Balance walking shoes at all.

I’m very disappointed, but I may need just to nix the boots.  It’s very sad to me, though I know it’s not truly a big deal.  I think I’ve just gotten to the point of having so little of value or meaning in my life that the loss of even the option to use the shoes that most aesthetically appeal to me feels like the death of an old friend.

It’s all rather pathetic, and not in a good way.  Still, I must do what I must, tautologically speaking.  So, I’ll try to do the walk again tomorrow morning, wearing the walking shoes, and see if it really is easier on the joints of my feet.

By the way:  of course, I have not started writing any kind of short story, or any other story.  What’s more, I haven’t practiced my guitar at all, nor have I listened to any more of the Spanish version of Harry Potter.  I also didn’t translate beyond the first sentence of the Japanese version of Harry Potter.  Nor did I read more than a few paragraphs past the preface or opening note or whatever he called it of Robert Sapolsky’s new book.

I didn’t even finish listening to the podcast with Sean Carroll and David Deutsch.  I tried to listen to a playlist of my favorite songs yesterday while waiting for the train in the evening, but after skipping about a dozen or so of my favorite songs because I just wasn’t interested in listening to them, I concluded (correctly) that I just didn’t want to listen to anything.  Nothing is interesting.

Of course, a famous (and fatuous) saying is that only boring people are bored, but in my case it’s not completely inaccurate.  I am dreadfully boring, even to myself.  Having to listen to me talk, or even just to be around me, for any length of time would probably count as cruel and unusual punishment.  I know it’s punishment to me.

I just got on the train.  It’s mildly interesting to note that there was enough breeze blowing up the tracks as I waited that, given my underlying sweatiness, I actually felt a bit chilly, and had to put my hood up.  That worked well, though.  And once I get to the office, I have other clothes into which to change.

This week has already seemed very long, and it’s just now Wednesday.  It’s kind of a weird inversion or subjective tension when one compares this to the lyrics of the song Time.  Whereas those lyrics note that “every year is getting shorter”, to me it feels‒though the year thing still seems true‒that every day is getting longer.  If the two tendencies continue, I could run into another paradox, in which a day eventually feels longer than a year, and then, again, the world might come to an end because of a logic error.

Actually, I guess it’s not always a contradiction for a day to be longer than a year.  If memory serves, for instance, Mercury is almost tidally locked with the sun, so its days and years are nearly the same length.  And if I recall correctly, I think that a day on Venus‒meaning a complete planetary revolution‒is longer than a year*.

On Earth, though, days are much, much shorter than years.  That’s even truer on Jupiter, where the days are about ten hours long, but the years are nearly a dozen times as long as Earth’s, because of its greater distance from the sun**.

Anyway, all this trivia is beside the point.  I am almost entirely without any sustained joy or happiness, nor do I see any reasonable prospect of that changing.  What would change about it?  I don’t really even care about the upcoming 60th anniversary Doctor Who special!  There are no books or movies or shows or whatever that seem interesting.

And I’m very tired.

*I did recall correctly; that is in fact true.

**This follows from Kepler’s 3rd law of planetary motion, which states, if memory serves, that the period of a planet’s orbit is proportional to the 3/2 power of the length of its orbit’s semimajor axis.  This would mean Jupiter orbits at just under 12^(2/3), or 5.24, times the distance of Earth…and indeed, according to Wikipedia, Jupiter’s semimajor axis is indeed 5.2038 astronomical units.  See, all that math we learned in school is useful for something.

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Trivial nonsense on a pseudo-ominous day

I’d intended to walk to the train this morning, so of course I didn’t bring my portable, foldable computer designed to be suitable for use resting upon one’s lap with me yesterday.  Therefore, I am writing this blog post on my smartphone*.  However, I did not walk to the train.

I just felt really wiped out still this morning; my sleep wasn’t quite as bad as it had been the night before, but it still was rotten, and I feel rotten.  Also, this morning it’s three degrees (Fahrenheit…so one and two thirds degrees Celsius) hotter than it was two days ago.  I’m sweating even more than usual even though I’m just sitting at the train station right now.  There’s also, again, no breeze of which to speak, so everything is stagnant, and sweat doesn’t really do any work toward cooling one down.

I hope that, by this evening, it’s either cooler or at least breezier, and that I’ll have a bit more energy, so I might feel up to walking back from the train.  At least then I wouldn’t have to worry about sweating on train seats.

My coworker did come to the office yesterday, bearing pictures and stories of his brief family trip, mainly focused on his very young daughter.  It was quite charming.  Another person I know is currently on a trip as well‒two of them together, really‒and all these reports got me nostalgic about trips I had taken to (or times I had lived in) their various destinations.  I fear to talk too much about my own experiences in such circumstances, though I feel the urge‒I suspect that I’m just being horribly obnoxious when I catch myself doing it, and internally rebuke myself with things like, “No one gives a shit about all your stupid stories” and so on.

To be fair, no one has complained to me about it, so I evidently haven’t overstepped the bounds of good taste too much.  I probably do so overstep here, on my blog, but if anyone here doesn’t want to “hear” my stupid stories, they have only themselves to blame for reading them.

Today is Friday the 13th, isn’t it?  Back in the old days, some local network station would probably have used today‒and the fact that we are in the month of October, to boot‒as an excuse to show some highly edited versions of the slasher films named after the day.  For all I know, some of them still do.  Anyway, I tend to like Friday the 13th, largely because 13 is a prime number, and it’s one for which I feel a special affection precisely because it is so reviled by so many other people, for silly, superstitious reasons.  I myself am not superstitious.  I’m just a little bit stitious.  Ba-dump-bump.

I will be working tomorrow, so maybe I’ll walk to the train in the morning.  Timing things like that can be a bit awkward on the weekend, because the trains only run every hour, and none of the departure times is roughly comparable to the place in the hour that I usually catch them.  So if I get up at the same time as usual, whether walking or otherwise, I’m either “too early” or “too late” compared to my preference.  Of course “too early” is VASTLY preferable to the alternative, so I will err in that direction.  It’s not as though I can choose just to sleep in‒not without the use of pharmaceuticals‒so I might as well just get going.

I had a rather abrupt surge in my lower back pain this morning, above the usual baseline (to which I’ve almost become accustomed).  It may be because I didn’t put on my spandex knee and ankle support thingies**, since I had chosen not to walk.  It seems a bit much to think, though, that just the very small amount of walking I’ve done without them, wearing boots that give decent ankle support, would trigger an exacerbation.  It’s possible, I guess, but it seems unlikely.  It’s also possible that I slept in an unusual position, or just that fatigue and relative dehydration and whatnot are taking a bit of a toll.

Ah, well.  I brought my knee and ankle specialty spandex bits of supplemental clothing with me, in case I walk this evening, so I can always slip them on during the day.

I already gave away my folding massage chair.  It wasn’t doing me any good anymore, and it’s one less thing to have around or to leave behind.  I’m trying to farm off or just eliminate as much useless junk as I can.  The less clutter, the better.

That last sentence makes me wish I could legitimately say “and the less butter, the cletter”, but that last word, alas, has no meaning of which I am aware.  I suppose I could make up a meaning for it, but if you have to invent a word to make a pseudo-spoonerism work, then you’re really reaching.

One of the security guys on the train just walked by, and as he did, he muttered, “Damn, it’s hot.”  He’s far from overstating the situation.  The A/C on the train appears to be running***, based on the noise, but it doesn’t seem to be cooling the car much if at all.  I guess that at least means that my glasses (and my phone) won’t fog up when I exit the train, and that’s worth avoiding, so it’s a good thing.  See?  Who says I can’t find the positive in seemingly negative situations?

Some do say that cynics are really just frustrated idealists.  I don’t know that I am or ever have been an idealist, but I certainly am frustrated.

With that, I’ll draw (or write) this post to a close.  I hope you all have a good and lucky Friday the 13th, and that you have a good weekend to follow.  I expect to be writing a post for tomorrow morning, so if you like that sort of thing, come to this space then‒figuratively speaking‒at about the usual time.

*I don’t have any urge to clarify the word “smartphone” because it really doesn’t refer to any other entity in the universe of which I know, and‒certainly compared to any phones I used prior to the last ten years‒it is a very smart phone indeed.

**I’m not sure what the best term for these is.  “Brace” feels most typical, but that, to me, somehow implies hard, hinged, moving parts, which are lacking in the products I use.  “Support” seems reasonable, but it feels a bit vague.  Perhaps “compression sleeve” would work, but that feels a bit confusing.

***I would guess that it’s probably powered by alternating current created by an alternator (duh!) attached to the engine, but it could be run from batteries that receive their charge via rectified current initially generated in the engine.  If that is the case, then we have the rather pleasing situation of an A/C running on DC.  That’s better than butter and cletter than clutter.

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…sore labour’s bath, blog of hurt minds, great nature’s second course…

Hello and good morning.

It’s Thursday again, and as I warned you would happen, I am writing this blog post on my laptop computer.  You have no one to blame but yourself if you’re reading it in spite of that fact.

I had a terrible night’s sleep last night, and I feel absolutely wiped out this morning.  It’s not that I couldn’t fall asleep.  Indeed, I fell asleep several times throughout the night.  But, of course, one is really only supposed to fall asleep the one time at night, and then wake up the one time in the morning, at least under ideal circumstances.

I know that many, perhaps most, people often have some interruptions to their sleep; it’s not unusual for bathroom trips to be required at some point.  But this was a deeply fragmented night, even by my standards, and I’m utterly exhausted.  I’m sure I’ve said that before, possibly more often than not.

At least this morning there is a slight breeze, with occasional accelerations to being a noticeable wind, and that’s pleasant while I’m sitting at the train station.  I did not walk to the train this morning, because, again, I’m trying not to overdo things in the short term.  It would have been a comparatively pleasant morning on which to walk, though.

Still, yesterday I did just over eight miles total, so it’s not too bad for there to be a brief respite.

One of the issues with my sleep last night was that one of my house-sharers’ dogs started barking incessantly at around midnight or so.  I had succumbed to the blandishments of Amazon Day or whatever the special thing was yesterday, and had ordered several items that I was considering ordering anyway.  Most were due to arrive Friday or so, but there were a few things—allergy meds and the like—that were due to arrive “same day”, yesterday, in the evening, which was handy but not essential.

They were to have arrived by 10, but as that time approached and they had not been delivered (according to Amazon’s site) I decided it wasn’t worth it to wait up for them.  I had taken half a Benadryl to try at least to help me get to sleep, which it seemed to do.

So, when I woke up, maybe two hours later, I thought perhaps the package had just been delivered, and the dog was barking at the delivery person.  Alas, it was not so.  In fact, the Amazon site indicated that this delivery was running late, and would now be arriving sometime today before 10pm, even though it had been listed as “out for delivery” since 4pm yesterday.  I don’t know how it went from “out for delivery” to “now arriving today by 10pm”, but it’s terribly irritating, since they are the ones who offered the fast delivery.  It’s not as though I cajoled or pressured them into saying they would do it.

Anyway, I decided to go out and make sure the Amazon report was correct; sometimes they are not.  Also, there was the bare possibility that some human or other kind of animal was puttering around in front of the house.  I almost hoped that was the case.  I grabbed my stainless steel baseball bat from among the four or so weapons I keep by my side when I sleep, donned the slip-on shoes that I use for going outside on short notice, and headed out.

I inadvertently scared a tiny and cute opossum away from the cat food I put out for the two remaining cats (who were just milling about, unconcerned about the interloper, so I wasn’t worried either), and I walked around to the front of the house.  There was no sign of the Amazon package, nor was there anyone on whom to practice my swing with the baseball bat, so it was a mostly fruitless trip.  At least it seemed that the dog was able to see me, and it started barking harder as I turned and walked back toward the rear of the house.

As I went, I heard, inside, the neighbor getting up and yelling at the dog to shut up, so there’s at least some compensation.  They need to train their dogs, if they’re going to keep them.  The dogs are nice, but they have almost no discipline.  So, it’s right that the dogs’ owner(s) should be awakened at night by the fruits of their lack of labor.

Anyway, I got back to my room and was generally very irritated.  If Amazon had said from the start that the few items in my now-late order were to arrive today, I would have been fine with it.  But they offered, without me asking, to deliver them the same day—if one ordered $25 or more worth, anyway—so I did order that much, and now it’s late.  Out of frustration, I cancelled all the other, unshipped things in my upcoming order.  It was not a small order.  I almost just canceled my Amazon Prime membership, but I’m not quite at that stage, yet.  For now, it’s still useful.  But it won’t be useful, to me or to anyone else, much longer—at least I hope not.

Of course, that wasn’t the only interruption in my sleep, but it was a big one, and it put me in a grumpier mood than I would have been in otherwise—if you can believe such a thing is possible!  So now, in the morning, at the station, I feel as if my very mind and soul are tattered shreds of cobweb, riddled with dust, flecked with tiny flakes of old, decaying paint and gnats that were never eaten by any spider but had simply become trapped and slowly died there.

Something like that.

I also have a bit of a belly ache, and I’m not just speaking figuratively.  I wish I didn’t have to go in and work today, but I’m not sure that my coworker will be back, though he’s supposed to be.  People are unreliable, so obviously, I cannot rely upon his return.

I almost wish I could believe that my abdomen would develop some kind of deadly process that would kill me or at least hospitalize me today, but given how unpleasant abdominal pain tends to be, I suppose I don’t really want that.  Still, it would be nice to have something happen that would take this all away from me, since I’m too strongly conditioned to be able just to quit everything on my own, for my own sake…at least, so far.

Eventually, I’ll reach my limit, no doubt.  I hope to do so very soon.  I was on the verge of it two or so weeks ago, when my coworker’s vacation plans came to light and then changed, and I had to postpone things or else make the occurrence of my quietus something that caused more disruption than I was willing to tolerate at the time.

Perhaps I’m making excuses.

Anyway, I’m tired beyond easy belief, and I’m tired of dealing with and doing all this bullshit.  I need to go.  At the very least, I need to go to sleep, and just be able not to keep waking up over and over and over all the time.  I need to escape.

I don’t like my chances.

Anyway, I hope you all had a better night than I had.  That would at least be some consolation for me.  And I hope you all have a very good day.

TTFN

sleep-no-more-altered

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Annotations Pending

Well, against my prior intention, I’m writing this on my laptop today—meaning the laptop computer.

God, why can’t I just accept the fact that “laptop” is obviously a word referring to the computer on which I’m writing this, not the top of my personal lap as part of my body when in a particular configuration?  Surely, every person with the savvy to read this online knows what I mean when I say that I’m writing this on my laptop.  At the very least, it is extremely unlikely that they don’t.

And if, by bizarre chance, people are reading this some decades or centuries after it was written, and laptop computers are no longer a common item, or no longer exist at all, there will probably be scholars who will put little annotations in to tell those future readers what we meant back in this era by “laptop” when we’re referring to writing on something.  It’ll be like those side notes when one is reading Shakespeare, notes that let everyone know—who doesn’t already—that “bodkin” for instance, as used in Hamlet’s soliloquy, means dagger, and thus, someone making his quietus with a bare bodkin is killing himself with a dagger.

Somehow, though, I have a terrible time not clarifying that I mean “the computer” when I refer to my laptop.  There’s an actual tension, a feeling of significant stress involved.  I suppose some might call it an anxiety, but that doesn’t feel quite like the correct term.  I don’t really feel worried or in any sense scared or threatened, not even at a social level or whatever it might be.  I feel as though it would be wrong not to clarify when there are multiple meanings of the word “laptop”, in case someone might have the bizarre misunderstanding that I’m writing on the top of my actual lap.

It’s pretty stupid, and it really gets to me sometimes.  It makes me want to peel the skin off my head by grabbing my hair and pulling my scalp apart, it’s so frustrating.

To be clear, I don’t really want to do that.  I don’t know, frankly, that I would even have the strength to do it, since skin is tougher than it seems, and also the skin of the face, at least, is pinned down to the underlying tissue by an intricate and interwoven network of tough fibrous tissue*, causing it to follow the movements of the facial muscles, allowing expression (a resource often wasted on me).

Though, of course, the scalp is much more loosely held to the skull and tissue under it, so that part would be peelable if one were strong enough to make the initial split.

I’m not really that tempted to try, but when I get so tense and stressed out (I almost wrote “sense and tressed out”) I can imagine myself reaching up to grab the sides of my head by the hair and yanking steadily, and it feels as though it would be some form of release.

It’s a bit like slapping oneself in the face when one does something stupid—though in that case, I do actually slap myself in the face.  The trick is to do it hard enough that you actually get a real punishment for your own stupidity and thus might actually learn something.  It’s not quite as intense as banging one’s head against a wall or against one’s desk (which I also do when I’m stressed out enough), but the latter is not really so much a punishment as it is just a way of trying to overwhelm stress with pain.

Or, well, it’s something like that.  Even as I wrote that, I realized it didn’t quite seem like an accurate description, or at least not the full answer.  Sometimes I think it’s just a form of giving in to my desire to lash out when I’m very stressed, but to do so against the only person I have a right to harm.  I’ve at times given myself actual swollen, black and blue (initially subcutaneously red with extravasated blood) marks on my forehead, but usually it’s not that bad.

I don’t want to give myself a concussion or anything, after all.  My brain is dysfunctional enough, and I don’t want to lose the few good things it can do.  There are other ways I can hurt myself when necessary.

Speaking of the good things, I keep trying to get myself back into writing fiction or something, maybe, just to see if it makes me feel any better, which it had a tendency to do in the past.  That’s a minor part of why I decided to bring my laptop today (the other laptop is with me whenever I sit down, so it requires no effort to bring it).  But I don’t know; I can’t feel any excitement or anticipation about HELIOS or Changeling in a Shadow World, or DFandD, or Outlaw’s Mind, or any other stories, and I certainly don’t think anyone else is excited about the prospect of those stories being written, either.

I don’t know what to do**.

As usual, of course, I have written much more quickly on the laptop computer than on the smartphone, which should come as no surprise.  But I don’t know if it has any effect on my style, or on how good a post comes of it.  I would welcome your evaluations, of course, but I know it’s hard to judge from one instance.  It may be a better or worse post than usual for reasons that have nothing to do at all with my choice of tools for writing it.  There are too many variables at play.

A reasonably controlled experiment could be done, with me writing a long series of posts, randomly (perhaps) alternating between smartphone and laptop and asking readers to evaluate each post for quality without knowing which kind the post was.  But that would be far more trouble than it’s worth, and I don’t mind subjective and non-rigorous impressions, if anyone wants to give them in the comments below.

I don’t really have much more to say today.  I just feel stressed and tense and frustrated and angry and just…squeezed by reality.  I feel almost as if there’s some metaphorical, inverted mountain suspended above me that I have to hold up or it will crash down and, I don’t know, bury me, crush me, impale me on its peak…something like that.  I don’t think it will harm anyone else; there’s no one else for my collapse to harm, really, certainly not in any deep way.  So far, I’m just holding it up out of habit, and because people will say that “you’ve got to try to hold on” or things along those lines.  But it’s tiring and it’s stressful and it’s wearing me out at the same time that it’s pissing me off.

Anyway, this is all pointless.  Sorry to waste your time.  I hope you haven’t been too disappointed.  And I also hope you have a good day.

*The skin of the palms of the hand and the working surface of the fingers is even more tightly and intricately bound to the underlying tissue; this contributes to the way one’s fingers wrinkle up when your hands soak in water for a while.  The soles of your feet and bottoms of your toes are similarly tacked down, though it serves a slightly different “purpose” there.  Dissection of the palms to look at the underlying muscle and tendons and so on is a laborious process in Gross Anatomy class.  Ditto with the face.

**Am I always in the dark, living in a powder keg and giving off sparks?  Probably not.  That was a pretty good song, though, wasn’t it?

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“Father snores as his wife gets into her dressing gown”

It’s Wednesday now, in case you were wondering.  Yesterday during the day I felt very much as grim and gloomy as my blog post in the morning, if a bit less angry.  In the evening, though, I stuck to my plan to walk back from the train to the house, and I talked to my sister on the phone while I did.  That’s more than seventeen miles of walking in the past few days.  It helped that it wasn’t raining at all, and the evening temperature, while far from cool, was not as hot as it has been.  Also, there was something of a breeze blowing.

My new boots are working well; I had no blistering or worsening of pain or anything of that sort.  Only after I took them off did I feel that there was a very slight irritation in a spot on the ball of my left foot.  There’s no visible sign of anything, and since I’m going to be resting from long walking today, it should have ample time to recover from whatever minor issues it has.  I seem to be having, just maybe, a tiny bit less back pain‒or at least fewer bad exacerbations‒than usual, as I get in better condition and (I think) lose a bit of weight.

It’s a good start, but I’m a long way from being the way I wish I were, in either direction.

We had a heck of a day in the office yesterday, being very busy and with many successful events, so to speak.  That’s always a good thing, at least ceteris paribus.  There were, however, several times when I got stressed out* because of people not following the protocols or leaving out stupid things‒like a customer’s zip code, for instance!  Sometimes they don’t even put down the state, or they’ll write down what’s supposed to be the email address, but it seems to be only whatever must have come before the @ symbol.  It’s as if they imagine there’s really only one email server.  I know Gmail is big, but there are many others.

These people are almost all younger than I am.  They have grown up with this technology firmly in place all around them.  How is it that they can fail to know the basics of email?  It’s frankly astonishing.

I just realized it’s my father’s birthday today.  He knew more about computers than I, right up until the day he died, probably, but then again, that was his profession.  He certainly used email before anyone else I know.

He was a smart guy, and he worked hard.  If he had grown up somewhere other than a blue collar factory town, he probably would have done even more than he did with computers.  Of course, it’s hard to tell for sure; when you change one thing, usually many other things change as well.

He did all right, anyway.  He and my Mom, who had known each other since well before they were married, stayed together until he died.  I think it must be really nice to have one constant, steady and reliable companion for a lifetime.  Of course, in such situations, it’s often the case that, once one dies, the other soon follows‒which was the case with my parents.  That’s not a horrible thing, really, to be able to wind down and cash out, once one’s spouse is gone, because life just isn’t worth nearly as much without them.  In some ways it’s touching.

Living alone, and not having any good skill or ability at making new friends or new connections, is not touching.  Then again, most people are just frustrating and bizarre.  I don’t exclude myself from this judgment, even from my own point of view.  I usually find myself terribly unpleasant.  At least I’m familiar with myself, but that doesn’t necessarily mean I like me.  Most of the time I don’t.  And yet, as I’ve said before, there’s certainly no one else I’d rather be.  So I’m in a difficult circumstance.

There are, it seems, ways around all that.  But they require some courage, so it’s taking me time and effort to work my way up to it.  I certainly have no interest in trying to maintain the status quo in the absurd and pointless game of my daily existence.

People follow all these rules and customs and mores, but they’re all just ad hoc inventions, just crap that fell together all on its own.  And yet, people treat them as if they are important, just as they seem to think of the people in government as somehow different from themselves.  Would that it were the case.  But the people in government‒making laws, making decisions, making judgments, participating in bureaucracies and the like‒are all just flesh and blood creatures that eat and excrete like every other living thing.

Don’t be in too much awe of any human, or frankly of any other kind of creature, real or imaginary.  You would be a fool, in general, to revere any government figure much.  Most of them are narcissists and opportunists of one stripe or another, because that’s the sort of person for whom roles in government tend to select.  Often they are also self-righteous and hypocritical.  And yet, other humans beings who are no brighter (or dimmer) than their so-called leaders will follow and sometimes come near to worshiping such people.  It’s all rather pathetic.

Humans‒you can’t live with ’em, you can’t eat ’em (too many germs and toxins).

Anyway, that’s enough for now.  I’ll give you a break after yesterday’s quite long post.  All bitterness aside, I honestly wish you well, and I hope you have a good day.

And Happy Birthday, Dad, wherever you may be, even if you are nowhere but in the past.  You did a pretty good job, and you certainly took what you did seriously, seeing fatherhood as a duty, not as a privilege.  Would that more people would have that sort of attitude.  It wouldn’t solve all the world’s problems, but I suspect it would make many things better.

*I even had minor chest pains at one point.

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Apologies, but this is a much darker and more erratic post than yesterday’s

I did not walk to the train this morning, because I’m planning to walk again this evening, on the way back to the house from the train station, and I don’t want to push things too fast and give myself frustrating negative outcomes.  Of course, I’m quite pleased to note that I’ve appeared to suffer no negative physical outcomes from yesterday’s walk at all.  My body appears to be adapting.

My body, that is, by which I mean everything outside the blood-brain barrier.  I guess I had a sort of negative outcome in that I got a slightly giddy feeling after my walk‒I think you could probably recognize that fact in my post yesterday, which was written starting right after the end of the walk.  It was a low-grade version of a runner’s high, which I used to get quite wonderfully when I was running regularly.  How is that a negative outcome, you ask?  Well, it’s quite temporary, unfortunately.  It lasted a few hours, but then, by the time work had been underway for a short time, it faded and disappeared, and I was left feeling thoroughly down and grumpy and gloomy.

I know that if I had eaten or drunk something with sugar or starch or whatever, it probably would have perked me up briefly‒probably more briefly than the exercise high‒and then I would have felt physically much worse afterward, and my energy would be lower, and I wouldn’t have the capacity to do my walks or anything of the sort for a while.  I know this; I’ve done those experiments, with as much rigor as I could bring to bear.  So, all the good feelings I have at ready disposal are short lived and have rotten side effects or withdrawal symptoms.

It’s quite frustrating.  But then again, nearly everything in my day to day life is frustrating.

For instance:  I’m almost due to renew my state ID card, and I tried to access the online system to do so, but it’s different than it was when I did it last (several years ago).  Though technology has advanced a great deal since then, the website for renewing IDs and driver’s licenses in Florida has become shit.  Anyone out there with any inside input with the people responsible for such things, let them know:  that website is shit.  SquareSpace could’ve done a better website for you 12 years ago, and I know because I used them.

Anyway, it also asked various questions to try to confirm one’s identity, but they were bizarrely worded, making it unclear what the correct answer should be, and also asked about things like what previous address was associated with this ID.  I think my previous address was at the work release center‒I certainly haven’t moved since then except to the house where I am now, because if I move (at least within Florida) I’m supposed to register my new address with the state, since, you know, I’m an ex-felon and they need to know where I am in case I’m prone to further felonies and all that bouncing bullshit.  But I wasn’t sure about the correct address, or the right answer to some other questions, and so wasn’t able to log into the system.

I swear, I am often tempted just to buy a bunch of bottles of charcoal lighter fluid and go to the Palm Beach courthouse, sit in front of it like a good Buddhist monk, pour the fluid over myself and set myself on fire.  Maybe I could livestream it with a message and a protest about things like the extortionate nature of the plea bargain system, and the absurdity of a criminal justice system that allows private lawyers of any kind‒which means that the affluent-to-wealthy will always have a better chance of being found not guilty, while the more or less indigent* are given to the hands of competent and hard-working but overworked and underpaid public defenders**.  Then, to save themselves the trouble of actually having to prove a case in court, the prosecutors offer some “plea bargain”, which includes the threat (yes, of course it is a threat) that if it’s not accepted they’ll pursue the greatest possible charges with the greatest possible penalties they can achieve.

And, of course, if the prosecutor loses this game of chicken, and they somehow fail to convince a jury that even one of their thirty or forty dubious-to-confected charges is true, then what?  They lose a case.  Part of the job.  You win some, you lose some.  Next!

But if the poor (in multiple senses) defendant loses****, well, he could face a minimum of fifteen years, by statute.  He would have no chance to see his kids before they were in their twenties!*****  So, though he has never willfully or willingly attempted to traffic in controlled substances in any sense, but was honestly (if naively and possibly “neurodivergently”) trying to help other people suffering from chronic pain, he decides to take the plea bargain, which will include the extensive time he has already served, and fuck what the legal system or society at large thinks of him.

He knows he’s innocent, that he had no mens rea whatsoever.  He knows when he was in that pain management practice that he even asked the PBSO officer who did inspections if there was anything that the practice for which he was working was doing wrong or what have you, because he didn’t want that.  He just wanted to try to help people who were in pain.  The deputy made no mention of anything.

So he took the plea.  He did it because he was threatened…by the prosecutor.  And prosecutors have terrible power, a great deal of it‒they also work with the police, as colleagues‒and in the course of their business, they destroy countless lives, with little to no risk to themselves.  The only saving grace for them is that, for the most part, I think most of them really do mean well and want to do good.

But meaning well‒believing you are right‒can still be dangerous, often far more dangerous than psychopathic malevolence and selfishness (My own failures while meaning well, as described here, at least mainly blew up in my own face and didn’t do too much collateral damage).

Psychopaths tend to try not to cause themselves too much harm or pain.  It’s people who are moral and tend to moralize, who believe that they are right, who are willing to sacrifice the lives and comfort of others for some imagined “greater good”.  Assholes.  Idiots.  Pathetic, delusional, driverless semi-trucks full of explosives and rotting garbage is what they are.

Anyway, that’s enough for today.  I’m sorry it’s swerved so far from yesterday‒but yesterday’s post doesn’t seem to have been too popular, anyway.  No one much likes to read about relatively pleasant times or thoughts (me included); the dark stuff is much more gripping, and that’s true for good, sound, biological reasons.

So, just to keep my options open, I am ordering and buying a decent supply of charcoal lighter fluid.  It wouldn’t take very much to get the job done.

Have a good day.  Please, if you can’t do anything else for me, please, at least have a good day.  Somebody should have one.  Why not you?

*Which I was, certainly after waiting in jail 8 months before being bailed out.  Remember, I had been working locum tenens after “temporary disability” and chronic pain and failing to be able to keep up with a few other positions, due to my back injury/surgery and pretty bad depression, even for me.  I’d been off work for more than a year and a half, maybe longer, before restarting, and I ended up giving away a fair amount of whatever I brought in.  I was never great at managing my life and finances and stuff like that.  This may be related to my possible ASD, I don’t know.  I’ve never been very good at caring for myself, though I’m okay at doing it for other people.

**Prosecutor’s offices also tend to have much higher budgets than public defender’s offices, a fact which certainly does seem to fly in the face of the supposed “presumption of innocence” hypocritically spouted by Americans who have never had the experience of a misfiring justice system***.  Imbeciles.

***The fact that private defense attorneys are allowed in the criminal justice system, by the way, contributes to  the fact that there are far more black men in prison than is predictable by population rates.  It is well known that the mean and median wealth (not to be confused with income) of black people in America is much lower than that of white people, for clear and obvious historical reasons.  Well, wealth is what you dip into if you need to hire a top-notch defense attorney‒very few people have the income to afford such things.  So, the criminal justice system, by allowing private defense attorneys, stacks the deck even further against the economically impaired, which disproportionately includes all minorities, and particularly black people on average, even if there is no active racism in any of the people or in the system itself.

****Because when a prosecutor throws all sorts of counts of things at the defendant, charging any prescription someone writes, for instance, as a count of “trafficking”, then jurors are going to be inclined to think that, if there’s so much smoke, there must be at least a little fire, no matter how much it flies in the face of the character the defendant has shown his entire life (jurors don’t know about the stage-effect smoke machines working behind the scenes).  And when the defendant has a bit of a wooden face and a monotone voice and isn’t good at expressing his emotions or even recognizing them in real time, but tends to be analytic and logical and rather esoteric, he’s unlikely to elicit sympathy from jurors.  So I was told even by my own attorney and her supervisor, among other things.

*****The idiotic irony here is that, despite the plea bargain, he still hasn’t seen his children so far since then, anyway‒by their wish and request.  So, he (I) might as well have just gone to trial, even if it might have meant spending fifteen or more years in prison.  What’s the difference?  Prison was not significantly worse than my current life.  I might even have written more books and stories there.  Maybe they wouldn’t ever be published, but that wouldn’t do much to change the number of people who have read them.  It would be no loss to the world, certainly.

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G’mar chatimah tovah

It’s Monday, and it’s Yom Kippur, but I am not only going to work, I am actually writing this on Monday morning, because I have a hard time breaking these sorts of patterns.  It’s as difficult for me to force myself to write a post a day early‒on Sunday in this case‒as it is for me not to write a post (or, previously, not to write 3 to 4 pages on a draft of fiction) on a workday morning.  I don’t know whether to feel proud or embarrassed by this attribute, but it can be frustrating at times, and at other times, it can be useful.  Those two things aren’t mutually exclusive.

I am fasting today, however, and I began the fast probably shortly after sundown last night.  I wasn’t paying close attention to the time.  As I’ve discussed previously, the fast entails abstinence from food as well as anything to drink.  That latter bit is in some ways nice, because I tend to have to use the bathroom frequently*, and often have to do so while en route to work.

This is one advantage the trains have over buses: they have bathrooms.  But using them is often a frustrating process, because it’s frequently the case that one or more of the bathrooms is in use (or locked for staff use, as I suspect, though that seems very inappropriate) and I have to go from car to car to find one that’s free.  Of course there are other issues with any public lavatory, but those go without saying.

Anyway, with minimal PO liquid intake, other than what is needed to accompany aspirin and other daily meds and whatnot, I shouldn’t spend nearly as much time running back and forth to the bathroom.  That’s not the main purpose of the fast, of course; it’s merely a silver lining.

It will also be nice not to have to buy anything for lunch today, and not to buy any beverages as well.  Sometimes when I fast, I feel like I don’t know what to do with myself.  I often eat and drink during most days just to pass the time, just to give myself something to do, and to give myself a brief, reliable prod to the reward circuits in my brain.  I certainly almost never eat out of true hunger.  In fact, often, the longer it’s been since I’ve eaten, the less hungry I feel.  I also tend to feel sharper, and a bit more alert.  But I get bored, or tense, or something, and food (and water) is a momentary relief switch.

Whatever.  The point is, I’ll be doing without food and water today, but I am working, though I shouldn’t be.  I shouldn’t be doing anything that I’m going to be doing.  Saturday was the first day of autumn, and Friday was September 22nd**, as I’ve discussed, and I wanted to at least try to use those facts as impetus to take some kind of action…but I don’t want to screw up my coworker’s planned family outing this coming weekend.  At least I didn’t have to work this last Saturday.

If there were a longer time span between now and when he was going, I think I would have been forced to ignore the fact; after all, there’s only so much I can keep putting things off just to avoid the inconvenience of others.  Two weeks extra may at least give me time to make more preparations‒and who knows, maybe it’ll allow time for some superhero to come and save me, or at least to change my mind.

Ha ha.  I’m joking.  That’s extremely unlikely to happen in any form or sense.  If that were going to happen, it’s had plenty of time to do so.

There has been a slight, coincidentally autumnal, turn in the weather this weekend, in that Saturday it was overcast and rainy, and it rained overnight, and there was a bit more wind.  It’s still hot, but a few degrees less so that it has been.  Sunday was warmer and brighter than Saturday, but there was at least still a bit of wind.

My back/hip/leg pain has been flaring these last few days, unfortunately.  It’s always there to some degree, but it’s annoying when it acts up.  Maybe the fast will help reduce it a bit by the end of the day.  I can’t remember if it’s done that in the past‒which probably means it has not.  If it did, if it does, I might be inclined to fast much longer.  Of course, that would be a fast related to food, not to water.  A water fast isn’t going to make one feel better for very long.  It might have other benefits, of course, but that’s not directly related to my pain level…though it is indirectly related.

In any case, I don’t expect anything to give me very much benefit.  But I may try to extend the food fast at least a little bit, even past today.  I could save some money.  And it’s nice not to have to clean dishes or throw away packaging or things like that.  Life is full of so many stupid little inconveniences, all of which add up to a truly miserable experience unless there’s something to counter-balance them.  For me, unfortunately, there is little to no such counter-weight anymore, and there hasn’t been for quite a long time.

All right, well…that’s enough for now.  If any of you are fasting for Yom Kippur, you probably are reading this after the holiday, so I hope you had a good one.  It’s not a happy holiday necessarily, but it’s not sad or mournful, either.  In some ways, it’s an attempt to make a fresh start in a new year, and that’s probably a good thing for anyone.

I don’t expect a fresh start for myself.  I’m not even sure what such a thing would entail.  But it would be nice just to stop feeling rotten (physically, mentally, socially, morally, and so on).  I don’t have high hopes…but then, I wouldn’t, would I?yom kippur

*You can ask my brother and sister; I was a real trial on long-distance road trips of any kind, because I needed to go to the bathroom so often…sometimes more often than there were available bathroom facilities, so I spent a certain portion of my youth relieving myself near the shoulder of many a road.

**Among other things, the night Frodo left Bag End in The Lord of the Rings.

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When the train comes, should I run or hide my head?

Here I go again, wasting your time and mine with another daily blog post that accomplishes nothing for anyone.  I hope you enjoy it.

I arrived at the train station just now, literally seconds before the train prior to the one I planned to take arrived.  This is because I got up even earlier than I usually do, so I figured, “What the heck”, and decided just to get going.  I had some old trash and knickknacks I wanted to make sure to get out in today’s garbage pickup, anyway, and since I was awake anyway, I got up very early to take care of some of it.  I’m clearing out as much clutter as I can, throwing out unnecessary clothes, old Halloween costume stuff, beat up old books I’ll never read, magazines, tools…all sorts of stuff, things that just take up space and make a mess.  I gave my folding massage chair at work to my coworker who has a bad back‒it doesn’t really do very much for me, anyway.  And I’m going to give my colored pencils and such to one of my coworkers who has a young son who has used them when he was here with his father.

Oh, right, I was talking about the train.  Sorry.  As I was saying, I arrived at the station just in time to see the first northbound train pulling in, and my strong impulse was to rush to try to catch it.  I probably could have done so.  It would have required just breaking into a jog for a bit, and hoping the conductor saw me and wasn’t in too much of a hurry‒the train was, technically, slightly early.

However, I decided to fight that impulse, partly because I already get so sweaty, and partly because I didn’t want to have to stress myself out with that somewhat irrational impulse to catch the earliest train.  So, I strolled up along the northbound side of the station, figuratively gritting my teeth, watching the train come to a halt and then depart.

That turned out to be very stressful in and of itself, and I’m still stressed out about it now, especially as more people arrive at the track to wait for the next train, which is sure to be more crowded than the first.  I also can’t seem to help thinking about the possibility that this next train might run late, and that would mean it would probably be more crowded still, and also, just, well…that it would be more of a loss of time than I will already experience from not getting on the initial train.  Not that I have any urgent need to get anywhere very soon.  Work doesn’t actually start for five more hours.  But once I’ve decided to get up and get there, being delayed is just extremely stressful.

I get the impression that my stress doesn’t really show on my face or in my demeanor, any more than my depression does, because nobody seems to notice either thing, though I feel as if they must be glaring and blaring like a fire truck with lights and sirens going at maximum level.  Evidently this is not so.  I think I could probably douse myself in lighter fluid and rubbing alcohol and set myself on fire in the middle of the office, and people would just say, “Hey, Doc, how’s it goin’?”*  Or I could go to the roof of the highest nearby building or parking structure and step out onto the ledge, and anyone passing would just say to me something like, “Isn’t that a great view?”

Oh, well.  It doesn’t matter, really.

I am possibly going to push some of my “plans” back by about two weeks, unfortunately.  I have this weekend off, but the following weekend, when I am scheduled to work, my coworker and his wife are taking their daughter to Orlando, and if I weren’t available, he might feel that he ought to cancel that vacation to cover for me.  I don’t want that.

There’s always something, isn’t there?

[Okay, my train arrived almost on time just now.  I’m still torn about having skipped the earlier one, but I can’t change that now.]

Anyway, the weekend after that is, more or less, on or around my Dad’s birthday.  I guess that’s both more and less momentous than Bilbo’s and Frodo’s birthday, and certainly it is more directly personal to me.

I don’t really know what I’m talking about here, sorry.  I’m kind of all over the place.  And yet, I’m still going nowhere‒figuratively speaking, anyway.  I mean, okay, literally, I’m on a commuter train heading north at quite a decent speed.

Of course it could be that this is also, as Kenny Rogers sang in The Gambler, a train bound for nowhere.  I’ve always thought there was some pretty good poetry in that song:  “We were both too tired to sleep”, “We took turns a-starin’ out the window at the darkness, but boredom overtook us”, “If you don’t mind me saying, I can see you’re out of aces”, “Because every hand’s a winner, and every hand’s a loser, and the best that you can hope for is to die in your sleep”, “And somewhere in the darkness, the gambler, he broke even”.

Not Shakespeare level stuff, maybe, but still, there were some nice turns of phrase in it.  The chorus, ironically, has some of the weakest lyrics in the song, in my opinion.  They aren’t bad, but the verses are better.

Jeez, Louise, why am I writing about the lyrics of an old Kenny Rogers song?  It’s not a bad song, of course, but how have I come to be writing about it in a blog I originally started as a promotional venue for my fiction?  It’s bizarre.  I don’t quite understand it.

Of course, there’s nothing truly mysterious about the whole thing; it’s just the product of stochastic, drunkard’s walk events.  It has no directionality, no purpose, no meaning.  But it’s still just quietly mind-boggling.  What a catastrophically banal, monumentally tiny, outrageously boring shit-show my life has become.  It’s enough to make you laugh until you choke…or maybe to yawn until you choke.

Anyway, that’ll do for today, I think.  I hope you have a nice day.  Try not to let my words and thoughts infect you with my way of looking at things.  It’s not anything I recommend, and I certainly don’t think I have any particularly wise insights; I can’t even manage my own mind.

tri rail train dramatic

*”Doc” is what people at the office call me.

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Songs, weather, depression/pain, AI, the subjectivity of time, and the apparent inevitability of entropy

It’s Monday, Monday, like the Mama’s and the Papa’s sang.  I’ve never quite known what that song was about in any deep sense, since I’ve never paid too much attention to the lyrics, other than “Monday morning couldn’t guarantee / that Monday evening you would still be here with me.”  Could it be about the tenuousness of joy or something?  Maybe it’s a sort of Buddhist message.  Of course, no morning can guarantee (so to speak) that by the evening anything at all will be the same, apart from the fundamental laws of physics (whatever they may ultimately be).

One wonders:  has Monday morning, in some anthropomorphic sense, ever guaranteed anything to anyone?  It’s a weird notion.  Maybe I’m thinking too much about this.

Anyway, I’ve always thought the song had a pleasant melody, and the harmonies were good, as tended to be the case with that group.  I like California Dreamin’ better, and not just because the meaning is a little less opaque.  However, I do have sort of the opposite feeling to the singer(s) of the latter song.

In that song, they lament the fact that all the leaves are brown and the sky is gray, and they dream of being in California, “safe and warm”, even on a winter’s day.  Well, I’ve been for plenty of winter walks here in south Florida when I didn’t need to wear a jacket or long sleeves, and could go barefoot, and could even have worn shorts if it weren’t for the fact that my lower legs are kind of scarred up and embarrassing.

But growing up, I’ve always liked autumn best of all the seasons.  Halloween is my favorite holiday, and winter, frankly, was never too hard a problem.  At least I could enjoy a hot cup of coffee in a way that I just can’t here in Florida.  Here, I’m sitting motionless at the train station and literally dripping with sweat just from…I don’t know, just from being alive, I guess (I don’t recommend it).  And then, most of the time, trains and buses and stores are all over air conditioned, so when you’re sweaty from being outdoors you feel seriously chilly when you enter them.  And then, when you go back outside, your glasses instantly mist up, because their surfaces are so cold and the air is so humid.

I know, I know, these are not exactly the trials of Hercules.  But they are annoyances to which I wish I had never chosen to subject myself.  Now, however, as the man said, “I am in blood, stepped in so far that, should I wade no more, to turn back would be as difficult as go o’er”.  Mind you, I have never done anything as horrible as Macbeth did in the play, but that doesn’t mean the metaphor can’t still apply.  One of the brilliant aspects of Shakespeare’s writing is that his lines can be used not merely in context, but to examine, explore, and describe so many things in life.

Anyway, knowing me, I probably would be just as unhappy had I stayed up north somewhere.  I think the fundamental problem is an internal one‒well, I mean, that’s clear and plain, since I started having trouble with dysthymia and depression long before I ever moved south.  The problem is with me.  I am faulty.  And when the problem is fundamental to oneself, one cannot avoid it by going elsewhere, because, as many have pointed out, from Ralph Waldo Emerson* on, “No matter where you go, there you are.”

If one’s own nature is the problem‒or some aspect of it, anyway, or some damage that is permanent, a wound that goes too deep, that has taken hold‒there is little that one can do about it.  If there is no therapy that seems to help, whether medical or psychological, and there are no lands to the west in which to seek healing, what is one to do?

Of course, if one is convinced that the odds are, in the long run, that the good things in life will outweigh the pain (of all kinds), then one can choose simply to bear it as best one can.  After all, pain, of all kinds, is an inevitable (or at least inevitably potential) part of life, for good, sound biological and ecological and statistical reasons.  Pain keeps organisms alive, when it’s working best.  But it can reach a point where it’s not functioning optimally, where it’s not producing a net gain‒physically, psychologically, “spiritually”, or in any other clear way.  Then, what does one do?

I’m speaking mostly rhetorically here, but I guess if anyone thinks they have an idea I haven’t discovered, they are welcome to share.  I have thought long and hard about these issues, and I’ve read a lot of related material, and have tried many forms of treatment, but I can’t claim to have learned everything that could possibly be known about them.  I’m reasonably smart, but I have had finite time and finite energy and finite intelligence with which to explore.

Even a “deep learning” AI can often only “learn” so much, so quickly, because it trains on immense streams of data, beyond any human bandwidth.  And adversarial systems like Alpha Zero learned to play Go even better than previous systems by playing millions or billions of games against itself to develop its skills.  A human who was capable of that concentration and memory and above all, who had the time might well become just as good.

But human experiential time takes much more real time than does that of an electronic system**.  Also, humans were not built to be able to focus solely on one thing for such scales of time and experience.  There’s no net survival or reproductive advantage to it on any kind of ordinary, biological level.

AI’s have to be built and actively maintained.  They cannot yet sustain themselves.  Perhaps, when they can, there will occur an evolutionary arms race between and among such AIs, happening much more quickly than human biological or even cultural evolution.  But it seems difficult to speculate about what the outcome of such evolution might be, once it took the bit in its teeth and ran where it “wanted” to go.

Well, it’s fairly easy to speculate, but that speculation is probably going to be fruitless.  The phase space of possible states is too big to explore easily.  Even an AI evolution that proceeded at maximal possible speed might only explore the tiniest fraction of all possible forms and functions of intelligence before entropy led it to fall apart, like the rest of the universe.

Of course, it’s not in principle impossible that an AI (or other intelligence) could figure out ways around even the heat death of the universe, or the Big Crunch, or a Big Bounce, or whatever the future of the universe ends up being.  Even if the universe turns out to have been simulated (which I doubt mightily but don’t rule out completely), the simulation has to exist in some outer reality, and the mathematics of entropy seems likely to apply in all possible realities.  There are simply more ways, in general***, for a set of things to be put together in such a way that they do not achieve any given function or meet any given criteria of order, than for them to be put together in ways that do.

Anyway, I don’t know how I got on that topic.  I tend toward entropy in the subject of my thoughts as well as in reality, it seems.  (This is not ironic, by the way, lest someone mislabel it as such.  This is actually quite appropriate, and is a rather pleasing concordance.)

That’s enough for me for Monday morning.  I hope the morning is very good to you, and that Monday evening is even better.

time or not cropped png

*He didn’t put it in those exact words, but he certainly criticized his friend, Henry David Thoreau, for going into the woods to find himself.

**Which leads to potentially horrifying speculations about what it might be like for an artificial general intelligence trying to have interactions with biological intelligences and having to wait between interactions‒times that could be the subjective equivalent of a human waiting for decades or centuries or even millennia‒just to “hear” what the human says next at normal human speed.  Orson Scott Card explored a little of this notion in the interactions between Ender and “Jane” in the brilliant Speaker for the Dead, the first sequel to Ender’s Game.

***Here I’m using “in general” mainly in the physicist’s sense, meaning something that applies to every situation of a given kind, everywhere, as opposed to the more common, colloquial meaning which is roughly synonymous with “usually”.