Personal

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The brain may devise laws for the blog, but a hot temper leaps o’er a cold decree.

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, of course, and it is also the 2nd day of October.  Those two things don’t always coincide‒that probably goes without saying‒but in this case (and roughly one seventh of all October 2nds) they do.

It’s also Yom Kippur, and though if I were truly observant of the holiday, I would not be writing this or going to work, I still want to wish anyone out there observing (it’s not really celebrating) the day a very good and positive one (but if you’re observant, so to speak, you’re unlikely to see this until after the holiday ends).

And, of course, I have begun my fast.  That’s not very impressive so far, mind you; I just haven’t eaten anything since yesterday afternoon at about 4:30, which is not too much longer than usual at this time of day.  Of course, I feel fine, energy and hunger-wise, because I don’t usually eat anything by this hour.  I will be drinking water‒fizzy most of the time, but still water, even though it’s not still water, ha ha‒and possibly diet soda, but that’s it.  I have to have water, because I take a fair amount of medicine for my pain and such, and many of those things should not be sitting in an unlubricated stomach.

It’s not really that hard for me to hold off on eating once I commit to it.  Throughout high school at least, and part of college, I never ate breakfast and rarely ate lunch.  I was skinny, but my mind was as sharp as it’s ever been (though of course I am “smarter” now than I was, because I know a lot more, and that’s not just knowledge, but skills and habits as well).

I also had plenty of energy back then.  I’ve spoken before about how this makes biological sense.  In our ancestral environment, a lack of recent food would be associated with the need or urge to seek food out, and that requires alertness and motivation and energy for a hunting species or even a gathering species, and certainly for one that does both.

Anyway, I really hope not only that this fast helps to clear my mind a bit and to calm my “spirit”, but also that it helps reset my body somewhat.  At the very least, it would be good to get back to that high school (and college) tendency of spending less of my time eating.  It’s gotten to the point that what I do in my “spare time” is often just eating, for momentary pleasure, for distraction, for avoiding boredom, for escape, etc.  But, of course, that tends to lead to a negative cycle, and I feel physically worse and worse about myself afterward.

So, hopefully, I will cross the activation-energy barrier today and head on through towards a more stable plane (or plain) of mentality, and of metabolism.  I don’t know for sure how long the journey will last, or where I will end up, but I will probably keep you all posted.  Watch this space, as they say.

It would be very nice if I successfully get some degree of spiritual insight from this fasting process‒whatever that even means*‒but whatever happens, until the end, I will probably continue to post here every work day.

In the meantime, I’ve at least put in some absurd footnotes as tangential thoughts struck me while writing.  I even did one of my footnote-within-a-footnote thingys, which is always fun (for me, anyway).  But you have to be careful with such digressions;  it’s a bit like writing a computer program with lots of subroutines embedded within other subroutines embedded within yet other subroutines.  The potential for errors that confound your logic (and that make your program freeze, in the programming case) is quite high.

Anyway, G’mar chatima tova, everyone.  I hope you have a good day.  I think I will, too.  And if I uncover any special psychic powers though this fasting process, well…I probably wouldn’t say anything about it.  But who knows, I might.

TTFN

*I’m referring to “spiritual insight”, not “this process”.  I’m pretty sure I know what “this process” means in this particular case**.

**Actually, that’s a pretty unambiguous term nearly any time you might use it.  You might not understand what this process is, but you probably understand what “this process” means in most cases, assuming a decent command of English***.

***That’s a command of the English language, not command of the English.  Commanding the English, and the rest of the inhabitants of the British Isles, has historically been a tricky business, including by the English themselves.  Even the Romans had issues with the “English” and when it came to Scotland, well, Emperor Hadrian just said, “Screw it, put a wall up to try to keep them there up North, I don’t wanna have to deal with those crazy bastards”.  He probably said it in Latin**** though.

****I can’t even imagine the nightmare of trying to conjugate all the Latin verbs and so on in my imaginary quote from Hadrian.

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“What hears with their ear? The abyss between the stars.”

Well, I did bring the mini lapcom with me when I left work yesterday.  Nevertheless, I am writing this blog post on my smartphone.  There are specific, calculated reasons for this, but I’m not going to bore you with them, because they are only relevant to me.  But please, do tell me if you notice that this change has affected the quality of my writing, for better or for worse.

Okay, that’s that out of the way.  Now, on to more interesting things.  It’s the first day of October, my favorite month, although the reasons it has always been my favorite month are almost all effaced here in south Florida, in the current state of my “life”.  Still, it is the month of Halloween, and of Cooger and Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show, and all of that, so it still holds its position as number one month, as well as being the eighth and the tenth.

A few years ago‒it feels longer‒I set myself the task of writing a “short” story to honor the month of October (though the story didn’t have to be set in the month of October).  That led to Hole for a Heart, which is not my darkest story*, but my sister says it’s my scariest story.  I’m sure that’s pretty subjective, but it warms my own heart-shaped hole at least a bit to have written a quite scary story.

I wish I had the gumption to write something new again for this month.  If I did, the lapcom would be better for writing fiction than the smartphone, though the latter might keep me from going too ham on the whole thing, i.e., writing too much.

But I have a sort of feeling of learned helplessness about writing fiction, as well as about music (writing it and even just playing it) and art and science and everything else I do.  I put a lot of energy into things with almost no return, certainly not one commensurate to the effort involved.  Eventually, I just feel like an exhausted rat lying in the bottom of his cage, knowing that no matter what choice he makes or action he takes, he will be randomly shocked and otherwise tormented.

It’s not that he doesn’t care about the pain or the other stuff, he just knows the pain will come no matter what, and that has taken almost all the possible joy from being creative.  This is especially so when the creativity goes almost entirely unnoticed, like a sculpture made on the ISS and then promptly launched from there into deep space without anyone having seen it but a handful of astronauts.

I don’t know what it might take to rekindle (no pun intended) my writing or other creative sparks.  Maybe if I just had less pain it would do.  Unfortunately, the pain seems just to add new flavors and textures to itself over time; it doesn’t diminish.

I guess maybe that could be considered creative in a sense.

It’s a curious sort of irony, but I know that writing fiction seemed to stave off my depression, at least a little.  One might think it would be exhausting, writing 1400 to 2000 words every workday (except when editing/rewriting, which was its own grind).  Maybe eventually it was, and that was what led me to stop finally, since there was no real reward to it after a while, since almost nobody buys the books and/or reads them.

I don’t regret having written my stories, of course, nor my songs, nor any drawings I’ve made, nor my blog(s).  But over time I’ve had rapidly diminishing relative returns on the fiction writing and on the music and such.  The returns on this blog, relative to the effort, are shrinking more slowly, and occasionally there seems even to be an uptick, but the overall trend of basically everything except my personal knowledge** is downward.

I don’t know when the y-axis overall will cross the origin‒for many particular things, I think it has long since done so‒but I suspect it’s a finite distance, and I’m not decelerating, so I will cross it eventually.

Sometimes‒indeed, pretty much every day and twice on Sundays, ha ha‒I think to myself the metaphorical equivalent of “Where is that fucking x-axis?  It’s time for this to be finished already.”  If I had a goal, or anything significant toward which to look forward, things would probably be different.  But I don’t, and they aren’t.  That’s logic for you.

Well, anyway, this evening begins Yom Kippur and my fast.  Whatever you all are doing, I hope you have a good day.  I expect that I will be writing to you again tomorrow.

*That would be Solitaire.  I’ve told the story of that tale’s origin here before, I think, so I won’t get into it now.  If I am misremembering, let me know, and I’ll try to tell you the curious but not very exciting tale of a very dark tale indeed.  Oh, and if you want to read either of those stories but don’t want to do the Kindle thing, they are both featured in Dr. Elessar’s Cabinet of Curiosities, which is so far my only work you can get in Kindle, paperback, and even hardback!

**I do think that I am always learning new things and improving my understanding of things I knew from before, and I have a good memory, especially for things in which I’m interested.  That’s all well and good, and I’m glad of it, but knowledge in my head is only as good and as durable as my head is.  Eventually, as Roy Baty said, all these moments will be lost in time like tears in the rain.

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“I’m coming down fast, but don’t let me break you.”

I’m writing this post on my mini lapcom, as I call it, following the lesson of my own reflections yesterday on how my thumbs and whatnot are getting particularly sore and tender while writing on the smartphone, and it’s just easier writing with the “laptop” computer.

Of course, I don’t know what subject on which to write, but that’s typical, even usual for me, though I probably wouldn’t call it “normal”.  It’s just my personal, weird way of approaching this blog.  I suppose my subconscious is probably working on some of it ahead of time.  But I don’t really ever plan the posts, though occasionally I think about a general, vague kind of thing that I will discuss, like “What is that flat, circular thing that they throw in the Olympics called, again?”

Sorry, that was a really stupid joke.

There are some imminently upcoming matters that are of at least personal interest to me.  For instance, this is the last day of September in 2025.  Tomorrow begins October, which is generally my favorite month, though down here you can’t readily tell October from any other month.  But it’s still a good month, and it culminates in my favorite holiday (which is Halloween, in case that wasn’t clear).

Tomorrow at sundown also begins Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement.  Now, I clearly am not “observant” in any serious way, and I have no local (or other) community of any kind, but pretty much every year, unless I am physically sick, I fast for Yom Kippur, from sundown to sundown (at least).  One is supposed to fast from food and water, but since I’ve been in south Florida, I tend to skip the water fasting part; even at this time of year, it’s too easy to get dehydrated, and I sure as hell don’t want any more kidney stones if I can help it.

I may try to extend my fast this year, beyond just one day.  I’ve done it before.  Once I get past a certain point, it becomes comparatively easy just to continue not to eat, and for me, at least, that point of ease arrives pretty quickly.

Clearly one cannot fast indefinitely.  Or rather, if one does it for more than a certain length of time, one is likely to cease to eat permanently (if you take my meaning).  That’s not so bad a thing, really, and it doesn’t seem like a terrible way to die, to me, though I know a lot of people seem to think it especially horrible.

But the thing is, ketosis (which happens when fasting) is fairly pleasant, as I know from personal experience; the brain prefers to run on ketone bodies (in the sense that it runs better on them), and one’s hormonal status, such as one’s bouncing stress hormones related to insulin and glucose zooming up and down, at least become steadier when one has gone without food for a bit.

It’s not a mere coincidence that many religions and spiritual practices make use of fasts.  Up to a certain point, going without food for a while keeps one clear-headed, less emotional and distracted (once one gets over the initial hump of habit).  There are hypothetical biological reasons for this; an animal (such as a human, or even me) needs to be clear and sharp when food has been scarce, because they need to seek it.

I wouldn’t mind achieving some type of epiphany because of a fast.  I also have a (slim) hope that fasting might help some of my pain symptoms, at least the more recent ones.  I have a slight suspicion that maybe I have some form of psoriatic arthritis (though it certainly could be a “second year medical student syndrome” type of thing), since my fingers are particularly getting more painful and swollen lately*, and I have new tendonitis-type symptoms and even a proximal interphalangeal joint in my right middle finger that’s popping in and out as I move it.

The left hand is not as bad, but then again, I am right handed, so the right hand gets more use and stress—not least from controlling a computer mouse.  But I also get a lot of pain that has become more localized to my ileo-sacral region, shifting from side to side (and various other joints, not quite symmetrically) which is a common spot for psoriatic arthritis to affect.  So, it could be a somewhat atypical presentation of psoriatic arthritis (I do have a long-standing psoriasis-like rash).

More likely, though, all of these symptoms are merely part of my chronic pain syndrome, which leads to awkward postural adjustments that cause irregular strain on various joints and tendons, and it’s all made worse by the fact that I am way too fat (because I often eat for “comfort” when the pain is acting up, which is likewise often).  So, whether by one mechanism or another, perhaps fasting would help reset things.

I would not hope to get carried away and fast forever, but at least it would be nice not to die a fatty.  I guess we’ll see how everything goes.  But I am at least going to fast tonight until tomorrow night.  I have plenty of internal reserves on which to live, but I will keep taking my vitamins and pain medicine, of course.

That’s pretty much it for now.  I hope you all have a good day, and by tomorrow night I’ll have begun my fast.  If I keep it up, you’ll be able to follow my progress here.  It probably won’t be very interesting, but it might be.

Talk to you soon.

*That’s discouraged me from playing guitar very often, which is annoying in itself.

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I’m back and (nominally) going forth

It’s Monday again‒the last Monday of September in 2025.  This day, in this month, in this year, will never come again.  Or, well, even if the universe is one big closed time-loop of some kind, it seems quite clear that the scale of it is so huge that it may as well be eternity before this time will come around again.

And then, of course, even if it does come around again, it’s not as though we would be aware of it.  I’ve brought up before the notion of it being like people in movie on a DVD or Blu-ray or what have you; at each moment, the characters are, from their viewpoint, facing an uncertain future with many possibilities, and yet we the viewers know that exactly the same things will happen to them, and they will do exactly the same things each time we watch the movie.

That’s all old hat, I guess (a weird expression, but somehow it works).  But it is interesting to consider occasionally, and then to think about where (if anywhere) quantum indeterminacy fits into such a picture, from the possible “many worlds” Everettian version of quantum mechanics to things like superdeterminism on the other end and so on.

Whatever.  Sorry, I sometimes get a little swept up in such matters, and it probably gets quite boring for my readers.

Anyway, I did not go to work on Friday, and that’s why I didn’t write a blog post.  My apologies.  I felt truly horrible at a sort of pan-corporeal level; it almost felt as if I were experiencing the effects of some kind of poison (though I do not actually suspect such a thing, it’s just a way to convey my experience).  I think something “global” and metabolic was going on, though I guess it might have been some viral syndrome or other.  I’m not feeling completely better, even today.

I also scratched my right eye in my sleep apparently, on Thursday night, and that didn’t help matters.  Thankfully, the conjunctivae heal very quickly, so that’s mostly better now.  It’s still a little irritated, and so it is irritating, but that should just be a matter of time.

As for anything else, well…I have nothing, really.  That applies in more than one sense, now that I think about it.  But in this case, I mean that I have nothing interesting in mind about which to write.  It doesn’t help that I’m doing this on my smartphone, which makes writing slower and also a bit painful.

I really should bring the mini lapcom back to the house with me.  It’s so much easier to write on it‒it really allows me to be in some ways more fluent and fluid even than when speaking (although if you get me started on a subject in which I’m interested, I can talk at a rate that will make most people wish for me to get severe laryngitis).

It’s tough, however, to talk with my six pm self to get him to want to bring the lapcom, when he’s globally fatigued at the end of the workday.  Likewise, he has a hard time making excuses to my morning self, who is still fatigued and who has sore thumb bases.

Nominally, of course, they are “the same” person‒and taking “the person” as the four-dimensional self-reinforcing and self-sustaining pattern that I am, like a complex braid in spacetime, one would say that they are indeed the same person, or at least that they are parts of the same person.  But as an experiential matter, they are subjectively quite different, instantiating different states of body and mind.

Oh, they are obviously far more alike than unalike‒the morning me is closer by far in overall state to the afternoon me than to any state of any other person, let alone any other animal or what have you.  But still, the Buddhist (and similar systems of thought) notion of the lack of any fixed “self” riding around inside the mind like a homunculus is clearly correct.

There is no “center” of consciousness in the brain except for the whole brain itself.  But even that does not exist in a vacuum*.  Its state is influenced by the states of the rest of the body, of the environment, of the information coming into the person’s mind via the senses, and so on.

It’s a fucking complicated system, okay?  It’s the most complicated thing‒at least on this scale‒of which we are aware.  By that, I mean human (and humanoid) minds and brains in general, not mine specifically.  I have a fairly high judgment of my own intelligence, but I’m not as egotistical as all that.

Maybe I should try to be.  Maybe I should cultivate a sense of self-importance and specialness (why is that not “specialty”?) that would keep me feeling nominally good about myself.  But people like that are so boring and annoying and even pitiful.  I don’t know if going that way would be more triumph or surrender.  It would probably be the latter.

Oh, well.  Try to have a good day.

*Unless it’s a Boltzmann Brain, which is pretty unlikely.  You can know you’re not a Boltzmann Brain if you continue to exist for more than a few seconds before disintegrating into the global entropy of a nearly empty universe.  Although, of course, your memories of having existed for more than a few seconds may simply be false memories, a real possibility in principle in any Boltzmann Brain.  But contemplating those possibilities reveals that they would make baseless any notion we have of consistent physical laws, including the laws that allow for Boltzmann Brains (if they do, which is questionable), so it gets pointless pretty quickly.

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

Hello and good morning.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TTFN

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

**There was.

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

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

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My a pile of cheese for this post

I really don’t feel well today, either mentally or physically, so please excuse me if this post is sub par.  I would probably not even go to work today if it weren’t payroll day (Wednesday) but it is.  So, I am going to the office, but I don’t know if I’ll stay there the whole day.  If I still feel as wiped by the time I’m done with payroll‒and I usually feel more wiped at such a time‒then I will probably go back to the house.

Some of what’s causing me trouble is the new soreness and pain in my right forearm up to my elbow.  It’s some form of connective tissue inflammation, I’m nearly sure, but it’s not clear what the cause is.  I sort of hyperflexed my right wrist‒under my whole weight‒several weeks ago, but to my surprise, that didn’t even hurt the next day.  It’s not impossible for this to be some delayed, accumulated damage/inflammation, but it would be strange to have had no symptoms in between.  Still, that’s the only concrete and direct potential cause of which I am aware.

Whatever the case, even picking up lightweight things with my right hand is painful, and that’s frustrating because one thing I’m not uncomfortable saying about myself is that I’m pretty strong.  I do under- and overhand pull ups and dips as my main upper-body workout.  But there were certainly no pull-ups this morning.

Of course, I have most of my usual pains‒my back hasn’t stopped hurting for two decades, so there’s no reason to think it would stop now‒including the arthralgia in the base of my thumbs.  Nevertheless, this week I’ve been writing my posts on my smartphone because carrying the lapcom feels too daunting.

My apologies; I doubt that anyone reads this blog merely to follow my litany of physical and psychological complaints.

I honestly don’t know why anyone in particular reads anything I write.  I appreciate it, of course.  Thank you.  But I don’t understand it very well.  If I didn’t have to interact with myself, I wouldn’t.

Actually, I guess I can understand why someone might read my fiction.  Many people like reading sci-fi, fantasy, and horror stories, and I’m at least willing to admit that I like my own stories, so it’s not insane that someone else might.  I actually know three people who have read at least some of my (published) stories and enjoyed them, and one of them‒my sister‒is still alive (I don’t think liking my stories is what killed the other two, but it is a rather disheartening coincidence).

But this blog is strange.  That’s not surprising in and of itself; this is me we’re discussing here (or at least I am).  I just don’t know what it is that appeals to people about this.  I’m glad that it does, but I don’t get it.  While I do often (well…occasionally, anyway) go back and reread some of my fiction, I don’t know that I have ever gone back to reread any of my old blog posts.

If anyone reading has done that, I’d be interested to know what motivated it, and whether it was a good experience.  Heck, if you think you’ve thereby learned any useful information about me that I might not already know, please, lay it on me.  After all, they say knowledge is power, but it’s much, much better than that‒knowledge is knowledge, which is better than power.  When you acquire knowledge, you take part of the universe into yourself without diminishing that which you internalize.

Well, okay, acquiring knowledge does increase the overall entropy of the universe, but at a very low rate considering what is gained.  Anyway, everything increases the overall entropy of the universe, because that’s what the mathematics requires.  I wrote a post on Iterations of Zero about that once.  If I can find it without much trouble, I’ll put a link to it.

Okay‒[shakes head metaphorically to try to clear it]‒I think I’m going to wrap this up.  My brain is really fatigued, and it’s only very early in the morning.  Actually, presumably the rest of my body is also fatigued‒it certainly feels fatigued.  But I only feel the rest of my body via my brain, so it’s all sort of redundant and recursive and self-referential filter.  I guess that’s a bit like this blog.

Anyway, have a good day, please.  Thank you.

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Another holi day.  I’m so tired of all of this.

L’Shana Tova, first of all.  That’s the traditional greeting for Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, which is today.  It’s interesting that it comes right after the Autumnal Equinox, but it changes from year to year, since the Hebrew calendar is a lunar calendar, not a solar one.

I’m slightly embarrassed to admit that, until yesterday during the work day, I didn’t even realize that today was going to be Rosh Hashanah.  Then again, it’s not as though I have any event or get-together to attend for the holiday, nor am I in any form of dialogue with the local Jewish community‒nor with any other community, actually.

I really ought not to be going to work today, but it’s not as though I’ve been observant in any way, so I feel it would be hypocritical to use the holiday as an excuse to take the day off.  I suppose it wouldn’t be too horrible in the scheme of things.  After all, how many nominal Christians who celebrate Christmas and Easter and the like are otherwise observant folk who regularly go to church and whatnot?

How many of even the seemingly devout Christians in the US who claim the identity like a badge of superiority and special privilege are actually aware of, let alone observant of, the ideals presented in their Bible, especially the “gospels”?

Certainly the so-called Christian Nationalists have no apparent familiarity with the ideas and ideals behind Christianity or the United States Constitution.  They seem merely to be a collection of deeply insecure, terrified, woefully and willfully undereducated troglodytes.  This is not my presumption; this is my provisional conclusion based upon the ones I see and hear in the news and on “social” media.  They really are pathetic and pitiable.

But because of their very insecurity and fear and ignorance, they are dangerous, like underage and untrained pre-teens who have somehow stolen an armed and armored military vehicle and are taking it on a joy ride.  Ideally, one should try to stop the vehicle and them and get them out of it and give them a stern lecture to try to educate them.  But above all, it’s important to try to keep them from doing too much damage to the numerous innocent people through whose lives they are driving their foolishly commandeered vehicle.

The preceding was a fairly ham-handed metaphor I know.  But the ham-handedness doesn’t mean it’s wrong.

I won’t get too far into the apparent claim by someone somewhere that today was going to be the day of  the “rapture”.  That’s frankly just the latest in a string of such absurd claims that goes back probably through most of the last two millennia.  It would be amusing if it were not so very sad.

There’s so much real wonder available, so much about the actual, verifiable world that is remarkable and astonishing and inspiring, yet so many waste their time with fairy tales so uninspired and unoriginal that, if someone presented them as ideas for children’s books to a publisher, the publisher would quickly see them to the door.

I suppose the charitable thing to do would be to shrug sadly and say that one should let people believe what they will, as long as they are uninterested in trying to test and improve their beliefs and their understanding.  Indeed, that is my inclination.  Unfortunately, many such people wish to impose their beliefs upon others, and not just by persuasion but by force.

It can sometimes be positively motivated*; if one believes, for whatever reason, that one’s ideology is the only way to guarantee the long-term wellbeing of everyone, both in life and after death, and that the alternative is potentially eternal suffering, then I can understand (in principle) someone trying to spread their faith out of a true sense of beneficence.

However, when one observes the behavior and personalities and choices of such people, they do not come across as ones who are doing what they do out of a sense of kindness and benevolence.  They seem, rather, to be grasping, vindictive, petulant, and defensive–terribly insecure and easily made to feel unsafe.  They seem so fragile and yet so spiteful.

I strongly suspect that there are forces quite different from a true desire to rescue and protect innocent and endangered souls behind almost every action taken by such people.  I suspect most of that stuff is just excuses and pretexts, not any honest beatitude.

I could be wrong, of course.  But such are my provisional conclusions.

How did I get on that unpleasant subject?  I’m not sure.  Still, most subjects and experiences are unpleasant for me anymore, so I guess it doesn’t much matter.  I guess the fact of yet another day that’s supposed to be one of celebration arouses a bit of reactive spite in me, since I don’t exactly have much to celebrate on any kind of sensible basis, nor anyone with whom to do the celebrating (nor the ability to find such a person or people).

To be fair, I never said that I wasn’t pathetic and pitiable and driven by darker thoughts and feelings.  I also don’t claim to have any moral superiority or to be the bringer of any kind of important moral message.

In closing, I’ll say:  it’s worth it to avoid being dominated by people who claim to have some superior insight.  Paternalism is never a safe notion, because‒unfortunately‒all the people who would put themselves in the paternalistic positions are just flesh and blood, ordinary humans like all the people they desire to control, with no greater wisdom, no greater insight, and certainly no greater ability than anyone else.

Beware the sheep that would be a shepherd.  It may well have developed a proclivity for cannibalism.

Happy New Year.

*Though we know where the road paved with good intentions leads.  Good intentions are just the beginning of doing good, and they are barely even that.

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“Is this the region, this the soil, the clime…?”

First of all, Happy Birthday to Bilbo and Frodo Baggins, who shared the same birthday (albeit 78 years apart) in Tolkien’s world, September 22nd by Shire reckoning.  I’m not absolutely sure that Shire reckoning would align its dates exactly with ours, but it’s not really necessary to nitpick.

Also, it is the day of the Autumnal Equinox, the beginning of Fall/Autumn in the northern hemisphere (and Spring in the southern hemisphere, but I don’t think they call it the Vernal Equinox down there).   From now until the next equinox, the nights will be longer than the days (in the northern hemisphere‒in the southern hemisphere the days will dominate).

It’s also the beginning of a new work week, which ought to be auspicious given that it’s the beginning of Autumn, but honestly, there’s nothing to which to look forward, whether in the short term or the long term.  It’s just the persistence of pointlessness and futility, like every day has been for the last 12 years (at least!) for me.

I’m writing this on my smartphone today, by the way.  This was not a surprise or a mistake this time; I deliberately did not bring the lapcom back to the house with me on Friday.  I didn’t have the energy.

It was a sloppy, crappy weekend, weather-wise.  It felt very much like a tropical rainforest down by me, and not in a good way.  It’s been a pretty lame hurricane season around here so far this year, and hitherto we’ve had much less rain than usual, but it seems to be trying to make up for lost time now these past few weeks.

Perhaps climate change has led to a slight shifting of the weather patterns, making the rainy season come slightly later here than usual.  In any case, it’s muggy and hot and wet and fairly disgusting in Florida…and that’s just the politics!!

Ha ha.  I’m kidding.  It’s not just the politics that’s disgusting here.  Still, if it weren’t for the fact that my youngest was born here in Florida, I would be inclined to say that, overall, Florida has been a worse than worthless place for me to live, and I wish I had never moved here.

For all I know, being in Florida could have been the trigger for my chronic pain problem.  I doubt it‒it was a physical, structural, fairly severe injury in my L5-S1 disk that started the problem, and it’s not too easy to conjure a Florida-specific explanation for that.  But I’m nearly certain that I wouldn’t have foolishly gotten into the medical practice that led to my legal troubles in New York, say.  They take better care of both patients and doctors in New York.  Indeed, in most states‒certainly in the ones in which I’ve lived‒they seem to have better healthcare systems than Florida.

That’s not a very high bar to clear, of course.  Just look at the corrupt politics and the sorts of disgusting worms we’ve sent to the Senate and the House, and to the Governor’s mansion, for that matter.  I don’t know why Florida is so fertile for self-serving shit-heads on a scale that dwarfs even the overrepresented shit-heads involved in politics in most states.  But it surely must be telling that Donna Tramp’s main house is down here.  Florida is America’s syphilitic penis, and the Palm Beach Cheeto is a genital wart on its upper surface.  If only Florida had embraced the HPV vaccine early enough…

I came to Florida because my then-wife was tired of living in cold climates.  She is uniquely susceptible to the cold for unclear reasons; her body does not seem to hold in heat but instead radiates it away.  She always kept the thermostat set at something like 78 Fahrenheit, even in the summer.

I wish she’d wanted to go to Arizona or something along those lines, but I guess politically it has its issues, too.  New Mexico might’ve been better‒the Santa Fe Institute is there, at least.  It might have been nice to be able to be near that, and to perhaps even take in a lecture or two from time to time.  Florida is certainly not a hotspot for cutting edge science and philosophy, despite Cape Canaveral.  We barely even have a space program anymore; we need Russia or Elon Musk to get us into low Earth orbit nowadays.  Look how the mighty have fallen.

Once I got done with work release, I could’ve lived with my parents and my sister; my father invited me to stay when I went to visit upon my release, making it clear he was happy with me working on my writing there.  I elected to come back here, though, because my children live here, and I was hoping to be able to see them on the regular and be a real part of their life again before I had missed the rest of their childhoods entirely.

Boy was that a miscalculation.  What a joke.  I might as well have hoped to capture a wild panther with my bare hands.

Well, one cannot change what has already happened.  And one cannot change what will happen or what is happening once it is happening.  One can only try to surf on the chaos as best one can.  But it loses its charm, that chaos surfing, over time, at least when there are very few good moments involved, and no positive outcomes to which to look forward, and nothing productive or creative to do anymore that grabs one’s attention.

I can’t seem to motivate myself to write fiction or to write music or to draw or to work on honing my physics and math skills and knowledge.  Being in chronic pain and having ASD level 2, but without actually having any social or other supports of significance*, really takes the wind out of one’s sails, more so every day.  I need something‒a break, an escape, rescue, relief, or just for everything to be over.

What else is new, right?  And on top of everything else, my train is running late.  It’s par for the crookedly run course down here.

It doesn’t matter, I guess.  Nothing does.  So, you might as well have a good first day of Autumn.  And, of course, enjoy celebrating Bilbo’s and Frodo’s birthdays.

*I don’t mean to be dismissive about my sister or my youngest child; they are wonderful and I love them and appreciate my connection with them.  But I am referring to regular, daily, local, literal support, of which I have none.  I don’t even have any friends (other than “work friends”) within a thousand miles.

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Near the bottom of the week there lies…this blog post

It’s Friday, in case you’re fairly out of it, or in case you’re reading this some day other than the day on which I’m writing it.  I’m surprised, actually, how many people who first start to follow my blog go back and read earlier posts, and even “like” them (which may or may not indicate that they actually like them).

It’s quite heartening, when it happens, even if it’s only because suddenly my blog gets a lot more views and I get lots of notifications when I get on the site.  I also feel impressed, because there is a rather intimidating—or so I would imagine—number of my blog posts on here.  There probably aren’t all  that many people who don’t write for a living who have written more than I have on this blog, going back almost 10 years.

Of course, when I say things like “how many” in the first paragraph, that’s a relative term.  I only get a few dozen or so people coming to my blog on a regular basis, even though I share it on pretty much all my social media (other than Instagram, which isn’t well suited to sharing links to blog posts, and TikTok, which I simply don’t have or use).  It would be great, of course, if I could get the sorts of visits and views and shares as some of the young women who just dance around a bit in cosplay, lip-syncing to snippets of songs and so on.  It’s charming sometimes, of course—I like to see the costumes, and some of the little skits can be funny—but it gets to be very much the same thing over and over again after a while.

It can be more fun seeing some of the compilations of people’s antics while they’re playing a game and streaming on Twitch.  That’s another social media platform with which I have no connection, since I don’t spend a great deal of time playing, let alone watching, many games (more’s the pity, since I do tend to like video games, all other things being equal).

Still, the best (to me) non-written material on the various social media are the ones where people discuss new findings in science or who discuss economic issues and international relations and so on, from professional points of view.  It’s not as good as reading a good blog post about a topic in which I’m interested, or better yet a book, but it can be hard to find blog posts about things in which I’m interested.  Podcasts are more reliable in this region, but I really only regularly listen to two of those:  Sean Carroll’s Mindscape and Sam Harris’s Making Sense.

I do subscribe to several people on Substack, but it’s hard even to see notifications of articles being posted by people in whom I’m interested.  And, of course, there are a number of blogs here on WordPress that I follow, but that number is so large that I miss quite a lot of them a lot of the time.

Of course, my interests aren’t necessarily like a lot of other people’s.  Science (especially but by no means exclusively physics), mathematics, a bit of economics, a bit of political philosophy and other philosophy, those sorts of topics and subjects are what interest me mostly.

I like movies and shows of certain kinds, though I watch fewer and fewer of them nowadays since I have no one with whom to watch them, and that takes a lot of the fun out of them.  I don’t have much interest in reading about shows and movies, though watching reaction videos for movies I’ve seen can be fun—it’s almost like sharing a movie one likes with a friend or friends who haven’t seen it.  Of course, it’s not fully like that, since one certainly can’t interact with those people, and in all honesty, most of them would probably find hanging out with me tedious to unpleasant.

I don’t know why I’m writing about this stuff, today.  As you probably know, I don’t plan these posts out in advance; they are very much stream-of-consciousness.  I hope they’re easier to follow than the first section of The Sound and the Fury, or something by James Joyce, but they still are very much just a sample of what comes out of my mind, which I am discovering with almost as much surprise as any of you are.

I started doing this every work day since I stopped writing fiction—which has been a while now—and I thought perhaps to use it as a form of therapy, but one for which I don’t have to pay nearly as much as the therapists I have seen in the past.  I don’t know if it’s doing me any good or not, but at least it lets me feel that I exist in something other than a purely local, ephemeral, and virtual sense.  That’s worth something at least.

With that, I’ll call this good for today and for toweek*.  I truly hope you all have a great day and a great weekend, and that you can look forward both to the arrival of autumn and to Bilbo and Frodo’s birthday next Monday.  I’m sure I’ll mention those things in my next post, but it shouldn’t hurt to prepare you.

*This is one of my neologisms, emulating the pattern from the word “today”, which means more or less “this day”.  That’s probably obvious, but just in case it wasn’t, I figured I’d leave a little explainer.

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Tear down the wall(s)!

I saw a video on YouTube yesterday in which a neuroscientist was being interviewed and asked to “grade” the danger level of various drugs—obviously not all of them since that would have taken far longer than the hour the video lasted.  Mind you, the video ran much more quickly for me, because this is one of those that I watch at 1.5 times speed, which I can get away with if I have the subtitles on and the speaker doesn’t speak too quickly.  I don’t do this for reaction videos or comedy videos, of course, and I certainly don’t do it with music or music reaction videos.  That would be absurd.

Anyway, watching the video, in which the scientist discussed the effects and mechanisms of action of the various drugs, made me think of something that has occurred to me before in recent months and years:  What if someone slipped MDMA (aka Ecstasy) into the food and/or water of all the members of the Senate and House of Representatives* before every legislative session?

This drug has the tendency to lower psychological barriers between people, to encourage a feeling of acceptance and a kind of “unconditional love”, without many other serious untoward effects in most cases (I have never tried it, but I have never tried most non-prescription drugs).  It would be rather interesting to see what legislatures could accomplish if they felt real warmth toward each other rather than seeing each other as opponents and even frank enemies**.  I wonder what might happen.

Alternatively, or similarly, it would be interesting to see a similar experiment involving the UN.  Heck, it would be great just to infuse every water-supply throughout the middle-east with MDMA.  I would not want to use any true hallucinogens in that region of the world, though—we don’t need new religions or spiritual notions popping up in a region that is already the wellspring of the western world’s absurd religious conflicts.

It would be great just to calm the overactive amygdalae of the people in the various legislatures and international organizations, to encourage their prefrontal cortices to be more active, so they can work together for the good of the people they have chosen (and competed) to represent—and whom they fail every time they put partisan hostility above the best interests of the people of the country.  Maybe it would be simpler just to fit all legislators and similar officials with shock collars that activate any time that individual’s voice goes above a certain decibel level, or when a localized EEG detects too much activity in the limbic system and not enough in the frontal lobes.

This is all pipe dreaming, of course, though there’s nothing in the laws of physics that prevents either of these notions from being brought to bear.  Still, it’s probably refreshing to see me thinking of plots and plans intended to work to help people get along better rather than just to obliterate them from the face of the cosmos***.  Though that may well be more likely to happen, considering the warnings of a recent book I just got.

This book is If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, a warning book about the dangers of superintelligent AI, written by one of my favorite thinkers, Eliezer Yudkowsky, and his coauthor, Nate Soares.  They appeared (so to speak) on Sam Harris’s podcast that came out yesterday.  Now, I have not listened to the entire podcast yet, and I certainly haven’t read the book yet, but I have little doubt that the authors are at least not far wrong in their warnings.

I’m not going to go into those arguments now, because you can (and should) read the book or at least look into Eliezer Yudkowsky’s work and ideas.  His book Rationality:  From AI to Zombies is a masterpiece, and though it is long, it is divided into easily ingested chunks, since it started out as a long series of blog posts.

I occasionally toy with the idea of doing podcast type stuff like Sam Harris and so many others—indeed, I have done several of what I call “audio blogs” since I don’t know if they would technically count as podcasts—because people really seem to prefer listening to people talk more than they prefer reading.  This is despite the fact that reading is faster and requires less data to convey the same number of ideas.

I don’t know.  It’s probably better for the world if my thoughts and ideas achieve the least penetration into the zeitgeist as possible.  Still, maybe I’ll embed a few examples of my “audio blogs” here for anyone interested in listening, to see if you think it would be worth it for me to do more.

Please have a good day.

On fatigue, depression, general relativity, and spaceships becoming discoid black holes:

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Morgoth, Arda, redemption, morality, and blame:

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The Cosmic Perspective:

*If you live in a country other than the US—as most people do—then substitute your own legislative bodies for these.

**It astonishes me how people in the same legislature, in the same country, see each other as opponents and even as “evil” based almost entirely upon the arbitrary and absurd notion of political party.  It’s ridiculous enough when people arbitrarily choose to be loyal to some specific sports team and then hate other ones based purely on that arbitrary self-identification, but when it involves people who are supposed to be trying to manage the governance of the nation, or state, or county, or what have you, it smacks of a complete lack of seriousness and maturity, of childishness.

***Though I still like my idea of getting someone to engineer the mumps virus to make it more likely to cause orchitis****, especially if it can be encouraged to make males more likely to be sterile.  That way we would decrease the population of those who are prone to avoid vaccinations.  But that’s me in my mad scientist mode.

****Inflammation of the testes, a relatively rare complication of mumps.