Personal

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“Remember: All you’ll be is all you’ve been”

It’s Wednesday morning, quite early, and as is the case nearly every Wednesday, I am struggling not to incorporate some version of the first line from She’s Leaving Home by the Beatles* into my writing.  Oops, it looks like I failed in that struggle.  Well, at least I put the actual line in a footnote instead of quoting it in the main body of the post.

Speaking of songs and lyrics, I want to apologize to anyone who feels disappointed by the fact that I still have yet to start writing a song based on the trigger “humility”, and also that I haven’t done anything more with my previous tentative song, Native Alien.  I’m not sure I’m satisfied with the melody I have for it so far‒at some time in the future, I may redo it.  Or I may go back to it and find that I like the melody and chords, after all.  For that, we can all only wait and see; I don’t know much more about what will happen than you all do.

As for other incomplete songs, I have no fewer than two “videos” of such critters on my YouTube channel:  Mercury Lamp, which is really just a kind of demo, but which I like, though I haven’t felt like expanding it yet, and Come Back Again, which is actually mixed and produced, after a fashion, but is far from being in releasable form.

The lyrics of the latter song are quite old‒I wrote them (with more recent slight modifications) while I was in college, and reproduced them from memory when I decided to record the tune.  I had a little spiral notebook** that I sometimes wrote “poems” in, and this song was one of them, or a combination of such poems, originally.  Though it was a long time after writing the words that I ever formally wrote down the tune, the tune was in my head since not long after I wrote the poem.

Actually, there was somewhat more to the poem(s) than appears in the song now.  There’s a sort of prelude of three couplet lines, which I recorded and sang, but I decided it was too stilted and moany/whiny to start out the song.  I replaced it with a collection of “Aah, ah ah ahh…” singing, which I think works better, though I secretly*** left one faint track with the initial singing, which one can here and there just faintly detect in the background.

Anyway, as I said, I’m fond of the lyrics and the melody, and though I always just wing it on my harmonies****, I like the ones here.  I also like my little bass riff and my looped, reversed drum beat pattern.  The whole thing has many elements that I like.

[As an aside, here is a fun fact:  I was relistening to this song a few times recently, since it has obviously been on my mind.  On the side bar on YouTube where it gives further video suggestions/options when you’re watching something, it also gives you little buttons by which you can narrow down the available recommendations.  The first of these was fairly unsurprising, as it read “More from Robert Elessar”.  But the next one allowed me to choose to narrow my suggestions to “Progressive Rock”.

Evidently, the YouTube algorithm considers my unfinished song to be most consistent with the genre of progressive rock.  I’m not at all disappointed by that.  By all means, group me in with people like Pink Floyd and Yes and Kansas.  I’ll take that designation without any complaint at all.]

But of course, this song is really not in any kind of shape to be held up against any of those bands’ works.  The mix is uneven/unbalanced and still quite messy and blurry; the timing is at least slightly off in a great many places*****; and there are other technical issues.  Also, the arrangement is not quite to my liking.  For one thing, I’d like to add a bit of lead guitar to it; it feels too low in pitch overall to me, without any real bright sounds.  It’s not a song with a bright atmosphere, perhaps, but a range of pitches and timbres and so on is still desirable (at least to me).

Anyway, I’m mildly frustrated because I still don’t have any decent thoughts on a lead guitar part nor do I have the gumption to try to clean up the mix.

I will, however, embed the “video” here, and I would be delighted to receive any feedback or ideas you want to share.  Try not to be too cruel, if you can help it, please; I’m sometimes surprisingly fragile and also sometimes horribly spiteful, though I try not to act on or express any of those reactions.

Thank you very much.

*”Wednesday morning at five o’clock as the day begins…”

**Not precisely “a little black book with my poems in”, but not too far from that, either.

***Well, it was a secret.  I guess it’s not really a secret now, though the words still are.

****In Like and Share, I even just spontaneously did the whistling that appears in the bridge while I was recording my (also improvised) harmonies, and I liked that outcome quite a lot.  There was only one take on them, and that’s what you hear in the song.

*****To cut me a bit of slack, I did have to record all the parts separately, with just inexpensive,  USB-based mics and basic computer recording programs, in the back room of an office that used to be a store in a strip mall, with no MIDI or anything of the sort, and only a little Katana practice amp for the guitar.  Then I mixed it using the “free” program Audacity, which doesn’t have a “beat finder” function like the notorious Pro Tools does.  All things considered, I think I made pretty good use of what I had.

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This is my title; there are many others like it, but this one is mine

It’s Tuesday now, and we begin to commence the rest of what is now a brace of braces of regular work days.  I guess those of you to whom that applies probably already know it, so I’m giving you no new information, unless you count as information the particular way in which I convey it.  Meanwhile, for those to whom this information does not apply, it’s probably just tedious trivia, if even that.

That’s not my fault; at least it’s not entirely my fault.  Of course, I’m the one who’s writing this drivel, but you’re reading it, and no one’s forcing you to do so.  There are two parts to the freedom of speech:  the freedom to speak (or not to do so) and the freedom to hear and listen (or not to hear/listen).  So there is mutual responsibility—or a lack of mutual responsibility if the notion of responsibility doesn’t apply.

I’m pretty sure that no one is ultimately responsible for anything let alone everything.  That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t try to hold people accountable when they do bad things, or reward people for good things; it’s good to discourage the negative and encourage the positive, I would think.

But none of us made the world or the universe, and none of us made ourselves, despite the popular notion of the “self-made man” (or woman).  We all happened, like everything else happens, and we didn’t get to pick which universe into which we’re born, if there are choices of such things.  Or, if we were given a choice in some bizarre, pre-conception, pre-birth sorting ceremony, our memories of such things have been erased pretty thoroughly.

I’m pretty convinced that there is no such pre-birth, and I’m nearly as sure that there’s no post-death, either.  My slightly less certain attitude toward the latter is probably just an artifact of self-bias that comes with being a biological organism whose ancestors were selected for (among other thing) a tendency to want to stay alive.  And, of course, it is influenced by the simple inability for anyone to imagine themselves not existing, since the minute you’re imagining anything, you’re very much not modeling a lack of existence.

If you’ve ever been under general anesthesia, such as during major surgery, and if there were no mishaps, such as a failure of the anesthesia, then you could say that whatever you experienced while you were under general anesthesia is the closest living simulacrum to what you’ll experience when you’re dead.  But of course, the point is, you didn’t experience anything.  Anesthesia means “without sensation” or “without feeling”, and it is pretty well named.

A tangent to this notion:  who the hell first came up with the term “lived experience”?  Speaking of punishment to discourage things, if we can find that person, they should be subject to serious public shaming.  Why do we need to add a modifier to the word “experience”?  Speaking of words that convey no information (which I did earlier), this literally is redundant.  One cannot have “non-lived experience” or “dead experience”.  It’s experience.  If you experience it, you’re alive.  Experience is an individual, personal, conscious thing that happens only to living things, almost by definition.

Even if you’re “learning from someone else’s experience”, you’re really learning from your awareness and intake of the information regarding that person’s experience.  That is the experience from which you are learning, and it is your experience, not that of some other person from whom you might be learning a lesson.

There are so many stupid things in the world.  I have no doubt that I am a prominent one of these things.  Still, some things are so stupid that they feel like personal attacks on, not my sanity exactly, but certainly on my equanimity.  Some human habits and words and deeds are like mosquito bites or poison ivy, like itching, burning rashes.  They make me want to snarl and lash out in irritation.

Oh, well.  I guess it’s hard to blame the stupid for being stupid—and we’re all stupid more than we are smart.  I guess all we can do is to try to become a little smarter every day, like the YouTube channel says.

In other news, it turns out that September is suicide prevention month (or some term to that effect).  I’m not sure why this particular month has been chosen for that designation.  Is it because it’s a time when kids go back to school, and so might need such support?  I don’t know; I always liked it when school started up again.  Is it because it’s the month when autumn begins?  Again, I wouldn’t get it, because autumn has always been my favorite season, though here in the sweaty intertriginous regions of south Florida, autumn is indistinguishable from most of the rest of the year.

Anyway, I’m the last person one should seek to try to help prevent suicide in someone else.  If anything, I would be more able to provide arguments in support of self-destruction, though I would not ever try to talk anyone else into taking their own life.

Well…I can think of a few people I might be willing to so encourage, but the people I might be willing to encourage to kill themselves are usually the sorts of people who would never even consider doing such a thing.  They think far too highly of themselves.

But hey, as for the rest of you, why not go out there and, if the opportunity occurs, prevent a suicide or something?  Batman knows I spend a lot of my time looking at support sites and information and posts and accounts and reading books and so on that are related to this.  Unfortunately, every argument I’ve encountered hitherto has been just repetition of the same old trite vomitus that people tend to spew about such things, and it often just makes me feel even less like I want to stay alive.

Unfortunately, Hamlet is much more convincing than the cast majority of the people who counsel others not to die.  Is that simply because Shakespeare was such a brilliant writer?  Or is it because he has the best arguments?  I guess it could be a combination—a superposition, if you will—of the two.

Whatever.  Try to have a good day.

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“Now…what shall we talk about?”

It’s Friday, the end of the work week, and thankfully, I feel somewhat better than I did at the beginning of the week.  That’s rather unusual for me, and it has little (but not nothing) to do with the fact that the weekend begins tomorrow; it’s more about how badly I felt earlier.

Of course, many people look forward to the weekend; Loverboy even had a song about it.  And why not?  People look forward to spending time with friends and family, to being able to sleep late and relax.  It’s even possible to look forward to things like grocery shopping and yard work if it’s with and/or for one’s loved ones.

A lot of that doesn’t apply to me, since I’m almost always just by myself on the weekends (last weekend being a blessed exception).  And though it is quite nice to be able to rest, and even to sleep longer with the aid of OTC pharmaceuticals and natural supplements, I have a very difficult time loving or even liking myself, so I’m not spending the weekend with anyone whom I love.

I’m trying, though.  Those of you who regularly read this blog may understandably think that I have given up on myself, on ever being happy or having significant wellbeing or whatever you want to call it‒some state that could be described as one of “noncontradictory joy”.  But I do try.

One might say that I am always trying, really, though one may quibble with the definitions and whether they apply even when I am sleeping or engaged in other tasks.  But I arrange the place, the time, the surroundings, and even the posture of my sleep to try to improve my chronic pain (and of course my insomnia).

I also try to arrange the way I sit at work, the types of socks and shoes and other clothes that I wear to improve my state of being.  I take carefully chosen vitamins at particular times of day, and I alternate OTC pain meds to try to decrease, at least somewhat, the chance of negative side-effects and interactions.  So, I haven’t given up, though I often wonder why I have not.

I think one of the hardest things, for me, is to follow the (quite good) advice that one should treat oneself with the care and support one would any other person for whom one is responsible and whom they love.  I have a hard time loving myself.  I certainly quite often don’t even like myself, but that’s a lesser problem; it’s entirely possible to love someone but not like them in most senses.

Okay, well, this is getting dull, and I have just been distracted by one of those silly “provocative” questions one often finds on social media, specifically, “Is a hot dog a sandwich?”  These questions are apparently meant to start discussions (or even arguments) online or in person, and they are much of a type with questions such as “Does pineapple belong on pizza?”

To me, such questions are basically category errors, or something closely adjacent.  My first reaction to such questions is to want to give them a sneer worthy of Billy Idol.  A hot dog is a hot dog; who cares if it’s a “sandwich”?  And nothing “belongs” on pizza.  Pizza is an invented concoction, people can put on it what they want.  In any case, to make such questions in any way useful and amenable to reasonable discussion, the questioners need to define their terms.

What do they mean by “hot dog”?  If they just mean the meat-cylinder, then no, that’s not a sandwich by most definitions, but that would need to be defined too.  If one defines each of the terms precisely and specifically, then one could sensibly address questions such as “Is a hot dog a sandwich?” or “Does pineapple belong on pizza?”

But of course, deciding the question based on those rigorous terms and applications doesn’t answer it when other definitions and terms are applied.  The vast majority of words don’t really have definitions, they have usages.  The vast majority of words just happened, they were not invented by one person who could thereby define the meaning of the word as they invented it.

I could give you the definition of the word “orcerterlolet”* from my book The Chasm and the Collision, and this would be one of those rare situations in life where I actually have authority over the meaning of the word, because I am the author.  I invented the word and its meaning.

Except in such rare cases, though, there are no final and definitive definitions of words, at least not prior to mutual agreement for specific purposes.  Also, there are no authorities about anything that wasn’t specifically and entirely invented by the person claiming authority.  There are experts, but there are no authorities.

For instance, the police are not “the authorities”, and elected officials are not our “leaders”.  They are all public servants, employees hired (in various senses) by the people of a given nation, and they should be treated as such.  But that’s a whole ‘nother subject, and I’m not going to get started on that now.

I hope you all have a good day and a good weekend.

*I’m not going to give you the definition, though.  If you want to find out what it is, you should read the book.

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I’m back, despite my back holding me back

I apologize for not writing a post yesterday.  I did not go in to the office, because the pain I was having on Monday just continued and worsened, and by yesterday morning I was just exhausted.  I’m frankly not feeling a whole lot better today, to be honest (and to be redundant, since I already said “frankly” which means essentially the same thing as “to be honest”).

In case any of you don’t already know, I have a thing called “failed back surgery syndrome”, which seems a bit unfair to the surgeon, who was a colleague of mine.  He did as good a job as science and technology allowed.  I just had a fairly bad lower back injury:  specifically, a ruptured L5-S1 intervertebral disk.

That’s not a bulging disk, that’s a rupture‒it was torn all the way down into the nucleus pulposus of the disk, which is the delicious jelly center from which the bouncability arises.  I had all sorts of investigations after the pain began, because it didn’t first present as back pain but with pain in my legs.  And then once the disk issue was confirmed, I tried a lot of less invasive interventions to treat my pain, none of which did anything much.

Even after the surgery, I tried and was on various medications, of various classes‒including opioids‒which helped some but which caused their own issues over time.  But the pain has never gone away since its onset, over twenty years ago, and which has contributed greatly to things like the failure of my marriage and the ruination of my career.  Still, the surgery did reduce the pain at least to some degree.

But of course, these last several days have been worse than usual, probably partly because I was exercising (low impact) to try to improve my condition and help my pain.  Irony can be pretty ironic sometimes, can’t it?

Anyway, I have to go to work today because it’s payroll day.  That was the same reason I kind of pushed to be let out of the hospital early with my recent kidney stone:  I had to do the payroll the next day.  That was unpleasant, I can tell you.

Such is my life now, it seems:  Chronic pain with varying intensity, insomnia, tension/anxiety and depression‒both at least partly (probably) related to ASD‒and work, then going back to the house to lie down to try to recover for the next day.  The only real bright spots are seeing my youngest child now and then (this was started by the kidney stone, curiously enough, so that at least paid for itself) and talking to my sister on the phone once every week or so.

In case anyone wonders why I have suicidal ideation, well, all the above should explain at least some of it.  Of course, I’ve had such thoughts since I was a teenager, long before my chronic pain developed, but I did have chronic depression (AKA dysthymia) starting at that time.  Looking back, this was probably at least partly because of my long-undiagnosed ASD (level 2).

I also had the other kind of ASD‒an atrial septal defect‒until I was 18 and had heart surgery for it.  Interestingly enough, there is a higher incidence of the heart-based ASD in people with the other kind of ASD, according to some studies I have read.  There’s also some increased prevalence of spina bifida occulta, which often has its effects very low down the spine.  I sometimes wonder if I might have had a very slight version of this that made me prone to have the back injury I had, but I may be going through “second year medical student syndrome” again with respect to that possibility.

Okay, well, sorry about annoying you with my medical history and medical/psychiatric complaints.  For the most part, it’s all I have to talk about anymore.  I don’t do anything interesting; I don’t do anything much at all other than work and trying to rest and distract myself.  It’s really quite pathetic and pointless.

I keep hoping that all the aspirin I take (among the other strictly OTC meds I now use) will lead me to have some form of hemorrhage and take this all away from me, but I have had no luck so far.  I guess it’s true what they say, that if you want something done “right” you need to do it yourself.

I don’t know if that’s always true, though.  I think what really happens is that people want to do something in a particular way for personal, often aesthetic, reasons, and want to be able to have some control over something, so they do it themselves.  Then, no matter how badly they fuck it up or how much better someone else might have done the job, they convince themselves that what they did was best, since confirmation bias is one of the easiest fallacies of reasoning into which people can fall.

Anyway, that’s enough for today.  I hope you feel better than I do, since that would at least be some comfort for me.  I’ll probably be back to write a post tomorrow, Batman knows why.  But he’s not telling.

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Is this my eigenstate? If so, I fear it makes me LESS coherent.

It’s Monday, and I really am going to try to keep this short.  The only reason I’m writing this post at all is because I don’t want anyone to worry about me in any unnecessary way.  I suppose it’s okay for people to worry about me in general‒I think I would, if I were someone else and if I cared what happens to me.  I’m certainly not in good shape, just as a general matter, and I don’t seem to be getting better at all, so who knows what to say?

But today, I am not taking off work or anything.  I am however in a significant amount of pain, above my usual baseline, and I have been so since last week.  It’s quite frustrating, and it takes the wind out of my sails for getting anything done but the bare minimum.  Certainly I have done no walking or biking.

I did have a lovely day on Saturday, because I got to spend time with my youngest.  That was, of course, quite wonderful.  So you will hear (or read) no complaints from me about that.  It was officially one of the two best days I have had since 2012, at least.

I wish that could make my chronic pain go away, but alas, it does not.  It does take the edge off my depression for a while‒certainly while spending time together‒and that’s obviously good.  If only there were something that could be done in addition to that.

Unfortunately, I’m currently in the state* that I tend to refer to as feeling as if I have already been embalmed despite the fact that I am nominally still alive.  This is meant to convey how stiff and constricted I feel, and how every motion is difficult and painful.  I at least did my dips this morning, despite feeling wiped out already upon awakening.  Yay, me, right?  Huzzah.

It probably comes as no surprise that I continue to have insomnia, and the pain exacerbation doesn’t help that.  Well, in a certain sense one could say it helps the insomnia.  It impairs the somnia, if you will.

I’m writing this on my smartphone, by the way.  I have the mini lapcom with me, but it’s too much trouble to use right now.  So I am using the smartphone.  Using it is, however, also somewhat painful for the bases of my thumbs, but almost nothing I do does not hurt, so there’s little hope of avoiding pain entirely no matter what I’m doing.

It looks like Chrome and Google Docs and everything have updated themselves again, and now it’s causing trouble with the way the computer starts and the way I write this on my smartphone as well.  It’s terribly annoying; they change things that don’t need changing and that seem to work fine, apparently for cosmetic reasons, because they think they need to…I don’t know, keep up with the other software giants?  Anyway, it’s terribly annoying.

Are they really continuously releasing a product that has so many deficiencies that they need to keep updating every other week (or so it seems)?  Perhaps they’re hiding nefarious changes behind these seemingly pointless ones.  How would we know if they were?  How can we know this isn’t the work of some AI that got out of the box, for that matter?

Though, honestly, I think such an AI would do a better job of not requiring so many pointless-seeming updates.  But maybe that would be the perfect camouflage:  artificial intelligence masquerading as human stupidity.

Heavy sigh, as Justine would say**.

Anyway, that’s gonna be enough for me today.  It’s 5:30 in the morning and I’m already exhausted.  I am not, however, sleepy.  Talk about a system that needs an update!

Well, have a good day if you can.

*Not to be confused with the state of Florida, though the two states have things in common.

**A character in The Accountant and its sequel.

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“For he will lose the best part of the strength that was native to him in his beginning”

It’s Odin’s day now, so…well, have a good day, Odin, or Wotan, or however you prefer to refer to yourself.

I’m on my way to work, but I did not walk today.  Yesterday was a horrible day, pain-wise*, focused on my left knee, which is still sore, so I’m not going to try to do much walking.  I have knee braces and so on, but they only do so much.  I was wearing them on Monday during my walk, and they probably helped.  Maybe the alternate shoes that avoided bothering my blisters made the stresses and tensions produced by the way I walk different than usual, and that’s why everything was irritated.

Oy, I seem to have a hard time discussing anything interesting, don’t I?  It’s just all boring nonsense.  I suppose some of this is the sort of stuff I might talk about with a spouse or a partner or a close friend if I had one.  I guess that makes the blog behave as a kind of talk therapy.

I actually have intended for it to be thus in the past, but I can’t say that I’ve seen any serious positive results.  Of course, I can’t see what I would have been like if I had not been writing this blog.  Perhaps I would have been much worse  Or maybe I would have been healthier, but no one would ever know, and my thoughts would forever be lost to the world.

What a tragedy.  Ha ha.

It’s a weird thought, but what if putting my thoughts out into the world actually makes me worse, but it makes me someone who will, to however small an extent, be remembered in some way (since I don’t have a family with whom I live or spend time to remember my thoughts and my day-to-day foibles).  It’s a bit like Melkor putting his power into Arda, leaving it suffused with traces of him until its end, though he was weakened thereby, and he was defeated at least partly because he had weakened himself so much.  And, to a lesser extent, it’s like Sauron, putting his will and power and spirit into the One Ring.

None of that has any true bearing on reality, of course, there being no real Melkor or Sauron.  There is also no real spiritual “power” of that nature.  At least, there’s nothing that anyone can demonstrate convincingly in a way that makes it clear that it’s not just the wishful thinking of frightened naked house apes who want to believe that they have power and consequence in what is, after all, a very large universe.  At best it’s smoke and mirrors and placebo effects and the happy coincidence (with applicable confirmation bias) of some real processes that humans can influence, albeit not by mere will and vague thought and heart but by actions, by choices, by real thoughts guiding real deeds.

The current state of the world—or at least of the US—makes it clear how rare real thoughts are among the primates here.  One need only study chimpanzees and orangutans and, for that matter, capuchin monkeys and the like to get a basic grasp on most of human behaviors.  Humans just have other notions cluttering up things, and those can sometimes distract one from recognizing what’s really happening—monkey-work from top to bottom, all but unmitigated.

I guess there’s nothing particularly bad about monkeys.  It’s just that humans think they are somehow fundamentally different than monkeys and other primates and other animals.  They are different in more or less trivial ways, of course, as all species, and indeed all individuals, are different.  But they are not a different fundamental type of being.  They just have more memory and processing power in their brains, and their social hierarchies are able to take place at much higher removes.  Thus they need ideas, stories, that bind them together to get things done.

Ants and termites use pheromones and/or other chemical signals, which they produce and use instinctively.  Humans use stories and songs.  But it’s all just spontaneously self-organizing behavior, with little to no deep thought above or behind the scenes, however people like to delude themselves about their puissance and their importance.

Oh, well.  Let them delude themselves and grope through their shallow pseudo-mysteries.  The universe will deliver whatever it delivers to them, and their most fervent beliefs will not change anything in and of themselves.  And most people will probably never even realize that they were shown to be misguided and even deluded.  They will go to their graves proclaiming desperately that they are not in fact even dying.

As I’m fond of saying, whataya gonna do?  I hope though that, for today at least, you’re gonna have a good day.  As for me, well, I’m sure you can believe that no day that someone spends with me is likely to be a very good day, not anymore anyway, and unfortunately, I have to spend every day with me.  So, at least spare me a little sympathy.

*In that I had a horrible day because I was in pain, not that pain had a horrible day.  I don’t know whether some personification of pain would have had a good day or a bad one.  I might imagine that the personification of pain would dislike chronic pain because it’s not useful.  It’s not helping to protect against any injuries; the injuries are already done.  It has become, instead of a protective process, an erosive one, something that worsens the status of its bearer.

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A 2sday blog post 4 U

Okay, well, it’s Tuesday now, which often happens immediately after the end of Monday, at least when one is using the ordering of days that we use here in the modern, technological world, agreed upon just by general convention, since there’s no particular real meaning to any such ordering.  Also, of course, the specific names of the days varies from language to language.  But somehow, the seven-day week became the generally accepted one worldwide—possibly partly because it’s a prime number, and of course, partly related to the number of “non-fixed” celestial bodies visible before the invention of the telescope.

Not that any of that is very interesting, but it’s not as though I make it my business to write interesting blog posts.  I just…write blog posts.  Whether they’re interesting or not is pretty much in the eye of the beholder, as it were.

I think maybe I will embed the audio of my recent recording of Nothing Compares 2 U below, which I mentioned last week some time.  The audio is not ideal, of course, but it’s better than one might expect.  Whether the playing and singing is any good is, again, up to the aesthetic taste of each individual who happens to listen.  I make no promises or guarantees or representations about it being particularly good.  It’s okay, I would say.

As for other things, well, this morning I did not walk to the train station, nor did I bike here.  I’m still at the stage of working on my fitness in which I have to take a day off in between walks.  That’s not so disappointing, I guess; I did walk about seven or so miles total yesterday.  The biggest impediment so far to walking two or more days in a row is that my left knee is a bit sore from yesterday’s walk.

You might think I would be used to pain by now; I haven’t had a day free of significant pain in a quarter of a century now.  Unfortunately, biology mandates that pain is not something with which a living thing can easily become “comfortable”.

At least the blisters on my right foot are not acting up.  I wore a different pair of shoes than usual yesterday, a make and model I haven’t worn in a while, and it seems they were kinder to my heel and Achilles tendon than the others.

It’s rather frustrating.  I like the other kind because they are very lightweight and “breathable” if you want to call it that.  That’s important in south Florida, where merely standing still for more than five minutes is likely to lead to the growth of various fungi and algae on your skin*.

At least there’s always Lysol.  It helps if you pretend you work for a bowling alley and have to spray each pair of shoes after it’s been used to make sure no one catches a fungus from the previous wearer.  Even when that wearer is you, you don’t want to have a foot fungus if you can help it.

Ugh, all this is so boring, isn’t it?  Life is almost entirely composed of boredom interspersed with stress and tension anymore.  When I meditate, which I do, it helps my tension and stress and hostility a bit, but I find myself feeling very depressed instead.  It’s quite annoying.  Is tension and stress my only alternative to profound depression anymore?  Perhaps.  The world is overall so utterly idiotic and frustrating, this is just par for the course, as they say.

Despite the fact that I’m sharing a bit of singing here today, I haven’t played my guitar or sang even for a moment in over a week.  I haven’t really done anything creative or expressive in a long time, unless you count this blog (which I don’t, honestly).

I am rereading The Lord of the Rings, which is always good, at least.  I’m in The Two Towers now, at the point where Pippin and Merry have just met Treebeard.

It occurs to me that I tend to write (and think of) that pair of hobbits as “Pippin and Merry” rather than “Merry and Pippin”, despite the fact that Merry is the first alphabetically and in the stories Merry is slightly older.  It’s peculiar.  It’s not important or anything, but it is odd.

I also tend to write “off” accidentally nearly every time I’m trying to write the word “odd”, but that’s not so peculiar (ha ha).  The “d” and “f” keys are right next to each other on the keyboard, and both words (“odd” and “off”) are legitimate words.  They also can both often be workable in the same context.  Calling something “a little off” can be synonymous with calling something “a little odd”.  Curious.

My train will be arriving soon.  I am sorry to have to admit that I have provided nothing of value here.  That’s not too unusual for me, though.  I’m not sure that I’ve ever contributed anything of value to the world other than my children.  They are valuable, of course, so I’m not unhappy about that.  I’m just unhappy by nature, and I’m unhappy about that fact, and that further fact is something about which I am, again, unhappy.  It’s like an infinite series**, and the question is, does it converge to some finite limit, or does it diverge to negative infinity?  I don’t know.

And sometimes—most days, maybe—I share that unhappiness with you, my all-too-generous readers.  It seems grossly unfair to you.  And it is.  I admire your optimism, though.  I don’t understand it.  But I do admire it.

Have a good day,  You might as well.  Somebody ought to do it.

*I’m exaggerating, of course.  It usually takes as much as ten minutes.

**Mathematically, I mean, not like, say, The Simpsons, or Superman comics.

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Rockin’, rockin’ and rollin’. Down to the train I’m strollin’.

Well, it’s Monday again.  Yippee.  I’m writing this post on my “smartphone”* today because I didn’t feel like taking my miniature laptop computer with me when I left the office on Friday.  Perhaps that was shortsighted of me, but hopefully at least this way I will avoid writing too much today.

Of course, as usual, I have no particular subject or topic to address with this blog post.  I just started writing and, well, we’ll all find out what comes forth, won’t we?  It may be a lame-ass way to run a blog, but whataya gonna do?

I did walk to the train this morning, five miles (the same distance as before, of course‒it would be weird if the distance changed from day to day).  It was, perhaps, slightly easier than the last time, which is good.  It would be troubling if it were getting harder every time, though blisters can sometimes make that happen.

I rode my new bike around on Saturday and on Sunday, but I didn’t have the heart to try to ride it this morning.  For one thing, riding it is still just exhausting relative to walking or to riding my other bike.  Also, I cannot help but fear getting a flat tire while on the way to the train (or on the way back), and that possibility makes me too nervous to want to use it.

If I get a flat on the weekend, then I merely need to walk the bike back to the house‒or to a bicycle repair shop, if there’s one nearby, which there pretty much isn’t.  But if I get a flat on the way to the train, then I have to deal with a bike with a flat and with getting to work.

Perhaps I’m just a wimp for not wanting to deal with such things, but I have only so many “spoons” to go around, and they get used up by so many little things throughout every single work day (and other days as well) that I don’t feel that I have any reserves.  For many years now, I’ve felt that I’m in imminent danger of complete collapse; I still feel that way.

One of these times, I’ll be correct in that estimate, but that’s a bit of a cop-out.  It’s like someone stating that the world will end tomorrow, then when it doesn’t (if it doesn’t) they just roll it over to the next day.  Sooner or later, they will be right.  It may take over a trillion tries‒let’s imagine they’re immortal as well as absurdly bloody-minded‒but they will eventually be correct.

Anyway, though, for me it’s not the fact of getting flat tires that’s the exhausting part (though it is exhausting when it happens).  It is, rather, the tension of worrying about it every single time I ride.  You might say that I simply shouldn’t let myself worry about it, should not let that imagined possibility interfere with the “now”.  To which I might reply that you shouldn’t fear cancer and/or heart disease and/or Alzheimer’s, etc., because sooner or later something is going to get you, and your fear is just causing you stress in the here and now.

Or perhaps it would be better, or more analogous, to tell you that you shouldn’t fear running across a busy road, because either a car will hit you or it won’t, and you won’t change that by worrying.  Except, of course, you can change that by worrying, if you act on your worry and therefore don’t recklessly run into the street.

I know, I’m being fairly silly.  I’m not trying very hard to be rigorous right now, so some of my logic may be strained.  But I hope I’m not being fundamentally or thoroughly irrational.  I don’t think I am, but just as it’s not up to you whether or not you’re appropriately considered an asshole, it’s not necessarily reliable for me to judge my own rationality.  I do judge myself, and I am fairly harsh about it, but if I were to start losing my mind, I would be an unreliable witness to what was happening.

Anyway, that’s enough for now.  I hope you’ve enjoyed this post, if that’s even possible.

Oh, and by the way, though I have not set up a Patreon or anything, if any of you would like to request that I write a post about some specific subject or topic, by all means, please let me know in the comments.  I don’t promise to fulfill any and/or all such requests, but I do promise to read and consider them.

In the meanwhile, please have a good day.

*I don’t mean to denigrate the phone by putting that term in scare quotes.  It’s a fine piece of technology, and for the most part, it does what it’s meant to do.  I just think the expression “smartphone” is a poor term.  It’s mainly a marketing gimmick, like “organic” and “gluten free” and “non-GMO”:  designed to lure in the insecure and get them to buy particular products to try to counter their…I don’t know, their existential angst or summat.

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Is it possible to choose not to care, if you do?

It’s Friday again.  I won’t say “Thank God it’s Friday” or “Thank Batman it’s Friday” or anything of that sort.  Of course, I’m glad that we’re ending what has been a terribly long work week, which has provided only a few moments of accomplishment, apart from the trivial and the usual (i.e., working).  But that’s not saying much.  In general, for me, the weekend is just another two empty, lonely days coming up before the start of another work week.

I’ll be glad to get some rest, of course, since on the weekend I can knock myself out because I don’t have to worry about being able to do anything that requires mental effort the next day.  I find that terribly useful.  Also, I intend to try to get used to riding my new bicycle more over the weekend, especially since my right heel and the ball of my right foot now have new blisters from walking yesterday, and these will make further walking painful and somewhat counterproductive for the immediate future.

Other than that, though, there’s really nothing else going on.  I had thought—earlier in the week, when lack of foreknowledge allowed me to be stupidly optimistic—that maybe this weekend I would ride my new bike to the movie theater and see the new Fantastic Four movie, since I’ve always been a fan of the FF, and of course, I hear that the new Doctor Doom makes a post-credit appearance.  I’m an even bigger fan of Doctor Doom than of the FF.

I have mixed feelings about how they’re doing Doom.  He is (usually) my favorite villain across all fictional universes, and I’ve been very disappointed—mostly—by the way the movies have failed to portray him.

To be clear, I thought Julian McMahon (RIP) was a very good cast as Doom.  But the script of that first FF movie all but completely ruined his character, though it and he were still enjoyable.  I’ve long said, if someone wants to see a movie with a nearly perfect portrayal of how Doom should be, they should watch Star Trek II:  The Wrath of Khan.  Ricardo Montalban’s performance as Khan, and the way Khan is written, is almost perfect for Doom.

Anyway, all this is really neither here nor there.  I’m almost certain that the MCU is going to fuck up in trying to bring Doom to the screen—not least because they’re using RDJ to play him.  The means they’re going to somehow link Tony Stark and Victor von Doom.

While I admire Downey’s portrayal of Iron Man, which made him much more interesting in the movies than he ever was in the comic books, Tony Stark does not so much as deserve to polish Doom’s boots, let alone be somehow incarnated as Doom.  RDJ could have played Doom de novo, probably—he’s a very good actor—but to link those characters annoys me.

I don’t know why it matters to me.  It really shouldn’t.  I don’t know why much of anything matters to me.  I don’t know why I bother writing this stupid blog or doing anything else.

I want to rest.  I feel like I can never just clear the tension from my system.  Maybe if I actually stopped caring at all, I could do it.  But it’s very difficult to make yourself stop caring, because you already do care, and to be able to reprogram that particular function of your being, you would have to be able not to care about the fact that you would no longer care.

This is a conundrum that has long haunted or at least worried AI researchers.  If you program an AI with a particular terminal goal—the one that motivates it above all, to which all other goals are instrumental, subordinate goals—it becomes nigh impossible to make it voluntarily submit to changing that terminal goal.

If this seems obscure and abstract, consider a man (for instance) who deeply loves and cares about his family, more than he cares about anything else, or even everything else, in the world.  And then imagine asking him to submit voluntarily to some procedure by which he will be made to stop caring at all for his family.  Can you imagine such a person agreeing to that?  Would you agree to that?

If you don’t love or care about your family, try to think of something else you dearly love and feel justified in loving, like, I don’t know, Nascar or some particular political movement or some such.  Then imagine submitting yourself to some procedure or medicine or whatever that changes that, not because you have come to think that it’s a bad thing to love, but just because not caring about it would be simpler.

I’m not sure what point there is to this post.  Probably there is none.  I just need to shut it down for now, and hopefully over the weekend I’ll at least get some rest.  I don’t know what to say about anything else.  But please, do have a good weekend.

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That small model of the barren earth which serves as paste and cover to our blogs

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, and I’m sitting at the train station as I begin to write this, having walked the five miles here from the house.

I’d intended either to walk or ride the bike today, having taken a rest break yesterday, but riding the new bike was just a little too intimidating.  I think I’ll need to get a bit of practice in over the weekend—a longish ride or two each on Saturday and Sunday—in order to get really used to it, so I don’t feel daunted when I arise in the morning.

I don’t have anything against walking, of course.  It’s actually rather enjoyable.  But it does take quite a bit longer than biking does, and it’s much more likely to cause me blisters, as well as irritation in my right ankle and left knee (though I have a spandex brace on for the latter issue, and it helps).

How’s that for a boring beginning?  Still, at least it’s a form of “good” news, in the sense that I have accomplished something useful already today.  That’s one reason it’s nice to get your exercise in before work—or whatever constitutes the morning for you—because then you begin the rest of your day with an accomplishment already under your belt, so to speak.  And, of course, over time you’ll be able tighten that belt, or so it is to be hoped, if you keep up the good habits.

In any case, I’m starting this post off much more positively than I did yesterday’s post, though that’s admittedly a very low bar to clear.  Hopefully there will be no minor catastrophes today involving the train as there were on Tuesday after I walked.  The announcement proclaims the train is on its way in ten minutes, which will make it right on time, so that’s a hopeful fact.

It’s not as though I don’t have plenty of time before work officially starts; I can’t seem to sleep past about three in the morning, and I wake up more than once before then, no matter when I go to sleep.  I might as well use that time to get some things done, and exercise can be one of those things.

Okay, well—what should I talk about now?  I don’t know.  I never plan these things out, as you know, and though sometimes I think I write better when I feel angry in general, I don’t feel especially so at the moment.  I keep trying to give myself positive “self-talk” as they call it, but it’s difficult for me to do, because I find that I don’t believe it.  I want to be able to say to myself that “I love my life and I love myself” but I really don’t.  Maybe if I said something like, “I deserve to love myself” or similar I might find that easier to stomach.

I doubt it, though.  Perhaps if I’m able to get into better condition, as I am trying to do, I’ll feel better about feeling better about myself.

***

Well, I’m on the train now, and we appear to be moving on time and on schedule and other redundant expressions meaning that things are going according to plan.  It’s quite chilly on the train, after the tropical mugginess of the very early south Florida morning.  Fortunately, I brought an extra tee-shirt to put on over my fancy one, the latter of which is supposed to allow perspiration to evaporate quickly.  I’m not sure that it really does that, but it at least doesn’t tend to sag as it sticks to your skin with your sweat.

Well, it doesn’t actually do anything to your skin or in response to your sweat.  As far as I know, no one else but I has worn any of my shirts.  That’s good.  I don’t really want anyone else to be in my shirts, and I certainly wouldn’t recommend to anyone that they try being in my shoes.

Ha.

Ha.

So, now, what to do otherwise for today?  Of course, I will go to the office, and I will work, which makes good sense, since that is the point of getting up and leaving in the morning.  It all does get quite drab and repetitive, though, and it is certainly pointless from any objective point of view.  Unfortunately, it’s also pretty pointless from my subjective point of view, and over time that view has become more and more definitively that my days are without a point.

Do most people have a subjective sense that their daily lives have some meaning?  I suppose if they live with a spouse and/or children and/or have a group of friends with whom they spend their time, they might not even have to acknowledge any subjective sense of meaning; they will simply instantiate it.  That’s probably nice.

And so it goes, and so it goes, and the train is also going, and there seem to be no untoward complications.  It’s still dark, but dawn is in the east, gradually drowning out the lovely morning spectacle of Jupiter floating a degree or so above Venus in the eastern sky.  Venus, of course, is far brighter than Jupiter, belying the actual relative sizes of the planets, since it is much farther away and light intensity falls off as the square of the distance, due to the geometry of space.

It’s interesting how many names Venus has, and how contradictory they are.  In middle-earth, of course, it is Eärendil, and we call it Venus, but it was also the original Lucifer, the morning star—and it’s also the evening star, depending on where in its orbit it is relative to the Earth.  And it is, of course, the most transitory of planets.

With that really stupid and bad astronomy joke I’ll end for the day, and none too soon.  I hope you all are feeling well and are accomplishing your own little or not-so-little successes.  Sometimes just living to the next day can feel like a heroic accomplishment.  And sometimes it can feel like a terrible mistake.

TTFN