Personal

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“Monday morning turning back…”

“…yellow lorry slow, nowhere to go.”

To my surprise, I am writing this blog post on my smartphone today.  I say “to my surprise” because I did not bring my mini laptop computer back to the house with me on Thursday evening, but I did not recall that fact until I unzipped my backpack and started looking for the computer.  It’s a tad frustrating to have allowed that to slip my mind, but then again, it has been four days.

I don’t feel well this morning, though it’s not because of any weekend debauchery of any kind.  I did essentially nothing this weekend.  Of course, that’s always an inaccurate statement if taken literally, but it catches the gist, the impression, of what I mean to convey.  Obviously, I breathed, and my heart pumped blood, and my bone marrow presumably kept on making blood, and I ate and excreted and so on.  And I did walk to the bank and to the convenience store and so on, and I watched a few videos on YouTube and on “Prime Video”.  But that’s about it.

Despite having rested quite a lot, my entire body just aches and is sore‒especially my back and left hip and knee and ankle and my left shoulder and arm and hand.  Both my thumbs are stiff and sore, making the process of writing this post on the smartphone particularly annoying.  I feel almost as if I were fighting some systemic infection, but I have no other localizing or specifying symptoms or signs.

Of course, I’m on my way to the office right now, to start another thoroughly pointless week of work.  I say “pointless” because I’m not going anywhere, metaphorically or literally.  I see no future other than the pointless repetition of today, with its utter lack of anything fulfilling and its ample sampling of pain and tension and frustration and anxiety and loneliness and depression.

If I had some purpose, some desired goal, something toward which I was working, it would be okay, I suspect.  Or if I just had someone with whom to legitimately share my time, with whom I could have anything more than a superficial connection, it might be tolerable.

Alas, I don’t have those things, and I strongly suspect that I never will have them.  I have had good friends (and excellent family) in my life, but I seem to have lost my ability to make friends, at least to make anything other than work friends.  And I am certainly not a dating kind of person, unfortunately.

I don’t know what point I’m getting at (yet again).  Maybe the point is that there is no point.

I don’t know if any of you stopped in on Friday and read the Declaration of Independence.  Ironically, anyone who bothered to stop and read it is likely not the sort of person who would need to be reminded of the principles involved.  So who knows whether anyone really got anything out of the fact that I shared the text of the document here?

Who knows?  Who cares?  Why bother?

What else is there to say today?  Not very much.  Again, I just don’t feel very well at all, this morning, even for me.  (And when was the last time I felt reasonably healthy in the morning?  It probably long predates the origin of this blog.)

All right, well, I’ll leave it here for today, pretty much.  I feel quite discouraged and despondent and just physically rather beat up.  I’ve taken two extra-strength acetaminophen and three aspirin today so far already, but I don’t yet detect any sign of them making anything better.  Perhaps I haven’t given them a fair day in court, so to speak.  We shall see.

In the meantime, I hope that all of you have a good day and a good week, and a good month on top of that.  And so on, and so on, and so on…

In the meantime, here’s my cover of the song from which this blog post’s title comes.

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This post is not entitled to a headline

I’m writing this on my “smart” phone this morning.  When I left the office yesterday, I was just too exhausted to want to deal with carrying the miniature laptop computer.  I don’t know exactly why; maybe it’s because I’ve been burning my limited energy trying to force myself to be positive and upbeat.

I’ve even used the old autosuggestion, “Every day in every way I’m getting better and better” whenever walking or mentally idle.  But it wears me out after a while, and it feels so false as to be unsustainable in my head, just like when I found I couldn’t even think the words “I love my life and I love myself.”  I don’t believe any of it.

So, I wrote a few halfway positive blog posts in recent days and weeks, and hopefully they’ve been mildly entertaining from time to time, but I don’t know that I’m going to be able to keep that up.  I don’t feel good about myself or about the world in general.  I don’t feel in any way optimistic‒though I wouldn’t say I’m truly pessimistic, either.  It’s not even really what I would call fatalism.

I can only say that my attitude is that things in general will only ever be as good as they have to be, as they are forced to be, because there’s no percentage in being any better than that overall, just as there is no need in biology for organisms to be any better than the minimum required to survive and reproduce.

I could go into the reasons for these facts, but I’ve gone into them before on this blog, and I have done so more than once, so you can look around and find such posts here somewhere.  I’ve probably also discussed them on Iterations of Zero.  Today, I simply do not have the energy available to do so‒and it’s not even 4:30 in the morning yet.

Obviously my insomnia continues, but that’s not new.  I just haven’t been writing about it, because I thought people would be sick of it.  Similarly, I always have my chronic pain, which waxes and wanes a bit, but doesn’t ever take a day off, not for more than 20 years.  And my depression and anxiety continue, probably inescapably, since they are probably related to (or at least exacerbated by) my ASD.

It’s pretty sad, but I’ve realized‒or I have at least faced the fact‒that my time at the office is better than my time back at the house.  I have to go to the house, of course, because I need a place of privacy and rest, but I don’t like it there.  Especially in the morning, before everyone else arrives, the office is very much more comfortable.

And let’s be honest, pretty much all of my socializing happens at the office.  That’s more or less always been my pattern:  I make my friends either at work or school or what have you, though especially when I was younger, those friendships expanded from school and became broader and better.

That sort of thing doesn’t seem to happen anymore.  I am less and less able to connect with people as time goes by, partly because my energy budget is so low, and I have fewer and fewer interests and pastimes and distractions.  Everything in my life‒well, nearly everything‒sucks, and that’s because I suck.  The things in my life that don’t suck are as they are in spite of me.  Some people and things are just inherently good enough to be better than I am worse.  But that doesn’t make me any better.

I’m tired, and I don’t know any good, real reasons to keep trying.  I have and take very little joy in my nature.  Also, in general, I feel that my body is rotting throughout, and has been doing so for a few decades now.  I’m like a fruit that fell to the ground in infertile soil a long time ago, and there’s nothing for me to do but get first mushy and then dry and to slowly, grossly, wither away, surrounded only by various kinds of flies and ants.

Okay, that’s a bit purple and melodramatic.  My apologies.  But it captures a lot of how I feel about myself, my disgust and self-loathing; I make myself want just to throw up.

I wish I had the willpower to stop eating for good, just never to eat again.  That would be kind of nice.  Then I could just wither and fade out, and even get skinny before the end‒unless something else killed me before I reached that point.  I guess that would be okay.

Anyway, I’m not sure I’ll write tomorrow.  I am working then, of course, but I make no promises about writing a blog post.  The office is actually going to be closed on Friday for Independence Day, the first time I can remember us being closed for that holiday, but I’ve already got a pre-programmed post prepared for propagation that day.

Having the holiday off isn’t any particularly great thing from my point of view.  It’s not as though I’ll be doing anything to celebrate (other than my pre-programmed post), nor will I spend my time doing anything fun or interesting.  I’ll probably try just to knock myself out with Benadryl on Thursday night as I do on Friday nights, and then just…lie around.

I’m getting pretty bored with the movies and shows available, even ones that I know already and like, and YouTube is getting overdone, too.  There’s no new science that’s especially interesting, and certainly no new fiction that catches my eye.  And humanity in general, and America in particular, is just disappointing (I have never expected much from them, but they find so many ways to let me down, nevertheless).

Oh, well.  Whatever.  It’s not important, and it certainly doesn’t matter.  It’s just so wearying.  And I am tired.

I guess if I write a post tomorrow, you can read it.  If I don’t, you can’t.  That’s how that works.  But Friday will bring my preprogrammed post, and then Saturday and Sunday of course there will be nothing.

I’m not optimistic enough to start planning for next week.  Honestly, it doesn’t seem worth the wait.

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Compassion is true justice, isn’t it?

It’s Friday, and I’m writing what should be my last blog post of the week, since I don’t think I’m going to work tomorrow—we’ve been having a good week, all things considered, though it doesn’t have a great deal of impact on me other than making it more likely for me to have Saturday off.

I guess I’m grateful for that.  After all, I really do seem to need frequent time to decompress by just lolling about and doing nothing.  Considering that, throughout my life, I’ve almost never given myself any time to rest beyond that which is absolutely necessary, I guess it’s not too surprising that I’ve worn myself out.

I feel a vague, general hostility this morning, bordering on unfocused hatred—not towards any specific or particular thing but toward everything in general.  It’s a bit of a shame.  It’s not really new for me, though.  I remember, well into my past, realizing that I didn’t like “people” overall, but that I had a hard time specifically hating people I knew, or at least the people I knew fairly well.

That’s a curious fact.  I could recognize that, at first glance, I found humans as a whole frustrating, often disgusting, frequently reprehensible, and in general just rather pathetic—but then, when I got to know someone, I usually found them at least tolerable, and usually in some ways likable.  It’s probably because, when you get to know a person, and you see the various aspects of their lives and their personalities, you realize that even their negative attributes are clearly not of their choosing, and you develop at least a sense of compassion for them, even if there is no actual affection.

I guess, in a way, it’s a realization that humans are not much more responsible for their character than, say, a dog is, though they delude themselves otherwise.  And although there are dogs that are unpleasant, with bad habits and so on, people mostly recognize that dogs are not the authors of their negative attributes (nor of their positive ones).

Humans in general have more agency than dogs, but not nearly as much as they think they have.  No one chooses their ancestry, of course, and so they do not choose their genes, nor the location and circumstances of their birth, nor the culture in which they live, nor the things they are taught—true and false and nonspecific.  It’s probably unnecessarily biasing to think of everyone as “victims”, since not all the things that happen to us (or within us) are negative.  But certainly, people are passengers in life rather than drivers.

Yes, even those who have great wealth and power are no more the authors of the world than are the most abjectly impoverished.  They are luckier, of course; it would be churlish and foolish to think otherwise.  But they are not really any more “in charge” than anyone else is.

They don’t like to admit it, but that’s probably because they are terrified of recognizing their own powerlessness, which is understandable.  But there is little to no doubt about the fact that they are just the same type of flotsam and jetsam as everyone else.  Even the vastly wealthy and successful (and reasonably smart) Steve Jobs fell victim not just to pancreatic cancer but to his own irrational biases in eschewing scientifically supported treatment for it.

This is not to imply that, had he been treated, he would definitely have survived.  Pancreatic cancer is no joke.  The pancreas has no tissue capsule around it, and it is not surrounded by firm structures that would lead to early pain and thus early diagnosis of the illness, so by the time most people know they have the disease, it is often very advanced and has spread quite far.

Jobs’s outcome might have been no better had he engaged the best, top-level, scientifically validated treatment available (which he certainly could have afforded).  His chances would just have been better.

Sooner or later he would have died anyway, just like everyone else.  Death is not optional, not even for the universe itself, as far as we can tell.  This is not to say that spacetime may not endure forever in some form or another—it quite possibly shall—but what we consider to be our universe, a place in which complexity and life itself can exist, even if only in a tiny, tiny, miniscule fraction of the cosmos, is inescapably working toward increasing entropy.  And while a Poincaré recurrence may also wait in the distant future (the mathematics suggests that it does), that’s not likely to be much consolation to anyone here and now.

No, in the scope of time even more so than in the expanse of space*, the place for any kind of life appears tiny indeed.  People say silly things like “our universe is fine-tuned for life”, but that’s absurd on its face.  Almost every location in the cosmos is incapable of supporting life as we know it, at least without significant modification**.

People are biased because they live in places where life is possible—but that’s tautological, when you think about it.  And even here, on the surface of the Earth, in a civilization that spontaneously self-assembled to house humans and their subordinate animals, most people could not survive without the technology and services provided by (and invented by) other humans.

So, perhaps compassion is the most reasonable attitude to have toward people, even when they are at their worst.  That doesn’t mean one shouldn’t try to stop people from doing bad things and hurting each other and themselves.  But thinking of them as evil is probably not merely counterproductive but actually unjust.  Evil is an adjective that can apply to deeds, but I think it’s never a very good description of individuals in real life.

That’s me being relatively positive and gentle, isn’t it?  I know, it’s disgusting.  I’ll try to avoid it in the future.  In the meantime, please try to have a good day and a good weekend, and repeat after that for as long as you can.

*If time and space are both infinite in extent, as they may be, it’s difficult to compare fractions of them to say which might, in some fashion, be a bigger proportion.  Is a googol (10100) a bigger percentage of infinity than 1 is?  Not mathematically.  Any finite number one can choose, no matter how large, is unreasonably close to zero when compared to infinity.  And that’s just the smallest version of infinity, ℵ0.  Don’t even try to start considering fractions of, say, the real numbers.  You can’t even begin to count them, because you cannot, even in principle, find a smallest one with which to begin, or the next one from any starting point.  There are an uncountably infinite number of real numbers between any two specific numbers you might pick, no matter how close together they are.

**I did a YouTube video related to this, that I titled There is NO life in the universe.  I don’t remember how good my points were, but if you’re interested, here it is.  Actually, even if you’re not interested, here it is.

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Dreams of a rational culture

I’m writing this on my mini laptop computer again today, because I got tired of the frustrating process of doing stuff on the smartphone.  Really, writing and texting and everything else via the smartphone is more often than not terribly annoying.  I know Steve Jobs got inspired by Star Trek: The Next Generation and wanted to make some version of a tablet with their touch-screen controls and all, but that was fiction.  If he wanted to make something more useful based on Star Trek, why couldn’t he have put some money into warp drive or something?

Of course, he was mainly a software guy, not actually any kind of physicist or true engineer or something, any more than Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos or Peter Thiel or any of these other successful billionaires and so on are.  Don’t get me wrong; I’m sure they’re all reasonably clever, and they’re decent at business, especially at business that doesn’t require them to manufacture things that require serious production and safety and stress testing and all that.

Well, okay, Musk does make cars that are often quite decent (from what I have seen) and rockets that are sometimes quite impressive (and often not).  But mostly what these really successful business people seem to be good at is marketing, AKA self-aggrandizement.  Likewise for successful politicians.

They don’t actually have to be exceptionally good relative to their competitors, they just have to convince enough people that they’re cool and clever, and that if those people want other people to think that they are cool and clever, they should buy their products or use their services or whatnot.  It’s all rather pathetic on their part, and even more pathetic on the part of the people who faddishly embrace them.

Again, don’t get me wrong; I like things about Amazon, for instance, especially the ability to get books that I never was able to find even in Barnes & Noble or Borders (RIP) or Books-A-Million.  And I publish through Amazon when I publish my own books (or, rather, when I used to do so) because of their reach, not that it did me any particular good—I, unlike the humans to whom I referred earlier, am not a natural self-promoter.

I wish humans were less enamored of having obnoxious, “flashy”, egotistical (often male) tribal leader types and instead focused on competence and level-headedness.  Just imagine if most of our politicians were not interested in bombast and attention and rhetoric and recognition and “importance” and were just mainly interested in doing a good job on behalf of the people who elected (i.e., hired) them.

I don’t know what point I’m trying to make here.  I never plan these posts out ahead of time, so they are very much just whatever pops out of my mind on any given day.  In a way, all of you reading are only slightly more surprised by what you read here than I am by writing it.

Still, I don’t think I’m alone in wishing people would be less flash and more substance.  Then we wouldn’t have brain-worm-dead people like RFK Jr. in charge of the nation’s healthcare and medicine organizations when he is not merely unqualified but is anti-qualified.  Ditto for the one who appointed him (and for the abysmally cowardly congresspeople who approved the appointment and the poor misled people who elected them all).

If people in general were less interested in seeing who “owns” or “destroys” someone else in mere “debate”, but instead were interested in seeking reliable information and solutions together, things would likely be better.  If we want to try to model things in our society after Star Trek, I wish we could try to instantiate some version of Vulcan philosophy and practice.  Mr. Spock is so much more admirable as a character than nearly every other person on the original Enterprise, and Captain Picard in TNG is almost Vulcan in his own character.

We shouldn’t, of course, seek to eliminate emotion; that’s hardly possible.  Emotion is what gives us impetus, and indeed, that may be its entire biological “purpose”.  But we can try to govern our passions (to quote Spock) to make them our faithful servants rather than our capricious and chaotic masters.  This is not impossible by any means.

Not that I am a master of my own emotions, especially my negative ones.  But I do not consider them to be anyone else’s major concern, and certainly no other person is responsible for them or to blame for them.  I try not to let them destroy me, though I am so inclined.  But if we could all put more emphasis on, for instance, Stoic philosophy, on Vipassana and Metta and similar meditation practices and some of the ideas from, for instance, the Tao te Ching, I think all the world would be better.

I guess for now, at least, it’s a pipe dream—whatever it is I’m “dreaming” about, that is.  Frankly, I’m not sure what I’ve written here today, so far, or if there’s any coherence to it at all.  If there is not, I can only apologize at this point, because I have no intention of starting this post over.  Hopefully I’ll be able to get through this day less down and discouraged than I was yesterday*.

The world is terribly annoying and disappointing and, yes. discouraging, and my own personal life is in some ways even more so of all three of those things.  I try not to let it defeat me, but perhaps that very determination to keep playing the stupid game of the stupid human race and the stupid universe is the very thing that should count as being defeated—being fooled into taking part in the pantomime that is “civilization” instead of making my quietus, or perhaps finding some other path.

I guess I have to figure that out for myself, as with most things for most people.  Please try to have a good day if you can.  It would be nice if someone could do so.

*Apparently, I was so plainly depressed that someone (or perhaps “the algorithm” itself) on Threads thought that I might need help, and I got another one of those “someone thinks you’re having trouble and might need someone to talk to” or whatever that message is, along with a link to the mental health/suicide hotline.  Frankly, I’m amazed that I don’t get such suggestions every day, since I spend at least part of each day thinking about dying—and not thinking about it as a passive thing.

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Stupidity make me angry–especially my own

Once again, I am writing this on my smartphone.  Yesterday I didn’t even bother to take the laptop computer back to the house with me.  I was pretty much fed up with everything.  Though we had a successful day at work, there were multiple cases of people not paying attention to our guidelines and rules; but whenever I would bring them up, there was (and is) always an excuse to go around them‒sound familiar to anyone?‒and I repeatedly got overridden, leaving me to wonder why I bother.

I also hit the top of my head hard on the corner of my metal filing cabinet early yesterday, while reaching down to pick up a dropped pen.  It really hurt, and it left a cut, and I had a headache and a sore neck for pretty much the rest of the day.  Unfortunately, I don’t seem to have developed a subarachnoid hemorrhage, so I have to keep moving.  It sucks.

And, of course, there’s all the idiocy that is actively occurring in America and the rest of the world.  There might be some who would characterize certain things that happen and that people do as “sick” and/or even “insane”, but I don’t like to use such terms to describe the various moronic and submoronic things humans do that are not only detrimental but cause spreading suffering to others.

First of all, it denigrates people who are actually sick/have mental illness and other related disorders.  Such people (of which I guess I am one) rarely do much harm to anyone but themselves‒though sometimes, some of us wish to do harm to certain carefully chosen other people.

But also, it dignifies the idiots.  After all, insanity is a legal term that indicates someone does not know right from wrong or lacks the capacity to control their own actions.  Now, at a deep level, it is almost certain that none of us has free will, at least not in anything but the vaguest, most hand-wavy, compatibilist sense.  But there is a real difference between someone who has OCD and cannot help but wash his or her hands until they bleed and a person who selfishly and arrogantly assumes that they have the right and the power and the competence to try to run other people’s lives but who then don’t accept responsibility for the horrific messes they make.

Stupidity can be defined as doing something in such a way that it is worse than just random action‒like trying to get to the airport by driving around one’s residential block over and over again ad infinitum*, or to try to solve a Rubik’s Cube by just spinning one side over and over (again, ad infinitum).  And this is so often the distillation of so many things that humans do, especially when they group together in significant numbers.

It reminds me of a post I saw on Threads or X or Bluesky or one of those.  The person said that people are selfish when isolated, but that such selfishness doesn’t really work, that we only survive and thrive by drawing together and supporting each other, working together, caring for each other.  This is true, as far as it goes‒humans are the most social of the social primates, and their greatest power comes from their ability to work together, to cooperate, to communicate.  This is why written language is the wellspring and lifeblood of civilization.  And yet, I am also reminded of the line from the original Men In Black, which I will only paraphrase here:  a person can be smart, but people together are stupid, reactionary, panicky, dangerous animals.

Both of these things are true, at least within certain contexts.  This probably explains at least part of the appeal of Ayn Rand’s** focus on rational self interest‒which, in a large society, is going to, in its limit, come to be the same thing as rational altruism.  But it is strange to have those seemingly at least partly contradictory facts both be true, at least in a highly simplified outline of the social nature of naked house apes***.

It is terribly frustrating.  Even the most well-intentioned people, like the person who made that point about humans being social and needing each other (or at least many of those who agree with those sentiments) will often virulently demonize those who are on the opposite side of a given political spectrum or argument, not even trying to show compassion or empathy or understanding for those who disagree with them.

Likewise, those on the “other side” who seem to wallow in self-righteousness and yearn for authoritarianism will nevertheless seemingly believe that, for instance, they follow the teachings of a very socialistic, compassion-loving rabbi from 1st century, Roman-controlled Judea.

These are some of the things that make me angry, not just the persistent headache and my other, never-ending body pains and mental divergences.  And although anger can be energizing, it is also unpleasant and, as Radiohead said, “it wears me out”.

I can endure a lot, it seems, whether out of stubbornness or willpower or just my own form of stupidity, but there’s no clear reason to keep enduring when there’s no evidence of any available relief or any joy that lasts more than a few hours at a time before leaving me alone to stew in my own, solitary, odious juices again.

I really do hate the whole universe a lot of the time, and that time proportion appears to be growing as that time goes by, like the product of some perverse Dark Energy in my own psyche.  I don’t know what to do about it in my almost entirely empty life.

I say almost entirely, because there are just enough little rays of light to keep me fooling myself that I might one day return to a satisfying, mutual daily existence with people I love, only to have those hopes draw away like a will-o-the-wisp, keeping me eager and even desperate to follow them, but leaving me lost and stranded in the marshland of my mind instead of just escaping into oblivion.

Oh, well.  Life sucks.  No shit, Sherlock, what else is new?  Further clichés as thoughts warrant.

I hope you lot are in better mental states than I am, and that you each and all have a good day.

*To borrow an example, though I cannot right now recall from where.

**Do you think Ayn Rand might have been an undiagnosed autistic person?  Discuss.

***It reminds me of the “Riddle of Steel” as described in the movie Conan the Barbarian.  Early in the movie, Conan’s father tells him that you cannot rely on men or gods, but that you can trust steel.  But then, later, Thulsa Doom (played by James Earl Jones) reveals the punchline of the riddle:  Steel is not strong, flesh (i.e., a person) is stronger.  These contradictory truths engender and represent the vortex of seeming paradox through which people must try to navigate, to find the eye of the storm, the balance point at which effective action is possible.

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Dogmas are a disease, a cancer of the mind. Avoid carcinogenic thinking if you can.

I’m going to try to keep this brief this morning, so even though I brought the mini laptop computer with me when I left work on Friday*, I am writing this on my smartphone.  It does make my thumbs sore, or at least it highlights their inherent soreness and stiffness, but that’s part of what makes me tend to write less.  Or at least, I write more slowly; it is not always easy to get me to write less.

I’m choosing this partly because I am just very tired.  On Friday nights and Saturday nights, I can take a couple of Benadryl and so on to help me sleep‒I know it’s not truly good sleep, but just being unconscious for more than an hour or two at a time is such a relief‒but on work nights that’s no good.  So, especially after the artificially extended sleep on the weekend, I tend to have a bad sleep on…well, on every other night, really, but Sunday is the first such night in the work week.

Another problem, and part of my reason for worse sleep, is that I am having a bit of a flare-up of my back/hip pain, and that makes nearly every effort feel that much harder, including simply trying to sleep‒although that’s a somewhat different type of effort than many others.

So, yeah, if there’s anything noticeably different in my writing style today than in my last handful of blog posts, it may be because of the fact that I’m writing on the smartphone.  It may also be something else entirely, of course, or even a combination of things (this seems most likely).  Just because one idea seems to provide a good explanation‒a good story, if you will‒doesn’t mean it’s right.

That’s a common trap into which I frequently see people fall, and it always annoys me (especially when I’m the person).  Some situation will happen, some occurrence will occur, and someone will propose‒perhaps just to themselves‒some reason, some explanation for the event(s), and it will seem at least somewhat plausible, and at least physically possible, and it doesn’t have any glaring logical inconsistencies.  And that’s where they stop.  In their heads, that will be what they think of as the actual explanation for whatever it is they’re explaining.

Unfortunately, this is actually‒at best‒a hypothesis.

Now, if people just recognized that fact and kept the notion in their heads as a hypothesis, then this would be no problem.  All knowledge about the world is, in principle, provisional**.  There’s nothing wrong with having a hypothesis that you recognize as such.  All good science proceeds from speculation (first triggered and then confirmed or denied by observation and testing).

If one has relatively non-crucial concepts to address, one need not even be particularly bothered about confirming or denying one’s little hypothesis.  One can simply have it, tacitly implied, sitting there in potentia in the process of one’s mind.  Then if, quite by chance, one should encounter data or concepts or arguments that bear on the likelihood of that hypothesis, one can‒sometimes quite unconsciously‒adjust one’s hypothesis, or one can discard or replace it or even find oneself more confident in it.

This is all well and good.  But all too often, humans take their first plausible seeming notion and decide that they must now have the answer.  And then, depending on their emotional connection to the idea, if they encounter disconfirming evidence or argument, they twist away from it, dismiss it, seek out only pseudo-confirming ideas and evidence or even (shudder) just the company of other people who share their epistemologically suspect ideas.

These are such things as conspiracy theories are made on, or even religions (literal or figurative ones, including cultish forms of economic theories and philosophical ideas).  And when one does not update one’s ideas, when one is not aligned with reality, sooner or later, one will collide with it.  When one collides with reality, it’s never reality that is damaged.

If it were only the person who persisted in self deception that got hurt in the crash, it would still be tragic but at least at least it would be tolerable.  But as with literal crashes, the innocent are all too often harmed and made to suffer as a consequence of someone else’s poor judgment.

This is part of why I despise all dogmatic thinking.  I even coined an expression in relation to it:  Spay and neuter your dogmas!

Do not let them propagate.  Dogmas are among the most perilous of meme-plexes because they are so stiff and brittle and they tend to have sharp edges.  But even when they don’t, there is still the problem of going against reality.  One can imagine the real nature of the world as a kind of tunnel or pipe or tube‒in places it is very wide and in places very narrow.  In some regions, a fair amount of variability in course is tolerable within it, but sooner or later, if one is not moving parallel to the course of reality, one will hit a wall.

How bad the collision will be can depend on many factors; one can have a mere scrape, or a glancing blow, or one can have a true “crash and burn” situation.

Those are generally worth avoiding.

Okay, that’s it for today.  I feel a bit grumpy and curmudgeonly right now, largely because of my pain and poor sleep, but sometimes it leads to decent writing.  Whether that’s been the case today, I’ll let you be the judge.  I am not impartial.

Have a good one.

*In case it wasn’t clear, I did not work on Saturday.

**Even the old cogito ergo sum.  And don’t get me started on cogitum ergot hatto.

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“Or play the game ‘existence’ to the end…of the beginning”

You’d think that people would have had enough of silly blog posts.  But I look around me and I see…well, nothing particularly revealing in any direction.  For all I can tell, the people reading this blog may be the last people in the world who read blog posts, and everyone else is sick of them (the blog posts, not the people who read blog posts).

Perhaps the people reading this are sick of them, too, but have some peculiar masochistic streak, some deep need for punishment in the form of inane reading material that must be satisfied once a day whenever possible.  It’s a  big world; there could, in principle, be such people, and enough of them to account for almost everyone who reads my blog with any regularity.

On the other hand, blog posts could be more like the silly love songs mentioned in Paul McCartney’s tune.  They may not be everybody’s cup of tea*, but maybe a lot of people really love them and enjoy them and are moved by them.  In which case, it may be that the only reason that my blog only gets a few readers every day is that I write weird stuff about weird stuff a lot, and I often come across as nihilistic and/or pessimistic**, and I certainly I have much trouble with my chronic issues.

Not that being a downer or focusing on difficult (or even quite odd) things is necessarily going to make people not want to read a blog.  Quite apart from the possible cliché that misery loves company (which I doubt would have much influence on blog posts) it is a fact that people who have their own troubles will often try to find others with similar issues, perhaps to see if they have different insights, perhaps just to share solidarity or even inspiration.

Maybe the only reason that my blog isn’t the most read thing in the history of the world is that not enough people know about it.  We do know that PR campaigns can make a huge difference, can turn mediocre stories into international bestsellers, or can bring an entirely unqualified (indeed, an antiqualified) person into high political office.  When the promotion is promoting something that’s actually good, and the promotion itself is good enough, truly amazing results can happen.

What a crime it would be if I were writing the best writing ever known to humanity and only a few dozen people ever regularly read it, just because I’m no good at promoting myself due to low self-esteem and/or ASD.  Thank goodness I’m not writing the best writing ever, right?  That’s a real load off, as they say.

But I am writing, it seems, and I will try to continue to write every morning when I’m going to work.  I don’t know for certain whether I will be working tomorrow—watch this space and see if I write a post, I guess.  I hope I’m not working.  Though I’ve been trying hard to present the façade of upbeatness, I am very mentally fatigued, as I tend to be.

I don’t know, maybe I’ve been mentally fatigued for years, or even decades, now.  I know I don’t ever tend to give my mind or myself a break if I can help it.  And apparently, for those with ASD, just the process of daily living among humans is draining, partly because of masking (pretending to be normal, pretending to be fine, pretending to understand nonverbal social cues, or even just tolerating the inanities of primate social dominance displays and rituals among the naked house apes), partly because of having to deal with sensory assaults, partly from just not being able naturally to connect with those around them.

So, maybe through this blog I might connect with—or at least provide connection for—people who have similar issues, at least if they are similar enough.  Though, even the thought of making connections with new people, or of people even wanting to connect with me, has made me feel suddenly tense and defensive—anxious, you might say—even as I write about it.

It’s so strange, isn’t it?  Just an imaginary social encounter, even through the medium of a blog, feels like a potential, literal attack.  And yet, I’ve had friends before—very good friends—and I always enjoyed my time with them, and I never wanted to be away from my wife and kids any more than I had to be.

Of course, that didn’t pan out; like most things that really matter to me, I managed to screw it up in various ways.  Not all of it was my doing, of course—back injuries and chronic pain, along with congenital neurodevelopmental conditions, are difficult to blame on anyone, or on any particular thing, though some morons try—but events often do seem to go against my dearest, most heartfelt, wishes.

Maybe I should find a way to wish that I was not an internationally famous, hugely best-selling author with hundreds of millions of devoted fans and good relationships, real and virtual, with people who make sense to me, and vice versa, and even potentially some strong romantic relationship of some kind.  If I could come to really want to avoid those things, then they would, for me, seem more likely to come to pass.

Either way I would be unhappy of course—in a kind of Twilight Zone style inversion of expectations delivering what someone thought they wanted but really didn’t—but at least one way I would be someone whose writing reached out and touched*** millions of people.

Whatever.  If wishes were horses, we’d all be neck deep in horseshit—and not just in the figurative way we already are.

I hope you have a good day, and that you have a good weekend as well.  If I write on Saturday, it shall be here.  If not, it will likely mean I am not working.  If something happens and I never write here again…well, it’s been nice writing to you.

*But then again, even tea isn’t everyone’s cup of tea.

**An accurate impression, to be fair.

***Not in an inappropriate way.

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Viewing his progress through, what perils past, what crosses to ensue, would shut the blog

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, and so it’s time for my “usual” weekly Thursday blog post.  Aren’t you lucky?

I was a bit surprised that yesterday’s post seemed to be rather successful, at least in that people commented on it, here and on social media (where I share it).  I don’t know if anyone else shared it—I encourage anyone who enjoys any of my posts to share it to your own social media, and of course, I encourage you to “like” it if you like it, though I’m falling afoul of my own cautionary song Like and Share by encouraging such activities.

Still, it would be nice if people could share my stuff or comment on it.  I’ll say again:  comments on social media aren’t as useful to me as comments here, on my main page.  Here is where all* the readers come together (over me, so to speak).  So, if one person makes a comment, it might be something that another person finds interesting or insightful, and they might comment back and even get a conversation going.

I don’t know.  I’m probably being unreasonable.  I usually am.  I just have a bit of a hard time sustaining conversation, myself, so I’m always hoping that other people will do so in response to the prompts of my random thoughts, like the ones from yesterday.

Here I’m using a rather constrained version of the term “random”; my thoughts are not random in any true, nondeterministic, quantum mechanical kind of way.  They’re just stochastic, as well as being occasionally sarcastic**, as in my third sentence above.  So, while in practice they are unpredictable, in principle, each follows directly from some individual cause or set of causes.

Of course, nowadays, many people creating “content” on the various social media ask for “likes” or “thumbs up” or whatever the specific equivalent on their site is, as well as sharing and subscribing when that applies.  They also often have things like Patreon accounts, or Ko-fi accounts or whatever (those latter ones allow people to send them small amounts—the price of a cup of coffee, for instance—to help support them), so that some of them can make an actual living by making their “content”.

Of course, it would be nice to make a living by making content, i.e., by these blog posts.  I suppose one can also write posts on Substack nowadays; they are set up to allow people to give paid subscriptions in addition to free subscriptions.

Actually, I think WordPress has instituted something along those lines as well; I’ve gotten notifications of some such things at some point, but I haven’t paid that much attention to them.  All the social media and search engine companies and streaming services are all changing things far too often, so I don’t even try to keep up.

This constant updating gives one (this one, anyway) the impression that the companies really don’t know what they’re doing, and that they haven’t made a good product before they put it out to the public, so they have to keep tweaking it.

I suspect, though, that it’s more that they think they have to keep changing things to keep up with all the competition.  It’s a bit as if seals and sea lions tried to grow tentacles because they saw that squid and octopuses have a fair amount of success using them.

It might be worth it to remind them (the software companies and the pinnipeds) that, while all improvement is change, not all change is improvement.  In fact, most potential change is at best neutral, and more often detrimental, especially in situations in which something is working at least reasonably well.

This is the root of the admission in the Declaration of Independence that prudence dictates that established governments should not be changed due to light or transient causes (something like that, anyway).  It’s also part of why I hate when organizations or people call for “change” without being more specific.  I have more patience with the label “progressive”, because at least it gives tacit recognition to the notion that progress (by whatever definition) is what we want, not mere random change.

It’s true that evolution by natural selection happens with random mutations and non-random survival, and that over time, progress can be made that way, but it is a grim, ungainly, blundering, low, ghastly, ominous, wasteful, and horribly cruel process (here I’m combining words from Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Darwin).  It’s better to use engineering principles rather than random trial and error if one wants to head more swiftly and surely in better directions***.

Anyway, I don’t have any direct way to monetize this blog, though there are probably ways it can be done.  And so, I keep going to work every day, as I am doing now.  If people want to support me, of course, giving “likes” and commenting and (if such a thing ever happens) sharing the link to the posts is also very nice.

Of course, if anyone wants to support me monetarily, they can certainly do so—in principle—by buying my published books and talking about them to other people (and rating and reviewing them on Amazon, for instance).  And, of course, they can play/stream my music on Spotify and YouTube Music and iTunes and so on.  Some of my songs are even available to use as background music for reels on Instagram and TikTok and Facebook.

But I am more or less certain that I’ve made a staggering**** net loss on my music.  That’s okay.  People have listened to my songs, and some people have said that they really like them.  I even had one work friend who was a former professional musician/singer/songwriter say that he thought if my song Breaking Me Down had been released (in a professionally produced version shortened for radio) in the seventies, it would have been a hit.

So, if you so desire, please do listen to my music, share my posts, buy and read my books, all that stuff.  I would be grateful.  And hey, if any of you out there think I ought to try to monetize this blog, please let me know.

It seems unlikely that anyone actually reads far enough even to let me know their response, but if that’s the case, well, I guess I don’t mind being a voice crying out in the wilderness—I’ve always felt that way no matter what.

TTFN

*Though it may be a bit much to use the word “all”, considering that I don’t exactly have that many regular readers—a few dozen at most, most days.

**Oh, noooo, I would never be sarcastic.  Batman forbid!

***Of course, there are many possible ways to think of something as “better”, so making that judgment should also be an important part of the process if one wants actually to make things improve in a way upon which most, if not all, can agree.

****As a matter of percentage in versus percentage out.  The actual amounts are not great in either direction.

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A brief rundown of my events since last I wrote

I hope nobody’s been too worried about me since I haven’t written a post since Friday.

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!

I know, I know, that’s ridiculous.  I doubt anyone really even noticed that I hadn’t written.  But I haven’t in fact written since Friday (the 13th).

We ended up not working Saturday, partly because it was Father’s (Fathers’?) Day weekend.  That was good, because my youngest came to visit me on Saturday in celebration of that holiday, and as I said to them on Saturday, it was my favorite day in at least 12 years.

Sunday, of course, I don’t write blog posts, so that was nothing unusual; I did laundry and so on.  Then, yesterday, as I got up to get ready for work and to start writing my post, I realized that I really didn’t feel well.  I almost threw up before even getting my shoes on, then things progressed to more dire regions of state-space, and, well…I ended up staying at the house with GI distress and a low-grade fever.  As I told my boss, I think I ate something that disagreed with me strongly and in no uncertain terms.

Still, now I’m feeling a bit better, although I am still washed out.  The biggest worry for me about it at the time, though, was fear that I would dehydrate and might be at risk for having a kidney stone again.  Despite that fear, though, for the most part I didn’t want to take anything in by mouth.  And it’s not as though I have the capacity to take in anything by any other route.  I don’t have the equipment at the house to give myself IV fluids, though I suppose I could get some to have around in case of emergencies.

Anyway, sorry, that’s pretty boring.  I’m feeling at least like I’m heading in the right direction now.  And I can’t really miss more than the one day at work, because then there’s just too much on which to catch up.  Therefore, here I am on my way in, but I’m not fully at my usual capacity‒so please cut me a bit of slack if I’m not as coherent as I might usually be.

Saturday was quite nice, though.  We went first to a gaming/arcade kind of place.  It was a bit loud, but still, it was a lot of fun.  For the first time in my life, I was able to grab a prize with a claw game on my first try.  That was pretty much my only real triumph, but as I said, it was still very enjoyable.

Then we went to lunch at Talkin’ Tacos because, of course, I wanted to have tacos on that Saturday in particular.  After that, we went to a local farmer’s market that I’ve wandered through a few times before (but such places are really not much fun alone).  It was fun this Saturday, though.  It would probably have been more fun if it hadn’t been quite so hot and sunny and humid, but it was still cool‒just not in the literal, physical sense.

Other than that, well…I don’t know.  I don’t really have much more about which to write today, and I’m a bit washed out, as I think I mentioned.  So for now, I guess I’ll draw this to a close.  I hope all you fathers out there had a lovely holiday, and that everyone else also had a nice weekend and a nice day yesterday.  Hopefully, by tomorrow, I’ll be back up to snuff and can write something a bit more interesting.

Thank you for reading.

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Uttering such dulcet and harmonious blogs, that the rude sea grew civil at her song

Goodo and hell morning.

I’m pretty sure I’ve used that pseudo spoonerism before in a Thursday blog post opening, but I guess that’s okay.  I would be the only one to complain about such copying (and perhaps some imaginary, truly obsessive reader) and I’m okay with it as long as I am also the copier.

I’m writing this on my smartphone, because I had a very bad pain day yesterday*, and even the small extra weight of the mini laptop computer was something I wanted to avoid‒probably purely for psychological reasons, since I doubt it affected the level of my pain directly.

Anyway, I’m not in as much pain today so far, though it’s early doors, of course.  Still, I can’t change my mind and conjure the laptop computer at this point; if I could do that sort of thing, why would I bother going to the office?

Well, today I have one reason other than exerting effort necessary to maintain my job**:  my black Strat is back.  I asked my boss to bring it back, since it was just sitting in his garage, and yesterday he did so.  I even took a bit of time near the end of lunch to change to low E string, though I had brought my electronic tuner back to the house, so I had to tune the guitar afterward by ear***.  I’m pretty good at that, though.  Tuning a cello is much trickier, and I’ve done that a lot in my time.

I diddled around a little bit on it during a brief lull in the afternoon, and it was definitely nice.  I could still play Wish You Were Here and The Man Who Sold the World and Nothing Compares 2U, but I’m embarrassed to say that I had to look up the 5th (or was it 6th?) chord in Fake Plastic Trees****.  Once I got that chord back, though, it was as if I had never forgotten it.

My boss said that he thought my desk area looked better now with the guitar back in place.  Or maybe he asked me if I thought that was so.  Either way, the general message was the same, and I agreed with his assessment (or just answered his question in the affirmative).

I’ll probably do a bit of strumming and plucking this morning before work (and of course I will sing along).  One of these days, maybe I’ll do one of my videos of me playing and singing one of those songs above, or maybe One Headlight, or something like that.  I wonder how the acoustics in the new office would measure up when recording music.

We’ll have to see if I can still sing okay‒though, really, I do sing occasionally at the house when the housemates are out, and as far as I can tell my voice is still tolerable.  I don’t think I sing as well as I used to, but then again back in the day I used to sing more or less constantly during every daily commute, so I got a lot of practice.  I’d play and sing along with the Beatles or Elton John or Billy Joel or the soundtrack from Les Mis or (my favorite) The Phantom of the Opera.  Then later, when I had really long commutes after my divorce, I’d sing along with Tori Amos and Pink Floyd and Radiohead in addition to the previously mentioned artists.

Is it weird that, talking about how (or whether) I can sing, I cannot help but think of the old Simpsons  episode in which Troy McClure stars in the Broadway show Stop the Planet of the Apes, I Want to Get Off?  Specifically, I remember when the famous “Take your stinking paws off me…” line leads into a song in which the surrounding apes repeat, “He can talk, he can talk, he can talk, he can talk, he can talk, he can talk…” and Troy belts out, “I can siiiiiiiiiing!”

I haven’t watched much of The Simpsons since Phil Hartman was murdered.  He was never a main character, but he was always awesome.  I once read that he claimed, “I can do a thousand voices…and they all sound like Phil Hartman.”

Well, I suppose that’s enough gobbledegook for today.  For those of you who prefer talk of music to talk of mathematics and physics and their relationships to prosaic, daily matters:  You’re welcome*****.

I hope you have a good day today‒though as you should know by now, it will inevitably be the best possible day you can have, so don’t fret too much.  Reality is what it is.  And as John Mellencamp might have said (though he did not, as far as I know):  “When I fight reality, reality always wins.”

That’s one of the ways we know that it’s reality.

TTFN

I like this picture because David Gilmour’s Strat here looks JUST LIKE mine.

*Unless you prefer to say that, because of how much pain I was in, it was a good day for pain but a bad day for a person who would rather not be in chronic pain.  Raise your hand if that describes you.

**This is a bit peculiar, but without intending to do so, I initially wrote, “…exerting effort to stay alive” (emphasis added).  That hadn’t been the conscious idea or intention in my head as I was writing.  I wonder what a Freudian would say about that off slip of the typing thumbs.

***No, this is not going to be a stupid “by ear” related dad joke.  I just wanted to point out that I did use a video on YouTube where the proper guitar notes were played, just to get the sound for my low E.  After that, the rest of the tuning is pretty easy.

****It was a Dsus2, if memory serves at the moment.  [Checks the chords]  Yes.  Yes, it was a Dsus2.  And it was the 5th chord in the song, if you count the little Asus4 temporary life as a chord that’s separate from the A major chord from which it arises and to which it returns.

*****It’s not “your welcome”, which would seem to refer to a welcome that belongs specifically to you‒it’s “you’re welcome”, with the contracted form of “you are”, meaning, yes, you are welcome to the boon I have provided in the form of not writing about physics and mathematics today******.

******And though I’ve never seen it written so, it’s also not “yore welcome”, which would seem to be some reference to the way people used to be welcomed in the old days.