Personal

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Brief Wednesday writing report and digressions

Today’s writing on Extra Body:

“Block” words:  738

Net words: 698

Evidently, I cut a fair few words (40 overall) in my rereading/editing of previous writing, making the difference about 5.7% today, an unusually large disparity, at least since I’ve started keeping track.  The total number of words in the story as of today is 48,422, and it is 71 pages long (single-spaced on Word in Calibri 11-point).

As I wrote today, I came to worry that I had given my character a work-week that was now almost eight days long, because I had the character mention that the weekend was coming, but it seemed a long time since the previous weekend.  So, I scrolled back up through the story, noting the day of the week in any given scene, and realized that in the moment of the story that I wrote today, it was Thursday evening.  The weekend was indeed just about to arrive.

Apparently, somewhere in my mind, I had kept track of the days in the story better than I thought I had.

This sort of thing happens to me a lot.  I seem underdeveloped in the usual tendency toward mental self-confidence, and so I frequently check and recheck things to make sure they are as I thought they were.  I check my pockets to make sure my keys are there probably several dozen times a day or more, for instance.  I’m pretty good at mental arithmetic–I do it as part of my job, for one thing, and I can total up the sales numbers as they happen faster than other people can when they use calculators, but then I always recheck the totals three different ways using Excel, and when they are all the same and agree with my numbers, I consider it tolerably likely that I’m correct.  But I never feel certain.  Even though mathematics is the realm of theorems, and once proven, such theorem-laden information should be epistemologically final, I don’t ever feel final about it.  Perhaps this is part of why I am incapable of being religious; faith doesn’t even make any sense to me.

I also find that confidence, as expressed by other people, especially strong confidence, is almost always distasteful, in a powerful, visceral way.  I have severe contempt for people who make declarative statements about things they cannot know for sure, especially about the states of mind of other people, and about other people’s intentions.  Observing discourse about politics is almost always nauseating and infuriating.

The more confident someone is, the less I trust them, because I’ve noted that most people are far more confident than they are justified in being about most things.  And yet, many humans respond to the confident people positively, granting them pseudo-authority, even when–perhaps especially when–their confidence is not based upon anything testable or peer-reviewed or reliable.  This is part of why I hate thinking of those who hold political office as “leaders”.  They are almost always not leaders in any meaningful sense of the term, or they should not be.  I think it would be much better to think of them as employees, and to treat them accordingly.

Oh, well.  Perhaps this sense of uncertainty and the lack of reliability of people who nevertheless have outsized impacts on the lives of others is part of why I have trouble sleeping (though I think it’s mainly inherent and neuro-humoral, and related to what I suspect is ASD).

I slept a little better last night than the night before or the night before that, though it’s not saying much.  I felt vague and punchy all day yesterday, and I pseudo-jokingly said to my coworker that I wondered if anyone knows how to get in touch with Michael Jackson’s former doctor, because I could really use some Propofol.  It’s a pseudo-joke because, while I said it as if it were a joke, if someone offered me the option of being put under with it, even given the risk of death, I might take that offer.  I would certainly consider it.  Though I would have to feel reasonably confident that I was getting what I thought I was getting.  I suppose that’s part of why I wouldn’t really ever want to use illicit drugs–I would never feel comfortable that I was actually getting what I thought I was getting, let alone in any kind of reliable dose.

I hope you all feel vastly better than I feel.  It would be at least some crumb of comfort to be reasonably convinced that the large majority of people in the world tend to be much happier and healthier than I am.  If not, then what’s the point of bothering with the world?

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If Tuesday morning is like this, and Tuesday afternoon is never-ending…

It is Tuesday morning, the 28th of May in 2024 AD or CE, depending on how you prefer to write it.  I suppose it doesn’t really matter much to me; I’m okay either way.  I only first encountered the designation “CE” by the time I was in college (or “university”‒again depending on your preference), but I get why people use it.

I guess it’s probably silly to think that anyone should care whether I indicate what calendar era it is in which I’m writing.  I don’t suppose anyone would think I was writing a blog post in 2024 BC (aka “BCE”).  How would one even know toward which year one was counting down, if one were writing such dates?  Still, who knows how dates may change in the future, and whether someone might stumble across my blog posts in some unguessed age, on some weird, digital archaeological expedition.

How will such searches of the past even happen in the future?  If we advance beyond our current kind of online and personal storage, what would even happen to the data presently on the Internet and web and cloud and whatnot?  Heck, if all power went out for a significant amount of time in the near future, I would suspect that much of the stored data on the net might be lost.

Of course, quantum information will be conserved, if we understand that part of nature as well as we seem to understand it.  But the fact that it exists is not the same as being able to recover it.

Online is not forever.  Even if the actual data related to something sticks around, there will be so much other data that it will be as invisible as a single leaf in the Amazon rainforest as seen from space.  Perhaps far more so.  Very little that happens online is salient to anyone even as it happens, let alone after much time has passed.

Anyway…I’m writing this post on my phone in the back of an Uber heading to the office, because I again slept horribly last night, despite taking melatonin early in the evening.  I don’t know what to do about this sleep problem.  As John at the bar said to Bill*, I believe this is killing me.  And I don’t think I’m being melodramatic or hyperbolic**.

I mean to write at least a little bit of fiction this morning, but my last experience using the laptop computer in the backseat of an Uber was unpleasant.  To be honest, though, just about everything is unpleasant now.  There’s little if anything that brings me even transient joy.  There is occasional, momentary escape in the form of humor, for instance, but even that is becoming more and more difficult.  Mainly, I just feel ridiculously tense and guarded and tired and in pain pretty much all the time, or at least the vast majority of it.

I don’t want to keep doing this.  It’s just not worth it.  Nothing I do and nothing about me is worthwhile.

<sigh>  I’ll add an addendum about my fiction writing before I post this.

***

Well, I wrote 798 “block” words and 799 net words, which means that when I reread stuff today I added a word relative to the previous state of the story.  Still, like yesterday, it seems the difference is only one word, so I’m well below the roughly 3% difference seen in the past.  I don’t know if that’s good or bad or merely a neutral fact.

I could feel how foggy and vague I was while writing, so I forced myself to keep it short.  Actually, I had to force myself to write as much as I did, which was one page.  I’m not sure what my average page number per day has been since I started.  Most days that I write, I write well over one page and usually over two pages, but there have been many non-writing days, so it may average about one a day.  It’s a bit over 45 pages long so far, if memory serves.

No, that’s dead wrong.  It’s actually 70 pages long (I just checked).  That can’t be just a page a day, can it?  Have I been working on this story for more than two months?  I can’t remember.  If anyone out there has been paying attention, please let me know.

Okay, well, that’s enough of that.  I’m done for the day, at least on this stuff.  I feel like I’m done for everything else, too, but of course, the workday hasn’t even really gotten started.  I’m so tired.  This has to end soon.  Everything hurts, and nothing is beautiful, to reverse Vonnegut’s famous quote, as I like to do (I think I’ve done this recently, haven’t I?).  I only even keep moving at all out of habit.  I need just to lie down, figuratively, and let the elements*** take me.

I guess we’ll see if I’m strong enough to do that.  Meanwhile, all of you please have a good day.

*In the song Piano Man by Billy Joel

**As far as I know, I’m Euclidean.

***Or the elephants.  I’m not picky.

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Monday report, 5-27-2024

I did not write or go to work on Friday.  I started to develop a “classic migraine”, i.e., one that begins with a visual “aura”, on Thursday while on my way back to the house, and despite three Ibuprofen and a caffeine pill, it developed and lasted well into the following evening.  I achieved nothing of worth nor of any real enjoyment over the weekend, so there’s nothing to report regarding that.  I was very much lying about, punctuated by a few short walks to the store (and a malfunction of the clothes washing machine on Sunday morning in the middle of my second load, forcing me to wring out those clothes before putting them in the dryer), because my back was acting up something fierce–possibly because I’d been lying around (in the dark) in a funny way due to my migraine.

Anyway, this morning I wrote some on Extra Body:  1,262 “block” words, but with a net 1,261 total new words, which means that, in my rereading and editing, I took out one more word than I added.

Since I have no life, there is nothing else to report other than that, as usual, there was a bunch of catch-up stuff to do at the office this morning, but I’m awake early in the morning, anyway.  It’s Memorial Day in the US, of course, but our office is open.  We would probably be open on Christmas if anyone would come in, and we are usually open on New Year’s Day.

I hope those of you who observe it have a good Memorial Day, and that those of you who don’t observe it nevertheless have a good day.

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By medicine life may be prolong’d, yet death will blog the doctor too.

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, and so—as I mentioned yesterday that I would—I’m writing a standard blog post.

I’m writing in the back of an Uber right now, but I’m using my laptop, and that combination is a first for me, I think.  I know that taking Ubers is probably an unjustifiable expense, and I mean to cut back on them, but this week I’ve had very little useful energy*, and anyway, I’m only too happy just to burn through the quite small amount of money that I have, since I have no reason to save for the future.

I was briefly puzzled as I did the initial “save” for this document, since I save my blogs by date and day of the week, when I saw that last year the 23rd of May fell on a Tuesday, not a Wednesday.  Each year generally shifts the day (of the week) of any given date one day later than the previous year, since a standard year is one day longer than a multiple of 7: [52 x 7 = 364].  I think that the official mathematical term is “modulo” when you’re just looking at the remainder.  And I vaguely recall noting, earlier this year, that the dates this year were one day later.

But, of course, this is a leap year, in which we “add” a day to the year, specifically on February 29th.  So it makes sense:  early in the year, this year’s dates are one weekday later than they were last year, but after the end of February, they are two days later.  I suppose that means that next January and February will be two days later than they were this year, but after that things will revert to one day later.

Hold on to your hats, folks!  If the whole blog post is this exciting, goodness knows how you’re going to be able to stand it.

It’s a bit tricky writing in the back seat here, because my laptop computer doesn’t have illuminated keys.  When the bouncing around of the car throws me off too much, I have to re-find my typing location by trial and error.  Once I do, I don’t really need to be able to see; I know my way around the keyboard pretty much by proprioception.  After all, I’ve been typing at least since I was eleven.

Not to say that I don’t make plenty of typos.  My coordination isn’t all that great, and I often get ahead of myself.  But at least with modern word processors, it’s so easy to correct for errors that it’s not a big deal.

Actually, I suspect that if I’d been forced to keep using my grandmother’s typewriter, which is what I used to start my typing career, and on which I needed to use correction film to erase mistakes, I would probably be a better, or at least cleaner, typist than I am now.  Once word processing programs came into play, there was no longer as much of a price to pay for minor errors, and so there was less pressure to be more accurate.  As I’ve noted many times, everything responds to local pressures and incentives and disincentives.

I warned you that this might be exciting, didn’t I?

I almost didn’t go in to work today.  That was why I let myself get the Uber:  to help me to clear that activation energy barrier.  I am not particularly physically sick, though I feel a bit of a tickle in the back of my throat.  I just didn’t want to go in.  Yesterday, all day, I was extremely tense and stressed out, and the noise was particularly irksome, and I had payroll to do, and I was always just sliding along what felt like the razor edge of a true breakdown or explosion.  Yet no one seems to have noticed.

I banged my head on the wall quite hard at one point, and did several other things to cause myself pain throughout the day.  I don’t want to go into specifics too much; I don’t want people to think I’m a weirdo or something.

Ha.  Ha.  Ha.  Ha.  Ha.

Anyway, I’ve actually just arrived at the office.  I hope my hands and thumbs won’t feel too sore, today.  Yesterday, my thumb bases were painfully tight, and most of the rest of my finger joints were sore and stiff, albeit to a lesser degree than the thumbs.  It made it quite difficult to try to play guitar, so I didn’t do much of that.

Actually, because of the trouble with my hands, and my shoulders, and of course, the ongoing issues with my back and hips and knees and ankles—especially with my back—I decided to buy a huge bottle of Ibuprofen, and I’ve taken some of them starting yesterday afternoon.

I have been “off” Ibuprofen for quite some time, now, though it was my go-to anti-inflammatory for many years.  I started to avoid it when its use was associated on two or three occasions—possibly just by coincidence—with a relatively high occurrence of what I presume were premature atrial contractions, with associated palpitations.  It was nothing terribly severe, of course, but at the time, I wanted to live, so I switched mainly to naproxen.

I also use some aspirin, as well as acetaminophen for headaches and other things that don’t benefit from any suppression of cyclooxygenase.  But, despite its longer action, naproxen has never worked quite as well as ibuprofen seemed to work, though perhaps that’s been confounded by other variables.  It’s hard to do a double-blind test on oneself.

In any case, at this point, I don’t much care if I get palpitations, although if they happen, maybe I’ll find them unpleasant enough that I’ll change my mind.  Frankly, I don’t mind if I have a full-fledged arrhythmia.  Sudden cardiac death due to ventricular fibrillation, for instance, is probably one of the best ways to die.  You basically just faint, since your brain is no longer getting blood flow, and that’s that.  If no one defibrillates you, and if the arrhythmia doesn’t spontaneously resolve, you’re done.

It’s probably not quite as quick a death as being at ground zero of a thermonuclear explosion, and it’s certainly not as quick as being obliterated when the vacuum energy of the universe quantum tunnels down to a lower level**, since that process would spread throughout the cosmos at the speed of light, and no information within spacetime can exceed the speed of light, so it’s fundamentally impossible to know such an event is happening before it arrives.  It’s also impossible to know about it once it arrives, since everything currently existing in our universe, right down to fundamental particles, would by obliterated by the vacuum state decay—again, at the speed of light, which is far faster than the rate at which the nervous system can experience anything.

Unfortunately, even more than the thermonuclear explosion possibility, vacuum decay would involve taking other, “innocent” people along with me, at least some of whom both wish and deserve to continue living.  That seems a bit unethical—or at least rude, which I sometimes think is worse—and anyway, it’s not as though anyone knows how to make it happen.

It’s better to keep things confined to my person.

I guess even a hemorrhagic stroke wouldn’t be too bad, to be honest, and given my tendency to bang my head against the wall when I get too frazzled and stressed, it seems immensely more likely than vacuum state collapse.  I suppose I could even tolerate death by bleeding ulcer, though I really don’t like nausea***.

Probably, though, in the end, I’m going to have to take a more active and deliberate hand in things.  I suppose we’ll see.  It’s hard to work up the courage to face the discomfort and even frank pain associated with most such interventions, but practice makes better, and I already have a fair amount of experience deliberately causing myself pain, as noted above.

That’s enough blog post for now.  I’ve already droned on and on.  My tentative plan is to do some fiction writing tomorrow morning, and if I do (or even if I don’t) I plan to leave a little report about it here.  I am off work this weekend, so I won’t be writing anything on Saturday (barring, as always, the unforeseen).

I truly, honestly, and fervently hope that each and every one of you feels better than I do right now, and I mean substantially better.  You probably do; it seems likely that, in the phase space of physical and emotional states, there are many more possibilities in that direction than in the other.  But I could be wrong.

TTFN

Addendum:  While editing, I found that MS Word had underlined a sentence in the draft above, in which I wrote, “I think that the official mathematical term is….”  The editor gave the comment that “expressing opinions with certainty adds formality”.  I don’t think I could possibly disagree more than I do with that sentence. 

Bad advice in editor marked up

 PLEASE DON’T DO THAT, PEOPLE!!!!!!!!  Opinions are opinions.  Expressing them with certainty when you are not certain is tantamount to outright lying, and is a huge problem with human discourse!  I’m ashamed of MS Word for making that suggestion.  What a horrible, horrible recommendation!  What a nightmarish thing to say!

*And yet, my level of tension has been exceptionally high.  That’s a frustrating bit of irony, as I probably don’t need to tell you.

**This is purely a hypothetical possibility.  The vacuum energy of the universe may well be at its lowest/ground state, though it is patently not quite zero.  If it were, cosmic expansion would not be accelerating.  Indeed, I often say that cosmic inflation is happening now, based on all the data we have.  That’s what “dark energy” is doing, albeit at a slower rate than what is proposed to have happened 13.7 billion years ago.

***Weird, right?  I don’t like nausea?  How unusual!

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Brief-ish report on Wednesday morning, May 22, 2024 AD/CE

Well, I slept somewhat better last night than the night before; it would not have been easy to sleep worse.  I took a full Benadryl (actually, a generic version of it), and two extra-strength Tylenol (also generic), and I slept a total of perhaps four and a half hours.  That’s not much, but it’s enough to make me feel better than I did yesterday.

Again, that’s not a high bar to clear.  I spent the entire day yesterday wishing I were dead, feeling like some Earth-bound phantom of some unimportant, nameless soul who had died alone a long, long time ago (to quote David Bowie).

Not one person in the office asked if I was okay or if I needed anything, or if I was having trouble.  I guess my emotions and state really are hard for other people to see from my appearance.  It’s too bad, because if someone had asked, I really was going to tell them, “I wish I were dead.”  Unfortunately, no one asked, so that was a missed opportunity.  Of course, even if I had said that, people probably would have thought I was joking, or that I was exaggerating, and certainly no one would have tried to help me in any way.

I suppose that’s par for the course.  I’ve needed help for a long time, honestly, and I’ve tried to be worthy of help; I have helped other people when I could, though I don’t think I’ve done very much good for anyone, in the long run.  I think I’m probably a lost cause, anyway.  I guess that’s okay.  Honestly, I’m so freaking tired that I don’t know if I’d be able to help anyone who was trying to help me, if you take my meaning.  I just want to rest.

Anyway, this morning I did write some on Extra Body.  As is often the case, I started just telling myself that I was only going to write one page, no more, but once I got started, I kept going.  It helped that there was a guy on the train asking people to fill out surveys about the train service, and I told him, “Sorry, I’m working on something.”  I did have my laptop computer open and was typing when he approached me.  Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate and approve of the organization trying to get feedback to help improve its operations, but I don’t like being talked to in the morning.  So, that impelled me to keep typing until it was time to get ready to get off the train, so the guy wouldn’t feel tempted to come back and ask me again.

In the end, the word count of the block of new writing was 2,079, but the net word count gain was 2,008.  So, this time, unlike Monday, I edited out words in the stuff I was rereading instead of adding some–a total of 71, evidently.  That’s good to know, somehow.  That’s about a 3.5% difference between the two counts, a little more than Monday, but not much.  Of course, my sample size is only two days, so we’ll have to wait and see if there’s a clearer statistical trend.

And that’s all I have for you this morning.  I’m planning to write my traditional Thursday post tomorrow, which is good, since tomorrow is Thursday.  It is, isn’t it?  Yes, it is, I just checked.  Anyway, I hope you all have a good day.

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Mishegas from a misanthropic, moribund, misbegotten former Michigander

It’s very early on Tuesday morning, and I’m already at the office.  I’m not going to be writing any fiction today, unless you count any pretense I make at coherence here in this blog post.

I had a very bad sleep last night, despite taking some diphenhydramine*.  I felt relatively optimistic at the beginning of the week (yesterday), with thoughts of reading some science and/or mathematics and/or other books when there was occasional downtime.  But then, of course, people arrived at the office and started talking and making other noise, and then the “music” was started, and I could not concentrate.

And, back at the house, the air conditioning and fan were, perforce, churning, since it’s quite hot and humid around here.  That’s better than the office noise, because at least it’s steady and sort of “white noise”, but it’s still physically irritating in the small, confined space of my room, especially accompanying, as it does, my now-bilateral tinnitus.

“‘Is this the region, this the soil, the clime,’ spake then the apostate angel, ‘this the site, that we must change for Heav’n, this mournful gloom for that eternal light?'”

Nah, I’ll pass.

I’m trying to be optimistic, or at least to be upbeat.  I’m trying very hard to act as if I’m doing better–playing guitar, writing fiction–in hopes that it will become real.  “Dream that what is dreamed will be.”  I know that I can physically endure, if necessary…but for what purpose, to what end?  It’s just a cycle from dreary to noisy to lonely to turbulent to idiotic to angry to absurd back to dreary and so on, all set against a landscape of chronic pain and self-loathing, accompanied by a constant, high-pitched whine (and no, I don’t mean the fact that I’m whining about it, though I am).

I know, I know:  “Shut up, no one wants to hear about it, everyone has their own issues, just suck it up and walk it off and lather, rinse, repeat.  Everyone suffers, everyone has problems, everybody hurts, yada yada yada.”  This is supposed to, what…make a person want to stick around in the world?  Or is it a somewhat subtle way of encouraging someone just to get gone already, to leave the world to the vapid troglodytes?

I’m so tired.  I don’t have anything to which to look forward.  The only advantage of weekends, even, is that I don’t have to deal with the foolishness and the overhead noise in the office…but then I don’t really do anything on the weekends, either.  I can’t even seem to read, now.  My brain is frazzled and fried and other words beginning with “f”.

Hmm…let’s see…

Fudge’s face froze, feeling forsaken from fair freedom’s fiefdom, foundering forlornly, foully fettered, finding few facts, fearing fundamental farragoes, fleeting facets fabricated from Facebook**.

Oh, for fuck’s fake***!  I need to stop.  Is it any wonder I don’t have people with whom to hang out?  Is it any wonder that eventually even people who love me find it better to do so from a distance?  I, at least, don’t find it surprising.  I don’t even like my own company, honestly, and I’m often driven to punish myself in various ways when I get too wound up…that way, at least, I don’t go off on other people.

I don’t have any idea what I’m trying to accomplish here today, other than perhaps to convey the message, “Look, I wrote a blog post today, even though I didn’t write any fiction!”  Also, I suppose, to try to let people know that I’m slowly, and perhaps subtly, crashing.  It’s a bit (I imagine) like trying to stay above the surface of a vast body of a very viscous liquid that nevertheless has a specific gravity much lower than water.  One cannot float on it, anymore than one could float on the surface of gasoline, but the process of sinking is a slow one (because of the viscosity), so one can “swim” or “tread liquid” to stay on the surface, but it requires constant effort, and the stickiness makes it harder, and there’s no land in sight.

Oh, well.  Life doesn’t promise anyone a rose garden.  Even if one gets a rose garden, there are always thorns (or, technically, according to botanists, “prickles”, but “Every rose has its prickle” doesn’t work as well as a lyric).

A hemlock garden would be better.  If the umbels are tall and fair, one might even encounter Tinúviel dancing among them to a pipe unseen.  And I hear the plant can be used to make an interesting tea, though no man (or plucked chicken) tends to drink it more than once.

All right, all right, that’s enough nonsense.  Sorry.  Have a good day.

*I originally wrote that as “diphenhydrazine”, which is a peculiar typo to make–would that be rocket fuel with a benzyl ring attached at each end of every molecule?

**Sorry.  The ending of the previous comment made me want to see if I could write an entire long sentence in which every word begins with “f” and that nevertheless at least makes some form of sense, grammatically if in no other way.

***Use this last “f” as an archaically written “s”, such as one can sometimes see in old English documents, e.g., “feveral”.

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Very brief report

I did write a bit of fiction this morning — 783 words to be exact and precise.  I wish it were a prime number, but it’s divisible by 3 and 9 at least, since the digits add to 18.  Oh, well, it can’t always work out.

I’m feeling quite unwell; yesterday I left the office early (not by much) and yet I still didn’t get any good sleep.  But I’ve felt queasy and weak and just kind of under the weather for the last 18 hours or more.  So, I didn’t really have the energy to write more.  I did play a little guitar and sang some this morning, but it was sub-par, probably because of feeling poorly.

I am scheduled to work tomorrow, though, so maybe I’ll feel a little better then and will write some more.  I guess we’ll see.  Have a good day.

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And writers say, the most forward bud is eaten by the canker ere it blog

Hello and good morning.

It’s Thursday, so it’s time for my Thursday blog post.  There will be no fiction from me today, other than such ordinary, day-to-day fiction as pretending to be doing better than I really am, as well as using money to buy things*.

I’m writing this on my phone, since I didn’t bring the laptop computer back to the house yesterday.  I was wiped out, and stressed out, and I didn’t feel like carrying any more than necessary.  I did get a bit of walking in, since I had to stop at the store on the way back.  I guess that was good, though something in the way I moved caused a blister on the medial side of my right big toe.  It’s not too bad, but I’ll probably not do any serious walking today.

It’s often questionable why I bother.  Of course, I would like to lose weight and whatnot; I would rather not die the physical travesty that I currently am.  But the best way to do that would be to stop eating completely.  That would be a win-win situation, as the cliché goes.  But that is very difficult to do in ordinary, day-to-day life in the modern United States.

I got a terrible night’s sleep again last night.  It wasn’t as bad as my one-hour night earlier in the week, but it wasn’t a whole lot better.  I’ve been trying to restrict my caffeine intake to the relatively early morning, just to make sure that doesn’t interfere with my sleep, but it doesn’t seem to make much difference.

I haven’t read anything much in quite a while.  I think it’s been over a month since I read any book, fiction or nonfiction.  I have been doing some stuff on Brilliant dot org, as I’ve mentioned here, but yesterday I didn’t even feel like extending my “streak” by doing some simple work in their computer programming course.  For one thing, the constant prods to “extend one’s streak” are thoroughly irritating.

I really despise all the manipulative tactics undertaken by these companies to get people to keep using their sites.  Even Kindle does it.  I had a “streak” of something like 170 or more weeks of reading pretty much every day on my Kindle app, but that’s now been broken, and already Amazon isn’t even recommending any e-books to me.

Still, it’s not as though I ever read to maintain a “streak”.  I read because I want to read.  Except right now I don’t.  I don’t even want to read my own stuff.

I did practice a little on the guitar yesterday.  I guess that’s something.  And, as you all know, I’ve been writing fiction now for a total of over twenty days (counting only writing days).  But it feels almost disloyal to be writing without reading, though it’s only myself that I’m betraying, and I don’t like myself, anyway.  Still, reading has been a fundamental part of my identity for literally as long as I can remember, and not being able to do it makes me feel very much adrift and puzzled.

It’s getting seriously hot and muggy down here in Florida.  I’m sweating significantly and quite visibly just sitting at the train station.  I suppose, if climate change persists, Florida will at least reap what it has politically sown, since both the heat and the sea levels are likely to drive quite a lot of people out of the state, and make much of the coveted ocean-front property into literal and figurative underwater real estate.

I’m not the sort to laugh in malicious glee when people get their comeuppances; I’m much more the type to tighten my lips grimly and nod in affirmative contempt.  But that doesn’t mean it’s not ego-syntonic for me when people get fucked over because of their own arrogant stupidity.

I don’t expect to be around to see any of it happen.  And, honestly, I would not be disappointed if people actually make headway at fixing the problems and correct them in time to save even people who don’t necessarily deserve to be saved, because innocent and beneficent people will be saved along with them.

Human ingenuity is much rarer than people probably think; however, it is so incredibly powerful that it doesn’t take much of it to accomplish wonders.  I guess it’s worth it for there to be so much arrogant stupidity if that’s necessary or unavoidable in order for the occasional sparks of cleverness and even genius to be found.  But it would be nice if stupidity were more sexually unappealing than it is.  Regrettably, though, stupid people seem more likely to breed than smart ones, especially since the smart ones understand about planning and delaying reproduction, or even choosing not to reproduce at all.

Oh, well.  This is the tragic farce of life.  It can be funny if you like lowbrow slapstick in the vein of the Three Stooges.  Unfortunately, I’m not really a big fan of such things, so I don’t think I’m going to keep watching much longer.

All right.  Time to call this to an end.  My back is flaring up quite a lot, probably from yesterday’s walk, and it’s distracting me.  Please try to nurture cleverness and creativity at all levels, and please don’t feed the trolls in any sense.  They’re not worth it.

TTFN

*Yuval Harari famously pointed out that money is a “fiction”, though it is a useful and important one.  So is law and government and the very existence of rights and stuff like that.  Such things exist only in the minds and works of people.  Nature certainly recognizes no rights, unless you want to count the right to be wiped out if you don’t do what you need to survive.  Indeed, the world seems to promise only one thing:  eventually, you (as well as everything you would recognize as the universe) will die.  That’s probably a truly unalienable right.

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Tuesday report: May 14, 2024 AD (or CE)

Well, I’ve written 1,419 words of fiction this morning already, having decided again that I would write at least one full page and then going beyond that.  I could’ve written even more, but I didn’t want to bother, and I figured I’d write a quick blog post/report for the day during the rest of my commute.  I’m not even going to change the base font to Calibri for this, since it’s just going to be converted on WordPress, anyway.

Extra Body is getting ever closer to its first-draft completion, though I doubt it will be finished this week.  Still, it shouldn’t be much later than that.  It’s rather absurd and pathetic that my “short story” is now over 38,000 words long.  This is despite me having missed quite a few days’ writing on and off.

I really don’t feel well, though.  I had an unusually bad sleep last night, even for me—though perhaps I should no longer think of such nights as bad “for me”, since they seem to happen so very often.  Anyway, I got significantly fewer than two hours of sleep, and I had to force myself not just to get up when my brief slumber had already started to fade, nearly an hour earlier than I eventually did (and less than an hour after I finally dropped off).

It’s maddening, and I was already mad enough when I started out—in the old-school sense of “mad”, meaning insane, not angry.  Though I really think of myself more as “unsane”, since I don’t think my mental health or my mental state has ever been what most people would consider normal.

I’m severely tired of all this.  Even despite now writing new fiction, I feel a constant, varying mixture of despair and apathy, seasoned with pain and tension, accompanied by the high-pitched whines of tinnitus.  I know, there are many worse situations for someone to need to endure, and many people endure them and have endured them.  But I have no purpose, no reason, no value, and no desire to endure or to find an answer.  I’ve spent so much time and effort already trying and failing to do those things; it doesn’t work.

So, like Extra Body, I think I’m nearing the end of my own story.  I don’t expect it to end before the first draft of Extra Body is completed, and maybe not even before the story is published.  But I don’t think it will be much longer than that, and I don’t expect to do anything significant with HELIOS.  I’m too tired.  I’m too discouraged.  I have no hope for a future that’s any better than my present, and I certainly don’t think I deserve one.

I suppose there will be further bulletins as events warrant, but I doubt anyone will care.  It really doesn’t matter whether I live or die, and I’m not sure that even “regular” readers will notice when I stop doing this.  Oh, well.

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A brief report from Monday morning 5-13-2024

I intended to force myself to write a single page this morning while waiting for and then while on the train.  As often happens, once I got started, the whole thing took care of itself, and I wrote 2,103 words on Extra Body.  I can’t believe how long this story is already getting, though it is drawing to its conclusion fairly soon.  Then will come the editing and paring down and shortening (and other synonyms).

I think I may indeed publish this story in a paperback version in addition to the Kindle version, since it really does qualify as a novella.  Which makes me consider re-publishing some of my longer, old “short stories” as stand-alone novellas.  I have long had the thought that people would be more likely to buy a short-ish story in Kindle format than in a small paperback format (which would, perforce, be more expensive than the e-book version).  However, maybe there are still enough people out there who prefer a physical book to an e-book that I would make more sales that way.

I’d be interested in hearing from you, if you have any thoughts about this.  Please, leave a comment below on my blog page on WordPress if you have input to give.

In other matters, the new tinnitus in my left ear continues, though it waxes and wanes, and the right ear is currently louder.  I got some walking and some biking in this weekend, but it’s been very hot for this early in the year around here–in the mid 90s on Saturday and the low 90s on Sunday–so it really wiped me out.  Still, I remembered at least to put on a little sunblock, so I didn’t get as sunburned as I usually do, if at all.

I hope all you mothers* out there had a good Mother’s Day yesterday.  And I hope all of you have a good week.

*And, no, I don’t mean that as half a word.