Personal

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Write till your ink be dry, and with your tears moist it again, and frame some feeling blog

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, as you may already know, though if you’re reading this later, you may not.  But now you do know, just in case you care.

I’m writing this at the train station, where I just missed a late previous train because the elevator was slow.  I would think they might have been willing to hold the train for the 5 extra seconds it would have taken for me to board‒certainly, the conductor saw me getting off the elevator.  I would respect their desire not to delay if it were not for the fact that they were the ones already running late, according to a schedule that they had promulgated.

They certainly have no leg to stand on with regard to other people taking an extra moment to get on the train, when they are late almost every day.  If they ran consistently and reliably on time, I would respect their demands for punctuality from passengers.  But it is not so.  They are merely hypocrites.

Anyway, I wasn’t planning to get on that train in the first place, because I wasn’t on time for its scheduled departure.  I’m just irritable.

I’m also getting sick‒and not just in my usual, everyday way.  I have a low-grade fever (about 99.7 or so by core temperature) and feel achy and crappy and have a bit of a dry cough.  It could be Covid, I suppose, but I don’t give a f*ck.  Covid was disappointing in that both times I had it‒before and after vaccination‒it didn’t even come close to killing me.

Boo, I say.

Anyway, I probably ought not to go into work today, but I don’t know if my coworker will be there.  Supposedly he is going to be coming in, but then again, supposedly he was going to be there on Saturday, and I ended up getting a last minute Uber to the office (for which the boss has not offered to compensate me, by the way).  So, I’d rather go in and, if my coworker comes, perhaps leave early.

Ideally, I should have taken a 4-day weekend of sorts.  I should just have rested.  Unfortunately, we are not very civilized about such things here in this part of the world.  If I were like so many other people at work‒having a poor time sense and less than ideal work ethic‒I guess I would just indulge myself and give a mental “up yours” to everyone else.

For reasons of which I am far from certain, however, I don’t seem to be built that way.  This has led to me being taken advantage of quite a few times, sometimes continuously, in my life.  That’s probably a large part of what landed me in prison‒being used as a target and a dupe because I wanted to help people with chronic pain, since I suffer from it myself and knew the prejudice such people face.

I guess I was and am stupid, huh?  I don’t see myself changing this characteristic, except to the extent that avoiding it underlies my unwillingness to get very close to anyone.  I sure as Hell* don’t want any romantic entanglements.  They tend to cause me nothing but heartache and heartbreak, though I am at least truly thankful for my children.  I could never regret anything that led to their existence.  After that, though‒especially after 2013, which was when I last actually saw my kids‒all bets are off, and everything is pretty pointless.

Yes, I know, I wrote my books and stories and have done this blog since then.  Again, I say, everything is pretty pointless.  I’m not persuaded that those things‒this thing‒never having happened would be any loss to the world whatsoever.

Whenever I get sick these days, I hope that it will turn into something like pneumonia and perhaps kill me.  I’d prefer not to die of dysentery, but that would be tolerable.  And I’d rather not get meningitis or encephalitis, just because if I survive I might have brain damage that I wouldn’t like.

Reality rarely seeks one’s opinion of course‒a case in point is that I am still alive even after all those opportunities for pneumonia, and my open heart surgery and my back surgery and all the rest.

I just got on the next train, which was 6 minutes late from its scheduled time.  It’s so irritating.  Why is it difficult for trains to keep a schedule?  Buses sometimes have some excuse, but why trains?

It’s also a bit over air conditioned on board, at least relative to the platform, where I was literally sweating like a human despite just sitting still.  I’ve mentioned how the extreme air conditioning is just making the world slightly worse overall, and it seems obvious to me, but what are you going to do with the stupid humans?

Don’t answer that.  I have plenty of ideas of my own.  Only some of them involve the Hobbesian** point that humans can provide some important protein.

Anyway, if I do stay out of the office sick tomorrow, I won’t be writing a post before Monday.  And if this URI converts into an LRI or something equally serious and kills me, or at least puts me in the hospital, I might not be writing a post Monday…or indeed, perhaps I might not write one ever again.

If that’s a prospect that excites you‒and why would it not?‒just imagine how exciting it is for me to consider!  And yet, so far, I keep recovering every time.  Dammit.  F*ck you, Biology!

So, in case I’m not here tomorrow writing a post, I hope you all are happy and well and that you collectively have a very good weekend.  Try to stay safe and healthy; I don’t wish the negative things for others that I wish for myself.

TTFN

best-anime-about-illness

*Surer than Hell, really.  Hell is quite unlikely actually to exist, even if there is a God.  What sort of benevolent deity would punish for eternity the souls of people It created because they were imperfect?  How about doing some teaching and training and corrective maintenance, instead?  How about doing a better job at creating people?  I’ve often said, if even one person‒no matter how horrible‒is consigned to Hell for eternity for the deeds of a human lifetime, then a God that arranged such a thing is unworthy of worship.

**From Calvin and Hobbes, not the author of The Leviathan.

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There is no gravity–the universe is just warped

Here I am again, at the train station, waiting for the train, writing a blog post on my smartphone.  I didn’t walk this time, because by yesterday afternoon, I was getting extra stiff and sore again, and that could well have been because I walked the 7 miles I walked yesterday in my hiking boots.  Ironically, they may well have been causing me more trouble when “hiking” longer distances.  It’s rather discouraging; I like those boots.

Today, I’m wearing the new shoes of my other type that were supposed to have arrived the day before but only got there yesterday during the day while I was at work.  I didn’t walk in them yet because I’m still in a bit of exacerbated pain.  I’ll physically rest for today, then walk again tomorrow.  The good thing is I seem to be mostly past any tendency to blister.  Thank goodness for small favors.

So, basically, the thing I look forward to‒practically the only thing‒is doing more walking.  I guess that’s a reasonably good thing as far as it goes; it’s better than looking forward only to one’s next martini or one’s next hit of heroin.  But it’s still pretty dissatisfying.  I really hate my life.  Everything stressed me out.  I’m tired.  I want simply to stop.

It doesn’t help that my coworker who shares some of my duties is still out of the office, though I don’t know if he will be out today (I hope not, since it’s payroll day).  What I mean is, he was out yesterday and Monday.  So, I got called in on Saturday and since then (actually, since Friday) have been doing more work than usual‒while in more pain than usual‒for the last 4 work days.  Even before that, I was already at the threshold of cashing it all in.  So, I’m not exactly working toward a more positive outlook.

There’s a defective announcement sign (that I wrote about the other day then deleted from the final draft of the day’s post) cycling away with a moderately distorted message obviously meant to be the same as all the other boards.  I recognize the similarity of its garbled stuff with the intended message.  If I knew the system and its programming, I could probably figure out what’s wrong and possibly even fix it.  But it will likely take the Tri Rail people a while to get to it.  Only yesterday did they apparently fix a malfunctioning check-in kiosk, the one I used to use regularly, that’s been just off, without power, for well over a month.

I guess all these things take effort and money, but it’s frustrating.  I look around at our society and see the deterioration of infrastructure, and the diminution of what little pride we seem to take in running things well.  Even with a reasonably well-rounded system like the Tri Rail, it seems the trains are late almost as often as they are on time.  And, indeed, my train was supposed to have arrived by now, but it has not, and there’s no sign of its light approaching.  On the tracking software website they offer, there’s not even any indication that the train is coming.

Okay, just now its light is becoming visible.  So it’s not too very late…only about 5 minutes.

I don’t understand how it happens that, when they make their own schedule, they can’t seem to keep to it even the majority of the time.  It’s like at work‒our hours have been the same for years, but people can’t seem to get them right.  Of course, it doesn’t help that the boss doesn’t enforce them, or apply any penalty for being late or for staying late.  I can’t understand it, and I don’t want to understand it.  Of course, everyone encounters unexpected things from time to time.  But if it happens regularly, frequently, then probably the person to whom it is happening is partly causing it.

I can’t, of course, hold it against my coworker that everyone in his household is sick‒including his one year old daughter.  It happens, and there is only so much people can do to avoid it.  But people who are late to work nearly every day are just getting up and/or leaving their houses too late.  The correction to this is obvious, and one should really be encouraged to enact it, rather than be indulged.

Oh, well, the world is shit, or at least the human world is.  And the average person is going to get more and more mentally lazy as LLMs and the like do more of their “thinking” for them.  I’m not convinced that these things in any sense actually think or create, but then again, there are plenty of humans who don’t convince me that they think.

I guess I can’t hold it against the computers.  They didn’t make themselves.  Neither did the humans, of course, but at least many of them have access to resources with which they could make themselves better.  The fact that, for the most part, they do not make themselves better I hold as a defect or failure on their part.

I can say what I want about them, in any case.  They don’t read, so they’re unlikely to ever encounter my criticism.

Well, that’s eight hundred plus words, now, so I’ll start drawing to a close.  I wish I could do that overall, honestly.  I wish I could just lay me down to sleep, as the old nursery rhyme prayer says.  And if I should die before I wake, well…that wouldn’t be so bad either.  It wouldn’t break my heart.  And I doubt it would break anyone else’s heart, though a handful of people might be temporarily slightly sad.  And people at work would be in a bit of extra stick for a while.  But for them, in that, I have only a little sympathy.

And the rest of the world can go to Hell, which is what it’s steadily doing to itself, anyway.

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Bouncing tangents on walking, boots, pain, technology, science, politics, and probably other random stuff

Well, here I am again, writing this blog post at the train station after having walked here this morning.  I had intended to do this wearing a new pair of shoes of the same make and model (so to speak) as the pair I wore yesterday, but that pair, which was supposed to have been delivered yesterday evening, is instead delayed until this morning, after 8 am, which doesn’t do me any good whatsoever.  Anyway, it forced me to do an experiment walking in my boots this morning, which is what I did.

I had switched from my boots because I feared that they might have been responsible for last week’s rather extreme flare-up of my pain.  However, as I changed from them, I also changed chairs in my office.  That’s not a good way to do science, obviously:  varying two parameters at the same time.  It makes it hard to tell which one‒if either‒is having the dominant effect, if indeed there is one.  However, when dealing with severe exacerbations of already-maddening chronic pain, one can easily become impatient.

I’m not excusing it, but I am explaining it.

Anyway, I have come to the suspicion that, just maybe, it wasn’t the footwear at all but mainly the chair that was making things worse.  And now I’ve been forced into doing a better experiment.  If, after today, my pain gets significantly worse, that increases the credence that the boots are the problem.  However, if my pain level is stable‒and certainly yesterday’s walking didn’t seem to exacerbate it‒then maybe the boots aren’t causing any trouble.

I will say one thing about how quickly I’ve gotten into a state of readiness:  though I wore boots, which are heavier than the shoes I wore yesterday, I made slightly better time on my walk today.

Oh, I forgot to note that today is the first day of August‒named for Caesar Augustus (Née Octavian) who followed Julius Caesar (after whom July was named).  Welcome.  Summer is almost half over, at least by dates.  There’s nothing particularly interesting about the start of this month, other than rent and other bills being due, and the prospect of facing another long, dreary month with nothing interesting happening, other than bad things out in the world, which always seem to happen, anyway.

Of course, the US is more and more comically and tragically stupid than it used to be, but that’s been happening for a long time.  I remember when they canceled the Superconducting Supercollider in the late nineties, and I thought to myself, “That’s it, the United States’ days of being an intellectual and scientific and progress-oriented world leader are coming to an end.”

It wasn’t just my physics bias that led me to that conclusion, though that had its impact.  It was mainly the idea that, before, a large part of the ethos of the country seemed focused on constant improvement and leadership, in the sciences, in the arts, in technology, and in prosperity in general, including the traditional “American dream”.  But it turns out‒or so it seems‒that all of that seemingly intrinsic love of education and innovation and hard work was simply born of the post WWII era Cold War competition with the USSR.  We didn’t love these things for their own sake, not in general, not on average.  We just wanted to outcompete the “Godless Communists”.

Indeed, after the Soviet Union fell, the religious right poisoned the Republican Party more and more‒or so it seemed to me‒and turned their hostility inward on their own nation.  And some of the people on the left, without having to worry about being compared to the US’ enemies, became more leftish and pseudo-religious in their own Orwellian ideas.

Of course, most people were, and probably still are, much more centrist/moderate than you would guess, based on people in the news.  But now that we have no opponent against whom to unite, ideologically and physically, we can turn on ourselves more and more, and the most extreme voices aren’t curtailed out of the necessity of unity against a serious enemy.

China doesn’t present the same kind of opposition as the Soviets did, at least in our collective mind, probably because they’re far away and also they are our trading partners, and aren’t of European descent and are culturally different enough to avoid a metaphorical uncanny valley problem.  Also, they’ve not really openly declared any ideologically motivated intention to “take over the world” or to “bury the West”, at least not as far as I’ve heard.

That’s good, as far as it goes, of course.  The Cold War was dreadful;  I honestly grew up thinking that civilization was going to be destroyed by nuclear war at any moment.  When I was a teenager, my friends and I honestly and seriously thought about what we might do to survive after WWIII.  It wasn’t a joke.  And in my late teens, as part of a youth orchestra, I traveled to Lübeck, on the East/West German border, and got to see the fence line, the barbed wire, the mined “no man’s land” area and the machine-gun towers on the Eastern side‒not for keeping people out, but for preventing people from leaving.

That was pretty scary.

I don’t have high hopes for the future of the USA, but I don’t have high hopes for the rest of the world, either.  Our greater technology and abilities haven’t left the average person more respectful of science, because they don’t even understand the basics of the science that dominates almost every aspect of their lives.  Clarke’s Third Law states that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, but I wouldn’t have thought it would apply to the technology we have today.  Yet many people seem as incurious about real science‒and mathematics, and philosophy, and other fields of intellect‒as they would be about a world run by wizards.

There are flat-Earthers out there, for crying out loud, even though the refutations of that hypothesis are trivially easy to recognize, and many have been known for thousands of years!  There are people who have been so protected from deadly diseases by successful programs of vaccination (and sanitation and so on) that they actually think vaccines, and those who create them, are the enemy.

It really is depressing.  It’s like the fall of Camelot‒and I don’t refer to the JFK White House culture that people called Camelot, but the mythological Camelot related to the legend of King Arthur.  Though, come to think of it, RFK, Jr is a worthy spiritual heir of Mordred, in being the nephew of the man who declared the intention to have America land on the moon and yet who himself is now working toward the corruption and downfall of all for which his progenitors stood.

Oh, well.  I guess if the people in America and the rest of the world don’t wake up and drink some strong, black coffee and take responsibility for knowledge and growth and improvement, they will get what they deserve.  If they don’t change direction, they will end up where they’re going.  Unfortunately, they will take helpless innocents in vast numbers along with them.

Anyway, that’s my series of tangents for today, like a random plot of the scattering of elementary particles.  I hope it’s been worth your time.  Have a good day.

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A brief and weary Monday blog post

Welcome to Monday‒if that makes any sense to say.  I’m writing this on my smartphone and I am at the train station as I begin it, because I decided to walk to the train this morning.  I figure, if I’m going to be in pain anyway, I might as well get something out of it.  And, of course, it’s slightly more pleasant to walk 5 miles in the morning than in the evening at this time of year.

Mind you, I’m still so sweaty that my shirt looks as if I had just fallen into a swimming pool.  My pants are less soaked but still noticeably wet.  Nevertheless, I’m not too worried.  I have sprayed myself with “Scent Bomb” spray, so mostly I smell like artificial mango odor, which is not half bad.

I will make this short today.  I’m really in a very poor mood in general.  I had to get called into the office on Saturday*, which is terribly annoying, because I was truly looking forward to being able to relax after my week of exceptional pain.  I was even thinking of ordering a steak from Outback.  I did not do that or anything else that was fun on Saturday, and of course, Sunday was mainly just laundry day‒though I did have a nice phone conversation with my sister on Sunday evening.  Most of it consisted of me talking about esoteric things in which I’m interested, while she listened politely.  I used to be better about giving other people the floor, so to speak.  Now I’m just a nearly insufferable droner on about my interests.

I’m so tired of everything, and I’m tired of myself most of all.  I just can’t seem to like myself.

Can you blame me?

Anyway, I don’t really have anything interesting to discuss, not even an answer to the question “What is the deal with that round flat thing they throw in the Olympics?”

I guess the days are getting noticeably shorter, in the sense that sunrise is noticeably later than it was a month ago.  But that should come as no surprise.  We’re more than a month after the solstice, after all.  It’s not getting any cooler or breezier or less humid around here, however.  In fact, the fifteen day forecast, when last I checked it, basically showed the same predicted highs and lows and precipitation chances marching forward like a line of disciplined but unimaginative soldiers.  It’s so dreary.

Oh, well.  Whataya gonna do?  I don’t have any new ideas, but I’m still keeping the old one‒basically, just leaving, leaving everything and everyone and never being seen again.  I’m so tired.

Speaking of being tired, this is all I’m going to write today.  I hope, at least, that it hasn’t been boring.

*I had worried on Friday that I might be asked to do so, but by the end of the day I had been assured that it would not be necessary.  Then, at 9:38 on Saturday morning, just an hour and 22 minutes before the office was due to open, I was texted to ask if I could please go in, because my coworker simply could not, because most of his family was ill.  Being the idiot I am, I not only went in, but took an Uber in since there was no way, especially on Saturday, for me to get to the office before about noon otherwise.  I was not reimbursed for it, at least so far.

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What could compare 2 A future of cyber super-stupidity?

Well, I’m back on my smartphone to write this blog post, but I’m not going to do the whole indenting thing this time.  It was a cute little indulgence, but it doesn’t really add anything, and it’s a minor pain, and I’m just not going to do it.  So, there.

I didn’t bring the laptop with me yesterday, because I was still in a lot of pain by the end of the day, and didn’t want the extra burden.  Of course, I’m still in a lot of pain now, as I write this, and I’m sweating even as I just stand still outside.  I don’t think I’ll be using the laptop again any time soon.  But I guess I might change my mind again, depending on how I feel and how things go.

I’m certainly changing up my shoes again, trying to find a pair (and a type) that gives me the least trouble.  I don’t know how much, if any, difference it will make, but I have to keep trying things, just in case something works; I’m too stubborn to do otherwise.  I also widened my pull-up stance this morning to see if that helps, and maybe it will, and maybe it won’t throw my left shoulder into a tail-spin like it did the last time I tried it.

I know, I know, all of this is boring.  I’m a boring person, what can I say?

I did get out the guitar just a little yesterday, because one of the new people at work asked me about it, after recognizing that I was listening to a Radiohead song (Climbing up the Walls).  I’ve downloaded the chords for Nothing Compares 2 U again.  I frivolously imagine that I might do a video of me playing and singing it in honor most specifically of Sinead O’Connor, who just died, making her the third and final person I associate with that song to die (the other two, of course, being Prince, who wrote it, and Chris Cornell, who did my favorite version of it).  Hey, maybe if I do a good version, and people enjoy it, I’ll get caught up in that group, so to speak.

Fingers crossed!

I have tomorrow off, so I won’t be doing a blog post.  I’ll have a full weekend by myself to do fuck-all on my own.  I hope at least to be able to go for a walk if my back cooperates.  Other than that, I really have nothing.  I guess I might watch a movie or something.  I’m not going to go to the theater to see Oppenheimer, though it looks like a good movie.  After my last visit to the theater by myself, I just don’t see it being much fun.

Oh, but I do plan on calling my sister this weekend!  That will be good, so there’s something positive, at least.  Sorry, I didn’t mean to disparage her or be dismissive.  Talking on the phone to her is pretty much the only thing to which I look forward.  I still always get anxiety before using the phone, but that’s not her fault; that’s my defect.

Here’s something darkly amusing:  the Google Docs autocorrect is now urging me to add a “to” after the word “forward” at the end of the penultimate sentence of the preceding paragraph.  This is the state to which we’ve fallen; the pseudo-helpful editing software system suggests that I change a perfectly grammatical sentence by adding a preposition (sans object) to the end of that sentence!  Why?  I suspect because that’s what almost everyone else does out there in the trash heap of humanity*, and that’s the source of the system’s recommendations.

This is the crap from which such LLMs as Chat GPT and the like are compiling their informal and inscrutable linguistic rules and predictive language models, and to which they are then going to be adding their shitty, shitty, derivative writings and recursively worsening the deterioration of human reading and writing (and thinking) ability.  Maybe we should burn them all down, along with pretty much everything else.

Don’t get me wrong.  I’m no Luddite by any means.  I’m quite a fan of useful technology, including computers in general, and of course, I love science.  But technology that decreases people’s need to discipline and improve themselves in writing, in reading, in thinking, and in seeking out reliable information makes me nervous, to say the least.

People tend to be mentally lazy much of the time‒thus the current and recent polarized and moronic political climates. The way many people use technology that they don’t even remotely understand is not improving that tendency.  So, what if our future dystopia is not, for instance, the rise of a super intelligent AI that either reduces humans to its dependent pets or eliminates them entirely but an actual artificial stupidity that people think is smart, and which is more efficient and potent at being non-intelligent than humans are, as well as at giving humans what they “want” in the short term?

What if those wants become self-reinforcing and ever more intense, as any supra-normal stimulus can cause to happen?  What if this leads everyone to a mutually dependent culture of stupid eloi and stupid morlocks with neither truly victimizing the other, but both perpetuating a clueless, increasingly incompetent civilization of human and artificial minds that cycles about in increasing ignorance of the greater universe, and is eventually obliterated by some entirely avoidable catastrophe?

In many ways, this scenario seems worse than takeover by truly super-intelligent AGI, because at least with the latter there would be super-intelligence, and it would have the potential to endure and learn and grow and spread and perhaps even become cosmically significant.

(This is all somewhat reminiscent of ideas discussed in the excellent video Dystopias Don’t Go to Heaven from the YouTube channel Highly Entropic Mind.  I encourage you to check out his stuff.)

I think it’s better to use complementary technology to the degree possible, as David Krakauer refers to such things as abacuses and bicycles and actual maps that enhance our abilities.  I think computers in general, and search engines, per se, are complementary in that, to an active mind, they allow much faster access to and use of legitimate information.  But systems that write (and sometimes just make up) stuff for people to consume without ever going anywhere or knowing anything about the quality of the information source, and which can even potentially make fake video and audio, could easily just lead everyone into a virtual world of spiraling, increasing idiocy.

Maybe this is the way the world ends, this is the way the world ends, this is the way the world ends‒not with a bang but with a singularity of self-reinforcing non-intelligence.  It would be ironic at least, and I do appreciate irony.

Anyway, that’s enough for today, and for this week.  I guess I’ll write to you Monday if I’m still doing what I do.  Have a good weekend, please.

*I’ve even read formally published books, released by respected publishing houses, that contain sentences that end in duplicated prepositions, e.g.: “…to which I was looking forward to.” And people wonder why I often just want to die.

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I’ll rack thee with old cramps, fill all thy bones with aches, make thee roar that beasts shall tremble at thy blog.

Hello and good morning.

It’s Thursday again, and I’m writing one of my old “Thursday-style” blog posts, or at least I’m trying to do that.  I’m not sure how well it’ll come out, since I’m feeling rather poorly right now, but that’s mainly pain-related.

Yesterday afternoon, I had a brief respite from pain, or at least a significant reduction in it.  It got to the point where my spirits rose, and I joked a bit with coworkers, that sort of thing.  Nothing major, of course, but in the morning I had been thoroughly anti-social, wanting to snap on everyone from my boss to the few particularly irritating people in the office.  One of these latter had the gall to pat me on the shoulder from behind—while I was working on something—and I snarled at him not to touch me.

Mind you, that’s not new; I feel very awkward about people touching me, especially when they’re being irritating yet are trying to display some kind of manufactured camaraderie, and I’m trying to work on something important at my desk.  Also, this person had arrived late, as he frequently does, yet suffered not so much as a rebuke, and even got paid his “spiff” which is supposed to be forfeited when someone is late with good excuse.

As he walked away, I grumbled, “I’ll cut your fucking hand off.”  At the time, I meant it, but I’m not sure he heard.  Apparently, I don’t have a good sense of how to speak up so that people can hear me, even though I feel like I’m speaking just fine.

Anyway, in the afternoon I had less pain than usual, for unclear reasons, and that was good.  As I walked to the train station after work, it was cloudy and a bit drizzly and windy, but far from being displeased, I felt almost as if someone somewhere had decided to give me weather that felt at least a bit autumnal—which it did—as if in response to my blog post yesterday.  It was quite nice.  And I started thinking about getting back into long walking, and maybe some hiking and whatnot.  I was absurdly optimistic for a brief time.

I even brought my little laptop with me when I left the office.  That’s what I’m using to write this.

Overnight, however, my pain has resurged with a vengeance.  First my low back and down my left hip and knee and calf and thigh and foot and ankle flared up, waking me in the night, and I applied my little massage gun as best I could—after taking some analgesics, of course.  I soothed it enough to go back to sleep, but shortly thereafter woke up with my right side doing the same thing.  Now they’re both acting up, and it’s hard to stand up from a seated position because both of my hips hurt a lot when I do.  I’ve tried all along to exercise and stretch and adjust, and to do all the other interventions I can bring to mind, all the time, over and over, but it’s difficult to tell what, if anything, makes a difference.

I don’t know what led to my brief lull of pain yesterday afternoon.  I don’t know what made it act up again last night and through to now.  I don’t know if weather changes affect it, I don’t know if that’s just a bias or a random, illusory correlation.  I try very hard to be objective, but I can’t figure out what to do.

Of course, my hands—especially my thumbs—and my shoulders and my neck are also sore and stiff, but compared to the chronic pain in the entire lower half of my body, they’re almost pleasant by comparison.

I’m sorry to keep boring you all with this.  I would love to discuss something interesting and likely to incite wonder or at least curiosity.  But evolution has shaped pain to be difficult to ignore, unfortunately.  If you find it tedious and irritating, just imagine how it is for me.  You already have preemptive revenge upon me, for I have to live with it, and can’t even walk away to get a break, at least not in any predictable fashion.  Right now, on both sides, my entire body from about umbilicus level or so on down is one contiguous, 7 out of 10 ache, and my hands and my shoulders are stiff and sore.  And I can’t take anything else in the way of meds at the moment without it being frankly toxic, and also probably making me want to throw up again.

I have had various epidurals and other more invasive interventions in the past—including surgery, as you may recall—and yet here I am.  I have no desire to be put on prescription pain medicine again.  I’ve been through that, and I think the way it affected my thought processes didn’t help with the whole crash and burn through which my career and my life have gone.

The weather is so hot that it’s hard to deal with going for walks because I get so sweaty, but maybe what I really should do is just do what I’ve so often thought of doing:  go out and start walking, and keep walking (with rests as necessary) until it kills me or until I feel better—or both, I suppose, that’s not out of the realm of possibility.  I really don’t know what to do.  But, of course, I’m still doing this blog post, so I haven’t headed off into the sunrise yet, and right now, the process of even walking to the bus stop is daunting.

I may order a Lyft to get to the train station, or an Uber, whichever is cheaper.  I hate to waste the money, but I haven’t the energy to do other things.  By now, I could have bought an electric-assist bike or one of those electric scooters, and it probably wouldn’t have been much more expensive than car services.

I honestly and strongly hope that every last one of the people reading this feels much better than I do right now.  That would at least be some consolation for me, and not a small consolation at that.  I want you to have good lives and be happy, and to have friends and family around you, and to live among people who make at least a modicum of sense to you.  I hope you don’t feel like aliens in your own environments.

It doesn’t feel like too much to ask.  Maybe it is.  Anyway, I’m done with the blog post today, but there will very likely be one tomorrow.  Why would I stop rolling this boulder, after all?

TTFN

skelington

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Universal heat death will be cold, but today it’s too hot and yet too air conditioned, and life hurts

     I don’t quite clearly remember all that I wrote in my blog post yesterday, and even the memory of the process of writing it has that slightly hazy feel of delirium, though I don’t think it literally applies.  Today I have to go to the office, because it is payroll day, and I’m already way behind on what I need to get done for that.  But I am still in a great deal of pain, even for me.

     I do remember deciding to indent my paragraphs by five spaces, as a kind of homage to the days of writing fiction‒though I used tab keys for that then, because I was using MS Word, not a smartphone.  I’m still indenting for this post.

     I’m getting on a very early train today so that I can get into the office in time to get some catch-up work done, and at a slow pace, because I still am in enough pain that my usual concentration is markedly diminished.  I don’t feel quite as delirious as I did yesterday‒I seem to have had some form of GI bug that made things worse‒but I’m far from my peak powers.  I still feel rather ill.  But I cannot simply take much time off.

     It’s oppressively hot and humid out.  Just standing still and waiting for the train caused me to be covered with sweat.  And then, getting on the train, I find the car is over-air conditioned, so it feels, at least for a moment, uncomfortably cool.  This is an interesting paradox of our climate control of our little, self-contained worlds: we control transient environments perhaps too much, and can never fully acclimate to the overarching external circumstances.  Admittedly, the weather being so hot and humid is quite uncomfortable, so I have a preference for some degree of climate control.  But it becomes a minor shock to the system when one leaves one environment for another.

     And, of course, the second law of thermodynamics (and the first) demands that the only way we can get it cooler inside is by putting more waste heat, and at higher entropy, into the outside world than we remove from the interior of, for instance, a train car.  No matter how efficient the system may be (and I doubt that it’s all that efficient) it cannot, in principle, be perfectly so.  This has been known for more than a century and a half.  Even the biological machinery that maintains a mammalian body within a narrow range of temperature, which is more efficient than any equivalent product of technology, still produces tremendous waste heat in highly disordered form, converting low-entropy energy into high entropy heat that cannot readily be used, eventually radiating into the surrounding cosmos, where it spreads out more with the expansion of spacetime, as all things head toward a predicted final fate of maximal entropy.

     Of course, on a universal scale, that process is going to take a very long time, so long that a human lifespan might as well be one of the fabled “virtual particles” of quantum field theory, popping into and out of existence before the universe can notice them‒though they can have effects.  I’ve written about this stuff before, I know, and won’t go into it again.  I’m sure if you searched either on this blog or on Iterations of Zero, you could find posts that discuss such things.

     As for me, I feel that my little, virtual existence is rapidly approaching its end.  Every day is painful, and that pain is not productive or useful; it certainly does not seem to make me stronger.  And, of course, I don’t really do anything for fun, I don’t do anything useful, I don’t make any arguable contribution that I can see.  I don’t think I’m even so much as a part of the quantum foam that has effects that can be felt in the reaction rates of elementary particles.  I’m just a virtual photon in intergalactic space.

     Though, I guess, I’ve had some effects already, since I have saved some lives and eased some suffering, and I’ve written several books and short stories, and most importantly, I have two wonderful children.  But my effects on them‒and certainly the impact of my fiction, and any past effects of my medical work‒are no longer happening. I hear from my daughter, but I have nothing of use to offer her, and I almost never hear from my son.

     I’m not doing much that has even a local, transient use anymore.  I certainly don’t think I’m having or sharing any insights or ideas that could honestly be useful to any of my readers.  And I no longer seem capable of making friends, nor of connecting with my prior friends, nor anything else along such lines.

     So, when I vanish back into the vacuum state of whatever quantum field I represent, there will be no real loss to anyone in the universe.  It would be nice to have family and friends around as one gets sicker and wastes away, but I don’t think I’ve earned any such thing.

     It is whatever it is, I guess.  I’m very tired, anyway.  And so much of what I am is pain, nowadays, without any counter-balancing joy.  At least I have done those bits of good in the past, for whatever they are worth.

     Anyway, I’m getting close to my stop.  I’m still a bit queasy, I’m sorry to say.  Or, well, I’m sorry to be able to say it truthfully.  It’s the fact, not the sharing of it, that troubles me.

     I hope you all have a good day, though.  Try not to air condition things too much‒it only serves to make the universe that much hotter that much sooner.  Ironically, so does heating things, by the way.

     Take care of yourselves and each other.  Spend time with your friends and families.  Be beneficent or at least neutral as much as you can.  And don’t worry too much.  In ten to the hundredth years, no one will remember all this, even in principle.

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Not feeling at all well today

I wish I had something clever to say to start the blog post for today, but nothing is coming to mind.  Maybe this is one of those Socratic type moments in which the recognition that one is not clever is the cleverest thing possible.  I doubt it.  Probably it’s just a failure of creativity and writing ability.

     I really had a rough day yesterday, with respect to pain and tension and alienation.  First off, the pain‒it was particularly intense and persistent.  No matter what I took for it or did for it, it didn’t want to diminish, let alone go away.  I couldn’t relax at all, all day, and no matter what anyone else was doing or saying, I just wanted everyone to shut up.  I even took to saying “shut up, shut up, shut up” under my breath when things particularly annoyed me.

     Not that people were doing anything bad or inappropriate or unreasonable.  They were just interacting, being friendly with each other, talking about stupid, unimportant, frivolous things, like people do.  They were not knowingly harming anyone.  I was the one full of malice and negativity, as usual.  Perhaps I should say “as always”.

     I think that I’ve been a negative, evil person‒at heart, anyway‒for nearly as long as I can remember.  It seems to be my natural inclination.  I’ve always resisted it, though, I’ll give myself credit for that.  I’ve tried not to be cruel or spiteful or nasty, even when I want to be, even when I feel so irked and irritated by every aspect of the world.  I’ve tried to do good in the world, going so far as becoming a doctor even though that had not been my dream.  I tried to do good by doing that, but I’m not sure how much good I ever accomplished, whether through that or through anything else I’ve ever done.  I think I’m pretty much rotten at the core, to be honest, and it’s just gradually spread outward as my life has progressed.

     Speaking of rotten, I feel kind of rotten right now, in that I feel pretty nauseated.  I took a lot of OTC pain medicine yesterday, even for me, combining Naproxen and Aspirin and Tylenol, oh my (no name brands, though) to the point where I’ve reordered a new bottle of acetaminophen for me to use at the office because the other one was getting low*.  Now, this morning, I already had to take something, because I woke up no less sore than I went to bed, and indeed, I spent a fair fraction of the night applying my massage gun to my foot and hip and lower back and so on.  When one side improves, the other side starts hurting more, as if in compensation.

     I think I may not go in to the office today.  I need to see if the nausea passes or not.  I don’t want to throw up on myself while walking to the bus stop, but even more so, I don’t want to do it while on the bus or the train.  I guess people might assume I was a drinker or that I was withdrawing from drugs if that happened; not that I really care what other people think in such circumstances, but the inconvenience of having to deal with getting sick in public is something I’d like to avoid.

     Of course, I have gotten up and gotten showered and gotten dressed, as I do pretty much every day, but I may change my mind.  The combination of being in pain and being nauseated is a bit much.  I don’t like to let myself give in to weakness too much, but it may be necessary.

     It’s too bad this isn’t the pain and nausea associated with a heart attack.  It seems unlikely, given how much aspirin I take, and how much exercise I get, though of course, neither of those things is perfect protection.  I do have some degree of family history, but again, my symptoms don’t seem to fit the usual presentation.  I think I’m just in a lot of pain and chronically sleep deprived and have some gastric toxicity due to the amount of pain medicine I take.

     If I don’t go in today, there will be that much more to take care of tomorrow, on payroll day.  But I guess I could try just to get in early in that case.  I don’t know.

     I also don’t know why I bother doing any of it.  There’s no point.  I have no long-term goals or plans or hopes or even dreams, anymore.  Well, I guess I would like to see autumn one more time before I die, if that’s possible.  And I mean real autumn, where the leaves change and the weather gets cool and people put up Halloween decorations and things like that.  I do like the semi-tropical aspects of Florida’s ecology‒the reptiles and (occasionally) amphibians and the birds and the spiders and even some of the insects…dragonflies are big down here, in more than one sense.  But as the time comes nearer for my birthday and for Halloween and so on, I always miss the northern Fall.  It has always been my favorite season.

     I don’t think I have the will or energy to get back up North, though.  I’m not good at vacations, certainly not by or for myself.  And goodness knows I barely feel like I want to survive to the end of the week, let alone until the end of the summer.  I don’t know what I’ll do.  Probably keep continuing, which is what I’ve been doing.

     I think I am going to stay at the house today‒I can’t call it “staying home” because this is not a home for me‒and try to rest a little.  I’ll post this, since I’ve written it.  I have to go in tomorrow, though.  So I guess I’ll write another post then.

     Sorry for the melodrama; I know it’s pathetic, but I guess that’s just the way I am.  I’ll try to keep it under wraps more tomorrow if I can.  It can’t be very much fun to read.  Thank you for toughing it out, those of you who do so.  It’s much more than I deserve.

*And there are so few remaining that, if I impulsively swallowed them all, it probably wouldn’t kill me, though I would surely get quite sick.  Once, in college, I got so stressed out by something‒I don’t remember what‒that I took all the remains of a little bottle of Tylenol at once.  It was either 7 or 11 pills, I know it was a prime number, that probably contributed to my decision.  Anyway, I got sick, but not severely so.  Still, the effects were apparently obvious enough that when I went to a music class the next day, they said I should go home, because I didn’t look well.  I’ve never spoken or written about that before, to anyone.  You’re welcome.  See, I’ve been fucked up for decades, at least.

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Here we go again.

It’s Monday again.

I don’t know how we keep allowing this to happen, but it keeps on doing it, over and over again, from the Monday on or immediately after the day we’re born until the last Monday on or before the day we die.  I don’t know about all of you, but I don’t really want to go back to work.

I’ll try to make this a comparatively short blog post if I can, unlike the weird one I did on Saturday, where I got off on a tangent about the number of possible blog posts one could write given a thousand words of length and a limited number of potential words after each previous one.  If you like that sort of thing, and you didn’t read it yet because you don’t read blogs on the weekend, do feel free to check it out.  I was writing off the top of my head, and I only briefly fact checked a few quick items, so there could be errors in specifics, but I think the reasoning was okay.

Yesterday, on the other hand, I suffered from ill-effects of something I had eaten Saturday, or perhaps some combination of things.  Anyway, I was feeling quite poorly, though thankfully whatever it was seems mostly to have worked its way through my system.  Fingers crossed!

Oh, and I don’t know if anyone anywhere has noticed, but for my last two blog posts, I added “tags” which are supposed to help people find what you write if they’re looking for material on given subjects.  It’s a part of that whole “search engine optimization” thing that’s been a big deal on and off, but which must surely change faster than even fashion and politics, given how the various things operating and interacting on the internet and the web are changing so quickly, and how new things become a big deal so quickly, and presumably will be altered and will warp and distort and mutate if they survive at all.  Remember Myspace?

And, of course, the advent of the various GPT-type things and their use in searching and in creating will no doubt change not only the structure but the content of the cyber-world.  Heck, soon most of the internet and web could be things written by LLMs having cobbled stuff together by interacting with other LLMs, and the humans who still go there won’t even realize that the base of the structure, founded in reality initially, has long since washed away, leaving only a cobweb of nonsense built on earlier layers of nonsense built on earlier layers of nonsense and so on.  And, unless there is some collision with actual, practical requirements of reality that forces natural selection to act on such things, it could go on existing for a very long time, all the while signifying nothing.

Of course, unless it is forced to solve problems for which there can be real world right and wrong answers, with consequences, I don’t know how it could develop into any kind of actual general, self-directed intelligence.  But I haven’t really thought about it all that much, and I am no expert.  I have read and listened to some of the experts in the area, and some of them impress me with their reasoning, and some strike me as rather foolish and simple-minded,  seeming to miss many points about how things can and do go wrong in reality.

I suppose it doesn’t make much difference what I think.  Anyway, servers produce so much waste heat and they use so much power, the whole WWW may become increasingly unworkable as temperatures rise and use of resources needs to be curtailed.  It may be more energy efficient and climate-friendly to build artificial intelligence using actual nerves, genetically engineered and powered by photosynthetic cells that remove carbon dioxide from the environment and are vastly more energy efficient than electronic circuits.

What are the odds that humans will avoid total catastrophe long enough for those few, those happy few, creative and intelligent individuals to figure out solutions to various problems and implement them?  Will the demagogues and the polarizing political fashionistas wreck everything too soon for it to be saved?

The clever and creative people are very impressive, and they never stop trying if they can help it, but it is much easier to destroy than to create.  The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics makes it just so easy for things to fail.

That’s not because the second law is some force acting on everything, some quantum field or curvature of spacetime.  It’s much more fundamental than that.  It’s simply the mathematics of probability and statistics, and it will apply in any system in which mathematics applies, which seems likely to be any possible universe.  There are simply vastly more ways for any system to be “disordered” than there are for things to be ordered in any particular way one might desire.  So, even the most well-constructed things will fall apart; even the most carefully balanced center cannot hold forever.

I guess I’m not an optimist, am I?  Nevertheless, I’m not a complete pessimist.  I think it is possible for the clever, creative people to create faster than what they create is destroyed, and to carry the mass of humanity and life itself forward into a future of cosmic consequence, the nature of which we cannot predict, because to predict it, we’d have to already know the things we’ll need to know to get there.  It’s possible.  But there are no guarantees, and there are so many ways for it not to happen.  It will require tremendous care by so many people‒as it has all along‒to avoid utter dissolution.

I don’t know if the odds make it worth the effort. But the clever people often don’t let that stop them.  And though most will fail, it doesn’t take very many clever, creative successes to move the world along.  They are just that powerful.

Maybe I’m more optimistic than I like to let myself believe.  That would be disgusting, wouldn’t it?  But I’m not dead yet, even though I often wish I were; I haven’t killed myself yet, though I think about it so very often and feel so bad so much of the time.  I’m stubborn, I guess.

I could really use some help with that‒not the stubbornness, but the depression and anxiety and pain stuff‒but I don’t have the energy and I don’t like myself enough to seek it out and to do anything more than cursorily try to help myself.  We’ll see how long I last.  Not long, I’ll bet.  But I’ve been wrong before.

With that, let’s quit this post.  Have a good week.  If I’m still alive tomorrow morning and going to work, I will grudgingly and grumpily write another blog post.  Damn it.

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There is no receding, you are pain. Something like that.

I’ve been trying, over the past few days, to write blog posts that are slightly more upbeat, and maybe a bit funny here and there, compared to most of my other posts.  I’ve done this to try to give a bit of a break to the people who read my blog with some regularity, and I hope the most recent posts have actually been enjoyable for them.  I’m quite sure they deserve to have something fun to read.

I don’t know if I’m going to be able to keep that up for long, or very consistently.  I’m afraid the increased pain I’ve had lately doesn’t seem to be abating.

Every night, pretty much all night, it’s been just gnawing away at my back and hips and knees and ankles like a demonic, semi-ethereal rat that can’t not gnaw because its teeth are always growing, and if it doesn’t wear them down, it will die a rather slow and horrible death.  If my pain were caused by some dreadful, progressive illness, I would surely be long dead by now, and that would likely be a mercy, for me and for the world at large.

I’m not just sitting back and letting it happen, just so you know.  I am always trying different stretches and exercises and combinations of analgesics and ointments and so on.  I also have massage gun thingies and a foot massager and a foldout massage chair at the office to try to help relax my back and feet.  I’ve tried inversion tables.  And I try to adjust various things to improve my sleep at night, and my sleep posture, changing pillows and locations and types of bedding and all.  Believe me, I don’t relish being in pain.

Speaking of relish, I even try adjusting what foods I eat, and when, to see if that makes any difference.  That’s a bit of a ham-handed* segue, I know, but it’s true.

Unfortunately, it’s hard for me to tell if any of it makes any difference at all.  For all I know, my chronic and daily pain might be no worse if I had never taken anything for it at all nor tried in any way to combat it.  My moments of temporary respite might be happening on their own, or due to my expectations, rather than thanks to any intervention.  It’s so difficult to judge these things with trials on one person involving a process that waxes and wanes in what amounts to a very long-period, low-frequency throbbing, but never quite goes away.

Even when I was taking chronic, prescription pain meds, the pain didn’t go away for long at a time, and the meds ended up causing suppression of my TSH and GnRH, so I had secondary hypothyroidism and low testosterone, which didn’t help my mood and health.  Certainly, weaning myself off of them didn’t make my pain worse, overall.  And as a bonus, my eyebrows grew back at their outer edges, where they had stopped growing when my thyroid was low.

There are some problems that we do not have the technology and science and resources to be able to solve or correct, and for which we may never have these things.  Perhaps it would be necessary for me to grow a new, cloned body in which to transplant my brain to cure my chronic pain.  Maybe even that wouldn’t work, because my central nervous system‒never quite ideally tuned anyway, though it has many fine features‒might have been too altered by chronic pain to do anything but induce it in a new body.  Maybe if I were a full on cyborg it would be better.  Or maybe it wouldn’t be.

There comes a time when fighting something is no longer beneficial, but is just an act of habit, or of ego, or of stubbornness, or some combination of these things.  My father died peacefully at home, with his wife and daughter (my mother and sister) nearby, taking medication to control his pain‒at that point, hypothalamic/pituitary suppression was not an issue‒and there are far worse ways to do things.  My mother was in hospice when she died, but my sister and I were nearby for her.

I’m sorry to say it, but when I die, I will probably die alone, and not merely in the sense that everyone dies alone.  Though I don’t like the idea of causing trouble for others, I fear that I will be one of those people who dies a solitary death in a lonely room and is only found sometime later.  It’s probably no more than I deserve, and no less.

Oh, by the way, I looked for that graffiti on the way back from work yesterday‒the one I mentioned that had briefly triggered a story idea but that I forgot afterwards.  I didn’t see it, though I tried to start looking at the graffiti as the train passed the spot where I remembered having seen it.  I saw lots of other graffiti that I remembered, but I didn’t see that one.  I’m pretty confident that I would have recognized it, though I suppose I cannot be completely certain.  I was in a slightly different position in the train car, so my angle might not have been right to catch the one I had seen the day before.  Oh, well, I did re-transfer my old notebook file of story ideas from my previous phone to this one, so I wasn’t otherwise idle.

That’s probably all futile, anyway.  I doubt that I’ll actually write any more fiction, or draw any more pictures, or write any more songs‒I probably won’t play and/or sing even any covers of any songs.  I’m just wishing when I think about things like that, just like I’m wishing for someone to be able to help me and to choose to do so.  Anyway, I don’t really deserve any help, so it’s not as though I expect it.

But boy, this pain is really getting old.  I mean, it’s been old for quite a while, and‒as they say‒it’s not getting any younger.  Neither am I, of course, and neither is anyone else.

I’m tired of being in pain, and I’m tired of being tired, and I’m tired of being alone.  I can try to do things about them, and I have done, and I am, though I may not necessarily mention all the things I do here in my blog.  But I do try.  I’ve been trying for a long time, and I will keep on trying for at least a bit more.  Like probably everything else in the universe, it’s almost certainly pointless, but it’s the way nature has programmed me.  I’m an idiot who doesn’t give up easily, even when he thinks it’s the sensible thing to do.

Maybe that’s why I make so many arguments about futility and pointlessness.  I’m certainly not trying to convince anyone else about life being pointless‒I would hate to think I had talked someone else into suicide**.  Maybe I’m trying just to convince myself.  Obviously, I haven’t succeeded yet; if I had, I wouldn’t be writing this.  But I am tired, and I am in rather nasty pain, and I am alone, and I don’t see readily available alternatives for the life I’m living, which I really don’t like.  I don’t have the energy to make any radical changes.  I barely have the energy to write this blog (and I can do that on my phone).

Oh, well.  The universe wasn’t made for my sake, and like everyone else, I wasn’t ever promised anything by the universe other than mortality.  It is what it is.  I don’t know if my existence is overall better or worse than that of an insect that’s accidentally wandered into an outdoor elevator car at a train station, and which will probably die in there, unable even to comprehend why it cannot seem to escape.  But I can’t be other than what I am.  Neither can anyone or anything else be other than what they are.

One thing I am is, “working tomorrow”.  So, barring the unforeseen, there will be a blog post forthcoming.  Who knows, maybe I’ll be able to report that I’ve figured out the solution to my pain and my depression and my insomnia and my disconnection and loneliness, and I’ll be able to share it with you and the rest of the world, and Earth will be transformed into a place of peace and joy for everyone.

I wouldn’t hold your breath, but I suppose that, technically, it is possible.  Have a good day.

*Ha ha.  There was no pun intended when I wrote that.  Honest.  I was actually quoting Hannibal Lecter…for whom food-based terms seem particularly appropriate, I guess.

**With the possible exception of some rare political figures.