Personal

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Random thoughts about nothing on a Tuesday morning

It’s Tuesday, June 28th, 2022.  It’s not the day for my usual blog post, (that’s on Thursdays).  I don’t currently have any more of Outlaw’s Mind to share, since I posted the rest of what I had last week, and I certainly haven’t written any more of it since.  Heck, since last Thursday, I’ve only written about 800 words on The Dark Fairy and the Desperado, and I haven’t decided if I’m going to share that at all or not.  But I felt the urge to write something to share for this blog, so I’m writing now, though I don’t have much more idea what it will say—despite the fact that I’m writing it—than you probably have while reading it.

I did an “extra” post last weekend, sharing the YouTube videos of a couple of Shakespeare soliloquys I did on my cell phone camera.  Those were somewhat fun.  In the interim, I did another quick video of the opening soliloquy of Richard III and posted that to YouTube.  Here it is, in case you want to watch it.

I’ve also, since that time, recorded videos of myself “performing” the first act of Macbeth, with the idea that I will edit it down and put in some captions and subtitles and title cards for scene changes and character identification, and then share that, and if people like it, continue to do so with the rest of the play.  I even started editing the video, but then yesterday, I had an issue with saving it, and I lost a good chunk of the editing I’d done, which is very frustrating.

Victor Frankl famously said that humans can endure nearly any hardship* if they have a reason to endure it, a meaning behind enduring it.  Conversely, however, if one has no meaning, no reason to do things, then even minor setbacks can be utterly enervating.  So right now, I’m feeling a bit deflated regarding my Shakespearean ambitions.  Anyway, I’m sure no one really wants to look at my face for too long at a time.  It’s probably an environmental health hazard.

I also haven’t really played my guitar(s) in over a week, now that I think about it…or at least nearly a week.  I’ve been getting soreness/inflammation in the tendons of my right hand and forearm from picking strumming, etc., which would seem absurd to me, given the paucity of my playing ability, if it weren’t for the fact that it is indeed happening.  Anyway, I’m getting tired of doing it, so I suppose it’s just as well.  I’m getting tired of practically everything.  If I were one of those people who stop eating when depressed, at last I would lose some weight, but I’m one of the ones who tends to gain weight, which leaves me feeling worse about myself than I already did.  It’s most unsatisfactory.

I have an idea for a sort of “epic quest”—it would really only be epic to me, frankly, and it would probably have no impact on anyone else whatsoever—and I’ve even solved many of the problems I had with shoes/feet that were getting in the way of it, which I tested a bit this weekend.  So that’s good.  If I decide to undertake such a thing, I’m sure I’ll be sharing more about it here, so you all will come to know it—those of you who actually read my full blog posts, anyway.

Deep down, though, I think I’m just feeling very discouraged, and very alone, and yet I don’t have the capacity to reach out and make friends and connect with people, let alone to ask for help; I don’t even frankly feel like I’m the same species as the people around me.  I feel like a changeling, like some different kind of creature than all the other creatures in the world—an alien whose mind got accidentally implanted in a human body…or perhaps it was implanted deliberately, as part of some scientific experiment, but one which requires the subject not to know of the experiment, to avoid bias.  Or perhaps it’s an experiment for which the funding was cut off right in the middle of the process, and the whole apparatus was just packed up, and all testing and connections were shut down, without anyone remembering to rescue the subject of the test.

I know this is all not really the case, just in case you’re wondering.  I don’t really think I’m a changeling, or an alien emplaced here either deliberately or by accident.  I may be a mutant in a sense, but only in a boring one, a mundane occurrence found throughout biology.  Mutants are real things; they really happen.  If this weren’t the case, there would be no evolution, and there would be no cancer.  But I don’t really think that I’m an android or an alien or some supernatural thing.  I may be unsane, but I’m not insane—not that way, anyway—as far as I know.

Anyway, I’m just writing this because I want to write something, but I have no interest in writing fiction right now, any more than pretty much anyone has in reading my fiction.  I’m tired.  I’m bored.  I’m uninterested in the things in the world, because for the most part, they seem stupid and chaotic and utterly pointless, and yet people don’t even realize just how stupid the things they do seem to be**.  This doesn’t apply to everyone, all the time, of course.  There are people who are not stupid, at least not all the time and not about everything.  Perhaps no one is stupid all the time about everything.  But the people—or the moments of non-stupidity—are tiny little flecks of diamond in a very large, very pungent, and extremely putrid dung heap.  It’s almost worse to know that they are there and will be not only overwhelmed and squashed but utterly unappreciated by the apes around them, including themselves, than if they weren’t there at all.

“How weary, stale, and flat seem to me all the uses of this world,” as Hamlet said, in another of his soliloquys, earlier in the play than the most famous one.  I can relate.  Except that, I know, it is I who am weary, stale, and flat—which makes sense, given that it’s more likely that the way the universe, or at least the human race, seems horrible is in the eye of the beholder than in the actual entirety of the human race.  Occam’s Razor, though it is double-edged, and can cut you if you use it carelessly, is nevertheless a useful guideline.  It’s more likely that I am pointless than that the world is—though of course, it’s entirely possible for both things to be so, and in fact, from a certain, objective point of view, I’m reasonably convinced that this is the case.  And it’s certainly more ethically tenable to say that, if the existence of most of humanity causes me pain, it is I who should vacate the premises, not try to destroy the rest of the human race, satisfying though that possibility might sometime seem to be.

I’m so tired; I don’t know what to do.  I’m so tired; my mind is set on…who?  Or, rather, on whom?  “No one”, is the answer.  There is no one there.  I am alone.  The air bites now, the sky is grey—as is the forest and the field and the ocean and the river and the lake and the cities and everything else—and I am alone.

*And he would know.

**And maybe, to them, those things don’t seem stupid.  I must be fair and consider that possibility.

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As you from blogs would pardon’d be, let your indulgence set me free.

Hello and good morning and welcome to Thursday and to another edition of my weekly blog post.  Also, of course, welcome to Summer (in the northern hemisphere, anyway…in the southern one, welcome to Winter).  Tuesday was the Solstice, aka the longest day of the year (in the north), if by “day” you mean the time during which the sun is above the horizon.  Now, as always happens during Summer, the “days” are getting shorter.  That may seem counter-intuitive to some, but when you take a moment to think about it, it’s pretty clearly the case, just as during Winter the “days” are growing longer.  The solstice is the peak (or the nadir) of the sine curve of day length, from which there is nowhere to go but down (or up).

I haven’t written much this week.  Last Friday and then this Tuesday and Wednesday, I only wrote about 700 words each, and on Monday I didn’t write anything at all*.  Nor did I play any guitar.  I just didn’t have the energy for much of anything.  I still don’t have much energy, frankly, but it seems this blog is the place in which I’ll delay longest before slacking off.  It’s the Tom Bombadil of my resistance to the figurative assault by Sauron on my middle-earth…to stretch a metaphor to its breaking point.

I have written a few thousand words on The Dark Fairy and the Desperado this week (go ahead, do the math), but my writing has been so slow that even since last week, the protagonists haven’t formally met with Lucy, the extradimensional demi-god who adores the Beatles.  They’ve traveled through her world a bit more, at least, and I’ve thrown in lots of little references that only Beatles fans will get.  It might be amusing for eventual readers; it also might be irritating.  I suppose it could be both.

As those of you who are paying attention to such things will already know, on Tuesday I uploaded the rest of Outlaw’s Mind that I have written so far.  It stops abruptly during the middle of a scene, because that’s where I was when I took my hiatus from writing it; apologies for that.  As for why I posted the rest—well, I just wanted to get it “over with” up to the current point, in case anything prevents further uploads.  If circumstances permit (and if anyone so much as expresses even the tiniest interest) I may continue with it at some future date.  I doubt anyone will much care, however, one way or the other.

As I said in Tuesday’s pre-story comment, I may soon post what I’ve written so far of The Dark Fairy and the Desperado, though any potential readers should bear in mind that it’s even more of a first draft than Outlaw’s Mind was.  If I do it, I’ll probably just post it all at once, though it’s over 60,000 words so far.  I don’t think there should be any upper limit to the length of a written blog post, though.  After all, even at so many words long, the file is only about 633 K in size, making it much shorter than the average video, even videos that are only a few minutes long.  So, data size at least shouldn’t get in the way.

Speaking of video files, I posted a silly little video last night on YouTube, which I’ll embed here, below.  It was, as I say in the video, a test of the function of using my phone to record and then upload videos to YouTube, and I think it went pretty well…though I suspect that the last few seconds of the video got cut off, just as I was about to stop “filming”.  I didn’t lose any content to speak of, and I wonder if YouTube just does that to such videos, or if the upload process did it (via WiFi, of course), or what exactly happened.  I uploaded it directly to YouTube, rather than, for instance, saving it to Google Drive and then uploading it from a laptop.  It was a trial in case I end up in situations where I want to upload videos but I’m not in good circumstances for using a laptop.

I can’t directly live-stream to YouTube** from my phone currently, because I don’t have enough subscribers to my YouTube channel.  That’s an interesting criterion for people to be able to live-stream from a phone.  I’m sure there was some quasi-logical decision-making process involved in setting the requirement, but I haven’t come up with any good hypotheses for what it might be (I also haven’t tried very hard to do so).  Of course, I could live-stream from a desktop or laptop if I wanted, because anyone can if they have a channel (or so I understand), but that wasn’t the point of my latest video.

Anyway, that’s about all there is to say about the video for now.  I did a few other test videos on two different computers earlier, and I uploaded them, but I haven’t made them public yet, and I may not ever do so.  I’m not sure.  I suppose we shall see.  Here’s the video in question above, though.

Don’t mind the sunglasses and the mask.  I was just playing around with the look, and frankly, I think it’s a lot better than my naked face.  Honestly, I could almost think I looked cool that way, which is a weird thought.  I’ll try not to get used to it.

With that, I don’t have much more to write in this week’s blog post.  Life is boring and unrewarding, and I don’t readily foresee any change to that, though I have something in mind that might do the trick.  Further bulletins on that as events warrant.  In the meantime, though, I hope you all are doing reasonably well—indeed, I would wish for you to be doing as well as it’s possible for you to be doing.  In fact, I will wish for it.  Why not?

There, I did it.

In a certain sense, of course, you already are doing as well as it’s possible for you to be doing right now, because once “now” has happened, it’s not as though you can do a mid-game reset and go back to try to do better.  I don’t know if that’s a comforting thought or a distressing one, though it could be both or either or neither, depending on the person.  But anyway, please try to make your present and your future as good as they can possibly be for you and for those you love.  You might as well—it’s not like you’ve got anything better to do with your time.

TTFN

summer dawn

*And, of course, I wrote nothing on the “weekend”.  I pretty much did nothing on the weekend.

**From my phone, anyway.

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For many miles about there’s scarce a blog.

Hi.  Morning.  Thursday.  Blog post.

You get the general idea.

It’s been a relatively unremarkable week, so far, though I did a few mildly atypical things.  On Monday, I posted a selection of recordings of me “practicing” several songs that I like to do (just rhythm guitar and voice, nothing fancy).  I’d recorded them for my own benefit, but I thought I would share to see if anyone thought any of them were worth working into a video.  If you’re interested in that kind of stuff, by all means, feel free to check it out here.

I uploaded a few videos to YouTube that relate to the “black hole” topic below, but then I decided to keep them private for the moment; I don’t know whether or when I’ll ever make them public.  But I also did post a brief, smartphone video of a colony of tadpoles that had hatched in a slow-flowing storm drain behind where I work.  It’s dried up now, sadly, or at least the stuff above the drain has.  I don’t know the fate of the tadpoles, but it was probably dire, which is sad.  Still, they were cute, and it was funny that, for a time, there was an actual ecosystem in the alley there, just because the drain works so poorly.

On Tuesday, I posted the latest section of Outlaw’s Mind.  In it, Timothy is considering joining the Saturday class at the Vipassana Center; he feels that he’s getting a lot out of his early experience of meditation and would like to go further.  We can try to be optimistic on his behalf, but things will not go as he might wish.  If you’re interested in keeping up with that story so far, please check it out at the above link.  If you want to go back to the first section, the “cold opening”, you can find that here.  And if you just want to go to the collection of all the sections of Outlaw’s Mind so far, you can go here, but I think they will show up in reverse order.

I’ve written steadily on The Dark Fairy and the Desperado, though not quite as fast as last week—only about 4200 words since last Friday.  Still, it’s plugging along, for whatever that’s worth.  Our titular characters are now traveling through the realm of the extra-dimensional being named Lucy.  Though they have no context by which to recognize the significance of words being said and characters and settings they encounter there, the author, and hopefully many of the eventual readers, will find many amusing or charming or bizarre references to a certain legendary band, whose music is so amazing that it’s known throughout the Omniverse.

As for other matters…well, I’m currently stuck in a decaying orbit around a rather good-sized black hole.  It must be good sized, possibly even supermassive, because the tidal forces haven’t spaghettified me yet, though I’m steadily drawing closer, and apparently distant observers—all observers are distant from me—haven’t noted any significant tidal or relativistic effects.  Or maybe they have, but I just can’t tell.  I’m definitely feeling the tidal effects, those painful forces that pull me in opposite directions, and that may one day rip me apart, but so far, I haven’t catastrophically come asunder.  That will probably only happen after I’m below the event horizon, but that will depend on the mass of the black hole.

There doesn’t appear to be a significant accretion disk, which is probably why the black hole is invisible to distant observers, and why my orbit is decaying relatively slowly.  But decaying it is, and I suspect it’s by some process beyond simply the radiation of gravitational waves, since that seems too slow to explain the rate at which I’m approaching the horizon.  Maybe not; I’m not sure.

Anyway, whatever the case, I don’t seem to have the necessary propulsion power to pull myself out of my inward/downward spiral toward the horizon and thence to the singularity on my own, so unless someone out there is paying attention and flings out a big, interstellar length (and quite sturdy) rope of some kind, I don’t see myself doing anything but eventually—probably rather soon—passing the event horizon.  Supposedly, that’s something that’s not actually noticeable to the person so passing, at least according to General Relativity, but it would be noticeable from outside if anyone happened to be looking.  I guess I might have crossed the horizon already, now that I think about it.  Maybe that’s why none of the signals I send seem to reach anyone.

Huh.  That’s an interesting thought.

It’s a good question whether any quantum information regarding my state will survive to reach the outside universe, even in principle.  I know there are speculations about wormholes and the like solving the quantum information paradox, but I’m fairly sure that’s not a resolved issue, and it may not be until a full theory of quantum gravity is developed.  In any case, odds are that, even if in principle some traces of me remain in the outside universe, they will amount—in practice—to nothing more than random Hawking radiation, unnoticed by anyone, ever.

The foregoing is all metaphor, of course, though I’ve tried to keep the physics consistent and accurate.  What’s the point of using a weird, esoteric metaphor that only a science geek would use if you’re going to be reckless with your General Relativity?  Being reckless with metaphors is perfectly acceptable, however, and I’ve certainly done that.  That’s my way, I suppose, of effectively sabotaging myself so that no one can really quite grasp what I’m trying to say—or at least they can’t be sure—and so even if there were someone inclined to act, they’ll have reasons and/or excuses not to do so.  Can you blame them?  I can’t.

Anyway, that’s getting closer and closer to all I’ve got to say.  I hope all of you “distant observers” are doing well, and that only planetary and solar scale gravitational effects are impinging on you.  Please take care of yourselves and each other.

TTFNBlack hole

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Some Practice Recordings

Last Friday (the 10th) I was feeling pretty under the weather, and in the morning, before work, I could barely get any writing done.  So I decided to record myself playing several songs that I like to mess around on, so I could listen to myself afterward for presumed self-improvement.  It’s good to be able to hear when the chords don’t sound good, and of course, when one’s singing is off-key or just doesn’t sound very good.  It’s most irritating to when it’s just a little off, by like an eighth of a step, and I think, “How did I not hear myself doing that?”

Anyway, I thought I’d share the recordings here, flubs, pitchiness, and all, as a curiosity, and to see if anyone has any recommendations about ones of which I should work on doing a video/cover.  I did some cleaning up of background noise, added some reverb, and did a bit of compression, just to make it all a little easier to listen for those who are interested.

Only two of them (Julia and Here Comes the Sun) were played from memory, though I know Fake Plastic Trees by heart, and I screwed up more by following the chords in the book than I probably would have if I’d just trusted myself.  Go figure.

Julia (I needed to increase to gain on the guitar for this one):

Fake Plastic Trees (by Radiohead):

Desperado (by Eagles):

Here Comes the Sun:

Here, There, and Everywhere (by the Beatles):

Just the Way You Are (by Billy Joel, but with no piano here):

Karma Police (by Radiohead):

Lucky (by Radiohead…NOT to be confused with “Get Lucky” by Daft Punk…two VERY different songs!):

and last but not least,

You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away (by the Beatles):

That’s all for now.  I don’t know why I didn’t do “One Headlight” which I also know by heart.  Maybe I’ll save that for another time or just do it as a video.

I hope you enjoy, at least a little, if you listen.  At the very least, it’s probably slightly amusing to hear me get ticked when I make a mistake.

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An old man, broken with the storms of state, is come to lay his weary blogs among ye

Hello and good morning, as always.  It’s Thursday—the first Thursday and the second day in June of 2022—and so, of course, it is likewise time for the first edition of my weekly blog post in June of 2022.

I posted a section of Outlaw’s Mind on Tuesday of this week, but it was still May then.  It was quite a short section; not much happened in it other than Timothy exploring some of what goes on in his titular mind when he practices mindfulness meditation.  It’s looking good for him for right now, and he will find meditation both interesting and beneficial, but of course, this being a story by me, it’s wise not to become sanguine.  It won’t be too long before things take strange, dark, and unexpected turns.

I’ve also been working well on The Dark Fairy and the Desperado, having written almost six thousand words already this week so far, and that’s without writing on Saturday or Sunday*.  Our heroes are now on their way to their first quest and have just encountered one of the characters I’ve been planning for this story almost as long as I’ve had the story idea.  That’s kind of nice.  I’m looking forward to their interactions.

I do wish that I could write full time**.  Then I wouldn’t be commuting as much (obviously) and thus I wouldn’t take the pounding that appears to be worsening my back and leg and hip pain daily, and I could also write most of my stories and books and everything even more quickly than I already do.  That would be nice, because I have more stories to write still than I probably have time in my life.  I guess that’s better than being in the opposite situation, but it’s still a bit frustrating.  I’m sure you can all relate.

It would be nice to win the lottery, not so that I could be idly rich, but so that I wouldn’t have to keep my “day job” (though I do like my boss and most of my coworkers).  That’s not likely to happen, since, as in the joke about the devout religious man who prays to win the lottery, I never buy a ticket.  I understand the mathematics of the situation too well ever to play it except as a lark, and I just don’t find it interesting enough to bother doing it for fun.

As for everything else—well, that’s mostly it, I guess.  I’ve done no new music recording, but I still diddle around on the guitar for a bit more mornings than not.  But the recent and ongoing exacerbations of my back and leg issues are really taking the wind out of my sails with respect to doing much of anything at all.  Also, I’ve had a secondary change*** in my living circumstances that, being the way that I am, I find quite stressful, so that coming home from work is no more a thing to which to look forward than is going to work in the morning.  It’s not seeming to get any easier over time.  I guess this is part of being apparently “neurodivergent” as they say…because we must have identifying labels for ourselves and our tribes****, mustn’t we?  Heaven forbid that we should simply be individuals without some external form of “identity” to separate us and alienate us from whole masses of other people.

That’s a sore spot, obviously, and I’ve got enough of those already, so I’m going to leave that topic.

And that’s about it for the moment.  I don’t want to bring everyone down too much, so I won’t talk about certain other things that always preoccupy me.  I’ve been tilting at that windmill for months, now, without much measurable benefit to speak of—mostly without people even seeming to notice—so fuck it.  I’m giving up.  I guess I never really expected anything to come of it in the first place, and goodness knows I don’t deserve any help or rescue or even sympathy.  Not that “deserve” is a concept that makes sense, anyway.  All such notions are mere fictions—often useful ones, admittedly—created by humans who made the error of thinking the words represent something real, something overarching and even cosmic, rather than a provincial, parochial custom or ritual relating to the social structure of a single primate species on a single world orbiting a single sun among hundreds of billions in its galaxy, which is one of possibly a trillion galaxies in the accessible universe.  It’s not important.  Maybe nothing is.

Nevertheless, I’m sure there are people who are important to you, and it’s perfectly reasonable for you to reach out to and look out for them, and to enjoy their company and be thankful for their existence.  If you’re up to it*****, look out for yourselves as well, and try to be as happy and as healthy as you can.

TTFN

empty hall (2)

*Most people don’t count Saturday as this week, and I don’t really, either, but I just wanted to make it clear that I’m referring to my writing since last Friday, and I did not write last weekend at all.  I didn’t really do anything last weekend but try to rest my back and legs, which may sound good, but it gets old after a very short while.

**Of course, if wishes were horses, we’d all be shoulder deep in horseshit.

***By which I mean that it was not I who changed anything, but the person with whom I had been living, and those with whom I am now living, all without input from me.

****To be fair, I don’t have a “tribe”.  I’m not really a member of any group or collection or way of thinking or identity agglomeration, or whatever.  I don’t even feel like a human, to be honest.  Not that it’s any big loss not to be part of that disg-race.

*****I’m not.

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And then this ‘blog’ is like a spendthrift sigh, that hurts by easing.

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday again—this time the last Thursday in May of 2022—and so, of course, you know the drill.  Obviously*.

I’m back to writing on my laptop again.  Not carrying it around with me did absolutely nothing to relieve or improve my back pain; in fact, last week was, if anything, above average in terms of round-the-clock, low-grade** agony.  Given that, it seemed pointless to restrict myself to the phone, since it’s simply much easier to type using the laptop, and it doesn’t make my thumbs sore.  Also, it lets me write a bit faster.  Whether I write better or not is a question to which I have difficulty finding an answer.

It’s been an interesting week, with interesting not quite being used in the sense of the supposed Chinese curse, “May you live in interesting times,” but not entirely separate from it as well.  On Tuesday evening, for instance, some disaster struck the signaling and dispatching system of the Tri-rail and other parts of the commuter rail and Amtrack system in south Florida, and all the signals and comms went down at once, apparently.  Anyway, there was no train to get home on Tuesday evening, the bus would’ve taken at least two hours, and I’m far too socially awkward to want to use Uber or the like.  Also, there’s really nothing at “home” that gives it an advantage over work, so I slept at the office.

It’s a strange moment when you realize that your existence is so empty that the only reason you would bother going to the house you live in to sleep is because it has a shower and a change of clothes.  I don’t even sleep on a bed at home because of my back—I sleep on a yoga mat now, which is much better for my back than any mattress (except the ones they use in jail/prison, ironically).  But the carpet at work is just as good.  It’s all kind of pathetic.

I was also a bit discombobulated on Tuesday morning—Tuesday was a heck of a day—because I was having real trouble with pain, even for me.  I forgot to post the latest section of Outlaw’s Mind until a bit later in the day than usual.  It was a loooong section, one that started well enough, but that ended in one of the most heart-wrenching scenes in the story.  At least, it was heart-wrenching to write.  I have no idea what it was like for anyone to read, or if anyone actually has read it or ever will.  Anyway, it’s a moment where Timothy finds himself trapped between his mother’s fears for him and his own fear of himself.  For him, at least—and for me, writing it, since it was not entirely a fictional thing—it was a dreadful, dreadful event.

Of course, I’ve been writing steadily on The Dark Fairy and the Desperado, which is coming along nicely.  Sometimes it’s good to do something that’s rather non-serious for a change, especially since I’ve written so much horror in recent times.  I even cranked out a decent amount yesterday morning—almost two thousand words—after I’d slept in the office.  Of course, I used my laptop then, since there would be no reason to use the phone unless I thought I wrote better with it, which I now suspect isn’t the case.

And if you’re wondering if there’s anything else going on in my life—there isn’t.  You’ve now read about pretty much everything of note that’s happened to me since my last blog post, and it’s debatable how noteworthy it is.  I haven’t done any new videos of me doing any music, for which I’m sure you’re all quite thankful.  I haven’t watched any new shows or movies, and I haven’t really read any new books that are worth talking about, though I do read something pretty much every day.  There’s really nothing in my life worth talking about, let alone living.

As Morpheus said, “Welcome to the desert of the real.”  Too bad one couldn’t be welcomed to the dessert of the real, right?  But desserts aren’t really very good for one, anyway, and are best kept in significant moderation or else they will become more detrimental than beneficial—a bad habit rather than a treat or a reward.

I hope all of you are doing at least a little better, or have lives at least a little more interesting—in the good sense, not the “Chinese curse” sense—than I.  Please take care of yourselves and of those around you, if you are fortunate enough to have people you love around you.  Try to be optimistic if you can, and please accept my apologies for making it that much more difficult by being such a downer all the time.  Hopefully, something will kill me soon, and you all won’t have to deal with me anymore.  I know it’ll be a relief to me.

TTFN

rocky desert

*i.e., it’s time for my weekly blog post.

**But high quality, if that could be the correct term.  It’s good at what it does, anyway, though what it does well is certainly not very nice.

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Trust not my reading, nor my observations, which with experimental seal do warrant the tenor of my blog.

Hello.  Good morning.  Today is Thursday, and so of course it’s time for the most recent edition of my weekly blog post.

I’m writing this post on my phone, using the Google Docs app, because unfortunately, even my petite, eleven-inch-hypotenuse laptop seems to be too much to carry around in my backpack, given how badly my back and hips and ankle have been behaving.  I don’t think it’s so much the weight of the thing that’s the issue as where it tends to rest‒right up against my lumbar spine.  It may not truly be triggering any problems, because my back and hips and my right knee and ankle are in pretty severe pain no matter what, even though I’ve lost two belt notches worth of weight recently.  However, reducing the load in that area seems to decrease my pain, or at least to cause less of an exacerbation, so for now I’m writing on my phone, so to speak.

I keep trying to find things to do that decrease my pain, but all my attempts have so far been quite unsatisfying.  Perhaps the Dread Pirate Roberts was right after all, and life is pain.  Or was that the Buddha?  Anyway, one or more of those great philosophers said something about life and pain being inextricable.

I’ve been writing The Dark Fairy and the Desperado on my phone this week as well.  The two main characters have finally met!  Of course, the Dark Fairy immediately tried to kill the Desperado, but that’s to be expected.  It’s slightly slower writing on the phone than it is with the laptop, as I’m sure I’ve mentioned before, but as I’ve also mentioned, that may be good for keeping my writing more concise.  On the other hand, my verbosity may not be something any device known to humanity can curtail.

I posted the most recent section of Outlaw’s Mind here this week.  There’s still quite a bit to go before we reach the point where I’ve stopped writing it, and I hope those of you who read it are enjoying the story.

In other news, yesterday I recorded, overdubbed, edited, and posted a video of me playing and singing the Beatles song And I Love Her, and I’ll embed it here.  I’ve been half-heartedly working on getting it into playable shape for a while, and I decided I needed to have a rhythm track (which I had to create the new-fashioned way, beat by beat, on Audacity, since I have no drums), and that it also would be much better with the little accompanying arpeggios* during the second, third, and last verses in the background.  I wanted to be able to do those at speed when I played them.  To pat myself on the back (which doesn’t help my back pain), I only got the basic chords from a guitar book, but did the (admittedly simple) key changing and worked out the solo and stuff for myself.  I’m reasonably pleased with the results, though it’s far from perfect.  I’ve gotten pretty good at throwing these videos together at least, including sound editing and backing tracks and the like; I did these things literally in my spare time yesterday morning.

There’s no need to feel obligated to watch the video of me playing, though; I certainly take no joy in looking at myself and it’s hard to imagine anyone else would.  It’s basically there to prove that, yes, except for backup/overdubs, I really did play and sing it all at once, myself…and because the milling masses mostly only seem to respond to video** anymore‒but here it is in case you want to listen:

I’m not sure what else there is to talk about today.  Of course, there are always subjects that could be raised, but I’ve not really done any discussion or commentary, either here or on Iterations of Zero, for quite a while.  The whole process seems utterly pointless (not least because of the aforementioned predilection of the populace for video***); my energy level is steadily deteriorating, and my motivation is doing so even more.  I’m not convinced that anything I write or say or do will make any difference, even for me.  I continue this blog mainly out of stubbornness.

I did do a slightly curious thing this week.  There’s a horror novel that I used to read and reread a lot back when I was a teenager:  Floating Dragon, by Peter Straub.  The events of the story begin on May 17, 1980.  Indeed, there’s a line in the book that goes, “On May 17th, 1980, the Dragon came to Patchin County.”  That line is always bouncing around my head at this time of year, so on Tuesday (which was the 17th) I decided to buy the Kindle version of the book, though I haven’t started reading it yet.  I miss my old, battered paperback copy, lost now with all my other possessions from before 2013.  It had the amusing characteristic that the way the title and author were written on the spine, if one read them in ordinary left-to-right fashion, seemed to say, “Floating Peter/Dragon Straub”.  I wonder if the publishers realized that after the fact and were duly embarrassed.  Anyway, it was a good, albeit very weird horror story, and I still can recite parts of it from memory, such as:

“You were dreaming for a long time, and then you were not.  You were asleep in a place you did not know, and when you awakened you were someone else.  You had a drink in your hand, and a woman was looking at you, and Dragon, the world was yours again.”

With that, I’ll call things to a close today.  I hope you’ve enjoyed this atypically written blog post, and that you’re all as well as you can possibly be.

TTFN

dragon

*Is it supposed to be “arpeggi”?  That’s how Radiohead spelled it in the title of their song Weird Fishes/Arpeggi, and they’re Cambridge-educated, albeit probably not in linguistics.  Then again, I studied English at Cornell.  Not that such a thing matters much anyway, since the word in question is Italian…but it’s not being used as Italian, but rather as a term of musical jargon.  I should probably just look it up, but where’s the fun in that?

**Angels and ministers of grace defend us from anyone who might think to ask most people to read.

***Perhaps we should retire the term vox populi and replace it with visus populi.

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For grief is proud, and makes his blogger stoop.

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, the second Thursday in May of 2022, and it’s time for another edition of my weekly blog post.  Tomorrow will be Friday the 13th! Unlike many people, I like Friday the 13th both because I like being a bit contrary and because I like prime numbers.  I used to always put thirteen gallons of gas in my car when I filled it up, just because I like prime numbers, and I particularly like thirteen because so many people dislike it.  Maybe I thought it deserved to get some positive attention for a change.

I haven’t been quite as productive this week as last week, but I did write a good five thousand words on The Dark Fairy and the Desperado.  I’ve been a little worn out because my recent travails have exacerbated my chronic back and leg pain, and yet I’m walking about two and half miles a day as part of my commute.  So, my concentration—nay, even my very will to live*—has been detrimentally affected.  Nevertheless, I have continued to write; being on the train is nice for doing that, at the very least.

I posted the next section of Outlaw’s Mind this Tuesday, but it was a short one.  I didn’t want to add the subsequent section to beef it up any, because that section is already rather long, and adding them together would have made it too much, I think.  I don’t know if anyone is actually reading the story—I don’t know if anyone is actually reading this, for that matter—and if they are, I don’t know whether they like it.  I suppose it’s possible that some masochist might hate the whole thing but read it for that very reason.  That seems unlikely, though.

I mentioned last week, with my tongue in my cheek, that I tend to play guitar and sing as a way to punish the world.  Well, I’ve done a bit of such punishing recently; I’ve embedded below two videos of me amateurishly playing guitar and singing, for anyone who feels the need to scold themselves, perhaps for falling off a diet, or not getting enough exercise, or committing adultery…stuff like that.  In all seriousness, however, I like both of these songs a lot, and so I did my amateurish best to play and sing them.

The first is If You Could Read My Mind, by Gordon Lightfoot, a song I’ve known and liked since I was a little boy.  I’ve always loved the melody, and Gordon Lightfoot was a very good singer.

The second is No Surprises, by Radiohead, which I only came to be aware of perhaps fifteen years ago, but which very quickly became one of my favorite songs (and bands).  It’s harder to play than IYCRMM, as you can probably tell, but I really love it.  In many ways, it is the song of my soul, if there is such a thing.

As for anything else…well, there really isn’t much else.  There was a death in my family late last week, about which I’m quite sad.  This was my uncle, whom I hadn’t seen in quite a while, but who had been, along with his son—my cousin—one of the only people in my family to attend my wedding.  That’s part of a long and dreary story that I won’t go into, but it is a shame that I hadn’t seen him in so long, and now I won’t be able to do so.  Such is the story of life, unfortunately.  I wish I could have told him how much that meant at the time, and even though that marriage has since failed, that gesture still means a great deal to me.  At least I can hereby tell my cousin the same for his part!

I fear quite honestly that I am on the verge of a real and serious mental (and physical) breakdown, and I don’t know what to do about it.  I also fear that, even if I did know what to do about it, I would not have the will to do it.  I wish I did.  I would like to be optimistic and upbeat; I have been so in the past.  No one who suffers from chronic depression and/or other, related difficulties would wish to suffer from it/them. They might well believe, however, that they richly deserve their own suffering for being the awful, evil, rotten person that they see, that they “know”, themselves to be.  I don’t know how to escape that trap.  I have tried, many times and in many ways, but I don’t think I have the strength or the resources to do it on my own.  And on my own is what I am.

I hope, nevertheless, that all of you reading are feeling and doing as well as you possibly can, and that you are with those you love, or at least in communication with them, and that you find a great deal of joy in that.  Please take care of yourselves, and of each other.

TTFN

wallpapersden.com_dark-sky-tree-purple-sky-nature_1920x1200

*It’s an interesting notion, this concept of “will to live”.  It’s misguided and misleading, because it’s not as though one can simply stop having some “will to live” and consequently just die.  Trust me, I know.  The body and brain have been shaped by millions upon millions of years of evolution to try to stay alive, and one’s will, at the human level, has almost nothing to do with it.  Ditto with eating and drinking and breathing.  Just try not doing those things.  The machine keeps cranking along until it falls apart, or until something breaks it.  Believe me, if not having the “will to live” mattered at all, there are many times—several in any given week, I’d say—in which I would already have died.  Alas, it’s the will to die that’s more a real kind of will, and it is set against gargantuan, Lovecraftian powers of nature that force living beings to stay alive whether they really want to or not.  I’m working on it, though.

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Plenty and peace blogs cowards; hardness ever of hardiness is mother.

Hello, everyone, and good morning, everyone.  It’s Thursday—it’s quite early in the morning, since I’m having a particularly noteworthy iteration of insomnia today—and so it’s time once again for my weekly blog post.  This is the first Thursday in May of 2022, which is mildly interesting, I guess.  It’s also Cinco de Mayo, so for those of you who celebrate that holiday:  Enjoy!

As those of you who pay attention to it will have noted, I posted the most recent part of Outlaw’s Mind here on Tuesday.  I hope those who are reading along steadily—if there are any such people—are enjoying it.  It’s a fairly dark tale, which is probably why I’ve had to keep stopping and starting it as I go along.  I like my main character, Timothy Outlaw, and I keep making crappy things happen to him, or at least having him experience crappy things.  So, I have to take a step back from time to time.  It’s strange that this story has such an effect on me, considering I’m the author; I don’t know what it might say about my own psychology, if anything, but it can be a bit frustrating.

On the other hand, The Dark Fairy and the Desperado—which is not entirely a light-hearted tale, either—is at least quite fanciful, it being a supernatural adventure across multiple universes, the main characters of which are an unerringly deadly gunman from the Old West of our world (or one very much like ours) and a very angry fairy from a completely different world, whose experiences with humans have filled her with an enduring wrath that earned her her sobriquet.  And, of course, they only meet because of the machinations of a wizard from yet another world who has become trapped in a universe of his own creation and needs help getting out of it.  So, while it’s heavier in some senses than Outlaw’s Mind—Omniversally heavy, one might say—it’s lighter in tone.

I’ve gotten quite a lot of writing done on it lately.  This is at least partly because I’ve been taking the train, and so I can write while I’m traveling to work.  Even though I didn’t accomplish anything at all last Friday, I’ve still written just shy of 8500 words since this time last week.  I haven’t even introduced the Dark Fairy yet, since it takes some time to bring a desperado out of the Old West into a trans-universal setting and explain to him what the heck is going on when it happens.  It helps that, at the time he is transported from his home, he is facing nearly certain death in the desert, without a horse and without water.  He figures almost anything would be preferable to that, so he’s able to go along with things.

Anyway, it’s a fun story, and one I’ve had in my mind for roughly as long as I had Mark Red.  Like Mark Red, it was originally thought up as a manga, and it’s now meant to be a series of books; I haven’t written any more of Mark’s story yet because, frankly, no one has expressed any interest.  I still may end up doing it, though—assuming I live that long—because Morgan, the vampire who saves Mark’s life by making him into a demi-vampire, is still my favorite character that I’ve written to date.  There are at least two more books waiting to be written about her and Mark.

The adventures of The Dark Fairy and the Desperado will probably take more books, because of the structure of the adventure they’re going to be having, but I don’t expect the books to be as long individually.  There will be more action and less soul-searching, so to speak, since neither of the main characters are teenagers, and in fact are quite hardened and cynical, each in his or her own way.  Neither one needs to try to avoid becoming a killer and/or a supernatural being, since it’s already too late to avoid such things.

They inhabit the same Omniverse as do the various characters in my other stories—after all, the Omniverse is infinite in infinite dimensions, and it contains all possible universes of any nature—but they will spend more time traveling from one realm to another than pretty much any of my other characters*.

And that’s pretty much a summary of everything that’s happening in my life or is likely to happen—I don’t really do anything for fun**, I don’t have any real friends***, I have no pets, no local family (none that want to see me, anyway), and no hobbies**.  I occasionally attempt to play guitar and sing, but that’s more my way of punishing the world, à la Welcome to the Machine.  I don’t know that it could be considered a worthwhile endeavor.

But I continue to write, both my books and this blog.  I hope you all enjoy reading it (and them, when and if it applies), and I hope you have a good holiday, if it is one for you, and that in general you have the best possible day, week, month, year, and life you can have, along with those you love and who love you.  And try to treat all the other people well, also, if you can.

Oh, and wish your mothers Happy Mother’s Day this coming Sunday, if you’re lucky enough still to be able to do so.  And to all you mothers**** out there—Happy (early) Mother’s Day from me!

TTFN

cinco dance

*With the possible exception of the eventual story Changeling in a Shadow World, which I’ve mentioned here previously.

**Other than writing, I guess.

***Does that surprise anyone at all?

****Rarely enough, for me, this is not intended as “half a word”.

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Why, what is pomp, rule, reign, but earth and dust? And, blog we how we can, yet die we must.

Hello.  Good morning.  It’s Thursday, and so, whether anyone asked for it or not—whether anyone wants it or not—it’s time for my weekly blog post.

I can only apologize.

So far, this week has been marginally better than last week for me, which may not be saying very much, but at least it is better by some measures.  I got quite a bit of writing done this Monday through Wednesday on the train; I’ve been using my laptop, not my phone to do it, despite my thoughts that I just might stick with the former device.  Still, on each of those three days, I wrote roughly 2100 words in the morning, which is more than twice as many as I wrote last Friday, which was a very difficult day, continuing the pattern of the days that had preceded it.

Anyway, The Dark Fairy and the Desperado is moving along well.  Though we have not met the Dark Fairy yet, we have met the Desperado.  He is the first person we encounter, and he is soon to be sent to meet his fellow title character.  It won’t be a friendly encounter, I’m afraid, but if things all went easily, where would be the fun?  A story without the exchange of fireballs and bullets between protagonists can hardly be called a story at all.

I also remembered to post the next part of Outlaw’s Mind here this week, unlike last week, so to those of you who were pining for it, you’re welcome.  I tried to put in a “continue reading” tab, so that it wouldn’t take up as much screen space for scrolling purposes if you’re trying to go back to further entries, but I’m not sure I succeeded.  I didn’t try very hard to check, and I haven’t yet gone back to insert any in earlier posts.  Have I but world enough and time, I mean to do so.

I’ve considered perhaps interspersing some posting of parts of The Dark Fairy and the Desperado here, perhaps alternating with Outlaw’s Mind, perhaps posting them on another day of the week.  Let me know what you think, if you have any interest in the question at all.  It’s not a horror story, but is instead a trans-universal fantasy adventure, so be prepared.  I want to (and so I hereby do) remind everyone that these are stories in early draft form*, so they won’t be as polished and streamlined as something that’s been formally published would be.

In this, unfortunately, they may bear all too much resemblance to all too many of at least the online versions of publications from Scientific American to the various major newspapers, all of which seem to have fallen into the editorial hands of the pointy-haired boss from Dilbert, and many of the writers of which seem to have learned their trade via Twitter-mediated coursework.  Honestly, the state of much of the publishing industry is terribly dispiriting to note.

More than once within the last few months, in mainstream-published books about arguably serious subject matter, I’ve encountered the words “free reign” used instead of “free rein”.  That latter is an expression related to horseback riding, in which one essentially releases control of the horse to allow it to go where it will, presumably at high speed, but with outcomes that may be difficult to predict, and this is the source of the metaphor.  The former is…I don’t know, perhaps a reference to some form of particularly liberal monarchial regime**.

But, as they say, I digress.  I’m prone to do so often and grievously.  The point I meant to make was simply that I wouldn’t want you to mistake the form in which I might share parts of a story here for the way they might appear in “officially” published form, in case anyone were to consider buying one of my books.

One other thing I did at the end of last week was to record a video of me playing guitar and singing the David Bowie song, A Space Oddity.  I had downloaded the chords to the song from a site of which I am a member, and they sounded so good to me when I played them, even though they weren’t particularly difficult chords, that I couldn’t resist making a video.  I’ll embed it here, for anyone who is interested.  I make no promises regarding the quality of the playing or the singing; I just liked singing and playing the song.

And I think that’s pretty much what I have to share this week.  I hope you’ve all been feeling and doing better than I have been, and I do mean “all”.  I’ve been having a truly rough time, though at least I’ve kept on writing, and I don’t want any of you to feel like I do, no matter what Peter Frampton might say.  I would seriously like you to share (in the comments here, not on Facebook or Twitter, which I tend not to spend much time on for the sake of my already alarmingly tenuous mental health) whether you would be interested in reading sections of The Dark Fairy and the Desperado, and if so whether you would mind if I alternated them with Outlaw’s Mind, or if you would prefer to have me share them in another slot during the week.

Otherwise, as always, please try to be kind to each other and to yourselves, because goodness knows I’m not likely to do it.

TTFN

Theoden king

*It wouldn’t be quite accurate to say that they are first drafts, because I always reread what I’ve written the previous day before starting on any new writing, and I edit as I do so.  Often, I’ll have reread a portion and edited it more than once in this process, depending on how much I wrote the preceding day.

**A regime, by the way, is related to the rule of a person or dynasty over a nation, or something analogous.  A regimen is a “prescribed course of medical treatment, way of life, or diet for the promotion or restoration of health”, and related usages.  The words are obviously related, so it’s not such a big deal to conflate them***, but it is a bit sloppy, and—of course—it irritates me far beyond its level of importance.  One follows an exercise regimen, not an exercise regime, unless one is ruled over/governed by one’s workout routine in a more or less literal sense****.

*** “Reign”, on the other hand, comes from Latin via Old French and Middle English and so on, while “rein” is apparently derived from Old Norse, so though they are homophones, they are not closely related words.

****A “diet” is more complicated, since it can refer to a legislative body, thus making things ever more confusing, though I doubt that many people confuse regime with regimen for that specific reason.  There’s even a famous historical “Diet of Worms”, which had nothing to do with the eating habits of annelids, but instead referred to a body convened to address the heresy of Martin Luther.  Though I love it dearly, English is often muddled and can be confusing.  It’s both a technically “degenerate” code and also often not a very specific one.  Maybe I shouldn’t get so worked up by people mistaking a horseback metaphor for one related to monarchy and similar governmental situations.