Psychology

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For the blog sees not itself, but by reflection, by some other things.

Hello and good morning.

It’s Thursday, of course, and so I began with my customary Thursday greeting, which takes some form of “Hello and good morning”.  I have occasionally varied the specifics of that a bit—at least once going so far as to write “Goodo and hell morning”—but it tends to stay the same.  Likewise, on Thursdays, I end my blog post with a farewell that I took from Tigger (not from the A. A. Milne stories but from the Disney adaptations):  TTFN, which stands for “Ta-ta for now”.

Anyone who has followed my blog for a while probably knows all this already.  Still, since I can at least have a little hope that maybe some new people will come to read my blog, it’s nice occasionally to let them know about some of the relatively consistent things I tend to do.

Speaking thereof, on Thursdays I also tend to title my blog with some quote from Shakespeare, altered to replace one of the words in the quote with some form of the word “blog”.  Sometimes I have to squeeze the word in pretty brutally, but other times it works really well.  Fortunately, Shakespeare had more quotable lines than pretty much anyone else or even any other relatively circumscribed collection of people, at least in English.

Now that we’re past that introduction of sorts, I should try to write about something more interesting.  I don’t know what that might be or whether I will succeed, but I will try.

I’m still not feeling very well, though I think I may be on an upward swing; I still have a bit of a sore throat and a bit of a cough and all that.  Also, my hearing is persistently hosed in the left ear as it has long been in the right*, with associated tinnitus.  I fear that may be permanent.  There’s not much to do about that.

Because of those issues, I’ve recently been avoiding using my earphones, so I haven’t listened to any podcasts, let alone audio books.  It’s possible I’ll avoid them for good, but I may return to them, or I may elect to go for headphones rather than insertable ear phones.  I prefer the wired kind to any possible wireless ear phones, partly because they tend to stay in place much better than free-floating little ear inserts, but more because they don’t have to be charged all the time.  It’s bad enough to have to keep recharging the stupid phone.

I really wish I could be less tense than I normally am without regressing into depression or having to rely on some manner of pharmaceutical.  I mean to try to get back into regular, daily (or more frequent) meditation.  I know that I’ve said—truthfully—that it often tends to make my depression flare when I start to meditate again, even as it truly helps my anxiety and the erratic, chaotic nature of my thoughts and emotions.  But perhaps I should just accept that and go with it.  I rarely find depression completely debilitating, though it is often life-threatening.  But that’s as may be.  Life is life-threatening.

But I do want to clarify my concentration back to earlier, better levels.  I’m full of ideas for things to do in my immediate future, such as meditating and working on my stories and adjusting my diet and walking more and learning more about all things, all that stuff.  They are good ideas.  But I almost always get distracted by some new thing from even a good preceding thing, much as I used to do when writing stories.

It’s been said that wisdom is the ability to follow the advice you would give yourself if you were someone else.  It’s not nearly as easy as it seems it ought to be.  That’s because humans—and humanoids—are still very much biological organisms with billions of years of potent evolutionary heritage that shapes the moment-to-moment states of the nervous system, rough hew them how we may.

But there are ways to have more control.  I used to do self-hypnotism/meditation every day, a couple of times a day, starting from when I was in junior high.  It was also starting at around that time that I began to do very well in school (to be fair, I was never a bad student, but my performance improved significantly after that).

Once I left that practice behind, becoming distracted by things like college and my soon-to-be-wife, I think my mental discipline and my ability to bring my mind to task as desired deteriorated.  I suppose it’s analogous to an athlete who stops exercising and gets out of shape.

But it’s possible to get back into shape, and the brain is more amenable to improvements—more “plastic” to use the biological/medical term—than are the muscles and connective tissues of the body; you’re never really too old to improve your mind until you’re dead.

So, I mean at least to try to get back into some habits that have been useful to me in the past.  And it cannot hurt to explore the reaches of my mind—though as I make clear in Outlaw’s Mind, this is not always guaranteed not to come with dangers.  Of course, that’s a fantasy/horror story, so there are occurrences in it that, as far as we know, cannot be encountered in real life.  But that doesn’t mean there are no dangers.  For instance, as I just pointed out, mediation sometimes triggers worsening depression for me, and that depression is dangerous (to me).

It’s not as though I’m doing great otherwise, however.  And though it is true to say “all improvement is change, but most possible change is not improvement”, there are situations in which one is in the negative so far that there may be a greater chance of improvement that deterioration.  If one does a “drunkard’s walk” with a barrier preventing motion in one direction, like a figurative large brick wall one cannot get through or around or over or under, and one is already near that wall, random motion is unlikely to get one much closer to it, but can readily take one farther away.

That’s a ham-handed metaphor, I guess, but I suspect you know what I mean.  I’ll try to keep you all posted on whatever I do and what effects those actions have.  In the meantime, I hope you have a good day.

TTFN

*That sounds almost biblical, doesn’t it?

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“In an interstellar burst, I’m back…”

I wish that I could honestly tell you that the reason I didn’t post a post yesterday was because I had been working on The Dark Fairy and the Desperado and so I decided to leave the blog dormant.  Alas, that was not the reason for my absence yesterday.  Instead, it was something far more prosaic:  I was out sick.  The cold I’d been fighting for days worsened, and I was very worn out after going to work Monday, and my voice was pretty rough, and I was coughing a bit, and, well…you know, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria, all that.

I’m not feeling a whole lot better today, to be fully forthcoming, but I need to do payroll, and of course, when I’m gone for a day or longer, things pile up that I take care of gradually most days, and it can be that much more overwhelming to catch up with everything.  I suppose none of it really matters much.  It probably wouldn’t matter very much if I didn’t do any of the things I do at work.

Also, honestly, I still haven’t been paid last week’s pay.  I think it’s probably just an oversight on my boss’s part because of the chaos of recent weeks.  It’s unlikely that it’s a deliberate tactic to make me want to go away.  Nevertheless, the irrational, paranoid part of me—the part that assumes everyone else will eventually come to hate me, since I hate myself, and I know me better than anyone else does—is hyper alert for possible hostility.

Anyway, I haven’t actually gotten much done on my return to DFandD.  It was only in the evening yesterday that I started rereading it, but I’ve only gotten as far as the point where the Desperado looks into the well and suddenly hears the sound of rushing water.  If you don’t know what I mean, that’s just because you haven’t read any of what I’ve put up for you to read of that story, though it’s been available for months and months.

I wonder if anyone (other than my sister) has actually read it or any other fiction I’ve posted here.  I don’t recall getting any (non-sibling) feedback on any of it.

Maybe that’s to do with the short attention spans we all seem to have now, thanks to the overabundance of easy-to-consume-without-much-mental-effort-media.  Not only do we have all the easily consumable content on YouTube, which at least includes some very high-quality material, but we have little snippet “shorts” and “reels” on almost all sites now that are often heavily manipulative, but which perforce do not contain much information.

And the algorithms that try to steer us to things that will keep us on-site, or to steer those things toward us, seem to have become rather clunky and ham-handed, and they now push us (or at least me) away from things that would have been useful and interesting toward just boring shit that’s often absurd or stupid or at least just vapid.

Probably the lack of feedback on my stories is just because my stories are not that interesting to many people, or at least not to the sort of people who come to read my blog; I may be selecting for a group of readers who prefer nonfiction to fantastical fiction.

Wouldn’t that be ironic?  I started this blog as a way to promote my fiction writing by having a point of interaction with potential readers of my fiction, to give them some ”inside information” if they were interested in it.  Iterations of Zero was supposed to be the separate blog where I talked about my interests or concerns or issues related to science, mathematics, philosophy, politics, or what have you.

Of course, the phenomenon of such things evolving and changing in ways unforeseen during their inception is not unusual, online or in life.  Just look at early Peanuts or Calvin and Hobbes (or even Dilbert) comics compared to later ones.  But it’s frustrating to see, in real time as it were, things evolving away from usefulness, evolving toward senescence.  I suppose, in a way, that’s the story of almost everything that evolves—most changes in any RNA world that predated what we would call true life, for instance, were prone to make things less useful.  And by “useful” here I mean just “liable to make many and good copies of itself”.

One would like to imagine that human society, or at least human technology, would be less prone toward changes that make things worse, since it’s guided by actual minds, and in the case of technology, some of these minds are quite high-quality.

And I think, when the technology was actual hardware and needed to compete against other hardware, the changes would tend to be good—not universally so, but pretty impressively so.  It was such technological advance guided by effective minds that led from Kitty Hawk to the Moon in about 60 years.

However, computers have developed—and they have been prone to impressive improvement guided by some very fine minds indeed—and their products have become easier and more thoughtless to use, such that it required almost no mental skill or ability to interact with and consume those products.  And thus the tendency for things to head in good directions became less potent.

Even the finest associated minds, such as they are, don’t fully understand the specific inner workings of things like LLMs and other deep learning computer systems, which we loosely call AI.  And, of course, the computers don’t know how they work, either.  And the complex interactions of the millions and even billions of people who use social media every day and/or constantly is a complex system the dynamics of which can only be modeled for gross tendencies.  Chaos will always apply.

I don’t know what point I’m trying to make, other than that there seems to be no point, and that indeed there seem to be mostly anti-points, to so much of what happens in the world.  It’s terribly frustrating and pushes me toward full-on despair.  And I cannot seem to find interest in or derive joy from the things that used to make me at least temporarily joyous.  And that doesn’t really matter to anyone, to be honest.  Probably that’s appropriate.  I am probably not worth any effort from anyone at any level (though I would welcome it).

Or maybe I unconsciously drive people away, and that’s the problem.  Who knows?  I don’t.  And we can be sure that Socrates doesn’t and didn’t know, since reputedly the only thing he knew was that he knew nothing, and this marked him as the wisest person in the world.

As for me, I am not wise, or at least not very wise.  But I am about done, at least for today.  I feel almost done in general.  I’m very tired of going through these motions of pretending to be alive when really I am just a crude mockery of life.

As evidence of my mental stupidity:  When I wrote that last line, I could not help thinking of one of the female leads from Young Frankenstein singing, “Oh…crude mockery of life, at last I’ve found you!”

I hope you readers of my blog all have a good day, but that everyone who doesn’t read my blog has a bad day.  I don’t want them to have too bad a day—nothing tragic—but just enough for them to realize their mistake and come read my blog.

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Not much to report, but that never stops me

I’m writing this post on my mini lapcom today, because I brought it back to the house with me over the weekend.  The idea was to have it with me so I can work on The Dark Fairy and the Desperado.  I have that file open—I had originally saved it with the Word app on my phone, I think, so I had to download the latest version of it and adjust the settings, which had a ridiculously large indentation.  Still, I haven’t started rereading and/or editing what I have yet, nor have I yet written anything new on it.

It’s funny that I think of it as a little bit of a story so far when it’s over 100 Microsoft pages (in Calibri, font size 11, no spaces between paragraphs) and over 70,000 words long.  I know of some complete “novels” that are not much longer than that.  I think it might already be longer than Extra Body, which I consider a novella.  Let me look…

Okay, it’s not longer, since Extra Body is almost 77,000 words long, but it’s getting close.  I had intended to publish the latter as a novella, in Kindle and paperback versions, but I got burned out by other things and didn’t have the energy to edit it.  It is posted on this blog (see the link above) in case you want to read it.  I think it appears in reverse order thanks to the way my blog lists things newest first then going backward.  There may be a way to reverse that—I would suspect there should be—but I don’t have the mental energy to look into how to do it.  I don’t have the mental energy for very much lately.

Actually, my physical energy is lagging a bit as well, at the moment.  I am still fighting that cold I had a few days ago, and I have partly lost my voice.  But I don’t think I have a fever nor other hallmarks of systemic infection, and though I’m coughing up some goo, there’s no evidence of any life-threatening pneumonia, unfortunately.  I’m going to work, nevertheless.  I will be masking* today, and I don’t think I’ll be talking on the phone at all, but I can still do all my clerical and computer and office management stuff.

I don’t really do any sales myself, but that’s not because I wasn’t able to do it.  That’s how I started here.  I just am better at other aspects of the office work, so I do those.  Also, I have a very hard time hearing things on some of the phones, and I doubt that’s gotten better with the tinnitus now in both ears (yes, of course, it persists, like the horrors do and like I do).

During the latest part of last week, I meant to try to look at and work on DFandD in the office, but though I did get it set up and corrected the tabs, I didn’t so much as look at it afterwards, though there were moments when I could have done so.  I’m going to need to work on that, or else do my writing on it in the morning and perhaps put aside this blog most days.  I’d rather not do that; this blog is nearly my only connection with the outside world.

I don’t know what is going to happen, of course.  I really ought to publish Extra Body formally—though that would require removing it from this blog—before I even do more work on DFandD.  Heck, if I’m doing things in order, I really should finish Outlaw’s Mind first, which started out as a short story but has become a novel, one that ties into other parts of my already-written and not-yet-written universes.

But almost all of the wind has been taken from my sails over the years.  I have no real support of any kind, not anywhere near me, anyway.  And I have been diagnosed with level 2 ASD, which entails “moderate support needs”.  But just because you have “needs” doesn’t mean they’re going to be met.  That’s just the way things are, unfortunately.

I don’t know.  I’m even starting to feel like my boss wishes I would go, but that he’s too nice to be too open about it.  There are some things that have recently led me to wonder, though I’m probably being paranoid.  Anyway, we’ve been making some adjustments relating to the consolidation of things and people in our two offices, and I think those changes are positive and productive.  But I fear that I am just in the way of such things, since change makes me grumpy and stressed out.

The office, after a momentary bit of confusion, would probably be better off if I were gone and/or dead.  But that’s not unique to the office.  Everything in the world would probably be (at least slightly) better off if I were gone and/or dead.  If I were being sensible, that’s probably what I would be focused on making happen rather than trying to write more fiction again.

I thought about doing it last week, on New Year’s Eve or Day, but I decided that the thing I was thinking of doing would be too expensive if I didn’t have the nerve to go through with it.  I’m glad I didn’t spend that money—assuming there is any long-term need for it—because I haven’t been paid my latest pay yet.  I don’t know why.  It may be because I’m not worth the money or effort; that certainly wouldn’t surprise me.

Anyway, that’s it for this morning.  If I suddenly develop full-blown, life-threatening pneumonia or similar, this’ll be it.  That wouldn’t be such a tragedy, at least not from my point of view.  And it’s not like anyone else’s life would change in any noticeable way.  They certainly wouldn’t change in any significant way.  There might be a few ripples on the surface of a few ponds, but those would fade almost before it would be possible to notice them.

Enjoy your day.

*Physically, literally, I mean.  I probably do at least some metaphorical masking every day.  It’s hard for me to tell.  I don’t know if I’ve ever not been masking my whole life.

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I have no title for this post. Oh, wait…

Well, it’s Friday, the end of the “traditional” work week, though I suspect many people have today off.  A traditional workplace at this time of year would have had people take yesterday (and possibly the day before) off, and one might as well make it a four-day (or five-day) weekend.  Heck, if I remember correctly, it was typical for schools in my youth to take the equivalent of a four-day weekend two weeks in a row.  Though, come to think of it, maybe we just had winter break around then.  I’m not sure now; I think it was the latter situation, actually.

Anyway, in the modern environment, which has been allowed to become very skewed between businesses and employees, competition for scarce resources has led to a kind of mission creep in which people are led to feel that it is good and impressive and necessary to work as much as one can physically (and mentally) work, even to one’s net detriment.

Yes, we are meant to think it is impressive, but there is only very little marginal reward (and almost no true thankfulness and appreciation) for the extra work.  At the higher levels of the economic food chain, of course, the accumulation of even minor incremental wealth at each level of the pyramid adds up to seemingly large amounts, like the proverbial accumulation of DDT in birds’ bones and eggs, or mercury sequestering in certain kinds of tuna.

There’s not actually all that much of it, that extra scavenged wealth, and everyone, including the very rich, would enjoy a much healthier economy, a healthier world, if more money were in circulation‒buying, selling, making more things‒rather than accumulated into the hands of a few individuals who are not nearly as impressive as their hoarded wealth makes them imagine they are.

Hoarded wealth is useless, because money does not have any inherent value.  It is a tool of exchange, one that allows economic interactions to be both more efficient and broader and more productive, more fecund if you will.

If only “home economics” courses taught young people about actual economics‒supply and demand, markets, the effects of various regulations for better and worse, all that.

And if only we had Civics class again, or the equivalent, so people could actually learn about the Constitution, so they could recognize when elected public servants are violating it and hold them accountable.  Why, just the act of reading the second part of the Declaration of Independence (the part that begins “We hold these truths to be self evident…”) might reorient the attitude some people have toward their government and the people they hire (by electing them) to serve what are supposed to be the interests of the members of the public.

Perhaps after whatever horrendous upheaval occurs in the imminent future, when society is trying to repair itself, we will improve our metaphorical infrastructure, much as we did after the last world war (though the situation then was very different).  Perhaps we will try to find new safeguards for the systems, to decrease the risk of gross unfairness and economic stagnation, as well as of government corruption.

I don’t know.  I don’t have high hopes.  Humans‒or humanity, really‒forget the lessons of their past so easily.  And though nearly all of human knowledge is so easily available to nearly anyone, the low barriers to entry for putting things online mean that the noise on the internet is prone quite strongly to wash out any signals.  It’s like some weird grand ballroom full of “scholars” of wildly varying quality, all of them talking at once as loudly as they can about whatever topic strikes their fancy.

It’s a bit like this blog, huh?  Pot, meet kettle.  Oh, well.  On to other matters.

I’m feeling slightly better this morning than I did yesterday, though I’m still under the weather, and my (now) maddeningly bilateral tinnitus persists.  But a fortuitous thing did happen:  I was looking for something on a shelf and found a bunch of old papers, including the only remaining bit of my first novel, Ends of the Maelstrom.  It’s only the first chapter, which I had typed into an oldish computer and printed on that good old continuous feed printer paper back in the late eighties or early nineties.  It’s not much, but it’s kind of nostalgic, and it fed into thoughts I’d already been having.

I had been thinking about rereading and maybe starting again to write one of my unfinished stories‒Outlaw’s Mind, or The Dark Fairy and the Desperado, or HELIOS, or perhaps something else entirely.  I wouldn’t have to give up blogging at least to begin that process.  I can read and edit the stories on my mini lapcom at the office during downtime, instead of doing that ADHD-style thing of skimming through various news sites and social media and online manga and so on when things are slow at work.  It would honestly be more productive, and probably more ego syntonic.

What do you all think?  Maybe I should run one of those polls that people can do here on WordPress.  I’ve never really looked into how to do them, and it probably wouldn’t be very useful to do one‒indeed it might be depressing‒because I would probably get one response, if that, and that’s not a good statistical sample of pretty much anything.

Okay, well, I’m not going to do one of those.  I don’t have the spare mental energy to look into how it’s done.  However, if anyone reading would care just to say in the comments (in addition to anything else you want to say, if there is anything else) whether you think I should reread and then get to work on finishing one of the above-mentioned books, or perhaps on some other story I’ve mentioned at some time, or perhaps some older story…or even just to do something completely new.  I would truly welcome your input, but please at least try to be specific.

If you need guilt to compel you, I think your input might really help my mental state, which is extremely prone to negativity and self-hatred and self-destruction.  See, I can manipulate people, at least in principle.  I just find it “low key” repulsive.

But, heck, if you want, you can tell me I’m better off not writing any new fiction, or that my writing sucks in general and you wish I’d just stop writing, or even that I should just die already.

You’re unlikely to say anything to me that’s worse than the things I say to myself pretty much every day.  And if you can say some such thing, I’m honestly curious what it could be.  But you could easily say nicer and more productive things than I have ever probably said to myself, or at least better than I’ve said in a long time.  If that’s your preference, have at you!

I’ll be back tomorrow, I think.  Have a good weekend.

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The moving finger writes, and having writ, now must edit

This is it:  my last blog post of 2025 (barring some truly unexpected circumstances).  I will probably be writing a post tomorrow, because I think we’re going to be working tomorrow, despite the fact that it will be New Year’s Day, and a stunningly large fraction of the people of the world will be hung over or otherwise exhausted from ringing in the New Year.

I suspect New Year’s Eve/Day is the most widely celebrated holiday in the world, far surpassing the numbers who celebrate any mere religious holiday.  Since the world in general uses the same “Gregorian”* calendar, it’s a rare commonality for the human race, and worth celebrating.

If only they could work on finding more things in common, since after all, they have almost everything actually in common with each other.  And yet, they focus on trivial cultural or superficial differences and battle viciously over them, as if they were fighting truly alien beings.  Talk about your narcissism of small differences.

Humans are so stupid.  The more of them there are, the stupider, somehow, as though the lowest common denominator tends always to dominate the dynamics.  It’s like Tommy Lee Jones’s character said in Men In Black:  a person is smart, but people are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals, and you know it.

That isn’t always the case, obviously.  Humans have accomplished great things in large groups, interacting with mutual exchange to mutual benefit (or not so mutual benefit), but that probably only happens in rarefied circumstances, discovered or arranged by luck or by the skill of one or a few who are cleverer than average, and sustained thanks to a form of natural selection.

Because of the sheer power of such organizations of people, those rare few types of interactions can endure for tremendous lengths of time and be astonishingly effective and broadly prevalent.  This can distract one from the fact that the ideas were so singular and ingenious.

Money, for instance, has been invented more than once, but it’s a relatively low-hanging and particularly nutritious fruit, allowing as it does for the far more efficient exchange of goods and services to (ideally) mutual benefit.  Of course, commerce can be cheated and can thereby become nonproductive or even counterproductive, especially if one or a few entities obtain disproportionate wealth and power.  This sort of selection for detrimental equilibria happens in the world of biology as well.

Imagine a football game in which, every time one team scores, that team gains an extra player and the other team loses one.  Once one side takes the lead, they’re likely to keep it and increase it, making them ever more likely to maintain their dominance.  It can make for a pretty boring and not very productive game.  Such a situation is worth avoiding, even if you happen to be on the winning team.

Written language is, of course, the single most important human invention‒more important than even the invention of language itself, though that was a necessary prerequisite, so the argument could be made that it is more important or at least more fundamental.  Thankfully, language is a different type of thing than money, so it’s not as easy to game it to secure an unreasonable advantage for any individual or group.

There is, of course, an often-used attempted strategy of discouraging or preventing literacy in some groups or one sex (always the same one, it seems) to keep them from gaining the power that written language can impart, but it can be harder to keep those systems in place than for a monopoly to maintain its economic advantage.

Still, even written language isn’t automatically self-protective.  It’s possible for misinformation and disinformation to spread and even prosper, at least for a time (such situations tend to self-destruct), and it can do terrible damage, much as mutations in somatic DNA can lead to cell dysfunction, cell death, and sometimes cancer.

Analogous things can happen to whole civilizations as well, and they have happened many times, but that’s no reason to blame language or learning.  One doesn’t prevent cancer by eliminating DNA itself or by killing the host organism (that does eliminate the cancer, but in an unsatisfying way).  Only better, more thorough thinking and language, the equivalent of DNA proofreading, can do that without catastrophe.

And I, by writing this post, try to contribute to the good language, the useful or at least interesting language, in the world.  I suspect I will continue to do so as the next year begins.  I hope you enjoy whatever celebrations you have in store.

*Though Pope Gregory the Whatever Number was merely the one who commissioned it.  Astronomers and mathematicians actually did the work.  We have some scientifically literate Popes nowadays, at least, and a Belgian priest was among the first to do rigorous mathematics using Einstein’s new field equations (though Friedman got there a little earlier, his work was apparently not as convincing) to demonstrate that the universe could not be static** based upon them.

**Leading Einstein to introduce Λ (lambda), the cosmological constant.  He later called this his biggest blunder (supposedly) but it turned out to be a useful and term and concept in describing the apparent evolution of the universe as we know it now.  Like Planck before him, even Einstein’s fudges*** were deeply insightful and useful.

***Speaking of Einstein, I recently got an email from my old med school alumni association with the subject line “You are responsible for Einstein’s success”.  To which I so wanted to reply, “I know, right?  But did he mention me in any of his papers or even throw me a word of thanks (in German or otherwise) in his acceptance speech when he got his Nobel Prize for demonstrating that light comes in ‘packets’ which we now call photons?  No!  Ungrateful bastard.”

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“For years and years I roamed.”

Well, I might as well stick to the same pattern, so…ahem.  It’s New Year’s Eve Eve today, which means tomorrow will be New Year’s Eve and Thursday will be New Year’s Day.  At that point, if we wanted, we could just start counting days down or up‒i.e., Day 1, Day 2…or Day 365, Day 364…and so on.

Of course, if we were going to do such numbering, I guess it would make sense to divide things up into months for easier “local” day-keeping, which is what we’ve done as a civilization.  But those months are irregular and rather haphazardly named.  This can occasionally be irritating, though of course I have a sentimental fondness for at least some of the month names.

Unfortunately for the goal of making months of uniform length, the number of days in the year isn’t evenly divisible by any number larger than 5, unless I’m mistaken…

Yes, I was correct, unless you want to divide the year into 5 groups of 73 days.  That might be kind of fun, since 73 is one of those overlooked prime numbers, and it has the slight extra fun that its digits add up to 10, the base of our usual number system.

Still, especially considering the necessity of leap years (with the convoluted adding of days, removing of seconds, not adding a day when it’s the turn of a century unless it’s also the turn of a millennium and so on) it seems cumbersome to divide the year evenly.

I rather like the solution of making 12 months that are each 30 days long and having the remaining 5 (or 6) days be a period of celebration.  It could be held around one of the equinoxes or the solstices, or it could even be split up between two of them.  I’m inclined to put them at the end of the year, when the Winter Solstice in the northern hemisphere happens, because it’s long been a holiday time anyway.

Of course, this all biases against those in the southern hemisphere, but there are significantly fewer people in the southern hemisphere, or at least there were the last time I looked into it…

Yes, I was correct again, it seems.  According to my quick and dirty check, there are on the order of about a billion people in the southern hemisphere, as opposed to the remaining roughly seven billion people in the northern hemisphere.  I guess that means the winter solstice would be a good time for those separate days.  And I’ve not heard many Aussies complain about being able to go to the beach on Christmas or New Year.

Mind you, one could do that down where I live anyway, if one were so inclined.  I am not.  The beaches on the east coast of Florida are mostly annoying, and the Atlantic is not much fun for swimming.  The west coast of Florida, where one swims in the Gulf of Mexico, is much more pleasant.

I’m not a very big beach person at the best of times (or the worst of times) but I have quite a few pleasant memories of being on one or another beach on the Gulf (of Mexico).  They all date back to at least 33 years ago, though, so maybe it was just due to the nature of youth that I enjoyed them.

Alas, I’m not truly young anymore by most standards; I’m 954 years old.

Ha ha, just kidding.  Or, wait, maybe not.  I know that exoplanets have been discovered that orbit very close to their stars, and so have orbits that can be as short as a few Earth days (possibly fewer).  So, if the universe is infinite in spatial extent, which it so far looks as though it is, and if there is no lower constraint due to the laws of physics on the length of possible “years”, then there exists, somewhere in spacetime, a planet by the years of which I would be 954 years old.

Actually, if spacetime is infinite, there should be an infinite number of such planets even if they happen only once within any cosmic horizon.  But let’s not get into that right now.

Let’s do the math; it’s simple and easy, so why not?  56 years old x 365.25 days in an Earth year makes me 20,454 days old, at least on my latest birthday.  Dividing that by 954, which is almost a thousand, should give a year length of roughly 20 days per year…okay, well, the “exact” number of 21 and 70/159 days per planetary year is what is required to make me 954 years old.

Actually, though, since the number of days in that hypothetical year is smaller than the time since my last Earthday birthday, I will have to adjust my days’ old age number to the precise one:  20,525 days, which if divided by 954 gives us a year length of 21 and 491/954 days, or 21.51 days (playing slightly free and loose with significant figures).  There will be a range of possibilities, of course, since I could be anywhere in the 21-ish day course of my 955th year and still be able to call myself 954 years old, if we go by similar conventions to those followed by humans on Earth.

Okay, well…that was sort of a weird digression.  I know, I’m weird, so maybe given that, a weird digression is, in a sense, not weird.  But given other considerations, it still is.

I am an odd person, I know (though I don’t know if I’m prime).  Sometimes‒rather often‒I think I’m losing my mind.  At other times, though, I think my mind is functioning within parameters, but it is contemplating things that are vast and potentially troubling to the feeble mortal ego if one does not drape oneself in the obscuring veil and cloak of delusion.  But my fabric sensitivity doesn’t allow me to tolerate such garments for long; you could say I lack PPE for such things.  Perhaps the secret is to destroy the ego (which may well just be an illusion, anyway), but that is more easily said than done.

Who knows?  Not I.

And yes, it’s “Not I” not “Not me”.  You wouldn’t say, “Me don’t know”, so you shouldn’t say “Not me” in response to the question “Who knows?”  Apologies to David Bowie and Nirvana‒but The Man Who Sold the World is a song, and so they are allowed poetic license.

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“…cold as a razor blade, tight as a tourniquet…”

Heavy sigh.  Here we go again.  It’s a new week, and the last beginning of a work week in 2025.  I guess last week was the last full work week, though honestly, it barely could be counted as that at my office since everything was so topsy turvy and weird and so many people had issues keeping them out of the office.  It felt almost post-apocalyptic, and not in a good way.

It was still better to be at the office than at the house (that’s the only place I do anything that resembles socializing) but unfortunately, we left very early and didn’t do much on Wednesday or on Friday, so I commuted in pointlessly‒it’s no joke of a commute, either, and I do not have a vehicle.

So basically, I was by myself nearly all day on Wednesday and Friday, and was literally by myself Thursday, Saturday, and Sunday.

I was also in an especially large amount of pain on Saturday and Sunday, though I am not sure why (and it persists today, though not quite as badly).  I often have difficulty teasing out what triggers an exacerbation.  Sometimes I can see it with a fair amount of confidence.  Other times it is opaque and therefore all the more annoying.

Of course, I did not choose to get a room in that high rise hotel on Christmas Eve and/or Day, though it would have been surprisingly affordable.  If I were to get a room for New Year’s Eve, it would be slightly pricier, but that’s not a surprise.  New Year is definitely more of a “get a fancy hotel room” kind of holiday.  Anyway, if I decide to book a room there on New Year’s Eve or whatever, I’m not worried about the expense.

I’ve occasionally said (with tongue in cheek), “The one who dies in the most debt wins.”  That’s not really my ethos in general, of course, but when one has tried hard (albeit far from perfectly) to live an ethical and beneficent life, and one reaps mainly mutant, deformed, and vaguely toxic crops despite what one has tried to sow, one can become quite disillusioned about various ethical guidelines, including one’s own bespoke ethics.

Not that the reason to be good is because one expects to be rewarded; that’s the tragic situation of most of the big monotheistic religions.  Their people can never do a good deed that isn’t tainted by the fact that they believe they will be somehow rewarded in “Heaven” for being good.

So, I instinctively take a slightly more deontological attitude toward deeds than a utilitarian or consequentialist one, but that probably has a lot to do with my ASD.  I’m still probably mainly consequentialist in my ideas, but I’m not dogmatic about being in one camp or another.

I don’t think we have a convincing final answer on such things; if we did, its reasoning could probably be followed by any rational person and would be convincing to anyone inquiring with intellectual honesty.  This is one of the reasons that I’m dubious of all the “revealed” religions and their texts.

I mean, humans can make a convincing proof that the square root of 2 is irrational and that there is no highest prime number, and anyone who pays attention to the argument (and understands the terms) will find it convincing.  Surely an omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, and (omni)benevolent god could author a book that would be at least as convincing as the proof by contradiction that there is no highest prime number, or a demonstration that the Pythagorean Theorem is correct.  But no such book appears to be on offer.

Written language of one form or another was invented, to varying degrees, on both sides of the Atlantic before those civilizations encountered each other.  The Mayans had the number zero and a system of manipulating numbers, as well as a highly accurate calendar that would, with appropriate translation, match any such things from the “old world”.

Universal facts will be discovered to be the same by anyone looking.  And yet no two cultures long separated from each other have come up with the same religions.  No, for some reason, the deity/deities require(s) men (and I do mean men for the most part) to spread their religion, often “by the sword”.

It’s odd. You don’t tend to have to force people to obey the laws of gravity or of thermodynamics or of quantum mechanics.  You also don’t tend to have to convince people (who are not actively suicidal) to jump out of the way of an oncoming truck, or not to jump from a balcony that’s many stories up.

I don’t know if there’s any interesting point being made here.  I apologize.  This is just me spewing metaphorical fluid from the leaky, crumbling mechanism of my mind.  It’s boring, even to me.  I can’t really imagine what it must be to all of you reading (if the word “all” is even appropriate).

Pretty much everything is boring.  I’m running out of successful distractions, and nothing new has presented itself.  No new shows or movies or even books seem interesting.  The next Doctor Who episode and the next Avengers movie (which should have my very favorite villain if they do it right) won’t be out until this time next year.  Honestly, though, I’m not even interested in them.  “Nothing is very much fun anymore”, like the song* said.

Anyway, that’s enough of this shit for today.  I’m so tired already and it’s just the start of the week.  I don’t know how I’m going to make it to next year, but I’ll probably be posting tomorrow, at least.

*One of my Turns from The Wall, by Pink Floyd.

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“Is there anybody out there?”

Here we are again, I guess.  I told you it wasn’t likely that yesterday was my final bellyache, didn’t I?  Anyway, I wrote words to that effect.  And I was right, though many might think that’s a pity and a shame.

It’s Christmas Eve Eve, a silly designation involving iterated “Eves” which would become unworkable pretty quickly.  You’ll notice that I didn’t call yesterday “Christmas Eve Eve Eve”, even (ha) though that would have worked and been accurate.  Still, if one keeps up that process, then “Boxing Day” (aka the day after Christmas in the US) would be “Christmas (Eve364)” or some such notation.

I suppose if one wanted, one could keep track of the days of the year in that fashion, but it seems quite clunky.  Also, if one were inclined just to count the days of the year, or to count them down, it would make more sense to use counting numbers and to start with New Year’s Day.  So the first day would be just Day 1, or Day 365 (or 366) if one were counting down.

Sorry, I know I’m being pretty bizarre.  Maybe that’s just some kind of hallmark of genius or something (though I doubt it).

It’s been a strange several days, including some atypical days at work.  Everyone else in the office has various things happening with their (sometimes growing) families, not all of it joyous and positive, but much of it disruptive.  And sales are always a bit slower at this time of year; people are busy buying presents for loved ones and the like in the latter part of December, even when the political and economic situation isn’t a category 5 shit storm.  But, of course, they are, collectively, just such a shit storm now, so things are more erratic than usual.

I was going to say “chaotic”, but at this stage in the universe’s evolution, chaos is almost always in play‒the mathematical kind, I mean.

Wow, I’ve written about 320 words so far, and I don’t think I’ve actually said anything.  Or, at least, I haven’t said much.  As a method of conveying useful information, this post (and perhaps this whole blog) has been highly inefficient, hasn’t it?  Of course, if I had specific information I was trying to convey, I might do better.

Though, honestly, I have a truly hard time being honest and clear when I’m trying to convey certain kinds of information.  I will often attempt to express what I think are highly urgent messages‒in person sometimes, but much more often in this blog‒yet it seems I am too esoteric or awkward in my attempts to express myself.  Certainly, those attempts have yet to achieve anything like my desired aims.

Yesterday was no exception.  I thought I was being rather ham-handed, to be honest, but clearly I was not.  I cannot, in good conscience, blame my reader(s).  If a pitcher throws a wild enough pitch, the catcher cannot reasonably be expected to catch it, though that’s the catcher’s expertise.  How much more unreasonable would it be to blame other people for not getting points my unconscious or awkward or habit-driven and “neurodivergent” mind is forcing me to make in very awkward ways?

I am far from a professional pitcher in this metaphor, and no one has ever volunteered to be my catcher.  Most people who end up trying to do it, out of chance or kindness or whatever, get sick of the work after a very short while.

I cannot justly blame them; that’s one villain trope I find intolerable, blaming other people and taking out one’s frustration on them instead of assessing how one’s own choices can be improved.  It’s small wonder these bad guys, who have secured all the advantages through diligent villainy, fail in the end.  It’s not just because of plot armor.

Another bad villain habit is gloating over a still-living arch-enemy.  In Revenge of the Sith, Palpatine (aka Darth Sidious) had caught Yoda off-guard with force lightning.  Yoda was down!  And Palpatine allowed him to get up because he had “been waiting for this for a long time”.

Moron!  If he had pressed his advantage with more force lightning or even just rushed up and cut the little bugger in half with his lightsaber, he would have had time to head to Mustafar (remember, he sensed that Lord Vader was in danger).  Even if Obi wan got away, he wouldn’t have Yoda’s backup or anything.  Palpatine could have won much more thoroughly, and Vader might never have needed his breathing armor and could have achieved his full potential, and he might even have had Luke and Leia with him.

That was a hell of a nerdy tangent, wasn’t it?  Sorry.  It’s a pet peeve of mine.  But I guess tripping over one’s ego is a natural hazard for the sorts of people who become arch villains.

Maybe I dwell on such things too much.  Perhaps that’s what started me down the road to being habitually hyper self-critical, which evolved into self-hatred and a desire for self-destruction.  It’s a bit of a conundrum, but I would still rather not become cocky and arrogant in anything but a comedic way.  I don’t like seeing it; I really don’t want to do it.

Well, this has been another sort of bipolar-pattern post, hasn’t it?  It really does seem to me that I often produce a vaguely sinusoidal pattern of posts veering from very gloomy and morose and thoroughly nihilistic and moribund to weirdly hyperactive, almost hypomanic posts.  Yet even such latter type posts, of which this is one, really feel pressured to me most of the time, in the psychiatric/psychological usage of the term as applied to speech.

There’s nothing really that I can do with these sorts of insights, though, and certainly no one else is using them for any benevolent purpose toward me.  I guess that shouldn’t surprise me.  As Gendo Ikari pointed out, everyone is ultimately alone, and we certainly die alone.

On that cheery note:  Happy Holidays, everyone!

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Is this my final fit, my final bellyache? I doubt it.

I don’t think I’m going to write very much today.  It’s Monday morning, Hanukkah is basically over, Christmas is coming in three days, and the world‒as always‒is just a dried out, crusty piece of crap.  Perhaps that’s good if you’re a dung beetle.  But I am not one of those.

Come to think of it, maybe that’s a good way to regard the people who want to claim as much of the world for themselves as they can without care for whether they deserve it from any point of view, and who don’t care what condition it’s in, since everything is shit anyway, and they are fond of shit.

Yeah, let’s call those people dung beetles.

This is not intended as a slight against actual dung beetles, though, which are honorable creatures which play an important part in the general ecosystem.

Anyway, it probably doesn’t matter.  Of course, whether or not something matters is very dependent upon one’s point of view.  What matters to an architect who specializes in skyscrapers might be of very little even trivial interest to a beet farmer.

That’s just a pair of examples‒or an example of a pair.  This is not to be confused with the worries of a pear farmer (Ha ha); they might yet have a third set of priorities, mightn’t they?  Though I suspect the concerns of the pear farmer would probably have more in common with those of the beet farmer than those of the architect.  And, of course, assuming they are all human, their overall concerns share much more in common than those any of them might share with sea anemone…or just ordinary anemones.

I don’t know what the hell I’m going on about right now.  I was thinking of just embedding some YouTube “videos” of some music that I’ve done‒some original, some covers‒that sort of convey the way I feel today, since none of my blogging seems to work.  Maybe I’ll do some of that, anyway.  I don’t know that there’s any point in it, but then, I don’t know that there’s any point in anything, do I?  I have my suspicions, but I don’t know, and I have no interest in believing in much of anything, at least in certain senses of the word.  Indeed, I have real contempt for people who think believing is a good enough way to approach reality.

Sorry, I suspect I’m not making much sense here.  I guess it doesn’t matter.  Here, take a look at a few pieces of music, some original, some covers.  Then I’ll shut up and spare you lot the nonsense.

Actually, I don’t know if I’m even going to do that.  I guess you will know, if you’re reading this.  But I hate what I’ve written so far here today.  Though, perhaps it’s a work of unparalleled genius.  The odds are far from great, but they are not zero.

Ugh.  I don’t know what I’m doing.  This season of the year has really exacerbated my already not insignificant neuropsychiatric issues.

I’ve learned that there’s a nice high-rise Hyatt hotel in downtown Fort Lauderdale with surprisingly reasonable room rates, and I was thinking of maybe getting a balcony room there either on Christmas Eve or on New Year’s Eve or something.  It sounds like it might be a good place from which to watch fireworks.

I’ll keep you posted about that.  Or maybe I won’t, I don’t know.  I know I have a cover of No Surprises as one of my favorite songs‒in a way, my theme song‒but that doesn’t mean I’m dogmatic about it.  Anyway, something could be a surprise to all of you (though goodness knows it shouldn’t be) and not so much of one to me.

I’m not a big fan of surprises, because most of the surprises in my life have been unpleasant to horrible.  And almost all of them occurred slowly, almost creepily.  They aren’t the sorts of surprises to make you jump, though they sometimes can leave you with your jaw hanging open and your breath bated.

Enough.  This blog is done for today.

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A shorter and slightly less negative post

Okay, well, I’m back writing this on the smartphone again today.  I decided not to take the lapcom back to the house with me yesterday, because it was annoying to deal with even the minor extra weight, and also because I fear that writing using the lapcom leads me to get a bit too wordy and carried away.  I’ve mentioned this before more than once, though I cannot immediately give you links to the earliest or the most recent mention of the issue.

Anyway, the point is that I can type on a regular keyboard almost as fast as I can talk*, so I kind of run off at the mouth…so to speak.

It’s not necessarily a bad thing‒though given that we’re discussing me, it probably is‒but I think it can cause a bit of an aversion in some people when they see that a blog post is longer than usual.  I don’t know how many of my readers actually do read to the end of the average post, but surely it’s less likely to happen if the post is 1400 words long than if it is merely 900 words long.

Of course, I set my target nowadays at 700 words, but that just means I am less likely to go over 1000.  I almost never stop at or before 700 words.

I tend not to write as much, as fast, on the smartphone. This is partly because it’s just not a good way to write things; it’s clunky and prone to induce errors, and the lack of real keys makes it so there is less sensory feedback about what one is typing.  Also, my thumbs get sore from writing on the phone.

Now, though, I’ve had a few days off, so my thumbs are less painful.  I’ve also been taking strong doses of NSAIDs over the past few days, and that may be helping them.  It’s not helping my stomach, though.  I already feel nauseated right now, and it’s not even 5 am as I write this.

My life is so glamorous, isn’t it?  And I share most of the best aspects of it here, with you readers.  There are many things about which I feel too dreary even to bring them up.  I don’t want even people who are quite nonjudgmental and positive about me to see the squalor in which I live.  I am not very good at taking care of myself.

Sorry, I’m sure this is all very boring.

Sometimes I must admit that I envy people with unreasonably high self-esteem.  I mean, past a certain point, overinflated self-esteem makes one prone to do harm to other people.  But at least such people spend their time, day in and day out, with someone they love, right?  They tend to disgust me (and many other people too) but the kicker is:  they don’t care!

This is not to confuse such people with the pathologically narcissistic, who seem clearly to be motivated by some deep insecurities that they chase like a heroin addict needing a fix.  They are pathetic and do not seem comfortable with themselves, though they can come across as shameless.  I wish I could think of a good, well-known public example of such a person, but for the life of me, no one comes to mind.

Ha.

Ha.

Anyway, my problems lie in the other direction.  I have a pathological self-hatred.  When I’m calm and objective, I know that there are at least some aspects of myself that are not horrible, and some that are even arguably good.  I’m reasonably smart and rather creative, for instance.  But I just annoy the hell out of myself, and it’s very hard to get a break.

I know it’s possible to love someone without really liking them (in the sense of just enjoying spending time with them), but after a while, if you’re forced to spend every moment, waking or otherwise, with this person you had loved but whose personality you found annoying, you can become prone to hate them, or at least to hate their presence.

I’ve never felt this way about another person, but it’s how I tend to feel about myself.  I’m like a chronic, itchy, burning rash somewhere between the lower edges of my shoulder blades, just where it’s hardest to reach.  And though I can briefly mitigate the problem, it doesn’t go away.  There’s only one cure, and unfortunately it involves killing the patient.

Oh, well, whatever.  I need just to get over myself, so to speak.  I think I take life too seriously.  I would be able to do better if not for my chronic, really annoying pain.  I might even be able to enjoy life with or without loving myself.  But, as I often say, if wishes were horses, we’d all be neck deep in horse shit.

I don’t know if I’m working tomorrow, but if I do, I’ll probably write a blog post, and you’ll see it here.  If not, you won’t.  Either way, I hope you all have a good day and a good weekend.

*And not the sort of hesitant speech that happens when I don’t really know the people with whom I’m conversing, but rather my speech when I’m talking to someone about something in which I’m interested.  That probably only happens regularly with my sister, once every week or two, nowadays.