Psychology

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“When I try to get through on the telephone to you…”

Well, it’s Monday again, and as I foresaw and predicted, I am writing a blog post.  Yes, indeed, as Pink said, I’ve got electric light, and I’ve got second sight‒I’ve got amazing powers of observation.

It’s not all that impressive when you stop and think about the fact that I’m predicting (after foreseeing) my own actions, over which I presumably have some degree of control.  Such control is far from complete, but for stuff like this, it’s fairly effective.

I’m going to try to keep this post short today, mainly because I know people don’t seem to like it when I get too negative and depressed and morbid, but that’s very much how I feel this morning.  So, I can’t really express my feelings without bringing discomfort to my readers.  That feels churlish to me, and anyway, it doesn’t seem to do me or anyone else any good at all.

That’s no real surprise.  It doesn’t seem to be in my nature to do or to be good; it requires specific effort for me to do good in the world.  It certainly doesn’t appear to be my natural inclination.

Then again, the argument could be made that, because I choose to try to do good (at least sometimes) that means I am good by nature.  After all, if one is simply inclined to do good, or at least to try to do good, then one will simply tend to do so.  That’s good, of course, and such people are welcome.  But it’s not that impressive.  Like a very tall person easily getting something down from a high shelf for a shorter compatriot, it’s good and helpful, but it’s not that impressive, and it’s certainly not heroic.

Whereas if a person has a tendency to be angry and to wish people ill and to become easily frustrated and to desire to lash out, but they don’t do those things because they feel it would be wrong…well, that’s got a certain degree of admirability, since it requires conscious effort to restrain one’s impulses.  I’m not saying that it’s particularly impressive; almost everyone restrains a great many impulses in order to exist in society.  But it is something that requires at least a modicum of effort.

Okay, well, enough of that nonsense.

The point is, I’m going to try not to dwell too much on my depression and self-destructive thoughts, because it doesn’t do anyone any good, including me.  I’ve yet to receive any significant help from anyone or anything because of it, and though certainly I receive some well-meaning suggestions or thoughts or what have you, most of them are things I’ve already considered or tried.

So, it’s not doing me any good, and it’s not doing anyone else any good, as far as I can tell.  I’m just getting steadily worse over time, though that may not be obvious from the outside.  But the fact that I neither do music nor write any fiction any more is telling.  In fact, I don’t really do anything creative or artistic or scientific or whatever.  I just exist most of the time.  And it’s hard to see why I bother.

Ah, well, it probably doesn’t help that I had a particularly poor night’s sleep last night, even for me.  I’m already mentally exhausted, and I’m just starting the work week.

I did get some decent walking in yesterday‒about five and a half miles total.  Fortunately, I’m not having any negative consequences from that so far, and I would have expected to have them by now if they were coming.

Of course, my various chronic problems continue, including my chronic pain, my chronic depression and I guess my ASD (it’s congenital, so I guess that makes it chronic, in a sense).

Anyway, again, enough of this.  Even though I said I would try not to do so, I am dwelling on negative things, not just in my head but here on my blog.  I can only apologize.  I guess that’s one of the dangers of “stream of consciousness” writing.

It doesn’t really matter.  I hope you all have a good day and a good week.  October starts this week already, and it’s normally my favorite month, but there’s nothing really to which I look forward this time around.  It’s just blah.

Meh, whataya gonna do?

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There are more things dreamt of in your philosophy…

Well, you can’t in good faith claim that I didn’t warn you.  I told you yesterday that I would likely be writing a blog post today, because I am working today, which I am.

I am writing this on my mini lapcom, because I happen already to be at the office, and the lapcom is at the office, and I might as well enjoy making use of it, right?  As I’ve often noted, it’s much easier for me to write on the lapcom than on the smartphone.  That often means that I write too much when I use the lapcom, but today I think it less likely than usual, since I’m already quite tired and my energy is not at its best.

As I noted, I’m already in the office this morning.  I spoke with my sister on the phone yesterday evening, from the office, starting nearly right after I finished work.  We spoke for quite a while, and by the time we hung up, it was rather late—not crazily so, but still, it made little sense to go all the way back to the house, to try to get to sleep, to try to stay asleep, then to get up and come to the office again.

It’s not as though I had anything to do at the house other than put out some food for the neighborhood cats, and they’ll be fine until this evening; cats are pretty durable and adaptable.

So, yeah, here I am in the morning in the office, having slept on the floor, using the hoody that I keep in my backpack as a blanket of sorts (and using the backpack as a pillow).  It was a surprisingly good sleep, all things considered, though I wouldn’t call it good overall on an objective level.  I think, relative to what many people do, my sleep was rather poor, but that’s the norm* for me, anyway.

I will not of course be working tomorrow, and I will therefore not be writing a blog post tomorrow, though I expect to write one on Monday (exclusis improvisis).  That time will take of itself, however.  There’s no need to dwell on it at the moment.

I’m not sure on what to dwell, however.  I guess I can note that it’s been 24 days since the last time I wrote a blog post on the lapcom, which I can tell because I save them by date.  That’s a fairly long stretch.  And yet, it’s so much easier and more natural, more pleasant, for me to write using the lapcom.

It feels like an extension of me, like something almost directly connected to my nervous system.  It feel much more a part of me than the phone does, a fact which may be slightly ironic.  After all, I have the phone with me most of the time, and I read books on it—that’s by far its greatest strength—and use it to check the weather, and to send texts that are related to work and other matters.  It’s also my alarm clock, and in a pinch I can use it for emails (though that’s never very wieldy compared to a lapcom or desktop computer).

Okay, whew, I’d better slow down and calm down, so I don’t overexcite all of you with this gripping blog post!  I would hate to cause someone to have an increased risk for a heart attack.

Well…there are people for whom I think a heart attack would be good, for everyone else if not for the one who has the infarction.  There simply are people who cause a great deal of harm and suffering to those around them; even if nonfatal, a heart attack would likely take the wind out of their sails as it were.

I’m sure you could all name political figures and business people and even entertainers—let alone people you know in your own life—who would benefit the world by being significantly sickened or weakened by a health crisis, or even killed by one.

It’s not evil to wish for the ill health of highly detrimental people, but it may not be great for your own psyche to dwell too much on such things.  This is partly because wishes don’t do anything in and of themselves, and also because such negative dwelling is almost certainly not good for your own mental health.

It’s better to approach things with a Stoic sort of attitude:  you cannot directly change other people, and you cannot change the laws of nature nor most of the circumstances therein, so dwelling on them (except when literally, practically useful) is only going to tend to be futile and frustrating.  Instead, work on making yourself better, on not letting things bother you that are deeply unimportant, and focus on those things over which you do have some control.  There are fewer of them than you might imagine.

I’m being fairly vague about that, I know, but I don’t know what the specific thoughts and feelings and focuses are that might be optimal for your life, and it would be foolish of me to pretend that I did know such things.  The onus is on you, unfortunately.  That wasn’t my decision, it’s just the way things are.

In closing, based on the preceding paragraphs, I’ll just note that I suspect that people in general, and younger people more specifically, would do better if instead of all the therapizing that’s being done nowadays, they did more philosophizing.  I think studying and discussing philosophy, especially things like Stoicism and Buddhism and maybe Taoism and Existentialism, would be far more conducive to mental health, and might even enhance mental strength in developing minds.

And all minds are developing, despite what you might think, for as long as the lights are on.  You might as well make the best you can of it, whatever “best” might mean in your case.

Have a good day and a good remainder of your weekend, please.

*Norm!!

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Wouldst thou blog that which thou esteem’st the ornament of life?

Hello and good morning.

It’s Thursday.

TTFN

Ha ha.  I’m just kidding.  It would be absurd for me to let you all off that easily.  Not that you don’t deserve to be let off easily; you probably do.  Whatever “deserve” means.

But it rarely matters in this world what you “deserve” or think that you deserve or have been told that you deserve.  Nature, physics, biology, the universe‒they don’t notice anything at all about what you might “deserve”.  They just do what they do, and if you don’t want to be ground into nothingness before your time, you’d better learn to surf on that chaos.

The notion of people deserving things has always been a bit strange to me.  It is nebulous and ill-considered in almost all situations.  What does it mean, for instance, for someone to deserve love?  How can you deserve something that is dependent on the judgment and emotion of another person or people?  You can’t have an innate right to another person’s esteem.

You can have a right, of sorts, to be left alone (as long as you’re not infringing other people’s rights) but not necessarily to be supported or admired or rewarded or what have you.

I suppose you can have a legal right, for instance, to health care (in principle), depending on the laws where you are.  But you can’t exactly have a moral right to it, because somebody‒a lot of people, really‒has to provide it, both the substance and the processes, the knowledge and the infrastructure.  You cannot morally own another person’s effort without a freely chosen mutual exchange for it.  Otherwise, you’re just enacting a form of slavery (which you’re only willing to do precisely because the service being provided is so important).  Think about the moral illogic there.

Don’t get me wrong; I’ve come to the pretty strong suspicion that “universal” healthcare is generally very good for a society.  It helps make the life of those in that society more stable and more worth living, and I think it tends to help people be more creative and productive, ceteris paribus.  And it can be made a legal right, as I said.

But it cannot be a moral right, and it’s important for people to remember that.  Because when people start feeling truly entitled, they tend to become unreasonable, forgetting that in the real universe, everything requires energy and effort and understanding, and there is always some tradeoff somewhere.

Again, I want to reiterate, I think universal healthcare is generally a good use of resources, one that has a sort of money multiplier effect on a society, at least when administered well (which is not a low bar to clear).  But, again, it cannot be a moral right.  It has to be paid for by somebody, somewhere.  You don’t have a moral right to a particular bridge being built, say, or to cable TV and internet access, or to a luxury car…or to any car at all, really.

How could people have an innate right to a car, for instance?  What would that mean for the billions and billions of people who lived before cars ever existed?  What about air travel?

Heck, what about space travel?  In the future, space travel might become necessary for most people to be able to work, rather as cars are in some places and situations now.  Will that imply that there is and has always been a moral right to space travel?  Have we all had our rights systematically thwarted by the tyranny of linear time and causality?  Whom do we sue?

I think we should dispense with the notion of “deserving” things in general, except specific performance or products for which one has paid through mutual, freely chosen exchange with someone else.  In other words, if you made a contract and you held up your end of the bargain, it makes sense to say that you deserve for the other party to hold up their end of the bargain.

Everywhere else, the notion of deserving things tends to be subjective and self-serving, and it tends to turn people into entitled assholes who appear to think of themselves as the center of the universe.

Of course, physically, each person is the center of their own visible universe.  Congratulations, you are experiencing the phenomenon of a 3-dimensional horizon.  It happens to us all.  You are not special.

Well, you are special in some senses, of course.  You have various specific, local aspects and attributes that are not exactly duplicated anywhere within our visible universe.  This makes you unique.  Which, ironically, makes you just like everybody else.

Dash was right; saying that everybody is special is just another way of saying that no one is.  And, in fact, except from the highly parochial, anthropocentric, myopic, terrified point of view of the typical human, no one is special‒not from “outside” anyway.

Still, it’s okay to think that the ones you love are truly the most wonderful people in the universe, because‒in the universe of your mind and experience‒they are.  Unless you don’t think they are, but that’s a different sort of problem.

Perhaps one of the biggest problems with the concept of “deserving” things is that it is a powerful impediment to feelings of gratitude.  And that’s pretty pathetic, both for those around the ungrateful ones and for the ungrateful ones themselves.  If you think you’re entitled to many things, you’re likely to be miserable, because you’re unlikely to get all those things to which you feel entitled, and you’ll be prone to make the people around you miserable, too.

You don’t deserve to read my blog.  And I don’t deserve to have you read it, nor to have you like and share it (as in my song, below).  But I am grateful that you are reading, and would be pleased if you decided to spread it around.  I am lucky to have any good things at all, as are all people who have good things.

And now, for real this time:

TTFN

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“When the storm arrives, would you be seen with me?”

Okay, well, I will have set this up to post at about 8 am my time today, just as I did with yesterday’s post.  I have not yet looked at my stats for yesterday’s post, so I don’t know whether, so far, doing this has made any difference in my readership.

That’s fine, though, because it would be absurd to try to read any conclusions from one day of a slightly changed time of posting.  It’s not a statistically significant sample size, among other things.  So, it’s best to try it for a bit and see how it goes and only to draw conclusions after I’ve had at least a decent run of days.

I am still somewhat under the weather from yesterday, but I have to go to the office because it is payroll day, and that needs to get done.  I did leave the office at lunchtime yesterday, and when I got back to the house I knocked myself out with some benadryl and some CBD gummies with a bit of delta-9 and delta-8.  It did help me sleep, at least, though I’m sure it wasn’t an ideal sleep.  Still, beggars can’t be choosers, generally speaking, though I’m sure there are exceptions to that “rule”.

I did wake up hideously early, though, even for me, but I didn’t want to take any further sedation, because then it might affect my ability to do what I need to do today.

I forgot to take some of my vitamins and stuff yesterday evening, including the lithium supplement that I’ve been taking.  I didn’t take that this morning, either, just to see how the dearth of it will affect me, if at all.  I know, I know, I’m doing too much haphazard starting and stopping of variables, and it makes it very difficult‒as well as potentially very misleading‒to draw conclusions about what effects these interventions are having.

But I have a difficult time being patient with this stuff.  Anyway, this was an accidental skip last night; I’m just continuing it for the moment.  We’ll see whether there is any noticeable change in my mood, but it certainly didn’t revolutionize my affect by taking it, and it’s not supposed to have the same kind of delayed effect that the traditional antidepressants require.

So, yeah, with both of those things, we shall see how the outcome goes.  Or maybe we won’t, I don’t know.  There are no guarantees.  Even the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics could be wrong, though it is unlikely.

I’m going to try to abstain from discussing my darker moods and thoughts here for at least a little while.  I’ve begun to wonder if ruminating on them and putting them out there in writing is making them worse rather than making them any better at all.

I guess I’m doing lots of little would-be therapeutic interventions for me.  Someone has to do it, and I’m probably the one best placed to take action, though I am entangled in the outcomes, which may confound things.  Still, I’m the only one who is going to do anything for me, so there are no other options.

I am in a very real sense quite alone in my situation.  I guess that’s not new, is it?  I’ve tended to be the one who helps other people, not the one who gets helped.  That’s just the way it goes, though.  Like Chris Cornell sang, “Arm yourself, because no one else here will save you.”  These are words of wisdom, and not just for fictional super-spies.

I still haven’t played guitar (and sang) for more than one little fifteen-minute interval over the last three weeks or so.  That’s an estimate, of course.  It is mildly worrying or at least disappointing how much I am losing interest in so many things that usually have interested me.  I certainly haven’t written any fiction, nor have I studied much new physics or biology or what have you, though I have hearkened to the computer science/AI stuff a bit, because at least that is somewhat interesting and intriguing.

Well, I will endeavor to persevere and even to improve.

You all, my readers, could in principle spot changes in my mental status before I even recognize them, myself, and I do hope, as well as request, that you do that.  It would be most welcome and potentially useful.  I thank you in advance.  In the meantime, I hope you’ve been having a good week, and that you continue to do so, and indeed, that each day is an improvement over the previous one.  Why not?  It doesn’t take much improvement per day, if it is every day, for truly impressive results to accrue.

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Say to them “My Own Special Creation has sent me to you.”

I think I will really keep this post short today, because I think I may be coming down with something.  I’m not certain, but I have the beginning of that sort of systemic feeling of interleukins, interferons, and other cytokines and such hitting the system.  I sometimes don’t get a very clear early fever response to things because I almost always have NSAIDs on board, so it can be hard to tell.

If I remember to go according to plan, I will have set this to post at about 8 o’clock eastern time.  I don’t recall if it’s EST or EDT, because I honestly don’t really distinguish them.  It’s all arbitrary, anyway; as long as everyone in this time zone is calling it the same time, they can call it Eastern Nap Time if they want.

There must have been some decent-seeming reasons for creating the whole “daylight savings time” thing; I mean, Ben Franklin was involved, I think, and he was not a stupid man, though like everyone he had his limits.  But for the life of me, I don’t see why we keep using it.  I don’t think it has any residual benefits, if it ever had any at all, which I doubt.

Oh, well.  That’s not really important, and it’s a bit of a tangent.  The point I was making is that I will have set this to go up at about 8 am, my local time, to see if that has any effect on how many people read it.  I will also try not to be moody and morose*, because I don’t want to frighten any potential new readers away.

At least, I don’t want to frighten them with that kind of stuff.  If they are frightened by my would-be sense of humor, or my topics of interest, then there’s nothing much I can do about that.  Like Popeye and God and that character from La Cage aux Folles, I am what I am.  I’m not going to try to change who I am just to get attention, in case that’s not obvious.

In other news, well, I am not really going to talk about the news much, in general.  It’s generally boring and/or stupid.  Though the agent(s) breakout from OpenAI and hacking of Hugging Face** was quite interesting, and I’ve watched some videos, by people who specialize in such things, about what happened.  It’s quite fascinating.  I won’t try to comment on it, because I am not an expert, but I’ll embed a video from computerphile, featuring Robert Miles, and another one that goes over the whole thing by a new YouTuber I’ve recently encountered, both of whom have interesting insights into the situation.

Let’s see, what else is going on…

Well, I just checked my temperature, and I may just barely have a low-grade fever.  Then again, body temperature fluctuates throughout the day, and I haven’t often tested it at this hour.  In general, for most people, body temperature bottoms out around 3 am, but those people tend to be asleep at three.  I had already been awake for about two hours by then, after dropping off to sleep at maybe eleven pm.  It’s 4:30 as I am writing the first draft here, and the heck of it is that this is not an outlier.  It’s not significantly different than usual.

So, if people wonder why I tend to be grouchy or whiny or what have you, at least that gives me some leeway I would hope.

How’s the weather by you guys right now?  I know, you’re not all in the same place, but I would still be interested in your comments about your local weather.  Down by me it’s quite humid and slightly rainy, and quite warm/hot, though it’s better in the morning.  However, at this time of day, the air is often stagnant and still, which makes humidity rather more oppressive.  Still, this is not all that big a difficulty.  If I could be cured of my chronic pain but had to face muggy weather every day for the rest of my life, well…

…actually, I would have to think about it pretty carefully.  But it would be tempting.  Still, both problems can be addressed, at least to some degree, without making weird deals that trade one misery for another, trying to assess which is the lesser of two evils.

Even if there were some type of supernatural entity with which one could make such bargains‒and I do not believe in such a thing‒I don’t think I would try to seek its favors.  I don’t like owing debts to people, let alone gods or demons or whatever.

Okay, well, I’ve been a bit all over the place this morning, haven’t I?  I’ll blame it on being slightly ill, as if it were any different than how I usually am.

I hope you all are well and having a good day.

*Which sounds like a law firm.

**Why did they name their company after the larval form of xenomorphs?

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“Sometimes I think I’d like to watch it burn.”

Umm…I don’t have any idea what to write this morning, this work-week beginning, this dawn of yet another iteration of zero.  But I guess that hasn’t ever stopped me before, though it feels more prominent now than I remember it feeling in the past.

But such feelings are unreliable guides to the past and present actual state of reality.  This is not to say that they are absolutely untrue and misleading; if that were the case, not only would everyone have picked up on it long ago, but it would have been weeded out of the gene pool.  A perfectly unreliable memory is no better than no memory at all.

On the other hand, it’s not evolutionarily sensible to have a perfect memory, either, largely because the information required to store perfectly all the things that have happened to you, and to which your senses had access, would very rapidly exceed your “hard drive” space.  No, your nervous system must sift out the useful information and discard the useless, or the not salient or pertinent, as much as possible, because the brain, though tremendously useful, is extremely energy intensive.

Human brains burn about 20 percent of the daily calories burned by a person.  Yes, that’s true even of people you consider morons.  The most ignorant person around still has a version of the best operating system available in the known universe (at least for the moment).  How much smarter is the least intelligent but functioning human compared to the smartest nematode…or even the smartest house cat?

Oh, who cares?  I don’t know why I go on about this nonsense.  It’s not as though people are actually interested.  I’m hemorrhaging readers steadily, it seems.  I’m not exactly sure why.

Maybe it’s because my insomnia and early awakening are getting steadily worse, and so I’m posting my posts earlier and earlier.  Maybe if I delayed them, like I do with the audio posts, more people would notice them.  What do you think?  Should I try that?  Would it bother you if my posts went up at, say 8 am versus whenever I finish them?  Would it matter?  Do you think there is a better time for them?

I don’t really expect it to make a difference.  No one notices when I’m not around, so to speak.  I’ve been banned from Meta platforms for some time now, and the only people who have touched base were the few people who did so anyway.  There are quite a few people whom I would consider friends, and who could get in contact with me, but they don’t.

I’m not saying that they ought to check on me.  It’s not their responsibility.  But I suspect at least a part of the whole thing is that, once I am not even peripherally in their lives, people don’t really notice.  If anything, I suspect that they probably feel a slight lightness, a sense of greater vivacity, some decreased sense of dreariness about life, the universe, and everything.

Certainly I have not heard anyone complain about the fact that I’m not around.  No one says they miss me, that their lives are emptier without me nearby.  No, most people either don’t notice (at least superficially) or just experience relief.

Even the four dollar coins* I keep for helping me make certain decisions are not on my side (not that they would be, since they are coins, not people).  Late last week‒I think it was Saturday, but it might have been Friday‒when I was feeling particularly low, I asked if I should just kill myself.  I spun the four coins and, on the first try, I got four heads.

Heads is the side I use to mean “yes”.

So, yeah, even the ladies (2 Susan B. Anthonies and 2 Sacagaweas) don’t seem to think having me around is worth much.  Of course, they are just coins.  I know there is no actual thought or judgment there, let alone attachment or agency.  It’s just sort of perversely funny to me.

Whatever.  I’m tired of this, and everything is getting less and less consequential.  I think, unless someone voices clear and convincing objections in the comments today, I will set up tomorrow’s post to come out at 8 eastern time, at least roughly.

Or maybe I just won’t post anything.  It’s not as though doing this is helping my mental health (obviously), and I doubt that I’m contributing anything to the world of ideas.  Even if I had some deep and interesting insight, it would go essentially nowhere and reach almost no one.

Oh, again, who cares?  Thanks for reading today.  I hope you have a good week, a good remainder of the month, a good rest of the year, and a good rest of your lives‒just in case you never hear from me again.

*By which I mean four one-dollar coins, not $4 coins.

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You can’t teach an old dogma new tricks

It’s Friday, but I won’t thank God for it this time, because I expect to work tomorrow.  I also am simply disinclined to thank that imaginary sky daddy for much today, nor to say that he/it is great, since today is the 25th anniversary of the 9-11 attacks, which were just the latest in the atrocities performed in the supposed name of the God of Abraham™ (other deities are available, though they are not really any better).

I’m not going to get into September 11th related stuff, though.  I doubt that I would have anything to say about it that others haven’t said at least as well as I ever could.  If you would like a good discussion by a very good thinker, Sam Harris released a recent, brief podcast about it.  The event both shaped and catalyzed his career as a public thinker.  It shaped a lot of things, and unfortunately, very, very few of them produced anything good or beneficial as a consequence, unlike Sam’s work.

I don’t know what I am going to write, though.  I’m still really wiped out from a very bad pain day yesterday (that pain is far from gone).  Also, I somehow scratched my right eye during the night, and it is quite irritated, so looking at the smartphone as I type is more irksome than usual.

I had at least a passing thought, though, about the notion of owning up to when we’re making immoral (but best available) choices rather than justifying to ourselves why what we are doing is “right”, which can sometimes lead to increasingly excessive behaviors driven by a sense (sometimes desperately clasped out of fear of facing the facts) of self-righteousness that can expand into dogmatism.

Dogmatism almost never makes any real sense, and it often leads to terrible, horrible, and reprehensible deeds (9-11 was just one of countless such depravities).

I think it would be better for us, culturally and perhaps individually, if we owned up to it when we violated our own precepts, even‒or especially‒when we do it out of real necessity.  At least it might give us more intellectual and moral humility.

For instance, it says in the founding document of the United States that life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are unalienable rights.  In other words, they cannot ever be taken away by some outside power, not morally.

One can argue whether those rights actually exist and whether any such rights exist and so on, but I’m not interested in that discussion right now (though it is a good topic).  But if we assume arguendo that the rights enumerated are real and apply to the USA, then we cannot resist the fact that we violate them frequently‒by law, by custom, by various accidental means.

We imprison people, for instance, often out of necessity (when we do it “legitimately”, anyway, but again, that’s another subject).  If someone is dangerous to others and cannot be cured of whatever makes them dangerous, then we must separate such a person from others to protect their rights.  That doesn’t mean we aren’t violating the first person’s rights; those rights are declared to be unalienable.  But we are trapped in a place of competing rights, and must do our best to balance them.

We should admit that to ourselves.  We should say to ourselves, “Yes, we are violating this person’s rights, and it is not by nature a moral act.  But it is the best act we have available right now, so we will accept and endure the pangs of our consciences and do it, while always trying to find better alternatives.”

It’s that last part on which the crux of my point rests.  When we admit that we are doing something that is not moral, but that is the most moral option we have available, then we leave open‒indeed, we invite and encourage‒the quest for better solutions.  Whereas, when we tell ourselves we’re right to commit such violations, then we effectively raise a barrier against forces that might improve things.

When challenged on the morality of such deeds, if we haven’t already faced their morally turbid status, we unfortunately often get defensive and double down, because it’s too uncomfortable for most people most of the time to face the fact that they might be really wrong about something really consequential.

But dogmatism precludes improvement.  And if you believe that there is no room for improvement in any ideas you have been handed, then, well…I’ve got a bridge to sell you.  You can pay me for it in cash or, better yet, in precious metals and jewelry‒I’m hoping to make a great big heap of gems and jewelry and try to sleep on it.  Maybe it would cure my insomnia; I’ve always suspected that Smaug was onto something.

Anyway, that’s enough.  I don’t think I did justice to that random, walk-in topic, and I may not even have been coherent.  But, it was the best I could do for now, until I can figure out a way to do better.

I hope you have a good day today.  I will write another post tomorrow, exclusis improvisis.

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It’s serious Labor just to get through each Day

Good day to you all.  It’s Monday, the 7th of September, and for those in the USA, it is Labor Day.  That’s sort of the government holiday antipode of Memorial Day.  The latter marks the unofficial beginning of summer, and the former marks the unofficial end of summer.  In south Florida, I can fairly and reasonably say about the supposed end of summer, “Would that it were.”

That’s because the weather in autumn‒late autumn, anyway‒is much more pleasant than it is in summer here.  This is a large part of the reason for the “snow bird” phenomenon:  people who live up north during the warmer half (roughly) of the year and then come down to Florida during the cooler half of the year.

I say “cooler” in the meteorological, thermodynamic sense, not the social sense.  Contrary to what many people here seem to believe, there are not many cool people per capita in Florida.  It just doesn’t tend to fit the regional identity in any sense; “The Florida Man” is not celebrated for his coolness.

Just to give you an idea of how bad it is:  I am probably only barely below the mean level of coolness in Florida, at least based on the usual criteria of greater society.  Even well-known people from Florida are rarely noted for being cool.

Not that it really matters, of course.  Coolness is an epiphenomenon that accreted like pipe scale on the surface of primate dominance and reproductive hierarchical behavior patterns; that’s all fairly obvious looking at humans from the outside as it were.  But it all becomes self-referential after a while, building on and/or reacting in support of or opposition to prior standards of “coolness”, until it’s long since become a sort of autoerotic death spiral, a precursor to AI slop.

That doesn’t mean I don’t sometimes appreciate cool things and people; I just recognize “coolness” as entirely parochial.  What octopuses think is cool and what spiders think is cool and what albatrosses think is cool are going to be very different from each other and from what humans think is cool*.

Speaking of coolness, I went to the movie theater (by myself) this weekend to see the new Spider-Man movie.  The movie was certainly reasonably cool as far as it went; I thought it was well made and well acted and fun and so on.  It was at a theater that has a full bar, which is also pretty cool, so while I waited I had a Jack and Coke (to help with some social anxiety).  It was tasty, but it made me need to use the restroom four times before the movie started.  That was annoying.  But I rarely drink alcohol, anyway, so it’s an effect I need not dread.

The popcorn was pretty good, I guess, and so on, and the seats were comfy, but by the end of the movie I just felt more alone than I had before, despite coming out and joining the throng (then going into Target for some cat food and then to Walgreens for some sparkling water before ordering an Uber back to the house).

It was an expensive day, though.  The concessions were even more expensive than the ticket (and that’s not counting the Jack and Coke).  And the Uber to and from the theater was not cheap, either.  So, I don’t think I’m going to be doing that very often.  I may not do it ever again, maybe not even for Doomsday.

Though, when it comes to money, it’s not as though I’m saving for retirement.  I don’t expect to retire.  As of right now, I just expect to keep moving until I fall apart and then just basically die.  I mean, in the end that’s what everyone does, but my situation is likely to have less bric-a-brac cluttering up the works than many.

Honestly, I wish I could skip to the end a lot of the time.  Which I guess I can, of course, but it requires gumption and willpower to do it, and I am generally low on spoons, as the metaphor goes nowadays; I’m not sure how that figure of speech became prominent, nor why, but it feels somehow apropos.

Many things that I am doing to try to improve my willpower and my mental reserves and so on are at least partly to try to build the will to overcome my instinctive but annoying resistance to self-destruction.  I’m getting there, I think.  I’m making progress.  Maybe I’ll get there soon.

Honestly, I don’t really even mind that much if I don’t get to see Avengers: Doomsday.  I’m just sick of all of this shit.

I hope you all are doing better than I am.

*Of course, the thought processes as such are likely only to be very roughly analogous to what humans think about coolness, especially for non-social species.  There may also be overlap; I imagine many humans might think certain examples of flying skill shown by an albatross are very cool, and so might another albatross.

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“I said he’ll flip ya…flip ya for real.”

It’s Friday today, and though I am not a believer (and, more or less as I say in the meme below, I don’t want to be one, since I’m not impressed by “belief”) I will thank anyone and everyone who might be responsible for the fact that this is the end of my work week this week.  So, thank God it’s Friday, thank Cat it’s Friday, thank Frigg it’s Friday (thank Tony for his “Friggin’ Friday” comment), thank Cthulhu it’s Friday, thank Doom it’s Friday, thank Eru it’s Friday, thank Brahma it’s Friday…

I suspect that you get the idea.

Anyway, I’m very tired and need some rest.  It’s not that it’s been a particularly onerous week; it hasn’t really been.  If anything, it is I who has been more onerous than usual this week even than I usually am.  But I don’t think I’ve been much more onerous than usual.

I suppose that it’s up to those around me to say how much of a burden I’ve been, but I know their answers would be inconsistent and pretty confabulated.  This is not intended to insult them; it’s just the nature of human accounts of things that have happened to them when they are asked without having been paying attention to those things (in particular) in the first place.

Nature didn’t create a brain that keeps a running measure of its mood in relation to each individual around them, like some endless EEG plot.  What would be the use of such a function in the natural world?  Even if useful, would the use be worth the inevitable cost?  And could the drunken walk of the blind idiot god Evolution ever stumble upon such a process even if it were useful?

Well, given infinite time, it probably could, but we haven’t had infinite time to explore the space of possible biological innovations, and we probably will not have it.

Anyway, the point is, as Louis C K pointed out, it’s not up to me whether I’m being an asshole, at least not according to the impressions of others.  And I guess it’s not up to me whether others feel I am onerous or not.

Then again, it’s not up to them whether I consider myself to be a burden or not.  And I have the only front-row seats to me.  I am the one (and only) who is with me all the time*.

And consider something else:  all my meandering oddness (oddity?) that is on display here is me when I am tired, slowed down by literal decades of insufficient sleep.  Imagine how irritating I might be if I were fully rested and energetic!

Don’t make the mistake of imagining that it would necessarily make me calmer and more sedate.  I knew me back in the years when I used to get much more adequate sleep (though I have always slept less than most anyone else in my family).  I was not particularly sedate or calm then.

In closing, I’ll mention a weird thought that occurred to me when I was looking in the mirror (another daily burden) after my shower.  In principle, if one were picked up out of 3D space into 4D space, rotated in the proper way while there, then set down in 3D space again, one would be physically mirror-reversed***.

This would be a big problem, and not just because other people would be freaked out in subtle ways.  Every chiral molecule in one’s body would also be flipped from ortho to sinister, left to right (and vice versa).  That means you would need to eat similarly flipped food****, because your biological molecules only work on one version of most molecules.

Also, your DNA (which has chirality in spades) would be rotated in the other direction, so you certainly couldn’t reproduce.  But you couldn’t build new cells anyway, because many of the requisite molecules in that process are chiral.

Even your neutrinos/W and Z particles would behave differently, because this is one force/process in nature that is not parity-symmetric.  Meaning there is in a sense a handedness to the way the weak force acts.

Of course, that’s also the case with electromagnetism, come to think of it.  There is the famous “right hand rule” for how magnetic fields occur in response to changing electric fields/moving currents, and how electric fields respond to changing magnetic fields (see Maxwell’s equations).

So, heck, if you were so flipped, you might not even be able to interact with the electroweak sector of the quantum fields of our universe, and you might fall apart immediately at the subatomic level.  It would depend very much on whether such constraints are carried along with the stuff of one’s body or if they are imposed (and reimposed) by the fields in the universe around it.

I don’t even know what would happen with electric charge or hypercharge or spin or whatnot.  It almost makes me want to write Changeling in a Shadow World.  But I doubt that will happen.

With that weird stream of consciousness, I will let you go for the week.  I won’t be writing any new posts before Monday, exclusis improvisis.

*At least I’m the only one with a nervous system.  I suppose my skin and gut flora are with me all the time, but as far as I know, they don’t think in any reasonable sense.  Also, can any of them really be said to be with me always?  Their dividing/reproducing rates are very high compared to a human (or humanoid) lifetime, after all.  I guess it depends upon whether I consider a bacterium that undergoes mitosis to be two new organisms or just one increased organism that is continuous**.  Both options are reasonable and plausible, and nature doesn’t appear to care, outside the minds of humans, how such things are considered.

**This implies, in a sense, that all life on Earth could honestly be considered one organism, since there appears to have been one ultimate common ancestor to us all.  Thus, Life would really be a (so far) immortal organism.  I think that’s actually a pretty reasonable way to look at things, and it’s very much a sort of larger-scale, fractally self-similar pattern to how a human body is initiated with one cell−the “ensouled zygote” as I once mockingly made a meme about, after deciding it would be a good name for a band.

***If this is difficult to imagine, consider it in lower-dimensions.  Imagine an asymmetrical trapezoid in Abbot’s Flatland, with one of its two “legs” different than the other.  If it were picked up into three dimensions, flipped over, and then put back down, its asymmetry would now be in the other direction, and other Flatlanders might no longer even recognize it.

****This is part of why the possibility of being eaten by aliens, or of them eating us, makes little sense.  If you tried to eat food from an alien ecosystem, it would at best just go through you unabsorbed, and at worst would give you potentially fatal indigestion.  All your digestive processes are honed to work on other biological substances that occur within the ecosystem that evolved on Earth.  And this entails many lock-and-key enzymes and molecules that digest depending on chirality.  This was part of the motivation behind creating left-handed sugar and left-handed fat, which might physically behave similarly and perhaps even smell or taste somewhat the same, but would not be absorbed.  But such products almost inevitably lead to digestive troubles at best.

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A jest’s prosperity lies in the ear of him that hears it, never in the blog of him that makes it

Hello and good morning.

It’s Thursday again and time for another of my traditional Thursday blog posts*, though nowadays that’s embedded among the blog posts I write on all the other work days.  I haven’t written fiction in quite a long time, and the original reason for this (Thursday) blog was to promote my fiction.

But heck, it’s been a couple of weeks since I’ve even so much as picked up a guitar‒though I keep looking online at these parlor style acoustics, because they look like they’d be a good size for convenience and such.  But it’s just a bit of a pipe dream and a distraction to look at them.

There is no lapcom involved in this post today.  I didn’t take it with me when I left the office last night, but there was no more “reason” for that decision than there had been for the fact that I brought it the day before.  There were causes, as there always are, but not reasons.

Although, now that I consider it, I did feel that yesterday’s post was a bit too long.  That didn’t consciously enter into my decision-making when I chose not to bring the lapcom, but I did think about it earlier in the day, after posting.  Most, if not all, of what happens in most decisions we make is unconscious, or subconscious**, or whatever word you might want to choose.  So I can’t rule out that there were actual reasons for me not bringing my lapcom last night, but whatever the facts of that matter might be, there were, and always are, causes.

In any case, yesterday I fell prey to my tendency to write quite a lot when typing on a lapcom or other regular keyboard, because it’s so fast and easy for me.  It’s faster than speaking for me, and it’s certainly faster than using the “smartphone”, even not counting all the typos that occur when using the latter***.

I continue to toy, from time to time, with trying to type a tome using Google Docs.  But its interfaces, while okay for writing blog posts, don’t feel quite right for writing fiction, at least not for me.  It’s probably a stupid notion anyway.  I don’t really expect ever to write any more fiction.  That’s not a good thing, but then again, very little is.

I’m actually getting irritated that my lapcoms and my desktop computer at work are beginning to show some signs of their ages, and I fear that they may need to be replaced soon.  Worse, my smartphone is getting a bit laggy, and I cannot upgrade it to the latest operating system so I can no longer use my banking app on it.

But I really don’t want to go through the hassle of getting and setting up a new phone (or computer).  It’s so irritating and so uninteresting.  I actually had the general, vague hope that I would not live long enough to need to upgrade my computer(s) or phone again.

Honestly, the constant displacement of entropy that comprises the process of staying alive at so many levels is just dreary and almost laughable.

Speaking of laughable, I’ve been thinking about trying a personal experiment:  I’ve been thinking about trying to go without laughing for a day or a week or something along those lines****.  I just wonder what effect that would have on my experiences.

I tend to overdo it with jokiness, and I tend to partake in a lot of comedy of various kinds, almost in a desperate way.  It could even be be considered an addiction, or at least like a substance abuse problem, including its own abstinence syndrome:  I used to have the experience that, after reading a Dave Barry book, I would crash and feel quite depressed and morose for a while, as if in withdrawal from laughing so much.

Perhaps laughter is one of my means to try to hide from reality, to hide from the present, to try to hide from me.  I haven’t committed to the idea, yet, but it does intrigue me.  Most of my literary heroes do not spend a lot of time laughing.  And I have few, if any, real world heroes, but such as I have, though far from agelastic, are not prone to joke about a lot or get giggly or silly, like I do.

Those facts may be irrelevant for me, of course.  I am a unique snowflake (just like all the other snowflakes), and I don’t necessarily have the same attributes as those I admire, especially fictional characters.   But it is intriguing as almost a kind of fast, but one in which I would abstain from laughing rather than from food or water.

I’ll keep you posted on my effort (probably).  If you want to give me your input, you’re welcome to do so.  In the meantime, I hope you have a very good day.  Don’t stop laughing on my account.

TTFN

[P.S., a thought just occurred to me, because the words of an old ABBA song (misheard, as I just realized) started going through my head:  If you think that there’s nothing you can’t do, that anything is possible, then all the troubles that continue in the world are implicitly your fault, because you could have solved them.  After all, there’s nothing you can’t do.  To be fair to them, ABBA was actually singing “there is nothing we can do”, which I had misheard and misremembered as “can’t” for decades.  Indeed, their song goes pretty well with parts of this post, especially the song’s first few lines.  Who would have guessed?]

*I almost said “my traditional Thursday podcast”.  How’s that for a weird mistake?  I’ve certainly toyed with the idea of a podcast at times, but that requires more time and editing and so on than my little five-minute or so snippets of audio.  But I do like to listen to podcasts, at least about topics that interest me.  Perhaps it was a Freudian slip.

**I accidentally typed “sunconscious” here, originally, and it seems like kind of a charming word, so it’s a shame it doesn’t really mean anything.  But one certainly doesn’t want a conscious sun, as the dubious Doctor Who episode “42” tried to warn us…or something like that.

***You might almost think that word means “one who lats”, but of course it’s not that kind of word and has close kinship with “later” and its ilk.

****I.e., a period of time.