Psychology

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Wayward versus prodigal suns, negative integrals, and mildew

Well, it’s Tuesday now, and I’m sitting at the train and writing this blog post on my laptop.  Apparently, the last time I wrote using it was August 21st, but it feels as if it were longer ago than that.  I brought the laptop back to the house with me last night because I knew I wasn’t going to walk back from the train in the evening, having already walked to the train (and then some) in the morning.  And I knew I wasn’t going to walk to the train this morning, because I plan to walk back from the train this evening.  I figured that made it a good evening to carry the computer.

It’s curious how heavy this little thing feels when it’s in the backpack, compared to what I usually keep in there.  When I pick up the laptop in my hands, it feels almost miraculously light, given that I know what it is and what it does, and I know how much computers used to weigh and all that trivia.  But then after I put it in the backpack and later go to pick up and sling the backpack, it’s just so much heavier, subjectively speaking, than it ought to feel.

It’s quite annoying.  I dislike being subject to such subjective impressions from the world.  It’s inescapable, I suppose, since certainly this body was never shaped by nature accurately to assess the weight of a backpack with or without a laptop in it.  I guess the fact that our impressions are so inexact and inconsistent can be useful as a way to keep from feeling overconfident in our assessments of various facts and opinions about the world.

But then again, I tend to hold my judgments and opinions and abilities to be extremely unreliable, anyway.  I think the most common thing I say to myself is, “Robert, you fucking moron!”  That happens at least several times a day, pretty much every day (and I make that estimate without any willful exaggeration).  Just ask some of my coworkers if you don’t believe me*.  I really hold myself in contempt; I hate how weak and pathetic and idiotic I am so much of the time.  Trust me, if you were inside my head, you’d probably feel the same way.

Speaking of me being an idiot, I had slight passing thoughts on and off yesterday of trying to start writing a story I had considered writing before.  It involves a character I invented waaaaay long ago, back when I was maybe about 10 years old.  It was intended then as a comic book.  I even drew the beginnings of one or two comics about the character, one featuring the origin of his arch-enemy and all that.

Then, years later, I started thinking of an idea for a manga featuring the character, but with a much less comic-book style origin and story.  Indeed, it would become a tale about a teenager (not a grown-up, unlike the original notion) who has gone through some form of trauma and has lost his memories and whatnot, but discovers that—apparently as part of the thing that caused him the trauma and memory loss—he has developed incredible powers.

These powers are not psychic abilities or anything, but entail the ability to convert his own matter, and the matter around him directly into energy, which obviously means a lot of energy, given E=mc2  and all that.  It’s a silly-ish story, one for which I’ve drawn a picture or two, and it’s called HELIOS, with a rather silly and whimsical subtitle, “the wayward sun”.  Although maybe it should be “the prodigal sun” or something along those lines.

MS Word has underlined the word “sun” in that last sentence.  Apparently, it’s able to recognize the original phrase well enough to think that the word following “prodigal” should be “son”, not “sun”.  Curiously, it did not underline the word “sun” after “wayward”.  Apparently the song by Kansas isn’t as ubiquitous as the term from that horrible, perverse parable in the gospels.  Who would’ve thought it?  Admittedly, the one from the New Testament has a two millennia head start, so I guess we can cut Kansas a little bit of slack.

Anyway, obviously I know the whole back story regarding HELIOS, and of course there is a reason the title is spelled in capital letters.  I think it could be a decent light-novel type story.  It might even be worth trying to write it on the smartphone, just to see how well I can write stories like that using that tool.

But this is all a pipe dream, of course.  I don’t think anyone would be interested in reading it, even if I were able to force myself to start writing fiction again and do it.  It’s just my little personal fantasy (about writing another science fiction story**).  I doubt that I’d be able to summon the energy to write about that character (which is mildly ironic), but even if I did, there would be no point.

I don’t think I’m going to be able to summon the energy for much of anything, anymore.  I mean, obviously, I’m currently still writing this blog, and I’m sometimes walking to and/or from the train station, and of course I’m working at work.  But there’s no percentage in any of it.  I’m just slowly eroding whatever’s left of me.  I don’t really, honestly expect to make it to the end of this month, not without some major catastrophe or departure or whatever.

Maybe it’s just that I don’t want to make it to the end of this month.  It’s an annoying version of the old notion of “feeling that you can’t go on”.  Unfortunately, I know that I can go on, in the sense that I’m at least physically capable of doing it.  I just don’t want to go on.  I see no good reason to do it.  I want to escape.

Also, even though I didn’t walk to the train today, and the only walking I did so far was up to the end of the station to sit down, I’m already sweaty and my shirt and I smell like mildew!  I doubt anyone else can smell it, but I can, and it’s disgusting.  I just washed this shirt, and did so thoroughly, and dried my clothes thoroughly afterwards.  I don’t know how much Lysol I’m going to have to spray on it and me to kill that horrible smell, but unfortunately, I don’t have a change of shirt with me, and believe me, no one wants to see me topless!

It’s a minor frustration, I know—hardly a tragedy.  But there are so few, if any, compensatory joys in the world anymore.  Even if the function’s y-output isn’t terribly negative, if it just is negative at all, overall, then as time goes on, the integral, the area under the curve (or, well, over the curve) is going to be negative, and that negative integral will only get more and more negative as long as the function continues.  Better just to return the thing to zero and cut one’s losses.

That’s a bit of an obscure metaphor, I suppose, but hopefully it makes sense to people who know a little calculus.

I’m just so tired and worn out.  I feel angry all the time, but the vast majority of that anger is always directed at myself, and rightly so.  I need to escape.  But I probably can’t do it on my own.  At least, I only see one general way to do so on my own.

Oh, well, what are you gonna do?  The universe is a horrible place.  No wonder every little bit of spacetime is trying to push away from every other little bit.  Maybe so-called Dark Energy is just an expression of cosmic self-disgust.

Intergalactic space would certainly not be too distant a place for someone to want me to be from them.  I wish I could be so far away from myself a lot of the time.  But I don’t want to be someone else, either.  That’s another conundrum.

All right, this has gotten too long.  Have a good day, please, and thank you for reading.

helios sharper

[P.S.  Upon looking up this old drawing, it appears that I did think of making the subtitle “the prodigal sun”.  Now I like “wayward” better.  Maybe I’m just being perverse.]

*I don’t know how you might go about that, though, and I don’t really expect you to try.

**It would not be hard sci fi in any way, since of course it leans toward the comic book style of things, but the idea behind some of it is based in a bit of real science, including particle physics, especially relating to the Higgs field (where the H in HELIOS comes from), all that kind of stuff.  But I never thought of it as a serious science fiction thing, like Son of Man.

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Meet the new month…same as the old month?

It’s the first of September (in 2023 A.D., in case anyone is reading this far enough in the future for that to be unclear and yet interesting) and it’s a Friday.  I’m at the train station again, waiting for the train.  I thought about walking to the train this morning, but I was just too tired.  I didn’t walk last night, either, because it was quite rainy, and that was annoying.

I’ve had persistent digestive sensitivity this week since my bout on the weekend, and particularly starches and things like that seem to be giving me lots of trouble.  So, I’m going to try to keep them to a minimum.  That also tends to make me feel physically better in general (though it does seem to lead to lowering of my baseline mood).

It’s a bit of a frustrating conundrum, that foods that let me feel physically healthier and more capable lead me to be more dysthymic and depressed.  Sometimes, though, I think I prefer plain depression to tension/stress/anxiety.  At least with the former, I can, if I find the time, try to take a nap.

I’ve been trying to find books to read, and it’s becoming ever more difficult.  Fiction is almost impossible‒even the silly light novels aren’t able to hold my attention, though maybe if there were a new installment of a series I’d already been reading, it might be okay.  But I read those things within a day, even when I don’t have much free time.  And none of them seem enticing at all.

Worse still, even nonfiction is getting difficult.  I’m in the “middle” of a comparative slew of books‒three or four about computer science/hacking/AI, another about the mathematics of probability and statistics as applied to daily life, one about the history of the sugar industry and the effects that has had on global health (not good ones), two broad physics books, and just general stuff like that.  I have no new physics books that interest me, though I have a few of which I haven’t read much, yet‒I’m in chapter 2 of the Feynman lectures on Physics, which is wonderful, of course, but even the great RF can’t seem to hold my interest.

I can’t even read my own stories, and that’s usually an escape route for me.

I also haven’t found music to be interesting, though yesterday, for a very brief while, I listened to a bit.  But that waned quickly.  I certainly haven’t played anything in quite a while.

If I can’t listen to music, and especially if I can’t read, then I really don’t see any point in continuing.  I mean, I’m obviously able to write this blog, but I can’t seem to write fiction anymore.  Or, at least I have no desire to write it.  And there’s only one movie that I haven’t seen that I really have even a modicum of interest in seeing.  But I’m not that interested in it, to be honest.

Frankly, writing this blog feels pretty boring right now, and I’m sure that reading it can’t be very gripping.  I don’t think I have anything to say that I haven’t said a godzillion times.  If anything, the only message I’m truly trying to convey‒the only one I care about trying to convey‒is a futile one.  It certainly hasn’t done what I dreamed it might do.  I have little to no hope that it will ever succeed.

Oh, yeah, and I forgot to mention before that we slid right past another potential palindromic recording number sequence yesterday.  It seems (surprise, surprise) that the universe is not going to send me any messages regarding whether I should continue living or not.  Or else, it’s sending me a message by not sending me one.  But, of course, the universe doesn’t actually care about me one way or the other, nor about anyone else.  It just is, as far as I can see*.  It is simply a magnificent desolation, to quote Buzz Aldrin.

And here I am, a tiny little speck of that vast emptiness.  I’m much less magnificent, but certainly, I am a desolation.

Oh, yeah, I guess this is technically the beginning of a holiday weekend in the US.  Labor Day, apparently, is Monday.  It doesn’t matter much to me, nor does it make any difference.  I work tomorrow, and we will be working Monday.  We don’t tend to take those kinds of holidays off.  I guess that’s fine; I don’t have anything enjoyable to do if I take time off.  I wish I could sleep.  Then I might enjoy having free days.  But even when I’m mentally and physically exhausted, I have trouble sleeping.  When I try to lie down for little cat naps to rest my back, setting a timer for 19 minutes, more often than not I get up before even that much time has passed.

I’ve also stopped sitting through any full cycles of the massage chair I bought a while back, because it doesn’t do anything for my back and leg pain anymore, so sitting in it is just frustrating.

To add further insult, when I sweat, everything smells like mildew, like fungus (to me anyway) and that’s one of my least favorite smells in the world.  I try to wash my clothes (and myself) very thoroughly, and I use Lysol and similar in between.  I think maybe it’s just Florida being a fungal paradise that makes it such a struggle.

I hope this is my very last “first day of the month” blog post.  It probably won’t be my last post of all, not even of this week.  I expect to write one tomorrow, since I’m working tomorrow.  But, great Caesar’s ghost! it’s daunting.  It’s got to be even worse for all of you.  I do hope, though, that you have a good weekend, and if you live in the US that you have a good holiday.  Please, let someone out there have a life worth living, in and of itself, for its own sake.

desolation

*Which is, in principle, about 40 some odd billion light years at most, given the finite speed of light, the time since the last scattering surface, and the expansion of the universe.

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When virtue’s steely blogs look bleak i’ the cold wind

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday again, and it’s also the last day of August in 2023, to which I say, “Good riddance.”  What a crappy month.  The effects of the hurricane have all but completely vanished from here in south Florida, apart from the fact that, at relatively low altitudes, you can still sometimes see streams of fast-moving clouds.  They’re going roughly east-northeast now, as the direction to the distant hurricane’s center has changed.  At ground level, however, and especially during the day, we seem to have lost the wind, and now the air is dead again, humid, and quite hot.

Just sitting at the train station early in the morning, I keep thinking that insects‒probably mosquitoes‒are landing on my neck, but when I reach back to brush them away, they’re just beads of sweat.

I’m slightly annoyed about myself and other things this morning.  I awoke early, even for me, and after lying about for a few hours,  I got up, did some dips, and took a shower and all the usual stuff.  I could’ve walked to the train, I suppose, but I plan to walk this evening, and the weather is just disgusting right now.  Anyway, I recently discovered that there’s a Tri Rail related Uber coupon that gets you $5 off each way (only 2 times a day) when getting a ride to and from the Tri Rail station, so I decided to use that.

The youngish driver, in a Tesla, got there quickly, and we were making such good time that I thought I might even be able to get on the very first train of the day, with a minute or two to spare.

Then, we got to the last turn onto a main street just before the station, and the light was red, and there were three or four cars waiting to go on the cross street, but then they went, and the cross-traffic was then nonexistent…and the driver just sat there and waited for the green (there is no “No turn on red” sign at this intersection).  Now, I’m not comfortable enough talking to strangers to feel fine with saying, “Hey, traffic’s clear, you can go right now.”  So, I just kind of fidgeted in my seat.

Then, when we arrived at the station, the first train was approaching and the gates had just come down, so without sprinting around them and across in front of the train, I couldn’t make that one.  Even if I had run to and up the stairs, across the bridge, and then down, I think there’s almost no chance I would have made it.  So, I walked up along the near side of the track, grumbling, punching one of the pillars as I passed (mainly just to hurt myself a bit, since I was mainly angry with me) and watched the train arrive and then go away.  Now, I’m sitting waiting for the next train, which comes half an hour after.

As I said, my anger is really directed at myself.  I mean, yes, it would have been good for the driver to pay attention and realize he could turn right…but why do I care?  I wasn’t planning to catch that train in the first…

Oh, wait.  They just announced that the train for which I am waiting is delayed “ten, fifteen minutes” (not 10 to 15 minutes, for reasons I’m hitherto unable to guess).  So it really would have been better to catch the earlier one.  I wonder how much an Uber or Lyft to the office would be.

***

Well, I won’t say it’s cheap, but it’s cheaper than a cab would be, and my driver was right there at the station, so I’m going.  You might think that it’s nice that I can afford to do this, but I really can’t.  However, I have no one on whom I need to spend money, and I have no plans for the future, so it’s not as though I’m trying to save anything.  I might as well just burn it all up.

I’m so tired of being stressed out and irritated.  I wish I could just smile and not worry about things.  You would think that if, at root, someone doesn’t care if he lives or dies‒and indeed, leans toward preferring the latter‒it would be easy enough just to be sort of Zen/Taoist in attitude, but that’s not the case, at least for me.

Perhaps it has to do with the intellectual versus the emotional aspects of a desire/drive.  Someone who lacked a basic, emotional survival drive might very well intellectually want to live and yet be calm, at ease, unflappable, perhaps like Hannibal Lecter as portrayed in the books.  He’s not afraid of dying, or even really of pain, but he enjoys his life (such as it is) and wants it to continue.  Whereas I, intellectually, don’t enjoy my life, and I don’t think much of anything I do or say or experience matters at all, and yet every little thing feels like a four-alarm fire, like a call of “General Quarters”, like there’s an enemy at the gates of the city.

Yesterday, during the day, I wished, wished I had a gun, so I could shoot myself, even right there in the office, and fuck trying to be polite and not disturb other people.  It’s not as though other people make even minor, simple, easy efforts to avoid causing me distress.  I thought that I probably wouldn’t shoot myself in the head‒partly because I would worry about a poorly aimed shot causing brain damage but not killing me, but also, partly, I think it would be too big a hurdle to clear based on that biological drive to survive, which is hard to overcome.  Maybe I’m just a coward.  I’m okay with that possibility.

Anyway, I figured I might go the Van Gogh way and shoot myself in the chest or belly or whatever.  That would be pretty gnarly, if you ask me, and I’ve always thought it was a real ballsy way to do things.  No painless and quick death there, even back in Vincent’s day.

Of course, I didn’t have a gun, and I didn’t know anyone from whom I could get one on short notice.  So I ground through the day feeling like my spirit was crawling with metaphysical parasites, stressed out beyond any reasonability.  I mean, come on, I’ve literally dealt with life and death situations many times, often on a daily basis, more than I would be able to count!  Why does my stupid present daily life get to me so much?

Probably because it is such a stupid, pointless daily life.  The fact that I bother with it at all, when there is quite literally no point to it, or to me anymore, is probably what makes it so stressful.  Or maybe, after everything I’ve been through, I have some weird form of PTSD‒that’s fashionable, right?  I have no idea.  I don’t feel like I have something like that.  I just feel…weird.  Which I guess is appropriate, since I am weird.

***

And now I am here at my destination, at which I’ve arrived even earlier than I would have if the second train had been on time.  That’s a nice euphemism, isn’t it?  That would be a nice way to think of dying before your time, don’t you think?  “He arrived at his destination earlier than expected.  It was very thoughtful and pleasant of him.”

Well, anyway, tomorrow begins September, a far better month than August, the month of the equinox and of Bilbo’s and Frodo’s birthday.  It’s a month in which it might be worthwhile to sell Bag End to the Sackville-Bagginses and head off on the quest to throw a cursed item into the Cracks of Doom, ending at least one particular evil forever.

We’re approaching another potential palindromic recording number possibility today (already).  I don’t think there will be many more chances for one to come up.  Even if one occurred at this stage, I don’t think I would pay attention to it.  It’s like when you flip a coin to decide whether you’ll go off a diet or something, and it comes out a certain way, and you realize that, no, you’re going to go the other way, anyway.  It’s a good way to test yourself and find out what you really wanted to do in the first place.

What I want you to do, if you’re willing and able, is to have a good day, and to appreciate the ones you love and who love you, and to spend time with them if you have that opportunity.  Just spend time with people who are willing and able to spend time with you, and who matter to you, and to whom you matter.  If you are lucky enough to be with the people you love, don’t take that for granted.  That’s my advice/request, for what it’s worth.  I’m not known for my wisdom, but that’s the best I have right now.

TTFN

vincent in the museum

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Moods and moons and musings on mythology and morality via Middle-earth

I’m mainly over my weekend gastroenterological difficulty, so physically I’m definitely doing better than I was.  That can’t help but bolster my mood at least a bit, though the elevation bears all the hallmarks of being a supremely temporary state*.  Perhaps you think I’m being pessimistic, but I know myself and my moods reasonably well‒although I will freely admit that it is impossible to be fully objective about such things, given their very nature.

It looks like the moon is very close to its full state this morning, so if it’s not truly “full” now, then it’s one day before or one day after.  If I were a werewolf, I suppose this would be bad news for people around me.  However, I clearly am not a werewolf.  Nor is anyone else**.

I’m also not one who follows all the supposed names of the full moons and all that.  There’s nothing wrong with it, and if paying attention to whether it’s a harvest moon, or a hunter’s moon, or a sun myung moon, or whatever, makes you happy, then do please enjoy yourself.  The whole “super moon” thing is a bit more laughable, though.  The difference in angular size between the moon at perigee and the moon at apogee is too small to be detectable by the naked eye.  Sorry.  Also, by the way, the fact that the moon looks bigger when near the horizon is not even an optical effect***, but is merely an optical illusion.

The weather is slightly more pleasant right now than it has been, because we have a good, strong breeze, thanks to Idalia.  Other parts of Florida are having much worse weather, with the aforementioned hurricane and all, but that’s hitting the northwestern coast of the state, and will cross farther north and east.  We are on the real outer periphery of the storm’s effects down here; we just have more wind than usual, some intermittent rain (not truly unusual) and the very nifty spectacle of the fast-moving clouds all traveling in the same direction, following their course counter-clockwise relative to the center of the storm, hundreds of miles away.

I guess, from a Tolkien-based mythological perspective, a hurricane is sort of a partnership/game between Manwë and Ulmo, though those two don’t ever really come across as overly playful, and I guess they probably wouldn’t willfully do something to cause grief to the Children of Ilúvatar.  That might be more Ossë’s thing; he was apparently associated with storms and whatnot.  Of course, most unfairly, Melkor gets blamed for all the negative stuff‒burning heat and bitter cold immoderate and all that‒but Eru himself plainly and clearly said that everything comes from him.  “Thou shalt prove but mine instrument…” and all that.

Really, Melkor is just a convenient scapegoat so that people don’t get ticked off at Ilúvatar, who gets the credit for the good stuff and gets to foist off blame for the bad stuff, even though he is the one responsible for all of it.  Indeed, he’s the only one**** who could be responsible.

From a certain point of view, Melkor is the being in Ilúvatar’s creation that suffers the most.  He is given the greatest gifts of knowledge and of power of all the created beings in that universe, but he is fated, by his creator, to be disconnected, to be alienated, to feel an emptiness that his brethren don’t seem to share‒he lacks something, he is different, his thoughts are unlike those of his brethren (I can sympathize), and that torments him into becoming the original Dark Lord, the supposed source of all evil in Arda.

But of course, as openly admitted by the being himself, Ilúvatar is the source of all evil in Arda.  It may be worthwhile‒perhaps the gain in beauty and heroism and triumph and courage gained by those who live in his creation more than makes up for the suffering caused by and to the evil creatures.  But those evil creatures are still victims‒perhaps the greatest victims.

Ilúvatar could just have repaired Melkor (and Sauron, etc.).  He could have shown them his wisdom, the error of their ways, could have cured their dysfunction.  But no, that would be boring; that wouldn’t make a good story.  How could he have a heroic and triumphant journey for Frodo and Sam without sacrificing the soul of Sauron to endless emptiness and loneliness and bitterness and fear and hatred, and finally to being blown away into the Void, to suffer there forever (or at least until Ilúvatar decides it’s time to remake the world)?

And let’s not forget Melkor, with his feet chopped off and his head chained between his knees, floating immortally in the Void, with no respite from pain and suffering, no treatment or correction for the flaws and lacks that made him what he was, that Ilúvatar put there to make him an instrument for devising things of greater beauty.  He’s the clay mold around a bronze statue, broken and cast away once the metal cools.

Melkor can’t die, can’t sleep, can’t even change his form anymore.  No wonder he has always hated and envied the favored golden Children.  No wonder he hates Ilúvatar.

Okay, that was a weird digression, and of course, it’s all fiction, though it’s great and wonderful fiction.  But it is a way of highlighting a conclusion that I think is inescapable:  if there is/were a universe created by an infinitely powerful, omniscient, omnipresent being, then that being, and that being alone, would be responsible for all suffering, for all evil.  Everyone else is just a puppet by commission or by omission.

Fortunately(?), there is no reason to suspect such a thing, and I give it quite a low Bayesian credence (though not, perhaps, as low as werewolves).  That doesn’t mean that “free will” and “blame” and “retribution” make any more ethical or moral sense than they would have made otherwise‒they don’t.  But at least we can all cut ourselves and the universe a bit of slack, all the while recognizing that we’re on our own, no one’s going to help us, and it’ll be up to us to sink or to swim…or, maybe, to try to swim but sink anyway.

I don’t know what I’m getting at, but thanks for your patience.  Have a good day, please, if you’re able.

*It was.  Even as I’m editing this, my mood is crashing.  I don’t think it was some manner of self-fulfilling prophecy, but even if it was, I don’t know what I could have done to avoid fulfilling it.  My nature is what it is, while I’m alive‒which doesn’t go a long way to making me attached to that state of existence.

**While, in principle, one cannot really assign absolute certainty to some given proposition, this is a case where my Bayesian prior‒if prior it really is‒is well above 99%.

***Unlike, for instance the fact that, due to atmospheric refraction, we see the sun in the morning before it would technically be directly in view without such refraction, and continue to see it longer than it is truly in line of sight in the evening.  That wouldn’t happen if the Earth had no atmosphere, but then we wouldn’t really care because we probably would all be dead.

****Apart from Tolkien (the author), but I’m approaching this from the point of view of Arda being real, so we’re not going to address that.  Of course, it is a fact that the bad guys in the story are used by the author to create beauty that would not exist if it were not for the hardships and struggles of the heroes.  I know all about this.  I’ve tortured the characters in my stories beyond anything any real people could ever experience.  I guess no creator of any but the simplest of things can ever be truly innocent.

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Apologies for a blogless Monday

I was out sick with some form of enteropathy* yesterday, so I didn’t write a blog post.  I frankly haven’t done much of anything that’s in any way productive since Friday, and I’m not sure I did anything productive then.  I hope no one was too bereft by not being able to read my writing for three days (ha ha).

I’m now sitting at the train station, waiting for the train to the office (well, it doesn’t actually go to the office, but I think you know what I mean), not looking forward to the fact that I’ll have to do extra catch-up work from both Saturday and yesterday.  I really don’t want to have to deal with any of it or with anything at all.

I don’t know why I keep doing anything whatsoever.  I can speculate on certain causes, of course‒habit, the evolved drive simply to continue to survive, a dislike for causing inconvenience to other people, all that sort of thing.  Also, I guess there is the idiotic hope that maybe, just maybe, I will find some answers, some meaning, or some solutions to at least some of my problems.

Honestly, when I get sick like over Sunday through yesterday, I get the wild hope that maybe I’ll need to be hospitalized, and while in the hospital, I’ll be able to get some help for my psychological issues as well as my physical ones.  It’s stupid, I know.  I need to stop hoping for anything.  Hope is a waste of my time.

Ironically, it’s hope that keeps me writing about the fact that I’m having problems going on, problems dealing with my issues and my loneliness and my depression and insomnia and pain and all that crap.  I hope that somehow, by talking about it, I’ll either arrive at some insight or ideas or some semblance of understanding that might lead to some modicum of peace.  Or I hope that someone out there in the WordPress world‒perhaps it should be called the WorldPress‒will have some new ideas or insights or some help to offer.  Or maybe some old friend of mine will read what I write and will reach out and offer a hand or something.  I don’t know what they could do, or what I could do.  But anyway, it is hope that keeps me writing, I guess.

But it’s getting old.  I’m getting tired of it.

When I don’t just dwell on morosity (I don’t know if that’s a proper word), I write about weird shit, like I did on Friday.  I could write about current events, I suppose, but most of those are discouraging and boring.  It’s basically about as fun as writing about the interactions of a very large colony of baboons from the baboons’ points of view.  Baboons don’t want to admit to themselves that most of their choices and motivations are almost entirely simple primate dominance, mating, and social jockeying behaviors.

Humans really are just baboons with delusions of grandeur, some of which are excusable, many (perhaps most) of which are not.  They’re weirdly built and strange to look at, with very rare exceptions.  They think their culture and society and civilization were made somehow, deliberately‒by them it sometimes seems they imagine, though that cannot be possible‒when really, it all just sort of happened and continues just to happen, like any weather phenomenon or termite mound.  This is nothing of which to be ashamed‒it’s the nature of everything as far as I can see‒I just find the hubris disgusting and inexcusable.

Even nature itself seems just weird and rather twisted and horrifying when I look at it these days.  Maybe part of it is that I’m down here in Florida, but when you look closely at the very ad hoc, cobbled together, misery-laden natural world, in which even green plants compete ruthlessly against each other, while insects gnaw the tree trunks, and birds eat the insects and cats eat the birds (when they can) and meanwhile ten thousand other such painful and fear-ridden interactions are taking place in every acre, at all levels, from viruses to bacteria, to yeast, to protozoa, to slime molds and lichen and moss and mold and mushrooms up to grasses and bushes and trees and worms and snails and arthropods and fish and amphibians and reptiles and birds and mammals…everything ultimately just churning away at low entropy energy and converting it into high entropy energy…well, it all seems horrifying and discouraging and very, very dark.

Everything in the world seems alien to me…which I guess must mean that I am alien, since everything else is just there, doing what it does, being what it is, and I’m the one that finds it all daunting and repulsive.

I often bring up the concept of Sisyphus, and it now occurs to me that, maybe, Sisyphus is gradually wearing away the mountain on which he rolls his ever-falling boulder, slowly grinding it down until, finally, it’s level, and the boulder will no longer roll but will stay where Sisyphus puts it, and that will be the state of the universe at very high entropy (I want to say at maximum entropy, but I don’t think there is a maximum overall entropy**).

Of course “maximal” entropy is a state that can go on for a very long time.  It’s like the fable (as told by the 12th Doctor) in which the Emperor asks a shepherd boy to tell him the meaning of eternity.  The shepherd boy says there is somewhere a mountain of pure diamond.  It takes an hour to climb and an hour to go around.  Once every hundred years, a tiny bird comes along and sharpens its beak on the diamond mountain.  And when, after so many repetitions of that once-a-century sharpening happens that the diamond mountain is finally worn down to nothing…then the first second of eternity will have passed.

Even once the “heat death” of the universe comes to pass‒assuming that is what will come to pass‒and all is a haze of elementary particles, barely above absolute zero in an endlessly expanding but empty spacetime, which will come potentially after more than 10 to the 100th power years, that will only be an infinitesimal instant at the uttermost beginning of the eternity of nothingness.

In that quantum vacuum, even a direction of time will have less meaning than would any possible sense of up, down, left, right, forward, and backward in the heart of one of the intergalactic supervoids, in which not even a single distant star or galaxy could be seen with anything but the strongest telescope on long exposure.  To the human eye, in a supervoid, all would be blackness and emptiness in all directions, and in the heat death, that would apply to time as well.  With no change, the past and the future are indistinguishable.

Yet, eventually, new universes, or Boltzmann brains, or other esoterica might yet come to be.  Eternity is a long time.  Or maybe they will be found to have been in what seems to be the future but which is, eventually, the past of some universe with an opposite-pointing “arrow of time”.

Anyway, my point is, the universe is weird and harsh and the hubris of self-important creatures would be laughable if it were not so nauseating.

I don’t think I can do all this much longer.  My stop is coming up soon.  Have a good day.

*You can look it up.

**There is a maximum amount of entropy that can be fit into any given region of spacetime, and that is the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy of the area of an event horizon of a black hole that would enclose that region, expressed in square Planck lengths.  Actually, if memory serves, it’s the logarithm of that surface area (probably the natural logarithm).  If you tried to “add more entropy” to such a region, the black hole would grow, and the horizon would just get larger…you wouldn’t get more entropy “within” the given region.

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Minor meandering, major depression, and a locrian outlook

It’s Tuesday morning now, and if the Beatles are to be believed, we will never see Wednesday morning, because “Tuesday afternoon is never ending.”  We’ll know by tomorrow if they are correct, but experience suggests they are not.

I walked to the train station this morning, and I must say, though the temperature and humidity are no better than before, at least now there is some wind.  It makes a world of difference, at least in the amount of sweat one accumulates.  I’m wearing one of those tee shirts that’s made of material that supposedly “wicks away” perspiration‒presumably while still allowing it to achieve its primary function of carrying away heat‒but when there’s no wind, the things just get saturated.

As I’ve said before (I have been told it; I did not arrive at the conclusion on my own), my sweat apparently doesn’t have much of an odor, at least in the short term.  I also spritzed myself with a bit of “scent bomb” before starting this post and prior to getting on the train.  It’s a mango scented one that everyone I’ve known to have smelled it finds pleasant.  Hopefully that all helps me avoid being too disgusting.  There’s not too much I can do about my face; I guess I could just wear a mask.  It works for Batman and Doctor Doom and Erik, the Phantom of the Opera.  We’ll have to see.

I decided to stop taking melatonin, so I didn’t take any last night.  I’ve been using it for roughly a month, but it doesn’t seem to be helping my sleep, and it’s certainly not improving my mood or my mental acuity, so f*ck it.  If I never have another full night’s restful sleep for the rest of my life, well…what else is new?  I’ll just stick with my multivitamin and stuff like that (and OTC pain medicine) and try just to get more into walking now that I’ve got the shoe situation more or less sorted.

I remain very sad about the fact that the hiking boots seem to cause me more pain when I wear them for long.  Still, heartbreak is the normal, usual state of my life, on scales from the trivial to the profound, so I guess I should just shrug it off as best I can.  The boot debacle is very, very far from my worst disappointment.  It is recent, though, so it still stings a bit; I guess I haven’t cauterized my metaphorical nerve endings well enough.

I listened to a few decent podcasts while walking, and that was beneficial, because they are the sorts of podcasts that deal with ideas in non-simplistic ways, and that approach such ideas as matters for discussion and thought, not for debate and spectacle.  A debate is just a kind of sporting match‒it can be entertaining, and the displays of skill can be exciting.  But the way to come ever closer to ever greater amounts of truth about reality is not via rhetoric and engaging personality (which are mere superficialities that titillate social monkeys such as humans) but by using actual ideas, exchanging information, testing it, and trying to minimize noise and entropy and error.

Truth is not an “Us versus Them”, zero sum game of scoring points and humiliating an opponent.  That which is actually true, in reality, is true for everyone, whether they perceive it or not, whether they know it or not, and whether they believe it or not.

Anyway, that’s a bit of minor meandering.  Today again appears to be one of those days in which I spin from idea to tangent idea here in my blog, for no specific discernable reasons.  At least I don’t discern them.  Maybe some astute and skilled reader can do better.

Oh, if I haven’t already said, I’ve been writing this on my smartphone.  Actually, even if I have already said, I’ve nevertheless been writing this on my smartphone.  That’s one of those truths about reality I mentioned, though it’s not a very big one.

Yesterday at the end of the work day, I just didn’t want to carry the extra weight of the laptop with me.  I was in a horrible, horrible, angrily depressed mood, and was barely able to contain myself, though I think very few people in the office‒perhaps none‒noticed it.  I tend to turn my fury inward, since I know I have the right to harm myself, whereas it’s a much dicier moral proposition to hurt someone else.  So, I quietly burned myself twice yesterday (not severely), and I have a small new blister on my left forearm and a linear welt from a heated paperclip on my right anterior upper arm.

I told you, I’m not doing well.  I don’t just hate my life and myself; I don’t think I can stand it much longer, and I don’t mean that metaphorically, and I don’t think I’m exaggerating.

It’s a month from today until Bilbo’s and Frodo’s birthday, which is also a day before the start of autumn, at the autumnal equinox.  It’s a very good day, I think, for someone to begin an epic journey.  The biggest question, for me, is whether I can wait that long.  I’m not sure that I can.

I guess, yet again, we’ll have to wait and see.  Obviously I’ve been able to endure long enough to write this morning’s blog post, and on my phone, what’s more.  I make no promises about tomorrow.  I don’t even know how good the odds are, honestly.  I’m not doing well, I’m not getting better, and I hate my life a little bit more with every passing day.  I’m also growing less and less fond of the world and of all the people and creatures in it with each passing hour, it seems.

Oh, well.  The world will little note, nor long remember…well, honestly, anything at all.  Everything is effaced by time and entropy, and nothing really has any point outside and beyond itself.  That latter conclusion actually presents a kind of brilliant freedom, really; meaning is not imposed, it is created.  But that can be a heavy burden, and our culture is poorly organized to bring such facts to the clear attention of those within it.

Still, culture has no more extrinsic meaning than does an individual life, nor is it any more planned and finely tuned.  As with all else, it just happens‒or happened I guess, and now merely continues.

Jeez Louise, it’s all both nauseating and boring, and that’s a truly repellent combination.  I have a harder and harder time every day just metaphorically holding my nose and continuing to walk through the sewer of the world.

Ah, well, I’m not getting anywhere with this.  Let’s stop for now.  Please try to have a good day.

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No bootlaces to be tied by this Monday’s child

Well, it’s Monday again—the 21st of August—and today I am writing this on my mini-laptop computer, as I said in my Saturday post that I would try to do.  So, at least some of my intentions do end up happening in the world, if they are minor and mainly inconsequential.

Of course, most of what anyone ever intends, or does, or does not do, is from any kind of serious perspective inconsequential.  One can also make the argument that, since pretty much everything is inconsequential, then everything is consequential, from the corollary or converse or obverse or whatever the term is of Dash’s point in The Incredibles*.  And, to stick with Sci-Fi/Fantasy worlds, the 11th Doctor more than once made the point that, in all his travels through time and space, he’d never met anyone unimportant.

So, congratulations, your decision about what to have for breakfast—and whether or not to have anything at all—is just as important to the cosmos at large as any decision that might be made today by any head of state in the world.

Does that make you feel important?  In what way?  Or if not, why do you think it doesn’t?

[Sorry, somehow that felt like the proper moment to pretend to be a cartoon-style psychotherapist.]

Speaking of psychotherapy and its targeted problems, I missed yet another potential stop-code among the recording numbers in the verification system on Saturday.  As the day started, with the first deal, we were coming close to a potential palindromic sequence, and we had two deals in quick succession, so it seemed we might just land on it this time (although there was never very much of a chance).

Anyway, there was then a long gap between deals, and we blew right past the next potential one by well over a hundred by the time we made our next deal for the day.  There won’t be many more opportunities between now and my semi-planned final takeoff date.

Even if a palindromic number sequence were to come up, I’m not sure what I would do about it.  I don’t truly believe in any kind of mystic notion relating to numbers, I just find them mildly amusing to play with, and so gave myself this notion of an “abort code”**.  But if such a number came up now, I don’t know that its occurrence would sway me one way or another.

In any case, I’m the only one who would know, since no one at work seems to have even the slightest clue that I feel self-destructive in the first place, let alone that I set myself little escape hatches or potential self-messages to give up on ending things.  It’s not for want of wanting to get the idea across to people—without being unnecessarily melodramatic or intrusive, anyway—but I don’t seem to be very good at crying for help.  I guess that’s a pretty big weakness.

Still, if a palindromic number sequence were to come up sometime between now and, say, Bilbo and Frodo’s birthday, I think I would just find it a curiosity.

I think I’m going to start to phase out even the few little things I’ve been doing to try to improve my mental health to whatever limited degree I am able to do it.  As regular readers will know, I stopped taking any form of anti-depressant, since it wasn’t working for me at all, and the side-effects were annoying.  I think I’m going to stop even trying to improve my sleep anymore.  Talk about tilting at windmills; I haven’t been sleeping any better than I used to, and I certainly don’t think my mood has improved.

But if it has, it’s done so in a tiny, miserable little way, which in some ways could be a curse.  It’s a bit like taking a disease someone has that’s killing them and pulling back its intensity just enough so that they can stay alive indefinitely, but not enough to make them feel any better or be any healthier.

Come to think of it, it’s not a bit like that at all; it’s exactly and literally that.

[Brief side note:  I’ve noticing that my laptop is very laggy—at least, my laptop computer is—as I’ve been using it today, especially once I activated the auto-save.  I don’t know why it’s especially slow at this point.  I haven’t upgraded it to Windows 11, since I worry that it wouldn’t handle the change that well, and I don’t like unneeded change myself if I can help it.  Also, I don’t really think that’s the problem.  It was never meant to be a speedy and powerful computer, since I got it just to write stories and blog posts.  Oh, well, maybe it’s just that I haven’t used it in a while.]

So far I’ve resisted the urge to get an Uber to the train station; my plan is to try to force myself to take the bus to the train, and then on the way back this evening I intend to try to walk back to the house from the station.  The only real impediment to the walking is the heat; the exertion itself doesn’t intimidate me.  The potential for added pain is sometimes a concern, but I think I’ve adjusted myself, shoe and knee-brace wise, in ways that keep that stable, so the walking doesn’t make things worse.  Knock on wood, if you do that sort of thing.

Soon it will be time to close out the first draft of this post and head for the bus stop.  I guess I’ll try to listen to some podcast or other on the way.  I don’t have any real interest in listening to any of the audio books I have.  I don’t have much, if any, interest in reading any book books, frankly, digital or paper.  Even non-fiction is getting unworkable, and I’ve long since lost my ability to engage in fiction almost entirely.

I’m also getting bored with the Euchre app game that I play, and with the Sudoku app that I play, and frankly, with everything else.  YouTube is getting boring, the various news sites and blogs I try to read can’t seem to catch my attention or lift my spirits.  Nothing seems to be working, and the days are getting shorter now, so to speak, so the seasonality to my mood is heading into worse territory.  This whole game is getting more uninteresting by the moment.  In the words of the WOPR from the movie War Games, it seems that the only winning move is not to play.

But of course, once you can choose your move, you’ve already been forced to start playing.  It’s all rather unfair and unkind, but that’s reality for you.  You get squeezed into the game without being consulted (since you cannot be consulted until you’re already in the game) by people who were themselves squeezed into the game without being consulted, all the way back to the beginning of the whole thing.  So, I guess none of us should feel too bad if we fail to live up to some expectations or ideals or something along those lines.

That’s enough half-assed philosophy for today.  I hope you all are starting what is going to be a good week, and that you have reasonably good weeks from now until the end of your days.  Why not?  I might as well hope for that for you.  You deserve it as much as anyone does, and probably more than most (from my point of view) since you are people who read.

*When his mother told him, “Everyone’s special, Dash,” he replied with, “Which is another way of saying no one is.”

**Though, in sense, it should be considered an anti-abort code, like the process needed to turn off an auto-destruct sequence for a spaceship.  Why would so many imagined futuristic civilizations make spaceships with self-destruct systems, anyway?  Are they all carrying state secrets of some kind?  We don’t put autodestruct systems into cars or trucks or trains or planes or even warships, tanks, and fighter jets.  It’s a weird thing to do.  I suspect it’s usually just a rather ham handed plot device, and once it happened prominently in one story, other stories mimicked it.

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The sobering fact of a drunkard’s walk of a blog post

It’s Saturday morning now, for future reference, for people who aren’t reading this entry when it is first posted, but at some later date.  I’m sitting at the train station as I write this.  I may finish it before the train arrives; on Saturdays, the trains come only once an hour, much less frequently than during the week, so there’s more idle time to wait at the station, and I write pretty quickly.

I’ve been writing all my posts on my smartphone lately, but I think I’m going to try to remember to bring the laptop back with me from work today.  It’s getting to be too much of a pain to write on the phone, and I write so much more smoothly on the computer.

I just realized that I still have my walking clothes from yesterday in my backpack.  When I got back to the house, I was pretty beat, and I didn’t even think to unpack them.  It’s okay, I spray them and dry them in front of a little fan during the day, so they don’t really smell, but it’s very annoying.  At least they don’t weigh much.  I vaguely thought about unpacking them during the middle of the night, during one of my oodles of nocturnal awakenings, but the thought obviously didn’t stay in my head.

I really didn’t feel well yesterday.  The whole day, I had full body aches and soreness, as if I were fighting a systemic infection of some kind, and I even developed a very slight fever‒only about half a degree Fahrenheit over my usual temperature (yes, I did check my temperature, since I felt as if I were getting sick).  Of course, I was going to come to work today even if I were truly ill, unless it was bad enough for me to be hospitalized.  If I missed one weekend, I would have to make it up by working two Saturdays in a row, and I cannot tolerate that possibility.

I can barely tolerate going to work at all, but then again, I can barely tolerate being at the house, either.  I can barely get through anything at all, and only the force of habit‒and the terrible stress and tension that goes with deviating from habits and expectation‒keeps me functioning.

I guess that’s what the gods did to Sisyphus to keep him rolling that stupid boulder; every time he started to falter and think it was futile, which it was, he probably felt terrible stress and anxiety, and the only way to assuage it even slightly was to keep pushing the stupid thing.  So, it’s either steadily elevating anxiety or perpetual futile behavior‒or death or some other kind of breakdown, I guess, though those were not an option for Sisyphus.

I may have mentioned it before, but I sometimes think that Prometheus had it better than Sisyphus.  He felt more pain (probably) but at least he didn’t have to be an active participant in his own punishment.

Speaking of anxiety and repetitive tasks, I occasionally wonder how often on any given day I feel the need to check and make sure that I still have my phone, my keys, my wallet and everything in my pockets.  Dozens at least.  Perhaps, occasionally, hundreds.  I also can’t stand still without either flipping a pen in the air (four turns per flip) and catching it or rolling dollar coins on the backs of my fingers.

Oh, by the way, I just got on the train.  I didn’t have quite enough time to write the whole post before it arrived, though maybe I would have been able to do so with my laptop.  I definitely need to try to remember to bring it with me today.

It’s all rather pointless, of course, but then again, so is everything.  Even our sense of law and order is weird, when you get right down to it.  I mean, why should I feel obligated to follow local, state, federal, and Constitutional law, let alone international law?  I do feel like I should follow them (see above about anxiety-driven behavior), but from an ethical point of view it’s very hard to see that I should have any obligation to follow those codes and rules that predated me, and in which I had no say, which were enacted by people who may as well be another species from me.

Some of the people who made the laws probably meant well and were doing the best they could to try to keep their society functioning, while others were probably merely self-serving, responding to lobbyists (or the equivalent) and fads and whims.  They would not have been thinking deeply about moral and ethical concerns for their present and future, but rather were engaged in the usual primate dominance maneuverings of the naked house ape (genus Homo species, possibly misnamed, sapiens), which are so similar to those of the baboon and the chimpanzee.

The notion of a social contract has always been a bit of a farce, from my point of view.  To have an actual contract, both (or all) parties have to have agreed to it, and for it to be morally, if not merely legally, binding then they have to have entered into it without duress.  One cannot, ethically, be born into a contract, any more than anyone can sensibly be born carrying the guilt of the deeds of their ancestors or antecedents‒thus the absurdity of the notion of original sin.  The famous teenage statement, “I didn’t ask to be born” is an entirely legitimate point.

I don’t know how I got into this tangent path.  I guess it’s a sort of free-association thing, or perhaps a proverbial drunkard’s walk.  I wish it were more therapeutic for me, but hopefully it’s at least sometimes interesting for you readers.

Speaking of that, I noticed that WordPress is apparently offering the option of creating a paid newsletter‒I guess it’s meant to be a bit analogous to what some people are doing on Substack and the like‒as a way for people to make some money with their blogging.  Presumably, WordPress would take a small cut, which seems only fair.  I think it’s all a nice idea, and paid services are often more pleasant than those that use advertising, at least if the advertising is intrusive.  I don’t mind banner ads and sidebar ads, but ones that pop up and block the screen make me never want to go back to a site again.

Still, there are only so many subscriptions a single person can have‒although, when paper magazines were still the thing, I sometimes felt that my parents wanted to test the upper limits of that claim.  They loved reading those magazines, and my father would accumulate vast piles of them near the foot of his chair.  I think they would have been avid consumers of online media‒actually, my father probably was.  He was a computer guy by profession, and was always ahead of me on that front.

It’s rather funny to imagine anyone paying to read my blog.  It’s a lovely fantasy‒hey, maybe more people would read it if they had to pay to read it‒but it seems unlikely.  Very few people pay even to read my books or stories, though on Kindle they are cheaper than a cup of Starbucks “coffee”, and they are more convenient.

Well, anyway, we’re getting close to my stop, and this has really been a wandering, meandering post.  I don’t even know what I’ve been writing about.  But, hey, if you want to support me monetarily, since I don’t have a Patreon or a Ko-Fi account or a WordPress paid newsletter thing, just buy one of my books.  Or buy one of my short stories, even‒they’re just 99 cents.

Enough self-serving tripe.  I’m no good at that kind of thing.  Have a good weekend if you can, everyone.  I will try (and almost certainly fail) to do so as well.

arthur drunk

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Walking and thinking of the ups and downs of knowing what is or isn’t true

It’s Friday, but that’s not really a big deal for me, since I’m working tomorrow.  Honestly, though, the difference between leisure time and work time for me anymore is mainly just where I happen to be, since I don’t find any significant joy in either situation.  There’s not much I can do about that, other than just lay down and die, which has its appeal.

I walked to the train station this morning, having walked very little yesterday.  I made good time, and my ankles seem to be okay, more or less, which is nice.  I listened to parts of a couple of old podcasts while walking, one by Sean Carroll, the other by Sam Harris, and each one led me briefly to make a voice recording of a thought that came to me at the time.

First, the Sean Carroll one led me to make a rather bad play on words:  “It’s no exaggeration that to say that y equals one over x is to be speaking hyperbolically.”  It’s a silly play on the fact that “hyperbolic” can refer to an exaggeration or to the mathematical shape, a hyperbola.

Hey, I’m be here all week.  Make sure to tip your servers.

(Should you tip your local area network, though?  That’s a trickier question.)

So, that was the silly thought.  The more serious one came as I listened to Sam Harris’s podcast with Nina Schick, the author of Deepfakes: The Coming Infocalypse, in which they discussed the advent and potential impacts of the increasing ability to make (and the decreasing cost of) convincing simulated representations of real people’s voices and appearances.  Of course, among the potential issues being presented was that this will actually increase the deniability of inconvenient events for political and other public figures, but at root, to me, it brings to mind something I wrote some time ago in a blog post on the problem of attribution.

When one quotes a person who said something one thinks is worth repeating, it’s generally considered appropriate to give an attribution, to credit the quote.  But even before the advent of possible deep fakery, the tendency to attribute quotes is a problem because humans are so idiotically tribal.  If you say a quote comes from Karl Marx or from Ayn Rand, you will automatically gain free credit and presumptive agreement from one group and automatic dismissal, disdain, and even hatred from another.

That’s stupid.  It’s not who says something that makes it true or valuable or worthy of note; it’s the actual thing being said.  This is one of the reasons I dislike formal debates, and the techniques of rhetoric in general.  They all boil down to primate dominance displays‒manipulations rather than actual, useful reasoning and sharing of the best available information.

I remember back in the late 90s, when people were getting all excited about the burgeoning web and internet, and about how they were going to make information so much cheaper and more readily available.  I agreed that would be the case, but I also had real misgivings, because I knew that also meant that misinformation, disinformation, and noise would become ever easier to disseminate.  And now, of course, people can “see” things online that never took place, and which nevertheless will influence their sense of what is real.  But reality does exist, outside of any perceptions or biases, though we may always only imperfectly apprehend it.

I think people shouldn’t worry nearly as much about who said something as about what exactly was said and whether or not it was true or plausible or reasonable or rational.  I suppose that being aware of a source’s credentials and track record can make one better able to decide whether to pay any attention whatsoever to what they say or write‒we all have only finite time and attention‒but even so, you should think rigorously about what someone says, no matter who says it.  Your favorite person can be (and is) wrong about many things, and your most hated enemy can say things that are correct (sometimes about you).

Hitler and Stalin were both quite aware that 2 + 2 = 4 and that the sun comes up in the east (so to speak), but the fact that these odious figures accepted such truths doesn’t make the facts any less true.  And the fact that the son and nephew of beloved historical political figures claims (miserabile* dictu) that vaccines cause autism and Wi-Fi causes cancer does not for a moment gainsay all the research that has demonstrated that they do not and that it does not.

Maybe people should just stick to print media and perhaps even only to printed print media.  At least there’s some cost to its production and that might weed out some of the riff-raff.  Though, come to think of it, maybe it wouldn’t.  It’s not as though there haven’t long been whole bookstores full of psychic and supernatural bullshit, and large sections of such material selling quite well even in reputable emporia.

Maybe people should just use online media of various kinds as entertainment but not as sources of information and evidence for too many things.  Then again, there are very good science programs and other kinds of information online that are wonderful to behold, and that can be informative and thought-provoking.  Even some blogs are quite good (this is probably not one of them).

I guess, maybe people should just try to think carefully and rigorously, and to recognize their own fallibility and that of their idols, as well as the potential for their “enemies” to be right sometimes and to be often other than pure incarnations of evil.

Maybe pigs should grow wings and take a skiing trip to Hell.

I’m not optimistic.  But hopefully I’ll be dead before everything goes to shit.  Unless that’s already happened, and this is the dystopia.  After all, how does one know one is in a failed society from the inside?  I suppose there are objective facts to be noticed in such a case, but that’s the heart of the problem.

Heavy sigh.

1 over x adapted

*That was deliberate, not a typo.

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If I have veil’d my blog, I turn the trouble of my countenance merely upon myself

Hello.  Good morning.

I really wished that this would be the Thursday blog post that I would title with the unaltered Shakespeare quote, “The rest is silence”, which is Prince Hamlet’s last line before he dies.  Then maybe I would share a brief clip from the video for the Radiohead song No Surprises, the part where Thom Yorke sings, “I’ll take a quiet life, a handshake of carbon monoxide, and no alarms and no surprises.  No alarms and no surprises.  No alarms and no surprises.  Silent.  Silent.”

Unfortunately, this will probably not be my final fit nor my final bellyache.  I certainly still feel compelled to write this today.  I woke up quite early, as usual, and lay in my room just staring about, wondering if there was any excuse I could give for not going to the office, and whether staying at the house would be in any way better than just going in.  Neither seemed to be the case.  So, finally, I got up, showered, and decided to take an Uber to the train very early.  In fact, I arrived just as the first train of the day was pulling into the station, though I made no attempt to catch that one, since it was functionally impossible.

And now, here I am, sitting and sweating and writing.

A weird thing did happen as I was getting ready to go this morning.  I put in my earphones and pulled up YouTube Music and chose my playlist “Favorite Songs”, with YouTube doing its little self-promotion about some new, unrequested service it now provides or something, in which I had no interest.  Anyway, I tapped the “shuffle playlist” option, and the song/video that came up first was my own song, Schrodinger’s Head.  But the song that began playing was none other than the aforementioned No Surprises.  It continued to play, overtop of my own song’s logo and screen, even when I backed up to the beginning of the song.  It didn’t correct itself until I’d skipped to the next song and then came back, at which point it was my own song that started playing.

That’s a strange glitch.  Does it mean that the program loads “video” and “sound”, at least in YouTube Music, as two separate processes?  I usually just go for the song rather than the video option (when that’s available), but I have always guessed that doing so simply involved the suppression of the video portion of the file in some sense.  But I’ve not ever seen a mixed song and video from different sources.

Not that I’m bothered.  It’s far from insulting if a Radiohead song presents as if it were my own.  Well, it might be insulting to Radiohead, but not to me.

Anyway, I didn’t actually listen to either song at the time.  I realized that what I really wanted was actual silence, and just leaving the earphones in but not playing anything is the closest I can come to that.  Of course, tinnitus means I haven’t experienced full silence for about 15 years, at least not in my right ear, but I can try to come as close as possible.

My pain wasn’t as bad yesterday during the day as it had been on the previous two days, and that’s definitely a good thing, though now it’s acting up more severely again.  That’s not really anything new.

As I stood outside waiting for the Uber, the air was as usual in the morning lately:  stagnant and still in addition to being hot and humid.  But far up and away to the east and south were high clouds, and there was rather frequent lightning to be seen, then and when I was riding to the train.

We used to call that “heat lightning” and I think people imagined it was something different than usual lightning, but my current understanding is that it is the same electrostatic phenomenon, merely much higher in the air (where I suspect the resistivity is lower, though I may be wrong about that…in any case, there would be more cosmic ray bombardment to seed ionization paths for lightning to follow).

Of course, one never hears thunder from heat lightning.  Maybe that’s because it’s so high and far that the sound is thin even to begin with, since sound travels more slowly and less effectively through less dense media.  And then, of course, as it hits the lower atmosphere, trying to enter a denser medium (with faster propagation speeds) it might be unable to penetrate.  Indeed, there might* be a phenomenon analogous to total internal reflection, the process that, among other things, allows fiber optic cables to work with essentially no signal loss.

When light is traveling through a dense medium, like glass or diamond, in which it moves much more slowly relative to its speed through air or vacuum, and it comes to an interface where it would pass out into a much less dense medium‒where it would travel much more quickly‒if it strikes at too shallow an angle, it will not exit its current medium at all, but will instead fully reflect, effectively without any loss.

My first thought was that it was the opposite situation for sound traveling from high, thin air to lower, much denser air.  But then it occurred to me that it’s not the density of the medium that directly causes total internal reflection, or any refraction, really.  It’s the differential speed of propagation that causes refraction and total internal reflection**.  And sound travels more quickly through a denser medium, not less quickly, whereas light does the opposite.  So, comparatively slow sound in thinner, upper air, coming to denser, lower air, might reflect if it arrives at a shallow enough angle.

It’s somewhat like being below the surface of a pool.  We know that sound travels much better and farther in water than air, but if your head is underwater, you may not be able at all to hear people talking who are standing near the pool, and you might not even be able to hear loud ambient music (unless a subwoofer is in contact with the ground/floor and thence to the pool).

I think I’m more or less on track with this as at least part of the explanation for the fact that one never hears the thunder that accompanies very, very high lightning.  Of course, some of it could simply be ordinary attenuation, since the intensity of sound falls off as the square of the distance (as with light, also…this is one of those physical facts of reality that is directly caused by the geometry of three-dimensional space, nothing more esoteric and nothing less profound).  But that doesn’t seem to me to be an adequate explanation for why one never hears the sound of “heat lightning”.

Well, that’s enough ado about nothing for today.  It’s more than I expected or wanted to write.  I mostly just wanted to write some form of goodbye.  But the horrible, terrible, inexorable pressure of habit and routine in someone with a particular type of nervous system can be nearly as potent and irresistible as the laws of reflection and refraction and geometry.  I can only seem to escape such habits when I am forced by external circumstances to do so, but then new habits and routines‒compulsions, really‒take the place of the old ones.  I try to procure useful habits when I can, but one cannot entirely pick and choose such things.

I fear my only escape will happen when I actually die.  Of course, if time and space are fixed and super-deterministic, then even that might not actually be an escape.  As far as my experience goes, it might just lead to me starting over at the beginning, like a video being played on a loop.

Nietzsche actually used that notion (obviously not based in Einsteinian concepts, but it doesn’t have to be) as the basis for a thought-provoking question:  if you knew for certain that, once you die, you would then live your life over and over again exactly as it happened this time around, how would you change your current and future behavior?  Is your life now one that would horrify you to repeat infinitely, or would it be okay?

Inquiring minds want to know, I guess.  Or maybe not.

TTFN

no surprise

*This is just me speculating in real time.  If anyone knows the correct answer, please let me know.

**Thus the frequent demonstrative analogy used to teach about refraction:  a row of soldiers marching side by side coming at an angle to a place where they leave hard, firm ground and enter deep mud, which will tend to change the angle of their movement.  Alternately, one often encounters the story of a lifeguard running across the beach to save someone drowning, needing to judge the best place to enter the ocean to minimize the overall time taken to reach the swimmer.  Too much time in the water slows the lifeguard too much, too much time on land makes the path longer, and thus also slows the lifeguard.  The lifeguard’s path of least time turns out to be exactly analogous to what light does when refracting through differing media.  A brilliant, “for-the-layperson” account of the quantum mechanics behind this is given in Feynman’s QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter.