Psychology

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“Cobwebs long since overrun by an old Wellington boot”

Welcome to a rare Saturday blog post.  You can’t say I didn’t warn you that I would be writing a post today.

Actually, of course you can say it.  You can say anything your mouth, lungs, and brain are capable of creating as a sound.  Think of Chomsky’s perfectly grammatical but nonsensical sentence, “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously,” or Stephen Fry’s even more nonsensical, “Hold the newsreader’s nose squarely, waiter, or friendly milk will countermand my trousers.”

We are not constrained by nature to be truthful (or even sensible) in what we say.  Human society would probably work better overall if we were incapable of lying (at least actively).  It would take a bit of time to get used to it, and many people would have to learn just not to say anything most of the time.  But I think it would be better, certainly in a peaceful society‒which, alas, we have not yet achieved.

On the other hand, deception is a huge part of nature (the living part of it at least), in one way or another.  Especially when there are predators and prey and competitors for mates and for food and so on, lying‒in one sense or another‒is an extremely useful survival strategy and tactic, at least when done well and carefully.

It may be that, in a mature and peaceful civilization, lying is detrimental and to be discouraged‒indeed, to be eliminated if possible*.  But as long as there is not true peace and true freedom‒as long as there are people who will take advantage of and harm and victimize other people‒sometimes deception will be necessary.

It is, or at least it can be, analogous to the notion of using violence in self defense.  Pacifism seems all well and good on the surface, but when there exist people willing to use violence against others in aggressive, oppressive ways**, then pacifism is just a fatal vulnerability.  Pacifistic “resistance” can work if one’s opponent has a relatively strong moral code or conscience.  But against an actual psychopath, or a psychopathic ideology, non-violent passivity is just doing your opponent a favor.

And no, despite what V said, ideas are not bulletproof.  They can be bullet resistant, but enough bullets in enough brains‒for instance, the brains of every person who holds a particular idea‒can erase any idea as it is.  Some ideas are harder to wipe out than others, and some spring up anew in disparate places even after being eliminated, but enough destruction can obliterate anything that is not a fact of external nature***.

So, violence and deception are at times necessary in a society in which there are occasional psychopaths, or at least psychopathic behaviors.  But that doesn’t mean we should not aspire to create a society that is honest and peaceful.  It just means we cannot try to skip to the end by eliminating all capacity for violence and deceit in ourselves; that can only be done when (if) all potential threats have been quelled, and brought more or less permanently out of the realm of possibility.

Wow, I had no intention or notion to write a post centered on moral philosophy today.  And it was all triggered by my cliché opening sentences.  It’s quite strange just how stochastic my writing can be when I haven’t planned ahead.  And, of course, I never plan these posts ahead of writing them.

Also, in case it’s not clear, I don’t plan them retrospectively, since as I said yesterday, I am not capable of violating the laws of causality (such as by traveling faster than the speed of light in a vacuum).

I think that’s enough for a Saturday morning now, though.  I hope you’re all having a good weekend, whether it’s a holiday weekend for you or not (it both is and very much isn’t for me).

Until next time, please be well.  And, if you can manage it, keep being well even after next time.

*There can still always be a fifth-amendment style right not to speak and a right to privacy.  Unless and until there exists some form of communal mind, I think there are legitimate rights to privacy.

**Such people do exist, and they may exist as long as there are people, springing up de novo at times, because it can be an evolutionarily and game theoretically stable strategy to be a psychopath in a group of relatively honest people.  See:  POTUS.

***It can eliminate our knowledge of such things, but knowledge is an epiphenomenon.  The laws of physics themselves do not require humans to know that they exist in order to do so.  To believe that humans are the center of the universe (literally or metaphorically) or that the human mind creates reality is astonishing and contemptible hubris.

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“He thrusts his fists against the posts…”

Hey, everybody.  It’s Friday, and I’m not sure if I will be working tomorrow, so I guess just keep your eyes open for a blog post in case there is one.  I suspect that I will not be working, since many of the silly and tragic and chaotic and even the arguably good (but disruptive) things going on in the lives of people at the office persist, flowing and whirling through the phase space of possibilities, forming vortices and other turbulent and chaotic patterns.  Still, I may be wrong.  It would be far from the first time.  So take a peek tomorrow morning, if you’re up and up for it; if I work, I will (probably) write a post.

Anyway, I want to keep this short for today if I can.  I just feel worn out and over-stressed by the various chaotic things happening and by other things in my life.  Some of them should, on their surface, seem good, at least in some aspects, though I think anyone could imagine that they wouldn’t be exclusively good.  And there is a surprising amount of associated stress* and tension and consequent depression and worsened insomnia‒and it all doesn’t help how I feel about myself.

And then, of course, though I don’t very often talk about it, there is always my chronic pain.  Always.

In addition, despite the silliness from yesterday’s post, the holidays do stress me out.  It’s a frustrating kind of stress, because while I feel very lonely, I’m all but certain I would not be able to tolerate being part of someone’s celebration.  I’m too chronically “on my own”, so I can’t even readily imagine myself taking part in any kind of get together unless I was on some kind of powerful anxiolytic or similar.

Maybe I’ve gone too far down the “stranded alien” rabbit hole.  I guess that’s better than going down the “stranded rabbit” alien hole, though neither one sounds inviting.  Anyway, I’ve just gotten too accustomed to being isolated and non-social and paranoid.  Not that I actually think people are out to get me**; I just don’t think people are safe.  They are not trustworthy.  This is not meant to be an aspersion on their characters.  I don’t think they are (necessarily) malicious.  I just think they’re unreliable in too many, too important ways.

So, despite whatever dreams and wishes I have‒and I do have them, though I try not to waste too much energy on them‒I expect that the state I’m in right now (I don’t mean Florida) is the state I’ll be in for the remainder of my existence.  And that is at least part of why I don’t desire my existences persistence.  It’s not great for me and it seems terribly unlikely that it would be any significant good for anyone else.

One benefit of being isolated is surely that at least one’s existence or nonexistence is unlikely to be very disruptive of other people’s lives, one way or another.  And my personal ethos contains a strong aspect of trying not to cause other people trouble, and feeling horrible if I do.

It’s not even about whether those other people actually feel inconvenienced or troubled; even if they reassure me, it probably will not help.  I am the one who experiences the shame of bothering other people.  It’s not as much an empathy-related phenomenon as a sort of Categorical Imperative kind of problem.  Well, no, that’s not the right reference.  I think the term is Deontology.  It’s a rule I have to follow even if it has no impact on anyone in any way.

To be clear, though, this is not a philosophical stance on my part.  I haven’t chosen to do this based on any reasoning or logic; I’m just using those things to explain it.  It’s very much a setting-point, akin to a black-box strategy devised through gradient descent in machine learning.  As such, it is something preceding and overwhelming any potential rational assessment and judgment on my part.

I don’t think I’m expressing this well.  Perhaps that’s partly because I don’t fully understand it in any kind of systematic, algorithmic fashion.  Perhaps it’s not understandable in such terms, but is rather the product of the various nonlinear processes that entail the brain functions of human beings.

Anyway, that’s enough for now.  If I work tomorrow, I’ll probably write a blog post.  If I don’t work tomorrow, I almost certainly will not write a blog post.  This leaves a little gray area in the outcome “no blog post” because it’s not completely impossible that I might work and yet not write a blog post.  So, not working almost certainly implies no blog post, but no blog post does not imply not working with as strong a tendency.  This is a fact of probabilities relating to Bayesian statistics that sometimes throws people off, but it’s important in practical matters, such as in knowing what to make of a “positive” screening test result, say for an infection or cancer.

I leave it as an exercise for you, if you’re interested (also if it’s not just obvious to you), to work out why these things are so.  And I also leave it as an exercise for you to have a good day and a good weekend.

*Not to be confused with the Associated Press, though there are commonalities.

**I don’t rule it out categorically, of course, since it is a physical possibility and thus does not have a truly zero chance of happening.  But it seems unlikely.  Why would anyone be truly out to get me?  Whose priorities could be so out of whack that I would be their focus?  Still, people are stupid (present company included), so I can’t dismiss it completely, and I always have such possibilities at least in the back of my mind.

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The blogger’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, doth glance from heaven to Earth, from Earth to heaven

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday again, so I’m starting this post with my traditional salutation.  Well, actually, I already started it with that salutation, so I’m telling you what I did right after you just saw that I had already done it.  It’s not terribly efficient, but I guess at least I have provided some explanation for the uninitiated.

As of today, there are only eleven shopping months until my birthday, so you might want to start thinking about what you’re going to do to celebrate when the time comes.  Not that there’s any guarantee that I’ll even still be around for my next birthday, but maybe you’ll want to commemorate it in some way after I’m dead.

Heck, maybe I’ll even be famous after I’m dead.  That would be a little bit ironic, right?  I’m not saying it wouldn’t be nice, in a sense, for a lot of people to like my books (and maybe my music and my other writing) after I’m gone, but I won’t know about it, so it’s at best a theoretical niceness.  It would be better if people liked them while I’m alive.

I’m very bad at self-promotion, though, and I’m also bad at connecting with people who do promoting for others.  I have a poor self-image, for one thing (the fact that it’s bad doesn’t mean it’s inaccurate), and I also am just very socially awkward and find it very uncomfortable and even shameful to try to talk myself up, as it were.

I guess I would have been better off if I were a narcissist without shame; then I might be much more successful.  Heck, I might even be elected president, against the better judgment of practically every sane and sensible and moral and situationally aware person in the whole effing world.

At least the shameless don’t tend to be hypocrites.  That’s small consolation for everyone else, I guess, but the truly shameless don’t even pretend to try to follow any moral code that other people follow, and in that tiny way only, it’s mildly refreshing.

Let’s not go down that road, though, shall we?  It’s a depressing insight into human nature.

It’s the holiday season now, so to speak, at least here in the US.  Next Thursday is Thanksgiving, in fact, and the office is more or less certain not to be open, so I won’t be writing a blog post then.  Instead, I’ll be cooking a turkey and making some stuffing and potatoes and cranberry sauce and green beans and some pumpkin pie and apple pie and all that for all the guests who will be coming to celebrate with me.

Actually, though, since all my guests are imaginary, the food can be imaginary as well, which does save on expenses.  If I have nothing else, I have a good imagination.  I can dream up the best Thanksgiving feast you could ever eat.

Mind you, if I’m doing the dreaming, it’s going to conform to my tastes, and I don’t feel too bad about that.  All the above items are, of course, things I’ve always enjoyed at prior Thanksgiving dinners.  There will, however, be no mushrooms of any kind in my feast, nor zucchini, nor eggplant (these latter aren’t really part of most traditional feasts, anyway, unless I’m very mistaken).

Also, though there will be salad—I love a good salad—there will be no cucumbers, no tomatoes*, nothing related to avocados, and no walnuts or pecans or stuff like that.  Still, I don’t need to go into an exhaustive list of banned foods, since I’m the one imagining the feast; I just won’t add them!

When other people are involved, though, it can be useful to have a list of items someone cannot or will not eat.  Then, whatever someone makes to eat should be at least tolerable to everyone.  And after all, even merely tolerable food should be quite a good thing, since food is a fundamental and necessary good.

It’s a bit like sex:  even relatively boring and banal (don’t!) sex is better than almost anything else one might do on a given day, unless there are factors that get in the way**.  Of course, because of all the cultural baggage we have about sex—partly rooted in the idiocy of Saul of Tarsus, but amplified by other various repressive assholes throughout history—sometimes even sex between consenting adults can be associated with lots of hang-ups and discomfort.  It’s a shame, really.

Oh, well, it’s not as though I’m the most well-adjusted and clear-headed of people, so I only have so much of a leg to stand on to criticize other people’s foibles.  I’m so socially awkward and alexithymic that I’ve generally felt uncomfortable ever initiating anything, even in a long-term, committed relationship.  I also have a habit of trying not to impose my feelings or preferences or urges on other people, so I tend to feel ashamed or guilty about even considering making amorous overtures.

Sorry, I don’t know why I’m sharing these embarrassing details.  Maybe I’m dying and this is some kind of subconscious confession or something.  I mean, of course, we’re all dying, all the time.  But it may be more precipitous in my case—I’m not aware of it being so, but I don’t know—and maybe my inner mind could pick up on the fact.  Or maybe it has plans it’s not telling me.

All right, enough.  I hope you have a good Thursday and then a good day on each of the rest of the days of your life.  You’ve slogged through my weird writing; you deserve some type of reward.

TTFN

*I like—often I love—almost everything made from tomatoes, but raw tomatoes gross me out.

**In my case, sex has a lot in common with my Thanksgiving feast, ha ha.

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Blog post for 11-18-2025, Tuesday

Well, it’s Tuesday and I’m already exhausted after just one day of work for the week.  Mind you, it was a strange day at work, with people struck with family tragedies, people with personal catastrophes (such as a DUI), my coworker out sick, and all that sort of stuff.  The things that were/are not usual were manifold, and they are very unpleasant to me.

Also, I’ve had a dull, kind of pressure-like headache for the last perhaps 18 hours (with some lulls), and it feels almost like a “mini migraine”.  It certainly interferes with my mental acuity.  It may interfere with my writing; I can’t really tell.  If anyone notices anything regarding that, I would be grateful if you would let me know*.

I also feel a bit queasy, which goes along with the low-grade migraine notion.  I am going in to the office anyway, though.  First off, I don’t know if my coworker will still be out sick, and I don’t want to leave other people too much in the lurch.  In addition, if I get behind on things for one day, I’ll just have to catch up on things the next day, eliminating any potential benefit from resting for a day.

Also, let’s be real:  I don’t enjoy spending time at the house.  I need to rest there frequently‒longer than I actually do‒but it’s not pleasant for me.

Speaking of rest, I had a really bad sleep last night.  I mean, I didn’t sleep more than maybe half an hour before 3 this morning.  Then I dozed for a wee bit‒less than an hour.  But now I’m up, exhausted but not sleepy.

What am I doing?  Why am I doing it?  What is the point?  Why do I bother going on?  Is it just fear of death that prevents me from dying?  Or is it also the fear of hurting people who matter to me?

But if they love me, why would they want me to suffer?  I understand that there is nothing they can do for me, of course.  But then they should accept things they cannot change, not wish for some other person to endure without reward or with no assistance.

Actually, all these things, these wishes from other people, are in my head.  Very few people have said they want me not to die.

I don’t think that’s because all the other people do want me to die.  Most people are probably pretty much indifferent.  Most people don’t worry about other people much because they’re too busy imagining that other people are “worrying about” them.

But they aren’t.  It’s just not workable.  People think about other people, of course, and especially about their family and friends.  But they cannot think about them much.  I don’t know what the percentage is, but it’s hard enough trying to pay attention to oneself and one’s actions, to try to manage one’s days and nights, one’s work, one’s meals, one’s rest.

The percentage of time spent dwelling on other people instead of oneself cannot be very high in the double digits, if that.  This is not an indictment or a judgment.  I think it is literally just about all that people can do.

This is surely why narcissists are always so unhappy.  They can never get as much attention as they wish and imagine they deserve from other people.

We should all probably let go of our sense of entitlement.  The universe “promises” us all one thing and one thing only:  that everything, all this that exists around us, like ourselves, will end.  It may then begin again in some sense, but that doesn’t change the fact that it ended.  Just because there’s another sausage after the link, doesn’t mean the preceding sausage isn’t nevertheless gone.

Wow, that’s a weird analogy or metaphor:  The universe as one sausage in an endless chain of sausage links.

I guess it makes as much sense as many such metaphors, and more sense than some.  I don’t really know what point I was trying to make, if there was one, but at least it ought to be somewhat memorable.  That’s worth something, right?

I’m too tired to contemplate any more at the moment.  I’m going to finish this off now and call it good enough.  I hope you all have a good day (or rather, that each of you has a good day).

But in closing, a thought just occurred to me.  Remember, mushrooms are not vegetables.  As fungi, they are more closely related to your fish and your chicken and your beef (and you) than they are to corn and carrots and peas and potatoes.

Okay, that’s enough.  Please have a good day.

*My gratitude is probably utterly worthless, of course, like my sorrow and regret and disappointment, not to mention my love and my joy and my dreams.

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“…like a ghastly rapid river, through the pale door…”

It’s Monday again.  It keeps doing this, starting a new work week, despite the demonstrated futility of everything.  You’d think that our culture had all read The Myth of Sisyphus as one and had decided to embrace that futility.

But, of course, embracing the absurd and working endlessly and finding happiness in that meaningless repetition is just what the exploiters‒whoever they may be‒would want you to do.  So maybe

But if so, it’s almost certainly an accidental one.

Even true “conspiracies” in the world (which are less common than you’d think) are, I suspect, rarely planned out ahead of time; they simply happen.  Some course or tendency exists that a few alert people, or just lucky people, recognize as something they can exploit for their own gain, and they do, and the process becomes self-reinforcing.  But no one thought it up.  It’s like the nonrandom survival of randomly varying replicators.  Reality is too complex for even very bright minds to create highly complicated and intricate conspiracies ahead of time.

I’ve written about all of this before, and frankly, I’m tired of discussing it right now.  If you’re interested, go find my earlier discussions, here and/or on Iterations of Zero.

Today, I’m not sure what to write about, though.  Nevertheless, I am writing.  I guess the Sisyphus reference comes all too naturally in such situations, doesn’t it?

I don’t really have much to discuss, now that I think about it.  I had a nice evening Friday, albeit too short of one, but otherwise, there’s nothing really going on.  At least, there’s nothing I know of in the world right now that’s of particular interest to me.

Despite the fact that I am coming off a full-length weekend, on which I had a nice Friday evening watching a few Doctor Who episodes with my youngest, I already feel very tired.  I think that’s probably not too related to broad corporeal processes‒though my chronic pain makes even stationary existence exhausting‒but probably has at least something to do with the waning length of daylight as we approach the Winter Solstice (still more than a month away).

I’m definitely a bit susceptible to seasonal affective effects, on top of my tendency toward difficult to treat dysthymia, which I now suspect has always been so difficult to treat because it’s related to my ASD.

Coincidentally‒but not surprisingly‒my first big and particularly recalcitrant depression happened not long after my ASD repair*.  It’s fairly common for patients to suffer from depressive syndromes after having had open heart surgery.  I didn’t know this at the time (I was only 18) but I experienced it firsthand, and I learned all about it later.

I even wrote a review paper about the neurologic side-effects of surgeries that involve heart-lung bypass.

Again, I’ve written about all this crap before; I’m sorry to rehash it.  Please feel free to go hunt down the various mentions of all this in my prior writing here and on IoZ.  If anyone finds any particularly interesting tidbits, feel free to share them and/or the links in the comments, so others might be able to find them more quickly than you did.

I know, I know‒no one is interested in any of that shit, no one is going to look it up, and no one is going to share it.  I’m being patently ridiculous.  But I feel that I must write something, since I’m writing at all.  Thankfully, I’m nearly at the target number of 701 words, so soon I’ll be able to draw this tediousness to a close, at least for today.  It’s too much to hope‒for you, for me, for everybody‒for this to be the last such post for anything other than tragic reasons.

Life is almost always disappointing, though if you don’t expect things‒as the Tao recommends‒you will not be disappointed.

Speaking of expectations not playing out, on the way toward the office this morning, I waited at an intersection where there is a right turn arrow that crosses what would be my route.  Before the walk signal turned, a car turned in front of me, as was appropriate.  Then the signal changed and I had the right of way, so I went.

As I half-expected, a car on its way in went to turn right and had to stop short to avoid plowing straight through me.  I took no evasive action, just muttered to myself, “Hit me, hit me, hit me…” as I walked along.  Alas, the driver did no such thing, so as I continued through the intersection, I looked back at the car and muttered, “Pussy.”

Of course, it was not the car’s fault.  Though capable of motion, it was a fundamentally inanimate object, with no arguable or even fanciful sense of agency.  Its shape made it clear that it was well over a decade old, and it certainly predated any AI drivership, even if it had been the right make and model for such things, which it was not.

It was the driver who was not willing to kill (or even just injure) a random pedestrian who was obeying traffic laws and signals.  I guess that’s actually commendable.

All right, that’s enough of this idiocy for now.  I hope you all had a good weekend and that you will have a truly exceptionally wonderful week‒and then that the exceptional wonderfulness becomes the norm, and all your future weeks become brilliant, but you never become complacent about it; you are always grateful and happy.

I would also like a unicorn pony.

*The heart one, not the neurodevelopmental disorder.  Acronyms really are a potentially treacherous form of data compression, aren’t they?

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“Vainly I had sought to borrow from my books surcease of sorrow…”

Well, it’s Friday at last, and the day I mentioned earlier this week—you know, 11-14-25.  I’m sure you all “got” the slight fun I found in this date, and I’m not going to go into it any farther.  If you’re interested, you could go back and look at that earlier post.

I’m writing this on my lapcom today, for the first time since last week.  It will—or should—be the last post before Monday, because I don’t think we’re going to be working tomorrow.  At least one of our best closers who comes in on weekends when we’re open has a family crisis, and it’s a serious one, so he won’t be coming in, and that means the rest probably wouldn’t find it worthwhile.  If that situation changes, I might write a post, but I doubt it.  The boss himself suggested we won’t be working tomorrow, so there’s a pretty strong inclination in that direction.

I hope to be doing something rather enjoyable at the office after work this evening, but I won’t get into it now.  It’s nothing most of you would probably care about, and many of you might not find it interesting, but I’m looking forward to it.  Hopefully it all goes well.

I did not read any Principles of Neural Science yesterday, nor indeed any of my other science books.  I’m afraid my stomach (or, really, my whole GI tract) was giving me quite a bit of trouble during the day, and so I didn’t really do anything that required any significant focus or imagination.  I hope to read something today—my GI tract appears to be responding to my attempts at remediation—but we shall see.

The GI tract has its own, dedicated sub-nervous system, which by some measures is reputedly at least as sophisticated as a cat’s brain, and mine is pretty clearly about as stubborn and willful as any cat.  I guess I don’t have much right to complain, since I am also rather stubborn and willful, and in some senses catlike*; I’ve got little leg to stand on for complaining.

Let’s see, let’s see, what else should I write about…or, rather, about what else should I write?  I’m really not sure.  I’m trying very hard not to share too many too negative thoughts here, but it’s hard, since that’s a lot of my thoughts.  It also hasn’t seemed to do anything to improve the circulation of this blog.  I have returned to the old numbers of typical daily readers—roughly a few dozen—and if anything the number seems to have shrunk slightly.  I don’t really know what to make of it.

It would be nice to have a wider audience, and especially one that was widening, but I am not good at self-promotion.  It makes me feel very uncomfortable.  That’s largely because of poor self-esteem, I guess.  Or maybe it’s just social anxiety/awkwardness, or just a general sense of rudeness, or ASD, I don’t know for sure.

It would be nice if more people read my blog, though, or listened to my music, or read my books.  I would really love to have people enjoy my creations, and maybe even have a few of them tell me so and tell me what they liked about them—especially the books, of course.

Maybe my work will become popular after I die.  I guess I’ll never know whether that happens, but it’s something onto which I can hold to console myself when next to no one reads anything I write, especially fiction, or listens to my music, or whatever.

I’m at least still trying to keep my posts somewhat short, setting my target now for 701 words as I have for the last week or so.  Indeed, I’m getting pretty close to that number now, already.  I don’t know whether my readers are grateful for the slightly shorter posts, or if they dislike them, or if they are thoroughly indifferent.

I frequently wrestle with just giving up the whole process as a bad bet.  Writing this blog never did seem to improve the sales of my books, which was the whole reason I first started doing it.  It certainly hasn’t helped my mental illnesses; or if it has, I don’t even want to consider what they would have been like without it.

And it certainly hasn’t made my life into anything anyone sane would want to have.  I don’t think even Hill House would want it, and it’s not sane**.  Hell, I’m not entirely sane, myself—whatever that means—and I don’t really want my life, either.

Oh, well, there’s probably nothing I can do.  Maybe I should just stop trying.  I wish I were able simply to give up and let go.  Maybe someday soon I will be so able.  That would be a relief, certainly for me, and maybe for all of you.

I guess it doesn’t really much matter to anyone but me, though, certainly in the relatively long term.

Oh, well.  I hope you all have a very good day and a very good weekend and a very good week after that, and so on and on.

*Not my agility, though.  That’s not horrible, but it’s far from catlike.  And my dexterity leaves even more to be desired, unless I’m paying close attention.  My default state seems to leave me rather disconnected from my body in certain senses, and that tends to lead to a bit of clumsiness.

**So said Shirley Jackson, the author of The Haunting of Hill House, and she has authority.

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“I turn the trouble of my countenance merely upon myself.”

I would like to apologize to anyone who was worried about me* on Saturday (and possibly through the rest of the weekend) because I did not post on that day.  One of our two weekend closers was unable to make it in because of serious personal things happening, and our newest fronter‒the only remaining active one‒also could not make it.  If we had opened the office, there would have been very little to accomplish, so the office did not open.

Thus, I had the weekend “off”, for whatever that’s worth.  I was at least able to get some rest and to get some walking in (trying to be careful not to overdo it).  It was all very boring, though.

I’ve chewed up and digested (and passed) a lot of the things that I do for distraction, like YouTube videos, and the Algorithm** cannot seem to grasp my desires and interests as well as it used to do.  It’s quite frustrating at times.  But I suspect the fault lies not in my algorithms but in myself.  I am running out of capacity to divert myself adequately.  To quote the Pink Floyd song One of My Turns, “nothing is very much fun anymore.”

It shouldn’t be so, of course (though what “should” be anything is quite debatable).  I have oodles of books in my Kindle and even a fair few “real” books.  I have a stack of science books above my desk including Spacetime and Geometry by Sean Carroll, and the whole “Theoretical Minimum” series by Leonard Susskind et al, and Quantum Field Theory As Simply As Possible by Anthony Zee, and even a text coauthored by Stephen Hawking called Euclidean Quantum Gravity.

These are all books I chose and in which I have real, serious interest, but I cannot seem to muster the focus to take them down and read them during breaks and down time.  I could even be using my membership to Brilliant to review things and to learn new things‒it’s a lovely service/site/app.  I also have a lifetime membership to Babbel that was surprisingly cheap, which I have hardly used at all.

This is all stuff in which I am seriously interested; no one is asking me to study this material, let alone making me do it.  But I cannot seem to focus on any of it.

I guess I’ve always done better, academically, when I was in a formal program, with quizzes and tests and discussions and so on.  But even in those situations, I often got distracted and sometimes had to forbid myself to do anything but classwork during the week.  Even then, my approach was never typical.

My ex-wife used to say that I was the only medical student she knew that never studied but still passed everything.  Now, that was a serious exaggeration; I studied in my way, but not when she was around.  Also, how many medical students had she known other than me?

Still, I don’t and didn’t study the way other people seem to tend to study.  I don’t memorize things, generally.  I make a sort of model or mechanism of the subject in my head, putting the pieces together, and though this might make me slower to learn initially, it keeps the knowledge in my head, because it’s not rote memorization, it’s more of a system or a construct.  I have a kind of picture or shape or edifice, and if I “look at it”, the answers are almost implicit.

It sounds sexier than it is, probably.

In any case, I’m fortunate that I can learn that way, because cranking through things has always been…well, not quite anathema to me, but I do have a hard time.

According to what I have read, between 30% and 70% of people with autism spectrum disorder also have diagnosable ADHD.  Now, I don’t know whether this might be behind some issues for me, but my studying, though relatively successful for me in the past, has never been very sensible.

For instance, the one thing common to pretty much all my notebooks in undergrad and in med school is that nearly every page was packed, not with notes from whatever the lecture was, but with doodles of varying kinds, some quite intricate.

Many of these doodles were dark (it’s me, after all) but there were also a lot of whimsical things.  For instance, in a lecture in anatomy class that included descriptions of the lactiferous duct, I drew an elaborate cartoon of a “lactiferous duck” which was a caricature of a mallard swimming along with a bottle of milk slung around its neck in the fashion of the stereotypical rescue Saint Bernard’s bottle of booze.

My friend Chivano thought it was pretty funny.  He was sitting next to me while I drew it.

Well…this has been a weird blog post, has it not?  And I’ve passed the 701 word target, so it’s time to draw this weirdness to a close.  Also, I’m not really interested in writing more at the moment.  It, like everything else, is in a superposition of boring and irritating.  It probably gets that from me.

I hope you all have a good day and a good week, and so on, and so on, and so on…

*See, I still occasionally write some fiction.

**As if there were only one.

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Unless you work with leather, awl is vanity

Well, it’s Friday, and I’m writing this on my smartphone again today.  Though writing on my lapcom was definitely better and more fun, I just didn’t have the will to bring it with me at the end of the day.

I had a bad day depression-wise yesterday, and I feel that it had a somewhat contagious effect on the office, though I tried to keep it to myself.  The trouble is, I guess the general negative feeling and my near-catatonia can be felt, in a way, by the others in the office.

Anyway, enough about that.  I’m trying to avoid talking about the dysthymia/depression stuff and its associated thoughts and emotions.  It just serves to bum other people out, it doesn’t seem to help me in and of itself.  It certainly hasn’t led to anyone coming and rescuing me, despite my past open cries for help.  People are far more likely to come to me asking for help with their own issues than to try to help me.

That’s probably my own doing, really.  I mean, I’m a doctor (though I am no longer allowed by the esteemed and wise and intelligent government of Florida to practice medicine).  I’ve always tried to be of benefit, to earn my continued existence and to earn other people’s affection and/or company by being useful.

The trouble with that is that people will tend to drop you like a ninety pound cockroach once you’re no longer useful, or if you become inconvenient.  And yet, in contrast, many selfish dotards‒like the present dotard-in-chief‒will garner loyal followers who get abused and lied to and taken advantage of in every nasty way, only to respond with a (metaphorical), “Thank you, sir, may I have another?”

Humans are so very stupid, but plainly, so am I.

I should be working tomorrow, so I will write another post then, assuming nothing catastrophic (or dogastrophic) happens between now and then.  Does that statement entail a promise or is it a threat?  That’s very much up to the person receiving the message, but as for my intention, it’s just to inform you.

Oh, hey, maybe some of you might know the answer to my following bit of curiosity.  During the latter part of last week, my blog abruptly spiked in readership, peaking at more than 10 times my usual number of visits and views.  This is still nothing about which to write home*, but it’s quite startling.  Now, it’s sliding back to more normal numbers, which I guess is just regression to the mean, but I am basically curious as to why so many new people (apparently) came to read my blog at the end of last week and into the very early part of this one.

It’s embarrassing to admit, but when I saw that initial little spike begin and then persist and increase for a few days, I wondered whether maybe I had suddenly found a bigger audience, and maybe my writing situation was going to change thereby.  Obviously, though, that’s not what happened.  That’s fine; I didn’t really expect it to be that way, I just had a little frisson of “ooh, what if…”

I did get an “official” check mark on Twitter not long ago, just to try to improve my reach, and I wonder if that had anything to do with my brief readership bump.  I was about to get the same “official check mark” through the Meta based platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Threads) as well, but I am going to wait a bit just because of the added expense.  I don’t know why, exactly, since I have nothing better to do, and I honestly like Threads better than the website formerly known as Twitter, and more people whom I actually know are on Facebook.

Oh, well, it’s not the first time I’ve been unable to explain my actions in a purely rational way.  That’s par for the universe, though; there are always causes, for everything, but there are only very rarely reasons.  Telos is a human-invented concept, like justice, like money, and like so many other things people take so seriously.

I guess I can’t complain too much about people taking justice seriously.  While there are unending struggles to determine just what justice is‒I always say that true justice must be based on compassion, for how can you possibly judge someone’s actions without knowing as much about what led to them as possible‒it’s hard to make a good, honest case that justice is unimportant, at least within human civilization.

[Weird aside:  the thought just popped into my head that someone should write an anti-Wuthering Heights story and call it Withering Depths.  I don’t know why I thought that; I’ve never even read Wuthering Heights nor seen any production of it other than the semaphore version by Monty Python’s Flying Circus.]

Okay, well, that’s enough for now.  If any of you accidentally boosted my readership last week, I would just like to say “Thank you.”  So here it is:  Thank you.

May I have another?

*I don’t have a home to which to write, anyway, nor anyone to whom to send such a homeward-bound missive should I write one.

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For ’tis your thoughts that now must blog our kings

Hello and good morning.  It’s the first Thursday in November today—it has to be so, since it’s the 6th, and there are only 7 days in a week, so there could not have been a prior Thursday in November, there being no “negative numbered days”.  QED*.

I’m writing today’s post on my mini lapcom, as I call it, which I decided to bring with me to the house yesterday, just in case.  Possibly I was persuaded by my discussion in yesterday’s post about the prospect of writing and writing and writing, on some future day, to see how long I could just keep writing off the cuff, impromptu, without a script and without an agenda, with only bathroom (and food) breaks.

I realized that was not something I would ever want to do on my smartphone.  Not that it couldn’t be done, it just wouldn’t be as much fun.  Also, I think the bases of my thumbs would probably swell up to twice their baseline size if I did that, and I might never be able to use them again.

I don’t know what subject or subjects to address on this first Thursday post of November in 2025 (AD or CE, whichever you prefer), but that didn’t stop me from writing nearly two hundred words before even beginning this paragraph.  I guess maybe this is how most casual conversations go, isn’t it?  People just sort of start talking and see what comes out of their own mouths and the mouths of their interlocutor(s).

I suspect that, a decent portion of the time, most people in a conversation are only slightly more “surprised”** by what another person says than they are about what they say themselves.  We don’t tend to think ahead before we speak, at least not in most interactions; we hear our own thoughts even as we’re enunciating them.

So it is with my writing—at least my nonfiction (though my fiction very much also just happens).  I rarely know ahead of time what the next word will be.  I certainly don’t know more than a word or two in advance, unless I’m really focused on making some specific point that’s going to require specific words.

I guess it’s not entirely unlike the way LLMs produce words and so on.  They don’t exactly plan it out ahead of time.  The various weights in the network interact in whatever way they do, which has been influenced by their “training”, and they come out with the next word and the next.  They don’t really have any clearer, linear, step-by-step processes that they would understand (in detail) themselves.

That’s not to say they couldn’t in principle know the weight values of their nodes (I think that’s the term usually used), and could literally copy those weights into other places to run an AI that starts off identical to the original—it’s much easier for software to do this than for wetware like human brains/minds.  But they couldn’t discern and work out the logic, the steps, the process in detail of how and why they work they way they do specifically.

This is the good ol’ Elessar’s Conjecture (which I suspect is a law, or else I wouldn’t conject it):  No mind can ever fully and completely understand itself, because each data processing unit, be it neuron or a transistor or whatever, does not have the information processing power to describe itself, let alone its interaction with the rest of the network of which it is a part.

Intelligence cannot ever be a simple process, I’m very nearly certain of that.  And nonlinear, neural network style “programs” are not simpler just because we can grow them far more easily than we can write out the program for an actual AI.  We don’t know how they work—not in detail, sometimes barely even in vague terms.  They just “grow” if we follow certain steps.

But you can grow a plant in a similar fashion.  Heck, you can grow a new human if you follow a few relatively simple and often not unpleasant*** steps.  But could you “write” a human?  Could you design and them build one, biochemistry to brain and all?

If you can honestly and correctly answer “yes” to that question, what the hell are you doing reading this?  We need you out there solving all the world’s problems!  Maybe you are, though.  I could hardly expect to know better than you what actions you should take if you are such an incredible mind.  Maybe you know exactly what you’re doing.

I doubt it, though.

Nevertheless, perhaps we only truly understand something when we can actually design and build it, piece by piece.  We do not understand our AIs.  What’s more, they do not understand themselves, any more than you and I understand ourselves in detail (though I think we’re currently better at that than AIs, but we’ve had a lot more practice).

Okay, well, I passed 701 words just a moment ago, so I’ll bring this post to a close, having once again meandered into surprising territory, though I hope it’s at least mildly interesting and thought provoking.  I’ll just close with the notion that, perhaps, if one wishes to take drastic, revolutionary action to save the world from great crisis, one should not act against specific human political leaders and the like, but one should rather sabotage server farms and related parts of computer infrastructure.  It is relatively fragile.

I’m not saying I recommend this, I’m just…thinking “out loud” on a keyboard.

TTFN

*That’s the old quod erat demonstrandum, not quantum electrodynamics, though kudos indeed to the Physics community for making one of the best science acronyms ever in QED.

**By which I don’t mean “startled” in any sense, though that can happen.  I just mean that one doesn’t know ahead of time and so one’s own speech is as much a revelation to one’s consciousness as is that of others.

***For good, sound, biological reasons:  Creatures that enjoy sex are far more likely to leave offspring than those that do not, so over time, such creatures will tend to comprise the vast majority of any population that reproduces sexually.

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Mon Dieu, it’s Mon day

Well, it’s Monday again and here I go again…on my own…going down the only road I’ve ever known.  Like a drifter, I was born to wear cologne*.

Anyway, I’m starting a new blog post at the beginning of a new work week, and the number of words in the footnotes is already significantly larger than the number here in the “main body” of the post.  That’s not all that unusual for me, but it is probably above the mean by at least a standard deviation.  I don’t see any practical way to check that, though, and I certainly don’t have enough interest to try to figure out such a way.  If any readers want to figure it out and share their results, please feel free to share them (but not with me).

I wonder if I’ve ever written a blog post in which the number of words in the footnotes is larger overall than the number of words in the main body.  It’s not impossible.  I wouldn’t be surprised either way, honestly.  But I’m not going to check.  You guys can if you want, and you should definitely share the results if you do (but again, not with me***).

[Quick aside‒I just thought of a spoof term, “Alexathymia”:  a condition that occurs when a person is so ensnared by the internet, web, and social media, that they need to ask their “digital assistant” how they feel (or should feel) about some product or issue or person.]

I’m sorry, I know this is a fairly strange sequence of thoughts to convey in a beginning-of-the-week blog post, even for me.  At least it feels that way from the inside.  I guess that’s one of the perks and the drawbacks of not having an agenda when one starts writing a post.  It can go anywhere (yay!), but also, well…it can go anywhere (ugh!).

Still, however erratic or hard to follow or annoying my writing here is, it’s at least better than me writing about all the negative thoughts and feelings that run through my poor excuse for a mind.  I hope it’s better.  If my dark, crumbly center is the best of me, well, I’m not sure what to make of that.  Probably, I would just make a mess.

However jerkily erratic my writing might be this morning, at least I’m sticking with my new word count “goal” of 701, so hopefully I won’t bore you for too long with my weirdnesses.  Also, I hope I won’t bore you with my banalities.  To be too unremarkable or to be too unusual are both negative things; you can tell by the use of the word “too”, which in this case refers to detrimental excess (though it can also mean “also”, but that wouldn’t make much sense here).

As for anything else, well…I guess this is the first full week of the new month, November****.  We also had the daylight savings time flip over this weekend here in the US, the one where we “fall back”, i.e., we set all clocks back an hour.  I’m never sure whether this constitutes the start or the stop of “Daylight Savings Time”, but it really doesn’t matter, so I don’t waste any time trying to memorize it.

It’s a strange thing, this hour shift, and it can throw one’s circadian rhythms off a bit, which is troubling if one is subject to seasonal affective problems, which I am.  It’s particularly annoying for nightfall to come suddenly much sooner than it did the day before.  I know that the nighttime grows longer during the time between the autumnal equinox and the winter solstice anyway, but it’s easier to stomach without the sudden jump.

In college, though, I liked getting that extra hour on one weekend in the autumn, though I rued its reverse in the spring.  Mind you, I suspect it had little actual impact, but the psychological reward/punishment effect on my affect was not to be entirely dismissed.

And, with that, I think I’ll draw this fairly disjointed blog post to a close and put it out of your misery, if not its own.  Thank you for joining me here in the month of November.  I say “here” as if it referred to a place rather than a time (or a range of time, though we rarely refer only to dimensionless points when we refer to places in space, so I guess that’s okay).  ANYWAY, I hope you all have a week this week that is better than the last was, and that this trend continues, even if only in the most gradual fashion, for the rest of your lives.

*That’s a Mondegreen‒a misheard lyric‒from the song Here I Go Again by Whitesnake (which I thought came out much later in the ‘80s than it actually did, which was 1982).  Well, the last sentence was a Mondegreen**, the previous ones were accurate.

**Though I often do wear cologne, because I like having a pleasant odor.  But I’m not wearing any today, and I certainly was not born to do so.

***Okay, I’m trying to be funny and to seem coolly uninterested, but I would hate for someone to figure those things out and yet not share them with me, so please do share it if you gather that data.

****“November” almost seems like it might mean “new” something…a new ember perhaps, the first cast-off remnant of a dying fire symbolizing the fading of the year.  But, of course, the Nov- here refers to the number nine rather than to newness, as in “nova”*****.

*****Of course, in Spanish, nova could mean “no go”, as in, “it doesn’t go”, which partly explains why the Chevrolet Nova didn’t sell that well in Latin America.