reading

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If wishes would prevail with me, my purpose should not fail with me, but thither would I blog.

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, so I’m beginning this post in the fashion customary for my Thursday blogs, going back to when this blog was intended as a promotional project for my fiction writing.  Now I’m just going through the motions, but I guess that’s what one does with motions—one goes through them.

I half-heartedly intended to walk this morning, but it’s so effing muggy and the air is so dead that it’s intolerable.  Even here at the train station, reasonably near the ocean and the highway, the atmosphere feels utterly immobile; sweat gathers on me everywhere (including behind and beneath my reading glasses) even while I’m sitting still.  It’s quite annoying.

In other news:  yesterday, during what was probably my last “celebratory” day of sorts, I missed another palindromic number sequence in the recording numbers at work.  It was close—we passed the palindromic number by only 26, which is pretty small considering it’s an eight-digit number.  Still, it might as well be ten thousand or a million away.  A miss is a miss.  I did not get a palindromic number, and I don’t intend (or I don’t hope) to stick around to try for another one.  This has all gotten far too terribly old at this point.  There’s little to no expected return on continued investment in this failure of an enterprise that I call my life.

I mean to give things a little space of time.  I don’t want to sully the important day that was yesterday, after all.  But there are always days one doesn’t want to mar; there are always excuses and evasions.  One cannot keep succumbing to them indefinitely, or enterprises of great pitch and moment will their courses turn awry and lose the name of action.  Eventually, one must just take up that bare bodkin and use it on the nearest of all possible targets.

I don’t really know what else there is to write, today, but if I leave it here, this will be an extremely short blog post.  Perhaps everyone would welcome that.  Perhaps it would become my most popular blog post ever.  That would be pretty funny, and perhaps a bit ironic.  But even if it were my most well-read post, I don’t think anyone would take seriously the not-so-subtle subtext, the point I’m trying to make without being frankly out in the open.

I don’t think anyone really cares very much.  I can’t blame them.  If even I don’t like having me around; why would I expect anyone else to want to have me around, or even to share the Earth’s air with me?

I stink to myself, a lot of the time, though I try not to do so.  I wash regularly, and I use antiperspirant and aftershave, and I brush my teeth and so on.  This is part of why I hate the sweating thing.  It just feels so icky, and depending on the shirt I’m wearing, it can trigger that mildew smell.

Today, thankfully, I’m wearing a “new” make and model of shirt, so to speak, and in addition to being more comfortable, this type doesn’t seem as prone to the mildewage.  It doesn’t, however, have a pocket, which is what I liked about the others.  Oh, well.  That’s a tolerable trade-off.  I can tuck my reading glasses into the collar, and anything else I can just put in my other pockets.

Okay, well, that was a few more paragraphs about absolute drivel and pointlessness, wasn’t it?  Yet I’ve still only reached six-hundred words, just a moment ago.  Usually the nonsense just pours out of me, which makes sense, since I’m stuffed to overflowing with it; indeed, I may be made of nonsense entirely.

Really, though, I honestly don’t have much to say.

Which reminds me:  How many of you think the little “reprise” of Breathe from the album Dark Side of the Moon was sort of tacked on at the end of the song Time, just so it didn’t end with the words, “The time is gone; the song is over.  Thought I’d something more to say”?  I think that’s the true end of the song, because it’s the only ending that makes sense given the rest of the song.  It’s also quite a poignant and beautiful ending.

I ask this because, after watching some “reaction” videos on YouTube, especially of people listening to the song without listening to the whole album in a row, it nevertheless surprises me that more people don’t note the incongruous shift in tone, tune, rhythm, melody and whatnot that follows the seeming originally intended ending of the song.

I guess it doesn’t matter.  Most of the song has never really applied to me, anyway, apart from that last line.  I’ve never just kicked around on a piece of ground in my hometown or waited for someone or something to show me the way.  I was always ambitious*, even back when I was quite young.  I went all the way through to pretty impressive achievements, as far as it went.  I certainly didn’t miss the starting gun.  If anything, I was prone to jump it.

I was third-born, like Ender, with whom I felt some kindship the first time I read that book, though my brother and sister are more or less nothing like Peter and Valentine Wiggin, apart from the bipedal, upright posture and bilateral superficial symmetry**.

Of course, as Caesar could have told us, the wages of ambition are death.  But, then again, so are the wages of indolence.  And while ambition can be good, it can also be terribly disappointing.  Plans that come to fruition are little different—in the long run at least—from plans that come to naught.

And now, it’s time for this blog post to come to its end (now that I’ve padded it a bit with further idiocy), even if it isn’t actually going to come to naught, since it’s already written, and has been saved.

I hope you all have a nice day and all that.

TTFN

prism

*So says Brutus, and Brutus is an honorable man.

**I presume they both have the usual internal asymmetry of the organs, like we all have, but I’ve never so much as seen an x-ray of either of them to confirm it.  Nevertheless, I know they have both been to doctors on many occasions for many things, and I suspect, had there been major atypia in their internal anatomy, it would have been noted and made much of already.

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“Although I laugh, and I act like a clown…”

It’s Friday, and I’m sitting at the train station, writing this on my laptop—by which I mean I’m writing it on my laptop computer.

I’m pretty sure that everyone reading this knows that, when I say I’m writing on my laptop, I mean I’m using my laptop computer, not that I’m doing some bizarre form of self-decoration by writing on my actual lap, and then—presumably—recopying it onto the web sometime later.  That makes little to no sense.  Nevertheless, I feel compelled to clarify that when I say “laptop” I mean “laptop computer”.  I try to make it into a joke—I do this with a lot of things that I find it impossible not initially to take literally—and it is indeed funny sometimes.  However, it is not simply my choice to try to be jokey.  I cannot resist thinking that way, it seems.  At least, I don’t tend to be able to resist it.

I brought my computer with me because I didn’t walk back to the house (which is not my home) from the train after work, and I knew I wasn’t going to walk to the train this morning.  I was a bit physically wiped out yesterday by noon.  I was also psychologically wiped out, even more than usual, to be honest.  I started the day ever so slightly giddy after having walked to the train station—I’m a person who responds well to accomplishments, and I also tend to get good endorphin rushes (apparently) from endurance exercise.

I guess in a way my “crashing” is probably like coming down from any kind of drug—you get a rebound effect.  So, even if the endorphins and enkephalins or whatever are endogenous, if you get in a state where you have a high concentration of them—or, rather, a high degree of activity in nerve cell groups that are associated with those neurotransmitters—when it stops, the overstimulated postsynaptic nerves are going to become more inactive than they were at baseline.

I’ve noticed that I often have this sort of experience with comedy.  If I’ve been watching lots of funny videos, for instance, afterwards I’ll often have a powerful come-down feeling, and actually get depressed—more so than I am at baseline, I mean, which is pretty flipping low.  This used to happen to me especially badly when I would read through my former Dave Barry collection.  He was so funny, so consistently, that by the time I’d read very much of his stuff, I was apparently strongly prone to shift the other way, and sometimes got very depressed afterwards.

Maybe the opposite of this phenomenon is why so many people like sad stories and sad songs.  If you listen to a particularly heartbreaking song—it would probably have to be a good one, of course, if it’s going to elicit particular emotions—and feel very sad for the duration of the song, maybe afterward you get the equivalent of an upward rebound.

This doesn’t seem as persistent or prolonged in most cases—the sadness from a song or similar, I mean—as does the potential for laughter from good comedy.  Maybe that’s why I’ve never noticed any tendency to get happier after feeling sadder from a song (or a story).  Then again, I don’t tend to be happy in the first place.  Once my brain gets depressed, that tends to be a self-reinforcing process, like a hurricane forming over the ocean when it’s hot at the end of the summer, which becomes a self-sustaining cycle.

I’ve used that metaphor for depression before, and I’ve even mentioned it here, I think.  In a sense, I could just characterize my tendency toward depression by thinking that I’m just a tropical ocean late in the summer.  How lovely.

I don’t know what I’m trying to accomplish by writing that stuff, honestly.  I guess I’m probably not actually trying to accomplish anything other than “writing today’s blog post”, which is what I am usually setting out to accomplish when I start writing every day.  I won’t be writing tomorrow, though.  I have the weekend off, and that’s good.

So many little things stress me out, and I don’t know why.  I have a present for my daughter’s birthday—really, a collection of presents—and I need to write out the card I have and finish boxing things in the box I have, and tape it up and address it and bring it to the nearby post-office and send it away, but even the thought of writing the card—deciding what to “say” and how to put things, even though I’ve written millions upon millions of words in my time, and my daughter is not a harshly critical audience—and then of actually going to the post office and going up to send the package are just so inducing of anxiety that I tend to put it off.

It’s weird because I know it’s not a big deal.  I’ve done many much harder, more stressful things in my life.  Yet, even thinking about it and writing about it fills me with tension and stress.  It’s really quite pathetic.  I hate that part of myself.  Which makes it pretty much like every other part of myself, come to think of it.

Anyway, I haven’t started writing any new fiction, of course.  I idly searched through Amazon for spiral-bound, top-flipping writing pads, imagining that, if I got something handy and convenient in which I could write with pen on paper, the “old-fashioned” way, maybe I’d start writing some new fiction.  I’ve tried to do analogous things to myself many, many times in the past.

It doesn’t work; I don’t think it ever has, for me.  I write fiction if and when I’ve decided I’m going to write fiction, and when that’s the case, it doesn’t need to be on any particular, special device or surface.  I wrote two novels and a novella while I was in prison, for crying out loud.

Maybe I’ve stopped writing (fiction) just because I’m mentally and emotionally exhausted.  I don’t sleep well at all—it’s so bad that I hardly even talk about it, because it’s just the same fucking thing all the time, anyway.

I don’t have any real joy in the work I do, I don’t have any real friendships, certainly not with anyone with whom I spend any time other than at work.  There’s nothing that I do for “fun” other than watching YouTube videos and—to a steadily diminishing degree—reading nonfiction (a rapidly shrinking pursuit) and fiction (all but completely gone).

I found a meme yesterday that I guess I’ll share here, showing the difference in what it looks like from outside to be reading, and what it feels like from inside, to be reading.  That used to be abundantly true for me.  Reading was probably my single favorite thing ever—and not just reading fiction, obviously.  I’ve always said that the written language is by far the single greatest invention of the human race.  I have encountered no reason to change that assessment.

reading

But now, steadily, I’m losing the joy of reading, and I have been for a while.  There are no dragons or rainbows or other mystical and mythical things going on in my head, like in the picture.  Reading, for me, is just a desert (but not a dessert, alas) for the most part.  Even nonfiction isn’t that interesting—the good stuff I liked I’ve read quite a lot about, and I have reread my favorite books on various subjects over and over.  None of it is engaging any more.  I force myself to do it, because without it, I don’t even know what I am, let alone who I am.

But I can’t really seem to read fiction of any kind anymore.

I don’t know how I’m going to make it to the end of this month.  I don’t truly expect to make it to the end of this month.  And I honestly don’t very much want to make it to the end of this month.  I’m reminded of the lines from a Beatles song:  “I don’t want to spoil the party, so I’ll go.  I would hate my disappointment to show.  There’s nothing for me here, so I will disappear…”

Several people in the office—or, well, three of them at least—are on vacation at the moment, and I guess that’s good for them.  I honestly wish them the best of times.  But I don’t know what I would even do or want to do if I took time off.  I can’t think of anything fun that I would want to accomplish or experience.  And, frankly, the prospect of trying to make arrangements for going somewhere and doing something is so stressful and intimidating that even thinking vaguely and nebulously about such a non-specific trip or vacation makes me feels so tense I’m surprised you cannot hear me vibrating.  Maybe you can.

What I need is a dirt vacation*, I think.

Oh, well.  It’ll come quite soon, I suspect.  I can’t say I’m looking forward to it, necessarily, except that it would be worth feeling nothing simply not to feel so stressed and depressed and lonely and so bloody tired all the time.  It’s just a regression to the mean, if you will—and the mean is zero, or vanishingly close to zero**.

Have a good weekend.

*That’s like the proverbial “dirt nap”, but it lasts longer.  Ha.  Ha.

**This is somewhat related to the fact of why perturbation theory can work in things like quantum electrodynamics.  Most positives are canceled out by negatives, leaving finite answers to things like path integrals and so on—a converging, rather than a diverging, infinite series.

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Add title. Beat until foamy and stir until well mixed

It’s Wednesday morning at almost exactly 5 o’clock, and I’m writing this on my phone today, because I did not take my laptop with me yesterday afternoon.  I did walk from the train to the house in the evening, though, even though I got out of the office slightly late.  It was a decent walk, and I had a nice talk with my sister* while I did it.

Today, except for the phone conversation, I plan to do a repeat, which would be good.  Between yesterday and the day before, I walked a total of about 15 miles.  That’s not too bad.  I was very thirsty by the time I got back to the house, and I drank a largish bottle of seltzer nearly all in one go (not quite, of course‒that’s hard to do with fizzy water because of the carbonation).

Otherwise, let’s see, is there any real news?  Oh!  Well, I was able to get the payroll done a day early yesterday, because the report we usually get on Wednesday is going to be practically nonexistent.  At most there might be minor adjustments.  So, that’s good in its way; there will be far less stress during the day today.  I only wish I had other ways to engage my mind when things are not as busy.  Unfortunately, as I think you know, I’ve been having real trouble finding even any nonfiction reading that’s engaging, let alone any fiction.

Oh, yes, and I certainly haven’t started writing any new fiction, whether HELIOS, which I mentioned yesterday, or any other of the ideas I have about which I could write.  There’s been no sign that anyone is even politely interested in that prospect.

I sometimes‒often‒envy some other bloggers who have a vibrant comments section.  Indeed, there is a site to which I go every day, on which I find the posts interesting and also often find the comments interesting.  Many days‒perhaps more often than not‒I will even leave comments, myself.  Usually it’s nothing very deep; I leave compliments on pictures shared by other readers when I like them, or I’ll make a stupid reference or joke of some kind.  I don’t know if my few comments are ever very interesting to anyone.  I often suspect that I’m just annoying to pretty much everyone else who uses the site.  But it’s nice that they always have some comments.  It makes the whole thing feel like discussions more than articles, really.

Of course, that particular writer has a few tens of thousands of people following his site, so I can’t expect his engagement, even if the percentage of people who comment were the same.  Also, let’s be honest, my stuff isn’t necessarily all that interesting.

I suppose, in the age of social media, it’s possible‒in principle, at least‒for almost anyone to get a large following, at least by old time standards, but the barrier to be cleared is actually to reach people who might be interested.  Of course, I share my posts on TSFKAT**, and on Facebook, and even on LinkedIn, but I don’t have many followers on those sites, and I don’t know how the algorithm pushes any of my posts, or Xpostulatiions, or links, or whatever.

Back in the day, when I was promoting my books (sort of), I paid to boost a few posts on Facebook, but I don’t know that it did much.  I couldn’t afford to boost them much, let alone to do a paid Amazon promotion or anything of the sort.

Advertising or even asking people to “Like” and “share”*** always feels somewhat suspect to me.  I feel as though it’s a sign of poor character for me to try to get people to know about my work through anything other than word of mouth.  I have a species of very low self-esteem.  Perhaps it’s a defense mechanism.  I fear that if I were even somewhat narcissistic or entitled or whatever, I would end up doing a tremendous amount of damage.  Maybe even that fear is rather egotistical.  Probably it’s just that I honestly don’t like myself, and so have a very hard time pushing my stuff, even when I think that stuff is pretty good.

And I do think most of my fiction is pretty good.  It’s never going to rival the works of Tolkien, or Stephen King, or J. K. Rowling or anyone at that level.  But I think there are readers out there who would like the stories if they ever became aware of them.  It would be nice at least to be able to do that tiny little amount of good in the world entailed in writing a story that some people enjoy reading, even if they only enjoy it a little.

Of course, there’s no point promoting anything I do on YouTube.  It would be a bit weird for me to make a video to promote a blog.  I guess reading some of my stories out loud and sharing those “videos” is promotional, in a way.  Maybe I should read some of my blog posts as a YouTube video or something.  If so, which ones would I choose?  Any suggestions?

Of course, though I automatically have an Instagram account via Facebook, I certainly don’t use it.  And I sure as Hell don’t have TikTok.  I think I made a Tumblr account once, but I have no idea what it was or how to access it, and in any case, I don’t really look at Tumblr.  I know I had a Pinterest account, and I think that site is still up and running, but again, it doesn’t do too well with written matter.

Oh, well.  I like WordPress.  It’s nice to be able to share daily thoughts in writing, and for the most part, not to torture anyone with my face and/or voice.  And I like to read a lot of the things other people write, though I wish I could read more‒not just that I had enough time, but that I had the will and capacity to read.  Anyone who knew me back in the day, so to speak, would know just how horrible it is for me not to be able to read fiction (or even much nonfiction).  It’s a bit like not being able to breathe, but it kills you much more slowly, so the torment is drawn out.

Anyway, if any of you feel like it, please do like, share, and even comment on this or other posts of mine.  If you’ve read any of my books and want to share info about them, that would of course, be welcome and greatly appreciated.  Likewise (but less likely) for my music.

And if anyone actually would like to watch/listen to me reading any of my blog posts via a YouTube video, and you have any posts in mind, please let me know.  You can leave a comment anonymously if you like, so you don’t have to fear too much backlash for encouraging the likes of me.

Thank you for reading, no matter what.  And please, do have a good day.

*On the phone, which I guess is obvious; she didn’t come down to Florida just to accompany me from the train station to the house.

**The site formerly known as Twitter.

***That reminds me of a song…

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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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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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Blue, blue glass moon-day, under the crimson air

It’s Monday, June 5th, 2023.  As a mathematical necessity, given the ordinal numbering system of the days of the month, and the number of days in a week, this is the first Monday of June.  I hope it’s proud of itself.

I’m writing this post on my phone, today.  I didn’t take my laptop with me when I left the office on Friday, because I still felt pretty physically wiped out, and just didn’t want to carry anything unnecessary.  In the morning, I considered bringing a guitar book back to the house with me, and the chord sheets for a a few songs, but as the day went on and the weekend approached, I laughed an evil, sardonic, cynical, maniacal laugh at myself*.  Did I really think that I would actually pick up and play any instrument this weekend?  How naïve!

Well, my cynicism was correct, to no one’s real surprise.  I didn’t even touch a guitar or the cello, and I only touched the keyboard (the musical one) when I was using it to rest my folded laundry.  This is despite the fact that, after a heavy storm on Saturday morning, for most of the weekend, the internet and cable were down.  It came back up a few times then would go back down, then would be down for many hours, then would come back up for a brief while, then go back down for several hours.  I’m not sure what the nature of the issue was, but it certainly highlights the fact that I’ve become too dependent upon cable and internet.

Fortunately, I have some other resources.  I still have actual, physical books, in addition to the hundreds of Kindle books in my Kindle library.  I chose the former most of the time this weekend, though really it was just manga** that I read.  I thought about picking up my new, paperback edition of Susan Kay’s Phantom, which is, in a sense, the greatest fanfiction I’ve ever encountered, telling the life story of Erik,  the Phantom of the Opera.  But that book is tragic and sad, so I didn’t.  My mood is too fragile as it is.

Anyway, in addition to watching a few DVD episodes of QI, I did read some manga, though I had to put on my stronger reading glasses to follow the not-self-illuminated pages.  This is an interesting realization, the fact that reading things on Kindle probably partly disguises, or compensates for, the progression of far-sightedness as my eyes age.

When the ciliary muscles of the eye are relaxed, the lens is focused “at infinity” more or less, meaning truly parallel light rays will be focused on the retina***.  To focus nearer requires deliberate deforming of the lens by the ciliary muscles, but the lens gets stiffer as we age‒as do many other parts of the body‒and so it becomes more and more difficult to focus nearby.

Now, I always had better-than-normal distant vision and good near vision, but now my near vision is diminishing, and no one has invented Retinox 1 even, let alone Retinox 5.  So, like Admiral Kirk, I must use reading glasses.  Unlike the admirable admiral, I like the glasses, though I don’t enjoy the visual issues that force me to wear them, and I also don’t like the drying eyes I’ve been developing over recent years.

That drying tendency is probably inflammatory in nature, though that’s just a rough guess.  I could go see a doctor about it, but I have no primary doctor (nor secondary, tertiary, or any other level of doctor), and no insurance, and it’s not the sort of thing urgent care centers handle.

Anyway, I’m not especially interested in taking care of my health, except to the extent of wanting to feel slightly less pain and fatigue when I can.  I do hate myself, yes, but I still have to experience all the ailments and discomforts of my hated self, and pain gets old very fast.  And then it stays old, even after twenty years.  That’s the nature of pain, and there are good, sound, biological reasons for that, but the goodness and the soundness of the reasons don’t make it suck any less.

I’m going to need to head out to the bus here in a moment‒no Uber or Lyft, today, those are too expensive to be frequent indulgences.  As expected, I’ve written fewer words in the time I’ve taken to do this than I would have done on my laptop, but that’s probably a boon, not a bug.  Let me know, if you have a recognized preference, whether you like my phone blogs or my laptop blogs better…i.e., whether you like them slightly longer or about this length.

Also, I hope you all had a good weekend and that you have a good week.

*”Ha ha,” I said.  “Ha ha.”

**Mieruko chan, of which I have only the first 4 volumes in hard copy, and then the first volume of Tsukihime (which means moon princess, and involves vampires, both good and bad, but in a much more original way than most western presentations, including my own).

***So don’t ever shine a laser, even a weak one, at your or anyone else’s eye, unless you intend to destroy permanently at least part of their/your vision.

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I didn’t write a blog post yesterday

Well, it’s Tuesday, and I’m back to writing on my laptop—the computer, that is, not the upper surface of my thighs when I’m seated.  Writing on those would not only be rather bizarre, but I think it would be quite difficult to upload such writing to WordPress without first retyping it, anyway.  And if I’m going to do that, I might as well just write my posts out longhand on paper before typing them in.  I sometimes consider doing that, but the time required is prohibitive.

I was off sick yesterday, which is why I didn’t write a blog post.  I had a migraine, with nausea, though somewhat regrettably, I did not find myself able to throw up.  So I laid on the floor with the lights off and the blinds drawn for a little more than half the day.

I’m going to be riding the bus to the train station this morning, though I was tempted to try my bike, because I got this new, portable, electric, USB rechargeable air pump on which you can set your goal pressure and it pumps up to that pressure very quickly then stops.  It came fully charged and worked beautifully on my scooter tires—then the scooter battery turned out to be dead, so I couldn’t use it.

I was frustrated, so I tried it on the bike and realized that, despite my earlier attempts, I had previously underinflated the tires a bit.  So, I rode the bike to 7-11 Sunday (and back—no need to leave it there), and I had no noticeable exacerbation of my back pain.

However, the trip to 7-11 is shorter than to the train station and back, and I’m a bit too nervous to do the latter today…cats walking on hot stoves and all that.  Anyway, I’m writing the beginning of this post (now) in my room in the house, but will probably finish it at the bus stop*, depending on how fast I write, which is, to be fair, pretty fast.

I started taking Saint John’s Wort again this weekend—it’s possible that’s what gave me a belly-ache on Sunday and then might even have contributed to my migraine yesterday, though I’m skeptical of that.  Still, it’s not as though any other antidepressant ever failed to give me side-effects, and most of the others require a prescription.

I tried the curcumin stuff, but it gave me stomach problems almost immediately, so that was a miss.  I’ve got Sam-E, or however they write that stuff, but it’s more of a supplement to treatment or whatever and I’d rather not start it at the same time as the SJW**.  Anyway, since “the wort” (as in “going from bad to wort”?) was the first and most effective antidepressant I’ve taken, so I’ll try it again as, potentially, the last antidepressant I take.  I simply cannot go on the way I am.

I’ve been trying to do mindfulness meditation, as you may know, and when I do it helps a bit.  I also try not to let myself by constantly distracted by other things from it when I’m at work, and it seems to be somewhat useful as far as it goes.  One of the biggest benefits to meditation is that it seems to make me less grumpy at the office, and less stressed out when people interrupt something I’m working on to ask me to do something unrelated, derailing my train of thought and my work process and everything.  I still dislike those things, but at least I don’t feel like I want to lash out at the people involved with teeth and fists and claws and everything to make them go away.  Well…I do feel like I want to, but I can at least keep from letting it show in my voice.

I think it only shows to me, anyway.  I don’t think other people ever really pick up on what’s going on in my head.  I feel like it ought to be obvious to everyone that I’ve been depressed and self-harming and feel suicidal and all that, but no one really says anything, and when I mention such things, people seem to think I’m joking.

I suppose I have only myself to blame for that latter problem; I have a dark and somewhat morbid sense of humor, and I guess my delivery must be pretty deadpan whether I’m joking or not.

Here’s a hint, in case anyone is paying attention:  If I ever say that I hate my life and feel like I want to kill myself, and to hurt myself, and wish I would catch pneumonia or cancer or trip in front of an oncoming car or just drop dead—even if I sound like I’m joking, even if I am joking—I do mean it.  It may not be the whole story of me.  Obviously it isn’t, because I’m not dead yet, but it is true, nevertheless.  I hate myself, and a big part of why I haven’t actively sought out help or whatever, or at least not much, is that I really don’t like myself, and don’t want help, or rather, can’t let myself seek help because I don’t think I deserve it.

I have no sense of anything like a future for myself; I can’t imagine a life even one year down the road, even one in the autumn of this year.  I can’t imagine another birthday.  I have no image of my own future life in my mind.  It’s just a fog of emptiness and entropy.

Anyway, that’s that.  Go ahead, take it as a joke or as the mind drippings of a dealer in melodrama.  I missed yet another potential palindromic digit sequence in recording numbers at the office last week, and it’s getting old even hoping for one, however fun it would be.  If one appeared today, I don’t  think it would matter (though it’s not possible, currently).  What’s the point?  Is getting eight digits that read the same front to back as the recording number on an audio recording verification system really a good enough reason to stay alive?

I mean, I like fun with numbers and everything, but they only have so much charm.  Hell, there’ve been at least two new Numberphile videos with Professor Grime, one of my favorites, and I haven’t bothered to watch either of them.  I couldn’t give a shit.

That’s not a good sign, in case you didn’t know.

Anyway, it’s getting about time to leave for the bus stop, and I’m already at over a thousand words in the first draft of this.  I do type quickly, and when I can just write what I think pretty much as I think it, as I do with these blog posts, it comes fast.  It’s much easier and quicker than speaking, ironically.  Unfortunately, fewer and fewer people seem to read anymore.  They all want to watch five minute smartphone videos on Instagram or TikTok or whatever, with their annoying, vertical aspect ratios that just don’t really work to make a watchable tableaux of anything but some juvenile face, most of the time.

There are a few brilliantly funny videos, I’ll admit, but they are short.

There are reasons both movies and TV are wider than they are tall and always have been.  A lot of it has to do with the fact that we evolved in a world where all the stuff with which we can interact is within a fairly narrow vertical range but a functionally unlimited one horizontally.  We and other animals don’t do much going up or down relative to moving along the surface of the ground.  Even flight takes place within a range much narrower than the horizon is wide.

But because smartphones are relatively effortless—and thus mindless—people make all those stupid vertical videos.  Heck, I’ve done it myself.  See?

video screenshot

Anyway, that’s enough of that.  Who knows what will come next.  I’m giving myself a last chance with the Saint John’s Wort, but it may be just enough to give me the will to make an end, who knows?  Prediction is difficult, especially about the future.  Maybe this blog will all be the beginning of a truly long course of writing, and maybe it will be the final records of a mind headed for catastrophic failure and death.  The latter seems more likely to me, but I’m unable to be objective about it.

Thank you all for reading, anyway.  You know who you are:  you’re the ones reading, and thus the only ones who will be thanked.  That’s kind of convenient, at least.

*I finished it at the house before leaving.

**Saint John’s Wort, that is.  It has nothing to do with “social justice” or the warriors thereof.  I’m not even sure that’s a coherent term, “social justice”.  Perhaps it’s merely a redundant one.  What’s the alternative?  Anti-social justice?  Asocial justice?  Solitary justice?  It’s weird.

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Sometimes jokes are expressions of desperation.

Well, it’s Monday again.  Welcome to another Monday.

I walked to the train again this morning, as I did on Friday, and since I chose to get up and go a bit earlier today, I’m actually now on a train that will arrive at my destination earlier than would have the one I would have boarded had I taken the bus to the train.

Wow, that was a long and convoluted sentence, wasn’t it?  Sorry.

I think on Friday, after my first morning walk to the train, I started the day off a bit giddy, and I think that affected the quality of my blog post that day, so my apologies for that.  I think I was experiencing my first real endorphin rush from endurance exercise in many years, and it got me rather wired and a bit garrulous and—for me—outgoing for the very early part of the day.

That didn’t last, of course.  By early afternoon my general outlook was diminishing and deteriorating and various other verbs starting with “d” and ending in “ing”.  I don’t know how well that fact came across to others in the office, though.  I seemed to make people laugh a bit more than usual in the morning, and I certainly felt less tense than I usually did, but I can’t tell at all if my personality from their point of view was any different than usual.  Even when I’m profoundly depressed—in my immediate mood in addition to my general state of neuro-psychology—I tend to say sardonic things that people find funny a lot of the time.

I think this actually impairs my ability to convey the fact that I really feel deeply horrible.  People seem to assume that if you’re making jokes and are funny, you must be doing okay.  I can tell you from personal experience, this is not necessarily the case.  Sometimes jokes are expressions of desperation.  Just look at poor Robin Williams, if you don’t believe me.

But by the end of the day I felt tired and frustrated and grumpy and gloomy.  That was me on Friday afternoon, which makes me rather different—according to popular understanding, anyway—from most people.  Friday afternoon leading into a weekend in which I don’t work is not a prospect that meant much good for me.  I just sat around in my room at the house, alone—after walking home from the train, which at least caused another, if less notable, bump up in my mood.

I walked to local convenience stores a couple of times over the weekend, and I walked to Burger King on Sunday, and of course I did my laundry, but that was it.  I didn’t really do anything enjoyable.  I certainly didn’t spend time with friends, since I don’t really have any—though I did speak with my sister on the phone on Sunday evening, and that was very nice.

But really, I have a hard time being at all interested in anything much.  The YouTube algorithm is beginning to fail me with respect to offering me things I’m interested in viewing; but perhaps it’s me failing at the algorithm, in that I simply don’t have anything that interests me, and so YouTube can’t offer me much in the way of stuff I’d like to see.  It does occasionally offer me the little option box of being shown an assortment of things that I’ve never seen so far.  I’ve used that box once or twice in the past, but I don’t remember it being particularly beneficial.  I didn’t use it this weekend.

I wish I could find some longish-form fiction that I could enjoy again, like I used to.  Back when I was reading The Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever and The Belgariad, and later the Harry Potter books, and even things like The Sword of Shannara, and then The Elfstones of Shannara, or various Stephen King and related books, the books gripped my attention and could keep me occupied for quite a long stretch each.  Also, of course, in between reading books, I actually had a group of friends with whom I did things that we enjoyed.

Not so, now.  Now the only fiction that I’ve been able to stick with has been a few select Japanese light novels, most of them centered around high school kids, most of those being loners of some sort or another.  But these books, though I can stick with them, seem just to make me feel a bit more depressed when I’m done, as if they are surrogate friends or surrogate lives, and once they’re done, I’m even more alone than I was before.  And they are all ridiculously short, being light novels.

I have noticed a peculiar and rather amusing effect of reading some of these stories:  When they are written in first person, which is common, I often tend to think to myself in the fashion of the character for about twenty minutes or so after a bout of reading them, almost narrating my actions as if I were writing a first person story.  This goes away rather quickly, but it’s a bit unsettling.  It’s as though my sense of personal identity is so effaced that I just start mirroring the only identities from which I can get any inside view, which are those of first person narratives.

Oh, well, I think we’ve established already that I’m a weird person, so I don’t know why even I am surprised when I find new weird things about myself.  Maybe I’m just irredeemable—you certainly cannot save me up and exchange me for valuable prizes or anything of the sort.  If you save me up, so to speak, I just become wearisome.  Everyone who has ever spent a long time with me on a regular basis has ultimately found me not worth enduring.

I am one of those people.

I guess I don’t have an endorphin rush today.  I hope you have one, if you can.  They’re nice.