songs

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Monday reflections and a song parody

It’s Monday morning, the morning after the Super Bowl, in case you pay attention to such things.  It was a pretty good game, I guess‒I watched it‒but it never felt very exciting to me at all.  Not much seems very exciting to me, honestly.  I had gone for a couple of long walks and bought some snacks and ordered a bit of indulgent food for the game, but I’ve ended up throwing most of that away.  I guess that’s probably good, in the sense that I don’t need the extra junk food calories and whatnot.  But it is a shame to waste the food.

Still, food waste is not the biggest problem.  Even in the places in the world where there is starvation, the problem is not that there is no capacity to get the people food.  The problem is political‒local and geo‒in addition to economics that are born of twisted politics.

At least food waste is, more or less by definition, biodegradable.

I haven’t written any new fiction, of course, but I did something slightly creative yesterday morning.  Somehow, the Carpenters’ song Close to You got in my head.  As its lyrics passed through my thoughts, I again had the impression‒which often happens with this song‒that the person being described seems to have sinister, supernatural powers, or at least is surrounded by supernatural portents.  Then it occurred to me that the words “close to you” and the word “antichrist” have the same number of syllables and the same (rough) stresses.  So, inspired by these two facts, I wrote a parody of Close to You called, of course, Antichrist.

As someone who has long enjoyed horror fiction and who at an early age familiarized himself with the “Revelation of Saint John the Divine” as it is sometimes known‒the last book in the standard Christian Bible‒the lyrics came rather easily.  I’ll share them below.  I vaguely entertain the notion of actually recording my parody, doing all the various parts and whatnot, but since I haven’t been practicing or playing guitar more than once every few months, and have done the keyboards even less, I wouldn’t hold your breath waiting for that to happen.

I also thought once again yesterday about some slight tweaking to the plot of my “super hero” story HELIOS.  This is an idea that took root originally waaaay back in my childhood, and was one of the “comic book characters” I used to draw, and for which I made some partial comic books and even an arch-enemy.  But the more current version of the idea isn’t really a superhero story, certainly not the type that would involve costumes and secret identities and whatnot.  I even thought, for a moment, that I just might start working on that story soon.

That didn’t last long, though.  I just don’t feel any motivation to do it.  If five living people, total, have read any or all of my books or stories, I would be surprised.  So, writing them is a bit like taking all the pages of the finished works and scattering them into a hurricane.  They just all go off somewhere and become mere parts of the detritus of reality, their information lost to all but Laplace’s Demon.  And, presumably, He wouldn’t appreciate them as stories, even though He could keep track of each and every force and particle they entailed.

Maybe the fact that these thoughts and stirrings happened on the weekend, and after one full day off, means that if only I had some regular mental rest, I might find the energy to start writing fiction again, or playing music, or some other, similar creative endeavors.

I doubt that will happen, though.  I’m in the middle of the ocean treading water as it is.  How am I supposed to locate a place to rest?  The odds of me happening upon some Gilligan’s Island type of refuge are pretty low.  I’m just biding my time, waiting for fatigue and hypothermia to get the best of me.  In a real ocean, that would have happened a long time ago.  Unfortunately, metaphors are not as lethal as one might like them to be.

Anyway, there’s not much more to say.  I guess I’ll close by giving you the lyrics of my parody.  Here it is:

ANTICHRIST

A parody of Close to You (by the Carpenters)

–

Why do crows suddenly appear

Every time you are near?

Seems to me

You’ve got to be

the Antichrist.

–

Flaming stones fall down from the sky

Every time you walk by.

Plain to see

You’ve got to be

the Antichrist.

–

On the day that you were born the demons got together

And forged a waking nightmare built for strife

With storm clouds heralding your birth and armies of the dead that came to life.

–

Businessmen and others who want power

Before you now will cower

They just know

It must be so

You’re the Antichrist.

–

When at last the time arrives to show your true dark nature

all of those who bear your mark you’ll pierce

With fire and brimstone in your breath and ten horns on your seven heads so fierce!

–

Then the world meets its final end.

Into Hell it descends.

There awaits

Your dismal fate,

Antichrist

–

Seems to me

It sucks to be

The Antichrist.

–

Waah, Antichrist

Waah, Antichrist…

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This is NOT a quote from Shakespeare (as far as I know)

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, the first of February in 2024 (AD or CE) and I’m writing a blog post for the day even though I’m not at all sure of any good reason to do so.  I even began it in the traditional way (“Hello and good morning”) in which I have usually started my Thursday blogs, going back to when Thursday was the only day of the week I wrote them, reserving all other days for writing fiction.

I don’t think I’m going to do a modified Shakespeare quote for the title, today, though.  It’s too much of a pain and takes too long, since all of the most obvious ones have already been used.  I suppose I might change my mind before the time I publish this, in which case, you will already know, though I do not know as I’m writing it.

As the 11th Doctor said:  “Time travel; you can’t keep it straight in your head.”

Yesterday’s blog post title was an actual quote from the song I referenced in the footnote.  It’s a good song (off OK Computer).  Radiohead did an amazing job making sounds that were evocative of the notion of aliens and the like, and it has the wonderful little riff at the beginning and end.

That album really is one of the greatest albums ever.  It’s not a concept album.  Radiohead is too eclectic a band, I think, ever to try to make a concept album, though their albums tend to have an internal cohesiveness to them.  They often are very careful and strict about the order in which to put their songs, and which ones to include.

For instance, in OK/not OK, their rerelease of OK Computer a few years ago, they included several songs on the “not OK” portion that they hadn’t included in the original, some of which they left out because they didn’t match the tone of the album.  I certainly understand where they were coming from, but it’s a mild shame to have had to wait so long for songs such as Polyethylene (Parts 1 & 2), Man of War, I Promise, and Lift.

That last one is one of my very favorite Radiohead songs.  It sounds too upbeat and hopeful for the tone of OK Computer, but I take that as “deliberately” misleading, a slightly different version of what they did with No Suprises (in which the song sounds like a beautiful lullaby, but the lyrics tell a very different story—I did my own “live” cover of that song, because it’s so representative of how I feel much of the time).  Alternatively, one could say that the tone of Lift is positive because the singer takes a very different attitude toward the subject matter as I take it from the song compared to most people, and is optimistic about it.

I interpret Lift, consistent with my biases and attitude, to be a song about escaping from life (by dying).  “This is the place.  Sit down.  You’re safe now.  You’ve been stuck in a lift.  We’ve been trying to reach you, Thom*.  This is the place.  It won’t hurt ever again.”  And, of course, later there’s the line, “You’ve been stuck in a lift, in the belly of a whale, at the bottom of the ocean**.”

I interpret this as expressing the thoughts of someone who’s finally getting out of all the stress and pain and horror of life (the lift, the two words being only off by one letter) into the safety and freedom from pain that is death.

On the other hand, the song ends with the words, “Today is the first day of the rest of your days.  So lighten up, Squirt.”  That could be taken as life-affirming and optimistic, and I’m by no means certain that Radiohead intended the song to be about what I take it to be about—my biases are clear and obvious, even to me—but that last line can still work in my interpretation.  After all, he doesn’t say it’s the first day of the rest of your life but of the rest of your days.

I’m overreading things, probably.  In any case, it’s a great song, and if you want to interpret it in a positive, life-affirming way, by all means, please do so.  It’s art, innit?  You can interpret it according to your impressions.  Just remember, this was a song from the time in which the band created (or at least finished) such tracks as Exit Music (For A Film), Climbing Up the Walls, Let Down, Fitter Happier, and of course, the aforementioned No Surprises.

As for other “not OK” songs, I really love Man of War, which was reportedly inspired by James Bond.  The video for the modern release is brilliant and haunting.  I also really like both to listen to and to play and sing Polyethylene (Parts 1 & 2), though I haven’t done so in quite a long time.  I did a video of myself playing and singing it once, but it’s not up on YouTube.  I didn’t think it was very good, and I think my voice broke at one point.  I might have shared it here, though.  Yes?  No?  I’ll try to find out before I publish this.  If so, I’ll put a link:  Here.

If not, I won’t***.

By the way, I’m writing this post on my laptop computer (is it an OK computer?  It’s pretty darn good, at least), for the same reason I did so yesterday:  to give my thumbs some rest.  That does seem to be doing at least some good.  The bases of my thumbs are still quite sore when I rub them, and they feel stiff, but at least typing doesn’t make it worse, since I don’t use my thumbs during regular typing.

Anyway, that’s probably all I need to inflict on you today.  I did not know, when I started this post, that I would be mostly discussing Radiohead songs.  I do really like them, though.  And the new mini-band, The Smile, that Jonny Greenwood and Thom Yorke have formed, along with Tom Skinner, has some good songs as well, though I haven’t listened to all of them.  Their recent video for Friend of a Friend has the trio performing for what seems to be a group of elementary school students, and at the end, after bowing to the pleased audience, Thom has a nice little smile on his face.

Who could not smile after having a bunch of young kids cheer for your song?

Anyway, that’s enough for today.  The train is going to be here in a moment, and it’s not as though I have any further agenda.  My pain is nearly back to its usual baseline level, which is not great, but at least I’m more or less accustomed to it.  I’m not going to insert a picture in this blog post, unless I change my mind, but if I do, you’ll already know.

I may write a post tomorrow, but I may not.  It’s more likely than the possibility of me writing some fiction tomorrow, though, sad though that fact may be.

TTFN

*I usually sing it as “We’ve been trying to reach you, Rob.”

**This line “reminds” me of the ending of Weird Fishes/Arpeggi, another brilliant song, which closes with the words, “I…I hit the bottom…hit the bottom and escape…escape.”

***I have no such link, but I do have the original video file.  I decided not to share or upload that, but quickly rendered the audio from it, did a little noise reduction, compression, added some reverb and so on.  You can hear my voice really break at 2:13 or so, but that’s not the only time.  I think you can hear why I didn’t put this video on YouTube, but I like my little comment at the end, so I didn’t even edit out my cringey “Ohhhhh”s, though they are embarrassing.  Here it is:

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Candles and tears and songs and memories of the late, great “Johnny Ace”*

It’s Friday morning, the end of the work week for many—though not for me, this week—and it’s also the first full day of Hanukkah.  I won’t post any more pictures of dreidels and so on, but I may still remind my readers daily while the holiday lasts.

It’s not as though the world is politely restrained about the other upcoming major festival, after all.  Though, of course, Hanukkah isn’t really that major a festival in Judaism, compared to things like Passover or Yom Kippur and such.  It’s just become major in competition, if you will, with Christmas, as a children’s holiday.

I don’t have any issue with that.  The more reasons one can find to celebrate with friends and family and encourage joy in the darker days of the year, the better, as far as I can see.  That growth curve might level off and even dip downward eventually as one piles on more and more such reasons for celebration; reality is rarely governed by truly linear equations, after all.  But I don’t think we’re anywhere near the peak of the curve, so have at it.

Today is also the anniversary of what was, in my memory, the most horrifying news event in my young life:  the murder of John Lennon**.

I’ve said it before, the Beatles were my first true religion, in a sense.  I cannot recall ever not knowing almost all of their songs by heart.  I was the youngest of three children, I was born in 1969, and my sister and brother were big fans (for as long as I can remember, anyway, which is of course, not as far back as they can).  So the Beatles were ever-present.

The number two spot in my list of favorite bands has varied over the years—the Police, Pink Floyd, now Radiohead—but the number one position has never been seriously challenged, even as I’ve heard more bands, even as I’ve heard and played more music of all kinds, from “ancient” to modern, from western to middle-eastern and eastern and so on.

Of course, the Beatles have recently had their latest new number one single, Now and Then, which was grown from the root of a recording John had done on a cheap cassette tape*** in the late ‘70s.  I won’t say it’s on a par with In My Life or I Feel Fine or Come Together, but since John Lennon was stolen from us by an insect—as it’s put in Elton John’s song, Hey, Hey, Johnny—it’s what we have, and it’s not bad at all.

Still, it’s terribly sad to think of what the world may have missed.  Not long before he was murdered, John had gotten back into the recording studio after a long hiatus, releasing his album, Double Fantasy.  Who knows what might have happened had he lived?  A true Beatles reunion of some kind or another might have been in the offing, and in any case, it’s almost certain that John Lennon would have created much more music in the four plus decades since 1980.

One often sees memes with clichés about how, if one has left one person’s life better before one dies, then one’s life has been worth living.  Imagine then the massively negative weighting of the life of the person that stole from the world potentially forty years’ worth of John Lennon’s music.  And that suppurating rectal fistula that did it—who, as far as I know, has never contributed anything to anyone, least of all himself—is still alive.

If I found myself responsible for his medical care, I probably would do my duty and care for him to the best of my ability, since a shit-stain such as he would not be worth violating my medical principles.  But goodness, it would be tempting to give him an IV infusion laced with fluid from a campsite outhouse.

I imagine (sorry, that wasn’t intentional, but I’m leaving it in) that John himself would probably counsel against even the notion of revenge.  Then again, in his cautionary song, Revolution 1—the first version, that is, on the “White Album”—he seemed conflicted, singing, “But when you talk about destruction, don’t you know that you can count me out…in.”  That little second thought doesn’t appear in the more rocking single version of the song, but remember, this is the guy who wrote Norwegian Wood, with shades of perhaps not-entirely-figurative arson, and even Run For Your Life, for crying out loud.  Still, I suspect that he would have wanted to be the sort of person who would not wish to seek revenge, even against his own murderer.

Then again, that snotty-faced heap of parrot droppings that killed him also robbed Sean Lennon of years and years with his father, and robbed John of such years with his wife and his children, and all because that endometrial teratoma that had been mistaken for a human child was so pathetic that he wanted to kill celebrities as a way of becoming famous.

Anyway, that’s enough of that.  I remember John Lennon, and enjoy his music, far more often than I indulge in violent fantasies about what to do with the “man” who killed him, and that’s certainly as it should be.  I will listen to some of that music today.  And I will have a peaceful Friday (probably), and I will work tomorrow.  So I will write a post tomorrow.

Until then, have a good day, if you can.

johnlennon-RIP without words

*This refers to the song by Paul Simon, which commemorated the deaths of blues musician Johnny Ace, and of JFK, and of course of John Lennon.

**I consider the murder of an artist such as John Lennon to be much more repulsive and distasteful than, say, the murder of a political figure or instigator of social change, or even a religious figure (depending on the religion).  The latter types of people are, to borrow a phrase from The Godfather, “in the muscle end of the family”.  Artists are creators, sometimes of breathtaking beauty.  To seek out and deliberately kill an artist (without some extraordinarily good reason) is an insult against the very value of joy and beauty and existence itself.

***It’s quite interesting to remember that my brother and sister and I used to make various recordings of various things, also on standard cassette tapes.  Sometimes we sang, sometimes we did little shows, sometimes we recorded the sound of TV shows such as The Incredible Hulk so we could listen to them when going to bed.

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I searched for form and land; for years and years I roamed

It’s Friday, and since I don’t work tomorrow (on what would have been my Mom’s birthday), it really is the last day of the work week for me.  Not that I have anything planned for the weekend, other than doing my laundry on Sunday morning.  I don’t know whether I feel worse on the Fridays before I work on Saturday, or on Fridays before I don’t, but neither one is worth anticipation, and today is no exception.  I feel quite blah.

I did not walk (nor jog) to the station today.  I got slightly stiff, and had a mild exacerbation of my back pain, during the day yesterday, and decided I would give myself a break this morning for my body to do any adapting and recovery it needs.  It’s a bit of a shame; the weather is semi-cool and there is a nice wind blowing, so it would have been pleasant for walking.  Depending on how I feel this afternoon, I may walk back from the train, but then again, I deliberately wore boots today to discourage myself from not letting myself rest.

Also, of course, I like my boots, and wanted to wear them.  As you can see, I have not given them away or otherwise disposed of them yet.

I’m trying to do the whole “I love the world” thing, but I’m having trouble with it.  I haven’t given up yet, but my mood seems to get in the way even of that much.  It’s apparently hard for me even to say that I love the world, let alone myself.

I wish my mood were more consistent.  Little moments where mantras work and when I feel that I’ve made some progress give me a false shot of hope, but then‒as always‒I wake up ridiculously early in the morning and just watch the clock until it’s late enough that I can say, “Fine, you might as well just get up.”  Then I find every little thing stressful and irritating.  Maybe I give up trying to give myself calm, positive self-messages and just try to get in some regular mindfulness meditation and/or self-hypnotism.

Or maybe I should just give up, full stop.

I would obviously like it if I were to be able to be in at least a neutral mood most of the time.  Of course, it would be preferable to be able to be positive a goodly amount of the time, but that’s a lot to ask.  It would even, as I said, be acceptable just to be glum all the time so that I didn’t get all the yo-yo action that drives me ever crazier.

No, I don’t appear to have any clear form of bipolar disorder, based on clinical criteria, just in case anyone’s wondering.  I’ve been seen and evaluated by a decent number of mental health professionals, and though, of course, they could be wrong, they seem to have a consensus about my dysthymia and depression, and none of them seem to consider any form of bipolar to be an issue.  Although maybe I’m masking symptoms and signs of that, even from myself.

It seems unlikely, but I’m apparently pretty good at masking in general, so who knows?  Not me.  We never lost control.  You’re face to face with the man who sold the world.

Sorry, I slipped into quoting a David Bowie/Nirvana song there.  It’s a good song (both versions) and it’s fairly simple to play and sing, so that’s nice.  I haven’t ether played or sung it in quite a while, but I listen to it from time to time.

I think it’s interesting that, in the Nirvana version, Kurt changed the line in the second verse from “We must have died alone, a long, long time ago,” to “I must have died alone, a long, long time ago.”  He definitely gave away some of his internal issues in his choice of lyrics in a lot of his songs, and apparently, even in his covers.  It didn’t do him much good, unfortunately; he certainly didn’t seem to get the help he needed.

I guess it’s hard.  The world is very big and impersonal, and though it is beautiful in all sorts of ways, it does not seem to give a flying f*ck at a rat’s a*s about any particular, extremely finite, living creatures.

Anyway, I guess it’s fitting for me to end the week on a downer, since I tend to start the week on a downer, and the occasional upbeat posts are the exceptions.

I’d like to say something snarky and dismissive and contemptuous to close out, but I really do hope that everyone who reads this has a good weekend, as do all the people whom all the readers love and about whom they care, and then on out to six or so more layers.  What the heck, why doesn’t everyone have a good weekend?  I, myself, don’t expect to do so, but it would be at least some consolation if everyone else in the world did.

See if you can all do me that favor, please.

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“Who knows? Not me.”

I didn’t walk the full five miles from the train to the house yesterday afternoon‒I walked about three or three and a half‒because I didn’t want to give myself any blisters or abrasions from walking too far for the first time in a new pair of boots.  But I seem to have stopped well in time for that, since there are no blisters or even sore spots on my feet now, and my ankles and right Achilles tendon appear to be in good nick.  Also, and most importantly, though I had a bit of tension in my right side along my back upon returning to the house, that went away nicely with a bit of stretching and replenishment, so that’s pretty good.

Anyway, lesson learned:  it matters if the boots you wear are even a little bit oversized if you’re going to be walking any very long distances in them.  It looks like these new, half-downsized ones will work well.

It’s been sloppy and wet here in south Florida these last several days, but there does seem to be a slight increase in morning breeziness.  And, of course, since Saturday, the time of darkness has been slightly greater than the time of daylight, and its dominance is increasing at the most rapid pace at which that will happen.  This is because, for a sinusoidal curve, the fastest rate of change is when it crosses the x-axis (at the equinoxes in this case), and the slowest rates of change are at the peak and at the nadir (the solstices in this case).  So, for a little while now, the nighttime will be growing rapidly before it settles out, steadily and gradually, as we barrel toward the end of the year.

After mentioning the fact that I don’t play the guitar in the morning anymore, yesterday I decided to fire up the axe for a bit.  Remarkably, it was still almost perfectly in tune!  Probably it helps that the office is kept pretty much at a constant temperature.  Also, I had left the capo on the fourth fret the last time I played.  That was for playing the chords and stuff from the Nirvana version of The Man Who Sold the World.  I didn’t start with that yesterday, instead playing through a few iterations of Nothing Compares 2 U.  It’s a lovely song.  I like the Chris Cornell version best.  Of course, now Prince (the songwriter and original performer) and Chris Cornell and Sinead O’Conner (who had a big hit with her cover of it) are all dead.

Then I did play some of The Man Who Sold the World, and then Ashes to Ashes, both Bowie tunes, at least originally.  And, of course, Bowie and Kobain are also both dead, though they died under very different circumstances.  Then I got my guitar book out and played a little Just the Way You Are, and Sorry Seems To Be the Hardest Word, and Here, There, and Everywhere, by Billy Joel, Elton John, and Paul McCartney‒all of whom are still alive!  That’s just weird, isn’t it?  Imagine that!

Of course, the latter song is credited to Lennon and McCartney, but that was a formality according to their agreement for all Beatles songs they wrote.  It was a McCartney song, and it was apparently the only song of his for which Lennon directly complimented him.

Considering the quality of Sir Paul’s work overall, that’s a hell of a statement, in more than one way.  First off, it must have really impressed John (rightly so) for him to make a point of telling Paul that it was a good song.  But it seems harsh that John never complimented any others, at least to Paul’s face.

Then again, he was British, and emotional expressiveness (other than through song and theater and literature) is a major national deficit by most accounts.  Maybe that’s why they do so much good music and poetry and drama and comedy and the like.  I often get the feeling that part of the reason Thom Yorke’s singing is so powerful and conveys and evokes such emotion in the listener is that this is Thom’s only real way of expressing himself deeply.  And, of course, he does seem almost possessed when he’s performing.

As a YouTube reactor (I cannot recall which one, for which I apologize) said of his singing, “He’s feelin’ it when he’s singing…and he makes you feel it, too!”

Now, John Lennon did compliment Paul to other people‒during interviews, for instance.  Though even then, he was far from effusive.  That was just his way, I think.  He had a very troubled childhood, and emotional expression was probably difficult for him, even for a Brit.

Then again, he wrote some incredibly expressive songs, from If I Fell to In My Life to Julia to Across the Universe, all the way up to Starting Over and Woman, with scads of others thrown in for good measure.  If being closed off and repressed helped lead to the creation of those truly great works of art, the world at least can hardly feel too horrible about it.  Though it would be nice if a person could be well-adjusted and have the ability to express and receive affection easily and still produce great art (and ideally, of course, not be murdered by a slimy little worm of a creature who claimed to be a fan).

Alas, though it seems possible in principle, it doesn’t seem to happen often, if at all, in practice*.  Shakespeare supposedly wrote Hamlet, and some of his other great tragedies, partly in response to the death of his son, Hamnet.  And of course, I, his much later and far inferior admirer, only really started to write and publish stories that have always been in my head once my life, my family, and my career had been wrecked, and I was in prison.

We can be thankful, if saddened, for the great art that was born of Shakespeare’s sorrow, and of Lennon’s.  In my case, on the other hand, it was almost certainly not worth it, particularly for me.  But I can’t change any of that stuff, either.

Life’s like that, I suppose‒to quite the end of one of my own short stories, possibly the darkest one I’ve ever written…which, weirdly enough, first came out of me years ago, while I was happily passing the time keeping my then-friend and soon-to-be fiancée company while she did some overnight work for a summer job.  I don’t know where it came from, except that I did often like to play solitaire (with real cards).

Anyway, that’s enough for now.  Have a good Wednesday.

*As Einstein is reputed to have said, “In principle, principle and practice should be the same, but in practice, they often are not”, or something like that.  He was a clever fellow.

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But if of ships I now should sing, what ship would come to me?

It’s Friday, September 22nd (in 2023 AD or CE…I don’t know what year it might be by Shire reckoning), and that day is the birthday of both Bilbo and Frodo Baggins, the primary characters of The Hobbit and of The Lord of the Rings*, respectively.  They are not close in age, though Bilbo had adopted Frodo as his heir.  In the first chapter of LotR, we find the two celebrating their mutual birthday, when Frodo is turning 33 and Bilbo is turning 111 (eleventy-one, as hobbits apparently say) with their combined ages coming to 144, a “gross”.  So, the age gap is 78 years, but it seems smaller because Bilbo’s life has been stretched by his ownership of the Ring.

An interesting thing to note (for me, at least) is as follows:  since 33 is clearly divisible by 3, and so is 111 (its digits certainly add up to a multiple of 3), then the difference between them, 78, must also be divisible by 3.  Which it is, of course.  78 is 3 times 26, 111 is 3 times 37, and of course 33 is 3 times 11 (which is, of course, 37 minus 26).  This also means that the combined total of 144 is 3 times 48, which it is.

That doesn’t work the same way in reverse, of course.  Just because the difference between two numbers is a multiple of 3 doesn’t mean the numbers themselves are (though if one is, the other is).  As a relatively extreme example, 137 and 149 are both prime, but their difference (12) is a multiple of three.  Obviously, no prime numbers (other than 3 itself) are multiples of 3, by definition.

On the other hand, the difference between any two primes, as long as neither of them is 2, is an even number, since all prime numbers larger than 2 are odd numbers (the even numbers all being divisible evenly by 2), and the difference of any two odd numbers is always going to be even.

Okay, sorry to bore you with all that.  I like trivia about numbers, and especially prime numbers.  I particularly like those primes that others disrespect, or at least I want to show them respect, as it were.  I think I’ve mentioned here before that I used to always try to put 13 gallons in my gas tank whenever I “filled it up”, back in the day.  It didn’t mean anything‒I have no suspicion that there are any mystical qualities to any numbers‒I just thought it was fun, to the point of my being disappointed when I couldn’t do it.

Anyway, today is a memorable day, at least for Tolkien fans (of which there are many), and tomorrow is the equinox, the start of Autumn in the northern hemisphere, and of Spring in the southern hemisphere.  Then, starting Sunday night at sundown, as I mentioned recently, is Yom Kippur.

So, this should be an auspicious weekend for embarking on momentous “journeys” of one kind of another.  But I’m stupidly going to have to wait, out of deference to my coworker.  He went home sick after lunch yesterday, but hopefully he will be in today**.  This is his weekend to work, and I have no desire to cover for him, because he obviously won’t be working next weekend, which would make three weekends in a row for me.

I’ve worked worse and harder schedules, of course, but I was younger then, and I had actual reasons for working and staying alive.  I was literally saving other people’s lives as well, and I was also relieving suffering, to the degree that I could.  Now, I’m a few decades older, and I have no particular reason to work even just to keep myself alive.  I’m not doing any good for anyone, least of all myself.  I’m almost certainly a net detriment to the people who have to interact with me‒this seems a fairly firm conclusion, given that most people have eventually wanted to get away from me, even people who love me, like parents and spouse and children.  I’m definitely not of much benefit to the world at large, either.

I plan to fast on Yom Kippur, which I usually do, though I’m not observant in any other way, anymore.  I think the fast is a useful, or at least interesting, thing.  Since it’s only 24 hours, it’s a full fast, meaning no food or water or anything else, though one is expected to take any medicine one usually takes.  The preservation of life supersedes all competing mitzvot.

Anyway, sorry, I’m being boring again, I think.  I meant to say that I may not write a blog post on Monday morning‒just as a little nod to the day‒or I may write one early, on Sunday, and put it up with a delayed publication time, so it will show up Monday morning.  Or I may just write one on Monday as usual.  It’s not as though I have any true, deep connection to any form of ritual or observance.  Why should I fool myself or anyone else?  I certainly don’t think any external, let alone supernal, aspect of the universe cares about my actions in any sense, or even about my existence itself.

I guess we’ll all have to wait and see what I do.  Maybe something will happen and take it all out of my hands.  That would be okay.  Or maybe I’ll lose my tenuous grip on what remains of my will to live and decide that I don’t care about inconveniencing anyone anymore.  I’ve spent a lot of time and energy in my life trying to make things as easy as possible for other people, and (as I said) to relieve suffering when I could.  It wears me out.  It has worn me out.  And it’s not as though it’s had much in the way of compensatory positive effects on my own life, though I guess I should never have expected to be rewarded or admired for things that were, in the end, my decisions carried out because they were what I thought I should do at any given moment.

The universe is uncaring, and humanity as a whole often instantiates that fact quite glaringly, though they do‒occasionally‒display behavior of a nicer, kinder type.  There often doesn’t seem to be enough of that aspect to go around, even on Earth, let alone on a universal scale, but then again, benevolence and beneficence are not substances, and there are no conservation laws concerning them.  They can, in principle, increase without limit.  They can also diminish and even vanish utterly.

If I had to bet on which I thought was more likely, all things considered, I would probably bet on the latter, but I would hope to lose.  I’m okay with losing things like that.  Hey, as the theme song from MASH notes, I’m going to lose at this game anyway.  So there’s not too much point, in and of itself, of trying to drag it out for its own sake.  It’s one thing if there are other variables, other pressures, other forces, other fields, other considerations‒those can make the game worth playing for as long as one is able.  But the game, in and of itself, is not necessarily an inherent good.

That was slightly cryptic, I guess.  Sorry.  I have a hard time saying clearly what I mean, partly because I’m often unsure, myself, and at other times because I simply can’t seem to express my feelings well.  Occasionally, I think I’ve done it reasonably well in my songs, like in this one, or this one, or cover songs like this one and this one and this one and this one.  But those don’t garner much of an audience***, so it doesn’t really matter, as anyone can see.

Enough!  I’ve already wasted too much of your time.  Have a good first day of Autumn tomorrow, enjoy your celebrations of Bilbo’s and Frodo’s birthday (you do celebrate it, don’t you?), and if you observe Yom Kippur, then g’mar chatima tovah and good Yom Tov.

bilbo frodo birthday adjusted

*Though, of course, while the title character of The Hobbit is indeed Bilbo Baggins, the title character of The Lord of the Rings is the villain, Sauron.  Just imagine if the Harry Potter books had been titled, for instance, He Who Must Not Be Named and the Goblet of Fire.  Actually, that’s not bad, is it?

**It turns out he will not.  He has some form of sinus infection.  When I got his text I actually started to cry a little; I hope he doesn’t call out sick tomorrow.

***Certainly nothing close to the size of the audience for The Rockford Files in its heyday.  Get it?  Garner?  Rockford Files?  Never mind.

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When the train comes, should I run or hide my head?

Here I go again, wasting your time and mine with another daily blog post that accomplishes nothing for anyone.  I hope you enjoy it.

I arrived at the train station just now, literally seconds before the train prior to the one I planned to take arrived.  This is because I got up even earlier than I usually do, so I figured, “What the heck”, and decided just to get going.  I had some old trash and knickknacks I wanted to make sure to get out in today’s garbage pickup, anyway, and since I was awake anyway, I got up very early to take care of some of it.  I’m clearing out as much clutter as I can, throwing out unnecessary clothes, old Halloween costume stuff, beat up old books I’ll never read, magazines, tools…all sorts of stuff, things that just take up space and make a mess.  I gave my folding massage chair at work to my coworker who has a bad back‒it doesn’t really do very much for me, anyway.  And I’m going to give my colored pencils and such to one of my coworkers who has a young son who has used them when he was here with his father.

Oh, right, I was talking about the train.  Sorry.  As I was saying, I arrived at the station just in time to see the first northbound train pulling in, and my strong impulse was to rush to try to catch it.  I probably could have done so.  It would have required just breaking into a jog for a bit, and hoping the conductor saw me and wasn’t in too much of a hurry‒the train was, technically, slightly early.

However, I decided to fight that impulse, partly because I already get so sweaty, and partly because I didn’t want to have to stress myself out with that somewhat irrational impulse to catch the earliest train.  So, I strolled up along the northbound side of the station, figuratively gritting my teeth, watching the train come to a halt and then depart.

That turned out to be very stressful in and of itself, and I’m still stressed out about it now, especially as more people arrive at the track to wait for the next train, which is sure to be more crowded than the first.  I also can’t seem to help thinking about the possibility that this next train might run late, and that would mean it would probably be more crowded still, and also, just, well…that it would be more of a loss of time than I will already experience from not getting on the initial train.  Not that I have any urgent need to get anywhere very soon.  Work doesn’t actually start for five more hours.  But once I’ve decided to get up and get there, being delayed is just extremely stressful.

I get the impression that my stress doesn’t really show on my face or in my demeanor, any more than my depression does, because nobody seems to notice either thing, though I feel as if they must be glaring and blaring like a fire truck with lights and sirens going at maximum level.  Evidently this is not so.  I think I could probably douse myself in lighter fluid and rubbing alcohol and set myself on fire in the middle of the office, and people would just say, “Hey, Doc, how’s it goin’?”*  Or I could go to the roof of the highest nearby building or parking structure and step out onto the ledge, and anyone passing would just say to me something like, “Isn’t that a great view?”

Oh, well.  It doesn’t matter, really.

I am possibly going to push some of my “plans” back by about two weeks, unfortunately.  I have this weekend off, but the following weekend, when I am scheduled to work, my coworker and his wife are taking their daughter to Orlando, and if I weren’t available, he might feel that he ought to cancel that vacation to cover for me.  I don’t want that.

There’s always something, isn’t there?

[Okay, my train arrived almost on time just now.  I’m still torn about having skipped the earlier one, but I can’t change that now.]

Anyway, the weekend after that is, more or less, on or around my Dad’s birthday.  I guess that’s both more and less momentous than Bilbo’s and Frodo’s birthday, and certainly it is more directly personal to me.

I don’t really know what I’m talking about here, sorry.  I’m kind of all over the place.  And yet, I’m still going nowhere‒figuratively speaking, anyway.  I mean, okay, literally, I’m on a commuter train heading north at quite a decent speed.

Of course it could be that this is also, as Kenny Rogers sang in The Gambler, a train bound for nowhere.  I’ve always thought there was some pretty good poetry in that song:  “We were both too tired to sleep”, “We took turns a-starin’ out the window at the darkness, but boredom overtook us”, “If you don’t mind me saying, I can see you’re out of aces”, “Because every hand’s a winner, and every hand’s a loser, and the best that you can hope for is to die in your sleep”, “And somewhere in the darkness, the gambler, he broke even”.

Not Shakespeare level stuff, maybe, but still, there were some nice turns of phrase in it.  The chorus, ironically, has some of the weakest lyrics in the song, in my opinion.  They aren’t bad, but the verses are better.

Jeez, Louise, why am I writing about the lyrics of an old Kenny Rogers song?  It’s not a bad song, of course, but how have I come to be writing about it in a blog I originally started as a promotional venue for my fiction?  It’s bizarre.  I don’t quite understand it.

Of course, there’s nothing truly mysterious about the whole thing; it’s just the product of stochastic, drunkard’s walk events.  It has no directionality, no purpose, no meaning.  But it’s still just quietly mind-boggling.  What a catastrophically banal, monumentally tiny, outrageously boring shit-show my life has become.  It’s enough to make you laugh until you choke…or maybe to yawn until you choke.

Anyway, that’ll do for today, I think.  I hope you have a nice day.  Try not to let my words and thoughts infect you with my way of looking at things.  It’s not anything I recommend, and I certainly don’t think I have any particularly wise insights; I can’t even manage my own mind.

tri rail train dramatic

*”Doc” is what people at the office call me.

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Songs, weather, depression/pain, AI, the subjectivity of time, and the apparent inevitability of entropy

It’s Monday, Monday, like the Mama’s and the Papa’s sang.  I’ve never quite known what that song was about in any deep sense, since I’ve never paid too much attention to the lyrics, other than “Monday morning couldn’t guarantee / that Monday evening you would still be here with me.”  Could it be about the tenuousness of joy or something?  Maybe it’s a sort of Buddhist message.  Of course, no morning can guarantee (so to speak) that by the evening anything at all will be the same, apart from the fundamental laws of physics (whatever they may ultimately be).

One wonders:  has Monday morning, in some anthropomorphic sense, ever guaranteed anything to anyone?  It’s a weird notion.  Maybe I’m thinking too much about this.

Anyway, I’ve always thought the song had a pleasant melody, and the harmonies were good, as tended to be the case with that group.  I like California Dreamin’ better, and not just because the meaning is a little less opaque.  However, I do have sort of the opposite feeling to the singer(s) of the latter song.

In that song, they lament the fact that all the leaves are brown and the sky is gray, and they dream of being in California, “safe and warm”, even on a winter’s day.  Well, I’ve been for plenty of winter walks here in south Florida when I didn’t need to wear a jacket or long sleeves, and could go barefoot, and could even have worn shorts if it weren’t for the fact that my lower legs are kind of scarred up and embarrassing.

But growing up, I’ve always liked autumn best of all the seasons.  Halloween is my favorite holiday, and winter, frankly, was never too hard a problem.  At least I could enjoy a hot cup of coffee in a way that I just can’t here in Florida.  Here, I’m sitting motionless at the train station and literally dripping with sweat just from…I don’t know, just from being alive, I guess (I don’t recommend it).  And then, most of the time, trains and buses and stores are all over air conditioned, so when you’re sweaty from being outdoors you feel seriously chilly when you enter them.  And then, when you go back outside, your glasses instantly mist up, because their surfaces are so cold and the air is so humid.

I know, I know, these are not exactly the trials of Hercules.  But they are annoyances to which I wish I had never chosen to subject myself.  Now, however, as the man said, “I am in blood, stepped in so far that, should I wade no more, to turn back would be as difficult as go o’er”.  Mind you, I have never done anything as horrible as Macbeth did in the play, but that doesn’t mean the metaphor can’t still apply.  One of the brilliant aspects of Shakespeare’s writing is that his lines can be used not merely in context, but to examine, explore, and describe so many things in life.

Anyway, knowing me, I probably would be just as unhappy had I stayed up north somewhere.  I think the fundamental problem is an internal one‒well, I mean, that’s clear and plain, since I started having trouble with dysthymia and depression long before I ever moved south.  The problem is with me.  I am faulty.  And when the problem is fundamental to oneself, one cannot avoid it by going elsewhere, because, as many have pointed out, from Ralph Waldo Emerson* on, “No matter where you go, there you are.”

If one’s own nature is the problem‒or some aspect of it, anyway, or some damage that is permanent, a wound that goes too deep, that has taken hold‒there is little that one can do about it.  If there is no therapy that seems to help, whether medical or psychological, and there are no lands to the west in which to seek healing, what is one to do?

Of course, if one is convinced that the odds are, in the long run, that the good things in life will outweigh the pain (of all kinds), then one can choose simply to bear it as best one can.  After all, pain, of all kinds, is an inevitable (or at least inevitably potential) part of life, for good, sound biological and ecological and statistical reasons.  Pain keeps organisms alive, when it’s working best.  But it can reach a point where it’s not functioning optimally, where it’s not producing a net gain‒physically, psychologically, “spiritually”, or in any other clear way.  Then, what does one do?

I’m speaking mostly rhetorically here, but I guess if anyone thinks they have an idea I haven’t discovered, they are welcome to share.  I have thought long and hard about these issues, and I’ve read a lot of related material, and have tried many forms of treatment, but I can’t claim to have learned everything that could possibly be known about them.  I’m reasonably smart, but I have had finite time and finite energy and finite intelligence with which to explore.

Even a “deep learning” AI can often only “learn” so much, so quickly, because it trains on immense streams of data, beyond any human bandwidth.  And adversarial systems like Alpha Zero learned to play Go even better than previous systems by playing millions or billions of games against itself to develop its skills.  A human who was capable of that concentration and memory and above all, who had the time might well become just as good.

But human experiential time takes much more real time than does that of an electronic system**.  Also, humans were not built to be able to focus solely on one thing for such scales of time and experience.  There’s no net survival or reproductive advantage to it on any kind of ordinary, biological level.

AI’s have to be built and actively maintained.  They cannot yet sustain themselves.  Perhaps, when they can, there will occur an evolutionary arms race between and among such AIs, happening much more quickly than human biological or even cultural evolution.  But it seems difficult to speculate about what the outcome of such evolution might be, once it took the bit in its teeth and ran where it “wanted” to go.

Well, it’s fairly easy to speculate, but that speculation is probably going to be fruitless.  The phase space of possible states is too big to explore easily.  Even an AI evolution that proceeded at maximal possible speed might only explore the tiniest fraction of all possible forms and functions of intelligence before entropy led it to fall apart, like the rest of the universe.

Of course, it’s not in principle impossible that an AI (or other intelligence) could figure out ways around even the heat death of the universe, or the Big Crunch, or a Big Bounce, or whatever the future of the universe ends up being.  Even if the universe turns out to have been simulated (which I doubt mightily but don’t rule out completely), the simulation has to exist in some outer reality, and the mathematics of entropy seems likely to apply in all possible realities.  There are simply more ways, in general***, for a set of things to be put together in such a way that they do not achieve any given function or meet any given criteria of order, than for them to be put together in ways that do.

Anyway, I don’t know how I got on that topic.  I tend toward entropy in the subject of my thoughts as well as in reality, it seems.  (This is not ironic, by the way, lest someone mislabel it as such.  This is actually quite appropriate, and is a rather pleasing concordance.)

That’s enough for me for Monday morning.  I hope the morning is very good to you, and that Monday evening is even better.

time or not cropped png

*He didn’t put it in those exact words, but he certainly criticized his friend, Henry David Thoreau, for going into the woods to find himself.

**Which leads to potentially horrifying speculations about what it might be like for an artificial general intelligence trying to have interactions with biological intelligences and having to wait between interactions‒times that could be the subjective equivalent of a human waiting for decades or centuries or even millennia‒just to “hear” what the human says next at normal human speed.  Orson Scott Card explored a little of this notion in the interactions between Ender and “Jane” in the brilliant Speaker for the Dead, the first sequel to Ender’s Game.

***Here I’m using “in general” mainly in the physicist’s sense, meaning something that applies to every situation of a given kind, everywhere, as opposed to the more common, colloquial meaning which is roughly synonymous with “usually”.

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

Hello.  Good morning.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TTFN

no surprise

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

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