songs

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“With your feet on the air and your head on the ground…”

TBIF*!

Unusually for me, I am looking forward to this weekend, even though I don’t have any wonderful outings with my youngest in the offing.  I just need to rest, because in case you can’t tell, I’ve really been all over the place mentally this week.  I guess that’s not so unusual for me, at least not from outside (but it’s been atypically bad from the inside).  I’m sure it’s quite tedious and repetitive and depressing for you to keep reading about it.  Honestly, why in the world are you wasting your time with this bullshit?!?!?

I’m being a bit facetious just now‒or, rather, I was being a bit facetious.  I don’t really want you all to stop “wasting your time” with my blog.  No, indeed, I would rather you not only read all of my posts but also all of my books, and to spread the word and “like” and “share” them with everyone you know (and even those you don’t) on social media and elsewhere.

Speaking of liking and sharing, hey, why not share all of my songs and shit?  Put ‘em on your Spotify playlist or your iTunes or YouTubeMusic or Pandora or whatnot.  They’re there on all of those, supposedly.  Actually, I know they’re on YouTube and I know they’re on Spotify.  I have them on my own playlists, and I even occasionally sneak them into the background music playlist at work, though it’s slightly embarrassing.

Actually, come to think of it, the hold music for our office VOIP phones is a slightly edited version of Like and Share with a shorter intro.  We’ve even received compliments from people about it from time to time, and these are people who were on hold during discussions with salespeople!

All that bouncing around above of things I would want to promote can serve to highlight one of the big problems I have with myself:  I have too many “special interests”.

If I only had one focus, or just one main focus, I think I could become really good at it and maybe even contribute significant things.  If I were a full-time musician, for instance, I think I would become very good at that.  If I were able to focus on physics/mathematics I think I could really learn a lot of it quite deeply, and maybe even make contributions to science.

And we know that, when I committed to writing just for an hour or so a day, I wrote a lot of stories over the course of a few years, even while in stir.

Unfortunately, after focusing on one thing or mostly one thing for a while, I start missing the other stuff, or I just get distracted by the other stuff.  Every minute is an opportunity cost.  Of course, that’s true for everyone‒we all have to choose one path, and in choosing it, we must therefore not choose others, and that chosen path will determine future options that might have been otherwise.

I think maybe I just dwell on such facts more than most people do.  I suppose that’s one side-effect of having difficulty socializing:  I spend a lot of time with my own thoughts (or reading the thoughts of others, of course).

I also have a tendency to move back and forth between many books at one time.  Back when I was married, it used to irritate my (now ex) wife because I’d have seven or eight books at a time on my bedside table, many with more than one bookmark stuck in them.  To be fair to her, she was never very critical of it; she was (and still is, presumably) a very avid reader herself.  Anyway, that’s the sort of stuff I do.

It all means that I do know at least superficially about an awful lot of stuff, and of widely varying genres and contexts and subjects and topics and various other synonyms and near-synonyms**.  Currently, my non-fiction reading is bouncing between Lisa Randall’s Warped Passages, a physics book, which I mentioned before, and Cass Sunstein’s new book On Liberalism: In Defense of Freedom.

In my recent books alone (on Kindle) I have Japanese light novels, a book on political philosophy (see above), two physics books, a book about geometry applied to the real world in surprising ways***, a book about autism, a book about the Beatles and the recording of their songs, a book on a current issue in sociology/psychology, and so on.  This should give you a locally scaled example of how my mind goes all over the place.

For the most part, I cannot complain about having many interests.  It would be nice if I had someone with whom to share at least some of them, as used to be the case, but if wishes were horses we’d all need to carry manure shovels with us everywhere we go (and not just metaphorically, as we already do).

So, anyway, my mind is all over the place, but this week there have been several stretches in which I had no interest in any subject.  When that happens to me, I know I’m really spiraling down deep into the depression thing.  Hopefully, though, if I can truly get some extra mental rest this weekend, it will regress a bit.

I hope you all have as good a weekend as it’s possible for you to have‒and if you’ve been here for a while, you know that my take is that you always have the best weekend you could possibly have, because as soon as things happen, they become inevitable, since you cannot undo events that have already taken place.

This also means you always have the worst weekend possible, of course, by logical necessity.  But that’s not horrible‒after all, if you consider most weekends, you can realize, “Hey, if this really has been the worst my weekend could possibly have been, well that’s pretty cool, because it hasn’t really been that bad.”

I’ll talk to you on Monday, barring (as always) the unforeseen.

*Thank Batman it’s Friday, for those of you who have not yet seen this from me.

**Could you call those “perisynonyms”?  Well, I know you could call them that, but I mean, does anyone think it might catch on, and is the meaning fairly obvious?

***Jordan Ellenberg’s Shape.  I strongly recommend this and his previous book How Not To Be Wrong if you want to kindle (no pun intended) or rekindle a love of mathematics.  He narrates the audiobook versions of his books, and he is an excellent teacher.

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“Remember: All you’ll be is all you’ve been”

It’s Wednesday morning, quite early, and as is the case nearly every Wednesday, I am struggling not to incorporate some version of the first line from She’s Leaving Home by the Beatles* into my writing.  Oops, it looks like I failed in that struggle.  Well, at least I put the actual line in a footnote instead of quoting it in the main body of the post.

Speaking of songs and lyrics, I want to apologize to anyone who feels disappointed by the fact that I still have yet to start writing a song based on the trigger “humility”, and also that I haven’t done anything more with my previous tentative song, Native Alien.  I’m not sure I’m satisfied with the melody I have for it so far‒at some time in the future, I may redo it.  Or I may go back to it and find that I like the melody and chords, after all.  For that, we can all only wait and see; I don’t know much more about what will happen than you all do.

As for other incomplete songs, I have no fewer than two “videos” of such critters on my YouTube channel:  Mercury Lamp, which is really just a kind of demo, but which I like, though I haven’t felt like expanding it yet, and Come Back Again, which is actually mixed and produced, after a fashion, but is far from being in releasable form.

The lyrics of the latter song are quite old‒I wrote them (with more recent slight modifications) while I was in college, and reproduced them from memory when I decided to record the tune.  I had a little spiral notebook** that I sometimes wrote “poems” in, and this song was one of them, or a combination of such poems, originally.  Though it was a long time after writing the words that I ever formally wrote down the tune, the tune was in my head since not long after I wrote the poem.

Actually, there was somewhat more to the poem(s) than appears in the song now.  There’s a sort of prelude of three couplet lines, which I recorded and sang, but I decided it was too stilted and moany/whiny to start out the song.  I replaced it with a collection of “Aah, ah ah ahh…” singing, which I think works better, though I secretly*** left one faint track with the initial singing, which one can here and there just faintly detect in the background.

Anyway, as I said, I’m fond of the lyrics and the melody, and though I always just wing it on my harmonies****, I like the ones here.  I also like my little bass riff and my looped, reversed drum beat pattern.  The whole thing has many elements that I like.

[As an aside, here is a fun fact:  I was relistening to this song a few times recently, since it has obviously been on my mind.  On the side bar on YouTube where it gives further video suggestions/options when you’re watching something, it also gives you little buttons by which you can narrow down the available recommendations.  The first of these was fairly unsurprising, as it read “More from Robert Elessar”.  But the next one allowed me to choose to narrow my suggestions to “Progressive Rock”.

Evidently, the YouTube algorithm considers my unfinished song to be most consistent with the genre of progressive rock.  I’m not at all disappointed by that.  By all means, group me in with people like Pink Floyd and Yes and Kansas.  I’ll take that designation without any complaint at all.]

But of course, this song is really not in any kind of shape to be held up against any of those bands’ works.  The mix is uneven/unbalanced and still quite messy and blurry; the timing is at least slightly off in a great many places*****; and there are other technical issues.  Also, the arrangement is not quite to my liking.  For one thing, I’d like to add a bit of lead guitar to it; it feels too low in pitch overall to me, without any real bright sounds.  It’s not a song with a bright atmosphere, perhaps, but a range of pitches and timbres and so on is still desirable (at least to me).

Anyway, I’m mildly frustrated because I still don’t have any decent thoughts on a lead guitar part nor do I have the gumption to try to clean up the mix.

I will, however, embed the “video” here, and I would be delighted to receive any feedback or ideas you want to share.  Try not to be too cruel, if you can help it, please; I’m sometimes surprisingly fragile and also sometimes horribly spiteful, though I try not to act on or express any of those reactions.

Thank you very much.

*”Wednesday morning at five o’clock as the day begins…”

**Not precisely “a little black book with my poems in”, but not too far from that, either.

***Well, it was a secret.  I guess it’s not really a secret now, though the words still are.

****In Like and Share, I even just spontaneously did the whistling that appears in the bridge while I was recording my (also improvised) harmonies, and I liked that outcome quite a lot.  There was only one take on them, and that’s what you hear in the song.

*****To cut me a bit of slack, I did have to record all the parts separately, with just inexpensive,  USB-based mics and basic computer recording programs, in the back room of an office that used to be a store in a strip mall, with no MIDI or anything of the sort, and only a little Katana practice amp for the guitar.  Then I mixed it using the “free” program Audacity, which doesn’t have a “beat finder” function like the notorious Pro Tools does.  All things considered, I think I made pretty good use of what I had.

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A 2sday blog post 4 U

Okay, well, it’s Tuesday now, which often happens immediately after the end of Monday, at least when one is using the ordering of days that we use here in the modern, technological world, agreed upon just by general convention, since there’s no particular real meaning to any such ordering.  Also, of course, the specific names of the days varies from language to language.  But somehow, the seven-day week became the generally accepted one worldwide—possibly partly because it’s a prime number, and of course, partly related to the number of “non-fixed” celestial bodies visible before the invention of the telescope.

Not that any of that is very interesting, but it’s not as though I make it my business to write interesting blog posts.  I just…write blog posts.  Whether they’re interesting or not is pretty much in the eye of the beholder, as it were.

I think maybe I will embed the audio of my recent recording of Nothing Compares 2 U below, which I mentioned last week some time.  The audio is not ideal, of course, but it’s better than one might expect.  Whether the playing and singing is any good is, again, up to the aesthetic taste of each individual who happens to listen.  I make no promises or guarantees or representations about it being particularly good.  It’s okay, I would say.

As for other things, well, this morning I did not walk to the train station, nor did I bike here.  I’m still at the stage of working on my fitness in which I have to take a day off in between walks.  That’s not so disappointing, I guess; I did walk about seven or so miles total yesterday.  The biggest impediment so far to walking two or more days in a row is that my left knee is a bit sore from yesterday’s walk.

You might think I would be used to pain by now; I haven’t had a day free of significant pain in a quarter of a century now.  Unfortunately, biology mandates that pain is not something with which a living thing can easily become “comfortable”.

At least the blisters on my right foot are not acting up.  I wore a different pair of shoes than usual yesterday, a make and model I haven’t worn in a while, and it seems they were kinder to my heel and Achilles tendon than the others.

It’s rather frustrating.  I like the other kind because they are very lightweight and “breathable” if you want to call it that.  That’s important in south Florida, where merely standing still for more than five minutes is likely to lead to the growth of various fungi and algae on your skin*.

At least there’s always Lysol.  It helps if you pretend you work for a bowling alley and have to spray each pair of shoes after it’s been used to make sure no one catches a fungus from the previous wearer.  Even when that wearer is you, you don’t want to have a foot fungus if you can help it.

Ugh, all this is so boring, isn’t it?  Life is almost entirely composed of boredom interspersed with stress and tension anymore.  When I meditate, which I do, it helps my tension and stress and hostility a bit, but I find myself feeling very depressed instead.  It’s quite annoying.  Is tension and stress my only alternative to profound depression anymore?  Perhaps.  The world is overall so utterly idiotic and frustrating, this is just par for the course, as they say.

Despite the fact that I’m sharing a bit of singing here today, I haven’t played my guitar or sang even for a moment in over a week.  I haven’t really done anything creative or expressive in a long time, unless you count this blog (which I don’t, honestly).

I am rereading The Lord of the Rings, which is always good, at least.  I’m in The Two Towers now, at the point where Pippin and Merry have just met Treebeard.

It occurs to me that I tend to write (and think of) that pair of hobbits as “Pippin and Merry” rather than “Merry and Pippin”, despite the fact that Merry is the first alphabetically and in the stories Merry is slightly older.  It’s peculiar.  It’s not important or anything, but it is odd.

I also tend to write “off” accidentally nearly every time I’m trying to write the word “odd”, but that’s not so peculiar (ha ha).  The “d” and “f” keys are right next to each other on the keyboard, and both words (“odd” and “off”) are legitimate words.  They also can both often be workable in the same context.  Calling something “a little off” can be synonymous with calling something “a little odd”.  Curious.

My train will be arriving soon.  I am sorry to have to admit that I have provided nothing of value here.  That’s not too unusual for me, though.  I’m not sure that I’ve ever contributed anything of value to the world other than my children.  They are valuable, of course, so I’m not unhappy about that.  I’m just unhappy by nature, and I’m unhappy about that fact, and that further fact is something about which I am, again, unhappy.  It’s like an infinite series**, and the question is, does it converge to some finite limit, or does it diverge to negative infinity?  I don’t know.

And sometimes—most days, maybe—I share that unhappiness with you, my all-too-generous readers.  It seems grossly unfair to you.  And it is.  I admire your optimism, though.  I don’t understand it.  But I do admire it.

Have a good day,  You might as well.  Somebody ought to do it.

*I’m exaggerating, of course.  It usually takes as much as ten minutes.

**Mathematically, I mean, not like, say, The Simpsons, or Superman comics.

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Try to remember the kind of Sexember…

Well, first of all:  TBIF (Thank Batman it’s Friday).  I’ve been feeling particularly poorly this week, with sleep that’s even worse than my usual, and that is not good to start with.  At least, on the weekend, I can knock myself out at night with Benadryl and not really care that I will be groggy the next day.

I’m basically going to call this week a loss.  I haven’t gotten much of anything done that I had intended to do, and that’s discouraging.  But it’s a new month now, so there may be some psychological* tendency to think of it as a potential new beginning of sorts.  Mind you, there’s really nothing special about this day relative to any other; the length of a month is related to the lunar cycle and the length of the year, but only roughly, and the specific divisions are fairly arbitrary.

Of course, we know that August is named for Augustus Caesar, née Octavian, who succeeded in taking control of Rome after the assassination of Julius Caesar (after whom July was renamed).  But it’s interesting, at least to me, to consider what it would have been named otherwise.  September, after all, is named after the fact that it was “originally” the seventh month, as October was the eighth, November the ninth, and December the tenth.

So, would August originally have been named Sexember (the sixth month)?  I think that would be the correct form, though Latin scholars among my readers should please correct me if I’ve used the wrong prefix**.  If I’m correct, I would like to propose a global change of name for this month back to the potential previous name.

“Sexember” sounds like a much more fun month than “August”, with its dog day connotations and so on.  Although, the prefix “sex-” referring to six has, as far as I know, nothing at all to do with the word “sex” relating to the reproductive divisions among animals, nor to the process involved, which‒for good, sound, biological reasons‒is something dwelt upon and enjoyed and even obsessed over by so many.  But I’m not worried about etymological purity here.

Imagine the antics on the various social media as oodles of young people of all ages geared up to celebrate “Sexember” and talked about how they planned to celebrate it.  Of course, I suspect most people would exaggerate their planned exploits, as people tend to do.  Social media is a supremely fertile ground for hyperbole and posturing and pretense and performative outrage, whether about political matters or just how “hot” one is and how perfect one’s life is.  I wrote a song about this topic a few years ago:  Like and Share.  Here, I’ll embed it in this post.

That brings up an issue raised by a very old*** and good friend of mine.  He noted that, since the company which published my songs put things on YouTube with disabled comments, there’s no direct way for people to give me feedback on them, good or bad.  Of course, the songs are also on Spotify and iTunes and supposedly on TikTok and all those others, but many of those don’t allow comments, either.

My works are also among the various available background songs that one can choose for “reels” on Instagram and on Facebook.  I enabled that last bit, and even used one once.  You all should feel free to use them, too.  In principle, I get paid when you do****.

Anyway, the thought I had was that maybe I should embed the songs here, on my blog, as posts.  Or maybe I could create a new page, like the one I have for “my books”.  I could call it “my songs” and could put the officially released ones there, as well as ones in progress, and I could even share some of my covers.  If I shared them as blog posts, at least, comments would be always available, and are almost always welcome.

Of course, that covers and the incomplete stuff are already on my YouTube channel, such as it is, and I even have a created playlist with all of them in it.  Those are already available for comment and response on YouTube.  I’m a long way away from having a monetized YouTube channel, though, and this blog isn’t monetized, either (though I sometimes think maybe I ought to monetize it, at least partially, or make a Patreon account or something).

I’m not sure what I’ll do.

In the meantime, hopefully today will be better than yesterday, which was a day on which I quite literally wished to be dead, because I felt miserable and in pain and alone, to say nothing of failing to achieve what I’ve wanted to achieve this week (or in this life).  The thing that most prevented me from taking action on that wish was that the effort involved would have been too great.

I feel less bad today, which‒given the nature of number lines and greater than/less than meanings and equivalences*****‒means I feel better than I did.  I still haven’t crossed the origin into positive territory, though, and I don’t know if I ever will again.  That’s the consideration that leads to contemplation of death:  if one’s present and expected future wellbeing function is always in the negative, then a return to zero is a net gain.  It’s analogous to a jokey thing I used to say:  The one who dies with the most debt wins.

Enough of this nonsense.  I’ll call this post and this work week to an end now.  I wish you all an excellent weekend, and of course, enjoy the first of Sexember!

*I made an interesting typo when I wrote this word, one which I don’t think I’ve made before, though it would seem a very easy one to make, given the layout of the QWERTY keyboard:  I wrote it as “paychological”.  That seems almost like something that could be a new slang term, with related terms “paychopathology” and “paychopath”.

**Perhaps “Hexember” would be at least as proper or more so (though we don’t have “Heptember”).  I’m not sure.  That would surely please some of the many Goth people I tend to follow online, but it doesn’t have as broad an appeal as “Sex-” does.

***By which I mean he has been my friend from way back (starting freshman year of college), not that he is very old.  He’s roughly the same age I am, and‒though I often feel as if I’ve been kept alive by one of the great rings for centuries or even millennia beyond my natural time‒my real age, in proper time, is 55 years, soon to be 56.  Of course, there is no actual quantum leap in age at the anniversary of one’s birth.  Time is continuous‒or, well, it is quantized, but at the scale of 10-43 seconds.  So for all foreseeable, practical purposes within our lifetimes, it is continuous.

****Though the pay rate is nearly as miniscule as the Planck time mentioned in the previous footnote.

*****A pet peeve of mine is when some people denigrate the notion of choosing “the lesser of two evils”, particularly during elections, expressing such sentiments as “the lesser of two evils is still evil”.  This may be true in a simple-minded sense, but it misses the point entirely and expresses woefully clunky thinking.  Such a person might be expected to feel that owing a debt of $10 was not any better than owing a debt of $100,000, since both are debts.  But when you think about with which debt you’d prefer to be saddled, the difference is clear.  Money has a way of sharpening people’s intuitions regarding numbers.  Indeed, there’s some evidence that “negative numbers” were first invented to deal with debts.

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Another eddy in the corrosive, chaotic cloud exuded by my mind

Well, it’s just another moronic Monday (with apologies to the Bangles).  I did not do any work on Native Alien this weekend.  To be fair, it’s basically complete with respect to chords and of course words and melody‒though I don’t preclude any modest changes along the way, and certainly I have not arranged it.  But I basically didn’t do anything useful or productive over the weekend, I just vegetated by myself.

I intended to do some biking; I went so far as to pump the tires up to their target pressure and everything.  But as often happens, I got anxious over getting on the bike to ride*.  I did some walking, at least; not very much, but at least I took some precautions that have mostly spared my knees and my ankle.

I mean to do a decent walk this evening and get that bit more of exercise in.  I’m trying to get healthier, but it’s hard to motivate myself when I don’t even want me to be healthy.  I don’t like myself.  Almost everything about me is frustrating or even infuriating.

But if walking can help me be slightly healthier, it may make me less annoying, in that I hopefully will feel less pain and irritation.  So, I don’t really care about my own well-being to any significant degree, but I want this stupid body to be as minimally uncomfortable as I can make it.

I’m supposed to start working this week on the lyrics to my next song, with the takeoff word “humility” this time.  I already have a few ideas, though I don’t know if they’ll be what shows up finally.  I also intend to do a quick, low quality “demo” of Native Alien that I may share here on this blog.  That way people can hear the tune I have in mind for it.

I didn’t do any Brilliant stuff over the weekend, but that’s okay.  I do that in much the same way that I have my physics and calculus text books and so on:  to keep alive the pipe dream of actually getting to a level of expertise in the various subjects to be able to do something useful.  But I don’t think I really ever will do those things.

Not that there’s anything wrong with learning just for the sake of understanding the world better.  Indeed, it’s a kind of hunger, a wish to take more and more of the universe into my mind, and thereby to “own” more of it, in the only sense that really works.  But it seems unlikely that I will ever find the time and/or the energy to achieve the level of expertise I would like to achieve in those various subjects.

Plus, honestly, my interest in one subject is constantly being derailed by something else, though it happens over relatively long time-scales.  That’s one of the reasons it was good for me to be enrolled in programmed curricula; I don’t have to worry as much about being distracted because I need to do certain things in a certain order at certain times.  Not that I can’t stay focused on something in which I’m interested; I can do that to a borderline psychotic level sometimes.  But I can’t readily choose which interest is going to grab me at a given moment.

Of course, most people don’t do what they want to do most of the time.  We all do what we must‒or else we die young, or suffer, or what have you; sometimes more than one bad outcome ensues.  Of course, even when we do what we must‒by whatever measure you want to determine that “mustness”‒we often accrue negative consequences.

I’ve tried very hard to do what I “must” throughout my life, for as long as I can remember.  I tried to live a clean life and to be productive and prosperous, to be useful to people who mattered to me and to innocent strangers and all that stuff.  I never knowingly or willingly, let alone willfully, committed crimes (other than minor speeding and so on), but I still ended up spending three years incarcerated and lost my medical license and much of what was left of my connection with my children, a good deal of which had already been hammered by my chronic pain problem and all the “fun” it gave me.

Also, of course, it turns out that all along I had ASD (of two varieties, the first having been fixed by open-heart surgery, and there may be some problem with that discovered a few years ago, but I’m not bothering looking into that, as there would be little point).  That doesn’t tend to have made things easier, I guess, though I have no direct point of comparison, since I have always been I.

I don’t know what point I’m trying to make, which probably means I’m not trying to make any point, I’m just meandering in my mind and sharing the dubious results with you, o injudicious reader.  Hopefully this isn’t too much of a bummer with which to start your work week.

But, hey, I’m not making you read this, am I?  If anything, I would advise against it, as I would advise pretty much anyone against wasting any time, effort, emotional investment, what have you, in me.  I’m a black cloud.  In the final analysis, I bring nothing but corrosion and discomfort and misery to those who spend too much time in my vicinity, literally or figuratively.

You should try to find something more pleasant if you can.

*I’ve only recently come to the (admittedly fairly obvious) conclusion that a big part of my anxiety about biking is because I have had at least two accidents on bicycles that hurt my shoulders‒a connective/soft tissue injury on the left that still causes my trouble, and a fractured scapula on the right (which healed very completely, as bones tend to do).

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Neither jot nor tittle, but just a title

It is Friday.  Friday it is.  I do not, though, plan to eat any green eggs and ham, nor do I intend to train Jedi.  I merely like to fiddle around with words.  I have also even been known to write and speak about cellos and violins and violas and basses‒wording around with fiddles, that is.

Anyway, this should be the end of the work week for me, so don’t expect a blog post tomorrow.  I’m not saying that there definitely won’t be one; it’s an outcome with a low probability, but it’s not zero.  In principle, the probability of any physically possible event happening is never zero.  But the odds can be so vanishingly small as to be zero for all practical purposes.

For instance, it’s physically possible for the entire Earth (the Moon included) to quantum tunnel to the Andromeda Galaxy, but I wouldn’t hold your breath.  I suspect that the odds of it happening are so low that the time scale between now and the evaporation of the largest black holes due to Hawking radiation (roughly a googol* years) would not even begin to make it likely to happen, even if it weren’t for the fact that the Earth and the Moon will have been so dead and so disintegrated by then that even the memory of their memory’s memories would have been long since lost to any mind that might still exist at that time…probably.

So, you can treat that Earth-Moon Andromeda tunneling as “impossible” for all practical purposes, but in principle, it could happen…

…right…

…NOW!

Okay, well, as far as I can tell, it hasn’t happened.  The sky is too hazy for me to see if the stars have changed, but I don’t think they have.  It would be quite something to experience the local stars of a different galaxy, but of course, if we tunneled into Andromeda, we might be in a relative star desert, or we might be in a place with too many stars for our long-term safety.  Also, if our solar system’s net momentum persisted, we would be unlikely to arrive in any kind of stable orbit of the center of that galaxy.

And, of course, I did not say the sun would come with us‒that would make the whole thing even more vanishingly unlikely‒so we’d all freeze in fairly short order, apart from organisms that use geothermal sources as the base of their food chains and energy cycles.  Those might survive for eons.

Anyway, it’s vastly more likely that I’ll work and write a blog post tomorrow than that we will quantum tunnel to Andromeda**, but it is still a very small likelihood***.  It may be less than one percent, I don’t know.  But it’s quite unlikely.

So, though it might be worth a quick glance to check in come the morning, especially if you were going to do that sort of thing anyway, I would not go out of your way, and I certainly wouldn’t recommend holding your breath.  I don’t think even a sperm whale could hold its breath that long, and I think they have the longest breath-holding record of any mammal (if anyone knows otherwise, please let me know).

In other news‒not that I’ve really given you any news so far‒my keyboard arrived safe and sound (so to speak) yesterday afternoon, so hopefully this morning I’ll be able to finalize the chords to Native Alien.  Then, maybe this weekend, I’ll record a little guitar-chord and voice demo so I don’t lose track of the song.

Then, next week, I can start working on a song based on the trigger “humility”.  I still have no clear conscious notion of an idea for such a song, but I’m not worried about that.  I know I can produce something (not the Beatles song).

I have to keep reminding myself that I don’t need to produce anything great as far as lyrics go‒I think the lyrics I have for Native Alien, which I shared the other day, are okay but not terrific‒I just need to get some words down.  I can always edit and alter things as the process evolves, just as the first draft of a story (or to a lesser degree a blog post) is just the beginning.

I’m also continuing with the circuit course on Brilliant, and I’m alternating reading that book Vector and The Lord of the Rings (yet again) and my own book, The Chasm and the Collision (also yet again, though LotR still holds the 2nd place record for my number of reads, well ahead of CatC and only bested in number of readings by The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever).

All these are things that I can do alone, of course.  If there’s something to do that would require someone else’s participation, well, I’m shit out of luck.

I think that’s a phrase that applies fairly well to me, come to think of it.  And the word “alone” might as well have my picture next to it in the dictionary.  Though that might be confusing, since I can think of other words that would merit my picture even more than “alone” would‒words that would do their part to explicate just why I am alone, no doubt.

Batman knows I don’t want to hang around with me.

Anyway, I hope you all have a nice weekend, and if anything truly improbable happens to you, I hope it’s a very good improbable thing.

*That’s 10 to the 100th power, or a 1 followed by 100 zeros, in case you’ve forgotten whence the software company cribbed their name.

**Quantum tunneling is not rare on small enough scales, though.  It happens countless times every second in the heart of the sun, for instance.  If it did not, there would not be enough heat and pressure to overcome the coulomb barrier to fusion, and the sun would be some very large equivalent of a brown dwarf…or maybe it would contract more and get hot enough for fusion to take place without tunneling, but then I think the sun would be hotter and brighter and more short-lived, and I think it’s unlikely that the Earth would have produced any life, let alone humans.

***Think about it:  if you took something with odds of ten to the minus 120‒that’s 119 zeroes between the decimal point and the first non-zero digit‒and then made it a billion times more likely than it is, you’d still have odds of 10 to the negative 111th power, or 0.000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001.  This is a good reminder that relative risk (or probability) is not the same as absolute risk (or probability).

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Progress and (good) regress reports

I’ll start with the good regress:  I’m feeling significantly closer to baseline pain levels today than I was the last few days‒at least so far, though the day has only just begun.  I suppose I could have just said that I feel “better” today, but I fear that could be construed as meaning that I feel “all better”, which is not true and hasn’t been true for many, many years.

Still, I would rather be at my current level of chronic pain than the pain I was in yesterday or the day before.  And it should probably go without saying that I would pick either state over the pain I had while my kidney stone was present (and the irritation from the ureteral stent over the subsequent two weeks was nearly as bad, largely because it persisted for those few weeks).

I didn’t get a lot of work done on Native Alien yesterday, though I did progress a little.  I also don’t have anything down regarding the new song-takeoff word “humility”.  I’m beginning to think that I should stick to a song every two weeks, because I just have too much else going on to be able to achieve a song a week.

I also think I may need to buy a new small keyboard (the piano kind, not the typing kind) to use at the office, because I really have a somewhat difficult time trying to work out chords for a tune when I’m trying to play the tune on the guitar and then to play the chords on the guitar and see how they sound together.  I can’t really do both at once on a guitar, but on a keyboard it’s a piece of piss (as Brits might say).  Also, singing while figuring out the chords is difficult because my pitch in singing can be influenced by the chord I’m playing, and I might mistakenly adjust the tune to the chords instead of the other way around, without realizing that I have done so.

So, we’ll see.  I may order a new, relatively small keyboard for the office.  It would need to be inexpensive, but that should be pretty doable*.

I have continued to do the Brilliant course on circuits, which remains quite basic.  It’s a far cry from when I started doing their course on linear algebra, which I had never formally studied.  Don’t get me wrong; that’s a very cool and good course, and it applies to things in which I’m very interested, such as General Relativity in particular, but I got distracted in the middle of it‒I think I should have started by reviewing the fundamentals first.

I am currently reading a book called Vector, which goes into the history and mathematical theory of vectors and tensors, via quaternions and so on, and that’s pretty cool.  I find that learning the history of science and mathematics really helps get the subjects into my head.

As for other matters, well, there’s not much else going on.  Today is payroll day at work, so it will be somewhat hectic, but there’s no holiday or anything to warp the schedule.  Hopefully that means everything will go pretty smoothly.  At least I won’t have to be in as much pain while doing it as I might be.

I’m trying very hard to get back into doing more regular exercise, but trying to avoid causing exacerbations to my chronic pain while doing so.  It’s a bit of a tightrope walk, so to speak.  If I screw up, while it doesn’t lead to me literally plummeting to my death, it can set me back and make me feel terribly discouraged.

I had intended to try to ride my bike to the train this morning, but starting yesterday afternoon it began to rain quite heavily all throughout the area, so I didn’t get a chance to pump up the tires and whatnot.  This morning it was not raining, but it is supposed to rain on and off throughout the day, so biking isn’t so attractive.  I guess I’ll just wait on that and do some extra walking if I can.

Sorry, I know this is probably really dull and uninspiring reading.  I don’t know what to say about that.  I just spew these blog posts out as they come, so I don’t claim much more responsibility for the quality of the content than you can claim while reading it.

I will keep you updated on progress on my song(s) and of course you will see my writing.  I suppose, if I should try to start writing fiction again, I’ll let you know about that, but I don’t think that’s likely to happen any time soon.  There’s too much other stuff going on, and I’d need to stop doing this blog every day but Thursday.  I doubt that anyone would actually feel bereft if I stopped writing, but I flatter and delude myself that maybe it would be so.

I hope once more that you all have a very good day, and I reiterate that, no matter what, you will have the best day you could possibly have.  Don’t let that stop you from trying to ensure that this particular best day is really a very, very good one.  You might as well try.

*Addendum:  I looked on Amazon and there was a well-rated, small “beginners'” keyboard by Yamaha that can be delivered by tomorrow and was quite inexpensive, so…reader, I ordered it.

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Some words about words to put to music and orthogonal pain

Well, it’s Tuesday, and here’s my blog post.  I’ve had a very rough day and night, I’m afraid.  Not just my back and hips and shoulders and so on, but as I told my boss when he asked me, “Every fucking thing hurts.”  I left the office about 45 minutes early, and got on the really crowded train that I would usually have avoided.  At least at the house I was able just to lay down, but I’d already taken a lot of (OTC) stuff to do what I could about my pain.  But it has certainly not gone completely away since yesterday; it hasn’t completely gone away for a couple of decades.  But it is still worse than usual.

In spite of the above difficulties, I did a little work on Native Alien yesterday morning.  For one thing, I retranscribed the melody onto real staff paper, because the crudely drawn staffs on which I had previously written it were very small and unwieldy.  Then I worked on the chords, confirming that, yes, the song (as I sang the melody when I made it up) is in the key of F major/D minor and indeed the initial chord should be D minor (this implies an overall minor key, but it is not dispositive).  I’m not sure of all the chords yet; I was in too much discomfort to keep working on it.

I also did my coin-flipping binary search for a new song topic/subject/trigger, and that trigger word is:  humility.

That could be quite an interesting take-off for a song idea.  It makes me think of Billy Joel’s song, Honesty.  Of course, I haven’t even begun writing down any lyrics yet, nor even really thinking of them, but I’m sure my subconscious mind is cranking away.  It always seems to be making progress; remember what I said yesterday about how, after a break, I sometimes come back better at something than I was before the break?

I may post here below the lyrics of Native Alien just for your perusal*, though not really for feedback unless you feel a burning need.  Here they are, in the first draft.  Bear in mind, there would/will likely be modifications to the wording in any final version that might one day come to exist of the song.

The planet Earth is beautiful

A gem in outer space

But I feel like a stranger here

As if I’m from some other place.

–

The humans are like aliens

They often make no sense

Their gives and takes and lies and fakes

Make me feel better on the fence.

–

Could I just be some kind of native alien,

Delivered by some ET stork that got its signals crossed?

Is it possible that I

don’t belong beneath this sky,

an entity who’s home but still is lost?

–

Do people that you meet seem strange

And even ones you know?

You study them to learn their ways

But it just leaves you in a daze

Unsure who’s really friend or foe.

–

Could you just be some kind of native alien

A seed that germinated here in unfamiliar soil?

Is it possible that you

Don’t belong beneath this sky so blue,

a mortal wrapped in some mistaken coil?

Again, I’ll remind anyone reading that A) this is the draft form, which may change, and B) the point of this exercise is just to write something, not to try to produce a masterpiece.

I know that not all of the lines quite scan, but that’s something that can be adjusted in the singing process.  Think of how Jimi Hendrix squeezed the words “Whatever it is, that girl put a spell on me” into the same musical phrase and length as “‘Scuse me while I kiss the sky”.  I’m no Jimi, of course‒for one thing, I’m right-handed, so I don’t have to reverse-string my Strat‒but I do what I can.

I haven’t done any more thinking on my ideas of quantum wave-functions literally back-propagating through time and interfering retroactively with earlier parts of themselves and other waves to set up a potential cause for superdeterminism or something else.  For one thing, as I said, I need to seriously advance my mathematical prowess with QFT and such before I can determine if there’s any real potential to the idea.  Also, it’s hard to think about abstract, four-dimensional complex time stuff when you’re in a lot of pain.

I did log in to Brilliant dot org as I mentioned I intended to do yesterday, where I quickly saw that they had a new course on circuits, and I couldn’t resist getting started on that rather than working toward that other notion.  The basics so far are, well, really basic, but that’s okay.  It’s still better to do something like that in one’s spare time rather than participate in outrage on social media‒even though that outrage is often justified.

Oh, well.  I’m still tired.  I’ll try to work on the Native Alien tune a bit more and probably tweak the lyrics, but I’ll also try to come up with some words related to “humility”.  That could be fun, at least.

I hope you all have a very good, relatively pain-free day.

*It seems I have done so.

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Chords in music and in time

It’s Monday again, the start of another work week‒that is, if your work week begins on Monday.  In the modern world‒and indeed, perhaps always‒there are many people whose work weeks start on days other than Monday.  I suspect, though, that the majority of people still work their week starting on Monday, at least in the West, though it may not be a large majority.  If anyone out there has easy access to any rigorous statistics on the matter, I would be interested to learn.  On the other hand, I’m not going to seek the information on my own, so it’s not a tragedy if no readers have it.  I like trivia, but this is definitely quite trivial, at least from my point of view.

I hope you all had a good weekend.  My own was not very interesting, and I felt tired, but then again, I did have a cold starting in the middle of last week, so I guess I was still recovering.  I feel as though that particular infirmity is reasonably well on its way.

I worked a little on the chords of last week’s song, Native Alien, though not very much.  At least at the house I have my keyboard, so I can play melody and chords at once to confirm which chords sound best to me.  Interestingly, it seems that the chord to start the song (at least the melody) will be a C major chord, which is the V chord of the key of F major (though if the song could be considered to be in D minor, it would be the VII chord).  This is not unusual, of course, nor particularly noteworthy.  It’s just interesting for me to recognize specific facts to which I didn’t pay attention when I wrote earlier songs, because I’ve thought more about music theory since then, probably because of the guitar.  It’s a curiosity for me.

Speaking of songs, today I plan to do another round of flipping coins to pick a basic topic, or subject, or trigger‒whatever might be the better term‒for another song (lyrics) for this week.  Of course, last week’s word, Earth, didn’t really become the subject of the song, just a takeoff point, but that’s fine.  The idea was just to give me some way to give myself a start.

In other news, I had a weird thought last night after watching one of Sabine Hossenfelder’s latest videos.  I wrote an email to myself about the thought so I wouldn’t forget it, and I’ll include that text here, so you‒yes, you‒can see what you think (I have edited this text for clarity and to correct typos):

“If the overall arrow of time is caused by the tendency toward increase in entropy from a lower to a higher entropy state (“Big Bang” to heat death, at the cosmic level), that could behave analogously to a current (like in the ocean, not a wire).  Meanwhile, locally*, we know that the laws of physics don’t appear to have any directionality time-wise.  So perhaps locally, matter and wave interferences in the sense of quantum wavefunctions can happen not just in space but in time itself and the future can feedback on the past, just not in such a large way that it would overwhelm the overall tendency (though maybe even that is not impossible).  The effect of such a temporally retrograde wave wouldn’t flow backwards so fast that it would override the current itself (probably).  However, that wave could still affect its predecessor, creating standing interference patterns in time and things along those lines that might be the source of so-called super determinism.  Think about this a little bit.”

That last injunction was intended for me, but if any of you want to think about it, you’re welcome to do so (it’s not as though I could stop you even if I wished to stop you, which I don’t).  Of course, if I’m going to really explore this notion, I’m going to need to bone up on my mathematical physics in a serious way, and it’s always hard to find the time.  That’s always been a bit of a weakness of mine:  I get very interested in something and develop skills in it because of my interest, then something else catches my attention, and soon all my energy goes there.  I don’t tend to forget the things I learned previously, at least, and sometimes when I return to them, I even find that I’m better than I was before (e.g., after not playing guitar for quite a while, when I picked it up again, certain songs or chords with which I had trouble before had become much easier).

Also, of course, the fact that I have to work for a living is another distraction.  I really do need some ultra-wealthy patron out there to provide me with living and intellectual resources so that I can devote my time to my wonderful pursuits without having to earn my living.  I also want world peace, world freedom…and a unicorn.

I guess in the meantime I should probably go back to using Brilliant dot org to spruce myself up in terms of mathematics and physics (and computer science in the meantime, why not?).  I have an annual subscription (supporting Sabine Hossenfelder, whom I mentioned earlier), so I might as well use it.  It’s a better use for my spare time than diddling around on social media.

Okay, well, I hope you all have a very good day, and that it is the beginning of a very good week for you.

*I’m using the colloquial meaning of “locally” her not the strict physics definition of locality.

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Songs from a life less interesting*****

In case it wasn’t obvious, I did not go to work yesterday.  I have a head cold of some variety that seemed to begin in the afternoon on Wednesday‒maybe it started sooner than that, I’m not sure.  Anyway, I stayed at the house yesterday, trying to rest.  But I was pretty stuffed up, which I still am, and now my mouth is dry from (apparent) mouth-breathing when I slept.

Sorry, I know this is really dull material.  Such is life, I guess.  Or, at least, such is my life.  I suppose a dull life is better than many of the lives that would make for more interesting reading.  This was a point I first recall encountering in The Hobbit, when Bilbo remarked that his time in Rivendell would make boring reading, though it was wonderful to experience.

I think it is possible to have an exciting or at least interesting life that does not fall prey to the curse of “may you live in interesting times”.  I think it is possible to have a life that most people would find fascinating to hear about, and which is also quite fulfilling to experience.  But it does seem that this is a relatively small subset of available lives.

For the most part, humans seem to prefer stories about harrowing, horrific things.  This is not restricted to fiction, but is also part of why news media tend to focus on the more dire and terrifying news stories.

Of course, there are probably good, sound biological reasons for this.  As a matter of survival, it’s crucial to attend to danger and threat much more so than to pleasant, routine, comfortable things, because those creatures that don’t become extra alert and energetic when danger is present are less likely to leave offspring than are those that respond with arousal*.  So the fact that many of our favorite stories describe horrible things may be analogous to why so many of our snacks are very sweet and/or very salty:  a supranormal stimulus increases engagement powerfully, and can easily become habit-forming.

How in the world did I get on that subject?  I’m not sure.  I guess I could go back and reread this to find out, but I’ll be doing that when I edit it, anyway, so I’m not going to waste my time now.

In other news, I wrote a second verse for my “weekly” song on Wednesday afternoon, and even took a little notebook with me with the song paper in it, so I can continue the process wherever I might be.  Unfortunately, I did not work on it at all yesterday, but then again, I didn’t really work on anything yesterday.  I’ll try to write a chorus and then a third verse today.

I have to remind myself that I’m not trying to produce something superb, even assuming I could do that on command.  I’m just trying to produce something**.  So if it feels a little inane and contrived to me, well, that’s okay.  It’s just got to be some “song”.

I use quotes there because I am really starting with the poem, the lyrics, which is “usually” how I do things.  I don’t know if I’ll be able to do lyrics and music within one week on the same song.  At least so far, that pace doesn’t seem to be in the process of being achieved, though I suppose I might finish the song and come up with a melody over the weekend.  Or maybe what I can do is make songs in a kind of assembly-line style:  lyrics this week, then next week, while coming up with lyrics for another song, do the melody for the first song.

I have heard that most songwriters tend to do melodies first and then come up with lyrics.  That may be a true statistical statement, but I know it’s not the way everyone does it, because at least two of my favorites do otherwise.

We know, of course, that Elton John writes the music after Bernie Taupin writes the lyrics, by their own description of their songwriting process.  And, of course, many operas and musicals start with the libretto***, and the music is written afterward.  And Roger Waters, one of the best lyricists ever****, implies in The Wall that he writes his lyrics as poems, e.g., “I’ve got a little black book with my poems in…”, and also e.g., the scene in the movie where young Pink has his poem book, which contains the lyrics for the song Money, discovered by the oppressive teacher.

So, writing lyrics and then making a melody afterward wouldn’t put me in bad company (though I don’t know how the band Bad Company actually wrote their songs).

Anyway, that’s enough for today.  Batman knows if I was even coherent.  I suppose the editing will make that somewhat clearer, but my mind might be fuzzy enough that I cannot even tell in the immediate editing period.  But you will know.  So, please, have patience with me.

And have a good day and a good weekend, also, if you’re able.

*There’s nothing sexy in this use of the word, just to be clear.  I’m not referring to creatures that get “turned on” by danger and threat; those types of creatures seem less likely to survive than their compatriots, ceteris paribus.

**Not the Beatles song.  I already did a cover of that, anyway.

***Italian for “little book”, in case that wasn’t obvious.

****As evidence:  He wrote almost all of the lyrics for Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here, Animals, and The Wall.

*****I feel like this could be a good album title.