The Chasm and the Collision

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“Now…what shall we talk about?”

It’s Friday, the end of the work week, and thankfully, I feel somewhat better than I did at the beginning of the week.  That’s rather unusual for me, and it has little (but not nothing) to do with the fact that the weekend begins tomorrow; it’s more about how badly I felt earlier.

Of course, many people look forward to the weekend; Loverboy even had a song about it.  And why not?  People look forward to spending time with friends and family, to being able to sleep late and relax.  It’s even possible to look forward to things like grocery shopping and yard work if it’s with and/or for one’s loved ones.

A lot of that doesn’t apply to me, since I’m almost always just by myself on the weekends (last weekend being a blessed exception).  And though it is quite nice to be able to rest, and even to sleep longer with the aid of OTC pharmaceuticals and natural supplements, I have a very difficult time loving or even liking myself, so I’m not spending the weekend with anyone whom I love.

I’m trying, though.  Those of you who regularly read this blog may understandably think that I have given up on myself, on ever being happy or having significant wellbeing or whatever you want to call it‒some state that could be described as one of “noncontradictory joy”.  But I do try.

One might say that I am always trying, really, though one may quibble with the definitions and whether they apply even when I am sleeping or engaged in other tasks.  But I arrange the place, the time, the surroundings, and even the posture of my sleep to try to improve my chronic pain (and of course my insomnia).

I also try to arrange the way I sit at work, the types of socks and shoes and other clothes that I wear to improve my state of being.  I take carefully chosen vitamins at particular times of day, and I alternate OTC pain meds to try to decrease, at least somewhat, the chance of negative side-effects and interactions.  So, I haven’t given up, though I often wonder why I have not.

I think one of the hardest things, for me, is to follow the (quite good) advice that one should treat oneself with the care and support one would any other person for whom one is responsible and whom they love.  I have a hard time loving myself.  I certainly quite often don’t even like myself, but that’s a lesser problem; it’s entirely possible to love someone but not like them in most senses.

Okay, well, this is getting dull, and I have just been distracted by one of those silly “provocative” questions one often finds on social media, specifically, “Is a hot dog a sandwich?”  These questions are apparently meant to start discussions (or even arguments) online or in person, and they are much of a type with questions such as “Does pineapple belong on pizza?”

To me, such questions are basically category errors, or something closely adjacent.  My first reaction to such questions is to want to give them a sneer worthy of Billy Idol.  A hot dog is a hot dog; who cares if it’s a “sandwich”?  And nothing “belongs” on pizza.  Pizza is an invented concoction, people can put on it what they want.  In any case, to make such questions in any way useful and amenable to reasonable discussion, the questioners need to define their terms.

What do they mean by “hot dog”?  If they just mean the meat-cylinder, then no, that’s not a sandwich by most definitions, but that would need to be defined too.  If one defines each of the terms precisely and specifically, then one could sensibly address questions such as “Is a hot dog a sandwich?” or “Does pineapple belong on pizza?”

But of course, deciding the question based on those rigorous terms and applications doesn’t answer it when other definitions and terms are applied.  The vast majority of words don’t really have definitions, they have usages.  The vast majority of words just happened, they were not invented by one person who could thereby define the meaning of the word as they invented it.

I could give you the definition of the word “orcerterlolet”* from my book The Chasm and the Collision, and this would be one of those rare situations in life where I actually have authority over the meaning of the word, because I am the author.  I invented the word and its meaning.

Except in such rare cases, though, there are no final and definitive definitions of words, at least not prior to mutual agreement for specific purposes.  Also, there are no authorities about anything that wasn’t specifically and entirely invented by the person claiming authority.  There are experts, but there are no authorities.

For instance, the police are not “the authorities”, and elected officials are not our “leaders”.  They are all public servants, employees hired (in various senses) by the people of a given nation, and they should be treated as such.  But that’s a whole ‘nother subject, and I’m not going to get started on that now.

I hope you all have a good day and a good weekend.

*I’m not going to give you the definition, though.  If you want to find out what it is, you should read the book.

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Learning about science, troubles with reading and socialization, and (not) writing fiction

It’s Saturday morning, and boy was yesterday’s audio blog a little weird.  I think it’s not so much that I said anything particularly weird—certainly not for me—but rather the odd meanderings thing took, from musing on the fact that I’ve been losing any joy of any kind in my life, becoming more and more bored or even irritated by more and more things that used to be interesting, on to the various declining cinematic universes and finally to thoughts about General Relativity.

At least that latter part encouraged me to read some material and watch some relatively hard-core YouTube videos about General Relativity and its mathematics.  By “hard-core”, I don’t mean there was any graphic sex involved.  First of all, I don’t think they allow stuff like that on YouTube, but even more to the point, I don’t see how one could work such a thing into an educational video about matrices and tensors and stuff like that.  I mean “hard-core” as in being more in-depth than just a general information, analogy kind of educational presentation, and especially that it talked about the mathematics underlying the science.

Not that I’m against the more general stuff.  I certainly began all of my interest in science with general knowledge/information.  When I was a kid, growing up (which is what kids do if things go well), I had a whole bookshelf I called my “science shelf” full of various kid-level books about everything from biology to paleontology (there were lots of dinosaur books—my first career ambition was to be a paleontologist) to “how things work” kinds of books and so on.

I didn’t really start to have as much physics and astronomy related material until after Cosmos came out.  That show was the reason our family got our first color TV.  I also asked for (and received) a hardcover copy of the book for my 10th or 11th birthday (it came out in 1980, I think, so it should have been 10th), and I was very pleased.  That book and show really triggered my love of space-oriented and physics-oriented science, including—of course—cosmology.

I chose my undergraduate college precisely because it was where Carl Sagan was a professor, though I never did meet him.  I would have thought it presumptuous and appalling to try to seek him out and bother him with gestures of my admiration and thanks.  I tend to feel that way about inflicting myself upon anybody—friend, foe, or stranger.  I just feel that I don’t have any right to intrude upon anyone else’s life or time, and also that I frankly don’t know what to say if I do meet them.

It’s a bit sad, though.  By most accounts, Professor Sagan tended to be quite pleasant and positive toward people who liked his work, and he considered himself—according to him—first and foremost a teacher.  He certainly taught me a great deal.  Though his books are now somewhat out of date, they are mostly still great repositories of fact and interest, and they remain overflowing founts of wonder.  I feel confident in recommending them to anyone, most prominently Cosmos, Pale Blue Dot, and especially The Demon-Haunted World.

Of course, I’ve read a lot of his intellectual descendants since then, and his cousins as well in other fields (Stephen Jay Gould’s and Richard Dawkins’s books and collections about biology are wonderful, too, for instance).  One thing I like about listening to podcasts that focus on ideas is that the guests are often people who have recently (or not-so-recently) written books, and if the subject is interesting I can read their books to get more deeply into their work.  I first encountered David Deutsch and Max Tegmark (and many others) on Sam Harris’s podcast, for instance.

And, of course, I have also read books by Brian Greene and Sean Carroll (and others) about physics in general.  It was to The Big Picture that I turned yesterday after my audio blog, in addition to the aforementioned video, to review some of the mathematical basics of General Relativity.  From there, maybe I’ll go on to the YouTube videos of Leonard Susskind’s* real graduate level lectures at Stanford, and to reading Sean Carroll’s textbook.  I’d also like to read through Zee’s Quantum Field Theory, As Simply As Possible, which I’ve mentioned before (with the thought of going on to his textbook if I can).

I have Zee’s layperson-oriented book in hardcover, but the print is small, and it’s difficult to read.  Still, I took delivery yesterday of a new set of reading glasses that are slightly stronger than the ones I was using, so I hope they’ll make it easier.  I’d really prefer to learn by reading than even by watching videos.

Of course, all this is probably just “pie in the sky” thinking.  My biggest difficulty is just summoning the will, the energy, to do these things.  It’s similar to the trouble I have with writing fiction.  I have quite a few story ideas I could write, but I have no drive, no desire to do the writing.  There’s no percentage in it, so to speak.  It’s not as though I have any fans out there telling me how much they like my books and want more.  I mean, my sister has read them all, and she liked at least most of them, and says she really liked The Chasm and the Collision.  That’s very nice, and I do appreciate it.  Apparently, though, it’s not the required stimulus for me to want to write more fiction.

Perhaps nothing would be.  Perhaps I’m just deteriorating too much, or have deteriorated too much.

Or perhaps it’s that I feel that a truly tiny minority even of people who engage with fiction do so in written form nowadays.  There’s too much competing immediate gratification out there, and primates—probably almost all life forms—are prone to fall for immediate gratification, and to someone else doing the imaginative work for them.

I fear that much of the general population has allowed their personal imaginations to atrophy, much as physical health atrophies when someone goes everywhere by car.  People even play Dungeons & Dragons online now, apparently.  That seems weird to me.  I don’t think I could really stand to play role playing games with strangers.  Playing them with my friends, as I did back in junior high and high school, for countless hours, was greatly enjoyable, and I think it did exercise and improve my imagination and my story-telling and story-creating “muscles”.

Oh, well.  I don’t have anyone with whom to do any of that stuff now, and I can’t even really imagine trying to find new people with whom to do it—see my above discussion about inflicting myself on people for part of the reason, but that’s not the only one.  I also don’t want to invest the considerable necessary stress and effort and anxiety into trying to find friends with whom I actually share interests—if such people even exist—and then have it all go sour or just go away as nearly every other relationship of any kind that I’ve ever had has done.  The juice, however delicious, is not worth that old vice-grip-on-the-testicles (and on all the joints and tips of one’s fingers) level squeeze.  The juice doesn’t last, anyway.

I’m on the train now, and I’m not exactly producing anything edifying, am I?  I’ll bring this week’s writing to an end, but I hope I’ll have the will to keep studying, at least.  And, of course, I hope most fervently and sincerely that all of you have a very good weekend.

*I also have his series The Theoretical Minimum in kindle and/or paperback and/or hardback form; his most recent one was about GR.  But I’ve had trouble reading physical books of any kind (let alone the Suss kind…ha ha) lately; I’m hoping my new reading glasses will help that.

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It’s Mon the Day, callooh, callay.

I think I misspelled those borrowed words from Jabberwocky, but since they were just nonsense words anyway, I suppose it doesn’t matter.  I’m being sarcastic, anyway.  It’s certainly not any kind of frabjous day for me, or if it turns out to be, I’ll be very surprised.

I had the weekend off, as you know‒which unfortunately means I’m going to be working six days this week‒and now I’m getting ready to head in to the office.  I’m strongly tempted to get an Uber to the train station rather than waiting for the bus.  It’s wasteful, of course, but it’s easier, and the heat outside means even walking to the bus stop would leave me disgustingly sweaty.  Maybe I will take an Uber.

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Well, I didn’t take an Uber, I took a Lyft, because when I first looked at the Uber app, it was reading a price that was more than twice the usual rate.  I don’t know why; perhaps all their drivers were engaged already and the app automatically adjusts for supply and demand.

Anyway, it was a decent ride, but even waiting for the few minutes in front of the house for the Lyft left me copiously sweating, and I still am doing so at the train station, just sitting here on the platform.  I sometimes wonder if I’m profoundly ill in some way‒physically, I mean‒to be sweating so much at relative rest.  But if I’m that sick, why don’t I have more trouble on those days when I walk eight miles and whatnot?

I do feel physically quite a bit like crap, but a lot of that is just because of all my chronic pains.  Hips, knees, back, ankles, plantar fascia, belly‒when all these things hurt most days, it’s hard to muster a lot of energy.  It wears me out.

I wish I could go home.  By that, I don’t just mean going back to the house and skipping work.  I don’t consider that house “home”.  It’s just a place I go to sleep (a little) because I have to go somewhere.  I mean, I wish I could go back to where I grew up, where I had family and friends.

Of course, someone else lives in the house in which I grew up, and the city in which I grew up‒Pontiac‒is not in terrific economic shape.  The junior high and high school and at least one of the elementary schools I attended are closed, and are more or less abandoned.  Their likenesses live on in Mark Red and in The Chasm and the Collision, but only in my mind, really.

You probably couldn’t guess from reading those books that the schools were based on the ones I attended.  That’s fine, of course, from a narrative perspective; I’d prefer people to think of their own schools when reading the stories.  That’s more fun.  So the descriptions are at least a bit vague.

Anyway, I’ve veered off my point (how unusual!), which was just basically that there’s really nothing left of my home for me.  Nearly all the people I knew there are long gone, and even the company Pontiac Motors (a subsidiary of GM) is no longer in business.  The Pontiac Silverdome is also gone.

I’d still like to go back there, of course, though I know it would be bittersweet, and I entertain a fantasy of doing so in a fairly radical fashion.  But I don’t see myself being able to, for instance, go on a vacation there.

No, I would have to uproot and abandon my present life, more or less, and I don’t know how I would be able to start anything new elsewhere.  I don’t think I would be able to make any new connections, and I’m unsure of my ability to reestablish any old ones‒I’m very unpleasant and asocial, and I’m weirder even than I used to be, so I don’t think I’d be able to live with anyone else…or rather, I don’t think that anyone else would be able to live with me.

I really don’t see any available exit or escape, and I can’t really imagine any kind of rescue or help.  I also don’t expect that I’ll ever see my kids in person again.  That is the worst thought.  But I have no capacity to try to push the issue.  I don’t deserve them, anyway.

I wish I would collapse and just fall apart, do you know what I mean?  It will happen to everyone (and everything) sooner or later, anyway.  It would be nice if it were sooner, because I am tired of trying to continue, but I’m not built well for doing much of anything else.

I’m really, really tired.  And it’s just Monday morning.  The work week is just getting started.  I hate my life, I hate the world, I hate myself.  At least, I hate aspects of the world, and my life is a shambles, and I’m extremely tired of myself.  He’s such an annoying person.

All right, that’s pretty much enough for today.  I’m about two and a half stops from my destination, and I have nothing very interesting or useful to say, so I’ll start wrapping things up.  I feel very much that the world is inundated with some kind of caustic, disgusting effluvium, everywhere I go, so that everything in the world is tainted and not worth enduring.  But of course, no matter where I go, there I am, so it’s most parsimonious to think that the effluvium of disgust I find wherever I go is so seemingly ubiquitous only because I carry it with me; I am its source.  I’m not being saturated by the stink of the world, I’m saturating the world with my own stench.  It’s repulsive.

This is metaphorical, of course.  I bathe regularly and wash my clothes and all that.  As far as I can tell, I don’t literally smell bad.  It’s more of a spiritual fume of some noxious variety that I exude.  Unfortunately, I don’t seem prone to getting used to it.

Enough.  On that cheerful note and thought, I bid you farewell, and wish you a happy day and a happy week.  For goodness sake, look out for your family and friends.  And hopefully they will look out for you.

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Taking pains to meditate on some of my books

Well, it’s Saturday, and I’m writing this at the bus stop instead of starting it at the house because…well, I just felt like getting out of the house.  I had a pretty bad night, pain-wise, with the pain waking me rudely at a bit before 2 am.  It hasn’t really gotten any better since then, and I certainly didn’t get any more sleep.  It’s really bad, even now, on the second edit; it may be getting worse.

This sort of thing makes my attempts to fight depression extremely difficult sometimes.  Yesterday I did, as I said I would, make it a point to do a bit of mindfulness meditation, usually only for a few minutes at a time; I am just getting into/back into it.  I feel that I was at least a bit less tense thanks to that.  I even walked about halfway back to the house from the train.  That was the second half, since I took the bus partway.

The walk was decent, and I don’t think it triggered my current pain flare-up, because I was already having an equivalent flare-up during the day yesterday, and if anything, it felt a bit better after the walk.  I’m not sure what might have made my pain edge up from its baseline, but edge up it has indeed done, and with a vengeance*.

As I said, it’s hard to try to think about improving my spiritual status when my pain is so striking**.  But I’ll keep trying.

I’m also trying not to listen to any podcasts or audio books or even music for now so that, when I have moments without tasks to which to attend, I can try to relax and be “mindful”.  Possibly it’s beneficial, in and of itself, not to have information piping into my ears all the time, even if it’s interesting information.  Maybe that will help encourage my own identity to speak more.

That’s probably not a good thing, given the nature of my identity, but we’ll see.  As I say, though, the pain makes it hard to meditate, or indeed to be positive in any sense.

I’m well aware, of course, that it is actually possible for one to meditate using one’s pain as a focus of the mindfulness.  I, however, am not nearly advanced enough for such a thing, and I doubt I ever will be.

I’m very tired of being in pain.  It’s been going on for two decades pretty much without any respite‒not for a single day, as far as I can recall‒and it surely looks like it’s going to be with me until I die.  That’s a horrible thought, but it would be mitigated if I had something else onto which to hold.  Unfortunately, right now I do not have any such thing, nor do I have any inkling where to find such a thing, or even if such a thing exists.

It’s frustrating, but I’ll keep trying to meditate, and to walk, and to minimize my eating-as-stimming habits.  I’m even tempted to start taking Saint John’s Wort again, though the last time I started it I felt worse rather than improved.  But maybe it was interacting with something else at that time, because the first time I ever used it, it was quite beneficial.

This is all probably an exercise in futility, or more than one such exercise; it’s entirely possible that I’m simply not built to be relatively pain free or psychologically stable.  It may be my destiny to be the King of Pain, as the song says.  That’s one song I have memorized still for the piano.  It’s a great song.  One of the others I can always play is Eleanor Rigby…you know, the song about all the lonely people.  Why do you suppose those two songs have stuck in my head over the decades?

It’s a mystery, Charlie Brown.

I don’t have much more to write this morning.  Though, speaking of my writing, I did, on a whim, begin to read my book Mark Red again yesterday evening.  I’m still only in the first chapter‒really, the first scene‒but it’s something to read at least.

I am fond of the book; I think it’s a good story, and I like Mark, and I like the version of vampires I’ve created in this universe.  But I particularly love Morgan, the vampire who saves Mark‒because he was mortally wounded thinking he was trying to save her‒by making him into a demi-vampire.  I think she’s still my favorite character that I’ve created, though there are strong contenders in The Vagabond and The Chasm and the Collision.

Heck, I really like Michael from Unanimity, who I didn’t realize as I was writing him is almost certainly on the autism spectrum.  He’s an awkward, shy, brilliant but self-doubting, reluctant hero, so to speak.

I guess it’s good that I like my characters and my stories.  It’s not as though I wrote them to try to please anyone else, though I certainly had my kids in mind when I did CatC.  Sure, it would be great if there were lots of people who read and liked my books, and if any of you want to share links to them with anyone you think might enjoy them, I would certainly be delighted.  But I didn’t ever really expect wide readership let alone fame, though I can’t say I never dreamed of it..  I’ve just always liked to make up and write stories.

Self promotion, on the other hand, has always been one of my worst areas.

Life is curious.  Sometimes it’s even curious in a good way.  Often it’s not.  Ah, well, I wasn’t consulted when the universe came into existence…as far as I know, anyway.  Although, as in my book Son of Man it’s conceivable, if far from known to be possible, for the “future” to influence the “past”.  So maybe I was consulted.  Maybe someday I will even create the universe itself, to my own design.

That would probably explain a lot of the poor craftsmanship, wouldn’t it?

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*We’re talking Wrath of Khan, Captain Ahab level vengeance here; we’re talking Law Abiding Citizen level vengeance.  We’re not pussy-footing around.

**Or boring, perhaps, would be more accurate.  But I mean boring like a drill is boring, not as a synonym for “dull”…though it could be described as feeling as if someone were using a drill with a dull but broad bit on various parts of my anatomy.  And it does certainly get old.

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Words, and spice, and a futile device…that’s what this blog post is made of

Well, it’s Friday again, and so tomorrow is Saturday, in the system by which we name our days.

The days themselves don’t know or care about what we call them, anymore than all the various plants and animals and fungi in the world care—as far as anyone can tell—what we call them.  Our names of things are solely for our convenience, to make communication easier and more streamlined—paintbrush handles of thought, as I think Eliezer Yudkowsky described them.

But, of course, having finite minds, as surely do all creatures, we tend to get so used to thinking of things by their names that we think the names and the things are interconnected in and of themselves, and even that the names have inherent power.  This is akin to all the old magical ideas that knowing someone’s or something’s true name gives you power over them in some mystical fashion.  It’s also related to our (depressingly) current notions of names or other words being capable of causing actual, physical harm, and being taboo—even words that are basically innocuous.

I can certainly understand why people might want to avoid using a term that’s been almost exclusively associated with historical injustice, oppression, and literal violence; that’s just a matter of trying to be polite, as far as I can see, and politeness is rarely a bad thing, as long as people don’t get too carried away.  But the tendency of humans to get hung up on some mystical (and fictional) power of names often becomes a problem, and is the error of thought which required the creation of the formerly popular and very important corrective, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.”

That’s very true—unless you’re dealing with Paul Atreides or some other Bene Gesserit person.  Alas, those are fictional beings.  I say “alas” not because I think that it’s too bad that we don’t have the Bene Gesserit and so on, but because it would be great if there really were people/creatures like the Guild Navigators, with the ability to fold space thanks to long exposure to the spice mélange.  That would be tremendously useful for space travel, obviously.  In our world, though, “He who controls the spice controls the universe” just refers to KFC and Colonel Sanders’s secret original recipe for fried chicken, which is tasty, but is not going to get us interstellar travel, at least not anytime soon.

Similarly, as far as we know, in our particular brane-world, there are no orcterlolets, with their ability to manipulate space directly (no spice needed).  And if Simon Belmont is real in our universe, he’s keeping his knowledge and abilities quiet, probably wisely*.

Anyway, coming back to the subject of the day and days, I hope you all are going to have a good weekend, and that you get some time off from work and so on.  I’m going to work tomorrow, unless some highly unusual situation develops, and so I will be writing a blog post tomorrow.

In case you couldn’t tell, I’ve been using my laptop all this week to write, and it’s definitely helping my thumbs, though they are not fully recovered yet.  I will say, even I am struck by how much faster and more eloquently I “speak” when typing than in any other fashion, including actual speech, as far as I can see.  As you may know, I’ve tried to work on doing “audio blogs”, since more people seem to like to listen and to watch things than to read—see yesterday’s post for my lament about that fact—but it’s not nearly as natural to me.  I did find it gratifying to read aloud my last post from Iterations of Zero, which I turned into a “video” on YouTube and embedded here, but that’s as much because I really was trying to get that message out…yet again, perhaps for the last time, after so many, repeated failures.

Apparently, I’m not very good at making myself clear.  Then again, the reason for that, and the emphasis on that reason, was a big part of the point of that last IoZ blog post and the fact that I read it aloud and shared it in different format.  I’m probably wasting my time, though.  Even if someone actually gets the point I’m trying to make, why on Earth would anyone act on it?  Why would anyone even try to save the prisoner in my thought experiment?

Let him die, I say.  He’s a worthless little piece of shit, anyway.  I hate him.

With that, I’ll wrap up this rather bizarre and somewhat short Friday blog post.  I didn’t have any agenda going in, and I think I’ve achieved that agenda nicely, and in fewer words than I usually take to do it.  If you’re spending the weekend with family and/or friends, please do your best to appreciate your time with them.  Make the most of it.  Don’t take them for granted.  Take nothing for granted.  The universe only makes one promise to everyone—and we can’t even be completely, mathematically, epistemically certain of that one.

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*The immediately preceding few sentences were references to my “fantasy” adventure book, The Chasm and the Collision, in case anyone was confused more by them than by references to Dune.  To learn more about what those references mean, you should buy and read my book!  Heck, buy them all!  They will change your life, I promise you…at the very least in the sense that you will own several more books than you had owned previously.  That’s technically a change, right?

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Though there’s only one lunar day per month, this is the weekly day of the moon

Okay, it’s Monday morning, and I’m writing this on my smartphone, so I’m not going to try anything too ambitious.  I didn’t bring my laptop back with me to the house because, again, I brought home some music (sheets and a book) under the absurd notion that I might play some guitar or possibly “piano” this weekend.  I don’t know if that was me being in an optimistic frame of mind or me deceiving myself‒or if, indeed, there is any difference at all between the two things.

In any case, as is presumably obvious, I did not play or even listen to any music this weekend.  I barely did anything at all.  I mean, on Sunday I did my laundry, getting terribly stressed before starting it that I would find the machine in use already, even early on Sunday morning, but thankfully that didn’t happen.

I suppose I got a lot of rest, which I needed, because I was still pretty wiped out from the virus or whatever that I’ve been fighting.  I watched some YouTube videos of mainly British comedy panel shows, most of which I’ve seen numerous times already, and on Sunday I watched The Accountant again; that’s becoming one of my favorite movies.  And I watched the Gallifrey Gals’ latest reaction video to Doctor Who.  And I took a few moderate walks, during one of which I spoke to my sister on the phone, which is always nice.  That was pretty much all the socializing I did…for the week, really, not counting interactions at work.

I didn’t read at all this weekend‒not a single page of a book.  Nothing gripped me enough to make me even open the Kindle app on my phone, let alone to grab one of the books I have in my room.  Last week, as you may recall, I reread The Chasm and the Collision.  I also reread one of the stories from Welcome to Paradox City, and I reread “I for one welcome our new computer overlords” in the version that’s in Dr. Elessar’s Cabinet of Curiosities.  They weren’t as fun as CatC, but they were decent stories and I still like them.  But I didn’t feel the urge to read even any of my own stuff this weekend.

I’m on the train on my way to the office now, and wondering what I’m going to do in general.  I keep intending to get back into some kind of better shape, so I don’t die a corpulent grimace of a blob of some kind.  I’m working on it.  I am walking some, trying to work my way up, and I do upper body training to at least some degree every day (except when sick…and after even a few days, it’s remarkable how much more difficult it becomes).  I’m trying to adjust my diet, but that seems to be my most difficult hurdle; eating is one of those rare self-soothing behaviors that’s biologically reliable, and from which it’s difficult to quit cold turkey as it were*.  Still, there are further interventions on which to work.

I’m not giving up on it.  I have something I want to try to do sometime in the relatively near future, and I would need to lose weight before doing it.  I’ve also toyed with the notion, in the past, of perhaps running a marathon some day.  I’ve had difficulties with jogging because of my back, which has at times been sensitive to me running, and some chronic ankle and knee weakness, but since I’ve been walking my two plus miles a day just from and to the train station, I think those areas are getting stronger, and sleeping on the futon on the floor is probably also helping.  Maybe I can gradually work my way up.  I’m not as young as I was in college when I first got into serious running condition, but if anything I am more stubborn.

I need to have something to do with my time, and I certainly don’t “have a life” as the expression goes.  I’ll try to get back to my medical postings soon, anyway, and I apologize for frequently putting them off.  There’s the follow-up to the neurology based post and the discussion of sugar I first sort of introduced last Thursday.

I don’t know what else I might end up doing.  I’m really rather rudderless now, and feel like I’m becoming more so as time goes on.  I have no real sense of a future, just the endless trudge that is the directionless present.  At least the weather is a little cooler down here for walking.  That’s a slight boon.  So much of the year it’s way too hot and humid.

Anyway, that’s it for today.  I hope you all have a good start to your week.

*Ha ha

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You are not I, but I have a URI

In case anyone was worried, I apologize for not writing my blog post yesterday.  I was “home” sick with an upper respiratory infection, and had neither the energy nor the inclination to try to write a post.  I’m obviously not completely recovered today, but I am going in to the office—it’s payroll day, after all—and I feel a bit better than I did on Monday afternoon and yesterday, at least physically.  My mind feels quite foggy, but that’s not that unusual.

Of course, I’m not going to write either my follow-up neurology post nor the post about sugar and its discontents (so to speak) yet.  My mental acuity is not up to those at the moment, nor am I completely prepared for the former article, so I won’t be getting to them quite yet.  For those who might be waiting, again, I apologize.

There’s not much happening that’s particularly interesting.  I have been rereading the latter part of The Chasm and the Collision over the past few days, and I’m pleased to note that I still enjoy the story.  Parts of it even bring me near tears, which is a curious experience for the author, but then again, I guess it is more personal to me than it might be to others.  I’ve found a few typos—less than a handful, I would say—that were missed before, and if this were a world in which I had time and will and executive function (as they call it), I’d fix them and try to go and adjust the text for future purchasers, but I’m not up to that.

Anyway, it’s nice to know that at least I like the book, still, but I think there would be a lot of people out there who would like it, if it could be brought to their attention.  Unfortunately, I’m not good at self-promotion in any serious way.  This blog is as close to promotion as I get, and you all see how upbeat and enthusiastic I am with it.

Speaking of typos—I was, you can check for yourself—I’ve been making an awful lot of them while typing this.  I guess it’s part of being sick, or sicker than usual, or sick in more ways than usual.  I also, after waking up many times through the night, actually didn’t hear my alarm clock until the second repeat, ten minutes after it first goes off, because apparently I was sleeping on my left side, and I’m very hard of hearing in my right ear.  Probably at least a bit of it is also because I’m sick.  I wish I could say I felt more rested, but who feels better rested when sick?  Maybe afterwards, but not while it’s going on.

I’m wearing a mask on the train today, since I am sick, whereas lately I’ve been occasionally going without it, since often I’d literally be the only masked person in sight.  Perhaps going without a mask is why I’ve gotten sick.  It would make a certain amount of sense.

I think I may try to reread some of my other stories.  Somebody ought to read them, since they’re out there, and it’s not their fault their author isn’t good at promotion.  There are whole communities of people on Twitter and the like who promote independent writers and publishers, and I’ve tried to be an active member of such things in the past, but I’m afraid I have a hard time not getting stressed out by the whole process.  I guess this is why authors get agents and work through publishing houses, but frankly, the notion of dealing even with those situations—getting an agency or a publisher or any of that—is too daunting.  I barely have the will to get up and out of “bed”, frankly, but staying there would be more unpleasant than getting up, so…

Anyway, all that isn’t very interesting.  I guess the only other moderately interesting thing I have to note is that, Monday evening, as I was on my way back to the house, and already feeling the effects of this URI, I was “inspired” to write lyrics to the chorus and after that the first verse, and then a slightly altered second chorus, to a new song.  I even had a little melody in my head to go with it at the time, though I don’t recall that now.  I recorded the initial chorus, sort of, on my voice recorder, though I’m not sure I really caught the tune I had in my head for it, and then I wrote that chorus and the rest in the note-taking app.  I suppose I should email them to myself, lest my phone die and they be lost (though that wouldn’t exactly be a tragedy).  It was a slightly upbeat sounding melody, which was mildly ironic given that the words were rather negative—a cautionary note against complacency and overconfidence.

Is it any surprise that new song lyrics I would write would be so?

Anyway, that’s all that’s going on right now.  For me, I mean.  I don’t know if I’ll go any further with the song idea, but one thing I will do is try to avoid getting too wordy with it, since I tend to do that and end up making songs that are quite long.  I’ll add at most one or two other verses* and maybe a vocal bridge section if the mood for that strikes me.  We’ll see.  Odds are nothing is ever going to come of it, which is fine, because it’s not as though anyone makes a habit of listening to my music, anyway.

Okay, that’s enough of that nonsense.  I hope you all had a decent Tuesday, and have a good last day of November today.  Tomorrow begins what by name should be the tenth month, but which is actually the twelfth month—December, in case you didn’t know.  Yippee.

*To be clear, the verses and chorus such as I have are remarkably unwordy for me, so two to three verses, a chorus (with minor changes in its second repeat) and maybe a little bridge would not be too much.

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The time is out of joint : O cursed spite, that ever I was blogg’d to set it right!

Hello and good morning, everyone reading this.  It’s Thursday again, and time for my more traditional, weekly blog post, that I’ve maintained for some years, unlike the daily one I’ve been doing in recent months.  I’m not sure how long I’ve been doing the daily one, now, to be honest.  It feels both like a short time—in that I can sort of remember the sense of when I started doing it and stopped writing fiction and stopped playing guitar—but also a long time in the sense that it’s difficult to feel the memory of it ever having been otherwise than it is right now.

All things can feel eternal sometimes.

Speaking of writing fiction, last Saturday I wrote a post in which I reminded people of the YouTube “videos” of me reading the first nine chapters of The Chasm and the Collision, as well as three, I think, of my short stories.  I don’t know if anyone has listened at all, but if you have, I would greatly appreciate any feedback you might have to offer, and if you’re interested in having me read any more.

Anyway, because I posted about it, I decided to reread that book, and I’m not quite halfway through the reread—I’ve been interspersing it with reading the latest Richard Dawkins book, Flights of Fancy, and then I’m reading Emmy Noether’s Wonderful Theorem, which I got after mentioning her earlier this week.  I think CatC has stood the test of time, at least for me.  I don’t feel too uncomfortable recommending it as a family-friendly book, a “fantasy” adventure for the young and the not-so-young alike.  I don’t know if it’s my favorite of my books or not, but I like it.

I like most of my stories, really, which is good, because it’s hard to tell if many other people even read them.  If anyone has read any of my books, having bought them from Amazon, I’d really appreciate if you’d rate them.  I’m not asking you to write a review—I know that can be a pain—but you can give it a star rating with only the click of a mouse or the tap of a finger.

I try to remember at least to rate every book that I read, but only once I’ve finished them.  That probably biases my ratings toward the higher end of the scale, since if I dislike a book enough, I’m not going to finish it.  But, really, I don’t know if I’ve ever read a book that I’d give one star, not even Swan Song, which I did not finish.  Somebody worked for a long time writing each and every one of those books, and the mental effort is not small.

Also, if there was a book so bad (to me) that it would be likely to give it one star, I think I’d recognize ahead of time that it wasn’t something I was going to like, and just wouldn’t buy it.  But, if you have read any of my books and think they only are worth one star, then by crikey, rate them one star.

I kind of wish I felt like writing, because both Outlaw’s Mind and The Dark Fairy and the Desperado are well begun, and I like both stories.  I’m a bit more attached to the former, partly because I’ve been working on it longer (though DFandD as a story idea is quite a bit older).  If anyone would be interested, I could post at least the beginning bits of the latter story here, like I did with Outlaw’s Mind, so you can see how it is, but I haven’t edited it at all (except the quick reread of the previous day’s work before writing on any given day), so it may be quite raw.

Seriously, though, I doubt there’s anyone interested in any of it.  I don’t know why I’m wasting my time.

Not that there’s anything else to do with my time but waste it.  I certainly have nothing useful to do.  Every day I feel like I want to slice my own skin off, or beat myself around all my major joints with a hammer, or maybe just break and burn everything I own.  Yesterday, at a frustrating moment, I honestly came perilously close to smashing the guitar I have at work, but instead I was able to take some of my stress out by just snapping a pen in my hands.  It was a good snap; it broke into four apparent pieces, one of which I haven’t found.  I guess it went flying.

Sometimes several times a day, on web searches and on my phone browser and in my contacts, I keep looking at the site and the numbers of the suicide prevention hotline.  But I can’t bring myself to use it, not after what happened to me last time I did.  I really don’t want to be handcuffed or locked up again, not ever.  I tried very hard all my life to do and be good and to do “right”, or at least not to do “wrong”, to live a life where I wouldn’t have such things happen to me, and yet they did anyway, and I lost everything I had that I hadn’t already lost.  I don’t want a repeat of that.  It’s not fun.

Also, honestly, I feel like I don’t have any right to ask for anyone’s help or to use any public resources (or private resources) to help me, though I need it desperately.  I don’t have anything to offer in return.  I don’t really think I’m worth saving, and I don’t think anyone else really thinks I am either.  It’s certainly unlikely that anyone will pine for me when I’m gone.

Well, that’s enough of that.  At least, for what it’s worth, I don’t think it’s going to go on for much longer.  I’m barely getting through each day, frankly.  But the days do seem to last for such a long time.  That’s that subjectively confusing sense of duration I mentioned earlier.

I do hope that all of you are doing okay, and that you’re in the company of friends and loved ones, and that you enjoy doing things with them, even boring, everyday things.  Hold onto that shit.  Seriously.  Nothing else is as important.  Probably.  Though, what would I know?

TTFN

[Apologies, but there is no picture today.]

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A brief reminder of my “audio stories”

Well, I’m working today—as I will also be doing Monday—so, obviously, I’m writing a blog post.  Aren’t you excited?

When I arrived at the train station this morning, I thought the whole system was shut down somehow, because the “garage-door” style barriers were closed, blocking the stairs, the elevators, and the payment machines, like they do when there’s a hurricane coming (there isn’t…I check frequently).  However, it turns out that the guy who opens them just hadn’t arrived yet.  He only arrived after I had gone all the way down to the end of the station to the road to cross the tracks and had come all the way back up on the side on which I need to be.

Ah, well, it’s a little bit of extra exercise, and that can’t be too bad, can it?

I planned yesterday to mention the subject of some of my reading-aloud “videos” of my fiction, but the post got to be too long, and it would have been a very abrupt change of topic, considering I was writing about my difficulties seeking and finding and begging for help when one is circling the drain, as I am.  I haven’t gotten any useful answers, other than a commiserating one to the effect, “Whataya gonna do?  You just gotta keep on moving.”  I can respect that attitude.  It’s far better than someone pretending to have answers when they don’t.  But it doesn’t help me figure out why one should bother to keep moving.  I can’t see any reason, honestly, and the effort has long outweighed the reward for me.  I’m frankly skeptical that there is any reward at all, or that there has been one for some time.

Anyway.

Quite a while ago, I did some recordings of me reading some of my stories, and I turned them into videos, though the “video” portion is nothing but the cover of the story in question.  I think they came out reasonably well; I’ve always been decent at reading stories out loud.  But they didn’t and don’t get much play, even though they are a free way to listen to my (already cheap) short stories, which is why I stopped doing them.

I also recorded and uploaded onto YouTube the first nine chapters of my book The Chasm and the Collision.  This is my most family friendly story, since I wrote it with my kids—who were in fifth and fourth grades when I started it, I think—in mind.  It a story about three middle-school students who become caught up in a trans-universal “fantasy”* adventure.

Thanks to the very wise advice of my father, there’s not even a single curse word in the whole book, though there are scary bits, since there is real danger in the story.  Real danger to the characters, I mean.  I don’t mean to say that reading the story is dangerous.  It’s not.  My sister has read the book several times, now, and she says it’s her favorite of my stories.  As far as I can tell, it has nothing to do with the fact that she fell and hit her head earlier this week.

I recorded the first nine chapters, but I finally stopped doing it, because, as I said, no one seemed to be listening.  I thought it was a shame, but it was a lot of work to do the reading and then the editing of the audio (though it helped me learn Audacity, which was definitely worthwhile).  Since then, at various times, I’ve thought that maybe I would like to pick up on reading the chapters and uploading them, and then maybe even start to record and upload my other books, a bit at a time**.  I’ve also got a few more short stories and novellas that I haven’t recorded and uploaded, and they could be stand-alone “videos”.  But, again, it’s a lot of work, and it would be doubly frustrating if no one ever listens.

I’m embedding here, below, the YouTube video of the first chapter of The Chasm and the Collision, so that people can get a sample of it.  I’m also going to see if it’s possible to embed the YouTube playlist that is all the “videos” that I’ve done so far from that book, and maybe even the playlist that has the “short” stories that I’ve read aloud and posted.  Again, it’s a good way for people to get exposed to the stories*** for free.

If you listen and like them, I obviously would be delighted if you’d decide to buy them.  All my stories are available for Kindle, and my novels and collections are available in paperback as well.  My last collection, Dr. Elessar’s Cabinet of Curiosities is even available in hardback.  Here’s a link to my Amazon author’s page, so you can peruse them:  The Link.

If there’s more than one person out there who would be interested in hearing more of me reading my stories, please let me know in the comments below.  You can also leave story-related comments on YouTube.

Nowadays one can self-publish for Audible, which is kind of neat, but I think I’m going to stick with the YouTube format, because it’s more informal, and it’s free for listeners so they can introduce themselves to the stories, as read by the author.  I’m very self-hating in general, and that hasn’t changed, but I think my stories are pretty good, and I’m especially proud of The Chasm and the Collision, because I wrote it with my kids in mind—though I don’t think either of them has ever read it, and they probably never will.

That’s about all I have for today.  Nothing has really changed since yesterday, so there’s no other real news to give.  Have a good holiday weekend, for those of you in the United States.  And everyone else, I hope you just have a good weekend.

Here’s the embedding of those videos and playlists, if I can successfully do the latter:

*I put that in “scare quotes” because if you pay attention when you read it, you’ll notice it’s actually a science fiction story.  But the character of the tale is definitely more like fantasy than sci-fi.

**Boy howdy, wouldn’t Unanimity end up taking up a looooooong time?

***That makes them sound radioactive, somehow.  As far as I know, they are not.

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O God, your only blog-maker. What should a man do but be merry?

Okay, well…hello and good morning and welcome to another Thursday edition of my weekly blog post.  I don’t have anything quite as momentous as last week to talk about today, but I’m making progress on good things, nevertheless.

For instance, I’m almost done editing my short story House Guest, which is even older than The Vagabond…I wrote it when I was in high school; I think I was sixteen at the time.  Editing this story is a much faster process than editing The Vagabond was, and it’s about eighty times faster than editing Unanimity was.  House Guest is a true short story, only about six thousand words long; even going through it repeatedly doesn’t take much time.  I haven’t needed to change much, except to update some of the medical trivia based on my far more advanced present knowledge.  There’s only a little bit of it; it’s not crucial to the story, but it does enhance it a bit.

It’s nice to be able to go back and see that I didn’t write much worse then than I do now.  I might have written better occasionally.  Certainly, I didn’t tend to write as long a story.  Or, well, maybe that might not actually be true, now that I think about it.  House Guest is just a short story, after all, and is simply no longer than it needs to be.  My hand-written Sci-Fi/Fantasy novel Ends of the Maelstrom from around the same time was well over five hundred hand-written, single-spaced pages long, on very narrow-ruled paper*, and was almost certainly longer than The Vagabond.  Maybe I worry about story length too much.

Oh, by the way, happy April Fool’s Day!  I only realized the auspicious date—if that’s really the best term—when I saved this file just now.  Despite the usual form of celebration—again, if that’s the right term—associated with this day, I’m pulling no pranks and telling no lies in the writing of this post, unless my forced cheerfulness counts as a lie.  But if that’s a lie, it’s one that I, and I think most other people, tell frequently, probably many times a day.

I don’t think I’m alone in this.  I encounter a lot of upbeat, “power of positive thinking” type statements and quotes and tweets and posts and whatnot all around cyberspace, but they often give me the sense conveyed by Queen Gertrude when she says, “The lady doth protest too much methinks.”  It’s a rather desperate, almost panicky, quasi-hysterical positivity and cheerfulness…because, after all, no one will like you if you’re not cheerful, right?

And if you do admit to feeling poorly, especially emotionally, then you’ll often get responses full of platitudes and homilies and you-think-you’ve-got-it-bads, sometimes verging toward the tone of a slap in the face from Cher and a shout of, “Snap out of it!”

Of course, to be fair, you also tend to find sincere sympathy and concern.  Even the other stuff often plainly comes from a well-meaning place, so to speak.  I don’t want to impugn the motivations of those responding to things for which our culture gives us very few tools.  I think almost all such people really do mean well.

But our society is drenched in the myths of the rugged individualist and The Secret, and the power of positive thinking and “Think and Grow Rich”, and “quantum healing” nonsense.  If you find yourself tempted by the sugary, empty-calorie bait in those intellectual traps, remember, you only ever hear about the good outcomes, the lucky ones…the failures don’t publish their tales, and the marketing people certainly don’t promote them.  If ever there was an inbuilt and all-but-inescapable confirmation bias, it’s in attitudes about the power of positive thinking.

Not that being reasonably, cautiously optimistic and positive is a bad thing—it’s not, if you can do it, and if you are so constituted that it doesn’t require you to browbeat yourself when you feel down, as you will sometimes, no matter who you are.  Even the Donald gets down in the doldrums de vez en cuando, I’d stake my left kidney on it.  But there’s no evidence whatsoever that the state of the present or future universe is affected by human thoughts and attitudes other than by dint of prosaic methods:  hard work, discipline, planning, thought, careful evaluation and analysis, proverbial blood, sweat, and tears, and—almost always—many failures along the way.

I wish some people would positively think themselves able to defy gravity by the power of their minds and would hurl themselves from the nearest equivalent of the observation deck of the Empire State Building to prove it.  That would be putting their money where they mouths are.  When Deepak Chopra talks about the power of the mind to heal and to resist aging (and the like) through some kind of pseudo-quantum nonsense, make sure to compare photos of him now with photos taken twenty or thirty years ago (they are, unfortunately, readily available).  He’s aged conspicuously.  Also, remember that people like Heisenberg, Schrödinger, Dirac, Feynman, Bohr, Einstein, Wheeler, and the like—all of whom understood quantum mechanics far better than your favorite local or international or celebrity purveyor of quantum woo, to say the least—are currently and conspicuously dead.  At least in this branch of the Everettian** multiverse.

Wow.  That was a hell of a tangent, wasn’t it?  No April Fools, though.  I was speaking from the heart—which is to say, conveying my honest thoughts and feelings by means of a computer keyboard.  Nevertheless, the good things I shared at the beginning of this post are true and unsullied, and The Vagabond is out there to be read by any who enjoy horror novels.  I’m getting good feedback on it, as well as on Son of Man, which a coworker of mine recently finished.  She said she loved the twists and surprises, and really enjoyed the book, which can’t help but make even a curmudgeon like me feel happy.  Also, I recently reread The Chasm and the Collision, and the ending of my own book brought minor tears of joy to my eyes.  That’s pretty cheesy, I guess, but I’ll take my little bits of satisfaction where I can get them, and I’ll try not to be too embarrassed.

And though you might not think it, I would take great and honest satisfaction in knowing that all of those who read this, and their loved ones—and everyone else for that matter—were healthy, and comfortable, and as safe as they can be, and as happy as often and for as long as they can be without using inappropriate and/or detrimental substances***.  So, if you could do me a favor, please see if you can achieve those results.

TTFN

Some people even go

*I haven’t been able to find such narrow-ruled paper again since that time, though I’ve often looked for it.  Apparently, that super-tight ruling of notebook paper has fallen out of fashion.  It’s too bad, really, because I loved the convenience of having to use fewer pages, though it made editing a bit of a mess.  There were added sentences running into the tattered margins on almost every page, and even I had trouble reading what I had written.  Maybe there’s a good reason that paper fell out of fashion…but it did look beautiful when blank.  So many lines available to fill!

**Hugh Everett is also, lamentably, dead.  He died at age fifty-one, my current age, after having left physics at least partly because of the animosity he experienced against his “many-worlds” interpretation of quantum mechanics, which may nevertheless be correct.

***I might think otherwise if such substances were reliable, or if they didn’t tend to end up causing a subsequent rapid, severe, and painfully ironic downturn in the happiness curve of life, but that’s just not the way things are.