time

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“From ev’ry depth of good and ill…”

Does anyone else ever feel guilty about never letting their first alarm of the day sound, about always shutting it off before its allotted time because you’re awake anyway?  It feels almost like an unkindness—as though the alarm wanted to do its job, but was always thwarted.

I wouldn’t be surprised if I’m the only one who so anthropomorphizes such a function, but what can I say?  I’m a weirdo.

I’m currently waiting for the very first train of the day, since I was awake anyway, and I decided to see how the new, even earlier, 4:20 first train is.  I’m hoping it will at least be less crowded than the 5:20 train.

They haven’t even opened the gates that lead to the stairs or the elevators or the ticket machines at the train station yet, which seems a bit unreasonable, considering they are the ones who set up the new schedule.  Still, according to the tracker site, the train is on its way, and it’s only two minutes (!) behind schedule.

I don’t know why it’s two minutes behind schedule at this hour.  I don’t see how it can be dealing with any kind of traffic or anything.  Oh, well.  This constant inability for people to keep to schedules is only one of the reasons I despise living in this world.

Speaking of things that make me not want to continue living, if anyone out there reads this on WordPress Reader, or by any other, similar means:  are you able to comment and “like” the blog posts I write just as used to be the case?  I know I’m having trouble doing so with, for instance, my favorite website that I follow, and that fact is starting to make me fade away from reading it as consistently as I used to do, because I cannot “like” a post and see the comments (or leave a comment) all in the same place.  I’m wondering if that’s also happened with my blog, because I’m getting many fewer views and stuff than I used to receive.

It may simply be that people have gotten tired of reading my posts or even of dealing with me at all.  I know I’ve gotten tired of myself, more and more all the time.  I can certainly understand if people have just gradually drawn away from what is, after all, a depressing blog.

Even posts like yesterday’s, in which I went into all sorts of minutiae and trivia about temperatures and percentages and the like, are probably just mind-numbingly dull for most people.  Many of the things I enjoy are difficult for other people to appreciate, it seems.  As Edgar Allan Poe wrote in one of my favorite poems, “…all I loved, I loved alone.”

Anyway, I would appreciate some feedback about the visibility and/or accessibility of this blog for others, because I cannot readily tell from my perspective how others are seeing it.  And please—as always—comment here, not on Facebook or TWFKAT*.

I fear that the “Happiness Engineers” at WordPress, as they nauseatingly refer to themselves, have altered things to try to make the platform more exciting and up-to-date and have instead caused it to cease to work properly for oddballs like me who really would prefer things to be consistent, for them not to be constantly fiddled with, especially since that so often makes so many things so much worse.

If I were more paranoid, I might imagine that the world is trying to push me finally to commit suicide, since so many of the things from which I have taken at least some small modicum of distraction, if not necessarily comfort**, are shriveling up and blowing away.  I’m getting increasingly bored of the science and mathematics offerings on YouTube, and the reaction channels I watch have already reacted to stuff I like, and no matter how briefly enjoyable it can be to pretend I’m watching something with a friend, that’s clearly really not what’s happening.

Most of these people would never be my friends even if we lived nearby and had anything else in common but shows to watch.

And the newer science and math and nature videos I’m encountering are sometimes astonishingly idiotic, credulously addressing things like UFOs and whatnot.  Ex-Twitter is even less interesting than it was before, and I was never a huge fan of it.

I try to get involved in Facebook, but it’s also rather sparse and spare, and there’s not as much interaction as might be beneficial, and even the briefly interesting little, short video things very rapidly become astonishingly repetitive and boring.  I think those are all attempts to compete with TikTok or whatever, and if that platform is at all like those things, then I can see that I am not missing much.

Even the podcasts by Sean Carroll any by Sam Harris are too brief and intermittent to provide enough benefit to make a serious difference, though they at least are truly engaging while they last.

[FYI, the train arrived finally, just about here.  I meant to note this when it happened, but I got distracted.  It’s more crowded than I would have predicted, which is quite disappointing and borderline distressing.]

And now I have this external pressure to get health insurance, even though I don’t want to care for my health, because there’s not any compelling urge to keep myself alive and “healthy”***.  However, I did promise****.

I don’t want to take care of myself.  For what purpose, to what end, would I do so?  I mean, I do keep trying little things, attempting to tweak matters, trying to adjust and improve my physical and mental health, but even when I start a day in a relatively playful mood, I still wind up at some point slamming my forehead repeatedly against the metal posts that support cubicle walls in the office, until a coworker has to come and make me stop.

This was because some people who arrive late end up staying and working into lunchtime, bringing me alone for the ride, even if it’s supposed to be my break time.

I think, today, if at the beginning of lunch anyone is still on the phone who arrived at the office later than the official starting time, I’m going to unplug the modem and just forcibly interrupt these worms who have no consideration for other people’s time.  Of course, if there are people who were on time who are still on the phone, I’ll not do that.  People who began work when work is supposed to begin and who just overflow a bit into break time deserve some courtesy.  The others deserve only shadow and flame, but I’ll be merciful; they’ren’t really worth the trouble.

I’m really uncomfortable in my own head and my own skin.  I feel quite desperate, and I am losing most of what few psychological supports I had.  I will do my best to force myself through the process of setting up insurance before the end of the week if I can, but I can’t help but hope that some catastrophe will take the whole thing out of my hands and make it moot before then.

I’m running out of time, though.  I’m so tired and stressed out and frustrated and in pain, and it’s only the stupid, pre-programmed, hard-wired, firmware-like, non-intellectual fear drive that keeps me from doing the sensible thing and just dying.

I’m not afraid of anything specific, really; it’s just that innate, existential, unkind drive to avoid dying, which is about as pleasant to me as the need to urinate and defecate.  I hate being alive.  I hate my life.  And while I definitely don’t want to hurt people who still think I’m the person they used to know, and whom they wouldn’t want to have die “before his time”, it’s simply the case that that person is already dead, anyway.  He has been dead for years.

I’m so tired.  I feel like the last passenger pigeon or the final surviving quagga, whiling its time away in a bleak cage somewhere with no company of its own kind, waiting to die and put the final full stop on the extinction of its species.

I suppose it would still be acceptable if some miracle were to happen and change my life and bring me back to the way I used to be, or better, but I don’t see how it’s going to happen.  Certainly, no “supernatural” figure seems poised to intervene, and I don’t think any natural ones have the wherewithal or the inclination.  There’s certainly little to no benefit in the admittedly well-meaning cajolery to “just hold on” and all that jazz.  I try, obviously.  I’m still here and writing.  But it feels more like I’m fulfilling a prison sentence than it does like surviving…and I’m familiar with both.

As another poet I admire—and who escaped the prison by his owns hands—wrote:  “Oh, well, whatever, never mind.”

*The Website Formerly Known as Twitter.

**WEIT is a comfort and often a joy, and I am very distressed about not being able to see and comment and “like” it, and other comments, as I usually do.

***Physically, of course.  My mental health is a lost cause, anyway.  I received a “how are you doing?” automated email from betterhelp.com last week.  I had briefly used their service, but I quit when my therapist had to go on leave (for legitimate personal reasons).  I didn’t want to have to try to find a new therapist.  I know the checking-in email was automated, and the corporate decision to send it was probably related to the time of year, since many people have troubles in this season.  It felt touching, in a way, even though I know that there were no real people involved in sending anything to me specifically.

****To be fair to me, this was a promise made on the spot, and to someone who had long since broken her own much less spontaneous promise to be with me for the rest of our lives, through better and worse, sickness and health, and all that bullshit, so I guess I shouldn’t feel too pressured.  Promises like the aforementioned, traditional ones, however, are no longer taken very seriously, even in the moment they are pronounced…or so it seems.  That’s yet another charming human innovation:  purely performative vows.

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Probing train and work schedule inconsistencies and galaxy-scale “natural” selection

It’s midway through the week now—or it will be sometime today—and I don’t think I have anything intellectually interesting or challenging (or whatever) to write today like I did yesterday.  That’s probably a relief to most of my readers.  I don’t think those posts go over particularly well.

The train is supposed to be arriving on the proper side of the track, according to the tracker site, but we shall see.  It was also supposed to be here at 4:44 am, and it’s now two minutes behind that time, which was already one minute behind it’s programmed schedule.  Supposedly, there’s going to be some overall schedule change next week.  I hope it’s not too radical; I hate the notion of having to reset the whole system in my head.

Okay, well, this morning’s train arrived on the correct side, at least, though it was a total of six minutes late.  I know that’s not too bad—it certainly won’t change my day much—but it does boggle my mind how the very first train of the day can already be running behind schedule.  I mean, they promulgate the schedule themselves, so they know it in advance.  It’s the same every Monday through Friday.

Of course, I know that unexpected thing happen that engender delays, but if the unexpected happens and causes delays nearly every day, nearly every time, then it’s not the unexpected that’s to blame.  It’s the planning and preparation of the organization which is clearly inadequate and leads to too many things being unexpected that ought to be expected.

It’s a bit like what happens at the office.  There are people who are never there by the official time for work, and they keep being late because they face no consequences, not even embarrassment, for doing so.

I would be happy to offer some suggestions for such consequences.

Likewise with ordinary office maintenance.  I’ve announced and posted notes and signs repeatedly about, for instance, turning off the coffee pot (or brewing a new pot) if one drinks the last cup—the post-it note is literally at eye level just above the coffee maker.  But still, yesterday afternoon before I left, I had to shut off the coffee maker and put the pot in the sink to soak because someone left it on with less than a cup in it, and the residue baked into a crust of black, dehydrated coffee.

There are so many maddening things about the human world.

There are plenty of horrible things about the non-human world too, of course.  Nature does have its up-side, but it is also “red in tooth and claw” as the cliché says.  Darwin wasn’t crazy when he described that it is because of the war of nature, of famine and death, that we have the wonderful diversity of life and its beautiful and marvelous (and terrible) forms and functions.

The Buddhists were also right that suffering* is a key hallmark of life.  In any form of evolved life that I can seriously conceive, that’s going to need to be the case, since fear and pain are essential for staying alive in any world with competition for resources influencing survival and reproduction.  Genes that create bodies that don’t have pain and fear and disgust and so on don’t tend to get replicated nearly as much as genes that do, and when there is competition for scarce resources, ultimately such genes will fade away.

It seems possible, in principle, to design a life form—however loosely you want to use that term—that would not actually be capable of any kind of suffering, and if it were a stand-alone being or machine or what have you, it could very well continue to be that way, at least until it broke down.  But if it’s any kind of self-replicating “organism”, such as a Von Neumann probe or similar, there are inevitably** going to be slight errors in reproduction in each generation.  And that sets the stage for evolution via natural selection, even if it is the evolution of self-reproducing robot probes.

If there is differential survival and reproduction of variants, the ones that reproduce and/or survive better will come to dominate, even if there’s no inherent competitiveness between the probes.  If they go out into the galaxy in opposite directions, their evolution could diverge, and when and if they later encounter each other, they might have diverged enough to be in true competition for resources and/or space or what have you.

Eventually, especially as easily obtainable resources are used up by earlier generations of such probes, the ones that develop a certain degree of aggressiveness relative to others might have an advantage.  Ones that came to recognize other probe “species” as handy, localized sources of material that are easier to use than mining planets and asteroids and whatnot might become a sort of predatory or parasitic species of probe relative to the more autotrophic ones.

There might then follow a vast Darwinian evolution by natural selection of numerous species of what used to be Von Neumann probes, originating initially just from one source, and becoming a galaxy-scale ecosystem of self-replicating robots, just as life on Earth is a planet-scale ecosystem of self-replicating robots.  And maybe there might evolve some manner of multi-“cellular” “life”, and even a higher-scale form of intelligent, or meta-intelligent, “life”, that might begin to think about exploring other galaxies, and making new forms of probes, perhaps, to do that…

I don’t know if the universe would be “habitable” long enough for any further steps to occur.  It depends how long the steps would take.  But at all levels, some manner of drives and urges inherent to the system would exist, and deprivation and damage and danger to those urges’ ends would also engender some form of what would be fear and disgust and pain.

Always.  World without end.  Amen.

*duhkha is the official Sanskrit word, apparently translated as everything from “suffering” to “unease” to “unsatisfactoriness”.

**By which I mean, it is literally impossible to copy any complex structure or information perfectly and repetitively without infinite precision and infinite checking and awareness, which is not achievable in reality, as far as anyone can tell.

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So it begins, and so it goes, and so it shall end

Well, it’s been a mixed-auspices start of the first work day of the first full week of the month of December in 2023*.

I arrived at the train station almost exactly on time for the first train of said first day—that was a positive thing—but as the train pulled in, I and all the other people waiting at the station saw that it was arriving on the opposite side from normal.  There had been no announcement of the track side change, so I and all the several other people waiting had to scramble up the stairs, over the bridge and down the other side to get on.  Fortunately, the train did wait a bit, since apparently they realized that the announcement had not been given, but still, it was a bit maddening.

So far, I have no chest pains or other indicators of any cardiac event, though it is taking me a while to catch my breath.  I’m mildly disappointed in that absence of angina, because not only would it represent a potential break for me of some kind or other—temporary or permanent—it would also be only too appropriate for the Tri-Rail to face some consequences of their poor management in changing track boarding sides without informing riders who were waiting.  A lawsuit, in such a circumstances, might not be inappropriate, out of spite if nothing else.

However, I suppose I’ve been relatively protected, since I have done a fair amount of reasonably serious endurance (though not speed) exercise until about three weeks ago, when I got sick.  I’m still quite a bit heavier than I want to be, but at least my cardiovascular fitness isn’t too horrible.  Should I be thankful for that?  Maybe I should regret it.  I don’t know.

I haven’t really slept well at all this weekend, and certainly not last night, but at least I did rest, as far as that goes.  By that I mean that I did nothing that was productive, and almost nothing that required any exertion at all.  I watched the second of the Doctor Who 60th Anniversary specials, but though it was good, as far as it went, I wasn’t as moved or interested as I thought I would be.  I fear that the huge time gap since the last special—The Power of the Doctor—was just too much, and I rather lost my momentum for the show.

It’s disappointing, but it’s not unique.  I’ve lost my momentum for pretty much everything lately.  I don’t play or even listen to music, anymore.  I don’t write fiction.  I don’t watch any new shows or movies.  I’m even getting sick of reading.  I haven’t read anything at all since Friday evening, fiction or non-fiction.  I didn’t watch any football games or golf yesterday (or Saturday) which I have been known to do if the urge strikes me.  It didn’t strike this weekend.

Hanukkah is coming up this Thursday night, and I’ll send my kids each a rather unimaginative present, since I don’t really have a good idea what to give them specifically that they would want, other than things I’ve already gotten them.  I don’t really know what they like or like to do.  I don’t really know my own kids, anymore.

Mind you, I don’t really know anyone else, either.  I don’t even know if I know myself.  And, I guess, if you don’t know whether or not you know yourself, then it’s pretty clear that you don’t actually know yourself, because if you knew yourself, presumably, one of the things you would know is whether or not you know yourself.

Something like that, anyway.  Possibly I’m wrong.

I don’t really have much else to say today that I haven’t said a million times.  I’m still in the process of crashing and burning; it’s just happening slowly, like something that’s been filmed by an ultra-high-frame-rate camera, so when you play it back, it looks like barely anything is happening.  But it is happening.  In the end, I’m sure it will be possible to “play it back” at full speed, and you’ll make out clearly the whole sweep of the event.

But no one is watching for that right now.  No one really cares, and I’m afraid that I can’t blame them.  What use am I to the world and what cost would it be for the world to lose me?  “Vanishingly little” is the proper answer to both questions.  Indeed, I’m probably more of a net detriment while I’m around, so the loss of me would probably be to the world’s gain.

I guess I’ll never know, myself, but maybe some of you will know, eventually.  I wish I could find out for sure.  I imagine it would make certain decisions easier.  Then again, maybe it wouldn’t help at all.

Oh, well, that’s enough for today.  Have a good day and a good week, everyone.

*Hereinafter I’ll just assume you know I mean CE or AD when referring to the year, and will only put an acronym—if that’s the proper term—after the year if it is other than that era.

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At LEAST three thresholds

It’s Friday morning, and it really is the end of the work week for me this time.  I’m at the train station waiting for the first train of the day…

…aaaaaand now it’s arriving.

And now, I’m on the train.

It’s a bit strange—there were only four people waiting for the first train at Hollywood station this morning, and that’s counting the Tri-rail™ security guy who was just waiting there for his pickup to start his workday (I think that’s what he was doing).  Still, the train itself seems to have roughly as many passengers as it usually does, so I don’t think today’s some weird, low-usage day.

It is, of course, the first of December, and if one uses monthly passes, today is the day to get one*, so maybe some people put that off a couple of days, since they probably also have to pay rent and that sort of thing.  I don’t know.  Possibly I’m overthinking it.  It may be nothing more than ordinary fluctuations and ebbs and flows of numbers of people doing particular things.  Who knows?  Also, who cares?

(It seems that I do, at least in passing, though why I notice and bother to think about such things is not clear even to me.)

I’m going to try to keep this brief today, mainly because I’m very tired.  Of course I didn’t sleep well; that’s why I’m here on the first train.  At least this really is the end of the week for me, though it’s the beginning of a new month.  But it’s the month that’s at the end of the year, so that’s two to one in favor of ends over beginnings, at least for today.

I’m still having trouble seeing and commenting on, or at least following, the website I usually follow, and that’s very discouraging, though I have evidence that at least it is not about me, personally.  My paranoia wants to tell me not to believe that, though.  I mean, just because other people are suffering similar troubles, and they are certainly not being singled out, doesn’t mean that I couldn’t be having troubles and be singled out because I’m an annoying git.  They’re not mutually exclusive states of reality.

Anyway, that’s one daily source of assurance or comfort or whatever that isn’t working like it usually does.  I’m also getting pretty bored with a lot of the YouTube channels I watch.  I am also bored with almost all of the books in my Kindle library, though I’m rereading at least parts of Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Rationality: From AI to Zombies.  It’s an excellent book—really it’s a collection of blog posts he did over quite a long time on a site called “Less Wrong”, or something like that.  I know the book has been published split into two parts as well.

I highly recommend the book, in whatever form.  Since it’s a collection of posts, each individual section is relatively brief and easily digestible, so to speak, so don’t worry that it’ll be a slog.  Yudkowsky is also an engaging and entertaining writer, and he’s really effing smart and knowledgeable.

I don’t really know what I’m going to do this weekend, other than watching Doctor Who on Saturday and doing my laundry on Sunday.  I probably won’t really do much of anything.  Hopefully I can at least sleep a bit.  I plan to take some Benadryl® tonight.  I know its effects don’t engender truly healthy sleep, but even an increased amount of physical rest—even just an increased amount of oblivion—is worth quite a bit.

I’m very tired.  I think I said that before.  I’m also very discouraged and rather lost.  I feel increasingly like a ghost of myself, and I also feel increasingly that my hold on a superficially normal life and lifestyle is slipping.  I don’t think I’d want to go on, even if I could, but it’s a moot point, because I don’t think I’m going to be able to go on much longer.  I think I’ll end up in some type of hospital or the morgue or something similarly non-ideal soon.  At least the morgue would be a cool place (in the physical, temperature-related sense of the word).

I’m running on empty, running on fumes, near the end of my rope, teetering on the brink; I’m also running out of figures of speech.  Anyone who knows me well enough will know how unusual that is.

I wish I had something fun or funny or “clever” with which to leave you for this week.  Nothing’s coming to mind, though.  All I can say instead is, as always, I hope you have a good day, and a good weekend, and that you have a good beginning to the month of December.  Major Holiday Time® is coming, but try not to be too stressed about it.  If you can, try to look forward to spending some time with your friends and family.  Try to spend time with people you love and who love you.

I guess if you love yourself, that last bit is easy enough to accomplish, though I wouldn’t know from personal experience.

*Actually, today is the first day to get one for the month whether or not one uses them, but it’s not really a relevant fact for people who don’t.

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I blog you give me leave to go from hence

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, and for the first time in three weeks, I’m writing a Thursday style blog post.  You can all start breathing again.

Yesterday’s blog post was kind of weird, wasn’t it?  I’m not even completely sure what I wrote.  I certainly haven’t reread it since editing it before finally posting it, but I feel I said a lot of strange things, and wrote about things I don’t know if I’ve ever talked about with anyone before.  Maybe I have.  I don’t think there was anything particularly shocking except that it was weird for me to say some of them.  Also, I feel it was more erratic and bizarre even than my usual posts.

It’s now the last day of November in 2023 (AD or CE).  That’s mildly momentous, or at minimum a mediocre milestone.  There shall be no recurrence of the month of November in 2023 (AD or CE) in any of our lives again, unless the ways we “define” the terms are changed.  Even if we had a time machine to come back to this day, we would not experience a new November in 2023 (AD or CE) if we were to return to it; we would be re-experiencing the same one, albeit from some different perspective.

I don’t know if returning to the same month would initiate some new Everettian branch of the universe, as in my short story Penal Colony, or if it would instead be some manner of closed, time-like loop in spacetime, which always happens exactly the same way—since it only actually exists in one instantiation—even if you were to experience it more than once.  It might be like coming to a crossroad, going through the light, looping around a “cloverleaf” in the road, and coming back to the crossroad in the perpendicular direction, then going on forward.  There’s only one route; it just happens to cross itself.

And, of course, if you did a self-Oedipus and somehow killed yourself at the crossroad, its not as though you would be changing your future in any sense;  that would “always” simply have been the way you died.  So, 12 Monkeys would be much more like the nature of such reality than, say, Back to the Future or Time Cop or that newer time travel movie with Bruce Willis that I haven’t seen.

I don’t know quite how I got on that subject.  My mind meanders morosely (and occasionally merrily), and I don’t necessarily know where it’s going.  As I noted above, sometimes I don’t even know where it’s been.

That’s why I never eat off of it, if I can help it.

One thing I’ve tentatively concluded after my thoughts from yesterday, though, is that I really am not capable of managing life in the human world.  I don’t think I ever have been; other people have helped me out in the past, and I have no such other people available now.

I have skills and tenacity and intelligence enough to survive for a time, and to create an illusion of “getting by” that’s convincing enough for people who aren’t really part of my life—which is everyone, these days—but everything is falling apart, and I don’t know how to maintain it, nor do I have the will and the wherewithal to do so.

You might as well ask a moth to maintain a termite mound.  Or even just ask an ant—maybe that’s a better comparison.  An ant could sort of get the idea of a termite mound, and if it’s already been built, the ant could sort of help maintain it to some degree for a bit.  But really, it’s not where the ant belongs, it’s not the lifestyle to which it is adapted.

Ask a human to try to live the life of an ostrich, among ostriches.  The human might put on an interesting show for a bit, and since humans are smarter than ostriches, the human might even succeed at things the ostriches couldn’t from time to time, but if the human is committed to living and behaving like an ostrich—if there are only ostriches anywhere to be found in that human’s environment—that human is inevitably, eventually going to fail catastrophically.  It may be a slow catastrophe.  Maybe it’s nothing anyone would make into and share as a video on YouTube or Instagram or TikTok.  But it would still be a catastrophe.  It would not be pleasant to experience.

Drawing closer to home, it would be hard enough for, say, a chimpanzee to try to live with and as orangutans or vice versa.  Even chimpanzees and bonobos—as closely related as primates get one to another—would probably not be able to thrive if one were placed within the other’s society.  I would guess that a bonobo would probably be abused and die before too long in the company of chimpanzees (who are notorious assholes) but a displaced chimpanzee would probably have just as confusing and frightening a time, if more subtle, trying to blend in with bonobos.  It would have a few slight advantages in strength and size, on average, and it might even be able to learn to try to fit in and make its way.  But it would be living a lifestyle subtly but profoundly different than the one to which it is adapted.

Anyway, that’s all a bit tangential and weird.  I don’t think I’m making myself very clear, and for that I apologize.  I just realize more and more that I don’t think I’m going to survive much longer, even if I were to find the motivation and desire to do so.  It’s a slow crash and burn, perhaps, but I think I really am crashing and burning.  And I don’t think that there was ever a chance for anything otherwise to happen, with me trying to live among and adapt to the world of humans—or normal humans, or “neurotypical” humans, if you prefer those metaphors.  So, what should I do?  I don’t know.

In the meantime, though, I hope you all are having and have had and will continue to have or (if that’s the best for which I can hope) that you begin to have a very good day and week and a very good new month starting tomorrow and so on.

TTFN

Hermit or magus

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“A hideous throng rush out forever, and laugh—but smile no more.”

It’s Wednesday morning—quite a bit before five o’clock and well before when the day “begins”, at least if the day begins at sunrise.  That will come…let’s see…at 6:49 am.  So says the weather app on my smartphone.  I’m at the train station today even earlier than yesterday because I woke up even earlier than yesterday and the day before.

I occasionally entertain the whimsical—and clearly untrue—notion that a person’s lifespan is limited by the time they spend awake, and so I expect to die quite a bit earlier than most other people (on average) because I’ve spent more of my time not asleep than most people have.  I’d say I get on average at least two fewer hours of sleep a night than most people I know.

Many nights, it’s quite a bit worse than that.

In a year, that’s 730.5 hours (roughly, ha ha) of sleep deficit, which is just over 30 days.  Although, come to think of it, if we’re counting awake time as a day, and the “usual” waking day is about sixteen hours, it’s more like 45 days—which makes sense, since 24 is one and a half times 16, and 45 is one and a half times 30.

Yes, I did that figuring in my head.  It’s terribly impressive, I know*.  I did not, however, calculate the sunrise on my own, as I noted.  I don’t really know how to go about that.  I’m sure it could be done, but probably not with the data available to me this morning at the train station.  Clearly, when people started tracking and plotting the days and seasons and sunrise and sunset and all that stuff, they did not have smartphones or the internet.  Those were days even before Commodore 64s and TRS-80s!

Anyway, the point I was making is that with all those matters taken into account, if I average only two hours dearth of sleep (a conservative amount, since the deficit is often larger), given my notion of a fixed amount of time awake determining the length of a life, I’m chewing a month and half extra off my life every year.  That’s one eighth of a year per year.  Which would mean that, just since I was in my teens, when I already slept less than the other people in my family and the other people I knew, I’ve lost five or more years of my life.  And every year that I get older in real time, my ultimate lifespan shrinks another eighth of a year.  Eventually, those time fronts will collide, and that will be the end.

This raises an interesting coincidence**:  Autistic individuals are known to have a much higher incidence of sleep disturbance than the general population, and recent studies found that, in the UK specifically, the average lifespan of an autistic male is about 8 years shorter than that of the general male population.  That’s in the UK, where they have a National Health System and actual programs and support services in place to help people with autism, imperfect though those systems are.  I shudder to think what the expected lifespan reduction is in the United States; I think I have encountered estimates of ten and more years’ reduction in healthy lifespan.

Still, it would be silly (and foolish) to attribute that decreased lifespan to number of hours of sleep loss.  There are many ways in which people on the autism spectrum have difficulty optimizing their health, even when they are otherwise “high functioning”, as the term goes.

If you don’t think those difficulties really matter, consider my circumstance (and I’m not even sure that I have ASD; it’s very difficult for me even to seek out, let alone avail myself of, resources to get evaluated).

I have strengths and talents of various kinds, but I’m living in a single, modest room in an old, cinderblock house in south Florida where I sleep on the floor on a futon and eat only microwave or order-in food; I work as a sort of office manager/record keeper/verifier in a phone sales office; I don’t have a driver’s license or any of that stuff anymore, nor do I do anything socially or spend any time with friends or family.  I supposedly have an IQ in the low 160s, I graduated with honors*** from an Ivy League university (which I attended on a full scholarship), I won a National Council of Teachers of English Award in high school, I went to medical school almost as an afterthought, became a doctor and did that job pretty well while I was doing it (though the record keeping and management functions were anathema to me).

But I could not thrive in the human world for long.  My back injury and chronic pain contributed to my specific failure, but I’d already had many instances in which depression and difficulty with certain kinds of administrative and record-keeping tasks caused me to land in personal crises.

I’ve written six novels and (self) published five, as well as several “short” stories (published individually and/or in two collections).  I’ve recorded and released four original songs (poorly produced, by me, on free software and with cheap, cheap recording equipment), and have written and shared a few others.  I can draw (and paint a bit), I can sculpt (with clay), I play piano and cello and guitar, I can sing, and I can even act reasonably well (how else do you think I pretended to be human for such long periods of time?  I even fooled myself).

All these abilities just make me even more of a failure, don’t they?  “How the mighty have fallen!”

Enough.  I’m almost at my stop (the train arrived just as I mentioned the TRS-80, which sounds like an omen…but an omen of what?), so I’ll wrap it up.  I guess I’ll write another post tomorrow, for what it’s worth.  Have a good day.

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*I know, I know, it’s not actually impressive.  It’s easy enough to figure with multiples of 2, and 2 hours a day times 365.25 days per year is simply enough 730.5.  I left the extra digit just to be silly; it’s not significant, especially since, in the very next operation, I needed to divide that number by 24 hours in a day.  Since 3 times 24 is 72, I know that 730.5 hours is just ten and a half hours more than 30 days.  I could then simply have applied the 24 = 1.5 x 16 to do the next calculation, but that only occurred to me afterwards.  Anyway, it’s more fun to note that since 9 time 8 is 72, 16 goes into 72 four and a half times, and then multiply by ten, since 730 is ten times 73.  The remainder there is the same as with twenty-four—ten hours and a half—but that’s a bigger fraction of a sixteen hour day than a twenty-four hour day.  All this silliness at least can serve to remind us that the Phoenicians or Babylonians (I forget which) were not foolish to do things in 60s and 24s and 360s and so on—all these numbers are so readily divisible into fractions that they’re terribly useful.

**And yes, it is all coincidence.  Please don’t take my “lifespan limited by time awake” notion seriously.  Though it is certain that chronic sleep loss diminishes one’s health and can reduce one’s lifespan, it is not a simple arithmetic process, and there’s not the slightest reason to think that human lifespans are determined specifically by number of hours awake.  That’s even sillier than the notion of a lifespan being determined by the number of heartbeats one has.  I’ve had sinus tachycardia all my life; I would have been dead years ago if a lifespan were determined by numbers of heartbeats.

***I wrote my 50-page honors thesis in one weekend after it was revealed to me that I had misremembered the due date as being a month later than it was, and having been grudgingly given that one weekend extension to get it done if I wanted to get honors.  It turned out decently, because even then I could write very quickly tolerably well under pressure, and I knew my subject.  But this demonstrates all the more how, despite having talents (and some skills), I am rotten at navigating the ins and outs of human society (I’ve only gotten worse since then, because I’m just more and more worn out).  It wasn’t even my idea to try for honors; that was my then-fiancée’s idea.  It was something that looked good on resumes and applications.  Such thoughts, about self-promotion and seeking advancement in that fashion, have never been natural to me.  They are, if anything, worse now that I am on my own.

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On Black Friday, call not for A doctor but for THE Doctor

Well, it’s Friday, and—just to remind everyone outside the US why there was a gap in posting—it was Thanksgiving yesterday.  I’ve said it before, I think, though perhaps not on my blog, but Thanksgiving is possibly the most broadly observed American holiday nowadays, more so than anything but (perhaps) New Year’s Day.  The latter is observed largely because so many people have been up quite late, and many of them have been drinking rather more heavily than they would usually do.  Whereas with Thanksgiving, I suspect it’s so widely observed because it’s an almost purely American holiday—Canada has their Thanksgiving in October—and though it’s very secular in nature, it has an almost religious feel.  After all, many religions do say a lot about thankfulness, and it probably is a good mindset to have, in general.

Even the pizza places and Chinese restaurants were closed yesterday; at least all the ones near me were closed.  I tried to order some Chinese or some pizza, or other kinds of delivery food, and I didn’t have any luck with any of my usual suspects, nor was a wider-spread search any better.  Thankfully, most of the convenience stores and gas stations were open, so I was able to get some snacks and a few pre-packaged sandwiches.

I was also able to buy some wine, though that was probably not great for me.  It doesn’t matter much, though.  I don’t really get the urge to drink alcohol very often; I enjoy talking about drinking far more than I enjoy drinking.  It’s useful enough if I’m forced to socialize, of course, but when I’m by myself (which is pretty much all the time, now) it mainly serves as an attempt to become numb.  It did that yesterday somewhat, but it’s not really a pleasant thing.  A nice glass of good wine can taste nice with a good meal, but that was not applicable here.

Anyway, now it’s Black Friday, a name that used to be just a tongue-in-cheek, unofficial nickname for the day after Thanksgiving, because so many people would rush out to begin Christmas shopping since they had the day off anyway.  Now it’s more or less an official shopping spree “holiday” of sorts, and I think it’s even spread as far as the UK, though there is no preceding holiday, so it doesn’t make a lot of sense.

Back in the old days, most American places of employment other than retailers were closed for the whole four-day weekend associated with Thanksgiving.  Nowadays, I don’t think as many places take Friday off.  Although, given that I’m currently the only person waiting on the northbound side of the station and it’s only ten minutes until the train is due, maybe a lot of people do take today off.  It’s probably just as well that I do not have the day off, since I would have nothing to do in my downtime.

Yesterday was also, by the way, the 60th anniversary of the first broadcast of Doctor Who*.  I spent a good portion of my day watching Doctor Who related videos on YouTube.  The first 60th Anniversary special—there are actually going to be a total of three of them—airs tomorrow.  Supposedly, Disney Plus will be streaming it starting at 1:30 pm Eastern time, which is the same literal time—6:30 pm for them—that it will be airing on the BBC.  Of course, those who follow the show know that, at the end of Jodie Whittaker’s run, to the surprise of almost everyone, instead of regenerating into Ncuti Gatwa, she became David Tennant, i.e. the former 10th, now 14th Doctor.  He’s only going to be there for the specials though, and will then regenerate into the 15th Doctor, who will be played by Ncuti Gatwa.

Those of you who don’t know or care about Doctor Who will no doubt want to skip the previous paragraph.  However, since you’re here now, you’ve probably already read the previous paragraph, so it’s too late to make that decision.  You’d have to have some kind of…some kind of…time machine to be able to go back now, but it still wouldn’t help much, because in order to know you need to skip the paragraph, you’d have to know what the paragraph was about, and unless you have someone out there to warn you, there’s no way for you to know without reading it.

Wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey.

Of course, those who do follow Doctor Who will surely already know everything I mentioned in the Doctor Who related paragraph.  However, such people tend not to get easily tired of hearing about and talking about the show—as you can probably tell—so I don’t need to apologize to them.

I just got on the train now—it was right on time—and though a few other people showed up to the station, many of the regulars were definitely not here.  I have the entire rear-mid section of the car to myself, in my usual spot, and that’s quite striking.  But the conductor is the usual conductor, and the train is on its usual schedule.  Tomorrow it will be on its weekend-and-holiday schedule, and I will be using it then as well, since I work tomorrow.

That, of course, means that I will be writing a blog post tomorrow, since I obviously have not started writing any new fiction.  I did get the Stephen King audio book, and I’ve listened to a bit of it.  It’s fun, at least.  I’ve read the print version often enough that I’m not hearing anything that I don’t already know and even sometimes anticipate, but it’s still enjoyable.  It hasn’t made me feel like I want to get back to writing fiction, but I don’t know that anything is going to do that before I die, so I can’t hold that against Stephen King.

Anyway, that’ll do for now.  “See” you tomorrow.  I hope you had a good Thanksgiving, if you live in the US, and I hope you have a good, even if “Black”, Friday and a good weekend in general, all around.

*That’s right, Doctor Who first aired the day after JFK was assassinated.  If the Doctor had only been around just one day earlier, he might have saved the President—it’s the sort of thing he does.  Then again, according to Series 1, Episode 1 of the new Doctor Who, the 9th Doctor actually was present at that assassination.  Presumably, it was one of those Pompeii-like situations where, if he had changed it, worse things would happen.

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Be thankful you’re not a simulation. Or are you?

I’m writing this on my phone for the first time in quite a while, seated in the rear of an Uber, on the way to the office.  This was something of a whim‒the phone writing, I mean, not the Uber.  The Uber was a carefully considered choice, and it is relatively cheap because of the hour at which I’m taking it.  It’s not something I would do on a regular basis, at least not for long.  Maybe if I finally give up and decide to die in short order I might just burn a lot of money on Ubers.  I doubt it, though.

No, the whim is deciding to write on the phone, since I have some down time in the back seat.  I could use my laptop, but that feels slightly weirder or more uncomfortable to me, though I’m not sure why that’s the case.  I could also just wait until I got to the office to start, because I’m going to be very early.

The reason for going to the office by Uber is that I made the mistake of ordering an Amazon “Try Before You Buy” article of clothing‒a somewhat expensive one.  It did not fit right.  But then I learned that Amazon doesn’t do a pickup to return items like that; you need to drop them at a Whole Foods or a UPS store or similar.

That was not clear to me when I was using the option, or I wouldn’t have done it.  I have no straightforward way to get to any of the above locations, and even to use Uber to get to one would require going during working hours.  I had to arrange for a UPS pickup, at my expense, but I had to set it up to happen at the office, because I won’t be at the house during the day for ten more days (at least on days UPS does such pickups) and that’s past the pickup time window for the “Try Before You Buy” system.

So, here I am, bringing a cumbersome, and not too light, package to the office with me so that UPS can pick it up between 9 and 6.  I never want to do this sort of thing again.  It was foolish of me to try a rather expensive article of clothing anyway, but I guess it was sort of an attempt to cheer myself up with an indulgence.

That sure misfired, didn’t it?

Speaking of cheering oneself up with indulgence‒or with the inability to do so‒tomorrow is Thanksgiving for my fellow United Statesians.  We don’t call this evening “Thanksgiving Eve”, which feels like a shame to me, but certainly people do start celebrating the holiday, in a sense, quite early.  I think many people take the whole week off work.

I, on the other hand, am not really going to be doing anything to celebrate.  The closest I might come is walking to a gas station not too far from the house, where they tend to have pretty decent pre-made turkey sandwiches with mildly cranberry-associated topping.  It’s not very impressive, nor is it terribly satisfying.  I’d feel much better, I think, if I were able simply to go to sleep tonight and sleep through until Friday morning.  As it is, I probably won’t be able to sleep or rest any more than usual, and that’s even counting my plan to take some Benadryl tonight.

I’m almost at the office, so I’ll take a brief pause here and resume after I arrive.  You may not notice the gap.

Did you notice it?  I’m guessing you probably recognize that it happened, but only because I told you that it was happening.  Like the scenes in a movie that’s been filmed over months and months, or the paragraphs of a long novel like my forced two-parter Unanimity that was written and edited over the course of more than a year, the final product may end up relatively seamless despite a long and discontinuous origin.

I’ve occasionally imagined that it might be possible (in principle, anyway) for our reality to be a simulation in which each moment‒maybe each Planck time‒in every location in space‒perhaps each cubic Planck length‒is prepared individually, one by one, then subsequent and nearby ones are calculated based on the laws of physics, and each next place and time is then updated piece by piece, one infinitesimal space and one instant of time at a time, as it were*.

The simulator could take a trillion years to calculate even one second of the spacetime in the visible universe, probably far longer.  But it wouldn’t really matter, necessarily**, how long it took, provided there was enough memory available to keep everything stored.  From the outside, the process of one human life (and its past and future light cones) might take a googol years to calculate, but from the inside point of view, for the human being “simulated”, time would just progress normally.

It doesn’t matter to the people in a video, for instance, if their video is viewed at 2x speed or .25x speed; for them it all happens the same way no matter what.  It doesn’t matter to the characters in a Studio Ghibli movie that their individual movie cels each took hours to be painstakingly drawn and painted, or if a Pixar character took even longer to be computer generated.  Their “experience” would pass at one frame per frame, or 24 frames per experienced “second” for them (at traditional movie frame rates).

Even if each second of the person’s life took a trillion eons to simulate, it would still be experienced just as a second for that person.

A rather weird and possibly disquieting implication of this is that, if those simulating the person stopped doing it‒perhaps they got bored, or had a power cut, or suffered a natural disaster or catastrophe in their meta-level universe‒the simulation would just…stop.  It’s not that the people in the simulated universe would die in any conventional sense; certainly they would not die in the usual within-the-universe meaning of dying.  Nor would their universe “die” as if some cataclysm like a phase change in the vacuum energy occurred***.  It would just stop.

There would be no next moment, no next occurrence*****.  If someone were later to restart that simulation for whatever reason, even if it was ten to the thousand to the googol years later or more, the people within the simulation would experience no difference between the before pause and after pause moments than between any other two moments in their existence.

But if the simulation were stopped and never restarted, with perhaps all associated memory erased…well, again, the inhabitants would not experience it in any possible, conceivable sense, any more than a video game character experiences the moments when and after you reset the game or the power goes out.  If you are a simulated existence, and the simulation is permanently stopped, you will not so much die as cease to have any manner of existence whatsoever.

Have a happy Thanksgiving.

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*It’s interesting also to think of, for instance, two “people” starting to simulate such a universe from different points in space and time, and to wonder what would happen when they came together if their simulations did not mesh perfectly, like frost on a window-pane with multiple initial points of nucleation leading to a “fractured” pattern.  But that’s a different, if related, thought process.

**From the point of view of the “simulated” universe, anyway.  It’s hard to see anyone having the commitment or desire to bother actually carrying out such a laborious simulation; that would be quite a dreary task.

***This is a possible occurrence in an ordinary, physics-related sense.  If the “dark energy” is indeed the cosmological constant (called lambda, Λ, as in the ΛCDM model of cosmology) but is not at its lowest “vacuum state”, then it could spontaneously “tunnel” down to a lower, more stable set-point.  This would wipe out every particle in the current universe in a growing sphere, with its outer shell expanding at the speed of light.  Of course, that means that you could never, in principle, have any warning that it was happening, nor could you, even in principle, experience your destruction and that of everything else that exists.  This is not the same manner of cessation as what I discuss in the main body of the post‒it is very much a within-simulation event, not a meta-level one‒but it would still be just an instantaneous erasure of sorts, happening too fast to be experienced even in principle****.  There are many worse ways to die.  Indeed, almost all ways humans do die are much worse than this.

**** Presumably, quantum information would be conserved even in this catastrophe, whereas in a halted and erased simulation, that principle wouldn’t apply, at least within the simulation.  Whether it would apply to the process of simulating and then ceasing to do so would depend on the nature of the meta-level universe.

*****I suppose this is analogous to what will happen to everything in the universes of my stories Outlaw’s Mind and The Dark Fairy and the Desperado if I never finish those stories.

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I almost forgot to give this a title

I seriously considered walking to the train station today, but after I finally arose—I’d been awake for hours, already—I realized that I just wasn’t up to doing it, physically.  Or maybe I wasn’t up to doing it, mentally.  In any case, it’s not as though there’s any actual difference or separation between the two things, despite the wishes of dualists* of many stripes throughout the ages.

I simply am this thing that is writing this, and it’s all instantiated in this body—though I store aspects of my persona and records of various things and highlights of information in external media, as people have done for quite some time to greater and lesser degrees.

In any case, I really don’t feel very well, and I don’t mean just my usual depression/dysthymia, though it may be related to those things.  Perhaps it’s just an exacerbation.  After all, dysthymia (now officially called persistent depressive disorder or some such boring name, because that’s what really matters, making sure that things have optimal names, right?) can episodically increase into a full blown episode of major depression.

Also, it’s that time of the year for those whose symptoms are affected by the seasons—in the northern hemisphere, at least—to feel the detriment of longer nights and shorter days (so to speak).  I am at least somewhat “seasonally affected”, though I’ve always loved autumn.  This may seem superficially contradictory, but in my youth, autumn was a time that brought birthdays and holidays and the start of school and all that good stuff that I liked.  Also, probably when I was quite young, I didn’t have any real evidence of depressive disorders to come, at least as far as I recall right now.  Although, if I do have ASD, it was present then.  There is some evidence in my recollections that it was.

In addition, of course—speaking of holidays—this is a rough time of year for people who are already depressed and who are also socially isolated**.  Thanksgiving is in two days, and that is a traditional, very positive and social family holiday, which I will not be celebrating again this year.  I will have the day off work, though—all the better to drive home the fact of being alone in a single room (with attached bath) and having no one with whom one shares life at pretty much any level.  Then of course, the Hanukkah season (and Christmas season) and New Years and all that is coming up—extremely family-and-friends-oriented holidays.  I again am not planning on trying to spend any of them with anyone else.

The weird irony is, when I imagine actually trying to spend holidays with other people—yes, even when I merely imagine it—I feel tremendous tension.  I guess it’s what one could call significant anxiety.  It’s a strange kind of…not exactly a contradiction, but a conflict, a tension of ideas.  I am depressed and gloomy when alone, which is my usual way to be, but I feel almost terrified at the thought of being around other people socially.

I particularly wouldn’t want to have a group of people just bring me into their celebrations of holidays just so that I could have someone with whom to celebrate.  It’s not that I dislike people I don’t know.  How could I dislike them if I don’t know them?  I just don’t feel a sense of camaraderie with most people; I don’t feel like a member of the same species.

The guy, Paul Micaleff from the YouTube channel “Asperger’s from the Inside” (well, now it’s “Autism from the Insode”) made a great analogy that struck home with me about that kind of thing.  He said that, if he goes to a pond and sees a lot of ducklings playing around and swimming and all that, he might really think they were great and enjoy watching them, but it would never occur to him to try to join them in their pond.  That would make no sense.  He wouldn’t know how to act, they would be terrified of his presence, and he would never be able to fit in or enjoy trying to pretend to be like them, in any case.

I think it’s a really good analogy.  One doesn’t have to hate a group of people or even think them uninteresting not to feel that one has any business trying to join the group or attempting to act as if one were like them.

I don’t know what my species is.  Even though I find people like Paul more relatable than most, I still don’t really feel like I could connect even with the people in those communities.  I think the closest guy online I feel like could be my kind of person is Dave, from Dave’s Garage (his book was also very good and extremely relatable).  But I don’t think that he would find me very interesting, partly because our backgrounds are so dissimilar.  Anyway, he’s doing his thing and putting up nice educational videos about computers and stuff, and that’s good enough for me.

Actually, I don’t know that there’s anyone I might possibly want to spend time with who would truly want to spend time with me, except for family of course.  Even more so, I would not feel comfortable imposing myself upon anyone, even if I wanted to spend time with them and they were interested.  I’m just not selfish and cruel enough to inflict myself upon people I like.

I’m very tired and just utterly pointless—in the sense that I have no particular reason to do much of anything; I just have biological drives and habits, none of which provide any purpose or sense of satisfaction.

I have been thinking about using this month’s Audible credit to get Stephen King’s On Writing in audiobook format.  It’s read by King-sensei himself and his two author sons (Owen King and Joe Hill).  I’ve read the print version before, of course—more than once—and it was certainly inspiring in its way.  Stephen King’s nonfiction is sometimes even better than his fiction.  His style and substance and personality are quite engaging.  So, maybe if I get that audiobook, I’ll listen to it, and maybe just feel inspired to start writing fiction again.

Possibly, it’s worth a try.  If it doesn’t work, well, I don’t know what will happen.  That’s not new, though.  No one knows the specifics of the future in other than trivial senses until it happens.  And then it’s no longer the future.  We’re falling through time, in that sense, facing backwards, only seeing where we’re going once we’re past it.

It seems like a weird way to run things, but of course, it’s the only way that makes sense, given that complexity and life and memory are all driven by processes that harness increasing entropy.  And being fairly close to the surface of an extremely low-entropy state in space-time (AKA “The Big Bang”) explains why things like life and mind exist at all.  You wouldn’t see stalactites and stalagmites form in a place without a local strong gravity differential providing a sensible “up” and “down”, and you wouldn’t see life or consciousness forming in a spacetime with already uniform entropy, thus leaving no local “past” or “future”.

All right, let’s stop before I go off on a tangent, even a sine or a secant.  Have a good day.

*Not to be confused with “duelists”, a group or set that could certainly overlap with dualists, but need not do so, and which is defined by quite unrelated characteristics.

**Not in the sense of avoiding spreading disease, but just in general lack of social contacts or supports.  I am very “challenged” in that area.

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“And I find it kind of funny, I find it kind of sad…”

The madness continues, or begins again, as the beginning of a new work week occurs.  “What madness is that?” you ask?  I mean the madness of bothering to stay alive, the madness of continuing to do things that are absolutely pointless and irrelevant even in the moment, let alone in the long term history of the cosmos.  I mean the madness of trying to pretend to be cheerful or positive in any way, to try to be polite or engaged or interested in anything around me.

That madness, and other forms related and/or similar to it, is the sort of madness I mean.

I guess I really would have to say that the madness “continues” rather than that it begins again.  It’s not as though it has ever stopped or paused.  It simply takes a different form over the weekend, when there is less to do.  But there is no more real sanity involved in any of my activities even when I’m not commuting to the office and back.  I’m just less constrained to try to seem vaguely pseudo-normal, or at least vaguely pseudo-tolerable, when I’m by myself in my room.

I should look up a thorough etymology of the word “madness” or “mad”.  I know that it has morphed, to at least some degree, into a modern synonym of “angry”, but the older meaning of “lack of sanity” or “extreme agitation” of other types still persists at least a bit.  And it’s better than “insanity” in my opinion.

Madness has a certain poetic quality to it that “insanity”, which is really a legal term, does not have.  Insanity, whether by design or just by customary use, carries the impression of a loss of previously existing “sanity”.  I’ve introduced my term “unsane” before, but I don’t know if it’s going to catch on.  At least, though, it conveys the notion, potentially, of situations or people or beings to whom or to which the very concept of sanity doesn’t apply.

But of course, as I noted, insanity (and sanity) is a legal term that applies to assessing whether or not one can be held legally culpable for one’s actions.  As such, it can be fairly vague, and certainly it is not scientific.  There are quite a few forms of mental illness* that are truly debilitating and dangerous and can even be life-threatening, and are certainly immiserating, but which would not allow one to be found “not guilty by reason of insanity” if one committed a crime.

Mind you, all these notions, from laws to words to legal or even moral responsibilities, are simply inventions, creations, “fictions” produced by humans for various reasons—they are memes** and memeplexes that happened to survive and reproduce, so they carried on.  Often, though not always, such memes persist in the meme pool—i.e., culture—because they are useful to the organism(s) through which they propagate.  But they do not have any truly fundamental reality.  They are emergent things in a spontaneously self-assembled complex adaptive system that has no more intrinsic, inherent meaning than does a snowflake or a piece of rock candy—also, they are far less beautiful and/or tasty, though they have their charms.

Still, I’m sick of nearly all of it—mentally sick, physically sick.  I’m particularly sick of my part within it, largely because I don’t think I have much of a part within it.  Like the song says, I don’t belong here.  But, of course, the fact of not belonging in one place does not logically imply that one belongs somewhere else.  Even setting aside the fact that the term “belong” is fairly vague and protean, by any version of it but the very loosest one, it is entirely possible for an individual entity or being not truly to “belong” anywhere at all.

I certainly know that it’s possible to feel that one does not belong anywhere.

It’s vaguely reminiscent the old Groucho Marx joke in which he said he would never join a club that would have him as a member.  It’s funny, but it’s also a good description of a dysfunctional state of mind—or at least an inefficacious frame of mind—such that a person feels that he or she is an outsider, and that any group that would welcome him or her is probably not the sort of group in which he or she could possibly feel comfortable.

It’s what happens when one looks online to find communities that purportedly have common difficulties or shared issues and which intend to provide mutual support, but one feels at least as alien and uncomfortable with the thought of these support groups as one does about any other group.

No-win situations are clearly possible in reality—the very concept of “winning” is another entirely artificial one, though it can be pertinent to the objective biological world in some circumstances—and when one is in one, it can be reasonable to try simply to accept that one cannot win, and therefore that one’s choice of how to escape the situation is arbitrary and so may as well be random, or whatever seems most attractive at the time.

Anyway, that’s enough bullshit from me for today.  I don’t know what point I’m trying to make, but that’s okay; there is no inherent point, no evident telos to the cosmos.  There is no purpose in which to lose myself, and there is no home to which I can return.  I’m certainly in no position to try to make a new home of any kind or to create some new purpose.  I wish I had just walked away a month ago today, as I’d hoped to do—it would have been a good day for it.  Or perhaps I should have done so a month before that; it would have been even better.

Oh, well.  The past cannot be changed, anymore than the characters in a film can rewind their own reels and edit earlier frames to change their story.  If one were able to change past time, it would necessarily involve another level of time, some “higher” time in which a different kind of future and past existed, not constrained by the one within this world.  That’s conceivable, of course.  However, there’s no evidence that it exists.

But that’s a discussion for some other time.

*Yes, I prefer to call things “mental illness” when they impair the successful functioning of a person’s mind, to greater or lesser extent.  Referring to everything as “mental health” comes across as just weird a lot of the time.  “He struggles with mental health” is the sort of thing people sometimes seem to say, but that doesn’t make much sense.  Surely he struggles with his relative dearth of mental health.  Or is it meant that perhaps he dislikes mental health, which seems fairly pathological in and of itself, just as a person might want to sabotage that person’s own physical health?  Either tendency seems to be a case of mental illness, in the same sense that anything from an upper respiratory infection, to dysentery, to a heart attack, to vasculitis, and to cancer are all forms of “physical” illness, not physical health.

**In the original sense of the term, coined by Richard Dawkins in his brilliant work, The Selfish Gene.