time

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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.

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I’m sorry about yesterday (not the song…the song is good, but I had nothing to do with that)

It’s Friday, and I did not write a blog post yesterday, because I did not go in to the office.  I also will not be writing a post tomorrow, because I am not scheduled to work then.

I’m waiting at the train station very early, by the way.  Technically, I arrived just in time for the scheduled first train of the day, but it’s apparently running about eleven minutes late.  It’s hard to hold this too much against them.  Over the past few days, the weather here has been so wet and windy and floody that it has bordered upon tropical storm level, but it’s persisted much longer than such tropical storms tend to do.

I didn’t go to the office yesterday as both a direct (I think) and indirect (I’m pretty sure) consequence of the weather.  You see, my back pain, with major radiation down my legs, especially the right one, was tremendously severe.  When I got up in the morning, I barely could move.  I don’t know if it was because of the weather directly, in that the changing humidity and pressure and whatnot cause my various injured spinal and connective tissue elements to act up—certainly my shoulders were also achy—but I also walked to the nearby gas station after taking the train to my station in Hollywood on Wednesday night.  Because of the rain and the wind and so on, there were lots of puddles, and my coordination was rather screwed up, so in trying to go over puddles and sometimes jumping them, I think I hurt myself.

I was going to try to take an Uber into the office, anyway, yesterday, but because of the weather, the Uber rates were more than twice what they would usually be.  Given that I felt very similar to crap, that would probably have been a bad decision, anyway.  I’m glad I rested, because while I am far from pain free, I feel better than I did.  I don’t ever really expect to be “pain free” anymore; I just try to get it below the threshold of interfering too much with conscious thought and effort.

I’m not going to be writing a blog post next Thursday, of course, because it is Thanksgiving here in the US, and that’s a day that more people take off than perhaps any other specific holiday but New Year’s Day.  It feels mildly weird not to have written my “classic” Thursday blog post two weeks in a row, but that’s just the way it goes.

I suppose that, if Christmas had fallen on a Thursday since I’ve been doing my blog, then I would have missed the blog posts two weeks in a row, because Christmas and New Years are exactly a week apart.  That probably did happen at least once sometime since I’ve started writing my fiction and writing my blog; it ought to happen once every seven years*.  But I’m not sure.  It certainly hasn’t been for a while.

My Thursday blog started basically as an attempt to promote my writing and to engage with potential readers of my fiction.  A fat lot of good that did me.  I probably should have known better.  I’ve never been terribly good at self-aggrandizement, or self-promotion, and I certainly should have realized that exposing people to my true personality—to the degree that such a thing is possible when writing a blog—was never going to be a good way to promote my work.  It’s a bit like an orc trying to enter a human beauty contest; unless it’s heavily disguised, it’s never even going to get in the door, and certainly no one looking for human beauty if going to give it high marks.

Mind you, of course, beauty is subjective and is relative to the species.  Peahens apparently find the peacock’s tail feathers not merely lovely—a sentiment many humans share—but they also find them sexy.  Moths are drawn to moth pheromones, Bower Bird females love a guy who lays out a brilliant-looking bower, even though it will never be used for anything, and certainly not for nesting.

That’s was a weird tangent, wasn’t it?  My brain tends to do lots of weird things.  Although I laid around most of the time yesterday, it’s not true to say that I got a lot of rest.  My right leg, with its radiating pain, was so severe that it developed a bit of a “causalgia” phenomenon, in that vasomotor activity was affected by the pain process, and my entire leg felt tight as well as cold to the touch relative to the rest of my body.

It wasn’t too severe; it wasn’t as though it was going blue or otherwise discolored, other than a slight increased pallor.  However, it made it clear to me that my pain wasn’t “all in my head”.  It was certainly all in my nervous system, of course, but that’s a thing that spreads through the whole body, from the brain to the spine to all the limbs and the heart and lungs and the whole GI tract—the latter of which by some measures has a local nervous system as complex as the entire brain of a cat.

No wonder GI tracts can be so grumpy if you don’t treat them perfectly.

Anyway, that’s enough for today.  I’ll not be writing tomorrow—barring the unforeseen—so I’ll next be writing on Monday, November 20th.  What a month it’s been since October 20th.  I didn’t expect to be here at this time, or indeed (possibly) to be anywhere at all—I don’t know what to make of it.

*Though, given the existence of leap years, there can be temporary deviations from the hard and fast pattern.  So Christmas/New Years might have skipped a year at some point within the past eight to ten years, and so I might not have missed my Thursday blog two weeks in a row for that reason.  I could check on it, but it’s not something about which I’m curious enough right now**.

**Though it wouldn’t be surprising if, later, the question nags at me enough that I go and look it up***.

***I did that (of course) and it turned out that, because of the 2020 leap year, Christmas skipped from Wednesday in 2019 to Friday in 2020.  So I have not missed two Thursdays in a row for that reason, since I did not begin writing my Thursday blog as early as 2013.

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I was off sick yesterday. You’re welcome.

Hi, everybody.  I’m writing this blog post on my laptop computer.  I brought it back to the house with me on Friday (when I left work early) and it seemed a shame not to make use of it.  Of course, this was my intention when I brought it.  I like typing much better than using the phone, as you all know, if you’ve been reading my blog posts for very long, and I also needed to give my thumbs a rest because of the relatively mild but nagging and persistent arthralgia* they’ve been having.

I am sorry that I did not write a post yesterday.  I was out sick; I have been sick all weekend, feeling quite crappy, I’m afraid.  I’m still far from my baseline health, but I need to go into the office or too many things are going to get into disarray and be terribly backed up.

Also, to be honest, when I’m just sitting at the house, I don’t do well.  It doesn’t help that we had the “Fall back” thing this weekend, but even without that, my sense of time’s passage was really screwed up over this slightly prolonged isolation.  It felt like a surreal sort of turbulent time flow, with me waking up, thinking it must be morning, and realizing that it was only ten thirty at night, and I’d barely dozed off (for instance).  My sleep has been deeply discombobulated.  I definitely got a bit of a feel for the notion of time not being linear but being a “big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey…stuff.”**

Unfortunately, I haven’t been walking for three or four days, at least nothing of significance.  My back is absolutely killing me.  I can barely reach down to tie my shoes, even when seated.  I feel as though I’ve aged decades over this weekend.  I don’t know if this is partly from coughing a lot, or mainly from lying around so much or what.  Probably it’s multi-factorial.  In any case, though, I feel horribly stiff in addition to having what I suspect is an on and off fever (because I have intermittent sweats, especially after taking analgesics/antipyretics).

It’s interesting to note, as I just did when I pre-saved this blog post, that last year’s post for November 7th was written on a Monday.  So, we’ve shifted to one day later for the same date this year, at least at this time of the year.  I guess that makes sense, since 52 (weeks) times 7 (days) is 364, which gives one extra day in non-leap years.  I’ve probably noted this before, but it still sometimes strikes me as interesting, albeit probably not very important.

It also shows that I’ve been writing these daily blog posts instead of writing fiction most days of the week for at least a year, and almost certainly quite a bit longer.  That’s rather disappointing, at least to me, because these were meant to be therapeutic in some sense; I was hoping to get my mental health into better condition before nearly this long had passed.  Of course, I don’t know what my mental health would have been like had I not been writing these blog posts.  Maybe it would have been better, maybe it would have been worse.  Regrettably, I can only imagine the alternatives; I cannot actually carry out any form of controlled test.

I probably would have been better off if I had just either written fiction every day, even if almost no one ever read it, or not having written anything at all.  I don’t think I would have been any healthier, had that been the case.  In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if I were already dead*** in that case.  But at least I wouldn’t be facing this same daily grind of nonsense and futility.

The funny thing is, I could write fiction.  I’ve never had traditional writer’s block in the sense of sitting and looking at the page or screen and not knowing what to write.  I’ve just felt utterly unmotivated.  It’s much akin to the fact that I seem unable to say, “I love the world and I love myself” even in my own head.

I just have no will to do anything.  Or perhaps it would be more precise to say that I have no drive to do anything.  I have will in the sense of being able to resist various impulses, albeit imperfectly and not consistently.  The various portions of my frontal lobes that are involved in impulse regulation seem to be functioning reasonably well.  Sometimes I think they’re functioning too well.  Unfortunately, the stress-related parts of my brain have grown stronger over time—my amygdala is probably pretty beefy at this stage, and I don’t think it used to be that way.  I am much more tense and stress-able than I ever used to be.

I mean, I guess I’ve been through a fair amount, and chronic pain (and a stint in FSP) certainly doesn’t help to calm one’s fight-or-flight responses, though it can lead to kind of “learned helplessness” over time.

Anyway, that’s enough for today, I think.  My mind went wandering for about ten minutes just now, and I sort of forgot what I was doing, so I think I’ve said more than I have to say for today.  I hope you all are physically well, and that you’re mentally exceptionally good.  Why not?  Hope is hope; it’s only a bit more constrained than wishes.  I can wish for world peace to happen today, by some miracle, and I know that’s almost impossible, but I can (and do) sincerely hope for you all to have a good day.

*From athro- referring to joints or articulations, and -algia, referring to pain, as in analgesics.  So, arthralgia literally just means “joint pain”.  But it sounds more impressive in Latin (or is it Greek, or both?), and also, if it’s in a “dead” language, then it can be a term that medical professionals around the world can use without having to learn each other’s many terms for the various things.

**A quote from the 10th Doctor (played by David Tennant) from Doctor Who, Series 3, episode 10, “Blink”.

***Can dead people be surprised that they’re dead?  I suspect not, but it’s quite difficult to know, as we get no actual (reliable) reports from the undiscovered country.

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Don’t worry; this won’t be like yesterday’s post

It’s Friday again, and I’m working again tomorrow, so this won’t be the end of the work week for me.  I did not walk to or from the train station yesterday, deciding to give myself that recovery day after nearly 24 miles of walking over the previous two days.  But I did walk to the station this morning.  I probably won’t walk back this evening, but that will depend at least a bit on how I feel.

I started off the morning yesterday in a moderately good mood, at least for me.  As you may have noticed, I was rather silly and self-indulgent as I wrote yesterday’s post, of which the footnotes were almost longer than the main body.  I feel better about such footnotes while reading Determined, because Robert Sapolsky seems at least as fond of frequent and often extensive asides as I am.  Maybe it’s something to do with having the name Robert*.

I often imagine that my less dark and somber and repetitive posts‒like yesterday’s‒will be more popular than my usual ones.  That’s certainly how I feel when I’m writing them:  “Here, at least, is something that readers might be able to enjoy, and which deals with somewhat interesting subjects.”

However, time and again, I have found that such posts receive fewer likes and comments and so on than my darker posts.  It’s been similar to the way my interactions with other people in the workaday world‒and before that, the academic world‒tend to be.  When I’m feeling relatively good, and feeling good about myself, people seem to find me confusing and irritating (at least based on the ways they interact with me, and their expressions, and the impatient tones of their voices, and their tendencies to keep their distance).  Maybe I just get too hyper and silly.

On the other hand, when I’m dysthymic and even fully depressed, although people do seem to find me a bit of a downer, they don’t seem to mind me as much.  It’s frustrating, but it’s been a long-standing pattern that I’ve noticed throughout my life.  It makes it that much harder to want to bother trying to be upbeat and energetic.  What’s the point, if when I’m actually feeling halfway good about myself I just rub other people the wrong way?

I guess maybe it would be different if I truly didn’t care whether people liked me at all or found me a pain in the ass.  But there are at least some people with whom I like to be on friendly terms, if I can, and that very class of people seems to find an upbeat, positive, energetic Robert to be annoying.  I guess maybe I’m just too weird overall; and at least when I’m depressed, the exposure of others to my weirdness is blunted, whereas when I’m in one of those increasingly rare states of higher energy, my weirdness comes out in full force.

I’m tired of this, anyway, all of it.  The universe, even in a form recognizable as similar to how it is now, may continue for tens of billions of years, but even the small span of years since I last saw my kids‒about ten and a half of them‒seems functionally eternal to me.  And, of course, depending on the time scale one uses, it could seem huge to anyone, and on other scales it can be unnoticeably tiny.  If one proceeds along orders of magnitude, rather than some linear measure, then the human lifespan is somewhere in the middle between the Planck time and the life of the universe, at least as we know it**.  But that’s neither here nor there.

When one is feeling depressed and hopeless***, people are prone to say things like “Be strong” and “Hold on”, as if these were self-evidently good things to do.  But they are not self-evidently good.  They are very much context-dependent.

If one follows such advice regarding a feud or vendetta or some other culturally negative or destructive matter, one is prone to do far greater harm than if one just let things go and gave up.  Think of Ahab in Moby Dick.  And wouldn’t it have been better if Hitler had killed himself ten years earlier than he did?  If many of the mass-shooter/suicide perpetrators had skipped some steps and just killed themselves in the first place, would not the world‒and its memory of those individuals‒be vastly better?

I need to leave, I need to escape, I need to stop trying.  I’m too exhausted.  Above all, I need to stop even hoping to be upbeat and positive.  It tends, mainly, not to be profitable (metaphorically or literally) for me.

Okay, that’s enough crap from me for now.  I’m working tomorrow, so the plan is for me to write another bloody post then.  I doubt that I’ll be lucky enough (or that you will be lucky enough) to have events intercede and let me stop trying anymore before then.  But I can always at least hope for the final disappearance of hope itself, even in its flimsiest fragments, so I can just call it a life and be done.

Maybe I’ll get lucky.  If not, well, I guess I’ll write some more tomorrow.

*I don’t really think so, of course.  It’s just a silly thought.  Though he has apparently also had lifelong trouble with depression, so maybe that could be a more realistic connection.

**Of course, if one thinks of the time needed for even supermassive black holes to evaporate due to Hawking radiation, we are far closer to the short than to the long.  Then again, when compared to infinity, any finite number, no matter how large, is unreasonably close to zero.

***And particularly if one expresses the fact that they feel suicidal.

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Blogs without all remedy should be without regard

Hello and good morning to everyone who is reading this.

And to everyone who is not reading this‒well, nothing, really.  It doesn’t matter what I say to the people not reading this, because, until and unless they actually read this, there will be no way for them to know what I am “saying” to them.

I suppose it’s possible that someone might read this blog post out loud to someone else, in which case the listener can know what I’ve written without literally reading it.  But, if you can consider listening to an audiobook to be “reading” the book‒and you can, though you’re not required to do so‒then that would count very much as the same thing.

It’s a bit like, for instance, the wave-front of the wave equation of a photon that was released from the last scattering surface of the early cosmos, just as the universe became cool enough for electrons and nuclei to join together and stop being plasma.

Imagine such a photon’s wave function progressing through the expanding universe, on and on, its wavelength increasing with the expansion of spacetime, red shifting and red shifting and red shifting.  What if it never interacts with anything else in the cosmos?  What if it’s never absorbed or scattered or reflected, “measured” by nothing but spacetime itself, on into the heat death of the universe, until there’s no longer even anything within its cosmic horizon with which it can interact?  Its wavelength stretches and stretches, perhaps eventually becoming light years in size*.  At some point it’s going to be completely swamped and washed out by the random quantum oscillations of the universe, even if that universe is immeasurably close to absolute zero in temperature.

Imagine such a photon given off by that last scattering surface and then traveling for a trillion years, a googol years, then for so long that a googol years seems as vanishing as a microsecond, never interacting, perhaps, until some version of a Poincare recurrence of the universe happens.  In principle, it might not interact even then***.  In what deep sense can that photon be said to be “light”?

It might even count as some manner of “virtual” photon, though certainly not the kind that is usually meant when that term is used.  It might seem lonely and depressing to be that photon, but we can console ourselves with the fact that, as far as any sensible notion of reality appears, photons have no subjective experience*****.  Even the absurd notions of panpsychism don’t literally imagine that photons are individually, actually conscious, in the sense of having internal “qualia“.

So, if I write something that no one reads, then what I have written cannot matter to those who have not read it.  Of course, in principle, all measurable remnants of even Shakespeare’s writing will someday be read and/or uttered for the very last time, but that’s different‒they will already have interacted immeasurably often before then.  The outcome will be nothingness‒or as near to it as possible‒but in the meantime, much will have happened.

Of course, according to quantum mechanics, quantum information is conserved, so everything from Hamlet to my imagined stray, lonely photon would be, in principle, recoverable.  But that’s a very rarefied “in principle”.

So, for those of you reading this, you really don’t have to worry about what people who have never read nor will ever read it will think about it.  They simply won’t have read it.  Likewise, I don’t have to worry about the reaction to my writing from people who don’t read it.

And, of course, if people “react” without ever having read a thing, which certainly does happen, those opinions are not worth considering.  I don’t need to take thought for some criticism of the Mona Lisa by a person who has never seen even any manner of reproduction or image of the painting.

Nor should I worry about being offended by the chattering of a squirrel in a nearby tree, or the noise arising from leaves stirred by the wind.  It’s merely noise, not too different from those quantum jitters that happen even in a region of the universe that’s as close to absolute zero as it can be.  There is always noise‒though it can become vanishingly close to silence (which sounds quite nice, so to speak).

Anyway, that’s enough of that.  I had a long day of walking yesterday‒about 15 miles total distance, and my joints and muscles still feel pretty good, so the shoes are all right******.  I did not walk to the train this morning‒I figure just a bit of recovery time is warranted‒but I may walk this evening.  I hope you have a good day, and that all your metaphorical photons have lots of interesting and enjoyable interactions before they dissipate.

What more could you reasonably ask?

TTFN

Keds cartoon

*That seems an interesting possibility.  What does it mean for a photon to have a wavelength measured in light years**?  If one wavelength takes a year to pass, is it really even a wave anymore?

**Okay, one can literally measure any wavelength in light years if one is so inclined, but for ordinary wavelengths such as those of more usual light, on the scale of nanometers and such, it’s a bit absurd.  One might as well measure the energy output of an LED bulb in megatons of TNT per second.

***Though, if it arrives at another “Big Bang” coming from the other direction in time, as I speculate could be possible, then it’s hard to see it approaching a state of new, lowering entropy from an impending region of inflation and another “last scattering surface” without actually scattering off the dense plasma‒and then our photon would end as it had begun, a quantum event going from the remnant of one Big Bang to another, countless years “later”****

****Though the notion of “later” might be irrelevant, since the directionality of time is determined by the direction of increasing entropy, and that would be inconsistent and reverse itself in my conjectured scenario.  It’s a bit like floating in intergalactic space and saying one is trying to go “higher”.  You can say it if you want, but it’s not really apposite‒it may even be the opposite of apposite.  Higher from one point of view becomes lower from another, even if one is traveling from planet to planet within a solar system.  Likewise for “later” and “earlier” when moving from one inflating region to another…if such a thing can happen, of course.

*****And they also don’t “experience” any passage of time internally…from the point of view of a photon, so to speak, it starts and ends instantaneously.

******That makes me wish I were wearing Keds, so I could honestly say. “The Keds are alright.”

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[Put some quote from a Pink Floyd song here]

I’m writing this on my smartphone after having walked to the train station this morning.  It’s cool enough weather that I even wore a hoodie for the walk (though if the sun had been up but the temperature the same I probably would not have done so), and I certainly don’t feel dehydrated.  I didn’t walk back from the train last night, but that was only because we got out of the office late, and then the later train I caught was a further 20 minutes behind schedule.  That was really irritating.

The 610 train is just arriving now, but I will catch the next one (and I only feel a little bit of anxiety over that decision).  I made good time, and I also got up a bit earlier than scheduled, because that seems to be the general trend of my life.  If this continues long enough, I might end up getting up in the morning before I go to bed.  I need to do something about this before I arrive at a contradiction and make the World Program™ crash and shut down.

I wore my boots this morning, and as I had intended yesterday, I did not overtighten the laces.  This has helped a little, at least, but I fear it’s not enough.  My right Achilles tendon is burning, and the arch of my left foot, just a bit behind the 1st metatarsophalangeal joint, is already feeling tight and achy.  That’s not too terrible after five miles of walking at a pretty brisk pace, but it didn’t seem to happen with the New Balance walking shoes at all.

I’m very disappointed, but I may need just to nix the boots.  It’s very sad to me, though I know it’s not truly a big deal.  I think I’ve just gotten to the point of having so little of value or meaning in my life that the loss of even the option to use the shoes that most aesthetically appeal to me feels like the death of an old friend.

It’s all rather pathetic, and not in a good way.  Still, I must do what I must, tautologically speaking.  So, I’ll try to do the walk again tomorrow morning, wearing the walking shoes, and see if it really is easier on the joints of my feet.

By the way:  of course, I have not started writing any kind of short story, or any other story.  What’s more, I haven’t practiced my guitar at all, nor have I listened to any more of the Spanish version of Harry Potter.  I also didn’t translate beyond the first sentence of the Japanese version of Harry Potter.  Nor did I read more than a few paragraphs past the preface or opening note or whatever he called it of Robert Sapolsky’s new book.

I didn’t even finish listening to the podcast with Sean Carroll and David Deutsch.  I tried to listen to a playlist of my favorite songs yesterday while waiting for the train in the evening, but after skipping about a dozen or so of my favorite songs because I just wasn’t interested in listening to them, I concluded (correctly) that I just didn’t want to listen to anything.  Nothing is interesting.

Of course, a famous (and fatuous) saying is that only boring people are bored, but in my case it’s not completely inaccurate.  I am dreadfully boring, even to myself.  Having to listen to me talk, or even just to be around me, for any length of time would probably count as cruel and unusual punishment.  I know it’s punishment to me.

I just got on the train.  It’s mildly interesting to note that there was enough breeze blowing up the tracks as I waited that, given my underlying sweatiness, I actually felt a bit chilly, and had to put my hood up.  That worked well, though.  And once I get to the office, I have other clothes into which to change.

This week has already seemed very long, and it’s just now Wednesday.  It’s kind of a weird inversion or subjective tension when one compares this to the lyrics of the song Time.  Whereas those lyrics note that “every year is getting shorter”, to me it feels‒though the year thing still seems true‒that every day is getting longer.  If the two tendencies continue, I could run into another paradox, in which a day eventually feels longer than a year, and then, again, the world might come to an end because of a logic error.

Actually, I guess it’s not always a contradiction for a day to be longer than a year.  If memory serves, for instance, Mercury is almost tidally locked with the sun, so its days and years are nearly the same length.  And if I recall correctly, I think that a day on Venus‒meaning a complete planetary revolution‒is longer than a year*.

On Earth, though, days are much, much shorter than years.  That’s even truer on Jupiter, where the days are about ten hours long, but the years are nearly a dozen times as long as Earth’s, because of its greater distance from the sun**.

Anyway, all this trivia is beside the point.  I am almost entirely without any sustained joy or happiness, nor do I see any reasonable prospect of that changing.  What would change about it?  I don’t really even care about the upcoming 60th anniversary Doctor Who special!  There are no books or movies or shows or whatever that seem interesting.

And I’m very tired.

*I did recall correctly; that is in fact true.

**This follows from Kepler’s 3rd law of planetary motion, which states, if memory serves, that the period of a planet’s orbit is proportional to the 3/2 power of the length of its orbit’s semimajor axis.  This would mean Jupiter orbits at just under 12^(2/3), or 5.24, times the distance of Earth…and indeed, according to Wikipedia, Jupiter’s semimajor axis is indeed 5.2038 astronomical units.  See, all that math we learned in school is useful for something.