time

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Trivial nonsense on a pseudo-ominous day

I’d intended to walk to the train this morning, so of course I didn’t bring my portable, foldable computer designed to be suitable for use resting upon one’s lap with me yesterday.  Therefore, I am writing this blog post on my smartphone*.  However, I did not walk to the train.

I just felt really wiped out still this morning; my sleep wasn’t quite as bad as it had been the night before, but it still was rotten, and I feel rotten.  Also, this morning it’s three degrees (Fahrenheit…so one and two thirds degrees Celsius) hotter than it was two days ago.  I’m sweating even more than usual even though I’m just sitting at the train station right now.  There’s also, again, no breeze of which to speak, so everything is stagnant, and sweat doesn’t really do any work toward cooling one down.

I hope that, by this evening, it’s either cooler or at least breezier, and that I’ll have a bit more energy, so I might feel up to walking back from the train.  At least then I wouldn’t have to worry about sweating on train seats.

My coworker did come to the office yesterday, bearing pictures and stories of his brief family trip, mainly focused on his very young daughter.  It was quite charming.  Another person I know is currently on a trip as well‒two of them together, really‒and all these reports got me nostalgic about trips I had taken to (or times I had lived in) their various destinations.  I fear to talk too much about my own experiences in such circumstances, though I feel the urge‒I suspect that I’m just being horribly obnoxious when I catch myself doing it, and internally rebuke myself with things like, “No one gives a shit about all your stupid stories” and so on.

To be fair, no one has complained to me about it, so I evidently haven’t overstepped the bounds of good taste too much.  I probably do so overstep here, on my blog, but if anyone here doesn’t want to “hear” my stupid stories, they have only themselves to blame for reading them.

Today is Friday the 13th, isn’t it?  Back in the old days, some local network station would probably have used today‒and the fact that we are in the month of October, to boot‒as an excuse to show some highly edited versions of the slasher films named after the day.  For all I know, some of them still do.  Anyway, I tend to like Friday the 13th, largely because 13 is a prime number, and it’s one for which I feel a special affection precisely because it is so reviled by so many other people, for silly, superstitious reasons.  I myself am not superstitious.  I’m just a little bit stitious.  Ba-dump-bump.

I will be working tomorrow, so maybe I’ll walk to the train in the morning.  Timing things like that can be a bit awkward on the weekend, because the trains only run every hour, and none of the departure times is roughly comparable to the place in the hour that I usually catch them.  So if I get up at the same time as usual, whether walking or otherwise, I’m either “too early” or “too late” compared to my preference.  Of course “too early” is VASTLY preferable to the alternative, so I will err in that direction.  It’s not as though I can choose just to sleep in‒not without the use of pharmaceuticals‒so I might as well just get going.

I had a rather abrupt surge in my lower back pain this morning, above the usual baseline (to which I’ve almost become accustomed).  It may be because I didn’t put on my spandex knee and ankle support thingies**, since I had chosen not to walk.  It seems a bit much to think, though, that just the very small amount of walking I’ve done without them, wearing boots that give decent ankle support, would trigger an exacerbation.  It’s possible, I guess, but it seems unlikely.  It’s also possible that I slept in an unusual position, or just that fatigue and relative dehydration and whatnot are taking a bit of a toll.

Ah, well.  I brought my knee and ankle specialty spandex bits of supplemental clothing with me, in case I walk this evening, so I can always slip them on during the day.

I already gave away my folding massage chair.  It wasn’t doing me any good anymore, and it’s one less thing to have around or to leave behind.  I’m trying to farm off or just eliminate as much useless junk as I can.  The less clutter, the better.

That last sentence makes me wish I could legitimately say “and the less butter, the cletter”, but that last word, alas, has no meaning of which I am aware.  I suppose I could make up a meaning for it, but if you have to invent a word to make a pseudo-spoonerism work, then you’re really reaching.

One of the security guys on the train just walked by, and as he did, he muttered, “Damn, it’s hot.”  He’s far from overstating the situation.  The A/C on the train appears to be running***, based on the noise, but it doesn’t seem to be cooling the car much if at all.  I guess that at least means that my glasses (and my phone) won’t fog up when I exit the train, and that’s worth avoiding, so it’s a good thing.  See?  Who says I can’t find the positive in seemingly negative situations?

Some do say that cynics are really just frustrated idealists.  I don’t know that I am or ever have been an idealist, but I certainly am frustrated.

With that, I’ll draw (or write) this post to a close.  I hope you all have a good and lucky Friday the 13th, and that you have a good weekend to follow.  I expect to be writing a post for tomorrow morning, so if you like that sort of thing, come to this space then‒figuratively speaking‒at about the usual time.

*I don’t have any urge to clarify the word “smartphone” because it really doesn’t refer to any other entity in the universe of which I know, and‒certainly compared to any phones I used prior to the last ten years‒it is a very smart phone indeed.

**I’m not sure what the best term for these is.  “Brace” feels most typical, but that, to me, somehow implies hard, hinged, moving parts, which are lacking in the products I use.  “Support” seems reasonable, but it feels a bit vague.  Perhaps “compression sleeve” would work, but that feels a bit confusing.

***I would guess that it’s probably powered by alternating current created by an alternator (duh!) attached to the engine, but it could be run from batteries that receive their charge via rectified current initially generated in the engine.  If that is the case, then we have the rather pleasing situation of an A/C running on DC.  That’s better than butter and cletter than clutter.

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…or art thou but a dagger of the mind, a false creation, proceeding from the heat-oppressed blog?

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday again, against almost everyone’s better judgment, and so it’s time for another Thursday edition of my blog post.

I had a subjectively bizarre day yesterday, or a disquieting day, or a disheartening day…something along those lines.  Outwardly, it wasn’t that strange, I suppose.  Inwardly, I’ve been feeling increasingly weird and disjointed.  I don’t know if that’s showing itself in my writing at all or not; there’s no good way for me to tell.

There have been two closely spaced opportunities to have palindromic number sequences in the 8-digit recording numbers this week.  If it seems strange to you that there should be two that come close together, just think about how, up until a number sequence is centered on “99”, the stepwise increase in those middle two numbers to keep them the same is 11, 22, 33, 44…and so on.  Then, right after 99, it immediately flips over to “00”, and the sequence restarts.

Anyway, we passed the 99 one earlier this week.  I think it was Tuesday.  Then, yesterday morning, it turned over to 00 and then it was just a matter of the last 3 digits being a reverse of the first.

It was getting close, and the numbers were increasing only slowly, because it was early in the day.  Then, there was a long break between deals, and I took a moment to dial the verification line just to see what number we were on.  It was only 12 shy of the palindrome!

Then, I had to use the restroom, and during the half-a-minute while I was in, a new deal closed and my coworker went over to begin verifying it.  Shortly after I came out, he sort of waved me over.  I thought he was going to give me the paperwork so I could begin processing the deal, but he pointed at the recording number:  26500562.

He knows I’m into number patterns, and he figured I’d like that.

Afterwards, I asked him the (probably strange) questions, “That’s really what the number was, right?  You didn’t just write it down that way because you knew I’d like it?”  He chuckled, obviously understanding at least some of my wish to confirm the result.  But no, it was real. It was a palindromic number.  I should have been pleased and even thrilled.

All I really felt afterward was a deep and profound worsening of my feeling of depression.  I didn’t feel like I’d gotten a message from the universe, but even if I did, it was way after the “due date”, which would have been last Friday at the very latest (and that was a date that had been pushed back repeatedly).  I could think of excuses to invalidate it, like saying I had skewed the results by calling the recording line earlier.  But that’s all just a silly way of messing with oneself.  What it really came down to was:  the number wasn’t enough to give me motivation.  It was definitely cool, but it didn’t mean anything deeper to me.

I’ve experienced similar phenomena before.  From time to time, I’ll be slightly torn about a particular course of action‒nothing momentous, just usually choices of a meal, such as whether to eat something healthy or something indulgent‒and I’ll flip a coin about it, usually one of my collection of dollar coins.  Sometimes I’ll flip three or five or even nine of them, as if taking a vote.  Then, when I have the outcome…well, I’ll often realize that, no matter the result of the coin flips, I want to do something other than what the result directs.  And so I ignore that result.

It’s a psychologically interesting phenomenon.  The coins don’t act as a true decision maker, but they do clarify, for me, what my real wish or inclination is.  So it’s useful in some ways.

The palindromic number is similar.  Maybe if I did have some kind of stupid, quasi-mystical idea of what the numbers symbolized, I would find it more compelling.  But, of course, I have no actual belief that the universe is sending me any messages.  In a way, it’s good that one turned up‒way after my original deadline and idea‒because now I know that it doesn’t give me any more reason or drive to live at all.  Rather, it just highlights the fact that I have no such drive or reason, and it was absurd to think an eight-digit number sequence could provide it.

Yesterday it also turned out that my coworker’s wife‒who is also a coworker‒is coming down with a cold, and so it looks like they aren’t going away this weekend but are going to reschedule to go next weekend.  This would have me push any plans or tentative ideas back yet another week.  I almost started to cry in the office, and just had to sit and look at my computer screen or down at the top of my desk for a while.  My coworker asked if I was okay, and I said, honestly, “No.”  He then asked what was wrong and all I could reply was, “Nothing new.”

Anyway, since then I’ve acclimated slightly to the schedule change.  I know that the palindromic numbers don’t actually mean anything to me, and that realization made me feel even more depressed.  And the timing of the date pushback is also more depressing.

But, on the other hand, this coming Sunday is October 1st, and when the first of a month falls on a Sunday, that always means that there will be a Friday the 13th in the month.  And that will begin the weekend after my planned-to-be pushed back work weekend.  So, if I want a good day to take some special action, and I can’t use Bilbo and Frodo’s birthday, then after a Friday the 13th, especially in October, is at least mildly ominous.

Well, okay, not really.  Not to me.  I like the number 13, and Fridays the 13th are good days, especially in October.  Also, both my niece and my daughter were born on the 13th of their birth months, albeit different months and widely separate years, so I can’t feel that the 13th, Friday or otherwise, bodes ill, and I never have.

Really, I see this coming Friday the 13th and related events as potentially…well, not good, maybe, but at least as good as things are going to get.

In the meantime, I must say I’ve been having a lot of bizarre sensory impressions recently.  It’s not that anything particularly strange is happening‒I myself am the strangest thing in my own life, to be honest‒but I keep having this odd feeling that things aren’t actually the way they seem to be, though they seem “normal”.

It’s not a feeling of déjà vu, but it’s almost similar in character.  It’s as if the familiar things I’m seeing and doing and feeling are actually simulacra or illusions‒or perhaps that the memories I have of having been in these places before is an illusion, a false memory.

Also, the flow of time feels a little off.  For instance, when I’m waiting for one light to turn green after another turns red, it seems to take several seconds, way longer than usual, to the point where I find myself looking around impatiently while at the crosswalk.  It also seems that drivers are taking longer than usual to start moving after a traffic light changes.  Things all around me seem to be moving more slowly.  This does not, however, really give me any advantage; I am moving slowly too.  I can only observe the phenomenon, not act more quickly than usual, relatively speaking.

I think there has been an increased frequency of me thinking I see movement out of the corner of my eye, or I hear a noise of movement just beyond eye-shot.  When I see such movement or some shape out of the corner of my eye, I first suspect that it’s a bug of some kind, but that’s not new.  This is south Florida in the hot and wet part of the year.  Seven times out of ten, such movement really is a bug.

I’m also feeling the need to check my pockets even more frequently than usual to make sure that I have my wallet and keys and phone and all still with me.  I never feel secure about that.  I’m not sure that I want to feel secure about such things.  I’d rather be anxious than overconfident and wrong about keys and wallet and phone, etc.

The tension does wear me out though.

Anyway, I don’t feel that reality is illusory, though I feel increasingly distanced and separate from it.  It’s more as if, perhaps, I myself am an illusion.  It would be an elaborate illusion, of course, since I would even have illusory thoughts and experiences and dreams and all that, but hey, according to some Hindu beliefs, all of reality is but a dream being dreamed by Brahma.

It’s reminiscent of something Stephen King described in Danse Macabre, and which was quoted in the Vsauce video about “creepiness”:  Imagine coming home and realizing that everything you own has been replaced by an exact duplicate.

It’s not that I actually think that.  I don’t.  But it almost feels vaguely that way, only it’s all of reality that feels like it’s a replica…perhaps including me.

I guess it doesn’t matter, anyway.  Our experience of reality is always a form of constrained dream.  It shouldn’t make a difference if it sometimes feels more like a full-fledged dream even while awake, especially for someone like me, who has such bad and long-standing insomnia.

That’s enough for now.  I don’t really know what, if anything, my point has been‒here in this blog post, or the point of my existence in general.  I hope you all have as good a Thursday as you can.

TTFN

dagger of the mind merged down

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

time or not cropped png

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

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

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

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When virtue’s steely blogs look bleak i’ the cold wind

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday again, and it’s also the last day of August in 2023, to which I say, “Good riddance.”  What a crappy month.  The effects of the hurricane have all but completely vanished from here in south Florida, apart from the fact that, at relatively low altitudes, you can still sometimes see streams of fast-moving clouds.  They’re going roughly east-northeast now, as the direction to the distant hurricane’s center has changed.  At ground level, however, and especially during the day, we seem to have lost the wind, and now the air is dead again, humid, and quite hot.

Just sitting at the train station early in the morning, I keep thinking that insects‒probably mosquitoes‒are landing on my neck, but when I reach back to brush them away, they’re just beads of sweat.

I’m slightly annoyed about myself and other things this morning.  I awoke early, even for me, and after lying about for a few hours,  I got up, did some dips, and took a shower and all the usual stuff.  I could’ve walked to the train, I suppose, but I plan to walk this evening, and the weather is just disgusting right now.  Anyway, I recently discovered that there’s a Tri Rail related Uber coupon that gets you $5 off each way (only 2 times a day) when getting a ride to and from the Tri Rail station, so I decided to use that.

The youngish driver, in a Tesla, got there quickly, and we were making such good time that I thought I might even be able to get on the very first train of the day, with a minute or two to spare.

Then, we got to the last turn onto a main street just before the station, and the light was red, and there were three or four cars waiting to go on the cross street, but then they went, and the cross-traffic was then nonexistent…and the driver just sat there and waited for the green (there is no “No turn on red” sign at this intersection).  Now, I’m not comfortable enough talking to strangers to feel fine with saying, “Hey, traffic’s clear, you can go right now.”  So, I just kind of fidgeted in my seat.

Then, when we arrived at the station, the first train was approaching and the gates had just come down, so without sprinting around them and across in front of the train, I couldn’t make that one.  Even if I had run to and up the stairs, across the bridge, and then down, I think there’s almost no chance I would have made it.  So, I walked up along the near side of the track, grumbling, punching one of the pillars as I passed (mainly just to hurt myself a bit, since I was mainly angry with me) and watched the train arrive and then go away.  Now, I’m sitting waiting for the next train, which comes half an hour after.

As I said, my anger is really directed at myself.  I mean, yes, it would have been good for the driver to pay attention and realize he could turn right…but why do I care?  I wasn’t planning to catch that train in the first…

Oh, wait.  They just announced that the train for which I am waiting is delayed “ten, fifteen minutes” (not 10 to 15 minutes, for reasons I’m hitherto unable to guess).  So it really would have been better to catch the earlier one.  I wonder how much an Uber or Lyft to the office would be.

***

Well, I won’t say it’s cheap, but it’s cheaper than a cab would be, and my driver was right there at the station, so I’m going.  You might think that it’s nice that I can afford to do this, but I really can’t.  However, I have no one on whom I need to spend money, and I have no plans for the future, so it’s not as though I’m trying to save anything.  I might as well just burn it all up.

I’m so tired of being stressed out and irritated.  I wish I could just smile and not worry about things.  You would think that if, at root, someone doesn’t care if he lives or dies‒and indeed, leans toward preferring the latter‒it would be easy enough just to be sort of Zen/Taoist in attitude, but that’s not the case, at least for me.

Perhaps it has to do with the intellectual versus the emotional aspects of a desire/drive.  Someone who lacked a basic, emotional survival drive might very well intellectually want to live and yet be calm, at ease, unflappable, perhaps like Hannibal Lecter as portrayed in the books.  He’s not afraid of dying, or even really of pain, but he enjoys his life (such as it is) and wants it to continue.  Whereas I, intellectually, don’t enjoy my life, and I don’t think much of anything I do or say or experience matters at all, and yet every little thing feels like a four-alarm fire, like a call of “General Quarters”, like there’s an enemy at the gates of the city.

Yesterday, during the day, I wished, wished I had a gun, so I could shoot myself, even right there in the office, and fuck trying to be polite and not disturb other people.  It’s not as though other people make even minor, simple, easy efforts to avoid causing me distress.  I thought that I probably wouldn’t shoot myself in the head‒partly because I would worry about a poorly aimed shot causing brain damage but not killing me, but also, partly, I think it would be too big a hurdle to clear based on that biological drive to survive, which is hard to overcome.  Maybe I’m just a coward.  I’m okay with that possibility.

Anyway, I figured I might go the Van Gogh way and shoot myself in the chest or belly or whatever.  That would be pretty gnarly, if you ask me, and I’ve always thought it was a real ballsy way to do things.  No painless and quick death there, even back in Vincent’s day.

Of course, I didn’t have a gun, and I didn’t know anyone from whom I could get one on short notice.  So I ground through the day feeling like my spirit was crawling with metaphysical parasites, stressed out beyond any reasonability.  I mean, come on, I’ve literally dealt with life and death situations many times, often on a daily basis, more than I would be able to count!  Why does my stupid present daily life get to me so much?

Probably because it is such a stupid, pointless daily life.  The fact that I bother with it at all, when there is quite literally no point to it, or to me anymore, is probably what makes it so stressful.  Or maybe, after everything I’ve been through, I have some weird form of PTSD‒that’s fashionable, right?  I have no idea.  I don’t feel like I have something like that.  I just feel…weird.  Which I guess is appropriate, since I am weird.

***

And now I am here at my destination, at which I’ve arrived even earlier than I would have if the second train had been on time.  That’s a nice euphemism, isn’t it?  That would be a nice way to think of dying before your time, don’t you think?  “He arrived at his destination earlier than expected.  It was very thoughtful and pleasant of him.”

Well, anyway, tomorrow begins September, a far better month than August, the month of the equinox and of Bilbo’s and Frodo’s birthday.  It’s a month in which it might be worthwhile to sell Bag End to the Sackville-Bagginses and head off on the quest to throw a cursed item into the Cracks of Doom, ending at least one particular evil forever.

We’re approaching another potential palindromic recording number possibility today (already).  I don’t think there will be many more chances for one to come up.  Even if one occurred at this stage, I don’t think I would pay attention to it.  It’s like when you flip a coin to decide whether you’ll go off a diet or something, and it comes out a certain way, and you realize that, no, you’re going to go the other way, anyway.  It’s a good way to test yourself and find out what you really wanted to do in the first place.

What I want you to do, if you’re willing and able, is to have a good day, and to appreciate the ones you love and who love you, and to spend time with them if you have that opportunity.  Just spend time with people who are willing and able to spend time with you, and who matter to you, and to whom you matter.  If you are lucky enough to be with the people you love, don’t take that for granted.  That’s my advice/request, for what it’s worth.  I’m not known for my wisdom, but that’s the best I have right now.

TTFN

vincent in the museum

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Apologies for a blogless Monday

I was out sick with some form of enteropathy* yesterday, so I didn’t write a blog post.  I frankly haven’t done much of anything that’s in any way productive since Friday, and I’m not sure I did anything productive then.  I hope no one was too bereft by not being able to read my writing for three days (ha ha).

I’m now sitting at the train station, waiting for the train to the office (well, it doesn’t actually go to the office, but I think you know what I mean), not looking forward to the fact that I’ll have to do extra catch-up work from both Saturday and yesterday.  I really don’t want to have to deal with any of it or with anything at all.

I don’t know why I keep doing anything whatsoever.  I can speculate on certain causes, of course‒habit, the evolved drive simply to continue to survive, a dislike for causing inconvenience to other people, all that sort of thing.  Also, I guess there is the idiotic hope that maybe, just maybe, I will find some answers, some meaning, or some solutions to at least some of my problems.

Honestly, when I get sick like over Sunday through yesterday, I get the wild hope that maybe I’ll need to be hospitalized, and while in the hospital, I’ll be able to get some help for my psychological issues as well as my physical ones.  It’s stupid, I know.  I need to stop hoping for anything.  Hope is a waste of my time.

Ironically, it’s hope that keeps me writing about the fact that I’m having problems going on, problems dealing with my issues and my loneliness and my depression and insomnia and pain and all that crap.  I hope that somehow, by talking about it, I’ll either arrive at some insight or ideas or some semblance of understanding that might lead to some modicum of peace.  Or I hope that someone out there in the WordPress world‒perhaps it should be called the WorldPress‒will have some new ideas or insights or some help to offer.  Or maybe some old friend of mine will read what I write and will reach out and offer a hand or something.  I don’t know what they could do, or what I could do.  But anyway, it is hope that keeps me writing, I guess.

But it’s getting old.  I’m getting tired of it.

When I don’t just dwell on morosity (I don’t know if that’s a proper word), I write about weird shit, like I did on Friday.  I could write about current events, I suppose, but most of those are discouraging and boring.  It’s basically about as fun as writing about the interactions of a very large colony of baboons from the baboons’ points of view.  Baboons don’t want to admit to themselves that most of their choices and motivations are almost entirely simple primate dominance, mating, and social jockeying behaviors.

Humans really are just baboons with delusions of grandeur, some of which are excusable, many (perhaps most) of which are not.  They’re weirdly built and strange to look at, with very rare exceptions.  They think their culture and society and civilization were made somehow, deliberately‒by them it sometimes seems they imagine, though that cannot be possible‒when really, it all just sort of happened and continues just to happen, like any weather phenomenon or termite mound.  This is nothing of which to be ashamed‒it’s the nature of everything as far as I can see‒I just find the hubris disgusting and inexcusable.

Even nature itself seems just weird and rather twisted and horrifying when I look at it these days.  Maybe part of it is that I’m down here in Florida, but when you look closely at the very ad hoc, cobbled together, misery-laden natural world, in which even green plants compete ruthlessly against each other, while insects gnaw the tree trunks, and birds eat the insects and cats eat the birds (when they can) and meanwhile ten thousand other such painful and fear-ridden interactions are taking place in every acre, at all levels, from viruses to bacteria, to yeast, to protozoa, to slime molds and lichen and moss and mold and mushrooms up to grasses and bushes and trees and worms and snails and arthropods and fish and amphibians and reptiles and birds and mammals…everything ultimately just churning away at low entropy energy and converting it into high entropy energy…well, it all seems horrifying and discouraging and very, very dark.

Everything in the world seems alien to me…which I guess must mean that I am alien, since everything else is just there, doing what it does, being what it is, and I’m the one that finds it all daunting and repulsive.

I often bring up the concept of Sisyphus, and it now occurs to me that, maybe, Sisyphus is gradually wearing away the mountain on which he rolls his ever-falling boulder, slowly grinding it down until, finally, it’s level, and the boulder will no longer roll but will stay where Sisyphus puts it, and that will be the state of the universe at very high entropy (I want to say at maximum entropy, but I don’t think there is a maximum overall entropy**).

Of course “maximal” entropy is a state that can go on for a very long time.  It’s like the fable (as told by the 12th Doctor) in which the Emperor asks a shepherd boy to tell him the meaning of eternity.  The shepherd boy says there is somewhere a mountain of pure diamond.  It takes an hour to climb and an hour to go around.  Once every hundred years, a tiny bird comes along and sharpens its beak on the diamond mountain.  And when, after so many repetitions of that once-a-century sharpening happens that the diamond mountain is finally worn down to nothing…then the first second of eternity will have passed.

Even once the “heat death” of the universe comes to pass‒assuming that is what will come to pass‒and all is a haze of elementary particles, barely above absolute zero in an endlessly expanding but empty spacetime, which will come potentially after more than 10 to the 100th power years, that will only be an infinitesimal instant at the uttermost beginning of the eternity of nothingness.

In that quantum vacuum, even a direction of time will have less meaning than would any possible sense of up, down, left, right, forward, and backward in the heart of one of the intergalactic supervoids, in which not even a single distant star or galaxy could be seen with anything but the strongest telescope on long exposure.  To the human eye, in a supervoid, all would be blackness and emptiness in all directions, and in the heat death, that would apply to time as well.  With no change, the past and the future are indistinguishable.

Yet, eventually, new universes, or Boltzmann brains, or other esoterica might yet come to be.  Eternity is a long time.  Or maybe they will be found to have been in what seems to be the future but which is, eventually, the past of some universe with an opposite-pointing “arrow of time”.

Anyway, my point is, the universe is weird and harsh and the hubris of self-important creatures would be laughable if it were not so nauseating.

I don’t think I can do all this much longer.  My stop is coming up soon.  Have a good day.

*You can look it up.

**There is a maximum amount of entropy that can be fit into any given region of spacetime, and that is the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy of the area of an event horizon of a black hole that would enclose that region, expressed in square Planck lengths.  Actually, if memory serves, it’s the logarithm of that surface area (probably the natural logarithm).  If you tried to “add more entropy” to such a region, the black hole would grow, and the horizon would just get larger…you wouldn’t get more entropy “within” the given region.

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Minor meandering, major depression, and a locrian outlook

It’s Tuesday morning now, and if the Beatles are to be believed, we will never see Wednesday morning, because “Tuesday afternoon is never ending.”  We’ll know by tomorrow if they are correct, but experience suggests they are not.

I walked to the train station this morning, and I must say, though the temperature and humidity are no better than before, at least now there is some wind.  It makes a world of difference, at least in the amount of sweat one accumulates.  I’m wearing one of those tee shirts that’s made of material that supposedly “wicks away” perspiration‒presumably while still allowing it to achieve its primary function of carrying away heat‒but when there’s no wind, the things just get saturated.

As I’ve said before (I have been told it; I did not arrive at the conclusion on my own), my sweat apparently doesn’t have much of an odor, at least in the short term.  I also spritzed myself with a bit of “scent bomb” before starting this post and prior to getting on the train.  It’s a mango scented one that everyone I’ve known to have smelled it finds pleasant.  Hopefully that all helps me avoid being too disgusting.  There’s not too much I can do about my face; I guess I could just wear a mask.  It works for Batman and Doctor Doom and Erik, the Phantom of the Opera.  We’ll have to see.

I decided to stop taking melatonin, so I didn’t take any last night.  I’ve been using it for roughly a month, but it doesn’t seem to be helping my sleep, and it’s certainly not improving my mood or my mental acuity, so f*ck it.  If I never have another full night’s restful sleep for the rest of my life, well…what else is new?  I’ll just stick with my multivitamin and stuff like that (and OTC pain medicine) and try just to get more into walking now that I’ve got the shoe situation more or less sorted.

I remain very sad about the fact that the hiking boots seem to cause me more pain when I wear them for long.  Still, heartbreak is the normal, usual state of my life, on scales from the trivial to the profound, so I guess I should just shrug it off as best I can.  The boot debacle is very, very far from my worst disappointment.  It is recent, though, so it still stings a bit; I guess I haven’t cauterized my metaphorical nerve endings well enough.

I listened to a few decent podcasts while walking, and that was beneficial, because they are the sorts of podcasts that deal with ideas in non-simplistic ways, and that approach such ideas as matters for discussion and thought, not for debate and spectacle.  A debate is just a kind of sporting match‒it can be entertaining, and the displays of skill can be exciting.  But the way to come ever closer to ever greater amounts of truth about reality is not via rhetoric and engaging personality (which are mere superficialities that titillate social monkeys such as humans) but by using actual ideas, exchanging information, testing it, and trying to minimize noise and entropy and error.

Truth is not an “Us versus Them”, zero sum game of scoring points and humiliating an opponent.  That which is actually true, in reality, is true for everyone, whether they perceive it or not, whether they know it or not, and whether they believe it or not.

Anyway, that’s a bit of minor meandering.  Today again appears to be one of those days in which I spin from idea to tangent idea here in my blog, for no specific discernable reasons.  At least I don’t discern them.  Maybe some astute and skilled reader can do better.

Oh, if I haven’t already said, I’ve been writing this on my smartphone.  Actually, even if I have already said, I’ve nevertheless been writing this on my smartphone.  That’s one of those truths about reality I mentioned, though it’s not a very big one.

Yesterday at the end of the work day, I just didn’t want to carry the extra weight of the laptop with me.  I was in a horrible, horrible, angrily depressed mood, and was barely able to contain myself, though I think very few people in the office‒perhaps none‒noticed it.  I tend to turn my fury inward, since I know I have the right to harm myself, whereas it’s a much dicier moral proposition to hurt someone else.  So, I quietly burned myself twice yesterday (not severely), and I have a small new blister on my left forearm and a linear welt from a heated paperclip on my right anterior upper arm.

I told you, I’m not doing well.  I don’t just hate my life and myself; I don’t think I can stand it much longer, and I don’t mean that metaphorically, and I don’t think I’m exaggerating.

It’s a month from today until Bilbo’s and Frodo’s birthday, which is also a day before the start of autumn, at the autumnal equinox.  It’s a very good day, I think, for someone to begin an epic journey.  The biggest question, for me, is whether I can wait that long.  I’m not sure that I can.

I guess, yet again, we’ll have to wait and see.  Obviously I’ve been able to endure long enough to write this morning’s blog post, and on my phone, what’s more.  I make no promises about tomorrow.  I don’t even know how good the odds are, honestly.  I’m not doing well, I’m not getting better, and I hate my life a little bit more with every passing day.  I’m also growing less and less fond of the world and of all the people and creatures in it with each passing hour, it seems.

Oh, well.  The world will little note, nor long remember…well, honestly, anything at all.  Everything is effaced by time and entropy, and nothing really has any point outside and beyond itself.  That latter conclusion actually presents a kind of brilliant freedom, really; meaning is not imposed, it is created.  But that can be a heavy burden, and our culture is poorly organized to bring such facts to the clear attention of those within it.

Still, culture has no more extrinsic meaning than does an individual life, nor is it any more planned and finely tuned.  As with all else, it just happens‒or happened I guess, and now merely continues.

Jeez Louise, it’s all both nauseating and boring, and that’s a truly repellent combination.  I have a harder and harder time every day just metaphorically holding my nose and continuing to walk through the sewer of the world.

Ah, well, I’m not getting anywhere with this.  Let’s stop for now.  Please try to have a good day.

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There’s got to be some kind of kvetch

It’s Friday, and I’m standing at the train platform, writing this post on my smartphone, waiting for the second train of the day to arrive (I’m hoping it’s not delayed).  It’s a very exciting, jet-setting sort of life that I live, I know.

It’s unbearably humid this morning, and once again, I’ve started sweating copiously just from standing still outside.  I don’t think it was ever this bad up North where I grew up, except perhaps a few days of the summer every now and then.  Down here in south Florida, it’s like this for a good chunk of the year.

I had a particularly rough night last night, sleep-wise; by which I mean it was worse and more fragmented than usual, even for me.  I don’t think I got so much as a single hour of uninterrupted sleep, though over the course of the night, if you string all my sleep together, I probably got a few hours in total.  So, I’m a bit despondent to start the day today.  What else is new?

I had a bad day, mood-wise yesterday.  It was somewhat worse than usual, in the sense that I felt almost completely shut down inside, empty except for malignant self-hate.  Yet, I think all that showed on my face was a blank expression.  I’ve often, in the past, wondered how it is that people cannot see how horrible I feel, when it feels like it’s screaming out of my every pore.  But I guess my emotions don’t show on my face or in my voice.  I try to make them show here, but that doesn’t seem to do me much good, either.  It feels a bit like trying to use active sonar from inside a whirlpool; no recognizable message seems to get out to anyone, even though one is screaming and shouting and about to be dragged into the abyss.

That’s consistent with a “meme” I saw on Facebook yesterday that I downloaded.  I’ve made a slight adjustment to it, and I’ll share that version below, but it reads, “This is what depression looks like”.  Below this, there’s a gridwork of nine black and white pictures of smiling faces…but they’re all faces of well known people‒such as Robin Williams, Kurt Cobain, Chris Cornell, etc.‒who have killed themselves or died in ways more indirectly related to depression.  I didn’t recognize every face on it, but the gist was obvious to me.

The train was five minutes late, again.  This is not horrible, of course, but it is still symptomatic of the slipshod ways in which our society functions.  It would be one thing if it happened only comparatively rarely‒even once or twice in a week might be tolerable‒but it’s running late more often than it’s on time.  When one considers that trains were one of the reasons that coordinated times from place to place were put in place, leading to GMT and ever more careful chronometry, the people running the system should really be ashamed of themselves.  The fact that they are not‒if they are not‒is something for which they should be doubly ashamed.

Oh, well.  What are you going to do?  (I have my ideas, but most people probably wouldn’t endorse them.)

I had a halfway decent day pain-wise yesterday, but my back seems to be trying to make up for le temps perdu this morning, so far;  my right lower back and hip feel like they’re full of broken glass at the moment.  Again, what else is new, right?

Oh, by the way, if anyone out there is affiliated with Google or Microsoft or any of the other software companies, could you send them the message from me that they should please stop doing updates on their systems which make cosmetic changes that don’t improve functionality but that, if anything, make their systems more awkward and clunky and kindergarten-like?

For instance, the new download process on Chrome on desktop is not better; it’s actually worse than before, keeping track of downloads at the top of the screen and showing progress with a weird little twirling symbol that looks like a casino chip.  It makes me feel like I’m gambling about whether my download is actually going to work.  The old system had downloads showing at the bottom of the screen, which made sense.  You could see the things you had downloaded there, at the bottom, until you were ready to clear them or open them.

Also, this irritating tendency to round all the corners of search bars and input areas and all that bullshit is just pathetic.  It’s inefficient.  You don’t see rounded corners on books and the like, because in media that use print, those shapes don’t make sense!  They’re wasteful of space, they’re inefficient, and they look dopey.  The only books with rounded corners are ones with thick, cardboard pages that are made for babies and toddlers, who might be prone to poke themselves slightly with a hard corner of a book.  But you cannot poke yourself with the corner of a search bar on a computer or phone screen.

If the average person needs such daycare center style safety corners on digital material, then maybe the average person has no business using digital material.  Maybe such people should try to work their way up to Little Golden Books before trying to get online.

But, of course, I don’t think the average person actually does want or prefer such nonsense.  I think the average user is quite practical and hardheaded (in a good way).  I think these idiotic changes are produced by lazy software engineers who want to be seen to be doing something to justify their pay, so they do visually obvious things that they imagine are aesthetically pleasing.

It would be better if they could improve real bugs*, of which there are always plenty.  But that would require serious mental effort and work, and when updates would happen…no one would notice any obvious difference most of the time.

Of course, that really is the way updates ought to be.  Functions that work shouldn’t change.  The update should be more like an effective vaccine or other preventive medicine:  you don’t notice its effect really, because the main effect is that you don’t get sick when you might otherwise have done so.  All that people will experience when using a well-updated system of software will be a normal period of use, but with fewer occasions of frustrating dysfunction.

Speaking of frustrating dysfunction, that’s it for me, today.  Regrettably, I can’t say that’s it for me forever, though I guess that’s possible.  I don’t work tomorrow‒I won’t work tomorrow‒so at earliest, I’ll be back on Monday.  Have a good weekend.

depression2

*Perhaps some of them are, of course; I should give credit if it’s due.  Perhaps most of their work produces results as I describe which are invisible because they simply correct former dysfunction, but then the developers and engineers feel that they have to do something to show that they really did update the system, so they make cosmetic changes as well.  Maybe it’s the equivalent of people getting stickers and pins and stuff when they’ve been vaccinated.  But, oy, it’s annoying.

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If thou hast no name to be blogged by, let us call thee devil.

Hello and good morning. It’s Thursday, the day of the week on which I wrote blog posts even when I was spending my other days writing fiction.  I tended to start those posts with some variation of “Hello and good morning”, and the title was always a slightly altered quote from Shakespeare.  I’ve kept up that Thursday template even now that I blog daily, because I like to stick to a pattern or routine once I’ve established it.

The above information is provided for the sake* of any new readers of this blog.  Apologies to any long-time readers for the redundancy.

I walked to the train station this morning, after having rested a bit yesterday (I only walked a total of about 3 miles overall), since I’d walked almost 16 miles over the previous 2 days.  Thus far, including this morning’s walk, I’ve done about 24 miles this week.  That’s not too bad.

It would be faster if I could jog the distance; maybe I’ll eventually be able to do that.  I used to really like jogging/running, and even when I was in residency I used to run on the treadmill in the mornings.  I had to stop eventually, as I went into practice and had a growing family; time just wasn’t really available.  And since my back problem began, running has tended to exacerbate it.  Maybe, if I were to get back into shape and lose a bit of weight, that wouldn’t be an issue.

(And maybe if we all wish hard enough, there will be world peace and happiness, and unicorns will appear that poop ice cream that provides all nutrients humans need without any health detriments, and they’ll also pee sweet tea with the disinhibiting effects of alcohol but none of the negative toxicity.)

I’m sorry that my posts have been such downers lately (if they don’t come across that way to you readers, then I’m really not expressing myself well).  I’ve just been feeling steadily and persistently more despondent as time has proceeded.  My optimism, such as it ever was, has declined and declined, and my hope even of the possibility of any rescue or revitalization is diminishing.  I don’t see how my life is ever going to turn around and improve.

I’m just tired, you know?  I’m really quite worn down and nearly out.  Admittedly, that doesn’t necessarily keep me from walking to the train despite the heat, and sometimes walking back from the train in the heat, but some of that fact is because I’m able to think of it as a kind of self-harm.

Of course, it’s self-harm that could backfire and end up doing me good, but that’s the chance a person takes when doing such things.  The best laid plans of mice and men gang aft agley.  Which just goes to show that it’s really not a great idea to try to get mice and men together to make plans for things.  Their priorities just don’t mesh.

As for my own plans, I guess I don’t really have any.

I’m getting close to my train stop, and I haven’t written much yet today, and I certainly haven’t written anything of consequence.  I haven’t even reached 600 words yet, let alone 800 or 1000.  Should I try to push for more?  Or is this enough?  Is it already too much?

My life has almost certainly already been “too much”, by any reasonable, objective measure.  I really should do something about that.  But, of course, I don’t really want to make too big a mess for other people to clean up‒though why I should be so considerate is sometimes beyond me.

Also, I have the faintest, residual hope that somewhere out there, someone has some answers, some purpose or meaning that I can learn, or that I can discover.  But it is a faint hope.  I’ve sampled most of the popular, ready-made suggestions and ideas, from religion to philosophy to psychology and psychiatry, and so far have been thoroughly disappointed.  But, as I’ve said before, I don’t want to want to die.  But I also don’t want facile, delusional, banal pseudo-motivation.

Oh, well.  The universe wasn’t made for me‒nor was it made for you, or for any or all of us put together, as far as anyone can tell‒so I don’t expect it necessarily to fit my preferences.  Honestly, I don’t know what I would ask of a universe if I were given the opportunity to special-order one.  Any change I might request would likely have unexpected consequences, much in the way that any pharmaceutical intervention in the human body brings side-effects that can be quite unpredictable.

Now, take that to a cosmic scale.  Everything in the universe has to fit with everything else without producing any actual contradictions.  No part can contradict the whole, nor can it contradict other, actual parts.  You can speak a contradiction‒the rules of grammar allow it‒but you cannot instantiate one.  It’s analogous to the way you can write a computer program with a syntax error or an endless loop or an old “return without gosub” error, but the program will not run.

I guess that’s enough for today.  I don’t know what I’ll title this, or what picture I’ll add to it, but of course, if you’re reading this, you know, which is kind of cool in its way, showing as it does a form of temporal relativity and multidimensionality that has nothing to do with Einstein.  I hope you all are feeling reasonably well and trying not to get too overheated (in any sense).  With that in mind, I’ll close with a rather “chilling” but pithy statement I heard from a climate scientist in a WIRED YouTube video:  “On average, this is the hottest summer you’ve ever experienced.  It’s also the coolest summer for the rest of your life.”***

TTFN

for your own sake

*That’s “sake” with a long A and a silent E, not the transliteration of the Japanese word  酒, which means, in Japan, more or less any alcoholic beverage, but which in the West is how we think of Nihon-shu (日本酒), the Japanese so-called rice “wine”…which would actually be more a kind of a beer, since it’s made of grain, whereas wines are made from fruit (interesting side note:  originally the fermentation was begun after the rice was chewed and then spit into a container, because salivary amylase starts breaking the starches into sugar**).  “Sake” is one of the few Japanese things that doesn’t really do much for me.  I’ve yet to try Japanese whiskey, but since it’s based on Scotch whiskey, and produced with typical Japanese attention to detail, it’s probably pretty darn good.

**You can test this for yourself.  If you take an unsweetened white cracker (no pun intended) or, say, a bit of potato in your mouth and just kind of keep it there, perhaps chewing it, it will eventually start to become noticeably sweet…unless you’re so overexposed to sugary foods that your taste buds are too insensitive to notice.  Don’t do this experiment around other people, though‒you’re likely to get some odd looks.

***Of course, he is basing his predictions on current technology.  And though, as he pointed out during the video, our current carbon capture technology is woefully inadequate to turn things around on any reasonable scale, one must not underestimate the power of human ingenuity when Mother Necessity is standing over the world with a ruler, ready to rap everyone on the knuckles until they bleed.  The next Manhattan Project may well be geared toward developing newer, much more potent, means of carbon capture that could be effective on a scale big enough to correct climate change in a sensible time frame.  This won’t happen on its own and it won’t be cheap, but as more and more‒and richer and more powerful‒people start suffering from the effects of climate change, distractions will tend to fall by the wayside.  If they don’t, then I guess the human race will get what it deserves.

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Numbers and trains and colicky pains, those are of what this blog post is made

It’s Tuesday morning, August 8th, 2023.  I was writing out the numerical date combination as I saved this post draft, and of course writing that date, 8-8, is a tiny bit of fun, not least because it is the same whether in European or American configuration.

What’s also interesting‒to weirdos like me, anyway‒is that if you write 8-8-23, you can consider the fact that 2 to the 3rd power is also 8, giving you three 8s in a row, in a sense*.  It requires a bit of twisting to make it work, obviously, and just as obviously, you have to ignore the first two digits of the full year to make it even come close to working, but it can be done.

Such is the way with all such numerology (and bible codes and the like); they all involve tortured logic to the degree that you can find almost any sort of pattern you might want to create if you’re dedicated enough.  But those patterns are clearly all in the eye of the beholder.

There’s nothing wrong with seeing and finding patterns in things and being amused by them, but don’t imagine that those patterns are actually “real” in the sense that they are put there deliberately by someone or something other than the one who finds them.  To imagine that some other power is trying to communicate with, or about, you is called, if I remember correctly, “ideas of reference”, and can be a hallmark of delusional psychopathology.

People are prone to self importance, unfortunately.  Perhaps it’s a defense mechanism against the heartless meaninglessness of existence, but it is rather amusing and often pathetic.  Even Heath Ledger’s Joker in The Dark Knight falls prey to this, though he is fictional and certainly not sane in any ordinary sense.  He says that he is an “agent of chaos”…as if chaos would need an agent.  Trust me, it gets plenty of work without any help.

Especially in fantastical literature, from myths, to heroic epics, to horror novels, to comic books and the like, people are often claimed to be “agents of…” various things, such as Death, Evil, Good, “The Balance”, that sort of thing.  In the real world, though, forces of nature and philosophical ideas do not operate through nor do they require “agents”.  Just imagine someone claiming to be “an agent of Gravity”, or “an agent of Electromagnetism” or “an agent of the Fine Structure Constant”.  It’s rather laughable.

Anyway, I’m not writing this on the night before posting‒that would have been the 7th‒but am sitting at the train station to write it.  I got to the station for an early train, but it is in fact delayed almost to the scheduled time of the next train, which is absurd and pathetic.

They’ve only just now begun an announcement that it’s going to be late, now that it’s already five minutes past its due time, and they say it will be delayed 15 to 20 minutes (currently the tracker estimate is actually 22 to 23 minutes late).  Then they say, “stand by for more information”.  They always say that.  But more information never arrives.  It’s just some kind of boilerplate that sounds quasi-military or official and impressive but means nothing.

I don’t understand why there are delays so often.  It’s their own schedule.  In Germany or Japan the people running this show would have been fired long ago.  And this is one of the best run things I know in this part of the world.  It would be enough to make me fall into despair-oh, if I weren’t already there**.

I had a bad day yesterday.  Though I did walk to the train, and that was fine, by the time I got to the office, I started having worse, and new, pain in my left mid to lower back.  It was very spasmodic and squeezy in nature, and quite severe.  I suspect I might have been passing a small kidney stone, given the character and location of the pain.

At my request, my boss tried to get me some urinalysis stuff from the local drug store so I could see if there was any microscopic blood in my urine, but all they had was UTI tests.  I didn’t have a UTI, to no one’s surprise.  Though maybe, just maybe, there was a trace of leukocyte esterase, which might indicate a tiny few white blood cells such as might accompany slight bleeding.

Anyway, the only thing I could do was drink lots of liquids, which I tried to do, and take lots of OTC pain meds, which I did.  It seemed gradually to progress and decrease, and now mostly there’s just a small remnant ache, overlying my usual pain.  It’s too bad I didn’t hurt enough for me to go to the hospital, but all they would have done at most would have been to give me IV fluids and maybe some pain meds.  Probably not.  There’s nothing much to be done.  Life is pain, as the Dread Pirate Roberts said.

Well, they have canceled that late train‒apparently due to mechanical troubles‒and now it’s started to rain heavily.  The 540 train is going to be doubly crowded now.

I hate crowded stuff.

Then again, basically, I hate my life and I hate myself, which is the ironic, opposite counterpart of the mantra which, as I mentioned yesterday, I formerly tried to train into myself.  In the morning, I feel miserable about going to the office, and in the evening, I feel just as miserable about heading back to the house.  There’s nothing in either place that gives me joy, and sleep for me is neither very long nor unbroken nor restful.  I don’t remember the last time I slept more than 2 hours before I started waking up repeatedly, not at all refreshed.

At least at the office there are people with whom I can talk, though not really about anything in which I have any interest.  I can call my sister sometimes in the evenings, when she’s off work and I’m not too tired and I get off early enough.  Or on a weekend.  That’s good.  It’s infrequent, though, and my poor hearing is annoying when using cell phones.

Otherwise, my life is empty, as you all know by now, I’m sure, and there’s no prospect of anything new or good or interesting in the future.  What does one do with something once it’s empty?  Well, if it’s recyclable, I guess one can recycle it.  I am not a recyclable container, as far as I know, or if I am, I’ve already been recycled a few times, if you can call major, sometimes catastrophic life changes to be “recycling”.  The usual practice after recycling is done, I think, would be to throw the empty container away.

That’s enough blogging for today, I think.  It’s probably more than enough for any day or any lifetime.  I’m really sore, and I’m really tired.

*By the way, 8 to the 3rd power is 512, which astute readers will note is also 2 to the 9th.  This makes sense because 2 to the third is 8 (as noted), and taking 2 to the 3rd to the third is the same as taking 2 to the 9th.  It’s some minor fun with exponents, and with powers of 2 and 8, which certainly is pertinent to bits and bytes in computer science.  On the other hand, 8-8-8 is just negative 8, and 8-8-23 is just  negative 23, which is at least a negative prime number (so to speak), but otherwise, it’s all rather dull.  In any straight arithmetic process, 8-8 is always going to be zero.

**Here’s a bit of an amusing note: the 515 train is now expected to arrive 5 minutes later than the 540 train, which appears to be moving steadily and on time.  Did that train pass the other?  Did they switch official route numbers?  Why is the other one having trouble?***

***As we now know, it had mechanical problems.  Perhaps they need more, better, and newer cars and engines.  They could increase local gasoline taxes to fund them, thus providing disincentives for driving and encouraging more use of public transportation at the same time, all of which would be at least a bit good for the climate.  But people would whine about that, wouldn’t they, and no one likes to hear babies crying, so we give them pacifiers.

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This post was written on Sunday night. That may be the most interesting thing about it.

I’m starting this blog post on Sunday evening, which is obviously not when I usually write my blog posts.  I’m writing it on my phone, because I didn’t bring the mini laptop with me when I left work early on Thursday, and though I could use my full-size laptop, I have no desire to bring it along with me tomorrow.  I tentatively plan to walk to the train in the morning.  I’ve given up on the boots; I think they do exacerbate my back pain.  It’s very sad, because I like them, but there’s not much that can be done about that.

I still have a bit of a low-grade fever this evening, but that’s okay.  I’m not particularly interested in trying to protect my health.  I’ve been here in my room‒with some outings to the store of course‒since Thursday evening.  I’m not very good company, not even for myself, I’m afraid.

It’s rather amusing; I have recently gotten suggestions for videos on YouTube about dealing with trauma from being in relationships with someone with Narcissistic Personality Disorder, and probably also because I liked a video by a self proclaimed NPD person who did a good video about the Doctor, especially the 12th Doctor, as an example of someone with autistic characteristics.

Anyway, I don’t think I’ve been in any relationships with anyone with NPD,  and I certainly don’t have anything akin to NPD myself.  Quite the contrary.  When I was younger, I used to sort of pretend to be an egotist and to have a huge self-image and I (jokingly) pretended to think I was great and wonderful.  I’m pretty sure no one who knew me really took me seriously.  I’ve certainly never acted like a real narcissist or psychopath or anything, but there have been times when I envied them their self-love.  I’ve even tried‒especially when I was in prison‒to do auto-suggestion with a mantra saying, “I love my life and I love myself.”

After a while, though, I couldn’t even think the words in my head, not while trying to mean them, not while trying to believe them.  It feels like telling a foul and terrible lie.  I am often amused by people and literature and the like that speak of the (supposedly) ubiquitous sin of self-love.

I don’t think I have ever loved myself, not in my entire life.  Not in my oldest memories do I have any sense of feeling that I liked or loved myself.  It almost feels like a category error.  I never thought of myself as the kind of entity or being or concept such as that to which love might pertain.  I don’t think of myself as some identity, really.  Who am I?  I’m just the specific being that is asking that question, that’s all, whatever that is.

I’m a weird, complex four-dimensional braid in spacetime, comprised of the swirling patterns of all the particles that come together and form this long time-space tornado, bits coming into it and going out of it, everywhere, all the time, the pattern changing as one moves from past toward future, but only gradually.  And the overall pattern is continuous, and presumably will last for a bit longer before it can no longer be self-sustaining, and then it will fray and scatter and dissolve, the former bits going to be temporary parts of various other spacetime braids.

L’dor v’dor.  Amayn.

I certainly feel continuous with the kid crying in bed with his leg aches when he was little, and who always kind of was watching everything from outside.  Don’t get me wrong, I’ve had a good upbringing and a loving family.  I had good friends in school, and we did fun and interesting things together.  And I loved learning things, and I still do love that.  But I’ve always been weird, I know that.

I’ve felt…well, I wouldn’t say I felt different because it wasn’t really about any comparison.  Again, it feels almost like a category error.  I recently coined a term unsane as a contrast to the term “insane”, to mean something, someone, to whom the very concept of sanity doesn’t really apply.  I’ve often sort of thrown that (in my head) as an epithet at the deeds and behaviors of so many people and things around out there in the world.  But maybe it really applies to me.

I feel like maybe I’ve always been at right angles to every dimension of all the people around me.  But I don’t think I’ve ever loved myself, not even for a moment, though there are plenty of other people and things I love.

I think the person I’m most like, in raw aspects, is my Dad.  I had the advantage of being the youngest of three children, and so had support and people I could watch to see how things were done (and sometimes to see what not to do, what sorts of things didn’t tend to work).  My Dad was the eldest child in his family, so I guess he had to pick up a lot of things on his own.  But to his credit (and to hers) my Mom was with my Dad from when they were married until the day he died.

But he was often the one who in many ways made sense to me, even when I was really mad at him.  He was the only one who ever wanted to spend as much time at an exhibit in a museum or a zoo as I do.  Everyone else always moves along way too fast.  But somehow it’s not as much fun to see such things alone.  

I don’t know that for certain, actually.  I don’t think I’ve ever tried to go to a museum or library by myself.  The closest I’ve come is going to a bookstore by myself, and even that is just blah.  When I’m by myself, I have no will to get out and do much of anything at all.  I don’t do things for myself.  I have no desire to do things for myself.  I wish I didn’t have to obey the urge to eat or drink or breathe for myself.  It’s all quite boring.  I don’t even like to look at myself in the mirror*.

I don’t know why I’m writing this.  It’s just what this entity does at this point in spacetime, because of the various internal and external interactions among the various forces and “particles” in this particular spacetime weather pattern.  Why does that eddy in that river swirl about in that particular way at that point in a stream?  Because of physics.  There’s nothing deeper as far as I know.

That doesn’t mean I think it’s simple.  It’s ridiculously complex.  No system‒as I think I’ve said before‒can ever be complex enough to understand itself completely, for that would require an infinite expansion of complexity.

Anyway, this is already long enough for a full blog post.  If this is not the last paragraph**, it will mean that I’ve added something tomorrow morning.  I don’t know whether that will happen, but if you’re reading this, you will know the answer, but it’s further down the braid than where I am now.  I’m planning to walk to the train in the morning.  If I get hit by a car (or a bus or a truck, I’m not picky), or if I have a heart attack or a stroke, or if I’m sicker than I feel and collapse because of it‒none of which would break my heart, except perhaps literally‒I’m unlikely to add to it.  Maybe I’ll put this up on WordPress and set it to auto-post in the morning.  That way it will go up whether I’m alive or dead or something in between, and some mystery will remain.  I guess you all will see.

[Addendum:  I made it to the train station, and I did walk.  Better luck next time.]

*Though, curiously, I find listening to my own songs and covers relaxing.  Damned if I know why.

**Not counting footnotes.