villains

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No songs or pictures, just pathetic words of despite and destruction and despair

Well, it’s Tuesday.  I think my stunt (or whatever you might call it) yesterday has failed miserably.  I don’t know why I’m surprised, let alone disappointed.  I’m either just not good at that sort of thing, or I’m just not worthy of that sort of thing.

I don’t know if that quite made sense just now.  I’m apparently very bad at getting my feelings across, on top of the fact that, a lot of the time, I’m not quite sure specifically what I’m feeling.  They’re just a bunch of swirling, overpowering sensations that don’t ever seem to show on my face or in my voice.

Anyway, I have no subject on which to speak (so to speak) today, and it doesn’t really matter, because I seem incapable of conveying anything important to anyone for whom it could possibly matter.  It’s fine.  As Thomas Covenant said (before he ever went to the Land) this is what people are like:  futile.  He would change his point of view on that after many grueling and heartbreaking yet inspiring experiences, but I think he was onto something.

I’ve always had a bit of sympathy for Lord Foul in those books.  Part of this was just because he was so eloquent‒I’m a bit of a sucker for a good speaker‒but especially after I learned that he was trapped inside the arch of time, inside the Land, and he literally cannot possibly die or be permanently defeated while trapped there.  He hates everything in the Land and its world not just because it’s his nature to hate, but because he is trapped by and with everything there, potentially forever.  So if he is ever to be free to go anywhere else‒even to die‒he has to destroy the arch of time and thus that world.  It is personal to him, of course‒he’s not called the Despiser for nothing‒but it needn’t be.

Anyway, I am not trapped in the arch of time, or at least I’m not constrained from ever dying within it.  Or maybe my own arch of time is just that span of moments that began at birth (or conception) and will reach its other end at my death.  If that’s the case, I wouldn’t need to destroy the arch, just…complete it.

This is all metaphorical bullshit, I know.  Don’t misunderstand me.  I don’t have any misgiving that any of that could be real.  But the stories were good, at least the first two trilogies; I’ve never finished the last 4 books.  There is no denying that The Lord of the Rings is better, and much more inspiring and uplifting.  But the Thomas Covenant books do a better job of capturing the horror and despair and terror of not just fighting evil, but of being evil.

That’s probably why it appealed to me.  My innate tendency is to be, well, perhaps not evil, but destructive.  I feel terribly angry so much, so often, and I just want to break and burn this world, this life, that is so bloody uncomfortable.  But I know that I don’t have any business hurting other people, almost none of whom are ever deliberately hurting me.  So I bottle it up and try to calm it, and I don’t act on it.

But like I said in my reversal of Nebula’s last line to Drax in Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 3, I wasn’t born to be a dad, I was born to be a destroyer.  I’ve just always tried to fight against that, and I have in some small ways succeeded.  I even swung things in the other direction at times, becoming a doctor and a dad.  Of course, I eventually failed miserably at both of those things, as usual, but I did some good in the meantime.

And there is one being I have a proprietary right to destroy.  I just need to quit the foreplay.

Anyway, this has been weird, I suspect, but what else is new?  I hope you all have a good day.

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I have a plan, though I have no dream

It’s Wednesday, which is payroll day.  This means that today at the office will be relatively stressful, especially since the largest of the relevant weekly reports didn’t arrive until just before closing time yesterday, so I didn’t get the chance to start to work through it.  Still, that’s okay.  It’s been a weirdly slow week at the office, all things considered (even on Monday, when I wasn’t there), so it won’t be as bad as it might be.

In the meantime, I’ve come to a tentative‒well, not all that tentative, really, but like all rational conclusions it is in principle provisional‒plan or goal set or determination or whatever the most appropriate term might be.

Here it is:

Within a fairly short period of time (I don’t have a specific amount laid aside, but it will certainly be well before my next birthday*) one of three things will have happened.

1)  I will have lost a significant amount of weight and it will help reduce my chronic pain.

2)  I will have lost a significant amount of weight and it will not help reduce my chronic pain.

3)  I will fail to lose a significant amount of weight.

It’s not that I’m horribly overweight, but I am nearly the heaviest I have ever been, and that’s not cool, so to speak.  It certainly isn’t likely to be helping my chronic pain.

Anyway, the upshot of the plan is, if the first thing happens, I will then try to reassess my depression and anxiety and my lifestyle and my ASD and see where to go from there.

If one of the latter two outcomes occurs, I will kill myself.

I’m not sure by what means I will do so, and whether I will make it public or not, or if I will try to make it some kind of statement; I just don’t know.  I try not to box myself in with too many specifics about things I’m going to do, because to do so would limit me; the best means and methods might reveal themselves only in the future.

I think this plan makes good sense.  At the very least, I would like to try to reduce my chronic pain, and though I doubt that all of it would go away with a significant reduction in weight, I expect at least some of it will improve.  Whatever else is the case, if I lose a significant amount of weight and it doesn’t help my pain, well, at least I will have lost weight and will not die as quite the disgusting creature that I currently am.

I intend at least tacitly to inform some of the people at the office of this plan‒at least the people who are smart enough to take it seriously.  That way I can hopefully avoid anyone unwittingly sabotaging my goals by offering me food of various kinds that will get in the way of weight loss; it can be very difficult to resist temptation in any given moment.  And, of course, people who know my intention and who for whatever reason are willing to sabotage it, will be thereby revealed to be my enemies.

Now, enemies are not as troubling a thing for someone who is depressed and suicidal (Oh, what are you going to do to me, keep me alive?) but I do not promise that, if I fail and have just to kill myself, that I will not take the opportunity to take vengeance on those who deserve it.

Of course, I also do not promise that I will take vengeance upon anyone at all.  For the most part, in my life, the opinions, nature, state of being, and other aspects of people I don’t like (or who don’t like me) are not very important.  I suppose that’s one positive aspect of autism spectrum disorder:  no one really lives in my head rent-free, as the saying goes.

People who are literally in my presence impinge upon my consciousness, but I don’t actually ever really even imagine what other people are thinking or doing when I’m not with them**.  As long as they just leave me alone and don’t bother me, I generally don’t tend to hold grudges.  Just because I consider someone my enemy, doesn’t mean I consider myself their enemy.

That may be a subtle distinction, but it’s significant.  If someone is my enemy, it’s something I may need to take into account in my dealings, depending on the situation, but then, so is infectious disease and shower mildew.  It’s not personally significant to me.

But if I declare myself someone else’s enemy, then I will do my best to merit the title “The Enemy” like Sauron and Morgoth, like Doom and Lord Foul (and worse than Voldemort).

Well, I would be worse than the wizard formerly known as Tom Riddle in general, but like him, and less like the others, I would not tend to want to torment my enemies.  There would be no clever deathtraps and torture chambers (physical or psychological) from which one’s targets can potentially escape.  I prefer the style of the Terminator or The Accountant; just wipe the subject from existence as completely and efficiently as possible.

Anyway, that’s a digression.  I wouldn’t do to others what I’m not willing to do to myself, and the only person I’m at all likely to kill is me, which seems fair.  So, that’s the plan:  Try to do something that has at least some chance of reducing my chronic pain, and if I fail, die in short order.

I’m not completely sure which outcome I prefer.

*I’m thinking of setting it at no later than what would have been my next wedding anniversary if I were still married.

**This is probably related to deficits in the so-called theory of mind that are a frequent part of ASD.

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When we fight reality, reality always wins.

It’s Tuesday morning now‒which, fortunately, as far as I know, has never been described as “never-ending”.  Alas, the same cannot be said of Tuesday afternoon.  However, since we are not still stuck in the last Tuesday afternoon‒or indeed in the very first Tuesday afternoon‒then we have to conclude that the line “Tuesday afternoon is never-ending” from the Beatles song Lady Madonna is a poetic figure of speech.

That’s weirdly frustrating for me.  It reminds me a bit of how I remember reading that Tolkien was frustrated with the play Macbeth because Birnam Wood didn’t actually come to Dunsinane, signaling Macbeth’s imminent defeat*.  Tolkien didn’t see why, in a play that clearly involved the supernatural, the wood could not literally come to Dunsinane.

Of course, in the fullness of time, in his own work, the Forest of Fangorn really did come to Isengard, and to Helm’s Deep.  It’s one of the best moments in The Lord of the Rings.

How did I get onto that subject?  Or, as Théoden asked, “How did it come to this?”

Now I’m suddenly thinking about the moment when Théoden, despairing, asks (in the movie) “What can men do against such reckless hate?”  It’s a real moment of doubt and pain, but Aragorn is there to support his spirit.

And that makes me think of doing a “parody” version of Sympathy for the Devil, in which we would have the line, “I was ‘round when Théoden had his moment of doubt and pain / Made damn sure that the uruk hai met our swords and sealed their fate.”  It could be called, perhaps, Sympathy for the Ranger or Sympathy for the Strider or something like that.

We could have lines like “Just as every Noldor is a kinslayer, and all the Nazgul slaves / as East is West just call me…Aragorn, ‘cause Minas Tirith I will save,” or something along those lines.  It’s a bit silly and cheesy, I guess, but that’s okay; it’s a parody.  Anyway, I don’t think I’m actually going to try to produce a whole set of lyrics for it, but who knows?  I’ve done weirder things for more frivolous reasons.

As for what to do about relatively more serious things‒i.e., my diagnosis of ASD level2‒I still don’t know.  I don’t know how I’m going to go about following the recommendations in the report, such as they are.  Knowing at least some of the explanations for many of the difficulties I’ve had in my life, including my relatively intractable troubles with depression and with insomnia and social anxiety, is a good thing in and of itself, but it doesn’t necessarily give me any idea how to approach things from here.

In some sense, it is a little discouraging, especially regarding my depression and insomnia, since there is no cure for neurodevelopmental disorders; they are a product of the fundamental structure and function of the brain.  At best, they can be managed.  This also explains why many traditional or typical treatments for such things do not work well in those with ASD; evidently, for instance, cognitive behavioral therapy doesn’t tend to work as well for people with autism as it does for “neurotypical” people.  And I know that antidepressants have more limited efficacy as well.

This makes sense.  We commonly hear of how many of the treatments and scientific understanding of major illness were for a long time only studied in men, and women were treated the same way as males, until slowly, gradually, the medical community realized that many diseases present differently in women, and respond differently to treatment.

Well, autistic and other “neurodivergent” people are a much smaller portion of the population than women are, and we don’t know as much as we would like about psychiatric and related disorders and their treatment even in the neurotypical.  It makes sense that we should be somewhat behind the curve in even understanding, let alone knowing how to treat, psychological and neurological disorders in those with underlying neurodevelopmental conditions.

The universe is complicated.  Any attempt to make it seem or feel less so, as by following the “ideas” of demagogues and demonizing those who might disagree, is just going to leave one vulnerable to underlying, actual reality‒which is not merely a matter of perception.

The universe at large does not care what you believe.  You can definitely be killed by forces and things that you not only don’t understand, but in which you don’t believe, or about which you have not the slightest inkling.  As a particularly gruesome example, it didn’t matter whether JFK ever knew he was being shot at, let alone that he had been hit.  A person can die before they even know that anything is happening; they can be just snuffed out and gone.  Probably most people, and nearly all other animals, die not understanding at all what is killing them or how or why or what death is.

Such is the evenhanded dealing of the world, to paraphrase Ebenezer Scrooge.  The only thing we can do to armor ourselves is to try to understand as much about the universe as we can.  For one never knows what knowledge will be useful or even essential before one has that knowledge.  Greater knowledge is always worthwhile, all other things being equal.

Of course, all other things never really are equal, but that’s why it pays to learn how to solve partial differential equations.

That’s enough for now.  Have a good day if you can, please.

*Macbeth’s reaction when he receives the news that, apparently, Birnam Wood really has come to Dunsinane Hill, is to hit the messenger and yell “Liar and slave!”  I know I’m not the only one who thinks it’s kind of funny and also is an instance of one of the cardinal failures of literary and dramatic (and real life) villains:  they discourage their own people from giving them information by punishing them for delivering accurate but bad news.

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What’s past and what’s to come is blogged with husks and formless ruin of oblivion

Hello and good morning and all that blather.  It’s Thursday, so it’s time for my weekly blog post, though apart from brute habit I have a hard time finding good reasons to write it.

I finished the second edit-through of Extra Body earlier this week.  That’s not too impressive; I should’ve finished some time last week, but I’ve been going very slowly.  I have no excitement about finishing and publishing the story.  I honestly don’t really care.  I just have nothing better to do.

That’s been the case with pretty much everything these days.  I’ve been trying to find interest in things, but it’s been almost entirely unsuccessful.  I did stumble into some Facebook videos of various people doing drawings and paintings, and that got me interested in doing some of that, myself, so I did some doodling and sketching and stuff.  I even ordered some new pencils and pens and markers and cetera; but there’s a weird sort of desperation involved in these actions, which became evident to me when delivery of a couple of items was delayed and I was absurdly furious about it.

I’m angry most of the time nowadays.  It’s very annoying.

Anyway, I’ve done a few little drawings, including the ones I’m going to include below.  The first is a sketch of Cthulhu which I did on H. P. Lovecraft’s birthday (though I didn’t know it at the time).  I’ve enhanced it a bit, digitally, since it wasn’t finished, but anyway, that’s about as good as anything I’ve done in any sense, which is hardly saying much.

I also made a couple of other doodles, one of which I colored with pencils and the other of which I colored with some delayed-delivery markers (about which one of my internalized fits of rage took place).  I also printed out some old pictures of mine to practice coloring, but they’re only partially done, and I screwed up one by coloring another with it underneath, so the color bled through.  I guess I’ll share them here, for shits and giggles.

I’ve been fiddling on the guitar some, too, but I remain exceptionally mediocre, and I haven’t any urge to write new music.

I’ve taken a sort of impromptu break from studying any physics or mathematics, also.  I have no energy (nor momentum nor charge) for any of it.

Of course, a lot of this trouble surely is complicated by the persistent elevation of my chronic pain, though that’s at least begun to level off slightly‒whether from my personal interventions or from the natural rhythms of physical processes or some combination of the two, it’s difficult to say.  My sleep, on the other hand, seems to be steadily worsening over time.  Last night, for instance, I slept less than three hours.

Oh, I was also out sick Monday, after getting sick on Sunday a bit.  I didn’t really get much rest or benefit from my absence; being at the house is no more pleasant than being at the office*.  At least there’s more space at the office, and when no one else is there, it’s also much quieter.  Honestly, in some ways, jail and prison were both more pleasant than being at the house where I currently live.  Weirdly enough, I had a greater feeling of personal space when incarcerated than I have now, and I also felt like I was occasionally doing some good, since I helped several people get their GEDs and helped some guys who weren’t very good at writing send letters to their families.

At least I wasn’t both bored and distracted, and I had things to which to look forward‒including, ironically, the life I’m living now, though it is not at all what I had anticipated (for instance, I declined to stay with my Mom and Dad and sister because I wanted to be near my kids, but despite that, I haven’t seen either of my children in more than eleven years, now, by their choice).  Now, I’m basically just floating by myself through turbulent, greasy, polluted chop from day to day.

I’ve noticed a clear tendency for people who spend very much time with me for very long to decide that they don’t really want to be around me anymore.  I cannot blame them.  I’m a difficult, unpleasant person, and by nature I’m prone to profound darkness.  I try not to give in to that nature if I can help it**, and I try to be upbeat and positive or at least funny in my expressions and indulgences in gloom and pan-antipathy.  But it wears me out.

I don’t think I’m really capable of doing any good in the world anymore; I don’t have the energy or the drive for it.  And if I don’t want to indulge my nature as a Destroyer‒which I do want to indulge, but you know what I mean‒then I ought just to turn that tendency fully inward.

Anyway, that’s all that.  I don’t know what else to say, and more to the point, I don’t know why I should say or do anything else.  Sorry to be a bummer; it’s just who I am.  I hope you all have a good day, week, month and even year.  I can’t promise “I’ll be there for you”, but probably somebody will be.

TTFN

cthulhu draft

cracked egg

unknown woman

dark fairy and friend partial recoloring with bleed through

Jacob versus alien queen partial recoloring

Gandalf and Balrog partial recoloring

*Especially when, as has been the case this week, we’ve had some chaos and stress involving the personal troubles of some of our long-time workers.

**This explains why one of my favorite lines from Doctor Who is when the eleventh Doctor, in a moment of terrifyingly cold anger, says, “Good men don’t need rules.  Today is not the day to find out why I have so many.”  There is a reason why I created a short-lived series of blog posts entitled My Heroes Have Always Been Villains.

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Morgoth, Arda, redemption, morality, and blame (not the name of a law firm)

I was out sick yesterday, but the following is audio I recorded this morning about ideas of redemption and recreation in the world of J.R.R. Tolkien, especially as goes for beings and characters such as Melkor/Morgoth and Sauron and the like.  It’s a bit meandering, I fear, and it’s longer than other recent stuff has been, but please let me know if you find it interesting, and if you have any comments on the subject(s), or on such audio posts in general, I would be glad to receive your feedback. I’ll probably be turning it into a “video” eventually, for YouTube.  I don’t know, are those easier to partake of than the audio here on the blog?  Certainly the storage availability on YouTube is functionally unlimited, but I’m not yet anywhere near the limits of my personal storage here on WordPress yet, anyway.

This probably almost would count as a podcast, though I don’t know whether I feel comfortable arrogating that status to my measly ponderings.

Let me know what you think, please, and thank you.

Addendum:  Here is the link to In Deep Geek.  

I also highly recommend Nerd of the Rings.

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There is a kind of character in thy blog, that to the observer doth thy history fully unfold.

Hello, again, and good morning, again, and welcome once again to another Thursday edition of my weekly blog post.

It’s the second Thursday of the month, and at one time it would have been the occasion for an edition of “My heroes have always been villains,” but that’s long since been abandoned due to lack of reader interest.  Oh, well, I probably would quickly have run out of interesting villains to discuss.  There are plenty of fictional baddies out there, of course, but there aren’t all that many that really merit exploration and discussion.  Villains are a necessary part of nearly any fictional adventure, and often of other kinds of tales as well, but they frequently have little depth.

One villain, however, retains acute pertinence and interest for me, and that is the title character of The Vagabond.  I’m within fifty pages of finishing the final edit of the book, and then will come the remaining layout and finishing of the cover design before publication.  That should all happen by the end of March, so that’s something to look forward to, for those of you who like horror stories with well-fleshed-out supernatural villains.  For the Vagabond is no merely supernatural force, something elemental and impersonal, though those can be wonderful antagonists in horror stories.

Essentially all of H. P. Lovecraft’s dark entities (for instance) are not characters so much as ideas, physical representations of forces of nature (and unnature).  If they have character, it is beyond human comprehension.  This can make them exceptionally frightening.  It’s bad enough to face an entity that hates you and wants to hurt you, but at least you matter to such villains.  Hate is just the opposite side of the coin of love, after all, and is a form of attachment and connection, though it’s one that’s well worth avoiding.  But Lovecraft’s beings don’t really care or think much about humans, much like Terry Pratchett’s creatures from the “dungeon dimensions”.  To them, humans are not much more than ants or cockroaches…and they are decidedly not entomologist types, so they have no affection for humans, even as subjects of study.

But the Vagabond is a character.  In fact, he’s the second character we meet in the book.  I don’t think I’m giving away any spoilers by saying that.  It’s pretty obvious within seconds of encountering him that he’s not quite…right, as it were.  For him (he identifies as male, as they say), humans do very much matter, but only because he really, really dislikes us.  It would be far better for us if he didn’t care at all.

I’ve had no success in hunting down the scanned version of my old, favorite drawing of the Vagabond (which I know I scanned at some point, and which I could swear I’ve seen sometime in the last eight years, but for the life of me I don’t know where).  I’m very disappointed.  I wanted to at least base my cover on that drawing, though I would probably embellish and alter it in some ways.  I can see the picture clearly in my mind’s eye—I’m the one who drew it, after all.  But that doesn’t mean I could reproduce it.  I’m out of practice with drawing, and practice really does make a difference.  Also, that drawing captured something that I don’t think I could mimic readily.  I’ve tried sketching some version of it from time to time, but I haven’t liked any of the results.

So, I’m pursuing other means of making the imagery I want.  I’ve done a sort of “sketch” if you will (though it’s not a drawing) of the impression he gives, and I’ll include it in this post, below.  It’s not the final form of the cover by any means—there are ways it doesn’t quite match his overall look, though it’s very close.  Still, it gives something of a taste of what I recall capturing in the drawing, and the impression I have of him in my mind.

Take a look.  See if he’s someone you would want to pick up if you saw him hitchhiking along the interstate.  I’m guessing you wouldn’t—not that you would have any choice, if he decided he wanted a ride from you.

Vagabond cover prohect 3

So anyway, that’s fairly exciting, for me, and I hope that some of you are at least interested or intrigued.  It’s been more than thirty years since I first started this novel, and to see it finally published is something for which I had given up hope.  Thanks be to my ex-wife for discovering and sending it to me (and for many other things besides)!  It was dedicated to her from the start*, and so it shall stay, departing from my usual practice of dedicating my stories to my children.  I hope, quite fervently, that she will read it (again) when it’s published.  I know she liked it, once upon a time.

And with that ironic phrase, I’ll begin drawing this post to a close.  I’m still having trouble getting into fiction reading—or even watching—and frankly, even nonfiction is getting harder to find engaging.  But my passion for writing stories (and blog posts) remains, and I hope those of you not currently suffering from my peculiar literary ailment will enjoy reading them.  And, of course, I hope that you are and will remain well and happy.

TTFN

*This may seem a strange form of honor, but trust me, it was never meant or taken negatively.  Horror fiction was one of the things that brought us together, though it was not the primary one.  I even wrote my short story Solitaire while keeping her company as she worked on a project overnight for a summer job.  She read it soon after, but it was a bit dark even for her.  If I remember correctly, she said something along the lines of, “It’s a great story…but where the hell did that come from?”  I couldn’t say.  I was in quite a good mood, since I was spending time with the woman with whom I was very much in love.  I did tend to play a lot of solitaire at the time (with real cards), so obviously that was a trigger, but as for the substance of the admittedly quite horrific story…who knows?

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Let us be Diana’s foresters, bloggers of the shade, minions of the moon

Hello, good morning, and welcome to another Thursday, and another weekly edition of my blog.  Also, welcome to November of 2020, which—like other Novembers in leap years—is a time of some turbulence in the US.  I will make no further comment here about the specifics of that, however; enough, and probably far too much, has been said and is being said about it by others.

I don’t have much new to report today, so this posting may be brief…though, I often say this at the start and end up running off at the word processor nevertheless, whether or not I really have anything of substance to say.  This seems to be a common human tendency, and I am not immune to it.

Yesterday, I recorded one of my “audio blogs”, which I guess could be called a podcast of sorts*, as a follow-up to the post I wrote in Iterations of Zero a little over a week ago.  However, when I started to edit it, I soon lost interest.  It meandered too much, and there was too much required editing of breath sounds, of “ums”, of coughs, and especially of “but…”s, which I appear to use far too often to preface a new thought or tangent.

Maybe I was just not in a sound-editing mood, and if I come back to it, I’ll feel more sanguine.  I also am not sure whether anyone even listens to such things, anyway, even if I keep them short.  (Any feedback from my readers, or listeners, or whatever, would be helpful in guiding my future decisions about such things.)  For now, though, I think I’m going to put that on hold.  Unfortunately, writing new, additional posts is hard to work into my schedule, though writing is more natural to me than speaking.  I’m just pretty exhausted most days, as it is, and adding new things to my schedule feels like a herculean undertaking.

Sorry to be a downer.  I’m sure it’s a blog truism that more people will read posts that are upbeat and cheerful-seeming than otherwise, just as in real life people gravitate more to those who seem to be positive and enthusiastic.  This doesn’t of course mean that “those” people really are positive or cheerful.  Often, we force ourselves to behave (or to write) as if we were feeling positive, for the very purpose of trying to gather a surrounding batch of friends, or readers, or what-have-yous.  We’re not “allowed” to show our sadness or depression; it’s a huge taboo.  Depression is contagious, after all, and the world is already a hard-enough place without someone bringing you down.

On the other hand, pretending everything is great isn’t necessarily advisable, because the world doesn’t take your expectations or attitude into account in that vector space of forces which determine events, contrary to much popular delusion.  Not that optimism is always delusional—rational optimism and belief in possibility is fine as long as it doesn’t stray into overconfidence and unwarranted certainty.  As Daniel Kahneman has pointed out, confidence and accuracy do not correlate well.

Is my confidence in that fact a self-contradiction?  Have I caught myself by the tail?  I don’t think so**.  My confidence is provisional, my attitude deliberately modeled on the scientific method.  Let your conclusions and convictions be based as much as you can on evidence and reason, and always leave them, at least in principle, open to revision.  And, if you have the stomach for it, always try to poke holes in your own conclusions.  Ideas that survive constant criticism and prodding are more likely to be closer to truth than those that are never subject to criticism.  This is the root not merely of the scientific method, but also of the defense of freedom of speech as argued in John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, and in many other places.   I’ve encountered no arguments that have even slightly swayed me away from it.

I’m pretty good at self-criticism, of course.  It seems built into me at a more basic level than even my operating system; in the hardware, not the software.  I take after Hamlet more and more as time goes by, it seems, wearing dark clothing and reflecting on how stale, flat, and unprofitable are pretty much all the uses of the world (largely because I’m in it).  He was a bit of a downer, too, I guess.

My writing, though—albeit often dark—is not necessarily a downer.  For instance, I just finished the second run-through of The Vagabond, adding, adjusting, and hopefully improving it as I went along, and I think it’s a good story that ends on a positive note.  One thing I tend to do, despite my tongue-in-cheek “My Heroes Have Always Been Villains”, is to recognize that evil characters and things, the villains of my stories and of many others, are the most tragically self-deluded, fearful, and deeply unhappy people.  This doesn’t stop them from being dangerous.  I think that “evil” people—and certainly evil characters—tend to be the among the most alone, the most lost, the most despairing, the most deeply suffering in many ways, of all characters, and perhaps of all people.

One of the things I love about the anime Sailor Moon*** is that Usagi tends to win her battles, even against the Big Bad Guys, not by destroying her opponents—not if she can help it—but by redeeming them, and showing them that they are not alone.  Me, I’d tend more along the Sailor Saturn lines and be prone to wipe everything out and start over (I’ve even done that in some of my stories).  When Sailor Moon can’t avoid destroying someone, it breaks her heart.  But then, of course, “Our princess is such a crybaby,” as Sailor Uranus says, with affection and admiration.

That was a weird tangent, wasn’t it?  I did end up writing more than I expected (as I expected, ironically), but I’m not sure it really was about much or if it was expressed well.  ごめん ね すなお じゃなくて、 ゆめ の なか なら いえる****

I hope you’re all as well as can be, and that things go as best as possible for you, in the best of all possible lives you can lead.  Please try to stay safe and healthy.

TTFN

Sailors Saturn and Moon

*Google seems to list such things as podcasts, if you do a search for my name, which is interesting.  I’ve never even owned an iPod, and I only briefly used an MP3 player before it was superseded by smartphones.

**But then, I wouldn’t, would I?

***I love it.  I, a fifty-one-year-old, American male, ex-convict, M.D., love Sailor Moon.  Sue me.

**** “Gomen ne sunao janakute, yume no naka nara ieru.”  Roughly translated, it says, “I’m sorry I can’t be clear/candid; I can say it in my dreams.”  It’s the opening line to “Moonlight Densetsu”, the Sailor Moon opening song (at least for the first four seasons).

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And every tongue blogs in a several tale, and every tale condemns me for a villain.

Okay, well, welcome to another Thursday and to another edition of my weekly blog post.  This being the second Thursday in July, this would have been an edition of “My Heroes Have Always Been Villains”, which ran briefly, way back when, but which was stopped after not many people seemed to read it.  This surprised me, given the fact that so many people are so interested in the great villains of popular fiction:  Sauron, Hannibal Lecter, Thanos, Darth Vader, and so on, to say nothing of the quintessential dastard from whom I cribbed the title of this post.  I guess people often follow such characters on the DL, as a kind of guilty pleasure, and openly reading or talking about them is not as popular.

Oh, well.  I’ve been disappointed by the lack of popularity of that series, but the world is hard, and it’s under no obligation to conform to my expectations, let alone my hopes.

This fact was driven home yet again for me last week with the difficulty relating to my “single” Schrödinger’s Head, which had to be delayed because of restrictions on the word content of the cover art.  I quickly and easily (but not without grumbling) altered the cover to remove the warped opening lines of the song, and then adjusted the rest for better balance.  I also changed the official title of the song to include the umlaut.  This latter bit didn’t bother me nearly so much, especially since I’d already used an umlaut made from a tiny white cat’s head and a tiny black cat’s head above the “o” in the graphic (see below).  I’m not sure the umlaut in the official title was necessary—it’s hard for me to imagine that being something distributors and song sharing and selling sites would notice much—but it was satisfying, unlike the removal of my opening lyrics.

Bottom line, in short order, once my corrections were made, the song was distributed and has gone live and is now available for your listening pleasure on Spotify, iTunes, Amazon, YouTube Music, and numerous other venues of which I know the names of only a few, such as TikTok.  If anyone listens on one of those other venues, please let me know; I’d love to share the link.

The song is a folk-rock style, lighthearted, silly thing in which the singer (me) asks various binary questions, mostly about what the titular physicist might be thinking, arriving at the lamentable conclusion that nobody knows.  There’s a little more to it than that, including some deliberately contradictory wordplay, but it’s not supposed to be deep or to carry any message (unlike my previous release, Like and Share, which involves heartfelt, sad commentary about one aspect of social media).  The main guitar sounds are mostly “clean”, since I was really just learning to use it, and that’s part of what gives it the folk-tune feel.  I think.

Anyway, have a listen if you’re so inclined (though you won’t actually know if you are or not until you listen, and then the wave function will have collapsed…Ha Ha Ha!).

In other news, of course, Unanimity continues to hurtle toward completion, though never quite as quickly as I hope.  I, however, am schooled not to rely on the specifics of my hopes too much.  The Tao te Ching counsels us to act without expectation, and I think that’s very good advice, though not as simple as it might seem at a superficial glance*.

Anyway, my novel moves ever nearer to release, and I at least am excited about it.  It’s not for the faint of heart, though.  If you’re the sort of person who requires trigger warnings for anything at all, they are all hereby given.  I am not trying to avoid traumatizing you with this book; quite the contrary.

Not that traumatizing you is the point—or at least not the main one.  The main point is to tell a story about what happens when an innocent college student—Charley Banks—takes part in a neuroscience experiment at his university, has a seizure in an MRI machine during the process, and in the aftermath develops a seemingly impossible, potentially limitless, paranormal power to take over other people’s bodies and minds with just a touch.  Unfortunately, in the process he also appears to have suffered damage to his moral compass**, and he begins to do truly terrible and horrifying things with his new ability—things no one else could ever recognize as his handiwork.

What could be the nature and source of this impossible ability?  How can Charley be cured and/or stopped?  Can he be cured and/or stopped?  Will anyone even figure out what’s happening in time to do anything at all about it, if anything can be done?  How could you even detect a danger that potentially comes from all the people you know and love?

And will Vanessa ever be able to get Brad to notice and return her feelings, or will her poor, lonely, yearning heart be broken***?

Some of these questions—and others not mentioned—will be answered in Unanimity.  Some will remain mysteries.  To find out more, you’ll have to read the book.

TTFN

transformed s head cover no words2

*I urge you to look into it.  It’s not religion, though a religion has been made from it; as I see it, it’s really a book of practical philosophy in the form of 81 very short, evocative poem-oids.

**Or it could just be power corrupting, and corrupting fast, or revealing and releasing a side to Charley that was always present, or perhaps some dark, supernatural force is at work.  Who can say which it is?  Well, I can, of course, but I’m not saying, at least not here.

***Okay, that last question has nothing at all to do with the novel.  I don’t know where that comes from.  There are no such characters in my book.

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Discuss unto me: art thou blogger, or art thou base, common, and popular?

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Hello and good morning!  Welcome to another Thursday and—almost, but not quite, by definition—another episode of my (usually) weekly blog post.

First, let me apologize for missing last week without a word.  I ate something that really didn’t agree with me* early in the week, and for most of the rest of the week I was quite ill.  I considered getting online last Thursday to jot out a quick message to the effect of, “Hey, I’m sick, so I’m not making a formal blog post this week,” but I didn’t even have the gumption for that.

Again, I apologize.

I haven’t been completely idle over the last few weeks, however.  In fact, I’ve been rather absorbed with creating/producing/performing my latest—and probably best so far, at least in production quality—song.  It’s called “Like and Share”, and I’ve posted it here on this blog, and as a video** on Iterations of Zero, and on YouTube here.  As the name no doubt suggests, it’s a song that deals with social media, and as my nature no doubt suggests, it deals with the dark side of such media.

Sorry; I am who I am.

Though I always say words to this effect, this time I really, really, REALLY would like to know what you think about the song, so if you have a moment, please take a listen.  It doesn’t sound dark or anything, in case you’re worried.  Apparently, it’s got something of a sixties feel.  My sister—to whom I owe a tremendous debt for listening to various drafts and letting me know about balance issues and clarity issues and whatnot—said that if George Harrison and Pink Floyd had made a song together, this would be it.

Now…she’s my doting older sister, so she’s going to tend to be generous; I don’t want you to get your hopes up unreasonably based on her statement***.  Still, I do think it’s pretty good as far as it goes.  But I am needy, in my own weird little way, so if any (or all?) of you could take four minutes and thirty-seven seconds’ to listen, and then a moment or two more to make a comment either on my blog(s) or on YouTube or on Facebook (it’s also posted there), I’d be deeply grateful.

Seriously.  I’m begging.

As is usual when I’m in the final throes of making one of my songs, I’ve missed about two or three days’ worth of editing on Unanimity, but I’m back to it now with a vengeance.  It’s coming along and tightening up nicely.  I’m not yet getting bored of it, and most importantly (to me) I still like my main characters a lot.

It’s very hard to enjoy a story, even a good one, if one dislikes the characters, especially the protagonist(s).  I think the closest thing I know to an exception to that rule is The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever.  Though I find Thomas Covenant at least somewhat sympathetic (some of the time) and almost always interesting, I am by no means surprised when some people say they absolutely loathe him.  However, essentially all the other characters in the books are so moving and inspiring—especially Mhoram**** and Foamfollower—that even if you passionately hate Thomas Covenant, you can still really enjoy the books.  Also, the villain of the series, Lord Foul, is probably my single favorite bad guy of all time.  It doesn’t hurt that he speaks so eloquently that you might think him to be channeling Shakespeare himself.

It doesn’t hurt that he actually speaks, come to think of it.  The one serious dissatisfaction I’ve always had with The Lord of the Rings is that Sauron isn’t really a character.  I know, I know, that makes him all the more menacing—like a force of nature, rather like Lovecraft’s Great Old Ones.  Just imagine if we were able to read a conversation with Cthulhu!  Probably his voice alone would drive an interlocutor mad.

And indeed, in LotR, when Pippin interacts with Sauron via the palantír, we’re told that his laughter is like daggers, and I don’t think it’s meant metaphorically.  Still, Lord Foul achieves the unquestionable status of absolute worst guy in his universe, and a definite force of pure evil, even though we meet him as a character—a person—very early in the books.  Just take this, one of my favorite quotes from the end of his initial interaction with Thomas Covenant:

“Do not forget whom to fear at the last.  I have had to be content with killing and torment, but now my plans are laid, and I have begun.  I shall not rest until I have eradicated hope from the earth.  Think on that and be dismayed.”

Yes, a character can use the proper objective form of a commonly misused pronoun and still be fundamentally evil.  Actually, there are probably those who think that anyone who uses that form is evil, but who would entertain such nonsense?

Anyway, before I go off on too many tangents, I think I’ll wrap things up for today.  Thank you for reading, apologies for last week, and I do hope that you’ll take a bit of time to listen to and comment on my new song…and even, if you’re so inclined, to “Like” and “Share” it.  This is not straightforwardly ironic, perhaps, but given the rather negative attitude the song conveys toward some aspects of social media, perhaps it really would be ironic to do so.

I think that if you can achieve real irony in any given day, then surely that day hasn’t been wasted.

TTFN

*It thought, for instance, that Shakespeare was a mediocre writer and that mathematics and science are boring.

**As usual, the “video” portion is just a static image of the IoZ logo (see below), so don’t get your hopes up…or, alternatively, don’t be afraid; you won’t have to watch me singing.

***I personally get a sort of Simon and Garfunkel vibe from it, but that’s mostly because of the harmonization.

****I quote Thomas Covenant himself here: “You’re making a big mistake if you ever assume that Mhoram is helpless.”

 

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I am determined to prove a villain, and hate the idle pleasures of these blogs.
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I am determined to prove a villain, and hate the idle pleasures of these blogs.

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Hello and good morning!  It’s the last Thursday of the month, which implies that next Thursday will be the first Thursday of a new month.  Unfortunately, this no longer means that I’ll release a new episode of “My Heroes Have Always Been Villains.”  More’s the pity, but they just didn’t seem to get many readers.  Perhaps people were put off by the title, or maybe people have a trained aversion to admitting that villains are not only necessary to good stories but are also, often, the most interesting and pro-active characters.  I’ve often noted that it is the villains in great stories who make things happen, who try to change the world (often in not-so-good ways, of course), whereas the heroes tend just to react to events.  In this sense, revered inventors, discoverers, and innovators have more in common, personality-wise, with the villains of our tales than with the heroes.

I don’t know what this says about human nature, but I do rue the fact that no one seems to quite get the notions that I try to express in “MHHABV.”  (I’ll rule out the possibility that I’m simply not good enough at conveying those notions.  Let’s not be ridiculous, here).  Thus, I find myself in the shoes of many a villain—the comic-book style ones, anyway—in bemoaning the fact that there seems to be no one else in all the world with the vision, the intellect, the greatness of spirit to recognize and embrace the grandeur of my design!

<<Sigh>>  It’s lonely being a supervillain.  Just ask Thanos, or Dr. Doom, or Hannibal Lecter (but I recommend asking politely).

Tangentially, it’s interesting to wonder if it’s possible to be truly happy and yet to move forward and make profound changes for the better in the world.  Buddhist monks rarely seem motivated to cure (or treat) terrible diseases,* or to invent new products or technologies, or to discover new sciences.  Not to say their activities aren’t worthwhile.  Some of them accomplish real insight into the nature of the human mind.  Still, it’s telling that the end goal of (at least some versions of) Buddhist practice is to achieve a state where you stop being reborn and can finally just frikking die and cease to exist when your time comes.  I can offer anyone with that goal a hugely step-saving strategy.

Of course, I’m caricaturing the teachings of Buddhism and Buddhist monks somewhat; I hardly think I have the final word on this subject.

Speaking of final words, just yesterday I finished the first edit of Unanimity.  Yes, that was just the first one.  Oy.  But still, it was a milestone.  I’ve already trimmed about eleven thousand words from the story, but there’s a long way to go before it’s in publishable form, with lots of little tweaks and corrections to be made.  It’s hard to write a half-a-million-word novel and keep everything perfectly consistent, especially with respect to trivia such as the receptionist’s name in a medical office, whom you forgot you’d introduced once before, and so when you introduce that person again, you use a completely different name, and perhaps even a different personality.  To take just one (purely hypothetical!) example.

Of course, to the surprise of no one who knows me at all, I haven’t come to any conclusion regarding the fate of “Iterations of Zero.”  I would be less conflicted about keeping it going if I could just find the time (and the will) to write in it, or to record “audio blogs”, as regularly as I write here.  But time and will are exquisitely finite resources, even for supervillains like me.  I have to earn a living, doing things that are not nearly so fulfilling, and which bring me into daily contact with…well, certainly with many interesting characters.  In this case, I use the word “interesting” as in the (supposed) Chinese curse, “May you live in interesting times.”  Or, in a similar vein (har), as I’ve often said to patients, “You should try never to be interesting to your doctor.”

I would love to write, etc., full time, and to produce more material of more varied nature, but money’s tight.  Of course, if my books were to become international best-sellers and were made into blockbuster motion pictures, that would help matters tremendously, but that’s not entirely up to me.  I’m too self-effacing (and often self-loathing) to be very good at marketing myself aggressively.  This is in ironic contrast to certain people (some of them in high office) who seem uniquely skilled and talented at polishing the turds that they are and selling those shiny pieces of excrement to people who don’t appear to know better…or who don’t want to know better, which is worse.

Thinking about such things too much can arouse real sympathy for the great villains of literature.

If there’s anyone out there who wishes I had time to write more and who has a lot of money or is brilliant at marketing and has some spare time and wants a challenge, you’re certainly invited to help make my nefarious dreams a reality.  In the meantime, I hope you’re all enjoying the summer.  While you do, though, as I’ll make clear in my short story Free Range Meat, you must remember never to lock your dogs in vehicles, especially on hot, sunny days.  Conversely,** if you encounter a situation in which it seems someone else has done such a thing, you may want to think twice before intervening too aggressively.  Not all is as it seems, and the road to real Hell, as we know, can be paved with the best of intentions.

TTFN

*Physical ones, anyway.  The argument can be made that meditational practices show real promise in treating some psychological maladies.

**Or is it inversely?  Or obversely?