writing

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“‘Cause I’m your superhero. We are standing on the edge…”

Well, it’s Friday the 13th.  That’s at least one good thing about today.  And, of course, next month will also have a Friday the 13th, as I’ve noted previously (I don’t know specifically in which post I noted it, and I don’t really have the urge to go figure it out, so I’ll leave that to you to do if you’re interested).

It is slightly interesting to think about the fact that, on average, one of every seven Februarys will have a Friday the 13th, but not all of those will then lead to a subsequent Friday the 13th in March, because every 4th February will have 29 days*, by the Gregorian calendar, which is the one the world uses overall.

So, the total fraction of years with dual Fridays the 13th would be something like 1/7 minus a further ¼ of that one seventh—so 4/28 (i.e., 1/7) minus 1/28 (1/4 x 1/7), which leads us to the rough conclusion that only three out of 28 years will entail February and March each having a Friday the 13th.  That’s slightly less than one out of every nine years.  And since I’m 56, which is twice 28, I should have experienced about 6 such years in my life (perhaps counting this year).

Mind you, the numbers aren’t quite right overall.  The Gregorian calendar waives the extra day in February on years that are divisible by 100, i.e., the turns of centuries.  However, there’s a further exception to that:  the turn of a millennium, like what we all just had in the year 2000, does keep its 29 days in February.  So that brings the average closer to the raw number, but doesn’t account for the extra  ones that happen at more ordinary turns of centuries.

Of course, the only turn of a century through which I have lived—and through which I am likely to live**—was indeed the turn of a millennium, so I guess for me, the fraction 3/28 should be fairly accurate.

I could, if I were so inclined, go back to the first year in which I experienced a February—that would be 1970 (AD or CE)—and work through them to find out just how many dual Fridays the 13th I’ve experienced.  With modern computer-based calendars it would even be relatively easy.  But I don’t think I am so inclined.

Okay, that’s enough of that for now.  Actually, it’s probably too much of that, at least from any normal person’s (i.e., not my) perspective.  On to other things.

I’m writing this post on my mini lapcom, and I wrote yesterday’s post on the lapcom as well; I am doing this partly to spare my thumbs, but also to try to encourage myself to use the lapcom more and maybe even to write fiction again.  I don’t know whether or not that will happen, but it’s also just more natural for me to use the lapcom.  I’ve been typing, in one way or another, since I was 11 years old, if memory serves.  Clearly I have not been using a smartphone nearly that long, because they have not existed for that long.

Also, even when I saw the imagined future tech on Start Trek:  The Next Generation of tablets with virtual keyboards, I thought they looked like a terrible idea.  How lame, how unaesthetic, just to tap at a flat screen with no real keys.  Also, the “keys” on such devices in the real world are too effing small to be used to type in any traditional way.  Not but what one can get to be pretty speedy with them—I can zip along pretty well on my smartphone—but it’s nothing compared to being able to use one’s whole set of fingers to write.

Although, I’ve often touted the value of writing things longhand before retyping them into the computer, especially for fiction, because it can slow one down beneficially.  I did that—because I had no choice, being at the time a guest of the Florida DOC—with Mark Red, with The Chasm and the Collision, and with the “short” story Paradox City.  I don’t know whether they come across as better or worse or indistinguishable from the stories I have written directly onto the computer.

I would say that they might tend to be shorter, but Paradox City is a nominally short story that was about 60 hand-written pages long, so that didn’t make things much shorter.  Also, I think The Chasm and the Collision is longer than Son of Man, but that may just be a function of the nature of those stories.

Certainly Unanimity is longer than anything else I’ve written, by quite a margin, but that surprised me as much as it might anyone else.  I just started writing the story and it ended up taking that long to tell it.  That happens.  Outlaw’s Mind began as an idea for a short story, but there was definitely a lot there implicitly, even in the original idea, that made it unreasonable to plan to make it “short”.

Anyway, if any readers of this blog have also read my stories and have noticed any tendency toward difference between the initially handwritten and the entirely computer written (meaning written on a computer, not by a computer, unless one is referring to me as a computer) ones, I’d be pleased to get your feedback.

In other personal news, well…my pain is leveling off a bit, though my leg joints still feel loose and floppy and unstable, so I have to be careful, and I have my general persistent tension and neuropathic discomfort in my lower body.  I’ve tried to adjust (and decrease) my workout a bit to compensate, and that seems to be doing some good, but I cannot go without working out, because that tends to make my pain worse.

My mood is pretty much as it usually is, but I’ll spare you that hellscape out of courtesy.

Tomorrow is Saturday, and I am not supposed to be working this weekend.  If that changes—in other words, if I do work—I guess I’ll write a post.  Though, really, I should try to get back into Outlaw’s Mind and finish what I had started earliest so I could then get on to newer things.  And if wishes were horses, we’d all be drowning in manure***.

Tomorrow is also Valentine’s Day, but this is of no relevance to me, and that holiday hasn’t been relevant to me for more than 15 years, possibly quite a bit more.  It is not likely to be relevant to me again this side of the grave (and even less likely to be relevant on the other side).

I hope you all have a good weekend, even those of you who have loved ones with whom you can revel in the romance of the holiday.  It’s not your fault that you piss me off.

*This means, of course, that there will be some March Fridays the 13th in years where there was no February Friday the 13th.  If my figuring is correct, those will be the leap-year Februarys in which the 13th falls on a Thursday.

**If I were to be alive in 2100, I would be 130 years old, which would make me even with the Old Took, and which would be substantially older than any human is known to have lived.

***And ironically, any wishes for the manure to go away would just make things worse!

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Self-love, my blog, is not so vile a sin, as self-neglecting.

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday again, despite all misgivings, and I’m writing my official Thursday-style blog post because I cannot think of anything better to do.  Okay, well, I can think of better things to do—surely there is a functionally limitless number of possible better things—but I am not up to or capable of doing anything better, so here I am.

It would be great if I were writing fiction instead, here in the morning before/on the way to* work.  Then I could feel as if I’m accomplishing something.  Even if nearly no one reads my fiction during my lifetime, there’s always at least a chance that someone will pick it up and it will become beloved after I’m gone.

Heck, Moby Dick didn’t do well in Melville’s lifetime, but it’s now considered one of the great American classics of literature.  Even Khan quoted and paraphrased it in Star Trek II:  The Wrath of Khan.  Not that he’s maybe the best role model (and he is a fictional character) but nevertheless, the book is a classic great enough to have been imagined to live on into the 23rd century.

I guess this conundrum is part of why authors use agents to try to sell their works to publishers and use publishers to try to sell their works to the general public.  It’s a sensible division of labor, of course, and specialization often improves efficiency.  But who is available to help sell authors to agents at that level?

The way things are set up in our culture—and no, there’s no indication that this was planned by anyone, it just sort of happened emergently—we reward those not necessarily who are the best at doing something, but who are the best at self-promotion.  In other words, we reward those with a tendency toward narcissism, and the results show themselves all too well in our entertainment, in our businesses, and perhaps most horrifically and pathetically, in our politics.

Then, of course, you get gifted artists like Kurt Cobain, who was never really narcissistic as far as I can tell—he said he had wanted just to be in a band in the background, maybe playing rhythm guitar, but was instead the front man of a huge band and almost the face of a genre of music in the nineties.  Having him there made all the other people (and him as well) lots of money, and it brought joy to many fans.  This latter bit is good, of course—more joy, ceteris paribus, is better than less—but it can put a lot of pressure on someone who has negative self-esteem issues.

How many of the premature deaths—by clear suicide as in Cobain’s case or by effective suicide among people like Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, etc.—of successful artists are due to some form of rock star imposter syndrome?

This is not to say that sometimes narcissism, in moderate doses, cannot pay off, for the person and for everyone else.  Mick Jagger probably has a bit of narcissism in him, for instance; I remember him once describing himself as “just another girl on the runway” with a smirk on his face.  He clearly liked/likes attention.  But you don’t get the impression that it’s too pathological in his case, and the world got some great songs out of it.

Then there’s Freddy Mercury, who was certainly a bit of a diva, but popular music was all the better for that fact.  He did, of course, end up cutting his life short, but in a very different way from the Joplins** and Cobains.

Then there is someone like David Bowie, who changed rather constantly across his career and who always seemed just to be who he was, even when he was assuming other identities.  He was just an artist, I think (though he had his own issues with drugs, etc.).  Though, he had a competitive nature, too (his Life on Mars was his “revenge” on the song My Way, for which his proposed lyrics had been rejected).

I think it’s a bit more complicated but similar in the case of Radiohead, though all the attention and touring surrounding OKComputer did apparently nearly drive Thom Yorke to a “nervous breakdown”.  I have my own theories about why this was so hard for him, but I won’t get into them now, because they are very self-referential and, well…narcissistic in a sense.  In other words, I suspect Thom Yorke is in some ways like me and had troubles similar to ones I would have in his exact situation.

Anyway, that’s probably enough BS for today.  My pain is not quite as severe as it was, but my various joints still feel like they are not fully connected, and moving is painful—but sitting still gets painful after a while, too, so it’s not an easy way out.

Hey, you know what?  I thought of an idea.  If anyone out there has the resources and the desire to take in and support an author so he can work full-time writing fiction (and even some nonfiction and possibly some music, since I would have more time), please get in touch.  I can’t honestly say that I’m the tidiest person in the world, but I do my best to keep my untidiness to my own areas.  I am also a decent cook; that’s practically genetic in my case.

I would put you in the dedication to any books and other stories I finish, and of course, if I make it big, you’ll get your share.  If you have promotional skills (or connections), they would be a definite plus.  I am neither spayed nor neutered, of course, but I am woefully, painfully shy and self-effacing, so you don’t have to worry too much about “unwanted litters” and related issues.

Okay, enough silly pseudo-personal-column nonsense.  I am trying to be upbeat and silly**** to distract myself from pain and avoid despair, at least to the degree possible.  It may be true that “freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose”*****, but despair is still not very much fun.  It can be weirdly freeing—thus the lyric—but it’s not fun.

TTFN

*If you simplify that expression, discounting the spaces, you’re left with bfre/nt2hwayo.  I think I did that correctly.  If anyone catches something I’ve missed, please let me know.

**I remember when I was quite young and first heard of Janis Joplin; I wondered if maybe she was a descendant of Scott Joplin, the great ragtime pianist and composer who gave us such works as The Entertainer and The Maple Leaf Rag.  Yes, that’s the sort of background I had—I knew about ragtime musicians long before I knew about someone like Janice Joplin.  To be honest, I still prefer Scott’s music, and I like the version of Me and Bobby McGee*** sung by Roger Miller way more than I like the one Janis did.

***Of course, the song was written by Chris Christopherson.  He’s one of those songwriters who wrote a lot of songs that other people ended up playing and making famous, rather like Carole King.

****By the way, just because it’s silly doesn’t mean I wouldn’t necessarily jump at an offer in response to my proposal.  I’m silly but not stupid, or at least I’m not stupid in that way.

*****Now that was some good lyric-writing, Mr. Christopherson.  It’s one of the best lines ever in any song.

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“But see, amid the mimic rout, a crawling shape intrude.”

First of all‒first today, anyway‒I would like to apologize to anyone who feels disappointed that I did not write a blog post yesterday.

I’m sorry.

Okay, there, I apologized.

I don’t know if anyone actually missed there being a blog post to read from me yesterday.  Probably, I ought really to be apologizing on the days when I do write a blog post.  I know that I probably make a lot of readers feel like crap when they read my blog, no matter how good their intentions.

Then again, no one is forcing them to read it, are they?  If I could somehow make it so that people felt some powerful compulsion to read my blog, I would probably make a lot more people read it.  Heck, I don’t know that I would waste the effort on my blog; I’d be more inclined to make people feel compelled to read my fiction, if I could do that.  At least then I might eventually make some money from it, and more importantly, my stories would be read by more people.  Some of those people might even end up finding my stories to be some of their favorite stories.

That would be much more important than having more people read my blog, as far as I can see.  No one is going to read blog posts to their kids or talk about them with other people.  No one will wistfully pull a volume of my blog posts down from a shelf on a cool and rainy afternoon in autumn to pass a quiet day reading with a cup of tea or coffee or cocoa, maybe with a quilt or an afghan over his or her or their lap (perhaps with a pet dog or cat keeping the reader company).

It would be just barely possible that someone somewhere might do that with one of my stories if enough people knew of them.

Anyway, that’s that.

I didn’t write a blog post yesterday because I was out sick from work.  “Sick” feels like it’s not quite the right word, though.  “Sick” feels as though it should refer to someone suffering from something infectious‒a bacterial or viral or fungal disease.  Of course, I know that’s not the only way for a body to become compromised, but it’s the first notion that comes to my mind when I hear the word “sick”; much like Forrest Gump, I’m inclined to ask, “Do you have cough due to cold?”

This is not to imply that I was well.  I certainly was not well yesterday, not even for me.  The pain about which I wrote on Monday did not improve through the course of that day, and I left the office right after lunch time.  I tried to rest at the house; however, the pain (like the proverbial horrors) persisted.  It also did its really annoying thing where it shifts its focus from one side of my body to the other, probably as I compensate for that one side when it’s flaring, which this leads to increased irritation of the other side and then I compensate for that, and so on.

That cycle’s got a vicious streak a mile wide!  It’s a killer!  Look at the bones!

Anyway, at this moment, it’s my left side pain that dominates, from my shoulder and wrist and thumb and fingers (not really my elbow, oddly enough) down to my ribs, my back, my pelvis, my hip, my knee, and my ankle, down to the arch and ball of my foot, and to some degree my toes.

The right side still hurts, but it’s slightly drowned out by the left side.  That will probably shift, though.  It may do so sometime today.

I’ve been trying to medicate myself adequately with what’s legally available, but it all has limits, and lots of the available things have significant toxicity.  NSAIDS like Ibuprofen and Naproxen (and aspirin) can do some good, but they are hard on the kidneys and on the stomach.  I’ve been having a fair amount of nausea these last several days, probably at least partly because of these meds.  Acetaminophen is not anti-inflammatory and it is easier on the gut and kidneys, but it’s dangerous to the liver* in significant doses, and it doesn’t do much in less than significant doses.

So, yeah, that’s all that.  CBD seems to help a little bit, and I do use it, but it (plus its related compounds) makes me feel rather loopy.  This isn’t always a horrible thing, but it can make it hard to get things done.  And, unfortunately, since I am here alone in a civilization without much of a safety net, I cannot simply not get things done and try to rest and recover somewhere.  If I were independently wealthy, I suppose I might be able to do that‒or if there really were a great many people who bought and read my books, I might be able to have a less stressful lifestyle.

Alas, I am not independently wealthy, nor am I a bestselling author, nor‒as Théoden says to Aragorn‒am I as lucky in my friends as some are.  That’s not to say that I have not had good friends; I feel I have had some of the best friends it is possible for a person to have.  But I don’t really have then anymore; at least I don’t have them around.

I cannot blame this on anyone but myself, if blame is to be had.  After all, I am the common denominator of the whole situation.  Occam’s Razor suggests that I am probably the single biggest contributing factor in the fact that I have no friends, and no family, around me now.

I am not a good pony; I am not a good investment; I am not a good risk.

It doesn’t matter, though.  I’m just tired and worn down and in a great deal of pain, and it’s more annoying with every passing day.

People will tend to say they don’t want other people to take their own lives when their pain (physical, psychological, or both) is too persistently great.  But they don’t offer any actual help dealing with it, just trite clichés and moral homilies and pseudo-comforting nothings (“You would be missed”, “there are people who will miss you”, “there are people who would be sad if you were gone”, etc.**) that are not far removed from “thoughts and prayers”.

Whatever.  I guess we’ll all see whether or not I write a blog post tomorrow.  Or, well, I guess those who bother looking will see.  I will either see or I won’t, depending on the circumstances, but even if I don’t see, others may still see, if they look.

See you then.

*Its metabolism uses up glutathione (if memory serves) which is a scavenger of free radicals in liver cells.  When it gets used up, the radicals generated by the various stages of hepatic detoxification chew up the liver’s own cells.

**Really?  How would they even know?  If I stop blogging and posting tomorrow, as far as anyone but one or two people could know, it might be because I just quit blogging or got hit by a car or got abducted by extraterrestrials.  It would have no significant impact upon anyone.

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Solitary story telling in the desert

Told you, I did.  Saturday it is.  Now…there is a blog post.

That means, of course, that I am going to work today.

That’s not because of the fact that it’s Saturday, or because I’m writing a blog post, or even because I told you, though that may have some more causal input.  But otherwise the causality is very much:  I am going to work + I write blog posts on work days generally + I told you I would ⇒ I am writing a blog post.

It’s apparently been a sticking point in the history of statistics in the twentieth century that no one felt they could definitively infer actual causality by statistical testing (such as with medicine effects and so on) but only association.  Of course, this is a root problem in epistemology, not merely in statistics:  the question of how we know what we know or if we know what we think we know.  I’ve actually been dipping in and out of a book about the science of causality, called The Book of Why by Judea Pearl.  It’s good but somewhat dry, and that’s why I’ve had to keep dipping in and out of it between other things.

That latter is just an example of a frustration I’ve experienced throughout my life:  I have a hard time not getting distracted from one interesting thing by the next interesting thing, and so I don’t accomplish things I would like to accomplish.

In fact, the range of time from when I went to prison and the years following was a rare period during which I was able to commit to and follow through with (in this case) writing books and short stories, one at a time, finishing one before starting the next, which is the way I need to do things if I am to succeed.  And during that same time‒well, this started after prison really‒I practiced playing guitar and ended up writing and producing/performing/recording a total of six songs, four of which are published and streamable on all major platforms.

Since then, though, I have deviated from those habits, at least partly because of the utter lack of impact those things have had.  Telling stories while lost and alone to the struggling plants and rare animals in a desert oasis is not very fun.  Even though they don’t interrupt, they almost certainly don’t actually understand anything.  And they never give any feedback.

I’ve thought to myself many times recently that I wish I could form my own personal Tyler Durden.  For those of you who haven’t read or seen Fight Club, I will try to avoid any spoilers, but I will just say that Tyler Durden is Brad Pitt’s character in the movie (and one of the two main characters in both the book and the movie).  Those of you who have seen or read it will know what I mean when I say I need or want my own equivalent of Tyler.

In any case, I need to escape somehow.  I’m enraged by almost everything nowadays.  At least I feel rage.  It’s uncertain that rage is truly caused by the things toward which I feel it.  They may merely happen to be “there” when I’m prone to that feeling.

See what I mean about the whole causality thing?  One can sympathize with the statisticians who felt they could not firmly infer causality from association.  Human emotional states give us good reason to be cautious about drawing conclusions too quickly and recklessly.  As Radiohead sang, “Just ’cause you feel it doesn’t mean it’s there.”  Or, as I like to remind people, just because you infer it doesn’t mean it was implied.

One may feel what seems to be anger toward another person or circumstance, but then it turns out that one’s blood sugar is just low, and the body is secreting all sorts of sympathetic nervous system hormones to trigger the release and creation of glucose in the body.  But those hormones also influence the brain, and are associated with fight and flight.  The brain may then do its usual associational thing and draw mistaken conclusions about the source or cause of one’s anger.

It reminds me a little bit of the brilliantly acted scene in The Fellowship of the Ring (and the equivalent scene in the book) where Bilbo gets angry and snaps at Gandalf when Gandalf is encouraging him to leave the Ring behind for Frodo.  In this case, of course, it is the Ring itself that’s causing Bilbo’s ire, but he feels, at least for a moment, that it is Gandalf’s “fault”.

What point am I making?  I don’t know that I am actually coherently making any point at all.  But then, I’m thoroughly unconvinced that there’s any true point to anything (though certainly people can find their own internal, subjective meanings).  I have more than a little sympathy with (Health Ledger’s) the Joker, who wants to show the schemers how pathetic their attempts to control things really are.

Of course, he is mistaken in one thing (well…almost certainly more than one), and that is his claim that when one upsets the established order and introduces a little anarchy, everything becomes chaos.  Everything does not become chaos; everything always has been chaos.  Chaos and order are not opposites; order is just a subset of chaos.  What we call order is just one of the things chaos does in some places, in some times, in some circumstances.

And chaos doesn’t need agents, anymore than death needs incarnations or servants, or anymore than gravity needs invisible angels to guide the planets in their orbits around the sun.  This shit is just the way things happen; it doesn’t require any agency.  It simply is.

As for why it is the way it is, well, that is an interesting question.  Actually, it’s probably a whole slew of interesting questions.  I don’t think any of these are answered in The Book of Why, despite its title, though.  It’s just not the sort of thing toward which it is addressed.

Wow, I’m all over the place, which is on brand at least.  I’m going to draw this post to a close now.  I hope you have a good weekend.  If you like football, the SuperBowl is on this Sunday.  Actually, it’s on even if you don’t like football.  The game is not conditional upon any one person liking football‒although, it requires a certain minimum number of people to like football or else it will stop occurring.  But what is that number?  Does it vary from moment to moment?

Agh, I need not to get started on questions like that right now.  It may be the question that drives us, Neo, but I’m getting too wordy for a Saturday blog post.  Hasta luego mis amigos and soredewa mata jikai, minasan.

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My way of life is blogg’d into the sere, the yellow leaf

Hello and good morning.

TTFN

Ha.  Ha.  Sorry about that.  Just, honestly, I don’t really feel much like writing right now.  There are no other twos here today (at least, I’m not going to be talking about them, except to the extent that saying that I’m not talking about them constitutes talking about them).

Actually, wait.  I will make a relatively fun note that includes the number two, since it just occurred to me that today is the fifth:  If you add (or if anyone else adds) the first two prime numbers together, they give you the third one.  2 + 3 = 5.

This is the only place in all the infinite realm of the prime numbers in which you will be able to add two consecutive primes to get the next prime, because all prime numbers except two are odd, and if you add (or anyone else adds) two odd numbers together, you (or they or he or she) will get an even number.  And the only even prime is two.

Actually, it’s worth noting that one can add two primes that are not consecutive to get a third prime.  If one takes any of the first member of a set of twin primes* and adds two (that solitary even prime) to it, one will get the second of the pair of twin primes.  This may be able to be done in an infinite number of cases; it’s thought that there are an infinite number of twin primes, i.e., that there is no largest twin primes set.

However, this has not been proven yet (as far as I know) though work has been done on it and progress has been made.  I won’t get much more into it than this, except to say that apparently a lot of the work has been done by large, decentralized groups of mathematicians (professionals and amateurs) through a site called “polymath”, if my memory is correct.

Now that is an excellent name for a collaborative mathematics website.

Oy, there I go again, talking about trivia about prime numbers and so on.  Maybe it would make sense for me to get into these things if I were truly involved, but I’m a spectator of mathematics (apart from my truly useless invention of the gleeb**, a number which, when multiplied by 0 gives you 1).  So my interest is entirely esoteric and reflected.  I apologize to those of you who find it tiring.  To those of you who like it, I’ll say “You’re welcome”.

You’re welcome.

See, I told you I would say it.  And then I said it.  I guess that’s one point in my favor.

I’m not sure there are any others.  At least, none of them appear to me to be in my favor.  I am all but completely worn out.  I’m running on fumes, or whatever other metaphor one might want to apply that is applicable (since applying inapplicable ones is stupid) and my incessant pain continues to wear me down, adding to my depression, and eroding what little joy I have left.

I really have wanted so often just to hang it up.  I came relatively close yesterday afternoon and considered leaving a “post” that just said, “I don’t think I can do this anymore.”  The would be the title and the content.

I didn’t do it, of course, which you can tell by looking, if you are so inclined***.  But I came closer than I’ve come before, at least subjectively speaking.  Last week—I think it was—I posted a similar sentence on most of my social media, just the line “I don’t know if I can do all this much longer.”  I’ll embed a screen shot here:

 

So, fair warning is being given, here and elsewhere.  The fire alarm is giving off little warning beeps.  The readout dial is high in the yellow range, perhaps already inching into the red.  Creaking sounds and little wisps of steel and concrete dust are issuing from the support beams of the bridge.  Small tremors and puffs of escaping steam are increasing in frequency near the hitherto dormant volcano.  There’s a red sky in the morning, today****.

But, I appear not to be able to stop yet.  I’m not yet able to escape.  I’m still pushing the stupid boulder up the stupid hill, like the stupid idiot that I am.  I’m even writing this blog post on my lapcom for the first time in two weeks (well, this is the first time at all that I’m writing this blog post, but hopefully you know what I mean), just because I felt mildly nostalgic.

One of these days, though, I’ll be able to end my blog post with just “TT” instead of “TTFN”, and it won’t be over just for now but finally and for good—not just the blog but everything.  And I don’t know if that will be sad or a relief for anyone out there, but I hardly think it will be a tragedy, nor will it be more than little noted, and it will certainly not be long remembered.

But for now, I must needs sign off with the annoyingly non-climactic

TTFN

*Primes that are two apart from each other, such as 29 and 31, or 137 and 139.

**Seriously, I worked out a lot of the algebra that involves it and everything (for instance, it turns out that a gleeb squared is still a gleeb, and 1 over a gleeb equals 0).  I’m sure I discussed it in a previous blog post.  If I can find which one without much trouble, I’ll leave the link here.

***In principle, you can tell by looking even if you are not so inclined, but you simply will not tell because you won’t look.  Should that count, then, as a “can” situation if it’s not physical impossibility but mental disinterest that leads one never to do a thing?  If it simply will not ever happen, can one not just then say that it cannot happen?  Are “cannot” and “shall not” synonymous here, as when Ian McKellen misspoke his most famous line when facing the balrog in The Fellowship of the Ring?

****This may be true somewhere—it probably is, come to think of it—but it’s not true for me, because it’s still fully dark as I write this; the sun is not even lightening the eastern horizon yet.  I’m just being melodramatic.

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That was a weird tangent dot com?

Well, it’s Friday, the 30th of January.  We’re almost done with the first month of the year (2026).  Has it been an auspicious month?  Has it been inauspicious?  I suppose the answer to such questions will vary from person to person depending upon how their personal month has gone.  And I suppose that points toward the notion that actual auspices are certainly not any kind of reliable indicator of how the future might go, at least not without great care to separate true patterns from false ones.

On the other hand, it’s not entirely mad to try to draw some potential conclusions about the near future from what’s happening in the present and what has happened in the recent past.  That’s one of the useful skills that’s available to minds that have the capacity to note patterns‒one can try to anticipate the future based on patterns one has noticed over time, and potentially, one can try thereby to avoid outcomes that are undesirable.

Of course, humans do tend to notice patterns that aren’t actually there a lot more than ones that really are there*.  This is usually‒probably‒related to the notion of the differential detriments of different types of errors:  It’s usually more useful to see potential threats that aren’t there than it is not to see potential threats that are there.

I think anyone who stops to think about such things will recognize that the first type of organism will be somewhat more likely to live long enough to reproduce than the second type, though they may be much less comfortable and content in the meantime.  Jumping at shadows can certainly be maladaptive, and too much of it can have a net negative effect on general outcomes, but not jumping at hyenas and lions (for instance) tends to be a very short-lived habit.

This goes back to my frequent talking point that fear, the ability (and it is an ability) to become alarmed and unhappy but energized and driven to fight or flee is going to be present in nearly every lifeform capable of movement over time.  Variations who feel less fear, or none, will not tend to reproduce as much because they are more likely to be killed in any given finite stretch of time, so whatever genetic makeup they have that leads them to lack a fear response, or to be prone to lack it, will not tend to propagate down the generations.

“Genetic makeup”, the term I used in that last sentence (go look, it’s there), made me think of a possible future technology in which people use some CRISPR-style techniques to achieve the effects that hitherto require the use of cosmetics.  They could insert genes into the cells of their cheeks, for instance, to lead them to have more pinkish pigment, or perhaps to make local blood vessels dilate for a nice blushing look, instead of having to use rouge (which is what I think the stuff is called that one applies to make one’s cheeks look pinker).  Or one could generate actual pigments in the cells of one’s upper eyelids, or increase the thickness of one’s eyelashes, all that sort of stuff.

Of course, doing this might entail risks.  Presumably, altering the genes of a given population of cells, even at the local level, could increase the risk of developing cancers, because one cannot perfectly control where genes will insert (at least not so far), and there will always be a chance of mucking up genes that regulate cell division rates.

Once one cell becomes more rapidly reproducing than its companion cells, it will tend to overpower them, in numbers anyway, over time***.  And with rapid and persistently higher rates of reproduction, there come more chances for new mutations to happen.  Those mutations that kill their cells obviously just go away more or less immediately.  Even the ones that revert their cells’ division rates back to “normal” will be quickly locally overwhelmed by the faster growing ones.  But a mutation that encourages even faster division/reproduction will quickly take hold as the dominant cell type, ceteris paribus.

And then, of course, this even more rapidly dividing population of cells will have that many more chances to develop mutations.  And so, down the line, given the billions of cells present in just one’s face, we find the chance for skin cancers to develop, once a cell line becomes so prone to reproduce itself that it cannot be constrained by any local hormonal or immune processes.

That was a weird tangent, wasn’t it?  Although, frankly, I could change the title of my blog from “robertelessar.com” to “thatwasaweirdtangent.com” and it would not be inappropriate.

I’ll finish up today with just some basic housekeeping style stuff:

I will probably not work tomorrow, so I will probably not be writing a blog post.  But if I do write one, it will show up here.  I will certainly not be sleeping in the office tonight, but I did sleep here last night.  I had a terrible day yesterday, pain-wise, and after work I went to the train station but the train was badly crowded and there were no relatively comfortable seats available, so I gave up and trudged back to the office.

I just felt worn out, and I feared that if I did go back to the house, I might not come to the office today.  And today is payday, of course, and Sunday is the first of a new month, so rent is due (Wouldn’t it be nice if rent was dew?  Maybe not if you lived in the Atacama Desert.  Though a little dew might be very strong currency there, come to think of it, relative to most of the rest of the world). 

Hopefully today will be a better day than yesterday with respect to pain.  So far, at least, it doesn’t feel any worse.  The hard office floor can help a bit sometimes with my back pain.  That makes a certain amount of sense, or at least it may do so.  After all, our ancestral environment did not include mattresses.

Anyway, that’s what I’m up to, that’s my life.  I mean that seriously.  That’s pretty much all there is to my life:  Getting up and getting to work (while writing a blog post), doing office stuff while dealing with noise and people and tinnitus, not getting long enough breaks because people seem incapable of watching the time, being the last to leave the office, commuting back to the house, trying to get at least a bit of sleep, and then repeating.  There appears to be nothing more than that coming my way until I’m dead.  Which, I think you might be able to understand, becomes more attractive and less frightening as the tedious, exhausted, and painful days go by.

I hope you all have a good weekend.  As for me, I hope at least to be able to sedate myself enough to have a longer-than-usual sleep tonight.  It’s not ideal (pharmacologically induced sleep being generally and significantly less beneficial than natural sleep), but it’s what I have to use.

*Think of the constellations**.

**Won’t someone please think of the constellations!?!?

***It’s like the difference between exponential functions. ab will grow much more rapidly**** when b is 3, for instance, than when b is 2 or 1.5 or 1.1, and so on.

****Stop looking at the negative side of the number line, dammit.  Just stipulate that a is always a positive number.  Or make the function the absolute value of ab, in other words, |ab|.

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Should I write on Substack? Should I not write at all?

Well, first, today’s date is a bit boring; it’s just riddled with even numbers.  Even numbers, of course, are almost never prime‒out of all the infinite prime numbers that exist, only one is an even number, and that’s the even number:  2.  Likewise, out of all the infinite even numbers, only 2 is prime.

Now, you might point out that there is a 2 in today’s date; in fact there is more than one (har):  1-28-2026.  However, each of those twos reads, almost inescapably, as part of a larger, non-prime* number‒28, 20 (or 2000), 26.  So, they lose their charm.

And that’s my weird, number-related nonsense out of the way for now.

It’s Wednesday, which is payroll day, but I’ve done my best to get a head start on that this week, to the degree possible.  We’ll see whether or not that does me any good.  Well, I will see.  I doubt any of you will see, and you probably won’t know in any sense.  I guess I might share it here on this blog, if it sticks in my mind enough for me to mention it, but I doubt that will happen.  It seems unlikely that anyone would care, anyway.

The cliché thing to add at the end there wanted to be “but never say never”.  However, that expression annoys me, partly because it includes the word “never” twice while admonishing others not to use it.  Of course, I recognize that to be deliberate verbal irony, but I don’t find it very clever.

My preference is to say something like “never is a long time” when admonishing someone against making sweeping, “never”-related statements.  Or, if someone says something like, “they were supposed to get back to me, but they never did,” I will often say, “Never hasn’t happened yet.  They just haven’t gotten back to you so far.”

No, actually, I don’t have any (local) friends.  Why do you ask?

I still haven’t received any feedback regarding the Substack question.  In fact, the only feedback I’ve received of any kind has been from the two people who are basically the only people who comment on my blog.  It’s nice to get feedback from them, of course, but I would welcome others as well.  And I would really appreciate someone’s thoughts about the Substack and/or monetization idea.

I don’t know.  Maybe to be able to monetize one’s (nonfiction) writing, one needs to have some consistent shtick or something‒a focus on politics or medicine or philosophy or what have you.  Whereas I don’t even know what I’m going to discuss until I’m already discussing it**.  Is that the sort of thing that could sustain a paying audience?  I don’t know.

I would like to get some broader feedback on this, but I don’t know how to elicit that feedback except by asking here.  It’s not as though I have anyone else to whom I can talk about this kind of thing.  I barely have anyone to whom I can talk about anything.

I guess I could just try to “fake it until I make it” with a more focused blog, obeying an idiotic admonition that people recall only because it rhymes.

Now, I’m fond of lyrics and good poetry so I appreciate rhymes, but rhyme does not equal reason; in other words, don’t fall for someone saying something like, “If the glove does not fit, you must acquit.”

If anything, if someone tries to convince you using a rhyme, veer in the other direction from accepting what they say.  When people have good reasons for something, they don’t require clever verbosity to persuade a reasonable person.  I say “persuade”, but that’s really being a bit disrespectful to the notion of true persuasion.  Using the “rhyme as reason” fallacy is really a form of dishonest manipulation, as is the willful application of many fallacies when trying to influence another’s thoughts.

Anyway, I don’t want to fake it with respect to having a particular focus or agenda in a blog or other series of writing.  I’ve been faking being human all my life, and that’s more than exhausting enough.  Also, as time goes by, and I see more and more of the things humans do and the ways that humans do things, I’m thinking maybe trying to act like one of them isn’t such a well-advised undertaking.  Maybe humans are vastly overrated.

Then again, so are most other life forms on the planet.  Perhaps phytoplankton/cyanobacteria are the only innocent life forms on Earth (and I’m far from certain of their innocence).  Of course, since no being had any choice in being the being that it’s being, one could say that every life form is innocent, and that’s fair enough, but then the very concepts of innocence and guilt become nearly useless.  Maybe they should be.  Maybe they tend to mislead and muddle people’s thinking.

I don’t know what I’m on about with all this.  I suppose I’ll see how I got to this point when I edit the post.  I doubt it will be terribly enlightening, but it’s not impossible.

That’s enough for today, though.  If any readers do have any thoughts about the Substack idea or anything else, I would be interested to hear them.  And, yes, I would hear them even if they are just written on the page (or, rather, the screen), because when I read, I hear what I’m reading in my head; that’s how I read.  So there.

I hope you have a very good day.

*I think the official term is “composite number” but I don’t think they need (or deserve) a special name.  They are just non-primes.

**I’m using the word “discuss” fairly broadly here, since usually I’m the only one “talking”, and it’s not clear whether or not that counts as a discussion.

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I’m having difficulty coming up with a headline

Well, it’s Monday, 1-26-2026 (in the American ordering of dates), a sequence which is mildly but not very interesting because of the repeated “26”.  Now, come February 26th, writing the date in the more European fashion would be 26-02-2026, which will be almost palindromic, but not quite.  So that would be a sort of tease date, in a way.

None of it matters, of course.  Now, if there were a 62nd of February I would be somewhat tickled on that day.  Of course, in a way, you could say that the 3rd of April is the 62nd of February, if my math is correct.  I think that’s right.  Let’s see, there are 28 days in February (no more than that this year), then 31 days in March, which adds up to 59 days.  Then 3 more days will get you 62, so yeah, April 3rd.

Sorry, I know that’s probably terribly uninteresting to anyone but me.  A lot of things are like that.

I was able to get a decent night’s sleep on Saturday night by sedating myself with a combination of three (or so) different (legal and “over the counter”) medications.  Of course, I cannot do that on a weeknight or I will be useless the next day*.

Not to say that I’m particularly useful at any other time, but at least I can think with some clarity.  My emotions may tumble about‒though evidently they rarely if ever show on my face‒but at least I have a sharp mentality most of the time.  In fact, if I were able to bring myself into more durable focus, I think I could be more mentally acute than I’ve ever been in the past.

That’s because, although I’ve been through a lot of failures over time, I am at least always trying to learn, and I succeed in that quite often.  Whether or not I learn the things that are most interesting and/or most useful is another question.  But it’s hard to know for sure ahead of time what will be most useful to know, so it’s probably best to try to learn as much, about as many things, as well as you possibly can.

That’s probably as wise as I ever get.  Enjoy.

Let’s see, what else should I talk about?  I don’t know.  Is there anything you’re interested in discussing?  Do you have any questions for me that you would like answered**?

I suppose today I shall have to deal with the new format for entering the blog onto WordPress, which is somewhat irritating, because it is more difficult to read as I’m editing, and it is less user friendly.  I am at least half heartedly considering moving my blog to Substack (or something).  I have an account there, anyway, and quite a few of the people whose ideas interest me seem to publish there.

It’s a bit of a no-frills site, where you don’t make your page into a fancy-looking thing, you just publish your stuff, but it has its own sort of built-in social media thing where you can make the equivalent of tweets and respond to those of other people.  And, of course, it has a built-in capacity to set up paid subscriptions for people who want them, and one can choose which things are paywalled and which are not.

To be fair, WordPress has that capacity now, as well, but I’ve never seen it used nor looked too much into using it.  If any of my readers know about it and how it stacks up against other things, such as Patreon (and Substack) please let me know about your experience.  I would greatly appreciate it.

Of course, this is all pie in the sky thinking on my part.  I doubt that anyone cares either way, in any case.  And I don’t know if I’m going to crash and burn sometime in the near future.  I feel that the event is approaching rapidly, but I’ve felt that way often and for a long time, and yet against all odds (and certainly not by popular demand) I am still here.  I’m sort of like the world’s most verbose toenail fungus, in a way.

Anyway, I think this is enough for today.  Again, if any of you have experience with Substack, or with Patreon, or even with the subscription models on WordPress (this site is hosted through WordPress), I would appreciate your feedback.

In any case, I do hope that you have a good day.

*I will not, though, sleep more if I use this on weeknights‒I know this from bitter experience.  Something in my mind overrides even medication (within reason) and still wakes me up stupidly early on any day that I have anything to do, whether it’s work or laundry or what have you.  But the cumulative effects of pharmacological intervention nevertheless dull and slow my mind, so I feel worse very quickly.  Believe me, I’ve tried.

**I make no promise that I will answer just any question you might ask, but I will try to be forthcoming if I can.  I wouldn’t want to discourage someone who is taking an interest; such people are rare.

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Saturday.  Blog post.  Work.  Why am I doing this?

Okay, well, if we must, then let’s go.  I’ll try to write something that’s at least intelligible (which may or may not correlate with being intelligent) so that people won’t feel they’ve completely wasted their time reading my blog today-or hopefully any day that they read my blog, though I cannot guarantee that.

Obviously, as noted, I am working today, though I’m not happy about it.  I’m very tired.  I’m still well within my latest flare-up of my chronic pain, and I was so uncomfortable yesterday that I couldn’t even find any interest in eating comfort food to try to distract me.

The boss actually bought lunch for the office, but I didn’t really want what they were getting.  He offered to get me whatever I wanted, and told me to order from Uber Eats and he would pay me for it.  But nothing, not even ice cream or tacos or burgers or pizza or anything appealed to me.  So I didn’t have lunch.  I had some corn chips in the afternoon, but not very many, and I had a bit of bacon in the evening, because even when you’re not really interested in it, bacon is fairly tasty.

Anyway, this morning is already starting out annoyingly, and that’s not counting the fact that I am getting up to go to work on a Saturday after working Monday through Friday*.  Not that I was asleep.  I woke up more than two hours before I got up, partly because of pain, but also because of just my chronic insomnia/low grade feeling of lack of safety in the jungle at night.

To be clear, though I am living in a subtropical region, I do not actually sleep out in the jungle.  That’s just the feeling I have, that inability to rest and stay asleep, as if I might be attacked at any instant.

I won’t get into the specifics of what is so annoying.  It’s the sort of thing that would annoy pretty much anyone, though it is not life-threatening nor is it life-deranging, in and of itself.  It is, however, one more thing, another little weirdly heavy straw placed on the camel’s back, added to the already all but crippling pile.  Also, there seems to be some kind of fungus or caustic toxin in this pile of straw, because it itches and burns like nobody’s business**.  This is metaphorical, of course, but not far from reality.

Anyway, I don’t feel well.  I’m tired, I’m in pain, I’m exhausted but can’t sleep, and even the things that often tend to give me some degree of joy are not catching my attention.  I feel chaos and decay and dysfunction everywhere, in the world and in myself, and now even in the (paid!) service I use to post my blog.

I feel almost as if I’m sliding along on a zip line over a field of lava far below, and the rope on which I’m hanging is frayed and unraveling.  I can’t tell how long it will last.  Nor can I tell how far it is to my destination.

Maybe there is no destination.  Maybe the zip line just keeps going until the rope finally gives way.  Or maybe, at the far end, you just run out of rope and your zip line rig‒whatever the proper term for it is‒zips off the end, off the top of that final pole, and you go slinging into the lava anyway.

I certainly see nothing that gives me any indication of even any relatively pleasant end to the trip.  It’s just dangling over lava until I eventually fall in, the scent of sulfur and other foul odors rising up to entertain me along the way.  But I’m strapped to the zip line, and to get free prematurely would require unbuckling the harness or cutting the line or perhaps bouncing on it to increase the rate of fraying.  It can be done, but it is intimidating because of the damnable instincts baked into my hardware.

I’m so tired.  And I have no future to which to look forward.  I wish I could just find the courage to take my exit, to unbuckle from or cut the line.  I’m all alone here, anyway, so there’s no one depending on me‒other than the people at the office to a limited degree, I guess.  But one cannot stay alive merely to continue to do a job that one does merely to be able to stay alive.

It’s not as though anyone is anxiously awaiting my next book or my next song, and even the people who read my blog every time I write it are surely not eagerly awaiting it.  No one will be significantly bereft when I’m gone.  They can’t be, because no one is significantly in my presence.  For the most part, with respect to other people, I’m just a concept, a theoretical entity.  I’m not really a person someone could look at and spend time with and potentially touch (let alone help).  I’m an idea‒and not a cool one like the idea of Batman, as discussed in Batman Begins.  Thus, any idea anyone has of me now, they can still have after I die.

Don’t try idly to persuade me that this is not true.  The evidence is strongly against you, so convincing me otherwise is going to be a serious task.

I hope you have a good day, though.

*Oh, and now it turns out the WordPress has changed the way their classic editor works, making it less user-friendly, with a smaller and less clear type-face, so there’s yet another irritating thing, this one involving something with which I deal every single working day.  Perhaps this is a sign that I should just call this blog, and everything else, quits.  I don’t know if I can stand this anymore.  Living in this world is like rolling around naked in a field of nettles and brambles.

**That’s a peculiar expression, isn’t it, “like nobody’s business”?

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“I would rather discover one true cause than gain the kingdom of Persia.”

I’m going to try to keep this short today, because my energy level is petering out.  Although, ironically, depending upon one’s tendencies as a writer, it can take more effort to be brief than to ramble on*.  Still, my communication urge feels quite low.  I don’t think this will probably be all that long.

For the last several days, I’ve been striving to keep my discussions upbeat, though the topics I’ve chosen haven’t been as naturally uplifting as, say, sunflowers and hummingbirds**.  Still, for me they’ve been pretty positive (unlike the “time” component of the Pythagorean-style formula used to calculate the spacetime interval between two events).

But being positive is something that requires deliberate effort for me.  It’s not as much effort as is required for socializing in person, trying to be expressive, gregarious, and pleasant, but it is close.  And alcohol generally does not make it easier to be positive (in contrast to its helpful effects for socializing).

That’s probably good.  If alcohol were not such a very mixed and often unpleasant bag for me, I would probably be prone to have a problem with it.  As it is, its ill-effects almost always, and very quickly, overshadow its benefits.

I’ve had Valium™ I think twice or three times, all in medical circumstances, in my life, and that was revelatory.  Even though I had taken it for procedures such as wisdom teeth removal and cardiac catheterization (both happened when I was a teenager), its effects made me feel normal for maybe the only times in my life.

Normal is not necessarily better than abnormal, either practically or morally; it would probably be better to be an abnormally good and clever orc than to be a “normal” one.  But to feel at ease in one’s skin is a truly remarkable experience for someone who never has felt that way at any other time.

Maybe feeling at ease is not a good thing.  People don’t tend to accomplish much without at least a little tension and dissatisfaction.  I’ve written about the evolutionary inevitability of fear and pain before.  Well, for highly social mammals like humans, social anxiety can be a similarly inevitable tendency.  It can vary from person to person, of course, with some having it to such a degree that it becomes debilitating and some having too little, though what specifically appears as dysfunctional will depend on the overall circumstances.

Speaking of anxiety and pain, my own chronic pain has been flaring up severely for most of the last 48 hours, though I’m not sure what set it into overdrive.  Even if it’s merely some inherent cyclicity to the syndrome, there is still an underlying cause, or set of causes, as there is always a cause or causes for even the basic cycles in nature.  And if one can understand the causes of something, one has a far better chance to do something about them than if one does not.

There is not always a “why” to things, but there is always a “how” to everything that happens.  Telos (τέλος) is almost always misperceived, in the sense that it is almost always not even there (though there is a human bias to perceive it nearly everywhere, seemingly a byproduct of the human tendency, as social animals, to attempt always to read the intentions of others).  But it seems never to be utterly useless to look for ananke (ἀνάγκη) “force, constraint, necessity”.

I don’t know what I’m even getting at right now.  Probably, I’m not getting at anything, right?  I mean, think about what I just said about “how” versus “why”.  

Whatever.  I’m very tired, and not just physically‒except in the sense that everything that actually exists is physical‒but at a deep mental, one might say a “spiritual”, level.  Reality is too noisy and irritating and distracting and often disgusting.  I need some rest from it all, from everything, and probably even from myself.  If “need” is too extreme a word choice (after all, I can survive without it, so in some sense I do not need it) than I want it, and not just idly.

I crave rest from everything, I’m practically jonesing for it.  My metaphorical stomach is growling and my hands are shaking with hunger for it.  If I saw the prospect of a simple, painless, peaceful rest before me, I would probably drool.

Alas, I have merely the ongoing, ever-shifting flare-up of my always irritating chronic pain.  This doesn’t help my insomnia, of course, nor my depression.

And don’t even talk to me about my tinnitus and hearing difficulties.  No, seriously, don’t talk to me about them; I can’t hear you very well.  Just send me an email or a text or something.

Ha ha.  Okay, I guess I’m almost never grim and disheartened enough not to make stupid jokes.

Anyway, I hope you all have a better time than I’ve been having.  I think I’m going to be working tomorrow, and if I do, I will probably write a blog post.

*Thus the famous quote, attributed variously to Mark Twain or to Charles Dickens or to Pascal or even to Cicero:  “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.”

**The reality of which pair is probably more brutal than anything I could say about the irreversibility of time or the nature of stupidity.