writing

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This is the title, not a deed

It’s Monday morning again, despite popular demand, and here I am again, writing a blog post to start the week (despite lack of more or less any demand).  Welcome!

It’s already stupidly muggy here in south Florida, even though it’s only the last day of the first week (the first seven day stretch, not the first Sunday through Saturday period) of April.  And, of course, the world is stupid overall.

But what else is new?  Individual humans can be quite intelligent (in my experience, often far more so than they would credit themselves to be) but humans in large numbers tend to be dragged down by the lowest common denominators or the weakest links or whatever other metaphor you want to use for the least impressive aspects of human beings, either between or within individuals (or both).

As for anything else, well, I’m steadily getting better from my bronchitis, which is certainly something I prefer to continuing to have it.  I’m also trying some newish shoes (not a new make or model, but a slightly tweaked size) that seems to be better for walking than some of my prior ones.

I haven’t read anything from any books in the last 10 days or so‒more or less since I started getting sick‒and though it’s weird, it may be a useful mental break.  To be honest, I’ve had a hard time getting into any books recently, whether fiction or nonfiction, and maybe I just need to clear my head before starting back into things.

Of course, I could go and do some Brilliant dot org stuff and really bone up on my STEM* knowledge.  I could also work on learning some new languages using Babbel, of which I am a subscriber.  I had thought about learning Russian‒women speaking Russian just sound really…good for some reason, and I thought it might be nice to be able to converse with such women‒but given recent politics and conflicts, it’s slightly awkward to be learning Russian right now.  I’d also love to learn more German, or maybe French, and I could use a bit of refreshing on my Spanish, which is rusty.

Unfortunately, Babbel doesn’t really have any Asian languages, or I’d want to use it to improve my Japanese.  I’m a fan and proponent of learning other languages‒I think doing so helps one understand one’s own native language better and to grasp the structure and nature of languages and of thought itself, or at least the logical conveyance thereof.

More likely and more seriously, I’ve been thinking about doing some more deep learning on, well, deep learning, neural nets, as well as general neuroscience and computer science.  I have some background in many of these areas‒for instance, we had a truly wonderful neuroscience textbook in med school that I really loved‒but I would like to understand more.  I’m also interested in complexity and chaos theory and information theory in general.

Who knows whether any of this will ever come to fruition or if I will ever learn enough for it to matter?  It would be nice to make some contribution to human knowledge in some way, and not just by random pontifications here on a blog that’s read by maybe 30 people on a good day.

This is probably all pie in the sky stuff, anyway.  I don’t know what I’m actually going to do, except that if I’m not able to improve my chronic pain significantly, then all other bets are off.  In the meantime, I almost want to put out an appeal for requests (or a request for appeals) from readers.  It’s the sort of thing people with YouTube channels (and similar) do by getting Patreon accounts, where people pay some nominal amount to be patrons and are supposed to get some form of extra benefits through that, like recommending movies to which to react, or asking “ask me anything” type questions, that sort of thing.

I guess I wouldn’t mind people asking me to write about certain topics or subjects‒it might be better than just shouting into the vacuum, hoping someone notices.  Maybe it would get me more readers.

So , if any of you have any requests about things you want me to discuss‒within reason, of course‒then feel free to mention it in the comments below.  And by below, I mean below here on the website robertelessar.com, not on the website formerly known as Twitter or on Facebook or Bluesky or Threads or whatever.  Maybe if I were doing this as a full time job, I could commit to monitoring such venues thoroughly, but unless there is someone out there who really does want to be my patron, then I can only do this in my spare time‒like now, while I’m commuting to the office.  So please, if you actually want to give me feedback, come here to do it.

Thanks.  In the meantime, I hope you have a good week.

*I recently saw someone recommend the STEM acronym be changed to STEAM in one video from Computerphile, I think‒maybe it was Bill Maher‒because the person was pointing out that we need to have exposure to the “arts” (and humanities in general) if we want people to get exposed to interesting ideas and creativity to apply to their science, technology, engineering, and math stuff.  The argument was well made, and I’m not going to do it justice here, just bringing it up.

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I can’t think of a Shakespeare based title right now

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, and I’m writing this blog post on my laptop computer instead of on my smartphone, because yesterday when leaving the office, I felt like carrying my laptop computer with me.  That’s it.  There’s no better reason than that.  I was still in a lot of pain, but since trying to be careful with my back wasn’t making any difference, I figured the extra load of a pound or two couldn’t matter much.  It didn’t, as far as I can tell.

I don’t have any subject about which to write at the moment, and that’s beginning to get troubling, though I’m not entirely sure why that should be; certainly, it’s never slowed me down before.  I can always seem to write, the way some people can always seem to talk, and the good thing about writing is that I can go on and on about whatever subject I choose, just indulging myself, and I don’t have to stammer to a stop at some point because I realize that no one nearby has any interest in—and often no idea about—whatever I’m trying to discuss.

For the most part, people try to be patient with me, and for the most part, I try to pay attention to when people are obviously getting bored.  But it’s nice not to have to worry about it.  Anyone who isn’t interested in what I’m writing simply doesn’t have to read.

My pain is slightly less intrusive this morning.  I can move a bit more easily than yesterday without having to stop and hold still for a bit every time as if I’ve been stabbed or something.  It still hurts, but then, it always hurts.

I kept having an idea go through my head yesterday—it’s not a new idea—about possibly trying to write a new story, starting and finishing entirely on my smartphone using Google Docs.  I don’t know whether I would enjoy it or not, or if I would even do it; currently I don’t so much as have a candidate idea for a new story.  And, of course, those of you who have followed this blog for a while will recall that I recently wrote a new novella, called Extra Body, but that after an edit or two I lost interest in it and just published it here.  If you haven’t already, you can read it here.  If you like it, maybe you’ll look into some of my other stories.  Heck, maybe you can share and maybe tell some friends and followers.

Still, the prospect of writing a new story, which ought to be at least a little exciting, is just a dull and even an unpleasant thought to me, because I would expect to put in the effort of writing and then have barely anyone read what I wrote and have to watch it just sit out there, pointless and inert.

So, I don’t know if I’m going to write anything.  I guess I could look through my old story ideas and see if anything jumps out at me.  I haven’t had any new story ideas in a while, or at least, I haven’t written any down that come to me (they still do come).  There doesn’t seem to be much point in doing it.

My coworker is going to be away tomorrow and Monday because it’s his wife’s birthday and they’re going on a short trip, so it’s going to be slightly more stressful than usual at work.

I don’t understand it, really.  Who, as an adult, goes on a trip when they have a birthday?  I don’t recall ever going on a trip for my birthday, to be honest.  I don’t think I would want to do so, but even if I did, I don’t think it would happen.

I don’t have anyone with whom to go on a trip nowadays, or frankly, even with whom to go to see a movie or watch a TV show or whatever.  I’m actually very lonely, but it’s not as though I’m just able to make friends with just anyone and just start hanging out with someone.  The process of meeting someone new and getting used to someone and being comfortable making plans with another person is very difficult and ridiculously anxiety-provoking even to contemplate.

It’s very much a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situation.  And so, I’m just blah, just a dust mote floating in nothingness.  Unfortunately, it’s not a free-fall kind of nothingness, so there is net gravitational force on me at all times, and that causes my various pains to continue to act up.

I’m sure it’s probably nothing that I don’t deserve.  Goodness knows that I’m hard for other people to get close to, or even to tolerate, since I get so awkward around other people and have such a hard time feeling any common ground.  Also, I’m pretty fucking weird.

Anyway, that’s about it for today.  I don’t think I’ve said anything that’s of any use to anyone, except perhaps as a way to pass a few moments’ time on our mutual path to oblivion—or, as David Mitchell put it, “Whiling away our finite time before the grave.”

He says this at approximate time stamp 10:15 in the linked video.  It’s worth watching; it’s quite funny.

I don’t know if I’ll put a picture here or do a Shakespeare-based title.  I guess you’ll already know the answer long before you read this part of the post, won’t you?  I envy you.  I wish I’d already decided.

I guess beggars can’t be choosers.  And we’re all beggars here, when you get right down to it.  No one was born because they deserved to be born, so to speak; you can’t earn your existence before you exist.  You can’t choose your parents/genes, your place of origin, your time of origin, or your developmental influences.  And if you could choose, the odds of you (or anyone else) choosing wisely seem pretty low.

In the meantime, just…try to have a good day if you can.

TTFN

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No links to famous people’s works here. They don’t link to ME, after all.

I thought for a moment that someone had been listening to me, because when I started this new Word file from the last blog post I wrote on my mini-laptop computer, it was in Calibri font right from the beginning!  Then I went and closed the earlier file/blog post, and when I had returned to this one, the base font had reverted to Aptos (which I like to call “craptos” because I don’t think it merits a more sophisticated insult).

So, it turns out that no one was listening to me, of course.

It’s Tuesday now, and I’m writing this on my laptop computer as indicated above.  This will probably make it faster to write, but whether it’s any better written than yesterday’s post, I cannot say.  I felt that yesterday’s writing was fairly erratic and disjointed and borderline incoherent, but I often have a difficult time judging how my writing will be perceived by other people.

If it’s fiction, I can only care up to a certain point, because I write fiction that I want to read, so I cannot try to adjust it for others too much.  I can only guess that somewhere out there exists at least one other person whose reading taste is similar to mine, and who might enjoy my stories.  So far, not counting my sister*, I don’t know of more than three people who have read any of my fiction, so it’s hard to tell.

But, of course, though my tastes have been esoteric at times—especially when it comes to my love of relatively deep scientific and mathematical and philosophical reading—I have also enjoyed some massively popular books of certain kinds.  For instance, my very favorite book of all time is The Lord of the Rings (taking it as one large book, as it was initially written), and that’s hardly a rare choice.  Similarly, I’m a great fan of Shakespeare, and it’s not as though no one else ever reads or otherwise enjoys his plays.

There have also been popular series of books for which I waited eagerly and excitedly as each volume came out, including The Second Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, The Belgariad, the various Dragonlance books**, and of course the Harry Potter books.  I’m sure I’ve written here somewhere about how I read Harry Potter and the Half-blood Prince seven times while waiting for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows to come out.  All of these books have been quite popular, and I enjoyed them, too.

Then again, I had no interest whatsoever in any of the Twilight books, though I have written about vampires (and a demi-vampire) in one of my own books.  Likewise, I had no interest in Fifty Shades of Grey or the various Dan Brown books, and I haven’t read any new science fiction or fantasy in years, not counting Japanese light novels.

Speaking of that, I am very much impatient for some new volumes in a few light novel series I have read so far, but being light novels, they are much quicker to read than they are to publish.

In any case, I mean to say that just because I write to my own taste doesn’t mean that my stories are particularly esoteric in their nature and character.  I may be an alien in disguise, even to myself, but that doesn’t mean that stories that are bad are going to interest me.  Good stories have at least some degree of universality.  Even the Klingons love Shakespeare!***

My point is that, though I know I am a peculiar bean, I also think there are probably a lot of people (maybe not a majority, but a lot) who would enjoy at least some of my books and short stories.  But I am not good at promoting myself and making other people aware of my work.  This is probably related to my ASD and the related social anxiety, but also to my general self-hatred.  I tried to do a little promoting of my stuff at first, but it quickly became too stressful and irritating for me to tolerate.

So, if anyone out there has it in them—and so desires—to promote my stuff, even if just by sharing links and references in your own social media, that would be appreciated very much.  And while we’re at it, if anyone out there has a quick and easy cure for chronic pain*****, let me know.  Also, I want a unicorn.  (Actually, I want a dragon, but that might be harder to keep safely.)

Well, this post has probably been just as goofy and incoherent as yesterday’s.  My apologies.  That is, unless you like that sort of thing, in which case:  enjoy.  And try to have a good day.

*Not to imply that she doesn’t “count” in some important sense—she most certainly does—but just that it’s difficult to tease out the family relation from the other variables in the mix, so I cannot draw too many conclusions too easily.

**The ones that involved Raistlin, at least.  I didn’t have much interest in stories involving only the other characters of the stories.  Those of you who know those books can probably understand why this is so.

***Indeed, as the Klingon ambassador said in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country****, “You have never experienced Shakespeare until you have read him in the original Klingon.”

****The title itself is a Shakespearean reference, though in the movie, the undiscovered country is peace, whereas when Hamlet said it, he explicitly referred to death as the undiscovered country, one from whose bourn no traveler returns.

*****I don’t want to hear anyone saying “death” because that doesn’t count as a cure.  It makes the problem go away; it doesn’t solve it.  There is a difference.  And, don’t worry, as readers of my plan know, that is my own intended course of action if I cannot reduce my pain enough.

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Why would mice and men plan things together? Small wonder such plans go awry.

It’s Friday, as you know if you’re reading this on the day it’s posted.  I’m writing this on my smartphone because I didn’t feel like bringing my laptop computer with me when I left the office yesterday, but I’m beginning to regret it slightly.  My thumbs have still not completely recovered from their inflammation.  Perhaps they will never fully recover.  Who knows?  But it’s certainly the case that writing on the computer is much easier and more “natural” for me.

I will be working tomorrow if the office is open, and if so I will probably write a blog post.  For the past two weekends the office has not been open, since we had so few people willing to come in.  But maybe this weekend will be different, though we still have a lot of people out of the office.

As for anything else, well…I haven’t backslid on what to eat so far, in that I am following a path that should be good or at least useful.  I must say, though, there were times yesterday‒there are such times many days‒when I thought that maybe what I ought to do is just lock myself in the house and eat ice cream and cookies in huge quantities until it kills me.

Unfortunately, it takes a very long time to kill oneself that way, I’ll wager.  The body has a very high capacity to store calories before it completely breaks down and falls apart.  Individual mileage will vary, of course, but the mileage is long.  Such a course might be enough to make me stop liking ice cream and/or cookies, but that’s not the specific goal.

Yesterday I was also contemplating, both to myself and with my coworker, what I might be like if I had not had my back injury a little over 20 years ago.  I think I said something like, “You should see what I would be like if I didn’t have chronic pain.  You have no idea.”

I don’t have specific ideas myself either, but I do know that I used to be someone who‒when not suffering from too much chronic depression and apparently autistic burnout‒could do just about anything to which I put my mind.  For instance, I decided to apply to medical school more or less as an afterthought, but I never doubted that I could get in or that I could become a doctor.

It’s not that I was cocky.  Self-confidence of that sort has been something I occasionally pretended to have, but it’s not my natural state.  I just considered medical school an eminently soluble problem and proceeded to solve it.

Medical school does not involve a mentally super-challenging curriculum.  There’s a lot of information to internalize, of course, but none of it involves dealing with any counterintuitive notions.  There are rarely any complex numbers or linear algebra or calculus or differential geometry involved in medicine!  Quantum mechanics essentially never comes into play, except perhaps in describing vaguely how MRIs and PET scans work.

Anyway, things being so stochastic, it’s very difficult to imagine what I or my life would be like if I had never developed my chronic pain and back problem.  I might still be working in Winter Park as a doctor; I might still be married; and I would be much more likely to be with my kids, or at least to be able to see and interact with them.  I would also probably be much less grumpy than I am.  I don’t know how my autism itself would change its presentation.  Maybe I never would have sought out or even considered the diagnosis.

I guess it’s pointless to contemplate these things.  We cannot change the past.  Still, one of the big strengths of the human brain (or a pseudo-human brain) is the ability to contemplate counterfactuals as simulations so one can make decisions based on assessment of potential outcomes, colored by past experience and knowledge, rather than having to do everything trial-and-error, with death weeding out the worst local failures.

Still, all I can see stretching before me if I cannot reduce my pain and try to get better sleep at the least is loneliness (which is what I deserve, I guess) and pain and never-ending fatigue, with intermittent forced distraction.  That’s not worth the risk, especially since, in that scenario, an accidental or medical death would be one of the better outcomes.

Anyway, my resolve hasn’t changed since I discussed it earlier this week.  In the meantime, I hope you have a good day.  If I work tomorrow, I will probably write another post.  If not, I won’t.

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It seems to me most strange that men should blog

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, so I’m writing yet another blog post.  I’m also writing this on my miniature laptop computer, though it has seen better days and is getting a little bit laggy.

I don’t have anything in particular about which to write.  Certainly, I have no subject like yesterday’s, though I do wish to make clear that I was not joking in my previous blog post, and I am every bit as resolved today as I was yesterday to carry out my plan.  I’ve already begun, in fact, in the sense that yesterday I was very specific about what I ate.

Of course, I didn’t sleep very well last night, and I feel very, very tired, but what else is new?  I’ve been tired for almost as long as I can remember.  This fact gets tiring in its own right, which seems to be, well, not a contradiction, and certainly not ironic, but a positive (yet not positive, if you see what I mean) feedback loop.  Being tired is exhausting of morale, or poisonous to the will, or however you want to put it.

I think you probably worry too much about such things, though.  You should be like me, a catch as catch can, go with the flow, Hippy Dippy Dan sort of guy.

Ha ha, that’s a joke, of course.  I am not a laid-back person, and I don’t know that I ever have been.  I’m wound so tightly that only dogs and bats can hear me vibrating.  There were at least three times yesterday in the office when I literally jumped at sudden noises*.  It’s not such a surprise, I guess, that I get along well with cats—at least as well as most cats do with each other.

As an aside, since I’m writing this on the laptop computer for the first time in a while, might I say that if any of you have any avenues by which to address the movers and shakers of Microsoft, please tell them to do something about that stupid little icon that relates to their “AI”** which is there because, apparently, most people feel the need to have some electronic pseudo-entity hold their hands while they write something on a frikking word processor.

It’s pathetic and irritating.  If you know a way simply to turn that process off voluntarily, please let me know.  I haven’t looked for how to do it, but if it’s anything like how readily one can change from their new, horrible default font, there may be no readily available avenue.

I don’t need an AI to help me write.  I’ve been writing since before the effing TRS-80 came out.  I correct AI editing suggestions more often than they correct me.

I’m all in favor of spelling and grammar checkers, especially the ones that work after the fact, not while one is still writing (which can be quite distracting and annoying).  After all, pretty much everyone makes some errors in a first draft.  But I don’t need a machine to help create my writing for me, any more than I want one to help me come up with a tune or draw a picture from scratch.

My boss once said of me, when a few of us were discussing such things in passing in the office, “Doc is an AI.”  I guess that’s a compliment, and I took it as such, but if he was only thinking of our current generation of such things, it’s a bit insulting (though he didn’t mean it thus, I’m quite sure).

Anyway, that’s all as may be.  I got the payroll done efficiently yesterday, and honestly, I felt relatively upbeat in the office.  I haven’t yet revealed my plan to anyone there, yet; the time wasn’t really right, and I don’t want people to get distracted.  But there was a certain freedom of mind associated with having come to a decision, and having declared it publicly, that if I cannot in fairly short order get thinner and reduce my pain, I will kill myself.

Perhaps it’s just the sense of having an available escape that made me feel a bit less stressed.  As Radiohead sang in “Weird Fishes/Arpeggi”, “Yeah, I…I hit the bottom…hit the bottom and escape.  Escape.”  Hitting the bottom can be freeing sometimes, and the availability of an escape can be soothing.

It’s not ideal, of course.  It would be much better if people didn’t ever need to feel that they needed an escape.  But reality was not made for us, and we were not so much made for it as made by it, and quite by accident, as far as I can see.  In a way, if there were a designer that made us for reality, there would be more about which to complain, because that designer clearly fucked up many times.

I am surely one of those fuckups.

Anyway, that’ll do for now.  I hope you all have a good day, or at least as good a day as you can.  I’m going to have a usual, typical day for me, probably, which is nothing about which to write home.  And I don’t think I’ll write about it here.

TTFN

*My recording of a sudden versus not-so-sudden noise.

**That looks like the name Al, doesn’t it?  Can you tell the difference without context?

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What shall I do now?

I wrote the beginning of a first draft of a post for yesterday (which was Monday, since today is Tuesday) before it became obvious as I was getting ready for work that something in my GI tract, something that I had eaten, was taking its vengeance upon me.

I ended up not going to the office yesterday, and I ended up not even posting the draft, which I considered posting as was*.  However, there was really not much substance to it.  I think I realized as I was writing that it was St. Patrick’s Day, so I mentioned that in passing, but it’s never been a holiday that means much to me, at least not now that I cannot eat my mother’s homemade corned beef and cabbage.

Anyway, that’s a lot of the gist of yesterday’s post, at least if I recall correctly.  Oh, right, I also mentioned that, starting yesterday morning, I am not taking St. John’s Wort anymore.  I gave it well over the 6 week potential time frame for antidepressants at least to start to make a noticeable difference.  Some enterprising reader can‒if you are so inclined‒try to work out based on mentions in my posts roughly how long I’ve been going, but clearly it’s not been making my depression diminish; I think we can all agree about that.

I was also worried, probably unnecessarily, that it might be contributing to the recent apparent worsening of my chronic pain.  I don’t think that’s the case, but it’s a bit too soon to tell, and the matter is muddied by my recent GI trouble, which still leaves me feeling a bit bloated and sore this morning.

As for anything else, well, I don’t know.  What else do I have about which to write other than depression and illness and pain and insomnia?  I suppose I could write more about autism spectrum disorder, but I feel that would be a bit presumptuous of me.

Of course, I’ve learned a fair amount about autism in the research that eventually led me to seek a diagnosis, and my medical and scientific background gives me other advantages in understanding.  But I have been someone diagnosed with autism (level 2, not just level 1, so apparently I need significant support**) only for a few weeks now, so I don’t know about what even to talk.  What of the people, places, and events of my life are explained or explicated by the autism diagnosis?  Does it, or will it, help me come to terms with any of it?  I don’t know.

I certainly don’t feel that I can just waltz into any discussions of or by people with autism, or communities of such people, and have anything useful to say.  I also don’t feel that I have found “my people”, though I certainly can “get” at least some of the things they discuss better than I can some of the things that other people discuss.  But I still feel very much like an alien, an outsider, a changeling, a replicant, something that doesn’t belong on this planet‒even when I’m interacting with neurodivergent people.

So, I guess we’ll see what happens with the DCing of the Wort.  I doubt it will really affect my pain, though it may pain my affect*** if my depression worsens even from where it is now thanks to stopping it.  In any case, it really doesn’t matter, because I really don’t matter, so Batman knows what will happen.  If I implode completely, or if I crash and burn, or whatever figure of speech you want to use, there will be no significant loss, not even to me.

I don’t know what else to say.  I’m not doing anything creative or artistic.  I haven’t played guitar (or any other instrument) in weeks now, and I haven’t written fiction, and I haven’t drawn.  I’ve barely read anything other than rereading my own stuff to try to inspire or at least trigger myself.  That hasn’t worked.

So, who knows what will happen?  I certainly don’t.  But in the meanwhile, I hope you have a good day.

*The past tense of “as is”.

**I don’t really have that support, but just because someone needs something to be able to thrive doesn’t mean that thing is available to them.  Reality is heartless.

***Ha ha.

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Pi and the sky

It’s Friday and it’s Pi Day (i.e., in the American way of writing dates, it is 3-14, the first 3 digits of pi, the mathematical constant).  There was also a full moon last night, as well as a lunar eclipse.  Incidentally, lunar eclipses only happen during full moons (and solar eclipses only happen during “new” moons).

Okay, that’s probably the only even arguably interesting thing I have to say, so if you want, you can stop reading now.

I’m not really feeling any better today than yesterday.  I’ve had really bad pain, and walking is making things worse rather than better at the moment.  I’m not sure what to do about all of it.  Maybe there’s nothing to do about any of it.  Not all problems are solvable in the short term, with locally available knowledge and resources.

I do know that my general misanthropy, and indeed, my panantipathy, has been strengthened in recent months and weeks and days and even hours.  This is not meant to imply that every bit of incoming information has been confirmatory of my general disgust with humans and with reality in general.  That would be extraordinarily improbable.  If that were to appear to be the case, it would more likely indicate severe biases on my part than that reality is entirely negative.  Still the state of the world is overall pretty rancid, and so many people behave so stupidly.

Now, I would never expect anyone to be free from stupidity‒I’ve said before that intelligence and knowledge are always finite, while ignorance is always infinite.  Batman knows I’m plenty stupid, myself, and indeed, I berate myself more in a single average day (often combined with literal physical abuse) than I’ve probably berated other people in any given week, and possibly months or longer.  Also, I rarely berate other people as viciously or nastily as I do myself.  But that’s because I spend every waking moment with myself, so I have no respite from my own stupidity.

I don’t think I have much to say, otherwise.  The world is shit, overall, or at least that’s my provisional conclusion.  I’m open to countervailing evidence and argument, but I’m not seeking it out or asking for it.  I’ve spent a lot of my life looking for and trying to focus on the good things about reality, trying to find the arguments for optimism and reasons to continue, with far less success than I might have hoped*.  So please don’t try to persuade me unless you have something you think is original to say.

That’s enough for today.  I have nothing new to add at the moment.  I don’t know whether I’ll be working tomorrow‒there aren’t very many people available to come in, so I don’t know what the decision will be‒so I don’t know whether I will even consider writing a blog post.  Even if I do work, I don’t know if I will write a post.  I probably shouldn’t have bothered writing this one.  It’s not very good, and it’s certainly not uplifting or inspiring or edifying in any reasonable sense.

Oh, well, that’s pretty much a good description of reality, and it comes full circle to my point.  Whatever the case, whether it’s meaningless or not, I hope you have a good day and a good weekend.

*One might say that the search for reasons to be optimistic is itself a sign of optimism, and it’s not an entirely meritless point, but it’s not enough.  The desire to desire to live is not the same as the actual desire to live.  The wish to see if there is any worthwhile purpose to anything is not the same as having a worthwhile purpose.

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I’m sorry, I don’t have the energy for a Shakespeare based title

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, and though I don’t particularly feel like it, I’m writing a blog post because it’s Thursday.  This doesn’t necessarily mean I’m going to write one tomorrow or Saturday (assuming we* are open, which we probably will be, since it’s rare to be closed two weekends in a row).  As far as I know, I will not.

I don’t really have any energy or impetus to write much.  I’m trying.  I’ve been rereading my fiction to try to stimulate myself, but so far it’s obviously not doing the trick.  I reread first The Chasm and the Collision, then Son of Man, then The Vagabond, and just yesterday finished rereading Mark Red.  I’ve also reread a few of my short stories.  But, though I’ve enjoyed rereading my stuff as far as it goes, it’s not really doing anything as far as catalyzing any desire to write, whether fiction or nonfiction.

I think things would be much more positive if I were able to get a good sleep (at least one night) and especially if I weren’t in daily, increasing pain.  I’d be tempted even to try ketamine if I thought it would really help, though there are some cautionary examples in the mainstream media that would give me pause.  Heck, I’d practically be willing to try full-on PCP if I had good reason to think it would provide lasting relief without causing worse problems.

Of course, there’s the rub.  All of these things that can provide even temporary, real relief have a range of side-effects that would make my situation even worse than it is.  Yes, I freely admit that my life could get worse.  It’s almost always true that things could be worse than they actually are.  But that doesn’t mean they’re good.

I’m just so weary, so tired of every day being dominated by both physical and psychological pain.

Actually, I feel that the last adjective there should be “psychical” not “psychological”, since the latter term refers to the study of the psyche, and I don’t have pain or suffering that involves the study of my psyche, just pain in my psyche itself.  Still, the common usage, for what it’s worth, seems to lean toward “psychological”.  Then again, current common parlance refers to psychological problems as “mental health”, as in “Are you suffering from mental health?” which makes little sense.

I wish I could wrap myself in some kind of life-support cocoon and undergo some form of metamorphosis, like Adam Warlock in the comic books.  Hell, just being able to sleep for a while seems like it’s a ridiculous, superstitiously foolish notion, on a par with the expectations of the Heaven’s Gate cultists, who thought a space ship was coming to gather their souls (and was supposedly hiding in, I think, the tail of the Hale-Bopp comet).

I want to rest.  I want to stop being in constant pain.  It’s been going on for more than twenty years, and it’s tainted every aspect my existence.  It has contributed to everything from the breakup of my marriage, to my arrest and incarceration, and to my inability to sustain or create any kind of close relationship of any kind.

The people “closest” to me are hundreds to thousands of miles away, and I have no doubt that if they were physically closer, a kind of Uncertainty Principle-like process would occur, such as what makes the momentum/energy of, say, an electron greater and greater the more tightly you try to pin it down, until more and more of its wave function leaks out and the probability of it being elsewhere‒even on the other side of the universe, so to speak‒dominates over any local presence.

I’m probably not explaining that very well, I’m sorry.  But I don’t even have any will to watch science videos or to read science books or what have you, let alone to go into any rigorous discussions thereof.  I’m just making the point that I’m much better for other people from a distance than from up close, with the function approaching a singularity (of negative infinity) as the distance from me shrinks toward zero, rather like some logarithmic function.  This graph (of log base 2) demonstrates why, from a certain distance, it can start even to be pleasant to interact with me, though with diminishing returns…but woe betide anyone who drops below one unit of distance.

Okay, that’s enough for today.  It’s probably much more than enough.  I’m sorry to be so tedious; believe me, no one gets more tired of me than I do of myself.  At least all of you can just go read something else by someone else, or do something else entirely.  Not I.  I am stuck with being and enduring the miserable git that I am every waking moment.  And waking moments make up far too great a proportion of the times of my life.

Have a good day, if you can.

TT…FN, I guess.

*By we, I mean the office at which I work.  While I have no problem joining with you, my readers, into a collective, first person plural pronoun, I simply have no idea what y’all’s work schedules are.

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Anyway, here’s my Friday blog post

Well, it’s Friday, the official end to another work week‒though I am scheduled to work tomorrow‒and I am here writing yet another blog post.  Today, I’m writing on my phone, since the few days’ rest seems to have eased my thumbs at least a little.  Also, I feel that my last few posts, which were written on my mini laptop computer, sucked and went on too long*, so using the smartphone might improve things.  I don’t imagine it could readily make things much worse.

I’ve been having a great deal of pain over the last several days, as I think I’ve mentioned.  I mean, I’m in pain every day, pretty much all the time, but it does vary from day to day and even from moment to moment.  When it’s at its baseline, I can almost ignore it for a while.  But when it’s acting up, it’s very hard for me to put in the background.  It dominates whatever else might be happening.  It makes everything harder‒and things are often not easy for me in the first place because of my chronic depression and (apparently) due to my hitherto undiagnosed autism.

Anyway, I’ve felt very stiff and grumpy and above all pretty miserable over the past several days, but apparently, it doesn’t quite show on the outside.  I’ve occasionally quoted the song Brain Damage by Pink Floyd as representing the way I often feel:  “And if the cloud bursts thunder in your ear / You shout and no one seems to hear / And if the band you’re in starts playin’ different tunes / I’ll see you on the dark side of the moon.”

I guess the inability to make others aware of my distress‒and often my own inability to recognize it in myself‒is probably at least partly related to ASD.  I suppose it’s just as well that this aspect of it keeps me from being too irritating to the people around me (at least in this way).  I know that I’m plenty annoying in numerous other ways, though, and I spend a lot of time berating myself for having been an idiot in many situations and interactions.

I also find myself spending a lot of time being severely irritated by people and occurrences in the world around me.  Sometimes the irritation is perfectly well-deserved, and sometimes it is thoroughly irrational and unfair on my part.

I don’t know what to do with any of it.  I don’t know what to do with my life, other than to wad it up and throw it in the figurative dumpster.  I’m already like a plate of leftovers that’s been left in a not-quite-cool-enough refrigerator for many months.  I’m a putrid, fungus-and-bacteria-riddled mass of something that was (maybe) once fit for human consumption.

Now, even the most robust person‒or even a dog or a pig or a flipping billy goat‒would vomit if they thought to bring me into their lives.

If you look closely, you might even be able to make out the shape of what I used to be, but that old outline is obscured by alien clouds of hyphae and fruiting bodies, by oozing purulent liquid, and by the scent of mildew and gangrene.

The things I am and which remain to me are merely reminders and mockeries of what I used to be and what I used to have.  But even back then, in my “heyday”, I was a mess, never worthy of the good that existed in my life.  At least I’m more self-aware of my shortcomings now than I used to be.

But literally every step I take is painful.  Everything I do is uncomfortable.  And though I have never had an inherent belief or thought that I have any right to be comfortable, it all does old.  It’s something that can be endured if there is a compensatory reward of some kind; if one has love, if one has friendship, if one has companionship and purpose, then one can tolerate a great deal.  Otherwise, it’s just a parade of painful, pointless moments.

Of course, I would never say that I have more pain or discomfort than any other person.  I’m quite sure that there are many, many, many people whose lives are more painful and whose existence is less positive, less valuable or beneficial to themselves than mine is to me.  I don’t know why such people bother.  I don’t know why I bother.

I find myself disgusting.  I’m pathetic and weak and unimpressive, and I need to stop deluding myself that some day I might once again become otherwise (if I ever have been).  The return on the daily invested effort of existence is tiny, and it’s shrinking all the time.

That’s enough for today.  Honestly, with as much pain as I’ve been in, and as unpleasant as I find my own company, I would not complain if I don’t live to post tomorrow**.  I doubt anyone else would, either.

In the meantime, please try to have a good day, if you can.  You might as well.

*Reminiscent of my life, in that sense.

**That’s trivially true in a sense, of course.  If I’m not alive, how can I complain?  Nevertheless, I do mean it more deeply here.

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I do wish thou wert a dog, that I might blog thee something.

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, and I’m writing another blog post.

I did an update yesterday to my little miniature laptop, and now the MS Word (and presumably Office overall) has also been updated, with—as usual—relatively frustrating consequences.

Microsoft appears to have a real knack for changing things that were perfectly fine and making them not as good as they used to be, adding things that no intelligent person wants—like their frequent, irritating interruptions asking us if we want to let their AI assist us.

And, of course, they still have their stupid Craptos font in place as the baseline, even though it looks terrible and not at all professional.  Honestly, I’d rather submit a scientific paper in Comic Sans than in that stupid new Aptos, largely because they haven’t given us a choice whether or not to have that as our primary font.

They also have that stupid office icon everywhere that looks sort of like a ribbon folded over four times, or whatever that stupid symbol is supposed to seem to be.  It’s distracting and intrusive.  Why do they change things just for the sake of changing something?  It’s just stupid.

This is one of the big failings of some among the “progressive” end of the political spectrum.  They rant on and on about wanting to make “change”.  But change, in and of itself, is not necessarily a good thing.  I’ve gone over this so many times, but random change is much more likely to be detrimental than beneficial, especially in a system that is functioning relatively well.

Most mutations in germline cells don’t lead to improved survival and reproduction.  Only the rare few that happen to confer some local advantage will make an organism more robust.  That’s natural selection, and it is inherently blind and stupid.  It only produces “progress” because it has unthinkably long time-scales and numbers of organisms with which to work, and is utterly blind to suffering and failure and, yes, even to extinction.

When engineered systems are changed, those changes need to be evaluated, carefully thought through, and ideally tested thoroughly before being put into full implementation.  Otherwise, matters can degenerate rather than be enhanced.

Random mutations almost never produce benefit; even a complex, reasonably stable system is going to suffer if there are arbitrary changes.  Most systems in reality are not streamlined, smoothly functioning, sleek and simple designs.  They are Rube Goldberg machines, and if one bit of random “machinery” goes off, almost always the whole thing will fail completely.

In the body, random genetic changes are likely to lead to cell death or, even worse, to the development of cancer.  Similarly, radical changes in products or governments are almost always catastrophic.  This is one of the reasons even Jefferson noted, in the Declaration of Independence, that prudence recommends that, while imperfections in a current government are tolerable, it’s usually better not to go the way of revolution but to endure, changing the system gradually from within.

Only when there is no other way to do things that does not entail worse suffering should one overthrow or radically change the government.

Of course, for government changes to be overall beneficial, it’s important for the people involved to be knowledgeable and thoughtful, careful, committed to making things as good as possible and willing to correct their own errors (which requires them to admit to being fallible).  This is part of why the current and recent governments, in the USA at least, have been horrible.  They are run by micro-brained monkeys throwing their feces at each other, too stupid to realize that they are ignorant, and too narcissistic (on both sides) to be self-correcting.

Even the people at Microsoft, which is a premier technology company and has made real advances and improvements in its day, seem prone to this moronic “change for the sake of change” thing.

I hate them.  I hate all of them.  I hate everything.  It’s all so, so, so irritating.  People are so stupid they think that they—or some people—run the world, which is utter nonsense.  They seem to imagine that the people and places that exist now are real, while the countless dead people in the past are not.  But we are the same as our dead forebears.  We are all just individual molecules in a vast bath, or as Kansas so eloquently put it, “just a drop of water in an endless sea”.

The fact that all these little AI assistant things are being mindlessly added into products is an example of change that it not well-considered.  It’s just a desperate, hysterical attempt to compete again others who are doing the same stupid thing.  We don’t know yet what good, if any, will come of it, but outcomes will almost certainly be unforeseeable—even by AIs.

I don’t know if it’s possible for me to have any realistic hope at all for the future of civilization, whether human or artificial or some combination.  So far, AIs have only impressed me when they have carefully focused goals, like winning at Go or figuring out protein folding.

I’m angry and frustrated.  At times, I just want to destroy all life in the universe and all potential for future life.  It just so often seems that life is a thoroughly bad idea in and of itself.

But probably it will be more efficient if I just destroy me.  I’m sure most people would prefer that to other options.

In the meantime, try to have a good day if you can, enmeshed as you all are in the poisonous net of reality.

TTFN