writing

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Do you remember a Guy that’s been in such an early song?

It’s Guy Fawkes Day in the UK‒also known as Bonfire Night if I’m not mistaken.  “Remember, remember, the 5th of November, the gunpowder, treason, and plot…” and all that.  The holiday isn’t celebrated in the US, which is not surprising, since it has to do with a failed attempt to blow up the Houses of Parliament in 1605, before the future United States was seriously being colonized, let alone officially founded.

Of course, it’s still a good day for civil resistance (though perhaps without the explosives).  It might be a good day for some group to slip powerful laxatives into the food of many, if not all, of the members of the current administration and many of the members of Congress and the Senate and even the Supreme Court.  Our national government could certainly use a serious colon cleanse, metaphorically speaking; it might be amusing for that to become literal*.

I’m not actually endorsing that action or encouraging it, but it’s a rather entertaining thought.

I’m very tired today, even though we’re just coming into the middle of the week.  Of course, I’m almost always tired but very rarely sleepy, which is not a great combination.  I suppose someone who never gets a full night’s sleep does, in a certain sense, live more than someone who sleeps well.  If, say, a person can only sleep 4 hours a night instead of 8, then after 60 years, they will have been awake for the equivalent of another person’s 75 years, if my math is right, and ceteris paribus.

But all other things are very much not equal when one has chronic insomnia.  The early part of Fight Club gives some pretty good descriptions of how insomnia can feel.  I particularly like the line, “…everything is a copy of a copy of a copy…” which does give something of an idea of the feeling of never getting enough sleep.

So the tradeoff would seem to be, in a sense, living more but worse versus living less but better.  But that still doesn’t quite capture matters, because chronic insomnia also increases the occurrence of many chronic and even acute illnesses, thus likely shortening the insomniac’s life relative to good sleepers’ lives.  One’s immune system tends to suffer, for one thing, which not only affects one’s risk of infection but also of cancer.  In addition, one’s metabolism gets thrown askew, probably partly due to chronically elevated stress hormones.

Of course, some of these effects might actually be causes, mightn’t they be?  Chronically elevated stress hormones can, by more than one route, reduce one’s sleep quantity and quality, for instance.  That’s one of the tricky things about the biology of multicellular organisms.  Many questions become “chicken and egg” problems.

Though, the actual question, “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?” is one to which the answer is glaringly obvious.  Eggs have existed, in some form at least, since before backbones happened (paleontologists, please correct me if I’m wrong about that specific ordering).

Even if we focus only on hard-shelled eggs, like those of the proverbial chicken, these date back to the earliest fully land-based vertebrates, which if memory serves showed up at least a few hundred million years ago.  Chickens have only really been around, certainly in their modern form, since no farther back than the dawn of agriculture, say about 10,000 years ago.

These numbers are ballpark figures that I’m pulling out of my…memory.  If I’m off by a significant amount on any of them‒certainly by an order of magnitude or more‒please let me know.

Okay, well, I don’t know what else to write about this morning.  I mean, I could probably nevertheless keep writing indefinitely, pulling various weirdnesses out of my…store room.  But I won’t.

It might be fun to set that challenge for myself some day:  to see how long I can write at one sitting, with only bathroom breaks, and then just share the result on this blog without serious editing.  I think I would want to use the lapcom for such a task, or something similar with a real keyboard, rather than writing on my smartphone as I’ve been doing for most of my posts.

I wonder if there’s any Guinness World Records type entry on something like that.  Not that I’m into trying to make or break world records, but it’s amusing to contemplate.

Maybe someday I’ll do something like that, though I would need some manner of support to do it.  But it probably won’t happen very soon, if it happens.  It will probably have to wait until after I’ve caught the flying pig back from my skiing trip in Hell.

And I don’t know how to ski.

Well, that’s enough for today, I think.  I’ve passed 701 words, and like Major Tom after he passed 100,000 miles, I’m feeling very still.  I wish my spaceship knew which way to go.

But we can’t necessarily trust the good astronaut’s judgment on such matters, for as Bowie said later, in Ashes to Ashes, “We know Major Tom’s a junkie, strung out in Heaven’s high, hitting an all time low.”

Hopefully, you all have a much better day than Major Tom.

*The Dulcolax™ treason and plot, you might say.

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Wee are the champignons, but I still won’t eat them

First of all, I want to say, “Happy birthday, Mom, wherever you may be.”  So, here goes:

Happy birthday, Mom, wherever you may be.

My mother would have appreciated that joke, so if anyone out there is inclined to be offended on her behalf, well…you’d better check yourself before you wreck yourself, like the song said.  My mother’s sense of humor was very goofy and giggly and rather silly.  I got a goodly fraction of my sense of humor from her; she had extra, and no one else wanted it, so I got a very good deal.

Oh, on an unrelated note, I would like to note that, today, I am wearing cologne (or, well, aftershave, but I see no serious difference between the two things–one is named after a German city* and the other is just named for when you use it, as long as you’re not averse to the sting of alcohol on a freshly shaved face, which I am not, depending on whose face it is).  I felt awkward having yesterday used the misheard lyric from Whitesnake which says that I was born to wear cologne, when I wasn’t wearing cologne.

Of course, I’ve never really been like a drifter, either.

I do, unfortunately, drift and meander in my writing, at least when it’s nonfiction (broadly speaking) and when I’m trying not to write about my negative thoughts and feelings so I don’t bring people down too much.  That’s not as easy as it might seem, because those thoughts and feelings are always there, and they’ve been there for nearly as long as I can remember.

I’m not sure why they are there; presumably, and apparently, a lot of it has to do with my until-recently-undiagnosed ASD, but there’s also just something of a tendency toward dysthymia/depression in especially my Dad’s side of the family.

Though, honestly, there was almost certainly ASD on that side of the family, too**.  I would be very surprised if my father could not have been so diagnosed, though he was surely “Level 1”, whereas I am said to be “Level 2”.

Speaking of my Dad‒which I was‒I guess I should wish him a belated Happy Birthday, wherever he may be.  His birthday was a month ago today (it was a Saturday, so I wrote no blog post).

My own birthday is exactly in between my parents’ birthdays, which was something of a choice on their part; I was born by elective c-section, which was the usual practice in that era if one had previously had a c-section, which my mother had.  So they had at least some choice about the specific day on which I would be born.

They couldn’t just pick willy-nilly, of course.  If they had tried to wait until December, it would not have worked, and September would have been disastrous.  Probably even early November wouldn’t have panned out.  Still, I think they had at least a few days’ window in either direction, so‒it’s my understanding‒they picked my birthday to be right between theirs.

It’s the sort of thing I might have done, myself, so I appreciate it.

Let’s see now, what else is going on?  Of course, there are many things happening in the world, as is always the case, and many of those things seem and feel quite momentous to the people who see them or experience them.  From a certain point of view, they are indeed important, of course.  But I imagine that the average Roman citizen often thought that the momentary political happenings in their world were the be-all and end-all, and now we don’t even know what those concerns (or who those citizens) might have been.

Mind you, if their concerns related to the incoming Vandals and Visigoths and Huns and so on, I suppose they might have been at least somewhat justified in their belief that pivotal events were taking place.  But such times were narrow and few, relative to the “uninteresting times” in between.

Nowadays, of course, there are no actual external invaders coming in (though various propagandists might say there are).  Alas, in the modern world, we have met the Vandals, and they are us.

I almost feel that should have read “they are we”, but it might be taken as implying they are tiny, as in “they are wee”***.  Also, I wanted to throw a little homage to the famous Pogo cartoon in which Pogo originally said, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

With that, I will call this blog post to a close today.  I hope you all remember and embrace what we’ve accomplished here (basically nothing, as far as I can tell).  I also continue to hope that you all have an objectively good day.

*Weirdly enough, the full term is “eau de cologne” which I think is French for “water of Cologne”.  This is a curious term which must be quite historically contingent.  It must also be quite exaggerated, because I very much doubt that the water in the city of Cologne has any particularly attractive and pleasant odor.  Perhaps I’m wrong.

**There was even ASD, meaning Atrial Septal Defect, on that side of the family, which I had too, requiring open-heart surgery when I was 18.  It is an interesting fact that the cardiac ASD is more common in people with the neurodevelopmental ASD, as is cavum septum pellucidum, a benign atypia in the space between cerebral hemispheres, which was found in me incidentally while I was being worked up for, I think, the cause of some then-occurring pituitary dysfunction.

***Or that they are urine, I guess, which would be a more acceptable misunderstanding.

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Mon Dieu, it’s Mon day

Well, it’s Monday again and here I go again…on my own…going down the only road I’ve ever known.  Like a drifter, I was born to wear cologne*.

Anyway, I’m starting a new blog post at the beginning of a new work week, and the number of words in the footnotes is already significantly larger than the number here in the “main body” of the post.  That’s not all that unusual for me, but it is probably above the mean by at least a standard deviation.  I don’t see any practical way to check that, though, and I certainly don’t have enough interest to try to figure out such a way.  If any readers want to figure it out and share their results, please feel free to share them (but not with me).

I wonder if I’ve ever written a blog post in which the number of words in the footnotes is larger overall than the number of words in the main body.  It’s not impossible.  I wouldn’t be surprised either way, honestly.  But I’m not going to check.  You guys can if you want, and you should definitely share the results if you do (but again, not with me***).

[Quick aside‒I just thought of a spoof term, “Alexathymia”:  a condition that occurs when a person is so ensnared by the internet, web, and social media, that they need to ask their “digital assistant” how they feel (or should feel) about some product or issue or person.]

I’m sorry, I know this is a fairly strange sequence of thoughts to convey in a beginning-of-the-week blog post, even for me.  At least it feels that way from the inside.  I guess that’s one of the perks and the drawbacks of not having an agenda when one starts writing a post.  It can go anywhere (yay!), but also, well…it can go anywhere (ugh!).

Still, however erratic or hard to follow or annoying my writing here is, it’s at least better than me writing about all the negative thoughts and feelings that run through my poor excuse for a mind.  I hope it’s better.  If my dark, crumbly center is the best of me, well, I’m not sure what to make of that.  Probably, I would just make a mess.

However jerkily erratic my writing might be this morning, at least I’m sticking with my new word count “goal” of 701, so hopefully I won’t bore you for too long with my weirdnesses.  Also, I hope I won’t bore you with my banalities.  To be too unremarkable or to be too unusual are both negative things; you can tell by the use of the word “too”, which in this case refers to detrimental excess (though it can also mean “also”, but that wouldn’t make much sense here).

As for anything else, well…I guess this is the first full week of the new month, November****.  We also had the daylight savings time flip over this weekend here in the US, the one where we “fall back”, i.e., we set all clocks back an hour.  I’m never sure whether this constitutes the start or the stop of “Daylight Savings Time”, but it really doesn’t matter, so I don’t waste any time trying to memorize it.

It’s a strange thing, this hour shift, and it can throw one’s circadian rhythms off a bit, which is troubling if one is subject to seasonal affective problems, which I am.  It’s particularly annoying for nightfall to come suddenly much sooner than it did the day before.  I know that the nighttime grows longer during the time between the autumnal equinox and the winter solstice anyway, but it’s easier to stomach without the sudden jump.

In college, though, I liked getting that extra hour on one weekend in the autumn, though I rued its reverse in the spring.  Mind you, I suspect it had little actual impact, but the psychological reward/punishment effect on my affect was not to be entirely dismissed.

And, with that, I think I’ll draw this fairly disjointed blog post to a close and put it out of your misery, if not its own.  Thank you for joining me here in the month of November.  I say “here” as if it referred to a place rather than a time (or a range of time, though we rarely refer only to dimensionless points when we refer to places in space, so I guess that’s okay).  ANYWAY, I hope you all have a week this week that is better than the last was, and that this trend continues, even if only in the most gradual fashion, for the rest of your lives.

*That’s a Mondegreen‒a misheard lyric‒from the song Here I Go Again by Whitesnake (which I thought came out much later in the ‘80s than it actually did, which was 1982).  Well, the last sentence was a Mondegreen**, the previous ones were accurate.

**Though I often do wear cologne, because I like having a pleasant odor.  But I’m not wearing any today, and I certainly was not born to do so.

***Okay, I’m trying to be funny and to seem coolly uninterested, but I would hate for someone to figure those things out and yet not share them with me, so please do share it if you gather that data.

****“November” almost seems like it might mean “new” something…a new ember perhaps, the first cast-off remnant of a dying fire symbolizing the fading of the year.  But, of course, the Nov- here refers to the number nine rather than to newness, as in “nova”*****.

*****Of course, in Spanish, nova could mean “no go”, as in, “it doesn’t go”, which partly explains why the Chevrolet Nova didn’t sell that well in Latin America.

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Words about fear and words about words

Well, it’s Saturday again, and for the second week in a row, I am writing a blog post.  I warned you that I probably would:  here, go take a look.  See?  I told you.

Of course, a blog post means I’m going to the office today.  It’s not a full day, but it chews up so much of the middle part that there’s no possibility of getting any extra rest, at least not for me.  For instance, I have awakened well before I would need to go to the office, but my anxiety or tension or whatever it might best be called does not let me sleep‒for fear of oversleeping, I guess.  It’s some manner of fear, anyway.  It’s not a fear of physical attack (I think) but it sort of feels like I have to watch my back, as though someone or something is out to get me.

Fear is not the mind killer, of course, despite the popular mantra from Dune.  Fear (up to a point) can sharpen the mind, if it’s not resisted inappropriately.  I think the 12th Doctor’s take on being scared is far better than that from Dune.  See below:

–

Obviously, too much fear is bad, but as Stephen Fry, playing the unscrupulous tobacconist points out (starting at roughly the 2:45 point here), that’s what the term too much means.

Too much of anything, more or less by definition, is bad.  This is one of those somewhat rare circumstances in which one can say “by definition” and not be relaying a merely semantic point without substance.

This is in contrast to the silly old conundrum “If a tree falls in a forest and there’s no one to hear it, does it make a sound?”  If you simply define your terms precisely, there is not going to be any ambiguity in the answer‒but you have to choose your “definitions”* of each word clearly, especially ones like “hear” and “sound”.

If you’re ever arguing about something (other than etymology and/or usage and/or diction) and you want to go to the dictionary to settle it, then you’ve probably been arguing about something without substance‒arguing past each other, as they say.  I’ve heard such arguments, even between people with seemingly above-average intelligence.

Of course, if they’re arguing for fun, as a sort of mental sport and exercise, and if they both (or all) are enjoying the process, then I have no trouble with it.  It probably sharpens their thinking skills, as long as they don’t let themselves forget that they’re just arguing over misaligned coding and the logical implications thereof.  Even a skilled martial artist who trains purely for exhibitions may be in real trouble in a street fight against serious opponents.

But even the OED doesn’t decide or define what English words mean; it records what words have been used to mean, their origins, their etymology, all that good, interesting stuff.

How did I get on this subject?  I guess I’ll see as I do the editing.  I certainly do bounce and meander in my head, don’t I?  And that process is often inextricably intertwined with writing.

That can be a good thing, sometimes, I suppose.  I would think it’s at least related to the nature of creativity.  But it’s also important to be able to focus and stay on point, to be disciplined, if one is truly to create anything of depth.  One of my biggest problems in the past was that I would come up with, for instance, good story ideas, but I would soon get distracted by some new story idea and get diverted from the first.

One of the best things about having been to prison‒yeah, there were a few good things, though they were strongly overwhelmed by the bad‒was that I was in a situation in which I could discipline myself to write every morning, when lights came on (about 3 am) for 3 to 4 pages, and not go on to a new story until I finished the first.  I mailed the pages out to my Mom, Dad, and sister as I went along, after rewriting them for a bit of legibility**.

In this fashion, I wrote first Mark Red, then CatC, then Paradox City.  Then, after I got out, I continued writing, finishing one story before starting the next, right up until I began Outlaw’s Mind.  That was the last story I started in that pattern, though I’ve since written a bit on The Dark Fairy and the Desperado and even less on HELIOS.

Currently, I just write this every work day.  I cannot explain why in any quick and simple fashion, but it is what it is, as the tautology goes.

I hope you have a good day.  I should be back on Monday.

*I put that in scare quotes because in nearly all cases, words don’t have real, singular, exclusive definitions, but instead have usages.  Now, as the person who coined various words in, for instance, The Chasm and the Collision, I can actually and literally define those words.  I have actual authority over those words; I created those words and I created those worlds.

**I kept my first draft so I would be able to go back and check things if I needed to do so.

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It’s a prime day for a (slightly) shorter blog post

Morning has broken!

Does anyone out there know a good, reasonably priced morning repair service or person?  I really don’t have the money or time to go pick out and buy a new morning.

Ha ha.

Sorry.  I know that’s quite a stupid joke.  Still, it should give you some idea just how tired I am.

I should have been able to get a decent sleep last night, but I did not.  That shouldn’t be anything new to me, but some days the effects of the insomnia seem to pile up far more than on some other days.  And today is one of those “pile up” days, it seems.

Thus, I intend to make this a relatively short blog post today if I can.  To that end, I’m setting my “target” number of words to be 701 instead of the usual 800*.  701 has the added advantage of being a prime number, which always makes things at least a little bit better from my point of view.

It’s funny how, as numbers get bigger, there seem to be fewer primes (they fall off as something like the natural log of the number range at which you’re looking, if memory serves).  And yet, there are an infinite number of them‒the same “countable infinity” as the natural numbers, “aleph nought”:

Also, we have the twin primes conjecture‒which apparently most mathematicians think is correct‒that there are an infinite number of primes that are with 2 of each other.

It has apparently been proven that there are an infinite number of primes separated by no more than about 500 or some such (it’s probably a lower separation now, but I haven’t looked into it in a while).  That may not seem like much of an accomplishment, but remember, we’re talking infinity here.  No matter how big the numbers get** you will never stop finding new sets of prime numbers that are no more than about 500 apart.

That’s not particularly useful to anyone but number theorists, I suppose, but it seems very interesting to me.

Incidentally, 701 is not part of a pair of twin primes, since 703 is not prime (it has four factors) and 699 is obviously divisible by 3.  And of course there is only one even prime (the number 2) because all other even numbers are divisible by 2.

Sorry, I know many people find these things boring, but I’m a fan of prime numbers.  In any case I’m trying not to be so negative in my blog posts, since I think it bothers a lot of people and may even be contagious at times.

It certainly doesn’t appear to do me any more good than does being a voice crying out in the wilderness, so to speak.  And despite the excellent biblical reference***, voices crying out in the wilderness usually are not heard or received by anyone or anything that can even understand them, let alone offer them any help.

I guess I can still talk about “imaginary” and complex numbers, because they just involve the square roots of negatives, but are not necessarily negative themselves****.  As long as I avoid multiplying them together, I should be able to steer relatively clear of negativity.

Ha ha, again.

I’m trying to try to avoid making other people miserable by expressing my own dark thoughts, so instead it seems I will make others miserable with my bad jokes.  You’re welcome.

Thinking about complex numbers makes me start feeling like I want to learn more about quaternions and spinors and so on, which seem truly fascinating, but about which I have only highly superficial knowledge.

It would be nice to learn more about them.  I probably will not, knowing me and my fatigued and distractible mind, but at least I can maybe be on the lookout for Numberphile videos about related subjects.  There’s at least one YouTube channel with a series on spinors.  Unfortunately, PBS Infinite Series stopped making new videos some time ago, but at least PBS Spacetime is still going strong, as are all of Brady Haran’s excellent channels.

And now, I’m over 701 (in the first draft), and so I’m done (for today at least).  I hope you all have a good day, and that your subsequent good days scale as the number of days, not as any logarithm thereof.

*I almost always go over my target, but at least it gives me a noteworthy place to decide it’s “time to wrap this up”.

**And there are described numbers so large that if you could memorize every digit of them, the information would be so concentrated as to turn your head into a black hole.

***It’s from the book of Isaiah.  John the Baptist supposedly quoted it and referred to himself as that voice, but then again, a lot of the writers of the “New Testament” shoehorned in references to supposed prophecy in the “Old Testament” to make the whole thing seem more sexy-cool (I guess).

****I just have to try to keep to the right upper quadrant of the complex plane.

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“They tumble blindly as they make their way…”

It’s Tuesday morning and I’m beginning the process of making my way to the office.  By the time I finish writing this, and certainly by the time it’s posted, I will be there.

I thought I might stay out sick today, because yesterday at the office I felt pretty crummy and almost as if I had a fever.  I checked, and my temperature was normal, but that’s hard to interpret, because I almost never don’t have NSAIDS and other analgesic/antipyretics on board*.  So I could pretty easily have something brewing that would cause a fever, but my fever response is too suppressed.

That’s not an ideal situation, I know, but the alternative is to try to ignore the chronic pain I have.  That’s not so easy, for good, sound, biological reasons.  I’m not saying it’s impossible, and with the proper motivation I could probably do it, but I have no such motivation.

What would I be trying to achieve by not treating my pain as best I can?  Increased longevity?  Hah!  What would be the point of that?  This life that I have is not really something worth prolonging.

If one has a delicious meal one may want to eat slowly, to relish** it.  If one is spending time with a good friend or spouse or other beloved family member, certainly that’s worth making things last as long as one reasonably can do.  But even people who consider themselves masochists don’t really want to prolong their own suffering.  They tend only to want the pain that gets them excited, which is not really “suffering” as most people would think of it.  In any case, I am no masochist; my inclinations are, if anything, in the opposite direction.

I don’t mean to imply that my own suffering is particularly odious or anything.  I’m sure there are many people who suffer much more than I do.  Some of them have to suffer with being moral and intellectual imbeciles, and that’s pretty horrifying to contemplate; many such people are involved in government, even though these are probably the last people one would reasonably want to have the job of keeping the machinery of the state functioning.

I mean, we can all see how badly that works, though some are deluded enough that they would claim not to know whereof I speak.  Still, what are you going to do?  Force the more competent, moral, disciplined, intellectually humble but rigorous people to be governors and legislators and administrators?  What if they got really pissed off about it and decided just to wreck everything as much as they could because they’ve been forced to work in positions of governance?

You think things are bad now?  Beware the wrath of smart, patient, disciplined, creative people.

Anyway, that’s just a tangential thought, something in which I seem to specialize, though it is not deliberate.  I just tend to let my thoughts meander***.

Speaking of which, yesterday, in recognition of that tendency, I titled my post by paraphrasing the catchphrase of the old cartoon character Ricochet Rabbit.  Since then, I had a related memory pop up of the old toy “Ricochet Racers”.  I never actually owned one of those, but I can vaguely recall the jingle that went with their ads:  “Ricochet Racers on target!  Have a real play [or was it a great play?] with a ricochet.”  Something like that.  That second line may be slightly off, but it gets the gist.

I wish I could convey the tune in writing.  Instead, here’s a video with a later version of the toy, and the guy sings a bit of the original theme, but with a changed second line.  He’s not a great singer, though, and these aren’t exactly the original words.

Thinking about it, I realize that the rhythm of that jingle is at least a little bit interesting.  The song appears to be in some version of 4/4 time, but the first line is sung in a set of slow-ish triplets, each triplet being equivalent to 4 quarter notes.  That’s mildly impressive for a jingle written to sell a long-defunct kids’ toy.

I wonder how many truly skilled composers end up doing such less-than-glorified work because they’ve got to make a living somehow.

We know that many movie composers are truly brilliant, from John Williams and Hans Zimmer through to people who primarily work in other genres but sometimes do films, such as Jonny Greenwood.  But those are large scale, respectable composing jobs.  What of the could-be Mozart who must write songs for McDonalds commercials?

I guess if such a person finds joy and satisfaction in that work, then there’s nothing to lament****.  Perhaps they can do enough composing to make a living that way, and otherwise compose things of their own in their spare time, which might one day be played by fancier musicians for more high-falutin’ purposes.  That seems okay, too.

That might be analogous to what I do here, except that none of my writing makes me any money at all, so it’s a bit less rewarding.  Still, if anyone reading wants to send me money, we could probably figure out a way to do it.

I won’t hold my breath.  But, whatever.  I hope at least some of you, some of the time, enjoy my posts.  And heck, if you like them, you could certainly share them, if you can think about someone who might be interested in reading them.

Here, I wrote a song about such liking and sharing.  It’s no “Ricochet Racers” theme, but I think it’s pretty good.

Have a nice day.

*That means “in my system”, in typical medical jargon, in case that wasn’t clear.  It probably was clear, though, wasn’t it?

**Or whatever garnish or condiment one might like on one’s food.

***Like a restless wind inside a letter box, if you will.

****Imagine a lament for a writer of jingles.  Rather “meta” isn’t it?

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Bing-bing-bing! Ricochet Robert.

I’m in a rather unusually bad amount of pain this morning, even for me, so please excuse me if my thoughts are somewhat incoherent or distracted or grumpy-seeming.  Though I don’t know how you would be able to tell if I’m grumpier than usual.

It’s Monday yet again, and it’s only been two days since my last post, not three, because I worked on Saturday, and on that day, I also wrote a very angry blog post.  I think some people might have found the degree of malice I expressed on Saturday disquieting or at least just not good, which I can understand.  I tend to think of such terrible things a lot more often than most people do (though I share them only infrequently); it’s one of the reasons I find my own company unpleasant.

But, of course, I’ve tried to compensate for my dark tendencies by doing as much good in the world as I’ve been able to do, such as by becoming a doctor.  I’ve never actually acted on any of my darkest impulses and dreams, except when I write horror stories, or when I write non-horror stories with horrible elements in them.

I guess maybe that’s one of the things that’s been therapeutic for me about writing fiction.  Maybe the trouble is right now that I don’t have a good outlet for my terrible thoughts.

Of course, I know that the idea of thoughts and emotions as “substances”, as if some manner of fluids, which can build up and need release is not merely incorrect, but is not even a good analogy for how emotions and other neurological states work.  This is part of why meditation is far more effective against stress and tension than is, for instance, the often counterproductive notion of catharsis.

Of course, sometimes things that work well for neurotypicals don’t work nearly as well for those on the autism spectrum*.  For instance, there is apparently some reasonable evidence that cognitive behavioral therapy, which often works quite well for neurotypicals with depression, is not as effective and can even be counterproductive for autistic people; we already tend to over-self-evaluate our cognitions, and so the tricks and workarounds of CBT often are not merely redundant but miss the issues entirely.

Along a line of possibly similar nature, I’ve written before about how meditation often serves to reduce my anxiety but at the same time worsens my depression.

And yes, in case you’re wondering, I think it’s all a matter of neurological states‒or neurohumoral states if you want to be slightly more precise.  I’ve spent nearly my whole life interested in such things; still, I have found neither evidence nor argument that has so far persuaded me that there’s any significant credence to the notion that humans are anything but temporary patterns of matter/energy, “spontaneously” self-assembled like any termite mound/colony or beehive/swarm**.

Once that pattern breaks because it can no longer sustain itself, due to injury or age or what have you, there is nothing more to it; it’s a hurricane that has passed.  There can be records and traces of its passing, and the damage it has done can linger for a long time, but there is no “afterlife” for weather patterns.

People are more complicated than hurricanes, at least in some senses, I will admit that.  But more intricate complexity doesn’t tend to make things more durable; it makes them more fragile, ceteris paribus.

Of course, all else is almost never equal.  Nevertheless, it’s often useful to consider complex matters as partial differential equations in more than one variable***; one explores the equation by holding all but one variable constant and differentiating or integrating along only one variable at a time.  As long as one thinks carefully about such things and never forgets that one is holding the other variables constant‒and by not forgetting, hopefully avoiding the oversimplification of one’s model of reality‒one can penetrate a great deal by recognizing when powerful tendencies persist even given the fact that other variables can influence matters.

For instance, the metallicity**** of stars influences the size at which they undergo certain levels of fusion, which is why it is thought that the earliest stars had different lifespans and luminosities relative to mass than later stars (like our sun).  But they still, overall, behave like stars, and the bigger ones shine brighter and last a shorter time than the less massive ones.  They are more alike than unalike, the narcissism of small differences notwithstanding.

Well…that tangent, or series of tangents, sure took me down unexpected paths!  But I guess that’s the nature of tangents; in any nonlinear but continuous function (even one as simple as a circle), there are a functionally infinite number of possible tangents.

I think that’s the right mathematical metaphor; isn’t it?  I guess it doesn’t much matter.  I’m just expressing my highly stochastic thoughts (I doubt they’re truly random) as they come.  But they would probably follow different courses if I did not express them in this fashion.

I hope your own thoughts are less troublesome to you than mine are to me and that you are at least at some degree of peace with yourselves and with each other.  You might as well be, though I know that’s not enough to guarantee it.  Still, do what you can, okay?

*Which I am, as you may know; I have written at least in passing about my recent, quite late, diagnosis.

**I don’t mean “like” here as “the same as” but rather “in the same fashion as”.

***My terminology is a bit sloppy here, but I’m not trying to be mathematically rigorous, I’m just trying to get my thoughts across with some clarity and accuracy.

****To astronomers/astrophysicists, a “metal” is any other element but hydrogen and helium (this no doubt irks chemists).  The earliest stars would have been almost entirely hydrogen and helium, certainly to start off.  Mind you, even later generation stars like the sun are still by far mostly hydrogen, but seemingly small “contaminants” can have noticeable effects on big systems, as in the fact that water vapor and carbon dioxide markedly affect Earth’s atmosphere and surface temperature despite being present in tiny amounts compared to nitrogen and oxygen.

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“What IS real? How do you DEFINE ‘real’?”

Well, it’s Friday again, as happens if one waits long enough, but it wasn’t Thursday here yesterday.  Okay, well, that’s an exaggeration, obviously.  I simply didn’t write a blog post yesterday because I was out sick‒I ate something that chose to take vicious, but thankfully temporary, revenge on me for having eaten it‒and when I don’t go to the office, I don’t usually do a blog post.

It would be a somewhat interesting universe if time were constrained in some fashion by my blog post writing, or even defined by it.  Of course, that’s pretty vanishingly unlikely, since it would not readily be able to explain all of history‒including my own life and memories‒from before I started writing my blog and before blogs even existed.

There are philosophical and mathematical prestidigitations that can be performed that can allow one at least entertain the notion that all those memories and all those historical records are in their present configuration by mere chance, but such arguments tend to bite themselves in the ass by destroying all basis for believing in any specific laws of nature, including the probabilistic/entropic ones that, in principle, allow for such things.

Anyway, here I am, heading to the office on Friday, the first “real”* day after Wednesday, though I’m still a bit beat.

Given that last fact, I hope you’ll excuse me if I’ve nothing profound or even interesting to say today.  It’s the tail end of a week that should or at least could have been one of reasonable celebration, if I were inclined to consider the fact that I have lived another year something to celebrate.  Alas, I don’t have any strong inclination to consider that so, and I guess that’s just as well, because it hasn’t been a very good week for me.  I feel exhausted, and this is only “first thing in the morning”.

I don’t think I actually am literally exhausted, in the sense of being completely and thoroughly used up, because I am, after all, going to work and writing this.  A car with no gasoline does not even start let alone move**.  Whereas I am still moving, and contrary to some popular sayings, one cannot keep moving out of spite or stubbornness or whatever similar notions might be applied.  I don’t mean to dismiss the power of stubbornness, let alone of spite, but they do not (and cannot****) allow one to violate the laws of physics.

I am simply very fatigued‒physically, yes, and also emotionally, mentally, even “spiritually”, however that last word might be defined.  I don’t know how close to the bottom of my personal tank I really am.  Goodness knows, I wouldn’t have been surprised to have died at least twelve years ago, or even twenty.  I did not die (as you might be able to tell), so in a certain sense, my surprise is that I am alive.  But it’s not much of a happy surprise.  I certainly don’t feel any giddy joy over the fact that I have gotten through all the nonsense in my life so far without it killing me.

Still, it would be churlish and pathetic of me (perish the thought!) not to admit that there are still moments and occasions of joy and even happiness (which John Galt described as a state of noncontradictory joy, and I rather like that interpretation of the word).  But it would be nice to have occasional truly pain-free days.

Oh, well.  The universe does not conform to anyone’s wishes nor bend to the best interests of any given individual or even all individuals‒not as far as I can see.  But if the world did bend to my will in such matters, then all my readers would have a wonderful day today, and that would be the start of a long‒perhaps unbroken‒string of wonderful days hereafter.

And heck, everyone else might as well have wonderful days, also.  For it is difficult even for the most prosperous to be reliably and persistently happy in a world where there is gross injustice and undeserved misery.

*If by “real” we mean “days defined by the writing, by me, of one of my blog posts”, and if by “me” we mean the first person objective singular pronoun referring to Robert Elessar, the author of this blog (among other things).  But, of course, we don’t mean such a thing when we use the word “real” and though I define “me” that way, you would probably define it differently, but in very specifically different ways.  This is all just me (the same “me” from earlier) being somewhat silly.

**Well…unless it’s an electric car (or even a diesel*** powered car).  Ideally, one probably doesn’t want any gasoline in an electric car.  Gasoline in an electric engine is just a fire hazard.  It’s not a good conductor, so it probably wouldn’t cause the engine to short out directly, but once ignited, the fire could create local ions/plasmas that could conduct electricity and thus, among other things, short out the workings of the motor.  That would probably be among the least of the problems such fire caused, though.

***I once knew a guy who modified an old diesel Mercedes so that it ran on peanut oil.  Due to economies of scale, it was actually more expensive to drive than other cars, but at least it ran on a renewable fuel, of sorts.

****This is definitional, in my view:  anything that actually happens is, perforce, allowed by the laws of physics.  If you find something that seems to violate the laws of physics as you know them, that’s just an indictment of your understanding‒of the events and/or of the laws of physics.  This isn’t a horrible thing; it’s a chance to learn something new.

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Decoherence–but nothing overtly quantum mechanical

You might be interested to know that I am not writing this blog post on my smartphone on the way to the office.  Neither am I writing it on the mini lapcom on the way to the office.  I am actually writing this while already at the office, because I did not go back to the house last night.

The trains were running late, and when they run late, they also run crowded, because of the pileup of people for what would have been later trains, at least until you get to the first on-time train after all the late ones.  That one tends to be nice and light.  But goodness knows when that train would have come, and it occurred to me that…well, no one was waiting for me at the house (no one ever is), and there was no point in getting there late only to have to get up and come in to the office today.

So, I walked back to the office and just stayed here.  I ordered a mildly “celebratory” dinner from Outback to mark the day.  It was okay‒not great, not bad.  It certainly beat, say, a bag of chips or something along those lines.  It almost certainly was not worth what it cost, but I could have ordered something from Morton’s, which has steaks starting at over $70.  And that was not the most expensive place available on Uber Eats for steak!!

Anyway, I watched some music videos and reaction videos and sat around and‒well, I won’t get into my thought processes and whatnot.  There are some things that are negative enough and worrisome enough for people that I don’t really want to share them.  I’m sure people who read this regularly probably would find that difficult to believe, but it’s true; I have thoughts that are dark enough or weird enough or negative enough that I don’t talk about them, here or pretty much anywhere else.

I feel very beat up* overall, as I’m sure is not a surprise.  That’s not because I slept on the floor; that actually tends to be beneficial for my back, at least a little**.  But I certainly didn’t sleep as much as I might have, especially considering the fact that I spared myself the time of my commute.  But my insomnia has never been particularly well-attuned to usefulness, though at times it has been useful.  It certainly was handy during residency, in its way.

It is quite unpleasant, though, even when it is useful.  I haven’t felt well-rested in a very, very, very long time.

As for anything else, well, I certainly didn’t write any fiction yesterday, to no one’s real surprise.  I did feel the urge to play my guitar and sing a bit very late at night, but I decided that would be a little weird‒even for me‒and just in case anyone was near enough to hear and be disturbed***, I decided not to do it.

I worried most of yesterday about some trouble that I suddenly started having with my right shoulder, which is usually not a source of difficulty for me.  My right forearm and elbow have been giving me a lot of trouble lately, and maybe that’s working its way up the arm, who knows?  But I don’t mean to imply literally that I think it’s some form of creeping arm malaise that’s working its way up.  Rather, something that affects distal joints can create atypical tensions that hurt the body more proximally; think of how, when your ankle is acting up, it can affect your knee and hip and even back, triggering them also to have exacerbations.

Maybe that doesn’t happen to you.  But I assure you, it happens to me, and I think something like it has probably caused this new irritation and feeling of decreased mobility and new soreness and weakness (from tenderness, not actual loss of strength) in my right shoulder.

That’s about it, really.  There’s nothing else going on, not in my “life” anyway.  This is as good as it gets, and I doubt it will get this good again.  I’m very tired.  I wish I were sick with something more acute, something that would kill me or at least knock me out of commission for a while.  Unfortunately, one of the detrifits of being so socially uncomfortable is that I don’t get exposed to as many communicable pathogens as I otherwise might.

Oh, well, you know what they say:  If you want something done right…

Enough.  It’s been a blog post.  I hope you’ve found at least a moment’s interest in reading it, if you’ve read it.  I know people like to rubber-neck at roadside traffic accidents, so maybe my absurdity and distaste can at least engender some prurient interest.

I hope you have a good day, in any case.

*It’s slightly amusing that “beat up” has such a different meaning from “upbeat”.

**In any case, I always sleep on the floor, though at the house I have a modest futon.

***Or any other relatively high-end heavy metal band.

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Celebrate good times? Come ON.

I had a notion this weekend that I would write this blog post on Sunday afternoon/evening and set it up to publish itself‒so to speak‒this morning.  Then, I would use this morning to perhaps review an/or rebegin HELIOS, or maybe to work on Outlaw’s Mind or DFandD.  I even thought I could write any of those‒especially HELIOS‒on my smartphone, since I have them on Google Docs as well as MS Word.

So I thought, anyway.  When I looked, though, I found that I don’t actually appear to have any version of HELIOS on my Google drive, so it must either be on Word or I never typed in the little bit I had of it.  Of course, I could have just decided to restart and bring one of my spiral bound notebooks and write in that.  The only trouble with doing it that way, if I write during my morning commute, is that I eventually have to retype everything into one of my computers or smartphones.

Now, I have never done the thing* of handwriting a first draft and then copying it into a phone, but I have done that with handwriting and computer word processors.  That method has produced some of my best stuff (by some measures), including Mark Red, The Chasm and the Collision, Paradox City, and even part of The Vagabond, though that last one was written mainly on WriteNow on a Mac SE.  So, maybe the handwritten-to-smartphone idea could actually work pretty well, now that I think about it.

Anyway, all that’s fairly moot, because I did not in fact write this blog post on Sunday afternoon nor yet on Sunday evening.  I am writing it, as I usually do, in the morning, in the midst of my commute to the office, which is so effing early, but which is nevertheless far later than when I woke up.

I’m more than a bit disappointed in myself for failing to carry through with that idea, but it’s easy to think of ideas that seem so doable when you first think of them.  And they are doable, of course.  Not only is it physically possible for me to have written this post yesterday evening and to set a precedent of doing the blog posts in the evening and writing fiction in the morning, it’s banal.  If you told someone that had happened, they would be unlikely to do much more than shrug and say something like a noncommittal “cool”, before going on their way.

But as we all know‒or should know‒it’s much easier to intend to do things in the future than it is to muster the motivation to do them in the moment when one was hoping to do them.  There are many shifting, often conflicting, drives in the human** psyche, and our actions are born of a kind of vector sum of all those “forces” in any given moment.

But not only do those forces shift due to things as seemingly mundane as one’s current state of appetite or fatigue, but they are also affected by what one has done immediately before; for the outcome of that vector sum in one instant feeds back on the system in numerous places, changing the sum (I was going to write “changing the calculus” but I thought that might be mathematically confusing and even misleading, since I am not discussing calculus) with every new iteration.  These iterations and changes aren’t quite happening on the scale of the Planck time***, but they happen quickly‒certainly at least at the “speed of thought”, whatever that might be.

Even the physiological, hormonal, energy state of the body from moment to moment changes those vectors, sometimes a great deal.  If you find yourself needing to use the bathroom while you’re trying to accomplish some task, it can certainly change the state of your concentration.  And if you should suddenly begin to have difficulty breathing, it will distract you from pretty much anything else.

That’s why on airplanes they tell you that, in case of cabin depressurization, if you’re traveling with someone who needs help putting on the oxygen mask, put yours on first, before you help your companion.  If you can’t breathe, your ability to help anyone else is going to tank very rapidly.  We can live weeks to months without food, days without water, but only minutes without air.

On a less extreme angle, if one is hypoglycemic (for whatever reason), it strongly affects all the functions of one’s body, particularly one’s neuroendocrine system.  Less extreme but more persistent issues can sabotage one’s focus upon much else.

I don’t need to tell you, probably, that pain makes it much harder to focus and bring effort to bear on other things.  This is one of the most annoying aspects of chronic pain:  one does not quite ever become accustomed to it, because that would miss the whole biological point of pain.  Making pain something you could ignore would be a bit like making a fire alarm that plays soft, easy-listening elevator music at unobtrusive decibel levels.  It would be less annoying, but being burned to death in a fire is a bigger issue, even if it isn’t very likely.

Of course, if your (typical) fire alarm is stuck on, you may not ever be able completely to ignore it.  You also will not know when there is a real fire. Or at least you will be less likely to know.  And since that can potentially be a matter of life and death, the chronic alarm, like chronic pain, is in its own manifold ways life-threatening.

All that is very tangential to my original point, which was that I am writing this blog today, not writing fiction (at least not this morning on my commute).

Oh, well.  If there’s one day I can let myself get away with slacking a bit, I guess it’s today.  I hope you all have a good one.

*How’s that for clever, descriptive writing?

**Or whatever I am.

***Though the processes that underlie them do.