writing

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Just a quick status update

Our office was closed on Saturday, so I neither wrote a blog post nor any fiction, which is why there was no blog post.

Today, however, I had only my cell phone with me, so I used the MS Word app and wrote on HELIOS, and surprised myself by writing just shy of 2000 words on it!  I don’t want to leave Extra Body hanging, since it’s getting along nicely, but I’m pleased that I was at least able to make some progress on Helios, including introducing (for myself) the main characters.  On rereading what I had written before, it seems to flow pretty well, but time will tell.

That’s about it for today, but I thought I’d let you know in case anyone cares.  Have a good day.

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No real post today

But I did do a bit of creative writing.  Just under five hundred words on HELIOS while riding in to the office, and then just over five-hundred words on Extra Body in the office (I forgot to bring the mini-laptop-computer back to the house with me last night).  I don’t feel like my writing was very good, but that’s what editing is for, I guess.

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Had I pow’r, I should Pour the sweet blog of concord into hell

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday yet again, and I’m writing my more traditional blog post, but for those of you who weren’t expecting them, and so did not look, you should know that I also wrote posts on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday.  I had no drive or desire to write any fiction; it has felt utterly pointless to do so all week.  Everything pretty much feels pointless.

I did spend a bit of time yesterday sharing all my blog post links to my published works‒not counting music‒to X and LinkedIn and Facebook.  I don’t know if many people saw them, though my sister did leave a comment on Facebook on the shared link for Hole for a Heart, stating that it is one of my scariest stories.  Thankfully, it was intended to be scary, so that’s quite a good compliment.  If I’d meant it to be a light-hearted children’s fairy tale and it was one of my scariest stories, that would have been troubling.

I’ve long since noticed, from early on in my writing, that I tend to put horror elements into a lot of my work.  For instance, in Ends of the Maelstrom, my lost work from my teenage years‒which was an overlap of science fiction and fantasy‒I ended up having quite a few sequences that followed a large and powerful (and quite mad) cy-goyle named Chrayd, who was basically a horror monster, and whose actions didn’t directly push the plot forward.  His portions of the book were clearly little horror stories.

Also, my son read the original 2nd chapter of The Chasm and the Collision (which became the second half of the first chapter, “A Fruitful Day and a Frightful Night”) back when he was, I guess, about 11 or 12, and he said specifically that it was scary.  Of course, obviously it was meant to be scary for the main character‒I did call it “A Frightful Night” after all‒but I guess I did a good job of conveying Alex’s fear and making it at least slightly contagious.

I feel that at least some of the portions of Outlaw’s Mind ought to be quite scary‒it’s certainly meant to be a horror story‒but that may just be because I know what’s happening, and that at least some of events of the story were inspired by one of my two experiences of sleep paralysis (which is a truly frightening thing).

Of course, the two stories that are currently on my burners are not horror stories at all.  One is sort of a whimsical, light science fiction tale (set in the “ordinary” world), and the other is a more “light-novel” science fiction adventure, possibly good for young adults, based on a comic book I had long-ago envisioned.  I’m sure I will throw some horror elements in the latter by accident‒it seems to be how my writing works‒but it’s not any primary part of it.

Here I am writing as if any of those stories will be published and read by people.  Isn’t it cute?

One good thing about writing horror is that there is no reason to have any “trigger warnings”.  If you’re the sort of person who needs trigger warnings, you probably shouldn’t be reading horror stories.  I admit, though, that a few of my works probably merit greater-than-average caution; I’m thinking most specifically of Solitaire and both parts of Unanimity.  These are stories in which some quite “realistic” horrors take place‒things that could, in principle, happen in the real world.

Not that Unanimity itself could happen in the real world.  It couldn’t.  But many of the things done in the book that are horrific are possible and even realistic in a sense.

As for Solitaire, well…yeah, there’s nothing supernatural there at all.  It’s an entirely realistic story, probably too much so.  It’s short though, so a potential reader wouldn’t be troubled for long.  Still, that story is probably for “grown-ups” only.  Yet, as I’ve noted before, I wrote the story, all in one night, while I was in a perfectly good mood, keeping my then-future-fiancée company while she worked overnight on a project.

It’s curious to think about where these ideas originate and how they arise.

Even if we ever have a full description of the workings of a human brain, I doubt it will ever be possible to model, predictively and precisely, the specific outputs of any given one.  There are hundreds of trillions to a quadrillion synapses in a typical (or even divergent) brain, and those synapses are not simple And, Or, Xor, Not, Nand or other basic binary logic gates.  Their connections are almost continuously variable, and the reactivity and set-points can vary over time as well, in response to intracellular and extracellular conditions.

A quadrillion-bit system would never be close to big enough to model a human brain, even if we knew how to write the program.  And the possible outcomes of different processes in such a system would rapidly grow to numbers so vast they make the number of cubic Planck lengths in the accessible universe vanishingly close to zero.

As for “neural networks”, well, don’t let the name fool you too much.  They aren’t really modeling neurons or even acting very much like them.  I mean, they are super-cool*, don’t get me wrong!  But I don’t suspect that any of them, at least not by itself, will ever be a true AGI, not without also incorporating some analog of basal ganglia, limbic systems, and brain stems‒drives and motivations (general and partly alterable utility functions) in other words.

It’s also a concern (mainly orthogonal to the above) that, as more of what is out there on the anti-social webernet has been produced by LLM-based chat programs, the programs will more and more be modeling their future responses on responses not created by humans but by previous uses of the GPT style bots, and so they will more and more model only themselves‒a kind of solipsistic spiral that could rapidly degenerate into a huge, steaming pile of crap.

Of course, the programmers are clever, and they may well find ways to circumvent such issues.  I suppose we shall see what happens, unless civilization fails and falls before that comes to pass.

Wow, all that was a curious course of thought, wasn’t it?  I certainly neither planned for nor predicted it.  It just happened (like everything else).

As for what will happen for the rest of the week, well, I’m far from sure and can’t even give a very good guess.  I may write blog posts tomorrow and Saturday, or I may write fiction, or I may do neither.  I may take a long walk off a short pier, literally or metaphorically.  If Hugh Everett was right, there will probably be some versions of me “somewhere” who take each of all possible actions.

In the meantime, I sincerely hope that the only possible Everettian branches in your futures are ones in which you are happy.

TTFN

*Though at least most of them don’t need literally to be supercooled, unlike most modern quantum computing systems.

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Blog post for 4-10-2024 Wednesday

I’m not writing any fiction again today, it seems.  I just don’t have any urge to do it.  The very prospect of it feels almost entirely pointless, though that could be at least partly due to the fact that I’ve felt so gormy these last few days.

I’m not as nauseated as I was yesterday (though I’m probably just as nauseous, ha ha ha), since I took two omeprazole tablets last night, and also I didn’t take any aspirin or naproxen yesterday.  I did take a few acetaminophen, though those don’t tend to work as well on their own as they do in combination with aspirin and so on.  Still, I hate the feeling of nausea*, and would rather have at least a little pain than be nauseated.  It would have been one thing if I were sick enough just to throw up and get it over with, but all I had was just general gastro-intestinal distress and discomfort throughout the day, which really sapped my energy.

I don’t know what I’m going to do about my fiction.  This week I just haven’t had any enthusiasm for it (nor for any other positive thing in life, really).  Maybe I should try to reignite my energy by sharing more of the links to my pre-existing fiction on Twitter and Facebook and the like.  Maybe if I got any feedback of any kind on any of those posts or shares it might stoke the fire of creativity a bit.

Of course, it’s hard to see why anyone other than the people who already read my stuff would respond to my posts, but who knows?  It’s difficult for me to predict what might motivate other people to do something, at least some of the time.

I feel slightly awkward sharing my links and stuff on the various anti-social media, particularly because I’m currently reading Jonathan Haidt’s new book The Anxious Generation, about the detriments of social media and smartphones to younger people.  On the other hand, unless you’re asking an elf or a vampire, I probably would not be considered a younger person.  Also, I developed my neuro-psychiatric issues long before smartphones and even before the Worldwide Web—I come by them naturally, so to speak—so I shouldn’t have to worry too much about them twisting me in some negative way.  My personality, such as it is, is already formed.  Though, as I discussed yesterday, I do seem to be reasonably good at learning new things even though I’m an old geezer.

I guess maybe I will share my stuff on at least X** and Facebook, and maybe even LinkedIn, though I have less interest in the latter, since I don’t do the whole networking thing.  I might as well make those old posts in which I “advertised” my new stories and such work for me.  And I might as well make Zuckerberg’s and Musk’s endeavors serve some useful purpose, since it’s not as though they pay much in taxes or anything.

I don’t knew where I’m going with this today, otherwise.  At least I’m not going off on weird tangents about playing with infinite series that have obvious outcomes once you work them through.  I mean, yes, it’s rather fun to fiddle with such things in the moment, particularly when one has nothing better to do, and it’s even good when it comes back around and you realize it’s revealed something that should have been obvious with much less work***.  That’s okay.  There’s nothing too wrong with coming at something in a complicated way and finally realizing how simple the answer is.  As I mentioned yesterday, at the very least, it’s good mental exercise.

Still, I shouldn’t go off on too many tangents like that too often.  I don’t think people like those posts very much.  Though, for all I know, they might think they’re the greatest thing anyone’s ever done, they’re just too shy to say anything about it.  I simply don’t know.  It’s like firing a photon off in the direction of an intergalactic super-void:  I’m not ever going to get any feedback about what happened to that photon if it doesn’t interact with something relatively nearby very soon****, and even if it does, unless it reflects back, or unless some intelligence sends a signal in response, it’s still going to be lost.

Anyway, that’s enough for now.  I expect to write my usual Thursday post tomorrow, so if you look forward to such things, you can look forward to that.  If I don’t write it, it will be either because I’m not feeling well (more so than is typically the case) or I’m dead, or perhaps that some other, unpredicted alternative possibility has interfered.  I’d give well over 50% odds that I’ll write a post tomorrow.  But for today, this post is already too long and is almost entirely without substance (and I don’t mean that just because it’s written on a word processor and shared online).

I really do hope that you all have a good day.

*I know, how unusual, right?

**Does Mr. Musk realize that by calling his platform “X” and putting its symbol in the upper right corner of the various X-cretions, he makes it look as though one is supposed to click on that symbol to make a “tweet” go away?  I know that’s the way I feel, and I’ve even tried to do it once or twice when I was distracted.

***In this case, for instance, if you add some (single) fraction of an original number to that starting total, the amount that you added is now one integer step smaller fraction of the new total.  In other words, if you start with some number, then add a ninth, say, of the original number, you now have ten of those ninths in your new total, i.e., 1 and 1/9.  But that 1/9 is now 1/10 of your new  total, trivially.  So, if you want to tip, for instance, 20% of the new total (including the tip) then you need to tip 25% of the original amount before the tip.  In other words, to tip one fifth of the total including the tip, you tip one fourth of the original, pre-tip total, since then you will have five fourths.  Anyway, let me stop this now.

****Unless, I suppose, the universe if both closed—i.e., it loops around on itself like a torus or a sphere—and smaller than anyone has any reason to suspect.  It would have to be small because, based on the expansion rate of the universe as currently measured, any photon of reasonable wavelength would probably have red-shifted into undetectability long before the time I could receive it from the other direction if it circumnavigated a closed universe on anything like the minimum scale we think the universe is.  A photon of too tiny a wavelength, i.e., of high enough energy, would have too high a chance to spontaneously decompose into some particle-antiparticle pair somewhere along the way…I think.

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Squaring away a queasy stomach

It’s Tuesday morning, and I’m not writing any fiction today, because I don’t feel terribly well.  I took a lot of pain medicine yesterday, of more than one kind, and I think it upset my stomach.

Indeed, I woke up very early this morning feeling nauseated.  I wasn’t queasy enough to throw up, which is in some ways disappointing, since that always brings at least a bit of relief, but I was certainly unable to rest.  I decided, finally, just to get up and get an Uber in to the office, since I knew if I waited too long I might choose to stay “home” for the day, and that wouldn’t make me feel any better.

So I showered and then ordered an Uber; today the prices were reasonable, even for a ride all the way in to the office, which helped cement my decision.  It’s frivolous, of course, in that it’s an unnecessary expense, and I really need to avoid doing it too often.  But it ended up being interesting.

I decided, while en route, not to do any writing in the car, either on my phone or on my laptop computer, since I was worried about car-sickness.  Instead, I eventually started playing with the notion of the standard Uber tip buttons.  I thought, to myself, if I were to give a 25% tip (the maximum automatic one), that fact would increase the total amount paid, and so the net tip would be less than 25% of the new total.  So, if I added 25% of the extra, that would increase the total even more, but it would then still be less than 25% of the new total, so I would need to add more, and eventually it would converge on a final number.  As I did a quick bit of figuring, I realized that the final amount I was approaching was 33% more than the original amount.

I realized—this is not a terribly impressive mathematical insight, I know, but I was and am queasy and so it was an interesting distraction—that this process effectively entailed an infinite series, in the form of 1 + 1/n + 1/n2 + 1/n3 +… and so on.  The first little ad hoc trial I had done made me realize that, at least that series had taken n as 4, and iterated it, giving a final number that was 1 and 1/3.  That seemed interesting.

I wondered if this was a general pattern.  So, using a calculator this time, I took one then added a fifth, then added 1 over 5 squared, then one of 5 cubed and so on, and pretty clearly arrived at a final total that was one and a quarter.  A few other numbers made it clear that this was general, and it makes sense if you work it backwards.  25 (one quarter) added to 100 gives you 125, and 25 out of 125 is always going to be on fifth of the new total , or 20%.  33 and a third (or a third) added to 100 gives you 133 and a third, and 33 and a third out of 133 and a third will always be a quarter of the total.

And then, of course, there’s the old mathematics joke about an infinite number of mathematicians going into a bar, with the first one ordering a pint of beer, the second ordering a half pint, the third ordering half as much as the second, the fourth ordering half as much as the third and so on, until finally the bartender holds up a hand and says, “Gentlemen!  Know your limits!” before drawing two pints of beer and putting them out on the table.  This is because 1 + ½ + ¼ + … goes to 2 in the limit as iterations go to infinity.

So, the series 1 + 1/n + 1/n2 + 1/n3 +…converges to 1 + 1/(n-1), which is (n-1)/(n-1) + 1/(n-1), which is n-1+1/(n-1) or just n/(n-1).  I’ve tried to start working the algebra of the infinite series to produce this result (just for fun), but didn’t put much time into it, and it’s not really necessary, since I can see the result clearly by working backwards.

Of course, looking at my result, I know this is really basic stuff, and at some level I already “knew” it, at least formally.  But there’s nothing like working out a thing for yourself to make it sink in and make true sense to you.

This is a bit like something I did when I was in the Education Department at FSP West during my involuntary vacation with the Florida DOC.  I was helping inmates try to get their GEDs, which was rewarding work given the circumstances.  But at one point it occurred to me that I didn’t think I’d ever seen the Pythagorean Theorem proven*.  So, I set out to prove it for myself, just for a laugh.  It looked something like this:

pytho

I didn’t use any of the standard, purely geometrical proofs that one often sees, but instead applied a combination of geometry and algebra that I kind of fiddled together on the spot.  I don’t know if what I did was perfectly rigorous; probably not.  Nevertheless, after I’d worked things through and simplified my algebra and indeed came out with c2 = b2 + a2, I was more convinced than ever before that the Pythagorean Theorem was not merely a well-supported hypothesis, but was indeed a theorem, and that given Euclidean geometry and so on, it was absolutely true.

All this is frivolous, or trivial, or whatever the term you might want to apply.  It certainly has little bearing on my day to day life.  But it is reassuring to think that, contrary to popular belief, it is possible to have new insights into fundamental ideas and things, however basic they might be, even at an older age (in my forties and fifties in these cases).  The human brain does not stop “growing” or improving after one reaches one’s twenties or thirties or after one has left one’s teens (or at least, whatever kind of brain I have doesn’t stop).  Even old dogs can be taught new tricks; and how much more amenable to teaching are naked house apes!

I’ve often been frustrated when people complain that they learned things like the Pythagorean Theorem in high school (or whenever) and had never had to use them at any point in their lives.  That may well be true in a simple sense, though I think the usefulness of that theorem might surprise people (it appears often in the workings of advanced physics, for instance, including in the Lorentz transformations in Special Relativity, and also in calculating the probabilities of outcomes from the magnitudes of the wave equation when makings measurements of a quantum system).

But ultimately, I feel like asking such complainers, “Do you do push-ups in order to become better at doing push-ups?  Do you do bench presses and squats to become competitive squatters and pressers of benches?  Do you jog to become professional joggers?  Do you do yoga to become a champion yogi?  No, the vast majority of people who do such things do them to make themselves fitter overall, stronger, with better endurance and flexibility, to be better able to do the many things in the world for which it will be an advantage for them to improve their strength and their flexibility and their endurance, and to be healthier overall!”

So it is with exercise of the mind, except the mind is far more plastic, far more able to be improved and trained, than the structures and strengths of the muscles and bones and ligaments and cardiovascular system.  Learning some of the methods of geometry and algebra and calculus, learning basic physics, including Newtonian physics and thermodynamics, learning some Boolean logic, some probability and statistics, some basic biology and chemistry…all these things are both inherently useful, and also give you skills and tools and abilities that are adaptable to hitherto unguessed situations and problems in the world, and give you insight into how much commonality there is to the structure of reality.

Understanding a bit about Chaos and Complexity theory can help you recognize why the specifics of the weather are fundamentally unpredictable but nevertheless the climate can be amendable to explanation and broad prediction.  Understanding a bit about Bayesian reasoning can give you the comfort of knowing that, even if you have a positive mammogram, and that test has an 80% sensitivity, you probably have nothing like an 80% chance of having cancer.  Indeed, you could be an order of magnitude or so less likely than that, depending on base rates and false positive rates and the like.

And in a somewhat orthogonal area of inquiry, if you want to understand something about the human condition, it wouldn’t hurt to expose yourself to the works of Shakespeare, who wrote about that subject as well as or better than practically anyone else ever has, and who did it in remarkable and beautiful language, coining figures of speech we in the “Anglosphere” still use, regularly, in daily life, four hundred years after he created them.

Also, if you live your whole life without ever having read book one of Paradise Lost, I think you will have sadly missed out on a great experience.  It’s not really a very long read.  Milton made his Satan a relatable and charismatic, almost heroic, character, and seeing how he did this can help you understand the power and persuasion demagogues and ideologues can bring to bear in the world, and how dangerous and yet enticing they can be.  Also, Milton’s writing is just beautiful, sometimes better even than Shakespeare.

And in To His Coy Mistress, Andrew Marvell prefigures the works of Billy Joel’s Only the Good Die Young by over 300 years.  And I’m pretty sure Pink Floyd referenced the work in Time.

Anyway, that’s what I did this morning to distract myself from an upset stomach, showing that these pursuits and skills can have wildly unpredictable uses.  So, until and unless you have actual organic illness that prevents your brain from learning, you can still grow, and can take more and more of the universe into your mind.  And, as Milton’s big bad himself said, “What is else not to be overcome?”

*It probably was at some point in my education, but I didn’t recall the proof, so it had clearly never really sunk in for me.  I didn’t doubt the theorem—all the greatest mathematical minds of antiquity and modernity were convinced of it, and it has always worked in practice.  But that’s not quite the same thing.

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The moon may be a harsh mistress, but her eyes are nothing like the sun

I was going to write this post on my laptop computer, since I had brought it with me back from the office on Friday, thinking to write fiction this morning.  However, I am waiting for fares to go down to normal levels for Uber or Lyft this morning, so while I wait, I figured I might as well write this post on my smartphone.  It’s inconvenient to write on the laptop computer while waiting at the house, because to do so I need to set up a TV tray table type thing.  That’s not hard, of course, but it’s still more effort than I mean to put forth for something that will hopefully only entail a few minutes’ delay.

I should just have gotten up when I was awake‒well, okay, not when I was first awake.  There would be no point in going to the office in the literal middle of the night.  But if I had gone to the Tri-Rail station early enough, I might have gotten on the 4:20 train.  Still, who knows?  Maybe Uber rates were twice as high as usual even then.  I don’t know why the ride services are so busy at this hour on a Monday morning.

Whatever it is, I don’t see how it could have anything to do with the eclipse that will be coming today.  That phenomenon is cutting a line from the southwest to the northeast across the country, including up by my sister’s house.  I won’t be seeing it, of course, since I’m down here in south Florida, and there won’t be another opportunity to watch one in my lifetime from anywhere readily accessible to me.

I could have gone; I was invited to visit by my sister.  The people at work thought I should go.  But when I started looking into booking either buses or trains or planes‒even though I did renew my state ID to make things easier‒I felt tension bordering on dread at the prospect of traveling in any of those ways.  So I didn’t go.  And here I am.

***

Ride rates have now dropped to normal, and I’m outside waiting for my Uber.  I was hoping to be able to ride my bike to the train station; I changed up my upper body workout a bit last week, and it felt different enough that I thought I might be able to use the bike without issue.  I rode it a decent distance on Saturday, with minimal trouble, though I felt a bit stiff overnight.  Then I rode it some more yesterday, and while riding I felt fine.  I even felt rather good, if slightly breathless.  But then, overnight, the stiffness and splinting and spasms started up again, so I fear that’s just not going to work.  I also have soreness in my right Achilles tendon and significant pain in my left knee, and my left side feels like it’s been infused with hot metal.

***

I’m at the train station now, still in pain (of course) and seated on the ground because I was too late because of the Uber delays to get a good seat where I prefer to sit.  It’s annoying, but I guess I would have been even later if I had ridden my bicycle.  Then again, at least I would have had the good feeling of having gotten some exercise.

Oh, well.  I don’t know whom I think I’m fooling.  I don’t expect to get back in good shape any time before I die.  Every time I try to exercise (so far) it screws me up with worsening of my chronic pain.  I wish I could just shut the pain off, but biology is not readily amenable to compromises in that area.  Pain, like fear, is too essential.  All things that suppress either of them‒even when the pain and/or fear have become thoroughly dysfunctional‒cause terrible side effects.

I can’t go on much longer like this.  It’s almost too bad that the solar eclipse is not some harbinger of disaster, but of course, it is not.  It’s merely a consequence of the geometry of three bodies whose mutual orbits lie nearly in the same plane.  If the moon’s orbital plane were identical to the Earth’s around the sun, there would be a lunar eclipse and a solar eclipse with each orbit of the moon, and predicting such things would have been far less impressive to the native peoples of Hispaniola when Columbus used his knowledge thereof to dupe them into going along with his plans.

Some modern people seem barely less credulous, despite being avid users of the Internet and World Wide Web.  Why, the leading independent candidate for president is full of ideas so absurd that they would have been rejected as plot points in the later seasons of the X-files.  If you caught him at the right time, you could probably convince him that early vaccines had been used to mind-control him and that he had assassinated both his uncle and his father.

Sorry.  I’m grumpy.  My apologies.  I’m in a lot of pain‒more so than usual‒and of course my sleep has been horrible, though at least I napped some over the weekend.  I also replaced the shower-head in the bathroom, but that’s not very impressive, and I had the cable people out to replace the modem for the Wi-Fi, but though that was absurdly nerve-wracking, it’s hardly a big accomplishment.

I feel horrible and rotten and disgusting.  I wouldn’t give myself 5 stars even on an Uber or Lyft scale (in which, if someone doesn’t get 5 stars the app asks you what went wrong, but only gives you pre-programmed, simplistic options for explanation, eliminating the whole point of a 5 star rating system‒3 stars should be the average, but instead it’s something like 4.9).  I wouldn’t give myself an A even on the Yale grading scale (in which, it seems, the vast majority of students get As in the vast majority of their classes‒again, destroying the whole point of the grading system and eliminating any incentives to excel).

Maybe I should write a whole post about that issue, how (among other things) grade inflation makes the prestige of elite educational institutions evaporate, since in the real world, business is competitive, and a 4.0 from a school where everyone gets a 4.0 and there is no merit-based admission will gradually (but not necessarily slowly) come to be not worth the virtual paper on which it is written.

Again, I’m sorry.  I really don’t feel well at all, and I don’t feel good at all, either*.  I hope you all feel significantly better than I do, physically, emotionally, morally and otherwise.  I’m sure you all deserve it more than I do, though “deserves” is for the most part a vacuous term.

I hope you all have a very good day.  If you get a chance, and are in its path, observe the eclipse (but don’t do it directly, not with unprotected eyes).  It’s not an especially impressive cosmic phenomenon, but it’s still pretty cool.  It’s particularly cool that the human race understands the universe well enough that these phenomena, which confused our ancestors so mightily, are almost banal to us, and we can predict and plot them out centuries in advance.

It’s particularly uncool that despite how much is known and understood, there are people who live in the modern world and who constantly use devices that rely on quantum field theory and general relativity yet still think a solar eclipse might be some supernatural sign.

Heavy sigh.  What can you do?  The world is tragically comical and comically tragic.  It’s probably not worth the effort.  And I’m darn near sure that I am not.

*Yes, I mean two different things by those two words.

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Not A Blog Post…

…it’s just a quick update/bit of bragging.  I wrote about 1600 words this morning on Extra Body, and then I even played a bit of guitar for about half an hour (and sang with it).  I’m extremely rusty, particularly the singing, but it’s nice that some things come back seeming easier than they did the last time I played.  I guess I didn’t lose those learned skills, which is nice.  Writing is always relatively easy, though it’s not as if I’ve ever really stopped doing that.

No posts or updates this weekend unless things change.  I will write fiction on Monday, and if you want, I can leave little updates like this afterwards.

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This is not an altered Shakespearean quote, in case you couldn’t tell

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, and for the first time in quite a while, this is my weekly blog post, the way I used to do things.

I’ve not been very well lately, even by my standards.  By which I do not mean that I haven’t been writing.  Monday morning I wrote just under 1400 words on Extra Body, which I guess is a good thing.

Then, Tuesday I did not go into the office.

I’ve had a particularly bad time lately regarding my insomnia.  Since Friday night, I haven’t had a single night with as much as four hours of sleep, and many of the nights have seen significantly less.  On Tuesday morning, I just stayed home and took some Benadryl, which only made me doze off for about two hours.  Then, Tuesday night I got another few hours, and went to work Wednesday.  I felt a little loopy during the day yesterday, to be honest, and occasionally I even acted a bit silly.  I suppose everyone at the office thought I was feeling better.

But even my pain has been worse than usual, too, probably largely because of the sleep deprivation.  I don’t think that the causality works in the other direction, because it’s usually not pain that wakes me up; it’s the semi-panicked feeling that I must have overslept by hours and hours, even though it’s only been about five minutes or so since I dropped off.

In any case, I have some kind of feeling of anxiety or vulnerability while I’m asleep.  You’d think I was a Vietnam veteran or something, except I was born in 1969, so I would have been very young indeed to serve.  Whatever it is, I don’t feel safe, or at least secure, when I’m asleep.

Still, it’s not as though I’m safe when I’m awake.  The thing is, no one is safe, not entirely, and no one ever has been (as evidence, note that almost all people who have ever lived are currently dead).  And I frankly find life mostly painful and stressful and exhausting and lonely and dreary, so I don’t know what exactly I’m afraid of such that I’d feel worried about having anything taken away from me.  It’s weird.

Anyway, I didn’t even bring the little laptop computer with me on Monday when I left the office, so I didn’t have it when I was on my way to the office (extremely early) on Wednesday morning.  Instead, I decided to use the Word app, which I’ve mentioned before, and I started to write the beginning of HELIOS.  I did not plan to go far, and I didn’t, writing just over five hundred words‒just beginning to introduce the setting, really.  Then I got to the office and wrote a bit over 800 words on Extra Body, bringing my total new words that day up to nearly the same as on Monday.

On Monday morning, I even strummed the guitar just a little bit.

Unfortunately, there has been no joy in writing fiction‒nor in playing guitar, come to think of it‒since I’ve restarted doing it.  I don’t blame the fiction, of course.  Nor do I blame the guitar.  The problem is my own faulty hardware and/or software, my operating system or particular programs or I don’t know what.  To quote C3PO, “He’s faulty!  Malfunctioning!”

I wish I could get some kind of system update that would fix some of the bugs.  Or at the very least, I wish I could reboot from time to time‒in other words, that I could just get a restful night’s sleep.  I feel that if I could get just a good night’s sleep, it might be almost like a little resurrection.  I still recall how good it felt on that day in the nineties when I had my last (or at least my most recent) good night of sleep, from which I awoke refreshed and rested the next day.  I don’t recall what I did that day, but I felt amazing.

I don’t know how I could accomplish that, though.  I’ve tried medications of various kinds, but they’ve tended just to make things worse.  I can force myself unconscious with Benadryl, for instance, but I awaken feeling groggy and confused and more out of it than when I went to sleep.  I’ve tried getting massages of various kinds, from real massage therapists and so on, but I guess I can’t really relax with a stranger.  And massage chairs, unfortunately, just don’t do it.

So it sucks, and I’m tired, and I’m in pain, and I see no light at the end of the tunnel, not even a glimmer, not even a glint.  All I see is a vague sort of swamp-light haze, a sort of sickly phosphorescence.  There’s just enough light to be able to take in the dreariness of my surroundings.

Blackness would be better, honestly.  Black, silent, empty oblivion seems quite preferable to my life, in which the only joys I know are the guilty (and steadily diminishing) reward of food, and‒as Steve Martin said‒a dishwashing liquid.

I need just to opt out.  I need just to work up my nerve.  That’s the hard part.  Fighting against those ingrained drives to stay alive even though it’s not merely utterly pointless but almost entirely without joy (yet almost never without pain, both physical and psychological).

It’s been getting old for a long time.  I’m sure you’ll all agree.  From within, I feel about a thousand years old, or a million, or a billion‒but I’m not an organism built to live that long.  So, again, I’m faulty and malfunctioning, held together by gaffer tape and twine and mud and twigs and clothes-hanger wire and paper clips, with modeling clay stuck in some of the holes to keep the damp from getting in.

Anyway, that’s my status for now, which is nothing new, just more (and gradually worse) of the same.  I hope you’re all feeling much better than I am.  At the very least, you deserve it for being patient enough to read my blog.  That’s a definite trial by ordeal.

I will do my best to keep writing fiction tomorrow, and I plan to do next week what I planned to do this week, though hopefully with at least a little bit more sleep.  By which I mean, I want to try to write fiction every day but Thursday.

If you see a post go up on some other day, it means I lost my resolve for that plan, at least temporarily.

If you don’t see a blog post at all, not even next Thursday, then either I’ve gotten sick, or I’m dead.  The longer time passes with no posts, the more likely it is to be the latter.  We can always hope, right?  I don’t know, maybe you think it would be a negative thing for me to die.  I’ll even admit that I am afraid of dying, by which I mean the process.  I don’t so much want to die as I want, most days, to be dead.

Silence.  Oblivion.  These things so often seem so much better than the noise and stress and tension and pain of awareness.  If I could just become “comfortably numb” it would be a vast improvement.  But that’s not likely.

TTFN

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I hope you all have a good Friday (get it?)

It’s Friday, and for those of you for whom this is the last workday of the week, I hope you have a good weekend; I work tomorrow, so this is not a TGIF sort of Friday for me.  I am obviously writing a blog post today, and I plan to write one tomorrow, as well.  Aren’t you lucky?

However…

…my current plan after that is to bring my small laptop computer with me when I leave the office tomorrow and then, next week, write fiction in the morning every day except Thursday, on which day I will revert to my old, once-weekly blogging.  I don’t know how long this pattern will last; I’m not making promises, merely predictions.  Still, I want to try to finish Extra Body and publish it, and maybe even start writing HELIOS afterwards, though that’s a longer term prediction, and so, like the weather forecast, it becomes inherently less reliable.

I already reverted to the old form of blog title yesterday, that of using a Shakespearean quote, altered to insert some form of the word “blog”.  I hadn’t planned to do so, but since I discussed some matters about which I wished I could take vengeance, I naturally thought of Shylock’s little speech in The Merchant of Venice.  I had to have a title anyway, and it was Thursday, so, to quote Doc Brown**, “I figured…what the hell.”

(Had it been Saturday night, I might have thought it all right to say, “What have I got to lose?”)

I didn’t include a picture, as I often used to do for my Thursday posts (imagining that this would garner me more readers).  That’s because finding a usable picture, then modifying it to suit my needs, was always very effortful.  I could do it pretty quickly, and some of the results were even fairly creative and artistic (in my opinion), but they were not worth the effort.  And if they drew more attention, they drew the attention of people who were more interested in pictures than in words, which is not my intended audience, at least not for this blog.

Oh, my!  I just realized that this is “Good Friday”.  It seems odd to call “good” the day memorializing someone’s crucifixion, especially if it’s the crucifixion of a good person.  Still, “good” is a fairly protean concept in any case, and I understand the reasoning behind it, such as it is, for the day, but it still seems slightly perverse to me.

It first occurred to me to check if it was indeed that traditional Christian holiday because there seem to be slightly fewer people at the train station at this time than there usually are.  As far as I know, the train schedule is a standard weekday one, and on Sunday it will be, as always, on a Sunday schedule, so there’s no need to modify it for Easter.

I don’t think I’ve ever ridden the Tri-Rail on a Sunday, come to think of it.  But I have ridden it on many a “holiday”, when it was on a restricted schedule, because my office, like so many businesses in the modern world, is much less likely to take national holidays off than used to be the case for most organizations a few decades ago.

The businesses of the modern world are stuck in a Nash equilibrium (of sorts) in which were any of them to change and improve their practices (in the sense of being less aggressively competitive and allowing employees more days off), they would be outcompeted, would lose business, might go out of business, in which case their employees would also be harmed by losing jobs, which would affect the overall job market, dogs and cats would live together…mass hysteria!  In such situations, there is no way for individuals to change their practices without harm to themselves and even to the system, even if those practices are plainly not optimal.

It is for these reasons, among others, that governments are instituted among the peoples of the Earth (“deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed”), to try to act upon situations that will not correct themselves.  Unfortunately, governments too can fall into perverse equilibria of various kinds, and once they do, getting them out of it can require significant, sometimes catastrophic, upheavals.

Think of having to pull the power cord on your computer to restart it because it’s gotten bogged down or frozen, and Ctrl-Alt-Del isn’t doing anything at all.  If they haven’t been auto-saved, you might lose some files on which you were working, but at least the computer can be useful again.

That’s a strained metaphor, I know, and I apologize.  But sometimes one does have sympathy (albeit not full agreement) with Jefferson’s notion that, for people to remain free, and presumably for governments to do what they are supposed to do, there should be a literal revolution/rebellion every twenty years or so:  “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.  It is its natural manure.”

That’s a bit extreme, perhaps, but maybe it would be interesting if, say, once every twenty years or so, everyone in government had to be replaced.  This is beyond the concept of term limits, and it would not be a staggered affair but would happen all at once.

I know, I know, there would be many detriments, including harms due to the fact that, ceteris paribus, people tend to get better at jobs the longer they work at them.  There would be real losses and setbacks associated with everyone being new to the government.

But then again, when people do politics as a career, they often learn bad habits, and the system can develop unplanned but subsequently entrenched and self-reinforcing negative patterns, equilibria that cry out for punctuation***.  These lead to losses of opportunity, economic losses, the loss of lives, and the occurrence of needless suffering‒but these costs are usually unnoticed because they are diffuse and scattered.  It’s related to the way we don’t recognize antacids as genuinely life-saving drugs, because we’re not aware of the many people who would have died‒who used to die, and often quite young‒from ulcers and perforations and gastric and esophageal cancers.

It’s also related to the fact that, environmentally and public health wise, nuclear power is orders of magnitude safer than fossil fuels for the world and for people’s health.  The number of illnesses and premature deaths per capita caused by even the worst nuclear disasters, even if they were scaled up to account for the greater preponderance of fossil fuel based power, is probably little more than a rounding error compared to the respiratory illnesses and other causes of suffering and premature death due to airborne particulates and similar problems from fossil fuels.

Well, there I go again, swerving all over the shop from one tangent to another, like a space probe passing near a bunch of unrealistically closely packed planets and having its trajectory repeatedly altered as it does so.

Speaking of such things, I do wish I could find a way to keep the energy I tend to have on Monday mornings for physics and mathematics and make it last through the rest of the week.  But my mental energy and clarity seems to be swiftly diminished by the slings and arrows of outrageous stupidity throughout the working days, so even by Tuesdays, I am usually significantly enervated.

Well, whataya gonna do?  This post has gotten too long already, anyway, and we’re getting close to my train stop.  I hope those of you who celebrate this holiday have a truly good Friday, and the rest of you as well.  Tomorrow, I’ll probably wish you a happy Easter.

*An interesting phrase combining a present tense verb with a future-oriented adverb in a way.

**That’s the one from Back to the Future, not the one who makes the really great canned sodas you can get in good delis and similar places.

***To bastardize a concept from Gould and Eldredge.

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If you prick us, do we not blog?

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday again.  At least, I think it’s Thursday.  I’m fairly sure it’s Thursday.  I have on my Thursday trousers*, at least.

Yep, it’s Thursday; I checked my phone’s readout.  I was pretty sure anyway, but when my memory jibes with an external measure of which I have no current reason to be suspicious, that drives my credence even higher than it already was.  Most days I don’t need to double-check.  Most days, my internal experience of reality is persistent and consistent enough that I’m well aware of what day it is, usually even when I “first” wake up, to such a degree that if my smartphone’s readout gainsaid that, I would suspect that the phone was malfunctioning.

Today, though, I am mildly fuzzy-headed, relative to how I usually am.  I spent most of yesterday with some manner of persistent and non-peristaltic abdominal pain that left me very grumpy; it was good that I got started on payroll early and finished it early.

I didn’t leave the office early.  No, no.  I didn’t leave until nearly 7 pm, though it was different people who kept me late this time.

That’s part of the problem with things being so lax for my coworkers:  I have to be at the office first every morning (I do get there earlier than absolutely necessary, since I can’t sleep in the morning, anyway, and it’s better to travel before rush hour).  And I am also the last to leave at night, since I lock up the office.  Yet I live farther away than almost everyone else who works there, and I don’t drive.  So I am subject to the vagaries of each day’s least time-sensitive person, whoever it might be on any given day.  Often, the people who stay late do not arrive on time in the morning.  They are often also the people who work into and sometimes through lunch.

I ought to find a way to punish these people.  I ought to take extreme vengeance upon them, “in this life or the next”.  But I probably will do no such thing.

Anyway, that’s that.  I’m a bit fuzzier than usual because I didn’t even start eating any dinner or winding down until 9 o’clock or so last night.  And here I am at the train station slightly less than eight hours later.  So, plainly I did not have a full night’s sleep‒but that never happens, anyway.

On to other matters.

I still don’t know what to do about my fiction writing.  Writing this blog every day increases the daily readership by a significant margin, such that, in the few weeks in which I was doing 2 days a week, there were only about two thirds as many visits per day that I posted.  But, of course, it’s not as though I reach very many people even on my best days.

I am probably wasting my time doing this, both in potentially boosting the reach of my fiction, and in trying to improve my mental health by talking about it (there’s no sign of that making any difference, is there?).

I don’t know.  I suspect that if I suddenly just stopped writing this blog, there are only maybe two people in the world who would notice quickly, and they are both family members.  A few others might eventually vaguely realize that they were no longer getting posts from that weird guy who has insomnia and depression and goes on and on and on about it all the time.  Perhaps they’d wonder whether I just stopped blogging, or if I died, and if so, whether that was due to accident or illness or suicide

Actually, it’s reasonable in many‒perhaps most‒cases to call suicide a death due to illness.  It’s just a kind of illness that hasn’t been recognized as such throughout most of history, and still is not met with the attitude that would be useful from most people who interact with its sufferers.  Of course, it isn’t caused by any virus or bacteria (as far as we know) and so is not contagious in any straightforward sense (though memetic contagion cannot be ruled out in all cases).

Then again, people have only known about the contagious nature of things like smallpox and typhoid fever and the black death and the flu and various other infectious and parasitic diseases for a very short time.  But those are the comparative low-hanging fruit of illnesses, prevention and treatment-wise.  When a disease is caused by a definitive pathogen, an invader, there is a target that can be eliminated, if possible, to the unmitigated benefit of the one invaded.  It was a clear and definitive good for people when, for instance, smallpox was eradicated.

Problems related to malfunction or dysfunction or conflicting function of the organism itself, on the other hand, are much trickier.  The structure and function of a biological organism is akin to a vast and vastly complicated Rube Goldberg machine, where interventions in one region can have hard-to-predict effects elsewhere.  And, of course, once we’ve eliminated or at least significantly curtailed all the “easier” targets, then only harder ones remain.

Then people will complain about the slow pace of medical progress and the fact that some people must take lifelong medications to treat things like diabetes and high blood pressure, imagining that this fact is only and entirely due to, say, profiteering on the part of pharmaceutical companies.  Meanwhile, some of them will actually complain about and even resist the use of such things as vaccines, which have given them the luxury of being able to worry about things other than, say, how many of their children will die of measles encephalitis or will be crippled by polio.

It’s enough to make one want to paraphrase Colonel Jessup from A Few Good Men, and remind people that they rise and sleep under the blanket of the health and longevity provided by medical science and then question the manner in which it has been provided**.

I don’t know how I got onto that tangent.  Neither do I know why I got onto that tangent.  It’s all pointless, anyway.  I hope this hasn’t been too disjointed a blog post.  I also hope that you all have a good day, and a good rest of the week, and a good upcoming month, and a good rest of the year, and a good rest of your lives, and a good rest of eternity.

As for me, I’d be pleased just to get a good rest.  But I don’t expect that to happen any time before I die.

TTFN

*Yes, I have a pair that I wear specifically and only on Thursdays.

**But they don’t question it in any honest, serious, intellectual sense, such as would entail actually studying and deeply understanding even basic undergraduate level biology (to pick up a  weapon and stand a post, so to speak).  It’s remarkable how many problems seem so simple to those who don’t really, actually know Jack Shit about them.