writing

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Near-catatonic dysthymia with sensory overload and the difficulty they engender in writing fiction at work – a personal case report

Well…

I tried to write some on HELIOS yesterday‒even just a page would have been nice.  I got my clipboard down, put the title at the top of the first page, and I even worked on a few names for characters and places.  I chose a good name for the school in which some of the action takes place, one that I like (this happened before the workday started), and a couple of tentative names for three main characters.  I’m not sure about sticking with any of those.

As I’ve noted before, I made up the rough idea of HELIOS when I was quite young, as a comic book superhero.  I don’t remember what name I had given to the main character, but knowing me, it was probably some ridiculously simple and probably alliterative name.  For instance, I once made up a completely ripped-off-from-the-Hulk character called “the Cosmonster” (!) and his regular, human name was John Jackson.

To be fair to my past self, I was quite young, and I was influenced by Stan Lee, who made such characters as Bruce Banner, Peter Parker, and Reed Richards.  So, there was precedent.

Still, a decent name for the main character is rather important.  “Doofus Ignoramus” is unlikely to be the secret identity of a memorable hero, though it could be an interesting genus and species name for some newly described creature.

Anyway, as I implied, I got no actual writing done on the book.  It’s just too noisy and chaotic during the day, and it’s almost impossible for me to block it all out, since I have to attentive to work matters.

Also, my dysthymia/depression and probably some other things were in full swing yesterday, and I was all but catatonic through at least two thirds of the work day.  I barely moved when I didn’t need to move, I barely spoke‒even when someone spoke to me, except when necessary‒and I don’t think I showed any facial expression before about 4:30 pm, though it can be hard for me to tell.  I’m trying not to exaggerate here.  I really felt more or less completely empty.

I even did a quick Google search for the official clinical meaning of catatonia, to see if I was close to meeting it, as I felt I might be.  It wasn’t quite the right term, but it wasn’t ridiculously far off, either.  There were times during the day that, if I had somehow caught fire, I probably would have looked at it and thought something along the lines of, “Huh.  I’m on fire.  I should probably put that out.  But is there really any point to doing that?  It’s too noisy in this world, anyway…maybe I should just let myself burn.”

Eventually I thawed slightly as the day went on‒I do fit the typical pattern of depression in that my overt symptoms tend to be worse in the morning.  Weirdly, despite that fact, I find it far easier to get many things done in the morning, when it’s quiet and I’m effectively alone.

I’ve always been that way, or at least as long as it’s been pertinent.  Even in junior high, I used to get up and go to school very early, so I tended to be the first student there and have quiet space and time to feel like the surroundings were just mine before everyone else showed up.  I carried this on through high school.  In my undergrad years, I used to set my watch fifteen minutes ahead and then still make a point to get to class early, by my watch, even though I knew it was set ahead.

That would be harder to do nowadays, since all the effing digital devices display time based on local corrections to UTC, getting updates and adjustments through 5G or Wi-Fi or whatever other connections are there.  This is good around daylight savings time, I guess‒it’s harder for people to make the excuse that they forgot to set their clocks forward in the spring and that’s why they’re late for work the Monday after.  But the whole uniformity of time and whatnot seems overrated‒and it certainly doesn’t seem to stop people from being habitually late in the morning and then keeping other people late at the end of the day.

Not that I am bitter.

Going back to writing:  despite my emptiness and disconnectedness yesterday, and my inability to write any fiction, I decided to order two good spiral bound notebooks, thinking maybe I can at least bring them on the train and write on my way back to the house or something.  If I brought the clipboard with the paper in it, the pages would get all shmushed and mangled in my backpack, and that would be very aesthetically unpleasant.

So, I’ll be getting two of those lovely, sturdy “5-Star” spiral bound notebooks delivered today.  They were quicker to arrive and cheaper than if I had bought them in a stationery store, and I had better choices of colors, though I still had to settle for one green one along with the black one to get a one-day delivery.  That’s okay.  One of the nice things about black is that it goes with every color quite nicely.

I guess I’ll let you know how things go today.  I’m not too optimistic, especially given that work is more sensorially overloading and distressing than is even riding on a commuter train, a fact which at first glance might seem rather contradictory.

It makes a certain amount of sense, though.  On a train‒or a bus, or similar‒one is actually much more alone than one is in an office.  There are other people, but they are each also alone.  You are all mutually alone, and there is no impetus to communicate or interact.  It’s much more pleasant than working where people feel they can just come up and interact with you without warning, whether or not you’re already doing something.  And then, they’re all talking and interacting and there’s overhead music, and there’s stupidity, and you can’t even hear the useful, pertinent information that you’d like to hear.  It’s too chaotic and noisy, certainly for someone with constant tinnitus in one ear and other sensory difficulties.

Oh, well.  Whataya gonna do?  The forces that brought the world into existence never bothered to get my input when they did what they did.  The morons.  Things could have been so much better than they are, but they didn’t bother to ask me.  Then they give the poor excuse that I “didn’t exist” at the time.  Whose fault was that, huh?  Not mine!

Maybe it’s not too late for me to fix everything.  But it often seems hardly to be worth the effort, even if it can be done.  For the most part, life in general does not merit help or protection.  Macbeth had its number:  it’s a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Speaking of tales told by idiots, I’ll let you know tomorrow how it goes today with respect to fiction writing after my notebooks arrive.

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Whither one goes affects whether the effects of the weather are noteworthy

It’s a bit chilly this morning, at least for south Florida.  As I looked at the weather app when I was getting up, it reported that the temperature near me was about 51 degrees Fahrenheit.  We can take 32 away from that then multiply by 5/9‒so that’s 19 x 5, which is 95, divided by 9‒which gives just over 10 degrees Centigrade (or Celsius, depending upon whom one asks).

I guess that’s pretty cool, though certainly there are many places north of here where people would welcome it as a relatively balmy day for this time of year.  Alternatively, in parts of the southern hemisphere, where it is summer, it would seem aberrantly cold, even more noteworthy than it is in my neck of the subtropical woods.  Going farther afield, on Mars it would be truly a record-setting heat wave, whereas on Venus, such a temperature would be impossibly, unfathomably cold.

The surface temperature of Venus is, if memory serves, around 900º Fahrenheit, or nearly 500º Centigrade, or nearly 800 Kelvin (I am rounding the Kelvin “273” addition to Centigrade because I only have one significant figure in my recalled estimate of Venus’s average temperature in Fahrenheit, and adding other specific digits would be misleading and unjustified).

It’s interesting that Venus, the planet named for the goddess of sexual and romantic love, is the most hellish planet in the solar system.  It’s hot enough at the surface to melt lead.  The atmospheric pressure is 90 times that of Earth and largely consists of carbon dioxide.  The cloud cover is constant and it rains sulfuric acid.

Perhaps Venus, the morning “star” (and the evening “star” too, depending on which side of the sun it’s currently on from Earth’s point of view) is more appropriately given one of its other names, which is:  Lucifer, the light-bearer, herald of the dawn, who in later mythology was associated with the Devil (at least before his fall).

Of course, it’s hard to reconcile Lucifer’s supposed fall with the fact that the planet is still conspicuously up there in the sky.  And I do mean “conspicuously”.  Apart from the sun and the moon, Venus is easily the brightest thing in the night sky.  Sometimes one can still see it even as the sun is beginning to rise; the cloud cover of Venus makes it highly reflective of visible light.

Anyway, I find it sardonically and cynically amusing that the goddess of love is associated with a nightmarish hellscape, but I have a personal history that makes me look askance at romance.  I am, in other words, biased.

Venus is a good object lesson in the potent effects of carbon dioxide’s tendency to allow visible but not infrared light to pass easily through it, and so to create a “greenhouse effect” even in the modest concentration it achieves on Earth.

The physics of this is well understood, relating largely to the resonant frequency of the bonds in the molecule as well as its size and shape.  Smaller, tighter molecules like molecular nitrogen and molecular oxygen, the two gasses that make up the vast majority of Earth’s atmosphere, don’t interact much with infrared light, and are more prone to scatter shorter, bluer wavelengths of visible light‒this is a rough explanation of why the sky is blue (and why the sunrise and sunset are much redder, as that sunlight is going through more of the atmosphere due to the angle at which we see the sun at those times of day, and the blue is partly scattered out of it, leaving relatively more redder light behind).

Anyway, the broad physics of the greenhouse effect is almost elementary, and has been understood for a long time.  The specifics of what precisely will happen in any given set of circumstances can be tricky to tease out, given the complexity of reality‒you might say that Venus is in the details‒but the specifics are often less important than the broad strokes.

After all, when a giant asteroid is heading toward the Earth, it isn’t that reassuring to know that only, say, 75% of species will be driven extinct by its impact, and that life will survive and eventually once again thrive.  How much would someone have to pay you for you to be willing to accept a 75% chance that just you will die, let alone everyone like you on the planet?

There might well be a big enough sum for you to be willing to risk your own life, especially if you got to enjoy the money for a while before the dice were thrown, or to leave it to your heirs.  But for your whole species?  Is there a reward big enough to be able to take that chance?  Let’s assume you’re not a raging misanthrope/panantipath like I am for the sake of this question, since depending on my mood, I’d be inclined to negotiate for a higher chance of extinction.

Also, of course, by pretty much every possible form of ethics you might follow, you don’t have the right to roll the dice on all the members of your own species.   You don’t have any right to roll the dice on the members of your own family, unless they unilaterally and spontaneously and freely grant you that right.

Sorry, I don’t know why I’m writing about these topics today.  They are just what spewed out of me, like vomit from the proverbial drunkard or pus from a squeezed abscess.  I wish I could write something more interesting, or write something that helped my mood some.  Writing fiction did at least help fight my depression, but it’s hard when almost no one reads my stuff.

Maybe I should take to writing at least a page of fiction a day by hand, on the notebook paper and clipboard I have at the office, during downtime, instead of watching videos.  Yesterday I mainly watched ones about spontaneous symmetry breaking and the electro-weak era and the Higgs mechanism.  To be fair to me, it’s very interesting stuff, and it actually would have some relevance to my potential comic book turned manga turned science fiction story, HELIOS.

Of course, that’s named for another mythological figure, one that’s even hotter than Venus.  But I don’t know if I can write it.  Motivation is difficult.  Still, as Stephen King reputedly once told Neil Gaiman, if you write just one page a day, by the end of a year you’ll have a decent-sized novel*.

Once I get writing, I have a hard time stopping at only one page.  If you’re a regular reader of my blog, you’ll probably know this implicitly‒my general target for post length is about 800 words, but I almost never am able to keep it that short.

I guess we’ll see what happens.  And, of course, I’ll keep you all…posted.

*He has also noted that, for him‒as I have often found it to be for me‒writing fiction is the best form of therapy.

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Chaos surfing and the omni-curious mind

It’s Saturday morning and‒as I warned you‒I am writing a blog post today.

I just experienced a tiny little frisson of déjà vu, which is always interesting when it happens.  It involved that seemingly obvious, curious sensation that I could remember dreaming about the process of writing this particular blog post, in the location in which I’m writing it, at some time in the past.  Of course, I have no reason to suspect that precognitive dreams are actual things, except occasionally, by coincidence, due to the large number of dreams that happen and the brain’s capacity to model/predict its world with decent accuracy due to the regularities therein.  But déjà vu is still an interesting and sometimes enjoyable experience.

In case you haven’t noticed, mine is very much a stream-of-consciousness kind of blog.  I sometimes wish I were writing something more useful or informative or thought-provoking.  Then I could imagine I was contributing to the world in some way.  I have a wide range of knowledge on lots of topics‒science in general, some physics and cosmology, biology and medicine, some mathematics, a tiny bit of computers, and of course some philosophy (and psychology).

I sometimes regret not having explored philosophy more at an earlier age.  There was a philosophy class in my high school; it was one of my favorite classes, and the teacher was great, but I avoided philosophy in college deliberately.  I had little understanding of how good and useful it‒as well as pure mathematics, not solely for use in physics‒is in improving one’s ability to think about all subjects.

At its “worst” it’s at least analogous to doing calisthenics to get stronger and more fit.  One doesn’t do push ups in order to become a world champion at push ups‒usually‒and one doesn’t do push ups because one expects to become a professional pusher up and to make one’s living that way.  As far as I know, there is no such profession.  One does it to keep one’s body fit so it is more capable of responding to any of a functionally limitless number of specific challenges throughout life.  So it is with the mind, but the mind is far more capable of growth and strengthening than even the greatest athlete’s body has ever been.

I get so frustrated when I hear people whining about, say, the fact that they never use the Pythagorean Theorem in their daily lives, or haven’t used algebra since they left school.  My first reaction when I hear such moans is to think, “If that’s true, then too bad for you; you’re missing out.”

But I also find it noteworthy that most people don’t complain of the fact that they’ve never played kickball or tag or used their sandlot baseball skills in their later life.  Similarly, very few people get jobs playing video games‒there is a vanishingly small few who make at least temporary livings playing video games competitively, but that’s not a reliable long-term strategy for almost anyone.  Such skills are, for the most part, far less useful than those of algebra and calculus‒though I understand that there is some evidence that playing video games can make people better drivers by improving their alertness and response times.

Breadth and depth of knowledge are ends in themselves; they are their own reward, one might say.  When one learns something new, one makes oneself “larger” without taking anything away from anyone else*.  Information can be shared without loss, and one can contain whole universes‒real and/or imaginary‒in one’s mind.  It’s remarkable.

But also, knowledge, even of esoterica, is of practical, basic value.  Insights gained from having studied epistemology or Boolean logic may become useful, unexpectedly, in a business negotiation or a plumbing emergency.  Who knows?  The world is too complex for one to be able to predict the specifics of local events very far ahead of time‒and even the precise knowledge of that fact is based on an originally obscure branch of mathematics and information theory, and was formally born of the use of a “primitive” computer weather simulation.

You cannot fundamentally alter the chaotic nature of reality.  You cannot effectively steer the chaos‒but you can learn to surf on it.  And the more you know and the greater the breadth of your mental skills, the more likely you are to be able to catch the right waves and ride them to someplace you’d like to be.

Anyway, back to what I was saying earlier:  I sometimes imagine myself doing a more informative or exploratory blog, a discussion of sorts, albeit one-sided.  When I leave it to my stream of consciousness, my blog is often depressing (or at least it’s often depressed).  But I don’t know what people might like to read my thinking about; I have a great deal of difficulty understanding what other people find interesting or engaging, let alone why.  So, if anyone has any general subjects they’d like me to explore, whether truly broad or regarding current events or science news or anything within my relative wheelhouse**, feel free to let me know in the comments…or, I suppose, via Facebook or Twitter.  I don’t like to encourage such things, but these “social media” can be entertaining and even useful in certain rarefied situations.

In the meantime, have a good weekend if you’re able to do so.

*Apart from the tiny, tiny increase in overall universal entropy that all learning entails.  But that’s going to happen anyway, and the entropy created by a lifetime of astonishing erudition is unnoticeably small next to, say, that produced every day simply by the Earth absorbing sunlight, warming up, and releasing higher-entropy heat back out into the cosmos.

**My wheelhouse walls are made of rice paper, so I can easily knock them down and expand that chamber as desired.  I dream of my wheelhouse eventually being as large as the cosmic horizon‒or even larger!  Why not?

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Salutations on a Friday

I don’t have much to say, today‒or much to write, I guess, if you want to be precise.  Honestly, I don’t think I have much to say in the literal sense, either, but it’s harder to tell since I don’t tend to talk to anyone at all before nine or so in the morning.  Often, I would prefer not to say anything even then, but people will insist on saying things to me, like “Good morning,” and so on.

I guess I don’t really mind the “Hi” and “Good morning” type greetings*, though it is often irritating that one is expected to return them in some ritual fashion, for no particular purpose that I can discern‒other than, I suppose, that of primate hierarchical, dominance, and coalitional signaling between members of the same flange of naked house apes.  I doubt most people think much about it.  Still, a “Hi” is okay.  I can return it with a word and a nod, though often my voice is apparently too quiet for other people to hear when I reply.  I also will often give a Vulcan salute, which is good because it is silent and distinctive.

I gave one of those to a young man on the train who had asked me which stop was next because he needed to get off at a particular one.  I gave him useful information, he got off at his desired stop, and as he left, he thanked me.  I said a somewhat befuddled “you’re welcome” and without thinking did a low-key Vulcan salute.  I’m not sure he noticed it.

It can be amusing to greet or say goodbye to people using the American Sign language “love” gesture, with the index and pinky fingers and thumbs out but the middle two fingers down, as if you were Spider-Man shooting webs straight up into the air.  It’s not that I particularly like telling people that I “love” them‒generally, I don’t (love them or want to tell them), and I think the whole “I love you, man” kind of thing is very much overused, and bastardizes and cheapens the word and the very concept of love.

On the other hand, if you fold your thumb in, the “love” sign turns into the heavy metal sign of the devil (supposedly), so for people toward whom you have the least affection, it can be a good way to slag them off without them even realizing you’re doing it.  I know, it’s petty and rather unsatisfying, but it’s not as though you can act on your real impulses.  If you set them on fire with a homemade flame-thrower or beat them to death with a baseball bat, you’re liable to get arrested, even‒and this is the galling point‒if everyone else in the office agrees that the person is annoying.

This is all hypothetical, of course.

Anyway, I will be working tomorrow, so I suspect that I’ll be writing another blog post in the morning.  Yippee.  I don’t know why, but I have not yet been able to break that habit.

I am tempted just to sleep in the office tonight rather than go back to the house.  It’s a bit pointless, all the going back and forth.  There’s no one and nothing waiting at the house for me.  Even the neighborhood cats are coming around less often; someone else must be putting out better food than I do.

This is probably just as well.  I only started feeding the cats because my housemate used to do it, and he said he was going to come pick up the really skittish one.  He has not yet done so, and it’s been a few years now‒I don’t recall how long‒and I’ve been spending money on cat food that I could…I don’t know, that I could use as washrags to wipe the bathroom sink, something like that?  Nothing that I spend money on is really beneficial, other than books, perhaps, but I have oodles of those, and I still haven’t read much of Quantum Field Theory, As Simply as Possible, or Spacetime and Geometry, or Classical Electrodynamics or any of those books that I keep meaning to read.

It’s all very boring, but at least I have chronic pain and depression and insomnia to keep things from being too peaceful.  It’s too bad I don’t have drug or alcohol problems‒at least those keep life from being predictable.

I was being tongue-in-cheek with that last sentence.  I don’t want to have drug or alcohol problems, though they are enticing routes to self-destruction.  It was bad enough when I had to take prescription pain meds for so long.  And my favorite alcoholic beverages are the ones I imagine drinking; the real ones are always a disappointment, and they leave me feeling unpleasant.

I mean I feel unpleasant internally in that situation, meaning that I feel uncomfortable physically, that I feel unwell.  I know that I’m always relatively unpleasant to other people.

However, although my mind is not my friend, there are and have always been aspects of it that are the most treasured things about reality for me, and I don’t want to endanger those.  My love of learning and understanding, of reading, of horror and science fiction and fantasy, of music, all those things are treasures, even when my depression makes them inaccessible to me.  I don’t want them to go away permanently, at least not while I’m alive.  I guess that means that, if I were to get cancer, I wouldn’t want a brain tumor.

Of course, that would mean that I would be most likely to get a brain tumor, if the universe dealt in irony, which as far as I can tell it does not.  As far as I can tell, all instances of seeming “karmic” irony are cases of selection bias or recall bias.  We remember the time the guy who refused to fly died in a train derailment, or when the exercise guru died young of a heart attack, not realizing that we remember them precisely because they are unusual and atypical.  They are cases of “man bites dog”, which is news, according to the cliché, while “dog bites man” is not.

Talk to you tomorrow.

*On the other hand, I have great trouble with “How are you doing?” and related greetings.  I almost always freeze up for at least a moment when met with such inquiries.  I don’t know what to say.  Most days I feel that I am not doing well at all, but I don’t necessarily want to say that to others, nor are they likely to want to hear it, and I feel irritated at being put on the spot, especially when people don’t seem really to care much how well or poorly I’m faring.

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The enemy of my Self is Myself

I mean to try to keep this post relatively short today, and only partly because I’m writing this on my smartphone and don’t want to make my thumbs feel worse.  It’s mainly that I just don’t have much to say or talk about, and certainly nothing uplifting.

I tried to do a few relatively upbeat posts‒for me, anyway‒on Monday and Tuesday of this week, but I don’t think they’re as popular as my depressed and nihilistic posts.  It’s rather ironic; one might imagine that upbeat posts would be the ones people would prefer to read, but I guess that may not be true.  I shouldn’t be surprised that it surprises me, probably; people often make very little sense to me.

Anyway, I’m just tired.  I left work slightly early yesterday with a bad headache and just feeling horribly stressed out and tense and angry.  I don’t know if it was that things were particularly frustrating at the office, or if it was the usual fact that I cannot escape from the person I loathe most in the world:  me.

I often say that I hate the world and I hate my life‒at least, it feels as though I often say it, because I say it in my head a lot.  Maybe I don’t say it aloud or in writing as often as it feels as though I say it.  I haven’t kept track, and I don’t mean to do so.  That would be truly boring.

But of course, the reason (one of them, anyway) I don’t just change my life‒or try to change the world‒is that I cannot escape the common denominator that is the single biggest contributor to the fact that I hate the world and hate my life:  I hate myself.

I wish it were otherwise.  It would be nice to love myself, I guess.  I wouldn’t have to be narcissistic or anything.  It doesn’t require a delusional or overinflated self-worth to love oneself, any more than it need be irrational or delusional to love one’s spouse or one’s children even when one can see and knows their imperfections.  No one is perfect, after all‒I’m not even sure what the term could mean when applied to a person.

One can love another person even when angry at that person.  One can punish one’s children when they misbehave, and one can choose not to indulge all their wishes precisely because one loves them and hopes to guide them toward being the best people they can be.

So love doesn’t have to be stupid or delusional.  But that doesn’t necessarily mean one can simply choose to love someone.  I’ve tried to train myself to love myself, with positive self-reinforcement, with cognitive therapy, with auto-suggestion, with written lists of my positive attributes, and even with self-hypnosis.  Obviously, I have not succeeded.

Even when I’m stressed out and irritated by everything that happens at the office‒by the noise, by the overbearing “music”, by the stupid little rituals, by the personality conflicts, by the frequent interruptions when I’m doing one task and people just come in without preamble and start asking me about something else entirely*, as if I were a machine just waiting for them to give me work‒even when all these things are happening, the thing that bothers me most is that I am with me.

That’s what I feel, and it’s what I’ve been fighting and it’s the fact in spite of which I’ve been trying to be positive, at least in my writing, but that’s not really working.

When I was writing fiction, that seemed to help at least a bit‒and sometimes a lot‒but there’s only so much fiction one can write that almost no one reads before one feels as delusional as if one believed one had magic powers.  But it is true that writing fiction is good therapy, as Stephen King has pointed out on more than one occasion, and if I could do it full time without other commitments, I might again find the energy to do it.  Unfortunately, if I want to stay alive‒which is a rather big “if” a lot of the time‒I have to work, like everyone else, and my mental energy is used up and more than used up.

Anyway, that’s that.  Yesterday I was very stressed out and had a headache and yelled openly at my closest friend in the office and came within a hair’s breadth of breaking my tablet and my back Stratocaster.  I banged my head on the wall a few times to release some of those destructive urges, and that didn’t help my headache.

Yet I didn’t sleep well at all last night, even for me, despite going back to the house somewhat early.  I don’t feel rested; I almost never feel rested.  The very air through which I move feels like viscous, heavy smoke, burning my eyes, poisoning me as I breathe, impeding me as I try to walk, pressing down on me as I try to stand up.  I need to stop.  I need to rest.  I need to sleep.

*This is a bit akin to people who will come up and start talking to one when one is reading, as if someone who is reading must be unoccupied and just waiting to be of service to other people.

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Monday reflections and a song parody

It’s Monday morning, the morning after the Super Bowl, in case you pay attention to such things.  It was a pretty good game, I guess‒I watched it‒but it never felt very exciting to me at all.  Not much seems very exciting to me, honestly.  I had gone for a couple of long walks and bought some snacks and ordered a bit of indulgent food for the game, but I’ve ended up throwing most of that away.  I guess that’s probably good, in the sense that I don’t need the extra junk food calories and whatnot.  But it is a shame to waste the food.

Still, food waste is not the biggest problem.  Even in the places in the world where there is starvation, the problem is not that there is no capacity to get the people food.  The problem is political‒local and geo‒in addition to economics that are born of twisted politics.

At least food waste is, more or less by definition, biodegradable.

I haven’t written any new fiction, of course, but I did something slightly creative yesterday morning.  Somehow, the Carpenters’ song Close to You got in my head.  As its lyrics passed through my thoughts, I again had the impression‒which often happens with this song‒that the person being described seems to have sinister, supernatural powers, or at least is surrounded by supernatural portents.  Then it occurred to me that the words “close to you” and the word “antichrist” have the same number of syllables and the same (rough) stresses.  So, inspired by these two facts, I wrote a parody of Close to You called, of course, Antichrist.

As someone who has long enjoyed horror fiction and who at an early age familiarized himself with the “Revelation of Saint John the Divine” as it is sometimes known‒the last book in the standard Christian Bible‒the lyrics came rather easily.  I’ll share them below.  I vaguely entertain the notion of actually recording my parody, doing all the various parts and whatnot, but since I haven’t been practicing or playing guitar more than once every few months, and have done the keyboards even less, I wouldn’t hold your breath waiting for that to happen.

I also thought once again yesterday about some slight tweaking to the plot of my “super hero” story HELIOS.  This is an idea that took root originally waaaay back in my childhood, and was one of the “comic book characters” I used to draw, and for which I made some partial comic books and even an arch-enemy.  But the more current version of the idea isn’t really a superhero story, certainly not the type that would involve costumes and secret identities and whatnot.  I even thought, for a moment, that I just might start working on that story soon.

That didn’t last long, though.  I just don’t feel any motivation to do it.  If five living people, total, have read any or all of my books or stories, I would be surprised.  So, writing them is a bit like taking all the pages of the finished works and scattering them into a hurricane.  They just all go off somewhere and become mere parts of the detritus of reality, their information lost to all but Laplace’s Demon.  And, presumably, He wouldn’t appreciate them as stories, even though He could keep track of each and every force and particle they entailed.

Maybe the fact that these thoughts and stirrings happened on the weekend, and after one full day off, means that if only I had some regular mental rest, I might find the energy to start writing fiction again, or playing music, or some other, similar creative endeavors.

I doubt that will happen, though.  I’m in the middle of the ocean treading water as it is.  How am I supposed to locate a place to rest?  The odds of me happening upon some Gilligan’s Island type of refuge are pretty low.  I’m just biding my time, waiting for fatigue and hypothermia to get the best of me.  In a real ocean, that would have happened a long time ago.  Unfortunately, metaphors are not as lethal as one might like them to be.

Anyway, there’s not much more to say.  I guess I’ll close by giving you the lyrics of my parody.  Here it is:

ANTICHRIST

A parody of Close to You (by the Carpenters)

–

Why do crows suddenly appear

Every time you are near?

Seems to me

You’ve got to be

the Antichrist.

–

Flaming stones fall down from the sky

Every time you walk by.

Plain to see

You’ve got to be

the Antichrist.

–

On the day that you were born the demons got together

And forged a waking nightmare built for strife

With storm clouds heralding your birth and armies of the dead that came to life.

–

Businessmen and others who want power

Before you now will cower

They just know

It must be so

You’re the Antichrist.

–

When at last the time arrives to show your true dark nature

all of those who bear your mark you’ll pierce

With fire and brimstone in your breath and ten horns on your seven heads so fierce!

–

Then the world meets its final end.

Into Hell it descends.

There awaits

Your dismal fate,

Antichrist

–

Seems to me

It sucks to be

The Antichrist.

–

Waah, Antichrist

Waah, Antichrist…

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Learning about science, troubles with reading and socialization, and (not) writing fiction

It’s Saturday morning, and boy was yesterday’s audio blog a little weird.  I think it’s not so much that I said anything particularly weird—certainly not for me—but rather the odd meanderings thing took, from musing on the fact that I’ve been losing any joy of any kind in my life, becoming more and more bored or even irritated by more and more things that used to be interesting, on to the various declining cinematic universes and finally to thoughts about General Relativity.

At least that latter part encouraged me to read some material and watch some relatively hard-core YouTube videos about General Relativity and its mathematics.  By “hard-core”, I don’t mean there was any graphic sex involved.  First of all, I don’t think they allow stuff like that on YouTube, but even more to the point, I don’t see how one could work such a thing into an educational video about matrices and tensors and stuff like that.  I mean “hard-core” as in being more in-depth than just a general information, analogy kind of educational presentation, and especially that it talked about the mathematics underlying the science.

Not that I’m against the more general stuff.  I certainly began all of my interest in science with general knowledge/information.  When I was a kid, growing up (which is what kids do if things go well), I had a whole bookshelf I called my “science shelf” full of various kid-level books about everything from biology to paleontology (there were lots of dinosaur books—my first career ambition was to be a paleontologist) to “how things work” kinds of books and so on.

I didn’t really start to have as much physics and astronomy related material until after Cosmos came out.  That show was the reason our family got our first color TV.  I also asked for (and received) a hardcover copy of the book for my 10th or 11th birthday (it came out in 1980, I think, so it should have been 10th), and I was very pleased.  That book and show really triggered my love of space-oriented and physics-oriented science, including—of course—cosmology.

I chose my undergraduate college precisely because it was where Carl Sagan was a professor, though I never did meet him.  I would have thought it presumptuous and appalling to try to seek him out and bother him with gestures of my admiration and thanks.  I tend to feel that way about inflicting myself upon anybody—friend, foe, or stranger.  I just feel that I don’t have any right to intrude upon anyone else’s life or time, and also that I frankly don’t know what to say if I do meet them.

It’s a bit sad, though.  By most accounts, Professor Sagan tended to be quite pleasant and positive toward people who liked his work, and he considered himself—according to him—first and foremost a teacher.  He certainly taught me a great deal.  Though his books are now somewhat out of date, they are mostly still great repositories of fact and interest, and they remain overflowing founts of wonder.  I feel confident in recommending them to anyone, most prominently Cosmos, Pale Blue Dot, and especially The Demon-Haunted World.

Of course, I’ve read a lot of his intellectual descendants since then, and his cousins as well in other fields (Stephen Jay Gould’s and Richard Dawkins’s books and collections about biology are wonderful, too, for instance).  One thing I like about listening to podcasts that focus on ideas is that the guests are often people who have recently (or not-so-recently) written books, and if the subject is interesting I can read their books to get more deeply into their work.  I first encountered David Deutsch and Max Tegmark (and many others) on Sam Harris’s podcast, for instance.

And, of course, I have also read books by Brian Greene and Sean Carroll (and others) about physics in general.  It was to The Big Picture that I turned yesterday after my audio blog, in addition to the aforementioned video, to review some of the mathematical basics of General Relativity.  From there, maybe I’ll go on to the YouTube videos of Leonard Susskind’s* real graduate level lectures at Stanford, and to reading Sean Carroll’s textbook.  I’d also like to read through Zee’s Quantum Field Theory, As Simply As Possible, which I’ve mentioned before (with the thought of going on to his textbook if I can).

I have Zee’s layperson-oriented book in hardcover, but the print is small, and it’s difficult to read.  Still, I took delivery yesterday of a new set of reading glasses that are slightly stronger than the ones I was using, so I hope they’ll make it easier.  I’d really prefer to learn by reading than even by watching videos.

Of course, all this is probably just “pie in the sky” thinking.  My biggest difficulty is just summoning the will, the energy, to do these things.  It’s similar to the trouble I have with writing fiction.  I have quite a few story ideas I could write, but I have no drive, no desire to do the writing.  There’s no percentage in it, so to speak.  It’s not as though I have any fans out there telling me how much they like my books and want more.  I mean, my sister has read them all, and she liked at least most of them, and says she really liked The Chasm and the Collision.  That’s very nice, and I do appreciate it.  Apparently, though, it’s not the required stimulus for me to want to write more fiction.

Perhaps nothing would be.  Perhaps I’m just deteriorating too much, or have deteriorated too much.

Or perhaps it’s that I feel that a truly tiny minority even of people who engage with fiction do so in written form nowadays.  There’s too much competing immediate gratification out there, and primates—probably almost all life forms—are prone to fall for immediate gratification, and to someone else doing the imaginative work for them.

I fear that much of the general population has allowed their personal imaginations to atrophy, much as physical health atrophies when someone goes everywhere by car.  People even play Dungeons & Dragons online now, apparently.  That seems weird to me.  I don’t think I could really stand to play role playing games with strangers.  Playing them with my friends, as I did back in junior high and high school, for countless hours, was greatly enjoyable, and I think it did exercise and improve my imagination and my story-telling and story-creating “muscles”.

Oh, well.  I don’t have anyone with whom to do any of that stuff now, and I can’t even really imagine trying to find new people with whom to do it—see my above discussion about inflicting myself on people for part of the reason, but that’s not the only one.  I also don’t want to invest the considerable necessary stress and effort and anxiety into trying to find friends with whom I actually share interests—if such people even exist—and then have it all go sour or just go away as nearly every other relationship of any kind that I’ve ever had has done.  The juice, however delicious, is not worth that old vice-grip-on-the-testicles (and on all the joints and tips of one’s fingers) level squeeze.  The juice doesn’t last, anyway.

I’m on the train now, and I’m not exactly producing anything edifying, am I?  I’ll bring this week’s writing to an end, but I hope I’ll have the will to keep studying, at least.  And, of course, I hope most fervently and sincerely that all of you have a very good weekend.

*I also have his series The Theoretical Minimum in kindle and/or paperback and/or hardback form; his most recent one was about GR.  But I’ve had trouble reading physical books of any kind (let alone the Suss kind…ha ha) lately; I’m hoping my new reading glasses will help that.

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This is NOT a quote from Shakespeare (as far as I know)

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, the first of February in 2024 (AD or CE) and I’m writing a blog post for the day even though I’m not at all sure of any good reason to do so.  I even began it in the traditional way (“Hello and good morning”) in which I have usually started my Thursday blogs, going back to when Thursday was the only day of the week I wrote them, reserving all other days for writing fiction.

I don’t think I’m going to do a modified Shakespeare quote for the title, today, though.  It’s too much of a pain and takes too long, since all of the most obvious ones have already been used.  I suppose I might change my mind before the time I publish this, in which case, you will already know, though I do not know as I’m writing it.

As the 11th Doctor said:  “Time travel; you can’t keep it straight in your head.”

Yesterday’s blog post title was an actual quote from the song I referenced in the footnote.  It’s a good song (off OK Computer).  Radiohead did an amazing job making sounds that were evocative of the notion of aliens and the like, and it has the wonderful little riff at the beginning and end.

That album really is one of the greatest albums ever.  It’s not a concept album.  Radiohead is too eclectic a band, I think, ever to try to make a concept album, though their albums tend to have an internal cohesiveness to them.  They often are very careful and strict about the order in which to put their songs, and which ones to include.

For instance, in OK/not OK, their rerelease of OK Computer a few years ago, they included several songs on the “not OK” portion that they hadn’t included in the original, some of which they left out because they didn’t match the tone of the album.  I certainly understand where they were coming from, but it’s a mild shame to have had to wait so long for songs such as Polyethylene (Parts 1 & 2), Man of War, I Promise, and Lift.

That last one is one of my very favorite Radiohead songs.  It sounds too upbeat and hopeful for the tone of OK Computer, but I take that as “deliberately” misleading, a slightly different version of what they did with No Suprises (in which the song sounds like a beautiful lullaby, but the lyrics tell a very different story—I did my own “live” cover of that song, because it’s so representative of how I feel much of the time).  Alternatively, one could say that the tone of Lift is positive because the singer takes a very different attitude toward the subject matter as I take it from the song compared to most people, and is optimistic about it.

I interpret Lift, consistent with my biases and attitude, to be a song about escaping from life (by dying).  “This is the place.  Sit down.  You’re safe now.  You’ve been stuck in a lift.  We’ve been trying to reach you, Thom*.  This is the place.  It won’t hurt ever again.”  And, of course, later there’s the line, “You’ve been stuck in a lift, in the belly of a whale, at the bottom of the ocean**.”

I interpret this as expressing the thoughts of someone who’s finally getting out of all the stress and pain and horror of life (the lift, the two words being only off by one letter) into the safety and freedom from pain that is death.

On the other hand, the song ends with the words, “Today is the first day of the rest of your days.  So lighten up, Squirt.”  That could be taken as life-affirming and optimistic, and I’m by no means certain that Radiohead intended the song to be about what I take it to be about—my biases are clear and obvious, even to me—but that last line can still work in my interpretation.  After all, he doesn’t say it’s the first day of the rest of your life but of the rest of your days.

I’m overreading things, probably.  In any case, it’s a great song, and if you want to interpret it in a positive, life-affirming way, by all means, please do so.  It’s art, innit?  You can interpret it according to your impressions.  Just remember, this was a song from the time in which the band created (or at least finished) such tracks as Exit Music (For A Film), Climbing Up the Walls, Let Down, Fitter Happier, and of course, the aforementioned No Surprises.

As for other “not OK” songs, I really love Man of War, which was reportedly inspired by James Bond.  The video for the modern release is brilliant and haunting.  I also really like both to listen to and to play and sing Polyethylene (Parts 1 & 2), though I haven’t done so in quite a long time.  I did a video of myself playing and singing it once, but it’s not up on YouTube.  I didn’t think it was very good, and I think my voice broke at one point.  I might have shared it here, though.  Yes?  No?  I’ll try to find out before I publish this.  If so, I’ll put a link:  Here.

If not, I won’t***.

By the way, I’m writing this post on my laptop computer (is it an OK computer?  It’s pretty darn good, at least), for the same reason I did so yesterday:  to give my thumbs some rest.  That does seem to be doing at least some good.  The bases of my thumbs are still quite sore when I rub them, and they feel stiff, but at least typing doesn’t make it worse, since I don’t use my thumbs during regular typing.

Anyway, that’s probably all I need to inflict on you today.  I did not know, when I started this post, that I would be mostly discussing Radiohead songs.  I do really like them, though.  And the new mini-band, The Smile, that Jonny Greenwood and Thom Yorke have formed, along with Tom Skinner, has some good songs as well, though I haven’t listened to all of them.  Their recent video for Friend of a Friend has the trio performing for what seems to be a group of elementary school students, and at the end, after bowing to the pleased audience, Thom has a nice little smile on his face.

Who could not smile after having a bunch of young kids cheer for your song?

Anyway, that’s enough for today.  The train is going to be here in a moment, and it’s not as though I have any further agenda.  My pain is nearly back to its usual baseline level, which is not great, but at least I’m more or less accustomed to it.  I’m not going to insert a picture in this blog post, unless I change my mind, but if I do, you’ll already know.

I may write a post tomorrow, but I may not.  It’s more likely than the possibility of me writing some fiction tomorrow, though, sad though that fact may be.

TTFN

*I usually sing it as “We’ve been trying to reach you, Rob.”

**This line “reminds” me of the ending of Weird Fishes/Arpeggi, another brilliant song, which closes with the words, “I…I hit the bottom…hit the bottom and escape…escape.”

***I have no such link, but I do have the original video file.  I decided not to share or upload that, but quickly rendered the audio from it, did a little noise reduction, compression, added some reverb and so on.  You can hear my voice really break at 2:13 or so, but that’s not the only time.  I think you can hear why I didn’t put this video on YouTube, but I like my little comment at the end, so I didn’t even edit out my cringey “Ohhhhh”s, though they are embarrassing.  Here it is:

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A monotone audio blog that may or may not be monotonous in other senses

Here is the audio recording I did this morning because I didn’t feel like typing anything.  As you will hear (if you listen) I am not really feeling very upbeat, even for me.  Sorry.  I don’t know if I have anything at all interesting to say.  If I do, well…enjoy, I guess.

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When there’s nowhere to go but up, all paths are arduous

It’s Wednesday now, in case you were wondering, and I’m once again sitting at the train station.  I’m using the smartphone to write today, because I’m carrying some equipment to the office.  I took delivery of a new bike yesterday, but I had forgotten to bring an air pump, so I couldn’t ride it to the train and then home yesterday.  Thus, I have my pump, and the U lock, and another, backup pump, with me today.  I didn’t want to carry the laptop computer in addition to all that.

It’s probably foolishly optimistic of me to get the bike, but supposedly it’s the right size for me, and the handlebars are a better type than before.  It’s a hybrid type bike‒the sort that might be expected to conquer Gallifrey and stand in its ruins*.  I think it’s going to be okay, though I will need to get used to it.  I’ll give it a brief whirl at lunchtime today, I think, just to acclimate myself.  I won’t be riding it back to the house tonight, because I have a planned occurrence that would not work well with riding a bike.

Yesterday at work, I tried a little experiment, with my boss’s enthusiastic support.  I had heard of, and then watched the first part of, the Danish movie Another Round starring Mads Mikkelsen.  In it, a group of friends, who are teachers‒inspired by an obscure philosopher and tangentially by Ernest Hemingway‒decide to try drinking (only during the workday) to maintain a blood alcohol level of .05% and they find that, as predicted, it has some benefits for them.

Given that I’m quite upright and have a lot of social difficulties and tend to get extremely stressed out during the day, I thought it might be worth a try.  Evidently, my boss agreed and found the idea funny and interesting.  He was far more on-board than I had expected.  So, I looked up the required rate of intake, got a little medicine measuring cup, procured the required supplies, and yesterday gave it a go.

Most of the day, my boss apparently found it hard to believe I had been drinking at all.  It is only a small, if steady, amount of alcohol.  Unfortunately, it didn’t make me feel any better, and though my boss said he thought I had a slight smile or look of amusement on my face, that was an illusion.  It probably just highlights the fact that my face and my feelings do not coincide, which probably explains part of why people around me don’t know how often I am in despair.  Rather than feeling barriers coming down between me and others, I felt, if anything, more alien and separate than usual.  As I said to my boss, I felt “more autistic” than I usually do.  Maybe it’s only tension and stress that lets me pretend to be human most days, at least to myself.

Still, I may try it one more day (today) just to be sure.  I don’t know.  Maybe I won’t.  I don’t think it’s my fate ever to feel normal.  As I think I’ve written before, the only two times in my life when I’ve felt “normal” internally were when I was given Valium for medical procedures‒once for getting my wisdom teeth removed, once for my heart catheterization when I was 18.  I remember both experiences fondly, which in itself is not exactly normal, is it?

Okay, this is bizarre:  they announced, starting a while back, that the northbound train‒my train‒would be boarding on the opposite track than it usually does.  That’s not so strange; it happens from time to time due to maintenance and the like.  However, just a few moments ago, the security people got word that the southbound train is also switching sides.  So, the two trains just swapped tracks, and I don’t see what that could accomplish other than perhaps carrying out a psychological experiment upon riders, and making some people miss their trains.  I’m sure there’s a comedy of errors behind that set of events.

Switching gears again, last night was my second night without using nasal steroids.  That, I think, is probably already having some beneficial effects‒I had energy to walk halfway back to the house from the train last night, though maybe that was due to the other experiment.  But I feel like I’m not holding onto fluid as much and whatnot, and my physical energy is better, so maybe that’s another benefit.  Anyway, I’m using Sinex™ and Astepro™  for allergies, the latter of which smells and tastes even worse than fluticasone.

I don’t know why I’m doing all these things.  Maybe I just feel like I’m supposed to do them.  But why would I bother with attempted self-improvement?  What is there to gain?  I think it’s just a mental habit.

At least there are amusing things to note in the technology of blog writing, to shift topics another time.  Case in point:  in the previous paragraph, in the second from last sentence, I had initially written “What is there…” but apparently my phone’s local autocorrect had changed “there” to “their”, perhaps because many people are prone to write things such as “What is their problem?”  But, of course, after the sentence was finished, Google Docs’** autocorrect rightly highlighted it as needing to be changed back to the way I had written it in the first place.  It’s the battle of the auto-corrects!  And so, artificial stupidity begins to approach a level reminiscent of human stupidity.

On that note, I’m calling it finished for today.  Maybe, if I’m lucky, I’ll be able to call it finished for everything soon, though I would like to make it through to this evening, at least…which, knowing me, may make it more likely that I will not do so.  (That’s, of course, a bullshit characterization of reality born of selective memory and confirmation bias, as when people remember only those occasions when it rains after they forgot their umbrella.  It’s a tough illusion to avoid, though.)

Please try to have a good day.  You could be excused for not thinking so, but believe it or not, I always try.

*That’s a 9th (modern) series Doctor Who reference for any fellow Whovians out there.

**It’s a bit unclear to me whether this should really be “Google Docs’” or” Google Docs’s”.  Of course, when putting a possessive on a plural, one merely uses the apostrophe, but if a word to which the possessive is being applied simply ends in an “s”, as in the case of names and titles and the like (e.g., Davis’s), one adds an apostrophe and then an “s”.  But, although “Docs” is a plural in form here, it’s also part of the name of the program, and it is to that name‒and not to any collection of more than one Doc***‒that I was applying the possessive.  So, which form is most appropriate according to standard usage?  Hmm.

***Of course, there can really be only one true Doc…“and that I am he, let me a little show it, even in this:  that I was constant Cimber should be banished, and constant do remain to keep him so.”****

****Julius Caesar, Act 3, Scene 1, quoted off the top of my head.  Huzzah for me.