writing

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Annotations Pending

Well, against my prior intention, I’m writing this on my laptop today—meaning the laptop computer.

God, why can’t I just accept the fact that “laptop” is obviously a word referring to the computer on which I’m writing this, not the top of my personal lap as part of my body when in a particular configuration?  Surely, every person with the savvy to read this online knows what I mean when I say that I’m writing this on my laptop.  At the very least, it is extremely unlikely that they don’t.

And if, by bizarre chance, people are reading this some decades or centuries after it was written, and laptop computers are no longer a common item, or no longer exist at all, there will probably be scholars who will put little annotations in to tell those future readers what we meant back in this era by “laptop” when we’re referring to writing on something.  It’ll be like those side notes when one is reading Shakespeare, notes that let everyone know—who doesn’t already—that “bodkin” for instance, as used in Hamlet’s soliloquy, means dagger, and thus, someone making his quietus with a bare bodkin is killing himself with a dagger.

Somehow, though, I have a terrible time not clarifying that I mean “the computer” when I refer to my laptop.  There’s an actual tension, a feeling of significant stress involved.  I suppose some might call it an anxiety, but that doesn’t feel quite like the correct term.  I don’t really feel worried or in any sense scared or threatened, not even at a social level or whatever it might be.  I feel as though it would be wrong not to clarify when there are multiple meanings of the word “laptop”, in case someone might have the bizarre misunderstanding that I’m writing on the top of my actual lap.

It’s pretty stupid, and it really gets to me sometimes.  It makes me want to peel the skin off my head by grabbing my hair and pulling my scalp apart, it’s so frustrating.

To be clear, I don’t really want to do that.  I don’t know, frankly, that I would even have the strength to do it, since skin is tougher than it seems, and also the skin of the face, at least, is pinned down to the underlying tissue by an intricate and interwoven network of tough fibrous tissue*, causing it to follow the movements of the facial muscles, allowing expression (a resource often wasted on me).

Though, of course, the scalp is much more loosely held to the skull and tissue under it, so that part would be peelable if one were strong enough to make the initial split.

I’m not really that tempted to try, but when I get so tense and stressed out (I almost wrote “sense and tressed out”) I can imagine myself reaching up to grab the sides of my head by the hair and yanking steadily, and it feels as though it would be some form of release.

It’s a bit like slapping oneself in the face when one does something stupid—though in that case, I do actually slap myself in the face.  The trick is to do it hard enough that you actually get a real punishment for your own stupidity and thus might actually learn something.  It’s not quite as intense as banging one’s head against a wall or against one’s desk (which I also do when I’m stressed out enough), but the latter is not really so much a punishment as it is just a way of trying to overwhelm stress with pain.

Or, well, it’s something like that.  Even as I wrote that, I realized it didn’t quite seem like an accurate description, or at least not the full answer.  Sometimes I think it’s just a form of giving in to my desire to lash out when I’m very stressed, but to do so against the only person I have a right to harm.  I’ve at times given myself actual swollen, black and blue (initially subcutaneously red with extravasated blood) marks on my forehead, but usually it’s not that bad.

I don’t want to give myself a concussion or anything, after all.  My brain is dysfunctional enough, and I don’t want to lose the few good things it can do.  There are other ways I can hurt myself when necessary.

Speaking of the good things, I keep trying to get myself back into writing fiction or something, maybe, just to see if it makes me feel any better, which it had a tendency to do in the past.  That’s a minor part of why I decided to bring my laptop today (the other laptop is with me whenever I sit down, so it requires no effort to bring it).  But I don’t know; I can’t feel any excitement or anticipation about HELIOS or Changeling in a Shadow World, or DFandD, or Outlaw’s Mind, or any other stories, and I certainly don’t think anyone else is excited about the prospect of those stories being written, either.

I don’t know what to do**.

As usual, of course, I have written much more quickly on the laptop computer than on the smartphone, which should come as no surprise.  But I don’t know if it has any effect on my style, or on how good a post comes of it.  I would welcome your evaluations, of course, but I know it’s hard to judge from one instance.  It may be a better or worse post than usual for reasons that have nothing to do at all with my choice of tools for writing it.  There are too many variables at play.

A reasonably controlled experiment could be done, with me writing a long series of posts, randomly (perhaps) alternating between smartphone and laptop and asking readers to evaluate each post for quality without knowing which kind the post was.  But that would be far more trouble than it’s worth, and I don’t mind subjective and non-rigorous impressions, if anyone wants to give them in the comments below.

I don’t really have much more to say today.  I just feel stressed and tense and frustrated and angry and just…squeezed by reality.  I feel almost as if there’s some metaphorical, inverted mountain suspended above me that I have to hold up or it will crash down and, I don’t know, bury me, crush me, impale me on its peak…something like that.  I don’t think it will harm anyone else; there’s no one else for my collapse to harm, really, certainly not in any deep way.  So far, I’m just holding it up out of habit, and because people will say that “you’ve got to try to hold on” or things along those lines.  But it’s tiring and it’s stressful and it’s wearing me out at the same time that it’s pissing me off.

Anyway, this is all pointless.  Sorry to waste your time.  I hope you haven’t been too disappointed.  And I also hope you have a good day.

*The skin of the palms of the hand and the working surface of the fingers is even more tightly and intricately bound to the underlying tissue; this contributes to the way one’s fingers wrinkle up when your hands soak in water for a while.  The soles of your feet and bottoms of your toes are similarly tacked down, though it serves a slightly different “purpose” there.  Dissection of the palms to look at the underlying muscle and tendons and so on is a laborious process in Gross Anatomy class.  Ditto with the face.

**Am I always in the dark, living in a powder keg and giving off sparks?  Probably not.  That was a pretty good song, though, wasn’t it?

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Here we go again, it seems

Well, here we go again, as I wrote above, starting another work week against all of our better judgments.  I walked to the train station and arrived relatively early today, but I’m letting the 610 train go‒it’s just now arriving‒and I will get on the 630.  That way I have time to cool down a bit.  I will use the extra 20 minutes to write this blog post, such as it will be, here at the station.

I don’t know what I’m really going to write about‒though I’ll begin with the annoying fact that “what to write about” feels like a phrase that ends with a preposition.  I don’t think the word “about” actually is a preposition, but it acts sort of as one here, and its object is “what”.  I want to write something to the effect of “I don’t know about what I’m going to write”, but even I feel that’s more awkward than the more common alternative.  It does bother me, though.

On a different subject, I think that maybe I should just give up on talking about the fact of my worsening dysthymia/depression and suicidal thoughts that I wish I could escape.  The combination is what I wish I could get away from, I mean.  Either one, even without the other, is nearly just as bad, and it’s honestly not too easy to imagine the latter without the former.

I often present my intermittent desire to die as if it were a philosophical conclusion arrived at merely through thought, but those ideas are at best motivated reasoning and at worst sophistry.  I just happen to be good at such things, so it’s going to be difficult to argue around me.  And though I have arrived at some conclusions through more and less rigorous means, I am open to new and convincing reasoning and discussion and ideas.  Such things don’t appear to be forthcoming, alas.

Maybe, since my depression precedes and/or is orthogonal to my reasoning about the value of my life, I shouldn’t expect any counterbalancing notions to be arrived at by reasoning or conversation.  I’ve undergone cognitive-behavioral therapy before, which is keyed to targeting the disordered reasoning associated with depression, but it was no more successful‒with or without meds‒than other approaches.

However, it doesn’t mean that certain forms of response are welcome or even remotely useful.  For instance:  being berated is not useful.  I once had a former coworker/friend berate me for being depressed and feeling suicidal*.  They even compared my situation to theirs:  they had (and still have) some form of slowly progressive cancer, which remains under treatment, as it has been for years now.

To me it’s a rather foolish comparison, and not one to make to someone who is alone and feeling suicidal.  For one thing, though I would never dismiss or belittle that person’s suffering, that person did and does continue to share info about the course of their treatment on Facebook, with pictures of them at the hospital, for instance.  When they go, they are always accompanied by their spouse, their children,  their grandchildren, and so on.

I’m not saying their situation is enviable in general terms, but in some ways‒sometimes‒I do envy it, reprehensible though that may seem.  I’m fairly certain that, if such a thing were possible, I would gladly take that person’s illness upon myself if, by my doing so, they would be cured.  It would bring me joy to be able to make their life better, and to give them more and better time with their loved ones.

I would not then fight the illness, most likely.  I would simply ask for palliative care, and let the disease run its course.  Maybe‒but maybe not‒if my kids knew I would be dying soon, they would want to see me again.  I don’t know.

Maybe, even if it were possible, I would not actually go through with the disease transference.  It’s easy enough to think one would, but It’s just an idle thought as long as it’s an impossible thing to do.

But it was infuriating to be berated for feeling depressed and actually judged about it, as though I simply had chosen to be depressed and could choose not to be at a whim if I just stopped being…what?  I don’t know‒mentally lazy or something along those lines.

I am not my own biggest booster‒I’m more likely to be my own detractor and even derogator‒but neither mental nor physical laziness have been hallmarks of my life or character.  And failure to grasp simple concepts or recognize facts is not one of my major failings, though I certainly am capable of it.  I try very hard not to fool myself about things, but of course it’s always conceivable that such trying may lead me to fool myself in other ways.

Still, for instance, unless someone is going to perform some convincing miracle that would persuade even a disinterested extraterrestrial, then supernatural or mystical or religious arguments are not going to convince me of much of anything.

I’ve read the entire Bible (original and sequel) some of it more than once (and a tiny bit of it in Hebrew), and I’ve read as much of the Koran as I could get through, and I’ve read the Tao te Ching many times, and various other works of religion and philosophy.  I’ve tried to read both high and low religious apologia and statements and philosophy as much as I could without puking on myself, but even such luminaries as C. S. Lewis and Francis Collins and Descartes seem to lose their grasp on what it even means to have convincing reasons for something**.  If my discussions about depression and pointlessness and death involve motivated reasoning and sophistry, I’m far from alone in those things.

Of course, my depression and suicidal urges don’t really come from reasoning about my situation.  This is clear if for no other reason than that I had them even at some times in my life when everything was going objectively well for me.

It seems they are tendencies baked into the circuit boards of my brain in some fashion, possibly related to possible ASD***, or possibly orthogonal to that possibility.  Rather than a lack of joy or a surfeit of sorrow, they seem to be associated, at some level, with a setpoint issue‒perhaps a defect in one’s capacity to feel or sustain joy, or an overactive solemnity and dreariness perception circuit.  Certainly I have great difficulty with belief (as opposed to being provisionally convinced about something).

Maybe there is no help to be had, given current states of technology and knowledge.  It might be interesting to try psilocybin-based therapy or trans-cranial magnetic stimulation or some such other, but I don’t have real access to those things.  I’m also not able to advocate for myself.  That’s one of my problems.  I don’t like myself, and I have no real capacity to seek out anything on my own behalf.  I haven’t gone to see a doctor of any kind for some years now.  What I need is probably not argument or reasoning but rescue, and that is not forthcoming.  Why would it be, for such as me?

Anyway, writing this blog is about my only form of self-advocacy and help-seeking, but it seems to suck for those purposes.  Oh well.  I guess it’s something for me to do until my time is up‒which, for today at least, it is now.

*As if it were perhaps some form of “lifestyle choice”.

**And Augustine and Aquinas are frankly often embarrassing.  I suppose one must give them some slack given the fact that they lived many centuries ago‒but then again, Marcus Aurelius lived even longer ago than they, and he was able to write things that make a great deal more sense than these two.

***There are strong associations between the two noted in the literature, and people with ASD have much higher rates of depression and suicide than the general population, and an average lifespan, even among “high functioning” individuals, in the 50 to 60 year range.

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It’s a day more poached or boiled than fried

First, the latest updates on the work situation:  it looks like I am going to be working tomorrow, as previously scheduled, because my coworker’s wife is still sick, but they can’t get next weekend rebooked or some such, so he will be working then and doesn’t need to ask me to switch.  Of course, there apparently exists the possibility that they will be going instead sometime during the middle of one of the upcoming weeks, but you know what?  I can’t keep worrying about this crap.  I haven’t had a “vacation” since I went up north when my mother died a few years ago, so it’s not as though I’m not due, anyway.

Vacations are something people in general enjoy with their families or significant others or some such, and I have no one around here with whom to go on a vacation.  And being just off work and being by myself around the “house”‒or more specifically, the one room in which I live‒is in many ways worse than going to the office.  So I don’t tend to take time off except when I’m sick and/or in an exceptional amount of pain.

I know, it’s an exciting life, right?  I shouldn’t share such titillating tidbits too much or people will shrivel up with envy.

Ugh, it’s sooooo muggy and humid and the air is so still today.  I’m dripping with sweat so much that it’s fogging up my glasses and it’s getting in my eyes, even though I’m just standing on the platform waiting for the train.  Oh, and the announcement says the train is boarding on the opposite side from its usual one, so there are roughly twice as many people.  At least they’re all quiet at this time of day.  Of course, the northbound and southbound trains arrive at very close to the same time, for this pair of morning trains, but presumably‒and based on past experience‒the people running the system are on top of that coordination problem.  I’ve never heard of any train collisions since I’ve been using the system.

However, apparently they’re more than capable of screwing up in other ways. My usual train arrived just now on its usual side of the tracks, and everyone who had thoughtfully noted the announcement and waited on the other side‒which included me‒had to scramble to get over to the train quickly.  Thankfully, the train waited, but it’s really bad that they did this.  I had to rush down the stairs after riding the elevator up to the bridge with about eight or so other people.  I thought it might have been good if I had tripped and fallen on my way down, but such a fall would be unlikely to be fatal; it would probably just hurt a lot.  I suppose if that happened I might have been able to sue the Tri-Rail people, but that’s not the sort of thing in which I’m interested.

I’m so sick of my life.  This is it; you’re reading about the most interesting things that happen to me.  In fact, this blog is the most interesting thing I do.  But it’s not very interesting, is it?  The stuff in between is worse.  And, of course, I could try to find other things to do and with which to distract myself (and I still do try to read books that keep my attention, almost desperately) but there is nothing that makes me feel like I want to do it.

I guess I should stop writing about this stuff, huh?  My psychological/neurological issues are pretty dull.  Yesterday’s blog was longer than usual, because I was dealing with a lot of weird and highly personal and distressing subject matter, but I think I’ll leave off on things like that.  No one really wants to read it or hear it, there’s nothing anyone can do to help me with it, apparently, and I’m tired of beating that stupid dead horse.  I’m tired of metaphorically shouting into the void with this blog.  When you shout into the void, it seems, the void shouts back at you, and when the void is shouting, you just get emptier and emptier yourself.

At least the shout of the void gives an inviting hint of pure silence that might be waiting there for you‒silence not just in literal noise, but silence in the mind, in the heart, in emotions and thoughts.  Oblivion is preferable, eventually, to cacophony.

Of course, as Sauron (in a vision of the eye) said to Frodo in the movie version of The Fellowship of the Ring, “There is no life in the Void‒only death.”*  This is a bit contradictory, depending on one’s definitions.  Can there be death without life?  Was the universe “dead” for the billions of years that passed before life came into existence?  That doesn’t seem coherent to me, at least not the way I think of “death” as coming after life.

Mind you, if you define (or, rather, use) the word death simply to mean “lacking life” then I suppose the universe was dead, and in fact, almost all of it still is and probably will always be.

Maybe Sauron (as reimagined by Peter Jackson et al) just meant you can’t survive in the Void?  Perhaps he meant it was like a wasteland of sorts, a place barren of food and water, that holds only death for creatures that wander into it.  But no, that doesn’t make sense.  Sauron is one of the Maiar, and knows that he literally cannot die, though he can be reduced to a powerless, miserable spirit until the end of days (as he is).  Likewise, in Tolkien’s world, all men and elves and dwarves and hobbits and all those that are “kindled with the Flame Imperishable” do not die completely, though their bodies can die.  I assume that means that even orcs have an afterlife.

Anyway, enough.  Sorry to waste your time with my brain squeezings.  I should find something better to do, speaking of the Void.  In the meantime, I’ve got a headache from clenching my jaw, and I’ve written too much already.  Have a good day and a good weekend if you can.  I’ll be writing again tomorrow, probably.  More’s the pity.

*There is no comparable notion or connection in the books, and it’s hard to see why Sauron would speak of the Void.  Melkor spent much time in the Void both before Eä was even made and after, but he had been alone, and that was why he started to “think different” as they say.  Sauron, on the other hand, was originally a Maia  serving Aule; he wasn’t off in the Void with his eventual new master.  And, of course, Melkor was in the Void by the time of LotR, so there was life in the Void by then.

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“Who knows? Not me.”

I didn’t walk the full five miles from the train to the house yesterday afternoon‒I walked about three or three and a half‒because I didn’t want to give myself any blisters or abrasions from walking too far for the first time in a new pair of boots.  But I seem to have stopped well in time for that, since there are no blisters or even sore spots on my feet now, and my ankles and right Achilles tendon appear to be in good nick.  Also, and most importantly, though I had a bit of tension in my right side along my back upon returning to the house, that went away nicely with a bit of stretching and replenishment, so that’s pretty good.

Anyway, lesson learned:  it matters if the boots you wear are even a little bit oversized if you’re going to be walking any very long distances in them.  It looks like these new, half-downsized ones will work well.

It’s been sloppy and wet here in south Florida these last several days, but there does seem to be a slight increase in morning breeziness.  And, of course, since Saturday, the time of darkness has been slightly greater than the time of daylight, and its dominance is increasing at the most rapid pace at which that will happen.  This is because, for a sinusoidal curve, the fastest rate of change is when it crosses the x-axis (at the equinoxes in this case), and the slowest rates of change are at the peak and at the nadir (the solstices in this case).  So, for a little while now, the nighttime will be growing rapidly before it settles out, steadily and gradually, as we barrel toward the end of the year.

After mentioning the fact that I don’t play the guitar in the morning anymore, yesterday I decided to fire up the axe for a bit.  Remarkably, it was still almost perfectly in tune!  Probably it helps that the office is kept pretty much at a constant temperature.  Also, I had left the capo on the fourth fret the last time I played.  That was for playing the chords and stuff from the Nirvana version of The Man Who Sold the World.  I didn’t start with that yesterday, instead playing through a few iterations of Nothing Compares 2 U.  It’s a lovely song.  I like the Chris Cornell version best.  Of course, now Prince (the songwriter and original performer) and Chris Cornell and Sinead O’Conner (who had a big hit with her cover of it) are all dead.

Then I did play some of The Man Who Sold the World, and then Ashes to Ashes, both Bowie tunes, at least originally.  And, of course, Bowie and Kobain are also both dead, though they died under very different circumstances.  Then I got my guitar book out and played a little Just the Way You Are, and Sorry Seems To Be the Hardest Word, and Here, There, and Everywhere, by Billy Joel, Elton John, and Paul McCartney‒all of whom are still alive!  That’s just weird, isn’t it?  Imagine that!

Of course, the latter song is credited to Lennon and McCartney, but that was a formality according to their agreement for all Beatles songs they wrote.  It was a McCartney song, and it was apparently the only song of his for which Lennon directly complimented him.

Considering the quality of Sir Paul’s work overall, that’s a hell of a statement, in more than one way.  First off, it must have really impressed John (rightly so) for him to make a point of telling Paul that it was a good song.  But it seems harsh that John never complimented any others, at least to Paul’s face.

Then again, he was British, and emotional expressiveness (other than through song and theater and literature) is a major national deficit by most accounts.  Maybe that’s why they do so much good music and poetry and drama and comedy and the like.  I often get the feeling that part of the reason Thom Yorke’s singing is so powerful and conveys and evokes such emotion in the listener is that this is Thom’s only real way of expressing himself deeply.  And, of course, he does seem almost possessed when he’s performing.

As a YouTube reactor (I cannot recall which one, for which I apologize) said of his singing, “He’s feelin’ it when he’s singing…and he makes you feel it, too!”

Now, John Lennon did compliment Paul to other people‒during interviews, for instance.  Though even then, he was far from effusive.  That was just his way, I think.  He had a very troubled childhood, and emotional expression was probably difficult for him, even for a Brit.

Then again, he wrote some incredibly expressive songs, from If I Fell to In My Life to Julia to Across the Universe, all the way up to Starting Over and Woman, with scads of others thrown in for good measure.  If being closed off and repressed helped lead to the creation of those truly great works of art, the world at least can hardly feel too horrible about it.  Though it would be nice if a person could be well-adjusted and have the ability to express and receive affection easily and still produce great art (and ideally, of course, not be murdered by a slimy little worm of a creature who claimed to be a fan).

Alas, though it seems possible in principle, it doesn’t seem to happen often, if at all, in practice*.  Shakespeare supposedly wrote Hamlet, and some of his other great tragedies, partly in response to the death of his son, Hamnet.  And of course, I, his much later and far inferior admirer, only really started to write and publish stories that have always been in my head once my life, my family, and my career had been wrecked, and I was in prison.

We can be thankful, if saddened, for the great art that was born of Shakespeare’s sorrow, and of Lennon’s.  In my case, on the other hand, it was almost certainly not worth it, particularly for me.  But I can’t change any of that stuff, either.

Life’s like that, I suppose‒to quite the end of one of my own short stories, possibly the darkest one I’ve ever written…which, weirdly enough, first came out of me years ago, while I was happily passing the time keeping my then-friend and soon-to-be fiancée company while she did some overnight work for a summer job.  I don’t know where it came from, except that I did often like to play solitaire (with real cards).

Anyway, that’s enough for now.  Have a good Wednesday.

*As Einstein is reputed to have said, “In principle, principle and practice should be the same, but in practice, they often are not”, or something like that.  He was a clever fellow.

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Feel free to imagine your own illustration to accompany this post

As so often seems to happen, I arrived at the station this morning just in time to see the first train of the day arrive and pull out.  That’s fine; I hadn’t been planning to take it, anyway, and there was really no possible way for me to have done so.  If I had gotten up and left five minutes earlier, I very likely would have caught that one, but of course, there’s no true point to getting on that earliest train, since I’ll either be killing time at the office or at the train station or at the house.

I prefer to leave early, since I’m awake anyway, and have been for hours, and traveling early means things are less crowded.  I used to spend time in the morning practicing guitar after writing, but I don’t do that anymore, so there’s no huge benefit to being at the office.

Now, I’m sitting at the station and writing this post on my smartphone.  I’ve been writing all my posts on the phone, lately, since it’s just so convenient.  In fact, I took my little 11-inch laptop back to the house with me last night and I left it there.  I don’t think I’m going to be writing on it again.  I may, possibly, use it for something else, but that’s an iffy possibility.  I guess I’ll have to see.  Anyway, there isn’t much point in keeping it at the office.

I threw out some other things at the office that I don’t need, so it’s getting a little less cluttered.  That’s good, I guess.  It’s probably more pleasant for everyone else.  I still need to clear out some more of the crap there, and even more at the house.  I live in a small room, but there’s still too much useless drek in it, stuff that no one is ever going to want or need.  Better to do my part to contribute to the unsustainability of landfills.

I tried out a corrected-size pair of boots yesterday, since I think part of the issue with the others was that the sizes made by Timberland might be a bit larger than my usual.  Anyway, half a size down seems very good.  I had no adverse effects, and I plan to try a longer walk today, heading back to the house from the train after work.  I wasn’t going to do that yesterday, after a 24 hour food and water fast.  The food wouldn’t be an issue, but I might have become a bit too dehydrated.

The fast yesterday was interesting, as it always is.  I moved rather slowly and was not quite as mentally sharp as I normally am, though that was more due to lower caffeine levels than anything else.  I had one incidence of “head rush” when rising from a seated position, but it was pleasant and a good sign that I’m probably losing weight, which I want to do.

I’ve had head rushes before, and I’ve even had them bad enough to make me lose consciousness completely, including once while in jail.  I didn’t like smacking my head on the concrete (I didn’t feel it at the time; I definitely did afterwards), but passing out suddenly is not a bad feeling.  Indeed, it’s more or less no feeling at all.  That’s what’s great about it.  There’s just that hint of a head-rushy sensation, then everything goes white and then blank.  Even those sensations are probably reconstructed memories after the fact.

I suspect, based on actual expertise, that this is what it “feels” like to die of a sudden ventricular fibrillation arrest.  I don’t mean a heart attack; heart attacks are almost always quite painful and unpleasant, and in and of themselves, they don’t usually cause one to lose consciousness.  Though they can induce dangerous arrhythmias such as ventricular fibrillation, the process leading up to it is decidedly uncomfortable and generally terrifying for the person involved. Trust me; I’ve seen it many times, and I have a very good memory.

But in a V-fib arrest or similar process, the heart basically stops pumping blood all of a sudden, and the brain stops getting perfused‒it’s much like what happens in a sudden fainting spell, but more persistent‒and when the brain suddenly loses all blood flow, it pretty much suddenly blanks out, or at least consciousness does.

There’s no fear, there’s no pain, there’s not any experience of what’s happening.  One isn’t confronted by the threat of permanent cessation*, and there is no potential to “rage, rage, against the dying of the light”, anymore than a computer that is abruptly deprived of all power can struggle to stay “on”.  It simply doesn’t work that way.  The thing that does the raging is what is shut down, and quite abruptly.

Your brain (i.e., you) can no more fight to stay conscious or alive when suddenly deprived of blood flow than your lungs can successfully draw in oxygen if you suddenly find yourself in outer space without a space suit.  Though, even that seems likely to be less unpleasant than movies make it seem, because while you can’t get oxygen, you will still be able to expel carbon dioxide, and it’s the CO2 in your blood that drives your sense of needing to breathe.

So, you won’t feel like you’re suffocating; you’ll just get rapidly light-headed from the lack of oxygen.  Some of the other effects of vacuum might be unpleasant‒your saliva and mucus bubbling into gas phase, perhaps some bubbles forming within your eyes, some other outgassing here and there, but you won’t experience them for long, if at all, because the lack of oxygen will deliver a slightly slower version of the effect of the V-fib arrest.

Oh, by the way, you will not suddenly freeze or even accumulate frost in seconds, like in some movies.  Space is very cold, yes‒the overall temperature of the vacuum is about 2.7 degrees above absolute zero‒but there’s nothing there to conduct your heat away from you, so you only lose it through radiation (mostly infrared and such, but humans do give off a tiny amount of “visible” light), and that is a very slow process.

Think about it.  You can survive indefinitely and even feel pretty comfortable in 70 degree (Fahrenheit)** air, even without much clothing, and that is far from vacuum.  But if you are dropped in water at the same temperature without a wetsuit or similar, you will probably die from hypothermia before long.  And that probably would be quite unpleasant.

Anyway, that’s all quite a digression, but it does reinforce a point I sometimes make:  if you have a choice of how to die, do it by some means that suddenly and completely cuts the blood flow to your brain.

As for other fasting-related matters, well, there was, as always, a slight feeling of detachment from my body by the and of the day, not quite like my numerous experiences of depersonalization***.  It’s a good sort of feeling, a sense of being slightly out of sync with the physical world, but not in a confusing or disturbing way.  Maybe it’s akin to a much slower version of the fainting/V-fib experience.  Anyway, the less I experience being me, usually the better, from my point of view.  Not that I want to be someone else!  That would be even worse.

So, I’ve learned nothing new from fasting, really‒certainly there were no epiphanies‒but I have re-experienced things I’ve experienced before that I found worth repeating.

And now, we’re nearing my train destination, so I’ll let you all go, at least for now.  Have a good day, if you can.

*Or “death” as it is sometimes referred to in the medical literature…but I wanted to avoid too much jargon.

**70 degrees Centigrade/Celsius would be another matter entirely.

**I think that’s the term.

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G’mar chatimah tovah

It’s Monday, and it’s Yom Kippur, but I am not only going to work, I am actually writing this on Monday morning, because I have a hard time breaking these sorts of patterns.  It’s as difficult for me to force myself to write a post a day early‒on Sunday in this case‒as it is for me not to write a post (or, previously, not to write 3 to 4 pages on a draft of fiction) on a workday morning.  I don’t know whether to feel proud or embarrassed by this attribute, but it can be frustrating at times, and at other times, it can be useful.  Those two things aren’t mutually exclusive.

I am fasting today, however, and I began the fast probably shortly after sundown last night.  I wasn’t paying close attention to the time.  As I’ve discussed previously, the fast entails abstinence from food as well as anything to drink.  That latter bit is in some ways nice, because I tend to have to use the bathroom frequently*, and often have to do so while en route to work.

This is one advantage the trains have over buses: they have bathrooms.  But using them is often a frustrating process, because it’s frequently the case that one or more of the bathrooms is in use (or locked for staff use, as I suspect, though that seems very inappropriate) and I have to go from car to car to find one that’s free.  Of course there are other issues with any public lavatory, but those go without saying.

Anyway, with minimal PO liquid intake, other than what is needed to accompany aspirin and other daily meds and whatnot, I shouldn’t spend nearly as much time running back and forth to the bathroom.  That’s not the main purpose of the fast, of course; it’s merely a silver lining.

It will also be nice not to have to buy anything for lunch today, and not to buy any beverages as well.  Sometimes when I fast, I feel like I don’t know what to do with myself.  I often eat and drink during most days just to pass the time, just to give myself something to do, and to give myself a brief, reliable prod to the reward circuits in my brain.  I certainly almost never eat out of true hunger.  In fact, often, the longer it’s been since I’ve eaten, the less hungry I feel.  I also tend to feel sharper, and a bit more alert.  But I get bored, or tense, or something, and food (and water) is a momentary relief switch.

Whatever.  The point is, I’ll be doing without food and water today, but I am working, though I shouldn’t be.  I shouldn’t be doing anything that I’m going to be doing.  Saturday was the first day of autumn, and Friday was September 22nd**, as I’ve discussed, and I wanted to at least try to use those facts as impetus to take some kind of action…but I don’t want to screw up my coworker’s planned family outing this coming weekend.  At least I didn’t have to work this last Saturday.

If there were a longer time span between now and when he was going, I think I would have been forced to ignore the fact; after all, there’s only so much I can keep putting things off just to avoid the inconvenience of others.  Two weeks extra may at least give me time to make more preparations‒and who knows, maybe it’ll allow time for some superhero to come and save me, or at least to change my mind.

Ha ha.  I’m joking.  That’s extremely unlikely to happen in any form or sense.  If that were going to happen, it’s had plenty of time to do so.

There has been a slight, coincidentally autumnal, turn in the weather this weekend, in that Saturday it was overcast and rainy, and it rained overnight, and there was a bit more wind.  It’s still hot, but a few degrees less so that it has been.  Sunday was warmer and brighter than Saturday, but there was at least still a bit of wind.

My back/hip/leg pain has been flaring these last few days, unfortunately.  It’s always there to some degree, but it’s annoying when it acts up.  Maybe the fast will help reduce it a bit by the end of the day.  I can’t remember if it’s done that in the past‒which probably means it has not.  If it did, if it does, I might be inclined to fast much longer.  Of course, that would be a fast related to food, not to water.  A water fast isn’t going to make one feel better for very long.  It might have other benefits, of course, but that’s not directly related to my pain level…though it is indirectly related.

In any case, I don’t expect anything to give me very much benefit.  But I may try to extend the food fast at least a little bit, even past today.  I could save some money.  And it’s nice not to have to clean dishes or throw away packaging or things like that.  Life is full of so many stupid little inconveniences, all of which add up to a truly miserable experience unless there’s something to counter-balance them.  For me, unfortunately, there is little to no such counter-weight anymore, and there hasn’t been for quite a long time.

All right, well…that’s enough for now.  If any of you are fasting for Yom Kippur, you probably are reading this after the holiday, so I hope you had a good one.  It’s not a happy holiday necessarily, but it’s not sad or mournful, either.  In some ways, it’s an attempt to make a fresh start in a new year, and that’s probably a good thing for anyone.

I don’t expect a fresh start for myself.  I’m not even sure what such a thing would entail.  But it would be nice just to stop feeling rotten (physically, mentally, socially, morally, and so on).  I don’t have high hopes…but then, I wouldn’t, would I?yom kippur

*You can ask my brother and sister; I was a real trial on long-distance road trips of any kind, because I needed to go to the bathroom so often…sometimes more often than there were available bathroom facilities, so I spent a certain portion of my youth relieving myself near the shoulder of many a road.

**Among other things, the night Frodo left Bag End in The Lord of the Rings.

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But if of ships I now should sing, what ship would come to me?

It’s Friday, September 22nd (in 2023 AD or CE…I don’t know what year it might be by Shire reckoning), and that day is the birthday of both Bilbo and Frodo Baggins, the primary characters of The Hobbit and of The Lord of the Rings*, respectively.  They are not close in age, though Bilbo had adopted Frodo as his heir.  In the first chapter of LotR, we find the two celebrating their mutual birthday, when Frodo is turning 33 and Bilbo is turning 111 (eleventy-one, as hobbits apparently say) with their combined ages coming to 144, a “gross”.  So, the age gap is 78 years, but it seems smaller because Bilbo’s life has been stretched by his ownership of the Ring.

An interesting thing to note (for me, at least) is as follows:  since 33 is clearly divisible by 3, and so is 111 (its digits certainly add up to a multiple of 3), then the difference between them, 78, must also be divisible by 3.  Which it is, of course.  78 is 3 times 26, 111 is 3 times 37, and of course 33 is 3 times 11 (which is, of course, 37 minus 26).  This also means that the combined total of 144 is 3 times 48, which it is.

That doesn’t work the same way in reverse, of course.  Just because the difference between two numbers is a multiple of 3 doesn’t mean the numbers themselves are (though if one is, the other is).  As a relatively extreme example, 137 and 149 are both prime, but their difference (12) is a multiple of three.  Obviously, no prime numbers (other than 3 itself) are multiples of 3, by definition.

On the other hand, the difference between any two primes, as long as neither of them is 2, is an even number, since all prime numbers larger than 2 are odd numbers (the even numbers all being divisible evenly by 2), and the difference of any two odd numbers is always going to be even.

Okay, sorry to bore you with all that.  I like trivia about numbers, and especially prime numbers.  I particularly like those primes that others disrespect, or at least I want to show them respect, as it were.  I think I’ve mentioned here before that I used to always try to put 13 gallons in my gas tank whenever I “filled it up”, back in the day.  It didn’t mean anything‒I have no suspicion that there are any mystical qualities to any numbers‒I just thought it was fun, to the point of my being disappointed when I couldn’t do it.

Anyway, today is a memorable day, at least for Tolkien fans (of which there are many), and tomorrow is the equinox, the start of Autumn in the northern hemisphere, and of Spring in the southern hemisphere.  Then, starting Sunday night at sundown, as I mentioned recently, is Yom Kippur.

So, this should be an auspicious weekend for embarking on momentous “journeys” of one kind of another.  But I’m stupidly going to have to wait, out of deference to my coworker.  He went home sick after lunch yesterday, but hopefully he will be in today**.  This is his weekend to work, and I have no desire to cover for him, because he obviously won’t be working next weekend, which would make three weekends in a row for me.

I’ve worked worse and harder schedules, of course, but I was younger then, and I had actual reasons for working and staying alive.  I was literally saving other people’s lives as well, and I was also relieving suffering, to the degree that I could.  Now, I’m a few decades older, and I have no particular reason to work even just to keep myself alive.  I’m not doing any good for anyone, least of all myself.  I’m almost certainly a net detriment to the people who have to interact with me‒this seems a fairly firm conclusion, given that most people have eventually wanted to get away from me, even people who love me, like parents and spouse and children.  I’m definitely not of much benefit to the world at large, either.

I plan to fast on Yom Kippur, which I usually do, though I’m not observant in any other way, anymore.  I think the fast is a useful, or at least interesting, thing.  Since it’s only 24 hours, it’s a full fast, meaning no food or water or anything else, though one is expected to take any medicine one usually takes.  The preservation of life supersedes all competing mitzvot.

Anyway, sorry, I’m being boring again, I think.  I meant to say that I may not write a blog post on Monday morning‒just as a little nod to the day‒or I may write one early, on Sunday, and put it up with a delayed publication time, so it will show up Monday morning.  Or I may just write one on Monday as usual.  It’s not as though I have any true, deep connection to any form of ritual or observance.  Why should I fool myself or anyone else?  I certainly don’t think any external, let alone supernal, aspect of the universe cares about my actions in any sense, or even about my existence itself.

I guess we’ll all have to wait and see what I do.  Maybe something will happen and take it all out of my hands.  That would be okay.  Or maybe I’ll lose my tenuous grip on what remains of my will to live and decide that I don’t care about inconveniencing anyone anymore.  I’ve spent a lot of time and energy in my life trying to make things as easy as possible for other people, and (as I said) to relieve suffering when I could.  It wears me out.  It has worn me out.  And it’s not as though it’s had much in the way of compensatory positive effects on my own life, though I guess I should never have expected to be rewarded or admired for things that were, in the end, my decisions carried out because they were what I thought I should do at any given moment.

The universe is uncaring, and humanity as a whole often instantiates that fact quite glaringly, though they do‒occasionally‒display behavior of a nicer, kinder type.  There often doesn’t seem to be enough of that aspect to go around, even on Earth, let alone on a universal scale, but then again, benevolence and beneficence are not substances, and there are no conservation laws concerning them.  They can, in principle, increase without limit.  They can also diminish and even vanish utterly.

If I had to bet on which I thought was more likely, all things considered, I would probably bet on the latter, but I would hope to lose.  I’m okay with losing things like that.  Hey, as the theme song from MASH notes, I’m going to lose at this game anyway.  So there’s not too much point, in and of itself, of trying to drag it out for its own sake.  It’s one thing if there are other variables, other pressures, other forces, other fields, other considerations‒those can make the game worth playing for as long as one is able.  But the game, in and of itself, is not necessarily an inherent good.

That was slightly cryptic, I guess.  Sorry.  I have a hard time saying clearly what I mean, partly because I’m often unsure, myself, and at other times because I simply can’t seem to express my feelings well.  Occasionally, I think I’ve done it reasonably well in my songs, like in this one, or this one, or cover songs like this one and this one and this one and this one.  But those don’t garner much of an audience***, so it doesn’t really matter, as anyone can see.

Enough!  I’ve already wasted too much of your time.  Have a good first day of Autumn tomorrow, enjoy your celebrations of Bilbo’s and Frodo’s birthday (you do celebrate it, don’t you?), and if you observe Yom Kippur, then g’mar chatima tovah and good Yom Tov.

bilbo frodo birthday adjusted

*Though, of course, while the title character of The Hobbit is indeed Bilbo Baggins, the title character of The Lord of the Rings is the villain, Sauron.  Just imagine if the Harry Potter books had been titled, for instance, He Who Must Not Be Named and the Goblet of Fire.  Actually, that’s not bad, is it?

**It turns out he will not.  He has some form of sinus infection.  When I got his text I actually started to cry a little; I hope he doesn’t call out sick tomorrow.

***Certainly nothing close to the size of the audience for The Rockford Files in its heyday.  Get it?  Garner?  Rockford Files?  Never mind.

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Yet I, a dull and muddy-mettled rascal, blog, like John-a-dreams, unpregnant of my cause, and can say nothing

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday again.  I thought this might be the last Thursday blog post I was going to do, but because of my coworker’s vacation plans, I may do one or two more.  Or, of course, this could be the last one I do after all, depending upon the vicissitudes of fate and any tendency I may have to give in to (rather frequent) momentary impulses.  I suppose, as with all things, we will only know what really is going to happen when it arrives.  And then, it will be too late to change it.

Yesterday I had a slightly embarrassing moment when commenting on a website that I read pretty much every day.  The site owner had posted about a particular incidence of the bastardization of science teaching, and had embedded a PowerPoint show (with the voice) that had been made by the people responsible.  He invited the readers to watch the slide show, though he did an excellent job of summarizing things and pointing out errors of reasoning and of fundamental science.

I commented that I admired and thanked him for doing such things, and liked his description‒I think I said that last part‒but that I couldn’t bear to subject myself to the actual slide show, because my outlook on the world is too negative and discouraged already.

To my surprise, he replied, asking if I was being serious or if it was just a jokey way of saying that I didn’t have time to do it.

I don’t know if he was irritated by what might have seemed to be snark, or if he was concerned, or what, but I decided to make it clear that, while my tongue had been slightly in my cheek, I really did suffer from depression and that my outlook was fragile as it was, and too much exposure to such things could really make me despair‒or do so to a greater degree than I do already.  Then I added that, on the other hand, it was reassuring and encouraging that he (and implicitly, other people like him) did such a great job bringing such issues to attention and pointing out the problems they entail, and that fact bolstered me, if anything…and that was why I read his website every day.

I hope I got my point across, but I’ve been feeling embarrassed and stressed about those interactions since then.  I fear that my comments only ever serve to irritate this person, though I can’t be sure, and anyway, I don’t ever seem quite to get my points across, whether in such comments or here, for that matter.

I shouldn’t feel too bad about that, I guess, since even in person I’m apparently opaque to other people, as far as my meaning goes.  I sometimes don’t even know what I’m feeling‒when people ask me, I’m nearly always caught off guard and usually experience a very low-key panic.  One of my first therapists pointed out that I seemed quite disconnected from my own emotions and from that to which they were a response‒but even when I do know, and when I desperately want someone to notice, it never seems to work.

The train’s running twelve minutes late today, it seems; I’m standing on the platform waiting for it*.  Of course, more people than usual are gathering, and so it’s going to be more crowded, but I guess I’ll just tough it out.  It is frustrating, but I’ve gone into that fact many times before.

I see its headlights coming around the last bend now, anyway.

And now I’m on the train and we’re heading north.  That ought to be a very cool thing, oughtn’t it?  To any humans who lived before, say, 1800 and were transported to the modern world, it would surely be a miraculous and possibly terrifying phenomenon**.  Yet, as with all such things, or at least nearly all, it has become just another aspect of drudgery and bleak sameness and pointlessness, carrying people to jobs that don’t in any way fulfill or inspire them, then back to houses full merely of devices and foods and processes and whatnot that serve merely to distract them rather than fill or fulfill them.

Maybe that’s just me.

I’ve continued to throw out some more of my useless crap, which is a good thing.  I gave a bunch of colored pencils I had at the office to a coworker who has a young son yesterday***.  Did I mention that already?  I think I did, but I might be misremembering.  Possibly I just intended to mention it, and that intention remained vivid enough to seem to have happened.  It doesn’t really matter, of course; otherwise I could easily just go and look.

I threw out two bicycle pumps this morning, because I don’t think I’ll ever use them again, and they were just cluttering things up.  I think I may put the bicycle out in front of the house, by the street, and perhaps put a sign on it saying, “Free to any taker‒needs a new front inner tube.”  I’m not going to be riding that bike, or probably any bike, again.  It’s a bit of a shame, but whataya gonna do?

And now, well, I don’t know, is there anything left to say today?  I probably have nothing to share that is worth sharing.  It seems quite possible that I’ve never had anything to say that was worth saying, or anything to write that was worth writing, or anything to draw that was worth drawing, or what have you.

I certainly don’t seem to connect with anyone in any kind of truly deep or significant way; certainly not one single connection I’ve ever made at a close-up, strong level, has lasted.  It seems that I’m just not good at such things, or am simply not a good candidate for connections from other people’s point of view.  Matters have come to such a pass that I think if someone tried to make friends with me now, I would probably feel panicky and threatened, and even hostile, like the feral cats you see in videos, who are in terrible shape, and whom people are trying to rescue, but who resist with vicious fervor sometimes, because they are quite rationally suspicious of the intentions of these huge, weird creatures that are accosting them.

Sorry, I don’t know what I’m really going on about.  Apologies if it’s too incoherent.  I’ll draw to a close, now, and I guess I’ll be able to use my usual Thursday morning sign-off, since it will still pertain (barring accidents and impulses).  I certainly hope you all feel better than I do.  It would be just too horrible a thing indeed, if it were not so, at least most of the time.

Please take care of yourselves and of each other.  Tomorrow is Bilbo’s and Frodo’s birthday, and the day after that Autumn begins.  Then, Sunday night, Yom Kippur arrives, the Day of Atonement™.  It’s a big weekend, or it ought to be.  Probably almost no one around me will know or notice or care.

TTFN

hamlet statue old photo look

*One useful thing about writing this on the smartphone is that I can even write while standing up.

**Of course, the time travel technology used to transport such a person to the modern world would be even more amazing, but never mind.

***That is, I gave him the pencils yesterday.  His son has existed for quite some time.

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If wishes would prevail with me, my purpose should not fail with me, but thither would I blog.

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, so I’m beginning this post in the fashion customary for my Thursday blogs, going back to when this blog was intended as a promotional project for my fiction writing.  Now I’m just going through the motions, but I guess that’s what one does with motions—one goes through them.

I half-heartedly intended to walk this morning, but it’s so effing muggy and the air is so dead that it’s intolerable.  Even here at the train station, reasonably near the ocean and the highway, the atmosphere feels utterly immobile; sweat gathers on me everywhere (including behind and beneath my reading glasses) even while I’m sitting still.  It’s quite annoying.

In other news:  yesterday, during what was probably my last “celebratory” day of sorts, I missed another palindromic number sequence in the recording numbers at work.  It was close—we passed the palindromic number by only 26, which is pretty small considering it’s an eight-digit number.  Still, it might as well be ten thousand or a million away.  A miss is a miss.  I did not get a palindromic number, and I don’t intend (or I don’t hope) to stick around to try for another one.  This has all gotten far too terribly old at this point.  There’s little to no expected return on continued investment in this failure of an enterprise that I call my life.

I mean to give things a little space of time.  I don’t want to sully the important day that was yesterday, after all.  But there are always days one doesn’t want to mar; there are always excuses and evasions.  One cannot keep succumbing to them indefinitely, or enterprises of great pitch and moment will their courses turn awry and lose the name of action.  Eventually, one must just take up that bare bodkin and use it on the nearest of all possible targets.

I don’t really know what else there is to write, today, but if I leave it here, this will be an extremely short blog post.  Perhaps everyone would welcome that.  Perhaps it would become my most popular blog post ever.  That would be pretty funny, and perhaps a bit ironic.  But even if it were my most well-read post, I don’t think anyone would take seriously the not-so-subtle subtext, the point I’m trying to make without being frankly out in the open.

I don’t think anyone really cares very much.  I can’t blame them.  If even I don’t like having me around; why would I expect anyone else to want to have me around, or even to share the Earth’s air with me?

I stink to myself, a lot of the time, though I try not to do so.  I wash regularly, and I use antiperspirant and aftershave, and I brush my teeth and so on.  This is part of why I hate the sweating thing.  It just feels so icky, and depending on the shirt I’m wearing, it can trigger that mildew smell.

Today, thankfully, I’m wearing a “new” make and model of shirt, so to speak, and in addition to being more comfortable, this type doesn’t seem as prone to the mildewage.  It doesn’t, however, have a pocket, which is what I liked about the others.  Oh, well.  That’s a tolerable trade-off.  I can tuck my reading glasses into the collar, and anything else I can just put in my other pockets.

Okay, well, that was a few more paragraphs about absolute drivel and pointlessness, wasn’t it?  Yet I’ve still only reached six-hundred words, just a moment ago.  Usually the nonsense just pours out of me, which makes sense, since I’m stuffed to overflowing with it; indeed, I may be made of nonsense entirely.

Really, though, I honestly don’t have much to say.

Which reminds me:  How many of you think the little “reprise” of Breathe from the album Dark Side of the Moon was sort of tacked on at the end of the song Time, just so it didn’t end with the words, “The time is gone; the song is over.  Thought I’d something more to say”?  I think that’s the true end of the song, because it’s the only ending that makes sense given the rest of the song.  It’s also quite a poignant and beautiful ending.

I ask this because, after watching some “reaction” videos on YouTube, especially of people listening to the song without listening to the whole album in a row, it nevertheless surprises me that more people don’t note the incongruous shift in tone, tune, rhythm, melody and whatnot that follows the seeming originally intended ending of the song.

I guess it doesn’t matter.  Most of the song has never really applied to me, anyway, apart from that last line.  I’ve never just kicked around on a piece of ground in my hometown or waited for someone or something to show me the way.  I was always ambitious*, even back when I was quite young.  I went all the way through to pretty impressive achievements, as far as it went.  I certainly didn’t miss the starting gun.  If anything, I was prone to jump it.

I was third-born, like Ender, with whom I felt some kindship the first time I read that book, though my brother and sister are more or less nothing like Peter and Valentine Wiggin, apart from the bipedal, upright posture and bilateral superficial symmetry**.

Of course, as Caesar could have told us, the wages of ambition are death.  But, then again, so are the wages of indolence.  And while ambition can be good, it can also be terribly disappointing.  Plans that come to fruition are little different—in the long run at least—from plans that come to naught.

And now, it’s time for this blog post to come to its end (now that I’ve padded it a bit with further idiocy), even if it isn’t actually going to come to naught, since it’s already written, and has been saved.

I hope you all have a nice day and all that.

TTFN

prism

*So says Brutus, and Brutus is an honorable man.

**I presume they both have the usual internal asymmetry of the organs, like we all have, but I’ve never so much as seen an x-ray of either of them to confirm it.  Nevertheless, I know they have both been to doctors on many occasions for many things, and I suspect, had there been major atypia in their internal anatomy, it would have been noted and made much of already.

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Despite some personal and global grumbles, today is a day worth celebrating

Well, it’s another morning, as usually happens at this time of day, and I’m sitting at the train station.

I did not walk to the station this morning.  I get too washed out if I do that too often in a row while it’s this hot and muggy.  If it were a bit cooler, I could walk back and forth, to and from the train station, and as long as I gave my ankle(s) and Achilles tendon a rest when needed, I think I wouldn’t bat an eye*.  But, as is generally the case at this time of year, the weather in south Florida is disgusting.

Don’t get me wrong; in winter, and especially in late fall and early spring, it’s quite pleasant here.  But at this time of year, it’s sticky and rather gross.

Enough of all that.  I’m here at the train station now, and I’m writing this on my miniature laptop computer.  I needed to give the base of my thumbs a rest—speaking of resting sore parts of one’s body—because they have really been acting up lately.

It also just feels so much more natural to write this on the computer.  This computer—most any such computer, really—feels like an extension of me when I’m using it, much more so than my phone ever feels.  I’m not a huge fan of the smartphones, though I would never deny that they are tremendously useful in many ways, and I do make such use of them.

But I don’t find them handy for talking on the phone; I cannot hear properly using the inbuilt speaker, unless it’s absolutely quiet around me, and even then I have to focus.  So I use earphones, which take care of that, but regular office phones are still easier.  Anyway, the only person I talk to on the phone is my sister, so I guess that’s only an issue in that circumstance.

I do find texting reasonably convenient, but of course, when my thumb bases are suffering from arthralgia**, texting is uncomfortable.  It’s also terribly irritating when one is part of a texting group and there are texts going back and forth and back and forth, so there are text alerts every few seconds, preventing one from doing anything that one is trying to do, because one can’t just ignore the texts—they might be important.

Usually they aren’t.  They’re often just the cyber equivalent of moronic small talk.  It’s maddening.

I do like being able to listen to podcasts and audiobooks on my phone—using the aforementioned headphones—so I can hardly complain about that.  And few people have used a phone for reading Kindle books more than I have.  I also play Sudoku or Euchre when I need to kill a bit of time.

Maybe I’m actually a big fan of the smartphone.  Or perhaps I’ve merely been ensnared, put under a spell, forced to become dependent upon a nefarious technology.  It is a tad annoying that there are more things I can readily do on the phone than on the laptop, when the latter really ought to be more versatile and useful.

The computer certainly has, for me, a much better user interface.  But it doesn’t have the ability to connect to any “phone” networks in and of itself, and using public Wi-Fi makes me slightly nervous, at least in principle.  Of course, I can set up my phone as a mobile hotspot to which the computer can link.  I have done that before, but it uses up a fair amount of phone data and—appropriately—makes the phone get literally quite hot.  After all, processing information generates quite a lot of high-entropy waste heat.

This is, of course, part of the reason why crypto-currency mining is more harmful for the environment than automobile exhaust (if I understand correctly).  “The cloud” is far from carbon-neutral, also.  All those servers running the internet and web, and all those GPUs running all the time to do the “mining” and so on use tremendous amounts of energy, and that has to be generated somehow.

And as far as alternatives to burning stuff:  people are illogically afraid of nuclear power***, and solar is not yet at full efficiency, though there are no big and obvious reasons that it cannot become so in reasonable time.  Mind you, solar power is just a form of fusion power—natural fusion, but fusion nonetheless—when you get right down to it.  But we obviously can only harness the tiniest fragment of the fusion power from the sun.

Still, there’s so much power coming from the sun that even getting a tiny amount is pretty good.

I don’t know why I’m writing about these particular random things at the moment.  I have to write about something though****.  So I just write whatever comes to mind, and since it’s my mind, it’s often rather peculiar.

It is an important, good day globally today, though I won’t get into the specifics.  I’ll just say that one of the two most positive events in the history of the universe happened on this date, twenty-two years ago.  So, if anyone out there has the opportunity to celebrate, you should certainly do so, in whatever way gives you greatest and most durable joy (without causing physical harm to others).  You have ample reason, even if you don’t know what it is.  It’s that good.

You can also celebrate the fact that I am now drawing this blog post to a close, since it’s getting a bit long by now, counting the footnotes.  Please, really, do have a very good day if you can manage it.  Thank you.

celebration scaled

*And I certainly wouldn’t eye a bat.

**Which literally just means “joint pain”.

***Not realizing, perhaps, that probably more people die every year from simple air-pollution-related causes due to traditional power generation than have died from nuclear events since nuclear power has existed.  I’m only guessing, but I do guess, that’s probably even counting the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  But the deaths due to air pollution are covert deaths.  They happen in the background, they exist as an uptick in baseline mortality across populations, and each individual untimely death is all but unnoticeable, so it’s hard to recognize that large-scale tragedies are caused—or worsened—by pollution.  People aren’t good at statistics and probability, and they aren’t trained to become better, by and large.

****I really do.  It’s a compulsion.  Not to write on a given morning before work would be extremely stressful for me.  Imagine being forced to watch one of your loved ones (who perhaps has a bit of dyspraxia) trying for the very first time to snow-board, and doing so on a high mountain course with canyons and cliffs and numerous trees and very steep, treacherous paths, after having gotten quite drunk the night before.  It’s that kind of tension.  Or so I imagine.  I’m probably exaggerating.  But it isn’t good, that for certain.  Even thinking about not doing it makes me feel as if I’m in the presence of hostile others.