writing

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The return of the Desperado?

Well, it’s Friday, and I’m glad to be able to tell you that I don’t feel as overwhelmed as I did yesterday/Wednesday evening.  I’m not sure what has made the difference‒I have a hard time recognizing my own emotions, let alone decoding them‒but I got some good advice from an old* friend yesterday.  First, there was just the blunt confirmation that, yes, this stuff was in my head (which I knew in principle, but sometimes it pays to get it from outside oneself, particularly from someone who knew me since before I had even met my now-ex wife).

This friend also gave me the good advice that, if I don’t know what to do, I should just do nothing, and not worry about it too much.  Those are my words; he put it better.  He also gave me a meditation reference/link that was helpful.  I like meditation in general, though I have to be careful with it, since sometimes it can soothe anxiety but make my depression worse.  I strongly suspect that, if I could just stick with it, that side-effect would fade, but it’s quite intimidating, since my depression is often literally life-threatening.

I also want to apologize in general, and in spirit, for the implicit (but not intended) disparagement of my youngest child in yesterday’s post.  They definitely don’t deserve anything but praise and affection and love from me, and I mean the word ”deserve” here, despite it being a word I think often has no useful meaning in the contexts in which it is used.  I could not be prouder and more delighted than I am with my child (and my other child as well, except that I would be much more delighted if he would “speak” with me).

Okay, let’s not dwell too much on that stuff.  That’s the kind of rumination that can start a spiral.

In other news, I decided yesterday to start reading what I have written so far of The Dark Fairy and the Desperado, just to see if I liked it and maybe, perchance, if I would want to pick it up and work on it again.  It’s one of three stories on which I have at least a beginning (the other two are Outlaw’s Mind and HELIOS, though the latter is only barely begun).  It’s hard for me to tell if it’s any good, because as far as I can recall, I haven’t received any feedback on DFandD or Outlaw’s Mind, though I have posted them here.

If someone out there did give me feedback and I have forgotten, I do apologize.

Anyway, so far I quite like The Dark Fairy and the Desperado.  It’s got some subtle, meta-level humor in it, and the two characters therein are figures I’ve probably drawn more pictures of than any other, even Mark Red.  I’ll embed a few of them here, below.

I don’t know if I’ll pick back up on any of these stories, but I welcome any input from readers, though I cannot promise I will follow your recommendations.

Part of me thinks it would be most fun to write HELIOS.  Some of that feeling is because he/it began as my idea for a comic book superhero waaaay back when I was little**.  Also, since I’ve barely made a start on that story, I could in principle try to write it on Google Docs on my smartphone, but overlapping to a larger computer when desired.

Although, that latter plan suffers from the drawback that my mini-lapcom doesn’t really get internet access when I’m commuting, so access to Google Docs is limited.  Also, to be honest, I can write MSWord documents from my smartphone as well; it’s just that the phone app for that word processor is much more cumbersome and less fluid than is Google Docs, though the latter is not as good a word processor overall.

We’ll see what happens, I guess.  I don’t have to do anything, as my friend said, though it’s so hard for me to internalize that, when I’ve spent my whole life doing goal-directed behavior, and thinking that I really had to do things, to be productive, to achieve, in order to justify my continued existence.

But what if my continued existence isn’t justified?  What if no one’s is?  That seems reasonable and consistent with observed facts.   Perhaps it is merely the case that those things that exist do exist and that’s really all there is to it.  If you exist, then you are a fact in the universe.  It cannot have been any other way than to have you in it, once you are there.  If you were not in it, it would not be the same universe.  And it is the same universe.

That all doesn’t quite merit a QED (unless one refers to quantum electrodynamics), but I think it’s pretty definitive, nevertheless.

So, for now, I’ll just exist and not worry too much about doing anything.  This is reminiscent of the wu wei advice of the Tao te Ching, which I like, and other great old eastern philosophical traditions.  Not that I like them because of their age or where they arose; that would be silly.  I like them because they make sense.

Anyway, below are those pictures with which I threatened you.  Some of them are pretty good, I think, for a truly self-taught amateur.  I still would definitely appreciate any feedback about my partly-begun stories and what your thoughts are on which you might be most inclined to want to read.  No matter what I do, if I start writing fiction again, I think I will nevertheless keep writing this daily blog.  I would hate to leave all my countless readers (heh) high and dry.

Please have a good weekend!

*By “old friend” I mean he’s a friend I’ve known for a long time (almost 40 years!) not that he’s old.  He’s more or less the same age I am, give or take a few months.  I guess that’s “old” from a certain point of view, but it’s not old enough to start collecting retirement benefits.

**This may mean that, overall, I’ve drawn the most pictures of that character, but the pictures are of very different quality to one’s I’ve drawn as an adult.

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I can’t think of an appropriate Shakespeare-based title I haven’t already used

Hello and good morning.

Actually, though, I’m at least starting this blog post on Wednesday evening as I wait for my train.  I will have edited it Thursday morning, however.  I know this for a definitive fact, because this very sentence, and the immediately preceding one, is being/has been written on Thursday morning, while I’m editing.

Right now, though—that being Wednesday evening—I feel like I won’t have the energy for anything tomorrow.  I don’t think I would have the energy to breathe if it were not an automatic process.

All of this is getting too tedious; everything is getting tedious.  It’s the same old stupid thing after the previous same old stupid thing before the next same old stupid thing, and there’s no point and no joy in almost any of it.  It’s just compulsion; it’s just habit.  It’s just the fear that, if I stop doing this, I don’t think I’ll do anything else.

But why should I do anything else?  Why not just stop everything?

It would have no significant impact on anyone or anything.  It’s certainly unlikely to make things worse overall.  The world is as shitty as it’s ever yet been in my lifetime.  Humans have become ever more disappointing—not all of them mind you, but so many have become so disappointing that the good ones seem fewer and further between.

Of course, I’m pretty disappointing myself, albeit for somewhat different reasons than most.  So I don’t really have much right to complain.  It’s not as though I’m not a loser, after all.

Yeah, I think maybe I’m pretty much close to done—with everything.  I certainly don’t have any desire to celebrate having lived yet another pointless year in which I produce nothing of value and just wallow in the fact that biological existence has a tendency to continue—at least up to a point—if it’s not actively curtailed.

I’m so tired all the time, and I’m in pain all the time.

Just earlier today (Wednesday), it occurred to me—though I’ve probably said this before—that I feel as though I’ve already been embalmed, because just moving around in any way, just kicking any of my joints into flexion or extension, is difficult and often painful.  I feel stiff and sore; I also feel like my limbs are somewhat out of place, though it may be hard to convey that sense adequately.

I’m uncomfortable in my body and uncomfortable in my mind.  There are very few compensations.

I’m not saying there are none, and they are definitely nice when they happen, but they are few and far between, like tiny oases in a desert.  They are also bits of relief that I certainly do not deserve.

I’m also tired of complaining all the time.  I feel that it has to get really old for the people who read this blog.  But I don’t have much that’s more upbeat or uplifting to say.  I certainly don’t have much positive to say about myself.  I’ve failed at everything that actually matters to me, and at quite a few things that don’t, despite my supposed gifts and abilities.

It’s enough.  I really just ought to die soon.  My birthday is coming up; it would be appropriate for that to be the day I died.  At least it would have a nice faux symmetry.  It doesn’t really matter, of course, but I like symbols and symmetries and timing and so forth.  I just feel…well, I don’t feel like continuing, I don’t feel like putting in any more effort.  It’s useless and pointless and irritating.

Maybe I’ll feel different in the morning.  Maybe I’ll feel worse*.  Maybe I’ll develop enough resolve to take final action of some kind—I certainly have plenty of methods and means available.  I’ve been collecting and preparing such means of egress for a long time—I have nooses, and blades, and flammable liquids, and nonrebreather masks and tubing and regulator valves that could be used to deliver inert gases, and I have rat poison and various other potential toxins, for instance.

Or maybe I’ll develop enough energy to continue for a bit longer, however pointless it may be.

But I don’t know what to do.  I’m not sure what I’m going to do.  The only thing I have to which to look forward is occasionally seeing my youngest child, which started recently.  That’s always very nice, of course; that’s wonderful beyond easy explication.  But I feel—I must admit this may just be my mental illness speaking—that it’s an unkind obligation I’m putting on them, though I do not want to denigrate them or cast aspersions on their character.  That would be most unjust.

So it’s probably in my mind.  Nevertheless, I feel that I am causing undue trouble for them, and that I am not worth that trouble, not in the slightest.

I don’t know what to do.  I am so exhausted by everything, and I feel that I am nothing but pathetic.  I just want to exit, to escape, to be able to stop trying, even if it’s not truly what one could call “rest”.  I just need to let go—or something.

Whatever.  We’ll see.  I may not even post this post tomorrow morning.  I may just write something else**.  I don’t know.

TTFN

*This is a morning footnote, and it’s hard to say whether I feel different.  I feel slightly more rested, of course; I’m probably not rested enough, since my body doesn’t seem to like to indulge itself in getting enough rest.  I’m certainly still stiff and in pain, but I also nevertheless did my pull-ups this morning, so I have a bit more energy.  Also, I am a creature of habit, but I am not a nun, though I am worth none.

**I have not.  This is just the edited version of the post I wrote yesterday evening.

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For they blog between term and term, and then they perceive not how time moves

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, so of course I’m writing my “traditional” blog post, with my “traditional” salutation and ending.  I haven’t written the ending yet, but I will, and of course, when you’re reading this, I will have already written those four closing letters—like a vortex manipulator, it’s a kind of cheap and nasty time travel.

I’m writing this post on my mini lapcom, the device formerly known as a laptop computer (to me, at least), because I thought it would be good to write my traditional Thursday post on my traditional type of device.  It’s all very exciting, obviously.

Except of course that it is not exciting.  Nothing is exciting.  There are many worrisome and alarming and infuriating and disgusting things happening in the world and in my pseudo-life, but they are not exciting.

I can’t even feel one of my turns coming on.  Rather, I think I’ve been in “one of my turns” in a low-key way for quite some time now.

I’m very tired.

I wish getting out the lapcom got me fired up to write some new fiction.  I certainly have plenty of story ideas and plots and whatnots in the back of my mind.  But I have no energy to act on them.  By the end of any given workday, I can barely drag myself onto the train to go back to the house, to be honest.

Then, of course, there’s the current washing machine problem.  The machine has finally been delivered, but the old, broken machine is still in place, so the new one hasn’t been installed, and I’m not sure when it will be.  I’m eating into my savings, such as they are, buying new clothes in the meantime.

The need to buy new clothes is particularly irritating, because—quite apart from the expense—I had no desire to buy any, possibly ever again.  New clothes are for people who have a future toward which they look with at least some degree of positive anticipation.  I do not see my own future with any good feelings.

Speaking of the future and not having one and also writing fiction, I thought of an amusing, cautionary tale, a fable of sorts, recently.  Imagine a young man—this sort of story really only works with such a protagonist—who finds a literal genie in a lamp and is given the traditional three wishes.

For his first wish, this young man asks for the ability to stop other people (and things) in time, imagining/planning various nefarious deeds he might undertake while people are “frozen”.  The genie is puzzled and seems troubled, but he grants this first wish.  Soon, the young man finds himself in a situation where he wants to test the power, but when he turns it on a chosen target, as soon as he does, the person just…vanishes.

The young man summons the genie, saying the power didn’t work, panicking a bit about what happened.  The genie explains that the person for whom he stopped time vanished because they simply did not continue past the point in time at which they had been frozen.  So, they did not exist in any future time, and they never would.

The genie had wondered why the young man wanted that power, but he had granted it.  Unfortunately, this deed cannot be readily undone; they cannot bring the person out of the past using the young man’s power as it is.  To change that power and to bring the person back would require the use of the two remaining wishes.

Will the young man choose to do it?  Will he correct his error?  Or will he continue to have the power, now using it as a weapon rather than the for the lascivious means for which he had imagined using it?

I admit, it would be kind of interesting to have such a power.  It’s reminiscent of the ability to send people “away” that the main character had in Stranger in a Strange Land.

What would you do with such an ability?  I would probably use it in morally questionable ways, myself.  But there certainly are people about whom it can safely be said that the world would, overall, be better off if they stopped moving forward through time.

Incidentally, this process would not run afoul of the principle of conservation of energy.  That conservation principle, like all physical conservation principles, is dependent upon the symmetry of the system—this was demonstrated by the genius Emmy Noether in her famous theorem.

The conservation of energy is (or, rather, it would be) a consequence* of the time symmetry of the universe.  But the universe is not symmetric in time, not on large enough scales.  So, on large enough scales, energy (and thus also mass) is not conserved.  Locally it tends to be, because locally, time is symmetrical to a good approximation, rather as the local surface of the Earth is approximately flat on a small enough scale…or rather like the way a small enough portion of any continuous curve can be arbitrarily closely matched by a straight segment on a small enough scale.  This latter fact is the source of the power of calculus.

But just as one can have a local hill or curved shape on the surface of the Earth, one could—in principle—violate local conservation of energy given the right available manipulations.  Now, we in the real world cannot do such a thing, at least not right now, but presumably it would not be beyond the power of a genie.

Okay, well, that’s all pretty stupid, I know, but what do you expect?  It’s me, after all.

I hope you or y’all have as good a day as you possibly can, which you will have, since there is no other possibility.  That doesn’t mean it will be a good day.  It will merely be the best possible day you can have, even if it’s horrible.  Still, I do hope that for you, at least, it will be good.

TTFN

*An interesting term to use, given the current subject.  It has a relation to the order of things in time:  con (with) sequence (ordering of things).

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“What hears with their ear? The abyss between the stars.”

Well, I did bring the mini lapcom with me when I left work yesterday.  Nevertheless, I am writing this blog post on my smartphone.  There are specific, calculated reasons for this, but I’m not going to bore you with them, because they are only relevant to me.  But please, do tell me if you notice that this change has affected the quality of my writing, for better or for worse.

Okay, that’s that out of the way.  Now, on to more interesting things.  It’s the first day of October, my favorite month, although the reasons it has always been my favorite month are almost all effaced here in south Florida, in the current state of my “life”.  Still, it is the month of Halloween, and of Cooger and Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show, and all of that, so it still holds its position as number one month, as well as being the eighth and the tenth.

A few years ago‒it feels longer‒I set myself the task of writing a “short” story to honor the month of October (though the story didn’t have to be set in the month of October).  That led to Hole for a Heart, which is not my darkest story*, but my sister says it’s my scariest story.  I’m sure that’s pretty subjective, but it warms my own heart-shaped hole at least a bit to have written a quite scary story.

I wish I had the gumption to write something new again for this month.  If I did, the lapcom would be better for writing fiction than the smartphone, though the latter might keep me from going too ham on the whole thing, i.e., writing too much.

But I have a sort of feeling of learned helplessness about writing fiction, as well as about music (writing it and even just playing it) and art and science and everything else I do.  I put a lot of energy into things with almost no return, certainly not one commensurate to the effort involved.  Eventually, I just feel like an exhausted rat lying in the bottom of his cage, knowing that no matter what choice he makes or action he takes, he will be randomly shocked and otherwise tormented.

It’s not that he doesn’t care about the pain or the other stuff, he just knows the pain will come no matter what, and that has taken almost all the possible joy from being creative.  This is especially so when the creativity goes almost entirely unnoticed, like a sculpture made on the ISS and then promptly launched from there into deep space without anyone having seen it but a handful of astronauts.

I don’t know what it might take to rekindle (no pun intended) my writing or other creative sparks.  Maybe if I just had less pain it would do.  Unfortunately, the pain seems just to add new flavors and textures to itself over time; it doesn’t diminish.

I guess maybe that could be considered creative in a sense.

It’s a curious sort of irony, but I know that writing fiction seemed to stave off my depression, at least a little.  One might think it would be exhausting, writing 1400 to 2000 words every workday (except when editing/rewriting, which was its own grind).  Maybe eventually it was, and that was what led me to stop finally, since there was no real reward to it after a while, since almost nobody buys the books and/or reads them.

I don’t regret having written my stories, of course, nor my songs, nor any drawings I’ve made, nor my blog(s).  But over time I’ve had rapidly diminishing relative returns on the fiction writing and on the music and such.  The returns on this blog, relative to the effort, are shrinking more slowly, and occasionally there seems even to be an uptick, but the overall trend of basically everything except my personal knowledge** is downward.

I don’t know when the y-axis overall will cross the origin‒for many particular things, I think it has long since done so‒but I suspect it’s a finite distance, and I’m not decelerating, so I will cross it eventually.

Sometimes‒indeed, pretty much every day and twice on Sundays, ha ha‒I think to myself the metaphorical equivalent of “Where is that fucking x-axis?  It’s time for this to be finished already.”  If I had a goal, or anything significant toward which to look forward, things would probably be different.  But I don’t, and they aren’t.  That’s logic for you.

Well, anyway, this evening begins Yom Kippur and my fast.  Whatever you all are doing, I hope you have a good day.  I expect that I will be writing to you again tomorrow.

*That would be Solitaire.  I’ve told the story of that tale’s origin here before, I think, so I won’t get into it now.  If I am misremembering, let me know, and I’ll try to tell you the curious but not very exciting tale of a very dark tale indeed.  Oh, and if you want to read either of those stories but don’t want to do the Kindle thing, they are both featured in Dr. Elessar’s Cabinet of Curiosities, which is so far my only work you can get in Kindle, paperback, and even hardback!

**I do think that I am always learning new things and improving my understanding of things I knew from before, and I have a good memory, especially for things in which I’m interested.  That’s all well and good, and I’m glad of it, but knowledge in my head is only as good and as durable as my head is.  Eventually, as Roy Baty said, all these moments will be lost in time like tears in the rain.

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“I’m coming down fast, but don’t let me break you.”

I’m writing this post on my mini lapcom, as I call it, following the lesson of my own reflections yesterday on how my thumbs and whatnot are getting particularly sore and tender while writing on the smartphone, and it’s just easier writing with the “laptop” computer.

Of course, I don’t know what subject on which to write, but that’s typical, even usual for me, though I probably wouldn’t call it “normal”.  It’s just my personal, weird way of approaching this blog.  I suppose my subconscious is probably working on some of it ahead of time.  But I don’t really ever plan the posts, though occasionally I think about a general, vague kind of thing that I will discuss, like “What is that flat, circular thing that they throw in the Olympics called, again?”

Sorry, that was a really stupid joke.

There are some imminently upcoming matters that are of at least personal interest to me.  For instance, this is the last day of September in 2025.  Tomorrow begins October, which is generally my favorite month, though down here you can’t readily tell October from any other month.  But it’s still a good month, and it culminates in my favorite holiday (which is Halloween, in case that wasn’t clear).

Tomorrow at sundown also begins Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement.  Now, I clearly am not “observant” in any serious way, and I have no local (or other) community of any kind, but pretty much every year, unless I am physically sick, I fast for Yom Kippur, from sundown to sundown (at least).  One is supposed to fast from food and water, but since I’ve been in south Florida, I tend to skip the water fasting part; even at this time of year, it’s too easy to get dehydrated, and I sure as hell don’t want any more kidney stones if I can help it.

I may try to extend my fast this year, beyond just one day.  I’ve done it before.  Once I get past a certain point, it becomes comparatively easy just to continue not to eat, and for me, at least, that point of ease arrives pretty quickly.

Clearly one cannot fast indefinitely.  Or rather, if one does it for more than a certain length of time, one is likely to cease to eat permanently (if you take my meaning).  That’s not so bad a thing, really, and it doesn’t seem like a terrible way to die, to me, though I know a lot of people seem to think it especially horrible.

But the thing is, ketosis (which happens when fasting) is fairly pleasant, as I know from personal experience; the brain prefers to run on ketone bodies (in the sense that it runs better on them), and one’s hormonal status, such as one’s bouncing stress hormones related to insulin and glucose zooming up and down, at least become steadier when one has gone without food for a bit.

It’s not a mere coincidence that many religions and spiritual practices make use of fasts.  Up to a certain point, going without food for a while keeps one clear-headed, less emotional and distracted (once one gets over the initial hump of habit).  There are hypothetical biological reasons for this; an animal (such as a human, or even me) needs to be clear and sharp when food has been scarce, because they need to seek it.

I wouldn’t mind achieving some type of epiphany because of a fast.  I also have a (slim) hope that fasting might help some of my pain symptoms, at least the more recent ones.  I have a slight suspicion that maybe I have some form of psoriatic arthritis (though it certainly could be a “second year medical student syndrome” type of thing), since my fingers are particularly getting more painful and swollen lately*, and I have new tendonitis-type symptoms and even a proximal interphalangeal joint in my right middle finger that’s popping in and out as I move it.

The left hand is not as bad, but then again, I am right handed, so the right hand gets more use and stress—not least from controlling a computer mouse.  But I also get a lot of pain that has become more localized to my ileo-sacral region, shifting from side to side (and various other joints, not quite symmetrically) which is a common spot for psoriatic arthritis to affect.  So, it could be a somewhat atypical presentation of psoriatic arthritis (I do have a long-standing psoriasis-like rash).

More likely, though, all of these symptoms are merely part of my chronic pain syndrome, which leads to awkward postural adjustments that cause irregular strain on various joints and tendons, and it’s all made worse by the fact that I am way too fat (because I often eat for “comfort” when the pain is acting up, which is likewise often).  So, whether by one mechanism or another, perhaps fasting would help reset things.

I would not hope to get carried away and fast forever, but at least it would be nice not to die a fatty.  I guess we’ll see how everything goes.  But I am at least going to fast tonight until tomorrow night.  I have plenty of internal reserves on which to live, but I will keep taking my vitamins and pain medicine, of course.

That’s pretty much it for now.  I hope you all have a good day, and by tomorrow night I’ll have begun my fast.  If I keep it up, you’ll be able to follow my progress here.  It probably won’t be very interesting, but it might be.

Talk to you soon.

*That’s discouraged me from playing guitar very often, which is annoying in itself.

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I’m back and (nominally) going forth

It’s Monday again‒the last Monday of September in 2025.  This day, in this month, in this year, will never come again.  Or, well, even if the universe is one big closed time-loop of some kind, it seems quite clear that the scale of it is so huge that it may as well be eternity before this time will come around again.

And then, of course, even if it does come around again, it’s not as though we would be aware of it.  I’ve brought up before the notion of it being like people in movie on a DVD or Blu-ray or what have you; at each moment, the characters are, from their viewpoint, facing an uncertain future with many possibilities, and yet we the viewers know that exactly the same things will happen to them, and they will do exactly the same things each time we watch the movie.

That’s all old hat, I guess (a weird expression, but somehow it works).  But it is interesting to consider occasionally, and then to think about where (if anywhere) quantum indeterminacy fits into such a picture, from the possible “many worlds” Everettian version of quantum mechanics to things like superdeterminism on the other end and so on.

Whatever.  Sorry, I sometimes get a little swept up in such matters, and it probably gets quite boring for my readers.

Anyway, I did not go to work on Friday, and that’s why I didn’t write a blog post.  My apologies.  I felt truly horrible at a sort of pan-corporeal level; it almost felt as if I were experiencing the effects of some kind of poison (though I do not actually suspect such a thing, it’s just a way to convey my experience).  I think something “global” and metabolic was going on, though I guess it might have been some viral syndrome or other.  I’m not feeling completely better, even today.

I also scratched my right eye in my sleep apparently, on Thursday night, and that didn’t help matters.  Thankfully, the conjunctivae heal very quickly, so that’s mostly better now.  It’s still a little irritated, and so it is irritating, but that should just be a matter of time.

As for anything else, well…I have nothing, really.  That applies in more than one sense, now that I think about it.  But in this case, I mean that I have nothing interesting in mind about which to write.  It doesn’t help that I’m doing this on my smartphone, which makes writing slower and also a bit painful.

I really should bring the mini lapcom back to the house with me.  It’s so much easier to write on it‒it really allows me to be in some ways more fluent and fluid even than when speaking (although if you get me started on a subject in which I’m interested, I can talk at a rate that will make most people wish for me to get severe laryngitis).

It’s tough, however, to talk with my six pm self to get him to want to bring the lapcom, when he’s globally fatigued at the end of the workday.  Likewise, he has a hard time making excuses to my morning self, who is still fatigued and who has sore thumb bases.

Nominally, of course, they are “the same” person‒and taking “the person” as the four-dimensional self-reinforcing and self-sustaining pattern that I am, like a complex braid in spacetime, one would say that they are indeed the same person, or at least that they are parts of the same person.  But as an experiential matter, they are subjectively quite different, instantiating different states of body and mind.

Oh, they are obviously far more alike than unalike‒the morning me is closer by far in overall state to the afternoon me than to any state of any other person, let alone any other animal or what have you.  But still, the Buddhist (and similar systems of thought) notion of the lack of any fixed “self” riding around inside the mind like a homunculus is clearly correct.

There is no “center” of consciousness in the brain except for the whole brain itself.  But even that does not exist in a vacuum*.  Its state is influenced by the states of the rest of the body, of the environment, of the information coming into the person’s mind via the senses, and so on.

It’s a fucking complicated system, okay?  It’s the most complicated thing‒at least on this scale‒of which we are aware.  By that, I mean human (and humanoid) minds and brains in general, not mine specifically.  I have a fairly high judgment of my own intelligence, but I’m not as egotistical as all that.

Maybe I should try to be.  Maybe I should cultivate a sense of self-importance and specialness (why is that not “specialty”?) that would keep me feeling nominally good about myself.  But people like that are so boring and annoying and even pitiful.  I don’t know if going that way would be more triumph or surrender.  It would probably be the latter.

Oh, well.  Try to have a good day.

*Unless it’s a Boltzmann Brain, which is pretty unlikely.  You can know you’re not a Boltzmann Brain if you continue to exist for more than a few seconds before disintegrating into the global entropy of a nearly empty universe.  Although, of course, your memories of having existed for more than a few seconds may simply be false memories, a real possibility in principle in any Boltzmann Brain.  But contemplating those possibilities reveals that they would make baseless any notion we have of consistent physical laws, including the laws that allow for Boltzmann Brains (if they do, which is questionable), so it gets pointless pretty quickly.

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My a pile of cheese for this post

I really don’t feel well today, either mentally or physically, so please excuse me if this post is sub par.  I would probably not even go to work today if it weren’t payroll day (Wednesday) but it is.  So, I am going to the office, but I don’t know if I’ll stay there the whole day.  If I still feel as wiped by the time I’m done with payroll‒and I usually feel more wiped at such a time‒then I will probably go back to the house.

Some of what’s causing me trouble is the new soreness and pain in my right forearm up to my elbow.  It’s some form of connective tissue inflammation, I’m nearly sure, but it’s not clear what the cause is.  I sort of hyperflexed my right wrist‒under my whole weight‒several weeks ago, but to my surprise, that didn’t even hurt the next day.  It’s not impossible for this to be some delayed, accumulated damage/inflammation, but it would be strange to have had no symptoms in between.  Still, that’s the only concrete and direct potential cause of which I am aware.

Whatever the case, even picking up lightweight things with my right hand is painful, and that’s frustrating because one thing I’m not uncomfortable saying about myself is that I’m pretty strong.  I do under- and overhand pull ups and dips as my main upper-body workout.  But there were certainly no pull-ups this morning.

Of course, I have most of my usual pains‒my back hasn’t stopped hurting for two decades, so there’s no reason to think it would stop now‒including the arthralgia in the base of my thumbs.  Nevertheless, this week I’ve been writing my posts on my smartphone because carrying the lapcom feels too daunting.

My apologies; I doubt that anyone reads this blog merely to follow my litany of physical and psychological complaints.

I honestly don’t know why anyone in particular reads anything I write.  I appreciate it, of course.  Thank you.  But I don’t understand it very well.  If I didn’t have to interact with myself, I wouldn’t.

Actually, I guess I can understand why someone might read my fiction.  Many people like reading sci-fi, fantasy, and horror stories, and I’m at least willing to admit that I like my own stories, so it’s not insane that someone else might.  I actually know three people who have read at least some of my (published) stories and enjoyed them, and one of them‒my sister‒is still alive (I don’t think liking my stories is what killed the other two, but it is a rather disheartening coincidence).

But this blog is strange.  That’s not surprising in and of itself; this is me we’re discussing here (or at least I am).  I just don’t know what it is that appeals to people about this.  I’m glad that it does, but I don’t get it.  While I do often (well…occasionally, anyway) go back and reread some of my fiction, I don’t know that I have ever gone back to reread any of my old blog posts.

If anyone reading has done that, I’d be interested to know what motivated it, and whether it was a good experience.  Heck, if you think you’ve thereby learned any useful information about me that I might not already know, please, lay it on me.  After all, they say knowledge is power, but it’s much, much better than that‒knowledge is knowledge, which is better than power.  When you acquire knowledge, you take part of the universe into yourself without diminishing that which you internalize.

Well, okay, acquiring knowledge does increase the overall entropy of the universe, but at a very low rate considering what is gained.  Anyway, everything increases the overall entropy of the universe, because that’s what the mathematics requires.  I wrote a post on Iterations of Zero about that once.  If I can find it without much trouble, I’ll put a link to it.

Okay‒[shakes head metaphorically to try to clear it]‒I think I’m going to wrap this up.  My brain is really fatigued, and it’s only very early in the morning.  Actually, presumably the rest of my body is also fatigued‒it certainly feels fatigued.  But I only feel the rest of my body via my brain, so it’s all sort of redundant and recursive and self-referential filter.  I guess that’s a bit like this blog.

Anyway, have a good day, please.  Thank you.

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Near the bottom of the week there lies…this blog post

It’s Friday, in case you’re fairly out of it, or in case you’re reading this some day other than the day on which I’m writing it.  I’m surprised, actually, how many people who first start to follow my blog go back and read earlier posts, and even “like” them (which may or may not indicate that they actually like them).

It’s quite heartening, when it happens, even if it’s only because suddenly my blog gets a lot more views and I get lots of notifications when I get on the site.  I also feel impressed, because there is a rather intimidating—or so I would imagine—number of my blog posts on here.  There probably aren’t all  that many people who don’t write for a living who have written more than I have on this blog, going back almost 10 years.

Of course, when I say things like “how many” in the first paragraph, that’s a relative term.  I only get a few dozen or so people coming to my blog on a regular basis, even though I share it on pretty much all my social media (other than Instagram, which isn’t well suited to sharing links to blog posts, and TikTok, which I simply don’t have or use).  It would be great, of course, if I could get the sorts of visits and views and shares as some of the young women who just dance around a bit in cosplay, lip-syncing to snippets of songs and so on.  It’s charming sometimes, of course—I like to see the costumes, and some of the little skits can be funny—but it gets to be very much the same thing over and over again after a while.

It can be more fun seeing some of the compilations of people’s antics while they’re playing a game and streaming on Twitch.  That’s another social media platform with which I have no connection, since I don’t spend a great deal of time playing, let alone watching, many games (more’s the pity, since I do tend to like video games, all other things being equal).

Still, the best (to me) non-written material on the various social media are the ones where people discuss new findings in science or who discuss economic issues and international relations and so on, from professional points of view.  It’s not as good as reading a good blog post about a topic in which I’m interested, or better yet a book, but it can be hard to find blog posts about things in which I’m interested.  Podcasts are more reliable in this region, but I really only regularly listen to two of those:  Sean Carroll’s Mindscape and Sam Harris’s Making Sense.

I do subscribe to several people on Substack, but it’s hard even to see notifications of articles being posted by people in whom I’m interested.  And, of course, there are a number of blogs here on WordPress that I follow, but that number is so large that I miss quite a lot of them a lot of the time.

Of course, my interests aren’t necessarily like a lot of other people’s.  Science (especially but by no means exclusively physics), mathematics, a bit of economics, a bit of political philosophy and other philosophy, those sorts of topics and subjects are what interest me mostly.

I like movies and shows of certain kinds, though I watch fewer and fewer of them nowadays since I have no one with whom to watch them, and that takes a lot of the fun out of them.  I don’t have much interest in reading about shows and movies, though watching reaction videos for movies I’ve seen can be fun—it’s almost like sharing a movie one likes with a friend or friends who haven’t seen it.  Of course, it’s not fully like that, since one certainly can’t interact with those people, and in all honesty, most of them would probably find hanging out with me tedious to unpleasant.

I don’t know why I’m writing about this stuff, today.  As you probably know, I don’t plan these posts out in advance; they are very much stream-of-consciousness.  I hope they’re easier to follow than the first section of The Sound and the Fury, or something by James Joyce, but they still are very much just a sample of what comes out of my mind, which I am discovering with almost as much surprise as any of you are.

I started doing this every work day since I stopped writing fiction—which has been a while now—and I thought perhaps to use it as a form of therapy, but one for which I don’t have to pay nearly as much as the therapists I have seen in the past.  I don’t know if it’s doing me any good or not, but at least it lets me feel that I exist in something other than a purely local, ephemeral, and virtual sense.  That’s worth something at least.

With that, I’ll call this good for today and for toweek*.  I truly hope you all have a great day and a great weekend, and that you can look forward both to the arrival of autumn and to Bilbo and Frodo’s birthday next Monday.  I’m sure I’ll mention those things in my next post, but it shouldn’t hurt to prepare you.

*This is one of my neologisms, emulating the pattern from the word “today”, which means more or less “this day”.  That’s probably obvious, but just in case it wasn’t, I figured I’d leave a little explainer.

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“…the mystery which binds me still…”

I’m using the “lapcom” to write this today, so I clearly remembered to bring it back to the house with me yesterday.  It’s definitely better overall for typing upon than the smartphone is.

I wish it had backlit keys; you don’t see that very often on mini-lapcoms, unfortunately, and it does mean that the smartphone has an advantage over this computer in truly dark conditions, since its entire working surface is lit.   With the lapcom, only the screen is lit, which makes it slightly harder to see the keys, since the eyes adjust to the light level from the screen.  Still, I don’t really need to see the keyboard to be able to type; I’ve been doing it for a really long time.

By the way, in case anyone is curious and in case I think I haven’t explained it before—I think I might have, but I’m far from certain—it may seem odd that I say things like “bring it back to the house with me” instead of, for instance, “bring it back home with me”.  The reason is that I don’t consider the place where I live to be home.

I certainly don’t consider the previous place I lived to be home, nor the one before that.  In fact, ever since I’ve stopped living in any dwelling where my kids ever stayed, I consider myself homeless.  For a certain amount of that time, I was literally homeless.  I survived (obviously) but there have been quite a few unpleasant years since I last saw my children regularly; it’s been about 13 years since I’ve seen or spoken with my son.  I guess I really am difficult to endure.

I don’t try to be, of course.  Honestly, I don’t, especially not for the people I love.  You could even say that I try not to be difficult.  But I guess I am atypical to enough of a degree that I’m hard to endure for too long at a stretch.  According to my autism evaluation, I have ASD level 2, which means I have “moderate support needs” (as opposed to level 1, minimal support needs, and level 3, significant support needs).  So I’m not just “entry level” but pretty advanced, as it were.

My evaluator gave me the level 2 assessment because though I have a full-time job, it is clear that I am not thriving nor keeping up with many typical requirements of living (there’s more to it than just that, but that’s a summation).  I guess that probably means that sooner or later, my ad hoc, slipshod edifice will crumble.  But this is no surprise to me.  I’ve been crumbling for a long time.

I’m one of those houses built on sand, so to speak, without a foundation, and so it is fundamentally unstable and prone to breakage.  I don’t really have the wherewithal to repair it myself, though.  I’ve never been very good at taking care of myself.  I can take care of other people quite well, or at least I can take care of other people in certain ways.  But I’m not very good for me.

This poor self-care is not something I can correct with just an attitude or perspective adjustment; believe me, I’ve tried for decades in a great number of ways.  It appears just to be part of how my mind works.

So, don’t be surprised if, at some point, I just completely fall apart and implode or explode and am gone.  I know that I don’t have it in me to save myself; if I did, I would have done so long ago.  I’m smart and capable and have many abilities, but I do not have much of a capacity to bring them to bear on practical matters—or, well, on certain kinds of practical matters.  There are some such things I’m quite good at, but other important things have no hold in my mind.

I’m not sure what to do about all this.  Maybe I should start playing the Powerball™ or whatever it is.  I have never done so other than on occasion in the distant past as part of a group purchase of a ticket or some such.  I’ve always known that the math is such that there is essentially zero chance of any person winning the lottery, at least the big ones.

I used to tell my patients, if you’re in the store anyway, and you’ve got a couple of bucks that you might otherwise spent on candy or chips, then sure, go ahead, play the lottery.  It’s a bit of fun, and supposedly the proceeds or profits go to educational purposes (I have my doubts, but never mind).  But I always said to them that they should never take a special trip driving to the store to get a lottery ticket, because they were more likely to die in a car crash on the trip to get their ticket than they were to win.

Of course, if dying is a kind of winning for you, that may not be too much of a disincentive.  Anyway, I don’t have a vehicle of any kind, so I’m unlikely to get in a car crash on such a trip; I’m more likely to twist my ankle.

I’m sorry, I know there’s been no real reason or rhyme to this blog post.  I’m just allowing randomly firing neurons to express themselves.  I don’t know for sure if this is even intelligible to anyone but me (though I would give high credence that it is, based on past experience and as objective an assessment of my writing as I can make).  Thanks for reading, in any case.  I hope you have a good day.

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“I have seen the writing on the wall…”

It’s Monday again, unfortunately, and‒also unfortunately, certainly for you‒I am writing another blog post.  I thought that I had brought the mini lapcom back to the house with me on Friday, but apparently I didn’t do that.  I remember thinking about bringing it, but evidently that’s as far as I got.  I guess it’s not too important except for the fact that writing on the smartphone really seems to be exacerbating the arthropathy in my thumbs.

As far as I know, no one can tell any difference between my writing on the phone versus the computer anyway.  Maybe that shit’s all in my head, like all the rest of the shit of which my head is full.  Still, if I want my thumbs to recover, I should probably give myself a break from writing on the smartphone.

Of course, what I probably should do is stop wasting everyone’s time with this stupid blog.  I’m quite sure that some if not all of the people who read my posts do so out of politeness.  If I stop writing them, there will probably be a few people who will feel at least a small‒perhaps unnoticed but nevertheless real‒sense of relief.  I know that many of the things we all regularly do are pretty much pointless and are pursued out of a sense of duty or just politeness.

Not that I’m against politeness in general.  I have a few general attitudes toward things that I express as aphorisms, and two of them are:  Written language is the lifeblood of civilization, and courtesy is the lubricant of civilization.  But some things we are trained to think of as courtesy‒like where the utensils go in a place setting, or to greet other people with false* questions about their health and wellbeing‒are just customs, not really ways of avoiding abrasion in one’s interactions.

Anyway, the pointless that I’m making is, I suspect that not only am I doing something here that’s literally futile, it’s probably actually detrimental, as with so many of the things I do when I try to be positive.  I’m chewing up at least a little bit of my readers’ necessarily finite bandwidth, or RAM, or whatever metaphor you prefer, with my personal chaos.  I’m injecting negativity into the worldviews of anyone who reads my stuff seriously, and though I don’t think I’m wrong in my negative outlook, I know there are other perspectives that are more uplifting while nevertheless not being entirely delusional.

How’s that for a left-handed compliment?

Okay, well, what else do I have to say?  Not very much, I fear.  I am quite tempted just to stop doing this‒in case you can’t tell‒but not in order to free up my time or energy to write fiction or do music or art or anything creative.  I just sometimes feel that I ought to go quiet, just shut up and stop inflicting myself upon the world, in however small a way.  It’s often been the case that when I try to do good things, or creative things, in the long term it ends up blowing up in my and everyone else’s face(s).

If I just stop writing this‒if I just stop everything‒I wonder how long it would take for anyone really to notice.  I don’t ever seem to be good at getting attention when I’m hoping to do so.  Would the converse happen if I were to try not to get attention?  Or would it be more of the same?

Or am I, by speculating on such things, recognizing that I am trying to get attention by trying not to get attention, if that makes sense?

Who knows?  Who cares?  Why bother?

Not me.  I don’t know.  And I don’t have any good reason.

I hope you have a good day.

*I say “false” because, when people ask you how you’re doing or what have you, they don’t really want to know if you’re feeling any way but fine or great, and they certainly aren’t interested in hearing about any problems you might have, especially if you could actually use some help.