writing

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Wayward versus prodigal suns, negative integrals, and mildew

Well, it’s Tuesday now, and I’m sitting at the train and writing this blog post on my laptop.  Apparently, the last time I wrote using it was August 21st, but it feels as if it were longer ago than that.  I brought the laptop back to the house with me last night because I knew I wasn’t going to walk back from the train in the evening, having already walked to the train (and then some) in the morning.  And I knew I wasn’t going to walk to the train this morning, because I plan to walk back from the train this evening.  I figured that made it a good evening to carry the computer.

It’s curious how heavy this little thing feels when it’s in the backpack, compared to what I usually keep in there.  When I pick up the laptop in my hands, it feels almost miraculously light, given that I know what it is and what it does, and I know how much computers used to weigh and all that trivia.  But then after I put it in the backpack and later go to pick up and sling the backpack, it’s just so much heavier, subjectively speaking, than it ought to feel.

It’s quite annoying.  I dislike being subject to such subjective impressions from the world.  It’s inescapable, I suppose, since certainly this body was never shaped by nature accurately to assess the weight of a backpack with or without a laptop in it.  I guess the fact that our impressions are so inexact and inconsistent can be useful as a way to keep from feeling overconfident in our assessments of various facts and opinions about the world.

But then again, I tend to hold my judgments and opinions and abilities to be extremely unreliable, anyway.  I think the most common thing I say to myself is, “Robert, you fucking moron!”  That happens at least several times a day, pretty much every day (and I make that estimate without any willful exaggeration).  Just ask some of my coworkers if you don’t believe me*.  I really hold myself in contempt; I hate how weak and pathetic and idiotic I am so much of the time.  Trust me, if you were inside my head, you’d probably feel the same way.

Speaking of me being an idiot, I had slight passing thoughts on and off yesterday of trying to start writing a story I had considered writing before.  It involves a character I invented waaaaay long ago, back when I was maybe about 10 years old.  It was intended then as a comic book.  I even drew the beginnings of one or two comics about the character, one featuring the origin of his arch-enemy and all that.

Then, years later, I started thinking of an idea for a manga featuring the character, but with a much less comic-book style origin and story.  Indeed, it would become a tale about a teenager (not a grown-up, unlike the original notion) who has gone through some form of trauma and has lost his memories and whatnot, but discovers that—apparently as part of the thing that caused him the trauma and memory loss—he has developed incredible powers.

These powers are not psychic abilities or anything, but entail the ability to convert his own matter, and the matter around him directly into energy, which obviously means a lot of energy, given E=mc2  and all that.  It’s a silly-ish story, one for which I’ve drawn a picture or two, and it’s called HELIOS, with a rather silly and whimsical subtitle, “the wayward sun”.  Although maybe it should be “the prodigal sun” or something along those lines.

MS Word has underlined the word “sun” in that last sentence.  Apparently, it’s able to recognize the original phrase well enough to think that the word following “prodigal” should be “son”, not “sun”.  Curiously, it did not underline the word “sun” after “wayward”.  Apparently the song by Kansas isn’t as ubiquitous as the term from that horrible, perverse parable in the gospels.  Who would’ve thought it?  Admittedly, the one from the New Testament has a two millennia head start, so I guess we can cut Kansas a little bit of slack.

Anyway, obviously I know the whole back story regarding HELIOS, and of course there is a reason the title is spelled in capital letters.  I think it could be a decent light-novel type story.  It might even be worth trying to write it on the smartphone, just to see how well I can write stories like that using that tool.

But this is all a pipe dream, of course.  I don’t think anyone would be interested in reading it, even if I were able to force myself to start writing fiction again and do it.  It’s just my little personal fantasy (about writing another science fiction story**).  I doubt that I’d be able to summon the energy to write about that character (which is mildly ironic), but even if I did, there would be no point.

I don’t think I’m going to be able to summon the energy for much of anything, anymore.  I mean, obviously, I’m currently still writing this blog, and I’m sometimes walking to and/or from the train station, and of course I’m working at work.  But there’s no percentage in any of it.  I’m just slowly eroding whatever’s left of me.  I don’t really, honestly expect to make it to the end of this month, not without some major catastrophe or departure or whatever.

Maybe it’s just that I don’t want to make it to the end of this month.  It’s an annoying version of the old notion of “feeling that you can’t go on”.  Unfortunately, I know that I can go on, in the sense that I’m at least physically capable of doing it.  I just don’t want to go on.  I see no good reason to do it.  I want to escape.

Also, even though I didn’t walk to the train today, and the only walking I did so far was up to the end of the station to sit down, I’m already sweaty and my shirt and I smell like mildew!  I doubt anyone else can smell it, but I can, and it’s disgusting.  I just washed this shirt, and did so thoroughly, and dried my clothes thoroughly afterwards.  I don’t know how much Lysol I’m going to have to spray on it and me to kill that horrible smell, but unfortunately, I don’t have a change of shirt with me, and believe me, no one wants to see me topless!

It’s a minor frustration, I know—hardly a tragedy.  But there are so few, if any, compensatory joys in the world anymore.  Even if the function’s y-output isn’t terribly negative, if it just is negative at all, overall, then as time goes on, the integral, the area under the curve (or, well, over the curve) is going to be negative, and that negative integral will only get more and more negative as long as the function continues.  Better just to return the thing to zero and cut one’s losses.

That’s a bit of an obscure metaphor, I suppose, but hopefully it makes sense to people who know a little calculus.

I’m just so tired and worn out.  I feel angry all the time, but the vast majority of that anger is always directed at myself, and rightly so.  I need to escape.  But I probably can’t do it on my own.  At least, I only see one general way to do so on my own.

Oh, well, what are you gonna do?  The universe is a horrible place.  No wonder every little bit of spacetime is trying to push away from every other little bit.  Maybe so-called Dark Energy is just an expression of cosmic self-disgust.

Intergalactic space would certainly not be too distant a place for someone to want me to be from them.  I wish I could be so far away from myself a lot of the time.  But I don’t want to be someone else, either.  That’s another conundrum.

All right, this has gotten too long.  Have a good day, please, and thank you for reading.

helios sharper

[P.S.  Upon looking up this old drawing, it appears that I did think of making the subtitle “the prodigal sun”.  Now I like “wayward” better.  Maybe I’m just being perverse.]

*I don’t know how you might go about that, though, and I don’t really expect you to try.

**It would not be hard sci fi in any way, since of course it leans toward the comic book style of things, but the idea behind some of it is based in a bit of real science, including particle physics, especially relating to the Higgs field (where the H in HELIOS comes from), all that kind of stuff.  But I never thought of it as a serious science fiction thing, like Son of Man.

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Dreams of appreciation for one’s works in the past, present, and future

It’s Saturday morning, and I’m sitting at the Tri-Rail station, waiting for the first train of the day.  I’m writing this on my cell phone, though I came within a jackrabbit’s breadth* of bringing my mini laptop back with me yesterday afternoon.  I even packed it in my backpack.  But then I decided that its added weight might give me trouble, since I was planning to walk back to the house from the train station.  I also had planned to bring one or two other things that might add to the usual weight of the backpack.

It turns out, though, that not only was I too tired/lazy to walk, but I also forgot to bring the few things for which I had foregone bringing the laptop.  So, that was entirely pointless, and now, here I am “typing” on my “smartphone”, waiting for the train to bring me most of the way to the office on a Saturday during what is technically a holiday weekend (in the US).  And, of course, I’ll go in on Monday more or less at the same time, since on Monday, the Tri-Rail will be operating on a Sunday schedule (which is also a Saturday schedule), since most sensible people will take the day off.  I mean, it’s Labor Day.

If there were ever proof needed that we have failed to protect the rights and well-being of workers in general, it’s the fact that most businesses and services are open on Labor Day.  Even many white collar workers probably work on Labor Day (though many lawyers may not, since courts and other government facilities are closed).

I used to feel pretty good about going to a rather meaningless job, because the whole point‒as I deliberately decided and told myself‒was simply to keep myself alive while I wrote my books.  But I’ve stopped writing my books now.  I never really wrote them for anyone but myself, of course, but it does eventually get discouraging when no one but family actually reads them (to a good first approximation, anyway, though there are one or two exceptions).

I don’t tend to be the sort of person who craves popularity for its own sake, but it really would be nice if more people read and enjoyed my stories.  I guess maybe I should share them all again on social media, perhaps for the last time, and maybe I’ll share my songs (my original ones, I mean) while I’m at it.  Why not?  One last desperate grab at passing driftwood seems like an appropriate act for a drowning man.

Heck, if I thought anyone would listen, I’d try to read more of The Chasm and the Collision out loud and post it up to YouTube.  I have the first nine or so chapters up there, and a couple of my short stories.  But I don’t think anyone (but I) has listened to them.  They have fewer “views” even than some of the videos of my original songs or even the covers I’ve done.

Again, I do these things mainly for myself, not to pursue some dream of fame and fortune.  Nevertheless, one does sometimes sputter to a halt when one is not merely alone in day to day life but receives no significant interest in one’s best, most creative products.  It may be a fine thing to “dance like nobody’s watching”, but it’s less great to write like nobody’s reading, especially when it’s almost literally the case that no one is reading.  Ditto for writing and/or playing music.

If I were a painter, after a while, it would become discouraging to keep painting if no one wants any of the works.  I can completely sympathize with Van Gogh for shooting himself.  And while I am glad he did a lot of painting before that‒I think his pictures are often deeply beautiful and unique‒I recognize that the fact that he is revered now is of absolutely no benefit to the man as he lived his life.  There is no Doctor Who, “Vincent and the Doctor”, episode in real life to give a past figure‒Van Gogh, Herman Melville, whatever other famous-after-death artist one might consider‒a chance to know that, though unappreciated in life, the artist would eventually be recognized as someone who did something that would bring joy to many people.  For a real person, there is only what happens during one’s life.

Getting famous only after death is almost a form of tragic irony.  It’s not common, though.  I think it’s more common for one to be relatively successful and famous in one’s lifetime and then be forgotten than the other way around.  But many truly great creative artists‒Shakespeare, Picasso, Dickens, Beethoven, Rembrandt, Steinbeck, Tolkien‒were revered in their time and are still revered now.

I don’t quite know what point I’m trying to make.  Maybe just that there is no long-term point.  Or, maybe it’s a variant of the Woody Allen joke that he doesn’t want to achieve immortality through his work, he wants to achieve immortality through not dying.

But I don’t think it’s pointless to be respected (for one’s work) after death; I think it’s actually kind of wonderful to think that future generations might love and admire one’s work.  But it would be especially beneficial if they had also done so during one’s lifetime‒some of them, anyway.

The future admiration of the world is probably just as ephemeral as is such admiration during one’s lifetime‒since, compared to infinity, any finite amount of time, no matter how large, is vanishingly, unnoticeably tiny, and is always unreasonably close to the beginning of any counting of time‒but it is almost certainly the case that being honestly appreciated for one’s work during one’s life is a wonderful thing, all else being equal.

I don’t know how I got on that subject; perhaps I’ll figure it out when I read and edit this before posting it.  Whatever the case, I hope it was mildly entertaining for you.  Feel free to follow the links to my books or to my Amazon author page, or to my YouTube “topic” page where my original music is, or to my personal YouTube list if you want to hear my “covers” and a few raw originals, if all that seems as if it might be somewhat interesting to you.  And please try to have a good weekend, holiday or no holiday.

Thank you.

*Get it?

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Moods and moons and musings on mythology and morality via Middle-earth

I’m mainly over my weekend gastroenterological difficulty, so physically I’m definitely doing better than I was.  That can’t help but bolster my mood at least a bit, though the elevation bears all the hallmarks of being a supremely temporary state*.  Perhaps you think I’m being pessimistic, but I know myself and my moods reasonably well‒although I will freely admit that it is impossible to be fully objective about such things, given their very nature.

It looks like the moon is very close to its full state this morning, so if it’s not truly “full” now, then it’s one day before or one day after.  If I were a werewolf, I suppose this would be bad news for people around me.  However, I clearly am not a werewolf.  Nor is anyone else**.

I’m also not one who follows all the supposed names of the full moons and all that.  There’s nothing wrong with it, and if paying attention to whether it’s a harvest moon, or a hunter’s moon, or a sun myung moon, or whatever, makes you happy, then do please enjoy yourself.  The whole “super moon” thing is a bit more laughable, though.  The difference in angular size between the moon at perigee and the moon at apogee is too small to be detectable by the naked eye.  Sorry.  Also, by the way, the fact that the moon looks bigger when near the horizon is not even an optical effect***, but is merely an optical illusion.

The weather is slightly more pleasant right now than it has been, because we have a good, strong breeze, thanks to Idalia.  Other parts of Florida are having much worse weather, with the aforementioned hurricane and all, but that’s hitting the northwestern coast of the state, and will cross farther north and east.  We are on the real outer periphery of the storm’s effects down here; we just have more wind than usual, some intermittent rain (not truly unusual) and the very nifty spectacle of the fast-moving clouds all traveling in the same direction, following their course counter-clockwise relative to the center of the storm, hundreds of miles away.

I guess, from a Tolkien-based mythological perspective, a hurricane is sort of a partnership/game between Manwë and Ulmo, though those two don’t ever really come across as overly playful, and I guess they probably wouldn’t willfully do something to cause grief to the Children of Ilúvatar.  That might be more Ossë’s thing; he was apparently associated with storms and whatnot.  Of course, most unfairly, Melkor gets blamed for all the negative stuff‒burning heat and bitter cold immoderate and all that‒but Eru himself plainly and clearly said that everything comes from him.  “Thou shalt prove but mine instrument…” and all that.

Really, Melkor is just a convenient scapegoat so that people don’t get ticked off at Ilúvatar, who gets the credit for the good stuff and gets to foist off blame for the bad stuff, even though he is the one responsible for all of it.  Indeed, he’s the only one**** who could be responsible.

From a certain point of view, Melkor is the being in Ilúvatar’s creation that suffers the most.  He is given the greatest gifts of knowledge and of power of all the created beings in that universe, but he is fated, by his creator, to be disconnected, to be alienated, to feel an emptiness that his brethren don’t seem to share‒he lacks something, he is different, his thoughts are unlike those of his brethren (I can sympathize), and that torments him into becoming the original Dark Lord, the supposed source of all evil in Arda.

But of course, as openly admitted by the being himself, Ilúvatar is the source of all evil in Arda.  It may be worthwhile‒perhaps the gain in beauty and heroism and triumph and courage gained by those who live in his creation more than makes up for the suffering caused by and to the evil creatures.  But those evil creatures are still victims‒perhaps the greatest victims.

Ilúvatar could just have repaired Melkor (and Sauron, etc.).  He could have shown them his wisdom, the error of their ways, could have cured their dysfunction.  But no, that would be boring; that wouldn’t make a good story.  How could he have a heroic and triumphant journey for Frodo and Sam without sacrificing the soul of Sauron to endless emptiness and loneliness and bitterness and fear and hatred, and finally to being blown away into the Void, to suffer there forever (or at least until Ilúvatar decides it’s time to remake the world)?

And let’s not forget Melkor, with his feet chopped off and his head chained between his knees, floating immortally in the Void, with no respite from pain and suffering, no treatment or correction for the flaws and lacks that made him what he was, that Ilúvatar put there to make him an instrument for devising things of greater beauty.  He’s the clay mold around a bronze statue, broken and cast away once the metal cools.

Melkor can’t die, can’t sleep, can’t even change his form anymore.  No wonder he has always hated and envied the favored golden Children.  No wonder he hates Ilúvatar.

Okay, that was a weird digression, and of course, it’s all fiction, though it’s great and wonderful fiction.  But it is a way of highlighting a conclusion that I think is inescapable:  if there is/were a universe created by an infinitely powerful, omniscient, omnipresent being, then that being, and that being alone, would be responsible for all suffering, for all evil.  Everyone else is just a puppet by commission or by omission.

Fortunately(?), there is no reason to suspect such a thing, and I give it quite a low Bayesian credence (though not, perhaps, as low as werewolves).  That doesn’t mean that “free will” and “blame” and “retribution” make any more ethical or moral sense than they would have made otherwise‒they don’t.  But at least we can all cut ourselves and the universe a bit of slack, all the while recognizing that we’re on our own, no one’s going to help us, and it’ll be up to us to sink or to swim…or, maybe, to try to swim but sink anyway.

I don’t know what I’m getting at, but thanks for your patience.  Have a good day, please, if you’re able.

*It was.  Even as I’m editing this, my mood is crashing.  I don’t think it was some manner of self-fulfilling prophecy, but even if it was, I don’t know what I could have done to avoid fulfilling it.  My nature is what it is, while I’m alive‒which doesn’t go a long way to making me attached to that state of existence.

**While, in principle, one cannot really assign absolute certainty to some given proposition, this is a case where my Bayesian prior‒if prior it really is‒is well above 99%.

***Unlike, for instance the fact that, due to atmospheric refraction, we see the sun in the morning before it would technically be directly in view without such refraction, and continue to see it longer than it is truly in line of sight in the evening.  That wouldn’t happen if the Earth had no atmosphere, but then we wouldn’t really care because we probably would all be dead.

****Apart from Tolkien (the author), but I’m approaching this from the point of view of Arda being real, so we’re not going to address that.  Of course, it is a fact that the bad guys in the story are used by the author to create beauty that would not exist if it were not for the hardships and struggles of the heroes.  I know all about this.  I’ve tortured the characters in my stories beyond anything any real people could ever experience.  I guess no creator of any but the simplest of things can ever be truly innocent.

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I’ll give my jewels for a set of blogs, my gorgeous palace for a hermitage

Hello and good morning.  What follows is a very brief experimental attempt to see how well I can do voice to text while walking on my way toward the train station.  I don’t expect it to be a major way for me to produce this blog post, but maybe it’ll be entertaining, and if it turns out to be pretty good then I may actually go along with it further at some point.

I’m not sure how well to do things like line breaks and paragraph starts and so forth.  I may have to add all those after the fact by hand.  I don’t even know how it’s coming out right now so far, because I can’t really watch it while I’m walking as I speak/write.  I’ll have to learn at the end how well the voice to text process has worked.

In any case it is what it is, and I guess I’ll just have to see how it turns out.  It’s not that difficult in principle to add paragraph breaks after the fact.  I usually break up my paragraphs after my initial draft anyway.  But I’m not going to be doing this portion of this blog post much longer than to the end of the block.  It’s an interesting experiment and question, but until I find out how well it’s gone, and how well the computer has actually understood my spoken words to turn them into typewritten words, I don’t want to put too many eggs in that basket.

If that cliché is not your liking, please feel free to insert another.

It’s also a little bit awkward to speak too much when one is walking at a decent pace.  Okay, now I’m getting close to the end of the block and so I think I will draw this experimental portion of the blog post this close, and I will then finish it up by hand starting after I get to the train station.  Thank you for indulging me in this experiment.

***

Okay, that was the experimental section, which the smartphone says consists of 342 words.  That’s a fair few words to have spoken (to text) by the time I reached the end of my block, but then again, I live quite near one end of a long block, more akin to the space between avenues in Manhattan* than the space between “streets” in Manhattan.

I also tend to be rather garrulous when I get to talking, and I probably say less than the number of words used would imply.  In between such floods of verbiage, I am often at least somewhat taciturn, especially in the morning, and especially relating to “small talk”.  I really don’t like idle conversation at any time, but especially in the morning.  In fact, people who ask me “how I’m doing” or “how I’m feeling” in the morning can only be thankful‒though they know it not‒that I am not strong with the Force, because otherwise I would litter the morning floor with so many choked out bodies that Darth Vader would probably be moved to say, “Hey…dude…come on, man, you need to try to lighten up.  They didn’t do anything to deserve getting killed.”

Touché, Lord Vader.  Touché.  Actually, come to think of it, if you’re fencing with lightsabers, a touché is a pretty serious situation.

I’m sorry if I’m a bit bizarre today; I hardly slept at all last night, well under two hours.  I suspected this might happen.  As I stopped the melatonin, my daytime energy went up because I’m no longer groggy from the persistent hangover effect.  Then, yesterday, I walked 5 miles in the evening and got back to the house around 9, then showered and ate something and so on.  I was perhaps too physically wound up to easily get to sleep, and then staying asleep has never really been my strong point.  So…that happened, as they say, and it will probably affect my mood (affect my affect, if you will) today.

This is a deliberate and calculated thing I’m doing.  Quite apart from the fact that it didn’t seem to help my sleep much‒perhaps a slight amount‒the melatonin left me with less mental energy during the day.  Anyway, I’m trying to divest myself of most of the things I have and do that might make me meta-stable, that might hold back my depression, but not enough actually to treat it, only enough to keep it from completely destroying me.

I want to say to it, “Come on then, depression.  Here I am.  Do your worst.  No one’s coming to help, and I’m tired of trying to help myself.  If you’re capable of destroying me, then come on and do it, you piece of shit.”

It’s sort of a King Lear, “Blow, wind, and crack your cheeks…” moment:  An old man stands in the storm and invites it, or dares it, to destroy him.

I think I’ve already used part of that moment as a title of a previous Thursday blog, which is a shame.  It’s a lovely metaphor for many aspects of my life, perhaps much more than, say, Hamlet, which I quote more often.

Even Shakespeare, though, doesn’t have an infinite supply of potential quotes.  An infinite room full of monkeys and typewriters would, in principle, have a bigger body of work, but finding the good stuff would be a hell of a chore.  That’s probably a bit like reading my blog.  To those of you who do, thank you.  I appreciate your patience and kindness.

TTFN

palace in saint petersburgdarker

*I’m referring here to Manhattan Island in New York City.  There is also a Manhattan in Kansas, and there may be many more places named after the heart of New York City.  I don’t know much (if anything) about the street layout in such far flung places, but I would guess that their subway systems are less elaborate than that of the original.

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Perambulating meta-cycles of pointless (but pretentious) contemplation

Well, here we are again.  The cycle continues.  It’s not a motorcycle or a bicycle, of course; that would be silly.  And I’m not referring to something as fundamental as the Krebs Cycle, though of course, as long as I’m alive, that is constantly whirring in pretty much every cell of my body.

No, I’m referring to the cycle of days and weeks of my pseudo-life.  I’m back at the train station this morning, writing this on my “smart”* phone, having taken what I hope will be pretty close to my final Uber here.  I say that because, yesterday, I walked both to and from the train station, totaling over 12 miles for the day, and the ill-effects on my joints and back and so on are minimal.  I have no new blistering, no worsening of or new pains in my back or sides or hips or anything**.  I had a minor threatening back spasm yesterday evening, probably from fluid status changes.  That’s all right.  I drank a lot of fluids during the day and in the evening, and I think that took care of that.  It’s just a bit sore there now, and it’s certainly not more than a standard deviation worse than my average*** level of pain.

I plan to walk back to the house from the train this evening‒I have nothing better to do with my time, and I can listen to audiobooks and/or podcasts as I do it.  Then for the rest of the week, and hopefully for the rest of the time I’m here, I’ll walk to and from the train station every day.  The shoes I’ve chosen seem to be good; I may even get another pair or two, just so I can spread the wear and tear out.

[That was three words that rhyme in that one last sentence:  pair, wear, and tear.  So, there.]

I had a nice conversation with my sister on the phone last night as I walked back, and it even continued once I got to the house, at least for a while.  She’s the only one I talk to at all, really, except in passing to people at work.  It’s no surprise that I can talk to her even when I can’t tolerate talking to anyone else.   After all, I’ve literally known her all my life.  And she’s known me all my life (though not all of her life, since she is older than I am).

I used to call my Mom once or twice a week, usually twice, and we would talk for a while, but obviously that doesn’t happen anymore.  I mean, I could talk to my Mom, so to speak, but it would hardly be a conversation, since she cannot reply.  I don’t expect to be able to speak to her once I’m in the state she’s currently in, alas, though I suppose I could be wrong about that.  I don’t think I am (obviously) but I am not convinced beyond any shadow of a doubt.

I’m convinced beyond what I consider any reasonable doubt, but that’s not an insurmountable standard, as any unjustly convicted victim of the criminal justice system would surely agree (and there are almost certainly many of these poor souls languishing in prison, since we only ever directly learn about the ones who are eventually exonerated).

I’m on the train now, by the way, on my way to the office, ready to face another day at work.  At least, I’m as ready as I’m going to be.  I certainly am capable of doing what I do at the office, such as it is, even on payroll day.  But it’s not as though I’m excited or enthused about it.

Still, I don’t expect to be enthusiastic about work.  It’s work.  They pay you to do it.  Even when I was writing fiction every day, I didn’t feel enthusiastic about it when I did it in the mornings.  I felt a general positive sense about the stories, and about the characters and whatnot, but it wasn’t enthusiasm or “motivation” in the business-speak, life-coach type way the word seems often to be expressed.  Certainly there was never any “ooh-rah” feeling.  It was personal discipline to carry through on a commitment (self made and self directed) that also became a habit.

I think writing fiction did stave off my depression for a while, or at least it kept it more in check.  Those days are gone, though, likely never to return.  I mean, I really like Outlaw’s Mind so far, and The Dark Fairy and the Desperado was fun as far it’s gone (for me), and I think Neko/Neneko and Changeling in a Shadow World would be good, and it might even be worthwhile, someday, to try to recreate my first novel Ends of the Maelstrom or write the sequels of Mark Red or the prequel to Son of Man.  But I don’t think writing and/or finishing any of those is likely to happen.

Maybe if some wealthy benefactor/patron were willing to keep me alive and in a reasonably safe and tolerably comfortable situation, I might be convinced to start writing fiction again.  I know that I can write a lot when I choose to do it.  Just look how much gobbledygook I put out every day here on this blog.

I used to write over 2000 words a day on my fiction in the mornings before work (even when I was “up the road”) and sometimes I got quite carried away.  Unanimity had to be split into 2 parts because it was over half a million words long before I finished.  That’s slightly longer than It and around the length of the unabridged version of The Stand.  And I was not writing “full time”.

But I have no will to write fiction now.  There’s only so much one can do such a thing “into the void”, at least when one has nothing else of value in one’s life, before it feels like a thoroughgoing waste of effort.  Even this blog tends to feel utterly pointless‒it is utterly pointless, like most things I do, but it doesn’t always feel that way‒and I know there are people who read it.

I don’t know what point I’m trying to make.  Oh, wait, I just mentioned that it’s pointless, so I shouldn’t expect to have a point or to make one.  Maybe that is the point.  That would be rather circular and paradoxical and “meta” as they used to say before Zuckerberg pissed all over the word, and even stole the term “metaverse” which I had long planned to use in things like DFandD and CiaSW.  I know he didn’t know I meant to do that, and he surely had no malice toward me.  But, though I do not consider him to have willfully (or even willingly) done me wrong, I still am sorely miffed by his (quite lame) arrogation of the term.

All right, that’s enough for this day, and I’m almost at my stop.  Have a good day…please.  Someone ought to do it, and I’m neither talented nor skilled at such things, so I’m leaving that task to you readers.

*I suppose, to be fair, that it really is smart, depending on how you define the term.  That’s almost tautological, though, now that I think about it.  Depending on how one defines the term, my phone could honestly be called a dleefigle phone.

**My goal is to be able to walk as long as I might choose, indefinitely, without being stopped by any acute occurrence such as new onset of pain, blistering, etc.

***I avoided the more precise mathematical term “mean” level of pain because in the context of pain, “mean” can have multiple and misleading meanings…ha ha.

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Minor meandering, major depression, and a locrian outlook

It’s Tuesday morning now, and if the Beatles are to be believed, we will never see Wednesday morning, because “Tuesday afternoon is never ending.”  We’ll know by tomorrow if they are correct, but experience suggests they are not.

I walked to the train station this morning, and I must say, though the temperature and humidity are no better than before, at least now there is some wind.  It makes a world of difference, at least in the amount of sweat one accumulates.  I’m wearing one of those tee shirts that’s made of material that supposedly “wicks away” perspiration‒presumably while still allowing it to achieve its primary function of carrying away heat‒but when there’s no wind, the things just get saturated.

As I’ve said before (I have been told it; I did not arrive at the conclusion on my own), my sweat apparently doesn’t have much of an odor, at least in the short term.  I also spritzed myself with a bit of “scent bomb” before starting this post and prior to getting on the train.  It’s a mango scented one that everyone I’ve known to have smelled it finds pleasant.  Hopefully that all helps me avoid being too disgusting.  There’s not too much I can do about my face; I guess I could just wear a mask.  It works for Batman and Doctor Doom and Erik, the Phantom of the Opera.  We’ll have to see.

I decided to stop taking melatonin, so I didn’t take any last night.  I’ve been using it for roughly a month, but it doesn’t seem to be helping my sleep, and it’s certainly not improving my mood or my mental acuity, so f*ck it.  If I never have another full night’s restful sleep for the rest of my life, well…what else is new?  I’ll just stick with my multivitamin and stuff like that (and OTC pain medicine) and try just to get more into walking now that I’ve got the shoe situation more or less sorted.

I remain very sad about the fact that the hiking boots seem to cause me more pain when I wear them for long.  Still, heartbreak is the normal, usual state of my life, on scales from the trivial to the profound, so I guess I should just shrug it off as best I can.  The boot debacle is very, very far from my worst disappointment.  It is recent, though, so it still stings a bit; I guess I haven’t cauterized my metaphorical nerve endings well enough.

I listened to a few decent podcasts while walking, and that was beneficial, because they are the sorts of podcasts that deal with ideas in non-simplistic ways, and that approach such ideas as matters for discussion and thought, not for debate and spectacle.  A debate is just a kind of sporting match‒it can be entertaining, and the displays of skill can be exciting.  But the way to come ever closer to ever greater amounts of truth about reality is not via rhetoric and engaging personality (which are mere superficialities that titillate social monkeys such as humans) but by using actual ideas, exchanging information, testing it, and trying to minimize noise and entropy and error.

Truth is not an “Us versus Them”, zero sum game of scoring points and humiliating an opponent.  That which is actually true, in reality, is true for everyone, whether they perceive it or not, whether they know it or not, and whether they believe it or not.

Anyway, that’s a bit of minor meandering.  Today again appears to be one of those days in which I spin from idea to tangent idea here in my blog, for no specific discernable reasons.  At least I don’t discern them.  Maybe some astute and skilled reader can do better.

Oh, if I haven’t already said, I’ve been writing this on my smartphone.  Actually, even if I have already said, I’ve nevertheless been writing this on my smartphone.  That’s one of those truths about reality I mentioned, though it’s not a very big one.

Yesterday at the end of the work day, I just didn’t want to carry the extra weight of the laptop with me.  I was in a horrible, horrible, angrily depressed mood, and was barely able to contain myself, though I think very few people in the office‒perhaps none‒noticed it.  I tend to turn my fury inward, since I know I have the right to harm myself, whereas it’s a much dicier moral proposition to hurt someone else.  So, I quietly burned myself twice yesterday (not severely), and I have a small new blister on my left forearm and a linear welt from a heated paperclip on my right anterior upper arm.

I told you, I’m not doing well.  I don’t just hate my life and myself; I don’t think I can stand it much longer, and I don’t mean that metaphorically, and I don’t think I’m exaggerating.

It’s a month from today until Bilbo’s and Frodo’s birthday, which is also a day before the start of autumn, at the autumnal equinox.  It’s a very good day, I think, for someone to begin an epic journey.  The biggest question, for me, is whether I can wait that long.  I’m not sure that I can.

I guess, yet again, we’ll have to wait and see.  Obviously I’ve been able to endure long enough to write this morning’s blog post, and on my phone, what’s more.  I make no promises about tomorrow.  I don’t even know how good the odds are, honestly.  I’m not doing well, I’m not getting better, and I hate my life a little bit more with every passing day.  I’m also growing less and less fond of the world and of all the people and creatures in it with each passing hour, it seems.

Oh, well.  The world will little note, nor long remember…well, honestly, anything at all.  Everything is effaced by time and entropy, and nothing really has any point outside and beyond itself.  That latter conclusion actually presents a kind of brilliant freedom, really; meaning is not imposed, it is created.  But that can be a heavy burden, and our culture is poorly organized to bring such facts to the clear attention of those within it.

Still, culture has no more extrinsic meaning than does an individual life, nor is it any more planned and finely tuned.  As with all else, it just happens‒or happened I guess, and now merely continues.

Jeez Louise, it’s all both nauseating and boring, and that’s a truly repellent combination.  I have a harder and harder time every day just metaphorically holding my nose and continuing to walk through the sewer of the world.

Ah, well, I’m not getting anywhere with this.  Let’s stop for now.  Please try to have a good day.

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The sobering fact of a drunkard’s walk of a blog post

It’s Saturday morning now, for future reference, for people who aren’t reading this entry when it is first posted, but at some later date.  I’m sitting at the train station as I write this.  I may finish it before the train arrives; on Saturdays, the trains come only once an hour, much less frequently than during the week, so there’s more idle time to wait at the station, and I write pretty quickly.

I’ve been writing all my posts on my smartphone lately, but I think I’m going to try to remember to bring the laptop back with me from work today.  It’s getting to be too much of a pain to write on the phone, and I write so much more smoothly on the computer.

I just realized that I still have my walking clothes from yesterday in my backpack.  When I got back to the house, I was pretty beat, and I didn’t even think to unpack them.  It’s okay, I spray them and dry them in front of a little fan during the day, so they don’t really smell, but it’s very annoying.  At least they don’t weigh much.  I vaguely thought about unpacking them during the middle of the night, during one of my oodles of nocturnal awakenings, but the thought obviously didn’t stay in my head.

I really didn’t feel well yesterday.  The whole day, I had full body aches and soreness, as if I were fighting a systemic infection of some kind, and I even developed a very slight fever‒only about half a degree Fahrenheit over my usual temperature (yes, I did check my temperature, since I felt as if I were getting sick).  Of course, I was going to come to work today even if I were truly ill, unless it was bad enough for me to be hospitalized.  If I missed one weekend, I would have to make it up by working two Saturdays in a row, and I cannot tolerate that possibility.

I can barely tolerate going to work at all, but then again, I can barely tolerate being at the house, either.  I can barely get through anything at all, and only the force of habit‒and the terrible stress and tension that goes with deviating from habits and expectation‒keeps me functioning.

I guess that’s what the gods did to Sisyphus to keep him rolling that stupid boulder; every time he started to falter and think it was futile, which it was, he probably felt terrible stress and anxiety, and the only way to assuage it even slightly was to keep pushing the stupid thing.  So, it’s either steadily elevating anxiety or perpetual futile behavior‒or death or some other kind of breakdown, I guess, though those were not an option for Sisyphus.

I may have mentioned it before, but I sometimes think that Prometheus had it better than Sisyphus.  He felt more pain (probably) but at least he didn’t have to be an active participant in his own punishment.

Speaking of anxiety and repetitive tasks, I occasionally wonder how often on any given day I feel the need to check and make sure that I still have my phone, my keys, my wallet and everything in my pockets.  Dozens at least.  Perhaps, occasionally, hundreds.  I also can’t stand still without either flipping a pen in the air (four turns per flip) and catching it or rolling dollar coins on the backs of my fingers.

Oh, by the way, I just got on the train.  I didn’t have quite enough time to write the whole post before it arrived, though maybe I would have been able to do so with my laptop.  I definitely need to try to remember to bring it with me today.

It’s all rather pointless, of course, but then again, so is everything.  Even our sense of law and order is weird, when you get right down to it.  I mean, why should I feel obligated to follow local, state, federal, and Constitutional law, let alone international law?  I do feel like I should follow them (see above about anxiety-driven behavior), but from an ethical point of view it’s very hard to see that I should have any obligation to follow those codes and rules that predated me, and in which I had no say, which were enacted by people who may as well be another species from me.

Some of the people who made the laws probably meant well and were doing the best they could to try to keep their society functioning, while others were probably merely self-serving, responding to lobbyists (or the equivalent) and fads and whims.  They would not have been thinking deeply about moral and ethical concerns for their present and future, but rather were engaged in the usual primate dominance maneuverings of the naked house ape (genus Homo species, possibly misnamed, sapiens), which are so similar to those of the baboon and the chimpanzee.

The notion of a social contract has always been a bit of a farce, from my point of view.  To have an actual contract, both (or all) parties have to have agreed to it, and for it to be morally, if not merely legally, binding then they have to have entered into it without duress.  One cannot, ethically, be born into a contract, any more than anyone can sensibly be born carrying the guilt of the deeds of their ancestors or antecedents‒thus the absurdity of the notion of original sin.  The famous teenage statement, “I didn’t ask to be born” is an entirely legitimate point.

I don’t know how I got into this tangent path.  I guess it’s a sort of free-association thing, or perhaps a proverbial drunkard’s walk.  I wish it were more therapeutic for me, but hopefully it’s at least sometimes interesting for you readers.

Speaking of that, I noticed that WordPress is apparently offering the option of creating a paid newsletter‒I guess it’s meant to be a bit analogous to what some people are doing on Substack and the like‒as a way for people to make some money with their blogging.  Presumably, WordPress would take a small cut, which seems only fair.  I think it’s all a nice idea, and paid services are often more pleasant than those that use advertising, at least if the advertising is intrusive.  I don’t mind banner ads and sidebar ads, but ones that pop up and block the screen make me never want to go back to a site again.

Still, there are only so many subscriptions a single person can have‒although, when paper magazines were still the thing, I sometimes felt that my parents wanted to test the upper limits of that claim.  They loved reading those magazines, and my father would accumulate vast piles of them near the foot of his chair.  I think they would have been avid consumers of online media‒actually, my father probably was.  He was a computer guy by profession, and was always ahead of me on that front.

It’s rather funny to imagine anyone paying to read my blog.  It’s a lovely fantasy‒hey, maybe more people would read it if they had to pay to read it‒but it seems unlikely.  Very few people pay even to read my books or stories, though on Kindle they are cheaper than a cup of Starbucks “coffee”, and they are more convenient.

Well, anyway, we’re getting close to my stop, and this has really been a wandering, meandering post.  I don’t even know what I’ve been writing about.  But, hey, if you want to support me monetarily, since I don’t have a Patreon or a Ko-Fi account or a WordPress paid newsletter thing, just buy one of my books.  Or buy one of my short stories, even‒they’re just 99 cents.

Enough self-serving tripe.  I’m no good at that kind of thing.  Have a good weekend if you can, everyone.  I will try (and almost certainly fail) to do so as well.

arthur drunk

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If thou hast no name to be blogged by, let us call thee devil.

Hello and good morning. It’s Thursday, the day of the week on which I wrote blog posts even when I was spending my other days writing fiction.  I tended to start those posts with some variation of “Hello and good morning”, and the title was always a slightly altered quote from Shakespeare.  I’ve kept up that Thursday template even now that I blog daily, because I like to stick to a pattern or routine once I’ve established it.

The above information is provided for the sake* of any new readers of this blog.  Apologies to any long-time readers for the redundancy.

I walked to the train station this morning, after having rested a bit yesterday (I only walked a total of about 3 miles overall), since I’d walked almost 16 miles over the previous 2 days.  Thus far, including this morning’s walk, I’ve done about 24 miles this week.  That’s not too bad.

It would be faster if I could jog the distance; maybe I’ll eventually be able to do that.  I used to really like jogging/running, and even when I was in residency I used to run on the treadmill in the mornings.  I had to stop eventually, as I went into practice and had a growing family; time just wasn’t really available.  And since my back problem began, running has tended to exacerbate it.  Maybe, if I were to get back into shape and lose a bit of weight, that wouldn’t be an issue.

(And maybe if we all wish hard enough, there will be world peace and happiness, and unicorns will appear that poop ice cream that provides all nutrients humans need without any health detriments, and they’ll also pee sweet tea with the disinhibiting effects of alcohol but none of the negative toxicity.)

I’m sorry that my posts have been such downers lately (if they don’t come across that way to you readers, then I’m really not expressing myself well).  I’ve just been feeling steadily and persistently more despondent as time has proceeded.  My optimism, such as it ever was, has declined and declined, and my hope even of the possibility of any rescue or revitalization is diminishing.  I don’t see how my life is ever going to turn around and improve.

I’m just tired, you know?  I’m really quite worn down and nearly out.  Admittedly, that doesn’t necessarily keep me from walking to the train despite the heat, and sometimes walking back from the train in the heat, but some of that fact is because I’m able to think of it as a kind of self-harm.

Of course, it’s self-harm that could backfire and end up doing me good, but that’s the chance a person takes when doing such things.  The best laid plans of mice and men gang aft agley.  Which just goes to show that it’s really not a great idea to try to get mice and men together to make plans for things.  Their priorities just don’t mesh.

As for my own plans, I guess I don’t really have any.

I’m getting close to my train stop, and I haven’t written much yet today, and I certainly haven’t written anything of consequence.  I haven’t even reached 600 words yet, let alone 800 or 1000.  Should I try to push for more?  Or is this enough?  Is it already too much?

My life has almost certainly already been “too much”, by any reasonable, objective measure.  I really should do something about that.  But, of course, I don’t really want to make too big a mess for other people to clean up‒though why I should be so considerate is sometimes beyond me.

Also, I have the faintest, residual hope that somewhere out there, someone has some answers, some purpose or meaning that I can learn, or that I can discover.  But it is a faint hope.  I’ve sampled most of the popular, ready-made suggestions and ideas, from religion to philosophy to psychology and psychiatry, and so far have been thoroughly disappointed.  But, as I’ve said before, I don’t want to want to die.  But I also don’t want facile, delusional, banal pseudo-motivation.

Oh, well.  The universe wasn’t made for me‒nor was it made for you, or for any or all of us put together, as far as anyone can tell‒so I don’t expect it necessarily to fit my preferences.  Honestly, I don’t know what I would ask of a universe if I were given the opportunity to special-order one.  Any change I might request would likely have unexpected consequences, much in the way that any pharmaceutical intervention in the human body brings side-effects that can be quite unpredictable.

Now, take that to a cosmic scale.  Everything in the universe has to fit with everything else without producing any actual contradictions.  No part can contradict the whole, nor can it contradict other, actual parts.  You can speak a contradiction‒the rules of grammar allow it‒but you cannot instantiate one.  It’s analogous to the way you can write a computer program with a syntax error or an endless loop or an old “return without gosub” error, but the program will not run.

I guess that’s enough for today.  I don’t know what I’ll title this, or what picture I’ll add to it, but of course, if you’re reading this, you know, which is kind of cool in its way, showing as it does a form of temporal relativity and multidimensionality that has nothing to do with Einstein.  I hope you all are feeling reasonably well and trying not to get too overheated (in any sense).  With that in mind, I’ll close with a rather “chilling” but pithy statement I heard from a climate scientist in a WIRED YouTube video:  “On average, this is the hottest summer you’ve ever experienced.  It’s also the coolest summer for the rest of your life.”***

TTFN

for your own sake

*That’s “sake” with a long A and a silent E, not the transliteration of the Japanese word  酒, which means, in Japan, more or less any alcoholic beverage, but which in the West is how we think of Nihon-shu (日本酒), the Japanese so-called rice “wine”…which would actually be more a kind of a beer, since it’s made of grain, whereas wines are made from fruit (interesting side note:  originally the fermentation was begun after the rice was chewed and then spit into a container, because salivary amylase starts breaking the starches into sugar**).  “Sake” is one of the few Japanese things that doesn’t really do much for me.  I’ve yet to try Japanese whiskey, but since it’s based on Scotch whiskey, and produced with typical Japanese attention to detail, it’s probably pretty darn good.

**You can test this for yourself.  If you take an unsweetened white cracker (no pun intended) or, say, a bit of potato in your mouth and just kind of keep it there, perhaps chewing it, it will eventually start to become noticeably sweet…unless you’re so overexposed to sugary foods that your taste buds are too insensitive to notice.  Don’t do this experiment around other people, though‒you’re likely to get some odd looks.

***Of course, he is basing his predictions on current technology.  And though, as he pointed out during the video, our current carbon capture technology is woefully inadequate to turn things around on any reasonable scale, one must not underestimate the power of human ingenuity when Mother Necessity is standing over the world with a ruler, ready to rap everyone on the knuckles until they bleed.  The next Manhattan Project may well be geared toward developing newer, much more potent, means of carbon capture that could be effective on a scale big enough to correct climate change in a sensible time frame.  This won’t happen on its own and it won’t be cheap, but as more and more‒and richer and more powerful‒people start suffering from the effects of climate change, distractions will tend to fall by the wayside.  If they don’t, then I guess the human race will get what it deserves.

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This post was written on Sunday night. That may be the most interesting thing about it.

I’m starting this blog post on Sunday evening, which is obviously not when I usually write my blog posts.  I’m writing it on my phone, because I didn’t bring the mini laptop with me when I left work early on Thursday, and though I could use my full-size laptop, I have no desire to bring it along with me tomorrow.  I tentatively plan to walk to the train in the morning.  I’ve given up on the boots; I think they do exacerbate my back pain.  It’s very sad, because I like them, but there’s not much that can be done about that.

I still have a bit of a low-grade fever this evening, but that’s okay.  I’m not particularly interested in trying to protect my health.  I’ve been here in my room‒with some outings to the store of course‒since Thursday evening.  I’m not very good company, not even for myself, I’m afraid.

It’s rather amusing; I have recently gotten suggestions for videos on YouTube about dealing with trauma from being in relationships with someone with Narcissistic Personality Disorder, and probably also because I liked a video by a self proclaimed NPD person who did a good video about the Doctor, especially the 12th Doctor, as an example of someone with autistic characteristics.

Anyway, I don’t think I’ve been in any relationships with anyone with NPD,  and I certainly don’t have anything akin to NPD myself.  Quite the contrary.  When I was younger, I used to sort of pretend to be an egotist and to have a huge self-image and I (jokingly) pretended to think I was great and wonderful.  I’m pretty sure no one who knew me really took me seriously.  I’ve certainly never acted like a real narcissist or psychopath or anything, but there have been times when I envied them their self-love.  I’ve even tried‒especially when I was in prison‒to do auto-suggestion with a mantra saying, “I love my life and I love myself.”

After a while, though, I couldn’t even think the words in my head, not while trying to mean them, not while trying to believe them.  It feels like telling a foul and terrible lie.  I am often amused by people and literature and the like that speak of the (supposedly) ubiquitous sin of self-love.

I don’t think I have ever loved myself, not in my entire life.  Not in my oldest memories do I have any sense of feeling that I liked or loved myself.  It almost feels like a category error.  I never thought of myself as the kind of entity or being or concept such as that to which love might pertain.  I don’t think of myself as some identity, really.  Who am I?  I’m just the specific being that is asking that question, that’s all, whatever that is.

I’m a weird, complex four-dimensional braid in spacetime, comprised of the swirling patterns of all the particles that come together and form this long time-space tornado, bits coming into it and going out of it, everywhere, all the time, the pattern changing as one moves from past toward future, but only gradually.  And the overall pattern is continuous, and presumably will last for a bit longer before it can no longer be self-sustaining, and then it will fray and scatter and dissolve, the former bits going to be temporary parts of various other spacetime braids.

L’dor v’dor.  Amayn.

I certainly feel continuous with the kid crying in bed with his leg aches when he was little, and who always kind of was watching everything from outside.  Don’t get me wrong, I’ve had a good upbringing and a loving family.  I had good friends in school, and we did fun and interesting things together.  And I loved learning things, and I still do love that.  But I’ve always been weird, I know that.

I’ve felt…well, I wouldn’t say I felt different because it wasn’t really about any comparison.  Again, it feels almost like a category error.  I recently coined a term unsane as a contrast to the term “insane”, to mean something, someone, to whom the very concept of sanity doesn’t really apply.  I’ve often sort of thrown that (in my head) as an epithet at the deeds and behaviors of so many people and things around out there in the world.  But maybe it really applies to me.

I feel like maybe I’ve always been at right angles to every dimension of all the people around me.  But I don’t think I’ve ever loved myself, not even for a moment, though there are plenty of other people and things I love.

I think the person I’m most like, in raw aspects, is my Dad.  I had the advantage of being the youngest of three children, and so had support and people I could watch to see how things were done (and sometimes to see what not to do, what sorts of things didn’t tend to work).  My Dad was the eldest child in his family, so I guess he had to pick up a lot of things on his own.  But to his credit (and to hers) my Mom was with my Dad from when they were married until the day he died.

But he was often the one who in many ways made sense to me, even when I was really mad at him.  He was the only one who ever wanted to spend as much time at an exhibit in a museum or a zoo as I do.  Everyone else always moves along way too fast.  But somehow it’s not as much fun to see such things alone.  

I don’t know that for certain, actually.  I don’t think I’ve ever tried to go to a museum or library by myself.  The closest I’ve come is going to a bookstore by myself, and even that is just blah.  When I’m by myself, I have no will to get out and do much of anything at all.  I don’t do things for myself.  I have no desire to do things for myself.  I wish I didn’t have to obey the urge to eat or drink or breathe for myself.  It’s all quite boring.  I don’t even like to look at myself in the mirror*.

I don’t know why I’m writing this.  It’s just what this entity does at this point in spacetime, because of the various internal and external interactions among the various forces and “particles” in this particular spacetime weather pattern.  Why does that eddy in that river swirl about in that particular way at that point in a stream?  Because of physics.  There’s nothing deeper as far as I know.

That doesn’t mean I think it’s simple.  It’s ridiculously complex.  No system‒as I think I’ve said before‒can ever be complex enough to understand itself completely, for that would require an infinite expansion of complexity.

Anyway, this is already long enough for a full blog post.  If this is not the last paragraph**, it will mean that I’ve added something tomorrow morning.  I don’t know whether that will happen, but if you’re reading this, you will know the answer, but it’s further down the braid than where I am now.  I’m planning to walk to the train in the morning.  If I get hit by a car (or a bus or a truck, I’m not picky), or if I have a heart attack or a stroke, or if I’m sicker than I feel and collapse because of it‒none of which would break my heart, except perhaps literally‒I’m unlikely to add to it.  Maybe I’ll put this up on WordPress and set it to auto-post in the morning.  That way it will go up whether I’m alive or dead or something in between, and some mystery will remain.  I guess you all will see.

[Addendum:  I made it to the train station, and I did walk.  Better luck next time.]

*Though, curiously, I find listening to my own songs and covers relaxing.  Damned if I know why.

**Not counting footnotes.

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What could compare 2 A future of cyber super-stupidity?

Well, I’m back on my smartphone to write this blog post, but I’m not going to do the whole indenting thing this time.  It was a cute little indulgence, but it doesn’t really add anything, and it’s a minor pain, and I’m just not going to do it.  So, there.

I didn’t bring the laptop with me yesterday, because I was still in a lot of pain by the end of the day, and didn’t want the extra burden.  Of course, I’m still in a lot of pain now, as I write this, and I’m sweating even as I just stand still outside.  I don’t think I’ll be using the laptop again any time soon.  But I guess I might change my mind again, depending on how I feel and how things go.

I’m certainly changing up my shoes again, trying to find a pair (and a type) that gives me the least trouble.  I don’t know how much, if any, difference it will make, but I have to keep trying things, just in case something works; I’m too stubborn to do otherwise.  I also widened my pull-up stance this morning to see if that helps, and maybe it will, and maybe it won’t throw my left shoulder into a tail-spin like it did the last time I tried it.

I know, I know, all of this is boring.  I’m a boring person, what can I say?

I did get out the guitar just a little yesterday, because one of the new people at work asked me about it, after recognizing that I was listening to a Radiohead song (Climbing up the Walls).  I’ve downloaded the chords for Nothing Compares 2 U again.  I frivolously imagine that I might do a video of me playing and singing it in honor most specifically of Sinead O’Connor, who just died, making her the third and final person I associate with that song to die (the other two, of course, being Prince, who wrote it, and Chris Cornell, who did my favorite version of it).  Hey, maybe if I do a good version, and people enjoy it, I’ll get caught up in that group, so to speak.

Fingers crossed!

I have tomorrow off, so I won’t be doing a blog post.  I’ll have a full weekend by myself to do fuck-all on my own.  I hope at least to be able to go for a walk if my back cooperates.  Other than that, I really have nothing.  I guess I might watch a movie or something.  I’m not going to go to the theater to see Oppenheimer, though it looks like a good movie.  After my last visit to the theater by myself, I just don’t see it being much fun.

Oh, but I do plan on calling my sister this weekend!  That will be good, so there’s something positive, at least.  Sorry, I didn’t mean to disparage her or be dismissive.  Talking on the phone to her is pretty much the only thing to which I look forward.  I still always get anxiety before using the phone, but that’s not her fault; that’s my defect.

Here’s something darkly amusing:  the Google Docs autocorrect is now urging me to add a “to” after the word “forward” at the end of the penultimate sentence of the preceding paragraph.  This is the state to which we’ve fallen; the pseudo-helpful editing software system suggests that I change a perfectly grammatical sentence by adding a preposition (sans object) to the end of that sentence!  Why?  I suspect because that’s what almost everyone else does out there in the trash heap of humanity*, and that’s the source of the system’s recommendations.

This is the crap from which such LLMs as Chat GPT and the like are compiling their informal and inscrutable linguistic rules and predictive language models, and to which they are then going to be adding their shitty, shitty, derivative writings and recursively worsening the deterioration of human reading and writing (and thinking) ability.  Maybe we should burn them all down, along with pretty much everything else.

Don’t get me wrong.  I’m no Luddite by any means.  I’m quite a fan of useful technology, including computers in general, and of course, I love science.  But technology that decreases people’s need to discipline and improve themselves in writing, in reading, in thinking, and in seeking out reliable information makes me nervous, to say the least.

People tend to be mentally lazy much of the time‒thus the current and recent polarized and moronic political climates. The way many people use technology that they don’t even remotely understand is not improving that tendency.  So, what if our future dystopia is not, for instance, the rise of a super intelligent AI that either reduces humans to its dependent pets or eliminates them entirely but an actual artificial stupidity that people think is smart, and which is more efficient and potent at being non-intelligent than humans are, as well as at giving humans what they “want” in the short term?

What if those wants become self-reinforcing and ever more intense, as any supra-normal stimulus can cause to happen?  What if this leads everyone to a mutually dependent culture of stupid eloi and stupid morlocks with neither truly victimizing the other, but both perpetuating a clueless, increasingly incompetent civilization of human and artificial minds that cycles about in increasing ignorance of the greater universe, and is eventually obliterated by some entirely avoidable catastrophe?

In many ways, this scenario seems worse than takeover by truly super-intelligent AGI, because at least with the latter there would be super-intelligence, and it would have the potential to endure and learn and grow and spread and perhaps even become cosmically significant.

(This is all somewhat reminiscent of ideas discussed in the excellent video Dystopias Don’t Go to Heaven from the YouTube channel Highly Entropic Mind.  I encourage you to check out his stuff.)

I think it’s better to use complementary technology to the degree possible, as David Krakauer refers to such things as abacuses and bicycles and actual maps that enhance our abilities.  I think computers in general, and search engines, per se, are complementary in that, to an active mind, they allow much faster access to and use of legitimate information.  But systems that write (and sometimes just make up) stuff for people to consume without ever going anywhere or knowing anything about the quality of the information source, and which can even potentially make fake video and audio, could easily just lead everyone into a virtual world of spiraling, increasing idiocy.

Maybe this is the way the world ends, this is the way the world ends, this is the way the world ends‒not with a bang but with a singularity of self-reinforcing non-intelligence.  It would be ironic at least, and I do appreciate irony.

Anyway, that’s enough for today, and for this week.  I guess I’ll write to you Monday if I’m still doing what I do.  Have a good weekend, please.

*I’ve even read formally published books, released by respected publishing houses, that contain sentences that end in duplicated prepositions, e.g.: “…to which I was looking forward to.” And people wonder why I often just want to die.