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I want this all to end

It’s Tuesday now, and I’m writing this blog post on my laptop computer (the little one, not the regular sized one).  The laptop is slightly more awkward for typing on when there are bumps and shakes in a vehicle, but the vastly greater speed with which I’m able to type on it more than makes up for that—though it does not assuage the frustration.

I’m already exhausted (mentally) after only one day of work.  I don’t think it’s the work per se that’s so exhausting, it’s the environment, the people, the noise, the frustrations, the fact that other people arrive late or not at all, so many little frustrations.  There’s so little predictability in their behavior, and what there is is so often illogical.

I have, in general, identified more with Melkor than with Sauron in Tolkien’s universe—largely because he’s the Big Boss—but sometimes I can understand Sauron’s desire for order, and for forcing other creatures to be more orderly.  Of course, the way he goes about that is pretty stupid, but whataya gonna do?  As Gandalf said, he is a “wise fool” (a great expression).

Anyway, I like Lord Foul better than either of those two, and I like Doctor Doom most of all.  Doctor Doom is the sort of character about whom Christopher Nolan could make a movie trilogy, presenting him in a more down-to-earth fashion in a nearly realistic story, as he did with Batman, because Doom is not the product of radioactive spider bites, nor is he the last survivor of a star faring people with powers because of his alien nature, nor is he otherwise enhanced.  He is a human, but with a brilliant, inventive intellect and an obsessive drive.

Why am I writing about this stuff right now?  I have now idea.  This is all stream of consciousness, and that stream flows faster when I’m typing.  I’ve written all this so far in less than ten minutes (first draft), and I’m already almost halfway to my target word count.  I have to set a target, not so that I don’t go below it, but so that I don’t go too far over it.  I could probably gabble on here interminably.

But I want it to end.  I’m so very, very tired, and I have very little joy in my life.  I mean, I’m pleased that The Chasm and the Collision is still an enjoyable read even now.  But of course, I’m probably one of two people in the world who has actually read it.  My mother died just days after it was published—I tried to read some of it to her in her hospice bed, from her own miniature Kindle, but it was clear she wasn’t even following.  That’s too bad.  I think she really would have liked it.  I think she had been looking forward to reading it.

It’s such a me fact that my most wholesome, family-friendly story involves a threat of destruction to two universes and a villain who is unknowingly in the thrall of a much greater, larger scale “villain” or destructive force that threatens all universes, potentially.  That’s my meta-level villain; its influence is felt in many of my other stories, though I don’t always make that explicit.  I have so many ideas for my large-scale omniverse (formerly thought of as a “metaverse” before Schmuckerberg stole my term), so much backstory and intersections and connections and so on, but none of that is ever going to happen or be revealed or anything.  It’s sad, but, as a character in my darkest ever story says, “Life’s like that, I suppose.”

I wish I could sleep for a really long time, just to rest and recreate myself, but that’s not an available option.  I don’t simply long for “suspended animation” because that’s just like pausing a game; you wake up in the same state you were in when you laid down.  The only point to that would be living to see a future you wouldn’t otherwise have seen.  It’s not any kind of a cocoon, a chrysalis, an Adam Warlock kind of thing, where you change and grow and heal.

I don’t know why I’m writing about comic books and other wildly fictional characters.  Perhaps it’s because the real world is not only so stressful but is also so stupid.  This emergent system that is the whole human race interacting with itself is just an astonishing example of idiocy on performance enhancers.  I really am sick of them.

If I were Doom, I would decide to commit myself to saving them, correcting them, trying to make the world as good as I know it could be.  But of course, that leads Doom to be thought of as a villain (he has other psychopathology that contributes to that, of course).

Okay, well, I’m approaching my target, and obviously I have nothing to say, but that doesn’t stop me.  I’m really tired and depressed and discouraged.  I cannot go on like this for long.  Right now, I’m trying to hold on until at least next Friday, when I’m finally getting an autism assessment, but I don’t even know if that’s enough to cling to even for so short a time.

We shall see.

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“This is the moooorning report…”

Well, it’s Monday, and you’ve all had a brief respite since Saturday, but now here I am with a new blog post to torment you.  I’m cruel that way.

Yesterday was Super Bowl Sunday here in the US.  I watched most of the 1st half of the game, but it got boring because it was pretty obvious that Philadelphia’s defense was all but impregnable.  I was certainly impressed, and I admired their skills, but a blowout is never as exciting as a close game.

I tried to get in a little walking this morning, and I got in roughly 2.5 miles before heading in to work.  I don’t know whether it will do me any good, but I’m trying to begin a new regimen*.

I often like to paraphrase‒in my own head‒the last words of Doc Ock from Spider-Man II:  “I will not die a monster”.  Well, I try to say to myself, “I will not die a fatty.”  That may sound bad according to modern, politically correct social mores, but I certainly intend no body shaming for anyone else.  The only reason I might suggest weight control to another person (if asked) would be with respect to health, not aesthetics.

For myself, however, I have always been a sadistic, judgmental asshole of a martinet, psychologically and often physically self-abusive, and I hate how I look now.  I am objective enough about myself to admit that, at times in the past, I was reasonably good-looking**.  But that is not the case anymore, not for quite a while now.  I’ve been through and seen some serious shit since the last time I looked my “local” best, so I have some legitimate excuses, but that doesn’t satisfy me.

Fortunately, I’ve been changing my dietary patterns, and that has apparently been altering my appetite, and the decrease in certain kinds of foods has increased my physical energy at least a bit.  So I hope to be able to ratchet that up into regular walking, using time with which I don’t have anything better to do so that at least I can leave behind a decent looking corpse.

We’ll see what happens, but it can’t be too bad a thing to want to try to get more exercise.

I’m also rereading The Chasm and the Collision, just to see if I can get back into the mood to write.  I doubt it, but at least I’m still finding it enjoyable.  You should all buy it and read it.  You can get it for someone for Valentine’s Day if you want.  It’s got a little bit of innocent romance in it (the main characters are middle-schoolers, so there’s nothing very steamy).

If you want a sample, I recorded myself reading the first nine chapters, and that’s up on my YouTube channel, here.

Also, I decided to use the time while I was walking to begin listening to and using the Audible version of the Pimsleur beginning Russian course.  I’ve always thought Russian sounds nice, as a language‒at least when women speak it.  I have no particular interest in interacting with Russian-speaking men (though I have nothing against them) so I leave them out of my calculations.

I probably would have seemed peculiar, walking along the streets of south Florida at 4:30 in the morning, periodically trying to match Russian phrases and words out loud, but no one was really around.  I’m a pretty good mimic, so I hope to get decent results.  It’s a productive use of the time, at least.

That’s about it for today, I think.  I hope you all are at least not too unenthusiastic about the new work week.  Do your best.  I don’t know how to say that in Russian yet, so here it is in Japanese:  Ganbatte! [頑張って]

*And it’s “regimen” for something like a disciplined and planned program of activity, not “regime”, which refers to the reign of some sovereign, either literally or metaphorically.

**I had a girl friend (not girlfriend, at least not at the time) in high school who once told me I was just as cute as [redacted], who was one of my three best friends.  This was a generous exaggeration, as far as I can see.  Even when my (then) fiancee met [redacted], she told me that he was “every girl’s dream”.  Based on my experience as his best friend, I think she was probably right, but that’s something not even she ever said of me.  That’s okay, [redacted] is a good dude.

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No one else here will save you

It’s Saturday, and I’m writing another blog post.  You can’t say I didn’t warn you.

Well, actually, you can say that‒nothing is stopping you from enunciating those words‒but if you do, you’ll either be mistaken or lying.  And it would be hard to excuse you making that mistake, since I’m right here, reminding you that I did warn you, and I’m even putting a link in* to the post in which I warned you.

As for topics about which to write, well, I don’t know.  The world is such a boring place right now.  There’s nothing interesting or troubling or unusual happening at all.

I was being tongue-in-cheek there, as I hope was obvious (though social media and the internet more generally have shown us that this can never be taken for granted).  However, it’s also true that the tragicomedy of current politics is not really very interesting, any more than is any other set of primate dominance conflicts.  To the primates themselves, and perhaps to those who study them, it might be interesting, but to everything else in the universe‒including yours truly‒it’s just a bunch of noisy, smelly, stupid animals making a mess while jockeying for positions in a contest that only matters to them (and not even to all of them).

But it is still a potentially violent process, and there tend to be brutal injuries and fatalities, so I’ll repeat my admonition:  it’s fun to repeat the slogan “punch a Nazi” but it’s important to recognize that that is just a slogan, like “catch the wave:  Coke” or “nobody doesn’t like Sara Lee”**.

The actual Nazis‒you know, the real ones from 30s-40s Germany, not just the people you call Nazis the same way some might say “your mama”‒were stopped by people with real weapons, and it required real violence and personal danger.  Passive or verbal (or even fist-based) resistance works against relatively civilized opponents, like the colonial British in India, but would not work against actual Nazis, actual fascists, or against other actual totalitarians like the Soviets or Pol Pot or Chairman Mao and his successors, or the various smaller-scale dictators, authoritarians, totalitarians, and just generally other bully types throughout history.

Such people are not civilized‒not completely‒and they will use force against those who oppose them, or just against those whom they don’t like, or of whom they don’t approve 

You can say “punch a Nazi” when you’re talking about people who just act like Nazis, or who seem to sympathize with such ideologies, but when it comes to actual “Nazis”, the slogan should be more along the lines of the Joker’s three favorite things‒dynamite, and gunpowder, and gasoline.

Or, as Chris Cornell sang in his Casino Royale Bond song:  “Arm yourself, because no one else here will save you.”

The political right in the US has long been the group of people who are most fervent about defending the 2nd Amendment, but the right has betrayed so many of its former ideals already, and totalitarians (and would-be ones) will generally do their best to disarm a populace they want to control or oppress or simply to kill.  So, if you’re at all serious in thinking that those on the current “right” are akin to Nazis‒and this is not necessarily wrong‒I say again, get weapons and train yourself to use them well.  Learn the arts of sabotage and improvised munitions.  Take a bartending class and learn to make a Molotov Cocktail***.  Heck, buy a flamethrower; they’re legal (and ironically, they don’t count as firearms).

Of course, in fighting against oppressors, it is essential to remember Nietzsche’s admonition about fighting monsters and gazing into abysses.  Learn from the examples of the French Revolution, the Bolshevik Revolution, and the Chinese Communist Revolution; “revolutionary” ideologies tend to turn into paranoid self-policers, but not necessarily in a good way.  Remember, many of the initiators of the French Revolution ended up meeting the Guillotine themselves at the hands of their own co-revolutionaries.

Remember Robespierre.  Remember Trotsky.  Don’t become just as evil as the people you oppose.  Also, remember the presumption of innocence (even for people you hate) except in true, immediate danger to life and limb.  Just because you don’t like someone doesn’t mean they are evil (and just because you like them doesn’t mean they are not).  Just because you are fighting against “bad guys” doesn’t mean you are necessarily a “good guy”.  To be a “good guy” requires self-reflection and self-criticism and devotion to the concept of fallibilism.  Remember, Stalin fought against Hitler and helped defeat him, but he was most assuredly not a good guy.

On that cheery set of notes, I wish you a happy weekend.  Wishes may be useless, of course, as ineffectual as “thoughts and prayers”, but they are real, nonetheless.

*Not referring to the website/social media platform LinkedIn.

**I know these slogans are really old, but none that were more recent popped into my head, and I couldn’t be bothered to try to think of one.

***Yes, I know, it’s not a real drink.

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The universe is rounded at the tip–i.e., it’s pointless

Well, here I am again.  It’s Friday, and I’m writing another blog post.  I don’t know what, if anything, I have to say, but there it is.

Oh, but I do want to give some follow-up that I forgot to give yesterday:  Dorian, the gray cat I’ve fed for quite a while, has not come back again since that one night he returned last week as I mentioned.  I haven’t seen any trace of him.  If I were a superstitious person, I might imagine it was a ghost that came back that one evening to say goodbye.  However, he was quite solid; I gave him a pat, and he even ate some food.

Also, it would take quite a bit of evidence and logical argument to make me even seriously consider the possibility that ghosts are real.

Other than that, nothing much is new with me.  Of course, there are things going on in the world, but there always are.  It’s a little bit like saying that there are molecules always moving in a still glass of water.  It’s true, of course, and it is part of why water has the properties that it has, but the behavior of any particular molecule is inconsequential.  The things that are happening in the world are parochially interesting, but H. G. Wells’s Martians wouldn’t give a shit, nor would anyone else in the universe.  And, of course, the universe itself really doesn’t notice.

So much has happened in the world since it began, and the number of details that are available after even a hundred years is tiny.  It’s also very difficult to know what historical events actually affected the shape of subsequent happenings.  Sometimes, people just notice things and people and events that are loud.  But loud does not equal important, though they can overlap.

I’m almost done‒87% according to Kindle‒with the last light novel in that series I mentioned before*.  Once it’s done, I’m not sure what I’m going to read, or what I’m going to do if I can’t find anything to read.  I imagine doing my random flipping and reading a section at a time in my various science books, or just getting on the various preprint servers and skimming through random recent scientific papers, or of course using Brilliant to review and improve my science and math, or getting on Babbel and actually starting to learn some more languages.  But though these things ought to be interesting, they just aren’t.  Everything is boring.  Of course, such boredom is in the eye of the beholder, and is probably more symptomatic of dysfunction in the mind behind that eye than in the things being seen.

So, I don’t know what I’m going to do with myself in the short term.  I mean, if the office is open, I am going to work tomorrow, so I suppose I’ll write a blog post then, though I make no promises.  Maybe I’ll start sharing links to my books on Threads and Blue Sky and all that, like I used to do a long time ago.  I doubt anyone will buy them, but who knows?

I don’t know.  Nothing really means anything to me.  Everything is pointless, but I am especially and particularly pointless.  I guess that’s that for today.  I hope you all have a good day and then a good weekend.  You’ve earned it, after reading my morose musings.

*Actually, after writing the first draft of this post I finished it.

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I don’t have the energy to do a Shakespeare quote title

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, and this is technically the 4th blog post of the week, though yesterday’s post felt a bit disjointed and erratic.  I didn’t edit it much, and frankly, I’m not sure I had anything to say 

I did, though, get the “inspiration”, or perhaps the geas, to throw together that little slide-show-style video to the tune of Another Brick in the Wall Part 3 that I shared yesterday.  I did the whole thing in the morning before I posted, and threw it up on here and on Instagram.  I didn’t share a version of it to YouTube, because I figured it might get blocked.  I know it wouldn’t be monetized, but my channel isn’t monetized, anyway.

I don’t know if anyone really caught the meaning I was conveying.  Basically it’s a montage of pictures from my former life, of the people I love whom I no longer see, some of whom are dead, and basically all of whom are gone from my life.  Early on, the pictures are dominated by, or at least include, people who are dead.  Then there are loads of shots of my kids, some including my ex-wife and even me, then some of my coworkers and so on, switching from one to the next to the beat of the song.  Then, at the end, there’s a massively altered picture of me that looks just a bit like I’m made out of bricks:

The point is that, as the song sings, “I don’t need no arms around me…”  It’s showing all the people whose arms are not around me* and probably never will be again, and so on.  It’s appropriate and it is just, though; I’m not a person who is worth embracing.

Anyway, those last two songs on the first album of The Wall have always meant a lot to me, albeit in a very dark way.  They’re basically about giving up, about recognizing that you’re alone and you’re always going to be alone, and that’s just the way it is.  Also, relationships are perilous, especially if you’re the sort of person people tend to end up leaving.  To quote a different song that I’ve already covered, “Everyone I know goes away in the end.”  How can you not want to build a wall?

Some of us come with some sort of pre-built wall that requires active and sustained effort to lower, and which spontaneously regenerates even as you try to break it down.  It gets terribly exhausting.

Of course, it’s the following song from The Wall that’s most prominent to me, and I am going to start working on a video for that, but it won’t be a one morning thing made in a sort of compulsive fever dream state like this last one was.

Yesterday I was so wound up by the time I posted my “video” I had to close my little office door before work because I couldn’t stop crying for a while.  It wasn’t anything extravagant; I wasn’t sobbing or anything.  I was just sort of quietly crying, but it didn’t want to stop, and I didn’t want the people in the office to see me when they arrived.

I’m beginning the final novel of the light novel series I mentioned before, after which I’ll be pretty much done with every book I can find any interest in reading.  I cannot even sustain my interest in the e-book version I found of Susan Kay’s Phantom, which is one of my favorite books.

None of the hundreds of fiction or nonfiction books in my Kindle library catch my attention; they all seem boring.  And none of the books on Amazon seem interesting at all.  Many of them seem just frankly moronic.  To quote another song from The Wall, “…nothing is very much fun anymore.  And I…can…feel…one of my turns coming on.”

I haven’t played any guitar so far this week.  I certainly haven’t written any fiction.  I haven’t drawn anything apart from a weird doodle of a sort of demonic cartoon caterpillar on the top of one of our deal sheets.

I used to do that sort of thing all the time.  In undergrad and in med school, though I always brought a notebook and tried to take notes, that’s never really been the way I learn things.  So, my college and medical school notebooks are a smorgasbord of doodles‒some comical, some dark, some frankly horrifying, some very rough and some rather artistic.  I don’t know what has happened to any of them.

I feel as though I’m approaching the end of all this.  And so, I intend to make a sort of video to the song Goodbye, Cruel World, the last song on the first album of The Wall, and maybe release it as a message.  It’s not an iff** sort of statement.  For instance, I might not finish or post a video and yet still kill myself.  I came pretty close yesterday.  But no one seems to have noticed.

And, of course, even if I post it, it doesn’t necessarily mean that I will kill myself or have killed myself.  I might fail, even if I try.  And someone might even stop me.

Ha ha, just kidding.  That last scenario is definitely not gonna happen.

Anyway, that’s it for today.  I hope (and trust) that almost all of you are feeling much better than I am.

TTFN

*Actually, technically, if I were to show pictures of everyone whose arms are not around me and will not be, I’d have to show pictures of everyone in the world, which would take too much time.

**That’s mathematics-speak for “if and only if”.

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Detritus

Well, I’m getting ready to go to the office this morning.  It’s payroll day, which means I’ll be more stressed out than even I usually am.  It’s really gotten to be more complex over time, with different people being paid in different ways and rates and with different incentives, and people in our new, other office.  Oh, and now we’re getting yet a new “product” to sell which is going to require more differentiation and so on.  Huzzah!

I don’t know why I keep writing this blog.  I feel like I’m just continually rehashing the same things, saying the same things over and over again, not even really expecting different results.

Incidentally, there’s no actual (reliable) record anywhere of Einstein saying words to the effect of “the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”.  Frankly, it doesn’t even seem like anything he would have said.  It doesn’t make sense, either‒it flies completely in the face of the idea that someone can improve with practice at something, or that in some circumstances retrying something over and over again occasionally brings about different outcomes.

Einstein apparently did say that there are two things that are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and he wasn’t sure about the universe.  Of course, as a Jewish scientist, he left Germany in the 30s (I think) because he saw the products of the breed of human stupidity that arose there at around that time, so you can understand why he might take a dim view of human intelligence.  I wonder what he would think of us now.

Anyway, I’m still taking my “antidepressant” and also trying to adjust things better to control my chronic* pain.  I can feel the immediate effects of the St. John’s Wort, which I always do when I take it.  Dry mouth, slightly less reactive, and feeling a bit stiffer (metaphorically) and more socially withdrawn in the morning for a while after I take it.  It’s not making a difference for my sleep, that’s for sure.  But, again, maybe it will at least give me enough of a boost finally to act on my desire just to stop existing.

It would be nice if it at least gave me more will or drive to exercise, which it has done in the past, though not every time I’ve taken it.  At least it doesn’t tend to give me the asthenia that I would get with SSRIs, and it doesn’t give me the rampant and intolerable tension and anxiety that Wellbutrin and Effexor gave me.  It’s closest in character to the old tricyclics‒amitriptyline and nortriptyline‒but not as groggifiying.  Anyway, hopefully it does something to help me make some changes.

I think of depression as being at least partly a disease of gumption, a disease of the will, where the sense of motivation is impaired.  Or perhaps it’s more of a psychological autoimmune disorder, where the mind turns upon itself.  That’s an oversimplification, and there are certainly more aspects to it than that, but that is at least part of it.

Of course, there may be other factors at play in my brain.  I’ve encountered a place online that does reasonably priced autism assessments (I found it through Threads) and I may avail myself of that.  It is slightly worrying, of course.  It sometimes feels nearly certain that, if assessed, I would be told, “No, you don’t have ASD or anything related to it.  You’re just fucking out there like Vega, you don’t even count as human.”  Which would come as no real surprise, but it would be somewhat disheartening.  How does one treat, or at least accommodate, someone who is an alien?

I don’t know what I will do with any knowledge I gain through that process, if I do it.  Maybe I won’t do anything.  Maybe I’ll just flush it all away with every other bit of information I’ve ever taken in.  I guess that’s what’s going to happen one way or another, anyway, right?

Whatever.  I hope you all have a good day, or have good days, if that should be plural to match the subject.  I suppose I’ll probably write another blog post tomorrow.  I’m sure you can hardly wait.

In the meantime, here’s a little “video” (really more of a slide show) that I threw together this morning, to the tune of Another Brick in the Wall Part 3.

*I originally made a typo there and wrote “chromic” pain, which sounds like something from which a synesthete might suffer‒a chronic discomfort that they experience with all the colors of the rainbow.

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Same as the oldphemism

It’s Tuesday, the 4th of February, in case you didn’t know or if you are reading this some time in the future.  I think it’s pretty unlikely that future generations will care what I’ve written, but who knows?

I am writing this on my smartphone today.  Yesterday I wrote using my small laptop computer, which is surely part of why it was a longer post than usual.  I just type so much more easily on a real keyboard.  Indeed, I can type faster than I can coherently speak in most cases, and almost as fast as I can think.  This is one of the reasons I am fated to reach out through my writing rather than by making videos or “reels”.

Of course, recently, since I started trying to use Instagram (which is relatively entertaining, at least) I’ve reshared there some videos of me playing music.  I don’t know if they really get heard by many people, but certainly more people seem to interact already with the videos than has happened on YouTube since I first put them up.  Almost all of my “views” on YouTube come from me, listening to my own stuff as part of playlists I’ve made.  I put my stuff among selections from various musicians I like, with the vague notion that it may increase their association in “the algorithm” with such famous musical acts.  This is a very vague notion; I don’t really know if the algorithm works that way at all.  In any case, the strategy hasn’t seemed to increase my exposure.

Sometimes I will also listen to my own music to help me get to sleep, which for some reason it seems to do.  Although, to be fair, getting to sleep is not my main problem.  Staying asleep is my problem, and last night was no better than usual.

I don’t have any serious, large-scale topic today, unlike yesterday, and that’s probably just as well.  I’m sure most people didn’t find it particularly fun to read that post, but I think it’s a serious matter to consider.

Today, probably the most momentous thing I have to report is that for roughly the last five days I’ve restarted taking my antidepressant (Saint John’s Wort, in this case).  I don’t really expect it to change anything significant for me, but I’m hoping it will give me a bit more energy.  Who knows, maybe I’ll become part of that cohort of people who start taking antidepressants* and gain just enough energy and proactivity finally to kill themselves.  I wouldn’t mind.

Oh, wait, sorry, I guess I should have said “unalive themselves”, not “kill themselves”.  That’s one of those stupid newphemisms that social media have led many “content creators” to use to avoid their videos being blocked.  I think this was mainly a Tik Tok based thing, though perhaps there has been some tendency for it on other social media.

In any case, it’s idiotic.  Replacing taboo words with new euphemisms just eventually leads to the newphemisms becoming taboo in turn, and newer, temporarily safe terms being chosen which will become taboo also, and then things shuffle back and forth going nowhere fast, like the linguistic undead**.  This all seems to arise because of the unwholesome tendency of humans to think that words can have magical powers.  They need to stop that.  Words have their own “magic” that is far more powerful and real than any imagined invocation of the devil that might lead to him appearing.

Anyway, that’s just about it.  I think, in closing, I’ll try to see if I can share one of those videos here as it appears on Instagram.  Maybe I’ll do more than one.  Anyway, I guess you guys will know if it worked.

*Not for the first time, of course.

**Would that be “ununalive” in Newspeak?

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Sticks and stones…

I don’t really know what to write about that’s personal at the moment, so I thought I’d weigh in on a matter that’s occasionally been popping to my mind.

Those who believe that we are marching toward fascism in the United State—and I’m not saying they are necessarily wrong—need to start availing themselves of their 2nd Amendment Constitutional rights, if they haven’t already done so.

Many have long held that the 2nd Amendment did not secure the right to keep and bear arms as protection against ordinary criminals or terrorists or even mad people like school shooters and the like.  They maintain that it is a measure put in place to protect the citizens against the potential depredations of an oppressive government (such as the one against which the founders had recently revolted).

I’m not Constitutional scholar enough to know for certain what the definitive intention of the writers of the 2nd Amendment was, and given how disparate the interpretations thereof are, I would suspect that no one is.  But we don’t really need to dwell too much on that, since we are the ones interpreting the Constitution now.  Here are the words:  “A well regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.”

The argument can be made that the 2nd Amendment is a straightforward compound sentence with two separate subjects.  The first part basically says that we all know that any free state of any kind is going to have to have some kind of military.  It’s a necessity.  But the second half says that because of the fact stated in the first part, the right of the people—not the militia— to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

The point, I am led to understand, of this interpretation of the 2nd Amendment is that since the government is always going to have a militia—and since over time, governments may become tempted to use those militias against their own citizens—the citizens should be armed, so that they can at least fight back.

In any case, whether you buy that interpretation of the 2nd Amendment or not, it’s a good point to consider now.  If you honestly think that the current government is really striving to enact a form of fascism in the United States, and that it will oppress innocent people and use force against them—and how are laws enforced other than through the threat of literal violence by the police or the military?—then you need to be prepared for active resistance, not just rhetoric.  When name-calling fails (impossible as that might seem), what are you going to do to resist unlawful encroachment by those who seek to use the offices of government to further their own selfish ends?

Thomas Jefferson had his faults, of course, some of which are difficult to understand, but he did almost solely write the founding document of the United States of America*.  He was also, based on some of his writings, a bit of a radical recurrent revolutionary, at least in principle.  He famously wrote that he thought there should be an armed revolution as often as every twenty years if people wanted to remain free.  “What country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance?  Let them take arms…the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.  It is it’s natural manure.”

I don’t know how tongue-in-cheek he might have been when he wrote that, but it doesn’t really matter, because the message is the message, and it stands or falls on its own, regardless of who said it or why.

If you hate oppressive, authoritarian, or totalitarian regimes, it’s hard to blame you.  But while the slogan “punch a Nazi” is funny, and seems vaguely tough and “cool” to people who’ve never been in a serious fight in their lives, the Nazis—the real Nazis, the originals—were not defeated by people punching them.  They were not defeated by protests.  And though words helped, they were not finally defeated with words, certainly not the sort of words we find tossed about on social media.  They were fought, they were captured—and when nothing else could be done, they were killed—by other armed people.

I cannot recommend going out and killing people you don’t like just based on political differences.  That’s catastrophic, cosmic-level idiocy.  But if life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are actually under immediate threat carried out by armed individuals, then such people must be resisted with arms, if one wants to have any chance of success.

Imagine how hard the Warsaw Ghetto would have been even to make happen, let alone for the people there to be gradually massacred, if most or even just some of the original 400,000 Jews who had been put there had been armed and had recognized that their lives were in danger.

Imagine if all the Jews and Gypsies and gay and handicapped people in Germany and Austria and Poland and France and Czechoslovakia and so on had all possessed personal firearms.

There are, last I heard, more guns in private hands than there are citizens in the US.  Whether or not one sees this as a good thing depends very much upon one’s criteria for goodness in this matter, but it is true that it is much harder for the Thought Police to kick in people’s doors to enforce conformity if a good percentage of those people are armed and know how to use their weapons to fight** in defense of their lives and those of their families.

Anyway, I thought this was an important point to make; at least it’s one that nags at me.  It’s very easy, and relatively safe, to argue with people on social media, calling them names from the other side of the country or the other side of the planet.  But when would-be oppressors from any part of the political spectrum come to enforce their ideas violently upon others, clever online memes are unlikely to stop them.

I don’t condone armed attacks against people who aren’t in the muscle end of the family, so to speak, and in any case, such things often backfire.  But if the SS or the KGB or the DHS or any other manner of secret police are coming for you and those you love, though you have committed no actual crime, and if you aren’t sure what they’re going to do if they capture you/them, it seems perfectly reasonable to shoot as many of them in the head as you can.  You can at least make their job both difficult and dangerous.

Words may never hurt me, but sticks and stones can break my bones, even if I don’t choose to use them.  So, if I honestly think such things are coming, I really should pick up my own sticks and stones.  It’s vastly better to use reason and discussion and politics to settle differences, to arrive at compromise, to make things work as well and as honorably as we can for everyone, but when faced with a literal and immediate threat of deadly force, it is perfectly moral to defend oneself with deadly force.

*That’s the Declaration of Independence, in case you were wondering.

**This is crucial.  Guns are not magic talismans, and if you’re going to get one, you should learn how to use it.  You should train and indoctrinate yourself in gun safety, and—equally important—you should practice so that, when necessary, you can use your weapon very unsafely.

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And I looked, and behold a pale cat

Well, I have some relatively good news, which is why I decided to write a post today instead of just leaving it:  Dorian, the light gray cat, has returned.  Well…he was back last night, at least, though this morning he was nowhere to be seen once again, which is itself somewhat unusual.

He was a bit scraggly, with some traces of dried blood around his fur on the side of his head and neck, but it didn’t look like it was his blood.  He actually looked lean and healthy, moving very much like the hard-ass stray cat that he is.

I’m guessing that he got into a pretty big fight at some point‒he seems prone to them‒and then hid away somewhere while he recovered his strength.  Then, that pale grey shadow took a new shape* and grew again.

I think stray cats, like defective and damaged people, don’t like to show any weakness to those around them.  Perhaps it’s more accurate to say that they are unable to show their weakness, even though they may crave acceptance and support.  There are good, sound biological motivations for this in stray cats and other mammals; showing weakness or injury can invite further aggression from other cats and even encourage predators.

Of course, human males (or anthropoid creatures living among humans, such as I) are no exceptions to that tendency.

It’s also been said that, in many ways, people on the autism spectrum are like cats, at least in some ways, and I can see the point, though it is an oversimplification.  Still, it leads me to speculate that, sometime in the relatively deep past, perhaps two separate subspecies of humans (maybe the legendary Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons) existed, one being more naturally ultrasocial, the other more constrained but with other capacities that aided their survival.  We know that Neanderthals, for instance, had bigger brains than so-called modern humans, but the structure appears to have been slightly different.

Perhaps it’s the genes from such a separate subspecies that led to some people having ASD or other versions of “neurodivergence”.  To be clear, I don’t know that there’s any good evidence that this is the case.  I did encounter at least one study that looked for markers known to be associated with the autism spectrum and the DNA residua of Neanderthals present in people of European descent.  There seemed to be some correlation, but I didn’t think it was particularly impressive.  So there’s not a lot of data to support the hypothesis.

It would be nice‒in some ways‒to think of oneself as just a different kind of human, not as something alien.  But I think that’s probably a silly dream for me.  I do not belong here in any serious sense; I am an alien, a mutant, a replicant, a stranger.  And to humans, of course, a stranger is presumptively an enemy unless and until proven otherwise.

Anyway, Dorian was back last night, but gone again this morning.  We’ll see if he returns.  There are other cats who come around.  But, of course, there is no real affection from most of them.  They come to me opportunistically, because I put food out for them.  I am useful to them.  Similarly, I am often useful to humans in the world.  I have many skills and abilities, so I have frequently found that people like to have me around to help them get things done.  But eventually, the negatives of my presence outweigh the positives, and people go away (or send me away).

I don’t blame them.  I want to go away from myself, though I have never had any desire to be anyone else.  I would prefer oblivion.  Or maybe I would just prefer rest.

Speaking thereof, I slept almost four hours last night, and of course, I awakened and couldn’t go back to sleep in the wee hours of the night, and I am now at the office finishing this post.  I don’t look forward to the weekend‒there’s nothing good about it‒but at least I can collapse and try to recuperate.  I don’t know if I’ll write anything next week, or just leave everything be.

I feel perched on the borderland between life and death, and the Undiscovered Country beckons.  It must be really great there, because no one who goes ever comes back.

*To be honest, it’s pretty much exactly the same as the old shape.

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…since brevity is the soul of wit, and tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes, I will be brief: your noble blogger is mad.

Hello and good morning.

It’s Thursday.  That’s why I did the whole “hello and good morning” thing.  I started doing that, not thinking much about it, when I first started my weekly blog as a would-be promotion for my fiction.  Then, when I started doing posts every workday, I still made it a point to use that phrase on Thursdays.  That’s the kind of odd person I am:  I keep traditions and habits that absolutely no one cares about, because really, nothing I do is actually consequential to anyone, including me.

I seriously think I may just stop doing this now.  In fact, yesterday, my tentative plan was to come on today and do a post with the title “I’m not doing this anymore”, and with content consisting of “It’s just a waste of my time and that of anyone who reads it.  Oh, well.  Whatever. Never mind.”  And that was going to be that.

But I figured maybe I would give a slightly more polite sendoff, so here it is.  Who knows, maybe I’ll change my mind.  I can’t readily make or maintain any commitments right now‒except, it seems, for the commitment to use some version of “Hello and good morning” on any Thursday blog post, for what that’s worth.

All sorts of little ideas and thoughts come into my head about what I want to do.  I want to learn more quantum mechanics and relativity.  I want to start to learn Russian, or learn more Japanese, or bone up on my Spanish.  I want to start “audio book” recordings for Son of Man.  I want to make video recordings of me playing and singing various songs, like Ashes to Ashes, The Man Who Sold the World, or One Headlight, or Nothing Compares 2 U, or any of a number of other songs I can play and sing reasonably well.  I want to get a new acoustic guitar.

I want to finish my started and planned works of fiction. I want to draw.  I want to paint.

I want to try to get an “official” diagnosis of ASD (or not).

I want to wipe out the whole human race and all other life on Earth.

(None of these things is likely to happen.)

More than anything else, I want…well, I don’t know how to put it but that I want to be able to rest.  But I can’t seem to do it, not unless I’m deathly ill.  I’ve already been awake today since 1 am‒no slipping in and out of a doze this time‒and that was after only maybe two and a half hours of sleep.  I’m so tired.  But I’m not sleepy.

TTFN

P.S. – The picture above is an original work.