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But darkness and the gloomy blog of death environ you…

Hello and good morning.

If you’re a regular reader, you know what day it must be if I’m using that opening phrase.  It’s Thursday, the third one in December of 2024 AD (or CE if you prefer).  There’s only one more week until Boxing Day, so keep your training up!

You should probably take a rest on the day before Boxing Day‒“Boxing Eve”, if you will, though there are other names for the day, I’m led to understand.  In many places, people take Boxing Eve off from work, so it might be a good time to kick back and relax your body, to let it recover from your training.  Get a decent meal with plenty of protein, but abstain from alcoholic beverages* entirely.  And keep the refined carbs to a minimum.

Also, of course, you should not listen to songs like Baker Street, or Careless Whisper, or Turn the Page.  While it’s slightly controversial, many experts agree that one should avoid sax before a fight.  You might even want to avoid Feels So Good, by Chuck Mangione, for though he plays the flugelhorn, not the saxophone, the sound is similar, and science is not entirely certain which aspect of the sax’s sound interferes with boxing ability.

It may simply be that it leaves a person too relaxed and at ease to be at their fiercest.  So, perhaps one should just avoid soothing music altogether, and stick with environments that keep one hostile and alert.  Remember what Palatine said about anger:  “It gives you focus…makes you stronger.”

Fortunately, many people find the traditional Boxing Eve celebrations with family quite stressful and irritating.  You gotta hold on to that fury.

All right, enough of that silliness.

Next week is also the beginning of Hanukkah, the first night of which begins on Boxing Eve (also known as “Christmas”, which is a curious amalgam of Saturnalia and the Nordic Yule grafted onto the celebration of the birth of the founder of an obscure Jewish sect).  None of this stuff is really of any consequence to me, though; I’m not celebrating anything.  What cause would I have to celebrate, and with whom would I do so?  Nothing and no one.

I’m frankly discouraged that it looks like I’m going to be around to see a new year.  Of course, every day is, in principle, the beginning of a new year, just as every second begins a new hour, and every day is the last day of your life so far, for whatever that’s worth.  I wouldn’t think it would be worth very much, but who knows?  Worth is a very subjective thing.  It can be intersubjective, but unless you’re talking about things like food, water, air, and shelter, most values are related to the valuer and the culture such a valuer shares with other valuers.

Stepping farther back, even the seemingly inherent value in things like food, water, air, and shelter is predicated entirely on the needs of living creatures‒subjects, if you will.  Life itself is an entirely subjective value, at least in that sense.

Please note that I’m not saying that reality is subjective!  One’s personal experience of reality is, to some degree, subjective, but reality itself is what it is, not what individual persons believe it to be…unless those persons happen to believe it to be as it is, whether through luck or discerning thought and perception.

Anyway, this is all pointless.  I tend to try to cloak my inner darkness in humor and whimsy for other people’s sake.  This might fool you into thinking you’re seeing someone who’s not really unwell, not really so down, not really doing all that badly.  Similarly, an active accretion disk might make you think a particular astronomical object is inherently bright, staggeringly so even.  But that radiance is merely the conflagration of all the matter spinning and colliding and accelerating and trying to squeeze into limited, rotating spacetime before passing the event horizon.

With the exception of Hawking radiation‒which is smaller and fainter the larger the black hole‒the event horizon is a surface of absolute darkness, at least from the outside.

You might ask why there could not be something even darker than a lack of light, perhaps some form of antilight.  But, no.  Photons are bosons, and bosons are, in a sense, their own antiparticles, so the opposite of light is just light.  Under normal circumstances, bosons don’t self-annihilate, though they can destructively interfere, in a fairly straightforward, wave dynamics kind of way.

This blog post, and the blog itself, is in a sense my accretion disk.  It may be hot and sometimes bright, in an ordinary incandescent way, but so many things burn and flare, hot and bright and fierce and beautiful, even as they fall to ashes, never then to shine again, reduced to a state of maximum local entropy.

And, at the heart of the black hole‒at least in GR, avoiding quantum mechanical concerns**‒lies the singularity.  It’s appropriate.  The center is a singular entity‒like a singular person‒which does not entail anything but an end to time itself, the complete obliteration of anything and everything and everyone that it encounters.

No wonder people stay away from such individuals.

TTFN

*In some cultures, people tend to drink alcoholic beverages on Boxing Eve.

**Which you can’t really do, to be honest; see my point about reality not being subjective.

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“There is no life in the Void…”

I feel that I ought to write something today, but I don’t really have any idea just what I ought to write.  It seems the only things I have to discuss nowadays are gloomy, depressing, soul-sucking things.  Then again, at least nowadays, gloominess and soul-suckery seem to be the most prominent aspects of who I am.  If I were a character from the Harry Potter books, I would be a dementor.

I know, dementors aren’t really characters, per se.  They’re really just creatures.  We don’t really get the notion of any personalities from them, though they apparently are able to negotiate and make agreements with the Ministry of Magic, or with Voldemort and the Death Eaters*.  We also know that they can reproduce.

Of course, I’ve often compared myself to the Nazgul from The Lord of the Rings, but I think in most cases I’m a bit less malevolent.  Then again, I’m not under the command of any Sauron equivalent, who has malevolent and authoritarian** intentions and is the real proximate cause of the ringwraiths’ bad deeds.

My own stories were much more positive and lighthearted‒such as Mark Red and The Chasm and the Collision‒when I was in prison, oddly enough.  I suspect that’s because, while there, I was able to think that when I got out I would be able to return to some form of life, to be part of my kids’ lives again, maybe to find some new purpose and new friends and so on.  That delusion that didn’t survive long, though; once I learned that my kids didn’t want to go back to seeing me every other week (or even less) and that my son didn’t want to interact with me at all, it became hard to be upbeat.

It sometimes pisses me off when I see people who are less reliable and safe than I am, who care far less about their families and their children, who have various destructive habits that wreak havoc in the lives of their loved ones…and yet who have friends and families, children and loved ones who stick with them, who strive to help them, who actually want their presence, even through catastrophes worse than mine and through harmful deeds that I would never even consider.

I don’t really grok it‒it seems profoundly unjust‒but intellectually I know that it’s only to be expected, and has multivariate causes.  I also know that justice is entirely a human invention, a fiction of you will, like money and the various religions, and that I have no excuse for expecting any reward for the good deeds I’ve done (such as they are) or for the positive character attributes I have tried to embody (however imperfectly).

I don’t expect anything to get better at this point, and my own fiction has trended in that direction ever since I got out of work-release.  Not that it was ever truly lighthearted, mind you‒even CatC presented a universe-destroying threat and put the onus for preventing it on three middle-school students.  But the stories were optimistic in general.

My most recent story, Extra Body, is admittedly rather optimistic and even has a happy ending.  But that was deliberate.  I had to make a conscious effort to write so positively, and you’ll notice I haven’t published the story other than here in this blog.

Oh, well.  Whadaya gonna do?  I’m simply not having a wonderful Christmas time (with apologies to Sir Paul), nor a wonderful Hanukkah time, nor a wonderful week or month or year or decade.  No matter where I go, there I am, and I think you all can at least imagine how unpleasant it is to be around me 24 hours a day, every day, for the rest of my life.  You would want to kill yourself, too, if you had no other means of escape.

*Surely that must be the name of some indie heavy metal or goth or punk band somewhere.  If it’s not, then that’s further proof of the degeneration of the music industry.

**I say authoritarian rather than totalitarian because Sauron does not seem inclined to micromanage the thoughts of those rules.  His orcs certainly don’t seem to worship him exactly, nor be motivated by ideology as such.  They admire and fear his power, of course, and act out of hope for personal gain.  Also, of course, their nature, twisted by Morgoth originally, is such that Sauron, or someone like him, is their only workable authority figure.  You’d think it might be worth the Valar’s time to try to treat and heal the orcs, who are as they are through no fault of their own.  But no, Manwe et al would rather sit in their little paradise, high up on their mountain or in their halls of judgment, all of which isn’t even directly attached to Middle Earth anymore.  Heck, maybe if they had tried to reach out to Melkor in the first place, when he was such an awkward outsider even at the start, things would all have been much less traumatic for all.  But no, Iluvatar wants his entertainment, his ongoing struggle of “good” versus “evil”, all of which is his doing in the first place.  I wonder if he creates his own popcorn to eat while watching.

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But though my blogs be mean, take them in good part.

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday again, so I’m writing another edition of my blog post.  It’s not the first nor the second post I’ve done this week, so calling it my “weekly” blog post would seem somewhat inaccurate.

It’s now only two weeks until Boxing Day, so you should get out your gloves and your speed rope and your heavy bag and get yourself back in shape for the ring!

I really didn’t want to go to the office today.  If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have written a post, except perhaps a single line such as “No blog post today”.  That would be borderline self-contradictory, but since my thoughts and words have been dealing with depression and suicidality lately, I thought if I just wrote nothing people might become concerned.

I’m probably being egotistical even to imagine such a thing.

The reason I didn’t want to go to work was because the office holiday dinner takes place tonight, and I really feel tense about it.  We’ll be going to the same restaurant we used last year, and it was overcrowded and had too much sensory overload even back then, such that I had to start drinking (alcohol) as soon as possible to keep from scratching my own skin off.

It would have been one thing if everyone there had been people with whom I felt comfortable.  There are three or so people at the office with whom I get along well enough that, if just that group and I were going somewhere, it would have been okay.  Certainly there have been many times in my life when I’ve gone out to eat (and similar) with family and/or close friends, and I enjoyed myself.  But I was younger then*, and I had more energy for acting normal, and the people who knew me well were nonjudgmental about my weirdnesses, anyway.

Most of the people at the office, though, are people with whom I wouldn’t normally hang out at any stage in my life‒no insult to them intended, there’s just no common framework.  And the two or three people with whom I think I would most have enjoyed spending time seem to have become more distant recently.  Perhaps that’s all my doing; it almost certainly is my fault.  I know I’m becoming ever less fun to be around.  So I don’t really have anyone with whom I feel I could hang out comfortably‒not in the office, probably not in the world.

It’s not that there’s no one out there who might be willing.  There are many kind people about, though sometimes that can be hard to believe.  But I am not good company‒not for anyone, probably not ever again‒and I certainly don’t deserve any kindness.  I am too weird now, and my life is a mutated, Lovecraftian monstrosity compared to what it once was.

Let’s face it, I was always just a weirdo, anyway; I was just better at pretending to be human in the past‒or if not better, I at least had more energy for it.

Now, I barely have the will to get up and get going in the morning**.  Almost everything I do is just to distract myself, to divert my attention from being aware of my own pathetic and worthless existence.  It makes me wish I had a serious drug or alcohol problem.  Then I could both have a powerful distraction and something that would potentially lead to my death in short order.  Instead, I’ve wasted years trudging through my nosferatu pseudo-life.  My books and blog posts notwithstanding, it really would have made more sense if I had died some time in 2013.  Nothing since then has been of any real use, not to anyone else, and not to me.

I’ll try to work up something remotely akin to enthusiasm for the holiday dinner tonight.  But, if I’m too stressed, I just won’t go.  I know the food will be good, though.  I’m trying to watch what I eat, but everything and everyone around me tends to want to sabotage that intention (including me) especially at this time of the year.

Maybe I should just eat and drink until I make myself really sick, and then I won’t want to do it anymore.  It would be quite nice not to be a person who eats as an escape, as his only reliable source of distraction.  I feel much more clear-headed when I don’t eat, and I know I am much sharper.

How nice it would be not to be such a pathetic glutton.  But I do miss my sister’s holiday cookies.  And I mean to eat whatever I feel like eating this evening‒whether I go to the office dinner or not.

Maybe I’ll get botulism, or a bad case of Hepatitis A that turns fulminant or something.  Keep your fingers crossed!

TTFN

*Such is the nature of the past.

**Though I still cannot sleep even close to as much as I would need to be healthy.

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No one is to blame

Well, as often happens on the day immediately following a Monday, it is now Tuesday.  Congratulations.

I don’t know why I wrote “congratulations” there.  I felt as if I were saying that the fact that Tuesday has arrived was some manner of accomplishment and not merely the universe continuing to do what it does and work through its laws as always.

Maybe the thought was to congratulate those of you who consider it a positive thing to live another day for succeeding at doing so.  Maybe it’s a supportive statement to those who really don’t want to go on, but who continue to endure because they don’t want to bring pain to their loved ones.  Making it through another day for a person in that situation is no joke, and those people should be recognized.

It would be nice if they could be recognized in a non-judgmental way by those loved ones for whom the people in question endure.  Not that I expect that the loved ones of the suffering have any better calibration than the people who love them.  Nothing finite is without imperfections (and I’m agnostic about the situation with infinite things, but I have my doubts).

So, it is hard for a person with depression to endure, even when they’re doing it for their family and friends and are suffering because of it, and those depressed people are worthy of sympathy and non-judgmental support from their loved ones and the world in general.  But the people around them are worthy of sympathy, too, and should not be regarded judgmentally for not being able to recognize or even help their loved ones’ suffering.

Here’s where we come to the concept of blame, and how utterly unjustified it is, in every single case.  And to be clear, I don’t mean to say we shouldn’t hold people responsible for their actions in the sense that they are the proximate causes of those actions, and their behavior can be adjusted and improved.  But they are not the ultimate cause‒not of what they are, not of their strengths and weaknesses, not of their limits and their experiences and their sensory acuities and their social skills 

If you have car trouble and your cousin, with whom you are hanging out, doesn’t know the first thing about cars‒doesn’t own one, doesn’t drive, never has‒you may well be disappointed that this cousin can’t help you and doesn’t even recognize that there is a problem until and unless your car completely breaks down.  But you don’t get self-righteously angry at your cousin for that lack of knowledge and skill‒not if you’re even remotely reasonable.  You don’t fully understand what’s wrong with your car, yourself, and you certainly don’t know how to fix it.  And it’s your car.  How can you expect others to be both able and willing to fix your car for you?  They have their own vehicular maintenance issues.

I’m pushing the metaphor, I know.  But I think it’s a good one.  We can all, of course, try to be there for those we love, and to be worthy of having others be there for us, and sometimes that’ll work out and sometimes it won’t.  It can be quite natural to feel resentful and wounded by the people who fail to see your suffering, even though they care about you and are important to you.  But, as Radiohead sang, “Just ‘cause you feel it doesn’t mean it’s there.”  So cut other people slack; and cut yourself some if you can, too.

You didn’t build the universe, or the world, or your nation, or your community.  Neither did anyone else, living or dead.  These things just happened, rarely with any kind of coherent, before-the-fact plan of any kind.  And on the rare occasion when people did try to plan things, those plans essentially always went aglee‒the stricter and more regimented and more dogmatic the plan, the greater the apparent tendency to veer wildly astray, as though there were some manner of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle that applies at the scale of societies.

Civilization is a spontaneously self-assembled and self-assembling system, and like frost on a window, different parts of it carry different orientations and patterns that are not the product of any of the individual constituent water molecules.  The molecules can only line up in the crystal where there is a spot and only in particular orientations, based entirely upon where it is in the system and what the surrounding dynamics are‒and what came before.

This may be the case for the entire universe, as well.  The underlying quantum fields may just all “crystallize” out in particular ways that are highly stochastic and ultimately local, with different kinds of complexity in different places.

Anyway, I’m veering off topic.  The point is, there’s no call for and no use in blaming people for not knowing about your suffering and how they might have done differently and it might have helped you.  And don’t blame yourself, either‒unless you invented the universe.  If you did, well, you’ got some ‘splaining to do.

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When will the system crash?

Well, it’s another Monday‒the second one in December of 2024*‒and I decided I’d write a little Monday morning blog post.

I’m writing this on my phone today.  I wrote last Thursday’s blog post on my miniature laptop computer, and it got too long and only a few people apparently read it‒or, well, only a few people went to the page.  I can’t tell if they’ve actually read the thing.  The only real way to tell if someone reads something is if they make a comment that clearly responds to the substance of the post.

It’s rather appalling how rarely people read at all anymore.  The odds of someone both liking and actually sharing any of my blog posts are absolutely miniscule.  I suppose I shouldn’t complain too much, since I wrote an actual song called “Like and Share” about some evils of the social media landscape.  But the evils I was decrying really focused around the people who curate their online presence to seem as though they and their lives are “perfect” while having who knows how many skeletons in their closets, and the other people who, through comparing themselves to the false images of people online, come to hate themselves and their own lives.

I would love it if people shared my blogs or even my songs or my books (well…the links to my books), but I guess the way one grows one’s audience and gets spread and “retweeted” and so on is by sharing politically charged content with some particular stance.  The more vituperative and divisive and snide, the more likely a thing is to be noticed and shared.  Of course, that’s not going to guarantee spread, but it seems to be an almost necessary thing.

The fact that my primary medium is writing doesn’t help.  With that in mind, I made a little vertical video yesterday, intended primarily for Instagram because “Why not?”, and I shared it there and on YouTube and Facebook and even Threads and X and Bluesky just because, again, why not?

I’m terribly frustrated.  Maybe I should take some controversial stance.  Maybe I should say outrageous and hateful things.  It wouldn’t be that hard.  I hate nearly everything in the whole stupid world.  The problem is that my hatred is equal opportunity.  I find the left and the right to be equally sub moronic, though the malady presents slightly differently in the two political directions.

Maybe I should start promoting an all-out war between neurodivergent people and the NT’s, sort of like Magneto against the humans.  Humans screw everything up.  Many if not most of the positive advances in civilization came from people who were probably “neurodivergent”.  The normies just take advantage of those advances and drive the world into the abyss.

Maybe I should start brainstorming and propounding the benefits of initiating a planet-destroying catastrophe.  I mean, it would be easy enough (in principle) to arrange for various asteroids to end up hitting the Earth; all one really needs is a space agency‒perhaps even a private one, a la SpaceX.  After that, Newtonian mechanics is enough to do the job, plus a little trial and error.

I don’t think it would be enough just to wipe out the human race or current civilization.  I’m thinking of complete sterilization.  None of the other life forms on this planet are any more benevolent or kind or positive than humans are; they’re just less competent.  Weirdly enough, humans appear to be by far the most compassionate, the kindest, the most “life-affirming” species on the planet.  All those that seem kinder or less damaging are simply less powerful.  Even things like lichen and bacteria and archaea have caused massive, even global, catastrophes in the past.

The fact that humans, of all things, are the kindest species on the planet is surely the strongest argument that can be made that life on this planet‒and perhaps all life in the universe‒is simply a huge mistake, and one that ought to be rectified.

I’m pretty sure my own life is a huge mistake, with the exception of my kids.  Certainly everything since about 2012, and possibly somewhat earlier, has been one giant error message written across the monitor of my existence.  I should just power down everything; not restart it, just shut it off and throw it in the trash.

Any thoughts?  “Like” and “share” if you feel the urge.

*Geez, that means the year is almost over again, and I’m still here, like a bad outbreak of herpes.

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O Caesar! These blogs are beyond all use…

Hello, and yes, good morning.  It’s the 1st Thursday of December in 2024, and so it is time for another edition of my weekly blog post.

I’m writing this on my miniature laptop* on the way in to the office, because I figured it would be a shame to let the device go to waste.  I haven’t used it at all since the last blog post I wrote on it, which would have been…looks like it was November 20, 2024.

Other than the little post I wrote on Monday—which I wrote on my smartphone—I haven’t written anything this week.  I haven’t played any music this week, by which I mean neither have I played it on a device for me to hear, nor have I played the guitar or the keyboard, though I guess I’ve tapped drumbeats on walls and desktops and door jambs and the like from time to time.

I am reading a Japanese light novel series, one that I’ve chosen because the characters are at least reasonably likeable, the story is more or less upbeat and decently written and translated, and there are enough volumes out to keep me busy for a week or two.

I haven’t read any science or math or philosophy in quite a while.  I certainly haven’t written on any books of my own.  I haven’t even watched any science-related videos, to be honest.  The only math I’ve done was when I saw a Facebook post of a sign in Taiwan or China that had an infinite series in sigma form written on it.  I thought I recognized the series, but I wasn’t at all sure, so I worked out the first seven or so terms and summed them up, and it became clear that this was the series that summed to Pi.  It was indicating, apparently, that there were 3.14 kilometers left in what I think was a marathon route.

You wouldn’t see a sign like that in the USA.  Though we have some truly brilliant people in mathematics and science and whatnot, they are a rarefied bunch, and the vast majority of the population is borderline mathematically illiterate, and some of them are stupid enough to be proud of that fact.

I did have one slightly interesting occurrence yesterday—from my point of view.  I was scrolling through “reels” on Facebook and saw one with a woman sitting in a room and giving a sort of strained, tiny smile, and the caption read something like, “I guess the fact that it’s holiday decorations that are hanging now, and not yourself, makes it a successful year.”  That’s not quite right; it was better written, but that was the gist.

I recall thinking, not entirely seriously, “That’s easy for you to say.  I don’t consider it a good result that I’m not the one hanging.  I even have two ropes already prepared for that possibility, but I don’t have any decorations or ornaments, and I have no one with whom to share the holiday season or anything anyway.”

I intended to write that (more or less) as a comment, which required going to the original post on Instagram; I was going to try to be at least a bit jokey about it, so as not to make the poster think was angry at her.  But when I got to the post, I saw that there were people who were complaining about it, saying that jokes about suicide were in bad taste or something, that they had lost relatives or friends or whatever to suicide, and such posts made them feel sad or something.  They had a long string of comments.

A few people wrote in response that such “jokes” or posts, even if seemingly morbid, were often a good way for people to deal with the emotions that overwhelm them, and knowing that other people feel that way and can speak about it was helpful.

But the Puritans were all too stuck in scolding mode.

I wanted to write more, but ended up just saying, “Surely no one has been forced to read this posting.”  The original poster, apparently, replied to my comment, saying that I was wrong, that she was sorry to have been insensitive to people, and wanted to try to be more careful in the future.  I had to bite my figurative tongue to keep from replying, “I was wrong?  You mean people were forced to read the post?”

And then I wanted to add something along the following lines:

“As someone who thinks about suicide daily, ever more so over time, and who feels the urge particularly strongly at this time of year, what with the waning sunlight and the holiday environment, it can be kind of nice to know that other people are thinking similarly, and are even able to be somewhat lighthearted about it–even going so far as to give a slight joke, to try to be positive.  I think all the people who are scolding and berating should be turning their scorn on themselves, if anything.  Maybe if they’d spent less time being so eager to shut other people down when talking about uncomfortable things, they might have encouraged a situation in which their own loved ones might have felt able to talk about their depression and despair.  Maybe these commenters are feeling defensive about the fact that, for all that they’re willing to berate strangers for talking about suicide (in a comparatively light hearted way) what they really need to do is berate themselves for not having done anything of significance to try to help their relatives or friends or acquaintances who were in such pain that they ended their lives.  Maybe if they tried to encourage a climate in which people felt able to talk about the despair that so many people experience—especially people who are “different”, who are, for instance, “neurodivergent” or who just feel weird and alien compared to everyone else on this waste of a planet—then fewer people would feel utterly alone and at a loss and with no apparent answer to their pain and loneliness other than destroying themselves.”

Of course, I didn’t leave that comment.  But it is terribly irritating that people go out of their way to comment negatively about someone who is trying to put out at least a slightly uplifting or relieving thought, but I doubt they went to any trouble at all to support their “loved ones” who were suffering.  Fuck all of them, I say, and in all the most inappropriate and uncomfortable orifices.  They’re making the world worse, not better, with their “Waah, look at how this all affects me, everyone, I don’t like to be reminded about sad things, because I did nothing to prevent or ameliorate the sadness, so now I want to make sure no one else admits that it exists”.

Well, the maker of that reel apologized, but I don’t think she should have, and I am certainly not doing so, though I restrained myself from hurling my ire at those people in the comments section, and only left my original one.  But if I could, I would like to give those people a brief taste of the despair and solitude and emptiness and pain that a person feels when they are severely depressed and suicidal but don’t have anyone they can really talk to about it, no support, since our society still doesn’t deal with mental health issues almost at all.

Even if I could do that, it probably wouldn’t help.  Once that temporary pain went away, those people would almost certainly go back to the way they were before.

That’s enough for now.  I’ve written too much, and the editing process is daunting.  I think I’m only going to give it two go-throughs before posting, instead of three.

I hope most of you—well, all of you—feel better than I do.  If I were convincingly told (by some being who could guarantee it) that by my death I could eliminate depression and despair in the world in everyone else, or even that I could just foster an environment in which people could be open about it and help could be provided at least to the same degree we provide it for heart disease and cancer and infectious disease, then that would be a pretty east decision.

But, of course, reality doesn’t work that way, and there’s no reason to think it ever will.  That still doesn’t mean that there aren’t other, legitimate, valid reasons for a person like me to feel that he and everyone else would be better off—or at least no worse off—if I were dead already.

“Oh well, whatever.  Never mind.”

TTFN

*The miniature laptop is a computer.  The top of my own literal lap, though slightly reduced due to my paunch, in certainly not miniature.

**In English, of course—I’m not partaking of my old ambition to practice reading Japanese until I got truly good at it.  What’s the point?  They would never allow me in the country, anyway, thanks to my “criminal” record***.

***That’s actually kind of funny…what if nations didn’t allow President-elect Trump into their countries because of his felony record?  Of course, that’s not going to happen, it would be a diplomatic disaster.   Once again, the Donald shows that he can successfully be separated from the enforcement of the law, thus sending what ought to be a message to the American people:  Why should you bother obeying any inconvenient laws?  The President doesn’t!  Screw paying taxes or following through on contracts!  It’s every person for itself, in the most short-sighted, opportunistic, petty ways possible.

****Who would ever choose such a thing?  Its very nature is learned helplessness, self-hatred, emotional and physical pain that doesn’t seem to let up, that feels eternal when it’s happening.  It is a metaphorical and sometimes nearly literal version of Hell.

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The second of the “10th” that is the twelfth

It’s the first Monday of December in 2024‒December 2nd, specifically, meaning that the 1st fell on a Sunday, which means that there will be a Friday the 13th in this month*‒and I thought I would write a brief blog post for the day.  I don’t know if anyone was hoping for that, but it’s happening.

It’s relatively cool down here for south Florida; it was 55 degrees Fahrenheit when I left the house, which is, let’s see…(55-32) * 5/9, so 23 * 5/9, so 115/9, so just under 13 degrees Centigrade/Celsius.  That’s also about 286 Kelvin, but the Kelvin scale is a bit inconvenient for most day-to-day temperature readings.

I could’ve just looked all that up online, but I think it’s good for the mind, and for people in general, to know and remember (and apply) the conversion between Celsius and Fahrenheit, even if only for the mental exercise.  If we turn everything over to apps and computers, then eventually no one (or at least very few people) will even remember what such things mean or where they come from, or why.

Anyway, it’s something with which to keep one’s mind occupied.

There’s not much for me to do or to say, anymore.  I’m just killing time while waiting for time to kill me, so to speak.  That’s all I see myself doing from now on.  I have no goals or hopes or dreams or anything.  I don’t expect that I’ll ever see my kids again, or that I’ll ever see any of my other family and/or friends, or that I’ll make any new friends, let alone any kind of “new family”.

I’m not cut out for meeting new people or making new friends on my own.  I never have been.  All my old friends were people I knew from school‒junior high, high school, university, medical school, residency, all that.  I’m basically alone, and I think I will be for the rest of my life‒which hopefully won’t be very long, because it’s really quite pointless and stupid, and I’m pointless and stupid, and so is the world as a whole.

Hopefully, some day soon I’ll be able to say to you all, “this is my last ever blog post”, because it will be one of my last ever anything.  I’m so tired, and I’m stressed, and I’m in pain, and I’m depressed, and I can’t sleep for shit, and above all, I’m alone.  I’m sick of just about everything that I do, and I’m very much sick of myself.

And, frankly, the world as a whole, the universe as a whole, is just irritating and stupid and such a waste of potential.  There’s no point to any of it, and it’s not even headed in any kind of positive direction.

As Yeats wrote, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / are full of passionate intensity”.  I suspect that’s just the nature of things, since passionate intensity tends to be the habit of those with a dogmatic turn of mind, and those tend to be the people who do the most damage, who commit the most destruction:  precisely the people who believe that they are right, that they know what’s morally right, and that belief gives them carte blanche to do what they claim to think is right and fumigates all their deeds from any possibility of wrongdoing (in their own heads, at least).

Dogmatic thinking tends to be profoundly dangerous and destructive.  “Certainty” kills.  That’s why I say, “Spay and neuter your dogmas.”  We don’t need or want them to spread and reproduce.

Anyway, that’s enough for today, enough for a lifetime, enough for eternity, whatever.  I hope you all have a pretty good week and month and so on, or even better than pretty good, if possible.

*If you stop and think about it, this will almost certainly be obvious, since the 2nd week of such a month will run, Sunday through Saturday on the 8th through the 14th, which means the 13th is a Friday.

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But can a short blog post be neverending?

It’s Tuesday morning, which is probably not neverending, because if it were, one would never even reach Tuesday afternoon, in which case it couldn’t be neverending, no matter what the Beatles say.

Although…if Tuesday afternoon never begins (because Tuesday morning is neverending) then Tuesday afternoon would also be neverending.  After all, according to the Oracle, everything that has a beginning has an end.  To which I tend to respond, “Yes, at the very least, if one reverses the direction in time in which one is considering a thing, then its beginning is an end.  QED.”

Enough.  I’m writing this post this morning because I have nothing better to do with my time‒or at least nothing better that I am capable of rousing the gumption to do.  I mean, I could always be on brilliant dot org, working on some mathematics or physics or computer science problems, or I could be writing a story‒you know, something productive.  But I don’t think that’s likely to happen.

This Thursday, of course, is Thanksgiving.  You’re welcome.  So, only two more shopping days left.

It used to be that nearly everything was closed on major holidays like Thanksgiving.  And Thanksgiving is still maybe a more “closed for the holiday” holiday than even Christmas and New Year.  But there will always be stores open now‒at least a 7-11, a Wawa, or some other equivalent.  And working at those stores on that holiday will be people who don’t have plans to celebrate with anyone and/or who could really use the extra money so they work.

Anyway, I think it’s still the biggest family holiday in the US.  It’s certainly the time when people travel to visit other regions of the county and exchange viruses from those different regions with the greatest fervor.  This is part of why, in the US at least, there tends to be a big surge of respiratory infections early in December.

I don’t have statistics on that.  I just remember it being the case.  That’s clearly not a rigorous scientific conclusion, it’s my perception of the situation, possibly supported by the experience of other physicians, and possibly by some remembered textbook reference(s).  Anyway, that’s not significant evidence, not if one is trying to make a scientific evaluation.  But I still do think it’s the case, and I think that impression is based on good evidence that I have encountered in the past.

I really don’t have much else to say.  Even this nonsense is too much effort to continue for long.  But who knows, maybe a short blog post will be more popular.  In any case, I don’t know what will happen tomorrow, but I plan not to write a post on Thursday, so this may be my last chance to wish those of you who celebrate it a Happy Thanksgiving.

My wishes are never very effective, unfortunately.  Just look at my life.  But maybe they’ll work better for you than for me.

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Raveling down the knitted sleeve of care

Well, it’s Saturday morning, and I’m heading to the office‒way too early, because I still can’t get a good night’s sleep,  Even with recent interventions to try to help my pain and insomnia, it seems the sleep honeymoon phase might already be over.

I felt very much like the lone soldier in the jungle again last night, unable truly to rest and relax, primed at some pervasive level to jump up and react in case some threat developed.  This wouldn’t necessarily be a true external threat.  It might be some break in my routine, sleeping past my alarm*, realizing I had forgotten to set my alarm**, or there might be an intruder, some deliberate, secret assailant, come to attack me in my sleep***, or just a new flare-up of chronic pain developing.

It’s not a great way to start a day or to continue a life.  As I said, I had some temporary improvement not in the quantity of my sleep but in the quality thereof‒I wasn’t sleeping more, but I felt as though I was sleeping better‒for the past week plus a day or so.  This is probably why I’ve had the energy to write some blog posts this week.  But last night felt just like one of my typical, paranoid, restless, angry “sleeps” from before.  I have not stopped my new intervention, but apparently it’s no longer addressing whatever the roots of my sleep issues are.

I suppose I shouldn’t draw too sweeping a conclusion so readily.  One night is not a pattern.  But it’s such a familiar experience, and after such a short semi-respite, that it’s almost worse than never having a respite at all.

For at least 15 years (at least), I’ve spent most of my days and nights alone in the wasteland‒not literally, of course, don’t be stupid.  I just mean that I’ve had the sense of being by myself‒even when in crowded places, such as malls or prison‒and with no real recourse to anyone to help me defend against potential enemies, physical or social or “spiritual”, real or even imagined, external and internal.

To be clear, I don’t feel that the world around me is generally hostile.  In some ways, that would be easier, although considerably less stable.  If I were literally being attacked, I could literally take arms against that sea of troubles and let slip the dogs of war, imitate the action of the tiger, throw my warlike shield before my body and lay on*, fighting against assailants until they were all beaten or until I was dead‒and damned be him that first cried, “Hold, enough!”

Almost certainly, the outcome would be my destruction, but we all have that coming, anyway.  Dying in battle against actual attackers isn’t the worst death I can imagine, if I’m honest (it’s not the best one, either, don’t mistake me…I am not a Klingon or a Sontaran, and I do not embrace the philosophies).

Alas, I will probably be taken down in the end just by the progressive deterioration of my body.  It would be nice to die in a way that is heroic or at least useful, but that’s unlikely to happen.

I’m frustrated and angry about many things this morning, and I’m sick of feeling this way so much of the time.  What is the point of this?  Unlike Camus, I don’t imagine Sisyphus is happy.

It would be one thing if he had people whose company he enjoyed with whom to spend his time while he kept pushing his boulder.  Or, if he really were achieving some result, something beneficial, something that improved the world beyond himself.  But just to keep grinding away at his absurd and pointless task, with no benefit, with no entertainment, with no inherent joy in the process…why bother with that?

At the very least, he could try to plot his escape and enact vengeance against those who sentenced him to this fate!  It might take a long time, but it’s not as though he has anything else to do.  Even though he was made to roll his rock as a punishment, any eternal punishment would always be immoral when brought in response to any finite deed in a finite lifetime.

Of course, no one has put me in my current state.  Well, okay, the government of Florida and of Palm Beach County certainly did their parts in carrying out significant injustice in my case, and those involved are probably worthy of retribution, but it’s all really just so haphazard and so much a part of an unplanned, inefficient, and fundamentally unjust system that it’s not even easy to know where to begin.  Probably, we just need another really big asteroid, or a nearby gamma ray burst, just to wipe the slate entirely clean.

I guess we’ll all see what happens.  In the meantime, I hope you have a good weekend, whether you want to do so or not.  So there.

*Ha ha, I don’t recall whether that has ever happened to me.

 **This has happened, but almost always in the middle of the night, when I awaken, realize with a feeling of severe tension that I forgot to set my alarm, quickly make sure to set it…and then just stay awake until it goes off or until just before it goes off.

***I keep various weapons next to me, within arm’s reach, when I sleep.

****Macduff

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Desperate but not undaunted

This may be short, but I thought I’d share a bit of info since I brought the general topic up earlier this week.  Just this morning, while I was getting ready for work (and indeed, just as I was about to brush my teeth) the idea for a story popped into my head.  This happens a fair amount, as I think I’ve said, with weird little scenarios triggered by something that’s been going through my mind or that I see, and they coalesce into the root of what might be a possible story.  Well, since I had spoken (so to speak, ha ha) with all of you about this earlier, I decided to pause my oral hygiene routine briefly and go write the story idea down in the notebook function of my smartphone.

I don’t want to overreact or to ask anyone to get their hopes up.  That latter bit would be utter hypocrisy.  It’s always difficult to say what will come of a story idea, or even the shape it will take‒just look at Outlaw’s Mind*, at how much it changed and improved (to me) from its simpler beginning.

I’m writing all this on my phone once again, by the way.  And the fact that I’ve written at least the roots of this story and most of this week’s posts on my phone leads me to toy with the idea of writing a next story wholly on the phone.  I know, I know, I’ve gone back and forth about hand-writing stories versus word processor/laptop computer versus phones, and I got all those notebooks and pens and everything, thinking that I’d write HELIOS in long hand, and now I’m thinking of the opposite.

This is an example of the workings of a desperate mind, one trying, scrambling, scrounging, looking for answers to getting back to writing, or music, or trying to help my chronic pain, or my insomnia, or my depression, and whether or not to pursue the possibility of an ASD diagnosis (not the heart kind‒I know I had that).  I’m trying to find something that has some meaning at all for my life to persist.

I guess that means I haven’t given up yet, but that’s more a matter of habit than anything else.  I am extremely stubborn, and I have trouble letting go of a process once it’s a habit.  Maybe that’s the ASD doing its thing, assuming it’s there.  Maybe I’m just dysfunctional and odd and alien.  I suppose those things aren’t mutually exclusive.

Still, writing about this idea got me thinking of potential scenes and events for the story I mentioned above, so please forgive me if I space out a bit.  Just wait a moment or two; I’ll be back**.

That was kind of fun.  It could be an interesting story, this new idea.  We’ll see if anything happens with it.  I wouldn’t put serious money on the possibility, and I certainly don’t recommend holding your breath.  But if I were to write a novel or novella on the phone, the portability would be a big plus.

That reminds me of those old “palm pilot” things people used to have, the little personal data notebook digital things, with the plastic styluses.  Some people thought they were so cool using those things.  They were always so geeked out about them and seemed to look for excuses to get them out all the time.

Don’t get me wrong; if someone was just having a great time, enjoying using a brilliant piece of then-new technology, then have at them!  Enjoy!  Why not be happy with a new, useful tool, especially if it’s a cool tool?

At least some of the people who ostentatiously used the “personal data assistants”, though, were mainly status hungry.  I get it (though I may not grok it).  Humans in general tend to be status hungry; for ancestral humans, in-group status could have a big effect on reproductive opportunities (and even just basic survival chances), so any genes that pushed toward such behavior would tend, ceteris paribus, to be at an advantage, locally (i.e., in that particular gene pool).

But it is rather bizarre to watch from the outside, and instances of the phenomenon vary between the amusing and the contemptible, with many a superposition of the two.  It still happens today, of course.

Humans also haven’t shown any sign of ceasing to select status hungry people as the ones they follow, even though there are such obvious conflicts of interest and so much bias that makes such people unreliable in the long run.

Oh, well.  I guess it doesn’t matter, because in the truly long run there will be nothing but random elementary particles and forever-expanding spacetime, if the current understanding is correct.

Or, of course, there could be even worse alternatives.

There’s probably no possible horrible situation that couldn’t in principle be made even worse.  Even Sam Harris’s “worst possible misery for everyone” could be made even “worse” just by adding more people to the situation, each one of whom is in the worst possible misery they can be.

I suppose that fact implies the theoretical possibility of its opposite:  the best possible well-being for everyone.  Why does that feel so much more unrealistic?  Well, I could get into some of the potential reasons, many involving the biological necessity and crucial importance of fear and pain.  But that’s for another time, or you can read a bunch of my blog posts here and on Iterations of Zero.  I’m sure you can find my thoughts on the subject.

Aaaaand that’s enough meandering.  You all hopefully are going to have a good weekend.  I am tentatively scheduled to work tomorrow, but we shall see.

*Seriously, go take a look.  If you like it, why not buy some of my published stuff?  And then tell two friends, and so on, and so on, and so on.

**Ha ha.  That’s a trick.  You can’t tell when or for how long I spaced out while writing, unless I tell you, or put a space or row of asterisks in the body of the writing.  I could begin a sentence one day and finish it years later.  It’s a bit like listening to a studio recording that had overdubs and one person doing more than one part.  You hear it all at once, but that’s not how it came to be.