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Extra Body: Chapter 3

Albert left early for the lunch meeting on Sunday, eager and even slightly nervous about seeing his friend.  He’d had abundant energy the day before, so he’d gone for a walk, done some chores around his place, and gotten a head-start on his laundry, since he wasn’t going to be hanging around during the day on Sunday.  He had even gone to a small local restaurant for his dinner, by himself.

Ordinarily, he would have been a bit self-conscious, thinking it was pathetic for a fifty-year-old man (plus a few years) to be eating out alone on a Saturday night.  That night, though, he’d felt fine about it.  The evening air was pleasant, so he had walked to the restaurant, and he felt more than satisfied with the available options.  He enjoyed a glass of wine with his dinner, feeling only very slightly affected by it, and when walking back to his house afterward, he thought that, just maybe, his waitress had been flirting with him. Continue reading →

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Extra Body: Chapter 2

As the week passed, Albert continued to use his new shampoo sparingly.  At the rate he was consuming it, he probably could make the bottle last more than a month, maybe even two months.  He did not grow tired of its odor, nor did it cease to perk him up in the morning, though he found he was not requiring a pick-me-up as much as usual.  The walking was clearly doing him a world of good.

In his off-time, when he had the chance and the ability, he ducked into other stores to look at their shampoos.  It was harder to do than it might have been if he had his car back yet, but he found that his energy level was greater than usual—probably because he was getting exercise for the first time in over a decade—and so he got more done than he expected.  There was a Target less than a mile from the office, and he found that he was able to get there, look at their shampoo selection—bigger than that at Winn-Dixie—sniff around a bit and then get back to the office before lunch hour had passed.  He didn’t even feel winded after the endeavor, though he developed a bit of sweat that the tried to wipe off in the bathroom before returning to his desk. Continue reading →

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Extra Body: Chapter 1

Albert Ohlinger strode down the second aisle of the small convenience store, irritated by the need to buy toiletries there instead of at the grocery store.  His car was in the shop and he couldn’t afford a rental—or, at least, he couldn’t justify the expense to himself—so he’d had to ride the bus to and from work that day, and there was no supermarket or drugstore between the bus stop and the house where he rented the “in-law suite” in the back.

He had squeezed the last of his shampoo onto his thinning hair that morning, thinking he had another bottle under the sink.  Then, on quickly checking after his shower, he’d realized that he had misremembered.  At the time, he’d shrugged and hadn’t been too bothered; shampoo was readily available, after all, and he often stopped at the grocery store on his way home from work.  Then, in the afternoon, waiting for the bus was enough of a novelty that the lack of shampoo had slipped his mind. Continue reading →

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A surprise Monday post

It’s Monday morning, and I didn’t bring my little laptop computer back to the house with me this weekend‒mainly just because I hadn’t brought it all week last week, and so I was just sort of “in that mode” when I left the office on Saturday‒and so I’m not doing any editing this morning on Extra Body.  It’s possible, of course, for me to edit it via the smartphone based Word app, but the few times I’ve used that, I found it cumbersome and unpleasant.  So, I decided I would write a random blog post on my smartphone, using Google Docs, for “old times’ sake”.

I’m already somewhat tired of editing and working on Extra Body, and I haven’t even finished the third edit (I’m about 20 pages from the end of that).  I will try to complete at least that much this week, but after that, I don’t know.  I just don’t feel that interested in it anymore.  I honestly don’t feel that interested in anything anymore.  Everything is boring or irritating or frustrating or some combination thereof.  Even reading nonfiction about topics in which I have long-standing interest is basically almost more of a chore than a pleasure.  If you know me at all, you know that’s a true departure, and is surely atypical.  I just have no interest in things in general.  That fact doesn’t even feel sad, to me.  It doesn’t feel like anything that’s being or been lost.  It feels like something that’s long since gone, if it ever existed in the first place.

This week will see the Autumnal equinox and the beginning of Fall/Autumn (in the northern hemisphere), but here in South Florida, it’s still so hot and muggy that I’m sweating just from sitting here and waiting for the train.  And I’m not talking about a little dampness in the armpits.  I’m talking about needing to wipe my eyes frequently because of the sweat dripping down into them, and sometimes dripping onto the inside surface of my reading glasses.  I’m wearing a shirt designed for athletes, with that cooling, “wicking” nature, and I have a change of shirt for the office.  Honestly, I wonder if I shouldn’t have brought a change of underwear.

I know, I complain about the hot, muggy weather here quite a lot, but it really is annoying.  There are long stretches of the year in which it is not just unpleasant to do any kind of exercise outdoors, but it is actually dangerous, because one overheats and dehydrates so quickly.  Presumably, it’s only going to get worse down here over the years, but at least that won’t apply to me.

In other weather related stuff, I’ve been trying to initiate the habit of riding my bicycle.  I’ve adjusted the seat to a better height for me (it required buying and using a pipe cutter, but that worked and it is much better now), and I got some new, high quality headlights and taillights, and I was all set to ride it some yesterday…and then, just as I was finishing up my laundry, thunderstorms rolled in, and they dominated the weather for the rest of the day.

It may take one much longer to get anywhere when walking‒or even jogging‒compared to biking, but at least it is less impacted by rain.  You can always carry an umbrella when walking, and you can avoid the worst puddles and such by stepping carefully.  And parkas work much better when on foot (at least in my experience) than when biking.  If you have a computer in your backpack and you’re caught in a serious rainfall, it’s much easier to protect that computer when on foot than when riding a bicycle.

Not that I have any experience with this.

Of course, walking has its own issues.  I did a bit of fairly serious walking last week, and I’m having some surprising and quite uncomfortable left heel/plantar fascia pain.  That’s extremely annoying, and it is probably the result of some relative postural mismatch on the length and/or configuration of my walking.  Certainly, based on the pattern of wear on my shoes, I put pressure on the outer ball of my right foot much more than the rest of that foot, and the heel of my left more than the ball.  This is a long-standing pattern, and may be produced by even very mild anatomic and/or gait-related asymmetry.

Still, I already had/have heel inserts for shoes, specifically intended to counter issues with the plantar fascia, and I have them in, today.  We shall see if and to what degree they soothe that problem.  If they do not, then I may have to revert to not wearing socks, which (to my surprise) seems to ease many of my foot and even leg problems, though it entails a significant temporary increase in blisters and, of course, given the heat and humidity of south Florida, makes shoes wear out quite a bit faster.  If you do it, I encourage generous use of Lysol; just pretend you’re a bowling alley attendant every time you take off your shoes.

We’ll see what ends up being the best option, at least for the time being.

And now, it’s almost time for my train to arrive, so I’ll call this all good for the day.

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…what dreams may come, when we have shuffled off this mortal blog…

Hello and good morning on this Thursday‒a day of the week on which those in the know have been able, these last several years, to indulge in reading my weekly blog posts.  And this is, of course, another iteration thereof; not to be confused with Iterations of Zero, my other, far less prolific blog, which I had originally created to be a place where I could discuss things unrelated to my fiction writing.

Of course, the notion that this blog was supposed to focus on my fiction has long since mostly gone by the wayside.  It never seems to have made much difference for that, in any case.  And of course, as many of you will know, for quite a while I wrote here almost daily, and I didn’t write any fiction at all during that time.

Plans or dreams or hopes are whatever they are, I guess (there’s a hunk of logic, right?).  I suspect that, even for the most successful and fulfilled of all people, their plans bear only vague resemblance to the specifics of their outcomes.  Probably, the most successful, the most fulfilled people, are able to make general plans but also to adapt to and optimize based upon the various comparatively unpredictable events that actually happen 

Your host, not fulfilled*, has had a bad week.

This weekend was so hot and humid that I had to sleep with the AC off on Saturday and Sunday nights.  Wait, you may ask, why would it be that high heat and humidity led me to turn off the air conditioning?  Because the unit‒imperfectly but permanently placed in the wall‒leaked so much condensation that, despite tupperware-style buckets put down to try to catch it and old clothes to soak it up, the water seeped into my futon.  It was better to go old school and just let the fan blow on me.

Then, after the week started, on Monday night I literally did not sleep at all.  I got not one moment of sleep, just spent the night lying around, trying not to do anything that would awaken me more.  Because of that, on Tuesday evening, having no energy to face my commute, I just slept at the office.  I got at least a few hours of broken sleep there, on the floor, with my head on my backpack for a pillow.  It was more restful than the previous three nights, which may not be saying much, but is nevertheless true.

I have not worked on Extra Body at all this week.  I just don’t have the energy, even though I’m nearly done with the third edit.  I just don’t have the energy.  I’ve also hardly played anything on the guitar, though yesterday morning I did a little, but my singing was rough and my voice got hoarse very quickly.  I haven’t even been bringing my little laptop computer with me.  I’m writing this on my phone, using Google Docs.

Tomorrow, at least, is a positive day.  I don’t mean that in the general, Annie sort of way**.  Cat forbid I should ever attempt such sickening pseudo-optimism.  No, it’s specific to this particular, non-fungible tomorrow.  Not only is it Friday the 13th, a day I always like when it happens (largely because some people stupidstitiously think it’s “unlucky”) but it’s also a day to celebrate one of the two most important events ever in my existence.  I won’t get into more specifics, but historically, for me, it more than made up for what happened two days earlier.

Anyway, after that, I’ve got nothing.  I don’t even know if I’ll actually get back to work on Extra Body or if I’ll just say “fuck it” to that and to any other attempt to do anything creative or positive or productive.  I suspect that I’ve already done all the good that I’m ever going to do in the world, unimpressive though it may be.

I guess futility is really a characteristic of everything that happens in the universe, ever, at least on a large enough scale.  The universe itself‒our universe, this instantiation or region or whatever you want to call it of whatever possible larger multiverse or metaverse or omniverse may be‒is itself the very physical instantiation of something immense beyond reckoning (possibly infinite in spatial extent) and yet ultimately trending simply toward some version of “heat death” if our understanding of physics and cosmology are even vaguely correct

Of course, there is certainly much we don’t know about the nature and structure of the cosmos.  And if our civilization persists in whatever form and continues to grow and create more knowledge, it may even someday be that cosmic engineering could be possible, or even the creation of new cosmoses.

But the second law of thermodynamics seems pretty inescapable in the long run‒it’s not just physics, it’s the raw mathematics that seems to imply it.  I think I wrote a post on IoZ a long time ago about that.  If I find it, I’ll have included the link.

Anyway, let us draw this particular local instantiation of futility to a close for now.  I hope you have all been having a much better week than I, and that your days and weeks and so on improve consistently, as much as is reasonably possible.  I would really like that.

TTFN

*To paraphrase Shirley Jackson’s description of Hill House.

**“The sun’ll come ooouuut…tomorrow…”

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There would have been a time for such a blog

Hello and good morning.  Yeah, it’s Thursday, so here’s another edition of my now-again-weekly blog.

I actually wrote a little post on my phone at some point in between, while I was in transit last week, because something happened that frustrated me with the irrational things people do.  I haven’t looked at it again, and I certainly haven’t posted it.  Probably I never will.

I sometimes miss writing my near-daily blog posts.  They were a way for me to keep in somewhat frequent contact with people in the human world (or at least to allow the potential for people to be aware of my existence).  But I cannot muster the mental energy both to write/edit fiction and to write a blog while still working.

Actually, this last weekend, for various reasons, I had a three-day weekend for the first time in I don’t know how long—maybe as long as eight years or so, and I’m not being hyperbolic*.  Despite having that time off, I didn’t really do anything.  It basically rained the entire weekend down by me, and it was thoroughly sloppy and disgusting out, but it’s not as though I had anywhere to go even if the weather had been lovely.

Such is my life, if you can call it that:  Go to work Monday through Friday and every other Saturday, commuting quite a long way (which allows me to write while commuting, at least) and then, when off, basically just collapse on my cheap futon on the floor of my one-room dwelling and watch semi-random YouTube videos (and occasional shows on Amazon or Netflix or Hulu or whatnot).

I have, at least, been working on editing Extra Body; I’m almost finished with the third run-through.  I think I’ve done quite a lot of cutting of digressional stuff this time through, which is almost certainly good for the story.  My general practice is/has been to edit my stuff seven times—more if I haven’t been able to cut back to my word number goal—before being willing to publish.  It takes a long time, of course, though it would probably be faster if I had more mental energy and motivation.

It certainly took a long time to edit Unanimity, which was significantly over half a million words long in first draft.  That’s my personal version of what happened with The Stand  and The Lord of the Rings:  I wrote a book too long to be publishable as a single volume because it couldn’t be printed that way.

I’ve still been practicing a little bit of guitar more days than not, I guess; I even played a little bit over the weekend.  I guess I must be getting better to some degree, because a few things that used to be quite difficult for me are not nearly so hard, and I find that I can easily substitute a different version of a particular chord if I don’t like the way it’s been suggested by a given source of tabs and chords.

I guess that’s good, though I don’t know what good it actually does, even for me.  I’m way too self-conscious to play for anyone else, and I certainly haven’t tried to write any new music in a long time.  I have a few little notepad entries with lyrics I’ve come up with here and there, but they’re all just shit, so I don’t feel any desire to work on them further.  Nor do I have any urge to turn either Mercury Lamp or Come Back Again into finished, “produced” works and publish them for any streaming sources or anything.

That’s about it.  I’m basically running on fumes, as people used to say**, and I expect—and kind of hope—to run completely out of gas very soon, one way or another.  I’m actually pretty irritated by my endurance so far.  If there’s no potential light at the end of my tunnel, as there doesn’t seem to be, I wish I would just crash and burn.  I don’t want to have any kind of metaphorical multi-vehicle crash, in which any other people’s lives get ruined in the process of me self-destructing.  That would be rude.  Although, I suppose, if I could somehow manage to arrange it so that I took some true villain, or some significant instance of villainy*** with me, it might be worth it.

Anyway, that’s enough for this week.  I spaced out for a good five minutes just now, which seems to indicate that I don’t have much more to think for the moment, let alone to say.  The weather is horribly muggy here, and I’m sweating just from typing while sitting still, which really shouldn’t generate all that much heat.

I hope you all had a decent holiday weekend (those who actually observed Labor Day, of course).  I hope you’re having a decent beginning of September, which is the current month.  It includes a few important birthdays to me, and of course, Autumn begins in September (in the Northern hemisphere).  But there’s no real Autumn in south Florida, anyway, so that’s just a tease.

Oh, well, to hell with it.

TTFN

*Neither am I being spherical or toroidal; I’m pretty much being strictly Euclidean as far as I can tell.

**Of course, it’s only the vapor of gasoline that ever ignites to provide impetus in the internal combustion engine, but the gasoline is stored as a liquid, at least.

***In my judgement, anyway.  I certainly can’t use anyone else’s judgement, after all, and frankly, I wouldn’t want to do so if I could.

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There’s no art to find the mind’s construction in the blog.

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, so you know the drill:  it’s time for my weekly blog post.

I don’t know what I’m going to write about today.  I don’t have much to say, or if I do, I don’t know what it might be.  I’ve gotten out of practice writing about nothing—or beginning to write about nothing and waiting to see what happens—since I stopped writing near-daily blog posts.  Right now I just feel blank and empty…and nonspecifically angry.

Of course, I’ve been editing Extra Body, and I’m doing a decent job of trimming it down.  I feel that I’m getting more ruthless about removing passages of digression about tangential things in my descriptions and expositions.  Having written the story on the laptop computer, it was only too easy for me to write and write and write a lot, very fast, of whatever came into my mind.

I guess that’s okay, as long as one is careful then to pare away the extraneous after one is done.  It’s analogous to sculpture, I suppose.  One can start with a huge, bulbous lump of clay and make the general shape however involved as one wants, but to get down to final form, one needs to remove the stuff that doesn’t match the vision, even if that vision isn’t necessarily very clear when one begins.

Not that I’m a sculptor.  I did love to play with modeling clay when I was young, though.  I used to get multicolored packs of it and almost immediately mix the colors together, because I knew it was going to happen anyway.  I never had any desire to make something out of clay that had different hues in different parts.

It was interesting to meld and squeeze various different colors together, seeing them form ribbons of shades that got finer and more interdigitated as I folded and  refolded the clay, the fat stripes of various colors turning to thinner, more finely and multi-layered stripes, eventually turning into a sort of purply-gray-brown uniformity.

I thus learned an intuitive notion of the second law of thermodynamics early in life.  There was never any inkling of the possibility of unmixing the colors of modeling clay.  After two colors came into even momentary significant contact, it wasn’t possibly to separate them completely.  And after one interfolding, there was no point to try to keep anything separate.

That never bothered me.  I liked the shade it became, and I liked not having to worry about trying to separate colors.  The shape and feel of the clay, and the squeezing and molding it into various shapes, was enjoyable.

It would probably be useful to let students of topology play with modeling clay, or perhaps with Silly Putty™, just to give them a proprioceptive insight into the deformation of shapes and surfaces and the nature of holes and the like.  You can really get why a donut and a coffee mug are the same shape topologically if you literally start with one and mold it into the other without making any new holes or eliminating preexisting ones.

Maybe it wouldn’t be very useful.  Still, Einstein (so I’ve read) enjoyed playing with blocks when he was young.  He apparently thought that experience influenced his physical intuition; and there have been few physicists with better or more fruitful intuitions about how physics will tend to behave.

That’s enough of that tangent.

Again, I’m about midway through my third edit of Extra Body, and I’m definitely finding that it improves with less digression.  I don’t know if anyone else will agree, but it’s not as though I have some huge audience to whom to cater; audience capture is not my problem, and I’m not sure if it ever would be.  Maybe I should start a political and social and scientific commentary thing on Substack.  And maybe I should make beans into peas*.

I’ve been diddling around on the guitar on and off on most work mornings, but I can’t really play when I’m back at the house, because I’m not really alone there, so I feel too self-conscious.  At the office, early in the morning, I can play and sing and not have to worry about anyone listening or responding.  I’m my own harshest critic, but at least when I’m alone I can express myself.

It’s a weird conundrum, because on the one hand, on the rare occasions when people have enjoyed my singing or playing or writing or academic work or anything else in my life, it’s been tremendously moving and gratifying; even the thought of someone accidentally hearing me playing and saying they think it’s really nice can bring tears to my eyes.  But I don’t really think anything I do is worthy of praise.  I can’t feel proud of something unless it’s literally perfect.

It’s pretty remarkable that I released the songs I did over recent years, given that they are not perfect, since they were produced in very inauspicious circumstances**.  But I think a lot of that was just me seeing, for my own sake, if I could actually do it.  Then I did, and I was, like, “Okay.  I can do that.  That’s that done.”

It’s like in medical school, when I got honors in my first two classes and then I was kind of, “Okay, I can do that, I guess; point proven to myself.”  And after that I didn’t feel motivated to get the top marks in the class or anything, so I didn’t (except on epidemiology and statistics, which felt too gripping and too important not to squeeze as much as I could out of it).

I suppose if I had stumbled upon a significant number of people who really liked my music/my songs and said so, I might’ve felt more impetus to do more, and to do better versions, but who knows?  Anyway, that’s not how such things tend to happen.

I also recently got briefly captivated by Facebook reels related to drawing and painting, and I bought several kinds of pencils and pens and stuff, hoping or imagining that I would start drawing again, but apart from a little doodle or two, it’s not really going anywhere.

I decided to try to play the Radiohead song Reckoner after I rewatched the “from the basement” video and realized that the guitar in that song was entirely played by Thom Yorke (while singing) and everyone else pretty much did various rhythm parts.  I turned to the song chords in my Radiohead guitar chord book and realized that they were straightforward chords (C, E minor, D, A, that sort of thing) but played high up the neck in unusual locations, finger-picked***.

However, I discovered that my low E-string is apparently getting long in the tooth, and the note on the 12th fret—which ought to be an E one octave higher than the open string—is very different than it should be.  It sounded horrible!  So, I ended up just playing and singing the song using more ordinary, “first position” chords, but it wasn’t as satisfying.  Still, it’s good falsetto practice.  I suppose I could just change the E-string, but that involves more “executive function” than I have to spare, especially on a Strat****.

That’s about all that I have to talk about.  I’ll close by noting that the Tri-rail is running late this morning.  Almost every day it runs late at least at some point.  The announcements say, “Train blah-blah is running late however many minutes…stand by for more information”, but there never is any more information.

The whole thing should probably be burned down and started over—as should the entire world.  Actually, maybe leave off the “started over” part.  Just burn everything and let the ashes cool into the microwave background that will eventually become the long radio wave background.  It’s not as though there’s any point to anything.

This blog post has also gone on too long.  Heck, the blog itself has gone on too long.  Everything about me has gone on too long.  So I’ll let you go for today.

TTFN

*That’s a reference from the movie Time Bandits.

**That fact may have given me an escape clause from the rule of perfection.

***On a lovely Gibson SG in his case.

****You have to take the back panel off and such, and it’s a pain.

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What’s past and what’s to come is blogged with husks and formless ruin of oblivion

Hello and good morning and all that blather.  It’s Thursday, so it’s time for my weekly blog post, though apart from brute habit I have a hard time finding good reasons to write it.

I finished the second edit-through of Extra Body earlier this week.  That’s not too impressive; I should’ve finished some time last week, but I’ve been going very slowly.  I have no excitement about finishing and publishing the story.  I honestly don’t really care.  I just have nothing better to do.

That’s been the case with pretty much everything these days.  I’ve been trying to find interest in things, but it’s been almost entirely unsuccessful.  I did stumble into some Facebook videos of various people doing drawings and paintings, and that got me interested in doing some of that, myself, so I did some doodling and sketching and stuff.  I even ordered some new pencils and pens and markers and cetera; but there’s a weird sort of desperation involved in these actions, which became evident to me when delivery of a couple of items was delayed and I was absurdly furious about it.

I’m angry most of the time nowadays.  It’s very annoying.

Anyway, I’ve done a few little drawings, including the ones I’m going to include below.  The first is a sketch of Cthulhu which I did on H. P. Lovecraft’s birthday (though I didn’t know it at the time).  I’ve enhanced it a bit, digitally, since it wasn’t finished, but anyway, that’s about as good as anything I’ve done in any sense, which is hardly saying much.

I also made a couple of other doodles, one of which I colored with pencils and the other of which I colored with some delayed-delivery markers (about which one of my internalized fits of rage took place).  I also printed out some old pictures of mine to practice coloring, but they’re only partially done, and I screwed up one by coloring another with it underneath, so the color bled through.  I guess I’ll share them here, for shits and giggles.

I’ve been fiddling on the guitar some, too, but I remain exceptionally mediocre, and I haven’t any urge to write new music.

I’ve taken a sort of impromptu break from studying any physics or mathematics, also.  I have no energy (nor momentum nor charge) for any of it.

Of course, a lot of this trouble surely is complicated by the persistent elevation of my chronic pain, though that’s at least begun to level off slightly‒whether from my personal interventions or from the natural rhythms of physical processes or some combination of the two, it’s difficult to say.  My sleep, on the other hand, seems to be steadily worsening over time.  Last night, for instance, I slept less than three hours.

Oh, I was also out sick Monday, after getting sick on Sunday a bit.  I didn’t really get much rest or benefit from my absence; being at the house is no more pleasant than being at the office*.  At least there’s more space at the office, and when no one else is there, it’s also much quieter.  Honestly, in some ways, jail and prison were both more pleasant than being at the house where I currently live.  Weirdly enough, I had a greater feeling of personal space when incarcerated than I have now, and I also felt like I was occasionally doing some good, since I helped several people get their GEDs and helped some guys who weren’t very good at writing send letters to their families.

At least I wasn’t both bored and distracted, and I had things to which to look forward‒including, ironically, the life I’m living now, though it is not at all what I had anticipated (for instance, I declined to stay with my Mom and Dad and sister because I wanted to be near my kids, but despite that, I haven’t seen either of my children in more than eleven years, now, by their choice).  Now, I’m basically just floating by myself through turbulent, greasy, polluted chop from day to day.

I’ve noticed a clear tendency for people who spend very much time with me for very long to decide that they don’t really want to be around me anymore.  I cannot blame them.  I’m a difficult, unpleasant person, and by nature I’m prone to profound darkness.  I try not to give in to that nature if I can help it**, and I try to be upbeat and positive or at least funny in my expressions and indulgences in gloom and pan-antipathy.  But it wears me out.

I don’t think I’m really capable of doing any good in the world anymore; I don’t have the energy or the drive for it.  And if I don’t want to indulge my nature as a Destroyer‒which I do want to indulge, but you know what I mean‒then I ought just to turn that tendency fully inward.

Anyway, that’s all that.  I don’t know what else to say, and more to the point, I don’t know why I should say or do anything else.  Sorry to be a bummer; it’s just who I am.  I hope you all have a good day, week, month and even year.  I can’t promise “I’ll be there for you”, but probably somebody will be.

TTFN

cthulhu draft

cracked egg

unknown woman

dark fairy and friend partial recoloring with bleed through

Jacob versus alien queen partial recoloring

Gandalf and Balrog partial recoloring

*Especially when, as has been the case this week, we’ve had some chaos and stress involving the personal troubles of some of our long-time workers.

**This explains why one of my favorite lines from Doctor Who is when the eleventh Doctor, in a moment of terrifyingly cold anger, says, “Good men don’t need rules.  Today is not the day to find out why I have so many.”  There is a reason why I created a short-lived series of blog posts entitled My Heroes Have Always Been Villains.

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…and oft it blogs where hope is coldest, and despair most fits

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, and so of course it’s time for my weekly blog post.

I’ve thought from time to time about writing some supplemental posts during the rest of the week as well‒usually on Mondays, before the restless days take all my energy* away‒but so far it hasn’t happened.  Instead I let myself be distracted by silly, stupid things during the week, when I could be learning new physics or mathematics or computer science or any of a number of other rewarding subjects.

A big part of what drains my energy, of course, is pain.  That hasn’t been significantly better this week than last week, despite various attempted modifications and medications and interventions and so on.  Of course, it’s hard to make oneself do significant extra exercise when one is already exhausted and depressed and it’s ridiculously hot and muggy out.  I don’t exaggerate when I say that just standing still outside for a few minutes leaves me dripping with sweat‒sweat that does very little to cool me down.

This is why the heat index is so often well above 100 down here; since one’s bodily cooling functions don’t work adequately in this environment, exposure to the outside, humid air actually just raises one’s temperature.

I think if someone systematically sabotaged the air conditioning industry or all the AC units on a massive scale, one would depopulate much of Florida.  In a desert, if one has copious amounts of water, one can tolerate seemingly more-oppressive heat because one’s sweat-evaporation systems work optimally in dry air, and humans have an unparalleled ability to regulate heat by sweating.  But in Florida, the air is already saturated with water, so one’s sweat doesn’t evaporate**, thus it carries away almost no heat.  Without air conditioning, much of Florida would soon be deadly to much of the human population.

As always, I’m trying various interventions to decrease my pain.  I’m currently working on an attempt at pretty radical weight loss.  I really have to do it; there’s reason to think that losing a good deal of weight may help my pain.  If it doesn’t, I’m going to have to check out soon; I can’t keep going like this.  It’s not as though I have any good (or at least strong) reasons to stay alive.  And my loss would certainly not have any significant impact.  I know this because my presence doesn’t have any significant impact.

Anyway…

I’m almost through the second edit of Extra Body, and I’m successfully tightening it up as I go along.  It’s a relatively lighthearted (and fun?) story, and this is unlike most of my stories, as you know.

Actually, do you know?  How many of the readers of this blog (not counting my sister; I already know she’s read my stuff) have actually read a single one of my stories?  I’m curious.  This blog originated as an attempt to promote my fiction writing, but like most things I undertake that matter to me, I fear it has utterly failed in its purpose.  Let me know, please, if I’m wrong about this.

Speaking of my other, non-cheerful stories, I was thinking, if a miracle occurs and I can find the will to go on living and to continue writing, I want to slightly rework and then finish Outlaw’s Mind.  That’s another one of my works that was intended as a short story, but has grown to become what is really a novel already.  I like the main character and the situations and the mythos of what’s happening to him, and it would be good to finish it.  But I would eliminate the “cold open” portion, which was originally thought to be a prelude to the end of the story, because I don’t think that’s how I want it to end, now.  Timothy and his situation have become much more interesting than the original idea.

I’m not optimistic about that ever happening, of course.  Too many things have to go right for that to pan out, and it’s been quite a long time since I’ve been any good at making things go right for myself.  A big part of the problem is that I basically hate myself.  Which is curious, because there are things that I honestly like about myself, I just don’t seem to love me.  It’s a bit like the reverse of that old song, You’ve Really Got A Hold On Me, with my version beginning “I don’t dislike you, but I hate you.”

It’s weird.  I occasionally try to do auto-suggestion via a sort of mantra*** such as “I love my life and I love myself” or even just “I love myself.”  Some people talk as if self-love is normal (and even perilous:  “the all-natural opiate”), but it’s never been normal for me.  When I try my mental internal suggestion tactics, I can feel that they might be useful and even beneficial, but my figurative tongue soon dries up and goes into spasm‒it honestly is very mentally uncomfortable‒because I can’t easily even pretend to love myself.  As I said, it’s weird.

Returning to potential stories:  of course, there’s also HELIOS waiting in the wings, and the sequels to Mark Red, and DFandD, and my long-awaited Changeling in a Shadow World.  For a long time, I’ve even toyed with the idea of a sequel to The Vagabond, an idea that appeals partly because its title would be The Grey Pilgrim.

If I were able to write full time, I could write new stuff in the morning and edit other stuff in the afternoon and even possibly throw in near-daily blog posts, and I could still study various subjects in my spare time.  Also, I would have world peace and live in a house made out of never-melting, never diminishing ice cream, and would have a superhuman, immortal physique that doesn’t require exercise to maintain.

And a pony.  I want a pony.  It’s not that I particularly like ponies, though I don’t mind them; that’s just what one is supposed to wish for when making wishes that will not be achieved.

Okay, that’s enough for now.  I hope you all have as good a day as that for which you can reasonably wish.  Why not?  No one’s really keeping score.  You can have as many good days as humanly possible and it’s not as though you’ll be building up any kind of bullshit “karmic” debt.  Indeed, people having good days tend to do good things, so if anything, by having a good day, you’ll probably make the world a slightly better place by almost any reasonable measure.  So, get to it.

TTFN

*Perhaps it’s a disorder of what they now call “executive function”.

**This has to do with the physics of diffusion across concentration gradients, and it is constrained by physical and mathematical law, including the second law of thermodynamics.

***As long as I can remember, I’ve always tended to have either some phrase or verse or song or whatever playing through my head repetitively whenever I’m mentally idle‒such as if I’m walking somewhere‒so I harness that and try to give myself useful sentences to repeat, geared toward self-improvement.  I’ve been doing this at least since junior high school.