by

“Cobwebs long since overrun by an old Wellington boot”

Welcome to a rare Saturday blog post.  You can’t say I didn’t warn you that I would be writing a post today.

Actually, of course you can say it.  You can say anything your mouth, lungs, and brain are capable of creating as a sound.  Think of Chomsky’s perfectly grammatical but nonsensical sentence, “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously,” or Stephen Fry’s even more nonsensical, “Hold the newsreader’s nose squarely, waiter, or friendly milk will countermand my trousers.”

We are not constrained by nature to be truthful (or even sensible) in what we say.  Human society would probably work better overall if we were incapable of lying (at least actively).  It would take a bit of time to get used to it, and many people would have to learn just not to say anything most of the time.  But I think it would be better, certainly in a peaceful society‒which, alas, we have not yet achieved.

On the other hand, deception is a huge part of nature (the living part of it at least), in one way or another.  Especially when there are predators and prey and competitors for mates and for food and so on, lying‒in one sense or another‒is an extremely useful survival strategy and tactic, at least when done well and carefully.

It may be that, in a mature and peaceful civilization, lying is detrimental and to be discouraged‒indeed, to be eliminated if possible*.  But as long as there is not true peace and true freedom‒as long as there are people who will take advantage of and harm and victimize other people‒sometimes deception will be necessary.

It is, or at least it can be, analogous to the notion of using violence in self defense.  Pacifism seems all well and good on the surface, but when there exist people willing to use violence against others in aggressive, oppressive ways**, then pacifism is just a fatal vulnerability.  Pacifistic “resistance” can work if one’s opponent has a relatively strong moral code or conscience.  But against an actual psychopath, or a psychopathic ideology, non-violent passivity is just doing your opponent a favor.

And no, despite what V said, ideas are not bulletproof.  They can be bullet resistant, but enough bullets in enough brains‒for instance, the brains of every person who holds a particular idea‒can erase any idea as it is.  Some ideas are harder to wipe out than others, and some spring up anew in disparate places even after being eliminated, but enough destruction can obliterate anything that is not a fact of external nature***.

So, violence and deception are at times necessary in a society in which there are occasional psychopaths, or at least psychopathic behaviors.  But that doesn’t mean we should not aspire to create a society that is honest and peaceful.  It just means we cannot try to skip to the end by eliminating all capacity for violence and deceit in ourselves; that can only be done when (if) all potential threats have been quelled, and brought more or less permanently out of the realm of possibility.

Wow, I had no intention or notion to write a post centered on moral philosophy today.  And it was all triggered by my cliché opening sentences.  It’s quite strange just how stochastic my writing can be when I haven’t planned ahead.  And, of course, I never plan these posts ahead of writing them.

Also, in case it’s not clear, I don’t plan them retrospectively, since as I said yesterday, I am not capable of violating the laws of causality (such as by traveling faster than the speed of light in a vacuum).

I think that’s enough for a Saturday morning now, though.  I hope you’re all having a good weekend, whether it’s a holiday weekend for you or not (it both is and very much isn’t for me).

Until next time, please be well.  And, if you can manage it, keep being well even after next time.

*There can still always be a fifth-amendment style right not to speak and a right to privacy.  Unless and until there exists some form of communal mind, I think there are legitimate rights to privacy.

**Such people do exist, and they may exist as long as there are people, springing up de novo at times, because it can be an evolutionarily and game theoretically stable strategy to be a psychopath in a group of relatively honest people.  See:  POTUS.

***It can eliminate our knowledge of such things, but knowledge is an epiphenomenon.  The laws of physics themselves do not require humans to know that they exist in order to do so.  To believe that humans are the center of the universe (literally or metaphorically) or that the human mind creates reality is astonishing and contemptible hubris.

by

Black Friday Sun, won’t you come?

Well, it’s officially “Black Friday” here in the US at least‒an ironic name that referred to the fact that the day after Thanksgiving was, at least traditionally, the busiest shopping day of the year, so going holiday shopping (mainly for Christmas) was always considered an ordeal.  And therefore…well, therefore everyone went and did it.  It doesn’t make a lot of sense if you look at it that way.  But that’s the way humans are, isn’t it?  Think of the hoarding of toilet paper that led to self-fulfilling prophecies of shortages during early COVID-19 days.

So, anyway, I’m going to the office today, because we’re open.  We’re also planning to be open tomorrow.

I wish I were sick.  I mean, I’m sick in the head (ask just about anybody, if they’re being honest) and I have chronic pain and all the fun associated with that, but I am not acutely ill, let alone ill enough that I could mentally excuse myself from going to work.

I wonder what would happen if I just decided not to go.  I wonder what would happen if I just didn’t go to work, didn’t write my blog, shut my phone off or put it on airplane mode, and just vegetated until I wilted and became compost.  Not very much, I suspect.

I mean, people at work would try to figure out where I was, because it’s work, and if I’m not there, someone will have to pick up the slack.  And I think my sister would try to figure out what had happened to me.  But that’s most of it.

A few people would worry, but that would only be for a while, and then even all passing thought of me would taper down, asymptotically approaching zero, but in the fashion of a quantum event‒more episodic and sporadic in measurable character than a seemingly smooth decay, but nevertheless getting closer and closer to zero all the time.

I’m tired.  Also, frankly, I’m uninterested.  The two things may be related.

None of the things I do for entertainment‒for distraction really‒are working very well anymore.  I am particularly bored of being in pain, of course.  That gets old very quickly, especially when it’s chronic, and mine has been there for decades now.  It’s not a warning of some life-threatening process happening, it’s just a set of alarms that are broken so they’re stuck in the “on” position.

Of course, my main problem(s) is/are me.  I’m a piece of merchandise that’s defective in many ways and in more than one system.  Believe me, if you got me as a present, you would hope whoever bought me had kept the receipt.

Anyway, I hope you all had a nice Thanksgiving yesterday if you celebrated the holiday.  I ate a bit of junk food at the house, but it wasn’t very good, and it seemed to give me some gastrointestinal trouble, so that wasn’t a lot of fun.  There was nothing good on TV, unfortunately; I started to watch the Lions game (American football), but got bored very quickly.

I watched some videos on YouTube, but I’m running out of things there that are interesting.  The best thing I saw was a couple reacting to Rogue One, but that’s still very much a simulated, twice removed illusion of watching a movie with friends, so it’s a bit lame.

Obviously‒I hope it’s obvious‒I’m giving you my viewpoint on these things, not claiming to have some definitive, objective take on them.  If people enjoy something and it does no harm, then it’s a positive and “good” thing, so I mean no disparagement.

I am not a good measure for how good things might be, because I tend to see things in a less than optimistic and upbeat fashion.

That’s enough for now.  I guess I’ll be writing a post tomorrow, barring the unforeseen, though it’s difficult to see why.  Maybe some catastrophe will befall me and become a blessing to you all (and to me) by finishing everything for me.  In any case, I hope you all have a good weekend.

by

“Shadows of the evening crawl across the years”

Well, it’s Wednesday morning‒insert your joke of choice related to the Beatles song She’s Leaving Home here‒and here is my blog post for the day.  I will not be posting tomorrow (barring the very much unforeseen), since today is Thanksgiving Eve* here in the US, and therefore tomorrow will be Thanksgiving.  I will not be working on Thanksgiving, so there is to be no “traditional” Thursday post.  I’m sure you’re all devastated, but hopefully you can eat yourself into a stupor tomorrow to flee from your sorrow and loss.

Speaking of stupors, I slept a bit better‒or at least a bit longer‒last night than the night before.  This is because, despite it being a weeknight/worknight, I knocked myself out a bit with an OTC sleep aid.  So, if I seem a bit odd today‒for me, I mean‒that’s probably why.

Of course, I’m well aware that the sleep induced by such medications is not proper sleep.  That’s a very interesting fact for someone who gets proper sleep on their own, but it’s pretty theoretical to me.  It’s a bit like quibbling by saying, “going through a wormhole to get to a distant part of spacetime quickly isn’t really going faster than the speed of light”.  Well, okay, if I can find ways to break the laws of causality** I will, but in the meantime, I’ll use the wormhole.

Likewise, sometimes I just want to be unconscious, and I have a hard time achieving it on my own.  Oblivion is such a relief when and if it happens (so to speak).  Yet, even when I do sleep, there’s always a background watchfulness in my head, a feeling that where I am is not safe in some sense, so I cannot completely relax.

I almost never wake up without some manner of start, i.e., a bit of a jump in place.  I don’t know why***.  Maybe this is just the way it is when you’re nominally a member of a species of pack hunters but you’re functionally completely alone, separated from whatever group(s) there were to which you belonged and surviving on your own as best you can.  The world is never fully safe for such a creature.

Well, the world is never fully safe, period, full stop.  No one here gets out alive, after all.  Nevertheless, natural selection tends to lead to the state where the only surviving organisms are descendants of those who feel fear and who feel pain and who try to stay alive indefinitely, even when that survival is pointless (biologically speaking, I mean‒I won’t get into the deeper philosophical questions that can apply, because that would take too much time and energy).

I’m going to bring this to a close here pretty soon, if I can.  My thumb arthritis is acting up, today, and writing this is more painful than it usually is.  Well, actually, I don’t know that “arthritis” is the proper word, since that implies a process that is primarily inflammatory.  It’s probably more precise to say “arthropathy”, which just means “something wrong with a joint”.  “Arthralgia” works quite well here, also, meaning just “joint pain”, but it’s pretty darn vague in its implications of any possible cause.

I suppose it doesn’t make a great deal of difference.

Anyway, I hope everyone who is celebrating has a truly wonderful Thanksgiving Day tomorrow, and that you spend a pleasant time with friends and family (and maybe some football).  I will be back on Friday, barring (as always) the unforeseen.  I work at a sales office, after all, and Friday is “Black Friday”, traditionally the biggest sales day of the year in the US.  Though, there has been a significant degree of “feature creep” or whatever the best term might be regarding that, so now the whole of this time of year is becoming an extended “Black Friday”.  Natural selection tends to encourage such things.

Anyway, I expect to write a post on Friday, so I will “see you” then.  Or at least you will see me.

*There is no such holiday, official or unofficial, as Thanksgiving Eve, but it’s still obvious what I mean by it.  Isn’t it?

**The speed of light in a vacuum being the speed of causality.  This appears to be a large part of why nothing can travel faster.  How could something move more quickly than causality?

***As far as I can tell, it’s not because of having gone to prison.  For one thing, my sleep problems started way before that pleasant interlude.  For another, I didn’t have any real problems with people starting shit with me in prison.  Apparently, I looked (look?) a bit nuts or something.  Also, honestly, I got along okay with people there, all things considered.

by

“These our actors…are melted into air, into thin air.”

Well, it’s Tuesday, and for reasons (or, rather, causes) that are unclear to me, I had a particularly poor sleep last night.  I just didn’t feel sleepy.  Even this morning, when I told myself I needed to buckle down and get some shut-eye at least, I was only “out” for a few moments.  I even felt, or worried, that I had overslept somehow, if that’s believable.  But when my eyes snapped inevitably open, I saw that maybe 15 minutes had passed.

Eventually, even someone as stubborn as I must give way to the brute facts of reality, so I gave up and got up.  Of course, even if one doesn’t decide to “give way”, it doesn’t change anything.  Reality doesn’t depend upon the approval or acquiescence of conscious beings, however they might like to flatter themselves that it does.  It simply is whatever it is.  That’s what makes it reality.

This is a good thing, of course.  If reality could simply be changed by the power of a mind‒for instance, my mind‒there would be many, many people who failed to signal or otherwise drove badly who would simply disappear, never again to be heard from by their friends and loved ones*.

In reality, though, if one wants to disintegrate someone, it’s a somewhat laborious and messy process.  As far as I can tell, there is no way to make something like a phaser from Star Trek that can just scatter someone into particles, or whatever it is that phasers do.  Trust me, I’ve thought about potential designs on and off over the course of decades.

You can’t shoot a beam of gluons because they self-interact and are not found outside the nucleus (or a quark-gluon plasma), which is why the strong force has such relatively short range despite having a massless force-carrying boson (i.e., the gluon).

One also cannot shoot W or Z particles, perhaps hoping to initiate some form of decay.  Those bosons interact with the Higgs field, and so they have mass‒quite a sizeable mass for force-carrying particles.  And the W bosons even have electric charges.  So they don’t have a range much longer than the size of a nucleon, if that.

One could accelerate neutrons; or rather, one could accelerate parallel and matched electrons and protons and set them to collide with each other and continue in their initial trajectory as newly formed neutrons (plus some neutrinos).  Depending on their speed, they might just break apart some larger nuclei (or raise the atomic numbers of some others, à la the S process and R process nucleogenesis such as occurs in supernovae and neutron star collisions).

This could do some damage, I guess.  One might even be able to make it lethal if it were strong enough; and it might be a delayed death, which could be useful for assassins of one kind or another, I guess.  But if you wanted to disintegrate someone, you’d have to cause a very large explosion, which would not treat you kindly if you were anywhere near.

If you could generate a beam of antimatter‒positrons or, worse, antiprotons or antineutrons‒you could certainly obliterate someone if you had enough.  But it would be an even worse explosion than the neutrons would give.  A person’s mass, annihilating with an equivalent amount of antimatter, would yield far greater explosive force than any nuclear weapon ever detonated (even the Tsar Bomba, which only involved the conversion of about 5 pounds of matter into energy, much smaller than any adult human).

So, yeah, instant disintegration by a ray gun (or a beam from the eyes like in comic books) using anything we currently understand is unworkable for various reasons.  Whether dark matter particles (if they exist) or even neutrinos (which do exist and do have quite peculiar properties) could be made to disintegrate someone is far from clear or promising.  In any case, they would be likely to lead to some manner of explosion such as mentioned above.

You wouldn’t want to do that in traffic.  The whole point is to delete people who needlessly make driving less safe for those around them!  You would cause more harm than good, by quite some margin, if you obliterated them, however satisfying it might be to turn an inattentive driver (and their car if they are alone**) into a small but very powerful explosive.

Wow.  I guess this is the sort of stuff that goes through my mind when I sleep very poorly, huh?  It makes me feel a bit like writing some on HELIOS.  I could explain why but that would give potential spoilers for the book, in case I ever write it.

Oh, well.  I hope you all have a very good day.  But do use your signals when you drive, for goodness’s sake.

*I know, I’m being unreasonably generous.  Of course, people who don’t signal properly when they drive don’t have friends, and it’s all but certain that no one loves them.  Whether they are, themselves, capable of love is open to debate.

**If they are not alone in their car, or on the road, it would be too dangerous to obliterate them in situ, in terms of collateral damage.  Perhaps the neutron beam that is only lethal after a delay would be useful for that after all, doing damage that only has its full effect over time.  One could similarly use X-rays or even gamma rays for that, but their penetrating power makes it much harder to avoid hitting innocent people.

by

“No need to get up-tighter”?

It’s Monday again, and though it is not raining down by me, I’m all but certain that it’s raining somewhere right now, so one could say “it’s raining again” without fear of being entirely wrong.  No matter how you might want to cut up spacetime based on “planes” of “simultaneity”, there is sure to be somewhere in the universe where it is raining now.

Actually, if the universe is infinite in spatial extent, one could probably prove that it is a mathematical certainty that it’s raining somewhere, since there are‒as far as we can tell‒only a finite number* of possible quantum states in any given region of spacetime, and some of these include rain.  Indeed, even if it were not raining on Earth, anywhere, in some given instant (an unlikely eventuality), the fact is that rain can happen in many places in many forms.  I’m led to understand that it sometimes rains neon in the atmosphere of Jupiter.

So, perhaps the song by Supertramp shouldn’t have been It’s Raining Again, but should have been It’s Raining Still.

I don’t know.  Maybe that wouldn’t suit the rhythm of the song.  Then again, it always was a song where the sentiments expressed in the lyrics didn’t quite match the upbeat character of the tune.  This was probably deliberate on the part of the band.

Oh, in case anyone was wondering, the reason there was no post on Saturday was that, indeed, we did not work in the office on Saturday.  We didn’t work out of the office, either, as far as I know.  Well, I know I didn’t work, so even if they worked, we did not work, so I guess I’m right there.

I did a fair amount of walking on Saturday, and nearly as much on Sunday, though Saturday’s walk was more interesting.  I walked in a “park” along a canal in south Florida, and found myself well down into Dade County before I found an exit from the park area that took me to a road on which I could get something to quench my thirst and a place to which to call an Uber (they have a hard time picking one up in a park alongside a canal).  I had walked about seven and a half miles, and I could tell I was getting a bit too much sun**, though my feet and ankles and knees seemed to be holding up okay.

On Sunday I went for another walk, during which I had enough sunscreen.  That was because on Sunday I took my walk solely for the sake of walking, unlike Saturday, on which I had a specific purpose, and my longer walk began on a whim after that purpose was achieved.

It wasn’t an interesting or noteworthy purpose, by the way.  I’m just not discussing it because it cannot have any bearing for anyone but me.

Let’s see, is there anything else going on that’s worth discussing?  Well, of course, there are things going on in the world, and in the universe, and so on, all the time, and probably many of them are worth discussing to someone, or would be, even if no one knows they are happening.  But, of course, pretty much anything that happens, no matter how locally momentous, is historically trivial, let alone cosmically trivial.

Probably there aren’t many things that aren’t cosmically trivial.  I suppose if inflationary cosmology is real and it started at some locus in spacetime, then that would not have been trivial.  But if there is eternal inflation, there’s a real question as to whether it started at all.

Of course, even then, with eternal inflation, the local drop of the inflaton field down to the vacuum state (or a pseudo-vacuum state) here in our bubble universe‒leading to the formation of our universe, all its matter and energy, and possibly the configuration of our natural laws and constants‒would seem to be significant.

But that would only be significant to us, the creatures in this bubble universe.  On the scale of the cosmos overall, it would be just one bubble universe formation in an endless sea of such bubble universes, each one no more striking than the cavitation bubbles that form and then collapse in water that’s starting to boil.  Indeed, if our universe is such that an eventual recollapse will happen, i.e., a “Big Crunch”***, then we really are a lot like a cavitation bubble.

I guess this has been a slightly odd way to start the week‒which is unfortunate, given that today’s date is an even number (24) not an odd one.  But I don’t think I’ve ever claimed not to be an odd person.  I think I’ve known that I was different and a bit peculiar‒perhaps more than “a bit”‒since I was very young.  That’s okay in and of itself.  If most people are “normal”, why the hell would anyone want to be normal?

With that, I wish you all an abnormally good day and week, and if you’re in the US, I hope you have a good holiday coming up, and that you are anticipating it with eagerness.

*It’s big, don’t be mistaken.  But the biggest finite number you can think of‒ever‒is no closer to infinity than is the number 1.  So, in a universe that’s infinite in spatial extent, all possible finite configurations will be instantiated somewhere‒indeed, they will be instantiated an infinite number of times.

**I hadn’t planned on such a long walk, so I was not prepared in that sense.

***Our best information right now seems to indicate that we are not going to recollapse, but that we will continue to expand, at an ever-increasing rate.  I suppose that would make us more akin to a bubble that fully forms and expands in boiling water, escaping from the liquid into the air above.  Such bubbles are no more important than the cavitation bubbles, though.  They’re merely different. 

by

“He thrusts his fists against the posts…”

Hey, everybody.  It’s Friday, and I’m not sure if I will be working tomorrow, so I guess just keep your eyes open for a blog post in case there is one.  I suspect that I will not be working, since many of the silly and tragic and chaotic and even the arguably good (but disruptive) things going on in the lives of people at the office persist, flowing and whirling through the phase space of possibilities, forming vortices and other turbulent and chaotic patterns.  Still, I may be wrong.  It would be far from the first time.  So take a peek tomorrow morning, if you’re up and up for it; if I work, I will (probably) write a post.

Anyway, I want to keep this short for today if I can.  I just feel worn out and over-stressed by the various chaotic things happening and by other things in my life.  Some of them should, on their surface, seem good, at least in some aspects, though I think anyone could imagine that they wouldn’t be exclusively good.  And there is a surprising amount of associated stress* and tension and consequent depression and worsened insomnia‒and it all doesn’t help how I feel about myself.

And then, of course, though I don’t very often talk about it, there is always my chronic pain.  Always.

In addition, despite the silliness from yesterday’s post, the holidays do stress me out.  It’s a frustrating kind of stress, because while I feel very lonely, I’m all but certain I would not be able to tolerate being part of someone’s celebration.  I’m too chronically “on my own”, so I can’t even readily imagine myself taking part in any kind of get together unless I was on some kind of powerful anxiolytic or similar.

Maybe I’ve gone too far down the “stranded alien” rabbit hole.  I guess that’s better than going down the “stranded rabbit” alien hole, though neither one sounds inviting.  Anyway, I’ve just gotten too accustomed to being isolated and non-social and paranoid.  Not that I actually think people are out to get me**; I just don’t think people are safe.  They are not trustworthy.  This is not meant to be an aspersion on their characters.  I don’t think they are (necessarily) malicious.  I just think they’re unreliable in too many, too important ways.

So, despite whatever dreams and wishes I have‒and I do have them, though I try not to waste too much energy on them‒I expect that the state I’m in right now (I don’t mean Florida) is the state I’ll be in for the remainder of my existence.  And that is at least part of why I don’t desire my existences persistence.  It’s not great for me and it seems terribly unlikely that it would be any significant good for anyone else.

One benefit of being isolated is surely that at least one’s existence or nonexistence is unlikely to be very disruptive of other people’s lives, one way or another.  And my personal ethos contains a strong aspect of trying not to cause other people trouble, and feeling horrible if I do.

It’s not even about whether those other people actually feel inconvenienced or troubled; even if they reassure me, it probably will not help.  I am the one who experiences the shame of bothering other people.  It’s not as much an empathy-related phenomenon as a sort of Categorical Imperative kind of problem.  Well, no, that’s not the right reference.  I think the term is Deontology.  It’s a rule I have to follow even if it has no impact on anyone in any way.

To be clear, though, this is not a philosophical stance on my part.  I haven’t chosen to do this based on any reasoning or logic; I’m just using those things to explain it.  It’s very much a setting-point, akin to a black-box strategy devised through gradient descent in machine learning.  As such, it is something preceding and overwhelming any potential rational assessment and judgment on my part.

I don’t think I’m expressing this well.  Perhaps that’s partly because I don’t fully understand it in any kind of systematic, algorithmic fashion.  Perhaps it’s not understandable in such terms, but is rather the product of the various nonlinear processes that entail the brain functions of human beings.

Anyway, that’s enough for now.  If I work tomorrow, I’ll probably write a blog post.  If I don’t work tomorrow, I almost certainly will not write a blog post.  This leaves a little gray area in the outcome “no blog post” because it’s not completely impossible that I might work and yet not write a blog post.  So, not working almost certainly implies no blog post, but no blog post does not imply not working with as strong a tendency.  This is a fact of probabilities relating to Bayesian statistics that sometimes throws people off, but it’s important in practical matters, such as in knowing what to make of a “positive” screening test result, say for an infection or cancer.

I leave it as an exercise for you, if you’re interested (also if it’s not just obvious to you), to work out why these things are so.  And I also leave it as an exercise for you to have a good day and a good weekend.

*Not to be confused with the Associated Press, though there are commonalities.

**I don’t rule it out categorically, of course, since it is a physical possibility and thus does not have a truly zero chance of happening.  But it seems unlikely.  Why would anyone be truly out to get me?  Whose priorities could be so out of whack that I would be their focus?  Still, people are stupid (present company included), so I can’t dismiss it completely, and I always have such possibilities at least in the back of my mind.

by

The blogger’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, doth glance from heaven to Earth, from Earth to heaven

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday again, so I’m starting this post with my traditional salutation.  Well, actually, I already started it with that salutation, so I’m telling you what I did right after you just saw that I had already done it.  It’s not terribly efficient, but I guess at least I have provided some explanation for the uninitiated.

As of today, there are only eleven shopping months until my birthday, so you might want to start thinking about what you’re going to do to celebrate when the time comes.  Not that there’s any guarantee that I’ll even still be around for my next birthday, but maybe you’ll want to commemorate it in some way after I’m dead.

Heck, maybe I’ll even be famous after I’m dead.  That would be a little bit ironic, right?  I’m not saying it wouldn’t be nice, in a sense, for a lot of people to like my books (and maybe my music and my other writing) after I’m gone, but I won’t know about it, so it’s at best a theoretical niceness.  It would be better if people liked them while I’m alive.

I’m very bad at self-promotion, though, and I’m also bad at connecting with people who do promoting for others.  I have a poor self-image, for one thing (the fact that it’s bad doesn’t mean it’s inaccurate), and I also am just very socially awkward and find it very uncomfortable and even shameful to try to talk myself up, as it were.

I guess I would have been better off if I were a narcissist without shame; then I might be much more successful.  Heck, I might even be elected president, against the better judgment of practically every sane and sensible and moral and situationally aware person in the whole effing world.

At least the shameless don’t tend to be hypocrites.  That’s small consolation for everyone else, I guess, but the truly shameless don’t even pretend to try to follow any moral code that other people follow, and in that tiny way only, it’s mildly refreshing.

Let’s not go down that road, though, shall we?  It’s a depressing insight into human nature.

It’s the holiday season now, so to speak, at least here in the US.  Next Thursday is Thanksgiving, in fact, and the office is more or less certain not to be open, so I won’t be writing a blog post then.  Instead, I’ll be cooking a turkey and making some stuffing and potatoes and cranberry sauce and green beans and some pumpkin pie and apple pie and all that for all the guests who will be coming to celebrate with me.

Actually, though, since all my guests are imaginary, the food can be imaginary as well, which does save on expenses.  If I have nothing else, I have a good imagination.  I can dream up the best Thanksgiving feast you could ever eat.

Mind you, if I’m doing the dreaming, it’s going to conform to my tastes, and I don’t feel too bad about that.  All the above items are, of course, things I’ve always enjoyed at prior Thanksgiving dinners.  There will, however, be no mushrooms of any kind in my feast, nor zucchini, nor eggplant (these latter aren’t really part of most traditional feasts, anyway, unless I’m very mistaken).

Also, though there will be salad—I love a good salad—there will be no cucumbers, no tomatoes*, nothing related to avocados, and no walnuts or pecans or stuff like that.  Still, I don’t need to go into an exhaustive list of banned foods, since I’m the one imagining the feast; I just won’t add them!

When other people are involved, though, it can be useful to have a list of items someone cannot or will not eat.  Then, whatever someone makes to eat should be at least tolerable to everyone.  And after all, even merely tolerable food should be quite a good thing, since food is a fundamental and necessary good.

It’s a bit like sex:  even relatively boring and banal (don’t!) sex is better than almost anything else one might do on a given day, unless there are factors that get in the way**.  Of course, because of all the cultural baggage we have about sex—partly rooted in the idiocy of Saul of Tarsus, but amplified by other various repressive assholes throughout history—sometimes even sex between consenting adults can be associated with lots of hang-ups and discomfort.  It’s a shame, really.

Oh, well, it’s not as though I’m the most well-adjusted and clear-headed of people, so I only have so much of a leg to stand on to criticize other people’s foibles.  I’m so socially awkward and alexithymic that I’ve generally felt uncomfortable ever initiating anything, even in a long-term, committed relationship.  I also have a habit of trying not to impose my feelings or preferences or urges on other people, so I tend to feel ashamed or guilty about even considering making amorous overtures.

Sorry, I don’t know why I’m sharing these embarrassing details.  Maybe I’m dying and this is some kind of subconscious confession or something.  I mean, of course, we’re all dying, all the time.  But it may be more precipitous in my case—I’m not aware of it being so, but I don’t know—and maybe my inner mind could pick up on the fact.  Or maybe it has plans it’s not telling me.

All right, enough.  I hope you have a good Thursday and then a good day on each of the rest of the days of your life.  You’ve slogged through my weird writing; you deserve some type of reward.

TTFN

*I like—often I love—almost everything made from tomatoes, but raw tomatoes gross me out.

**In my case, sex has a lot in common with my Thanksgiving feast, ha ha.

by

How should I title this blog post?

I can’t really remember what I wrote about yesterday, other than the fact that at one point I referred to being grateful and in a footnote admitted that my gratitude was probably worthless, like most of my other feelings.  I remember all that mainly because of the comment (and my persistently and perversely negative reply) about it.

Yeah, I was very tired yesterday.

I got better sleep last night (i.e., the one from which I most recently arose and started writing this post, today) than the night before.  That’s not saying a huge lot‒I still woke up slightly after two am‒but it feels significantly better.  I guess to a person who has eaten only a can of tuna a day for weeks, an ordinary bologna sandwich with potato chips on the side would seem a feast*.

There’s that gratitude stuff I mentioned yesterday again, though in a more general sense.

Speaking of yesterday, I’m sure readers noticed that I titled yesterday’s post just “Blog post for 11-18-2025, Tuesday”.  That is the format in which I name my blog posts as I save them when I write them.  It’s concise and specific, and could even be useful, in principle, to future archaeologists***.

It is not, of course, how I usually “headline” my blog posts here on the site.  Usually I’ll try to think of some pertinent phrase or play on words or quote that seems apposite****.  And of course on Thursdays I find a Shakespearean quote that seems vaguely pertinent and replace one of the words with some form of the word “blog”.  This is how the sausage is made, as they say.

But I wonder how my readers would like it if I just did perhaps every title but the ones on Thursday in that format I used yesterday.  Please do say; ink wiring minds want to know.

I’m serious (despite the weird wordplay).  Actually, I would be pleased to get most any kind of comments from more of you on a regular basis.  This blog is the vast majority of my personal interaction on almost any given day, apart from liking some posts on social media and occasionally adding a cynical comment.  Still, my request should be received like a broken barometer:  no pressure.

I suspect that the words in the footnotes of this post may so far outnumber those in the main body (though I’m not certain).  Somehow, that possibility makes me think of the “fact” that gut organisms outnumber all the human cells in a typical human by something like a factor of ten or so.  I’ll need to look that up to see if it’s true*****.

That’s not really important, though.  Actually, probably nothing in this post is particularly important, nor is anything in practically any other blog post I’ve written, nor in any other thing that I’ve written or otherwise created (with the exception of my children, who are important in and of themselves, quite apart even from their importance to me, which is very great indeed).

Of course, from the proper point of view, nothing is important.  And, similarly, from the proper point of view, everything is important.  But if everything is important, that is almost the same as saying that nothing is important.

Ah, whatevs.  I hope you all have a very nice day, whether it’s an important one or not.

*And since, surely, a feast is in the mouth of the consumer, then a feast it is.  This fact highlights the potential paucity of joy in a life where one can and does too readily indulge one’s appetites.  I think Aristotle and the Buddha would both have pertinent commentary on this matter, and so would Marcus Aurelius and his Stoic homies**.

**That might be a good name for a band.

***Such neo-Indiana Joneses will be exploring this part of the world of their past through digital digging rather than hunting through deserts and jungles and temples and tombs.  My blogs are stored digitally-only (as far as I know), in various places and formats, with some redundancy.  There are, on the other hand, physical versions of my fiction.

****I’m trying to think of a word that is the opposite of apposite but also contains the “-posite” ending, just for fun.  I think my sense of humor is rather similar to that of George Gamow.  Anyway, I haven’t thought of a good one yet, so I would welcome your suggestions.

*****Okay, I looked it up, and it turns out that the latest count that I could find among reliable outlets available on quite short notice, estimates the number of gut bacteria to be about 3.8 x 10^13, whereas their count/estimate of human cells in a typical person’s body is about 3.0 x 10^13.  That makes us only slightly outnumbered by our gut bacteria, contrary to popular understanding, of which I was one “victim”.  So, it’s 3.8/3, or 1.26666…, times as many bacterial as human cells.  That’s got to be closer to the ratio of footnote words to main body words in even the most pathologically footnoted****** of my blog posts.

******Like this one*******.

*******Although, even despite the many footnotes here and the relatively brief main body, the words in the footnotes are still outnumbered by those in the main body of this post.  Go ahead, check for yourself.

by

Blog post for 11-18-2025, Tuesday

Well, it’s Tuesday and I’m already exhausted after just one day of work for the week.  Mind you, it was a strange day at work, with people struck with family tragedies, people with personal catastrophes (such as a DUI), my coworker out sick, and all that sort of stuff.  The things that were/are not usual were manifold, and they are very unpleasant to me.

Also, I’ve had a dull, kind of pressure-like headache for the last perhaps 18 hours (with some lulls), and it feels almost like a “mini migraine”.  It certainly interferes with my mental acuity.  It may interfere with my writing; I can’t really tell.  If anyone notices anything regarding that, I would be grateful if you would let me know*.

I also feel a bit queasy, which goes along with the low-grade migraine notion.  I am going in to the office anyway, though.  First off, I don’t know if my coworker will still be out sick, and I don’t want to leave other people too much in the lurch.  In addition, if I get behind on things for one day, I’ll just have to catch up on things the next day, eliminating any potential benefit from resting for a day.

Also, let’s be real:  I don’t enjoy spending time at the house.  I need to rest there frequently‒longer than I actually do‒but it’s not pleasant for me.

Speaking of rest, I had a really bad sleep last night.  I mean, I didn’t sleep more than maybe half an hour before 3 this morning.  Then I dozed for a wee bit‒less than an hour.  But now I’m up, exhausted but not sleepy.

What am I doing?  Why am I doing it?  What is the point?  Why do I bother going on?  Is it just fear of death that prevents me from dying?  Or is it also the fear of hurting people who matter to me?

But if they love me, why would they want me to suffer?  I understand that there is nothing they can do for me, of course.  But then they should accept things they cannot change, not wish for some other person to endure without reward or with no assistance.

Actually, all these things, these wishes from other people, are in my head.  Very few people have said they want me not to die.

I don’t think that’s because all the other people do want me to die.  Most people are probably pretty much indifferent.  Most people don’t worry about other people much because they’re too busy imagining that other people are “worrying about” them.

But they aren’t.  It’s just not workable.  People think about other people, of course, and especially about their family and friends.  But they cannot think about them much.  I don’t know what the percentage is, but it’s hard enough trying to pay attention to oneself and one’s actions, to try to manage one’s days and nights, one’s work, one’s meals, one’s rest.

The percentage of time spent dwelling on other people instead of oneself cannot be very high in the double digits, if that.  This is not an indictment or a judgment.  I think it is literally just about all that people can do.

This is surely why narcissists are always so unhappy.  They can never get as much attention as they wish and imagine they deserve from other people.

We should all probably let go of our sense of entitlement.  The universe “promises” us all one thing and one thing only:  that everything, all this that exists around us, like ourselves, will end.  It may then begin again in some sense, but that doesn’t change the fact that it ended.  Just because there’s another sausage after the link, doesn’t mean the preceding sausage isn’t nevertheless gone.

Wow, that’s a weird analogy or metaphor:  The universe as one sausage in an endless chain of sausage links.

I guess it makes as much sense as many such metaphors, and more sense than some.  I don’t really know what point I was trying to make, if there was one, but at least it ought to be somewhat memorable.  That’s worth something, right?

I’m too tired to contemplate any more at the moment.  I’m going to finish this off now and call it good enough.  I hope you all have a good day (or rather, that each of you has a good day).

But in closing, a thought just occurred to me.  Remember, mushrooms are not vegetables.  As fungi, they are more closely related to your fish and your chicken and your beef (and you) than they are to corn and carrots and peas and potatoes.

Okay, that’s enough.  Please have a good day.

*My gratitude is probably utterly worthless, of course, like my sorrow and regret and disappointment, not to mention my love and my joy and my dreams.

by

“…like a ghastly rapid river, through the pale door…”

It’s Monday again.  It keeps doing this, starting a new work week, despite the demonstrated futility of everything.  You’d think that our culture had all read The Myth of Sisyphus as one and had decided to embrace that futility.

But, of course, embracing the absurd and working endlessly and finding happiness in that meaningless repetition is just what the exploiters‒whoever they may be‒would want you to do.  So maybe

But if so, it’s almost certainly an accidental one.

Even true “conspiracies” in the world (which are less common than you’d think) are, I suspect, rarely planned out ahead of time; they simply happen.  Some course or tendency exists that a few alert people, or just lucky people, recognize as something they can exploit for their own gain, and they do, and the process becomes self-reinforcing.  But no one thought it up.  It’s like the nonrandom survival of randomly varying replicators.  Reality is too complex for even very bright minds to create highly complicated and intricate conspiracies ahead of time.

I’ve written about all of this before, and frankly, I’m tired of discussing it right now.  If you’re interested, go find my earlier discussions, here and/or on Iterations of Zero.

Today, I’m not sure what to write about, though.  Nevertheless, I am writing.  I guess the Sisyphus reference comes all too naturally in such situations, doesn’t it?

I don’t really have much to discuss, now that I think about it.  I had a nice evening Friday, albeit too short of one, but otherwise, there’s nothing really going on.  At least, there’s nothing I know of in the world right now that’s of particular interest to me.

Despite the fact that I am coming off a full-length weekend, on which I had a nice Friday evening watching a few Doctor Who episodes with my youngest, I already feel very tired.  I think that’s probably not too related to broad corporeal processes‒though my chronic pain makes even stationary existence exhausting‒but probably has at least something to do with the waning length of daylight as we approach the Winter Solstice (still more than a month away).

I’m definitely a bit susceptible to seasonal affective effects, on top of my tendency toward difficult to treat dysthymia, which I now suspect has always been so difficult to treat because it’s related to my ASD.

Coincidentally‒but not surprisingly‒my first big and particularly recalcitrant depression happened not long after my ASD repair*.  It’s fairly common for patients to suffer from depressive syndromes after having had open heart surgery.  I didn’t know this at the time (I was only 18) but I experienced it firsthand, and I learned all about it later.

I even wrote a review paper about the neurologic side-effects of surgeries that involve heart-lung bypass.

Again, I’ve written about all this crap before; I’m sorry to rehash it.  Please feel free to go hunt down the various mentions of all this in my prior writing here and on IoZ.  If anyone finds any particularly interesting tidbits, feel free to share them and/or the links in the comments, so others might be able to find them more quickly than you did.

I know, I know‒no one is interested in any of that shit, no one is going to look it up, and no one is going to share it.  I’m being patently ridiculous.  But I feel that I must write something, since I’m writing at all.  Thankfully, I’m nearly at the target number of 701 words, so soon I’ll be able to draw this tediousness to a close, at least for today.  It’s too much to hope‒for you, for me, for everybody‒for this to be the last such post for anything other than tragic reasons.

Life is almost always disappointing, though if you don’t expect things‒as the Tao recommends‒you will not be disappointed.

Speaking of expectations not playing out, on the way toward the office this morning, I waited at an intersection where there is a right turn arrow that crosses what would be my route.  Before the walk signal turned, a car turned in front of me, as was appropriate.  Then the signal changed and I had the right of way, so I went.

As I half-expected, a car on its way in went to turn right and had to stop short to avoid plowing straight through me.  I took no evasive action, just muttered to myself, “Hit me, hit me, hit me…” as I walked along.  Alas, the driver did no such thing, so as I continued through the intersection, I looked back at the car and muttered, “Pussy.”

Of course, it was not the car’s fault.  Though capable of motion, it was a fundamentally inanimate object, with no arguable or even fanciful sense of agency.  Its shape made it clear that it was well over a decade old, and it certainly predated any AI drivership, even if it had been the right make and model for such things, which it was not.

It was the driver who was not willing to kill (or even just injure) a random pedestrian who was obeying traffic laws and signals.  I guess that’s actually commendable.

All right, that’s enough of this idiocy for now.  I hope you all had a good weekend and that you will have a truly exceptionally wonderful week‒and then that the exceptional wonderfulness becomes the norm, and all your future weeks become brilliant, but you never become complacent about it; you are always grateful and happy.

I would also like a unicorn pony.

*The heart one, not the neurodevelopmental disorder.  Acronyms really are a potentially treacherous form of data compression, aren’t they?