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Aleph naughts, alphabets, infinite libraries, decks of cards, and monkeys

It’s Tuesday, the thirteenth day of the month of June.

I was going to try to avoid any commentary about the number two today—it gets to be two much, sometimes—but I do just want to start by saying that, if you subtract the digits in today’s date, the difference is two.

You could also, if you’re leaving out the first two digits of the year, look at 6-13-23 and say, “To get six, first you take one three, then a second three, and there you have six”.  I know, depending on how you read it (e.g. one three plus two threes), you might actually come out with nine, but that’s the risk you take with numerological interpretations.

This should hopefully alert any who might be susceptible that they should not to give credence to numerology or any other similar detected “codes” in unrelated things, like the old Bible code nonsense and so on.  The fact is, if you’re looking for patterns, especially if you’re not too picky about what patterns you seek, you can almost always find some.  It can be fun, but don’t fool yourself into thinking that there actually was some hidden message in the text or the number in the first place.  It’s all, almost certainly, in the eye (and mind) of the beholder.

Don’t feel too bad if you have occasionally fallen for such things.  No less than Isaac Newton himself, among the mightiest of minds the planet has yet known, got sucked into the whole notion of looking for hidden messages in the Bible.

Now, admittedly, he didn’t have the background of genius predecessors that we have nowadays from whom to learn lessons about signal and noise.  And though he worked out far better ways to calculate pi (than Archimedes’s method of exhaustion) and similar matters using infinite series, it may not have occurred to him that, since pi was an infinite, non-repeating number, if one looked far enough, long enough, one could find any given finite sequence of numbers one might want within it.  And that, of course, can be converted into any given sequence of letters, or whatever, using whatever translational code or cypher one might want.

I’m pretty sure I’m correct about that, but please correct me if there’s a flaw in my reasoning.  There’s certainly a ceiling*.

It’s a bit like the wonderful “Library of Babel”, based on a short story by Jorge Luis Borges, in which the algorithm can generate every possible string of letters in the modern version of the Latin alphabet, (AKA the English alphabet).  Using the program, you can search for any expression possible in the library.  In principle, it encodes everything that could ever be written (up to a certain length), though they are not generated until you search.  In other words, every paragraph (or at least subparagraph) in this blog post is already, at least implicitly, written there.

Of course, the vast majority of what’s in there is utter gibberish, mere random collections of letters and spaces and so on that would mean nothing to anyone.  But it’s sobering to think sometimes that, in potential, everything that could possibly be written could be generated somewhere in that computer code.  Does that mean that it is, in a sense, already written?  I suppose if one is a mathematical Platonist, one would probably be forced to say that it is there, in a real, albeit fuzzy-ish, sense.

This is nothing new.  It’s like the old notion of an infinite number of monkeys writing on an infinite number of typewriters.  Eventually, not only will they produce the works of Shakespeare, but they will produce every possible work that could be produced by typing in this alphabet and associated characters.  Indeed, if there really is an infinite number of monkeys and typewriters, they will produce each possible work an infinite number of times—in fact, they already will have done so, and will continue to do so, over and over again (usually in different places by different monkeys) forever.

Still, the vast majority of what they produce will be gibberish.  You’d have to look for a long time to find a bit of writing that is even arguably coherent, and much longer if you sought something specific.

It’s a bit like the “level one multiverse” implicit in a spatially infinite universe in which in any given region there are only a finite (however large) number of possible quantum states:  everything possible will be instantiated not just somewhere, but an infinite number of times.

To think about such things in “smaller” terms:  if you have an infinite number of decks of cards (no jokers), and they are all shuffled—each random sorting being one of 52! (approximately 8.06581752 x 1067) possible orderings—there will still be only a finite number of ways to order them.  It’s a big number!  Don’t, get, me, wrong!  It’s BIG!  It’s so big you can know to a mathematical confidence much more than secure enough that you could comfortably bet your life on it** that if you shuffle a deck thoroughly it will be in an order that has never existed before in the world.

But the number of possible orderings of shuffled decks is no closer to infinity than is the number one.  So in an infinite collection of shuffled decks, every possible sorting will appear an infinite number of times.

In fact, if you think about it, every possible ordering will somewhere be sitting next to multiple iterations of identical orderings, somewhere in that infinite selection (say if you had your decks all floating in some 3-D matrix).  Depending on how many duplicates you want to find you may need to “look” farther and farther, but even if you want a huge number of duplicate shufflings next to each other, if the space of shuffles is infinite, and is sorted randomly, you will be able to find that group somewhere.

It may even be the case—and here I’m not on completely certain ground, so any mathematicians out there please give me some feedback—that you can find a “region” in which there are an infinite number of repeated shufflings “next to” each other.  How could this be possible, when the set of decks itself is only infinite?  Well, infinity is weird, and strange things happen when you’re contemplating it***.

Perhaps thinking of a similar but more straightforward notion might help.

Of all the integers, only every tenth one is a multiple of ten, so there should be only one out of ten integers that meet that criterion of being a multiple of ten, if you’re looking for them.  Yet, the number of multiples of ten is equal to the number of integers in total!  If you don’t believe me, just knock the final “zero” off each multiple of ten and take a look.  You will have reconstructed the original integers!  So in any infinity, you may be able to find an infinite subset—say all on one row if your infinity is grouped in rows and columns and levels—that meets any given criterion or criteria, depending on how you sort it.

This fact is part of what gives rise to the so-called “measure problem”, which I won’t address just now, but to which I have linked.

I could go on and on about this—almost by definition—but I don’t have any intention of writing an infinite blog post, even if such a thing were possible in a universe in which entropy is always increasing.  But it can be fun to think about arrangements of letters and numbers, and information, and signals versus noise.

Unfortunately, after thinking about it, one can sometimes find the ordinary bits of everyday life rather silly and pointless and even worthy of despair—“the pale deaths that men miscall their lives”.  Maybe that’s part of why some great mathematicians were psychologically troubled.  Gödel, for instance, starved to death because he wouldn’t eat any food not prepared by his wife; he feared being poisoned, and eventually she either got sick or died (I don’t recall which).

His logic doesn’t seem very good—if you’re avoiding dying by poison but thereby inevitably die of starvation when your wife can no longer cook for you, you’re clearly not protecting yourself, except perhaps from a painful poisoning death, instead gaining a comparatively peaceful death by starvation.

Anyway, they say genius and madness are related.  They would say that, wouldn’t they, since they understand neither state.  But you lot are much smarter than they are.  And therefore, I hope you have a good, albeit finite, day.

*Ba-dump-bump.

**And you bet your life on MUCH riskier things every day, numerous times per day, make no mistake about that.

***And we’re just discussing the “smallest” infinity, Aleph Number Alef 0 Cardinality Mathematics Infinity, PNG, 565x580px ... AKA “Aleph nought” or “Aleph zero” or “Aleph null”.  It’s the so-called “countable” infinity, meaning not that you really could count the whole thing, but you could at least get started and make progress, as in “1, 2, 3, 4,…”.  When you turn to, for instance, the infinity of “real” numbers, you can’t even start counting, because between any two non-identical, arbitrarily chosen real numbers, no matter how close they are to each other, there is an uncountable infinity of real numbers between them!

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This title has nothing to do with this post, other than the inevitable fact that it is the title of this post

It’s Monday again, and I’m using my laptop to write this post, after having used my phone all last week*.  It’s much faster and more natural for me to write on the laptop, of course, and it doesn’t tend to cause soreness in the base of my thumbs (since I hardly use them when I’m typing).  But of course, it has its disadvantages, too, the biggest being the computer’s weight.  Although it is a slender, small, 11 inch laptop, it’s still heavier than my smartphone—and I carry my smartphone with me even when I have my laptop.

Nevertheless, it’s not that heavy, and I would like to be in decent enough shape that simply carrying my laptop in my backpack along with other stuff makes no real difference.  If I ever mean to go on any long hikes, with a backpack full of clothes and supplies, I would hope the laptop would seem negligible.

Also, when I’m writing on the laptop, using Word, at least the autocorrect function of my phone doesn’t keep changing “its” to “it’s”.  I try to catch them all—like Pokémon, I guess, but much more irritating—but I’m not certain that I succeed.  It would be frustrating to find that I’d allowed a grammatical slip caused by the “smartphone” to go out when I was just using it out of laziness.  I guess it would be just deserts**, but still, I’d rather be hoist by my own petard for something I did myself, not something that was a poor consequence of an automatic, would-be spelling assistant.

Speaking of malfunctioning technology, I had a stressful morning yesterday.  I put my laundry in the washing machine, with soap and fabric softener as usual, and then…the machine didn’t turn on.  There was not so much as a flicker or blink of its lights.

I have to admit that I freaked out much more than was probably warranted, though I doubt that any outside observer would have been able to tell.  Evidently, my emotions don’t show much on my face, and apparently also not in my voice or my choice of words.  Inside my mind, I felt like I was going to rip into pieces from tension and stress.

Sunday is the only day of the week on which I do laundry, since it’s the only day of the week I’m certain to be at the house, and I’ve done it that way for years, now.  I also start my washing early, because I get up early, and the sooner I get it done, the sooner I can stop having to go out into the rest of the house where I might encounter my—perfectly pleasant—housemates and have to interact with them.

Anyway, I texted my former housemate and the owner each (knowing I would have to wait a while for their replies), while trying to brainstorm ideas for what might be the issue.  Of course, I checked (and reset) all the circuit breakers, and checked the locking mechanism on the machine, and all sorts of other obvious things.  I’m not sure any of that improved anything.  In the meantime I ordered a few new shirts and a new pair of pants and some underwear (I accidentally ordered the wrong size, though), and so on, just in case.

Meanwhile, faced with the prospect of not being able to do my laundry, I honestly wished that I would have a heart attack or a stroke or something like that, and that it would all become moot.

I didn’t, of course, have either of those things, as far as I can tell.  In the long run, between me and my former housemate and the landlord, texting back and forth in parallel conversations, I got the washer to work by stretching a very long combo of extension cords to an outside socket and doing what I think was a hard reset of the washing machine—after having left it unplugged for quite some time, starting it on rinse, then stopping, turning it up to “normal” wash while it was running.

Anyway, I got my laundry done, thank goodness.  I honestly think that, in my current state of semi-life, I would rather die than have to find a way to go and use a laundromat.  I’m not speaking hyperbolically, except perhaps in the mathematical sense in which I’m at the long tail of a hyperbolic function (such as y=1/x), asymptotically approaching zero.

Wouldn’t it be horrible to find oneself steadily and slowly getting closer and closer to zero, but at a slower and slower rate, so that actually to reach zero would literally take an infinite amount of time?  The horror of getting weaker and more depressed and more decrepit, and yet never being able to die, would be…well, quite obviously, a fate worse than death.  Of course, it’s entirely possible that such will be the fate of the universe itself on the longest of time scales, if the cosmological constant really is a constant and whatnot.  But that’s in a truly, very long time.  Hyperbole aside, I don’t imagine I’ll live long enough for that to be relevant, except as a matter of scientific curiosity.

Speaking of decrepitude, I’ve been trying to do some wider spaced pull-ups recently, rather than my usual, shoulder-width ones, because I thought it might help my back.  I think it actually may have been helping my back a bit, but unfortunately, an old injury to my left shoulder began acting up by the second iteration of those pull-ups, and has gotten worse, and that pain and soreness radiates down the whole arm in a sort of electrical feeling (not the good kind), reminiscent of “causalgia” which is a term that might not be in current use anymore.

In any case, this morning I went back to more usual width, but my shoulder is still acting up.  This isn’t too surprising; once triggered, that kind of thing can take a while to calm down.

In conclusion, my life is definitely not worth the effort.  It’s just a bad habit for me, at this point.  I don’t contribute anything of substance to anyone, probably not even to myself.  I’m stressed out to the point of near-suicidality by even minor things—like having to get up and go into the office.  But, as is often the case, bad habits are hard to break.  I mean to try, though.  I’ve been hoping for some way to wean myself off, and I still have hope for that, but I may need simply to go cold turkey***.

*Imagine what someone perhaps a century or so ago would have thought upon reading that sentence:  What?  You used your laptop to write something…a post?  And…sometimes you used a phone to write?  WHAT?

**There must be plenty of bakeries or ice cream shops or similar places that call themselves “Just Desserts”.  The sorts of people who make and sell sweets are definitely the sort to enjoy a nice pun.  I mean that as a compliment.

***Homer Simpson:  Mmmmm…turrrrkeyyy.

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Trying to be positive about meaninglessness, at least on other people’s behalf

For those of you who may not be reading this on the day it comes out, this post is being written on a Saturday morning.  I’m working today, of course, which is why I’m writing a blog post.  I don’t write blog posts on days when I don’t work, other than the occasional (very rare) brief notice I might put up when I’m out sick.  I do that in case anyone is worried about me.

It’s not that weird to think someone might be worried about me, at least if they’re an unusually kind person who worries and cares even about strangers (and rather pathetic ones, at that)

I had a middling day yesterday at the office, and there were some stressful moments that made me, as I often do, just feel that none of anything is worth the effort.  I encountered one of those situations, which seem to happen often, in which I had either to let someone flout the schedule (and my personal need for an officially scheduled break) for their own purposes or otherwise to feel like I’m being the “bad guy”, since in order to enforce the norms which we supposedly have in place, I have to be harsh.  In an office with so much noise and crap, even to be heard entails raising one’s voice, and to get people who aren’t particularly self-disciplined to respect other people’s concerns, you have to take harsh tones.

I don’t like being in either mode.

I had tried, earlier in the day, to do some meditation in my moments of relative inactivity, just to ease a bit of the tension I felt, which‒as is often the case‒was quite severe as the day began and things got moving.  The fact that it was Friday was of no benefit to my mood, unfortunately.  I work today, as you know, so it wasn’t the end of the work week for me.  But even when it is, the weekend is just a time for me to face how utterly alone and disengaged I am, to lie about in my room and try to pass the time by watching YouTube comedy or science videos, doing some reading, and just trying to avoid random noise and other inputs from the world.

I know; it’s all terribly exciting, isn’t it?  Anyway, of course I don’t particularly look forward to weekends, except to getting a break from the stress that interacting with people almost always brings.  I don’t have any casual and/or fun conversations except when I call my sister on the phone once a week.  I only sleep slightly longer on the weekends because I can take two Benadryl before bed, which I can’t do during the week, since it makes me groggy through the next day.  Even that just seems to let me sleep until about 5:30, and usually not without interruption.

Anyway, sorry, I know that’s all very boring.  Depression is boring, I guess.  It would be, of course.  That’s one of the things about it.  But I guess that I share at least some of this stuff about my life with the idea that maybe, just maybe, someone out there will have a brilliant solution, or some resource, or will be friends with some superhero who can come to the rescue of someone who doesn’t happen to be trapped in a literal burning building, but who is very much figuratively so trapped, and is unable to escape on his own.

Ah, well.  Hope is foolish, at least for a creature like me.  I should just get going and embrace the inevitable fire.  Once the superficial nerve endings go, burnt skin doesn’t feel direct pain anymore…though there are deeper nerves and other signals in the body that still sound the alarms of distress right until the very end, even when there is no point.  So, it’s not a good idea to burn yourself severely if you’re going to survive it.  Thus, my recommendation is to embrace it and let it complete its job.

At least, that’s my recommendation for me.  I don’t actually recommend to any of you that you do any such thing.  Frankly, I hope you all have decent lives, with good friends and families whom you love and who love you.  I hope you have jobs that aren’t too stressful but that pay you a decent wage and make you feel productive and useful.  I hope you have activities that you enjoy in your spare time, topics that interest you, and people with whom you can share your interests, if they’re the sorts of interests that can be shared.  Yes, it’s true that I don’t think there is any external meaning to the universe‒at least, I see no evidence or reason for there to be one‒but that’s fine, that’s whatever it is, it doesn’t really change anything.

You may think you couldn’t bear to live in a meaningless universe, but if the universe is meaningless, then you’ve been bearing living in a meaningless universe already, all your life.  Well done.

And if the universe does have some intrinsic and/or extrinsic meaning, but it’s not something any of us understands, that’s okay, too, because then you will have been living in that sort of universe all along.  Again, well done.

If, however, you think you know the meaning of the universe‒and, implicitly, that you know that it has such a meaning‒then I can’t quite give you as much of a “well done”, because I’m all but certain you’re delusional.  I could be wrong about that, and I’m open to evidence and reasoning on the subject, but my Bayesian priors are quite high (or low, depending on how you approach the question).

Still, even then, it’s hard to hold that against you, as long as you’re not using such delusions as an excuse to cause other people suffering or to take things that you have no credible right to have.  If you’re just doing what you can to muddle through, whatever your beliefs, and trying not to do damage if you can help it, well, that’s how this “life” thing is done, I guess.

Keep it up.

reaching-out

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How does one escape when one’s own mind is one’s persecutor?

Well, it’s Friday again, but since I’m working tomorrow, this won’t be the last blog post of this week‒unless some catastrophe happens and I’m unable to write and/or work tomorrow.  If something does happen, I hope it’s something that at least leaves me unconscious, possibly comatose, for however long it lasts.  It would be annoying to be stuck in a situation where I was, for instance, in great pain and unable to work, but still didn’t get any rest from myself.

I occasionally think about seeking out one of those experimental depression treatments, like ketamine or psilocybin or summat.  But I would be very nervous, especially about the psychedelic one.  I tend at times to have weird reactions, or at least unusual ones, to neuro-active substances, and as you may or may not have realized, my mind is not my friend.  I feel quite nervous that I would start a treatment like psilocybin and be stuck in a longish “bad trip”, which I know can literally last for hours and subjectively last interminably.

Of course, I frankly wouldn’t know where to seek out such a thing, anyway, and even if I did know, I don’t think I could force myself to go and seek it out, just on my own.  I can’t even work up the will to change the inner tube on the front tire of my bike.  I’ve been perusing electric scooters for weeks, but I’m no closer to buying one.  My ability to do anything other than my basic, daily routine is almost completely gone.

I can’t really foresee going on any trip, or doing anything fun on a weekend, such as seeing a movie, going to a bookstore, going to a restaurant, going to a zoo, or whatever.  Nothing is really any fun, anymore, anyway, so I have no motivation, no drive.  I wish I could just collapse, somehow.

I often think of the comic book version of Adam Warlock* who, when in distress, or after injury, or when needing healing or something, creates this cocoon around himself and just goes dormant for a long time.  I guess maybe some kind of sensory deprivation chamber might work like that, but again, I don’t even know where one would find such a thing near me, and I don’t think I would have the gumption to seek one out, anyway.

I don’t make things easy for myself, do I?  But then, who would make things easy for the person they most despise in the world?  It wouldn’t make sense.

I’m writing a bit slowly this morning, but that’s okay.  I always wait for a while at the bus stop, anyway, even when I leave “late”.  I would be terribly distressed if I left it to the point of barely getting to the bus on time.  That would make me feel horribly tense and uncomfortable and, frankly, angry at myself.

I always used to get to school more than an hour early, usually before most of the teachers.  That way I could just be in the place in silence for a while before anyone else showed up and began the cacophony.  Then the place at least felt, in some ways, like mine.

I do the same with work, now.  I can’t stand to arrive anything but quite early.  And I don’t like it much if other people get there too early as well, interfering with my time alone in the quiet.  But then again, I also hate when people show up late.  I really don’t make things easy, do I?  At least, the only person who suffers from all this is yours truly.  I mean, okay, occasionally I probably get grumpy, but since I don’t socialize much anyway, there are few consequences for anyone else.

For me, though, I start to feel tension build as the time approaches for the workday to begin, as people begin to arrive at the office, and they start to have conversations and interactions‒often talking to each other from clear across the room, rather than moving closer each to the others.  It’s horrible.  It’s like the shrieking of the damned, but they don’t even realize they are the damned, so it’s only other people they’re tormenting.

I’m being unfair, of course.  I am the weird one, obviously.  I am the odd one out.  No one else deserves recrimination for the fact that I’m always made uncomfortable by so many things other people do routinely without any malicious intent.

Of course, “deserves” is a silly, artificial, imaginary concept, like justice and goodness and law and money and civilization itself.  That doesn’t mean it’s all valueless, but it has no foundational, fundamental, inherent reality.

I wouldn’t say it’s a “language game”; that’s not really an accurate or useful description.  I like Yuval Noah Harari’s choice to call them all “fictions”, by which he doesn’t mean they are unreal‒a fictional story is, if you will, a real fictional story, after all, and though money is a fiction, its effects are immense‒but they are made up.  They don’t exist outside the minds of groups of humans and humanoids.

Anyway, as usual, I don’t know what point or points, if any, I might be trying to make.  I’m just writing because that’s what I do every working day.  I had thought for it to be a kind of therapy, hopefully helping treat or improve my dysthymia and depression, but I don’t think it’s doing that at all, and I’m sure many of you would concur.

Writing fiction seemed reliably to help my mood, which is consistent with Stephen King’s long-standing claim that his writing was, for him, the best therapy around.  It’s certainly ego-syntonic‒especially if, like Stephen King, you have other people who read and enjoy your work.

But I can’t seem to do that, anymore.  And I can’t seem to do music anymore, either.  I certainly haven’t fixed the E-string on the Strat.  My toe is steadily healing, at least.  It looks worse than it feels, but it is still sore.

Anyway, that’s all stuff and nonsense.  I’m at the bus stop, now, and not improving this post with further writing, so I’ll stop soon for today.  I’ll be here again tomorrow, and then Monday, then Tuesday, and so on and on, until something finally breaks me, or until‒much less likely‒some kind of epiphany or miracle happens and I get better, or perhaps I receive help from somewhere, somehow.  I don’t expect that to happen, however.  I could use it, I would probably welcome it, but it’s not going to happen based on my actions and initiative.  So I don’t have much hope for it.

Anyway, have a good weekend.

*I still haven’t seen the movie, yet, and I probably won’t go to the theater to see it, but will wait until it’s on Disney+, if I even watch it then.

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The wine of life is drawn, and the mere lees is left this vault to blog of.

Hello and good morning, all.  Though I suppose I should leave it up to each of your own individual intuitions and criteria about whether it really is a “good” morning, and indeed, what such a term even could mean.  But, really, it’s what they call “a polite nothing” I suppose, because it has no other purpose than being a ritual greeting.

Weird.

It’s June 8th.  In 10 days it will be “Fathers’ Day” (I’m not sure about the “official” placement of the apostrophe).  In 21 days it will be my wedding anniversary, so to speak; anyway, it will have been 32 years since I got married, and I will have been divorced for 2 years longer than I was married, which is a crappy, crappy milestone.  I’ve also already gone roughly 10 years without seeing my kids in person, which is getting close to being as long as I was a part of their lives.

What an utter waste of years and effort it has been for me to be alive since then.

I’m writing this on my phone still/again, at the house, before heading for the bus stop.  There’s not much going on so far today, except to note that I had an unusually bad sleep last night, even for me, so I’m starting the day already feeling exhausted.

As you may recall, yesterday I did not take any “antidepressant”, and I likewise have not taken any today.  I did feel less tense yesterday than I had the days before, and that was certainly a relief, but it’s the sort of thing that happens whenever I change something like that.  I had a brief elevation in my mood when I started the Wort, also.  I suspect it’s just a placebo effect, and/or a reverse version of the same.

Anyway, I can’t blame either starting or stopping the stuff for my sleep problems.  They were there before any meds and they’ll be there after them, probably for the rest of my life.  Hell, I wouldn’t be surprised if I were to keep having sleep problems after I die.

Well…yes, I would.  Both the fact of still having sleep problems and having the ability to be aware of them would be quite surprising to me after I’m dead.  In fact, the ability to be surprised would be quite a surprise after I’m dead.  It would certainly be intriguing, as would the fact of being capable of being intrigued.  In fact, it’s hard to see that, if one is capable of surprise or intrigue or any other emotion, one should actually be considered “dead” in any useful sense.

Of course, I don’t think any of that is possible, really.  I’m quite convinced (provisionally, as always) that death entails merely oblivion, which is one of the things that makes it so appealing.  Indeed, my “Bayesian Prior” on that is so high that I would, so to speak, be willing to bet my life on it.  Admittedly, that’s a cheap bet, from my point of view, but I don’t have any right to bet anyone else’s life, so it’s all I have, worthless and disgusting though it may be.

Almost none of the various antidepressants I’ve taken have ever seemed to help my sleep.  Tricyclics, Effexor, Trazodone, Wellbutrin, Celexa/Lexapro and most other SSRIs…they didn’t make it better and some made it worse.  Only Paxil seemed at least to make me enjoy sleeping, which had never happened to me before, but its other effects were not good.  One downside was that I gained a lot of weight, and that’s not good in someone like me, who is constitutionally prone to overweight and its related effects.  That wasn’t the only problem, either.

Anyway, I don’t know why, but my depression, after initially responding to meds and therapy, has become tougher to treat over the years.  I don’t know if this is partly related to my apparent ASD, or whatever form of atypical, non-human neurology I have, or to something about the nature of depression, or to these and other factors mixed together.

What’s more, I don’t think anyone else in the world could actually know, either.  At most, at best, hypotheses could be made and tested, by me and by other medical/scientific people.  But it’s simply a fact that “we”, meaning all consciousnesses of which any of us are actually aware, don’t know well enough the nature of the normal functioning of the brain, let alone the nature of things like depression, dysthymia, autism spectrum disorders, insomnia (or in fact what sleep really does at all levels) very deeply and/or causally.  It’s extremely complex, and not enough resources have been or are put into the study.

We do spend a lot of money on science, but still more on war, and on politics, and on sporting events and so on.  Actually, I don’t know which if any of those things receives a greater proportion of civilizational resources than science does, but it feels as though it would be nice to divert at least some of the resources away from such things and into science.  The advancement of science is something that can benefit everyone, current and subsequent, especially since, once the information is learned, is discovered, it can (in principle) be shared at vanishingly small cost, to the potential benefit of the whole planet and its future inhabitants.

Of course, the company Elsevier apparently owns many of the premier scientific journals‒it did not originate them, it just bought them and is now rent-seeking through them‒and it not only charges a frankly obscene amount for subscriptions, but it even charges scientists who want to publish in the journals.  That is, in a sense, an actual white-collar crime against humanity, against civilization.

Such people deserve to be strapped down onto tables and have one drop of liquid Drano applied to their skin every hour, or perhaps even just every day, or somewhere in between, until it finally dissolves them away enough for it to kill them.  They could be kept alive in the meantime, and suffering for as long as possible, by IV infusions and naso-gastric feeding.

It’s just a thought.  Probably, even if I were given the power and resources to do so without the risk of consequences for me, I wouldn’t actually torture such people.  They’re just monkeys doing what monkeys do, after all.  But I might take away all their wealth and make them work at subsistence level jobs for the rest of their days.  It’s not the worst punishment, maybe, but getting medical and scientific knowledge out of the control of such people would be the real goal.

Anyway, I’m going to need to head to the bus stop here in a moment.  I feel tired and grumpy, and I’m not looking forward to anything about today at all, not even to its end, since the end of each day is merely a prelude to the dismal cycle of the next day and the next and so on.

I never look forward to going to bed, because going to bed merely ushers in the beginning of the next dreary, worthless day, probably to be faced with too little, too fragmented sleep, and with ongoing pain, and without being around or with any of the people I love.  It’s not the sort of thing to which one would look forward with anything better than weary resignation, and often with frank horror and disgust…and sometimes, honestly, with something akin to terror.

What are you gonna do?  That’s life.  It’s not for the faint-hearted.  And I cannot, in good conscience, recommend it without significant caveats and reservations and misgivings.

TTFN

broken wine glasselectronic

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The General Relativity of life-threatening depression

There’s a moment in the movie version of Interview with the Vampire in which Lestat and Louis are sitting around a table and the latter is looking at a candle flame.  Lestat begins, “There’s nothing in the world now that doesn’t hold some…” and Louis finishes “…fascination.”

I used to be sort of like that, I think.  I’ve since become much more the opposite:  There’s nothing in the world now that doesn’t hold some irritation/frustration.

Of course, I can’t blame the world, especially not given my prior converse (or obverse or whatever the hell the proper term is) attitude.  The problem is clearly with the eye of the beholder, and more importantly, with the mind to which that eye is attached.  I know this.  But knowing it doesn’t change the fact that each waking moment‒and I have far too few non-waking moments‒is at least a minor form of torture.  And the only escape I get from my mind is in the precious few hours of interrupted sleep I have at night.  I need a better solution.

Speaking of that, as I said in my impromptu post yesterday afternoon, I haven’t taken anything for depression today (unless you count caffeine, which does have some benefit for depression, according to some studies).  The Wort wasn’t helping and may have been making things worse.  It’s far too early to notice any difference so far, but hopefully by the middle of the day to the afternoon, I might at least feel less tense.

As I said yesterday afternoon, a work situation got me so frustrated that I kicked my black Strat, briefly kind of hoping to break it*.  All that broke was the high E string, which needed changing, anyway.  I did, as part of the collateral chaos, break my PSP, which I had bought so I could play Pangya, but that’s no big loss.  I also really bruised my right big toe (not my left one, as I mistakenly wrote last night in my obviously quite severe mental confusion‒I don’t think I’ve ever confused my right foot for my left foot before) but I don’t think it’s probably broken.  It’s black and blue, but not as painful as I would expect it to be if it were broken.

That wasn’t the only frustrating thing at the office.  In the morning, I tried very hard to convince one of the office workers that they shouldn’t come to me and say “we need paper cups for the front”, because that’s just trivia, and it’s inaccurate and exaggerated.  After all, no one will die or even become ill without paper cups, and I don’t use them at all, so there’s no “we” in that situation from my point of view.  I just keep track of the cups and order them for the office when they get low.  In any case, the word “need”, in my perception, is usually manipulative.  I find myself reverting to my old Ayn Rand reading and thinking about the fact that each person’s need is their particular problem.  But I couldn’t get her just to ask for cups instead of proclaiming a need.  Next time I should just say, “I’ll alert the media.”

Anyway, it’s not as though I won’t keep providing and doling out cups as long as I’m around, and I was probably the rude one in that situation.  I just have a pet peeve about people not being able to ask for things directly and politely.  All this isn’t helped by my chronic pain and sleep deprivation and the horrible, high-pitched tinnitus in my right ear that’s been going on for 15+ years (objectively) or forever (subjectively).

I’ve also recently taken to burning several mosquito bites that have been really bothering me.  It’s been raining a fair amount lately, and it’s hot, so the mosquitoes are out and about in force, and I’ve always been particularly tasty to them, it seems.  Finally, I got so frustrated with all the itching** that, over the past few days, I’ve taken to holding the end of a paper clip briefly in a torch type lighter and then pressing it against a mosquito bite.  This worked in the past, when I tried it once, and it has seemed to help some, but it does tend to leave scars.

Two days ago, a combination of a bite on the back of my hand and the frustration of the noise and chaos of the office (and people just doing whatever they please, with no backup for me from the boss when I try to see if we can be more orderly and time-sensitive) led me to take that torch lighter and apply the flame semi-directly to my right hand.  It lasted only an instant, and it hurt less than the metal does‒which makes some sense, given how metal conducts heat‒but it did raise a nice blister.

However, though it has since spontaneously drained, that blister seems less inflamed and quite a bit more superficial than the other marks.  Frankly, it doesn’t look as bad as the copious other plain, unburned mosquito bites, which are scabbed and inflamed and still itchy.

I also had/have a headache and some slight wooziness from literally banging my head against a wall and a door at various times out of frustration.

Why am I telling you all this?  I’m trying to give some hint as to how distressed I am.  I think maybe my sardonic, sarcastic, jokey style makes people think I’m not being serious about some things about which I am, in fact, deadly serious.  It’s my own fault, obviously‒my own need, you might say‒so I’m trying, in my own weird, absurd, idiotic way, to be more effective in my metaphorical screaming.

Because one thing that’s clear from my own point of view, anyway, is that I am spiraling closer and closer to the pitch-black event horizon, and my orbit is getting faster and is more chaotic, and I’m starting to be torn apart, and will soon “spaghettify” if I can’t break out of this gravity well.  But, as is the case with real black holes in general relativity, “distant” observers can’t see the local happenings well or at all, as my apparent time slows and my radiated light is redshifted out of existence.  I don’t know if that’s ironic or appropriate or what.

Today is payroll day, which is always extra stressful.  I guess we’ll see if the lack of antidepressant makes a difference, for better or for worse.

I honestly half expect each blog post to be my last‒the final photon that’s just barely able to clear the gravity well and get out into the universe, perhaps to be detected by someone who might recognize it for what it is…but probably not.  It’s a big cosmos, and it’s mostly empty and getting bigger and emptier by the instant.  But I continue to remain, against all possible use or benefit to anyone, least of all to me.

I’m an idiot.  I ought to give up and go.  It’s not worth the effort to resist gravity.  But it’s also so hard to fight the dumbass biological drives and the moronic, faint delusion of potential hope that somehow, something or someone might rescue me.

With any luck, something will take it all out of my hands.  I try to arrange such things when I can.  I guess I haven’t tried hard enough yet, but if I keep trying, sooner or later something will nudge me over the horizon.  Or, less likely, something will pull me away from it.

Whatever.  Who the fuck cares?

*I was overwhelmed at baseline anyway.  I had earplugs in my ears and wore tinted reading glasses even indoors to try to blunt all the sensory input, but it didn’t make much difference.

**I scratch until I bleed and scab, and unfortunately, topical stuff doesn’t seem to be helping the itch, even stuff with lidocaine in it.

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I think I’m going to stop my antidepressant

It’s not working.  I don’t feel any less depressed or less stressed or less unable to tolerate the noise and chaos and other nonsense.  I very briefly had a lift in my mood–for about a few days–but I now strongly suspect that to have been a placebo effect.  Perhaps all that I’ve ever gained, such as it is, from antidepressants of any type or brand or what have you has all been placebo.  Anyway, it’s not like I feel any less like I want to die than I did whatever it was, six weeks or so ago, when I restarted.  If anything, I’m just spiraling farther downward.  So, I think I’m going to call it a failure, like most things I attempt, and just see what happens.

I kicked my black Strat in frustration today, but all I did was break a string (and bruised my left big toe), and broke the nearby retro PSP that I had.  Oh, well.  I feel like shit.  I feel tighter than any string of any guitar or cello or whatever.  I think I just need to go away, completely.  No one can do anything to help me, it seems, and I’m not able to help myself.  I’m just an unpleasant presence much of the time.  And I can’t sleep.  And I’m losing almost all of what little joy or interest I’ve had in anything.  I probably ought to take a dirt vacation*.

I don’t know what to do.  I don’t know how to do anything that would have any benefit whatsoever, to anyone at all.

Oh, by the way, I despise the new WordPress block editor functions that interfere with doing things the way one used to do it.  I’ve been paying for this domain and use for years, and for my other one that I almost never use.  I’m sick of things being changed when they were working fine.  It’s one thing to add functionality, to make more things available, but don’t do things that interfere with prior functionality that people were using, and for which they were paying.  That’s my message to WordPress.

Anyway, that’s completely an aside.  It’s just one of a seemingly limitless number of things that frustrate and stress me out.  Obviously, the problem is mainly just me.  And I don’t have very many options for what to do to solve that problem.  I’ve tried many things in the past, and obviously none have done very much.  I’m trying to eat right and exercise, I don’t have a drug or alcohol problem (unfortunately), I’m just a fucked up, faulty machine.  And I’m tired of it.  But the St John’s Wort isn’t helping so far.  And it may be making me more tense.  So I think I’m probably not going to take any more starting tomorrow.  And we’ll see how that makes me feel.

Honestly, I wish something would just kill me, preferably painlessly–or if painfully, maybe something prolonged so that maybe I’d get a chance to say goodbye to my kids, if they wanted.

Whatever.

*That’s like a dirt nap, but even longer.

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Picked over by the worms and weird fishes

It’s Tuesday, and though it’s merely a pair of otherwise unrelated homophones, I like to think of ways in which Tuesday might be related to a “two’s” day.  So, here we go.

Well, it’s June sixth, the 6th day of the 6th month, so there are two sixes right there.  And 6 is an even number, so that’s always a multiple of two.  And, indeed, six is the product of the first two prime numbers (2 and 3), which provides extra fun.  The year, of course, has 2 twos in it:  2023.  However, that second part “23” kind of adds a third 6 to the day, which is a tad irritating, and slightly spoils the symmetry of the date.  Oh, well.  The world is almost never satisfying.

I’m writing on my smartphone again, today, because I thought yesterday’s writing went okay, and it’s nice to have a continuing break from carrying my laptop.  I’m sure that, before too long, I’ll wobble in the other direction like a poorly damped spring, and go back to using the laptop.  I guess it doesn’t matter.  Nothing matters.  Not just “nothing really matters” like in Bohemian Rhapsody, but nothing matters at all.  Full stop.

The logic of that conclusion is sort of similar to what I used in my video in which I stated that there is no life in the universe.  Of course, if one is splitting hairs, I will be the first to concede that the difference between truly zero life and a tiny, unnoticeably small amount of life is more glaring‒it’s a categorical difference‒than the difference between a tiny amount of life and a significant amount of life‒which is just a difference of degree, not of type.  But that’s all in how you look at it; again, “see” my video*.

Life is frustrating, and for me at least, there are very few compensations that counterbalance the frustration anymore.  Even the increasing success of the office lately means, for me, more work, with more sales to process and record, more new people coming and going on whom I have to keep records and process payroll, and more chaos in the office because of more different voices and noises, on top of the “music” that’s constantly playing, supposedly so people don’t get distracted by their coworkers’ phone conversations.

But how do they not get utterly distracted simply by the level and incoherence of the noise, the lion’s share of which comes from the effing “music”?

Also, with more and more people, there is always a greater chance that every day someone will have a sale that overflows into lunch time or past the official end of the day.  I hate that.  I don’t get to “go home for lunch” in any case, since I live more than 30 miles from the office and don’t have a car, so I’m sort of a natural resource, and people take advantage without even thinking about it.  But I need my mental breaks, and my break from the noise, and my chance to rest my back.

Also, quite apart from that, I simply hate people not following the clearly promulgated (but lamentably not enforced!) schedule.  People come in late, then they stay late, as if it doesn’t even occur to them how their actions might affect other people (which it probably doesn’t).  It’s reprehensible.

This issue, or this suite of issues, is not unique to my workplace; it’s horribly common in the human world.  But at least in some places there are consequences for people being lax about hours and timing‒there are penalties of one kind or another.  The only penalty in our office is my anger and frustration, which I do express, but which is not really seriously backed up by the boss, and so the only potential serious consequence is that, one of these days I’m going just to douse my desk and myself with lighter fluid and set it all on fire.  Or else I’ll do something else that’s similarly destructive and self-destructive.  Many’s the time I have contemplated smashing my black Strat guitar to bits.  And this is just counting yesterday**.

At least when people work late or run late in medical settings, it’s usually because illness and injury (and the treatment thereof) don’t follow schedules; things take as long as they take.  Also, I’ve never been in a hospital‒indeed, in any of the various other industries in which I’ve worked‒in which people thought they needed to have constant, loud, background “music” to be able to do their jobs (not counting pit orchestras, in which one makes the “background” music).

It’s pathetic.  I don’t endorse it or approve or agree that it’s a valid point or claim that it needs to be there.  At worst, it’s a way for people to be able to feel more comfortable saying things they wouldn’t want anyone else to hear, possibly exaggerating the characteristics of what they’re selling‒which is stupid, because customers soon find out the specifics and, if they are not what they were told they were, they can just chargeback.  And they do.  Often they do it within the same day.

Anyway, sorry about the rants and complaints.  Life‒indeed, the simple fact of being alive‒is very stressful to me.  I’m sure that I need psychological and/or even medical/psychiatric help, but it’s not readily available, and I’m not capable of proactively seeking it out.  Maybe I was better at looking after myself in the past, but I’ve never been very good at it.  So I just trudge along, unable simply to stop out of embarrassment and confusion and inertia and simply my tendency to be strongly bound by my routines.  One example of which is writing this blog every workday morning.

Ugh.  I’m sick of this life and I’m sick of this world.  I look forward to the time when, like the protagonist of the Radiohead song Weird Fishes/Arpeggi, I hit the bottom and escape…escape.  Yeah.

*Really, you can just listen.  The visual is just…video of me talking.  People seem to like videos of people talking; there are 8 trillion and two of them uploaded to YouTube on any given day, but most throw in little pop-up graphics to give the viewer some distraction from simply watching a person talking.  I guess that’s analogous to slides in a lecture, or more recently, PowerPoint stuff.  It is weird how people learn, if they learn, and I don’t exclude myself.  The vast majority of the material in my college and med school notebooks were elaborate doodles and drawings I made during lectures.  I wish I still had my old notebooks.  Some of the drawings weren’t bad.  Most were grim and dark (since I was the one who drew them) but a few were funny.  For instance, during a lecture in which we were being taught about the lactiferous ducts, I drew a picture of a lactiferous duck‒imagine a cartoon waterfowl equivalent of a Saint Bernard rescue dog, but with a bottle of milk around its neck rather than a cask of booze.  It made my friend, who was sitting next to me, chuckle.

**That’s jokey, of course, but it’s also true.  I often feel like I want to hurt or damage something, but I don’t have the right to hurt or damage other people (generally speaking), and anyway, I hate myself most of all, so my inclination is to break my own stuff and hurt myself.  And there’s only so much stuff I can break and destroy anymore, so mainly I hurt myself in one way or another.

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Blue, blue glass moon-day, under the crimson air

It’s Monday, June 5th, 2023.  As a mathematical necessity, given the ordinal numbering system of the days of the month, and the number of days in a week, this is the first Monday of June.  I hope it’s proud of itself.

I’m writing this post on my phone, today.  I didn’t take my laptop with me when I left the office on Friday, because I still felt pretty physically wiped out, and just didn’t want to carry anything unnecessary.  In the morning, I considered bringing a guitar book back to the house with me, and the chord sheets for a a few songs, but as the day went on and the weekend approached, I laughed an evil, sardonic, cynical, maniacal laugh at myself*.  Did I really think that I would actually pick up and play any instrument this weekend?  How naïve!

Well, my cynicism was correct, to no one’s real surprise.  I didn’t even touch a guitar or the cello, and I only touched the keyboard (the musical one) when I was using it to rest my folded laundry.  This is despite the fact that, after a heavy storm on Saturday morning, for most of the weekend, the internet and cable were down.  It came back up a few times then would go back down, then would be down for many hours, then would come back up for a brief while, then go back down for several hours.  I’m not sure what the nature of the issue was, but it certainly highlights the fact that I’ve become too dependent upon cable and internet.

Fortunately, I have some other resources.  I still have actual, physical books, in addition to the hundreds of Kindle books in my Kindle library.  I chose the former most of the time this weekend, though really it was just manga** that I read.  I thought about picking up my new, paperback edition of Susan Kay’s Phantom, which is, in a sense, the greatest fanfiction I’ve ever encountered, telling the life story of Erik,  the Phantom of the Opera.  But that book is tragic and sad, so I didn’t.  My mood is too fragile as it is.

Anyway, in addition to watching a few DVD episodes of QI, I did read some manga, though I had to put on my stronger reading glasses to follow the not-self-illuminated pages.  This is an interesting realization, the fact that reading things on Kindle probably partly disguises, or compensates for, the progression of far-sightedness as my eyes age.

When the ciliary muscles of the eye are relaxed, the lens is focused “at infinity” more or less, meaning truly parallel light rays will be focused on the retina***.  To focus nearer requires deliberate deforming of the lens by the ciliary muscles, but the lens gets stiffer as we age‒as do many other parts of the body‒and so it becomes more and more difficult to focus nearby.

Now, I always had better-than-normal distant vision and good near vision, but now my near vision is diminishing, and no one has invented Retinox 1 even, let alone Retinox 5.  So, like Admiral Kirk, I must use reading glasses.  Unlike the admirable admiral, I like the glasses, though I don’t enjoy the visual issues that force me to wear them, and I also don’t like the drying eyes I’ve been developing over recent years.

That drying tendency is probably inflammatory in nature, though that’s just a rough guess.  I could go see a doctor about it, but I have no primary doctor (nor secondary, tertiary, or any other level of doctor), and no insurance, and it’s not the sort of thing urgent care centers handle.

Anyway, I’m not especially interested in taking care of my health, except to the extent of wanting to feel slightly less pain and fatigue when I can.  I do hate myself, yes, but I still have to experience all the ailments and discomforts of my hated self, and pain gets old very fast.  And then it stays old, even after twenty years.  That’s the nature of pain, and there are good, sound, biological reasons for that, but the goodness and the soundness of the reasons don’t make it suck any less.

I’m going to need to head out to the bus here in a moment‒no Uber or Lyft, today, those are too expensive to be frequent indulgences.  As expected, I’ve written fewer words in the time I’ve taken to do this than I would have done on my laptop, but that’s probably a boon, not a bug.  Let me know, if you have a recognized preference, whether you like my phone blogs or my laptop blogs better…i.e., whether you like them slightly longer or about this length.

Also, I hope you all had a good weekend and that you have a good week.

*”Ha ha,” I said.  “Ha ha.”

**Mieruko chan, of which I have only the first 4 volumes in hard copy, and then the first volume of Tsukihime (which means moon princess, and involves vampires, both good and bad, but in a much more original way than most western presentations, including my own).

***So don’t ever shine a laser, even a weak one, at your or anyone else’s eye, unless you intend to destroy permanently at least part of their/your vision.

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How to Lyft oneself Uber a growing population of frogs and pipe dreams

I’m writing at the train station in Hollywood (Florida, that is) this morning, and then on the train itself, because I decided to take a Lyft to the station before even starting to write.  I used one yesterday morning, but only after the initial draft of the blog post had been written.  I just feel too worn down from this URI to want to bother with the bus, and in fact, if not for the Lyft, I might not have gone in to work yesterday or today.  Thankfully, I should have this weekend completely off, since it is my coworker’s second weekend, making up for the two weekends I took in a row.

Further bulletins as events warrant.

I have to admit, I find those ride apps—Uber and Lyft—rather useful.  I’m not going to make a habit of using them; that would just end up being way too expensive.  But it is nice to have the convenience when I’m not feeling well.  I wish I had tried them before, about three or four weeks ago, because I had been thinking about going to see Guardians of the Galaxy 3 in the theater, but my bike tire had gone flat and I was having trouble with my back whenever I rode it, in any case.  I was feeling pretty discouraged that weekend, and ended up just saying to heck with it, but if I’d been familiar with Uber or Lyft, I might have used one.

You may ask why I couldn’t just go see the movie this weekend, but that urge has more or less passed.  Also, I’ve gone back on a more restrictive food regimen, so I wouldn’t be able to eat popcorn, which was something I anticipated if I went to the theater.  Now I wouldn’t eat any, and that would remove a large part of my enjoyment of the theater, a part which might have overbalanced the discomfort of being alone in a theater surrounded by so many people.  As it is, now, since my initial urge to see the film soon (largely due to the presence of Adam Warlock) has more or less passed, I’ll probably just wait for it to come to Disney+.

It would be nice if I had a good enough metabolism and/or had been able to maintain better fitness habits over time (my back injury/surgery/failure to completely recover has gotten in the way of that a lot).  Then, I wouldn’t have needed to worry about eating popcorn.

Unfortunately, I’m afraid I need to minimize such things not merely for long-term health—about which I have little concern, since in the long term I expect to be dead—but about moment to moment health.  As someone who already feels pretty bad psychologically a lot of the time, I don’t need the added physical weariness and discomfort that comes almost immediately if I eat the wrong things nowadays.

On a more positive note:  I saw a frog (possibly two frogs) this morning.  Indeed, one of them hopped into my room as I was returning from taking out the garbage, and I had to usher it back out as carefully as I could.  This may not seem like much of an event, but it’s nice to me.

Back when I was little, and we used to come to Florida to visit my mother’s parents, after many big rains there would be oodles of frogs and toads out.  We would sometimes try to catch them, and if we did, they would pee in our hands, which was both gross and hilarious when I was a young child, though I imagine it was terrifying for the poor amphibian, which probably thought it was about to be eaten.

Also, when we first moved down to Florida—that’s my now-ex-wife and my then-few-month-old son and I—when we first stopped in a motel in central Florida for the night, it was raining and there was a veritable biblical inundation of frogs of various sizes.  The motel didn’t have those flap things at the bottoms of the doors, and smaller frogs actually came into the room through the gap.  That didn’t bother us.  We thought it was funny and kind of cool to be moving to such a place.

Well, my son probably had no thoughts about it one way or the other.

However, over the intervening years, frog numbers appear to have drastically reduced.  I am under the impression that there was some form of blight or other that hit many frog populations worldwide, though I don’t recall the source of that impression.  In any case, something seemed to have happened to the frogs in Florida, because for many years now, even after a significant rain, there have been none to be seen.

For all I know, the frog I saw this morning may be the last I will ever see in south Florida—though I thought I saw another one as I rolled the garbage out, hopping to get away from me—but I would like for them to be making a comeback.  I am a fan of most insectivores, especially ones that eat things like mosquitoes and flies and—during swarming times—termites.  Of course, there are various lizards and birds that also eat such things, but they don’t seem to be as assertive about their jobs as the frogs and toads are.

Anyway, that’s all a lot of silliness.  It’s an okay way to end the week, though.  Maybe I’ll play a little guitar if I get to the office early enough.  I did a tiny bit of strumming yesterday, when I had some morning free time, though I didn’t know The Man Who Sold the World well enough to be able to appreciate fully the chord progressions as I played them.  They definitely had the David Bowie flair for interesting changes and sounds.

I have not thought about a tune for my dreary little poem from the other day, nor even reread it.  Maybe it would be funny to give it a jaunty, happy, major key tune of some kind.  As I think I’ve said before, I enjoy irony.

Probably nothing will come of it.  It’s not as though I’ve done any more work on the song of which I did a demo on YouTube—I had called it Mercury Lamp based on the inspiration for the song, but I think now I would call it Hollow Doll.  And though I like the tune and stuff for Come Back Again, the trial arrangement and mixing/recording I did was blurry and muddled, and I think it could use some lead guitar.

Again, though, this is all a collection of pipe dreams—or guitar dreams, I guess, though “pipes” can refer to someone’s voice, and I do sing on the songs, so maybe the original term is okay.  Come to think of it, A Collection of Pipe Dreams* might be a good name for an album.  It could be a follow-up to a first album called Iterations of Zero after the title of my other, now more or less unused, blog.

I must be sicker than I thought to be entertaining such things.  Well, it’s a bit of fun to imagine them, at least.

I hope you all have a good first weekend of June.

*Or even A Collection of Guitar Dreams