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Doom’d for a certain term to blog the night and, for the day, confin’d to fast in fires

Hello and good morning.

It’s Thursday, the 20th of April in 2023 (AD or CE, whichever you prefer), and so, here I am at the bus stop, writing my usual blog post.  It’s very exciting, isn’t it?  You can almost feel that paint drying!

I think there is a certain subgroup of people who celebrate this as “420” day, a reference to marijuana, though the origins of that reference are unclear to me*.  Though I find it silly, I guess such a day may as well exist.  There are holidays for every other stupid thing in the world, from various kinds of foods and snacks to alcoholic beverages and all sorts of other things.  I doubt there is a heroin day, but if I were to find out there is, I wouldn’t be surprised.  And, of course, there are geeky, nerdy holidays for people like me, such as Pi Day** and Star Wars Day***.

Much more importantly, it’s my son’s birthday, as I mentioned yesterday.  I sent him a present, of course, though it’s not particularly clever, because honestly, I don’t know what he’s into now or what he would like.  It’s been more than ten years since I’ve seen him in person or even heard his voice.

I’ve sent presents in the past (that’s not an intentional play on words) that matched what I knew his long-term interests were, and they apparently went over well.  But I’ve pretty much emptied my quiver on that front, at least for now, without simply rehashing things I’ve already sent, which seems lamer than sending something broad and generic, at least to me.  But what do I know?  I’m terrible at things like this.

I’m also terrible at things like just getting people to keep wanting to be around me for long.  People don’t end up hating me or anything, at least as far as I can tell; they just don’t ever stick too close to me for very long.  And, of course, I’ve screwed up everything in my life with respect to my children (and their mother) and my career and all that other stuff.

I’m quite good at useless things like teaching myself how to draw and to compose and play music and writing books that almost no one will ever read, and understanding complicated ideas of physics and math and biology and astronomy and medicine and all that stuff.  But regarding the things that have really, deeply mattered to me—being a good son, a good friend, a good husband, a good father—I’ve almost uniformly failed.

The fault is almost certainly all mine.  At the very least, it’s my fault in the sense that “I am a faulty machine”.  There’s definitely some fundamental flaw—and nothing limits the count to only one such flaw—in the way I try to live with the people I love the most, because at various times I’ve lost relationships with my parents, with my wife, with my kids, with friends, all that.  And I’m not the sort of person who can just pick up and restart his life, a so-called new life, with new people.

Even if I were such a person, given my track record, why would I be willing to submit to the risk with new people?  That would definitely be a masochistic choice.

All of my old friends are quite far away, and even with the use of social media, I’m not good at doing long-distance friendships very well.  I don’t quite even know what the protocols are, and I always feel awkward**** about intruding on the lives of other people at any level.  I’ve tended to make my friends in school and university and at work, from among people who had similar interests and tastes and so forth to me, and who were nearby.

I’ve been very lucky in the friends I made in middle-school to high school and in university.  But once I was married, and of course, going to med school and all that, my focus was on those closest by, as it tends to be.  I put a lot of effort into my marriage and my career, which makes sense, of course, and until my own health deteriorated because of my back injury, I handled it pretty well.

But I certainly couldn’t maintain any kind of extended social circle.  That’s not how I’m designed, it seems.  Thankfully, my wife’s family were always very welcoming and warm, and my own extended family has always been wonderful, and my wife had friends with whom we socialized.  But my family is a long way away now—those that remain—and when my wife divorced me, I couldn’t exactly maintain close ties with her family, though they were important to me.  Their loyalty belongs to her, not to me, which makes perfect sense.

Anyway, sorry about all that trivia.  I just feel the emptiness of life particularly strongly today, which is probably understandable.  I have a notion of a metaphorical creature or situation that matches the sense of how I feel and am, but I can’t quite grasp it and put it into words, because I can’t quite think of the life form that fits.  Maybe I’m like a wandering, free-living amoeba that used to be—and ought to be—part of a slime mold?

No, that doesn’t quite work, nor does it really make sense.

I was trying to think of a metaphorical herd animal or pack animal that got separated from its group—a deer, a wolf, a lion, an impala—or maybe an ant or a bee or a termite separated from its swarm, or whatever.  But of course, it’s really just that I’m a simulacrum of a human, a replicant, who is inherently separate from the humans to whom he was supposed to be assigned, still living in a parallel “space” so to speak, but unable to interact directly; and they certainly don’t seem to grok me.

It’s almost like a Star Trek episode, isn’t it?  Or maybe it’s like an X-files or a Supernatural or something:  there’s a poltergeist that’s terrifying or at least horrifying to people, that they want to avoid it or if necessary eliminate it, even though the entity causing the weirdness doesn’t mean any harm.

I wish there were someone who could exorcise me and send me on to the next plane or—better yet—to peaceful oblivion.  But, of course, even more so, I wish that I were able to be part of my kids’ lives, to spend time with them, to be close to them, and to have friends around me, and not to be in pain every day.

While I’m at it, I might as well ask for a pony and for world peace and harmony.

Enough of this.  I’m sorry to subject you all to my morosity.  Then again, no one’s forcing you to read it, I guess*****.  I hope, after reading this post, your day improves.  It’s unlikely to go downhill from here, right?  That, at the very least, is something I can offer you in my daily blog posts:  once you’ve hit rock bottom (i.e. by reading this) the only way to go is up.

TTFN

hamlet and dad

*And, to be fair, I don’t care enough to look into it very vigorously.

**March 14th, because in the US date system it shows up as 3-14.  Seven years ago, it would have been 3-14-16, which would have been especially good, though I don’t recall noting it at the time.

***“May the 4th be with you,” in case you don’t know.  It’s a stretch, but it’s doubly nerdy because of the pun.

****I think it’s particularly appropriate the the spelling of the word “awkward” is so awkward.  W-K-W?  What a peculiar progression of letters!

*****Though I am very, deeply grateful to you for doing so.

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“Ashes and dust and thirst there is, and pits, pits, pits.”

I’m at the bus stop today, because I didn’t feel up to riding the bike this morning.  I almost didn’t feel like riding the bike back from the train station at the end of the day, yesterday, even though that would have meant leaving it in the proven-to-be-unsafe location of the station.  I wouldn’t have worried about that too much, though.  I’ve got two thick cables and a U-lock securing it when it’s there, including one threading through the seat, so vandalism seems more likely than theft.

I did end up riding back to the house last night, but I just didn’t want to ride this morning.  I’m feeling some extra strain and pain in my hips and lower back that may be from riding, and I also just feel like I’m not up to the intensity of exertion it entails.  Walking is more my speed at the moment, and it’s cool enough out—for south Florida, anyway—that certainly the walk to the bus stop isn’t bad.

I may walk back from the train station today rather than take the bus, depending on how I feel.  I know I’ve written before about how much time it uses up, but it’s not as though I do anything better with my time than walk.  Honestly, if I could just avoid my feet feeling sore so often, I’d be fine with walking every day, everywhere.

I didn’t just feel tired yesterday afternoon.  I also felt extremely—I don’t know…stressed, anxious, tense, some word along those lines?  All afternoon, I felt as if I were going to fly apart.  I don’t mean I felt as though I would explode in anger, just perhaps that I might collapse into a ball or something.  I told my coworker, quietly, amidst another conversation, that I felt like I was going to have a nervous breakdown.  I know this is sort of a vague and antiquated term, but it seemed to capture what I felt.  My mind (and body) felt on the verge of shaking apart at the seams.

I still feel like that this morning, though not to as high a level, and it’s probably the main reason I didn’t want to ride my bike.  I also just feel fatigued, mentally and physically.  I’m even sort of out of breath, though that’s mainly a subjective feeling.  I just feel uncomfortable.

I’m very tired of all these negative feelings all the time, but I can’t seem to find many positive ones.  It might help if I had a pet, but I don’t have the wherewithal to take care of a dog because of my schedule, and I’m quite allergic to cats, so that’s not going to work.  I’ve already had the long experience of having a cat, and I had to take allergy meds and decongestants every day for seventeen years.  When I first got the cat, I didn’t know I was allergic, and once I had her, I wasn’t going to get rid of her.  But I can’t put myself in that position again.

Plus, honestly, I can barely take care of myself, and that meager ability is deteriorating day by day.  I don’t have any business trying to bring in and care for any other life form.

Oh, by the way, I didn’t realize it at the time, but yesterday was apparently Adult Autism Awareness Day, though I have no idea in what way it’s celebrated or promulgated or whatever.  Certainly in Florida there are no clear public health resources or supports of any kind for anyone with any kind of chronic, neurodevelopmental issues.

They will happily put you in prison, though.  Our benighted governor even jokes about putting another one of these prisons—as if we were not already overflowing with the shit-holes—on land near where Disney World is, as part of his process of antagonizing and threatening the state’s biggest employer and single biggest bringer of money into the state.  This is in response to the corporation merely making a public statement—you know, exercising a First Amendment right, that thing that even corporations can do, and which the Supreme Court said is why it’s okay for corporations and such to spend oodles of money in support of specific candidates, because that’s a form of speech, and is protected by the First Amendment.

He’s just so interested in the needs and concerns of the people of Florida.  He’s plainly trying to make himself attractive to the hardcore Trump supporters in case he has a run for President, and he’s perfectly willing to sacrifice the interests of the state for which he ran for governor, and to which he has sworn allegiance, willingly, voluntarily, to do it.  These are not the actions of an honorable man (unless I’m reading the situation incorrectly).

So, he fits right in in Tallahassee.  But not in the legitimate workings of the United States of America, as I’ve thought of it most of my life.  And it’s not as though he has the excuse of being ignorant of the US Constitution or the Florida Constitution; he’s an effing lawyer.  He graduated from an elite law school, and he worked for the JAG corps, I think, if memory serves.

Oh, well, I really shouldn’t care.  The people of Florida—at least the ones who are allowed to vote—apparently chose him and the legislators who write these various imbecilic laws.  I rather hope that he either causes the state to be subject to a multi-billion dollar lawsuit from Disney and that then the company leaves the state and the state goes bankrupt and everyone in the future ties its final decline to his idiotic actions.  He’s antagonizing a very large company that brings jobs and income to the state, and he has the temerity to call himself a Republican?

Anyway, that’s neither here nor there, I guess.  It certainly doesn’t have much effect on my non-life.  Everyone on both sides of the thing could burst into flames and die for all I care; the world would probably be a better place.  Then again, the world would probably be a better place if all humans burst into flames and died.  It would briefly raise carbon dioxide levels, but in the long-term, things would improve.

I should probably just put my money where my mouth is and lead by example.  It would be comparatively difficult to get gasoline right now, given recent flooding, but I think I have enough lighter fluid to douse myself quite thoroughly.

I doubt I’d have the courage to do that, though.  I need to find a better way.

In other news, tomorrow is my son’s twenty-third birthday.  It’s been more than ten years since I’ve seen him in person, or spoken with him, though we exchanged one email, more or less.  But he does always send along thanks for his birthday presents and other holiday presents, via his sister.  It’s been just as long since I’ve seen her in person, but I’ve spoken with her briefly on the phone, and we exchange texts and sometimes emails.

I doubt that I’ll ever see either of them again, or hear their voices, let alone spend any real time with them, which is the thing I would most like to do in the world.  They don’t want to do it, it seems, particularly my son, who doesn’t really want any kind of relationship with me.  How could I blame him?  I’ve surely fucked up everything important in my life, and they are the most important part of my life.  I’m no good at taking care of myself, either.

I’m really stressed out and tired and uncomfortable and lonely and confused and overwhelmed—the latter is ironic, because my life is thoroughly empty, so I don’t understand what feels so overwhelming.  But, it is what it is, as they say.  I used to want to conquer the world, and then sometimes I just wanted to destroy it.  Now, though, I just wish to be able to go to sleep and rest.  Why is chronic depression/dysthymia not considered a terminal illness for which one can avail oneself of physician-assisted suicide (not including oneself if one happens to be a physician)?

Well, okay, I guess the answer to that is fairly obvious.  Among other things, the whole nature of the disease calls the possibility of informed consent into question.  But goodness, sometimes the notion of a friendly IV mixture of opiates and benzodiazepines and barbiturates and digitalis sounds like the best, most delicious, most refreshing cocktail I’ve ever imagined.

Oh, well.  I guess I’ll wait a little longer.  It wouldn’t do to have anything happen that might taint the happiness of my son’s future birthday celebrations.  I want nothing but the very best possible life for him and for my daughter.  I wish that included my prominent presence, but maybe no one’s life would or will be made better by having me in it to anything more than a peripheral extent.  I know my life isn’t made better by having me in it.

Well, okay, that doesn’t make sense, does it?  My life is whatever it is, and no matter what state it might be in, it will be that way with me in it, more or less by definition.  But I do suspect that, given my neuropsychiatric characteristics, I am not prone to be a benefit to myself—certainly not when by myself.

Again, “Oh, well.”  I am what I am, I’m my own special…cremation?  Probably not.

ashes and dust

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No less than Moore’s Law

I’m writing today’s post on the train and on my laptop*, though I doubt that’s obvious to anyone at first glance**.  Yesterday’s voice-to-text experiment was not a complete failure, but neither was it a success, at least from my point of view.  Also, correcting the weirdness created by the voice-to-text process exacerbated the arthropathy in the base of my thumbs, and I’ve been fumbling and nearly dropping more things than usual since then.  Also, writing on various paperwork at the office has been more painful than usual.  So, I don’t think I’m going to be doing that again any time soon—at least until the technology improves significantly.

Not that I ought to besmirch that technology too much.  It’s a bit like the old bit about the dog that walks on its hind legs (or talks, in an alternate version):  it’s not that it does it well, it’s that it does it at all that should impress you.

I can still remember when my Dad—who worked with computers his entire career, going back to when they were huge, gym-room-sized megaliths—got our family an Apple II+.  We were the first people I knew who had a computer at home (I grew up in a factory town, after all).  I remember my friend Andy saying he was so “ennnvious” of me.  He said it with a grin, though***, and he and I would soon spend many hours learning to program in Basic and writing games to generate characters for Gamma World, for instance, or calculating the conversion of mass to energy via E=mc2 or getting on BBS services with our 600 or 1200 baud modems.

That computer, which was state-of-the-art for home machines, had the expansion to 64K of RAM!  That was a big deal back then.  As far as I know, there wasn’t a home computer with more RAM than that, though I could be wrong.

By comparison, the little mini-laptop on which I’m writing this has RAM that’s just shy of a hundred thousand times larger.  It almost certainly cost a LOT less, even in non-adjusted dollars.  I don’t know what my Dad paid for our Apple, but I’m pretty sure it cost more than $30, which is about what the one I’m working on would cost in roughly-calibrated 1980ish dollars, assuming a constant annual inflation rate of 5%.

The hard drive in this device—and it is far from the state of the art—is a million times larger than the RAM was on that Apple II+, though comparing RAM with a disk drive isn’t really a legitimate comparison.  It’s like comparing Apples and Verbatims.

Speaking of drives, I’m often kind of blown away by some other effects of Moore’s Law.  I sometimes call people’s attention—when I am able to keep them from falling asleep—to the fact that, when I had finished undergrad in 1992, my then-wife and I had a Mac SE, and we bought an external hard drive for it.  She was going to law school and I was doing post-bacc work to get my med school requirements (having decided to go to med school at the last minute, so to speak), and working at the same time, and it was handy not to have juggle all those old, not-so-floppy 3.5” floppy drives.  It cost us a few hundred dollars, if I remember correctly, and it had its own plug for a power supply, and it had a capacity of—wait for it—one megabyte!  And it was amazing!  I still think fondly of it.

Yet now, I can get on Amazon—or go to an appropriate shop, even sometimes a convenience store, certainly many drug stores—and for twenty to forty dollars buy something that has 256,000 times as much memory as that plug-in device that was as big as the base of the computer—and the working portion of the modern memory device is as small as a fingernail.  Also, its memory is much more durable.

And, of course, for well under a hundred dollars—in modern money—I got an external SD drive for the office that has the memory of my old desktop hard drive squared.  A million million bytes (not square bytes, so I was being a little sloppy there), or a terabyte****.  And let’s not even get into processing speed.

Seriously, let’s not.  At least, I really shouldn’t.  I don’t know that subject well enough to have a very good discussion of it.  I know that FLOP is a “floating point operation”.  Also, apparently the Apple II+ could reach processor speeds of up to 8 Megahertz, whereas my current processor is 1.1 Gigahertz, so about 125,000 times faster.  Again, I’m sure there is nuance here, by it’s the rough idea with which I’m dealing.

The point I’m making, overall, is that I shouldn’t be too dismissive or disrespectful of the failings of voice-to-text technology.  It didn’t exist, as such, even ten or so years ago, at least not in any commercially available form.  Now it’s an automatic, included thing in texting and writing functions on the smartphone in my pocket—which is far from top of the line, but is vastly more powerful than even my Mac SE, let alone the Apple II+.

It’s also not an Apple, because I’ve long since become disenchanted with Apple as a company, though their products are surely still good ones.

Nevertheless, typing is still a more effective way to write a blog post, and that’s what I have done and am doing today.  Oh, and by the way, I did in fact record a little five-minute audio tidbit yesterday after finishing my first draft of the “written” post, before someone else arrived at the bus stop and it became a bit too awkward to keep talking out loud to myself in a way that—to me at least—was obviously not a phone conversation.

However, when I went to edit the audio, the traffic noise was just too intrusive.  It was still possible to hear and understand me, mostly, since I was much closer to the microphone, but the noise of cars and the occasional truck was just too much.  I did my best to reduce that noise using various functions of the program, but to make it tolerable, at least to me, led to my voice sounding as though I were speaking through a tight respiratory mask made of cardboard and papier-mâché.

It wouldn’t have made good listening, even though it was only five minutes long, and I certainly didn’t say anything profound enough to make it worth anyone’s while to muscle through it.  So, I don’t plan to upload that.  If I’m going to do audio blogs—or podcasts, if you will—I’ll do them indoors, or in an outdoor setting where I’m away from the noises of traffic and from passers-by who might hear me talking.

With that meandering, weird, tangential bit of fluff, I’ll call today’s blog post to a close.  I hope you all have a good day and a good remainder of the week.  Take care of yourselves, and if you’re fortunate enough to be sharing your lives with people who love you and whom you love, make the most of that.  I don’t seem to be very good at such things over the long term.  Being bad at and awkward and uncomfortable about connecting with people and keeping relationships working doesn’t mean someone doesn’t want to do so, of course—though there probably are such people.  But for those who do want to but are abysmally poor at the process, it can be very unpleasant.  So, if that doesn’t describe you, try to enjoy it.

*I’m sitting on a seat in the train and I’m using my laptop, to be more precise.  I’m not sitting on my laptop, though in the original meaning, a lap is sometimes an appropriate place on which, or in which, to sit.  Still, how could I sit atop my own lap?  Nor am I sitting atop the train, though I understand there are (or have been) places in India where that happens.

**Which is why I’m telling you.

***And it wasn’t terribly long before his family got an Apple III, if I recall, which was also great.

****A terabyte is a trillion bytes, and a trillion (1,000,000,000,000) is a million time a million.  Just count the zeroes.  Now, I’m sure that there are fine points to the comparison, and the literal multiples are not exactly correct, and I’m sure some computer scientist out there could point out the subtleties, and that would be welcome, of course—learning is always a good thing.  But it wouldn’t really change my point.

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Voice-to-text is ill-advised for ready-to-publish blogging

What follows is an attempt to see if I can write a blog post using voice-to-text technology.  Paragraph.

Okay, “paragraph” doesn’t work; one has to start a new paragraph manually.  Anyway, I wanted to try to write on my phone today, but my thumbs still have not fully recovered from whatever dsmage caused them trouble previously.  Therefore, I am going to see how well I can initially “type” this out simply by speaking into the voice to text and then fixing up the incongruities and failures to make paragraphs when I edit it.  Return.

“Return” doesn’t work as a command, either.  Can I say “period” without it making a period?  Apparently, if I continue to the end of a sentence and the word period is in the middle, it does correct things eventually.

Today it’s raining, so I am going to be walking to the bus stop, taking the bus to the train station, the train to Deerfield, and taking a walk from Deerfield train station to the office.

I’m really not sure how good a technique this is for writing a blog post. It may have more in common with a podcast or personal reflection or what I call audio blogs then my typical blog post.  I don’t know how well it will come across but I will be editing it, so we’ll see.

I have just manually inserted a paragraph break then restarted the audio portion of the input.  We will see how that goes.  I’m going to have to be inserting a lot of punctuation and spacing after the initial draft.  It may not be worth it in the long run.  But it’s an interesting experiment for Monday morning when there if they’re already thunderstorms. (That should read, when there are already thunderstorms”).

I’m going to take a brief break now, because I haven’t yet left the house.  I want to give myself plenty of time so that I’m not going to wait at the bus stop any more than necessary.  It’s raining out, which is another reason I decided I wanted to try to write this on my phone.  I figured the phone is less vulnerable to the depredations of stray rain than the laptop is.

***

Okay, I’m at the bus stop now.  I’m a little worried about how traffic noise is going to affect this, but at least there’s not that much traffic at this hour.  It’s 5:00 in the morning, now.

I’m not sure what to discuss, since I’m doing this in a different way than I usually do.  I just cleared my throat, and it didn’t pick that up; that’s mildly interesting.  But it also didn’t pick up the first time that I attempted to speak that sentence after the throat clearing.  I had to backtrack manually, and then restart the sentence I had intended to speak.

I suppose the system has a propensity to miss hear, and to put the wrong words down, such as writing the words “miss” and then “here” instead of writing miss here…miss here…as in, to hear badly!  I can’t seem to say that word* in a way that makes it clear to voice-to-text technology what word I’m trying to produce.  That’s a bit annoying.

It does seem that when a car is driving by while I’m speaking it interferes with the function’s accuracy.  I suppose using this technology might be useful to improve one’s enunciation, at least.  After all, it can be quite frustrating when you have to backtrack manually and correct a computer-based error that doesn’t make much sense, so you might get in the habit of speaking very clearly.

I don’t know how many words I’ve spoken in this blog post yet.  It doesn’t seem very interesting to me, but then, most of my blog posts don’t seems terribly interesting to me anyway.

I’m not very good at judging what will be interesting to other people.  Many of the things that many people find interesting are utterly dull to me, and apparently many of the things that I find interesting are opaque to others.  I guess this explains my lifelong fondness for the Edgar Allan Poe poem alone.

I’m going to have to edit that last sentence so make it clear that the word “Alone” is the title of the poem.  There seems to be no easy way to cue the computer vocally that I’m trying to put quotation marks in.  Open quote quote quote.  Close quote.  See what I mean?  This is frankly more frustrating than I expected it to be.

There was a big flash of lightning just now but only distant and late following thunder.  So it was quite a long way away.  That was a random, interjected, spoken-aloud thought, but this sentence is not; it has been typed in later.

This technology is still far too stupid to be practically useful on a regular basis.  The time and effort put into editing and correcting it are going to be larger than the time and effort I probably usually use to break the whole thing.  To write the whole thing, I said.  Start to finish.

Maybe I should just stick to writing when I want to write, and if I wish to do audio, simply do an audio blog.  Right now there might be some trouble with that because of traffic noise, but that at least can either be edited out or recognized as background sounds, and I can resay something if it was scrambled up by a car.  That would just be part of the process.  It could even add color to an audio blog.

Anyway, life is frustrating.  For instance, the first thing the computer put in when I started “life is” was to end it with the word “good”, which sounds nothing like the word “frustrating”!  Then it kept writing “frustrated”.  I finally had to finish the sentence manually.

Enough of this nonsense.  This is an idea whose time has not yet come, or never was or will be.  Maybe speech is speech, and writing is writing, and never the tween shall meet.  Twain.

The voice-to-text can’t seem to recognize the word “Twain” except as a proper noun with a capital t as in Mark Twain.  But that name was a pseudonym based on an expression (supposedly) from navigating on the Mississippi River, and referred to a measured depth of two fathoms.  So when someone called out “mark twain” they meant the river at that point was two fathoms deep (12 feet).  It’s not quite full fathom five, as thy father lies‒I guess that might be “mark quint”.  Anyway, this is stupid.  But then again pretty much everything I do is stupid.  So what else is new?

I think I’m going to do a brief audio blog just to follow up on this. I may post it or leave it for my ears only.  Have a good day.

Voice stuffaltered

*Mishear.

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There are many different sos to speak, as it were

Well, it’s Saturday, and I’m at the train station instead of the bus stop, because I was able to ride my bike this morning.  I’m not going to have time to finish this post’s first draft before the train gets here, because I took a little too long getting ready at the house, dilly-dallying and puttering around because the first train on Saturday comes thirty-five minutes later than the one I would catch—if riding my bike—during the week.

Still, I had time to park and lock up my bike with two cables, one of them through the seat, and my U-lock thing, or whatever the proper term is.  I don’t see how someone could easily or readily steal the bike or any of its parts, including the front tire.  If such a thing nevertheless happens, I think I’m probably going to give up on the bike.  Then again, I’ve thought that way before.

***

I’m on the train now, and it’s not too crowded, which is one of the nice things about riding on a Saturday.  The horrible rain and consequent flooding seem largely to have tapered off, though I don’t imagine they are entirely gone.  Still, I was able to walk back to the house from the train station last night, and though I encountered about three minutes of very modest rainfall—prompting me to get my umbrella out, which I then carried, uselessly, the rest of the way to the house—I had much more irritation from gnats, which appear to have been given a boost by the rain.

I was quite nervous about termites swarming, honestly.  They tend to do that after the first big, heavy rain, when it’s followed by more pleasant, warmish weather.  Well, there were definitely termites in the air in the neighborhood near the house, and even a few of them around the outside lights, but it wasn’t a too-irritating and annoying batch, and none of them seemed to be swarming inside the house.

That happened a year or two ago, and at least once before that, though it was when I lived in a different room.  It was horrible, mainly because you certainly couldn’t ignore it, and they got into everything, and we literally had to suck them up with a Shop-Vac and find their holes and seal them up.  It is rather disgusting.  It’s not as big a problem for the house structure as it might be up north, because, like many slightly older houses in south Florida, the one in which I live is basically cinderblock with aluminum framing.

There are wood parts of some of the structures, I think, but nothing load-bearing in any sense.  This is a house that barely notices anything short of a category five hurricane.  If civilization ended, and assuming the sea level doesn’t rise too much, I could imagine much of the basic outline of the structure enduring for thousands of years, perhaps to be discovered by some future archeologist.  Cinderblock is tough stuff.

Of course, everything will fall apart eventually; but perhaps everything will then happen again.  The laws of nature (even discounting cyclical cosmologies like “the big bounce” or Conformal Cyclic Cosmology) seem to allow  for random fluctuations to lead, perhaps, to the spontaneous ne occurrence of concentrated inflaton field* and thus to a new period of inflation and a new universe in our future.

And if that universe has the same constants of nature that we have now, and infinite space—as we seem to have—then we will all happen again, and do so in infinite profusion, because in any given region of space, there are only a finite number of possible quantum states, and with any finite number of configurations happening in an infinite range of available slots, they will eventually repeat—and repeat infinitely.

I’m sure I’ve talked about this before.  I’ve probably even talked about my notion that the inflationary burst could go in both “directions” in time, and that our own inflationary burst could also have happened in the other (so to speak) direction even “when” it happened with us (so to speak), and that the future history of our universe could be peppered with “big bangs” coming and going, analogous to the way the present universe is mostly empty space, but there are pockets of places where matter has condensed into local regions where gravity makes the concept of an “up” direction and a “down” direction locally relevant, unlike everywhere in between.

And just as our kind of life can only really apparently happen on the surface of particularly hospitable local globs of heavy matter that we call planets, using the very up/down, purely local dichotomy as one of the facts that makes it possible, so life may also only be able to come into existence near the “surface” of these regions in time in which there is a gradient in entropy that makes “past” and “future” meaningful, though globally (so to speak) time may be nondirectional.

This last bit is all, by the way, my own speculation.  Inflationary cosmology is mainstream physics, but my own thoughts on the omnidirectionality of time are just that—my own thoughts.  I’ve encountered at least one real physicist who discusses something somewhat similar, but I get the impression that the idea is not generally paid much attention.

Still, it’s interesting to speculate.  And now, I have to draw to a close, because my stop is approaching, or we are approaching my stop—either description can be valid.  I hope you have a good remainder of your weekend, and I hope that Monday morning I’ll again be able to ride my bike.

cyclic cosmos

*This is, of course, if inflationary cosmology is the correct description of the universe.  That is by no means certain, but the theoretical structure of inflationary cosmologies answers many questions about the large scale structure of the universe, the horizon problem, cosmic uniformity as evidenced by the nearly completely smooth CMB, where the “bang” part came from, the power spectrum in the tiny variations in the CMB, and so on.  But it’s not the only dog in the race, and there is much that isn’t well known about the nature of, for instance, the inflaton field, whatever it may be.

But that state of not knowing is part of what makes science enjoyable and gratifying.  I may have mentioned this before, but the most exciting non-personal thing I’ve encountered in my life was when Perlmutter et al’s work showed that the universe’s expansion was accelerating.  No one had really even considered such a thing seriously, and so it radically changed the cosmological picture, at least regarding the future.  It was amazing and thrilling—the discovery of our time—and I felt privileged simply to be able to witness it.

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Above the lake, after the flood

It’s Friday again, but that fact in and of itself is no particular cause for celebration for me, because I work tomorrow.  Still, I’m up and at the bus stop today, unlike yesterday, which should imply that at least my back and legs are not as painful as they were yesterday.

I spent pretty much my entire yesterday lying down, just trying to rest and relax the muscles and joints in my back, my hips, my ankles, and my knees, all of which were hurting.  Of course, I availed myself of OTC analgesics, but I always use those, so it’s hard to make much difference using them without permanently disabling my kidneys and/or liver, which I am probably already doing based on the amount that I use every day.

It’s a bit frustrating finally to have sorted out most of the issues with my new bicycle and gotten it into a situation in which I can ride it comfortably and usefully only to have a week-long stretch of nearly constant rain.  I can’t even imagine how I would have gotten back to the house Wednesday night if I’d tried to ride the bike.

Just to give you some idea:  there is a small park area right near the train station in Hollywood (Florida), and a main feature of that is a river/lake that I suspect is artificial.  It runs under the main road as well as under some foot bridges.  Normally, the nearest foot bridge is the sort of thing you could imagine people rowing or canoeing or kayaking under easily, without needing to duck their heads.  Well, on Wednesday evening, the water in that lake was up to the bottom of the bridge, several feet above its baseline.  The water in the main road and the bus stop and the nearby fields was flowing—clearly, obviously, and powerfully—toward that lake, such that it looked as if soon the lake would swell its banks and the water level would engulf the sidewalks and the bus stop and the main road.

Of course, much of the road was underwater, anyway.  Particularly at the intersections and cross-walks, and along the edges where the bike lanes are, there were vast pools of water.  Even during the walk from my final bus stop to the house, which is just a bit under a mile, there were places I could not pass without stepping more than ankle deep in water.  And, of course, when trying to minimize the degree to which I had to do that, I skirted around edges of sidewalks and berms and roads, and met some very unsteady ground.  I’m sure it was more unsteady than usual.  So my back and knees and hips and ankles were subject to unusual stresses and strains that probably contributed to yesterday’s problem.

My Timberland boots would have been entirely useless for avoiding the soakers I had in both feet before I got even close to the house.  If I had worn my “motorcycle” boots, those would have kept my feet dry in anything much less than knee-high water—they’re pretty great for that.  However, they are not great for walking if you want to avoid blisters or ankle problems, because they don’t exactly grip the feet firmly, and they have elevated heels.  They look good, and they would be good for wading, up to a point, but they wouldn’t be good for any significant walking, and you certainly wouldn’t want to run in them.

Once again, here I go, writing about the weather, of all things.  It’s a reflection of the sorry state of my life that this really is the only interesting* stuff that’s going on with me.  Weather, commuting, depression, pain—these are the things I have about which to communicate.  At least, they are the things that come to my mind.  I’m not really learning anything new—not by my standards, anyway.  I still haven’t really written anything at length about sugar or whatnot, and I haven’t done any audio posts or “podcasts” or whatever you want to call that stuff.  I just don’t have the will to do it, any more than I have the will to write any new fiction.

It is an interesting fact that, most days, more people look at my blog than have bought, let alone read, all of my books put together.  I’m not counting the stupid purchases I made of my own books, which I then signed and gave to the people at the office.  As far as I know, only two of those people have actually read any of my books, and one of them subsequently died of a drug overdose; he was the closest thing to a real friend that I’d made in well over ten years.

That’s frustrating, to say the least.

I’m not sure what to do.  I don’t expect any epiphany or any other kind of spiritual or psychological breakthrough; I’ve been trying to explore the nature of reality and, to some extent, my own mind for most of my life, as far as I can remember.  I’ve read lots of science books, of course, but I’ve also read many self-help books and spiritual books and so on.  I’ve meditated and did self-hypnosis throughout my teenage years.  I’ve read religious works of various stripes; some of them were interesting and engaging and even profound in places.  But none of them were very impressive overall.  Shakespeare was better.  As was Milton.

I don’t know what I’m getting at.  When do I ever, right?  I know where I’m going in the long run, at least, which is the same place we’re all going in the long run.  If there’s something else waiting, I’ve never encountered anything close to good evidence or argument for it.  I have looked, but I’ve tried to do so without self-deception.

Maybe that’s my problem.  Maybe the only escape from dreariness and depression entails or requires some form of delusion or another.  Maybe Shirley Jackson was right, and no live organism really can continue to exist “sanely” under conditions of absolute reality.

But, of course, we never really exist under conditions of “absolute reality” in any serious sense.  We don’t have access to all levels of reality using just our ordinary, unaided senses, not even close to it.  But that (in principle, surmountable) limitation is one thing, while inventing stories about the “meaning” of life and reality out of wisps of desperation, fear, loneliness, loss, and pain is another thing entirely.  I have no intention or desire to do that.  It’s like trying to weave a sweater out of yarn spun from cotton candy.  It would be an interesting novelty, but at any real test—including just sweating while wearing it—it would melt and dissolve and draw swarms of flies and ants and just be disgusting.

That’s a weird metaphor, I know.  Sorry.  I’m not being particularly coherent here.  Which I guess is reason enough to call this post to a close.  I hope you all have a good weekend, and spend it relaxing with people you love and who love you.  What else is there?  A lot, I guess, but none of it is quite as pleasant, and it’s not more important.  Not that anything is important; or rather, on a cosmic scale, either everything is important or nothing is important.

On the scale of an individual life, though, things can be quite different, and in an entirely reasonable sense.  So, if you can, enjoy your weekend.

*I use that term hesitantly.  Perhaps I should have written that it is the closest thing to being something interesting that’s happened to me.

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This is not a regular Thursday post.

Hello all and good morning.  I’m going to be thoroughly brief:. I’m at the house, lying down and trying to rest today, because my back and legs and feet are killing me.  There was flooding all around the area last night and at various times just walking to (and then from) the bus, I had to navigate* though regions newly dominated by water that was ankle deep and deeper.  I took many odd steps and my balance was often awkward.  Probably the air pressure and humidity and all that aren’t helping, but that’s more speculative.

Anyway, that’s what’s happening.  I’m alive, for better or worse, so you don’t need to be worried**.  Hopefully the resting will help and by tomorrow I’ll be better able to move and will write a better post.

TTFNwindstormandmanscaled

*Almost using the original meaning of that word.

**Or my condolences, as the case may be.

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Half sunk a shattered visage lies

Well, it’s Wednesday morning, and I’m sitting at the bus stop again, because it’s still raining in south Florida.

One thing that I like about summer in Florida—though it seems more of a central than a south Florida phenomenon—is that there is an almost-daily thunderstorm, but it happens in mid-afternoon, lasts for a brief period, and then goes away.  If you’re biking or walking or otherwise vulnerable to the elements, and you don’t feel like enduring the process, you can just wait it out.  Again, this does not seem quite to be the case as much here in south Florida, at least not on the east coast, but it’s relatively predictable.

Anyway, that’s not such a big deal, but it does mean that both walking and biking have been a pain these past few days.  I have also had very bad issues with literal back and leg pain, though the knee brace on my left knee seems to be helping that joint at least a little.  But much of last night, when I wish I were sleeping, my time was taken up with trying to loosen the spasms in my back and my hip and my calf and the arch of my foot and so on.  I met with only modest success.  So, as is often the case, I am now very tired, even more so than average, though certainly not many standard deviations away from the mean.

I try not to be mean, but on average, I think I am meaner than the mode in which I would prefer to be.  Ha.  Ha.

So, physically, I feel pretty ground down, and even the walk to the bus stop was less minor than it ought to have been, though I will admit that, compared to when I started back up walking not so very long ago, it feels like much a lighter endeavor.  Compared to walking five miles to the train station, it’s laughable, but then again, it’s unfortunately not much exercise.

I’ve noticed that riding the bike, while quite invigorating when the weather is decent, definitely puts new and different stresses and tensions on my skeleton and connective tissue and musculature, and it instigates flare-ups (flares-up?) of pain in slightly unusual places that catch me rather off-guard.  One doesn’t really, fully “get used to” chronic pain, but at least it has familiar patterns a lot of the time.  Then, when new things happen, they are especially disheartening, because they don’t tend to reduce the prior pain, just add to and overlay it.

Fun.

I’m sorry to keep talking (or writing, if you want to be pedantic, though I think “talking” is a perfectly reasonable word to use*) about this kind of irritating and negative stuff, but it’s what’s dominating my mind, unfortunately.  Believe it or not, I don’t even share some of my darker thoughts, even in posts like yesterday’s in which I dwelt on—and considered methods of—suicide.

I would love to make this more a blog of ideas and explorations, but when I’m feeling so depressed and in pain and alone, my ideas tend to go along nihilistic, entropic, pessimistic, pro-mortalist lines.  I look even at notions like the Lovecraftian concept of an alien and uncaring, unkind, malevolent cosmos populated and dominated by truly alien entities, and find myself disdainful—because I think it’s still anthropomorphizing the universe to imagine it inhabited by godlike or demonic beings, however alien and uncaring or malevolent they might be, and however much they may disdain humanity.  I also find it rather ho-hum, because, yeah, so, the universe is vast and dangerous and uncaring.  What else is new?

The fact is, as far as we can tell, there aren’t even any Lovecraftian god-aliens out there, certainly not on any kind of relevant scale, and such beings as there are certainly aren’t showing any interest in humans.  There is no reason for them to be interested.  Humans are only really important to other humans…and indirectly to the various other life-forms on Earth on which their activities impinge.

In some ways, humans are the closest things in the human world to actual Lovecraftian monsters:  innumerable and powerful but uncaring and destructive to less powerful beings.  To cephalopods, for instance and ironically, it would be humans that would be the “great old ones”, though humans are not so old, and they are great only in their power and ability to wreak havoc—though they have the potential for truer greatness.

But overall, the universe is far vaster than people can even begin to contemplate seriously, at least not without concerted effort.  The average, typical location in the universe is intergalactic space, in which there is perhaps one hydrogen atom per cubic meter, where light from even the nearest galaxy would be far too faint for the unaided human eye to detect.  In other words, it is an empty blackness, with a steadily shrinking temperature of only 2.7 Kelvin.  It’s cold, and dark, and empty, and it’s getting more so of all of those things with every passing Planck time.

Left to its own devices, the universe, as far as we can tell, is going to become that way everywhere, only even colder and even emptier.  If life is ever to become truly consequential on a cosmic scale—which is not, in principle, impossible—it will require seriousness and commitment and work, by the majority of people.

The current political and social and artistic cycles of the world, to say nothing of the military and ideological aspects of human interaction, don’t exactly thrill me with their possibilities.  Humans are like preschoolers fighting over toys and snacks and who gets to be “it” while clustering in a ramshackle hut with a hurricane approaching from one direction and an active volcano in the other, and the floor of which straddles a major, active geological fault-line.

When the end comes, it will probably be terrifying and painful, but it will likely be quick, at least—on a cosmic scale, anyway—because the toddlers have no idea how to protect themselves and each other and to survive.  And then, in the end, darkness and decay and the Red Death will hold absolute dominion and sway over all, and the lone and level sands of the desert will blow unnoticing about the forgotten monument-legs the toddlers leave behind, until—in quite short order—even the ruins and then the sand itself will go the way of all else.

There are billions of “livable” years in the universe, and even perhaps trillions if one stays close to red dwarf stars.  Given the potential of knowledge growth of which, if they decide to do it, humans are capable, that could easily be more than enough time to find the science and technology to get around even the heat death of the universe.  It’s not, in principle, impossible.

I’m not holding my breath.  I’ve known toddlers who were intelligent, inquisitive, cooperative, creative, kind, and showed promise of great things.  The human race as a whole does not meet that description.  It’s a shame about the good ones; but there aren’t enough of them, I suspect, to prevail against the troglodyte toddlers**.  So, I don’t think I’m going to try to wait around and see what amazing things they’ll get up to, because I think I’ll just be tragically disappointed.

And if I’m wrong, well—I will have deserved to be wrong, and that’s not a horrible outcome.  I’ll be dead, anyway, so I don’t think it will make any difference to me either way, even if it would be nice to know.

That’s it for today, I think.  There, I did actually get some ideas into this blog post.  I hope you’re pleased.

end-of-evangelion

*For pedants among us—I tend to be one—it’s worth reminding ourselves that all words are made up.  No set of letters or sounds have any inherent meaning, even within the human and related species.  Nevertheless, I am certainly against the casual bastardization and flagrant misuse of words, relative to their generally accepted meaning, and I truly dislike awkward, manipulative, new terms such as “allyship”, which sounds like a vessel in the navy of a nation that’s politically aligned with one’s own.

**Trogglers, if you will.

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Don’t know why there’s no sun up in the sky…

It’s Tuesday morning, and instead of sitting at the train station, I’m sitting at the bus stop.  It’s been quite rainy out, and after riding my bike back to the house from the train station yesterday afternoon in a non-stop deluge, I decided to walk to the bus to the train and so on instead.

I’m a glutton for punishment, obviously enough, but everything in my body aches now after the wet ride yesterday, and I was up more than usual during the night with back and hip and leg pain.  That’s not really anything new, but it felt clear that it was exacerbated by the thorough soaking, and then of course, by nearly slipping on the wet floor in my room, which is hard, smooth tile.

I say “nearly slipping”.  I guess I actually did slip, but I caught myself before getting very close to falling.  I suppose that’s a good sign of improved physical strength and agility from all my walking and biking and everything, but it doesn’t mean I don’t feel the consequences.

Even my supposedly water-resistant boots were literally squishing inside by the time I’d gotten back to the house, only five miles from the train station.

This is boring, isn’t it?  I keep realizing how boring it is that I’m writing about this stuff, and I do apologize.  I guess it’s the sort of thing about which most people talk to their friends or their spouses or their family in general when it happens, but I don’t really have any such people to whom to talk about it on a daily basis.  I suppose I can mention it at work, and people will probably listen politely, as they will when I tell the about a physics article describing the extreme roundness of an isolated electron and so on.  But no one really interacts about it.

No one really interacts much about anything I’m interested in; I bore people pretty quickly with them.  I, in turn, have a hard time getting interested in anything in which they are interested.  Certainly, typical matters of gossip or popular entertainment are pretty lost on me.

The closest thing I really have to regular, daily social interaction is reading and leaving comments and getting responses on Jerry Coyne’s website Why Evolution Is True.  But yesterday, at least, every comment I tried to leave disappeared.  I don’t know if that was a technical glitch or just that my comments were blocked or whatever by PCC(E)*.  I sometimes get the impression, on the rare occasion when he responds to one of my comments, that he doesn’t like me (this is not an unusual attribute), so he may just be disallowing my comments.  Thus, even that little outlet is fading or at least is glitching.

It’s irritatingly windy this morning, and the wind is blowing water from nearby trees even here to the middle of the bus shelter, and it’s getting on the screen of my computer some.  I may have to stop and finish this later.  It’s frustrating.  But what do I not find frustrating?

I felt horribly depressed almost all day yesterday.  In fact, ironically, I was probably least depressed while I was riding through the rain, partly because my locking mechanism for the seat of my bike had worked, and partly because it was just kind of hilarious how wet I was getting, from above and below.  I would have been less soaked if I had walked, because I could have used an umbrella.  It’s hard to use an umbrella on a bike.

There were a number of times during the day yesterday when I thought about how much I hated my life and hated the world and (mainly) hated myself, and how I wanted to just swallow all the Tylenol in the bottle I have at the desk** or slice myself open with one of the box cutters I have, or douse myself in lighter fluid and set myself on fire***.

None of these are great options, and I would prefer to find something less painful.  Of course, the governor of the sunshine state and the goobers in the legislature are, I think, working on making it so that I’ll legally be able to purchase a gun again soon, if they haven’t already.  Anyway, there are plenty of people in gun shows and so on who probably wouldn’t care about restrictions on selling guns to people like me—you know, non-violent “ex-felons” or whatever the proper term is, even though my “felony” charges were ones to which I pled guilty only because of extortion by the legal system.  I never knowingly or willingly “trafficked” in drugs; I was trying to help people with chronic pain in a society in which those with non-lethal causes of pain are expected simply to keep soldiering on despite constant misery, even though—ironically—their pain will continue much longer than will that of a person with, say, terminal cancer.

It’s hard to say, though, whether I could use a gun to kill myself.  I have too much knowledge about guns, and have used them with respect, shooting competitively and for pleasure—never once having so much as fired at another living thing, unless you count scaring squirrels or raccoons off with a low-power bb gun.  I did once play Russian Roulette, but only once, and afterwards, though I was obviously horribly depressed, my hands were shaking.  I didn’t do it again, though if I had succeeded, at least I wouldn’t have gone to prison, not that I knew that at the time.  I had no clue what was coming.

I don’t know why I’m talking about all this, or rather, writing about all this, sitting at the bus stop waiting to go to the train to the walk to the office.  I don’t have a therapist anymore, so that’s part of it.  I don’t have a personal physician of any kind, either.  I don’t have any local emotional support, and I don’t make a good friend, so I’m not likely to obtain any new ones or any other form of a social circle.

I keep wishing I would catch pneumonia or some other severe illness and be killed by it.  Maybe that’s part of why I was so amused by getting so wet when riding last night; there was just the bare possibility that my resistance would go down low enough that I would catch something.  But of course, that isn’t really how infection works, and I know it only too well.  You have to be exposed to an infectious agent, and I don’t seem to be all that susceptible.  Probably I have lots of antibodies and whatnot from medical school and then medical practice.

I’m just so tired.  I can’t sleep at night for more than about an hour at a time, then I wake up and try to go back to sleep and sleep at most another hour, and then eventually just watch the clock reach the time for me to get up.  I want to be able to sleep and just stay asleep until I feel rested, or forever, whichever comes first.  That would be like…well, I was going to say “like a dream”, but it’s not quite accurate.  That would be wonderful.  That’s what it would be.

rainybikebandw

*This is how many of us refer to Professor Coyne.

**This is probably not a good choice.  It takes a long time to work, and if it fails it can still cause terrible liver problems, and it’s a long and drawn out death even if it works.  It’s very unpleasant.

***That’s something best not to do indoors, of course, and it was rainy yesterday, so it probably wouldn’t have worked outdoors if I had tried.  Also, it’s not got too high a fatality rate, or if it is fatal, it too can be a long, drawn out, and very painful death.  My point, overall, is to try to diminish and avoid or escape chronic pain, both physical and psychological.

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Here we go again, still.

It’s Monday morning, and I’m on the train as I write this, though I had meant to miss the train that I rode on Friday and start writing while sitting at the train station, because that somehow feels better to me.  I’m not sure why it feels better.  Maybe it’s because, for a long time, when I got to the train station early, it was where I started writing my fiction on a given day.  I don’t know.

Anyway, I dilly-dallied at the house for a bit, doing some minor chores that I don’t normally do in the morning, before leaving a little later than usual.  But it turns out that the train was, as the automated announcement said, “fifteen, twenty minutes late”.

I don’t know why it’s not programmed to say, “fifteen to twenty minutes late”.  The way the announcement comes across, one might be excused for thinking that the train was going to be one thousand five hundred twenty minutes late.  That’s 25 hours and 20 minutes.  One might as well take an extra day off today and come back tomorrow!

So, I got on the train I had tried to miss by a bit, after waiting…well, about fifteen or twenty minutes.  And now I’m writing this blog post, for which I have no particular topic, on the train.

I don’t understand why even a relatively well-run system like the Tri-rail in south Florida is so often behind schedule or has trains cancelled and so on.  This is not the norm in many other parts of the world*.  In some parts of the world, they don’t even have to punish people who screw up and make a train system late, thus inconveniencing thousands to sometimes tens of thousands of people and more.  The people running it would be ashamed and humiliated to allow the trains to run late on their watch, and if something unavoidable were to happen, such people would scramble and struggle to correct it as fast as humanly possible, and not rest until it was fixed.

I’m not, in general, a fan of the emotion of shame, but a little bit of shame in the right place can be a good thing.  It exists because it can serve a purpose in social animals, and humans are social animals.  A person should be embarrassed and even ashamed if, through laziness or carelessness or inattention they cause problems that affect the lives of a large number of people.  If that seems like too minor a thing about which to worry, remember, statistically speaking, if one causes delays for enough people, often enough, there will be consequent serious suffering and even premature deaths—deaths that would not have happened if one had done one’s job**.

Speaking of deaths:  honestly, I didn’t really expect to be alive, myself, at this point.  Or, at least, I didn’t mean to be continuing to muddle through on my usual daily so-called life.  But I’m still here just standing on the ledge or the balcony, or the bridge-side, or whatever, looking down, trying to decide what to do.  It’s scary to jump—for good, sound, biological reasons over which I have very little control—and so I hesitate.

But I don’t have a strong desire to turn around and walk away from the edge, either.  I guess, at some level, some part of me is wondering if someone can give me a good, motivating, convincing reason to step away from the edge.  Not a request, not a cajolement, not an emotional appeal, not a pep talk—none of these things are means by which I want to be easily influenced.  I’ve looked at most of them already, and in any case, they don’t really solve the problem, they just push it back a little.  I don’t want to believe, I want to be convinced by evidence and reasoning, or by something that doesn’t rely on the exhortation just to keep buggering on because that’s what you’re supposed to do.

I’ve been buggering on against dysthymia and depression for almost forty years, certainly since my early teens, and against chronic pain for about twenty.  I don’t seem to have gained much ground, if any.

If I were still in medical practice and were treating a patient like me who came in, I might well recommend hospitalization.  I’m certainly a danger to myself—I hate myself, I consider myself my enemy.  But I cannot afford some kind of voluntary psychiatric hospitalization, certainly not in any kind of very good facility, and I don’t have any insurance.  And, of course, I’m not in medical practice anymore.

I don’t know what to do.  But my train stop is coming up next, and since I have to pause my writing at least for a while when I get there, I might as well stop this post now.  I hope you had a good weekend and that you have a good week.

no belief

*Though, admittedly, there are also parts of the world in which this is much better than the norm.  But the US is the world’s largest economy; we like to think of ourselves as advanced and innovative and productive and “great”, but—to reference a cliché that wasn’t even true about the person about whom it was often said—we can’t even seem to keep the trains running on time.  It’s embarrassing.  Or at least, it ought to be embarrassing.  If we are not embarrassed by it, that fact should be embarrassing, too.

**It’s possible, of course, that there are deaths that will happen when the trains run on time that would not have happened if they had been late, but people don’t tend to see as morally culpable on the people keeping things running on time when there are benevolent reasons for doing so.  Running things on time was the intent of the system, it was part of the stated goal from the start, and it was thus because it was potentially useful for many people.  It’s not a bug, it’s a feature.  But when it fails in its promised service, and because of that failure someone dies (or suffers) unnecessarily, it seems reasonable to consider it a morally culpable situation.