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For a minute there, I found myself

Wow, I’m really tired.  I had a terrible time falling asleep last night, even though, once again, I was tired and “shagged out” as if after a long squawk, in the words of Michael Palin’s pet shop owner from the dead parrot sketch.  And then, of course, when I finally did get to sleep, I didn’t even come close to sleeping through until my alarm‒though, rather amusingly, I fell back to sleep about half an hour before my alarm was due to go off, so I got to enjoy being awakened by it when I was thoroughly mired in unconsciousness and confusion.  Nevertheless, I did still get up and do three quick sets of (bad) pull-ups before taking my shower, getting dressed, and so on.  And here I am at the train station, waiting for the second train of the day.

I know all this must make for incredibly tedious reading, and for that I am truly sorry.  I’d prefer to write more about potential stories, and which ones, if any, my readers prefer, and about potential “podcasts”*, and all that stuff, with an eye to the future.  But when I revert to insomnia‒after an all-too-brief respite caused by a rather severe illness, the remnants of which are not even gone‒it’s just terribly discouraging.  It’s a special kind of teasing furlough, like getting a weekend off from being in prison, but having to go right back up the road after the weekend, for a sentence the length of which you don’t even know.  And there’s only one reliable way to escape.

It makes it hard to think about any future whatsoever.

Ah, well, it probably really doesn’t matter.  What do I want with a future, anyway?  I don’t have “a life” at all in any appreciable sense.  I can’t even read fiction‒including even comic books and manga for the most part‒anymore, and that’s long been one of the highlights of my life.

I’ve occasionally been able to watch some shows, most recently Wednesday, and I’ve even gotten through five episodes of The Rings of Power, the latter while I was sick.  And, of course, I’ve watched all of the episodes of the modern Doctor Who, most of them more than once, but these are the sorts of things that in the past I had always done with other people, with whom I could share the enjoyment, and even talk about the shows and so on.  It’s just not as much fun to do by myself, even when I watch some of the “reaction” videos of other people watching the shows for the first time, which is almost like watching with a friend, but not quite.

Even the prospects of getting healthier, sleeping better, trying to conquer dysthymia and to integrate into my self-understanding a probable diagnosis of Asperger’s all seem pretty unmotivating.  What’s the point, for instance, of seeking out an official, confirmatory diagnosis of the Syndrome Formerly Known As Asperger’s, at significant personal time and expense?  What, ultimately, would this even do for me?

What’s the point of trying to find a therapist with whom I can work, and that I can work into my schedule‒perhaps through BetterHelp or similar‒to try to mitigate my dysthymia/depression?  It feels better, so to speak, just to feel horrible constantly rather than to have brief respites of feeling a bit better, a bit more “normal”, only to have that feeling slip away again.

It’s even hard to pursue further learning in mathematics and physics, both of which I find deeply interesting.  I have tried to use Brilliant to work on my skills, but though their interactive, stepwise, animated approach is interesting, and I can see why it would appeal to many people, I find it boring after a very short time after I start to use it.  I think I just do better with textbooks, and with problem sets.  I even bought a copy of one of my old college calculus textbooks, the Thomas and Finney one, and started working through it to re-hone and improve my mathematics skills, with an eye toward moving to higher level mathematics after that.  But I haven’t gotten very far.

I also got a copy of Sean Carroll’s Spacetime and Geometry, and the huge tome Gravitation, by Misner, Thorne, Wheeler, et al, which not only is the bible of General Relativity, but is also an excellent demonstration of its own subject.  This is all in an attempt to improve my formal understanding, at the mathematical level, of General Relativity.  Special Relativity is pretty easy, and the mathematics to deal with it formally is/are rather straightforward.  But I don’t have a deep handle on tensors and matrices and higher dimensional geometries‒not at the mathematical level, anyway‒which I’d like to have to be able to approach the subject at a real, quasi-professional level.

I’d also like to be able to do the same thing for quantum mechanics, which is at some levels more straightforward than GR.  I got Susskind’s Theoretical Minimum book on that, but haven’t been able to sustain my attention for it.  That’s my fault, not the writers’.  Anyway, I really want more than the “minimum”; I want to get deeper into the subject, mathematically, because the concepts are all reasonably clear‒although often explained in rather wooly terms by many popularizers‒and I would like to be more formally and mathematically adept at the subject.

And I deeply regret not having done more in pursuit of furthering my pretty good initial exposure to computer science, both at the software and hardware levels.  Related to that, I would like to have done more in circuit theory and more general electrical engineering.

Of course, I did have a lot of my time and energy taken up by biology, chemistry, organic chemistry and the other subjects related to becoming a doctor.  And, of course, “helping” my now-ex-wife study (to the extent she needed help, which was, let’s face it, not very much) when she was in law school was quite fun.  But the time and effort put into both medicine and my marriage have turned out now to be moot and pointless, though they were worth the cost due to the fact that my children are here in the world now.

That fact would be worth almost anything.

Anyway, I don’t have any point** here with all this, and I’ve gone on long enough today.  I’m just tired, and if I can’t find a way to stop being so tired all the time, I really don’t see any good reason to try to keep slogging forward.  All the way up until my next birthday, my age and the two digit number for this year are both prime, and it’s sometimes better to leave while still in one’s prime than afterward, as I mentioned in a previous post.  Meanwhile, though, I’ll see if I can find any other answers.

Oh, P.S.:  Does anyone know off the top of your head how one checks the results (so far) of a poll one has arranged on WordPress?  I’m sure the answer is somewhere in the WordPress “help” functions, but it’s not amenable to a superficial and obvious search, and I’d rather not have to “chat” with one of their “happiness engineers”.  It doesn’t matter much, but if you know,  would you please leave a comment below?  Thanks.

*That’s one of those amazing terms that was a brand new thing based on an entirely new and revolutionary technology, but now that technology itself is already obsolete, but the term lives on.  I think the closest similar thing that readily comes to mind right now is the expression “running out of steam”, which I would guess arose from the era of steam engines, which are quite obsolete, but the expression remains common.

**Now there’s a pithy summary of a life 

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As blog is full of unbefitting strains, all wanton as a child, skipping and vain

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, the 5th of January, and this is my first official, “original recipe” Thursday morning blog of the new year.  Isn’t it exciting?

Yeah, I didn’t think so.  But people are supposed to pretend to be enthusiastic and celebratory about every little thing it seems, until there are so many celebrations and holidays that it becomes a relief when a rare day arrives in which nothing in particular is being celebrated.  There are so many sweets and treats and rewards and awards, day after day, that soon people feel entitled to receive a medal for not drooling and peeing on themselves, and a piece of cake for dinner because they skipped a cookie at lunch.

Eventually, many seem to think that, because they got their various “best attitude” or “cleanest desk” awards throughout their formative years, they’re just as worthy of admiration as someone who received a Nobel Prize in Physics or a Fields Medal or a Hugo and/or Nebula Award for science fiction.  It’s nauseating.  No wonder we consume so many acid blocking medications these days!

As you can probably tell, I’m a bit grumpy today.  This is in large part because I’m very tired again.  My insomnia has been reasserting itself over the last few days, with last night being worse than the night before.  Though exhausted and stressed from matters at work‒another contributing factor to my grumpiness‒I couldn’t get to sleep once I finally got back to the house, and then, despite that, I woke up starting at 3ish this morning, slightly earlier than yesterday.  It’s a weird situation when one finds oneself wistful and nostalgic for the times when one was (more) severely ill, because at least in those situations, one could rest.

In other matters, at the time of my latest look this morning, there have been two total votes on my poll from yesterday.  I would say that’s not a statistically significant sample of any kind, especially since the two didn’t choose the same option.  Perhaps the statistically significant result, which should have been obvious to me from the start, is that nobody gives a flying fuck at a rat’s ass what I do.

Well, why should they?

Apparently, the Tri-rail has given up on even the pretense of trying to run their trains in time in the year 2023.  So far, every train I’ve been on, and the other ones I’ve seen going the other direction, have been five to ten minutes behind schedule.  There are those who believe in some notion of “American Exceptionalism”, but sometimes it seems that we’re most exceptional‒at least among wealthy, “western style” democracies‒at being slipshod and disorganized.

Oh, I know, I know, NASA is pretty darn impressive, and always has been.  But NASA by its nature draws applicants from among the brightest, hardest working people in the country (and the world) and can be selective‒for now, at least‒about whom it hires even from among that group.  Of course it would tend to do exceptional things, even if that were the only factor that made it exceptional.

But to be exceptional is a judgment only properly to be applied after the fact, rather like “luck”.  There is no inherent “exceptionalness” which would mean someone or something is exceptional before it’s done anything at all.  Of course, one could say that everyone is exceptional in some way; certainly each person’s specific genes and environment are unique, and indeed each new moment in the universe in any given place is different in some sense from every other that has come before.  But this sort of “universal, uniform exceptionality” is trivial at best.  Or, as Dash so wisely noted in The Incredibles, to say that everyone is special is just another way of saying that no one is.

“Ignorance is strength.  Freedom is slavery.  Speech is violence.” One of those three statements is not from the original book, 1984, but spiritually it belongs right there among the aphorisms and axioms of Big Brother’s Party.  Of course, nowadays, if you mention Big Brother, most people will probably just be triggered* to think of some idiotic “reality show”.

I don’t know how I got on that track, but that’s one of the things about a free-form blog post: you never know what you’re going to get**.  I honestly didn’t much feel like writing at all, today, but “mood is a thing for cattle and loveplay, not fighting”, and also not for most anything else to which one has committed oneself.  An Impala that doesn’t keep a watch for lions and leopards and hyenas and the like because it’s not in the mood is soon going to be removed from the population and gene pool.  That’s more or less how it has to be, given the laws on nature.

TTFN

day off

*Shouldn’t we be eliminating the use of the word “triggered”, given that it could be, well…triggering in and of itself, since it can invoke thoughts of firing pistols and rifles, which thoughts can cause recurrent trauma in those who are personally devastated by news stories of mass shootings, even if they’ve never experienced a single instance of true violence in their own lives?  It seems rather insensitive.  We really ought to put edge guards and drawer locks and padding on (and apply sanitary wipes frequently to) all surfaces, literal and metaphorical, should we not?  We need to child-proof the world, since it is, after all, populated merely and entirely by children.  Of course, it bears remembering that all the Powers That Be are children, too, so they certainly can’t be trusted with doing the child-proofing.

**This is in contrast to the Gump-ian box of chocolates, since with a box of chocolates, unless it is a prank or joke or a trap, what you’re going to get is a selection of chocolates.  Of course, what you’re going to get in a blog post is some sort of writing on some subject or topic of the writer’s choice, so perhaps it’s unfair of me to criticize the line from Forrest Gump, but rest assured that when I do so criticize, I do it for a very good reason: I am a Hypocrite.

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A story I forgot to mention yesterday…and a poll!

Whew, I’m a bit more tired than I was yesterday morning.  It was a long and somewhat frustrating day at the office yesterday, and then I had trouble getting to sleep and subsequently a bit of that really early awakening with which I sometimes have trouble.  Whatever else you may say about being sick, I have been getting slightly better sleep since my recent illness started, and that is nice.  Hopefully last night was a minor fluke*, and I’ll revert back to my slightly improved sleep pattern at least.  I have reason to suspect it may be so, but it’s not guaranteed.

Oh, by the way, yesterday when I mentioned the possibility of starting writing again, and using solely the cell phone to do so, I neglected to mention the option of starting a new story that would be written entirely on the phone.  If I did start such a novel, it would almost certainly be Changeling in a Shadow World, a story I’ve mentioned here before.  It’s an old story idea; I even wrote the beginning of a prologue to it once, back in the day.  It has ties to other stories of mine, including Outlaw’s Mind itself and The Chasm and the Collision.  It even has bits that hearken back to my lost, first sci-fi/fantasy novel, Ends of the Maelstrom.  So I have some affection for it.

So, please throw that into your voting machines.  Come to think of it, maybe I’ll try to insert a readers’ poll here, if I can easily figure out how to do it.  I know it can be done, because I’ve seen other people do it, but I don’t feel like trying too hard about it.  I’d rather just get some feedback in the comments below.  There’s more flexibility that way, and it feels more like an interaction.  I know that, in some situations, a poll is simply efficient, but I think I still have a contained (shall we say “elite”? Yes, I think we shall) enough readership that we don’t have to resort to crude measures.  That doesn’t mean you can’t curse in your comments, by the way, as long as it’s cursing that serves a grammatical and/or rhetorical purpose!

One thing I will say, though, is that if I do this, and start writing fiction again, I want to stick to whichever story I pick until it’s done.  One of the things that kept me from ever having finished and published anything prior to going to prison was that I would have a new idea for a story, or something similar, and let myself divert from one to the other, and so I had a relatively wide selection of beginnings of books, but only two that I’d finished in even first draft form**.  I also had a handful of completed short stories, and the cheapo, low-quality screenplay I wrote in high school, with the notion of trying actually to make it, starring my friends and classmates.

I even filmed, or attempted to film, one scene, using a home VHS video camera one of them had, but it and the sound were really quite limited, and I had no personal experience with movie-making, and it was high school so we had a lot going on.  Anyway, it didn’t get made, which is not a tragedy.  My friend Joe said that the title*** was too good for the story, anyway, and he was right.

I did write some decent musical themes for it, though, including a bad guy’s theme that drew inspiration from the carousel in Something Wicked This Way Comes, and a main title theme that I can still play pretty much by heart on the piano, and which is probably the prettiest music I’ve written.  That may not be saying much, but it is what it is.

Okay, well, sorry about those various tangents.  I’ll do my best to stick with sines and cosines**** hereinafter.

Anyway, I really would appreciate your input about how I should go about doing a story and the blog posts‒using the phone should make it easier to work writing in, anyway‒and which story to write if I write anything.  Or are things in the world better in general without my writing any more new fiction?  It’s certainly possible that such is the case.  Although, if someone convincingly told me that my continued writing of new fiction would literally and significantly put the whole human race in jeopardy, that might very well give me an added impetus to write.  I am a would-be supervillain at heart, after all.

Well, let me know, please.  Also, have a good day, if you can, and if you are so inclined.

Oh, and I did put a poll in at the bottom, below the footnotes, so if you’re so inclined, would you weigh in with your choice?

*Which sounds like some part of the anatomy of a whale or a seal or some other, similar marine mammal.

**That’s Ends of the Maelstrom that I mentioned earlier, and The Vagabond, which at the time I called simply Vagabond.

***Night Vision.

****This is an example of that truly rarefied entity, trigonometry related humor.  Pythagoras would probably not approve, but he was a putz who repressed knowledge of irrational numbers and the dodecahedron (or his followers did) and who (as I’ve heard it) died when he refused to run away from would be murderers across a field of beans, because he hated beans.  Now that’s what I call a food intolerance!

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Some of my thoughts, and a request for some of yours

It’s Tuesday, even though it’s the third day of the year, not the second.  I’ve put in a complaint to the Department of Wordplay Regarding Days and Numbers, but I haven’t heard back from them, and now I think it’s too late to expect that I will.  Sorry.  I did what I could.

Speaking of doing what I could:  boy, yesterday was really pretty tough going.  It was a very busy day at the office, and I was still not at 100% capacity‒far from it.  I’m not really close to 100% today, frankly, though I feel a bit better than yesterday.  Hopefully, my voice will improve some.  I ended up having to do phone stuff a lot yesterday, and by the end I was pretty hoarse, which is (I tentatively conclude) nothing at all like being a pretty horse*.  I would like to do my “podcast” about sugar sometime soon, but I need to wait until my voice is more or less back to normal.

In other news, yesterday I uploaded the whole files of Outlaw’s Mind and The Dark Fairy and the Desperado to Google Drive.  I foresee a day soon when, perhaps, I’m going to adjust my commuting schedule to make it perforce include a bit more walking, and this would also make the commute last a bit longer (including the parts of it that happen on bus and train).  Now, since I’ve come to the provisional conclusion that I write reasonably well using my smartphone‒I’m writing this on my phone‒I thought maybe, just maybe, I might take up one or the other of those stories during a prolonged commute, and doing that with my phone would be easier than with the laptop.

I’m conflicted about this, because I think it might take away from this daily blog posting, to which I’ve become accustomed.  I think, if the commute is long enough, I might be able to do both‒write a first draft of the blog post then jump over to fiction right after that‒but I’m far from sure, and I would definitely want to eat my cake and have it, too.

If I were to start back working on one of those stories, I’d be delighted to get input from any of you out there about which one you think I should continue.  I’ve asked about that before, and as I recall, I didn’t get any replies whatsoever‒certainly not here on the site**.  Please, correct me if I’m wrong.  I would definitely be interested in knowing if any of you have any preference, and even to know that you don’t have a specific preference, but at least have seen and recognized the question.

I’ve posted the full text (so far) of Outlaw’s Mind here on this site, in case you want to run through it and see if you think it should continue.  I have not posted the text of any of DFandD here, but it’s basically a more lighthearted (for me) story about a very deadly outlaw in the old west who gets abducted by a wizard (who is trapped within his own pocket universe) and sent to find a magical being called the Dark Fairy.  Together, they are persuaded to go off on a poly-versal quest to gather some magical things that will allow the wizard to escape his accidentally self-imposed confinement.

It’s a more lighthearted tale, as I said, but this is me we’re talking about, so it will have its share of dark places.  I mean, one of the two main characters (the Desperado) is a gunman so dangerous that every bullet he fires is a kill.  And, of course, the other main character is the Dark Fairy.

Anyway, these are tentative thoughts regarding taking up the metaphorical quill again, but I’d be interested in any of your thoughts on the matter.  If I do it, I want to figure out how not to let it completely derail this blog.

And, of course, I do want to get on with doing “podcasts” or “audio blogs” or whatever I’m going to call them.  I don’t mean to make the entries very long, generally, since it’s asking a lot to have people sit and listen to me blabbering about a subject of my choice for too very long.  Still, presumably, in this large population of organisms on Earth, there is probably an audience for almost anything that’s done in a reasonably coherent fashion, so if you know someone you think might like such a “podcast”, when it comes out, please do consider sharing it with them.  Heck, while you’re at it, if you know anyone you think might like this blog, please let them know about it.

And, of course, if you know fans of fairly dark sci-fi, fantasy, and/or horror, please let them know about my books.  I would dearly love and appreciate it if more people could read them, because I think there are many who would enjoy them.  But perhaps I’m biased and this is my one (willing) indulgence in self-deception.

In any case, thanks for reading.  I hope you have a good Tuesday, and a good year, by and large.  Don’t rely on my good wishes to make it so, though; I optimistically*** called 2020 the “year of seeing clearly”, and we all saw‒ha ha‒how that developed.

Well, most of it wasn’t really my fault.  Was it?

*It’s probably because of things like that that the Wordplay Departments won’t respond to my inquiries.  I give them a bad name‒like “Fauntleroy” or “Ignatius” or something similar.

**And, as I’ve said before, if you want me to see a comment or a reply, you need to put it here, on this site.  I can’t promise I’ll look at Facebook or Twitter more often than I must.  Both venues are far too full of the stench of primate dominance hierarchy games and would-be mating displays for me to stay too long or too often.  An overcrowded monkey cage at a zoo would frankly feel more wholesome; at least the monkeys would have no delusions or pretensions of grandeur.

***Does that count as a play on words?

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In the year of the wildebeest, I wish you a “Happy Gnu Year”

Well, first things first (or perhaps first things second, or second things first), since the actual first was a Sunday, I would like now to wish you all a Happy New Year.  I know there won’t be any major holidays for a while, because the Tri-rail announcement has switched over to letting everyone know that it will be operating on a Sunday schedule on Memorial Day, which is in May.  To be fair to them, that’s a holiday in the US that always falls on a Monday, so it does bear announcing that they will be operating on a Sunday schedule that day.

I can’t say I’m unhappy to see the tail end of the holidays, because the single biggest thing they entail for me now is trying not to think about past times when I celebrated them with family and friends, and thinking about such times makes me very sad.  I’m pretty sure I’m not alone in this.

So, as you all know, I was already getting sick last week by Wednesday, and then on Thursday, I posted a little blurb that I wrote directly on my phone to the WordPress site, just to let you know that I wouldn’t be doing my usual Thursday post.  By the time I wrote that, I think‒in retrospect‒that I was borderline delirious, and I probably had a fever, though I hadn’t checked my temperature (even as I was feeling better I still had a low grade fever, so it had probably been higher earlier).  I kept seeing weird streaks of movement across the floors and walls (never the ceiling, oddly enough) that looked almost like impossibly fast insects (or small mice?) zipping along straight gridline paths, like light-cycles in Tron, and of course, time was strange, and everything around me was slightly off and disconnected.  It was interesting, and I recognized right away that it wasn’t anything real.  I’ve been delirious before.  I wasn’t bothered by it, other than the fact that I felt like crap.

What had started as a purely respiratory illness, including sneezing and very violent coughing, strangely had spread into my lower GI tract (thankfully there was no throwing up, at least), and by the time I wrote my little Thursday tidbit, I was on the border of recommending to myself that I go to the emergency room to get some IV fluids or summat.  That didn’t really appeal, though, so I did my best rehydrating by mouth and just mostly being asleep/unconscious, between urgent and occasionally semi-catastrophic trips to the bathroom.

It occurred to me during the early hours of Thursday, that if I were to take a turn for the worst, and didn’t have the mental wherewithal to call 911, I might not even have made it to 2023 (which I have done, in case you were wondering).  I doubt I would have been stuck rotting in my room until the people in the other part of the house started to smell me‒people from the office probably would have called the police soon enough before then, since I’ve never been both absent and incommunicado before‒though I’m not sure if any of them know my address off the top of their heads (it’s not as though I ever have any visitors).

I’m frankly pretty okay with that possibility, though as I have said, it would be a shame to die “before my prime”.  Ha ha.  I’m with Dr. House (in the pilot episode of the show) in being of the opinion that there’s simply no such thing as dying with dignity, not really.  There are worse and better deaths, of course; I’m convinced about that.  But as for the rather nebulous term “dignity”, that applies to the way one lives, not to the way one dies.  That’s my point of view on it, anyway.  At least if I just died in my room it wouldn’t inconvenience other people too badly.

Anyway, that’s all by the by, since as far as I can tell, I did not die from my recent illness.  If I’m mistaken about that fact, I do hope someone will let me know.

That makes me think of an idea for a short story.  Imagine a man who has what seems to him to be a harrowing brush with what could have been a fatal accident, leaving him shaken but otherwise fine.  But the next day, when he goes to work or whatever, there are signs of his desk and everything being cleared out, and pretty soon he talks to a coworker or someone, who seems surprised and even puzzled that he is there.  That coworker‒and soon, everyone else‒tells him that, no, he didn’t survive his brush with death, he was killed, and he really needs to stop being in denial about it.

The key element here is that they aren’t freaked out or frightened or even stunned and disbelieving about the fact that he’s trying to go to work and so on despite the fact that‒according to them‒he’s dead.  They’re simply puzzled, in a “why are you doing this?” kind of way, and some are inconvenienced and annoyed, a few telling him that he’s making it very difficult for them to mourn and then get past his loss and to move on with their lives.

There is another layer of explanation behind all this, but I’m not going to tell you what it is, just in case I ever end up writing the story.  It’s not likely, but stranger things have happened‒four whole seasons of them, if I understand correctly.  I had a hard time sticking with that show…couldn’t get past the 4th episode or so, I’m not sure why.  It should have been right up my alley.  Though watching it led me to wonder, were my friends and I the only people who played Dungeons and Dragons (and many other role playing games) without using little figurines?

Well, enough of all that.  I’ll finish up by saying that, yes, I do still intend to do a “podcast” about sugar, and then maybe other subjects depending on how that goes, but I’m going to have to wait a little, because my voice is one of the things affected by my recent/current illness, and I’m going to be talking a lot today because the other verifier is going to be out sick.  In the meantime, I again wish you all a Happy New Year, and hope you have a good first work week of 2023.  Also, given that he’s now back as the 14th Doctor, I thought the following GIF with the 10th Doctor was particularly appropriate for this year.

New Year

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No regular Thursday post today

I thought I would just quickly get on to let you all know that I am staying at the house, sick today, and will not be doing my usual Thursday blog.  I hope you all feel better than I do (though I suspect my cousin, Lance, does not feel better.  So for those of you who are well:. Good.  Please try to stay that way.  For the others, please take good care of yourselves and get better soon.

TTFN

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I’m under the (warming and improving) weather

I’m really going to try to make this short, if not sweet, today, because I’m laden with a respiratory virus that hit rather suddenly and progressed very quickly yesterday afternoon.  I’m feeling quite under the weather, however much better the weather is than it was only a few days ago.  How under the weather, you ask?  Well, I woke up to my alarm this morning rather than hours before.  I guess my body is awash with enough immune cytokines and interferons and interleukins and related crap that they were able to suppress my insomnia.  I guess that’s a good thing, in its own way.  At least my system is smart enough to force itself to go into rest mode in certain, relatively extreme circumstances.

Of course, I’m going in to the office today, though ideally, I should not.  Indeed, I would not if it were not Wednesday.  But on Wednesdays, the payroll has to be done, so I’ll do it as soon as all the reports arrive.  But after that, I mean to leave the office.  It’s just too ironic that I’m sick enough that I’m able to sleep, but I can’t because of work.  I’m sure there are millions of people who can relate to that.

I’m writing this on my phone, by the way, because I deliberately chose not to bring the laptop with me yesterday when I left the office.  I felt like crap, and I just didn’t want to have anything extra to carry.  I will try to remember to bring it today, though.  The Thursday blog post is easier to write‒and feels more natural‒on the laptop.

I’ve been feeling an added impetus to do a “podcast” if you will, what I call an “audio blog” post, relating to sugar metabolism and its issues, since I uncovered how apparently insulin resistant I have become.  It seems appropriate.  Of course, right now I am just too hoarse and ill to consider doing such a thing.  But I will try to get around to it soon.  Obviously, it’s been something I’ve been thinking about quite a lot, both lately, and in the past.  Diabetes and related matters comprise a big chunk of the work of a typical general internist in the modern world.

Then I guess I’ll try perhaps to do an audio blog on Parkinson’s disease and/or on the whole cybernetic future thing.  I’m not, for the moment, planning on doing any specific outline of the subjects before doing the recordings, but obviously, I’ll think them through a bit ahead of time.  I’ll see how they do, audience reception-wise, before deciding whether or not to do more.  But I’m not likely to record anything before the new year.

Wow, “the new year”…just think about it:  within a few days it will be the beginning of 2023.  It seems like barely 12 months ago that it was the end of 2021.  How did 2 years pass in just over 12 months?

Ha ha.

Of course, now that Christmas has passed, the Tri-rail has, as I suspected they would, put on the automated message that, yes, they will be operating on a Sunday schedule on January 1st, New Year’s Day.  Which is a Sunday, so of course they are on a Sunday schedule.  The saddest part of that announcement is that there probably really are a few people out there who need to be told that information.  But I can’t help thinking that a person who requires that announcement to know that the trains will run on a Sunday schedule on a Sunday will probably still not get the idea.

I wonder how long it will be before they start auto playing the announcement about the next holiday that applies.  I’ll probably let you know when it happens.

Anyway, I think that’s about it for now.  It’s been difficult enough getting the post to be this long.  Stay well and healthy.  And wear masks if you have to go out in public when you’re sick.  That’s what I’m doing.  Or, well, I’m wearing a mask; more than one at a time is rather stifling, and probably doesn’t confer significantly greater benefits, though it may perhaps give some improvement.

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And “prime” rib doesn’t come from the 13th rib, even though cows have that many*****

Well, it’s Tuesday, the 27th of December (in 2022 AD or CE) and I’m writing this on my phone because I didn’t feel like carrying my laptop yesterday.  I have to say, now that I’m not writing fiction anymore, I find the portable laptop more and more just useless and even irritating.  It was handy on Friday night, when I was at the hotel‒“free” Wifi that comes with the room and all that‒but that sort of thing is unlikely to happen very often.  In any case, I brought it with me on Friday specifically with that thought in mind.  But for other purposes, it’s just mostly an unnecessary and often unpleasant burden, rather like its owner (me).

I think it’s interesting that, come 2023, I will be (indeed, I already am) 53, a prime number, in a year for which the last 2 digits (23) are a prime.  2023 is not a prime, though it looks like it might be at first glance.  But it has prime factors 7 and 17 apparently; a nice pair, but the number they produce (by multiplying 7 x 17 x 17) is by definition not prime.  Still, that’s not many prime factors, and again, they’re particularly pleasing primes, though 7 and 13 would have been more fun.  But 7 x 13 x 13 would be 1183, I think…yes, that’s right.  I just went and checked my mental arithmetic and it was correct.  Phew, that would have been embarrassing to make that sort of mistake in front of all my readers.

So, anyway, 1183 is nice, but it’s 840 years ago next year.  So I’m a little late for that one, I’m afraid.  It’s 839 years ago this year, and 839 is a prime number, but neither 2022 nor 22 are prime, so what’s the point in that?  I wouldn’t even have looked at the number if not for my previous digression.

All that stuff is beside the point I intended to make.  The point is, my age is a prime, and the last 2 digits of the year will be prime, so if I die before my next birthday (but on or after New Year’s Day, of course), I will, in a sense, die “in my prime”.  It’s slightly forced, but as Michael Palin said in the role of a pet shop owner, “It’s as near as dammit”.  He was trying to pass off a terrier as a cat for the customer, who said it wasn’t a “proper cat”.

Anyway, that’s all slightly encouraging about next year’s prospects for me.  It’s about all I have to look forward to (or, rather, “all I have to which to look forward”), so I have to take what I can get, even if it involves squeezing a bit of the potential prime number relationships.

When you think about it, the numbers for the years are more or less entirely arbitrary, and even Darth Ratzinger* has admitted that the historical Jesus (assuming he actually lived) was born in about 6 BC, according to our current date system.  Which is kind of funny, when you think about it‒Jesus was born six years before Christ.  But then, we know he wasn’t born on Christmas, either, as I’ve mentioned before.  Hey, it was 2000 or so years ago, how accurate do you want people to have been**?

The next subsequent chance I would possibly have to die “in my prime” would not be until 2029, when I’m 59!  Although, 2029 is actually a prime number, and so is 29.  So that’s a bit tempting.  But I don’t even really want to imagine waiting six more years!!  And what if I died by accident some year in between?  What a waste that would be.

All of this is silliness, of course.  I like the idea because it’s playing with prime numbers and playing with words at the same time, and they are both things that I like to do.  But I’m not in any way committed to any numerological notions in any magical thinking sense.  If I were, then the 2029, 59 thing would be much more convincing, particularly since 2029 is the year the asteroid Apophis‒named for an ancient Egyptian god of chaos and destruction‒will come within 19,000 kilometers of Earth on April 13th.   That will be a Friday the 13th, by the way!  And if the asteroid passes through a very tiny gravitational “keyhole” (extremely unlikely) it will have its orbit altered such that seven years later it will hit the Earth***.  If I were dogmatic, committed to some quasi-mystical notion of prime numbers and the magical powers of some words, that would all be quite convincing.

But I don’t believe in any mystical or magical things, and I don’t think I’m wrong not to want to believe in them.  I’m well acquainted with metaphorical notions of magic (and fictional ones, of course) and am well acquainted with awe and with the numinous and with the state of being moved profoundly by wondrous things, from the contemplation of the scope of space and time on up to the births of my children.  But these don’t require belief, in the sense of conviction without justifiable evidence and reason.  Faith of that kind is a bug, not a feature, of the minds in which it resides.

So, no, I’m not convinced by the prime number/prime of one’s life coincidence.  I’m just very tired, and have nothing of real, deep value in my life, nor am I myself of any real, deep value.  But I enjoy prime numbers and word games, so it would at least be mildly amusing and satisfying‒or so I imagine‒to die in a year in which my age is prime and so are the last 2 digits of the year.  There’s nothing deeper to it than that.

There probably is nothing deeper than that, come to think of it.

*That’s the Sith name of Pope Emeritus Benedict.  Is he even still alive?  Also, why does “Sith” get the red squiggly underline of an unrecognized word, but “Jedi” doesn’t?  It’s blatant bigotry and hypocrisy by the Jedi, as should come as no surprise to anyone.  Well, I’ve added Sith to my local dictionary, at least.

**Of course, presumably God could have ensured precision and accuracy, but probably an omniscient, omnipotent, infinite being would not think our arbitrary dating systems‒or indeed, we ourselves‒were important in any way whatsoever.

***Of course, there’s plenty of time before then for someone who has, for instance, a private space program to send up a rocket that will gently nudge the asteroid, just a little bit, so that it hits the Earth in 2029…or in 2036, if that’s easier to pull off.  It wouldn’t need to be anything as dramatic as NASA’s recent asteroid deflection test thing, but it would require careful simulation and then application of force on a local scale.  Are you listening, Elon?  It wouldn’t be a mass extinction event, nor even a civilization-ending event, but it would be a global catastrophe such as hasn’t been seen since civilization began.  It might shake humans out of their idiotic Woke vs. MAGA type tribal bickering and make them take seriously the fact that they need to spread out off this planet, to colonize the moon and Mars and so on.  Or…was that actually the purpose of the rocket you sent toward Mars with a Tesla in it?  Is that camouflage for a mission to nudge Apophis to make it hit the Earth?  That’s it, isn’t it?  Oh, I knew you were an evil genius after my own heart!****

****Speaking of evil geniuses, I’ve seen recent videos that show, for instance, what the Death Star’s weapon would look like if it were accurate to real lasers, or showing how impractical it would be to use such a powerful laser, and regarding the apparent rebound energy if one fired a laser powerful enough to destroy a planet.  But the Death Star weapon is no more a laser than are blasters or lightsabers (though lasers may be involved in the workings of the devices).  Blasters and lightsabers are packeted plasma weapons of some kind, with the plasma perhaps constrained in highly shaped electromagnetic fields.  And the Death Star weapon is similar but of a different fundamental type.  I suspect it to be a highly energetic and dense plasma, but composed of anti-matter, and when the plasma strikes the planet at relativistic speeds, the matter/antimatter annihilation is what provides the incredible destructive force.  Or perhaps, alternatively, it is some form of plasma of W and Z particles, which cause massive, rapid nuclear decay in the atoms of the planets they strike, causing hitherto unprecedented fission events on a planetary scale.  It might even be a quark-gluon plasma, but generating that on such a scale seems boggling even to my jaded science fantasy mind.  Anyway, that’s neither here nor there, it’s just a pet peeve.

*****It can come from the 7th rib, though, and I guess you could request that specially.

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Happy Boxing Day, everyone!

For those of you in the United States, just in case you don’t already know, Boxing Day is basically just the day after Christmas.  It’s celebrated in the UK, and apparently in Canada and other parts of the “Commonwealth”, though how exactly it’s celebrated is not clear to me.  It’s also not clear to me—after a few random, admittedly not very careful searches—just what the day actually celebrates, other than the day after Christmas, or to what the Boxing part of Boxing Day refers.

It doesn’t appear to have anything at all to do with the sport of boxing, nor the dog breed, boxers.  I don’t think it has anything to do with the Boxer rebellion in China, either—why would it?  It’s a bit of a mystery.  Maybe it’s related to people putting the gifts they didn’t really want that they received for Christmas back in their boxes to take to the store for refunds, or to put in the attic (or “loft” as they say in the UK).  I doubt that, though.

It’s been a slightly interesting weekend.  On Friday I bit the bullet and went to the evening dinner/party with the office, but I arranged things so that I didn’t need anyone to drive me there or to drive me all the way back to the house.  Instead, I took the train up to Delray Beach as soon as the office closed and walked to a hotel—The Hyatt Place at Delray Beach—where I’d decided to indulge in a rather large expense and reserve a room for the night.

From there, after a rest, I walked two blocks to the restaurant and immediately started ordering drinks to allow me to socialize, then had a pleasant evening with the people I know from the office.  It had begun to get cold—for south Florida, certainly—by that time, and I was pleased to have only a two block walk back to my nicely warm hotel room, where I cuddled up and slept off my drinks, had a continental breakfast in the morning, and then walked back to the train station at about eleven-ish (it was 3 miles…still is, as far as I know) and took the train back to Hollywood and thence to the house.

Since then, I’ve slept a great deal, which is really nice for me.  I tried to keep low on carbs for what I’ve eaten this weekend, because it turns out that I’ve probably become pre-diabetic.

I had been trying to see if I could do a near-vegan* diet, including plenty of legumes and other sources of protein, to see if it could help me be healthier and lose weight.  It rapidly did the opposite (I was gaining weight and I felt worse), and as I walked through a Walgreen’s one evening, thinking about my family history, I checked into the diabetic supplies area, amazed to note that one could buy a glucometer for less than twenty dollars!  I remember when you used to need a prescription to get one because you needed your insurance to pay for it, because they were expensive.

Anyway, not that day, but soon after, I bought one, and tested my fasting blood sugar a few days in a row, and found it to be slightly high, in the pre-diabetic range.  This is not terribly surprising, given my family history, but it was a well-needed confirmation of my suspicion.  I have to admit, on those few occasions when I’ve tried a carbohydrate-restricted diet, I have felt generally healthier.  But it’s been hard for me to maintain, for the temptations of carbs are everywhere, and are all the more difficult to resist when one is stressed out, as appears to be my default state.

But now I have blood glucose confirmation that things are going to go badly if I continue to indulge—and death by type 2 diabetes is too slow a process to make it appealing.  I also know that low carb diets have been objectively beneficial for me in the past—my resting pulse, which normally runs too fast (at over 100 bpm) went down to the mid-sixties, my total cholesterol to about 138, my triglycerides almost ridiculously low, and my HDL at a nicely normal range.  You get the idea.  I felt better, and I looked better (at least at the chemical, microscopic level), and it was only because I had trouble being motivated to control my appetite that I didn’t stick with that mode of eating.

So that’s the plan, or part of it, for the moment.  I’ll keep you posted on an intermittent basis on how things are going.

In the meantime, I’m on my way to the office, though there are far fewer people on the train today than usual—in fact, until five minutes before time for the first train to arrive, I was the only person waiting at the station.  I’m still waking up early, but then again, given how much I slept this weekend, at least I don’t feel worn out.  It’s good not to feel worn out already, first thing on a Monday morning, but I often already do feel that way.  So in that sense, it’s been a good holiday weekend.  Indeed, we did not work on Saturday, but I did have a nice (low carb) breakfast and a good walk to the train.

I hope you all have a nice several days in this last week of 2022.  Remember, since January 1st will fall on a Sunday, there will be a Friday the 13th in January—not one of the movies, but the day.  I always like those days.  They’re almost never bad luck for me (and there’s no reason other than self-fulfilling prophecies for them to be bad luck for anyone else).

Please enjoy your elaborate, traditional Boxing Day celebrations.  But if you do celebrate by boxing, please restrict yourselves to body blows.  Even with gloves and padding, just the inertial transfer of any blows to the head always does some damage to the brain, which tends to be both permanent and cumulative.  Many of us can’t afford to lose more than we already have lost.

*I like to make the joke that it’s ironic that people who only eat vegetables or similar here on earth use the term “vegan”, because the dominant native intelligent life forms in the Vega star system—the Vegans, in other words—are obligate carnivores.  Of course, that’s just a joke; there aren’t really any native species in the Vega star system—it’s too young a star to have evolved complex life.  The inhabitants there are all colonists.  But the dominant ones of those are obligate carnivores**.

**Earth people need not fear some kind of carnivorous alien invasion, though.  Any species that are products of completely separate evolutionary histories cannot readily eat any of the life forms from the other biosphere.  At best they would simply get no nutritional value from their meal—like pandas, as carnivores, trying to get enough food out of bamboo, but thousands of times worse, with only some minerals and electrolytes and perhaps a few simple biochemicals being useful.  But much more likely, the eaten life form’s own endemic microbes would begin to break down their hosts while in the new species’ ineffectual digestive system, and would cause physical and probably chemical damage to the eater.  Many very basic microbes are remarkably good at dining on things that complex life cannot digest…including said complex life.

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“No more work to-night; Christmas Eve, Dick! Christmas, Ebenezer!”

critic

 

Okay, well, it’s Friday at last, and it’s “Christmas Eve eve” as I sometimes say.  It turns out that the office apparently isn’t going to be open tomorrow, which surprises me‒as is obvious, I guess.  I still could find out otherwise, I suppose, but I doubt it.

I’m writing this on my phone again, and I have been doing so most days this week.  I think I used my laptop on one of the days, perhaps Tuesday, but not on Wednesday, when I wrote my long and rather irritating post full of self-congratulation for deeds of the past that have no relevance to my current life.  That long-winded blather was from my phone, if you can believe it!

I actually slept comparatively well last night; I only finally woke up at about 3:50 this morning, which for me is about a two-hour lie-in.  I’m not even waiting for the first train of the day; I’m waiting for the second one!

I’m surprised that I slept quite so well yesterday, because I had an unusually bad day for pain‒or perhaps it would be better to say it was a good day for pain and thus a bad day for me.  The pain was focused in my right lower back down through my hip to the ankle and the arch and ball of my foot, but spreading up through to the upper back and shoulder blade and arm, and nothing that I did or took seemed to make more than a transient difference.

I was walking around the office like Richard the Third most of the day, when I was up.  We did get some very lovely cookies from my sister for the office‒she sends such packages often and they are beloved by all, and justly so‒but I couldn’t enjoy them as much as I wish I could have, because I was in a lot of pain and severely grumpy.

They were/are amazingly good, though.

I am still in a bit of accelerated pain this morning, but then I’m basically always in pain.  It’s not yet as bad as yesterday, at least, so keep your fingers crossed, please.  Or don’t if you’d rather not; I hardly think it actually has any effect on any outcome other than the configuration of your fingers.

I suppose it’s just a way for me to express my anxious hope mixed with fear and tension, and to invite some kind of shared emotional support from readers.  Though, of course, for that, it doesn’t make all that much sense, since how would I even know if any of you are crossing your fingers?  I suppose you could leave a comment saying that you are, but the very act of typing a comment must make it at least slightly less likely that your fingers are actually crossed, certainly while typing.

Anyway, I hope that my pain today is less than it was yesterday.  But even I personally will not be crossing my fingers, since I don’t think that gesture has any magical powers, so you shouldn’t feel obliged to do it, yourself, either.

Come to think of it, I don’t think anything has any magical powers.  My first thought about that is “more’s the pity”, but really, what would magical powers even be?  If they existed, they would be actual phenomena of nature, and would have some lawful underpinning and explanation.

That’s one thing I’ve always kind of been disappointed about in the Harry Potter books.  They take place in a school, and have genius characters like Dumbledore and Tom Riddle and Hermione, who surely would have curiosity toward the hows and wherefores of magic, yet there’s not even a hint of an explanation for how it works, why it works, what it actually is, or anything.  I think some touching upon that subject would have been very fun.

I mean, for instance, how does apparation work?  It involves a sensation of squeezing through something, but is that some form of hyperspace, or a wormhole, or what?  How do wands enhance or channel magical power from individuals gifted in magic?  How was that figured out for the first time?  Clearly people can do some magic without wands‒so, how necessary are they?

When did people begin to be able to do magic?  Clearly people haven’t always been able to do magic; there haven’t even always been people!  Was the ability to use magic some new, isolated mutation, like blue eyes, that spread through the population (as it surely would)?  Clearly it’s not some complex mutation, as it arises de novo in the human population, leading muggle-born witches and wizards to arise with some regularity.

Perhaps there is a complex of genes that, only when all present together (perhaps even only when homozygous) instantiate the ability to do magic.  Maybe most humans have some large fraction of the necessary genes‒after all, as I noted, the ability to use magic seems likely to have been a significant evolutionary advantage‒but it’s so easy to lose some necessary part of the biological (neurological?) machinery necessary through random mutation that most people are mutated slightly away from the complete set and so become muggles*.  Or, if born to witches and wizards they are given the derogatory term “squibs”.

I don’t recall how I got on this topic, but it is interesting, and I wish Rowling would at least have hinted at some studies or explanation, at least when discussing the Department of Mysteries.

Alas.

Anyway, since I apparently won’t be writing a post tomorrow, I would like to wish all of you who celebrate it‒in the words of the late, great hero, Dobby the house elf‒a very Harry Christmas**.  Maybe take a moment to read the Christmas scenes in the various Harry Potter novels.  Christmas at Hogwarts, for the students who stayed over the holidays, seems always to have been an interesting occasion, albeit not as fun as Halloween.  Halloween at Hogwarts would have been quite the thing to experience. The only close contender that readily comes to mind is Halloween with the Addamses.  That would be interesting!

I guess I’ll be back on Monday, then, though it is at least slightly possible that I could be wrong about tomorrow.  If I am, I’ll be writing a post, and it may be quite a grumpy one, though maybe not.  After all, what do I have to do with my time other than go to the office?  Not much, honestly.

Oh, well.

santa-whoand merry

 

*This raises the odd thought for me about what might happen if a cancer developed that, by chance, has a complete set of magical genes, in a muggle who had been almost complete.  Could one have a “magic tumor”?  I guess probably not, since it seems magic would be a collective function of many aspects of the nervous system, not a property of every individual cell.  Perhaps this is one reason why wizards can’t just fix visual impairment‒Harry Potter wears glasses, and no one ever even suggests that magic might be able to cure his vision. But the eyes are, quite literally, extensions of the central nervous system‒though the lenses aren’t, come to think of it‒and maybe tampering with the eyes through magic is particularly dangerous, or perhaps the nervous system always rejects such attempts.

**As an aside, I have to tell someone that, in the song Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas, I’ve always tended to hear the line, “Faithful friends who are dear to us gather near to us once more,” as if they are singing, “…gather near to us one s’more”, and I think, “How are they going to share one s’more between a group of people?  I mean, it’s “friends” who are dear to “us”, which to me implies at least four people, total.  How can you split one s’more between four people?  Also, it would make a mess, with graham cracker crumbs and melted chocolate all over various hands and the floor and all that.  Anyway, I know that’s not what they’re saying, but every time I hear it, those thoughts go through my head.