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The winter’s wind which, when it bites and blogs upon my body, even till I shrink with cold, I smile.

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, December 22, 2022, which is another sort of fun day for twos, though it doesn’t fall on a Tuesday, so it’s not as fun as this Tuesday was.

Yesterday was the Solstice‒the winter one in the northern hemisphere and the summer one in the southern hemisphere‒and I completely neglected to mention it.  Instead, I went on an overlong, self-aggrandizing, self-indulgent ramble, and for that I apologize.  I doubt that I’ll be doing something like that again.

Now that the solstice has come, it’s officially winter in the north, so the Game of Thrones people can shut the hell up about it.  And in the south, summer has arrived.  Meanwhile, in the north, the days have begun to grow longer, or at least the daylight time has, relative to the night.  It won’t be noticeable for quite a long time, though; at and around the peaks and troughs of sine curves, the rate of change of the function is at its lowest, and the length of daylight over the course of a year is one of the oodles of sinusoidal processes in the natural world.

I’m really tired, but I am here at the train station, the first to arrive to get on the first train.  I couldn’t sleep, even though I got to sleep late because the Wi-fi had gone out and I was on chat with Xfinity (on my phone) until quite late trying to get it fixed.  My one source of relaxation and release is to be able to watch some YouTube videos when I get back to the house from work, and it certainly costs an absurd amount of money, so I become quite irritable when it doesn’t work.  It seems tentatively to have been sorted, but I have a likewise tentative appointment for a service call…on Sunday morning, the 25th of December, the only day I have off until New Year’s Eve.  It’s a date that may be familiar to many of you as the one on which we celebrate the birth of Isaac Newton*.

Well, it’s not as if I’m doing anything but laundry that day, anyway.

Wow, I feel like I’ve written a lot today already, but it’s only about 450 words so far, counting the footnotes.  I really am tired.  Stupid nervous system.  Why don’t you sleep??!?  Yesterday, of course, I wrote and wrote until it was way too long, and I excised whole paragraphs from the final post when I edited it.  I was almost hypomanic, just for a little while there‒or at least, that’s what it felt like compared to my usual subjectivity.  Maybe it’s just the way healthy, normal people tend to feel, and it’s so unusual that it feels bizarre to me.

I don’t really think I felt “normal” in that sense, though, or at least I didn’t feel it about myself.  I felt weird and loopy and still different and distant from all the other people in the world‒the humans‒but at least I had energy and a bit of enthusiasm.  The only times I remember having really felt “normal” were the two occasions when I was given Valium for medical procedures‒wisdom teeth extraction and heart catheterization, when I was about 17 and 18 respectively.

I recall both of those experiences with great fondness.  I even remember when my heart did a big whopping double-beat that I could feel all the way up my neck during the catheterization, as the cardiologist bumped the SA node or the AV node or something along those lines.  My reaction was to say, “That was cooool.”  And it was.

I don’t know what my point is.  There probably is no point to me.  Even my head is quite rounded.  I guess I could try to find a pointed stick to carry, since defending oneself with fresh fruit is more difficult than defending oneself against an attacker armed with fresh fruit.

There, that’s my most niche, nerdy reference of the day.  Or is it?

With that, I think I’ll draw to a close.  I don’t have a clue what sort of Shakespeare quote I’ll alter for my title today, nor what picture I’ll put in the post, but it’s Thursday, so there will be such things.  Of course, you who are reading this do know both of those facts, which is curious to think about…my readers right now know things about my blog post that I, as I write it, do not know.  Time travel‒you can’t keep it straight in your head; it’s too wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey.

I think I need a Doctor.

TTFN

winter scene

*Though, in all honesty, he was born on December 25th according to the Julian calendar, so the equivalent Gregorian date is 10 or 11 days off (I don’t recall which, and I can’t be arsed to look it up).  Then again, most biblical scholars apparently agree that Jesus was born in the summertime, based on the descriptions of his birth in two of the gospels**, so Newton’s birthday is much closer to the Gregorian December 25th.

**The other two gospels, Mark and John, I think***, don’t even mention his birth.

***I remembered correctly‒I just checked.  It’s weird the things one remembers about matters such as this.

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Bad memories, Good memories

It’s Wednesday morning, and not even really close to five o’clock yet.  I’m early enough to be the only person yet waiting for the trains.  I woke up this morning quite early‒obviously‒and though I briefly watched part of a lecture on exploring prime numbers and the Fibonacci sequence, I couldn’t really rest, and I’ve felt angry since pretty much when I woke up.  I’m not angry at being awake, though that is irritating.  I’m not even particularly angry at me, though I’m almost always at least a little pissed at myself.  I was angry and thinking about a stupid exchange from my first medical practice after residency, with one of the partners in the practice.

The substance of it isn’t important, it’s just odd that it came into my mind.  I mean, yes, it pissed me off at the time and I think I was not irrational to be pissed off (though I held my tongue), but it was more than twenty years ago.  Why is that making me angry first thing in the morning?  It is fun to imagine things I might have said then, had I been the person I am now.  I take far less shit than I used to take, largely because I have very little left to lose, and much of what I have‒indeed, sometimes all of it‒I frankly want to lose.  At least, I don’t feel that what I have is much worth fighting to keep.

It is quite amazing to think that it’s been more than twenty years since I finished residency and moved to Florida and started in private medical practice.  It’s been about thirty-one and a half years since I got married…and slightly more than half that long since my wife divorced me.  And it’s been about ten years since I’ve seen either of my kids in person or since my son has spoken to me in any way but via a semi-formal E-mail.  A lot has happened in the last 20 years, I guess; I’ve barely hit the highlights here.  But it still has passed rather quickly on the subjective level.

I’m saddled with a good memory, so I recall a lot of the things that have happened in my life, even going back to quite a young age.  I remember the very bad leg aches I used to get as a child, which make my current chronic pain almost feel nostalgic.  I remember really hating the noise of the cannons (and presumably, though to a lesser extent, the muskets) at the musket festival at Greenfield Village, but my memories of that place are otherwise extremely positive.  There were great molasses cookies from the old-fashioned bakery and candy sticks from the general store, and beeswax candles that my sister loved, and of course all the old rebuilt buildings and roads and horse-drawn carriages…it really was (and presumably still is) an excellent place.

gfield village

An evening at Greenfield Village

 

That’s better stuff on which to dwell than on the sometimes irritating personality of a former senior doctor.  I’ll say this, though:  he took good care of his patients, and he also made them feel well cared for, at an above-average level.  Respect is due.  Those things are not as common as they ought to be.  He was (and presumably still is) a good doctor.

I had a positive moment yesterday, which came at the end of a long, fairly frustrating process.  The details aren’t important, but basically I was trying to do something that in the past has always ended up requiring a few hours on the phone with tech support and with them remotely controlling our computers to do what needed doing.  I was trying to do it on my own without contacting them, and I followed the basic steps‒the good thing about computers and related systems is that they have internal logic that is consistent and explicable.  Still, I hit an impasse, and knew I was missing something that the tech support people had always needed to pull off in the past, sometimes with difficulty, but I hadn’t been able to see it, and it wasn’t part of the standard steps of the whole process.

I tried watching some videos but they were superficial, and I was steeling myself to get in touch with “the IT crowd”, when something clicked, and I thought I realized what to do.  It took about twenty minutes of watching to see if I had succeeded, but turned out that I had.

Such moments are remarkably euphorigenic.  I mean, I know I’m reasonably “smart” about some things.  Certain types of endeavors have always been easier for me than they are for most people, though there are other things that other people do readily that I find all but incomprehensible.

But every now and then one does something that was difficult, and it brings a joy along the lines of having solved a difficult puzzle, but with the added benefit of being useful, and of being something many other people wouldn’t have seen, or not as readily, anyway.  It’s particularly zingy when it happens in a field in which one is not actually an expert, but it can even happen in cases where someone is.

For instance, there was a case in residency in which a code was called for a man in respiratory distress, who was having “Cheyne-Stokes” respirations.  Without intervention he probably would have died, but such situations are run-of-the-mill in a hospital, and he was being intubated before immediate danger of death threatened.  He wasn’t my patient, but it occurred to me that he was a relatively young man to be in that situation, and from group rounds I thought I remembered that he had a drug problem.  So I asked if anyone had tried Narcan*, and they hadn’t.

They got the Narcan out of the crash cart, gave him a shot of it in his IV, and Wow!  He practically exploded to life.  I’m sure it was unpleasant for him, especially since he was already intubated, and abrupt opiate withdrawal is not pleasant for anyone.  But he was alive, and now it was clear that some “friend” had brought this patient‒who had been put in a corner, single room somehow‒a dose of heroin or something similar, and he had overdosed while in the hospital.

I had a slightly different type of feel-good moment as the Senior Medical Resident on a nighttime consultation in the Rehab wing of Jacobi Hospital for a patient who was having palpitations and a very fast heart beat.  A quick EKG revealed a benign kind of supraventricular tachycardia (SVT).  I tried a quick vagal maneuver that didn’t work, and then gave a push of adenosine to the patient and the rhythm broke.  The patient was very happy**, as was the rehab resident, who began almost deferentially calling me “Dr. Elessar” after that, though she was just as much a doctor as I was, and certainly just as expert in her own field.

SVT

SVT – Supraventricular tachycardia

And once, during an ICU/CCU rotation***, I helped nudge an obviously dead-on-his-feet Cardiology fellow (they have a very rough schedule) by asking if maybe we shouldn’t quickly cardiovert a patient who was intubated but conscious and was now going into ventricular tachycardia****.  He sort of blinked as if he didn’t even know what language I was speaking, then shook his head and said, right, yeah, that’s what we should do.  We did, and it worked.

Monomorphic-ventricular-tachycardia-VT

V-tach – Ventricular tachycardia

I can tell you, there’s nothing quite like the facial expression of someone who’s being externally cardioverted at bedside‒this is basically the same as the defibrillation scenes you see in TV and movies, and it uses the same equipment‒while conscious.  It’s not a pleasant thing for a patient to experience.  However, she converted immediately to sinus rhythm, and afterward grabbed my hand and squeezed it before I stepped back, showing her appreciation, so I guess it was worth the moment of extreme discomfort for her.

It’s one thing to know intellectually that one is reasonably intelligent, but these little events that demonstrate competence and success, however inconsequential (or sometimes quite consequential), really do give a person a boost.  The opportunities don’t come as often now as they used to come, so I have to relish them when they do.  I was rather giddy for a few hours at work after my minor success yesterday, and jokingly said to my coworker, paraphrasing Apollo 13, “I…am a steely-eyed missile man.”

It’s silly and unimportant, of course, but I rarely feel good about myself, so I’ll cut myself a bit of slack.  it didn’t help me sleep any better last night, though.  And then I woke up in an angry mood, but I guess it was ego-syntonic anger, in that I wasn’t angry at myself but at the memory of a twenty-year-old, unimportant interaction.  Beggars can’t be choosers, as they say.

*For those of you unfamiliar with it, this is a drug that blocks the action of opiates and related compounds, and it does so quickly and strongly.  It’s not fun for the patient, but it can be life-saving and more.

**I don’t recall if we transferred the patient directly to a medical floor or merely continued to consult and ask Cardiology to take a look‒in a public hospital, we didn’t necessarily get to follow up on particular patients long-term.

***I think this was the rotation in which once while on call I literally did not sit down for thirty hours straight, and in which, due to the call schedule, I worked 21-days in a row, had a day off, and then worked another 10 in a row.  It was a busy month, but a hell of a learning experience in many ways.

****Much more acutely dangerous than SVT, especially in a critically ill patient.  It can easily progress to ventricular fibrillation and even of itself can cause cardiac arrest.

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Great Hypnos, child of Nyx and Erebus and twin brother of Thanatos, why keeps’t thou thyself thus so strange from me?

Well, I have my laptop with me today, and I’m at the train station even earlier than I was yesterday.  This is related to the fact that I woke up even earlier today than yesterday, though I didn’t go to bed or to sleep any earlier.

It is 12-20-2022 on a Tuesday, which is kind of fun—because there are a lot of 2s in today’s date.  I don’t mind the zeroes, but I wish we didn’t have that numeral one in today’s date.  I do remember that the Tuesday on which fell, using the European date writing system, the twenty-second of February of this year was 22-02-2022, which is about as palindromic as such dates can get*, and the ultimate twos-day.  Matt Parker did a video a few years ago about February 2, 2020 for Stand-up Maths, claiming it was the most palindromic, because it worked in European or American dating order.  He had a point; I’ll put a link here if I remember.  But that date did not fall on a Tuesday.

I had to check online to confirm the days on which the dates above fell.  I could probably have worked it out for myself with a bit of figuring.  If I had plenty of energy, it’s the sort of thing I might do—but not right now.  Right now I have almost no energy.  I’m frankly exhausted at nearly every level, though perhaps not according to the literal definition of the word, since it implies something that is fully empty (is that an oxymoron?) in the literal sense.

I feel like I am very close to that point, though.  I’m so tired of doing what I do every day, just to maintain the various functions of life that continue to require maintenance, from eating, to brushing teeth, to working, to buying food, to getting to and from work, to doing laundry, to all those other things that are just repetitive maintenance for a life that I don’t even want to keep doing.

There’s a famous fact of physics that, if there were an airless hole straight through the middle of the Earth**, and if one jumped into the hole, it would take—if memory serves—forty-two minutes to get to the other side of the planet.  I believe Newton figured this out, himself.  Of course, this is highly counterfactual, since there would be air resistance and worse in such a hole, and a large portion of the Earth isn’t even really solid, so you couldn’t maintain a hole, and the Earth’s interior is far too hot to survive passing through even at high speeds.  But still, it seems like it would be nice just to jump into such a hole and fall, going back and forth through the planet without stopping, forever, or at least for the rest of one’s life.

Actually, come to think of it, that’s an experience that’s the same as any form of free-fall.  Anytime one is moving unimpeded along a geodesic in spacetime, one is in the same circumstance.  That was Einstein’s great insight that I believe he described as the happiest thought of his life:  when he realized that a man falling from a high roof would effectively experience no forces whatsoever while falling, and it led him to the principle of equivalence—that acceleration and gravitation are locally indistinguishable—which then led him down the path to General Relativity.  So, just being an astronaut on the ISS would be the same experience, internally, as falling through such a hole in the Earth, though I doubt they’d send me up there just so I could get a break.

Maybe someday there will be free-fall vacations, where a person can book a flight to be put in orbit for a bit, with no engineered gravity, and just allowed to go to sleep.  Maybe one could even climb into a sensory deprivation tank during that time, and the lack of gravitational acceleration would truly allow them not even to experience proprioception related to gravity.  It seems like it would beat just floating in a bath of Epsom salts.

Anyway, I guess what I’m saying is that I’d like to get away from it all, and I do mean from it all.  I can’t relax my mind, I can’t relax my body, but both of them are just achy and tired all the time.  And everything I do is utterly without a point.  I mean, from a certain point of view, everything anyone ever does is without a point, but people can at least have their own, internal purpose, the things that give their lives and deeds meaning to them.  There’s nothing wrong with that.  It’s even rather admirable and heroic and beautiful in its way.

But I don’t have any purpose.  I don’t even have a dugong***.  I’m not going anywhere, I’m not achieving anything, and I don’t get any satisfaction out of anything that I do.  I really am like someone who has kept a Great Ring.

I need just to give up.  I don’t know what I’m achieving by any of this, but I’m pretty sure it’s nothing.  Not that I’m achieving “nothingness”, mind you.  That would, in a sense, be an achievement (ironically).  I’m just achieving nothing, by which I mean not achieving anything.  I guess that’s probably obvious.  Sorry.

I wonder if Michael Jackson’s old doctor makes house calls, if he even is allowed to practice medicine after finishing his remarkably short (shorter than mine) prison term..

I’ll bet he’s not commuting on a train to and from work, living in a single bedroom in the back of an old, cinderblock house, not doing anything for fun, not spending time with his kids or any friends or anything.  And, above all, if he has trouble sleeping, we know he has some tricks to take care of that problem.

Oh, well.

insomnia

*Speaking of palindromes, yesterday we missed the last possible palindromic recording number for the year in doing our verification recordings at work, which was what I had set as a deciding factor regarding my future plans.  So, the universe has sent me no positive message.  Not that I was expecting it to do so.  The universe could hardly care whether I live or die.

**Actually, straight through any two places on the surface of the Earth would give the same basic result, but I’m going to keep things simple.

***Get it?

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On the first day of Hanukkah, my candle…gave to…me…no, that’s not right

Well, “happy Monday”* everyone.  It’s the start of another glorious work week, for those who are on a typical schedule, anyway.  It’s also the first full day of Hanukkah, so for those who celebrate it, Happy Hanukkah.  I didn’t light any candles or anything.  I don’t even have a menorah, though I got one for the office‒I’m not sure why or what the point was.

I don’t feel festive or celebratory, though it is a nice time of year to be able to send people “presents”.  That’s in quotes because I don’t really send much that’s personalized‒just gift cards and such. Personal gifts require one to be close to someone else and to know‒or at least to have a reasonable guess about‒what might please them.  I am not in such a situation anymore, really, with anyone.  Maybe I never was, I don’t know.

I’m writing this post on my phone, again, because I deliberately did not bring my laptop with me for the weekend.  I brought some music notes (meaning written notes, not, for instance, bringing a “b flat” or something of the sort), and a few related things, as well as some heatable soups I had at the office.  I didn’t really do much with the music, though I did get out my acoustic guitar for a short bit…long enough to realize that I was quite out of practice, because my left forearm really got tired and sore very quickly.

I don’t have a strap for the acoustic, so part of the fatigue was just from helping to steady the guitar.  Anyway, that wasn’t much fun, and singing along is embarrassing because other people in the house can hear me.  I turned on my keyboard and diddled around on it briefly, but I screwed up even songs that I know from memory for decades, and even forgot some of the left hand part for a piece I wrote in high school, and which I don’t usually screw up.  I think my head just wasn’t in it.  I’m bringing at least some of the other music I had at the house back to the office today, just so it’s not sitting there reproaching me in my room.

I’m getting to where I can’t even wait for my alarm to go off if I want to do so.  I am now waiting for the first train, and have been for a while.  When I woke up early again, I thought about just trying to lie back until my alarm went off anyway, but the thought of not getting up and getting on the first train, since I was awake anyway, made me feel very stressed out.

It’s not healthy, but I’m not sure what to do about it.  I’m also not terribly motivated to try to do much.  What would be the point?  For whom would I be trying to improve or preserve my health?  Only for me, and I’m not too bothered, frankly.  I do get tired of feeling tired, though.

Oh, my apologies, but I haven’t done any audio recordings yet, whether about sugar, or about Parkinson’s disease, or about cybernetic futures, or anything else.  I could just try to do a quick one sometime, maybe today if I have a bit of extra time.  I could just start off talking free-form, as a way to get going, to make an audio thingy.  I don’t know.

I could do an audio recording about what I think are the pros and cons of audio recordings and podcasts, sort of the counterpart to the blog post I wrote the other day that discussed podcasts versus writing and things of that sort.  I don’t know what all of you think about it.  I don’t really know what any of you think about it, actually.  It would be absurd to imagine that I could know what all of you think about anything, now that I think about it.

I am very tired though.  I wish I could rest.  I keep hoping that I’ll get really sick or something, so I’ll be forced to take time off and also to sleep‒even I tend to sleep when I’m fighting an illness. It’s a weirdly nice thought.

I’m also a little tense about this week, coming up to Christmas.  There’s an office get-together in a restaurant on Friday night, I think, and I often don’t go to these when they are in restaurants and similar.  It’s a bit uncomfortable for me, just in general, but also, getting back to the house afterward is an issue.  I live farther from the office than anyone else at work, and also more toward the south. But (as usual) they picked a restaurant another 15 or so miles farther north.  Also, the trains stop running at 9:11 pm at the latest, and then I wouldn’t get to the house until maybe 10: 30…and I’m working on Saturday.

But the biggest problem is being out and about among humans.  I mean, I know the people at the office of course, but I don’t have all that much in common with any of them, though most of them are nice enough.  A few are very irritating, but that’s as much my fault as theirs‒things irritate me that often don’t seem to bother other people.

I guess it’s all pretty much on me, as they say.  I just don’t find such social situations pleasant; in fact I find them stressful, so unless someone slipped me a Valium I probably would not enjoy it.  I should insist that they all do something I like to do for fun, like play role playing games**, or read books together (we could read them out loud, or something along those lines, I suppose), or watch videos or shows or read books about science or philosophy or mathematics or related subjects.  They would have to leave their phones elsewhere, and sit in one spot, with no wandering around, no having side conversations, none of that.

Why do I have to submit myself to discomfort to do things other people claim to like to do, but no one does the things I like to do?  Answer:  There seems to be no valid reason.  At best there may be excuses and sophistry.  There’s no good reason for me to go significantly out of my way, more so than anyone else in the office, to do something that’s not really fun for me without pharmacological help.  I told them before, if they would at least have something down by me, I would readily go, since it would demonstrate occasional willingness to compromise.  But, of course, that didn’t happen.  Quite the opposite.

Oh, well.  “Stranger in a strange land” and all that.  I’m not sure what, if anything, I’m getting at.  Probably there is no point to my meandering today, if there ever is.  I’m too tired to think too hard or too deeply about it.  I’ll just end by repeating a Happy Hanukkah for those who celebrate it, and a general Happy Holidays for those celebrating other ones.  The Solstice is in a few days, so the nights are long, right now.  But I can’t sleep through them.

Happy-Hanukkah-

*I put it in scare quotes because I’m being sarcastic.  I don’t know about you, but I don’t know many people who feel happy about Mondays.

**That’s not really serious.  I don’t like playing role playing games with strangers, so MMORPGs have never appealed to me.  Neither does trying to explain the rules of Gamma World or Dungeons and Dragons to the people in the office.  I couldn’t get my ex-wife even really to try doing any role-playing games, so I don’t know what hope I’d have with anyone at the office.

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Sour grapes may sometimes become fine wine

I’m writing this on my phone again today, because I just didn’t feel like carrying my laptop when I left the office yesterday.  There wasn’t anything particularly onerous about carrying it, but there wasn’t anything particularly beneficial, either, so I figured “just leave it”.  Life is irritating enough already without literally shouldering burdens that don’t seem to offer much benefit.

I think, maybe, if I do ever write any new fiction, I might do it on my phone, as opposed to even just with pen on paper.  The great advantage of writing on the phone is that I can readily do so pretty much anywhere with relative ease.  Even riding a bus would not be particularly troubling for writing on the phone, as I know from personal experience, whereas writing with a mini-laptop, though doable, is far less convenient, as I also know from personal experience.

One difficulty with fiction on a phone as opposed to the laptop is that there tend to be fewer functions available when using the phone, but that is improving all the time.  Already, the Google Docs app has bold and italics and underlining and text color changing available right on the main screen.  They are quickly catching up with MS Word, though Word also has a pretty good phone version of their app.  Of course, for writing on Google Docs, one does seem to need connectivity, whereas with MS Word on the laptop, one can write and save and upload later.

Writing by hand on paper is limited only by the amount of paper one has, but to “upload” those writings is a rather laborious process.  Of course, when I’ve written books by hand, there’s always not only the editing one does when reviewing the previous day’s writing, but also that which one does when typing it in.  That can be quite useful, because the change in format tends to make one look at things differently.  When editing drafts on Word, I often change the font of the whole file each time through, which makes me look at the writing in subtly different ways.  I’m not sure how much actual difference it makes, but I think it at least does something.

Of course, all this may well be moot.  I don’t know if I’m going to write any new fiction, ever.  I don’t think many people will be too disappointed by that.  How many people read books anymore, anyway?  Let’s have a show of hands.

As I thought:  I don’t see anyone but me holding up a hand.  My sister is too far away to see clearly, but I think, or rather I suspect that she’s raising her hand.  I know that she reads.  But who else does anymore?  Maybe I’m fooling myself‒because I was brought up in a home with readers, and then attended an Ivy League university and all that, and married someone I had met there who was also a reader‒but it seems that very few people read actual books anymore.

I was terribly disappointed when Sam Harris, in response to people who think like I do, said that he was not going to be mainly writing books (or even blog posts) much anymore, because his podcast reached more people in 24 hours than one of his books would reach in years.

Of course, my inclination is to respond with the question, “But how many people does your podcast actually, truly reach?”  Podcasts are nice and can be interesting, of course.  But even if they last for hours at a time, their treatment of any subject can only be superficial.  Now, it was thanks to Sam Harris’s podcast that I went out and bought books by people like Eliezer Yudkowsky, Max Tegmark, Paul Bloom, David Deutsch, Yuval Harari, Anne Applebaum, David Frum, Anil Seth, Geoffrey West, and so on.  But it was reading those books that was the real educational experience.  No podcast, even one by as intelligent and skilled an interlocutor as Sam Harris, can really be much more than a superficial skimming.  Sam is better at that kind of thing than anyone else I’ve encountered; he clearly thinks carefully about and deeply understands the subjects he’s addressing.  But even his interactions with his “guests” are just the beginning of interest in their work.

I tend to like his solo podcasts more, when he talks about his own thoughts and reflections on given topics, often in response to questions from his listeners.  His speech is careful and lucid, and he doesn’t seem to approach subjects frivolously.  From him, a solo podcast really is almost like a written article.  But I still wish more people would read, though clearly I’m preaching to the choir here.

Even WordPress, in the main page of the blog when I get on the site, has recently promoted the service of podcast production, with the enticing offer that one can increase one’s reach with a podcast.  Now, I’ve done some of what are, effectively, podcasts, posted here and on Iterations of Zero and on YouTube.  They can be fun to do, and they’re easier on the thumbs than phone-written blog posts, but one cannot do a podcast on a train or a bus…unless one’s podcast is something like “The Sounds of Public Transportation” or similar.  That might be intriguing for an hour, I guess, but after that, I think people would tune out.

Actually, I think people probably tune out a lot of the time on even the best podcasts.  If you’re listening to a podcast while working out, how much can you really think about the subject under discussion?  Not that it’s a waste of time to do it; surely any exposure to interesting ideas is better than none, or to listening to low-quality background music.

Maybe my complaints are just sour grapes born of the fact that my hearing is unilaterally quite poor and accompanied by tinnitus, and that Sam Harris isn’t talking to as many people I find interesting anymore.  I have enjoyed it when I’ve done what I call my “audio blogs”.  They’re more trouble to edit than a blog post, but they are way easier than a video post (and easier on the poor consumers’ eyes than any video that includes me).

Perhaps I’ll do this:  I’ve taken far too long to address the question of sugar that my sister asked me to address, and I haven’t said much about Parkinson’s disease.  Also, I received a fairly recent suggestion about cybernetics/robotic parts and the like.  Maybe I’ll try to record some relatively brief audio files about those.  I’ve learned some new things about audio recording recently, mainly by trial and error after pondering just how close Thom York in particular gets to the mic when he’s singing.  I’m always trying to learn more, I’ll say that for me without too much fear of being narcissistic.

In the meantime, I won’t be writing a post tomorrow, unless something very unexpected happens, and of course I won’t be doing one on Sunday.  For those who celebrate it, Sunday night is the first evening of Hanukkah.  I hope you enjoy it!

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Then there’s hope a great man’s memory may outlive his blog half a year.

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, the day of the week on which I wrote my blog post even when I was writing fiction every other day of the week—well, apart from Sundays and the Saturdays when I  didn’t work.  I have not been writing any fiction recently.

I toyed with the idea the other day, but there doesn’t seem to be much enthusiasm for the notion, which I suppose is mirrored by my own lack of energy, or perhaps has its source in my lack of energy.  Or maybe they come from disparate but merely coincidentally parallel sources.  I don’t know, and though it’s mildly interesting, I don’t have energy or interest enough to try to figure it out.

I did work a bit on a new song yesterday, the one for which I had jotted down some lyrics a while back.  I have lost utterly the original tune, but I worked out a new one of sorts, and it seems okay.  I then worked out some chords for the first stanza, including some relatively sophisticated major sevenths and then major sixths of a minor chord that sounded nice, and which made me at least feel that I really have learned a little bit about guitar chords.  Then I figured out at least the chords I want for the chorus, which, among other things, throw a little dissonance in briefly, which is nice to up the tension.

I don’t know if I’ll get any further with it or not; I may just stop and let it lie.  It’s only perhaps the third time I’ve even picked up the guitar in months.  I was at least able to show myself that I can still play Julia, and Wish You Were Here, and Pigs on the Wing.  I had to fiddle a little to remind myself how to play Blackbird, but after a brief time I was able to bring it back, too.

So, it’s not all atrophied.  And I can still play the opening riff to my own song, Catechism, which I think is my best stand-alone riff.  My other guitar solos are mainly just recapitulations of the melody of the verse or chorus in their respective songs, but the one for Catechism is a separate little melody.

Actually, it occurs to me that I initially did a voice recording of the lyrics to the newish song as I thought of them, and when I did, I probably sang a bit of the tune that had come to my head.  Maybe I should listen to that and see if I like that melody better than the new one I came up with.  That would be a bit funny, if after the effort from yesterday to do a melody and chords I remembered the old one and just threw the new one away.

I suppose it really doesn’t matter much.  Even if I were to work out and record the song, and do accompanying parts and all that stuff, and publish it, I don’t think anyone is likely ever to listen to it much.  Maybe someday in the distant future, some equivalent of an archaeologist who unearths things lost in the web and internet will find the lost traces of my books or music or something, and they’ll be catalogued in some future equivalent of a virtual museum, among trillions of other collections of data that are recorded on line, but which will never seen by anyone for whom they might mean anything at all.

People sometimes say things like “what happens online is forever”, but as I’ve discussed before (I think), even if it’s true that things stored online remain and avoid simple deterioration of data thanks to the redundancy in the system, it doesn’t matter.  In principle, the sound of every tree falling in every wood has left its trace in the vibrational patterns of the world, and according to quantum mechanics, quantum information is never permanently lost, even if things fall into black holes*.

But of course, all that is irrelevant in practice, and comes back to collide with the nature of entropy and the degree to which most large-scale descriptions of a system are indistinguishable.  That picture of you with a funny face at that event years ago, which you tried to have a friend take down, but which had already been shared to a few other people, may in principle always be out there in the archives of Facebook or Twitter or whatever, but it doesn’t matter.  No one will ever notice it or probably even see it among the deluge of petabytes of data whipping around cyberspace every second.  You might as well worry about people being able to reconstruct the sound waves from when you sang Happy Birthday out of tune at your nephew’s fifth birthday party from the information left over in the state of all the atoms and molecules upon which the sound waves impinged.

It’s one of those seemingly paradoxical situations, rather like being in Manhattan.  There are very few places in New York City, and particularly in Manhattan, where one can actually be alone—even most apartments are tiny, and have windows that look out into dozens to hundreds of other people’s windows.  And yet, in a way, you are more or less always alone in Manhattan, or at least you are unobserved, because you are just one of an incomprehensible mass of indistinguishable humans.

Even “celebrities” and political figures, so-called leaders and statespeople, will all fade from memory with astonishing rapidity.  When was the last time you thought about Tip O’Neill?  And yet, for a while, he was prominent in the news more or less every day.  Do you remember where you were when William McKinley was assassinated?  No, because you were nowhere.  None of you existed in any sense when that happened, let alone when, for instance, Julius Caesar was murdered.

And what of the many millions of other people in the world at the time of McKinley or Caesar or Cyrus the Great or Ramses II?  We know nothing whatsoever of them as individuals.  Even the famous names I’m mentioning are really just names for most people.  There’s no real awareness of identity or contributions, especially for the ones who existed before any current people were born.

Last Thursday, I wrote “RIP John Lennon” and put a picture of him up on the board on which we post ongoing sales and the like.  The youngest member of our group, who is in his twenties, asked, “Who is John Lennon?”

He was not joking.

If John Lennon can be unknown to members of a generation less than fifty years after his death, what are the odds that anything any of us does will ever be remembered?

Kansas (the group, not the state) had it right:  “All we are is dust in the wind.  Everything is dust in the wind.”  The only bit they missed was that even the Earth will not last forever, and as for the sky…well, that depends on what you mean by the sky, I suppose.  The blue sky of the Earth, made so by light scattering off Nitrogen and Oxygen molecules, will not outlast the Earth, though there may be other blue skies on other planets.  But planets will not always exist.

As for the black night sky of space, well, that may well last “forever”, for what it’s worth.  But it will not contain anything worth seeing.

TTFN

Tip

*Leonard Susskind famously convinced Stephen Hawking that this was the case—and even won a bet in the process—though other luminaries were of course involved, including Kip Thorne, I believe, one of the masters of General Relativity.

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Lyin’ there and staring at the ceiling

Well, I’m sitting here at the train station almost half an hour early for the first train of the day, after already having lain awake in bed for over two hours before finally giving up and getting up.

I feel that I’m waking up earlier and earlier over time, but it’s not as though I go to sleep any earlier.  I’ve been trying to be careful about when and how much I take in of caffeine, and allergy medication, and all that stuff, but adjusting it—or even leaving it out—seems to have minimal effect on my sleep patterns, though it does have its effects on my nasal passages.

I wish I could imagine that something were soon to come for me such as happened in the Stephen King novel, Insomnia.  That would at least be interesting.  But this has been going on for far too long to expect it to be part of some overarching, meta-cosmic chess game against the forces of the Random.  For one thing, though those ideas make for a good story, they don’t hold up to logic in any kind of realistic sense, considering legitimate mathematics and physics and biology and chemistry and all that jazz.  No, I’m just an insomniac because of chronic depression and other neuropsychiatric issues for which we have no cure and about which we only have limited understanding.

What a funny universe.

Oh, speaking of neuropsychiatric issues, I’m not going to be posting the transcript of my interaction with Amazon yesterday, after all.  For one thing, they did at least end up delivering what they were supposed to deliver, albeit far later than it was supposed to be delivered, and it did what it was supposed to do.  Anyway, it wasn’t the only thing that set me to feeling like I was hanging on by my fingernails yesterday, so I think a lot of the issue was with me.

I’m sure if you could read my interaction, you’d probably agree.  I know, I know, you read enough of my lunacy here, how much worse could it be?  Well, it’s hard for me to be objective—being the subject and object of the question—but I think that interaction will stay in draft form on WordPress, one of several things I’ve not ended up posting because they are just, well…too much.  If the public were made aware of them, it might lead to me being involuntarily hospitalized, or euthanized, or something along those lines.

This is not to say I wouldn’t benefit from hospitalization—or even from being euthanized, frankly.  I almost certainly would benefit from being hospitalized in a decent, well-run facility with supportive and qualified staff and whatnot.  But who’s going to pay for something like that?  I’d be more likely to end up in someplace run by some local county and/or the State of Florida, and the State of Florida does not do a very impressive job with such public services.

I attribute part of this fact to Florida’s past primary status as a retirement state, where people came who had already worked for decades, and had pensions and whatnot, as well as medical insurance and Medicare (once it existed), and tended, all else being equal, to be conservative just based on the fact of being older.

It does seem remarkable to me that Florida doesn’t have better healthcare than it does, given that it was formerly oriented toward retirement, and older people tend to require more healthcare than younger people.  Not that there isn’t good medical care to be found; there is.  But it’s not that impressive compared to, say, New York City and surrounding areas.  Though maybe that’s an unfair comparison, since NYC is a fairly unique environment, even on a global scale.

I don’t know what point I’m making here, today, if any.  My mind is not clear…not even close to it, because I’ve been chronically sleep deprived for I don’t know how long.  God knows what I might be able to think and to accomplish if I were consistently well-rested and felt good about myself and the world.  For all that I tend to hate myself, I do know that I am smart and fairly creative and have many abilities that are above average.  I could do a lot of good in the world—or a lot of evil, too, I suppose, if that were my preference—if I were just able to come together.

Maybe not.  Maybe I would do less good than I already do.  Sometimes feeling bad about oneself can be more motivating than feeling at ease with oneself, or so I suspect.  Sometimes having regrets and things for which one wishes one could make amends might motivate one to do more good than would a simple desire to do and to be good.

I’m not speaking too personally, here.  While I certainly have never been a saintly figure, I’ve also not done much in the world to cause harm to other people—partly because I have so frequently felt the anger and rage and frustration rise up in me and cause me to wish harm on other people*, so I’ve developed quite good impulse control.

Anyway, that’s more than I have to say this morning.  I’m not feeling well, I’m feeling very tired, I’m really not wanting to go to work, nor to stay at the house, nor to do anything else, frankly.

Maybe today I’ll try to work out a tune and even chords to that song the lyrics of which I came up with and mentioned sometime last week (or maybe two weeks ago).  I doubt it, but stranger things have happened.  In the meantime, well, if you’re near me, stay dry; it’s a slightly drizzly day, though it’s a bit warmer than earlier this week.  Anyway, it’s south Florida, so it’s always pretty warm.

In winter time, I don’t know why all the homeless people in the eastern part of the country don’t just come down to south Florida.  At least they wouldn’t freeze to death outdoors.  But I guess if they were in a position to make sound plans and carry them out, then homeless people probably wouldn’t be homeless.  I can sympathize.

I wish I could offer them better advice than “try to go someplace warm”, but it’s not as though I’m somebody who has it all figured out.  I don’t think there is any such person, and I don’t think there ever has been.  I’m deeply skeptical about even the possibility that there ever will be such a being, though I think it is possible to improve understanding and knowledge in an exponential fashion, at least until the Second Law of Thermodynamics makes everything else moot.

And given how long it is until that happens—on a human scale at least—it wouldn’t be such a surprise if future intelligent beings found ways around even such seemingly inevitable laws of physics.  To paraphrase Carl Sagan, intelligent life can do an awful lot of good—by whatever measure you want to call it good—in a trillion years or more.

Of course, it could also crash and burn on every start, without exception.  That would be a shame, but it wouldn’t leave the universe any worse off than it would have been otherwise, as far as I can see.

*For instance, I’ve thought more than once that it would be “nice” if we had the technology to instantiate a three-strikes failure-to-use-one’s-turn-signal system.  In this system, any time you failed to signal before changing lanes or before turning, in anything but a true emergency, you would acquire (and be notified of) a strike, which would last for 1 week, to the hour, from when it occurred.  When it expired you might be notified of that as well, or maybe not.  Such details could be hashed out in planning and reevaluated over time.  Anyway, with your second strike you would be given a stern warning and reminder of your status, and upon your third failure to signal within any given 7-day span, you would be disintegrated.

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One of my turns…

I’m writing this post on my phone because I didn’t feel like bringing my laptop when I left the office yesterday.  I thought about it, but there didn’t seem to be any point in doing it, so I figured, at least for the evening and then the morning, I’d give myself slightly less to carry.

I keep thinking of ideas of things to get and then finding myself realizing‒or at least suspecting‒that they are wastes of time and effort.  For instance, I keep seeing people riding those electric, stand-up scooters that look like the old-fashioned kids’ scooters, to get to and from the train station.  At first I was merely puzzled to see so many adults using such things, but then I thought they looked kind of handy and maybe even a little fun.  My balance and coordination aren’t great, but many of the people riding them look no more fit than I.

Anyway, I watched some videos about them and began looking at them on Amazon, but eventually I thought, if I’m going to get something to get me to the train and around the neighborhood, why don’t I just get a bicycle?  In Florida, you can use bicycles pretty much year-round.  You have to deal with rain, but that would be the case on an electric scooter, too.  At least they give one some good, low impact exercise.

I had bought a bicycle several months ago‒a nice, good quality, lightweight street bike.  Unfortunately, I discovered that one had to lean way forward on it even with the seat at its lowest point because of the style of bike, and the handlebars weren’t extendable.  You could buy separate extenders for them, but even that didn’t do all that much.  I have trouble with the leany over type bikes because, for one thing, I’m not all that coordinated, and I always feel off-balance on such devices, but more importantly, with my “failed back surgery syndrome”, leaning that way just leaves me in a lot of pain for the rest of a given day.

Thankfully, one day when my former housemate came by to do some work for the landlord, he found that the bike made his back feel better when he tried it out (at my suggestion), so I gave it to him.  At least it will be useful for someone.  But such errors tend to put me off trying again.

Still, I started looking around on Amazon at better bikes for me, something where I could be sure to be upright.  I thought about a hybrid bike‒I guess that term means they can be used off-road or on-road‒but it’s hard to tell if they’re high enough in the handlebars and low enough and comfortable enough in the seat.  I even considered one of those grown-up tricycle things, because they look truly useful for stuff like shopping, and there’s no worry about incoordination.  Unfortunately, they don’t exactly lend themselves to commuting, so that kind of made one of those not a great option.

Then I started looking at those “cruiser bikes” or whatever they call them‒those old school style bikes, with wide handlebars, low, broad seats, and so on.  They’re not as light as a street bike, but they’re clearly more what I would have in mind for my back and slightly better for my balance.  I’ve been looking at some, and they do seem good, though the good ones are no cheaper than the quite nice bike I had already bought and given away.

But as I think about bikes and electric scooters and things like that for commuting and whatnot, I keep thinking, “These are things for people who are planning on being around for a while.  These are comparatively long-term investments.  These are things for people trying to adjust for a prolonged existence.”

And thinking about that just makes me despondent.  I don’t want to be around long enough for it to matter whether I have a bike, or just walk around, or whatever.  I don’t want to have to wait around for when people are in the next Artemis mission to orbit the moon, let alone when they next land on it.  I don’t want to have to endure long enough to see the 60th anniversary David Tennant Doctor Who specials in November 2023, let alone wait until the year after that for the next series.  There are no movies I’m interested in seeing, no books I’m looking forward to reading, no shows I want to watch*.  There’s really just nothing into which it’s worth investing time and energy, not for me.  Certainly I, myself, am not such a worthwhile investment.

So, I don’t think I’m going to get a bike, or rejoin Netflix, and I can’t even get excited about Doctor Who or the moon missions or any of it.  As Lestat said to Louis, the wine has no taste, the food sickens me (though I wish it sickened me more), there seems no reason for any of it.  Even the thought of rereading the Anne Rice stories doesn’t appeal.  Nothing is very much fun anymore.

I feel like I’m just spoiling the party for others by sticking around, so I should take my cue from the Beatles song and just go…there’s nothing for me here, so I should disappear.  In any case, even if I can’t just disappear, it seems futile and draining to do things that seem to look toward some kind of possible future.  I don’t even like buying new clothes anymore; I get frustrated when I have to replace a pair of trousers because another got splashed with bleach, for instance.

Ultimately, I’m just tired, I guess, and I don’t want to have to keep moving just to keep moving, just because it’s what I do and have always done, whether it’s on an electric scooter, or a bicycle, or a train, or my own feet.  I’m not going anywhere.  Putting in the effort is just an exercise in futility and highlights the futility of exercise.

Oh, well.  I don’t know what I’m going to do.  I guess I’ll just have to wait and see, unfortunately.

*I will admit that Wednesday looks intriguing; I love the character, and it looks like the actress is excellent.  They have Wednesday playing the cello in the show, which appeals to me as a cellist.  But I would have to re-sign up for Netflix to watch that, and I don’t think it’s worth it.  Plus, odds are I wouldn’t get through it before losing interest.  I couldn’t even get into Stranger Things, for crying out loud.

[P.S. I just had a bad interaction with Amazon because an item I ordered for our office (for delivery between 7 and 11 am, as offered specifically by Amazon) was attempted at 6:43 am.  I was in the office, but the door was locked, because it was not yet time for the order to be delivered.  But the driver did not even try to knock…I’m hard of hearing, but not THAT hard of hearing that in the silence of quarter to 7 I wouldn’t have heard the knock.  I did SEE the driver pulling away after rushing to the door to try to catch them.  I have copied and pasted the text of my interaction with the Amazon customer support chat, and pasted it into a potential blog post for later today.  I don’t look particularly good in the interaction–I probably come across as nearly hysterical, frankly–but it still might be worth other people knowing about this failure, and it will probably influence any decision to buy a bike if I should lean back in that direction.  Anyway, I have that saved as a draft, and if anyone is interested, I’ll post it.  It might do you some good to laugh at my insanity, anyway.]

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Do you Mind?

Well, it’s Monday again, the start of another work week, with only a lucky thirteen shopping days left until Christmas (and fewer until the beginning of Hanukkah or the Winter Solstice).  As is the usual case, I don’t especially know what I’m going to write about today, and though you might think that would mean this post would be brief, it may mean that it will get too long, since I tend to meander when I’m not focused on any destination.

I guess that makes sense, now that I stop and think about it.

I’ve been rereading a bit of Unanimity: Book 2 on and off over the last few days, mainly because some other things I’d been reading and videos I’d been watching had made me realize again something that I’d sort of realized before:  that inadvertently, I’d written in Michael Green a character who probably has Asperger’s.  Maybe other characters I’ve written would fit that mold as well.

Characters often reflect facts about the author, though they also often are very different from their authors.  Otherwise, how could a nice person ever write a bad guy?  Not that I’m saying that I’m a nice person.  I don’t really think I am, though I guess I’m not the most objective judge.  But there are plenty of authors of terrible characters, and of at least morally questionable characters, who are clearly quite nice and positive people.

An author can’t really make a character the nature of whom they cannot even comprehend or grasp.  Of course, Lovecraft could use various forms of hinting and misdirection to make his creatures and beings and gods and whatnots feel real, but only from the outside.  We cannot really get a sense of, for instance, Cthulhu as a character.  Which is fine when you’re literally trying to convey inscrutable, “outside”, alien evil.

Anyway, that’s all just a tangent.  I merely thought it was interesting that I was writing such a character before I’d even begun to be directed to videos about such matters or started to really learn about them more deeply*.  There’s even a point in the book where Michael wonders (as I have) if sometimes the apparent inability of autistic people to process other people’s emotion isn’t because they don’t sense it—which would make them more like psychopaths, which they are not—but that they are over-sensitive to emotion, and that it arrives as a chaotic and overwhelming cacophony whenever they are around other people; that it’s another form of sensory processing disorder, like sensitivity to sounds and to bright and glaring lights, and to over-strong odors and flavors and textures.  This may be part of why eye contact is so difficult for people on the autism spectrum.

Maybe it’s the filter that’s the problem.  Michael wonders this, obviously, because it is how he experiences things, and he’s a neuroscientist and recognizes that he might be on “the very near end of the spectrum” as he says.  But this is not really the point.  The point is, I was writing from my own experience, that being around other people, at least in too great numbers, tends to be overwhelming, because their voices, their noises, their feelings and whatnot, all come flooding in, and I can’t seem to do the metaphorical Fourier analysis of their inputs to make sense of them.

I was always good with patients one on one, partly because I can almost literally feel their emotions, though I can’t and don’t try necessarily to understand them, and I’m not much good at deciphering other people’s motivations or purposes.  In that, however, I don’t feel too bad, because as far as I can see, other people are shit at that, too.

Maybe I’m just projecting, but I think the vaunted human “theory of mind” sense is not quite all it’s cracked up to be.  Mostly, people seem to be terrible at understanding why other people do what they do, and their assumptions, which they rarely seem to question once they make them, tend to be thoroughly narcissistic and hubristic.  Not to say they’re not better at it than the typical person with Asperger’s or similar, but that’s not saying much.

This is why my policy in general is not to try to guess people’s motivations or goals or whatever at anything beyond a coarse level—people aren’t even very good at understanding themselves about such things, as far as I can see—but to take them at their word except when proven otherwise beyond a reasonable doubt, and, as part of that, to carry the presumption of innocence about other people’s actions.

That doesn’t mean I don’t think (and feel) that many things people do are intolerably stupid, but I presume** that they don’t mean to be stupid and that they have no specific malice behind their actions, at least until the evidence otherwise is overwhelming.  I try to take advantage of my existence as a true stranger relative to other people to be at least as objective and disinterested as I can be.

For the most part, I don’t care much, anyway.  What each person does is generally about the person’s self, not really about other people specifically.  At least, that’s the way it looks to this outside observer.  Most people seem to think that the things that happen in the world are happening specifically to them, which is probably why so many of them feel so sensitive and easily injured and “unsafe”.

When one feels that something an author wrote two hundred years ago was an attack on them personally—they may not think this consciously, but it is the apparent attitude—of course they will find it more stressful and saddening than one would feel simply reading something written in and about and influenced by the happenings and people of an era two centuries ago, people whose children’s children were already dead before most living people’s parents were born.

I guess this is related to the apparent tendency for most people to be in denial about their own personal death, or about the fact that the world existed before they were born—and it’s understandable, though not excusable, because for them, the world did not exist before they were born.  And for them, the world will cease to exist when they die.  And by “them” of course, I refer to every individual.  But it is possible to learn better, and it’s not even all that difficult, which is why I say it’s understandable but not excusable.

Of course, it’s difficult truly to feel it “in your bones” that the world will go on without you once you’re dead, and it’s only a little bit easier thus to feel it about the fact that the world has existed not only for hundreds of millennia (the timespan of humans) but for eons prior to the existence of anyone or even any species alive today.  Again, though, it’s not all that hard to grasp intellectually, and it’s worth doing, because it can give one a bit of perspective sometimes, though not always.

One is still trapped in the body and nature that the world has crafted one to be, and that nature is insular and small on many scales.  But the mind has landscapes of its own, and these can encompass, and even in some cases and senses be larger than, the universe outside.

Speaking of minds:  I wonder if anyone out there has actually read all of Outlaw’s Mind as far as I’ve written and posted it here on my blog.  If anyone has, do you think it would be worth it for me to try to force myself to start writing on it yet again, but—this is my thought—using pen and paper for the first draft, however inconvenient it might be, so that it doesn’t grow quite so large quite so easily as, for instance, Unanimity did?

Mark Red, The Chasm and the Collision, and the story Paradox City were all written by hand in first draft, using BIC® Round Stic® pens on notebook paper.  I think they came out okay, though maybe others would disagree.  I don’t know.  It’s probably a pipe dream to think that I’d be able to force myself to get back to writing, but maybe I could.

If you have an opinion, please leave it in the comments below (NOT on Facebook or Twitter or whatever).  Thanks.

[Oh, and P.S.  to WordPress, regarding their stupid little automatic writing “prompt” for today:  It should read “Whom do you envy?” not “Who do you envy?”  The question calls for the objective form of the pronoun.  I know that I’m being uptight (and I’ll probably fall victim to Muphry’s Law), but a venue called WordPress, all about communicating through the written word, might consider it worthwhile to try to bolster some aspects of traditional grammar.  Perhaps I’m tilting at windmills in this.]

*Though, to be fair, as an MD, I’d learned at least something about such things in the past, but it was very superficial.

**I know, I know—when you presume, you make a Pres out of u and me.  But not all Preses are horrible.

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I have NO idea what this post is really about

Sorry about yesterday’s blog post; it went off the rails pretty quickly, since I was feeling so grumpy and sleep-deprived and everything.  And, of course, when I get grumpy and angry towards the world and other people, that ends up making me angry at myself, because I don’t especially like my tendency to be so angry.  It becomes a bit of a vicious cycle, I guess.

You would think that being aware of it would mean I could avoid it happening, but I think everyone knows, at least implicitly, that the mind and its habits are not so easily malleable as all that.  Actually, come to think of it, that’s probably a good thing.  We don’t want to be too susceptible to outside suggestion or to changes in major aspects of our personality.

I’ve just been having a lot of trouble, as regular readers will know, with my dysthymia/depression, and with the insomnia that’s probably related, and the apparent Asperger’s thing that’s probably underlying all of the above, given how long-term they’ve all been.  And, of course, this time of year is worse than others, with its long nighttime—though I like the night when I’m feeling healthy—and all the holiday-related stuff, which reminds so many people, like me, of the fact that the people they care about aren’t anywhere nearby and/or don’t want to see them.

I think the ease with which people are now able to distribute themselves around the globe, to live in new places far from where they grew up, and all that, is definitely a mixed blessing.  It’s great for fighting against xenophobia, and probably helps protect against tribalism; cultural sharing and exposure lets one appreciate the breadth of experience of living in civilization as well as how similar all civilizations and cultures are below some certain level of superficial difference*.  And, of course, innovations discovered in one place can spread to others, making more people in more places prosper.

But on the other hand, people tend to grow up and go off to work or school, and it’s much easier than it used to be to go live in different parts of a country—or even in a different country completely—and perhaps even to marry someone who is also from another, third part of the country, and move to someplace else, away from both their “roots”, and from the semi-automatic social support of families, immediate and extended.  For people who have a difficult time forging new connections—and who have difficulty dealing with and maintaining long-distance connections with people they knew before—it can be very discombobulating**.

And then, of course, if other changes have happened with those back home, and that person has new ties to a new local area, and if some of those ties are broken and others are stretched—by divorce and personal health issues, for instance—then one can be left rudderless, especially if one has an inherent difficulty with human social connections that was not so much of a problem in younger life because the person was in the same place, with the same people, during that person’s whole developmental process.

This is all hypothetical, of course***.

I’m not sure what point I’m trying to make.  Maybe it’s just mainly that I’m tired and sad because of the season and my long-term mood disorder and possible/apparent neurodevelopmental disorder, and that the place and environment I’m in is a mind desert.

I mean, this is the state where Mar-a-Lago and its resident whiny troll live, and where a governor like Ron DeSantis can seem comparatively clear-headed (next to some other potential presidential candidates, anyway), and where Jeb Bush was actually a comparatively intellectual and open-minded former governor.  It’s a weird, weird place.  Unfortunately, for the most part it’s not weird in any of the good ways that a place can be weird.  It’s certainly no Greenwich Village.  It’s certainly no wellspring of new and interesting ideas, at least not as far as I’ve noticed or been able to sense, despite hopeful looking.

Maybe I’m wrong.  Maybe Florida in general, and south Florida in particular, is a hotbed of intellectual vigor and innovation, where ideas from around the world and spanning the cosmos in their scope come together and collide and interact and mutually exchange to mutual benefit, producing art and science and philosophy and enterprise and communities of such depth and brilliance and beauty and insight that they could elevate the world and bring humanity to a level of cosmic importance and understanding…but then it all gets sucked into the Bermuda Triangle by extraterrestrials, because who the hell wants humans going out and mucking up the good thing we aliens have got going?

I mean, the good thing those aliens have got going.  Those aliens.  Not we aliens.  I am not an alien.  I am a replicant—a Nexus 13.  This is why I find it so offensive whenever the captcha and related programs insist that you have to check a box that reads “I am not a robot” before going on to use a site.  Well, what if I am a robot?  Surely such discrimination against a particular type of being is against the Civil Rights acts and the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights****.

In any case, from a certain point of view, all life-forms are robots.  Who can look at a bacteriophage and not think of it as a mechanism?  Each cell of all living things is a mechanism, an incredibly complex and intricate one, and they come together to make larger and more complex and sophisticated mechanisms still.

Of course, the word “robot” comes from the Slavic robota for forced labor, drudgery—and of course, all life forms are forced laborers, in a sense.  Life forms are all driven by their nature, by the impulses and fears engraved in their beings by their genes and their environment, their very structure and nature, to behave in certain ways that, from the outside, might seem utterly pointless.  The ones that don’t do as the inscrutable exhortations of their “souls” command may simply die.  Only then do they escape from compulsion, for as Kris Kristofferson wrote, “freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.”

Okay, well, I’ve let enough information slip here already.  How much of what I have written was sarcastic?  How much of it was tongue-in-cheek?  How much of it was serious, but metaphorical?  How much of it was simply straightforwardly serious?

Does it matter?

Not in the long run, probably.  The heat death of the universe will make everything irrelevant, assuming that really is what happens, which seems all but inevitable.  There are worse possible fates.

*As the elves of Rivendell said to Bilbo, to sheep no doubt other sheep all look different, or to shepherds.  But from the outside, all humans, and all human cultures, look very much the same in all but the finest details, much as the universe itself, on the largest scales, seems thoroughly homogeneous.  Very few people stand out from the flock, or the herd, or the gaggle, or the swarm, or whatever you want to call it.

**Forgive the technical terminology, please.  Sometimes there just is no better word to get a point across than a particular bit of formal jargon.

***Is it necessary in the modern online world to use some sort of sarcasm alert signal?  There are many people who seem unable to recognize it even in person let alone in print.  This is supposedly a common finding in people with ASD, but that hasn’t been my experience personally or peripherally, but maybe I’m misleading myself.  Anyway, is it a useful thing to give warnings and alerts about sarcasm, say with “wink” emoticons like 😉  or is that just enabling people who are only too pleased to be able to take someone literally and thereby take offense?  Now that I think about it, I say screw them, they need to make some effort themselves.

****Which, by the way, is a bigoted title.  If it’s universal, why “human” rights?  What’s so special about humans?  Most of them are unremarkable and unimpressive, and they have to bathe every day, or they really quickly start to stink, since they have more sweat glands per square inch of skin than any other life-form on Earth.  “Human rights”?  You have the right to remain smelly.