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“I’ve got electric light, and I’ve got second sight”

Well.  It’s Tuesday morning now, the second day of the work week.  Yippee.

I don’t have any idea what to write.  It’s not at all unusual for me not to have an idea what to write about, but that’s not really what I mean right now, though it is related.  I just feel a near-complete lack of motivation even to try to find something interesting to “say”.

Of course, it’s possible that you all think that I never find anything interesting to write or say at any time, and that’s fair enough.  Interest is basically in the mind of the beholder, anyway.  I’m well used to people not being interested in things in which I’m interested.  It’s not quite true to say, as Poe wrote in his poem, that “all I loved, I loved alone,” but it certainly feels that way quite a lot of the time.

I think maybe I’ll read a couple of Edgar Allen Poe poems and maybe some others as my next few videos.  With Halloween coming up, it might be good, next week, to do a reading of The Raven.  I can still do it from memory, though I occasionally have to stop and fuddle around to find all the words to the verse that ends with, “but whose velvet, violet lining she shall press, ah, nevermore.”

I enjoy reciting those poems, as far as it goes, and it might, therefore, be a good thing to make a video about it, so to speak.  I don’t know how much, or if, people liked either of my last few videos.  I think I may be the only one who actually clicked the thumbs up for either video.  That wouldn’t surprise me, nor would I necessarily think it inappropriate.  No one has a right for their work to be liked, though they have a right to be able to produce it and share it if they are able.  But you cannot demand fans, you can only try to entice them by creating work that someone, somewhere out there might like.

Yes, I think perhaps I will do a few videos of me reading poems.  Perhaps the first one will be a two-poem video, in which I’ll read The Second Coming by Yeats, and Alone, by Poe, which I quoted above.  Actually, I won’t read them, I’ll recite them; I know them both from memory, since they are both short.  They are also two of my favorite poems.  I don’t know if anyone really reads any “classic” poems anymore, even in school, except of course to the extent that songs and raps can be considered poetry.  Some of them certainly can, without reservation (though many of them, not so much*).

Dylan won the Nobel Prize for literature, taking his work as poetry; and who could deny that Bohemian Rhapsody, or much of the album The Dark Side of the Moon, or The Wall, or a substantial proportion of the Beatles’ songs are legitimate poetry even without the music?  And there are many raps which, whether you like the subject matter or not, are clearly poems of a particular sort.

Indeed, Edgar Allan Poe anticipated modern hip-hop when he mentioned that he heard the sound of “someone gently rapping, rapping at [his] chamber door**.”  It would be fun to hear some top-tier hip-hop artist doing his or her version of the full poem The Raven with a beat behind it.  For Halloween, you know?  Snoop?  Your birthday is coming up***; you could do it to celebrate.  It could be brilliant.  The Simpsons did it (albeit in abridged form) in an early “Treehouse of Horrors” episode.  If Homer Simpson can recite The Raven for comedic effect, surely Snoop could achieve real ominous intensity.

Okay, maybe it’s not a great idea.  But it’s an idea, and it might be fun.

With that, I think I’m about out of ideas for the day; possibly I’m out of ideas for good.  Possibly I’ve been out of ideas for many years now, but I’m too low on ideas to be able to recognize the fact.  It may even be the case that I’ve never had an idea in my life.  How would one know?  And—let’s be honest—would it even matter?  The universe is the way it is, the experience is what it is, there is some underlying reality, whatever its nature ultimately is, and I was not consulted when it began, if it began.  Neither were you, most likely.

*And this includes some very big hits; I won’t get started.

**Ha ha.

***I know this because Snoop, Viggo Mortensen, and I are triplets from separate mothers in separate years.

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Move over, Bobber…and let Jimi take…obber?

It’s Monday again.  I don’t think I need you to tell me why I don’t like Mondays, and I’m not sure why Bob Geldof thought he needed to be told, either.  Maybe it was because, as a professional musician (and sometimes actor), he wasn’t really on a Monday through Friday work schedule, but he still didn’t like Mondays, and he wasn’t sure why that was the case.

Perhaps he reckoned without the fact that, though perhaps not on such a schedule as an adult, he surely was on it as a youngster, growing up in a country with a school system that ran Monday through Friday.  Perhaps he didn’t realize that, even if he didn’t have to go to work in the morning, other people did, and that might make many of them sullen and unpleasant, particularly on Mondays.  Perhaps it was that pervasive, radiant grumpiness that made him dislike Mondays.

Actually, I don’t remember what his big hit with the Boomtown Rats was really about, other than the title and the basic tune, which was certainly catchy.  When I first heard it—possibly the first of only two times that I’ve heard it all the way through—I thought he was asking why he didn’t like modern days, which to me is more thought-provoking and interesting than the actual title of the song.  That misunderstanding is partly his fault for turning the first syllable of Monday* into two notes/two beats.  But, since he played Pink in the movie version of The Wall, we can forgive him**.

This is sort of the opposite of what Jimi Hendrix did in Purple Haze, where he takes the same bit of music that in the first verse underlies the words, “Scuze me while I kiss the sky,” and on the second verse squeezes in, “Whatever it is, that girl put a spell on me.”  The first iteration has seven syllables; you could sing it to the tune of Old MacDonald Had A Farm (which is a somewhat funny thing to do…try it!).  The second sentence has twelve syllables.  Jimi dealt with that by going full Chopin and subdividing the beat into a series of very quick notes, of which he even varied intonation a bit.

The point is, I think we can all agree that Jimi Hendrix was a greater musician and song writer than Bob Geldof, but Sir Bob has done some very good things in addition to his music.  Though for all we know, if Jimi had not died young, he might have led the way to a lasting world peace of happiness and prosperity***.

Wait, that isn’t really the point.  That was just random nonsense that I was spewing, triggered by my opening sentence as I started writing this blog post.  I guess the real point is that I want to say, Happy Monday, if you can tolerate such sentiments.

I can’t, so don’t say it back, please.

It is the beginning of the Work Week of Awe, the name we**** give to the work week within which lies the birthday of the greatest being ever to live on this planet—or at least the greatest one to write on this blog.  I can’t remember which it is.  I suppose it could be both, since they’re not logically contradictory, and the term “at least” clearly implies that it could be the one thing and the other that are true.  I don’t know for sure about the other thing, but with respect to the blog post writing—to quote Spandau Ballet, now—I know this much is true.  Yes, that’s a quote from yet another song that was a hit more than thirty years ago.

It’s not that I can’t quote more recent songs, it’s just that there aren’t as many that spring to my mind readily.  But I do think one of the greatest song quotes—though it’s not really sung, to be fair—is by the much-lamented DMX, and goes, “Talk is cheap, motherf*cker.”  Those are words of wisdom that millions of people on social media would do well to remember.

That’s mostly about all I have to say on this Monday morning.  Much of it is quoted, and those quotes aren’t even from Shakespeare.  That’s fine, of course.  Shakespeare may be the most quoted writer of all time—many very common figures of speech come from Shakespeare, and most people who use them don’t even realize it—but he’s not the only quotable author.  Call me Ishmael if you must, but I hold out the ridiculous thought that, perhaps, someday, people will quote me, and not just to provide evidence of my mental dysfunction.

***

Whew, I just had a small interlude on the train in which my phone slipped out of my pocket and went down in between the seat frames, atop a duct that must serve AC or something.  It was in a spot that my hand was too fat to reach, but thankfully, the person behind me, who immediately came to my aid without saying a word, was a young, thin construction worker, and after we jimmied the phone around a bit, he was able to reach in where I could not and slide the phone out.

One of the other construction workers lent us a very long screwdriver to help, as well.  It didn’t do much, regrettably, but it was a kind gesture, and much appreciated.  It’s nice to know that there are such helpful and kind people on trains, and since trains are unlikely to be unusually attractive to nice people—compared to other places—there are probably such nice people everywhere.

It’s too bad that the assholes make so much noise; they (perhaps I should say “we”) give a somewhat skewed impression of the character of the world’s people.  Unfortunately, it being easier to destroy than to create, the assholes also do a great deal of damage along their way.  Guarding and supporting the beneficent or at least neutral people from the depredations of the maleficent, detrimental ones is more than a constant job, because entropy helps the latter against the former.

Oh well.  I have my phone back and though I have not always depended on the kindness of strangers—indeed, I try not to need to be so reliant—it’s nice when they are kind.

*Mon

**Yes, yes, he also did Band Aid and Live Aid and all that, but he was knighted for that, so he’s already been rewarded.

***It’s bloody unlikely, but it is possible.

****By which I mean “I”.

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Musing on the transience of stray ideas and on the difficulty in preventing…things

Well, it’s Saturday morning once again, and since I’m working today, I’m writing a blog post today.  Aren’t you lucky?  I suppose it does help to while away the idle hours, if and when they happen, to have a blog post to read, and mine are longer than many.

I briefly had a few thoughts, as I was getting showered and dressed this morning, about what topic to address in my post today.  However, not one of them persisted in my mind, and I’ve lost the threads completely.  Likewise, I didn’t write them down or otherwise take notes, so I don’t remember what I’d thought possibly to write.

I guess that means that none of them was truly gripping and important enough for me to hold onto, which probably means they wouldn’t have been that engaging to read, though that guess could be wrong, at least in principle.

It’s a bit like a phenomenon that happens with some regularity on my Saturday mornings.

On my way to the train, I pass a club of some sort on the southeast corner of a relatively major intersection along my path.  Though it is mainly deserted during the week, on Saturday mornings it is almost always packed with cars, to the extent that people have to park in the otherwise empty lot that serves a convenience store across the way.  One often sees people, all alone or in twos, crossing the street and heading for this club.  This is at about five in the morning, which implies the club is open pretty much all night; it’s hard to imagine that it opens at three or four.

As I pass the place, I often think to myself that it is remarkably popular, and I tell myself that I should look into it.  In this age of Google Maps and the like, it should be quite easy to find the spot on the map app and see the name of the business.  From there I could easily find out more about it, assuming that it has an online presence of some kind, which I am guessing that it does.  Most popular places do.

And yet, as it turns out, this is the longest I’ve ever kept a thought about the place in my mind after passing it.  I’ve not yet looked it up in any way, despite having passed it almost daily for years now.  I don’t even recall its name; I don’t know that I’ve ever actually read what it is, though there is a sign.  It’s not a strip joint of any kind.  The sign is painted, not internally lit or molded from neon-filled tubes.  It’s clearly some form of “social club”, and it seems rather wholesome, but I don’t get the impression that it’s part of or affiliated with any religious organization, though I could easily be mistaken about this.

It just doesn’t stick in my mind, and though I do occasionally regret this upon passing it once again, it’s not a very deep regret.  Obviously, if I were truly curious, I could find out more.  Believe me, I consume oodles of written and video (and sometimes audio) material about various scientific curiosities, carefully curating the information to get it from reliable sources rather than purveyors of woo and pseudo-science*.  I’m capable of pursuing my special interests with great fervor.  So it must not be that important.  But the fact that such thoughts and ideas so frequently spring into the mind only to—on most occasions—simply dissolve into nothingness like a light frost in a warm morning sun shows something interesting about the way ideas and thoughts come into a mind.

On an unrelated note, I’m now sitting on the train in a seat analogous to the one by the poster of which I shared a picture recently (the one about the suicide help line, which I still haven’t called again, though I surely qualify for its services).  The poster here, which I’ll show below, is for “Aware and Care Palm Beach County”, which is about preventing mass violence.  Indeed, as you can see, it reads, “Mass violence can be prevented…it starts with you!”

poster on violence prevention

I applaud the sentiment of preventing mass violence**, pretty much however one can define it, but I’m not sure that the statement is correct.  It’s certainly not been demonstrated, either logically or in practice to be completely preventable.  If someone is dysfunctional enough to want to commit violent acts against large numbers of strangers, and is even willing to give their own life to do so, it’s hard to see it being absolutely preventable.  I think what the sign-makers really mean to convey is that mass violence can be reduced, or that some mass violence can be prevented.

But the sign also includes the words “Learn how to…report suspicious behavior”, and that makes me nervous.  It seems to imply a bit of a Big Brother mentality, a KGB, Stasi, CCP, DHS, Gestapo kind of attitude of seeking out and removing “undesirables”.  I don’t think that’s its intent, but such things often, or perhaps always, have “good” intentions at their roots.  Rarely does a dangerous but popular movement get started by openly encouraging people to act to cause chaos, death, pain, and destruction on huge scales.

But a state has tremendous power, and it can—and does—commit greater violence and destruction against its own citizens on many occasions and in many ways than any lone madman, however well-armed.  And this happens so diffusely, its effects so broad, that most of the time, most people don’t even notice it, let alone think about it.  It’s a bit like death and injury rates from car accidents—they are huge in number, scope, and overall scale, but they are hardly even noticed, for they happen episodically, their effects spread out over time and space, so only very few people notice the carnage and devastation they entail.

It is probably the case that most committers of mass violence share certain characteristics of personality, psychopathology, and behavior.  This is barely the beginning of working out a predictive model for locating such people.  It’s like the breast cancer screening test problem as so often used to explain Bayesian reasoning relating to probability and statistics.  Veritasium did a good video on this, and Derek is also an excellent educator about difficult concepts, so I’m linking that video.  You could do worse than to subscribe to his channel.

The important thing is not solely that most—or even all—mass violence committers have a certain set of characteristics, but also how many of the possibly billions of people who have those characteristics will ever go on to commit any kind of mass violence.  I suspect you’d find it to be a tiny percentage indeed.  You may have some of those characteristics yourself.  How confident are you in the state’s ability to tell the difference between those who will commit violence and those who will not?  What if they think that you are such a person?

That being said, of course, I do think, if you see someone who has access to many and/or powerful weapons and they are acting in ways that make you think they are considering committing some atrocity, it’s reasonable for you to tell someone about it.  You’ll probably be wrong, of course, given the statistics of the matter, but you might at least call someone’s attention to a person who could use some psychological help.

But it’s worth it always to keep in mind that those in “authority” are just flesh, blood, bone, and (in principle) brain like you are, and on average they are no more intelligent nor aware nor ethical***.  Don’t give those people more power than that with which you’d trust the average football fan…and less than you’d give a referee.

*Though I enjoyed such material when I was very young—from stories of UFOs and so-called paranormal phenomena, to “cryptozoology” stories about such things as Bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster—as I got older, I was able to see the difference between the type and quality of evidence behind such claims and the information which explained, for instance, how and why biology operates, what makes cars and ships and planes function, what the nature is of gravity and electromagnetism, the history of the universe as well as we can discern it, and so on.  These are not only much more satisfying because they are about subjects that are actually real (as witnessed in part by the immensely powerful technologies such information can produce) but also because they have internal and mutual logical consistency.  It’s hard to see how a universe that is not mutually consistent could even hold together.  For a good primer on the important difference of such fields of curiosity, I can unreservedly recommend Carl Sagan’s The Demon Haunted World.  Get it and read it if you haven’t already.  His writing is clear and conversational, and he conveys complex ideas in ways that are both wondrous and easy to understand.  It’s not for nothing that Stephen Jay Gould called Sagan “the best advocate for science in the millennium”.

**This is violence that interacts with the Higgs Field, and so has mass even at “rest”, and cannot ever move through space at the speed of light.  This is as opposed to “massless violence” which always travels through a vacuum at the speed of light.  Massless violence doesn’t experience a “personal” flow of time.

***Certainly the readers of this blog are well above average in intellect, knowledge, and morality, though that doesn’t necessarily reflect on the blog’s writer.

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Make sure to water your pedestrians

Okay, well, here we all are again on a Friday.  It’s the end of the “standard” work-week, though I am scheduled to work tomorrow, so that doesn’t really mean much to me.

I posted my video yesterday, finally, on YouTube, and here it is below, for your viewing pleasure, or for your viewing pain, or for your viewing indifference, or for your complete lack of viewing.  Obviously, I would appreciate if you would watch it, and (as I say in the video) give it a “thumbs up”, share, subscribe, all that stuff.  I don’t know whether it makes a difference to my statistics whether you watch it here or on YouTube proper…if someone out there does know, could you let me know in the comments?

Thanks.

By the way, I’m writing this post on my smartphone, via Google Docs, rather than on my laptop, because I arrived at the station barely five minutes before time for the earliest train, and it would be a pain to get the laptop out and then pack it right back up.  Of course, it turns out the train was about ten minutes behind schedule, but here it comes now…

…and, wouldn’t you know it, it’s arriving on the wrong side of the station today again, even though there was no announcement that such a thing was happening, not even just on the light-boxes, and yesterday it had gone back to its usual side.  Thankfully, one of the people waiting on the “correct” side with me was a Tri-rail security officer.  He waved down the driver and insisted that they wait for us all to cross.  That took some of the stress out of the situation, and gave me and five other people a chance mutually to vent our frustrations and sardonic amusement as we crossed back over.  However, we still had to hurry a bit, and I took a misstep getting onto the train, which has drawn vociferous objections* from my left knee, hip, and ankle and from my lower back.  That’s not too unusual, but it is annoying.

I’m mildly curious about why they went back to the normal side yesterday morning, then flipped again today to the abnormal side.  I suppose I could ask the conductor, but he is working and is also at the other end of the front car.  Also, of course, he’s a stranger, at least if sorts**, and I’m not overly comfortable striking up conversations with humans I don’t know, though a bit of mutual grumbling in the midst of a frustrating gaffe by the Tri-rail people seems to have been fine.  It didn’t hurt that I’m already an outsider among the group that had to scramble across this morning.  That makes things easier in some ways.  I’m already not expected to “fit in” so a lot of the pressure is off.

Oh, I meant to ask those of you who are regular readers if you can tell any difference in my writing style in this blog post, which I’m writing on my phone*** as compared to my typical blog post, and whether that difference is good or bad or something more complex.  I’ve asked this before, on those occasions when I’ve used my phone to write posts, but I don’t remember getting any feedback.  Maybe no one really had an opinion or preference.  Maybe some people had a preference, but didn’t feel like bothering to make a comment (which is fair enough, I guess).  Or maybe no one has actually read any of those blog posts, and so no one even knew that I had asked.

It would be sad but also laughable if I were writing these near-daily posts and no one had actually read a single one of them, or perhaps no more than enough to make a rare comment that seems to have to do with the post, just to keep me thinking that someone reads them and even “likes” them, when in actuality they are sources of amused scorn, ridicule, and contempt for the readers.  That would be hilarious, in a way.  To paraphrase The Master, from The End of Time, Part 1, that would be the funniest thing in the whole wide world.

Why, I’m laughing so hard right now it brings tears to my eyes.  I can hardly see to write for all the laughing.  I hope you’re having at least as much fun as I am.  It’s not hard; I hardly have any fun at all, or so it feels to me.

And that brings me to roughly 800 words, counting footnotes****.  I guess I might as well draw to a halt now in the next few moments.  If you’re so inclined, please check out my video.  I’m glad to be sharing it.

I’m also glad to have changed my “gravitar” and the sharing profile picture, so it doesn’t give the impression that I’m just speaking tongue in cheek when I say I hate my life and wish I would find some way to pass away, preferably without too much fuss or inconvenience.  I’m not joking.  I am conflicted, and wish I could be cured, but I don’t see it happening, and my pain continues and is quite real.  So, well…just so you know.

P.S. I want briefly to discuss a bit of a pet peeve of mine.  As I walk from the train station to the office, I pass along in front of many businesses with “lawns”.  And at that time of the morning, often, the sprinklers are on and steadily watering the grass (as well as the sidewalk and the people walking on the sidewalk) even though it’s been raining steadily and heavily for days.  These sprinklers will still run even during a hurricane, as long as the power isn’t out.  I’m not being facetious.  I have seen it.

It would be so easy to devise a small, open-topped reservoir on a simple scale, spring based or balance based, whatever is easier and cheaper, that pressed down when filled with more than a minimal amount of water‒as from rain‒and suppressed the sprinklers’ watering programs.  It would then dry out when it had been non-rainy, and the sprinklers could run again.  There could, perhaps, be a tilted mesh screen above the little reservoir to keep debris out so it doesn’t falsely suppress the sprinklers.  And it would save water that is otherwise wasted on already sopping grass, and on sidewalks and pedestrians.

*So to speak.

**Though I have been on trains with this particular conductor so often, over the course of so much time, that he feels very familiar to me.  I doubt he recognizes me, though.

***Remember?

****There are four of them now, in case you lost count.

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Here is my throne, bid kings come blog to it.

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, unless I’m losing track of things, and thus it’s time for my formerly weekly blog post, on its usual day.  It’s also the thirteenth of October, which is always at least a bit of a fun date, as far as it goes, and it has significance to my extended family.

The trains are back on the usual side of the tracks now.  This actually was inconvenient for me, because I missed the earlier train which arrived just as I got here, since it was on the opposite side from the entrance.  I don’t know if I would have been able to make it even if I’d run up the stairs, across the bridge, and down the other side.  But I wasn’t up to that, anyway.  My chronic pain has been even more severe than usual lately, with my back, hips, and ankles giving me tremendous trouble, even compared to their usual sorry state.

The train adjustment isn’t that big a deal, though.  The one I just missed was the earlier train, not the one I “usually” take.  I woke up way early but decided not to get up too much earlier than my alarm, because I figured that getting up to stand would exacerbate my pain a bit.  I was correct in that assessment, of course—I know the subject pretty well, after all—so at least I was not surprised.  That’s good.  I’m not a huge fan of surprises.

Now I’m sitting back in my usual seat on the usual side of the track, and I’ve got a bit of time to write this before the usual train comes.  Of course, I still don’t really have much about which to write.

I guess I could let you know that, although my video was done, I forgot to upload it to YouTube yesterday.  I’ll do that: “My video was done as of yesterday morning, but I forgot to upload it to YouTube.”  I would apologize to those who were waiting for it, but I doubt that there is even one such person, let alone more than one.

Of course, I haven’t written any new fiction, though I talk about my fiction in the video, encouraging people to consider buying a copy of some of it if they’re interested, or if they want to “support” me.

Actually, if someone really wanted to support me, they could get me admitted to some neuropsychiatric hospital somewhere.  Or they could procure for me lethal doses of fentanyl and valium in combination.  That seems like it would be a good way to go; at least they would leave me relaxed and not in pain.  I would really like to be relaxed and not in pain.  I don’t even remember what either of those states is like, let alone a combination of the two.  Then I might be able legitimately to quote Kurt Vonnegut and say, “Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt.”  As it is, I usually say the opposite*.

I’m honestly more tired than ever of everything.  It doesn’t help that some idiot is having a heated phone conversation on the other side of the track, presumably to someone in her headphones, at whom she is spewing unimaginative expletives.  Yet the other person is remaining on the phone with her, at five in the morning.

Or, perhaps, she’s having an argument with a hallucination; that would be harder to recognize in the modern era, given the prevalence of smartphones and Bluetooth headsets.  But she seems to be having a believably real conversation.  If she’s not schizophrenic, then she has no excuse for being so rude as to inflict her profanity-laden conflict on everyone waiting for the trains in the early morning.  Where is Hannibal Lecter to deal with such rude people in his typical fashion?

He’s a fictional character, of course, so he is nowhere.

I haven’t made any new fictional characters recently, as I noted above.  I did pick up and strum around on the guitar I have in the office the last few mornings, but it was highly unsatisfying.  My playing just sounds like crap to me, and it’s all just the same old thing over and over again; and it’s not as though there’s anyone who listens or cares about it.

Someone on one of the other WordPress blogs I followed shared a meme from the video game God of War III that I liked enough to copy and save, though it doesn’t apply to me, since it’s about “hope”.  Obviously, it wasn’t something that Kratos, the main character, said.  He’s not big on hope, but he is stubborn and angry enough that hope is mostly not necessary for him.  This resonates with me far more than hope does.

Anyway, my son has always loved those games, and I thought I would share it with him, but I had to do so indirectly, through his sister, because I don’t want to irritate him by sending him yet another email, when he already said he didn’t want to have a personal relationship with me.  It’s weird:  His sister, my daughter, is spending a semester or year in South Korea for college, which is mightily cool, but in the modern world, it’s swifter to send something to her, on the other side of the world, and have her send it back around the world to her brother, less than a hundred miles away from me, than just mailing something would be, let alone bringing it to him.

It’s beautiful, but at the same time heartbreaking.  I haven’t actually seen either of them in ten years—by their choice—though I do interact with my daughter at least.

I’m seriously thinking of just selling Bag End to the Sackville-Bagginses** on my birthday, which is rapidly approaching.  It seems like the sort of thing that would be fitting.

Anyway, the train just arrived, and it stopped at a different location than usual, so I had to trudge along to get on it, and my ankles and hips hurt so much that I had to fight back real tears in the face of the random, unnecessary additional walking, and then climbing into the train and up the few stairs.

That’s it for me, at least for today.  I hope you’re all feeling a lot better than I am.

TTFN

painful sorrow

*Nothing was beautiful, and everything hurt.

**This is a metaphor, by the way.  I neither own a place called Bag End, nor do I know any Sackville-Bagginses.

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Much ado about what are effectively mere fluctuations in the vacuum states of quantum fields

Okay, it’s the “middle” of the “work week” and this is my next daily “blog post”, in case any of you reading didn’t know these things.

I made a video yesterday, and I even pretty much edited it, but I haven’t yet posted it to YouTube, and so I cannot share/embed it here.  It was a free-form recording, and ended up being essentially a form of minor self-promotion, in which I encourage people to buy my books (and to a lesser extent to listen to my music) if they want to support me—though that raises the question of whether anyone would ever want to support me in the first place.  In my experience, the answer is “no”.  Heck, I don’t even want to support myself.

But it does show, at least, that I have a certain amount of affection, bordering on pride, for my fiction, and indeed, I am reasonably proud of my books and short stories.  I’m even fairly proud of my songs, though I wish I’d had better equipment to record and produce them.  Still, considering I was literally learning as I went along, I think they came out okay.

I will say this, though—I don’t think I’m going to be making many more videos using my Samsung tablet.  In addition to giving me the black sidebar thingies, which I chose to accept, since lateral videos just need to have background edited out, it also records at way too high a definition, and so videos take up an absurd amount of memory.  I suppose this would be useful and good if I were recording fine visuals, so I have no actual complaints about the tablet’s camera quality, but when the picture is basically just me then frankly, the lower the definition the better.

If I could be rendered in 8-bit graphics, it probably wouldn’t be a horrible thing.

Also, upon sending the video to the desktop, via Google Drive, I couldn’t import it directly into DaVinci* Resolve without the video getting all higgledy-piggledy**, so I had first to import it into the Microsoft video editor (I took advantage and adjusted the audio right then and there at an earlier step than usual), then export it to import into Resolve.  But, of course, even after doing that, and adjusting the output for only medium video quality, the file was still huge.

How much impact on the environment is occurring because of all the memory being generated and all the electricity needed to operate and cool all the huge servers which we use to run and store just the videos we use and the documents in Google Drives and the like?  Might it be more ecologically efficient if we literally just recorded the entire internet on old-fashioned paper?

If we get the wood pulp from tree farms, it would not decrease the forests in the world, and in fact, the paper would be, at least for a time, an effective carbon sink.  Interesting, no?  It just goes to show you, real situations are complicated, and your first, instinctive reactions are often inaccurate.  It’s hard to store an actual video on paper of course, but celluloid is another matter…though that is extremely flammable.

I think for my next video, I’m just going to try to use the camera on the little laptop on which I write this blog post.  It’s comparatively low definition, which is fine with me.  If the microphone were better I might use it for everything, except the Resolve parts.  I’ve tried attaching my USB microphone to a mini laptop once and it didn’t work well—but I think that might have been my previous laptop, not this one.  I think I have tried the native microphone for this laptop, and it was good enough for general recording.

Anyway, that’s yet another blog post about nothing, following on a video about nothing after a previous blog post about nothing.  It’s fine, though, since really everything is about nothing.  I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, we’re all just (metaphorical) virtual particles***, popping into existence, sometimes (rarely) having externally felt mass effects, and then vanishing back into the nothingness from which we arose before a Planck time (metaphorically, again) has even passed.  Though, en masse, we can have local effects, any individual virtual particle (it would be pairs of particles, really, if the metaphor were strictly applied) effectively does not exist at all, from the point of view of the outside universe.  Think on that, and…

…have a nice day.

*Which seems to imply that the program comes from the city of Vinci, which is in Tuscany, in Italy.  DaVinci wasn’t Leonardo’s “last name” in the modern use of such things, it was just an indicator of where he was from, like Conan of Cimmeria or Simon of Sheboygan.  When people use “DaVinci” to refer to Leonardo as if it were his last name, it leads to some humorous effects at times, if you’re paying attention and applying the literal meaning of the words.

**Please excuse the technical jargon.

***Strictly speaking, virtual particles are sort of metaphorical even in quantum mechanics, at least according to my best understanding.  They really are a shorthand for a more sophisticated process involving quantum fields, but I guess it’s easier to think of things as virtual particles.  That seems to complicate matters unnecessarily, to me, not make them simpler, but I’m weird.

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Don’t touch that line, it’s hot!

It’s Tuesday morning, which should come as no surprise, since yesterday was Monday.  I am on the earliest train right now—I just got on board less than a minute ago, I’d say, and certainly it only just left the station.  I woke up early, as usual, and just didn’t feel like I could sleep anymore.  On the other hand, although I did wake up early, I can at least report that I didn’t keep waking up over and over again before the final time I woke up, so I seem to have had a few hours’ uninterrupted sleep.  That feels like a major boon*.

Today’s date is a little fun, if you’re using the American ordering of the numbers.  It’s 10-11-2022, which of course is a mini pattern, with a ten and an eleven doubling into a twenty and a twenty-two…all on a “Twosday”!  So, again, a bit of fun with numbers, if you like that sort of thing.  Possibly I’m the only one in the world who finds it amusing.  It wouldn’t be the first time.

I regret to say that I wasn’t able to make a video yesterday, or rather, I wasn’t able to complete one.  I started one, but we had one of our various weird situations at the office, with a potentially returning coworker, who was there quite early, and that interfered with my ability to do a video.  I got less than five minutes of talking done before the interruption came.  I did fiddle around with trying out the video recording on my tablet again a few times during the day, just for experimentation, but that was all.  I ended up knocking the tablet stand over while reaching for something else, and thus knocking over the tablet, but it was not harmed in any visibly detectable*** way.

Hopefully, I’ll get a chance to make a video today.

I think I need to update my “gravitar”, or whatever that term was, that generates the accompanying picture that goes with blog posts, because it shows a picture of me from about ten years ago, in which I was trying to look vaguely amused and whimsical.  It’s a perfectly good picture, of course—“perfectly” not being meant in its literal sense, obviously, since I don’t know what a literally perfectly good picture would even be—but I think it makes readers not quite internalize the blog posts and things that I’m sharing as serious.  I think people read my blog posts in which I try to express my distress and depression, and they see that stupid “gravitar” of me smirking ten years ago, and they think, “Oh, he’s not really all that fucked up right now, he’s just exaggerating for dramatic and/or comedic effect.”

I don’t like the guy in those pictures.  But I guess that probably goes without saying.

It’s been a long time since I updated that picture—I don’t recall even how it’s supposed to be done, frankly, but I’m sure I’ll be able to find it somewhere on the WordPress site, which is where I added it originally.  I need to upload something that’s accurate to how I am now.

I finally have returned to the particular train and the particular seat across from that National Suicide Prevention Hotline poster that I wrote about sometime in the past, and this time, I remembered to take a quick snap of it.  That happened between sentences while writing this blog post.  You probably didn’t even notice it; it was such a swift process that there was nary a hitch in my writing!

I’m not being serious, of course.  Well, I did take a picture, I’m serious about that.  But of course, the time stream of me writing this and the time stream of the final blog post are not the same.  The flow of time is different in the two, and the flow of time in the blog post per anyone reading can be entirely different as well.

That’s kind of curious to think about, at least for me.  I might have mentioned before that if our universe were simulated, down to the Planck scale in space and time, each calculation of interactions could, in principle, take billions of years for some simulating advanced civilizations, but then, after the googols of years it would take to calculate enough of them, we on Earth might still only experience the outcome as the passing of a second, for instance.

I don’t know why an advanced civilization would bother with such things.  But it’s a thought experiment, the domain of spherical inclined planes and frictionless cows, so just go with it.

Anyway, I’ll share the picture of the poster, because one thing that bothers me is that they not only split the infinitive (to be), but they underlined the word with which they split it.  I think it would have been more effective, if anything, to write “It’s OK to be not OK”.  Even the more proper “It’s OK not to be OK” would be preferable to me.

ok not ok scaled down

I truly appreciate and admire the sentiments****, but the split infinitive just makes me more depressed than ever.  The uses of this world and the usages of words seems utterly irrational and pointless to me.  There’s just nobody home.

Might as well shut off the lights.

*Not a reference to Major Boone**.

**I don’t know who “Major Boone” might be, but it would be a good name for a character.

***Nothing I could see, anyway, with or without my reading glasses.  I’m sure there were microscopic scratches and dings, the inevitable hallmarks of entropy, such as will accumulate on even the most durable of substances.  Even diamonds surely lose a carbon atom or two whenever one rubs at them.  The surface atoms, after all, cannot be bonded each to four other carbon atoms, unlike the interior atoms; some must be bonded only to three, and perhaps some even only to two.  And the ones that are bonded to four other atoms in their traditional tetrahedral lattice, are obviously not in an unbreakable arrangement, or there would be no way to cut diamonds.  As far as I know, there is no such thing as an unbreakable arrangement.

****And I don’t want to denigrate the hotline, though my personal experience with them was regrettable because the PBSO came and took me away to a shithole, which I’ve talked about before.  I was only there for less than a day, but it was humiliating and associated with nerve damage to my left wrist, and it did not end up helping me feel better in the long run.  None of this was the hotline’s fault, and I recognize that, but it was quite unpleasant, and is one of the reasons I hesitate to use their services.  I think about calling (or texting) them more days than not, but I don’t think I ever will.  I’m not worth their effort, in any case.  There are many far better uses for their resources than something like me.

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If life’s a piece of sh*t, as Eric Idle sang, then where is the flush pull?

It’s Monday, the start of another “work week”.  It’s interesting, isn’t it, how we divide time into both arbitrary and non-arbitrary measures?  A day is a sensible division of time, as is a year, and even a month is not pushing things too much.  But weeks are thoroughly arbitrary, and rather bizarre in that they are comprised of 7 days, a prime number—not that I’m complaining about that, since I’m a big fan of prime numbers.

Anyway, that’s what we’re dealing with, this arbitrary thing called a week, which gets further narrowed into the “work week” which is nominally Monday through Friday, though in fact many people’s actual work weeks are nothing like so well-constrained.  More’s the pity.

It would actually be rather nice if everyone worked the same work week, but then, of course, grocery stores and other shopping places would be closed just when people had the free time to use them, and people would be forced to be more thoroughly idle on the weekends, which would have some advantages but also some disadvantages.  I could see such a thing happening briefly, but cultural evolution would more or less guarantee that something would adjust to fill the niche of open commercial time on the weekends, and other things would have to compete with such newcomers or lose ground and perhaps perish.

Indeed, that is what has happened, such that now, even on days that are official or national holidays, or big holidays, like Christmas and the like, one doesn’t see all that many things closed, other than those few remaining factories and big businesses in the US.  I don’t know how it is in other nations.  But I suspect that they fall into similar cycles of competition leading to mutual erosion of quality of life, in a truly maddening feedback loop, because anyone who tries, individually, as a company or whatever, to focus on reasonable time schedules and the like will be outcompeted, and they will be forced out of the market.

Of course, our various legislative bodies are supposed to make laws that will curtail the excesses of such situations, artificially as it were, but they are subject to similar competition of funding and marketing and donations and so on, and they will almost inevitably fall into one form of corruption or another.  There are also feedback loops that support divisiveness, since one way to rouse one’s own supporters is to treat those who disagree with one politically as immoral, as the enemy, as a literal threat—which is all nonsense, of course.

One party is only rarely much more moral (or immoral) than any other in politics, or in nations.  They’re all just made up of people scrambling locally to survive and thrive, responding to local forces, like anything and everything in the physical universe, and producing larger effects and patterns without any deeper thought or intention, as epiphenomena.  And almost none of them ever stop to take a look at themselves and the forces to which they respond as phenomena, to think about what changes might affect those local forces, and in what ways.

It would be nice if “political science” were approached like an actual science.  I guess that’s not likely to happen any time soon.

Well, it’s the start of a new week, as I said, although yesterday was literally the start of the “calendar” week.  I have not yet made my new video, though I had the time to do it.  I simply didn’t quite have the energy to make it, so to speak.  Though the intention to do so at least led me to transfer notes from my previous phone to an email to myself, and to download a new note-taking app to my new phone.  It’s the first “smartphone” I’ve bought that didn’t just come with a note-taking app built in, which surprises me.  It doesn’t seem like the sort of thing that would cost the manufacturers anything to add, and it might be a selling feature.  But there may be forces at work affecting this of which I am unaware.

I’m not looking forward to going back to the office, though I may at least try to start making a new video once there.  But last Friday, my already high-stress state, which has been getting steadily worse over time—not that this is anyone’s fault but my own “faulty” machinery—was worsened further by a particular idiot and related, peri-idiot idiocy in addition to the usual chaos and nonsense in the office, and some other parallel idiocy, and I literally both shattered my coffee mug and banged my head on my desk until I gave myself a bad bruise and possible minor concussion, knocking some things off the desk from the force of my head banging.  I did other things as well that were harmful to myself, but I won’t get into those as they might be troubling to readers.

Also, the trains are boarding all on one side of the track at my station again, though I’m not at all sure why—there’s no sign of any construction or maintenance on the other side that I’ve discerned, but of course, that doesn’t mean there isn’t any going on.  But it does stress me out a bit.  I suppose to a normal person it would be just a minor thing, possibly not even an inconvenience.  After all, the side on which we’re boarding is nearer the entrance, so the change in sides means I didn’t have to go across the tracks in the overhead bridge.  But it does make the one side of the track more crowded with people—urrgh, bleah—and it just kind of messes up my expectations, or my usual pattern, I guess.

It’s stupid, I know.  I have mentioned that my machinery is clearly faulty, but unfortunately, I have only limited access either to the hardware or the source code.  I do my best to tweak things as I can, to try to improve them, and I’ve been working on that since at least middle school, with autosuggestion, with self-hypnotism, with trying to enforce personal habits, with simply learning about how such systems work and behave, and trying to pay attention to the way people around me—particularly my older brother and sister back in the day—behaved that worked well for them, and the behaviors and activities that seemed not to produce good results for them.  I think that was a real advantage, having people from whom to learn by example, even indirectly.

But there’s no one from whom to learn, now, or nearly no one.  I mean, there’s something at least to be learned from everyone, there’s almost always some tidbit of skill or knowledge any given human has that I don’t have.  But it’s hard even to tell which ones might be useful, though seeing which ones are definitely not ones to emulate is clearer these days than it was with my siblings, neither of whom did many very counterproductive things relative to the great mass of humans.  I’m very lucky that way.

But I’m not lucky enough to have been hit by a meteor or to have a sudden lethal heart arrhythmia or hemorrhage or be struck by lightning or whatever, so I’m headed to work again today.  As I’ve long suspected, I’m just going to need to be more proactive.  It’s annoying, but there’s a reason for the cliché, “If you want something done right, you’ve got to do it yourself.”

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The borogroves sure are mimsy today, aren’t they?

It’s Friday again, and another weekend approaches.

Yippee.  Huzzah.  O frabjous day.

I think I don’t work tomorrow—at least, I’m not supposed to—so there probably won’t be any blog post then (which will be Saturday, unless some hitherto unimagined catastrophe literally throws the days of the week out of order).

I may be posting a new video on my YouTube channel this weekend, though.  I haven’t made one yet, so there’s no guarantee that something won’t stop me from doing so.  I’m unlikely to be lucky enough to be involved in an asteroid impact between now and tomorrow, but there’s a functionally limitless number of things that could, in principle, stop me from recording a video.

Nevertheless, it is my intention to make a video, so I probably will.  This is a different type of thing than fasting; no physiological processes and neurological feedback loops are likely to interfere with my commitment to making a video.  Evolution is, so far, utterly blind even to the existence of videos…though that could change.

I’m still not sure what topic I want to address in the video, unlike last time.  I may literally just start my timer, start my video, start to talk, and see what happens.  If that sounds like an inauspicious way to start a video, well, you’re reading the written equivalent of it right now.  If you enjoy this, you’re proof that it can work.  If you don’t enjoy it, that’s not proof that it cannot work, since your lack of enjoyment doesn’t preclude anyone else from enjoying it.

People do seem to have trouble understanding that others can like things that they themselves find disgusting.  I can sympathize with that, and fall prey to the failing myself, but that doesn’t make it reasonable.

It’s true that all mammals, let alone all humans, have more in common than they have differences, but nevertheless, the potential differences just within a given species, given sexual recombination of genes and the sheer number of genes each individual has, is well worthy of the adjective “astronomical”, so we shouldn’t be surprised that others like things we find repugnant.  In fact, given that the number of possible combinations of gene pairs in human DNA alone is vastly larger than the number of (for instance) light years the visible universe is across*, maybe we should switch our use of the terms “biological” and “astronomical” to describe very large numbers.  Unfortunately, I think most people wouldn’t catch onto the nuance of saying that something was “biologically large”.

Oh, well.  It was a brief dream, swiftly shattered by the one who dreamed it.  Typical.

Anyway, so, I’m back on food again, more’s the pity.  I’m tired of having all these biological urges and needs and drives.  They’re very irritating.

Also, I’m tired of how stressed and angry I get about things people do at work.  Don’t get me wrong—the specific things I’m thinking about are worthy of anger.  But the problem is that I get so stressed, and so angry, and it just makes me hate myself more and more all the time, without any evident upper bound to the process.

I wish it were true to say, “I can’t stand it anymore”, but unfortunately, I’m able in principle to continue standing things for who knows how long.  I wish I would just collapse into a heap, and literally, physically, not be able to go on.  It would take so much out of my hands and would be such a relief.  Unfortunately, there’s no clear sign of that happening, though I try to sabotage my own health as much as feasible without being Baker Acted.

And here is another maddening thing that just happened:  the trains this morning, it turns out, were all shifted to one side of the track, as was the case last week once.  But this wasn’t announced early, unlike last time, so I went to my usual spot to start writing this while waiting.  Then, when the “announcement” was made, it was just posted on the overhead light board; there was no verbal announcement, though they give recorded verbal reminders about such things usually—they’ve been informing us, ever since Labor Day, that the system will be running on a Sunday schedule on Thanksgiving, which is in November, for those of you who don’t know.  Labor Day was in the beginning of September.

I only failed to miss my train because I always start getting ready to board five minutes early, and I looked up from my writing to notice that there was no one on my side of the tracks.  Only then did I see the notice that trains were all boarding on the other side.  I was able to take the elevator up to the bridge, but I had to rush down the stairs on the other side because my train was approaching, and my knees and hips and ankle were miffed about that.

It would have been nice for one of the people who always gets on the same train I get on to have said something to me, rather than just letting me sit there typing on one side of the track by myself.  I’d like to think I would have said something to them, were the situation reversed.  Maybe I wouldn’t.  Maybe it’s an instance of the bystander effect.  Maybe it’s one of those rare circumstances in which my reticence to interact with strangers is obvious to everyone, and I seem so unpleasant that no one wants to interact with me even enough to say, “Hey, all the trains are boarding on the other side for some reason…better cross over.”

Better cross over.  That’s the best idea I’ve heard today, that’s for sure.

Okay, well, that’s it for today’s disjointed meandering.  I hope you’ve found some modicum of joy in it.  It would be nice to be able to do at least something positive for the world, even if it’s small.  It would be far better than what I usually do.

*Using the particle horizon as the measured “distance across”. **

**Actually, since there are four bases in human DNA (guanine, cytosine, adenine, and thymine), if they were assigned randomly, then even a string of 1000 base pairs has 1.15 x 10602 possible combinations.  If memory serves, this is larger than the String Theory landscape, which number is already so vast as to lead many physicists to say it can predict anything and therefore it can predict nothing.  And human DNA is on the order of a billion nucleotides long.  My computer calculator can’t deal with billionth powers of four, but a billion is a thousand times a thousand times a thousand, so 41000 cubed should be about 101806 unless I’m missing something.  The diameter of the visible universe in Planck lengths is only 5 x 1061, which is not even close to the same order of magnitude.  Of course, the maximal information within a horizon the size of the visible universe is larger still, but then again, that’s a measure of the maximum entropy possible within that region, so that’s almost a given.  I think it’s 210^123 or something along those lines.  I may be getting at least some of this wrong.

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I dare do all that may become a blog; Who dares do more, is none

Hello, good morning, and welcome to another Thursday, which makes it time for another edition of my ever-popular “traditional” blog post on this 6th day of October in 2022 AD/CE.  I hope you’re all doing as well as is physically possible.

Of course, if there is only one universe, not a multiverse, and the “many worlds” description of quantum mechanics is not literally right, then there is only one way that things are and thus only one way that things could be, and so it’s true that everyone is always doing as well—and doing as poorly—as it’s possible for them to be doing.  I’m not sure that’s comforting, but it doesn’t tend to have much impact on daily life, so unless you find the question interesting in and of itself, as I do, I wouldn’t let it worry you.  Try not to think about it.

I’m disappointed to have to report to you all that I have not extended my fast, despite my hopes and intentions yesterday.  I was more affected by my immediately preceding illness, which was mainly GI-related, than I had really recognized, and by mid-day I was not only thoroughly wiped out, but I was also getting dizzy and giddy and loopy, as well as other related adjectives.

At times it was kind of amusing and even a bit fun—certainly I was less stressed out by things than usual, once I got to the loopy stage—but my mental clarity was not good, I was very tired, and I was in slight danger of passing out from standing up too quickly.  That has happened to me before, one time earning me a mild concussion, so I prefer to avoid it.  As it was, I had to drink water, since I knew I was already a bit dehydrated, and it wouldn’t be too safe to do without.

It’s odd for me to think why I care about being overly dehydrated when I frankly don’t even like myself, let alone care about my personal health in the long term.  I think it’s mainly because I don’t want anything to interfere with my mental acuity disproportionately.  The one thing I have in this world is being smart-ish, and I don’t like things that interfere with that, certainly not in an acute fashion.

It’s not comparative intelligence that matters to me; I don’t need to feel like I’m the smartest person in the room or anything.  In fact, I tend to enjoy myself much more when I’m with people who are smarter than I am than otherwise.  Those are the situations in which one can learn something new, in which one can be challenged and can grow, and that’s always fun.

This was always Dr. Doom’s biggest failing, to my mind, the insecurity that required him to demand that his was the greatest intellect in the universe.  Well, in the Marvel Universe, he may well be a contender for the smartest human, but come on, there are beings like the Stranger, and Eon, and all those living computers of Xandar, or whatever that was.

Anyway, that’s neither here nor there—which means it must be in the potentially much larger set of places that can’t be described as “here” or “there”, which will depend on how we define “here” and “there”.  But I’m not going to go into that right now; it’s beside the point*.

Still, being able to do what I do mentally, and to do it well, to understand interesting concepts and ideas, to learn new things, to accomplish mental tasks quickly—these are some of my few remaining joys, and they are mainly without detrimental consequences, unlike eating too much or any more troubling potential bad habit, most of which don’t appeal to me in the slightest.  So I don’t particularly like having them impaired, especially on a day-to-day basis, at work, when I have tasks to accomplish upon which others have come to rely.

Perhaps if I were able simply to be away for a retreat of some kind, or have no assumed responsibilities, it wouldn’t matter if I were too wiped out from being sick before fasting, but as it is, right now, it’s not an acceptable trade off.

I did, however, keep up my fast until well after sundown, so it was a good full 24+ hours.  And I did feel some benefits, I think, or I talked myself into thinking I felt them.  But, since the benefits are psychological ones anyway, talking oneself into them is the same as actually getting them, at least up to a point, so I guess it doesn’t matter.  It’s a bit like courage—acting as if one is brave, in a real danger situation, is actually being brave, which is not to be confused with being fearless.  Fearlessness is pathological; fear is a superpower, to quote or at least to paraphrase the 12th Doctor**.

All right, well, I think that’s enough talk about nothing whatsoever for today.  I mean to try to do another video soon, one that I’ll keep shorter than the last one by starting my timer before I start recording, but I’m not sure what subject I’ll address.  Maybe I’ll talk about some of the pitfalls of listening too closely to the philosophical interpretations of brilliant people, from Bohr and Heisenberg to Hume and Popper and so on.

I think admiring smart people and considering smart arguments is both fun and useful, but controlled and directed iconoclasm is essential to avoid getting caught up in personality cults and related cognitive biases and fallacies.  The people we admire are all just flesh and blood and bone, and they are all finite.  Not one of them has authority over anything in the natural world.  It’s easy enough to speak as if one has authority, but saying it doesn’t make it so.

Maybe I’ve just said enough about that to make my point.  I doubt it.  We’ll see.  In the meantime, I hope you are all having a good week, maybe even better than you would have expected, and that you are as happy and healthy as you’re able to be, and not just in the way I mentioned earlier.

TTFN

doctor-who-listen-meditation

*Get it?

**Series 8, episode 4, “Listen”.  One of the best episodes of Nu-Who, in my opinion.  Though, if you only get to watch one episode at all, I would probably recommend the one that got me interested, which is Series 9, episode 11, “Heaven Sent”.  It is possibly the best hour of TV I have ever watched, though that is specific to me and to my interests and proclivities.  Anyway, having seen clips from it on YouTube, thinking it looked interesting, and then deciding to find a place where I could watch it (which I did), all led me to decide that, yes, I need to watch Doctor Who, at least the new ones.  So, I went back to Series 1, Episode 1 (“Rose”) and watched the whole of new Doctor Who as far as it has gone.  Later this month we will have the 60th anniversary special, in which the brilliant 13th Doctor regenerates into Ncuti Gatwa’s 14th Doctor.  It’s one of the few things to which I am looking forward.

scared is a superpower