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Is it a sine of the (space)times that we are where we are in the week?

TBIF* or TDIF**, either way, it’s Friday.  It’s the last day of the work week.  I started writing “It’s the end of the work week” (emphasis added), but I realized that, since it is early in the morning, and I am just on my way to work, this time could not accurately be called the end of the work week.  One could, in fact, say that 20% of the work week yet remains; that can hardly be called an end, any more than a B minus can be considered a perfect score (unless one radically changes the grading system one is using).

Such are the random things that spring forth from my brain via my fingers when I am writing my blog posts in the mornings (in this case on my laptop computer, which is literally on my lap***).  I’m sure you’re well aware of that, if you’ve read this blog for any length of time.  I don’t really know ahead of time what I’m going to write, unless I have a specific subject to address.  Even then I often address subjects in ways that surprise me.  This is because when I write I am really “thinking out loud”, although in this case, “out loud” is figurative.

Do my thoughts meander like a restless wind inside a letter box?  Well, they’re probably more like a restless discarded Cheetos® wrapper in the wind of a nearby tornado; one should almost certainly use a junk food metaphor when describing the way my thoughts spontaneously arise.  Not that I think my thoughts are “junk”, no more so than anyone else’s are.  I just think it’s rather appropriate to consider many of them as having a bit of a temporary amusing effect, but without any real nutritional substance.  Junk food has its place****, after all.

I don’t know what else to write today, but I’ve only written about 450 words so far, including the first four footnotes below.  I would say that I don’t want to shortchange you, the reader, but you’re not actually paying for this in any sense other than spending your time.  And since time cannot be used as legal tender—when you “spend” it, I don’t receive any from you—I guess I shouldn’t consider it to be shortchanging you.

In any case, whether you spend your time reading my blog or doing something else, your time passes all the same.  You could slow it down relative the those around you by accelerating to relativistic speeds, but you would still require the same amount of your “proper time” to read a blog post.  And to those watching you pass at some substantial fraction of the speed of light, it would seem to take you longer than it would take us.

Remember, from a particular, mathematically precise, point of view, you’re always moving at the speed of light—it’s just that most of your motion is through time.  This is part of why you cannot ever reach the speed of light through space:  As you tilt your motion vector toward faster motion through space, less of your motion is through time, until it would stop for you completely.

It’s a bit analogous to moving (say, driving or flying) in particular compass directions.  Imagine your default motion is all northwards, so there is no east or west component to your momentum, but that your momentum vector is always the same length, i.e., you speed in your direction of travel is constant.  If you start to veer eastward a bit, going at that same fixed speed now in a north-northeast direction (for instance) the component of your motion that is northward is smaller than it was*****.

As you veer more through northeast toward east-northeast and beyond, staying at your same speed but in your new direction, the component of your motion that is northward becomes smaller and smaller.  Finally, of course, if you go due east, there is no longer any component of your motion in the northerly direction.

This is close to being the same thing that would happen if you could somehow achieve the speed of light through space, except that the geometry of spacetime is (if memory serves) hyperbolic.  This means “relating to or described by hyperbolas”, it doesn’t mean that the geometry of spacetime exaggerates things all the time.

In any case, though, an object or person traveling at the speed of light (through space, so to speak) would cease to experience any “proper time”.

And with that, I think we’ve come to the proper time to bring this week of blog posts to a close, even if the work week still has a fifth of its time remaining.  I hope you all have a good day (whatever day on which you may read this) and then a good weekend (whenever the next one is for you) and a good week and so on and so on and so on.

*Thank Batman it’s Friday.

**Thank Doom it’s Friday (I suppose one could use TDDIF, Thank Doctor Doom it’s Friday, but that would eliminate the parallel with the more traditional version of the acronym).

***Does the term “laptop computer” imply that there could be a “lapbottom computer”?  What would the bottom of a lap look like?  Would it just be the “bottom”, in which case it really has nothing to do with the lap, since your lap disappears when you stand up, but your ass doesn’t?  If there is no lapbottom (i.e., if laps are instead bottomless) then why use the term laptop?  Why not just call it a “lap computer”?  If people wanted a foreshortened version of that, they could just call it their lapcom.

****That place is 7-11™.

*****By how much?  Why, one only need apply the Pythagorean Theorem to the components of your momentum vector.  It’s dead simple.  If you prefer, you can use trigonometric functions, such as the cosine of the angle of your motion relative to full north, but mathematically there is no difference.

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A 2sday blog post 4 U

Okay, well, it’s Tuesday now, which often happens immediately after the end of Monday, at least when one is using the ordering of days that we use here in the modern, technological world, agreed upon just by general convention, since there’s no particular real meaning to any such ordering.  Also, of course, the specific names of the days varies from language to language.  But somehow, the seven-day week became the generally accepted one worldwide—possibly partly because it’s a prime number, and of course, partly related to the number of “non-fixed” celestial bodies visible before the invention of the telescope.

Not that any of that is very interesting, but it’s not as though I make it my business to write interesting blog posts.  I just…write blog posts.  Whether they’re interesting or not is pretty much in the eye of the beholder, as it were.

I think maybe I will embed the audio of my recent recording of Nothing Compares 2 U below, which I mentioned last week some time.  The audio is not ideal, of course, but it’s better than one might expect.  Whether the playing and singing is any good is, again, up to the aesthetic taste of each individual who happens to listen.  I make no promises or guarantees or representations about it being particularly good.  It’s okay, I would say.

As for other things, well, this morning I did not walk to the train station, nor did I bike here.  I’m still at the stage of working on my fitness in which I have to take a day off in between walks.  That’s not so disappointing, I guess; I did walk about seven or so miles total yesterday.  The biggest impediment so far to walking two or more days in a row is that my left knee is a bit sore from yesterday’s walk.

You might think I would be used to pain by now; I haven’t had a day free of significant pain in a quarter of a century now.  Unfortunately, biology mandates that pain is not something with which a living thing can easily become “comfortable”.

At least the blisters on my right foot are not acting up.  I wore a different pair of shoes than usual yesterday, a make and model I haven’t worn in a while, and it seems they were kinder to my heel and Achilles tendon than the others.

It’s rather frustrating.  I like the other kind because they are very lightweight and “breathable” if you want to call it that.  That’s important in south Florida, where merely standing still for more than five minutes is likely to lead to the growth of various fungi and algae on your skin*.

At least there’s always Lysol.  It helps if you pretend you work for a bowling alley and have to spray each pair of shoes after it’s been used to make sure no one catches a fungus from the previous wearer.  Even when that wearer is you, you don’t want to have a foot fungus if you can help it.

Ugh, all this is so boring, isn’t it?  Life is almost entirely composed of boredom interspersed with stress and tension anymore.  When I meditate, which I do, it helps my tension and stress and hostility a bit, but I find myself feeling very depressed instead.  It’s quite annoying.  Is tension and stress my only alternative to profound depression anymore?  Perhaps.  The world is overall so utterly idiotic and frustrating, this is just par for the course, as they say.

Despite the fact that I’m sharing a bit of singing here today, I haven’t played my guitar or sang even for a moment in over a week.  I haven’t really done anything creative or expressive in a long time, unless you count this blog (which I don’t, honestly).

I am rereading The Lord of the Rings, which is always good, at least.  I’m in The Two Towers now, at the point where Pippin and Merry have just met Treebeard.

It occurs to me that I tend to write (and think of) that pair of hobbits as “Pippin and Merry” rather than “Merry and Pippin”, despite the fact that Merry is the first alphabetically and in the stories Merry is slightly older.  It’s peculiar.  It’s not important or anything, but it is odd.

I also tend to write “off” accidentally nearly every time I’m trying to write the word “odd”, but that’s not so peculiar (ha ha).  The “d” and “f” keys are right next to each other on the keyboard, and both words (“odd” and “off”) are legitimate words.  They also can both often be workable in the same context.  Calling something “a little off” can be synonymous with calling something “a little odd”.  Curious.

My train will be arriving soon.  I am sorry to have to admit that I have provided nothing of value here.  That’s not too unusual for me, though.  I’m not sure that I’ve ever contributed anything of value to the world other than my children.  They are valuable, of course, so I’m not unhappy about that.  I’m just unhappy by nature, and I’m unhappy about that fact, and that further fact is something about which I am, again, unhappy.  It’s like an infinite series**, and the question is, does it converge to some finite limit, or does it diverge to negative infinity?  I don’t know.

And sometimes—most days, maybe—I share that unhappiness with you, my all-too-generous readers.  It seems grossly unfair to you.  And it is.  I admire your optimism, though.  I don’t understand it.  But I do admire it.

Have a good day,  You might as well.  Somebody ought to do it.

*I’m exaggerating, of course.  It usually takes as much as ten minutes.

**Mathematically, I mean, not like, say, The Simpsons, or Superman comics.

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True hope is swift, and blogs with swallow’s wings: kings it makes gods and meaner creatures kings

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, and against popular demand (or at least orthogonal to it) I am writing another blog post.  I don’t know how you feel about that, but you’re reading it, so I guess you can’t complain too much.

I had a rough day again yesterday, pain-wise.  I basically took everything that was safe to take, and then a bit more, but it did not do a great job of getting the pain under control.  However, I did take delivery of my latest attempt at lifestyle change:  a new, folding bicycle, which is quite a lot smaller (and has a smaller wheel base) than my other one.  It’s also lighter, and so it is easier to transport, and starting this afternoon, I mean to ride it from and to the train in the morning and evening‒or, well, in the evening and morning, to keep the order consistent.

I tried it for a little ride-around in the afternoon, and while the smaller wheels make it feel slightly less stable (thanks to a smaller moment of inertia, proportional to the mass times the square of the radius of rotation, if memory serves), it’s still comfortable, and it is also easier to get on for me, since I can step through it rather than having to raise my stupid, stiff old legs and hip.

Hopefully, it will help me get around faster and get stronger/healthier again.  Even my little test ride yesterday seemed to loosen my back up a bit, which was a bonus.  I think the lower-impact movement of a bicycle is much easier on my joints* than, say, running, which I’ve otherwise always really liked.  It’s also just faster to get around on a bike than by walking, but you don’t completely lose out on the experience of being in the midst of the places through which you are traveling.

So, yeah, that’s my reason for guarded optimism today.  I have a hard time being optimistic even at the best of times, though.  It feels like I’m setting myself up to fall into a trap.

That reminds me, I rather like something I heard David Frum say recently.  I can’t reproduce his exact words at the moment, but he basically said he tries to follow the guideline:  think like a pessimist but act like an optimist.  Or,  as Mel Brooks put it in the theme song** for his early movie The Twelve Chairs, “Hope for the best, expect the worst”.

In some ways, I feel that’s almost become my default setting, because when I’m at my current clearest state of headedness, I am definitely depressive and gloomy and neither expect nor feel that I deserve anything good.  But I still keep moving forward (well, if you’re moving at all, then “forward” can be defined as just going in the direction in which you are, in fact, going) and trying new things.

With respect to everything else, well, because my pain flare has been so distracting this week, I haven’t done any music of any kind (even listening, really) nor have I written any fiction.  I also haven’t worked on any lyrics for a song taking off from the word “humility”.  Hopefully, if I can feel better from riding the new bike, it will help me have more energy to do things.  Of course, it will be physically taxing at first, at least a little bit, but that’s okay.

As for anything else, well, I still occasionally toy with the notion of adding a Patreon account or something to this blog, just to see if it does anything at all.  But one is expected to give perks to one’s patrons, and I’m not sure what I have to offer.  Of course, I could write special posts that are only available to patrons, but I don’t know how exciting that would be.

Maybe I could ask patrons to suggest topics or subjects for blog posts, or do some manner of “ask me anything” posts, open to patrons only.  I don’t really know what on Earth people on Patreon could possibly want to learn from or about me, but maybe there would be interest.  I don’t know what else might entice someone.  If any of you out there have any ideas, I would love to hear them.

See what I mean by “think like a pessimist, act like an optimist”?  It’s hard for me to imagine anyone wanting to pay to read my writing, since I barely want to read my own stuff for free***.  And yet, I would consider trying to start making money from even my non-fiction writing, because what have I got to lose by trying that, other than an expenditure of time and energy?

Well, we’ll see what happens.  I would greatly welcome your input on such things, O Reader of My Blog.  In the meantime, please have a good day.

TTFN

*As long as I can avoid repeating any of my two prior major bike accidents, which each did harm to one of my shoulder joints‒first the left then the right, first a connective tissue injury, then a fracture.

**Which, yes, he wrote himself, both the song and the movie.

***Okay, that’s a lie.  I tend to enjoy rereading my own fiction quite a bit.  Is that narcissistic?  If it is, I’m a very peculiar kind of self-hating narcissist:  I think I’m the most annoying, disgusting being this side of a palmetto bug, and yet I think my stories (and my songs) are pretty good, and I enjoy them even if no one else does.

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Another eddy in the corrosive, chaotic cloud exuded by my mind

Well, it’s just another moronic Monday (with apologies to the Bangles).  I did not do any work on Native Alien this weekend.  To be fair, it’s basically complete with respect to chords and of course words and melody‒though I don’t preclude any modest changes along the way, and certainly I have not arranged it.  But I basically didn’t do anything useful or productive over the weekend, I just vegetated by myself.

I intended to do some biking; I went so far as to pump the tires up to their target pressure and everything.  But as often happens, I got anxious over getting on the bike to ride*.  I did some walking, at least; not very much, but at least I took some precautions that have mostly spared my knees and my ankle.

I mean to do a decent walk this evening and get that bit more of exercise in.  I’m trying to get healthier, but it’s hard to motivate myself when I don’t even want me to be healthy.  I don’t like myself.  Almost everything about me is frustrating or even infuriating.

But if walking can help me be slightly healthier, it may make me less annoying, in that I hopefully will feel less pain and irritation.  So, I don’t really care about my own well-being to any significant degree, but I want this stupid body to be as minimally uncomfortable as I can make it.

I’m supposed to start working this week on the lyrics to my next song, with the takeoff word “humility” this time.  I already have a few ideas, though I don’t know if they’ll be what shows up finally.  I also intend to do a quick, low quality “demo” of Native Alien that I may share here on this blog.  That way people can hear the tune I have in mind for it.

I didn’t do any Brilliant stuff over the weekend, but that’s okay.  I do that in much the same way that I have my physics and calculus text books and so on:  to keep alive the pipe dream of actually getting to a level of expertise in the various subjects to be able to do something useful.  But I don’t think I really ever will do those things.

Not that there’s anything wrong with learning just for the sake of understanding the world better.  Indeed, it’s a kind of hunger, a wish to take more and more of the universe into my mind, and thereby to “own” more of it, in the only sense that really works.  But it seems unlikely that I will ever find the time and/or the energy to achieve the level of expertise I would like to achieve in those various subjects.

Plus, honestly, my interest in one subject is constantly being derailed by something else, though it happens over relatively long time-scales.  That’s one of the reasons it was good for me to be enrolled in programmed curricula; I don’t have to worry as much about being distracted because I need to do certain things in a certain order at certain times.  Not that I can’t stay focused on something in which I’m interested; I can do that to a borderline psychotic level sometimes.  But I can’t readily choose which interest is going to grab me at a given moment.

Of course, most people don’t do what they want to do most of the time.  We all do what we must‒or else we die young, or suffer, or what have you; sometimes more than one bad outcome ensues.  Of course, even when we do what we must‒by whatever measure you want to determine that “mustness”‒we often accrue negative consequences.

I’ve tried very hard to do what I “must” throughout my life, for as long as I can remember.  I tried to live a clean life and to be productive and prosperous, to be useful to people who mattered to me and to innocent strangers and all that stuff.  I never knowingly or willingly, let alone willfully, committed crimes (other than minor speeding and so on), but I still ended up spending three years incarcerated and lost my medical license and much of what was left of my connection with my children, a good deal of which had already been hammered by my chronic pain problem and all the “fun” it gave me.

Also, of course, it turns out that all along I had ASD (of two varieties, the first having been fixed by open-heart surgery, and there may be some problem with that discovered a few years ago, but I’m not bothering looking into that, as there would be little point).  That doesn’t tend to have made things easier, I guess, though I have no direct point of comparison, since I have always been I.

I don’t know what point I’m trying to make, which probably means I’m not trying to make any point, I’m just meandering in my mind and sharing the dubious results with you, o injudicious reader.  Hopefully this isn’t too much of a bummer with which to start your work week.

But, hey, I’m not making you read this, am I?  If anything, I would advise against it, as I would advise pretty much anyone against wasting any time, effort, emotional investment, what have you, in me.  I’m a black cloud.  In the final analysis, I bring nothing but corrosion and discomfort and misery to those who spend too much time in my vicinity, literally or figuratively.

You should try to find something more pleasant if you can.

*I’ve only recently come to the (admittedly fairly obvious) conclusion that a big part of my anxiety about biking is because I have had at least two accidents on bicycles that hurt my shoulders‒a connective/soft tissue injury on the left that still causes my trouble, and a fractured scapula on the right (which healed very completely, as bones tend to do).

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“Monday morning turning back…”

“…yellow lorry slow, nowhere to go.”

To my surprise, I am writing this blog post on my smartphone today.  I say “to my surprise” because I did not bring my mini laptop computer back to the house with me on Thursday evening, but I did not recall that fact until I unzipped my backpack and started looking for the computer.  It’s a tad frustrating to have allowed that to slip my mind, but then again, it has been four days.

I don’t feel well this morning, though it’s not because of any weekend debauchery of any kind.  I did essentially nothing this weekend.  Of course, that’s always an inaccurate statement if taken literally, but it catches the gist, the impression, of what I mean to convey.  Obviously, I breathed, and my heart pumped blood, and my bone marrow presumably kept on making blood, and I ate and excreted and so on.  And I did walk to the bank and to the convenience store and so on, and I watched a few videos on YouTube and on “Prime Video”.  But that’s about it.

Despite having rested quite a lot, my entire body just aches and is sore‒especially my back and left hip and knee and ankle and my left shoulder and arm and hand.  Both my thumbs are stiff and sore, making the process of writing this post on the smartphone particularly annoying.  I feel almost as if I were fighting some systemic infection, but I have no other localizing or specifying symptoms or signs.

Of course, I’m on my way to the office right now, to start another thoroughly pointless week of work.  I say “pointless” because I’m not going anywhere, metaphorically or literally.  I see no future other than the pointless repetition of today, with its utter lack of anything fulfilling and its ample sampling of pain and tension and frustration and anxiety and loneliness and depression.

If I had some purpose, some desired goal, something toward which I was working, it would be okay, I suspect.  Or if I just had someone with whom to legitimately share my time, with whom I could have anything more than a superficial connection, it might be tolerable.

Alas, I don’t have those things, and I strongly suspect that I never will have them.  I have had good friends (and excellent family) in my life, but I seem to have lost my ability to make friends, at least to make anything other than work friends.  And I am certainly not a dating kind of person, unfortunately.

I don’t know what point I’m getting at (yet again).  Maybe the point is that there is no point.

I don’t know if any of you stopped in on Friday and read the Declaration of Independence.  Ironically, anyone who bothered to stop and read it is likely not the sort of person who would need to be reminded of the principles involved.  So who knows whether anyone really got anything out of the fact that I shared the text of the document here?

Who knows?  Who cares?  Why bother?

What else is there to say today?  Not very much.  Again, I just don’t feel very well at all, this morning, even for me.  (And when was the last time I felt reasonably healthy in the morning?  It probably long predates the origin of this blog.)

All right, well, I’ll leave it here for today, pretty much.  I feel quite discouraged and despondent and just physically rather beat up.  I’ve taken two extra-strength acetaminophen and three aspirin today so far already, but I don’t yet detect any sign of them making anything better.  Perhaps I haven’t given them a fair day in court, so to speak.  We shall see.

In the meantime, I hope that all of you have a good day and a good week, and a good month on top of that.  And so on, and so on, and so on…

In the meantime, here’s my cover of the song from which this blog post’s title comes.

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“Or play the game ‘existence’ to the end…of the beginning”

You’d think that people would have had enough of silly blog posts.  But I look around me and I see…well, nothing particularly revealing in any direction.  For all I can tell, the people reading this blog may be the last people in the world who read blog posts, and everyone else is sick of them (the blog posts, not the people who read blog posts).

Perhaps the people reading this are sick of them, too, but have some peculiar masochistic streak, some deep need for punishment in the form of inane reading material that must be satisfied once a day whenever possible.  It’s a  big world; there could, in principle, be such people, and enough of them to account for almost everyone who reads my blog with any regularity.

On the other hand, blog posts could be more like the silly love songs mentioned in Paul McCartney’s tune.  They may not be everybody’s cup of tea*, but maybe a lot of people really love them and enjoy them and are moved by them.  In which case, it may be that the only reason that my blog only gets a few readers every day is that I write weird stuff about weird stuff a lot, and I often come across as nihilistic and/or pessimistic**, and I certainly I have much trouble with my chronic issues.

Not that being a downer or focusing on difficult (or even quite odd) things is necessarily going to make people not want to read a blog.  Quite apart from the possible cliché that misery loves company (which I doubt would have much influence on blog posts) it is a fact that people who have their own troubles will often try to find others with similar issues, perhaps to see if they have different insights, perhaps just to share solidarity or even inspiration.

Maybe the only reason that my blog isn’t the most read thing in the history of the world is that not enough people know about it.  We do know that PR campaigns can make a huge difference, can turn mediocre stories into international bestsellers, or can bring an entirely unqualified (indeed, an antiqualified) person into high political office.  When the promotion is promoting something that’s actually good, and the promotion itself is good enough, truly amazing results can happen.

What a crime it would be if I were writing the best writing ever known to humanity and only a few dozen people ever regularly read it, just because I’m no good at promoting myself due to low self-esteem and/or ASD.  Thank goodness I’m not writing the best writing ever, right?  That’s a real load off, as they say.

But I am writing, it seems, and I will try to continue to write every morning when I’m going to work.  I don’t know for certain whether I will be working tomorrow—watch this space and see if I write a post, I guess.  I hope I’m not working.  Though I’ve been trying hard to present the façade of upbeatness, I am very mentally fatigued, as I tend to be.

I don’t know, maybe I’ve been mentally fatigued for years, or even decades, now.  I know I don’t ever tend to give my mind or myself a break if I can help it.  And apparently, for those with ASD, just the process of daily living among humans is draining, partly because of masking (pretending to be normal, pretending to be fine, pretending to understand nonverbal social cues, or even just tolerating the inanities of primate social dominance displays and rituals among the naked house apes), partly because of having to deal with sensory assaults, partly from just not being able naturally to connect with those around them.

So, maybe through this blog I might connect with—or at least provide connection for—people who have similar issues, at least if they are similar enough.  Though, even the thought of making connections with new people, or of people even wanting to connect with me, has made me feel suddenly tense and defensive—anxious, you might say—even as I write about it.

It’s so strange, isn’t it?  Just an imaginary social encounter, even through the medium of a blog, feels like a potential, literal attack.  And yet, I’ve had friends before—very good friends—and I always enjoyed my time with them, and I never wanted to be away from my wife and kids any more than I had to be.

Of course, that didn’t pan out; like most things that really matter to me, I managed to screw it up in various ways.  Not all of it was my doing, of course—back injuries and chronic pain, along with congenital neurodevelopmental conditions, are difficult to blame on anyone, or on any particular thing, though some morons try—but events often do seem to go against my dearest, most heartfelt, wishes.

Maybe I should find a way to wish that I was not an internationally famous, hugely best-selling author with hundreds of millions of devoted fans and good relationships, real and virtual, with people who make sense to me, and vice versa, and even potentially some strong romantic relationship of some kind.  If I could come to really want to avoid those things, then they would, for me, seem more likely to come to pass.

Either way I would be unhappy of course—in a kind of Twilight Zone style inversion of expectations delivering what someone thought they wanted but really didn’t—but at least one way I would be someone whose writing reached out and touched*** millions of people.

Whatever.  If wishes were horses, we’d all be neck deep in horseshit—and not just in the figurative way we already are.

I hope you have a good day, and that you have a good weekend as well.  If I write on Saturday, it shall be here.  If not, it will likely mean I am not working.  If something happens and I never write here again…well, it’s been nice writing to you.

*But then again, even tea isn’t everyone’s cup of tea.

**An accurate impression, to be fair.

***Not in an inappropriate way.

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Viewing his progress through, what perils past, what crosses to ensue, would shut the blog

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, and so it’s time for my “usual” weekly Thursday blog post.  Aren’t you lucky?

I was a bit surprised that yesterday’s post seemed to be rather successful, at least in that people commented on it, here and on social media (where I share it).  I don’t know if anyone else shared it—I encourage anyone who enjoys any of my posts to share it to your own social media, and of course, I encourage you to “like” it if you like it, though I’m falling afoul of my own cautionary song Like and Share by encouraging such activities.

Still, it would be nice if people could share my stuff or comment on it.  I’ll say again:  comments on social media aren’t as useful to me as comments here, on my main page.  Here is where all* the readers come together (over me, so to speak).  So, if one person makes a comment, it might be something that another person finds interesting or insightful, and they might comment back and even get a conversation going.

I don’t know.  I’m probably being unreasonable.  I usually am.  I just have a bit of a hard time sustaining conversation, myself, so I’m always hoping that other people will do so in response to the prompts of my random thoughts, like the ones from yesterday.

Here I’m using a rather constrained version of the term “random”; my thoughts are not random in any true, nondeterministic, quantum mechanical kind of way.  They’re just stochastic, as well as being occasionally sarcastic**, as in my third sentence above.  So, while in practice they are unpredictable, in principle, each follows directly from some individual cause or set of causes.

Of course, nowadays, many people creating “content” on the various social media ask for “likes” or “thumbs up” or whatever the specific equivalent on their site is, as well as sharing and subscribing when that applies.  They also often have things like Patreon accounts, or Ko-fi accounts or whatever (those latter ones allow people to send them small amounts—the price of a cup of coffee, for instance—to help support them), so that some of them can make an actual living by making their “content”.

Of course, it would be nice to make a living by making content, i.e., by these blog posts.  I suppose one can also write posts on Substack nowadays; they are set up to allow people to give paid subscriptions in addition to free subscriptions.

Actually, I think WordPress has instituted something along those lines as well; I’ve gotten notifications of some such things at some point, but I haven’t paid that much attention to them.  All the social media and search engine companies and streaming services are all changing things far too often, so I don’t even try to keep up.

This constant updating gives one (this one, anyway) the impression that the companies really don’t know what they’re doing, and that they haven’t made a good product before they put it out to the public, so they have to keep tweaking it.

I suspect, though, that it’s more that they think they have to keep changing things to keep up with all the competition.  It’s a bit as if seals and sea lions tried to grow tentacles because they saw that squid and octopuses have a fair amount of success using them.

It might be worth it to remind them (the software companies and the pinnipeds) that, while all improvement is change, not all change is improvement.  In fact, most potential change is at best neutral, and more often detrimental, especially in situations in which something is working at least reasonably well.

This is the root of the admission in the Declaration of Independence that prudence dictates that established governments should not be changed due to light or transient causes (something like that, anyway).  It’s also part of why I hate when organizations or people call for “change” without being more specific.  I have more patience with the label “progressive”, because at least it gives tacit recognition to the notion that progress (by whatever definition) is what we want, not mere random change.

It’s true that evolution by natural selection happens with random mutations and non-random survival, and that over time, progress can be made that way, but it is a grim, ungainly, blundering, low, ghastly, ominous, wasteful, and horribly cruel process (here I’m combining words from Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Darwin).  It’s better to use engineering principles rather than random trial and error if one wants to head more swiftly and surely in better directions***.

Anyway, I don’t have any direct way to monetize this blog, though there are probably ways it can be done.  And so, I keep going to work every day, as I am doing now.  If people want to support me, of course, giving “likes” and commenting and (if such a thing ever happens) sharing the link to the posts is also very nice.

Of course, if anyone wants to support me monetarily, they can certainly do so—in principle—by buying my published books and talking about them to other people (and rating and reviewing them on Amazon, for instance).  And, of course, they can play/stream my music on Spotify and YouTube Music and iTunes and so on.  Some of my songs are even available to use as background music for reels on Instagram and TikTok and Facebook.

But I am more or less certain that I’ve made a staggering**** net loss on my music.  That’s okay.  People have listened to my songs, and some people have said that they really like them.  I even had one work friend who was a former professional musician/singer/songwriter say that he thought if my song Breaking Me Down had been released (in a professionally produced version shortened for radio) in the seventies, it would have been a hit.

So, if you so desire, please do listen to my music, share my posts, buy and read my books, all that stuff.  I would be grateful.  And hey, if any of you out there think I ought to try to monetize this blog, please let me know.

It seems unlikely that anyone actually reads far enough even to let me know their response, but if that’s the case, well, I guess I don’t mind being a voice crying out in the wilderness—I’ve always felt that way no matter what.

TTFN

*Though it may be a bit much to use the word “all”, considering that I don’t exactly have that many regular readers—a few dozen at most, most days.

**Oh, noooo, I would never be sarcastic.  Batman forbid!

***Of course, there are many possible ways to think of something as “better”, so making that judgment should also be an important part of the process if one wants actually to make things improve in a way upon which most, if not all, can agree.

****As a matter of percentage in versus percentage out.  The actual amounts are not great in either direction.

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“It’s just the kind of day to leave myself behind”

Well, it’s Tuesday, isn’t it.

Note that I ended that sentence with a period, despite the fact that it seems to be in the form of a question.  That’s because I didn’t really mean it as a question; I had no desire to imply that I wasn’t sure what day of the week it was.  I’m reasonably certain that today is Tuesday.

I’m not absolutely certain, of course, because outside the realms of self-contained systems of mathematical or logical axioms and rigorously defined and applied operations, there can be no true certainty, only higher or lower credence.  Real-world probabilities never reach zero or one.

Mind you, some things are so likely as to be practically certain, and there’s not much point in worrying about whether they are true unless and until some completely new evidence and/or argument makes itself known.  Such is my conviction that today is Tuesday*.

No, I was expressing a sort of resignation about the fact that today is Tuesday.  I would have said it in a sardonic tone had I been speaking aloud.  It’s not that Tuesday is an especially bad day of the week necessarily, notwithstanding the Beatles telling us that Tuesday afternoon is never-ending.  No, it’s just that Tuesday is still practically the beginning of the week, but I am already tired from Monday, and it’s a long way until the weekend, especially if one works on Saturday, which I am going to do, as far as I know.

That last statement has a lower credence than I give to the fact that today is Tuesday, but it’s still well above a 50% chance.

I know, I know, why am I writing this inane nonsense?

It’s just stream of consciousness.  I’m not planning it out, except to the extent that something I’ve written already makes me think of something else I want to write next.  But I have no particular chosen topic today, obviously.  Not that this is atypical.  I almost never have any plan when I start writing blog posts; I just start writing.  Sometimes I’ll just start with an inane phrase, like I did today, and see where that takes me.

Oddly enough, I think when I do have a particular topic in mind—such as in my short-lived series My Heroes Have Always Been Villains—people don’t seem to enjoy my posts as much.  Or, at least, I don’t get as many “likes” or views.  Maybe some people read and “like” them via social media or something, but if so, whatever they’re doing doesn’t reach me as feedback.  I don’t really see comments or responses that aren’t done here on my page.

Of course, as you may already know, the initial purpose for this blog—in this incarnation—was to try to promote my fiction by interacting with potential readers.  Boy was that a dud of an idea!  [No question mark ==> rhetorical, but not really a question].

More people read and have read this blog than ever read any of my books, unfortunately.  It’s rather discouraging, and it’s a large part of why I haven’t been writing fiction for a while, and the last thing I wrote, Extra Body, I just published here.

While I always write the stories I want to write and that I will enjoy (or whatever one might call the process) there really is a rapidly diminishing marginal return as one writes books that almost no one is even aware of, let alone purchases, let alone reads.  And as you know, I have no stomach for self-promotion.  Sometimes I envy narcissists, at least for an instant; then I remember that I tend to find them disgusting (though just a smidge of narcissism can be endearing in the right circumstances).

I also am not very good at interacting with people who might help promote my work, let alone at asking for that help.  I’m pretty good at the creative stuff, or at least I’m tolerably good at it.  I can write, I can draw, I can do music (playing and singing) and other similar stuff.

I’m also pretty good at science and math, and not just in a rote learning sense; I’m pretty creative there, too.  I once invented my own “number” which I call a “gleeb”, the symbol for which was a combined cursive g and b:

The nature of a gleeb is that, if you multiply it by zero, you get one (in other words, a gleeb is the “forbidden” or “undefined” result of 1/0).  That may not seem to make sense, but while I was “up the road” I even worked out some of the algebra and properties of such a number, and it turned out—to my inexpert analysis—to be logically consistent, at least.

I’m not saying it’s useful.  As far as I can tell, it’s not.  But it was a bit of mental fun and exercise, perhaps the intellectual analogue of playing hacky sack.

I’ve also occasionally thought of ideas in physics and in medicine that I thought were interesting, and which later I discovered had actually become areas of research or therapy (the therapy bit is in medicine, not in physics…as far as I know, there are no therapies in physics, despite the fact that there is such a thing as physical therapy**).

But I am not good at putting myself forward or putting myself out there or calling attention to myself.

Okay, well, I guess that’s enough meandering nonsense for the moment, though such nonsense can sometimes be fun.  Hopefully, Tuesday afternoon will not become some bizarre event horizon in which we are stuck forever.

Of course, the person going through the event horizon doesn’t experience the process as eternal; only the distant observers “see****” them slowing and slowing and coming finally, asymptotically, to a complete standstill.  The person who goes through, if they are looking backward, might see the whole history of the universe playing out before them—at least until tidal forces spaghettify them—but they will not experience time stopping.  Think about it:  how could one experience time stopping?  The passage of time is inherent in the process of experience, certainly as we know it.

I hope you have a good day.

*And even if it weren’t, I could just call it Tuesday and say that I have my own way of naming the days of the week, and it would be no more arbitrary than the one in use here in the US and elsewhere.

**This is as opposed to psychotherapy, of course, but it also can lead one to imagine such things as ethereal therapy or conceptual therapy or metaphysical therapy.  What would that last one be***?

***See, I ended that sentence with a question mark; it really was a question, though mainly a rhetorical one.

****I put that in scare quotes because as a person (or whatever) gets closer and closer to an event horizon, any light or other signal leaving them, heading outward, gets red-shifted to longer and longer wavelengths, so it becomes harder and harder actually to see them.  In the end, we cannot truly observe them stuck there forever, because the wavelength of the light leaving them approaches infinity.

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Crystallized thought and civilizational axle grease

It’s Friday, and I suspect I will be working tomorrow, and if I do, I will probably write a blog post.  Further bulletins on that subject as events warrant.

I’m really, really exhausted.  I think the events of the past few weeks are finally just catching up to me, now that I don’t literally have constant tension and discomfort from the stent, which truly made me unable to rest for more than an hour at a time, maximum.  Yesterday at work was really rough; by the end I was just lying my head back limply in my seat and kind of staring and trying to doze off‒at which I succeeded for a few minutes at a time.  But I certainly haven’t recovered.

I wish I could spend about 24 hours straight just sleeping in a comfortable bed in an air conditioned room with no interruptions.  Oh, and I would want plenty of water and other beverages to drink.

Well, my portable AC unit is supposed to arrive today, and if I’m lucky, maybe I’ll even have the energy to set it up and turn it on this evening.  I hope I will.  It would be a shame not to be able to take advantage of it.

I really hope it works well.

As for everything else, well, I have no idea, really.  I certainly feel no urge or drive to create anything, unless you count this blog as a creative endeavor, which I’m not sure I do.  Maybe if I get the AC in and running I’ll have more creative energy.  I don’t know.  I’m somewhat pessimistic, but that’s more down to my character than to a balanced assessment of the situation.

I still have my overarching plan about either losing weight and diminishing my chronic pain or else…well, you know, but I haven’t made much headway yet on that, because a number of events have gotten in the way.  These last few weeks even my upper body workout in the mornings has been erratic; it’s hard to keep my discipline up.

I wish there were some patron out there, perhaps some manner of “sugar mama” or whatever it would be, to sponsor me in doing some creative endeavors.  On the other hand, I wouldn’t want such a person to have the rights to any intellectual property I produced, so it’s not as though I would just welcome and work for anyone.

It would be nice to have some help, though, on a regular basis.  But, of course, I know I have no right to expect that nor do I in any possible sense deserve it.

Of course, the very concept of “deserving” things is one that I find vague and nebulous, and often without substance.  I can understand it in a situation in which one has been part of a contract and one has fulfilled one’s agreed upon end of the bargain‒then such a person deserves the payment (or whatever) to which they agreed in the contract.

Other than that, though, I think the term is usually vacuous, at least the way most people seem to use it, as in, “You deserve someone who treats you like a queen/king” or some such sentiments.  Really?  Someone deserves that?  How so?  What service did that person perform for the world or what attributes do they embody that make them deserve such treatment?

I don’t think most people actually really ever think about it when they say such things.  And yet, they fill themselves and each other with these concepts of entitlement without basis, and this leads them to a cycle of letting the “perfect”* be the enemy of the good.  It’s a kind of narcissism, in a way, and as usually seems to be the case (to an outside observer such as I am) such attributes almost always bring misery to the person who embodies them, and often to those around them.

I do wish people would be more careful with their words‒even in private, impromptu interactions to some degree.  Language is crystallized thought, and sloppy language doesn’t merely reflect sloppy thought; it engenders it.

But, of course, while language, especially written language, is the lifeblood of civilization, courtesy is the lubricant**, without which the machinery of civilization grinds itself down and rapidly ceases to function well, if at all.  Thus, it’s worth applying the principle of charity to other people when interacting, rather than trying to pounce on any potential cause of offense, or to “pwn” them (as they used to say) or to “destroy” them in a discussion.

Besides being hyperbolic (and inaccurate in other ways) such notions surely miss the whole point of a discussion (or, Batman forbid, a debate) which should be about interacting with others’ thoughts and trying to improve one’s own (and mutual) understanding and to try to achieve an ever-improving understanding of the reality in which everyone exists.

It’s frustrating.  But so are many other things, I suppose.  I wish there were more rewards to compensate for the frustrations, but it’s been a long time since that has been anything approaching a balance for me.

Whatever.  I hope you all have a good day, and a good weekend, whether or not I write a post tomorrow.

*Another word that is almost always vacuous.

**I know, I’m mixing metaphors here, but I’m doing it with full and deliberate awareness, so I hope it’s not too grating.

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A hot and muggy morning blog post*

Okay, well, it’s Wednesday morning, and I didn’t write a blog post yesterday.  I didn’t go to work yesterday, either, because yesterday was my appointment to get the stent taken out of my right ureterovesical junction—you can look that up in case you don’t already know to what I refer.  In any case, my thought process was that, since to get to my appointment on time from the office would have taken most of two hours, I would’ve had to leave work very shortly after it started, and I was not feeling well at all on Monday, nor on Tuesday.

Now, I am pleased to report, the stent came out without much trouble, though it was terribly uncomfortable.  Nevertheless, it is a true relief to have it gone.  Now, without the access “thread” from the stent hanging out, I can actually not feel like I have to use the bathroom constantly.  That’s a tremendous relief.

The urologist recommended that I drink lots of liquid every day from now on, and when I suggested “At least three liters?” he shook his head and pointed up with his thumb The Accountant style, and told me “Four or five at least”.

I’m not going to resist that advice, of course.  I already live in south Florida, and the heat and humidity are ridiculous.  I probably need to drink quite a bit more than even that if I can; the threat of recurrent kidney stones is a powerful one.  What’s worse, my room’s air conditioner is on the fritz, and it has been for some time.  I looked this morning at a little digital thermometer that I have and that I had forgotten for a while, and the temperature in my room was 89.5 degrees Fahrenheit.  This was at four in the morning.

Well, I already have a new, portable air conditioning unit on the way, which should arrive no later than Friday.  I look forward to it because, although I have quite a good and powerful floor fan, that leaves me with more of a tendency to dehydrate because it cools by evaporation.

I know, all this is rather boring.  I apologize.  I never told anyone I have an exciting or interesting life, though it carries its share of intense drama and angst, I guess.  Still, I can write about much more interesting things than would ever happen to me, and I can even give people happy endings to their stories, which is something that is almost certainly not going to happen to me.

Oh, I forgot to mention, I am writing this blog post on my mini laptop computer, as I suggested I might on Monday (I think I suggested it then, but I’m not going to check to be sure—I’ll have put a link to it, so anyone out there who so desires can go check on my behalf).  It’s been just over a month since the last time I wrote on the laptop computer.  It is a pleasant change to be able to write so fluidly, and in a way that feels much more natural and easier.

That being said, I don’t really have much about which to write other than my recent medical issues.  I continue not to write fiction, and I continue not to play music, let alone to compose it, and I continue not to draw or paint, and I haven’t been reading anything educational at all, whether about physics or mathematics or neuroscience or biology more generally.

Maybe I should get Richard Dawkins’s recent work about the genetic book of the dead.  His stuff is usually pretty gripping, and I like biology.  It’s harder to find physics books that I want to read, because much of the popular writing about physics is stuff that I already know, and about which I know more than is usually discussed in popular books.

I guess that’s just the way it goes.  The world wasn’t built for any of us or for all of us.  It just happened, as did our so-called civilization.  That doesn’t mean it’s not worth trying to make it a better situation for as many of us as we can and to try to avoid committing injustice to others.  But that requires reflection and calm assessment, and humans in general are not strongly disposed to such things.

We can only try, I suppose.  Meanwhile, at least try to have a good day.

*By which I mean that the morning is hot and muggy, not that the blog post is hot and muggy.  What would that even mean?