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Thoughts meander like a restless spore inside a humid room

In case you’re confused:  Yes, it is Monday, even though I’m writing a blog post.  I just decided that I might as well do something that gives the illusion of productivity, since, y’know, I’m awake and on my way to the office anyway.

As for topics about which to write, well, on that I don’t know.  I don’t think there are any momentous or interesting things worth discussing that are happening in the world right now (ba-dump-bump, chhh!).

Still, it is true that to a very good approximation every event that happens and that seems so earth-shattering and important in the moment is utterly forgotten by everything except quantum mechanics and Laplace’s demon.

Don’t believe me?  Do you remember that scandal in the Roman Senate when Cinna the Younger misdirected Republic funds to buy a “servant” for his household?  No?  Neither does anyone else.  Of course, that was 2000 years ago, so you may think it doesn’t count, but I’m sure almost none of you know about any of the “crucial” events of the day or the escapades of popular stars even 40 years ago.  I certainly don’t remember any, and I was fifteen at the time, and I have an unusually good memory.

Also, time‒with respect to online information, anyway‒is cycling more quickly nowadays.  Sure, information can last a very long time online*, but that doesn’t really matter in a dispositive way, because there is a constant gusher of new and distracting information coming in at all times, with signal and noise intermingling haphazardly.  It’s a bit akin to the fact that although Manhattan is crowded with millions of people in a small area‒so you might think your life would be less private‒in many ways it is more private than other places, because when there, you are one indistinguishable face among those millions.

The internet makes Manhattan look like Mayberry.

Still, it would be nice to be able to get my words and maybe my stories and maybe even my music out to more people who might find them interesting and/or entertaining.  It’s not immortality in anything like a literal sense‒nothing is‒but still, there’s at least some little internal drive to spread the memetic code of me out in the world.  I could think of myself like the fruiting body of a fungus, spewing the spores of my thoughts into the wind, seeing if they’ll be able to infest and infect any other people out there.

It might at least be interesting to give someone the psychological equivalent of a persistent, itchy rash thanks to my words.

Of course, the fungus metaphor is an ironic one for me, since I cannot stand mushrooms for eating, and even the smell of wild mushrooms after damp weather (or mildew for that matter) fills me with literal nausea.  Then again, given my own poor opinion of myself, maybe it’s right for me to think of myself and my ideas (my celium, perhaps…get it?) that way.

Fungi don’t have any qualifications or requirements to meet other than survival and reproduction.  And that’s very much the nature of online information exchange; the stuff that spreads most isn’t the “brilliant” or the “important”, it’s just the catchiest.  The whole process is stochastic.

Of course, there is an entire ecosystem of such meme-plexes, and they vary in their tendencies to spread quickly versus being more long-lasting.  Like the species in a rainforest, some spread quickly and germinate and reproduce quickly, but then quickly die, with short, frequently repeating cycles; others spread and grow more slowly, some perhaps becoming the mighty trees that dominate the structure of the forest, but which perforce have longer, slower growth and death cycles.  And, of course, the various other plants (and animals) in the jungle create and are each others’ environment.  There are even parasitic plants, and opportunistic ones that germinate only after a fire.  It’s very complicated, and no one plant is crucial or eternal**, though they may think they are.

Am I pushing the metaphor too far?  I don’t think so.  I think it’s important for people to recognize that no one controls the internet, just as no one controls the economy, just as no one controls the ecosystem, just as no one controls the evolution of the universe itself.  Everything just happens thanks to the interactions of numerous smaller elements interacting according to local forces and pressures.

That’s enough for a Monday, I think.  I hope you all have a good one.

*But not forever, despite what anyone says.  I fear no contradiction here, because to prove me wrong, you would have to wait until forever had passed.  At which point, if you are right, I will gladly concede the issue.

**Unless you count microbes‒some of those could be considered immortal.  Of course, in a sense, since it all has one common ancestor somewhere, life as a whole could be considered just one gigantic, very long-lived (but probably not immortal) organism.

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But though my blogs be mean, take them in good part.

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday again, so I’m writing another edition of my blog post.  It’s not the first nor the second post I’ve done this week, so calling it my “weekly” blog post would seem somewhat inaccurate.

It’s now only two weeks until Boxing Day, so you should get out your gloves and your speed rope and your heavy bag and get yourself back in shape for the ring!

I really didn’t want to go to the office today.  If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have written a post, except perhaps a single line such as “No blog post today”.  That would be borderline self-contradictory, but since my thoughts and words have been dealing with depression and suicidality lately, I thought if I just wrote nothing people might become concerned.

I’m probably being egotistical even to imagine such a thing.

The reason I didn’t want to go to work was because the office holiday dinner takes place tonight, and I really feel tense about it.  We’ll be going to the same restaurant we used last year, and it was overcrowded and had too much sensory overload even back then, such that I had to start drinking (alcohol) as soon as possible to keep from scratching my own skin off.

It would have been one thing if everyone there had been people with whom I felt comfortable.  There are three or so people at the office with whom I get along well enough that, if just that group and I were going somewhere, it would have been okay.  Certainly there have been many times in my life when I’ve gone out to eat (and similar) with family and/or close friends, and I enjoyed myself.  But I was younger then*, and I had more energy for acting normal, and the people who knew me well were nonjudgmental about my weirdnesses, anyway.

Most of the people at the office, though, are people with whom I wouldn’t normally hang out at any stage in my life‒no insult to them intended, there’s just no common framework.  And the two or three people with whom I think I would most have enjoyed spending time seem to have become more distant recently.  Perhaps that’s all my doing; it almost certainly is my fault.  I know I’m becoming ever less fun to be around.  So I don’t really have anyone with whom I feel I could hang out comfortably‒not in the office, probably not in the world.

It’s not that there’s no one out there who might be willing.  There are many kind people about, though sometimes that can be hard to believe.  But I am not good company‒not for anyone, probably not ever again‒and I certainly don’t deserve any kindness.  I am too weird now, and my life is a mutated, Lovecraftian monstrosity compared to what it once was.

Let’s face it, I was always just a weirdo, anyway; I was just better at pretending to be human in the past‒or if not better, I at least had more energy for it.

Now, I barely have the will to get up and get going in the morning**.  Almost everything I do is just to distract myself, to divert my attention from being aware of my own pathetic and worthless existence.  It makes me wish I had a serious drug or alcohol problem.  Then I could both have a powerful distraction and something that would potentially lead to my death in short order.  Instead, I’ve wasted years trudging through my nosferatu pseudo-life.  My books and blog posts notwithstanding, it really would have made more sense if I had died some time in 2013.  Nothing since then has been of any real use, not to anyone else, and not to me.

I’ll try to work up something remotely akin to enthusiasm for the holiday dinner tonight.  But, if I’m too stressed, I just won’t go.  I know the food will be good, though.  I’m trying to watch what I eat, but everything and everyone around me tends to want to sabotage that intention (including me) especially at this time of the year.

Maybe I should just eat and drink until I make myself really sick, and then I won’t want to do it anymore.  It would be quite nice not to be a person who eats as an escape, as his only reliable source of distraction.  I feel much more clear-headed when I don’t eat, and I know I am much sharper.

How nice it would be not to be such a pathetic glutton.  But I do miss my sister’s holiday cookies.  And I mean to eat whatever I feel like eating this evening‒whether I go to the office dinner or not.

Maybe I’ll get botulism, or a bad case of Hepatitis A that turns fulminant or something.  Keep your fingers crossed!

TTFN

*Such is the nature of the past.

**Though I still cannot sleep even close to as much as I would need to be healthy.

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When will the system crash?

Well, it’s another Monday‒the second one in December of 2024*‒and I decided I’d write a little Monday morning blog post.

I’m writing this on my phone today.  I wrote last Thursday’s blog post on my miniature laptop computer, and it got too long and only a few people apparently read it‒or, well, only a few people went to the page.  I can’t tell if they’ve actually read the thing.  The only real way to tell if someone reads something is if they make a comment that clearly responds to the substance of the post.

It’s rather appalling how rarely people read at all anymore.  The odds of someone both liking and actually sharing any of my blog posts are absolutely miniscule.  I suppose I shouldn’t complain too much, since I wrote an actual song called “Like and Share” about some evils of the social media landscape.  But the evils I was decrying really focused around the people who curate their online presence to seem as though they and their lives are “perfect” while having who knows how many skeletons in their closets, and the other people who, through comparing themselves to the false images of people online, come to hate themselves and their own lives.

I would love it if people shared my blogs or even my songs or my books (well…the links to my books), but I guess the way one grows one’s audience and gets spread and “retweeted” and so on is by sharing politically charged content with some particular stance.  The more vituperative and divisive and snide, the more likely a thing is to be noticed and shared.  Of course, that’s not going to guarantee spread, but it seems to be an almost necessary thing.

The fact that my primary medium is writing doesn’t help.  With that in mind, I made a little vertical video yesterday, intended primarily for Instagram because “Why not?”, and I shared it there and on YouTube and Facebook and even Threads and X and Bluesky just because, again, why not?

I’m terribly frustrated.  Maybe I should take some controversial stance.  Maybe I should say outrageous and hateful things.  It wouldn’t be that hard.  I hate nearly everything in the whole stupid world.  The problem is that my hatred is equal opportunity.  I find the left and the right to be equally sub moronic, though the malady presents slightly differently in the two political directions.

Maybe I should start promoting an all-out war between neurodivergent people and the NT’s, sort of like Magneto against the humans.  Humans screw everything up.  Many if not most of the positive advances in civilization came from people who were probably “neurodivergent”.  The normies just take advantage of those advances and drive the world into the abyss.

Maybe I should start brainstorming and propounding the benefits of initiating a planet-destroying catastrophe.  I mean, it would be easy enough (in principle) to arrange for various asteroids to end up hitting the Earth; all one really needs is a space agency‒perhaps even a private one, a la SpaceX.  After that, Newtonian mechanics is enough to do the job, plus a little trial and error.

I don’t think it would be enough just to wipe out the human race or current civilization.  I’m thinking of complete sterilization.  None of the other life forms on this planet are any more benevolent or kind or positive than humans are; they’re just less competent.  Weirdly enough, humans appear to be by far the most compassionate, the kindest, the most “life-affirming” species on the planet.  All those that seem kinder or less damaging are simply less powerful.  Even things like lichen and bacteria and archaea have caused massive, even global, catastrophes in the past.

The fact that humans, of all things, are the kindest species on the planet is surely the strongest argument that can be made that life on this planet‒and perhaps all life in the universe‒is simply a huge mistake, and one that ought to be rectified.

I’m pretty sure my own life is a huge mistake, with the exception of my kids.  Certainly everything since about 2012, and possibly somewhat earlier, has been one giant error message written across the monitor of my existence.  I should just power down everything; not restart it, just shut it off and throw it in the trash.

Any thoughts?  “Like” and “share” if you feel the urge.

*Geez, that means the year is almost over again, and I’m still here, like a bad outbreak of herpes.

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Two-day Tuesday posting streak

I was about to start this post with “hello and good morning”, but I decided it wouldn’t be quite right to start a post that way on a Tuesday.  And it is Tuesday morning as I am writing this, on my phone, while en route to work.

As was the case yesterday, I have no topic in mind to discuss, so in a sense, you’re again reading my thoughts as they happen.  Of course, I will edit them before posting‒editing is a very important part of my writing, and the fact that I know that I will be editing extensively (when I’m writing fiction, at least) helps give me the freedom just to write something.

It doesn’t really matter if what you first spew out onto the “page”* is terrible, since you’re going to go over and over it, anyway.  It’s like sketching; your first line can be crap, and so can your second and so on, but you’re going to bring them all together into your final line or curve over time.

I sometimes almost wish I were able to say, with near-sincerity, that even what I first “spew out” onto the page is exceptional, is brilliant, is the product of absolute genius.  I could even cite some evidence.  For instance, when I was in high school I won a national writing award (there were two winners per state‒I was a representative of the solid state) and that was judged using a combination of a pre-written story and an impromptu, hand-written essay.  Given the handicap always created by my atrocious handwriting**, what I wrote must have been quite good, but I have no memory of what the subject even was, let alone what I wrote.

In high school, I used to be able to pretend to be a rampant egotist.  I could pretend to think I was the greatest, the most brilliant, the most admirable, of anyone anywhere.  People took my antics quite well; I guess it was obvious that I was joking, and my pseudo-egotism was never about being better than any particular person or group of people.  It was my silly pretense that I thought that I was the most brilliant being anywhere, ever, and there was no shame in being beneath me, since everyone was beneath me.

I have no idea how much my peers even noticed this, to be honest, or how much any of them would remember.  Probably not very much.  I was probably not as noticeable as I might have thought I was.

In any case, I didn’t quite realize it at the time, but there was a kind of sick desperation in my act, in my outward persona.  I knew that I was smart, but I also knew I was pretty weird, and I at least didn’t want anyone to be mistaken about the fact that I was smart.  I remember a particular formative event in this arc:  I was on my way home from school (I think it was on the way home) in 9th grade, and a random other student some ways away looked at me and yelled, “Look at the reeetard!”***

Now, I don’t think he was even with anyone that he might’ve been trying to impress by being cruel, so it was just the expression of that innate urge to denigrate that humans often have.  I didn’t even feel angry at him‒I’ve never taken name-calling personally, as such, particularly not by strangers.  However, I was mortified by the possibility that such was the way people judged me when they saw me.  I certainly hadn’t ever cared much about my appearance or what have you, though hygiene was never a problem.  But I worried that I came across as atypical enough to seem…disabled in some way.

So, I guess that contributed to me trying to improve the impression I gave, overall, with respect to general ability and smarts, and so on.  I think I was probably pretty good at that kind of “masking”, especially since I included at least some of my weirdness in my outward persona, more or less deliberately; I didn’t think there was any way I could completely suppress the weirdness.  I also tried to be always polite, and that makes up for a lot in the world.  If written language is the lifeblood of civilization, then courtesy is the lubricant, if you’ll pardon the mixed metaphor.

Okay, well…I guess that’s what has come out of me today.  It feels even more disjointed and weird to me than yesterday’s writing, but what are you gonna do?  I’m just desperately trying to establish some kind of contact with the world of humans in some fashion, to try to suppress or diminish my depression and tension and the feeling of imminent and inescapable‒and ongoing, since it has certainly already begun‒disintegration.  So, you know, no big deal.

*Conjecture:  The “page ranking”, named after Larry Page, of Google, became so powerful a term in information space that the term itself back-propagated through time, and it thereby became the word to apply to a side of a sheet of paper, and related things (eventually including web pages) on which one might imprint information.  Thus, all pages are named after Larry Page, it’s just that some of them are named after him…before him.

**I’ve said it before, the horror of my handwriting is the reason they call it curse-ive.

***His term, not mine.  I’m just quoting, and I’ve never really used that even as a non-serious epithet between friends.  Intellectual disability, or really any kind of mental disability, has never been something I found very funny.

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Sleep that knits up the ravell’d blog of care

Hello and good morning.

As those of you who read this blog regularly know, I’ve been ill for almost two weeks now.  I can’t say that I’m fully recovered yet, but‒unfortunately‒I am getting better.  In the early stages of the illness, when I stayed at the house for two of the days of last week, I was at least able to get a bit of extra sleep, thanks to that tendency of the body’s response to illness.  Since then, though, I seem to have rebounded into worse than usual insomnia.  I feel truly horrible, and I also have a persistent cough that’s irritating.

I wonder if there’s anyone out there from my past who truly hates me.  If so, I hope they stumble across this blog, or have already done so, so that they can at least experience a bit of schadenfreude.  It would be nice to think that my pathetic discomfort and self-hatred were at least bringing some joy to the world.  It might be spiteful joy, but I’ll take what I can get.  It’s not as though I’m very good at bringing joy to people I care about and who care about me for very long, at least when they are in regular, close proximity.

My subconscious mind gave me a slight birthday present on Sunday, in that I woke up with a little tune in my head that I’d heard in a dream.  I wasn’t sure if it was something I’ve heard before, but I didn’t and don’t think so.  Anyway, I felt compelled to work out the tune and then put chords to it on Sunday.  Then, Monday morning, I very quickly worked out the guitar melody and chords and did a quick little production of that.  It’s only 16 bars long, so that was easy enough.

I posted the audio here on Monday.  I also made a weird little video with it on my phone; I’ve tried to play with Instagram lately, just because I have a default account since I have a Facebook account.  I posted the combined video there and on YouTube (see below).

I think it was too much of a distraction making my strange introduction and then adding the weird effects.  That was me just playing around with the Clip Champ app from Microsoft, just to see what I could do with it.  But my intro is longer than the song, and I don’t think it adds much.

Anyway, if anyone recognizes the tune from somewhere, please let me know.  If not, I guess this was my personal Yesterday* kind of moment, though my tune is much more banal than Sir Paul’s.  There’s no real shame in that, though.  The vast majority of all songs ever written are not as good as Yesterday.

On a whim, I worked out the tune of another (pre-existing) song on an online keyboard yesterday‒I don’t even recall what song‒but it was interesting that I ended up “singing” it in my head in C Major/A minor.  It wasn’t deliberate, and I only realized it as I finished working out the whole melody.

This was striking because that was the key signature that the above, dream-based song came out in, and in which it is played, above.  However, I know that is not the key in which I originally dreamed it, because as soon as I woke up with it in my head on Sunday, I opened my phone’s voice recorder and tried to sort of hum the tune into it.  I’ll put that recording right here, as evidence (or whatever).

As I knew my voice was hoarse, and I wasn’t sure how well it would come across later (even to me) it wasn’t long before I opened up the online virtual keyboard (it was too early to use the real one) and worked out and wrote down the tune.

Anyway, the point is, between the time I had hummed the tune directly after my dream, which I’m pretty sure was in the key in which I dreamed it, and when I worked it out on the virtual keyboard, I’d taken it from G-sharp major/F minor (which I think is roughly the key in which I hummed it) to C major/A minor.  I don’t know why this happened, but it does make nearly all the black key notes go away.  C major is the simplest, most basic key‒in a sense, anyway‒whereas G-sharp major has its root on a black key.

I’d like to imagine that my subconscious mind corrected it to an easier key signature for me, and that’s not entirely beyond the realm of possibility.  I’ve been playing piano since I was nine (not continuously) and cello since I was ten (ditto), if only at a very flippant and superficial level, never developing any real skill with either instrument (and I do not have perfect pitch in the sense of being able to tell you what note is being played when I hear it, but I can certainly tell if something it out of tune with itself and otherwise deal with relative pitch).  Still, my subconscious might very well have enough imprinted memory of notes and scales to steer me toward easier keys when I’m writing something or sounding out something by ear.

All of this, though, is just a meandering distraction.  I’m not likely to do anything more with my dream-based tune, even if I become more firmly convinced that it’s mine.  I’ve occasionally found myself humming some impromptu lyrics to it in my head, but they are horrifyingly bad and stupid.  Compared to them, McCartney’s first lyrics to Yesterday‒“scambled eggs…dah dah dah dah dah, I love your legs”‒are worthy of Shakespeare or Milton.

So I’m not going to tell anyone what those are.  Anyway, sixteen bars do not a song make, as Yoda might say, so if I were going to turn it into something, I’d need to extrapolate.  That’s not hard to do once you’ve got a basic melody, but it requires you to have the drive to make a song.

I have no such drive for anything, really.  I can barely write this blog, and I am only doing it because I am a creature of habit and routine.  I am thoroughly exhausted by my worsening sleep, and I feel as though I’m experiencing the world through a multi-dimensional haze.  I’m also very depressed and I miss my kids and all the various other people for whom I’ve been too unpleasant for them to want to stay around anymore.

From day to day, and for a very long time, I have been thoroughly alone, and I fear that serves the greater good of the people who matter to me.  Even this week at work, since I’ve been here every day, has been far less successful than the days when I was out of the office.  Everything tends to be better when I’m not around.

I’m not living; I’m just waiting to die.  It’s taking a long frikking time, though, and I’m running out of patience and energy.  But I still can’t seem to sleep.  As the Ramones sang, “I wanna be sedated”.  I wonder if Michael Jackson’s old doctor is making house calls**.

TTFN

*Every Breath You Take had a similar origin.

**Is it too soon to be joking about him?  I have long been personally affronted by the fact that he spent less time in prison than I did.  Then again, he wasn’t in Florida.

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From the wisdom of beer commercials to the gibberings of Azathoth

It’s Friday.  I guess many people express the notion of gratefulness for the end of the work week by saying, “Thank God it’s Friday”, and I suppose that’s a positive and healthy attitude.  It’s good to enjoy your work and to be productive, of course‒though merely human levels of productivity are creeping ever closer to obsolescence‒but it’s also good to enjoy being nonproductive, to being able to divert oneself into other matters.  It’s like the guy sang in the old Michelob Light commercial:  “Who says you can’t love your job and leave it, too?”

Who’d have thought that one could find even small nuggets of real wisdom in beer commercials?  Then again, the making of beer may have been one of the early drivers of the development of agriculture, even more so than bread, so beer has been with us as long as civilization has existed.  It’s also one of the rewards that wheat gave us when it domesticated us.

I’m working tomorrow, so this is not the end of the work week for me.  I don’t know whether I will write a blog post tomorrow or not.  I didn’t plan specifically to write this one (but neither did I plan not to write a blog post).

Yesterday, though, I read a quick snippet from a young autistic woman on “Threads”, which is Zuckerberg’s competitor for the website formerly known as Twitter, and which is run as a sort of strangler fig on the tree trunk of Instagram.  This young woman commented on how she sometimes had the intense desire to write copious journals because that way, if she died alone and utterly separate and friendless‒as she seems to think might happen‒at least it was possible that someday someone might really know her and who she had been.

I’m paraphrasing, of course.  But this was the gist of her comment as I understood it, and it was brief and clear enough that I don’t think I could have misunderstood too badly.  Anyway, it struck a resonance within me, and made me think that such a drive might be at least part of my impetus to write my blog.

Of course, the retrospectoscope always distorts what one sees through it, so even though I trust my memory of my own internal states as much as I trust anything, I know it cannot be perfect.  How could it be?  The state of the mind in any instant encompasses all the memories and thoughts it contains about prior states, however limited or exhaustive that memory might be.  If the brain had then to remember that full state as part of its memory in the next state, then the required storage and processing would double with each passing instant.  And while I think it would be quite a treat to have exponentially growing intelligence, if it was mostly used to remember itself in every successive moment, that would be a bit of a waste.

Still, whether my prior motivations had any trace of the above notion or if it is a newly added interpretation, it doesn’t really matter.  It is here now, and I think it’s operational.  I used to have friends with whom I could talk on a daily basis about matters of mutual interest and so on, and with whom I could experience new things and take in new ideas.  But that was a long time ago.  And even then, I think I was weirder than my friends, and weirder than my wife once I was married.  And then, of course, I was divorced and then more, worse things happened, and well…it’s been roughly 2 decades since I had anyone with whom I could connect on anything like a daily basis.

So, though my blog never did really seem to help much as a form of psychotherapy (then again, my many, many hours of actual psychotherapy didn’t do very much but make me at least feel that I was communicating with someone) maybe it at least gave me some form of record, some sense in which I could know that, at least in principle, my thoughts (some of them, anyway) were out there in the world and discoverable, as are my so-far published books and my so-far released songs.

In the long run, this may well not matter even in a trivial sense.  On the scale of infinity, everything is negligible, and even on the “mere” scale of our cosmic horizon‒a sphere about 96 billion light years across‒everything that has ever happened or probably ever will happen on Earth is entirely unnoticeable.  Hell, even on the scale of the solar system, the Earth is not easily seen as any more striking than any other structures present.  And on the scale of the galaxy, again, we don’t even really exist in any meaningful way.  Not yet, anyway.

But on the scale of the Planck length and the Planck time, we are vast and ancient.  And on that scale, my thoughts may seem as potent (and perhaps as nonsensical) as the gibberings of Azathoth.  Nevertheless, they are here.  They are now.  I’m not sure whether I am glad of that fact, or embarrassed, or bemused, or what.  But these are those thoughts for this morning, for today.

Have a good one if you can.

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…what dreams may come, when we have shuffled off this mortal blog…

Hello and good morning on this Thursday‒a day of the week on which those in the know have been able, these last several years, to indulge in reading my weekly blog posts.  And this is, of course, another iteration thereof; not to be confused with Iterations of Zero, my other, far less prolific blog, which I had originally created to be a place where I could discuss things unrelated to my fiction writing.

Of course, the notion that this blog was supposed to focus on my fiction has long since mostly gone by the wayside.  It never seems to have made much difference for that, in any case.  And of course, as many of you will know, for quite a while I wrote here almost daily, and I didn’t write any fiction at all during that time.

Plans or dreams or hopes are whatever they are, I guess (there’s a hunk of logic, right?).  I suspect that, even for the most successful and fulfilled of all people, their plans bear only vague resemblance to the specifics of their outcomes.  Probably, the most successful, the most fulfilled people, are able to make general plans but also to adapt to and optimize based upon the various comparatively unpredictable events that actually happen 

Your host, not fulfilled*, has had a bad week.

This weekend was so hot and humid that I had to sleep with the AC off on Saturday and Sunday nights.  Wait, you may ask, why would it be that high heat and humidity led me to turn off the air conditioning?  Because the unit‒imperfectly but permanently placed in the wall‒leaked so much condensation that, despite tupperware-style buckets put down to try to catch it and old clothes to soak it up, the water seeped into my futon.  It was better to go old school and just let the fan blow on me.

Then, after the week started, on Monday night I literally did not sleep at all.  I got not one moment of sleep, just spent the night lying around, trying not to do anything that would awaken me more.  Because of that, on Tuesday evening, having no energy to face my commute, I just slept at the office.  I got at least a few hours of broken sleep there, on the floor, with my head on my backpack for a pillow.  It was more restful than the previous three nights, which may not be saying much, but is nevertheless true.

I have not worked on Extra Body at all this week.  I just don’t have the energy, even though I’m nearly done with the third edit.  I just don’t have the energy.  I’ve also hardly played anything on the guitar, though yesterday morning I did a little, but my singing was rough and my voice got hoarse very quickly.  I haven’t even been bringing my little laptop computer with me.  I’m writing this on my phone, using Google Docs.

Tomorrow, at least, is a positive day.  I don’t mean that in the general, Annie sort of way**.  Cat forbid I should ever attempt such sickening pseudo-optimism.  No, it’s specific to this particular, non-fungible tomorrow.  Not only is it Friday the 13th, a day I always like when it happens (largely because some people stupidstitiously think it’s “unlucky”) but it’s also a day to celebrate one of the two most important events ever in my existence.  I won’t get into more specifics, but historically, for me, it more than made up for what happened two days earlier.

Anyway, after that, I’ve got nothing.  I don’t even know if I’ll actually get back to work on Extra Body or if I’ll just say “fuck it” to that and to any other attempt to do anything creative or positive or productive.  I suspect that I’ve already done all the good that I’m ever going to do in the world, unimpressive though it may be.

I guess futility is really a characteristic of everything that happens in the universe, ever, at least on a large enough scale.  The universe itself‒our universe, this instantiation or region or whatever you want to call it of whatever possible larger multiverse or metaverse or omniverse may be‒is itself the very physical instantiation of something immense beyond reckoning (possibly infinite in spatial extent) and yet ultimately trending simply toward some version of “heat death” if our understanding of physics and cosmology are even vaguely correct

Of course, there is certainly much we don’t know about the nature and structure of the cosmos.  And if our civilization persists in whatever form and continues to grow and create more knowledge, it may even someday be that cosmic engineering could be possible, or even the creation of new cosmoses.

But the second law of thermodynamics seems pretty inescapable in the long run‒it’s not just physics, it’s the raw mathematics that seems to imply it.  I think I wrote a post on IoZ a long time ago about that.  If I find it, I’ll have included the link.

Anyway, let us draw this particular local instantiation of futility to a close for now.  I hope you have all been having a much better week than I, and that your days and weeks and so on improve consistently, as much as is reasonably possible.  I would really like that.

TTFN

*To paraphrase Shirley Jackson’s description of Hill House.

**“The sun’ll come ooouuut…tomorrow…”

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There’s the respect that makes calamity of so long blogs

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, and so it’s time for another weekly blog post.  Last Thursday I was out sick, so I only posted a very brief, almost telegraphic announcement of the fact that I wasn’t going to write a “true” post that day, and I said that I might write a true post on Friday if I was feeling better.  Of course, I was not feeling better by Friday, so there was no such post.

I’ve nearly recovered from my acute illness—probably some respiratory virus, but nothing too terribly severe—and now I am more or less back on my normal schedule.

Speaking of being “back”, though, my back has been acting up severely this week, and in an atypical fashion.  I’m not sure what triggered it.  Possibly it’s just due to being sick, with the coughing and the lying around more than usual and so on.  Possibly it’s something else.  Anyway, I’ve had to go to a combination of near-overdoses on my various OTC pain medications, and that’s not wonderful.  It got so severe yesterday that I was actually saying out loud that, if it didn’t improve, I was going to have to find some relatively high parking garage nearby and jump off it.  I was not exaggerating, as I think was obvious to those around me.

It’s easy enough to wonder why I don’t do that anyway, given that there is very little in my life that’s positive, and what positivity exists is episodic, and it can’t make up for the constant negatives of pain and illness and sleeplessness and depression and so on.  The closest I come to any comradely activity is streaming YouTube videos of people reacting to songs or movies that I like.  It’s almost, but not quite, exactly unlike watching a movie with a friend who has never seen it before.

Speaking of paraphrasing or otherwise referring to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, I’m most of the way through the first run of editing Extra Body.  There’s a long way to go, since I usually do as many as seven such iterations before considering my editing done.  I figure by that time I’ll usually have lost any proprietary affection for a story and it will begin to bore me, so it’ll be easier to cut out extraneous material.

That’s the principle, at least.  I don’t know how well it’s worked hitherto; I’m too deep inside the process to trust my evaluation.  I did at least transcribe the material I had written so far, in passing, on HELIOS, so that if/when I’m ready, I’ll be able to pick up writing that by hand in its first draft.

Extra Body is my first non-horror story in a while (unless you count the beginning I made on writing The Dark Fairy and the Desperado, which is certainly not horror, but is also certainly nowhere near done, if it ever will be).  It’s hard for me to tell if it’s a good choice to have reverted to a sort of lighthearted science fiction story set in the modern world, but at least I was able to squeeze the first draft out.

Of course, I’m paring down the word count as I go.  As I’m sure is obvious to all of you, I get rather wordy when I write, especially when I’m using the computer keyboard, since I type quickly and usually can do so more readily even than I can speak out loud.

I’ve been reading some more books about quantum field theory (and related subjects) lately.  It’s still very intro level stuff, of course, but either because recurrent exposure to increasingly technical material is gradually sinking into my head, or because I’m just getting a tiny bit “smarter” overall over time, I’m actually finding some of it more familiar and understandable than before.

I must say that I was a little bit proud of myself not too long ago when I was thinking about how complex numbers are represented using a two-dimensional plane, with internally consistent mathematics and whatnot, and I wondered if one could have three-part complex numbers.  I soon realized that only even-numbered ones would work, and then I learned that these were indeed a thing (i.e., quaternions) and that indeed only even-numbered versions of such things can work.  Of course, it’s very difficult to visualize something that has four dimensions, so you just have to do the math, and I haven’t started to work on or learn that seriously, but I played with some “higher order” complex-number multiplications a few times, which was how I saw that only even-numbered ones, with separate “imaginary” roots would work.

On a vaguely related note:  I was listening to Sean Carroll’s podcast yesterday evening.  He was speaking to Doris Tsao, a neuroscientist who specializes in facial recognition and processing centers of the brain, and she mentioned that the attributes of a face can be thought of as many-dimensional, in the sense that there are numerous “variables” that can be represented about any given face, and that they effectively comprise a higher-dimensional space.

Then she turned the matter around and noted that there are apparently those who consider using such things as faces as ways of intuiting mathematical or related systems with higher dimensions, thus representing them in ways that the human mind is capable of visualizing.  I though that was a fascinating notion*.

It reminds me little bit of the concept of the “memory palace”, a mnemonic/rhetorical tool that originated in ancient Greece (so I understand) in which one associates the aspects of, say, a speech one is going to give with imagined artifacts or decorations in some imagined hall or room, so that the aspects of that speech can more readily be remembered and brought to mind when needed.

There are several fictional characters, most notably Hannibal Lecter and the BBC’s Sherlock, who use rather exaggerated versions of these memory palaces.  The one described in Hannibal is more coherent than the one in Sherlock, but they both take great liberties with how the concept was originally used.  Nevertheless, for the longest time, thanks to the amusing tableau** Thomas Harris described for how Hannibal Lecter had “stored” Clarice Starling’s (fictional) home address, I could readily reconstruct her address at will.  I think I may still be able to do it.  It should be something like “#33 Tindall Ave, Arlington, Virginia, 22308”.  If anyone wants to check my recollection, that would be welcome.  I’m not certain I got it right.

I’ve usually found such mnemonics more trouble than they’re worth.  It’s easier for me to connect concepts in the real world, building mental models of the way things work rather than trying to memorize.  This means I probably don’t learn as quickly as some do, but I learn deeply when I do, and it’s easier to connect one model to another and to spot analogies and similarities and possible connections between systems that might at first seem unrelated.  That was quite useful in medical practice, as I’m sure you can imagine.

Oh, I almost forgot:  Welcome to the first day of August in 2024!

That’s all I have to say about that.

Apparently the summer Olympics are currently taking place, but I’ve been unable to muster any interest in them, though I used to love them, and I find that the manufactured controversies about some apparent misconstrual of the opening ceremony or some such (and the juvenile ripostes by political antagonists of the original misconstruers responding to the supposed offense) all serves simply to reinforce my feeling that not just the human race, but indeed all life of any kind, is a bad idea.  Thank goodness for the apparent inescapability of the second law of thermodynamics.

Anyway, I feel I’ve been meandering about here, randomly bouncing from topic to topic, without any consistency or coherency, so I’ll bring this to a close soon.  I fear that this once-weekly blog posting suffers from the fact that there are topics I probably would have brought up as solitary daily blog posts when I was doing them, but that I now want to try to squeeze in here.

I just can’t write (or edit) new fiction and write daily blog posts too, not while I’m forced to keep my day job.  If anyone out there wants to pay for my living expenses and support me so I can both write new fiction and write daily blog posts while still studying physics and programming and the like in the meantime, please, let yourself be known!  I’d be pleased to hear from you.

Otherwise, I’m pretty sure none of this is going to last very much longer.  My pain and dysthymia and alienation and insomnia are increasingly unpleasant, and there are fewer and fewer things in my life that compensate.

Here’s to Macbeth’s proverbial last syllable of recorded time.  L’mavet!***

TTFN

*It does come up against difficulties when considering the notion of orthogonal axes of vector spaces being able to be rotated into one-another.  It’s hard to see how one could intuitively consider rotating the variables of, say, eye size and cheek color into one another, or what an inner (or “dot”) product or cross product of two such variables could mean…though with the latter, it makes the use of the “right hand rule” an amusing invocation of a slap in the face…or at least poking someone’s cheek.

**Involving Jesus (age 33) marching along with a .308 Enfield rifle at shoulder arms, followed by J. Edgar Hoover in a tutu, followed by Clarice driving a “Tin Lizzy” model T Ford, going past Arlington National Cemetery.  Something like that, anyway.

***This is an expression I invented this morning, the counter-toast to the famous L’chaim, which in Hebrew means “to life”.  Then, being me, I jotted down some words for the first verse of a parody song of “To Life” from Fiddler on the Roof:


“To death!  To death!  L’mavet!

L’mavet, L’mavet, to death!

Here’s to the father I tried to be

Here’s to that travesty

Drink L’mavet, to death,

To death, L’mavet.

L’mavet, L’mavet, to death.

Death has a way of releasing us

Luring and teasing us

Drink L’mavet, to deeeeeaaaath…”

That’s as far as I got, but I did only work on it for about five minutes, so, it’s not too bad.

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Glory is like a circle in the water, which never ceaseth to enlarge itself, till, by broad blogging, it disperse to naught.

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, as you probably know if you’re reading this on the day it’s posted (if not, there’s only about a 1 in 7 chance* that it’s Thursday when you’re reading it).  This is to be a “typical” blog post, in the “old” style, but I don’t know how much difference that will make compared to other days‒except that I will not be giving you a report on today’s fiction writing, since there has been none.

I’m writing this post on my smartphone.  There are reasons I’m doing it thusly rather than on my laptop computer, but I won’t get into them right now.  I did bring my computer with me, intending to write this on it, but doing so can be mildly cumbersome at times.  It also doesn’t have illuminated keys‒those would have cost a lot more when I bought it‒whereas a smartphone perforce has luminous keys, since all its keys and other features are virtual.

Speaking of smartphones, I’ve recently been thinking about trying my hand at Instagram.  I don’t have the app on my phone, but of course I have an account (since Facebook gave everyone on Facebook an account).  I’ve even recently started following a few people on it.  I’m not particularly photogenic or anything, but I guess Instagram has wider reach than, for instance, blogs on WordPress.  This might give it an advantage as a way to promote my writing and maybe as a way to express other things.  I have no interest in TikTok, but maybe, since Instagram is already part of the Facebook platform, I could try it.

Of course, I have a YouTube channel, but that has never garnered me many views, and the process of making (and editing) videos for it is cumbersome.  I get the impression that there is in-app video production and editing via Instagram.  I know, giving my daily writing reports (for instance) via Instagram may seem like a betrayal of my commitment to the written word as the lifeblood of civilization, but it would be an attempt to promote my blog and more importantly my fiction, so perhaps it would be tolerable.  My soul is worthless anyway, so if I can sell it and get something out of it, maybe I should (METAphorically speaking…get it?).

I think you have to download the Instagram app into your phone to be able to upload videos, or at least I haven’t seen how to do it from a desktop.  But I haven’t looked very hard, either.  I think you can upload photos from the desktop.

Of course, I’m no fun to look at, so no one would come to my account because of my physical beauty…but I do look a little bit like the guy who reads all the signs in funny voices and inflections**, and that guy is hilarious and apparently quite popular (I would add a link, but I don’t know his account name).

I’ve occasionally thought of linking this account to Patreon, but it’s hard to imagine anyone paying even a dollar a month for my blog.  Likewise, I’ve thought about getting on Substack, but if I were to do that, I’d need to make a commitment to putting out more serious, or at least more thoughtful, material.  Also, long-term plans seem frankly comical for me, since I neither expect nor desire a long term.  I can barely get through a day, and I certainly cannot sleep through a night.

For instance, yesterday I had to leave work after lunch because everything from just below my diaphragm on down was in spasm and I was unable to make it resolve despite excessive aspirin and acetaminophen and so on.  Obviously, I did not get a good sleep last night, despite getting back to the house early.  At least the pain has been moderated a bit by my physical rest.

I guess even if I were to die today, given how bad my sleep has been for so many years, I’ve probably had as much “awake” time as a typical American man who dies when he’s 76.  Perhaps more.  I’d have to do the math.  Maybe I will.  Hang on a minute…

Okay, quickly and dirtily, and assuming that sleep change is lifelong and daily, a person who sleeps only 4 hours a day (which is often more than I sleep) will have reached as many waking hours as an 8-hours-a-day 76 year old person by the time the 4-hour person is 60.8 years old.  Of course, those years will be comparatively miserable and groggy and filled with the many consequences of sleep deprivation.  Frankly, 60 years is way too many.  I am not going to put up with 6 more years of this.  I don’t want to put up with 6 more days, and honestly, six hours is often barely achievable.  One of these days it won’t be.

In lighter news, I finally ordered some 6 x 9 spiral-bound “5 Star” notebooks and they arrived yesterday.  My plan is to transcribe into one of them what I’ve written on HELIOS and then continue writing the first draft there.  The ballooning size of Extra Body, and before that Outlaw’s Mind, has made me think I really need to do that.

Don’t get me wrong, neither of those stories could ever have been true “short stories” and I like what’s developed from them.  But I’m sure that my concision has suffered because it’s just so easy to write on the computer, and I get carried away, like someone with ASD who starts talking about a “special interest”.  Maybe that’s why I do it.

I wrote the first drafts of Mark Red, The Chasm and the Collision, and the borderline novella Paradox City on notebook paper, perched on my bunk, on a photo album-style book on my footlocker at just after lights-on (about 3:30 am) every morning at FSP West, and CatC is my sister’s favorite of my stories.  And you may already know that I wrote Solitaire all in one sitting, in a 6 x 9 spiral-bound notebook, while keeping my not-yet-girlfriend (also not-yet-fiancée, not-yet-wife, not-yet-ex-wife) company all night while she worked on a project for her summer job.  Also, parts of the original draft for The Vagabond were written by hand while I was in college and med school.  I finished it on a Mac SE, but those weren’t quite as handy and quick as modern laptop computers.

Anyway, I have this stupidly optimistic (and thus unrealistic) notion that I might actually write HELIOS in such a fashion.  We’ll see, but I wouldn’t hold your breath if I were you.

As always, I would welcome feedback in the comments below about any of the topics mentioned above‒especially about Instagram and the like.  Feedback here works best, in general, but obviously I don’t get very much of it whether here or in other venues, so I suppose I should be grateful for whatever I can get.

This blog post has felt quite long, but it’s actually not too terribly lengthy, so I guess writing on my smartphone has made a difference.  Imagine if I had to write this by hand before entering it into WordPress!  That’s not going to happen, of course, but it’s interesting to contemplate what it would be like.

I hope you all have a good day, and a good week, and month, and year, and so on.  Please take care of yourselves and of those you love and those who love you.

TTFN

*I say “about”, even though days of the week are evenly distributed, because there may be factors that influence the likelihood of someone reading something on any given day.  People may be more likely to read an “old” blog post on, say, the weekend than during the week, or on particular weekdays rather than others, and this distribution is likely to be multifactorial, so I cannot, in good faith, say the chance is exactly 1 in 7.

**I know this because once, I was watching one of that guy’s “reels” and someone came up behind me and asked if that was me in the video, or perhaps someone to whom I was related.

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Brief-ish report on Wednesday morning, May 22, 2024 AD/CE

Well, I slept somewhat better last night than the night before; it would not have been easy to sleep worse.  I took a full Benadryl (actually, a generic version of it), and two extra-strength Tylenol (also generic), and I slept a total of perhaps four and a half hours.  That’s not much, but it’s enough to make me feel better than I did yesterday.

Again, that’s not a high bar to clear.  I spent the entire day yesterday wishing I were dead, feeling like some Earth-bound phantom of some unimportant, nameless soul who had died alone a long, long time ago (to quote David Bowie).

Not one person in the office asked if I was okay or if I needed anything, or if I was having trouble.  I guess my emotions and state really are hard for other people to see from my appearance.  It’s too bad, because if someone had asked, I really was going to tell them, “I wish I were dead.”  Unfortunately, no one asked, so that was a missed opportunity.  Of course, even if I had said that, people probably would have thought I was joking, or that I was exaggerating, and certainly no one would have tried to help me in any way.

I suppose that’s par for the course.  I’ve needed help for a long time, honestly, and I’ve tried to be worthy of help; I have helped other people when I could, though I don’t think I’ve done very much good for anyone, in the long run.  I think I’m probably a lost cause, anyway.  I guess that’s okay.  Honestly, I’m so freaking tired that I don’t know if I’d be able to help anyone who was trying to help me, if you take my meaning.  I just want to rest.

Anyway, this morning I did write some on Extra Body.  As is often the case, I started just telling myself that I was only going to write one page, no more, but once I got started, I kept going.  It helped that there was a guy on the train asking people to fill out surveys about the train service, and I told him, “Sorry, I’m working on something.”  I did have my laptop computer open and was typing when he approached me.  Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate and approve of the organization trying to get feedback to help improve its operations, but I don’t like being talked to in the morning.  So, that impelled me to keep typing until it was time to get ready to get off the train, so the guy wouldn’t feel tempted to come back and ask me again.

In the end, the word count of the block of new writing was 2,079, but the net word count gain was 2,008.  So, this time, unlike Monday, I edited out words in the stuff I was rereading instead of adding some–a total of 71, evidently.  That’s good to know, somehow.  That’s about a 3.5% difference between the two counts, a little more than Monday, but not much.  Of course, my sample size is only two days, so we’ll have to wait and see if there’s a clearer statistical trend.

And that’s all I have for you this morning.  I’m planning to write my traditional Thursday post tomorrow, which is good, since tomorrow is Thursday.  It is, isn’t it?  Yes, it is, I just checked.  Anyway, I hope you all have a good day.