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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.

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And writers say, the most forward bud is eaten by the canker ere it blog

Hello and good morning.

It’s Thursday, so it’s time for my Thursday blog post.  There will be no fiction from me today, other than such ordinary, day-to-day fiction as pretending to be doing better than I really am, as well as using money to buy things*.

I’m writing this on my phone, since I didn’t bring the laptop computer back to the house yesterday.  I was wiped out, and stressed out, and I didn’t feel like carrying any more than necessary.  I did get a bit of walking in, since I had to stop at the store on the way back.  I guess that was good, though something in the way I moved caused a blister on the medial side of my right big toe.  It’s not too bad, but I’ll probably not do any serious walking today.

It’s often questionable why I bother.  Of course, I would like to lose weight and whatnot; I would rather not die the physical travesty that I currently am.  But the best way to do that would be to stop eating completely.  That would be a win-win situation, as the cliché goes.  But that is very difficult to do in ordinary, day-to-day life in the modern United States.

I got a terrible night’s sleep again last night.  It wasn’t as bad as my one-hour night earlier in the week, but it wasn’t a whole lot better.  I’ve been trying to restrict my caffeine intake to the relatively early morning, just to make sure that doesn’t interfere with my sleep, but it doesn’t seem to make much difference.

I haven’t read anything much in quite a while.  I think it’s been over a month since I read any book, fiction or nonfiction.  I have been doing some stuff on Brilliant dot org, as I’ve mentioned here, but yesterday I didn’t even feel like extending my “streak” by doing some simple work in their computer programming course.  For one thing, the constant prods to “extend one’s streak” are thoroughly irritating.

I really despise all the manipulative tactics undertaken by these companies to get people to keep using their sites.  Even Kindle does it.  I had a “streak” of something like 170 or more weeks of reading pretty much every day on my Kindle app, but that’s now been broken, and already Amazon isn’t even recommending any e-books to me.

Still, it’s not as though I ever read to maintain a “streak”.  I read because I want to read.  Except right now I don’t.  I don’t even want to read my own stuff.

I did practice a little on the guitar yesterday.  I guess that’s something.  And, as you all know, I’ve been writing fiction now for a total of over twenty days (counting only writing days).  But it feels almost disloyal to be writing without reading, though it’s only myself that I’m betraying, and I don’t like myself, anyway.  Still, reading has been a fundamental part of my identity for literally as long as I can remember, and not being able to do it makes me feel very much adrift and puzzled.

It’s getting seriously hot and muggy down here in Florida.  I’m sweating significantly and quite visibly just sitting at the train station.  I suppose, if climate change persists, Florida will at least reap what it has politically sown, since both the heat and the sea levels are likely to drive quite a lot of people out of the state, and make much of the coveted ocean-front property into literal and figurative underwater real estate.

I’m not the sort to laugh in malicious glee when people get their comeuppances; I’m much more the type to tighten my lips grimly and nod in affirmative contempt.  But that doesn’t mean it’s not ego-syntonic for me when people get fucked over because of their own arrogant stupidity.

I don’t expect to be around to see any of it happen.  And, honestly, I would not be disappointed if people actually make headway at fixing the problems and correct them in time to save even people who don’t necessarily deserve to be saved, because innocent and beneficent people will be saved along with them.

Human ingenuity is much rarer than people probably think; however, it is so incredibly powerful that it doesn’t take much of it to accomplish wonders.  I guess it’s worth it for there to be so much arrogant stupidity if that’s necessary or unavoidable in order for the occasional sparks of cleverness and even genius to be found.  But it would be nice if stupidity were more sexually unappealing than it is.  Regrettably, though, stupid people seem more likely to breed than smart ones, especially since the smart ones understand about planning and delaying reproduction, or even choosing not to reproduce at all.

Oh, well.  This is the tragic farce of life.  It can be funny if you like lowbrow slapstick in the vein of the Three Stooges.  Unfortunately, I’m not really a big fan of such things, so I don’t think I’m going to keep watching much longer.

All right.  Time to call this to an end.  My back is flaring up quite a lot, probably from yesterday’s walk, and it’s distracting me.  Please try to nurture cleverness and creativity at all levels, and please don’t feed the trolls in any sense.  They’re not worth it.

TTFN

*Yuval Harari famously pointed out that money is a “fiction”, though it is a useful and important one.  So is law and government and the very existence of rights and stuff like that.  Such things exist only in the minds and works of people.  Nature certainly recognizes no rights, unless you want to count the right to be wiped out if you don’t do what you need to survive.  Indeed, the world seems to promise only one thing:  eventually, you (as well as everything you would recognize as the universe) will die.  That’s probably a truly unalienable right.

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Both my ears are ringing down the curtain

I’m planning on writing at least a page on Extra Body once I get to the office, but I haven’t left yet, and so I’m starting on a bit of a blog post, which I plan to finish with an update on what I write.  I don’t want to get out the laptop computer and use it at the house before I leave.

I have some unfortunate news‒unfortunate for me, at any rate, though it may not matter much to anyone else.  Yesterday, May 9, 2024 AD, at roughly 3:25 pm Eastern time, I suddenly began to have tinnitus in my left ear, matching what I have had in my right ear since…about 2007, I think.  I have very poor hearing in my right ear as part of that process, and it’s hard to tell what’s going on with my left, so far.  I can only say that it’s quite distressing.  I felt like I wanted to scream in the office yesterday afternoon, when it happened.  I still want to scream.  It’s been going on for just over 13 hours now, and there is no sign of it abating.

I fear this may be the proverbial final straw for me.  I don’t know if I can go on like this.  There are already so few motivations for me to continue living, and so many things that make life unpleasant.  I really don’t know what to do.

It’s slightly interesting that the pitch in my left ear is almost identical to the pitch in my right ear, just perhaps an eighth of a step lower.  I’m not sure what might be behind that fact.  Perhaps that’s the pitch range at which my cochleae are most vulnerable.  I am not really sure how I would find out.

It’s worth noting, though, that there is no internal evidence of any form of “beat” phenomenon such as would happen with real, external sounds that are close in pitch but not exactly the same, as their waveforms go back and forth between constructively and destructively interfering with each other.  This makes sense, of course; they are not real sounds but are neurological phenomena, and are occurring in opposite ears, and are thus initially processed in different sides of my brain.  The “beat” phenomenon in slightly dissonant pitches is a literal, physical, external phenomenon, not a neurological illusion.  This, at least, my current experience is making clear and convincing to me, at least provisionally.  I guess I knew it already, implicitly.  Has anyone else out there had this experience?

Anyway, as I said, if this bilateral tinnitus continues, I don’t know if I can.  It’s one thing after another, or rather, one thing on top of another.  Chronic pain, dysthymia/depression, insomnia, possible ASD, solitude, and now double-tinnitus.  My cup of hemlock runneth over, and maybe it’s time I just quaffed that motherfucker.

I guess I can give this a few days to see if it resolves.  I’m not optimistic.  Since the right ear tinnitus began, in the latter parts of the first decade of this millennium, it has waxed and waned in intensity, but it has not stopped for a moment.  But one instance of a phenomenon does not a pattern make, though my knowledge of the subject from a medical point of view gives me more data, and it’s not comforting.

I’ll take a break writing now, for the moment.  I’ll complete this post later.

***

Okay, well, I wrote 728 words on Extra Body, which was basically one single-spaced page.  I guess that’s good, considering the circumstances.  It’s nice when the office is quiet‒it’s quieter than the house is when no one is here, because at the house, except in deep winter, I have to have the AC and/or fan on or it becomes unreasonably hot.

I still don’t know what I’m going to do, though.  The ringing in both ears is constant, like that high-pitched noise they play that only young people are supposed to be able to hear.  I don’t even want to play guitar or anything, for fear of it interacting.

I guess I’ll see what happens.  I’m off this weekend; maybe the noise will abate.  Or maybe I’ll finally go fully mad, like the Master in response to the drumming sound in his head.  Which reminds me, the new Doctor Who “season” starts tomorrow.  I guess there is that to which to look forward.  I really like Ncuti Gatwa so far, so hopefully it’ll be nice.  I’m off work this weekend; my coworker will be back in the office today.

I hope you all have a good weekend.

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Be sure to warm up before kipling

Here I am at the train station, to which I arrived quite a bit later than I ought to have done, because Uber switched drivers on me twice, meaning I was assigned to 3 different people, resetting the waiting clock each time.  Then the last driver didn’t follow the route recommended by his own company’s app, apparently thinking that taking the interstate would be faster.  Long experience with the area leaves me with the knowledge that the route that the app recommended really is the fastest route, especially at this time of day.  I was very tempted to give the driver a low tip and a low rating, but since I recognized that some of my animosity is due to matters outside his control‒specifically, the changed drivers‒I would not let him bear the brunt of the consequences.

I need to quit taking Uber.  I’ve curtailed my morning walk for now‒working on a different form of exercise‒because it’s been causing my left knee to act up with greater and greater severity.  But taking the bus to the other train station adds nearly an hour to my commute, or at least it makes me get to the office an hour later.  It’s very frustrating.

Obviously, I’m not writing any fiction today.  I’m not really doing much of anything that matters at all to me today (except, perhaps to a small extent, this blog).  I don’t think I’ll write fiction or play guitar or sing or study any interesting subject today.  By yesterday already, I was too drained and distracted to be able to consider focusing on studying any mathematics or physics or whatever, even just by watching videos.  Ear plugs and hearing protectors don’t help noticeably.

Today, I think I’m going to use double ear plugs in each ear.  They’re the little squishy, compressible, throw-away earplugs, so they can be rolled down to small enough size to insert even when doubled, I’ll wager.  I’m not terribly fond of having crap stuck in my ear canals, but it’s better than being exposed to all the loud voices and noises.  At least, I suspect it is.

You’re probably wondering why I keep going to the office and back and all that.  It’s a fair question, but the answer is neither profound nor very interesting:  it’s just all I have.  I can’t see myself trying to find a different job.  At least I know the people at this job, and I even like most of them.  And I’m at least used to the place where I live.  It’s decent.

I am frustrated about the fiction writing thing, though.  I haven’t even bothered taking the laptop computer back with me at the end of the day so far this week.  I know I’m not going to use it.

I sometimes wish I’d never started doing this daily blog, but it seems I don’t want not to do it.  It’s my pathetic little scent-marking on the world, I guess, though it’s probably not very interesting most of the time.  For instance, I doubt many people enjoyed my weird asides about cosmology yesterday.

It’s hard to remember writing much of Son of Man on my tiny old smartphone back in the day, but I know I did.  I think I didn’t do indenting, but instead just did double line breaks for paragraphs and then corrected the layout after the draft was done.  I suppose, in principle, I could do that here also, but I fiddled with it last week at one point using the Word mobile app, and found it very unsatisfying.

Of course, I did not use Word to write the initial part of Son of Man.  I used the notepad function on my smartphone at the time, which is reasonably impressive, even to me.  But it would seem a shame not to use my laptop computer, now that I have it.  I suppose I could bring it with me and write fiction in the morning before even leaving the house, and take the southbound bus to catch the northbound train‒that bus route doesn’t begin until far too late for the early trains.  I hate the idea of arriving so late, though, especially since I’m awake anyway in the very early morning, no matter how much trouble I have falling and staying asleep.

I really hate my life, to be honest.  I’m sure you picked that up by now; it’s not as though I’m being particularly subtle.  I’m just so tired.  I’ve lost almost everything that ever mattered to me.  What is it Kipling wrote, “If you can bear to hear the truths you’ve spoken / twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools / or watch the things you gave your life to, broken / and stoop build ’em up with worn-out tools…”?

If so, then…well, you’re probably just a stubborn idiot, I don’t know.  Don’t get me wrong, it’s a nice poem, very stirring and well-written, and obviously quite memorable.  But at the end, your big reward for all the listed attributes is, “you’ll be a man, my son”.  That’s it?  You get to be “a man” according to the criteria set by Rudyard Kipling?  Well, bully for you, I guess.  I don’t even feel human, let alone that I’m a man according to a nineteenth century author and poet’s* judgment.  I frankly feel dishonest when I have to check the Captcha box that says I’m not a robot, for crying out loud.

Anyway, that’s enough of my shit for today.  Unless we’re all lucky and something kills me or severely injures me between now and then, I guess I’ll write another blog post tomorrow, and I’ll probably be no closer to solving my difficulty with fiction writing than I am today.

I hope you’re all doing as well as you can do.

*He was a good one, though.  Gunga Din, The Jungle Book, all that kind of stuff was not half bad.

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Surprise! It’s a Monday morning blog post

It’s Monday, March 25th‒only 9 more shopping months remain until Christmas‒and I’m writing a blog post today (on my smartphone) instead of working on my short story, even though I brought my laptop with me when I last left the office.  I left (slightly) early on Thursday, and did not go in on Friday, because I was feeling quite ill.  I don’t know exactly what the nature of the illness was/is, but it was probably a respiratory virus.  I’m mostly over it now.

I’m still at the house while beginning this, because I’m waiting for Uber/Lyft rates to come down to reasonable levels before I accept one.  It should not cost all that much to get a ride less than 5 miles away, especially when I tip generously*.  I also have a bus pass available, which is quite a bit cheaper, but that would take quite a bit longer, whether I use it to get to the train or all the way to the office.  So, I’m not going to do that today, probably, but I may do so in the near future (Also, there are no bathrooms on the buses, but there are ones on the trains; this, for me, can be a serious concern).

I decided to write a post today mainly because I feel that I’m releasing most of my connection, such as it is, to the larger world by writing fewer posts.  Certainly, my readership has declined by a significant percent per post already.  Of course, I doubt that more than a handful of people would notice that I was gone even if I stopped completely.  I don’t know if I’ll keep this up or not, but I don’t think I can keep going back and forth.  I have to have some kind of mental momentum/inertia** to keep doing one thing; bouncing from one to another doesn’t seem to work well for me.

Obviously I would like to keep writing my stories, but if I go back to that 4 to 5 days (or more) per week, I would lose practically all sense of connection with the outside world other than weekly calls with my sister.  I like those weekly calls, of course, but at least when I write my blog posts, I know that a dozen or two people are, in principle, aware of my existence, and at least some of them actually read my stuff.

I guess that’s the sort of immediate feedback with activation of dopaminergic centers of the brain (the nucleus accumbens and related structures) upon which social media and similar situations depend, and of which they take advantage.  But it is (almost) all that I have, really, so that’s that.  It’s not as though I have any friends.

My sister lives in the path of the upcoming solar eclipse (which doesn’t narrow her location down by much, so I don’t think I’m being indiscreet for saying so), and she invited me to come visit to see it.  I really was going to try; I renewed my state ID to make travel easier, and I looked into bus and train and airfare, and they all seemed not too unreasonably expensive (unless you want a private compartment on a train, which would be cool, but would be ridiculously costly).  Unfortunately, I don’t think I can do it.  The prospect of traveling in cramped quarters for even the length of a plane ride seems just too unpleasant to tolerate.

I’m sorry about it; it would be great to see my sister and neat to experience a solar eclipse.  But the neatness thereof would not outweigh the prospect of the trip.  It’s pretty pathetic, I know, but then I don’t think I’ve ever specifically claimed that I was not pathetic.  My frequent readers will probably agree that I have been wise not to so claim.

I’m not sure what to do about this writing situation.  I sometimes consider just writing my fiction and maybe trying to do voice recordings a little later in the day, then editing and posting those as YouTube videos and embedding those as posts here.  I had reasonably good positive feedback when I did that before, but I don’t know how long it would last.  Also, I don’t know if I would lose people who prefer to read rather than to listen to a “video”, what I call an audio blog.

It’s probably all pointless, anyway.  I don’t think many people will probably ever read my work, fiction or nonfiction, or listen to my talk or my songs.  Likewise, though I have technically done a small part to add to the scientific knowledge of humanity, specifically relating to gliotoxin***, I’m not likely ever to make any contributions to quantum field theory or particle physics or cosmology, because while I think I am capable of contributing to them, there’s too much catch-up necessary, and I am limited more in energy even than in time‒there’s too much to which I have to adapt myself from day to day, and that burns my willpower up like nobody’s business.

It’s not as though I can just stop working.  At the beginning of a week, I can find the energy to start reading texts and other things relating to the pertinent fields (not just quantum ones, ha ha), but by the end of any given Monday, I am already so mentally drained that, come Tuesday, I don’t usually crack a single text.

I am, regrettably, not independently wealthy, so I can’t just go off and study.  I am also not mentally suited to seeking out and applying to graduate programs in appropriate fields, nor would I know quite where to begin.  I’m also pretty old to start such a thing, though I consider that less of a concern.  Mainly it’s just an “executive function” issue, as they say.  Also, I don’t think I could in good conscience accept loans or grant money for education.  I don’t think I’m a good risk; I’m too likely to kill myself sometime before finishing any academic program.

It’s not impossible for an autodidact to achieve at least some things‒after all, everyone is really self-taught, since it’s not as though anyone can do the learning for someone else.  They can only point the way; everyone has to walk the path individually.

I’m very tired, though.  If I could sleep decently, it would be easier, I think, but maybe I’m wrong.  Like the fella once said, it would be a real kick in the head for me to develop good sleep and find that I didn’t feel any better, would it not?

It’s a test I’m unlikely to encounter.

Well, that’s enough for today.  I expect I’ll write another post tomorrow.  Have a good day.

*Of course, like restaurant owners in America, Uber et al rely on tips to make up a good portion of their drivers’ pay; that way they can keep a bigger chunk of the fees for themselves and pay less out of their own pockets.  I would say they should in good conscience do otherwise, but they’re in something like a Nash equilibrium (as are all the various American restaurateurs) in that if they change their practices, they will be outcompeted by others who do not, and no one will be helped overall.  It’s one of those situations in which true collective action or legislation would be required to correct the inadequacy.

**Remember, inertia doesn’t just refer to an object’s tendency to remain at rest, but also to its tendency to continue moving in a straight line (or at least along a geodesic) at a constant velocity.

***Don’t bother looking into it.  It’s esoteric and not terribly interesting for those not working in mycology.