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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.

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Won’t you spring into silence with me?

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, the day of my old, traditional blog posts.  It’s also my second and the planned last blog post for this week.

In the morning, I entertained trying to write a post in the afternoon yesterday, and I even thought about it in the afternoon for a bit.  But there was just too much noise and irritation, and I couldn’t summon the concentration.  This is a bit similar to what often happens with my thoughts about studying during slow time at the office.  I consider it often, and in the morning, while I’m walking, if I’m listening to some science-oriented book, I think with truly eager anticipation about cracking open one of the texts I have at the office.

But the overhead noise and the people being late and saying silly things and all that just wears down my concentration.  I have to use all my energy just not to go berserk and/or leave the office.  Even when I am the one who chooses the overhead music playlist, as was the case on Monday and Tuesday, it’s not enough.  The only playlist I want is the original sound of silence, and I don’t mean the song by Simon and Garfunkel.  I mean silence, like that abyss between the stars I mentioned a few days ago.

There’s a reason Sailor Saturn is my favorite Sailor Senshi.  She’s the sailor of silence, the bringer of total destruction (and also rebirth, but no one’s perfect).

Anyway…

I walked to the train yesterday.  It was a good day for it, since it was relatively cool down here.  I also wrote a little over a thousand words on Extra Body, and that’s also good, of course.  I really find it tempting to want to write some on it every day, but I fear that I would lose my motivation if I did.  Also, as I’ve said before, this blog is my only frequent contact with the “outside world”, and my only personal “cry for help”, though that last part isn’t doing so well at its purpose‒which makes it pretty typical for things that I try, come to think of it.

The whole thing highlights one of the big problems with the various forms of serious mental illness:  The very nature of the problem significantly hinders the ability of the sufferer to seek or ask for, let alone to obtain, help.  If no outside person actually does anything, no assistance arrives, except perhaps after some true catastrophe, by which time it is often too late.

I suppose part of my problem in using this blog for that purpose is that I leave readers subject to the bystander effect.  Read about it.  It’s quite disheartening, and is yet another way the world sucks.  Basically, a person is more likely to help someone in need if he or she is the only one who can help.  When there are more people around, not only is each individual less likely to provide assistance, but the overall chance of anyone helping the person in need is less than if there was just one person to help.  At least, that’s if I recall the overall data about the effect well.

The most famous case of it turns out not to have been as clear-cut an instance as is often believed, so I won’t describe or link it here.  But there is some data demonstrating that people are less likely to offer aid to those in immediate need if there are other people around.

There’s at least a fair chance that someone will catch any events surrounding someone crashing and burning on their smartphone, though, and will share the video to social media.  If anyone ever wonders why I often express the sentiment that the human race ought to be destroyed, it’s these sorts of things that engender such a sentiment.

I don’t really know what else to write about today.  I’d love to discuss psychology and physics and math and economics and biology and philosophy, not to mention writing, but I’m frankly just exhausted.  I had a terrible night’s sleep last night, and I feel less well-rested after getting up than I did when I went to bed.  This is not unusual.

Also, the arthrosis in the base of my thumbs is getting worse, and I have not yet figured out any adequate therapeutic intervention.   Even doing the small amount of note-taking by hand that is required by my job is quite uncomfortable.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not horrific pain or anything like that.  I’ve had and continue to have far worse.  It’s just yet another straw laid across the dromedary’s hump, which would be fine if there were a good reason to keep carrying the load, but I have no such reason; I merely have the habit.

Life, for me, may be merely that:  a bad habit that I need to break.

Anyway, that’s enough for today, and for this week, and so on.  I hope you’re having a good first few days of Spring in the northern hemisphere; I hadn’t realized on Tuesday that the equinox was that day, slightly earlier (from a Gregorian calendrical point of view) than is typical, and by the time I did, the post had already been published.  Oh, well.  I’m probably the only one who cares, anyway.

TTFN

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“It’s like…writing on the surface of a lake”

It’s Saturday, and hopefully most of you reading this are doing so from your homes, relaxing‒sipping your favorite beverage, perhaps‒and enjoying your weekend.

As I begin writing this, I am at the train station, waiting for the first morning train to bring me to the office.  This is my third Tuesday-Thursday-every-other-Saturday blog post.  It seems that, so far, fewer people are reading the blog on the days when I post it than usually had read it when I posted “daily”*.  I don’t know whether this trend will continue‒three data points is not a great basis from which to extrapolate, unless you’re picking out a plane by getting three non-collinear points.  I am not doing that, so it would be premature of me to pay too much attention to the statistics that WordPress throws in my face when I log in.

I walked to the station yesterday, and then‒since I had brought my laptop computer with me‒I wrote a bit on Extra Body while on the train.  It felt like a very small amount, but it was about 750 words, which is not terrible for the length of a train ride.  I get the idea that only writing roughly a page at a time, especially only three days a week, really will make me write faster stories, because I’m impatient to get to the end.  But I’m not sure it’ll make the story any better.  I don’t know if maybe I should try to write fiction every day and then, during the day, write blog posts on my phone, the way I’m writing this one.  It’s hard for me to do fiction on my phone**, largely because of indentations and quotation marks and all that stuff.  But these blog posts seem okay, more or less.

I don’t know what the best thing to do is.  This blog is really my sole daily communication with the outside world; it’s not as though I have any friends with whom I hang out, and I cannot do online groups or what have you.  I considered joining some “autism related” groups, though I am not at all sure I even merit the diagnosis, but they all seem to be run by and populated by people who are much more comfortable with other people they don’t already know, at least online, than I am.

Also, the whole thing feels almost faddish and cliquey, like “all the cool kids are joining autistic support groups”, which is fairly ironic, when you think about it.  Anyway, I’ve never really been good at “defining” myself by any group membership, other than my core group of friends, back when I had such a thing, and of course my original family, and then, of course, even more strongly by my married family, with my wife and kids.  But I’m no longer a member of that latter group, and the first group doesn’t exist anymore, and unfortunately, though I do talk to my sister on the phone and text and stuff with my brother, they live 1100 and 1300 miles away, roughly, so my original family is rather scattered.

I used to feel almost like a member of the community at Jerry Coyne’s website, Why Evolution is True, but that site’s parameters have changed, and it’s not possible to read and like and comment all from the WordPress “reader function”, so I have to open each post in at least 2 tabs to be able to interact with the site fully, and that discourages me a lot of the time.  Anyway, I’ve long had the impression that PCC(E) found my comments irritating.  Likewise, I almost always find any comments I make on that site or anyplace else to be stupid and embarrassing if I look back on them, unless they’re just jokey throw-aways, like a funny-oid response to someone’s tweet.

I’m not sure what to do about all this.  No matter what, I feel like I’m spitting into the ocean or shouting in a hurricane.  Maybe I’m not even shouting; maybe I’m whispering.  Anyway, I don’t think it’s reaching very far or having any benefit, whether for me or for anyone else.  I guess I occasionally get to “show off” my familiarity with a very broad array of concepts and ideas and fields of study; that’s ego-syntonic in and of itself, I suppose, though the fact that it is ego-syntonic for me is rather embarrassing and even humiliating.  I mean, just how pathetic am I that I need to show off online in some blog that barely a dozen or so people even look at when I post it?

Still, it’s not as though I’m in some academic setting, where I could bounce ideas off colleagues and so on.  I guess I could try to get back into doing my “audio blogs” which are sort of mini-podcasts, but the process of dealing with audio and converting it to video is a pain in the ass.  I don’t think many people “watch” them, anyway.

Speaking of audio recordings, I have done audio recordings of two “chapters” (so far) of Quantum Field Theory, As Simply As Possible.  I guess that’s good.  It’s at least “forced” me to muscle through part of the book.  It’s not that the subject matter is hard‒so far it’s old hat, really, since he’s laying the foundations‒it’s that the print is small on the hardcover edition, and the Kindle version is just a PDF of that, so you can’t adjust the type size to suit your smartphone, not without expanding the page until most of it is off your screen.  That’s no way to read a book, especially one about a relatively complex subject.

Anyway, if I can keep it up and finish it, I may do something similar for some of my other books that don’t have audio versions, like Spacetime and Geometry and Gravitation and so on.  I don’t think doing audio for mathematics texts would be terribly useful, but maybe it would.  Maybe I’m fooling myself about all of it.

Oh, but I’m pleased to report that there’s now an Audible version of Rationality from AI to Zombies, and I used my credit this month to get it.  I’m in the midst of rereading the Kindle version of the book even now‒about 75% of the way through.

I don’t know what I’m going to do about the other stuff, but then, I don’t really know why I’m doing anything at all.  I have no particular goal or purpose in mind.  I certainly don’t look forward to anything, beyond just trying to find new stuff to learn about or to learn better, but it’s not as though I’m making any contribution to the world, or doing any good of any kind.  I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I’m just “a pig, in a cage, on antibiotics”, but I certainly don’t have much more consequence than any solitary wild pig.

That’s enough for now.  I don’t need to write a post that’s twice as long just because I’m writing it half as frequently.  Also, I’m getting close to my stop.  I hope you all have a good weekend, and if you’re celebrating it, a happy Saint Patrick’s Day tomorrow.  I mean to write fiction on Monday, but maybe I’ll do a blog on the phone afterwards, sometime during the day.  I’m making no promises, so don’t act in reliance.

*I used scare quotes because I effectively never post on Sundays.  There were a few times, way back in the day, when I posted on Iterations of Zero on Sundays, because that was supposed to be my blog that was not related to promoting my creative writing, but was to be about my various thoughts on science, philosophy, politics, psychology, and so on.  I haven’t written very many posts on it over time, especially since this blog took over being a catch-all for whatever thoughts come to me on any given day after I just start writing and see what happens.

**Though I wrote a significant part of Son of Man on my first, tiny little smartphone, because I had no other choice.  That was a great little phone, an LG from back when they still made them.  Once, it fell about 12 feet onto concrete and the back popped off and the battery fell out, but that was it.  It ran perfectly afterward, and the screen didn’t crack at all.  Some of that is just down to physics‒smaller screens have less local torque and also can only resonate at higher pitched frequencies.  Also, the back popping off and the battery popping out absorbed a lot of kinetic energy, so that was dissipated away from more sensitive things.

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“What hears with their ear? The abyss between the stars.”

It’s Friday, and presumably I’m not working tomorrow.  I don’t think I will work even if it turns out I am working, if you take my meaning.  I’m too tired.  My coworker was out sick yesterday, and so were some other people.  Unfortunately, I’m not sick, apart from the chronic, sick-in-the-head sort of sickness with which you all are no doubt familiar.

I’m writing this on my phone, though I brought my laptop computer with me yesterday.  I had thought to whip out a draft of a blog post on it then write a page of Extra Body before editing the blog post, but now I’m having to wait so long for an Uber that I decided just to take one into the office, anyway.

I hate how Uber always tries to get you to do the “share a ride” thing.  I wish they would stop suggesting it to me, or that there was some setting in the app that would let me tell them never to offer me a shared ride.  In the unlikely event that I want to share a ride, I’ll select that option from the start.  Stop “nudging” me.  It’s unpleasant enough for me to have to deal with the fact of the driver; I don’t want to share the back seat with some other stranger.

Actually, if I’m going to “share a ride” I’ll just take the flipping bus and pay pennies on the dollar, as the saying goes.  I really should just do that, anyway.  Uber and Lyft are bad habits, and not cheap ones.  In fact, I ought just to be walking to and from the train in the mornings, since riding the bike makes my back and hips absolutely scream with pain afterwards (which is very disheartening).

I took half a Benadryl again to try to help me sleep last night.  I don’t think it actually helped me rest, but I do feel groggy and incoherent this morning, so it’s had some effect, subjectively speaking.  I don’t know if you readers can tell, though.  It may well be that, from your point of view, I’m always more or less equally incoherent.

I feel that I’m becoming more and more decoherent with every day.  I wonder if my wave function is collapsing.  Can the Born Rule be applied to a human…or to whatever I am, for that matter?

I’m being silly, I know.

In a sense I suppose the Born Rule could apply to an individual if that individual makes a decision based on a quantum measurement.  There is, apparently, an app that allows you to do just that; it’s connected to a beam splitter in some lab somewhere, through which one photon at a time is being sent, and it tells you which direction a given photon ends up being measured.  Thus, you can make a truly random decision if you so desire‒as far as physics can currently tell, a fundamentally random decision.

A coin flip or a die roll is not fundamentally random, though for practical purposes it may as well be.  We don’t have access to enough information to predict a given outcome on a fair coin or die, but in principle it is possible.  Whereas with a photon going through a beam splitter, we have a completely, in-principle, unpredictable process.  The Nobel Prize was recently awarded to Aspect et al for their experiments that tested and confirmed the Bell inequalities, thus disproving anything but the most esoteric forms of “hidden variables” descriptions of quantum mechanics.

Sorry.  That was one of my weird tangents.  I’m a bit too mentally fatigued to restrain myself very well.

This sort of thing happens in real life, too.  Yesterday, I was talking about something to do with some song that came on the playlist to my boss, and I went off on some esoteric tangents about music and stuff, and I could finally just see his eyes start glazing over, so I pulled up short.  Then I caught myself looking up to see if I could find someone else in the office with whom to share some of my trivia and my thoughts about songs and various other things.

I caught myself in time, though, and retreated to my desk.  Then someone asked to change the music playlist to some pathetic new artist and related crap that wasn’t nearly as interesting.  I briefly put in my earphones and listened to some of the Feynman lectures on physics to block out the noise.  That didn’t work for long, though, because I kept having to do office stuff that required interaction with living humans.  And then, of course, I had to work through lunch, because three people got sales all at once, just as lunch arrived.

I hate my life.  I really do.  It’s not just work that I hate‒at least that involves some purpose, however unfulfilling.  I also hate my time “off”, my lack of friends, my apparent inability to be a friend, and my inability to be able to fucking sleep, along with many other things.

I’m so tired of it all.  I’m tired of writing this blog, but I feel stressed at the prospect of not writing it.  I don’t get tired of writing fiction so much as feel it’s an exercise in futility, and so I generally don’t get started anymore.

Then again, everything in the universe, ever, is just an exercise in futility.  As Charles Halloway said*, “Where do you come from?  The dust.  Where do you go to?  The grave.”  The same could be said of every planet and star and cluster and galaxy and every bit of the observable universe and everything else that may be beyond it‒metaphorically speaking, anyway.  Dust is something within the universe, as are graves, so it seems unlikely that the universe could come from dust.  But I think you get my point.

It’s that there is no point.

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I’m too tired to think of a good title for this post

I’m writing today’s blog post on my phone in the back of an Uber.  I could not sleep and figured I’d just head into the office, since it feels slightly more like home to me, at least when no one else is there, than does the house in which I sleep, .  I have my laptop (computer) with me, so I could write this post on it, but I think I would feel more awkward doing that.  It can be trying enough writing on it when riding the train, and the shifts and bumps and other minor accelerations in a regular car tend to be more irregular and pronounced than those in a railroad car.  There’s no track, for one thing, and also a car is much less massive, so it is more prone to lurch noticeably than a train is.

It’s a stupid waste of money to take an Uber, of course, but it’s not as though I’m saving up for the future.  I don’t expect any significant future, and to be honest, I don’t really want one, at least the way I feel most of the time lately.  Even the present is barely worth it, moment to moment.

I’ve recently learned that, in the UK at least, the average lifespan (the arithmetic mean, remember?) is only 55 years for people with autism spectrum disorder.  This average is no doubt weighted down by those who die quite young, but still, this is the UK, where there is a National Health Service.  Here in the US, where the average lifespan, at least for men, has actually recently begun to fall for the first time in any of our lifetimes, the average autistic lifespan is very likely to be lower than in the UK.  I’m 54 now.

I realize that there’s nothing magical about a statistical average when applied to an individual instance of a circumstance, but numbers mean a lot to me at least, and frankly, right now, the idea that there is a maximum predicted cutoff for my lifespan‒and that it is arriving soon‒is more of a relief and even a comfort than it is a horror.

Of course, I don’t carry an “official” diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder, but as one who has, as part of his now-dead career, given who-knows-how-many thousands of “official diagnoses”, I know there’s nothing magical about them.  They are educated, best-available descriptions of what’s happening in particular instances in a medical situation.  They are useful for steering thought and decision making, but because they cannot address all details of an individual case, they can also shackle one’s thought processes and lead one astray.

One thing is clear:  I have some manner of atypical neurology.  I certainly have trouble with dysthymia and depression; I have little doubt about those diagnoses.  I have rotten chronic insomnia, which may be a symptom/sign of that probable neurodevelopmental disorder.  I also had a secundum atrial septal defect, and I have a slight cavum septum pellucidum cyst in my brain, and these things both occur more frequently in people with the neurodevelopmental version of ASD (as opposed to the cardiac Atrial Septal Defect, see above).  They are far from diagnostic thereof, but their presence does shift my Bayesian estimates.  They can also be associated with other diagnoses as well, of course, but I don’t have nearly as many hallmarks of those disorders…at least as far as I’m aware.

Of course, each thing can also happen and stand on its own, being indicative of nothing but itself.  But I think we can all agree that there’s something atypical and dysfunctional happening in my brain, even if it doesn’t actually connect causally in any way to those other findings.

I did write a bit more than a page yesterday on Extra Body, which I guess is a worthwhile accomplishment.  I know it hasn’t been all that long, but I feel as if this only-one-page-a-day pattern is not giving me the benefit that I used to get from writing fiction.  Maybe it’s that I just get my juices going and then shut them down.  Maybe it’s that the story is taking so long to get on with itself.  I don’t know.  Maybe I’m just hoping for too much.  Hope is dangerous stuff.

I don’t know how to adjust my behavior, though.  I already tried to cut back on doing this daily blog, but found that not doing it made me very tense and stressed, since I’ve gotten into the habit of doing it.  It’s almost an OCD-like pattern.

I wouldn’t call it exactly anxiety that I feel if I think about not writing the blog (or doing any of a number of other things that I do by habit). It’s more of a kind of tension, a stress, and it can rapidly escalate into hostility.  Of course, all of these are associated with the sympathetic nervous system, the whole fight-or-flight mode, so maybe one could call my experiences anxiety.  Certainly, the physiological responses are related and quite similar.  But my mental state doesn’t feel fearful as much as angry, and even hateful.

Maybe that’s all just part of Yoda’s cliché little response to young Anakin admitting he was afraid in The Phantom Menace:  “Fear leads to anger; anger leads to hate; hate leads to suffering.”  I always wished Anakin would reply, “Yeah…the suffering of the people who made me afraid and angry.”  Oh, well, much of the Jedi philosophy in the prequels is kind of stupid, and it contributed to their downfall, but they’re fictional anyway.

Speaking of fiction, I’m not sure what I’m going to do about my fiction writing.  I intend to keep writing at least a page a day, but writing it after I write my blog is stressful.  But not writing my blog is stressful.  And writing only one page a day of fiction is stressful.  And dealing with people being late to work and the noise and nonsense and the internally created rules that are not enforced when it’s inconvenient is stressful.  And commuting is stressful, and neither of the places between which I commute are places of comfort to me.

A large contributor to these problems is that, no matter where I go, there I am, and I am not comforting to me.

The Buddhists are supposed to have said that life is suffering‒or was that the Dread Pirate Roberts?  I suppose they might have agreed on that statement.  Still, you’d think that would be enough to counter Yoda’s little admonition, with the reply, “Everything leads to suffering.  What’s your pointy-eared point?”

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I should take a flying Leap Day

Hello and good morning.

Happy February 29th.  This is a date that only comes approximately once every four years.  I say “approximately” because as I’ve noted before, on three of every four turns of centuries, there is no leap day.  This is because the length of a year is ever so slightly less than 365.25 days…though I don’t recall if that’s measured in solar days or sidereal days.

Anyway, I’ve gone over this ground often enough already‒too often, probably.  I won’t bore you with more of it for now.  Probably I’m the only one who really finds it interesting, anyway.

Yesterday was a miserable day overall, though I did start off somewhat productively, typing all of what I’d written so far of Extra Body into the laptop computer.  It was almost five handwritten pages, which turned out to be just shy of 1400 words.  That’s roughly how much I used to write on any given day when producing a draft of a new work of fiction.  Anyway, I didn’t write anything new after that yesterday , but at least it’s primed and hopefully I’ll do a page of new writing today, once I’m done with this.  I’m heading to the office early‒even for me‒to try to make sure I have plenty of time to get that started.

I ended up leaving the office really late last night, because now it turns out that even the two people I like most there are getting to be part of the group who is willing to roll over the guy who’s not capable of just shutting out and walking away from work and saying to Hell with people who don’t worry about how what they do affects others.

I was already really depressed and frazzled to start the day.  I even put ear plugs in and then wore my airport-style hearing protector muffs to block out the noise of the music and the people saying silly things.  Neither of the two measures works adequately on its own, but together they do a decent job.  However, the ear muffs give me a headache after a while, because they squeeze my head.

I should just sabotage the stupid sound system; unfortunately, it is both fixable and replaceable.

Sometimes I feel almost as if a collection of a few people in the office‒among them people I thought were my friends‒are trying to drive me to quit, or to kill myself, or perhaps just to lose it in some other way.  I know it’s pretty silly to think such things, but in some ways, it’s emotionally less horrible to think that people are deliberately out to cause me harm than to think that people about whom I care, and who I thought cared about me, are willing to cause me distress and pain just out of thoughtlessness and inconsideration.

I’m probably being oversensitive.  I’m probably actually just on the verge of seriously losing my mind.  That probably wouldn’t surprise anyone.

Anyway, I ended up getting back to the house quite late, and then‒because commuting is not inherently relaxing‒I was a bit wound up and had trouble getting to sleep, so I watched several videos of people “reacting” to songs that I know.  This can be kind of fun, to a limited degree, because it feels almost like listening to a song (or similarly, to watching a movie or show) with a friend who hasn’t seen it before, though there is no actual give and take.

It also doesn’t give you the experience of watching some new thing (or listening to some new song) that you yourself have never seen with a friend, because the YouTube videos can’t really embed an entire show or movie, without being taken down due to copyright.  One has to join Patreon groups to watch things like that, and I’m really only following two people on Patreon.

I joined one of the two to see reactions to Doctor Who, but they are now all caught up, and there won’t be new Doctor Who episodes until May, I think.  They react to other shows, most of which I haven’t watched, but unfortunately, most of those shows are ones in which I am not interested.

I might be interested in them if I truly, literally had someone with whom to watch them; I watched many shows with my (now-ex) wife that I probably wouldn’t have watched on my own, because she was interested in them, and it made me happy to enjoy them with her.  Also, of course, we had similar tastes in many things; there was, after all, a reason we got married.  Or, well, there was a whole set of reasons.  Just one probably wouldn’t have been an adequate incentive for either of us.

But I’m a tiresome person, even to people who honestly love me.  I can sympathize, since I find myself tiresome.  Maybe people at the office really would prefer me to be gone, but are too kind to allow themselves to think such thoughts in their conscious minds, but end up acting on them nevertheless.  I couldn’t blame them, really, for such a thing.  How can someone be blamed for their subconscious thoughts?

I should just take myself out of everybody’s way.  I don’t make other people happy in any kind of reliable sense, but I do make many other people unhappy, though I would prefer not to do so.  Since I’m a net negative on the world, any personal return to zero on my part would be a net gain for the world at large.  And after that, it wouldn’t be my problem anymore.

Time will tell, I guess.  I’ll try to screw my courage to the sticking point and see if I can eventually succeed.  Well, actually, I will only see if I fail.  Only others will be able to see if I succeed.  That’s the nature of the thing, as far as I can tell, and is one of the most potent arguments against it, given I would be causing problems for which I could provide no possible assistance.

But since other people seem sanguine about inconveniencing me‒and it seems to be a general tendency among humans‒I shouldn’t let it be an absolute barrier to my choices, though I still think it should be a relative one.

Anyway, that’s that.  I hope to get a page written on Extra Body today, if I can.  I suppose, if you’re unlucky enough for me to be still around tomorrow and writing my blog, I’ll let you know.

TTFN

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“Find my nest of salt”

It’s Friday, in case you didn’t already know, and since I am not scheduled to work tomorrow, it’s actually the last day of the workweek for me.  Oh frabjous day*.

I didn’t write a post yesterday, because I was out sick.  I think that some dip that I used had been in the fridge longer than I had remembered and had gone bad or summat, though it tasted okay.  Anyway, it certainly didn’t want to stay down after a while, so that was unpleasant.  I was worried that I might have caught some upper GI virus, but it was too self-limited an illness for that.

I feel as though I get sick on Thursdays more often than on other days, and especially on ones after a week in which I worked on Saturday.  I’m not sure if this is true pattern recognition on my part or some form of selection bias, but it feels as though it’s at least a slight trend.  I would suspect‒if it’s something real‒that it’s related to me getting worn down mentally (and physically) and becoming vulnerable to random physical insults after having had a longer week and no real recharge time.

This didn’t happen to me in the past, but then again, I was younger then**, and my reserves were deeper.  Also, I had a family to come home to, and a safe environment, and friends, and books that I wanted to read.  It was also reasonably quiet both at home and at school or work, and what noise there was‒even when it was quite chaotic‒was related to what was happening, what was being done, what the work entailed.

Things now are much different, and I need to find a way to recharge myself more rapidly and reliably, at least if I want to avoid total system collapse.  I’m not sure that I do want to avoid that, though.  Some part of me occasionally thinks that, at least if I completely fell apart, people would have to notice, and maybe someone would help me.

I doubt it.  The world is not set up well for doing very beneficial things, especially to and for people who are odd.  And I certainly don’t seem to be the sort of person people like to keep around for very long at a time, not in close personal contact, anyway.  They’ll happily‒or willingly, anyway‒keep themselves surrounded by shallow, lazy, manipulative users, as long as they wear at least a façade of warmth and cheerfulness.  But if someone approaches things differently, and is too mentally fatigued and fed up to bother trying to pretend otherwise or to force smiles all the time, they withdraw, even if that person works hard and tries hard, and is creative and smart and would never willingly betray them.

This is all hypothetical of course, but it does highlight why I think people‒indeed, the world‒are probably not worth keeping around.  Or it’s not worth keeping myself around to be among them.

Case in point:  for at least two days now (and it may have happened yesterday, too, for all I know) the Tri-Rail trains going north and south from my station boarded (with last-minute announcements) on opposite sides of the track from the ones they usually arrive on.  Now, it can make sense for one of the trains to board on its opposite side from usual; track maintenance needs to be done from time to time.  But having the trains switch sides smacks of someone just having screwed up, and then having done so again.  It’s not reassuring for passengers, that’s for certain.

Of course, my own reliability is not impressive lately.  I haven’t yet started work on HELIOS, though I have the blank notebook in my backpack (and another one remaining at the office).  I think, oddly enough, that if I were able to find a way to work on that during the day, I might recharge a bit just from that.  Then again, maybe I’m wrong.  I’ve only ever really successfully written fiction consistently early in the morning in near-silence.

Well, I haven’t given up on it yet, but I’m not optimistic.  I guess I’ll let you all know if I succeed in starting.

I also feel like I want to get the tabs to the Nirvana song All Apologies and learn it, and maybe do a recording of it, but I doubt that’s going to happen.  My guitars are just sitting unused.  Despite this, they give me no reproach‒guitars are very nonjudgmental that way.  They merely sit there, fallow, waiting and gathering dust, as is my keyboard (the musical one) and my cello.  It’s a shame, I know.  But, as the song’s lyrics say, “I’ll proceed from shame.”***

For now, though, I won’t proceed any further than this final paragraph.  I hope you who read this all have a good day and a good Saturday and a good Sunday if you’re at all able to do so.  As for everyone else, well, who cares about them?  They’re not like us, right?  We don’t need them.  They are our enemies, and we are theirs.  JK…OAI.

*Was anyone else really, really bothered when, in Tim Burton’s movie version of Alice in Wonderland, they referred to Christopher Lee’s character as if its name were “Jabberwocky” when that was just the title of the poem from which it was drawn.  The creature’s name, or title, is the Jabberwock.  It says so right in the second stanza of the poem:  “Beware the Jabberwock, my son!”  Yeah, I figured nobody else probably cared.

**Almost by definition.

***I don’t believe that the line is “aqua seafoam shame”, as so many people seem to think.  That’s merely a classic mondegreen.  I think this largely because the mondegreen version is a weird, abstract, bizarre bit of imagery that doesn’t resemble anything else in the words or tone of the song, whereas “I’ll proceed from shame,” follows quite logically from the preceding “I’ll take all the blame”.  Cobain’s lyrics could be cryptic and quasi-nonsensical sometimes, but their tone is more consistent than the whole aqua seafoam thing would be.  End rant.