blogging

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Crystallized thought and civilizational axle grease

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

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

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

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

I really hope it works well.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*Another word that is almost always vacuous.

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

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A hot and muggy morning blog post*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Definitely NOT in the park (and it isn’t the 4th of July)

Well, it’s Saturday, and this is a blog post, so as you may surmise, I am working today.  I’m writing this on Google Docs, but not on my mini laptop computer and also not on my phone.  I’m writing this on the desktop computer I use at the office.

I went to the train to head back to the house yesterday, feeling despondent and dreary.  When the train arrived, it was so overcrowded that I just couldn’t stand the idea of getting on, and so I decided to wait for the next one.  Then, as I waited and more people arrived at the station, I thought the next train was likely to get just as crowded as the previous.

I thought about the fact that I would just be going back to the house and trying to lie down and sleep and then trying (so to speak) to stay asleep, only to need to get up and make my way back to the office again.  Well, there’s nothing at the house that makes it much more inviting than the office, apart from the shower and clothes.  But I wear the same clothes to work every day, anyway‒same color, style, brand, what have you.  I can get away with a bit of deodorant and spray cologne and a shave and toothbrush‒I keep extra implements for such things at work.

So, anyway, I came back to the office and just slept here on the floor.  This is the exciting and glamorous life that I lead.

Now, it’s early in the morning on Saturday, and I figure I might as well write a blog post, as I warned you I might.  And here I am, writing it.  I think it’s going to be short; I have no topic to address, nor really any interest in anything.  I’m disconnected and disaffected, and if I can think of a good third word that both rhymes and applies, I’ll add it.

Nothing’s coming to mind so far, though.

I’m actually kind of pulling up short already.  I don’t know what to say next, other than to comment on the fact that I don’t know what to say next.  I’m still in pain, and it’s still above my average (though not by a huge amount), and of course, I slept no better at the office than I would at the house, but I also slept no worse.  It’s quieter at the office, also.  And it’s not as though there would have been anything interesting for me to do on Friday night, even if I’d been free, and there’s certainly no one with whom I would do anything.

I see that Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith is out in “select” theaters this week, to celebrate its 20th anniversary.  I’m unlikely to go see it.  If I had someone to accompany me (whose company I found comfortable enough) I might go, though it would be bittersweet, I think*.  The last time I saw the movie in theaters, I was with my (ex) wife and our kids.  We had a very good time, and my son at least was probably old enough to remember some of the event.

That’s about it.  No new fiction, no music‒I have my guitar right here next to me as I write this, but I cannot even comprehend the notion of wanting to pick it up and play.  When I conjure the image, I feel more like one might feel sitting in an overly sterile, very crowded waiting room for a job interview for a truly uninspiring company, one at which one really doesn’t want to work.  At least it’s not a nervous feeling; it’s just a bored and pointless feeling, a lack of interest in or at least energy for anything.

And now, this week I’m going to be getting less weekend rest than I have been for the past short while.  I only hope it doesn’t too strongly impact next week.  But it’s not as though I’ve been doing well even with full weekends and heavily sedated sleep (as heavy as OTC stuff will allow).

You would think that, as you approach the center of the whirlpool that leads you down to the inevitable abyss, you would pick up speed and things might at least become a little bit exciting.  This does not, however, appear to be the case for me right now.  I’m losing my patience.  I’m in physical and mental pain every waking moment‒and for me, that’s more moments per day than for most people‒and can really only seek distraction when I can get it.

That’s enough kvetching for now.  I know all you regular readers already know of my issues, and I don’t think anyone out there has any answers for me, even if they were inclined to provide them.  I hope you all have/are having a good weekend.

*Not the candy.  I don’t tend to eat anything with bittersweet chocolate while at the movies.

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It seems to me most strange that men should blog

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, so I’m writing yet another blog post.  I’m also writing this on my miniature laptop computer, though it has seen better days and is getting a little bit laggy.

I don’t have anything in particular about which to write.  Certainly, I have no subject like yesterday’s, though I do wish to make clear that I was not joking in my previous blog post, and I am every bit as resolved today as I was yesterday to carry out my plan.  I’ve already begun, in fact, in the sense that yesterday I was very specific about what I ate.

Of course, I didn’t sleep very well last night, and I feel very, very tired, but what else is new?  I’ve been tired for almost as long as I can remember.  This fact gets tiring in its own right, which seems to be, well, not a contradiction, and certainly not ironic, but a positive (yet not positive, if you see what I mean) feedback loop.  Being tired is exhausting of morale, or poisonous to the will, or however you want to put it.

I think you probably worry too much about such things, though.  You should be like me, a catch as catch can, go with the flow, Hippy Dippy Dan sort of guy.

Ha ha, that’s a joke, of course.  I am not a laid-back person, and I don’t know that I ever have been.  I’m wound so tightly that only dogs and bats can hear me vibrating.  There were at least three times yesterday in the office when I literally jumped at sudden noises*.  It’s not such a surprise, I guess, that I get along well with cats—at least as well as most cats do with each other.

As an aside, since I’m writing this on the laptop computer for the first time in a while, might I say that if any of you have any avenues by which to address the movers and shakers of Microsoft, please tell them to do something about that stupid little icon that relates to their “AI”** which is there because, apparently, most people feel the need to have some electronic pseudo-entity hold their hands while they write something on a frikking word processor.

It’s pathetic and irritating.  If you know a way simply to turn that process off voluntarily, please let me know.  I haven’t looked for how to do it, but if it’s anything like how readily one can change from their new, horrible default font, there may be no readily available avenue.

I don’t need an AI to help me write.  I’ve been writing since before the effing TRS-80 came out.  I correct AI editing suggestions more often than they correct me.

I’m all in favor of spelling and grammar checkers, especially the ones that work after the fact, not while one is still writing (which can be quite distracting and annoying).  After all, pretty much everyone makes some errors in a first draft.  But I don’t need a machine to help create my writing for me, any more than I want one to help me come up with a tune or draw a picture from scratch.

My boss once said of me, when a few of us were discussing such things in passing in the office, “Doc is an AI.”  I guess that’s a compliment, and I took it as such, but if he was only thinking of our current generation of such things, it’s a bit insulting (though he didn’t mean it thus, I’m quite sure).

Anyway, that’s all as may be.  I got the payroll done efficiently yesterday, and honestly, I felt relatively upbeat in the office.  I haven’t yet revealed my plan to anyone there, yet; the time wasn’t really right, and I don’t want people to get distracted.  But there was a certain freedom of mind associated with having come to a decision, and having declared it publicly, that if I cannot in fairly short order get thinner and reduce my pain, I will kill myself.

Perhaps it’s just the sense of having an available escape that made me feel a bit less stressed.  As Radiohead sang in “Weird Fishes/Arpeggi”, “Yeah, I…I hit the bottom…hit the bottom and escape.  Escape.”  Hitting the bottom can be freeing sometimes, and the availability of an escape can be soothing.

It’s not ideal, of course.  It would be much better if people didn’t ever need to feel that they needed an escape.  But reality was not made for us, and we were not so much made for it as made by it, and quite by accident, as far as I can see.  In a way, if there were a designer that made us for reality, there would be more about which to complain, because that designer clearly fucked up many times.

I am surely one of those fuckups.

Anyway, that’ll do for now.  I hope you all have a good day, or at least as good a day as you can.  I’m going to have a usual, typical day for me, probably, which is nothing about which to write home.  And I don’t think I’ll write about it here.

TTFN

*My recording of a sudden versus not-so-sudden noise.

**That looks like the name Al, doesn’t it?  Can you tell the difference without context?

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This is my brain, on.

I’ll bet you wish it could be turned off sometimes.  I know I do.

I’m writing this post on my laptop computer today, and at the very least, it’s going to be easier on my thumbs.

I was just about to sing the praises of MS Word, because it looked as though this new page on Word was going to start with the Calibri font instead of that new, Craptos font they’ve made their default because someone somewhere fellated just the right person.  Unfortunately, that was just the program catching up with itself, and the font changed to the new default, and I had to change it back manually.

Honestly, if anyone out there invents time travel to the past and figures out that it can change our timeline (I doubt it), then please, go back in time and interfere with the parents of each and every person involved in the decision to change the base font and in the design of the new font, so that all those people are never even conceived.

You see, I’m being generous.  I just want those people never to have been.  I don’t want them to suffer.

Actually, I do want them to suffer.  I want to torture and burn each and every one of them, to break their bodies with baseball bats and steel pipes and to wash their faces with broken glass.  But I know that’s a bit excessive, so I’m willing to settle for erasing their existence completely.

Such are the better angels of my nature.  This is me being kind.  Thanos was a pussy.

Okay, well, now that I’ve gotten a little bit of the madness out of my system, and all without hurting any actual people, I hope I can go on and write a somewhat sensible blog post.

I’ve already had some frustrations this morning, not least of which was waking up by about 2 am after less than four hours of sleep*.  Other things have happened as well, to do with transportation and so on, but I won’t get into it all.  I would come across as a truly disgruntled curmudgeon and/or just an asshole.  I’m not saying those would not be accurate descriptions of me, and sometimes even comparatively kind ones, but I would rather not come across that way if I can help it.

I haven’t received my report from my autism assessment yet, of course.  Well, not “of course”.  If something is supposed to arrive within a week, that means it could take less than a week, which this would be, if it had already arrived.  Be that as it may, it has not arrived.  There are three more days in that week (and in this month, it turns out), but I would of course rather it arrive sooner than later.  That’s not something about which I have a choice, however.  I put the ball in their court and they are the ones to return it.

Is that a tennis metaphor, the whole “ball in your court” cliché?  I suppose it could refer to volleyball or other “court” sports (but not badminton, since they do not use balls, they use shuttlecocks—why do these terms lend themselves so well to sophomoric jokes?).  I guess it could even have something to do with jurisprudence, but I don’t know what one would be doing with a ball in a court of law.  Maybe it originally referred to a masked ball, or even a formal ball, for all the lawyers and judges, and we’ve all been misunderstanding the metaphor as referring to a physical object, a ball, such as are used in many sports.

I doubt it.

Try not to be too bothered by my nonsense and gibberish.  I’ve always been mad, and I think I’m probably going madder.  That feels like it should be “more mad” but I think “madder” is more proper.  I don’t know for sure.  It doesn’t really madder much, though.  Ha ha.

Anyway, I’ve already reached my target word count for this bouncing bullshit, so I’ll call it quits.  I know I’m joking about it, but my mind really is falling apart.  Or, rather, I guess it’s more that it’s decaying, it’s rotting from within, it’s rusting, it’s crumbling, it’s finally succumbing to all of its design and manufacturing flaws.

I guess I was just a lemon, after all.  Unfortunately, I’m not the kind of lemon with which you can make lemonade.  Sorry about that.

*It’s proper to use “less than” here instead of “fewer than” even though hours are, in a sense, discrete, countable units, because I am referring to an overall measure of continuous time—an integral amount of sleep if you will—and I am giving an estimate, rounded up to what is perhaps the nearest whole hour.  It’s rather akin to saying you have drawn less than three buckets of water from a well; though buckets are discrete, water is continuous, so to speak.  On the other hand, it’s not sensible to say “there were less than ten people in the room,” for instance.  People are not a continuous variable.  They come in quanta, if you will, in indivisible** chunks.

**Well…you can divide people into smaller bits—much as I would like to do to the people behind the Aptos font in Microsoft Office apps—but then they cease to be people pretty quickly.

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O, you must blog your rue with a difference!

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday of course.  If you don’t know why I would say “of course” after my “Hello and good morning”, then you need to read more of my blog!

I recommend going back as far as you can; I certainly ought to have posts going back to, I don’t know, at least 2015.  For a while I just wrote weekly posts‒I was writing books and short stories and sometimes writing and recording music some of that time‒but then in more recent years I released one every workday.  Or perhaps you could say one escaped every workday.

That means…well, let’s do the figuring:  5.5 days a week (average) for 52 weeks is 286 days of a given year (roughly), and since I write an average of perhaps roughly 1000 words a blog post, then in a given year you have available about 280,000 words of mine to allow into your head.

You’ve already begun.

This means that there are multiple millions of my words out there, available for your imbibement, if you include my books and my blogs.  I really have written quite a lot.

It is from reading my blogs that you will probably rather quickly develop an understanding of why I said “of course” above.  But, of course (ha ha), reading my words, taking in my thoughts, can be terribly detrimental to your mental health, like exposure to mercury in tuna or to lead in car exhaust or to radon in your basement.  Or perhaps it might even be as bad as reading De Vermis Mysteriis, or even Al Azif (the original title of the Necronomicon).

Mind you, it’s unlikely to be as dramatic as what the stories depict happening when people read the above books, but then again, perhaps that’s worse.  After all, the initial infection with HIV is not usually terribly dramatic (sometimes there’s a mononucleosis-like syndrome, sometimes there’s nothing much at all), and Hepatitis B and/or C can be even more subtle.  But the long-term effects of those infections, if untreated, are terrible, and there is no known treatment for infestation with my thoughts.  Believe me, I’ve tried.

Like a retrovirus, my words are not as aggressively infectious as the common colds and coronaviruses and even the influenzas of social and other media.  But such loud viral spreads and “infections” tend to be very self-limited and acute.  They can (and do) sometimes destroy particularly susceptible people (I’m sure you can think of some) but for the most part, they come and go like the hula hoop or pole sitting*.

If it takes hold, my stuff is not too likely just to fade away into a mildly amusing memory of youthful or not-so-youthful foolishness.  My stuff will gnaw away at you like black mold and dry rot, like rust that slowly claims even mighty battleships, like erosion that wears down mountains, like a retrovirus that triggers lymphoma.  It’s terrifying.  And, of course, you have already been exposed, so it may already be too late for you.

Perhaps I should post a disclaimer at the beginning of every entry:  warning‒reading this writer’s words may be dangerous to your mental health.  Although, that might effectively be a sort of perverse advertising, like suggesting to people that they snowboard down this particular slope at their own risk, and we cannot be responsible for the outcome if you choose to do it.  The more humble and prudent people might heed the warning.  But the more daring, those who thrive on excitement, might be more inclined to dive right into my blog.

I guess such people would receive what they deserve.  For there is no excitement here, as such (though my stories can be relatively exciting).  Here there is only dark thought, sometimes disguised as humor or whimsy or curiosity or something else, for I cannot write what I don’t have inside, and as far as I can tell, all that exists within me now is darkness.

I guess that’s not anything really new.  I’ve always been dark and largely detrimental by nature.  I do, after all, have a subject heading for this blog that reads “My heroes have always been villains”***.  I’m a mutant grown from a mutant source.  I guess that’s how all new infections come into being.  They are not created ex nihilo, because nothing is****.

Well, it’s too late for you now.  Hopefully you won’t have too virulent a reaction, but I cannot be responsible, except in the broadest of senses, for whatever the outcome may be.

TTFN

*Just to be clear, all the discussion of infectious diseases (viruses specifically) is metaphorical.  It may not be necessary to point this out to most of you‒it probably isn’t‒but there are always those people who are metaphor-impaired, and we should strive to be patient with and supportive of such disadvantaged people.  Who would choose to be so impaired?  No one who knew what they were missing.  But, alas, such people do not know what they are missing.  It can break your heart, if you let it**.

**You probably shouldn’t let it.  If your heart is functioning properly, you should try to preserve and encourage its health.

***That’s a play on the old Willy Nelson song My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys.

****The only possible exception being everything.

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When will the system crash?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Desperate but not undaunted

This may be short, but I thought I’d share a bit of info since I brought the general topic up earlier this week.  Just this morning, while I was getting ready for work (and indeed, just as I was about to brush my teeth) the idea for a story popped into my head.  This happens a fair amount, as I think I’ve said, with weird little scenarios triggered by something that’s been going through my mind or that I see, and they coalesce into the root of what might be a possible story.  Well, since I had spoken (so to speak, ha ha) with all of you about this earlier, I decided to pause my oral hygiene routine briefly and go write the story idea down in the notebook function of my smartphone.

I don’t want to overreact or to ask anyone to get their hopes up.  That latter bit would be utter hypocrisy.  It’s always difficult to say what will come of a story idea, or even the shape it will take‒just look at Outlaw’s Mind*, at how much it changed and improved (to me) from its simpler beginning.

I’m writing all this on my phone once again, by the way.  And the fact that I’ve written at least the roots of this story and most of this week’s posts on my phone leads me to toy with the idea of writing a next story wholly on the phone.  I know, I know, I’ve gone back and forth about hand-writing stories versus word processor/laptop computer versus phones, and I got all those notebooks and pens and everything, thinking that I’d write HELIOS in long hand, and now I’m thinking of the opposite.

This is an example of the workings of a desperate mind, one trying, scrambling, scrounging, looking for answers to getting back to writing, or music, or trying to help my chronic pain, or my insomnia, or my depression, and whether or not to pursue the possibility of an ASD diagnosis (not the heart kind‒I know I had that).  I’m trying to find something that has some meaning at all for my life to persist.

I guess that means I haven’t given up yet, but that’s more a matter of habit than anything else.  I am extremely stubborn, and I have trouble letting go of a process once it’s a habit.  Maybe that’s the ASD doing its thing, assuming it’s there.  Maybe I’m just dysfunctional and odd and alien.  I suppose those things aren’t mutually exclusive.

Still, writing about this idea got me thinking of potential scenes and events for the story I mentioned above, so please forgive me if I space out a bit.  Just wait a moment or two; I’ll be back**.

That was kind of fun.  It could be an interesting story, this new idea.  We’ll see if anything happens with it.  I wouldn’t put serious money on the possibility, and I certainly don’t recommend holding your breath.  But if I were to write a novel or novella on the phone, the portability would be a big plus.

That reminds me of those old “palm pilot” things people used to have, the little personal data notebook digital things, with the plastic styluses.  Some people thought they were so cool using those things.  They were always so geeked out about them and seemed to look for excuses to get them out all the time.

Don’t get me wrong; if someone was just having a great time, enjoying using a brilliant piece of then-new technology, then have at them!  Enjoy!  Why not be happy with a new, useful tool, especially if it’s a cool tool?

At least some of the people who ostentatiously used the “personal data assistants”, though, were mainly status hungry.  I get it (though I may not grok it).  Humans in general tend to be status hungry; for ancestral humans, in-group status could have a big effect on reproductive opportunities (and even just basic survival chances), so any genes that pushed toward such behavior would tend, ceteris paribus, to be at an advantage, locally (i.e., in that particular gene pool).

But it is rather bizarre to watch from the outside, and instances of the phenomenon vary between the amusing and the contemptible, with many a superposition of the two.  It still happens today, of course.

Humans also haven’t shown any sign of ceasing to select status hungry people as the ones they follow, even though there are such obvious conflicts of interest and so much bias that makes such people unreliable in the long run.

Oh, well.  I guess it doesn’t matter, because in the truly long run there will be nothing but random elementary particles and forever-expanding spacetime, if the current understanding is correct.

Or, of course, there could be even worse alternatives.

There’s probably no possible horrible situation that couldn’t in principle be made even worse.  Even Sam Harris’s “worst possible misery for everyone” could be made even “worse” just by adding more people to the situation, each one of whom is in the worst possible misery they can be.

I suppose that fact implies the theoretical possibility of its opposite:  the best possible well-being for everyone.  Why does that feel so much more unrealistic?  Well, I could get into some of the potential reasons, many involving the biological necessity and crucial importance of fear and pain.  But that’s for another time, or you can read a bunch of my blog posts here and on Iterations of Zero.  I’m sure you can find my thoughts on the subject.

Aaaaand that’s enough meandering.  You all hopefully are going to have a good weekend.  I am tentatively scheduled to work tomorrow, but we shall see.

*Seriously, go take a look.  If you like it, why not buy some of my published stuff?  And then tell two friends, and so on, and so on, and so on.

**Ha ha.  That’s a trick.  You can’t tell when or for how long I spaced out while writing, unless I tell you, or put a space or row of asterisks in the body of the writing.  I could begin a sentence one day and finish it years later.  It’s a bit like listening to a studio recording that had overdubs and one person doing more than one part.  You hear it all at once, but that’s not how it came to be.

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Box open

I don’t know if I’m going to post this.

Of course, to a certain degree that’s true of anything I write.  There’s many a slip, as they* say, twixt dress and drawers.  One could begin writing and decide that what one was writing was crap and just delete it (fortunately, crap is my baseline, so if anything, I’m occasionally pleasantly surprised).

One could also lose the file.  This happened to me recently, for reasons that are not entirely clear, but probably had to do with poor network reception on the phone while in transit, and some flub that led to the post I had started not being saved on the phone.  That was frustrating, if slightly interesting; it’s been at least a few decades (I think) since I previously lost a document due to failure to save.  That used to be the nightmare scenario in college, but for as long as such an option has been available, I save at every full stop (well…nearly so).

Of course, one could even meet with misadventure between the time of beginning a post and when one intended to post it.  An accident, a major life event distraction, or even death could intervene.  Though, I can say with high confidence that, so far, I have not died without posting a particular bit of writing.

But none of these reasons is why I am not sure if I will post this, though some can never be ruled out ahead of time.  I simply have nothing in mind about which to write, so I don’t know if I’ll post whatever comes out.

This is very much stream-of-consciousness, but it is a stream of written consciousness, and the very act of expressing thoughts linguistically crystallizes them, changes their phase, perhaps reducing them in dimensionality–the expressed thought may merely be the circular shadow of the original thought’s sphere–and the degree to which they are smoothly continuous.  Though this writing is very much me and is true to my character and personality, this is not the way my thoughts are when I am not expressing them and/or interacting.

It’s a bit like that philosophy assignment Feynman talked about from his younger days, in which he tried to spend time being aware of his dreams and kept a journal about them.  He experienced various interesting things, but in the end, he correctly noted that he still didn’t know what went on in his dreams when he wasn’t paying attention to them.  And likewise we, even people who engage in deep and advanced mindfulness meditation, still know what our mind is like only when we are mindful of it.  We don’t know (for certain) what our minds are like when no one is looking**.

The point is, I have nothing really about which to write.  Which clearly does not stop me.  There are people who can speak at any time, despite having nothing interesting to force out of their mouths.  It seems that I, at least in some modes, am like this with the written word.

Mind you, I’m not good even at written conversations anymore, such as those in which one engages online.  I was very distressed and frustrated when PBS SpaceTime stopped doing answers to questions in the comments after ongoing videos, presumably because they had expanded their Patreon and got all that stuff done in the associated “Discord”.  I have never used a Discord (if that’s the proper way to say it) but I’ve used chat rooms and stuff in the past, to a limited degree.  I never had very much fun with them, not much more than I have fun having conversations with large groups of random strangers IRL****.  I did make a very good friend on a depression support chat group once, but I don’t think the group otherwise helped my depression.

So I don’t want to get involved in Discords and Patreon extras in order for the Spacetime guy to answer questions people have asked, or whatever, and so I stopped being a Patreon supporter for them, and I also don’t watch as many of their videos, or at least not as early or as eagerly.  I don’t seem to enjoy them nearly as much as I used to enjoy them.  But then again, that’s pretty much the case with everything.

Even interacting through the comments on blogs can be anxious.  I certainly rarely interact on other sites or blogs, fearful of annoying the hosts and other readers.  I’m almost always worried about a response  to a comment I make, bad or good.

And yet, I want to interact with people I like…and with people I think I might like and (even more rarely) people who might like me.  Yet, more and more, the possibility of interaction, even with people I already know, fills me with tension‒with I guess what must be called anxiety‒and I end up avoiding the possibilities.  And when someone replies to one of my comments, my first reaction is to feel a sense of dread, and I have to force myself even to look at the response.  I usually have to make myself wait, first to look at the response, and then, later, to respond to it, if such a response is appropriate.  It’s a bit maddening, and it’s certainly stupid.

So, I guess, today I just felt like communicating out into the world, even if only in one direction, and with nothing of real interest to say.  That’s that, that’s all it is, that’s all it’s about.

I don’t know if I will do this again tomorrow or not.  But in the meantime, I hope you have a good day.

*Nanny Ogg says it, anyway.

**Please note:  This has nothing whatsoever to do with quantum mechanics, the uncertainty principle, the collapse of the wave function and so on***.

***Except to the extent that, as far as we know, everything has to do with quantum mechanics, of course.

****“In real life” in the speech of SMS acronyms, though it could also mean “I really looked” when one is trying to find something but hasn’t been able to locate it, and some other person is snidely wondering if one made more than a cursory search.

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Performance is a kind of will or testament which argues a great sickness in his judgment that blogs it.

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday (of course) and so it’s time for my weekly blog post.

There have been no interim posts this week because I have been quite under the weather since Saturday night.  This doesn’t necessarily imply that if I had not been sick, I would definitely have written any extra posts, but the illness made that possibility all but zero.  And, of course, now that the potential extra-post days have passed, we can say that, at least in this part of the Everettian multiverse, it did not happen.

I was off work on Monday and Wednesday.  I sort of had to go in on Tuesday, because I needed to prepare the payroll, and most of that data comes back on Tuesday.  It was no mean task, because we have more people working than in the past, and we have two offices now, so I was somewhat stressed out, in addition to being sick.  I was able to finish the job from the house yesterday morning, because I had prepared everything adequately.

Anyway, I’m heading back in today‒though in a truly civilized society which the US is not, I would probably stay in the house until I was more recovered than I am.  Still, I really don’t like lying around there.  It’s crowded (with my own clutter of stuff) and it’s dim, and it’s not as though there’s anyone around to take care of me, so I have to do everything for myself anyway.  That limits my rest a bit.  In any case, it’s not a restful environment.  Though I don’t quite know what would constitute a restful environment for me, honestly.

Of course, yesterday, when I was at the house, they had a tremendously successful day at the office, perhaps the most successful day that we’ve ever had, doing as much business in one day as we used to do in a whole week.  This is yet more evidence supporting a hypothesis that I have long suspected to be true:  everything tends to go better when I am not around.

Probably, even those of you who read this blog regularly would have slightly better lives if you did not read it.

It’s pretty clear that things got easier for my parents after we had a falling out (for a while) and I took over my room and board and everything else for myself during the latter half of college*; they were finally able to get on with their freer lifestyle now that the last of their kids was truly out of the house (I do not mean to imply that this was in any way their aim or desire; that would be so far beneath them as to be indiscernible).  The next time my parents and I saw each other was when I graduated from medical school.

Also, of course, my ex-wife divorced me specifically because she wasn’t happy, and I think she has been much happier since she did so.  My kids certainly seem to have done well, especially since the time I was more or less completely excised from their lives by the State of Florida (it nothing to do with any kind of DCF parental problem finding, it was just me being sent away to be a guest at the FSP, securing the final nail in the coffin of my prior life).  Not having me around is certainly not acting to their detriment, at least, which is usually what having me around does to people.

In fact, non-family members** who feel the most affinity with me, or with whom I feel the most affinity, tend not to turn out well.  No fewer than two of the friends of my ex-wife’s parents who heard me sing*** for the first time and were enthusiastically and convincingly complimentary‒one of them even asked for a tape‒died within a year.  And two of the people at the office with whom I got along well and felt affinity, and one of whom could have become a close friend (he was the one who read Son of Man and liked it and was a techy sort of person) died of drug overdoses.

I’m not positing any kind of supernatural process, here; I don’t think there is such a thing as a real curse or anything along those lines.  But I think that there are aspects of my personality and nature and character which, when they resonate with people strongly in the wrong way, tend to reinforce bad outlooks and bad health, and can even lead to untimely death.

This is just a hypothesis, of course.  But it does seem potentially true that even the world itself would be slightly, but noticeably, happier, healthier, more prosperous, and in general better off, if I were not around.

It’s the ironic turnaround of the song Creep, in which Thom Yorke sings, “I want you to notice / when I’m not around.”  Well, people do tend to notice when I’m not around, and what they notice is that everything is at least a little bit better.

Like the fella once said, “Ain’t that a kick in the head?” to quote another, older song, also ironically****.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like my present illness is going to be lethal, though I suppose it could surprise me.  It is possible to seem to be improving and then to worsen or to experience complications or to have a superinfection that becomes life-threatening.  But the world is not usually so fair or just.  Jim Henson died in his prime of what would ordinarily have been a treatable infection, while slow-growing, purulent tumors such as I persist long past even their potential usefulness or value.

Ain’t that a hole in the boat?

TTFN

*I had a full scholarship, thankfully, otherwise I never could have gone there in the first place.

**Relatives appear to have some manner of immunity.

***I used to be better than I am currently, because I practiced more, and sang more “formal” stuff.

****I will not quote Alanis Morisette.