Hello and good morning.

It’s Thursday again and time for another of my traditional Thursday blog posts*, though nowadays that’s embedded among the blog posts I write on all the other work days.  I haven’t written fiction in quite a long time, and the original reason for this (Thursday) blog was to promote my fiction.

But heck, it’s been a couple of weeks since I’ve even so much as picked up a guitar‒though I keep looking online at these parlor style acoustics, because they look like they’d be a good size for convenience and such.  But it’s just a bit of a pipe dream and a distraction to look at them.

There is no lapcom involved in this post today.  I didn’t take it with me when I left the office last night, but there was no more “reason” for that decision than there had been for the fact that I brought it the day before.  There were causes, as there always are, but not reasons.

Although, now that I consider it, I did feel that yesterday’s post was a bit too long.  That didn’t consciously enter into my decision-making when I chose not to bring the lapcom, but I did think about it earlier in the day, after posting.  Most, if not all, of what happens in most decisions we make is unconscious, or subconscious**, or whatever word you might want to choose.  So I can’t rule out that there were actual reasons for me not bringing my lapcom last night, but whatever the facts of that matter might be, there were, and always are, causes.

In any case, yesterday I fell prey to my tendency to write quite a lot when typing on a lapcom or other regular keyboard, because it’s so fast and easy for me.  It’s faster than speaking for me, and it’s certainly faster than using the “smartphone”, even not counting all the typos that occur when using the latter***.

I continue to toy, from time to time, with trying to type a tome using Google Docs.  But its interfaces, while okay for writing blog posts, don’t feel quite right for writing fiction, at least not for me.  It’s probably a stupid notion anyway.  I don’t really expect ever to write any more fiction.  That’s not a good thing, but then again, very little is.

I’m actually getting irritated that my lapcoms and my desktop computer at work are beginning to show some signs of their ages, and I fear that they may need to be replaced soon.  Worse, my smartphone is getting a bit laggy, and I cannot upgrade it to the latest operating system so I can no longer use my banking app on it.

But I really don’t want to go through the hassle of getting and setting up a new phone (or computer).  It’s so irritating and so uninteresting.  I actually had the general, vague hope that I would not live long enough to need to upgrade my computer(s) or phone again.

Honestly, the constant displacement of entropy that comprises the process of staying alive at so many levels is just dreary and almost laughable.

Speaking of laughable, I’ve been thinking about trying a personal experiment:  I’ve been thinking about trying to go without laughing for a day or a week or something along those lines****.  I just wonder what effect that would have on my experiences.

I tend to overdo it with jokiness, and I tend to partake in a lot of comedy of various kinds, almost in a desperate way.  It could even be be considered an addiction, or at least like a substance abuse problem, including its own abstinence syndrome:  I used to have the experience that, after reading a Dave Barry book, I would crash and feel quite depressed and morose for a while, as if in withdrawal from laughing so much.

Perhaps laughter is one of my means to try to hide from reality, to hide from the present, to try to hide from me.  I haven’t committed to the idea, yet, but it does intrigue me.  Most of my literary heroes do not spend a lot of time laughing.  And I have few, if any, real world heroes, but such as I have, though far from agelastic, are not prone to joke about a lot or get giggly or silly, like I do.

Those facts may be irrelevant for me, of course.  I am a unique snowflake (just like all the other snowflakes), and I don’t necessarily have the same attributes as those I admire, especially fictional characters.   But it is intriguing as almost a kind of fast, but one in which I would abstain from laughing rather than from food or water.

I’ll keep you posted on my effort (probably).  If you want to give me your input, you’re welcome to do so.  In the meantime, I hope you have a very good day.  Don’t stop laughing on my account.

TTFN

[P.S., a thought just occurred to me, because the words of an old ABBA song (misheard, as I just realized) started going through my head:  If you think that there’s nothing you can’t do, that anything is possible, then all the troubles that continue in the world are implicitly your fault, because you could have solved them.  After all, there’s nothing you can’t do.  To be fair to them, ABBA was actually singing “there is nothing we can do”, which I had misheard and misremembered as “can’t” for decades.  Indeed, their song goes pretty well with parts of this post, especially the song’s first few lines.  Who would have guessed?]

*I almost said “my traditional Thursday podcast”.  How’s that for a weird mistake?  I’ve certainly toyed with the idea of a podcast at times, but that requires more time and editing and so on than my little five-minute or so snippets of audio.  But I do like to listen to podcasts, at least about topics that interest me.  Perhaps it was a Freudian slip.

**I accidentally typed “sunconscious” here, originally, and it seems like kind of a charming word, so it’s a shame it doesn’t really mean anything.  But one certainly doesn’t want a conscious sun, as the dubious Doctor Who episode “42” tried to warn us…or something like that.

***You might almost think that word means “one who lats”, but of course it’s not that kind of word and has close kinship with “later” and its ilk.

****I.e., a period of time.