days

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“For years and years I roamed.”

Well, I might as well stick to the same pattern, so…ahem.  It’s New Year’s Eve Eve today, which means tomorrow will be New Year’s Eve and Thursday will be New Year’s Day.  At that point, if we wanted, we could just start counting days down or up‒i.e., Day 1, Day 2…or Day 365, Day 364…and so on.

Of course, if we were going to do such numbering, I guess it would make sense to divide things up into months for easier “local” day-keeping, which is what we’ve done as a civilization.  But those months are irregular and rather haphazardly named.  This can occasionally be irritating, though of course I have a sentimental fondness for at least some of the month names.

Unfortunately for the goal of making months of uniform length, the number of days in the year isn’t evenly divisible by any number larger than 5, unless I’m mistaken…

Yes, I was correct, unless you want to divide the year into 5 groups of 73 days.  That might be kind of fun, since 73 is one of those overlooked prime numbers, and it has the slight extra fun that its digits add up to 10, the base of our usual number system.

Still, especially considering the necessity of leap years (with the convoluted adding of days, removing of seconds, not adding a day when it’s the turn of a century unless it’s also the turn of a millennium and so on) it seems cumbersome to divide the year evenly.

I rather like the solution of making 12 months that are each 30 days long and having the remaining 5 (or 6) days be a period of celebration.  It could be held around one of the equinoxes or the solstices, or it could even be split up between two of them.  I’m inclined to put them at the end of the year, when the Winter Solstice in the northern hemisphere happens, because it’s long been a holiday time anyway.

Of course, this all biases against those in the southern hemisphere, but there are significantly fewer people in the southern hemisphere, or at least there were the last time I looked into it…

Yes, I was correct again, it seems.  According to my quick and dirty check, there are on the order of about a billion people in the southern hemisphere, as opposed to the remaining roughly seven billion people in the northern hemisphere.  I guess that means the winter solstice would be a good time for those separate days.  And I’ve not heard many Aussies complain about being able to go to the beach on Christmas or New Year.

Mind you, one could do that down where I live anyway, if one were so inclined.  I am not.  The beaches on the east coast of Florida are mostly annoying, and the Atlantic is not much fun for swimming.  The west coast of Florida, where one swims in the Gulf of Mexico, is much more pleasant.

I’m not a very big beach person at the best of times (or the worst of times) but I have quite a few pleasant memories of being on one or another beach on the Gulf (of Mexico).  They all date back to at least 33 years ago, though, so maybe it was just due to the nature of youth that I enjoyed them.

Alas, I’m not truly young anymore by most standards; I’m 954 years old.

Ha ha, just kidding.  Or, wait, maybe not.  I know that exoplanets have been discovered that orbit very close to their stars, and so have orbits that can be as short as a few Earth days (possibly fewer).  So, if the universe is infinite in spatial extent, which it so far looks as though it is, and if there is no lower constraint due to the laws of physics on the length of possible “years”, then there exists, somewhere in spacetime, a planet by the years of which I would be 954 years old.

Actually, if spacetime is infinite, there should be an infinite number of such planets even if they happen only once within any cosmic horizon.  But let’s not get into that right now.

Let’s do the math; it’s simple and easy, so why not?  56 years old x 365.25 days in an Earth year makes me 20,454 days old, at least on my latest birthday.  Dividing that by 954, which is almost a thousand, should give a year length of roughly 20 days per year…okay, well, the “exact” number of 21 and 70/159 days per planetary year is what is required to make me 954 years old.

Actually, though, since the number of days in that hypothetical year is smaller than the time since my last Earthday birthday, I will have to adjust my days’ old age number to the precise one:  20,525 days, which if divided by 954 gives us a year length of 21 and 491/954 days, or 21.51 days (playing slightly free and loose with significant figures).  There will be a range of possibilities, of course, since I could be anywhere in the 21-ish day course of my 955th year and still be able to call myself 954 years old, if we go by similar conventions to those followed by humans on Earth.

Okay, well…that was sort of a weird digression.  I know, I’m weird, so maybe given that, a weird digression is, in a sense, not weird.  But given other considerations, it still is.

I am an odd person, I know (though I don’t know if I’m prime).  Sometimes‒rather often‒I think I’m losing my mind.  At other times, though, I think my mind is functioning within parameters, but it is contemplating things that are vast and potentially troubling to the feeble mortal ego if one does not drape oneself in the obscuring veil and cloak of delusion.  But my fabric sensitivity doesn’t allow me to tolerate such garments for long; you could say I lack PPE for such things.  Perhaps the secret is to destroy the ego (which may well just be an illusion, anyway), but that is more easily said than done.

Who knows?  Not I.

And yes, it’s “Not I” not “Not me”.  You wouldn’t say, “Me don’t know”, so you shouldn’t say “Not me” in response to the question “Who knows?”  Apologies to David Bowie and Nirvana‒but The Man Who Sold the World is a song, and so they are allowed poetic license.

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“It’s just the kind of day to leave myself behind”

Well, it’s Tuesday, isn’t it.

Note that I ended that sentence with a period, despite the fact that it seems to be in the form of a question.  That’s because I didn’t really mean it as a question; I had no desire to imply that I wasn’t sure what day of the week it was.  I’m reasonably certain that today is Tuesday.

I’m not absolutely certain, of course, because outside the realms of self-contained systems of mathematical or logical axioms and rigorously defined and applied operations, there can be no true certainty, only higher or lower credence.  Real-world probabilities never reach zero or one.

Mind you, some things are so likely as to be practically certain, and there’s not much point in worrying about whether they are true unless and until some completely new evidence and/or argument makes itself known.  Such is my conviction that today is Tuesday*.

No, I was expressing a sort of resignation about the fact that today is Tuesday.  I would have said it in a sardonic tone had I been speaking aloud.  It’s not that Tuesday is an especially bad day of the week necessarily, notwithstanding the Beatles telling us that Tuesday afternoon is never-ending.  No, it’s just that Tuesday is still practically the beginning of the week, but I am already tired from Monday, and it’s a long way until the weekend, especially if one works on Saturday, which I am going to do, as far as I know.

That last statement has a lower credence than I give to the fact that today is Tuesday, but it’s still well above a 50% chance.

I know, I know, why am I writing this inane nonsense?

It’s just stream of consciousness.  I’m not planning it out, except to the extent that something I’ve written already makes me think of something else I want to write next.  But I have no particular chosen topic today, obviously.  Not that this is atypical.  I almost never have any plan when I start writing blog posts; I just start writing.  Sometimes I’ll just start with an inane phrase, like I did today, and see where that takes me.

Oddly enough, I think when I do have a particular topic in mind—such as in my short-lived series My Heroes Have Always Been Villains—people don’t seem to enjoy my posts as much.  Or, at least, I don’t get as many “likes” or views.  Maybe some people read and “like” them via social media or something, but if so, whatever they’re doing doesn’t reach me as feedback.  I don’t really see comments or responses that aren’t done here on my page.

Of course, as you may already know, the initial purpose for this blog—in this incarnation—was to try to promote my fiction by interacting with potential readers.  Boy was that a dud of an idea!  [No question mark ==> rhetorical, but not really a question].

More people read and have read this blog than ever read any of my books, unfortunately.  It’s rather discouraging, and it’s a large part of why I haven’t been writing fiction for a while, and the last thing I wrote, Extra Body, I just published here.

While I always write the stories I want to write and that I will enjoy (or whatever one might call the process) there really is a rapidly diminishing marginal return as one writes books that almost no one is even aware of, let alone purchases, let alone reads.  And as you know, I have no stomach for self-promotion.  Sometimes I envy narcissists, at least for an instant; then I remember that I tend to find them disgusting (though just a smidge of narcissism can be endearing in the right circumstances).

I also am not very good at interacting with people who might help promote my work, let alone at asking for that help.  I’m pretty good at the creative stuff, or at least I’m tolerably good at it.  I can write, I can draw, I can do music (playing and singing) and other similar stuff.

I’m also pretty good at science and math, and not just in a rote learning sense; I’m pretty creative there, too.  I once invented my own “number” which I call a “gleeb”, the symbol for which was a combined cursive g and b:

The nature of a gleeb is that, if you multiply it by zero, you get one (in other words, a gleeb is the “forbidden” or “undefined” result of 1/0).  That may not seem to make sense, but while I was “up the road” I even worked out some of the algebra and properties of such a number, and it turned out—to my inexpert analysis—to be logically consistent, at least.

I’m not saying it’s useful.  As far as I can tell, it’s not.  But it was a bit of mental fun and exercise, perhaps the intellectual analogue of playing hacky sack.

I’ve also occasionally thought of ideas in physics and in medicine that I thought were interesting, and which later I discovered had actually become areas of research or therapy (the therapy bit is in medicine, not in physics…as far as I know, there are no therapies in physics, despite the fact that there is such a thing as physical therapy**).

But I am not good at putting myself forward or putting myself out there or calling attention to myself.

Okay, well, I guess that’s enough meandering nonsense for the moment, though such nonsense can sometimes be fun.  Hopefully, Tuesday afternoon will not become some bizarre event horizon in which we are stuck forever.

Of course, the person going through the event horizon doesn’t experience the process as eternal; only the distant observers “see****” them slowing and slowing and coming finally, asymptotically, to a complete standstill.  The person who goes through, if they are looking backward, might see the whole history of the universe playing out before them—at least until tidal forces spaghettify them—but they will not experience time stopping.  Think about it:  how could one experience time stopping?  The passage of time is inherent in the process of experience, certainly as we know it.

I hope you have a good day.

*And even if it weren’t, I could just call it Tuesday and say that I have my own way of naming the days of the week, and it would be no more arbitrary than the one in use here in the US and elsewhere.

**This is as opposed to psychotherapy, of course, but it also can lead one to imagine such things as ethereal therapy or conceptual therapy or metaphysical therapy.  What would that last one be***?

***See, I ended that sentence with a question mark; it really was a question, though mainly a rhetorical one.

****I put that in scare quotes because as a person (or whatever) gets closer and closer to an event horizon, any light or other signal leaving them, heading outward, gets red-shifted to longer and longer wavelengths, so it becomes harder and harder actually to see them.  In the end, we cannot truly observe them stuck there forever, because the wavelength of the light leaving them approaches infinity.