health

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The painful truth – the truthful pain

Please forgive me if I behave or speak as though today were Tuesday.  I know that it is in fact Wednesday as I write this‒it’s anyone’s guess on what day of the week you might be reading it (though I suspect that, for the most part, if one doesn’t read my blog on the day it’s posted, one is unlikely ever to read it)‒but I didn’t write a post yesterday (Tuesday) so I may be a bit thrown off.

I didn’t write a post yesterday because I didn’t go to work yesterday.  And I didn’t go to work yesterday because of pain.  I had already been having a bad pain day on Monday, one in a long string of worse-than-average pain days.  Then, in the evening on Monday, while trying to reach for something in my room, I took a bad step on the tile floor and slipped and nearly fell.

I caught myself, as is implied by the “nearly” in that last sentence, but I wrenched my back significantly, and the night and morning and so on were particularly bad, and I hardly slept and I did not have the energy to go to work, or at least to do so and not spend all my time writhing and snapping at people.  So I stayed at the house.

Regarding chronic pain, I’m fond of quoting Ulrich’s description of Vermithrax from Dragonslayer:  “When a dragon gets this old it knows nothing but pain, constant pain.  It grows decrepit.   Crippled.  Pitiful.  Spiteful.”  I had to double-check and fix a few words to get the quote exactly correct, but the most important parts are always remembered correctly.  And the whole thing feels like it describes me pretty well.

I used to be much more pleasant and amiable than I have become since my chronic pain began.  Though I’ve had problems with depression since my teens and anxiety before that and ASD since I was born (in two different senses), I always tried to be polite and amiable and kind as much as I could.  I always figured that was the real position of strength:  not being in competition with other people but just trying to do your best while others do similarly.

But when one is in chronic pain, it is hard not to be grumpy (presumably even if one hasn’t lost almost everything one had worked to achieve through the first thirty plus years of one’s life, though I cannot know for sure).  I think there are people who have only known me since the time of the beginning of my back problem who would be surprised by how pleasant I was back in the day.

Though, there are those who read this blog who did know me in the past, before the aforementioned time, and maybe they would give a different report.  I can only share my own perceptions and perspective, and I could to a certain degree be mistaken about how I came across to other people.

I’ve never been all that good at knowing what other people think of me.  Because of that, I generally try just to take people at their word, and take those words to have their most straightforward meaning.  If someone hopes to hint at something and I don’t get it, that’s on them.  Hints are overrated even when given and received by people who embrace the practice and consider themselves good at it.  There are too many possible variations and points of incomplete information.

Anyone who has saved and transferred a video file and has also saved and transferred word processor files should grasp the difference, at least if they have been paying any attention.  A video only a few moments long can, despite the latest compression algorithms, have a storage size that dwarfs the size of even, for instance, the word file for the unsplit book Unanimity.

Now, Unanimity is about half a million words long.  It’s certainly the longest thing that I have written.  But a video I did on my phone last week for minor fun, which was maybe 20 seconds long, takes up more than 16 meg, while the combined file size for the Kindle versions of both Unanimity: Book 1 and Unanimity: Book 2 is about 3.5 meg*.

That’s a few minutes of stupid and pointless video which will never be shared anywhere versus a work that took more than a year for me to complete, edit, and publish.

At least it’s fair to say that, from a useful information point of view, my book was and is much more efficient.  Though it requires enough shared experience for others to fill in meanings and images of things described, this is not a requirement that isn’t met by nearly every human on the planet.  Perhaps videos would be better for a truly alien species that was hitherto unfamiliar with human civilization.

Okay, well, that was a weird post, I guess.  I mean that in absolute terms, mainly; I don’t know if this post is much weirder or much less weird than my usual posts.  Possibly every potential interlocutor would have different things to say about that.

I guess that’s okay.  It had better be okay, if it’s true, because if it’s true, there’s nothing anyone can do about that, and they’re already living with it.  This is the Litany of Gendlin, as quoted by Eliezer Yudkowsky, of which I have a screenshot from his book Rationality:  From AI to Zombies, below.

Well, I hope you have a good day, whatever the truth is that you and all the rest of us are living.

*This is according to the AI summary of Google’s search for “Robert Elessar Unanimity file size”.  It’s almost certainly correct, because the info is part of the Amazon description of the book.  But it’s humorous to me that it’s easier to do an AI based web search to find the file size of my own novel than it is to look up the file, since I’m using my phone and don’t have direct access to the original at the moment.

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May the slope of your pain function always be negative

I’ve been thinking about something I wrote in my blog post yesterday.  I had thrown out the thought, in passing, about how it seemed as though all the things in my life that I still do are not things I necessarily do for joy or out of desire to achieve some goal, but rather they are things which are more painful not to do than to do, and so I do them.

There isn’t really a positive motivation—not the pursuit of happiness or improvement or fulfillment or enrichment.  It’s just that the feeling of stress and tension and anxiety (or whatever) regarding the prospect of, for instance, not going to work rapidly becomes worse than the equivalent feelings about going to work.

That’s not a great state of affairs.  Don’t get me wrong; it’s entirely natural.  I’ve written about this many times, this recognition of the fact that the negative experiences—fear, pain, revulsion, disgust, and so on—are the biologically most important ones.  Creatures that don’t run from danger, that don’t avoid injury, that don’t shy away from potential infection and poison, are far less likely to survive to reproduce than creatures that do those things.

We see clinical examples of people lacking some of these faculties—such as those with congenital insensitivity to pain—and while we might envy them a life without agony, it tends to be quite a short life.  Also, they tend to become immobile and deformed due to damage they do to their joints by not shifting position to improve blood flow.

In case you didn’t know, that’s one of the reasons you can’t stand completely still for very long; it’s not good for you.

But many of us, especially in the modern world, have some things that we do for positive experience.  Some of them are dubious, but food, sex, companionship/conversation, singing, dancing, all that stuff, are positive things.  Unfortunately, positive experience cannot be allowed—by biology—to last too long.

As Yuval Harari noted, a squirrel that got truly lasting satisfaction from eating a nut would be a squirrel that lived a very short—albeit fairly happy—life, and would be unlikely to leave too many offspring.

Maybe this is what happens to some drug addicts.  Maybe they really do get satisfaction or at least pleasure from drugs—and maybe that is what ends up destroying them.  At some level, that’s not truly in question, is it?  People who are addicted to drugs forego other pleasures and other positive things, but perhaps more importantly, they fail to avoid many sources of pain and fear and injury.

The reality is probably a bit of an amalgam, I suppose.  I would not say it’s a quantum superposition, though, except in the sense that everything is a quantum superposition (or, rather, a whole bunch of them).

This is one situation in which I think I’m right and Roger Penrose is wrong—a bold claim, but I think a fair one—in that I see no reason to suspect that the nature of consciousness either requires or even allows quantum processes, other than in the trivial sense that everything* involves quantum processes.  But there’s no reason seriously to think that (for instance) neurotubules can even sustain a quantum superposition internally, let alone that such a process can somehow affect the other processes of the neuron, many of which are well understood and show no sign of input from weird states of neurotubules, which act mainly structurally in neurons.

If deep learning systems—LLMs and the like—have demonstrated anything, it’s that intuitive thought** does not require anything magical, but rather can be a product of carefully curated, pruned, and adjusted networks of individual data processing units, feeding backward and forward and sideways in specific (but not necessarily preplanned or even well understood) ways.  No quantum magic or neurological voodoo need be involved.

I think too many people, even really smart people like Penrose, really want human intelligence to be something “special”, to be something that cannot be achieved except within human heads, and maybe in the heads of similar creatures.  Surely (they seem to believe) the human mind must have some pseudo-divine spark.  Otherwise, we oh-so-clever humans are just…just creatures in the world, evolved organisms, mortal and evanescent like everyone and everything else.

Which, of course, all the evidence and reasoning seems to suggest is the case.

Maybe, deep down, there isn’t much more to life than trying to choose the path from moment to moment that steers you toward the least “painful” thing you can find.

Please note, I’m not speaking here about some metaphorical continuum, some number line that points toward pleasure in one direction and pain in the other.  That’s at best a toy model.  In the actual body, in the actual nervous system, pain and fear and pleasure and motivation are literally separate systems, though clearly they interact.  Pleasure is not merely the absence of pain, nor is pain merely the absence of pleasure.  Even peripherally, the nerves that carry painful sensations (which include itching, as I noted yesterday!) use different paths and different neurotransmitters than the ones that deal in pleasure and positive sensation.

Within the brain, the amygdala and the nucleus accumbens (for instances) are separate structures—and more importantly, they perform different functions.  There’s nothing magical about their locations in the brain or the particular neurotransmitters they use.  Those things are accidents of evolutionary past.

There’s nothing inherently stimulating about epinephrine, and there’s nothing inherently soothing about endorphins or oxytocin, and there’s nothing inherently motivating or joyful about dopamine and serotonin.  They are all just molecular keys that have been forged to open specific “locks” or activate (or inactivate) specific processes in parts of other nerve cells (and some other types of cells).  It’s the process that does the work, Neo, not the neurotransmitter.

This brings up a slight pet peeve I have about people discussing “dopamine seeking” (often when talking about ADHD).  I know, the professionals probably use this as a mere shorthand, but that can be misleading to the relatively numerous nonprofessionals in the world.  The brain is not just a chemical vat.  Depression and the like are not just “chemical imbalances” in some ongoing multi-level redux reaction or something, they are malfunctions of complicated processes.  Improving them should be at least as involved as training an AI to recognize cat faces, wouldn’t you think?

But one can do the latter without really knowing the specifics of what is going on in the system.  It’s just sometimes difficult, and the things you think you need to train toward or with often end up giving you what you didn’t really want, or at least what you didn’t expect.

Maybe this is part of why mindfulness is useful (it’s not the only part).  With mindfulness, one actually engages in internal monitoring, not so much of the mechanical processes happening—no amount of mere meditation can reveal the structure of a neuron—but of the higher-scale, “emergent” processes happening, and one can learn from them and be better aware.  This can be an end in and of itself, of course.  But it can also at least sometimes help people decrease the amount of suffering they experience in their lives.

Speaking of that, I hope that reading this post has been at least slightly less painful for you than not reading it would have been.  Writing it has been less painful than I imagine not writing it would have been.  That doesn’t help my other chronic pain, of course, which continues to act up.

*With the possible exception of gravity.

**I.e., nonlinear processing and pattern recognition, the kind many people including Penrose think cannot be explained by ordinary computation, a la Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem, etc.

 

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Pain, pain, go away…and don’t come back some other day

I’m writing this post on my smartphone today, because I decided not to bring the lapcom back with me on Saturday.  I was very tired and sore and worn down from the week and felt that even that small extra weight was more than I cared to carry.

I got at least a bit of physical rest yesterday, but my mental rest was poor, and was somewhat disrupted by a few seemingly minor things that happened.  Worse, though, is the fact that I tried to sedate myself on Saturday night somewhat, but still woke up by two in the morning, after maybe four hours’ sleep.

It’s quite frustrating, as I’m sure you can well imagine.  I suppose it’s better than being one of those people who never seems to be able to wake up on time or to get places on time.  I don’t know how such people would have survived in the ancestral environment.  I suppose it’s just as well for them that they don’t live in such an environment.

So, anyway, I was both rather stressed out and unrested on my “day off” and now I’m no better rested, because I slept even less last night.  Also, my pain, which doesn’t like to become too boring (except in describing the character of the pain), has shifted its focus, and now it is my entire lower half (umbilicus down) that is achy and sore and doesn’t want to move.  Neither side is worse, but neither side is better*.  Although my left middle back and side are way more tight and sore than the right, and my left shoulder still has that weird, seemingly neurological, stiffness and pain.

It would be nice to be able to walk to the train this morning; the weather is not bad for it, and it would be a slight money-saver, though a time loser (but my time is mostly wasted time, anyway).  Unfortunately, I don’t know that I am physically up to the task, and I fear it might exacerbate my pain.  That’s never a good thing.

I wish I still had a scooter, or one of those electric scooters or bikes‒or better yet, that I could ride the bike(s) I have without having to fix their tires and such.  Maintenance of such things is really difficult for me, though; it’s not difficult to do as it were, i.e., the tasks are not in themselves particularly challenging physically or with respect to knowledge or dexterity.

It’s a matter of will in a sense.  Also, these kinds of tasks seem to do something akin to or analogous to creating an allergic reaction:  they make my mind itch horribly, and itching is, of course, a kind of pain, and my mind only has the reserves to deal with so much pain at any given time.

I seem able to regenerate less and less of that reserve each day‒either that or just my reserves are constantly being depleted at a rate faster than they can recover and so there are no “reserves”, just a base rate process that is in the net negative on average every day, and which will eventually run out and that will be that.

I don’t know what will happen then.  I’m honestly surprised that it hasn’t happened already.  Maybe it has.  Maybe this is me without any actual capacity to deal with anything other than those things which are more painful for me not to do.  Hmm.  That’s a vaguely interesting thought.

Whatever the best description is, I am very worn out.  More and more‒or so it seems right now‒I have no sense of any future for me.  I can’t even readily imagine my own future; I can’t see how a future can possibly happen that entails anything but quietly catastrophic dissolution.  And, of course, my pain doesn’t help my mood disorder(s) and my mood disorder doesn’t help it.  It’s another one of those cycles that has a vicious streak a mile wide.

Whenever I mention a vicious cycle, part of me nearly always thinks of the words “viscous cycle”, and I think vaguely about what might constitute a viscous cycle.  If any of you have any amusing thoughts about that, I would be delighted to hear them.  I could use a bit of a laugh today.

I’m really worn out, and it’s only Monday.  I don’t know why I bother.  I mean, I could give causal explanations, of course‒all things that happen in the ordinary world have causes‒and my descriptions would probably be fairly accurate and correct, though probably incomplete.  But as for reasons, that’s another matter.  Coming up with those is more difficult, and some of them are quite tortured.

In Man’s Search for Meaning, the author and psychologist Viktor Frankl points out the notion, not original to him but poignantly and painfully rediscovered by him in a profoundly visceral way in the concentration camps of Nazi Germany, that a person can endure nearly anything if they have a purpose, a reason, a meaning.  But such meaning is not always there to be found, and I don’t want to try to embrace a false one; and though it is possible for people to make meaning for themselves, my knack for that has worsened over time.

Again, the pain wears away so many things, as it has also stripped away so many people and so much property and so many accomplishments in my life.  I think I would be quite a different person, or at least there would be a real difference in balance in my personality, if I could be free of anything but more ordinary pain.

I wouldn’t even complain about being “comfortably numb”.  I know pain is biologically important, of course, but mine has gone well into the region of diminishing marginal returns, then rounded into negative marginal returns, and its net value crossed the x-axis downward a long time ago.  It might be nice to experience at least a brief period of having pathologically too little pain.  Even if it would make me vulnerable to injury and illness, I wouldn’t mind much.  It’s not as though I don’t crash up against illness and injury (in some sense) every day anyway.

Oh, what’s the point?  I’m sorry to bore you all with this nonsense.  I really should just call it quits, because this is at least as pointless as anything else I do, and that’s saying a lot.  It almost certainly does not do the world any net good, and I’m not sure whether it does me any good.

I guess I’ll keep doing it until it becomes more painful to do it than not to do it.  Or until I die, I guess.

*I sometimes like to indulge a clever paradoxical descriptive trick I picked up from Piers Anthony by saying something like “each leg hurt worse than the other one”.

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Happy Valentine’s Day, you filthy animals.

Well, guess what.  It’s Saturday now, and I’m writing a blog post, which can only mean that I am working today.  At the last minute, the schedule of the office was changed and now we’re working.  And we’re supposedly going to be doing this now every other (meaning alternating ones) Saturday.  But, of course, I worked last Saturday.  And who knows how things will change in the future?  I’m pretty sure not even the boss knows, because he changes the specifics somewhat irregularly, though there are always colorably reasonable purposes behind such changes.

I suppose I could merely have said, “No, I’m not coming in this weekend.  I worked last weekend, I had to walk to the bank after work and I caused my knees and my pain in general to flare up badly, and that problem continues.  I need a fucking break.”  But, of course, I’m not really built quite that way.  I have been too strongly trained to operate on the approach that to shirk going to work is to be a jerk*.

So, here I am, at the office, and it’s the middle of the night.  That’s right, when it got to be time to leave, I was in too much pain to want to ride the train‒it’s not comfortable to sit in, and I usually have to go to the upper levels to find a seat, which is a little exacerbating and occasionally exasperating‒and I didn’t want to pay to Uber back to the house like I did on Monday and then Thursday for the above reasons, so…I stayed here in the office overnight.

I’m tired of being in pain, I can tell you that.  I wish it were the sort of thing one could simply “get used to”, but biology does not tend to select for creatures that can get used to and ignore pain.  That would defeat the whole usefulness of pain.  Make no mistake:  like fire alarms, pain was and is (and probably always will be) terribly useful.  And “terribly” has more than one legitimate meaning here.

The trouble is that in the modern world, we suffer from and yet survive injuries and disorders that would almost never have been survived by our ancestors, and we can live on with the consequences of these injuries and illnesses for decades, but our nervous systems don’t have any clear function that suppresses or diminishes pain after a while.  There’s no selection pressure favoring such a thing.  Even for our ancestors who might have survived to have chronic pain, that problem tended to develop after peak reproductive years had already passed, and so evolution literally could not and cannot detect the issue.

Indeed, it’s just barely conceivable, though by no means demonstrated, that it might be good for male humans who have injuries that hamper them to feel the pain worsen, to have it lead to them removing themselves from the population in one way or another.  When they can no longer be physical providers, in order to increase the share of resources for their offspring and their other kin, they can kill themselves, directly or indirectly, giving the genes they share with close relatives that harbor that tendency a selective advantage.  This is hypothetical, bordering on speculative, but it might make some sense.

This could also be related to female humans being better suited to endure long-term pain than males, since matrilineal support among human tribes is common***, but that’s getting ever more speculative.

Don’t get me wrong; the ideas are plausible.  But it’s just when one’s ideas are strongly plausible‒but not specifically tested or backed by clear and specific evidence‒that one must be especially harsh and strict with oneself.  It’s comparatively simple, and psychologically rewarding, to come up with plausible and logical hypotheses, but even if one is very smart, most of one’s hypotheses are going to be incorrect.  Whether you’re more Popperian or more Bayesian, the crucial usefulness of testing a hypothesis to try to refute it or to see how your credences shift is inescapable.

This mildly interesting digression doesn’t change the fact that I am in searing pain lately, and it doesn’t seem to diminish much for long.  I’m already prone to dysthymia/chronic depression (veering into the acute stage frequently) and anxiety with at least some obsessive compulsive patterns, all of it occurring in a nervous system that is…atypical from the start.

I hate the world.  I hate my body.  I hate the twisted mockery my life has become.  I hate large parts of my mind (but not all of it).  I hate being around people.  I hate being alone.  I really just ought to stop the whole fucking ride and get off.  I just need to work up the nerve and the commitment.  I’m getting there, believe me.

Anyway, I hope you’re having just a lovely Valentine’s Day.

*And to rhyme all the time is to act like a slime and be covered with grime**.

**I know, none of that makes sense.  It’s not really meant to make sense.  I just accidentally did some internal rhyming in a sentence and that stimulated me to do more of it.

***There are good biological reasons for this as well.  Mothers, and therefore maternal grandmothers, all know whether a child is their child or not, so it’s easier to know that it’s a good idea to spend effort and resources on those descendants.  Males, in general, can not be as certain.

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That was a weird tangent dot com?

Well, it’s Friday, the 30th of January.  We’re almost done with the first month of the year (2026).  Has it been an auspicious month?  Has it been inauspicious?  I suppose the answer to such questions will vary from person to person depending upon how their personal month has gone.  And I suppose that points toward the notion that actual auspices are certainly not any kind of reliable indicator of how the future might go, at least not without great care to separate true patterns from false ones.

On the other hand, it’s not entirely mad to try to draw some potential conclusions about the near future from what’s happening in the present and what has happened in the recent past.  That’s one of the useful skills that’s available to minds that have the capacity to note patterns‒one can try to anticipate the future based on patterns one has noticed over time, and potentially, one can try thereby to avoid outcomes that are undesirable.

Of course, humans do tend to notice patterns that aren’t actually there a lot more than ones that really are there*.  This is usually‒probably‒related to the notion of the differential detriments of different types of errors:  It’s usually more useful to see potential threats that aren’t there than it is not to see potential threats that are there.

I think anyone who stops to think about such things will recognize that the first type of organism will be somewhat more likely to live long enough to reproduce than the second type, though they may be much less comfortable and content in the meantime.  Jumping at shadows can certainly be maladaptive, and too much of it can have a net negative effect on general outcomes, but not jumping at hyenas and lions (for instance) tends to be a very short-lived habit.

This goes back to my frequent talking point that fear, the ability (and it is an ability) to become alarmed and unhappy but energized and driven to fight or flee is going to be present in nearly every lifeform capable of movement over time.  Variations who feel less fear, or none, will not tend to reproduce as much because they are more likely to be killed in any given finite stretch of time, so whatever genetic makeup they have that leads them to lack a fear response, or to be prone to lack it, will not tend to propagate down the generations.

“Genetic makeup”, the term I used in that last sentence (go look, it’s there), made me think of a possible future technology in which people use some CRISPR-style techniques to achieve the effects that hitherto require the use of cosmetics.  They could insert genes into the cells of their cheeks, for instance, to lead them to have more pinkish pigment, or perhaps to make local blood vessels dilate for a nice blushing look, instead of having to use rouge (which is what I think the stuff is called that one applies to make one’s cheeks look pinker).  Or one could generate actual pigments in the cells of one’s upper eyelids, or increase the thickness of one’s eyelashes, all that sort of stuff.

Of course, doing this might entail risks.  Presumably, altering the genes of a given population of cells, even at the local level, could increase the risk of developing cancers, because one cannot perfectly control where genes will insert (at least not so far), and there will always be a chance of mucking up genes that regulate cell division rates.

Once one cell becomes more rapidly reproducing than its companion cells, it will tend to overpower them, in numbers anyway, over time***.  And with rapid and persistently higher rates of reproduction, there come more chances for new mutations to happen.  Those mutations that kill their cells obviously just go away more or less immediately.  Even the ones that revert their cells’ division rates back to “normal” will be quickly locally overwhelmed by the faster growing ones.  But a mutation that encourages even faster division/reproduction will quickly take hold as the dominant cell type, ceteris paribus.

And then, of course, this even more rapidly dividing population of cells will have that many more chances to develop mutations.  And so, down the line, given the billions of cells present in just one’s face, we find the chance for skin cancers to develop, once a cell line becomes so prone to reproduce itself that it cannot be constrained by any local hormonal or immune processes.

That was a weird tangent, wasn’t it?  Although, frankly, I could change the title of my blog from “robertelessar.com” to “thatwasaweirdtangent.com” and it would not be inappropriate.

I’ll finish up today with just some basic housekeeping style stuff:

I will probably not work tomorrow, so I will probably not be writing a blog post.  But if I do write one, it will show up here.  I will certainly not be sleeping in the office tonight, but I did sleep here last night.  I had a terrible day yesterday, pain-wise, and after work I went to the train station but the train was badly crowded and there were no relatively comfortable seats available, so I gave up and trudged back to the office.

I just felt worn out, and I feared that if I did go back to the house, I might not come to the office today.  And today is payday, of course, and Sunday is the first of a new month, so rent is due (Wouldn’t it be nice if rent was dew?  Maybe not if you lived in the Atacama Desert.  Though a little dew might be very strong currency there, come to think of it, relative to most of the rest of the world). 

Hopefully today will be a better day than yesterday with respect to pain.  So far, at least, it doesn’t feel any worse.  The hard office floor can help a bit sometimes with my back pain.  That makes a certain amount of sense, or at least it may do so.  After all, our ancestral environment did not include mattresses.

Anyway, that’s what I’m up to, that’s my life.  I mean that seriously.  That’s pretty much all there is to my life:  Getting up and getting to work (while writing a blog post), doing office stuff while dealing with noise and people and tinnitus, not getting long enough breaks because people seem incapable of watching the time, being the last to leave the office, commuting back to the house, trying to get at least a bit of sleep, and then repeating.  There appears to be nothing more than that coming my way until I’m dead.  Which, I think you might be able to understand, becomes more attractive and less frightening as the tedious, exhausted, and painful days go by.

I hope you all have a good weekend.  As for me, I hope at least to be able to sedate myself enough to have a longer-than-usual sleep tonight.  It’s not ideal (pharmacologically induced sleep being generally and significantly less beneficial than natural sleep), but it’s what I have to use.

*Think of the constellations**.

**Won’t someone please think of the constellations!?!?

***It’s like the difference between exponential functions. ab will grow much more rapidly**** when b is 3, for instance, than when b is 2 or 1.5 or 1.1, and so on.

****Stop looking at the negative side of the number line, dammit.  Just stipulate that a is always a positive number.  Or make the function the absolute value of ab, in other words, |ab|.

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There’s hope a great blog’s memory may outlive his life half a year.

Hello and good morning.

First of all, 

Actually, that was second of all, wasn’t it, following my traditional Thursday blog post salutation?  I would almost count that greeting as not being a first thing, however; it is practically automatic, requiring no new knowledge and very little in the way of thought.

Still, there clearly is some caloric expenditure in my nervous system related to doing it, and obviously there are impacts upon the world immediately around me.  And once the post is posted, that impact expands, at least a little.

After a very short while, I suspect, any impact that my writing that particular opening had will be entirely washed out by noise‒even thermal noise at some point.  Like the man said, “The world will little note nor long remember what we say here”.

Of course, the irony is that Lincoln’s speech is what we do remember most from Gettysburg.  By “we”, I mean Americans in general.  I don’t know if anyone in the rest of the world ever reads Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address (though it is a very well written, concise, and moving speech).

And yet, his point is that we ought to remember the battle, and the lives of the soldiers involved in it, and (to my mind) we ought to try to understand the causes of the Civil War and to wonder to what degree the soldiers on each side really were committed to the arguments and ideas supporting their group, or if, deep down, they were just fighting for “our group” against “their group”.*  Yet we most remember, ironically, the words of the man who said that the world would little note nor long remember what he said there.  That was the point I was making.

Anyway, it’s January 1st, the first day of 2026.  Huzzah.  Rah.  Yippee Kiy Yay.

I don’t think it bodes well for the year to start on a Thursday, since this is the day that DentArthurDent had such trouble getting the hang of.  On the other hand, maybe it’s a good thing, since Thursday is and has been my blog day for quite some time, even when I was writing fiction every other weekday.  Probably neither fact matters.

Of course, I am going to work today, despite it being such a universal holiday, and I am not at all happy about it.  I did no celebrating overnight, of course; what on Earth would I celebrate?  But my sleep was not good, anyway, because of all the fireworks and nonsense.  Also, the people with whom I share a house had a big family get together that had barely ended by the time I started writing this.  And, of course, I have chronic insomnia anyway.

It’s actually rather cold here in south Florida‒in the mid-forties right now‒and that makes getting to work slightly less pleasant than usual.  Also, the transit systems are on holiday schedules, and I have a long commute, especially since I have no vehicle.

I also feel that I might be coming down with a cold, but I’m not going to call in sick, because then it would look like I was pretending to be sick so I wouldn’t have to come in on New Year’s Day.  Still, my ears are plugged and my throat is a bit raw, and what might be just my allergies is acting up more than usual.  I’m not really coughing or sneezing, though.  Still, maybe I’ll develop pneumonia and die.  Fingers crossed!

Speaking of ears (I was, you can go back and check), all of a sudden in the middle of the night last night persistent tinnitus began in my left ear.  I have had chronic tinnitus in my right ear for about 18 years now, probably largely due to recurrent ear infections, which have tended to localize to the right side more often than the left.  When you have chronic tinnitus for so long, you get to the point where you…almost…don’t notice it anymore, though I do notice how bad the hearing is in my right ear.

And now my left ear feels very much like the right, with the high, sharp, intense pitch constantly sounding.  Mercifully, it seems to be roughly the same pitch as the noise on the right, a very high D note.  But it is quite annoying, and I fear my hearing is going to be too reduced for me to enjoy music, which is not so much terrifying as horrifying.

Ah, what are you gonna do?  This is life‒it’s a load of crap, but at least you get to die at the end.

I suppose I’ll be writing another post tomorrow, and probably Saturday as well, so you have that (those?) to which to look forward if nothing else.  I don’t know how many people will even read this post today, to be honest.  Will it be fewer than usual?  Will it be more?  Does it matter?

I know the answer to the last question at least.

Again, Happy New Year.  I’ll leave an optimistic-seeming GIF here below for you.  I don’t necessarily share the sentiments, but to be fair, as the Doctor knows full well, great isn’t necessarily good.

TTFN

*I’m reminded of Faramir’s words (in the movie) regarding the fallen soldier on the field:  “The enemy?  His sense of duty was no less than yours, I deem.  You wonder what his name is, where he came from.  And if he was really evil at heart.  What lies or threats led him on this long march from home.  If he would not rather have stayed there in peace.  War will make corpses of us all.”

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“Well…I’m back.”

First off, I apologize for not writing a post yesterday.  I did not go to work because I was not feeling at all well.  And, of course, the office was not open on Saturday, so I didn’t do a post then.  I ought to have been well rested, at least, but I wasn’t.  Being alone at the house is not conducive to restfulness and recharging for me, though it’s better than not getting days off.  But I have only my own company, and I hate that guy, so it’s not pleasant.

One of my main weaknesses in the realm of the physical is my GI tract, and that was the main problem over the past few days.  I’ve taken a lot of meds for my chronic pain‒aspirin, acetaminophen, ibuprofen, naproxen, all that stuff‒over the last 20+ years (and more, day per day, over the past 10 years or so), so there are no doubt chronic toxic effects on my stomach and even intestines (and possibly liver and kidneys).

Also, I have to take proton pump inhibitors or at least H2 blockers to prevent myself from getting gastritis and ulcers from all the NSAIDs I take.  That’s probably interfering with the absorption of at least some nutrients, such as perhaps calcium and iron, for instance.  I try to counter that with supplements, but it only can go so far.  Also, they tend to cause their own troubles.

Why do I do it?  Well, chronic pain really sucks, I can tell you.  I actually have told you, many a time and oft, probably to the point of making you feel nauseated*.  So I have to make choices about what I value more at any given moment.  And future selves of me don’t always agree with the past selves about these things‒that’s how brains/minds work, I’m afraid.

So, there’s the added frustration of trying to tell myself not to overdo it on aspirin, say, and to cut back on the omeprazole and maybe replace it with famotidine, but failing and becoming physically ill when pain is too much and then stomach upset is too much.  But nothing is ever just right.  And pain is never-ending but not constant, in the sense that it waxes and wanes at least a bit, and some days it is harder to keep to a manageable level than others.

Sometimes it helps if I do things that hurt myself, deliberately, to distract me at least a bit.  That’s difficult to grasp, maybe, for someone who hasn’t experienced such things, but it’s the way it is.  Also, hurting oneself physically can help distract from psychological pain, and give one a sense of at least some control of one’s pain.

Unfortunately, and perhaps strangely, chronic pain does not distract from psychological pain; it makes it worse.  No wonder Darth Vader was always so grumpy‒he was in chronic pain that must have been horrible (which he brought upon himself, of course).  Mind you, the “dark side” of the Force probably didn’t help.

I often think it’s very strange for something like the Force to have a “light side” and a “dark side”.  It feels very much that the sentient beings are projecting their own values onto something that is, finally, a natural phenomenon.  Also, I don’t get why someone would pick a part of the Force to “use” or to follow, but try to avoid the other “side”, if one is truly trying to discern and follow the “will” of the Force.

Oh, well, the metaphysics and metaethics of fictional universes can sometimes be entertaining, I guess, but this is not one such time.

In some ways, it’s just as well that I didn’t write a post yesterday, since it was the 45th “anniversary”** of the murder of John Lennon.  I might have dwelt on that a bit much, since it’s a horrible event that still grinds away at my sense of whether the human race has any net value whatsoever.

John Lennon has now been dead for five years longer than he lived, while his murderer turned 70 this year, alive and at least somewhat healthy.  Well, that little purulent exudate can at least count himself lucky that he has not found himself in my power in the time since 1980.  I would use all my knowledge and all of my quite active and very dark imagination to keep him alive and begging for death as long as I possibly could.  The Spanish Inquisition were pussies.

Anyway, that’s enough of that.

In closing, I just want to share a notion and question that came to me (and has done so on and off):  I wonder if I would get more, or at least second-level, response to my words if I did a sort of vlog in which I read out loud some of my prior posts.  What do my readers think?  Would it be worth it?

Anyway, try to have a good day.  Remember, “do” or “do not” is never fully in your control; there is only “try”.  Or as the Japanese say, you are responsible for the effort, not the outcome.

Yoda’s a moron.

*Ad nauseam, in other words.

**It seems almost disgusting to use that word here, since often anniversaries are celebrated, and this is not something worthy of celebration, but I had a hard time coming up with another word that worked.  And etymologically, the word “anniversary” doesn’t carry value judgments, it just means something that comes every year.

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“From childhood’s hour I have not been as others were…”

Well, it’s not just the start of a new “work week”, it’s also the start of a new month‒the last month of 2025.  That’s December, by the way, in case you didn’t remember or were confused by the month’s name, which indicates that it’s the tenth month, not the twelfth.

Don’t be confused by the fact that this month starts on a Monday, by the way; it’s when the first of a month falls on Sunday that the month will have a Friday the 13th.  This month will have a Friday the 12th.  I guess it doesn’t matter, but it’s mildly disappointing.

It’s hard to be clear why I find that as disappointing as I do.  I mean, I like prime numbers and particularly the number 13, but every month has a 13th day.  I guess it’s because of the supposedly unlucky implications of Fridays the 13th that I want to embrace the day.  Is that sympathy (for something not alive) or is it perversity?

I suspect it’s a bit of both.  I tend to feel sympathy and affection for peculiar things, and literally to feel bad for some inanimate and even abstract entities when I think they have been unfairly maligned.

But I do also tend to have a sort of affection for things that others fear.  I don’t know if that’s a defense mechanism or what.  But, after all, I did make a brief (failed) series of blog posts called “My heroes have always been villains.“

Whatever.  It doesn’t really matter.  I’m just a weirdo*.  What else is new?

Not much, of course.  I mean, I’m on my way to work, because I am working today, though I don’t feel very well.  But then, I never really feel well.  I’ve been in pain literally for more than 20 years straight, so I never do feel “well” anymore.  Every time I get up from my chair in the office, such as when I need to use the bathroom, I feel a bit like the Tin Man, trying to kick painfully rusted limbs into motion.  That’s just one example.

Do I have a heart, unlike the Tin Man?  I don’t know about the metaphorical one, but the physical one is real, because I had surgery on it for a birth defect when I was 18**.  It’s probably true, though, that my metaphorical heart is also defective, perhaps more so than my literal heart.

Who am I kidding with “perhaps”?  Of course it’s more defective.  For one thing, there is no surgery to repair a metaphorical organ.  You’d think that something conceptual might be easier to alter or repair than something physical, but that would only be the case if we understood how the whole thing works well enough to be able to figure out how to make adjustments and‒more crucially‒which adjustments to make and when.  It’s at least as difficult, in its way, as trying to control the weather.

What am I going on about?  I don’t know.  More pointedly, one could ask why I am going on‒with this blog, with work, with my life, with anything.  I’m wasting your time and mine, I think.  Mostly I’m wasting yours I suppose, since my time is a waste from the start.

Well, no, actually, that’s not entirely true.  Everything that led up to the birth of my children was absolutely important.  I would not change anything up to that point.  Any negative experiences that happened to me until then were worth it.  After that, though, there are many things I would change if I could‒indeed, there are probably many things that I cannot even bring to mind that I would want to change.

I don’t know what they might be, and I don’t really try to dwell on such things‒that’s probably part of why I dislike, or at least don’t enjoy, the weird manga/anime/light novels in which someone gets (for instance) hit by a car and seems to die, but is sent back in time to an earlier stage in their life and gets to live it again, but with their old memories, so they can change their outcome.

Yes, there is a whole slew of such stories, just as there are oodles of related “isekai” stories, where someone dies and ends up reborn in some “magical” world.  I guess that’s a bit related to things like The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, but he didn’t have to die to go to the Land, he was summoned.  And also, when Stephen R. Donaldson wrote those books, back in the 70s and 80s, the idea was relatively original, or at least not wildly overplayed.

Speaking of overplayed, I’ll call this blog post to a close now‒and by that criterion, I ought to call everything to a close.  I am badly overplayed.  I jumped the shark 13 years ago or more.  I don’t know why they keep renewing this show.  But I appear to be under contract to keep playing this stupid role as long as the show is renewed.  I wish I had an agent to whom I could talk about getting out of this with minimal fuss and mess.

Alas, that will probably just be up to me, and I’m not good at doing things with minimal mess, though the “fuss” part is at least something of a question.

Anyway, enough.  This is stupid.  I’ll just wish you all a very good day, and a good week, and a good month/rest of the year, and then a most excellent year next year.  And, what the heck, while I’m spitting into the ocean, I wish you a truly wonderful remainder of your lives.

Wishes have no power, maybe, but mine are at least sincere.

*And also a creep, no doubt.  What the hell am I doin’ here, indeed.  I really don’t belong here.  Not that I’m convinced that anyone does.

**The birth defect didn’t happen when I was 18, of course‒it was found when I was 18, and operated on within that same year.  But it had been there since at least the time I was born, more or less by definition.

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“Shadows of the evening crawl across the years”

Well, it’s Wednesday morning‒insert your joke of choice related to the Beatles song She’s Leaving Home here‒and here is my blog post for the day.  I will not be posting tomorrow (barring the very much unforeseen), since today is Thanksgiving Eve* here in the US, and therefore tomorrow will be Thanksgiving.  I will not be working on Thanksgiving, so there is to be no “traditional” Thursday post.  I’m sure you’re all devastated, but hopefully you can eat yourself into a stupor tomorrow to flee from your sorrow and loss.

Speaking of stupors, I slept a bit better‒or at least a bit longer‒last night than the night before.  This is because, despite it being a weeknight/worknight, I knocked myself out a bit with an OTC sleep aid.  So, if I seem a bit odd today‒for me, I mean‒that’s probably why.

Of course, I’m well aware that the sleep induced by such medications is not proper sleep.  That’s a very interesting fact for someone who gets proper sleep on their own, but it’s pretty theoretical to me.  It’s a bit like quibbling by saying, “going through a wormhole to get to a distant part of spacetime quickly isn’t really going faster than the speed of light”.  Well, okay, if I can find ways to break the laws of causality** I will, but in the meantime, I’ll use the wormhole.

Likewise, sometimes I just want to be unconscious, and I have a hard time achieving it on my own.  Oblivion is such a relief when and if it happens (so to speak).  Yet, even when I do sleep, there’s always a background watchfulness in my head, a feeling that where I am is not safe in some sense, so I cannot completely relax.

I almost never wake up without some manner of start, i.e., a bit of a jump in place.  I don’t know why***.  Maybe this is just the way it is when you’re nominally a member of a species of pack hunters but you’re functionally completely alone, separated from whatever group(s) there were to which you belonged and surviving on your own as best you can.  The world is never fully safe for such a creature.

Well, the world is never fully safe, period, full stop.  No one here gets out alive, after all.  Nevertheless, natural selection tends to lead to the state where the only surviving organisms are descendants of those who feel fear and who feel pain and who try to stay alive indefinitely, even when that survival is pointless (biologically speaking, I mean‒I won’t get into the deeper philosophical questions that can apply, because that would take too much time and energy).

I’m going to bring this to a close here pretty soon, if I can.  My thumb arthritis is acting up, today, and writing this is more painful than it usually is.  Well, actually, I don’t know that “arthritis” is the proper word, since that implies a process that is primarily inflammatory.  It’s probably more precise to say “arthropathy”, which just means “something wrong with a joint”.  “Arthralgia” works quite well here, also, meaning just “joint pain”, but it’s pretty darn vague in its implications of any possible cause.

I suppose it doesn’t make a great deal of difference.

Anyway, I hope everyone who is celebrating has a truly wonderful Thanksgiving Day tomorrow, and that you spend a pleasant time with friends and family (and maybe some football).  I will be back on Friday, barring (as always) the unforeseen.  I work at a sales office, after all, and Friday is “Black Friday”, traditionally the biggest sales day of the year in the US.  Though, there has been a significant degree of “feature creep” or whatever the best term might be regarding that, so now the whole of this time of year is becoming an extended “Black Friday”.  Natural selection tends to encourage such things.

Anyway, I expect to write a post on Friday, so I will “see you” then.  Or at least you will see me.

*There is no such holiday, official or unofficial, as Thanksgiving Eve, but it’s still obvious what I mean by it.  Isn’t it?

**The speed of light in a vacuum being the speed of causality.  This appears to be a large part of why nothing can travel faster.  How could something move more quickly than causality?

***As far as I can tell, it’s not because of having gone to prison.  For one thing, my sleep problems started way before that pleasant interlude.  For another, I didn’t have any real problems with people starting shit with me in prison.  Apparently, I looked (look?) a bit nuts or something.  Also, honestly, I got along okay with people there, all things considered.

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Do you remember a Guy that’s been in such an early song?

It’s Guy Fawkes Day in the UK‒also known as Bonfire Night if I’m not mistaken.  “Remember, remember, the 5th of November, the gunpowder, treason, and plot…” and all that.  The holiday isn’t celebrated in the US, which is not surprising, since it has to do with a failed attempt to blow up the Houses of Parliament in 1605, before the future United States was seriously being colonized, let alone officially founded.

Of course, it’s still a good day for civil resistance (though perhaps without the explosives).  It might be a good day for some group to slip powerful laxatives into the food of many, if not all, of the members of the current administration and many of the members of Congress and the Senate and even the Supreme Court.  Our national government could certainly use a serious colon cleanse, metaphorically speaking; it might be amusing for that to become literal*.

I’m not actually endorsing that action or encouraging it, but it’s a rather entertaining thought.

I’m very tired today, even though we’re just coming into the middle of the week.  Of course, I’m almost always tired but very rarely sleepy, which is not a great combination.  I suppose someone who never gets a full night’s sleep does, in a certain sense, live more than someone who sleeps well.  If, say, a person can only sleep 4 hours a night instead of 8, then after 60 years, they will have been awake for the equivalent of another person’s 75 years, if my math is right, and ceteris paribus.

But all other things are very much not equal when one has chronic insomnia.  The early part of Fight Club gives some pretty good descriptions of how insomnia can feel.  I particularly like the line, “…everything is a copy of a copy of a copy…” which does give something of an idea of the feeling of never getting enough sleep.

So the tradeoff would seem to be, in a sense, living more but worse versus living less but better.  But that still doesn’t quite capture matters, because chronic insomnia also increases the occurrence of many chronic and even acute illnesses, thus likely shortening the insomniac’s life relative to good sleepers’ lives.  One’s immune system tends to suffer, for one thing, which not only affects one’s risk of infection but also of cancer.  In addition, one’s metabolism gets thrown askew, probably partly due to chronically elevated stress hormones.

Of course, some of these effects might actually be causes, mightn’t they be?  Chronically elevated stress hormones can, by more than one route, reduce one’s sleep quantity and quality, for instance.  That’s one of the tricky things about the biology of multicellular organisms.  Many questions become “chicken and egg” problems.

Though, the actual question, “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?” is one to which the answer is glaringly obvious.  Eggs have existed, in some form at least, since before backbones happened (paleontologists, please correct me if I’m wrong about that specific ordering).

Even if we focus only on hard-shelled eggs, like those of the proverbial chicken, these date back to the earliest fully land-based vertebrates, which if memory serves showed up at least a few hundred million years ago.  Chickens have only really been around, certainly in their modern form, since no farther back than the dawn of agriculture, say about 10,000 years ago.

These numbers are ballpark figures that I’m pulling out of my…memory.  If I’m off by a significant amount on any of them‒certainly by an order of magnitude or more‒please let me know.

Okay, well, I don’t know what else to write about this morning.  I mean, I could probably nevertheless keep writing indefinitely, pulling various weirdnesses out of my…store room.  But I won’t.

It might be fun to set that challenge for myself some day:  to see how long I can write at one sitting, with only bathroom breaks, and then just share the result on this blog without serious editing.  I think I would want to use the lapcom for such a task, or something similar with a real keyboard, rather than writing on my smartphone as I’ve been doing for most of my posts.

I wonder if there’s any Guinness World Records type entry on something like that.  Not that I’m into trying to make or break world records, but it’s amusing to contemplate.

Maybe someday I’ll do something like that, though I would need some manner of support to do it.  But it probably won’t happen very soon, if it happens.  It will probably have to wait until after I’ve caught the flying pig back from my skiing trip in Hell.

And I don’t know how to ski.

Well, that’s enough for today, I think.  I’ve passed 701 words, and like Major Tom after he passed 100,000 miles, I’m feeling very still.  I wish my spaceship knew which way to go.

But we can’t necessarily trust the good astronaut’s judgment on such matters, for as Bowie said later, in Ashes to Ashes, “We know Major Tom’s a junkie, strung out in Heaven’s high, hitting an all time low.”

Hopefully, you all have a much better day than Major Tom.

*The Dulcolax™ treason and plot, you might say.