holidays

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How now, you secret, black, and midnight blogs!

Hello.  Good morning.

It’s Thursday.  It is, in fact, the 2nd Thursday in November, which means that, from the point of view of Thursdays in November, we are halfway to Thanksgiving (which in the US is the 4th Thursday in November).

Of course, we are not precisely halfway to Thanksgiving from the point of view of the days of the month of November overall.  Thanksgiving falls on the 27th of November this year‒14 days from today, of course‒so we are not quite halfway there as far as the days of November are concerned, but we are close to it.  If the month had started on a Friday, the halfway point in days versus Thursdays would be the same.

I think that the maximum disjunction would happen if the month began on a Thursday.  The 8th would then be the 2nd Thursday, and Thanksgiving would fall on the 22nd, which is quite a bit larger than 2 x 8.

Mind you, all this depends on starting one’s count in November.  That is not too unreasonable, but one could just as sensibly start counting Thursdays right at or after January 1st (let’s see, this year that’s 46/48 Thursdays, or about 95.833%).  If we did that, we would already be practically at Thanksgiving.  If we counted all days, we might be even closer still, percentage-wise.  Let’s see, 317/331, or about 95.770%.  Whataya know?  I was wrong, the Thursday one is “closer”.  I suspect this varies from year to year, but I’m not interested enough to check.

We could also begin our count at the beginning of autumn, which sort of seems appropriate.  Or, perhaps most sensibly still, we could start right after the previous Thanksgiving, beginning our counting on “Black Friday”.

Jeez Louise, I think I’m losing my mind, here.  Why am I writing about such nonsense?  I mean, yes, it’s interesting to notice how arbitrary and artificial human ways of counting days and things and so on are, so I suppose it’s somewhat edifying, and even could be mildly interesting for a moment.  But I nevertheless feel bad for wasting my readers’ time.

Though, I suppose, in a certain sense, one could say that all time is wasted‒“Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines” and all that.

“Where do we come from?  The dust.  Where do we go to?  The grave.”

Of course, that last quote was not meant to be a general description of the human condition, but refers to Ray Bradbury’s “October People” in Something Wicked This Way Comes.  I’ve always thought that I’m an October person, since I was born in October.  Like Macduff, in the play from which Bradbury’s title above is taken, I was a C-section, though it would be a hyperbolic* to say that I was “ripped untimely” from the womb.  (Still, does my manner of birth mean I could defeat Macbeth?)

October is over now, in any case, and who** knows if I shall see another.

I don’t know if anyone has ever written about “November People”, but they don’t sound particularly scary nor particularly inspiring.  This assessment is not meant to refer to people born in November!  Several of my favorite people were born in November.

In other news, I did receive my Principles of Neural Science yesterday.  I used my dollar coins to choose a section, and I read it in the afternoon:  it was about neural firing and muscular activation during locomotion, briefly comparing lamprey with vertebrate, especially mammalian, locomotion patterns.

It may seem trivial, and I didn’t learn much that I didn’t at least implicitly know before, but the specifics are new, and all information has the potential to be useful.  We cannot know for certain ahead of time what knowledge might be most beneficial, just as we cannot predict the specifics of progress and invention.

As I said, I chose the textbook page via my coin-flipping process, using my three Sacagawea coins.  I keep a few dollar coins with Susan B. Anthony and/or the aforementioned Sacagawea with me at all times.

I carry such coins not so much for decision-making but because I like to roll them across my fingers when I want to “stop my hands feeling busy”.  I guess it’s a form of “stimming”, and I’ve been doing that particular one since college.  I taught myself to do it after I saw Val Kilmer, as Chris Knight, doing it in the movie Real Genius, which was one of my favorite movies.

Well, this has been a lot of pointless nonsense today, hasn’t it?  I apologize, and I guess I can try to mitigate my offense by at least trying not to produce too much of nothing***.  So I will draw this post to a close now.  I hope you all have a good day.  I will very likely write a post tomorrow, so you can look forward to that, if it’s the sort of thing to which you look forward.

TTFN

*You know, like non-Euclidean geometry.

**The WHO does not know, though with a bit of background information they could probably make reasonable predictions.

***According to the song, that can make a man feel ill at ease.  It can also, according to the same song, make a man abuse a king, which seems like it would be quite a rare situation.

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For a charm of powerful trouble, like a hell-blog boil and bubble

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday.  It’s also “Devil’s Night” as it was called back where and when I grew up.  I don’t know if anyone still calls it that.  Nor do I know whether it’s still a night on which some people set fire to things in “celebration”.

I never did quite understand that tendency.  Well, no, actually I completely understand the urge to burn things, but I don’t understand giving oneself license to burn things that belong to other people, just because it’s the day before Halloween.

Of course, one could just call today Halloween Eve, but when you break down the etymology that doesn’t quite work.  Halloween is already “short” for “All Hallows’ Eve”, the day before what I think is called The Feast of All Saints, or just All Saints’ Day.  I guess that must be celebrated on November 1st, since Halloween is October 31st, but I have no idea how it’s traditionally celebrated by those who celebrate it.

Are there people who actually celebrate it?  There probably are such people.

I guess I get the progression:  on Halloween, the ghosts and goblins and vampires and werewolves parade around, before the ascendancy of “good” the next day in the form of all the nutbars who have been declared “saints”.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure there were some fine people who have been made saints, but most of the ones of whom I’ve heard were pretty clearly just people who were mentally ill.  However, their society was not prepared actually to help them in any way, so they called them holy people.  I guess it’s (usually) better than what happened to the people who were mentally ill but were seen to be possessed or to be witches or warlocks or what have you.

Mind you, they’re all dead now, and they would have been dead pretty much no matter what, so I guess it doesn’t matter to them what sorts of nonsense people have imagined about them.

Getting back to the holiday progression, I think the addition of Devil’s Night on the night before Halloween makes some sense and improves the mythology.  By that reading, on October 30th, the Devil is truly ascendant, and there is no flouncing about in silly costumes (well, there is, but not “officially”) just acts of destruction.  Then, on the 31st, regular people dress up as creatures of the night, to turn the tables on beings that live by causing fear (much as Batman is said to do!) and run them out of town—to Hell, presumably*.  And then, once the ordinary people have done the work of driving off evil, the saints can come marching in and pretend to be the source of the goodness, when it’s really just that bad things have been driven off (by ordinary people choosing not to be afraid of them).

That’s my highly editorialized take on things, anyway.  But, whatever.

This is usually my favorite time of year, and Halloween is certainly my favorite big general holiday.  I don’t really have any plans to celebrate it this year, though.  I’m not going to be giving out candy—I live in the rear room of the house, anyway—and I don’t mean to dress up or do anything celebratory otherwise tonight or tomorrow (alas, I plan to set no fires).  Like the rest of the landscape of time before me, this patch is dreary and boggy and gray and a bit smelly.  And there’s just dull mist ahead.

By the way, I think I’m going to do the same thing today that I did yesterday and set my initial goal for this post as 701 words, which I’ve almost reached already as I write this.  I will almost surely pass it, but not by too much.  I think it worked well, yesterday, though not as well as whatever I did the day before, when for unknown reasons I saw a huge spike in the number of people who came and saw my blog.  Perhaps that was because I not only invited people to like it and share it, but actually bolstered that by sharing my song Like and Share**.

What would happen if I shared by song Breaking Me Down?  Let’s see.  I’ll embed it below, and we’ll see how successfully I’ll be digested or otherwise broken down today.

In the meantime, please have a good Devil’s Day or whatever.

TTFN

*As Dave Barry pointed out, that’s in concourse D at O’Hare International Airport, which frequent travelers will know.

**Maybe it was sharing the Ricochet Racers that did it, triggering nostalgia in members of Generation X.  It’s possible.

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Joy and Oy to the world

I’m expecting and planning for this to be a short post; I think I’ve said pretty much all I have to say already, though, like in Pink Floyd’s song, Time, I “thought I’d something more to say”.  But since I’m going to the office today‒we’re open half a day, not least because I have to get payroll done and sent off a day early so that people can get paid this week‒I figured I might as well write something.

I’ll refrain from any more stupid Boxing Day references.  That was just a prime example of my sense of humor, such as it is.  I’m sure it gets particularly tiresome if one is exposed to it on a regular basis.  Actually, I have that on good authority.

Instead, I’ll just wish a Merry Christmas to those of you who celebrate that holiday, and a Happy Hanukkah to those of you who celebrate that one*.  And, of course, for anyone celebrating any other solstice-related holidays‒or just celebrating the solstice itself, and the now-increasing daylight in the northern hemisphere‒I wish you the best.  Next week we will have New Year’s, a traditional time for trying to initiate better habits and improve one’s life.  Mind you, the date of the “new year” is quite an arbitrary thing, unlike the solstice, which is a real phenomenon.

On the other hand, in the southern hemisphere, days have now begun to get shorter after the solstice, and Christmas and Hanukkah are summer holidays.  It’s an almost bizarre thought to those of us who grew up in the northern hemisphere, but that’s just the way it goes.  It certainly provides more evidence that, yes, Virginia, the world is round.

Anyway, that’s pretty much it.  I’m not celebrating anything, myself‒I don’t have anything to celebrate.  But I’ll send out some gifts and things to people who matter to me, because at least I can do that tiny bit of good in the world.  After that, who knows?  Work, days off, summer, winter, none of it really matters or makes any difference.  It’s all pretty much without interest, so whatever.

I will close with a paraphrase from Aragon (in the movies, not the book):  “I wish Joy to the world; I keep none for myself.”

santa-whoand merry

Happy-Hanukkah-

*This is one of those rare years in which Hanukkah starts at sundown on Christmas night.  It won’t be that way next year, since the Hebrew calendar is lunar, and the months change relative to those of the Gregorian calendar from year to year, since the moon’s orbit time around the Earth is not an even fraction of the Earth’s orbit time around the sun.  There are various adjustments and even extra months sometimes needed to keep the calendar roughly consistent with the solar year while maintaining the tradition.  The rabbis tend to be quite clever about figuring such things out.

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But though my blogs be mean, take them in good part.

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday again, so I’m writing another edition of my blog post.  It’s not the first nor the second post I’ve done this week, so calling it my “weekly” blog post would seem somewhat inaccurate.

It’s now only two weeks until Boxing Day, so you should get out your gloves and your speed rope and your heavy bag and get yourself back in shape for the ring!

I really didn’t want to go to the office today.  If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have written a post, except perhaps a single line such as “No blog post today”.  That would be borderline self-contradictory, but since my thoughts and words have been dealing with depression and suicidality lately, I thought if I just wrote nothing people might become concerned.

I’m probably being egotistical even to imagine such a thing.

The reason I didn’t want to go to work was because the office holiday dinner takes place tonight, and I really feel tense about it.  We’ll be going to the same restaurant we used last year, and it was overcrowded and had too much sensory overload even back then, such that I had to start drinking (alcohol) as soon as possible to keep from scratching my own skin off.

It would have been one thing if everyone there had been people with whom I felt comfortable.  There are three or so people at the office with whom I get along well enough that, if just that group and I were going somewhere, it would have been okay.  Certainly there have been many times in my life when I’ve gone out to eat (and similar) with family and/or close friends, and I enjoyed myself.  But I was younger then*, and I had more energy for acting normal, and the people who knew me well were nonjudgmental about my weirdnesses, anyway.

Most of the people at the office, though, are people with whom I wouldn’t normally hang out at any stage in my life‒no insult to them intended, there’s just no common framework.  And the two or three people with whom I think I would most have enjoyed spending time seem to have become more distant recently.  Perhaps that’s all my doing; it almost certainly is my fault.  I know I’m becoming ever less fun to be around.  So I don’t really have anyone with whom I feel I could hang out comfortably‒not in the office, probably not in the world.

It’s not that there’s no one out there who might be willing.  There are many kind people about, though sometimes that can be hard to believe.  But I am not good company‒not for anyone, probably not ever again‒and I certainly don’t deserve any kindness.  I am too weird now, and my life is a mutated, Lovecraftian monstrosity compared to what it once was.

Let’s face it, I was always just a weirdo, anyway; I was just better at pretending to be human in the past‒or if not better, I at least had more energy for it.

Now, I barely have the will to get up and get going in the morning**.  Almost everything I do is just to distract myself, to divert my attention from being aware of my own pathetic and worthless existence.  It makes me wish I had a serious drug or alcohol problem.  Then I could both have a powerful distraction and something that would potentially lead to my death in short order.  Instead, I’ve wasted years trudging through my nosferatu pseudo-life.  My books and blog posts notwithstanding, it really would have made more sense if I had died some time in 2013.  Nothing since then has been of any real use, not to anyone else, and not to me.

I’ll try to work up something remotely akin to enthusiasm for the holiday dinner tonight.  But, if I’m too stressed, I just won’t go.  I know the food will be good, though.  I’m trying to watch what I eat, but everything and everyone around me tends to want to sabotage that intention (including me) especially at this time of the year.

Maybe I should just eat and drink until I make myself really sick, and then I won’t want to do it anymore.  It would be quite nice not to be a person who eats as an escape, as his only reliable source of distraction.  I feel much more clear-headed when I don’t eat, and I know I am much sharper.

How nice it would be not to be such a pathetic glutton.  But I do miss my sister’s holiday cookies.  And I mean to eat whatever I feel like eating this evening‒whether I go to the office dinner or not.

Maybe I’ll get botulism, or a bad case of Hepatitis A that turns fulminant or something.  Keep your fingers crossed!

TTFN

*Such is the nature of the past.

**Though I still cannot sleep even close to as much as I would need to be healthy.

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But can a short blog post be neverending?

It’s Tuesday morning, which is probably not neverending, because if it were, one would never even reach Tuesday afternoon, in which case it couldn’t be neverending, no matter what the Beatles say.

Although…if Tuesday afternoon never begins (because Tuesday morning is neverending) then Tuesday afternoon would also be neverending.  After all, according to the Oracle, everything that has a beginning has an end.  To which I tend to respond, “Yes, at the very least, if one reverses the direction in time in which one is considering a thing, then its beginning is an end.  QED.”

Enough.  I’m writing this post this morning because I have nothing better to do with my time‒or at least nothing better that I am capable of rousing the gumption to do.  I mean, I could always be on brilliant dot org, working on some mathematics or physics or computer science problems, or I could be writing a story‒you know, something productive.  But I don’t think that’s likely to happen.

This Thursday, of course, is Thanksgiving.  You’re welcome.  So, only two more shopping days left.

It used to be that nearly everything was closed on major holidays like Thanksgiving.  And Thanksgiving is still maybe a more “closed for the holiday” holiday than even Christmas and New Year.  But there will always be stores open now‒at least a 7-11, a Wawa, or some other equivalent.  And working at those stores on that holiday will be people who don’t have plans to celebrate with anyone and/or who could really use the extra money so they work.

Anyway, I think it’s still the biggest family holiday in the US.  It’s certainly the time when people travel to visit other regions of the county and exchange viruses from those different regions with the greatest fervor.  This is part of why, in the US at least, there tends to be a big surge of respiratory infections early in December.

I don’t have statistics on that.  I just remember it being the case.  That’s clearly not a rigorous scientific conclusion, it’s my perception of the situation, possibly supported by the experience of other physicians, and possibly by some remembered textbook reference(s).  Anyway, that’s not significant evidence, not if one is trying to make a scientific evaluation.  But I still do think it’s the case, and I think that impression is based on good evidence that I have encountered in the past.

I really don’t have much else to say.  Even this nonsense is too much effort to continue for long.  But who knows, maybe a short blog post will be more popular.  In any case, I don’t know what will happen tomorrow, but I plan not to write a post on Thursday, so this may be my last chance to wish those of you who celebrate it a Happy Thanksgiving.

My wishes are never very effective, unfortunately.  Just look at my life.  But maybe they’ll work better for you than for me.

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Doom’d for a certain term to walk the night and, for the day, confin’d to blog in fires

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, and so I am writing my traditional Thursday morning blog post.  This is my first post this week—which feels odd, I have to admit—and should also be my last post for the week, barring (as I always say) the unforeseen.

It’s the Summer Solstice in the northern hemisphere (the Winter Solstice in the southern hemisphere), and so it is the “longest” (“shortest”) day of the year.  It’s also the official beginning of summer in the northern hemisphere (winter in the south), though nature doesn’t give a flying f*ck at a tiny little rat’s ass about how humans label the days.

Speaking of labeling the days, the Tri-rail system is making a repeated, official announcement that on July 4th it will be operating on a weekend/holiday schedule, which is not a surprise.  What is irritating—to me, though probably not to anyone else—is the fact that they have set it up to say that this schedule will occur on “the 4th of July, July 4th”, which they repeat in Spanish and Creole.

It’s irritating because, if they’re going to name the holiday and then give the date, why don’t they refer to it as “Independence Day”, which is after all the original name and point of the holiday?  I mean, it’s worth recalling the ideas included in the Declaration of Independence, aspirational though many have always been and not yet quite fully instantiated.  You know, the whole right to life, “liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”, the fact that all (people)* are created equal, and the fact that governments only legitimately exist in order to secure the rights of the people, “deriving their just power from the consent of the governed”, and that when government fails to perform its fundamental duty, it is the right of the people to change it, with the caveat that one should not change governments lightly or frivolously.

It’s absurd to say that the 4th of July is on July 4th, because it’s redundant, quite apart from failing to acknowledge the point of the holiday.  It’s a bit like making an announcement, “El tren funcionará según el horario de los domingos el Cinco de Mayo, el quinto día de mayo.”  The fact that the announcement is in the form it takes is further evidence that humans don’t think either about the significance of the day nor the logic and concision of the language they use to convey information.

It sometimes gets to the point where one doesn’t bother trying to determine why a particular person is a misanthrope but rather one wonders why anyone is not a misanthrope.  I’m not a bigot, though; I don’t just hate humans.  I don’t think the other animals are any better that humans are (and I’m no great admirer of fungi, plants, protozoa, and prokaryotes).  They’re just less competent (in the broad sense of the word), and so their blind self-interest and response to entirely “local”** influences tends to cause less damage and create fewer absurdities and stupidities.

That’s enough of me griping about train announcements.  In other news, I have been writing this week (though I did not work on Saturday after all, because the office was closed, so I didn’t write any on that day).  Since last post, I’ve written a total of 3,731 words on Extra Body.  It would have been more—it probably should have been more—but I’ve really been writing only a page a day, and I’ve had to force myself to do that.

I’m incredibly exhausted.  My sleep has been consistently poor, even for me, and if anything it seems to be deteriorating steadily.  I can’t even rest when I have down time; I’m extremely tired but I don’t feel sleepy.

To quote John at the bar in the song Piano Man, “I believe this is killing me”.  I’m not speaking metaphorically.  Every day I feel vague and separate, like a very faintly received and poorly rendered analog television signal, dominated by static.  My dysthymia/depression is very bad, my tinnitus is just awful, making my sensory sensitivity to sound (or “SSS” for short) all the worse.  I can’t even tell if I’m writing coherently, or if I’m speaking coherently at any given day or time.  Thankfully—I guess—I speak to nearly no one, other than a few people at work, and that’s pretty limited, because I feel like I have nothing to say that isn’t inane or repetitive.

Of course, it doesn’t help that Sunday was Father’s Day, which is at best a bittersweet holiday for me; I haven’t physically been in the presence of my children since about 2013, and though I’ve exchanged emails, texts, and a few phone calls with my daughter (and she sent me a cool gift for Father’s Day), I’ve had all of one e-mail exchange with my son since 2013 (unless I’m forgetting something).  Clearly, I’m unsatisfactory and/or unpleasant even to the people I love most in the world.  You can just imagine how irritating I am to people who hate me (of which group I am the chief member).

And, of course, two Saturdays from now, June 29th would have been my 33rd wedding anniversary.  Thirty-three is, of course, the age at which hobbits “come of age”, and was Frodo’s age at the beginning of The Lord of the Rings, though it was seventeen years later that he left the Shire to begin his great journey.

Okay, well, I’m rambling now.  I’ve probably been rambling all along, but it’s becoming impossible not to see it at this point, even for me.  I’ll try to get a little more done on Extra Body this week if I can.  It really is almost finished, but that’s a rather nebulous status.  I could conceivably finish the first draft by next Thursday, but I would not recommend placing any bets on it.  I also wouldn’t recommend placing any bets on me living to see it published, let alone to writing and finishing HELIOS, or anything else, for that matter.

I’m just too damn tired and discouraged, and whatever my species actually is, they seem to have forgotten about me, if they ever realized that they left me here***.  I’ve been investigating high, open parking garages in the area—they’re not as common as I would wish in this part of Florida—and experimenting with replacing the psyllium with other substances in these generic Metamucil capsules I have, just to try to figure out promising techniques or ideas.  I don’t know what’s going to happen, of course.  But I’m damn near sure that there will be no epiphany or miraculous rescue.  As far as I can tell, that’s just not how my life works.

Anyway, I hope you all have a good week, and a good beginning of summer, though of course the heat in the American east and northeast is supposedly pretty bad.  It’s rough down here, too, but that’s not anything new.

TTFN

destroyer

*Even Star Trek only fixed their androcentric version of things with the start of The Next Generation in the eighties, so we shouldn’t be too hard on Jefferson et al for unthinking sexism (they had other moral errors that were at least as egregious).  Even in Greece, the birthplace of democracy, women only got the right to vote in 1952, so the US had them beat by over 30 years.  And, of course, there are plenty of countries throughout the world where women still do not have equal rights…or often any rights.

**I’m using “local” in a relatively technical sense, here.  Obviously in these days of global communication networks of various kinds, one can be influenced by ideas and forces not merely from across the planet but also—given the information from history—from the past.  However, all these influences only come to bear upon individuals when they actually receive the information that influences them, when any incoming influence actually impinges on their nervous systems.  And, of course, no organism can help but respond to the forces that operate directly upon and within it, anymore than one can choose to waive one’s compliance with the laws of physics.  So, local, national, and international news are in this sense nevertheless all local forces.  Even gravity is really a local force in this sense—each portion of the gravitational field responds not literally to distant objects, but rather to the state of the field right next to it.  This is especially obvious in the phenomenon of gravitational waves, but is true of all gravitational effects.  And, of course, like all influences in this, our universe, the transmission of those influences cannot go faster than the fundamental speed of causality, which is the speed of light.  There is some possibility that, at least in some sense, quantum mechanics is a non-local process (or set of processes) but I have my doubts about even that.

***This is metaphorical—well, usually—and I am not literally delusional.  It merely captures how I feel about myself in relation to all the other people in the world.

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…and he must needs blog that the devil drives.

Good morning and welcome to another Thursday.  There’s no longer anything very interesting or specific to say about the date.  It’s not the week before Christmas, or the week between Christmas and New Year’s, nor is it even the week immediately after.  It is, instead, yet another featureless span of time, trapped in the wasteland of days that marks the first part of every year.  The next truly celebrated holiday—in America, at least—is Valentine’s Day, and that’s a highly artificial, commercial holiday, mainly celebrated by people in romantic relationships (known to the rest of us by various uncomplimentary epithets).  After that comes St. Patrick’s Day, which is a little better, and then the Easter/Passover time, which has much to do with the arrival of Spring.  Once Spring is here, certainly for those who live up north, one hardly needs a holiday in order to feel like celebrating.

Of course, here in South Florida, at the same latitude as Upper Egypt*, Spring arrives a bit earlier.

Those of you who follow my blog will know that I’ve gone back and forth a bit on the topic of how many projects to work on at once.  Well, I’m thinking of going back (or forth) yet again.  As you may recall, I decided to write Penal Colony and to publish Solitaire because Unanimity was taking so long, and I needed to give myself some variety so that I could maintain my pseudo-sanity.  But all along I’ve dabbled in other matters, such as my experimentation with audio versions of my stories and trying to put out a weekly posting on “Iterations of Zero.”

I can’t help but think, though, that if I hadn’t allowed myself to be distracted, that Unanimity might well be done by now.  Of course, that would mean that it would probably be slightly different than it’s going to be in this universe, but it would be done, and that’s the point.

So…I may go back to the purist’s recommendation and stick to one story at a time (except during the cooling off period between the first draft of a novel and the rewriting/editing process, which is a very good time for a short story).  Of course, there’s little doubt that, someday down the road, when I feel bored or impatient, I’ll switch it up again.  I’ll keep you posted on how that all goes.  I’m sure you can hardly wait.

One reason I’m thinking about this is that I’m frustrated that editing Penal Colony is going so slowly…or feels like it is.  By my usual standards, it’s not that long of a short story; it’s only about twenty-five thousand words.  But of course, for the moment, most of my writing time is dominated by Unanimity, as I come ever closer to its end…it’s hard to walk away from it when my schedule calls for me to do some work on Penal Colony.

This would all be easier, of course, if I were able to write full time, but alas, I must needs make my living in other ways for the time being.  Perhaps in days or years to come this will change.  Hopefully at least some of my Everettian branches have a full-time-writing future…which would mean that I will have such a future, even if I also have other futures, in which no such thing happens.  Each of those futures will be just as contiguous with—just as identical with—the current person writing this blog as any of the others.  All of which speculation assumes that Everett’s “Many Worlds” interpretation is right, of course, which is my personal suspicion.

Isn’t quantum mechanics fun?

I hope all of you who live in climates north of me are staying safely warm to as great a degree as possible.  It feels cold down here when it goes into the low fifties overnight (as it did last night), but I know that’s just because we’re all soft and weak.**  On the other hand, I have mangoes and papayas and avocados and bananas and coconuts all growing in my yard, so there are compensations to such softness and weakness.  I know that you’re all enduring much greater privation.  You may console yourselves with the knowledge that, before long, my home may be (literally) underwater.  A little schadenfreude helps keep the blood warm in winter; indulge yourself.

And what the hell, a belated Happy New Year to you all.

TTFN

*The “Upper” part, by the way, apparently refers to the course of the Nile, so Upper Egypt is actually farther south than Lower Egypt.

**I grew up in Michigan, did my undergraduate degree in upstate New York, then lived in Chicago for two years before med school…so I’ve known what it’s like to be through real, relatively severe cold.  Of course, people from North Dakota, from Minnesota, and from Canada may laugh at my presumption.  I accept such laughter as a just rebuke, even as I stand outside in the sunshine without a jacket in mid-January, wondering why creatures such as we—with almost no fur, and with the highest concentration of sweat glands of any living organism—ever left the rift valley of Africa.