insomnia

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Imagine whatever headline you want; I don’t care

Welcome to the Monday of the first full week of July in 2026 CE (or AD if you must).  I hope that those of you in the USA had a nice Independence Day weekend.  There are no more significant holidays (that I recall) until at least September, now.

I didn’t do anything to celebrate the holiday‒unless you count trying to burn some kudzu‒because holiday celebrations generally involve other people, family and friends and such like, and I did not have any such group with whom to celebrate.

It’s probably just as well for such groups that I am not a part of them; I’m a serious downer and an unpleasant person* to be around for very long.  This used not to be the case; in my default or older settings, I’m naturally more hyper and sometimes rather silly (that too can be irritating, I fear).  Since my chronic pain began, however, I have become a much grumpier, angrier, more irritable person.  Things that I would have laughed off in the past, or about which I would have been more “philosophical”, easily get my ire up, even tiny little, minor, innocent things.

Using the seven dwarfs as personal descriptions, I spend most of my time these days Grumpy, rarely if ever Happy, frequently Dopey, quite Bashful almost always, from time to time Sneezy, not Sleepy nearly as often as I would prefer.  But I’m always Doc.  Take that for what it’s worth, which is probably nothing.

Anyway, yeah, I didn’t do anything pleasant on Saturday, nor much on Sunday, though at least I did talk on the phone to my sister.

I toyed with the notion of “celebrating” the 4th by making my way to the front of the Palm Beach County courthouse and making a fireworks display in the style of Thích Quảng Đức.  However, it was not only a Saturday, but it was a federal holiday; no one would have been there.  Also, I don’t know that I would have the courage to go through with it.

I need to do something though.  I cannot keep doing what I’m doing.  But I don’t see many options which I’m capable of embracing, given my dearth of personal energy and motivation.

I’m sorry I’m not being more positive or interesting, or at least quirky and strange in a less negative way, today.  Actually, I don’t really know if I’m ever interesting.  But, anyway, I just don’t have the energy right now to pretend not to be depressed, like I often do.  Maybe I’ve been pretending all my life that way**.  They do talk a lot about “masking” in neurodivergent people, and it has struck me as a very accurate and apposite notion since the first time I encountered it.

But, of course, there’s not necessarily any identity underneath such masks.  There’s certainly nothing very consistent, since “who we are” at any given moment or stage of our lives is but a three-dimensional slice of what is actually a four-dimensional being.

In case that sounds weird, I just mean that who we are at any given moment is true for just a point in time, a snapshot of a being that has not only spatial extent but also has a beginning and an end in time and which changes with every moment of that time, taking in and losing particles, maintaining that roughly constant but always altering configuration from frame to frame of of the movie that is a person’s life.

So, a question like “Who am I, really?” is perhaps best answered by saying, “I am the being who is asking that question.”  There is probably no deeper answer, at least not any much more specific one.  There is no “character description” in some Platonic realm that lays out who we really are, or if there is, I’ve encountered not the slightest intimation of it, and I would be very surprised if it existed.

Anyway, enough gobbledegook.  I’m just tired already, and it’s only the very beginning of Monday morning.  I’m so very tired.  I really ought to go before I spoil the party, to paraphrase a good Beatles song (see below).  I fear that I will just be a black cloud for everyone around me today, and probably in general.

I can’t even seem to find a book I can stick with reading right now; I shuffled through several different genres, let alone books, in my Kindle library a few dozen times in recent days, weeks, whatever, trying to find something interesting.  But after a brief time reading each thing I lose momentum and interest.  Even The Noonday Demon, a well-written book about depression, loses me after a bit.  Even Physics isn’t interesting to me, and that’s a bad sign.  Ditto for music, or movies (or shows) or what have you.

Everything is just a drizzly, insipid gray‒metaphorically, and sometimes also literally.  And I sometimes don’t have the energy to keep pretending that I can see anything else.

Like Ed Deepneau said in Stephen King’s Insomnia, “…sometimes the world is full of colors…but now all the colors are turning black.”

Enough, this has gone on too long already.  I apologize.  I hope you have a good day and a good week and a good remainder of your lives.

*More than one person has told me this, and they did not compare notes.

**Probably not.  It would be very bizarre indeed to be born depressed, though the tendency thereto can certainly be congenital, much like both forms of ASD that I have/had.

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Sleep! Sleep like your life depended on it!

Well, it’s Friday, and it’s a slightly fun date to write out:  6-26-2026 or (slightly more fun) 6-26-26 or, in the European way, 26-6-2026 or 26-6-26 (which sounds a bit like a quarterback calling plays in American football, which is slightly ironic for the European format).

I’m writing this post on the lapcom, by the way, because I decided I didn’t want to let an entire week go by without using it, and it just feels better, more “natural” for me to write with it.

I wonder how many words I’ve written on this mini lapcom or one nearly identical to it.  Unanimity (books 1 and 2) was more than half a million words just by itself, and I don’t know how many words I’ve written in all my blog posts that I’ve done on one or another mini lapcom.  I suppose I could figure it out, but it seems like tedious work.  If anyone wants to check it for themselves, you can try, but don’t ask for access to my smartphone or lapcom.

I have a small bit of what is, for me, momentous news:  I slept almost five and a half hours last night!  That was more or less uninterrupted sleep, as far as I know.  If I woke up during the night, I don’t remember it, and I certainly needed to rush to the euphemism as if I had not gotten up during the night.

This may not seem like a big deal, but it’s the most sleep—certainly the longest uninterrupted sleep—that I’ve had in a long, long time without significant use of things that make me sleepy*, like Benadryl®.  However, though I have tried to use the aforementioned antihistamine on non-weekend days in the past, I’ve learned that it actually does me more harm than good the next day if I need to work.

The hangover/persistent effects of that stuff make me slow and stupid (even more so than usual!) and I don’t feel mentally very rested after it.  This makes sense, neurologically, given that sleep is not merely a lack of consciousness but a very involved, active, and utterly crucial** process we still understand only somewhat, and almost all sedatives disrupt it.

I have some hypotheses about why last night’s exceptional sleep happened.  Of course, it could well be just a random outlier—they happen if you wait long enough in pretty much all intrinsically variable systems that produce bell-curve distributions of outcomes—but there are a few contenders for possible, more causal, reasons.

I am always trying various things to see if they improve my health, my sleep, my pain, my mood, etc.  I don’t tend to be as scientific as I would prefer to be about such things, alas.  I tend to be in a constant state of low-level desperation (rather like the “low-flying panic attack” in Radiohead’s Burn the Witch), because I feel so uncomfortable in so many ways so much of the time, and so it’s all but impossible not to try as many things as one can try at any given time.

When you have a bad itch in the middle of your back that you cannot reach directly, and there is no one around to help, you can probably be pretty clever (and desperate) in how you’ll scratch that itch.  Well, itches are a kind of pain—they’re mediated similarly but not identically in the nervous system—they’re just a low-level kind.  That’s part of why scratching works to provide temporary relief:  the local receptors get drowned out by the surrounding inputs.

Now, if itching in your back can be so impossible to ignore that it drives you to scramble madly for a pencil or the corner of a wall or a tree trunk or whatever, no matter what you’re doing—and yet it can be countered by just locally running your fingernails over the surrounding area—well, just think how much more difficult it is to ignore a serious, deep and persistent pain, as well as general, persistent (largely social) anxiety, and depression.  Even when it’s been going on for years, for decades, the very hardware of your nervous system does not let you simply ignore it.

So, yeah, I’m cautiously glad about my night’s sleep.  I don’t want to get too excited.  It may not ever happen again.  What follows the vast majority of outliers in statistical distributions is a subsequent regression toward the mean.  This applies not just to good outliers but also to bad ones, though, so it’s not all bleak.

Anyway, maybe I’ll sleep well this weekend.  I’ll certainly sleep longer, because notwithstanding my above admissions about the drawbacks of antihistamines, it’s nice to be unconscious and physically resting for longer than usual, if the consequences are not significant.  So, long live diphenhydramine (so to speak).

I will not be working this weekend, so I don’t expect to produce another blog post before Monday.  I hope you all have a good weekend.

*It does make me sleepy—very much so.  I found that out the first time I had to take it in response to an attack of hives I got (apparently) from using Irish Spring™ soap.

**How crucial?  As far as we can tell, every animal with a nervous system needs to sleep a significant portion of its time.  This includes aquatic and marine mammals and reptiles, a fact that engenders some amazing adaptive creativity, such as creatures sleeping in one half of their brains at a time.  Evolution may be the true blind, idiot god, but it has a lot of time (much of it in parallel to itself) to explore innovation-space, and it does produce some amazing things.  But it does not seem able to select for simply not sleeping in any creature.  But sleep makes an animal vulnerable, tremendously so.  So, it must be really crucial—life and death crucial—for there to be no yet-discovered alternative.

 

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Tir’d with all these, for restful death I cry, as, to behold desert a blogger born

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday.  Further bulletins as events warrant.

I don’t know what to write today.  I’m really, really mentally fatigued.  I feel as if I’ve been working for forty days straight instead of just four.

I guess that’s at least slightly biblical, if you care about such things.  You know, raining forty days (and forty nights) or wandering in the desert for forty days while occasionally getting tempted by the devil and whatnot.

It’s all rather silly, of course, but it is memorable.  Anyway, I write stories about supernatural entities attacking college towns or trapping the spirit of a dead addict in a train station or about whole universes potentially colliding or teenagers becoming demi-vampires.  I can hardly complain if other people’s stories aren’t realistic.  Though, at least I don’t claim, let alone believe, that mine really happened.

Anyway, I haven’t written any new fiction in quite a while, and that is severely demoralizing.  I also haven’t played my guitar or even listened to any music this week.

I have listened to/am listening to Sean Carroll’s Mindscape podcast, because the first one of every month is his “Ask Me Anything” podcast, which lasts over 3 hours and is almost always very interesting.  If you like physics with a bit of philosophy thrown in, you might enjoy it.

Of course, what I should be doing‒or, rather, what I want to want fervently to be doing‒is reading Professor Carroll’s General Relativity textbook, Spacetime and Geometry, as well as other similar sources.  Or I want to wish to go on Brilliant dot org and work through their mathematics and physics and CS courses as completely as I can.  Or I want to yearn to get to work on the Babbel app, learning some German or some Russian or some French‒it doesn’t seem to have any Asian languages (last time I checked), so I can’t use it to bone up on my Japanese, nor to try to learn Cantonese or Mandarin or what have you.

But my mind is so tired.  I don’t even do any singing, let alone playing, like I said.

I know why I’m so tired, or at least, I know a big part of it:  chronic pain.  For just about a quarter of a century‒nearly half of my life‒I have been in pain every day, all day, except for those brief moments when I have had enough medications on board to do their own damage to my mind and my body (depending on which of the many medications it is that I’ve taken).

I’m also always grumpy nowadays, which is really disappointing.  This probably goes back to when my chronic pain really became chronic and exacerbated my depression and everything, but it’s become more persistent over time, and now it seems to be my default state.

The people who know me now just think of me as a grumpy and ornery person by nature; it’s even a bit of a joke, since I know that I am grumpy* and at least retain the capacity to be self-deprecating and not to hold it against people.

But that’s not the way I used to be!  That’s not who I was before my chronic pain started.  I did have trouble with depression (and I was, apparently, always autistic), and that probably sometimes made me irritable, but not like now.  I think‒I recall‒that I was usually a fairly upbeat and enthusiastic person, reasonably friendly and kind whenever I could be.

Anyone reading who knew me in the past, feel free to disabuse me of that notion if it’s wrong.  In some weird way, it might be comforting to learn that I’ve always been just an asshole, I simply didn’t know it back then.

Oh, and teeth; I used to have great teeth.  I took good care of them, flossed all the time and everything.  I had dentists tell me that I was a very boring patient.  But various of the meds I’ve taken (and the mental states into which I’ve fallen, to say nothing of the state prisons into which I’ve fallen) since my chronic pain started have more than decimated my oral hygiene, despite regular, frequent brushing and flossing.

I am a shambles.  I’m a twisted wreck of what I used to be, with only just enough in common with that self to remind me of it.  Or so it seems to me.

I don’t think I’m going to last much longer.  I do not want to last much longer‒not like this.  Every day is a trial by endurance, like the stupid “touch the truck” thing, but as far as I can see, there’s no prize…not even a stupid truck.

It’s more like Space Invaders:  see how long you can keep shooting down all the things that are trying to destroy you, but as you succeed, the onslaught becomes more and more difficult, and it never lets up except for brief seconds when it’s about to send a new, harder wave at you.

And then, once you finally, inevitably fail, it’s just…game over.  It might as well not have happened.  Maybe you can put your initials up if you lasted unusually long (thereby scoring more points than others), but no one really cares, and your mark will be displaced very soon anyway.

It reminds me of the final words of my story Solitaire, which you can get as a stand-alone story or in Kindle format or hard cover in Dr. Elessar’s Cabinet of Curiosities.  Now that’s a story that’s not silly, but it is very dark and horrifying.  It’s also short, so if you’re interested, it won’t take much of your time.

Okay, well, that’s it for now.  Unless you’re lucky, I’ll write a post tomorrow and also on Saturday.

TTFN

*I sometimes say that I am an amalgam of the Seven Dwarves:  I’m occasionally happy, I am sometimes sneezy, I’m quite bashful in many situations, I’m frequently sleepy but rarely enough to stay asleep for long, I’m definitely often dopey, I’m usually grumpy…but I’m always Doc.

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“Nothing to do to save his life, call his wife in.”

What a strange night and morning it has been.  I had a terribly disjointed sleep, which itself is not surprising‒in fact it’s more or less par for the course‒but then I dozed off for a bit just after 3.  Then I almost overslept for my reserved Uber to the train station.  I reserved the ride to make sure I wouldn’t be tempted to walk any part of the way to the train, since my knees and hips and everything else are still bad, and I have taken significantly less naproxen than usual, so I am very stiff and sore.  But I didn’t set my alarm, because I’m almost always awake anyway.

I was able to scramble and even to shower and then make it for my ride without any penalties, though that wouldn’t have been too horrible an outcome if it had happened.  Indeed, I might have then bit the bullet and gotten an Uber all the way to the office.  That would cost a lot more, though.

Anyway, I hate the very notion of being late for something, even if it’s not really important and was a deadline/time semi-arbitrarily chosen by me.  There’s no one really in my life for me to disappoint, other than myself, of course, and I’m already almost always disappointed in and by me.  Still, the notion of being late is mortifying to me, and I really need to struggle to resist as much self-loathing as possible, so it’s best not to fail at one of the few things at which I usually succeed.

So, here I am.  I made it to the station and I’m writing this post.  To that degree, at least, I am successful.  I am, of course, a failure at pretty much everything else.  Certainly I have failed at nearly all the things that have been truly important to me.

C’est la vie, I suppose.  Some people succeed through no credit of their own, and can thereby develop a sense that they are special and divinely protected or some such stupidity, when in fact they are some of the least impressive humans around.  Other people‒many more, it seems‒fail and fall despite having done everything they could, in the ways they were told they ought to do things.

They keep trying to be and do good, trying to achieve success and stability, maybe even trying to have a family and a career.  But they end up seeing everything fall apart, feeling it crumble in their hands even as they try to hold it together.  Indeed, often their attempts to buttress and repair things seem merely to speed up the destruction and exacerbate the decay.  Then, finally, they die alone, surrounded by no one (or at least by no one they know, no one who loves them, if such people even exist).

C’est la mort as well, I guess.  The universe makes no special deals.  It makes no promises, either, other than its implicit “promise” always and only to proceed by its own rules, though we only incompletely know what all those rules are.  It certainly never said, “If you do everything right according to these very human-invented and evolved and imagined rules of behavior, I will ensure that you have something at least approximating the good life you have been told to seek and to expect.”

The universe doesn’t actually say anything at all, come to think of it.  Well, it “says” stuff in the sense that people are part of it, and they say various things, but they in no sense represent the intentions and thoughts of the universe (these do not appear to exist, so people could not represent them).

The universe, as far as we can tell, has no larger scale intelligence and intentions.  It merely is, if the concept of “mere” applies to something that may well be infinite in spatial and temporal extent, and at the very least is much, much larger than anything humans evolved to grasp directly, and also much, much smaller and more finely grained than humans ever evolved to grasp directly.

I guess “mere” is in the eye of the beholder.  And joy is in the ears that hear, not in the mouth that speaks, as Foamfollower often said.  Though I doubt there is much, if any, joy for anyone anywhere in “hearing” my words.

It’s hard for me even to say that I have joy in writing them.  I certainly feel internal pressure to write them, and going with it does relieve some of that tension, and that relief could be called joy, I suppose.  But I don’t think that’s what poets and plasterers and everyone in between really imagines when they speak of “joy”.

Still, we can only take what the universe gives us.  It’s not offering any exchanges.  And it’s not as though we can just go somewhere else to see if they have a better deal.

So, I guess we do what we can with what we have where we are and try not to let ourselves get distracted by foolish notions that the universe owes us some reward.  As far as I can see, the universe “promises” us only one thing, and‒also as far as I can see‒it never fails to deliver this, sooner or later.

Anyway, I hope your weekends are starting off more auspiciously than mine is.  Of course, my weekends always have the major drawback that I am there, and so far, it is certainly a drawback today.

Please take care of yourselves.  I hope you have some joy this weekend that isn’t just a dishwashing liquid.

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“You look so tired, unhappy…”

I don’t think I’m going to write anything interesting or thought provoking today, as I sort of did deliberately earlier this week (Monday more than Tuesday).  I certainly don’t expect to write anything profound.  I’m actually just very mentally and emotionally* tired right now, which is nothing new, but which is more onerous sometimes than others.  Such is the case with all things, I guess.

Yesterday, for most of the day, I felt extremely grumpy, by which I mean that basically everything was bothering me.  Part of this is no doubt due to my recent exacerbation and complication of my chronic pain:  I did something to injure my right knee, and it’s still very stiff and sore, especially when I first try to rise after being seated for a while.

It eases a bit after I walk a little; the stiffness seems to work itself out some.  But then it just re-seizes up as I sit, and it’s quite painful once I move again.  It certainly isn’t enough to distract from my chronic pain, but it does add extra highlights to it.  I guess at least it keeps things from being too dull (though the pain still often feels extremely boring‒in the “drill bit” sense, not the “tedious” sense**).

I’m sure it’s all plenty boring for you to read, probably in more than one sense.  I apologize.  You come to my blog in good faith, expecting to find something at least tolerably worth reading, and I keep spewing my vitriol and discomfort all over your minds.  Again, I am sorry.

I’m so tired of my life, though.  Yesterday, I don’t know how many times, or in how many ways, I fantasized about…well, you know.  I’m just very drained, and I feel as though there are always new setbacks.  I suppose that’s true, in a sense.  It’s probably true for almost everyone, in some fashion or other.  That doesn’t make it better or easier to bear, though.  If anything, it just reinforces my sense of despondency about the world and the universe.

Ordinarily, I can be philosophical about such things, embracing the apparent lack of meaning partly because it means that people can create and choose the meanings of their own lives.  But chronic pain and chronic insomnia just chew away at one’s sense of optimism or even one’s sense of acceptance.  Chronic pain tends to make one hostile and even spiteful, especially when one is dealing with it all by oneself.

Also, my thumbs are sore, despite the fact that I’m trying to find ways to give them a rest.  And the stupid rash on my right hand that seems to have started (years ago) due to some kind of contact hypersensitivity to something in the “rubberized” grip of those Pilot® gel-roller pens (which I love but, alas, must avoid) continues to act up, and as a consequence the skin near the crook of my right thumb is dry and splitting open, which can sting quite a bit.

Oh, and I’d also like to register a complaint about this parrot what I bought not half an hour ago from this very boutique.

You want to complain?  Look at these shoes!  I’ve only had them three weeks, and the heels are worn right through.  If you complain, nothing happens, you might as well not bother.

Something like that, anyway.  It is terribly annoying.  O that this too, too solid flesh would melt, thaw, and resolve itself into a dew.  Fie on’t!  O fie! ‘Tis an unweeded garden that grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature possess it merely.

And if the cloudbursts thunder in your ear‒you shout and no one seems to hear‒and if the band you’re in starts playing different tunes, I’ll see you on the dark side of the moon.

Sorry about that hodgepodge of quotes from various brilliant British artists from different times and very different genres.  Such are my go-tos, as they say.

What is it about Britain that has led to everyone from Shakespeare to Newton, to Darwin, to Maxwell, to Monty Python, to Tolkien, to Orwell, To Kipling and Wells, to Byron and both Shelleys, to the Beatles and the Stones and Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin and Radiohead and the Police and so on and so on?  Maybe it’s the chronic emotional repression, which leads to the build-up of thoughts and feelings that have to burst out somewhere?

Except I don’t think that’s how such things as feelings actually work.  Maybe it’s just that it’s not culturally “acceptable” there to express one’s deepest feelings and concerns except through formal art.  Keep a stiff upper lip, everyone‒unless you’re making an embouchure to play an instrument.  Then you can blow away!

Speaking of which, that’s probably what many of you wish you could do to me right now.  With that in mind, and since I don’t think I’ve something more to say, I will draw to a close.  I hope you all have a very good day.

*Aren’t those really just part of the same thing, though?  I think so.  Emotions are a kind of thought, or at least a state of mind.

**Though it is all but unbearably tedious, believe me.

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“Perfect” IS the enemy of the good

I would like to propose that we eliminate or at least strongly curtail the use of the word and concept of “perfect”.  And since there is no reason for me not to propose it, I will do so:

Let us eliminate or at least strongly curtail the use of the word and concept “perfect”.

I wrote those two short paragraphs‒really, a short paragraph and a single sentence‒yesterday afternoon, starting this blog post much earlier than I usually do, because it’s a subject that’s a bit of a pet peeve, but which is also, I think, important.

People have this word, “perfect”, and they think it means something, so they try to behave as if it means something.  But for all but the most trivial cases‒one’s score on a straightforward test, the answer to a well-defined problem in mathematics, et cetera‒it’s a word with no serious meaning in actual reality.

What would a perfect person be?  What would that even mean?  Perfect by what criteria?

What could it mean to say that a work of art is perfect, that a song is perfect?  One can say an interval of notes is “perfect”, e.g., a perfect fifth, but that is because it is a concept with a precise definition in a very limited bailiwick.

In the real world, so to speak, “perfection” is a will-o-the-wisp, an illusion without underlying substance that will tend to lure one into a treacherous (metaphorical) bog.  I think it’s fairly widely recognized that perfectionism is a dangerous and usually detrimental habit or attribute.  One can almost never achieve perfection, even by relatively serious criteria, in the real world; reality is too complex and unpredictable.

But the notion of perfection can certainly succeed at taking most of the joy out of one’s accomplishments.  No matter how good one already is, or how much one improves from one’s previous state, one can never just feel pretty good about it if one is always measuring oneself against an unrealistic and unachievable standard, so one is always failing.

The desire for perfection can also lead to misplaced notions of idealism, which can engender well-meaning atrocities, as one strives to achieve some imaginary, impossible, invented notion of a perfect world.  I’ve written before about the fact that all ideologies are wrong.

The world is simply too complicated (har) for any relatively simple and concise set of ideas* to apply all over, unless you’re counting quantum field theory and general relativity as a relatively simple set of ideas.  They are simple in a certain sense, of course, but that’s a rarefied kind of “simple”.  And we also know they are not complete and do not apply everywhere in their present form as we understand them; they conflict with each other in regions where gravity must be quantized, e.g., the Big Bang or the inside of black holes.

Having the notion of “perfection” also does us the disservice of implying that there is some upper bound on improvement, whether personal or societal or anything in between.  It’s as if there were some analog of the speed of light, an ultimate limit that can only be approached asymptotically.

But, as far as we can tell, there is no upper limit on improvement, at least not by anything other than trivial measures.  A person can, on average, continue to improve over an entire lifetime, never reaching a limit, always able to get better and better, however they might reasonably define “better”.  So can a city, or a nation, or a civilization.

It can be quite discouraging and enervating to compare oneself always to an ideal that is impossible to achieve, at least partly because it is not sensibly defined and cannot be so defined.  And then, as Hamlet said, enterprises of great pitch and moment with this regard their courses turn awry and lose the name of action.  Or something like that.  If you are always falling short because your measure of worth is unattainable, you’re liable to become quite discouraged.

Even in fiction, there are no interesting “perfect” heroes.  Sir Galahad is just boring, for example, while Sir Lancelot is interesting, because he has flaws.  He’s still a good guy, though, even though he may consider himself a failure in the end.

Anyway, there’s more that I could say, and I’m not at all sure that I’ve made my point very well.  This has just been a minor rant about a personal pet peeve, but one that I think has actual detrimental consequences for the world at large.

Speaking of imperfection, my pain persists (of course) and my insomnia has been horrible, particularly last night.  I hope you all have a good week.  I just want to rest.

*Such as the notion that unregulated, truly free markets are the most ideal and efficient way to run an economy for all purposes, or the contrapuntal idea of “from each according to his ability to each according to his need”, or even the seemingly decent “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one”.  For the “many” consists entirely and always of a collection of “ones”, and if some larger group can violate the rights of a smaller group or an individual simply because their “needs” are those of a greater number of people, then there are no rights, and no consistent argument for why anyone’s needs should matter at all.  Even the Golden Rule is far from straightforward in its application.

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A brief post for the end of the week

First off, I’m sorry about not writing a post yesterday, in case anyone was significantly disappointed.  I had a very bad night on Wednesday night, both with respect to pain and with respect to sleep‒the latter having been at least somewhat influenced by the former, of course.  In any case, come yesterday morning, I was too wiped out to be able to get up and go to the office.  In fact, I was still in pretty bad pain all day, even though I stayed at the house, and on through last night.

I’m actually still in pain now, of course.  But at least I’ve been physically and mentally resting as much as I can, so I can make it through today‒though I have been maxing out on my medications pretty much across the board, so hopefully at least things don’t get worse.  I don’t really know what I’ll do if they do.

That, I’m afraid, about as interesting as my life tends to get at this point, and I’m sure it’s quite boring to read.  That’s got to be one of the ultimate insults:  your experiences are unpleasant enough to be worthy of the proverbial curse, “may you live in interesting times”, and yet they’re still not interesting.  I guess that’s sort of ironic, at least.  Irony is perhaps the last, desperate refuge for squeezing some narrative value out of pointless events.

I don’t remember what my posts from earlier this week entailed.  I do recall freaking out not long ago about the changes WordPress had made, without warning and without option.  That was really frustrating, let there be no doubt about that.  Peculiarly, I’ve tended to be much better at handling matters of life and death‒and I’ve dealt with quite a few‒than with changes to my routine and to things to which I’ve become accustomed.

I haven’t been reading much this week, not nearly as much as I usually do.  I even have a couple of new hard copy books‒by which I mean they are physical, printed books instead of e-books, not that they have anything to do with that idiotic old tabloid TV show‒but I haven’t taken one out of its package, and I’ve read about a paragraph of the other.  I also haven’t read any of the several hundred Kindle books I have.  I’m just finding it very difficult to concentrate even on my greatest lifelong pleasure/pastime* (reading).  I certainly haven’t written any fiction.

I did play a bit of guitar and sang on Wednesday morning, for the first time in over a week (I think).  My heart wasn’t really in it, though, and I made a lot of mistakes I don’t usually make.  My singing was okay, though.

At least I am off this weekend.  I wish that meant I would be likely to get a good rest, but at least I’ll get some relative rest.  That’s got to be worth something.  All rest is relative rest in some sense, anyway; one could, in principle, always have rested even better than one really did.  So I certainly don’t wish to  belittle or disrespect the amount of rest I am going to be getting.  I just know that it’s going to be inadequate to make me ready to face the week next week.  And I know from experience that whatever little mental energy I restore will be gone by the end of Monday, let alone the rest of the week.

Obviously, I’ll be able to get through the week literally‒or, well, I expect to be able to, though I suppose I could be wrong‒but that’s merely because it’s a matter of habit.  It can be harder to break a habit than to continue it, even when the habit requires energy.  That just seems to be how these nervous system things are set up.

Okay, I think I’m going to call it good now, for today and for this week.  I don’t have any interesting thoughts at the moment, and so I’m just wasting my readers’ time shuffling through my moans and complaints.  I’m sure you have better things to do.  I hope you have a very good day and a very good weekend.

*I originally wrote the typo “pastome” which I think is pretty great as typos go, especially given the subject.

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Brownian motion, eat your heart out

Okay, well, it’s Tuesday.

Ummm…

I’m not sure what to say now.  I have probably already used all the potential plays on words based on the fact that Tuesday sounds like “twos-day” or similar.  I suppose I could invoke something like a “too’s” day, suggesting the notion that this is too many days in the work week already, or that there are too many weeks, or other similar ideas.  But that doesn’t seem too clever, let alone funny.  It’s certainly neither insightful nor thought-provoking.

So, I’ll leave that be for now.

I was thinking this morning about the time when I used to write my fiction in the morning, back before I did this blog every day (it used to be something I did only on Thursdays, partly in homage to DentArthurDent).  One of the things that made that process perhaps a bit more streamlined‒or less clunky or however you want to characterize it‒than this blog was that I was either editing or I was writing first draft stuff, but I wasn’t publishing what I wrote every day.  So, I would either write my four pages (roughly) of new stuff or edit for a certain period of time, and then I would just save my work (in two places) and then close the lapcom and get on with something else‒often working on music or summat.

This blog is not as seamless to produce as writing fiction was day-to-day.  I have to edit every post and then post it and share it every day*.  That can involve a fair bit of extra time.  On the other hand, at least some people actually read this blog.  It’s not as good as my stories (in my judgment) but it comes in smaller chunks, which allows it to fit into the stunted attention span of the modern adult human.

I don’t refer just to the latter generations in that statement.  Attention span seems to be a bit like muscle tone; it’s not a fixed thing, it’s a neurological habit (or, well, its set-point is influenceable through neurological habit).  It can be made stronger with exercise, and a lack thereof will tend to lead it to atrophy**.  On average, I suspect that everyone’s attention span is not what it would have been in the past.

I don’t know what I’m trying to do or what point I’m trying to make right now, with this post.  It feels like it’s just all over the place, though perhaps that’s merely me projecting the experience of my own attention-fatigued state onto the experience of other people reading my blog.  I don’t know.

I’m having difficulty deciding what to write.  And yet, I’ve already written more than 500 words (counting footnotes).  I feel, as I said, very much all over the place, and pretty stressed out‒not by anything in particular, just as a kind of baseline.  I’m also tired, of course, since nothing about my insomnia or my chronic pain has changed.  And other than talking to people at work, this blog is the only social interaction I have during the week, so I guess I have some pent up conversational or interactional urge in me.

I do feed some neighborhood cats‒so that’s a bit of social interaction of a sort‒but the ones who seemed to like me and let me pet them and sometimes even sat on my lap are all long gone.  The ones who hang around now are just self-serving opportunists.  That’s not a surprise; they are cats.  They are all unabashed, self-serving opportunists.  It is, as they say, the nature of the beast.

They are not solely self-serving opportunists, of course.  But it is always at least part of their character.  Probably, it’s also always part of ours.

The world is complicated.  The fundamental building blocks are‒duh!‒fundamental, but if simple water molecules stacking together stochastically, following precise, local laws can produce all the variegations*** of frost on a window pane, think what the possibilities are for all of reality, with its Planck-scale interactions happening at astonishing rates and in inconceivable numbers.  The possibilities include all that is around you, but also (almost certainly) much, much more.

What if our reality were a simulation, but a fully simulated one, down to the quantum state.  Perhaps it could merely be simulated as those quantum states, with no eye to any larger patterns.  To calculate each next Planck time “frame” of that simulation could require a billion years of processing time in the simulators’ world, and so to them their simulation would plod at a ridiculously slow rate.  And yet, for us‒the simulated‒time would proceed as it always has and does, since our experience of time is internal to our universe and based on interaction rates within our universe.

Okay, that was a severe tangent, sorry.  I don’t know that it actually made sense relative to what I was trying to discuss (if such a thing really exists).  So, I think I’ll wrap this up for today.  I hope you all have a good one.

*I can no longer share it to Meta♣-based platforms, so a fair few people who occasionally stumbled upon it before (and people I knew from back in the day) won’t see it now.  That’s frustrating.  If anyone out there wants to share my posts to those platforms, I would be grateful.  I know it won’t reach the same specific people, but that’s okay.  I don’t have much choice, anyway.

**This is the general tendency of most biological traits or functions or attributes.  In the sieve of natural selection, if one wastes one’s energy and other resources maintaining functions at peak strength that are not actively used, one uses resources that could go to things that are actively useful, and resources are always finite.  Genes that tend to create bodies that tend to do such things will be less likely to get through the filter to the next generation.

***That’s not quite the right word, but it sounds so nice that I’m leaving it.

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“I too have sailed the world and seen its wonders…”

I almost started this post by writing “Hello and good morning,” but I can’t really do that, or future readers‒and possibly even some current readers‒might think this was a Thursday blog post.  But this isn’t a Thursday post.  It’s a Tuesday post.  It’s a “Taco Tuesday post”, really, since Taco Tuesday is a thing (an advertising thing, mostly, but still a thing I like).  Pertinent to that, today is also, of course, Cinco de Mayo.

It’s not a terribly clever name for a holiday.  It’s about as bland as “The 4th of July”.  At least that’s not the official name for that holiday; the official name is “Independence Day”, which has specific significance, since it is the date of the signing and release of the Declaration of Independence.  I try never to wish someone a happy 4th of July, but say, “Happy Independence Day”, because it’s an important thing to know and recall (for an American).

Of course, there may be an actual, official title to Cinco de Mayo, but if there is, I don’t know it (if there isn’t, I still don’t know it).  I don’t even recall what the day commemorates.  I know it’s not the Mexican Independence Day equivalent.  If anyone out there knows what it is off the top of his or her or their head, please let me know in the comments below.

“Please let me know in the comments below” could be a nice part of some rap, couldn’t it?  It’s got a good rhythm and an internal rhyme.  If you’re a rapper and want to use that phrase, please do.  But let me know about the final product, please.  I’d be interested to see what grows up around it.

I could, in principle, write such a rap myself‒I’m reasonably good at rhythmic rhyming‒but just try to imagine me producing and performing a rap song!  I’m almost certain that would be one of the worst signs of the end of the world.

Though, if that’s the case, maybe I should do a rap, come to think of it.  If by doing so I really could engender the end of the world*, it could be worth doing it.  I could put everyone out of their misery.  As for those who aren’t miserable, well, we have Sweeney Todd’s words to address that:

 

“They all deserve to die

Tell you why, Mrs. Lovett, tell you why.

Because

In all of the whole human race, Mrs. Lovett

There are two kinds of men and only two:

There’s the one staying put in his proper place

And the one with his foot in the other one’s face

Look at me, Mrs. Lovett, look at you.

No, we all deserve to die!

Even you, Mrs. Lovett, even I

Because

the lives of the wicked should be

made brief

For the rest of us death will be a relief

We all deserve to die!

 

And I’ll never see Johanna…”

 

Okay, well, that last bit is the beginning of another segment of the song, in which Sweeney laments his lost daughter.  I won’t get into the plot more than that right now, but it’s a great musical.

The film version with Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, Alan Rickman, and so on was excellent, though apparently Johnny Depp didn’t know whether he could sing (adequately for the role) when Tim Burton asked him to play Sweeney Todd.  He knew he could play music, but singing “lead” was just not something he had done.  So, according to what I’ve heard, before accepting the role he went off in solitude and practiced singing (to confirm he could do it) before coming back and saying okay.

I’m glad he did it.

As an aside, I suspect that anyone who can do various voices and accents and who also can play and hear music almost has to be able to sing reasonably well, if they practice.  The tools required to make alternate voices and accents are more or less the same as the tools for singing specific tones and notes.  You also have to be able to hear tunes and to hear yourself and adjust to hit the proper note, but as I said, Depp was already a serious musician.

Okay, well, that’s a lot of erratic stuff, isn’t it?  Clearly I have no specific agenda here (trendy or otherwise) at least not any conscious one.  As for what goes on in my unconscious mind, well, I don’t know what that is, more or less by definition.  If I knew what it was thinking, it wouldn’t be unconscious.

Of course, there’s always a legitimate question whether the unconscious mind actually has its own internal self-awareness, or even more than one, but this is pretty much speculative for now, so I’m not going to get into it or its implications.

Boy, wow.  I’m really feeling pretty incoherent right now.  As you might have guessed, I didn’t sleep well last night, even for me.  As for pain, well, large portions of my body feel somewhat as if they have already been embalmed, but the sensory nerves‒the nociceptors, at least‒are still working.  If anything, they’re working too well.

Ah, well.  I’ll wrap up now with these almost kindly but ominous words, again from Sweeney Todd:  “You are young.  Life has been kind to you.  You will learn.”

Please have a good day if you’re able.

*“Engender the end of” also has a good cadence or rhythm or whatever as well as a bit of an internal rhyme.  You could go on with something like, “Engender the end of the trendy agenda,” or similar.  “No rapper can rap quite like I can”, eh?  That’s a fact for which all rap fans can be grateful.

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May the 4th be yadda, yadda, yadda

First, let me get the irresistible, nerdly, liturgical invocation (or whatever you should call it) out of the way:

There, that’s that.

Yes, it’s “Star Wars Day”‒because of the play on words, y’know?  So, I give a nod to it, since I like Star Wars and I like plays on words (with some exceptions here and there for both “likes”).

I think I’m going to keep this short today if I can.  My back and hips and ankles and knee and hands/thumbs and shoulder and all are really uncomfortable, and they have been so despite my attempts at various interventions and despite the fact that I rested this weekend.

Well, I didn’t merely rest.  I did go for a couple of moderate walks over the weekend, one about 5 miles, one about 4 miles.  But I took my time, I wore good shoes, I walked on nice, level pavement and so on.  In between, I tried to take it easy on my back and whatnot; I even took a short break or two during my walks.

It’s probably not logically sensible for me to say that my interventions did no good; after all, I don’t know what the outcome(s) would have been had I done differently than I did.  It could have been better, it could have been worse, it could have been the same*.

Anyway, it’s all very frustrating, and it doesn’t help my sleep, either.  I was going to say that it doesn’t help my insomnia, but of course, it does help my insomnia, making it a much more effective (and affective, ha ha) disorder.

I probably shouldn’t even talk about the pain’s effects on my actual affective disorder(s), dysthymia and depression.  In my experience, when you talk to people about depression, it doesn’t bring out the best in them, and it tends to drive them away‒sometimes permanently.  It’s one of those gifts that keeps on giving, I guess.

One slight “benefit” about being in enough pain, is that it blunts, or perhaps overshadows, some forms of social anxiety.  When you’re in enough pain, for long enough, you sometimes get to where you really don’t give a flying fuck at a rat’s ass what other people think of you.  Sometimes you just start to hate everything and everyone, but especially yourself and your life.

I say “your”, but of course I mean “my”.  I don’t know for certain what happens in your mind.

Oh, and by the way, chronic pain doesn’t seem to blunt other anxieties, unfortunately.  If anything, it makes one jumpier, and OCD-style anxieties and insecurities are sometimes amplified.  They seem to be with me.

This reminds me (somehow) of my metaphor about navigating through reality being like driving along a narrow road between two infinitely tall, indestructible walls**.  Rationality consists, ultimately, of keeping one’s course parallel to those walls.

If you’re driving on that road and your heading deviates from parallel by even a millionth of a degree, sooner or later you will crash into one of the walls***.  That’s you, colliding with reality.  And when anyone collides with reality, reality does not break, the one colliding does.  In a way, that’s what reveals reality to be reality.

But of course, it’s functionally impossible to pick your course perfectly along the parallel path (this is much like my point about the unlikelihood of hitting zero on the number line, see the first footnote below).  So what can one do?  One can keep one’s hands on the wheel and adjust course as one goes along, watching the walls to see if they are staying safely away from your vehicle.

This is one reason dogmatism is a bad thing (i.e., a worse than useless thing).  The odds of you picking the right direction (or right beliefs) on, say, the first try, are functionally zero.  What’s more, the odds that you have achieved the perfect direction on the 2nd or the 3rd or the 42nd or 1729th try are also functionally zero.

You will never come to the single, final answer‒at least your odds of doing so are vanishingly small‒and so you will never get to rest steering, to stop course-correction.  Sorry.  Drivers just don’t get to sleep, and you’re driving if anyone is.  The only way to rest from steering is to stop moving or to crash into the wall.

When I (or you) fight reality, reality always wins.  Again:  that’s kind of how you know it’s reality.

Anyway, I hope you all have a good day and a good week.  Drive carefully and safely.  Don’t forget to check your mirrors and your blind spots; and don’t just trust the AI (or drivers of other cars) to steer you.

 

*It’s vanishingly unlikely to have been exactly the same, though.  There’s only one zero point on a number line, for instance, though there are infinitely many points arbitrarily close to zero (in the Real numbers, anyway).  Mathematically, your odds of hitting zero if, for instance, you throw an infinitely pointy (no pun intended) dart at a number line are, well…zero.  And yet it can happen, in principle.  That’s just thinking in one dimension, though.  The phase space describing what could have changed in my experience is probably quite high-dimensional, and things are identical if and only if you hit the point where the change along all those dimensions is zero.

**I don’t know why this thought was triggered; I wasn’t paying close enough attention to my own thoughts to see what led them there.

***If you start in the middle of the (perfectly straight) road, and it’s 25 meters to each wall, if you’re off by one millionth of a degree in your course, you will collide with the wall in roughly 1.4 billion meters, or 1.4 million kilometers, or (for those in the US) about 860,000 miles.  The fact that it can take so long should highlight the fact that you cannot assume, just because you haven’t crashed into a wall yet, that you have chosen the perfect heading.  You will still need to course-correct, or you will crash.