irrationality

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“And as the fear grows, the bad blood slows and turns to stone…”

It’s Friday, and I feel as though I’ve recently run an ultra-marathon‒except that, if I were in the habit of running ultra-marathons, I think I would be more physically fit.  I like running, actually; I used to get that famous “runner’s high” endorphin rush, and it made me feel that if I just pushed a little bit extra with my next step, I could take off and fly.

Alas, my chronic pain has made it very difficult to do regular jogging and/or running.  I still like to walk, but I have to be careful.  In any case, pain saps my energy even for walking, and for many other seemingly minor things.

I’ve had a lot of pain this week, in my usual places as well as in my more newly encroached-upon regions, like my right hand/wrist/forearm/elbow.  I wish I could sleep better, just to escape from it, but my sleep has also been even worse than usual this week.

I’m stressed by the laundry machine thing as well, of course.  I’ve had to wear old backup clothes and buy quite a few new pieces of clothing, chewing up some of my savings, such as they are, and that’s so frustrating.

I hate my life, but I’m stuck in a sort of slight local bump in the middle of a huge surrounding value-sink, a kind of one-person Nash equilibrium.  There is almost nothing in my life (my daily life, anyway) that is much good, but to change my life would nevertheless at least temporarily make everything worse, and there is no way of knowing if it would ever get better.

So, I do nothing but what you “see”, waiting here for the branch* to break, which I’m sure it will do before very long at all.  It could be today; I would not be surprised.  I barely had the energy to go back to the house after work last night, and I can barely get going to go to work this morning (though I am doing it).

I don’t know why I do it.  It’s probably more out of habit and training than anything else.  Not only do I find no lasting happiness or fulfilment, I have no even momentary peace of mind.  I just occasionally get so exhausted that I am able to become unconscious, but that lasts a very short time before I sort of start awake, as if I’ve heard enemy troops going through the jungle nearby.

I’ve never fought any wars in any jungles, of course.  But I just don’t ever feel safe**.  And I certainly have no squad, no fellowship, nor even any partner with whom to share the watch or whatever.

Lone tigers can do well, I guess, since that is their nature.  But wolves and humans and humanoids (like me) are not really at our best when alone.  That was why in the ancestral environment, ostracism was such a serious punishment.  A human alone on the Serengeti thirty thousand years ago was a human who was unlikely to survive for long, let alone to leave any offspring.

It’s appropriate for something like I am, I suppose.  If I were worth being around, there would probably be people around me.  But whatever compensations I was able to generate in the past to make my weirdness worth tolerating, I don’t have the energy or the will‒or the skill, to be thorough‒to bring those things to bear.  I’m not even sure what they are anymore.

Oh, well.  It’s not like there’s any reason to suspect that anyone else knows what they’re doing or has many true, deep insights.  There are a few people here and there in history who figure out useful things, but everyone is merely flesh and blood.  Their minds and wills and insights are markedly finite.  One can learn what one can from them, but one can expect no deep, final answers.

There may be no such deep, final answers.  The universe shows no evidence of having been built for us, after all.  We are just epiphenomena.  Don’t let anyone try to fool you with any ridiculous “fine-tuning” argument(s).  The universe is not fine-tuned for us.  There is almost nowhere in the universe where we can survive.  I made a video that more or less talked about this, if I recall correctly.  Even the Earth is largely hostile to us, and it’s by far the most livable place in the known universe.

The fine-tuning claims remind me a bit of people who say that natural immunity is adequate (or even best) and that we don’t need vaccines.  People can imagine this to be true only because they are the recipients of the world their ancestors created: a world where there are few deadly diseases that wipe people out in childhood the way they used to, because of measures like vaccines.

Or‒to think of other people who speak and act out of ignorance of what it has taken to make the world in which they find themselves‒we have those who decry capitalism as fundamentally evil all while writing on their laptops and tablets and smartphones and driving their electric cars to get overpriced coffee-like dessert beverages from international coffee chains.

Don’t even get me started on flat-earthers.  The frikking ancient Greeks and Egyptians and Phoenicians and all those ancient civilizations knew the Earth was round.  Eratosthenes even figured out how big it was, to within a few percent of our modern measurements, about 2200 years ago.

No intelligent people who paid attention and thought things through (or cared) ever really thought the Earth was flat.  If the Earth were flat, on a clear day you could climb to the top of a high building and essentially see to the edge in all directions.  With a good enough telescope and no interfering mountains, you could peep through someone’s Tokyo window from Chicago.  The Earth is not flat.

I, however, am a flat person‒not in the sense of being roughly planar, but rather in the sense that all my fizz is gone; my pep and vigor are asymptotically approaching zero.

At least it’s Friday.  Maybe next week will be better.

I doubt it, though.

*Or the camel’s back, if you prefer.

**I’m actually not safe, of course.  No one ever is.  But there are gradations of safety, and probability rules ordinary reality.  When risk is low enough, one should ideally feel quite different, much more even-keeled, than when risk is high.  Unfortunately, that’s often not how things are.

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The aged man that coffers up his gold is blogged with cramps and gouts and painful fits

Hello, all.  Good morning and welcome to Thursday again.  It’s time for another of my weekly blog posts.

Of course, the major news in the human world—such as it is—is the ongoing international tour de force of the COVID-19 virus.  I’ve expressed (elsewhere) my frustration with the irrationality with which people are responding to this pandemic*, including the hoarding of toilet paper, which makes little to no sense, and believing sub-moronic videos that say, for instance, that you can cure the virus or prevent its spread by aiming a hot blow-dryer into your nose and mouth.  These are such things as make me wish—only semi-facetiously—that people needed a license to reproduce.  Don’t even get me started on the various absurd prophecies and conspiracy theories many embrace and share about this and other global events.  It’s bizarre that people can simultaneously think so highly and so poorly of human nature, in such unjustifiable ways.

Behaviors such as these tend to exacerbate my baseline melancholy, and have in the past led me to, among other things, write a song about depression.  The song, in this case, was Breaking Me Down, of which I shared the “final release” earlier this week on Iterations of Zero and on YouTube.  When I originally wrote it, I wasn’t thinking explicitly about depression, but I was going through a pretty bad exacerbation, so when I wrote a poem/song about my thoughts and feelings, that was what came out.

I have recorded and released earlier versions of the song, but they suffered partly from my inexperience with mixing and production, and from initially being too low (the final product is up two full steps from how I initially wrote it), and too slow.  The original vocals were not so great, either, both in recording/mixing quality and in the singing.  However, as with most things, practice makes better, though it’s unlikely that it ever makes “perfect”**.  So, now, the song is in a higher key and at a quicker tempo, such that I playfully refer to it as a song about depression that you can dance to if you feel like it.  I think that’s a pretty cool accomplishment, though you may or may not agree that I’ve succeeded.

After fixing this song up, I realized that if I remaster my first, sort of jokey song, Schrodinger’s Head, I’ll have enough for about half an album(!).  That’s five original songs, running a total of roughly twenty-five minutes.  Of course, being the lunatic that I am, that thought immediately led me to go back and start tweaking Schrodinger’s Head, including re-recording vocals and doing some harmony.  That’s not so hard—the good thing about singing is, one always has one’s instrument.  And the actual remixing/remastering process, though time-consuming, is weirdly entertaining and satisfying.

The real issue is that once this is done, I will no doubt feel the urge, or the drive, or the compulsion, to make more songs for the other side of an album***.  I do have here and there the beginnings of other songs, and even have a longer portion of something I mean to write about a manga character, but I just know that this is going to consume a lot of time.  Of course, if I were in one of those industries that’s been forced to take a hiatus in response to COVID-19, writing and recording songs might be a good use of my extra hours.  Unfortunately—well, fortunately, really…let’s be fair and positive, if that’s possible for me—my job is going strong, and I continue to be in the office five to six days a week.  Thus, this little musical hobby tends to eat into my real work, which is writing.

That being said, though, Unanimity is coming along well.  I’m nearly done with the latest run-through, and it’s getting closer and closer to publishable form.  It certainly is a long story, but at least I don’t find it boring.  Whether anyone else will share my assessment only time can tell, but at least liking it myself is a good starting point.

That’s pretty nearly it for this week.  I hope you all do your best to stay well…but don’t do crazy and stupid things, okay? For my part, I’ve always frequently washed my hands and coughed and sneezed into the hollow of my elbow, but then, I am an MD.  As for social distancing, well, that’s something I haven’t ever had to think about much.  It seems to be a task at which I’m particularly gifted, and I’ve only gotten better, if that’s the correct term, over the years.  Remember what I said about practice?

Ironically enough, I—someone very far from being attached to existence—am relatively protected compared to all the many people who want so desperately to cling to their lives.  I wouldn’t call it cosmic irony—that would probably have to involve quasars, galaxies, black holes, dark energy, and the like—but it is certainly irony at a high level.

TTFN

*I know the root words are different, but I can’t help imagining that the word “pandemic” should somehow mean “bread for the people,” or maybe “bread made out of people,” such as Jack and the Beanstalk’s giant might enjoy.

**In most cases, the term “perfect” isn’t defined, and is probably undefinable.  Unless one has a clearly delineated set of criteria by which to judge something, declaring perfection is mere wordplay.  I’m a fan of wordplay, of course, but in this case, people seem to think they mean something, formally, when they use the term.  It leads to much confusion.  It also leads many people to drive themselves to distraction, often to despair, and occasionally to destruction in the dreadful pursuit of “perfection”, a hallucinatory goal that never comes nearer than the horizon.  By all means, strive always to improve yourself.  But sincerely trying to achieve perfection can lead to a life of frustration and self-loathing.

***Don’t ask me what I mean to do with such a collection once I make it, assuming that I do.  It’s not as though I have any experience in making or releasing albums.  I would, however, almost certainly call it “Iterations of Zero”.  Consistency is good.