life

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A random, walk-in blog post

It’s Monday again, despite popular demand, and I am here writing another blog post‒not necessarily against or by popular demand.  It’s really more or less orthogonal to such things.

I had a weekend full of little setbacks, and it was quite frustrating.  I had committed to riding my bike four times this weekend, and I started in good form.  I got out relatively early and went riding.  It felt pretty good, pretty comfortable, but I decided not to push too hard, only riding out about 3 miles.  Walking 3 miles is relatively far if it’s hot, but biking 3 miles is not bad at all.

Then, of course, just after I turned around, my rear tire lost pressure.  I don’t know where the puncture was, but I had to walk the bike back to the house.  And 3 miles walking a bike is much more unpleasant than riding or even walking without a bike.

I ordered some Slime brand tire repair stuff for same day delivery, but then it got delayed till Sunday (it actually arrived very late Saturday night).  Then, on Sunday, in between loads of laundry, I tried to repair the tire (so to speak) but at first I had trouble getting it to work, and it wouldn’t stay inflated.  Finally, though, it seemed to stabilize, at least without my fat ass on it.

I was going to go for a short ride to test it, but I couldn’t stand the idea that I might have to walk it back again.  So I went for about a 2 mile walk instead, which is really not very far, but then overnight and into now my back really flared up and is annoying the heck out of me.  Also, my right ankle is sore again.

So I’m frustrated in my attempt to develop better habits and health.  I also had some failures by Uber Eats that were annoying, but that’s a minor issue.  Then yesterday my internet went out and I had to deal with their customer service people to help get it going again, which took way longer than it should have taken.

I suppose all this is really minor stuff, so-called first world problems.  But things accumulate and interact with each other, especially when you don’t really have any outlet for anything and nothing to counteract them.  It might be better if I had someone with whom I could just hang out on a regular basis, but I feel like a different species than the people around me, and no one is offering, in any case.

This is all boring for all of you, I strongly suspect, so I apologize.  It’s bad enough for me to be unpleasant to myself, but I should try not to bring misery upon other people, especially people who are kind enough to read my blog.

Last week was certainly a miss with respect to getting anything done on any music or songs.  I didn’t so much as sing or play keyboard or play guitar at all last week, not once.  I did some reading, including finishing rereading The Chasm and the Collision, which is the book of which I am proudest.  If anyone out there knows people who enjoy fantasy/sci-fi adventures involving middle-schoolers, you should consider suggesting that they check it out.

I don’t know how this week is going to be.  I’m starting it in well-above-average pain, for me, and with worse sleep than usual (though that was the case most of last week as well).  I don’t think this guarantees that it will be a particularly bad week.  The world is complicated, and small things can make relatively large changes, and large things can sometimes be surprisingly ineffectual*.

Maybe I would get started writing fiction again and do it better if I did the first draft of a story by hand (as I did with CatC as well as Mark Red and the title story in Welcome to Paradox City).  As long-time readers will know, I go back and forth about this all the time, and I think I’m probably just chasing my tail.

I have all these dreams and ambitions, and I know I have the ability to carry them out, in some sense, but it’s very hard to keep the will, the motivation.

I’ve said before, I’m sure, that depression itself seems almost to be an illness of the will, a sort of muscular dystrophy or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis of the mind, though I think its causes and complications are much more intricate and multivariate than at least the first of those two comparisons.

I think for a fair amount of those who suffer badly from it, depression makes them want to kill themselves, but depression is also what keeps them from killing themselves; they cannot bring the effort to bear.  This is part of why the beginning of antidepressant therapy in a depressed person with suicidal ideation can be dangerous.  Such a person may begin to feel capable of getting things done, but not optimistic enough to avoid suicidal ideation, so they can sometimes use that new energy to act to kill themselves.

In any case, that’s not really the subject on which I was focused during this post.  I don’t think I’ve really been focused at all in writing this.  I don’t really know what subjects and topics I’ve raised.  I suppose you will know, more or less, having read this far.  And I guess, by the time I edit this, I will know.  But I don’t know right now.

It’s not important.  But one thing that is important is that I hope you all do your best to have a good day.

 *In the movie version of The Lord of the Rings, Galadriel says to Frodo that even the smallest person can change the course of the future, espousing a sort of rudimentary Chaos Theory.  But what does it mean to “change the course of the future”?  If the future has a course, it is defined and determined by the laws of physics, and any seeming “changes” were part of that process, so the course of the future is not “changed”, it is merely instantiated in whatever way it always is.

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Try to remember the kind of Sexember…

Well, first of all:  TBIF (Thank Batman it’s Friday).  I’ve been feeling particularly poorly this week, with sleep that’s even worse than my usual, and that is not good to start with.  At least, on the weekend, I can knock myself out at night with Benadryl and not really care that I will be groggy the next day.

I’m basically going to call this week a loss.  I haven’t gotten much of anything done that I had intended to do, and that’s discouraging.  But it’s a new month now, so there may be some psychological* tendency to think of it as a potential new beginning of sorts.  Mind you, there’s really nothing special about this day relative to any other; the length of a month is related to the lunar cycle and the length of the year, but only roughly, and the specific divisions are fairly arbitrary.

Of course, we know that August is named for Augustus Caesar, née Octavian, who succeeded in taking control of Rome after the assassination of Julius Caesar (after whom July was renamed).  But it’s interesting, at least to me, to consider what it would have been named otherwise.  September, after all, is named after the fact that it was “originally” the seventh month, as October was the eighth, November the ninth, and December the tenth.

So, would August originally have been named Sexember (the sixth month)?  I think that would be the correct form, though Latin scholars among my readers should please correct me if I’ve used the wrong prefix**.  If I’m correct, I would like to propose a global change of name for this month back to the potential previous name.

“Sexember” sounds like a much more fun month than “August”, with its dog day connotations and so on.  Although, the prefix “sex-” referring to six has, as far as I know, nothing at all to do with the word “sex” relating to the reproductive divisions among animals, nor to the process involved, which‒for good, sound, biological reasons‒is something dwelt upon and enjoyed and even obsessed over by so many.  But I’m not worried about etymological purity here.

Imagine the antics on the various social media as oodles of young people of all ages geared up to celebrate “Sexember” and talked about how they planned to celebrate it.  Of course, I suspect most people would exaggerate their planned exploits, as people tend to do.  Social media is a supremely fertile ground for hyperbole and posturing and pretense and performative outrage, whether about political matters or just how “hot” one is and how perfect one’s life is.  I wrote a song about this topic a few years ago:  Like and Share.  Here, I’ll embed it in this post.

That brings up an issue raised by a very old*** and good friend of mine.  He noted that, since the company which published my songs put things on YouTube with disabled comments, there’s no direct way for people to give me feedback on them, good or bad.  Of course, the songs are also on Spotify and iTunes and supposedly on TikTok and all those others, but many of those don’t allow comments, either.

My works are also among the various available background songs that one can choose for “reels” on Instagram and on Facebook.  I enabled that last bit, and even used one once.  You all should feel free to use them, too.  In principle, I get paid when you do****.

Anyway, the thought I had was that maybe I should embed the songs here, on my blog, as posts.  Or maybe I could create a new page, like the one I have for “my books”.  I could call it “my songs” and could put the officially released ones there, as well as ones in progress, and I could even share some of my covers.  If I shared them as blog posts, at least, comments would be always available, and are almost always welcome.

Of course, that covers and the incomplete stuff are already on my YouTube channel, such as it is, and I even have a created playlist with all of them in it.  Those are already available for comment and response on YouTube.  I’m a long way away from having a monetized YouTube channel, though, and this blog isn’t monetized, either (though I sometimes think maybe I ought to monetize it, at least partially, or make a Patreon account or something).

I’m not sure what I’ll do.

In the meantime, hopefully today will be better than yesterday, which was a day on which I quite literally wished to be dead, because I felt miserable and in pain and alone, to say nothing of failing to achieve what I’ve wanted to achieve this week (or in this life).  The thing that most prevented me from taking action on that wish was that the effort involved would have been too great.

I feel less bad today, which‒given the nature of number lines and greater than/less than meanings and equivalences*****‒means I feel better than I did.  I still haven’t crossed the origin into positive territory, though, and I don’t know if I ever will again.  That’s the consideration that leads to contemplation of death:  if one’s present and expected future wellbeing function is always in the negative, then a return to zero is a net gain.  It’s analogous to a jokey thing I used to say:  The one who dies with the most debt wins.

Enough of this nonsense.  I’ll call this post and this work week to an end now.  I wish you all an excellent weekend, and of course, enjoy the first of Sexember!

*I made an interesting typo when I wrote this word, one which I don’t think I’ve made before, though it would seem a very easy one to make, given the layout of the QWERTY keyboard:  I wrote it as “paychological”.  That seems almost like something that could be a new slang term, with related terms “paychopathology” and “paychopath”.

**Perhaps “Hexember” would be at least as proper or more so (though we don’t have “Heptember”).  I’m not sure.  That would surely please some of the many Goth people I tend to follow online, but it doesn’t have as broad an appeal as “Sex-” does.

***By which I mean he has been my friend from way back (starting freshman year of college), not that he is very old.  He’s roughly the same age I am, and‒though I often feel as if I’ve been kept alive by one of the great rings for centuries or even millennia beyond my natural time‒my real age, in proper time, is 55 years, soon to be 56.  Of course, there is no actual quantum leap in age at the anniversary of one’s birth.  Time is continuous‒or, well, it is quantized, but at the scale of 10-43 seconds.  So for all foreseeable, practical purposes within our lifetimes, it is continuous.

****Though the pay rate is nearly as miniscule as the Planck time mentioned in the previous footnote.

*****A pet peeve of mine is when some people denigrate the notion of choosing “the lesser of two evils”, particularly during elections, expressing such sentiments as “the lesser of two evils is still evil”.  This may be true in a simple-minded sense, but it misses the point entirely and expresses woefully clunky thinking.  Such a person might be expected to feel that owing a debt of $10 was not any better than owing a debt of $100,000, since both are debts.  But when you think about with which debt you’d prefer to be saddled, the difference is clear.  Money has a way of sharpening people’s intuitions regarding numbers.  Indeed, there’s some evidence that “negative numbers” were first invented to deal with debts.

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“I don’t think I’ll ever get over the hill; those wounds run…pretty deep.”

It’s the penultimate day of July in 2025, and I can’t honestly say I’ll be sad to see the month go‒nor the year, nor the life, for that matter.

The word “penultimate” does make me wonder if any stationery company ever marketed a writing implement as the “Pen Ultimate”.  If so, I’ve not heard of it.  I guess it’s not a terrific marketing idea, just a mildly amusing play on words.

Anyway, it’s Wednesday, the so-called hump day‒because presumably once one passes the midpoint of the week, one finds it easier to coast through the rest of the week, as if one had reached the top of some hill (or hump) and was now loping, or perhaps sledding or skiing or snowboarding, down the other side.

Of course, that metaphor presumes there’s something akin to gravity applicable here, which is the force that makes it hard to go up a hill and easier to go down it.  But there is no such force applicable to time (though time is affected by gravity).

As far as I can see, no matter what you do, the days of the week proceed at the same monotonous rate, whether one puts any effort into it or not.  Time passes at the same rate (ignoring tiiiiiiiny adjustments for relative speeds and altitudes) for the most active athlete or business tycoon or person in the grip of mania as it does for someone idle or even someone in a coma.  And even if one can slow down one’s time relative to others‒for instance by going some substantial portion of the speed of light relative to them or by going into an area of strong gravity‒one’s own “proper time”, the time one experiences, will still be the same*.

One might effectively travel into the future of the people one left behind on one’s high-speed voyage, but one will also skip and miss all those years that one is “away”, and there’s no way to get that time back.  The nature of causality appears to preclude it.

So, yeah, the concept of hump day is purely psychological, and like so much of human psychology, it is stupid.  I wish I could say that my impression of such things has become less negative as my own proper time has passed, but alas, the young provide no more basis for hope with their presumed energy and creativity than the older ones do with their presumed greater experience and knowledge.

Almost all humans are really quite pathetic and come despair-inducingly far from achieving anything like their potential in wisdom or intelligence or creativity.  They mostly just bounce around like air molecules in a closed chamber, achieving maximal local entropy.

And don’t delude yourself that any other creatures on the planet are any “better” than humans.  Even the relatively smart ones like chimpanzees and porpoises and cephalopods and corvids tend to be often vicious, selfish, and violent.  That’s not all they are, of course, but it’s plenty.  They’re certainly not pure or innocent or fundamentally beneficent creatures.

Neither are dogs or cats or other mammals, or reptiles of any kind, nor fishes, nor birds, nor arthropods, nor annelids, nor protozoa, and so on.  Nothing in the world is inherently beneficent.  Even plants fight and harm and kill each other; trees waste their resources by growing taller to outcompete each other for sunlight, when if they all stayed shorter, at some uniform height, they would all be better off.

And fungi eat everyone, using other life forms for their resources and sometimes for locomotion, and they wage constant war with bacteria and so on.

There’s no good reason to expect any form of alien intelligence to be any better, nor AI either.  No matter how much smarter one being is than another, the most powerful defining factor of each is its limits.  Every finite thing is equally far from infinity.

Unfortunately, beneficence overall is not really an evolutionarily stable strategy.  Even if all beings in a given ecosystem were mutually benevolent, all it would take would be for one mutant to instantiate a degree of selfishness and ruthlessness and it would have a tremendous advantage over its kindly brethren, and its genes would spread and become more and more prevalent.

Of course, universal malevolence and selfishness are not stable, either.  That’s a recipe for overall destruction, as much as anything else is.  Prey are necessary for a predator to survive.  As Porter said in Payback about nice guys:  You’ve gotta have somebody to take advantage of.  The food web has to have a base somewhere.

It seems to me that there will never be any system that doesn’t have some such mixture of predators and prey‒even metaphorically within species and societies.  Of course, it makes sense to prevent and mitigate the depredations of the assholes and, if possible, to discourage them from existing at all.  That’s better for everyone.  But as with the trees**, it doesn’t happen on its own, and it is not self-sustaining.  The price of such freedom really is constant vigilance, and unerring vigilance of that kind is probably impossible in principle.

I’m not really trying to come to some point here.  Mostly I’m just expressing my frustration and despair and cynicism/nihilism.  There is not only horror in the world, but horror is always there and almost certainly always will be, at least until the ultimate (but at least peaceful) horror of universal heat death (or whatever) brings about the elimination of all experience of any kind in the universe.

The only enduring peace and freedom may be simple nonexistence.  But then there’s that damn Poincaré Recurrence!

Ah, well.  Have a day.  You can call it a hump day if it amuses you.  I don’t know why I care.

*And, of course, if one is traveling at a substantial portion of the speed of light, if one doesn’t have adequate shielding, one’s lifespan is liable to be shortened significantly due to exposure to induced cosmic rays:  When you travel at a very high speed through the elementary particles of open space, the elementary particles of open space travel at a very high speed through you.

**Think about it:  those beautiful California redwood trees are possibly the greatest, most glacially persistent testament to the “dog eat dog” nature of the non-human world; a centuries-long spectacle of cutthroat one-upsmanship, each tree fighting maniacally to outcompete the others for sunlight.  They are beautiful, of course, but so is a raging fire.

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This tue, tue sullied (or solid) day

Tuesday or not Tuesday?  That is the question.  And the answer, for today at least, is that today is Tuesday.

I don’t know when you’re reading this, though.  Odds are, if you aren’t reading this on the day I publish it, that you are not reading it on a Tuesday.  In fact, once we get out past the rest of this week* there should only be a roughly 1 in 7 chance that you are reading this on a Tuesday.

That’s probably pretty obvious, huh?  Still, it can be useful to be in the habit of thinking in terms of probability and statistics, since that’s the way nature sorts itself out, right on down to the level of quantum mechanics, to the best of our understanding.  If people had a better understanding of the nature of probability, many things in the world would run far better, or so I suspect.

I have written at least one previous post (on Iterations of Zero) about how I think probability and statistics should be emphasized far more in general math education at the secondary school level (even for non-college-prep students).

Imagine a world in which most people had grown up learning about the nature of probability with reasonable rigor.  There would be fewer headline-based scares about things that are unlikely enough to be irrelevant‒e.g., plane crashes‒and more appropriate understanding about things like vaccination and disease prevention of various kinds, among numerous other matters.

Imagine if the people of the world really understood the difference between absolute risk and relative risk, and if they grasped the difference between sensitivity and specificity for medical tests.  Heck, imagine if the public at large had a decent elementary grasp of Bayesian probability.  Bayes’s Theorem is not really all that difficult, when you get right down to it.  Veritasium did a nice video about it**.

Of course, as I’ve said before, if wishes were horses, we’d all be neck deep in horse shit, whereas that’s only figuratively the case as it is.  But it would be nice if politicians and other people with undue influence had to deal with a general public that was savvy about the legitimate use of statistics and why (and how) they are fundamental to a thorough understanding of the world itself.  It’s not an accident nor a mistake that Jaynes named his book Probability Theory: The Logic of Science.

And science is not an esoteric thing.  It is not a high-falutin’ mode of thought that doesn’t pertain to the average person.  It comes from the Latin scire, meaning to know.  It is fundamental to the nature of our epistemology, to not just what we know about the world but how we come to know it, how complete and how incomplete is our understanding and what the nature of the world really is at deepest and broadest and finest and coarsest levels.

So, it’s fairly pertinent to everyone, really.  After all, if you want to win a game (or get your best score or whatever) you’re best off understanding the rules as well as you can.  A true novice is unlikely to win a game of chess, or of Go, or even of Mario Kart against someone who knows what they are doing.

Now, nature isn’t our adversary per se‒if it were, we would all be long gone‒but it “knows” its rules and always and only plays by those rules, by definition.  In fact, if you come upon a place where you think nature has broken its rules***, what’s really happened is that you’ve come to a place where you don’t understand the rules.  Nature cannot be “wrong”.  There is no such thing as the “supernatural” in reality, because anything that actually happens, that actually exists, is part of nature.

Even if you discovered that you were in a situation such as that described by Descartes or The Matrix, in which the reality you think you know is an illusion, that is simply a newly discovered fact about the nature of reality, and it raises**** the question of what is the nature of that illusion, what is behind it, and by what laws of physics do those entities operate?

So, anyway, it’s good to learn about how reality works if you want your best chance (never a guarantee) of doing what you want successfully and getting what you desire from life.  No one here gets out alive (at least it’s very unlikely) but you might as well make the game as rewarding as you can in the meantime.

*Which I suspect would be when most non-same-day readers would read this.

**He also did a really nice one about the logistic map and chaos and the Mandelbrot Set that will blow your mind if you haven’t thought about it before.

***I’m thinking of those stories with submoronic headlines such as “New discovery breaks physics!” which don’t make sense to anyone who knows anything, and which should embarrass those who write them.

****It does not beg the question.  To beg a question is not to raise the question, but rather to proceed as if it had already been asked and answered in a way that you’re presuming it to be answered.  It is a way of skirting fundamental issues and avoiding having to prove a case.  In other words, it is willfully or accidentally disingenuous.

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Another eddy in the corrosive, chaotic cloud exuded by my mind

Well, it’s just another moronic Monday (with apologies to the Bangles).  I did not do any work on Native Alien this weekend.  To be fair, it’s basically complete with respect to chords and of course words and melody‒though I don’t preclude any modest changes along the way, and certainly I have not arranged it.  But I basically didn’t do anything useful or productive over the weekend, I just vegetated by myself.

I intended to do some biking; I went so far as to pump the tires up to their target pressure and everything.  But as often happens, I got anxious over getting on the bike to ride*.  I did some walking, at least; not very much, but at least I took some precautions that have mostly spared my knees and my ankle.

I mean to do a decent walk this evening and get that bit more of exercise in.  I’m trying to get healthier, but it’s hard to motivate myself when I don’t even want me to be healthy.  I don’t like myself.  Almost everything about me is frustrating or even infuriating.

But if walking can help me be slightly healthier, it may make me less annoying, in that I hopefully will feel less pain and irritation.  So, I don’t really care about my own well-being to any significant degree, but I want this stupid body to be as minimally uncomfortable as I can make it.

I’m supposed to start working this week on the lyrics to my next song, with the takeoff word “humility” this time.  I already have a few ideas, though I don’t know if they’ll be what shows up finally.  I also intend to do a quick, low quality “demo” of Native Alien that I may share here on this blog.  That way people can hear the tune I have in mind for it.

I didn’t do any Brilliant stuff over the weekend, but that’s okay.  I do that in much the same way that I have my physics and calculus text books and so on:  to keep alive the pipe dream of actually getting to a level of expertise in the various subjects to be able to do something useful.  But I don’t think I really ever will do those things.

Not that there’s anything wrong with learning just for the sake of understanding the world better.  Indeed, it’s a kind of hunger, a wish to take more and more of the universe into my mind, and thereby to “own” more of it, in the only sense that really works.  But it seems unlikely that I will ever find the time and/or the energy to achieve the level of expertise I would like to achieve in those various subjects.

Plus, honestly, my interest in one subject is constantly being derailed by something else, though it happens over relatively long time-scales.  That’s one of the reasons it was good for me to be enrolled in programmed curricula; I don’t have to worry as much about being distracted because I need to do certain things in a certain order at certain times.  Not that I can’t stay focused on something in which I’m interested; I can do that to a borderline psychotic level sometimes.  But I can’t readily choose which interest is going to grab me at a given moment.

Of course, most people don’t do what they want to do most of the time.  We all do what we must‒or else we die young, or suffer, or what have you; sometimes more than one bad outcome ensues.  Of course, even when we do what we must‒by whatever measure you want to determine that “mustness”‒we often accrue negative consequences.

I’ve tried very hard to do what I “must” throughout my life, for as long as I can remember.  I tried to live a clean life and to be productive and prosperous, to be useful to people who mattered to me and to innocent strangers and all that stuff.  I never knowingly or willingly, let alone willfully, committed crimes (other than minor speeding and so on), but I still ended up spending three years incarcerated and lost my medical license and much of what was left of my connection with my children, a good deal of which had already been hammered by my chronic pain problem and all the “fun” it gave me.

Also, of course, it turns out that all along I had ASD (of two varieties, the first having been fixed by open-heart surgery, and there may be some problem with that discovered a few years ago, but I’m not bothering looking into that, as there would be little point).  That doesn’t tend to have made things easier, I guess, though I have no direct point of comparison, since I have always been I.

I don’t know what point I’m trying to make, which probably means I’m not trying to make any point, I’m just meandering in my mind and sharing the dubious results with you, o injudicious reader.  Hopefully this isn’t too much of a bummer with which to start your work week.

But, hey, I’m not making you read this, am I?  If anything, I would advise against it, as I would advise pretty much anyone against wasting any time, effort, emotional investment, what have you, in me.  I’m a black cloud.  In the final analysis, I bring nothing but corrosion and discomfort and misery to those who spend too much time in my vicinity, literally or figuratively.

You should try to find something more pleasant if you can.

*I’ve only recently come to the (admittedly fairly obvious) conclusion that a big part of my anxiety about biking is because I have had at least two accidents on bicycles that hurt my shoulders‒a connective/soft tissue injury on the left that still causes my trouble, and a fractured scapula on the right (which healed very completely, as bones tend to do).

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Neither jot nor tittle, but just a title

It is Friday.  Friday it is.  I do not, though, plan to eat any green eggs and ham, nor do I intend to train Jedi.  I merely like to fiddle around with words.  I have also even been known to write and speak about cellos and violins and violas and basses‒wording around with fiddles, that is.

Anyway, this should be the end of the work week for me, so don’t expect a blog post tomorrow.  I’m not saying that there definitely won’t be one; it’s an outcome with a low probability, but it’s not zero.  In principle, the probability of any physically possible event happening is never zero.  But the odds can be so vanishingly small as to be zero for all practical purposes.

For instance, it’s physically possible for the entire Earth (the Moon included) to quantum tunnel to the Andromeda Galaxy, but I wouldn’t hold your breath.  I suspect that the odds of it happening are so low that the time scale between now and the evaporation of the largest black holes due to Hawking radiation (roughly a googol* years) would not even begin to make it likely to happen, even if it weren’t for the fact that the Earth and the Moon will have been so dead and so disintegrated by then that even the memory of their memory’s memories would have been long since lost to any mind that might still exist at that time…probably.

So, you can treat that Earth-Moon Andromeda tunneling as “impossible” for all practical purposes, but in principle, it could happen…

…right…

…NOW!

Okay, well, as far as I can tell, it hasn’t happened.  The sky is too hazy for me to see if the stars have changed, but I don’t think they have.  It would be quite something to experience the local stars of a different galaxy, but of course, if we tunneled into Andromeda, we might be in a relative star desert, or we might be in a place with too many stars for our long-term safety.  Also, if our solar system’s net momentum persisted, we would be unlikely to arrive in any kind of stable orbit of the center of that galaxy.

And, of course, I did not say the sun would come with us‒that would make the whole thing even more vanishingly unlikely‒so we’d all freeze in fairly short order, apart from organisms that use geothermal sources as the base of their food chains and energy cycles.  Those might survive for eons.

Anyway, it’s vastly more likely that I’ll work and write a blog post tomorrow than that we will quantum tunnel to Andromeda**, but it is still a very small likelihood***.  It may be less than one percent, I don’t know.  But it’s quite unlikely.

So, though it might be worth a quick glance to check in come the morning, especially if you were going to do that sort of thing anyway, I would not go out of your way, and I certainly wouldn’t recommend holding your breath.  I don’t think even a sperm whale could hold its breath that long, and I think they have the longest breath-holding record of any mammal (if anyone knows otherwise, please let me know).

In other news‒not that I’ve really given you any news so far‒my keyboard arrived safe and sound (so to speak) yesterday afternoon, so hopefully this morning I’ll be able to finalize the chords to Native Alien.  Then, maybe this weekend, I’ll record a little guitar-chord and voice demo so I don’t lose track of the song.

Then, next week, I can start working on a song based on the trigger “humility”.  I still have no clear conscious notion of an idea for such a song, but I’m not worried about that.  I know I can produce something (not the Beatles song).

I have to keep reminding myself that I don’t need to produce anything great as far as lyrics go‒I think the lyrics I have for Native Alien, which I shared the other day, are okay but not terrific‒I just need to get some words down.  I can always edit and alter things as the process evolves, just as the first draft of a story (or to a lesser degree a blog post) is just the beginning.

I’m also continuing with the circuit course on Brilliant, and I’m alternating reading that book Vector and The Lord of the Rings (yet again) and my own book, The Chasm and the Collision (also yet again, though LotR still holds the 2nd place record for my number of reads, well ahead of CatC and only bested in number of readings by The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever).

All these are things that I can do alone, of course.  If there’s something to do that would require someone else’s participation, well, I’m shit out of luck.

I think that’s a phrase that applies fairly well to me, come to think of it.  And the word “alone” might as well have my picture next to it in the dictionary.  Though that might be confusing, since I can think of other words that would merit my picture even more than “alone” would‒words that would do their part to explicate just why I am alone, no doubt.

Batman knows I don’t want to hang around with me.

Anyway, I hope you all have a nice weekend, and if anything truly improbable happens to you, I hope it’s a very good improbable thing.

*That’s 10 to the 100th power, or a 1 followed by 100 zeros, in case you’ve forgotten whence the software company cribbed their name.

**Quantum tunneling is not rare on small enough scales, though.  It happens countless times every second in the heart of the sun, for instance.  If it did not, there would not be enough heat and pressure to overcome the coulomb barrier to fusion, and the sun would be some very large equivalent of a brown dwarf…or maybe it would contract more and get hot enough for fusion to take place without tunneling, but then I think the sun would be hotter and brighter and more short-lived, and I think it’s unlikely that the Earth would have produced any life, let alone humans.

***Think about it:  if you took something with odds of ten to the minus 120‒that’s 119 zeroes between the decimal point and the first non-zero digit‒and then made it a billion times more likely than it is, you’d still have odds of 10 to the negative 111th power, or 0.000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001.  This is a good reminder that relative risk (or probability) is not the same as absolute risk (or probability).

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I well believe thou wilt not blog what thou dost not know, and so far will I trust thee.

Hello and, of course, good morning.  It’s Thursday, which you may have savvily guessed‒you are a clever one‒from the fact that I started the post with a variation of “Hello and good morning”.  Also, you’ve probably seen that the title above is some modified Shakespearean quote, though as I write this, I have no idea what that quote will be, other than that it will, with very high probability, be a quote from Shakespeare.

Not much new has happened since yesterday’s post‒not for me, anyway.  There’s plenty of material out there for those who wish to comment on what’s happening in the naked house ape world (said apes sometimes imagine that their “world” is of cosmic importance, but it’s actually not even a flash in the pan as far as the universe is concerned) but I try to avoid commenting on such things here, except to note that, boy, humans can be remarkably stupid.

There was a recent-ish Doctor Who episode in which the bad guy made every human on Earth feel absolutely convinced that they were right, about whatever opinions they might hold.  Predictably, this led to global chaos and destruction.  But wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could do the opposite, or roughly so, to the whole of humanity?  I’m not talking about making people all believe they are wrong about everything; I don’t even know quite how that would manifest itself.  I just mean removing or strongly blunting the sense of feeling right about things.

It’s a reasonably well-attested fact* that people prone to depression, for instance, are not prone to rate their own skills and abilities as worse than they really are but instead are more realistic about them.  This is as opposed to the more “typical” people, not prone to depression, who overestimate their own capabilities, e.g., the notion that, say, ninety percent of people think their driving skills are above the median**.  So, though people who are prone to depression are, well, prone to depression, they are at least less prone to start wars and commit atrocities based on half-baked ideologies.

Oh, and by the way:  to a good first approximation, all ideologies are half-baked.  This isn’t to say that they all are completely wrong.  It’s merely to say that not one of them actually contains “everything you need to know about” whatever.  If they did, it would be painfully obvious to every intellectually honest person.  Intelligent, well-meaning, non-delusional people would be convinced by the ideas as soon as they understood them.  People prone to depression might find consolation and some degree of peace in them.  Atheists would be “converted”.

The notion that any self-contained set of ideas could hold the answers to “life, the universe, and everything” flies in the face of all logic (and few things are more annoying than flies in one’s face).  For crying out loud, it takes hundreds and hundreds of pages to explain rigorously the nature and implications of classical motion, as in Newton’s “laws”, with subsequent improvements by Laplace and Lagrange and Hamilton and so on, and all that is only an approximation, at macroscopic scales, to our best understanding (which is known to be incomplete) of the physical nature of reality.  And that’s not counting electrodynamics and gravity, let alone getting into the strong force and the weak force and so on.

It’s a distressing tendency, this human desire to feel right, to want to think that they know the answers and so don’t have to think about things anymore.  It leads to so much more of the trouble in the world than “simple” evil does.

Psychopaths, I suspect, do far less harm overall than people with normal moral capacities‒good people, so to speak‒who believe that they are right.  “For the greater good” is the kind of sophistry that can, to paraphrase Ayn Rand, fumigate any atrocity, including the slaughter of a continent.

Of course, Rand-sensei fell prey to her own self-created dogma and the personality cult that had grown up around her, leading her to get stuck in some quite dubious conclusions.  This is despite her commendable starting points (i.e., metaphysics:  objective reality, and epistemology:  rational thought).  If only she hadn’t been so dead-set against humility.

Humility****, after all, is not really the belief that you are fundamentally worthless (though that may indeed be true on any sort of cosmic scale), but just the recognition that you are subject to error, like every finite being (and probably most “conceivable” infinite ones), and that, it being error, you will not necessarily know where it lies.  It is, after all, the place in which you are mistaken; if it were glaringly obvious, you might be expected to have noticed it already.  Being wrong feels the same as being right, at least until you realize that you are wrong.

There, I did some broad level commentary on the nature of at least some of the world’s problems.  Let this be my open warning against certainty, especially in the realm of morals, especially when you’re assessing other people.  If you ever find yourself in a situation in which you feel that the suffering and even death of other people is tolerable, or even desirable, in order to achieve some presumed better future world, you should stop and maybe induce a seizure so you can reset your brain.

On the other hand, if you just believe something so much that you’re willing to suffer and/or die yourself, and only yourself, well, that’s on you.  Knock yourself out.

TTFN

*I think this data has withstood the reproducibility crisis in psychology, but correct me if I’m wrong.

**I say median instead of “average” because the average is usually meant to refer to the arithmetic mean, but it is in principle entirely possible for ninety percent of people to be above the mean, but not for any more than fifty percent of people to be above the median, by definition***.

***This is one of those rare cases where it’s fully appropriate to say “by definition”, because it is not merely rhetoric but literally applies, the median being a mathematical term with rigorous meaning.

****I just recognized, while editing, that this is the subject/topic/trigger for what is to be my next song.

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“You’d say I’m puttin’ you on, but it’s no joke…”

I’m writing this on my smartphone today, a more or less deliberate choice, as much as anything we do is truly deliberate.  I was already very tired when I left work yesterday, but now it’s even worse, because I got very little sleep last night, even for me.  I’m quite worn out in general.  By rights, I ought to stay at the house, but Wednesday is payroll day, and anyway, I’m more comfortable at the office than I am in my room.  Or, at least, being at work is as good as my days get.

I may or may not go to work tomorrow depending on how I’m feeling.  Even if I go to work, I may or may not write a blog post.  I honestly barely have the gumption to write what I’m writing now.

I haven’t written any of the “Earth” song lyrics for my weekly (or whatever) song yet*, but I have been thinking about them and what approach to take.  I considered doing something that references the idea from Ann Rice’s vampire stories of going into the Earth to rest or escape, but I did a quick Google search and there are already several songs with the title Into the Earth (though I have no idea what the songs are about) which I guess isn’t surprising.  They were very popular books, and the notion of a vampire going “into the Earth” is evocative.

So, I’ll take another approach, perhaps discussing coming up from the Earth or some such.  We’ll see.  I guess I don’t really have to take it too seriously.

Boy, am I tired.  I was already worn out and stressed and tense at the end of the workday yesterday (there were reasons, but I won’t go into them), and now I feel worse.  A person really ought to feel better after having spent the evening and night in their private place in the house, but it’s not so with me in this case.  Honestly, I considered sending for an Uber and just going into the office at about 1:30 in the morning or so, but I decided that would seem too weird; I think the boss gets notifications when the alarm is turned on and when it is turned off.

I’ve been thinking back to when I had my kidney stone‒it’s only been two months‒and about how I sometimes wish it had been some more deadly affliction, or perhaps even that when they did the CT scan they might have found some lesion somewhere in my abdomen or pelvis that indicated some untreatable illness‒cancer or something similar.  Then everything would be taken out of my hands.  I could just find some doctor from whom I could get palliative care when necessary and then wait for the end.  I mean, in a way, that’s what I’m doing anyway‒it’s what everyone is doing‒but it’s vague and indefinite right now.

I’m sorry to be so morbid.  I know most people don’t like to think about death and dying, let alone to “speak” about it.  Then again, the Tao te Ching counsels us to embrace death with our whole being.  It’s pretty clear that it doesn’t mean that we should worship or love death, à la “we love death more than you love life”.  Quite the contrary.  I read it as saying that you will only be able to enjoy life fully and wisely if you internalize and accept the fact that you are going to die someday.

Once again, we find that Tyler Durden captured at least some ancient wisdom in his “teachings”.

Anyway, my own fanciful yearning for a terminal diagnosis has nothing to do with a healthy and wise attitude toward my own mortality.  No, my yearning is born of simple mental exhaustion, of chronic pain for more than two decades, of chronic insomnia for even longer than that, and of depression/dysthymia with concurrent “anxiety” that is only superseded in length by my recently diagnosed neurodevelopmental disorder, which is congenital.

Unfortunately, I see no evidence that any of these things is likely to go away‒especially the latter one‒and I’m just puttering around here in south Florida, accompanied by various arthropods and reptiles and fungi and humidity and rain and heat and one of the most idiotic state governments the nation has ever seen.  And I am just so very tired.

So, anyway, that’s that.  If I write a post tomorrow, it will be here, of course.  If I don’t, it won’t.  If that’s not clear to anyone, please let me know in the comments (I’m kidding, I know you all understand, though you should certainly feel free to leave comments).  If I make any progress on writing a song, I’ll let you know about that when it happens.

I hope you have a good day.

*Addendum:  Between rounds of editing this post, I came up with a possible first verse of a song.  I won’t share it right now, but it’s a start.

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The pointless but occasionally enjoyable music of this sphere.

Well, it’s Tuesday now, as you will know if you’re reading this on the day of its release.  You might not be sure if you read it later.  As far as I know, it’s not possible for you to read this earlier than I write it, but if you have that capacity, presumably you don’t need me to tell you what day and time it is when I’m writing it.  Presumably, you have quite a handle on times that things happen if you have that kind of ability—though I suppose that if you travel through time a lot, you might eventually have a hard time keeping track of what the local labels are on dates and times.

Sorry, that’s a bit of frivolous nonsense, which I hope doesn’t offend any non-time-travelers out there.  I’m here again, writing a blog post on my way to work and wondering what the point is to anything.  Not that I honestly suspect that there is a point to anything, really.  As far as I can see, there is no point to anything, and there is also no point to everything.  Everything just happens, and there’s no more to any of it than that, as far as I can see, and as far as anyone knows.

There are people who will tell you otherwise.  Lots of people claim to have found or been taught the meaning of life or of existence and whatnot, but either they are trying to manipulate you and/or sell you something, or they are sincere but mistaken.  In any case, they are not correct.  They do not know the meaning of life.  If they were to know it (not merely believe it), it could be conveyed in a way that, presumably, would be convincing to pretty much any listener.  Certainly they should be able to muster arguments, and perhaps evidence, that would convince a highly intelligent but disinterested extraterrestrial.

Enough philosophy for now.

Looking back to yesterday, I mentioned my idea about setting myself a goal of writing a song a week or maybe every two weeks.  Well, I didn’t do any song writing yesterday, but I did go to the Shakespeare AZ quotes site and flip coins repeatedly to pick the topic of a first song, and what I got was:  Earth.

That’s a bit unusual as a song topic, but I guess it’s doable.  I wouldn’t want to try to do some “We are the world” kind of thing, because that’s not what I really think of when I think of the Earth.  I think of the planet, the physical things, including all the animals and plants and fungi and bacteria and archaea and all that, but also including the geology and the geography and the chemistry and physics and everything else.

Despite the saying, man is not the measure of all things.  Man is barely even the measure of man, so to speak.  Humans by and large are relatively impressive animals, but they tend to think far more highly of themselves than is merited, in almost every case.

There are probably exceptions, but none of them come immediately to mind.

So, I’ll come up first with some lyrics (AKA a poem) about the planet Earth, or at least taking off from there, so to speak.  I have to remind myself that it doesn’t have to be very long, indeed that it should not be very long—I tend to get carried away when writing things, as you probably know.

I also need to decide what structure the song should be, like verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-verse-chorus or what have you.  Then, after that, I’ll think of an appropriate melody to go with the words.  It will probably all be quite mediocre, but the point of the exercise is not to worry about trying to be brilliant, but just to get something done.  We’ll see how that goes.

In other news—related, at least distantly—I just discovered that my former college roommate, who is also the best guitarist I’ve known, has begun producing and releasing more new music, on YouTube and on some other site.  His YouTube channel is bluetonegtr, which is a fun name because his name is Tony and of course, he plays guitar, and the blues is a big part of any really good guitarist’s repertoire (not mine).  I highly recommend checking his stuff out; he’s really good.  I’ll embed his latest song below, for your ease of access.

As for everything else, well—the world is still shit, though it certainly doesn’t have to be.  It just tends that way, or at least the human world does.  Maybe I could make that part of my song idea.  Or maybe I could deal with the fact that even life overall is pretty crappy, I don’t know.  I guess I’ll see.  Maybe I’ll just address the issue of absurd flat-Earth notions.  Maybe I could make it a comical song.

I don’t know.  This is all probably a stupid waste of time, anyway.  But time is a waste in any case, I guess, so I might as well use it stupidly.  Everyone else seems to do so.

I hope you at least enjoy at least part of your own wasted day today.

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Musings on moving and putting muses to work

It’s the start of another work week, which I guess is good from a certain point of view.  It’s a sign of…I don’t know, economic activity or some such.  I mean, it is good for people to be productive in that sense, though it’s also nice for people to have time and space to rest and to enjoy life.  After all, what’s the point of working to sustain existence if that existence is mainly dominated by discomfort and fear?

The world is complicated, of course, and many things are happening in nearly any place at nearly any time, but ultimately, for each individual, there is merely moment to moment experience.  And if that experience is negative in general, none of the other crap really matters very much.  Or so it seems to me.

You may recall—though it’s unlikely—that my workplace recently changed to a different office location.  It wasn’t a big change; we’re still in the same zip code.  But the new location is more pleasant, and the office is more pleasant as well, though smaller.  Also, in addition to there being a goodly number of apartments right across the road, there is also even a “high-end” trailer park nearby (yes, such a thing does exist).  I haven’t been to the latter, but I can see the former, and they look pretty decent.

My coworker and my boss suggested to me that I should think about moving and renting one of those apartments or—apparently these are nicer—one of the trailers.  When they suggested this, I basically gave a standard reply, with the main thing being that I hate to move.  By which I mean, I hate to change the place where I live, not that I prefer to remain stationary and frozen in person.

I hate the process of moving, I hate the necessary upheavals, the new connections to new landlords and services and so on, all of it.  I also don’t want other people touching and getting into my stuff to move it for me, and I’m not going to be able to do it myself.  Dealing with “paperwork” is another significant headache.

Ultimately, though, as I thought about it after our conversation, I realized that really a big part of the reason I don’t want to move is that I have no desire to go forward, nothing toward which to proceed, so there’s no point to the effort.  There is nothing fulfilling in my life, and I have no hope for improvement, so it seems ridiculous to spin my wheels.

I started my current living situation under the delusion that I would continue to write stories indefinitely, and then that I would make music too, and that I might reunite in a real and meaningful way with those who matter most to me.  A lot of that was a pipe dream, though I have at least made more of a connection with my youngest child.  We’ve actually been in each other’s presence twice since May, which is twice more than any other time since 2013.  That’s very good.

But otherwise, what I’m basically doing right now is waiting to die, just killing time until time kills me.  It’s being a bit of a slacker, I have to say.  I suspect that I’m going to need to take a personal hand in things—if one wants to have something done “right” one should just do it oneself, that sort of cliché.

But that runs afoul of various societal mores (and possibly morays, for all I know).  Not that I’m good at following or even grasping social mores.  I mean, the ones that make sense I have no trouble remembering, but a lot of them are irrational, and I have difficulty even desiring to internalize those.  Eventually, I’ll probably break down and say “to hell with it” and take matters into my own hands, unless something else does it for me, or unless I find some internal or external motivation that changes my status.  I don’t particularly know if I want to hope for that; everything seems to be more work than it’s worth.

In other news—either parallel or orthogonal to the above, I’m not sure which metaphor works better—I was thinking about songwriting, which I think I discussed briefly last week.  I know that at many times, bands (like the Beatles and so on) are tasked with preparing a new album, and will sit down and write songs in quite short order for such an album.

That seems intimidating, but it occurred to me that it’s probably analogous to what Stephen King does, and what Ray Bradbury described doing:  you just sit down and produce something every day.  Worry about making it better in the rewrite/editing stage, but just get something down.  It won’t all be genius—in most cases, anyway—but it will be something.

I thought, you know what, that’s probably a lot like what people like the Beatles (specifically Lennon and McCartney) did.  They knew they had to write songs for their next albums, so they just sat down and produced something, and then worked things out, rejecting some, improving others, and so on.

I thought about trying to do something like that, just out of curiosity, as an exercise, but I always have trouble thinking of topics or subjects for a song (or a poem, as the case may be), and so the poems and songs I’ve written have tended to be highly intermittent and often rather peculiar.

But I nevertheless thought that, maybe, I could set myself the task of writing songs more rapidly, just the way for a long while I wrote fiction every day.  I couldn’t write a song a day, of course.  I thought about trying to maybe write a song a week*, but even that felt intimidating.  But when I thought about writing a song a month, that seemed too slow, somehow.

So maybe I would be able to achieve something in between, maybe a song every two weeks.  But who knows, if I don’t expect myself to produce and record the songs one a week, I might be able to crank out something once a week.

And it occurred to me, also, that for subject matter I could turn to a source that I use (AZ quotes) when I can’t think of a pertinent Shakespearean quote for the title of my Thursday blog posts.  I could flip a coin to narrow it down by halves to pick my subject from among the long list of such subjects for quotes on that page.  It’s probably better than trying to find a subject by picking a random word by flipping through the pages of a book with my eyes closed.

So, who knows, maybe I’ll do that.  Maybe I’ll try to write a new “song” every one to two weeks, at least the words and basic melody.  Who knows, maybe if I’m pleased with any of them, I might do more with them and actually “release” them.  Though I currently have two songs that I wrote and haven’t yet released already:  Mercury Lamp and Come Back Again.

This is getting way too long for a single blog post, isn’t it?  Sorry to keep you, if there is anyone out there who has actually read this entire thing through to the end.  Hey, if you have, and if you feel like doing so, why not leave a comment below on WordPress so I know.  I would ask perhaps for you to leave the first line of Mercury Lamp to prove you’d read that far (and listened) but it seems unfair to ask you to do two things during a busy day.  So maybe just try to write something that makes it clear that you’ve read here.

Now, I let you go, with apologies for being so long-winded.

*I’m not talking about completing a song a week, as in getting all the parts prepared and recording and mixing and all that; that would be utterly unreasonable by myself, even if I weren’t working full-time.  But words and basic melody could be done.