life

by

Meandering moody Monday musings

In case you were wondering if you might somehow have missed it:  no, I did not write a blog post on Saturday (the one just two days ago, I mean‒March 14th, 2026).  It turned out there were a number of people who would not be able to come in to the office, making it pointless (more or less) for the few who remained.  One of our best closers had to go out of state to a wedding, and another’s spouse was having medical issues, and so on.

As for me, I am always “available”.  This is one of the perks of having no life.  I have no spouse or significant other or physical friends or family fewer than hundreds to thousands of miles away.  So, I can dedicate the last calorie of energy, the last ounce of will, the bitter dregs of my spirit, to throwing my remnants onto the incineration heap of gainful employment.  Though I also reserve some energy to spend on twisted, tortured, melodramatic metaphors, as you can see.

Anyway, we rescheduled things, and we will be working this Saturday, i.e., the next one coming up in the current direction of time, so I expect I will be writing a post on that morning, five days from now‒unless I am lucky enough to get severely ill.

It seems that everyone keeps getting sick on and off around me, but I don’t catch nearly as many even potentially life-threatening infections as many other people do.  I guess that’s one of the side-effects of not really interacting with other people in person (or in other ways, for the most part).  The most I could catch here would be a computer virus.

Anyway, I know that’s probably not at all interesting, but I’m just the one writing it; you’re the one choosing to read it.  I’d prefer you to read my fiction, but I know that costs money.  It also doesn’t tend to come in relatively bite-sized chunks, as a daily blog tends to do.  Though, to be honest, I sometimes write rather big blog bites, and they probably taste a bit strange, as well.

I sometimes think about‒and sometimes write about‒setting up a Patreon, or maybe just doing something simpler like that “Ko-fi” thing, where people can do the equivalent of buying someone (e.g., me) a cup of coffee as a thanks for their work.  The problem is, I would feel awkward about asking my regular readers for money, though maybe that’s weird.

Also, then I would have to try to keep track of the whole thing, on top of the other things I have to do regarding work and commuting and chronic pain and so on.  I mean, I suppose if everyone who comes to read or see my blog every day bought me a cup of coffee each, every single day, I might be able to write full time, that might make it doable.

And, if wishes were horses, what would be the result?  It doesn’t matter, of course, because wishes are not horses; they’re not even the same kind of thing as horses.  Both words are nouns, but only one of them is a noun representing a physical object of some kind*.  Consider the reverse notion:  what would it mean for horses to be wishes?

If horses were wishes, then riders would be screwed (figuratively speaking).  Because wishes that are fulfilled destroy themselves in a sense‒they make themselves unnecessary‒and so an extant wish is one that is unfulfilled.

That’s all really stupid, isn’t it?  Sorry.

I’m still not sure what to write today.  This is a fairly amusing fact since, at this point, I’ve written over 600 words despite not knowing what I want to write.  It’s not very amusing, but it is rather pathetic in a not-quite-tragic way.

I occasionally, as I’ve mentioned recently, think about doing videos of some of my stuff to put up on YouTube and Instagram (I don’t use or have TikTok, though my published songs are available there, apparently).  These are places (and media) where, it seems, one can get significant spread of one’s work.

But whenever I do test videos of myself talking, I’m very displeased with having to see my face.  Of course, I’ve done several videos on YouTube of me playing music, but though I can feel at least tolerably well-disposed toward those because the focus is on the music, I nevertheless get embarrassed to see them.

And somehow, it seems to me that, with each new video, I get uglier.  I know, it’s unlikely that this perception is accurate in any objective way, since it honestly doesn’t make much sense, but I cannot seem to change my impression of myself.  I have tried wearing masks of one kind or another when doing videos, and that helps, but it’s a bit weird, probably.

Part of the problem is probably the perils of parallax:  when one is close in to the camera, as one tends to be with smartphone-based videos, the photons from one’s face come to the lens from relatively wide angles, making one’s face seem slightly wider than it actually is on the flat video sensor and the video.

Maybe that’s part of why my music-playing videos don’t bother me as much‒they were taken using a camera that was a good six feet away (or nearly) and so gave a much less distorted image.  This raises possible partial potential remedies** for my video issues.

All of this is probably just pipe dreaming, anyway.  I don’t have the mental energy and drive to get my bicycle tire repaired from last year, nor to pump up the tires on my other bike, nor to do much of anything except go through the pre-programmed motions of a very uninteresting and inconsequential and all but completely empty life.  But at least it can sometimes be distracting to pretend.

*Though, in a very real sense, a wish is something physical, because wishes occur as states in the nervous systems of (relatively) intelligent mammals, so they do occur as physical things.  But you still couldn’t put a saddle on one and ride it.

**I was unable to come up with a p-word that really worked here.  Oh, well.

by

In a better blog than this, I shall desire more love and knowledge of you

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, and I’m writing this post on my lapcom.  I feel as though I ought write these posts only on the computer (not that smartphones are not computers, but cut me a little slack on this, please), and I would be more inclined to do so if Microsoft would stop making Aptos the default font!!!!!

If I could go back in time and change something, that’s one of the things I would be inclined to change.  If I found that there was one person mainly responsible for this new font, well…I don’t know if I’d go all Terminator on them and kill that person’s mother before that person was born, or kill the person when that person was a child, but something needs to be done to erase the stain of this horrible font from existence.

Certainly, if I were given* absolute power over the world, from this moment forward, one of the petty things I would do (I would try to keep the petty things to a very bare minimum, trust me**) is to eliminate that font from any and all standard computer systems anywhere.  I would probably allow for individuals to select the font if they really like it, but would not let them use it on anything but internal work between people who also like the font.

Also, I would probably mark people who chose the font freely for a visit from my secret police.

I’m kidding.  I despise the very notion of thought crime, let alone aesthetic policing in private matters.  This is even though some people’s quality of thought sometimes feels like a crime against nature.  But, of course, there cannot actually be crimes against nature.  Nature does not punish one for disobedience to its laws.  It’s simply not possible to do anything but follow them.

That’s one reason why I truly despise headlines like “The new finding by Hubble that breaks physics!” and whatnot.  Not only are they plainly clickbait, they are stupid clickbait.  I don’t know for sure if it’s just the headline writer or the writer of whatever the attached article might be who makes the headline in specific instances, but in either case, when I see headlines like that, I think that whoever wrote it really, clearly doesn’t understand physics very well.  Nor do they the nature of scientific discovery and advancement.  Because of that, I am far less likely to read the attached article (or watch the video) or even click on its link.

Nothing can break physics.  If you find something that seems to violate physics as you understand it, what you have found is not a violation of physics but rather a place where your understanding of physics is clearly incorrect.  This is far from a horrible thing.  This is how progress in physics (and in other sciences) is made:  by finding the places where our “understanding” doesn’t predict or describe what actually appears to be happening.  The world cannot be “wrong”, so our understanding of it must be, and will need to be revised.

That’s progress.

One should be hesitant to give too much “trust” to anyone who refuses to change their mind.  One of the best lines in a Doctor Who episode (not a truly great episode, maybe, but it has a wonderful speech by the Doctor) is after the Doctor has said to the “villain” (who goes by the human name Bonnie, though she is not human) “I just want you to think.  Do you know what thinking is?  It’s just a fancy word for changing your mind.”

Bonnie responds, “I will not change my mind.”

And the Doctor says, “Then you will die stupid.”***

This is simply true.  If you never learn that you were wrong about something, if you never update your credences or think about things in a new way, you will never learn anything new or develop any better understanding of the world than you did when you formed those credences.  Or, to paraphrase Eliezer Yudkowsky, if no state of the world can change the state of your retina and how you perceive that state, that’s called being blind.

I like to refer to Yudkowsky-sensei a lot, but that’s because he has said a lot of bright and interesting things, and he has said them well.  It’s also nice to know that there are some highly intelligent and thoughtful people in the world—clearly there are, or humans would long since has gone the way of the trilobites—because the idiots and the assholes make so much noise.

The best evidence I see for the fact that most people are good or at least benign (overall) is that civilization still exists, and has done so for a long time.  It is far easier to destroy than to create or even to maintain; the second law of thermodynamics tells us that things will fall apart even if we do nothing at all to break them (it says that more or less, anyway—that’s a bit of a bastardization of the proper, mathematical law, but it is related and implicit).

The fact that civilization still exists—so far, at least—seems to indicate that there must be a lot of people working to maintain and sustain and improve it, because we can easily see how much how many people seem to be trying to make it crumble****.

Assholes tend to make a lot of noise in the world, but they’re pretty much all full of shit and “hot air”.  It’s worth it to keep this in mind, because there have always been plenty of such nether orifices out there, spewing their flatus everywhere like perverse crop-dusters.  But the evidence strongly suggests that they are not the norm; they are just the noisiest.

I suppose that’s a good moral of sorts on which to end this post:  Be willing, even eager, to change your mind when warranted, and try not to let the assholes make you think the world is no better than a camp latrine (even if you’re one of the assholes sometimes, which you are, since we all are, sometimes*****).

Though, to be fair, I am hardly the person to be giving that last piece of advice unironically.

TTFN

*If you must be given absolute power, do you actually then have absolute power?  This is similar to the old song that says “Don’t ever take away our freedom.”  If you have to beseech someone not to take away your freedom, you’re not free, and if you have to be given power, your power is clearly not absolute.

**Or don’t, if that’s not in your character.  I’ve often spoken implicitly against the concept of trust, stating that I don’t feel that I can actually, truly trust any living person.  It’s calculated risks all the way down, which is empirically true if nothing else.  So, I can hardly scold someone if they don’t “trust” me.  Go ahead, form your own conclusions.  I do exhort you, though, to be as rational as possible when you form them, with your conclusions drawn as a consequence of the evidence and argument, not with your evidence and argument being curated based on your knee-jerk or at least hasty “conclusion”.

***He then proceeds to lay out the alternatives; he’s not making a threat, he’s making a point.

****When you read that, did you immediately think of your own least favorite political or other public figure, or perhaps of the people you encounter who disagree with your politics or religion or dietary preference or what have you?  Be careful.  Us/them thinking is not usually conducive to formulating true and accurate pictures of reality (though it did inspire at least one beautiful song):

*****We’re also all deuterostomes (I’m assuming only humans are reading this).  Look it up.  It’s kind of funny.

by

I had a good headline idea, but it slipped my mind

I was surprised by how much response I’ve received to yesterday’s blog (and that of the day before) as well as the number of comments.  It’s very gratifying, and I appreciate it very much.  Thank you.

As for today, well, I am really not sure what to write, because yesterday’s blog was‒from my viewpoint, anyway‒about as free-form and chaotic and tangential and stochastic (not to say redundant) as anything I’ve written.  But maybe that’s just the experience I had while writing it; maybe it doesn’t actually come across that way to the reader(s).  It’s difficult for me to know, because even more than reading, writing is a solitary thing.

That’s not to say that people can’t write together.  Back when I was a teenager, I co-wrote some partial stories with one of my best friends, and we did it sitting next to each other and talking things through aloud as we typed.  That was a pretty active and interactive collaboration.

Unfortunately, I don’t think we got very far with it.  We made much more progress writing silly computer programs in Basic on the Apple II+ my father had bought.  This was in the days before there were any ISPs as far as I know, though we did dial onto a couple of local “billboard” services from time to time with my dad’s old modem (I think it was 600 baud*, but it may be some even divisor or even a very small multiple of that number).

One time, I even had a conversation with a girl (!) who was helping run one of the billboards.  She was (supposedly) about my age, and obviously she was much more into computers than I was for the time.  There was never (in my regretful mind) any possibility of an ongoing interaction, let alone a physical meetup or anything, however.  Even then, though I was reasonably confident when within my local group of friends and teachers, I was painfully shy and awkward, and could never make conversation other than about specific topics.

Goal-directed interactions are okay, as they tend to flow naturally from the process involved.  This is why I’ve made nearly all my friends at school or at work.  Purely social interactions were never really an option for me, except with people I already knew quite well.  And having a successful romantic relationship was unfortunately not in the cards for me.

It still isn’t, as far as I can tell.  I suspect the problem is that there’s no other member of my true species on this planet.  I did come reasonably close, or so I thought for a long time, but I’ve been divorced now about five years longer than I was married, so I apparently wasn’t all that successful.

Okay, well, sorry about the weird, ancient info-dump.  It’s not nearly as cool as the data that’s coming in from the recently-activated Vera Rubin observatory.  That, at least, is the sort of thing that helps restore my faith in humanity.  Or, well, maybe it would be more accurate to say that it shifts my Bayesian credence slightly away from the “humans are without net redeeming value” end and toward the “humans may not be all that bad in the end” end.

The credence is still quite low, though.  By which I mean I’m closer to the first end than the second most of the time.

Things might be a little bit better if the sort of people who do things like setting up the Vera Rubin telescope, and who set up and launched and now use the James Webb telescope, and the members of the former human genome project, and the people who study cognitive neuroscience, were the sort of people working in government, writing and administering laws.  Generally speaking, though, the first type of people don’t tend to want to do the governing nonsense, probably not least because a lot of that business is not about everyone trying to do the best they can for the people they represent.

The people who want to do astronomy and mathematics and biology and geology and neuroscience and meteorology and so on are probably some of the best people to do those things‒not just from their point of view but also from the viewpoint of civilizational benefit.  Unfortunately, many of the people who want to go into government and politics tend to be some of the worst people for those jobs, from the point of view of civilization.

I can’t say they are the worst possible group for the job.  The truly disaffected and uninterested or the misanthropic and nihilistic might well do a worse job even than the lot who do it now.  This is despite the fact that most of those latter people act on shallow and immediate self-interest.  Self-interest can do the job adequately when the incentives are structured such that one’s self-interest is served by serving the interests of the people of one’s community/city/nation/species.

Those incentives are very tricky to manage, unfortunately.  It would be much better if we could find people who had real enthusiasm and curiosity and an actually somewhat scientific approach to government.  If only we could find a group as committed to seeing a truly and objectively well-run society‒in which everyone was better off than they would have been in nearly any other‒as the group who set up the Vera Rubin observatory was committed to actually getting the observatory done so they and we could learn ever more about the universe on the largest scales, things might be quite a bit better than they are.  Maybe not, but my credence leans more toward the “maybe so” end.

Alas, politics and government were not born of human curiosity and creativity‒the things almost entirely unique to the species‒but of the old, stupid primate dominance hierarchy/mating drives, which are evolutionarily understandable, but which don’t make for pretty, let alone beneficial, government.  Think about it.  Would you want to put a bunch of self-serving apes doing the jobs of government?

Oh, wait!  That is the group doing the jobs of the government!  Of course, it’s also the group being governed.  Uh-oh.  This could be boding better**.

Not that being recognized as an ape is an insult per se; apes are all that we’ve had available, and they’re the best that’s come along so far.  Some of them are really not so bad.  Some of them figure out ways to launch immense telescopes into space, not so very long after one of them first created the telescope.  Some of them figure out ways to cure and even prevent unnecessary disease.  Some of them figure out ways to turn simple manipulations of base-two arithmetic into information processing that can be scaled up to any kind of logic and information that can be codified.

Some of them just write blogs and sometimes write stories and songs and such***.  But hopefully, that’s not too detrimental an endeavor.

*A baud is a bit per second being sent over the phone lines.  Not a meg, not a K, not even a byte, but rather a bit‒a binary digit, a one versus a zero, on or off.  If you listened to the sound of the modem, you could imagine you could almost hear the individual bits.

**Tip of the hat to Dave Barry’s “Mister Language Person”.

***Though I have done my very small part in advancing human scientific knowledge, in that I am a co-author and co-investigator on an actual published scientific paper.

by

This is the blog this man’s soul tries

Well, in case some of you were starting to feel lighthearted and optimistic‒just a little more at ease with yourselves and the world after two whole days without reading my work‒here I am to write another blog post that will probably bring you down and make you inclined to wonder whether anything at all is really worth anything, or if you should just give it all up, especially the habit of reading this blog.

Congratulations.  It’s Monday again, the start of another work week.  Also, Daylight Savings Time has ended (or is it “begun”?) over this last weekend, so for a bit, a lot of people’s circadian rhythms are going to be slightly off.  That will contribute to an increased number of accidents, both minor and major.  There will also be increased rates of illness (again, both major and minor), and I believe there is even some evidence that men at least will suffer more heart attacks after the time changes.

And what are the other advantages of Daylight Savings Time?  I’m not aware of any actual other benefits.

Of course, like most of you, I’m starting my own work week today, and it’s going to be a long one; the office is scheduled to be open this Saturday.  By then, the shifted time measure will be mostly adjusted in everyone’s heads.  I’m speaking of things here in the US, of course; I honestly don’t know off the top of my head whether other cultures have adopted this weird custom.

Whence did it originate?  I’ve heard explanations and excuses at various times in my life, but they are not very convincing.  If you know‒with reasonably good credence‒please share that information in the comments below.  And like and share it if you’re so inclined, especially if you have a strong sense of irony.  Heck, like and share the song itself if you want to immerse yourself in a kind of meta-level irony, or something like that:

I don’t know what to discuss today, even more so than usual.  I’ve committed to trying not to dwell on, or at least to share, my negative thoughts and emotions and so on, since I’m sure they do very little other than make other people feel depressed (yes, certain kinds of mental illness can be rather contagious, in a sense at least).

I won’t say I would never wish depression on anyone; that’s ridiculous.  For instance, I would feel much safer in the world if this Presidential administration, and indeed most of its equivalents around the globe, suffered from enough depression to make them second-guess themselves and doubt themselves from time to time.  It almost ought to be a requirement for office that someone be prone to dysthymia at the very least, so they would feel less confident that their shit doesn’t stink, so to speak.

And no, I am not suggesting that the people of the world ought to put me in charge for the best chance to make the world better.  I used to dream of such things, and I had a very Sauron-like wish to control events in the world for the greater good.  It might still not be too horrible a notion.

But my inclination over time has become more negative, more Melkor/Morgoth like.  So if anyone is inclined to encourage and engender acts of chaos and destruction on a hitherto unseen scale, by all means, give me immense power.  I make no warranties or guarantees or even assurances that I will use such power wisely.

I’ll try, of course.  No one can be expected (fairly) to do anything more than that, no matter what Yoda said.

Goodness knows I’ve tried a lot, in a lot of ways, all throughout my life, literally for as long as I can remember.  By which I mean, I’ve tried to do my best to do good things and to be a good person‒a good friend, a good son, a good husband, a good father, a good doctor, all that.  You can probably tell by my current state‒solitary, lonely, divorced, professionally ostracized, in bad physical health, in horrible mental health, alone*‒how well I’ve done at all those things.

I’m not exaggerating when I say I’ve tried hard.  I’m not one to big myself up very much, but I have worked hard all my life, trying to be a good son, a good friend, a good brother, a good husband, a good doctor, a good father.  Yet despite my sincere efforts and my reasonably high intelligence, here I am.

I suppose a lot of the disappointing outcome(s) is/are related to my ASD, both the heart-based one and the brain-based one, as well as my tendency (probably related to the preceding) to depression and some degree of low-grade paranoia.

By “low-grade” there, I mean that I don’t literally suspect that there are malicious forces plotting against me or trying to control me; I honestly don’t think highly enough of humans (or any other beings) to expect them to be capable of such things.  It would almost be reassuring if they were.

No, I mean I just have a general, global sense‒not just intellectually, but in my bones as it were, in my deep intuitions‒that I cannot rely upon anyone or upon anything, other than the laws of nature themselves (whatever their final version might be).  I don’t “trust” anyone or anything, including (one might even say “especially”) myself.  Everything is a calculated risk.

This is of course literally true for everyone, but I think most people hide from that fact most of the time, usually (but definitely not always) without terrible consequences.  I don’t know if that’s worse or better.  It may be more pleasant, but I suspect it’s misleading, and has been responsible for, or at least it has contributed to, many ills the human race has brought upon itself and upon others.

Whataya gonna do?  I guess you’re gonna do whatever you must, as they say, since it’s not as though you can do anything other than what you do once you’ve done it, and so it was all along what you were going to do, and so it was what you must do (or must have done).

I hope you have a good day and a good week.  I’ve tried to withhold my depression and negativity, with at least some degree of success‒trust me, I’ve withheld‒and I will continue to do so, because sharing it is pointless, and asking for help is laughable.

*Now, that phrase had some redundant notions, didn’t it?

by

Thoughts meander like a restless Melkor in the Outer Void…

It’s Friday, and this week I can be thankful therefor, because I do not work tomorrow.  The office will be closed (and locked) on Saturday.  Only those who have keys and the alarm code and some other reason for being there would be there (I suppose someone could break in, but there are cameras and alarms in place, and there is nothing of any significant net value, i.e., value worth risking the alarms and cameras to reach, inside).

Next Friday won’t be as good from a strictly work/not work point of view, but at least it will be Friday the 13th again, for the second month in a row.  Then we will have to wait an average* of 7 years for it to happen that way again.

***

Okay, I guess I’ve always known that I’m weird, but I just wrote a series of footnotes about Friday the 13th and year lengths and lengths of weekly cycle recurrences that dwarfed what I had yet written in the main body of this post.  I think I’m probably the only being in the universe that would write about such things and imagine that anyone else would be interested.

Yeah, definitely weird.

Still, I guess that sort of thing just happens when you talk to yourself in print and share it with any interested parties who might stumble upon it.  Also, when one is without companions or interactions one can, like Melkor, develop thoughts and thought patterns that are unlike those of one’s brethren.

I suppose that can sometimes be a good thing, though it can also sometimes be a very bad thing (rarely as bad as in the fictional Melkor case).  Though all improvement is change, most change is not an improvement‒at least not if it’s not deliberate and directed change.  So if one develops thoughts that are significantly divergent from those of all of one’s peers, odds are that they will not be a net improvement over most of the peer-born thoughts.

I have, of course, mitigated against this somewhat by reading a lot (and consuming other media that deal with science and mathematics and philosophy and such, as well as comedy panel shows).  That’s not randomly chosen reading, either; it’s carefully chosen reading.  I think this has helped improve the general content and tendencies of my thought, because I’ve influenced myself with the carefully thought-out thoughts of very bright people.

I suppose, though, that if one can read what one wants and does so, one is not really isolated from all other thoughts, so one’s own cannot be too very different, or at least are not very likely to be.  That’s good, I think.  Simply developing new thoughts without much input from others would be most likely to lead to some sort of feral state or something akin to schizophrenia.  

So, I guess it can be good to take tangents in one’s thinking, as long as they are not too many and too extreme.  But even given that, it’s clearly useful to have someone to rein one in, if one can, when one goes too far off the rails (yes, that’s a bad metaphor, since a train going off the rails at all is in huge trouble, rails representing a near-binary situation‒if one is a train and one is not on the rails completely, one has experienced a failure of locomotion).

Well, I guess that’s that for this week.  Actually, I suppose that is always that, by some principle of identity or self-reflection or something; I’m sure there’s an “official” name.  “It is what it is” as they say.  What I mean, though, is that I am drawing this post, and this week of posts, to a close now.

I hope you have a very good weekend.

After that I don’t give a shit.

(I’m kidding.)

*I know, I know, we won’t have to wait an average number of anything.  There is a specific and exact number of years before the next time February and March have Fridays the 13th, but I cannot be arsed to work it out just now**.

**Okay, well, since I am unable to keep myself from thinking about it at least a little, I think it’s going to be 6 years from now.  That’s because each regular year is 1 day longer than a multiple of a week:  365/7 is 52 with a remainder of 1, so one day longer than an even number of weekdays.  So next February should have the 13th on a Saturday, then a Sunday the following year, but then on a Tuesday the year after that because of the leap year (366/7 is 52 with remainder 2).  Then it will be Wednesday, then Thursday, then Friday.  So 6 years, if my figuring is correct***.

***If it seems counterintuitive that it’s 6 years when the average should be 7, remember that while in this case the leap year makes the next instance come faster, there will be occasional years when Thursday the 13th falls on a leap year and the following year will go straight to Saturday the 13th, the first of another six years (I think) that will be needed for the subsequent Friday the 13th in February.  In any case, 6 plus (6 x ⅙) equals 7, as does 6 + (a x 1/a) no matter what a is****.

****This doesn’t factor in those leap years in which February has a Friday the 13th, but March will not.  That may change the overall calculations somewhat regarding the average time between dual Fridays the 13th, but not the calculations about when the next one will be.

by

The painful truth – the truthful pain

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

by

And his brain ate into the worms…

Ugh.  Didn’t we just leave this party?  Evidently, we did not leave it precipitously enough, because here we are‒or at least, here I am‒rejoining it in the morning.

It seems like an ill-advised notion, but then again, I’m not sure who specifically advised me, or any of you, to do it.  There probably were a few literal, formal pieces of advice that we all or each received throughout our lives‒advice about getting up early and going to work and striving to fulfill our potential, and how if we didn’t we were somehow letting ourselves and (more importantly) letting everyone else down.

“The early bird gets the worm” is a typical phrase about such ambition and dedication and hard work.  But like many of us, I’ve often thought that worms are overrated.  They’re not rated highly at all, I’ll admit, but nevertheless, I think they are rated too highly.  Evidently‒according to what I have read‒all earthworms in at least the northern part of North America were killed off in the last ice age.  Nevertheless, plants grew and flourished without verminous help in the soil before Europeans accidentally brought their own earthworms here.

Of course, the saying is metaphorical, I know that.  We’re not really advised to seek earthworms early in the day, though perhaps liver flukes and flatworms and tapeworms and roundworms are also considered as among the worms that might be caught.

No, probably not.

But anyway, even though metaphorical, that saying raises higher level questions, such as, “Is the life of a metaphorical early bird worth having?”

Consider what that life entails:  Getting up (early), pecking around on the ground for worms and probably also for various other insects and their larvae and a few arachnids as well*; trying to avoid, in that process, being caught by some predator (such as a house cat); trying to find and attract a mate when the season is right; helping build a nest, if you’re that kind of bird; guarding the eggs and maybe sitting on them yourself, until they hatch; then, feeding and protecting them until they can fly on their own; then repeating these steps until disease or starvation or one of those house cats gets you.

That’s it.  And while there are many embellishments and flourishes and complications in the typical human life cycle, overall it is much the same as that of the bird.  Why would we expect it to be otherwise?

Admittedly, humans (and humanoids) can dream up other things to do, and some of them are more interesting and fulfilling, from their own points of view at least, than the ordinary early bird pattern.  But though, in the long run, humans as a whole may become significant enough to do something truly meaningful on a cosmic scale, almost all of them have no deeper lives than those lived by the early birds.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing, of course.  Taken with the pertinent attitude, such a life can be well lived and fulfilling.  It probably won’t end happily, because it’s not in the nature of life to be happy when ending; there’s just no real evolutionary benefit to having such a tendency.

Still, before imbibing the so-called Kool-Aid™ of the motivational life-messages‒those social moralities that keep us getting up and joining the rat race (to shoehorn in another animal-related metaphor)‒it would probably behoove us to consider whether that is the life we think we want, to ponder if that overall shape and experience are okay with us as the outline of our lives.

If so, there’s nothing wrong with that.  As long as you’re not interfering with other people’s ability to try to live their lives as they try to see fit**, then do what seems best to you.

But it’s useful to think about what might be the overall shape of your life if you continue as you currently are and if that shape will be aesthetically (or otherwise) pleasing to you.  If not, what change might improve that overall shape, trying to take all reasonably plausible inputs and outputs into consideration?

I won’t say that the unexamined life is not worth living, because, if it’s unexamined, how do you know that it’s not worth living?  Huh?  Huh?  Nevertheless, I will say that the unexamined, unconsidered life could be fulfilling only by accident, whereas it may be possible, with deliberation, to steer toward a better one.

Not that I’m a good piece of evidence in favor of this.  I think and overthink to the point that I hate the noise of my own mind, but I haven’t been able to steer myself into an optimal shape***.  But at least I make a lot of “noise” about such things.  That might be worth something.

Anyway, have a good day.  Enjoy your worms or salads or whatever other life forms you kill and consume to remain alive today (I’m assuming you are not a green plant).  Watch out for the Kool-Aid™ and even more so for the cats.

*I am quite sure that, to such a bird, these things taste delicious, so I don’t mean to disparage their diet as unpalatable.  Appetites of various kinds are species specific; what’s appetizing or sexually attractive to, say, a housefly is unlikely to appeal to any psychologically healthy human.  Likewise, the most beautiful human woman ever is not going to do anything for a male tarantula.  He also probably would have no interest in having a bite of her salad.

**This is more difficult to navigate than it may seem at first, because even when one is acting on one’s own, there are always effects at some level, there are always “externalities”, and occasionally these will have an impact on other people‒a foreseeable but perhaps unforeseen impact.  And vice versa.

***Should there be a “yet” at the end of that sentence?  I don’t know; we’ll have to see what happens to me in the future.  We can be reasonably sure, though, that there shouldn’t be a yeti at the end of that sentence, or of any sentence except one that mentions such creatures.

by

A notification of whatever

I expect this post to be brief today, though I’ve been known to be wrong about that sort of thing.  I had sort of “intended” to make my headline “Oh, well, whatever…” and then make the entire body of the post “…never mind.”  Thus I would be quoting the last verse-line of Smells Like Teen Spirit by Nirvana.  The subsequent words in the song are just the chorus and then a refrain of “A denial” repeated nine times (if memory serves).

I wasn’t sure I hadn’t already done this before, though.  I could have checked, but I didn’t have the mental energy.

Still, using that last line from a Kurt Cobain song carries a certain subtext which would have served my purposes well.

Or, well, actually, given past history, it probably wouldn’t have served my purposes at all.  None of this sort of thing seems to serve my purpose, no matter what I do.  As far as I can tell, only one person actually read my (admittedly somewhat long) post yesterday, but though I was borderline explicit about my meaning, I don’t think it did any good whatsoever.  That’s not unusual, of course; much if not all that I do never ends up doing me much good.

Sometimes I have to be subtle because I cannot force myself to be open about my internal states after a lifetime of fighting to appear “normal”, to the degree I can achieve that, and to avoid being too much trouble for other people, since I don’t think I have the right to trouble them, and in fact I think (or feel) that I’m fundamentally reprehensible.

I shouldn’t worry, though.  The times I am more open and obvious‒even when I am borderline explicit‒don’t appear to be any more successful than when I am at my most cryptic.  Possibly, I am just not able to communicate my feelings effectively with humans.

At the very least, my success rate must be below one percent.  It’s not quite as bad as playing the lottery, but it’s pretty pathetic.  Then again, so am I.

Whatever.  Never mind.  Ha ha.

But really, though, I don’t have much to say.  Quoting iconic songs may be the extent of my capacity to convey myself.

Ironically, I don’t feel the urge to share quotes from my own songs (or my fiction).  You would think they would be the best choice for conveying my inner thoughts.  That’s not always the case, though.

In fact, though I like my songs well enough, and Breaking Me Down is meant to be fairly explicitly about depression (at least my species thereof), none of them have enough oomph, as it were.  Or maybe it’s just that they are not well known*, so no one recognizes and identifies with the words.

I think I have some pretty good lines in Come Back Again, including what’s probably my favorite:

“Only meeting strangers

always losing friends.

Every new beginning

always ends.”

It may seem a bit bleak, but it’s also true more or less by definition.  If you’re meeting someone for the first time, they had been a stranger until that point.  And friends do become “lost”.  And the next two lines are rather obviously true.

Of course, a very good signing (singing?) off quote would be from Pink Floyd’s Time:  “The time is gone, the song is over, thought I’d something more to say.”

I’ve always been annoyed that they added the little reprise of Breathe after that and made it officially part of the song, because those other two lines constitute a perfect song ending.  I always figured they didn’t want to make the song end on too much of a downer, so they threw in the reprise as part of that song instead of as a separate one.  Maybe they were unwittingly invoking a version of the peak-end rule I mentioned the other day.

Anyway, I have a locked and loaded draft of a blog post that already applies that couplet from Time, with the headline being the first half, continuing into the post which consists only of the second half of that quote, followed by the embedded “video” of the final song on the first album of The Wall.

That, of course, is still a draft, and has been waiting there for a while, because if I use it, it’s meant to be my final blog post, and practically my final anything.  So I wasn’t going to use it today.  Not quite.  But I’m close.  The Nirvana quote isn’t quite as final, but it is a warning, especially given the fate of the guy who wrote it.

Anyway, consider yourselves on notice.  On notice of what?

Figure it out.

*That’s an understatement, eh?

by

This is not an attention-grabbing headline

I’m writing this post on my smartphone, even though I brought my lapcom with me yesterday evening.  I did not use my lapcom for yesterday’s post, such as it was.  I didn’t even write that post in the morning yesterday, or at least, I didn’t write the “first draft” of it then.

By the end of the workday on Wednesday, I didn’t feel like I was going to want to write a blog post on Thursday.  So I went to the site directly and just wrote the “Hello and good morning,” and the “TTFN” and set it to publish later.

I already knew what title I was going to want to use for it.  I wanted to use Polonius’s dithering, meandering jabber about brevity being the soul of wit, as a sort of left-handed self compliment about my own brevity in that post, and because, in the original form, it would have made the headline longer than the post, which would be ironically funny, in principle.

Then, yesterday morning, I got the urge to put my little “insert here” bracketed bit in the post, the better to convey how disgruntled and disaffected and self-disgusted I (still) felt, as well as how tired.  It did sort of spoil the joke about the headline being longer than the post, of course.  At least the older joke about Polonius still holds water.  Then again, that joke was made by Shakespeare, so we shouldn’t be too surprised if it has serious legs (though this raises the question of how serious legs could possibly hold water).

One thing worth at least assessing this week might be whether there is an aesthetic difference between this post (for instance) and the posts I wrote earlier this week, on the lapcom.  Writing on the lapcom is quite different for me in many ways.

On the lapcom, I generally have to work to stop myself before a post, or whatever, gets too long.  Whereas on the smartphone, that isn’t as frequent a problem.  Not that I can’t yammer on and on even with the smartphone, of course.  Some might say all I ever do is yammer on and on.  But anyway, I can’t write as “effortlessly” on the smartphone as I can on a regular keyboard*.

Sorry, I’m retreading a lot of old ground here, which I guess is better than retreading a lot of old tires. I know how to tread on the ground; indeed, I cannot recall a time when I didn’t know how to do that kind of treading.  Whereas retreading a tire sounds like something that requires special skills and equipment, both of which I lack.

I don’t know, I’ve heard of “retread” tires, but I don’t know if such things still abound, or if they ever did.  It sounds vaguely like a bad idea, like such tires might be more prone to blowouts.  But latex is a finite resource, and there aren’t very good synthetic alternatives, so maybe there’s at least some cost/benefit tradeoff (or treadoff?) there.

Ugh.  With that last joke, I probably convinced at least some of my readers that, yes, the world would be better off if I were dead.  Actually, I say that as if it were conditional, but it’s not.  It would be more in line with reality to say “the world will be better off when I am dead”.

There’s a quote by which to be remembered, eh?

I cannot say whether I will be better off when dead.  It’s probably a nonsensical question.  When I am dead, I will not be anything at all, not better, not worse, not uglier.  What happens to virtual particles after they have annihilated?  Nothing, and less than nothing, for they truly no longer exist, and in some senses they never existed.  Indeed, as physics goes, they probably never do exist; they are a shorthand description of what happens in quantum fields when perturbances in the fields have effects that do not rise to the level of actual, true particle production.

Or so I am led to understand.

From another point of view, it is possible for something to improve, at least in a sense, by ending.  I’ve mentioned this before, but if the curve of a function‒perhaps a graph of the “quality of life” or one’s “wellbeing”, to say nothing of happiness‒is persistently negative, then returning to zero is a net gain.  It can be a huge net gain, in fact.  This is related to the origin of my own version of an old saying, which I use with tongue definitively in cheek:  The one who dies with the most debt wins.

Now, of course, the integral, the area “under” that wellbeing curve would not be improved by the curve reverting to zero and stopping.  But at least that integral would not keep getting more and more negative over time.

Some might say, “well, the integral can become less negative over time, and might even become positive”.  This is, in principle, true.  And when one is younger enough, it’s relatively easier to tip the curve, and its integral, into positive territory.  But as the curve goes on, having been negative for a longer and longer time, it’s going to become ever harder to bring things to a net, overall positive integral, even if one could reliably make one’s curve positive (which one often simply cannot do).

Of course, the moment to moment experience (which is all the mind really gets) of an ascending curve could be pretty darn good, and might well be worth experiencing, even if it’s not enough to bring the integral into positive territory.  We are straying into the “peak-end” rule here, which was elicited regarding (among other things) colonoscopies but applies to much else in human experience.

Speaking of peak endings, I’ll mention in passing the curious fact that, no less than twice in the last week, the evening train service has been disrupted by someone either getting hit by or becoming ill next to the train.

Earlier this week, right by the station where I catch the train to go back to the house, there was a man who looked like he was probably homeless and had collapsed next to the train tracks not far from the station.  I saw him brought away, finally, on a stretcher.  He didn’t look physically injured‒certainly not in the ways I would expect someone who had actually been hit by a train to look‒but he did look cachectic, which is why I thought he might be homeless.

Then, last night’s commute was interrupted by what they call a “trespasser strike”, one that did not involve the train I rode but which always slows everything down.  I’m vaguely amused by the euphemism “trespasser strike”.  A “trespasser” here is a non-passenger who doesn’t work for the train company (or whatever) who is in the area adjacent to the tracks.  The “strike” part is probably self-explanatory.

I suppose it’s literally true, at least from a legal point of view, to call the person a trespasser.  But it’s amusing that the train people have to say something derogatory about a person hit by a train‒even if the person deliberately put themselves in harm’s way‒to sort of, I don’t know, assuage the company’s conscience.

But we are all trespassers, in at least some senses.  We are also, in other senses, all owners.  We are all innocent, and we are all, in some other senses, guilty.  “Every cop is a criminal and all the sinners saints.”  Above all, we are all very much just passing through, staying only a very short time.  We are all virtual particles.  Or you might say, we are all Iterations of Zero.

Have a good weekend.  I should not be writing a post tomorrow (in more than one sense).

*I wish I could honestly say that my use of a piano-style keyboard were as effortless, but I am terribly rusty with that, though I started learning it when I was 9, a rough 2 years earlier than when I got my first typewriter.

by

“Like”, “comment”, and “share” (if you feel like it)

I’m very tired this morning.  By which I mean I’m more tired even than usual.  My head is a bit foggy—more so than usual, again—and I feel like I just belong lying down inert, perhaps in an open-topped coffin.  I’ve occasionally thought that they looked like good places to sleep.  It seems a shame to waste them on people who are already dead.

It’s Wednesday today, and I don’t think I’m going to have anything nearly as thoughtful to say as what I wrote yesterday, which was at least rather “deep” if not particularly useful or helpful or interesting to any of my readers.  I did get an interested comment on my take on one of the reasons mindfulness is useful, and that’s always nice.  I’d love to encourage greater feedback from more of my readers, here on the site in the comments, but I don’t know what to do to encourage them [I decided just to do a little cajoling in the headline, in case that works].

Probably there is just some percentage of people who tend to comment, no matter the situation.  It’s a bit like the long-known “fact” (which may or may not be a true fact) that every advertisement, from flyers/mailings to commercials, actually elicit a response in only about two percent of people who interact with it.  I suspect it’s probably similar with things related to blogging and social media and the like.

One sees it most readily on places like YouTube.  The number of views of a video is almost always something like an order of magnitude greater than the number of likes (and often it’s larger than the number of subscribers), and that’s still larger, though by a ratio that’s not as clear to me, than the number of people who comment (let alone share).

My own YouTube videos (and those of my published songs) are poor examples, or perhaps one might say “poor samples”, not representative of the phenomenon as a whole.  I have a number of “views” on my music videos that is generally a couple of orders of magnitude larger than the number of “likes”, but I know why that is.

Almost all of those views are from me, because I put my songs in my YouTube music playlist, and so I have listened to them often, back when I used to ride my scooter to work and back.  I had a lovely Bluetooth enabled helmet.  I like to listen to songs and sing along in a car, or similar, when I’m on my way places*.  So I’ve listened to my own songs probably orders of magnitude more times than everyone else put together has listened to any of my songs.

It’s kind of pathetic, isn’t it?  I’m also the one who has bought more copies of my books—because I gave copies to the people in the office—than everyone else put together, I’m fairly sure.

As for this blog, well, I get a higher number of likes relative to number of readers than I do with anything else, and I even recently have been getting a comment or so most days, which is very nice.  There’s at least some interaction.  It would be nice if I could reach a larger audience, but I’m not terribly good at self-promotion.  I am pretty good at self-denigration, though.  In fact, I’m one of the best there is at it!

Ha ha.

Well, like the song says, it’s all just a drop of water in an endless sea.  Or, it’s all just spit in the ocean** as more people probably say.  My spit may be more purulent than average, but it’s all still just spit.

Anyway, I don’t know what else to discuss today.  I’m very tired and worn out and I’m in ongoing pain that only responds somewhat to all the mitigating things I try to do, at least so far.  I’ve been through a quarter of a century of trying, and I have not been passive nor uncreative nor ignorant in my attempts.  As those reading might notice, I’ve thought about this matter a lot.  You probably would also if you were in chronic pain for nearly half of your life (so far).  It has a way of garnering your attention.  It’s built that way.

It’s interesting to note that shortly after I’m sixty, if I’m still alive***, I will have been in essentially constant pain for half my life.  After that it will become a majority (unless I’m cured at some point along the way, of course).

I occasionally (not often, though, because it’s too disheartening) wonder what my life would be like, what I would be like, if not for my chronic pain.

Things would almost certainly be vastly different.  I cannot be certain that they would be better—there are probably at least a few things that would be worse.  But it seems likely that my life would be much better overall, if only because I wouldn’t have a huge chunk of my will and energy stolen by being in pain all the time.  That constant pain really does make everything else harder.

But no matter the state of the rest of my life, at least one thing would be true (by “definition” in this case), and that is that I would not be in pain every fucking day of my stupid useless life.

Surely that must be worth something.  It would not be worth not having my children exist, but almost everything else would be worth trading.  I sometimes think of it as parallel to a line from Me and Bobby McGee:  “I’d give all of my tomorrows for a single yesterday, holding Bobby’s body next to mine.”  It’s nice poetry, albeit a bit weird to think about temporally.  But in my case, I think of it as basically saying I would gladly give up some significant fraction of what would otherwise have been my future if I could be out of pain.

But, of course, my future is less valuable to me now at least partly because I am in pain.  If I were not in pain, ironically, the future would be much more valuable, since it would be at least somewhat less uncomfortable.  If I could be free of depression, and the tendency thereto, that would make things better still.  That might even constitute a future worth having.

Yeah, yeah, I know, wishes, horses, manure, beggars riding, dogs and cats living together, watermelon, cantaloupe, rutabaga, yada, yada, yada.  I’m wasting my time and yours.  And I’m writing too much, because I’m using the lapcom, and I’m not saying or doing (or being) anything at all worth saying or doing or being.  This is all just stupid.

I hope you all at least have a good day.  I would not mind if this were my last one.

*I can’t do it anymore because I don’t ride or drive anywhere anymore, so I am not “alone” when commuting anymore.  I’m also not alone at the house.  It’s really quite disappointing.  I like to sing.

**This is a bit amusing:  I made a typo when I first wrote that phrase, and it was rendered as “spit is the ocean”, which seems almost like some vaguely deep thought about how oceans are lived in, swum in, excreted in, and bled in by numerous living creatures.

***Right now that seems a horrifying prospect.