life

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I never may believe these antique fables nor these fairy blogs.

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, as the savvy/experienced can tell from the fact that I said “Hello and good morning” or similar words at the beginning of the post.

I’m not at all sure what to write now.  There’s nothing coming into my thoughts that seems interesting.  There are many annoying things, things that make me want to swat or poison or burn them like a swarm of mosquitoes and other bloodsucking, disease carrying pestilentia.  I don’t know if that last word is “really” a word, as in one that’s used and recognized by many people.  But it’s a word that feels right, and does at least some job of conveying the formication* that so many things in life induce for me.

Everything in my life is either dominated or highlighted by pain and/or tension-anxiety and/or depression, and all of that tends to make me feel angry or at least grumpy a lot.  It’s not pleasant, as I’m sure you’d agree.

Ugh, this is all so tedious and pointless.  I’m spitting in the ocean as if there’s any real chance that my loogie could change the course of the Gulf Stream even at a small scale.  But its impact is entirely washed out by thermal and other noise.

I’m having a hard time getting interested in anything positive‒I haven’t watched any science videos or read any science books or philosophy or whatever for a while.  I have plenty, and there are many things I would wish to understand better than I do.  But I have no available energy for such things.  It takes all the energy I have to get up and go to work and try to pretend to be human and productive, and then to get back to the house at the end of the day.

Time’s been my way when I would have thought it would be a shame if humanity dies out without ever leaving this solar system, without ever expanding and maybe, potentially, becoming cosmically significant, as described in David Deutsch’s The Beginning of Infinity.

Now, at least some of the time, I think it’s probably appropriate.  Why inflict the naked house apes and their progeny (literal or figurative) upon the greater, future cosmos?  Let there be disharmony.  Let there be dissonance.  Let there be cacophony.  Let there be chaos.  And finally, let there be silence.

I don’t know what point, if any, I’m trying to make here.

I need to clear my head, or at least I wish to clear my head.  My brain always seems to be cranking away at about a mile a second, in a random, drunken walk through the phase space of my possible thoughts.  I think it’s been like that pretty much all my life, but in the past, when the machine was newer, it ran more smoothly, and all the pipes and tubes and wires and hoses and fans and transistors and every other metaphorical part were functioning more efficiently.

What’s the point of all this nonsense?  I’m sorry.  I’m sure this is very unpleasant.  I’m sure that I am very unpleasant; I’ve been told so before, and the cases made were not unconvincing.

I used to be able to hide that part of me a lot of the time.  I used to be able to pretend to be positive and upbeat and to help the people around me to feel good sometimes.  I’ve even done some good at times in the past.  It’s been a long time since that’s been the case.  But that’s not too consequential, since I am now alone, and probably will be for the rest of my life, which feels pretty appropriate to me.

Anyway, whatever.  Try to have a good day.

TTN

*That one is a “real” word**, and no, it has pretty much no common ground with the word “fornication” beyond similar sound and shape.

**And I looked up and confirmed that “pestilentia” is a recognized word also and means roughly what I used it to mean when I “reinvented” it.  I guess that shows that it’s a well-crafted word.

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Knock there and ask your blog what it doth know

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday.  At least, I think it’s Thursday.  I’m wearing my Thursday trousers and my Thursday boots.  You may think I’m joking, but I’m not; I have a specific pair of each of those things for Thursdays.  The other days of the week are not quite as specific because all my other trousers and shoes are identical one to another, at least in “make and model”, if you will, though some have seen more wear than others.

I don’t like having to choose what to wear anymore, and I don’t want to have to worry about matching colors or styles or anything like that.  So it’s all black, same shirt brand and model, same trousers, underwear, socks, and shoes.

But on Thursdays, I wear a pair of‒get this‒gunmetal gray trousers*.  They are the same brand and “model” as the others, though.  Interestingly, the gray ones don’t hold a crease nearly as well as the black ones do; possibly something about the dyeing process affects the fabric.

Oy, this is boring, huh?  I can’t believe I’ve been writing about my clothes!  The thing I meant to address when starting this post was that I feel mildly unsure about days and dates lately.  I’m not completely lost, of course; I can check my phone and computers and whatnot to confirm the day and the date and the time.  Also, of course, I remember writing in yesterday’s post about how the date numbers were 1-2-3 in order, so it was December 3rd.  And yesterday I did the payroll, which means yesterday was Wednesday**.

There is, however, a circuit or module or subroutine in my brain/mind that seems weaker than it is in many other people:  the feeling of being right (as in “correct factually”, but to a lesser degree, also the feeling of being morally right).  This is not to be confused with the intellectual process of discerning whether something is correct, in either sense.  I’m talking about the feeling, the belief if you will, that one is right, which often has very little to do with actually being right.  One is an intellectual process while the other is an emotion, and emotions are unreliable indicators of truth or guides to action‒but they are powerful***.

This is an important and consequential dichotomy.  It gives rise to the tendency for a particular societal issue, so nicely put by Yeats:  “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / are full of passionate intensity.”

I strongly suspect that it’s not being “the worst” that leads to such passionate intensity, but rather passionate intensity‒that feeling that one is right‒that makes one prone to do horrible things.  If you feel that you are right, you’re more inclined to give yourself license to do whatever you think is “for the greater good”.

I think this is also part of the explanation for OCD****.  Sufferers have some dysfunction in the parts of their brains that produces the feeling of being right, so they have to keep rechecking and can become more and more unsure of more things, developing “rituals” and repetitive behaviors to try to stave off the anxiety of not being able to feel that one has, for instance, turned off the stove, even when intellectually one knows, or at least has good reason to think, one has done so.

I have at least a little of this problem, perhaps best exemplified in my use of mental arithmetic.  I keep track of ongoing sales at an individual and group level in the office, by dollar amount and by what is sold and so on, and I put it up on “the board” to update it as it happens.  Over time, I’ve gotten pretty good at mental arithmetic‒I never was very bad at it‒and I’ve even gotten to the point where, for fun, I will do some algebra and calculus equations in my head, say if I see one as the thumbnail of a YouTube video.

But even though I’m generally confident of my results intellectually, I never feel okay enough not to check my numbers using the functions of, for instance, Excel.  So, I can run many numbers faster in my head than I could using a calculator, but I cannot trust my answers.

At some level, I think this is better than the alternative.  We can probably all think of people who are quite sure of themselves, quite confident in the results of whatever “thought” processes they have gone through, and yet are woefully off-track or unqualified or just fucking wrong.  And we see what such people do to the world, because they are quite comfortable asserting themselves and seizing power and resources, because they feel that they are in some sense correct.

When you feel that you’re right, you don’t tend to check yourself as often as you would otherwise.  You also are less open to criticism and suggestions, because they fly in the face of your feelings.  This phenomenon is nicely explored in the book On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You’re Not by Robert Burton, MD*****.

I could go on and on and on about this, I’m sure.  But it’s time to draw this to a close for the day.  I will finish with one of my favorite quotes from Radiohead:  “Just ‘cause you feel it doesn’t mean it’s there.”

TTFN

*Why do I use the word “trousers” rather than “pants” when I’m an American?  Well, I watch a lot of British comedy panel shows, to the extent that I find if I say “pants” I feel that I’m talking about underwear, since that’s to what the British term “pants” refers.

**Last week, though, due to the holiday, I did the payroll a day early.  And, of course, I didn’t wear my Thursday pants (trousers) at all last week; I wasn’t going to work, so I just rewore the clothes from the day before.  It wasn’t as though I was planning to interact with anyone else, and indeed I did not.  Still, maybe the holiday has thrown me off a bit.

***For good, sound biological reasons as I always say, but such reasons can easily overshoot usefulness and become detrimental.

****It may also contribute to chronic tendencies toward depression, in which one never feels one is “right” either literally or morally or existentially, and also to the tendency for people with depression to be more prone to be accurate in their self-assessment of things such as, for instance, driving ability.

*****I just realized that “On Being Certain, by Robert Burton” rhymes.

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“I am still right here”

Well, it’s Wednesday, and in the American ordering of date numbers, the date is 12-3, (which means “December 3rd”, not “9”).  That’s mildly fun, since it has 1, 2, and 3 in order.  In 20 years, we’ll have 12-3-45, which is also kind of fun.  But we’re ignoring the century number, which ruins everything:  12-3-2045 if you “spell” it out.  See what I mean?  I guess in 2542 years we’ll have 12-3-4567.  That’s much more amusing, but odds are good that by that time, we’ll have different ways of representing the date, so it probably won’t work.

Oh, well.  Life is indeed unsatisfactoriness, or dukkha as you might say.  

I’ve been trying to find something interesting to read, but neither fiction nor nonfiction seems able to grab my attention.  I’ve tried reading books about computer science/machine learning, and about the nature of mathematics in general, and about political philosophy, and about physics, and so on.  I can’t seem to summon the energy to focus or get into any of them.

I did listen to the song Like A Stone by Audioslave* for the first time during the last several days.  I got the chords for it and everything.  I’ve played the video over and over (as I do) and practiced singing it and playing it myself.  It’s got a lot of barre chords, so it’s good exercise for my left hand (which can get very sore) but otherwise it’s fairly simple.

It’s a good song.  Even so, I can only distract myself with that for a short while at a time, and the whole thing is already losing interest for me.  But then again, so is Radiohead, and the Beatles, and Bowie, and Pink Floyd, and all those other people whose songs I play and sing for myself.  It’s all just been done, and it’s just me trying to amuse myself, like when I used to play tabletop RPGs alone as a teenager, rolling random encounters and making stories up based on those as I went along.

I almost wish I still had my old role-playing games, like Gamma World and DragonQuest and Villains and Vigilantes (and even D&D) as well as some dice and hex paper, so I could play again.  But probably, if I had them, I would find them boring, too.

I am not interested in online RPGs, especially not the MMORPG things, especially the ones with graphics.  I have no interest in playing role-playing games with strangers.  That’s an almost horrifying thought.

The problem is clearly with me in all of this.  I got spun off years ago from having any kind of the close and consistent social interaction (outside work and my interlude of prison) which had previously served to keep me more like a human.  Since then I’ve gotten, or felt, more and more…different.  I’ve always known I was weird, really, but in the past I had family and friends around to keep me from going off the rails too much.

It’s a bit like a neutron.  As you probably know, neutrons in a nucleus, where they interact with surrounding nucleons via the strong force, are stable effectively forever.  However, a neutron outside the nucleus decays with a half life of only about ten minutes.  That means that after an hour, only one in 64 such neutrons will not have yet decayed.  After two hours, that would be only one in 4096.  They will all decay eventually.

That’s just an analogy, but it’s apt, I think.  I am a free neutron (and cheap at twice the price!) and must decay before long.

I think I just don’t have any capacity actually to connect to any other beings, anymore.  I don’t feel as though there’s anyone whose interests even complement mine, let alone match up to any reasonable degree.  And when I try to interact with people at a more personal level, it tends before long to be the case that we are both awkward and uncomfortable (but especially me).

Oh, well, again.  I have no reason to expect things to be otherwise, nor to expect to find any “kindred spirit(s)” out there.  I’m way past tired of trying to change myself to fit in with other people, to try to make them happy.  I tried to do that in the past, really pretty much all the time; it slowly but surely wore me down and wore me out.  It never ended up working, anyway; at some point or other, everyone I love has, consciously or unconsciously, found me not worth the effort of being around.

And what have I become, my sweetest friend?  I’m a neutron, a sustained interaction between the up quark field, the down quark field, and the gluon field(s), and I will decay into a proton, an electron, and an electron-antineutrino.

Okay, I’m pushing that metaphor way too far, sorry.  Bottom line, I know I’m weird and unpleasant, and I am not worth the trouble even for myself, let alone anyone else.  If someone wanted to help me or save me, I couldn’t encourage them, not if I were being honest and kind, anyway.  I’m not a good pony, and I don’t recommend betting on me.  “I will let you down; I will make you hurt.”

*Quick Chris Cornell-centered “dad joke”:  Where does an Audioslave work?  In the Soundgarden behind the Temple of the Dog.

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Another day, same old stories

Well, it’s Tuesday the 2nd (of December) and that two/Tue coincidence has to be worth something doesn’t it?  I suppose it would be better if this were February (the 2nd month), but perhaps it’s enough to note that the difference between the official number of this month (12) and its nominative number (10) is 2.  Anyway, having two twos might make more “sense” than having three of them.

Is that important?  Almost certainly not.  In 56 years of time and space, I’ve never encountered anything that was truly and objectively “important”.  But it is the sort of thing that engages my (admittedly rather odd) aesthetic sense, and this is my blog*, so I will indulge myself.

Anyway, it’s the second day of the work week, and I’m going to work.  The reason I go to work is, at root, nominally to keep myself alive and “thriving”, so I can…what?  Keep working?  I don’t have any other, deeper or longer-term reasons.  It’s fairly absurd when you think about it.  It’s a self-referential, almost tautological, ouroboros-like situation.

By the way, I don’t see any reason to think that this state of affairs is the product of some conspiracy‒centuries or even millennia long as it would have to be‒by the powerful to keep the masses toiling away for their benefit.  For one thing, as we can all plainly see (I hope) the powerful are at least as idiotic and moronic and clueless as anyone else, and they probably tend to be less self-critical, so they are more prone to do really stupid things without anyone protecting them from their own stupidity.

They no more really, actually control anything‒including themselves‒than a queen bee (or ant or termite) runs its hive/hill/colony.  The queen just happens to be the breeding female.  And even that is not a role based on any merit, other than being capable of developing active ovaries.  The queens are “chosen” randomly, as far as we can tell.

It’s all just shit that happens in a region of spacetime in which entropy is moving from low to high, as it tends to do, but in which there’s enough movement involved in the process to allow for locally highly complex phenomena based on carbon’s extraordinarily fecund chemistry, which occasionally forms self-replicating molecules that undergo natural selection.

But people tell stories about things.  It’s one of our strongest attributes, and it serves in us roughly the same “purpose” as the various pheromone trails and hive dances in the aforementioned ants and bees and termites.  Our stories allow us to act in concert with many other people, on a scale that puts even the social insects to shame.

We often believe that our stories are true, at least to some degree.  And some of them, in a limited sense, really are “true”.  But most of them are just stories, made up “just so” explanations of things we either haven’t figured out or that have a nature too complicated or too daunting for us to want to face them as they are.

As someone who has a penchant for creating stories, I can tell you, it’s quite easy to make up plausible-seeming, internally consistent tales about worlds and characters and events, real or otherwise, that have little to do with reality other than that it is a fact of reality that I made up those stories.

I consider all religions and all their related tales to be part of this phenomenon.  This is not an insult to them per se, and the tendency for people to take it as an insult or an attack belies the faith such people claim to have in their religions.  But people who really think a particular thing is true don’t have to defend it with anger, let alone violence.

Imagine if the classical physics people had crucified Planck for solving the “ultraviolet catastrophe” by positing that only certain chunks (quanta) of energy can be produced, or if they had burned Einstein at the stake for not only showing that light comes in such quanta but that matter is also finely divided***.

Science does also work with stories.  Every hypothesis is a story, and some of them can seem extremely compelling.  Some of them we really want to think are true.  And that’s why, ideally, science takes every such story and pokes the hell out of it, trying to show if and where it’s wrong, where it’s internally inconsistent, where it doesn’t match what actually seems to happen in the world.  It’s not perfect, but it does improve in an incremental, ratchet-like fashion, at least as long as we hold to the rigorous, ruthless, but honest criticism of those stories.

With that, I’ll draw the main body of this post to a close.  I have no idea why I’ve written what I’ve written, or at least I don’t know very well.  I doubt there’s any internal consistency or coherence to it, but I guess that supports my point.

Please try to have a good day.

[Aside: a thought occurred to me yesterday that, as we approach the era of humane, lab-grown meat derived from animal stem cells, what, if any, would be the moral implications of using human stem cells, taken from a volunteer‒I’m willing‒to grow meat in the lab and have people eat it?  There’s no risk of parasites or infections, assuming reasonable genetic screening, such as might explain an evolved revulsion for cannibalism.  There’s no one being harmed.  What do you think?  I’m not concerned with whether you feel it’s somehow “icky”; that’s just misfiring evolution-based taboos.  Do you think there is any moral reason not to grow and eat such meat?  If so, what are they?]

*There are many others like it**, but this one is mine.

**Are they really like it, though?  You tell me.

***These are two of the things Einstein demonstrated during his annus mirabilis (i.e., “miraculous ass”***) in 1905, the same year he published his paper introducing special relativity.

***That’s not really what it means.

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“From childhood’s hour I have not been as others were…”

Well, it’s not just the start of a new “work week”, it’s also the start of a new month‒the last month of 2025.  That’s December, by the way, in case you didn’t remember or were confused by the month’s name, which indicates that it’s the tenth month, not the twelfth.

Don’t be confused by the fact that this month starts on a Monday, by the way; it’s when the first of a month falls on Sunday that the month will have a Friday the 13th.  This month will have a Friday the 12th.  I guess it doesn’t matter, but it’s mildly disappointing.

It’s hard to be clear why I find that as disappointing as I do.  I mean, I like prime numbers and particularly the number 13, but every month has a 13th day.  I guess it’s because of the supposedly unlucky implications of Fridays the 13th that I want to embrace the day.  Is that sympathy (for something not alive) or is it perversity?

I suspect it’s a bit of both.  I tend to feel sympathy and affection for peculiar things, and literally to feel bad for some inanimate and even abstract entities when I think they have been unfairly maligned.

But I do also tend to have a sort of affection for things that others fear.  I don’t know if that’s a defense mechanism or what.  But, after all, I did make a brief (failed) series of blog posts called “My heroes have always been villains.“

Whatever.  It doesn’t really matter.  I’m just a weirdo*.  What else is new?

Not much, of course.  I mean, I’m on my way to work, because I am working today, though I don’t feel very well.  But then, I never really feel well.  I’ve been in pain literally for more than 20 years straight, so I never do feel “well” anymore.  Every time I get up from my chair in the office, such as when I need to use the bathroom, I feel a bit like the Tin Man, trying to kick painfully rusted limbs into motion.  That’s just one example.

Do I have a heart, unlike the Tin Man?  I don’t know about the metaphorical one, but the physical one is real, because I had surgery on it for a birth defect when I was 18**.  It’s probably true, though, that my metaphorical heart is also defective, perhaps more so than my literal heart.

Who am I kidding with “perhaps”?  Of course it’s more defective.  For one thing, there is no surgery to repair a metaphorical organ.  You’d think that something conceptual might be easier to alter or repair than something physical, but that would only be the case if we understood how the whole thing works well enough to be able to figure out how to make adjustments and‒more crucially‒which adjustments to make and when.  It’s at least as difficult, in its way, as trying to control the weather.

What am I going on about?  I don’t know.  More pointedly, one could ask why I am going on‒with this blog, with work, with my life, with anything.  I’m wasting your time and mine, I think.  Mostly I’m wasting yours I suppose, since my time is a waste from the start.

Well, no, actually, that’s not entirely true.  Everything that led up to the birth of my children was absolutely important.  I would not change anything up to that point.  Any negative experiences that happened to me until then were worth it.  After that, though, there are many things I would change if I could‒indeed, there are probably many things that I cannot even bring to mind that I would want to change.

I don’t know what they might be, and I don’t really try to dwell on such things‒that’s probably part of why I dislike, or at least don’t enjoy, the weird manga/anime/light novels in which someone gets (for instance) hit by a car and seems to die, but is sent back in time to an earlier stage in their life and gets to live it again, but with their old memories, so they can change their outcome.

Yes, there is a whole slew of such stories, just as there are oodles of related “isekai” stories, where someone dies and ends up reborn in some “magical” world.  I guess that’s a bit related to things like The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, but he didn’t have to die to go to the Land, he was summoned.  And also, when Stephen R. Donaldson wrote those books, back in the 70s and 80s, the idea was relatively original, or at least not wildly overplayed.

Speaking of overplayed, I’ll call this blog post to a close now‒and by that criterion, I ought to call everything to a close.  I am badly overplayed.  I jumped the shark 13 years ago or more.  I don’t know why they keep renewing this show.  But I appear to be under contract to keep playing this stupid role as long as the show is renewed.  I wish I had an agent to whom I could talk about getting out of this with minimal fuss and mess.

Alas, that will probably just be up to me, and I’m not good at doing things with minimal mess, though the “fuss” part is at least something of a question.

Anyway, enough.  This is stupid.  I’ll just wish you all a very good day, and a good week, and a good month/rest of the year, and then a most excellent year next year.  And, what the heck, while I’m spitting into the ocean, I wish you a truly wonderful remainder of your lives.

Wishes have no power, maybe, but mine are at least sincere.

*And also a creep, no doubt.  What the hell am I doin’ here, indeed.  I really don’t belong here.  Not that I’m convinced that anyone does.

**The birth defect didn’t happen when I was 18, of course‒it was found when I was 18, and operated on within that same year.  But it had been there since at least the time I was born, more or less by definition.

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“Cobwebs long since overrun by an old Wellington boot”

Welcome to a rare Saturday blog post.  You can’t say I didn’t warn you that I would be writing a post today.

Actually, of course you can say it.  You can say anything your mouth, lungs, and brain are capable of creating as a sound.  Think of Chomsky’s perfectly grammatical but nonsensical sentence, “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously,” or Stephen Fry’s even more nonsensical, “Hold the newsreader’s nose squarely, waiter, or friendly milk will countermand my trousers.”

We are not constrained by nature to be truthful (or even sensible) in what we say.  Human society would probably work better overall if we were incapable of lying (at least actively).  It would take a bit of time to get used to it, and many people would have to learn just not to say anything most of the time.  But I think it would be better, certainly in a peaceful society‒which, alas, we have not yet achieved.

On the other hand, deception is a huge part of nature (the living part of it at least), in one way or another.  Especially when there are predators and prey and competitors for mates and for food and so on, lying‒in one sense or another‒is an extremely useful survival strategy and tactic, at least when done well and carefully.

It may be that, in a mature and peaceful civilization, lying is detrimental and to be discouraged‒indeed, to be eliminated if possible*.  But as long as there is not true peace and true freedom‒as long as there are people who will take advantage of and harm and victimize other people‒sometimes deception will be necessary.

It is, or at least it can be, analogous to the notion of using violence in self defense.  Pacifism seems all well and good on the surface, but when there exist people willing to use violence against others in aggressive, oppressive ways**, then pacifism is just a fatal vulnerability.  Pacifistic “resistance” can work if one’s opponent has a relatively strong moral code or conscience.  But against an actual psychopath, or a psychopathic ideology, non-violent passivity is just doing your opponent a favor.

And no, despite what V said, ideas are not bulletproof.  They can be bullet resistant, but enough bullets in enough brains‒for instance, the brains of every person who holds a particular idea‒can erase any idea as it is.  Some ideas are harder to wipe out than others, and some spring up anew in disparate places even after being eliminated, but enough destruction can obliterate anything that is not a fact of external nature***.

So, violence and deception are at times necessary in a society in which there are occasional psychopaths, or at least psychopathic behaviors.  But that doesn’t mean we should not aspire to create a society that is honest and peaceful.  It just means we cannot try to skip to the end by eliminating all capacity for violence and deceit in ourselves; that can only be done when (if) all potential threats have been quelled, and brought more or less permanently out of the realm of possibility.

Wow, I had no intention or notion to write a post centered on moral philosophy today.  And it was all triggered by my cliché opening sentences.  It’s quite strange just how stochastic my writing can be when I haven’t planned ahead.  And, of course, I never plan these posts ahead of writing them.

Also, in case it’s not clear, I don’t plan them retrospectively, since as I said yesterday, I am not capable of violating the laws of causality (such as by traveling faster than the speed of light in a vacuum).

I think that’s enough for a Saturday morning now, though.  I hope you’re all having a good weekend, whether it’s a holiday weekend for you or not (it both is and very much isn’t for me).

Until next time, please be well.  And, if you can manage it, keep being well even after next time.

*There can still always be a fifth-amendment style right not to speak and a right to privacy.  Unless and until there exists some form of communal mind, I think there are legitimate rights to privacy.

**Such people do exist, and they may exist as long as there are people, springing up de novo at times, because it can be an evolutionarily and game theoretically stable strategy to be a psychopath in a group of relatively honest people.  See:  POTUS.

***It can eliminate our knowledge of such things, but knowledge is an epiphenomenon.  The laws of physics themselves do not require humans to know that they exist in order to do so.  To believe that humans are the center of the universe (literally or metaphorically) or that the human mind creates reality is astonishing and contemptible hubris.

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Black Friday Sun, won’t you come?

Well, it’s officially “Black Friday” here in the US at least‒an ironic name that referred to the fact that the day after Thanksgiving was, at least traditionally, the busiest shopping day of the year, so going holiday shopping (mainly for Christmas) was always considered an ordeal.  And therefore…well, therefore everyone went and did it.  It doesn’t make a lot of sense if you look at it that way.  But that’s the way humans are, isn’t it?  Think of the hoarding of toilet paper that led to self-fulfilling prophecies of shortages during early COVID-19 days.

So, anyway, I’m going to the office today, because we’re open.  We’re also planning to be open tomorrow.

I wish I were sick.  I mean, I’m sick in the head (ask just about anybody, if they’re being honest) and I have chronic pain and all the fun associated with that, but I am not acutely ill, let alone ill enough that I could mentally excuse myself from going to work.

I wonder what would happen if I just decided not to go.  I wonder what would happen if I just didn’t go to work, didn’t write my blog, shut my phone off or put it on airplane mode, and just vegetated until I wilted and became compost.  Not very much, I suspect.

I mean, people at work would try to figure out where I was, because it’s work, and if I’m not there, someone will have to pick up the slack.  And I think my sister would try to figure out what had happened to me.  But that’s most of it.

A few people would worry, but that would only be for a while, and then even all passing thought of me would taper down, asymptotically approaching zero, but in the fashion of a quantum event‒more episodic and sporadic in measurable character than a seemingly smooth decay, but nevertheless getting closer and closer to zero all the time.

I’m tired.  Also, frankly, I’m uninterested.  The two things may be related.

None of the things I do for entertainment‒for distraction really‒are working very well anymore.  I am particularly bored of being in pain, of course.  That gets old very quickly, especially when it’s chronic, and mine has been there for decades now.  It’s not a warning of some life-threatening process happening, it’s just a set of alarms that are broken so they’re stuck in the “on” position.

Of course, my main problem(s) is/are me.  I’m a piece of merchandise that’s defective in many ways and in more than one system.  Believe me, if you got me as a present, you would hope whoever bought me had kept the receipt.

Anyway, I hope you all had a nice Thanksgiving yesterday if you celebrated the holiday.  I ate a bit of junk food at the house, but it wasn’t very good, and it seemed to give me some gastrointestinal trouble, so that wasn’t a lot of fun.  There was nothing good on TV, unfortunately; I started to watch the Lions game (American football), but got bored very quickly.

I watched some videos on YouTube, but I’m running out of things there that are interesting.  The best thing I saw was a couple reacting to Rogue One, but that’s still very much a simulated, twice removed illusion of watching a movie with friends, so it’s a bit lame.

Obviously‒I hope it’s obvious‒I’m giving you my viewpoint on these things, not claiming to have some definitive, objective take on them.  If people enjoy something and it does no harm, then it’s a positive and “good” thing, so I mean no disparagement.

I am not a good measure for how good things might be, because I tend to see things in a less than optimistic and upbeat fashion.

That’s enough for now.  I guess I’ll be writing a post tomorrow, barring the unforeseen, though it’s difficult to see why.  Maybe some catastrophe will befall me and become a blessing to you all (and to me) by finishing everything for me.  In any case, I hope you all have a good weekend.

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“Shadows of the evening crawl across the years”

Well, it’s Wednesday morning‒insert your joke of choice related to the Beatles song She’s Leaving Home here‒and here is my blog post for the day.  I will not be posting tomorrow (barring the very much unforeseen), since today is Thanksgiving Eve* here in the US, and therefore tomorrow will be Thanksgiving.  I will not be working on Thanksgiving, so there is to be no “traditional” Thursday post.  I’m sure you’re all devastated, but hopefully you can eat yourself into a stupor tomorrow to flee from your sorrow and loss.

Speaking of stupors, I slept a bit better‒or at least a bit longer‒last night than the night before.  This is because, despite it being a weeknight/worknight, I knocked myself out a bit with an OTC sleep aid.  So, if I seem a bit odd today‒for me, I mean‒that’s probably why.

Of course, I’m well aware that the sleep induced by such medications is not proper sleep.  That’s a very interesting fact for someone who gets proper sleep on their own, but it’s pretty theoretical to me.  It’s a bit like quibbling by saying, “going through a wormhole to get to a distant part of spacetime quickly isn’t really going faster than the speed of light”.  Well, okay, if I can find ways to break the laws of causality** I will, but in the meantime, I’ll use the wormhole.

Likewise, sometimes I just want to be unconscious, and I have a hard time achieving it on my own.  Oblivion is such a relief when and if it happens (so to speak).  Yet, even when I do sleep, there’s always a background watchfulness in my head, a feeling that where I am is not safe in some sense, so I cannot completely relax.

I almost never wake up without some manner of start, i.e., a bit of a jump in place.  I don’t know why***.  Maybe this is just the way it is when you’re nominally a member of a species of pack hunters but you’re functionally completely alone, separated from whatever group(s) there were to which you belonged and surviving on your own as best you can.  The world is never fully safe for such a creature.

Well, the world is never fully safe, period, full stop.  No one here gets out alive, after all.  Nevertheless, natural selection tends to lead to the state where the only surviving organisms are descendants of those who feel fear and who feel pain and who try to stay alive indefinitely, even when that survival is pointless (biologically speaking, I mean‒I won’t get into the deeper philosophical questions that can apply, because that would take too much time and energy).

I’m going to bring this to a close here pretty soon, if I can.  My thumb arthritis is acting up, today, and writing this is more painful than it usually is.  Well, actually, I don’t know that “arthritis” is the proper word, since that implies a process that is primarily inflammatory.  It’s probably more precise to say “arthropathy”, which just means “something wrong with a joint”.  “Arthralgia” works quite well here, also, meaning just “joint pain”, but it’s pretty darn vague in its implications of any possible cause.

I suppose it doesn’t make a great deal of difference.

Anyway, I hope everyone who is celebrating has a truly wonderful Thanksgiving Day tomorrow, and that you spend a pleasant time with friends and family (and maybe some football).  I will be back on Friday, barring (as always) the unforeseen.  I work at a sales office, after all, and Friday is “Black Friday”, traditionally the biggest sales day of the year in the US.  Though, there has been a significant degree of “feature creep” or whatever the best term might be regarding that, so now the whole of this time of year is becoming an extended “Black Friday”.  Natural selection tends to encourage such things.

Anyway, I expect to write a post on Friday, so I will “see you” then.  Or at least you will see me.

*There is no such holiday, official or unofficial, as Thanksgiving Eve, but it’s still obvious what I mean by it.  Isn’t it?

**The speed of light in a vacuum being the speed of causality.  This appears to be a large part of why nothing can travel faster.  How could something move more quickly than causality?

***As far as I can tell, it’s not because of having gone to prison.  For one thing, my sleep problems started way before that pleasant interlude.  For another, I didn’t have any real problems with people starting shit with me in prison.  Apparently, I looked (look?) a bit nuts or something.  Also, honestly, I got along okay with people there, all things considered.

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“No need to get up-tighter”?

It’s Monday again, and though it is not raining down by me, I’m all but certain that it’s raining somewhere right now, so one could say “it’s raining again” without fear of being entirely wrong.  No matter how you might want to cut up spacetime based on “planes” of “simultaneity”, there is sure to be somewhere in the universe where it is raining now.

Actually, if the universe is infinite in spatial extent, one could probably prove that it is a mathematical certainty that it’s raining somewhere, since there are‒as far as we can tell‒only a finite number* of possible quantum states in any given region of spacetime, and some of these include rain.  Indeed, even if it were not raining on Earth, anywhere, in some given instant (an unlikely eventuality), the fact is that rain can happen in many places in many forms.  I’m led to understand that it sometimes rains neon in the atmosphere of Jupiter.

So, perhaps the song by Supertramp shouldn’t have been It’s Raining Again, but should have been It’s Raining Still.

I don’t know.  Maybe that wouldn’t suit the rhythm of the song.  Then again, it always was a song where the sentiments expressed in the lyrics didn’t quite match the upbeat character of the tune.  This was probably deliberate on the part of the band.

Oh, in case anyone was wondering, the reason there was no post on Saturday was that, indeed, we did not work in the office on Saturday.  We didn’t work out of the office, either, as far as I know.  Well, I know I didn’t work, so even if they worked, we did not work, so I guess I’m right there.

I did a fair amount of walking on Saturday, and nearly as much on Sunday, though Saturday’s walk was more interesting.  I walked in a “park” along a canal in south Florida, and found myself well down into Dade County before I found an exit from the park area that took me to a road on which I could get something to quench my thirst and a place to which to call an Uber (they have a hard time picking one up in a park alongside a canal).  I had walked about seven and a half miles, and I could tell I was getting a bit too much sun**, though my feet and ankles and knees seemed to be holding up okay.

On Sunday I went for another walk, during which I had enough sunscreen.  That was because on Sunday I took my walk solely for the sake of walking, unlike Saturday, on which I had a specific purpose, and my longer walk began on a whim after that purpose was achieved.

It wasn’t an interesting or noteworthy purpose, by the way.  I’m just not discussing it because it cannot have any bearing for anyone but me.

Let’s see, is there anything else going on that’s worth discussing?  Well, of course, there are things going on in the world, and in the universe, and so on, all the time, and probably many of them are worth discussing to someone, or would be, even if no one knows they are happening.  But, of course, pretty much anything that happens, no matter how locally momentous, is historically trivial, let alone cosmically trivial.

Probably there aren’t many things that aren’t cosmically trivial.  I suppose if inflationary cosmology is real and it started at some locus in spacetime, then that would not have been trivial.  But if there is eternal inflation, there’s a real question as to whether it started at all.

Of course, even then, with eternal inflation, the local drop of the inflaton field down to the vacuum state (or a pseudo-vacuum state) here in our bubble universe‒leading to the formation of our universe, all its matter and energy, and possibly the configuration of our natural laws and constants‒would seem to be significant.

But that would only be significant to us, the creatures in this bubble universe.  On the scale of the cosmos overall, it would be just one bubble universe formation in an endless sea of such bubble universes, each one no more striking than the cavitation bubbles that form and then collapse in water that’s starting to boil.  Indeed, if our universe is such that an eventual recollapse will happen, i.e., a “Big Crunch”***, then we really are a lot like a cavitation bubble.

I guess this has been a slightly odd way to start the week‒which is unfortunate, given that today’s date is an even number (24) not an odd one.  But I don’t think I’ve ever claimed not to be an odd person.  I think I’ve known that I was different and a bit peculiar‒perhaps more than “a bit”‒since I was very young.  That’s okay in and of itself.  If most people are “normal”, why the hell would anyone want to be normal?

With that, I wish you all an abnormally good day and week, and if you’re in the US, I hope you have a good holiday coming up, and that you are anticipating it with eagerness.

*It’s big, don’t be mistaken.  But the biggest finite number you can think of‒ever‒is no closer to infinity than is the number 1.  So, in a universe that’s infinite in spatial extent, all possible finite configurations will be instantiated somewhere‒indeed, they will be instantiated an infinite number of times.

**I hadn’t planned on such a long walk, so I was not prepared in that sense.

***Our best information right now seems to indicate that we are not going to recollapse, but that we will continue to expand, at an ever-increasing rate.  I suppose that would make us more akin to a bubble that fully forms and expands in boiling water, escaping from the liquid into the air above.  Such bubbles are no more important than the cavitation bubbles, though.  They’re merely different. 

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“He thrusts his fists against the posts…”

Hey, everybody.  It’s Friday, and I’m not sure if I will be working tomorrow, so I guess just keep your eyes open for a blog post in case there is one.  I suspect that I will not be working, since many of the silly and tragic and chaotic and even the arguably good (but disruptive) things going on in the lives of people at the office persist, flowing and whirling through the phase space of possibilities, forming vortices and other turbulent and chaotic patterns.  Still, I may be wrong.  It would be far from the first time.  So take a peek tomorrow morning, if you’re up and up for it; if I work, I will (probably) write a post.

Anyway, I want to keep this short for today if I can.  I just feel worn out and over-stressed by the various chaotic things happening and by other things in my life.  Some of them should, on their surface, seem good, at least in some aspects, though I think anyone could imagine that they wouldn’t be exclusively good.  And there is a surprising amount of associated stress* and tension and consequent depression and worsened insomnia‒and it all doesn’t help how I feel about myself.

And then, of course, though I don’t very often talk about it, there is always my chronic pain.  Always.

In addition, despite the silliness from yesterday’s post, the holidays do stress me out.  It’s a frustrating kind of stress, because while I feel very lonely, I’m all but certain I would not be able to tolerate being part of someone’s celebration.  I’m too chronically “on my own”, so I can’t even readily imagine myself taking part in any kind of get together unless I was on some kind of powerful anxiolytic or similar.

Maybe I’ve gone too far down the “stranded alien” rabbit hole.  I guess that’s better than going down the “stranded rabbit” alien hole, though neither one sounds inviting.  Anyway, I’ve just gotten too accustomed to being isolated and non-social and paranoid.  Not that I actually think people are out to get me**; I just don’t think people are safe.  They are not trustworthy.  This is not meant to be an aspersion on their characters.  I don’t think they are (necessarily) malicious.  I just think they’re unreliable in too many, too important ways.

So, despite whatever dreams and wishes I have‒and I do have them, though I try not to waste too much energy on them‒I expect that the state I’m in right now (I don’t mean Florida) is the state I’ll be in for the remainder of my existence.  And that is at least part of why I don’t desire my existences persistence.  It’s not great for me and it seems terribly unlikely that it would be any significant good for anyone else.

One benefit of being isolated is surely that at least one’s existence or nonexistence is unlikely to be very disruptive of other people’s lives, one way or another.  And my personal ethos contains a strong aspect of trying not to cause other people trouble, and feeling horrible if I do.

It’s not even about whether those other people actually feel inconvenienced or troubled; even if they reassure me, it probably will not help.  I am the one who experiences the shame of bothering other people.  It’s not as much an empathy-related phenomenon as a sort of Categorical Imperative kind of problem.  Well, no, that’s not the right reference.  I think the term is Deontology.  It’s a rule I have to follow even if it has no impact on anyone in any way.

To be clear, though, this is not a philosophical stance on my part.  I haven’t chosen to do this based on any reasoning or logic; I’m just using those things to explain it.  It’s very much a setting-point, akin to a black-box strategy devised through gradient descent in machine learning.  As such, it is something preceding and overwhelming any potential rational assessment and judgment on my part.

I don’t think I’m expressing this well.  Perhaps that’s partly because I don’t fully understand it in any kind of systematic, algorithmic fashion.  Perhaps it’s not understandable in such terms, but is rather the product of the various nonlinear processes that entail the brain functions of human beings.

Anyway, that’s enough for now.  If I work tomorrow, I’ll probably write a blog post.  If I don’t work tomorrow, I almost certainly will not write a blog post.  This leaves a little gray area in the outcome “no blog post” because it’s not completely impossible that I might work and yet not write a blog post.  So, not working almost certainly implies no blog post, but no blog post does not imply not working with as strong a tendency.  This is a fact of probabilities relating to Bayesian statistics that sometimes throws people off, but it’s important in practical matters, such as in knowing what to make of a “positive” screening test result, say for an infection or cancer.

I leave it as an exercise for you, if you’re interested (also if it’s not just obvious to you), to work out why these things are so.  And I also leave it as an exercise for you to have a good day and a good weekend.

*Not to be confused with the Associated Press, though there are commonalities.

**I don’t rule it out categorically, of course, since it is a physical possibility and thus does not have a truly zero chance of happening.  But it seems unlikely.  Why would anyone be truly out to get me?  Whose priorities could be so out of whack that I would be their focus?  Still, people are stupid (present company included), so I can’t dismiss it completely, and I always have such possibilities at least in the back of my mind.