life

by

Decoherence–but nothing overtly quantum mechanical

You might be interested to know that I am not writing this blog post on my smartphone on the way to the office.  Neither am I writing it on the mini lapcom on the way to the office.  I am actually writing this while already at the office, because I did not go back to the house last night.

The trains were running late, and when they run late, they also run crowded, because of the pileup of people for what would have been later trains, at least until you get to the first on-time train after all the late ones.  That one tends to be nice and light.  But goodness knows when that train would have come, and it occurred to me that…well, no one was waiting for me at the house (no one ever is), and there was no point in getting there late only to have to get up and come in to the office today.

So, I walked back to the office and just stayed here.  I ordered a mildly “celebratory” dinner from Outback to mark the day.  It was okay‒not great, not bad.  It certainly beat, say, a bag of chips or something along those lines.  It almost certainly was not worth what it cost, but I could have ordered something from Morton’s, which has steaks starting at over $70.  And that was not the most expensive place available on Uber Eats for steak!!

Anyway, I watched some music videos and reaction videos and sat around and‒well, I won’t get into my thought processes and whatnot.  There are some things that are negative enough and worrisome enough for people that I don’t really want to share them.  I’m sure people who read this regularly probably would find that difficult to believe, but it’s true; I have thoughts that are dark enough or weird enough or negative enough that I don’t talk about them, here or pretty much anywhere else.

I feel very beat up* overall, as I’m sure is not a surprise.  That’s not because I slept on the floor; that actually tends to be beneficial for my back, at least a little**.  But I certainly didn’t sleep as much as I might have, especially considering the fact that I spared myself the time of my commute.  But my insomnia has never been particularly well-attuned to usefulness, though at times it has been useful.  It certainly was handy during residency, in its way.

It is quite unpleasant, though, even when it is useful.  I haven’t felt well-rested in a very, very, very long time.

As for anything else, well, I certainly didn’t write any fiction yesterday, to no one’s real surprise.  I did feel the urge to play my guitar and sing a bit very late at night, but I decided that would be a little weird‒even for me‒and just in case anyone was near enough to hear and be disturbed***, I decided not to do it.

I worried most of yesterday about some trouble that I suddenly started having with my right shoulder, which is usually not a source of difficulty for me.  My right forearm and elbow have been giving me a lot of trouble lately, and maybe that’s working its way up the arm, who knows?  But I don’t mean to imply literally that I think it’s some form of creeping arm malaise that’s working its way up.  Rather, something that affects distal joints can create atypical tensions that hurt the body more proximally; think of how, when your ankle is acting up, it can affect your knee and hip and even back, triggering them also to have exacerbations.

Maybe that doesn’t happen to you.  But I assure you, it happens to me, and I think something like it has probably caused this new irritation and feeling of decreased mobility and new soreness and weakness (from tenderness, not actual loss of strength) in my right shoulder.

That’s about it, really.  There’s nothing else going on, not in my “life” anyway.  This is as good as it gets, and I doubt it will get this good again.  I’m very tired.  I wish I were sick with something more acute, something that would kill me or at least knock me out of commission for a while.  Unfortunately, one of the detrifits of being so socially uncomfortable is that I don’t get exposed to as many communicable pathogens as I otherwise might.

Oh, well, you know what they say:  If you want something done right…

Enough.  It’s been a blog post.  I hope you’ve found at least a moment’s interest in reading it, if you’ve read it.  I know people like to rubber-neck at roadside traffic accidents, so maybe my absurdity and distaste can at least engender some prurient interest.

I hope you have a good day, in any case.

*It’s slightly amusing that “beat up” has such a different meaning from “upbeat”.

**In any case, I always sleep on the floor, though at the house I have a modest futon.

***Or any other relatively high-end heavy metal band.

by

Celebrate good times? Come ON.

I had a notion this weekend that I would write this blog post on Sunday afternoon/evening and set it up to publish itself‒so to speak‒this morning.  Then, I would use this morning to perhaps review an/or rebegin HELIOS, or maybe to work on Outlaw’s Mind or DFandD.  I even thought I could write any of those‒especially HELIOS‒on my smartphone, since I have them on Google Docs as well as MS Word.

So I thought, anyway.  When I looked, though, I found that I don’t actually appear to have any version of HELIOS on my Google drive, so it must either be on Word or I never typed in the little bit I had of it.  Of course, I could have just decided to restart and bring one of my spiral bound notebooks and write in that.  The only trouble with doing it that way, if I write during my morning commute, is that I eventually have to retype everything into one of my computers or smartphones.

Now, I have never done the thing* of handwriting a first draft and then copying it into a phone, but I have done that with handwriting and computer word processors.  That method has produced some of my best stuff (by some measures), including Mark Red, The Chasm and the Collision, Paradox City, and even part of The Vagabond, though that last one was written mainly on WriteNow on a Mac SE.  So, maybe the handwritten-to-smartphone idea could actually work pretty well, now that I think about it.

Anyway, all that’s fairly moot, because I did not in fact write this blog post on Sunday afternoon nor yet on Sunday evening.  I am writing it, as I usually do, in the morning, in the midst of my commute to the office, which is so effing early, but which is nevertheless far later than when I woke up.

I’m more than a bit disappointed in myself for failing to carry through with that idea, but it’s easy to think of ideas that seem so doable when you first think of them.  And they are doable, of course.  Not only is it physically possible for me to have written this post yesterday evening and to set a precedent of doing the blog posts in the evening and writing fiction in the morning, it’s banal.  If you told someone that had happened, they would be unlikely to do much more than shrug and say something like a noncommittal “cool”, before going on their way.

But as we all know‒or should know‒it’s much easier to intend to do things in the future than it is to muster the motivation to do them in the moment when one was hoping to do them.  There are many shifting, often conflicting, drives in the human** psyche, and our actions are born of a kind of vector sum of all those “forces” in any given moment.

But not only do those forces shift due to things as seemingly mundane as one’s current state of appetite or fatigue, but they are also affected by what one has done immediately before; for the outcome of that vector sum in one instant feeds back on the system in numerous places, changing the sum (I was going to write “changing the calculus” but I thought that might be mathematically confusing and even misleading, since I am not discussing calculus) with every new iteration.  These iterations and changes aren’t quite happening on the scale of the Planck time***, but they happen quickly‒certainly at least at the “speed of thought”, whatever that might be.

Even the physiological, hormonal, energy state of the body from moment to moment changes those vectors, sometimes a great deal.  If you find yourself needing to use the bathroom while you’re trying to accomplish some task, it can certainly change the state of your concentration.  And if you should suddenly begin to have difficulty breathing, it will distract you from pretty much anything else.

That’s why on airplanes they tell you that, in case of cabin depressurization, if you’re traveling with someone who needs help putting on the oxygen mask, put yours on first, before you help your companion.  If you can’t breathe, your ability to help anyone else is going to tank very rapidly.  We can live weeks to months without food, days without water, but only minutes without air.

On a less extreme angle, if one is hypoglycemic (for whatever reason), it strongly affects all the functions of one’s body, particularly one’s neuroendocrine system.  Less extreme but more persistent issues can sabotage one’s focus upon much else.

I don’t need to tell you, probably, that pain makes it much harder to focus and bring effort to bear on other things.  This is one of the most annoying aspects of chronic pain:  one does not quite ever become accustomed to it, because that would miss the whole biological point of pain.  Making pain something you could ignore would be a bit like making a fire alarm that plays soft, easy-listening elevator music at unobtrusive decibel levels.  It would be less annoying, but being burned to death in a fire is a bigger issue, even if it isn’t very likely.

Of course, if your (typical) fire alarm is stuck on, you may not ever be able completely to ignore it.  You also will not know when there is a real fire. Or at least you will be less likely to know.  And since that can potentially be a matter of life and death, the chronic alarm, like chronic pain, is in its own manifold ways life-threatening.

All that is very tangential to my original point, which was that I am writing this blog today, not writing fiction (at least not this morning on my commute).

Oh, well.  If there’s one day I can let myself get away with slacking a bit, I guess it’s today.  I hope you all have a good one.

*How’s that for clever, descriptive writing?

**Or whatever I am.

***Though the processes that underlie them do.

by

The return of the Desperado?

Well, it’s Friday, and I’m glad to be able to tell you that I don’t feel as overwhelmed as I did yesterday/Wednesday evening.  I’m not sure what has made the difference‒I have a hard time recognizing my own emotions, let alone decoding them‒but I got some good advice from an old* friend yesterday.  First, there was just the blunt confirmation that, yes, this stuff was in my head (which I knew in principle, but sometimes it pays to get it from outside oneself, particularly from someone who knew me since before I had even met my now-ex wife).

This friend also gave me the good advice that, if I don’t know what to do, I should just do nothing, and not worry about it too much.  Those are my words; he put it better.  He also gave me a meditation reference/link that was helpful.  I like meditation in general, though I have to be careful with it, since sometimes it can soothe anxiety but make my depression worse.  I strongly suspect that, if I could just stick with it, that side-effect would fade, but it’s quite intimidating, since my depression is often literally life-threatening.

I also want to apologize in general, and in spirit, for the implicit (but not intended) disparagement of my youngest child in yesterday’s post.  They definitely don’t deserve anything but praise and affection and love from me, and I mean the word ”deserve” here, despite it being a word I think often has no useful meaning in the contexts in which it is used.  I could not be prouder and more delighted than I am with my child (and my other child as well, except that I would be much more delighted if he would “speak” with me).

Okay, let’s not dwell too much on that stuff.  That’s the kind of rumination that can start a spiral.

In other news, I decided yesterday to start reading what I have written so far of The Dark Fairy and the Desperado, just to see if I liked it and maybe, perchance, if I would want to pick it up and work on it again.  It’s one of three stories on which I have at least a beginning (the other two are Outlaw’s Mind and HELIOS, though the latter is only barely begun).  It’s hard for me to tell if it’s any good, because as far as I can recall, I haven’t received any feedback on DFandD or Outlaw’s Mind, though I have posted them here.

If someone out there did give me feedback and I have forgotten, I do apologize.

Anyway, so far I quite like The Dark Fairy and the Desperado.  It’s got some subtle, meta-level humor in it, and the two characters therein are figures I’ve probably drawn more pictures of than any other, even Mark Red.  I’ll embed a few of them here, below.

I don’t know if I’ll pick back up on any of these stories, but I welcome any input from readers, though I cannot promise I will follow your recommendations.

Part of me thinks it would be most fun to write HELIOS.  Some of that feeling is because he/it began as my idea for a comic book superhero waaaay back when I was little**.  Also, since I’ve barely made a start on that story, I could in principle try to write it on Google Docs on my smartphone, but overlapping to a larger computer when desired.

Although, that latter plan suffers from the drawback that my mini-lapcom doesn’t really get internet access when I’m commuting, so access to Google Docs is limited.  Also, to be honest, I can write MSWord documents from my smartphone as well; it’s just that the phone app for that word processor is much more cumbersome and less fluid than is Google Docs, though the latter is not as good a word processor overall.

We’ll see what happens, I guess.  I don’t have to do anything, as my friend said, though it’s so hard for me to internalize that, when I’ve spent my whole life doing goal-directed behavior, and thinking that I really had to do things, to be productive, to achieve, in order to justify my continued existence.

But what if my continued existence isn’t justified?  What if no one’s is?  That seems reasonable and consistent with observed facts.   Perhaps it is merely the case that those things that exist do exist and that’s really all there is to it.  If you exist, then you are a fact in the universe.  It cannot have been any other way than to have you in it, once you are there.  If you were not in it, it would not be the same universe.  And it is the same universe.

That all doesn’t quite merit a QED (unless one refers to quantum electrodynamics), but I think it’s pretty definitive, nevertheless.

So, for now, I’ll just exist and not worry too much about doing anything.  This is reminiscent of the wu wei advice of the Tao te Ching, which I like, and other great old eastern philosophical traditions.  Not that I like them because of their age or where they arose; that would be silly.  I like them because they make sense.

Anyway, below are those pictures with which I threatened you.  Some of them are pretty good, I think, for a truly self-taught amateur.  I still would definitely appreciate any feedback about my partly-begun stories and what your thoughts are on which you might be most inclined to want to read.  No matter what I do, if I start writing fiction again, I think I will nevertheless keep writing this daily blog.  I would hate to leave all my countless readers (heh) high and dry.

Please have a good weekend!

*By “old friend” I mean he’s a friend I’ve known for a long time (almost 40 years!) not that he’s old.  He’s more or less the same age I am, give or take a few months.  I guess that’s “old” from a certain point of view, but it’s not old enough to start collecting retirement benefits.

**This may mean that, overall, I’ve drawn the most pictures of that character, but the pictures are of very different quality to one’s I’ve drawn as an adult.

by

I can’t think of an appropriate Shakespeare-based title I haven’t already used

Hello and good morning.

Actually, though, I’m at least starting this blog post on Wednesday evening as I wait for my train.  I will have edited it Thursday morning, however.  I know this for a definitive fact, because this very sentence, and the immediately preceding one, is being/has been written on Thursday morning, while I’m editing.

Right now, though—that being Wednesday evening—I feel like I won’t have the energy for anything tomorrow.  I don’t think I would have the energy to breathe if it were not an automatic process.

All of this is getting too tedious; everything is getting tedious.  It’s the same old stupid thing after the previous same old stupid thing before the next same old stupid thing, and there’s no point and no joy in almost any of it.  It’s just compulsion; it’s just habit.  It’s just the fear that, if I stop doing this, I don’t think I’ll do anything else.

But why should I do anything else?  Why not just stop everything?

It would have no significant impact on anyone or anything.  It’s certainly unlikely to make things worse overall.  The world is as shitty as it’s ever yet been in my lifetime.  Humans have become ever more disappointing—not all of them mind you, but so many have become so disappointing that the good ones seem fewer and further between.

Of course, I’m pretty disappointing myself, albeit for somewhat different reasons than most.  So I don’t really have much right to complain.  It’s not as though I’m not a loser, after all.

Yeah, I think maybe I’m pretty much close to done—with everything.  I certainly don’t have any desire to celebrate having lived yet another pointless year in which I produce nothing of value and just wallow in the fact that biological existence has a tendency to continue—at least up to a point—if it’s not actively curtailed.

I’m so tired all the time, and I’m in pain all the time.

Just earlier today (Wednesday), it occurred to me—though I’ve probably said this before—that I feel as though I’ve already been embalmed, because just moving around in any way, just kicking any of my joints into flexion or extension, is difficult and often painful.  I feel stiff and sore; I also feel like my limbs are somewhat out of place, though it may be hard to convey that sense adequately.

I’m uncomfortable in my body and uncomfortable in my mind.  There are very few compensations.

I’m not saying there are none, and they are definitely nice when they happen, but they are few and far between, like tiny oases in a desert.  They are also bits of relief that I certainly do not deserve.

I’m also tired of complaining all the time.  I feel that it has to get really old for the people who read this blog.  But I don’t have much that’s more upbeat or uplifting to say.  I certainly don’t have much positive to say about myself.  I’ve failed at everything that actually matters to me, and at quite a few things that don’t, despite my supposed gifts and abilities.

It’s enough.  I really just ought to die soon.  My birthday is coming up; it would be appropriate for that to be the day I died.  At least it would have a nice faux symmetry.  It doesn’t really matter, of course, but I like symbols and symmetries and timing and so forth.  I just feel…well, I don’t feel like continuing, I don’t feel like putting in any more effort.  It’s useless and pointless and irritating.

Maybe I’ll feel different in the morning.  Maybe I’ll feel worse*.  Maybe I’ll develop enough resolve to take final action of some kind—I certainly have plenty of methods and means available.  I’ve been collecting and preparing such means of egress for a long time—I have nooses, and blades, and flammable liquids, and nonrebreather masks and tubing and regulator valves that could be used to deliver inert gases, and I have rat poison and various other potential toxins, for instance.

Or maybe I’ll develop enough energy to continue for a bit longer, however pointless it may be.

But I don’t know what to do.  I’m not sure what I’m going to do.  The only thing I have to which to look forward is occasionally seeing my youngest child, which started recently.  That’s always very nice, of course; that’s wonderful beyond easy explication.  But I feel—I must admit this may just be my mental illness speaking—that it’s an unkind obligation I’m putting on them, though I do not want to denigrate them or cast aspersions on their character.  That would be most unjust.

So it’s probably in my mind.  Nevertheless, I feel that I am causing undue trouble for them, and that I am not worth that trouble, not in the slightest.

I don’t know what to do.  I am so exhausted by everything, and I feel that I am nothing but pathetic.  I just want to exit, to escape, to be able to stop trying, even if it’s not truly what one could call “rest”.  I just need to let go—or something.

Whatever.  We’ll see.  I may not even post this post tomorrow morning.  I may just write something else**.  I don’t know.

TTFN

*This is a morning footnote, and it’s hard to say whether I feel different.  I feel slightly more rested, of course; I’m probably not rested enough, since my body doesn’t seem to like to indulge itself in getting enough rest.  I’m certainly still stiff and in pain, but I also nevertheless did my pull-ups this morning, so I have a bit more energy.  Also, I am a creature of habit, but I am not a nun, though I am worth none.

**I have not.  This is just the edited version of the post I wrote yesterday evening.

by

“And by a sleep to say we end the heartache…”

I am really groggy this morning.  I feel as if I slept very poorly, or at least not nearly enough.  Of course, both of those things tend to be true pretty much every night on which I don’t literally sedate myself.  But somehow I’m really feeling it today.

Usually, I’m so tense overall that even though I sleep poorly, I’m still alert bordering on hyperalert.  Maybe now I’ve had such poor sleep for so long that it’s finally catching up with me and wearing me down.  Or perhaps one might say it is Breaking Me Down.  [That was a shameless plug.  BTW, my songs are also available on Spotify and iTunes, and you can choose them as background music for Instagram and (so I’m told) even TikTok.]

Of course, it may be that I actually slept better than usual last night, but it was simply not enough of such better sleep, so I’m feeling very mentally tired because I started to get some rest, but have by no means made up for my deficit.  Does that make sense?

I suppose it doesn’t matter much.  I guess if I somehow develop better sleep and begin to be better rested, it will gradually produce some effects.  I don’t know what such effects might be.  Perhaps such sleep would improve my creativity, my energy, my optimism, what have you.

Maybe I would start writing fiction again.  Maybe I would start writing music again.  Maybe I would start drawing and painting again.  Maybe I would find the energy really to study the physics and mathematics I want to study, and even to master more of the science of biological and machine intelligence.

And maybe I would catch the flying pig to go take a skiing trip in Hell.  Unfortunately, I do not know how to ski (except in principle).  Also, snowboarding looks like it would be more fun.  In any case, I think such activities would be very hard on my joints and back.  But who knows?  Maybe if I were able to get enough sleep for long enough, even my chronic pain would improve.

We know how crucial sleep must be, because every single creature with a nervous system seems to do it, even though it puts us all into a vulnerable state at least part of every day.  If there were a way around it, you’d think that some creature would have developed that capacity, but the closest we have is things like dolphins and other marine and aquatic creatures that sleep with half their brains at a time.

That’s pretty remarkable and cool, when you think about it.  I know that not just marine mammals and some reptiles do this, but also some birds do it.

I also had Mark Reed do something akin to this in Mark Red.  As he developed into what he was becoming (a demi-vampire) he stopped needing to sleep at all, and Morgan (a full vampire) speculated that maybe during the day his vampire half slept, while at night his human half slept.

Of course, he was a supernatural being, so parallels with even the most esoteric of real creatures are at best quite a stretch.  It’s all pretty much a stretch for me, as well, though I am certainly not a supernatural being.  I’m quite weird, but that’s not the same.

Mind you, as I’ve said before, in reality there can be no such thing as the supernatural (at least as I would straightforwardly define the term) because anything that actually exists‒no matter how bizarre or inexplicable‒is part of nature, and so is natural.  If ghosts exist*, then ghosts are natural.  If vampires exist** then vampires are natural.  If Cthulhu and Azathoth and Nyarlathotep exist***, then they are natural as well.

Nature is big.  It’s not just the biosphere of Earth.  It’s the whole capital-U Universe, by which I mean everything, even if there is a multiverse or many different levels of multiverses.  It’s what I might call the Omniverse, as I did in The Dark Fairy and the Desperado.  I had planned on referring to it as the metaverse, starting from well over 20 years ago, but then Fuckerberg stole the term and applied it to his lame-ass would-be virtual reality thing.

Oh, well, what are you gonna do?  I suppose he has his uses.  I don’t know whether his existence is a net positive or a net negative, and such measures are always dependent upon what criteria one uses to judge things, anyway.  And as long as one is fairly rigorous and consistent and careful in applying one’s criteria, I would say that all such evaluations are reasonably valid within their own bailiwicks.  My own frustration, though perhaps likewise valid by those measures, is a bit petty and somewhat pathetic, even from my own point of view.

What else is new?

Not very much, I’m afraid.  Details change from moment to moment, though even that depends to some degree upon one’s perspective.  Certainly no human, nor indeed any manner of finite mind, has ever had or can ever have all the answers.  The best we can do is to try always to increase our knowledge, to improve our understanding.  It may take forever to learn every possible thing there is to know, but what better way could there be to spend eternity?

I hope you all have a good day and a good week, even though you can only learn and improve a finite amount in that time.  It’s good enough.

*They almost certainly do not.

**They also almost certainly do not, unless you count the bats and other blood-eating parasites like mosquitoes and fleas and the Masai people.

***Alas, even these beings almost certainly do not really exist.

by

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I doubt it, though.

*Or the camel’s back, if you prefer.

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

by

“Broken branches trip me as I speak.”

Tuesday, Tuesday, Tuesday…I can’t think of any jokes or plays on words regarding this day of the week that I haven’t already done, probably ad nauseam.  That’s my habit, it seems:  perseveration, repetition, all that stuff.  That’s probably related to the ASD thing.  It’s certainly been with me all my life in one form or another, or at least as far back as I can remember.

Speaking of “as far back as I can remember”:  I think my oldest memory‒certainly one of the oldest‒is of having to be carried out of The Three Caballeros in the main street theater in Disney World (currently known as the Magic Kingdom), because they started shooting their guns.  I remember the noise being painful and terrifying, and I remember someone picking me up and taking me out of the theater.  I would have been about two years old, I believe.

I used to be unable to tolerate loud noises such as fireworks and muskets* and the like.  I also hated getting my hair cut, I remember that; but I also really hated getting it combed, especially since it was so prone to tangles.

Enough pointless recollection.  I don’t even know what I was trying to discuss there.

Ugh.  I don’t even know why I’m doing this, he said, inadvertently quoting Luke Skywalker from The Empire Strikes Back.  I mean, I get the nature of habit, but I don’t want to be a creature that blindly follows habit.  I’ve been trying to improve my own habits, to decrease or eliminate bad ones, to inculcate good new ones (or to reinitiate older habits that were good).

But even those objectives, though “good” in and of themselves from the point of view of having better strength of character or whatever, are also pointless in the end.  If I’m just robotically carrying out “good” habits without joy or friendship or love or anything along those lines, it’s just a Sisyphean task, and I’ve never been convinced by Camus on that subject.  I’ve written about this before, but I’m not sure precisely where and when.

I’ve probably written about all of this before.  Everything is repetitive and dull; it’s so irritating.  The YouTube algorithm is even failing to find me videos in which I have enough interest to distract myself for a moment.  The other social media are likewise tedious to annoying; they’re mostly just online forms of distilled human stupidity.  As if human stupidity weren’t concentrated enough already.

I’m not interested in any new science right now, or math, or computer stuff, or philosophy, or even fiction (new or old).  I have no interest in any movies or shows that are coming out; what a joke that landscape entails.  I also have no interest in listening to or writing or playing music, despite my Radiohead quote in the title of this post.

Oh, yeah, and every day, so much of the day, so much of me hurts.  That takes the bloom off many a potential rose.

I’m not even happy about the fact that it’s October and Halloween is coming.  I have no one with whom to celebrate it.  Ditto for the subsequent celebrations.  Holidays are things people celebrate with other people.  Maybe not all possible kinds of people do it that way, but on this planet it seems pretty consistent.

I thought about it recently, as if for the first time, though I don’t see how it could have been:  For the initial long stretch of my life, I was always around other people, even in my personal life.  I was the third of three children, so my parents and siblings were always about; I even shared a room with my brother until I was high school age.

I was in the same house and school system from K through 12 as they say, so I knew my fellow students and had several good friends.  Then, in college, I had a consistent roommate for all four years‒a most excellent one, I may say‒and another core group of friends.

Then, of course, I got married.  That entailed a bit of a rift with my own family‒I won’t get into that cluster fuck, because no one comes out looking good‒but also became a welcomed part of my then-wife’s family.  Unfortunately, with respect to my prior friends, when I’m away from people I have serious trouble maintaining ties‒this is apparently related to autism, but I’ve always just felt ashamed of it but incapable of doing otherwise.

Then of course I went to med school and residency and lived with my wife, and eventually we had kids, and that was wonderful‒they are wonderful‒but then my injury and chronic pain happened, and I guess my underlying ASD didn’t help me deal with that.

Then I got separated and then got divorced**.  And then I made the foolish (however well-intended they were, which they were) choices that led to me being a guest of the Florida DOC for 3 years (minus gain time).

Gradually, more and more, I have been alone by myself, and I am not good at taking care of myself***.  It’s odd; I used to be pretty good at taking care of other people, though I don’t think I have that will anymore, but I’ve never been good at taking care of myself.

And when, over time, everyone you care about goes away, consistently, then whatever your priors were, your Bayesian assessment of probabilities almost has to lead you to a high credence that you are a big part of the problem.

And by “you” I mean, of course, me.

*For instance, at the musket festival at Greenfield Village in Dearborn, Michigan…an immensely cool place, by the way.  Greenfield Village, I mean.  I don’t really know anything about the rest of Dearborn, but I expect it’s fine.

**I deliberately put this in the passive voice, because it wasn’t my idea.  I think I would never have sought a divorce‒it’s not really in my nature‒but I wasn’t going to try to coerce someone who didn’t want to be around me to stay around me, despite oaths freely given and all that.  I could never blame someone for finding my company objectionable.

***As for what “self” actually means, I’m using it here informally, just as a general reference to the person writing this blog and about whom it is being written.  There are no deeper metaphysical meanings; you can infer them if you wish, but that doesn’t mean they were implied.

by

“I am Jack’s wasted life…”

Well, it’s Monday again, and honestly, I don’t care or see the point…or, well, some other nearby sentiment to those two.  I’m not sure exactly what sentiment I’m trying to convey, really.  I just feel wound up yet worn out.  It’s been a very annoying weekend.

On Friday, I got back to the house to discover that ice accumulation around the “freezer” area in my half-fridge had pushed the door open, which had led to much more accumulation and also dripping condensation.  This is south Florida, after all; there’s a lot of water in the air.  I ended up having to unplug the fridge and just let it all melt, trying to soak up the water with old shirts (There were no spare towels‒I only had two*).

The wet was a bit too much for the shirts to absorb, but I have a strong floor fan, so I turned it toward that task, instead of cooling me.  I had to throw out pretty much everything in the fridge, but that was not much; I don’t ever have many refrigerable foods.  Like the narrator in Fight Club said:  “A refrigerator full of condiments and no food.  How embarrassing.”

Anyway, the rest of Saturday had a lot of drying of the floor, and a walk to the bank.  Not much else of note took place.  I did dust off my PS4 and try to get it going for the first time in a very long time.  I got it to start after a while‒it seemed almost to have atrophied or gone into some electronic rigor mortis or something.  Anyway, I got it updated after I reset my password, and then played two of my favorite games for about ten minutes each before realizing they were not any fun.

Then, Sunday morning when I went to do my laundry, the washer wasn’t working.  I tried to figure out the problem, and at first it seemed to be an electricity issue.  I tried all the circuit breakers, but they were fine, and the ground fault interrupt was also not sprung.  I got out a long extension cord; I had to depower my fridge (and microwave) to use it, but there was nothing in the fridge by then, anyway.

Power was thus supplied, and I hoped the problem was solved, but it was not.  The washing machine was broken.  Despite various interventions, I could not get it to run.

My laundry, with detergent, was just sitting in the machine.  The landlord tried to get a replacement washer out to us as soon as possible, but his guy was busy elsewhere, and of course, it was Sunday.  So my laundry has not been done this week.  I’ve had to buy some new clothes (and new towels) and get out old clothes I don’t usually wear and so on.  It’s very uncomfortable and unpleasant, as well as expensive.

So, my whole routine has been thrown for a loop, and my routine is all that I have anymore.  I went for quite a long walk on Sunday afternoon once it became clear that the washer replacement wasn’t soon arriving.  It was pretty hot out, but the heat index was one to three degrees below body temperature, so at least normal thermoregulation functioned, more or less, though I got a bit of sunburn.

I walked west along 215th Street, AKA County Line Road, until I got to the place where 215th crosses the Florida Turnpike.  I looked down to see how high the overpass was, but it was disappointing.  If it was done right, a person could probably carefully hang and drop, landing with minimal injury beyond a few scrapes.

Even if one were trying to kill oneself by jumping from there, one would have to go head first (doing it just right) and/or rely on getting killed by traffic.  That would be rude; it would not be okay to traumatize some poor shmoe who’s just going somewhere on the turnpike on a Sunday afternoon.

At that point, I turned around and headed back.  I stopped at a convenience store nearby and bought three beverages, all of which I drank before getting back to the house.

To top everything off for the weekend, one of the stray cats I feed, a quite neurotic and paranoid one, and certainly the oldest of her cohort, died overnight.  She had been (apparently) okay earlier in the day, but maybe she had an infection.  I don’t know.  It doesn’t seem to have been a horrible death, and I guess it was pretty fast.  She wasn’t alone, at least.  The other few cats who tend to stay close to the house were nearby and seemed to have kept her company, at least in some sense.

I don’t know.  I’m probably anthropomorphising.  Still, she had more friends (and probably family, really, when you think about the nature of stray cats) around her when she died than I will likely have when I die.  I honestly don’t know if that’s better or worse.  Maybe it’s not good to subject the people you love to your final hours.

Still, I was regretful and sad (still am) that my Dad died while I was en route to see him for the last time.  And I was glad‒or, well, it was a positive thing, anyway‒to be there with my mother when she died, though I don’t think my presence did any actual good for her.  At least my sister wasn’t there alone.  I guess that was pretty clearly good.

I don’t know what the point of all this is, but in a way, that really is the point, and it makes my point:  there is no use in all that I do, such as this blog.  There is no use in anything.  And I certainly am of no use.

Maybe the social media-ites are right and one shouldn’t have to earn the right to exist, but I have never felt, not for one moment in my life, that I deserve anything just because I’m alive, including my life itself.  Nature is not generous or kind, and as far as I can see, nature doesn’t consider anyone or anything to “deserve” to exist.

I certainly don’t.

*Thanks to other recent events reported here, I bought some more.

by

“I’m falling down the spiral, destination unknown”

Well, it’s Friday morning, and I’m still fasting.  I’m also, once again, writing this post on my smartphone.  It is so hard not to take the easiest, lowest “action” route at any given time in any given moment, such as when leaving the office to go back to the house.  I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised by that; it’s what the laws of nature themselves do at every time in every place, following the “path” with the least local action.

That is local though.  Nature doesn’t necessarily come out with the most straightforward long-term pathway for things.  That would require it to see ahead, to be able to act at a distance, in a more literal and broad sense than even just the collapse of the wave-function*.  And so, likewise, for instance (please forgive me for being very loose with my analogies) I leave the mini lapcom at the office even though I will regret having done so the next morning.

And so, also, I will snack on and just eat unhealthy foods in too-great amounts, even though I will regret it later, and despite prior experience.  That prior experience can only change my action when its negative effect applies strongly enough in the moment of temptation.  But alas, it’s difficult to get to that point.

If I were somehow to get sick to my stomach‒or, well, even just nauseated‒every time I ate anything but the healthiest food, I would probably rather quickly stop desiring a lot of foods, because nausea is a very strong internal signal that leads to longer-term aversion in the human nervous system, a fact shaped by evolution to prevent someone from eating poisonous or infectious foods more than once (ideally).

Anyway…

I’m tolerating my fast so far with minimal trouble, which doesn’t surprise me.  Indeed, by the end of work yesterday, I felt very upbeat, at least physically.  I wouldn’t go so far as to say I was euphoric, but it was a feeling in the same genus, if not the same species.

However, I did not sleep well last night, even for me, which surprised me a bit.  I honestly expected I would probably feel sleepier than usual, just as a matter of energy conservation.  Of course, that would fly in the face of my own reasoning about the extra alertness and motivation engendered by food deprivation, at least up to a point.  So I should not be surprised, and if I am, that’s a sign of my own relative lack of thorough and rigorous thinking about what was happening.

Mind you, it’s only been 36 hours since I last ate something.  That’s not exactly earthshaking.  I’m sure that other states of mind and body would/will arise if I continue to fast.  I do feel a little floaty and disconnected already, but then my mind is weird even at the best of times.

One thing that fasting makes clear to me:  food really is practically the only thing that gives me any reliable dose of joy anymore, however transitory and however low the rebound takes me afterward.  There is nothing else in my life‒nothing of which to speak, anyway.

I don’t do anything for fun, I don’t really have any conversations with anyone (except my sister slightly less often than once a week), I don’t go anywhere for fun or inspiration or interest.  I watch semi-random YouTube videos and putter around on a few other social media just as distractions.  I haven’t even watched any sports or any other shows, not after the first regular season football week, because it rapidly got boring.  I don’t even play any of the video games I have.

I still do read some, but I’m running out of books in which I have any interest‒currently I’m most of the way through If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies.  After that, I don’t even know what I would want to read next.

It would be best‒not just for me but for everyone else in the long run‒if I could apply enough willpower to stop eating completely, forever.  Goodness knows that’s what I want to do.  I don’t know if I’ll be able to do it, though.  I mean, I will try, I am trying, and maybe after the first few days it will become easier.

So far, though, dealing with the dearth of activation in my nucleus accumbens is daunting.  I’m a miserable person even when I can stuff my face with food that I like.  Without food or music or creative writing or any other expression, it’s all very much a long, long road with no inn at the end or even any rest stops along the way.

I don’t know what to do.  Perhaps some epiphany will hit me.  I doubt it.  I suspect there is no deep, secret answer.  There’s only transient, pointless existence then a return to nonexistence; so I suspect, though I do not claim to know for certain.

Whatever.  It’s Friday, and the weekend approaches.  Who knows?  Maybe I’ll still be fasting by Monday for my next blog post.  I would like that.  I would also like it if you all have a very good day and a good weekend.

*That is what Einstein referred to as “spooky action at a distance”, not quantum entanglement. 

by

The brain may devise laws for the blog, but a hot temper leaps o’er a cold decree.

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, of course, and it is also the 2nd day of October.  Those two things don’t always coincide‒that probably goes without saying‒but in this case (and roughly one seventh of all October 2nds) they do.

It’s also Yom Kippur, and though if I were truly observant of the holiday, I would not be writing this or going to work, I still want to wish anyone out there observing (it’s not really celebrating) the day a very good and positive one (but if you’re observant, so to speak, you’re unlikely to see this until after the holiday ends).

And, of course, I have begun my fast.  That’s not very impressive so far, mind you; I just haven’t eaten anything since yesterday afternoon at about 4:30, which is not too much longer than usual at this time of day.  Of course, I feel fine, energy and hunger-wise, because I don’t usually eat anything by this hour.  I will be drinking water‒fizzy most of the time, but still water, even though it’s not still water, ha ha‒and possibly diet soda, but that’s it.  I have to have water, because I take a fair amount of medicine for my pain and such, and many of those things should not be sitting in an unlubricated stomach.

It’s not really that hard for me to hold off on eating once I commit to it.  Throughout high school at least, and part of college, I never ate breakfast and rarely ate lunch.  I was skinny, but my mind was as sharp as it’s ever been (though of course I am “smarter” now than I was, because I know a lot more, and that’s not just knowledge, but skills and habits as well).

I also had plenty of energy back then.  I’ve spoken before about how this makes biological sense.  In our ancestral environment, a lack of recent food would be associated with the need or urge to seek food out, and that requires alertness and motivation and energy for a hunting species or even a gathering species, and certainly for one that does both.

Anyway, I really hope not only that this fast helps to clear my mind a bit and to calm my “spirit”, but also that it helps reset my body somewhat.  At the very least, it would be good to get back to that high school (and college) tendency of spending less of my time eating.  It’s gotten to the point that what I do in my “spare time” is often just eating, for momentary pleasure, for distraction, for avoiding boredom, for escape, etc.  But, of course, that tends to lead to a negative cycle, and I feel physically worse and worse about myself afterward.

So, hopefully, I will cross the activation-energy barrier today and head on through towards a more stable plane (or plain) of mentality, and of metabolism.  I don’t know for sure how long the journey will last, or where I will end up, but I will probably keep you all posted.  Watch this space, as they say.

It would be very nice if I successfully get some degree of spiritual insight from this fasting process‒whatever that even means*‒but whatever happens, until the end, I will probably continue to post here every work day.

In the meantime, I’ve at least put in some absurd footnotes as tangential thoughts struck me while writing.  I even did one of my footnote-within-a-footnote thingys, which is always fun (for me, anyway).  But you have to be careful with such digressions;  it’s a bit like writing a computer program with lots of subroutines embedded within other subroutines embedded within yet other subroutines.  The potential for errors that confound your logic (and that make your program freeze, in the programming case) is quite high.

Anyway, G’mar chatima tova, everyone.  I hope you have a good day.  I think I will, too.  And if I uncover any special psychic powers though this fasting process, well…I probably wouldn’t say anything about it.  But who knows, I might.

TTFN

*I’m referring to “spiritual insight”, not “this process”.  I’m pretty sure I know what “this process” means in this particular case**.

**Actually, that’s a pretty unambiguous term nearly any time you might use it.  You might not understand what this process is, but you probably understand what “this process” means in most cases, assuming a decent command of English***.

***That’s a command of the English language, not command of the English.  Commanding the English, and the rest of the inhabitants of the British Isles, has historically been a tricky business, including by the English themselves.  Even the Romans had issues with the “English” and when it came to Scotland, well, Emperor Hadrian just said, “Screw it, put a wall up to try to keep them there up North, I don’t wanna have to deal with those crazy bastards”.  He probably said it in Latin**** though.

****I can’t even imagine the nightmare of trying to conjugate all the Latin verbs and so on in my imaginary quote from Hadrian.