life

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“Nothing to do to save his life, call his wife in.”

What a strange night and morning it has been.  I had a terribly disjointed sleep, which itself is not surprising‒in fact it’s more or less par for the course‒but then I dozed off for a bit just after 3.  Then I almost overslept for my reserved Uber to the train station.  I reserved the ride to make sure I wouldn’t be tempted to walk any part of the way to the train, since my knees and hips and everything else are still bad, and I have taken significantly less naproxen than usual, so I am very stiff and sore.  But I didn’t set my alarm, because I’m almost always awake anyway.

I was able to scramble and even to shower and then make it for my ride without any penalties, though that wouldn’t have been too horrible an outcome if it had happened.  Indeed, I might have then bit the bullet and gotten an Uber all the way to the office.  That would cost a lot more, though.

Anyway, I hate the very notion of being late for something, even if it’s not really important and was a deadline/time semi-arbitrarily chosen by me.  There’s no one really in my life for me to disappoint, other than myself, of course, and I’m already almost always disappointed in and by me.  Still, the notion of being late is mortifying to me, and I really need to struggle to resist as much self-loathing as possible, so it’s best not to fail at one of the few things at which I usually succeed.

So, here I am.  I made it to the station and I’m writing this post.  To that degree, at least, I am successful.  I am, of course, a failure at pretty much everything else.  Certainly I have failed at nearly all the things that have been truly important to me.

C’est la vie, I suppose.  Some people succeed through no credit of their own, and can thereby develop a sense that they are special and divinely protected or some such stupidity, when in fact they are some of the least impressive humans around.  Other people‒many more, it seems‒fail and fall despite having done everything they could, in the ways they were told they ought to do things.

They keep trying to be and do good, trying to achieve success and stability, maybe even trying to have a family and a career.  But they end up seeing everything fall apart, feeling it crumble in their hands even as they try to hold it together.  Indeed, often their attempts to buttress and repair things seem merely to speed up the destruction and exacerbate the decay.  Then, finally, they die alone, surrounded by no one (or at least by no one they know, no one who loves them, if such people even exist).

C’est la mort as well, I guess.  The universe makes no special deals.  It makes no promises, either, other than its implicit “promise” always and only to proceed by its own rules, though we only incompletely know what all those rules are.  It certainly never said, “If you do everything right according to these very human-invented and evolved and imagined rules of behavior, I will ensure that you have something at least approximating the good life you have been told to seek and to expect.”

The universe doesn’t actually say anything at all, come to think of it.  Well, it “says” stuff in the sense that people are part of it, and they say various things, but they in no sense represent the intentions and thoughts of the universe (these do not appear to exist, so people could not represent them).

The universe, as far as we can tell, has no larger scale intelligence and intentions.  It merely is, if the concept of “mere” applies to something that may well be infinite in spatial and temporal extent, and at the very least is much, much larger than anything humans evolved to grasp directly, and also much, much smaller and more finely grained than humans ever evolved to grasp directly.

I guess “mere” is in the eye of the beholder.  And joy is in the ears that hear, not in the mouth that speaks, as Foamfollower often said.  Though I doubt there is much, if any, joy for anyone anywhere in “hearing” my words.

It’s hard for me even to say that I have joy in writing them.  I certainly feel internal pressure to write them, and going with it does relieve some of that tension, and that relief could be called joy, I suppose.  But I don’t think that’s what poets and plasterers and everyone in between really imagines when they speak of “joy”.

Still, we can only take what the universe gives us.  It’s not offering any exchanges.  And it’s not as though we can just go somewhere else to see if they have a better deal.

So, I guess we do what we can with what we have where we are and try not to let ourselves get distracted by foolish notions that the universe owes us some reward.  As far as I can see, the universe “promises” us only one thing, and‒also as far as I can see‒it never fails to deliver this, sooner or later.

Anyway, I hope your weekends are starting off more auspiciously than mine is.  Of course, my weekends always have the major drawback that I am there, and so far, it is certainly a drawback today.

Please take care of yourselves.  I hope you have some joy this weekend that isn’t just a dishwashing liquid.

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In nature’s infinite blog of secrecy a little I can read.

Hello and good morning.

I may be brief today*, because I am mentally fairly exhausted.  Yesterday was a bad day for me, pain-wise and mood-wise.  I’ve had large amounts of more than one kind of pain medicine on board, and I felt…well, I felt somewhat less pain in some places, but I’ve started to get some broader symptoms that I sometimes get when I’m taking too many NSAIDs for too long.

My thumbs and my knees and ankles and such are actually feeling wobbly and unstable as well as being generally a bit puffy and plenty sore.  This isn’t really like an inflammatory kind of swelling; that would indeed be a failure of the Non-Steroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drug(s) I take, would it not?  No, this feels more like a sense of having excess fluid in each joint, as well as in between them, and less tautness, less stability, and somewhat ironically, more pain, albeit of a slightly different character that usual.  It’s quite frustrating.

Also, my back and hips and shoulders don’t feel much, if any, better than usual.

I’ve been wondering lately if I might have some form of relatively mild hypermobility syndrome, which often goes along with ASD it seems (some of the causative genes are probably the same, or at least tend to travel together through the genome).

I have long had certain slightly atypical flexibility issues or attributes**.  For instance, I’ve always been able, with a bit of a pull, to put one or the other of my feet behind my head from a seated position.  I can also scratch pretty much any part of my own back, and I have always been able to do this, though I sometimes need to pull one arm a bit with the other.  Also, I have a hard time holding my head straight upright for very long at a time; it’s uncomfortable, and I need to lean it to one side or another pretty much constantly.  Maybe that’s just a weird habit, I don’t know.

Of course, hypermobility can be associated with various kinds of chronic pain, and can certainly make other things worse.  Unfortunately, it’s not something that can be cured, any more than autism can be cured (or any more than having a particular color of eyes or hair can be cured, though they can be masked, as by dyes or contact lenses).

I am far from sure about this tentative self-diagnosis, and I’m always leery of “second year med student syndrome”, but I think I am being reasonably objective here.  Genetic testing would be required to confirm something like Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, but I don’t meet the criteria for full-blown EDS***, and less full-blown syndromes may not easily (nor cheaply) be testable, or testable at all.

I suppose it doesn’t really matter much.  I do not expect my baseline previous health to be recoverable in any reasonable sense.  This is one reason I’m not too terribly worried about things like heart disease and infections and so on.  Why would I want to live a longer life of the kind I now live?  It’s like asking someone if they want the massive street construction project on their block, that’s slowing traffic and making terrible noise all day and into most nights, to be extended‒not by the workers doing more improvement, but just by working more slowly and being less efficient.

At least yesterday, in between doing payroll, processing deals on an unusually busy day, and trying to discourage my body from committing war crimes against itself, I remembered and indulged in a resource I haven’t used in a while:  I got on bioarXiv and skimmed through the abstracts of some of the more recently uploaded papers in general biology, neuroscience, genetics, molecular biology, and such like.  It can be kind of fun.

I don’t enjoy it as much as I do going to the original arXiv (hosted at my alma mater), which deals in physics, mathematics, computer science and the like.  But the bio site requires less mental effort and is simpler in many ways.  This is at least partly due to the fact that I am an MD, and I got my degree from one of the more research-oriented medical schools (we were required to do a publishable medical science research project as part of our degree) so the terminology is more or less at my fingertips.  This probably would apply even more at medrXiv, at which I spend less time than the latter two.

ArXiv, the physics/maths/CS site, has oodles of interesting articles always up‒I have, for instance, downloaded a PDF of a paper by David Deutsch from there‒but most require more mental effort than on the other sites, because I don’t have as good a handle on some of the jargon, and I often need to review the mathematics involved, or more often try to absorb it for the first time.  Still, it’s very cool, though it’s a real embarrassment of riches; it’s like being in the biggest candy store in the world,  but having only three dollars to your name, and having to choose what to buy with it.

The potential opportunity costs are staggering, but I guess that’s a good problem to have.

Speaking of reviewing mathematics, I found a nice little YouTube channel by a woman from MIT who does good reviews of basic integration and more advanced techniques like integration by parts and trig substitutions and such like.  I find her stuff much less sleep-inducing than the videos on 3Blue1Brown, though Grant has oodles of great videos, well-produced and in-depth but clear, about many topics in mathematics.  Unfortunately, his voice is if anything too calm for me, and his animations, though superb, are if anything too smooth.

I think, also, that I learn better by seeing someone writing the stuff out‒possibly this engages my mirror neurons and thus makes more of my whole brain focused on what’s happening.

Incidentally, the lady mentioned above is not officially affiliated with MIT, she just went there.  But you can actually “attend” lecture courses in various subjects in Physics, in Mathematics, in Economics, in Computer Science, and so on, from MIT at their YouTube channel.  It’s truly remarkable, and if you’re just after learning the stuff but aren’t seeking an Official Piece of Paper™, it’s a tremendous resource!  Stanford also has similar online lecture courses, as I think does CalTech.

I’m pretty sure Harvard does this also, but there’s no need for any of you to go slumming there.  Why not just watch Baby Shark or something‒and Gangnam Style is actually pretty enjoyable.  I know, I know, Steven Pinker is at Harvard, and he’s one of the most enjoyable (and thought-provoking) public thinkers in the world, but I don’t think he gives any of their online lectures.

Although, given the notorious grade inflation known to be rampant at Harvard, you might just get an official “A” from them simply by clicking on one of their videos.

Okay, I’m at the stage of taking cheap shots at Harvard (they do not deserve such disrespect, even though there really is a problem with grade inflation), so I’ll call this post to a close.  I hope you’re all having a better week, year, decade, and life than I am having.  Though, really, if you’re not reading preprint scientific papers for free online, how good can your life be?

TTFN

*I was not.  Perhaps this is analogous to the situation that led to the famous quote about not having time enough to write a short letter‒only in this case, it is not time but mental energy that limits my concision.

**Some of these things are slightly curtailed now because I am too plump, but that’s a different issue.

***No, I do not refer to Ross Perot’s old company, Electronic Data Systems.

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“You look so tired, unhappy…”

I don’t think I’m going to write anything interesting or thought provoking today, as I sort of did deliberately earlier this week (Monday more than Tuesday).  I certainly don’t expect to write anything profound.  I’m actually just very mentally and emotionally* tired right now, which is nothing new, but which is more onerous sometimes than others.  Such is the case with all things, I guess.

Yesterday, for most of the day, I felt extremely grumpy, by which I mean that basically everything was bothering me.  Part of this is no doubt due to my recent exacerbation and complication of my chronic pain:  I did something to injure my right knee, and it’s still very stiff and sore, especially when I first try to rise after being seated for a while.

It eases a bit after I walk a little; the stiffness seems to work itself out some.  But then it just re-seizes up as I sit, and it’s quite painful once I move again.  It certainly isn’t enough to distract from my chronic pain, but it does add extra highlights to it.  I guess at least it keeps things from being too dull (though the pain still often feels extremely boring‒in the “drill bit” sense, not the “tedious” sense**).

I’m sure it’s all plenty boring for you to read, probably in more than one sense.  I apologize.  You come to my blog in good faith, expecting to find something at least tolerably worth reading, and I keep spewing my vitriol and discomfort all over your minds.  Again, I am sorry.

I’m so tired of my life, though.  Yesterday, I don’t know how many times, or in how many ways, I fantasized about…well, you know.  I’m just very drained, and I feel as though there are always new setbacks.  I suppose that’s true, in a sense.  It’s probably true for almost everyone, in some fashion or other.  That doesn’t make it better or easier to bear, though.  If anything, it just reinforces my sense of despondency about the world and the universe.

Ordinarily, I can be philosophical about such things, embracing the apparent lack of meaning partly because it means that people can create and choose the meanings of their own lives.  But chronic pain and chronic insomnia just chew away at one’s sense of optimism or even one’s sense of acceptance.  Chronic pain tends to make one hostile and even spiteful, especially when one is dealing with it all by oneself.

Also, my thumbs are sore, despite the fact that I’m trying to find ways to give them a rest.  And the stupid rash on my right hand that seems to have started (years ago) due to some kind of contact hypersensitivity to something in the “rubberized” grip of those Pilot® gel-roller pens (which I love but, alas, must avoid) continues to act up, and as a consequence the skin near the crook of my right thumb is dry and splitting open, which can sting quite a bit.

Oh, and I’d also like to register a complaint about this parrot what I bought not half an hour ago from this very boutique.

You want to complain?  Look at these shoes!  I’ve only had them three weeks, and the heels are worn right through.  If you complain, nothing happens, you might as well not bother.

Something like that, anyway.  It is terribly annoying.  O that this too, too solid flesh would melt, thaw, and resolve itself into a dew.  Fie on’t!  O fie! ‘Tis an unweeded garden that grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature possess it merely.

And if the cloudbursts thunder in your ear‒you shout and no one seems to hear‒and if the band you’re in starts playing different tunes, I’ll see you on the dark side of the moon.

Sorry about that hodgepodge of quotes from various brilliant British artists from different times and very different genres.  Such are my go-tos, as they say.

What is it about Britain that has led to everyone from Shakespeare to Newton, to Darwin, to Maxwell, to Monty Python, to Tolkien, to Orwell, To Kipling and Wells, to Byron and both Shelleys, to the Beatles and the Stones and Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin and Radiohead and the Police and so on and so on?  Maybe it’s the chronic emotional repression, which leads to the build-up of thoughts and feelings that have to burst out somewhere?

Except I don’t think that’s how such things as feelings actually work.  Maybe it’s just that it’s not culturally “acceptable” there to express one’s deepest feelings and concerns except through formal art.  Keep a stiff upper lip, everyone‒unless you’re making an embouchure to play an instrument.  Then you can blow away!

Speaking of which, that’s probably what many of you wish you could do to me right now.  With that in mind, and since I don’t think I’ve something more to say, I will draw to a close.  I hope you all have a very good day.

*Aren’t those really just part of the same thing, though?  I think so.  Emotions are a kind of thought, or at least a state of mind.

**Though it is all but unbearably tedious, believe me.

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Try not to let the wrong kind of strangers depend on your kindness

I don’t have anything planned to “talk” about today, unlike yesterday, which makes this a much more typical‒though possibly less auspicious‒beginning for a blog post.

In any case, I feel the pressure to keep writing, because this is my only real contact with the outside world in which I share anything like my real, deeper thoughts and so on.  When I bring such matters up at work, people tend to laugh a bit‒I can be relatively funny when I try‒but otherwise they tend to look a bit confused or just awkward.

I don’t know whether any of the people from back home, who might occasionally have encountered my blog via Facebook or Threads, will ever happen to come read it here.  That’s one reason I always tried to encourage people to interact with the blog in the comments section below, rather than in the posts on social media.  That way they are more sure to be able to keep getting the posts.

But I haven’t received any comments from any of them here since the Meta-based platforms kicked me off for no reason I can discern.  I suppose it’s a lesson of sorts, not to place any reliance upon third party businesses that don’t even have an arguable fiduciary duty to me, since I am not their customer but their product (as are you, if you use them).

They clearly don’t feel any significant moral or ethical obligations toward the people who use their platforms.  You should all remember that fact if the time comes where you have them in any sense at your advantage.  Don’t be kind to them.  To be kind to them is to insult those who do show signs of ethics and morality and good will, to those who deserve (whatever that might mean) and will appreciate kindness.

Whom do you think ought to be most rewarded by your good will?  Which form of being do you want to encourage?

Of course, kindness being what it is (if it is authentic kindness, rather than someone just being “nice” or being “charming” as tactics for advancing their own interests) the tendency is to be kind to all comers.  I get that, and I applaud it.

But the kindness of those who are truly kind‒or at least their ability to enact it‒is finite, as is their personal time and energy.

If one had unlimited strength and energy and time, one could simply be kind to everyone, and it would almost certainly make the world a better place overall, by most reasonable definitions.  For kindness may not have the same immense R0 value, the same easy transmissibility as do malice and contempt and rudeness and anger, but when it takes hold, it can be much more persistent, and can change (for the better) the kind individual as well as those around them.

The negative contagions‒malice, anger, contempt, and so on‒tend to be self-corrosive and destructive, in addition to being highly transmissible.  They are like the “Spanish” flu, or even like a highly virulent form of measles:  readily transmitted but terribly damaging (and often fatal) to those they infect.

Kindness is more like‒I hope you’ll pardon the seemingly negative comparison‒HIV or HTLV-1.  It can intercalate (or, to be technical with respect to the mentioned retroviruses, reverse transcribe) itself into the very DNA of those who “catch” it, changing them slowly and gradually but profoundly and‒unlike those two viruses I mentioned‒almost always for the better.  And true kindness can be very difficult to “cure”, thank goodness.

But it is a finite thing, and there are always those who will make use of the kindness‒even just the implicit kindness‒of others for their own ends, without rewarding anyone but themselves any more than they must, least of all those who are unselfishly kind to them.

In any ecosystem, if there is “free energy” floating around, then sooner or later some organism is going to develop the ability to exploit it.  And the exploiters can then readily grow and mutate and can even become pernicious or overt predators and parasites.  In this, they can be like the fungi that had been breaking down dead matter, but which went on to develop the capacity to infect living bodies and even to manipulate some of them to encourage the fungus’s spread.

None of this requires conscious intent (there certainly is no such thing evident in fungi, for instance).  It does not require foresight or planning.  Ideas and strategies and ways of being simply develop and mutate and “try out” various seemingly available niches, never knowing ahead of time which ways of doing and being will succeed.  It’s just that those organisms (or companies, etc.) who happen to stumble upon a useful and “profitable” way of doing things will happen to survive and grow and, relatively speaking, to thrive.

So, don’t give too much credit or admiration to the Zuckerbergs and the Musks and the Bezoses, nor to any of the others of their ilk, and certainly not to those who inherit success, like children born with an infection passed on by the mother* in utero.  Their success is stochastic, and was certainly not thanks to any particular prescience or cleverness on their part.

They are no more inherently impressive than any of the thousands and even millions who tried to do similar things and failed.  They simply happened to stumble upon a strategy that, in the local circumstances in which they found themselves, happened to work.  And once a degree of success happens, it tends to be self reinforcing, ceteris paribus.

This is to no credit of the viruses and parasites in and of themselves.  It is simply the way of economies and ecologies, no matter what such organisms may tell themselves to justify their actions to themselves and to assuage whatever rudimentary consciences they may possess.

Don’t waste your admiration, and certainly not your kindness, on those who happened to be in the right part of some particular phase space at the right time, through no virtue of their own, unless you would also feel fine giving that admiration and kindness to the many variants of influenza and coronaviruses and poxviruses and liver flukes and malaria protozoans and so on that spread and consume and have their various effects on the lives and bodies of other organisms.

And certainly don’t trust them to be kind to you or to anyone else.

*This is where my analogy with HIV falls short, but of course it was inevitably going to do, since HIV is pathogenic, whereas kindness does not tend to be so, nor does inherited wealth (except perhaps in more subtle ways).  Perhaps one might think of kindness as like the first archaea that “infected” another type or archaea and became, in the fullness of time, our mitochondria.  Okay, I’m pushing my analogies here, I know.

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“Perfect” IS the enemy of the good

I would like to propose that we eliminate or at least strongly curtail the use of the word and concept of “perfect”.  And since there is no reason for me not to propose it, I will do so:

Let us eliminate or at least strongly curtail the use of the word and concept “perfect”.

I wrote those two short paragraphs‒really, a short paragraph and a single sentence‒yesterday afternoon, starting this blog post much earlier than I usually do, because it’s a subject that’s a bit of a pet peeve, but which is also, I think, important.

People have this word, “perfect”, and they think it means something, so they try to behave as if it means something.  But for all but the most trivial cases‒one’s score on a straightforward test, the answer to a well-defined problem in mathematics, et cetera‒it’s a word with no serious meaning in actual reality.

What would a perfect person be?  What would that even mean?  Perfect by what criteria?

What could it mean to say that a work of art is perfect, that a song is perfect?  One can say an interval of notes is “perfect”, e.g., a perfect fifth, but that is because it is a concept with a precise definition in a very limited bailiwick.

In the real world, so to speak, “perfection” is a will-o-the-wisp, an illusion without underlying substance that will tend to lure one into a treacherous (metaphorical) bog.  I think it’s fairly widely recognized that perfectionism is a dangerous and usually detrimental habit or attribute.  One can almost never achieve perfection, even by relatively serious criteria, in the real world; reality is too complex and unpredictable.

But the notion of perfection can certainly succeed at taking most of the joy out of one’s accomplishments.  No matter how good one already is, or how much one improves from one’s previous state, one can never just feel pretty good about it if one is always measuring oneself against an unrealistic and unachievable standard, so one is always failing.

The desire for perfection can also lead to misplaced notions of idealism, which can engender well-meaning atrocities, as one strives to achieve some imaginary, impossible, invented notion of a perfect world.  I’ve written before about the fact that all ideologies are wrong.

The world is simply too complicated (har) for any relatively simple and concise set of ideas* to apply all over, unless you’re counting quantum field theory and general relativity as a relatively simple set of ideas.  They are simple in a certain sense, of course, but that’s a rarefied kind of “simple”.  And we also know they are not complete and do not apply everywhere in their present form as we understand them; they conflict with each other in regions where gravity must be quantized, e.g., the Big Bang or the inside of black holes.

Having the notion of “perfection” also does us the disservice of implying that there is some upper bound on improvement, whether personal or societal or anything in between.  It’s as if there were some analog of the speed of light, an ultimate limit that can only be approached asymptotically.

But, as far as we can tell, there is no upper limit on improvement, at least not by anything other than trivial measures.  A person can, on average, continue to improve over an entire lifetime, never reaching a limit, always able to get better and better, however they might reasonably define “better”.  So can a city, or a nation, or a civilization.

It can be quite discouraging and enervating to compare oneself always to an ideal that is impossible to achieve, at least partly because it is not sensibly defined and cannot be so defined.  And then, as Hamlet said, enterprises of great pitch and moment with this regard their courses turn awry and lose the name of action.  Or something like that.  If you are always falling short because your measure of worth is unattainable, you’re liable to become quite discouraged.

Even in fiction, there are no interesting “perfect” heroes.  Sir Galahad is just boring, for example, while Sir Lancelot is interesting, because he has flaws.  He’s still a good guy, though, even though he may consider himself a failure in the end.

Anyway, there’s more that I could say, and I’m not at all sure that I’ve made my point very well.  This has just been a minor rant about a personal pet peeve, but one that I think has actual detrimental consequences for the world at large.

Speaking of imperfection, my pain persists (of course) and my insomnia has been horrible, particularly last night.  I hope you all have a good week.  I just want to rest.

*Such as the notion that unregulated, truly free markets are the most ideal and efficient way to run an economy for all purposes, or the contrapuntal idea of “from each according to his ability to each according to his need”, or even the seemingly decent “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one”.  For the “many” consists entirely and always of a collection of “ones”, and if some larger group can violate the rights of a smaller group or an individual simply because their “needs” are those of a greater number of people, then there are no rights, and no consistent argument for why anyone’s needs should matter at all.  Even the Golden Rule is far from straightforward in its application.

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A brief post for the end of the week

First off, I’m sorry about not writing a post yesterday, in case anyone was significantly disappointed.  I had a very bad night on Wednesday night, both with respect to pain and with respect to sleep‒the latter having been at least somewhat influenced by the former, of course.  In any case, come yesterday morning, I was too wiped out to be able to get up and go to the office.  In fact, I was still in pretty bad pain all day, even though I stayed at the house, and on through last night.

I’m actually still in pain now, of course.  But at least I’ve been physically and mentally resting as much as I can, so I can make it through today‒though I have been maxing out on my medications pretty much across the board, so hopefully at least things don’t get worse.  I don’t really know what I’ll do if they do.

That, I’m afraid, about as interesting as my life tends to get at this point, and I’m sure it’s quite boring to read.  That’s got to be one of the ultimate insults:  your experiences are unpleasant enough to be worthy of the proverbial curse, “may you live in interesting times”, and yet they’re still not interesting.  I guess that’s sort of ironic, at least.  Irony is perhaps the last, desperate refuge for squeezing some narrative value out of pointless events.

I don’t remember what my posts from earlier this week entailed.  I do recall freaking out not long ago about the changes WordPress had made, without warning and without option.  That was really frustrating, let there be no doubt about that.  Peculiarly, I’ve tended to be much better at handling matters of life and death‒and I’ve dealt with quite a few‒than with changes to my routine and to things to which I’ve become accustomed.

I haven’t been reading much this week, not nearly as much as I usually do.  I even have a couple of new hard copy books‒by which I mean they are physical, printed books instead of e-books, not that they have anything to do with that idiotic old tabloid TV show‒but I haven’t taken one out of its package, and I’ve read about a paragraph of the other.  I also haven’t read any of the several hundred Kindle books I have.  I’m just finding it very difficult to concentrate even on my greatest lifelong pleasure/pastime* (reading).  I certainly haven’t written any fiction.

I did play a bit of guitar and sang on Wednesday morning, for the first time in over a week (I think).  My heart wasn’t really in it, though, and I made a lot of mistakes I don’t usually make.  My singing was okay, though.

At least I am off this weekend.  I wish that meant I would be likely to get a good rest, but at least I’ll get some relative rest.  That’s got to be worth something.  All rest is relative rest in some sense, anyway; one could, in principle, always have rested even better than one really did.  So I certainly don’t wish to  belittle or disrespect the amount of rest I am going to be getting.  I just know that it’s going to be inadequate to make me ready to face the week next week.  And I know from experience that whatever little mental energy I restore will be gone by the end of Monday, let alone the rest of the week.

Obviously, I’ll be able to get through the week literally‒or, well, I expect to be able to, though I suppose I could be wrong‒but that’s merely because it’s a matter of habit.  It can be harder to break a habit than to continue it, even when the habit requires energy.  That just seems to be how these nervous system things are set up.

Okay, I think I’m going to call it good now, for today and for this week.  I don’t have any interesting thoughts at the moment, and so I’m just wasting my readers’ time shuffling through my moans and complaints.  I’m sure you have better things to do.  I hope you have a very good day and a very good weekend.

*I originally wrote the typo “pastome” which I think is pretty great as typos go, especially given the subject.

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I am near the end of my rope with this

Well, here we are again.  It’s Saturday, and as I warned you, I am writing/have written/will have written a blog post.

Is this a good thing?  Is it a bad thing?  I suppose that’s all in the mind of the reader (or the avoider as the case may be).  I don’t think there’s any final, objective assessment of the goodness or badness of me writing (or having written) this blog post.  Everything happens as it must, I suppose.

There’s nothing deep about that.  I’m not saying that everything happens for a reason, as if there is some telos to reality; as far as I can see, there’s no reason (ha!) to suspect that there’s any deep meaning to things other than simply that they are.  The universe does what it does, physics does what it does, and once it’s done, it doesn’t change and could not in any sensible way have been otherwise.  Thus, everything happens as it must, in the sense that it had no choice.

I’ve gone over this ground many times before, I’m sure.  There must be figurative ruts in this thought path deep enough to be able to fit the Loch Ness monster, if you flooded the ruts with water, and if there were a real monster (other than humans) associated with Loch Ness.

Sorry.  I had a very bad sleep last night, even for me, and here I think we can bring an objective measure of badness to bear.  Sleep that doesn’t last and doesn’t bring any refreshment is sleep that’s not doing what is expected of it, and that’s bad.

I don’t think I got a single uninterrupted hour of sleep last night.  That doesn’t mean I slept only less than an hour overall; I slept in fits and starts, as it were, but the total was probably a few hours.  I have been fully awake for about three or so hours already as I write this‒since a little after one in the morning.  So, it’s been quite a poor night, because I certainly didn’t go to sleep very early.

[Aside:  doesn’t the word “manifesto” sound like something a stage magician might say when apparently conjuring something out of midair?  Alternatively, perhaps it could be the name of a breakfast cereal:  Try new Manifest-Os!  Part of this complete breakfast!  Sorry, that thought came to me as I was briefly recalling a video I watched last night.]

Such is my life now, or my “life” as I ought to write, with scare quotes (or should that be “scare” quotes?).  Of course, life is life; it is what it is, like Popeye and the God of Exodus.  My life is no more meaningless than that of the dead “palmetto bug” I flushed down the toilet this morning.

It’s not all that much more meaningful either.  Yes, I write a blog and I go to work, and I’ve written books and songs and such like, and most importantly, I have two children who are awesome*.  But maybe that giant cockroach had done the equivalent in its own millicosm**.  For all I know, its importance to the world of coprophages is unparalleled, and will be remembered for many generations, perhaps forever.

Well…“forever” is quite a heavy lift, as they say.  But maybe its memory will live as long as cockroaches endure, which is likely to be longer than humans endure, unless humans proceed very carefully.  Of course, human records and so on tend to deteriorate over time, being recopied, adjusted, edited, lost and found, reinterpreted through the lens of later ideas that did not exist when original events took place, and gradually just eroded by entropy.

Perhaps palmetto bugs have more relatively durable means of keeping records‒it seems quite unlikely, but it’s not literally impossible.  Even so, they cannot be exempted from the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics.  As Saruman said (in the movie, not the book) to Gandalf about the prospect of anyone standing against Sauron:  “There are none who can.”

Okay, well, I’m veering from the imagined lives and memories of the good and great among cockroaches to quoting the movie version of The Fellowship of the Ring.  My chronic and acute lack of sleep is definitely having its effects.

I truly don’t know whether this post has been worth writing, let alone reading.  I guess that latter part will be for each of you to judge.  But, to make your judgement, you must actually read the post‒if you want your judgement to have any reasonable basis‒and then it’s too late for you to decide it wasn’t worth it, except perhaps as a lamentation.

Well, I hope the rest of your weekend has no further causes of potential rue.  Thank you for reading my blog.

Addendum: I have discovered that WordPress has changed their shit again, and I cannot access the editor I used to use. I don’t know why, and they cannot seem to figure out how to reactivate it, but it is TOO MUCH RIGHT NOW. I don’t know if I am going to keep doing this. They call themselves “Happiness Engineers”, but if so, they’re rather comparable to the engineers that made the Tay Bridge in Scotland. It all comes crashing down. I’m already at my wits’ end this morning, as you can probably tell. This blog is one of the only little bits of satisfaction I have on a regular day, and they’ve screwed that up. Fuck WordPress, fuck this blog, and fuck this whole stupid planet.

*They got the “awe” part from my “aw(e)ful” nature, and the “some” part from their mother’s “fearsome” character.  Thank goodness they didn’t inherit the full “awful” (the full aw?) from me, nor did they inherit the other two half-words and end up just fearful.

**This is a new word I just made up.  I thought “microcosm” isn’t the right term‒a roach is not on a millionth of the scale on which I live.  I don’t think even its mass is that relatively small, but I’ll look it up***.  So, I thought, “A thousandth scale seems better, and we have micro and nano and pico scales, so why not ‘millicosm’?”

***Its mass is nearly that small relative to me, but its other dimensions are nowhere close, and since the “micro” in “microscopic” generally refers to one-dimensional measures, my choice still can apply.

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Let airplanes circle screaming overhead

After my little test yesterday of the “writing a blog post directly on the app related to my WordPress account”, I considered writing this morning’s post directly on that app, just to see how it went.  However, I don’t yet know how to keep track of my word count on that app*, and I don’t feel like doing any trial and error exploration this morning‒not of that, anyway.

So, I’m writing this instead on the usual Google Docs app.  Google Docs has the advantage that when I write this document on my phone, it automatically saves to my Google Drive, and I can then readily open it up on any computer that has an internet connection.  That’s fairly handy.

Of course, it means that I’m putting many eggs in the Google basket, but for these purposes, I’m okay with that.  Also, when it comes to phone apps, Google Docs is so far the best word processor I’ve tried, as far as interface quality goes.  The same cannot be said for the desktop app, but it’s perhaps better than it used to be.

I don’t really like to leave my fiction in Google’s hands if I can help it.  I like having a hard copy, so to speak, of my fiction writing.  So far, except for those which were written with pen and paper for the first draft, all my fiction has been written on MSWord (and even the handwritten ones were completed on Word).  I used to recopy each file onto a thumb drive after a day’s writing, in addition to keeping it saved on my mini lapcom, so I knew I had at least two up to date copies.  Then‒once it became a thing‒it would also auto-save onto my Microsoft OneDrive.

The inception of the latter made me think that maybe I could write everything on the Word app for smartphones.  It auto-updates in a fashion similar to Google Docs.  Alas, it’s not nearly as fluid and seamless as the Google app.  If it were, I would probably use it, although‒the nature of Microsoft accounts being what they are‒I wouldn’t be able just to pull it up on the work computer, since it uses a different (boss-related) Microsoft account.  So, I would have to send a file as an email or something no matter what.

I’m sure there are ways around that‒or, well, there may be ways around that‒but the phone app for Word just is too cumbersome for now.  It’s not worth the effort.

Sorry, I know this is probably dreadfully dull to all of you.  I’m impressed that you’ve read this far.  You may know, I guess, that I don’t plan these posts out ahead of time, I just spew out whatever comes into my head.  If you find it tedious or infuriating, just imagine how I feel!  You, at least, could always navigate to another website.  What am I supposed to do?  I can’t even get away from myself by sleeping most of the time.

Anyway…

I’ve been doing a little bit of rereading of some of my fiction recently.  For instance, yesterday afternoon, while waiting for my train, I finished rereading The Chasm and the Collision.

I still like it.

I have a hard time feeling good about things that I do (and am) but I think CatC is a good story, and I think its world is interesting and that the characters are good and so on.  I think there are probably a lot of people out there who would like it.  And, like I mentioned sometime earlier this week, it would be really cool to encounter fanfiction based on it.

Alas, I am not good at self-promotion.  I don’t like myself, so it’s hard to find the will to promote my work, even when I like the work.  It’s quite dispiriting, and the fact that I can only hold myself, and my nature, responsible for it doesn’t make it any easier to swallow that bitter pill.

Now I’m rereading Unanimity: Book 2, though I’m not sure if I’ll read it all the way through to the end.  That’s another book that I think is good, though it is long, and some of the characters aren’t as likeable as in CatC.  Of course, they’re not supposed to be likeable, when they’re not.  It is a horror story, after all, and in many ways it is one of my two most horrifying stories.  Weirdly enough, those two most horrifying stories are my longest and my shortest works.

On the other hand, my sister recently pointed out to me that‒ironically‒my most lighthearted story is The Vagabond, which is a sort of old-school, gonzo horror story.  She’s right.  I guess that lightness shows that I wrote it (originally) while in college and med school.

The heck with it, all of my stories are good.  Some are better than others, and different people would surely prefer different ones, but I think they’re all pretty good.  Even the stuff only published here like Extra Body (which is complete) and Outlaw’s Mind and The Dark Fairy and the Desperado (those two are not complete) are good.  So read them.  Read all of my stories.  Tell your friends and families and even your enemies and strangers about them.  Spread the word far and wide across the land.  “Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone, prevent the dog from barking with a juice bone”.  Okay, well, maybe not that last bit, but do get the word out.

Thanks.

Okay, well, tomorrow I work, so expect a blog post tomorrow, whether you like it or not.  I may do another test post this afternoon if I get a bit bored, mainly to see if I can sort out the word count stuff on the app for WordPress.  If so, I’ll post it.  If not, of course, I won’t.  It’s funny how that works, isn’t it?

I hope you have a good day.

*I need to keep track of that because I can sometimes get quite carried away.

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O Caesar, these blogs are beyond all use and I do fear them

Hello and good morning.

I thought of a good opening sentence and line for this blog post today, but unfortunately, I thought of it at around one in the morning, during one of my earlier mid-night* awakenings.  These happen more or less every night, at various times.  Sometimes I will start** awake thinking I’ve badly overslept, only to find that I’ve been asleep for less than an hour.  Sometimes the opposite sort of thing happens.  Anyway, one of the hallmarks of things I think during those early midnight awakenings is that I don’t remember their specifics very well.

In other words, I don’t recall what the opening sentence that came to me was.  Given the nature of nocturnal, half-awake thoughts, it might well have been an idiotic starting sentence.  It might have been utter gibberish.  I might not even really have thought of any sentence at all; I might just have had one of those curious activations of certain brain modules without the usual stimulus (such as thinking of an actual sentence) that engenders them.

I suppose it’s somewhat similar to déjà vu, that free-floating feeling of familiarity and recollection that isn’t actually triggered by something familiar but by stochastic activation of areas of the brain that register familiarity and memory.

So, I might have had the feeling that I had just thought of a good sentence to start this blog post, but it was triggered by something that wasn’t related to any actual sentence.  Like Scrooge said to Marley’s ghost, “There’s more of gravy than grave about you.”

The quote was something close to that, anyway; I don’t feel like going to look it up and check.

All this highlights how important it can be not to trust your feelings.  As Radiohead sang, “Just ‘cause you feel it doesn’t mean it’s there.”

Please don’t take this to mean that I think you should repress or ignore your feelings.  Feelings exist for good, sound, biological reasons.  But while they can be good sources of motivation‒indeed, one might argue that any motivation is a feeling‒emotions are unreliable guides for action, especially in the complex modern human world.  It is still certainly worth attending to them, however, rather than merely ignoring them or trying to push them down.

I think fear, in particular, is usually worth noticing and inspecting.  Just because you feel afraid doesn’t necessarily mean that there is some threat or danger nearby, even a merely social one, but nature has clearly arrived at the provisional conclusion that it’s better to be afraid of something that turns out not to be a danger than not to feel afraid of something that is a danger.

Of course, ideally, one would like to feel fear only for real dangers, and only to the degree that they are dangerous, and otherwise to feel fine.  It would similarly be nice to desire to eat and to enjoy eating only those foods that will be most healthy for us at that moment, at that time, and to desire only just as much as we need, and not to want those foods that will be bad for us in the short and long term.

Such perfect accuracy is not even close to being possible, not even for deliberately designed systems, let alone for evolved biological organisms.  And when survival and reproduction are the means by which genes go on into the future, it’s far better (up to a point) to make a type 1 error‒sensing or fearing nonexistent danger‒than a type 2 error‒not recognizing actual danger.

Modern society has discouraged us somewhat from listening to such fears, sometimes out of a desire to be polite, but again, though one should not take such fear, or other emotions, at simple face value, one should listen to them.  One should inspect the feeling and one’s surroundings and circumstances and try to discern why one feels that fear.

If it becomes clear after honest internal and external inquiry that it is a baseless anxiety, a fear without focus, then one can try to shrug to oneself and simply go about one’s business as best one can.  But if there’s a colorable explanation for your fear‒such as a possibly dangerous or certainly unknown person nearby during moments of potential vulnerability‒one should pay attention and act appropriately.  This is especially true for women (and girls), but it applies to men as well.  Gavin deBecker wrote a powerful book about this subject called The Gift of Fear, and I recommend it (this is one of those rare instances in which Oprah and I agree on a book recommendation).

Fear is not the mind killer.  Fear can be the mind sharpener.  The only people who don’t feel fear are fools and corpses.

On the other hand, to go back to the earlier point, emotions are still very blunt and fuzzy instruments, so don’t just let them push you around willy-nilly.  Just because you feel angry, for instance, doesn’t mean that anyone actually did anything to deserve it.  You might be hypoglycemic, you might have had too much caffeine, you might be in pain and/or have had chronic bad sleep***, you might be feeling residual emotional upheaval from something you saw on the news.

The feelings you have can be misleading, but they are not merely random nor are they completely irrelevant or unreliable.  Some of them are positive in and of themselves:  Joy and love are certainly worth not avoiding, for instance.

And middle-of-the-night feelings related to the nebulous impression that one has thought of a good start for a blog post can sometimes be without substance entirely.  And yet, even then, they might sometimes lead more or less directly to a blog post.

TTFN

*As opposed to “midnight”, which would usually mean 12 am.

**I.e., “a sudden, jerky motion, usually a response to some alarming and/or unexpected stimulus” not as in “begin”.

***This can happen, or so I’m led to understand.

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Wotan can KEEP this day as far as I’m concerned

Okay, first off, to begin with‒or should it be “with which to begin”?‒it is the 6th of May today (a Wednesday, though that fact is not terribly relevant) and to continue the Star Wars related references, I will note that today is the date of the Revenge of the Sixth.

Get it?  It’s a bit tortured, I’m afraid.  I don’t think anyone would have come up with the notion had it not been for “May the 4th be with you”.  That, at least, is a more straightforward play on words, and is specific to this month and that day.  “Revenge of the Sixth” doesn’t specify the month; one could, in principle, use that line on any 6th of a month.  But one would not, because this day is “celebrated” only in reaction to Star Wars Day on May 4th.

It’s sort of funny and fun, but it reduces the Sith to merely a perverse notion, existing only in reaction to the Jedi, like a whole order of Force users acting out the parts of rebellious teenagers.

Of course, probably that was sort of what happened in George Lucas’s mind when he came up with the Sith:  They were the anti-Jedi, a parity-violating, distorted reflection of the “good guys”.  But, of course, a whole philosophical movement that sprang up only as an enemy to another is intellectually and narratively vacuous.

It’s somewhat reminiscent of the moronic religious people who seem to think that if one does not believe in God, then one must worship Satan.  It can be very hard for some people to get around the whole “if you’re not with me, then you’re my enemy” notion.  Only in this case it’s not even a philosophical enmity, but is merely a reactive enmity.  Also, it doesn’t take too much thought to realize that such a situation would seem to imply that whichever of the two sides came first would be assumed to be the “good guys”.

But one doesn’t look at any random patch of spacetime and think, “if there’s no electron in this spot then there must instead be a positron”, or vice versa.  As a matter of physics and of logic, this is a pretty glaring error.  Just as indifference, not hate, is the complete absence of love, the default state of reality is not the opposite of some particular presence, it is simple absence.  In physics, that means all the quantum fields being in their vacuum states, with minimal energy (it’s not zero because of the uncertainty principle).

In the Star Wars extended universe, the Sith have a background that is separate in origin (I think) from the Jedi.  I think they began as a race of Force users.  I could be wrong about this; I’m not all that much of a Star Wars nerd.

Ask me questions about the backgrounds of things in the universe(s) of my stories and I could share some serious lore with you.  But no one is going to ask me about those because essentially no one has read them.

Boy, it would be cool to have someone write fanfiction based in the worlds of my stories.  I remember reading a lot of Harry Potter fanfiction while waiting for the next book(s) to come out, back in the day.  Some of it was bad, of course, but not much of it, and some of it was really quite good.  People who love to read and feel the urge to write an homage out of love for a work and its characters tend to be at least somewhat okay at it.

Some of it was downright brilliant.

Of course, humans being what humans are, some of it was smut.  There’s nothing really wrong with that, when you get right down to it.  Members (ha ha) of a sexually reproducing species are going to tend to find sex…engaging, to say the least.  Every human alive (and that has ever lived) comes from a long, unbroken line of ancestors who had sex at least once*.  That includes your parents and your grandparents, by the way.  You’re welcome.

In a species like humans, those who are more into sex and more driven toward it and obsessed with it are, ceteris paribus, going to have more offspring.  It won’t take very many generations for any genes that make one less interested in sex to fade out of the gene pool‒again, and very importantly, ceteris paribus.

All other things are essentially never equal, of course, and there are complex tradeoffs in all such behavioral tendencies, but that’s a can of bees I really don’t have the energy to open right at this moment.

I’m in a truly terrible amount of pain this morning, I’m afraid, continuing from last night and yesterday and so on. and it’s making it a bit hard to write, though that somehow doesn’t keep me from running off at the figurative mouth.

I think it would be harder for me not to write right now, though.  I don’t know for sure.  I haven’t tried.

Even thinking about not writing at all makes me feel squirmy and cringey and quite strange.  It’s not quite as bad not to play or listen to or sing any music‒which I haven’t done for weeks now, alas‒but that does also feel bad.

But I think if I were to stop writing, and at least every week sharing my writing‒particularly now that I don’t have access to Facebook or Threads‒I would pretty rapidly feel that I didn’t even exist.

I have no real life here from day to day.  There is no joy, there is only (attempted) distraction.  Other than my episodic interactions with my youngest child (which are distinctly good and real and joyful to me, a real oasis in the desert) everything in my life from day to day feels less real than the events of the most banal video game.

Yesterday, I started searching eBay and other online sources for used ECT devices (they are out there) and looking up whether one can legally buy insulin over the counter (one can, to some degree), or what medications are prone to produce seizures.  The idea was to see if it would be possible for me to induce a seizure in myself and hopefully treat my depression.

I know it can’t help my underlying ASD, but ECT and other kinds of induced seizures have consistently been shown to work against even highly treatment-resistant depression.  I have tried every class of (legal) medication and many different types of therapy for my dysthymia/depression.  I think most regular readers can tell just how well that arsenal has worked.

Of course, pain complicates everything.  It taints everything, it erodes everything, it corrodes everything, it corrupts and desecrates everything.  I really want it to stop.  Sometimes I want it to stop at nearly any cost (at least to me, though I can’t in good conscience invoke avoidable costs upon other people).

If I thought inducing seizures would help my pain, I would probably just do it.  I know how to make such things happen‒the research I did yesterday was just to indulge myself so I could more realistically fantasize about the outcome if it were to work.  It was one of those distractions I mentioned above.  But having seizures would probably make my physical pain worse, since seizures are not easy on the body.

They could also kill me, but that would be far from the worst outcome.

Death‒not necessarily seizure-related death, but death generally‒will probably be the only thing that relieves my pain.  Well, “relieves” is not really the right word.  But could death be what ends it?  Yes.  And thankfully, no one is dependent upon me or is very close to me or is really used to having me around, so the collateral damage would be minimal, no matter what all the simple-minded (but well-meaning) Instagram videos try to tell you.

Maybe I’m just as well off not to be able to go to that site anymore.  Everything there would be irritating.  Though, that’s just like more or less everything else in the world, to be fair.  Right now, I could almost wish for everything else in reality to cease to exist so I could just enjoy some silence.  But that would be unkind and terribly presumptuous.  It would be better to go back to the nidus of the pain and pluck that out.

Have a good day.

Though I suspect Mr. Smear would disagree with me: