New Year

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The year is dead; long live the year. Whatever.

It’s Tuesday, December 31st, 2024‒New Year’s Eve.  Of course, as I’ve written before, every day is the first day of a new year, in a trivial but nevertheless true way.  The day to mark the new year is an arbitrary choice.  We could have had the new year begin “officially” on the first of any month.  Indeed, we could have started it in the middle of a month, or perhaps on the winter solstice.  Or we could have 12 months of thirty days, leaving a 5 day extra period which we could use as a long holiday and an official new year celebration, with an extra day every leap year.  We could do this around the winter solstice, or even around the summer one, like hobbits do.

Oh, well.  It’s not as though people are going to collectively change, any more than people are going to go back to really celebrating holidays:  with most workplaces closed except for hospitals and police and fire stations and the like, with people spending the holidays with loved ones.  Once one business stays open on those extra days, competitors (direct and indirect ones) will stay open, too, or suffer a disadvantage that may lead them to be more likely to go out of business.

The world of commerce is red in tooth, claw, and debt, so after a while, only those who push every edge they can without getting more negative marginal returns, will dominate.  And that will become the norm.

No one made it happen, no one planned it.  Everyone’s caught in the currents of chaos, but those able to use the flows to their advantage‒chaos surfing, as I call it‒will thrive, at least temporarily, even if they don’t realize why they are succeeding, which they usually don’t.

It’s similar with the workers:  once some small subgroup is willing to eschew holidays and to work longer hours, they will have advantages over other workers, at least as long as working more proves advantageous to them and their workplaces.  Soon, the marketplace of workers will skew toward people being willing to work longer hours in worse conditions, as long as it provides a relative, local advantage.  Those who cannot match this will fall by the wayside, perhaps becoming homeless, getting addicted to drugs, going to jail or prison‒self-destructing directly or indirectly.

This is not a conspiracy by employers or governments or anyone else.  No one is that clever, and they are all beset by their own local pressures and competitions.  Why else would the very wealthy do anything but sit back and eat ice cream until they die (figuratively speaking)?  They are no more happy or satisfied than most other people.

It’s analogous to the situation with trees and forests.  It takes a lot of effort and resources for trees to grow tall.  Why do they do it?  Because other trees do it, and any tree that doesn’t want the sun blocked out had better do the same*.  If all trees could agree somehow to stay short, they could all thrive and get adequate sunlight and nutrition and water and air at a fraction of their usual height and resource usage.

But once one tree grows taller, the arms race begins.  Such is the way of economies and ecologies.  They cannot be planned, they cannot even really be controlled or constrained (at least not without disastrous results).  At best, they can be “herded”.  That’s a metaphorical herding, by the way‒a careful nudging of things to keep the eddies in the phase space currents from driving the system toward deteriorating returns, along whatever axes one may use to measure such things.

None of this happens due to some malicious plot, and it is not generally evil.  This competitive jockeying and self-abnegation while seeking seemingly locally selfish ends, or at least responding to local pressures (internal and external), has led to all the many scientific and technological advances that we have, from improved farming techniques that allow the world to sustain billions, to better healthcare, better sanitation, better transportation, greater safety from the elements, greater understanding of the universe at large…and the sometimes-cesspool that is the world of electronics, computers, smartphones, tablets, and digital interactions.

No, this shit all just happens “on its own”.  Natural selection works in places other than biology, and it is a ruthless, blind, and amoral driver, here in the region of spacetime where increasing entropy is in the stage where that increase leads to local complexity rather than uniformity.

Whether or not the local manifestation of it will last long remains to be seen.  There are many ways for any particular state of a system to be obliterated, or for that system itself to decay and disintegrate.  It requires constant effort to maintain anything like homeostasis and growth, but not just any effort will do.  One must constantly reassess, course correct, look for mistakes from which to learn, adapt to all the new, varying states of the system, or perish.

I don’t know about you, but I’m very unsure that it’s worth it.  In all honesty, I did not want to see 2025, and really, I still don’t.  I want to find the courage just to check out.  There’s very little for me here, and of all the things in the world that frustrate and irritate and disgust me, I’m the worst.

I guess if I write a blog post on Thursday, you’ll know that I am still around to see 2025.  If so, please don’t congratulate me.  It is not a good thing; it’s yet another failure in my long string of them.

Anyway, I hope you all have a Happy New Year.

*I’m anthropomorphizing here, but don’t get confused.  The individual trees don’t get to choose, evolution just favors the tall in this situation, ceteris paribus.

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I’ll have my blogs ta’en out and buttered, and give them to a dog for a new-year’s gift

Hello, good morning, and welcome to the last Thursday of 2018.

I had three consecutive days off work this week, the longest such stretch in quite some time that didn’t involve sad family events.  To the surprise of no one, I did not get any writing done over those three days—no new work on Unanimity, and no editing on Penal Colony.

Because of this, there’s not much for me to say today.  I have, except on the three aforementioned days off, continued to make good progress.  In Unanimity, I’ve reached the final confrontation that will resolve the outcome of the book, but its development involves some flashbacks, for reasons of dramatic tension.  I think this will work well, but in the end, readers must judge for themselves.  In any case, there’s a great deal of work to do before the book will be ready for anyone but me to read and judge.  Such is the way of things.

I hope you all have a wonderful time on New Year’s Eve and a relatively painless recovery on New Year’s Day.  When next we meet here, it will be 2019.  I have a silly, semi-fun dread of the coming year, since in much of the Stephen King multiverse, the number 19 is one of terrible omen.  Of course, I don’t actually subscribe to any form of numerology, unless one counts my true and deep love (occasionally unrequited) of mathematics itself.  It’s just fun to imagine what might happen if that number really were a harbinger of evil.

The fact that I find such thoughts fun is probably why I tend to sneak “horror” into most of what I write, intentionally or not.

I first clearly recognized this about myself in high school, when I wrote my first full-length novel, Ends of the Maelstrom.  This was a sort of cross-over fantasy/sci-fi adventure novel involving multiple universes, in which beings of godlike power used magic and/or ultra-high technology to battle for the fate of our universe and ultimately all the other realms of the multiverse.  The story’s ultimate villain, the Talberod, had obliterated whole galaxies to demonstrate his power, but he nevertheless had a code of honor and a strong moral sense.  In contrast, the hero was more than willing to lie and cheat to win.  These are far from new twists, of course, but I felt pretty proud of them as a high school student.  Alas, that novel is lost to time and bitter circumstance, though one day I may seek to recreate it.

In any case, during the larger course of that story, I inserted little interludes detailing smaller-scale levels of the invasion, including a series in which a demonic being called Chrayd, for personal enjoyment, preys on numerous random humans from our world (before finally being killed by a lucky and courageous one of those same humans, whom Chrayd “salutes” even as he dies).  These latter sequences amounted to mini horror stories in the middle of my larger epic, though I only recognized them as such after the fact.  They were also the parts of the novel that were the most fun to write and—I suspect—were the most gripping to read.

Similarly, on those rare occasions when I’ve written Harry Potter fanfics, they’ve tended to turn out in rather…well, let’s just say that Harry has done some very dark, bad things.

We use the tools that we are given.

And that’s about it for now.  As usual, it’s more than I expected to write.  This is another gift or tool given to me.  I can’t really claim any credit for it, and it’s occasionally frustrating (for readers even more than for me, I suspect), but whataya gonna do?

Again, I wish you the best of all possible new years.  19 may be a number of ill-omen in the Stephen King universe, and it is certainly a prime number…but 2019 is not prime.  Let us then therefore give honor to the beloved goddess of irony by turning 2019 into a prime year in every other sense.

TTFN