seasons

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“Is this the region, this the soil, the clime…?”

First of all, Happy Birthday to Bilbo and Frodo Baggins, who shared the same birthday (albeit 78 years apart) in Tolkien’s world, September 22nd by Shire reckoning.  I’m not absolutely sure that Shire reckoning would align its dates exactly with ours, but it’s not really necessary to nitpick.

Also, it is the day of the Autumnal Equinox, the beginning of Fall/Autumn in the northern hemisphere (and Spring in the southern hemisphere, but I don’t think they call it the Vernal Equinox down there).   From now until the next equinox, the nights will be longer than the days (in the northern hemisphere‒in the southern hemisphere the days will dominate).

It’s also the beginning of a new work week, which ought to be auspicious given that it’s the beginning of Autumn, but honestly, there’s nothing to which to look forward, whether in the short term or the long term.  It’s just the persistence of pointlessness and futility, like every day has been for the last 12 years (at least!) for me.

I’m writing this on my smartphone today, by the way.  This was not a surprise or a mistake this time; I deliberately did not bring the lapcom back to the house with me on Friday.  I didn’t have the energy.

It was a sloppy, crappy weekend, weather-wise.  It felt very much like a tropical rainforest down by me, and not in a good way.  It’s been a pretty lame hurricane season around here so far this year, and hitherto we’ve had much less rain than usual, but it seems to be trying to make up for lost time now these past few weeks.

Perhaps climate change has led to a slight shifting of the weather patterns, making the rainy season come slightly later here than usual.  In any case, it’s muggy and hot and wet and fairly disgusting in Florida…and that’s just the politics!!

Ha ha.  I’m kidding.  It’s not just the politics that’s disgusting here.  Still, if it weren’t for the fact that my youngest was born here in Florida, I would be inclined to say that, overall, Florida has been a worse than worthless place for me to live, and I wish I had never moved here.

For all I know, being in Florida could have been the trigger for my chronic pain problem.  I doubt it‒it was a physical, structural, fairly severe injury in my L5-S1 disk that started the problem, and it’s not too easy to conjure a Florida-specific explanation for that.  But I’m nearly certain that I wouldn’t have foolishly gotten into the medical practice that led to my legal troubles in New York, say.  They take better care of both patients and doctors in New York.  Indeed, in most states‒certainly in the ones in which I’ve lived‒they seem to have better healthcare systems than Florida.

That’s not a very high bar to clear, of course.  Just look at the corrupt politics and the sorts of disgusting worms we’ve sent to the Senate and the House, and to the Governor’s mansion, for that matter.  I don’t know why Florida is so fertile for self-serving shit-heads on a scale that dwarfs even the overrepresented shit-heads involved in politics in most states.  But it surely must be telling that Donna Tramp’s main house is down here.  Florida is America’s syphilitic penis, and the Palm Beach Cheeto is a genital wart on its upper surface.  If only Florida had embraced the HPV vaccine early enough…

I came to Florida because my then-wife was tired of living in cold climates.  She is uniquely susceptible to the cold for unclear reasons; her body does not seem to hold in heat but instead radiates it away.  She always kept the thermostat set at something like 78 Fahrenheit, even in the summer.

I wish she’d wanted to go to Arizona or something along those lines, but I guess politically it has its issues, too.  New Mexico might’ve been better‒the Santa Fe Institute is there, at least.  It might have been nice to be able to be near that, and to perhaps even take in a lecture or two from time to time.  Florida is certainly not a hotspot for cutting edge science and philosophy, despite Cape Canaveral.  We barely even have a space program anymore; we need Russia or Elon Musk to get us into low Earth orbit nowadays.  Look how the mighty have fallen.

Once I got done with work release, I could’ve lived with my parents and my sister; my father invited me to stay when I went to visit upon my release, making it clear he was happy with me working on my writing there.  I elected to come back here, though, because my children live here, and I was hoping to be able to see them on the regular and be a real part of their life again before I had missed the rest of their childhoods entirely.

Boy was that a miscalculation.  What a joke.  I might as well have hoped to capture a wild panther with my bare hands.

Well, one cannot change what has already happened.  And one cannot change what will happen or what is happening once it is happening.  One can only try to surf on the chaos as best one can.  But it loses its charm, that chaos surfing, over time, at least when there are very few good moments involved, and no positive outcomes to which to look forward, and nothing productive or creative to do anymore that grabs one’s attention.

I can’t seem to motivate myself to write fiction or to write music or to draw or to work on honing my physics and math skills and knowledge.  Being in chronic pain and having ASD level 2, but without actually having any social or other supports of significance*, really takes the wind out of one’s sails, more so every day.  I need something‒a break, an escape, rescue, relief, or just for everything to be over.

What else is new, right?  And on top of everything else, my train is running late.  It’s par for the crookedly run course down here.

It doesn’t matter, I guess.  Nothing does.  So, you might as well have a good first day of Autumn.  And, of course, enjoy celebrating Bilbo’s and Frodo’s birthdays.

*I don’t mean to be dismissive about my sister or my youngest child; they are wonderful and I love them and appreciate my connection with them.  But I am referring to regular, daily, local, literal support, of which I have none.  I don’t even have any friends (other than “work friends”) within a thousand miles.

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But thy eternal summer shall not fade nor lose possession of that fair thou blogest

Greetings, good morning, hello, and redundant salutations!  I hereby wish a happy Valentine’s Day to those who have cause to celebrate it.  It’s Thursday morning and time for another of my weekly blog posts.  We’re almost two-thirds of the way through winter—a term that has only limited meaning here in south Florida—and the approach of springtime is becoming at least a plausible hypothesis.

It’s been a productive week, all things considered, at least for me; I can’t speak for anyone else.  On Tuesday morning, I finished the first draft of my latest short story and found I had some time and energy left.  I pulled out the half-finished draft of In the Shade, thinking that I would write on it a bit, but then it occurred to me that it and the story I’d just completed were very much in the same sub-genre.  I didn’t want to work on them so close together, lest I bore my readers and—even worse—myself.  Yet another story I considered writing also was in a vaguely similar vein, though a bit more divergent.  Not to be discouraged, I activated my trusty memo app and read through my jotted-down story ideas.  There I found one that would make for a nice change of pace.  I immediately began writing it, and by yesterday had already produced six pages.

When writing first paragraph of this post, regarding the time of year and today’s holiday, it occurred to me to wonder just why we have a “romantic” celebration during what is, in much of the northern hemisphere, a bitter time of year.  Of course, it’s a recently-invented holiday, not one that’s been celebrated back into antiquity in one form or another, as so many of the major holidays have been.  Perhaps that’s enough of an explanation.  There’s a long, barren stretch of time between New Years and the next big holiday cycle at Easter/Passover, after all (I’m not going to count Saint Patrick’s Day).  And, of course, holidays have great commercial value, with seasonal cards and items always dominating the displays of even pharmacies, let alone malls and department stores.

Still, that doesn’t seem quite adequate to explain the day, and especially not the specific type of holiday that it is.  The middle of February seems to me an odd time to celebrate romance.  I suppose one might say that, in ancestral times, perhaps this was a month in which people tended even more so than usual to huddle together at night for warmth, with a consequent increase in expressions of (ahem) physical affection.  But if there is a historical surge in birth rates in roughly the month of November, such as one might expect if that scenario is right, then I haven’t heard of it.

Perhaps I simply don’t know enough about the history of Valentine’s Day even to hazard a guess.  Isn’t it officially called “Saint Valentine’s Day”?  Was Saint Valentine even a real, formally canonized person, or is he one of those fictional saints one encounters from time to time, like Saint Kitt and Saint Gandalf?

In the era of Google and Wikipedia, I could readily find the answers to these questions if I so chose, and the fact that I haven’t seems to show that I’m not troubled enough to seek them out.  Perhaps at some point I will be.  For now, though, since my resources of time, memory, and energy are finite, I must be choosy about where I spend them.

The fact that I’m halfway through February (as are all of you, at least at the time of this writing) means that I’m halfway through the minimum duration of my post-draft hiatus on Unanimity.  I’ve had little trouble resisting its call so far, mainly because I’ve been writing new stuff.  In fact, I may wait until after I’ve finished and edited and published both of my current short stories before getting back to Unanimity…but, then again, I doubt it.  For commercial/marketing reasons, I think at most I’ll complete the editing and publishing of one of those two stories, then allow a bit of a lag between it and the publication of the next, so there isn’t too big a gap between the release times of any two new works.  Whether or not this matters is difficult for me to tell, but at least it keeps me occupied.

Hmm…this week’s post feels slightly disjointed and unfocused, doesn’t it?  That’s okay, though; they can’t all be gems of clarity and unity.  Sometimes a blog post is just a chance to get out random thoughts and to share a few minor tidbits of news with people who might be interested.  I’m unable to be objective about whether or not a particular form of post is better or worse than others, and opinions and judgments will probably vary from person to person, anyway.  You’re welcome to share your thoughts with me.  In the meantime, stay warm and, if you’re one of those contemptibly lucky people who have good reason to celebrate Valentine’s Day, enjoy it.

TTFN