It’s Friday, and I am not expecting to work tomorrow.  In fact, I think if I were asked to work tomorrow, I would have to refuse.  If someone tried to coerce me with a gun to my head, I would probably just tell them to pull the effing trigger.  I might just try to fight them, frankly, and force their hand, because if someone threatened me with deadly force, I wouldn’t feel any real compunction about doing my best to kill them, instead.

My point is, I’m not going to work tomorrow unless lives depend on it (which seem quite unlikely).  Even then, it would very much matter whose life was in the balance; there’s a moral triage that would need to be done.  There are people whom I would not be willing to put myself to any significant effort to save, even if I were the only one able to do it.

That’s not true of most people, though.  Despite my talk in yesterday’s post, I wouldn’t be inclined to let any of the vast majority of people on the planet die just so I could avoid going to work.  But there are people about whom I would consider it a lovely opportunity, if it happened.

This is all so stupid, I’m sorry.  It’s just an absurd notion, though I know that sometimes one can imagine physically unlikely situations in order to clarify moral concerns, such as in the truly blunt thought instrument of the “trolley problem”.  I think that scenario is so absurd and contrived that I have a hard time taking it seriously when I hear or read it.

I mean, how did I come to be put in charge of this trolley lever?  I certainly didn’t ask for the responsibility.  And then there’s the whole “fat person” variation, where you can push a heavy person onto the track to stop the trolley, saving the 5 people down the way.  But if a trolley can be stopped by one person, however large, then how could it have the power to kill all 5 people working down the track?  Is that one person literally larger than five track workers?  And are the track workers really so oblivious that they can’t see or hear the trolley coming?  It can’t be going very fast, since kinetic energy scales as velocity squared, and if it was going very fast, the heavy person wouldn’t stop it.

Also, what about the people in the trolley?  What about the driver?  Are they all just oblivious?  If I can see the problem, why can’t the driver?  If the heavy person is pushed and stops the trolley, will it derail?  How many injuries and potential deaths will be caused by the sudden, catastrophic stopping of the trolley?  And where are those responsible for the scheduling and routing of these trolleys?  And where is the foreman (foreperson?*) responsible for scheduling the track work?  Why am I being thrust into a situation where I need to fix their failures?

More importantly, how did I get sidetracked (ha ha) onto the stupid trolley problem?  What is my idiot mind doing today, anyway?

I’m so beat right now.  We’re going to be moving offices within this next week, and I hate the process of moving and the need to adapt to a new place.  It’s so irritating and stressful.  It would be one thing if there were compensations of some kind‒not monetary, but perhaps an improvement in my commute.  Unfortunately, the new location is barely different from the old, just a block or two away.

I also have accumulated a fair amount of stuff in the office.  I’m tempted just to throw all of it away, including my guitar, my science books, my drawing supplies, all of it.  It’s all just going to lie fallow, and will simply act as a constant reminder and reproach about all my various failed endeavors, which are legion.

Yesterday morning, I forced myself to pick up and strum around on my guitar at the office and sing.  I literally had to force myself.  I got bored after about three or four songs, though it was nice that I didn’t need to look at the chord sheets or anything for most of them.  The tuning didn’t require much adjustment, which points toward how consistent the temperature in the office is.

And here I go again, just meandering in my thoughts, not giving any kind of consistent output.  I’m not sure if any of this even makes sense.  It’s almost like free association, as in the old Freudian style psychoanalysis.  I suppose this blog provides a slightly pertinent data point about just how useless that endeavor was, since doing this has clearly not helped my mental health (well, maybe I would be even worse otherwise, but at the very least it has failed to get me into a healthy mental state).

Okay, that’s enough idiocy.  I’m past 800 words, and I doubt more than one or two people will really read this whole thing (you have my admiration, oh intrepid souls).  I hope you all have a good day, a good weekend, and as good an every day after that as you can.

*I raise the question because I’m led to understand that, in its origins and original use, the word “man” was sex/gender neutral, and just referred to a person.  I may be wrong about that, though.