writing

by

“You’d say I’m puttin’ you on, but it’s no joke…”

I’m writing this on my smartphone today, a more or less deliberate choice, as much as anything we do is truly deliberate.  I was already very tired when I left work yesterday, but now it’s even worse, because I got very little sleep last night, even for me.  I’m quite worn out in general.  By rights, I ought to stay at the house, but Wednesday is payroll day, and anyway, I’m more comfortable at the office than I am in my room.  Or, at least, being at work is as good as my days get.

I may or may not go to work tomorrow depending on how I’m feeling.  Even if I go to work, I may or may not write a blog post.  I honestly barely have the gumption to write what I’m writing now.

I haven’t written any of the “Earth” song lyrics for my weekly (or whatever) song yet*, but I have been thinking about them and what approach to take.  I considered doing something that references the idea from Ann Rice’s vampire stories of going into the Earth to rest or escape, but I did a quick Google search and there are already several songs with the title Into the Earth (though I have no idea what the songs are about) which I guess isn’t surprising.  They were very popular books, and the notion of a vampire going “into the Earth” is evocative.

So, I’ll take another approach, perhaps discussing coming up from the Earth or some such.  We’ll see.  I guess I don’t really have to take it too seriously.

Boy, am I tired.  I was already worn out and stressed and tense at the end of the workday yesterday (there were reasons, but I won’t go into them), and now I feel worse.  A person really ought to feel better after having spent the evening and night in their private place in the house, but it’s not so with me in this case.  Honestly, I considered sending for an Uber and just going into the office at about 1:30 in the morning or so, but I decided that would seem too weird; I think the boss gets notifications when the alarm is turned on and when it is turned off.

I’ve been thinking back to when I had my kidney stone‒it’s only been two months‒and about how I sometimes wish it had been some more deadly affliction, or perhaps even that when they did the CT scan they might have found some lesion somewhere in my abdomen or pelvis that indicated some untreatable illness‒cancer or something similar.  Then everything would be taken out of my hands.  I could just find some doctor from whom I could get palliative care when necessary and then wait for the end.  I mean, in a way, that’s what I’m doing anyway‒it’s what everyone is doing‒but it’s vague and indefinite right now.

I’m sorry to be so morbid.  I know most people don’t like to think about death and dying, let alone to “speak” about it.  Then again, the Tao te Ching counsels us to embrace death with our whole being.  It’s pretty clear that it doesn’t mean that we should worship or love death, à la “we love death more than you love life”.  Quite the contrary.  I read it as saying that you will only be able to enjoy life fully and wisely if you internalize and accept the fact that you are going to die someday.

Once again, we find that Tyler Durden captured at least some ancient wisdom in his “teachings”.

Anyway, my own fanciful yearning for a terminal diagnosis has nothing to do with a healthy and wise attitude toward my own mortality.  No, my yearning is born of simple mental exhaustion, of chronic pain for more than two decades, of chronic insomnia for even longer than that, and of depression/dysthymia with concurrent “anxiety” that is only superseded in length by my recently diagnosed neurodevelopmental disorder, which is congenital.

Unfortunately, I see no evidence that any of these things is likely to go away‒especially the latter one‒and I’m just puttering around here in south Florida, accompanied by various arthropods and reptiles and fungi and humidity and rain and heat and one of the most idiotic state governments the nation has ever seen.  And I am just so very tired.

So, anyway, that’s that.  If I write a post tomorrow, it will be here, of course.  If I don’t, it won’t.  If that’s not clear to anyone, please let me know in the comments (I’m kidding, I know you all understand, though you should certainly feel free to leave comments).  If I make any progress on writing a song, I’ll let you know about that when it happens.

I hope you have a good day.

*Addendum:  Between rounds of editing this post, I came up with a possible first verse of a song.  I won’t share it right now, but it’s a start.

by

The pointless but occasionally enjoyable music of this sphere.

Well, it’s Tuesday now, as you will know if you’re reading this on the day of its release.  You might not be sure if you read it later.  As far as I know, it’s not possible for you to read this earlier than I write it, but if you have that capacity, presumably you don’t need me to tell you what day and time it is when I’m writing it.  Presumably, you have quite a handle on times that things happen if you have that kind of ability—though I suppose that if you travel through time a lot, you might eventually have a hard time keeping track of what the local labels are on dates and times.

Sorry, that’s a bit of frivolous nonsense, which I hope doesn’t offend any non-time-travelers out there.  I’m here again, writing a blog post on my way to work and wondering what the point is to anything.  Not that I honestly suspect that there is a point to anything, really.  As far as I can see, there is no point to anything, and there is also no point to everything.  Everything just happens, and there’s no more to any of it than that, as far as I can see, and as far as anyone knows.

There are people who will tell you otherwise.  Lots of people claim to have found or been taught the meaning of life or of existence and whatnot, but either they are trying to manipulate you and/or sell you something, or they are sincere but mistaken.  In any case, they are not correct.  They do not know the meaning of life.  If they were to know it (not merely believe it), it could be conveyed in a way that, presumably, would be convincing to pretty much any listener.  Certainly they should be able to muster arguments, and perhaps evidence, that would convince a highly intelligent but disinterested extraterrestrial.

Enough philosophy for now.

Looking back to yesterday, I mentioned my idea about setting myself a goal of writing a song a week or maybe every two weeks.  Well, I didn’t do any song writing yesterday, but I did go to the Shakespeare AZ quotes site and flip coins repeatedly to pick the topic of a first song, and what I got was:  Earth.

That’s a bit unusual as a song topic, but I guess it’s doable.  I wouldn’t want to try to do some “We are the world” kind of thing, because that’s not what I really think of when I think of the Earth.  I think of the planet, the physical things, including all the animals and plants and fungi and bacteria and archaea and all that, but also including the geology and the geography and the chemistry and physics and everything else.

Despite the saying, man is not the measure of all things.  Man is barely even the measure of man, so to speak.  Humans by and large are relatively impressive animals, but they tend to think far more highly of themselves than is merited, in almost every case.

There are probably exceptions, but none of them come immediately to mind.

So, I’ll come up first with some lyrics (AKA a poem) about the planet Earth, or at least taking off from there, so to speak.  I have to remind myself that it doesn’t have to be very long, indeed that it should not be very long—I tend to get carried away when writing things, as you probably know.

I also need to decide what structure the song should be, like verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-verse-chorus or what have you.  Then, after that, I’ll think of an appropriate melody to go with the words.  It will probably all be quite mediocre, but the point of the exercise is not to worry about trying to be brilliant, but just to get something done.  We’ll see how that goes.

In other news—related, at least distantly—I just discovered that my former college roommate, who is also the best guitarist I’ve known, has begun producing and releasing more new music, on YouTube and on some other site.  His YouTube channel is bluetonegtr, which is a fun name because his name is Tony and of course, he plays guitar, and the blues is a big part of any really good guitarist’s repertoire (not mine).  I highly recommend checking his stuff out; he’s really good.  I’ll embed his latest song below, for your ease of access.

As for everything else, well—the world is still shit, though it certainly doesn’t have to be.  It just tends that way, or at least the human world does.  Maybe I could make that part of my song idea.  Or maybe I could deal with the fact that even life overall is pretty crappy, I don’t know.  I guess I’ll see.  Maybe I’ll just address the issue of absurd flat-Earth notions.  Maybe I could make it a comical song.

I don’t know.  This is all probably a stupid waste of time, anyway.  But time is a waste in any case, I guess, so I might as well use it stupidly.  Everyone else seems to do so.

I hope you at least enjoy at least part of your own wasted day today.

by

Musings on moving and putting muses to work

It’s the start of another work week, which I guess is good from a certain point of view.  It’s a sign of…I don’t know, economic activity or some such.  I mean, it is good for people to be productive in that sense, though it’s also nice for people to have time and space to rest and to enjoy life.  After all, what’s the point of working to sustain existence if that existence is mainly dominated by discomfort and fear?

The world is complicated, of course, and many things are happening in nearly any place at nearly any time, but ultimately, for each individual, there is merely moment to moment experience.  And if that experience is negative in general, none of the other crap really matters very much.  Or so it seems to me.

You may recall—though it’s unlikely—that my workplace recently changed to a different office location.  It wasn’t a big change; we’re still in the same zip code.  But the new location is more pleasant, and the office is more pleasant as well, though smaller.  Also, in addition to there being a goodly number of apartments right across the road, there is also even a “high-end” trailer park nearby (yes, such a thing does exist).  I haven’t been to the latter, but I can see the former, and they look pretty decent.

My coworker and my boss suggested to me that I should think about moving and renting one of those apartments or—apparently these are nicer—one of the trailers.  When they suggested this, I basically gave a standard reply, with the main thing being that I hate to move.  By which I mean, I hate to change the place where I live, not that I prefer to remain stationary and frozen in person.

I hate the process of moving, I hate the necessary upheavals, the new connections to new landlords and services and so on, all of it.  I also don’t want other people touching and getting into my stuff to move it for me, and I’m not going to be able to do it myself.  Dealing with “paperwork” is another significant headache.

Ultimately, though, as I thought about it after our conversation, I realized that really a big part of the reason I don’t want to move is that I have no desire to go forward, nothing toward which to proceed, so there’s no point to the effort.  There is nothing fulfilling in my life, and I have no hope for improvement, so it seems ridiculous to spin my wheels.

I started my current living situation under the delusion that I would continue to write stories indefinitely, and then that I would make music too, and that I might reunite in a real and meaningful way with those who matter most to me.  A lot of that was a pipe dream, though I have at least made more of a connection with my youngest child.  We’ve actually been in each other’s presence twice since May, which is twice more than any other time since 2013.  That’s very good.

But otherwise, what I’m basically doing right now is waiting to die, just killing time until time kills me.  It’s being a bit of a slacker, I have to say.  I suspect that I’m going to need to take a personal hand in things—if one wants to have something done “right” one should just do it oneself, that sort of cliché.

But that runs afoul of various societal mores (and possibly morays, for all I know).  Not that I’m good at following or even grasping social mores.  I mean, the ones that make sense I have no trouble remembering, but a lot of them are irrational, and I have difficulty even desiring to internalize those.  Eventually, I’ll probably break down and say “to hell with it” and take matters into my own hands, unless something else does it for me, or unless I find some internal or external motivation that changes my status.  I don’t particularly know if I want to hope for that; everything seems to be more work than it’s worth.

In other news—either parallel or orthogonal to the above, I’m not sure which metaphor works better—I was thinking about songwriting, which I think I discussed briefly last week.  I know that at many times, bands (like the Beatles and so on) are tasked with preparing a new album, and will sit down and write songs in quite short order for such an album.

That seems intimidating, but it occurred to me that it’s probably analogous to what Stephen King does, and what Ray Bradbury described doing:  you just sit down and produce something every day.  Worry about making it better in the rewrite/editing stage, but just get something down.  It won’t all be genius—in most cases, anyway—but it will be something.

I thought, you know what, that’s probably a lot like what people like the Beatles (specifically Lennon and McCartney) did.  They knew they had to write songs for their next albums, so they just sat down and produced something, and then worked things out, rejecting some, improving others, and so on.

I thought about trying to do something like that, just out of curiosity, as an exercise, but I always have trouble thinking of topics or subjects for a song (or a poem, as the case may be), and so the poems and songs I’ve written have tended to be highly intermittent and often rather peculiar.

But I nevertheless thought that, maybe, I could set myself the task of writing songs more rapidly, just the way for a long while I wrote fiction every day.  I couldn’t write a song a day, of course.  I thought about trying to maybe write a song a week*, but even that felt intimidating.  But when I thought about writing a song a month, that seemed too slow, somehow.

So maybe I would be able to achieve something in between, maybe a song every two weeks.  But who knows, if I don’t expect myself to produce and record the songs one a week, I might be able to crank out something once a week.

And it occurred to me, also, that for subject matter I could turn to a source that I use (AZ quotes) when I can’t think of a pertinent Shakespearean quote for the title of my Thursday blog posts.  I could flip a coin to narrow it down by halves to pick my subject from among the long list of such subjects for quotes on that page.  It’s probably better than trying to find a subject by picking a random word by flipping through the pages of a book with my eyes closed.

So, who knows, maybe I’ll do that.  Maybe I’ll try to write a new “song” every one to two weeks, at least the words and basic melody.  Who knows, maybe if I’m pleased with any of them, I might do more with them and actually “release” them.  Though I currently have two songs that I wrote and haven’t yet released already:  Mercury Lamp and Come Back Again.

This is getting way too long for a single blog post, isn’t it?  Sorry to keep you, if there is anyone out there who has actually read this entire thing through to the end.  Hey, if you have, and if you feel like doing so, why not leave a comment below on WordPress so I know.  I would ask perhaps for you to leave the first line of Mercury Lamp to prove you’d read that far (and listened) but it seems unfair to ask you to do two things during a busy day.  So maybe just try to write something that makes it clear that you’ve read here.

Now, I let you go, with apologies for being so long-winded.

*I’m not talking about completing a song a week, as in getting all the parts prepared and recording and mixing and all that; that would be utterly unreasonable by myself, even if I weren’t working full-time.  But words and basic melody could be done.

by

“Friday night arrives without a suitcase”

I’m writing this today on my smartphone, but this time it’s happened more or less deliberately.  I had several things to bring back to the house last night, and they made my backpack significantly heavier than usual.  Though more than capable of carrying it, I decided there was neither need nor benefit in doing so, so I left the mini laptop computer at the office.

I don’t know about what topic to write today.  I have, of course, not started jotting down potential subjects for blog posts, as I mentioned yesterday (I think).  Or perhaps I have started, but I simply didn’t think of any such topics or subjects yesterday, and so I didn’t write any down.  Such ideas almost never occur to me ahead of time, anyway.  Maybe if I were keyed into that process, it would become more common.

I did write down a potential story idea (or really a story’s beginning) yesterday.  I still do that from time to time, even though I don’t have any expectation of writing any of them.  Here, I’ll show you what I wrote based on something I saw along the route back to the house that I hadn’t noticed before:

“Story idea:  a person who lives in a thoroughly flat area is on a walk and sees a partly obscured path or road that seems to go up a slope that shouldn’t lead anywhere.  He assumes it must just be a ramp that leads to a parking structure or building that’s obscured by vegetation, and he decides to head up and see where it leads.  There’s no signage or barriers to stop him, which seems a bit odd.  He goes up, but as far as he can tell, it continues to be a road, slightly winding, through woods, up a hill that cannot be there, and soon it becomes clear that it must be very big.  What is it?  Where does it go?”

There it is, a typical trigger for a story, of the sort that happens to me occasionally.  I doubt I’ll ever write it, or indeed any fiction ever again, but it still arouses intriguing thoughts and possibilities.  If any readers find that it triggers your own ideas for a story, feel free to use it.  I give you my blessing or permission or whatever it might be.  Even if we both (or all, if there were more than one of you) were to write stories based on that trigger, they would probably all be wildly different stories.  Indeed, it seems like the sort of exercise that might be done in some “creative writing” course, with everyone writing stories based on the same prompt.

I sometimes wish I would have such notions about songs to write (or poems, which is more or less equivalent for me…unlike a lot of songwriters, apparently, I come up with the words first, because I am a wordy kind of guy).  I sometimes wonder how songs are written by very productive songwriters or songwriting teams.

I have read quite a few books and so on about or by people such as the Beatles in general and Paul McCartney specifically, and Radiohead (they are my two favorite song creating groups, though there are, of course, many others including Billy Joel, Don Henley/Glen Frey/Eagles, Roger Waters/Pink Floyd, etc.).

But nothing I have read seems to resonate with me about how to write a song.  For one thing, the primary songwriters in neither the Beatles nor Radiohead actually “read music” as they say, whereas I was “classically trained”* on both piano and cello.  So it’s quite hard for me to separate the idea of songwriting from that background, even if I were to want to do so, which I don’t.

I also really don’t tend to come up with chord progressions until after I’ve come up with a melody, but that’s probably because the cello has been my main instrument in the past (and voice even more so than that).  One rarely plays chords on a cello and almost never can one sing chords**.

Okay, well, in case anyone was interested, that was a little bit of spontaneously written “under the hood” description of some of my creative “processes”, though it seems pretentious and even misleading to talk of such a thing as a process in my case.  I suppose, if I were doing such writing full-time, I would need to have, or would just develop automatically, a more rigorous creative process, especially if it were how I made my living.

Alas, that seems unlikely to be my situation at any point in my future, though it would be nice if it happened.  We’ll see how that goes, but I can’t in good faith recommend that anyone bet on it, let alone that they hold their breath waiting.

I hope you all have a very nice weekend, or that you all have very nice weekends, which are two different ways of giving the same well-wishing that have a slightly different feel, but which empirically must mean the same thing.  In any case, please be well.

*That sounds much more high-falutin’ than it really is.  It just means that I took piano lessons and I played in orchestras at school, in which we were taught formally about musical notation and timing and‒to some degree‒music theory.

**Unless one is doing overdubs with one’s own voice, singing harmony parts.  I’ve done that on “all” of my songs, and it can be quite fun and very neat.  It was also really fun to reproduce the Beatles’ harmonies on my covers of Something and You Never Give Me Your Money.  On my songs, the harmony tends to be improvised; I certainly don’t consciously plan it ahead of time.  Some things, like the whistling in the bridge of Like and Share, just happen spontaneously.  I don’t write songs often enough for me to explore how such things happen.

 

by

This majestical blog fretted with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors

Hello and good morning.

A thought passed through my head yesterday evening about a topic to write about this morning, but now it appears to have slipped my mind.  That’s a bit frustrating, but I guess it’s not unusual, nor is it pathological.  I know that Stephen King has said that he doesn’t write down story ideas; he just keeps them in his head and lets them develop, and then, if they go away, he figures they weren’t the really good ideas.

That’s fine and dandy for him.  Writing fiction is his full time job, and so that’s what his brain is keyed into, presumably even when he’s not actively writing.  However, I am doing my writing—nonfiction and fiction* alike—as a “sideline”, so a lot of other things have the potential to drive story ideas out.  Also, my mind perforce wanders to many areas other than writing, including physics, biology, other sciences, mathematics, and philosophy of various subtypes, including ethics, political philosophy, epistemology, antinatalism, promortalism, nihilism, stoicism, and so on.

So, I’ve long since taken to writing down story ideas in my phone’s notes app, and I have subsequently written many of those stories.  Some I have not written, and I suppose that would mean that those ones are my equivalent of the story ideas that fade away in Stephen King’s head.  But I can still look at those story ideas and often remember what I was doing when I thought of them, and even what triggered the idea.  Not always, but sometimes.

Maybe I should take similar notes of blog post ideas or something along those lines.  But, of course, as long-timer readers may know, I almost never plan these posts out ahead of time.  Even the weirdest and most esoteric musings just come out of my head as I write in the morning on my way to work, which was when I used to write my fiction.  So, I don’t tend even to think about blog post ideas at other times (though, obviously, it does happen, given what I wrote above).

Anyway, planning ahead for any such things is pretty stupid in my case.  I don’t expect ever to write any fiction ever again, nor to write any new music nor draw any new pictures nor do anything else creative.  I suppose this blog could be considered creative in a certain sense, though it is nonfiction.

It would be nice to think that my writing this blog contributes in some way to the global intellectual conversation, the sharing of ideas, and that it thereby leads to some good in the world somehow, in some honestly consequential sense.  But I doubt that it does.  It’s just my little weird set of quantum interactions with my own field and with other fields around me in my brief stint as a (metaphorical) virtual particle.

We pop into existence, briefly interact (or not) and then return to nothingness, and only our cumulative effects on the superpositions of the interactions have any effect on the overall world at all—if they even do that.  On a cosmic scale, everything here is just virtual particles, just ephemera.

Even the universe itself may be a kind of virtual particle, proceeding from one kind of emptiness to another kind of emptiness.  Everything we imagine to be important just amounts to eddies in the currents of the process of moving from one blank, lower entropy state to a more final, higher entropy state.  And there’s no good reason even to suspect that there was anything before or that there will be anything after our brief lives for any of us.

That’s part of why I named my other blog Iterations of Zero.  But that blog too is now fallow.  Pretty much everything in my life is fallow.

There is no point to doing anything, not even in the short term, because there’s not even really any transient sense of reward, let alone any sense of deeper fulfillment.  “All is vanity”, as it says in Ecclesiastes.

I don’t really have more to say today, and probably I have no more of importance to say ever again (though that probably won’t keep me from saying shit), and it’s highly debatable whether I’ve ever said anything worth saying at all, at any time in my life.  It would be nice to be convinced that I’d had some real, relatively enduring impact on the world—for good, I mean—but everything I do is futile.

TTFN

*I haven’t actually written any fiction since I wrote Extra Body, nor have I felt an urge to do so.  It’s too thankless a task, given how much effort it entails, despite the fact that such effort is a “labor of love”.  Unrequited love is always wretchedly painful, and I disagree with the poetic line declaring that it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.  I think it very much depends on the circumstances.  I would rather spend the rest of my life alone and lonely than to fall in love and then have my heart willfully broken yet again, which is by far the most likely outcome of any romantic notion for me.  So it is, albeit to a lesser degree, with my fiction**.

**I’m reminded of a scene in Lord Foul’s Bane when Thomas Covenant is in a boat with the giant, Foamfollower, and Foamfollower asks if Thomas Covenant is a storyteller.  When Covenant replies, “I was, once,” Foamfollower says that the fact that he gave it up is as sad a story in three words as any he could have told.  Then he asks Covenant how he lives without stories, and Covenant shrugs and replies, “I live.”  Foamfollower, half-joking, says something to the effect of, “Another, in two words, sadder than the first.  Say no more.  With one word you will make me weep.”

by

Tuesdays too many

I want to begin with a minor caveat (added here after the first draft):  I don’t feel that I’m writing very well, today.  I apologize for this, and I will try not to make it a habit.

It’s now Tuesday morning, and today I am writing this on my mini laptop computer.  Even though I felt pretty crappy all day yesterday—recall that I was sore all over, and it was particularly bad in my “usual suspect” joints and such—I decided I still didn’t want to write anything on my smartphone today again, so I brought the computer back to the house with me.

The bases of my thumbs continued (and continue) to be sore, and the process of writing on the stupidphone doesn’t get any more pleasant as I go along.  Anyway, today I feel a little less achy all over than yesterday, probably thanks to fairly high doses of three different OTC analgesics/anti-inflammatories.

I still feel vaguely as if I am fighting some flu-like syndrome, except I have no fever that I can detect and no other localizing symptoms.  I just feel blah and bleagh, as though all sorts of cytokines are flowing through my body, all those interleukins and interferons and prostaglandins and the like, making me feel as though I am beset by some infection.

As for everything else—well, the world at large continues to be comically tragic and tragically comical, more so of both than usual, and that’s stressful as well.  And there is no more apparent point to participating in any of it, or indeed in anything at all, today than there was yesterday.

But, nevertheless* I am going to the office.  What would I do otherwise?  Lie about back at the house, in my little room, and just…I don’t know, try to pass my time somehow?  It’s not as though I can readily sleep when there; I slept quite a bit less than three hours total last night, and it was not all in a row.  So, if I’m grumpy, I hope you’ll forgive me.  If you won’t, well…I don’t really give too much of a shit.

As for what to write today, well, I guess you’re reading it, whatever it is.  I have no specific topic, or subject, other than the general notion that I’m writing and sharing my thoughts, such as they are, as they stream through my consciousness in response to my obsessive-compulsive urge to write this blog every workday, even though I have no overarching subject about which to write.

I would love to be able to discuss some interesting subject in physics or mathematics or biology—or even medicine, which technically is part of biology—but though there are surely many interesting things being explored and discovered and discussed, they all seem pointless to me.  My state of mind is definitely not good if even my favorite sciences (and science-adjacent subjects) are incapable of grabbing my interest.

So, all I have to discuss, if that’s the right term, is that my chronic pain continues, and my dysthymia/depression continues, and my social anxiety continues, as does my general free-floating hostility.  All these latter things are at least partly triggered and/or exacerbated by my ASD, which is something that is never going to stop for as long as I’m alive—which has already been too long.

I’ve done pretty much all the good I’m ever going to do in the world, probably.  And I did do some good here and there.  Of course, the best thing I ever did was to father my children, so that’s one thing.  But I also contributed to scientific advancement in my own tiny little way, and I did a pretty good job of relieving suffering in my patients, and saving people’s lives**.  And I wrote my books, which very few people will ever read, but which I nevertheless think are pretty decent, and I wrote and recorded some songs, which very few people will ever hear, but which I nevertheless think are also pretty decent.

It would be nice if I felt able to write fiction again, I guess, but even the process of trying seems terribly daunting.  There is little expected reward, since probably no one but my sister will end up reading anything I write in the future (fiction-wise, anyway), if there is such writing, which seems unlikely.  And it’s almost laughable to think that I might write and record any new songs.

Also, in the end, I have always failed at everything that really matters to me.

So, I’m pretty much just coasting along, waiting for my momentum to be used up.  It’s annoyingly persistent, but I guess I can only blame some metaphorical translational symmetry for that conservation of metaphorical momentum.  I’m probably pushing the metaphor too far (a process that is itself metaphorical), but that’s what I tend to do.

I’m sorry to be such a downer.  Even worse, I’m sorry to be so boring.  It’s not personal; though it’s also not strictly business, either.  I don’t know what it is.  I’m at a loss.  But that too seems just to be my usual state.  Perhaps I’ve never been otherwise.

I hope all of you feel better than I feel today, and every day.  I hope that, even on days when I feel good—if there ever are such days again in my life, which feels pretty unlikely—that you all still feel better than I do.  Why not?  The bar is set pretty low, but at least that means there’s plenty of room for you to be boosted up.

*Is it redundant to say “but, nevertheless”?  I suspect that it is.

**Though I dislike that expression somewhat; “saving lives” is always just saving them for later, since everyone dies eventually.

by

“Monday morning turning back…”

“…yellow lorry slow, nowhere to go.”

To my surprise, I am writing this blog post on my smartphone today.  I say “to my surprise” because I did not bring my mini laptop computer back to the house with me on Thursday evening, but I did not recall that fact until I unzipped my backpack and started looking for the computer.  It’s a tad frustrating to have allowed that to slip my mind, but then again, it has been four days.

I don’t feel well this morning, though it’s not because of any weekend debauchery of any kind.  I did essentially nothing this weekend.  Of course, that’s always an inaccurate statement if taken literally, but it catches the gist, the impression, of what I mean to convey.  Obviously, I breathed, and my heart pumped blood, and my bone marrow presumably kept on making blood, and I ate and excreted and so on.  And I did walk to the bank and to the convenience store and so on, and I watched a few videos on YouTube and on “Prime Video”.  But that’s about it.

Despite having rested quite a lot, my entire body just aches and is sore‒especially my back and left hip and knee and ankle and my left shoulder and arm and hand.  Both my thumbs are stiff and sore, making the process of writing this post on the smartphone particularly annoying.  I feel almost as if I were fighting some systemic infection, but I have no other localizing or specifying symptoms or signs.

Of course, I’m on my way to the office right now, to start another thoroughly pointless week of work.  I say “pointless” because I’m not going anywhere, metaphorically or literally.  I see no future other than the pointless repetition of today, with its utter lack of anything fulfilling and its ample sampling of pain and tension and frustration and anxiety and loneliness and depression.

If I had some purpose, some desired goal, something toward which I was working, it would be okay, I suspect.  Or if I just had someone with whom to legitimately share my time, with whom I could have anything more than a superficial connection, it might be tolerable.

Alas, I don’t have those things, and I strongly suspect that I never will have them.  I have had good friends (and excellent family) in my life, but I seem to have lost my ability to make friends, at least to make anything other than work friends.  And I am certainly not a dating kind of person, unfortunately.

I don’t know what point I’m getting at (yet again).  Maybe the point is that there is no point.

I don’t know if any of you stopped in on Friday and read the Declaration of Independence.  Ironically, anyone who bothered to stop and read it is likely not the sort of person who would need to be reminded of the principles involved.  So who knows whether anyone really got anything out of the fact that I shared the text of the document here?

Who knows?  Who cares?  Why bother?

What else is there to say today?  Not very much.  Again, I just don’t feel very well at all, this morning, even for me.  (And when was the last time I felt reasonably healthy in the morning?  It probably long predates the origin of this blog.)

All right, well, I’ll leave it here for today, pretty much.  I feel quite discouraged and despondent and just physically rather beat up.  I’ve taken two extra-strength acetaminophen and three aspirin today so far already, but I don’t yet detect any sign of them making anything better.  Perhaps I haven’t given them a fair day in court, so to speak.  We shall see.

In the meantime, I hope that all of you have a good day and a good week, and a good month on top of that.  And so on, and so on, and so on…

In the meantime, here’s my cover of the song from which this blog post’s title comes.

by

Though all things foul would wear the blogs of grace, yet grace must still look so.

Hello and good morning.

Yes, yes, I know—I got your hopes all up yesterday by letting you think that I might not be writing a blog post today, and yet, here I am writing a blog post.  And I’m doing it today.

I’m sorry.  It seems my compulsive behavior patterns are stronger than my depression, at least in this regard.  I suppose that could be considered a strength in some cases, though as someone said somewhere, obsessions and compulsions are good servants but bad masters.  I take that to mean that it’s good to use them to get things done that you want or need to get done, but if they take control, they can become an apparent end in themselves and get in the way of things that would be more beneficial.

You probably know this.  Maybe you’ve not thought of it consciously, deliberately, but it’s probably pretty clear and obvious once you think about it.  I’m not really good at delivering deep and life-changing secrets; if I knew such things, surely my life would be in far better shape.

Anyway, I don’t really have a subject about which to write today—though there is much in the world that is worthy of commentary, let there be no doubt about that—so I’ll just meander a bit.

I’m in a slightly better mood than I was in yesterday.  I suspect that’s partly because I made it a point not to curtail or suppress my caffeine intake.  It’s not that I had abstained from caffeine the day before; Batman forbid.  But I kind of pushed it yesterday, and didn’t stop even in the afternoon.

Weirdly enough, that tends to improve if not the duration of my sleep, then the quality of it.  Perhaps it has to do with enhancing the muscle tone in my nasopharynx and oropharynx, making them less prone to flop about and cause possible apneic episodes.  It’s well known that caffeine increases cyclic AMP inside cells, and in particular muscle cells, and that improves their activity and tone.

This is part of why, for instance, a quick and dirty, temporizing measure in the case of someone having an asthma attack without their usual medicine available, can be a strong cup of coffee (not too hot, because it’s good to get it in quickly).  It’s not ideal, and cannot replace albuterol and other similar bronchodilators, but it can buy some time.

All that aside—and it is an aside—I wouldn’t say that I’m feeling upbeat today, but I am at least a bit energetic.  Caffeine is the most popular drug in the world (by far) for strong reasons, after all.  Even most strict religions that ban alcohol and other euphoriants rarely ban caffeine (though I’m led to understand that Mormonism is an exception).

Even many anti-drug fanatics tend to take in caffeine in one form or another; some of them should probably cut back, actually.  But the joke is certainly on them a bit, especially if they are among the benighted masses who see drug use (and abuse) in pseudo-moralizing terms, for they are often quite dependent on their drug of choice, as are so many of the rest of us.

Oh, well.  Most people are clueless most of the time, which is why it can be so heartbreakingly easy for con artists to fool so many into stupid things like avoiding vaccines or thinking that someone who has only ever engaged in self-service and self-aggrandizement is going to look out for them once such a person gains real political power.

This is all strictly hypothetical, of course.

On to other matters.  Today is Independence Eve, if you will, and tomorrow is Independence Day (in the United States of America).  Some people here don’t want even to celebrate the occasion because they are so frustrated with the situation in America, and I can understand their sentiments, but I think they are mistaken.

I think, more than ever, it’s important to review and renew the ideas and ideals on which the USA was founded, to go back to the startup and the operating system—to try to reboot, perhaps, with some bugs patched if possible, and with some malware removed.  The notions are straightforward in many cases, such as that governments are instituted, in principle, to protect and preserve the rights of the people of the country.  They are not the source of such rights; they are merely charged with their protection.  It is a duty, not a privilege, and they are certainly not an “authority”.

The Declaration of Independence is not a long document.  It’s only about 1400 words long, including signatures.  I’ve written blog posts longer than that.  And even the Constitution, with amendments, is only about 7000 words long.  That’s shorter than every short story I’ve ever written—even Solitaire is twice that long—and it’s not particularly difficult language.  The ideas aren’t all that difficult, either, though they are probably deeper than many people realize at first glance.

So, for tomorrow’s pre-programmed post, I have prepared to share the text of the Declaration of Independence.  Of course, one can go and read it at the government archives site, but I don’t feel as confident that it will remain available there indefinitely as I felt in the past.  So, I’m putting it up here, on the 4th of July, Independence Day.  I encourage you to copy and download it, and if you want, to share it.  Let’s make sure it’s out there in the world as much as possible.

Even the section that relates the grievances that led to the declaration are pertinent, though they can seem tedious, because some of them are being recapitulated (and worsened) by the present government.  And it doesn’t make things any better that our own government is the one acting in ways prone to “reduce them under absolute Despotism”; it makes it even more important to remember the point of founding the US in the first place.

No, we have never quite lived up to the ideals expressed in the Declaration—never fully, never as deeply or as rigorously as we ought to have done—but that is a failure in our attempts, not in the ideals themselves.  So, please, do read the post tomorrow, share it, make it go viral if you can (the Declaration, not my blog, though I guess I wouldn’t complain about the blog doing so).

Later on, I can start sharing the US Constitution, perhaps, and the Bill of Rights and other Amendments.  It’s important that we pay renewed attention to such things, for so many seem to have forgotten them (or more likely never to have learned them).

I hope those of you in the US have a good holiday tomorrow and a good holiday weekend.  Enjoy time with your families if you can.  But do try to remember what you’re celebrating, and why.

TTFN

by

This post is not entitled to a headline

I’m writing this on my “smart” phone this morning.  When I left the office yesterday, I was just too exhausted to want to deal with carrying the miniature laptop computer.  I don’t know exactly why; maybe it’s because I’ve been burning my limited energy trying to force myself to be positive and upbeat.

I’ve even used the old autosuggestion, “Every day in every way I’m getting better and better” whenever walking or mentally idle.  But it wears me out after a while, and it feels so false as to be unsustainable in my head, just like when I found I couldn’t even think the words “I love my life and I love myself.”  I don’t believe any of it.

So, I wrote a few halfway positive blog posts in recent days and weeks, and hopefully they’ve been mildly entertaining from time to time, but I don’t know that I’m going to be able to keep that up.  I don’t feel good about myself or about the world in general.  I don’t feel in any way optimistic‒though I wouldn’t say I’m truly pessimistic, either.  It’s not even really what I would call fatalism.

I can only say that my attitude is that things in general will only ever be as good as they have to be, as they are forced to be, because there’s no percentage in being any better than that overall, just as there is no need in biology for organisms to be any better than the minimum required to survive and reproduce.

I could go into the reasons for these facts, but I’ve gone into them before on this blog, and I have done so more than once, so you can look around and find such posts here somewhere.  I’ve probably also discussed them on Iterations of Zero.  Today, I simply do not have the energy available to do so‒and it’s not even 4:30 in the morning yet.

Obviously my insomnia continues, but that’s not new.  I just haven’t been writing about it, because I thought people would be sick of it.  Similarly, I always have my chronic pain, which waxes and wanes a bit, but doesn’t ever take a day off, not for more than 20 years.  And my depression and anxiety continue, probably inescapably, since they are probably related to (or at least exacerbated by) my ASD.

It’s pretty sad, but I’ve realized‒or I have at least faced the fact‒that my time at the office is better than my time back at the house.  I have to go to the house, of course, because I need a place of privacy and rest, but I don’t like it there.  Especially in the morning, before everyone else arrives, the office is very much more comfortable.

And let’s be honest, pretty much all of my socializing happens at the office.  That’s more or less always been my pattern:  I make my friends either at work or school or what have you, though especially when I was younger, those friendships expanded from school and became broader and better.

That sort of thing doesn’t seem to happen anymore.  I am less and less able to connect with people as time goes by, partly because my energy budget is so low, and I have fewer and fewer interests and pastimes and distractions.  Everything in my life‒well, nearly everything‒sucks, and that’s because I suck.  The things in my life that don’t suck are as they are in spite of me.  Some people and things are just inherently good enough to be better than I am worse.  But that doesn’t make me any better.

I’m tired, and I don’t know any good, real reasons to keep trying.  I have and take very little joy in my nature.  Also, in general, I feel that my body is rotting throughout, and has been doing so for a few decades now.  I’m like a fruit that fell to the ground in infertile soil a long time ago, and there’s nothing for me to do but get first mushy and then dry and to slowly, grossly, wither away, surrounded only by various kinds of flies and ants.

Okay, that’s a bit purple and melodramatic.  My apologies.  But it captures a lot of how I feel about myself, my disgust and self-loathing; I make myself want just to throw up.

I wish I had the willpower to stop eating for good, just never to eat again.  That would be kind of nice.  Then I could just wither and fade out, and even get skinny before the end‒unless something else killed me before I reached that point.  I guess that would be okay.

Anyway, I’m not sure I’ll write tomorrow.  I am working then, of course, but I make no promises about writing a blog post.  The office is actually going to be closed on Friday for Independence Day, the first time I can remember us being closed for that holiday, but I’ve already got a pre-programmed post prepared for propagation that day.

Having the holiday off isn’t any particularly great thing from my point of view.  It’s not as though I’ll be doing anything to celebrate (other than my pre-programmed post), nor will I spend my time doing anything fun or interesting.  I’ll probably try just to knock myself out with Benadryl on Thursday night as I do on Friday nights, and then just…lie around.

I’m getting pretty bored with the movies and shows available, even ones that I know already and like, and YouTube is getting overdone, too.  There’s no new science that’s especially interesting, and certainly no new fiction that catches my eye.  And humanity in general, and America in particular, is just disappointing (I have never expected much from them, but they find so many ways to let me down, nevertheless).

Oh, well.  Whatever.  It’s not important, and it certainly doesn’t matter.  It’s just so wearying.  And I am tired.

I guess if I write a post tomorrow, you can read it.  If I don’t, you can’t.  That’s how that works.  But Friday will bring my preprogrammed post, and then Saturday and Sunday of course there will be nothing.

I’m not optimistic enough to start planning for next week.  Honestly, it doesn’t seem worth the wait.

by

Compassion is true justice, isn’t it?

It’s Friday, and I’m writing what should be my last blog post of the week, since I don’t think I’m going to work tomorrow—we’ve been having a good week, all things considered, though it doesn’t have a great deal of impact on me other than making it more likely for me to have Saturday off.

I guess I’m grateful for that.  After all, I really do seem to need frequent time to decompress by just lolling about and doing nothing.  Considering that, throughout my life, I’ve almost never given myself any time to rest beyond that which is absolutely necessary, I guess it’s not too surprising that I’ve worn myself out.

I feel a vague, general hostility this morning, bordering on unfocused hatred—not towards any specific or particular thing but toward everything in general.  It’s a bit of a shame.  It’s not really new for me, though.  I remember, well into my past, realizing that I didn’t like “people” overall, but that I had a hard time specifically hating people I knew, or at least the people I knew fairly well.

That’s a curious fact.  I could recognize that, at first glance, I found humans as a whole frustrating, often disgusting, frequently reprehensible, and in general just rather pathetic—but then, when I got to know someone, I usually found them at least tolerable, and usually in some ways likable.  It’s probably because, when you get to know a person, and you see the various aspects of their lives and their personalities, you realize that even their negative attributes are clearly not of their choosing, and you develop at least a sense of compassion for them, even if there is no actual affection.

I guess, in a way, it’s a realization that humans are not much more responsible for their character than, say, a dog is, though they delude themselves otherwise.  And although there are dogs that are unpleasant, with bad habits and so on, people mostly recognize that dogs are not the authors of their negative attributes (nor of their positive ones).

Humans in general have more agency than dogs, but not nearly as much as they think they have.  No one chooses their ancestry, of course, and so they do not choose their genes, nor the location and circumstances of their birth, nor the culture in which they live, nor the things they are taught—true and false and nonspecific.  It’s probably unnecessarily biasing to think of everyone as “victims”, since not all the things that happen to us (or within us) are negative.  But certainly, people are passengers in life rather than drivers.

Yes, even those who have great wealth and power are no more the authors of the world than are the most abjectly impoverished.  They are luckier, of course; it would be churlish and foolish to think otherwise.  But they are not really any more “in charge” than anyone else is.

They don’t like to admit it, but that’s probably because they are terrified of recognizing their own powerlessness, which is understandable.  But there is little to no doubt about the fact that they are just the same type of flotsam and jetsam as everyone else.  Even the vastly wealthy and successful (and reasonably smart) Steve Jobs fell victim not just to pancreatic cancer but to his own irrational biases in eschewing scientifically supported treatment for it.

This is not to imply that, had he been treated, he would definitely have survived.  Pancreatic cancer is no joke.  The pancreas has no tissue capsule around it, and it is not surrounded by firm structures that would lead to early pain and thus early diagnosis of the illness, so by the time most people know they have the disease, it is often very advanced and has spread quite far.

Jobs’s outcome might have been no better had he engaged the best, top-level, scientifically validated treatment available (which he certainly could have afforded).  His chances would just have been better.

Sooner or later he would have died anyway, just like everyone else.  Death is not optional, not even for the universe itself, as far as we can tell.  This is not to say that spacetime may not endure forever in some form or another—it quite possibly shall—but what we consider to be our universe, a place in which complexity and life itself can exist, even if only in a tiny, tiny, miniscule fraction of the cosmos, is inescapably working toward increasing entropy.  And while a Poincaré recurrence may also wait in the distant future (the mathematics suggests that it does), that’s not likely to be much consolation to anyone here and now.

No, in the scope of time even more so than in the expanse of space*, the place for any kind of life appears tiny indeed.  People say silly things like “our universe is fine-tuned for life”, but that’s absurd on its face.  Almost every location in the cosmos is incapable of supporting life as we know it, at least without significant modification**.

People are biased because they live in places where life is possible—but that’s tautological, when you think about it.  And even here, on the surface of the Earth, in a civilization that spontaneously self-assembled to house humans and their subordinate animals, most people could not survive without the technology and services provided by (and invented by) other humans.

So, perhaps compassion is the most reasonable attitude to have toward people, even when they are at their worst.  That doesn’t mean one shouldn’t try to stop people from doing bad things and hurting each other and themselves.  But thinking of them as evil is probably not merely counterproductive but actually unjust.  Evil is an adjective that can apply to deeds, but I think it’s never a very good description of individuals in real life.

That’s me being relatively positive and gentle, isn’t it?  I know, it’s disgusting.  I’ll try to avoid it in the future.  In the meantime, please try to have a good day and a good weekend, and repeat after that for as long as you can.

*If time and space are both infinite in extent, as they may be, it’s difficult to compare fractions of them to say which might, in some fashion, be a bigger proportion.  Is a googol (10100) a bigger percentage of infinity than 1 is?  Not mathematically.  Any finite number one can choose, no matter how large, is unreasonably close to zero when compared to infinity.  And that’s just the smallest version of infinity, ℵ0.  Don’t even try to start considering fractions of, say, the real numbers.  You can’t even begin to count them, because you cannot, even in principle, find a smallest one with which to begin, or the next one from any starting point.  There are an uncountably infinite number of real numbers between any two specific numbers you might pick, no matter how close together they are.

**I did a YouTube video related to this, that I titled There is NO life in the universe.  I don’t remember how good my points were, but if you’re interested, here it is.  Actually, even if you’re not interested, here it is.