writing

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I’m back and (nominally) going forth

It’s Monday again‒the last Monday of September in 2025.  This day, in this month, in this year, will never come again.  Or, well, even if the universe is one big closed time-loop of some kind, it seems quite clear that the scale of it is so huge that it may as well be eternity before this time will come around again.

And then, of course, even if it does come around again, it’s not as though we would be aware of it.  I’ve brought up before the notion of it being like people in movie on a DVD or Blu-ray or what have you; at each moment, the characters are, from their viewpoint, facing an uncertain future with many possibilities, and yet we the viewers know that exactly the same things will happen to them, and they will do exactly the same things each time we watch the movie.

That’s all old hat, I guess (a weird expression, but somehow it works).  But it is interesting to consider occasionally, and then to think about where (if anywhere) quantum indeterminacy fits into such a picture, from the possible “many worlds” Everettian version of quantum mechanics to things like superdeterminism on the other end and so on.

Whatever.  Sorry, I sometimes get a little swept up in such matters, and it probably gets quite boring for my readers.

Anyway, I did not go to work on Friday, and that’s why I didn’t write a blog post.  My apologies.  I felt truly horrible at a sort of pan-corporeal level; it almost felt as if I were experiencing the effects of some kind of poison (though I do not actually suspect such a thing, it’s just a way to convey my experience).  I think something “global” and metabolic was going on, though I guess it might have been some viral syndrome or other.  I’m not feeling completely better, even today.

I also scratched my right eye in my sleep apparently, on Thursday night, and that didn’t help matters.  Thankfully, the conjunctivae heal very quickly, so that’s mostly better now.  It’s still a little irritated, and so it is irritating, but that should just be a matter of time.

As for anything else, well…I have nothing, really.  That applies in more than one sense, now that I think about it.  But in this case, I mean that I have nothing interesting in mind about which to write.  It doesn’t help that I’m doing this on my smartphone, which makes writing slower and also a bit painful.

I really should bring the mini lapcom back to the house with me.  It’s so much easier to write on it‒it really allows me to be in some ways more fluent and fluid even than when speaking (although if you get me started on a subject in which I’m interested, I can talk at a rate that will make most people wish for me to get severe laryngitis).

It’s tough, however, to talk with my six pm self to get him to want to bring the lapcom, when he’s globally fatigued at the end of the workday.  Likewise, he has a hard time making excuses to my morning self, who is still fatigued and who has sore thumb bases.

Nominally, of course, they are “the same” person‒and taking “the person” as the four-dimensional self-reinforcing and self-sustaining pattern that I am, like a complex braid in spacetime, one would say that they are indeed the same person, or at least that they are parts of the same person.  But as an experiential matter, they are subjectively quite different, instantiating different states of body and mind.

Oh, they are obviously far more alike than unalike‒the morning me is closer by far in overall state to the afternoon me than to any state of any other person, let alone any other animal or what have you.  But still, the Buddhist (and similar systems of thought) notion of the lack of any fixed “self” riding around inside the mind like a homunculus is clearly correct.

There is no “center” of consciousness in the brain except for the whole brain itself.  But even that does not exist in a vacuum*.  Its state is influenced by the states of the rest of the body, of the environment, of the information coming into the person’s mind via the senses, and so on.

It’s a fucking complicated system, okay?  It’s the most complicated thing‒at least on this scale‒of which we are aware.  By that, I mean human (and humanoid) minds and brains in general, not mine specifically.  I have a fairly high judgment of my own intelligence, but I’m not as egotistical as all that.

Maybe I should try to be.  Maybe I should cultivate a sense of self-importance and specialness (why is that not “specialty”?) that would keep me feeling nominally good about myself.  But people like that are so boring and annoying and even pitiful.  I don’t know if going that way would be more triumph or surrender.  It would probably be the latter.

Oh, well.  Try to have a good day.

*Unless it’s a Boltzmann Brain, which is pretty unlikely.  You can know you’re not a Boltzmann Brain if you continue to exist for more than a few seconds before disintegrating into the global entropy of a nearly empty universe.  Although, of course, your memories of having existed for more than a few seconds may simply be false memories, a real possibility in principle in any Boltzmann Brain.  But contemplating those possibilities reveals that they would make baseless any notion we have of consistent physical laws, including the laws that allow for Boltzmann Brains (if they do, which is questionable), so it gets pointless pretty quickly.

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Near the bottom of the week there lies…this blog post

It’s Friday, in case you’re fairly out of it, or in case you’re reading this some day other than the day on which I’m writing it.  I’m surprised, actually, how many people who first start to follow my blog go back and read earlier posts, and even “like” them (which may or may not indicate that they actually like them).

It’s quite heartening, when it happens, even if it’s only because suddenly my blog gets a lot more views and I get lots of notifications when I get on the site.  I also feel impressed, because there is a rather intimidating—or so I would imagine—number of my blog posts on here.  There probably aren’t all  that many people who don’t write for a living who have written more than I have on this blog, going back almost 10 years.

Of course, when I say things like “how many” in the first paragraph, that’s a relative term.  I only get a few dozen or so people coming to my blog on a regular basis, even though I share it on pretty much all my social media (other than Instagram, which isn’t well suited to sharing links to blog posts, and TikTok, which I simply don’t have or use).  It would be great, of course, if I could get the sorts of visits and views and shares as some of the young women who just dance around a bit in cosplay, lip-syncing to snippets of songs and so on.  It’s charming sometimes, of course—I like to see the costumes, and some of the little skits can be funny—but it gets to be very much the same thing over and over again after a while.

It can be more fun seeing some of the compilations of people’s antics while they’re playing a game and streaming on Twitch.  That’s another social media platform with which I have no connection, since I don’t spend a great deal of time playing, let alone watching, many games (more’s the pity, since I do tend to like video games, all other things being equal).

Still, the best (to me) non-written material on the various social media are the ones where people discuss new findings in science or who discuss economic issues and international relations and so on, from professional points of view.  It’s not as good as reading a good blog post about a topic in which I’m interested, or better yet a book, but it can be hard to find blog posts about things in which I’m interested.  Podcasts are more reliable in this region, but I really only regularly listen to two of those:  Sean Carroll’s Mindscape and Sam Harris’s Making Sense.

I do subscribe to several people on Substack, but it’s hard even to see notifications of articles being posted by people in whom I’m interested.  And, of course, there are a number of blogs here on WordPress that I follow, but that number is so large that I miss quite a lot of them a lot of the time.

Of course, my interests aren’t necessarily like a lot of other people’s.  Science (especially but by no means exclusively physics), mathematics, a bit of economics, a bit of political philosophy and other philosophy, those sorts of topics and subjects are what interest me mostly.

I like movies and shows of certain kinds, though I watch fewer and fewer of them nowadays since I have no one with whom to watch them, and that takes a lot of the fun out of them.  I don’t have much interest in reading about shows and movies, though watching reaction videos for movies I’ve seen can be fun—it’s almost like sharing a movie one likes with a friend or friends who haven’t seen it.  Of course, it’s not fully like that, since one certainly can’t interact with those people, and in all honesty, most of them would probably find hanging out with me tedious to unpleasant.

I don’t know why I’m writing about this stuff, today.  As you probably know, I don’t plan these posts out in advance; they are very much stream-of-consciousness.  I hope they’re easier to follow than the first section of The Sound and the Fury, or something by James Joyce, but they still are very much just a sample of what comes out of my mind, which I am discovering with almost as much surprise as any of you are.

I started doing this every work day since I stopped writing fiction—which has been a while now—and I thought perhaps to use it as a form of therapy, but one for which I don’t have to pay nearly as much as the therapists I have seen in the past.  I don’t know if it’s doing me any good or not, but at least it lets me feel that I exist in something other than a purely local, ephemeral, and virtual sense.  That’s worth something at least.

With that, I’ll call this good for today and for toweek*.  I truly hope you all have a great day and a great weekend, and that you can look forward both to the arrival of autumn and to Bilbo and Frodo’s birthday next Monday.  I’m sure I’ll mention those things in my next post, but it shouldn’t hurt to prepare you.

*This is one of my neologisms, emulating the pattern from the word “today”, which means more or less “this day”.  That’s probably obvious, but just in case it wasn’t, I figured I’d leave a little explainer.

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Tear down the wall(s)!

I saw a video on YouTube yesterday in which a neuroscientist was being interviewed and asked to “grade” the danger level of various drugs—obviously not all of them since that would have taken far longer than the hour the video lasted.  Mind you, the video ran much more quickly for me, because this is one of those that I watch at 1.5 times speed, which I can get away with if I have the subtitles on and the speaker doesn’t speak too quickly.  I don’t do this for reaction videos or comedy videos, of course, and I certainly don’t do it with music or music reaction videos.  That would be absurd.

Anyway, watching the video, in which the scientist discussed the effects and mechanisms of action of the various drugs, made me think of something that has occurred to me before in recent months and years:  What if someone slipped MDMA (aka Ecstasy) into the food and/or water of all the members of the Senate and House of Representatives* before every legislative session?

This drug has the tendency to lower psychological barriers between people, to encourage a feeling of acceptance and a kind of “unconditional love”, without many other serious untoward effects in most cases (I have never tried it, but I have never tried most non-prescription drugs).  It would be rather interesting to see what legislatures could accomplish if they felt real warmth toward each other rather than seeing each other as opponents and even frank enemies**.  I wonder what might happen.

Alternatively, or similarly, it would be interesting to see a similar experiment involving the UN.  Heck, it would be great just to infuse every water-supply throughout the middle-east with MDMA.  I would not want to use any true hallucinogens in that region of the world, though—we don’t need new religions or spiritual notions popping up in a region that is already the wellspring of the western world’s absurd religious conflicts.

It would be great just to calm the overactive amygdalae of the people in the various legislatures and international organizations, to encourage their prefrontal cortices to be more active, so they can work together for the good of the people they have chosen (and competed) to represent—and whom they fail every time they put partisan hostility above the best interests of the people of the country.  Maybe it would be simpler just to fit all legislators and similar officials with shock collars that activate any time that individual’s voice goes above a certain decibel level, or when a localized EEG detects too much activity in the limbic system and not enough in the frontal lobes.

This is all pipe dreaming, of course, though there’s nothing in the laws of physics that prevents either of these notions from being brought to bear.  Still, it’s probably refreshing to see me thinking of plots and plans intended to work to help people get along better rather than just to obliterate them from the face of the cosmos***.  Though that may well be more likely to happen, considering the warnings of a recent book I just got.

This book is If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, a warning book about the dangers of superintelligent AI, written by one of my favorite thinkers, Eliezer Yudkowsky, and his coauthor, Nate Soares.  They appeared (so to speak) on Sam Harris’s podcast that came out yesterday.  Now, I have not listened to the entire podcast yet, and I certainly haven’t read the book yet, but I have little doubt that the authors are at least not far wrong in their warnings.

I’m not going to go into those arguments now, because you can (and should) read the book or at least look into Eliezer Yudkowsky’s work and ideas.  His book Rationality:  From AI to Zombies is a masterpiece, and though it is long, it is divided into easily ingested chunks, since it started out as a long series of blog posts.

I occasionally toy with the idea of doing podcast type stuff like Sam Harris and so many others—indeed, I have done several of what I call “audio blogs” since I don’t know if they would technically count as podcasts—because people really seem to prefer listening to people talk more than they prefer reading.  This is despite the fact that reading is faster and requires less data to convey the same number of ideas.

I don’t know.  It’s probably better for the world if my thoughts and ideas achieve the least penetration into the zeitgeist as possible.  Still, maybe I’ll embed a few examples of my “audio blogs” here for anyone interested in listening, to see if you think it would be worth it for me to do more.

Please have a good day.

On fatigue, depression, general relativity, and spaceships becoming discoid black holes:

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Morgoth, Arda, redemption, morality, and blame:

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The Cosmic Perspective:

*If you live in a country other than the US—as most people do—then substitute your own legislative bodies for these.

**It astonishes me how people in the same legislature, in the same country, see each other as opponents and even as “evil” based almost entirely upon the arbitrary and absurd notion of political party.  It’s ridiculous enough when people arbitrarily choose to be loyal to some specific sports team and then hate other ones based purely on that arbitrary self-identification, but when it involves people who are supposed to be trying to manage the governance of the nation, or state, or county, or what have you, it smacks of a complete lack of seriousness and maturity, of childishness.

***Though I still like my idea of getting someone to engineer the mumps virus to make it more likely to cause orchitis****, especially if it can be encouraged to make males more likely to be sterile.  That way we would decrease the population of those who are prone to avoid vaccinations.  But that’s me in my mad scientist mode.

****Inflammation of the testes, a relatively rare complication of mumps.

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“…the mystery which binds me still…”

I’m using the “lapcom” to write this today, so I clearly remembered to bring it back to the house with me yesterday.  It’s definitely better overall for typing upon than the smartphone is.

I wish it had backlit keys; you don’t see that very often on mini-lapcoms, unfortunately, and it does mean that the smartphone has an advantage over this computer in truly dark conditions, since its entire working surface is lit.   With the lapcom, only the screen is lit, which makes it slightly harder to see the keys, since the eyes adjust to the light level from the screen.  Still, I don’t really need to see the keyboard to be able to type; I’ve been doing it for a really long time.

By the way, in case anyone is curious and in case I think I haven’t explained it before—I think I might have, but I’m far from certain—it may seem odd that I say things like “bring it back to the house with me” instead of, for instance, “bring it back home with me”.  The reason is that I don’t consider the place where I live to be home.

I certainly don’t consider the previous place I lived to be home, nor the one before that.  In fact, ever since I’ve stopped living in any dwelling where my kids ever stayed, I consider myself homeless.  For a certain amount of that time, I was literally homeless.  I survived (obviously) but there have been quite a few unpleasant years since I last saw my children regularly; it’s been about 13 years since I’ve seen or spoken with my son.  I guess I really am difficult to endure.

I don’t try to be, of course.  Honestly, I don’t, especially not for the people I love.  You could even say that I try not to be difficult.  But I guess I am atypical to enough of a degree that I’m hard to endure for too long at a stretch.  According to my autism evaluation, I have ASD level 2, which means I have “moderate support needs” (as opposed to level 1, minimal support needs, and level 3, significant support needs).  So I’m not just “entry level” but pretty advanced, as it were.

My evaluator gave me the level 2 assessment because though I have a full-time job, it is clear that I am not thriving nor keeping up with many typical requirements of living (there’s more to it than just that, but that’s a summation).  I guess that probably means that sooner or later, my ad hoc, slipshod edifice will crumble.  But this is no surprise to me.  I’ve been crumbling for a long time.

I’m one of those houses built on sand, so to speak, without a foundation, and so it is fundamentally unstable and prone to breakage.  I don’t really have the wherewithal to repair it myself, though.  I’ve never been very good at taking care of myself.  I can take care of other people quite well, or at least I can take care of other people in certain ways.  But I’m not very good for me.

This poor self-care is not something I can correct with just an attitude or perspective adjustment; believe me, I’ve tried for decades in a great number of ways.  It appears just to be part of how my mind works.

So, don’t be surprised if, at some point, I just completely fall apart and implode or explode and am gone.  I know that I don’t have it in me to save myself; if I did, I would have done so long ago.  I’m smart and capable and have many abilities, but I do not have much of a capacity to bring them to bear on practical matters—or, well, on certain kinds of practical matters.  There are some such things I’m quite good at, but other important things have no hold in my mind.

I’m not sure what to do about all this.  Maybe I should start playing the Powerball™ or whatever it is.  I have never done so other than on occasion in the distant past as part of a group purchase of a ticket or some such.  I’ve always known that the math is such that there is essentially zero chance of any person winning the lottery, at least the big ones.

I used to tell my patients, if you’re in the store anyway, and you’ve got a couple of bucks that you might otherwise spent on candy or chips, then sure, go ahead, play the lottery.  It’s a bit of fun, and supposedly the proceeds or profits go to educational purposes (I have my doubts, but never mind).  But I always said to them that they should never take a special trip driving to the store to get a lottery ticket, because they were more likely to die in a car crash on the trip to get their ticket than they were to win.

Of course, if dying is a kind of winning for you, that may not be too much of a disincentive.  Anyway, I don’t have a vehicle of any kind, so I’m unlikely to get in a car crash on such a trip; I’m more likely to twist my ankle.

I’m sorry, I know there’s been no real reason or rhyme to this blog post.  I’m just allowing randomly firing neurons to express themselves.  I don’t know for sure if this is even intelligible to anyone but me (though I would give high credence that it is, based on past experience and as objective an assessment of my writing as I can make).  Thanks for reading, in any case.  I hope you have a good day.

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“I have seen the writing on the wall…”

It’s Monday again, unfortunately, and‒also unfortunately, certainly for you‒I am writing another blog post.  I thought that I had brought the mini lapcom back to the house with me on Friday, but apparently I didn’t do that.  I remember thinking about bringing it, but evidently that’s as far as I got.  I guess it’s not too important except for the fact that writing on the smartphone really seems to be exacerbating the arthropathy in my thumbs.

As far as I know, no one can tell any difference between my writing on the phone versus the computer anyway.  Maybe that shit’s all in my head, like all the rest of the shit of which my head is full.  Still, if I want my thumbs to recover, I should probably give myself a break from writing on the smartphone.

Of course, what I probably should do is stop wasting everyone’s time with this stupid blog.  I’m quite sure that some if not all of the people who read my posts do so out of politeness.  If I stop writing them, there will probably be a few people who will feel at least a small‒perhaps unnoticed but nevertheless real‒sense of relief.  I know that many of the things we all regularly do are pretty much pointless and are pursued out of a sense of duty or just politeness.

Not that I’m against politeness in general.  I have a few general attitudes toward things that I express as aphorisms, and two of them are:  Written language is the lifeblood of civilization, and courtesy is the lubricant of civilization.  But some things we are trained to think of as courtesy‒like where the utensils go in a place setting, or to greet other people with false* questions about their health and wellbeing‒are just customs, not really ways of avoiding abrasion in one’s interactions.

Anyway, the pointless that I’m making is, I suspect that not only am I doing something here that’s literally futile, it’s probably actually detrimental, as with so many of the things I do when I try to be positive.  I’m chewing up at least a little bit of my readers’ necessarily finite bandwidth, or RAM, or whatever metaphor you prefer, with my personal chaos.  I’m injecting negativity into the worldviews of anyone who reads my stuff seriously, and though I don’t think I’m wrong in my negative outlook, I know there are other perspectives that are more uplifting while nevertheless not being entirely delusional.

How’s that for a left-handed compliment?

Okay, well, what else do I have to say?  Not very much, I fear.  I am quite tempted just to stop doing this‒in case you can’t tell‒but not in order to free up my time or energy to write fiction or do music or art or anything creative.  I just sometimes feel that I ought to go quiet, just shut up and stop inflicting myself upon the world, in however small a way.  It’s often been the case that when I try to do good things, or creative things, in the long term it ends up blowing up in my and everyone else’s face(s).

If I just stop writing this‒if I just stop everything‒I wonder how long it would take for anyone really to notice.  I don’t ever seem to be good at getting attention when I’m hoping to do so.  Would the converse happen if I were to try not to get attention?  Or would it be more of the same?

Or am I, by speculating on such things, recognizing that I am trying to get attention by trying not to get attention, if that makes sense?

Who knows?  Who cares?  Why bother?

Not me.  I don’t know.  And I don’t have any good reason.

I hope you have a good day.

*I say “false” because, when people ask you how you’re doing or what have you, they don’t really want to know if you’re feeling any way but fine or great, and they certainly aren’t interested in hearing about any problems you might have, especially if you could actually use some help.

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And blogged with restless violence round about the pendant world

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday of course, which is why I opened with that greeting.  I appear to have survived World Suicide Prevention Day.  I suppose one could argue that this fact is a good thing, though it can also be argued the other way.  I’m of more than one mind on this subject, so I’ll perforce withhold my own judgment.

Of course, it is now the 11th of September in 2025 (AD or CE), the 24th “anniversary” of 9-11-2001.  That was a bad day, there’s no doubt about it, and it heralded more bad days to come‒though two days later was, for me, one of the two best days of my life.

Anyway, there was big news yesterday, with more than one violent and newsworthy event happening in the western US.  I’m not going to get into my specific takes on things, since I don’t really do that sort of thing here.  I’ll just say that I was annoyed by the senators and representatives on the democrat side (probably there were some on the republican side) who immediately sent their “thoughts and prayers” (i.e., nothing whatsoever) and then said things like “political violence is never acceptable in a democratic society”, some of them being broader and saying political violence is never acceptable, period.

I just had to point out that our country (the US) was founded via political violence‒the American Revolution, you know.  I also pointed out that, when government no longer respects the Constitution and the rule of law, and legislators (and law enforcement personnel) are not stepping up to hold people accountable to their freely sworn duties, and the judiciary is biased in favor of those who ignore the judiciary, then sometimes violence becomes the only recourse, just as was the case when this country was founded.

I will make one judgment-type statement and say, when someone has only engaged in speech of one kind or another‒even if that speech ironically seems to endorse or at least express acceptance of certain kinds of violence‒then the proper response is more speech or counter speech (by which I do not mean trying to shout someone down).  Speech is not the same as violence in nearly any situation‒unless you’re one of the Fremen of Arrakis in the older movie version of Dune‒and should not be countered with violence.

It is, however, less scary to use violence against someone who is not immediately threatening violence than against those who actually are threatening or ordering or enacting violence.  That, though, is the path of cowardice.

Naked house apes are, finally, just apes.  If they recognized and accepted that fact, then they could be on guard against the baser primate drives and habits and instincts that no longer serve them well in the modern world.  But so many of them seem, either implicitly or explicitly, to consider themselves something other than animals, and that delusion lays the groundwork for much error, which can be catastrophic and tragic.

It’s a bit like someone believing for no good reason that their car is partly self-steering, and that once the cruise control is on, they don’t even need to watch traffic or steer for themselves.  Things are not going to turn out well for such a person.  And unfortunately, things are likely to go badly for other, perhaps more sensible, people who just happen to be near the first person.

“Heavy sigh,” to quote Justine from The Accountant (and The Accountant squared, which is what the name of the sequel is, apparently*).

In other, less momentous news, I practiced the guitar (and sang) a bit yesterday.  Among other things, I looked up the form of the “Blues” scale (and the major and minor pentatonic scales and the so-called Japanese scale, a slightly different pentatonic scale) and fiddled around with them.  Well, I guess I guitared around with them, actually, since a guitar is not a fiddle (though Jonny Greenwood has been known to use a bow on his guitar from time to time).

I did this because of a suggestion in the comments a bit ago by one of my old friends who is also a stellar guitarist.  He suggested that I might use a blues guitar bit for the possible lead on my song Come Back Again.  Unfortunately, I had to admit that I didn’t know specifically what that entailed.

I have a sensitive ego for such a self-hating person, so I ended up looking it up and playing with it to correct my shame.  I must admit, the blues scale is a real blast and sounds great for something so simple.  The pentatonic scales are a bit more boring, but I sort of already knew that.  I don’t expect that I’ll ever be an improvisational player; I tend to have to plan things out and lay them out and think them through and do trial and error.  But still, it never hurts to practice one’s scales.

Well, actually, when one’s arthropathy is acting up, it can hurt to practice, and it often does.  But that’s not exactly what I meant, as I suspect you already knew.

I hope you all have a good day, and don’t dwell too much on political violence, recent or older.

TTFN

*One could expand out The Accountant2 to be The AAccccoouunnttaanntt, and we could then group like variables together, which would get us The AAaaccccoouunnnntttt, or The A2a2c4o2u2n4t4.  It’s probably not as catchy that way, but I suspect the title character of the movies would appreciate it.  Of course, the preceding presumes that the “squared” bit on the original title applies to all the letters in the word “Accountant”, since it’s one word.  Otherwise, in traditional mathematical notation, it would end up being The Ac2ouan2t3.

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Discussions of my “first draft” styles and a bit of shameful self-promotion

I wrote yesterday’s post on my miniature laptop computer‒what I call a “lapcom” if you remember, and even if you don’t‒and today I am writing this on my smartphone, because I didn’t feel like lugging the lapcom when I left the office.  It’s not done deliberately (by me), but I am curious about something.

You see, to my surprise, yesterday’s post appears to have been rather popular and successful.  I say “to my surprise” because to me it felt rather disjointed and erratic and like it didn’t go anywhere.  I’m not sure why that is or to what it is in response, or indeed, whether it was merely a fluctuation in a chaotic system and had nothing whatsoever to do with any particular thing I had done.

Still, as you may know, I do feel that I write differently when using different tools for doing it.  On the lapcom, I tend more easily to run off at the page, if you will, because typing on a word processor is just so easy and natural for me.  That doesn’t necessarily make the writing better, though.  I fear that I get too verbose sometimes.

And, of course, writing on the smartphone is less fluid, more cumbersome.  It also tends to exacerbate the arthropathy in my thumbs, for what are probably obvious reasons.

Pen and paper‒for first drafts, anyway‒ is certainly my most long-standing method of writing, and I don’t think I tend to get quite as carried away with that as with typing.  I suspect, but don’t by any means know for certain, that the things I write by pen and paper‒the fiction, at least‒are somewhat better, or at least more fun, than what I write on either a phone or a computer.

Here’s a bit of a rundown.  The following stories I wrote by hand in the first draft, having no other options:  Mark Red, The Chasm and the Collision, and my long short story Paradox City.  I also wrote my stories House Guest and Solitaire with paper and pen, the latter in one sitting, the former way back in high school.

I wrote the first draft of Son of Man at least partly on a very small smartphone that I really liked.

The Vagabond is a bit of a mixed bag.  I started it while at university, and finished the first draft while in med school.  Part of the first draft was written by hand (i.e., with pen on paper) but most of it was written on a Mac SE using the good old word processing program WriteNow.  Does anyone out there remember that one?

The rest of my stories, at least the published ones, were written on mini laptop computers (well, some here and there would have been on full-sized ones) from the beginning.  Most notable of these, perhaps, is Unanimity, which is very long.  But many of my “short stories” were written on regular keyboards, including the other two stories in Welcome to Paradox City, and my “short” stories, Prometheus and Chiron, “I for one welcome our new computer overlords”, Hole for a Heart, Penal Colony, Free Range Meat, and In the Shade, the latter of which‒like House Guest‒appears only in my collection Dr. Elessar’s Cabinet of Curiosities.

Oh, right, and of course Outlaw’s Mind, Extra Body, and The Dark Fairy and the Desperado have all been written (so far) on the lapcom.

If anyone out there has read a sampling of some of these, or all of them, and can give me any considered feedback on any overall difference in quality between the means of writing, pros and cons, I would certainly appreciate it.

And if any of you haven’t read any of the above, well…what are you waiting for?  If you’re a fan of fantasy/sci-fi/horror, you might like some or all of my stuff.  If you’re not sure where to start, by all means, I’ll give you recommendations based on your personal preferences, if I can.

I suspect that The Chasm and the Collision would have the broadest popular appeal, especially for people who like the Harry Potter books and similar stories.  Son of Man is probably my purest science fiction story, but this is not “space opera” type science fiction.  “I for one welcome my new computer overlords” is basically science fiction*, too, in case the title didn’t clue you in.

Everything else is horror of one kind or another.  Most of my horror is supernatural in one sense or another, and I veer into the borders of Lovecraft’s universes in at least two stories**.  Mark Red is supernatural and in some senses horror-adjacent, since it involves vampires and so on, but it’s really more a teen/young-adult supernatural adventure, a story originally intended to be a manga.

My darkest story has no supernatural elements in it at all.  That’s Solitaire; it can be had in stand-alone form for Kindle, and it also appears in the middle of Dr. Elessar’s Cabinet of Curiosities.

Well, that’s been about as much self-promotion as I think I’ve ever done here before.  I didn’t really intend to do it, but once I got going on discussing my various story drafts, it just seemed to go that way.  I hope I haven’t been too insufferable.  I’m really not a raving egomaniac, though I may be some other type of raving maniac.

I hope you all have a good day.

*And I guess Extra Body is sort of light-hearted sci-fi.  It’s even somewhat comical, as my story If the Spirit Moves You is a sort of supernatural comedy (expect no laugh-out-loud moments, though, since they are dry comedy at most).

**The Death Sentence, which appears in Welcome to Paradox City, and In the Shade, mentioned above and in my other collection.

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“Vast forms that move fantastically to a discordant melody”

There may come a week when I will start the work week of blog posts off without mentioning that the day is Monday.  But it is not this week.

And yes, indeed, it is now Monday, the beginning of another “traditional” work week, and I am writing my first blog post of the week, and I have no idea what I’m going to write other than that I knew I would almost certainly mention the fact that it is Monday.  For future reference, this particular Monday is September 8, 2025 (AD or CE) and is thus the second Monday in September.  Isn’t that all just riveting information?

Well, it’s not much, but it may very well be the best I have for you—and it may not even get this good again for the rest of the post.  Then again, maybe I’ll come up with something brilliant or at least amusing before the end of the next several hundred words.  And that will have made it all worthwhile, you wagering your precious, irreplaceable time on this blog post being interesting, let alone informative.  I’d advise against you wagering a lot of money on it, but you do you, as they say nowadays*.

What else should I talk** about now?  I don’t really know.  I don’t think I have anything interesting to say.  Nothing new or interesting has happened in my life, nor would any such thing be expected to happen.  I was in too much pain even to go for much of a walk on either Saturday or Sunday—just a half-mile stroll to the local convenience store.

I’ve tried mainly to rest and watch interesting and occasionally even educational videos on YouTube, and to read a little bit here and there.  On Sunday afternoon I started watching a bit of football (after I did my laundry), but I lost interest in that pretty quickly.  Really, the only good thing about this weekend, other than getting some rest, was that I had a nice phone conversation with my sister.

Of course, there are certainly things going on in the nation and in the world that could be discussed, but there are plenty of other people discussing those things, and they tend to stress me out too much; it’s sometimes hard to accept the flagrant stupidity of so many members of the human race.  But then I recall that they are all just naked house apes, only a tiny fraction of whom ever truly rise above their broad primate natures, bringing other apes along for the ride.

But, hey, being called a primate is not an insult (and if it is, too bad for you, because odds are you are one).  They’re some of the smartest creatures on this planet.  They also have the capacity to work together in immense and intricate ways in order to survive and thrive, to help each other, to defend each other against the elements and predators and all sorts of other things.

On the other hand, they can also be a#sholes sometimes.  Humans have the disadvantage that their relative competence gives them the power to do great damage when they’re being as#holes—often largely to themselves,  both personally and collectively.  It’s certainly rare when someone does damage that doesn’t at least partly damage them, though the damage may be of a sort that they disdain, not knowing how it will impair them in the future, and possibly—often—not even recognizing, when it becomes clear that the damage has consequences, that it is of their own making.

What the hell am I talking about?  I’m not thinking of any specific cases or examples here, just in case you were wondering if I was.  I’m actually thinking of this in an abstract, almost mathematical way:  a formula, the characteristics of which one can see even when there are multiple unknowns.  It’s hard to say how generalizable the formula might be, and of course details would remain unknown until the thing is actually worked out.  Nevertheless, patterns can be seen ahead of time to some degree.

Jeez Louise, I’m kind of all over the place and still going nowhere right now, am I not?  I don’t know what to do but apologize.  So, here goes:  I’m sorry this post is incoherent and without any point.  I wish I had some brilliant thoughts and insights to share, but genius is as genius does, and by that measure, I am certainly no genius.

I wish I could become some kind of Surak for the human race, to help engender the worldwide embrace of and commitment to rationalism, to reason, to “logic”.  Alas, I doubt that I have it in me to be such a benefactor.  My natural inclination has always been to be a malefactor, but reason tells me I have no right to do harm to innocent people and things.

I wish I felt like writing fiction.  I can channel my dark self in fiction.  And it would be nice, so to speak, to finish telling the story of Timothy Outlaw, most of which is unknown to anyone but me, and some of which would be a revelation even to me if I were to continue to write it.  And that’s just one of several stories that lie fallow in my mind.

Oh, well.  None of it matters, anyway.  Still, I hope you all have a good day, one that presages a very good week.

*And they don’t even mean it as a clever euphemism for “go f#ck yourself”!

**I am using the term “talk” rather than “write” here deliberately, though pedants might insist that what I am doing now is not talking.  I disagree with such people, plainly, and if they say that writing on a word processor is not talking, then what about a nonverbal person who has only that means by which to communicate?  Are they not talking when they do their written communication?

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“With your feet on the air and your head on the ground…”

TBIF*!

Unusually for me, I am looking forward to this weekend, even though I don’t have any wonderful outings with my youngest in the offing.  I just need to rest, because in case you can’t tell, I’ve really been all over the place mentally this week.  I guess that’s not so unusual for me, at least not from outside (but it’s been atypically bad from the inside).  I’m sure it’s quite tedious and repetitive and depressing for you to keep reading about it.  Honestly, why in the world are you wasting your time with this bullshit?!?!?

I’m being a bit facetious just now‒or, rather, I was being a bit facetious.  I don’t really want you all to stop “wasting your time” with my blog.  No, indeed, I would rather you not only read all of my posts but also all of my books, and to spread the word and “like” and “share” them with everyone you know (and even those you don’t) on social media and elsewhere.

Speaking of liking and sharing, hey, why not share all of my songs and shit?  Put ‘em on your Spotify playlist or your iTunes or YouTubeMusic or Pandora or whatnot.  They’re there on all of those, supposedly.  Actually, I know they’re on YouTube and I know they’re on Spotify.  I have them on my own playlists, and I even occasionally sneak them into the background music playlist at work, though it’s slightly embarrassing.

Actually, come to think of it, the hold music for our office VOIP phones is a slightly edited version of Like and Share with a shorter intro.  We’ve even received compliments from people about it from time to time, and these are people who were on hold during discussions with salespeople!

All that bouncing around above of things I would want to promote can serve to highlight one of the big problems I have with myself:  I have too many “special interests”.

If I only had one focus, or just one main focus, I think I could become really good at it and maybe even contribute significant things.  If I were a full-time musician, for instance, I think I would become very good at that.  If I were able to focus on physics/mathematics I think I could really learn a lot of it quite deeply, and maybe even make contributions to science.

And we know that, when I committed to writing just for an hour or so a day, I wrote a lot of stories over the course of a few years, even while in stir.

Unfortunately, after focusing on one thing or mostly one thing for a while, I start missing the other stuff, or I just get distracted by the other stuff.  Every minute is an opportunity cost.  Of course, that’s true for everyone‒we all have to choose one path, and in choosing it, we must therefore not choose others, and that chosen path will determine future options that might have been otherwise.

I think maybe I just dwell on such facts more than most people do.  I suppose that’s one side-effect of having difficulty socializing:  I spend a lot of time with my own thoughts (or reading the thoughts of others, of course).

I also have a tendency to move back and forth between many books at one time.  Back when I was married, it used to irritate my (now ex) wife because I’d have seven or eight books at a time on my bedside table, many with more than one bookmark stuck in them.  To be fair to her, she was never very critical of it; she was (and still is, presumably) a very avid reader herself.  Anyway, that’s the sort of stuff I do.

It all means that I do know at least superficially about an awful lot of stuff, and of widely varying genres and contexts and subjects and topics and various other synonyms and near-synonyms**.  Currently, my non-fiction reading is bouncing between Lisa Randall’s Warped Passages, a physics book, which I mentioned before, and Cass Sunstein’s new book On Liberalism: In Defense of Freedom.

In my recent books alone (on Kindle) I have Japanese light novels, a book on political philosophy (see above), two physics books, a book about geometry applied to the real world in surprising ways***, a book about autism, a book about the Beatles and the recording of their songs, a book on a current issue in sociology/psychology, and so on.  This should give you a locally scaled example of how my mind goes all over the place.

For the most part, I cannot complain about having many interests.  It would be nice if I had someone with whom to share at least some of them, as used to be the case, but if wishes were horses we’d all need to carry manure shovels with us everywhere we go (and not just metaphorically, as we already do).

So, anyway, my mind is all over the place, but this week there have been several stretches in which I had no interest in any subject.  When that happens to me, I know I’m really spiraling down deep into the depression thing.  Hopefully, though, if I can truly get some extra mental rest this weekend, it will regress a bit.

I hope you all have as good a weekend as it’s possible for you to have‒and if you’ve been here for a while, you know that my take is that you always have the best weekend you could possibly have, because as soon as things happen, they become inevitable, since you cannot undo events that have already taken place.

This also means you always have the worst weekend possible, of course, by logical necessity.  But that’s not horrible‒after all, if you consider most weekends, you can realize, “Hey, if this really has been the worst my weekend could possibly have been, well that’s pretty cool, because it hasn’t really been that bad.”

I’ll talk to you on Monday, barring (as always) the unforeseen.

*Thank Batman it’s Friday, for those of you who have not yet seen this from me.

**Could you call those “perisynonyms”?  Well, I know you could call them that, but I mean, does anyone think it might catch on, and is the meaning fairly obvious?

***Jordan Ellenberg’s Shape.  I strongly recommend this and his previous book How Not To Be Wrong if you want to kindle (no pun intended) or rekindle a love of mathematics.  He narrates the audiobook versions of his books, and he is an excellent teacher.

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“Remember: All you’ll be is all you’ve been”

It’s Wednesday morning, quite early, and as is the case nearly every Wednesday, I am struggling not to incorporate some version of the first line from She’s Leaving Home by the Beatles* into my writing.  Oops, it looks like I failed in that struggle.  Well, at least I put the actual line in a footnote instead of quoting it in the main body of the post.

Speaking of songs and lyrics, I want to apologize to anyone who feels disappointed by the fact that I still have yet to start writing a song based on the trigger “humility”, and also that I haven’t done anything more with my previous tentative song, Native Alien.  I’m not sure I’m satisfied with the melody I have for it so far‒at some time in the future, I may redo it.  Or I may go back to it and find that I like the melody and chords, after all.  For that, we can all only wait and see; I don’t know much more about what will happen than you all do.

As for other incomplete songs, I have no fewer than two “videos” of such critters on my YouTube channel:  Mercury Lamp, which is really just a kind of demo, but which I like, though I haven’t felt like expanding it yet, and Come Back Again, which is actually mixed and produced, after a fashion, but is far from being in releasable form.

The lyrics of the latter song are quite old‒I wrote them (with more recent slight modifications) while I was in college, and reproduced them from memory when I decided to record the tune.  I had a little spiral notebook** that I sometimes wrote “poems” in, and this song was one of them, or a combination of such poems, originally.  Though it was a long time after writing the words that I ever formally wrote down the tune, the tune was in my head since not long after I wrote the poem.

Actually, there was somewhat more to the poem(s) than appears in the song now.  There’s a sort of prelude of three couplet lines, which I recorded and sang, but I decided it was too stilted and moany/whiny to start out the song.  I replaced it with a collection of “Aah, ah ah ahh…” singing, which I think works better, though I secretly*** left one faint track with the initial singing, which one can here and there just faintly detect in the background.

Anyway, as I said, I’m fond of the lyrics and the melody, and though I always just wing it on my harmonies****, I like the ones here.  I also like my little bass riff and my looped, reversed drum beat pattern.  The whole thing has many elements that I like.

[As an aside, here is a fun fact:  I was relistening to this song a few times recently, since it has obviously been on my mind.  On the side bar on YouTube where it gives further video suggestions/options when you’re watching something, it also gives you little buttons by which you can narrow down the available recommendations.  The first of these was fairly unsurprising, as it read “More from Robert Elessar”.  But the next one allowed me to choose to narrow my suggestions to “Progressive Rock”.

Evidently, the YouTube algorithm considers my unfinished song to be most consistent with the genre of progressive rock.  I’m not at all disappointed by that.  By all means, group me in with people like Pink Floyd and Yes and Kansas.  I’ll take that designation without any complaint at all.]

But of course, this song is really not in any kind of shape to be held up against any of those bands’ works.  The mix is uneven/unbalanced and still quite messy and blurry; the timing is at least slightly off in a great many places*****; and there are other technical issues.  Also, the arrangement is not quite to my liking.  For one thing, I’d like to add a bit of lead guitar to it; it feels too low in pitch overall to me, without any real bright sounds.  It’s not a song with a bright atmosphere, perhaps, but a range of pitches and timbres and so on is still desirable (at least to me).

Anyway, I’m mildly frustrated because I still don’t have any decent thoughts on a lead guitar part nor do I have the gumption to try to clean up the mix.

I will, however, embed the “video” here, and I would be delighted to receive any feedback or ideas you want to share.  Try not to be too cruel, if you can help it, please; I’m sometimes surprisingly fragile and also sometimes horribly spiteful, though I try not to act on or express any of those reactions.

Thank you very much.

*”Wednesday morning at five o’clock as the day begins…”

**Not precisely “a little black book with my poems in”, but not too far from that, either.

***Well, it was a secret.  I guess it’s not really a secret now, though the words still are.

****In Like and Share, I even just spontaneously did the whistling that appears in the bridge while I was recording my (also improvised) harmonies, and I liked that outcome quite a lot.  There was only one take on them, and that’s what you hear in the song.

*****To cut me a bit of slack, I did have to record all the parts separately, with just inexpensive,  USB-based mics and basic computer recording programs, in the back room of an office that used to be a store in a strip mall, with no MIDI or anything of the sort, and only a little Katana practice amp for the guitar.  Then I mixed it using the “free” program Audacity, which doesn’t have a “beat finder” function like the notorious Pro Tools does.  All things considered, I think I made pretty good use of what I had.