It’s a gloomy day in the Bay Area, with one rainy storm moving through last night, another due tonight, with clouds and patches of sunlight today. We visited the Farmers Market in Montclair Village today, bought some produce, and a falafel.
Remarkably, I found no political news items or political commentaries today worth capturing for comment on this blog. Just as well; I spend too much time posting here about things that virtually no one will ever read, with no expectations about why anyone should care about my views about politics and religion.
I think I said a decade ago that posts here were in part items noted as research for my book — and that’s still true. But over the years many of my points have been made, about human nature, about conservatives and progress, about the apparent limits of human nature and cognition. I need to swing back to focusing on science fiction, and science, and noting current events only to the extent that they illustrate the broader picture I’m trying to assemble, and knit them all into a final product. Yet even so, that might produce a book… that perhaps a few hundred people would read.
A comment has been going around on Facebook that struck a nerve, since that book with my essay was just published and I don’t know how anyone will notice. I had a link to one version of the comment, but that link has disappeared. I’ll just quote the comment:
The real tragedy of being a writer isn’t rejection. It’s finally getting published and realizing nobody cares.
Of course these days *so much* is being published, no one can keep up. Anyone can write a blog, or self-publish a book, and why should anyone care, outside a few friends and family? Or taking the opposite POV, how much content by other people should one be expected to keep up with? No one comments on my blog; but then I don’t comment on anyone else’s blogs, not even the ones I read regularly. But let me not dwell on this.
Except to imagine that maybe I have some deep, original insight, in that essay, and in my book, that others might notice.
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So, what’s happening now? It’s mid-November. 2025. I turned 70 this year. I’m still pretty healthy, I think, compared to some of the comments from Facebook friends my age and their health problems. I’m slowing down a bit. A walk that took 30 minutes 5 years ago now takes 33 minutes. But I can still walk. I can still exercise, biceps and triceps and so-on, with 10-pount dumbbells. I see all my doctors regularly, as advised.
My life is framed by the goal of writing a book that combines the understanding of modern science, as opposed to ancient, intuitive thinking, and how science fiction has or has not anticipated that understanding. It’s an ambitious, open-ended project: no matter how many books I read toward it, there will always be more to read. Perhaps I’m stuck in a Don’t Let the Perfect Be the Enemy of the Good cycle.
At the same time, I’m enjoying a vicarious (not sure this is the right word) family life via my partner and his two kids, boys, one who lives in the Bay Area, the other in LA, and at each end they have kids and extended families of cousins and in-laws. As I posted about on Monday, about last weekend’s trip to LA. We have traditions of visits back and forth at Thanksgiving and Christmas, but given their growing families, we don’t depend on them working out again. We’ll see.
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