Maybe my suicide attempt was the best thing that I’ve ever done for myself. Yes, my injuries were so severe that I barely survived. But I was finally able to find my true self, where I had sort of lost myself before.

Yes, my injuries reduced my IQ by 20 or 30 points; but maybe that was a good thing. So perhaps it was both the best and the worst thing i did for myself.

Maybe i thought about stuff too much. I had a lot to learn about letting go; i still do.

From my point of view, i regard this reality as perhaps being the afterlife. Maybe I did die and this is the afterlife. Why not? Any evidence to the contrary?

So i try to live like this is it. (And i hope to all the gods i know that this IS it — if there’s a whole other life to endure, boy i am gonna be pissed.)

So i just write what i write, and i don’t worry about it. It’s not worth worrying about anything anyway. Everything is temporary.

So I suppose i should tell you how I came to jump off the bridge — i keep not doing that.

My girlfriend, who lived in Ottawa, had unceremoniously dumped me — through a dear John letter, no less — and so i had decided to kill myself. (I know, right … get a life.) And by this point, I was a true Cornellian; so the proper way to kill myself was to jump off the bridge.

Typical of the early 1990s, i wasn’t confiding my difficulties in anyone … let alone actually seeking help. Nobody paid much attention to how i was doing, believe me — i gave them no reason to.

What might’ve been a clue is that i wrote a story for my Creative Writing class about a kid who jumped off a dock high dock at low tide in order to die, but it was the early 90s and a lot of the short stories were probably a little violent or gruesome. I probably should’ve just made a little more of an effort to talk to this Creative Writing teacher more — i was very attracted to her, but not confident enough to meet with her outside of class.

Ironically, i became a lot more confident after the whole jumping-off-the-bridge thing. And i purposely ran into that same teacher during a book signing in 2013 and joked with her about having a big crush on her as a student. She seemed very not-available in 1992, and even more-so in 2013 (with young kids) — and very successful, with more books and a teaching gig at Boston College.

There’s nothing significant in the details of a failed young romance. Happens all the time. Hey, at least it earned me mention in the Wikipedia article titled Cornell Gorge Suicides — the first survivor off of the main suicide bridge.

So here i am, still going.

I promised myself that i would put together a second book out of these blog entries, a sequel to anomaly (2001) that i was going to call Better Off.

I made it through Cornell University all the way to my senior year … before i really went crazy.

My earlier interest in Anne Sexton set the stage for my fascination with the writer George Eliot (the pen name of Mary Ann(e) Evans) when i became an English major at the beginning of junior year.

I guess i was just lucky to have taken a class early on where we read George Elliot at all — how did i know who i would really like? I’d like to think that i took good advantage of opportunities i had — maybe enough to make up for the opportunities i missed. Lots of people probably end up finishing college with majors they didn’t really want, but they did it because they thought it would prepare them for the “best” job. I suppose i was really privileged (as well as ballsy enough) to be able to do what i wanted — i didn’t care about making money.

Maybe if I hadn’t embraced romance, i would have made it through college more easily (i.e., without going crazy). Maybe i would’ve ended up teaching physics somewhere, if i hadn’t switched to English … if i hadn’t fallen in love.

I really don’t know whether that would’ve been better or not. Maybe my fascination with love was as misguided as my fascination with math and physics. Maybe in the end i’m happy to be alone and have lots of time to do whatever i want.

Maybe i never had any idea of what i really should do, … what would be best for me.  Like most of my classmates i mostly stuck with things i was good at. Maybe none of my choices would’ve made any difference.

My troubles with depression probably go back to freshman year of college, at Cornell University.

I may have been a little depressed in high school too, but nothing like what happened at Cornell. I had gotten in over my head academically, and i retreated within myself. My physics professor didn’t care that i had stopped coming to class, and my friends just let it slide. Outwardly, i seemed OK most of the time; but inwardly, i had become obsessed with suicide.

There was something of an under-culture of suicide at Cornell in the 1980s & ‘90s. There were many grisly jokes about self-harm (and roommate harm) going around in those days. When it came close to exam time, people would yell to each other as we were crossing one of the bridges (especially the one with no guard-rails) that went over the deep gorges cutting through campus — “Don’t jump! It’s not worth it!”

That’s what suicide had been reduced to — a joke.

And i had become obsessed with a Peter Gabriel song, called “Mercy Street” about the poet Anne Sexton who eventually killed herself. I used to put the CD in my stereo and set it to infinite-repeat on that song; i would lie on my bed and listen to it for hours.

Oh no, i didn’t have any problems.

[There’s a YouTube link at the bottom of this entry, in case you’re not familiar with the song.]

My roommate was so busy with school that i rarely saw him, and he didn’t know how bad it had gotten. I used to go up to the study lounge on the top floor of our high rise dorm in the evening and think about how it would feel to jump off the balcony. And of course the bridges too.

https://youtu.be/DYw9UrsFJa4?si=prGW0KxoSC-dMDck

This was a day of missing Sandi. It’s the 13th, and 13 was always our number. We got married on the 13th of the month in the year 2013 at 13 o’clock.

Plus, Sandi was a witch. Either you get it or you don’t. I was about to go to bed without having made any entry for today. You know, maybe give myself a little break. It’s frickin’ Saturday!

So yeah, i was missing Sandi. I was missing having my friend here with me … my love … but not to be. Everything is temporary. I know that’s a lyric from the Sundays, but i don’t know where else it’s from — and right now I don’t feel like freaking asking Google. (and don’t even get me started with ChatGPT.)

Of course I was missing Ojo too. The photos program on my iPhone made me a little Ojo video yesterday, i think … it was very sweet … of pictures from 2024.

Just keep getting up every day: Ignore the losses. Ignore the defeats. Just keep going as best you can. Don’t listen to the haters. I hope you have a good voice inside you that you can listen to. I don’t think the voice inside me was always very good; it is now, but it took some discipline.

Love takes discipline. That’s what I learned in marriage. Not some abstract, romantic view of love; but a practical one.

I hope you find love out there, my friends. Even if only from yourself.

Writing a story basically comes down to emotional manipulation. To tell a story well, the writer has to be able to manipulate the reader … emotionally. A little, at least. And the reader, they have to want to be manipulated. They’re choosing to be manipulated by whomever they’re reading.

And that’s why i have trouble writing fiction — because i don’t like performing emotional manipulation, as it involves feeling unpleasant things; basically emotional prostitution.

In the end, you write primarily for yourself. Sure, you can say that you have a specific audience in mind; but if you don’t like what you’re writing, you’ll either stop or change it. You’re writing for yourself.

I guess that’s why i’m more comfortable writing non-fiction … even if it’s just non-fiction about me — the most boring topic imaginable to everybody else.

Perhaps I should go back to writing other kinds of non-fiction; maybe that would be a good compromise.

It’s worth a shot. I just have to find a topic.

The current Large Language Model AI is not AI of the Good-Old-Fashioned variety, is it? It’s not really intelligent at all. It can’t answer even fairly simple questions, unless it has the answer already written down for it.

It has no capacity to understand meaning, does it? No.

Current AI is a major disappointment. Sure, it can do some nifty tricks; but it’s nowhere near “intelligent”, let alone self-aware.

Large Language Model AI is fun, and can do some drudge work; but it’s just a pretty façade. (Basically, it’s plagiarism AI; it uses patterns detected in huge amounts of data to “answer” questions or make pictures — it’s the 2025 version of a kid in the ‘70s copying the text of a World Book Encyclopedia article nearly word-for-word for a 3rd grade assignment.)

Maybe sometime in the future, AI will get closer to real intelligence; but it ain’t there yet … not by a long shot.

[When i Google “shortcomings of current AI,” it provides the following pretty good answer — ]

Current “AI” systems, including large language models, lack true understanding, creativity, and common sense, operating primarily as sophisticated pattern-matching tools. Beyond these fundamental technical constraints, a number of ethical, data, and operational shortcomings pose significant challenges. 

If i won’t be able to remember new people i meet (or at least not very well), is it worth meeting them in the first place? Probably not.

Do i tend to watch new TV shows or read new books? No. I mostly watch & read the shows & books that i’m already familiar with; they are more comforting and predictable.

Is that a little cowardly? Maybe. I don’t care.

It’s part of why i don’t want another romantic relationship — it’s too difficult; it hurts too much. It’s a lot easier being alone.

My memory isn’t going to get any better. I’m probably as healed as i’m going to be. Sandi did her best to accept me as i am, but i knew she was frustrated by my limitations — who wouldn’t be?

Maybe it wasn’t fair to Sandi, the whole thing; maybe i never should have put her through all that. Yes, i did help her to get through terminal cancer; and for that i’m glad. My time with Sandi was the high point of my life; maybe it was enough.

I guess i finally got to the point where i could love myself for myself, shortcomings notwithstanding.

This is it. This is life.

It doesn’t matter if i don’t remember everything. I’ll remember enough.

Whatever you end up writing, it’s just the best you could do on some particular day. You always do your best — it’s just not always that great.

Writing is merely a job. It’s just something you do, and if you’re lucky you get paid to do it. Every single time you sit down and you write something, you give it your all; you put everything you’ve got into it and … who knows what happens. Maybe nothing. (But it’s your nothing, and you earned it.)

And then you do it again the next day. And the next.

Language Is About Simplification

Very finite words must represent an extremely complex reality — not quite infinite, but close.

In the end, rendering reality into language has its limitations.

What terms sink into ambiguity?

How do you balance the simple vs complex?

At what level is too much detail lost? (And are you willing to accept the compromise?)

Goy vs Yid, Wrong/Right, Native/Colonizer, et cetera. Binary vs Non-Binary. Popular alternatives come and go. And two is rarely the true number of choices in a situation. Usually it’s at least three or four, if not seven.

We don’t have much evidence to measure the past; we have to infer a lot and make a lot of guesses. Many of them probably are wrong. Writing down some version of the past is just a starting point; it’s not the end.

And there’s a lot of courtesy in language, which makes it cloudy.

~

Unintended homonym: “finite” rendered as “fine Knight” (renderer’s capitalization).

Since my bank provides me with monthly FICO scores, i don’t bother to check the so-called credit bureaus, Experian, TransUnion, and whatever the hell the third one is called — Equifax.

But on a friends advice, I go on Experian to check — she wants me to maybe co-sign a loan for her, and that’s the bureau her mortgage service uses — and it gives me some score about 150 points lower than my own banks’s FICO score, and i figured that’s odd, but whatever. So i sign up for their free service, and i’ve been a “Member of Experian” now for like a month, and mysteriously my “credit score” there has slowly risen about 50 points — but at the same time it stayed exactly the same in my own bank (which is still a hundred-and-some points higher).

So now i get that Experian is just trying to sell me their stupid credit services, like credit monitoring or credit protection, blah blah blah. It’s a bunch of crap.

They are in business to help you “improve” your credit score — double-talk for paying them to artificially improve it. It’s just a pay-to-play scheme; the more of their services you sign up for, the more they raise the credit score they report in your name.

It’s a scam.

Experian is just another for-profit company that got in big with other banks. They reported making $7.5 billion in the last fiscal year. The difference is that they’re one of the big three who hold your “official” credit score hostage.

So if i want to borrow money, i do so from my own bank — and i don’t care what Experian, TransUnion, and Equifax say.

Turns out your credit score from one of the three for-profit “credit bureaus” means very little.

Fuck ‘em.

Arrange lending from your own bank.

Ignore the “Big Three.”