2020

● Wednesday, 1-1-2020:   2019 was the year of:

○ Stopping using rubbing alcohol on my face.
○ Writing and posting the car-crash argument.
○ Writing the second Dr. Kong trial brief.
○ Writing the arguments against Rito G’s malpractice lawsuit against me and my boss, Scott Warmuth, Esq.

● Wednesday, 1-8-2020:   Today in a deposition, the defense lawyer asked my client why she waited so long to file her (workers’ compensation) claims. I objected, first, on the grounds that the question was unintelligible, and, second, on the grounds that it called for speculation. The defense attorney replied, “Speculation about her own mental state?” To which I replied, “Any answer to a nonsensical question is inherently speculative.” [Rereading this in August 2020, I would supplement the objection with the ground that the question is argumentative and assumes a fact not in evidence: it assumes that the time between the client’s injury and her claim-filing was too long. Or the question lacks foundation: it fails to establish that the time gap was too long.]

● Thursday, 1-9-2020:   I heard on the news that, just an hour or so after Iran retaliated against Donald Trump’s assassinating their General Suleimani (Iran retaliated by firing missiles at a U.S. airbase in Iraq), Iran shot down a Ukranian passenger jetliner. I blame that on Trump. Probably the Iranians interpreted that plane as a U.S. military aircraft coming to bomb them in retaliation for the missile strike. This consequence of Trump’s act of war was unintended and probably unforeseen, but entirely foreseeable. Why are people blaming Iran, and not Trump, who started the chain of events?

● Today, I cashed two of my paychecks at the bank. I finished the session by depositing a bit more than half of the money. I hand-counted the cash, and then the bank tellers counted it with the currency-counting machine. For the first time in my experience, my count was right, but the currency machine miscounted (undercounted). I caught the mistake, and brought it to the bank’s attention. I assumed one bill had gotten stuck inside the machine, but the explanation was slightly different (though the machine did indeed miscount—my count was correct).

● Monday, 1-13-2020:   You can have your cake and eat it too . . . if you buy two cakes.

● You can’t have your pet lamb and lamb-chops, too.

● Tuesday, 1-21-2020:   I got some good news today: my (annual) hearing test showed no deterioration of my hearing since my last hearing test.

● Friday, 1-24-2020:   Today for the first time I ate breakfast at Saigon’s Bakery, a little bakery diagonally across the street from where I work, at Scott Warmuth’s San Gabriel office, on Valley Boulevard. It was good. I usually eat a salad and toast at the local IHOP, but I’m suspending eating there; they only recently fumigated the place, and I want to wait for a while until any pesticide residues clear away.

● Saturday, 1-25-2020:   This is the statement of the philosophy club discussion topic for January 2020:

“The Natural, the Supernatural, and What can be Studied by Science: Is science only concerned with the empirical world? In addition, does science assume that only the natural world exists? Does science assume that a supernatural realm either does not exist, could not exist, or if the supernatural did exist, that it would be beyond the purview of science to study? These are common views about the nature of science—among scientists, philosophers, and lay people alike—but are all or any of them right?”

Here’s my brief, first-impression answer: There is no “supernatural.” If a god or angels or a devil, or such things, exist, they are part of the existing universe. The purview of science is all that exists. If whatever you call supernatural exists, science should attempt to examine it. Can science study a frog? Yes, of course. Can science study a monkey? Yes. Can science study a dolphin? Yes. Can science study a man? Yes. Can science study a god? If one actually exists, yes. If it doesn’t exist, science still studies it, by studying man, through the science of psychology.

● A United States government official recently criticized teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg, saying something like, “Why would you listen to her—does she have a college degree in economics?” My response: Well, when your house is on fire, do you call an economist, or the fire department? The fire department, of course. And you don’t need a college degree—in any subject—to know that. And you don’t need a degree in economics to know that a physically devastated planet is bad for the economy (if economic data says that such a world is better off, then, to that extent, economics is a flawed science—though the selfish rich may be better off). If you don’t understand that, your problem is not a lack of education—it’s a lack of intelligence.

● Wednesday, 1-29-2020:   Early this morning I dreamed—very pleasantly—that I was in a crowd of young people, as at a university, and a young woman and I decided, on impulse, to marry each other.

● Thinking about dreams; for at least several years I’ve had a recurrent dream: arguing with myself whether to abstain from smoking marijuana or to indulge in it. My impression is that, in those dreams, I want, I try, to abstain. But in the end it’s a losing battle. In real life, the situation is reversed: I’ve steadfastly remained abstinent from using psychoactive drugs (recreationally) for twenty-four years now.

● Thursday, 1-30-2020:   Early this morning, someone online wrote disparagingly of Donald Trump by contrasting him with Presidents George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan, saying that, though he disagreed with the latter two politically, at least they were respectful, etc. I considered replying, but then thought better of it. I was thinking of saying something like this: The difference between Trump and Reagan is that Reagan screwed the country politely; Trump screwed the country impolitely.

● Friday, 1-31-2020:   I woke from sleep just now with terrible leg cramps. It seemed to take 20 minutes or more for them (the cramps . . . not the legs) to subside.

● “Make America great again” involves a category mistake: Persons, and their works, can be great; but countries cannot be great.

● Saturday, 2-1-2020:   I went to get my car’s oil changed, and I got a surprise: they checked the oil, and told me I didn’t need to change it yet. So I’ll wait a few weeks more.

● I got a gold vermeil Montblanc ballpoint pen polished at the Montblanc store in the Topanga Plaza in Canoga Park today. Alex there helped me. If I want it polished more thoroughly, they can send it out for that, for a price. It would be worth it.

● Tuesday, 2-4-2020:   Donald Trump has a penchant for giving nicknames to his enemies, like Crooked Hillary, Crazy Bernie. I have one for him: Demolition Donald: today, our democracy; tomorrow, truth; the day after that, the planet!

● Wednesday, 2-5-2020:   It has been argued that the universe must have had a beginning. But if infinite space is possible, why isn’t infinite time, also, possible—in both directions?

● Saturday, 2-8-2020:   My boss, Scott Warmuth, has hired another lawyer, Eric Ellison, for the workers’ compensation department. Eric is very experienced in workers’ compensation law and is going to head the department. He made another attempt yesterday to persuade me to change my employment status: from independent contractor (paid on an hourly basis) to employee (paid by salary). I resisted. I’d have to learn how to do various functions on workers’ compensation cases that I haven’t done before. It will be less comfortable in the near term, but probably to my long-term advantage.

Now, on Wednesday, 2-12-2020, their tactic is clear: he (Eric) is handling all the depositions himself, drying up my source of income, trying to pressure me into converting to a salaried employee. I’ve been debating it with myself, and I’ve decided that I won’t give in. If there’s no more work with Scott Warmuth’s office, so be it. I’ll go back to handling depositions and court appearances for various other attorneys. I had an anxious night last night, mulling over my options, weighing their benefits and drawbacks. Today, I took my accustomed desert drive. In Lancaster, I stopped at a T-Mobile cell phone store, and a salesman showed me how to use the text-communication feature on my cell phone. One big advantage of going back to freelancing, working for various attorneys, is that I’ll once again have leisure time, which I haven’t had for the last four years or so, working for Warmuth. I haven’t had enough time even for exercise. Almost as if to answer my question, the drive, for the first time in a long, long time, was very pleasant, bordering on joyful! I’ve been trading money for time, precious time. Cutting back my work will give me a far better quality of life; I’m looking forward to my new life.

If I can’t survive that way, I can probably always go back to Warmuth and be a salaried employee. I believe they think well of me, of my professional ability. Or, perhaps, before rejecting it, I should inquire about the amount of the salary, though I could do that, too, later. Alas, I think I’d characterize it this way: I faithfully rode this train to the end of the line. Having reached that point, it’s time to gracefully step off.

● Thursday, 2-13-2020:   In his lecture/essay “The American Scholar,” Emerson urges American intellectuals to become independent of European thought by forming themselves into a sort of collective American thinker. As Professor Jennifer Cognard-Black puts it in her essay “The Essayist as Public Intellectual”: “To try to achieve a new nation of men and women—of people who will no longer mimic the ‘courtly muses of Europe’ but who will, instead, forge their own ideas and produce their own literature and art—Emerson calls on the young Harvard men to become a figure he names ‘Man Thinking.’ By this term, Emerson means a kind of scholarly collective consciousness of the best and the brightest, using their shared brain power to lead the country out from under the cultural thumb of Europe.” Emerson (according to Cognard-Black) goes on to set down certain principles or influences to which the thinker must adhere. For example, he “must appreciate the miracle of human empathy”; he “must understand that [he is] . . . bound to everything else in the universe and recognize [himself] . . . in nature”; he “must do as well as think.” Emerson’s most basic error here is this: a truly independent thinker is quintessentially an individual mind, not part of any collective consciousness, not even one dedicated to dislodging itself from another collective. And the independent thinker follows just his own principles, not ones prescribed by others, no matter how renowned the others may be.

● I think I have a slight cold. It’s so slight that I didn’t think I did have it—I wondered about it, but concluded not . . . until just now, when I’ve awoken with a very slight sore throat (in addition to the slight cough).

● I drove to the beach today. It was not as pleasant a trip as my ride to the desert yesterday.

● Saturday, 2-15-2020:   It’s been said that, based on their customers’ Internet search patterns, Google and Facebook know their customers better than those customers know themselves. It seems to me that, if Google or Facebook knows you better than you know yourself, you’re a pretty shallow person.

[Later note (5-8-2022): Shallow . . . or just not very self-aware.]

● Saturday, 2-22-2020:   On Monday (2-17-2020) I got a new desktop computer; yesterday, I got a new computer monitor.

● I’ve noticed a common dream pattern in myself: When I’m having trouble sleeping because of some bodily discomfort, like a dry mouth or a full urinary bladder, but I don’t get out of bed to relieve it, and I instead try to sleep through it, I find myself in shallow sleep repeating over and over a short dream element, or fragment, or pattern, or motto, with small changes in the settings. When I finally get up to remedy the physical need, I think to myself that I should have done it sooner, and I think that getting out of bed to take care of that need will also serve to reset (to end) the repeating dream pattern (and it always relieves both forms of discomfort). In this last dream, I was in the military, and I was assigned the task or mission to prove (or disprove) the thesis that the squad (defined in the dream as a group of 30 soldiers) was still relevant (that’s the logic of dreams!). In every scene, I managed to maintain the thesis, but toward the end I think I may have found a reason why it was false, or perhaps an exception to it.

● Thursday, 2-27-2020:   Today I handled my last trial (workers’ compensation) for Atty Scott Warmuth (Applicant Mimi Chu v. Hawaiian Gardens Casino). I ended on a high note, as it were: I prepared brilliantly and even wrote another excellent trial brief. We got a good settlement, so we didn’t actually try the case. The end of this phase of work is worthy of celebration; preparing for trials and writing trial briefs is very hard work, really worth much more than I was paid for it. It’s one thing if I’m doing a mixture of easy tasks (depositions) and hard ones (trials), as was true for several years. But lately they canceled all my depositions (they had someone else doing them), and gave me just trials, for the same pay rate. So this is a relief. I’ll get deposition work from other lawyers. I’ve already started doing depositions (I’ve done one so far for another lawyer, and he wants me to handle other appearances [not trials] next week). So things are looking up.

● Friday, 2-28-2020:   It’s a privilege and an honor (if not always a pleasure) to be a human being.

● 7-24-1999:   Here’s a Diary entry from 1999 (slightly revised on 2-28-2020): If I had to pick which came first, the chicken or the egg, I would, broadly speaking, pick the egg, on the reasoning that the more complex evolves from the simpler. The chicken is more complex than the egg. Eggs become chickens, but (though chickens produce eggs) chickens do not become eggs.

● Wednesday, 3-4-2020:   I got two calls in the last week from a voice from the past: Joey, a negotiator who worked for an associated law office when I had my own law office in Los Angeles in the 1990s. He was looking for work. Even if I had an office of my own and I needed a negotiator, I wouldn’t hire him; he was a bad person, dishonest, insulting. But I didn’t tell him that. His phone number: (310) XXX-XXXX. I note the number here, mainly so that I can determine whether a call is coming from him, so I can avoid returning it.

● Saturday, 3-7-2020:   That illness last week, perhaps especially because of the loss of appetite, left me even thinner; I was shocked to look at my naked body in the bathroom mirror. I looked emaciated, skeletal.

[Later note (May 2021): I’ve looked that way ever since. Apparently it’s not unhealthy for me: I feel healthy, and my mind is quite sharp.]

● There’s a positive correlation between wealth and freedom: The greater your wealth (up to a point), the greater your freedom. The poor person is not free to spend his time as he pleases: to survive, he must work; and the poorer he is, the more of his available time and energy he must spend working for others, to get enough money to survive (he’s a wage slave). Whereas, a rich person is free to use his time as he sees fit. He needn’t work at all, if he doesn’t want to, since he has enough money to live, and live well (he’s independently wealthy). And equality of freedom requires equality of wealth.

● Monday, 3-9-2020:   Desert ride. After a rocky start, it was pleasant. I ate breakfast at Tom’s # 25 in West Palmdale. I had my usual patty melt. It was mediocre: stale, and not hot.

● Sunday, 3-15-2020:   I again ate breakfast at Tom’s #25 in West Palmdale. I had my usual patty melt. This time it was very good: fresh and hot.

● Wednesday, 3-18-2020:   For years, I’ve been complaining, periodically, about the rear gate of this apartment complex sticking open, and asking to have a repairman sent to fix it. Finally, yesterday, I tried to fix it myself, and it worked: I just had to put some oil on the doorknob mechanism, and now it works perfectly.

● Friday, 3-20-2020:   Many months ago, I told the gardener here that I’d give him $200 toward the purchase of an electric leaf-blower if he bought it, to replace his polluting gasoline-powered one. He replaced it, and yesterday he asked me for money. I gave him $100 cash. I told him that this was all I could afford, because I’m not working now, which (at least the part about not working now) is true.

● Tuesday, 3-24-2020:   Well, here we are, in the middle of the so-called “novel-coronavirus crisis.” On second thought, that’s too optimistic, to say that we’re in the middle of it: we may be just at the very beginning of it. It’s affecting me, financially (so far, I haven’t gotten sick). Depositions, my sole source of income, have been suspended for now. So I have no income at all. I probably have sufficient savings to ride this out, but it will cause a considerable loss. After I pay my 2019 taxes in a week or so, I’ll have about $X,XXX cash in my home. If I need more, I have another $X,XXX in the bank, and then my stock market account. A few months ago, my stock market account was worth just under $XX,XXX. Last week it was down to $XX,XXX. In a panic, I told my broker to close my account and send me a check, but he talked me out of it, and I left the money in. I fear the market will fall much farther before it rebounds. I was overdue for a rest, for some time off of work, but this is too much of a good thing in that regard.

In the last few weeks, basic goods, like toilet paper, paper towels, and bottled drinking water, have been in short supply in stores. I was afraid of running out. But I’ve been persistent, and, little by little, augmented my supply—and now I have plenty of each item.

But I love the less-crowded streets and the lower gasoline prices. And it has been a learning experience; among other things, I’ve learned that distilled water is quite drinkable (I couldn’t tell the difference between it and regular drinking water).

One sentiment I’ve heard expressed about this crisis is “We’re all in this together.” Which is ridiculous! The rich and the poor are not in this together. The poor person’s very survival is at risk; not so for the rich man, who, even if he loses money, will remain rich; he must simply change his routine a little. For the poor man, it’s a calamity. For the rich man, it’s an adventure.

● Wednesday, 3-25-2020:   I have enough time to exercise as much as I want to, so I simply take my walk once a day; I’ve stopped doing it twice on any day. That’s a luxury.

● I ate my usual patty melt at Tom’s #25 Restaurant in Palmdale, and, from there, took a desert ride—truncated. It’s good that I truncated it, because I got back home in time to accept a deposition assignment for tomorrow (from Scott Warmuth’s office).

● Sunday, 3-29-2020:   I had my usual patty melt at Tom’s #27 Restaurant in East Palmdale, the first Tom’s Restaurant I ate at, many years ago.

● Wednesday, 4-1-2020:   I just got a pleasant surprise: In the wee hours of this morning, I couldn’t sleep, and I had occasion to read some of the entries at the beginning of this Diary. I was very favorably impressed with the quality of the thought and expression. I thought it was a gold mine! Which, incidentally, also shows the value of sobriety: I remember many years ago reading through some of the entries in an earlier Diary I kept when I was getting intoxicated every day, and they struck me as utter trash. (I started this document about eight years after I quit using drugs recreationally.) The contrast is very instructive indeed! (One lesson, for me: stay sober!) Another impression: I’ve come a long way, and grown a lot. Thank you, Richard!

● Sunday, 4-5-2020:   In the employment relationship, loyalty is a one-way street: the employer demands loyalty from his employee, but if the employer can ever make an extra nickel by cutting the employee’s pay, or replacing him altogether, he’ll do it without hesitation.

[Later note (2020): There’s a flaw in that reasoning: Though the employee is loyal to his employer while he’s working for him, the employee, too, if he can find a better job, will take it.]

● Well, well, well! I had posted many essays to the philosophy club website over the years. When that website went away, I collected my essays that I’d posted there and put them on a website of my own. There was just one essay that I couldn’t find. Well, I just now found it! It was on my computer, saved under the document title, “Universal Love.” I’ll add it to my essays website next week. This is the piece I spoke of in the 9-13-2013 entry, above, in this Diary.

● I’m very sensitive to how I spend my money. I love getting a good deal, and I’m infuriated when I get tricked into wasting my money. I should be equally concerned about how I spend my time, which I tend to waste badly. For example, I may spend an extra half hour traveling, to save five dollars, even thinking to myself that it’s nonsensical, considering that I make (or, now, made) fifty dollars an hour, and I worked full time! But I did it anyway, and I never quite justified it to myself, maybe thinking something to the effect that it wasn’t a strictly rational decision: it made me feel good (?!). . . . Yesterday, I cut off my left leg—I was curious to see how it would be to have just one leg. I know you might say that was very stupid. But, you know, it wasn’t an entirely rational decision. It wasn’t irrational; it was arational. Curiosity, on one hand, and inconvenience and pain, on the other, are not commensurable. There’s no direct tradeoff between those desiderata. Besides, it was only my left leg. I’m right-side dominant, so that leg was less important than my right leg. On second thought—no, it was stupid.

● Seven o’clock in the morning seems very early. But eight o’clock doesn’t seem early. Yet there’s only an hour’s difference; so if seven is early, eight should be early, too.

[Later note (2021): On the other hand, you could use that logic to conclude that every time is early: If 8:00 is early, so is 9:00 (since those times are just an hour apart); and if 9:00 is early, so is 10:00 (since those times are just an hour apart), and so on.]

● Someone wrote this online:

My mantra for life: “and in the end, the love you take, is equal to the love, you make.” – J. Lennon & P. McCartney.

I thought of writing this reply (but didn’t reply):

So, if you don’t “take” as much “love” as you “made”; do you feel cheated? It occurs to me that that line by the Beatles, which at first blush sounds positive, encouraging people to give, actually means the opposite, implying that the point of it all is to take as much as possible, and that giving is merely a means to getting. The line may be an example of the Beatles’ famous penchant for irony.

● Tuesday, 4-7-2020:   During this no-paid-work time of pandemic, I’m listening to my required continuing legal education audio tapes; rereading books on writing; and listening to general-education audio programs. Mostly, though, I’m relaxing; whatever I do that involves work (in the broader sense), I do at a very leisurely pace. I’ve reverted to taking a (30 – 90 minute) nap almost daily. As always, my favorite time of day, unless I have occasion to do some writing (which is even more enjoyable), is dinnertime, when I eat and watch (non-educational) television shows or movies. I begin my dinner every day at about 3:30 p.m., and I go to bed for the night at 6:00 – 7:00 p.m. I’m trying to keep to certain rules about my schedule, to avoid getting into bad habits, and wasting even more time than I already do. For example, I’m trying to not watch purely entertainment television before dinnertime.

● Thursday, 4-9-2020:   Yesterday marked a dramatic turning point in my relationship with my next-door neighbors to the east, in apartment 3. Since they first came here, they’ve been unremittingly very hostile. Yesterday, and continuing today, they’ve been almost pacific. I don’t know what caused it, but I’m certainly for it!

● Friday, 4-10-2020:   Here’s a note I was about to leave on a clothes-dryer in the laundry room at the apartment complex. I didn’t use it (the note), because the clothes were removed just before I was about to post the note:

Your clothes are in the washing machine. I waited for you to move them—I waited for over two hours, until I couldn’t wait any longer. If you still haven’t moved your clothes when I’m done using the dryer, I’ll put your clothes back in the dryer. But I’ll leave this note so that you’ll know what happened.

By the way, I’ll use clean protective gloves when I touch your clothes, so they’ll still be clean—at least they’ll be as clean as they were before I touched them.

● Today I gave my accountant the checks to pay my (2019) income tax. The federal government extended the deadline to 15 July 2020 (three months). But I wanted to get it over with, so that I don’t have it hanging over me, and to simplify my mental view of my finances (to be able to contemplate my money in one step, rather than two—to just think of what I have, rather than to think of what I have and then subtract what I’ll soon have to pay).

● I just got an email from my trademark lawyer, Robert Berliner, in which he used a wrong word: he wrote that he’d keep me appraised, when he obviously meant apprised. I hope he’s all right.

● That hiatus in the hostility toward me by the neighbors in no. 3 is over. I got attacked again today, just one time too many. The limit of my forbearance has been reached, and my retaliation will resume tomorrow morning. My retaliation against the neighbors in no. 3 is on a daily schedule; against the neighbor in no. 1, weekly.

● Saturday, 4-11-2020:   I’d someday like to write a book titled, The Commanding View from the Moral High Ground.

● God supposedly not only hears everything you say, but also knows everything you think. He lets you endure endless misfortune and suffering. At the end, he kills you. And, if he dislikes you, he sends you to Hell for eternity. I think that if people really believed in God, they’d be extremely angry. We should protest God’s treatment of us by standing in front of churches with picket signs reading “Human Lives Matter!”

● Sunday, 4-12-2020:   This morning I ate at Tom’s #7 (in North Hollywood, only fourteen miles from home). I’d forgotten that I once ate there, until I looked up the driving directions on the computer. When I read the directions, I remembered it.

● The coronavirus pandemic is hardly adversely affecting me. The sole negative effect is the lack of work, or, more precisely, the lack of income. But I have enough money saved up to weather the crisis, even if it lasts for several more months. As for the work itself that produces my income, I dislike it, so not doing it is a plus. It’s a vacation. The prohibition on social congregation hardly affects me, since I’m a loner. I can still buy what I need at stores and restaurants. In fact, it’s prompted me to try some new meal items, and I’ve found a whole new set of things that I like to eat, and which, to boot, are less expensive. The things I did for pleasure are not badly affected, either. One was to go for drives, by myself, which I can still do without limitation. In fact, driving is even better now, since the roads are almost empty, a great improvement from my point of view. When not driving, I would stay at home, and watch television and eat, which I can still do uninhibitedly, though I must put my own limits on those activities, to avoid gluttony or excessive time-wasting. On second thought, I’m not sure I could become a glutton, anyway, since these days I have a pretty small appetite. A fairly small amount of food sates me. I must severely limit what I eat for breakfast, so I’ll have some appetite at dinnertime. Other than that, I’m using the occasion to catch up on my reading and writing. Of course, there’s an endless amount to read and to write, so you never really “catch up” on those pursuits.

● I suspect that geniuses are vastly outnumbered by those who believe they’re geniuses, but aren’t.

[Later note (3-3-2023): And yet, there are probably a larger proportion of geniuses among those who think they’re geniuses than among those who don’t think they’re geniuses.]

● Saturday, 4-18-2020:   There has been a dramatic turn of events with my next-door neighbors to the east, in apartment no. 3 (I’m in no. 2). By the way, I’ve discovered which member of the family living there (a father, a mother, and their three children, two of whom are very young) is mainly responsible for their attacks on me: it’s the “adult” male. I figured that out by comparing the pattern of attacks on me with my observation of his leaving the apartment: I notice that when he leaves, then, at least for a while, the attacks end. Here’s the recent development: A few nights ago, probably Wednesday night, when I was eating dinner, he or they (probably he, and the little kids at his prompting) were attacking me by what I’ve called the “landmining” technique—that is, they predict when I’m about to make some sounds, then, just before I make my movement that produces sounds, they make a noise, so that it ostensibly appears as if I’m making noise in response to their noise. This is their preferred mode of attack. I usually fight back, or defend myself, against that attack, by trying to avoid making the predicted sound. I’m usually successful. But it’s hard to avoid at the dinner table, especially when their noise-attacks come in long chains. Last Wednesday night, though, I fought back in a more pointed way than ever before: I stopped dead in my tracks and left a long silence just following their noise, so that their noise sort of hung in the air, very conspicuously and awkwardly, revealing to anyone who could hear it, what it was, what their intent was. (You see, when they make a “landmining” sound, they then stop, and go silent, to listen for my “response.” So if I fail to make the predicted sound, and I instead remain perfectly silent for some extended time, it’s just their tactical sound, followed by a long, conspicuous silence, which reveals the pattern, and the nature of their sound.)

The next night, when I ate dinner, that tactic stopped, as if he, or they, had been shamed for it. I think he was probably humiliated in front of his family. After that, when I happened to see his face, he had what seemed to me a sour, or bitter, expression. The next day (Thursday) and continuing yesterday (Friday), as if to compensate, or retaliate, for that thwarting, he, or they, started a new form of attack on me: the walls are so thin in these apartments that, if one has good hearing—and they do—they can hear certain bodily sounds, like my swallowing. And now when I swallow, they make a noise immediately after it, to let me know that they heard my sound. It’s infuriating. I tried defeating it by using a masking sound, running the bathroom fan. But that didn’t work. They can still hear me. I’m not quite sure how to deal with it. For now, I think there’s nothing I can do about it. I’ll continue to use my angry-sound once a day every morning to retaliate against them for their attacks on me the day before.

Today (and as I write this paragraph it’s late at night), that new tactic on their part seems mostly to have stopped, and relations were fairly peaceful—a big change. It’s as if the net effect of these events was a salutary one, sensitizing the little children, making them aware that what they do in my “presence” has largely been for my benefit—to attack me. I hope the good effect lasts.

[Later note (May 2021): If the “adult” male was the primary aggressor then, that’s no longer true: they’re all extremely hostile.]

● [Monday, 4-20-2020:]   . . . Oh, naive me!

● Sunday, 4-19-2020:   Desert ride. Pleasant.

● Monday, 4-20-2020:   I met with Attorney Louis Bermeo today. He wanted me to work on many cases, on a percentage-payment basis. I declined.

● Friday, 4-24-2020:   Well, it finally happened for the year: a heat wave. The temperature soars to nearly 100 degrees during the day, and is too warm at night. It makes it very hard to sleep.

● I finally finished the audio course Becoming a Great Essayist, by Professor Jennifer Cognard-Black. It took me two and a half years to get through them! I listened to the lectures infrequently. I have some additional audio courses that I bought some months ago, which I’ll now get to.

● I think it might go a long way to cleansing this country if Donald Trump would take his own advice and drink bleach.

● Sunday, 4-26-2020:   Here’s a start that I may never finish:

Funny Story, or, Something Funny Happened on the way to . . . Wherever I was going at the Time

I was with my friend Jack. We were on our way back to my place to watch a movie, and we decided to stop at a grocery store to buy some food. (Ah, I guess it was on the way to my apartment.) We stopped at Joe’s Grocery Store. At the dairy section, I bought a container of half-and-half for coffee and tea. They had several grades: A, B, C, D, and F. I guess that’s five grades. Grade A was the most expensive, the price decreasing with each lower grade. I picked a container of the Grade A, commenting to Jack, “I’ll go with the best; I’m in the mood to splurge.” The last thing I got was a box of chocolate chip cookies. They had some fresh ones and some others that were less so; they were very close to their sell-by date, but they were on sale. I got those (the ones on sale). Jack said, “What happened to ‘Go with the best’”? I replied, “Sometimes saving money is best. As they say, ‘A penny saved is a penny earned.’ And earning money is good.” Jack said, “I still think you’re being inconsistent.” I said, “Not at all. In both cases, I went with my gut.” To which Jack said, “Your gut’s inconsistent. We’ll see how your gut likes those cookies.” I said, “Don’t overthink it, man.”

When we got to my apartment, we were hungry, so the first thing we did was eat some of the cookies. They were terrible—very stale! So we drove back to the store and bought a box of the fresh chocolate chip cookies. When we (again) got back to my apartment, we tried them, and they were really good; they really hit the spot. I said, “You see: my gut told me to buy these cookies, and I went with my gut.”

● The New York Daily News has called Trump a “total bleach bum.” I have another one: “Donald Bleachin’ Trump.”

● Friday, 5-1-2020:   I had intended to take a drive to Ridgecrest today, and I started the trip. But I cut it short, taking just the truncated desert drive. There were just too many cars on the road. I figured I’d wait till Sunday, when traffic may be lighter.

● This quarantine time has been good for me creatively, or at least productively. I found an essay that I thought was lost, “Universal Love”; I enhanced my essay on Kant’s categorical imperative; and I reread my 2002 “Aristotle Notes,” and found enough material for nine short essays I could add to my online essay collection, at RichardEisner.com. I said that I was “productive” instead of “creative,” because all the essays, except the one on Kant, I merely selected, extracted, and edited (and one I simply found). Enhancing the Kant essay, though, was creative. But I didn’t want to overstate my recent accomplishment. Of the nine essays I extracted from my “Aristotle Notes,” eight were on Plato and Aristotle; one was on Descartes. I put the latter one into a piece titled “Truth, Fact, and Faith.” The other eight I posted as one piece titled “Eight Comments on Plato and Aristotle.”

In the end, though, I decided against publishing the piece on Descartes. As I wrote in a brief preface to the (unpublished) essay: I was going to post this essay in my online essay collection . . . but then thought better of it. I’m just not sure about the generalizations I make. Over the years I’ve learned to recognize the feeling of not quite knowing what I’m talking about; I have that feeling here. And I’ve learned that, when I don’t quite fully grasp what I’m saying, it’s probably untrue—or, at best, it’s very problematic, not fully supportable. (As I’ve said: To write well, you must know what you’re talking about.) I have too many really solid pieces in the published collection to risk spoiling it by including a clinker. To put it in a rhyming rule, a la the late famous attorney Johnny Cochran: If in doubt, leave it out!

● I sympathize and empathize with those persons clamoring for a reopening of “the economy,” even though doing so now might be dangerously premature. It’s common knowledge that many persons live paycheck to paycheck, and lack the money to meet even a $400 emergency. If you’re living paycheck to paycheck, what happens when the paychecks stop for several months?! I remember when—not long ago!—I was in that kind of precarious financial situation. I remember the terror I felt at the prospect of running out of money, of ending up on the street, homeless, and losing all my possessions. It was a fate literally worse than death, and I tentatively planned to commit suicide when it looked as if it might happen to me.

I felt a surge of anger today when, on my desert drive, I saw a sign hung from a freeway overpass, a sign sponsored by a very successful lawyer I know of, which read: “We’ll get through this together.” That lawyer is very rich, and, even if he makes no more money during this health crisis, he’ll still be very rich. I thought, How is he going to help all those who won’t get through it intact—how will he help them get through it? Will he share his money with them?! Will he buy them groceries, or pay their rent?! I happen to know that he’s politically “conservative.” This hypocrite no doubt votes for tax cuts, which in effect take money from the poor to give to the rich.

● Saturday, 5-2-2020:   How many people would I kill, to save my writings? I’m glad I’ll probably never find out.

● Sunday, 5-3-2020:   I finally took that drive to Ridgecrest, an enhanced desert drive, about 290 miles, eight hours, round-trip. It was very pleasant. I mentally revised one of my recently extracted Aristotle essays. On the way, I ate at Tom’s Restaurant #30, in Lancaster. I’d never been to that location of Tom’s; it was very good, much better than my experience at Tom’s #25 in Palmdale two days before, when the food I got was not hot. I got a (medium-sized) iced coffee at the Baskin-Robbins store in downtown Ridgecrest, and it was excellent. When I got home, I spent several hours working on that essay, and thoroughly changed it again. So the work I did during the trip today was, not the end of the process, but merely a continuation of it. It was a necessary step, though, toward the ultimate completion, which I now think I’ve achieved. We’ll see.

● For the past six weeks or so (coinciding with the stay-at-home situation, or quarantine), I’ve reverted to gorging myself on sweets (in the form of pastries) at dinner. I’m going to try to get back to my reasonable diet soon. I’ve noticed something interesting about that experience: I look forward to dinner, mostly for the sweets; but I find greater pleasure in consuming the food part of the meal, before the dessert, which (the dessert) is always a little disappointing somehow. I suppose that’s good, an automatic disincentive to a bad habit.

● Tuesday, 5-5-2020:   I’m a noncognitivist.

[Later note (9-24-2023): I’m not sure whether I’m a noncognitivist or just a subjectivist.]

● Wednesday, 5-6-2020:   Well, it turns out that the labor I did on Sunday on my newly extracted “Eight Comments on Plato and Aristotle” was not the last of that labor. I’ve continued to make changes, daily, at times almost hourly. Every time I reread the piece, I make at least one more change. Of course, now it feels finished! Again, we’ll see. One sign that the work is finished is when I read it through without making a change.

● Thursday, 5-7-2020:   If, as Christians profess to believe, there’s an eternal afterlife, where the good are rewarded and the bad punished, why is it a sin to commit murder? If you murder a good person, he goes to a better existence, so he’s better off—you’ve benefitted him. If you murder a bad person, he’s worse off, but he deserves it. On the other hand, how rational is it to be surprised to find another bit of illogic in religion?

● When you must accomplish something by a certain date, and you have two opportunities to do it, use the earlier one, because if something goes wrong and you can’t do it, you still have one chance left. Whereas, if you wait till the later time, and something goes wrong that prevents you from doing it then, you have no further chance to do it.

● Friday, 5-8-2020:   My knowledge in most areas of learning, where I have any knowledge at all, is pretty rudimentary. But I get an extraordinary amount of use from what little I do know.

● We can no more determine the good life, than we can determine the good food—because everyone likes and wants a different thing.

● I feel very good now, a sense of accomplishment. I’ve read through my recently extracted and edited “Eight Comments on Plato and Aristotle” and, for the first time, have made no further changes to it. Also, I just finished revising my malpractice defense arguments (GTS v. Warmuth and Eisner). I’d been thinking about revising it for several months, and I finally did it; I significantly improved the piece. I may even take that Ridgecrest drive again this Sunday, to celebrate.

● Saturday, 5-9-2020:   I used to get a manicure and an eyebrow trim every other week; for several weeks, no one has been available to trim my eyebrows, and now the manicurist I found won’t work for several weeks longer. I’ve learned how to trim my own eyebrows, and have been doing so. And I just filed my own nails. I actually did a pretty good job of it, though it’s no substitute for a manicure. But it’ll do for a few weeks.

● Monday, 5-11-2020:   Two scenarios: One: A woman gets a routine physical examination, ordered by her doctor. The laboratory that does the testing, accidentally switches the woman’s results with those of another patient, who has terminal cancer. The doctor gets the (erroneous) result from the lab, and gives his patient the bad news—she has just six months to live. The woman prays to God to be healed. Four months later, the doctor has the woman repeat the lab tests. She does. This time the lab makes no mistake. The doctor gives the woman the good news—she’s healthy, disease-free. The woman thanks God for His miraculous intervention, for answering her prayers and curing her of the disease.

Two: In a certain city, a religious center, every year about ten people are diagnosed with cancer. Four of them die of the disease; the other six recover. This is the same mortality rate from cancer across the country. All ten of these people, when they get the terrible diagnosis, pray that God will heal them. When any of the four who succumb, do so, their family (a child, for example) says, “Well, it was God’s will. Our mother is in a better place now—she’s with God.” When any one of the other six recovers, or finds out that now he doesn’t have the illness, he takes it as further proof of God’s existence and beneficence, and thanks God for healing him.

● Wednesday, 5-13-2020:   I’m watching DVD lecture series. I’ve started with one titled, Philosophy of Religion, by Professor James Hall.

In the last lecture in that series, the subject was raised of “eschatological verification,” the claim that we perhaps now do not know that God exists, etc., but His existence, etc., will be revealed to us after we die. Well, here’s my response: That assertion (the latter part, concerning God’s existence and related matters being revealed to us after we die) is either true or false. Right now, I must decide what I believe about that. And right now, I believe that the claim is false, that there is no god and no afterlife, etc. If I’m wrong, then, presumably, when I die, I’ll learn that I was wrong. The doctrine is almost an admission that the theists’ claims are unconvincing: “Based on the evidence we’ve presented and the arguments we’ve made, our claims might seem farfetched; but after you’re dead, you’ll see that we were right . . . and won’t you feel silly then!” It’s yet another theists’ artful dodge, which they so often seem to need.

[Later note (1-23-2022): Moreover, if all these truths about religion are revealed to us only after we’re dead, why do the theists know it now, when they’re alive? Perhaps when they die, they, too, will discover that what they believed when they were alive was wrong? Or perhaps they’re dead now?]

● If God’s utter transcendence makes it impossible for us non-theists to know or understand Him or, for that matter, for us to know or understand the theists’ beliefs, how can the theists know or understand God (or their beliefs)?

● The lecture series on philosophy of religion has, I think, vindicated my argument for the impossibility of God. It has vindicated it in two ways: First, it has vindicated its originality, because Professor Hall has not mentioned my main argument, and he tries to present the most important arguments, pro and con. [Later note (May 2021): Of course, that leaves open the possibility simply that my argument is not one of the most important ones.] Second, it has vindicated it in confirming the conception of God that I attack—mine is not a straw man argument. Nay, I’ve discovered that my argument is even more powerful than I thought, in that I learned that not only are omniscience and omnipotence essential to the traditional conception of God, but so too is non-contingency itself. And my argument disproves God’s non-contingency in its first few steps, even before I attack omniscience and omnipotence.

● Tuesday, 5-19-2020:   I’ve finally used up all the sweets (cookies and pastries) that I bought. I’m going to try to quit eating sweets, at least for a while. We’ll see how long this abstinence lasts.

● Wednesday, 5-20-2020:   Well, today was my first dinner (in the last few weeks or months) without sweets (only cashews and dates). I had a momentary feeling something like panic, of severe deprivation. But the feeling passed.

● Thursday, 21 May 2020:   Happy Birthday, Richard!

● I got the latest shipment of Mom’s Meals, a set of ten meals. It included four cookies. I had intended not to eat them, because of my abstinence from sweets. But I couldn’t resist; I ate all four cookies. They were very filling. Oh well. But I haven’t bought any more (I have no control over what comes in the box, the little side items with the meals).

● Monday, 5-25-2020:   Yesterday was the first Philosophy Club meeting I attended in many years. I finally have time, because I’m unemployed. The discussion topic this time was finally “A Foolish Consistency.” I submitted my short piece on it, and Brian Gould (the organizer/moderator) was impressed with it and quoted it in his list of readings. Also, I wrote a rebuttal to one of the essays included in the readings on the topic, an essay by Eric Kaplan. I just finished it today (I started it on Saturday, so it took me three days). I’m very pleased with it; it turned out very well. In a few weeks’ time, I’ll send it to Brian Gould, and post it to my online essay collection. That’s my situation: unemployed; less money, more time, and more creative productivity.

● Tuesday, 5-26-2020:   I keep changing that little essay I just mentioned (the rebuttal to Eric Kaplan).

● Friday, 5-29-2020:   I last changed that essay (the Kaplan rebuttal) yesterday. Since yesterday afternoon, I’ve made no further changes. So it took me six days to write it and finish it (and it went through many radical changes). For me, that’s very fast. It was a wonderful luxury to be able to work on it whenever I wanted to, and for as long as I wanted to, with no obligations to interfere. I hasten to add that I think it is, among other things, a triumph of mental flexibility and intellectual honesty: the final version takes an approach very different from the original one.

● Well, hallelujah! It looks as if people moved into apartment number 10 today. That’s significant because they’re directly above the hostile neighbors in apartment 3. Until now, for a long time, at least, the only neighbor adjacent to apartment 3 was me; there’s no apartment on the other side of apartment 3; so it’s just me, on their west side, and number 10, above them, which was unoccupied. The presence of another neighbor naturally inhibits the hostile sounds they make for my benefit, because they have to worry about the effect on (and possible retaliation from) the other neighbor.

● Saturday, 5-30-2020:   Today I made one change to that piece I’ve been talking about (the Kaplan rebuttal). I made the change, and then I changed it back to the way it was before. Does that count as having made a change?

[Later note (2021): Here’s a funny postscript: my concluding words in that essay are “. . . though, alas, I suspect these words won’t reach Kaplan anytime soon.” I meant to refer to my writing’s complete lack of publication. But I later found out that, before I wrote the essay, Kaplan had died.]

● Sunday, 5-31-2020:   Another Ridgecrest drive today. Very pleasant, if not quite as idyllic as the one four weeks ago.

● Tuesday, 6-9-2020:   I had a dream early this morning, while still sleeping (of course), that I had died and—I’m not sure what the relationship was—but I was the caretaker of my body, which was in a violin case. My old friend-foe from my late teens, Art B, was trying to open the violin case-casket, to get at, or to see, my body, and I was trying to prevent him from doing it. The case was in a white van, and I was trying to leave, to bring my body home. Near the end of the dream, I remember looking toward the ceiling of the van and saying to myself, “It’s been a long, crazy life!” At that point, I believed I was 19 years old, and I thought to myself, “I have a lot of time left.” Then, disappointed, I realized that I was much older, almost 70.

I interpret the dream this way: to be in a violin case is to see myself as a violin, a vessel of creativity, an instrument capable of producing beautiful music. I think the dream is a reflection of concern about preparation for the end of my life, and specifically about how I can leave my writing to the world so that it won’t be lost.

● Yesterday, I had a telephone session with a new psychiatrist at Kaiser. It was a good conversation. Among other things, she suggested halving my current 15 mg dose of Remeron, which I take at bedtime every day for sleep. I tried it (the 7.5 mg dose) last night, and it seemed to help. Paradoxically, reducing the dose increases the sedation (but reduces the antidepressant effect). Which is good for me because I have no depression, but I need the help with sleep.

[Later note (2021): I suppose that that trend (halving the dose increasing the sedation) works only to a point: until the amount of the drug is too small to have any perceptible effect.]

● Thursday, 6-11-2020:   I saw a news headline to the effect that Donald Trump had demanded a retraction and an apology from a certain newspaper over their publishing a poll that put Joe Biden far ahead of Trump in this year’s presidential race, on the grounds that the poll was somehow inaccurate. I don’t know what the newspaper’s response was, or will be, but this responsive headline occurred to me: Trump—Stickler for Truth!

● The day before yesterday, we had the second telephone conference in a week’s time about strategy on the legal malpractice case that one of Scott Warmuth’s clients brought against the firm over a workers’ compensation case on which I was the defense attorney. Yesterday, I wrote and sent to the participants my reasoning why they should settle the case. Presumably it had an effect, because, within hours of my sending the email, they announced they were settling. I was very gratified, not only that the case had settled, within Scott Warmuth’s malpractice insurance policy limits, but also knowing that I had been helpful in it. Here’s the email I sent to all concerned:

Following up on yesterday’s telephone conference, I concur with what Scott Warmuth said in his email yesterday (at 8:59 a.m.). Something no one has noted is that, were plaintiff G to prove that he should have won the workers’ compensation case, by establishing that the injured worker was an independent contractor instead of an employee, not only would G not have had to pay anything to the injured worker, but he also would not have had to pay the hospital, which he had to do under the work comp settlement. I don’t know how much he eventually paid the hospital, but their bill was close to half a million dollars, and their last payment demand that I know of was about $190,000. Intuitively weighing the risks and benefits in the present case, it seems to me that, if there’s only $225,000 left on the insurance policy, and G’s attorney will settle for it—that’s a bargain for us. We have much more to lose than to gain by not settling for that. And I don’t think mediation would be a good option. As I said, that’s not a risk-free course for us. The mediator might opine that the case is worth significantly more than the $225,000, which could increase the plaintiff’s demand (and we’d have to pay significantly more or go to trial). Or the mediator could say he thinks the case is worth the $225,000; we’d then have to pay that amount, but there would be $20,000 or $25,000 less money available under the insurance policy, having spent that much in legal costs for the mediation, and Scott would have to make up the difference out of his own pocket. And even if the mediator says the case is worth less than $225,000, it’s unlikely that G’s attorney would take less, in which event we’d be back to where we started from—except we’d be worse off, because there would be less money available on the insurance policy (having used some of it for the mediation)—not to mention the time and effort involved in preparing for and attending the mediation.

Richard

P.S. Though I’m convinced that, in the underlying workers’ compensation case, far from committing legal malpractice, we did excellent work, there’s a risk that a judge or jury in the present case might not see it that way.

● Sunday, 6-14-2020:   I recently finished watching a second lecture series on DVD, titled The Philosopher’s Toolkit: How to be the Most Rational Person in Any Room, by Professor Patrick Grim. I understood it completely. I’m now watching a third one: The Theory of Everything: The Quest to Explain All Reality, by Professor Don Lincoln. I’m about three-quarters of the way through it. I understand little of it. One thing I learned is that Einstein’s special theory of relativity and his general theory of relativity are two different theories: they pertain to slightly different circumstances. To make certain calculations, scientists have to use both theories. I used to think that the special theory was merely an earlier version of the general theory, which superseded it. The theory would be more impressive were the relationship the way I had imagined; it’s more elegant to have a single theory that covers all circumstances. In that respect, my theory of the impossibility of intrinsic value has an advantage over Einstein’s relativity theory: mine is a single theory, whereas his is divided into two theories.

I’m just now watching lecture number 19 (of 24). One thing puzzles me. Dr. Lincoln presented a chart showing that the universe is composed of 5 percent ordinary matter; 25 percent dark matter; and 70 percent dark energy. My question is this: if there’s both dark and ordinary matter; why isn’t there both dark and ordinary energy?

I understand so little of it that it’s unpleasant to watch. For that reason, together with it taking so much mental energy to grapple with it, I find I’m limited to watching about two lectures a day, even when I have nothing else to do. I listen to some of the constituent lectures many times, the ones about which I understand something. Sometimes it seems as if, the more times I watch the lecture, the less I feel I understand it.

● Tuesday, 6-16-2020:   I finally got my car fixed. I had to get it smog-checked, but it was failing the emissions test. It took several weeks of going to the repair shop, sometimes spending the whole day there, and driving the car long distances to try to get the engine to clear whatever the problem was. But they finally fixed another problem with the car that had bothered me almost from the day I first got it: a certain rattle or knocking sound when driving it on uneven surfaces. What a relief!

[Later note (May 2021): the rattle has returned.]

[Later note (1-23-2022): They worked on that again a few months ago. They fixed it again, but this time it stayed fixed.]

● Today I finished an addendum to the paragraph on possibility that I recently wrote. What prompted me to add the section was looking up “possible” in the dictionary, and seeing the fourth definition: “Of uncertain likelihood.” The finished essay is posted as “Possible and/or Impossible” on RichardEisner.com.

● Saturday, 6-20-2020:   Haircut (Brenda).

● Sunday, 6-21-2020:   I last changed my little piece on possibility in the wee hours of—today, 6-21-2020: it’s been less than 24 hours.

● Desert drive.

● Monday, 6-22-2020 . . . Well, now it’s been about 24 hours (since I revised the piece on possibility). Could it be finished now?

● I just finished watching the lecture series A Theory of Everything: the Quest to Explain All Reality. Next, I’m going to watch the lecture series The String Quartets of Beethoven. I watch these lectures, not for enjoyment, but to aid my own work: for raw material, for both form and content, and for inspiration.

● Tuesday, 6-23-2020:   Today I reached a milestone or breakthrough of sorts: I sent one of my advertising flyers (1-800-SUE-THEM) and a one-page list of reasons why it’s so effective, to a lawyer-prospect by email.

● Friday, 6-26-2020:   A silver lining of the coronavirus pandemic may be the demise of Donald Trump’s presidency.

● Sunday, 6-28-2020:   Today there’s a Philosophy Club meeting, by computer (the Zoom program). The topic is “The Meaning and Ethics of Cultural Symbols, Monuments, and Statues.” I wrote a short piece, in record time, “Confederate Statues Should be Removed.”

● Here’s a short argument for the proposition that some statues should be removed (this isn’t the piece I just referred to):

Imagine a community in which a public meeting is held to decide whether a certain statue should be erected. It’s known that the statue in question, if erected, would cause everyone in the town pain. The decision-makers vote, quite reasonably, not to erect it. But the notes of the meeting contain a typographical error such that the statue shop gets the wrong message about this, and mistakenly thinks they’ve been requested to make and erect the statue, and they do so. Just as was believed, the statue, once erected, does indeed cause everyone in town pain. The question is: Should the statue be removed? Of course it should. Which answers the question (the answer being that, under certain circumstances, public monuments should be removed). But let’s consider further: If the statue caused pain to only 95 percent of the town folk, should it be removed? What about 75 percent?; or 50 percent? I would say, still yes, unless there were some special reason to keep it.

Or consider this variation: the town decides to put up a statue to a local hero, a firefighter who, at great risk to his own safety, saved an entire family from a fire. But the public records department sends the public works department (the department that makes the statues) the wrong person’s information, that of a heinous criminal, a serial killer. The statue of the killer is made and erected. When the town discovers the error, should it take down the wrong statue and replace it with the intended one? (Of course.)

Or this: Say Germany decides to erect a statue to a man who in 1942 tried to assassinate Hitler, but, through a typographical error in the instructions, the statue maker thinks they want a statue of Hitler, and he makes one, and the Hitler statue is put up. When (immediately) the mistake is discovered, should Germany remove the Hitler statue? (Obviously so.)

Or perhaps the statue was not an accident. What if the Germans discovered a statue (in Germany) of Hitler that was put up decades ago by Nazis, or neo-Nazis. Should Germany remove it? (Certainly.)

● Monday, 6-29-2020:   In an effort to more accurately assess whether I should retaliate against the neighbor in apartment one (and I’m on a once-a-week retaliation cycle with him—every Sunday afternoon), I’m going to keep this log, for at least this week, of all of his potential offenses against me; perhaps this will help me see the pattern more clearly:

○ Monday, 6-29-2020, at about 5:30 a.m.: he loudly closed the back door, the one right next to my “kitchen,” when I walked near the kitchen.

○ Thursday, 7-2-2020, at about 7:15 a.m.: he closed the back door very loudly exactly when I, having just gotten up from sleeping, walked into the kitchen. I can stop keeping this log now (at least for this week), because that was not subtle; it was a flagrantly hostile gesture, and obviously, easily sufficient to warrant retaliation (on Sunday).

● Saturday, 7-4-2020:   Like Beethoven, I value originality in my works. Unlike him, though, I don’t consciously strive for originality. My originality is so strong a force in me that my works are automatically original. Instead, what I strive for is excellence: saying more effectively what I’m trying to say, eliminating what flaws I’m aware of, enhancing the structural integrity. The originality takes care of itself.

● One of my most-frequently used household things is a backscratcher. I use it (for the intended purpose) several times a day.

● Tuesday, 7-7-2020:   In effect, Trump was elected president by all the people who didn’t vote.

● Sunday, 7-12-2020:   I’ve made a decision: I’m going to ask whether Scott Warmuth’s employment offer is still open. I’ve tried to resume making legal appearances for other attorneys. But with this pandemic, what small bit of such work is available pays so little that it’s not worth doing. Right now, then, it’s that (Warmuth’s) job or nothing. I’ve had no income for about four months, and I don’t have the luxury to go a long time without income. It would be imprudent of me, just to avoid a job that’s less than ideal, to use up the bulk of the modest financial cushion I’ve finally accumulated after 69 years. Moreover, that job may not be as unpleasant as I feared. And, contrary to another of my fears about it, I may be able to do it competently (it may be somewhat easier just now, with the slowdown of economic activity). Further, the experience may make me a more able, more well-rounded workers’ compensation lawyer, thus enlarging my possibilities for work (including higher pay) in future. And if it really is awful, I can always quit. At least I’ll know I tried. This may be the least bad of a set of bad options.

● I just now posted online my short piece on Possibility. It’s a milestone in my life; I think it’s one of my finest pieces of writing, though very brief. Shortly after I posted it, someone wrote this response to it: “And the purpose of this exercise is? To help me close escrow on Martian property where I’ll build my retirement house and where it’s quiet and no list serves? Oh well, off to the lumber yard.” I considered replying to him with this: “The purpose? It’s about language and logic, presumably of interest to lawyers, members of this learned profession.” But then I thought better of replying at all. That’s been my pattern: I make my original well-thought-out comment, and let that suffice, eschewing follow-up bickering. Which would dilute the effect.

[Later note (2021): The one and only circumstance (thus far) in which I post replies or follow-up comments, is when I find an error in my original comments. In my follow-up, I acknowledge the error and offer a repair. I suppose that’s to my credit.]

● Monday, 7-13-2020:   Well, I just inquired about the employment with Scott Warmuth’s office; they told me that they’ve already hired a lawyer, and so the offer is no longer open. My disappointment is tempered by my awareness of all the fears and potential negatives I mentioned. Indeed, I’m ambivalent about it: part of me is disappointed, but another part of me is relieved.

● Wednesday, 7-15-2020:   Mixed messages produce mixed results.

● Thursday, 7-16-2020:   I’ve begun looking for employment in earnest, or hesitantly. I’ve also had several ideas for new pieces of writing: another piece on justice, and one on the good life. A way in which I plan to start on these new pieces is to go through my Diaries and excerpt all the passages that bear on each of those topics. Which dovetails with another writing project that occurred to me: to go through my Diaries and edit them.

● Friday, 7-17-2020:   I had a slight pain in my right groin or inside right thigh this morning, so I forewent my daily walk and stretching exercises. The pain was gone by the end of the day.

● I replied to a CAALA (Los Angeles Trial Lawyers) Listserv posting about a homeless law clerk looking for work; I said that, though I was not homeless (yet), I was willing to work as a law clerk. I got two responses, and quoted my rate tentatively as $25 an hour. Both lawyers thought that was a good deal for them, and one actually gave me a project, which I tried to do, but could not.

● I actually finished (?) a short piece on the good life, a variation on something I wrote before.

● Sunday, 7-19-2020:   I’ve been reading a much earlier Diary, and I just came across an entry recounting my first ever urinary catheterization, on 2-17-1999. So, I’ve been catheterizing for about 21 1⁄2 years. Interesting. It seems longer. More generally, I’ve come a long way since then. But it took a long time. In another 21 years, I’ll be ninety years old. I don’t have much longer. That’s depressing, and anxiety-provoking.

● Wednesday, 7-22-2020:   I’m reading through my Diaries. I’ve just come across a passage, dated 11-26-2000, that I found inspiring. They say (and I agree), If you don’t vote, don’t complain (about the political situation). A corollary to that is this: If you’re not working as hard as you could to improve your life, don’t complain about that, either.

● I came across another Diary entry, dated 2-21-2000, and a further one, on the same subject, of 2-27-2000, talking about my reaction to my father’s response to my 2001 essay “Morality and Religion.” (I must have finished it earlier than that, in early 2000). I was very hurt by my father’s negative reaction to the piece, which at the time I thought was one of my finest. He said he found it “tiresome.” Out of curiosity, I reread the work. To my surprise, I had the same reaction as my father did: I found it tiresome! My impression was that there were a few good thoughts in it, but most of the material was useless padding. In it, I did what I now criticize in other writers’ work: The material is not strictly necessary to the thesis, but it’s material the writer thought was impressive, and so he used the essay as a vehicle, or excuse, to present it. If I were to rewrite it, it would end up being much shorter, maybe just a few paragraphs. I think my writing style has evolved since then; it’s now much more compressed, more concentrated, more concise. I feel an urge to rewrite it, if just as an exercise, to see how my approach to the writing would differ.

I’ve rewritten it; it’s much shorter—fewer than a quarter of the number of words of the original. I think I’m also writing faster. Years ago, this rewriting might have taken me weeks to do, instead of just hours.

● Friday, 7-24-2020:   I’ve rewritten it yet again! It’s now even shorter (less than a seventh the number of words of the original), but it’s much more compelling (at least I think so now). I had to go through a certain mental process—in which I come to see the logical flaws in previous versions of the work, and find a more cogent argument to replace it. That revelation is usually accompanied by a radical restructuring of the piece. [Later note (2021): Of course it would entail a radical restructuring: if it’s a different argument, it’s a whole different piece of writing!] It seems that, generally, unless I go through that process, the work is banal. The piece is now good enough, I think, to publish in my online essay collection. And it’s not redundant of any other material there, as is my recent piece on the good life, which, though well and interestingly stated, is a reworking of material that already appears in several of the essays. With that recent essay on the good life, I figure that what I’d gain in having an additional piece of work would be more than offset by dilution of the content (so I won’t post it there).

[Later note (10-11-2023): A distinction: Usually, a new piece that rearranges material in existing pieces does not represent an improvement to speak of over those existing pieces. Occasionally, though, a piece that rearranges previous material, even if there’s no new material in it, may present the material in a clearer, more effective way, which makes it an advancement over the existing pieces. It’s the difference between rehash and culmination.]

[Later note (10-27-2023): Unfortunately, you may have to do a lot of rehashing before you get to a culmination . . . and culminations are rare.]

● Monday, 7-27-2020:   Yesterday’s Philosophy Club discussion topic was reparations to African Americans for slavery and other forms of racism. I took the occasion to revise my old piece on the subject. It has turned out very well (I’m pleased with it). I may add it to my online essay collection.

● A year or two ago, I hurt my right knee by vigorously kicking a fence, out of anger for a dog there barking at me on my daily walk. It took till just recently to seem as if it was healing. Then, last week, the same thing happened at another place along my walk. The kicking was less vigorous, but it has aggravated my right knee (or an area on the side of my right leg, at the level of the knee). I can hardly believe my foolishness, of last week. Did I not learn from the earlier incident?!

[Later note (June 2021): Within the last few months, I’ve noticed that that pain in my right knee has pretty much disappeared.]

● Thursday, 7-30-2020:   I had a telephone consultation with Elizabeth Bernstein, a career counselor with Southwestern Law School, my legal alma mater, to help me with a job search.

[Later note (July 2021): That effort was a complete waste of time.]

● It’s been a week since I started revising my short piece on reparations for African Americans. Since then (about a week ago), I’ve been working on the revision more or less constantly, producing a steady stream of changes. The changes seem to have stopped; I haven’t made any more of them for over twelve hours. Which suggests to me that it may be finished. I hope so. . . . Now, at the end of the day (11:45 p.m.), I’ve made one more edit. Perhaps tomorrow I’ll change it back to the way it was before. Does it count as revising it if I change it back to the way it was?

● Friday, 7-31-2020:   That’s exactly what happened: I made a notation for a possible change to the piece, but then thought better of it, and canceled it. . . . So, not counting that as a change, it’s been about 36 hours since I revised it. Very encouraging!

● I finished reading through an older Diary, the one covering January 1998 to April 2003. I was starting on the next volume of my Diary, when I came across an entry referring to an even older one, covering 1993 to 1995. So I went back and found that one on the computer, and I’m reading it now. What a huge difference between the two diaries. The earlier one (1993 – 1995), written when I was still abusing drugs, compared to the later one, is almost completely uninteresting. It’s drivel. It’s almost as if I was lobotomized.

● In reading through those two earlier Diaries, it strikes me that, though I’m considerably older now, my situation overall has vastly improved: I’ve added greatly to my body of work; my health problems have largely gone away; I’m no longer depressed; and my finances are not precarious (though I’m getting concerned about that, with the pandemic). Last but not least, I’m drug free. Reading through that early Diary (covering 1993 – 1995) has made me newly appreciate the difference. The drug abstinence was occasioned by my arrest for drug possession (codeine) around that time (1996?). I think that was a blessing in disguise!

● Sunday, 8-2-2020:   I’ve had a significant worsening of my neighbor situation. I’ve written that about three and a half months ago the neighbors to the east (in apartment no. 3) started making a noise on my swallowing. This past week, the neighbor to the west (in apartment no. 1) picked up that mode of attack and now he, too, has begun attacking me the same way. I believe he was trying to make me think it was coming from the other neighbors. The bastard!

● I’ve just finished watching/listening to another lecture series (24 lectures), this one on Beethoven’s string quartets. I listen to most of the lectures at least twice.

● Tuesday, 8-4-2020:   I’ve just had a new and severe symptom: pain in my left hand and middle and ring fingers. It was bad enough this afternoon to take pain medication for it (I took half of a #3 codeine tablet); but it was even worse after I went to bed. Continual shooting pains in those areas badly interfered with sleep. I suppose that’s arthritis. It was nightmarish. I hope it goes away soon.

● Wednesday, 8-5-2020:   Today, that arthritis (the symptom) in the left hand and fingers is about 90 percent improved, thankfully.

● I’m on a creative spree, writing new pieces and rewriting old ones. I’m getting very good at rewriting old compositions, and I seem to be able to do it more quickly than ever before. Today, it took just a few hours to rewrite “Opportunity and Capitalism,” a piece I wrote in 2003. It’s discouraging to see how much revision the pieces need, but encouraging to see that I have them and how easy it is for me now to rewrite them.

● Now, that arthritis attack seems completely resolved.

● Saturday, 8-8-2020:   I managed to pull a very cogent comment out of the muddle that’s the 7-10-2005 entry, above. I’m going to add it to my piece: “Eight Comments on Plato and Aristotle.” Of course, I’ll retitle it “Nine Comments . . .”. It was like pulling a submerged diamond out of a pool of mud. It’s not as if a few simple deletions revealed a perfectly formed piece. I still had to do some deft rewriting, but now I’ve polished the gem to perfection! [I didn’t include those rough notes in this Journal. But you can see the finished product at RichardEisner.com.]

● Sunday, 8-9-2020:   I’ve lately (in the last four or five months) added many new essays to my online essay collection. I’m now wondering if perhaps in adding them I’ve been less selective than I should be. The collection is designed, not as an exhaustive collection of all of my work, but as a showcase for some of the best of it. The more pieces I have there, the more selective I should be in adding new ones. I recently rewrote two older essays, but I’ve now decided not to add them to the online collection, because they’re somehow not worth adding: the third version of my essay “Moral Luck,” and the current new version of “Nietzsche’s ‘Master’ Morality.” But two other pieces, the seventh version of my “Opportunity and Capitalism” and the short comment on Plato’s city-soul analogy—I will add; I think they’re particularly good.

● Monday, 8-10-2020:   Last night I again revised my piece on Nietzsche’s “Master Morality,” and I think it’s now good enough to be added to my online essay collection. The basic approach in my recent revisions of the piece is to combine the old version of it with the material I wrote in the paragraph constituting the 1-31-2019 entry in this Diary [not included here].

● And this evening I revised it again.

● Tuesday, 8-11-2020:   Today I got a very pleasant surprise. For the past five months or so, since the stock market began to sink, I’ve avoided checking the balance of my stock market account, to avoid getting depressed. But this morning, after I heard on the radio that the stock market was at near record highs, I decided to check it: it’s the highest it’s ever been! A great relief.

● Wednesday, 8-12-2020:   The entry here of 12-8-2013 is significant: it marks a certain change in my writing: I started leaving just one space after a period (between a period and the first word of the next sentence), instead of two spaces. I learned about that in Bryan Garner’s legal writing course, which I took around that time. [Later note (2020): When I transferred the Diary entries to this Eisner’s Journal, I changed the spacing in all earlier entries to the single space.]

● Friday, 8-14-2020:   This year I’ve changed manicurists. I’ve stopped going to Hands to Hold, and started going to The Best Nails, in Northridge. I originally went to the new place because they were the only ones open (during the pandemic). I went back to Hands to Hold one last time, when they briefly reopened in late June, but found that Kathy at The Best Nails gave me an even better manicure than I was getting at Hands to Hold, and for less money, to boot. They’re also slightly closer to my home. An easy decision, I suppose.

● I’ve decided to create a new website for some of my writings: Eisner’s Journal (“EisnersJournal.com”), in which I’ll put excerpts from my Diaries. I’m looking forward to creating it.

● Friday, 8-21-2020:   Why did it take God so long to invent time?

● Sunday, 8-23-2020:   Philosophy Club meeting (by Zoom—computer). Topic: “Altruism versus Psychological Egoism.” I’ve written an argument on the topic, in record time: 36 hours from first getting the topic to final draft! It’s a short argument, just 216 words. I’ll send it to Brian Gould (the facilitator), and perhaps he’ll email it to the other attendees. . . . I sent it to him, and he included it in the material he sent to the other attendees.

● Wednesday, 8-26-2020:   I’m very proud of that little argument I wrote (on altruism) for last Sunday’s Philosophy Club meeting. I’ve been debating with myself whether I should add it to my online essay collection as its own little essay, or incorporate the argument in my long essay “Morality” (which is also among the online essays). At first, after an initial, unsatisfactory attempt to incorporate it in “Morality,” I decided to add it as its own essay. Then I found a very good way to revise the longer piece, which not only accommodates the new argument on altruism, but also improves another paragraph in the longer essay, so I’ll do that instead. I can’t do both, which would make for redundant material. And, in general, I’d rather enhance a major work in my oeuvre than add a minor work to it.

● Thursday, 8-27-2020:   During this heat wave, I’ve observed that the temperature at night is even more important than that during the day.

● Saturday, 8-29-2020:   Some people (usually, right-wingers) insist that the policemen who murder Black people, in the guise of doing their jobs, are merely “bad apples,” and not reflections of a racist system—yet, when people gather to protest that police violence, and a few criminals, in the midst of the protests, engage in looting or other antisocial acts, those same right-wingers refuse to separate the few criminals from the mass of protesters, and characterize all the protesters as looters and rioters.

● Tuesday, 9-1-2020:   This year’s U.S. presidential election will depend, not on changing voters’ preferences, but on changing voters’ inclinations—that is, not on changing which candidates people favor, but on motivating people who would otherwise not vote, to vote.

● Thursday, 9-3-2020:   Haydn is watered-down Mozart.

● Monday, 9-7-2020 (Memorial Day Holiday):   One of the many ways in which I try to economize is in my use of grocery bags and trash bags. I take my old grocery bags to the market to reuse, as grocery bags. I replace them when they wear out or break, but they last a long time. And I reuse trash bags. Instead of putting in the dumpster the trash along with the trash bag holding it, I empty the contents of the trash bag into the dumpster and take the (now empty) trash bag back into the house to reuse as a trash bag. Sometimes, though, it is useful to throw away the trash bag along with its contents. But I don’t buy trash bags. Instead, when I use up packages of goods, or get things by mail or delivery, I save the large package wrappers and the large mailing envelopes, to use as trash bags.

● After about five months with no income at all, I started getting paid deposition work since just before the middle of last month (August 2020). I’m doing them through a court-appearance law firm (Greg Polster): an attorney pays the appearance firm, and the appearance firm pays me for the appearances. The pay is much less than I was getting (Polster pays me $50 for the first hour, and $35 for each additional hour; the last hour, if it’s less than 60 minutes but at least 15 minutes, is counted as an hour). But it’s better than nothing. And it’s essentially part-time work, which gives me time to work on my writing.

● I reread my “Moral Luck” piece, and I changed my mind about (not) including it in the online essays—I added it.

● Thursday, 9-17-2020:   I just awoke from (what I thought was) an interesting dream: I was with many other people on a sightseeing tour of the Empire State Building in New York. I was awed by its tallness, and I was afraid to look down from its height, outside. Then my point of view changed to that of a murderer who was dropping objects off the very top to kill people on the ground below. The deadly objects were something like toothpicks or wooden matches coated with a poison. At first, I was watching the scene, like a news reporter. Then at the end I was the murderer, when the police arrested him, and were leading him (me) away. In the last part of the dream, I was a music student, taking a violin class at or near the top of the same building. I had only two- or three-hours’ time to get there, from California, and I remember hurrying to travel, almost sure that I’d be late. But I went to the airport and got to New York, and to the (Empire State) Building, on time. Then I realized that I’d left my violin at home and would have to rent one. I was renting one on a lower floor of the building, in a busy office or business establishment, perhaps a restaurant. The man wanted $120 for the daily rental. I haggled with him, to try to get it for an even $100, which I think in the end he agreed to, but for a lesser violin, one he kept in a backroom, not among those on display in the main room. I then proceeded to my lesson in the penthouse. I joked with someone that it may have been a bad thing that I actually got there on time, all the way from California, within two hours, as that would encourage me to cut the time very close in future. The last thing I remember in the dream was walking with the violin on the roof of the building, at dusk, and someone was asking me about my hand deformity (which I had in the dream, but I don’t have in actuality). I was trying to minimize it, and said something about the doctor having told me just to apply warm water to it and it would go away, but my interlocutor said, “Well, that was obviously wrong.” The interpretation?: broadly, I suppose it’s about my perennial concern with my creative output, and the question whether I’ll have enough time in life to accomplish my goal of producing enough work . . . enough to make me famous, or to meet my own standards. The building, very famous, and one of the tallest, perhaps represents the stature I like to think, or hope, my work will attain. Possibly I’m a murderer in killing time—my precious time—for which eventually I’ll pay (the murderer being caught), just as getting a less expensive, lower quality violin may symbolize my lack of money (and hence lack of time) diminishing my oeuvre. The amazing two-hour trip from (California) home to the Empire State Building may signify my speed lately in reworking old pieces. The hand deformity could symbolize concern about my looks as I get older; or my disappointment with the recent Internet posting of my magnum opus, “Ethics,” the reproduction of whose graphic elements was grotesque; or even, more generally, worry about the quality of my writing.

● Friday, 9-18-2020:   In the last four or five months (since the start of the pandemic), I’ve roughly halved my caffeine consumption. In a day, instead of two cups of (McDonald’s) coffee, I usually drink two cups of black tea (with half-and-half added).

● Saturday, 9-19-2020:   Follow-up to the 3-20-2020 entry, above: Today I gave our gardener another $100, the rest of the $200 I’d promised him. I felt bad about not fully keeping my promise to him, and thought I could afford to do it now, because I have some income.

● Sunday, 9-20-2020:   When you turn a radio on and off, you’re wearing it out. So when you turn off a radio to save the battery, you’re in effect shortening the life of the radio itself to lengthen the life of the (current) battery. On the other hand, sometimes the battery-saving is greater than I plan, because sometimes, after a certain interruption in listening to the radio, when I come back from my break, I forget to resume listening. . . .

● Wednesday, 9-23-2020:   How do you measure the rate of flow of a liquid? With a flowgibiter.

● My effectiveness in telling jokes is impaired by my inability to keep a straight face in the process. I suppose that precludes my having a dry sense of humor. My humor is very wet.

[Later note (8-3-2023): That might be true of my humor delivered orally. But most of my humor is written (because I’m seldom in social situations). And my written humor—mainly just because it’s written—is dry.]

● Sunday, 9-27-2020:   Yesterday, for the first time in my life, I tried substituting hydrogen peroxide for isopropyl alcohol (because alcohol is the one commodity that’s still hard to get in stores). The substitution seems to work for all my purposes.

● The next meeting of the Philosophy Club will be this evening (during the pandemic, the meetings are by computer—Zoom). This month’s topic is: “Do we have ethical obligations toward sentient machines, artificial life forms, or alien species?” The issue is commonly summed up in the phrase moral status—meaning, what beings, or things, are we morally obligated to treat, or to avoid treating, in certain ways, for their sake? My own preliminary answer is this: Concomitant with my belief that intrinsic value is impossible, I think there is no absolute, or intrinsic, or objective moral status. No one, and no thing, has moral status. And to try to make fine distinctions here is pointless. Nonetheless, I think we should avoid unnecessarily causing suffering to aware nonhuman entities, and even positively enhance their well-being, to the extent that it’s practical for us—that is, that it doesn’t significantly reduce our own (human) well-being. What laws we should make about this is another matter.

Having now read the assigned readings on the topic, I would add that I favor what’s described as the “multi-standard” or “eclectic” ethical approach, which coincides with my own position that moral obligations are subjective, that I don’t feel strict moral obligations, and that moral judgments are ultimately intuitive, ad hoc.

To quote one sentence in the encyclopedia.com article: “It is no mere coincidence that human beings usually end up possessing the highest moral status via the rules of moral sentience they have devised.” I agree. It’s no mere coincidence—it’s a significant coincidence. Which is explained by self-interest: We give preference to humans, not so much because humans, for some good reason, are deserving of that status, but simply because we are humans: we favor ourselves. Whether or not doing so is “reasonable,” it’s certainly understandable, and part of human nature—perhaps of any species’ nature. In the past, we’ve attempted to make this conclusion objectively based, as for example by positing that man is the sole species to have an “immortal soul” because we’re created in God’s image. Let’s act this way, but drop the pretense of objectivity, and instead be honest about what we’re doing.

My foregoing comment originally had this fourth paragraph:

In the Encyclopedia.com article on Moral Status, in the section titled “The Moral Status of a Human Embryo” there’s this: “William E. May, a Jesuit moralist, acknowledges a significant difference between the capacities of a human embryo and a normal adult. Human individuals of intelligence and self-consciousness are ‘moral beings’ because they have the capacity to comprehend, love, and choose. Although they are moral beings, because they are ‘minded’ entities, their moral status is no greater than any other human being’s, because all humans, including embryos, are ‘beings of moral worth.’ [Perhaps the previous sentence should read instead: Although embryos are not moral beings, because they are not “minded” entities, their moral status is as great as any other human being’s, because all humans, including embryos, are “beings of moral worth.”] All share ‘something rooted in their being human beings,’ beginning at conception. This ‘something’ is the soul . . ..” I find that reasoning contradictory. It’s like saying that marshmallows, even though they have none of the properties of rocks, are nonetheless rocks, because, if you mix them with sand and cement, they may turn into rocks.

I removed the paragraph because I found my analogy flawed, in two ways: One, concrete (the product of sand and cement) is not rock (rock, by definition, is natural; whereas, concrete is man-made, synthetic). And, two (more important), marshmallows do not “turn into” concrete—it’s the sand and cement that do; in fact, the marshmallows are not even a necessary ingredient in the concrete. Whereas, an embryo, if left alone, in its natural environment, automatically—and all by itself—turns into a human being (it turns into an infant, which, if properly nurtured, turns into an adult human). I still disagree with May’s conclusion, but his argument is not ridiculous in the way I initially supposed.

● In one of the readings on this topic, the observation was made that the question “What is it like to be this thing?” makes sense just as to things having awareness. Does that mean that it’s senseless to ask, “What is it like to be dead?”?

[Later note (10-11-2023): Yes.]

● Monday, 9-28-2020:   I’ve just finished going through my Eisner’s Journal, to edit it. I’ll go through it two more times. It’s a long piece, over 400 pages. The next step, after the final read-through, will be getting an estimate of the cost to post it on the Web. (I originally, here, said that I’d read it through one more time. But in reading it that “one more” time [I’m in the midst of it now], I’m doing considerable editing, much more than I expected, which entails an additional review, after this one—the last one should find very little need, or desire, for editing.)

[Later note (8-4-2024): My statement there, “I’ll go through it two more times” now strikes me as very funny!]

● Sunday, 10-4-2020:   Why is it (according to Christianity) that we can repent our sins and accept Christ and thus avoid an eternity in Hell, only during this brief life on Earth, and not when we’re in Hell? (Which—Hell—by the way, seems a pretty drastic penalty for having guessed wrong about religious dogma, in the face of a total lack of compelling evidence.) The answer is that the theory’s purpose is to affect behavior. If we were told we could repent our sins and accept Christ in the afterlife, we’d put it off till then—that is, we wouldn’t do it.

● Monday, 10-5-2020:   I don’t use air-conditioning (electric refrigerated cooling) in my apartment. Instead, when it’s very hot, I use electric fans during the day; and at night I keep my front door open (with the screen door closed), to let in cooler air. But for the last two days, I’ve kept the door closed at night, because the air outside has been so polluted (I check the public air-quality website, and keep the door closed if the rating is over 100—the threshold for “unhealthy” air). For that reason (bad air), I’ve also suspended my daily exercise-walks. Fortunately, this condition is unusual, and we’re not in the midst of a heat wave; in fact, the weather is just starting to get cooler, with the advent of October, Fall.

● Tuesday, 10-6-2020:   Nietzsche proposes, as the prime desideratum, “power” (by which I believe he means creative or intellectual mastery or self-actualization). Though Nietzsche does not argue that power is intrinsically valuable, he proposes it such that it functions like intrinsic value: to wit, as the sole desideratum, and applicable to everyone. In response, I said this: Happiness is a better candidate for intrinsic value than power, for this reason. If something is desirable, there must be something which is undesirable. This is implicit in our cognate notion of good and evil. That which is undesirable or evil consists in negative degrees of the same entity whose positive degrees are desirable or good. Evil is not simply the absence of good, and vice versa. (Thus Hell is worse than nothing.) Happiness, or pleasure, satisfies this basic structural requirement, for it has negative values—unhappiness, or pain. But power doesn’t meet the requirement, for the least power possible, as it were, is simply a total absence of power; there’s no negative power.

I went on to say that, though intrinsic value is impossible, there is something closely related to it, which we might call quasi-intrinsic value: that which is intrinsically or necessarily valuable or good—for us. And it consists in . . . happiness. It’s necessarily good for us because it’s something (indeed, the only thing) that everyone appreciates in every circumstance. For example, if I were alone in the universe, I wouldn’t value my creative expression (since there would be no audience for it). Instead, what (and all) I’d care about would be (my) happiness. And what (and all) I’d care to avoid would be (my) unhappiness.

It seems significant that what’s quasi-intrinsically valuable satisfies the structural requirement we postulated for intrinsic value. Which suggests that the process is the reverse of what I’ve implied. Instead of positing the concept of intrinsic value, divining its properties, using that set of properties to determine what’s intrinsically valuable, and concluding that (if anything is) it’s happiness/unhappiness; perhaps we start with our sense that happiness and unhappiness are what we like and dislike in all circumstances, and from that we get our philosophical concepts of good and evil—and intrinsic value, with its positive and negative degrees.

● Thursday, 10-8-2020:   In editing my Eisner’s Journal just now, I found a large date-gap—one entry was dated 4-16-2003; the next one was dated 12-29-2004. I did some quick research and discovered that, in going through my Diaries for material, I had completely overlooked one Diary, the one with entries written during that span, about a hundred pages worth of stuff. I’m always glad to find more material, but this drastically slows down the process, because the earlier tasks in the process take more time than the later ones: I have to read each entry; evaluate it for inclusion; then (if I might include it) I have to see if it’s redundant of existing material, and then (if it is redundant) rewrite the two overlapping items to combine the best elements of both.

[Later note (2021): Consolidating redundant entries is the ideal procedure. My neglect, so often, to follow it is one of my failures as an editor here. On the other hand, if I followed that procedure perfectly, this work might become a series of essays rather than a journal. But that’s just a rationalization.]

● Friday, 10-9-2020:   I had an interesting experience today. I was at home, as I typically am these days, working on compiling my Eisner’s Journal. The neighbors in no. 3, to the east, were very hostile, also as usual. I started to get bogged down, my energy flagged, and I had the urge to take a nap (or at least to lie down on the bed—what passes for a nap these days). But I felt that my doing so would in effect give them a victory over me. So I resisted, and forced myself to plow ahead; I kept working at the computer. Eventually, I got to a point where the feeling of tiredness passed, and I felt energetic, and worked energetically the rest of the day. What I think I learned from this experience is that the tiredness I feel, which compels me to take naps during the day, is, not so much physiological, as psychological, and that if I simply press on, it will pass.

● Sunday, 10-11-2020:   This thought occurred to me about voting: as to a slate of candidates for a certain office, a citizen should have two available votes: one for, and one against. Even if you don’t know which candidate you’d want for the office, you may know which you’d not want . . .. That’s not a serious suggestion. But I’m in favor of ranked-choice voting, where a voter gives his first, second, third, and so on, choices for the list of candidates.

[Later note (6-26-2022): On second thought, though the vote-against idea was originally facetious, perhaps there’s something to it, after all.]

[Later note (2-4-2024): There is something to it. If the choice on a ballot is between two candidates, one a Democrat and the other a Republican—that’s enough information for me (I’ll vote for the Democrat). But suppose the choice is among ten candidates, one a Republican and the rest Democrats, and you’re allowed to vote for just one. With just that information, I’d be inclined to randomly choose one of the nine Democrats, as a (very problematic) way to increase the likelihood that a Democrat will win instead of the Republican. I’d much rather be able simply to vote against the Republican . . ..]

● I just finished going through the other Diary I referenced in my 10-8-2020 note, above, for material in it to put in Eisner’s Journal. The additional material made Eisner’s Journal about sixty-five pages longer. Considering how much stuff there was, I think my doing that work was very fast. I’m getting more efficient.

● Yesterday, I repeated my Friday’s no-nap mode. I’ll try to do that every day when I can. I think it’s more wholesome than taking naps. Perhaps it’s a habit I can break.

● Monday, 10-12-2020:   I’m not an expert on music, but my own impression is that Felix Mendelssohn’s greatest work is his violin concerto.

● I took what I’ll call my Camarillo drive today, about 77 miles. Pleasant; for some time, I was even ecstatic.

● Wednesday, 10-14-2020:   Today will be the sixth day in a row when I’ve resisted taking a daytime nap. My impression is that it (avoiding a nap) is getting easier.

● Friday, 10-16-2020:   A nice person is someone . . . who’s nice to me.

● Saturday, 10-17-2020:   I usually get up several times (at least once) during the night/early morning, to urinate and get a drink of water. Early this morning, about 1:00 – 2:00, I noticed a slight smell of smoke in my apartment, and found that it was coming from the direction of my front door, which I leave open at night in hot weather, for cooling (at night the outside air is cooler than that inside my apartment). I went outside the apartment complex to investigate the source of the smoke: was it from a fire? No. Outside of the complex, there was no smoke odor. So it was probably cigarette smoke originating within the complex. I then walked around within the complex to see if I could spot the source. I think I did: an upstairs apartment, number 16. The smell seemed stronger there, especially under the air-conditioner, which was running, and I could see occupants inside (I refrained from trying to look closer to perhaps be able to espy someone inside actually smoking, lest I be seen as a peeping Tom). But that’s now the suspected source. I’m not sure what to do about it, whether to complain to the homeowners’ association or leave a note at that apartment. I’ll probably give it a day or two to resolve on its own—I’m hesitant to take action on what may be a one-time or just occasional problem. I’ve always found the smell of cigarette smoke extremely unpleasant. I kept my door closed when I returned to bed. . . . A further development: about an hour later, I got up from bed—to, among other things, write this note in my Diary. When I finished, I opened my door to see if the smell had abated. It had—it was less strong. I saw that the door to apartment 16 was open, with the outside screen door closed, which I figured was to air the apartment out, to clear out the smoke. Now the lights in the apartment were out, but I could see the television was on. The observation of the open door there I think supports my hunch that that was the source of the smoke smell. This time, I’m leaving my door open as I return to bed. Miserable!

● How can I regret that Hitler lived and did what he did?: If world events before my time had been significantly different, I probably wouldn’t have been born.

● Haircut (Brenda).

● Sunday, 10-18-2020:   A confused mind is like a messy house. You may hold inconsistent beliefs, but you don’t see them because of the clutter. Both phenomena are all too common.

● Today the electricity here went out for about three hours. Better today than in a heat wave, one of which we’ve just passed. I hope the food in my refrigerator is still good.

● Monday, 10-19-2020:   I had an interesting dream last night. I dreamed that I was a patient of some psychologists or psychiatrists, and I had a legal case, perhaps a workers’ compensation case, for psychological injury. I was getting therapy, which I thought was not helping me. But then I had a great revelation, which I voiced to the doctors and others involved in my care. I said, “Perhaps what it comes down to is that, if you want to get something done in life, you just have to work hard to accomplish it.”

● The lawyers for whom I’ve been handling workers’ compensation depositions for the last few months called me today and said they’d like to hire me for their firm full-time. I said I’d welcome that, and we’re to meet for lunch sometime soon to discuss it. A big impediment is the court appearance firm (Greg Polster) through which I’ve handled the depositions. These attorneys asked me to talk to him (Greg Polster) about it today; I did, when he called me. He said he thought that my working directly for those lawyers would hurt him, as he’d be cut out of the situation, and so lose business, but he left open the possibility of making some sort of arrangement. I’ll talk to the other lawyers about it when we meet.

● Wednesday, 10-21-2020:   I’m in an uncomfortable period with the hostile neighbors in no. 3 wherein I can’t retaliate: not because their hostility has ceased (it hasn’t), but because it’s taking such forms (like subtlety) as would make retaliation backfire. To use a legal analogy, it’s as if they constantly violate the spirit of the law, but, to retaliate, I must wait for a violation of the letter of the law. Inevitably, though, with each passing day, their hostility slowly gravitates back toward the usual more overt forms that enable unproblematic retaliation. I just wait.

● I have a theory about people who are for Donald Trump for president the second time (or who say they’re for him): many of them are simply people who can’t admit they made a mistake.

● Thursday, 10-22-2020:   I’ve had a backache since yesterday afternoon that was bad enough to prevent me from taking my exercise-walk today.

● I had an (I thought) interesting dream early this morning. I dreamed I was with my father. We were traveling together in a car; I was driving. We were on our way (and we were late) to see his girlfriend; I’d written a flattering poem-essay about her, of which I was very proud. At one point, we were talking about some, I think, scientific topic; I had just read an article about it, and I referenced a detail from the article. My father gave me some advice: he said that I should know more scientific details generally, instead of speaking only vaguely about such matters, which (knowing more science) would enhance my credibility. I seem to remember spending the rest of the dream inwardly contemplating that advice.

● The (or a) big hole in my education is mathematics.

● About last Monday’s positive development with the lawyers wanting to hire me, a disappointing turn of events. When I called them, I told them about my conversation with Polster; they said I shouldn’t have talked to him about it. I didn’t remind them that I did so because they had suggested it. Somehow they seemed no longer interested in meeting with me. Did I say something wrong in last Monday’s telephone conversation with them? Whatever the reason, I’m very disappointed. On the positive side, though, the experience shows that lawyers find my legal work impressive. [Later note: I think I probably did say something wrong: namely, that I would “welcome” making some sort of more direct and thorough-going arrangement with them. I probably showed too great eagerness. I should have said something like, “I’d be interested in exploring it.”]

● Friday, 10-23-2020:   Well, the cool weather has finally arrived!

● I’ve finished going through my Eisner’s Journal once more for editing. It’s over 480 pages. Just one more read-through. Then I’ll explore possibly posting it on the Web!

● Saturday, 10-24-2020:   I’ve had occasion to look up in the dictionary the phrase “putting too fine a point on it” and it (“Not to put too fine a point on it”) seems to mean something like a preface to a blunt statement. I sometimes use the phrase a bit more literally, to mean making a statement more precise than the subject logically permits.

● Wednesday’s backache is diminishing, but slowly. Though I still have some symptoms, I’m going to take my daily exercise-walk.

● My mother once told me I laugh in my sleep.

● Trump is incompetent . . . fortunately!

● I voted today. I voted for Joe Biden for president—not so much for him, as against Trump.

● Sunday, 10-25-2020:   Yesterday, after standing in line waiting to vote, I felt unwell, with significant back discomfort. But early this morning, I feel much better. The back discomfort has greatly diminished, and I feel generally good.

● Philosophy Club meeting. Topic: “How Would You Rewrite the U.S. Constitution?”

● The United States pledge of allegiance goes this way: “I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.” It has several problems, including these three: One, “under God” violates the U.S. Constitution First Amendment’s establishment clause, which, according to annotations, holds, among other things: “Also included in the free exercise clause is the right not to believe in any religion, and the right not to participate in religious activities.” Yet, the pledge of allegiance would command everyone in the country, even atheists, to pledge allegiance to “. . . one Nation under God . . .” Two, “justice for all” is illogical, because, by definition, justice is global—it encompasses everyone simultaneously; it’s the proper allocation of society’s goods and ills, benefits and detriments, among all people. If someone is not getting from society what he should get, or he’s getting what he shouldn’t get, it’s not a lack of justice (for him); it’s an injustice. Three, why would you pledge allegiance to the Republic and to its flag? What is allegiance to a flag, separate from allegiance to the Republic? If they redid the flag, would you feel compelled to be disloyal to the new flag, because you’d pledged allegiance to the old one?

I would propose this alternate version of the pledge: I pledge allegiance to the enhancement of humanity’s well-being, and to what in human institutions is valid and good, and opposition to what in them is invalid and bad.

● Monday, 10-26-2020:   The backache seems finally to have resolved.

[Later note (10-6-2024): I’ve noticed lately that, in reading the Journal, when I read an entry, like this one, that talks about my backache having resolved, it seems meaningless, because I don’t remember what I wrote about that backache—I write about them so often that they all seem to blend together. I don’t know what the solution is, other than to stop writing about my every backache. Which is probably not a good solution, because I don’t have enough discipline to take that advice. Besides, if I stop writing boring entries, I won’t have the opportunity to write funny comments on how boring those entries are.]

● I took my Camarillo drive again. It was very windy today.

● Tuesday, 10-27-2020:   I’ve written a short response to last Sunday’s Philosophy Club topic. I’ve been working on it for three days straight, since Sunday. I keep changing it, improving it. When I think it’s done, I’ll send it to Brian Gould, the Philosophy Club host/facilitator, and post it in this Diary and in my Eisner’s Journal.

● Thursday, 10-29-2020:   I just awoke from three nightmares in a row. All I remember from the first was a single scene or situation: I was in my backyard (a fictional one); I saw a large male African lion in a neighbor’s adjoining backyard, and felt a sudden premonition that it was about to charge me, to eat me. I momentarily debated whether I should run for the backdoor of my house or hide, take cover, somewhere in the backyard. Going into the house would be ideal; but I didn’t know if I’d make it there before the lion caught up with me. I decided to run for the house, and started to do so. But when I got to a small fence within my own backyard that I’d have to get over to reach the house, my motion seemed somehow impeded, and I seemed unable to scale the fence, but I was straining to do so. I feared that, if the lion was running after me, I’d have lost the race. Then I woke up. I persisted in bed, and at length fell asleep again. The second dream was the most extreme one, in part a lucid dream. I dared imagine some action, and then it happened. I was a member of a religious community, and the Devil or bad spirits would take over various persons’ bodies and act out some outrageously terrible acts (I can’t now remember the details). It was prolonged and phantasmagorical. Toward the end, I was out on my (fictional) front lawn, and thinking, almost like the creator of a movie, that this was a good way to end this dream, that certain visual elements of the previous nightmare would appear, but now they’d be in a normal context. Which indeed happened, and the dream turned calm. In the third and final dream, I was in law school, studying. I’d go from semester to semester, year to year, learning to practice law so that I could earn a living. But the progress seemed very slow. In the dream I was living with my very old parents, and (very similar to the first dream situation) I seemed to be in a race with time: I didn’t think I’d be ready to practice law without finishing the full course of study, but thought it was almost miraculous that my parents were still alive to continue to support me. I feared that they’d die, and I’d run out of time: stranded—both unsupported by my parents, and unable to support myself. I was contemplating the unpleasant suggestion (I don’t know where it came from) that I’d have to find a way to start practicing law before I was fully prepared (a compromise analogous to hiding in the backyard, from the lion, in the first dream). This dream (also like the first one) ended before I got the answer, the resolution.

● Friday, 10-30-2020:   Last night was another uncomfortable night, with the (albeit less strong than last time) smell of cigarette smoke. For one reason or another, last night/this morning was even more sleepless than usual.

● I think that piece on the U.S. Constitution is finished. Here it is:

I have neither the time nor the inclination (I suppose if I had the inclination, I’d find the time) to write an American constitution in toto, from scratch. But, in Order to form a more nearly perfect Union, establish Justice, and better promote the general Welfare, here are some changes I’d make to our existing constitution:

➤ State’s Number of Senators:   The number of a state’s members of the Senate is to be proportionate to its population size.

➤ Right to Vote:   Every United States citizen has a right to vote in all federal, state, and local elections in which he would otherwise be eligible to vote.

➤ Ranked-Choice Voting:   All elections for public office in which more than two candidates run, is to be decided by a ranked-choice voting system.

➤ Electoral College:   The Electoral College is abolished. The president is to be chosen by popular vote. The candidate who gets the most votes, wins.

➤ Gerrymandering:   Gerrymandering is prohibited.

➤ Supreme Court Justices:   Supreme Court Justices are to serve a term of twenty years, unless earlier dismissed for cause. New Justices are to be appointed by Congress, alternately by members of the two then largest parties, and alternately by the Senate and the House of Representatives, as follows: The first selection is to be made by Senators of the largest party in the Senate; next by the Senators of the other major party; next by Representatives of the other major party; next by Representatives of the other major party; next, again, by Senators of the other major party, and so forth. If and when the Congressional members designated by this rule to select a Supreme Court Justice do not then constitute at least thirty percent of their Congressional chamber, the members of that party of the other chamber will make the selection. If they, too, fall short of thirty percent membership of their chamber, Congress is to decide on a temporary alternative procedure for selecting that Justice. When an alternative selection procedure is used, the decisional rotation is to resume as if the prior selection had been made by the regularly scheduled group.

➤ Other Rights:   Every United States resident has a right to:
➢ Housing;
➢ Healthcare;
➢ Education.

➤ Limitation of Wealth-Disparity:   A mere technically or theoretically equal opportunity to attain a good life is not enough (everyone who plays in a lottery has an equal chance to win, yet all but one lose). Everyone should have, not merely an equal chance at a good life, but an equal and realistic chance at it. And an equal, real opportunity for a good life requires roughly equal material resources. (A thousand millionaires, is preferable to one billionaire and 999 paupers—because in the former situation the general Welfare is far greater.) Therefore, no United States resident may have more than twice as much wealth as another.

Afternote:   I wanted also to ban people from making big monetary donations to political campaigns, but then figured that my foregoing final clause was sufficient: rough equality of wealth would eliminate both the incentive and the ability to do so.

● Sunday, 11-1-2020:   Ridgecrest ride; pleasant. It was refreshing; it was good to get out of the house for a while. I hadn’t taken this drive, or even the shorter “desert drive,” for a long time.

● Tuesday, 11-3-2020:   I’m looking forward to seeing the voting returns later today. I hope the experience is more pleasant than that four years ago.

● I just got a call from what obviously was a charity looking for a donation. The caller announced himself like this: “I’m with the Leukemia Foundation; we’re a non-profit.” I simply replied to this effect: “Well, that gives us something in common: Right now, I, too, am non-profit.” He took the hint and just said, “Thank you.”

● Wednesday, 11-4-2020:   As of 2:30 this morning, we still don’t know who won the presidential election. Very frustrating.

● I’m about 50 pages into my next (third?) read-through of my newly compiled Eisner’s Journal. I’m still finding many edits—too many to let this be the final reading before publishing it.

● A few comments on Trump’s defeat in the 2020 presidential election:

○ I wish Biden’s margin of victory had been bigger, but I’ll take it!
○ The nation’s nightmare is over!
○ We’ve cut the worst single malignancy out of the body politic.

● Friday, 11-6-2020:   I’ve just gotten over another backache, lasting for several days, though not as severe as the one before it, about two weeks ago. And I’ve just realized why I’m having more backaches lately: I’ve stopped taking daytime naps (the last nap was on 8 October 2020). Naturally, lying down for an hour in the middle of the day helps my back. Suddenly stopping that practice puts more pressure on the back; I suppose my body has to get used to the change. But there’s another bodily side-effect of my no-nap practice: no headaches. For a long time, I’ve thought that my headaches were somehow caused (or at least worsened) by my irregular sleep schedule, and sleeping too much. Which theory now seems confirmed: I checked my headache record, and the last time I had a headache (strong enough to require medication) was 8 October 2020!

[Later note (May 2021): That diagnosis of my backaches, turns out, I think, to have been perceptive. I got several more, but by now the spate of them has largely subsided.]

● Monday, 11-9-2020:   My deposition of this morning was cancelled, so I took my Camarillo drive, and returned via Pacific Coast Highway. It was very pleasant, especially the first half. I was surprised that the Coast-route variation was just 83 miles (roundtrip), only 6 miles longer than the other route.

● For many years when I was young, perhaps from about age ten to about sixteen or seventeen, I hated the way I looked; I thought I was ugly, and especially I felt that my nose was too big. Since my early twenties, though, my feeling about my looks changed. At some point I began to have the opposite feeling, and since then I’ve thought I’m quite handsome—and I like my nose. I don’t know if I actually got better looking, so to speak. More likely, I think, the fluctuating feeling about my looks, was a manifestation of my more general self-esteem, or lack of it.

● Today we got the good news that one of the pharmaceutical companies has a COVID-19 vaccine that’s 90 percent effective. I think it was very significant that they held the news till just after the presidential election. Had they revealed it before then, it might have changed the election’s result, the way FBI Director Comey’s announcement, just days before the last election, about resumed investigation into candidate Hillary Clinton’s emails, apparently changed the result of that election, and threw the victory to Trump. Good for them this time.

● Tuesday, 11-10-2020:   Today I filed a claim, by telephone, with the relevant state agency, for unemployment benefits (payments). It won’t amount to much, perhaps $160 a week. But any money helps.

● Another backache.

● Wednesday, 11-11-2020:   My back feels a bit better today.

● And then I made it worse: Eager to take a break from my work by doing another constructive activity, rather than taking a nap, I took a second exercise-walk. With my backache, that was—and proved—very unwise.

● Thursday, 11-12-2020:   I’ve just gotten up for the day, and the back pain has completely resolved. I feel not a trace of it!

● Desert ride. Pleasant. Coming back, there was a horrendous traffic jam on the 5 freeway south, in Sylmar. I took a long detour. I don’t know if it saved time, but it was surely more agreeable than sitting in traffic.

● Is philosophizing introspective or extrospective? Both. Introspection is defined as “Contemplation of one’s own thoughts, feelings, and sensations.” Philosophizing is introspective in that you’re contemplating, or probing, your own thoughts—but it’s extrospective in that the thoughts you explore are ones about the world and the universe.

● Trump is claiming to have won the 2020 presidential election, and is alleging that his opponent, Joe Biden’s apparent win is somehow a result of vote fraud. As usual, Trump is projecting his own propensity onto others: the only vote fraud here is Trump’s own fraudulent claim of fraud. If he could find a way to steal the election, he would. Meanwhile, he’s the world’s biggest sore loser.

[Later note (7-2-2022): To say that Trump’s allegation of vote fraud is projecting, is too charitable, because it implies that he believes it. He doesn’t believe it—it’s a lie. On the other hand, I then call his allegation fraudulent, which implies that it’s a lie. So perhaps the real problem (with the foregoing paragraph) is just inconsistency on my part.]

● Saturday, 11-14-2020:   My electricity was off for about five hours this morning. Someone posted a comment online saying it was caused by a car driving into a power line (or pole) in the neighborhood. It’s good that this is a cold day: so that the things in my refrigerator stayed cool.

● Sunday, 11-15-2020:   Ridgecrest drive. It was about 290 miles roundtrip, seven and a half hours (6:45 a.m. – 2:15 p.m.). The first half (going to Ridgecrest) was mildly pleasant. But coming back was tedious; I felt as if I was driving, not for pleasure, but just to get home. There were too many cars on the road for it to be very pleasurable. Historically, though, I’ve been very poor at understanding my feelings. Whether I would have had a pleasant experience had traffic been lighter, I don’t know. All I know for sure is that the heavy traffic made it less pleasant.

● Thursday, 11-19-2020:   Another night last night in which I seemed vaguely to smell cigarette smoke.

● Saturday, 11-21-2020:   Donald Trump claims that his opponent, Joe Biden’s (apparent) victory in the 2020 U.S. presidential election was obtained by fraud, and that he (Trump) is the rightful winner. What evidence does Trump have for this allegation? None but the outcome itself. He starts with the premise that he (Trump) is, or should be, the winner; therefore, any other result is fraudulent. It amounts to the contention that the winner of the election should be decided by Donald Trump, not by the people. But Trump’s defeat was an especially pointed rejection of him, for this reason: In the same election, in other branches of the government, the Republicans (Trump’s party) gained members over the Democrats (the opposing party). So, Trump lost the election, not because people disfavored his party, but because they disfavored him. I regret that the Republicans advanced in the election, but take some consolation in the stinging defeat of Donald Trump.

● I just took medication for a headache. This is the first time since 8 October 2020 (almost a month and a half) that I’ve had a headache, the longest I’ve gone without a headache probably in decades. The improvement is due to no longer taking (daytime) naps.

● Sunday, 11-22-2020:   Philosophy Club meeting (by Zoom). Topic: “criminal punishment.”

● Perhaps utilitarian and retributive approaches to criminal punishment can to some extent be theoretically reconciled if we (a la utilitarianism) take into consideration the reduction in a crime victim’s anguish that’s effected by retributive punishment of the criminal who victimized him, as well as the community’s relief in seeing “justice” done by such retribution. More generally, here, as in many (all?) moral contexts, I favor a hybrid or eclectic approach. We should avoid hard and fast moral rules, though we must have some legal rules, because there’s value in the rule of law.

I’m against the death penalty, for several reasons. One, our criminal judicial system is far from infallible. Unavoidably, some not insignificant percentage of criminal defendants will be wrongly convicted. And not infrequently we discover the error within the wrongly convicted person’s lifetime. It’s much better to discover the mistake if he’s in prison than if we’ve killed him, because in the former situation we can to some extent compensate for the wrong; in the latter, we can’t at all. Two, if we execute a person of extraordinary ability, we lose the fruits of his talents. Which, by the way, also means we should structure confinement to enable inmates to actualize their potential, for society’s sake, if not theirs. I used to say that I opposed the death penalty because I wanted the convicted criminal to suffer; and death is not suffering, but imprisonment is. Having just given the foregoing reasons for opposing the death penalty, this latter ground now seems flippant.

[Later note (2021): But if we arrange for prisoners to actualize their potential, would that not motivate some persons to commit crime in order to become imprisoned, where they might have greater opportunity to fulfill their talents than they have out of prison, where they may not have enough leisure time to do it?]

[Later note (1-23-2022): The solution to that problem is to expand everyone’s opportunity for self-actualization.]

● The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy contains an article by philosopher and lawyer Kevin Murtagh on criminal punishment, in which Murtagh cites an argument by Gertrude Ezorsky, to the effect that, if we imagine a world in which punishing criminals has no further effects worth achieving, such as deterrence, it would be odd to think that justice and desert (a la Kant) require such punishment. Murtagh replies that Kant would probably disagree, on the grounds that, even in such a world, if we fail to punish crimes, people “will fail to abide by the dictates of justice, and their lives will be of lesser value.” Two points: One, Murtagh is not honestly addressing Ezorsky’s point. He’s not criticizing Ezorsky’s reasoning; he’s merely refusing to accept her hypothetical supposition, that criminal punishment does not achieve any worthwhile effects, like deterrence. Criminal punishment’s inducing people to “abide by the dictates of justice” (which Murtagh replies would not happen if we fail to punish crime) is deterrence. Two, in connection, not with criminal punishment, but with Kant’s moral philosophy (IF Kant would say what Murtagh says he’d say, a big if), isn’t an action’s effect on the degree of some value (here, that of human lives) consequentialist, rather than deontological? Indeed, it’s essentially the same as utilitarianism, which urges maximizing intrinsic value (which it identifies as happiness). The only difference is that Kant doesn’t identify a more specific element of human lives as the intrinsic value—he just says, the value of “human lives.”

● Thursday, 11-26-2020 (Thanksgiving Day):   Desert ride. I intended to go to Ridgecrest, expecting that traffic would be very light (Thanksgiving Day). But traffic was very heavy, and, in any event, I was just not in the mood for it (perhaps because of the traffic). So I truncated the drive; in Mojave, I detoured to take the shorter “desert drive,” but “in reverse.”

● I’ve just finished yet another read-through of my newly created Eisner’s Journal. On this reading, I made many salutary edits. Onto the next read-through . . ..

● Saturday, 11-28-2020 (2:00 a.m.):   I resumed taking my daily exercise-walk yesterday, because my back was much better. But I think it was premature—it seems to have made it worse.

● Just after noon, my back felt good enough so that I took my walk today.

● Sunday, 11-29-2020:    Leaving debris from Earth on other heavenly bodies in the solar system perhaps risks upsetting the gravitational balance between them: it reduces Earth’s mass, and increases that of the other bodies. Probably a small amount would have no significant effect, but I wonder how much would be needed to have a noticeable effect. We should consider it before blithely strewing our trash in space, as we do on Earth.

● Wednesday, 12-2-2020:    Donald Trump is the Greater Evil. Joe Biden is the Lesser Evil. Well, that’s not quite true. To be precise, Joe Biden is the Lesser Evil-elect.

● Saturday, 12-5-2020:    It’s early morning, and I’ve just awoken from a very long, drawn-out, beautiful dream with many scenes and situations, all involving my budding romantic relationship with a young Black lady I used to date (or some composite of them both—there were two). The situation I remember most clearly is one in which we were both students in a class. The students were given an assignment of responding to two religious essays. I had written two responsive essays, and I was exceedingly proud of them. On the day the students were to have their responses ready, just two students showed up for class: me and her. We were both going to read our essays out loud to the class, which meant to each other.

● Tuesday, 12-8-2020:   The neighbors in apartment no. 7 have for some time expressed hostility toward me by shadowing me. When I come out of my apartment, one of them comes out of their apartment. Today, when I went out to get my mail, the man came out of their apartment and walked by me. I haven’t retaliated yet. But I’ve finally gotten fed up. I’m going to start retaliating. From now on, at least when I come out to get the mail, I’ll carry in my pocket a certain noisemaker (I think I’ll use the maraca), and, if and when he follows me and comes near me, I’ll take it out and make the noise at him, establishing it as my angry sound for him. Once established, I can flexibly use that sound as a weapon against them. . . . Now I’m having second thoughts: whether to use the maraca, or the drum. No, the drum! The maraca is too soft. They can’t hear it in their apartment with the door closed. But the drum—ah! (I should explain that apartment no. 7 is not adjacent to mine, where neighbors can hear every little sound I make in my apartment. So, to be sure that those residents hear my sound, it must be loud enough. . . .)

● Wednesday, 12-9-2020:   I just noticed that in the “teen” numbers, like seventeen, the “teen” is an extension of “ten.” So, seventeen is seven plus ten. (As they say, “You learn something every day”!) But I wonder why eleven and twelve aren’t called simply oneteen and twoteen. (Perhaps it’s because “eleven” and “twelve” sound much better.)

● Thursday, 12-10-2020:   I’ve heard concern expressed over some people’s reluctance to take the COVID-19 vaccine; and they’re trying to figure out how to persuade such resistant people to take it. My reaction is this: There’s not yet enough vaccine even for those who want it. If someone doesn’t want it, that’s fine—leave it for those of us who do. Once those who want it have gotten it, then we can worry about the others.

● Saturday, 12-12-2020:   Today, I’m returning four cartons of dates I recently bought. I’ve been buying them all year, and never before had to return so many at one time. Why now? Two reasons, I think: One, they’re probably out of season now. Two, I didn’t know as well how to pick ‘em (I think I know now). How are those two reasons related? Well, earlier in the year, when the dates were in season, you could take almost any carton of them, since nine dates in ten were good. But now, perhaps only two in twenty are good, and, to get a reasonable proportion of good ones, you have to know very well how to pick ‘em.

● Sunday, 12-13-2020:   I’ve just finished another read-through, for editing, of my newly compiled Eisner’s Journal. I see from other entries that, apparently, I began this last read-through on November 26 (2020); so this one took about 18 days—the amount of time it takes is diminishing, I think. In this latest reading, I (again) made many useful edits. Which means I must go through it at least once more.

● Camarillo drive.

● As I’ve said, I’m on a weekly retaliation schedule—on Sundays—with the neighbor in number one. I chose Sunday for maximum effect, since that’s been his social day, when he socializes with guests, in his apartment. In the last few months, I thought I noticed that he switched his social day to Saturday, which I interpreted as a defense against my attack. I thought he had switched back to Sunday. I retaliated just a few hours ago, and now I realize that, no, he has switched his social day to Saturday—or at least it’s no longer Sunday. So next time I retaliate, it will be on a Saturday. Or I suppose I could even do it Saturday and Sunday.

[Later note (11-16-2023): For the last year or two, he no longer socializes in his apartment—no doubt because of me.]

● Tuesday, 12-15-2020:   I just awoke from a dream in which I was trying to establish a thesis that raising a child is like any positive social interaction, except more sustained because your interests in it are more enduring; and is the opposite of a dedicated destructive project, like blowing up an enemy city, because the object of child-rearing is positive (as opposed to the negative of the attack) as well as (again) enduring, as opposed to short-term (the harm from the attack may be lasting, but the destructive act itself is quick). In one scene in the dream, I arrived at a store where apparently I worked—I arrived early—and sat down on the sidewalk outside, trying to write my thesis. Later, the store owner came, opened the store, and urged me to come inside because it was cold out. I declined, saying I wanted to stay outside a bit longer. I told him something to the effect that, before he came, I was suffering from the cold and the darkness; now that there was light outside, I wanted to savor the difference in the light, even if it was still cold. Perhaps that bit was stimulated by feeling cold lying in bed—I don’t know if I felt cold in bed, or (if so) whether those elements were connected.

● Thursday, 12-17-2020:   About a week ago, I heard a lecture (or part of one) by Dr. Michael F. Roizen, M.D., about diet (he wrote a book, What to Eat When). He said our earliest meal of the day should be our biggest one, and our latest meal of the day should be our lightest one. Or, in Dr. Roizen’s more elegant words, “More in the morning and less later on.” I tried to take that advice simply by switching the salad (which I used to eat for breakfast) and the hot meal (which I used to eat at dinner). I’ve done that for four or five days now, and my impression is that my sleep has significantly improved. I fall asleep sooner, and sleep more soundly. A pleasant surprise. It’s interesting that such a small change in diet can have such a big effect on well-being.

[Later note (2021): That good effect didn’t last, perhaps because I’ve reverted to eating a more substantial second meal.]

[Later note (8-4-2024): If eating less at the second meal indeed significantly increases my well-being, can I not muster a little willpower and eat a bit less then?! I’ll try it.]

[Later note (8-5-2024): I ate less at dinner yesterday; I slept better last night; and I don’t feel tired this morning. Amazing!]

● Sunday, 12-20-2020:   Philosophy Club meeting (by Zoom). Topic: “Involuntary Treatment of the Mentally Ill or Addicted.” I favor involuntary treatment of mentally ill persons when they’re a danger, even just to themselves. If someone was sleepwalking and about to walk into traffic, I think that a bystander could rightfully restrain him, even if he (the sleepwalker) insisted that he wanted to walk into traffic. The issue is sometimes framed as a conflict between paternalism and autonomy: between our forcing a person to act in a way that we deem better for him versus allowing him to control his own behavior, and to do as he wishes. But a mentally ill person’s behavior may not be autonomous, or self-determined, because it’s not a product of his true self, which has been hijacked or usurped by the mental illness. In that situation, when he’s not in his right mind, we have a duty to protect him, to act as a proxy for his true self, to prevent the mental illness from irreparably damaging the true self’s interests. When his true self returns, he’ll be grateful for our intervention. Imagine a seventy-year-old painter. He has, in his house, all the canvases he’s painted during his lifetime, and he’s very proud of them; they’re a source of great satisfaction to him, and he hopes eventually to leave them to museums, which have expressed considerable interest in getting them. One day, he takes LSD; he goes temporarily insane, and decides to burn all his paintings, for some crazy-sounding reason. His friends, who are with him, restrain him from burning the paintings. Twelve hours later, the drug’s effect wears off, and he thanks his friends for so restraining him. Why should it make a difference if the insanity lasts twelve hours or twelve months, or if the insanity’s cause is unknown, or if museums had not expressed interest in getting the paintings?

● In retaliating against my neighbors, I don’t rely just on my memory of their offenses during the current retaliation cycle (either 24 hours, or one week). To determine whether to retaliate, I put a note on (the inside of) my front door. If the note is there when it’s time to retaliate, I do; if it’s not, I don’t. Sometimes I put the note up, but then change my mind and take it down. I think I should devise a more efficient procedure for determining whether to put up the note, a procedure that might avoid the need to cancel a planned retaliation. Perhaps a procedure like this: Post the note when but only when the offenses are sufficient such that no amount of good conduct (that is, absence of bad conduct) during the rest of the period would warrant canceling the retaliation. On further thought, I think I wouldn’t use that procedure, because of the fear of the opposite problem—of not retaliating, when I should retaliate. I fear that, if I wait to put the note up, I’ll forget some of the offenses that gave me cause for retaliation. Alas, it seems that there’s no simple formula that will allow me to avoid using my judgment, which can be difficult, and is not infallible. Wherever you draw the proverbial line, some cases will fall near it, which will be hard to decide.

● Tuesday, 12-23-2020:   In this time of pandemic, when we have a crisis of overflowing hospitals, the public is urged to stay at home, and forego travel, as far as possible. I had planned to take my Ridgecrest ride this Friday, Christmas Day (when traffic may be light). I had thought that there’s little risk in just driving, by myself. But there is a risk: if my car breaks down and I need to have it towed back home, I’d probably have to take a long ride sitting in the cab of the truck with the tow-truck driver. If he’s infected, I’m very liable to get sick. I’ve decided to take the risk. If traffic is too heavy, I’ll cut the trip short.

● Thursday, 12-24-2020:   I just awoke from a dream in which I was a graphic-art student. Fusing music and graphic art, I was studying the paintings of Mozart and Bach, and inspired by their work to do my own paintings. But I resisted doing it because it was unpleasant. I was trying to paint a picture of a tree in a car’s rearview mirror, but having difficulty with it, due to distortion of the image caused by dirt on the mirror. I chided myself for my difficulty, looking at a similar painting by Bach, and noticing how he made the distortion part of the composition. This dream took an actual autobiographical element: I used to do graphic art, which was my great aspiration in my late teens and early twenties, before I found writing. But I resisted practicing it; I found it unpleasant, though I had considerable talent. Almost all of my drawings and paintings were lost along with almost all of my writing in that great loss I’ve written about.

● Well, this has been the year of . . .
○ Pandemic.
○ The end of full-time (paid) work (for the Law Offices of Scott Warmuth).
○ The end of taking (daytime) naps.
○ The beginning of leisure time.
○ Eisner’s Journal.

● Friday, 12-25-2020:   Ridgecrest ride—truncated (I stopped short of Ridgecrest. I went to Red Rock Canyon Park and turned around, shaving 50 miles off of the full trip—so it was about 240 miles). It was pleasant, if not actually pleasurable. At IHOP, I ate the “Rise-and-Shine” breakfast, which was tasty. In retrospect, I spent too much time waiting inside the restaurant close to other customers—very risky these days. I played a new (new for me) five-CD collection of country music. It turns out that the last two are terrible, but the first three are pretty good.

● Sunday, 12-27-2020:   To broadcast radio signals into space to try to communicate with intelligent extra-terrestrial beings is like an insect that should hide itself from predators, casting off its camouflage and moving about to try to attract attention.

● Tuesday, 12-29-2020:   I bought a new electric blanket a little over a year ago, to replace my old one. But I procrastinated switching it. The fabric of the old one became increasingly frayed, and then a few months ago the heating on one side of the blanket failed entirely. Yet I kept using it until today, when, last night, I was so cold I had to pull the bed covers completely over my head to try to get some warmth from my own body and breath—and I was still too cold to sleep. So today I bit the bullet and replaced the blanket. The new one looks like a much superior product. I’ll test it out tonight, when the weather will again be very cold.

● Thursday, 12-31-2020:   The new electric blanket is a vast improvement over the old one in many ways! . . . in addition to that the new one works and the old one was broken.

● I’ve just finished the latest read-through of Eisner’s Journal, for editing. I’m now familiar enough with it to have made this observation: the quality seems to drop significantly in the last third or so—especially in the first third of that last third—(philosophy yields to the quotidian; it’s as if thinking stops, I still feel a reflexive need to write, but all I have left to write is the recounting of mundane, trivial events: I had a sore throat this morning; I ate salad tonight; I asked Scott about my advertising, he said “no”; on the way back home, traffic was heavier than usual; etc.). And I believe I know what caused the deterioration: it more or less coincides with my working full-time—so I had much less time for thinking and writing. Now I must decide how much of that later material to delete. My tentative inclination is to cut as much of the vapid stuff as possible without hurting the “narrative.” At nearly 500 pages—and counting—I figure I can afford to sacrifice a bit of quantity, to (try to) maintain the quality.

2021 >>