Malcolm Gladwell: Notes Toward A Practical Theory Of Life

So I've been going through my usual midwinter funk, this time with extra sauce. I haven't been blogging because a) my thoughts are too disordered for me to be able to write well, and b) there would be too much temptation to complain.

However, it has not been entirely miserable. I've done a fairly healthy amount of reading, and it has been remarkably rewarding. I'll want to mention John Waters's latest book, for instance, but the most significant experience I had was discovering the works of Malcolm Gladwell.

I've been communicating with a number of people on their reaction to the book Outliers, in particular Catherine Schaff-Stump. Here's part of our exchange, and here's another. I promised I'd acquire the book itself and respond to the work rather than the response to it.

Well, when the missus was visiting family in Florida, I had my usual withdrawals. One night I woke up at midnight, knew I was awake, and went prowling around for something to read. Fiction gives me difficulties these days; I wanted something soft and easy to understand. I found a book on the shelf called Blink, a yard sale rescue item.

I was blown away. When I started thinking, "Man, those people talking up Outliers ought to be reading this guy," I remembered the time my brother and I spent nearly a year with him trying to get me to read this short story in Omni called Johnny Mnemonic, while I pushed Neuromancer on him, both of us convinced we'd found the greatest science fiction ever. Of course after all the fighting and outrage had cleared out, we realized we'd both discovered William Gibson. (Typically, Duncan found him first. I'm always late to the party.)

I got up from bed and checked the computer; sure enough, Gladwell wrote both books and a third called Tipping Point. So the next day I walked to four different local stored and located Tipping Point, and then performed an act of grim dedication. I bought Outliers new, in hardback, from a big chain store. God have mercy on my sin-blistered soul.

This is exemplary non-fiction, with direct, intelligent prose and an understated but distinct authorial presence. These works gave me the much-appreciated pleasure of the company of a congenial mind, one rich in intelligence, common sense, diligence, and humanity. I do not agree with everything he says, and I feel that in Outliers, he begins to have serious trouble with unstated theses and the making of assumptions -- there is a sense of fatigue there. Or possibly desperation.

Because underneath the smooth surface of his presentation, Gladwell shows every sign of being passionately concerned with one of life's most serious question, and by implication concerned with life's only serious question.

Why do some people succeed and some fail? More specifically, why do so many gifted people fail? How is it that some people are able to change their circumstances radically, while others seem trapped by their position in life?

How does this apply to me?

How should I live my life?

That is the only important question. All others derive from it. And Malcolm Gladwell made me think about it. Hard. Because he doesn't just have speculation. He's got solid, verified observation, and he draws useful conclusions. He's been thinking about a lot of things that have occupied me recently, and he's in a position to have a better understanding of them then I do.

Rather than do a serious critique -- which will come, after I've had time to seriously read and notate the books -- let me tell you how my attitudes and approaches to life have changed in response to my initial reading. I did not digest these books, or ponder them, I gulped them down in raw steaming chunks. These are the personal responses I took away.

1
My big problem is not mental illness, it is class. It would be proper for me to attempt to gain access to the perquisites of the middle class, rather than defiantly shake my fist from the gutter.

My sister and I spoke of this yesterday morning. The difference between the way she was raised and the way I was raised left her a member of the lower middle class, and me a member of the lower class. It is distinct.

This is an issue in my relationship with the missus. She's upper middle/lower upper class, and the clash between my short-sighted fatalism and her arrogant entitlement provides us with hours of amusement.

In these books, Gladwell points out over and over again, subtly and overtly, that poverty carries with it a mental and emotional burden, and this burden predisposes a person to failure.

To be working class is to know that all you have has been given to you, and it could be taken away at any moment. Any bad decision you make can cost you everything. Starving in the gutter is not a metaphor; it is an activity. Have you ever felt your belly eat itself? Fuck you. And there is no profit to be made from your commitment, passion, and action. No benefit accrues from effort. The guy who spends half the day jacking off in the men's room takes home the same check you do. And honestly, if this is the best you can do you're a loser, plain and simple. You are a burden, everything you have is taken away from someone else, and if you attract any attention it will come in the form of trouble. So if you like attention, you better like trouble too.

This is the real key to my experience of life. I know people who are, like me, high-functioning mentally ill. And they own houses. They have careers. They take vacations.

Because somewhere down the line they got the information that they deserved to have their needs met. That the world was going to provide for those needs.

And this feeling of basic confidence in one's right to exist is a powerful thing. It might be more honest to say that the elimination of pride and confidence is shattering. That it prevents a person from functioning properly in the world.

So now I know why it's important for me to feel as though I deserve to have my needs and desires met. This condition I exist in is not virtuous; it is a pathological response to stress and trauma. It inhibits the quality of life of those who care for me. And it will certainly shorten my life if indulged.

But I find myself resistant, and the resistance is based on two feelings. One is that I am falling into sin, that to care for oneself is both vain and definitively selfish, the other is that my ability to physically dominate a situation might be compromised by an appearance that says anything other than, "I do not give a shit, and I am ready to die at any minute."

Honestly? You ask me what I want to look like? My mind immediately flashes to one of those Somalian dudes with a hyena on a chain. This must be modified at the very least.

So how does one go about addressing such an existential disaster?

Gladwell posted some signs, and I found they led somewhere productive.

2
Style Is Substantial

Nice is a word that's always given me problems. I am a tremendous supporter of nice in the Elwood Dowd sense, but the importance of things looking nice, or being nice has always bothered me. "Why should I have to dress nice, why should I have to clean up?" was a question whose answer always hinged on other people. Why should I have to dress differently just because of them? I don't mind clutter, I know where everything is. Why should it make any difference?

Gladwell makes it plain, over and over, that it makes a difference. A big difference. Coke tastes different out of the can. When New York literally cleaned up its infrastructure, it metaphorically cleaned up its crime problem. And when I wear a sport coat, people treat me differently. Because I went to the trouble of telling them that I'm a person worthy of respect.

In our house, there is a sharp division of height. Everything over five-six or so is mine. And for decades, there have been piles of books and CDs and bags of old bank statements and every little bit of crippy-crappy that gets handed to me that I don't care about accumulating on the tops of our shelves and dressers and so on.

Thinking about how New York got cleaned up, I started the week by clearing all those off. Interestingly, it's lighter downstairs -- they were actual hovering dark presences. More importantly, I'm trying to send a message to myself -- no more darkened unexamined corners. Everything out in the open, neat and tidy.

And now I understand that clothes are a language, and a personal signifier as well. The semiotics of personal presentation are the most controllable aspect of one's public person, and frequently it's the most instrumental.

I typically dress in a ragged T-shirt and too-big jeans held up by a too-big belt and muddy hiking boots. My hair is usually overgrown and vaguely... Ever see a picture of Gabby Hayes? Like that. I've had people throw change in my lap while I was waiting for the bus.

My clothes and person say, 'this is someone who is almost but not quite able to take care of himself, he's clean enough so that he probably doesn't live on the street, but if he wears pajamas they have feet.' Like it or not, this is a limited but accurate view.

I'm going to figure out how to make my appearance make the equally limited-but-accurate statement that, 'this is an artist, confident, and capable, a professional creator fit to act at the highest level.' I have it on good authority that I am not a wannabe, I'm a professional waiting to get paid. Time to start dressing in a fashion that allows others to view me in that light as easily as possible.

This is going to be a whole other post or series of posts in itself. Conquering my style issues is going to be a fucking bear.

But at least I know.

(A brief postscript -- the missus went mad and dragged me to a thrift store this afternoon. I agreed, but told her I would not buy anything that didn't grab me. That if I was going to make the clothing thing work, it would have to be based on positive feedback and pleasure -- on a sense that I was doing something that I wanted to do.

So when we stepped into the store, they were playing the Edgar Winter Group instrumental Frankenstein [you know I love this one - bwa-bwa-bwabwa-bwabwabwa-bwa!], and the very first men's garment I saw was a Ramones-style leather jacket that fit me? [I'm six-three and oddly built.] This is a garment I've wanted for more than twenty years, and the first time in my motherfucking life I go clothes shopping for fun I find one for thirty dollars, half off. Well. I changed my attitude. If I get to rock, this is going to be fun! When I picked up my niece this afternoon I dressed up a bit; she and her sister agreed that I was definitely on the right track.)

3
I Am Part Of Something Larger Than Myself

I know how important other people are to me. I'm starting to figure out how important I am to other people.

These books make it plain that we are literally part of one another. People who spend time together divide up mental chores unconsciously, by ability -- so when you're together, each of you has an extended mental capacity.

You ever get together with someone and just go, 'whew, I needed that?' You did need that. And they needed you. And guess what?

Your successes and failures impact the quality of their lives in a myriad of ways both subtle and overt. When we rise, we lift other with us. So there actually is a moral obligation to treat ourselves not just well, but in a way that maximizes our health and joy in life. Because we are always examples and models as well as individuals.

This applies to art as well. While Gladwell didn't deal with the arts per se, these books strongly reinforced my notion that art is one of the primary influences on the weltenschaung, and that as an artist regardless of my conventional success and failure, I have already began to exert an influence on the tone of the world. There is a real power here, and one largely unrecognized.

But I now feel that by exerting myself in my chosen fields, I can have a positive effect on both the people I care for, and the world at large.

Further. I am not simply an isolated individual. My well-being is of significance to many others, and by failing myself, I am failing them -- and these patterns have all kinds of complex feedback loops.

People who are happy and strong make me feel better. They help me. The more happy strong people there are, the better. So if I can turn me into a happy strong person, I make life better for others. It's a straightforward conclusion. To seek benefits and advantages for myself is not an entirely selfish pursuit. To seek abnegation and minimization is not a selfless act; rather, it is the pursuit of eccentricity at cost to those closest to me.

4
I Live in a Rice Economy

One of the flaws in Outliers is Gladwell's failure to think things through to a conclusion. I feel as if his need for journalistic distance is at odds with the very personal drive behind his work.

The section on rice cultures was where his thoughts scattered. He convincingly argued that rice cultures have the strongest work ethic because rice cultivation is successful in direct proportion to the labor and skill of the farmer. The harder they work, the more they are rewarded. The smarter they work, the more they are rewarded.

Gladwell states that we could learn from these cultures. But learn what? He emphasizes the effort and time involved in successful rice farming, and demonstrated that this level of commitment produces spectacular results anywhere it is applied.

But he also points out earlier in Outliers that that level of commitment is a hardship, is demanding, and if it doesn't produce a profit in itself? It is expensive, and someone other than the practitioner must foot the bill. It is this simple. Do I really have to point out that this is a fairly serious class issue as well? I wouldn't have gotten my outlier hours in if I hadn't been a) crazy and b) disabled. This is how America trains its artists, he said bitterly.

He also points out that the values of a rice culture evaporate outside an environment where there is not a directly perceptible connection between effort and benefit. Like it or not, in our culture the connections between labor, ability, and success are frequently diffuse and unpredictable. Many people find no healthy motivation to engage in life on this basis. Gladwell does not address this issue -- I'm not convinced he pondered it consciously while writing this work.

But I am an artist. I know from experience that I am happiest when I work a ten-to-twelve hour creative workday encompassing a variety of challenging activities, and that my work drastically improves under those circumstances. Work is healthy for me, and the more I do, the better I am, the better my odds of success.

As I said, this post might have been a bit muddled, a bit pointless. I'm struggling with the midwinters right now. Haven't eaten in two days, and the ulcer feels like someone's trying to dig their way out of me with a Popsicle stick. Blaaaaaaaaaaargh. But I am not giving up, not wallowing in negativity and passivity. I am making progress.

I've got warm feelings toward the work of Malcolm Gladwell. If you see him, tell him I said thanks.

What The Hell Is Going On?

I'll tell you about this later. It should be -- oh, shit. Is that a bear?

It's been a while since I've posted. Life has been interesting in the proverbial sense...

But here's the big news.

1. I made my first performance, unless you count speaking at weddings and funerals.

2. I spoke to a psychiatrist, and have tentatively begun treatment.

3. Swill is out.

So I'll talk about the shrink first. Get it out of the way.

It was interesting. The nurse running the place immediately slotted me for a two-week stay in the bin, to be monitored while they determined my medication.

She said, "They'll be delighted with you."

Thus we have my relationship with the mental health profession. It's kind of like Where The Wild Things Are. "Oh please don't go! Oh please don't go! We'll eat you up, we love you so!"

I wound up speaking with the doctor for quite some time. Near the beginning of our interview, she said, "Normally these are much shorter, but you're so interesting!"

In my lowest moments, I can think back on moments such as these, and comfort myself with the thought that women find me of great clinical interest.

So, I've mentioned in previous posts that I've been diagnosed with agitated depression and borderline schizophrenia. Well, the doctor told me that there is no longer such thing as agitated depression, and 'borderline schizophrenia' never existed -- some shrinks use it as a shorthand for, 'well, there's something going on in there, and it's making me nervous.'

What she said? Post-traumatic stress disorder (which, interestingly, Jim MacDonald diagnosed for one of my autobiographical characters) and obsessive-compulsive disorder. "You've got a little bipolar, too, but all artists have a little bipolar." And I'm hypomanic. If you know me personally, look up hypomania and nod in recognition.

There was something I very much appreciated. I mean, she's letting me keep my bipolar! (Well, hypomania is pretty functional.) She specifically stated that the goal of my treatment was maximum creativity, minimum medication. "Maybe just stabilizing your sleep would be enough."

Yes, yes, yes.

She also said something interesting. "I don't think you represent a danger to yourself or the community at all." She said it with the definite air of a woman making a contradiction. I suspect it was directed at the nurse, since the doctor didn't put me in the bin after all.

Instead, I received an initial prescription for two anti-depressants and an anti-psychotic. Which I guess is minimal medication for such as me.

The missus, bless her heart, after all this... after making me go to the emergency room, insisting that I do the follow-up, driving me to the appointment...

"They're putting you on a caaaaahk-tail! That stuff is poison! It's addictive, you know. Have you talked to ______ about how they feel on their medication? (the individual in question has behaved violently when not on meds) You won't be able to work."

And so on. Her great fear is that I'll wind up a broken zombie. I told her that if she doesn't like what it does to me, I stop. The point of this is to make me as easy to live with as possible. So we'll see. She's having me hold off for a few days, which is fine with me. Get one last band session in with beer before the long drought -- no drinking with meds.

I think talk therapy will be more useful to me -- but it's going to be a long time before I can get that going. Turns out Berkeley is hurting for low-cost counseling.

And so.

How'd the performance go? First off, let me thank everyone who showed up. I have got a swell community and I am grateful for it.

And as for the performance. It turns out that my completely unreasonable confidence was not unreasonable at all. I have a talent for performing that isn't obvious until I have an audience to fuck with.

I'm good at it. Real good. The video will go up at some point, but I will tell you in honest pride that I kicked ass. I was told a number of times by a number of people that I was 'the hit of the evening.' What's sick? I didn't need to be told. I knew it; I was there.

This was something for me. A while ago I began attending readings, and soon found that I wanted to be on the other side of the podium. I can even put a date on the birth of this ambition -- my birthday in 2009, when I attended the Litpunk reading. To concieve an ambition, and see it through to completion at a high level of skill in a prestigious venue? On purpose? Dang. Didn't know I could do that shit. Bodes well for the future.

Okay, I'll confess. When I was told that I was going to be opening, I smiled and nodded and agreed internally that it was only smart to put the new guy in first. First time out, you can't expect too much.

But something in me said very distinctly, "You're gonna eat that."

Not a nice statement, is it? But there it was. Something in me felt challenged, and responded. I don't think I would have done as well if I didn't have a wee touch of malice in my motivation.

It was interesting. I was in a distinctly altered frame of mind. Normally that kind of busy-busy atmosphere -- people bustling around, eating, talking -- shuts me right down. Instead, I was able to smile and converse, but I felt a real distance from everyone. That was my only bad feeling of the evening -- I felt guilty about not being able to spend real personal time with all the friends who had come out to support me.

And here's the other thing that was weird. When I looked at the audience? They were all just a horrible undifferentiated blur, a genially horrid many-handed monster -- except for women I found attractive, who gave the impression of being arranged like chocolates in a box. Very disturbing. Between that and the disassociation, I think I have a better understanding of how celebrities get into trouble.

But I'll tell you what. After an initial stumble, I had them. I got laughs I wasn't expecting, but when I turned the screw they shut the fuck up and listened. The missus later explained that stumble to me. At the start, I mentioned that I'd brought the wrong copy of the manuscript.

At first I argued with her about that -- I was just being candid, which is part of my thang, etc. But on further thought, I decided she was right. (Sweetie, here it is in front of everyone -- you were right, and I was wrong.) I think an audience likes being told what to do -- if you have convinced it that you are in charge. By admitting an error, I cast doubt on my authority, which made the audience suspicious until I proved my mettle.

And once I thought of it that way, I realized the pleasure I'd experienced in performing. It was that of dominance. Control. I work hard on being polite, deferential, cooperative, a person of service. I do this because the alpha male I have locked in the basement is a motherfucker and I do not trust him.

Performance gave me a time and place to let him out for a while. I liked that. I want to do more. And it felt safe. It was appropriate for me to be extreme, demanding, and unquestioningly in charge. It was the time and place where I was serving by ruling, to put a ridiculously overweening caste on things.

And like I said, it's safe, it's harmless. I mean, some crazy artist getting sick power thrills from the control of crowds? What could possibly go wrong with that?

I'll tell you about Swill tomorrow.

This Is Your Brain On Art

There we go. Much better. And I've got a new one I might be able to finish today. It's got a new feature -- a human being! After all, what's the point of doing landscapes like these with no-one in them to feel distressed, alienated, and threatened?

So to shift the current focus of the blog a little bit, here's some information I recently received that gave me a fresh look at the relationship between mental illness and creativity. This is, as you may imagine, a subject of great interest to me. There are so many factors that come into play here -- everything from tenacity that looks a little like OCD if you tilt your head to childlessness to poor boundaries making characterization and dialog easier to write to vulnerability to sensory input to the stress experienced when one lives in a culture-hating culture -- on, and on, and on.

Look. I know healthy, stable artists who are sick of the 'crazy artist' stereotype. Sorry, folks, you seem to be in the minority. When people apply it to you, it's a stereotype. When they apply it to me, it's observation.

Artists of any kind tend to be a little messed up, and when they aren't, they are usually kinda weird. I used to go through phases of being upset when waves of mental illness seemed to sweep through my friends, and then I realized that I only like hanging out with driven creative people.

Well. I think I have figured out one of the reasons why art is so good for those of us who have a few screws rattling loose in the cranium.

The information came from two different sources. One was the book This Is Your Brain On Music by Daniel J. Levitin, the other was an episode of the Mythbusters TV show.

The Mythbusters included a segment on the idea that you use ten percent of your brain at any given time. Bullshit, of course, but there was something very interesting that came up near the end. If you aren't familiar with Mythbusters, they're a TV show devoted to the scientific (on a crude but real level) investigation of everything from turns of phrase to movie cliches. They investigate the myth, and then when they're done, they try and either replicate it, exaggerate it, or completely reverse it.

In this case, they wanted to turn the myth around and have someone use their entire brain at the same time. Do you know what the subject did that used their entire brain simultaneously?

They told a story.

Memory, sensory details, emotions -- everything came into play. And as they described what was going on, I realized that if I had a chart of the areas of the brain, I could intentionally activate any of them through an act of imagination or memory. (They're pretty much the same thing, actually, or so it looks these days.)

You could do it too. It's not hard at all, it turns out.

And in This Is Your Brain On Music (a wonderful book, if you think you might be interested in it you should read it), it was revealed to me what part of the brain is used when you play music.

All of it. The whole meghilla.

Let me tell you a little something. I play bass, and before my music buddy became a father we were pretty serious in a garage-band way. Recorded an album that's actually listenable in a way. But my bass playing stalled out a bit, and I recently figured out the totally-obvious reason why.

With my back, I don't practice any more. The more I sit, the more I hurt. It's a simple formula.

But recently music has been taking off on me. I had a couple of baritone ukuleles that I found at yard sales. The nice thing about ukes is that with their short necks, I can play them lying down or sitting in my recliner. Well, a few months back I found something else. A pair of violin stands that are the perfect size for the ukes. I tuned one uke EADG like a bass, the other DGBE, which is standard baritone uke tuning, and then set them out on the floor. Where they stayed in tune a hell of a lot better, and they were there. I could just reach out, and there was an instrument that I could actually play. And I would.

In fact, I do. I've gotten in the habit of periodically breaking while working to play a melody or a scale or a few chords. Sloop John B is my current favorite, and those who remember the VPXIII singalong will be amazed to hear that I've got it sounding halfway decent.

It's gotten to be a habit because when I do it, it's like running a comb through my thoughts. The bristly stray cognitions that have begun to block my work in writing or visual arts are put back in place, and I can return to work refreshed and confident.

Very interesting, no?

And there is a feeling that I've been getting with my writing more and more frequently -- a sense of control. Of knowing that I know what I'm doing. It's actually intoxicating.

I think it's my whole brain going at once. I think one of the great attractions to art is that it allows the artist to fucking make their brain shut up and do what it's told.

Here's another anecdote. (I know, the plural of anecdote is not evidence -- but I am not claiming to do research here. I am saying, hey! You! Research this for me.)

For me, creating visual art does not feel like a complete experience in itself. I need music to fill things out. I don't want music when I write. People who write to music might want to ponder this a bit. Is this the reason I'm a second-rater in the visual arts? I need the music to propel me through the laborious parts of the process. If I was actually interested in each brush stroke I'd be a better artist. (Although Chuck Close works to music, so that theory might be blown right there.)

Last Saturday I was working on a print, and instead of playing music, I played an instructional CD on learning rhythm. Fascinating, delightful stuff -- here it it -- and it riveted me. I was chanting along unconsciously while I worked, occasionally taking time out to do a little hambone. It was a great fucking afternoon. I came out of it feeling euphoric. And I'll bet I maxed out my brain. Overclocked that son of a bitch.

I think I'm a whole-brain junkie. I think my brain is like one of those high-end sportscars where if you just drive it in traffic, it gets fucked up. You need to take it out on a track every once in a while and put that fucking pedal down.

Or so I suspect. Anyone got an EEG so we can check this shit out?

The State of the Oaf

There we go. This looks right and will print properly. Alas, the other piece I want to work on? I lost the fucking file for it, and will have to reproduce it from scans and photographs. Oh, well. I'm just going to have to do the fucking work -- turns out that these aren't just going to Spectrum, they're also going to the SF MOMA! I got an invitation to submit in my email this morning. Which means I'm putting the Swillistrations out into the commercial and fine arts worlds simultaneously.

Duchamp rotates as I type, faster and faster and faster... a little smoke emerges from his grave...

So I haven't been too communicative about my personal situation over the last week or so. I've been mulling things over. This is an eminently mullable situation. Here's the deal.

Two weeks ago, I checked into the emergency room after vomiting impressive quantities of blood for three days. This is the third incident of this I've had in the past few months, so the missus was frightened enough so that... well. If I didn't do what she wanted, I'd have felt like a total shit.

Now here is a familiar pattern. I will take care of myself if it is something I need to do for the sake of another person. This is one of the reasons I'm hard on the nerves, but it's also one of the reasons I'm still alive. Yes, it's bad that a human being needs a mechanism like this in order to function. But you know what? Sometimes you need a fucking crutch. People badmouth crutches all the time -- but who goes around taking people's crutches away, for chrissakes?

That was what was driven home to me in the hospital. You see, what Karen and I thought was some sort of gastrointestinal condition turned out to be a stress reaction or anxiety attack. And it seems as if the sight of my reaction to three shots of Ativan, a Valium, and a dose of morphine made an impression on the missus.

Because last week she took me back to the hospital. She'd spoken with my doctor and they'd decided to get me on some tranks to last me until I consult with a shrink, one batch of pills and one batch of suppositories in case I climb back on board the blood-puking train. (Look, I need a general term for counselors, psychiatrists, and psychologists and shrink would be the word.)

Which I am going to do. I'm not going to do it until the Swillistrations are done and off, because I need to cater to my OCD tendencies a bit in order to keep my stress at a manageable level.

This is representative of the way I'm coming to think now.

What strikes me as interesting is that I had the attack just a little while after I decided that I needed to simplify my life, to work with my quirks and eccentricities rather than fight them.

Now this is going to sound horrible, but I'm trying to look at myself semi-objectively here. I've always considered myself a crazy genius, but, you know. The domestic, or tea-cup variety. Someone who'd be more accurately described as a gifted eccentric.

That estimation isn't exactly holding up. I'm crazy enough so that big 'S' society has decided that I need medication and observation. And I'm genius enough to be simultaneously rocking literary fiction, scriptwriting, surrealist digital prints, and paleontological reconstruction, all well enough to be taken seriously by those in a position to do so.

I mean, I've gotten serious big-name approval. The scary kind. Patrick Neilsen Hayden bought my fiction and wants to see all of it, the BBC has broadcast my shitty cartoon scripts, Harlan Ellison (who does, in fact, know art) praised my art very highly in personal correspondence and it has improved distinctly since then, the Smithsonian mentioned my latest paleontological print by name on one of their popular science blogs. If I heard any one of these things about someone else I'd be impressed. To know that these are all true of me... Honestly, I still think I made all that shit up but there is a fucking paper trail! These things happened and they continue to happen! Shit, I'm about to start in on performance and spoken word stuff, and even there I'm starting out at a respectable level.

It is fucking hallucinatory. It contradicts my views of myself profoundly. This is one of the reasons I've been going nuts lately. I keep talking about this kind of stuff to the people I know because I can't believe it's true.

I bet it's getting a little dull to listen to.

What helps put this into perspective, is that when I told the doctor that I'd been diagnosed with agitated depression or mixed state when I was in my mid-twenties, she was suddenly very, very concerned. She scootched close to me and put her hand on mine and looked me in the eye and said, very, very gently...

"So, can you go outside at all? Or do you have to stay at home?"

The thing is, is that she wasn't being clueless. So far as they can tell, about a third of the people who are diagnosed with agitated depression kill themselves. This is, for many people who suffer from it, essentially a life-ending diagnosis. Permanent misery. To be able to speak articulately to a doctor while in a state of distress is enough to mark me as extremely high-functioning. And it is far from the only thing that's odd in my noggin.

But while it's important, it isn't what my life is about. Yesterday I wrote an essay for an upcoming project that I'll tell you more about later. It was a bit of absurdism/surrealism that was... Well, I know I can hurt people with my fiction, that I can show horrid events from a horrid viewpoint and have the reader walk away feeling worse for the experience, wondering why they didn't just stop reading. I wanted to see if I could write something that could impart a powerful feeling of positivity and uplift.

I gave it to the missus to read, and when I asked her how she liked it, I thought she might be close to crying.

"I wish you really did feel this way," she said. When I was able to explain to her that I do not write things that are not true, she felt pretty good. I swear, you know the story of the blind men and the elephant? I'm sorta like the elephant.

People tend not to see all of me at once. Some people cannot imagine me having a negative thought and some people cannot imagine me having a positive one. But I am a creature of balanced extremes. If I did not have a compensatory optimism and ambition, I wouldn't be here. But I do, and I am.

I'm going through an important transitional period in my life. This is why I'm having these crises. This is why I'm constantly excited. And the excitation is part of the problem. Good news increases my heart rate, makes it difficult for me to sleep...

It's stress. The doctor spoke to me about this when she encouraged me to get into counseling. Why am I having these spectacular blood-spurting breakdowns? Because my life is starting to come together and I have no basis for coping with success. At all. And it's something that takes coping.

So this is it. I'm giving up on trying to be a conventional person. Nine-to-Five house and kids 401k Sean is not a possibility. It's too late, and a bad fit. I do not fit into the American categories of winner and loser at all comfortably. I need to make crazy genius work.

Let me put this into literary terms. As a child I idealized the Heinlein man, Conan, the My Side of the Mountain guy, but that isn't the way it works for me. If left entirely to my own devices, I would die due to simple lack of interest in eating and drinking. I am not an independent person. I am not a loner. I'm more like Nero Wolfe or Sherlock Holmes, someone of great gifts who is also very dependent on those around him for support and structure. By struggling against this, I've made life harder for my support group.

That's one of the reasons I'm finishing Swill, and sending the art off to the Spectrum collection and the SF MOMA before I make the hike down into Oakland to be evaluated, designated, slotted, spotted, and then head-shrank. The genius part has to carry more weight than the crazy.

Here's where I am this moment. I've taken two of the Ativan since last Wednesday, and I don't like it. It makes me feel slow, numb, and slightly confused. It is better than serious anxiety, though. I've noticed that if I threaten myself with one, I calm down so I don't have to take it. Very interesting.

And the last two nights, I've gotten relatively decent drug-free sleep for the first time in years. I believe I've found the secret. I need to be in bed between eight and eight-thirty, I crash by nine, I'm up at five in the morning. That's my proper slot. My insomnia is partially because since I've stopped work, my bedtime has drifted later and later so I can spend time with Karen in the evenings. (Well, sweetie, would you rather have me awake at ten, or in bed at three?)

My facing up to the fact that I've got a mental illness that does require treatment, my days and nights of compulsively writhing and vomiting? These aren't issues. They're climate and weather. My life is coming together, and I'm finally finding out who I really am. This is a good time. This is a healthy process for me. This shit does not represent a setback, it is just some of the baggage I have to deal with. And other people have it worse, and there is no point in comparison.

This is my life, and hey. It may not be what anyone expected but it is a thing.

Priorities

So, what's up with me lately? I'll tell you what's up with me lately. Things are great and kind of awful at the same time. And I just realized that I'm in a particularly tricky position right now.

Right now things are different for me than they ever have been before. Instead of being a creep alone in his room, I'm a lovable eccentric with a small audience and a growing circle of professional acquaintances. Instead of doing this weird, half-formed art and writing, I'm creating at a higher level than I'd ever seriously aspired to. There is a shift in my relationship with the missus; I'm gaining status and a whiff of romance is in the air. I'm currently in a position to make some substantial changes in my living conditions. And it's been nearly six months since I've had a major episode of mental illness. I've gotten a little shitty around the edges here and there, but I've exhibited no genuinely aberrant behavior.

But in the last few weeks, I've started having episodes of insomnia again. Rather than waking up at two or three and going back to bed at three or four, I'm waking up and staying up. Because I'm working or fiddling.

Or, mainly, worrying.

I've managed to overcommit myself and I'm not managing it well. Actually, my suspicion is that I've commited myself to an appropriate degree, but I suck.

That sentence has a familiar look. Let's rephrase that. I don't suck, but I'm going through a period of transition and I wish I was handling it more gracefully. I wish I was carrying out my obligations in a more generous and timely fashion. And I'm going to have to make some life choices (like buying more prepared foods, or pre-making and freezing meals) that I'm not crazy about if I'm going to pursue my ambitions fully.

Right now I'm facing a constant demand for one thing or another from me. An illustration here, a critique there, and then there's the missus, who wants me to do stuff with her and around the house and she's not above yelling and she probably has a point.

And she wants me to write her a promotional piece for her business, but I've been asked for a crit and I've been putting it off and I'm working on it and I get an email asking if the crit is in the works and I say yes and the missus asks me if her piece is ready and she sounds like she's upset and I have to go to class and I haven't done homework all week I'll have to do it in a chunk and my stomach hurts I've got to sign up with California Lawyers for the Arts and find out about health care so I can get a checkup and when was the last time I checked in with Twitter but it's time to make fucking lunch for the missus and all this crap is piling up in the studio and I need to get those blinds put in I can hardly see the fucking screen and I've got to pick up Poppy from school jesus I sweat so much everywhere I go I've taken to carrying a rag crap should I get a macro lens for the next batch of Swillistrations or is there a magnifying setup that would work what if magic was a peasant martial art that allowed an unarmed combatant to take on a member of the local warrior elite that would motherfucking rock I could base it on my high school gang fucking have to write that oh crap I need to xerox this shit scanning it in takes to long crap where's my pen I should be asleep right now why am I looking at musical instruments on line I haven't touched the novel in three fucking days shit shit shit --

Like I said, right now I have all the ingredients for a sweet life and I'm managing to dick things up to a limited extent. Not entirely, thank goodness. If I let myself continue to lose sleep because I'm worried about all the wonderful things going on in my life, I'll screw myself up. I do not want to slide back into that fucking cycle of madness if I can avoid it.

Here's how that goes. I eat one meal a day -- which I've been doing for some time. That interferes a bit with sleep, so the insomnia kicks in. Three, four hours sleep last night, so there we go. The lack of eating and the insomnia feed into each other until other symptoms kick in, like irritability, pacing, compulsive verbalization, perhaps a bit of finger- 0r lip-chewing, and by that point, well, look at the image at the top of this post.

I'm currently at the point where I'm constantly working and I can't feel as if I'm getting anywhere, and every time anyone makes a perfectly reasonable request of me I feel like curling up in a ball and screaming while big chunks of concrete are dropped on me until the screaming stops. So I need to prioritize.

I'm halfway through a critique. Finish it, and then no more online critiques until I've got breathing space. Then write the promotional piece for the missus. And then do my homework for Grammar.

No. Grammar first. This is my fucking livelihood, let's be serious. I'm putting the other things ahead of it in an expression of what some would call a martyr complex.

Then crit. Then Karen's piece.

Then regular doses of Grammar rather than a pre-class cram. And tackle fucking Swill. I have been anxious to do the next batch of Swillistrations since I finished the last. I've refined my system, I'm adding a fascinating new element that will help me ground the images with their inspiration in the novel, I have new tools.

But now that I think about it, there's a big mistake I've made in priorities already.

Why did I write this garble instead of going to bed? Now I've got to get dressed to go shopping and come home and work on my homework and hopefully get some time in on the crits and the promotional piece before I go to class it'll be another late night damnit and --

And the missus yelled at me to go shopping, and I avoided screaming at her. When I explained why screaming was even on the menu, she got it. My not blaming her for anything helped. Which is convenient, because I would have had to work to blame her. And that would take time I should be spending on other things. I need to quit panicking, take a breath, and make some decisions.

Connections. That's my blessing and my curse, is my mind's ability to correlate its contents. I need to stop seeing the forest and start looking at the trees one at a time, instead of being overwhelmed this baffling series of interconnected tasks every I contemplate any labor.

Oafboy? Tomorrow, maybe Friday, you sit your ass down and make some kind of concrete plan, a one-step-at-a-time deal.

And you move sleep to the top of your list of priorities. You see that thing at the top of the post, boy? You seen one of those before? Can you take a motherfucking hint?

Get some sleep, Oafboy. And stop worrying so much.

Good Friends

So when I saw this cereal in the 'let's get rid of this crap but pronto' section of the supermarket, my immediate thought was, "These folks were trying for lesbian, but they overshot and hit Marxist instead."

So my horrible, horrible brain said, "Don't you think there should be a cereal like THIS?"

I think my horrible brain is right. I think the world is ready for a breakfast cereal featuring commie pariah dictator-types. I think those jackoffs on the Wheaties box have had their fucking day.

Who Writes My Stuff

I just put up a small paleo-art gallery at Redbubble -- go ahead and take a look!

So Catherine Schaff-Stump posted a link to one of those hideous internet sell-your-soul-to-the-devil thingies. You'll have to check it out for yourself, but it's exactly the kind of brain candy I can't help but gobble down. You give it a chunk of text, it tells you who wrote it. I had to give it a shot; the results were interesting.

I began by feeding it the current first chapter of the novel, one scene at a time. The first scene involved a conversation between two friends, a man and a woman. It was supposedly written by Steven King. Look, I respect King, but he is not my god of prose. No flies on him, I read and enjoy much of his work and wish him well, but he's not the kind of writer that makes me wish I'd done what he'd done.

Steven King. Huh.

The next involved an encounter with a couple of street musicians and was written by Chuck Palahniuk. Fight Club is a movie I love way more than it deserves, okay? And Palahniuk has a reputation for being exactly the kind of writer I treasure. But I've read Choke and gotten halfway through Haunted and I just don't seem to like his work. I'll try more but... Palahniuk.

Huh. Okay, I can see my stuff on the shelf with those dudes. It does make a certain sense.

Next scene? King again. Okay.

Then Salinger.

I mean, what the fuck? J.D. motherfucking Salinger. I write like J.D. mother-god-damned-fucking Salinger. I will be dipped in shit and then spit roasted.

Next up? Jack London. Okay, I can see that fitting into a certain sorta polarity with King and Palahniuk. The next one is by Ian Fleming. I read Chitty-Chitty Bang-Bang as a child and enjoyed it; I read a James Bond novel and 007 was bound and spanked by someone named Blofeld. No, thank you. The last is by King again.

Then I run the whole chapter through the thing and it was written by Palahniuk. Okay. Right. Sentimental types, tough-ish, a tendency toward spare phrasing with regular decorations. I can see something to this.

So then I decide to try my published story, Tourists. You've read it, haven't you? If you haven't, go and fucking read it and come back.

Sorry about that, but unless you've read the story you won't get this. I mean, I busted my fucking ass on that story. I ripped my goddamned heart out for you people. And even if you don't like the stupid fucking thing, you've got to admit it's a rich mix -- everything from religious satire to sensitive observations of family relationships to science fiction horror embodying a critique of colonial appropriation of intellectual and cultural property and no, I am not shitting you on the last.

And who do you think wrote the damned story? Dan F.-is-for-Fucking Brown. The daVinci Code motherfucker. That goddamned jackoff no-talent --

Okay. Okay. I promised myself a long time ago to be moderate in my critical positions. I'm not one for the snark, you know?

But the missus made me read that goddamned book and it was just well-plotted enough to keep me hooked until the end. Oh, you should have heard me cursing and quoting and getting up to look up verification for my refutations of Dan Brown's repulsively boneheaded made-up factoid grout. It was a horrible, horrible experience and I took it very personally, so to find out that Dan Brown wrote a story so personal, so important to me... it hurt.

So I figured I'd try another.

I tried Hate Her, Hate Her, Tribulator! That's an odd one. It's a deal with the devil story where the devil is the sympathetic character and winds up destroyed by interspecies culture shock. It's an attempt to portray a supernatural character that observes the classic rules for a science fiction alien -- as John Campbell requested, something that thinks as well as a man but not like a man. It's about love, fate -- the big shit.

It was written by William Shakespeare. Fuck you, Dan Brown!

Then I tried my tribute to tiny SF worlds and got Palahniuk again. There seemed to be a lot of that going around.

Then I tried my favorite of my stories, a straightforward vision of a man in hell and how he makes the situation worse. Oh, it is nasty. Very pleasing to see that it was done by Raymond Chandler.

Steven King wrote my most recent story about a single mom pestered by raccoons. Fair enough. But then he wrote the excised acid trip party clearance scene from my novel! No way! That was supposed to be by Hunter Thompson!

I decided to try something different, an old trunk story that's probably a spoken word piece in disguise. It was by Chuck Palahniuk again, so I gave it up.

But hark! One last throw of the dice... Let's see who wrote one of the dizzying cosmic trip-in-present-tense-and-italics passages from the novel!

Holy motherfucking shit. This is too perfect. It was written by...

(drum roll, please)

James.

The Mutilator!

JOYCE!

That is right, folks, my writing seems to rest in the Tough Guy section of the Sometimes Vaguely Literary department of Popular Fiction, but it officially runs the span from Dan Brown to James Joyce, taking in Jack London, Raymond Chandler, and William Shakespeare along the way.

Somehow this seems about right. Holy smokes, that crazy gizmo really works!

Head Case

I know, I need to do the last section of the Atheism essay. But I need to do this first.

I've been going through it the last couple of years. I try not to turn this blog into a whinefest, but there are times when it helps me to get things out. Writing on my blog doesn't feel like talking to myself; it feels as if I'm conversing with a friend. So, buddy, here's what's going on...

My head's been getting worse. By this I refer to my being, well, a crazy person. I'd been on a slow but steady path of improvement for a very long time, but the last two years have seen things degenerate. This last winter and the current spring are giving me extra difficulties.

My insomnia has gotten worse. If I can get five hours of sleep a night, I'm okay. But lately I haven't been able to get that. I'm averaging three or four hours a night. That's still better than my worst, but it isn't good.

I've been spacey and irresponsible in ways that are totally new to me. Missing classes and appointments, forgetting things that I have to do, going to wrong buildings, etc. I mean, I thought I wasn't the kind of person who did those kinds of things, and here I am doing them.

And I've been finding myself just freezing for extended periods of time, sitting down at the computer, doing a quick web surf, and then realizing I've been doing it for hours. Or realizing that I've been walking back and forth between the living room and the kitchen for hours. Pulling out stacks of books and reading all the introductions and afterwards and none of the actual material. That kind of thing. It happens when I think about all the things I could be doing, all the things I should be doing, how lucky I am. How privileged.

I've been troubled by obsessive disquieting thoughts badly enough to lose sleep over them. Here's a sample -- imagine holding a steel tetrahedron between your teeth -- the taste of the metal, the smooth cold feel, the sense that it's harder than your teeth, the feeling of electricity where it touches your fillings. Bite down until your teeth break. Feel the splinters of tooth, taste the blood, and as you lay there in the dark, experience that bite over and over again.

That's a mild one.

There are times when I walk while I'm infuriated, slapping signs and kicking newspaper vending machines and muttering furiously. Every so often I'll get a strange look from someone in public, and I have to wonder if they've seen me during one of those little excursions. A pal of mine recently spotted me on the street while he was driving; he said I looked like someone you'd cross the street to avoid. At first I felt amused and complimented but hey. That's not really wholesome, you know? Behaving abberently in public is just not good.

I've been self-medicating with alcohol, and that isn't good, either. I swear off drinking alone, I stick to it for a while, something comes up that I know booze will help get me through, the booze helps, my prohibition loosens, eventually I get offensively drunk and swear off solitary drinking again. Lather, rinse, repeat. I'm not talking about daily drinking -- I couldn't fucking afford to be a real alcoholic -- but both my parents and both my grandfathers were alcoholics. I can't take drinking for granted, and I don't feel entirely under control of the situation.

No point in going into more detail. It's just not been good. And at the same time it has been good. I've gone through real creative breakthroughs during this time, I've found that there are times and places where I'm valued, where I have something real to contribute. The missus is convinced that it's because of the progress I've made with my art and writing -- that it's fear of success.

I don't think that's all of it, but I'm not saying she's wrong...

Right now I'm at a crucial point in my life. I've proven to myself that I've got what it takes as an artist and a writer -- but that's all I've got going for me. I need to find some way to make a living, and being crazy is not helping me here.

And a big part of what's going on is that I simply don't know how to live life on the most basic level. I actually tried to sign up for a basic life skills class last semester, but found out it was for developmentally disabled people... I shoulda taken it anyway. Let's face it, I'm just Rain Man with a vocabulary. Taxes? Job hunting? Savings? Jesus! I have no idea how people do that stuff. I am but a cork, bobbing in the current...

When I've read up on this stuff, the message I see over and over again is, "Seek professional help." I'm reluctant to do that. My previous experience with counseling and medication was almost entirely negative -- my shrink did turn me on to Robertson Davies, but that was it. The more analysis, the worse I felt, and the anti-depressant (Nortryptiline, if you're curious) did me no good at all. My counselor and consulting psychiatrist were terrified of/for me. If I hadn't been intimidated by the forms I had to fill out, I would have been committed. I still feel guilty about how depressed I made my shrink.

But things have changed since then. I'm nowhere near as bad off as I was at that age, even with my current troubles. And there have been a lot of advances in medication.

So I've decided to bite the bullet and investigate the possibility of getting back into some kind of therapy. I spoke to the missus about this, and she's started nosing around, bless her. She says there are a lot of free options around here. I don't know how I feel about medication -- I've heard some real horror stories about the adjustments people have had to make while figuring out their medicinal regimen, and the idea of suddenly turning into some kind of goddamned pharmaceutical werewolf is both chilling and not entirely impossible. But just having someone to talk to would make a difference.

Hey. It's worth a shot.

I'm An Atheist 3

(Click here for part 1.)
(Click here for part 2.)

A lot of atheists fail to understand the force and power of a revelatory religious experience. As a crazy person, I've got a bit more sympathy. I'm entering into murky, subjective waters here, so let me make a few things clear.

I am not making any claims for the objective truth of these experiences. I suspect that some have a basis in objective reality, and some are purely neurological events, and I'll explain that further as we go along, but please keep in mind that as I stated in the first part of this monstrosity, I am a materialist. I do not believe in supernatural influences. And while we're at it, I don't believe that the Earth has been contacted by aliens.

But far from unusual for people to have experiences that, if accepted uncritically, can lead one to the exact opposite conclusion. I'm going to write about some of these. I suspect that some of you who read these will go, "Wow. Dude needs some heavy, heavy medication," while others will say, "Wow. Dude is in total denial of what really happened to him."

But to put this in the proper context, I've had plenty of experiences with hallucinations. I've hallucinated from time to time for my whole life, I've hallucinated with every sense. I hallucinated as a child and teen before having any experience at all with intoxicants; I have used hallucinogenic drugs as a young adult; I hallucinate when tired, or stressed, or bored, or as a precursor to a mood swing. (I've also had the experience of dismissing things as hallucinations only to find they were real -- but that's another set of stories involving things like lasers and giant spiders and the Special Olympics. Maybe when I'm done with this atheist stuff.)

Which means that I have very little faith in the evidence of my senses or anyone else's. But I have every faith in the possible suggestive reality of any given reported experience.

The believer's mistake is to say, "Holy smokes, that was God in a flying saucer."

The skeptic's mistake is to say, "Oh, you did not either see anything, you big fat liar."

I'll give you two examples from my own life, both from the same period of time. They're certainly the most spectacular. They took place when I was trying to attend UC Santa Cruz. I got in even though I had a D + grade point average, because I got 1440 on the SATs -- the only questions I got wrong were in the advanced math section, where I still scored in the eighty-fourth percentile even though I'd flunked algebra twice.

Y'all should be able to guess what that means -- classic underachiever.

This made things stressful for me. I had absolutely no self-discipline or study skills -- I relied entirely on brute brainpower, and that only goes so far. And for the first time in my life, there was no-0ne fucking beating on me. You'd think I'd have been relieved. You would be wrong. I felt like one of those deep-sea fish whose swim bladder swells out of their mouth when you haul them to the surface. I was used to the pressure of the icy depths and the sunlight burned. I was exposed for the first time to people who were seriously -- but uncritically -- studying the occult, UFOs, Kaballa, that kind of thing. And I was also experimenting with drugs.

I think all of these contributed to the experiences that drove me crazy for a few years. Please note that when these experiences occurred I was sober and had been for some time -- when I mention drugs as a contributor, I don't mean that these were drug experiences.

The first was a fairly classic dose of gnosis. Late one afternoon I was laying in my bed, when all of a sudden I became keenly aware of everything around me. This awareness began to take the form of something resembling intuitional X-ray vision -- I could sense the studs and wires and pipes in the walls, the people passing by outside. I felt as though a hand came down and pulled me out of my body -- I saw the apartment building, then the campus, the city, the planet, out into the stars. My sense of time had vanished, and I felt myself seeing existence through God's eyes, felt myself cradled in God's hand.

I was terrified; I sensed the beneficence of God, but I was overwhelmed by the power of something who regarded every facet of reality that I could conceive as the tiniest portion of something far greater. I felt loved, I felt a sense that I was as important as any other aspect of reality -- but I was overwhelmed and fearful.

Then I found myself spiraling back down to Earth. When I was perceiving the world in a conventional fashion, it was after nine. I'd been lying there for four or five hours.

Another time, I had spent an afternoon talking with friends about a character named Wiley Brooks, a con-man who promoted Breatharianism, the belief that people can get all the nutrition they need by breathing.

(As an aside, one of the cults with which the missus was involved had a real trial when their leader began to promote breatharianism. Everyone felt just terrible that when they stopped eating, they starved -- it was a sign that they weren't spiritual enough... And yes, I mocked her throughout.)

He had made an appearance on the TV show That's Incredible, where he seemed to lift a thousand-pound weight, his purported strength the result of Breatharianism. My friends had arranged for him to make an appearance in Santa Cruz, but then they got a letter from his girlfriend, who explained that he'd been busted buying junk food, and was a complete fraud, a weird shell of a man who only came to life in front of an audience.

I bought the idea that he could lift the thousand pounds. I wondered if he was some kind of psychic vampire, if removing one layer of magic from him only revealed another mystery. (These days? My diagnosis is straight-up hoax. "But I saw it on TV!")

I grew agitated, and after sunset I went for a walk. I wound up at one of my favorite spots on campus, the upper quarry. It was a place where limestone had been mined to make cement for the rebuilding of San Francisco after the earthquake -- if you went back into the woods you could still find the kilns where the limestone had been reduced to lime.

After expending some energy shifting rocks and logs, I sat down and looked up at the night sky and noticed a particularly bright star overhead. It began to move, getting closer to the horizon directly in front of me. It got to just below the top of the trees, and then moved horizontally back and forth. This wasn't my first UFO siting, but it was different than the others. They'd taken place when I wasn't alone, and they were both easily explicable. One was a strange weather phenomenon, the other a cruise missile test. This was different. This frightened me.

I heard a rock fall in the darkness, then another, and another, more and more rapidly, circling me.

The darkness directly in front of me seemed to take on a predatory shape. It was as though I was being stalked by a wolf made of shadows.

Then to my right I saw a glowing figure like a human-sized insect with four arms folded across its chest. It seemed somehow maternal to me, a protective figure. It came closer and closer and I knew it was protecting me from the shadows.

Then I felt the sense of fear lift from me. I looked back at the shadows and it was the same friendly darkness that I was used to. And the insect-woman was gone as well. I looked at the light bobbing behind the trees and it began to rise until it was directly overhead; it shrank and vanished, presumably into the distance.

As vivid as this experience was, as tangible as it seemed, part of me drew back and said, this is not physical. This is psychic. Because at that time, I lived in a culture where psychic phenomena were assumed to be real, I interpreted my experience from that perspective.

That's one of the problems with religion, with non-materialistic belief systems -- they provide a context for delusion. In many ways the brain is a pattern-making organ. These kinds of experiences are common throughout history, and what one culture interprets as an alien invasion, another interprets as a manifestation of the Virgin Mary, another interprets as ghosts or elves.

Perhaps for some people, that helps them integrate these experiences into their lives. For me, they were a horrid destabilizing factor. For years after this, I strongly believed that there must have been something to them. I had nightmares that were so bad I preferred the hell of chronic insomnia to sleep.

Hell, for a while the missus and her friends were encouraging me to get regression therapy. You know, the kind where the therapist implants suggestions in your mind and convinces you that they're true? The false memories of satanic molestation and such?

If I were a devout Christian -- a devout member of any religion -- I would have tried to reconcile my experiences with my faith and it would have been easy. Those kinds of spectacular delusions support belief in the supernatural. "Oh, yes, God spoke to me, and the devil threatened me but the Virgin Mary kept me safe." Hell, I might have wound up as a preacher.

Instead, I decided to apply my rational mind to the problem. I systematically researched every claim of the paranormal that I could. In the end, I was not able to find any of them convincing. I wanted to be convinced, but the evidence just was not there.

But in the process I began to study various theories of the mind, and that led me to believe in the neurological origins of my experiences -- and that led first to agnosticism, and then finally to atheism. I was an agnostic first because something had happened to me, then because I thought it most rational to allow for the possibility of God. Now? I see no reason to entertain that possibility without evidence. On that basis you may as well acknowledge the possible existence of the Tooth Fairy in order to be intellectually rigorous. It's completely arbitrary.

So why am I able to have faith in science when I can't maintain faith in spirituality? I'll tell you that tomorrow.

(To be continued.)

Manlihood

The current work in progress -- because nothing says Manlihood like a lavender seascape with butterfly wings.

My distaste for males began when I was a child. As a tender sprat of an oaf, I thought that men were too big and too loud. They were ugly and smelly and pushy and drunk and gross and they had a horrible tendency to hit things. Things like me. The way they talked about women was absolutely repulsive. I wished there was some way to have them fixed, like dogs. The best thing you could say about them is that they were easy to fool.*

Imagine my shock when I came to one afternoon to find that I was adjusting my nuts, guzzling beer, and talking about pussy -- and I gotta admit, I'm pretty gullible. I hadn't just turned into a man. I'd turned into the kind of loud-mouthed vulgar brute I hate the most.

I'm not going to go into how this happened, because it happened to all of us and we all know it was horrible. (A brief moment of reflection on the universal miseries of adolescence.) Instead, please, allow me to contemplate the state of my manlihood.

See, while I hate men, I wouldn't be a woman for all the drugs in Berkeley. I mean, vulnerable adorability as a survival trait -- who the fuck came up with that one? Look, I am pro-breast. When I worked at BookPeople we used to carry a volume called Dr. Susan Love's Breast Book, and every time I put a stack of 'em on the shelf, I could hear the voice of a small boy call out from deep within me, saying, "Me too! Me too! I love breasts too!"

But in a world that is primed to explode into unspeakable violence at any moment the last fucking thing I need are tender cushions of sweetly scented flesh attached to my goddamned chest. I have no idea how you people live like that. (Yes, what you say about the penis and testicles, that's very true. I am not making claims regarding the safety or dignity of my junk, but I've learned to live with it.) And shall we discuss the horrors of reproduction? Let's not.

I must confess, red-faced, to a certain pride in being a fairly masculine kinda guy. It's disgusting, I know, but there it is -- or is it? I have some fairly serious reservations as to whether or not I can legitimately regard myself as a Real Man.

The Argument For My Manlihood

(In which my boasting will make you sick.)

1) Let's get the obvious out of the way. For the record, that's a standard doorway. You certainly wouldn't want me to fall on you. I almost never wear those kinds of clothes, though. Typically, I wear jeans and a T-shirt that says something like 'Dolomite,' or 'You're The Reason Baby Jesus Drinks.'

2) I grew up in a working and shirking-class city, and a lot of my schoolmates lived in the projects. From second grade through my junior year in high school, people wanted to beat me up all the fucking time. (The racial component to this was far to complex to go into here. Maybe another time...)

I went through an extended phase of non-violent protest, inspired by Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. that came to an end when I realized that some folks were regarding my behavior as freak show stuff. "Hey, professor, can I show my friend? Look, I'm really hurting him and he don't do nothing!" Then one day as I was walking home and two of my classmates were throwing rocks at my head as they followed me, something snapped. I realized that the effectiveness of non-violence is strictly situational and that it never works on assholes. That, under certain circumstances, Gandhi-style non-violence made you feel superior while encouraging others to behave badly.

So I started fighting again. I fought and fought and fought and fought until I was a senior in high school, when people didn't want to fight me anymore, because it hurt too much. The abuse continued, but it was furtive and crafty hit-and-run stuff.

While I haven't had to fight as an adult, that's because if disrespected or threatened, I flip the fuck out -- and that tends to make people back down, believe it or not. I've had a few run-ins that have made it plain that I'm endangering myself with this behavior pattern -- but it's not a matter of conscious decision-making. I come down from the rage-rush, and think, "You've gotta cut that tough-guy horseshit out, Oafboy."

3) I once stood down a Hell's Angel. This was during the month when I lived with a coke-freak who had a bunch of junkie friends who'd come over and shoot up. The Angel in question was a coke-freak too, and he'd settled well into the psychotic phase. He was under the impression that I was a deaf-mute, and if I said something, it was Satan speaking through my voiceless mouth. I had no idea he was a Hell's Angel. I just thought he was a squirrelly asshole.

My roommate and I were conversing in a parked car, when there was a crunch and the car rocked up. The Hell's Angel dude had rammed the car with his pickup truck.

I jumped out and gave him the 'bring it on' hand -- arm extended, pinky and ring fingers folded, middle and index fingers extended. He jumped out and got in my face, screaming, "Jesus wants me to fight you! Jesus wants me to fight you!"

"Then fucking hit me! Fucking hit me!"

"Jesus wants me to fight you!"

This went on for a while, while my roommate sits in his car, frozen. The sight was more embarrassing than awe-inspiring, though. I weighed a hundred and forty-five pounds, and the Angel was about five-six, five-eight. Finally, he backed off and got back in his pickup. "God's going to get you for that!" he screamed as he drove off.

When I got back in the car, my roommate was pale and shaking.

"Jesus, dude, that guy's a fucking Angel! If you laid a finger on him, they'd all come after you!"

Of course, back then I was suicidal, so the idea of dying in a fight with a bunch of Hell's Angels was not exactly discouraging. Later, the guy came to me and apologized, told me he was in Narcotics Anonymous. He was, as Stew once sang, very, very, very optimistic.

4) My roommate back then was in the habit of ripping off everyone around him -- he was at the cocaine stage where he simply did not give a shit about anything but the next needleful of Bolivian confidence. Yes, you told that person you were going to buy them drugs, and yes, you fucking spent their money on coke, but the real problem is who else has money you can access.

So one sunny afternoon when he was out ripping someone else off or shooting up, there was a knock on the door.

"Steve! Steve, get your fucking ass out here! We want our fucking money!"

I got out of bed, dressed in just jeans (remember, I weighed one-forty-five, and my body was a source of pity rather than fear), and pulled back the curtain.

There were six or eight people out there with chains and two-by-fours and objects of that nature. The guy on the porch saw me and pounded on the door again.

"Don't make us come in there!"

So I went to the kitchen and looked under the sink, where I found a can of Easy-Off oven cleaner. Which is sprayable lye. I grabbed it, then went and opened the door, and set the Easy-Off down on the hall table with a thump, then loomed over the dude on the porch. (Looming is one of my gifts -- I should put it on my resume.)

He looked up at me. "Steve fucking ripped us off and we want our money back!"

"Steve isn't here," I said.

"Then we're coming in and waiting for him."

"No, you're not," I said. "I got work in the morning and I've gotta get up at fucking five and there's no way I'm going to get to sleep with you clowns in the house."

"Oh," he said, and turned around to look at his crew. "Uh. Well, tell Steve we came by, will you?"

"Will do," I said, and shut the door. When I heard them leave, I put the Easy-Off back under the sink. I was kinda disappointed; I wanted to know if it would, you know. Work.

5) And so on, until the accumulation leaves you bored and disgusted. Some of these I sure as shit will not post on the fucking Internet.

6) When I was into weight training, I got to the point where I was racking a number of exercises, had to have someone hold me down while I was doing lat pulls, that kind of thing. One day an instructor came up to me.

"So we were wondering." Jesus, I'm a subject of conversation? "What sport are you training for? I bet it's rock climbing."

"Nah," I said. "I just work out for the buzz."

7) I like my beer strong and my whisky neat.

8) When I was a manual laborer, I worked like a ring-tailed son of a bitch. When I left my janitorial position in Santa Cruz, they hired two janitors and a glass-cleaning service to replace me, and the store still went to hell. I've had three bosses tell me flat-out that I couldn't quit because they needed me, and one of them tried to claim that I hadn't given notice after I gave both one-month and two-week notices.

Once when I was working my warehouse job, the one where I lost my discs, I wound up being the only person functioning in my department for about a week. When the other dude who actually worked in the department came back, he said, "So the way they've been talking about you, I was expecting to see a blue ox following you around."

9) I sweat and stink. I huff and puff and take no guff. I am covered in hair. My mighty tread shakes the Earth, or at least the house. Ask the missus about a phenomenon we refer to as the "zone of destruction."

10) Pain does not deter me. As a child, I saw photographs in National Geographic showing Easter in the Philippines (feel free to look it up), and wondered if I could do something like that to myself. So I spent an evening pushing a fat sewing needle through the tip of my thumb, in under the nail and out the other side.

I've lived through a winter with an untreated broken jaw (a gift from a couple of classmates, I'll tell you about it another time), feeling the ends of the break grate against one another every time I chewed. Didn't want to bother my mother; she was having a rough time that year. I've punched out freight elevators and lost, medicine cabinets and doors and won, and then gone on to do serious labor with my injured hands.

Sometimes I'll whack off a chunk of myself and not notice until the missus complains about the blood.

11) A number of other things that I am not going to fucking talk about on the internet.

12) I dig emergencies, and when the situation calls for leadership, I look around. If nobody else steps up, I roll my eyes, sigh wearily, and take charge.

13) I've never had sexual feelings toward another man. Attraction to men baffles me -- honestly, I think that at some level, gay men and straight women are out of their fucking minds. Especially women -- how could you possibly be attracted to an animal that could beat you in a fight? Are you people crazy? Being with a man is like having a pet lion or a pet chimp. How can you trust them?

The Argument Against My Manlihood

1) I've never had sexual feelings toward another man, and the manliest of manly men -- the real men -- have rejected femininity completely. I will never be a Spartan.

2) And it ain't like I've got an impressive record with the ladies. I once thought I asked a girl out on a date, but it turned out that I was mistaken. I didn't hold hands until I was twenty-three. I've only been with two women in my life, and only in the context of a committed relationship. Both of them made the first move. I'm almost completely ignorant regarding boys and girls together. Beauty tends to scare me -- it's way too powerful; I'm attracted to intelligence, humor, and ability.

3) I hate sports. I've had conversations that have let me understand what people see in them, and I can understand the fun of playing them, but I have never deliberately sat down and watched a sporting event and probably will never do so. That shit is dull.

4) I listen to Gilbert and Sullivan, I like Vince Guaraldi, I like Gilberto Gil, I like Ella Fitzgerald, I like Cole Porter. I find the song Somewhere Over The Rainbow touching, and I like the Judy Garland version as much as the Israel Kamakawiwo'ole version. That's probably enough to end the discussion right here.

5) I've never driven a car. The one time I tried, I became absolutely convinced that if I drove, I'd kill someone. So I don't drive.

6) I cook and eat vegetables every day. I clean the kitchen.

7) I take care of children. I will change diapers. (I did find an odd example of sexism in my diaper-changing practices -- if I'm going to be passing a baby on to a guy, I check the diaper first and change it if necessary, because I don't trust 'em to do the job.)

8) I don't like bossing people around. I avoid positions of power.

9) I hate competition. I do not want to be in a position of superiority.

10) The most important influence on my writing has been exerted by M.F.K. Fisher. I think Norma Ephron wrote some damned good casual essays. I have a vague crush on Dorothy Parker. And so on.

11) I have never made a life or taken a life. I have never been in the military or prison or been a cop or a sailor or a fireman or an astronaut. I probably won't be president.

12) I have never said, "Get me a beer and a sandwich," and I doubt I ever will. This leaves me feeling somehow cheated.

And, most crushingly,

13) I will ask for directions, I will ask for instructions, I will admit when I'm wrong, I pick up my socks. I put the seat down even when the missus is out of town.

Fuckit. That settles it. I am a total girl.



* There were two series of children's books that had horrid and pernicious effects on my behavior when I was wee, because I regarded them as challenges to my intelligence, which was the only fucking thing I had going for me at that point. The Great Brain books by John Dennis Fitzgerald convinced me that the signal mark of intellect was the ability to take money from people.

Since I had two younger siblings and my parents and their friends were drunks, I had considerable success in this -- but when I realized that being a creepy little con artist was a loathsome thing, I turned my back on money. You can ask the missus how that worked out for me... I'm currently trying to convince myself that making money isn't reprehensible.

The behavior inspired by the Encyclopedia Brown books by Donald J. Sobol was much worse. Each volume featured a series of short mysteries intended to be solved by the reader, with the answers in the back of the book. I would read these in the living room, and at the end of each chapter I'd loudly announce the solution to the mystery -- "He's lying because ambergris floats!" -- and then turn to the back of the book to check the answer. When I was right, which was the vast majority of the time, I'd say, out loud, "I knew it! I was right again!" When I was wrong? I'd plunge into the depths and sulk for days.

Yes, it's wrong for children to be beaten and bullied -- but I have to admit, I kinda asked for it.

Flossing and Art

I'm going to make this fast because I want to get back to work, but Glendon Mellow and Peter Bond have both left comments on my recent post regarding creative productivity. Their plaintive bleats have touched my heart, and I think this is worth putting up in a more accessible place than the comments section of an old post.

Look, this is something I've only been doing for a week. So I'm not all that much of an authority, but here goes.

When my brother died, I stopped flossing for a couple of years. One day I was complaining about it to a friend at lunch.

"I want to. I'll floss for a day or two, and then I'll start blowing it off again. It really makes me feel like I have no real discipline, you know?"

My buddy nodded. "I went through that too. Then one day I realized that wanting to floss is bullshit. It doesn't mean anything.

You either floss, or you don't, and how you feel about it doesn't mean anything."

You floss. Or you don't.

Sounds harsh, huh? But I started flossing that night, and haven't had a break from it since.

Because I really did want to floss -- and I was letting my desire turn the situation into a drama instead of a decision.

Next verse, same as the first.

I let my desire turn the situation into a drama instead of a decision.

And when I stopped? I made the decision.

When I wanted, wanted, wanted to be flossing, that meant that every time I had to make the decision it carried a lot of emotional weight for me. It wasn't just flossing -- it was my sense of responsibility to myself, my fears of the future, and so on, and so forth.

Now? When I'm brushing my teeth, and it comes time to floss? I just do it. And when I'm done, my mouth tastes nicer. Immediate gratification, long-term investment. And if I get lazy and skip a day?

I forgive myself. And I floss the next time. Because it's not a big deal. No one instance is significant if the overall pattern works.

Do not try and make yourself do something because you ought to, and if you fail to do something, don't sweat it. Know that you'll do it when the time comes.

Here's the thing about being a creator. Some people say they hate the act, love the product. Me? I create because it makes me feel good, for any number of reasons. But I do it because I want to. I feel good while I'm doing it, and I feel pride in having done it. And doing what I want to do makes me feel as though I have some measure of control over my life.

If you want to create, do it because you want to. Strip "should" from your internal dialog. Stick with, "I want to."

So I get up in the morning, I've had an awful night's sleep. I'm burnt out and uninspired. I wish I could be asleep.

My habit has been to say, "I'm fucked. I ought to work, but I don't feel like it." And then I'll look for something to kill the time -- a movie, a book, comics, the fucking internet. Because that 'ought to' carries a whole emotional load with it that I want to fucking avoid -- but then it stays with me as I intentionally kill time, and feel guilty about wasting my talent and opportunities.


But I know that once I start working on something, my energy levels will rise. I'll start feeling a sense of accomplishment.

I know this from experience.

If I ask myself, "What to I want to do now?" rather than, "What do I wish I would do?" I get much better results.

Get in touch with your actual desires. Ditch obligation, duty, and responsibility. What we do is fun -- and if we enjoy doing it, it shows in the finished product.

We live in a culture of distraction. The degree t0 which we're bombarded by entertainment is fucking grotesque. And as a result, it's easy to make immersion in media our default behavior; what we do if we're not doing anything else.

I've decided that that position in my life will be occupied by my art.

Creativity is my default behavior. If there isn't something else that I want to do for specific and compelling reasons, I will create.

If there is, I will engage in that activity without guilt or self-recrimination. It's the pattern that's important, not every individual moment.

I will not start work looking forward to the moment when I can quit and go on to something else. The work is what I want to do.

It's simple, it's easy. It's just a matter of, well...

You floss. Or you don't.

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go make lunch, finish re-reading my script, and then write a treatment, maybe get some editing in...

Good times, people. Good times.