A Wrong, Bad Book

(All quotes and images copyright 2001 Ken Ham, and are used for purposes of review. All art by Earle and Bonnie Snellenberger.)

Oh, yard sales, what wanton agents of fortune you are. I have been looking at this book for the last six months, trying to figure out how to write about it. The problem is that it's hilarious.

Ken Ham is a young Earth creationist. He argues that the Bible is literally true, and consistent with the fossil record, and that dinosaurs have lived alongside man until very recently.

Every single page presents one with a worldview so patently deranged that reading it is like being slapped with a rubber chicken over and over again. Nothing about it isn't funny.

Except that it's presented to children as fact, with the promise of Heaven and the threat of Hell held over them as a goad to belief.

I am an atheistic materialist. I find this is the only worldview that is both internally consistent and congruent with observed reality. I do not object specifically to the existence of religion, although I regard it as a sign that humans are not perfect thinking machines. I will say grace, I will attend church if invited, I will pray alongside the faithful when it is important to them. My feelings about religion are mixed. I state this up front so as to make my perspective clear.

Let me tell you something. If nothing else, living under the Bush administration taught me something about the banality of evil. This book features evil whose banality has gone baroque, and it announces itself as clearly as the hard buzz of a rattlesnake.

Young people often ask the question, "If there's so much evidence for the Flood all over the earth, and if it's so obvious God created, and the Bible is true, wouldn't the scientists surely believe these things?"

The answer is that scientists, like everyone else, are sinners. Because of this, they don't want to believe. It has nothing to do with the evidence. (Use of bold taken from text.)

If you are an adult, and you find, "Because I said so, and only bad people argue" convincing, you are an idiot. If you find the blanket condemnation of scientists as willfully-ignorant sinners acceptable, you are contemptible. But if you hear this when you're a kid, and your critical faculties haven't been developed, well.

In the future, the US will be able to look to Mr. Ham and say, "He helped keep our children away from science." I do not believe that will be regarded as a good thing. Mr. Ham is militating for a stupider nation.

I am not going to do a point-by-point refutation of Mr. Ham's position. I simply shrug, and say, "Geology, biology, paleontology, astronomy, chemistry, and physics all view the world the same way, and they work. You don't have the integrity to keep your own story straight, so not only is everything you say wrong, it isn't even wrong from a conceptually valid stance. Nothing you say is correct once you drift from the idea that people should be nice. Arguing with you is like braiding worms, and I will not do it."

I am going to engage in a bit of humor at the expense of Mr. Ham and the Snellenbergers. But as I do, please understand that I've imagined being a small child, and having the minister I have heard speaking with authority on the subject of sin and the fate of sinners come to me with this book.

I'm thinking about how much larger the minister is then I am. I imagine cologne, and warmth from his body as he sits next to me. This is a man of authority. He shows me a picture --

Take a close look at that gorilla. The single most important goal of this book? Get teeth wrong. Every damned time they show or mention a tooth? They get it wrong. Oh, and it's Eden so of course lemons are delicious. What kind of dummy are you, anyway?

-- and tells me that the only reason anyone would disbelieve it is that they are sinners and they choose not to believe.

What happens if I laugh? I don't know. But there is no way this situation could ever work to the benefit of the child.

I wanted to make this clear before I start with the haw-haw -- I am not belittling Mr. Ham when I mock his beliefs. Rather, I fear and despise the power he has over the lives of others.

He may be a good man. He may be, in the balance, a good father. But to present a child with this kind of cognitive dissonance is damaging, and worthy of strong rebuke, and I cannot find it in me to respond to this book and its mindset with anything but condemnation.

I understand that religion is the most important form of folk culture in the world, that the intellectual tradition springs from religion, that it is an important force for social organization. But it is the easiest way in the world for someone to simply claim a position of authority and begin exercising power and...

... remember what I said about the banality of evil?

Anyway.

Click on this image for madness. QED, motherfuckers.

What I love about this diagram? The implication that there is no problem here, see? They fit!

Now, the myth of the ark makes sense if you only know about a couple of dozen types of large animal, but by the time you take the world into account -- how many types of tapir are there, anyway? -- you have to start getting into some serious handwaving to get it to make sense, and our boy Ham here decides fuck it, pedal to the metal, we're including the entire fossil record as well. All of it.

Do you think he has a little cart in which to carry his balls, or do attendants bear them in a sling?

Is is just me, or does that kid have a holster? What kind of Bible-science bullets does it shoot? Or is it a zap gun? Probably a zap gun. This is all so exciting!

What's cute is the way Ham hates science so much he's going to reclaim silver jumpsuits for the faith. And the Biblical control panel is a concept resistant to speculation -- what happens when you turn the knobs? Maybe it adjusts Leviticus so you can stone people you don't like without having to eat kosher.

And let's take a moment to notice the semi-competent art. I bet the Snellenbergers have taken classes, maybe even have a degree or two between them. But the stiff, clumsy, vaguely ugly quality of the illustration is of a piece with the text.

When religious belief takes on a quality of grandeur, when it truly does exalt the human spirit, then it's hard for me not to get swept up in the moment. But this book shows a world without wonder -- flat words and images have condemned it to a sort of folding-chair spirituality, a cafeteria of the soul, a holy linoleum.

Okay, start at Babel, head North, and then turn left when you get to the white part.

I'll give them this much. I like this one. The idea of a polar pack-Pachycephalosaur is genuinely charming, in a crack-brained way.

I can't tell you how much pleasure and concern this terrible, terrible book has brought me. But interestingly, it has also led me to perform a dangerous act only to have my faith in mankind renewed.



These horses show up over and over again in the background of illustrations in this book, and they are never given a name. Actually, they aren't horses. The only type of living wild horse is Przewalski's horse, and these aren't those.

My current thought is that these are a Snellenberger's concept of a quagga. But the question of their identity was really bugging me. So I did the only Google search that I thought might give me some solid information. It was also the single riskiest search for images I've done since Harlequin ichthyosis.

"Wild ass images."

Of course my fear was getting into the eyebleach zone with scat porn at best and having my understanding of human sexuality expanded at worst. There are reasons the Internet age is also the age of hand sanitizers -- after the things we see, the entire world seems filthy.

But in this case?

Zebras, onagers -- wild asses. The ones I was looking for. The first screen I called up was entirely crazy little horsies of one kind or another.

I actually responded emotionally to the moment. Don't get me wrong, I don't feel crappy if I run across a picture of a cute butt on the net, but the idea that I could get clean results from that search seemed nothing short of miraculous. Perhaps I sensed the hand of God at work, a kinder God than one who'd put an old drunk on a boat with a bunch of fucking dinosaurs.

I didn't go to the second screen. Why tempt fate?

A Resolution, Of Sorts

Coming from an art/illustration background, messing around with things like color and focus are more fun for me than actually taking the pictures in the first place.

So this is going to be one of those miserable self-pity posts. Not as bad as some, but still. Oh, well. Sometimes I need to use the blog as a journal, so here comes a bit of self-examination. And hey -- if I wasn't feeling better, I wouldn't be able to write this.

I've been going through an extended period of fairly serious depression, which had disguised itself by synergyzing with the interminable flu. It was a classic Trojan Horse move. And since I experience some of the more exotic varieties of depression it's tricky for me to recognize your garden-variety state of emotional paralysis. If I'm not injuring myself or terrifying passersby, it's hard for me to recognize when I'm in an unhealthy state.

Now, while the missus has been gone, we've been talking on the phone every day. And every time, she's made a point of asking me to do something nice for myself that day. I have to admit, that question -- that whole concept -- leaves me feeling anxious. 'Do something nice for myself.' What the fuck does that even mean?

And then this morning I got a genuinely sweet email from a good friend. The time and date, the reserved nature of the individual in question, and the lack of capitals make me suspect it was a beverage-related missive, though no less welcome for that. One of the things he said was this:

i think you're a really good person who cares a lot about others, and i wish to hell you could extend to yourself the feelings you extend to your friends.

In a previous post, I wrote about my experiences at the Viable Paradise writer's workshop, and how I had a breakthrough moment where I realized that I was no longer capable of hating myself. This has held true -- I don't hate myself.

But that's not exactly the attitude you want from the person who exerts the largest influence on your life, now is it? "Well, at least they don't hate me." And it's not as if the hatred stopped because I liked myself -- rather, I became incapable of maintaining the cognitive dissonance (oh, how I love that phrase) of hating myself while respecting the opinions of me that others have expressed.

In other words, great improvement but it's still far from an optimum situation. If I regard myself as my owner, or wrangler, or keeper, well. I'm awful. If I treated any other organism the way I treat myself, I would be fucking locked up. There was a point recently where I didn't eat for a few days and didn't drink for one. That was a bit of a wake-up call. H'mmm, my palate and tongue have the texture of patent leather. Whassup with that? I had a rather unpleasant image of myself as a solitary old man dying from simple lack of interest in taking care of my own needs.

Yesterday I took care of my nieces. (At their request, I made noodle cake with stir-fried pork, mushrooms, red bell pepper, water chestnuts, and broccolinni. For desert, I gave them each an advent calender with chocolates in the little windows. "By having you open one a day, your parents teach you a valuable lesson about deferred gratification," I said to Ava. "By letting you rip through the whole thing in one shot, I'm thinking that I might be able to destroy your self-control." Ava was horrified -- "I don't want you to do that!" But she ate the chocolate. What can I say? Sometimes I'm evil.)

Being around other people really made me understand just how bad I've let myself get. Between not eating and not sleeping I've managed to put myself into a grotesque state that is neither dreaming nor wakefulness, where every sensory input has a touch of the uncanny. Where the essentially hallucinatory nature of consciousness cannot be ignored. And again, this was a wake-up call.

There's part of me that thinks it's time to sit down and make a list of resolutions. Drink less, exercise more, do some volunteer work -- but that shit never works for me. I do what I do because that's what I do and a list isn't going to change that. What I need is something pervasive. Something that affects my nature, which will then affect my behavior.

I am going to try and figure out a way to change the way I regard myself. I know, lifelong ongoing project -- but I feel as though I'm now in a position to make a different type of effort along these lines. The idea of regarding oneself with affection is profoundly alien to me. When I turn it over in my head it's like a freak exercise in topology or an Escher print or something. It's like trying to imagine fucking myself. That's not how it works -- my dick points out!

But since I've received serious confirmation of my abilities as a writer and artist, I've had a new perspective. As someone who values the arts highly, I can't help but feel as though I'm now responsible for myself as an artist as much as a human being. That the oaf might actually make a legitimate contribution to the culture if I can keep him alive and working. I know this is simultaneously neurotic and hubristic, but like I said, this is an exercise in topology. I need some kind of warp in order to direct regard at myself.

We shall see. We shall see.

Interesting Times

Well, I am feeling terrified, depressed, elated, proud, worried, and hopeful. Got a lot of life going on. For those who are interested, lemme fill you in.

The big issue is my mother-in-law, the well-known printmaker and teacher Ruth Leaf. I'm not going to go into details because it ain't your nevermind, but she's going through a serious health crisis and things are not looking good. The missus has been staying with her for the last couple of weeks, but she's coming back tomorrow and the situation is nowhere near to being resolved. I'm concerned both for her and for my wife.

The other issue is that the missus got turned down as a co-signer for my student loan, so I am a broke-ass son of a bitch. This is about as distressing as you'd imagine. I'm going to have to find another co-signer, go on some kind of public support (which I do not want to do, unless it's in the form of an NEA grant or some such), leech off the missus (whose finances aren't that much more cheerful than mine, currently), find some means of earning a living, or wither and die. The last option would be quite unpopular in some quarters, so I'm trying to figure out how to make another one of the others work.

Right now my main concern is avoiding lapsing into a paralytic depression. It would be so easy for me to collapse right now, and the fact that I haven't laid eyes on the missus in a long time makes that even easier. Since she's been gone I've had one night when I slept for six hours; aside from that it's been less than three hours a night, which frees up a lot of time for laying in the dark worrying. Ain't gonna let myself drift into greyspace, though; now is not the time.

But while the above complaints have me going through hell, there's a great deal of hope as well. I've mentioned that the novel is running strong and has been described by an entertainment professional as extremely saleable. Another pal has a possible job offer for me that might get my foot in the copywriting and layout door. And this morning, a guy who's published one of my stories and has another in the hopper sent me an invitation to participate in a documentary on up-and-coming writers. (I seem to be on a few people's radar in that realm...) And I've got Viable Paradise to look forward to -- it's coming up fast.

So what are the plans? I'm gonna send out a mass email to my relatives to see if anyone is willing to co-sign for me. Gonna go down to the rehabilitation department and get myself on the list for assistance. Gonna get hold of some grant forms. Gonna put together a presentation for the above-mentioned job possibility. I'm changing my educational plans -- I'm getting into the editorial program at the UC extension as soon as possible, despite my concerns as to how it might impact my work on the novel. And it may sound crazy, but I think I should apply for work at Pixar.

I'm gonna monetize this blog, set up a Redbubble store, and change my other site to be a professional site dealing with copywriting and design. Now is not the time for me to indulge in self-doubt. Money must be made one way or another.

I can't do everything at once, but today? I can edit a couple of chapters of the novel for Homework Club, edit the submissions for this week's Monday night group, take care of my photography homework, send out my pleading email, and work on that job presentation I mentioned.

No self-pity, no self-flagellation. It's just trouble, and it's not like I've never had trouble before. And I've got to admit there's a certain exhilaration in my complete ignorance of what my life is gonna be like when things return to some sort of equilibrium.

Crazy days, folks, crazy days.

Arguing About Extinction

Look out! Look out! It's a man eating dinosaur!

Haw! Haw! Haw! I crack me up. So what's this all about? I'll let you know on March First...

So I got into a bit of a kerfuffle with one of my writing buddies this week. Allison made this post over on her blog, The Volcano. You should go read it – but to put her position into the least-nuanced terms, she ran across some information regarding a so-called animal sanctuary that claimed to have ecological concerns at heart while operating as a tourist trap. She thought it would be more ethical to let the animals go extinct than to engage in that kind of abuse in the name of saving the species.

And I went kind of nuts. As I wrote to her in an email –

Again, I know my response here is way, way disproportional -- you just had the misfortune to tap into a subject that's one of my obsessions, and you hit a high-pressure node of opinion.

When it comes to this issue I feel very strongly that we as a species need to prioritize other animals much more highly than we do. I’ve got an elaborate framework of logic built up around this but in the end it’s an emotional response. My allegiance is to life in general before my species.

(When it comes to individuals my feelings are different, of course. I’ll tend to value those I know over those I don’t – which means that I’ll take a lizard I love over a human I don’t know, or a human I know over a dog I don’t. This isn’t rational; it’s just the way my priorities operate.)

But in the end, there is something about allowing a species to go extinct that seems like, well, a sin.

I can rationalize this by saying that someday humans may achieve a less-destructive relationship with the environment and it might be possible to allow the species to return to the wild if we had viable breeding populations in captivity. And it’s entirely possible that individual species could have their populations supplemented by captive-bred stock if dedicated preserves are allocated to them. And so on – I have some links below where related ideas are discussed with more clarity than I can bring to the subject.

Still, my reaction is, as I said, an emotional one. Extinct is as gone as it gets. You can’t replace a species that you’ve killed. The biome, Gaia, the ecosphere – whatever you want to call it, it’s my primary emotional allegiance and an extinction impoverishes it. And us. And me.

Here’s a snippet from my email exchange with Allison.

Please note that I am in no way denying that some horrible shit happens in this realm, and that a lot of bastards blanket themselves in save-the-Earth fuzzy bunnies and green fields as a cover for their rotten behavior. That doesn't mean that we should deny the value of the best work in the field. In a world where I read this in the news...

Extinction Fear For Black Rhino

... I cannot feel a sense of acceptance. When I see this I cannot calmly accept your position that --


In nature, species live and species die off. Working to prevent extinction is yet another example of how man inserts himself into the wild.

That statement really sounds as if (and I doubt that I'm reading you correctly here -- but this is how it sounds) you're putting the efforts of these folks --

Saving Rhinos

on the same level as the poachers and boner-pill freaks who are bringing about rhino extinction. As if it's possible for us to exist without affecting the environment. As if there is something fundamentally wrong with making an effort to deal with specific ecological issues. I just don't buy it.

At a different point in our exchange I suggested that if human-caused extinction was natural, then how could human-assisted survival be unnatural?

Allison also said that she’d might view my arguments differently if I could provide her with some examples of stewardship, of the ends I favor being pursued in an honorable fashion.

Here’s how I responded.

The place to start looking for models of stewardship would be in the examples that I mentioned already. First, the California Condor (and you might want to look around at the rest of this site).

The Peregrine Fund on California Condor Restoration

Gerald Durrell is the one man who's influenced my thoughts on this subject more than anyone else. Here's a brief look at his legacy.

A New Vision At The Durrell Wildlife Trust

And here's his ethos regarding zoos.

The Durrell Policy For Zoos

If you want an example of that ethos in action you might want to look through this and see which animals his zoo is helping to survive.

He's also written a large number of books that detail his efforts. They aren't heavy tomes -- they're intentionally light and amusing. He wrote them to fund his efforts, and they still work to that end. If you're interested I'd be happy to pass some on.

There are wildlife rescue groups everywhere. Here's an accessible local organization that you could take a closer look at before you dismiss the possibility of stewardship. It's just one of many.

International Bird Rescue Research Center

And later…

... on a much baser level, this kind of activity can be one of the most beautiful things a human being can do. One aspect of humanity that is dear to me (and you know there are damned few of those, he snarled) is our ability to engender bonds of affection across species.

What I'm saying here is that the animals involved might not agree with your position. Yeah, those temple tigers are being fucked over but you should ask the lion in this video about his opinion of animal rescue.

Christian the Lion

Yeah, that is brute-force sentimental propaganda for my position... but here's some more information on the park where the lion in question was rehabilitated.

Kora National Park

A similar interventionist organization is here.

The Sepilok Orangutan Rehabilitation Center

Again, I have to ask if you are genuinely opposed to these efforts?

There were a few more issues and nuances to our discussion, but those were the main points. Right now we’ve retired to our corners to think things over. I’ll admit that my example of the California Condor isn’t the strongest – this is an animal that seems to need a Pleistocene ecology in order to thrive in the wild. It will likely need captive breeding programs permanently if it’s going to survive.

But something in me just doesn’t want to live in a world without them.

Yesterday Was A Pain In The Ass (And Locations Further South)

Sometimes it might seem like I don't like anything. That's not true. I've been fortunate enough to have been given a few trips to the tropics -- these were drawn on a Caribbean cruise to which the missus's father treated the whole family. Which I loved.

I was no more alienated from the people on the cruise than I am from the rest of the livestock in the world (although the palpable misery of the people in the casino was a bummer) and my daily routine was dee-fucking-lightful. Three edible meals a day that someone else cooked.

I'd go snorkeling in the morning, nap after lunch, in the afternoon I'd drop a couple of Lortab (which was my painkillor at that time and the best so far), then retire to a pleasantly empty bar and listen to Billy Holiday and such while drinking two Guinness (the Guinness was a different beer than I was used to -- same bottle, same brewery, but it was so much better than I expected) and a double Knockando.

The missus said, "Actually, I like your drinking this time. It makes you witty at dinner." Which I was -- I walked that fine line that separates the outrageous hilarious oaf from the disturbing oaf with great skill, frequently provoking gales of laughter.

I would sometimes sketch in the bar -- these are the best of those lazy afternoon sessions. At that point, though, I was going through one of my periodic, "My art sucks, I can't draw, I hate myself for failing the muse," phases. I kinda like these, though.

The only drawback was that I came back fat. Of course that may have had something to do with Cortisone and the sixty pounds of muscle I lost while bedridden with my back and hitting my middle years all at the same time.

Yesterday was a pain in the ass, for the most part.

Lessee. First off, there was the whole bar story debacle as covered in the last post. This left me feeling crappy -- my most widely-available stories were flawed by nature due to my laziness-inspired cluelessness. Which gave me that shame of craft feeling.

Which didn't go away when I started in on the day's art. First, I found that the image that I posted yesterday had been converted to 72 dpi. For reasons I do not know. I'd created it at 300 dpi -- and suspected that I should have gone higher, to give me flexibility in case I wanted to use it in a print at some point. Now? All those hours of cleaning and darkening the pencil sketch went into an image fit only for the internet.

So I go back and look at some of my other images to make sure the same thing hadn't happened to them. In the process, I found a tiny flaw in my big imaginary landscape. Since I want to print that out large, the file is about a gig and a half. Working on it gives me nostalgia for the old days -- opening it takes forever, saving takes forever, you have to go off and do something else while doing either.

So after finding the flaw I started going over the thing a pixel at a time. This is an image that's four feet long at 240 dpi. It takes a while.

And I find something mysterious. There are these little scraps of hard-edged color -- it looks as if someone's tossed a handful of cellphane confetti onto the damned thing. And when I track down the Photoshop layer where those bits of color lived I found another mystery.

They were on a file that had been converted for smart filters. Once you do that, you can't do anything but filters on that layer. No drawing, no smudging, nothing. And the filter on that layer was a blur. So there was no way for that layer to have anything on it that wasn't blurred.

But there they were. Like I said, a mystery. And one that took me a looong time to track down.

I think I've figured out how to fix it. Wish me luck.

Then I went to prepare the piece I'm printing on canvas tomorrow. (Oh, that's gonna be pricey. Oh well.) Blowing it up to size -- 3' by 4' -- went smoothly. So did adding the overlap at the edges.

But bearing in mind my experience with the landscape, I went over it one fucking pixel at a time.

I found a bunch of stupid little flaws. Which I fixed and the thing looks better. But I've already printed out two of these and one's been framed.

Again, craft-shame. Kraftschaden?

(A quick aside -- I was just called downstairs to field a phone call from my dad. In reference to this news story the following conversation ensued.

The Oaf: I wish I could find a way to get to Washington and punch that cocksucking idiot's heart out because punching him in the fucking head isn't gonna do a goddamn thing.

The Da: Fuckin' A right.

The Missus: Who's an idiot?

The Oaf, for the ten millionth time since the start of their relationship: Please, sweetie, I'm on the phone, I can't talk to you when I'm on the phone.

The Da, as heard by the non-multitasking Oaf: Blather obbla woadle schnuck! Phlabber. Glot.

The Missus: Who's the idiot?

The Oaf: You are, for talking at me when I'm on the phone! Will you cut it out?

The Da: Faolin tchotchke schlab I can't believe the Democrats aren't just saying, "Go ahead and filibuster, assholes, see how your voters like that."

I did apologize later -- but why does she keep doing this? There seems to be no way to stop her.)

So I wake up at midnight. My back's not as bad as it was earlier this week; this was just the regular insomnia. I stay up until nearly five, then come back to bed and try headphones and melatonin. I've been taking it easy with the sleep aids lately and the melatonin hit me hard, got some good dreaming and visuals out of it. Hallucinations are the funnest part of being crazy.

(The best were a series of Frazetta drawings [which were, of course, imaginary] of, um. Lady's bee-hinds done Frazetta-style. What can I say, I've got a vulgar subconscious -- and yesterday I saw a comic with his The Moon Maid painting on the cover. And I just got the pun in that painting for the first time in my goddamn life and I first saw that one when I was eight or nine...)

The bad news was that when the melatonin relaxed my body my fucking back went out again. Now I feel that delicious electric barbwire tickle all the way from my hips to my toes, both sides, and I had to get out of bed while still able to sleep because of the pain.

So I am a grumpy fellow. A very grumpy fellow indeed.

Pull Up Your Socks, Oafboy

This is the official logo for the Dizzy Toilet Devils. Intentionally.

So I've been out of commission for the last little while. It's been a combination of back and crazy -- the two do so like to link their moist little paws and walk side by side.

I haven't been answering my emails, I haven't attended classes, I haven't posted here, I haven't done any writing or art. It hasn't been the kind of thing where I'm nipping little bits of flesh off of myself and terrifying strangers; rather, I've been blank. Absent. Without volition or will of any kind. The kind of thing where I can spend hours absentmindedly pacing back and forth between the television set and the refrigerator, carefully and deliberately failing to make up my mind as to any course of action.

Part of it has to do with the season (you'll hear me blaming the seasons for my mental condition on a regular basis -- I have a different crazy for every part of the year). Part of it has to do with hitting a stage of completion on two major projects within a few days of each other. Part of it has to do with a failure to take proper care of myself.

But it's been too damned long and I need to pull myself out of the slough of despond. I'm gonna start by putting up a couple of posts here, then answer my emails, then get to work on the Swill material, then get the Anomalocaris drawing back in the game.

One step at a time, oafboy. One step at a time.

Riding The Bummer Train

Here's my studio and myself in the late eighties, back when I had a dog and some hair. This was done in pencil and ink on tracing vellum for an architectural rendering class -- I drafted the room from the blueprints, then drew the rest with a combination of classic perspective and guesswork. Yeah, that is the actual shape of the studio. And at the far end, that is a lavender staircase.

I took the line drawing and had it copied onto watercolor paper. I took six of these and painted them simultaneously, discarding the ones I fucked up until I had this at the end. I hate trying to get accurate results with conventional media... Note the boot print in the upper right-hand corner, a not uncommon feature in my work. I need to learn a little respect.

Well, there's a good chance this post will fall into the Too Much Information category. Please, if you don't have any interest in the complaints of an overprivileged white boy skip this. It's all pissing and moaning intended to get my bitching out of my head so I can get on with my work.

I've been going through a very nice little period in my life for the past week and a half. Last night it came to a screeching -- or rather a hollering -- halt.

In many ways I'm an extraordinarily fortunate person. But there are a few issues in my life that give me real problems and make me feel concerned for my future. And unfortunately they act to reinforce each other.

They're located at each end of my spinal column.

I have a bad back and I suffer from mental illness. As a nut, earlier in my life I was able to find refuge in physical labor. If I slapped my headphones on and worked until the sweat flowed I was able to cope and be useful at the same time.

My last job of this sort was in the warehouse of an employee-owned book distribution company, BookPeople. After working there for a couple of years I had the single most physically demanding job in the place, restocking the gravity flow racks. These were a series of racks with wheeled tracks installed in them and they were where the fastest-moving titles were stored. Instead of stacks of books on a shelf, the gravity flow rack held whole boxes of books, typically five or six boxes of a given title at a time.

This was a perfect job for me. I was able to work four days a week (yeah, I took a substantial pay cut for this -- but I had no real choice -- explanation to follow) I had my own little kingdom, I had minimal interaction with the people around me, and I had as much work as I could handle. But during my first couple of years I had a bad habit -- I'd straddle the cart I used to carry the boxes and then twist to the side to load the box into the rack. These boxes averaged about thirty-five pounds each and went up to about seventy-five pounds and I did this all day long.

When I was told that this was a really bad practice that could lead to a bad back I changed the way I worked. It was too late.

When I started to feel sciatic pain I countered it with exercises that helped for a while. My routine involved getting up at four-thirty or five and doing an hour's workout to prepare myself for work. Let me tell you, I was in monstrously good physical condition. I miss it -- having a genuinely powerful body is a real pleasure.

But the pain continued and got worse. And they installed a new set of gravity flow racks and the most strenuous part of my job was doubled. Finally after working in constant pain for well over a year I went to see a physical therapist. Who after a while had me get an MRI. One disc compressed, one disc spectacularly ruptured. And it seems that working hard for a long time has given me nerve damage. I will never not hurt again.

That was it for my career as a big strong guy.

I don't want to go into detail about the drama that attended my settlement. Maybe in a later post. But I will say that everyone associated with my rehabilitation training -- including my insurance adjuster -- told me it was inadequate. If I'd been injured a few years earlier I would have gotten a lot more rehab. If I'd been injured a few years later I would have gotten a much larger settlement. I was just lucky enough to hit the sweet spot. And the lawyers who act on behalf of the insurance companies are honest-to-God sociopaths. No fooling.
If the money that had been spent on the PI they had videotape me (which actually hurt the case the insurance company was trying to make against me -- truth is always the best defense) had been spent on my rehab I'd fucking well have a job now.

So. The reason why I worked part-time? I'm nuts. The one time I was in counseling I asked how I'd be diagnosed. The answer was complex.

Agitated depression with obsessive-compulsive tendencies, violent and suicidal impulses, accompanied by visual, tactile, and auditory hallucinations. The last shrink I consulted with said he'd tentatively peg me as borderline schizophrenic. The combination would seem to indicate psychotic agitated depression -- but I think the schizophrenia and the depression are compartmentalized enough to clear me of that diagnosis.

(Of course I never told her about my Whitley Strieber-style saucerman experiences. For the record, yeah, abductees experience the things they report. I believe that it's a form of mental illness rather than an exterior phenomenon. I think that getting caught up in the mythology around UFOs is really, really unhealthy for people with schizophrenic tendencies. I think it should be studied and I damn well would like it if they came up with an effective treatment.)

I was given tricyclics -- Nortryptiline, to be specific. It was worse than useless. These days they say that anti-depressants are bad news for people with agitated depression -- powerful tranquilizers are reccomended and I am considering getting a supply for emergency use. My couselor told me I was the sanest person she had ever met. She also wanted to have me institutionalized because I represented a danger to myself and the community.

Agitated depression is the kind of mental illness that results in death. Here's one way to get a glimpse into the condition. It's a metaphor but I suspect there's some literal truth to it.

Our emotions are generated by physical structures in the brain. (I suspect the body as well -- my own belief is that the mind is concentrated rather than isolated in the brain -- but that's just one nut's opinion.) Just as with any other part of the body things can go wrong.

So imagine the way you felt when you were betrayed by someone close to you, or someone you loved died. Think of the very worst that you have ever felt, those moments when it seemed as if there was nothing good at all in your life. These feelings are generated in your brain. What if your brain generated these feeling spontaneously? Think of it as emotional epilepsy.

Or imagine that your ability to feel pleasure suddenly vanished. That nothing felt good, tasted good, looked good. That every sensory stimulus was a source of irritation. It is possible to be blind to pleasure the same way you can be visually blind, or deaf, or lack any other sense.

Those two states are components of depression.

In agitated depression this misery is compounded by a flood of nervous energy that compels some kind of action. This is what makes it one of the most dangerous mental illnesses. And this is what I've got.

And how did I get this way? Heredity and environment and plenty of both. A violent life during childhood and my teen years and a history of mental illness on both sides of the family. It's like I'm the result of a eugenics program intended to produce the craziest redneck in the world.

The thing is, when people at work (I was a janitor in a high-end department store at this point) found out that I was seeing a shrink they were baffled. See, if you aren't right in my immediate circle I come across as a really nice guy who seems to have his shit together. (Haw! Haw! Haw! As an aside, this period in my life is one of the major elements in the novel.)

Potential employers -- I'm great on the job. I'm a good friend. When the crunch comes down, when there's an emergency -- that's when I shine.

But living day-to-day? I just don't have the knack. I think of myself as being like one of those British sports cars that are soooo much fun to drive when they aren't in the shop.

And at the same time my creativity is directly linked to my insanity. That's why I have to work part-time if I'm going to function in society. Creative activity, whether art or writing or music, is the best therapy I've found. Ol' Lunchboxxx commented on my ability to crap out art -- this is where the ability comes from.

For those familiar with drug use, at my most sober and stable my mental state is comparable to a half-hit of bad acid. Twitchy, excitable, nervous, uncomfortable, and vaguely hallucinatory around the edges, just waiting for the overwhelming visions to roll in. Distressingly, the closest I come to what I would regard as a 'normal' mental state is when I have a mild hangover. There's a strong history of alchoholism on both sides of my family so this really isn't the solution I'm looking for...

When my back pain is bad, the only things that can make a dent are narcotics. But they tend to trigger my depression. But so does the pain. Cue the trombone -- bwaa-waa-waa.

So. Two things that are important for my maintenance of a tolerably mental state are eating and sleeping. And that's why I'm back on the bummer train.

My back's sensitive this semester. I have a four-hour class on the same day that I have band practice and that hurts and the next day I have a three-hour class. It takes me days to recover from that one-two punch. When I attended the Digital Arts Club Meeting followed by the Milvia Street release party Friday before last it screwed me up. Saturday's writer's group meeting didn't help. And on Monday I went to grill some lamb for lunch (I do the cooking -- my food tastes better than what you'll get in most restaurants) and found that the missus had stacked a bunch of plants and planters around the grill. The lamb had been coated with a mustard/garlic/horseradish paste and thus was not fit to put in a saute pan. It had to be grilled. I moved the pots because the missus wasn't home.

Biiig mistake. If I take care of myself I hardly notice my back. This makes me start thinking, "Dude, you are totally goldbricking. Time to find your lazy ass a fucking job." And then I push it and I wonder how long it's going to be before I need more surgery. I need a job I can do from my workstation. That's why I'm trying to be a writer/artist -- but when the novel's done I'm getting training as an editor. Please, please, please don't make me have to go on the public tit, no SSI, no welfare...

So for the last two nights my sleep has been interrupted by a new pain. It's like two sharply curved hooks coming out of my spine and jabbing into my hip joints. The only place I can be comfortable is in the recliner that's the center of my workstation. Which means I can't sleep. Which is why I'm sitting here bitching into the intertubes.

And for the last two nights I've gone to make myself dinner and found that the missus had eaten the last of a crucial ingredient. She's got food issues (my take on it is that the masculine tendency is to be perverse about sex while the feminine tendency is to be perverse around food) and so if I've bought something for my own meals -- I don't cook all of her food, since she's a food nut and thus is compelled to eat a lot of seaweed and pureed green slop and so on and so forth -- she will unexpectedly devour it all.

I have to be patient; I have to understand; but it screws me up. If I'm in an emotionally delicate state I have to convince myself to eat. I have to focus on what I'm going to make ahead of time and coax myself into looking forward to it.

And if I can't have what I've set myself up for, I either eat randomly until I get indigestion (best case scenario and that happened Monday night) or I can't eat at all (the more common result and that's what happened last night). If it's because the missus has eaten all of something she's sworn she will never eat again I become frustrated with her.

So last night when I found she'd eaten the salami I'd intended for a pizza I snapped at her. Keep in mind that I'd been in a state of pain for the last two days and have slept badly even by my (typically five hours a night) standards.

But she was going through a hassle with one of her friends and was emotionally delicate herself. So she got mad at me for being mad at her. I think of this as two-for-flinching. She does something to piss me off and then punishes me for being unhappy. This ain't the typical mode in our relationship -- but it is one of the typical hassles.

So the bottom drops out and I plunge into the pit. And she tells me that because of what's going on she feels like there's no one she can turn to, that she's alone. So I choke down my feelings and comport myself in a way intended to alleviate what she's going through.

But inside I'm eating out my fuckin' liver and she knows it. But since I'm being nice she doesn't press matters. Finally, when we're in bed at the end of the day I'm laying next to her seething and hating myself and I realize that if I lay there I may scream or put my fist through the window or some goddamn thing and the best recoure is to go to the studio and work for a while. But when I get upstairs the kava and melatonin I've taken in order to have a chance at sleep make me incapable of functioning creatively. And she had earlier told me that when I went out walking she worried (quite legitimately) that I might do something that would get me in trouble.

I kept my voice even and my manner low-key when she asked what was going on. We lay next to each other and talked ("I don't understand how you can go from the top to the bottom so fast.") and we both settled down and appreciated the love we feel for each other. It was a satisfactory ending to a stupid conflict. Despite these occasional flareups we really are good for each other -- thank god, because we love each other enough to stick together no matter how bad things get.

But my back still hurts and I didn't sleep well and I was only able to eat one meal yesterday. I'm back on the bummer train -- but the last week and a half was great. And there will be more good times in the future. But.

I been shot at and missed, shit at and hit.

I've got a hell of a lot to do today -- get three stories ready and delivered to Milvia Street (the editor contacted the woman who runs the Saturday writer's group and asked her to get stories from me -- I quit submitting short fiction and now editors come to me), so I'll be taking a walk downtown. While I'm there I may as well make an appointment with the school shrink and see about those tranqs. I want to knock out a full chapter of the novel (I'm almost done and if I crank hard I can be finished in two weeks), and I want to do a logo for Deborah. But if I can find the time I'll put up a more cheerful post to compensate for this disgusting outpouring of self-pity.