12/24/05

Just in time for Christmas Day and the first night of Chanukah, all of me here at the TG wish all of you out there a very joyous Holy Day and a rockin', rollin' and fabulous New Year! Ho ho ho!

12/19/05

Do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself. Stendhal and Whitman can collude on an epic free-verse novel about me for all I care. In this case, however, the vasty multitudes I contain aren't so very numerous as all that. It's just a matter of brain engines.

Stephen Jay Gould wrote an essay (huh, like that's a revelation) on an 18th century English aristocrat who made an examination of a preposterously precocious musical prodigy name of Wolfgang Mozart. In his subsequent report, the amateur psychologist-before-there-were-psychologists observed that Young Wolfie was by any objective measure a perfectly ordinary little boy who just happened to play the spinet like a muhfuh. Almost as an aside he opined that such an outsized talent implied the existence of regions of mentality providing the meat for specific skill sets and operating more or less independently of the rest of personality.

Gould himself went on to point up in his generalist way the value of volunteers in research and even theoretical development in science, noting that the good gentleman of leasure's little paper anticipated the now widely accepted model of multiple human intelligences by, oh, a couple hundred years or so.

I was somewhat dismayed to read the whole account, as I had myself come up with a similar notion. There goes the ol' Nobel, eh Spunky? In the absence of any nascent Mozarts in my immediate vicinity, I'd fallen back on my own peculiarly talented self as subject of scrutiny and concluded that I was possessed of or by various "brain engines," portions of my neural anatomy that performed stupid information tricks all by their lonesomes. I bogged down attempting to taxonimize them (does "music" form a single unit, or does it break down or interact with verbal engines? Is "arithmetic" different from higher math? ad nauseum) and eventually gave the matter up, or as I comforted myself in believing, "put it aside."

There are times when self-propelled talents can practically take over. When I first encountered computer programming as a frothy young college student, the initial interaction bore a resemblance to various accounts of How I Got Hooked On Smack -- the curiosity, the first experience, the habit, the inevitable downward spiral. I managed to obliterate major blocks of my otherwise feckless youth, 18 and upwards hours at a stretch, in the confines of the claustrophobic computer center hidden deep in the bowels of the Old Main building at Reed, my autonomic selves exercising to exhaustion amidst the clang of the line-printer and the chatter of the punchcard machines, obsessing endlessly over the bugs and inefficiencies in my stupid little programs. Ah, good times, good times.

Despite my apparent penchant for the rapidly burgeoning field, or more correctly my jones, I became convinced that data processing was not for me. I had any number of excuses, personal and professional, but the real reason may have been the addictive character of the subject itself.

Along with my robots of language and mathematics and design and art that hacking engaged so alarmingly well, somewhere in me there's a small still voice of, if not reason, at least reticence. Somehow I've been gifted or cursed with an emergency override that kicks in when I'm having just a bit too much fun, that tries to remind me of the other minor duties in my life like eating and sleeping and maybe paying the rent sometime. It's shielded me from a bunch of adverse situations and dragged me out of others by the short and curlies. That it probably scotched a lotta really swell opportunities as well (the redhead at the party who pinched my ass springs to mind) (you should pardon the expression) is an inevitable side effect that in no way diminishes the utility of the process. Well, maybe a little.

I recently found myself laden with an abundance of free time (which is to say, a lack of remunerative labor) and fell to updating the website for my infinitesimal record company Bard's Cathedral to include a hard and firm price list for CD duplication.

Now witness ye and tremble at the ravages of disease: it would have been trivial, a matter of mere moments, to set down in simple ASCII a list of the prices I charge for the various services I perform. And thanks to the labor-saving features of my text editor, a single push of the key would have rendered that self-same list into the harrowingly obscure dialect of HTML, formatting and spacing (mostly) intact, ready to be saved to my server along with a brief annotation announcing its existence. With the minor task safely dispensed with, I could have immediately turned my attention to more useful matters, like, say, the intractable piles of chaos and clutter hemming me in on every quarter.

Ah, but no. No, I was visited by a vision, a vision of an unknowing websurfer, casually clicking into my innocent-looking site, being confronted, overwhelmed, blinded by the glory of a full-fledged online application that not only communicated the cost of services but would actually estimate the cost of his project right there on the spot. Would that be kyewl or what? Kneel before the power of my 1337 ski11z, n00b!

Pitiful, huh? Fueled by incomplete documentation in dusty idiot books from the dim dead days of 1999, I dove headlong into the fetid waters of online hackery. That I speak to you now is ample evidence that I successfully navigated slimy, alligator-infested Javascript Bog, returning, grinning ear to ear, with the aforementioned applet firmly clutched in my steaming, muck-encrusted fist. Somehow, though, the fact that I could have rebuilt the shower and sorted at least a couple tool sheds with the amount of energy I expended weighs somewhat heavily on, if not my mind, at least my sense of efficiency.

Or maybe it's just that little spoilsport in the back room there complaining because I actually enjoyed myself. Whatever. Live by the brain engine, perish by the brain engine.

12/12/05

In pursuit of whatever it is I'm pursuing here in my clever human being disguise, I have my share of close encounters with the great symbolic grimoire of physicality, generally involving my imminent personal demise although not always. I'm careful to take note of them, even if, clever human being that I am, I refuse to learn.

Our text of cryptic wisdom is taken today from the Book of Fixit, Chapter 289. (That's the section covering the last lower lefthand corner of ducts and furnaces and proceeding into the realm of baseboard heaters and toaster ovens, with asides on shrubbery. Nobody ever said the Book of Fixit was logically arranged.) It is a tale of control gone awry, of domicile in disarray, and of the blessings of balance and of order. Can I get an Amen? Shut up, Pico.

When we moved into our pleasant present peasant digs, long about -- yikes! -- eight years ago, we soon were taught that eternal cosmic truth: wallboard heaters suck. Dust traps, curtain burners, furniture fryers, cash pits -- take a bow, all this and much much more. That wallboard heaters are among the easiest forms of heat to install did not present itself as a virtue until later, when I became actively involved in the extreme sport of remodeling.

Our most immediate discovery that first winter on site, however, was that while the other spaces regulated their temperature in a reasonable fashion, the heaters in our laughably titled great room, were markedly disfunctional. Cracking the knob on the Comfort Zone (bah!) thermostat even a fraction cranked the two 2000 watt 8' smokers along the outside walls up to eleven, where they stayed in bellowing fury until, sweating like a bwana on an East African safari, you returned to slam them back off. That little quirk, combined with our propensity for dressings on our windows, prevented us from utilizing the major source of warmth in our abode for, well, ever. We bundled up during cold snaps and accounted ourselves fortunate, but the equanimity of our home was constantly being disrupted.

After the Great Disability Remodel of 2001, with its downgrading of heaters in other rooms, it became increasingly necessary to find some source of vuh-vuh time btu's besides the kitchen and bedroom. We cleared the living room heaters of burnt curtains and debris, got rid of all our conventional stuffy-chair furniture (which we really didn't have room for anyway), moved the musical instrument arrangement off the floor and started setting the big logs ablaze once more, constantly trotting to the control in servitude to manual regulation and adding swelter to our habitual shivers.

Such an unsettled state of affairs can only go on for so long, even in my house. This fall I finally concluded that it was high time to, uh, address the issue once and for all.

I'd burrowed into the obvious source of the problem, the thermostat itself, a couple times in the course of other repairs and remodels, but my profound and nuanced conclusion was always the same -- doesn't work, must be broken -- followed by a disconnect. This time I betook myself to the hardware store (the local boys, not Home Despot) and purchased a brand spankin' (ouch) new 'stat in a groovy clamshell package as a statement of intention.

A much-overlooked feature of brand spankin' (ouch) new construction supplies is the frequent inclusion of actual palpable specifications and instructions regarding the function and installation of said items. In true 99%-chance-I'm-a-woman style, I went to the trouble of reading the sheet that came with the new unit. Imagine my astonishment upon discovering that, contrary to intuition and any and all sacred tenets of brute force fixitry, 220V thermostats have two circuits, only one of which is active.

A crushing landslide of realization descended upon me: the old thermostat wasn't busted, it'd just been installed wrong. A few moments with a multimeter confirmed my suspicions, and with a flick of the wrist and an exchange of circuits, an eight year old problem was solved. For free, yet. Would that Dennis the Menace (another 8-year-old problem) (ba-dump) yielded so gracefully.

Now friends, as you can tell by the word-count, it's coming on time for the homily. So, what did we learn today? Why, it's obvious: don't monkey around with thermostats if you don't know what you're doing, moron!

Okay, besides that? Well, now that we've got actual thermal regulation going, the living room and the whole house are a much more accommodating environment, better suited to a genteel lifestyle and refined manners. It's all veddy civilized, don't you know, a properly managed homeostatic system.

So here we sit in the midst of a country and a world reduced to a technological demolition derby, beset on all sides by the strident bray of rabid feedback mechanisms heterodyning like Jimi Hendrix on the Star Spangled Banner. How many of the overseer processes of this our oh-so-charming oh-so-busted culture are really sprung mattresses that need to be hauled to the landfill and how many are just, well, badly installed? Capable of working just fine, of providing a proper room temperature and never being noticed again, if they were just tweaked a little? Is it really necessary to blow it all up and start from scratch, or could the revolution be downgraded to nothing more than a little (okay, a lot) of rewiring?

Certainly such malfunctions aren't easy to spot -- it took me eight years to find one stinking crossthreaded thermostat. But talk about your bang for the buck.

12/5/05

I've said it before and I'll say it again: doctors and nurses are among my most favorite people in the world, but Ford above do I hate hospitals. I hate them only a little less than I hate the consequences of not having them when we need them. Sometimes, though, the extremity of a journey (with gun and camera) through the wilds of the ER to the ICU to the telemetry ward is the only way I get any time off from 24/7/365 backup/default caregiving.

Such a vacation naturally comes with its price, and in my case the factory invoice includes a considerable amount of guilt. Guilt guilt guilty guilt guilt. How could I have let this happen? What subtle little warning signs did I ignore that led to this latest catastrophic breakdown? How can I be peacefully puttering around my silent empty house when the love of my life is out there languishing in her Bed O' Pain (tm)?

Apart from suspicions that I'm being attacked with mind control rays from the American Florist Society, I do have a certain amount of justification in my autoflagellation. I am the goto guy here. Despite my inherent attitude of Leave the Doctoring to the Doctors, I have to be the frontline dentist when it comes to S's general level of health, most especially when she starts getting fatigued and a little inattentive. And there's no doubt at all that this time, whether willfully or nilfully, I fumbled the pigskin.

Happily, S is mu-u-u-uch better, not particularly the worse for wear and ready to come home. One of the suspected sources of her problem, her chronic sleep apnea, is being treated with a new cool breathing machine, and from what I can tell she's more alert than she's been in months. That could be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on her mood at the moment, but at least she'll be more likely to communicate her bodily condition accurately.

But whether I'll be any better a responder is still a question. Ain't no newfangled aerodoodle pumping up my attention. And it may well be that the problem doesn't lie in my immediate attentiveness anyway. I may have just gotten desensitized.

In Gunther Grass's classic novel The Tin Drum, the celebrated novelist spins a metaphor of postwar Germany in which shattered citizens, numbed to near catatonia by the horrific events of the previous five or ten years, gather in a bombed-out basement refitted as a faux restaurant, "The Onion Cellar." There, at tiny tables lit by candles, the waiters bring breadboards bearing whole onions and carving knives. The customers chop the onions and discuss the terrible times they've been through, as the pungent fumes bring tears streaming down their faces -- the only stimulant capable of making them cry, so calloused have they become to tragedy.

I won't say I've gone to onion chopping. I've never been too much taken by onions or tears. A considerable portion of my childhood was spent engaging in a series of screaming tantrums over one thing and another, and when I was finally weaned from the lacrimose lactose of the tear-tit, i got pretty stoic out of simple necessity of kleenex economy. Like most guys, and many people of both sexes, I came to see crying as a socially inappropriate self-indulgence. The occasional rain squall that does pass through usually takes me by surprise, even irritation.

I've done my share of getting reacquainted with my puling, pamper-pooping inner brat, and it always does a body good to get down on the floor and play with some Legos now and then. Once I learned how to say "I love you" without flinching, though, I figured I'd pretty much put that teeshirt in the ragout bin.

But I'm starting to think that it's time for me to crank up the ol' sensitivity training victrola once more. Since we've become enmeshed in her HOC (horrible old condition), Sandahbeth and I have been through one Immelman turn of medical aerial circus after another, her in the cockpit hanging onto the stick for (literally) dear life, me on the ground with a fire bucket and a lotta gravel in the stomach. Inevitably, a steady diet of 3/4 aggregate has left me without much appetite for yet again mo' better drama, and that in turn is making me notably sloppy in my duties as Ready Dog. I'm a veritable knight in shining armor, shining and impervious and constricting and likely as not to drag me down to a watery grave should I venture too far out into the turbulent tides of my abnormal normal life.

What I'm going through here is as much a symptom of my times as of my own life. Today as never before we citizens of Media America are privy to the private sorrows and flesh-rending atrocities of seemingly the entire rest of the world. Living as we do in relative comfort and security, we bathe in a hot bubbling informative acid bath of suicide bombings and child slavery and endless, unmitigated poverty and starvation, the fetid spoor of the dinosaurs of oppression shaking the earth in their passage.

Faced with such an endless vista of disaster, it's only natural to do a snail and yank those delicate feelers in. Disconnection may well be the new complacency, with the parade of cop/medical procedurals on tv featuring extremes of bodily depiction more suitable for a first year anatomy class than prime time entertainment as a superficial symptom. And that could be disastrous for us, for our whole society.

Don't think so? Just ask the Katrina victims.