The latest ada dition to my Wall Of Text Fan Club is Lexi, the cashier at an Oldtown Portland Convenient Store.
Whenever I set foot in her shop Lexi calls out "My Hero!" because I defended her agains a shoplifter who tried to put the arm on a pint of Ben And Jerry's.
While I did not injure that right chap in _any_ way, I put the fear of G-d in him when I grabbed him then shouted "Put That Back!" as well as "Call 9-1-1!" The particular way I grabbed him prevented him from punching me.
He won't be shoplifting at _that_ particular store any time soon.
Sammy used to work at a donut shop near my home. I was very proud when she told me she shared my writing with a friend. For Sammy I bought a binder; when I saw her each week I gave her a new essay, article, rant or manifesto which I three hole punched at work.
Sammy doesn't work at the donut shop anymore, so I'll be mailing my Walls Of Text to her at her new place of work.
“Sarah” is not her real name because she’s got a Monkey On Her Back.
She held out hope of such Weasel Action last night but actually spent fifteen solid hours in the can doing her makeup as I myself whiled away the early morning hours instructing my own Monkey on the crucial importance of avoiding recidivism
I just now left her at my place as I set off to totally blow away an Electroencephalograph machine. I am by now Dead Certain I have Temporal Lobe Epilepsy - thus my Hypergraphia and my “Altered Sexuality”.
What remains to be seen is whether the TLE explains _all_ of my Neurological Disorders as I _also_ have all the symptoms of Pernicious Anemia. We’re that actually the case, Vitamin B12 Injections would save my very life as it _killed_ my Great-Grandfather.
Doubt was cast on any form of B12 Anemia by another doctor when he pointed out that my symptoms were transitory. We’re it B12 only the injections would enable me to speak or to write intelligibly.
It is difficult to detect TLE as one’s Temporal Lobes are small and in the very center of our brains, just to either side of the Corpus Callosum that bridges our two lives together.
It there is a far more sensitive EEG electrode array that one wears like a hairnet. I don’t know yet which electrode type I will have as yet.
Sarah suggested she and I hand over a ten spot for a private theater this evening. It happens that try as I might I simply cannot Spooge if I hadn’t enough sleep; she hasn’t slept in days and would need to “Get Well” to do so.
“What do I do when you fall asleep at McDonalds?”
“Call me on my phone or tell me to go outside and smoke a cigarette.”
So when she falls asleep at the skinflick tonight I’ll drop her a dime to suggest she have a smoke.
She’s a member of the very same sex club I’m in, which far more than bodes we’ll for William Jefferson Clinton:
It means I’ll only have to pay ten clams to get in when the manager throws a... uh... “Party” and so springs for pizza and snacks.
While us male regulars at the Oregon are all old familiar friends, for unaccompanied women it’s not nearly so humbly homely:
“I had to call the cops.”
In other news, Google Webmaster atolls yields the insight that 58% of my search referrals are for “Oregon Theater”.
It’s helpful that my business and personal sites are now on different domains as I would not want potential clients to regard me as unprofessional.
“But you said I can’t make it look like this is real,” I said. Okay, maybe I whined it. I was confused, as I almost always am talking to this guy.
“It’s all right,” Rority replied. “Nobody will believe it, anyway. Well, except Noboty.”
“Huh?”
“My butler Noboty. He’s a robot made out of nobots.”
“Oh yeah, you mentioned him...”
“Yeah, you’ll write about it. You got it all wrong, but not bad for a protohuman.”
“And you’re really taking me to the future?” I asked, incredulous.
“Well,” he said, giving me a sly look... or what I interpreted as one. “Kind of. It’s nobotic.”
“So it won’t be real?”
Rority took a hit off of his stratodoober, laughed uproariously, and things got weird.
As I write this, it’s February 2000. Five years ago I foresaw some really big problems, because they had designed all the world’s databases with only two characters in the date fields, as if it was going to be the twentieth century forever. Luckily, so did everybody else who knew how computers work, and governments and industry industriously got to work and fixed it.
I got a huge raise a few years ago, and I understand the recession is over for everybody else, too, since Clinton was elected. We’re buying a house this year.
I logged on to the internet to work on my web site, the Springfield Fragfest. The new 56K modem was screeching as Rority appeared, as weird as ever. It looks like smoke or fog assembling into him, and then becomes solid.
Rority says I can’t let anyone see this until at least late 2018, which will be the Illinois bicentennial.
I should mention what nobots are, I guess. Nobots are microscopic robots, each having a computer orders of magnitude more powerful than all the computing power that exists today, and they’re all networked together. They can assemble with other nobots to make solid things. Rority says that in his time, everything but food and drink is made of nobots.
Rority is from ten million years in the future and looks like an Area 51 space alien. Most of what he does looks like magic to me, but I’ve read Clarke. Ten million years is a long time. But time travel, and going faster than light that he says are related, seem like impossibilities to me. But I’m really primitive to him. I think he sees me as a pet.
“We need at least ten cubic meters of space to do this,” he said.
“I know just the place,” I replied. “There’s a cornfield not too far from here, and they won’t be planting for a couple of months.”
We got in my car and drove out there. I hopped the fence and Rority walked right through it like it wasn’t even there. About twenty yards in, Rority said “Okay, we’re far enough. Just a second while I... okay, here we go.”
And I thought how he shows up and walks right through things is weird! Everything turned to fog, kind of the opposite of when Rority shows up.
The fog solidified into a room. There was a desk with a computer on it, and the screen was really strange, only about an inch thick and perfectly flat. There were some strange, cylindrical light “bulbs” in the room’s lamps. Various little lights on the computer were blinking. It took a minute or so to take it all in.
I finally noticed the desk had no phone on it, but didn’t say anything. I didn’t pay much attention to the framed, backlit poster on the wall, until the image started moving, talking, and making music.
“How far into the future is this, anyway?” I asked. “Freakin’ Star Trek.”
“It’s 2018.” Right then I realized that the poster was really a television, tuned to CNN. The announcer said something about the president; Donald Trump was on the screen in front of the White House.
My jaw dropped. “Don’t tell me he’s president!”
Rority grinned and shrugged. “Okay, I won’t. But ignorance won’t change reality.”
“How in the hell...”
Rority seemed to be really enjoying himself. “This fall, back in your time, George Bush will be elected president...”
“Again? He could only serve one more term.”
“No, his son George. Despite what Clinton had warned him about Al Queda, he let his guard down and the country was attacked.”
“Who’s this Al Queda guy, some Mexican drug lord?”
“It’s an Islamic terrorist organization based in Afghanistan. They flew two jet airliners into the Twin Towers in New York, one into the Pentagon, and tried to fly one into the capitol building, but that one crashed. Actually, I made it crash.”
“What’s that got to do with Trump?”
“I’m getting to it. Anyway, Bush started an undeclared war on Afghanistan, then attacked Iraq. Despite, or rather because of his two wars, he was re-elected.
“Then toward the end of his second term, the economy crashed and crashed hard, starting what is called the ‘Great Recession’. Your historians say it was banking that caused it, but the real reason was that fuel prices more than quadrupled. It was either buy gas to get to work or pay the mortgage. The Republican, a war hero named John McCain, lost to Barack Obama, a black man.”
“But how did Trump get to be president?”
“I’m getting to it. Obama was a very good president who your historians say was history’s twelfth best. He managed to find and kill Osama Bin Laden...”
“Is that some federal bill?”
“No, he was the head of Al Queda and ordered the attack on the US. Obama also stopped the country from sliding into a full-blown depression (don’t tell anybody, but I had a hand in that, too) and managed to get a law passed that made sure everyone could get health care.”
“And Trump?”
“When Obama first ran, Trump cooked up a phony story about Obama being Muslim and not a citizen. The crazy racists bought it. Trump, the fraudster, huckster, and all around terrible protohuman kept it up. Obama ran for re-election against Mitt Romney and beat him handily; Obama was a popular president.
“Then in the 2016 election, Trump bullied all the other Republicans out of the race, and the Democrats chose Clinton’s wife.”
“Clinton’s wife?”
“Yes, she’d served two terms as a New York senator, and Obama had appointed her as Secretary of State. There were a series of scandals right before the election, and she was never very popular anyway. None the less, she won the popular vote but lost in the electoral college. So Trump’s been President for almost two years. Racism was his ticket to the White House.”
“Who’s this ‘Mueller’ guy, anyway?”
“He’s investigating Trump for collusion with the Russians to steal the election, bribery, campaign finance crimes, witness intimidation...”
“Sounds worse than Nixon.”
“He is. Lets go outside so you can look around.”
“Okay, but why?”
“Because it’s necessary to keep you stupid protohumans from completely destroying your environment. If you don’t stop burning fossil fuels I’ll never be born. Not just you, everybody. And Trump seems to hate the environment.”
“What makes you say that?”
“He appointed a man who had sued the EPA many times as head of the EPA, they’re now dismantling everything the EPA has done in the last fifty years, and Trump took us out of the Paris agreement.”
“Paris agreement?”
“That was another big Obama success. He got together with all the world’s leaders to find a way to stop the global warming. Only one small, poor nation didn’t sign, and Trump pulled out of the agreement as soon as he took office. Come on, let’s go outside.” He opened the door and exited.
I followed him out into the cold. There were a couple of inches of snow on the ground. “If Trump is such a danger to the future, why did you let him win?”
“The math boys say if Clinton had won, destruction would have come even sooner.” He walked up to a really cool looking car and got in the driver’s seat. I got in the passenger seat.
“Why? She had the experience.”
“How much of your history do you know?”
“What I learned in school, about the same as most people, I guess. Why?”
“Because her government experience was a close parallel to James Buchanan’s. Buchanan was the one who started the civil war; he tried too hard to please everyone, just like Clinton. The math boys say had she won, there would have been a thermonuclear war resulting in a massive extinction event that would have dwarfed even the ‘Great Dying’.”
The car started moving and didn’t make a sound. At least, not enough for me to hear. “So I take it that Trump and Clinton both need to be out of the picture? What happens to them?”
“I can’t tell you, your knowledge would be dangerous. It will work out okay after the next recession.”
“The next recession?”
“There’s always a next recession, at least until we got past laboring for goods.”
“When will it hit?”
“I can’t tell you, you’d really screw things up for us.”
A Harley thundered past us going the opposite way. “This is sure a quiet car. I don’t recognize the brand.”
“It will be another three years before they even get started building a company. This is a Tesla Model S.”
“They must have some breakthrough mufflers.”
“It’s electric. It doesn’t need a muffler. In parts of the world, it would emit no pollution or carbon at all. The trouble is, and this is what I want you to tell people in 2018, is that here in Springfield this Tesla pollutes more than any vehicle on the road.
“Well, maybe school buses are dirtier, those things really stink. But this Tesla runs on coal.”
“Coal?”
“Its batteries are charged from the local electric grid when the car’s parked. Springfield’s biggest and most used generator is coal-fired. So here, electric cars pollute more than even diesel.”
We went as far as Ash street, and signs indicated that it was closed. Rority pointed to it. “They’re building a high-speed rail system through here. There won’t be any crossings, just underpasses. Ash will be open next Spring and they’ll close Laurel to construct its underpass.
“I wanted you to see the progress.” He turned left on Ash and left again on 5th. We drove down to the university.
“See that shiny wall?” he asked as we drove through the campus.
“Yeah, what’s it for? It looks strange.”
“It’s a solar panel. It generates electricity from sunlight.”
“Yeah, I’ve heard of solar cells but have read that they’re way too expensive and inefficient to be practical.” By then he was heading south on I-55.
“They were, twenty years ago. In fifty years there won’t be many traditional electric generators, except some old hydroelectric and nuclear plants. Most houses will have solar panels on the roof, and most skyscrapers will have windmills on top.”
“You mean like in the old Dutch paintings?”
“No, these look like... well, they probably will look like a prop from a science fiction movie to you. We’ll come up on one soon... oh, over there, look.”
It kind of looked like a giant futuristic box fan mounted on a huge pole, only without the box. The blades turned slowly.
“Not much wind today,” he said. “Now we’re going three hundred years in your future; your future if you keep burning coal and oil.” It suddenly got very foggy, and Rority pulled off of the road and stopped. We had been going through a wooded area, snow still on the ground.
The fog lifted. I’d never seen it get so foggy so fast, or for it to lift so fast.
The highway was so cracked and disused and full of potholes it was hard to recognize as a road, let alone a highway. The snow was gone, and the sunlight’s angle suggested a summer day rather than winter. The trees were mostly gone, and what was left was dead and broken. Rority did a U-turn and went back north, still in the southbound lanes. It worried me.
“Aren’t you afraid of a head on crash?” I asked nervously.
He shook his head. “There’s no other traffic.” We came up on an overpass, and I understood why he’d said that—the overpass had collapsed, blocking the road. He drove up the entrance and back down the exit.
Farther down he exited on an entrance ramp and turned left on highway 104. “Where’ we goin’?” I asked.
“Back to Springfield.”
“Kind of the long way there, ain’t it?”
“The bridge over Lake Springfield is out.”
We passed through Auburn, or at least the town’s ruins. I wondered what had happened to the town? There were only a few structures still standing. There was evidence of a great many fires. He turned right on highway 4. I didn’t say anything until we reached Chatham, which was likewise in ruins.
“What the hell happened?” I was both aghast and awe-struck.
“I told you, global warming.” We crossed over a stream or something, the creaky old bridge miraculously still standing.
“Just the rising temperatures caused all this?”
“It started it. California and Florida were the worst hit in North America, but the rising seas and frequent, never before seen monster storms, destroyed most of the world’s coasts. Fires destroyed most of California. Crops failed worldwide from droughts.”
He got on highway 72 and crossed the median; highway 4 had collapsed on the interstate. We were going east in the westbound lanes. “The wars did most of the damage.”
“I thought you said it was global warming.”
“It was. Hungry people fight for food.”
When we reached the entrance from 5th street he moved onto 6th street at the entrance to a big Walmart, which wasn’t there in 2000 and now laid in ruins, like everything else. We continued north. The railroad overpass by Stanford Avenue was completely missing, with no debris on the road.
Further north, the next railroad overpass was down, debris blocking three of the four lanes. Most of the houses were completely gone, with nothing left but charred rubble.
I asked “Hungry people did all this?”
“Hungry nations did all this. Wars were fought, more wars were fought, nuclear arms were unleashed, and this is the result. No more people, dogs, cats, birds... in fact, there’s very little still alive. Cockroaches, Tardigrades, very few other species.
“The math boys say that in about another five hundred million years there would be new land species, even evolving to sentience later, but we’ll be gone. By the time the few surviving species become sentient, no trace of humanity will remain at all.”
He turned left on Capitol, and there it was: the Illinois State Capitol building, charred and blackened, but still standing. He headed back to the cornfield.
“So how am I supposed to stop all this?” I asked, frantic. This was about the worst thing I’d ever seen.
“Your little web site?”
“What about it?”
“It’s going to get you started writing. You already wrote the art thing and the thing about the cat. By 2018 you’ll have written and published half a dozen books. When we get back, write this down, put it away, and post it on the internet no earlier than Halloween 2018.”
By then we had reached the cornfield, now only dirt, and got out of the Tesla. There was no fence to hop. The fog rose and fell again, and the fence, snow and stalk stumps were back, the stumps flattened to the ground in a square, ten yards to a side.
“I’ll see you,” he said. “Go on home and write this down. But do not under any circumstances let anyone see it or even hear about it until after Halloween 2018.”
“But how will that stop the destruction?”
“Look, I don’t have the math to explain it to you even if you could understand it. But you’ve heard of the ‘butterfly effect’, where the flapping of a butterfly’s wings affects the weather, haven’t you?”
“Yes, but what does that have to do with this?”
“You’re the butterfly that prevents the hurricane!”
He hit his stratodoober again, laughed uproariously, and vanished in the now familiar cloud of smoke.
I sure hope I’m flapping my wings right.
My friend Norman King has been working part-time for me to list all the homepage URLs of VC Portfolio Companies.
Earlier this evening I tried to list a certain robotics company but was unable to figure out where they were. That company did mention their "acquisition" by another robotics firm, so I looked there to, only to be turned away empty handed.
So I googled for "Foocorp Location", whereupon Wikipedia yielded the insight that they were out of business. It also said that the robotics firm that had acquired them had only bought their IP.
HOWEVER!
Neither Foocorp nor their IP-acquiring company claimed Foocorp had any open positions. I expect the continued existence of their site enables them to sell off their existing inventory.
So.
There.
Sigh. Kids These Days.
My deeply troubled friend quite clearly wants romance.
A far-wiser mentor of mine advised me that for me to allow that would do _both_ of us a grave disservice. Even so, I've been reluctant to put a stop to what presently is barreling along turned all the way up to 11: Full-Hormonal.
The very best that I can really hope for is to be there when she's hungry for food - which she's actually not, not very much, and even then she's largely living off of peanut butter and honey - as well as giving her a safe place to sleep, to the extent she's not engaged in her relentless search for her next fix.
She quite clearly _hopes_ to get clean somehow, someday. I want to facilitate that. My far-wiser mentor advised me to encourage anything she does that is positive. But so far, also she has is hope for "someday".
She's not in as much denial as I've known lots of others to be. She knows very well that this stuff is bound to kill her someday. She's quite dismayed to have woken up in the back of an ambulance after she unwittingly shot fentanyl then "got NarCanned" but not as dismayed as she would have been had that fentanyl actually killed her.
From time to time she'll ask me whether I object to The Monkey On Her Back. Quite clearly I do, but always I say "It is _your_ decision, and yours _alone_". I know this from hard experience with other addicts I have known.
Someone mailed it - anonymously - to me in the slammer. I recall that it was an award winner for the fourteenth year of that particular award, but not which award that was.
It is written in the first person, with the protagonist reporting that he's just about to be discharged after five years in a mental hospital. I _think_ he was a physicist.
In other news, as I write this I'm blasting Beth Hart's and Joe Bonamassa's "I'll Take Care Of You" turned all the way up to 11: Mutually Assured Destruction.
Good Times.
While there are other reasons that I've been gravitating towards what I'm about to say, it was having seen not "Lady Gaga" but Stefani Germanotta as well as Bradley Cooper in their remake of "A Star Is Born" that actually precipitated my long-delayed decision
: A couple years back I quite sadly read Steven Pressfield's "Turning Pro". "Sadly" because while I was greatly inspired by his "The War Of Art", I had not read far before I knew full well that not only was I not a Pro, I was unlikely ever to become one as well.
That all changed right around 7:15 this last evening - Sunday, December 16th, 2018:
That is not a decision to be made lightly, but I will explain later just why it is not, as well as what it actually means not so much to be a Pro, but to become one.
I will say that before the sun sets on another day, I will have posted my first vocal demo track at the above site. I'm having trouble getting my "Dry" raw recordings mixed right so as to sound good when they're "Wet", that is, when they've had such effects as Reverb mixed into them.
I've been working on a full-length vocal CD for a while now. Quite likely I won't need to mix my Dry tracks at all were I to add a third mic placed about fifteen feet away so as to capture the room ambience.
Just now I emailed my piano EP's producer Pete Burnight to ask his recommendation for a battery-powered Electret Mic.
He lent me two such mics for my EP's recordings onto his portable four-track with TDK SA-X cassette tapes run at double speed - so as to diminish the Tape Hiss - then mixed them for me onto a DAT cassette.
More commonly known as "Condenser Mics", they require "Phantom Power" not so much as to power them rather to charge the two metal-coated membranes whose change in capacitance results in subtle AC current fluctuations. "Phantom" because very, very little actual current flows.
I want a battery-powered mic - Pete's were battery powered - because I regard amp-supplied power over the XLR cable to be Wrong In The Eyes Of The Lord.
That first demo track I'll record with my iPhone 7 and the mostly-excellent Pro Microphone iOS. "Mostly": I'll post a review on my above site Real Soon Now.
Steven Pressfield Dot Com while quick to answer pings leads my browser to spin for tens of minutes just now. I'll post links to both "Turning Pro" and "The War Of Art" after Pressfield's webmaster gives his box a Boot To The Head.
Don't worry The Thought Police aren't after me again.
I wrote a short essay about the most frightening experience of my entire life.
While I posted it, and while it will show up in web search as I added it's URL to my Sitemaps Protocol map, it's going to be a good long time before I tell anyone but a deeply trusted few, and even them not for a while from now. I won't email it to anyone rather I will send it snail mail.
I will leave you with this hint though.
The first time I made a Schizophrenic stop hallucinating just by talking to him was in the plain sight of two Psychiatric Nurse in a PICU. One of them wandered nonchalantly out from behind the nurses desk about ten minutes later:
Did you see what I did there,
I asked quietly.
Yes, just as quietly.
I don't know why it worked.
You entered his reality. If you can figure out the rules
that apply there, you can bring him some relief.
A deeply faithful old man was being tormented by the Devil. Bernard just asked me to say a blessing over him.
In reality I can't make anyone stop hallucinating. While every Schizophrenic can make himself stop hallucinating, the don't know they can until I point that fact out to them.
Just writing this is really freaking me out. I'm going to go somewhere far away from my office, and I will leave my phone in my file cabinet.
_Speculate_ now.
Surely my many Soylentil friends will agree I am _exceedingly_ Hypergraphic.
My own interpretation of my Methylmalonic Acid blood test is that it was inconclusive: I was right in the middle of the normal range, but its Wikipedia article points out that it can have false negatives as well as false positives.
There are six or eight other B12 Deficiency tests, the most definitive one generally performed last as Bone Marrow Biopsies are both painful and costly.
TLE Hypergraphia along with a few other traits are collectively regarded as Geschwind Syndrome. In my case I also experience Hyperreligiosity, as I will discuss in another post in a day or two, as well as Circumstantiality, a tendency to talk incessantly, wandering from topic to topic with no apparent connection between them.
I'm heavily into talking just that same way.
While Broca's Aphasia originates in the similarly-named Brain Area, the Broca's Area is immediately forward of the Temporal Lobe of one's dominant brain hemisphere, either the right for most artists and musicians or - in my case, as a Scientist, Engineer and Writer - the left one.
However, TLE would _not_ explain my numb feet and lips. I don't know whether or not either B12 or TLE would explain the sudden onset as well as severity of Tinnitus at the start of that same episode, or the severe dizziness that first occurred that afternoon. That dizziness persists, two or three episodes each day, one to three hours each time.
My reading of Wikipedia's Methylmalonic Acid article leads me to figure that my test result of 216 nmol/L is inconclusive. While that level is normal, in the nine weeks before you ordered my blood draw, I'd been eating antacid just like it was M&M candy. This at first due to nausea after my Radical Nephrectomy on 10/31, then later due to the nausea that comes if I move my head even just a little when I get dizzy.
So far today while I was dizzy for three hours. I can avoid nausea without antacids by lying quietly on my bed in the dark listening to music, as that discourages head music. When the dizziness struck this afternoon I was in my therapist's waiting room, so I put my computer back in its bag then sat quietly, staring at a spot on the opposite wall. During my session with her I explained why she'd found me sitting quietly, then for the entire session took care always to look directly at her, never looking away.