Author Archives: oinsketta

Monday Morning

Monday morning dawns late around here, Tony Bennett is already chatting amiably with Leonard Lopate.   Lopate asks a joking question and Bennett answers with his great, gentle laugh.  Why am I listening to Tony Bennett?  Then again, listen to him.

Somehow people get themselves to do tasks, then play later, if they get a chance.  I have many tasks to do, but all I want to do… yes, yes, never mind.   The children of my good friends used to tell people that I was a child like them.  I was forty at that time.   These kids are all older than me now, out in the world, making deals.

OK, enough of this, time to put my shoulder to the wheel, get out in the world and start making deals.   Let’s make a deal.

New World Odor

The old cartoon comes to mind.  Guy lying on psychiatrist’s couch saying “nobody listens to me,” and the shrink, behind him, is looking out the window, staring intently at something, or doing a crossword puzzle, checking his Blackberry.  “I’m sorry,” says the shrink “did you say something?”

Take a deep breath, friend, that old joke has become the new joke, the new world odor.   The smell of distraction is the prevailing stink.  Look at it this way– if you weren’t distracted, hoo boy.

Delcog III

Here on Delcog III we don’t mess around with pie in the sky, or touchy feeliness either.  Life here is as frightening as it wants to be, and nobody on the planet has any quaint illusions that it could be any different. 

“Oh, yeah, Delcog III, isn’t that a bit lame, sir?” a blunt reader might ask.

“A bit lame, earthling, sure, as lame as you like.  It could not be otherwise, no matter what color glasses you put on, no matter what olfactory filter you dial in.  The air here, for example, you cannot breathe it.  When your tank runs out you will die in four or five agonizing minutes,”  the Delcog looked off indifferently, then went back about its business.

And you wonder, who is the narrator here?  Who is Delcog?  Why am I suddenly part of this story?   Is it true about the atmosphere on “Delcog III”?  Am I living in a fool’s paradise of bottled air, will it run out and will I asphyxiate?

“You may scoff at Deleterious Cognition,” said the Delcog, “you may think it is the same as plain pessimism, or depression, mere expectation of the worst.  But it is more than a passive expectation of the worst, I assure you, my soon to be oxygen deprived friend,” the Delcog gave its version of a smile.  It was as bad as the confident prediction of an agonizing death.  

“Cognition,” continued the Delcog mercilessly, “is a thought process that involves perception, gathering information, digesting it and using it to make informed predictions while assessing various risk factors.  You label it Deleterious and we embrace that label, yes, cognition can be deleterious– to wishful illusion, for one thing.  Your dreams, my friend, they depend very much on your oxygen supply.  I note that you are wearing a four hour tank and that the gauge reads 5%.  Let us do the math together– 50% would be 2 hours of breathing time, or 120 minutes.  5% of four hours, therefore, is a tenth of 2 hours or 12 minutes.  I suppose we can round it down to eleven now.”

You know, I’m thinking I don’t have to take this kind of crap from some pedantic literary invention, yet I stand here, under the winking blackness.  I’m interested to hear what this sick bastard has to say.

“Of course you are,” said the Delcog agreeably, moving seamlessly into the past tense, “instead of making your way back to the ship to replenish your air supply you are listening to me rattle on with breath so bad that, I dare say, if you were not wearing the mask and breathing apparatus you would be unable to stand so close to me.  The ship, by the way, is at least seven minutes from us, so in three or four minutes the point will be as moot, as mute, as the song you imagine you are hearing.”  

The music I hadn’t been aware of swelled thrillingly, and along with it a sense of hope, soaring.  That is one amazing aspect of music I sometimes forget, it can fill you with feeling, sometimes impossible to express except through music.  

“Yes, that’s fantastic,” said the Delcog with a slight smirk, “talk about music, since it is more precious, apparently, than life itself.  It’s kind of funny: choosing music over life, since in the afterlife everybody is deaf.”

Now the Delcog had gone too far.  I was thinking about zapping him with my bop gun, raising some funk and a little sand too.  But what if he was right about the atmosphere being poison for me to breathe?  

“By way of example,” the Delcog said, “and forgetting about your insoluble breathing emergency a few minutes from now, you are writing this instead of working on a business plan, instead of figuring out how to recruit the crucial people that will allow your plan to move forward, instead of working on strategies to network and sell your idea.  Whatever you think about capitalism, baby, you’ve got to raise capital if you want your own business.  The widgets your business will make are no different than any other widgets, they’ve got to be branded, marketed, dressed in short skirts and marched out into the marketplace.  You think you are doing something special since you are ‘nonprofit’.   That’s very funny, if you think about it for a minute.  Oh, I forgot, you don’t really have a minute… that’s a little Delcog III joke… you actually have maybe nine minutes, or, actually, two– to decide to hightail it back to the ship and see if they can get the hatch open in time.” 

It was wearying talking to this guy, but I was already weary.  I got to thinking it was a long shot to make it back to the ship in time to save myself.  The music had stopped, I felt sick, sweaty and claustrophobic in my space suit.  I had to get out of it.  I pulled off the face mask, and, outside of the fartlike smell of the Delcog, who hadn’t been wrong about his breath, the air was very much like the air in a dank basement.  It didn’t smell very fresh, but it was fine to breathe.  I winked at the Delcog and went on my miserable way, shrugging into a long sideways leap in the low gravity of Delcog III.

Disorder

There is a book called the DSM, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, I think they are using version IV now, working on five.  The book lists symptoms and describes  the gradated spectrum of each diverse, specific, and sometimes subtle, mental disorder.  

Among these are the perfect statistical descriptions of each of the several distinct types that make up the editorial board of the American Psychiatric Association– brilliant and nervous,  dour and paranoid, voluble and smiling but filled with unspeakable rage, intense, taciturn but almost completely quiescent.  Those who twitch and those who smile fiercely, with one eye twitching slightly from time to time.  The trained observer may catch the occasional micro-expression showing the primal will to violence, but, for the most part, the editorial board of the DSM looks like a high-level group of accomplished professionals.

And it is.   I drop this all casually, though, of course, it’s a cliche: the crazy psychiatrist.  But the authors of the DSM, the book that categorizes every insurable mental disorder, are a select breed of psychiatrist, true experts, standing at a rare vantage point, on the defining edge, that hair’s breadth between normalcy and disorder.  

Diagnostic:  their diagnostic checklists of symptoms will decide what mental disorder you suffer from, please answer the following questions.   Are you ever sad?  Do you ever have bad dreams?  Do you become sexually aroused at odd times?   Do you like to shake your leg rhythmically for long periods of time?    A code is issued for each customized disorder and the psychiatrist  prescribes, and a pharmacist dispenses, the suggested drugs, according to the scientific recommendations of pharmaceutical industry expert psychiatrists.   Because a code number has been submitted with this claim, everyone along the line will be paid well for the patented medication to make this poor bastard function better.

Except that sometimes the poor bastard functions well, medication or no, and at other times not so well.   These mood fluctuations are a symptom of our condition here, buffeted by the pressurized demands of the world around us.  I’m just saying– a person who is freaking out might do better resting in a quiet room with soft music than strapped to a gurney, people screaming, lights flashing, men with guns, as the sedation is administered.

On the other hand, I’m no psychiatrist.

DSM-IV DSM-IV.jpg

Deleterious Cognition

At the request of a friend, and regular reader of these posts, I grapple once again with the slippery concept of Deleterious Cognition — a thought process that leads to harm rather than better health, optimism or anything good.

My friend himself provided an excellent example of the process recently and has graciously offered it for use here.   He had a wonderful long weekend in Roma, his wife was charming and delightful, the light and food were fantastic, everything was beautiful.  Then, on returning home, crippling pain a few days later.  The cause and effect, in his beleaguered state, seemed clear to him.   He’d enjoyed himself, therefore there was a karmic price to be collected ASAP, and it had come in the form of this crippling pain.

His theory  may be true, it may be bullshit, in any case, there was nothing good in it for him believing it — except to be on guard against enjoyment.  The main thing was that it made his suffering worse.  I wrote:

I don’t know about your karmic payback for enjoying yourself in Rome theory.  There’s cause and effect and then there’s just bitter coincidence.  A belief in the karmic payback theory might qualify as Deleterious Cognition.  A theory that makes the reality even worse than it might otherwise be, absent the theory.  As good a definition of that elusive concept as I’ve ever arrived at.

And there we go.  You can see this kind of thinking everywhere, such as when we fear the worst and are later relieved to find out we were wrong, though we can never get back the time spent fearing the worst.  We can construct elaborate thought castles, every room a different kind of torture chamber, but walking through these castles is a game for suckers.

I had great success with the workshop last week.  It was almost unbelievable how close to my conception of how the workshop would operate it was.  The children ran things wonderfully, several discreet jobs done well and the room a beehive of focused creative activity from 3:15 to 4:55.  I was almost giddy as I sent off a touchy feely email to the parents of the workshop members, along with the edited animation.   As often happens, I heard nothing back from any of them.  

Then, a day or two later, speaking in a voice as clear as these bold-faced words you are reading now, Deleterious Cognition said: “you went too far, they now believe you are nuts, maybe you are nuts.  Why did you ruin everything?”

The plain facts are these: I did not go too far, nobody thinks I am nuts (though maybe I am) and I have ruined nothing.  Far from it, I have created something out of the air, something with great potential to help everyone who comes in contact with it.

But I would not know that listening to the voice that, while seemingly quite logical, and bedecked with a fancy name, is only a kick in the balls dressed up as a well-meaning thought process.

Intentions

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Intentional kicks may actually hurt more than accidental ones, least hurtful being accidental, followed by a quick, sincere apology, a new study suggests.   A thought experiment, actually.

There are thoughts that hurt, like words, and thoughts that can heal, like proper words at the needed time.   Thoughts can freeze right action in its tracks, lead directly to tissue death, heart failure, horror.  

Thoughts can also open a window high on the wall, gracefully fly up through that window to wherever you want to go.   Words discourage and disable, words encourage and enable.   Deeds, same, same.   Silence, same.  What you think the world is– it is.

For example: there are, it is said, a thousand reasons for the thing to fail, but only one needed for it to flourish.  

Smiling faces may smile for different reasons, but a real smile strikes a certain beautiful harmonic note.

There are people who look good, have winning personalities, charm and talent, who assure you, through proxies, of their affection.   You want to believe them, whether they mean any of it or not, because they are such appealing people.  And it is shame on you if you let a mistaken belief in friendship shake you up.  

 Take off the fairy glasses, man, yer old to be so naive.

Some kindness is done with great intention.   Some is done with no thought attached to it at all.  This unintended kindness may be the greatest kindness of all.  The same holds true for unkindness.