The High Crime of Oversleeping

There's a story popping up here and there on my news feed about a young man who accidentally slept through his jury duty appointment and for this was brought before a judge and sentenced to ten days in jail. 

America is a land of law and order they say. This is why the democracy works they say. Yet it seems to me that these same laws seldom apply to the powerful. They only apply to the small folks, the little people, the common citizens, to those who sleep late. At the very top, among the rich, among the politically powerful, among the somebodies, we see these laws transgressed again and again, and blatantly so. Take Donald Trump, for instance. Tax evasion, bribery, corruption, money laundering--hey, no problem. Just throw some money at it. Just hire squads of lawyers, tie it up in court. Just claim special privilege. 

What a crock of shit it all is. 

Averages and Evolution

In a novel I am reading (Kronik Burung Pegas, by Haruki Murakami, English title The Windup Bird Chronicle), and have been reading for a long while (it's 900 pages of small print), a teenage girl asks the question 'What would happen if people lived forever? Would they care very much about things going on in the world? She concludes that they would not, that there would exist no sense of urgency pressing them to get anything done, anything explained, anything accomplished. All things can be put off till tomorrow, ad infinitum. Why would any of these human philosophies matter? In fact, she theorizes, it is our mortality that drives us to strive toward meaningful philosophies, toward fathoming, toward fashioning some sort of permanence that will outlast the individual. It is therefore convenient for evolution to include death such that the species itself, ironically, may evolve. 

It's not something I had ever thought about. Murakami is good at that--at coming up with stuff people have not really thought about.  But I reckon, upon consideration, that the girl is just about right. Death, in this sphere anyway, in this dimension that we know, happens in the interest of mankind. It is as much a part of the plan as birth. 

Is this also why we feel, as we grow older, as we see more and more clearly the edge of the far horizon now drawn near, a sense of urgency become more urgent yet? We think 'Okay, I know, I have always known. I just didn't intend to get here so quickly. But wait, I'm not done. There are things that need to be ordered, put in place, tidied up. There are loose ends that need to be tied. The work is not done.'

I am 65 now, for just a few more months. Perhaps. I wonder if these things work on a sort of hereditary average. If I take the ages of my immediate family members, the average age of demise puts me at 56.75. Therefore, I have already outlived myself by roughly 9 years. Talk about a sense of urgency! Furthermore, if you add in the ages of my grandparents on my father's side, my average age of demise decreases even further. On the other hand, my mother was adopted and had no knowledge of who her birth parents were or how long they lived. Who knows, maybe each of them lived well past 100. This would significantly elevate my own result.

But maybe it doesn't work this way. Who can say? What we do know, what we cannot change, is inevitability itself. We must all evolve. It is the one thing we have done together from the very beginning. 

The Grip of It

What is better? To accept the horror presented before you or search for a way out? To hunt in yourself for a comparable defect or to pull yourself tall and strong to support the correction of someone else's faults?
--Jac Jemc, The Grip of It

Jac Jemc, a Chicago author of a number of award-winning novels and short story collections, has been popularly heralded as a successor to literary practitioners such as Shirley Jackson and Henry James. I don't know that I'd go that far. Frankly, her prose style reminds me more of that of Virginia Wolfe. I mean, let's face it, Jackson and James set a pretty high bar, especially in the category of comparison intended, that being literary horror.

Nonetheless, Jemc is inventive and effective, even if occasionally a tad too effusive. It's a bit difficult to know just what The Grip of It is "about", just as it is a bit difficult to know just what James' The Turn of the Screw is about--which is to say that this is not necessarily a bad thing in the case of this literary 'spook story'. Even if it seems somewhat derivative in some aspects--one cannot help but think of Stephen' King's The Shining, for instance, in abbreviated form--Jemc does succeed in telling an eerie tale of hauntings in her own direful tone. Moreover, she somehow manages to leave a mind-impression that proves creepier on later rumination than the actual text had seemed. I found, for my own part, that uneasy dreams were being suggested by certain events in the novel, as if parts of the story had plugged themselves into something essential on a psychological or subconscious level.

This in itself persuades me of the worthiness of The Grip of It in the genre.

Brainstorm

brainstorm
noun
   1. a spontaneous group discussion to produce     ideas and ways of solving problems.
   2. a moment in which  one is suddenly unable to think clearly or act sensibly.
   3. a chaotic jumble of phantom sensations and sounds in the brain resembling the character of a violent electrical storm (unofficial MS definition). 

For the last three nights, I've experienced what I call a brainstorm. It has nothing to do with coming up with inspired ideas or schemes, nor has it to do with a sudden inability to think or act sensibly, given that one is just waking from sleep when he experiences, or rather suffers, the phenomenon. 

What I mean to describe is an essentially indescribable conflagration in the brain. This is often preceded by a ringing in the ears before sleep (though of course it's not really in the ears, as one is not really hearing it, but experiencing it). This is usually accompanied by at least a mild headache. One then awakes somewhere in the middle of the night to find the ringing accompanied by a sense of pulsation in the brain itself coupled with what I can only describe as 'electrical' sounds, like broken, buzzing, sparking twitching circuits, which themselves throb like individual aches. This goes on until you simply fall to sleep again. There's no way to stop it, other than unconsciousness. 

I always picture this as constituting an awareness of the destruction of myelin (the protective covering of nerves) as it is occurring, like hearing the chewing of termites inside a table leg. I always imagine that MS is getting ready to put another body part or system out of service, and what I am hearing is the gnawing through of a final thread of tissue, the denuding of the coppery electrified nerve, the hissing, hushing, sibilating shriek of violation. 

In short, it's unpleasant. 

Why this happens, or what exactly it is, I do not know, nor has any doctor ever been able to say (or to even understand what I'm talking about, for that matter). 

Does it even have anything to do with MS? Who can say? What I can say, though, is that I had never experienced this phenomenon prior to MS, and I have experienced it regularly ever since. It comes and goes, and may be absent for months at a time. It does not seem instigated by anything in particular. But as with any symptom, I insist that it must have meaning, for  a symptom by definition is an expression of an underlying malady.

Then again, maybe it doesn't have to be a malady. Maybe this is the sound of myelin repairing itself, of ongoing construction at a building site, the clack of hammers, the buzz of equipment--a cacophony that is annoying while it is in progress but which leads to the accomplishment of something stable and new. 

Hey, I like the sound of that! 

Fifteen Minutes

A friend shared an article with me this morning from Business Insider. 

Neuroscience shows that 50-year-olds can have the brains of 25-year-olds if they sit quietly and do nothing for 15 minutes a day.

Hmm. How does that work on 65-year-olds? Do we, theoretically, end up with the brains of 30-year-olds, or 35-year-olds? Or is the cut off for brain renewal fixed at 50? 

I dunno. What I do know is that at the end of each day, I sit wondering how the end came so fast and just what the hell I've been doing all day. Going to bed for the night seems something I was doing only moments ago. And if sitting quietly and doing nothing for 15 minutes a day turns a 50-year-old into a 25-year-old, why doesn't 8 hours of sleep turn the same man into a babbling infant? 

Perhaps I'm missing the point. 

Einstein once explained the theory of relativity in in a manner something like this: Say you're having coffee at a café with a beautiful woman of especial interest to you. Hours may pass and seem like minutes. On the other hand, minutes at the end of a tiring work day may seem like hours. 

It's all relative, as they say. Although I cannot say quite what this relates to in regards to the issue I set out to address. I must not have gotten my 15 minutes in yesterday, for the tide seems to have turned the other direction. I'm suddenly thinking like a 75-year-old. Or maybe I always do. Who's to say that a 65-year-old has to think like a 65-year-old? For that matter, what does a 65-year-old think like?

As I am sitting at Starbucks this morning, trying unsuccessfully to reset my Starbucks password whilst ruminating about neuroscience, a man approaches me, smiling happily, and extends his hand. "Hi, Pak Will," he says. "How are you doing?"

I have no idea who this man is. No idea whatsoever. Not wanting to look stupid, or senile, or 65, I play along, returning his greeting with an absurdly gleeful smile. "Wow, long time no see!"

So the man chats along, scrolling out the usual niceties, I presume--for he is speaking very quickly in Indonesian and with a heavy accent. It is clear that he thinks I speak Indonesian fluently. I figure he must be thinking of a sharper version of me, one who spoke Indonesian fluently. I feel badly for not being that person, guilty somehow. 

But we get through okay. In time, I am able to shift from my struggle with the perplexing Starbucks app and the mysteries of neuroscience back to the present moment, the smiling man before me in the crisp Batik shirt, and the Indonesian language. I begin to pick up what he's saying, and to respond appropriately by the time he hurries away on other business. 

But I still don't know who he is.

Maybe if I sit for 15 minutes later on and do nothing, it will come to me. Like a second language. 

"Ok" is Not Okay

Scrolling through Facebook this morning, I happened to see a story detailing a general outcry against an employee of some sort of theme park in Florida (I think) who had made the "Ok" sign over the shoulder of a little girl of mixed race. 

Initially, I could not understand the crime. What had caused the outcry? Was it something about the guy, the girl, or the hand gesture?

Well, I read on, and found the problem explained in a following paragraph. The "Ok" sign, I was surprised to learn, no longer means … uh … 'Ok'. Apparently it is now a sign indicating an allegiance upon the 'signer's' part to the ideology of white supremacy; or, to put it more succinctly, the person performing the gesture is a freaking racist, and proud of it. And this is definitely not Ok. 

It occurs to me now that if I were ever to return to America, I would need to do some catching up, preferably beforehand. As a matter of fact, if anyone from Indonesia were to visit or immigrate to America, he or she had better take some preparatory measures as well, because I can tell you that just recently I flashed this hand signal to a young man who had helped me with something and that both he and I mutually and immediately understood the sign to mean "Ok" or "Good job, thank you." We both understood it in the same way that we would both understand the 'thumbs up' gesture. Or has that, too, changed in America? Hmmm. 

See what I mean? I shudder to think what might happen to me or to my Indonesian friend were we to stroll about confidently flashing this sign. 

Which gestures are now 'ok', and which not? Which words are ok? Which have changed meaning?  I know that at some point the word "sick" came to mean, in popular lingo, not "ill", but "cool". I wonder what it means now. In times long past, the word "gay" meant "happy", and now … well, you know. The hand sign where you use the index and third finger to make a V began as a sign meaning 'victory' (as in World War II). It's meaning in the 60's changed to 'peace'. And now?

I dunno, maybe we'd all be better off just expressing ourselves in plain English. Dig?

The First Day of the Rest of My Life

Coming out my door this morning, I happened to meet Sia and Lupi, just passing by on their way to work. 

"You look handsome this morning," Sia said. 

"Yes," Lupi agreed. "Nice outfit. Are you doing something special today?"

"Well, you never know," I answered, and then added, somewhat to my own surprise, "It's the first day of the rest of my life." 

I got to thinking about that response later on. It's a bit like an old quote from Tom Petty--"If you're not getting older, you're dead"--only with a sunnier sort of spin. 

This is, after all, the first day of the rest of my life. Tomorrow will also be the first day, for the rest of my life starts, really, the moment I awake in the morning and become conscious of the day. 

I've decided that this is a pretty good way to look at things, something I will want to remember. And given that my memory is starting out new and must therefore have plenty of storage space, this should not be difficult to do.