Category Archives: Uncategorized

Some Thoughts on Suicide

12 Tuesday Aug 2014

Posted by in Fiction, Opinion, Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , ,

imgres
Image courtesy of the Guardian Liberty Voice

As I write this, seemingly the world but certainly much of the country is mourning the death of the incredibly talented and comedically brilliant Robin Williams, possibly from suicide, according to the Tiburon sheriff.

With everyone and his brother–including me on Facebook–eulogizing Williams, I’m not going waste time on that.  Instead, I wanted to talk about the manner of his death, and a tiny little bit about the nature of his disease.

Now, I am not and never have been particularly suicidal.  I’m too arrogant and self-interested, and obnoxiously believe the world is generally a better place with me in it than without me.  But there was a time when I did, quite seriously, consider killing myself, and I’ll never forget it.

I suffer from chronic neck pain, a condition I’ve written about once or twice in various blogs here and there.  In my mid-30s, I was out skeet-shooting with my father-in-law and exacerbated a design flaw in my neck–my spinal column is very narrow up in the cervical area–causing a disk to bulge into my spinal cord, crushing some nerves and causing me immense pain.  And when I say “immense”, this is not typical Doug hyperbole; this is the kind of pain so intense that 12 Vicodin a day not only did not make me sleepy, but only controlled the agony sufficiently enough for me to minimally function.  I would wake at 3am in pain in advance of my 4am dose; I drove my car one-handed, the other propped painfully on the arm rest.  Etc.  It was unbelievable.  “Worse than labor pains, I’m told!” my orthopedic surgeon cheerfully told me.

I had surgery, relieving me of the worst of the pain, but since then, for the last 15 or so years, I’ve had associated pain around that area, at the base of my skull.  I get regular shots in the back of my head to control the pain; I go to the chiropractor regularly; I see a pain management doctor every 4 weeks; I take an almost-absurd cocktail of drugs.  By and large, the pain is controlled and “managed”, though I’m never quite free of it, even on the best days.

By and large.

But I do have occasional “flare-ups”, where the pain approaches and sometimes reaches the same levels of agony that I sustained back before the surgery.  And one day, sitting on the floor of the shower, head in hands, water pouring down on me, desperately waiting and praying that the additional morphine, Excedrin, Advil, and tequila I had ingested would do something, anything, to alleviate my agony, I reached the Dark Place.

If you’ve thought about suicide, seriously thought about it, thought about actually doing it, you know what I’m talking about.  The Dark Place is where you–literally–feel you can’t go on, you can’t take any more, the only way to end your suffering is to end your life.

“Cowardly”; “a waste”; “selfish”; I’ve heard all these and more with regard to suicide, and felt that way myself.  But in that Dark Place?  You’re in massive, unbelievable emotional (or in my case, physical) pain.  You can’t imagine it ever getting better, or going away.  You think of the days, months, and years of pain stretching ahead of you–decades of suffering, suffering, suffering–and you think, “What’s the fucking point?”

Think of me, there in that shower.  Naked (best not contemplate that image too closely!), cross-legged on the tiles, head hanging down, the water pounding down on the back of my neck,, the pain like someone who weighs 300 pounds pressing a dull knife into the back of my neck just below my skull over and Over and OVER and OVER again, endlessly, never to stop.  15 years of pain and suffering behind me.  My grandmother lived to be 90–40 more years of suffering and pain, pain, pain, endless pain stretching ahead of me.  Pain and bills and pain and guilt and pain and worry and pain and workworkwork and pain and . . .

And you think, ya know, I have plenty of morphine there in the bottle.  More than enough.  I’ll fall asleep and that’ll be it–no 40 years of constant, non-stop, unendurable pain.  Haven’t I given enough?  Haven’t I tried enough?  How long do I have to keep on before I get a friggin’ break?

Now obviously, I left the Dark Place.  No, that’s not entirely accurate; I thought of Sami and my two kids and the other folks who–God only knows why–love me and care about me, and I held onto that thought tight and hauled myself out of that Dark Place by desperate strength, holding on to the thin reed of hope that the pain would abate, would get better, and I wouldn’t be facing 40 more years of it, ever and ever amen.  And when I was done, I turned off the shower, dried off, and went and lay in bed for several hours, feeling like, well . . .

Do you remember the scene in Return of the King, when Frodo loses the ring, it’s destroyed, and he’s dangling over a river of lava, not convinced whether he should bother helping Sam haul him back up?  But he does, he climbs out of his own Dark Place–40 years of longing for the ring, and suffering the hurt of losing it, the pain of the spider’s sting, the pain from the knife wound in his shoulder, the PTSD of carrying that damn thing for so long–and lets Sam lead him out.  And then he passes out, waking up in a soft bed in Ithilien, Gandalf leaning over him.  Remember the look on Elijah Wood’s face?  He’s “saved”, yeah; he’s still alive, but he’s wounded, and exhausted, and clearly not entirely sure he really wants to go on.

Yeah, that.  That’s where I was that day, laying on that bed, trying to leave that Dark Place behind.

It sucks at you, the Dark Place, like an effin’ black hole.  It pulls at you with the gravity of a promise of an end, an end, dammit, to the suffering.  And after years, decades of suffering, why the hell would you not want an end?  Why wouldn’t you deserve an end?  Haven’t you done enough, suffered enough, tried enough to get “better”, to end the pain, to leave that Dark Place behind?  How much longer do you have to try before you’ve earned your rest?  Earned an end to all that?  And if that end is only The End, so what?  How much more do you expect a guy to take?

Now look:  I’m fine.  I can still see that Dark Place, still feel its gravity, but it’s no more effective on me than the gravity of Neptune is on planet Earth; it may perturb my orbit a tiny, essentially immeasurable amount, but that’s it, really.  I’ve seen that, for my own pain, my physical pain, there are other options, things can improve, and so my thin reed of hope is now more like a strong metal ladder, bolted to the concrete and wood framework of my life.  I’m in a safe place, and I’m not worried.  And if I get close to the Dark Place again, there’s this good, solid ladder.

But what about psychological pain?  Pain that is unquantifiable, literally “all in your head”?  And what if you’ve been suffering for 40 or more years?  And have made multiple trips to that Dark Place?  And are staring another 30 years of pain and suffering in the face, having tried multiple times to leave it behind, build your own ladder and bolt it to your foundation?  And what if your foundation is termite-riddled bare wood on dirt instead of a good ol’ solid concrete slab?  What then?

Yeah, metaphor-heavy.  I’m sorry.  But you see the point, don’t you?  You see how a person’s genius, their ability to make other people happy, to make other people laugh, doesn’t do jack when you’re trapped in that Dark Place, and not only can’t find a way out, but can’t even imagine a way out.  And even when you can, when you can bring up the image of escape, all you can think is, “And jesus yeah, I may get out of here, but what then?  30 more years of this?  No!”

Robin Williams is gone, maybe from suicide.  But you won’t hear from me about “what a waste”, or that it was “selfish”, or that he should have “battled harder”.  Unless you’ve been in that Dark Place yourself and climbed out–and like Williams, climbed out multiple time–you really should keep your opinions to yourself.  You don’t know.  Even I don’t know.  But from where I sit, feeling even the tiny tug of my own Neptune-distant Dark Place, I know enough not to judge.

We are without Robin Williams now, and the world is poorer for it.  But I understand why he decided to leave.  And maybe now you understand, just a tiny bit better.

Information Isn’t Power

28 Monday Apr 2014

Posted by in Opinion, Uncategorized

≈ 12 Comments

Tags

, , , ,

BmUSt7rCUAA6ueO.jpg-large
Illustration by David Somerville based on the original by Hugh McLeod

I read a pretty broad swath of stuff, from my son’s car magazines to high tech blogs to marketing web sites.  My job is weird, and (apparently) my thirst for input is pretty promiscuous.  Thus it was that I was reading a post by the aforementioned Mr. Somerville on the Brain on Digital site.  And there, right up front, the very first sentence grabbed my attention:

They used to say knowledge is power, but now there’s Google — information is everywhere, and cheap.

Now, don’t get the wrong idea here; Somerville’s post is about how in the ocean of data that washes over us every day, the most important commodity is attention.  How can you catch someone’s eye when you know that they’re flooded by information?  How can you get someone (to stick to our water analogy) to pay attention to a particular drop of water when they’re swimming in the middle of a data equivalent of the Mississippi river?  It’s well worth reading.

But it was that first sentence that got me thinking, because I’m sure that there is a big difference between information, and knowledge.  That old chestnut states “Knowledge is power”; not data, or information, but knowledge.  I’m not being pedantic here; in a world where we almost literally have an incredible amount of data (some of it highly dubious) at our fingertips, it’s how we collate, integrate, and apply that information that gives you knowledge.  And, as Somerville shows, hopefully eventually wisdom.

When I was a kid, what I wanted more than anything was eidetic memory, i.e. “photographic memory”.  I had an unusually good memory, but it was frustratingly imperfect and I wanted it perfect.  I wanted to remember everything.  I knew that a lot of folks with eidetic memory had some fairly severe neurological or psychological issues, but I was Doug; I wouldn’t have that problem, right?  The perfect arrogance of a child.

In the years since, I’ve learned that there’s a reason eidetic memory is both rare, and often associated with disorders; how the heck do you catalog and store all that data?  How can your brain keep up?  Memory is associative; that is, when you create a new memory, it associates with other memories in your brain and forms new connections.  It’s not a straight linear progression of adding raw data; your brain is always taking that data and doing shit with it.  “That reminds me of . . .”  The more memories, the more associations.  So most people’s brains flush some stuff, just to make room.  People with eidetic memories are awash in memories, flooded by data.  No wonder they struggle!  Do you really want to remember, say, what it smelled like that day you had the flu in 1987?  Or how your skin felt when you burned yourself on the stove that time in December, 1992?  What if you couldn’t forget that?

The Internet is our cultural eidetic memory; it stores everything.  We apply associations by hand with links, but the Internet doesn’t self-associate.  Adding new data and linking it to other data doesn’t create real associations like we do with our brains; they’re just static links.  They’re something some random person at some point thought was related to the topic at hand.  Useful, but not the same thing.

So now we all have access to eidetic memory, but does all that data make us all equally “powerful” in the “knowledge is power” sense?  Clearly not.  You have to tag, order, sort, and organize that information in some way.  Then you have to create connection between pieces of data that maybe other folks don’t see.  “Huh; you know, that makes me think of what this book by Dr. Blaupunkt said on a related topic . . .”  And with those connections, you come up with ideas and thoughts that maybe didn’t exist before.  And that is power.

People in fiction often use the “knowledge is power” formulation to demonstrate that when a state or other entity withholds information, withholds data, the people are ignorant and the folks holding that information have the power.  And that’s true, of course, but why?  Because without that data, people can’t collate the information, form those associations, and come up with their own ideas and thoughts.  If you don’t know the multiplication tables, you can’t do fractions.  But if you do know those multiplication tables, you can move on to division, and fractions, and algebra, and geometry, and on into Calculus and the next thing you know you’ve got Newton’s Laws of Motion and nuclear power and iPhones and whatnot.  But it’s not just the raw data; it’s the insight to see connections between those data points that other people haven’t seen yet.  And it builds on itself; new ideas create new data, which allows people to have new insights and create new data, and so on ad infinitum.

And it’s not just having access to the data and making connections, either; finding the information is more difficult than people imply when they say “Just Google it”.  Google is all well and good, but if you’re using the wrong search terms, you’re not going to find what you’re looking for no matter how many times you click the Search button.  You have to imply a certain amount of insight and use some guesswork (“I wonder what most people would call that?”) to get what you’re looking for.  Google can’t do that thinking for you.

While not a great movie (and I personally don’t like Bradley Cooper), “Limitless” explored this in a very interesting way.  Our Hero, Eddie, is a smart but unmotivated fiction writer.  He takes a drug, and suddenly he’s brilliant.  But not because he’s suddenly taking in a huge new ocean of data; no, it’s because he can make connections between data that was already there in his noggin, and create new ideas and new conclusions from it.  Such is also the brilliance of Sherlock Holmes, Mr. Spock, Herocule Poirot, and many other “genius” fictional characters.  It’s not the data, folks, it’s the connections and conclusions and deductions.

So fear not:  Even though the Internet and the Web and Google and WikiPedia level the data playing field, that ability to create those connections, and from them original ideas, is still the thing that counts.  Data isn’t power; knowledge is power, and knowledge comes from those insights and connections.

That’s what I think, anyway.  But maybe I need some more data.

The Anti-Dad

16 Sunday Jun 2013

Posted by in Uncategorized

≈ 3 Comments

ward-cleaver
Note: Not the kind of dad Doug is

It’s Father’s Day, and that made me start thinking about Dads, and how I am similar and different two my two man Dad examples: My blood father, F.J. (“Joe”) Moran, and my father-in-law–who has all but adopted me, and who I love dearly–Carl Webb. And honestly, compared to them, I’m almost the Anti-Dad.

I grew up in a time when the whole Ward Cleaver, “Leave It To Beaver”, 50s suburban Dad-who-works-at-the-office and Mom-stays-home-wth-kids thing was still in firm control of national life. And indeed, my family was a lot like that until I hit about 13 or so. And in that context, Dad works at the office, he does chores around the home on the weekend, he plays golf with some buddies, he watches football, he carves the turkey at Thanksgiving. He fixes stuff when it breaks, like the car or the kitchen sink or that balky door to the upstairs bathroom. He mows the lawn. He paints the house. Etc. He is Dad, the 50s American Platonic Ideal of Dad.

I’m not like that guy at all.

I can’t fix dick; I’m a computer nerd, and despite my Pops’ best efforts, fixing anything more complicated than, say, a doorknob is really beyond me. Kitchen sink? Call the plumber. Car is busted? Off to the dealer!

But even more so, I’m not that guy. I don’t play golf. I mean, I learned, I know how, but ever since my Pops died in 2000, I haven’t played a single hole. I don’t get it, honestly. There’s so many other sports I’d rather do (if my body could take it), like soccer or ultimate or disc golf (which is like regular golf only in that involves walking around outdoors). I don’t get the fascination with the equipment, the shoes, the shirts, the clubs, the gizmos. I can’t imagine a more boring game to watch on TV; hell, curling is more exciting. I don’t get golf. In that component of Dad-dom, I’m a flop.

Then again, I don’t go into the office. I quit my job–not a leave absence, an actual resignation–so I could stay home and take care of Joseph for the first year after we adopted him. (Sami made more money than me at the time. In fact, in yet another nod to anti-Dad-dom, Sami has usually made more money than me.) I work from home. When the kids need to go to the dentist or the doctor or the therapist or their drama club or whatever, I usually am the one doing the lugging. I do the laundry. I grocery shop. When the house needs painting, I call a house painter.

And I refuse to mow the lawn. What is it with guys and riding mowers, anyway?

During our parenting, plenty of people have looked askance at how Sami and I have arranged things, divided up the work, the decisions we’ve made that are partly the reason I’m the anti-Dad. And yet somehow all the teachers at school tell us what a good job we’re doing, what great kids we have, what a delight they are. And even now at 18, Maggie doesn’t hate us and Joe is no more than usually surly for a 15 year old.

I may be the anti-Dad by “Leave It To Beaver” standards, but I wouldn’t have it any other way. Just a thought from one Dad on Father’s Day.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll call my one remaining Pop and tell him I love him; he deserves it.

Where’s Doug?

22 Sunday Jun 2008

Posted by in Uncategorized

≈ 4 Comments

I haven’t posted for quite a while, as you two or three people who read this blog might have noticed. This is not because I have stopped posting, or even stopped having opinions (that’ll be the day); rather it is because I am currently blogging at an experimental site that is a sub-site of Salon: Open Salon. I’m doing this because I’m an arrogant dweeb, and think that posts there will get a wider distribution than here.

I would direct the three (or however many) of you to head on over there. The site is currently in Beta and is thus (ironically) not “open,” but you can sign up easily if you want, and it shortly will be open.

In the meantime, I’ll be posting there rather than here. Just so’s you know.

Perception vs. Reality

09 Wednesday Apr 2008

Posted by in Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Alex Koppleman of Salon has a video up about the recent flap over Hillary Clinton’s “woman’s baby died because of evil heathcare industry” anecdote. Koppleman makes a good point that it is surprising that people on the Left would trust the word of a hospital CEO more than they would trust Clinton, a member of the same left. And he is very even-handed in this; I have no truck with Koppleman’s basic premise.

My point is, if so many folks on the left now doubt Clinton’s veracity as their default position, how on Earth is she going to convince swing voters in the general election? How can she continue to try to make the electability argument when her word is doubted by her own supporters?

I’ve said again and again that I think Clinton is unelectable in the general. If this doesn’t prove it, what the heck will?

Random Election Thoughts

07 Monday Apr 2008

Posted by in Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Some random thoughts on the current campaign nuttiness.

  • If John McCain’s temper is so “well documented”, why are we hardly hearing about it during his current press-driven beatification tour?
  • Is it just me, or are articles on “Why Clinton Should be Winning” or “Why Clinton Really is Winning” or “Why Obama’s current lead doesn’t really matter” more the kind of thing one hears as after a campaign is over as part of the postmortem?
  • How do people so out-of-touch as David Broder and Cokie Roberts get to keep insisting that they know what “typical Americans” are thinking?
  • Is anyone but me (and Glenn Greenwald, apparently) as disgusted by the fact that Ana Marie Cox, nee Wonkette, has become so much a part of the Washington media that she can’t even recognize the obvious: that attending a friggin’ bar-b-que with John McCain has an effect on the type of reporting he can expect from her?
  • Why do people in a state being heavily wooed by candidates still get sucked in by naked and obvious pandering by those candidates? Do people in Ohio really think Clinton or Obama would throw out NAFTA? Do people in Florida really think they care (in an ultimate sense) about Castro? Do people in Pennsylvania really believe Clinton likes “Rocky,” or that Obama is a Steelers fan?

Hillary, Michigan, and Florida

06 Sunday Apr 2008

Posted by in Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Am I the only one who is bothered by the blatant hypocrisy of the Clinton campaign with regard to the Florida and Michigan votes?

With Florida, Clinton has a bit of a case; everyone was on the ballot. But in Michigan, Clinton waited until every other candidate had removed their names from the ballot, and then she announced she would stay on. That’s just blatant calculation and manipulation, and she knows as well as you or I that’s it’s absurd after something like that to talk about “counting everyone’s votes.”

But that’s not what’s bothering me. What’s really bothering me is the fact that I know–and I’m sure that everyone knows–Clinton really couldn’t give a rip about the voters in those states. If she had clobbered Obama on SuperDuper Tuesday, she wouldn’t have cared about Florida and Michigan. If she had knocked Obama out via Iowa and New Hampshire, she wouldn’t have cared about Florida and Michigan. The only reason she really cares is because she can’t possibly be the nominee without those two states.

And after her blatant manipulation of the process with regard to Michigan, that makes me ill.

I am so damn tired of the Clintons; I really really want them to go away.

Still Confused

31 Monday Mar 2008

Posted by in Uncategorized

≈ 1 Comment

At this stage, the Clinton campaign baffles me. As far as I can see, her only path to the nomination is through re-doing the Florida and Michigan primaries (which they’ve already rejected), getting 2/3 or more of the remaining super-delegates to vote for her, or waiting for Obama to implode a la Muskie in 1968. Or a combination of them all. All this in combination with a scorched-Earth campaign to make Obama unelectable.

Is it just me, or is this complete insanity?

Over and over, I’ve said two things: that Hillary would make a fine President (although her campaign’s recent [i.e., in the last month and a half or so] behavior is giving me serious cause to reconsider), and that she can’t possibly win the general election. And I’ve seen nothing in this campaign that causes me to reassess the latter opinion. Consider:

  • Hillary’s negatives are remarkably consistent, between 45-55%.

  • A Hillary candidacy will bring out the wing-nuts in droves. Right now they’re apathetic. (Do the Hillary people want to wake that slumbering giant?)

  • Hillary’s current option–a scorched-Earth campaign followed by an overturn of the “regular” delegates by the “super” delegates–is almost guaranteed to alienate a lot of the new people who voted in the primary. How many will stay home? (In my view: a lot.)

  • With the Clinton’s there’s always something for opponents to shoot at. Her Bosnia thing. Her “peace in Northern Ireland” thing. Bill’s stupid statements.
    Something. And that’s without the Right rehashing all the past stuff to invoke Clinton fatigue.

This is not sexism; this is not Hillary Hate; this is just a gimlet-eyed view of the current situation. I’m sure Clinton has pollsters and strategists and position papers up the wazoo showing how she can overcome all that, if she does all the right things. For one, I don’t believe it. For another, hasn’t her campaign shown so far that she can’t do all the right things? (No campaign can, durn it!)

So why is she continuing? I can think of a few reasons, but none of them are very flattering, honestly. And speaking personally, I just wish she’d friggin’ quit!

The Day After

05 Wednesday Mar 2008

Posted by in Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Well, Clinton won two states and eked out a narrow vote win here in Texas.

My position is–and always has been–that Hillary would make a perfectly fine President, but that there’s no way she can win in November. No way. The youth vote that supported Obama will stay home; the Republicans who are currently apathetic (at best) over McCain will be galvanized, and she will lose. So it’s a complete bafflement to me that people continue to vote for her.

So I’m depressed. Because I’m tired of this campaign and want it over. Because I’m tired of the Clintons and want them off the stage. Because I’m convinced that the campaign is now going to descend to mutual mud-slinging, and I’m friggin’ sick of that. And because I’m convinced that the longer this goes on, the greater the chance of a Republican win in November.

So I’m depressed. How about you?

Update: 9pm

05 Wednesday Mar 2008

Posted by in Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Finished with the “precinct convention” (i.e., caucus) portion of the vote. The caucus started at about 7:15, and was still going on when I left at about 8:15. What I experienced sounds pretty different from what I’ve read about the Iowa process (probably because we’re down to 2 candidates).

At 7:15, lines were formed for each candidate–a line for Clinton and a line for Obama, and each person “signed in,” pledging their caucus vote to a particular candidate. There was no trying to talk Edwards supporters over to the Obama or Hillary side, or any of that; you just signed your name in the appropriate place (with your address, after showing either an ID that they checked against the rolls, or the little card they gave you earlier in the day that said, in effect, “Yuppers, I voted!”), and that was it. After everyone signed, there were be the proportional distribution of delegates for the district, followed by the delegate selection.

There were easily two Obama volunteers for every Clinton volunteer. There were also far more Obama people–I would guess between 2 and 3-1 out of a crowd that looked to me to be between 200-300 people (in a township that only has a stated population of about 1100!). This part of Austin would look to be heavy Obama territory.

At 8:15, there were still lines to sign in. There were now two lines for each candidate, and there was basically no waiting at the “Hillary” lines, with plenty of people still in the “Obama” lines. The Obama people were a big cross-section of folks–mostly white (Austin is pretty heavily Caucasian), but a few African-Americans and Indian-Americans. They covered all the age spectrum, and were men and women both. The Clinton folks were heavily female.

It wasn’t a “contact sport” here in Rollingwood, but when something like 60% of the adult population of the district shows up to vote for a single party’s primary, that’s pretty amazing.