"The unexpected becomes expected."
"The unexpected becomes expected."
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*If you are curious:
where the name comes from
I have been thinking, lately, about the many ways that language can go wrong. The ways are practically indefinite, and can involve any number of gaffes, assumptions, falsehoods, and so forth but it seems possible to diagram and limit the process to a few key factors. For now, the aspect of lying is put to the way-side, but could be said to fit into the "encoding" process. Assumptions are summed up with expectations, but would also exist in the encoding and decoding process. Gaffes, meaning slips of the tongue or Joe Biden like moments over over verbosity, again fit into the encoding and decoding aspects. For the most part, though, I am examining the notion of fundamental failures of communication that can occur even when the message is true. To do so, I created a crazy ass diagram:
On the left side, you have the Transmitter. The Transmitter is broken down into the Speaker, the understanding and expectations of the speaker, and the ability of the speaker to encode the message into a linguistic form. On the right side, you have the Receiver. The Receiver is likewise broken down in basically the same way.
On the top, you have the "Linguistic Environment", which can also be called "The Set of Things, Actions, Facts, and Processes in the World which Impact this Specific Act of Communication". The LE influences every other portion of this diagram.
In the middle, you have the encoding, the medium through which the message travels, and the decoding. This is the process we call Language. Encoding is shared between the Transmitter and Languague, and decoding is likewise shared between Receiver and Language.
The Transmitter's Understanding (TU) involves not only understanding the Speaker, but also the modes of encoding and the Listener (as well as how the Listener will decode the message) and the LE. Likewise, the Receiver's Understanding (RU) must know the Speaker, the modes of decoding, and the LE.
Now that we have these out of the way, let's elaborate some on how it can go wrong.
Unmutual Expectations: If the Speaker and the Listener have differing expectations about the outcome, this will affect not only the entirety of communication, but will specifically give false positives on the understanding of the encoding/decoding process.
Lacks of Understanding: If the Speaker does not know how to word his or her question, or answer; does not understand what he or she is really wanting; does not understand the LE or how the medium works; or, does not understand the Listener, then the encoding is bound to fail slightly, making proper decoding impossible. If the Listener fails to understand similar things, then decoding is not fully possible.
Changes in the LE over Time: As the LE changes, the sum of the message might change. Linguistic differences might arise, expectations might have altered, understandings might alter, and even the identity of the Listener might change.
Limits of the Medium: Finally, the last primary way that language can go wrong in this model is by some limit imposed by the medium. Maybe not all the proper understanding can be imparted into the medium, maybe there are expectations of the medium that are unfair, maybe the medium truncates the message, and maybe the medium adds some encoding or decoding step that does not function properly.
"Communication over Information": This is something of a growing buzzword lately, and it means just what it says. Treat such language cycles as cycles. Even if you are the listener, or the speaker, be ready to change positions and accept a feedback loop. While doing so, allow yourself to alter your expectations, your understandings, and adjust the medium as needed to better fulfill the desires of both (or more) parties.
Be Aware of, and Control, Expectations: Note when some expectation is applying pressure to the communication, be aware of what expectations are figuring in, try to limit unnecessary expectations, and, from the feedback loop above, work on letting some expectations go while fine tuning the ones best suited.
Learn the Limits of the Medium: self-explanatory. Is the way you are communicating, including the terms and symbols inherent in the encoding and decoding process, changing the what you are communicating? Probably yes, but learning out how much and how to work with it, instead of struggling against it, is tantamount to not creating unexpected falsities and failures.
Learn which Understandings to Hold, and Which to Let Go: Once a communication loop is established, it is likely that understandings will have to change or alter as well as the expectations. Care and attention to learning will help to teach both Speakers and Listeners how to evaluate and communicate new understandings.
Be Aware of the Environment: Lastly, for now, care should be given to understanding the environment in which the communication is occurring. What limits or constraints does it add to the table?
Well, this is not really concluding anything. This is practically a ramble meant to help sort the brain. It does illuminate a few things, though, namely the high level of interactivity that expectations and understandings play with current communication, despite the fact that little communication exists that will not alter them. Also, the medium threatens to bottleneck communication and strip it over key aspects of the Listener and the Speaker.
For now, though, I will conclude that proper communication requires a loop and some care.
Si Vales, Valeo
When I bought the BBC "complete Hitchhiker's Guide Radioplays" boxset a few months ago, I read a review that mentioned "until the sixth!" I was not 100% sure what they were referring to, whether a book or a radioplay or if that was some random reference to another movie, but I came across a McNaughton Adult newsletter today and it mentioned that Eoin Colfer (if you know him, you know him from Artemis Fowl most likely) will indeed be doing the sixth book in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy "trilogy": And Another Thing....
My heart is mixed on this one. From what little bit of Artemis Fowl's adventures I have read, his writing is "of the type" that might make a H2G2 story work. However, as the world has shown multiple times in the past few years, follow-up writers and third party series completions can, and often will, go awry. Right now, my big hope is it will be an adequately told tale that will not piss me off. I'll settle for adequate. If this turns out to be another ... of Dune, though, I am done with the technique.
Besides, the "ironically happy" ending of the fifth book of the original H2G2 was the best part.
Si Vales, Valeo
If today was any indication, then the experiment will be a rousing success and I should published and world famous come next Thursday. I assume it is a little of an outlier, but today I:
It really has been one of the most fulfilling days in a while. A little Mea Culpa, I did load up Facebook for a few seconds because right before deciding to shut it down for a month, I had set a couple things into motion and I wanted to see how that turned out. Turns out, my advice I left was never responded to (on one hand) but a couple of classmates I had friended had responded, so now I have pretty much wrapped up everything for now (and hey, had a couple of friend requests that I wasn't expecting, so that's cool). I really am, now, pretty much able to walk away without any loose ends.
Well, sure, there are lots of loose ends, but that's kind of the point of this.
So, Day One was good. Day Two will bring up something interesting I read about the three classic stages of rhetoric and how it links to the three classic stages of communication, possibly part 3 to my now week-long delayed articles about how the ALA code of ethics shows up in real-life cases, and it should (around midnight) bring in the second espisode of True Library Confessions. This week, the nameless librarian is up against The New Klan members in "Librarian versus White Supremacist".
Si Vales, Valeo
Facebook and Goodreads notifications are turned off. My myspace is going to disappear for good sometime this weekend. Chat is getting shut down at midnight. My e-mail and aggregator programs are taken off auto-refresh. My newsreader is off.
Just to clarify the ons and offs. I will be doing e-mail. I want to do a good amount of it. In fact, I will be swooping around Facebook and a couple other spots tonight to collect e-mails. I will be "doing" blogs except non-interactively. I will read my friends blogs, assuming that I can (in other words, friends that post to LJ and/or Blogger/spot and I can aggregate them) and I will be reading book-industry and library-related blogs. I will possibly be Tweeting out to announce new blog posts or important bits. I will not, however, be seeing responses. This will be strange, somewhat, but it will do one important thing for me. I will focus on writing only what comes to mind and not responsively. Considering I am kind of the cusp of trying to get published, this is not a bad practice, to get used to tempering myself for my own sake.
When I come back, I'll have a month of webcomics to catch up on. Woo. I'll have a month of Failblog and the like to catch up on. Woo. I'll likely have about 800 notification from Facebook. Woo.
I'll also have what is likely a longish post about how I took it. This seems weird, and overreactionary, but keep in mind that the Internet is my primary way of communicating. Hell, it probably will still be my primary way of communicating (Dickens of a Blog and e-mail), I'm just going to get rid of all of the little "instant gratification" bits and see how I react to things differently. Possibly not at all, but I am curious.
Just to summarize:
If you have a blog on Facebook or something (one person I know updates her Facebook notes regularly) please e-mail me a copy so I can keep up. If that's bothersome, then I'll just catch the notes when I get back, I guess.
And again, I am kind of looking forward to e-mail, so keep that up.
Good night. Good July. And, good luck...
Si Vales, Valeo
I just got off the phone with a Fox representative. I returned my copy, which was broken due to Fox's error, of Slumdog Millionaire for a new, non-broken copy. This was 2-3 weeks ago. They payed for return postage, sure, but part of me feels like their handling of this is not really customer friendly. As it currently stands, you go online and feel out a short form and they send you a label to print out and mail. You send it back to them. Then you wait about 2 months for them to send you a working copy. If you take the DVD back to the store, there is no good way to tell, right off, if it is one of the broken or unbroken versions. Presumably, this way will definitely get you a fully working copy. However, at the $20 bucks a pop cost, and the wait time of months, this ends up being a pretty shitty deal for a consumer. Once again, the early worm gets eaten and Fox ends up with a bunch of "renters copies" it can sell out to places like Netflix and Redbox or as a "budget" copy. My guess is that Fox 100% recoups and even betters costs with the current version of their exchange program. The original version just involved calling them and giving them the UPC code and personal information, but it apparently took about 30 seconds for jerks to copy down the information in the store (or share it in forums) and get free DVDs. Claiming, of course, that Fox had screwed customers and deserved. Which forced Fox, at that time overnighting replacement disks, to screw customers. If this turns out to be some sort of actuarial game to get customers' information, I'm going to be pissed. As it is, and I say this with no reservations, I am never, ever buying a Fox DVD again until it has gotten over the initial shipment and someone personally guarantees me that Fox's usual band of idiots got it right this time. If they do not include some sort of coupon or SOMETHING with the DVD, I will probably stop buying non-used FOX dvds as it is.
In better, and more free, media news; you can listen to Moby's new album, Wait for Me, for free though NPR's First Listen. Did not know it sooner, or I would have listened to it a couple of weeks ago. I like it. It's sort of like a more minimalistic version of 18, maybe, but a touch more personal. The lyrics and samples have been toned back to slightly more repetitive, shorter bursts. I think it helps to clarify the album, some, but the effect is a little bit to the "lay back and chill" than something you can definitely focus on. Play it in the background on first listen, I think, and then let the random bits surface. If you want to buy it, it's only $3.99 for the time being on AmazonMP3.
Not that that exactly matters to me. Sarah and I have entered into a realm of brokeness that you people wouldn't believe. In utter frustrations, I had to get up last night and spend $20 that I did not really have on medicine that I needed for my sinuses and allergies. When buying a $10 box of generic allergy medication makes you have to double check a couple of different bills and balance a few things out over the next week or two just to make sure it does not bounce your rent check: dang. Sarah and I are on what I call "starvation rations", which means, in American dialect, that we are only able to slightly overstuff our faces this next couple of weeks. We spent $10 on beans and rice, and 'shelp me if that's not just about enough for a fortnight of bland meals, alone. Tossing in tomatoes, curry, cumin, chilis, onions, soy sauce, olive oil, and other sundry vegetables into the mix guarantess that it's enough to last us. That and fried bologna. Mmmm, good. I'm frankly a lot more worried about gas and not having you know whats (rhymes with uninspected insurgencies) than food. Well, a week and a half to go. Here's crossing the fingers!
Despite our utter brokeness, we did have a chance to hang out with Alicia some this weekend. Mostly this meant that I showed her stuff like Great Horror Family, The Coffin, Dawn of the Dead 2004, and, for some strange reason, we rewatched Beerfest. Oh, and some Mighty Boosh and Kamen Rider Black. And we briefly walked around Midtowne on the Park or whatever that gestating housing project behind Target is called. It was all good.
Partially in celebration of the brokeness, I have been doing a little bit of writing and a lot of reading. Things that do not cost me anything but time. For those curious, I have a poem up (it was posted here already, but a longer and slightly revised version is up at): "For Some Time, or I know how this must end". In "bigger news", I also posted the first chapter in my soon to be weekly, ongoing story of True Library Confessions. They are about a nameless (obstensibly me) librarian who lives in a world where all the weird things I think about can and will come true. It is somewhere between horror, comedy, and action with a lot of weird easter eggs and injokes hidden in the text. Partially, it is an exercise in writing. Partially, it is me trying to write the sort of "librarian fiction" that I have been wanting to see. Most LF tends to barely reference anything like books (written more from a writer's perspective, as well) and when it does, only in a short and almost hateful way. TLC is going to involve a lot of book references, some vague and some pretty obvious, and puns and such based on the Library of Congress Subject Headings. I am trying to write it in such a way that no one would be lost if they did not know what book I was talking about, but if you do, you get a little chuckle out of it. Part of the concept, by the way, is to imagine me where instead of the Summer of Hell, and it's precursor, the Spring Semester of the Damned, which lead to a lot of soul searching and sort of rear-ended and knocked me off the rails a little to a lot; I am older when I go through some of the same angry depression issues. The nameless Librarian is about my age now, maybe even a little bit older, and loves his job and loves his life but also kind of hates both and so takes it out on the weird things that keep happening to him. You can read the first story here: True Library Confessions #1 - Librarian versus Zombie.
Ok, about time for me to get ready for class, but wanted to end with a preview. I think I am going to try a "No-Net" experiment for a bit. How I'm picturing this working is me limiting myself down to just blogs, e-mail, and sites needed for my work and school and "business" sites like the bank. No Twitter. No Facebook. I'm still debating on how far I want to take it. Anyhow, it will be for one month and will give me time to focus on writing, getting back to exercising at night, reading, pre-emptive studying, and the like.
If I do it, it will likely run from this friday (July 3rd) to August's first friday (whichever that is). More details will definitely follow.
Si Vales, Valeo
You break my heart because I know how this must end One day, never though I will, and I hold my breath (though the stars aren't seas) And I pretend we are about to drown, just lost sheep again Playing in the everlasting depth at the shore of soliloquies : All the pretty words, the pretty hugs, the sweetest touch, The vows, the heart strings knotted and red and full, the dinners, the quiet Moments shaped like dreams spent close together, the couch Warm with our breath and hope, the bed shaped like night, The call of the dripping lyre Playing outside in the great turning gyre, in the fog... Calling us home though we have been there... For some time.
Just thought I would share these: two pictures posted by blogs I follow (only rehosted here to avoid hotlinking and all that it implies). The first is an 1960s picture of Philip K Dick preparing a birthday dinner for his family. This is a picture of Hatte and Laura in 1963, maybe a May birthday dinner for Hatte since it's still so light. We sat down for dinner together every night and always made a big deal out of birthdays (source: Total Dick Head). The second is a volcano exploding as seen from space (source: Toren Atkinson's Absolute Blog).
Si Vales, Valeo
Wake up with bad stomach cramps and a headache, sweating, face down. Stomach churning. Arm asleep. Book by Harold Bloom in hand. How to Read and Why. Also known as Bloom spoils all of his favorite stories while namedropping Shakespeare. Subtitled: A lot. Page 246. Bloom's talking about Miss Lonelyhearts. My eyes are to washed out from tears and pain to focus on the page, so I don't actually know if Shakespeare is mentioned on it. I don't remember, anyhow. 246? No way I got that far along. I must have been skipping around.
Mental inventory. Checking for breaks in the hull integrity. Head hurts, I've been over that. Stomach feels like I am digesting tacks. My memory of last night is nill, so maybe I am. The bed around me is soaked. Sweat I hope, but I'll settle for anything that isn't too pro-bacterial. I smell something horrible that I must have left in the bathroom. That's awesome. Right thigh feels like I drilled a small hole into it and then pushed a big peg into it. Left ribs feel vaguely like I have been in a fight. Have I? I don't know. I hurt. What's the metaphysical requirements of a fight? A win and a loss? A possible draw? Pain and regret afterwards? Check and check. Kidneys working overtime. I recognize that bottom of the pit of the stomach need to piss. I drank heavy. I'm bursting for a slash. Bladder renting out nearby space in a desperate attempt to not be overrun by tenant issues. Squatters have set up in my urethra. The others say they have to go and I am game to agree with them.
Roll over. Look right at the north wall where my bathroom door should be, ready to face down the source of that smell if it means I can reduce some of the urgency my gut is red alerting. There is a now a chifferobe there. Chest-of-drawers next to it. Former looks faded dark cherry. Latter glossy oak. Latter has a cat on it. Pretty sable kitty staring at me. That's not my cat. This is not my house. Smell like a burned death with a toping of rancid food discarded in a Mexican restaurant's dumpster hits me. That does not smell like my puke. Realizing that the pain has let up, some, in my left ribs I feel down and find two bottles—one empty and one a quarter gone—of Bacardi 151 stashed under me like I was a mother hen and this was my brood.
Hell. Those aren't mine, either.
Stumble my sizable frame upright and then shift slightly to the starboard. Aft. Whichever. Bottle in my left hand, book in the right. Nearly tip over. Right into the wall with the window. Pink curtains with green vines faking their way through them, as though it was some weird mutant canopy. That's a bad sign. Single pillow, pillow case with stars on it, full sized bed, green and brown and earth tone decor. Black cat. Old grandmother furniture that has been restored, slightly. Rose petals on a white cloth, red and white candles above it, scent of more rose oil in the air. Posters on the wall with pictures of flowers and an Amy Brown faerie. I've done a one-nighter with a Wiccan looking for love. Bollocks.
Maybe. Just one kretek in the room and I would know for sure. Whatever stinks, stinks enough that clove smoke is a thing of some distant, more eden-like past.
Kidneys call, and no curses for me for pissing on a Wiccan's most humble abode. Whoever's puke smells like a piper smoked a bowl of rotted liver, that puke is the lighthouse of my destiny, and I set out after it. Whomever's? Whatever. I make out the bedroom door, down the patchouli vague as a ghost hallway, and around the corner that clearly has an open door to the bathroom and realize the smell is coming from the door ahead of me and not to the side of me (if anything, I'm thinking a strong whiff of lilac, she's trying to drive away evil, maybe last night did not go so well) and suddenly my need to piss is nearly fulfilled by me just letting go. Trying to not piss myself, I squeeze it off as tight as a man can despite, you know, not really being equipped for that Kegel stuff. Not just finding out where the smell is really coming form, but when I pushed the book down into my pocket, my hand touched something. Not a big peg in a small peg hole, I remember now. It's a gun.
I don't know guns, that was my younger brother's thing, before we went spelunking those years ago, but it's about as big as could fit in my generally lose pocket. Revolver. Smells used. I imitate the movies and pop out the spinny thing. You know, with the bullets? There are four. Not four full ones and two used ones. No, just four. Like I shot something twice and then took the shells out. Why? Maybe I shot six things but only had ten bullets? Just where is miss Lonelyspells anyhow?
Oh, God. My insipid internal worldplay makes me realize something. Did I talk to her about the book? Was I in that mode. The schmooze? The "New York Times Bestseller List is so pedestrian" mode? Jesus Christ. Mea culpa. No one deserves that fate. Maybe she dumped me on the spot, took pity on my sorry ass, and let me take up her bed for the...nah, that's a stupid theory.
Bullets. Right. Gun. Right. Because...of what is behind door number two. Not the lilac. The stench. Liver vomit. Ahead of me. Noon. High Midnight. Fuck. The zombies.
I forgot all about the zombies.
Rule number one. Never forget about the zombies.
I'm fishing for details, building a jigsaw puzzle out of broken memories rum shots. Four of them. Five of them? Three of them. Some number. I lured them inside. Somehow. I'm not a natural runner. More of a shove things aside, type. Maybe I pushed them. Down into the basement. Then locked the door? Why? Who in their right mind would...right, rum was involved. Tequila. Oh, that burp sure felt like tequila. Note, Wiccans like the hard stuff. I pushed them into the basement. Then locked the door. And went to bed with a hot and horny Wiccan who ravished from head to toe all night long, while I got pissed drunk. Wait, back up. What proof of that do I have? That's right. I hear them shumbling around down there so something pushed them down into the basement and I woke up in bed that some lonely, love-starved Wiccan apparently sleeps in (cloves or no). Did I shoot any of them? No. I found the gun? Wait, did I have sex at all? Hell, that explains why I was fully dressed. Just who the hell's house is this?
I need a plan of action. I need options. Any system needs options or it's not properly thought out. Option 1. Go back to bed. Pros: Bed. Cons: nothing solved. Problem? I don't know. Option 2. Kill zombies. Pros: zombies dead. Cons: my head would still be killing me. Option 3. Leave. Pros: I'd be gone, the cat can handle it. Cons: see headache and nothing solved cons, above. Problem? Probably. No one turns their back on the unholy marriage between life and death and feels like a man. Or something. Forgot what the poster said. Something something...Trident gum. We salute. Something.
Option 4: I need an accurate count. How does one get an accurate count of an indefinite horde of undead from a basement? Magic. Man, I know just the chick to ask. Well, know might be too strong of a word. I know OF a chick to ask. She likes pink and somehow allowing drunken schlumps to sleep in her bed. Solution: I kick the door, hard. Thinking about that, now, a split second later, it seems pretty stupid. Like the time I jumped over the railing of a patio down to the ground below, just because I knew if I waited I wouldn't do it, and bruised my ankle. Sometimes we do stupid things all at once because we know we will over...
Ok, two zombies down, two bullets. I'm a pro. This gun is an extension of my body. I breathe bullets and zombies fall down. Well, shit, I missed that one. And, ah, that's a click. Where'd that fourth shot go. Oh, look like I shot that one twice. Great, once in the leg when I screamed a little and jumped back. In the leg and not the chest, headshots would have saved your... Oh, there are more. Our zombie to bullet ratio just divided by zero. Crap.
Plan, two, I brain the next one in the head with the bottle. Get a good "slush chunk". Heh, it's kind of a funny noise. Bring it around and turns out I'm a natural at this, too. I am the bottle wielder. You know, I am fighitng zombies. Like, a dozen of them. Here I am, laughing, empty gun in one hand, a bottle of mostly full rum in the other, and I am using the bottle. Left-handed? I am a weird guy.
Stench number five (six?) goes in for a bit of the old sweaty forearm and I kick him down, which knocks me down. On a scale of one to ten, me with a hangover is slightly under "zombie" as far as grace. Sitting there, on the stairs, and I can hear more. I made into some sort of game of last night, didn't I? "I can kill them in the morning," I bet I said, smugly. "Let's get one more." Prick.
Death by undead is the mother invention so I slam the Bacardi into the wall, rip the book out of my pocket and douse the whole thing in the gushy of strong alcohol. You know the worst thing about homemade molotovs in the morning? The need to vomit so bad that you sort of lose track of what you were up to. Right, not dying. Then, whipping out my trusty box of Davidoff complimentary matches, I managed to break one, drop one, one's a dude and SWEET MARTIAN MARY CHRIST, I start a blaze a burning. In my hand. It will heal. Toss it down into the front of the stench coming on up the east side, slapping my hand into the wall to put it out, and then slush the rest of the Bacardi right into his rictus grin, and this time I skip the bravado kick, which means I am able to stand as opposed to falling back down and I back up quick.
Zombies burn fast, and they hate fire, and so some primal instinct caused the poor damned thing to slam into the wall before dropping back down into the others. Which also burns fast. You know what the suckiest thing about old houses? They burn faster than zombies. Instinct carries me around a corner and nearly to the front door before I remember: stupid cat.
Around the corner from the opposite way, shoulder a flaming zom back down the stairs, past the smell of lilac and into the bedroom. I snatch up Mr. Sable with my burned hand, pretend it does not hurt because I am big man, and then hurl aforementioned big man and terrified kitten through the glass surrounded by pink and fake vines, and right into the gravel outside. Some Wiccans hate grass, apparently. Scratches on the face and the cat teeth marks'll heal too. Get up and scoot away by several feet right as something, likely a gas tank or similar, goes up in the house and the old wooden thing is just a bunch of flames. I drop the cat, not too gracefully, as the heat hits the cuts in my face. Funny thing is, the guy sticks around. Nowhere else to go I imagine. Speaking of go, I drop trou right there and just piss like a race horse. It is awesome.
Only after I am done do I think to ask, again, "Who the hell's house was that?"
Those who follow me on Twitter or Facebook, or see the status updates on Dickens of a Blog, might have noticed a string of updates that started with "hah, I think I feel sick" to "let's joke about me being sick some more!" and then ended with "everyone stop joking, i'm going down!". I mean, that's not the updates, but their basic intent. I ended up missing class because it hurt to sit upright and later I fell asleep pretty hard in the middle of reading, and was still pretty sick the next morning. I feel better now, though just a tad drained on the edges, but I am mostly posting about this because of what I think it was.
From order of least likely to most likely reasons I was sick. (a) Sudden Onset Virus (100 to 1 chance). Not likely because the symptoms (headache, cramps, weakness) fail to fit any definite viral patterns. It's almost like my body was feigning a virus by having a little bit of everything that a virus might make you have, but not in proper proportions. (b) Insomnia induced (50 to 1). Not that likely, since I have had insomnia before, but as I get older it might cause worse side effects. (c) Food poisoning (25 to 1). Most likely [sub-]culprit was Chik-Fil-A. I had ordered a sausage biscuit that I remember tasting a wee bit off, but did not think much of it. Do not think it is likely, since some of the more "volatile" symptoms of food poisoning did not occur. (d) Electrolyte imbalance coupled with sunlight allergy (5 to 1 each, separate, 2 to 1 combined). That's right, the most likely culprit looks like it will be some sort of potassium, or other, depletion brought on by the weekend. Walking to work in heavy heat on Friday. Walking around Botanical Gardens on Saturday. Walking around Executive Plaza on Sunday. While Monday was pretty banal as far as heat and sweating goes, I still have a strong suspicion that I had unbalanced my body chemistry and then that's what lead to the insomnia and weird stomach cramps Sunday and Monday night, and it culminated into a feverish, headachy, stomach cramping weakness on Tuesday. At any rate, I downed like five bananas and a quart of orange juice and ate molasses (a good source of natrual minerals) on my cereal this morning, and most of the symptoms have went away. Doug's not dead. Yet.
It was something close to serendepity, though.
While I was sick and laying in bed, I brought out my copy of Harold Bloom's How to Read and Why. At some point in time, I passed out good with it still in hand and I woke up, face down, sweaty and still in pain, and the book still clamped in my right hand. The hand was now under me and had fallen asleep. I couldn't help but think "this is the librarian equivalent of waking up with a bottle of rye in hand, face down, in Mexico". I wrote a tweet that went like this: "Woke up with bad stomach cramps and a headache, sweating, face down. Arm asleep. Book by Harold Bloom in hand. (True librarian confessions)"
Shortly afterwards, I was thinking...I can turn that into a short story opening. I have been chugging it around for the last day and a half, and I think I will turn it into a short story opening, or, I guess to be more venacular specific, short work opening. I am thinking of starting a series of stories called "True Librarian Confessions" that will be semi-autobiographical, if I lived in a world where zombies were real and the gay mafia really did wear pink suits and try to turn straights around in rehabilitation camps. Essentially a world of bad stereotypes, and a chronically sleep deprived reference librarian who survives half through bad jokes and half through sheer tenacity. In some, I plan on parodying real life cases that have hit libraries (ranging from book burnings to Twilight to budget cuts) but in others, it will be straight up nonsense where only a slight nod towards book culture will even identify the nameless librarian (read: Doug).
Why? I guess because I can.
Si Vales, Valeo
This is going to be a short, and not necessarily successful, divergence (divulgence, as well) from my normal stye. A concept in mind, that I wanted to say aloud. Write, anyhow. At least briefly. Soon I will return you to your regularly scheduled Doug-style updates.
I have recently become aware, thinking about it, that fear and awe and even laughter all come from the same place: the darkness at the edge of the campfire. Religious parables and horror stories are cousins, of a such. Note the holy reverence we talk about monsters, the frightful way we approach God. The new age "god", the being of light and eternal happiness, is a weak god that rarely snares true believers. (S)He was created to be forgotten. Old school God, with His wrath and demands, that religion has survived and will continue to survive. That religion predates the written record of man, predates mankind even writing of himself as a thinking, internal being, as do our oldest monsters. Dragons and vampires and the undead and face changing demons are ubiquitous, predating culture so that all cultures share them. The same with gods. The same with jokes.
We think of light as a point, a series of points. Many of them man made. We think of darkness as a whole. What's more, while we see and address the mechanics behind light, we understand that darkness has no mechanics, it is just what is always there. At some point, we decided that the darkness had a face, had a personality. We started giving it names. As Nietzsche said, art and religion are just two ways for us to put a white mask on the darkness that surrounds us. It is more than just claiming that God is some anthropological nonsense. Whether or not God is real, that first true taste of what God might be is facing the darkness, looking up not at the stars but the greater, much larger blackness that fits in the cracks between them, and knowing that, unlike light, it goes on forever.
We fear it, sleep in it, shape it, name it, tend to it, destroy it, and try to forget it; but that darkness at the edge of our campfire—the true apeiron of our existence from which the short, quiet angles of light derive their meaning—is the model by which the "beyond everday" takes shape. Except it is essentially shapeless, the very definition of shapelessness, though, I cannot help but notice, we always assume it ultimately has a name, a purpose, a logos, a direction...we make it hate us and love us, but except in kiddie stories we never quite believe, we always acknowledge it is bigger than us, whether it be vampires more than human than human, or a loving God bringing about the end of the world, or just infinite space, so big that all the infinite light still is not enough to illuminate it.
I will conclude by saying this might be the ultimate lack of science. It tries to treat darkness as merely a backdrop to the curious things going on in the world, as something already overcome by rational thinking itself. It will be curious if this instinct to witness darkness permeates even science in the end.
Si Vales, Valeo
Written by W Doug Bolden
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