Sixth session. Shading is almost done, color is starting to enter the picture. I actually had no clue what this looked like til I got this picture, I couldn’t get a good angle even with a mirror. Click to embiggen.
Sixth session. Shading is almost done, color is starting to enter the picture. I actually had no clue what this looked like til I got this picture, I couldn’t get a good angle even with a mirror.
Click to embiggen.
I’ve had my share of hallucinations in my time. Both the pure-fatigue type (which consist mainly of non-persistent but repeating peripheral visions), and the chemically induced type which can be persistent, but also include a distinct muzzy-headedness, and often don’t repeat. Last night, though, I experienced a wholly unexpected side effect of a medication i […]
I’ve had my share of hallucinations in my time. Both the pure-fatigue type (which consist mainly of non-persistent but repeating peripheral visions), and the chemically induced type which can be persistent, but also include a distinct muzzy-headedness, and often don’t repeat.
Last night, though, I experienced a wholly unexpected side effect of a medication i take semi-regularly.
I suffer insomnia sometimes; not consistent, but often enough that it’s a factor in my life. Sometimes this is good, because I used to get a lot of writing done after 2am, with bleary red eyes and fevered mind. More recently though, it’s been more the in-bed-on-the-edge-of-sleep kind; the kind where worries dominate and the brain gets stuck in repeating loops.
So on occasions, I use sleep aids which easily gets me past that portal to the land of dream.
Now, hallucinations are known side effects of certain meds; I see that every time I read the labels and warnings (which I obsessively do; I research every med I take, and every med my friends and family take, just because pharmacology fascinates me). BUt I’ve never experienced a single hallucination from normal sleep meds.
Last night, I had a full-blown hallucinatory experience, from a very normal dose (10mg) of a very normal med (@mb1en, spelled that way to avoid spammers).
I was watching the tail end of this week’s the fashions show, bravo’s project runway knockoff. And as the show ended and I turned off my teevee, I began to see ghostly cobwebs reach out from the still glowing teevee toward my ceiling fan.
I looked around the bed, and there seemed to be similar cobwebs on on the bed and, and then they began to stretch out onto the walls.
I looked at my bedside lamp; in bright light, I saw nothing other than a very slight haze. But in shadow, the general moving, drifting webbiness increased.
“I’m starting to hallucinate,” I said.
I began to describe the visuals to my nearly-sleeping bedmate, who tolerantly said ‘go to sleep’. But as I looked around, I found my wall paper (which is covered with a deeply-detailed, dark leopard print, as can be seen in the background of this image) was beginning to breath and roil, and then manifest in living, dragon-like shapes which would move as I did (likely it was my shadow and shifting point of vierw that animated it; the motion generally ceased when I held still).
I got up to pace around the room, wanting to explore what I was seeing. Close to the wall, the paper’s patters became blowing prairie grass, so vivid I felt I should feel it moving. Yet to my fingers, it was cool and papery-smooth. My eyes retained the visual of blowing fur or grass, but the experience wasn’t the least bit tactile.
I turned on bright overhead lights, and was left only with haziness; but when I turned the light out, all the visuals returned.
One corner of the room began to manifest as a sort of bio-mechanical, moving figure; made of webwork, but some sort of intricate flexible metal spider web. The shape resembled a witch or scarecrow, and again, it moved with my movements, breaking down into hazy cobweb when I moved close, but re-assembling into a consistent form when I walked away. Lights cleared it completely.
I turned and looked into my closet, where a figure stood – and this was the first one I actually found alarming. What looked like some sort of three-musketeers swashbuckler all in black, with a broad-brimmed hat. He grinned, though only grin was visible, no eyes. He bent his head and then faded into the shelving as I moved close, one of my hats and a pair of my boots clearly the source of the vision. I saw that only once, but it was startlingly vivid.
I prowled the room for several minutes; the experience was delightfully puzzling; never have I experienced hallucinations so consistent and visually organized. I roamed the rest of the house, still seeing creeping cobwebs and movement in shadows, but nothing in bright light (I think my daughters guinea pigs thought I was death from above when I tried to pet them, but I wanted to feel the webby trails they were creating as they scuttled and squeaked.)
I tried looking at my face in a mirror, and saw nothing but sleepy eyes and vague haze. Whatever I was seeing clearly had a light threshold. And I began to feel too sleepy to continue investigating what I was seeing. I went to bed and turned out the lights, and darkness obliterated any further experience. “I wish I could write this down now, so I don’t forget any of it,” I think were my last words before I drifted off.
—-
The most interesting things about the experience, for me, were that I felt completely lucid; I wasn’t high, or confused. I was sleepy, because that was the intent of the medication. But I wasn’t befuddled, so my attempts to define the difference between visual and tactile stimulation felt organized, almost scientific. The other thing was that the medications I was on – teh sleep med, above, and an anti-inflammatory I sometimes take a bedtime for my achy shoulder – are things I’ve taken many times, separately and together. So I have no explianation for why the hallucinations manifested so strongly this one night. I’m puzzled about it, and curious about a repeat of the same experience. The sleeping dose I took was on the higher side (I usually take a half, but a whole 10mg isn’t unusual). I tend to have a high resistance to medications, so this amount wasn’t anything Id’ have ever expected a visual side effect from.
I remain curious.
“I don’t belive in writer’s block”, Neil Gaiman said. “I belive that what writers get, is ‘stuck’.” “Writers, you see, are very good at convincing people of things. What that means is that when they get stuck, they prefer something grand and dramatic; ‘I have writers block‘ sounds very much better that ‘I’m stuck’.” The […]
“I don’t belive in writer’s block”, Neil Gaiman said. “I belive that what writers get, is ‘stuck’.”
“Writers, you see, are very good at convincing people of things. What that means is that when they get stuck, they prefer something grand and dramatic; ‘I have writers block‘ sounds very much better that ‘I’m stuck’.”
The quote above – mis-quote actually, because I’m quoting from memory and can’t possibly have gotten it right – was something Neil said at a reading last year in Palo Alto. And it got a huge laugh, I think more from the writers in the crowd than anyone else. Because writers know how true the statement is, that we’re very good at convincing people of things.
However, I don’t agree with him about the block.
It’s very glib, for example, for musicians to assert that it’s easy to play an instrument. It’s easy for those annoying people with perfect pitch to tune a guitar. That’s because they happen to have been born with a gift, which they then developed So, sure, it’s effortless for them.
The thing, though, is that not everyone has that pitch. Some have to work very long and very hard to develop it. I can, barely, and with a great deal of work, get a guitar vaguely close to ‘in tune’. That’s taken years, and a lot of practice at detecting differences in pitch. I had to teach my brain to sort of what my ear couldn’t.
Some people are born storytellers. They drop out of the womb screaming, and from that moment, the language needs to get out. Gaiman is one such; he bleeds stories. He has more ideas that any three normal writers, and can’t stop having ideas. He had to become a writer, because what else, in these days, can someone like that do? It was either than or be the guy at the end of the bar who, for the cost of a pint, will tell you his and anyone else’s life stories.
Some of us learned this craft the hard way. And it never, ever comes easy. Tobias Wolf, in a talk he gave in Menlo Park, remarked how he envied those writers for who ‘the story just writes itself’. Because, he said, not a single word he ever wrote came easy. He sweated and worked over every syllable.
For me, this is something that comes only when my brain goes into a sort of linguistic overdrive, and when I can then direct that into typed characters on a screen. Usually, I can’t. When the inspiration comes, as often as not, I have no way to stop and put it down, or lack the focus to retain an idea for more than moments. Sitting down to write is almost never productive; ideas rarely flow.
Part of this, certainly, is simple discipline; I can’t seem to find a way to sit down every day and type. If I did, the routine would help, lubricating the creative mind by making the simple act of typing coherent paragraphs routine. By decoupling the physical act of writing from the creation itself, I’d find less inertia in beginning.
So is this writer’s block? Or is this just a bad habit; is this just a time management issue?
I’d argue with Neil; if he sits down and stares at a blank sheet of paper in his typewriter and feels defeated, feels his mind drain as empty as that white sheet, that’s The Block. Neil’s talking about that moment in a story – and any writer has been there – when you say, crap, what happens now? how do I get from point A to point C? What’s my B? And I’ve been there; when I was writing the last section of Wanton, I hit a hard wall in the last scene. I couldn’t get the characters from ‘hello’ to ‘goodbye’. That story was a runaway freight train for me before that point; I knew at every step what was happening next. But I found myself up a tree with no way down. I (metaphorically) tore my hair, called myself a hack, wanted to throw my computer through a window (which isn’t easy with a sparcstation). I walked away. And then I came back, threw away my re-writes, got out my first draft, and found the hinge point where the wall came in. I backed up a paragraph or two, and started over. And it came together as well as anything I’ve ever written.
Stuck isn’t the same, though, as block. Because stuck can be solved by simply back-tracking or re-thinking (and I say ‘simple’ as if it were easy; it’s not easy). Block is different. Stuck means you don’t have quite the right tool, or can’t choose between several. Blocked, though, means you have no tools. None at all.
That’s how it feels to be profoundly blocked; you open your writer’s toolkit and find nothing but dust, spider nests and the detritus of scorched and broken adjectives. You find no theme, no allegory, not even well-worn plot device. And no matter how many times you open that box, you continue to find nothing.
It’s a profoundly frustrating feeling. As if you’d misplaced something, and can’t for all your brain wracking and pacing and retracing of steps, recall where it is.
That is the feeling I’ve had for many, many months; paths well worn back to that empty toolbox, and almost always, finding nothing.
There’s no single solution to the problem. Today, I solved it by sitting in my car by an empty suburban park, someplace where I found no internet connection. I solved it by playing music down low, turning off my phone, and beginning by using someone else’s words to build momentum.
And yet I’ve said nothing; still, it’s better than saying nothing silently.
This is what happens when you drink with videographers. You get your beach house weekend turned into a music video. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xp_QvObmulo&hl=en&fs=1&] This was a long weekend in Dillion Beach, CA; four couples, three children, seven cameras, 20 bottles of wine, fifty oysters, many cases of beer, and no internet connection of cell phones. It […]
This is what happens when you drink with videographers. You get your beach house weekend turned into a music video.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xp_QvObmulo&hl=en&fs=1&]
This was a long weekend in Dillion Beach, CA; four couples, three children, seven cameras, 20 bottles of wine, fifty oysters, many cases of beer, and no internet connection of cell phones.
It was over too soon, but now thanks to film maker Dave Manzo, we won’t be able to forget it.
god i wish my head would retain more detail from dreams.
I woke up from an elaborate dream – I was on the phone with you, on my cell phone, but describing a scene to you. I was outside, and it was stormy, with an angry gray sky, the scent of rain and a cold wind.
I can’t recall the early details of the story I told you, but it wound up with you, bent over against the side of an old truck (I think I was describing the scene I was in, but inserting you into it.). You were in an worn, faded pair of jeans, and I was threatening you with what I’d do. Then I bagan to spank you, my hand against the worn-smooth denim, I was whispering into the phone, but at the same tie I was now feeling teh story, hearing your moans and gasps, and then sobs.
When you began to sob, I unfasten your jeans and shoved them down, leaving your panties up. I spanked, and then stroked your bottom, and then began to slide my hand between your thighs, feeling how wet you were. I found your clit, and began to rub.
I could hear lightening in the distance, as I made you come for the first time.
I woke up with my cock like an iron bar, wishing I could hear your voice.
That last entry was kind of grim, huh? I know I’ve written something grim when no one comments, but but I get email from loved ones saying “are you ok” or “I’m worried about you”. The downside of tranks (which I just adore), is that there’s a bit of a crash on the tail end. […]
That last entry was kind of grim, huh? I know I’ve written something grim when no one comments, but but I get email from loved ones saying “are you ok” or “I’m worried about you”.
The downside of tranks (which I just adore), is that there’s a bit of a crash on the tail end. I wish I had a cut-and-pastable version of Art Pepper’s autobiography, straight life (which is fucking brilliant), because it captures the extremes of this like nothing else]. People with psychosis disorders or extremes of depression sometimes find it leaves them with, in effect, all the misery and black depression that it’s held off for ten to twelve hours, collected and concentrated and experienced all at once. I’m lucky. all I get, the rare times I take it to help me sleep, is an hour or two of grumpiness on the tail end, before my psyche self-corrects.
That’s not to say any of what I wrote yesterday was inaccurate; but the tone wound up more intensely bleak than is my usual style due to lingering effects, and oncoming trank hangover. I consider that actually a good thing, because it helped me actually get over a verbal drought and say something.
The problem I’m having, lately, is a combination of a huge hit to my productivity, and a vastly increased workload (trying to build a side business of my own, as well as my team at work having to support many, many projects at the same time).
It sounds like I’m whining when I say this. But it’s really causing me a problem. Being productive isn’t really my most consistent skill at the best of times.
Going from having an office to living it cube-land has been disastrous for me. Sure, I was a cube-dweller for the better part of two decades before I started my current job, so it’s not like I’ve never been there. But I have a huge problem with distraction. In the past, I managed that by staying incredibly busy doing fairly linear work, and by working at home when I could (in my previous job, that was almost half my time). This job’s different. Partly because my team are less staffed, partly because we’re more specialized, partly because the schedule we’re on is vastly more accelerated. And also because my current employer still functions like a pre-internet company and does things face to face, in meetings and hallway conversations. So crucial support people need to be physically in the office, and physically near the key users.
For me, this is the very worst environment for productivity. I don’t sound-screen well; I hear everyone around me having a dozen different conversations. I don’t visually screen; my peripheral vision is acute, and I track movement and changes in light constantly. In my old bldg, I had control over light (I left it off all the time, with only natural window light). I could screen sound by closing my door or playing music. I could even drop my blinds and lock my door for when distraction was at it’s worse (or, you know, so I could catch up with my favorite web cam girls).
For me, that was as ideal a situation as I could have, working in an office bldg. I was close to my user community, but I had methods to manage my environment, and my distraction level.
The bldg I’m in now is, frankly, about as badly designed as is possible for a modern office bldg. What I suspect is that it was designed by architecture students who’d never actually worked in an office, because the wrongness is so fundamentally obvious. Hard walls everywhere; offices and conference rooms walled in glass. Cube walls are half glass (thus blowing both reasons for cubes; sound screen and privacy). Celings are high, and the lighting has two options (off and as brightly glaring as a stage). Most of the flooring is hard surface, with the little carpeted area hard at leather, and black, a color that shows every bit of dust and spilled food. Instead of conference rooms, we have un-walled “soft seating” areas.
In all this noise-and-light-fest, I wound up in the worst corner in the bldg; a corner that sticks out into a major walkway, at the junction of stairs, and coffee/break area. My corner is bombarded with constant slamming doors, loud chatter, roaring coffee machines (they’re as loud as espresso machines), and traffic moving past my glass-walled cube in a never-ending stream. And of course, with no sound buffering, every person in the area is party to every phone conversation anyone has.
Use Headphones, people say. But unfortunately, my inherent jumpiness and resistance to vulnerability makes me loath headphones. I’ve never been able to work in them, and don’t even like them when I’m alone in my house. As much as I loved a doobie and dark side of the moon back in the day, I still always preferred to have the lights off and the speakers screaming than a pair of headphones.
So the last few months have been a constant struggle for me at work. And it cascades; I can’t make personal calls at work the way I used to, so I’m no longer able to use my breaks to manage personal business. I used to do my banking, make appointments, all manner of things that needed both the phone and business hours, from my desk in between tasks (because let’s face it, there are always moments of the day when we’re goofing off, and it was better than playing solitaire, checking facebook, or visiting ‘guess her muff’). Now, I can’t make my goof-off time personally productive; I’m not making appointments I need to make (dentist, chiropractor, tax guy, etc).
The sum of it all is that I feel harried all the time; I feel like I’m incredibly busy. But I’m not getting enough done. I can feel my time getting wasted. I’m not even enjoying it when I fuck off, because I know when I’m done it’ll be even worse.
I don’t have a solution for this right now. My company is in a space crunch (which is good, ultimately; we’re growing, hiring in a down economy, but it has a short term cost in terms of comfort). My building, built to house two organizations with growth room, was full before we’d even moved in. And being a key support person, no one wants me off site, not even one bldg over, because they feel my attention on them means they get better support (they’re profoundly wrong, I respond best to email, not to being accosted in the hall).
Sure, it’s easy to say i’m lucky to have a job, that if I worked in a filthy place for a shitty wage doing dangerous work, I’d dream about a job like I have now. And I know that’s true, I’ve had jobs like that. My problem is,I’m better than this. I’m capable of being not good, not competent, but truly great at my job. And right now, I’m not there. I’m struggling to maintain mediocrity, and that isn’t enough for me. I could be mediocre for a lot less stress than this.
I guess the answer is I need to make some fundamental change. I know that; two weeks ago on a whim I sent a resume to facebook (they had a job listed that was a perfect fit for me, though they were too stupid to realize that and send me a polite form blow-off letter.) I don’t think I actually wanted to work for facebook; I think something in me just knew I needed to start thinking about what I’m doing, what I want to be doing, and what the delta between these is. I don’t have an answer yet, But I guess I know that’s the question.
I think one of the reasons I haven’t be blogging lately is that I feel like a broken record. No time, fatigue, stress, burnout, beat until frothy and place in 350 degree oven. I get tired of saying it. There are few thing in the world a hate like I hate self-pity. Those who put […]
I think one of the reasons I haven’t be blogging lately is that I feel like a broken record.
No time, fatigue, stress, burnout, beat until frothy and place in 350 degree oven.
I get tired of saying it. There are few thing in the world a hate like I hate self-pity. Those who put themselves in a situation and then bitch; those who won’t take action to solve a problem.
But when I try to write, what comes to mind first is, how completely fucked up I feel right now. To the point that in blots out all other thought.
I look back at my last year’s blogging and in between tattoo posting and links to porn, humor, music and art, I find the interconnections all have the same theme. Burnout.
So I’m trying to figure out why it is I feel that way. It’s not that I’m working that hard right now – in fact, I’m not really getting much done at all. But I feel, for the first time since I joined apple nine years ago (almost to the day), like my job is dragging me down into quicksand.
My life is organized around my greatest strengths. What I do is solve problems. I didn’t have any grand plan for a career, so I derive what my career has been only by looking back at it. And to a one, the jobs I seek, or create, or thrust into, all have that thread. I’m not a projects guy, I don’t do organization and follow-through well. What I do, though, is look at systems and see the flaws, the missing pieces, the inefficiencies. My life also seems to follow that pattern. The people to whom I’ve been most drawn are broken in some fundamental way. Not that they need help, per se, but that they have some vast physical, mental or character deficiency
The cost of all that, of course, is that I put myself into broken systems, and being that I can’t stand things that are broken, I strive fix them, often via sheer brute force. I become the link that holds the chain together, and I’m the strongest link, because I tolerate no less of myself. But to steal a line from genesis and a hundred others, we’re only as strong, As the weakest link in the chain. So no matter how strong I make my one link, the chain will always fail elsewhere.
Chaos is the default state of the universe. We impose order for a while; but only will and energy can maintain it. Living things are a system slightly more organized than the baseline chaos of an ecosystem; an ecosystem is a system slightly more organized than the universe. Only man’s mind can create and maintain a system more tightly and carefully organized than biological organisms, and only constant thought can produce the ongoing effort that maintains such systems.
Thing want to fall apart; buildings want to fall down. Computers want to fail.
Due to inherent aptitude, genetic inheritance, and the way I was raised, I feel a great compulsion to hold that line against chaos. When I think if it, it turns into an almost cartoonish vision of some Moorcockian champion of order (where’s my black fucking sword? Where’s my companion and his winged cat?). But the reality of it isn’t as much fun; I won’t have another incarnation to continue the fight; I can’t call another version of myself for help through some portal in the multiverse.
I do this alone. Not because there’s no help, but because I can’t stand help that isn’t absolutely under my control and on my terms. Help, when I ask for it, has to be exactly the help I need and no more.
The cost of this is that I put myself in situations where I’m absolutely vital, and absolutely irreplaceable. Not only at work, but everywhere in my life, I have vast lists of things that need to be done, and in ways that no one else I see around me can handle. Because solutions have to do more than solve a problem; they have to strike blow against encroaching chaos.
That battle seems to get harder each year. I don’t know if it’s simply the natural progression of the world, the inherent growth of a system over time. I don’t know if it’s that life, inevitably, grows more complex as one acquires more things, builds investments, raises children. Or if it’s the inevitable fact of age. To steal another line,as soon as we’re born we start dying. But it isn’t linear; it accelerates with time, picking up speed with each round of auld lang syne.
Whatever it is, more and more of late my mind is full of the maddening minutiae of life, the crushing weight of task lists that grow only longer. And I find, at the end of days which flash by ever faster, that I have nothing in that part of my mind that yearns to put words together in creative ways. It’s easier to reach for a beer and the remote control. Because when I reach for my computer, nothing comes out but the same worn and blacked refrain about time and burnout.
The eagle, as they say, has landed. Fifth session: I was a little hung over today (man, what a party that was last night), so we made this a short session. Just the shading on the eagle. The only thing left to shade is the ship, and then we’re ready to start coloring. That should […]
The eagle, as they say, has landed.
Fifth session: I was a little hung over today (man, what a party that was last night), so we made this a short session. Just the shading on the eagle. The only thing left to shade is the ship, and then we’re ready to start coloring. That should happen at my next appointment in June.
I absolutely love this blog: “guess her muff”. I love it because it’s a game, AND becauseit’s (good quality) porn (pictures of lovely real naked girls, not posed pros). I also love it because it’s exactly the sort of game I play. I look at women in various circumstances (at work, at school-related parent meetings, […]
I absolutely love this blog: “guess her muff”.
I love it because it’s a game, AND becauseit’s (good quality) porn (pictures of lovely real naked girls, not posed pros).
I also love it because it’s exactly the sort of game I play. I look at women in various circumstances (at work, at school-related parent meetings, at various social gatherings) and wonder, what’s she look like naked. I wonder, does she shave? If so, how? Does she wax? Does she use a razor in the shower? Does she leave a landing strip, or is she sweetly, wetly bare (which is not just a preference of mine, but in truth a fetish; it’s been so since long before porn adopted it as a standard).
This site has kept me entertained, and distracted, for two days now. Were I keeping score, my score would be lousy, almost always guessing wrong.
The site itself is work-safe, but beware the ‘See the Answer’ links. They’re not just naked, some of them are profoundly pornographic (buttsechs!). So open with care. And prepare to be distracted.
Holy shit it’s been a week. This is almost entirely work stuff, so of course I can’t talk about details; you know how my employer is about details. But it’s been the kind of week that phrase like ‘for fuck’s sake’ were invented for. I’ve reached the point where I’m jumpy and flinching every time […]
Holy shit it’s been a week.
This is almost entirely work stuff, so of course I can’t talk about details; you know how my employer is about details.
But it’s been the kind of week that phrase like ‘for fuck’s sake’ were invented for. I’ve reached the point where I’m jumpy and flinching every time I open my email or check my phone for messages, wondering what’s broken now.
Here’s how things have been this week, in the insult-to-injury department: we actually had a server farm taken down this week due to a lightening strike yesterday, and then early this morning, my key software vendor who’s doing support lost his home phone, internet, and cell, all due to intentionally cut fiber optic cables.
Because we needed more goddamn chaos.
I don’t even have time this week to get my taxes finished, so I’m in danger of having to take an extension; I don’t have time to go to the doctor even though I’m pretty damn sure I’ve got a sinus infection going (wow, the allergies have sucked this season). I don’t even have time to take a goddamn shower.
Anyone want my job for a day so I can go sleep? No? I didn’t think so.
On the other hand, I had the most wonderful dream last night, about a stunning, exotic brunette, though I woke before we could get past the ‘looking at each other like something good to eat’ phase. But still, it was enough that I woke up vaguely in love/ Maybe I’ll actually have time to write the rest that down sometime next goddamn year.