I frequently come across this glitch with Google.
I type in what I want…
chocolate cake
world peace
sublime contentment
…and all I get are recipes and blogs and Wikipedia articles.
It’s 2013, can we fix this already?
Google Dream Factory
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Author Archives: jeremyrbutler
Typewriting
We had a typewriter in the basement. It had its own suitcase. It was heavy and I always jammed up the keys. It was worth jamming them in order to pick through and un-jam them.
Everything I ever typed had the holes on the wrong side, and the top margin at the bottom. I seemed to like custom paper sizes, trimming the paper…just ‘cuz.
It made a noise. Not a thwack not a thump but a combination of the two. Then the letter appeared. It didn’t have the fancy corrective paper, I just re-typed the letter over and over and over again until the mistake (and its replacement) were a smudgy hole.
I wrote stories about currency, The Misadventures of Big Bully Dollar. I wrote about my pet Pegasus and the airplane I intended to build. I wrote about my friend Chris(topher) but abbreviated his name to “Christ”. Christ and I went on a lot of adventures; my teachers must’ve thought my parents were evangelicals.
On the Scriptnotes podcast, John August uses the phrase “something that exists in the world” to mark the definitive transition from idea or intention to physical presence.
A typewritten page, however wrinkled, however corrected is something that exists in this world. I have them.
Is a .pdf something that exists?
I don’t have a typewriter anymore. What will my daughters look back on? Their first e-book?
Lycka till
Rumor has it this is the year.
Each October Haruki Murakami’s name gets trotted out for the Nobel Prize for Literature and each year it goes to someone else. This year, a fabled bookie, known for his literary prize predicting infallibility, says that tomorrow is the day.
We’ll see.
Regardless, I send Mr. Murakami my love and adoration. It was January of 2005 that I picked him up for the first time. I read a review of Kafka on the Shore that hyped its bildungsroman arc: young man goes on bizarro adventure, meets strange characters, danger and self-discovery ensue.
Only, wait. What…? How the…?
Murakami is a poultice for my aching brain. He presents solutions for the equations of being non-linearly and with such elegance that my overly-analytic, rigidly-doubtful mind is by turns baffled, paralyzed, and then put to sleep.
Mr. Murakami, you are a Vulcan Death Grip for my banality. Thank you. You are jazz incarnate.
I hope tomorrow brings you the acclaim you deserve. Just keep doing what you’re doing.
Insomnia sux
It’s ain’t alcohol, honey. Just good old-fashioned dread.
The kind that you can’t do anything about at 3 am; by 8 am you’re too tired to tyep.
Caffeine? Yes. I won’t be more coherent, but I will make eye contact.
Pixar Onboard
I just returned from a Disney cruise. I won’t pretend that it was creatively stimulating, in fact, spending seven days in a G-rated paradise just left me jonesing for whiskey, swear words and a fist fight.
However, it left me plenty of time to contemplate the Disney/Pixar catalog of films (seeing as they play in rotation 24-hours a day, with little else other than the lifeboat drill channel and Fox News).
I came to appreciate the existential dread that fills each one. It is common and easy to build death into the stakes in any dramatic conflict, however Pixar films go one step beyond by flaunting mortality, time’s erosion and predation from the first frame.
Typical plots may show us the villain’s willingness to kill, but Pixar pits the characters not merely against their own death but against the inevitable death of everything.
Toys will be forgotten. Fish will be eaten. Cars rust. Ants grow old to die and be replaced. Superheroes are abandoned. Relationships and dream die too soon.
Admittedly, Cars 2 does not fit this mold, but even in Monsters University there is the line (paraphrased): What is the point of a monster that isn’t scary? What’s at stake for Mike is not humiliation but utter redundancy.
The universal success of these films (I offer) is that they strike at a universal theme (despondency, fear, terror) in the face of death and then give us the same antidote each time: friends, family, social purpose.
In PixarLand (which I might consider visiting) being alone is futile; bond or die.
Of course this theme also makes for highly successful dramatic arc-marketing synergy as bonding (to these characters and the world) is exactly the hope of any successful franchise.
In Search of Periods
Life is mostly a series of sentence fragments connected loosely by ellipses, commas, dashes.
Rarely, a semicolon shows up. When it does; it is used improperly.
How I wish life came in sentences, or the odd paragraph. A complete thought or experience self-contained from the surrounding experiences.
Oh, how I long for an act break. A full stop. An intermission with time to reflect—recognizing that what will follow may be a variation on the movement that just ended…but something ended!
Fall feels like a new beginning, only as I get older it feels like too many half-finished beginnings are still playing. It feels too rushed, too cacaphonous.
I’ve still got a time problem on my hands.
A Lost Year
It’s been a long time since I stuck anything up here. I guess it’s been one of those years.
I’ve been doing high-volume psychiatry. Which probably has me talking to north of a thousand patients a year. It’s an interesting counterpoint to the small private practice I used to have.
Humans are fractals. That’s the thought for the day.
One property of fractals is pattern with indifference to scale: small forms echo larger forms.
If one listens closely to the data—the words, the feelings, the context—in human interaction, you will begin to see the smaller pattern, and then the larger one.
Sometimes it’s a word choice in someone else’s report, the opening salvo as doctor and patient meet, a misunderstanding about appointment times…the data is present in everything, and the future is encoded therein. Like a symphony that builds from a theme, those themes are just as frequent in our own interpersonal fumblings as in music.
Hopeful or hopeless?
When I notice this, patterns playing over timescapes large and small, the corollary is that change is illusory.
Included in that recursion is me. Ebbing and flowing, waxing and waning my way through productivity and paralysis. Blessedly I’ve gotten a lot done this year, despite bloggy silence.
With any luck, an upslope of verbosity to follow…
On hope
Is depression defined by (expectedReality – Reality) >0 ?
No. That’s the equation for disappointment. But depression might be a good descriptor for a large difference between the two. Injustice and anger may also work.
Is happiness then described as (expectedReality – Reality) <0 ?
Maybe, but maybe it’s better called gratitude, or potentially, guilt.
Satisfaction is the state where expectedReality and Reality are equal.
For some expectedReality is fixed; car + 2.5 kids + job + golf.
For others expectedReality is a vector; today’s assets > yesterday’s assets, or Reality(today) + 1.
The difference between a fixed and changing expectedReality, is an expected(delta)Reality value also in the equation for happiness. It’s there that people can be better described.
If, based on life experience and wiring, tomorrow’s reality will be less than today’s reality (i.e., worsening health, closer to death, less money) then expectedReality is more likely to be fixed, and satisfaction achievable. If, however, there are no perceived limits on tomorrow’s reality (i.e., I could win the lottery, I could find a better wife, my kids will behave better), then expectedReality is variable, and satisfaction elusive.
This exercise is reductive enough, but my point is this: the perception of a better tomorrow may be the enemy of happiness.
Of course, reality cancels out somewhere along the way, too. But it’s an idea.
Scalzi’s Redshirts
Expected the laughs, but not the tears. Damn, I love Existential Fiction, science-based or otherwise.
Speaking of which, just finished Death Sentences by Kawamata Chiaki. Also very much at the intersection of artistic creation and meaning of life. How can you not like a book that has both Marcel Duchamp and a Martian mercenary as characters?
I’ve read a lot of criticism lately of modern writing being “downbeat” with “passive” characters, mostly from editors with rallying cries for optimism! and action! Both of these works capture the bewildering complexity of living, while avoiding maudlin answers, hopelessness, and passivity.
Now to steal everything I can from them…
Futures
There’s a pretty cool website called futureme.org. I can’t remember how I came across it, but it allows you to time-delay an email to yourself. A little time capsule shows up on your doorstep just when you’d forgotten it existed.
In 2006, I wrote a note to myself for 2009. Last week I received the note that I wrote to myself in 2009. It reads:
Wassup? Don’t know if you’ll remember this one. You didn’t the last.
It’s June 2009. You’re about to move into your new home. You’re at 19 w 1 d. Don’t know the sex yet. Fatherhood, a home, they’re all just slightly more than an idea…
Writing, writing, writing. What to do? How to do it? I hope you’ve figured that out by now. Still struggling, to get motivated, figure out how to overcome the demons.
Hang in there.
“Wassup” aside, what’s remarkable about the message is that it captures a psychic state three years ago, that is unchanged today: anxiety about being a father, fear of adult responsibilities, tackling the obstacles of writing, and an underlying hope that these are obstacles that can be “overcome.”
I wonder if that’s the case. One thing that’s a struggle as a psychiatrist is the illusion of change, the Holy Grail of change, for that matter. To deny its possibility is to give up hope, and hope is a very powerful therapeutic tool. On the other hand, to pretend that we don’t have some inherent human nature is to ignore the obvious.
There’s a great video that captures transient global amnesia. It’s heartbreaking to watch (remember it’s transient!) but it also reveals something about our baseline personality, beneath all the mishmash of the day, the person we are underneath it all. I’m left wondering if this email, which seems so close to what I might write today (and am tempted to), will resonate again with me in 2015.
I guess what I’m saying is this: for each of us, life is a type of struggle. And while at various times the rhythm changes, overall the melody remains the same.