Category: Ramble

Just writing stuff about things, and things about stuff.

No Time Like the Present

Pavowski10 Comments

We live in the past.

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Not just in the retrospective, nostalgic, times-were-better-when sense of the past. Literally, we can’t escape the past. Because information can only travel as fast as the speed of light, less the resistance of our crude organic matter, what we perceive as the present is a moment that is already a dim memory of the cosmos.

Of course, we’re not that far in the past. Only milliseconds, really. But the phenomenon stretches out into infinity the farther away the observed thing is from the observer. In fact, astronomers have recently concluded that their telescopes are looking at some objects so distant that the light from those objects was literally born in the same instant that our universe was. Which baffles the mind, really. Because here we are, the result of billions of years of senseless collisions of quarks and particles hurtling through the void, and we can simultaneously perceive the (almost) present and the beginning of knowable time.

Knowable for now, anyway.

The cool thing about science (and, incidentally, why I long ago decided that I much prefer science to religion) is that science can change its mind about things. Can, and does, actually. The scientific community is willing to reverse any number of preconceived notions the moment they learn a thing that disagrees with those notions. Which is just one reason among many that nerds around the world were (and still are) so excited about the work going on with the Large Hadron Collider. Every day, scientists are pushing the boundaries of the things we know. Sometimes, they learn what they expect to learn. Sometimes, their discoveries force them to virtually rewrite history. But what science doesn’t do is disagree with what’s staring it in the face. Science doesn’t sit there–as humans are wont to do–and say, “no, we don’t like what we’ve discovered here, that doesn’t jive with what we believe… let’s ignore it until it goes away.”

But I got off topic. Most animals are creatures that live in the present. They act on instinct. A wolf in the wild doesn’t ponder what its dad was thinking when it chomped him in the neck that one time as a child. The wolf goes for the kill because the kill is there, NOW. Humans, on the other hand, reach ceaselessly for the past. We romanticize. Reminisce. But the fact is, we don’t know what now looks like.

Not only can we not process information that fast–literally barring us from ever existing in the real, crackling cutting edge of the now–but everything we see and learn and experience gets filtered through the lens of the past, because we can’t help remembering it.

I feel like I’m drifting again. I’ve got a wicked cold setting in and it’s clouding what’s already a pretty murky train of thought. I think my point is this:

What would our world be like if we could experience the present? The wicked, razor-sharp edge of perception, the collisions of all the being and nothingness that drives everything in the universe? All thought takes time. Reacting takes time. Speaking to a friend takes time. If we could make perception and communication truly instantaneous, where would that put us?

I was going to try to answer my own question, but I don’t know if my disease-addled brain can manage it, so I’m going to leave it there. Maybe I’ll read this in the morning and realize that this entire ramble was just a tailspin down a condemned rabbit hole.

Or maybe it’s one I’ve fallen down before.

oooOOOOOOooo no, probably not.

See, this is what happens when pressure on my brain from an accumulation of mucus mixes with a cocktail of pseudoephedrine and wine. The safeguards shut down and the Id-Writer breaks loose and trashes the place.

Sigh. The prompt was “present.” Christmas is coming. Presents are awesome. The end.

This post is part of Stream of Consciousness Saturday.

Glitter Pills

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This one’s gonna be brief.

Because wow. I’m a pretty open-minded guy, and I always try real hard to empathize even when the opposing view doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, but I’m gonna go ahead and say that I don’t think I can be convinced on this one.

Apparently, they make these things called “glitter pills.” Now, I’m going to be brutally honest and admit that I’ve not done a lot of research. Nor am I going to. The thought of this research frightens me, and I’m sure it leads down dark corridors of the internet that I would rather not know about.

Because poop is a thing best left alone. Parents, I’ll grant, should be concerned with their kids’ poop. I’ve certainly been guilty of that here at the blarg (sorry about that). Doctors, nurses if you have a gastrointestinal issue, perhaps, might be clinically interested in your samples. Aside from that… ugh, why?

Why am I even talking about it? Because apparently if you take these pills your poop will sparkle.

A cursory glance at a Google search tells me is that the manufacturers of said pills claim that their product is not designed to, uh, enhance your poop. But what a further final glance through the crack in the door before I slam it shut and run in the other direction tells me is that that’s exactly what these pills are used for in most cases. SH!T GOLD, they proudly proclaim.

So, pop a pill and your insides will sparkle. Sparkly poop, sparkly pee. This will show my age, but when I read that, all I’m thinking about are kidney infections and intestinal obstructions, and a costly trip to the emergency room. But that’s a small price to pay, I suppose, for living our your fantasy of becoming a magical unicorn that literally craps rainbows.

Okay, that’s all I can stand even thinking about it. This has been a public service announcement. I just wanted you to know these things are out there. Do with that information what you will. I feel filthy even having googled the subject. I’m off for a thirty-minute, skin-searing shower. Now if I could only scrub down the inside of my brain…

 

Quarantine Zone

Pavowski2 Comments

It’s a well-established fact that children are essentially walking germ repositories. You combine an uncontrollable urge to grab and play with any- and everything that drifts in front of their maniacal little eyes with an inability to remain upright for more than thirty seconds at a time that results in a lot of contact with the ground and top it off with the mental lack of development to know that hand-washing is a good thing, and it’s no surprise that germs stick to them like lint on my nice pants. (Seriously, I have never had pants that attract lint like these navy slacks. I feel like a candy cane on the lawn and the ants are swarming.)

This time, though, it was my wife who brought the bug home. One of those feels-like-a-cold-but-it’s-not-really-a-full-blown-cold things, with the stuffiness and the sore throat and the general feeling of weakness and impending doom that these things bring. Regularly I ask what I can do to help, and regularly she responds, “kill me.”

She’s been miserable for almost a week, and when you couple that with the fact that the babies are regressing and waking up in the middle of the night, well… let’s just say it adds up not to be fun times in the house of Pav. Trouble is, my lovely wife wakes up if a mouse farts in the house, whereas I can sleep through crying kids, howling wind in the trees… hell, I could probably sleep through a shootout in the cul-de-sac. So naturally, she wakes up way before I can hope to when the kids wake up in the night, so I have virtually no chance to beat her to the punch on handling the kids. In short, she’s been not only miserable but also exhausted, and there is precious little I can do to alleviate the trouble.

Contagion was a horrifying film that came out a few years ago about one of those super-bugs that comes out of nowhere and wipes out the better part of the population in the space of a few months. Fantastic viewing for times like these in its own right, but it taught me a word that I wish I could unlearn: Fomites. A fomite is any otherwise inanimate or harmless object which is tainted with the infectious microorganisms from a doomed person, and the film brilliantly illustrates the concept by showing closeups of fingers touching elevator buttons, lips sipping from cups of coffee, hands passing cash back and forth, shoulders brushing through revolving doors. In short, GERMS ARE EVERYWHERE AND YOU’RE DOOMED.

Somehow, strangely, I was laying low and avoiding the disease. But when you’re a jerk like me you can only avoid fate for so long. Also, my wife and I share a lot of the same hoodies when we lounge around the house (yes, we can afford heat, but no, that doesn’t mean we use it all the time, do I look like I’m made of money). She used one of my favorites for an entire day the other day, coughing and spewing her dread spray into its shoulders and elbows and didn’t tell me, then I wore said hoodie while doing laundry this weekend. Essentially I was wearing the Queen Bee of the fomite colony in the house.

So now I have it.

And my wife is a lovely woman, but she takes a disconcerting pleasure in the fact that I have succumbed to this plague after she’s suffered with it for a week. I don’t know, I’d think there would be a little bit of sympathy or something given that she knows both the drear dankness I’m feeling and the creeping death in my future. But no. With poorly-masked glee she asks me how I’m feeling. Trying not to grumble too much, I mention the goopy drip in the back of my throat. She grins and claps with delight and tells me that the stuffy, my-head-is-full-of-slime feeling is coming next, and I wake up the next morning and there it is: my head feels like it weighs an extra five pounds with all the snot I’m piling up. And I look to her for pity as we wake up and she only laughs.

To her credit, I usually resist these things and she usually doesn’t, so I guess I can excuse a bit of schadenfreude. But that doesn’t make things any easier to swallow when my throat feels like garden gnomes have been going after it with a potato peeler and my skull feels like it’s crammed with cottage cheese.

The only hope at this point is that the kids don’t catch it. If the kids catch this bug, abandon all hope.

There’s Productivity, and then there’s Productivity

Pavowski8 Comments

Momentum matters.

The things you’ve been doing are the things you are going to keep doing until you make a concerted effort to stop doing them. The things you haven’t been doing are the things you will continue to not do until you force yourself to do them.

That being said, I am having doubts lately as to the quality of the things I’m doing in regards to my writing.

I’m guest-posting at LindaGHill’s blog, which is kind of a cool thing … not entirely unlike giving a fifteen-year-old the keys to a… god, I was going to say a Lamborghini but that’s not the hotness in cars anymore, is it? (God, it sucks getting older. Did you know that Friends is now showing reruns on Nick at Nite?) Anyway, I made a post there introducing myself and I mentioned all the writing I’ve gotten done this year and it got me thinking.

Because for all this capital-W “Writing” I’ve been doing this year, I’ve done more than my fair share of drooling nonsense onto the virtual pages of this blarg. At a rough estimate, I’ve probably got almost half as many words again here on the blarg as I’ve committed to the novel. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course — word count on the novel has slowed necessarily from almost 1200 words daily to about 100 (I’m editing, so some in, some out), and I can probably say that my active time working on the novel has declined from roughly an hour daily to more like thirty or forty-five minutes (editing feels so much more mentally taxing than drafting). I could be way off, but it feels like I’m not working on it nearly as much as when I was drafting. Meanwhile, the word vomit I’ve done here on the blarg has remained more or less constant.

Which is okay. I’m not complaining, because even when I’m not working on the novel, I’m kicking ideas around in my head, thinking about how changes would play out, about passages that need moving and restructuring, and dreaming up ways to break the story even more than I already have (and currently, it’s in more pieces than the wineglass I dropped the other night… not that that particular incident is in any way related to my novel, I promise).

But there’s the rub. Can I qualify “thinking time” as “working” with my novel? Can I justify a day wherein I didn’t actually sit down in front of my manuscript at all? If I wrote a blarg post on a day that I didn’t Write, was I still productive?

I want to say yes, because I’ve thought from the beginning that this blarg was as much an active piece of my Writing as a distraction from it: equal parts sharpening stone and shunting circuit (heh heh… shunt). From the beginning I’ve used my drivel in this space to puzzle through problems with characters, plot holes, scenarios and obstacles, and in a fair few of those situations I’ve actually found some new inspiration just from talking to myself for a while. But I’d be lying if I said that this page didn’t serve the equally important function of distracting me from The Project. Blarging about tv shows or books or shiny new things or toddlers or running or whatever else is front-of-mind on a given day is the pressure release valve on my overtaxed water heater. It’s low-stakes (if not no-stakes) relaxed musing that takes me away from the self-imposed pressure to produce quality work for the novel.

But is it productive?

On the one hand, I’m of a similar mind on writing as I am on running. Some runners who run exceptionally long distances or blistering fast paces refer to practice runs without a specific distance or pace goal as “junk miles”: miles that you get in just because you need to, because your training plan calls for them. But even when I was running more than 20 miles a week I couldn’t think of my runs that way. Every day I get out there feels like a victory, even if I’m hobbled and can only run a quarter of a mile from the house before I limp back. Every run is a good run. Likewise, every word written is a good word, even if it’s a horrible word, like “moist”. Every sentence, every paragraph, every page, every detour into excessively long lists to pad my word count sharpens the knife that little bit more. It’s all practice. Every step on the path teaches me how to step properly in the future, and every misstep reminds me to watch out for wonky rocks and tangling roots.

Then again, there’s the inescapable truth that time spent writing on the blarg is time not spent working on the novel, and time not spent working on the novel feels a little bit like wasted time. I waited long enough in my life to even leave the station on this little excursion; it feels sacrilegious to put it off any more than I have to.

Often at the end of one of these rambles, I come to find out that I really felt a certain way about the issue in question, I simply didn’t know it before I put it in words. That’s not the case here. I really enjoy the writing I do on the blarg–I’m even proud of it at times–but it’s a poor substitute for working on the novel. Then again, the unemotional side of my brain says, better junk writing than no writing at all. All that considered, there’s no denying that I do feel a sort of accomplishment after writing anything including a pointless blarg rumination, even if that something is just a rant about baby poop.

If anything, then, I guess it comes down to two kinds of productivity. Productive productivity (genuinely gets something done that needs doing) and Hedonistic productivity (feels productive but isn’t, or gets something done that doesn’t necessarily need doing). I used to read a lot of articles on Lifehacker, which is a sort of mecca for all things productivity- and efficiency-related, and there is a tendency for some of the techniques and products discussed over there to be more about cleverness than actual usefulness, placing them squarely in the latter category: the Hedonistically productive. There comes a point where the things we do become more about feeling clever, good, productive, or useful than actually being clever, good, productive, or useful. I think this blarg toes the line. One way or another, though, it’s hard to picture my writing process without the blarg, so I guess I’m stuck with it.

And so are you, if you’ve stuck with me this far.

The Thunderdome of Ideas

Pavowski7 Comments

How do you make sense of the ideas that occur to you?

I’m talking here about stories, lyrics, visions, hell, even blarg ideas. They come from somewhere, and whether that source is some external stimulus like a news story or a fantastic article or a brilliant film or a gripping novel, they all end up getting filtered through the mire of neurons and synapses inside your skull. Which means that from the time an idea first strikes, it gets tossed into the Thunderdome that’s raging inside your head at any given moment.

Maybe I should step away from the second person (pardon me, second person) and stick to the first (oh, hi, me). It’s a Thunderdome in my head. Many ideas enter. Few survive to be acted upon.

Seriously. It’s a wonder I can get anything done. I’m as scatterbrained as they come, so when a new idea strikes for me, it’s thrown into the arena with the other millions of things I’m thinking about, which include, but are not limited to:

  • My kids and whether I’ve remembered to feed them / change their diapers / change their clothes / clean up their messes / set a good example for them / actually know where they are at the moment / OH GOD WHERE ARE THE KIDS
  • The dollars and cents flowing through all the metaphorical holes in my metaphorical pockets (because money isn’t real anymore you know, it’s all just ones and zeros on some bank program and okay this is not a conspiracy theory blog) and all the stress associated with that.
  • The fact that it’s winter, and in the four winters we’ve weathered in this house, we’ve had pipes freeze and burst in the walls twice despite our best efforts, so does winter number five mean that nightmare is coming around again…
  • The kids have been quiet for a while, WHAT IS MY TODDLER DOING
  • The scent of burning that’s coming from somewhere and I can’t isolate it… is it the neighbors burning leaves? A car burning oil? The wires in the walls spontaneously combusting and preparing to burn the house down?
  • The theme song from Thomas the Tank Engine just keeps bouncing around in there for no good reason; it certainly isn’t helping me to focus. (Sidenote: “shunt” is a fun word that sounds dirty but isn’t–meaning to shove aside or divert–try using it at parties!)
  • How the balls did my kid dump an entire two pounds of dog food into the water bowl without me hearing it?

And that’s just the past, say, thirty seconds.

So any idea I’m trying to have, whether related to my current novel or any other prospective novel I may ever conceivably get around to writing if I ever finish this one, has to step into the steel cage death match with these other thoughts if it wants to win my focus long enough to be pondered, let alone written down and saved for later. And these other thoughts take no prisoners. They have nailbats and rusty crowbars and spiked shoes. That Thomas theme song carries around a friggin’ garrote in its pocket and will dispatch an interloping idea without batting an eye.

Somehow… somehow… some ideas make it through the riot of distractions and make it into the novel. I’m working on weaving in a particularly good one that occurred to me a few weeks ago while I was writing a blarg post about how I was stuck for ideas about how to improve my draft. Did it arise out of need? Was it the strongest of a series of weak, malformed conceptions of various other plot points I could have used instead, and the strongest survived? Or did it blunder through, catching the toddlers during a nap and catching that Thomas theme song looking the other way long enough to escape into daylight?

I have no idea where the ideas come from or how they get processed. I feel like if I did I’d be a tremendously better writer, and I could therefore avoid unnecessary and cumbersome adverbs in my prose, like “tremendously,” to choose a particularly egregious offender completely at random. Also egregious offenders: “particularly,” “completely,” and “egregious” (not an adverb but still offensive).

See, the idea to sidetrack into all that nonsense about adverbs came from somewhere, I decided it was a good detour to make and I made it. Somebody (even if that somebody is me) sent that message, and somebody (probably me) received it and acted on it.

Where does that impulse come from?

Is that my authorial text-transcending through-line? Is it an undercurrent of subconscious thematic tendency? Or did whoever’s pulling the strings in my writerly Thunderdome take pity on the adverb idea and give it a set of poison-tipped spiked brass knuckles to help it in the fight?

I fear this is one of those unknowable things that philosophers might struggle with through the ages, though they’d perhaps do it more eloquently than with Thunderdomes and brass knuckles. And they’d certainly steer clear of Thomas the Tank Engine and any associated theme songs.

This post is part of SoCS. This week’s prompt was the diabolical homonym quartet of “sense / scents / cents / sent”, a series of words which basically describes why anybody learning English as a second language might end up banging his head against a wall. Because I’m a fool for pain, I used them all.

Shunt.