Maybe it is too early to know.
As previously mentioned, I was perceiving a decrease in the efficacy of Zoloft at 100 mg/day.
I wasn't feeling nearly as "done" as before I started, but also not nearly as "glass half full" as I did some time after the increase to 100.
I'm not sure how long it took for the 100 to become fully effective.
I'm not sure how long it lasted before it began to decline.
I am very short on basic data.
After seeing my Psychiatrist, I ramped up to 150, and have been there for nearly a week.
There were a few brief episodes of what I might call "micro-mania", but is really what I believe should be my "normal", spontaneous and often extemporaneous singing during routine activities like driving, and a tendency to make the occasional bad joke or pun.
But those episodes are few and far between, and there may be no more forthcoming.
More importantly, the generalized "glass half full" attitude never came back.
In fact, my glass seems as broken and bloody as it was before the increase.
Maybe, just maybe, a little worse, but not with sufficient drama for certainty.
In the absence of significant external stimuli, my default mode seems that of an empty automaton, slogging through the tasks of existence with neither joy nor despair, thinking, apparently, about nothing most of the time.
My cognition seems to be impaired, and I don't just mean my usual memory problems, both short and long term. I find myself making absurdly stupid mistakes with increasing frequency. Things like waiting for a stop sign to change. I am more easily confused if there is too much incoherent external stimuli, such as more than one person talking at once, or even one person talking while I am attempting to engage in a simple task. All of these have been general low-grade problems for a long time, but they have become noticeably worse since the increase.
All of this feeds my already ample sense of worthlessness.
Other words and phrases are stumbling around in my head, but they refuse to line up in an orderly fashion and make useful sentences. Useful. I find the word almost funny enough right now to make me laugh, but not quite.
Is it possible that writing is not good for me? Obviously, I am not a particularly good writer, but that isn't the concern I am trying to express. Writing requires the exhausting effort of translating my chaotic and fragmentary thoughts into English sentences. It forces me to try to think. The more I think, the more I examine my own psyche, the more I hate myself. The hate is twofold, first because thinking is hard and I am stupid, and second because what little I can put together out of what is inside me is boring and ugly.
OK, enough of that for now. Time to take pills that make me sleep.
Monday, October 3, 2016
Friday, August 19, 2016
Too Much Introspection Makes Blah Blah Blah
As always, let's start with "I", the prison in which I live.
I didn't intend it, but this evening somehow I ended up re-reading a bunch of my Facebook "Notes", a minority of which have been re-published here as Blog entries.
It is a rabbit hole down which I have a history of falling, but have avoided for some time now. I remember my own writing poorly enough to find it interesting to re-read, and will spend an absurd amount of time re-experiencing myself, and as noted previously, usually myself at my worst.
I actually think that some kind of compilation of portions of my incessant whining might make an oddly interesting book, and as such the only work product of my entire life.
This returns me to that dangerous feeling of being "done". That feeling that led me to Zoloft, which provided some diversion for what seems like a remarkably short time. I can't think of anything to add, and I can find much that is redundant. I had started going to Karaoke From Hell again, something that is strangely important to me. I had even been embraced by a whole new semi-organized group of regulars that had developed in my years of absence. But then came the night that, a few hours in, I started to feel empty, foolish, self-conscious and out-of-place. I started to notice how poorly I sing, despite the charitable compliments.
I had been very steady for a little while on my Zoloft/Clonazepam combo, but now I feel an intolerable urgency for this feeling of meaningless emptiness to just stop. Fortunately, I have a very strong sense of, for lack of a better word, duty. There are things that need to be done, and I have to do them. There are people, very few but very important to me, who would be hurt, and I have to wait until I am sure they would be truly better off without me. This does nothing to calm me down, or alleviate my suffering, but it keeps me back from the edge.
Clearly, it is time for another appointment with my psychologist.
If anyone actually reads this, please don't panic. I'm all talk, all the time.
I didn't intend it, but this evening somehow I ended up re-reading a bunch of my Facebook "Notes", a minority of which have been re-published here as Blog entries.
It is a rabbit hole down which I have a history of falling, but have avoided for some time now. I remember my own writing poorly enough to find it interesting to re-read, and will spend an absurd amount of time re-experiencing myself, and as noted previously, usually myself at my worst.
I actually think that some kind of compilation of portions of my incessant whining might make an oddly interesting book, and as such the only work product of my entire life.
This returns me to that dangerous feeling of being "done". That feeling that led me to Zoloft, which provided some diversion for what seems like a remarkably short time. I can't think of anything to add, and I can find much that is redundant. I had started going to Karaoke From Hell again, something that is strangely important to me. I had even been embraced by a whole new semi-organized group of regulars that had developed in my years of absence. But then came the night that, a few hours in, I started to feel empty, foolish, self-conscious and out-of-place. I started to notice how poorly I sing, despite the charitable compliments.
I had been very steady for a little while on my Zoloft/Clonazepam combo, but now I feel an intolerable urgency for this feeling of meaningless emptiness to just stop. Fortunately, I have a very strong sense of, for lack of a better word, duty. There are things that need to be done, and I have to do them. There are people, very few but very important to me, who would be hurt, and I have to wait until I am sure they would be truly better off without me. This does nothing to calm me down, or alleviate my suffering, but it keeps me back from the edge.
Clearly, it is time for another appointment with my psychologist.
If anyone actually reads this, please don't panic. I'm all talk, all the time.
Thursday, August 18, 2016
A Post of Uncertain Motivation
Mostly, I think I just remembered that I had a blog, and noticed that I had not written in it in a long time. My best guess is that I only feel bloggy when I am depressed or otherwise distressed, and have this inexplicable urge to share the worst of me and my experience with my pantheon of imaginary friends.
So, am I depressed? Sometimes, and with increasing frequency, as best as I can judge as the thing inside the black box of my mind. I am approaching the point of considering modifications to my treatment, but I do so with much trepidation. I don't have a lot of overhead for dosage increase of Zoloft, and it seems awfully soon to go up from 100mg/day, when the absolute ceiling allowed is 200mg/day.
Hopefully, my psychiatrist kept notes on my effects and side-effects of the other medications I had tried and abandoned, as some may be worth re-visiting. Considering that some of the side-effects that had led to cessation of some medications have become permanent conditions of uncertain cause. I have so many things wrong with me, and I take so many medications, not just psychoactive ones, the cause of my "side-effects" would be a very difficult and hazardous thing to sort out.
Hey look, I just ran out of motivation to ramble into the void.
So, am I depressed? Sometimes, and with increasing frequency, as best as I can judge as the thing inside the black box of my mind. I am approaching the point of considering modifications to my treatment, but I do so with much trepidation. I don't have a lot of overhead for dosage increase of Zoloft, and it seems awfully soon to go up from 100mg/day, when the absolute ceiling allowed is 200mg/day.
Hopefully, my psychiatrist kept notes on my effects and side-effects of the other medications I had tried and abandoned, as some may be worth re-visiting. Considering that some of the side-effects that had led to cessation of some medications have become permanent conditions of uncertain cause. I have so many things wrong with me, and I take so many medications, not just psychoactive ones, the cause of my "side-effects" would be a very difficult and hazardous thing to sort out.
Hey look, I just ran out of motivation to ramble into the void.
Friday, April 8, 2016
A Gratitude Experiment
It took me a long time to arrive at the title for this experiment. I started with "Optimism" but that didn't feel right. I had noticed that when I write, even when I start out with intentions of reporting positive outcomes, I have a habit of making sure I thoroughly cover all of the negatives as well. The idea here is to write something in which I focus on the good over the bad of my experiences and feelings. I searched my psyche for positive adjectives I could apply to myself that didn't instantly inspire a sarcastic counterpoint, and I finally settled on "grateful". I can honestly say that there are a great many things in life for which I am grateful, but don't worry, this isn't turning into some kind of sappy list of puppies and sunsets.
This is part of a continuing series reporting to myself about the efficacy of pharmaceutical interventions of my various psychological and/or neurological defects.
After extensive trials over the course of years, the following medications have a net positive effect on my behavior and feelings:
Clonazepam (AKA Klonopin), a benzodiazepine class of tranquilizer
1mg every 6 hours.
This has been very effective in preventing a number of the worst of my traditional panic symptoms, as well as preventing a difficult to describe sort of obsessive circular thinking about unsolvable existential dilemmas, which had begun back when I was 3 years old (not kidding).
Atenolol, a Beta Blocker
25mg twice a day, six hours apart
While not technically a psychiatric medication, in addition to its application to hypertension, it suppresses the physical symptoms of panic attacks (increased heart rate, shortness of breath), and I believe it breaks a feedback loop that causes panic attacks to escalate. Without it, I often experienced subjectively realistic, yet false, symptoms of cardiac distress.
Sertraline (AKA Zoloft), an SSRI (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor)
100mg per day
This was the gold at the end of the rainbow for me. When I began Zoloft a few months ago, it had been literally years since I had last tried an SSRI. All previous trials with other drugs produced dramatic negative effects, both in terms of known possible side effects, and zero or inverse results for the intended primary effect. It isn't a "happy pill", but it is a surprisingly effective at making me feel significantly less terrible. I suspect this medication is what allows me to write this "Gratitude Experiment". Here's an unexpected and welcome side-effect: I am slowly but steadily losing weight since starting Sertraline, and I have no idea how or why. I could make some guesses, but I am pretty much unaware of the changes in my behavior that have led to this weight loss. I think I've been on it for a little more than two months, and I have lost 25lbs. Not to worry, I could lose another 25 and still be overweight.
So, those are the drugs for which I am grateful in terms of my psychological well being. For my purely physical conditions, there is a whole other list which I can't even remember off the top of my head, but I'm grateful for those as well.
I must emphasize strongly, as I have before, that I am not advocating the use of any of these specific substances. Every person is different, and responds differently to the same substances. If you don't feel overwhelmed by or hopeless about your life, you probably don't need any of these, or anything like them. If you would benefit from pharmaceutical intervention, that must be a cautious process undertaken at the direction of a qualified psychiatrist.
This satisfies the primary intent for this post. The lack of a list of the many people and things for which I am grateful should not be interpreted as a lack of appreciation for the same.
Ungrateful and ungracious complaints aplenty in future posts, I promise!
This is part of a continuing series reporting to myself about the efficacy of pharmaceutical interventions of my various psychological and/or neurological defects.
After extensive trials over the course of years, the following medications have a net positive effect on my behavior and feelings:
Clonazepam (AKA Klonopin), a benzodiazepine class of tranquilizer
1mg every 6 hours.
This has been very effective in preventing a number of the worst of my traditional panic symptoms, as well as preventing a difficult to describe sort of obsessive circular thinking about unsolvable existential dilemmas, which had begun back when I was 3 years old (not kidding).
Atenolol, a Beta Blocker
25mg twice a day, six hours apart
While not technically a psychiatric medication, in addition to its application to hypertension, it suppresses the physical symptoms of panic attacks (increased heart rate, shortness of breath), and I believe it breaks a feedback loop that causes panic attacks to escalate. Without it, I often experienced subjectively realistic, yet false, symptoms of cardiac distress.
Sertraline (AKA Zoloft), an SSRI (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor)
100mg per day
This was the gold at the end of the rainbow for me. When I began Zoloft a few months ago, it had been literally years since I had last tried an SSRI. All previous trials with other drugs produced dramatic negative effects, both in terms of known possible side effects, and zero or inverse results for the intended primary effect. It isn't a "happy pill", but it is a surprisingly effective at making me feel significantly less terrible. I suspect this medication is what allows me to write this "Gratitude Experiment". Here's an unexpected and welcome side-effect: I am slowly but steadily losing weight since starting Sertraline, and I have no idea how or why. I could make some guesses, but I am pretty much unaware of the changes in my behavior that have led to this weight loss. I think I've been on it for a little more than two months, and I have lost 25lbs. Not to worry, I could lose another 25 and still be overweight.
So, those are the drugs for which I am grateful in terms of my psychological well being. For my purely physical conditions, there is a whole other list which I can't even remember off the top of my head, but I'm grateful for those as well.
I must emphasize strongly, as I have before, that I am not advocating the use of any of these specific substances. Every person is different, and responds differently to the same substances. If you don't feel overwhelmed by or hopeless about your life, you probably don't need any of these, or anything like them. If you would benefit from pharmaceutical intervention, that must be a cautious process undertaken at the direction of a qualified psychiatrist.
This satisfies the primary intent for this post. The lack of a list of the many people and things for which I am grateful should not be interpreted as a lack of appreciation for the same.
Ungrateful and ungracious complaints aplenty in future posts, I promise!
Wednesday, February 17, 2016
I Lied
To my one possible reader: you probably shouldn't read this. I don't think it will be in any way helpful, and could be harmful. You know who you are.
We are now apparently beyond what had been the foreseeable future of my previous blog entry. I have an appointment with my psychiatrist within the next couple of weeks. My pretense here is to practice talking to myself about what I need to talk about with my psychiatrist.
My experience with Zoloft has been a net improvement over my state before I began taking it, yet it is not an improvement over my state when I first, years ago, became desperate enough to submit myself to pharmaceutical treatment. That is actually saying a lot, because before the Zoloft I was, as I had put it, "done". I can't think of any better way to put it. I think that may be how some people feel before they turn to suicide. My other way of describing my experience was the conviction that I had turned some kind of corner and was living a "post hope" existence.
The truth of my existence as I see it has not changed due to Zoloft. What has changed is that I spend less time thinking about it, less often, and with less severity. Before, I could not break out of almost constantly obsessing about hopelessness, failure, regret and shame. Now, those feelings are more like familiar companions, rather than a violent insurgency. They are always there, but they don't make as much noise.
In considering a Zoloft dosage increase, I am very concerned about maintaining realistic expectations of what good or harm could come of it. The good news is that I am presently at pretty much the minimum common dosage, and there is a lot of headroom between that and the maximum safe dosage allowed. This is pretty much the opposite of my situation with Clonazepam, which I have been taking at the maximum recommended dosage for several years.
What do I hope to accomplish with this, or any other, treatment? That's a tricky question. To my mind, hope is a dangerous idea. Hope is just self pity holding hands with self delusion and skipping down the path to disillusionment. (That image courtesy of watching The Wizard of OZ twice while babysitting last Sunday.) For someone such as myself in possession of all of the fundamental requirements for survival, and then some, hope is simply greed.
I guess, however shamefully, I hope for hope. I wish for the courage to be foolish, to want to do things and to do them with little concern about whether I am even good at doing things. Most of all, I want to sing, and I want to feel that transcendent feeling that music, and especially singing, had once given me.
This is absurd and selfish and wrong. Can a drug change that? Can anything? Should it?
I won't manage to say a fraction of this when I speak with my psychiatrist, and I have yet to meet one who likes written communication, but that's probably a HIPAA thing.
We are now apparently beyond what had been the foreseeable future of my previous blog entry. I have an appointment with my psychiatrist within the next couple of weeks. My pretense here is to practice talking to myself about what I need to talk about with my psychiatrist.
My experience with Zoloft has been a net improvement over my state before I began taking it, yet it is not an improvement over my state when I first, years ago, became desperate enough to submit myself to pharmaceutical treatment. That is actually saying a lot, because before the Zoloft I was, as I had put it, "done". I can't think of any better way to put it. I think that may be how some people feel before they turn to suicide. My other way of describing my experience was the conviction that I had turned some kind of corner and was living a "post hope" existence.
The truth of my existence as I see it has not changed due to Zoloft. What has changed is that I spend less time thinking about it, less often, and with less severity. Before, I could not break out of almost constantly obsessing about hopelessness, failure, regret and shame. Now, those feelings are more like familiar companions, rather than a violent insurgency. They are always there, but they don't make as much noise.
In considering a Zoloft dosage increase, I am very concerned about maintaining realistic expectations of what good or harm could come of it. The good news is that I am presently at pretty much the minimum common dosage, and there is a lot of headroom between that and the maximum safe dosage allowed. This is pretty much the opposite of my situation with Clonazepam, which I have been taking at the maximum recommended dosage for several years.
What do I hope to accomplish with this, or any other, treatment? That's a tricky question. To my mind, hope is a dangerous idea. Hope is just self pity holding hands with self delusion and skipping down the path to disillusionment. (That image courtesy of watching The Wizard of OZ twice while babysitting last Sunday.) For someone such as myself in possession of all of the fundamental requirements for survival, and then some, hope is simply greed.
I guess, however shamefully, I hope for hope. I wish for the courage to be foolish, to want to do things and to do them with little concern about whether I am even good at doing things. Most of all, I want to sing, and I want to feel that transcendent feeling that music, and especially singing, had once given me.
This is absurd and selfish and wrong. Can a drug change that? Can anything? Should it?
I won't manage to say a fraction of this when I speak with my psychiatrist, and I have yet to meet one who likes written communication, but that's probably a HIPAA thing.
Wednesday, February 3, 2016
Honk If You Love Retro-Blogs.
I don't hear any honking.
All blogging by Michael "Mookie" Kepler (born James Milton Wood [Jr.]), is suspended for the foreseeable future. Brief reports on family events and such will continue to be posted on Facebook, probably.
Thanks to Zoloft I no longer feel a frequent urgent desire to die, nor do I spend extended periods of time obsessing about how worthless and meaningless my existence is. I had not addressed these states of mind in previous writing, or speaking, because I felt it was somehow inappropriate. I'm not sure why I think it is OK now.
For some years now, Clonazepam has kept my mind out of truly horrifying places which had haunted me, often to the point of intolerable anguish, since I was three years old. So, that's old news, but it seemed related.
I guess the message is "Better tolerance of living through chemicals, hooray!"
Your results will almost certainly vary, and finding the right chemicals to tolerate your life, if needed, is a matter between you and your Psychiatrist, if any. Finding what seem to be the right chemicals for me took literally years of very unpleasant, and possibly dangerous at times, trial and error.
I suspect the ideal dosage of Zoloft for me is yet to be found. The darkness no longer overtakes me, but I feel it trying. I do not feel safe yet, but I am grateful for the improvements that have come.
Just so you know, I know that "tolerance" and "safe" are pretty much meaningless ideas, if you really apply any amount of critical logic to them.
This adequately demonstrates why I will no longer be writing into the void.
Goodbye, Imaginary Audience.
All blogging by Michael "Mookie" Kepler (born James Milton Wood [Jr.]), is suspended for the foreseeable future. Brief reports on family events and such will continue to be posted on Facebook, probably.
Thanks to Zoloft I no longer feel a frequent urgent desire to die, nor do I spend extended periods of time obsessing about how worthless and meaningless my existence is. I had not addressed these states of mind in previous writing, or speaking, because I felt it was somehow inappropriate. I'm not sure why I think it is OK now.
For some years now, Clonazepam has kept my mind out of truly horrifying places which had haunted me, often to the point of intolerable anguish, since I was three years old. So, that's old news, but it seemed related.
I guess the message is "Better tolerance of living through chemicals, hooray!"
Your results will almost certainly vary, and finding the right chemicals to tolerate your life, if needed, is a matter between you and your Psychiatrist, if any. Finding what seem to be the right chemicals for me took literally years of very unpleasant, and possibly dangerous at times, trial and error.
I suspect the ideal dosage of Zoloft for me is yet to be found. The darkness no longer overtakes me, but I feel it trying. I do not feel safe yet, but I am grateful for the improvements that have come.
Just so you know, I know that "tolerance" and "safe" are pretty much meaningless ideas, if you really apply any amount of critical logic to them.
This adequately demonstrates why I will no longer be writing into the void.
Goodbye, Imaginary Audience.
Tuesday, October 6, 2015
Retroblog 2008/1979 (ages 45/16): Memories of Bob Gardiner, JoAnn Glenisky, Ursula K. LeGuin and Micaela Massimino from 1979
[Editorial Note 2015 (age 52): I only found an unfinished draft of this old post, although I am fairly certain it was originally completed and posted to my MySpace blog in 2008, shortly after my post about Istvan and JoAnn Nadas. Yet extensive searching of my personal backups of online content have not uncovered a complete version, so I finally had to resort to finishing it as best I could, although I am certain the original effort yielded better results. The draft broke off in the middle of the third sentence about JoAnn Glenisky, so everything after that is newly written from degraded memories and with a diminished spirit.]
Half-Remembered: Bob Gardiner
As with my previous "Half-Remembered" post, the title refers exclusively to the failings of my memory in general, and should not be taken as a slight on the memorable nature of the subject. By all accounts, Bob Gardiner was one of the most memorable people ever.
I met Mr. Gardiner briefly, somewhere around 1978, spending a couple of days in his studio in Portland, OR, where he was living and working at the time. He is best known for the Oscar-Winning animated short feature "Closed Mondays", which he co-produced with Will Vinton. They split shortly after making that ground-breaking film, and Vinton's name has somewhat unfairly become exclusively synonymous with the field of "Claymation".
It was only today that I learned of his death in 2005. Broader, but generally breif, biographical information is readily available on the web; just Google his name if you are interested. This post is only going to be about my personal encounter with the man and his work, and the ways in which it instructed and inspired me.
An essential starting point is the short feature itself, which can also be easily found online by searching for "Closed Mondays" on YouTube. Go do that now, actually, and then come back and finish this, if you like.
"Closed Mondays" was the one work for which he is most noted and remembered, and was in fact the only work by which I knew of him prior to visiting his studio. I sensed that he felt a little opressed under the shadow of that early acheivement. Having an artistic temperment naturally gave him mixed feelings about the whole idea of the Oscar, so for him it may have been as much a curse as anything else.
My first visit was a small field trip for our small roster of TAG (Talented And Gifted) students (more about that later). My second visit was on my own.
He was in the middle of shooting a commercial for Kodak, which was to be a morphing sequence through all of their popular models of snapsot cameras, but admitted that it had been slow going, and as far as I know, it was never actually finished. He probably missed the deadline and defaulted on the contract. He had so many different projects in various stages of incompletion, and not just clay animation.
He worked in virtually any form of creative media you can imagine, and some that I had not even imagined. He had sculptures, clay "paintings", holograms ( more about those below), and played and sang original songs for us on an electric piano and on guitar. I felt a little bad about putting him on the spot, especially in the middle of the usualy isolate safety of his creative space. He wasn't a teacher and wasn't really sure what to do with kids around, especially since much of his work and much of his natural style was more adult in nature.
Most fascinating to me were the collection of cylindrical multiplex holograms he had created, as I had already experimented with holography, with little success, and this was a kind of hologram and production process that I had never seen or heard of before. He apparently had a hand in the development of the process, but I believe there were others involved as well. The finished product is a transparent cylinder about the size of large lampshade. When a point source of light (white light is fine, no need for lasers for viewing) is placed in the center of the cylinder, the effect is the closest thing to Hollywood depictions of "holograms" (eg. the Princess Leia hologram shown to Luke by R2D2 in Star Wars) that is ever likely to be physically possible to create. Suspended in the center of the cylinder is a 3 dimensional image which can be viewed from any angle. Additionally, the image can change or move with with the rotation of the cylinder, or by the observer moving around it. His subjects included live humans as well as clay sculptures, and many of them were designed to smoothly loop an animation sequence. I have always been surprised that this never caught on in any larger way as an art form, nor as a method for creating advertising displays. The starting point for creating these holograms is to film the subject with a motion picture camera as it makes a single full rotation on a turntable platform. The filming could be at a constant frame-rate, or it could be shot frame-by-frame, to facilitate stop-motion animation. Thus there was virtually no limit to the size or nature of the subject, so long as it could be viewed from all horizontal angles and an appropriate apparatus could be assembled to rotate it (or alternatively, the camera could be trucked in a precise circle around something very large, but as far as I know, this had not been attempted). I will refrain from going into the details of the remainder of the process here. Such details could probably be found online, or I could share as much as I know with any interested person who inquires.
The only downside of this form of holography relative to other methods is that, while it uses similar materials (ultra-high-resolution film) and equipment (lasers) for creating and embodying the image, it also has much in common with stereo photography and lenticular "3D", in that only horizontal parallax is recorded. In other words, while a traditional hologram is like a little window through which you view a fully three-dimensional image, a Cylindrical Multiplex Hologram only presents the two eyes with differing 2-dimensional perspectives on the subject, offset on the horizontal plane, although it does so by, in a sense, creating a multitude of narrow slit "windows" through which a single projected 2-dimensional motion picture frame could be viewed in full.
Also much like my previous post, this is as much about an exceptional teacher and person who did much to make my mind and my world something that greatly transcended my rural surroundings. JoAnn Glenisky was employed as an English teacher at my school, and when the federal government created the TAG (Talented and Gifted) program. The local superindendent had no clue what to do with it, so he put it in her hands, much to my benefit. She taught me how to fill out requisition forms and the process for getting them approved and turned me loose. It is hard to believe that the kid I remember convincing the district superintendant to approve and sign these forms was me. Such courage and audacity have long since been somehow deleted from my psyche, although these attributes stayed with me through some of the most challenging times of my young adulthood.
It was through these TAG funds, in part, that I was able to experiment with stop-motion animation and time-lapse photography. There were two incomplete attempts at animated short features, one of which was subsequently destroyed by a kitten, and time-lapse experiments which included a 3-minute drive across the continental United States. Eventually, some of these films were projected on stage during some shows of the 2000 tour of the band Man or Astro-man.
Mrs. Glenisky also greatly enabled my gradiose delusions of being a writer. Before I learned to type for myself, she would use her personal time to manually transcribe my barely legible handwritten drafts of truly awful short science fiction stories. While these were routinely rejected by magazine editors, one of them earned me an opportunity to join a writer's workshop with the author Ursula K. LeGuin, which was offered as a college credit summer course by Portland State University. Being a college course, this also required the payment of tuition, which Mrs. Glenisky also paid from her own personal funds. The workshop, part of a program called Haystack, was held in Cannon Beach Oregon, which also meant an exciting opportunity for 16-year-old me to be away from home and in the supportive company of adults who treated me as an equal, for an entire week.
I attended Haystack again two years later, again with Ursula K. LeGuin, with whom I had also maintained a correspondence, as well as other workshops, but by that time I was already creatively crippled by the general and social anxiety which keep me largely paralyzed to this day, even with treatment.
Both JoAnn Glenisky and Ursula LeGuin invested so much in me as a writer, my greatest regret in life is how, after a promising start, it all came to nothing, and how much I squandered such spectacularly unusual opportunities. But this isn't intended to be about me and my perpetual pity party. This is about how much I appreciate my fortunate encounters with truly amazing people.
There was another writer from the first workshop, Micaela Massimino, with whom I maintained a friendship and correspondence for a few years and even visited in Boston MA, at the end of the same cross-country drive during which I filmed my epic and chaotic time-lapse travel film. That trip, and it's cast of characters, are a whole story in themselves.
Bob Gardiner, as previously mentioned, passed away in 2005, Ursula K. LeGuinn still lives and writes in Portland OR [Update: Ursula just passed away on January 22, 2018], and my recent attempts to determine the status of JoAnn Glenisky or Micaela Massimino have been unsuccessful. I am grateful to all of them.
Half-Remembered: Bob Gardiner
As with my previous "Half-Remembered" post, the title refers exclusively to the failings of my memory in general, and should not be taken as a slight on the memorable nature of the subject. By all accounts, Bob Gardiner was one of the most memorable people ever.
I met Mr. Gardiner briefly, somewhere around 1978, spending a couple of days in his studio in Portland, OR, where he was living and working at the time. He is best known for the Oscar-Winning animated short feature "Closed Mondays", which he co-produced with Will Vinton. They split shortly after making that ground-breaking film, and Vinton's name has somewhat unfairly become exclusively synonymous with the field of "Claymation".
It was only today that I learned of his death in 2005. Broader, but generally breif, biographical information is readily available on the web; just Google his name if you are interested. This post is only going to be about my personal encounter with the man and his work, and the ways in which it instructed and inspired me.
An essential starting point is the short feature itself, which can also be easily found online by searching for "Closed Mondays" on YouTube. Go do that now, actually, and then come back and finish this, if you like.
"Closed Mondays" was the one work for which he is most noted and remembered, and was in fact the only work by which I knew of him prior to visiting his studio. I sensed that he felt a little opressed under the shadow of that early acheivement. Having an artistic temperment naturally gave him mixed feelings about the whole idea of the Oscar, so for him it may have been as much a curse as anything else.
My first visit was a small field trip for our small roster of TAG (Talented And Gifted) students (more about that later). My second visit was on my own.
He was in the middle of shooting a commercial for Kodak, which was to be a morphing sequence through all of their popular models of snapsot cameras, but admitted that it had been slow going, and as far as I know, it was never actually finished. He probably missed the deadline and defaulted on the contract. He had so many different projects in various stages of incompletion, and not just clay animation.
He worked in virtually any form of creative media you can imagine, and some that I had not even imagined. He had sculptures, clay "paintings", holograms ( more about those below), and played and sang original songs for us on an electric piano and on guitar. I felt a little bad about putting him on the spot, especially in the middle of the usualy isolate safety of his creative space. He wasn't a teacher and wasn't really sure what to do with kids around, especially since much of his work and much of his natural style was more adult in nature.
Most fascinating to me were the collection of cylindrical multiplex holograms he had created, as I had already experimented with holography, with little success, and this was a kind of hologram and production process that I had never seen or heard of before. He apparently had a hand in the development of the process, but I believe there were others involved as well. The finished product is a transparent cylinder about the size of large lampshade. When a point source of light (white light is fine, no need for lasers for viewing) is placed in the center of the cylinder, the effect is the closest thing to Hollywood depictions of "holograms" (eg. the Princess Leia hologram shown to Luke by R2D2 in Star Wars) that is ever likely to be physically possible to create. Suspended in the center of the cylinder is a 3 dimensional image which can be viewed from any angle. Additionally, the image can change or move with with the rotation of the cylinder, or by the observer moving around it. His subjects included live humans as well as clay sculptures, and many of them were designed to smoothly loop an animation sequence. I have always been surprised that this never caught on in any larger way as an art form, nor as a method for creating advertising displays. The starting point for creating these holograms is to film the subject with a motion picture camera as it makes a single full rotation on a turntable platform. The filming could be at a constant frame-rate, or it could be shot frame-by-frame, to facilitate stop-motion animation. Thus there was virtually no limit to the size or nature of the subject, so long as it could be viewed from all horizontal angles and an appropriate apparatus could be assembled to rotate it (or alternatively, the camera could be trucked in a precise circle around something very large, but as far as I know, this had not been attempted). I will refrain from going into the details of the remainder of the process here. Such details could probably be found online, or I could share as much as I know with any interested person who inquires.
The only downside of this form of holography relative to other methods is that, while it uses similar materials (ultra-high-resolution film) and equipment (lasers) for creating and embodying the image, it also has much in common with stereo photography and lenticular "3D", in that only horizontal parallax is recorded. In other words, while a traditional hologram is like a little window through which you view a fully three-dimensional image, a Cylindrical Multiplex Hologram only presents the two eyes with differing 2-dimensional perspectives on the subject, offset on the horizontal plane, although it does so by, in a sense, creating a multitude of narrow slit "windows" through which a single projected 2-dimensional motion picture frame could be viewed in full.
Also much like my previous post, this is as much about an exceptional teacher and person who did much to make my mind and my world something that greatly transcended my rural surroundings. JoAnn Glenisky was employed as an English teacher at my school, and when the federal government created the TAG (Talented and Gifted) program. The local superindendent had no clue what to do with it, so he put it in her hands, much to my benefit. She taught me how to fill out requisition forms and the process for getting them approved and turned me loose. It is hard to believe that the kid I remember convincing the district superintendant to approve and sign these forms was me. Such courage and audacity have long since been somehow deleted from my psyche, although these attributes stayed with me through some of the most challenging times of my young adulthood.
It was through these TAG funds, in part, that I was able to experiment with stop-motion animation and time-lapse photography. There were two incomplete attempts at animated short features, one of which was subsequently destroyed by a kitten, and time-lapse experiments which included a 3-minute drive across the continental United States. Eventually, some of these films were projected on stage during some shows of the 2000 tour of the band Man or Astro-man.
Mrs. Glenisky also greatly enabled my gradiose delusions of being a writer. Before I learned to type for myself, she would use her personal time to manually transcribe my barely legible handwritten drafts of truly awful short science fiction stories. While these were routinely rejected by magazine editors, one of them earned me an opportunity to join a writer's workshop with the author Ursula K. LeGuin, which was offered as a college credit summer course by Portland State University. Being a college course, this also required the payment of tuition, which Mrs. Glenisky also paid from her own personal funds. The workshop, part of a program called Haystack, was held in Cannon Beach Oregon, which also meant an exciting opportunity for 16-year-old me to be away from home and in the supportive company of adults who treated me as an equal, for an entire week.
I attended Haystack again two years later, again with Ursula K. LeGuin, with whom I had also maintained a correspondence, as well as other workshops, but by that time I was already creatively crippled by the general and social anxiety which keep me largely paralyzed to this day, even with treatment.
Both JoAnn Glenisky and Ursula LeGuin invested so much in me as a writer, my greatest regret in life is how, after a promising start, it all came to nothing, and how much I squandered such spectacularly unusual opportunities. But this isn't intended to be about me and my perpetual pity party. This is about how much I appreciate my fortunate encounters with truly amazing people.
There was another writer from the first workshop, Micaela Massimino, with whom I maintained a friendship and correspondence for a few years and even visited in Boston MA, at the end of the same cross-country drive during which I filmed my epic and chaotic time-lapse travel film. That trip, and it's cast of characters, are a whole story in themselves.
Bob Gardiner, as previously mentioned, passed away in 2005, Ursula K. LeGuinn still lives and writes in Portland OR [Update: Ursula just passed away on January 22, 2018], and my recent attempts to determine the status of JoAnn Glenisky or Micaela Massimino have been unsuccessful. I am grateful to all of them.
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