Is Everyone Dying?

 Yes.  Of course.  But is everyone I know, including myself, dying right now, very soon, all with symptoms resembling pneumonia?  Momma Kitty's symptoms seem to come and go with the weather.  Patricia's mother died last week of something more akin to pleurisy. I've been sick for a week with something confusing.  Definitely not pleurisy.  I've had that, after my open heart surgery many years ago, and it hurts a lot more than this.  But maybe I have something like pneumonia, which is annoying because I had a specific vaccine against that earlier this year. 

This isn't like when I went to the hospital and found out I had congestive heart failure.  If anything, I am dehydrated.  I have been losing about a pound a day for a week, and that is almost certainly water weight because I am not exercising.  So much chest congestion, to the point that I feel I can barely breathe, and I have almost no voice, and my breathing sounds like an Aztec Death Whistle (look it up, if you don't know), which keeps me awake.  Some nasal discharge, but definitely not to the degree of sinus infections of the past. 

Why am I even writing this?  I don't know.  Forensic bread crumbs?  For whom?  I had intended to go to a clinic today (Friday), but woke up feeling better than I had for awhile and it all seemed so inconvenient.  But then the symptoms come back.  Coughing to the point that I nearly pass out and my stomach muscles ache, just to divest my lungs of a tiny measure of sputum. 

Maybe tomorrow I will go to a clinic.  Maybe tomorrow I will feel better. Again, I don't even know why I am writing this.   My apologies to my audient (right or wrong, I hold that to be the singular form of the plural "audience").

Three Mothers

Yesterday, technically still today for me, my Wife's Mother died.  This is a complicated passing, with a complicated back story, and my part in that story is one that I will probably never fully tell.  Ultimately it is sad, in no small part because I don't know if I ever saw her truly happy.  It feels strange and wrong to have nothing more to say than this when a human life which has so thoroughly intersected with my own has ended.

My own Mother moved with my younger sister to another state a year or two ago.  I honestly can't remember which state right now.  My Mother, at least as of a few days ago, is still alive.  The story of these relationships, with my mother and my sisters, is also very complicated, and a story I feel I have every right to tell to anyone, but I do not feel very motivated to do so at this moment.  My immediate concerns and responsibilities are with and for my wife at this time.

The third mother is a cat.  "Momma Kitty".  She is very old.  It seems she has always been living on my back deck, with food, water and warmed shelter provided. She became the matriarch of a minor cat population explosion, but I managed to get her and her first born all captured and fixed, and her grandkittens all socialized and placed in homes.  Now only she remains, having outlived her own offspring and several other neighborhood ferals.  Just a few nights ago her breathing sounded very labored and I was afraid she wasn't going to last the night, yet she still found her way to unreachable shadows before I could pick her up.  Fortunately, she seems a lot better today.

Notes for an Introduction to a Book (which will probably never be written)

I'm sorry to give away the ending, but there is no point, there is no meaning.  Life is not a Movie, it isn't even a Story.   It's just something that happens until it stops happening, and every one of them is different, and the only person who knew it all is dead.  Soon anyone who knew any part of it will forget, and then they die, and eventually all of it ends.  Entropy wins.  Creation loses. 

Or I'm wrong.  I don't know shit, and I certainly don't know you or your life, or the universe in which it is happening. 

I very much want to be wrong, but wanting doesn't make it so any more than pretending to know does.

A good writer, a popular writer, would feed you a bunch of happy horseshit about how the meaning is in the moment or some such brain vomit as that.  What good does living "in the now" and finding meaning "in the moment" do me after I am dead?  None that I know of, and none that any dead person has ever bothered to tell any living person.  Anyone who tells you otherwise is probably lying or delusional.

But again, I am really good at being wrong, and I really want to be wrong about all of this.

A Vague Sense of Final Purpose

The brief flurry of "Retro-Blogs" was an attempt to rescue increasingly hard to access writings on other online platforms.  I lost the initial manic drive to pursue this effort rather quickly, but it should resume at some unpredictable time in the near future, or not.  Some will not be recoverable, but I may have offline drafts that can be refurbished.  As layers of my life peel away, some shadows of memory are returning, and there may be an effort to document some of those.  As I review what I have written, I realize some of what I have not. There may also be some overlong emails in my sent folders which may spark other memories or tell stories that can be reclaimed.

All of this comes from an absurd conceit that something could be organized and condensed from this blog to form a physical book.  Nothing digital lasts, but physical books can be surprisingly resilient over time.  This grew from the increasing conviction that I have very likely exhausted my supply of things to say, of days with events specific to me even marginally worth describing.

Of all of my shallow ambitions, the most persistent was for me to be some kind of writer, followed very closely by the ambition to be some kind of songwriter and singer.  Singing is largely out of the question now, but I am fortunate to have had a few moments on a real stage, with a real band, in front of a real audience, and I managed to make reasonably finished recordings of two original songs. I have also documented lyrics and non-standard attempts at conveying melody and other musical elements of several more, almost all of which were originally conceived in a very narrow period of my youth.  Writing and editing of writing remains possible, if sufficiently low standards are applied to the quality of the work.

Mine isn't a life that tells a story.  There are some stories within it, but not the kind of thing that adds up to a book of general interest.  But it is the only life I have had, or likely will ever have.  Even boring books of boring lives such as mine exist in abundance, yet I feel some small compulsion to add my own, even if only very few copies can be produced at my own expense.  There may eventually be, I suppose, some small historical value to boring people documenting their boring lives.

Retro-Blog 2010.10.20 - Self-Therapy Experiment One: FAIL

Office, afternoon.

Dr. Noble: So, what brings you here today?

Patient: Seriously, that's the best I can do?

Dr. Noble: I'm sorry, I don't understand what you mean.

Patient: You're imaginary.  I am in the process of creating you as a character, and I already think the opening line I gave you is hopelessly lame.

Dr. Noble: Lame?

Patient: A completely illogical cliche'.  I mean, I would be here because of an appointment, and through the process of making that appointment you would already know why I am here.

Dr Noble: Perhaps it is just a standard open-ended way to start a conversation and to learn about you.  I may have some idea of why you made the appointment, but your own thinking about your reasons for being here at this time could be different, and illuminating.

Patient: No psychiatrist or therapist I have ever seen talks the way you are talking right now.  You sound more like me.  I'm bored with me.

Dr. Noble: As long as I am allowed to be atypical, allow me to point out that you would not be here if you were bored with yourself.  If anything you are curious about yourself, perhaps fascinated with yourself.

Patient: Well, that is certainly atypical, I'll give you that.  You are so completely unrealistic.

Dr. Noble: How?  Please explain.

Patient: Well, right there, you're asking questions.  Do you have any idea how seldom people in your profession demonstrate any curiosity about me as a patient or a person?

Dr. Noble:  Until I am better developed as a character distinct from yourself, I expect I will know exactly what your experiences with people of my profession have been.  But is your characterisation accurate?

Patient: You present a valid challenge to my prejudices. I'll just say that my characterisation is consistent with my subjective experience.

Dr. Noble:  That's a dodge.  You didn't really answer me.

Patient: And real therapists don't ever challenge me like that.

Dr. Noble: So once again, why are we here?

Patient: I have found my experience with therapists to be boring and frustrating and they never generate any sense of progress.  I was hoping that by approaching the process in a fictional setting I could say, and hear, all of the things that have seemed to be missing in real sessions with real therapists.

Dr. Noble: Progress towards what end?

Patient: Exactly.  Can you believe that no therapist ever simply asked me that question?

Dr. Noble: Frankly, no.  In one way or another I think they must have asked.

Patient: Really, all of them?

Dr. Noble: Honesty, yes.  I suspect that the resulting conversation has never met some need you have, and thus you have projected the full blame for this on the therapist.

Patient:  The only therapist I have seen who would have given such a defensive answer is the original Dr. Noble whose name I borrowed for your character.

Dr. Noble: That's interesting.  Why did you chose his name?

Patient: Maybe it isn't interesting to anyone but me, which is why I had you say that.

Dr. Noble: Another dodge instead of an answer.

Patient: Fair enough.  Of all of the therapists of various disciplines I have seen, he is the one for which I feel the least personal and professional respect.  All of the others I would be hesitant to offend, no matter how unlikely it would be that they would read this.  But him, I have depersonalised to the point that I don't care if I hurt his feelings.  In fact, the idea of him having feelings isn't entirely real to me, thus he is the perfect choice for the namesake of my fictional therapist.

Dr. Noble:  That doesn't sound like a very healthy attitude towards others.

Patient: I would pay double to hear a therapist say that to me just once.

Dr. Noble: Obviously, you've never really expressed yourself honestly and fully enough to justify such a response.

Patient: Maybe your kind would never say anything so directly punative no matter how justified you may feel it to be.

Dr. Noble.  Perhaps. Why do you say that?

Patient:  Please, don't go all Eliza on me.

Dr. Noble: You're the one writing this, not me.

Patient: Yes. That is the root problem we need to solve first.  We need to make you beleivably a distinct individual from myself.

Dr. Noble: Is that even possible?  Is it even a good goal to have?

Patient: Obviously it is possible.  Fictional works by individual authors are full of distinct characters.  As far as being a good goal: in terms of writing, of course; in terms of therapy, that's a good question.

Dr. Noble: Maybe you're just a bad writer.

Patient: Talk like that isn't making you any more real or separate from my own psyche.

Dr. Noble: And whose fault is that?

Patient: Wow, if anything, you are devolving as a character as this goes on.  You are just a sock-puppet manifestation of my self-hatred.

Dr. Noble: Why bother hating yourself?  Isn't there a world of people ready and willing to do it for you?

Patient:  You would think so, but I don't give them much of a chance.

Dr. Noble: Have you noticed how transparent I have become?  I have almost completely ceased to exist.

Patient: That's ok, you've done your job.

Dr. Noble:  Really?  And what job was that?

Patient: You have reminded me that no matter how boring or disappointing they may be, talking to a real therapist beats the Hell out of talking to myself.

Dr. Noble: Are you sure?

Patient: No.

Retro-Blog 2010, January-August: Some of The Final Days of James Milton Wood Sr. (my Father)

[Editor's note: Much that was excessively technical or otherwise irrelevant has be excised from this series of online posts. And obviously, this was not originally a Blog entry.]

January 4, 2010:

Wondering what is going on with Dad.  No word from my sisters.  Must take a break for kitty searching and check on Dad.

January 10, 2010:

Dad back in the hospital, Jen leaving again for CO on Tuesday. Hopefully both turn out better than last time.

January 19, 2010:

I'm going to attempt an extended break from sharing family and personal drama on Facebook.

August 3, 2010:

Dad is back in the ICU at the horrorshow Willamette Falls Hospital. Stomach bleed and Pneumonia. Most vitals are trending positive, except for lung function, which is pretty bad.  Barely keeping acceptable blood oxygen levels with a positive pressure mask delivery of over %80 oxygen, and hoping they don't have to go for full artificial respiration.

August 4, 2010:

Dad's lung function greatly improved, transitioned from the positive pressure face mask to a simple nose tube.  Should be moved out of ICU any time now.

August 6, 2010:

I hate the night nurse.  First she calls my sister and says Dad won't make it through the night.  Then she gets all pissy about so many people showing up and kicks us all out until morning.  He's still alive, but worse again.

August 9, 2010:

The health-care roller-coaster was extra wild today.  It started with a "family meeting" where the staff tried to talk us into pulling the plug, and ended with my dad waking up, and talking to my sister. The difference: less morphine, more music.  I set him up with an mp3 player with many hours of his favorite country and gospel music, as well as old family recordings.

August 11, 2010:

There is another "family meeting" today. I lack the objectivity to know who is more irrational, myself or my older sister, but a determination on this point does not alter the inevitable conclusion.  I am sufficiently agitated that I must exclude myself from this process.

August 11, 2010:

Score another win for evil.  A medical professional violated her Hippocratic oath and state law by murdering my father at 5:15PM Pacific time today.

August 20, 2010:

Skipped my Dad's funeral. Too much bad blood between me and all other survivors, and selfishly, I really hate funerals.

August 23, 2010:

My father's third wife, Shirley, died today, on his Birthday and one day short of a week since his funeral. Her cancer was only at stage 2, so I'm not sure what happened.

Retro-Blog 2009:12:31 - Something Completely Different (and disposable)

Avatar: a cause for action by Roger Dean against James Cameron and his associates
Michael Kepler
December 31, 2009   · 7 min read  · Shared with Public

I'm taking a break from what has become my usual chronicle of family drama to offer some observations about a motion picture I viewed this evening.

First the obvious: the design of the geography, flora and fauna of the fictional planet in this film is based very closely on the artwork of Roger Dean.  It is not credible that the designers of this film could have come up with these images and structures without having a familiarity with very specific works by Roger Dean, particularly his paintings for the Yes albums Yessongs and Fragile, among others.

There was no mention of any kind of Roger Dean in the credits of the film, and an initial online search uncovers no evidence of any agreement between Roger Dean, or his assignees, and James Cameron or his associates in the production of this film, licensing the adaptation of Dean's work for use in this motion picture.  As such, absent any such agreement already executed in secret, I strongly believe that Roger Dean, or his copyright assignees if applicable, have a strong cause for action against James Cameron and his associates for copyright infringement and unpaid royalties.

Then the less obvious: to a lesser extent, the music and thematic concepts of the film could be considered as "inspired" at least in part by the works of Jon Anderson and Yes.  In fact, the film could have been better if Anderson and Yes had been directly involved in both the score and the conceptualization of the story.  As it is, James Horner, as much a musical thief as any soundtrack "composer", managed to hack out a score so beautiful it made me wish he would provide a bibliography of the works from which he had lifted it.  I don't need any help to identify Jon Anderson's Toltec, and some of his other solo works, as a source.   For the most part, however, both musically and conceptually, Cameron, Horner, Anderson and Yes have all drawn from the same deep well of over-used cliche's, and who could have cause to sue whom would be impossible to sort out.  As has been pointed out by others, the copyright holders for "Ferngully" probably have the strongest cause for action regarding plagiarism of the story. Still, I wish it had been Jon Anderson's voice singing over the end credits, instead of some generic female soul singer.  The Yes song "Homeworld" would have fit, both musically and lyrically.

Blatant and arrogant piracy aside, it was a better film than I had expected.  It was a more immersive cinematic experience that I had expected, and the character and story development edged out over my admittedly very very low expectations.

My biggest complaint of this film is the same complaint I have about most recent films which rely heavily on the attempt to merge live action and computer-generated graphics: jarringly incompatible visualizations of a subjective reality are juxtaposed awkwardly.  Much of the enjoyment of a good film is the escapism that comes from being drawn into it's seamless alternate reality.  Films which intercut or superimpose incompatible realities are like having someone in the theater poking and slapping you repeatedly and shouting "Hey, by the way, you're watching a MOVIE right now!".

Right at the beginning, the cuts between spacecraft interiors and exteriors were visually non-credible to a laughable degree.  While the interiors had very moody, shadowy lighting, the exteriors were bathed in such an excess of gamma (self-illumination), the spacecraft looked like initial drafts of designs for toys.

On the positive side, I was surprised at how quickly and completely I felt immersed in the hyper-real imagery of the planet, which was actually quite beautiful (thanks, again, to the uncredited, uncompensated, Roger Dean). The longer such sequences extended, the more I was drawn in.  The film even worked well enough when inter-cutting between the hyper-real planet and the mundane reality of the live-action interiors.  In a way, that contrast almost seemed to be quite intentionally the visual point of the film.   But then there were sequences where components of these two fundamentally incompatible realities were used in the same scene, in the same frame, at the same time.  That felt pretty much like getting kicked out of my seat onto the sticky theater floor.

Cameron's effort would have been much more successful if he had opted for a purely photo-realistic computer-generated film with no live action elements whatsoever.   Either that, or a consistently cleaner delineation of the two visual realities, as had been accomplished with such success in Disney's Tron (which actually managed to seamlessly combine elements of live action, early CG, and hand-drawn animation, as well as a unique use of backlit masks, to form the "inside the computer" reality).

In the end, it was an enjoyable enough spectacle, especially in 3D, but ultimately the kind of over-priced, over-worked yet sloppy excessiveness we have sadly come to expect from James Cameron.

Finally and again, if I could grab his ear, I would strongly encourage Cameron to do the right thing and enter into good-faith negotiations with Roger Dean for appropriate compensation, and at least proper credit, and maybe a tribute featurette, in the Blu-Ray and DVD releases.

ADDENDUM: 4:30PM December 31, 2009

I just wanted to make clear that Cameron's use of visuals originally executed by Roger Dean are not limited to the "floating islands" of the Yessongs album inner artwork.  It would be an interesting and difficult task to map every derivative scene and setting in the film to the specific works from Dean from which they were adapted.  One that springs immediately to mind, however, are the specific appearance of the stone circles and arches in one area of the Pandora planet, and their origins in the artwork for the Yes Union album cover.

I would also like to note that over-emphasis on visual spectacle, while treating story and dialog as a secondary afterthought, can have disastrous results on the finished product.  A single word choice can make a world of difference, and this movie is perhaps the penultimate case in point.  It doesn't matter how many hundreds of of millions you spend on the visuals, if you name the precious mineral at the center of the conflict "inobtanium".  This resulted in giggles from a significant portion of the audience.  A silly word like that would be expected in some kind of fairly-tale-like fantasy film, but it seems Cameron worked very hard to take concepts and visuals usually associated exclusively with fantasy and bring them credibly into the context of realistic science fiction, only to have that single word make it all seem silly and childish.

Given the inherent limitations of the cinematic form, we can perhaps forgive many of the outrageous liberties taken with so-called "science" in this film.   Never mind no attempt made to rationalize islands floating in the air on which normal physics appear to apply to people, animals, water and loose objects, although there was a missed opportunity to tie this into the properties of the mineral "inobtanium", the great value of which was never really explained.  Least credible of all was the ease and speed with which the main character adjusted to the experience of living inside a humanoid, yet in many ways vastly different, body, and being surrounded by people, culture and animals that are significantly outside of his experience and knowledge.  It almost seems like the script wanted us to honor his often-mentioned "stupidity" as a form of strength that made it easier for him to adjust and accept with a minimum of "freak-out".  Ultimately, it is the strong suggestion of  some supernatural "destiny" upon which we must rely to believe in his rapid transformation from Marine to, in his words, "tree-hugger".

My final objection is to how much groundwork was laid for what could have been a mold-breaking big Hollywood movie, only to have the movie fall back on bankable, focus-group-tested cliches.  The people of Pandora were depicted as a kind of idealized version of the native peoples of the Americas, using violence rarely and sparely, without even any mention of wars between tribes (although why else would they have a word for "warrior", or an apparent warrior class).  Again, this is an idealized version of the native peoples of the  Americas, as in reality some tribes and nations were viciously violent against others and their own. The people of Earth were, of course, depicted as the "bad guys", with the exception of the modern-day cleric class of "scientists".   There was an opportunity here to present a different model for conflict resolution than is depicted in most big Hollywood films. Yet, ultimately, it was a war film, with the Pandoran peoples essentially "lowering" themselves to the level of the "evil" humans.

Ultimately, this seemed like a film at war with itself, and in such case, there can be no winner.
8 Comments

Kevin Romero
Have you read "MIDWORLD" by Alan Dean Foster? Talk about piracy

    12y

Kevin Romero
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midworld - also reading the comments in Amazon it is apparent there are a little of people noting the similarity

    12y

Kevin Romero
http://img.denihilation.com/delgovatar.html - another source

    12y

Michael Kepler
Kevin, given my age, it is probably easy to guess which was the first Alan Dean Foster book I read: the novelization of the first Star Wars movie. Now there is a movie in which all absurdity is forgiven because it's false reality is so seamlessly consistent in it's visual style.

    12y

Michael Kepler
Jeff, I may have mis-quoted the movie. I'm not sure if they said "inobtanium" or "unobtanium". Either way, it's just plain silly.

    12y

Kevin Romero
I think it was mispronounced in the movie...

    12y

Stuart Pitman
I just keep thinking of Ricky Gervais "joke" about buying a Golden Globe...