Grey Matter

Work is really depressing at the moment. Layoffs, budget tightness, missed deadlines and the general feeling that the CEO thinks employees are not humans - they are just workers. My eyes have recovered, but my throat is still sore and hurts every time I swallow.

This should be the time that brings out the best in the writer. There is conflict, adversity, suffering. The artist is starting to be tortured - and we all know the necessity of pain for inspiring a writer. Hmmmmmmm. That gives me an idea. Maybe I should create a school for producing world-class poets. I'd have to make sure that students couldn't escape. If there was an easy escape from the suffering they couldn't produce their best work. This school would be a life-changing experience for the students - a grueling, tempering and refining of the mollycoddled 20th century child into either a deep-thinking, self-reliant sage or a jibbering wreck (depending on the outcome of the cathartic final exam). Either path could be said to produce great poets.

What is the cumulative effect on a child of having parents and grandparents refer to him in the third person as "the poor kid"? Mostly it is done outside his range of hearing, but no attempt is made to change the diminutive title when he is playing nearby. There is no doubt that the child has special dietary needs that prevent him from eating the wide range of foods that most of us enjoy. I suspect that the continual "poor kid" attitude is teaching him that he is permanently disadvantaged. Instead of focusing on his bright wit, energy and intelligence, he is being taught that he has a crutch, an excuse, a lever for prying out sympathy. He has already learnt that if he eats certain forbidden food that he can be excused for irresponsible behaviour. How will he grow in relationships? Will he subconsciously view himself as a cripple, deserving of understanding and pity? Will he "inherit" hypochondria?

I have my thousand post filk done now. Still about 15 posts to go before it is needed - a little surprising for me, to have something done well ahead of time. I'll post it in the journal when I get to my thousandth post.

I'm looking ahead to my 1000th post on EK. I have a plan. (Of course it is a cunning and devious plan - that goes without saying.) I will write a song/poem/filk that mentions the most prominent EK characters and their quirks, but in a friendly way. Not a piss-take. I gathered a list of members last night, expecting to get about 20-30 regular posters. I was shocked. I gathered a list of 80 names without even trying. I knew EK was a busy board, but I hadn't realised just how many names I had come to know.

If I sit quietly here at home I can just make out the whispered conversation of the Gods of Oz:
Bruces (god of culture-free entertainment): "Oi Steves! We've started."
Steves (god of mindless outdoor activities): "Started what, Bruces?"
Bruces: "You know - the plan to give that sod a quiet life and then dump all the bad crap on him at once."
Steves: "Oh yeah. Sounded neat. How's he coping?"
Bruces: "First we gave 'im the eye infection. That's always a laugh - make 'em itch so much that they have to rub. Then when they rub it makes the eyes worse and spreads the infection. The red eyes come up a flamin' treat mate."
Steves: "But he has sick leave from work, Bruces. He'll just stay home and rest them."
Bruces: "We know Steves. We know. That's when we started plan B. While he's at home, we get his boss to sack two of his engineers. Crikey Steves, ya should've seen his face when his boss rings up and says who got the axe."
Steves: "Cor Bruces. You are a right bastard. We thought we were being cruel when we started crippling his favorite football team."
Bruces: "Nah, that'd never work. You have to hit 'em where it hurts. Now the sod has to try to get his projects going with a team of angry disillusioned engineers. They've just seen a decade and a half of quiet reliable service to a company dismissed with a payout and a handshake. The sucker's on a hiding to nothing now. He's completely powerless."

I've reworked the story of Pig. This time with a return to the original ironic ending.
Pig
I also posted it on EK, specifically asking for criticism. I've no idea what that will educe - probably close to nothing. I've been less than loquacious in the EK library for a while now, so it would be a fair cop.

I went to the doctor this morning. It seems that I have viral conjunctivitis not bacterial conjunctivitis (or was that the other way round?). I'm on a different bottle of antibiotic eye-drops. Let's hope I can see properly by this afternoon so I can meet with some business process consultants scheduled to visit.

Last night we went out to see Terry Gilliam's Lost in La Mancha (sans kids who had been abducted by a school music camp). This is a "making of" documentary for a film that disintegrated before it could be completed. It provided some insight into the difficulties of making a huge-concept film on a very tight budget. I wasn't expecting knuckle-whitening action, but I did feel the documentary whimpered out towards the end. There was no critical decision point hinging the destiny of the participants. It just got worse and worse till all could see that the film was not going to be made.

While watching the discussion of project schedules I couldn't help being reminded of a particular project at work. The La Mancha crew were forced to work with an extremely tight schedule with absolutely no room for error or mishap. With a film production as with a technical project there are too many things that can and will go wrong. If you have no contingency, you will fail. It's not a case of hoping to be lucky. It's not just a case of allowing a little extra time for the unknown creative parts. Problems occur in the parts of the project that should be routine. There are humans involved.

This morning did not start well. I went to bed very early last night because my eyes were blurry and sore. Having slept for too long, I woke with a headache. By 11am I was feeling almost normal.

Last night I felt inspired to write but my eyes wouldn't cooperate. This morning writing was something that seemed foreign. I went out and took some photos instead.

My topic was Urban Suspense - inspired by all the suspended cables around town.
Chain

What if a soul did have a supernatural backup of my memories? It seems silly to think that a non-physical "magical" entity should keep an exact duplication of an extremely complex and somewhat error-prone system. The human brain is robust but far from error-free. If my soul corrects my memories as it stores duplicates of them, or doesn't mimic the way my memories fade and change slightly with time, then it cannot be me. Any life that uses those pristine memories would fail to understand most of the things that its previous host had ever done. It wouldn't understand the person it had become, so most of the memories would be useless - events without a personal context in which to frame them. Any soul that outlives my physical body and keeps my memories has to take with it a copy of my flawed memories and blindspots.

Maybe my soul will continue only as a stream of consciousness with no memories at all or with jumbles of incomprehensible memories. This soul would have to start again on another plane of existence or with a new earthly incarnation. Without the benefit of preserved learning and understanding from its previous life it has no concept of self, no communication, no frame of reference. It can't think in terms of "Wonderful! A whole new life to enjoy!" if the being it has become can't remember its previous incarnation. The only solace provided by this idea of soul is that it stops you having to think about what it must be like to not exist at all. But it really is just as hard to think of what it would be like to know nothing and understand nothing.

Life beyond death with only jumbled incomprehensible memories has at least some correlation with reincarnationist ideas. (It's when you hear about a person having memories of a past life as a mollusc that you have to question the source of the jumbled memories.) Religions that promise punishment for the souls of those who have disobeyed really require a soul to have a fair memory of a past life. Imagine enduring punishment as a soul with no clue of what you'd done to deserve it. Once a being has no knowledge or understanding of past sins what is the point of punishment? It can't be a corrective tool. How can a being change its ways when it can't remember them? Such punishment can only be for the vindictive pleasure of the punisher.

I lost my soul when I realised it didn't make sense.