a little fast fiction . . .

It’s a writing challenge on another site, my response.

I haven’t gotten much out these days, so I thought I’d stink this place up with it too. It’s a link to the other site’s version, ’cause it needs the pic, and I haven’t figured out how to do that here yet. Plus, the challenge belongs to someone over there, not really mine to repost. Here it is:

http://neighsayer.thoughts.com/posts/scribbles-bits-challenge-138-i-told-them

Here’s the text, but you may like to look at that Challenge series over there, and the picture is kind of mandatory for the story.

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(In Search of a title . . . )

I told them, you know I told them. Fuckin’ doctors don’t know everything. ‘It’s over.’ They said. ‘Vegetative state,’ they said. ‘let him go,’ they said! I knew it wasn’t over, not yet. I couldn’t tell them how I knew, of course. How would that sound? How could they believe that you weren’t gone, because you’d died once before for several minutes, during your bypass surgery and I knew it, I gave them the time and duration of your flat lining when they tried to tell me it had all gone smoothly? Fuckin’ doctors. Assholes like that aren’t going to credit that I can still feel you. When you’re gone I’ll tell them.

I know, I know: soon, my love. I know you’re not coming back to me either. You’ll be free soon enough.

The bastards knew I couldn’t pay. They already told me enough for me to get that the test was expensive and didn’t pay off often enough for Medicare to pay for it, ever, almost. I knew this wasn’t the time to tell them what I thought of ‘em or try to bitch them into it. If I’m nice, maybe I’m pitiful, husband of fifty years in a vegetative state, maybe they do the test just to comfort an old lady.

Plus, what I didn’t think of, apparently the test is fun. I mean, boys will be boys, and by chance, all the doctors were men and half the nurses too. I know there’s plenty of lady doctors these days, but you could’ve fooled me since this latest episode – last episode! Oh God– of yours. These were boys with new toys, a type we all know well. How this machine is flying under the radar, how it’s not all the buzz, I don’t know, doctor’s want money for us to even know about it, I guess. But Jack, the fucking thing is a mind-reader.

I looked up what I could, read their blog about it a little, and of course it’s complex. ‘Mind-reading,’ that is a very old, low-tech term; of course a brain is not a book. What happens in the brain, they say, doesn’t happen in English. To draw out something specific, something remotely coherent, anything concrete at all – that remains highly unlikely.

Ha – I know what you would’ve said to that, Jackie! I can see you, squinting and talking around one of those huge blunts you smoked forever – ‘Depends, Hon.’ Hooooot. ‘How coherent was the patient when they were conscious?’ I’d agree with you about most patients, Love. Just not you.

So what they say is, they’re not really sure why it works, I mean, they really don’t know why it doesn’t work better, or worse. They can’t say if the view they get of what is going on in a brain suffers from lookng too close, or from taking too high-level or too general a view. They don’t think there’s ever going to be a better version, because they don’t know what they might ever do to change it, apparently, the machines right now either work or not at all. They don’t degrade and they don’t improve. But when they work, what they give is  . . . interpretive. My word, not theirs. I kind of read between the lines, but I’ve got eighty years of experience at it – I’m the girl you want for that sort of thing, hearing what it is they’re not saying. Right Jackie? The machines, like brains they say, don’t have English as their operating system, you don’t get email or printouts.

What the machines put out is . . . art. Like dreams, or some combination of the two. There are a lot of views that seem random, like the weirdest of dreams, and the loved ones who see them aren’t comforted, although some see the chaos as evidence that the person really isn’t any kind of conscious. Then the family can feel better about letting them go. I imagine I’d spend the rest of my days going mad trying to understand it – but I can take that risk, at my age. Plus I knew you were still there. Apparently some few percent of the few percent of people who actually get their vegetative loved ones tested get a view that for some reason satisfies them. And for some reason, the ones that give meaning, by all accounts, these views are art, and not just art, but really good art. That drives the human artists nuts. Shades of Frankenstein, a line that was never supposed to be crossed, a machine that dredges the comatose for art! Lucky for me, though.

We never looked at the same thing the same way at the same time, Jackie, not once. I always said so and you always disagreed, proving my point for me, thank you. You always were such a gentleman that way, you knew how to agree to disagree without hurting people’s feelings. But you never admitted it, you never got anything right with me, like we couldn’t ever learn each other no matter how many decades we lived together. You were a gentleman, formal kind of, because, in a way, we never really met.

We were close sometimes, for moments or years, but that was something different, that was time out of time, somehow, wasn’t it? I think we weren’t ourselves, I think we made new selves for each other. The other times, when life was crazy and we lost that contact, when I saw you from a distance, I was sometimes a little shocked sometimes thrilled, but it was always a reminder of our differences. Rich, poor, conservative, liberal, we had them all. I never could see things your way, Jackie, but I always felt you.

I just wish I could have known you.

When we were apart, I’d see you so far away and I’d come back to you. But when I got close, you were always out of sight. That’s how it was, that’s what I thought all our lives together, but God bless you, or God damn you for holding out on me to the very end, I got your image.

As it turns out, my love, it’s all moot, the test. They’re talking to me now, telling me, yes, you were right, he is still mentating, but the test, run over time, shows that you’re fading away anyway, sure as taxes. I can’t feel that, all I know is for now, you’re still here. And you really saw us!

Why wouldn’t you tell me?

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thanks for reading!

I Love that Map on the Stats Page!

Abuse with an Excuse

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85% of the human brain is just filler!

They say we only use something like 15% of our brains. There are hydroencephalytics who only have 15% of their craniums occupied with brain tissue, and they’re still pretty much functional (this is part of the brain plasticity stuff that’s so fashionable now. These folks show that brain maps are changeable).

This from Time magazine, a link supplied by Mrmacq earlier today:

http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2092438,00.html

“Not only does this make a hash out of the accepted theory that the brain could not become more sophisticated until it got bigger, it also casts doubt on what’s been known for the past 30 years as the “obstetric hypothesis” — the idea that big human brains, and the big human heads that resulted, are what’s responsible for the unusually deep, bowl-like shape of the human pelvis. There’s simply no way a baby noggin could move through the birth canal unless human females evolved the orthopedic architecture to accommodate it.

But sediba calls that sensible-sounding idea into question. Its skull may be small, but the pelvis of the female was already human-like, without the flat, flaring look of those belonging to other Australopithecene. That may have conveniently helped it manage the big heads that would come along hundreds of thousands of years later, but it did not evolve for that reason. “Parts of the [sediba] pelvis are indistinguishable from that of humans,” says Job Kibii, also of the University of Witwatersrand. “At least in this lineage, the obstetric hyothesis…is wrong.””

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2092438,00.html#ixzz2DxBAXvra

This was the theory of the pelvic shape versus cranial/brain size for early humans, but it was wrong, and gives credence to my theory, the point of this post. The massive human brain is just filler. The pelvis changed first. We don’t yet know why, but it did, and small-skulled babies just fell out when we started walking around upright. The big-headed babies stayed in, and so those were the ones that made it to term and survived.

The big-brain mutation only succeeded because it kept those kids in long enough to develop to term. It – we – and our big brains are one of those accidents of evolution, a match of mutation to external conditions, and it has nothing to do with intelligence. Your big, fat head you’re so proud of, all that does for you is keep you in Mom long enough to develop the ability to breathe air before you were spit out into the world!

So wrap 15% of your brain around that!

😉

Soma Vacation

I’ve been on a bit of a dry spell, I’ve kind of said it all and I’m frustrated. My cause will never be won, not even a little. It’s tiring. We’ve had a death in my wife’s family and there’s a lot of stress around wills and probate and Oedipal crap going on. I’m dealing with it all by smoking a lot of dope.
But this is a temporary thing, a sort of narco-vacation, I’m gearing up for a treatment to give me some relief from the psoriasis, and it’s best not to be a smoker when your immune system is being suppressed. I don’t want to write a bunch of crap high. I am having a few ideas, though, in the voice memo app on the phone, maybe two ideas for a fiction project, but four or five for blogs. When I come back to y’all and to RL, I’ll have a few ready.
I’ve already been in this state and not writing for two months already, and it is strange and really encouraging to see I’m still somehow collecting a few views! I don’t know how it happens, but I can fantasize, I guess. Who’s my reader in Brazil?
Whoever’s reading, thank you, it means a lot. If any of you believe me, if someone out there can see the reversal of logic that the study of psychology and abuse shows the ‘theory of punishment’ to be, that is wonderful (I mean any punishment at all). I think, at least where I live, Canada, we’re a fairly small group. It’s nice to think someone might see it my way. Please don’t correct me if you know no-one does. That’s my baseline anyway.
Anyway, thank you all, I’ll see you pretty soon.
My tolerance was back to my old days after about one day. I can’t afford this shit.