Filed under: Climate Change, General Musings, Global Warming, Government, Health, Iraq, Politics, Press, Society
There’s a very good column by Eugene Robinson in Friday’s Washington Post, about the need for someone with some smarts in the Oval office. From the piece:
One thing that should be clear to anyone who’s been paying attention these past few years is that we need to go out and get ourselves the smartest president we can find. We need a brainiac president, a regular Mister or Miss Smarty-Pants. We need to elect the kid you hated in high school, the teacher’s pet with perfect grades.
When I look at what the next president will have to deal with, I don’t see much that can be solved with just a winning smile, a firm handshake and a ton of resolve. I see conundrums, dilemmas, quandaries, impasses, gnarly thickets of fateful possibility with no obvious way out. Iraq is the obvious place he or she will have to start; I want a president smart enough to figure out how to minimize the damage.
And even better:
Actually, I want a president smart enough to know a good deal about science. He or she doesn’t have to be able to do the math, but I want a president who knows that the great theories underpinning our understanding of the universe — general relativity and quantum mechanics — have stood for nearly a century and proved stunningly accurate, even though they describe a world that is more shimmer than substance. I want him or her to know that there’s a lot we still don’t know.
I want the next president to be intellectually curious — and also intellectually honest. I want him or her to understand the details, not just the big picture. I won’t complain if the next president occasionally uses a word I have to look up.
I wasn’t the smartest kid in my high school. But I was pretty damn close. I certainly wasn’t the smartest kid at my college – Grinnell was full of people as smart or smarter than me. But I have never, ever understood the instinct that some people have that their president should be someone “they’d want to have a beer with”. I don’t want to have a beer with them. I want them to bust their ass working to fix the myriad problems we face, or at least to mitigate the impact of those problems while we work to solve them over the long term. Not just Iraq, or terrorism, but Peak Oil, global warming, health care, the threat of a pandemic, rebuilding New Orleans, rebuilding the National Guard, et cetera, et cetera. I want someone who is at least as smart as I am, who is at least as well educated, who has some real life experience beyond just getting elected to office, and who has shown that they are actually competent in managing something more important than some bloody sports team. After six years of the Worst. President. Evah. you’d think that this would be obvious, but it is telling that it takes a columnist for one of the largest and most important papers in the country to come right out and say it.
Sheesh.
Jim Downey
(Tip of the hat to Hank Fox for the link.)
Filed under: Flu, General Musings, Government, Health, Pandemic, Plague, Science Fiction, Society, Wired, Writing stuff
In this post from last week, I talked about the relevant issues confronting us with pandemic threats such as the bubonic plague. Well, as you may have heard over the last day or so, public health authorities have acted to impose quarantine restrictions on a man with a drug-resistant form of TB. He’s now being treated with antibiotics as the authorities try and back-track his recent trip to Europe and see who he may have exposed to this particularly nasty strain of the disease.
In my early thinking about the ‘fire-flu’ which forms the back-story of Communion, I was intending on it being a strain of influenza which had developed resistance to early anti-viral treatments. I thought I’d have a series of serious but not pandemic flu strains weaken the global economy, and then have a really nasty one hit that was drug resistant. But so few people understand about the problems presented by widespread and inappropriate antibiotic use, that I gave on on that mechanism, figuring that it would just take too much explanation. Going with the ‘weaponized’ form of flu gave me some additional plot devices to work with, as becomes clear when you read the book.
But that doesn’t mean that the threat isn’t real. In fact, the reaction of the public health authorities is telling, I think. They know that having a nasty, drug-resistant form of TB widely spread by someone this way is a very serious threat, and could easily present a huge problem, and turn back the public-health clock 100 years.
Charming.
Jim Downey
“I need a toothpick.”
“No, mom, you had a toothpick after dinner. You picked your teeth for 40 minutes.”
“I need a toothpick!”
“Why?”
“‘Cause there’s something stuck between these front teeth.”
“You just brushed your teeth. There’s nothing there.”
“I can feel it.”
“Let me look.” (Looks. Nothing there.) “There’s nothing there but your gum, swollen from picking at it so long earlier.”
“I need a toothpick!!”
*sigh* Whisper, that only I hear. “Oh, not this again.”
“I need a toothpick!!”
“Mom, there’s nothing there. I just looked. Really.”
“But I can feel it!!”
“No. You picked at it so long…”
“When?”
“After dinner. You had a toothpick for over 40 minutes.”
“Really?”
“Yes, really.”
“But there’s something there! I know it.”
“Mom, I just looked. THERE IS NOTHING THERE. You just brushed your teeth, and rinsed…”
“I did? When?”
“Just now. Just two minutes ago.”
“But I know that there’s something stuck there…”
Jim Downey
(Cross-posted from Unscrewing the Inscrutable.)
Filed under: Flu, Government, Health, Pandemic, Predictions, Press, Science Fiction, Society, tech, Writing stuff
[Mild spoiler alert.]
Pandemic flu is at the heart of my novel Communion of Dreams. It is the ‘history’ of the novel, which has shaped the society of 2052 (the setting of the book). And it turns out to be the threat faced by the characters again in the latter third of the book. I won’t go into further detail, in case you haven’t read the book and would like to see how that all plays out.
When I first started formulating the novel, I immediately turned to the model of the 1918 flu pandemic to give me some idea of how I had to cope with the impacts that a renewed pandemic would have on our society. Since then, there have been additional pandemic scares crop up which have allowed me to see new aspects of this (and which, I am convinced, would make the book potentially a best seller, if it was allowed to escape the ‘sci-fi ghetto’). Why? Because pretty much everyone is slowly becoming convinced that we’re due for another pandemic, perhaps a really bad one.
And that fear has public-health officials nervous. Because they know that managing fear during a pandemic will be difficult. One example of this is the current research into whether conventional face masks would be effective or counter-productive in the event of a flu epidemic, and the recently announced guidelines from the CDC about who should wear masks, when.
While I worked in an abulatory surgical center during grad school, I had to wear a surgical mask at all times. You get used to it. And it does help control certain behaviours which can lead to the spread of disease (sneezing, absent-mindedly touching your nose or mouth, et cetera). But masks are not a panacea, and if used improperly or with a false sense of the protection they provide, could actually make matters worse on a societal scale.
It’ll be interesting, from an intellectual standpoint, to see how this plays out. Because I do expect a pandemic flu ‘event’ to happen within my lifetime. Not that I particularly want to actually have to experience it, mind. Mostly, I just hope that I have my book published before it hits, so people don’t think that I am just playing off of the fear and grief of recent history…
Jim Downey
Filed under: Alzheimer's, Depression, General Musings, Health, Marketing, Promotion, Writing stuff
I was chatting online with a friend who is a bookseller, and asked whether there was a “Caring for an Alzheimer’s patient from a male perspective” book out there, since most men aren’t care-givers in the way I am. The response I got back:
On an average day, we carry 6-8 titles on understanding Alzheimer’s and caring for people who have it. They are geared towards children dealing with parents. None of them are from a male point of view. However, watching the titles that come out and do well, my suggestion would be to write a memoir. That’s what sells. People love crisis memoir…
To which I replied:
Let’s see…think I have the material to pull one off? Orphaned at 13…adolescence of acting out, violence, drug abuse… but pulled it together enough to get into one of the premier small colleges…car accident during my sophomore year which left me partially paralyzed, but I got involved in a martial art, recovered almost full function and went on to be a world class athlete in an obscure but increasingly popular sport…rejected by the Writer’s Workshop, but found a career in grad school…opened a business, grew that business into the largest gallery in the state, but that failed in spite of working 70-80 hours per week, leaving me in huge debt and struggling with depression…in spite of that managed to write a work of fiction and become a seminal ‘internet performance artist’ (Wikipedia says so!)…became a beloved newspaper columnist while caring for my Alzheimer’s-suffering mother-in-law, fighting the recurrence of depression and flirting with alcoholism…all the while a victim of migraines, having ‘lost my relationship with the God of my childhood’…
Yeah, with the right kind of spin, Oprah would love it. 😉
Actually, all of that is true, and there’s a lot more besides. Maybe I ought to consider this if I can’t get someone to pick up Communion of Dreams…hmmm…
Jim Downey
Filed under: Alzheimer's, Depression, General Musings, Health, Sleep, Writing stuff
That’s what the doctor said yesterday.
We took my mother-in-law in for a check-up – first time she’s seen the doctor in almost a year. Oh, he’s been involved in her care all along, and will usually just prescribemeds or treatment without seeing her, based on our phone calls and stopping by his office, explaining what is going on, what we think she needs. That may seem unusual, but the truth is that it is easier and safer to do this – means that we don’t have to get her up and off to his office when she is fighting the flu or has been hurt. My medical skills are very good, and generally we can cope with anything here at home so long as we get the support from him.
Anyway, it was time for him to actually see her, and since she was doing OK presently, we got her off to his office. Thorough examination, discussion of her condition, confirmation of what we had suspected: that she had a minor stroke three weeks ago which had led to more little complications to our lives, less comfort for her.
And he asked us how we were doing, as he usually does. Whether we were getting a break now and again, et cetera. He, perhaps of all people, understands what care-giving at this level demands. He confirmed that we’re providing about the best care possible, based on what he can see, and make the comment at the head of this post. We came home.
And since then, we’ve been dealing with the ‘fallout’ of that visit. People who are living with many forms of dementia, and particularly with Alzheimer’s-type dementia, are disrupted by any changes in their routine. We’re lucky in that my mother-in-law usually stays pleasant during such changes (visits from people, going out to someplace strange) – many Alzheimer’s patients get very angry or combative during such occasions. But we always experience more problems in the 24 to 48 hours following. Last evening she was argumentative and hostile, and overnight she slept very poorly – changing position in her bed about every half hour after about midnight. And as a result, since I was ‘on-call’ and listening to the monitor to make sure she didn’t need help, I basically didn’t sleep during that whole time.
So this morning I’m exhausted, suffering a very nasty headache. And wondering just how the rest of the day is going to go wrong.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Alzheimer's, Depression, General Musings, Health, Sleep, Writing stuff
I once had a boss who was one of those self-made millionaires, a real classic ‘alpha’ from circa 1965, complete with the mindset and abuse of employees, even though it was some twenty years later. Once, when something I did was screwed up, I went in to talk with him about it. All in a huff he told me “I don’t want excuses.” I looked him in the eye and said “I’m not here to give an excuse. I’m here to give an explanation, so we know what went wrong and can avoid having it happen again.”
Eventually, I got him trained, and when it came time for me to move on we parted on good terms.
Nothing is screwed up, and I haven’t made any big mistakes that I’m here to explain. However, I have commented several times about how tired I am, and how being a full-time (read “around the clock”) care-provider for someone with Alzheimer’s means that I don’t ever get enough sleep. Basically, either my wife or I are always listening to a baby monitor at night, at most dozing lightly. We take turns doing this. The problem is, that even when you’re not ‘on-call’ it is tough to sleep really soundly when your bedmate is dozing lightly. And while I am willing to make many sacrifices to care for my mother-in-law, giving up sleeping with my wife altogether isn’t one of them.
Most parents know what this will do to you, since caring for an infant means this sort of interruption to your sleep cycle for weeks on end. But for us, this has been going on for about three years – it’s been a full year since we had much of a real vacation from it. It means that I operate at a chronic sleep deficit. I feel like I am perpetually at about the third entry in this blog-post about sleep deprivation, with a chronic low-grade headache, lack of focus, shortened temper, forgetfulness, et cetera.
Anyway, there’s an explanation for the next time I say that “I’m so tired,” echoing Lennon’s song of the same title written after three weeks of interrupted sleep cycle when off to Transcendental Meditation camp. When I say I don’t have the energy to do this or that, or that it is difficult to get my focus for accomplishing something, this is what I mean, not that I just didn’t get a good night’s sleep the night before.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Depression, General Musings, Health, Science Fiction, Writing stuff
One of the earlier incarnations of Communion had the main character, Jon, suffering from stress-triggered depression. I had seen it as an artifact of his early life, combined with a genetic disposition towards either depression or bipolar disorder.
I dropped that because it was just a little too autobiographical. The character isn’t ‘me’, not by a fair amount, but of course each of the different characters all contain some aspect of my personality and/or experience, drawn upon for a realistic portrayal. But when I had him suffering from depression, I thought that it would be too easy for anyone who read the book to conclude that I was indeed projecting the main character as myself.
I’m more ‘bipolar’ or ‘manic-depressive’ than suffering straight clinical depression. Been that way all my adult life. Learned to recognize the symptoms of any given phase in late adolescence, and to modify my behaviour to compensate accordingly. Still, the long dark periods of depression are grim, and tend to be exacerbated by stressful situations. Like the one I’m in now (explained in full in this post). Being an around-the-clock caregiver for someone with dementia is exhausting and isolating – two things that tend to feed my depression and curtail even the manic energy I feel when on the upswing (the ramp up into a manic state can be empowering, so long as you can maintain control – it is when things get out of hand that it becomes dangerous).
Anyway, it has been a particularly rough patch with my charge right now, as she has been having some other health problems which have thrown our routines into disarray and placed even more stress on my wife and I. Being the self-reflective sort that I am, I got to thinking about how such psychological strain effects people, which lead me back to thinking about the initial motivations and behaviour of my protagonist, which…well, lead to this.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Genetic Testing, Health, Machado-Joseph, Predictions, Science Fiction, Writing stuff
There’s a very good piece in today’s New York Times titled Facing Life With a Lethal Gene about one young woman’s decision to be tested to see if she carries the gene for Huntington’s Disease.
It is a very difficult decision to be tested for a genetic disease which you may have, and for which there is no known treatment (let alone a cure). If you test positive, you know exactly the sort of future you face. And, if you test positive, it can have a significant impact on your employment and insurance possibilities, even decades before you might experience any onset of symptoms.
There is a similar disease which runs in my family called Machado-Joseph. In terms of statistics, there is about a 68% chance that I carry the gene for it, though I do not have the other familial characteristics which seem to track with the disease. So I have elected not to be tested. Besides, at nearly 50 years of age, if I did have the onset of the disease, it would be likely that it would progress so slowly that I would die of something else (the younger the age of onset, the more rapidly the disease progresses).
Anyway, I recommend you read the article. Because as the science of genetic testing develops, it is likely that at some point you will have to make a decision about whether or not you are tested for either a genetic disease or a predisposition towards some type of health problem. Better to consider the matter before being confronted with it. Trust me on this.
What does this have to do with Communion? [warning – spoilers ahead]
The book’s history is premised on a flu pandemic about 40 years prior to the story. This pandemic not only killed hundreds of millions outright (and threw the world economy into complete chaos, resulting in hundreds of millions more deaths) , it left most of the survivors sterile – and did the same to most of the resulting children born. This is a recipe for extinction.
I chose this scenario for several reasons, not the least of which is that I think we are due for a world-wide pandemic sometime in the next decade. But also my family history and personal choice came into play – long before there was a genetic test to determine whether or not I carried the MJD gene, I made the decision to be childless. I felt at the time that the risks of passing on the disease were just too great. Not having any progeny leaves one with a sense of loss, even if it was a decision made for the best of reasons. I could only surmise that the effects of imposed childlessness population-wide would be even more profound.
And, [again, spoiler alert!] the psychological impact of the transformation which comes at the end of the book, through the agency of the alien artifact, would be a very literal rebirth for the entire human race. Not only do we give birth to a subsequent species in the form of the AI/Expert Seth (who achieves true sentience, midwifed by the artifact), but the entirety of the effects of the pandemic are cleansed – meaning that humankind has a second chance, and can start afresh. The hope is, of course, that we will do better the second time around.
So, go read the article.
Jim Downey
Communion Of Dreams 