Filed under: Art, Book Conservation, Brave New World, Connections, General Musings, Genetic Testing, Health, Humor, Machado-Joseph, New Horizons, Predictions, Preparedness, Science, Society | Tags: art, arthritis, ataxia, balance, blogging, book conservation, bookbinding, Communion of Dreams, fasciculation, genetics, guns, health, jim downey, Legacy Bookbindery, Machado-Joseph Disease, medicine, MJD, MMJ, neurology, neuromuscular disease, pain, peripheral neuropathy, SCA3, Science Fiction, spinocerebellar ataxia type 3, St. Cybi's Well, travel, vertigo, Wikipedia
For about 30 years, I’ve been a conservator of rare books & documents.
That came to an end yesterday when I met with my last institutional client and explained that I need to retire officially as a practicing conservator. Since they follow my blog posts and social media presence, this did not come as a surprise.
As I was driving home from the meeting, I was working through a fairly predictable mix of emotions. Guilt, because I know that this means that important works in their collection won’t get the treatment they need anytime soon. Relief, because now I won’t worry about accidentally damaging some important/valuable book or document. Loss, because my career was now over. Pride, because I know that I have done good work over the years, and made a real difference. And disorientation, because for some 30 years a big part of my identity was being a Book Conservator in private practice — something almost as rare as many of the items I have worked on over the last four decades.
I think anyone who reaches retirement age probably has some mixed emotions about actually retiring. But for most people, they’re ready to retire — to live life on their own terms, to travel, to just get out of the office, to get away from annoying co-workers.
The problem is, I wasn’t ready to retire. And I had already arranged my life so that I lived it largely on my own terms. I’ve traveled. I didn’t have an office I had to go to. I don’t have co-workers who annoy me. I had honestly expected that I would continue to do conservation work until old age claimed me, since the work is typically not strenuous.
MJD had other ideas, as I’ve noted.
So, officially, I am no longer a Book Conservator.
Yes, I am still many other things. An artist. A writer. A cool, handsome guy who is just 64 and certain that he’s still a babe magnet.
OK, maybe not that last one.
But the point remains that there are still many facets of my identity that remain, even though I have of necessity set aside the title “Book Conservator”.
I suppose “Retired Book Conservator” still sounds pretty cool.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Connections, Feedback, General Musings, Genetic Testing, Health, Humor, Machado-Joseph, New Horizons, Science | Tags: ataxia, blogging, cerebellum, Facebook, health, hypochondria, imposter syndrome, jim downey, Machado-Joseph Disease, medicine, MJD, neurology, neuromuscular disease, pain, proprioception, SCA3, science, spinocerebellar ataxia type 3, vertigo, Wikipedia
I’m in this curious grey zone currently. On the one hand, I’m about 99% certain that I have the onset of MJD, for all the reasons that I’ve mentioned. On the other, I don’t yet have a diagnosis or the results of the genetic test for the disease (which is definitive).
So there’s some small doubt in my mind sometimes as to whether I actually have the disease, or if I’m just concocting it from a variety of lesser symptoms of normal aging and my own rather rough & tumble life. And boy, wouldn’t that be embarrassing? I mean, I’ve told all my family and friends that I’ve got this happening, I’ve posted about it on Facebook, I’ve blogged about it. What if I’ve just imagined it all? What if I’ve got a case of hypochondria going on?
Think of it as an inverse version of imposter syndrome, and you’ll see what I mean. After all, the symptoms I have are currently episodic, lasting a few hours here or there, then disappearing for a day or three. When I’m not actually experiencing them, it’s almost easy to think that I was imagining it all. And not having the disease is how I’ve lived some 63 years of my life, so it’s the norm.
But then, there are days like yesterday.
We’d had some heavy rains, and I needed to go down into our crude basement to see how much flooding there was. It’s not a real basement, as most people think of such. Rather, there’s an area about 10×20′ that has a concrete floor, but then the floor slopes back to be just a crawlspace for the rest of the rambling structure. What passes for a foundation is a porous brick structure, and during heavy rain, it floods. Where there’s the concrete floor is where the boiler for the radiator system sits, and close by is the hot water heater. Such is the state of a 139 year old sprawling house that has seen multiple additions and changes.
Anyway, I’d installed a sump pump to deal with the worst of the flooding, and it works to do that reasonably well. But still, I usually go down and check when we have heavy storms. So that’s what I did yesterday.
After seeing that the concrete area was OK, I went further back just to look around at the rest of the crawlspace, using a flashlight. I had to crouch down a bit where the floor was rising. And the combination of bending over a bit and having a limited amount of light for visual reference triggered a quick and intense vertigo.
This is a classic MJD symptom. Because MJD is largely thought to cause disruptions in the cerebellum, people who have the disease are prone to balance and coordination problems. Without visual references to confirm my vestibular and proprioception, things got quickly out of whack.
Now, this never used to be a problem for me. I always had an exceptional sense of balance and awareness of my body in space, regardless of whether my eyes were open or closed, regardless of movement or orientation of my head. Having this happen is affirmation that my suspicions are likely correct, and I do have MJD and it’s not just my imagination/hypochondria.
I suppose either way, it’s all in my head.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Bipolar, Book Conservation, Brave New World, Connections, Depression, General Musings, Health, New Horizons, Pandemic, Predictions, Preparedness, Society, Survival, Writing stuff | Tags: bipolar, book conservation, Covid 19, depression, Legacy Bookbindery, life, manic, mental health, pandemic, St. Cybi's Well, writing
I’ve been pretty open about my mild bipolar condition since I started this blog a dozen years ago. It’s real, and I have to pay attention to it, but I’ve understood it and been able to manage it safely for decades. My natural bipolar cycle (from trough-to-trough or peak-to-peak) is very long, about 18 months, plus or minus a few weeks, and has been remarkably stable since I was in my 30s.
Until now.
As expected, I hit the bottom of my trough sometime last December. I tend to be stuck in that condition (or in the manic peak, which is actually more dangerous) for a month or so. Then things will slowly start to rise, I’ll feel the depression clear, and energy will return for six or seven months until I get into a truly manic state. And early this year, going into the spring, that’s what happened. And that, in large part, is why I was able to finally finish St Cybi’s Well.
Of course, at the same time, the Covid-19 pandemic hit.
Now, I’ll be honest: Covid-19 has had minimal impact on my life. I’m semi-retired from book conservation due to increasing problems with osteoarthritis in my hands, so I seldom meet with clients. I’m a strong introvert, so I rarely feel the need for much human company beyond time spent with my wife, and easily resist temptations for socializing. I have plenty of things to do at home, and our financial situation is stable. The lockdown and need to be socially distant were not a hardship.
But still, Covid had an impact on me. More than I realized. Because rather than continuing my bipolar climb, I started the downturn back towards depression sometime in May without ever entering into a manic state. It took some weeks before I could be certain that this shift was real (minor fluctuations up & down is normal within the overall bipolar cycle), but it’s been long enough that I am now certain.
When you’ve lived with something like this for literally decades, it’s disorienting and a little frightening to have it suddenly change like this. I can’t predict my baseline psychological state a month from now, or six months from now, or a year from now. I don’t know if this is just a one-off truncation of my more manic period, or if the cycle is now shortened, or is gone altogether.
Kinda like what the pandemic has done to a lot of things we used to consider ‘normal’. We’re left off balance, uncertain of the future.
Now, there’s no reason to worry about me. Having lived with periodic depression for so long, I well understand how to deal with it. My coping skills are very good (writing like this is one example), and I know what to watch for, when to turn to help if I need it.
But take this as a cautionary note, and pay attention to your own mental health. This pandemic is more far-reaching than you might realize.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Brave New World, Connections, Emergency, General Musings, Health, New Horizons, Science, Survival, tech | Tags: atherosclerosis, birthday, blogging, echocardiography, electrocardiography, health, heart attack, jim downey, luck, masculinity, miracles, myocardial infarction, science, Science Fiction, stent, technology, Wikipedia
A year ago yesterday, I met my cardiologist for the first time. After looking over the results of my stress echo-cardiogram and discussing what it possibly meant with me, he said that I needed to have a cardiac cath procedure sooner rather than later. Since he’s one of the premier heart surgeons in the mid-west, and always in demand, I expected that this meant I’d get put on a waiting list and have it done sometime in the next month or so when there was an opening in his schedule.
I nodded. “OK, when?”
He looked down at my chart, then back at me. “What are you doing tomorrow?”
Good thing I don’t panic easily.
* * *
Well, as I recounted a few days later, the procedure went smoothly, though longer than usual, with the end result that I had a couple of stents placed to correct a congenital heart defect. It took a while for all the ramifications of what I had lived with, and what it meant to have it corrected, to really sink in. Part of that was coming to full understanding of just how close to death I had come, because even the slightest amount of atherosclerosis, even the tiniest little blood clot, would have triggered a massive heart attack.
But now it’s been a year. I saw the cardiologist several times over that year, most recently a few weeks ago. And, basically, I’m now past it all. I’m no longer taking any blood thinners, I don’t need to take any real precautions, I only need to check in with the cardiologist once a year or if I notice a problem. If I’m smart, I’ll continue to get regular exercise (I now walk three miles each morning, and get in plenty of additional exercise doing yard work and such) and be a little careful about my diet, but those are things which any man my age should probably do.
So, basically, today’s the first anniversary of my rebirth.
And it feels good.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Alzheimer's, Amazon, Brave New World, Connections, Emergency, Failure, Faith healing, Feedback, Flu, General Musings, Government, Health, Kindle, New Horizons, Plague, Politics, Predictions, Religion, Science Fiction, Society, Survival, tech, Terrorism, Violence, Writing stuff | Tags: Alzheimer's, atherosclerosis, blogging, Brexit, care-giving, Communion of Dreams, election, faith healing, finance, health, heart attack, Her Final Year, jim downey, luck, miracles, myocardial infarction, politics, predictions, religion, Science Fiction, St. Cybi's Well, stent, survival, technology, theocracy
2016 was odd. Just plain odd.
On the one hand, I had the same dumpster-fire of a year that everyone had, in terms of notable deaths, bizarre & unexpected election results here and abroad, and surreal news & social trends.
On the other hand, I’m alive. Which is something of a small (technological) miracle.
I now understand better (thanks to more discussion with my doctors, research, and experience) what happened with my heart, and what it really meant. Turns out that I didn’t have any plaque build-up even in the convoluted artery in question, as I initially thought. No, it was just that badly kinked, and probably had been all my life. I had started to notice it just because of normal aging, meaning that the normal parts of my heart were slowly getting weaker.
In the last six months or so I have finally been able to strengthen the 1/3 of my heart which had never had proper blood supply. Meaning that now I am actually in better cardiac health than I have ever been before. I walk three miles most mornings (5-6 days a week, usually), and don’t feel the slightest bit fatigued from it. The other parts of my 58-year-old body may limit me, but my cardiac condition isn’t a problem at all. Part of me wonders what it would have been like to have had this kind of stamina when I was young and athletic. Another part of me realizes that those limitations helped me develop awareness and self-discipline which I may have missed, otherwise.
Related to that, as mentioned in this post, early last year our financial situation stabilized for the good. We still need to be reasonably prudent about how we go through life, but I no longer feel as if I am hanging on by my fingernails sometimes. Without that change, I may not have felt secure enough to have my heart checked out when I did — meaning that I was very much at risk for the slightest little blood clot to trigger a massive heart attack.
Unrelated to any of that, the election lead-up and results also proved to be both a blessing and a curse for me. I was astonished at the results of both the Brexit and US presidential elections (and no, I’m not going to argue the point in comments — so just refrain from making any on this topic), yet it solved a problem for me with writing St Cybi’s Well. See, in the alternate time-line of Communion of Dreams, prior to the onset of the fire-flu, the US had become an authoritarian, semi-theocratic state. But I was having a really hard time explaining how we had gotten to such a point when actually writing SCW; everything I came up with just seemed too outlandish for the willing suspension of disbelief on the part of the reader.
Well, that’s not a problem any longer. No, I’m not saying that I think that the US is headed for an authoritarian, semi-theocratic state … but because of the rhetoric and rise in power of some groups both in the US and the UK, that is no longer an unimaginable future. As a result, I have been revising the finished chapters of SCW to reflect these new insights, and I think that the book will be *much* stronger for it.
So yeah, I have really mixed feelings about 2016.
Oh well, I suppose that at least I’m around to have them. And that’s a good thing.
Happy New Year. Remember, today (and the first of every month until I say otherwise), both Communion of Dreams and Her Final Year are available for free download.
Jim Downey
*You should watch this sometime. Fun movie.
Filed under: Astronomy, Brave New World, Connections, Fermi's Paradox, Galaxy Zoo, General Musings, New Horizons, Science, Science Fiction, SETI, Space, tech, Universe Today | Tags: Aliens, blogging, Communion of Dreams, exoplanets, HD164595, jim downey, Kardashev scale, Paul Gilster, radio astronomy, Science Fiction, SETI, space, technology, Wikipedia, Zelenchukskaya
An international team of scientists from the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) is investigating mysterious signal spikes emitting from a 6.3-billion-year-old star in the constellation Hercules—95 light years away from Earth. The implications are extraordinary and point to the possibility of a civilization far more advanced than our own.
The unusual signal was originally detected on May 15, 2015, by the Russian Academy of Science-operated RATAN-600 radio telescope in Zelenchukskaya, Russia, but was kept secret from the international community. Interstellar space reporter Paul Gilster broke the story after the researchers quietly circulated a paper announcing the detection of “a strong signal in the direction of HD164595.”
Huh.
Even if it is a signal directly beamed at us, it would require a Kardashev Type I civilization (about 200 years beyond where Earth is currently). If it is just beaming off in all directions, it’s another whole magnitude of power — about a Kardashev Type II.
Huh.
Yeah, I’d say it warrants paying attention to.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Amazon, Art, Brave New World, Connections, Discover, Feedback, General Musings, Kindle, MetaFilter, New Horizons, Publishing, Science Fiction, Travel, Writing stuff, YouTube | Tags: Amazon, André Aciman, art, blogging, Communion of Dreams, direct publishing, feedback, Her Final Year, jim downey, Kindle, literature, memoir, MetaFilter, reviews, Science Fiction, St. Cybi's Well, travel, video, writing, www youtube
Got a couple of new reviews of Communion of Dreams over the weekend. Both are short enough to just post the whole thing. Here’s the first:
Hard to believe this is a first novel…, January 3, 2015
By Paula JeanWell plotted with disparate characterizations. Avoids science fiction cliches by and large. An interesting yarn with lots of good new ideas, thought provoking, and moves right along. Makes you want more. Bravo, Mr. Downey.
If you look through many of the reviews on Amazon and elsewhere, this is a fairly common comment: people are surprised that this is my first novel. I suppose that makes sense, since that information is right there on the ‘About the author’ section on Amazon and at the end of the book.
But the thing is, I’m not at all new to writing. And I’m not a young man. I’m 56, and have been writing fairly steadily since at least middle school. Essays. Short stories. Criticism. Advertising copy. Opinion pieces. Reviews. Memoir. Travelogues. Meditations. Instruction. Easily more than a million words — hell, I’ve written almost that many for this blog alone. So, probably a couple million words. As André Aciman says in this video (about the 2:00 mark):
I’ve written in all kinds of genres. And I’d like to think that most everything I do is governed by one idea, which is that you are after something that is quite difficult to articulate. And so most of the writing process is sort of prowling around this center, that you don’t see, but that the writing process will unveil and unearth for you.
It’s a way of discovering things. About the world. About people. About yourself.
And nowhere is this more obvious than in longform fiction. Communion helped me uncover a lot. St Cybi’s Well is helping me discover a lot more. I think that is why both books have taken such a long time to write, to work through. That process of unveiling (which is a major metaphor throughout Communion) is difficult, demanding, and never entirely done. You keep digging, keep whittling away, looking for a glimpse of the truth.
Speaking of whittling away, here’s the second review from this weekend:
By Amazon CustomerExcellent story. Well written, well-plotted. The dialogue and scene-setting is sparse, almost minimal, but that allows one to appreciate the plot that much more.
Happy New Year. Time for me to get back to work digging, digging, digging this Well.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Astronomy, Brave New World, Connections, movies, Music, NASA, New Horizons, NPR, Predictions, Science, Science Fiction, SETI, Society, Space, tech, YouTube | Tags: 13.7 Blog, blogging, Communion of Dreams, Drake Equation, exoplanets, jim downey, Kepler mission, Marcelo Gleiser, music, NASA, NPR, Pink Floyd, predictions, science, Science Fiction, SETI, space, technology, TESS, The Wall, www youtube
From the opening pages of Communion of Dreams:
Jon sat there for a moment, trying to digest what Seth said. According to what pretty much everyone thought, it wasn’t possible. SETI, OSETI, META and BETA had pretty much settled that question for most scientists decades ago, and twenty years of settlement efforts throughout the solar system hadn’t changed anyone’s mind. Even with the Advanced Survey Array out at Titan Prime searching nearby systems for good settlement prospects, there had never been an indication that there was an intelligent, technologically advanced race anywhere within earshot.
It’s one of the very basic questions of space science: are we (sentient beings) unique? Rare? Common? There are a lot of ways to think about it, and here’s a nice piece on NPR discussing some of the relevant parts of the question and what we’re doing about it. An excerpt:
So, to address the first part of the question we must find out how unique the Earth is. We then should figure out how unique life, and humans, are. Fortunately, thanks to NASA’s Kepler mission, we are making huge progress in the first part of the answer. A key finding is that the majority of stars (around 70 percent) have at least one planet orbiting around them. Based on the data so far (2,740 planet candidates and 115 confirmations), Kepler scientists estimate that some 17 percent of these are Earth-size, meaning with similar mass and rocky composition as the Earth, and possibly close enough to their parent star that water, if present, could be in its liquid state.
More good news arrived on this front earlier this month as NASA authorized the construction of Kepler’s successor, TESS (for Transit Exoplanet Survey Satellite). With launch scheduled for 2017, TESS will survey a much wider area of the sky than Kepler, while focusing mostly on stars that are closer. This way, it will use spectroscopy to resolve at least part of the atmospheric composition of the exoplanets. The goal is to find telling signs of life-related compounds such as ozone, water, carbon dioxide and, if we’re really lucky, even chlorophyll. Successful detection would be very exciting, as it’d point to what optimists expect, a few fairly close Earth-like planets with metabolizing beings.
I hope I live long enough that science is able to make a definitive affirmation of life, then intelligent life, outside our own planet.
Until then, well, there’s science fiction.
Jim Downey
Communion Of Dreams 