I posted this Quote of the Day item as a comment on John’s Facebook thread about yesterday’s “And who will that be?” blog entry:
“Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before… He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way.
— Kurt Vonnegut, “Cat’s Cradle”
Why? Well, in part because John (and most other people who heard it, including me) was understandably outraged about Mr. Robertson’s statement about divorcing a spouse who had Alzheimer’s. The simple ignorance of the statement is absolutely infuriating.
But I also posted it in recognition of something else I have learned: that I haven’t learned much about Alzheimer’s.
I should not say that. I have a book to sell, after all, one that I do honestly believe can help people. I want to see that book become a bestseller. I want it to become a reference for anyone who is in a care-giving role, and an insight into what it is like to be a care-giver for all their friends and family who are unsure how to react to their situation. I think that can really help matters for all concerned. And there are millions of people who are (or should be) concerned.
So I shouldn’t say that I haven’t learned much about Alzheimer’s. It undercuts my ‘authority’ as an author. It compromises the image of trust that I should work to build in the audience. It means that I can’t pull off the idea of being an ‘expert’ in the minds of the media elite who can help to promote our book and turn it into a success.
But I can’t lie about this. In fact, it may well be the deepest lesson to come out of the entire experience of caring for Martha Sr, then working hard for two and a half years to write this book: you do not “learn” about Alzheimer’s, or dementia, or being a care-giver by going through this.
Rather, you grow.
You grow to understand that there are few universal truths about care-giving someone with dementia. Yes, there are skills you acquire, and there are some excellent resources out there that can help. And I did learn things about the disease, and good nursing techniques, and even about myself. But I am not an expert on Alzheimer’s. Nor dementia. Nor care-giving.
You grow in ways which are not intellectual. Which cannot be readily taught, or summarized in a blog post or a powerpoint presentation or a tweet. Well, can’t be summarized by me, anyway. That’s why the book is over 400 pages long, made up of hundreds of individual entries, moments of experience, built over time. It’s growth, like a tree grows. That’s not intellectual. That’s not knowledge.
So yes, in some ways I remain ignorant. And I rage when others who have not been through this experience demonstrate their own ignorance, as Mr. Robertson did the other day.
But I hope. I hope that they will read our book. Share our experience. Maybe it will help them understand, before they go through the experience, themselves.
Jim D.
(Cross posted from the HFY blog.)
Filed under: Alzheimer's, Art, General Musings, NPR, Society, Survival, Writing stuff
Saturday afternoon they announced a new “Three Minute Fiction” contest on NPR. Here’s a bit about the theme this time around:
Round 7 Rules
Your story must have somebody arriving in town and somebody leaving town.
Your story must be 600 words or fewer. One entry per person. your deadline is 11:59 p.m. ET on Sunday, Sept. 25.
* * * * * * *
Had a nice bump up in downloads of Communion of Dreams so far this month. About 270 copies already. I’ve really stopped keeping track, but that puts it somewhere about 32,000 downloads so far.
Which has gotten me thinking. After going through and preparing the manuscript to self-publish Her Final Year, I know what is involved in that. It’d be simplicity itself to set things up to self-publish CoD. Given that I haven’t heard squat from Trapdoor books about publishing the book since the start of the year, I’ve given up on that possibility.
Then again, I am very disappointed in the sales of Her Final Year, since we’ve only sold about 10% of what we needed to sell in order to just break even on the costs of setting that up. I mean, we’re talking only a couple of dozen books so far. Damned depressing, especially given how much everyone has said that there is a huge need for the book and how good it is.
So, is it worth it? Would you actually buy a copy of Communion of Dreams?
And can I actually trust that?
* * * * * * *
There was an interesting item on Morning Edition this morning, about a relatively new kind of psychotherapy in use with people facing the end of life. It’s called Dignity Therapy. Here’s an excerpt from the story:
The something that Chochenoff decided to create was a formal written narrative of the patient’s life — a document that could be passed on to whomever they chose. The patients would be asked a series of questions about their life history and the parts they remember most or think are most important. Their answers would be transcribed and presented to them for editing until, after going back and forth with the therapist, a polished document resulted that could be passed on to the people that they loved.
Chochenoff named this process dignity therapy, and for the last 10 years he has used it with the dying. And one of the things that has struck him about the processes is this: The stories we tell about ourselves at the end of our lives are often very different than the stories that we tell about ourselves at other points.
“When you are standing at death’s door and you have a chance to say something to someone, I absolutely think that that proximity to death is going to influence the words that come out of your mouth,” Chochenoff says.
* * * * * * *
I by-and-large hid from all the 9/11 memorials over the weekend.
I have plenty of experience in dealing with traumatic loss. For me, remembering a loved one who has died is important, but so is moving on with life. And I can’t do that by constantly poking at the empty place left in my heart.
I know that I am different from most people in this way. Or at least I assume that I am, based on what I see. And I’m not just talking about the 9/11 memorials all weekend.
Recently, I was contacted by a gentleman who was doing some research for an ‘online memorial’ site. He wanted some details on my father’s death, along with specifics as to his burial location and my mom’s. He was polite about it, but somewhat surprisingly insistent almost to the point of annoyance.
I found this odd, and did a little checking. Turns out this fellow is part of something I call “competitive memorializing” – there’s a whole online community of these folks, who just like trying to see how many such memorials that they can create. Not for loved ones, or people they knew, either. Just total strangers who they for whatever reason decide they should “memorialize.” Who knew?
And here’s a small confession: I didn’t have most of the information this fellow was wanting. It’s just not important to me to remember my dad that way. His body was just a shell – it was what his life was that matters.
* * * * * * *
Saturday afternoon they announced a new “Three Minute Fiction” contest on NPR. Here’s a bit about the theme this time around:
Round 7 Rules
Your story must have somebody arriving in town and somebody leaving town.
Your story must be 600 words or fewer. One entry per person. your deadline is 11:59 p.m. ET on Sunday, Sept. 25.
I have some thoughts on this, tied to the ideas of memory and memorials and the things I have said above.
Because the stories we tell are important.
Jim Downey
(Cross posted to the HFY blog.)
Filed under: 2nd Amendment, Alzheimer's, Ballistics, Connections, Guns, Hospice, Politics, Promotion, Publishing, RKBA, Science, Society
Interesting observation: last week I set up two Twitter accounts, one for “HFYJim” to support the care-giving book, the other for “BBTIJim” for my gun-nut stuff. Since then I’ve been learning the ropes about the Twitter culture, getting established, figuring out who to ‘follow’ and gaining a few followers myself. As of this morning, both accounts had about the same number of followers (about a score).
Now, in any sort of social media like this, you’re going to get some amount of SPAM. It’s always interesting to see where, and how it manifests. Just recently, the new Her Final Year blog has started to get some comments which seem OK though generic on the surface but which are actually links to this or that scam website. That tells me that the blog has now started to show up in search engines enough to be something of a target. No big deal, it goes with the territory.
But in the world of Twitter, spam seems to manifest as bogus followers. Not sure why this would be beneficial, but that could just be because I have my computer set up to filter out all the advertising, flash, and pop-up crap from websites. Anyway, of the two accounts I set up at the same time on Twitter, guess which one had attracted a handful of bogus followers who were ostensibly attractive young women with links to ‘pictures’ in their profiles?
It wasn’t the gun-nut one.
Nope. It was the care-giving one. The one tied to AARP, a variety of different Alzheimer’s and hospice organizations, and which I selected to use to follow different news outlets and science bloggers, many of which have significant left-wing political overtones. Not the one tied to a number of firearms-related sites and bloggers, some of which also have a decidedly right-wing political stance.
Curious, that. Now, this is just a snapshot, and it may be that I’ll see the same thing happen with my BBTIJim profile as time goes on. But I thought it was interesting.
Jim Downey
(Cross posted to the BBTI blog.)
From Chapter 3 of Communion of Dreams:
The image of Seth disappeared, to be replaced by what seemed to be a miniature landscape of hills, a road, a small river, and a bridge. On one of the hills appeared a small person, looking around as though trying to find something. Ling commenced to play with the controls on the side of the projector. Jon didn’t recognize the game, looked to Klee.
The German smiled. In English he said, “No, it’s probably not a game you’ve ever played. It’s a little something Seth and I came up with to help her learn the fundamentals of game theory. In this first level, she has to learn how to communicate with the figure, and agree on a meeting place. The obvious choice is dictated by the terrain features: where the road crosses the river, there is a bridge. That is a unique point in the landscape, and hence a good starting point to establish a reference. The game goes on to introduce other concepts,using a variety of terrain features, multiple players, tacit and explicit communication, cooperation, and competition. She’s quite good at it, and no matter which variables the machine uses, Ling sees the essential key to each scenario quickly. Soon she’ll have mastered the principles of a zero-sum game, and we’ll move on to other lessons.”
* * * * * * *
Via BoingBoing:
‘Sleepy market town’ surrounded by ring of car cameras
Despite low levels of crime, police are installing a network of automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) cameras around historic Royston, Herts.
Police claim the devices will help catch criminals as Royston lies close to the borders of three counties and is the juncture of several main roads.
However, opponents claim the scheme is “grossly disproportionate”, an invasion of residents’ privacy and an unlawful expansion of Britain’s Big Brother state.
The system records the number plates of all vehicles passing through the cameras, logging their details in national database for up to five years.
* * * * * * *
It’s not the first time it’s been done, of course, though this is a somewhat larger scale. And after all, why should we worry? The use of surveillance cameras and other scanners is popular. It makes people feel safer. And if you aren’t doing anything wrong, why should you care?
Control the rules, and you control the game. See you at the crossroads.
Jim Downey
I think they did a good job with the photos they chose to go with my text:
One of my earliest memories is of shooting with my dad. I was about five or six. We were out at a relative’s place in the country. Plinkin’ cans with .22s. Then my dad let me shoot his service revolver for the first time, helping me hold up the Smith & Wesson Model 10 he had been issued by his department. Yeah, he was a cop.
Happy Father’s Day, everyone.
Jim Downey
(Cross posted to the BBTI blog.)
Interesting:
From the FRIDA project page:
Today, the development is at a stage where several prototypes have left the research lab and are being tested in pilot applications, with more work required to reach a fully agile assembly scenario.
This is more of an economic development than it is the advent of our New Robotic Overlords. Having such a robot on a human scale which is fairly modular means that it can be plugged into existing factories and systems with minimal additional investment. Depending on the cost of these things once they’re ready for sale, they could wind up supplanting human labor – likely first in environments where it is too dangerous/costly for humans to work, then increasingly in general repetitive labor.
The Utopian science fiction writers foresaw a society where robotic workers freed humans for a life of ease – allow people to do creative work at their leisure. Cynical bastard that I am, I always figured that such a life of ease would mostly be reserved for the people who *owned* the robotic workers, with everyone else struggling to get by in a society which no longer really needed human labor. Current economic trends have tended to bear this out.
But I suppose we’ll see what the future actually holds.
Jim Downey
Oh, this is really quite delightful:
Ah – sorry, evidently it was pulled. But you can see the trailer, and lots of information about the project, on the artist’s site. Evidently it is also now available on DVD though NetFlix doesn’t have it listed.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Emergency, Failure, Isaac Asimov, Politics, Predictions, Science Fiction, Society
There’s a sign in the desert that lies to the west
Where you can’t tell the night from the sunrise
And not all the king’s horses and all the king’s men
Have prevented the fall of the unwise*
Almost prophetic, isn’t it?
The homepage for Communion of Dreams has the following description:
The world I have envisioned in this book is recognizable, in the same way that the 1950’s are recognizable, but with a comparable amount of unpredictable change as between that era and the present. Most authors will avoid writing about the near-term future, because it is easy for a work to become dated. I’m not that smart.
Unpredictable change. Rapid change. Protests in Egypt started just a month ago. Protests in Libya started just a week ago. Then there’s Tunisia, Morocco, Yemen, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Saudi Arabia. Even China has started to get nervous about controlling discussion of events around the Mediterranean.
If we had Asimov’s psychohistory, perhaps we would have been able to foresee this shift. But even then, I have my doubts. It is one thing to say “people want freedom” and another to not be surprised by what is happening. You can call the internet, Twitter, and mobile phones transformational technologies all you want, but that doesn’t mean you understand *how* the changes they augment will actually play out.
History is full of odd twists and small turns which topple rulers and determine the outcome of wars. Yes, certain forces can come together to create the right environment – to supersaturate the solution, as it were – but then almost any kind of catalyst can precipitate a radical change, and which kind of catalyst makes a difference. I think this is what we are seeing with the sweeping turmoil in the Middle East and Mediterranean – a phase change, as it were, from one reality to another.
This isn’t the first such phase change I have seen. The collapse of the Soviet Union was another. I grew up thinking that it was an implacable enemy, a monolith which would last forever if it didn’t kill us all first. When I traveled behind the Iron Curtain in 1974 I would never have been able to predict that 15 years later the whole thing would just tumble into dust. But then again, no one else did, either.
And that’s the thing. As I work now on the prequel to Communion of Dreams, set just a year in the future (but not our future – a related one near at hand) it is easy to envision other kinds of radical change which would come to create the world of my novel . . . and perhaps our own.
(2/26/11) An addendum: for a further, and much more insightful – not to mention more informed – discussion of the changes in the Middle East, read this article.
Jim Downey
*Alan Parsons, Turn of a Friendly Card.
Got a note from a friend last evening:
Isn’t it cool to actually use the scientific method to figure these things out? I feel like I should send a thank you note to my high school chem teacher.
* * * * * * *
Last week one day when it was warm, I took advantage of the opportunity to get out to a nearby shooting range. I needed to proof some test loads for one of my guns, before I reloaded a bunch of ammo to those specs. That went fine.
I also planned on getting in a little pistol practice with a couple of my pistols I rely on for self defense. That didn’t go fine.
One of the guns had a problem. It failed to fire. I checked the ammunition, and determined that the firing pin wasn’t striking hard enough to initiate combustion. This was bad, and could have led to all manner of very negative outcomes.
* * * * * * *
Listening to the Diane Rehm Show this morning, they were talking about the protests and political situation in Wisconsin. One of the people Diane spoke with was the current Governor of Indiana, Mitch Daniels. Governor Daniels had been Director of the Office of Management and Budget during the Bush II Administration.
During the discussion, Gov. Daniels started in on how government deficits were what was driving the problems in Wisconsin. And he made a comment to the effect that this was just a reflection of the problems we’re having all across the country, particularly at the Federal level.
So far, so good. Deficit spending really *is* a problem, and it needs to be resolved at all levels of government. I couldn’t disagree with Gov. Daniels a bit on that.
Then he said something else: that the problems were all due to government spending, and that further cuts had to be made, in particular to the ‘entitlement programs.’ By this he meant Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.
* * * * * * *
Yesterday I had the time to take apart the pistol which had malfunctioned. Based on what had happened, I knew to look at three possible causes: a problem with the ammunition; a problem with the firing pin; a problem with the spring which drives the hammer forward into the firing pin.
I had ruled out the ammunition as a likely cause. Yeah, the first couple of rounds I tried were reloads (my own), and it was possible that I had either gotten a bad batch of primers or they hadn’t been seated properly. But the third round I tried was factory ammunition. Factory ammo can also fail, though in my experience that is fairly rare. The chance that I would have three failures in a row with different ammunition struck me as highly unlikely.
So I’d probably find the source of the problem in the gun, with either the firing pin, or the hammer spring.
I did the basic dis-assembly, breaking the gun into a couple of main components. One of these was the bottom of the gun, the part that has the frame & grip. At this point I could test the strength of the hammer manually, and see whether it had adequate power. It did.
So I turned my attention to the top of the gun, the part with the slide and barrel and that stuff. Getting to the firing pin isn’t exactly difficult if you know what you’re doing, but it does mean you’re basically taking the whole thing completely apart. And it’s not something you do as part of a routine cleaning – the bit which holds the firing pin and makes it operate properly is pretty closed up, and designed to not need detail cleaning very often.
* * * * * * *
Income disparity in the US has gotten consistently worse for the last 40 years. It’s about twice as bad now as it was in 1968.
Remember the Social Security “lockbox“? How about the “peace dividend“? Do you remember how, during the latter part of the Clinton Administration, there was so much of a budget surplus that there was actually a discussion about the damage it would do to our economy if we retired too much of the national debt?
What happened? Where did these huge deficits come from?
Actually, I think there are a whole bunch of reasons. An economy as massive as ours is subject to a huge variety of forces, both internal and external. But let’s boil it down to the bare essentials:
- Increased spending.
- Decreased revenue.
Gov. Daniels, and most of the rest of the political class these days, is saying that the problem is almost entirely increased spending. And that therefore, the way to fix the problem is to decrease spending.
That would perhaps work. But what if it is due to decreased revenue instead? The Bush tax cuts, recently extended, dropped the US federal government’s total income from taxation below the historical averages. Furthermore, we’ve seen a steady decline in tax rates on the upper income earners and corporations for the last 50 years – the top marginal tax rate during the Eisenhower administration was 91%. For most of the Reagan Administration, it was 50%. During the Clinton years it was just under 40%. It dropped to 35% thanks to the Bush tax cuts.
And during the same time we’ve seen such huge declines in the tax rates, we’ve also seen a growing disparity in income distribution.
* * * * * * *
Got a note from a friend last evening:
Isn’t it cool to actually use the scientific method to figure these things out? I feel like I should send a thank you note to my high school chem teacher.
My friend was responding to the information I had shared about the problem I had with my gun, and how I had tracked it down thanks to a little application of the scientific method. Proper analysis, test the theory, draw conclusions. Problem solved.
But he could have just as well been responding to trying to determine what was the problem with our national deficit.
I think most people don’t really mind some income disparity – we all want to think that we will be rich, ourselves, one day. But the analysis of what is going on with the deficit is another matter, particularly when you start talking about making substantial cuts to programs which make a huge difference for the bottom end of the income distribution. Just going back to the tax level and policies of the Clinton era would not solve all our problems.
But it sure as hell would be a good place to start.
Jim Downey
Communion Of Dreams 