On track, I think

I had Thanksgiving with my family for the first time in about two years. We held it at my brother Joe's group home. It was first time I've had a get together with all three in-town siblings in about two years. We didn't cook; nobody had time to do that, and the one who did can't cook. So, my siblings had it catered.

I brought Dad who's now totally dependent from his dementia. He has Progressive Supranuclear Palsy,  which destroys his coordination as well as his mind. He'll speak and suddenly forget a noun. It's always nouns, common or proper. You have to wait for him to come out with the word for a minute or two. And the delay is getting longer. He can hardly walk. Getting him from the doorway to a vehicle could take twenty minutes. It requires constant attention to take him anywhere.

It was a surprisingly pleasant time. Everyone pitched in, nobody bickered, and if I had boring moments, and there usually are with family gatherings, I said screw manners and began to write in my notebook. It made things so much better. I wish I started it twenty years ago.

The day before, my shrink and I had a disagreement over medications. She would not raise my ADHD meds. She deemed it too dangerous, and what does that oath say? Instead, she raised my lithium dosage. I was leery of this, but I saw my Mom go off her medications enough to know better.

To my amazement, there was an improvement within days. Even better, the writing seems to be going smoother, I seemed to get a lot done the last few days. But won't have an idea if it's really going faster for another week at least. I usually don't have a lot of time to write on Mondays and Tuesdays.

So, maybe my mind wasn't wandering from ADHD. Maybe I was moping. I definitely don't mope now at all. Lithium might take a while to have an effect, but that's if you're starting it. If it's raised dosage, the effect could be pretty quick.

Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving: that time where we say thank you to no one in particular for nothing in particular. Or, if you believe in God, you could replace "no one in particular" with "God,"  and "nothing in particular" with "everything."

Or if you want to get historical, you may say it's to commemorate the feast where the Puritans said thank you to the Indians who saved them from starving. The Indians were then shown just how ruthless Europeans, and their diseases could be. The story always sounded fishy to me as the Puritans' version of saying thanks would have been to covert you their own intolerant Christian sect.

In the good ol' days, and by that I mean during the Gilded Age and Jim Crow, the thanks in Thanksgiving would have been "Thank you boss (or masta) for giving me two days off in a row."

Only now, in the Second Gilded Aged, we've revoked the "spirit" of Thanksgiving by forcing people, especially in retail, to work. So, Thanksgiving is now coming to mean, "Thank you Target for this marvelous Black Friday sale starting Thursday!"

A different meaning for a new age. It's the most versatile holiday ever concocted.

My old nemesis in my mind

Writing saved my life after I had a complete breakdown in 2009. It's been a lifesaver every day since.

But it has one source of frustration, and it's not about getting published. It's the slow pace of my writing. You might have read here I have tried various changes in technique, but my writing speed remains glacial. I'm not being over-demanding on myself either. I'm left with one answer, and it's been under my nose--actually behind my nose-- all the time.

It's my ADHD. I think I must "leak seconds" as I write. I caught myself just now between sentences, sitting with my mind wandering about events today. That might be somewhat appropriate if I don't know what I'm writing, but I've spent months since 2009 frustrated because I knew where the plot was going, I couldn't get it into the PC for months. I think this is what happens: if coming out with a certain sentence baffles me, my mind will wander first before solving the problem. Sometimes I'll go back to previous paragraphs and start alter them.

Now that I suspect it, I caught myself today during conversation having my mind drift away, and it wasn't because it was boring. It was because I didn't know what to say. I imagine doing that now hundreds of times a day while I'm writing, and I think that must be the problem. It would explain why I could write so fast sometimes, but write so appallingly slow overall, because it's a sporadic problem. 

There's two solutions here: one is to raise my medication to liver-choking levels. The other is to simply try to stay aware. I could do what I do with reading and set a timer every five minutes with the goal of reading seven pages over that time. That works beautifully with reading, but I'm not sure anything similar will work with writing. Reading is traveling a paved road. Writing is cutting through an unexplored jungle with a machete.

(Found myself wandering again! This is it!)

Children with ADHD are known to be slow and that was true of me all throughout school. I remember it like a nightmare. (Went away again!) Not only did I have my mind drift during tasks, but I had to double check everything to make sure I didn't mess it up, and then check again to make sure I did the double check right. I had all kinds of hitches to translating instructions to actions. Things coaches would say about throwing a baseball, "Come over the top," made no damn sense to me. Didn't I come over the top? I discovered what they were talking about as an adult. Then couldn't stop experimenting with throwing for a whole morning.

The odd thing about attention deficit is that it's not a matter of not having attention. No, I could get obsessed with watching ants (and killing them) for whole afternoons. I could get obsessed with dice for days. The problem was I couldn't direct my attention. It had a mind of its own and went where it wanted. With untreated ADHD, I learned what it was like to have no choice about my life, because something so basic to my conscious thoughts guided me. I would compare it to being possessed.

Leading researchers are now defining ADHD as a "Deficiency in the executive function of the brain."    That might sound abstract, but it covers all the symptoms. Inability to plan, distractability, failure in working memory, impulsiveness, all of it. It's definitely a real disease. It might be difficult to spot in borderline cases, but it's symptoms are very clear in profound cases.

From the way my life went with the symptoms untreated, I would tell any parent do not leave ADHD undiagnosed and untreated. Its symptoms are not difficult to spot. Don't assume your child will outgrow it. You'll sentence them to a hard life even as adults. And absolutely don't rule out drugs as the treatment.

I see my psychiatrist on Wednesday. In the meantime I'm going to see how well I could address this without the meds, but there isn't too much time. Or maybe there is if my mind wouldn't wander.








 

The guest

I live in a building where the apartments are flush against each other. I could hear just about everything. My neighbor has a friend who comes to visit him now and then. But she's not really a friend. She's an alcoholic. While she's here, she spends hours shouting obscenities at him, throwing things, slamming doors, banging on the walls.

It's intermittent; it happens a few times an hour, day or night. Just when I'm about the call the police, it stops. A few days ago she raged for twenty straight minutes, most of it banging on the front door. Apparently, he locked her out. Unfortunately, he eventually let her back in. I'm going to ask him when she's gone why he ever lets her stay.  

I don't hear him shout back, but he's had throat cancer, so he couldn't shout if he wanted to. He's not a large guy, and he's feeble. I can't see him initiating abuse.

The last time she was in town, she squatted in the basement. That was neither safe nor sanitary, but at least it was a little more peaceful.

She's stayed with him four times, usually for a week to a month, and always it's like this. To describe her, she wears her hair bleach-blond and short, and she has tattoos, most prominently, on her face. Not artistic ones, either. She's in her forties or fifties.

So, the police came, and now it's quiet, until she gets back from the station.

The ADHD boredom survival pack

I served on jury duty Monday. It looked to be a lot of hurry up and waiting, so I needed the right supplies to get through the day. So, I'm going to tell the world how a man with ADHD fixes his backpack for a long boring day, and my reasoning behind them.



Now this is how I packed especially for jury duty along with my thinking at every step:

Hardcover book-- Essential to keep boredom at bay

But, I might get bored with that one.
Pack a second hardcover book

Wait! Those two are fiction. I need to be well-rounded.
Pack a third non-fiction hardcover book

But I might get bored with reading.
Notebook for writing

Hey, isn't the court building close to the library?
Fourth hardcover book to be returned to library.

I don't want to buy lunch.
Pack three apples.

But they'll get all bruised in the backpack.
Take Cracker box from recyclables and place apples inside, then pack.

Wait, one of the books I'm taking is signed. I don't want it to get damaged.
Take Grape-Nuts box from the recyclables, put the book inside.

I need to edit a friend's story by Thursday.
Print manuscript. Grab folder, throw contents on some horizontal surface somewhere. Put manuscript in and pack.

Wait, it might rain today.
Stuff raincoat on top of everything. 

And I might get thirsty.
Take bottle of water from refrigerator, pack it.

What if the sun breaks through the clouds? 
Pack sunglasses in case

The bifocals on my nose just aren't powerful enough. 
Pack reading glasses in case. 

These were added to the items I always keep in my BP:

Umbrella too easy to forget
Stapler: because the Second Amendment.
Digital recorder-- because the first Amendment

Mints- for dry mouth.
Gum-- because the mints contain sugar, and I'll otherwise go through them too fast.
Seven Metro Schedules-- because that's my mode of transportation.
2 black pens-- Because I'm a writer, and you never know.
2 blue pens-- for editing

Mini-LED flashlight-- You never know when you might drop your pen in the dark.
 Caffeine pills to combat boredom
Tylenol for Body aches and headaches
Antihistamines-- to fight mold and ragweed.
Antacids-- to combat the effects of eating out.
Aspirin-- For worse pain, to be taken with Tylenol.
Prescriptions: the less said the better.

And I always leave my place with my pockets full. Billfold, change, cellphone, two black pens, eye-drops, hand sanitizer, index cards (for quick notes) and so on.

With these items I'm as prepared Gordon Freeman to bravely face boredom.

 

New writing method

I have learned something over this last week about the writing process. Now I follow this procedure:

1) Write up one scene/chapter at a time.
2) Let sit, one hour to one day.
3) Add anything needed.
4) Cut what isn't working.
5) Shift order of action if needed.
6) Crucial: if the changes add up to more than twenty percent of the scene word count, or take more than fifty percent of the time it took to originally write the scene, discard the draft. Consider it to have been a practice run, but don't use it as a reference.
7) Start the procedure again.

For number six, I might reduce the trigger to ten percent of the word count depending on how things work.

This should save me a ton of writing time.




 

The toxic circle

Besides the fact that we're probably going to end the world with Global Warming, there are few common everyday things that cause me anxiety.

First, I hate having my picture taken. I go through cycles with this, but I hate being photographed and I've never seen a picture of myself that I've liked. I have a picture of myself with a movie star, and I won't post it because my being in it ruins it.

This is part of a larger complex. In grade and high school, I often got through the day pretending I was invisible.

I've never liked my name. A major reason why nobody knows whether to call me Charles, Charlie or Chuck. I've tried them all. None of them stick.

A real problem I had in finding a job was I couldn't stand to write a resume, and I couldn't stand to be interviewed. That drastically limited my job possibilities. Even now, when I'm asked for an author's bio (that hasn't happened very often yet) my mind freezes.

I'm not writing this because I'm depressed. I'm not depressed right now. I'm writing this because it gives some idea of the negative self-esteem, and how it hasn't really changed with therapy or medications.

Working Weekend

You could see by the title that I worked all weekend. However, yesterday and today a lot of it wasn't writing, it was also reading and learning.

In my previous entry, I mentioned Leonard Mldinov's book Subliminal, about the unconscious. It ends with some odd points about the self and self-confidence. That all this time, psychologists have thought that the mentally healthiest individuals were the most truthful about themselves. That turns out not to be true. About fifty percent will say they're in the top ten percent of their field. That's impossible, of course. But they have to believe it so they can function at their job. (It does present the question about pro-athletes, whose metrics are out there for everyone to see, how do they maintain confidence? However, professional athletics does have a high turnover.)

We can see how this works in real life, where so many people will never admit they made a professional mistake.

It turns out the people who have the most truthful evaluation of themselves are those who are slightly to moderately depressed.

Self-confidence is what psychologists should call a hack. It doesn't enlighten anyone of the truth, but it does enable them to function.

It's the same story with religion: not generally truthful, but it does allow people to function and unify socially.  

Life is full of discoveries. Many of them about humans and humankind.

How to really hate your work

Friday or Saturday is a day where I just write. Oh, or get tired and lie down. Despite the long hours, today wasn't as productive as it should have been. I'm going to write more this evening.

But the chapter I'm working on wasn't panning out. So, hit it with a sledge hammer, broke it into little pieces. Now I'm putting it all in a different order, but more importantly, I'm throwing out pieces that don't work, or information that can wait.

The scene is a conversation, but not one anybody would ever have in real life. I'm noting that those scenes are difficult. It's hard to keep track of what information would be most important to the characters, but crucial: what would be most important to the reader? How do you address those in dialog? And not make it obvious?

Finished reading:

Leonard Mldinow's Subliminal: "How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior." It's Nonfiction. Mldinow is a physicist who works with Stephen Hawking. This book is a bit of science journalism, off his specialty. He goes through the results of different experiments to identify how the unconscious operates. It's both exciting and disturbing. It confirms my longtime conviction that the unconscious mind is the one acts and our conscious mind simply comes up with the cover story. Though I now have to look at everyone's behavior (including my own) with a sense of humor.
Oh, I also recommend Mldinow's other book, "The Drunkards Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives." It changed the way I looked at everything from conspiracy theories to "self-made" wealthy people. 

Next book I'm going to read is fiction. A YA book, Jandy Nelson's "I'll Give You the Sun." It's a story about fraternal twins torn apart by tragedy. 

For films, I've seen:

For Halloween I watched several horror movies:

The Babadook, finally. I give it four out of five stars. It's great all the way through, but it comes apart at the end when the makers of the movie forget the difference between text and subtext.

For comparison, let's take Ginger Snaps. You know way before the end that there's an analogy drawn between turning into a werewolf and suffering from adolescence. For the end, though, the director, John Fawcett remembers the story is a werewolf story first, and does away with the adolescence symbolism. The werewolf is not literally adolescence in that fictional world. (Instead, after the the resolution, he does something else even better, but you'll have to see it.)

I also saw Insidious 3. Since this one was a prequel to the first two, it seemed a good place to begin the series. I'd give it a three for five. The plot is a watered down version of "The Exorcist" with "Poltergeists" thrown in. Nothing special, but nothing to recoil from either.

I also saw Carrie 1976 and Ginger Snaps once again.

Next on my list: Excision.

But tonight I'm going to write. After I lie down for about a half hour.