Today 125 people looked in on this writer's blog. Thank you for taking an interest. Cheer up poets and fiction writers, essayists and writers and philosophers of all sorts. E.O. Wilson writes, "If our species can be said to have a soul, it lives in the humanities."
The Meaning of Human Existence — p.185
I have done no rewriting for two days. Yesterday, I spent a good part of the afternoon in Kaiser-Permanente's urgent care on Mill Plain Blvd. I was pissing pure blood and pus and clots of blood. There was so much thick matter in my bladder that several times I had to push quite hard to get a flow started. I won't know until tomorrow, after a culture grows, if the cause of the bleeding is a bladder infection or the type of bleeding that can follow irradiation of the prostate because of a thinning bladder wall. For safety sake the PA put me on a strong antibiotic. Today I was too tired to write effectively. I didn't sleep last night for fear I wouldn't be able to pee in the morning when I got up. The threat of visit to an emergency room and a catheter was hanging over my head. Wanted to keep the flow going all night long. Drank quarts of blueberry/cranberry juice. Today, the urine is clear again. Whew. No catheter!
I'm tired right now and am bringing this entry to a close so I can go sit in my lounge chair again and luxuriate in the feelings of an invalid.Tomorrow the Zags play South Carolina in the NCAA tournament.
Why free will is an illusion. From the works of E.O.Wilson, but modified in such a way as to clarify Wilson's own inability to be rigorously objective.
"Our [brains] consist of storytelling. In each instant of present time, a flood of real-world information flows into [the body's] senses. Added to the severe limitation of the senses is the fact that the information [the senses] receive far exceeds what the brain can process. To augment this fraction, [the brain automatically triggers familiar] stories of past events for context and meaning. [It] compare[s] them with the unfolding past to apply the decisions that [it] made back in time, variously right or wrong. Then [the brain imagines] forward to create—not just to recall this time—multiple competing scenarios. [The brain emotionally evaluates them] against one another by the suppressing or intensifying effect imposed by aroused emotional centers. An [emotional trigger is automatically thrown] in the unconscious centers of the brain, it turns out from recent studies, several seconds before the [awareness of having made a] decision arrives in the conscious part."
The Meaning of Human Existence, p167
But Wilson says, and I agree, we must believe we possess free will.
"Confidence in free will is biologically adaptive.... Without it the conscious mind, at best a fragile dark window on the real world, would be cursed by fatalism. Like a prisoner confined for life to a solitary confinement, deprived of any freedom to explore and starving for surprise, it would deteriorate."
The Meaning of Human Existence, p170
Boy does that remind me of my first shivering encounter with Camus' The Stranger and Meursault in his prison cell awaiting his execution and the moment that he contemplates
his meaningless existence within the benign indifference of the
universe. I felt my existentialism in spades.
Today I rewrote two chapters of Ghoul World. Wish I could do that each day. Rewrite would be done in no time, and I had my bladder probed via my urethra today. Found two stones. It's a wonder I could do anything after that. All my writing is not fiction and poetry. Sometimes I write LTEs like the following:
People from the Silent Generation are uniquely positioned to comment on
American Greatness. I was born in 1937 and turned 8 when WWII ended. I turned
13 in 1950 as American greatness was in full roar. I deeply experienced American
greatness and was rightfully proud of America. The only word that comes to mind when I consider
America’s greatest days is SACRIFICE. The lives of our young men were spilled on foreign soil to help those less fortunate than us. Then
during the Marshall Plan we gave of our treasure to lift up nations and peoples
who were in dire need. We even delayed cutting our war times taxes until the
Marshall Plan was fulfilled. Those were our greatest days. Where is the call
today for the SACRIFICE that would make us great again?
Tonight the Zags play West Virginia in the NCAA tournament, their toughest test do date.
Staring through a rain streaked Starbucks' window that via the magic of Mac's Photo Booth app you can stare through also. Just finished rewriting Chapter 23 of Ghoul World. Earlier today in the morning got an X-ray of my ribs on the right side. Last week I lunged over the wooden arm of a chair to retrieve something I'd dropped and heard a crunching sound, followed by pain that has been with me for six or seven days. Since I'm on hormone treatments that make my bones likely to be brittle, my synaptic self directed me to talk to Doctor Sugarman about it. Thus the X-ray.
Talk about old age mental lapses...I was going to relate something about an old age mental lapse in the recent past, and I forgot what it was while I was positioning the cursor to write about it.... Here's another lapse. Yesterday I received a SASE in the mail from a submission of poetry I made to Elysian Fields Quarterly, a baseball magazine. A message on the envelope reported it was not deliverable. Of course it wasn't deliverable. Elysian Fields went out of business in 2009.
These days I'm experiencing moments of sheer ecstasy that arrive out of nowhere, delivered by my synaptic self for my personal enjoyment. I say, "Keep them coming," hoping those words tickle my synaptic self into delivering the goods. Hey, is this an instance of free will or just the synatic self enjoying itself for the pleasure of my consciousness?
Aha! The sun just came out.
Been more than a week since last entry, but we've had a crisis in wife's family so my writing schedule has, of course, been set aside. I did rewrite another chapter of Ghoul World Tuesday after our return from Spokane on Monday. Will hopefully rewrite another chapter today.
Washington State Poet Laureate Tod Marshall has undertaken putting together an anthology of living Washington State poets to celebrate our state's 129th year of statehood. I'm thrilled to be included in the anthology. Washington 129 will feature the poetry of 129 poets living in the state of Washington, and my poem "Legacy" will be included in the hard copy issue. It will also be turned into a handbill to be circulated at various literary events around the state. I look forward to seeing my name in the anthology among the many fine poets of Washington State, and I'm sure to recognize the names of old friends and acquaintances in the collection. As I learn more I'll let you know where you can purchase the anthology when it's published. Sage Hill Press will be the publisher. My poetry can be found at Amazon or Authorhouse. You can even find Gray House By Cold Mountain at Amazon for the low price of $2,498.00 through RedGooseMedia. Seriously. I think it's worth that at least.
I forked over $765 to take a screen writing course at NW Film Center that begins in April. Since it's almost impossible to find agents for film scripts, the expenditure is just to keep my brain on its toes. I did write a sci fi film script two summers ago, and I thought I might have an inclination for writing scripts. We'll see. I'm going to work on that script for course work.
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| The Bartlett bar |
75 people looked in on my bucket list quest yesterday. They find it on my Facebook page, The Silent Boomer, rather than directly here, I believe. I'm still confused by Google, Facebook and Silent Boomer connectivity. I'm going to have to step away from writing for the next five days or so again. On road to Spokane again, and I can't seem to write on the road. Speaking of the road, I watched On The Road last night for a 2nd time, a faithful chronological rendering of the novel. We're visiting my father-in-law who has recently entered hospice care from complications of diabetes. My wife has had to deal with my cancer last year and now her father is in decline. Think loving thoughts. While in Spokane we have previously ordered tickets for my son's improv group at The Bartlett.
I requested and received a confirmation about my poem "The Legacy" but still waiting the contract that makes it official before I say anything here. It's been months since I sent out any of my novels to agents. It's so hard for me to take the time away from actually writing to send out my work, tailor the query letters to the agents. I know there is now a service that takes over a writer's submissions, but I am slow to pick up on it. It's like having a paid agent for agents. Where does the retrogression end? Sometimes I feel I'm right on the verge...the "verge" of what?
