| | It's interesting to watch myself - a high-strung, ADD-riddled
individual - deal with boredom. Many years ago, I had the attention
span of a dead goldfish and was the terror of my mother, who couldn't
make me sit still for any length of time whatsoever.
And then
there are nights like tonight. During my teenage years I grew
increasingly geeky and internet-reliant. I lived in ten different time
zones and considered sleep a luxury afforded only to the dead. The
overwhelming connectivity and unrestrained availability of uncensored
data flooded my juvenile, sugar-and-caffiene fueled brain to fast to be
actually processed and understood, the end result of which was a major
emotional and physical crash somewhere around 18, when I discovered I
could no longer go on 20 hours of sleep a week.
In the last
several years I learned the hard way about 60 and 80 hour work weeks,
and to this day my biological clock has undergone so many rapid shifts
that it no longer has any kind of reliance on the 12-hour standard
day/night cycle.
I've taken drugs of varying strengths for
stimulation and wakefulness, and then drugs of varying strengths for
relaxation and sleep. My infinitely variable body chemistry has
responded by developing a sort of oddly passive existence, where sleep
is casual and unimportant, and the waking hours are differentiated only
by the fact that my brain and body interact with the real world, as
opposed to the imaginary world of dreams.
I can stay awake for
three or four days, drugged to the gills on pain meds, or sleep while
wired so tightly that my muscles vibrate from the flood of chaotic
neural stimulation. Up, down, awake, asleep - these states of existence
are so much the norm that they mean little to me now, whether
psychologically or physically.
Just as equally chaotic is my
disconnection from the earth's time clock. For years every room I've
lived in has had the windows boarded up with all the interior lights on
dimmers. I prefer to live in complete or semi-darkness - and in fact
have difficulty sleeping with any light source around, however dim.
Climate control disconnects me from the weather, and the end result of
all this is something akin to a cave-like dwelling, with the
temperature hovering around 70 degrees farenheit year round, and the
average light source being a 300 watt halogen bulb running at half
power.
I've learned (too late, now) of the many downsides to
this enforced life of disconnection, but there are also several
significant improvements that I've learned, not the least being that
'day' and 'night' are arbitary terms, as well as the time of day or
night being nearly as irrelevant. The only thing that matters to me is
whether I'm awake or asleep. If I'm sleeping, it's 'night' - if awake,
it's 'day'.
Another thing I've learned from this totally alien
lifecycle is how to deal with near-total solitude. In my younger years
I listened to music non-stop during most of my waking hours, but these
days I've grown to value silence, or, more accurately, the artificial
'silence' created out of the constant drone of computer cooling fans,
HVAC units, ceiling and/or tower fans, and the phantom siss of audio
amplifier noise floors elevated to audible levels.
My contact
with humanity has become increasingly erratic and dehumanised, with
most of my communication being channeled through pure-text forms such
as this blog, emails, instant messaging services of varying types;
seconded by phone communication and with personal, face-to-face
relegated to such a distant third that I grow quickly tired of such
overwhelming intimacy and noise, even when filtered through the common
fog of a chemically-altered reality.
Recently I've experimented
with wearing -30dB earplugs when around groups of loud or disagreeable
people, and by a process of slow adaptation have learned to hear sounds
in silence, being able to differentiate the dark pink noise of a
sleeping, distant city from the open crystalline brilliance of a clear
Texas night in the country.
Because of my time disconnect from
the rest of the world, I have learned to sit and vacate, doing nothing
and thinking less - not bored, but not interested, in some weird median
between waking and sleeping.
This brings me to nights like
tonight. One of my sisters informed me (at around 11:00 P.M. Saturday)
that she'd been experiencing increasing abdominal pain throughout most
of the day - having kindly failed to mention it even when dropping by
my room earlier that afternoon to listen to me read aloud from various
books.
So by 12:30 (A.M. Sunday) I had decided that her symptoms
resembled early onset appendicitis enough to warrant the waking of my
parents and heading into Weatherford for a more accurate mechanical
diagnosis (which occurred in the form of a contrast CT, for those who
are curious) - the end result of which was a burst ovarian cyst.
As my sister floated between lesser and greater states of wakefulness
and my mother (bless her) slowly lost the battle against the rising
need for sleep, I sat on the doctors exam stool with my legs locked
against the bed and my back flat against the wall and logged my
increasing pain levels as my opiates wore down, debated the merits of
taking one of my many available uppers (deciding in the end to save my
body's already stressed and limited dopamine levels for this
afternoon), and as the uneventful hours passed while my sister and
mother drowsed wearily - I simply waited.
I did read, a Chuck
Palahniuk book of nonfiction essays called "Stranger Than Fiction" - a
book which I'd read before (as I've read nearly all my books more than
once already), but nevertheless continue to enjoy and recieve
inspiration from. I wondered at his grasp of Hunter S. Thompson's
"Gonzo" journalism, and realised that I have in fact absorbed much of
the same concepts of semi-objective near-fact relativism.
You
can read many of my own attempts at this type of writing - this being
one of them, and in fact during the process of developing this idea
discovered that I have attempted the Gonzo approach long before I knew
what it was called or that a man named Thompson pioneered it long
before I was even born.
For those of you who don't know Gonzo,
or Thompson, for that matter, I will take it upon myself to explain the
concept. Like the quantum theory idea that you cannot observe something
without changing what is being observed, a "Gonzo" journalist does not
make any effort to report mere 'fact', but knows (or, possibly, does
not have conscious knowledge of the process) that he is in truth a part
of what he is reporting on and not only writes what he observes, but
also records the interplay between the observer and observed.
The end result, when done properly (one could argue that the process
requires a more than slightly deranged mind for proper execution) is a
fascinating interplay wherin fact and opinion are blended together to
form an often shocking new whole, wherin the sum is infinitely greater
than the parts.
I am not sure that all of this essay makes as
much sense as I think it does, but that's also part of the process. A
Gonzo journalist writes what he sees and feels, but most importantly,
his writing lays bare how his observations change himself, and the
changes that, in turn, alters how he views his subject.
Those of
you who are familiar with Thompson's work (which I am, admittedly, not
well acquainted with) will likely have their own personal epiphanic
moments, but for the rest of you, watch "Fear and Loathing in Las
Vegas". The true power of this approach to journalism comes in the
latter half of the movie, where Johnny Depp quotes Thompson's eternally
poignant view of the crumbling society surrounding him as the centuries
tick inexorably onwards toward an increasingly hazy future.
Admittedly, I've gotten somewhat (or more than somewhat, as the case
may be) lost in these musings, but nevertheless find it endlessly
fascinating that so much material should be inspired simply because I'm
better at staying awake than those around me.
I encourage you to
take the time to watch yourself watching the world, and in your studies
- whether casual or scholarly - learn to see a deeper, richer view. I
do not suppose that everyone can do this, and I do not presume to rank
myself with Thompson, but perhaps somewhere, eventually, my existence
and the record thereof may leave another with a similar feeling of
epiphany and inspiration.
The very idea is, to me, both
shockingly arrogant and simultaneously humbling - but I think it is
that spark of inspiration that drives me to write as I do. One day,
perhaps, you too will find the need to pass a similar spark onwards in
hope that another might find similar inspiration. |
| | Posted 5/13/2007 6:28 AM - 82 Views - 12 eProps - 7 comments
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Thanks for letting us peak inside your mind and heart once in a while. 
