Silas Meek's Ephemeral flotsam

frazerirving:

“Today, in our field, there is so much talent and recognition that we are reaching a saturation point. An artist should no longer strive only for breathtaking craftsmanship; he should, instead, try to help us live better, either by dressing the wounds that are constantly being opened by society,…

frazerirving:

“Today, in our field, there is so much talent and recognition that we are reaching a saturation point. An artist should no longer strive only for breathtaking craftsmanship; he should, instead, try to help us live better, either by dressing the wounds that are constantly being opened by society,…

youmightfindyourself:

By T. M. Luhrmann
The American Scholar, Summer 2012 

Hans is a Dutch man in his 20s, kind and large and careful in his speech and movement. He has the profile typical of someone with schizophrenia. He had been an excellent student in grade school, but things started to fall apart in his teens. He began to smoke a lot of marijuana and quit school at 17 to work in a factory. One evening, he heard a woman outside his apartment screaming for help. She was shrieking that five men were raping her and that they were going to kill her. Hans was afraid. He called the cops, anonymously, and they came to search, but they couldn’t find the woman in the apartment complex. Hans saw them drive away. He could still hear her screaming, high, loud, spine-chilling screams. Hans began to think that if the men raping her knew he could hear them, they would come to kill him, too, so he ran to his car and drove. He drove for half an hour, hard, until he could no longer hear her screams. She’s dead, he thought, and he didn’t dare go back to his apartment. He slept in his car that night, then went to work the next day. He got a newspaper to find out what had happened, but no one had reported the murder. He concluded that the men who had done it wanted him, too. Then he decided that one of them was his closest friend. He took a knife and went to see his friend, intending to slit his throat. He sat there with his friend, drinking tea, waiting for the right time to kill him—but he didn’t. He left his friend’s apartment and went back to his car, where he lived for two months. He heard voices outside his head, talking about him, commenting on the way he dressed, the way he looked, what they thought he should do. Which was mostly to die.

These external commenting voices are so distinctive that if patients report only that one symptom, and if their life has gone awry, they meet criteria for the diagnosis of schizophrenia. The voices told Hans that truck drivers were in on the conspiracy, too, so he could no longer sleep in highway pullouts. He went home to his mother. Hans is a quiet man, so he didn’t tell her about the voices or the knives he carried with him, and at first she didn’t notice. Then he confessed to her that he had raped a good friend. His mother didn’t believe it. She persuaded him to invite the girl to tea, and indeed the girl said he hadn’t raped her. That relieved Hans, but not his mother.

So Hans found himself in an inpatient psychiatric hospital, where he stayed for more than a year. He was diagnosed with schizophrenia and given Clozaril, one of the new “miracle” drugs for schizophrenia—miracle for a small handful of patients, a desperate stopgap for the rest. Nothing really changed for Hans on Clozaril, neither his voices nor his delusions, but he became calm. He became so calm that he slept all day. His panicked mother argued with the doctors, telling them this was no kind of life. They told her sleeping was normal “at this stage.” Hans’s skin itched. He gained 90 pounds, and now he could not think clearly or move comfortably, a Michelin man with tubby limbs. Over the course of the year, little changed.

Then Hans joined a group of people like him who met once a week. They talked about their voices, and they were encouraged to talk back to them. They were even encouraged to negotiate with their voices. One of Hans’s voices thought he would be better off if he devoted his life to Buddhist prayer. Hans is not a Buddhist—like many Dutch, he grew up as a secular Protestant—and he did not want to follow the voice’s command. The group persuaded him to cut a deal with his voices. He told his voices that he would read a book on Buddhism every day for one hour—but no more. He would say one Buddhist prayer every day—but no more. And if he did this, he told them, they had to leave him alone.

They did, more or less. He began to feel better. His psychiatrists began to lower his Clozaril from its high of 500 mg per day down eventually to a dose of 50 mg. He lost weight. He became more alert. He moved out of the hospital. The voices didn’t disappear immediately, but they got nicer. When he was moving into an apartment by himself—and petrified by the prospect—he heard a voice say, “Buck up, we know you can do it.” By the time I met him in 2009, he hadn’t heard a voice in more than a year.

kierongillen:

The morning reading. My friend apiphile joins 50K people and RTs the following story.

There’s a drunk guy outside singing What Makes You Beautiful to a tree. So I opened my window and played the actual song and he just got so happy. He looked at the sky and yelled, “You’re beautiful too,…

sarahwrotethat:

For those about to joke, regardless of topic: is anyone’s power about to be neutralized? Does the object of the joke have more or less power than the joker?

• Dictator slipping on a banana peel: A+ cathartic slapstick
• Political prisoner slipping on a banana peel: tragic…

sarahwrotethat:

For those about to joke, regardless of topic: is anyone’s power about to be neutralized? Does the object of the joke have more or less power than the joker?

• Dictator slipping on a banana peel: A+ cathartic slapstick
• Political prisoner slipping on a banana peel: tragic irony
• Guards laughing at…

sarahwrotethat:

For those about to joke, regardless of topic: is anyone’s power about to be neutralized? Does the object of the joke have more or less power than the joker?

• Dictator slipping on a banana peel: A+ cathartic slapstick
• Political prisoner slipping on a banana peel: tragic irony
• Guards laughing at…

Hullo! @ElloAndyGaffney, @rachelleabbott and I have done a podcast pilot. Have a listen and stroke our egos.

youmightfindyourself:

By: Paul Miller
The Verge, July 12, 2012

The hyperlink architecture of the internet allows for an only-in-the-21st-century kind of binge. It always starts innocuously enough. Like, one time I saw a video of someone explaining their Yu-Gi-Oh deck, and I didn’t understand 90 percent of the words they were using. So I read the Wikipedia entry on Yu-Gi-Oh. And then I watched some more YouTube videos. And then I read a Yu-Gi-Oh card game-specific wiki. And — OMG — I watched so many more YouTube videos.

Seven hours later, at midnight, I was pretty sure Yu-Gi-Oh wasn’t for me. What about Magic the Gathering? Three hours later, I fell asleep at my computer — dreaming about the Lord of The Rings collectible card game. 

Without the internet, a binge is more difficult. The other day I read a dozen thousand words about Assyrian archeology in my DVD copy of Encyclopedia Britannica, but when I wanted to read about the Xbox 360, there wasn’t even a single entry, so I gave up. Yu-Gi-Oh also isn’t known to Britannica, thankfully.

A friend of mine recently told me, triumphantly, that he hadn’t curtailed his internet use at all since I left the internet. I congratulated him, because he was the first person to brag about it. Most people I’ve spoken to in the past couple months have offered, unprompted, at least one aspect of their internet use they’d like to cut down on.

On the train ride out to Citi Field for the ultra-Orthodox Jew internet rally, I explained to a fellow non-Jewish passenger where we were headed. She said she didn’t have a problem with the internet, but then, a beat later, confessed to being “addicted to Facebook and Twitter.”

Even my zero-curtail friend did go on to admit that he’s been more cognizant lately of where his web browsing time goes. He feels no guilt over watching endless hours of StarCraft video on YouTube, but wasn’t sure he liked how much time he spent poring over sports statistics.

Sports were always a bit of a trap for me as well. Since I don’t follow any of them regularly, every time some character would stick out to me — Tim Tebow, Jeremy Lin, Roger Federer — I would have to spend hours catching up on their sport of choice for context, and then more hours reading every essay I could find explaining that athlete’s exceptionalism, or lack of.

Other top topics for recurring bingeing included Bob Dylan and World War II, specifically: why-the-hell-was-Hitler.

Reddit and SenórGIF were a different type of binge. If an endless trip through Bob Dylan’s worst-received albums is “exploring,” Reddit is getting lost in the woods — you don’t know where you’re going, and the more you walk the more lost you are. You don’t know why you just read that page, you don’t think it was a good use of your time, but maybe if you read just one more page you’ll find fulfillment. It’s like you’re eating pistachios, and those pistachios are salty animated GIFs of corgi pratfalls, and you can’t stop.

While I’m less of a binge risk these days, due to lack of opportunity, that doesn’t mean I’m safe — in fact, I might’ve lowered my tolerance. When I was a kid, I had a friend whose family didn’t watch TV. I’d go over to his house and we’d play LEGOs (his collection had all the weapons excised, but we improvised), Civil War (sticks make for great guns, two sticks taped together and you have a bayonet), or just pretend to shoot each other under no pretense. Then, one time, his parents rented a TV to watch some nature documentary, and I couldn’t peel him away from it. I was disgusted with him. I’d seen everything TV had to offer: Inspector Gadget, Garfield and Friends, part of Star Wars, and all of PBS. I guess you could’ve called me a connoisseur, and here this naive chump was being taken in by a cheesy made-for-TV doc on the migratory patterns of butterflies.

A couple weeks ago I was looking for some stuff to delete off my MacBook’s 128GB SSD, which is always full, and I happened upon a folder called “4chan dump,” which had been so kindly provided to me by a reader before I left the internet. It was terrible. The GIFs were okay — I mean, I’ve seen better — but the memes were either lame or offensive. I really don’t get that Spider-Man animated series meme where Spider-Man is a terrible person and has his hand down his pants. But I looked at every single image in that stupid directory. If it was too small to discern in the Quick Look view, I’d zoom in and read every imbecilic word. I absorbed that folder. It took me more than an hour, and I ended up being late for an evening appointment.

My fear is that I’ll return to the internet ten months from now and then just disappear for another year while I read everything, watch everything, and LOL at everything I’ve missed. What I need is an anti-binge strategy, a way to recognize when my curiosity on Bob Dylan and Yu-Gi-Oh has turned into a pistachio-type fever, and then how to put on the brakes.

In retrospect, it’s easy to see what information turns out useless, and what’s worth my time. In Amusing Ourselves To Death, which I quote too often, Neil Postman differentiates between the medium of books, which are a sin to burn, and newspapers, which require violent disposal — otherwise we’d be buried under them. It’s disposable information vs. evergreen information. Another metric he offers is “actionable” information: is reading about a hurricane thousands of miles away going to influence my actions, say, in terms of donating to the Red Cross, or is it mere spectacle? Postman’s problem isn’t with dumb entertainment, it’s with dumb entertainment that masquerades as knowledge. Still, it can be hard to know which is which up front.

The goal for me, in this year and beyond, is to do things consciously and purposefully — submitting my time to my personal goals and values, instead of the next clickiest link. Someone on Reddit warned me that I’d be bored if I left the internet, and they were right. I get bored all the time. In my internet days, I’d rarely be aware of boredom — I might chalk it up to my favorite websites being “boring,” or just satiate it with the endless spectacle of Tumblr or YouTube, and either way I’d keep clicking. But now I sit on my couch, and the boredom weighs heavy, and then I decide what to do. In the meatspace, my next activity doesn’t come to me in the form of a push notification. I have to reach for a book, or my bike, or a guitar. I might sound like a college student from 1992, but I don’t mind.

Paul Miller will regularly be posting dispatches from the disconnected world on The Verge during his year away from the internet. He won’t be reading your comments, but he’ll be here in spirit.

youmightfindyourself:

Look around in your kitchen and bathroom. There’s probably a graphical vomit of colors, typography, and garish images intruding your home. Our homes are miniature highway billboard galleries of questionable taste, especially our cupboards and bathrooms. You’ve probably blocked it all out over time due to overexposure, but you’d be better off removing most labels or transferring products into unmarked refillable containers (minus prescription medication and hazardous materials, of course).

For example, look at the Crest mouthwash bottle above: I peeled off the label and it’s now 110% more of a pleasing element in the bathroom. I already know what’s in it and how much to use, so there’s no mystery. This simple act of peeling away with the majority of product is a decor staging trick anyone can practice, and you might find yourself in much more soothing environments rather than the equivalent decor of a Cosby Sweater circa 1991. (via)