Master of the Hounds

At 3:45pm, Halley, our refugee kitty passed on. She had lived a year and a half longer with thyroid disease then the vet had given her. Sometime over the weekend she gave up and stopped eating and by this afternoon the light in her eyes was all but gone, so we decided to have the vet help her across. She did not have the easiest life before we knew her, nor was she the easiest cat to get along with. She never really did affection until the last few years of her life. She retained the refugee's singular focus on food up until the end. I can only hope that the ten years she spent with us was far better then the unknown number of proceeding years; that as Peter Watts puts it, her life sausage was far fatter with us. She was warm and safe and not alone in the end.

Addendum: The life sausage reference comes from Peter eulogizing his beloved cat Banana. It is a beautiful, honest, raw and brutally unsentimental remembrance of the passing of his friend, so here be grief triggers. It reminded me of our own loss when Freyja died. I still feel guilty that I grieve more for the passing of a cat, whom I was only aware of from a blog, then the one who shared my house for a decade.

much_ado Suggested that I may have been hasty in my headlong rush last night to show the world this great thing I had thunk. For some valid security reasons I've taken my project down, those who are interested in reading it I can e-mail a copy for your perusal. In the next couple of days I'll try and post a companion piece to it here. Also anyone who's read the project can discuss it here. Thank you all.

Today at school I had two rather touching interactions with people. This, on a day where I am sufficiently sleep deprived that everything has a slightly abstract detached quality to it, was especially nice to be reminded of the kindness of other human beings and the importance of even the more peripheral human relationships in my life.

Last night some dear friends made possible an experience I would not have been able to have otherwise.

It's been a good reminder of just how blessed I am and the many things I have to be thankful for.

It been some time since I wrote about my beliefs. To be perfectly honest it's been a long time since I've written anything at all publicly in this space, but we're not going to go there today.

As I was getting ready in the bathroom this morning, I had a moment of existential reflection followed by a momentary deep depressive episode.

( more on existential musings (long)... )

I am not implying that religion is a comforting lie, but if that was all it was it would be enough. If it is simply the mechanism we use to function in the face of paralyzing existential dread, then it has value it is not “meaningless”. The way in which we relate to each other has meaning. Most of all is the way we comfort each other and make the unbearable bearable.

Please hear me O Divine,

 

Weather thou be Supernatural Agencies, mysteries beyond understanding,

The spark of the divine in each of us, deep memetic cultural archetypes,

Neurobiological structures, or the physical laws that govern the universe.

Be with those I love who are suffering, know that I wish them aid and comfort.

Nights of Villjamur is a book of ambitious ideas and deeply flawed execution. I wanted to like this book, but it fell painfully short of expectations. It was not helped that I started reading it after finishing Amanda Downum’s The Bone Palace, after which many books will seem pale and clumsy in comparison. Sadly, Mark Charan Newton’s work stumbles all on it’s own, reaching for greatness and wonder, delivering something flat and incoherent.

After recovering from the derailing and unnecessary prolog, the book starts out with some promise. Under a dying red sun, the ancient fortress city, Villjamur, seat of the Jamur Empire is beset by a flood of refugees seeking shelter from the impending ice age. The Empire, though the pinnacle of civilization for the current age, is built on the bones of the greater more advanced ones that came before. Magic appears to be remnants of poorly understood ancient technology. Where there are nonhuman races, they aren’t the generic fantasy retreads of Tolkien. It’s all a refreshing change, if not entirely new. Newton evokes the fiction of Moorcock, Wolf and Vance in his world building. The plot threads again start with promise. High ranking city counselors are being murdered and the mystery points to a larger conspiracy. The Empire is under attack from shadowy external threats, some of which lead back to the above conspiracy. Plot threads begin to multiply, Newton overreaches and is unable to manage all the branching plot threads and weave them into a coherent whole.

At this point I begin to notice a niggling irritation that’s been growing in the periphery of my consciousness; the dissonance between what Newton is trying to convey and what is executed on page. Newton’s authorial voice is flat, affectless, matter of fact. The narrative beats are off. He tells more then he shows or at least gives the impression of doing so, the flat delivery draining the life out of some of the more descriptive passages. It reminds me of nothing so much as reading translations of Old Norse sagas or more modern works by Henning Mankell or Stieg Larsson. That is forgivable in those works, especially when the underling story and structure can stand up in spite of the unremarkable prose. Here it doesn’t.

 

( One may wonder why I kept going then... )

( However the most glaring failure of disbelief comes at the climax (Be forewarned spoilers ahead)... )

All of this is set up for future installments of the series wherein our heroes fight off invading Lovecraftian monsters (a plot line introduced close to the end of the book) and fight to restore the empire. The idea sounds interesting, but I don’t think I can force myself to see if Newton can improve on his execution. In the end I really can’t fault Newton for trying big and failing, but for failing such an uninteresting way.

Mom received a rather hinky call from a dude in some sort of incarceration...there is a special hell for those who try and scam quakers...

Thank You

By the nature of being human we all have cognitive biases.

Is it more noble to pretend we are without prejudice, fake it and hope that what we wish will become true?

Or to look inside, say " I have these feelings, they trouble me." to wrestle with them and strive to overcome?

This is not meant to be a pronouncement on recent events, though I believe those events ask for a much needed dialogue to start once again.

After this weeks earlier misadventure, I was able to see a specialist on Friday.  Or more accurately able to see the specialist's nurse practitioner and the specialist himself for less then 5 minutes. Through some universal irony and my insurance's byzantine referral process, the specialist for sleep I'm seeing happens to be the same specialist I've been seeing for the last twelve years for sleep apenea. They reviewed my history, the worsening insomnia, the worsening sleep deprivation symptoms and agreed that a new sleep study to try and figure out what's going on is in order. I was given a script for provigil and cautioned about driving while feeling fatigued.

Yesterday I test drove the new neurochemistry. My sweetie convinced me that the wisest course would be to take the stuff in a safe setting with another adult present, and nothing on the line like having to function for work, or get my ass too or from work without killing anyone.  The test was a success, a categorical success, as in I'm really not sure how i made it through the last three years without this stuff.

The first time in a long time, I was focused and alert.  On 100mgs I got a little over 10 hours of unfettered alertness. I had gotten about 4 hours of actual sleep the previous night, but I was wide awake, energetic and functional. I was still aware in the periphery of my consciousness that I was tired, but it didn't actually drag me down.

What I wasn't expecting was the effect on my mood. It's amazing how good I feel without the crushing weight of fatigue grinding me down. Chronic sleep deprivation can mimic symptoms of mental illness and I've been the functional equivalent of depressed for a very long time. I think I can clearly say that the depression was an artifact of sleep deprivation and depression is not the etiology of my insomnia. Though I don't believe this will solve the feelings of being overwhelmed and burnt out at work, it may make these things bearable of the time being.

I've not noticed much in the way of side effects.  Mostly there is a slight tendency to over do things ("Honey you're squeezing me a little too hard"), that might be a result of the dopaminergic effects.  Maybe some dry mouth, but thats it so far.

I understand this is not a panacea,  I'm still not sleeping well (if much at all), I don't know how much of the other effects of long term sleep deprivation this mitigates.  However as a stop gap measure, I'll take it. I can function, I feel alive, it feels good.