The commercials on CNN are AWESOME

I don't actually think CNN has commercials, does it?

I don't know; I don't have cable but I'm thinking no.

Anyway, in my dream CNN goes to a commercial break and this gorgeous brunette begins talking about how hard it is to find compromise about serious issues in relationships.  Other than the eye candy, it's a very sober scene, muted background music, her expression slightly sorrowful, much like a mormon advertisement.  And then...

"Take diet soda," she says.  "For years, Sam and I had the worst fights about it.  But then Diet Dr. Pepper came along.  Now we live in harmony again."  She smiles brilliantly, holds up a can and takes a sip.  The camera pans to a large marble-topped black desk.  A tall black leather chair is facing the window and slowly it turns around, as it has done in countless movies... 

to reveal an equally gorgeous blonde, her right hand wrapped around a sweating soda can.  The camera zooms in to show her long lacquered nails - black with white dice spots - framing the Dr. Pepper logo.  Then zooms back out to show her perfect white smile and just enough cleavage stuffed into a tight fitting jean jacket.  "Were you expecting someone else?" she smiles, flirtatiously.

Diet Dr. Pepper: $0.75- $1.25 depending on the vending machine.  Lesbian ads on mainstream cable? Priceless.

This is not a dream

It's more like a vision.

I woke up and in the foggy predawn of consciousness where I have all my great ideas (and all the bad ones too but bear with me), I realized that very soon we are going to have personalized medicine that includes brain scans so we can biofeedback our own learning.

This might be a bunch of crap but then again maybe it's brilliant.  That's the problem with the pre-awake ideas.  Many of them are genuinely awesome but they all feel exactly the same in that moment of encountering them consciously and groggily for the first time.

So generally I write these things down, and then I sit on them for a bit to see whether they are going to make friends with conscious reality.

I wonder if people who do really stupid, crazy or  unconscionable things are just like me except they don't bother with a waiting period.

Anyway I have somehow lost the seventeen notebooks I keep by the bed in case of early morning idea emergencies - I still have twenty-three pens but writing on my hand was impractical in this case (the idea "drink more water" is hand-compatible; complex near-future technology visions not so much).  So I went to the computer to record it in this forum instead.  The advantage being that if I'm right, maybe I'll be able to work out some legal argument to part of the patent rights down the road (more likely I'll just have bragging rights but that seems valuable too).

In any case, here's the intellectual wake upon which this particular notion was found surfing: I went to David Sedaris' book reading last night.  Two impressive things: the man is even funnier in person.  I've enjoyed his books but last night I laughed till I almost peed my pants which I didn't expect.  His humor is unique and well-timed on the page but it is also intensely sad so I don't often laugh out loud.

Somehow the comic timing of a live performance mitigates that, allows the absurdity more space to be both tragic and hysterical - and in a public space it is easier to fall down the laughing side of the mountain.  Everyone else is laughing at the mental image of an eviscerated man's lungs being used to create the wings in a human sculpture known as a "blood angel" so...

Before I go on, let me say that I know of no other person who can make the most honorable, appealing and interesting character in a story be a gerbil wearing a bikini.

The other thing, which everyone who saw the show will remember forever, is that WHILE HE WAS READING, at least twice, David Sedaris grabbed a notebook and jotted something down.  Without a break in his breathing, timing, or focus.  I have never seen anything like it.

When asked what he'd written, they were notes for two memory-anecdotes he'd realized he wanted to tell later on.

Which brings me to memory.  Unless you are a multi-tasking genius with an over-active intellect, that would only possible if you  had done something so often you could literally do it in your sleep.  I'm going to hazard a guess the first option above is actually true; but it is also certain that David Sedaris has written, pondered, re-written, read aloud and come to know his own words so well that speaking at least some of the word series is now in his muscle memory.

The very first thing that happened when I woke up this morning was that I started playing the movie of the choreography we learned in last week's salsa class in my head.  It is the next best thing to muscle memory.  It's also how I memorize public lectures if I don't have a space in which to  actually  pace and practise delivery aloud.

And I had this vision of the parts of my brain that are learning dance lighting up and all the connections and firing going on.  And then I thought we already have (fairly crude but constantly improving) ways to look at this electrical activity, and a rudimentary understanding of what it means when this part of the brain fires versus that one.

And then I realized that barring a complete global economic collapse or environmental disaster (both likely IMO BTW), we are going to have personalized medicine that - in addition to having all the genetic personalized biomarker testing and annotation you could want - will also have brain biofeedback. 

We are a completely self-absorbed, diy, gadget-hungry, consumer society.  Mood rings were the crude forerunners.  Now we have heart moniters, to get us in "the fat-burning zone" and pedometers to make sure we're walking 5000 steps a day and on amazon you can buy a device that mildly electrocutes you in order to discern your percent body fat.  It just makes sense - in fact in the first light of dawn seemed inevitable - that in the not at all distant future we'll have brain scanners that allow us to track and change how we learn.

I've been awake long enough to know this is not a crackhead idea.  I think it's solid.  I think I may need a patent attorney.  And you heard it here first...

I'm off to go dance.  And then I think I need to buy another notebook.

Not sleeping = not dreaming

I've been home for three hours which is like an eternity at the moment since the house is dark, my wife's asleep, the cats are napping, I've become allergic to television, and I've left my laptop at work so I have to surf the internet on an ancient emac in a drafty office.

The plan was to go to bed early because I've got to be at work early and I want to get to the gym before that and it behooves me to be unconscious Right Now and instead... my brain Will Not Go To Sleep.

I have read all the previously unread archives of best-of-CL.  I have written twelve emails setting up partner dance dates.  I have pondered deep philosophical questions and allowed myself a minor existential crisis.  I have promised myself I will eat less chocolate, drink more water, and take up meditation.  I have surfed all the casual encounters  mw4w ads and played the take a shot of vodka every time there's an ad with that picture of that woman with  breasts so huge that I seriously wonder if she tips over when she stands up game and it is often enough that I should have cirrhosis of the liver and yet somehow I am Still Awake.

Please, if there is a benevolent being running the universe, send me some sleepiness, or failing that, a drug  mule trafficking some decent narcotics.  If you know me and are reading this, you can also text me something outrageous. I'm up so... why not?

In the meantime, I'm off to lie on my bed and stare at the ceiling.

History lesson

I was on a partner game show like Jeopardy and my partner refused to answer the Holocaust category questions and wanted me to go straight to the Poland category.

The thing about waking up at 9 after waking up at 4 and falling back to sleep is that the realization that you are dehydrated does not magically resolve itself in your sleep.

When I go out drinking with my soccer team I really need to remember that I've been running around for ninety minutes and DRINK WATER.

The Dr. Hil Show

I was a therapist for four straight married couples on a reality show lasting three months; I'd been hired to replace a famous tv therapist, Jill Sherman, who'd been hit by a car midway through the series, and was still in traction.

Jill and I had been good friends since high school and she recommended me despite my lack of psychological credentials; the studio hired me out of desperation, and because Jill had a lot of clout but probably at least in equal measure because someone in marketing realized that having a molecular biologist step in as a therapist would allow them to bill it as an even more lurid social experiment than group marital counseling.

I'd see each couple for fifteen minutes - seven minutes each person, more or less - then the next couple would come up on stage.  But all the couples watched each other from the audience, as did the camera, and there was a group discussion at the end where couples could comment on what had come up in the sessions they'd observed.

My dream was a single session long. The third couple consisted of a tall, dark-haired, mild-mannered man and his voluptuous, long-haired, sarcastic wife. I said I wanted to ask them each the same question and see where it went: what is the one thing bothering you most in your relationship. Though I wasn't supposed to harbor such feelings, I secretly disliked the woman, found her abrasive, and felt a little sorry for the guy.

I asked the woman first. She said it was that her husband gave her specific instructions for how to be seductive. This immediately sparked a heated argument, where he became defensive and said she misrepresented what he said. Predictably she expressed anger and derision, but I felt she was actually very hurt, so I calmed them both down and then went back to her.

I pressed the wife on how that made her feel. She turned into a small grey and white cat, with typewritten phrases on her white flanks like "insecure" and "armored". I stroked her, told her she was safe, and asked her again. The text changed to "lonely" and "I feel inadequate".

The husband, who I had been expecting to melt with tenderness at his wife's unaccustomed vulnerability, instead became aggressive and sarcastic, echoing the behaviour he'd always disparaged in his wife. It was shocking to see; I felt as if his true nature had been revealed and I was disgusted.

Luckily we had spent so much time on the cat transformation that there was no time for him; I said we had to move on. I put Christine, the catwife, up on a high shelf, and reassured everyone that I was a scientist and knew she would transition back to human form in about twenty minutes, when she began feeling safe again.

There are identifiable real events behind this dream reality show concept: I flew home yesterday from New York City and there were 31 channels of HDTV on demand, of which 28 were reality shows.

I saw three episodes of a show about compulsive hoarders on A&E, caught two seconds of at least sixteen cooking shows, watched weather forecasts, plaintiffs and defendants in three different TV court rooms, Teen Moms debating adoption and prom dresses, and last but by no means least, five different straight couples being shepherded through houses in Toronto by a squeaky-voiced Canadian agent - this show, called Property Virgins easily embodies the most eggregious use of a sexual term to lure viewers into watching people discuss dry paint, which is to say that I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Before leaving New York, I had lunch with a friend who said I would make a great therapist;  I've been giving it a lot of thought since waking.  Most importantly, I'm wondering what the chances are that my clients would metamorphose into animals in the course of a session and whether it does only take twenty minutes to transition back.

Wormhole in the spacetime continuum

Angelina lives in a crappy apartment in LA, scraping together a living as the writer for the online gossip tabloid, I Spy.  Her photography counterparts stalk minor and/or ageing celebrities in various states of normalcy and it's Angie's job to come up with the slightly seedy or lurid byline.

Her boyfriend is a real estate agent in California.  It might not need to be said that he has fallen on hard times.  However it is worth saying that he has fallen back into the bottle, and stopped going to AA meetings.  His contribution to rent is inconsistent, as is his appearance at her crappy LA apartment.  What prevents Angelina from tossing him out, apart from a nearly paralyzing inability to face conflict?   Sober, he's a fantastic lover.  Drunk?  A 230 pound snoring couch-hog. 

Everything changes for her when one day, smoking a cigarette on her balcony and trying to find some way to make a plumber's-butt shot of Ruth McLanahan (aka Blanche Devereaux on the Golden Girls) into anything more than a tasteless "before her stroke" statement, a muscle-stimulating 180 volt lip curler appears in thin air at waist height and drops to the ground in front of her.

Over the next week this happens three more times; she is present for only one other - a plastic necklace of muted pastel beads.  Two items arrive at night while she is sleeping and she wakes to find a single scuffed black boot, size 187 (rough equivalent men's size 9), and a package of rice milk crackers with an expiration date in 2031. 

Despite her celebrity connections, many of Angie's friends are nerds and it isn't long before several of them have come up with the Wormhole Theory of How Things Appear On Angie's Balcony.  They also hypothesize about the names and functions of the items, based on a wide array of experimentation, hand-waving, passionate intellectual conversation, and google searches.  The lip curler, luckily, came in a box with instructions, otherwise it's hard to be certain what body parts might have ended up in a six hour state of shock-induced spasm.  Converting the current into something pluggable-into-a-wall to confirm the efficiency of the device took two MIT graduates and a soldering iron but it works exactly as advertised.  The most compelling support for the wormhole 25-years-into-the-future theory is isotope testing performed by a grad student at UCLA.

If this were a Hollywood film, the military would have descended on Angelina's apartment by now in order to study how to turn the source of 25 years-in-the-future objects into a weapon.  But this is my dream, and instead Angie becomes a minor celebrity gracing the cover of I Want To Believe, a glossy specializing in the paranormal, alongside her sober-that-day-recently-coiffed boyfriend.  Someone else writes the byline for that interview; she lands a paid daily blog about the objects that arrive on her balcony and then makes enough money selling them on ebay that she could move out of her apartment if she wanted to.  She doesn't.

Normally I don't nap in the middle of the afternoon.  Dozed off for a five minute shuteye at three and woke up at exactly 420, having presumably passed through the middle of area 51.

Morning in Brooklyn

The only thing I remember about last night's dream session is that I could taste colors and smell textures.  All morning I've wandered through farmer's markets and community gardens with my Brooklyn boyfriends and hunted down the aromas from flowers and fruit that made my blood itch and my fingers vibrate.

I've had this kind of sensual cross-wiring, known as synaesthesia, before.  When I was eight, running a temperature of 104, I couldn't look at my father's beard, or be covered with coarsely woven blankets; the warp and weft of the blanket, the intertwined strands of his dark hair, created a dischordant and nauseating vibration under my skin, especially my torso and fingers.  Texture came in units of violence. 

According to wikipedia, synesthesia isn't all that rare and comes in a lot of flavors; often people with one of its many forms have no idea that their experience isn't universal.  For instance, I strongly related to two of them:

both ordinal linguistic personification, in which numbers and letters have specific personalities - as long as I've been able to count that high, the number nine is a slinky, slightly untrustworthy but intriguing woman - late 20s, tall, long dark hair and eyes, wearing a revealing dark brown polyester dress and scoping for secrets; other numbers embody different features,

and also number form synesthesia where dates and seasons have precise locations on a visual map.  The year is an oval racetrack, and July and August occupy almost the entire length of one of the long sides, whereas September through June are crowded around the remaining space, getting smaller as they approach December, larger on the other side.  December is halfway through the other long side, and is the seam point where the track comes together; New Year's Eve is a narrow point through which time squeezes in order to enter January. 

Synaesthesia forms are notable for being both idiosyncratic, and stable.  I can't remember living without my yearmap and I was an adult before I wondered why the months weren't all the same size.  Possibly I took this for granted because it just makes sense: my map echoes both my school year (summer unaturally lengthened, the remainder of the year compressed) and the light cycle - growing up in northern Canada, the days are very long in midsummer, shortest at the end of December.  I wonder, if I'd grown up near the equator, whether my map would be round, with months more evenly spaced.

My time map has century blocks that lie sideways and progress left to right, where each decade is an angled row of bricks coming up from bottom left to top right.  Occupying the majority of the space slightly to the left of center is the only complete century: the 1900s.  Notable bricks are colored rather than being the usual cinderblock grey - 1941 and 1946 are blue, for my parents' birthdays.  My birthyear, 1971, in brown, my sister's, 1972, in yellow.  Before 1900 is a straggling stone wall, a collection of dates I know about from history, set in order but incomplete, with entire rows missing, a ruins.  The newest century lies on the other side of the 1999-2000 divide; the bricks are brand new, salmon colored and  uniform, but only a handful of rows thick.  To the right is empty space waiting to be developed.

It's breakfast time on a Sunday in Brooklyn, and the wizard in the kitchen is doing something magical with butter, free range eggs, shitake mushrooms, baby italian eggplant, and a bowl full of variegated green tomatoes.  The morning smells beautiful.