Upon attempting some of the beginning exercises in DOTRSotB, I have started to wonder a bit about whether I am at all impaired on the right side of my brain. I never had a stroke or anything, so any problem I have now, I should have always had, right?
A long time ago, I was almost *too* imaginative – creativity was not lacking, in fact I’d say I was right-brain dominant. I excelled in art and music classes (but I did have trouble with math, organization, languages, and logical problems). I never had spacial perception issues, and as for visual memory, I still remember the layout of the house in which I went to day care until I was sixteen months old. As I understand it, one’s brain can not short circuit from being overworked.
The question, which arises is this, then: what happened to my brain, that it seems to have switched sides?
I have a few ideas.
- I struggled so hard with left brain tasks in school that all my energies went into those tasks, and as a result they atrophied.
- There has been no atrophy, but since creativity-based classes were out of the picture after age 12, the left brain has developed, and the right just fell behind.
- The expensive neuro-psychological tests which alerted me to a dire lack of right-brain function were faulty.
I, for one am greatly offended by the fact that our education system manages to kill every ounce of creative energies in most students by the time they reach high-school. I suppose it goes to show that the real purpose of schools is not to produce a more educated populous, but to quash any possibility that people will think for themselves; in doing so schools prevent any challenge to status quo. Sad, though, that despite the overwhelming focus on mathematical and otherwise analytic thought in American schools, those same schools are very poorly rated in comparison to other industrialized nations. I wonder whether this is because the Chinese still have music programs.
In any case, I am making progress in my brain retraining very, very quickly. I can feel the shift between left and right, and am becoming adept at causing that shift. I’d known how to do this for years, but I’d always written it off and suppressed it. I isolate right-brain function so thoroughly in that trance-like state that language ceases to be perceptible to me. All this time I’d thought that the right-brain mode of mindedness was the same thing as zoning out.
I supposedly have a few more years to salvage the function of that ill-fated cortex.
Maybe there is hope afterall.
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So apparently one of the reasons I suck at the whole “being a normal, productive, person” thing is because I suffer from a nonverbal learning disability. Apparently my left brain is like the hulk on ‘roids, and my right brain is a deflated raisin, and so my visual memory is near null. Furthermore, it makes it very difficult for me to keep my thoughts organized, and worst of all, it stifles my creativity.
The diagnostician said that there’s nothing I can do about it, that it is just the way I am, and the way I will always be. My shrink, however, warned me not to let my diagnosis define me, and so, I’ve decided that I will not give up without a fight.
Indeed, I have declared war on the lazier hemisphere of my brain – I have sustained it for twenty-two years, and it is about time it returned the favor. I’ve started drawing, and trying to use my left hand for many everyday tasks, like brushing my teeth, and typing blog entries.
Brushing my teeth was very painful. My body decided that if I would not let it use my right hand, the toothbrush would stay still, and my head would do the moving. Upon realizing this I tensed my neck and forced my left arm to obey my commands. My gums are still bleeding a bit.
Drawing has never been one of my strengths, either. If I am going to win this battle, though, I need to learn to think like an artist does — since apparently, it is that ability which I most direly lack. The book “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain” is my guide, and though it caters to to left-brained people like myself, following the exercises makes banging my head against the wall seem a painless alternative. Sadly, though, banging my head against the wall will not help my brain work better.
I hope to make progress. It sure would be nice to have a whole brain, instead of just half of one. I’m not too optimistic, but I refuse to surrender, since my inability to remember faces, for example, upsets me greatly.
((((Apologies if this post was less than coherent. I was up late last night and then up early this morning, and I am very very tired.))))
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A lone clump of morning glories pierce the ashen, frozen sod, as dead leaves lilt, clinging still to a few remaining trees, swaying syncopated on the breeze.
I thought it strange to see leaves like these on trees in Spring, but no stanger than the light of noon at midnight, which took my friends, and brought what I had thought would be endless Winter.
I wonder if the morning’s glory will germinate or seed – as I worry that the only one alive is me.
Nothing on the radio – not since the EMP
Alone and feeling close to death I wonder how this calamity occurred
I recall the old refrain and it rattles though my soul and brain – more despairing with each word
And I shout that misguiding lie through the hardened, morning rain
“Freedom isn’t free”
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“I guess we should enjoy it while we can,” he said, graciously accepting a puff from a tightly and fatly rolled spliff. As he passed the illicit cigarette to the man at his right, he asked his gathered friends, “Anyone wan’ another beer?” Nobody said no. The name of the game that night was bacchanalia. Beer and rum flowed as if from fountains, and unlike past Saturday nights, tonight they drank as though they could afford it, despite their meager college budgets; the buds they smoked were smuggled into the states from B.C. It was the best and most expensive ‘dank’ they could find on such short notice. It was very expensive, but tonight Kowalski and the merrily sordid cast of freaks he called his friends didn’t care – for they were stranded in a crumbling industrial wasteland in eastern Indiana, and they collectively understood it to be the eve of the apocalypse.
Arthur Kowalski and his friends had long talked about “going off the grid,” but he always had suspected that he would be the only one among them who actually would. Though he and his closest friend, Jeff Cohn, shared dark sensibilities about human nature, Artie had always expected that when Jeff graduated, he would either get a “real” job and accept the reality of modern society, or not, and work on the Cohn family farm until he grew old.
Artie had struggled with the realities of modern society all his life. He had graduated high school, but only barely, and had dropped out of college twice. All his teachers, professors, shrinks, had the same thing to say about him: “He has the ability, the knowledge, the skill; but not the drive to succeed.” It wasn’t that he didn’t want succeed, either, but as far as he was concerned, he had more important things to think about. He excelled in all things outdoors, and all things intuitive. During high school, he spent all of his weekends in the woods of western New England. Indiana came as a shock to him – suddenly he found himself surrounded by unfamiliar plants and animals. For miles around his flat in Richmond, there was derelict concrete jungle, but by visiting the country with Jeff, he quickly became familiar with Midwestern wild food stocks.
He and Jeff both watched international news-feeds like vultures, starved for any scrap of new information they could find. At first Artie didn’t know what he was looking for as he compulsively scanned the AP ticker on his computer screen year after year, but as he grew older he realized that he sought a harbinger of the end of the epoch. As he listened on the radio to President Turgidson announcing plans for another invasion, he loaded his essentials into his old and trusted surplus frame-pack, bought as much dank as he could get his hands on, and headed to the liquor store to stock up for the long haul. He suspected this war would be the one Einstein had warned about. Once his amenities were meticulously stowed in a hollowed tree behind the college he’d been asked to leave years before, he headed to his friends’ house to announce the news and begin their last real party before the driest storm.
~+~+~+~+~
They awoke the next day around noon, in various uncomfortable poses in the living room where they had passed out. It was quiet outside – too quiet. At first, Artie worried something terrible had happened while they’d slept, then he realized it was Sunday.
“So, what’s the plan,” asked Dave, sipping a cup of tea at the breakfast table.
“Well, we need to get as many supplies as we can afford,” suggested Jeff, though he thought it obvious. Artie was surprised at his friends’ competence considering the situation at hand.
He wondered whether they realized what they were getting into, or whether he had underestimated them all along. After all, they had agreed to go off the grid come this juncture. Perhaps they were paranoid enough to survive. Though they were the ones he trusted most to survive with him, he remained watchful of their judgment. “Not all you can afford.. all you can fit in your cars. We need to be mobile at an instant’s notice. Also, stock up on tobacco.”
“I don’t smoke,” responded Dave, inviting a glare from Artie.
“They aren’t for smoking. They are bartering tokens. There is no telling what an addict in withdrawal will give for a pack of Marlboro’s. Your dollars ‘ll be worthless once the economy hits the shitter. And gold i’n't gunna help neither.” Artie whipped his head around to see whose words of wisdom had saved him the trouble, but he knew before he saw her.
“Chelsea! I’d hoped you’d know to come, but I never thought you would!”
“Are you kidding? Its the end of the world, I wouldn’t miss it for the world,” she grinned wildly, obviously pleased with her own wit.
“Welcome, and nice meet you in person – Arty has told me all about you,” Jeff let slip. Artie’s cheeks turned crimson.
“Oh, he has, has he? You must be Jeff. I was planning to fly in as soon as Turgidson announced.. but the airports were all closed… something about a ‘terror warning’… so I drove.”
“From New York? Overnight? You must be crazy” interjected Dave in disbelief, gazing unwittingly at her bosom.
“Well you shouldn’t be surprised that I’m crazy, since Artie does fancy me. And I didn’t drive from New York, I was in Boston when I heard – I was at a concert….So yeah… isn’t it great how adrenaline can substitute for sleep? Oh, and Artie, be a good boy and get me a cuppa.” Artie was not used to following anyone’s orders, and was especially not used to being called a boy, let alone good, but when Chel demands, Chel gets, and so Artie obliged.
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It has been months since I posted. Nothing worth writing about has occurred, save for those few events which were too broad or too sensitive to write about. It is far past my bedtime, though, and I’ve realized that tonight I probably will not sleep.
See, tonight, as I began to doze off, I realized that this is the anniversary of a close friend’s suicide.
To be honest, his phone number is still in my phone, and there are times I forget he is gone, and I start to call him.
To be honest, I still feel like his premature departure was my fault.
I knew what was going on inside his head. I talked about it with him regularly. I was freshly out of a mental hospital myself: working on my artistic credentials, and waiting for the doctors to decide that I was not likely to try, again, to kill myself . That is to say, I knew to a limited degree what he was going through. He discussed methods of self-asphyxiation with me. I was in denial of the dire situation, convinced that the whole ruckus was just an attempt to keep people’s attention. I figured that if he really wanted to die, he would keep it private, to ensure that nobody would stop him. But he talked about it a lot, and nobody stopped him.
I never expressed my concern about his wellbeing to anyone in a position of power, in part due to my fears and distrust of the people in positions of power, who had at that point already evicted my friend from campus housing, and declared to me that my own mental illness is just an excuse for laziness. Other friends of his did get him help though. It made him really angry at the time. He felt betrayed. I thank whoever it was, though. That interference kept our friend around a few days longer, and I can’t fathom what I’d give for just a minute more with him now.
A year and a day ago he came to me seeking support, but I turned him away. His emotional burdens atop my own had overwhelmed me, and I could not shoulder anymore.
I never saw him again.
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I was sitting down to read some more Jack Kerouac, when I heard a faint knocking on the storm door that leads to the entranceway to my dingy apartment, and the other hellholes in this building. I peered through the blinds, as I always do, to see what car might be parked outside. See, if the car belongs to a friend of mine, I let him or her in. If it is the landlord or his creepy, sexually androgenous maintainance guy, Bob, I rarely come to the door. They seem to be under the impression that though I am a tenant, I work for them, and so apparently have the responsibility to help them maintain the whole building.
The landlord, Franz, is in his fifties, but looks far older. He has an old world accent, though he grew up here in Indiana. Perhaps it is the result of a stroke. He does not take good care of himself. When his doctor told him that his cigarette habit was killing him, he switched to boozing. Since first meeting him four months ago, I’ve never seen him sober. He had another minor stroke last week. Bob tells me it was from from the stress of his work, though I know he has already passed most of his landlordly duties on to Bob, who is an old drinking buddy of his. He first hired Bob to help maintain his properties ten years ago.
Bob loves to talk, especially about himself and his life. He tells me most of his stories dozens of times, that is, whenever he gets me to come out of my apartment to talk to him. Bob tells me that he is a Blackfoot indian, and grew up on a reservation in the Dakotas. Having not met any members of that nation before him, I wonder whether his effeminite facial features might be attributed to his background. He is unmarried and claims to have bedded his alcoholic , Puerto Rican brother-in-law’s “wife” (they are not legally married). The brother-in-law, Hector, drinks Bud Lite constantly, and chases each beer with one of those little sample bottles of hard liquor that you can get for a buck. Since Bob financially supports Hector’s household of bastard children, the woman of the house makes Hector come and work with Bob some days.
Hector is always drunk on the job, and is very loud. He smokes foul smelling cigarillos, and ashes wherever he happens to be, including my self-proclaimed non-smoking apartment. He leaves a trail of beer cans in his wake and refuses to use any source of running water on the property other than my badly ventilated bathroom. I wonder whether the jobs would get done quicker without Hector, as when he paints windowframes, more paint gets ont he windows than the frames, and when he moves furniture, it always finds a way to get broken.
To paraphrase “Fight Club,” Bob has bitch tits. Perhaps they are the remnants of once well defined pectorals. He rarely wears a shirt. Though Bob looks neither certainly male nor female, he constantly talks about what a manly guy he is, and how people oughtn’t provoke him. When I first met him, he raved about how the previous tenents were slobs, and most certainly gay. I don’t know if they are, and I don’t care, but to Bob, it was the explaination of the mess they left in their wake. Yesterday Bob told me more about his experience as a trucker, how his codriver got drunk and sent their rig down a cliff in the Yukon while Bob slept. His story was littered with remarks about how he showed the codriver, and then the police who is boss. Apparently, Bob got the cops to look the other direction while he roughed up the codriver, on the day that the codriver was arrested. I don’t know whether to believe Bob’s stories or not; it is hard to trust a maintainance guy that consistently tries to push dope to tennants on the side.
Much to my surprise (and relief!) There was no car outside, today when I peeked between the blinds.
Cautiously latching the saftey chain into place, I peered around the door. I spotted a man whom I did not recognise. His greasy orange hair was pasted to his wrinkled brow in the day’s heat, and a grimy off-white baseball cap turned backwards covered his head. He wore a clashy, faded and dirty hawiian shirt and mudstained khacki trousers. Rather than opening the storm door to speak, he awkwardly bent sideways to speak to me through a corner of the storm door where the glass had broken away some time ago – and was apparently never repaired by the landlord or Bob.
He spoke quickly in a mumbley tone, such that I could not undersatnd a word. His pupils were tiny and his eyes glazed. Jim Beam and ice, you know wha’I mean. Against my better judgement, I opened the door, curious what he had to say. Still rapidly mumbling through the hole in the door I finally understood what he wanted to know. Apparently some limbs had fallen off a tree behind the building. I figured that Bob’s rusty old truck, one with a grumbly old smog breathing diesel engine, most likely knocked them down when he drove it around the back yesterday. Red the jolly meth-head wanted to know if he could haul the limbs away. Until now, of course, I did not realize there were any downed limbs. I told the man that I was just a tenant and that he would have to talk to the landlord about it, though Franz had left half an hour earlier, after inspecting Bob and Hector’s paintjob. As the man turned away, I closed and locked my door.
I sat back down to my reading, the words flowed in rhythm to the man behind the building, now loading logs into a truck.
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My friend, Kerri, told me today when she saw “On the Road,” open on a couch-side table in my flat, that she thought I had already read it many times. i seemed the “type” who would have read it. I suppose it is true that I have long idolized the great authors of the beat and so-called “hippie” generation. Adventures of such epic proportions as those in “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,” “Dharma Bums,” “On the Road,” etc. are reading staples of my generation, but seemingly not an inspiration to us. If the fear of arrest and/or bodily injury from hitch hiking and drugging did not stifle our ability to explore the country, perhaps, then, it is the collective sense that the old ideal of drugging and road-tripping is an anachronism – it was a thing of our parents’ generation. And half the allure of that scene is the carelessly rebellious experience that our naive parents must have had. As I began to read “On the Road” for the first time, though, my heart broke. I realized that we’d never be able to follow in those tire treads, at least not without some sense that the journey would be an unconvincing counterfeit of what others had once done.
Wondering what the great venture of my generation might be, i sought answers on Wikipedia. It told me that “generation C” was about connecting to each other and creating art: ease of access to information and whatnot. The Internet. Somehow, sitting in front of a computer, half-clothed in a dingy apartment – dirty dishes stacked high… it has no epic sense to it, really. In observing my self and peers though, it seems it must be the case. Pallor is fashionable these days. People who get out a lot do it for their health, or some other facade-building purpose. Growing organic vegetables, whatever. Everyone has a blog or two, many with video documentation of their daily, mundane lives. The so called culture is naught but a vast library of diaries. That is to say, the classical “normal” seems to be swinging in to fashion, give or take few technological advances.
We are so disillusioned that we know we cannot stop a war with our energies. Protests are regarded with a rolled eye in most circles. Activism, though not central to our generation’s ideology, seems to have evolved in to a much less shocking form. We write about out feelings about the war on our blogs. We take part in telephone and Internet polls. Basically, no matter how strong our opposition to the status-quo, we try to stay off the radar and out of trouble. By doing so we are placing votes of confidence in the market economy and the capital-driven imperialist infrastructure. In doing nothing but writing this, I too am casting a vote of confidence. I mean, what impact can these words really have? Everyone who reads it is going to just keep working in Joe’s proverbial button factory.
It may be that I’ve not slept well in days, save for the calm oblivion that rolls over me hours after i pop a prescription sleep-aid, and it may be that I have been in Indiana far too long, but it seems that my generation has far too early tossed our idealism and naivete aside. We are finding comfort in the great American dream of middle class living, for it is what we grew up with, despite the fact that the ones who were once long haired radicals are now our parents. And most of them straightened out, got an education and a job, and are looking forward to wholesome retirements full of days in the garden and walks in the park. The ones who didn’t straighten out, well they’ve burnt out: either gone nuts or lived fast and died young.
A Wikipedia contributor suggested that the upsurging of creativity and communication could catalyse a renaissance of some sort. But I’m not so sure. The romanticism and willingness to expand ones paradigm, such as with the French Renaissance, Harlem Renaissance and the Beat Renaissance, (if i may call it that) is absent from my generation. So in a way, that which made the road trips of my parents’ generation special is going to be what keeps my generation from being anything special: We’re moving along quite quickly, toward no where in particular.
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On second thought…
August 8, 2008 at 1:06 am (Journaling, Social Commentary) (Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, education, mental health, psychology)
Upon attempting some of the beginning exercises in DOTRSotB, I have started to wonder a bit about whether I am at all impaired on the right side of my brain. I never had a stroke or anything, so any problem I have now, I should have always had, right?
A long time ago, I was almost *too* imaginative – creativity was not lacking, in fact I’d say I was right-brain dominant. I excelled in art and music classes (but I did have trouble with math, organization, languages, and logical problems). I never had spacial perception issues, and as for visual memory, I still remember the layout of the house in which I went to day care until I was sixteen months old. As I understand it, one’s brain can not short circuit from being overworked.
The question, which arises is this, then: what happened to my brain, that it seems to have switched sides?
I have a few ideas.
- I struggled so hard with left brain tasks in school that all my energies went into those tasks, and as a result they atrophied.
- There has been no atrophy, but since creativity-based classes were out of the picture after age 12, the left brain has developed, and the right just fell behind.
- The expensive neuro-psychological tests which alerted me to a dire lack of right-brain function were faulty.
I, for one am greatly offended by the fact that our education system manages to kill every ounce of creative energies in most students by the time they reach high-school. I suppose it goes to show that the real purpose of schools is not to produce a more educated populous, but to quash any possibility that people will think for themselves; in doing so schools prevent any challenge to status quo. Sad, though, that despite the overwhelming focus on mathematical and otherwise analytic thought in American schools, those same schools are very poorly rated in comparison to other industrialized nations. I wonder whether this is because the Chinese still have music programs.
In any case, I am making progress in my brain retraining very, very quickly. I can feel the shift between left and right, and am becoming adept at causing that shift. I’d known how to do this for years, but I’d always written it off and suppressed it. I isolate right-brain function so thoroughly in that trance-like state that language ceases to be perceptible to me. All this time I’d thought that the right-brain mode of mindedness was the same thing as zoning out.
I supposedly have a few more years to salvage the function of that ill-fated cortex.
Maybe there is hope afterall.
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