Suspects in for questioning

I've been feeling bleak as of late. Very run down, prone to intense mood swings. The pendulum traced back and forth between a dark depression and blinding rage. It's been creeping up on me, but turning violent as of late...an addict smashing and grabbing in a cathedral. Last night, I felt dead outside, with only tactile sensations working if someone burrowed down past the several inches of psychic concrete that's coating me. I got home from work, took out the garbage, and then crawled into bed until my wife found me.

I've been here before. It's a territory well mapped and traveled. I know the customs, and the regulars acknowledge me with a grim sneer of "Oh, you're back" as they raise their heads from their acidic brews. But here is the Land of Nothing Worth Living For, and it casts long shadows. I've felt futile here. I've felt inferior. But I never felt the rage I have been cresting on.

So, after a delicious dinner by the hand of my wife and a non-threatening evening of a DVD and some re-writing, I felt better, calmer. During some evening typing, I'm tracking the past week, slowing and fast-forwarding, trying to isolate every little thing, pulling them onto small strings leading back to some common denominator. Wait, what was that bit about Jeff Gannon I wrote? I scroll back, ornery. A burst of bile in my chest, and I follow the feeling back further. Closing my eyes, and something's moving fast and light in the shadows. Deep breathing, and I follow the feeling of nascent rage in my head. Slow it down, and see the sequence play out in a slower motion. I can slice events into time fragments, the same way polygraph experts make notes on the paper denoting question and answer. Time is moved around, boxed and scanned. I open my eyes, time regains its speed and elasticity.

I know what happened.

I've been overdosing on news blogs, specifically the lefty opinion power houses Eschaton and Daily Kos. I've been wrapping too much time and energy around them. I'm been absorbing outrage after outrage, comment after comment. I've been juicing out on snark and desolation. I've been interalizing an entire community's sentiments until I was a proxy server for their frustrations, ranging from dark humor to depression. I lost myself in there. I've been substituting my own persona for a multitude, loosing hours writing comments and refreshing, contributing to discussions and singing along with the chorus. I've been hitting it hard for a coupe weeks straight, since the inauguration. I've been an addict. But I got overwhelmed in the witticisms and the anger. Yesterday afternoon, I shattered, and I posted this.

Damn I'm tired of this. I'm tired of the monsters in the White House pushing us into fascism a little bit more everyday and not caring. I'm tried of the press playing along. I'm tired of waking up to a new outrage and all the trolls tap-dancing in their goosestep boots. I'm tired of the lies that's bent into the truth. I'm tired. I just feel so fucking futile. I'm tried of trying to be the noble and upstanding soul who remembers what this country used to be like. I'm tired of stupid triumphing over smarts, tired of the smirk over the smile, tired of greed over goodwill. I can't take it. I don't want these monsters to win but I'm nearly the end of my rope. Nothing repels them. Nothing stops them. They take joy in this destruction and give nothing in return to enrich the soul. And if I hate them I become them. I just ache. Everywhere.

Looking back at it now, I can't really recognize this figure, but I feel sorry for him. He sounds as if he's going to do something rash, and I don't want him to. Maybe he should lay off the opiate of instant online partisan political gratification. Maybe he should stop visiting commentary sites and just focus on the news for a while. I hear the BBC is good, same with Cursor. News is terrible enough as is without a soft corrosion of gallows humor following it. He should concentrate on making sure he sees the good he has in his world. It's the line from Lord of the Rings where Gandalf reminds Frodo that despite all appearances, there are forces of good in this world. Hopefully, he'll find the balance between staying in the know and falling deep into the bottomless hole of e-political opinion. He needs to step away from poli-blogs and breathe. You know, maybe he's not Catholic, but he could co-opt Lent to detox himself, take a vacation from these blogs for 40 days. I'm sure those blogs will get on just fine as he undistracts himself

I hope he gets better. As for me, I have scrumptious Valentine's weekend plans. The wife and I are attending a stage version of "The Woman in Black." What can I say, my wife adores gothic horror. It's the perfect V-day gift. For me, some peaceful weekend writing. Revamping the synopsis and first chapter for contest. Deadline in 11 days.

Have some marvelous new ideas for the rest of the novel. Apparently working yourself into near-asphyxiation on an exercise machine works wonders.

With your host, Donatien Alphonse François de Sade

Channel 4 is preparing "Guantanamo Guidebook," a show that will test the effectiveness of interrogation techniques like sleep deprivation which freed inmates say were used by the U.S. military at its camp in Cuba.

Channel Four, which brought the world reality TV hit "Big Brother," will film seven volunteers as they are subjected to extreme temperatures and mild physical contact while being kept awake for long periods.

The techniques are based on information from declassified U.S. government documents, and will be carried out by expert interrogators from the United States, a Channel Four spokesman said on Wednesday, declining to provide additional details.

He said the volunteers were rigorously screened prior to their participation and received intensive medical and psychological attention during and after the taping of the show.

One man was forced by doctors to withdraw after he contracted hypothermia.

The programme, due to air in mid-March, will examine the effects of the interrogation techniques over 48 hours in a London warehouse. It is part of a four-part series on torture hosted by news presenter Jon Snow.

People get it. People read the news reports in the papers or see something on news broadcasts. They get something terrible and inhumane happened in Gitmo. To put it on TV like this turns the proceedings into a faux-reality show, our modern recasting of the carnival freak show. Torture, deemed quaint by our nation's incoming top lawyer, is getting closer to being sold as entertainment, with Satan in carnival barker pinstripes pulling back the curtain and beckoning you to peer inside the sulfur-smelling tent. It isn't torture, but Fear Factor without prizes. It mocks a word that normally was reserved for the most hideous interpersonal actions one person can do to another.

Besides, to truly show what torture is you have to do the following:

--Grab people off the streets, or bust down their doors in the middle of the night
--Don't tell them were they are going
--Put them in cages, thousands of miles away from home.
--Have guards who ridicule their customs and ethnicity
--Cut them off from all contact with loved ones and legal representatives
--Ignore their pleas for mercy.
--Laugh at the detainees when they want to "opt out"
--Detain your subjects as long as you want, then let them go without apologizing

But you know, it's part of a TV program about torture, so there you go. It's educational. You know, for the kids.

There's a scene in Alan Moore's stellar graphic novel (soon to be a motion picture I'm very eager to see) "V for Vendetta" where a doctor who worked at a death camp is confronted by the title character, a former occupant of the camp. The doctor tells V, an assassin in a Joker-esque guise, that she knows what she and the rest of the leaders at the camp did was wrong, and that deep down there was some hideous flaw inside mankind that allows the species to easily slaughter one another methodically if one was given the proper orders and justification. Resigned, the doctor admits "We deserve to be culled."

I'm just thankful American TV hasn't picked up on this yet. Imagining Paris and Nicole, maybe the crew from American Idol, struting around in Gucci shoes with tiny brownshirt-clad dogs in tow, flogging and giggling with an omigawd vapidity, smirking at the camera wondering what "culled" means.

Today's Word: Abstract

The world edged into odd angles, crippling the solidity of facts and reason. The rules were rewritten on a whim, and he was in tears with trying to grasp the streets, people, customs. The traffic lights were blue, constant flashing blue.

More to come. Maybe later. Off to get lunch.

Jeff Gannon, or whatever your name is

I was going to write a big heaping spoonful of wrath about this whole Gannon scandal. Yesterday, as I read more about the fall-out and the larger mosaic of implications, I got ornery. I could punch steel. But today, instead of flowing outrage, I just sat at my desk on the edge of a depression. In short: I was a journo at one point in my life. I find it shocking that there isn't more outcry from reporters that a complete fraud posing as a journalist made it past the White House security and sat in the press pool, giving softball questions at press conferences. If I was covering the White House, I'd be livid about a faker in my midst. I'd phone my editor and scream that this was a huge story, that the White House had a ringer in the press pool, and I'd follow that lead in the same way a couple reporters in the 1970s carefully linked an office break-in to the White House.

But no. The press in this country appears to just be sitting there and taking it. They don't acknowledge the contempt to their profession. Look, politicans are always going to lie, cheat and steal. Journalists are supposed to know better. Glad I dropped out of the game when I did.

Happy Birthday

It's my step-dad's birthday today, so a digital howdy-ho to him. Wifey and I shall give him the dutiful phone call tonight. He's impossible to buy for, so we sent him a card.

Today's Word: Smudge

He stood there, watching her cry in the rain. She screamed at him for minutes, rage and water and tears scattering in different directions. Her face was ruined, her make-up in terrible, broken smears.

Faith-based suffering for science

Story here

LONDON - Karl Marx famously pronounced that religion was "the opiate of the people" — but can one's belief in God really ease pain? Or is a placebo just as effective?

Researchers at Oxford University are taking these questions seriously, announcing plans Wednesday for an ambitious, multidisciplinary study to test the "faith factor" in coping with pain.

Volunteers will undergo brain scans while being subjected to painful experiments in laboratory conditions. The human guinea pigs also will be asked about their belief systems and what affect they have on their suffering.

“People frequently report that their beliefs do reduce their pain and we’d like to find what the psychological basis of that is," said Toby Collins, of Oxford's Department of Pharmacology.

The experiment is one of the first projects to be conducted at the Oxford Center for Science of the Mind (OXCSOM).

The pilot project, funded by a grant from the U.S.-based John Templeton Foundation, will examine all types of beliefs, "from those that make children think their stockings are filled by Santa Claus to the faith that drives fundamentalist terrorism," according to the university's Web site.

Today's Word: Wires

The crisscross of metal cables held up the stage. Salvaged from old power poles, the thick cables were black and wet with the sweat dripping on them.

Class update

Everything went very well. Read five pages from chapter one. Felt very much like a book signing event, with yours truly at the podium. Very positive comments with good feedback. Got an offer from the instructor that she'd help me with my synopsis for contest. I need to clear up a few logical gremlins, too. But all in all, a sigh of relief from the man with too much caffeine in his blood.

I have this dread feeling in the pit of my soul that I might have to break down and get Microsoft Word. I hate it. Too damn bulky and counterintuitive, but I'm getting killed in format issues when e-mail my non-Word files from home and put them into my office's Word so I can print them out. Perhaps I should print them out at home and save the trouble, but I'm so addicted to preening my stuff up until a couple hours before class. If I had a laptop that magically generated paper, I'd be printing out assignments in class, as my patient instructor waits on.

Tuesday night did offer a clever assignment to help with a breakthrough I've been needing. Simply put, how do you (or I, in this case) present the backstory of the fall of civilization without pouring on the pages, deadening the reader with what authors call "the information dump." I'm thinking about having it in pieces, sprinkled throughout the novel. Wrote a bit of it with Rayelle last night in an exercise. My exercise buddy, fyi, wrote about the proper use of a light anti-tank weapon, and did it without making it sound Clancyesque. Gallows humor in dialogue works wonders.

Dude...I mean, dude

Geoff Huish, 26, was so convinced England would win Saturday's match he told fellow drinkers at a social club, "If Wales win I'll cut my balls off," the paper said.

Friends at the club in Caerphilly, south Wales, thought he was joking.

But after the game Huish went home, severed his testicles with a knife, and walked 200 metres back to the bar with the testicles to show the shocked drinkers what he had done.

Huish was taken to hospital where he remained in a seriously ill condition, the paper said. Police told the paper he had a history of mental problems.

Wales's 11-9 victory over England at the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff was their first home win in 12 years.


Mental problems? Well, yeah, obviously.

Today's Word: String

Small fragments of words. Lining the journal. Blasts of thoughts. And the author. Too afraid. To. Put them together. He felt. Satisfied to write. Them down. But left them to die without. Nurturing.

First chapter undergoing a washing and waxing. My darling and loving wife tells me I'm obsessing. I know she's right, that there's a point on the assembly line when you tighten the bolts just a little too much. Or, for my foodie readers, you cook the thing until all the nutrients are out of it. It's supposed to be a beta draft anyway. It gets a lot done, but my instincts tells me it could be a little too overheated. Rayelle comes off like a bullet-proof ninja in the proceedings instead of the street rat I'm hoping for.

But I don't think it sucks. That's a relief. It'll be the first time in a few weeks that I'm not dreading going into class. Reading the syllabus, the next few weeks look light, which means more time for me to write (the novel) and revise (for contest). I gave my wife my copy of "Battlefront" for Xbox to hide at her work for time being. I need to prune the distractions from now until the contest conference in July. If I get half the book done by then, I'd be okay. Three-quarters with the ending written would be better.

Oh, and this is for Mrs. P. I don't get a lot of inspiration for gaming, although "Battlefront" (my precious) did give me some ideas for a graphic novel I'd kill to do. Usually, I game to just game. I consider my Xbox and Gamecube as my play areas and my laptop my work area. I've been a gamer since I was about 7, and the advent of the Atari 2600. I read a lot of insider gossip on video games, and I'm very selective about what I play. It also doesn't hurt that I live in Seattle: Cradle to Nintendo of America and home of Microsoft. I go through fits and spurts of loving and hating the industry, usually coming down on a modified Sturgeon's Law that 90 percent of video games are the same old crap in a market dominated by sequels and cross-market licensing. I'm floating into LoveLand now, curious about the upcoming video gamegasm trade show, E3. Next year is going to be the roll out of the next generation of consoles, and I'm interested if there's going to be real innovation (Nintendo's Revolution) or if it's just going to be prettier candy (Xbox 2, PS3).

I like gaming more than television. Sometimes I wish the industry would grow up and take more risks. Would like to see more mature titles that don't revolve around gore or nudity. Less sequels, more innovative concepts. That said, I'll always stop and pick up a Star Wars title or the latest in the Legend of Zelda series.

My hypocrisy always gets me in the end. At least my wife (casual gamer, at best) likes to watch me murder pixels.

The first 82 words

Rayelle tumbled out of the tenement doorway, sending the dented metal fire door around on its hinges and banging against the crumbling brick edifice. Streaks of blood trailed from her counterfeit Chinese combat boots, leaving red scuffs as she crunched on broken bones and discarded Wok Around the Block containers. A blast of chunky air infected with post-war carbon filaments made her cough in a key of a minor spasm. The Seattle night sky glowed orange from the fires in the north.

Today's Word: Clip

The fragment of old celluloid film was on the floor, black and curling in self defense. A fragment of her vision left vacant and to die of loneliness from the final cut. He picked it up, studied the frames, and he saw he was in it.

I'm never going to finish the damn chapter on time. I'm in that queasy space of impending failure. I have an optional assignment that I'm going to miss because I'm so drawn in on making the first chapter sing. I thought I was close, but I'm caught in heavy fog. The coastline is not in sight. We are running low on food. Landmarks are hazy and malleable in the night. The stars have forsaken us.

In more serious news, I want to extend heartfelt condolences to Mrs. P (link on the right). She lost her sister. Being an only child, I can't imagine losing a sibling. I can only envision it as a parallel death of yourself. Someone of your own blood, cut with some of the similar physical features, dies and makes you understand your own death is inevitable. But in the practical sense, I have no idea of what it's like to have someone that close gone. You're trained to understand parents and grandparents vanishing into that great beyond before you, but a brother or sister (like a spouse) is next to you, running along side on that linear of time's arrow. Having a vacancy next to you...I wish I had more to say than I'm sorry.