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Taking the Temperature of a Writer

Yesterday's writing task was to rework the opening chapter of the novel I am working on. Capturing the reader's attention quickly was the order of the day. I began the rewrite with the image of a icy drinking fountain, you know the ones that can make the water almost too cold to drink. The chapter is set in the early morning just after dawn on a crisp spring day. I struggled with that image and the fifteen hundred words that followed for most of the daylight and into the early evening.

Yesterday in Berkeley was a warm day, September is often the hottest month of the year here. Now by hot I mean maybe a couple of days of 90, but more likely some mid-80s. Officially it reached 84 yesterday. As I have oft mentioned in the past, my wall of windows faces due west, which means that around two in the afternoon the sun has begun to blaze into my nest. I tweak the blinds and switch on my fans but for a few days each year it gets downright uncomfortable in here. Yesterday was a borderline day, as long as I kept a fan directly on me as well as minimal clothing I was within my tolerable range of heat/mass/body index. So I sloughed on with the chapter.

By early evening my creative energies had been drained and with mild dissatisfaction I put the chapter to bed for the night. I slipped in the land of Morpheus sometime after midnight with the windows wide open, I didn't pull the comforter over me until sometime in the wee dark hours. This morning I opened my eyes to a grey day outside my windows, the marine layer had moved in overnight and temperatures had plummeted. After pulling on several layers of cotton I was at my desk reediting the chapter.

Metaphors and images that had hidden from me yesterday snapped into view. In a scant hour I had reworked the entire piece and captured the words that should enrapture an audience. It's still well short of noon and chapter two beckons. What a difference a day makes.

Today's lesson: If you are going to write about the Sahara Desert, better not to attempt it from Boulder, Colorado in February.

Camouflage

From 1975 to 1990 I lived in and around the South Bay neighborhoods of Los Angeles (Manhattan Beach, Torrance, Redondo Beach, Palos Verdes & Hermosa Beach). One of my friends then was an older gentleman who hung out at the beach bars I frequented. Charles was a storyteller, he was also a kind and gentle alcoholic. Nearly all of the beach bar denizens knew him as a regular but most thought his stories came out of the bottle. I learned that Charles had a really tough time in his golden years but I also discovered that he had a Ph.D. in literature that he got after first earning two engineering degrees. I liked to listen to him and didn't much care about the "truth" of his stories.

One day I took Charles down to Long Beach to visit his daughter. On the drive down he said:

"You know during the war if you took this street south you could drive right under the camouflage netting the defense department put up to hide the airplane plant from Japanese bombers."

"That must have been a lot of netting," I said.

"Oh yeah it went on for several miles," he replied.

This must have been 1982 or thereabouts when I heard this tale, no internet to go look up the veracity of the many tales he told. Besides I wasn't at all interested in proving him right or wrong. So imagine my surprise when I got these photos from a friend a few days ago, showing the vast camouflage netting the military put up in Long Beach to cover the Boeing plant. The shot above is the before photo, this next one is the after.

Here are a few more shots.

Underneath the netting

Treetop level

Hangar below

In one of the articles I read I found this line: "you could head south down Carson St. and drive right under the huge canopy." It was that same Carson St. forty years later that Charles and I were driving on the day when he told me the camouflage story.

Addendum: I am told that there was a similar camouflage set-up in Pasadena at the Lockheed plant and that some of these pictures might be from there. But who cares about a little mix-up in a good Charles story.

monkandre

A Webcomic

When I got the third recommendation for xkcd website ("a Webcomic of Romance, Sarcasm, Math and Language") I thought I should take a look. About every other offering is way too techie for most normal humanoids, but they do come out with some real gems, like the Green Sci-Fi cum Literati panels above.

Travels Plans Delayed

Today was to have been my jump-off day for the midwestern part of my fall road trip. However, once again my aching back has dictated a change of plans. I am back in Berkeley awaiting the results of x-rays and other tests. Then I expect we shall move on to an MRI and possibly a consultation with the USF spinal clinic.

I still hope to make some or all of my planned stops in the midwest this fall but I will be starting several weeks later than originally planned. Updates to those with spare bedrooms and awaiting dining rooms soon. To all my other readers - the blog goes on.

Professional Finger Painting

Medical Marijuana (7): Dosage

As I explained last week, I have as yet been unable to balance the palliative benefits of pain reduction with the side effects of being high, baked, wasted, buzzed, ripped, faded and/or stoned. You see, as with most prescription drugs, "effects may vary." The problem is dosage. We humans are not the same, we react differently based on age, weight, metabolism, contents of stomach, amount of sleep you got last night, stress, the phase of the moon.

You get the idea, we do not react the same to any stimuli, we are unique creatures. So with Medical Marijuana the prescribed "dosage" is a bit of a guessing game. Let me give you a most recent example:

I bought a six ounce Chocolate Peanut Butter Hash Bar (product review below). Yesterday I split the bar with a friend, he has less acute pain than I and he is a long time recreational pot user. So we had two levels of discomfort and two very different histories of functioning while under the influence. Adding these additional variables would provide more data for my experiment.

But with Medical Marijuana there is a second issue regarding dosage - there is no standard for what constitutes a "dose". I can report without fear of contradiction that one patient's 1/2 dose is another person's full dose or quarter dose or double dose. Here is yesterday's dual test subject report.

The effects began fairly quickly (30 minutes) for both participants. Pain was effectively reduced for both in the one hour to perhaps mid third hour after consumption. However, the bar was labeled as being 1/4 to 1/2 dose and we split the bar equally. So according to the manufacturer we each had 1/8 to 1/4 of a full dose.

By late in the fourth hour I was supine in a cool, dark room contemplating the nuances of string theory as it applies to snack cheese. Somewhere in the fifth hour my friend found me and suggested that the dosage disclosure on the packing had clearly been set for elephants or small cetaceans.

So as for dosage - you will have to learn to titrate any Medical Marijuana products to your unique physiology and to the wildly inconsistent labeling of the various products. Also recommended in the early testing stages - stay home but pre-stock the kitchen with chocolate.

PRODUCT REPORT: Chocolate Peanut Butter Hash Bar

Ingredients: Sugar, Peanut Oil, Flour, Milk, Salt, Hash.

Notice the absolute absence of chocolate in the product. Clearly bad labeling, however, it was wonderfully peanutty; in fact, this is the best tasting product so far in the experiment. As noted above the package dosage disclosure is obscenely low and should be adjusted in line with other competitive products. On a cost per dose basis, this is an exceptional value. My next test of this item will involved dividing the bar into eight doses.

Previous posts in this series:

Medical Marijuana (6): A Conundrum

Medical Marijuana (5): The Patients

Medical Marijuana (4): Botanical Chemistry

Medical Marijuana (3): Human Experimentation

Medical Marijuana (2): The Dispensary

Medical Marijuana (1): An Inquiry