Author Archives: Brick Wahl

Forgetting

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Fifteen years ago, I worked for about thirty or so people, from executives on down, and I handled all their expense reports and purchases and you name it. I was so good at it that I was one of the employees that others would come to when they were stumped trying to figure out how to expense something. Executives from outside my department would come and ask for help. That was at Disney and I knew my shit. I was also, for a year or two, the one man purchasing department for Disney Online, when it was a start up. Millions of dollars of purchases went through me, I drew up the purchase orders, I figured out to set up the accounting for each, I got them approved. I remember setting up a database on Access to keep track of them. A schedule on Project. I had that purchasing down, too. Later, I was told by accounting that I processed more accounts payable invoices than the rest of the Walt Disney Internet Group put together. Tens of millions of dollars every couple months. That is in addition to all those expense reports and getting purchase orders processed–though I was no longer the purchasing department. There were several people by then doing what I had once done. I was a master of details and process and numbers.

This occurred to me a couple nights ago as I stared at our bank account and tried to figure out if we had enough cash on hand to cover rent. (We did.) I couldn’t remember what charges were outstanding. I couldn’t remember what we had paid or not. I had definitely forgotten to pay the DWP, I knew that, as they were threatening to shut us off. Time Warner Cable too. All these numbers swimming, these things I have no ability to calculate or schedule or understand. An infinitesimal fraction of what I was once a master of at Disney. It’s all beyond me now.

Losing your executive functions is a bitch. Abilities just disappear. Things everyone can do I can no longer do. Basic human being things. Those neurons burned away a long time ago. My temporal lobe, where all these things lie, is a beat up mess. A life time of small seizures, thousands of them, have done their damage. It’s like someone reached into the hard drive of the computer I’m writing on and 0-949uj1/’p23fh13wcde’p9dcalkjaZXA. Just like that.

A couple days ago was our wedding anniversary. The day before I was looking up at the digital sign above the bus driver, charmed, and it said November 28. November 28? Oh wow, November 29th is our anniversary. I said that aloud. She said yes it is and smiled. I said I had completely forgotten. I had never forgotten before. Not even almost forgotten. I always remembered. She smiled again. That’s OK, she said, we’ll have a nice dinner. You live with a husband long enough and you can see that his brain has been zapped away, and that he forgets things, but he means well.

I had never forgotten our anniversary before. I wondered what else I was forgetting. What else I would forget. And I sat there, as the bus lurched along, with the cold hollow suspicion that I was not going to able to take care of us by myself much longer.

 

(This is also posted on brickwahl.com)

Facebook quizzes

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(From August, 2014, and I just wasted several minutes trying to figure out if this should be on bricksscience.com or bricksbrain.com.)

Every day on Facebook is a bombardment of What Whatever Are You? quizzes. I think they’re a little creepy. All they do is feed data to the data miners. That’s what they’re designed for. Every time we answer one of those questions, we have described a little more about ourselves. It’s that data that data miners with their incredibly sophisticated algorithms sift through to know what kinds of ads to show us, what kind of politics we prefer, and if we have criminal or terrorist proclivities or not. There is not a quiz we take on Facebook that is not used for data gathering. Selling that data is how Facebook makes its money. And to everybody freaking about the NSA knowing everything, where do you think they get the majority of their information?

You’re looking at it. (Well, you are if you’re looking at this on Facebook.)

Whenever you hear news about Facebook altering its privacy policy or profile policy or requesting information, it is about getting more access to your data for the purposes of data mining.

Not understanding data mining is like watching television without comprehending advertising. Imagine watching TV and thinking that every single commercial you were watching was true and shown for your own benefit. Imagine having no skepticism whatsoever about ads on TV. It’s unimaginable.

Well, that is Facebook. People refuse to become skeptical. But think of it this way…the data mining industry knows more about you than you do. They know our thinking and behavior and how we respond to certain stimuli (such as questions in quizzes.) And they are already shaping our behavior. Five years ago none of us would have bothered taking those What Kind of Whatever Quizzes, stupid as they are, over and over and over. Now we can’t stop. They’re stupid, they’re a pain in the ass, they’re a waste of time, yet Facebook users love them. And the only reward we get is being told we are Napoleon or Bob Dylan or Star Wars or Rhett Butler. Maybe three seconds of pleasure. Tell me the data mining industry isn’t controlling our behavior.  And that is just one example. I’m still trying to figure out what algorithm is involved in those moronic “Think of a city that does not contain an A. 90% of people wiil fail” quizzes. A zillion people respond. Why? It is so subtle it must be brilliant. And why is “will” so often misspelled? It was wll–no i–for a while. Lately they’re wiil (two i’s). Why?

90% of you reading this will say so what, I don’t care, I’m not worried about it. Think about that. Why is your natural skepticism neutralized? You probably distrust just about everything else. Even the most paranoid leftist and tea party people you will ever meet, people who see conspiracies everywhere, know What Classic Rock Band They Are.

Styx

I got Styx.

 

Panic in Seizure Park

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(Between health insurance in 2014…I spent over $8,000 on seizure meds that year.)

Off for more solid gold epilepsy medicine. This is like a heroin habit. Panic in Seizure Park. I prefer to go to 24 hour pharmacies late at night for the creepiness factor. Scoring Tegretol from sleazy pharmacists. OK, they’re not sleazy, but this shit is expensive. If I were Philip Seymour Hoffman this would be considered cool.

Sometimes the brain has no clue how confused it is

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(From a note to a friend suffering from a mysterious and incurable vertigo and damn if the doctors could figure out why.)

A clean bill of health does not mean the problem could not be neurological. It might just mean that somewhere in your neuro network a few neurons, or maybe a mess of neurons, are out of whack. I found that studying neurology helped me to make it through the randomness of epilepsy, with all kinds of neurons out of whack, and see it as not so much a medical problem as an engineering one. Whenever the brain began perceiving things wrongly–as in your brain still being convinced you have a balance problem–I learned how to work with it and either correct my brain’s incorrect assumptions or work around them. Just coming up with fixes and work arounds. Thus I was able to function successfully (more or less) in a world full of normal brained people. The neurologist V.S. Ramachandran‘s wonderful (and wonderfully readable) book The Tell-Tale Brain, in particular, was a real help. Brain patients are always fascinating anyway, mistaking wives for hats and all, and Ramachandran has come up with some extraordinary fixes (a jerry rigged box full of mirrors, for instance) for his patients that oft times just got the brain’s sense of self  (i.e., the parts of the brain that connects the mind with the body that holds it) to realize that it was actually the problem. More often than not looking at the carefully placed mirrors so that the  brain could see the missing arm from the brain’s point of view (and not a mirrored reflection) cause the phantom pain to disappear instantly.  Your phantom vertigo–caused either by a virus or statin drugs, both done with ages ago–might be like those who suffer phantom pain in a long lost arm or leg.

Incidentally, some of the exceptional skills and capacities your specific brain has–the way you can hear and transcribe vast orchestrations in your head perfectly, as if a symphony is playing in front of you–could actually be the root if the problem. You never know. But extraordinary cognitive abilities usually lead to unplanned difficulties at some point. Which is probably the reason that not everyone has those abilities–they have been selected against through natural selection. Genius does have its downside.

The brain ain’t having it

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It is getting harder and harder to do paperwork. The brain ain’t having it. Lots of confusion. I couldn’t remember what month it was, either February or March. My wife points out it’s October.

I’ll have to have someone fill out these forms for me. Short bus here I come. Think I’ll lie down for a bit till the skull and limb tingling passes, the fog melts away and I alight again in the middle of October with the rest of you.

Sometimes I miss the old me.

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Having your executive functions slip away is crippling. There is so much you can’t do anymore, basic fundamental stuff, it drives you nuts. Or it doesn’t, and everything is every pleasant, and then someone reminds you that you forgot to do almost everything you were supposed to do. The weirdest thing of all, though, is how everything is increasingly in the present tense. I quickly forget most things beyond a day or so, and I can’t see into the future at all as far as planning… anything. I just sort of wander along in the now, and the whole concept of time as a continuum from past to future disappeared somewhere a few hundred thousand missing neurons ago. When I’m hanging out with people you all talk about your lives in terms of things you did and things you plan to do. And I know that I used to be able to do that and just sit and marvel at the wonder of it. I think to myself that when I go home I will write about it, but I usually forget, and write about something else. Now I’m looking at this stack of papers on my desk and know that there are things I was supposed to do in there but can’t remember what. I lift up the keyboard and there’s an unpaid parking ticket and a jury notice I was supposed to call about. And a neurologist I was supposed to call. I forget his name. What a weird mess this is becoming, in tiny increments, a few damaged synapses at a time. Sometimes I miss the old Brick, but mostly I can’t remember much about him.

let the brain settle itself down

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[Email from February, 2006. Reading this now I can’t believe I didn’t apply for disability. Instead I toughed it out as the increased medication slowly settled things back down. Took only a year….though the damage was done.]  

My epilepsy’s been messing with me pretty hard and writing is dicey and any intellectual discourse more so….which kinda scotches a lot of our conversations! Feeling slowly better….I suddenly developed an incredible stammer which is almost completely gone and my memory seems to be returning pretty much intact. I had lost my ability to read other people which was a little unnerving…that seems to be coming back. I still have a reduced depth perception (mainly over long distances) which is always cool at first but gets old. The limbs keep going numb, the skull tingly, I get really tired. Been losing weight which is nice. Libido’s fine. And I am whining about myself a lot which is exceedingly rare so enjoy it while you can.  All I can say is that seizure disorders are overrated as a spiritual vocation. There are lots of things more fun to do.

Escher

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I think if our late middle aged selves ever came face to face with our early twenty something selves at a party, we’d be astonished at how open minded and open to influences we had once been. In fact, we’d probably both quickly get irritated at each other and leave, denying that could ever have been or ever could be us.

Prince

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(2009)

I just found out that Prince is epileptic.

I guess he had full seizures as a kid but they abated at some point (though odds are he’s still mildly epileptic, just without the big seizures.) Very very rare for a celebrity or any VIP in the US especially to own up to it….it’s pretty much a career killer. You’ll notice he gives the impression that he’s cured, which is more than doubtful. I remember reading an article on Neil Young that claimed he too was cured….but that doesn’t happen, really, not with adult seizures, and not on its own. Controlled at best. But it’s just that it’s better to let people think you’re cured.  Whenever you see lists of “Famous People With Epilepsy” it’s almost all historical people. Otherwise you got Margaux Hemingway and Florence Joyner, who both died from epilepsy, and badly. Margeaux destroyed herself, FloJo smothered face down in her pillow while seizing. Not too cool. There are others, but unless there are some terrible public scenes, like Margaux, or SUDEP (Sudden Unexpected Death in Epilepsy), as with Flojo, one’s epilepsy remains intensely private, known by only a few, and sometimes virtually no one at all. But we are odd, us epileptics, we are different. Prince, like Neil Young, like Bud Powell and Lester Young and Van Gogh and Dostoevsky and certainly Donald Snowden, are shaped by their seizures, or perhaps shaped by the fundamental differences between an epileptic’s brain and your brains. Our neurons are not like yours, our synapses fire much more wildly, we have thoughts like power surges, we see a flattened world and auras like a Van Gogh painting. Our memories disappear. We have extraordinary focus on some things and no focus at all on most of the rest. Most of us wind up nothings. Some of us wind up Prince.