over too soon

ｅｖａｐｏｒｗａｖｅ

heart failure

But I have this against you: you have let go of the love you had at first. 

 - Revelation 2:4

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And the store is hideously lit and infused with soul-killing muzak or corporate pop and it’s pretty much the last place you want to be but you can’t just get in and quickly out; you have to wander all over the huge, over-lit store’s confusing aisles to find the stuff you want and you have to manoeuvre your junky cart through all these other tired, hurried people with carts (et cetera, et cetera, cutting stuff out because this is a long ceremony) and eventually you get all your supper supplies, except now it turns out there aren’t enough check-out lanes open even though it’s the end-of-the-day rush. So the checkout line is incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating. But you can’t take your frustration out on the frantic lady working the register, who is overworked at a job whose daily tedium and meaninglessness surpasses the imagination of any of us here at a prestigious college.


But anyway, you finally get to the checkout line’s front, and you pay for your food, and you get told to “Have a nice day” in a voice that is the absolute voice of death. Then you have to take your creepy, flimsy, plastic bags of groceries in your cart with the one crazy wheel that pulls maddeningly to the left, all the way out through the crowded, bumpy, littery parking lot, and then you have to drive all the way home through slow, heavy, SUV-intensive, rush-hour traffic, et cetera et cetera.

Everyone here has done this, of course. But it hasn’t yet been part of you graduates’ actual life routine, day after week after month after year. But it will be.

And many more dreary, annoying, seemingly meaningless routines besides. But that is not the point. The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing is gonna come in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don’t make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I’m gonna be pissed and miserable every time I have to shop. Because my natural default setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me. About MY hungriness and MY fatigue and MY desire to just get home, and it’s going to seem for all the world like everybody else is just in my way. And who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are, and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line. And look at how deeply and personally unfair this is.

- David Foster Wallace, This is Water

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Heart failure means that the heart is unable to pump blood around the body properly. It usually occurs because the heart has become too weak or stiff.

It's sometimes called "congestive" heart failure, although this name isn't widely used nowadays.

Heart failure doesn't mean your heart has stopped working – it just needs some support to help it work better. It can occur at any age, but is most common in older people.

Heart failure is a long-term condition that tends to get gradually worse over time. It can't usually be cured, but the symptoms can often be controlled for many years.

Heart failure is often the result of a number of problems affecting the heart at the same time. It can happen as a result of factors that put extra strain on the heart which persist over a prolonged period of time. It can also result from a sudden traumatic injury to the heart, such as following a heart attack.

Heart failure is a serious long-term condition that will usually continue to get slowly worse over time.
It can severely limit the activities you're able to do and is often eventually fatal.

But it's very difficult to tell how the condition will progress on an individual basis. It's very unpredictable – lots of people remain stable for many years, while in some cases it may get worse quickly.

- https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/heart-failure/

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Today after a monstrous day - for various reasons I was in a foul mood - I was writing on an outlier ward ward 40 minutes after my shift had ended, 20 minutes before the last shuttle bus left, wanting just to hand over the plan and get out of there when a worried looking patient's relative approached me to tell me about her mother who had just started coughing. She wanted to know if I could have a look at her.

I wanted desperately to refuse - to fob her off onto a nurse or something - but I couldn't until I had ruled out an emergency. If the patient had aspirated or was actively choking I would need to secure her airway.

I followed the relative to the patient's room and found three other family members standing in a concerned semi-circle around her. The patient looked very unwell, about a hundred years old, frail and cachexic, sat up in bed, battling against some airway secretions with a rattly cough - not suffocating acutely as I had feared. It was then that the family revealed that she was made end of life for the past few days. However, they had noticed her being more alert these past few days. Drinking more water. They expressed that she was starting to get better, perhaps recovering against all odds, despite all active treatment being withdrawn.

The dilemma now was whether the decision should be reviewed and rescinded, if we should continue the antibiotics and supplements and cannulas and observations. Here was a woman who had ostensibly made a miraculous recovery, who had returned from the brink of death, and as I stood there at 5.45pm, listening, placing a sure, steady hand on her back, I just didn't - I just couldn't care.

Duke

the language of dreams

As you probably know, hieroglyphics were called "the words of God" and were mainly used by Egyptian priests. A separate script, known as hieratic, was used to conduct the business of everyday life. Hieractic was a quicker, streamlined form of hieroglyphic, often abbreviated to the point of abstraction.

However, few people know that this pictorial language was preceded by an even more archaic ancestor - what is now referred to as 'the language of dreams.' The american psychologist Julian Jaynes hypothesised that prior to developing consciousness the human mind was divided into two parts, one that spoke and issued commands and another part that listened and obeys. These subconscious edicts were given in the language of dreams. The language of instinct and and archetype, encompassing all fear and all desire. This language was then said to persist alongside the maturation of human consciousness. To give an example, when two people fall in love, they are said to speak a remnant of this language. The native language of immortality and flight and wonder. The language of the infinite, of possibility and implausibility, of sensation over sensibility, of alternate reality.

While spoken languages primarily served a social function, the language of dreams differed in that it could only be understood by one person. Some argued that this use of the term 'language' was inaccurate and should be discontinued. Suggestions for a substitute included 'the unconscious voice' or 'narrative subconscious'. Nevertheless, the label of 'language' stuck.

Information regarding the history of the language has been exclusively gathered from the accounts of certain aboriginal communities. There is invariably no written record. The responsibility of transmitting this information is normally entrusted to skilled orators who are also charged with telling the history of their tribe. Firsthand accounts of specific stimuli or phenomena that reliably induce recollection of this lost language have been shown to demonstrate a remarkable level of concordance. Many of these involve what are now classed as hallucinogenic substances. The recollection itself appears to most often manifest as a kaleidoscope of visceral and emotional experience, variously described as a sense of utter contentment and inescapable terror, a feeling of universal connection and alienation, a feeling of paralysis and complete freedom. Once, a researcher asked an aboriginal elder if he could be taught the language. In return, the elder chuckled and asked the researcher if sparrows could be taught the language of trees.

The traditional view is that our early forms of speech did not correlate well with the language of dreams. The vocabulary of concrete objects and shapes did not readily lend itself to the formlessness of the mind. We could say what we needed to live, but struggled to convey what made us feel alive. We could not describe our electric fantasies or terrible longings, we could only offer dull analogies that sketched a poor outline of what we truly meant - like descriptions of reflections of shadows in a cave.

Over the years, many people have dismissed the language as juvenile and outdated. Certain groups dismiss it as myth or believe it to be a political invention. Still other groups maintain that institutions and people in positions of power throughout history have largely succeeded in supplanting this language with the language of aerodynamics, national infrastructure and fixed rate mortgages. Some people say that the language of dreams fell out of common use sometime during the 14th century, while others maintain that the language is still in use but has over the years evolved into a form that bears no resemblance to the original. Among certain obscure and arcane circles, there are furtive suggestions of a sect who continue to speak it in secret, whispered rumours of certain people who have never lost the ability to hear it.



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light and salt II

choosing what to think about. Choosing how to think. Does any of that sound familiar?

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thank you for the men and women who had to work so hard to make this meal possible

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Starting F1 is a lot like learning how to cook pasta. The first couple of times it's going to be a disaster. The first time I tried I left half the spaghetti poking out the water so half was limp like tofu and the other half was hard as nails. Then you put in too much water, or not enough water. Sometimes you burn the pan. But the point is, if you keep doing it often enough - no matter how bad you were at the beginning - if you put effort into learning from your mistakes, you're only going to get better at it. And then one day you'll find that you've somehow cooked just the right amount of pasta to just the right consistency and prepared just the right amount of sauce. And to your surprise you do it again. And again. And again. The downside is that for a while at the beginning you're going to have to put up with eating some really lousy pasta. But after that, you get good enough to enjoy the pasta you're making. And then you get to enjoy making pasta.

wino forever