#25. What you feel like planning a sky

I have written, on and off, for more than 25 years. My first book was published in 2003, making me officially: very old.

But one thing that I have told my wife on numerous occasions is that: I don't know what I used to think about before I became a writer.

Because I am always in my head figuring out plot problems and telling stories to myself. I'm always thinking about my characters and their problems, whether I'm driving or eating Cheerios or lying in bed at night.

There is a wonderful song from Sunday in the Park with George, about the painter George Seurat, that describes this very thing. In his song, he's singing about painting a hat, and he sings:

Finishing the hat

How you have to finish the hat

How you watch the rest of the world

From a window

While you finish the hat

Mapping out a sky

What you feel like, planning a sky

What you feel when voices that come

Through the window

Go

Until they distance and die

Until there's nothing but sky

The thing is, I stopped writing in 2019. Like, completely. I considered myself retired. I didn't have, as I have described it before, that "fire in the belly" to write books. And I stopped thinking about stories. I started thinking about other stuff, and was amazed to realize there are other things to think about--like the side business that I started.

But what I also noticed (and still notice, if we're being honest) is that you can only sing about finishing the hat, getting lost in planning out the sky, if your mind is not doing something else. And, in those five years of not writing, you know what I was doing with my Mapping-Out-The-Sky time? I was looking at my stupid phone.

Now, let's be perfectly real here: I'm on my phone a lot, and I don't fault anyone AT ALL who is on their phone a lot. My therapist has encouraged me to sit with my wife at night and share memes and Instagrams back and forth. Phones can have very excellent uses.

The thing is: I have to try much harder these days to get into the Finishing The Hat mindset. My default has become: Phone. It is no longer: Boredom. And boredom, it turns out, is when you get the feeling "what you feel like planning the sky".

Anyway, the point of all this is that last week I finished my book and gave it to my agent.

Look I made a hat

Where there never was a hat

Bits and Bobs from the News

#1. So, I have the schizophrenias, and before I was well-medicated I saw things that weren't real and believed things that weren't true. It was weird. Well, new neuroscience is showing that the parts of the brain that produce these wonderful hallucinations in schizophrenics' brains (the fusiform gyrus) ALSO are the parts of brains that neurotypical people use for perception. So, scientists have been trying to figure out why you can imagine something but realize that your imagination isn’t real. It’s tricky. Here's a cool study: they showed test subjects randomly alternating images of slanted lines--some slanting to the right and some to the left. But they would prime the viewers with an image, either right or left. AND: the study found that if you had been primed with "right" then you literally see MORE right slants. If you're primed with "left" you literally see more lefts. All of this goes to show that so much of what we think we're seeing is actually the expected information our brain has been trained to see--we're seeing things that aren't real!

#2. WE'RE LIVING IN THE FUTURE. So scientists, who are both scientists, but also trying to make a little cash, figured out how to make succulents bioluminescent. Now, scientists have been making plants bioluminescent since the 80s, when they injected tobacco with firefly stuff (I don't know what stuff). But now they're doing it more reliable, and, more important, more capitalistically! The plant they chose is the succulent Echevaria ‘Mebina’, a common houseplant that grows rosettes of dense, fleshy leaves. By injecting it with strontium aluminate, they produce these cute little plants that glow in the dark. And, it can be yours for the low, low price of 10 yuan (about $1.40). No word yet on how soon these will be available at your local Home Depot.

#3. In more SCIENCE news, scientists have figured out how to create these little photovoltaic discs which fly around all by themselves, powered by the sun and wind, up in the mesosphere (an area of the atmosphere that is so seldom worried about it's called the "ignoreosphere.") Now, the picture makes them look big, and let me assure you that they are not big. They're about a centimeter across. But then... science mumble mumble... profit! The article I read said they were ten years from making these things reliable, but never once did it say what the point of them was. But they're neat!

#4. On a happier note, a 67-year-old man has broken the record for lasting the longest with a xenotransplantation--he has a pig kidney, and it's still working after six months, the longest that an animal's organ has ever worked in a human. The longest previous record was four months and nine days, before a 53-year-old woman's body rejected the organ and it was removed. Anyway: neat!

Diversions and Distractions

Ten years ago, musician Rob Cantor created this marvelously surreal song and video performance about "actual cannibal Shia Lebouf" that simply must be seen, reseen, and obsessed over.

As long as we're showing musical performances, this is a magnificent number from Chicago which so accurately depicts how press conferences (politicians, lawyers, whoever) play the media like puppets on a string.

And to round it out, here is Billy Joel and Itzhak Perlman performing my favorite (maybe?) Billy Joel song, Downeaster Alexa. It's pretty great.

Look I made a hat!