Losing ground, but making a game of it

When I started this blog I was 70. My goal was to write every day. I failed. 

So I tried again. And I failed again. But failing didn't daunt me. I've had lots of practice trying and failing. I tried and failed again. 

And again.

Now, a couple of years and a few failures later, it's time to try (and possibly fail) again. 

I'm older. I'm nearly 72, no longer the perky 70-year-old I once was. The ever present signs of aging are--well, they are ever present. I'm losing ground. Physically. Mentally. 

A few weeks ago I'd had it. "Enough!" I said. "I'm digging in. I'm going to recover some lost ground--or at least slow the decline." Well, I didn't actually say that. But I might have if I was writing a play about my life instead of living it.

So I decided to make a game of it, even though I knew was a game I was going to lose.

Face it: We're all going to die. You are, and more important, I am. And on the way to dying is the process of decline, euphemistically called aging. The aging that I imagined is different than the process that I'm experiencing. 

First, my imagined process of aging was, well, imaginary. Unreal. Theoretical and hypothetical. Aging was words. There is a difference, and not a small one, between the words "losing mental abilities" and the fact of losing them. The idea is kind of interesting. The fact is sucky. At least it was until I started taking action. Now it's getting a to be fun. A little. Sort of.

Or at least interesting enough to write about.

It started when I noticed changes in my speech. No one else noticed--or was willing to admit that they had noticed. But I did. When my speech system hiccupped--a stutter, or "too long" a pause looking for the right word--a metaphorical red light went on in my head. And recently the light's been going on too often.  Hence, action taken.

To speak we need to coordinate a set of complex, largely unconscious skills. Most often we able to articulate thoughts without "thinking."  By "thinking" I mean the deliberate process of creating, considering, selecting among alternative ideas, and alternative ways of presenting those ideas. The stream of ideas is converted to a stream of words, which are then translated to a stream of sounds, and movements of the lips and tongue and other parts of the vocal apparatus to manipulate those sounds into words. Magically, effortlessly, the words pour forth.

Voila!

Old people complain that young people talk too fast. But old people used to be young once, talked at that speed, and had older people tell them to slow down. Young people don't talk too fast. Old people listen too slow. 

Turning ideas into sound is a complex intellectual task, and so is turning sound back into ideas. I didn't realize how hard it is until I start losing the ability and until I thought about what was going on. Here's what I think happens. 

We think we hear the words in a sentence like "I want to go to the store," and know that someone wants to go to the store. But that's not how it works. If someone is talking to you in American (rather than English) you'll hear a sound stream that's more like "Iwunnaguhtuhduhstaw." Now you have to figure out where the words might begin and end before figuring out what the words might be, before attempting to decide what they might mean. It's an iterative process and if the first division of sounds into words doesn't make sense, we try another. This all takes computing power and time. The less computing power, the more time. 

My brain is my computer, and as I get older my clock runs slower and I've got fewer processing units to throw at the problem. As long as I've got enough CPU to resolve one utterance before the next one starts, things are alright. But if my window for computation closes, if someone says something before I fully understood what they previously said, my mental speech-to-meaning apparatus crashes and I can't understand anything. My choices: "Will you please repeat that--slower?" or "Uh huh."

The road to brain deterioration runs straight through "Uh huh." Brains are lazy. When a brain learns that failed speech-to-meaning translations are acceptable, it doesn't try as hard. Next time it will fail an easier translation with a longer window. And so it goes, all the way down to senility. 

The first time I became aware of the speech-to-meaning translation process I was in my thirties, watching to a play done in Irish dialect. I realized a lag between the speaking and my apprehension of the meaning. It was like watching a badly dubbed movie, or one for which the projectionist (remember those) had not looped the film (remember that) properly in the projector (remember them). 

It was interesting. It continued. And today it happens even when I listen to people who speak American in environments that are too noisy. 

On the output side, I'm increasingly aware of moments when my tongue and lips are trying to move in two (at least) different directions as my vocal apparatus tries to emit two words with roughly equivalent meanings at the same time. I assume that some mental module that would previously have chosen between the words and sent only one to the sound production apparatus is either not working at all or is failing to complete its computation in its computational window. 

When that happens, I might blend the two words, starting one and finishing the other. Or, in the worst case, the entire linguistic apparatus stops. Period. Dead. And there's a long, uncomfortable pause while it resets. Or an even longer period when it reboots. 

There are other failure modes, but I don't want to catalog them now. Or maybe ever. Instead I want to make the system run better.

To do that, I've decided exercise it more. One way is by dictating some blog posts. Sometimes I'll write them longhand, then dictate them. Sometimes, as with the last part of this one, I'll just dictate. 

Dictating from scratch has a many advantages. First of all, it does not give me the opportunity to endlessly edit, tweak, and tune what I'm writing. When I'm typing I fiddle endlessly. When I write by hand I fiddle less. When I dictate, I say it, and its done. I may edit a bit later, but I seem to be able to keep that under control.

Second, it gives me a way to exercise the entire mental and physical system from generation of ideas, to choice of words, to generation of sound. 

 I can force the pace by consciously trying to increase the rate at which words come out of my mouth. Sometimes that results in the speech generation machinery breaking down. Sometimes, I can't generate ideas fast enough. I adjust the timing, and give it another go. I'm getting a hell of a work out. 

I'm losing ground. I'm eventually going to die. But until I do, but I'm making a game of it.

My descent into editing hell

I like writing. That's why I write. That's why I'm writing this.

It would be nice if my writing was amazingly good, but it's not. It's good enough. I need to remind myself of that, because otherwise I don't finish what I write. Worse, I descend into my own, private editing hell.

Here's how it works:

I start writing when I find something that interests me and which might be interesting or useful to others. If the topic is an introspective one, as this one is, I've got time to do some unconstrained writing. If the topic is a factual one, as this one is not, I'll soon find a fact that needs checking. I'll start to Google and I won't quit until my mind's been buried under an avalanche of fact.

Why?  Because ignorance is a disease and I don't want to be a carrier. And because I don't want to be wrong. Or because it's a bad habit. Whatever the reason, my obsession with knowing everything about whatever I am writing about is one of the things that gets in my way.

The other is editing. I'm a good editor of others' work, and a lousy editor of my own. When I edit others' work then unless the structure of a piece is utterly, horribly, hopelessly broken--which it rarely it is--I leave the structure alone. I make small corrections and improvements. I wordsmith. Change voice. Reverse the order of two phrases. Add or remove transitions.

But no wholesale rewriting. Ever. It's my job to edit. Not to rewrite.

I might turn a piece back to its author, then read it again when the author's done with it, but I always I keep my editing within those boundaries.  Wordsmithing. Transitions. But no rewrites.

That discipline breaks when I edit my own writing. I start out following the rules I use for others but pretty soon it's open season on rewriting. I edit and rewrite and rewrite and rewrite until I've boiled away all the joy I started with. I end up with too many versions of the same piece, no one of which seems substantially better than any of the rest. Beginnings and middles, and no end.

The pattern's now clear to me.

I need to pretend someone else wrote this.

Good job, someone else.  You can post it now.

Failure is inevitable. Because death.

A picture of the hot house at the Botanical gardens. The hedge at the front said " Sex + Death" I have no idea what this means only that they are the 2 things in life that are truly inevitable (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

No escaping it. We're all going to die. That includes me, but that's not important--except to me, my family and friends. But 'we' includes you, and that's important--at least to you, your family, and your friends.

Point is, death is inevitable, and death is the ultimate failure. Therefore failure is inevitable.

So what?

So maybe (I'm talking to myself here, but you're welcome to listen in) small failures are not such a big deal. And the big failure at the end? Also not such a big deal, given the way that the game is rigged.

Failure is the price we pay to play the game. And assuming you're having a good game, it's not too high a price.

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9 Months later: what's up with that?

I haven't written anything for this blog for nine months. And I haven't written much else during that time. Maybe some emails. A few things for a course on memoir that I took. Time to get going again? I hope so, because I like writing. But I hate it, too.

Maybe hate is too strong a word. Maybe it's just frustrating because I suffer from could-be-betteritis. Could-be-betteritis is a disease characterized by the belief that whatever one does, it could be better. Duh. Of course it could be better. And by itself could-be-betteritis is not a problem. But when coupled with other conditions, it turns deadly.

For example: this. What I just wrote. What I am writing, now. It could be better. Of course. It could also be finished. But it won't be finished if keep making it better, which is what I'm doing, even as I'm writing this. 

I go back and change a word. The version that I had just a minute ago described 'should-be-better-itis' as the name of the accompanying condition that turns it deadly. But that's not it. It's not that it should be better. I'm beyond that particular 'should.' 

And it is getting better. If you could see this as it's evolving on the page you'd agree. More to the point, I look back, and I agree: I've made it better. I've also made it longer, more complete, so better in that way. So where's the problem?

There are two problems. Or at least two. The first: I don't seem to be able to say "it's good enough." It's good, but it's not good enough. And what's good enough?

According to memory someone asked Henry Ford III, "How much money is enough money?" His answer: "Just a little bit more." So what's good enough? "Just a little bit better."

The second problem is that there comes a time when I can't tell whether I'm making it better or I'm just making it different. And I don't seem to care. I just keep working on it, revising it, until all the energy is gone. Most things that I start to write eventually find themselves in the purgatory of drafts. There they wait. If they were living beings they might hope to ascend to publication. If so, they hope in vain.

But they don't find themselves in purgatory, do they? I put them there. And that's not a nice thing to do. I'm not nice to my writing. 

Take this guy, right here, the one that I am writing. Its purpose was to express some ideas about my writing. And it's done that. And its purpose was to be published. Or that was my original purpose for it. Now a new purpose has become dominant: it's "to be better than it is." Impossible, of course. So let's get back to the original purpose: to be published.

So, little blog post, you're not going to blog draft purgatory. You're not going to be much better than you are right now. You're going to be published.

Now.

The Aging, Retired ADDer

For decades I denied that I had Attention Deficit Deficiency (ADD) even though I had many of the symptoms. I just couldn't connect to the ADD poster-children described in the books that I read. I did procrastinate. And I did get distracted easily. And I wasn't all that organized. But I was functioning, and doing so at a pretty high level.

What may have kept me functioning was the combination of structure and fear that came with working for a living. Structure: I had jobs to do with dates--usually last week--attached. And hanging over me was the threat of disaster for my family--and failure for me--if I didn't get things done, if not last week then at least next week. Or the week after next.

So deadlines and threats kept me moving and focused. During the short interludes when finance was not a problem I'd happily let my mind wander. So many interesting things! Oh! Look! A squirrel.

Then came retirement. Thanks to the money that Bobbi had stashed we were in good shape. I didn't have to worry about compromising our life style. Our financial advisor figured that we'd both drop dead before we ran out of money. He said it in a much more politic way, but that was the message.

Our post-retirement cross-country trip was full of plans for things that I could do in retirement. I could paint, after first learning to draw. I could practice guitar and keyboards and get to be mediocre. I could sculpt. I could write.

Or I could surf the Internet and add to my store of useful, semi-useful, and utterly useless knowledge. Which, of course, I did. To excess. I wasn't exactly wasting time--I was using it to learn. But I wasn't doing what I said I wanted to do.

Most of all, I wanted to write, and I wasn't writing. I'd sit down to write. I'd pick a topic. I might even write a few sentences. But sooner or later--as in sooner--I'd decide that I didn't know enough about some facet of what I was writing about.  Or thinking about writing about. No problem. I was living in the world's biggest research library. So off I went, researching.

All of the world's knowledge is connected. Start anywhere, follow what's interesting, and you'll end up with hours consumed, learning about something that bears almost no relationship to what you first decided to learn. That is, if you were me. Which you're not, unless it's me reading this. But you get the idea.

I could explain how each topic I researched was connected to the one before it, but I couldn't draw a straight line in information space from the starting point through the intermediate points to the end. Or even a curvy one. The walk was random. Brownian motion in a browser.

My behavior had an underlying reason, and since the available choices were ADD and senility, I embraced ADD, and decided to do something about it. Of course there's a problem here. When a person like me with ADD decides to do something about ADD, the something that the person like me is likely to do involves Brownian browsing. ADD is the starting point for each walk. Who-the-fuck-knows-what is the ending point. Frogs? Thirteenth century painting? Quantum physics?

In desperation, I went to see my doctor. He prescribed  some meds that sat in my medicine cabinet for a few months, until finally, in greater desperation, I tried them. They didn't seem to do to much. So I traded him in for a doctor who put me on some meds that did some combination of helping me focus and making me less concerned about ADD.

It's been a few years, now. During that time I have had a few productive writing periods. And I found something useful to do for the company I'd retired from. A little structure, and a little money.

But the ADD hangs there. The only reason I'm writing this, and not out surfing, is the structure provided by my thrice-weekly writing hangout with my big little sister, and my commitment to her that I would spend that time writing, and not doing whatever I'd been working on when we started or whatever struck my fancy as we continued.

So that's the story behind this post.

And I'm sticking to it.

Confusion

On the surface my life is pretty simple. Scratch the surface and there's a lot of areas that are in a state of confusion. The canary in the mine is this statement: "I don't know what to do." That's a sign of confusion. And that's different from "I don't have enough time time to work on that; or to figure out what to do." And it's very different from "I don't care about that."

Confusions have the following characteristics: there's a situation; I want to do something about the situation; I have or can make some time; but I don't know what to do. I don't know where to start. I don't know where to start starting. I'm stuck. And those stucknesses weigh me down.

A simple example, one that came to me while I was writing this. I pride myself on my sense of humor. I'm able to look at something that seems serious and find something funny about it. That's a great personal ability. It keeps me from being stuck when there's nothing I can do--or nothing that I want to do. I can just laugh it off. It also helps when I can get someone else to laugh and get unstuck.

Bobbi, for example, has a sense of humor that's different from mine. If she finds something funny there's a high probability (high 90's) that I'll find it funny, too. Or if I don't find it funny, I can at least appreciate why someone might find it funny. The process is not symmetrical. If I find something funny there's maybe a 50% chance that she will not only not find it funny, but completely not understand why it might be funny.

This qualifies as a confusion. It's a situation. I want to do something about it--very much in fact. And I don't know what to do. I don't know where to start. I don't even quite know how to approach the existence of the problem.

But there you have it: a simple issue, one that can be, and has been overlooked many times.  Now it's time to stop overlooking these kinds of problems.

There are more such situations. Some relate to others. A few so purely personal that I don't want to share them public. So I've got a different blog for those and from time to time I will link to the blog. But access to that will be restricted. Some day, when I don't care, I'll make the restrictions less onerous.

The quest to improve---nothing

I'm not blogging. Or not blogging regularly, which as far as I am concerned qualifies as not blogging.

When did I post last? I dread checking. It's probably a week ago. Or more. I'm not going to look. Except I've got to look, because this post is a follow-up to what I think is my last post: My Deal With My Sister.

But I won't check the date. Whenever it was, it's too long ago.

Many of my posts, as Zygote 3, my youngest daughter, has observed, are on one or several of the following themes:

• How I stopped blogging
• How I'm going to start
• What I'm going to do to keep going
• My brilliant discovery of why I stopped last time and what I'm gonna to next time
• And so on.

And, of course, this one follows that pattern. Which I'm going to change (another theme) by wrapping up this post and writing a different one.

Right. That's the story.