mahiwaga

So I woke up at 2:30 a.m. because of some excruciating left upper quadrant (LUQ) abdominal pain, with some referred pain to the neck. The abdominal pain was a burning, almost boring, continuous sensation. I wasn’t short of breath or diaphoretic, and this was pretty typical for the problems I’ve been having with my GI tract, which I’ve basically written off as either really bad GERD or quite possibly some peptic ulcer disease. I blithely entertain the notion that I’m having a heart attack, but since the only symptom is this quite caustic sensation in my belly, I don’t buy it. In any case, the neck pain goes away after some Tums and ranitidine (Zantac) 300 mg (4x the over-the-counter dose.) But the acid pain is still there, and I figure I may as well eat. And since I’m eating, maybe I should go to the grocery store.

I’m done with groceries by just after 6 a.m., and while the pain has abated, it still quite annoyingly there. I end up buying some omeprazole (Prilosec), too, and gobble down 40 mg (2x the over-the-counter dose.) In about half-an-hour, the pain finally goes away to the point where I can get some sleep.

I end up having some really vivid and intense dreams. At first, it just starts out with me doing rounds with the new interns on internal medicine. It so happens I’m also taking call for the neuro service at the same time (which is completely nonsensical.) And my neuro attending is doing some really weird-ass research.

It turns out that, through sheer accident and some fucking around with the functional MRI scanner (fMRI), he has stumbled upon a region of the brain that lights up specifically when we’re trying to predict the future. (Would it make more sense to call it the Feynmann area or the Schroedinger area?) With a few other weird techniques including hypnosis and such, he has figured out how to get a snapshot of what this future prediction looks like, and essentially, the patient is able to make her imagined future environment persist, so that she can always go back to that timeline she predicted and make changes and do whatever. It’s like the ultimate immersive experience.

In slightly clearer language, basically the test subject is prompted to imagine something about the future, and then induced to dream. The test subject will then find themselves in a vivid dream set in the exact future that she imagined. Say that you make a prediction about Tokyo in 2038. Your brain does some calculation that includes the Feynman center, and spits out a likely scenario from which you can extrapolate whatever it was that someone wanted you to extrapolate. What my neuro attending’s contraption allows you to do is not only figure out the extrapolation, but actually make the Tokyo 2038 scenario you envisioned persist, so that you can return to it whenever you want and see whatever it is you want to see.

Now, since he hasn’t been doing this research long enough to figure out whether or not there’s anything to the futures his test subjects are predicting (no winning lottery numbers, sadly), all he’s really been doing is dutifully recording the extrapolations and scenarios. Well, it turns out that he figured that this would be really lucrative in the video game market, what with the extraordinarily fanciful futures that some of the test subjects have predicted.

As time goes on, he also figures out how to actually read the visual cortex and the images that flicker through it, and he can turn it into a computer model that can be manipulated and navigated in three dimensions. In this way, he becomes less dependent on the test subject’s recall, and it becomes easier to actually build a game this way.

Some of his results are particularly interesting, many of the test subjects evoking this world that feels like some weird melding of Japanese manga/anime tropes that are replete with mecha, cyberpunk dystopia, and interplanetary travel. One of the first games he manages to develop in this manner is a standard fighting game a la Street Fighter where you can choose to be various samurai from the Genji era, a few fight club participants from America in the late 1990s, or some kind of futuristic high-tech mercenary a la Boba Fett.

But a lot of the games are merely just background worlds. For example, there’s a future where the world has been totally wrecked by eco-disaster, and most of the world’s surface is covered by water (a la Waterworld.) But civilization hasn’t collapsed quite as much as in Kevin Costner’s movie. Naturally, the Japanese, being island dwellers who are used to extremely limited tracts of real estate, manage to survive quite skillfully, by building environments and habitats that are not only mobile, but can actually transform into mecha.

The also manage to either find a new fuel source other than hydrocarbons, figure out how to mine hydrocarbons from the Saturnine moon Titan, or actually discover an anti-gravitational force. Because, in addition to the mecha/habitats that roam the oceans of Earth, some people have actually taken to living on air-borne arcologies.

The world I enter is extremely dystopian. I have images of Depression Era 1940s, coupled with images from the [Spanish Inquisition]. Conservative Christianity holds sway over the entire Western World and the Reformation never happened. Islam enjoys the same niche compatibility that Judaism has, and the real ideological enemy becomes the East. The See of Rome intends to convert the believers of Hinduism and Buddhism to the Way, the Truth, and the Light.

So I find myself at a construction site which kind of reminds me of Mission Valley but in reality has no similarity to it at all. In fact, the mall reminds me almost of a favela. But some construction workers are building another parking complex, and some bizarre accident happens so that a really young black guy with cornrows wearing a wife-beater falls five stories and gets improbably impaled on a steel spike. Somehow, he manages to still have a pulse, although part of the steel spike has apparently penetrated into his brain, and he really isn’t saying much. Some of us assert that the guy wouldn’t’ve wanted to live brain-injured, and we try to cajole the on-site physician to at least give the guy some morphine until EMS arrives. However, because the Church has his fingers on everything, the on-site cleric puts the kibosh on that, saying that that would be euthanasia. I end up registering my disgust and try to get off the work site, knowing full well that I make myself an excellent target for the now 1.75 century old Inquisition.

The attending neurologist’s prodigy, however, is a 15 year old kid who is half-Japanese, half-French. His name is Shinji Yakamura, and from his labor alone, they have been able to sell two blockbuster games to Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft, basically securing funding for further research.

Another alternative future is something of a transportation dystopia. The world has apparently been, quite literally, paved over. We don’t notice the environmental catastrophe that ensues mainly because most of our environment is almost completely artificial. Roads and freeways run in and out of the Grand Canyon. Rivers are wantonly redirected to make road-building easier. Everyone drives their hydrogen-fueled cars with retrofuturistic features like the fiberglass hatch and afterburners.

Even the air-borne environments which I mentioned previously have roads going to and coming from them, so much so that most maps have to be rendered holographically, because it is nearly impossible to draw a usable map in only two dimensions.

I would love these vivid dreams if not for the fact that they leave me completely exhausted.

No, I haven’t watched it yet, so there aren’t any spoilers. I just read the review in the L.A. Times from yesterday, and it seems like it would be very much my movie, the way, I suppose, I got obsessed with “Beauty and the Beast”, even.

The sense of the protagonist’s shy, tentative optimism despite the overwhelming sense of loneliness, abandonment, and alienation that is already just palpable in the 5 min trailer is a little heartbreaking.

I can relate.

OK, I should’ve warned you, Kenneth Turan’s review of Wall-E does have a few details that could be construed as spoilers, although it doesn’t actually give any part of the plot away. The details make it sound almost like something that Douglas Adams would write.

Wall-E (which stands for Waste Allocator/Loader/Lifter - Earth Class, basically an autonomous, intelligent trash compactor) is the only sentience that seems to remain on Earth, excluding insects. He is tasked with the goal of reducing the amount of space all of the Earth’s garbage takes up.

Seemingly at odds with the typical Disney stereotype of “singing Zippy-dee-doo-dah out of your asshole”, “Wall-E” starts off with a rather dystopian vision of a planetary eco-catastrophe. The writers take our fears about rampant global capitalism and the inexorable expansion of the consumer culture, and they extrapolate them to their logical conclusion: the Earth basically becomes one large toxic landfill from which every human has fled, cavorting off into space polluting the rest of the universe too. The vision of lonely ruins of modern cities buried in garbage is extremely haunting, mostly because its probably going to be right.

And yet, despite this utterly hopeless desolation, you get the sense that Wall-E can’t help but harbor a spark of hope. As meager as his existence is, he finds small, meaningless joys in small, probably ultimately meaningless tasks. But none of this fulfills the need for companionship. For communion. For connection.

In a literal act of deus ex machina, EVE (which stands for Extraterrestrial Vegetation Evaluator) arrives on the planet, armed with a high-energy laser cannon. She is apparently the herald of the exiled, morbidly obese, wanton and gluttonous humans who have been living on interstellar cruise ships since the mass exodus—reminding me very much of the Golgafrincham B class as created by Douglas Adams in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe—an acerbic, sardonic send-up of humanity as a whole. Idiots, the lot of them. And that is where the mostly predictable plot begins.

Still, maybe that’s all there is to life. While I’ve had my moments of companionship, communion, and connection, they have, for the most part, been brief exercises, not going too deep, not getting too difficult. People slide in and out of life like set pieces. As long as you don’t ask too much, you’ll get by, but you won’t get much, either.

And it seems the moments that I’ve tried to bridge the gap, tried to reach out and go for something more meaningful have all been shot to shit somehow.

There’s no point in connecting closely, meaningfully, to anyone, because no one wants to be that close to me, and even if they did at the beginning, in the end, they leave as fast as they can physically go.

Times like these, I end up asking: why continue to burden the universe with my existence?

It would be one thing to be bitter and angry about all this, to learn all the wrong lessons. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. Get yours while the getting is good. Fuck everyone else. But all of that is pretty much just as meaningless as my one-dimensional existence of microscopic, ultimately meaningless, achievements. Why trade in one set of nonsense for a whole new set of nonsense, when the current set gets me nowhere just as well as the new set probably would?

So, instead, I’m just sad. And I wake up in the morning like everybody else, take a shower, get dressed, go to work. If I’m lucky, some of the meaningless little things I do will actually have measurable results, no matter how small.

Like I said, it’s not that there aren’t awesome people around me who are looking for deeper meaning in life. But they can usually find someone less mentally convoluted and more physically attractive than I am.

Ben likes to say that I’ve never (or at least, almost never) tried, and that’s why it hasn’t worked out for me all these years, and maybe it’s true. But each year I’m a little more tired. The gangrene affecting my soul advances just a little bit. Each advance, I feel less and less pain. Eventually I won’t be able to feel a damn thing at all, and then they can rip my soul out of me and I won’t even flinch.

Then again, when we’re talking about someone who is just awesome in so many ways, even just being friends with her is probably more than I deserve.

Small victories. Little triumphs.