The Internet Will Destroy All Humans!

Way up here in the mountains, our options for internet access are somewhat limited. High-speed cable internet is available in some parts of the Valley, and when the country's leading provider of same finally strings it out to our location, we will happily take them up on the fantastic money-saving thrice-weekly offer we've been receiving via the Postal Service for the last four years. Last week, a DHL express envelope arrived with my name on it; I got all excited and ripped it open, anticipating an acceptance notice from a literary journal informing me that one of my stories had been selected for publication, but, no, it was another exclusive offer for high-speed cable internet. This sort of thing frequently provokes outbursts of homicidal rage and usually results in spousal mandate that I put down the sword, drink some water, and apologize to the mailman. I have delivered numerous wrathful tirades to innocent and undeserving call-center workers demanding that their employer immediately cease the senseless slaughter of thousands of trees for the sole purpose of offering me a highly desirable service which it lacks the logistical infrastructure to provide, but still the onslaught continues. With the benefit of foresight, we could have saved quite a bit of money by when we moved here by purchasing an empty piece of land, putting up a mailbox, and living in a military surplus GP-medium tent until we accumulated enough raw material to build a three-bedroom home with billiards room and attached garage. Nevertheless, I will be waiting at the window with phone in hand, ready to sign up the very instant the installation crew runs the line past my house. 

Until salvation arrives, however, we are saddled with sattelite internet, which is overpriced, unreliable, governed by draconian and often inscrutable regulations, and monopolized by a single company which doesn't really care if its customers are happy or not, just as long as they pay their exorbitant fees every month. At the time I am writing this, our sattelite dish has been out of commission for just over a week; surprisingly, everyone is still alive. It has been very difficult for my wife, in her role as All-Powerful High Potentate of the family business, to do any banking or place orders with suppliers. Even worse than that, however, is having been out of contact with the majority of the people with whom we regularly interact for a disturbingly long period of time. I have had no communication with my submission service, long-distance friends, writing trustees, and various conversant publishers. I am plagued with visions of being passed up for publication because I didn't respond to an email in time. My mother called to make sure we were alright because she'd been texting me for two days without reply. My wife and I have both experienced a novel variant of cabin fever without the ability to instantly acquire random information on whatever topic our whim dictates.

All of this makes me feel rather spoiled. I think about the prehistoric hunter-gatherer who was basically screwed if his stone axe shattered and no replacement was available. I think about the Somali fisherman whose family goes hungry when his boat is under repair. I think about the World War Two cryptographers who cracked the German ENIGMA code with less computing power than can be found within a 20-foot radius of where I'm sitting. I think about a time long, long ago when there was no Internet, and yet somehow the world managed to stave off the Apocalypse every day, and I realize that I am a very spoiled person. Being the rugged survivalist types that we and most other Mainers are, Mrs. Benson and I are perfectly capable of surviving for days without electricity, but here we are going stir-crazy without access to hourly-incremental weather forecasts, pictures of my aunt with her new haircut, and the name of that actor who's in that movie we want to see and who was also in that other movie with Willem Dafoe.

For decades, science fiction writers have prophecized a dystopian future in which mankind's dominion of the Earth is eclipsed by highly advanced computers, but occurs to me that this troubling scenario may have become reality. True, there are no cold, logical AIs pragmatically declaring that the human race has become obsolete; there is no autonomous military defense network wiping us out with the very weapons from which it was designed to protect us; there are no predatory, self-replicating robots subjugating the entire species and using us for slave labor or turning us into living batteries. There is only an undirected, pervasive, omnipresent digital communication network which has, in the span of a single generation, become so vital that society can no longer function without it. What would happen to us if the Internet suddenly disappeared? Would the global economy still possess the ability to function the way it did twenty years ago, or would the world be instantly and irrevocably plunged into fiscal anarchy? Would there be an epidemic of mass suicide when millions people who had grown accustomed to receiving regular updates concerning the mundane and utterly uninteresting activies of distant acquaintances realized the horrible truth that each one of us is, in the metaphysical sense, absolutely alone in the Universe? Would I finally overcome my violent allergy to emoticons? Until the guy comes to fix our dish, these and many other very important questions must go unanswered.

We are experiencing Creational Difficulties- please stand by!

Those who have been following this young, precocious blog from the beginning may recall a few dire, cryptic warnings about 'dry periods,' times when updates will be few and far between. This is one of those times.

I am profoundly bi-polar. The pattern of my life is almost entirely defined by the irregular cycle of my mental illness, which can have me dangerously manic for minutes, hours, even days at a time, or plunge me into depression from which I may take weeks to emerge. The depression isn't any fun, but it's a known entity. We can handle it. The mania is worse; just when we think we've coined it, some new, ugly feature will expose itself, a previously non-existent emotional reaction or anxiety-trigger. 

It makes me a hard person to know, once you get below the charismatic veneer that I present to most of the world. Only two or three dozen people know what's under that top layer of me, the public face that isn't a mask but isn't the full picture, either. This is probably true for most people, but the difference, in my case, is that the number of individuals--family aside--who've gotten that close to me and have decided to stick with me to the end can be counted on one hand. The others were wise to get away, and I don't blame them. The last thing I want is to chain others to my illness. Those who are still with me are a special breed, seemingly immune to my emotional toxicity.

Damn, I've gone all maudlin. I think what I was getting at when I started was that my creativity is inherently tied to my emotional state. In the deepest depression, I can barely handle feeding and bathing myself, much less putting words to page. In fact, at those times, I am often completely cut off from whatever it is inside me that generates my stories, or channels them, or whatever. I've often been struck with a profound horror at such times, a fear that the stories have left me and will never return. I sometimes wonder if amputees feel the same terror when they discover their missing limb, and then later, when the stories start buzzing and I'm writing again, I'm ashamed to have made such a comparison.

Mania, as I've said, is often worse. If depression is a whirlpool that sucks everything down to fathomless depths, never to rise again, mania is its inverse, a tornado that uproots everything in its path, leaving carnage and chaos in its wake. There is a certain stage of mania that I can harness and channel into bursts of creative verve, but for the most part my manic periods are characterized by insomnia, mercurial temper, and a tangled mess of unfinished projects and half-formed ideas.

It is between these two extremes where I find productivity, and the longer I have lived with Bi-Polar Disorder, the more I have become able to find balance. I have not accomplished this feat alone; I am reliant on clever medication, occasional bouts of therapy, and the support of those who love me, those few people who have silently sworn, for reasons of their own that I rarely dare to question, to support and defend me, whatever may come. 

So where am I now? Stuck in the doldrums. Dealing with the lingering aftermath of a complicated injury, looking forward to probably another month of limited mobility and restricted activity (and after six or seven months of this, each seems agonozingly longer than the last), and entirely without any fresh ideas. I'm poking listlessly at ongoing projects, stuffing envelopes with anything that meets my fairly draconian standards of being publishable, and hoping beyond hope that something fresh will come along and I won't be scraping the bottom of the barrel come my next submission deadline. It sucks, but I have to keep plugging away if I'm going to make this work. As F. Scott Fitzgerald said: "Amateurs wait for inspiration. Professionals just get to work."

That's the short explanation of why my blog posts haven't been coming as frequently. I hope it helps clear things up.