Memory trouble

I blogged a few days ago about a sudden and quite egregious memory lapse I had over the weekend when preparing my laptop for potential death. It was so staggering that I was taken aback; although I’m fairly used to arriving in one part of my apartment with no idea why I planned to go in the first place I blame this on two simple things: firstly, the apartment is huge and it’s easy to forget, whilst traversing these gargantuan distances, why the hell I’m traversing them anyway, and secondly… I forgot… wait a moment… oh yes, secondly, I am usually thinking of about eighty things at once so I usually set myself off on a course to do something then spend the time in between on other matters. When I finally arrive at my destination my reason for going there in the first place has been swamped by a hundred other, equally fascinating and distracting little nuggets of thought.

Although I’d never had a lapse as extreme as the one where I utterly forgot, while sitting at my laptop, what the hell I was doing there and why there was a CD in the disc drive, I dismissed it out of hand as rather amusing. Now I’m a little less than amused because I’ve had a number of less dramatic but quite puzzling memory lapses. Synaesthesia has always blessed me with a memory that’s very good, and gets better the more it’s used, but lately it seems to have been struggling. I feel a little as though I’m miswired. Perhaps I’m no further from decrepitude than the laptop on which I’m now typing.

Of course, it could be Holosync. In what is a worryingly off-hand remark in the handbook I have regarding the course, it mentions memory loss as a temporary symptom of the mental run-off you can often get. I’d hoped, if I was going to lose memory, it would be the sort of memories I’d rather not keep. Like just about everything from 1990-1995, for instance, or the words to that especially irritating song they keep playing at my gym. One does not normally include memory loss amongst other symptoms in a list without explaining it, which the handbook doesn’t. I’ve been tempted to email Centerpointe to ask about it but I keep forgetting.

I’m still trundling my way through Level 2 of the program, and next Monday will start on the second disc. Although I’ve felt calmer and dealt with upheaval better, there’s been more of it, so at this point, when I might expect to be feeling that I’m not being pushed anymore, I’m usually aware of something being brought up to be dealt with. However, this is a time that’s so full of change and new challenges, that it’s hardly surprising. Or it would be, if I could remember it all.

Technojoy has arrived

Let me just state for the record that I’ve never liked mobile phones. In fact, for the most part, I hate them. It’s not the way that they mean you can always be contacted everywhere by anybody, mostly because every phone I’ve ever owned has had the kind of life-span that would impress nobody beyond your average mayfly, thus making it nearly impossible for anybody to reach me. They always seem capable of so much and yet do so little. The screens are too small for adequate internet browsing, their camera photos are awful, the predictive text seems to have been programmed with some language that has not yet been introduced to anywhere else on Earth, and the companies who produce and maintain them, their connections and everything else about them make them utterly incomprehensible. Every phone I’ve owned came with a booklet that would have impressed Tolstoy for length and Kafka for incomprehensibility. I once owned a phone with a booklet that did although it expounded on the values of taking photos, surfing the web and knowing exactly where you were at all times through GPRS, did not tell you how to get to your voicemail.

Not so my iPhone. Perhaps it’s because it’s an Apple product and I have a tendency to fall for anything Apple. In my defence, I have wondered how much I really want to watch TV programs on a screen not larger than an inch and a half square, given that I do very well not watching them on a full size screen, but even that has been swept aside by the simple joy of scanning YouTube wherever I am because I happen to want a fix of Dylan Moran’s Monster tour. I’m hooked.

Like all those who suffer from Technojoy I 1. do not ever read the manual first; and 2. have the expectation that in an instant I will not only be fully conversant with all its features but also be able to live my entire life from this one small box of a thing and never need to think ever after. I’ve always liked Apple Macs because they didn’t require a manual. I don’t think I even opened the manuals and instruction guides for either of my laptops and I certainly didn’t for my iPods. Reading is for fiction, or interesting non-fiction. Technical writers are not paid to be entertaining, ironic, sarcastic or witty, and therefore I’m not inclined to waste my time reading their venerable efforts when I could quite happily press buttons at random until the thing does what I want it to do.

My excuse is that I’m a kinetic learner when it comes to technical things. I will pick up masses from books and lectures on anything other than doing something practical. You can’t give me a set of instructions for doing something and expect me to follow it through – I need to work it through step by step in physical reality. My other excuse is that synaesthesia and being ambidextrous rob me of any concept of left or right beyond left being greenish and right being brownish. Oddly, I’m great at directions but this is only because I’ve learnt work-arounds. I write with my right hand but my stronger side is my left. This is often confusing.

Regardless of all this, I’ve fully taken to my iPhone like a duck to water. All my appointments, contacts, and soon budgetary information is there, and once I have a new laptop I am sure I’ll spend most of my time deciding which of the multitude of apps I can buy will most likely solve all my problems forever more. Until I go and break it, of course. Where once I scoffed at the idea of watching moving pictures on such a tiny screen, now I am a devotee. That didn’t take long, did it? Now all I need is a device which will allow me to project everything of Amnar out of my head into some communicable format without the need for me to type it all out. Then I shall be truly happy.

Vote for your favourite totalitarian dictator

A couple of weeks ago I read that in Russia they’ve begun holding those “Vote for your favourite…” things that they do in Britain such a lot. Your favourite hero, pop song, Abba song, TV show, comedian, garden shed… In Russia, however, the campaign to “Pick your favourite Russian leader” fell on hard times because the lead runner was Joseph Stalin. I noticed in the comments on the article that somebody said that when a similar exercise had been done in Germany, they had made it impossible to vote for Hitler, out of a fear that he would achieve the same kind of acclaim. The Russian response was to badger people into voting for Csar Nicholas instead. It would be embarrassing for the authorities if every Russian’s favourite hero was a man who sent millions to the gulag; about as embarrassing as Germany electing the late vegetarian genocidal maniac, Mr Worst Human Being Who Ever Lived 1945-2008, as their favourite leader. In China, meanwhile, a bright and bubbly new generation of students adore Mao as though he were some kind of god. They have no idea that the Cultural Revolution or the tragically misnamed “Great Leap Forward” ever happened.

The same qualities that made them terrifying symbols of human destruction not only swept them to power but keeps them alive now and in memory. Our list of great bastard leaders is far longer than our list of benevolent leaders, perhaps because in the human mind, we associate a desire for power with evil. All those who are good shun it by default, and the heroes of many a book are those who profess themselves humble, as though it is power itself, the force of controlling others through personal magnetism (for that is the starting point for any great leader), that creates evil. Our figures of evil crave power, control, are idealists with great and terrible visions, and our heroes are modest, shy creatures who withdraw into the shadows or, as in the case of Frodo at the end of Return of the King, look slightly constipated by the whole affair.

Good leaders lead disorganised bands; evil ones lead marches, armies, organise automatons who are easily defeated by a plucky hero with a decent sword (yeah, you can tell I write fantasy for a living, can’t you). Yet both are compelled by great vision, both are convinced that they are right to do what they do. Although I have often read of villains who desire to be evil for the sake of being evil, for the lust to kill and hurt and harm, human villains of the real world, the towering monolithic forms of such people as Stalin and Hitler, really did think they were making the world a better place. It’s a frightening thought and difficult to get your head around. You want to believe these people knew they were evil, were doing terrible things to destroy everybody. Actually, evil like that can compel few people; it’s ideology that inspires, and ideology that maintains their presence in our world even today.

Interestingly, the villains of our fictional worlds always seem to respect the tilt of good and evil. It allows us the blissful feeling that we’re good, that nothing lies within us that might rise up to be just as bad as that of which they are capable. The great tyrant of fantasy, Sauron, is bent only on destruction, and Voldemort, at least in the film versions, burns with a hatred for all those not like him that Hitler might have appreciated, but although they both yearn for power, they have an equal hatred for things that are “good” and recognise that there is a fundamental axis. Our real life tyrants have known no such thing. They believe they are acting for the good of mankind, which is perhaps what makes them ten thousand times more frightening, and not least because they often systematise their violence in a way that fiction never does. They don’t read their acts in the way that others do. It’s why it’s impossible to truly drive them out; as long as they have followers who share their conviction that what they do is just, then they will always live on. Usually, though, amongst the moderate majority, the reason why these men are so pervasive and memory serves them well is because mingled through with the atrocities, the genocide, were deeds that improved the lives of their supporters, even if it is a terrible thing to admit. We want, desperately, for evil to be pure evil. Good can be flawed, but evil must always be that way. I think that’s why I dislike the word and all its applications.

As a commentator remarked in the Times, ideological conviction, new age ideas and utter evil seem to go together well. This was a response to the arrest of Radovan Karadzic, who had been playing a new age doctor of some description in Belgrade, disguised not so much by a beard but as a beard. Ideology is a deadly thing, because it demands faith and adherence. It has little room for debate, discussion and query. On the other hand, human beings respond to powerful leaders who know what they’re doing. Nobody is going to pay much heed to Gordon Brown when he’s gone. I have a dish cloth with more charisma than he; forever he will stalk in the shadow of Tony Blair who had that charisma and the all-important ideology. As a consultant recently reminded me as I compiled a report for her, it really doesn’t matter what you say, but it’s how you say it.

I suddenly found myself raising these debates within the context of Amnar. Faced with a choice between ideologies, each spinning a line about the other, which one do you pick? People like ideology because it’s like religion. It tells you what to do and how to behave; this is why skeptics are rare – it’s not natural to our thinking to question. We want to have faith, and when great men, often with interesting facial hair, stand up and command our attention with stirring speeches, we go along with it right away. It takes a long time for it to tarnish, and amongst those who never know the dark side of it, who are carried at the very height of the wave and surf it, its easy to remain faithful. People want hope, they want promises of problems solved – and it’s the way those promises are made, not necessarily that they are fulfilled. Humans respond to their leaders emotionally, not intellectually. We also like things to be organised and to have a sense that our leaders know how to handle difficult situations, to make tough decisions. That is a very difficult thing for a “good guy” to pull off, since there are always so many options to consider and things to be held in balance. In the end what we seem to remember is not what our leaders did, necessarily, but how they went about the business of doing it, and how well they persuaded us of the quality of their leadership. That’s what lasts, which in the case of Stalin, appears to be what has happened.

The envelope

Those who have been reading over the last few days will not have escaped the conclusion that I’m something of a geek when it comes to certain things. True. My first full length book, which I must have composed around the age of nine, was written on a BBC Master, so computers have long been essential to my writing. I have written books by hand but it’s a very slow, agonising process when I’m in full swing and painful, too. I get RSI in my hands and typing keeps up with my brain better.

I have two laptops (formally three, and for a brief period four, although one of these PCs had no “N” key since it flew off never to be found again), many iPods, an iPhone which will only be useful for calls, texts and YouTube until I get a newer laptop at the end of August, digital camera and a host of other devices. I have drawers full of wires, spare wires, CDs, disk drives, rechargers, batteries and assorted paraphernalia the identity of which even I can’t clarify.

However, I have to confess there is one thing that I seem not to be able to do without which is as low tech as you get: the humble envelope. If I get an idea, in the middle of writing one chapter, which refers to another, the only thing I ever seem to have to hand to quickly jot down such a moment of clarity, is a pen and a used envelope. In this case, it’s a small one I received from the Job Centre a while ago about benefits I never got around to claiming. Covered in my personal scrawl, sometimes in pen and other times in pencil, it is one of many that have seen service and float about my apartment to be found long after they were covered completely with odd little ideas and mementos, many circled or outlined, or ticked off. They usually also feature ring stains from mugs of tea or cans of Pepsi Max. I have never yet found any application or device that could replace the envelope, the scrap of paper or the back of a VAT receipt. I’m not sure, in fact, if such a thing does exist, although I’ve seen many attempts to design one. It would appear that nothing really compensates for scraps of paper. They have a space in the modern world all their own.

Requiem for a dying laptop

This morning at 11am, in a busy Apple store in Manchester, I sat at a stool at the genius desk while the Genius calmly and collectedly lost the battle to get Leopard installed on my aged Powerbook. I was philosophical when all attempts failed; all it has to do is last until this new manuscript is complete, and the end of August, whichever comes first. It is plagued by numerous issues, from its fading graphics card, creating a faintly lined pink screen (almost invisible unless you’re looking for it), a clicking and tired motherboard and a damaged DVD optical drive.

One of the concierges, carrying a new Macbook Air with her as she dealt with incoming customers, paused to look at it as the Genius and I discussed what I would do next.

“Can we do anything?” she asked hopefully.

I shook my head, sad but resigned and in a sense proud that it had come so far. “No,” I said; “it’s dying.”

“It’s such a beautiful machine, though,” she said respectfully. “It’s like losing an arm.” An atmosphere of sadness hung over us.

It probably sounds moronic, but although many people have iPods and more and more are buying Macs because Windows and PCs are such utter rubbish, the core Macheads remain a bunch of people and if you’re prepared for it, you’re not just buying a laptop, you’re joining a community. I’ve never owned a machine more faithful than this one, although my original Mac, a 15inch Powerbook is still working with clear screen and functioning optical drive at five years old. This is mostly because once I moved up to the bigger 17inch, it had an easy life. It only did a couple of years hard service and is now my solid back-up.

The concierge is right to say it’s like losing an arm. This laptop has never failed on me apart from one scary evening when it turned out I’d done something silly, which hardly counts. My PC days are filled with horror stories of machines that fail within months, if not weeks, cannot cope with long hours of service or being frequently transported all over the globe, and have a tendency to shed their keys. Modern PCs slow you down: you spend most of your time reassuring them that they aren’t infected by viruses.

This is the laptop that’s been across the globe with me, including tours of China and a stay in Australia. It’s been carried by wiry men on their heads while I scurried behind making scared little noises. It’s been to literary festivals and connected itself effortlessly with free WiFi services, it’s known countless hotel rooms and put up with being dragged around in a Samsonite wheelie case that I bought solely because it was dragging on my shoulder during one trip. I can’t even count the number of times it’s been above 30,000 feet.

All its keys work perfectly, it can still do a decent job with CDs. It will stay awake without slowing or faltering during my endless writing stints, even if I and the Producer decided about six months ago that it’s too old to travel anywhere. Sometimes, if I move the screen too rapidly, it goes dark, but that’s easily fixed. I told the Genius that I needed to keep it running just for another couple of months, maybe just one, until I had saved up enough for a new Macbook Pro. Then this laptop will go into retirement. I seem to be unable to contemplate either having it refurbished for sale or scrapped. Old Macs don’t die, they just fade a little and lose their ability to play DVDs safely. Its last service to me is to be the scribe for the new Book One. Then it can rest at last.

Imagined memories

Once upon a time, I lost my memory. Without memory, you don’t exist. Remembering a past and imagining a future is the heart of consciousness, and without it, you are dead even as you walk around and talk to people. You won’t remember who they are or what they said, who you were and what you said. And without any story of who you are, any memory of it, you change in personality dramatically. Without a memory of a past, an understanding of the future, everything evaporates. The present doesn’t exist without something around which to glue it.

I realised, not long ago, that everything I think about myself is created, an imaginary story. Just as everybody who meets me, who reads me here or anywhere else, who knows me, has created a story about me and who I am, based on their own understanding and interpretation of the things I say and do, what I look like and how they feel about what I say and how I look. We create stories, legends about what’s happened to us, what we’ve done and how we’ve felt, and from that we create a self.

This might sound like new age bullshit, and it probably is. But it’s odd when it becomes real, and sitting listening to myself thinking out a story, creating myself, over and over again, I notice the stories I tell about what happened to me and what it means. And what it means to me – what it makes me – is the change that sometimes makes it difficult to pin down who I am.

Bullshit it might seem. Derek Bickerston wrote a book in 2000 about the evolutionary origins of language, which in its final chapter touched on how consciousness relates to language, to linguistics, and to the reality we create. Once we had language, we became divorced from the immediacy of the world around us, not just by one layer, but by two. A tree is a label for a thing, but what we discuss is the label, the concept tree and the word tree, not the real thing. Language gives us the ability to describe the world around us, but the very nature of our individual description is purely subjective, and can change in a moment.

I decided once I was one kind of person. I told myself a specific set of stories that made me into a specific type of person – a specific type of me. The stories I tell I believe as truth, real truth, for as long as I tell them, but they change with mood. The same incidents happened, the details remain the same, but my interpretation changes, how I understand what they say about me alters. Knowing this, everything changes.

Signs of aging

Last night, I ran one of my standard updates. I put a CD into my laptop and set it up to begin the process. Meanwhile, I sat quietly to one side and transferred my contacts from my old phone to my new iPhone. It’s a fantastic phone – today I entertained myself at lunchtime by watching a YouTube video of Dylan Moran, a break from the intensity of the work I’m doing at the moment.

Looking up, I realised it was getting late and since Friday would be another very long day, so I decided I really should go to bed. I glanced up and noticed my laptop was making a noise that suggested it was doing something. I know the sounds my laptop makes. After four years together, travelling all over the world, sitting in literary festivals WiFi zones or on planes somewhere between Xi’an and Beijing, or for hours and days and months in my flats, wherever I’ve lived, I know the sounds it makes when its playing CDs, DVDs, thinking about something, the strange rotating clicks when it’s not able to process something. I’ve always lived in quiet places, and I think my synaesthesia has given me this weird connection with it.

On this occasion, I noticed that my laptop was making its “I have a CD in me” noise.

“What’s it doing with a CD in it?” I asked myself, and pressed eject.

Pressing eject didn’t do anything and the laptop carried on humming softly. I frowned, and clicked on “Finder”. The dialog box showed up, and declared that it was in the middle of backing up my work and I could just wait, thank you, until it had finished.

I blinked.

I had just completely, and totally forgotten that I’d been backing up my work. I am clearly getting old.

The iPhone saga

My life is occasionally beset by sagas, most notably the saga of the sofa thief, the man who stole my sofa a couple of years ago, and who had the police after him for furniture felonies for a time. However, this isn’t such an amusing and bizarre story, mostly because it involves a mobile and a phone company, and those two things rarely – if ever – bring joy to my life. Despite this, it also proved why it is that I have such a love for Apple, and for people who really understand the meaning of ’service’ in the phrase ‘customer service.’

I have an old phone. It’s over two years old and has its own ideas about the calls and texts I should send and receive. Its battery life is about ten minutes long now, so its definitely served its time. Therefore, I decided that I would upgrade to an iPhone, since I was aware that it would be a simple process and relatively inexpensive. Oh, how wrong I was. I called in to Carphone Warehouse at lunchtime today and started the process of upgrading. I was told I could upgrade, but the cost of doing it would mean that my old contract would have to be paid off. It meant paying £343 in total for the whole business.

Decisions. Well, there wasn’t one to make. Whatever I did, I’d have to pay because if I wanted a different mobile, I’d have to pay for it. I sucked through my teeth and signed on the dotted line, thinking that at least this would be the end of my phone-related troubles. When a lot of your business is conducted by mobile, having one that doesn’t even want to take calls or receive texts is trouble indeed. I’m very picky about phones. I didn’t want one that I hated and despised, and having seen somebody using an iPhone, I knew I wanted something that would really make my life easier.

When it starts to do that, I’ll let you know. So far, life has been much harder.

By the time I got back to the client’s office, I discovered that my phone hadn’t been activated. I also discovered I needed a laptop with greater capabilities than my antiquated but utterly beloved Powerbook could supply. Sighing, and knowing it was even more outlay, after a very long day working late, I trotted to the Apple store to buy an upgrade for my Powerbook. Fine, I thought. Another massive outlay. I sighed. Then I made my way home and started the upgrade process.

It failed, probably because my DVD drive has issues of its own and isn’t up to the job. On the second turn-around, it threatened to erase all my files. Panicking, I took myself back to the Apple store. It was late, and they were about to close up, but one of the Geniuses said he would stay for me. They showed just as much love to my poor baby Powerbook as I do. You may laugh at Macheads, but seriously, if you have a Windows PC, when will you ever get a technician treat your computer with anything more than contempt? They understand, when you walk in and say “Help! My baby’s broken!” that it’s serious. Sometimes the technicians cry right along with you.

After just over half an hour’s work by the Genius, my laptop was restored, and we booked a meeting for Sunday morning to have it overhauled and reconditioned. It will last another year or so, provide the issues with the dying screen don’t cramp its style. By then I might have saved enough to buy myself a new one.

Somebody asked me today if I’d recommend getting a Mac. I would for one very simple reason: customer service. We use computers every day for everything. My life is on my computer, and I don’t know what I’d do without it. The prospect of losing everything took me beyond tears. Yet you walk into a store and even when they have no appointments, they will see you and talk to you, even if they’re managing two people at once. And when they are managing two people at once, they still do it to a level of care that is breathtaking. The atmosphere is communal, friendly and welcoming. That’s why you should buy a Mac.

The iPhone works. I really, really love it so far, and I haven’t even begun to use the best of its features. The best bit, of course, is knowing that when anything goes wrong, there are people on hand to help me deal with it.

When change happens

Out of curiosity, I decided to have a look at the diary I had a year ago when I first began Holosync last night. That was when I realised that if anybody ever published my diaries, they would make for incredibly tedious, not to mention repetitive, reading. It doesn’t help that it isn’t so much a diary as a record that I was asked to keep, of how I felt, about twenty times a day. And twenty times a day I wrangled over the same basic issues endlessly. It’s no wonder I commented to myself recently that I needed to move on if only because I’d bored myself rigid with all my issues. I’d become obsessive about them; they were a hobby in themselves. And that’s a dangerous place to be.

Still, despite the fact that a year ago I was apparently beleaguered by the same sets of unhelpful beliefs as I might have been until about a month or so ago, it would appear that the endless repeating cycle of struggling over the same beliefs came to a dramatic halt when my life was thrown around by a lot of unusual events outside of myself and furthermore, by the realisation that it wasn’t the beliefs I had that mattered, it was why I was holding onto them so very, very hard that needed to change.

I’ve lived a very, very introspective life. To the extent that I haven’t really been aware of the world around me at all for much of it. I’m always somewhere else, imagining some better way of being, or doing. There’s this feeling that a certain set of things are supposed to happen before “life” starts: you get the job you’re supposed to do, the person you’re supposed to be with. Then you’re living. Until then, you’re coasting, you’re somehow less real, not quite a member of the human race even. At least, that’s how it’s always felt to me. The prescribed route didn’t work out even remotely, and there’s this feeling I get that I’m stumbling along going completely wrong through the middle of a metaphorical briar patch.

The change of the last two months has floored me. People talk about desperately wanting change, but curiously, I understand that the most common reason why people return the Sedona Method course and ask for a refund isn’t because change didn’t happen, but because it did: way too fast. I only really stopped trundling around in my vicious little circles just as I started this latest contract. I was so shocked that something so appropriate, so conveniently timed and right, dropped right into my lap at the right time and saved me from a fate worse than bankruptcy, that for about a week I just sat around expecting to wake up and discover it was all a dream.

This particular new set of circumstances has led me to grow up a great deal, certainly emotionally. I’m much more present. I feel much more alive in my own skin, much more in myself, as opposed to being lost in some other time or place. Of course, reading a diary from a year ago, before I really began the hard work I’ve done in the last twelve months, might not count. It did demonstrate though, how much I’d stopped beating myself up for clinging on to the way things are. We all do it. I’m not at peace with myself yet, but the radical change of the last month has been quite something to behold, even if I’m the only one doing the beholding.

Pink flower

Sitting in bed reading, I notice that from where I am I can look out across Victorian grey slate rooftops, brick walls and the modern apartment block behind, and observe a tiny pink flower growing out of the top of a dividing wall between two roofs. It waves madly in the wind, rocking back and forth like a desktop toy on a spring.

Ah, what a potent symbol it is. Nature breaking through the ruins of the Industrial Revolution to some. A Buddhist might see it as an example of courage, how it has arisen here amongst all this dross. Some Chinese philosopher would remark that without the ugliness of the concrete giving it root, it would not be possible to consider it beautiful. Somebody into personal development would tell you that if the flower can do it, so can you. The Zen master remarks that the flower does everything with minimal effort. A mathematician discusses the chaos inherent in the wind that rocks the flower back and forth…

No, none of these. Because this flower isn’t just pink. It’s Hot Pink! Hot pink! with an exclamation mark. This is no delicate little daisy with fine petals and yellow, sun-like heart. This flower is the Austin Powers of the vegetable world. You can almost hear it crooning “Yeah, baby!” and if it had feet, you just know it would wear huge glitter-strewn platforms. It would dance to Abba and get drunk at karaoke on a Saturday night in hotpants and wobbling thighs.

Maybe, though, it’s just a flower, Just a flower, waving in a breeze more typical of November than July, on a Manchester rooftop. Around it swirl the myriad metaphors constructed by a human world, and it cares nothing for any of them. Still, I think it looks pretty determined.