Imam (Part I)
(A new attempt at a serialized short story. Bear with me.)
It's clicking again; rapid clicking. Soon it will go back to a more sustained buzzing. Then it will click at a slightly higher pitch before dropping down to the original pitch. The original pitch is 312 hertz (Hz). That's 312 cycles per second. I know this because it is my job to know the ins and outs of the clicking mechanism, among other things. The buzzing portion sounds like an alarm. The final clicking portion is between 437 and 443 Hz, depending on the temperature inside the chamber. We try to keep it constant, because this clicking pitch is actually essential to the smooth operation of the machine. That's why they have someone dedicated to knowing these things: they are salient. They are salient because this machine is essential for understanding what's going on in people's heads. That's right: I tend to the needs and wants of a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner. I won’t bore you with the details, but let me say that it measures brain activity. It is new and exciting. It gobbles power. It costs a great deal of money, and like any pseudosentient marvel of technology it tends to whine. That’s what I call it when it’s not quite broken, but it sends signals to my control panel telling me something is not right. I will then fiddle with the various functions, tools, diagnostics and controls in my toolbox to act as a final line of defense and restore homeostasis. And they call me a controller! If some subjects only knew how close the electromagnet came to giving out. Do you know what happens when an electromagnet that is generating a magnetic field 6,000,000 times stronger than the Earth’s gives out? I can only imagine, but I’d sure as hell feel sorry for the poor sucker whose head is in the center of the hungry, sick mechanism. From what I know, there would be a massive electric kickback, something on the order of a few hundred thousand lightning bolts aimed at the skull. Light bright enough to bleach the soul. Heat of such magnitude that if anything were to survive after that cataclysm, modern philosophical materialism would quickly run down the shitter. But I suppose there are worse ways to die.
TO BE CONTINUED
I know it's barely an introduction, but the blogging software has been having some problems lately.
Consider: "No More Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun. No More Swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No Fun — for anybody. 67. You are getting Greedy. Act your old age. Relax — This won't hurt."
It's clicking again; rapid clicking. Soon it will go back to a more sustained buzzing. Then it will click at a slightly higher pitch before dropping down to the original pitch. The original pitch is 312 hertz (Hz). That's 312 cycles per second. I know this because it is my job to know the ins and outs of the clicking mechanism, among other things. The buzzing portion sounds like an alarm. The final clicking portion is between 437 and 443 Hz, depending on the temperature inside the chamber. We try to keep it constant, because this clicking pitch is actually essential to the smooth operation of the machine. That's why they have someone dedicated to knowing these things: they are salient. They are salient because this machine is essential for understanding what's going on in people's heads. That's right: I tend to the needs and wants of a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner. I won’t bore you with the details, but let me say that it measures brain activity. It is new and exciting. It gobbles power. It costs a great deal of money, and like any pseudosentient marvel of technology it tends to whine. That’s what I call it when it’s not quite broken, but it sends signals to my control panel telling me something is not right. I will then fiddle with the various functions, tools, diagnostics and controls in my toolbox to act as a final line of defense and restore homeostasis. And they call me a controller! If some subjects only knew how close the electromagnet came to giving out. Do you know what happens when an electromagnet that is generating a magnetic field 6,000,000 times stronger than the Earth’s gives out? I can only imagine, but I’d sure as hell feel sorry for the poor sucker whose head is in the center of the hungry, sick mechanism. From what I know, there would be a massive electric kickback, something on the order of a few hundred thousand lightning bolts aimed at the skull. Light bright enough to bleach the soul. Heat of such magnitude that if anything were to survive after that cataclysm, modern philosophical materialism would quickly run down the shitter. But I suppose there are worse ways to die.
TO BE CONTINUED
I know it's barely an introduction, but the blogging software has been having some problems lately.
Consider: "No More Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun. No More Swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No Fun — for anybody. 67. You are getting Greedy. Act your old age. Relax — This won't hurt."
posted by A. D. at 10:11 PM
7 Comments:
-interesting title..why?
- what if your head *is* the fucking electromagnet?! would that hurt?
hope you don't give up on the urban soup series (or have you already?). other suggestions for serialisation, perhaps: tarot, uncanny, more on mental illness/ alterity.
anyway, thanks for writing!
Oh, the title. I hope to explain that with a later installment. As far as the Urban Soup is concerned, I've been throwing myself into the concept more than ever. And you know how when you're experiencing something you feel loath to write about it. I like writing as a form of fond recollection.
Mental illness is an awesome topic. But I don't think I could do it justiece except in the most shallow way. But maybe I'll seek out stories written with the voices of the "mentally ill" and link them. I have always suspected that the "disturbed" associative though processes of certian kinds schizophrenia are teh unmasked mechanism of human creativity. But that's just my opinion.
Cheers!
cool. will keep reading. where is the end quote from, btw?
consider this (by way of interest): "An Artful Madness : Talents Emerge, Dementia Takes Over" - research from Dr. Bruce Miller of theUniversity of California, San Francisco - Creative artistic and inventive activity is enhanced while at the same time speech and language centers of the brain are destroyed by "frontotemporal dementia" (FTD) disease. - ABCNEWS.com
can't find any more information on it at the moment, though.
what is fascinating is also transferred psychosis... (even metaphorically speaking?)
good luck with the soup.
The quote was Hunter S. Thompson's suicide note.
I went to a talk the other day, and the speaker mentioned that the most creative time for people in general is between the hours of 2 a.m. and 3 a.m. Maybe it has something to do with a distinct lack of control? A kind of waking dream? I haven't put theory into practice in a long time. I will soon.
Cheers!
trust me, it works.. by 2amish you lose control of what you are saying and the b.s. becomes strikingly lucid, even poetic.
but it's a narrow window. by 3:15amish you are mumbling incoherently. perhaps it is an idea to experiment and graph this progression.
it is too bad office hours are 9-5. explains the downward creativity, upward normalization sequence. looked for a support group but best i could find was this http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Studios/5423/nomid.html
Thank you!
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