Michael Offutt's Blog, page 160

When It's Time

Tuesday morning I drove up to my childhood home in Idaho Falls to put my mother in a care facility. Now that it's Wednesday night, and I'm writing this completely exhausted from two days of filling out paperwork, moving furniture, and setting up her room, I can tell you that this was the most difficult thing I've had to do in my life.

My mother has been battling mental illness for years. My father had grown incapable of managing her meds and was at the end of his rope, ready to flee with a packed suitcase to lord knows where. He just couldn't take it anymore. And the process was physically exhausting. I hit the road for an eight-hour round trip and had my first care facility appointment at noon. Then another at 1:00. Then a break for lunch and mom's doctor at 3:00 where we asked her, "Do you believe it's time?" And she responded, "Yes."

So we picked out a place, and I got 100-pages of paperwork to fill out (I'm serious). Living will, resuscitation, medicare, insurance, supplemental, social...all kinds of questions. Then came the part where we had to set up the room. This included picking out furniture, moving a 300-pound solid wood dresser, dolls, things that would give my mother some peace in her new home. All the while she was yelling at us, cussing us out, wondering what the hell is going on.  Then she fell twice, once outside. My dad just sat on the couch in a "fugue" state and said "Your mother fell down." And then just left her there so that I could go and scoop her up. He refused to answer simple questions. "Which pillow do you think she would like?" His response, "I'm not going to answer questions about that. Your decision."

He washed his hands of even the simplest questions.

Long-term care insurance had been lost. They were buried in one of three shoeboxes filled with hundreds of paper receipts from voided checks that should have been thrown away to receipts for stuff he's bought in the last ten years. Pure chaos. He couldn't find the keys to his truck, couldn't find my mother's dentures, was pretty helpless really.

So my brother and I did it all. We got my mother's clothes labeled with sharpies, we bought  cleaning supplies and spit-shined all the furniture going over, we selected all the photographs for her door display so that the residents could see who she was and be curious, we put away her clothes, hung the pictures in her room, connected the television, got her set up for her meds to be delivered already in bubble packs directly from the pharmacy with speed pay, signed all the papers, and then took her there.

I got emotional driving her there. She thought we were going to iHop which is one of her favorite restaurants. When we ended up at the nursing home, she knew what this place was, despite all of her mental issues. So I cried...I tried to stop it, but I couldn't.

If you ever have to commit your mother to a facility, I know your pain. My mother loves me so much. Though most of her is gone, this is one of those milestones where you know that a loved one's life left on this earth has grown short. And despite this love, I couldn't take her home. She wanted to go home to the dog she loves, to the place where she was comfortable, and she isn't going to go home ever again. This facility is now her home. I had to move out of state to find a job. I can only visit twice a year because of vacation. And you simply cannot live in this country if you don't have a job. So there's a mandatory 40-hours of my week that is gone. And honestly, there's no way I could care for her even if I lived locally.

So yeah, this week has been hell. I'll remember it for the rest of my life. I think she'll make new friends and lead a healthier more social lifestyle so perhaps this will be a good fit. The home I put her in seemed like a really good one.

Anyway, if I haven't had time to visit your blogs this week, this is why. This is what I've been doing. I've got one more day to wrap up and finalize some things, take my mom to a doctor's appointment, and replace a phone that I dropped accidentally in the hot tub at the hotel I'm staying at. Sigh. When this week is over, it shall be a big relief.

VY Canis Majoris

Our sun in comparison to just a small section of this enormous
star. If you were to carry it out past the edge of the screen, you'd
see how ridiculously huge this star happens to be.VY Canis Majoris is the largest star ever discovered. I was watching this show called "How the Universe Works" narrated by Mike Rowe, and I really enjoyed the explanation they had of VY Canis Majoris. Basically, it's a dying star. What keeps it burning at its center is a fusion reactor. Think of hydrogen bombs going off and you essentially understand the reaction taking place in the heart of stars.

So the thing that keeps a star from just flying apart is gravity. In the case of VY Canis Majoris, there is so much mass that when the fusion stops going, gravity is just going to kind of take over and crush the core of the star into a black hole.  Black holes are things that our brightest physicists don't really understand.  Places where infinite gravity takes over and time stops and light can't even escape.
So in the center of VY Canis Majoris, a black hole will eventually form. When that happens, it will consume the star from the inside. But it will do so incredibly fast, like a glutton, too fast that all of the colliding matter will explode in this thing called a hypernova. A hypernova produces more energy in a second than our sun will produce in its entire lifetime. That's just mind-boggling.

Up by Pixar

If only all stories, and all lives were this perfect. UP was a great film because of the age of its characters. Not only that though, it touched on issues of Ellie not being able to have a child, loneliness, and how two people can be so perfect for each other right from the very start. Whatever writers at Pixar came up with this story are absolutely brilliant. It's really the first movie I ever went to with my father where he said afterward, "I really liked this movie."

This is the octogenarian story that stole my heart.

Thoughts on Art and Criticism

I love the snippet I've included above. It is from Pixar's Ratatouille. It reminds me of the power that food has and that with a smell, a taste, and a touch, you can be transported to a time in your childhood when things were far less complicated. Below are thoughts on criticism and how we both give and receive.

“In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face, is that in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so. But there are times when a critic truly risks something, and that is in the discovery and defense of the new. The world is often unkind to new talent, new creations, the new needs friends. Last night, I experienced something new, an extraordinary meal from a singularly unexpected source. To say that both the meal and its maker have challenged my preconceptions about fine cooking is a gross understatement. They have rocked me to my core. In the past, I have made no secret of my disdain for Chef Gusteau’s famous motto: Anyone can cook. But I realize, only now do I truly understand what he meant. Not everyone can become a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere. It is difficult to imagine more humble origins than those of the genius now cooking at Gusteau’s, who is, in this critic’s opinion, nothing less than the finest chef in France. I will be returning to Gusteau’s soon, hungry for more." — Anton Ego

Sam Harris

Rain

Quotes from 1Q84 book 3 by Haruki Murakami

I recently finished the mind-bending book, 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami. Here are some quotes I want to share to see if they spark discussion. I'm still processing what I think of this book. I have given the quotations numbers to make them easy to reference. If you like, pick one and tell me what you think he is saying, whether you agree with it or not, and why you may think it is true or not.

1) Number one on the list now was a diet book entitled Eat as Much as You Want of the Food You Love and Still Lose Weight. What a great title. The whole book could be blank inside and it would still sell. 

2) Humans see time as a straight line. It's like putting notches on a long straight stick. The notch here is the future, the one on this side is the past, and the present is this point right here...But actually time isn't a straight line. It doesn't have a shape. In all senses of the term, it doesn't have any form. But since we can't picture something without form in our minds, for the sake of convenience we understand it as a straight line. At this point, humans are the only ones who can make that sort of conceptual substitution. 

3) There are always far more people in the world who make things worse, rather than help out. 

4) It was a well-known fact that certain members of the so-called elite had disgusting personalities and dark, twisted tendencies, as if they had taken more than the share of darkness allotted to them. 

5) Most people in the world don't really use their brains to think. And people who don't think are the ones who don't listen to others. 

6) I was confident that I was a special person. But time slowly chips away at life. People don't just die when their time comes. They gradually die away, from the inside. And finally the day comes when you have to settle accounts. Nobody can escape it. People have to pay the price for what they've received. 

7) If you do the same things everyone else does, in the same way, then you're no professional.

Murakami's book has been a heavy heavy read. I don't recommend it for everyone. But it has given me lots of pause to stop reading and just think about what he has said.

Prometheus Happy Birthday David

Oh my gosh...I just couldn't get past "P" in the A to Z challenge without another post where I gush about the movie I'm most looking forward to this year. The website io9 has a bunch of links and codes that you can go to and unlock David's emotions. You should try it if you're bored.

If you are new to my blog and don't know what this movie is, Prometheus is the prequel to the original Alien that Ridley Scott made almost 40 years ago.

They spent $200 million dollars on it before marketing.

That's just...wow!

The Oppenheimer Connection in SLIPSTREAM

SPOILER ALERT==> I'M CHATTING ABOUT MY BOOK SO GO AWAY IF YOU DON'T WANT TO FIND OUT WHAT PART OF THE STORY IS ABOUT:

I think that Robert Oppenheimer is a tragic figure. An American theoretical physicist, he along with Enrico Fermi, created the first atomic bomb as part of the Manhattan Project. Oppenheimer recalled after the detonation of the first atomic bomb (called Trinity) a verse from the Hindu holy book, the Bhagavad Gita. "If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the mighty one..." Years later, he said he also thought of a second verse, "I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."

Convinced that the H-bomb was a genocidal device that would cause excessive destruction, Oppenheimer believed an international agency should regulate nuclear weapons. He argued that the United States could secure its defense with a stockpile of atomic arms. However, at the height of the Cold War, defense hawks and anti-Communists saw Oppenheimer’s view as unpatriotic. Edward Teller and Lewis Strauss, two advocates for the hydrogen bomb, contributed to Oppenheimer’s humiliation in hearings that stripped him of his security clearance forever.

I've always thought that America behaved terribly toward one of our greatest minds. Fear of course was behind it, and Americans are some of the most afraid people in the world. I'm not saying that there isn't good reason to be afraid. But fear drives public policy, decision-making, and belief.
When I set out to write my book, I used the work that Robert Oppenheimer did and the Trinity bomb as a catalyst for the destruction of a parallel world in a mirror universe.
I posed this question: what would happen if there were two adjacent universes? We live in one. And people just like us live in the other. To keep these two identical universes apart, are two towers. One on Earth and one on the mirror world which I call Avalon.  These structures are big...really big. As tall as mountains. The one on Avalon was located in the desert of White Sands, New Mexico. So, what are these towers? I kind of picture the scale of the towers I envision as being similar to the
artist rendition of the Ultima Tower. This isn't a "fantasy" tower but something
that architects propose building someday on our own planet.
Think "the ultimate skyscraper" and you get the idea.Well I have an answer for that. These towers are just containers to keep a pair of boxes safe. The boxes are part of this whole idea that I had of a designer universe. In other words, the boxes are the most incredible super computer that you could possibly imagine and probably even a little beyond that. They have an unlimited unknown power supply self-contained within the towers. They run a computer program that defines all the laws of physics in mathematical terms for every thing in the universe.
You might ask...who created the towers? Who created the boxes? I name that being as simply "The Creator" and never go further into that. But the Creator would be a pretty amazing engineer.
So what is the Oppenheimer Connection in SLIPSTREAM? An atomic bomb produces an electro magnetic pulse. This thing disrupts electronics. The towers that house the amazing boxes that define how the universe works would have been immune to this. What I pose in my story (once I set up all these ideas) is that when Trinity was detonated on Earth, the effects of the EMP crossed the boundaries between universes inside the walls of the tower on the parallel world. It disrupted the computer program running in the box on the far side for a millionth of a second, and this was very bad.  It laid waste to an entire world, and the tower on that mirror planet that had stood for billions of years exploded.
This event set into motion everything that happens in SLIPSTREAM and in its sequels that I've plotted out, but have yet to write.

No Capes

I saw 1000 Ways to Die and stopped to watch. A man was impersonating a superhero, and he had the costume complete with cape. He saw some delinquents on top of a building smoking illegal drugs, and decided to interfere. He pushed one of the kids and the kids began to approach him. Outnumbered, he backed up. However, he tripped over his own cape and fell off the side of the building, landing in such a way that his ribs ripped his heart open.



I think any of us that write can understand how we sometimes include unnecessary details in our stories that really just gum up everything and basically, almost kill it. I've had to look long and hard at questions brought up by beta-readers and ask myself, "Is this a cape? Does this thing have any purpose? Or is it just something that's gonna drag me into a jet engine."

As an aside note, encouraged by feedback I got on my picture of Kolin that I posted a week or so ago, I decided to draw my protagonist, Jordan. This is 100% original artwork. I did it with Prismacolor coloring pencil on illustration board. Then I scanned in the original on my scanner and enhanced all of the colors, added effects, and redid problematic areas using Adobe Photoshop Elements. Please be kind, I am not a professional artist. I wanted to make sure that Jordan looks 17 and not how a "high school student played by 27-year-olds" looks (Think GLEE, SMALLVILLE, etc.). I'm happy with the result. Have a great Monday.