A friend of mine quit video games cold turkey, because he wanted to be more productive. His blood pressure skyrocketed. The cold turkey was dangerous.

One of the signs of addiction, and I want to put air quotes around the word addiction, but won’t, is that after going cold turkey, you experience severe symptoms of loss and withdrawal; the usual ones you know about. Irritability, depression, withdrawal, sleep problems, eating problems, focus problems, etc.

here’s an excerpt from a site about video game addiction:

The video gaming behavior of gaming addicts and non-addicted problem gamers often looks the same. Both groups play a lot, neglect other things in life, and suffer some consequences in their relationships, health, work, or education. The differences sometimes do not appear until moderation is tried. Non-addicted gamers can take a break or limit themselves to certain games or hours, are able to attend to their lives and needs, and often feel much better in the process. Meanwhile, gaming addicts often are afraid of cutting back, fail with any kind of limits, feel too overwhelmed to deal with life, and feel worse when taking a break from gaming. Your attempts at moderation should tell you what you need to know.

So, you don’t really know you’re addicted to something, until you stop trying to do it.

You can swap ‘smart phone’ or ‘social media’ into that paragraph for ‘gaming’ pretty easily.

As much as I have struggled with 12-step programs and addiction models for things like technology, food and sex, I’m now poking at on-line 12 step groups, and see the following breakdown:

• Internet and Technology Addiction
• Social Media Addiction
• Smartphone Addiction
• Streaming Addiction

Of course, you’re not supposed to talk about the meetings, like AA, though I guess I could mention I just sat in on one.

Bumped into the higher power of course, there; it’s a higher-power kinda place, the 12 step group.

Sigh.

I let meditation go until after dinner, and then had a class at 7, which went to nine, and boom, felt like I’d done enough ‘work’ for the day, at some level, and failed.

So, I need bloody timers, which I hate setting, and which weirdly just never work, and / or I need a goddamn schedule to create a real trigger. 

I think it’s gotta be coffee. It’s the one thing I always do when I get up… after medicating the cat, myself, and cleaning the kitchen.

I’m gonna do it while drinking the coffee, which takes some random amount of time. After I’ve had Enough; before it’s done. It can get cold, that’s not a big deal. Or the ice can melt.

My meditation app wants a check in before I meditate, but not one after, which seems dumb; what I find interesting about meditation is that there are things I learn about my current state of mind that fly below the radar normally. How agitated am I? How accepting am I? Is that resignation, depression? Am I looking backward or forward?

Generally backwards, nowadays, as flashes of images of the places I’ve lived life flutter through my mind’s eye, a kaleidoscope I can’t control, except, perhaps, to linger in an image, a moment, and a feeling of the quality of that light. Lying on an oriental carpet, thick and luxurious patterns in blue and white, reading a christmas present, a hardcover Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, the smell of the woodfire, the popping and cracking of the logs, and the scent of pine trees from the backyard, the muted conversation of adults, parents and grand parents and aunts and great aunts now all dead and gone. The translucent bars of neutragina soap in my grandparents big bathroom, the one with two vanities and the long wall mirror. My grandfathers shaving mirror, projecting from the wall on its brass accordion, and the boar bristle brush and its little round cake of soap. 

All these people now dead and gone. Murmuring voices echoing inside me.

Fuck aging. I want to be young again. I am young inside–and not in a good way. Trapped in this gently decaying structure. 

There are things I fear I will never accept.

I’ll slip into the void screaming, “NO!”

I have had a very hard time reading the last ten years. Maybe twenty.

I listen to audiobooks, which is like reading, but it’s slower and more time limited, so my overall book consumption has waned from peak reading in my early teens.

I think I retain a bit more, or at any rate I attend differently when I listen, missing bits and picking up on different bits I might have missed if I was reading as I used to, with the dead trees. Re-reading by listening is always fascinating, as you definitely notice stuff you really forgot.

I have a hard time getting though e-books, unless I am reading them out loud to others. They don’t implore me to finish them as does a paper book. In part because I’m never sure how how much I’ve read, and what’s left to read; enough publishers have snuck sneak previews of other books into the ends of ebooks so I’m never quite sure when I will suddenly fall off a cliff and be in some stupid preview I was not warned about; the progress bar will have been confusing me at this point, as I will have been thinking, “man, this feels almost done, but there’s 20% left?”

So, ebooks are rough, and audiobooks take a ton of time.

So I started collecting some old books, for the covers mostly, and was sort of amazed to pick up this paperback, Time for the Stars, and read half of it at a sitting. The way I used to. Now, I’ve read this one at least twice before, and listened to it as well, I’m guessing, but still.

So I am on the look out for stuff that was okay in 65 years ago, 1956, when this was written, but which feels politically toxic now, or just weirdly dated. Or just plain weird in a story telling way. Weird, or novel, if you will. Hah.

Let me preface this by saying I love these books and don’t yell at me about this list being negative, m’kay? Don’t yell at me for loving it, for that matter. Don’t. Blanket pronouncements about RAH? Yeah. Never mind. I know more about his failings than you ever will, bub. Been through the sadness there, and am out on the other side.

Here’s the bullet point list:

• Kids need beatings: RAH believed strongly in ‘loving’ corporal punishment; all the data from the last few decades indicate that corporal punishment doesn’t work, long term, for creating better people. It can work short term for extinguishing some behavior, but it creates more problems than it solves. Everyone agrees on this now, except for certain religious fundamentalists. Who are always wrong. But RAH makes this one point, not in this, but another book, that the first time the State can legally touch a child, in some cases, is after he is 18 and they insert the lethal injection needle. There’s this conservative idea, which many police hold, that beating someone, sometimes, is how you exert loving guidance; this isn’t even a Western idea; grandmotherly kindness, in Zen, is often portrayed as being hit with a stick by grandma when you are doing something dangerously stupid. 
• Newspapers are still a thing on interstellar space craft. Tons of paper in old SF. Nobody foresaw everyone walking around with networked computer displays in their pockets or built into their glasses / contact lenses. This is a weird part of the future that just didn’t occur to SF writers.
• The future has base income and POV characters are pissed about the taxes. This isn’t a complaint, really, but it is interesting that the conservative / libertarian writers of the 40s and 50s foresaw a socialized future where population pressures produced equally shared sacrifices creating a consensus around space colonization; calorie rations being cut for billions, for example. This generation lived through WW2, so I guess they foresaw this as inevitable in times of crisis. 1920s level inequality, staggering wealth and equally staggering poverty side by side, for a century, was never anything these old SF types worried about. At all. Ever. Not till Cyberpunk. COVID marks the first re-emergence of this kind of government response post WW2. The halfway decent early COVID response, to me, feels like retro-SF.
• Dangling unfinished plot threads raise eyebrows in short novel: the Panshin brothers, in their review of Time for the Stars, suggest that Heinlein had simply gotten tired of the book and wrapped it up quickly with a deux ex machina, faster than light travel, aborting many on-going plot threads. Why do the explorers never try to recover the landing team abducted by the lizard creatures? What happened to them? What really happened to the vanished ships that fall out of communication in flight? I was shocked, shocked at this explanation by the Panshins, that a writer would do that. For me, those loose ends made Time for the stars special. Magical even. Stories don’t always do what you expect them to, what you want them to do, what they seem to be telling you they will do. And that can be good.
• Single POC character is Singularly Charming: I honestly don’t feel like the single ‘negro’ character being saintly, charming, and the only religious character, is bad for 1956, but it does reflect the stylized, not fully rounded (human) representation of non-white characters in era. EE Smith would have made this guy a houseboy or porter or servant of course. And Niven would paint everyone purple, so everyone and no one is POC. But of course, none of Heinlein’s side characters are in any way rounded, so he is not doing anyone a particular disservice. 

I could go on and on but I won’t. I have stuff to do. I may keep this kid of post up, and give it a title, too, so people can sort through them by category. 

So, there’s always time to meditate—if I do it at the end of the day. Which feels dumb. I mean, shouldn’t I do it in the morning, and let the clarity and calm inform my fucking day? Huh? Shouldn’t I? What the fuck. Seriously.

But… there’s an appeal, to the gamification on my smartphone, to do it, so you can check it off there, and see a little streak.

What the fuck is that, exactly though?

So I am trying to tease apart the Quantified Self, aka total tech immersion, and use it for Good, not Bad. All these little things that turn into better health outcomes are worth, one would hope, this crazy intrusive wierd-ass smart watch smartphone dopamine machine.

Maybe. Or maybe it’s all methadone for my tech smack habit. Marginally better. Harm reduction. But don’t kid yourself. You are a barnacle on the ass of this big tech behemoth you helped dream into being. A citizen of Trantor gobbling down the Soylent Green and dreaming of the stars.

Still off social media. I think of things I want to say to someone, that are of interest to no one, that I used to post on feeds, figuring, eh, maybe someone cares. And now I think those thoughts and they float away without leaving a mark, and I find myself wondering, why does that feel like a loss?

Not writing them down?

Social media, I think, blogging a bit, turned me into a journal writer. The real reward of the challenges here is an excuse to write a journal. And my ego wants what I write to be read.

Sue Grafton, who wrote the alphabet mysteries that my whole family read, wrote two books at a time, one her book of the year, K is for Killer or whatever, and the other the meta book about the book filled with hugely boring details of the process. Some who read Grafton find her all hugely boring. Private detective work, and police work, is mostly boring–and she writes whole books of it, six to eight hours of boring shit, and then about twenty minutes of pulse-pounding action.

But yeah. You write a book for publication, as you write a boring book, that’s just you sketching, farting around, talking to yourself, because that is how you find things out, as they are written; every now and then some stuff goes from one book to the other, Grafton said, but not often. You mostly know which book you’re writing.

This is my boring book; I need to spend more time on the more interesting ones. What I am addicted to with social media is the instant gratification. I think many writers are. It’s a drug. Writing…. attention. BING! Dopamine! Instagram makes it even easier of course, you don’t even have to write something. Just be cute and take photos. BING! Eat a nice lunch. BING!

What I am fighting, learning to live with, trying to control, is that. The BING!

I’m terrible at this.

I met a tech writer at a company I was freelancing at once, and mentioned I’d sold a few stories to big-ish magazines, and he thought that was very cool. I wondered if I could do tech or business writing, and he said:

“Of course you can. Fiction is harder to write. If you can sell stories you can write anything.”

He’d tried to write fiction, and couldn’t sell much, and then he’d starting writing professionally in other capacities and he realized, he just liked typing about five pages a day; working on the five pages, getting them right.

It didn’t matter what the five pages were about.

I think of that, as I write my five pages a day. That anything not in the books, not in the novels, is eating that energy. This boring book is a more interesting book I’ll never write. So you have to find balance.

And do this as little as possible.

I am obsessing about a few things. Paperback book covers from the 70s; the era I’m interested in is when paperbacks sold for 95 cents to a buck and a quarter.

That was the cost of about 3-5 cups of the bad coffee we drank back then. This coffee was 35 cents a cup at diners; and it was bottomless. All the bad coffee you could drink for a quarter and a dime. Sometimes they set the whole thermal carafe on your table. Knock yourself out. It was an automatic drip blend, I think, huge cans, that’s right, tin cans with no pull tops, of Folgers, Maxwell house, some combination of robusto and arabica, which was the secret of the old-timey affordability. Arabica costs more.

I’m looking at series novels, series I read growing up. Maybe not surprising, having recently, err, in the last few years, completed my cover design / illustration project for Roger Zelazny’s Nine Princes in Amber, and several other titles including Doorways in the Sand, Creatures of Light and Darkness, Dilvish the Damned, and the ongoing My Name is Legion project.

Maintaining the consistent brand on these was a challenge… it’s far from perfect, which, as it turns out, is sort of the norm in the series I’ve studied.

Anyway, I have been obsessing on creating a collection of the series books that really influenced me, each brand consistent, as my collection growing up, the fragments of which I still own, after many purges, were mongrel messes of covers, of eras, and of quality.

Some were used bookstore finds that fell apart as I read them, or as they sat on a shelf; some were new, for the time, with awful covers and bad typography, which became normal for SF books in the 70s and 80s, for reasons that I do not fully understand; computers hadn’t yet wrecked, or made tasteless, let’s say, a lot of design, so why they all became hideous before that era is mysterious.

So far I have identified Larry Niven’s known space, Heinlein’s signet years, Heinlein’s Ace Juveniles, the Pyramid E.E. Smith Collections (skylark and lensmen) and the Ballentine Lovecraft paperbacks as being iconic visually and important science fictionally. Hm. There’s also a set of foundation covers I am very attached to, and of course, that first legal LOTR where the covers form a triptych. Oh well.

I’m buying them all. I’ll do good scans and upload them to pinterest or whatever. Here too.

So, I’m trying to tie the meditation into a trigger, which is coffee; drinking it, finishing it. Failed today, got distracted, but I’ll keep at it.

I’m resetting the clock, going for a full 30 days in a row, because I want to be sure I can do 10  minutes before I go to 15.

So, without my Facebook feed, I look at my other feed-like things; email, my indy-pub sales, (somewhere between 0 and 3 books a day; closer on average to 1.) my NYT alerts. Check my blog hits.

I read the promotions tab in my gmail.

I waste time. But you know, these things hit empty. And then you gotta do something else.

Because none of these things is designed to keep you glued in. You can waste time this way… but you have to put some effort into it. It is not effortless to waste time reading the news, looking at your email.

I miss the feed, but not how it made me feel, often. My political screeds would get some positive feedback, as i articulated a shared rage, but more and more, I wonder what that is for.

I like writing. I like people reading my writing. The feed is instantaneous. You don’t get paid but you barely get paid for writing fiction most of the time anyway, even if you can sell a fair amount of it at professional rates, which I can, and do.

So the feed is seductive. But it’s insubstantial. It’s ephemeral, topical. It creates cortisol spikes, rage, anger. Or rather it takes a rage, an anger, and it feeds that flame, so that temporary feeling of rage becomes a solid glowing coal. The feed fans the flame. The feed adds fuel to the fire.

The feed leads you around and you know it does that, but you pretend you are doing what you want to do, that what you do for the feed is your choice, but if you get away from the feed for a time, you discover, no.

You’re not really like that. You’re not the person the feed makes you. Not really.

The feed encourages you to perform an identity which creates feedback. It’s operant conditioning. The feed has you creating a bazillion niche content channels, cultivate an audience, filling those attention markets with free product, an endless long tail, that becomes eyeball glue, which becomes profit. But not for you. Never for you. Unless you win some sort of viral lottery. If you’re amazing, or sexy, or cute, or outrageous, or lucky, or some combination of those things, which 99% of aren’t and never will be.

You bring yourself to the feed, but you’ll find that much of what you bring sinks like a lead balloon, and you shrug, and you don’t mind, because that’s how intermittent reward schedules work. Nobody stops being addicted to slot machines because they don’t always pay off.

What matters is they spin, and and ping and pong and ring and clatter, and all of that bonds to those moments when you do win, and so every time, it starts up again, you remember, you could win. You could win. Like the time that open letter to those assholes at the radio station lead to a thousand shares and tens of thousands of hits and phone calls and sponsors pulling support and that actually did something.

That one time.

Life without the feed is this endless succession of things you find yourself gradually losing interest in; because that is how consciousness is supposed to work. That is how we find balance in our lives. By doing various things. But getting enough of some things.

I may be an extreme case, an edge case, someone for whom social media is particularly fucked up. I don’t know. But I find myself standing here staring into the sky wondering what the hell am I doing. Really. Who am I talking to.

Why am I talking to strangers at all.

So, I did about five days of my daily focus challenge before missing a day.

I missed a day. I resolved to not let missing the day derail me. To not beat myself up. Meditation is about acceptance, to some degree, at least for me.

Then I missed two days. I was amazed, as it seemed to me I had, at most, missed one. But no, two. I decided to not get too mad at myself, and resolved to do better.

Then I missed two days again, only, looking at my app, and here is where bookkeeping is essential, the two days was really four days.

Four days.

So, this isn’t working. Why? Well, I am not shaming myself into doing it. I’m not paying myself, nobody is paying me, to do it. Nobody but me cares if I do it. There are no immediate consequences for not doing it. There are things that call to me more urgently. The habit doesn’t take, or if it does, it can die away almost instantly.

I repeat the ‘making a habit stick,’ google search, which has like five ideas, which, it seems, I have to google over and over again as if I’m cooking dried beans in a pressure cooker. That’s one fucking number per bean. I eat two kinds of beans. I keep forgetting.

I need a schedule, or at the very least, a trigger for the new habit to stick. How do I know that?

One day missed, two days missed, then four, all while thinking I’m building a habit, when I am most definitely not.

I am shit at schedules. I slip on one thing and the whole day goes fucking out the window. So triggers.

Coffee. I always have coffee. It’s hard to say when I finish the coffee, sometimes I sip at it for a long damn time, but now, when I finish it, boom. Ten minutes.

Let’s try that.

I have some basic spam control plug-ins set, but hadn’t noticed that I had over 4500 subscribers with randomly generated looking names.

I deleted about 1500 of them before realizing that I have no way of telling the few real subscribers to maybe come back and re-subscribe if I, uh, delete them first. So. Yeah.

So those of you tucked into the remaining 3000 or so, you will be cut off shortly. I have a new deterrent for the new malicious signups, and will keep on top of the human spammers who get in.

I’m going to set up a very clear blog to email feature plug-in thingy. I have to research them a bit. I have mailchimp but ever since realizing that mailchimp content all ends up in people’s promotions folder at gmail, I have wondered if maybe another solution makes more sense. You would need to dig me out of the ads folder and do something to keep me from always landing in there… this is why nobody does blogs anymore…

WordPress link spam and comment spam is weird and depressing. The degree to which any and all functionality on any sort of website can be hijacked, abused, and used to make criminals a few pennies or so, isn’t something we thought about, back when we dreamed about this global computer network.

Ah. Our dreams. Well, Cyberpunk captures the feel of the present pretty well, actually. Dystopic in many ways.

The photo is of my bedroom, where I sit, on three square ikea shelves taped together on my Purple brand matress, with a magic foam neck pillow between my ass and the laminate particleboard.

The shelves provide support, get rid of the sinking into quicksand feeling. And the magic neck pillow doesn’t work for magically fixing your fucked up neck. No matter how many you buy. 

The light shifts on the blinds. When I start hallucinating I open my eyes, glasses off; the blinds are less interesting and catch my attention less than the eyelid movies that start playing after ten minutes or fifteen. I’ve read of traditions where the eyes are kept half open, half lidded, focused on a spot on the ground several feet ahead of the sitter, to avoid being interrupted by the scenes emerging from neural noise and overactive patter recognition circuitry.

I have a fan in the room, and I play a nature sound playlist from spotify, and the two create a stable sonic environment, again, just interesting enough to keep me from listening for distant cars, distant voices, picking out HVAC sounds, my wife typing at work downstairs.

I have to shave a lot of yaks, before I sit, make bed, pick up room, brush teeth, sometimes a neti pot, wash face, light incense, to blot out sensations that will annoy me that, undistracted, I will tune into.  Is there something stuck in my beard? Can I smell my own fucking breath? Did the cat pee somewhere in the condo it wasn’t supposed to, again, like it used to?

You get the idea.

Of course, a real pro could just plop the fuck down and let them all go, one by one, accept them, let them recede, but, as I gleefully admit, I suck at this, several thousand hours into the practice. 

And that’s fine. It’s the thing I let myself suck at without self recrimination. God that’s wonderful.

So. Why is it so hard to make myself do this?

It’s harder for people with ADD to make and maintain habits, I have been told, and this makes sense to me, as my life is amorphous haze of activity, hyper focus, procrastination, meaningless planning, good intentions, unachieved ambitions, self-flagellation and a kind of plodding progress toward long term goals.

Anyway, focus, we were talking about focus, right. I’ve been told the squirrel joke is really shitty by some people with ADD, but this is me, and let me say, ok, wait. I see. squirrel and what were we talking about again?

Focus.

So, rather than throw up my hands and say, ‘Ok, we start again at ONE, because, you know. I SUCK,’ or saying, “Okay, if I miss a day I have to just make it up with two sessions the next day…” I’m saying, “I took a break but will just do it today.”

So, I did, yay me, and I looked at my zen timer app, the biggest and bestest iphone timer app in the world, where I meditate with at least 10,000 other people all over the world at any given time, and jesus, why is that even a thing, knowing that, and I discovered, to my considerable chagrin, a word I seldom use, that I’d missed TWO whole days, in a row, and how did that happen?

So, new sub-goal, try to keep the missed days down to ONE for fuck’s sake.

So, to cross the two challenge streams here, I took a 50 day break from FB, and a 30 day break from Twitter, and glancing back through my feed to see how folks are doing, again and again I find people arguing with idiots. (GOP/ Trumpist Wing Nuts)

I feel like I need to join in, and add my two cents.

My heart speeds up. The words start forming in my head. My fingertips itch for a keyboard. I search for a link, to a recent NYT piece, to counter the dumb ass meme about Biden’s COVID deaths being just like Trump’s. The deaths are red-shifted, see? Because the fucking morons aren’t getting fucking vaccinated; because of fucking Trump and fucking right-wing hate radio, and social media, and also because people are sometimes stupid for other reasons, too.

Then I think why?

Why would I do that?

Who’s mind is going to be changed? Why? Oh, and what’s the primary cesspool spreading the poison?

Facebook. Social media. Youtube.

It’s the fucking Gamesters of Triskelion. (It’s a Star Trek episode, TOS, The Original Series, look it up I guess?)

We fight for their amusement. Oh, and our fights are monetized. Am I a hot chick in a green wig in a metal bikini? Or maybe I’m a megalomaniac in a toupee.

The brains laugh and make bets. Kirk tricks them into trying to care for the pathetic drones they have been parasitizing. Says that’s an interesting game. The Enterprise flies off.

I hope to hell the candy colored brains stuck with the program. And didn’t just go back to the pitch black oven like robot warehouses and the monetized dopamine trigger rage machines.

Meditation wise? Yeah, five days hasn’t transformed me into Buddha yet. My therapist said it could take, you know, years.

So maybe I should take the Adderal.

We’ll see. But seriously, FB and Twitter is miserable. Get off of it for six weeks, and come back and look at it, and monitor your body, as you do, your heart rate. It is so, so obviously unhealthy.

But you knew that already, didn’t you?