Spontaneous Musings

1. End of the week. Going to try and get sleep, get a chest x-ray on Sat, pay bills, and get exercise. Also drink more water.

Talked to a co-worker today who said that he made oatmeal muffins with steel cut oats. Interesting. I may hunt the recipe for that.

I need to find a baked oatmeal recipe that is workable.

2. My mother finally mentioned to my father that he might have rear-brain alzheimers and discussed the symptoms. He asked for more information, she looked it up on the internet and printed it out for him. He said that this really helped a lot, he was feeling so alone, isolated, and frustrated. Didn't understand why this was happening or what it was.

Rear-brain alzheimers otherwise known as posterior cortical atrophy is what the best-selling British fantasy novelist Terry Prachett died of, eventually.

My father exhibited the same symptoms Prachett had, that's why I decided it had to be rear-brain. This is the portion of the brain that controls vision or how our eye communicates images to our brain.

My father was an artist. Not necessarily for a living. So frustrated one. He could draw just about anything. I get my artistic ability from him, as does my brother. He was going to be a cartoonist at one stage. And has written and published six books.
Also an avid reader and historian.

Now? He can barely read, he can't draw at all, and he can't write. He used to spend hours doing watercolors, good ones, and writing his stories. He can't do it now.
Why?

Symptoms

The symptoms of posterior cortical atrophy can vary from one person to the next and can change as the condition progresses. The most common symptoms are consistent with damage to the posterior cortex of the brain, an area responsible for processing visual information. Consistent with this neurological damage are slowly developing difficulties with visual tasks such as reading a line of text, judging distances, distinguishing between moving objects and stationary objects, inability to perceive more than one object at a time, disorientation, and difficulty maneuvering, identifying, and using tools or common objects. Some patients experience hallucinations. Other symptoms can include difficulty performing mathematical calculations or spelling, and many people with posterior cortical atrophy experience anxiety, possibly because they know something is wrong. In the early stages of posterior cortical atrophy, most people do not have markedly reduced memory, but memory can be affected in later stages.

Also... 9 Things You Should Know About Rear-Brain Alzheimers.

Note Terry Prachett got it at 69, it hit my father much later, closer to 75 or 76, was when the signs started.

“Sometimes I cannot see what is there,” he wrote.

“I see the teacup with my eyes, but my brain refuses to send me the teacup message. It’s very Zen. First, there is no teacup and then, because I know there is a teacup, the teacup will appear the next time I look.

“I have little work-arounds to deal with this sort of thing – people with PCA live in a world of work-arounds.”

That's how I knew it was what my father was going through. He described the same thing. I'd watch him -- he didn't know where the glass was on the table, sometimes he could find it sometimes he couldn't.

Terry Prachette discusses being diagnosed with PCA:



Terry Prachett co-wrote Good Omens with Neil Gaiman, along with the Discworld novels and various others. PCA took away his ability to tell stories, to write, to draw,
to read. But he found ways to handle it up until the end.

I knew Prachett had Alzheimers, and I knew his problems with it long before my father began to exhibit symptoms.

But I didn't know how close those symptoms were to my father's until March 29, 2019.

In this POST - I link to a Tim Ferris interview with Neil Gaiman where he describes in detail Prachett's symptoms, and I began to cry. They were the same symptoms my father exhibited. I told my mother. But she didn't think to mention it to my father until the other day, when he got very frustrated at his "Memory Matters" course. The assignment was to draw President Lincoln. My father used to be able to draw beautifully. But all he could do was some sort of blob. When they looked at it, he quipped, "I drew Lincoln's brain." And he made a joke of it. But he was bothered by this and told my mother that he felt alone and didn't understand why he couldn't draw any longer. That's when she mentioned what I'd been telling her over and over again since March 29, 2019. That I thought my father had rear-brain alzheimers. He got interested. She looked it up -- said it mentioned Terry Prachett and various sources in the UK. She printed off the symptoms and read them to my father. His eyes lit up. For the first time, he said, he felt less alone. That he understood what was happening to him.

If it weren't for Terry Prachett telling his story, and Neil Gaiman talking about it - I'd have never realized that this is what my father was suffering from -- and I wouldn't have kept mentioning it to my mother, who finally told my father yesterday -- and finally gave him some comfort and an idea on how to proceed.

They've decided to go to the library and pick up various books on CD, and audio books. And see if they can find things that my father can do that are different from what he did in the past.

I'm sharing this - in my own rambling off-kilter way - to show how we can affect and change each other's lives in positive ways without realizing it or ever knowing we've done it.

Went book shopping today...okay, I did not intend to go book shopping. I intended to just take a leisurely walk and lust after books in book stores. But I got tempted. Books lusted after: "Elizbeth Bear's Blood and Iron", Peter S. Beagle's "The Last Unicorn", Marcel Proust's "Swann in Love" (which a portion of my flist has read, more than once already)- new translation by Lydia something - very pretty book - read a page and a half before reluctantly putting it back on the shelf and deciding, no this is not a summer book but a winter one which deserves a blanket, a cup of coco and a hot fire in the background, George Eliot's "Middlemarch" (which another portion of flist has read (note not the same one who read Swann in Love) and dismissed it for the same reasons.

Then found a book of personal essays by Jonathan Franzen entitled How to Be Alone. Read a few passages - such as "the local particularities of content matter less to me than the underlying investigation in all these essays: the problem of preserving individuality and complexity in a noisy and distracting mass culture: the guestion of how to be alone." And," Expecting a novel to bear the weight of our whole disturbed society - to help solve our contemporary problems- seems to me a peculiarly American delusion. To write sentences of such authenticity that refuge can be taken in them: Isn't this enough? Isn't it alot?" Read a bit more. Bought the book to take home and languish in and be comforted by. No, I don't entirely agree with everything he says, but some things....yes, I do. Which is odd, considering how much I despised him several years back for that essay in Harpers - which in this volumn he apologizes for and explains in a way that provides a new twist on it.
Also gave it up for Diana Gabaldon's Outlander - which several people rec'd and I've played with reading a few times over the years. Lengthy book though. And Terry Prachett's Witches Abroad, which may be a tad footnote heavy for my taste, after Kavaliar and Clay but we shall see. Yes, I know, I do not need any more new books. Have no room for the ones I have. What I should do is go to the library like everyone else - but am allergic to libraries (dust mites and evil company, which was filled with evil librarians or rather the librarians that couldn't get a job anywhere else) - that and I take too long to read the damn books and am too lazy to renew it. Cheaper to buy the dang things.

Other thing I spent money on? Video rentals - three for 9.95 at Blockbusters - so rented Shattered Glass, Superman the Movie and Superman II - which I'd been wanting to see since Superman Returns, which is more or less the sequel to Superman II. Felt odd walking about - as if I was not fitting in with the local fashion - in my Kate Hill sleeveless colored/three button down tank top. Black. Everyone else had this spagetti strap or thin strap tees on that made them look sort of saggy in the bust or like little boys with no bust. Thought about getting some at American Apparial but got distracted by bookstores, which were more appealing. I hate shopping for clothes. Do not understand the appeal at all.

Just finished watching Shattered Glass which is about Stephan Glass - the reporter who fabricated 21 of the 42 stories he wrote for The New Republic. The director chooses to tell the tale through the use of a "unreliable narrator" to frame it. Ie. We see much of it through the eyes of Stephen Glass, which would have worked better if he chose a more charismatic actor than Hayden Christianson to play Glass - although having seen the real Glass on the 60 minutes piece in the extras - Christianson does look and act like the real guy. I wanted to see the film through the eyes of Chuck Lane and Michael Kelly played respectively by Stephen Staarsgard and Hank Azaria, who do have screen charisma. Or Steven Zahn who played Adam Pemberton who broke the Glass fabrication for Forbes Digitial. But no, it's via Stephen's eyes, mostly and to a lesser extent, Chuck's and Adam's. The tale does depict how easy it is for a skilled liar to fabricate the truth and convince numerous people that it is the truth. Glass was a pathological liar and a clever/creative one. He didn't just lie, but created notes, a website, a newsletter, and other pieces to back up the lie. Then when he was caught, he continued to lie and manipulate people into feeling sorry for him. Did he get punished? Ah, here's the thing, not really. Oh sure, he got fired and sued and went to therapy. But he came out of it with a law degree from Georgetown, and a six figure book deal for a work of fiction entitled "The Fabulist" about a guy who fabricates articles to further his career in journalism. The people he hurt? They did not fare nearly as well. His main problem? Getting accepted to the New York Bar. Oh he passed the written, they are just uncertain about his character - this was in 1998 or thereabouts, no clue if he's practicing law now.

Depressing film. Not what I expected. But realistic. I've met a pathological liar who managed to hurt me a great deal. Almost destroyed me. I escaped. And eventually he destroyed himself. Granted he was also bi-polar and an alcoholic, so that may have contributed to the problem. And I've managed to let go of it, and even sort of forgive him. Life dealt with him far worse than I ever could.

It is however an interesting one - in that it decides to use the unreliable narrator to frame and present the story. It just doesn't stay in that point of view long enough for it to work, I think. Not like the brilliant David Fincher film Fight Club - where we are inside an unreliable narrator who is lying to himself throughout the movie. Ian McEwan also uses the technique in Atonement. It's in The Others. And M. Night Shyalaman uses it brilliantly in The Sixth Sense. Difficult technigue to utilize, you need a charismatic narrator in a film to pull it off, and you need to stay in that pov through out, otherwise the audience may get annoyed or confused. In the extras, the director of Shattered Glass admits that the unreliable narrator bit was tagged on at the last minute and not originally intended to frame the film - he put it there, when the original framing did not work for the studio. I'm not sure about the choice. I sort of wish he stuck with the New Republic staff telling the tale.

It's not a bad film all in all. I was entertained and found the story fascinating. But it's not a great one either. Doesn't have the grit of other journalistic films such as Absence of Malice or All The President's Men. But then it doesn't really try to be like those films. It's a small story and a small film and works as such.