At first, this post was about VHS store nostalgia, and I think it was wanting something lighter to talk about this week, but it fell kind of flat. I felt purposeless in drafting it up. Not only are there more important things in the world to talk about — and I don’t want to half-ass my thoughts there as I accumulate them into a grander picture — but there was something bigger for me, personally, this week, that does come with a little guilt.
So here’s a VHS cover to a terrible movie in its place. Truly god awful.
The first human touch I’ve had in months wasn’t what I expected it to be.
It wasn’t hugging a friend after months of not seeing them. I had seen friends at a socially distanced hangout a couple days prior, but none of us could quite give the embrace we wanted to. (Full disclosure: I did give one a light shoulder pat I had to let stand in for a hug at full arm’s length. This was my egregious quarantine violation.)
It was an electrical engineer taking a tape measure across my head, measuring my massive skull. It was all so I could get Zapped. And I remembered the Scott Baio film, for some reason, probably because 40% of my mind is z-rate late night cable fodder movies, of which I’ve seen so many more than any Oscar winners. Really, who needs those?
I mentioned it in the newsletter last week — I was to start transcranial magnetic stimulation. Literally a hyper focused electromagnet penetrating through my skull and into my brain. The hope is to alleviate depression and anxiety. I’ll be treated throughout June every weekday at 11 a.m., and then moving it into more irregular treatments.
After measuring my head, the engineer — in some medical things you want a technician over a doctor — took the electromagnet over my skull and tried to find the right area to stimulate, based on when my hands started twitching involuntarily. A few full body movements made it obvious I was too uptight. He tried to shock tension out of my shoulder with the magnet, to little effect — apparently it works on some people — and that didn’t work on me. I’m perpetually uptight in ways I wish I wasn’t.
We go back to trying to find the right area of my brain. The telltale finger twitch happens, so we have a relative area to try. It’s a matter of finding the right area to give relief now.
When he does, something shifts. I compared it to getting an IV drip of Xanax right onto my brain. A feeling of calm, almost euphoria. It’s all on the right side of my head. The stimulation on the left side doesn’t do much for me.
On a cap I wear every day, he has the spots marked, orienting them by a little line that’s to fall between my eyebrows.
There’s also the eye pain, the only real discomfort. On the right it’s a pressure. On the left, it feels like a stab.
Day two feels like more of the same, a sort of euphoria walking out. Looser. Freer. Not so tight chested. Day three brought some of the relief — but a creep back toward anxiety. Was the stimulation not working as well, or was it the forces of the outside world? There are lots of things to be anxious about, after all — the world is in some cases literally on fire and we’re all stewing in a pressure cooker with a broken release valve. There’s work. There’s navigating unfamiliar personal terrains. There’s still social isolation.
Day four feels like a reprieve from the anxiety, and then a return to it, both in the same day. We hadn’t targeted the left side that we’d worked on the day before — maybe it was energizing me too much? — but still there was a bit of anxiousness. Maybe it takes more than a day or two to unknot? Maybe there are too many forces at work there?
Maybe I want this so bad to work because nothing else has. There are nudges in the right direction. Maybe after four days, every day isn’t like the first, like feeling a physical chunk of anxiety break off of my head and dissolve into some kind of sea below. There’s a reason it’s not a four day process, and is a 40 treatment process.
There will be further updates on this, likely in the mental health section, which I’m skipping this week because it’s the main event of the newsletter this week. Or maybe it’ll take the front seat if there are bigger breakthroughs. There are still nebulous thoughts. This is the first chapter of this story. There isn’t even time for a cliffhanger yet.
But here’s me in my silly cap with the machine on my head.
It feels weird, in the kind of week the world has had, that I’ve had a journey that felt selfish on my own part. The United States was in upheaval and I was in a suburban medical clinic rather than in the streets. I was connected to an inward journey as the outward journey of the world was much grimmer. I was enjoying the privilege of good medical care while others were dying. Open season on the streets of black faces and I was worried about getting back to work in time. My contributions were money to bail funds and arguments about news coverage — abstract things. But the protests weren’t REAL where I was. I had friends out there — and I felt weird in the ways I was disconnected from it. It’s the hell of the inanity of Silicon Valley, where I feel like I’m living in a simulacrum town, and I felt the tinge of not only not doing enough, but doing something selfish — even though it’s something that could radically change my life.
But our mental health is important too, in its own way. Especially right now. I just have to be cognizant of the factors that leave me able to be in this moment, that come with being handed a privilege and a passage through life that someone who doesn’t look like me has to work 20x harder to get, and still may not reach it. Still may be killed over a minor infraction.
Donate to The Bail Project, or find a local bail fund.
Science
This feels strange to have here this week, all things given, but one thing caught my eye.
I didn’t see a ton of coverage of a story coming out of the virtual American Astronomical Society meeting, and that makes me not know what to make of this claim. Astronomers have been looking for more planets at Proxima Centauri, our nearest neighbor, since the first was announced in 2016. And indeed, the original paper strongly hinted at a second.
This week, astronomer Fritz Benedict claimed to find Proxima Centauri c hiding in old Hubble data. The method he claimed to find it — astrometry — has an incredibly tough track record of non-successes. (If only there were a book about it … wait …) That it didn’t get much coverage gives me a little pause. There’s no paper to read — it was a conference presentation — and not much to go on other than press releases. So perhaps the journalism world had other things on their mind, or maybe this is spurious. Either way it’s interesting — and at the very least, shows the continued vitality of astronomical archives, something I once wrote about for The Atlantic.
There are plenty of reasons to believe that Proxima Centauri holds a multi-planet system. We will see who nails it down first — and maybe it truly was Benedict, using data that is more than 20 years old.
Links
I didn’t read much this week, but this beautiful essay, sent by a treasured friend, was one of the better things I’ve read in a while.
The Videos That Rocked America. The Song That Knows Our Rage. (New York Times)
It’s ironic that writing this gorgeous came out of the same newspaper that ran the dreadful Tom Cotton column, elevating the voice of an actual fascist in the time when it’s needed least. The New York Times editorial page is a corrupt racket. The editors irresponsible, most of the columnists incompetent. But there is still beauty to be found in some of the writing there, when you let the right voices speak.
It’s unfortunate Weiss and Bennet will have this week be just another blip in their not-so-illustrious careers. The Federalist will take the former within a few years; the latter might consider a new career in elephant waste management at the Bronx Zoo.
Let’s throw opinion pages in the wastebin.
Jams
“Not one single soul was saved
I was ordering an Indian takeaway
I was spared whilst others went to an early grave
Oh, got stoned
Yeah, went out and got stoned
Well if your ancestors could see you standing there
They would gaze in wonder at your Frigidaire
They had to fight just to survive
So can't you do something with your life?”