Bob is your Uncle

I am a credulous person.

In another time, another place I might be called gullible or impressionable.

Weak-minded.

There are, however, a few things in this world for which I distrust categorically.
Ministers. Insurance salesmen. Books or movies based on true stories. White martial artists. Guys when they talk about fights they’ve had, or girls when they talk about how many people they've slept with.

You get the idea.

One thing I mistrust above all others, a real personal peccadillo, a key idiosyncrasy is this: opinions.

I don’t trust them. Not just other people’s, not a few, not those that dissent from my own but categorically. Up and down, left and right.

I don’t trust the easy ones: Nazi’s are bad; socialized medicine is good. Rape, cigarettes, red meat bad; stem cell research, abortion, and free market capitalism good…wait, bad…wait…which brings me to the hard ones.

I don’t like hard ones either.

I don’t trust anyone or anything that’s ever come to a conclusion or made a decision more important than what to order, burger or salad. It should be obvious at this point I’m contradicting myself.

In the Hagakure a manual for the mental training of young samurai it was suggested that all decisions be made in the time it takes for one to breathe seven times. Confucius when told by a disciple that he always thought things through three times told him gently “Twice is enough.”

I am a contrarian by nature. I’ve begun to think I’ve a real genius for it. I hate to argue but I do it all the time. Mostly internally. I love dissenting views, the underdog, unless everyone else does too. I like to agree but I don’t like it when people get too smug. I don’t like it when people are too sure of themselves and find it ridiculous when they are too insecure.

I loathe taking a position. There are few things as morally repugnant to me than taking a firm stand on anything. Still I find that there are times when the human thing to do would be to have a preference for one thing over another. This I determine by convenience. Almost every restaurant has a burger, thus burgers become my favorite food. Stealing is wrong because it’s not worth the concern.

I don’t have morals, I have customs.

Already, at this point in the paper I’m running out of steam and wondering how I’m going to extricate myself from the grossly explicit position preceding this paragraph. My plan is simple; make a bold statement and expound rapidly. You’re trapped into a forward progression and won’t remember the beginning by the time I’ve reached the end.

Unless this is the end.

We get the word jazz from the Acadian French word that originally meant “to chat.” “Do you want to chat?” was how hookers in New Orleans would politely ask a potential john to determine his intentions. The word jaser came to be a euphemism for the sex act itself. The music commonly played in these houses of ill-repute came also to be called jaser and finally just jazz. So really “jazz” music means “fuck” music.

Hello Sleepless!!

Some fun facts regarding insomnia, the National Sleep Foundation (!?) has linked sleep deprivation to a joyful panoply of ailments such as obesity, high blood pressure, negative mood and behavior, decreased productivity, and safety issues in the home, job, and road. Other side effects include Horn-in-the-head, deep ambivalence, the ability to taste through the soles of the feet and increased vulnerability to small-arms fire. Did I mention that snoring is fatal? That alone should keep you up.

Another bunch of white-coats down at the UCSD School of Medicine and Veterans Affairs Healthcare System applied some sci-fi shit called functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI!!!) technology to monitor activity in the brains of sleep-deprived subjects while they performed simple verbal learning tasks . The temporal lobe, a brain region involved with language and shit like that was activated during verbal learning in rested subjects but not in sleep deprived subjects. Additionally, a region of the brain called the parietal lobes, not activated in rested subjects during the verbal exercise, was more active (re: kickass) when the subjects were deprived of sleep. Although subjects’ memory performance was less efficient with sleep deprivation, greater activity in the parietal region was associated with better memory and longer lasting fresh breath.

However.

In an earlier study, the team studied sleep-deprived subjects performing an arithmetic (arithmetical? arithmeticulous? math?) task involving subtraction. In that study, they observed that the brain regions activated in rested subjects were not active in the sleep-deprived subjects. No other region of the brain became activated when subjects performed arithmetic when sleep-deprived. Subjects had fewer correct answers and omitted more responses when sleepy than when rested. They also never called their mother, sent thank you cards or got laid until their "dirty" thirties.

Also note:
After being awake for 17 to 19 hours (weak!) drivers performed worse than those with a blood alcohol level of .05 percent. That's the legal limit for drunk driving in most western European countries, though the United States of Besotted Drunkards set their blood alcohol limits a little higher (.08 percent). So, you know, feel free to stay up that extra 17 to 19 hours while cruising the good ol’ U.S. of A in your Humvee or one of those Cowboy Cadillacs.

On the other hand sleep deprivation –sleep dep to its familiars—can be a formidable weapon in the war against giving a shit. Imagine if you will a flowering sun of solipsism blooming in the midst of a sepia-tinted world, a world that grows ever more fatally distant and unreal. A world in which dreams, denied their conventional outlet, bleed surreptitiously into waking and day blends seamlessly into dreaming.

Maybe not quite that crazy sounding, after all it’s not trepanation or anything.

Sure some people have gone insane, had psychotic breaks, ran with Shadow People but there are also cases like that of Feodor Nesterchuk, a Ukrainian man who has gone perfectly well without sleep for the last 20 years.

Ok, there are about 8760 hours in any given year. Maybe 8784 on a Leap Year, I’ll be frank; I don’t know or care how that works. Anyway, boring people sleep about one-third of their day, for a grand tally of 2920 hours a year. This borscht-sucking vodka genius on the other hand has lived an extra fifty-eight thousand four hundred hours than any other man of equal age (2920 multiplied by 20). Now divide that by 8760 and you come up with six point six repeating. Six, almost seven, years of bonus life to do with as you please. Yes, that’s 42 in dog years.

What would you do with an extra 6 years?