Category: Personal Reflections and Diary

(diary)

Had an awesome roommate in college. Handsome. Funny. Had too much interest in alcohol and hallucinogenic pharmaceuticals. Obsessive about music. Attractive to women. Amazing at picking up the ladies. Son of Harvard grads. From Larchmont. Sophomore year he had a nervous breakdown of sorts. Called me to come rescue him from the asylum. Not sure it was a breakdown myself, since it sure seemed like some sort of mania from the combination of acid and coke that he seemed to live on. Best story is coming home in the middle of the night, seeing his bed turned over, wallet and keys on the desk. Clothes on the floor. And … missing. four AM, comes in. says nothing. Jumps into bed. No amount of verbal abuse has any effect. Wakes up in the morning. Sits up in bed. Looks quizzical. Looks at his lap. Says “Whose underwear are these?”. Turns out that he was so drunk that he went to the men’s room and locked himself out in the hall – naked. Everyone was gone so he kept knocking on doors until he found a group of people that would give him something to wear. Lots of kids dropped out from coke in my freshman and sophomore years. Anyway, haven’t talked to him since I think the 90’s. Was working at IBM. Still didn’t seem ‘right’ to me. Came up in conversation today. Did some digging. Been dead since before 2001. No idea how. I’d like to know how. I assume not from anything good. I tend to think my life has been difficult, but if I look around me at the people I went to school with I feel like the last man standing. i mean, i’ve always been a bit of an arrogant f–k, but you know, as the marathon progresses, most people drop out.

( In those few moments of greatest clarity I can glimpse an extreme state that I see no reason could not be experienced as a norm – where relations are subtle, effortless, and the faint whispers of associations that we strain to hear in the silence and darkness are instead as present and richly experienced as the taste and smell of the meal before us. my suspicion is that two things must occur in unison for this to happen. First that we must discover the remaining properties of reason and reality so that we reduce the burden of error, and second, that we discover a superior means of education, and third that we reduce the cost of neural transmission. My view (given my experimentation with neurological enhancement) is that what we consider to be around 140 today, seems a reachable median with our current physiology. I am suspicious of larger numbers since every example I have seen is not in fact an improvement, but a specialization that compensates for a defect. And because every measure I have seen says that the brain is a very expensive organ, and that it’s closer than we imagine to operating at the capacity of the rate of chemical changes by which we transmit information. Or put another way, if our brains get bigger it may not help us. We can only make them get less tired, clean cellular deposits more quickly, transmit information more easily, and accumulate and avoid error more easily through better initial information.)

( I am in a Barnes and Noble. The starbucks has no electrical plugs. They have removed all the B&N comfortable chairs. And I can’t find another coffee shop here in town. There are no other nerds. There are a lot of the ‘peasantry’ from the Hartford area here. And I am longing for the university town feeling. Because I can feel the IQ vacuum like a drop in atmospheric pressure. )