Platypterygius longmani 4

And there we go. That's it for today; I'm bushed. This one was intended to be a simple demonstration of the selections I've made this evening, but it kind of got out of hand when I started playing with filters in Photoshop.

Platypterygius longmani 3

So now I have to do the selections for the ichthyosaur, then ship things into Painter for rendering, so it'll be a long time before the next post, at least two or three hours. Shit -- five all ready. Well, we'll see how far I get tonight. I'm exhausted but game.

Platypterygius longmani 2

Here's the graphic illustration, done in Illustrator using Live Trace and Live Paint functions.

Platypterygius longmani 1

The next challenge up at Art Evolved is an ichthyosaur. Well, here we go! I'm going to spend the rest of the afternoon and early evening liveblogging this project. I hope -- perhaps in vain -- to have two finished art pieces by the end of the session.

One will be a simple graphic based on this sketch; the other will be a fully rendered piece. I've already done most of the work for the latter; all I have to do is adjust colors and render the beast.

And just for the record; this is not intended to be a rigorous reconstruction; rather, it's art derived from the fossil. For instance, the spine flexes up and down in this illustration, and I doubt ichthyosaurs did much of that. Oh, well, it's what my hand and eye did.

This was done in pencil on tracing vellum, then cleaned up in Photoshop.

See you soon...

The Pope!

I know this shouldn't be funny. This is institutionalized abuse of an exceptionally vile and damaging nature. This is a world power run amok with no-one in authority being willing to step up and prosecute criminal charges.

But last night, I had a realization about this whole wretched situation that made me crack up.

The Pope is a supervillain!

He wears a costume. He has a made-up name. He claims to have superpowers, and many believe those claims. He is a former Nazi Youth who spearheaded a conspiracy intended to benefit child molesters, and that is just one of many crimes against humanity committed by his shadowy criminal organization. He plunders the third world to maintain a palace of grotesque luxury. He has a Popemobile! I mean, come on.

No-one I can think of in the history of the world has been so clearly, so unmistakeably, exactly the kind of supervillain that Batman or the Fantastic Four would fight. He's pretty much Doctor Doom, right down to having his own Latveria.

And if you're Catholic, and you find my opinions offensive? Don't think I've singled you out. I pretty much hate all religions, from Hinduism which encourages people to kill their children by bathing them in a river of shit to Islam, whose concept of an afterlife is grotesquely perverse, degrading, and sweatily juvenile, to the Evangelical Christianity that's turning the US into a theocracy run by and for ignorant jingoistic pinheads. I hate 'em all...

... but at least they aren't run by supervillains.

Head Case

I know, I need to do the last section of the Atheism essay. But I need to do this first.

I've been going through it the last couple of years. I try not to turn this blog into a whinefest, but there are times when it helps me to get things out. Writing on my blog doesn't feel like talking to myself; it feels as if I'm conversing with a friend. So, buddy, here's what's going on...

My head's been getting worse. By this I refer to my being, well, a crazy person. I'd been on a slow but steady path of improvement for a very long time, but the last two years have seen things degenerate. This last winter and the current spring are giving me extra difficulties.

My insomnia has gotten worse. If I can get five hours of sleep a night, I'm okay. But lately I haven't been able to get that. I'm averaging three or four hours a night. That's still better than my worst, but it isn't good.

I've been spacey and irresponsible in ways that are totally new to me. Missing classes and appointments, forgetting things that I have to do, going to wrong buildings, etc. I mean, I thought I wasn't the kind of person who did those kinds of things, and here I am doing them.

And I've been finding myself just freezing for extended periods of time, sitting down at the computer, doing a quick web surf, and then realizing I've been doing it for hours. Or realizing that I've been walking back and forth between the living room and the kitchen for hours. Pulling out stacks of books and reading all the introductions and afterwards and none of the actual material. That kind of thing. It happens when I think about all the things I could be doing, all the things I should be doing, how lucky I am. How privileged.

I've been troubled by obsessive disquieting thoughts badly enough to lose sleep over them. Here's a sample -- imagine holding a steel tetrahedron between your teeth -- the taste of the metal, the smooth cold feel, the sense that it's harder than your teeth, the feeling of electricity where it touches your fillings. Bite down until your teeth break. Feel the splinters of tooth, taste the blood, and as you lay there in the dark, experience that bite over and over again.

That's a mild one.

There are times when I walk while I'm infuriated, slapping signs and kicking newspaper vending machines and muttering furiously. Every so often I'll get a strange look from someone in public, and I have to wonder if they've seen me during one of those little excursions. A pal of mine recently spotted me on the street while he was driving; he said I looked like someone you'd cross the street to avoid. At first I felt amused and complimented but hey. That's not really wholesome, you know? Behaving abberently in public is just not good.

I've been self-medicating with alcohol, and that isn't good, either. I swear off drinking alone, I stick to it for a while, something comes up that I know booze will help get me through, the booze helps, my prohibition loosens, eventually I get offensively drunk and swear off solitary drinking again. Lather, rinse, repeat. I'm not talking about daily drinking -- I couldn't fucking afford to be a real alcoholic -- but both my parents and both my grandfathers were alcoholics. I can't take drinking for granted, and I don't feel entirely under control of the situation.

No point in going into more detail. It's just not been good. And at the same time it has been good. I've gone through real creative breakthroughs during this time, I've found that there are times and places where I'm valued, where I have something real to contribute. The missus is convinced that it's because of the progress I've made with my art and writing -- that it's fear of success.

I don't think that's all of it, but I'm not saying she's wrong...

Right now I'm at a crucial point in my life. I've proven to myself that I've got what it takes as an artist and a writer -- but that's all I've got going for me. I need to find some way to make a living, and being crazy is not helping me here.

And a big part of what's going on is that I simply don't know how to live life on the most basic level. I actually tried to sign up for a basic life skills class last semester, but found out it was for developmentally disabled people... I shoulda taken it anyway. Let's face it, I'm just Rain Man with a vocabulary. Taxes? Job hunting? Savings? Jesus! I have no idea how people do that stuff. I am but a cork, bobbing in the current...

When I've read up on this stuff, the message I see over and over again is, "Seek professional help." I'm reluctant to do that. My previous experience with counseling and medication was almost entirely negative -- my shrink did turn me on to Robertson Davies, but that was it. The more analysis, the worse I felt, and the anti-depressant (Nortryptiline, if you're curious) did me no good at all. My counselor and consulting psychiatrist were terrified of/for me. If I hadn't been intimidated by the forms I had to fill out, I would have been committed. I still feel guilty about how depressed I made my shrink.

But things have changed since then. I'm nowhere near as bad off as I was at that age, even with my current troubles. And there have been a lot of advances in medication.

So I've decided to bite the bullet and investigate the possibility of getting back into some kind of therapy. I spoke to the missus about this, and she's started nosing around, bless her. She says there are a lot of free options around here. I don't know how I feel about medication -- I've heard some real horror stories about the adjustments people have had to make while figuring out their medicinal regimen, and the idea of suddenly turning into some kind of goddamned pharmaceutical werewolf is both chilling and not entirely impossible. But just having someone to talk to would make a difference.

Hey. It's worth a shot.

I'm An Atheist 3

(Click here for part 1.)
(Click here for part 2.)

A lot of atheists fail to understand the force and power of a revelatory religious experience. As a crazy person, I've got a bit more sympathy. I'm entering into murky, subjective waters here, so let me make a few things clear.

I am not making any claims for the objective truth of these experiences. I suspect that some have a basis in objective reality, and some are purely neurological events, and I'll explain that further as we go along, but please keep in mind that as I stated in the first part of this monstrosity, I am a materialist. I do not believe in supernatural influences. And while we're at it, I don't believe that the Earth has been contacted by aliens.

But far from unusual for people to have experiences that, if accepted uncritically, can lead one to the exact opposite conclusion. I'm going to write about some of these. I suspect that some of you who read these will go, "Wow. Dude needs some heavy, heavy medication," while others will say, "Wow. Dude is in total denial of what really happened to him."

But to put this in the proper context, I've had plenty of experiences with hallucinations. I've hallucinated from time to time for my whole life, I've hallucinated with every sense. I hallucinated as a child and teen before having any experience at all with intoxicants; I have used hallucinogenic drugs as a young adult; I hallucinate when tired, or stressed, or bored, or as a precursor to a mood swing. (I've also had the experience of dismissing things as hallucinations only to find they were real -- but that's another set of stories involving things like lasers and giant spiders and the Special Olympics. Maybe when I'm done with this atheist stuff.)

Which means that I have very little faith in the evidence of my senses or anyone else's. But I have every faith in the possible suggestive reality of any given reported experience.

The believer's mistake is to say, "Holy smokes, that was God in a flying saucer."

The skeptic's mistake is to say, "Oh, you did not either see anything, you big fat liar."

I'll give you two examples from my own life, both from the same period of time. They're certainly the most spectacular. They took place when I was trying to attend UC Santa Cruz. I got in even though I had a D + grade point average, because I got 1440 on the SATs -- the only questions I got wrong were in the advanced math section, where I still scored in the eighty-fourth percentile even though I'd flunked algebra twice.

Y'all should be able to guess what that means -- classic underachiever.

This made things stressful for me. I had absolutely no self-discipline or study skills -- I relied entirely on brute brainpower, and that only goes so far. And for the first time in my life, there was no-0ne fucking beating on me. You'd think I'd have been relieved. You would be wrong. I felt like one of those deep-sea fish whose swim bladder swells out of their mouth when you haul them to the surface. I was used to the pressure of the icy depths and the sunlight burned. I was exposed for the first time to people who were seriously -- but uncritically -- studying the occult, UFOs, Kaballa, that kind of thing. And I was also experimenting with drugs.

I think all of these contributed to the experiences that drove me crazy for a few years. Please note that when these experiences occurred I was sober and had been for some time -- when I mention drugs as a contributor, I don't mean that these were drug experiences.

The first was a fairly classic dose of gnosis. Late one afternoon I was laying in my bed, when all of a sudden I became keenly aware of everything around me. This awareness began to take the form of something resembling intuitional X-ray vision -- I could sense the studs and wires and pipes in the walls, the people passing by outside. I felt as though a hand came down and pulled me out of my body -- I saw the apartment building, then the campus, the city, the planet, out into the stars. My sense of time had vanished, and I felt myself seeing existence through God's eyes, felt myself cradled in God's hand.

I was terrified; I sensed the beneficence of God, but I was overwhelmed by the power of something who regarded every facet of reality that I could conceive as the tiniest portion of something far greater. I felt loved, I felt a sense that I was as important as any other aspect of reality -- but I was overwhelmed and fearful.

Then I found myself spiraling back down to Earth. When I was perceiving the world in a conventional fashion, it was after nine. I'd been lying there for four or five hours.

Another time, I had spent an afternoon talking with friends about a character named Wiley Brooks, a con-man who promoted Breatharianism, the belief that people can get all the nutrition they need by breathing.

(As an aside, one of the cults with which the missus was involved had a real trial when their leader began to promote breatharianism. Everyone felt just terrible that when they stopped eating, they starved -- it was a sign that they weren't spiritual enough... And yes, I mocked her throughout.)

He had made an appearance on the TV show That's Incredible, where he seemed to lift a thousand-pound weight, his purported strength the result of Breatharianism. My friends had arranged for him to make an appearance in Santa Cruz, but then they got a letter from his girlfriend, who explained that he'd been busted buying junk food, and was a complete fraud, a weird shell of a man who only came to life in front of an audience.

I bought the idea that he could lift the thousand pounds. I wondered if he was some kind of psychic vampire, if removing one layer of magic from him only revealed another mystery. (These days? My diagnosis is straight-up hoax. "But I saw it on TV!")

I grew agitated, and after sunset I went for a walk. I wound up at one of my favorite spots on campus, the upper quarry. It was a place where limestone had been mined to make cement for the rebuilding of San Francisco after the earthquake -- if you went back into the woods you could still find the kilns where the limestone had been reduced to lime.

After expending some energy shifting rocks and logs, I sat down and looked up at the night sky and noticed a particularly bright star overhead. It began to move, getting closer to the horizon directly in front of me. It got to just below the top of the trees, and then moved horizontally back and forth. This wasn't my first UFO siting, but it was different than the others. They'd taken place when I wasn't alone, and they were both easily explicable. One was a strange weather phenomenon, the other a cruise missile test. This was different. This frightened me.

I heard a rock fall in the darkness, then another, and another, more and more rapidly, circling me.

The darkness directly in front of me seemed to take on a predatory shape. It was as though I was being stalked by a wolf made of shadows.

Then to my right I saw a glowing figure like a human-sized insect with four arms folded across its chest. It seemed somehow maternal to me, a protective figure. It came closer and closer and I knew it was protecting me from the shadows.

Then I felt the sense of fear lift from me. I looked back at the shadows and it was the same friendly darkness that I was used to. And the insect-woman was gone as well. I looked at the light bobbing behind the trees and it began to rise until it was directly overhead; it shrank and vanished, presumably into the distance.

As vivid as this experience was, as tangible as it seemed, part of me drew back and said, this is not physical. This is psychic. Because at that time, I lived in a culture where psychic phenomena were assumed to be real, I interpreted my experience from that perspective.

That's one of the problems with religion, with non-materialistic belief systems -- they provide a context for delusion. In many ways the brain is a pattern-making organ. These kinds of experiences are common throughout history, and what one culture interprets as an alien invasion, another interprets as a manifestation of the Virgin Mary, another interprets as ghosts or elves.

Perhaps for some people, that helps them integrate these experiences into their lives. For me, they were a horrid destabilizing factor. For years after this, I strongly believed that there must have been something to them. I had nightmares that were so bad I preferred the hell of chronic insomnia to sleep.

Hell, for a while the missus and her friends were encouraging me to get regression therapy. You know, the kind where the therapist implants suggestions in your mind and convinces you that they're true? The false memories of satanic molestation and such?

If I were a devout Christian -- a devout member of any religion -- I would have tried to reconcile my experiences with my faith and it would have been easy. Those kinds of spectacular delusions support belief in the supernatural. "Oh, yes, God spoke to me, and the devil threatened me but the Virgin Mary kept me safe." Hell, I might have wound up as a preacher.

Instead, I decided to apply my rational mind to the problem. I systematically researched every claim of the paranormal that I could. In the end, I was not able to find any of them convincing. I wanted to be convinced, but the evidence just was not there.

But in the process I began to study various theories of the mind, and that led me to believe in the neurological origins of my experiences -- and that led first to agnosticism, and then finally to atheism. I was an agnostic first because something had happened to me, then because I thought it most rational to allow for the possibility of God. Now? I see no reason to entertain that possibility without evidence. On that basis you may as well acknowledge the possible existence of the Tooth Fairy in order to be intellectually rigorous. It's completely arbitrary.

So why am I able to have faith in science when I can't maintain faith in spirituality? I'll tell you that tomorrow.

(To be continued.)