Advice to those up late at night...

At the lowest points in my life, I would sometimes take a break from beating myself up, to think on dying, and the supposed release from the pain. I'd think about the point just after, and compare an eternity of nonexistence to a moment more of existence. I would meditate on the simplest of moments - dragging my hand across a textured wall as I walk down the hall, a whiff of Playdoh, or that fall day when the low-slung sun shimmered though the yellowing leaves as I walked home after work. Compared to an unfathomable nothing - a less than nothing, because you aren't there to even appreciate that nothingness. Which was better? 

There was always "one more thing". A taste, a smell, a touch, a sound, a sight, a feeling. Just one more, I'd say, and then I'm all set. But, if I could live a life just coming up with "one more thing", and just kept doing that, it would be infinitely better than the less-than-nothing. It could be one block...and you could build from there.

If you fail to go to sleep before the steel-blue of the early dawn, put on something warm (if appropriate) and head outside. Walk out into that retiring night, and I will be with you there in spirit as a dawntreader. Howl like a wolf and scream like a banshee in the direction of the light and know that you have made it through another dark night of the soul. You won. Go back home, make some eggs and tea, and hit the hay. 

Best wishes fellow travelers.

Re: Heathkit: Keeping Your Wits

Re: Discussion about the work I did on the VFO of the Heathkit HW-101 ham radio transceiver.

With such glowing remarks from its new owner, I'm as proud as a dad watching his kid graduate from college. It really wasn't TOO much of an accident that I chose to shine this radio up; before launching into that rebuild I did an obsessive amount of research into tube SSB radio design. I was looking for a typical radio of that design, and actually wanted to start with the KWM-2, but GOD is everything Collins expensive! I found that the HW-101 was not too different, relied on less expensive parts, and actually was laid out way better for this sort of work.

Anyway, why would somebody spend this amount of time, money and brainpower on such a thing, if they aren't going to really use it? I'm about to come up on the 1 year anniversary of a very critical day in my life, so I'm in the mood to share. 

I have a condition called dysthymia (constant, 'low-grade' depression), with dips into major depression. Left to its own devices, my mind will go into these very destructive thought loops that consume alot of my attention - "you are worthless, a waste of energy and space, you are mediocrity personified, permanently lame" and on and on - so imagine that happening though most of the waking day to you, every day. I found early on that if I could distract myself with a very time/thought consuming exercise, that the obsessive looping would be redirected to that instead of tearing myself down. Sometimes it worked, sometimes not. I saw a few doctors in the early days, but the ones near me were pretty incompetent. So I just trudged along, picking up projects to keep myself distracted. Some I finished, many I didn't. I went to college and got a degree in engineering (very distracting!) and had a steady girlfriend and lived in a nice rental house in a nice town.

Now I'm in my mid-20's and have all this free time in the night, and I had to do something. I went through a very quick succession of projects that, at one point or another, could not satisfy both my obsessive need to do a complete 'factory-fresh' rebuild and still fit my wallet and help me keep my wits. Boy, did I really burn through the money back then.  It wasn't until I moved into the house we bought down the street and I had setup a workshop in the basement that I was in a state to see a project through, and following a variety of influences, was on the track of this tube SSB thing. Really, the HW-101 was a perfect project - complex enough to soak up oodles of time and thought, and cheap enough to make perfect. I had already gotten a junker chassis from an estate I bought, so I bought a good clean unit from eBay. [At this point the story is a little complicated, so I'm going to gloss over history that does not further the point].

So, during a couple years of dark cold nights that I couldn't do something outside, I headed down to the basement and worked until midnight to rebuild this radio. During the commute or lunch, I'd think on or research on the latest thing I was working on. I kept me stable and I felt fairly good through those years; I had a permanent grin on my face as I worked through those daily challenges. And then, one day, it was finished. I'd leave it on during the summer to just listen to the band when I needed to cool off from mowing the lawn or hide from my girlfriend (now wife). And that was about it - actually using these radios on the air didn't give me the same effect as working on them, so I put it on the shelf. And, really, that's like keeping a MG-B in the garage through the whole summer or keeping a sitting room that nobody is allowed  to sit in. That is where Bernie's story picks up.

At a point about a year ago, I took a turn for the worse. I slept all day, took alot of sick days from work - and wasn't producing anything when I WAS at my desk. Every waking moment was a destructive thought loop, and I would sleep as much as I could to stave it off. I took a week's vacation from work to just get out. One day, I was sitting by the Charles River, and began to bawl. There was no trick that was going to get me out of this, no project or activity that would distract me. At that point, there appeared to be only two routes - hang myself in my sunroom, or check myself into a hospital. As bad as it got, I still had a shred of self-preservation left, and chose the latter. I saw the psychiatric doctors on an emergency basis, and began a process of 'rebirth'. After a number of tests with different medications, a low daily dose of Zoloft cleared the pain away. 

From this penultimate low, I am now riding what (for me) has been a permanent high. I'm both unburdened of the depression, AND the obsessive project building. I honestly even FEEL lighter. And I'm feel smarter too, now that I have all this brainpower available to keep focused on the thing I'm working on. I feel FREE. 

Looking back on it, it is a little bittersweet. I'm ecstatic that I was able to achieve a certain level of competency in fixing up the old radio AND finally finding the treatment to allow me to live a normal life. I'm a little sad that I spent so much of my 20's in this mode instead of taking full advantage of my salad days, and putting my wife through such suffering and worry. Looking at my little pill now (about the size of the glass nub of a Compactron), it seems that much more silly that I spent that time on everything else but fixing the most important rig - myself.

I've been on the fence about telling people about this; I'm not the sort to unload personal issues on strangers (or even my friends and family), and I certainly don't seek pity. But this feeling I have now is so good, and there are so many people out there affected, I have to tell them that there is hope for you.

So, finally, a message to all of you out there. Depression is a real disorder; it isn't a failing of your character or backbone or a lack or gumption. It is holding you down, and there is hope for your freedom. I can't say it will be as easy as it was for me - we are still in the infancy of understanding the brain and our tools are like using hammers and straps to fix an auto engine. But please understand that YOU are worth that investment, because it is YOU that have this gift of life - and you get it but ONCE. Don't waste another day. Restore yourself with the same thinking you'd apply to a good radio restoration - take the holistic view (not crystals and herbs, but look at your health, environment, food, etc). And, for goodness sake, if you run into a doctor that is being lazy and unthorough, remind them to work harder or find another one.

For the rest of you - if you know somebody who appears to have depression, please encourage them to seek help, in a positive way. Sure, cheering them up is nice, but you have no chance against an constantly errant mind. And PLEASE don't shame/harangue/force! In the end they have to make the choice to proceed. In the end, there are some people who, when they reach that moment of crisis like I did, are not going to have that little life preserver there to keep them up - and we sadly lose them. Please throw them a line.

I feel that if this helps at least one person understand, or get onto the path of recovery, then it was worth it. As usual, I am open for office hours. 

Letter to Amanda Palmer

Hello Ms. Palmer,

I am a fan and really like the work you do. But to be clear I'm not a rabid fan that goes travelling around the country to see your shows or buying all of your released. I did see you in the ART production of Cabaret, and (as a fellow Lexingtonian) I did see the play you did with the theater group at the high school. Full disclosure - I also admit to loudly singing along to 'Jeep Song' as I drove up Great Blue Hill everyday to my job at the time. But besides this, I'm a fairly boring guy that spends his weekends either fixing up the house, reading books, or put-putting around on my moped. I feel that I had to make this clear so that you can understand how unusual the following was for me.


I was sleeping on my couch and had this awesome dream last night. It went on for hours, in vivid detail and surround sound. My brain had decided to put on a musical, akin to 'Hedwig and the Angry Inch', or that puppet musical in that movie 'Forgetting Sarah Marshall'. It was the story of a struggling dancer making her way in the gritty world of 1970's New York City, but it was also the story of the falling star of a former dancer and producer, and the decay of the city in general. There were definitely Chevy Novas on the roads. You did this amazing song about the 'shit you gotta deal with to make it in this business', while holding auditions in a 3rd floor office with slimy black mold growing on the walls of the hallway (I confirmed this by touching said mold). This story had everything: it had drama, it had suspense, it had sad songs and happy songs and songs about people being cogs in a great machine. It even had a murder mystery when one of the other dancers was murdered by WHO??


I woke up with that fantastic feeling you get when walking out of a really nice movie or rock show; I could have gone for a cigarette. But as I rubbed my eyes and reached for my glasses, the memory of it faded away. I feel like I have really failed in my description of it - but this was all I could hold onto. And this really is too bad, because I think it would have been a great show to see in real life. You know, because of the connection to today's feeling of malaise and decline - with the economy and all. It would have resonated.


I like to think that Everett's many-worlds interpretation is true and there is another world where I DID remember everything, and somehow convinced somebody to make it reality, and somebody like you got to star in it. I'm sad that this isn't the reality that it happened in.


As an engineer, I hope to have more of the dreams where I'm inventing stuff, because I know how to remember those and make it reality (or at least find out somebody else already invented it). I'd rather leave the awesome musical dreams to the professionals.


Best Wishes

I'm up late tonight, cleaning the house in preparation of M returning from Los Angeles. We are in agreement with David Bowie - LA should burn to the fucking ground. All that sunshine and mountains and sea, and they still managed to fuck it up somehow. I really do think there is something to limitations and constraints being the wellspring of creativity. Even Boston is better!

I was driving around Boston late, and I heard this come up on the radio: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQ-KB1gqqMg

So, you may hear it and say, "yeah Moxie, that's more British jingly-jangly dreamy shit that you always send links of". And to that, I say - well, yeah. I like it. And as I was pulling onto that exciting loop over the Charles River by MIT, making my turn unnecessarily tight to squeeze out a little slippage from my 2-seater, I got to thinking of how times are much better than way-back-when.

Leaving out as much of the teenage-angst, I recall that, for those who really DIG something that happened to run against the mainstreams of the time, that you had to have a little bit of leather to your hide or no fucks to give about the negative comments you might get. As a teenage radio restorer with a penchant for early-30's jazz AND disco...well, that just about speaks for itself. But as I've been looking around for all the odd and new fashions today, I get this awesome feeling, not unlike an electric blanket, for all sorts of little niche things like mopeds, robot builting, LEGOs, there is a community that supports and champions it - even getting a little scratch out of it!

That in itself isn't new - that's just the Internet delivering on some of the promises of long ago. Guess all it took was bandwidth. There is something more. A sort of meritocracy - that if you do SOMETHING well, and call up in the voice of the inner child in all of us, that it deserves applause. Build a monster robot in your shed, stack and unstack cups wicked fast, mix a beat to a cockatiel singing - that's COOL. Personally, I've always thought so. But I teleported one of those Steampunk guys to 1984; a bunch of kids in my neighborhood threw crab apples at him!

Why this tolerance? I thought as I passed the Capitol Theater on Mass Ave. Is this part of a great swinging of the pendulum, from a positivism to past-itivitsm and back? Could this be the beginning of our own personal 1960s? Or is it a compensation for our current situation, that we give everybody a pass because otherwise we'd all realize that things are, or are going to be, in the shitter for a long time and we'd be best to take our suicide pills. That we are making our own little parts of the world as nice as we can to overcome the gloom around us. I hope it's the former.

I've gotta dash, because I'm cooking some rice and it is boiling over - and if there is one thing you must not do to an Asian woman hankering for rice, is fuck up the rice.