Category: Navel Lint

I like paper books. But I also like ebooks. They each have their place.

An ebook weighs less, has variable type size, is backlit. You can store hundreds of them in a space no bigger than a piece of toast. But I have just discovered one thing that ebooks really suck at. You can’t wing them off the nearest wall.

Roger Ebert called it the idiot plot. You know the type. For instance, a young woman decides to change into her nightie before going to the woods, alone at midnight, to investigate that demonic noise she just heard.

In the case of the ebook I was reading, the plot involved a graduate instructor inviting a female student (whom he didn’t much like) into his apartment not once, but three times, without thinking that there might be repercussions. Come on. I rarely criticize other writers, but come on. I’m supposed to care about this guy after that unforgivable brain fart? Burn him at the stake, I say.

A paper book could have been drop kicked across the room in a fit of irritation. But you really don’t want to do that with an ebook. So now I have to find something else to toss, pitch, kick or slap. I may be my own idiot plot today depending on who or what crosses me.

I believe in Multiple Personality Disorder. For a lot of people, this is akin to believing in the Tooth Fairy or deer with red noses. To make it more palatable, the behavior was renamed a while back to Associative Identity Disorder. Not that that helps things much.

Believers by and large stay deep in the closet on this one if they don’t want people to laugh and call them names. Psychologists and social workers who have toiled among society’s more fragile folks have often been spooked by it. They think they can even see physical changes as a ‘personality system’ moves from identity to identity. A person might be a diabetic in one personality but not in others. A scar might grow fainter in the identities that didn’t experience the actual wound. An aggressive man might take on the look and voice of a terrified child.

Weird science. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t true.

Take a look at this article from the Washington Post that reports a new study of a blind woman, saying : It was while seeking treatment for her dissociative identity disorder that the ability to see suddenly returned.

And in case you are of the liar-liar-pants-on-fire school, the article goes on to say: One explanation, that B.T. was “malingering,” or lying about her disability, was disproved by an EEG test. When B.T. was in her two blind states, her brain showed none of the electrical responses to visual stimuli that sighted people would display — even though B.T.’s eyes were open and she was looking right at them.

How do I react to this article? Vindication? No, not that so much as a deepened belief that the brain is too big a mystery for people to count things out. Besides, this sort of blindness in some of our identities may be the only explanation for American politics these days.

It’s a custom: I fall once a year. It’s still coming for 2015, and time is getting short. It will be caused by a stair that is too high or a somersault on ice or a drunken lurch through the nearest casino. The older I get, the more I dread it.

Much like farting or burping unexpectedly, we are embarrassed when we fall. It invariably happens in public when you are with, oh say, the Press Corp. And you, of course, deny that anything is hurt even if your right leg is on the opposite curb from your left.

I had a client in the deep South where they use pine needles instead of cedar chips as mulch. It’s a very slippery way to throw Yankees off balance. On a hill just outside the windows of their conference room, I pitched straight forward. Down, down, down. Head lower than my feet. Knocked so breathless that I could only smack my lips like a dying trout. Through the whole thing, I did not spill a drop of the Diet Coke I was carrying.

Another time, walking the streets of Chicago with the rep from a Public Relations agency, I suddenly executed a near perfect triple gainer and splatted down onto the broken concrete. I didn’t die, but I wanted to. Torn hamstring, the works. The PR specialist with me, adept at putting a positive spin on things, cried, “Oh, look! You didn’t even get your pants dirty!”

We are embarrassed when we fall, and we hate to admit that we actually hurt ourselves when we do. From now on, I am going to change that. I am going to lie there, thrashing and flailing as much as the various body parts will allow. I’ll sue the bastards who paved the whatever. I will pull down any goodie-two-shoes who so much at hints at, “Did you hurt yourself?”

Take this as a warning.