Buy Me

Buy me silk stockings and ruffled panties and a grey plush elephant with shiny eyes. Feed me hot chocolate and buttered toast with a linen napkin to wipe my crumbly mouth. Carry me to bed and tuck me in. My dad was neither a Daddy nor a Father. Swaddle me in comforters and roll me to sleep, like Alice, I long to sleep in tunnels. My life is oatmeal without authority figures. And I never got my fur coat.  ¶ 6:07 PM 0 comments

  Sugar Candy cannot fit inside me 03.21.01
12.27.03

candy sugar spun machines mirrors that turn
everything frontways stereos that pump
patchouli and stale popcorn smells through the
air, a Virginia slim gestures eloquently
the invisible man’s opinions the
elephants are dreaming of broken leaves
the lamp has feet, the chair has eyes, my
Xanax stopped working I don’t remember
when my body is pulling down into
my cunt there is nothing that cannot fit
inside me  ¶ 4:31 AM 0 comments

  Limbo runs hot and cold The meteorological forecast of future metaphors and man’s
measure of God. Emily Dickinso hefty in a gravy-stained
wedding-dress like a meaty Miss Havisham. All the
windows are shaded so thickly you can’t tell if there’s
really any glass behind the paper or if it’s just
more plasterboard wall. Billy Collins, hell is full of the
lukewarm. Tile in a hundred shades of grey. Prayer-beads
clacking on rheumatic hands, bumping fingernails ridged
yellow, thickly. When I grow up I shall buy
myself a gun. Red clay banks and I try to remember
how the mud in Virginia smells. Broke down
today and bought a pack of Kools. Milds in a
white pasteboard box. I miss my boyfriend.
Pervert that I am I get turned on reading about
the forced underage scabrous blow-job in that
book he loaned me, Filth, and try unsuccessfully to
remember when last I went down on him.  ¶ 2:08 PM 0 comments

  Between Armageddon and Galapagos 09.20.00
12.20.03

After the last couple HMO’s relocated to Japan
or declared bankruptcy most doctors’ offices relocated
to city malls, which made sense in terms of
efficiency of space and brought in a great
deal of miscellaneous income from window shopping
hypochondriacs. Naturally the Bodyshop and similar
stores transitioned from pick-me-up aromatherapeutic
incense and softly-scented anti-bacterial soaps....

During the last earthquake all the doors fell off all
bathrooms and glassshattered into airborne dust.
Men’s penises split and cracked and withered and
women’s uteruses slipped out from between their
legs, dragging painfully until
amputated or rotted away. Dams burst, islands sank, volcanos
crumpled, oceans curled in around themselves,
and California, like a ship delayed, split
hastily from the American Mainland and
sailed half-way to Jamaica before
taking up a somewhat fixed location. Sovereignty
was immediately dclared and trade relations
with Columbia established.  ¶ 2:12 PM 0 comments

  Sedatives are The Color of Invisible 03.29.01
11.24.03

[ ]

I like to write in silver[1], being the closest color to invisible. Sedatives are the color of invisible. Sedatives turn my capillaries to spun glass, also silver. I am homesick for my boyfriend’s bony shoulder—in this room people’s voices shell-edge sharp. “What happens at a lame party – everyone starts playing with the dog.” Voices, flattened glass pebbles, my ovoid head – the impact is omnidirectional. In college playgrounds the sunlight smells like cappuccino foam – I trade the sound of grass blades crunching for my tooth-marked thumb in my mouth. I’m lost; there’s a strip of muslin on my face. I’m lost; my feet refuse to recognize my head. Xanax makes the teacher’s voice echo. The tiles threaten to rearrange themselves. Stomach squeezes, I want to go home. Now would be a good time to knit socks. Must one be pretentious to wear black sneakers? I want a Christmas tamale and a chocolate hat. I want someone to take me shopping—I’ll be good, I’m not strong enough for him; I’m going to fail again.


[1] N.B.- Original notebook page written in pale silver ink on white paper; writing is only visible/legible at angle.  ¶ 5:57 AM 0 comments

  I Promise to Cheat I am listening to an endless menu of automated options waiting half-heartedly, augustly for rescue. Why didn’t he tell me it hurt? And soon I am going to cheat on him and I’m not at all sure how to tell him that or what to do about it—Lee is mine but I need other fucks other companions rougher, less exquisite forms of touch—I wonder who it is I am going to cheat on him with and of their gender and in part it doesn’t matter—I try to explain to Lee—he is mine but I do not belong to him last night I dreamt of a bathtub/shower full of bloody water, mud/clay and paperback books with #/letter combinations where the author’s name should be.

I dreamt I sat on frustrated carpet in my old room in my parent’s house after circuitous dream adventures—there is no escape—and pushed absentminded splinters of glass beneath his skin like picking sweater lint, the phone is beige plastic against my ear (when did they stop making them out of metal?)  ¶ 5:31 AM 0 comments

  Valium Liberation Army When I take over the world all vitamins
will also be m&m’s, broccoli plants everywhere will
wither up and die, and everyone will carry
their own personal escape hatch, like the black
holes in cartoons, around with them, initially
in a backpack, but probably over time they
can be made slim enough to fold up
and shove in a pocket. Gold will
become a national currency and all the candy
stores will also sell drugs. Any pirates then
imprisoned will be freed and reinstated as political
prisoners, provided they get a skull and crossbones
tattooed somewhere on their persons, not to be
removed until they retire or move to the
suburbs. All schools will distribute birth control,
anyone and everyone will have the right to express
themselves sexually, sensually or violently with as
many or as few people as they please provided
everyone involved has given informed consent.
Rainbow lasers will be made available to turn people
any color of their choosing and body modification
will be celebrated as a new form of art—
museums shall be established filled with living models,
there as volunteers or under contract for set
periods of time, and over time some may
donate their body to art post-mortem, and they
may be stuffed and displayed, or skinned and
the interesting patches framed.
Linguisticians will be hired to invent a new
set of non-gender specific words for each
specific language, and children will be
taught to always address a person with these
unless/until they have made a gender preference
clear, and in any case gender will be rendered
totally optional.
Bdsm will be given the non-profit status of a
major religion, and important days – like the birth of
Marquis de Sade – will be integrated into Judeo-Christian
calendars.
Teachers will be forced to take all their own
exams preceding each school year, and all their students’
grades will be curved according to the
teachers’ own results.
Public areas of self-expression will be
established, and anyone running for public office
must give one exterior wall of
their home over to the people as
a sort of public graffiti forum, which they
may not wash or paint over until their
term ends. Bratty children
of any age will all be placed in zoos. And I
will have a harem, composed of 1-3 representatives of
each reformed nation, and once I have slept with
all of them will step down from office, thus setting
strong precedent in term limits for the next
ruler.  ¶ 5:12 AM 0 comments

  My Heart of Darkness 04.07.00
01.08.04

[ ]

In thick-lunged terror
in blood sunk rage
in bodyless ecstatcy
of golden green
exist no words
exist no iconography
of sound

As a child as a small me in a smaller body
I suffered from the most terrible of nightmares, dreams
which seem to have expanded outward in their
complexity as my body was also grown.
I recurring visions I saw a wolf standing
darkly illuminated against a voided background, staring
out; I was conscious only of its eyes, full of all
the knowledge of what one experiences, integrates and
endures. This was knowledge I would never find in
books or the stalely [stale?] cencorious stories grown-ups
persuaded themselves I would wish to hear. Nonetheless
I read, read with a viscious avarice,
throwing books against the wall when they did not
meet my unspecified and urgent needs, taking spiteful
delight in the brittle cracking thump as they
slapped the floor. I woke up
screaming from these dreams, woke up all too
often in the smugly milk-stained comfort of
my parents’ sweating bed. I screamed for those
eyes which knew me and everything behind them
I wished to possess. I screamed in the fear
of knowing and the raging [ragged?] injustice of what is
forgotten. I screamed that they were not mine.
I screamed knowing that they someday would be, and
that once again, inevitably, I would lose them again.
I screamed because I did not know the
words. “Oh the horror. The horror.” I spent years of
hours searching with thinning hands, rooting and
plucking to reach my time swept knowledge and
reading, always reading, that I might translate
sensuous visions into words. The word is ravaged, is
plundered, sodomized and burnt. The word, also,
leaves traces of its past. I intended to leave
a hoarding for myself, upon my own return.
No more those eyes, that emptiness, no more
the breathless shock of emptiness, the unfilled
mind, those screams.  ¶ 5:25 PM 0 comments

  We Don't have to Fuck 11.29.99
12.04.03

I like clam chowder because it tastes like
secrets. This is the secret. There is never
enough time. Everyone is a different person
alone. Sneak up on me one night,
peer through the venetian blinds hanging
over the patio doors, knock
against my window. You will not
see me, you will see the person you
imagine yourself to be spying
upon.
This is the sort of loneliness one
dies of. I long for it to be late
enough for sleep. Only my innate sense of
self-preservation keeps me from calling
Billy. Dignity keeps me from J.
Fear of disapointment from calling Eric.
Tommorow night, if I have still heard
nothing, then I will call Eric. This
gives me something to look forward to.
I want to go to bed with
someone else. We don’t have to fuck,
don’t even really have to touch.
Beds are warmer when someone else is
in them with you.  ¶ 4:35 AM 1 comments

  Coming Down--From Heaven to Arkadia 03.02.00
12.07.03

Coming down I told Sassi I felt like I did
when Scooby and BJ convinced me to drink all
those glasses of brandy, but in a good way—I
mean it sucked then but it felt good tonight—
that same feeling of being in a little boat and that
feeling of a sense of floating slightly rocking
about motion....probably I should learn not to
talk until I’m actually all the way back to
earth. Walking outside to put Sir’s case away I
grinned up at all the stars. I’m a little afraid now,
being in the house alone with Scooby gone,
but I’ve got the cats, my stuffed
animals and police baton. I think the most
dangerous weapon anyone could ever use against
me is my own imagination—maybe that’s why I’m
so odd about not being often sharing the
things I fancy with people – that and how
weird they always are. Come to think, I scare
me far more often than anyone else ever has,
even Billy. Is everyone like that?  ¶ 2:21 AM 0 comments

  Hit the Bottle and Go Back to the Rock 11.26.99
12.03.03

No matter how hard I try, I am just no good at
smoking pot. I can drink and do shots and
look adorable while getting my ass kicked
at pool, I can do lines and some day I’ll
probably shoot up, if only to get over my
fear of it, but I don’t see myself
ever ever getting graceful at smoking
pot. It’s kind of a kicked back
kind of attitude you have to have,
snorting lines might be a single sharp stringed
solo, while marijuana is definitely more
percussive. I’m not sure where I’m going
with all this, except basicly to make
the point that I wasn’t meant to be a
pothead.  ¶ 2:15 PM 0 comments

  I Don't Remember Wishing to Forget 10.27.96
01.14.04

Sometimes I think that even if I knew there was a magic
thing I could do, snap my fingers or something and every
time I did it I could get just excatly what I wanted I
wouldn’t do it. My wishes always come true in humourous
ways and I never have very big wishes.
BJ asked me if didn’t I worry about the times Scooby
did things with strangers at Zorbas. But what is there to
worry about? Sometimes I am so many different people,
I wonder if/how we all get along.
BJ told me he would like to be a baby again for a
week or so. Male humans seem to want that a lot.
Yes, I am thinking of someone in specific. He said it’s
because babies feel safe. I was trying to get it but we
were on the phone so his vibes don’t come through so
clearly and all I could get was this faint
impression that was something like leaning your hand on
something only your whole was leaning on it. I don’t
remember being a baby and I don’t want to.
Sometimes I think I don’t want to be able to
remember anything ever again. And sometimes I can’t.
I tell so many cute childhood stories, I wonder if
any of them are true. I half-wait for people to
recognize them from t.v. or books. Even Scooby I
bullshit once in a while, very once in a while, because
everyone needs comic relief. I need a hug. And a
longer attention span.  ¶ 2:25 AM 0 comments

  Where My Bread-Crumbs Lead I will have a lie-down room, a very
small room, well ventilated so that I can smoke in
it, with the floor one big matress, wall to wall,
and the walls will be padded so that you
can lean comfortably against them and there will
be some blankets and pillows and a big
down comforter thrown about, and of course
all my stuffed animals. There will be a little
shelf for an ashtray and cigarettes and a
glass of water if I want one, and a small
stereo on which to listen to Robert Smith and
Billy Holiday when I cannot sleep. It will be
mine and no one will know about it unless
I choose to tell them and no one will
hang out in it unless I want them to and no
one will bring food into it ever and no
one can be mean to me in it and if I
had sex in it it would only be with
people I liked very much and trusted, but
othersiseI would take them to a different
room with a regular bed in it so no one
would ever have to know my secret
lie-down room was there. I wish I had one
now. Oh, and I don’t think it would have
windows, or a door. So no one could
get in and sneak up on me.  ¶ 5:54 PM 0 comments

  Not Dominated but Domesticated 12.19.00
11.22.0
Dreampt all about dying again last night—woke up and I’d forgotten everything. Lee says he felt guilty for not being able to have intercourse with me (I wonder if he actually realizes he could) but I intuit something part of it belongs to not getting an ‘A’ on his bio exam/the course. Lee knows he will never be good enough and maybe that’s something we have in common because I will never be good enough to be my father’s son. I write everything with an eye towards publication. Lee’s hair smells like magic markers—the scented kind you surreptitiously swipe at the tip of your tongue to find out if they taste like chemical fruits—but he says he thinks it smells like Kool-Aid. We spend hours sitting in the hallway listening to music and being silly—I know it is only good because impermanent. A Dowery chest is waiting for me on the hearth of my parents’ house. I pack couragated boxes of doll-china and embroidered table-clothes. Will I always be a Victorian little girl? I never have escaped my geisha dreams—will I grow younger as I age?  ¶ 5:50 PM 0 comments

  Ariel Jingle-Jangle telephone compliments—Darling, who does your hair? Divine Divine Moisturizer glitter goldust hairspray champagne baths pore luxurious. Flicka Flicka papercuts bandaids where did that little red string that used to be in the band-aid package go? What happened to it? And all those tan m&m’s? Are there still marshmallows in Lucky Charms and rings in the bottom of Crackerjack boxes? Fa la la…Do girl scouts still raise flags? I haven’t been to a flag-raising ceremony in years. I bet Dan would have totally been into boy scouts? I wonder if he was ever in them…Do they still put little white plastic tables on pizza? Ice cubes in the toes of my nylon stockings, Bengay in the fingers of my kidskin gloves pour mare’s milk over my hair so I can feel it growing out long and thick and dark in cold reflection and I shake it joyously dry. Run your hands over the frost-bitten mirror, soothing my reflection’s ruffled feathers. Drape me, bespangle me. Douse me in glitter and long winding strips of purple velvet. Roll me naked in the snow and crown me in dandelions. Let me shiver mutely, mutely wet and trying not to drip on your marble floor.  ¶ 5:45 PM 0 comments

  Wellbutrin and Vodka 01.18.01

My lover’s palm milimeters between my legs and my body draws eggletine light around his fetal shape and then my father is whispering in my ear—my skin granualates between his palm [sic], moisture coagulates—my thighs are sealed shut gummy like infant eyelashes. In my dream a sound once begun continues vibrating retroactively—I cannot remember a time before your voice. My lover’s come is a jalepeno milkshake. His ribs are concave xylophone meatless; I imagine them seared, charcoal blackened flaking charred ash and dripping barbecue sauce like Hollywood blood.  ¶ 5:37 PM 0 comments

  Decohering June 17, 1996

Schroedinger's Cation

Physicists prove that an atom can be in two different places at once

By John Horgan


Erwin Schroedinger
In 1935 the Austrian physicist Erwin Schroedinger proposed a thought experiment that has titillated philosophers and appalled cat lovers ever since. Now four researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Boulder, Colo., have carried out the notorious "Schroedinger's cat" test using not a living feline but a positively charged atom- -yes, a "cation" in scientific parlance--of beryllium.
Although somewhat smaller than a cat, the cation is still much larger than the electrons, photons and other particles that commonly exhibit bizarre quantum behavior. In a report in the May 24 issue of Science, the NIST team expresses the hope that their "mesoscopic system may provide insight into the fuzzy boundary between the classical and quantum worlds."
Schroedinger devised the cat experiment to illustrate just how radically the quantum realm differs from the macroscopic, everyday world that we inhabit. He himself had shown that a particle such as an electron exists in a number of possible states, the probability of each of which is incorporated into an equation known as the wave function. In the case of an atom of radioactive material, for example, the atom has a certain probability of decaying over a given period of time.
Based onour "classical" intuition, we would assume that there are only two possibilities: either the atom has decayed, or it has not. According to quantum physics, however, the atom inhabits both states simultaneously. It is only when an observer actually tries to determine the state of the atom by measuring it that the wave function "collapses," and the atom assumes just one of its possible states: decayed or undecayed.
Schroedinger reasoned that such probabilistic behavior could exist in the macroscopic world as well, even if we are rarely aware of it. He imagined a box containing an atom having a 50 percent likelihood of decaying in an hour, a radiation detector, a flask containing poison gas and a cat. When or if the atom decays, the Geiger counter will trigger a switch that causes a hammer to smash the flask, releasing the gas and killing the cat. When the experimenter opens the lid of the box and peers inside after an hour has passed, he or she will find the atom either intact or decayed and the cat either alive or dead. But according to quantum mechanics, during the period before the lid is opened, the cat exists in two superposed states: both dead and alive.
During the 1980s, the late theorist John Bell suggested a more palatable version of Schroedinger's experiment, one in which the decay of the atom causes a bottle of milk to spill onto the floor; the superposed cat is thus hungry or full rather than alive or dead. But either version seems weirdly nonsensical: the outcome seems logical from a quantum physics viewpoint, but common sense tells us that a cat cannot be alive and dead (or hungry and full) at the same time.
The paradox of Schroedinger's cat has provoked a great deal of debate among theoretical physicists and philosophers. Although some thinkers have argued that the cat actually does exist in two superposed states, most contend that superposition only occurs when a quantum system is isolated from the rest of its environment. Various explanations have been advanced to account for this paradox--including the idea that the cat, or simply the animal's physical environment, can act as an observer.
The question is, at what point, or scale, do the probabilistic rules of the quantum realm give way to the deterministic laws that govern the macroscopic world? This question has been brought into vivid relief by the recent work done by the NIST team, which includes Christopher Monroe, Dawn Meekhof, Brian King and Dave Wineland. The group confined a charged beryllium atom in a tiny electromagnetic cage and then cooled it with a laser to its lowest energy state. In this state the position of the atom and its "spin" (a quantum property that is only metaphorically analogous to spin in the ordinary sense) could be ascertained to within a very high degree of accuracy, limited by Heisenberg's uncertainty principle.
The workers then stimulated the atom with a laser just enough to change its wave function; according to the new wave function of the atom, it now had a 50 percent probability of being in a "spin-up" state in its initial position and an equal probability of being in a "spin-down" state in a position as much as 80 nanometers away, a vast distance indeed for the atomic realm. In effect, the atom was in two different places, as well as two different spin states, at the same time--an atomic analog of a cat both living and dead.
(The clinching evidence that the NIST researchers had achieved their goal came from their observation of an interference pattern; that phenomenon is a telltale sign that a single beryllium atom produced two distinct wave functions that interfered with each other.)
The NIST investigators are planning experiments that will probe more deeply into the process by which superposed systems "decohere," losing their schizoid qualities and giving way to more mundane classical behavior. Monroe says he and his colleagues hope both to coax single ions into a superposition of three or more states and to manipulate two or more ions in the same trap.
If the past is any guide, these experiments will not resolve the mystery of quantum mechanics but will only underscore just how deeply it seems to contradict our usual expectations. As Niels Bohr was fond of saying of quantum mechanics, "If you think you understand it, that only shows you don't know the first thing about it."

© 1996-2004 Scientific American, Inc. All rights reserved.
Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited.


Once upon a time....once upon a
time there was a girl who played with
shells and crystals. She built small
houses and villages of them, populating
them with small twigs and dandelion
stalks, marking out her world with
lines in sand.
One night, this girl has a terrible
dream. She dreampt she went out to
play, and there were no seashells or
crystal stones to build her play
things with. All the plants had
disappeared and the sand was packed
hard and intractable. And she screamed and
screamed because now there was
nothing to build worlds with. Her
screams rumbled through the Armageddon
skies, sound bouncing and
bending off the impregnable ground.
When she awoke, she vowed she
would never grow up.  ¶ 5:23 PM 0 comments

  Virgin Candles and Idle Hands 11.03.98
11.29.03

[ ]

Virgin candles the color of tomato juice and
crayons. Whiskey stinging the corners of my
vision, the Cure is a broken bone throbbing
in orgasm, I only miss you. I only
miss me, [us? illeg.] the story of me as a perfect,
the story of me good and held by you.
I will live on your stories. I will live in
moments of glass breaking, lighting
cigarettes and keeping my hands busy
enough not to think. In the third grade I
wore obnoxious lavender mother-of-pearl
glasses to school every day and if you
had only seen them you would have
thought them cool. Why didn’t I know
you then?  ¶ 5:01 AM 0 comments

  Been Caught Sobbing This evening for no discernible reason I
started crying in the shower. Crying wildly and
illogically with Jane’s Addiction playing on a little
transister radio in the background. Snotty sobs
and goosebump steam and too much obvious
flesh hanging breast globs and hip
pounds and freckly buttocks squished
against scummy plastic. And I still have no
idea why I was crying.  ¶ 4:54 AM 0 comments

  Don't You Want Somebody to Love I have missed June this year. That luminous, ludicrous,
luxurious month when the heat is not yet
insufferable at night and Jefferson Airplane
screams the question “Don’t You Want Somebody to Love?”
on a car stereo with no air conditioning and all
the windows rolled down driving with choppy frantic
speed down perpetual freeways on the way
to somewhere. In June there is always still
somewhere to go and someone to go there
with or at least someone to hope of seeing
there. But I spent this June with the air conditioning
blasting and a wall of fans spinning white noise
curled in a
sickbed disarray of scrunchy pillows and too
many blankets, sniffing and cuddling my
teddy-bear and memories of J.  ¶ 4:51 AM 0 comments

  How I Survive Working at the Mall There is a glass front to another woman’s shop about a hundred yards over. I imagine it full of Mesanities. I imagine my hair being down and my legs shaved, my body more streamlined, my clothes more elegant. And, standing in the glass front’s frosty glow I would slowly strip out of my skirt, and blouse, and bra, and panties, and shoes, and garters and stockings. And I would walk, sideways, up the naked glass. I would step carefully and precisely. I would look in at the clustering chin-dropped fashionably frugal women like a lady on a date glancing into an aquarium of not very tropical fish. I would give them a fabulous view of my voluptuously curving feet, the gaping red open of my unused cunt, the thick scars on the undersides of my breasts. And I would let them look and maybe they would recognize the mirror-glass.



03.16.97
11.29.03  ¶ 4:47 AM 0 comments

  Things Fall Apart; The Center Can't be Held I’ve been moody all day today. Although there have been a few good moments. What I really want, what I think right now that I really want, is someone to see me after I’ve been running around in the hot or tired and workpressed [sic] and give me a kiss because they think I’m beautiful. I mean someone who would like me that much. It’s happening, isn’t it? I’m turning into a girl. I’m afraid of sex. I would like very much to cry. I wish I remembered how. It’s been years, and my memory has always been rather spotty. I want someone to put their arms around me and kiss me just at the joining of my neck and scalp. I want to hold someone and feel my chin resting on the top of their head and their hands over mine. I suppose I am perhaps depressed. I remember telling J. a few lines from the W. B. Yeats poem, “Things fall apart....the Center cannot hold...” a couple weeks ago and him telling me that perfectly described how I was at NSA last year. Which seems eons away. But.....everyone just thinks I am so stable now. I looked at my mirror face as I brushed my hair tonight and I wanted to lean over and tap on the pupils “knock-knock, who’s there?” I am not fifteen!



03.07.97
11.29.03  ¶ 4:33 AM 0 comments

  Like Being Friends with Ghosts I like being friends with people that are
older than me because they know things. It is not
that people my age don’t know things, precisely,
but they have not yet relaxed into it. Sometimes
people reach a certain age that is right
for them, when conversing with them is like
lying on brushed cotton sheets, that is the age
I like to be friends with people at, because
friends like that are a luxury in a life where
I waited years for my first scrap of silk.
Like J, when he was 17, at the time it
was exactly the right age for him to be.
Alice, I think, will be there in her thirties.
I in my 60’s. Mrs. Johnson was there, I
believe Sir is. The age that ghosts are.
If it were possible to miss one’s ghosts then
I would sometimes miss mine.


02.13.00
12.15.03  ¶ 4:22 AM 0 comments

  Going Home with Myself 11.30.98
11.29.03

[ ]

I remember the night I broke up with him, J.
asking me “You think a lot of melancholy thoughts,
don’t you?” I am thinking them now. Perhaps
it’s because I’ve not eaten today but
nothing seems fully real. It feels like a
Sunday. Perhaps everyone is still adjusting
to the idea of it’s being Monday. I
am here, at Coffee Plantation, ostensibly
to meet someone but I look a little
too weird to actually get hit on. Perhaps
I should just have worn jeans....this
outfit so suits my mood, though.
Dress like what you want to go home with...
I am not. I cannot fathom random sex
tonight...I am in any case not in the
right costume. The moon is out, I’m feeling
fertile and out of condoms.  ¶ 2:33 AM 0 comments

  I Want Fear Itself 02.25.00
12.05.03

[ ]

I’m writing my lists out for Sir....and there are
so many things I’m afraid of that even thinking about
them makes me feel a little sick. And there are so
many things I don’t even know words for....and
so many things I’m afraid of are things I
also want....what’s up with that? Like how
sometimes I’m even afraid of being touched, and yet
I also want to be and not even sexually but a
hug or whatever. I’m afraid of people.
Afraid of failing – I don’t even know at what.
Afraid there’s something wrong with me. Afraid of
being lonely and also of being happy, or of
happiness. I’m even afraid of fear. I’m
afraid of not being angry and of getting too
enraged. I’m afraid of being like my
father or mother. Of not being able to take
care of myself. Of getting hurt. Ugh!  ¶ 2:32 AM 0 comments

  Itching a Scratch I want Ecstacy I want acid I want little lines of
coke to chop and play with pot to deseed and finicky
roll into joints. Sigh. It might be easier if I just liked
drinking more. I want to try Valium sometime, Alice
surely seemed to like it. Absinthe. Drugs. My mind just
itches for a good hallucinatory experience, sometimes.
I love the way acid scratches around my brains, and I
haven’t done it in about a year or so, nor coke
since last August, nor E since last December.
Ay. I’m sure I shouldn’t want these things, but
I still do. And I know Chris-Chris’s party will be
fun, even without the strippers, but I still
want to be beat. Or bound. Or whatever else crosses
Sir’s mind. My skin, my muscles itch for it. Sigh.
Maybe I should call Dan. Maybe a good fuck would help.
Maybe I should just get really fucked up. Sassi
asked permission to go out drinking with Akasha and some
of her friends at a Biker bar. They didn’t ask me, which is
probably just as well, I tend to get bored and/or in
trouble pretty quickly in bars, people come up and
talk to me and I don’t always have the sense to
tell them ‘go away.’ I don’t have the sense to do a lot
of things I maybe should.  ¶ 2:24 AM 0 comments

  Fetishizing Memory We walked through Chinese gardens and sat in a
little pagoda, smoking in the middle of downtown
Phoenix. You said we needed to find new
ways to think of each other, you were
afraid I still thought of you only in the
same old ways, had one set picture of
you and that was it. Yes, I wouldn’t admit
it, you were correct. It is a picture
I am constantly changing and one I
cherish dearly....I still have your
ponytail, wrapped in a purple cellophane bag
from the day you let them cut your
hair off. I am not giving it back.  ¶ 2:20 AM 0 comments

  Sir Asked Me to Be Afraid Sir asked me to write about what I’m afraid of in the
whole lifestyle thing, and then to write what my
fantasies are. I didn’t realize until I began
thinking about it how bitterly I am afraid of doing
that. And the thing I am most afraid of is my
fantasies, is committing those to paper, and then to
have someone else know and read them - is probably
most of all of having those fantasies happen.
Not, not so much the physical acts, everyone fantasizes
about things they would never do, never dream of
doing, but the thoughts/emotions behind them.
Because I fantasize in thousands of ways of giving up
control of myself, and because that is what I
am most afraid of doing.  ¶ 2:12 AM 0 comments

  Before the Year 2525 In the year 2020 we all grew wings and lost our hands.
Within weeks, buildings fell. Smokers reverted to chew. The
oceans turned to sugar-water and we stood by the shore,
tasting the sweetness through the soles of our feet like
butterflies do, crying when we stepped on an ant (the red
ones taste remarkably like Jalapeño, and sting beside).
In 2007 an earthquake triggered fire alarms globally,
the vibrations rent California from everything
else, but rather than sinking it floated out just far
enough to rest in international waters as the inhabitants
cheered and lit joints. Officials and autocrats were
unceremoniously dumped into life boats and pushed towards
open seas.
The shrill ringing lasted 3 days, and it
shook the milk from women’s’ breasts, turned streets to
tarry muck and split men’s’ penises pinkly down the
middle.  ¶ 2:02 AM 0 comments

  I Put a Spell on You 12.19.00
11.22.03


Shane's hair is bleach-blonde and a million hues of blue-green blue, he looks like the elfin offspring of an illicit affair between Scandinavian good-folk and pre-British water nymphs. I think of lists of ways to make him cry and spank him when he asks. If I cut his hair I could put a spell on him, as I tried to do with Jay, as Alice did to me.
Three people have brought me visions through their touch and each time the color/stories are different, are told in different tones. I miss Alice more than I will ever know. My dream father is always trying to strangle me and I have the idea she could help. I re-read her letter and don’t like the idea of looking forward to crying and hate seeing girls in tears in any event. If I had to cry with someone it’d be her because I think she would not hold it against me.
The washer is boiling over again; soap suds coat the living room floor and one of the cats is stuck mewing beneathe the couch. I remember, distantly, a poem about a man and his son finding a cat’s skeleton stuck in the plaster of a torn-down wall. I try to imagine what it feels like to dig a grave.  ¶ 2:25 PM 0 comments

  The Stories Falling The stories of falling in love, I read them all.
And they all make it sound so fated. Life sucks but
they go out with friends and sooner or later
they meet the one. Oh X, darling, where are you,
why don’t I even [ever?] know if you exist? Everyone says
I’m young. Wait. It gets better sooner or
later. Wait. I don’t want to fucking wait. I’m
young/depressed/naive and lonely. Out of coke
and sick of cigarettes. I don’t like pot –
am immune to sleeping pills. I just want
something transcendant. I just want something
definite to transcend. I want the fantasy, damnit!
I want those strong arms around me and love
glueing my ears. Play with my hair and rub
your knee against my crotch. For God’s sake just
pick me up and carry me somewhere else. Somewhere
different. Somewhere definitively not here.
I want to live in a made-for-tv commercial
where everything is good so long as my nail
polish matches my lips.  ¶ 2:22 PM 0 comments

  Yom Kippur Week 10.05.00
12.21.03

I forgot I knew how to be hungry.
Someone was making popcorn cakes. A girl was screaming as
an obscenely large spider advanced on her and I just
wanted her to shut up shut up shut up her
screaming was so terribly loud it hurt my head and then
I opened my eyes in bed but I could still hear her
screaming and my head ached and ached. Someone
called my name.
I dreampt I was stalling. I dreampt I went out
looking for my Master, trying to retrace steps
mistaken or untaken. Telephone were never in the right
place and I could not find his number. It is that
sort of terrible dream where you are desperately
seeking something without even knowing why. I e-mailed
him at 3 different adresses, each was promptly
sent back by a demon who politely informed me
my Master no longer existed, not at that adress. And all
I could think was, oh I have to find him.
I stood in a red box in a woman’s toilet, crying
for no good reason. I swallowed pills and pills but
they weren't chocolate-coated like they normally are
and stuck grainy, dissolving ackwardly in my throat.
Asleep/Awake I’m always taking pills. My
intestines could be a pharmacy.  ¶ 2:18 PM 0 comments

  The View Through Crib Bars 03.01.01
12.27.03

[ ]

“Song must be completely eliminated if your poems are
to be considered of the moment and not just a
poetess writing.” “I think tissue bothers me as the skin.”
Brandon is wearing a ‘Queer as Folk’ t-shirt today and I
wonder about getting one for Scooter.
I woke up in a silver-chrome playpen
with pre-schoolers throwing popcorn at my face. Salt and
powdered butter hit my eye. Every night I miss
my pacifier. Tim says I can watercolor him. We
wake each other shaking from bad dreams. I dreampt
of a series of pools, each evil/scary in a different
way. Tim was there, but he was someone
else too, and Topher was there conversing with him.
I know my mother was married at 23. Brian edges
himself against my nerves—I wonder if Tim affects
Scooter the same way. I want to wear mirrors in my
fingernails. My toothpaste is never where I left it.
The cold-cuts disapear while I’m at school but sometimes
he buys us pizza and I can’t complain when he talks
all during my video neutralizing all the suspenseful
bits with obvious comments about hair color and my
dominatrix future. Popcorn squeaks thoughtfully
between my teeth. “I don’t need lines drawn—
all of these things can exist in the same
place and share the same properties.”  ¶ 2:05 PM 0 comments

  Random Acts of Pseudo-Violence with Jack Womack Tuesday, 29 August 1995
Jack Womack is the Philip K. Dick Award-winning author of Elvissey and Random Acts of Violence. He joined us in Head Space to discuss pseudoscience and science fiction - the weird intermingling of psi powers, Dianetics, Forteanism, and perpetual motion devices with a literature devoted to technocratic rationality. Among his other achievements, Womack is one of the foremost collectors of '50s UFO books. He'll also tell us a bit about his next novel, Let's Put the Future Behind Us, which is set in contemporary Russia.
allynb asks: Will there ever be a mass market edition of Elvissey?
Womack: Allyn, at present Tor is taking Elvissey out of print. I hope to resell all the previous works to Grove, who seem to want them.
allynb asks: Do you recall the Hieronymous Machine that Campbell did a feature on?
Womack: Yes. Campbell had such a weakness for pseudoscience.
drdisco asks: You mentioned that you're a fan of Alan Moore, and his favorite mag is The Fortean Times. Do you read it as well?
Womack: Ah yes, never miss an issue of FT.
lethem asks: Jack, you tantalized me by saying that the examples of pseudo-science I'd listed in the promo for tonight were tame compared to your favorites. Do tell us what stimulates your jaded old tastes....
raydavis asks: Yes, do. I have some idea of what pseudo-social-science stirs your mirth (or wrath, it's so hard to tell the difference ...), but the harder stuff?
Womack: Ray, wrath, mirth, no difference, it's all grist for the mill. The sort of things I like are the Zig-Zag and Swirl theory of Suction and Pressure ... Another favorite is George Gillette's bound/rebounding theory of multinotes. Very silly.
lethem asks: What on earth is the Zig-Zag and Swirl theory of Suction and Pressure?
Womack: ZZ&S has to do with the concept of Penetrability. Lawson conceived notion after failing to set up 1st public airline in 1919.
lethem asks: Jack, John Clute says that SF has contributed more to pseudo-science than the reverse? What do you think?
Womack: I think so. A lot of crossover, especially at the low end of the bandwidth
raydavis asks: Are you mostly interested in the eccentrics, or in more "official" bad science as well (à la the aggressive chappies of 1960s anthropology and primate studies)?
Womack: Eccentrics, by and large. They're so much more creative. Every once in a while some real one will come along who'll be of interest, but not that often.
raydavis asks: That would make sense - "popular science" and "science fiction" are fraternal twins, and "popular science" is the form in which the eccentrics have to publish.
Womack: Siamese twins, too often. I'm thinking in particular of those turn of the century utopias.
lethem says: It's easy to imagine some of the great pseudo-scientists (Velikovsky, Wilhelm Reich etc.) restricting themselves to 'fiction' and being merely 3rd-rate SF writers ... sort of the "IRON DREAM" effect. The truly great claim their imaginative material for reality. Hubbard and Strieber figured it out halfway through their careers....
Womack: And made a lot of money doing it, too. Don't forget Ray Palmer.
drdisco asks: The really, really mad scientists are not that prominent in your books. Is that a conscious effort on your part to avoid them?
Womack: Yes, I tend to avoid them - they're hard to satirize.
scamp asks: What about John Mack? What about C. D. B. Bryan?
Womack: John Mack is quite silly. Bryan is fairly dull, considering. He is a good writer but he gives a lot of credence to things which don't really hold up. I like the sort of person who can conceive of evil beings living in the brain and causing bad things to happen.
allynb asks: What about Penrose?
Womack: Penrose? More, more.
allynb asks: Oxford Math maven Penrose of The Emperor's New Mind and Shadows of the Mind, where he argues, sorta, for a nonalgorithmic consciousness.
Womack: Oh, I know who you're talking about Allyn. Fairly sensible for my sort of thing.
raydavis asks: For real brain-science eccentricity, you have to turn to the Vatican neuroscientists who situate the soul in quantum indeterminancy.
Womack: I do like that. Often though correlating religion w/science leaves much to be desired, no matter the perspective. I do have a delightful book that posits that the 10 Lost tribes of Israel were dinosaurs.
allynb asks: Or sometimes there are proofs that the 10 lost tribes became British, according to the Great Pyramid.
Womack: My favorite of those is Comyns Beaumont, who proposes that all Greek/Biblical/Egyptian events took place in Scotland.
raydavis asks: So dinosaurs were not only warm-blooded, but circumcised?
Womack: They were circumcised, ray, yes, that's what killed them.
drdisco asks: There's a Gnostic theme that resurfaces in your books all the time. Why gnosticism of all things? Is it the "salvation through esoteric knowledge" that appeals to you?
raydavis asks: It seems a reasonable way for US fundamentalism to go if (as Jack assumes in his novels) Christianity falls apart: it lets you keep Satan and Hell....
Womack: The Gnostics got a raw deal, I always thought, particularly the Albingensians.
eyebrown asks: So, for a science to be "pseudo," it must have an element of the "silly?" Which is why quantum mech - slit-besotted photons and all - is not pseudo. It ain't silly enough.
Womack: Exactly, pseudo has to have the creative spark.
lethem says: The great 'pseudo' aspect of quantum mechanics, I think, is the relentless anthropomorphizing. Physics for poets, etc. Spin, charm, strangeness. The way it hopelessly devolves into projections of the human psyche.
Womack: Your friend the Atom, to a degree.
allynb asks: What sort of motivations do you see in pseudoscience, Jack? Reassurance?
Womack: Allyn, I think it's just the miracle of the human mind at work combined with the need to believe.
lethem asks: Jack, let me get you speculating about the rich interface between UFO culture and the history of the SF field, if you please. UFO's as "id," etc. Have you read Ian Watson's MIRACLE VISITORS?
Womack: Yes, I did. I kept thinking what a shame it was he beat me to it. It's not one of the SF books I reread, I'll put it that way.
mrzygote asks: Wasn't there some jive-ass Alien Autopsy show on Fox TV last night?
Womack: Yes, the show was utterly jive-ass.
raydavis asks: Cool. I'm also interested in this UFO as the "folk" substance of SF - though there seems to be much more of a divide between the artists and the substance here than there was between, say, Greek religion and Greek authors.
Womack: I don't know how many SF writers pay much attention to this material, though. Don't they tend to run away from it?
lethem says: I don't know how many SF writers pay much attention to any material outside of the field, to be cynical. But it's a part of the world they live in and (helplessly) write about nonetheless.
grifter says: Lethem: Good point. I don't think SF has any higher percentage of "Ripped from Today's Headline" stories than mainstream fiction does.
allynb says: One notable cross-over was Jane Roberts - she wrote some SF before the Seth material.
Womack: Oh, but she was so appallingly terrible.
scamp asks: So how do UFO books from the 50s differ from those of today????
Womack: The '50s volumes accept the fact of oceans on Venus, for one thing. They're much more innocent. No rectal probes, autopsies, that sort of thing.
eyebrown says: Pseudoscience came of age with the advent of rectal probes.
allynb asks: ... And all those Nordic alien women, instead of little gray men....
scamp asks: I would think they'd be more cold-war threat kind of stuff too.
Womack: It really did. Actually the 1st Nordic alien women date from 1953, and having sex with earth boys since 1957, as per the lit.
allynb asks: Any thoughts on the crop circle stuff?
Womack: Hoaxes, by and large. Don't know about the two or three don't knows.
allynb says: I enjoyed the crop circle in the shape of a Mandelbrot.
Womack: That was particularly inventive, I thought, and drove believers wild for years.
drdisco asks: Are there cultural differences between the stories of alien encounters or do they all look like space monkeys with big eyes all around the world?
Womack: There is some variance , drdisco, but less than you'd think. Of late of course, marketing has caused the little gray guys to win the marketplace.
allynb asks: I suspect the LGM stand in for HMO bureaucrats.
Womack: There's a lot of correlation among UFO/US conspiracy/et. al believers, more than the mass media have yet realized.
allynb asks: Jack, you mean militia types?
Womack: Yes, exactly, Allyn. Those guys have a very ... distinctive weltanschaung going down.
mrzygote asks: Conspiracy believers: my thoughts exactly. Those cats staking out the Black Mailbox at Area 51 are suspiciously militiaesque, prob. equate UFOs with One World Government. Then again, saucer people as friend/foe seems like prob. a 50/50 split, believer-wise.
grifter asks: Actually, I think there was a case u in Michigan where the militia types made an explicit connection between UFOs, UN troops, and "Secret codes" on the backs of freeway signs.
Womack: mrzygote - or lefty/fascist, depending. What gets interesting is when anti-Semitic references become a part of a UFO theory, as has happened more than once of late ... I shouldn't say interesting, horrible is more apt but not surprising.
grifter asks: Has anybody suggested the Lost Tribe is the Grays?
Womack: Not so far as I've noticed, but anything's possible, and I don't see everything, unfortunately.
allynb asks: I liked Brin's story about UFOs as nasty elves.
Womack: Allyn, haven't read it. Did see a post on alt.paranet.ufo today though that proposed that silly autopsied alien of last night was in truth an elf.
grifter asks: Have any of the fundie sects, especially the ones on TV, started talking much about UFOs, or is that still contradictory to their "we're the only ones here" stance?
Womack: Fundies been talking UFO and Satan since the early 50s.
grifter asks: Ah. So they're not aliens, they're devils.
Womack: Exactly.
raydavis says: Since UFO-mania seems to spring from the need to make the divine concrete, they're in competition.
mrzygote asks: Or angels ... Ezekiel's Wheel and all that.
grifter asks: OK, because I think we're starting to get to the point where the New Agey "angel movement" and the alien crowd are probably going to start dovetailing, too. If they haven't already.
raydavis asks: Oh, they have!
Womack: You all probably may not realize my sister channels angels, you know. I don't.
lethem asks: I've recently been thinking that the interesting thing about paranoid theories is the more obvious stuff they enable you to avoid thinking about. That for every conspiracy theory there's a blatant wrong/obvious connection that's too painful to consider....
Womack: Searching for flaws in these theories is like plucking June bugs off a fence.
mrzygote asks: "OOPS! A wacky, wishy-washy bookshelver killed the president ..."
lethem asks: Jack, at the risk of derailing a delightfully batty conversation, let me turn this in the last quarter hour (if others consent) to more Womack-related interview stuff, i.e., what are you working on at the moment?
Womack: Finishing the revisions on Let's Put the Future Behind Us. Pseudobelief plays a role in the book, as well as the infinite flexibility of history and truth.
raydavis asks: Also, Jack, what short fiction have you done besides Out of Sight, Out of Mind - and where would I find it?
Womack: Ray, pick up Datlow, Little Deaths, just out in pb, my best story's in it. Autoerotic asphyxiation and literary deconstruction in one piece.
raydavis asks: Is the Womack muse continuing to spend most of its time in NYC?
Womack: I've been here 18 years, I'm fine.
drdisco asks: What is it about angels (aliens of a different kind) that is so appealing in our world? I've not read all your books, but the ones that I have angels of various sorts appearing in the background.
Womack: drdisco, angels have their purpose.
grifter asks: Angels - on a related note, I thought the idea of a Gnostic Elvis was great. I especially liked that a writer was willing to treat Elvis in a somewhat serious fashion with regard to his spirituality, rather than dismiss it as a joke, even if you did "make it up."
raydavis asks: The appealing thing about Elvis to those of us who worship him is that he was God made Joke: genuinely awe-inspiring and genuinely awful (not to mention genuinely artificial). I also appreciated seeing it handled right for once.
Womack: We Southern boys take such things serious. Thank you both.
peske asks: Does SF limit or enable your writing, Jack?
allynb asks: Do you have an "end time vision?" i.e., a far-future vision?
Womack: I don't know that it does either, peske. My far future vision, Allyn, goes as far as the end of the year.
lethem asks: Jack, what about wrapping up the sequence with a sixth novel? Where does that stand?
Womack: I'll do that eventually, but not any time soon. I know what happens though.
phib says: Re the Elvis icon. I've only read Terraplane (have mercy!) but your treatment of Socialist icons was fresh.
Womack: I'm very fresh in the new Russian book, believe me.
raydavis asks: You mean the new book isn't the sixth novel?
Womack: No no no - completely unrelated but Womackian all the way.
drdisco asks: One final geek question: Do you have email and general net.access?
Womack: Yes I do. jwoma@pipeline.com.


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© 1994-2004 Wired Digital Inc., a Lycos Network site. All rights reserved.  ¶ 1:58 PM 0 comments

  Fatal Familial Insomnia May 6, 2001, Sunday


3. CASE STUDY: FATAL FAMILIAL INSOMNIA; LOCATION:
VENICE, ITALY; To Sleep No More


By D.T. Max

In 1791, in a small town near Venice, a man named Giacomo was born. Members of his family tended to be physically
impressive, powerful and broad-shouldered (and still are today), but one day in the fall of 1836, at the age of 45, Giacomo fell
mysteriously ill. He began to suffer from dementia. Eventually he was confined to bed, lying awake in torment. Then he died.

Giacomo had three children who survived infancy. One of those had six in turn. Over the next century and a half, his descendants
flourished. Family members would become prominent doctors and businessmen in the new state of Italy. One would own 130
apartments in Venice, including a palazzo on the Grand Canal. But running parallel with the family's affluence was an eerie record
of premature death. Parish books over the decades noted oddities like ''epilepsy and fever'' and ''nervous gastric fever.'' Later,
family death certificates would name meningitis, Economo's disease, presenile dementia, leukoencephalitis, alcoholic
encephalopathy and ictus. In fact, the cause of death was always the same: fatal familial insomnia, a genetic disease that was not
formally identified until 1986. It is vanishingly rare, and for a time, Giacomo's descendants were the only people on the planet
known to have it. (About 30 other families have been found since then.)


The course of symptoms of F.F.I., as the disease is known, is grim. In the typical case, one day in your early 50's, you suddenly
can't sleep through the night. You try compensating with a nap in the afternoon but without luck. Your pupils become tiny. Men
become impotent. Your blood pressure and pulse become elevated, and you sweat heavily as your body goes into overdrive.
Over the ensuing months, you try desperately, incessantly to sleep, sometimes closing your eyes but never succeeding in falling
into more than a light stupor that provides no actual rest. Inside your brain, the traffic light that controls activity is perpetually
green.

A downward progression ensues as your ability to balance, walk or speak disappears. Perhaps most tragic, your ability to think
remains intact; you often know exactly what is happening. At first, you can talk about your agony and even write down your
thoughts. Eventually you lose this level of coordination. As your body shuts down, only the desperate look in your eyes shows
that you know what is going on. In the final phase, usually after several months, you fall into a state of exhaustion resembling a
coma and, mercifully, die.

At least 30 of Giacomo's descendants have died this way in the last century -- 13 since 1973, 7 in the past decade. Among the
living, at least 25 more carry the gene that causes the disease. Within the Veneto region of Italy, where most of the family still
lives, the knowledge of a family cursed with a strange disease has long been widespread. Villagers speak of it behind the family's
back. Although the women tend to be beautiful and the family cultured and wealthy, finding spouses is difficult. The family cannot
get life insurance. ''I tried to get insurance the other day,'' said Elisabetta Roiter, Giacomo's great-great-great-granddaughter,
''and after filling out the form, the woman in the office asked, 'So, at what stage are you in the family disease?' ''

In the mid 1980's, Italian newspapers got hold of the story of Elisabetta's family. They pounced. Here was a wealthy family with
a problem -- sleeplessness -- so exotically un-Italian there is no easy word for it in the language. The media attention came
around the same time as the first reports of another new European scourge, mad cow disease. Neighborhood children came by
Elisabetta's home and made mooing noises. The family suffered deep upset. Elisabetta herself endured a psychosomatic attack of
insomnia. But in their cruel way, the local children had intuited something important. Their hunch that mad cow disease and fatal
familial insomnia were somehow connected would turn out to be right. Indeed, this realization would fundamentally expand our
understanding of disease.

One hundred sixty years after Giacomo's death, the king of Sweden shook hands with Stanley B. Prusiner, a professor at the
University of California at San Francisco, and gave him the 1997 Nobel Prize in medicine. It is unusual for a single researcher to
receive the prize, but Prusiner's work was exceptional. He had shown that under certain conditions, the body's own proteins can
warp and turn against it. They can make the body devour itself. He gave these deviant proteins an exotic name, prions
(pronounced PREE-ons), and established that they cause a rare class of degenerative brain ailments: Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease
for one and, more important, bovine spongiform encephalopathy. B.S.E., known popularly as mad cow disease, converts in
humans into a variant of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. At the time of the award, the disease had killed two dozen people in England
and one in France. It has since killed about 80 more people and spread in cattle throughout Europe. It may kill hundreds more
people, possibly thousands. No one knows for sure, because the disease has such a long incubation period. Mad cow disease
put Prusiner and his prions on the map in a way that a single family in the Veneto could never do.

But how did Prusiner demonstrate that misfolded proteins could cause disease? His key experiment was simple. He took
material extracted from the brains of members of Elisabetta's family who had died of F.F.I. He then injected this material into
mice genetically altered to produce human prions. The mice developed F.F.I. He performed the same experiment with brain
matter from Creutzfeldt-Jakob victims and got parallel results. Then he killed these mice and shot prions from them into new
mice and again got the two diseases. The conclusion was clear: malignant prions can cause disease, just as viruses or parasites or
bacteria can.

In the years since Prusiner's historic experiment, F.F.I. has become much more than a curio disease. It sits at the crossroads of
two new and exciting areas of scientific inquiry: sleep deprivation and prion research. In the past two decades, Giacomo's
descendants have gone from being local pariahs to a family whose genetic material is sought by scientists around the world. And
those who have fallen ill have been studied in minute detail by researchers exploring the fundamentals of sleep.

Many questions about fatal familial insomnia remain. Although the vast majority of victims fall ill in middle age, why do a few
people get sick in their teens? Why do a few who test positive for the gene not get the disease at all? Could studying these
irregularities suggest a pathway for blocking the general spread of prion diseases in humans, or for treating them before they
become symptomatic? Many researchers, including Prusiner himself, think so -- guaranteeing that Elisabetta's family will receive
more and more attention in the years to come.

Prusiner is a famously competitive researcher, even in the competitive world of finding new diseases. He has never gone into
detail about the Italian origin of his F.F.I. prions. But even if he had thought to talk about it, he would have had no idea of the
long chain of events that connected him and Giacomo.

Elisabetta and her husband, Ignazio, have a 14-year-old daughter. They live only a few miles from where Giacomo, Elisabetta's
ancestor, lived. Their daughter is tall and broad-shouldered, with chestnut-colored hair. When I went to visit her family's home,
she did not know why I was there. Her family did not want to tell her. She was not, as her mother put it, ''yet ready for the
information.'' As absorbed in her own world as any teenager, she wasn't really wondering. When the talk turned to mad cow
disease, Elisabetta and Ignazio stiffened, but their daughter breezily said that she loved meat and wasn't going to stop eating it.

Her mom is different. Elisabetta is small and intense. It is as if the Giacomo gene skipped a generation. She is 50, with
blond-brown hair and bags under her eyes. She trembles and cries often. She doesn't drive, getting around her little town with its
disused canals by bicycle. She is the only Italian I have ever met who doesn't like to be hugged or kissed. Her husband, Ignazio,
who has the soft face and bowed mustache of the lead in an operetta, got out a book and showed me a picture of Albrecht
Dürer's famous drawing of melancholy. ''This is Elisabetta,'' he said.

Elisabetta has lost her grandfather, two aunts and an uncle to the family disease. Even though the likelihood of having fatal familial
insomnia is one in 33 million, in her family, it is one in two. ''She loses someone every three years or so,'' Ignazio said. Elisabetta
has also led a family effort to confront the disease over the years. This was not something that came easily to her. She was
brought up in a strict religious home, where the disease was looked on as a kind of fate. But she was enthusiastic and bright and
became a nurse.

One day in 1971, her mother went in for a minor procedure at the same Venetian hospital where Pietro, Elisabetta's grandfather,
died in 1944. A doctor had pulled Pietro's old chart.

It said he died of encephalitis. ''The family just accepted these judgments,'' Elisabetta remembered. ''And we had our own myths.
My grandmother, for instance, called it a 'disease of exhaustion,' because she believed it struck you after a moment of extreme
stress.'' To Elisabetta that smelled of denial. So she looked over the hospital chart. Her grandfather had been a central figure in
the family. Under Mussolini, he was the mayor of the family's hometown. But in 1943, the Fascist government fell apart, and the
partisans sent Pietro a terrifying death threat. Soon after, he developed a fever of 104. He couldn't sleep. A few months later, he
was buried in the family plot.

The day Elisabetta read her grandfather's chart, she found something suspicious right away. Under ''spinal fluid'' was the notation
''clear as water in a rocky stream.'' (Italian medicine is full of such elegant oddities.) Elisabetta was familiar with spinal taps and
thought what she read was unlikely. The fluid of encephalitis victims nearly always shows contamination from the disease.

She told her mother and her widowed grandmother about it. They told her not to dwell on the past. Yet Elisabetta persisted.
Ignazio was himself training to be a doctor and agreed to help pursue the mystery.

A few years later, one of Elisabetta's aunts came to visit. She was 48 and had recently been through menopause. She seemed
depressed. She couldn't sleep. She asked Ignazio for a sedative. Nothing helped. The aunt began to despair over her perpetual
wakefulness and to hallucinate. Ignazio and Elisabetta took her to a neurologist in Padua, who diagnosed dementia, wrongly.
''The patient understands everything,'' Ignazio said of the disease. ''They know they are trapped in some sort of strange perpetual
exhaustion, but their minds are clear.'' The aunt died soon after, weighing just 65 pounds. The hospital did an autopsy. ''I can still
remember them coming out of the operating theater, their hands covered with blood, and saying 'Bo,' '' Elisabetta said. Bo is
Italian for ''We have no idea, and we aren't going to know.'' Under cause of death, a hospital official put ''encephalitis of
indeterminate origin.''

Five years later, in 1978, another aunt fell prey to the disease. She, too, died after being examined at Padua. This time after the
autopsy, Ignazio kept the brain. He took thin slices of it sealed in paraffin to a famous neurologist in Geneva, Dr. Johannes Wildi.
Ignazio and Elisabetta soon got back a detailed letter. Dr. Wildi did not know what killed Elisabetta's aunt, but he noted that the
brain decay resembled Creutzfeldt-Jakob. He was confused by a series of tiny lesions in the thalamus. The thalamus serves as a
way station for information going from the brain to the body and back. Without it you could not think cogently or maintain
balance. But the thalamus was not known to be associated with insomnia. Dr. Wildi considered the finding incidental.

In 1984, Silvano, Elisabetta's uncle, came for a visit. He had recently been held at gunpoint during a bank robbery in Venice. He
was 53. His eyes were small as pinpricks, his face drawn. It was obvious what was wrong with him.

Elisabetta was devastated. She and Ignazio had been holding off having children, waiting to see whether her own mother got
sick. ''I was a spy in my own house,'' she recalled. ''I'd sneak up to her room and make sure she was really asleep. She got
annoyed and starting throwing her slipper at me.''

Uncle Silvano had just been on vacation with his mother. He told them that he had been sweating so much he was embarrassed
to dance. He had always been a terrific dancer, elegant, a pocket square folded in his suit. A ladies' man, he was now impotent.
Elisabetta, Ignazio and Silvano all knew what was next. Though they couldn't yet prove it, they knew that what was killing the
family was insomnia -- that it wasn't just one of the features of the family's gothic affliction but the key feature.

They decided to consult an expert on sleep disorders. In Bologna, there was a clinic run by a professor named Elio Lugaresi.
Ignazio called him. Would the professor see his wife's uncle? Lugaresi asked the family to come the next day.

Lugaresi, a popular teacher at the University of Bologna, is a playful man with an easy manner. In one sense he is quintessentially
Italian: the only time I saw him truly upset was when, after taking me to an expensive restaurant, he found out I didn't drink wine.
But he is also ambitious and willing to think outside the conventions of Italian medicine.

Lugaresi vividly remembered Silvano's arrival. He was handsome and broad-shouldered, he said, ''a cultivated man.'' Silvano
was given a room with a comfortable bed. A videotape machine was set up to record his behavior, and his head was covered
with brain sensors.

The perverse pathology of F.F.I. moves the imagination, even of scientists. One prionresearcher told me that Elisabetta's family
reminded him of the sleepless townspeople of Macondo, frozen in their ''state of hallucinated lucidity,'' in Gabriel García
Márquez's ''One Hundred Years of Solitude.'' But I kept thinking of the stories of Edgar Allan Poe, in which the boundary
between consciousness, sleep and death is menacingly blurred. In particular there is Poe's ''Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,''
in which a doctor tells the story of a patient who, though without vital signs, can still respond through hypnosis to questions.

Uncle Silvano was admitted to Lugaresi's clinic in the spring of 1984. Lugaresi showed me the tapes of his decline. They make
for uncomfortable watching. His course is relentlessly downward. On a tape made in March, his eyelids flutter over the dots of
his eyes. Already like Valdemar, the ''glassy roll of the eye was changed for that expression of uneasy inward examination which
is never seen except in cases of sleep-waking.'' During good moments, Silvano can still read. He wears his glasses on the end of
his nose and keeps a pocket square in his pajamas. He ticks off the days on a pad. There are tapes of him at night, carefully
combing his hair in a hallucinatory stupor, thinking he is getting ready for a party. Once he salutes as if he were part of the
changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace.

Elisabetta remembered other such moments, like the time he offered the queen of England an orchid. During lucid moments,
Silvano laughed with the family over what was happening -- he joked that the brain-sensor cap on his head made him look like a
pope -- but that did not disguise his terror. Two months further into the disease, you see that on the tape too: howls in the night,
his arms and legs wrapped around themselves. In the last days of his life he lies in a twitchy, exhausted nothingness. ''Are you
dead?'' the doctor asks Valdemar at the end of Poe's story. Valdemar's response is chilling: ''For God's sake quick! -- quick! --
put me to sleep -- or, quick! -- waken me! -- quick! -- I say to you that I am dead!'' That was Silvano.

The uncle's death provided the break the family had been denied for so long. Lugaresi had arranged to have a pathologist on call
24 hours a day. Accordingly, Silvano's brain was removed within hours, preserved in Formalin and then shipped to Pierluigi
Gambetti, a former student of Lugaresi's who ran a neuropathology lab at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. (''Why
did Gambetti go to Cleveland?'' Lugaresi said to me one day, looking at the Apennine foothills outside his office. ''Bo.'') Lugaresi
told Gambetti to look carefully at the hypothalamus and the brain stem, regions of the brain that were then thought to control
sleep. Gambetti cut the brain into hundreds of pieces. Strangely, the tissue looked healthy -- except for a series of tiny lesions in
part of the thalamus.

The finding intrigued both him and Lugaresi. Why the thalamus? Neither had a clear answer. Lugaresi needed to get more
information -- and more brains.

Elisabetta and Ignazio set out to build a detailed family history. Elisabetta called relatives to ask if they knew of anyone who had
died under odd circumstances. Historic information was uncovered in church archives throughout the Veneto; Ignazio would
sneak down into various archives with a camera and search for the family surname. In this manner, he discovered unknown
relatives, including one who had supposedly died of ''schizophrenia'' in Geneva and whose brain had been preserved by a
perplexed clinician. The search for the origins of the disease gave them a shared purpose, a way to cope with the awfulness.
Meanwhile, Elisabetta's mother turned 65, beyond the age F.F.I. strikes. Soon after, Elisabetta and Ignazio conceived their
daughter, who was born in 1986.

Then a second tragic piece of good luck occurred. From a cold telephone call, Ignazio learned that Teresa, the 36-year-old
sister of a distant cousin of Elisabetta's, was behaving oddly. She was bumping into various objects as she walked around the
house and was sweating. Her sister took her to the clinic in Bologna. Of all the deaths the clinicians witnessed and filmed, hers
may have been the saddest -- perhaps because the disease, for reasons no one yet understands, struck Teresa much younger. A
mother of two, in her first moments at the clinic Teresa seems cheerful, dressed in a scarlet sweater, with a soft face and full lips.
Even a few months later, when her head inclines forward in a vain attempt to sleep, if a researcher taps her, she snaps to and
smiles. But the disease is implacable. It strips away the softness of her cheeks. Her face becomes a parody of a student who has
pulled an all-nighter. Enormous black circles develop around her eyes. As with other family members, she eventually falls into an
exhausted quasi-coma, her face twitching continuously, and dies.

More family members died. Twins two years apart. Teresa's uncle. In a meeting held in the Roiters' living room, Elisabetta,
Ignazio and the Bologna researchers agreed to name the disease fatal familial insomnia. Meanwhile, Gambetti's lab began to
make incremental progress in understanding the disease. But the precise cause continued to elude researchers.

Separately, Gambetti and Lugaresi noted something striking about the disease. In the charts documenting Teresa's brain activity,

Lugaresi saw spikes similar to those of patients with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. Gambetti, examining her actual brain back in
America,

noticed it was full of little holes: the tissue was spongiform. They both began to suspect that what they were looking at wasn't a
traditional infection. Both were aware of Stanley Prusiner's controversial theory about prions. Was he right, and were prions
what caused F.F.I.?

In 1992 Gambetti's research team was able to sequence the family's genetic material and pinpoint the mutation that causes F.F.I.
Armed with this information, they were able to administer a test to the family. Elisabetta persuaded reluctant members to
participate. Half of the 50 relatives tested had the fatal gene.

Around this time, Gambetti called Stanley Prusiner and asked him if he wanted to use some of the family's brain tissue. Prusiner
had mice with the human prion gene inserted, and Gambetti didn't -- without them he could not prove prions caused F.F.I. And
Prusiner had been supportive of Gambetti. ''Without him we wouldn't have gotten the disease accepted so fast,'' Gambetti said.
He sent the specimens. For Prusiner it was an unexpected break. He had been trying to show for more than 20 years that a
certain class of diseases were caused by their own malignant proteins. It seemed counterintuitive, to say the least. Proteins have
no nucleic acids and so no means of reproducing or replicating -- yet Prusiner was proposing that they could spread like an
infection, taking over healthy proteins and making them lethal to the parent organism. It was not inconceivable; such patterns had
been shown in yeast protein, for instance. Some proteins in the brain cells of people suffering from inherited Alzheimer's are also
altered by adjoining proteins. One way to think of the model for a prion infection is what happens when you drop an extremely
frozen ice crystal into a bucket of water. The rest of the water freezes, too, in response, from the nearest particle to the farthest.
But what could be the biological purpose of this, since prions have no genes to pass on? Not being alive, they have no motive to
kill.

Using the brain matter of Teresa and another relative, Prusiner in 1996 performed his key experiments. Having successfully
caused F.F.I. in the mice, Prusiner was able to confirm his theory at last. Deviant prions caused the disease. Prusiner had met the
basic standard of proof for an infectious agent. He would get his Nobel Prize a year later.

Not every scientist is convinced of the importance of prions. A small group of biologists still believe that hidden in these proteins
is some sort of slow virus, something else that is getting into the brain tissue and making people sick. They point especially to the
fact that no one has been able to convert a normal human prion into a lethal one in a test tube. Prusiner himself suspects there is
some sort of helper protein in the process, which he vaguely calls ''protein X.'' But there is an increasing amount of circumstantial
evidence to support his basic thesis. For one thing, there is never any sign of infection in those who die from prion diseases -- no
swelling or dead white blood cells or other signs of inflammation. Patients are not contagious in the conventional sense. Nobody
in Elisabetta's family has, for example, ever infected his neighbor or his wife or husband. But the main reason that prions remain
credible is that there is simply no better answer. As Gambetti told me, ''With every year that no better solution comes forward,
the evidence for prions grows stronger.'' It reminded me of the medieval proof of God, the one Giacomo would no doubt have
heard from his parish priest if he ever wondered what he had done to deserve his awful death: If there is no God, who made the
universe?

For Elisabetta and her family, Prusiner's Nobel did not change much. They continue to die. A new generation is now
approaching the age of greatest risk. Some have begun to question if it made sense to go through all that work -- the blood tests,
the publicity, the discrimination. Some family members wonder whether Elisabetta, who tested negative for the gene in 1993, and
Ignazio are pursuing the research for their own purposes. They have not been able to find out whether or not they carry the
F.F.I. gene; Bologna researchers refuse to tell them until there is a cure. ''Bring us news from Cleveland,'' they kept saying.

When I told this to Professor Gambetti, it caused him genuine pain. He is a tall man with his dark hair thinning on top and a
stoop. At least in my imagination, this came from the thousands of hours he has spent looking at brain tissue under a microscope.
His laboratory at Case Western is the United States surveillance center for outbreaks of prion diseases. There is a freezer with a
biohazard sign on it outside his door full of pieces of brain suspected of infection. Other freezers in the basement have several
hundred more, including the brains of many members of Elisabetta's family. The lab is, as much as the graveyard ringed by
cypresses near Elisabetta's home, the true tomb of Giacomo's clan. If the electricity fails, Gambetti's phone at home will
automatically ring. In the age of B.S.E., Gambetti's brain trove, one of the largest in the world, has great value.

During my visit to Gambetti's lab, the phone rang. I could hear only his part of the conversation, but it went this way: ''But you
have a way to keep it frozen? You have a refrigerator? Well see if it fits in the freezer then. What about dry ice?''

He put down the phone to speak eloquently about the scientific benefit gained by studying the brains of Elisabetta's family. He
sincerely regretted the family's distress. ''The good thing,'' he told me, ''is that research on prion diseases doesn't have to be
targeted to F.F.I. to work for F.F.I.'' One of his teams, he reported, is working on a C.J.D. vaccine. In another interesting
finding, Gambetti's research team has shown that variants of the same prion protein gene can produce both F.F.I. and a form of
C.J.D.

I got to look at Silvano's scarred thalamus under a microscope and, wearing gloves and a mask, saw mice in whom Gambetti's
team have inserted the human F.F.I. gene. If they can figure out how to start and stop the process by which prions convert other
prions, they would not only cure F.F.I. and C.J.D., they would also perhaps point to treatments for Alzheimer's. Prusiner's lab in
San Francisco is doing similar experiments, again with a cure for Alzheimer's as the ultimate goal.

As he showed me around his lab, Gambetti mentioned that F.F.I. patients also represent a remarkable opportunity to understand
ordinary insomnia. The function of sleep is the subject of ancient debate. Does it exist to keep us out of harm's way for part of
the day? To process newly learned material? To help us forget useless information? To improve immune function? Is it necessary
at all? ''If sleep does not serve an absolutely vital function, it is the greatest mistake that evolution ever made,'' wrote Allan
Rechtschaffen, a well-known American sleep researcher. As the videotapes of Elisabetta's relatives make clear, the victims of
F.F.I. build up an enormous sleep debt -- hundreds of times greater than subjects in sleep experiments have been able to.

We cannot live without sleep. At the same time, these catastrophic results are brought about by very limited cerebral damage --
and this almost exclusively to the thalamus. Vast portions of the brain are untouched. This finding has shocked pathologists and
sleep researchers and opened up new possibilities for aiding normal insomniacs. ''If I were the director of the N.I.H. I would
pour money into F.F.I. research,'' said William Dement, who founded the sleep disorders clinic at Stanford University. ''You
might get a cure for insomnia. At the very least we could make our sleeping pills infinitely safer and more practical.'' We would
no longer need to affect billions of receptors the way we do now, said Dement, to bring about the desired result: safe, deep
sleep.

As for Gambetti himself, he predicts a cure for F.F.I. within 10 years. It will not be an easy decade for him. ''When I began this
work,'' he said, ''I used to think Alzheimer's was the worst disease you could get. But to see a loved one disintegrate in front of
your eyes -- and for that person to know it is happening? Somehow, the fact that it is so rare makes it even worse, it seems to
me. I think now even a car accident would be less cruel.''

The day before I traveled to Italy, another of Elisabetta's cousins died. She and Ignazio made the familiar trip to the
cypress-lined cemetery. When I met them, she was still wearing black. The next day, the son of the latest victim called me. He
had put down the cause of death on his father's death certificate as Alzheimer's. He wanted to explain why, and also why he
didn't want to know whether he had the F.F.I. gene. It was because of the insurance problems and the discrimination, and also,
he pointed out, his voice tight with his grief, ''the stress of the test might even bring on the disease. Besides, what would I do with
the information? There is no cure. Maybe there will be one day, but there isn't now. I'd rather rely on my faith.''



Organizations mentioned in this article:

Related Terms:
Sleep; Insomnia; Fatal Familial Insomnia; Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease

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Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company  ¶ 1:48 PM 0 comments

  I Was Lying....Anyways She Was Dead I was lying in bed with my mom
and this strange man came over and lay in the bed
next to me and started telling me a scary story about
bodies. I kept telling him to stop but he wouldn’t,
he told it slowly line by line and each time he said a
new line he reached beneath the covers and touched me.
I kept trying to squirm away and I pulled
close to my mom but she got mad that I
accidentally bumped into her and pulled away. Then
I killed them both, violently, and after she was dead I
asked my mom why she did that and she said it was
because I touched her. I tried to explain it was an
accident but she wouldn’t listen and anyways she was dead.  ¶ 1:39 PM 0 comments

  The Angel Tapped My Mouth and I Woke Up 12.(05?).99
12.04.03


Last night I had dreams of the sort of
knowledge and awareness infants are said to
possess, before they are born and the angel
taps forgetfulness across their mouths. In my
dream I could tangibly see the lines
connecting me to four other people, could
see the life lines drawn out of us. And I,
don’t recall if I really knew I was
dreaming but I was quite aware I was not
consciously awake for I closed my eyes and
entered a secondary dream state. Felt myself
floating in it. And I woke with that same
forgetfulness, full knowing I should rise
immediately and write down all I could,
before it fled, yet I could not do so.  ¶ 1:36 PM 0 comments

  Sex That Smells Like Melting Crayons It’s 8:00 PM and a hundred degrees;
everyone/thing is heatwave restless.
Cruising cars drip primary colors,
streetlights waxy blur against the skyline.
We sputter slowly down Mill,
languishing under sticky misters.
Plastic cups of iced avant-gard slosh against our oozing palms.
Dark eyeliner sweats down my girlfriend’s face,
our mouths melt and stick to one another’s when we kiss.  ¶ 12:05 AM 0 comments