A Splintered Mind

Sometimes external forces can induce depression. They can induce panic. They can control how you see the world if you let them. I’ve got surgery coming up this week, so I’m getting my blogging in early. I want to work on my current novel when I start to come out of the anesthesia. We’ll see how that goes. In the meantime, I’m watching the crypto market implode…again. I decided to get into crypto last Spring—two days before China cracked down on Bitcoin miners and the Chinese banks that did business with them. I had only invested $10. It was play money, to be honest, but what a lesson that was for me! China’s crackdown caused the market to crash. That $10 became negative in just two days. I laughed. There I was. Mr. Moneybags. The Crypto Guru. All because I was so entertained just twenty-four hours earlier when my $10 had gained 50¢ in value. The main character of my book made and lost a fortune in crypto, so I wanted to understand that world bette...

A new beginning that looks an awful lot like the old one. When I set out to explore fractal art, I face a confusing array of controls & parameters. It has taken me years to develop the eye to select the best cropping, the most flattering palette, and the most interesting settings, then present them in a pleasing manner. Without this discipline, the fractal is an utter mess with no focus. By making a few poorly chosen decisions, the same mathematical location and the same color palette can appear completely different—and far less appealing. Of course, anybody with the time and desire to learn the software can produce pleasing images. It isn’t as if I received a PhD in advance fractal art, traveling to distant lands to study with the Mandelbrot masters before writing my doctoral thesis on the societal implications of sliders versus number fields and how they subvert the patriarchy. However, as I was exploring a particular fractal set the other day,—tweaking the parameters t...

Feedburner is being put to pasture by Google, so I have moved my Feedblitz email subscribers over to follow.it . Thank you for understanding.  My original RSS URL is sixteen years old, back from when I called this blog THE Splintered Mind, long before I discovered that early blog indexers alphabetized their listings without ignoring determiners like "a" or "the". So A Splintered Mind was born, and suddenly I was at the top of the lists. Yep, I was sneaky.  Then I discovered Feedburner which allowed me to track stats and such on the people who subscribed. Feedburner took the old RSS feed and gave you a new one to share with readers that made their magic work. Now Google's shelving the magic. Bad news for me, but not bad news for you. Feedburner for end users will hang around for an indeterminate amount of time according to Google. You should be able to continue accessing all your feedburner based RSS feeds in whatever RSS reader you still use. That means you...

❝My son fricken tried to commit suicide, so I had to drive all the way over there to deal with it. A few months ago, I pulled up to the one remaining branch in my area that US Bank allowed to be open during the pandemic and tentatively approached the entrance. I had banking to do, but they had bizarrely limited hours and, of course, they were closed. So I entered the ATM area and began my bank transfers with hundreds of dollars tight to my chest, hoping nobody would come in and rob me blind while I was feeding the money into the ATM. As I was doing my banking in the comfort of their ATM fishbowl, a woman entered behind me. I made some polite comment about how I was almost done, and that magically opened up a flood of information from her that I never would’ve expected. Strangers usually don’t open up to each other, especially about the subject that she was dealing with. The quote above is the choicest one that she shared with me. I remember thinking at the time how callous and...

Sometimes the best kind of journal is the one that you shred, light on fire, then cast its ashes to the wind. Last January, I woke up severely depressed one morning. At first, I didn’t realize what was happening. I just knew that I had no will to move, no will to eat, no will to do anything. I felt interred with heavy, suffocating sadness. Mmm, that sounds rather dramatic, doesn’t it? The moment I realized I was depressed, I grabbed my iPhone and began dictating a blog entry to Siri as a coping strategy. However, it was all in the same vein as that emo sentence above—nice and juicy with just the right amount of adverbial angst and self-indulgence. We should all be grateful that I deleted every single word of it. Normally, I avoid blogging or posting on social media while under the influence of Major Depressive Disorder . Despite my efforts to sound upbeat, depression affects my narrative voice and mental outlook. Fortunately, hindsight gained from experience keeps me from em...

Sometimes we can be so fixated upon the finish line that we miss how far we’ve already come. © Alan Watson Featherstone   Ah, if I hear another commercial on the radio with a smooth-talking announcer earnestly pretending their company cares about me during these “unprecedented times”, I may puke. I’ve moved way beyond that acid reflux-ish moment where my stomach’s contents race to my mouth to voice their opinion. I may not be able to hold them back next time. Between you and me, I’m a little worried about it. I’m still making payments on my car. So I’m not going to talk to you as if you just woke up next to Rip Van Winkle and need me to explain what COVID–19 is. I’m just going to write from my heart about how this pandemic has affected me, and maybe you’ll be able to relate: I feel like my life has been sealed in a cocoon. This is a funny thing to write because I’ve never before been so product...

As I wind up my latest book project, I thought it might be a good time to share an interview of sorts I did a few months ago. I was asked to answer the question “Is suicide preventable?” in three sentences. Can such a question be answered in three sentences‽ Actually, it can be answered with one word: Yes. I elaborated on that word with three sentences that I hope are helpful to somebody. Fortunately, the rest of the article was a bit longer, so there is plenty for you to read. Kate Haldeman tackled some of the typical stigmas of which depressives encounter. People mean well, but sometimes their advice does more harm than good. Ms. Haldeman addressed every negative word of “encouragement” you could imagine, from telling people to “get over it” to telling depressives to work harder at being happy. I liked her alternative questions. I hope that people who need to learn these tips find her article. There is no perfect way to respond to everybody...