The Crisis Report - 61
If you are just following me here on Substack, this piece will seem VERY DIFFERENT from EVERYTHING else. I don’t post my “personal” stuff here. Just Climate and Political\Geopolitical analysis for the most part. My personal stuff is on Medium and “pretty much” that’s where it’s going to stay.
This is “personal” stuff.
It’s my latest on Medium and it speaks to something I don’t mention here. Because I just assume that my readers either “get it” or “don/t care”.
I AM AUTISTIC.
I also experience kinesthetic synesthesia. I have my entire life.
PARTICULARLY ArounD TeXt.
Letters and words are not StiLL to me.
They have “shapes” and textuuures,
Colours and “GLOWS”.
I “SEE” texts ‘differently’ than most people.
I “masked” that difference my ENTIRE adult life. Now I am OLD and retired. I really do NOT CARE if you find my “style” difficult.
What you see on the page is still only an APPROXIMATION of what I SEE in my mind.
However, I do think you have a right to KNOW some things about the person who is offering up analysis in a public forum. So here is my latest piece on Medium where I discuss my “RESPONSE” to the Climate Crisis as an AUTISTIC PERSON.
I won't do this often here. If it’s IMPORTANT to you, then follow me there.
My Autistic Life — 04
“Discontinuities” are SCARY.
In both Climate Systems and Memory.
It took me a really LONG time growing up to realize that I had a “good” memory. I didn’t understand as a young child that EVERYONE wasn’t LIKE ME. I assumed everyone’s memory was just like mine.
I didn’t UNDERSTAND that my MEMORY made me “Freakish”.
I don’t think that I have an “eidetic” memory. At least not in the sense of the Sheldon Cooper character in the show “The Big Bang”.
I’m not even sure how that works for the people who really do have TOTAL RECALL of EVERYTHING they have done in their life. Who can tell you what they wore on every day of their life.
Who they talked to.
What was said.
What they did.
One of my wives had that kind of memory. She REMEMBERED DETAILS to a degree that amazed me. I remember thinking when I first saw her apartment that she was some kind of “packrat slob”. It was JAMMED full of STUFF in a completely DISORGANIZED fashion.
It looked like “heaps” and “piles” to me.
If we hadn’t been tearing each other’s clothes off and about to have SEX. I probably would have left. I grew up in a “hoarder house”. My mother was a MALIGNANT HOARDER and I had reacted to my childhood by adopting a “monkish” austerity and simplicity in my surroundings.
I LIKE “clean” and “organized”. “A place for EVERYTHING and EVERYTHING in it’s place” is a motto that “resonates” with me. I am COMPELLED to “break things down” and LABEL\ORGANIZE/FILE whatever I experience.
My bookshelves are organized by CATEGORY. With each collection sub-grouped into TOPICS and then by AUTHOR. Authors are in alphabetical order from Left to Right, top to bottom, switching DIRECTION from shelf to shelf on the descent.
Do you IMMEDIATELY SEE in your mind’s EYE that this makes a “continuous thread” without any DISCONTINUITY. Because I do.
I can’t NOT SEE that. BAM, like a glowing yellow thread overlaid on the books so that I just KNOW where every book on the THREAD sits.
I ORGANIZE things.
So, when I looked at her apartment it made my skin crawl. CHAOS and RANDOMNESS/disorder and sloppiness. This was NOT a “serious” person. This women was a FLAKE.
OH, but she was SMOKING HOT, only 4'11" (I’m 6'1"), 110bs, and she had told me in the elevator on the way up that, “she wanted me to use her like a ‘ragdoll’.”
Yeah, I stayed.
Best decision of my life.
Because she was also AUTISTIC and MUCH, much SMARTER than me.
She didn’t NEED to put things back “into places”.
She NEVER FORGOT where she put things down. NOT EVER.
To her things were “always” in “their place”. Wherever she put them down, WAS “their place”.
She didn’t FORGET things.
But I learned, over time, that she “edited” her memory.
I have learned, over time, that MOST of you DO THIS.
My MEMORY is DIFFERENT.
I don’t REMEMBER as much “detail”. My memory is about FOCUS.
So a LOT of what “normies” think is important to NOTICE and REMEMBER goes by me in a blur. It doesn’t EXCITE me enough to really SEE\ABSORB/HEAR and FOCUS my ATTENTION enough to create a DISTINCT-Discrete Memory.
When that happens. When I am TRIGGERED and I FOCUS.
I HYPER-FOCUS. I “see” EVERYTHING and I NEVER forget it.
EXACTLY the SAME. Every time.
That’s what makes my memory “freakish”.
In my High School Calculus class Senior Year, I was LAZY. I had stopped doing homework assignments and although I “aced” every test I was going to get a “B” for the final semester.
Our Calculus teacher wanted to make a point about the “fallacy” of thinking you can “cram” for a TEST so he offered the chance to everyone to raise their FINAL GRADE by earning points in a “memorization” test.
He gave us a page with 100 random numbers in a sequence and offered +1 point for each number in the sequence you could recall. Get enough points and you could change your grade.
Most couldn’t get past 20 numbers. Several got over 30.
I got 100 out of 100. I got my “A”.
I can still SEE that page almost 50 years later in my mind. But I cannot remember the name of a single one of the other people in that class.
I DON’T remember EVERYTHING. But the things I DO Remember, I remember “exactly”.
Although they say memory doesn’t work this way, the only way I can Visualize/describe how my memory works is VISUALLY. To me, when I recall my “life history”, it’s like stretches of BLUR with POPS of HIGH RES.
The BLUR parts aren’t HOLES. I “remember” the year I was in kindergarten COMPLETELY. The memory of SCHOOL that year is a complete THREAD from START to FINISH. It’s just that I only INTENSELY remember the moments I was FOCUSED on something.
There’s periods of daily BLUR with POPS of “hyper-focused” MEMORY.
That’s how my “LIFE STORY” memory feels to me.
It’s a different thing from being able to “just” remember every book I ever read.
I also remember every Movie I ever saw.
Every song on the radio that caught my attention.
Especially I remember EVERY thing I saw on television. I even remember the “first” time I watched almost every show.
These MEMORIES are “separated” (?) they are discrete and (self-contained).
Each BOOK or MOVIE is a LEAF on the symbolic “MEMORY TREE” that is my “file system” in the central garden of my Memory Palace.
It it a complete but (self-contained) memory.
LIFE Memory is DIFFERENT. There’s TOO MUCH of it to PROCESS.
So much of it is repetitive actions and routines where VERY LITTLE stands out in memory. The “blur” part that you remember “being present” for and “happening” without being able to recall much detail about.
MOST of our LIFE MEMORY is BLUR.
A long, winding, continuous THREAD of MEMORY from our childhood to our PRESENT. The BLUR of “daily life” with the knots and jewels of our pains and joys woven in along the way.
The things we remember when we tell the STORY of who we are and how we got to the HERE and NOW.
What’s IMPORTANT to US as “human beings” is NOT that we REMEMBER EVERY DETAIL. What/s IMPORTANT is that there are NO “discontinuities”.
When there are places where the “tape stops” and a GAP exists. It tends to BOTHER you. A LOT.
When my wife became septic and went into septic shock or “sepsis’ in 2017 she nearly died. We had gone to the De Young museum the day before to see the “Summer of Love” 50th Year Retrospective Exhibit with friends.
That morning she woke up with a PAIN in her side each time she took a breath. The PAIN was so BAD she wanted to go to an ER even though we were visiting California from Washington DC.
Not “so BAD” that she didn’t insist I help her get dressed in a coordinated outfit with “matching” sandals, but BAD.
4 hours later she was in the ICU. 20 minutes after they moved her into the ICU, her blood pressure fell to NOTHING and she went into sudden cardiac arrest. While I stood and watched.
They resuscitated her.
Got her intubated.
Got her stabilized.
And TIME “stopped” for HER.
Although 9 days went by for ME.
Those LOST days were a “discontinuity” in her “Memory Thread” and, in the first few years after this happened she OBSESSED about them.
I must have recounted a “day by day” narrative of her “ICU days” over a hundred times. She had me go over each day again and again. Constantly wanting more detail. It was MADDENING and she just wouldn’t LET it GO.
We found out that this was not uncommon among ICU survivors with extended periods of unconsciousness. People DON’T “like” discontinuities or HOLES in their Memory Thread. It bothers them, a LOT.
In Sweden it has become common to create a Day-by-Day video and picture record of unconscious patients in ICU’s. So that they can SEE what happened to them and there is no HOLE in their memory. It HELPS people process the trauma of what they went through and accept it.
It took my wife about two years to reach a level of acceptance such that she stopped asking me about it every few days. The NEED to fill in that GAP was very intense for her. It was hard for her to “let it go” and “move on”.
We don’t LIKE (discontinuities) in our Memory and in our Lives.
Things that we “can’t remember” usually AREN’T GOOD.
There are a couple of dozen places like that in my childhood. Places of DISCONTINUITY. Places where I have NO MEMORY of what happened to me or what I did.
Because, whatever HAPPENED in that place and time, I NEVER thought about it again. Eventually FORGETTING that I even had that Memory.
Forgetting that ANYTHING had ever happened. That a discontinuity existed in my MEMORY. That there were HOLES in my childhood.
Places where there should be a memory but there is a void. Places where a STRANGE memory exists but has no CONTEXT that makes sense.
Here’s one of those places.
When I was nine, IBM moved us to Chicago for some reason. We were Southerners, this was a BIG change. I remember most of that year vividly but there are HOLES.
My parents had strange financial problems at this time. They had been “IN TROUBLE” and “OWED People Money” for about five years. My Father blamed my Mother and was REALLY BITTER about it.
About the way she “screwed up their lives” and “put them in debt”.
He was making “good money” and we couldn’t even afford a television. We had a VW camper van as our only car during this period and it was CLEAR that we were FRUGAL.
My mother told friends that she had over for cards or coffee that my father was “cheap” and that “explained away” most of the things we didn’t have. People just assumed he was a tightwad because he certainly acted like one.
But I have a RAZOR SHARP memory of going out to the driveway one FALL Night at 3AM behind my father. Holding the flashlight ready to turn on and BLIND whoever was in our driveway trying to steal my father/s 65' Pontiac GTO.
So that he could shoot them with his shotgun.
I remember us going out the side door and creeping up on two men who had gotten the door open and were hot-wiring the car.
I remember the sound of the shotgun when my father cocked it. That sound is like nothing else.
That was my signal. I turned on the flashlight and pointed it right at them. The way that I had pointed it at numerous deer on “night hunts” with him since I was four.
The two men FROZE.
Then it gets ‘weird’. Because he knew these men and they knew him.
They had been sent to collect the car because he still ‘owed’ on his debt.
He INFORMED them that they were MISTAKEN and that if they didn’t leave he would shoot them on the spot.
They BELIEVED him.
They asked to use the phone to make “a call” so that this could all be straightened out AND that’s what we did.
We went into the kitchen through the garage and one man set at the table while the other dialed a number on the phone. My mother came down in her kitchen robe and the man at the table recognized her and said hello.
He said they “missed her” in Houston.
My father stood there the whole time with the shotgun and he was WIRED. There is NO DOUBT in my mind that he was ready to shoot both of these men in seconds AND that he WANTED to.
The man on the phone talked to someone and said OK. He hung up and told my father that it was a “mistake”. His final payment hadn’t been logged and so the guy at the warehouse didn’t know it was OK for him to take the GTO back.
The ‘collection order’ was just a paperwork mistake. They were sorry for all the excitement and wouldn’t be bothering him again. Houston had confirmed that his debt was paid off.
That’s when my mother noticed me. Still standing in the doorway to the garage. So, still and silent that everyone had forgotten I was there.
She told me to “get up to bed” and “go to sleep”.
“This will be just a dream in the morning.”
When she came up a few minutes later to make sure I was in bed. She told me not to “TELL ANYONE about this” because “It will make us look like TRASH.”
“People will LOOK DOWN on YOU if you tell anyone about this”.
“It’s a secret. For family ONLY.”
I never mentioned it to anyone and had forgotten I even had that memory. Until years later when I was in my 20’s and in the Navy.
My father had come out to San Diego to see me after the first time I took a “serious” injury during an operation. I was getting out of the hospital and we went drinking.
Five or six rounds in, he asks me if I remember the time he pulled the “shotgun” on the two “repo men” who tried to steal the GTO.
BAM.
Suddenly, I remembered the WHOLE episode. Every detail.
He wanted to turn it into a Father/Son “bonding” memory. Something he had “sanitized” into a funny story.
He didn’t want to answer my question about who they were in DEBT to and why it was ALL my Mother’s fault.
I still have “no context” for that memory.
It is an anomalous memory for me because it doesn/t “connect” to anything else in my childhood memories and it is “unexplained”.
I will NEVER “know” what that was about.
That thread will never be tied off.
It is a “discontinuity”.
We are having a “discontinuity” in the Climate System.
I mostly write about Climate Change these days. I know most of my readers both WANT/DREAD my next few Climate papers. I’m not the kind of Climate Writer who tells you everything is going to be “fine”.
We are having a GLOBAL CLIMATE DISCONTINUITY.
Hansen’s estimate.
May be “optimistic”.
What do you do with that KNOWLEDGE?
How do you process THAT?
rc
01212024
Richard,
Than you for sharing your story, and for tying that to what many may be experiencing with climate change and the coming discontinuous series of events.
First - to your memory and your experience. There is great value in you sharing it. Whether here or on Medium, or where ever.
In a vaguely similar way, my experiences and memory are also far distant from most people. I used to remember the future. That is what it felt like. And it was entirely accurate. It isn't and wasn't deja vu or anything else. It was literal memory of things that had not yet occurred. Like you I did not know that this was unusual. Also like you I expected that was how everyone experienced the world.
So too with memory. I too have an extremely long and detailed memory. It is different from yours or your wife's. And different from my father and brother. And it is different yet from five ladies in my life and one male friend. All six of them had universally perfect memories. None of them ever revealed that to anyone else in their lives - ever - to the days they each died. They lied and pretended to have bad memories. Every one of them was exceptionally kind.
They were blessed and cursed by their memories. The blessings were easy. The curse was that they each remembered every slight, every harsh word or thought they made to someone else, or that others made to them. And they lived those in the present moment every day of their lives.
The researchers, medical folks, psychiatrists and psychologists have a very narrow view of human memory and cognition. They generally work under the false premise that everyone is close to normal and the same, with minor degrees of differences and occasional severe defects.
They fail to understand that we humans are a collage of half a dozen to a dozen or more homo lines (Neaderthal, three+ Denizovan lines, Errectus, Heidelbergensis and others). Each of those developed and specialized in their own ways before the mergers 72k years and and 39k years ago, plus other cross breeding events.
I have become persuaded through my own experiences that the Neanderthals in particular developed a massively parallel way of experiencing and remembering the world through tremendous changes in their visual cortex and brain systems.
Sapiens became much more proficient at extreme audio processing and social organization, exploiting both complex audio analysis and linear memory as well as emotional interconnection in groups.
Mind you these are all variations off a common base, so anyone anywhere may exhibit degrees of all of these. And with the huge movement of peoples around the world, that is even more true. We have no true races in the human lines. We were never that distinct.
However, we do have huge variations. And it is that which the experts miss. I suspect that some or much of your uniqueness is from this complex reblending and in particular from Neanderthals unique visual abilities.
One thing you might consider, even in retirement, is the Irlen method. My father, my brother and my nephew all exhibited a form of dyslexia where text on a page wouldn't hold still. For each, colored transparencies lain over the page caused everything to stop moving. Each of them benefitted from a different color. For my nephew it was pink. My brother blue, And my dad a light green.
In my case, I do not 'suffer' from that, by I understand what they were seeing. We process visual imagery and text differently. In my mind b, d, p, q, 9, and 6 are all the same character with slight embellishments, rotations or inversions. I don't usually confuse them. For my dad and my brother, they had more difficulty. They had to learn to see the characters in relation to those adjacent to them to get them to hold still. Their minds (and mine) are constantly playing with the shapes. We seem not just as they are, but in all of the possible spatial rotations from there. Somehow the addition of the color transparency changes the balance. And the text quits moving.
As to climate change. I worked with a lot of the analysts and researchers, policy makers and such in the 1990s to the late 2010s. In the late 1990s many of the scientists and researchers became distraught. Their field work showed them frightening things about where we were and where we were headed. They became very active in fighting to get hat message to policy folks and decision makers. They were not especially successful. The decision makers and politicians in particular were far more caught in weighing economic impacts on industry in the current moment. They couldn't look 5 years into the future, let alone a few decades. Their world was the next election and the year following. That was it.
By the early 2000s, the scientists hair were proverbially "on fire". They were scared.
By the 2010s the fire went out and they largely became despondent. The change was that they had learned enough to know that there is no solution possible. And that even the most strident and urgent actions will inevitably result in massive changes, massive extinctions, and worse.
And they largely became quiet. It isn't that they don't care any more. They do - desperately. But the conditions they see now are even more dire. Stopping the emission of pollutants is enough on its own to shove us over the edge into severe change. Not stopping does the same slightly more slowly.
We messed up. It is clear now that our last point at which we could change to maintain a world somewhat like what we new as children into the future was likely before we were even born. And with every passing year and new information it becomes clearer that the point of departure to the dystopian future was even earlier than we thought a year before.
Next. Next where we go is to the fallacy that the world is in some sort of stable equilibrium and that no matter how hard we push, we change that in limited ways. No one states that out loud. But that is one of the implicit assumptions.
It is entirely false. We have been in a quasi-stable oscillating pattern for a few million years. It is technically an ice-age, but it oscillates (did oscillate) between warmer and colder periods every 41k or 105k years based on a set of wobbles in the Earth's orbit. Since the end of the last deep cold about 10k years ago we entered into a reasonably stable period - the holocene - that allowed for the development of agriculture. This is usually not possible for long.
The changes we have now wrought, push us out of this stable little band. We are now headed to hot house earth at +11 C from the preindustrial baselines. There is a barely possible chance that with extreme effort we might put the genie back in the bottle and that Greenland and Antarctica might provide the buffer to allow that. It is now unlikely.
The transition we are entering is at 20 times the rate, or more, as the Paleocene Eocene Thermal Maximum transition. (PETM). We are about to go through changes that are astounding. And that may be unsurvivable for humans. Most species will die. A new world is about to be born.
This was an excellent read, thank you for sharing. It’s oddly comforting to hear your personal story and to understand how you think, which is truly fascinating. What a gift to be able to hear your analyses on the climate predicament. Thank you for your perspective.