October 3, 2024 : Issue #77
WONDERCABINET : Lawrence Weschler’s Fortnightly Compendium of the Miscellaneous Diverse
WELCOME
A Palestinian haiku; a neurological donut hole; further analysis of streak incidence in Rayball; and more Errol Morris fare…
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Current Events
The Israeli Soldier’s Jenin Lament: A haiku
A few years ago I penned this haiku, which I recently came upon again while leafing through old notebooks and which alas appears to be attaining the status of something of a dark evergreen perennial.
The Israeli soldier’s Jenin lament
Palestinians
keep smashing their damned faces
into my sore fist
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The Main Event
Personal History
Donut Hole
I have no idea what I was doing Thursday afternoon, two weeks ago. I mean, literally none, nada: I’ve got nothing. There’s a five-hour experiential donut hole where my Thursday afternoon is supposed to have been.
My wife was not so lucky. To hear her tell it, around two p.m., I was wrestling with my computer, trapped in one of those infinite doom regressions—user name, password, the row of dots shaking no, try again, user name, password, vigorously shaking dots, check “change password,” go to email, get security code, get sent to place to change password, try to do so, fail, repeat, only this time being asked what my favorite ice cream flavor was in fourth grade, etc.—cussing out my laptop and the world in general, whereupon she wished me luck and said she was going swimming but when she came back we would have to decide whether we would be going to that evening’s dinner date in the city by train or car…
I don’t remember any of this.
When she came back an hour later, she says, I was still hunched over the computer, staring blankly. Bewildered, she asked whether I had made up my mind about dinner, and I said “What dinner?” She asked a few other questions, to equally befuddled response. She mentioned the dinner we had been to the night before, with the director of the film Incident which I’d been so excited about in recent days (witness the entire issue I devoted to the film three weeks ago) along with his main collaborator, in from Chicago, and I asked, “Incident? What incident?” At which point she called our family doctor who told her to get me to the emergency room at the nearby hospital immediately.
She directed me to the car (I could walk completely normally, follow orders with no difficulty or hesitation, my language skills were all fluent and intact—again, I remember none of this, though I am happy to infer from my behavior throughout that if I ever do descend into dementia, I am going to be one of those pleasant, easy-going space cadets, not the snarly angry other kind—the phrases I deployed to insist I had no idea what was going on were all syntactically appropriate, I could identify people I was talking to, I just didn't seem to be able to remember anything about anything, including the immediate past.
At the emergency room, I’m told the doctors and staff hopped to with impressive skill and urgency—they didn’t even bother inquiring after my insurance status (one would have thought I’d at least have remembered that, but I don’t)—they whisked me into the cat-scan room and slid me into the machine,
everybody working in swift concert with incredibly impressive competence, my wife assures me, for about twenty minutes, that is, until they’d established that I wasn’t having a stroke, at which point they sort of lost interest, they had more important things to be tending to, I was wheeled into a side room and placed on a temporary bed while they waited for a room to open up upstairs where they could place me under observation overnight. At a much more leisurely pace, doctors and nurses and techs of various sorts dropped by every now and then to poke and prod and check in on me, the hours passed, unregistered by me…
…till, around seven-thirty, when I came to, as if awakening from an uneventful slumber, to find myself in this odd place and curious situation. I turned to my wife who was sitting by the bed and said, “I have two questions: what am I doing here, and what about dinner tonight?” She let out a long, exasperated sigh and informed me that I had been asking those exact same questions, in exactly those words uttered in exactly the same cadences, about fifty times across the previous three hours. But for some reason, that time they stuck, I registered her comment and every other comment or event in the hours that followed, exactly as I would have had nothing untoward intervened, except that like I say, I had no memory whatsoever of the five missing hours and never ever recaptured one.
Weird. Easy for me to say: obviously much more difficult for my wife to have experienced. But now that she had my attention, she asked me, as she apparently had been trying, to no avail, fifty times before, where I kept the list of the various medications I am taking, all the doctors and nurses had been asking. I told her (as I had not before) that easiest would be for her to go home and get my laptop on which I keep a running log of same (at my age, it begins to be quite the scroll), and bring it back, which she did, returning less than an hour later, completely gobsmacked. It seems that while home she had taken the time to call our daughter, who lives in Ghent, Belgium, where she is pursuing a graduate degree (she hadn’t wanted to call her prior to that, in the middle of her night and before there was anything clear to report, but in the meantime she just had), and our daughter—this is classic Sara—said, “Oh wow, that sounds exactly like what happened on Radiolab back in, let’s see, it would have been 2012, in an episode entitled ‘Loops,’ about ten minutes into the episode, where they featured an interview with this lady whose mother went into exactly the same kind of repetitive trance, only the daughter recorded it, and Jad and Robert played the recording.” {Yes, the same Robert (Krulwich) we’ve recently started sampling here in the Cabinet. Hmmm: wonder if that had anything to do with it.} While they were still on the phone, Sara rummaged about on the internet, found the link and forwarded it—here it is—my wife had listened to it, and she was now telling me how she had gone all drop-jawed because this was indeed, exactly, but exactly, what it had been like for her to be interacting with me the past several hours. As I say, she was gobsmacked but also somewhat relieved, because on the show they explained how this was a not-all-that-unusual (albeit utterly perplexing and not terribly well understood) condition called TGA, transient global amnesia, which just comes and goes, and usually doesn’t come again, and only even gets diagnosed when there are witnesses (otherwise there’d be no way of knowing since the one who suffers from it precisely doesn’t remember having undergone anything untoward) and even then only when every other possibility (stroke, seizure, so-called TIA, transient ischemic attack, which is more serious) have all been ruled out.
(By the way, all of the preceding is my version of Joasia’s version of my tres riches heures in the donut-hole, and in offering it forth like this, I realize that I am in somewhat the same position as Krulwich himself in last week’s animated vignette of how he hijacked his wife’s tale of seeing Jackie O—but this will just have to suffice until she writes her own account, which I am urging her to do.)
Anyway, ruling out all the other possibilities was apparently why they wanted to keep me overnight (and eventually over two nights) there at the hospital, to run a whole battery of further tests just to make sure. And talk about repetition compulsion: don’t get me started on the futility of trying to get any sleep during overnights in hospitals, how one is constantly being woken up every couple hours to check on vitals, to draw blood, to take pills, just to see if one has been sleeping, or every ten minutes by piercing PA advisories on the ongoing status of the search for a patient missing from the Longterm Care facility (“female, seventy-five, gray hair, five-foot-six, one hundred and twenty pounds, last seen in white shirt and blue slacks”)—it got to the point where I was starting to root for the good lady’s escape (I could empathize, all she wanted was a good night’s sleep)—until there was another screeching advisory to the effect that we should never mind, they had found her, and, ten minutes later, yet another to make sure that we had all heard how we should never mind, they had found her.
Eventually though, having successively checked off the list of all the other things it could have been (and wasn’t) and satisfied that at least for the time being I was in as good shape as could be expected, they did let me go. (I kid, though actually the thoroughness of their vigilance had been quite impressive.) In the several days since my release, however, I have fallen into an entirely different sort of seemingly infinite repetitive loop, telling friends this same story over and over again (indeed, I am setting it down here at length so that in the future I can just refer people to this text and be done with the constant retelling). But one such telling was particularly striking. I was relating the story over the phone to my kid brother in Berkeley, Softball Ray, when he interrupted me mid-tale to say, “Wait a second. Wait a second. I have two questions.” At which point I stammered, “Oh no, now it’s happening to you!”
For a Bonus Burlian Convergence on themes donutian, click here.
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FOLLOW-UP
More on that disquieting loser streak
over in Ray’s Berkeley Softball game
Speaking of my brother Ray, regular readers will be relieved to hear that the multi-game losing streak in which his successive teams in the regular Sunday morning contests of his ongoing now-27-year Berkeley softball game had been mired, and which we recently alluded to here, finally broke the other day at eight consecutive losses. But not before one of the regular players, Brian Harding, an atmospheric physicist (of course he is: as some of you will recall, Ray’s game features a revolving cast of waitresses, professors, lawyers, trademark consultants, would-be and has-been entrepreneurs, students, retirees, homeless people, scientists, housewives, their kids, “embittered ex-partners,” and so forth, so of course there is bound to be the occasional atmospheric scientist)—anyway Harding ran the numbers and sent over a fascinating memo. To fully understand its implications, one needs to be reminded (for full details see Rayball’s first appearance in these pages here) how every week Ray emails a list of hundreds of locals who have taken to frequenting the game, inviting participation in the upcoming Sunday’s match on a first-replied-first-accepted basis. Once twenty folks have accepted (usually within hours of the precipitating email-blast), he closes applications for that week and proceeds to fashion what he hopes will be a pair of exquisitely balanced rosters, two teams as evenly matched as he can make them (both offensively and defensively, he assigns positions as well), to one of which he nominates a captain and the other of which he himself routinely helms from his regular perch at first base). And he always tries to be scrupulously fair: as he says, he would rather lose by one point than win by twenty (and every time there’s a blowout he extravagantly offers to resign though somehow he never actually does).
The point here being that the teams are different every week, and yet, and this was the thing, his own rotating team had been racking up a uncanny series of losses (notwithstanding the fact that each time they had shot out to a shocking lead in the early going only to fritter it away as the game proceeded). Ray was becoming demoralized, operatically so, across his weekly Tuesday midnight game summaries (might it be that he himself was the accursed one, as several of his rotating roster of doomed teammates had taken to wondering). At which point Brian the atmospheric physicist sent over the following email:
From: Brian Harding
Date: Wed, Sep 18, 2024 at 5:14 PM
To: Raymond WeschlerYour losing streak inspired me to once again troll through the Rayball database (2020-2023 only, for now). It turns out that you previously had a losing streak of 8 games. So if you lose on Sunday, then the next game may be a chance to break a record.
However, if it makes you feel better, I looked at the other players and you're in good company. Here's a plot of everyone in the league, organized by their max win streak and max losing streak. Michael Davey, Paul Fine, Burt, and Porter all have longer losing streaks than you do. I don't think I've ever met Chris L, but that poor soul appears to have won a few games early on, but then lost 12 in a row and quit Rayball.
On the winning side, Chris Fure holds a clear record with an 11-game streak. He also gets a shoutout for the overall "streakiest" player, also having an 8-game losing streak.
Ah, to be alive in this day and age, across which such sheer Himalayas of data have steadily been piling up, along with the sherpa nerds capable of scaling them and returning with insanely recondite findings such as these, which nevertheless somehow seem vaguely pertinent to so much else in the rest of our ongoing analog lives…
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More from Errol’s Aerie
Some further entries in our ongoing retrospective of classic commercials fashioned by the legendary documentarian Errol Morris (for more on which and whom, see here).
Miller High Life:
Southern Comfort:
Levi’s:
Citibank:
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ANIMAL MITCHELL
Cartoons by David Stanford, from the Animal Mitchell archive
animalmitchellpublications@gmail.com
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