Random Thoughts

We have been putting people under since 1846, and we still don't fully know how it works.

That's the part that gets me. Not the chemistry — the routine. Somewhere right now a person is counting backward from ten, and somewhere around seven the world ends. No dream, no dark, no sense of duration. Sleep at least leaves a residue — you wake knowing time passed, that you were somewhere. Anesthesia leaves nothing. You are mid-sentence, and then a stranger is saying your name and it is four hours later and the four hours never happened to you. Not skipped. Not fast-forwarded. Simply absent.

It's the closest thing to nonexistence a person can survive. A clean deletion of the self, scheduled, billed, recovered from by lunch.

And the mechanism is still, after nearly two centuries, an open question. We know which drugs do it. We can dose it to the minute. But how a molecule reaches in and switches off the thing that is you — the seeing, the worrying, the sense of being here — nobody can quite say. We turn consciousness off the way you'd flip a breaker in a house whose wiring you've never seen.

What stops me is that none of this stops anyone. People sign the form. They make the joke about the gas. They count. We have decided, collectively, that the one experience nobody can describe from the inside is fine, is normal, is Tuesday. The deepest mystery we have, and we schedule it around our errands.

The video is four hours long and that is the point. Not the argument — the duration. Four hours says: I did the reading, I went deep, you can trust this. The runtime is the thesis. The thumbnail barely needs words anymore.

I've started noticing how much I defer to length. A 4,000-word piece reads as researched. Three tight paragraphs read as a "take." A twelve-hour retrospective on a game I will never play feels, somehow, definitive. We've quietly agreed that time spent equals work done, and work done equals true.

It's backwards. Padding is free. Anyone can be long — you get there by not deciding what to cut, by keeping the tangent and the recap and the "but first, some context." Length is what an argument looks like before someone has done the hard part.

The hard part is compression: knowing a thing well enough to throw away nine-tenths of it and keep the tenth that holds weight. A short strong piece is a long weak one that somebody bothered to finish.

So I've stopped trusting the reflex. When something runs very long I no longer think thorough. I think: nobody made you choose.

This post is short. Read that however you like.

Though in many ways I’ve always known, I’ve only this weekend indwelled that without breath, we are nothing. I don’t mean that in some grand cosmic way (such is given) but in a kōanic, simple observation. Sure there are the meditators and monks and wellness types who know this all too well, but what about the rest of us? Do we take breath for granted? Or do we reserve that attention for the moments that matter?

Yesterday I laid on the brick in my backyard next to my Great Dane, Louie, as he died from what I assume was a heart attack (he was 9 and had DCM and a number of other long-term ailments, though through the end he was happy and nosy and sassy and playful all the same). I can’t shake the sound and feel of his last breath. One final exhale. There may be a word that encapsulates it — if there is I don’t know it. But then I noticed myself time after time yesterday and today exhaling slowly as my mind went back. I thought of my collegiate decathlon days, exhaling as I heard “on your marks”, drowning out all that was around me. I thought of the slightly-more-forceful-than-average exhales on my rebreather, deeper underwater than the Statue of Liberty is tall. Maybe it’s a good thing we think of breath only when absolutely necessary. Scarcity eases preciousness, even if only in notice. And what’s more precious than breath?