Fluorescent Bulbs Emit UV Rays
I have surmised that fluorescent bulbs emit low-level UV rays. There is no other explanation for the subtle face tan I have recently acquired. In the past two weeks, I have been outside twice. The first occasion was to hoist the rumbling wheels of my trash bins to the curb. The other time was to slog them back to their specified lineup alongside my apartment. The rest of my time has been spent viewing episodes of Portlandia [All of them. All three seasons] and typing in my storage closet of an office. Most Midwesterners my age [tricenarians] come to the Bay Area to step out of the closet, which they should be able to do anyplace. There shouldn’t be a closet to begin with. They should feel safe boasting their orientation to the world stentorian from rooftops or just quietly be themselves in a same-sex relationship while living harmoniously among the devout Twitter followers of Rick Santorum and the Westboro Baptist Facebook subscribers before it was riotously commandeered by hacker group, Anonymous. Regardless of zip code, those LGBT’s should feel safe, especially in place like NYC. But that is for another post… I have come to here to step into the closet and latch the door behind me to write in my hovel undisturbed by the ordinary sounds of a mostly quiet neighborhood [flocks of geese that honk, tires that hum on pavement, tiny students excited to be let out of school that skip giddily home – basically all of the audible indication of everyday life on earth that defines Hell for sufferers of misophonia]. And that is exactly what I have been doing. Writing and watching Portlandia. I have been doing it so much that I may have sustained a tailbone injury from sitting too long like a bedridden patient that develops painful bedsores from a prolonged, sloth-like existence. I only get up to make coffee or consume protein-rich snacks, like Greek yogurt mixed with gelatinous acai berries or fiber infused black beans that ferment in chilly Tupperware. I suppose this is how I work. I might write six or eight pages before I am able to scribble something coherent enough to use in a script or the book of poems / essays I am working on. If I could publish the stacks of unintelligible pages piled up around me, I would be one of the most prolific authors on the market. It takes awhile for me to warm up though. That is what I have always read about most writers and am discovering to be true of myself. When I worked fulltime I would always think, “It’s fine. I’ll get home, type a few pages and in no time, I will have a polished script. I’ll just sit down at the keyboard, enter the story where I left off.” Which of course, never happened. I would either be too tired to write or when I did muster the will to sit down and type, it would be something entirely different than I anticipated, verifiably insane and unusable. Sure, it may have been interesting to a clinical psychologist on its own, but as a story, it wasn’t working. I was living in a fantasy world thinking I could just sit down and produce intelligible content that flowed. Sitting in this room for the past two months struggling to produce a Portlandia episode comprised of 22 – 26 pages [entirely on spec] while trying to finish a feature-length script and book of poems / essays has been humbling. I kneel before the gods of the literati. I am beginning to figure out how the right hemisphere of my brain works though and I am honing in on a disciplined regimen. And I am happy to announce that I have completed a full episode of Portlandia [which again, I have done entirely on spec]. Read the rest of this entry »
