I dreamed that I, Steven Bollinger, also known as The Wrong Monkey, author of this blog and perenniel contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature, was also, to a certain extent, the fictional Saul Berenson, big CIA muckety-muck portrayed by Mandy Patinkin on the TV series "Homeland." I wrote this blog and was myself, but I also had a huge magnificent beard like Saul's, and I worked at CIA headquarters in Langley. Working on this blog was my job at the CIA. No-one seemed to have any doubt that success on the blog, high readership and my professional success as a writer, equaled a good job done for the CIA and better security for the US.
However, at the moment my methods were unpopular. I was working on a computer program which, I was convinced, would bring more traffic to the blog and greater safety to the world. However, my colleagues -- young punks, most of them -- had very little if any confidence in my abilities as a programmer. It seemed clear to me that my program was working, but mysteriously, no one else seemed to notice that traffic on my blog had sharply increased.
A man who resembled Dar Adal, the fictional colleague of the fictional Berenson on "Homeland," came to invite me to have some waffles for brunch with him. I'd recently started jogging and didn't feel the need for all of that syrup and butter, but Dar was very insistent.
Everything seemed connected: the blog, espionage, jogging, waffles -- it all seemed like one seamless thing.
Walking to the restaurant which Dar had recently discovered to get our waffle brunch, the topic of conversation gradually turned from Dar raving about the waffles at this place, which Dar assured me would blow my mind, to Dar complaining about Carrie Mathison (the fictional character portrayed by Claire Danes on "Homeland," Saul's protégé and friend). Carrie was convinced that some vital intelligence was being passed at dog shows, and was spending a lot of time among the people who showed dogs, despite the CIA director threatening her with suspension or worse if she didn't stop this line of inquiry. Carrie herself had gotten a dog for the first time in her life and was bonding with it. As usual, many people seemed to think that Carrie had finally gone permanently insane, and very few people besides me/Saul could see that she was continuing to function at genius level.
The neighborhood we were walking through on our way to the restaurant was beautiful: full of high-end shops, with broad sidewalks which had recently been paved with tiles in dark earth-tones. Many trees lined both sides of the street, it was a pleasantly brisk autumn morning, there were a few leafs in various bright colors on the sidewalks, the laughter of schoolchildren on recess was faintly aubible. The whole area was like an embodiment of the very principles of prosperity, calm, good health and other good things.
But before we reached the restaurant, the dispute about Carrie had become so heated that Dar began to grab and push me in anger, and I turned around and headed back to the office rather than risk getting into an actual fistfight with Dar, who was also a friend as well as a colleague.
Everything seemed connected in my mind: the blog, the CIA, computer programs, jogging and eating healthy, waffles, the beautiful neighborhood, the laughter of children, dogs -- everything. As I walked back to the office I felt very frustrated, because I thought that Carrie could understand such connections much more clearly than I. I wanted to talk to her and ask her to explain the connectedness, or at least try to make it more comprehensible to me. But at the moment she was undercover with the show-dog people, and very hard to reach.
At the office I checked the stats for the traffic on my blog, and it seemed as clear as could be that my programming had increased the traffic tremendously.
Then it occurred to me that no-one else had looked at the stats on the terminal in my office. The blog stats were classified and encrypted and tightly controlled, I couldn't access them on a phone, and neither could anyone else, unless they were an excellent hacker, or had some kind of clearance which I didn't know for sure that anyone had.
Otherwise, the blog stats were only accessible on the terminals at Langley and a few other CIA offices around the world. I had assumed that my snot-nosed young colleagues, who had remained so strangely unimpressed by my program and its effect on the blog's traffic, had been looking at the same data as I -- but now it occurred to me that perhaps an enemy hacker had separated my terminal from the others, so that either I was looking at falsified stats about the blog, or everyone else was, or maybe even both.
Then I woke up.
Showing posts with label homeland. Show all posts
Showing posts with label homeland. Show all posts
Monday, November 23, 2015
Monday, November 16, 2015
Dream Log: Real And Unreal Cities
Like many other people who have spent most of their adult lives in big cities, I grew up in rural areas, dreaming --literally and figuratively -- about big cities. Since I had spent very little time in big cities, my childhood dreams about them were, of course, quite unrealistic. For some reason, many of my dreams about big cities still have that same unrealistic quality, featuring a lot of really gorgeous-looking extremely-big buildings which have never existed.
Shortly before I went to bed last night I saw the latest episode of "Homeland." The episode was set mostly in Berlin, as is most of the current season of the show, and partly in Amsterdam. The establishing shots of Amsterdam, the wide-angled shots of downtown areas, clearly were really shot in Amsterdam. While watching the show I wondered how many of the scenes set in Amsterdam with Claire Danes and other major cast members were actually shot in Amsterdam, and how many back in Berlin. I was thinking, if that's fake Amsterdam shot in Berlin, it's pretty good fake Amsterdam.
Then this morning it occurred to me to wonder how many of the scenes set in Berlin might actually have been shot on a Hollywood sound stage, or in Canada, or Pittsburgh, or wherever. Part of the reason that more big-budget movies and TV are shot in southern California than anywhere else is because the area offers locations which can look like anywhere on Earth: the polar regions, the tropics, the Sahara, mountains, prairies, ancient Egypt, the moon -- you name it. And for over 100 years Hollywood has just kept on getting better at looking like anywhere. It used to disappoint me after I learned that so many movie and TV locations were faked. Now I just see it as one more aspect of film-making which can be done well or poorly, and I appreciate it when it's done well. Many movies set in NYC and shot in LA look much more like NYC than many shot in NYC. That's a fact. If any director has made a really good and convincing movie set in LA, with lots of exteriors, which was shot entirely in NYC, that director is an awesome genius. It's a lot more difficult than the other way around.
So anyway, I went to sleep thinking: Real Amsterdam? Fake Amsterdam? And maybe subconsciously I was already thinking: Real Berlin? Fake Berlin? (Clearly, a lot of it is real Berlin, including a fair amount with main cast members. I'm just wondering whether the Berlin in the show is 100% Berlin.) And I dreamed about a very unrealistic-looking Cologne, Germany. Way too many skyscrapers, and most of the other buildings were also unrealistically tall. Germany doesn't do skyscrapers the way the US does. 14 of the 15 tallest buildings in Germany are in Frankfurt, which gives it a skyline rivaling that of Cleveland, and not rivaling Chicago or NYC, or even LA.
So yeah, this dream-Cologne had an entirely unrealistic emphasis upon the vertical. Even in the dream I thought, Hey, is this Berlin or something? But the city in the dream was much more rife with skyscrapers than the real Berlin or even the real Frankfurt. It was more like the real Hong Kong, skyscraper-wise, than anything in Europe. (East Asia is doing skyscrapers even more than the US, these days.)
And the dream was mostly about a friend and me walking up and down and around on open-air staircases on apartment buildings way, way up in the air, among glassed-in skyscrapers, in nice short-sleeves weather with gentle breezes, visiting people who had big luxurious apartments with spectacular views of many skyscrapers all jammed together in an entirely unrealistic downtown Cologne. It felt a lot like we were flying.
Shortly before I went to bed last night I saw the latest episode of "Homeland." The episode was set mostly in Berlin, as is most of the current season of the show, and partly in Amsterdam. The establishing shots of Amsterdam, the wide-angled shots of downtown areas, clearly were really shot in Amsterdam. While watching the show I wondered how many of the scenes set in Amsterdam with Claire Danes and other major cast members were actually shot in Amsterdam, and how many back in Berlin. I was thinking, if that's fake Amsterdam shot in Berlin, it's pretty good fake Amsterdam.
Then this morning it occurred to me to wonder how many of the scenes set in Berlin might actually have been shot on a Hollywood sound stage, or in Canada, or Pittsburgh, or wherever. Part of the reason that more big-budget movies and TV are shot in southern California than anywhere else is because the area offers locations which can look like anywhere on Earth: the polar regions, the tropics, the Sahara, mountains, prairies, ancient Egypt, the moon -- you name it. And for over 100 years Hollywood has just kept on getting better at looking like anywhere. It used to disappoint me after I learned that so many movie and TV locations were faked. Now I just see it as one more aspect of film-making which can be done well or poorly, and I appreciate it when it's done well. Many movies set in NYC and shot in LA look much more like NYC than many shot in NYC. That's a fact. If any director has made a really good and convincing movie set in LA, with lots of exteriors, which was shot entirely in NYC, that director is an awesome genius. It's a lot more difficult than the other way around.
So anyway, I went to sleep thinking: Real Amsterdam? Fake Amsterdam? And maybe subconsciously I was already thinking: Real Berlin? Fake Berlin? (Clearly, a lot of it is real Berlin, including a fair amount with main cast members. I'm just wondering whether the Berlin in the show is 100% Berlin.) And I dreamed about a very unrealistic-looking Cologne, Germany. Way too many skyscrapers, and most of the other buildings were also unrealistically tall. Germany doesn't do skyscrapers the way the US does. 14 of the 15 tallest buildings in Germany are in Frankfurt, which gives it a skyline rivaling that of Cleveland, and not rivaling Chicago or NYC, or even LA.
So yeah, this dream-Cologne had an entirely unrealistic emphasis upon the vertical. Even in the dream I thought, Hey, is this Berlin or something? But the city in the dream was much more rife with skyscrapers than the real Berlin or even the real Frankfurt. It was more like the real Hong Kong, skyscraper-wise, than anything in Europe. (East Asia is doing skyscrapers even more than the US, these days.)
And the dream was mostly about a friend and me walking up and down and around on open-air staircases on apartment buildings way, way up in the air, among glassed-in skyscrapers, in nice short-sleeves weather with gentle breezes, visiting people who had big luxurious apartments with spectacular views of many skyscrapers all jammed together in an entirely unrealistic downtown Cologne. It felt a lot like we were flying.
Wednesday, January 7, 2015
Some Aspects Of My Autistic Experience Of Life
On "Homeland," Saul once said to Carrie, "You are the smartest and the dumbest fucking person I have ever met." The producers apparently liked that line: they added it to the audio of the next season's opening montage. (I like how cable series still have what would have been considered "full-length" opening montages on network TV until 1990 or so, when the networks started making them shorter and shorter, and/or running the main credits over the beginning of the episode, sometimes eliminating the opening montages altogether, not to mention what they do with the closing credits. All to make more time for commercials. NOT TO MENTION RUNNING GODDAM COMMERCIALS DURING THE SHOWS, POP-UP COMMERCIALS ALONG THE BOTTOM OF THE SCREEN, THAT ARE GETTING BIGGER AND BIGGER AND LONGER AND LONGER, AND MAKING OUR LIVES MORE AND MORE CLOSELY RESEMBLE CONSTANT NIGHTMARES. Maybe 1990 was when the MBA's started to take over network TV from people who actually knew something about TV and to systematically ruin it, as they've ruined so much else in our lives. Anyway, although I like how cable shows still consider opening credits to be worth doing, it disappoints me that they tend to run identical opening credits every season. The only exception I know is "Homeland," so good for them.)
Anyway, the line struck me too, because more than once someone has said the same thing to me. One difference is that it hasn't been said to me when I was a top-echelon CIA agent by my good friend, a former and future Agency Director, but when I was working for minimum wage at McDonald's, or for 50 cents an hour above minimum wage at a national-chain bookstore, or for 2 bucks an hour above minimum wage for a year-round outdoor graveyard-shift job in Alaska. Yes, it was colder than a welldigger's ass. Colder than penguin shit. Colder than -- well it was pretty cold, and I had chronic bronchitis, so I finally had the sense to quit before it literally killed me.
But I'm accepting that I've had it this way because I'm autistic. Not because I'm lazy or something like that. On some of the aforementioned entry-level jobs, some co-workers, emphasizing my exceptional intelligence more than my exceptional stupidity, assumed that soon I would be moving up in the world. They seemed to take it as a given that I was going to be doing something much more interesting and making much more money doing it.
Over and over I encountered such assumptions about myself, and before I was diagnosed, these assumptions puzzled me. I always felt more convinced by the assumptions of different people, who assured me that I would never amount to a sack of shit. Now I know that I'm autistic, and those two radically-different attitudes toward me and my aptitudes, taken together, make sense. Am I a genius? No. Am I a moron? No. I'm a genius and a moron. I'm a mutant. An alien in your midst. (Have no fear: I come in peace.) Sometimes I can solve a problem that's had you completely stuck and sometimes you'll need to explain something to me like I was 5 years old.
Some autistics have elite, top-government-clearance jobs. I don't think Carrie Mathison is autistic, but she's definitely neurologically divergent, and being atypical on a fundamental, neurological level often brings with it being very smart and very fucking stupid compared to average. Some autistics die homeless or in institutions and will never get even the lowest-level government security clearance. Most autistics my age or older haven't been correctly diagnosed. Consider Rain Man: correctly diagnosed even though he was older than I in 1988, smart enough to help you count cards in a 6-deck shoe, but too stupid not to tell the casino that you're counting cards. Didn't even seem to understand that he'd done something wrong by letting them know. The Feds aren't going to give him any kind of security clearance. In fact, it's pretty hard for me to imagine any sort of job for which Rain Man would be suited, other than charging admission for people to come and observe him. And believe me, I've given it a lot of thought. Why? Because I have a lot in common with him.
My arithmetical ability to do things like count cards in a 6-deck shoe and multiply 4-digit numbers in my head is somewhat less than Rain Man's, but it's way, way above average. And my tendency to tell the casino that we're counting cards seems to be very high -- my sense of what is appropriate or inappropriate to say in a given situation is very weak, that is. I'm guessing here, going over events in my mind which completely puzzled me at the time and trying to figure out what happened. Sometimes I'll figure out years after the fact that I should have said something at a particular point, or shouldn't have said what I did. After years of pondering it the way Rain Man ponders Abbott & Costello's "Who's On First?" sketch without getting it at all. Sometimes years after the fact I'll figure out something that someone said in a joking way.
For example, about 15 years after the fact, I finally put it together that a guy I'd known had been making fun of me by comparing me to Rain Man. (Politically-correct folks: sit the fuck back down and shut the fuck up, this was a very nice guy, an extremely nice guy, a perfect example of the point I often try to make in this blog that you can be extremely politically-incorrect also and a loving, generous, caring Left-wing Democrat staunchly opposed to all bigotry and prejudice, or politically-correct and also a hateful asshole.) That's why he would often mimic Rain Man and say thing like : "Yeah... Yeah... Yeah, definitely." He was mocking me, because, apparently, sometimes I act a little bit like Rain Man. Or maybe much more than a little bit. This was 1997, 10 years before I was finally diagnosed.
After 15 years I figured out he did his Rain Man routine in order to mock me, which gives me hope that eventually the real Rain Man, with the loving, dedicated, although occasionally impatient and not necessarily always politically-correct help of the young Tom Cruise, may finally figure out what the "Who's On First?" sketch is about. It does not give me a lot of hope that I will ever be a certain sort of sparkling social butterfly who gives inspiration to the next Noel Coward. I'm more likely to inspire someone like the next Mel Brooks or the next Farrelly brothers. (And that's okay.) Like Sheldon Cooper on "The Big Bang Theory," I have a crazy-high IQ while at the same time there are very important, basic areas of human intelligence in which I'm very, very stupid. No doubt there have been very many incidents in which I have behaved very stupidly and never noticed that something was wrong. Sheldon's Mom had him tested but she didn't follow up with that specialist, so I've had several years' worth of opportunity to become more aware of my neurological situation. I don't have a prestigious job like Sheldon, but I can drive (3 speeding tickets and 0 collisions in 39 years). I don't know Klingon but I know Latin. Sheldon's pronunciation in German is just freaking terrible for someone who insinuates that he's read Einstein untranslated.
Where was I? Just recently I've become aware that I constantly go off on tangents and that this is common among autistics. Been doing it all my life, just very recently became aware of it and began to ponder the consequences of it in my social interactions with the Earthlings.
Then there's eye contact: I'm not so good with the eye contact. Back in 1988, that acting teaching in Acting 101, did he tell us about how we could look at another actor's forehead onstage, and to the audience and even to the other actor it would would look exactly as if we were making eye contact -- is that something he always said in Acting 101, or did he toss in that tidbit because he noticed that I pretty much couldn't maintain eye contact for more than a second or so at a time? I've been working on eye contect in therapy, but I don't see any reason to expect that I'll ever become normal in that respect. "Look me in the eye, boy!" "Nossir, don't think I'll be doing that."
Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Valete. E pluribus unum. Aio, quantitas magna frumentorum est.
Anyway, the line struck me too, because more than once someone has said the same thing to me. One difference is that it hasn't been said to me when I was a top-echelon CIA agent by my good friend, a former and future Agency Director, but when I was working for minimum wage at McDonald's, or for 50 cents an hour above minimum wage at a national-chain bookstore, or for 2 bucks an hour above minimum wage for a year-round outdoor graveyard-shift job in Alaska. Yes, it was colder than a welldigger's ass. Colder than penguin shit. Colder than -- well it was pretty cold, and I had chronic bronchitis, so I finally had the sense to quit before it literally killed me.
But I'm accepting that I've had it this way because I'm autistic. Not because I'm lazy or something like that. On some of the aforementioned entry-level jobs, some co-workers, emphasizing my exceptional intelligence more than my exceptional stupidity, assumed that soon I would be moving up in the world. They seemed to take it as a given that I was going to be doing something much more interesting and making much more money doing it.
Over and over I encountered such assumptions about myself, and before I was diagnosed, these assumptions puzzled me. I always felt more convinced by the assumptions of different people, who assured me that I would never amount to a sack of shit. Now I know that I'm autistic, and those two radically-different attitudes toward me and my aptitudes, taken together, make sense. Am I a genius? No. Am I a moron? No. I'm a genius and a moron. I'm a mutant. An alien in your midst. (Have no fear: I come in peace.) Sometimes I can solve a problem that's had you completely stuck and sometimes you'll need to explain something to me like I was 5 years old.
Some autistics have elite, top-government-clearance jobs. I don't think Carrie Mathison is autistic, but she's definitely neurologically divergent, and being atypical on a fundamental, neurological level often brings with it being very smart and very fucking stupid compared to average. Some autistics die homeless or in institutions and will never get even the lowest-level government security clearance. Most autistics my age or older haven't been correctly diagnosed. Consider Rain Man: correctly diagnosed even though he was older than I in 1988, smart enough to help you count cards in a 6-deck shoe, but too stupid not to tell the casino that you're counting cards. Didn't even seem to understand that he'd done something wrong by letting them know. The Feds aren't going to give him any kind of security clearance. In fact, it's pretty hard for me to imagine any sort of job for which Rain Man would be suited, other than charging admission for people to come and observe him. And believe me, I've given it a lot of thought. Why? Because I have a lot in common with him.
My arithmetical ability to do things like count cards in a 6-deck shoe and multiply 4-digit numbers in my head is somewhat less than Rain Man's, but it's way, way above average. And my tendency to tell the casino that we're counting cards seems to be very high -- my sense of what is appropriate or inappropriate to say in a given situation is very weak, that is. I'm guessing here, going over events in my mind which completely puzzled me at the time and trying to figure out what happened. Sometimes I'll figure out years after the fact that I should have said something at a particular point, or shouldn't have said what I did. After years of pondering it the way Rain Man ponders Abbott & Costello's "Who's On First?" sketch without getting it at all. Sometimes years after the fact I'll figure out something that someone said in a joking way.
For example, about 15 years after the fact, I finally put it together that a guy I'd known had been making fun of me by comparing me to Rain Man. (Politically-correct folks: sit the fuck back down and shut the fuck up, this was a very nice guy, an extremely nice guy, a perfect example of the point I often try to make in this blog that you can be extremely politically-incorrect also and a loving, generous, caring Left-wing Democrat staunchly opposed to all bigotry and prejudice, or politically-correct and also a hateful asshole.) That's why he would often mimic Rain Man and say thing like : "Yeah... Yeah... Yeah, definitely." He was mocking me, because, apparently, sometimes I act a little bit like Rain Man. Or maybe much more than a little bit. This was 1997, 10 years before I was finally diagnosed.
After 15 years I figured out he did his Rain Man routine in order to mock me, which gives me hope that eventually the real Rain Man, with the loving, dedicated, although occasionally impatient and not necessarily always politically-correct help of the young Tom Cruise, may finally figure out what the "Who's On First?" sketch is about. It does not give me a lot of hope that I will ever be a certain sort of sparkling social butterfly who gives inspiration to the next Noel Coward. I'm more likely to inspire someone like the next Mel Brooks or the next Farrelly brothers. (And that's okay.) Like Sheldon Cooper on "The Big Bang Theory," I have a crazy-high IQ while at the same time there are very important, basic areas of human intelligence in which I'm very, very stupid. No doubt there have been very many incidents in which I have behaved very stupidly and never noticed that something was wrong. Sheldon's Mom had him tested but she didn't follow up with that specialist, so I've had several years' worth of opportunity to become more aware of my neurological situation. I don't have a prestigious job like Sheldon, but I can drive (3 speeding tickets and 0 collisions in 39 years). I don't know Klingon but I know Latin. Sheldon's pronunciation in German is just freaking terrible for someone who insinuates that he's read Einstein untranslated.
Where was I? Just recently I've become aware that I constantly go off on tangents and that this is common among autistics. Been doing it all my life, just very recently became aware of it and began to ponder the consequences of it in my social interactions with the Earthlings.
Then there's eye contact: I'm not so good with the eye contact. Back in 1988, that acting teaching in Acting 101, did he tell us about how we could look at another actor's forehead onstage, and to the audience and even to the other actor it would would look exactly as if we were making eye contact -- is that something he always said in Acting 101, or did he toss in that tidbit because he noticed that I pretty much couldn't maintain eye contact for more than a second or so at a time? I've been working on eye contect in therapy, but I don't see any reason to expect that I'll ever become normal in that respect. "Look me in the eye, boy!" "Nossir, don't think I'll be doing that."
Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Valete. E pluribus unum. Aio, quantitas magna frumentorum est.
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