My soul is starting to revive. I'm not only writing again, I've started editing Wikipedia again. Things that I stopped doing because I was too exhausted as a truck driver to continue doing, and had given up because I was diverting all my money to pay for a third marriage, and because I had grown weary with life and decided didn't matter, I am once again doing for sheer love. 

Mind you, I've decided that life is much too short for me to spend any more time trying to woo and please a woman. This is not a statement against women. I suspect that, in a different culture, I could have a successful marriage. But my personality, physiology and history, plus this culture and these times, all combine to make an aromatic poop sauce out of my intersex relationships.

I probably say this more than I need to. But it comes into my mind more than it probably will as the years pass and I grow more content with my life. I'm reminded of it now because I've only had this point of view -- that bachelorhood can be a good thing -- for a comparatively short time, and because I'm gradually discovering more benefits. At this time I'm still in the process of convincing myself that the course I've found to be necessary, is also good.

So maybe I should stop feeling embarrassed that I talk about bachelorhood frequently. I notice myself mentioning it and consider the line, "the dude doth protest too much, methinks." Is it evidence that I don't believe what I say, that I say it so often? That I'm trying to persuade myself?

Not necessarily, and as I now think, no. This whole lifestyle, and the possibilities that go with it, cut against the grain of my religion and a lifetime of expectations and hopes. So yeah, I am trying to convince myself, in the sense that the trained areas of my brain still react against what I'm doing and planning. It's how things work when you adopt a transcendent idea and have to put off old ways.

I have my own reasons for deciding to be a bachelor which are actually perfectly consistent with my religion and philosophy; not the stuff I'd talk to just anyone about (it has nothing to do with wanting to caress men's bums). This makes it easier; I'm not rebelling against former beliefs, so much as adjusting my expectations. It's a huge change, and as I get used to it, I start thinking of ways my life can change. For instance, I don't HAVE to be a trucker any more if I don't want to. At least, I'm under less pressure to barf up money to maintain child support plus a marriage.

With the incredible kindness and encouragement of my younger sister, who invited me to live with her family while I finish my recovery from brain surgery and revive my writing, I am beginning to do just that. It's been heavenly to spend frequent sessions discussing books and ideas with her. I didn't know until just a few years ago that we shared literary interests. Now she's encouraging me to consider professional and artistic goals that I'd discarded long ago because they didn't seem practical.

Preston McConkie

5 hours ago near Washington, UT

• ‎3,100 words last night. Kinda scares me; it was comforting, to a degree, to think I was forever done with fiction, because that made me feel like a hard-nosed, practical man. Argh, now I have to contend with that cherished old ghost of creative compulsion.

  
  KLC: 

  I'm glad that you are not forever done with fiction. I think being a "hard-nosed, practical man" is highly overrated. I have no talent for writing, so I am truly appreciative of those persons who do have that talent. I spend a lot of tim...

  • • Preston McConkie Wow, that's profound, "characters who won't suffer if I make a mistake." That was the rub about journalism. When I screwed up, people sometimes got hurt.

      
      BG: On the other hand, my wife and I were talking about how we as readers suffered as teenagers when we thought Gandalf died in the Fellowship of the Rings, and how gratified we were when Tolkien brought him back in The Two Towers. Don't underestimate the impact that a well written character can have upon a reader.
    • Preston McConkie I've struggled for 15 years with the question of whether fiction was a worthy pursuit for a man of faith. More than 20 years ago I began wrestling with the question of whether science fiction was worthy for a man of faith. I determined then, that I wouldn't write atheist future fiction; if I could write in a multiworld universe, God would be its author. Very slowly I began to build a theistic but fascinating multiverse; I just thank my creator that I was raised LDS and have a theology that embraces an infinite universe filled with peopled worlds.
      
      But in 1996 I had what I then considered a permanent transcendent experience that turned me away from fiction and very quickly set me on the road that within weeks had me hosting a radio show and, in a little over a year, writing columns and news. I assumed for a long time that fiction was forever behind me.
      
      But the urge never fully departed and I remembered the joy I used to feel at creating life of my own. And I especially wanted to be someone who helped people feel joy like I felt reading spectacular books. While nothing has surpassed the exalted expansion of the mind and soul from reading God's word, still othing has ever surpassed for giddy pleasure and exhilaration the time I spent hiding in the BYU library during Education Week and devouring "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy."
      
      But Douglas Adams was the most charming of atheists who ever lived, and I could not decide if my pleasure was lawful. Since then, though, I've read other works and examined the exaltation they light in me, and decided that fiction, in its place, can be more powerful than truth. Undoubtedly this is so, since God himself uses it in his allegories, and Christ taught in parables.
      
      At last, re-reading The Good Earth, for some reason it comes clear to me that fiction can be as noble as anything people create, and simultaneously as diverting, restful and joyful. And then I put my hand to the keyboard last night and felt words flowing.
      
      That doesn't mean my latest composition is worth reading by anyone. I hope it will be, but at least I know it is good for my own soul.
      
      I'm writing in stilted manner right now; I hope I don't sound as pompous to others as it seems that I am. I deliberately aim for a blend of Shakespearean/King James English and the manner of the 19th Century. It's my favorite form of expression, and emulated by my favorite writers, including the inimitable Joss Whedon.
      
      Anyway, here I am, starting over with some of the emotions and hopes of myself at 23, hammering out that last ambitious novel on the eve of my LDS mission to England. That was the last story I finished. Now I have experience and perspective and hopefully can write something more worthy than that 280 pages that, when I came back from my mission, shocked me with its awfulness and has daunted me ever since, knowing that I could deceive myself so utterly about the worth of my own work.
      
      Here's praying I'm at least marginally less sucky at fiction than I was then.

The Cold Turkey Chronicles

Friday, March 2, 12:20 a.m.
Cold turkey since 8 a.m. yesterday. Hour 16.

I know what this feels like. For months on end, this is what it felt like virtually all day, every day, in 1994-95. It had been creeping up on me, becoming a more frequent visitor, ever since Iraq.

Back then it was a feeling of certain doom, and an agitation that made me clench every muscle, sometimes thrash in helplessness, sometimes bite into the back of my fingers as hard as I could, just to distract from the physical feeling of tension like the feeling of onrushing destruction.

This is what's called "dysphoria." It's a major effect of opiate withdrawals. It's the monkey on the back of the addict. I've felt it before but I've always retreated from it because it's awful.

This isn't quite as bad as the last time, when I was coming off 60mg of morphine each eight hours and 40mg of percocet each four. That was nasty. That was unbearable.

Well, this isn't what I'd have called bearable. It's just that I know what it is. I'm so well acquainted with it now, it no longer frightens me. That feeling of doom doesn't mean anything. It's just a feeling.

It hurts. There's no difference between emotional and physical pain; that's been proven. They affect the same nerves, they manifest in the same way. It's just that certain pain is associated with emotions. That's a good thing; a properly functioning body is supposed to manifest neural perceptions that way. It warns us. It cautions us. It chastens us.

Then there are things that take the nervous system and turn it upside down, disconnecting it from reality, artificially punishing or artificially rewarding. It's not a good thing. It's not the way it's supposed to be.

The first thing that did that for me was the nerve agent "blocking" pills I took in Saudi Arabia and Iraq for a month and a half. I trusted the leaders who told me to take it. It was experimental poison and even in theory it was a crazy treatment. The pills were nerve agent. In an average healthy body they were supposed to block a third of the neural synapses. Supposedly this would block the "real" nerve agent from working its way between the synapses. The pill poison was supposed to cause less damage, to work its way out of the system faster.

Whatta buncha crap.

The second thing was the actual nerve agent, cycloserin. On March 2, 1991, we were sitting in the sun in Iraq, resting up after an exhausting four days of dash and smash. The Republican Guards had fled, bloodied, abandoning miles of bunkers filled with chemical weapons. The brass in Riyadh sent down orders for the engineers of the 18th Airborne Corps to blow it all up.

I lay on a cot next to my still mostly loaded ammunition truck and watched the small, gray mushroom clouds billow up as engineers set off demo charges all around us. The explosions were sharp and loud, smacking the ears and shaking the ground, but not with a rumble. With a single, hard wham. And unbeknownst to every fighting man watching, enjoying the show of Saddam's war machinery going up in smoke, that smoke was laced with nerve agent, and pretty soon we were all breathing it.

To be continued. I feel like crap, and I gotta pop some Ambien and ride this out for a while.

I want drugs!


I started using percocet to stave off the head pains in late November last year. The neurosurgeons kept saying "this kind of tumor grows really, really slowly." I suspect they'd reached that point of knowledge saturation whereby new information gets ignored; whatever this "kind" of tumor normally does, THIS tumor wasn't growing nearly as slowly as they expected. My eye went from troubled to useless in a couple of months, and then the pain behind the eye got unbearable.


Thank heaven for Dr. Crow at the Nephi VA Clinic, who had mercy on me and gave me some oxycodone with acetaminophen. Thank heaven for that stash of morphine left over from my herniated lumbar discs, that got me through til the percs arrived.


Now it's been about seven weeks since the docs spent 16 hours combing trigeminal schwanoma out of the nerves on the lower right side of my brain, and the steady aches that gave way to stabbing pains have mostly gone away, so long as I keep my fingers off the unadhered bones that still wobble and squeak in my skull. But getting off oxycodone is no picnic. It took me two months to get off the massive morphine and percs I was taking with the back; fortunately the pain wasn't as severe with my head. But the dysphoria of withdrawals is awful.

Here is today's comment on the matter:

Preston McConkie

I want drugs. I WANT DRUGZ! But I want work. And they make me pee to work. Drugs are in pee. Drugs make bad pee. Bad pee means no workee. No workee, no piles of money. Me like money. Me like money lots! So no drugs. ME WANT GOOD PEE!

 ·  · 30 minutes ago near Saint George

• • 
    

    Brent Glines I think you need to invest in higher quality drugs. The ones you are using aren't hacking it.
    

    19 minutes ago · 
  • 
    

    Preston McConkie That's just because I'm not taking them. They're wonderful when taken. Opium rocks!
    

    18 minutes ago · 
  • 
    

    Preston McConkie The plan is to repeatedly overdose on Ambien and sleep through the withdrawals. Fortunately zolpidem tartrate is a hypnotic, not a narcotic/analgesic (though as they say, there's no gesic like an anal gesic). The only consequence should be occasional dehydration, running out of Ambien, and not being able to sleep for a month afterward.
    

    2 minutes ago ·