Today at work was rather a drag. One other guy is on my specific task, a
talented programmer with far more experience than I. Both of us have been
given the job of redesigning certain control parameter panels for our
application. I just finished my first a week ago; he's on the verge of
completing his first, however his is far more complex. Suddenly, he's been
called away to fight fires elsewhere, but since his code is almost done
it's up to me to perform the final cosmetic touches - supposedly "just"
adding comments required by the coding standards. Other than that, it was
"done" (or so he said - yet today I discovered that it doesn't work!) Until
yesterday I wasn't at all familiar with his panel's functionality within
our application, so he gave me that information all at once, along with
how it works, in what's sometimes referred to as "brain dump":
he scrolled through his code on-screen, explaining what it does (and then
he left). In this type of situation I'm a good receiver for five or ten
minutes, then my buffers fill up and I just nod my head, making the
agreeable conversational noises - the acronym MEGO is relevant here. So
now they're expecting all this stuff in a few days, both looking
pretty and working, and I have that drowning, apathetic sensation
that's somewhat anti-motivational - I'm doomed, why bother? And with the
other guy gone, there's nobody to watch me, so my tendency to procrastinate
and goof off <1> is
stronger than ever.
Whenever someone is reciting a bunch of new information I'm supposed to
somehow retain, I think of this panel in an
R. Crumb story called "Dumb"
(from Zap #13, 1994). It shows Bob in an office with a suit, a tax
accountant type saying "Now, if we take a depreciation over the next five
years and amortise the interest that should put you just under the 30%
bracket...you follow me?", and he's nodding and saying "Uhh... I guess
so...", while question marks are swimming around his head. The caption
says "Still, I think I'm some sort of an 'idiot' because of L.S.D. (that's
right, blame it on the drugs!)" This is one of his self-examination-type
stories, quite a good one but a little disingenuous, since its thrust is
regret of his druggie past. But his acid experiments were probably
the catalyst for his artistic greatness - for many acid casualties that's
obviously not true, but R.Crumb's case was different - check this segment
from his 1988 Comics Journal interview with Gary Groth:
CRUMB: All that stuff from the late '60s was inspired by LSD. The visions
and attitudes I got out of taking that drug definitely altered my work
drastically.
GROTH: You told a story about how you took one very bad trip...
CRUMB: One, or two, or three, or four...
GROTH: No, this was one where someone actually warned you about this
particular hit, but you took it anyway, and you described yourself as being
in some "weird electric fog," which you had some difficulty getting out of.
CRUMB: Yeah, I took the drug in New York [in 1965], and I left New York and went to
Chicago and stayed with my friend Marty Pahls. That's when I thought up all those
characters that dominated my comics from that period: Mr. Natural, Shuman the Human,
the Snoids, Flakey Foont... I was seeing Snoids everywhere. It was really weird. It
was a state of grace in a way. I couldn't talk. Whenever I was riding a bus or
sitting around my mind would just start to drift into this uncontrollable state. I
would see ladies dancing, electronic figures in my brain, with no control over it. It
was a kind of delirium, but it was visionary and kind of nice. I remember when it
ended I thought, "Well, here I am, I'm back down to Earth now. Too bad."
GROTH: How long did that delirium last?
CRUMB: For a couple of months. I would just drift in and out of it. But I was
completely non-functional. I couldn't do anything. I could draw, but I could
hardly talk to people, let alone hold down a job or anything.
GROTH: So, you feel that you wouldn't have been able to create what you did
without the drug?
CRUMB: It would've been different, it definitely would've been different without
that. Something happened in there. I could show you in my sketchbooks where that
period starts, when I was in that fuzzy state, and how my art suddenly went
through this change, this transformation in that couple of months. I don't know if
it would've happened without that or not.