Welcome to my brain

Welcome to my brain! Population: one. Strap in boys and girls and non-binary or whatever pronouns you may use to identify yourself. It's gonna be interesting! It's gonna be a rollercoaster ride. It's gonna be written without AI. That final bit scares me, but I feel like my brain needs the exercise. Kind of like how we're all going to the gym now that we all have jobs that don't require us to move around anymore. Welcome to the gym of my brain now that AI is doing all the heavy thinking for me (Hey chatgpt, should I wear one or two socks? I feel like two is redundant...).

So, I've had this idea in my mind, to write about my brain. And I feel like the only way this is going to work, is by showing you. Think "A day in the life of", think "Reddit AMA", think "first date and you're trying to explain to the person sitting across from you what the hell a devops engineer does: so you write code, yea no. So you maintain servers? yea no. It's in the cloud..." Anyway: welcome to my brain, hey look, the title of the post!

Let's get properly started now. I'm in a book club. Every month we read another book, and this month we're doing non fiction. The book club picked "Consider the Lobster" by David Foster Wallace.

Hang on, this post is not going to be a book review. It's going to be an essay. The book is a collection of essays. So of course the first thing I had to do was figure out what exactly an essay is. "Hey chatgpt, what's an essay, make no mistakes!" Turns out "essay" comes from the french word "essayer" which means trying (for those of us who did not 'enjoy', and I'm using the world 'enjoy' very liberally here , a proper education). Writing an essay is an "attempt" to explore, test, or reason through an idea rather than deliver a final, absolute truth. The first essay in Wallace's book is an account of the AVN awards in 1998. If you're not familiar, you're a decent stand up person because: "The AVN Awards are annual industry honors presented by Adult Video News (AVN) to recognize excellence, achievement, and innovation in the adult entertainment industry. Often referred to as the "Oscars of porn" in popular culture". Thank you Wikipedia. Yes, Porn. You read that right. Right, that reminds me, I should put an NSFW warning in here somewhere. Well, warning: the rest of the text might contain pictures of my annotations from my copy of the book, depicting explicit acts. Better make sure your boss isn't watching you while you're reading this. Better make sure your boss isn't watching when you're reading Reddit either. Or wait up, make sure your boss is watching, then share the link in your company's Slack. I could use the site traffic. But I digress.

Dear reader, I hear you. What does porn have to do with 'a day inside the brain of the author of this blogpost'. Stick with me, we'll get there. Slowly, remember. Because we're "trying" to find an idea and explore it, and we might not get to a proper final conclusion. So, back to the essay about the AVN awards. There is the main text, detailing events of the AVN awards. And then there are footnotes. And boy, do I get excited when I see a proper footnote (remember Half a Shtof, Dear Sir where I discussed for about 20 minutes the footnote in Crime and Punishment where Half a Shtof is 600ml of vodka and how Marmeladov is giving a Ted talk).

But the author, Wallace, doesn't just like footnotes. He loves them, or to stay on brand with the AVN theme, he fetishizes them. Allow me to show you an example:

The footnote, ladies and gentlemen and other carbon life forms, is ONE AND A HALF PAGE LONG. I showed this to my partner and she rolled her eyes (I love her when she does this. You know I do sweetie!) But rolling her eyes told me enough. She basically said: "Dude... You're not seriously gonna read all that stuff." Meanwhile my mind was thinking: "Oh yes, finally somebody who thinks like me! Someone who thinks something, thinks of something else, then needs to explain that, then comes back to the original thought, then revises everything because they've found a new connection, rinse, repeat".

I mean, look at these footnotes:

The main text talks about the "fans" of adult entertainment. They're called 'mooks', an adult-industry term. Then there's a little asterisk, you glance down at the footnote. And there it is in all its glory: a full account of all the needed terminology and then some more. And not just that, there's even an exercise to use eight of them in a sentence, and an example solution.

My man Wallace even has footnotes with footnotes. Footnoteception. Hans Zimmer is already writing the soundtrack. Leonardo DiCaprio is eyeing a second Oscar. Anyway, a couple essays later, Wallace goes full UML (unified modelling language, a standardized, general-purpose visual modeling language used in software engineering and systems design)¹ diagram on the reader:

1) The irony of adding an explanation as to what UML is and then adding a footnote about it is not lost on the author.

Wallace, in 1998, already visualizing Terraform state graphs. I showed my loving partner, her eyes rolling even further back (Still loving you sweetie). My mind, even more intrigued: "I've found my brain's soulmate². Someone who thinks on the same wavelength as I do (approx. 25.984 micrometers, cfr. Petrova)".

2) The author wishes to make it explicitly clear that he loves his partner, and only his partner and that the reference to a soulmate is merely an intellectual curiosity that the author is currently investigating. This curiosity does not undo all the years of marriage while raising two kids and living together.

So that was layer 2 or 3. Back to layer 1. Welcome to my mind. We've gone one layer up in the dream. Now you understand why I had to show you some of Wallace's work. I had to show you, because my mind works the same way. Show, don't tell. Like in a good movie script. There used to be a whole explanation of me trying to explain to you, the reader, how my brain works. But show, don't tell. (again, the irony of me having to point out show, don't tell is not lost on the author)

Which reminds me. I was at my nephew's first birthday party (happy birthday boy) recently. Thinking back to birthday parties with the family when I was young. And there was this weird uncle or something, distant relationship. Mumbling things at the table. Being all smelly and weird. Probably drunk as well, I was too young to tell. Back to the present. Realization, oh crap, I am the weird uncle. Further realization: 'generational perspective'. This 'weird uncle' very possibly might have been living a perfectly coherent life that I just was not aware off at the time. Just like the kids at the party have no idea what is going on in this skull of mine. Maybe best that they're not exposed to that yet. Which begs the question, at what point can you start talking to your kid without any filter? Can you do that ever? Do you do that with anyone? Even with your partner you're putting up a filter: no honey, that dress does not make you look... yes honey, you were absolutely right... yes honey, I was listening... Is this what I'm doing with this essay? Am I "trying" (pun very much intended) to explain how my internal processes work, what is behind whatever filter I'm normally presenting to you? My stranger filter, my coworker filter, my friend filter? I swear I did not plan to arrive at this idea, it all evolved naturally.

Back up one layer, that was an introduction to my mind. A day in the life of, my mind. Please don't hate me now... I'm not any different than I was yesterday, I just put this stuff on paper (or bits? given that it's a blogpost, please leave a comment what you think is the right word to use here) for the first time. No AI, remember. Blunt, typos (probably, not sure I'll proofread this and tighten it up), and other weird stuff. Patrick from the future here: you idiot, of course it's full of typos! And you'll proofread it and add some more stuff and rephrase some things.

Yours truly,
A rambling madman by the name of Patrick

The author of this blogpost, currently writing his own collection of essays with loads of footnotes.