architects of the deep chest

much sniffling today despite some warm breezes that have come up from somewhere. many contrails slicing up the sky and a lead weight keeping me from starting anything properly. a small headache, i think, is beginning to fringe along the backs of my eyebrows in a way that makes me think i should retire to bed, or at least to the couch, wrapped in a quilt and scalding my tongue on a hot toddy. but alas,  Progress must be made.

it's not that i don't have enough ideas. (i am trying to put all of my best writing bones on to construct a convincing paper for the Perusal of school.) it's that once i unravel the skein into manageable ideas i cannot put the first words down. (but i can put many other words in many other places, no problem.)

instead i am feeling mostly seized up.

on a slightly different note i have been enjoying Oliver Sacks' An Anthropologist on Mars, a book describing case studies of patients with various neurological deficits. in his book Sacks seeks to illuminate the space where such patients (a colorblind painter, a Tourettic surgeon, a man newly gifted the ability to see following a cataract couching, an autistic savant child with immense graphic ability,) excel rather than focusing on their limitations or problems. most recently Sacks discusses Temple Grandin, a well-known high-functioning autist who has gone on to receive a Ph.D in animal sciences, to design feedlots and animal holding pens and, more strangely, to develop a (becoming more and more well-known and implemented) device known as the Hug Machine. (these folks will give you the transcripts from her interview with them as well as links to her websites.) the Hug Machine was developed by Grandin to provide a space where she could get physical contact she required (and longed for) without compromising her sense of well-being or causing a flare up of anxiety she associates with being held. the machine allows the user to exert exact pressure with an array of adjustments to simulate the gesture of being embraced without the need for physical contact. while this may, of course, be strange for a person who has no issue with the idea of being touched it has proven to be massively therapeutic to other autists or other similarly socially inhibited users. in keeping with the previously mentioned goal of understanding before wrinkling my nose i was glad to have thought it out deeply before judging. for aren't well all often hungry for a sense of touch and pressure at times when we are lonely? and further, if a person can construct a space that simulates affection and intimacy what other kinds of emotional architecture has yet to be built?

certainly a Hug Machine of any kind (wooden, flesh, down) could cure my inertia.