The business practice of brainstorming has been around with us so long that it seems like unadorned common sense: If you want a rash of new ideas, you get a group of people in a room, have them shout things out, and make sure not to criticize, because that sort of self-censoring is sure to kill the flow of new thoughts. . . .

[Alex Osborn, the 1940s ad man and inventor of brainstorming] thought, quite reasonably, that creativity was both brittle and fickle: In the presence of criticism, it simply couldn’t wring itself free from our own minds. We could only call our muses if judgments didn’t drag us down. Osborn claimed that this very brainstorming process was the secret to BBDO’s durable creativity, allowing his ad guys to produce as many as 87 ideas in 90 minutes—a veritable avalanche. “The brainstorm had turned his employees into imagination machines,” writes Jonah Lehrer in a long, excellent article in The New Yorker. But as Lehrer argues, the only problem with all this is that brainstorming is total bullshit. . . .

• You’re More Creative Working Alone: “Putting people into big groups doesn’t actually increase the flow of ideas. Group dynamics themselves—rather than overt criticism—work to stifle each person’s potential.”
• Criticism Improves the Brainstorming Process: “Usually, inventions often begin when an inventor spots a problem. Good ideas usually don’t hang by themselves, unattached. They come about as solutions. Thus, allowing criticism into a room full of people trying to brainstorm allows them to refine and redefine a problem.”
• Creativity Is About Happenstance, Not Planning: “Too much familiarity bred groupthink. Too little meant that they didn’t have enough chemistry to challenge each other. The most productive groups were those with a baseline of familiarity but just enough fresh blood to make things interesting. . . . Studies have shown that the most successful groups of scientists also work in extremely close physical proximity. Just being around another creative person is vital to the process . . .”

See, it was like this. Saturday night Lisa was out singing her big, wonderful heart out in the second of three holiday concerts. I stayed home, since some friends and I were going to take it in on Sunday before going to a post-concert dinner and Muppet movie viewing together with Lisa. So there I was sitting on the sofa (with the cat sleeping on my lap) catching up on a week’s worth of snail mail, writing odds-and-ends and worry and bullshit in my journal, plotting out my 12-mile running route for Sunday morning, and watching TiVo’ed “BBC World News” and “Charlie Rose” episodes.

I go back-and-forth between liking and loathing Charlie’s show.

Shoulder Jeff #1: “He’s the voice of the American, white, male, moneyed, center-right Washington/NYC-based establishment. While his guests have a variety of opinions, they helped talk you into supporting the 2003 invasion of Iraq . . . or, at least, not opposing it.”

Shoulder Jeff #2: “True, true. But his guests also talk about all of those things that interest you. And since you don’t read as much as non-diabetes/triathlon stuff as you used to, he’s bringing those opinion-makers opinions to you. Besides, you only seem to write in your journal when you’ve been reading the New York Times, watching Charlie, or traveling. Clearly you need him and his guests for inspiration. Plus, you still have Terri Gross’s daily NPR show/podcast/tumblr Fresh Air for balance. Anyway, it’s good background noise while Lisa is away.”

Shoulder Jeff #1: “Okay, well at least be careful. Especially of his guests with ties.”

All true, little shoulder Jeffs.

The last episode I watched had three 40-to-60-something guys (all wearing neckties . . . except maybe John Meacham) sitting around his table talking about the GOP presidential clown parade candidates. It was not a great interview, but it made me want to read their little book: Playbook 2012: The Right Fights Back. It’s one of those “insiders traveling with the candidates tell you about the presidential sausage being made” works that I always like reading in Newsweek after the election.

Except this wasn’t a real book at all. It was one of those “electronic” books. Did I really want to buy a bunch of bits to read on my iPod?

Shoulder Jeff #1: “Why don’t you start, Jeff’s reactionary psyche voice?”

Shoulder Jeff #2: “Oh goody! Okay, I have a list. You won’t actually own anything. What if the forces enabling DRM decide one day that you aren’t licensed to read it anymore? And you won’t be able to lend it out after you’ve read it. And when you’re done where will it go? There’s no bookshelf-able “thing.” If your hard drive crashes, it will be gone. (Well, okay, not gone gone . . . gone-until-you-redownload it gone.) And *gasp* it will be hard to read page after page on a smaller-than-a-notecard sized thing. Plus you’re going to encourage the publishers not to sell real books anymore.”

Shoulder Jeff #1: “WTF, man? It’s not like the words are going to be different. And do you really want to keep this 73-page gem around for your never-to-exist grandchildren to pick up randomly off the bookshelf. ‘Oh look, that Michelle Bachman person sounded cray cray forty years ago.’ Riiiight. Or maybe you’re ‘going to need it for part of a major research project’ in the future? Yeah, okay. Listen. You’ve been buying virtual iTunes music for the last seven years, *and* you still buy CDs when you come across amazing whole albums. Plus it’s just $2.99.”

So I bought the e-book.

(That last paragraph was actually supposed to be the majority of this dispatch, but I got carried away. Sorry.)

A recurring thought in my mind is what would have happened if I had been born 20-25 years earlier than 1974. Would I have been a protester, a marcher, a sitter-inner, a free-lover, a Weather Undergrounder? Or would I have been a “Get a job, you dirty hippy!” kind of guy? I can see both streaks in me, each conveniently made moot by time and a blanket of post-Watergate political apathy.

In high school I was comparatively liberal and a bit of a spacey free spirit. In college I was comparatively conservative, lacking in small-liberal-arts-college savoir faire and cultural sophistication, and rather disdainful of the sloganeering of the politically active folks on campus. Don’t just tell me, convince me. And, no, shouting loudly (or taping over your mouth in symbolic protest) is not at all convincing. If I had been in college in the late 60s and early 70s, which way would I have gone?

In 2003 I went to the one big anti-war protest in Boston that I heard about before it happened. (Was it just me or did the media do a terrible job covering pre-war dissent?) But I treated it as a sort of anthropological exercise, since I felt very ambivalent about the invasion. Looking back now, of course, I feel like a big dope for ever believing the administration. I took a lot of photographs of what I saw, but I think I missed the point that most of the people there were basically like me, just with more conviction.

So it was interesting when I was in France to hear a few of my fellow travelers relive a similar debate from an earlier generation. The woman whose husband was an Air Force wing commander during Vietnam argued that if we had helped the French with materiel and support at Dien Bien Phu, we would never have needed to go to war in Vietnam. On the other side was the former member of Students for a Democratic Society, who took time off school to protest and was ready to go to Canada to avoid the draft. He obviously saw things a bit differently. In the middle was the thermonuclear physicist who didn’t express much of a political opinion at all but just argued the facts.

That’s me. I’m the thermonuclear physicist, just 20-25 years younger.

So now that we have Occupy protests/camp-ins going on everywhere and local officials and the police moving against them in scenes straight from 1972, I’m torn again. I support the message of the Occupy folks. (I’m the 99%, too.) And I support many of the progressive causes that have glommed onto the original anti-plutocracy movement. But they’re often being presented in a way that makes them seems to me (at best) uncoordinated and (at worse) silly, vapid, elitist, or out-of-touch.

Maybe that’s it. I probably would have been a marcher but not an occupier/draft-card-burner. I can see myself having gone to protest along with the sensible people that I know and respect, rolled my eyes at the hippies, and then gotten on with the rest of my life.

Whew. I’m not a reactionary or freeloader (but just barely).

As my fascination grew, going to see local cemeteries became something that Lisa and I could do together on a whim. As I walked around with my pen and paper looking for names, Lisa would look at dates and ages and try to piece together family relationships. It’s been a while since I posted any of the more interesting names or headstones here. That’s about to change.

This headstone has it all: death with his scythe, cherubs, devils, crossed bones, an hourglass, scroll-work, the sun, and a snake eating its own tail to signify the unending cycle of life and death. See below for many more headstones.

Through this new crop of photographs, you can see similarities within regions and times, the effects of mass production, differing regional concepts of piety and sense of style . . . not to mention the role of wealth, the presence of master craftsmen, the concept of personhood, and so many other things.

Many markers are memorial stones—not actual headstones—and are often very simple. Many of the dead only got initials on their marker, if they had a stone at all. Some markers were added decades (even centuries) later, usually in a moment of civic pride.

The earliest remaining headstones with names and dates tend to be very ornate and were for extremely important clergy. There are vastly more 18th century headstones remaining, and they tend to be more simple. Unfortunately, machine-carved and die-cast stones signaled an enormous change in the interestingness of grave markers. By the late 19th century, everyone had a headstone, but most of them had no pictures at all. Almost 150 years after mass-production changed them, it’s interesting to see machine-etched pictures starting to return to stones in the late 20th century.

By touring cemeteries, you can see the transition from early Puritan to Georgian and Federal styles and themes. The macabre and religious iconography gave way to the secular and harmonious. In later stones, you can see hints of Transcendentalist sentiments (such as practicality and comity, symbolized in shaking hands) as well as the Second Great Awakening’s self-satisfied piety in skyward-pointing fingers exhorting you to look for the buried in Heaven. You can even occasionally see Art Nouveau and Art Deco stylings in New England.

Throughout the entirety of American grave markers, Bible verses or short secular poems appear. These usual implore the living not to mourn the dead but to seek to follow them into heaven. Indeed for a long time after the English first appeared in America in the early 17th century, images on headstones were one of the few acceptable forms of public art. Despite Biblical exhortations against the graven image, you can see the shape of a body in some of the early headstones. There are the shoulders; there is the round head. Eventually the skull gave way to the cherub and then to the fleshy human face.

Numerous themes appear in New England grave artwork, often combined together onto one stone:

• Skulls with crossed bones
• Skulls with wings
• Cherubs (or faces with wings)
• Faces and the “memento mori”
• Urns with trees
• Drapery, columns, arches, “false tombs” (This is a form of 18th/19th c. landscape art.)
• Scrollwork, vines, leaves
• Flowers
• Hourglasses
• Heraldry (Though this is usually very limited, very aristocratic, and very Tory.)
• Crosses, Jesus, Mary (These are almost uniformly Catholic.)
• Hands pointing toward heaven or shaking hands (These appeared during the Second Great Awakening.)
• Finials

A tour through a single large cemetery is often a fascinating way to see the generational changes in American orthography, typography, diction, expression, language, and style.

• “ye” versus “the”
• The ligature “s” (as f)
• The change of year didn’t always happen on January 1st. For example, you’ll see 1691/2.
• In the mid-19th century there was the same crazy typographical mishmash that you might see in a typical newspaper.

You can also see the change in tooling and craftsmanship that made these markers.

• Hand cut on slate by a local craftsman, often with visible guidelines — Until about 1820.
• Hand cut on marble by someone on a more regional basis, probably by mail order — Starting in earnest around 1840, just in time for the Civil War and its massive carnage.
• Cast from moulds. If you tap them, you can tell they’re hollow, and you can see the seams where they’re joined — ca. 1840s-1850s.
• Mass produced by machine with automated cutting tools — from 1860 onward.

I hope you will look at these photographs and start to see some of what I’ve noticed over the years. And I hope that, as you encounter things I haven’t noticed, you’ll tell me what you see.

Click on any photograph to enlarge it. Click on the enlarged photograph to move to the next one in the series.

Ever since LADA Awareness Week a couple weeks ago, I’ve been thinking a lot about having been diagnosed with type-1 diabetes as an adult. In particular, I’ve been considering how strange it is to go from being healthy—well, healthy enough—and then very sick—and then seemingly well again. When I was in the hospital, doctors and nurses asked me about my health, and I would say, “I’m well . . . except the diabetes, I guess.”

I lived more than twenty-four years without diabetes. That was long enough to do so many things, things I could certainly have done with or without diabetes. Before my diagnosis the idea of whether I could (or should) do those things had nothing to do with any kind of illness. Then, in a very short time, that easily-dismissed question was a constant part of the fabric of life.

When I think about diabetes, I don’t usually think about what-ifs or before/afters. It’s just the way things are; I can’t change it. But I do think about what it means to have my concept of myself changed in such an abrupt way. (As if, perhaps, I had awoken one day as a bug-like character in a Kafka novella.)

Lately I’ve also been thinking about the ways that I integrate (and resist integrating) the fact of diabetes into my concept of myself. First off, I’m not a dualist; there’s just matter. Mind is matter. Soul is matter. [1] And yet, diabetes still feels so foreign to me . . . so separate from me.

The defining characteristic of diabetes is usually put in terms of high blood glucose. In my mind, though, the defining characteristic should be “disease;” the high blood glucose is just the manifestation of the body’s failure to maintain homeostasis. Disease is the inability of my cells and systems to work properly, requiring on-going intervention to keep me alive and active. Of course, it’s hard work to mimic an endocrine system, but it’s been harder to accept that my body has failed me.

It has just recently occurred to me that these thoughts are probably related to my constant struggles with myself over my A1c, that little blood test which reflects three or four months of blood sugar fluctuations and purports to put into one number the quality of my diabetes management. [2] The number itself is just a number; it doesn’t judge me, though it suggests that I’m putting myself at increased risk for complications. My endocrinologist doesn’t judge me because of it, although I know she wants to help me lower it.

Even though I know I shouldn’t, I judge myself.

Ever since I went off NPH and onto the pump, my A1c has crawled steadily upwards. It’s gone up even more since I started exercising again. It defies the conventional wisdom, and it has had me wondering. Not about whether I’m trying hard enough—I know that I’m doing my best—but whether I’m making the right choices.

Life is choices. That’s been a fundamental principle of my life for two decades, far longer than I’ve had diabetes. You have to choose, and while you should think win-win, often you can’t have it all. Fine. I accept that. But the choices aren’t always easy to make or be happy with after the fact. Saying “no” can be difficult. Saying “no” to something you really want is agony.

I’m having trouble lately always believing that the range of choices is really as great as I tell people without diabetes, as we people with diabetes tell each other. “You can do this.” Of course! I can certainly make it through whatever diabetes throws my way.

Lately I’ve started to hear this mantra another way, though: “You can do this . . . but it has a cost. Is it worth the cost?” How do I know? How can I know?

On the way home from Simonpalooza in NYC, I had the talk with Lisa. What if I can’t have it all? What if I have to choose between two very important things? Triathlon has made me a better person, but in the training for it, I’ve let myself run high. I didn’t like it, and I didn’t mean to; it’s just what happened. Despite spending a lot of time paying attention to what my blood sugar did while I was exercising, I still don’t feel like I can predict what’s going to happen too well. So I start out higher than I would otherwise try to be. I’m not happy with it, and I know enough about control systems to suspect that those high readings are probably messing me up for the next twenty-four hours.

Where do I draw the boundaries between trying to stay alive as long as I can thanks to really good blood glucose control (by doing what my body should be doing) and living a full life—the life I would otherwise live—with a slightly higher A1c? It’s not either/or, of course; it’s a continuum.

So how do I find that balance? And what if? What if having a good A1c means not doing triathlon?

Time will tell. It’s probably a false choice. The only way I will know is to keep trying to do both until (and probably long past) it’s clear that I can’t.

And besides, my last A1c was down from 8.3% to 7.9%. I hope to keep bringing it down. I’m going to cowboy up and get back to working hard to figure things out, because that’s all I know how to do. But goddamit! it had better start getting easier—or I need to find a different way of thinking about things—because it’s kind of killing me to think that I could be shortening my life by doing the things I love.

See . . . wicked dark. Perhaps WordPress shouldn’t let me post anything when my blood sugar is over 400. I will probably regret this in the morning. Will you still respect me?

1 — To paraphrase Leibniz by way of Arcade Fire: My body is a cage that keeps me from dancing with the one I love, but my mind holds the key. [Go back . . .]

2 — During a #dsma twitter chat I once quipped that “A1c” is hell’s postal code. [Go back . . .]

There are a bunch of different ways that you can participate. Well, okay, I can think of three ways.

You can wear a diabetes-themed T-shirt that you got at an ADA, JDRF, or IDF event. Let your advocacy shine. You can also buy a shirt . . . online naturally. Some of these stores even donate the profits to organizations that do things for those of us with this little disease.

But the real fun is making your own. All it takes is an idea, a few craft supplies, and an hour or two. It’s good family fun, and when you’re done you can look at your creation with extra pride.

“Jeff, how do I make my own T-shirt?” I hear you asking. It’s easy, and it all starts at your local craft store. If your store is anything like the one in my town, you’ll find everything you need, from colorful, blank T-shirts to iron-on letters and patches to this special stuff that you can use to draw designs and write messages.

And, if you have a computer and inkjet printer, you can fire up Photoshop, make as fancy of a design as you can imagine, and print it out on iron-on transfer paper (also available at the craft store). One hot iron and a few minutes later, voilà! you’ve got your own fancy-pants DiabeTee. What? No printer? No worries; you can upload your design to a place like CafePress, which will print your design for you.

So are you ready? Great! You have 33 days left to make your shirt before November 14.

And don’t ever underestimate the power of a simple T-shirt.

p.s. — I have about a half-billion things on my mind that I want to write about. (For example, see the photos above.) Seems like it’s feast or famine around this here weblog. So I’m going to start with the most time-bound issues. I hope not to let y’all down and post the rest of everything here in the coming days.

She showed up with her shovel and started digging,
The woman from across the street whom I had never met.
We dug for a quiet hour that was really only a minute
Or two beneath the severe blue of a Wyoming April morning.
“My father died when I was about your age.”
There was too much snow to use the blower so we dug
With the shovels reserved for light October dustings
Which swirled around on my birthday,
The first snowfall after he brought us here.
“We suspected when you didn’t clear your driveway yesterday.”

Yesterday was still there. Waking to a too early phone call.
The shriek and commotion and “We have to go in a few minutes.”
Waiting in a hospital conference room with two other families,
Coworkers coming and going all day with news and snacks and hope.
Hours later, the sun already setting on a snowy scene
Beyond the window across the hospital bed in the unneeded room
Where I had come to escape the condolences,
The hand on my shoulder and a voice I almost knew:
“C’mon back. Your mom needs you.”

The smoke from her chimney rose into the clear sky.
“Thank you.” It was all I knew how to say in that moment.
That evening in my basement, Maggie the skier sat across the void from me,
In silence, knowing what she had to say, what I vaguely knew.
“My father died the year before you moved here.”
I apologized in sympathy knowing how hard this visit was for her
And retreated into silence, so different than my awkward mania
When friends brought by a potted plant and a disco LP.

Snow melts fast during a Wyoming spring and was gone
Before the funerals of the four people aboard the flight.
I had tried to read a few words for the occasion,
But they got lost somewhere over the casket.
After the service, one of his fellow paramedics
Put his hand on my shoulder and confided.
“We all had our difficulties. He was hard, but he was trying.
He talked about you all the time, more than his own kids.”
After hard years we were learning how to live together.

Grief keeps its own timetable, making regular stops at first.
The effects collected at the scene. The ashes in a cardboard box.
The coroner’s report I accidentally saw with details I never wanted to know.
The telemarketer calls trickling in over the rest of the spring:
“No. I’m sorry. My stepfather died in a plane crash.”
Now the ghost train stops just a few times each year
As I shovel clean the driveway after a Nor’easter.
Instead of leaving reminders, it transports me
Back to the snow of those Wyoming mornings
And all of the people who helped me through it.

Poem About Light

You can try to strangle light:
use your hands and think
you’ve found the throat of it,
but you haven’t.
You could use a rope or garrote
or a telephone cord,
but the light, amorphous, implacable,
will make a fool of you in the end.

You could make it your mission
to shut it out forever,
to crouch in the dark,
the blinds pulled tight—

still, in the morning,
a gleaming little ray will betray you, poking
its optimistic finger
through a corner of the blind,
and then more light,
clever, nervy, impossible,
spilling out from the crevices
warming the shade.

This is the stubborn sun,
choosing to rise,
like it did yesterday,
like it will tomorrow.
You have nothing to do with it.
The sun makes its own history;
light has its way.

— Kathleen Sheeder Bonanno

1 — The curious can find all of those posts here: June 30; September 1, 2, 11, 12, 13, 16, 24; and October 5, 2001. [Back . . .]

Death Barged In

In his Russian greatcoat
slamming open the door
with an unpardonable bang,
and he has been here ever since.

He changes everything,
rearranges the furniture,
his hand hovers
by the phone;
he will answer now, he says;
he will be the answer.

Tonight he sits down to dinner
at the head of the table
as we eat, mute;
later, he climbs into bed between us.

Even as I sit here,
he stands behind me
clamping two
colossal hands on my shoulders
and bends down
and whispers to my neck,
From now on,
you write about me.

—Kathleen Sheeder Bonanno (from Slamming Open the Door)

MTV is planning to highlight diabetes in its True Life show next season. Here’s an excerpt from the casting call request for people to share their stories.

Does your diabetes hold you back from living the life the way you want? Do you have an extreme form of the disease which requires you to constantly inject yourself with insulin? Or are you stuck monitoring your diet and exercise when you would rather just live a more regular life? Does it make you feel different from your peers? How is your situation more difficult than your friends’ at school? Are you embarrassed by your diabetes? How often do you visit doctors and how much effort do you put into your health? Have you had any scares relating to your diabetes recently? Are your parents always on your case about your medication, diet, doctor’s appointments, and exercise? Are you planning on taking a new approach to handling your health in the near future?

If your diabetes causes you major difficulty in your life and you appear between the ages of 16 and 28, email us at diabetes@miscmedia.tv and tell us your story. We want to know how living with diabetes makes your life complicated. Please include your name, location, phone number, and a recent photo of yourself.

Yo, MTV! I know that you specialize in playing up adolescent anxieties, but this is a little too far. Diabetes is hard enough for people who have it without being exploited. Why not show the young people with diabetes — not to mention your non-diabetic viewers — that it’s much, much more likely that they will live happy, productive lives with diabetes?

Maybe that’s what you’re after. (No, no. You could have a soul down deep somewhere.) But because I suspect that when I send this message to diabetes@miscmedia.tv, you won’t actually share my message with your viewers, I’ll answer your questions here, too.

Does your diabetes hold you back from living the life the way you want? Everybody’s diabetes prevents them from living the life the way they want. That’s the nature of a disease. We would all prefer to be healthy people living lives without the constant activities we have to undertake to keep ourselves well. We could also do without the mental baggage of diabetes. Is your show going to present that this is the normal state of anyone living with a chronic illness?

Do you have an extreme form of the disease which requires you to constantly inject yourself with insulin? There is really no such thing as an extreme form of diabetes. Every kind of diabetes — type 1, type 1.5, type 2, gestational — requires vigilance and takes a mental, physical, and social toll on the person who has it. I wear an insulin pump that continuously gives me insulin, but I don’t take injections. I know that takes away some cringe-inducing video, but are we still cool?

Or are you stuck monitoring your diet and exercise when you would rather just live a more regular life? Of course, I would like to be able to eat what I want without worry. And I would really, really love to be able to exercise whenever I want. Life is choices, and I try to make the best ones I can. Diabetes and the way we have to treat it makes the consequences of our choices more obvious and immediate. Maybe you could show me checking my blood sugar in the middle of a 12-mile run or show me forgoing a big ice cream cone so that I can avoid wildly out-of-balance blood glucose and insulin levels three hours later when I want to go for a long bike ride.

Does it make you feel different from your peers? Of course it does. We’ve all got our issues. Does being a reality television show producer make you feel different from your entertainment industry peers when you go to parties? Do you tell them that you play on people’s anxieties and exploit people who need support?

How is your situation more difficult than your friends’ at school? Let’s talk about work instead of school. I worry about experiencing hypoglycemia when giving presentations or talking to customers, but most people have performance anxiety. Oh, you know what would be awesome? You could start a shot by showing me testing my blood sugar in a meeting and then pull back to show one of my (non-diabetic) coworkers totally bombing during a presentation. You ought to get a hell of a rating out of that. 50 share, easy.

Are you embarrassed by your diabetes? No. You should show people that there’s no reason to be embarrassed by any disease or disability. And the only way you can do that and have any credibility with your demographic is to show us being bad-ass.

How often do you visit doctors and how much effort do you put into your health? I visit doctors seven or eight times per year. Staying healthy with diabetes is a 24/7 thing. Most people actively managing their diabetes probably have better health literacy than you do.

Have you had any scares relating to your diabetes recently? No. But one time last year I had a routine lab result that made me think there was something wrong with my kidneys. Turns out if you exercise too hard — say by riding 60 miles one day and running 10 miles the next — most people’s bodies are going to spill a bit of extra protein related to rebuilding muscle tissue. Does this make me compelling enough?

Are your parents always on your case about your medication, diet, doctor’s appointments, and exercise? No. My mom is really sweet.

Are you planning on taking a new approach to handling your health in the near future? I’m always trying to be the best-informed, most-engaged patient. I work with my medical team as a peer, and I have a fabulous support community online. You should seriously plug the positive role that Twitter can play for people with diabetes. I hear that lots of your viewers love Twitter.

p.s. — When I’m clean shaven, I can pass for 32 28. Here’s a recent photo.