The Perfect Chunk, the Twitter Pulse, and Why I Feel Depressed

When Twitter came along I thought I died and had gone to heaven, linguistically speaking.  As a practicing poet who had endured countless hours of graduate school misery to compress what I was writing into poetic bits that could be approved by the higher ups, I had finally found my calling. Even better, the process was institutionalized on a global basis.  The world would be my oyster.  Here was this Twitter thing, sounding very much like the song birds outside my window, through which I could upload 140 characters in poetic chunks.  For a moment I felt very modern, writing poetry in chunks of metadata that were searchable and, even better, would last forever.  I’ve read that chunky content in this weird tablet world is the next big thing and, no, it has nothing to do with the soup.

I am deeply saddened and embarrassed when I get the occasional lament from my friends at Twitter saying: “We have missed you at Twitter.” Well, truth be told, I have missed you as well and tried my best.  Didn’t I begin my tweets, appropriately, with short takes on the Northern Cardinal, the Downy Woodpecker, and the Red-Bellied Woodpecker?  Not a Common Tern among them!  I upped the ante and tweeted about the Red-tailed Hawk who savaged our local squirrel population.  Then I provided some night music with tweets about the Barred Owl who waits patiently for the mice to appear, offering no more than a lullaby of ooh, ooh, oohs to put us to sleep.

I guess Twitter has not made a lot of money monetizing my data.  But now that I have digested a fascinating research piece from UCLA and HP Labs, I am ready to have another go.  The paper by Roja Bandari and company, entitled “The Pulse of News in Social Media: Forecasting Popularity,” argues that despite randomness in human behavior, “it is possible to predict ranges of popularity on Twitter with an overall 84% accuracy.”

The focus for this study is news articles that by definition usually have a short lifespan.  Therefore, the task is quite daunting.  The researchers’ goal was “to discover if any predictors relevant only to the content exist and if it is possible to make a reasonable forecast of the spread of an article based on content features.”  The study collected data from Feedzilla, a news feed aggregator and developed an algorithm.  Popularity for a news article on Twitter was measured as the number of times a URL is posted.  They considered four article characteristics: the news source that generates and posts the article; the category of news; the subjectivity of the language in the article; and named entities mentioned in the article.  The researchers collected 40,000 feeds during a nine-day period in August 2011.  They refer to the average tweets per link or article as the t-density score.  Their analysis showed that technology, health, and fun stuff ranked the highest in t-density.

Perhaps even more interesting is the HP Lab team finds that the “top news sources on Twitter are not necessarily the conventionally popular news agencies and various technology blogs such as Mashable and the Google blog are widely shared in social media.”  But brands still matter.  Researchers found that one of the most important predictors of popularity was the source of the article.

We know from Twitter evangelists Jimmy Lin and Gilad Mishne that its users create approximately a quarter billion tweets and more than two billion search queries a day.  The two evangelists studied churn in tweets and real time search queries.  Churn is simply a measure of changes in term rank over time.  The researcher found that there is more churn in tweets than in search queries and that must be good for the business.

The folks at gigaom.com wrote the headline: “Twitter Slowly Unfolding Its Search Ambitions.”  This would include the recently unveiled expandable tweets and hashtag-based pages.  Having learned from Google about text search, Twitter’s ambitions will include more images and video.

The other day the NYT had an article on how depressives surf the Web.  Not surprisingly, they are compulsive, switching frequently among multiple application, from games, to chat rooms to file downloads.  Of course, they also show anxiety about email.  Perhaps they have a Mother Complex.  At any rate, this is called Flow Duration Therapy.  What good is a disease without a name?

Our friends at the Missouri University of Science and Technology gave us this study. One possible solution proposed is the creation of a software program that would tell us when our Internet usage is showing a pattern that might signal symptoms of a depression.  A perfect solution!

Psychologists refer to the “availability bias” to explain why people make certain decisions.  Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, Professors at Stanford University and the University of British Columbia, respectively, use this phrase to explain why people don’t always make rational choices.  Others have used this theory to explain why so many people jumped on the Facebook IPO.  It wasn’t necessarily because of the financial proposition.  As Rebecca Waber notes in her recent Harvard Business Review Blog, the critically important factor for many investors likely was "Facebook’s ubiquity and its starring role in so many people’s lives.”  Because so many of us use Facebook every day, the company likely loomed larger in the mind of investors than its balance sheet warranted.  This is the “availability bias.”

The “availability bias” might have implications for how we engage, consume, and invest in social media.

Pagers, Silver Water and the Future of Mobile Health

Small advances please me greatly. I learned on NPR this morning that NYU’s Langhorne Medical Center is phasing out the iconic pager that has been tied to doctor’s waists for almost sixty years to be replaced by the smartphone. Privacy concerns and cost slowed down this transition. Lethargy might have played a part.  I’ve had two successful operations at Langhorne and know doctors there who think pagers remain the perfectly appropriate technology not likely to end up inside a patient.

But it was time. When a technology becomes a butt of jokes and parody, such as in 30 Rock with its pager salesman and in the sci-fi series Dark Angel, it’s time to retire the beast. Presumably the Langhorne Medical Center has figured out how to improve frequent weak cell phone coverage inside the hospital corridors.

I think the health and fitness fields offer tremendous opportunities for advanced mobile technologies. But, as we know, every development has a shadow side and for the medical field the shadow is in the testing.  Recently I went to a new doctor for my annual physical. In addition to the blood work and the like, he ordered a stress test and an EKG for me, though I had given him a detailed history of my running, cycling, and endurance training.  I told him my history with Bicycling Magazine, Runner’s World, Scuba Diving, Men’s Health and Prevention to emphasize that I had been monitoring my health and the field for thirty years. I had no family history of heart disease and no symptoms.

As luck would have it, my May 2012 issue of the AARP Bulletin arrived with an article entitled, “7 Medical Procedures You Don’t Need.”  Leading the list were EKGs and stress tests for people without symptoms. The other six include (with some editing): bone scans for men under 65; antibiotics for mild/moderate sinus infections; Advil and Motrin for those with high blood pressure or kidney disease; CT scans for uncomplicated headaches; dubious diagnostic tests for suspected allergies; and CT scan, X-Ray, and MRI for lower back pain.  This data comes from a study by the American Board of Internal Medicine and forms the basis of their Choosing Wisely Campaign. Full details can be found at choosingwisely.org.

I assume good will on the part of most physicians and understand they are protecting themselves from malpractice. But I had a hard time swallowing advice from a New York physician who suggested I flush my sinus cavities with silver water. And the advice from a New York allergist, well-known to television audiences in the area, who pressed me to take monthly immunoglobulin  shots for allergies even when tests showed I had no antibody deficiencies. I finally found a physician who provided a low-cost, low-tech cure.

Few media companies of consequence don’t have a doctor on board to parse the unrelenting barrage of medical advice we receive from an array of journals, universities and trade associations. Consumers need help. The recent suggestion that men should not routinely be given the PSA test for prostate cancer has caused confusion and alarm.   

There appears to be an app for every pain and body part.  PriceWaterhouseCoopers estimates that there are more than 10,000 medical, fitness and health-related apps available for download. Jokes about pager use aside, we know that 95% of doctors with smart phones are using apps to assist in their work. Given the growing shortage of primary care physicians, it seems that the healthcare industry will inevitably make better use of mobile phone technology.  In India, a pilot project involving 50,000 consumers who get medical checkups over mobile devices shows promise.

The medical field does not lack information; we are inundated. What the field lacks is integration and particularly wireless integration. 

Qualcomm Life, a wholly owned subsidiary of Qualcomm Inc., is offering some tantalizing possibilities. (Full disclosure: I have consulted for Qualcomm QMT in the past).

Qualcomm Life is building a vast wireless ecosystem—in effect a platform that will include devices and apps, gateways, cloud-based connectivity, and access for patients, healthcare professionals, and payors. The platform is designed to meet HIPAA requirements and data security standards developed by the payment card industry.

Given Qualcomm’s knowledge of device manufacturers, carriers, and network development, the company will have something to say about the future of mobile health with the consumer as much a partner as patient. 

Angel Words & Demon Words & Those that Make Us Smart

As a long-time poet, I am a firm believer in the “angelology” of words and that poems originate in the psyche and my conscious self does little more than provide a final shape.  This is a Romantic notion, of course, harking back to the Italian Renaissance, and in our current world of SEO and rich metadata, this idea seems decidedly quaint.

When I was a graduate student. a professor suggested I read Hemingway night and day, both for style and content.  Since he was a Hemingway scholar, I knew this recommendation was in part rhetorical and even theatrical.  After all, hadn’t he occasionally come to class dressed as his favorite author, one time rifle in hand?  Neither was loaded.  But I took his advice and read Hemingway.  When all the chest-thumping about his unadorned prose is done, Hemingway has much to teach us about the language of abstraction. He couldn’t stand words like honor, glory, courage and heroism, preferring the concrete names of northern Italian towns and villages.  He stood with Shakespeare’s Falstaff, who, in a conversation of Prince Hal, the budding Puer about honor, replied, “Honor is he who died on Wednesday.”  Perhaps even more damning in Shakespeare’s grim wit, honor had no skill in surgery and couldn’t take away the grief of a wound.

It will take more than a university professor, even with rifle in hand, to preside over any orthodoxy in word choice and language style.  The cat is indeed out of the bag and trending on YouTube.  Still, words matter and can kill or least annoy, as every recipient of wayward smartphone conversations will attest. One doesn’t have to spend much time on the Web looking at some version of worst word sites to realize that there is still much language out there that still can’t take away the grief of a wound but that can provide a form of water torture, with an affected Valley Girl Lilt, as nagging as splinters under a nail.

I’m not talking about George Carlin’s seven dirty words or sites like Cracked.com, that explores the relationship between language, emotion, meaning, sound and feeling in the mouth as criteria to measure against the comfort level of the Decider.  Here, moist, slurp, bulbous and yolk are not likely to make the cut.  But these words are unlikely to interrupt my reverie to the degree the more innocuous do:  whatever, absolutely, awesome, basically, anyways, amazing, bling and dude et al, delivered at volume on speaker with bi-coastal sincerity and theatrical hand-wringing.  After all and after a certain age, we all want to become grammarians, a guardian of syntax, residing in that Senex consciousness where rules are made and enforced.

I’ve been working with nextPub, the publishing industry’s tech incubator, as it prepares to launch and market in June, 2012, the PRISM Source Vocabulary (PSV) Specification, which defines robust metadata taxonomies and controlled vocabularies that can be used to configure federated source content/rich media repositories. In this spirit, I’ve been trying to learn more about how content can be defined and structured so that it can be most useful across various channels and platforms.  This is poetry of another kind, hard-edged and smelling of nouns, more like the Imagists than the Romantics.

I read an article by a group at Trinity College, Dublin, that addresses the importance of targeted content “slices” for changing consumer demands and needs.  One obstacle to this is a reliance “upon bespoke, proprietary content” that lacks description and metadata.  I finished the article but all I could think about was the use of “bespoke” in this context.  Call me old fashioned, but I immediately thought of Shakespeare and Coleridge and the archaic use of “bespeak,” meaning to speak about, to complain, to order, to foretell and the like.  Just how did one of my favorite words or a version end up in an Irish Content Management System?

Putting on my grammarian’s hat, I acknowledge that “bespoke” is a version of “bespeak” and means custom-made, usually in reference to apparel.  For centuries, it has been very British and very upper crust. You ordered a suit or pair of shoes ahead of time and they were spoken or bespoken for, like a hand in marriage.

My thanks to the WSJ for recently publishing a front page article on why “bespoke,” that once had a narrow, somewhat snooty definition, has entered the vernacular and is as likely as not to show up on the next SAT.   The Journal notes that there are two dozen “bespoke” businesses in New York City alone, from bookstores to barber shops.  In the mergers and acquisition world there are “bespoke deals.” Hungry?  Look for Bespoke Crackers.  Live in San Francisco and want a custom bike? Go to Bespoke Cycles.

I served as editor and publisher of Bicycling magazine for a decade and never found the phrase “custom bike” wanting.  The phrase immediately conjures up scenes of northern Italy, from Milano to Venice, populated by Colnago, Columbus, Cinelli, Campagnola and others who know something about hand-made bicycle frames and parts.  Bespoke bicycles sounds just too English and pedestrian and seems much closer to “bangers and mash” than a Mediterranean dish.  And, yes, this too is part of my Italian fantasy made necessary and inevitable by my British birth.

The Journal concludes with the observation that “bespoke” is becoming downright ordinary. A word that for centuries has been the province and differentiator for generations of Saville Row tailors has become the leading adjective to describe literally hundreds of business categories, feeding the insatiable hunger for key word dominance, market edge and business advantage.

As my British friends would say, before the word made the sorry list: Brilliant!

The Sigmund Dream App, the Ego Trip and the Elusive Soul

The phrase “There’s an app for that” might be seen as a cultural assertion that everything can be measured, rendered and expressed in code.  This is a little more muscular and perhaps insidious than my mother saying there is nothing new under the sun.  Today, the tech sun shines deep inside our souls.

The application, keeping with its binary root, seems best suited to delivering information or providing step-by-step instructions with a big dose of social.  It was only a matter of time before this business would push its way into our interior lives.  Therefore, it comes as no surprise that the 99-cent Sigmund dream app is available to help people program their dreams, using a list of 1,000 pre-selected key words.  A female voice reads the word or words, up to five, while you are in REM sleep.

John D. Sutter, writing at CNN.com, states that “if you take a look at the list of words offered by the Sigmund app, it’s pretty easy to imagine some dreams that would be totally creepy, if not downright terrifying.  A dream, for example, that includes ‘mountain,’ ‘meadow,’ and ‘rain’ might be soothing, but throw in ‘tiger’ and ‘anaconda’ and, depending on your sub-psyche, things could turn south.  I tried the app last night and didn’t sleep well at all because I was so worried that the ‘panda’ I selected would attack me instead of being cute.”

The sound you are hearing is Sigmund Freud turning over in his grave—again.  This movement is no cause for alarm.  Every time he hears someone say a snake is a penis and a cave represents a vagina, he takes another turn for the worst.  This has been going on for fifty years, about the time it has taken the practitioners of depth psychology to codify dream imagery into a neat book of symbols handed out like candy by a therapist to a willing patient who is somehow assured that the narrative of her inner life has already been written by wiser souls. And now there is an app for that. 

The CNN quote seems quite representative and is consistent with our belief in cultural nominalism: we want to name our poisons.  With an able assist from technology, we expect to be authors of our fictions and writers of our dreams. The interest in becoming masters of our fate and captains of our soul did not begin with nineteen century American Exceptionalism.  The ego has a long and glorious past.  So have dreams, held by our distant ancestors to represent messages from the gods and by some present-day neurologists to represent neural dumping.

Long before SEO and our key word consciousness, we have been naming and classifying things, including psychic complaints.  In Revisioning Psychology, James Hillman writes that in the eighteenth and nineteenth century it was high psychiatric vogue to isolate specific disorders by inventing new names. The list is familiar:  alcoholism, autism, catatonia, claustrophobia, exhibitionism, homosexuality, masochism, schizophrenia, and psychopathology.  A famous dispute between French and German doctors regarding hysteria lasted into the 20^th century.  Germans insisted that hysteria could only apply to women because the word meant uterus and if French psychiatrists found hysteria in men, this told us more about Frenchmen than about hysteria.

I’m not certain what Hillman would say about the Sigmund app.  He would say that the psyche or soul is not under our control.  It is “autonomous.”  He is emphatic that we should not take our dream images literally. In the earlier quote, John Sutter is concerned about the panda turning ugly and perhaps tearing off his face.  This is understandable, but nonetheless reductionism.  If we find our dreams populated with weird mythological figures, better we accept them as fictions and perspectives.  It is no more surprising that mythological figures would invade our dreams than they do the big screen and popular culture.  After all, this is our cultural and psychic history, however much repressed.  Why do Thor, Hercules, Eros, Venus and the rest of the zodiac still resonate with us in the 21^st century, if only as cinematic parodies of themselves or throwaway additions to a Happy Meal?

That the panda might go postal in my dream is of course a concern.  We all want to be rocked to sleep with the sound of a babbling brook.  But depth psychology reminds us that dreams are also about pathology, what we hide and what we fear.  Among those things we fear, as individuals and as a nation, is death.

And, if there’s an app for that, I haven’t seen it.    

  

   

War, Political Fictions, & the Making of Pulitizers

These days war seems to reach us through the back doors of culture, long after Dancing with the Stars shows even more bodice and yet another reality show offers the next cadre of ginned up beauties who scratch their way into the popular imagination. This is pumped up tribalism at its campiest and probably best described by animal imagery or better yet, cartoons. I can think of no better presentation of the pain in our national psyche than the cartoons of Matt Wuerken, of Politico, who just won a Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartoons. Of the twenty cartoons offered on Politico to celebrate this amazing achievement, my favorite is the one asking cartoon subjects to raise their hands if they think we are involved in too many wars. Everyone does, of course, including the politicians and peaceniks. The heavy-burdened soldier also raises his hand but apparently does not have a vote. On a street corner not far from my house, small, competing war and anti-war groups ask motorists to honk their approval. They have been drowning each other out for about ten years.

We do our best to deny war and its consequences. After all, only about 1% of the population has direct involvement in our military campaigns. Most media outlets don’t have the time, money or resources to explore “our terrible love of war” and its consequences. And the public is weary. These realities make the Huffington Post’s receipt of the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting on war all the more noteworthy. Senior Military correspondent David Wood wrote a ten-part series, “Beyond the Battlefield,” examining the effect of war on the seriously wounded after they return from battle and on their families.

Enough will be written about an online news service winning this prestigious award after only seven years. It represents an enormous breakthrough. Most print publications would not have the stomach or the space for this kind of coverage. More than any account I am aware of, Wood has captured the physical and psychic cost of war, a story told with restraint and compassion from inside the families. Every American should read this series that grows in importance as the drumbeat for a war with Iran grows louder.

War has long been a part of America’s mythology—and politics. Whether one has served in the military doesn’t matter much now in a quest for political office. The last time military service seemed to be an issue was when George W. Bush was running for president and his service in the Texas National Guard came into question. Dan Rather of CBS put the issue in the national spotlight on a 60 Minutes broadcast September 8th 2004, providing documents that cast doubt on Bush’s service. The documents were attacked by conservative bloggers as forgeries, and twelve days later, CBS issued as retraction. Dan Rather apologized on the Evening News and six months later would leave the network. John Kerry, a genuine Vietnam hero, would be savaged by the Swift Boat crowd as a fraud and a phony and would lose a close election to Bush.

That might have been the end of the story. Dan Rather, ever ferocious in his reporting, wanders the world for HDNet, chasing a variety of stories. Sometimes I watch these reports, marveling at the tenacity of this eighty-year-old warrior who still thinks CBS caved due to pressure from the Bush family.

Rather might take some comfort in the Joe Hagan’s current Texas Monthly story, “Truth & Consequences,” that takes a fresh look at the Bush Texas National Guard years, an effort helped by the availability of new documents and less reticence on the part of observers now than Bush is out of office. This is a fascinating account and underscores that long-form journalism is alive and well. This piece is worthy of a National Magazine Award, at least.

Hagan does not come to any definite conclusions but sketches the intricate, complicated, shifting mosaic of Texas politics. Whether or not Rather got snookered by fake documents or a plant from a political operative, as the Texas Monthly coverage makes clear, the story was always about the chummy, clubby, back-scratching nature of Texas politics and how these influences found their way into appointments to the National Guard and government in general. Rather and his producer went for the smoking gun when the whole state was on fire and very smoky.

As Hagan points out, there are enough holes in Bush’s account of his Guard tenure to drive a tank through—my term. Did the elder Bush intervene to get his son in the Guard when he was three months away from being drafted and the Tet Offensive still resonated in the national consciousness? Once in, why did he stop flying? Why was he allowed to take a leave from duty to work in a political campaign? Why was he collecting pay for Reserve duty when he didn’t seem to be on base or even in the state? These issues remain important because they raise serious questions about Bush’s elaborate political narrative or fiction. And what will his Presidential Library say about these years when for a time he seemed to be missing in action?

But as Hagan notes, this might be as much about privilege as anything else. Many of the sons of the Texas wealthy and powerful found a home in the National Guard: Connolly, Bentsen, Bush, the grandson of oil tycoon H.L. Hunt, and members of the Dallas Cowboys. Maybe Bush was just lucky to win a spot in the coveted 147 Fighter Interceptor Unit known as the “champagne unit,” which was destined to keep the local Gulf waters safe for democracy.

I recall President Bush landing on the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln on May 1, 2003. He announced that the mission in Iraq was accomplished under a banner bearing the same words. We all owe a debt of gratitude to the Huffington Post, Texas Monthly and Politico for not allowing our wars to become fictions, photo ops or mere video games.

And as a veteran, I salute you.

Dreams, Digital Swagger and the Endless Conversation

It’s a pleasant Renaissance notion that the best response to a work of art or a poem is another work of art or poem. Modern-day depth psychologists, some of whom use the language of the Renaissance masters, suggest the same advice when it comes to the dream. Carl Jung suggested we dream the dream onward, using “active imagination” to deepen and extend the dream. The idea is not to kill the dream as if it were a snake in the grass, by instant analysis and categorization. The snake is question is not necessarily a penis or a link to the Garden of Eden. After all, I’m not the author of my own dreams.

We are living in the age of the Continued Conversation, where the responses to magazine and newspaper articles are often more interesting than the original entry. In our world of social media where sharing and commentary rules, we are in a dynamic state of co-creating, whether we are talking about a business project or a work-of-art. Digitally speaking, the conversation might never stop, even when we are dead. There are indeed apps for that end state. Technology makes every permutation possible. Google just posted through its Google Art Project 32,000 renowned works of art using its street view technology. The pixel density is just incredible, taking the viewer back to the painter’s brush strokes. Perhaps this is the final solution to dreaming the dream onward and moving backwards to artistic intention.

I come from a background of the solitary writer/artist. Whether a dissertation, a self-help book, a novel, or a poetry collection, the work has been solitary and individual. I just published a book-length poem, In the Shadow of the DMZ, where the zone is physical, psychological and theological and the subject matter is war. I wrote this on countless trips to Asia, especially to China, but the zone of creation was one of isolation, even on crowded planes at 35,000 feet surrounded by a Babel of tongues.

I will do the usual: sell the book on Amazon and the Kindle; market in select urban book stores; give public readings and the like. I’m thinking about putting on a one-act play dealing with that zone between the hotel Americana and the land of pimps. But this is so, yesterday, so 20th century.

I was completely pulled into an interview with Wired contributor Clive Thompson at Findings.com because, while I was ruminating, Thompson was putting down some very interesting fence posts. He mentions reading War and Peace on his iPhone and writing 16,000 words in notes and clippings. He printed these out “as an on-demand book. In short, I have a physical copy of all of my favorite parts of War and Peace that I can flip through, with my notes, but I don’t actually own a physical copy of War and Peace.”

The interviewer, sounding very much like a psychologist, asks Thompson, is he is having a conversation with the text, and perhaps even with his future self? Yes, it is all that, with all these characters present in what could be a lifelong conversation.

Paidcontent’s Mathew Ingram notes that “books remain stubbornly anti-social.”  He had a point, and this is one reason people love their Kindles that are far from the madding crowd.  I count myself among this congregation.  But Thompson is a little less dogmatic.  He sees the opportunity for the book-comment stream to be a turn-on option.  “You’ll have a digital book, and if you want, you’ll turn off all the comments, read in solitude-‘everyone shut up’-or you can say, show me the most awesome comments, show me the highest rated comments, show me everything, show me the fire hose.  What have my friends or people I care about said about a book?  Are there any actual people reading this page right now that I might want to have a live conversation with about it?  There is so much fun someone could have with these layers, ranging from classic, total isolation to like rollicking bar-party conversations.”

Freud famously wrote that even the slip of the scribe is significant.  If books go social we might have to retire that bromide.  Or rewrite it.  With so many people watching, sharing and commenting, no slip or stumble by the scribe will go unnoticed.  Everything is public.

Show me some mercy; show me my mistakes.

Freud, the Cult of the Personal, & the Trayvon Martin Case

NPR provided the delicious starting morsel: “A woman entered the room.” Viewers were invited to finish the sentence. And there were some good endings and flourishes. The starting point had something to do with it. After all, we were not dealing with a dark and stormy night or the car turning into a driveway.
This is all very human. We like to finish stories and video games. If not finish, we like to concoct. If we do concoct, we sometimes mistake the map for the territory. If we do this at the water cooler, little damage likely done. If we are the captain of the Concordia and miss an island that’s been off the coast of Italy for thousands of years, people die.

Jesse Singal, writing in the Daily Beast about the Trayvon Martin, case says, “We are inherently bothered by an incomplete story.” When we see holes in the narrative, we want to fill in the details. This penchant has more to do with our psychology than running out the grammatical string or finishing someone’s sentence. The subject/object world is straightforward, inviting and insufficient.

With all deference to Freud, we seem hard-wired to write fictions as well. This giant of psychology did not only bless us by putting our fictional in-laws in the room when we have sex, he also gave us a writing style that depends heavily on literature and mythology. Oedipus has occupied a chair in the consulting room for more than a hundred years along with a handful of his mythological friends and enemies. The master acknowledged as early as 1934 that he owed more to fiction writers, including Heine, Zola, and Goethe, than to scientific writing. He was not writing case studies; he was writing fictions. Freud earned the Goethe prize for literature.

We learn early on the difference between report, inference and judgment and how to avoid confusing levels of abstraction. We know from both hard research and the delicious and improbable CSI series that seeing is absolutely not believing. To paraphrase semanticist S.I. Hayakawa, we all have a tendency to see the “little man who wasn’t there.”

We don’t just fake our resumes, we fictionalize our biographies, our lives. The media is full of stories of remembrances of past lives and especially of sexual abuse. The former is a con; the latter more complex but still wide open to our imaginings. It has become a celebrity rite of passage, an affirmation of victimhood. Since the abolition of the draft almost forty years ago, the number of those faking their military resumes—stealing valor—has skyrocketed. Why earn a medal when you can buy one on eBay?

We will have our stories, one way or the other. I am writing a book about my Navy experiences in and around Yankee Station in the Tonkin Gulf. My fantasy is that it will be a cross between Mr. Roberts and Catch-22. As part of my research, I visited the Naval Archive Center in Washington, DC, and got some of the actual log books from the ships I served on. I was stunned by the mundane entry accounts of setting Condition Yoke, for watertight compartments, of standing down from a simulated atomic blast, and the captain’s mast for Seaman Mixed Hair. Except for Mixed Hair, the other items were routine at sea activities. But what about the typhoon that almost killed us, the on-board arsonist, the dust-ups off Vietnam, the suicide, etc.?

Those sailors weary of documenting their travels across the Atlantic and Pacific will talk about “gun-decking the log.” “The sea is always calm, the moon is high, and the chronometers have been wound and repaired.” Should my memory and imagination play second fiddle either to the facts or to the scribe who is writing his own case study about a private voyage inside his head?

A plot is a narrative of events. A story tells us what happens next, such as after the king dies. We want to nail down the plot; then we want the full story. What should or must happen next? By now this is as much about me as the characters in the drama.

What apparently troubles many of us about the Trayvon Martin case, other than the tragic death itself, is that the narrative lines and graphics keep changing. The first photo of Martin shows him as an angelic teenager. The shooter George Zimmerman appears in a mug shot. Later photos show Martin in a hoodie or with gold teeth. This time Zimmerman is in coat and tie and smiling.

Eye witnesses, videos, and leaks from the media and police come and go, adding to an increasingly complicated narrative thread. We are collectively writing a script and this plot is well on its way to becoming a film, whether we like it or not. That Martin’s mother is reportedly trying to trademark some of the familiar chants offered at rallies for her son, will not change the trajectory of the story.

Some judicial authority will write the official script, as in the OJ Simpson case, but that might not change a lot of minds. This narrative has been too juicy with too many invitations to enter the creative door for us to defer. Why let facts stand in the way? I’m not about to turn my back on that contract.

I haven’t seen or heard much understatement and humility, except from the funeral home director who prepared Martin’s body for burial.

The body showed no signs of a struggle. Just a 9-mm bullet hole in his chest.

End of plot.