Apophenia and Hypochondria: The Week of Magical Thinking

There's this joke that's based on the misogyny that is still so common in our society which says that women don't simply say "I'm a feminist," they say "I'm a feminist, but..." There has to be some sort of capitulation to the patriarchy. This idea has been developed elsewhere by other people, I merely bring it up to set up my own joke.

So I got my COVID-19 test rests and: I tested negative, but...



I'll be rereading Pattern Recognition at some point soon if all goes according to plan. Looking through my tumblr posts from the past, I found this quote from the novel which seems relevant to me now. I guess it's just a coincidence that I've had these weird symptoms during the time of the pandemic. I want to believe in the system and know that I do not have it, but I'm confused by what I feel like I have. "Have" seems like a weird word. When I reacted ambivalently to my negative test results, my dad pointed out that I could make a doctor's appointment to see what might actually be giving me a headache and an intermittent sore throat. Then he thought about it for a few minutes and said what I had already considered and what inspires my general lackluster response to what should be great news: what would a doctor really do for a patient with a headache? A thirty-five minute wait to get told to take some aspirin? I have symptoms... I think? I don't have coronavirus... I think?

I don't mean to whine and I know my privilege. I have a job that provides me with good insurance, for example. If I hadn't that, this negative test would have cost me $85. There's some kind of math joke here where the punchline is "negative eighty-five." You know, my dad taught his mother how to understand negative numbers through the concept of owing money. If I owe you $5, I essentially have -$5. Another interesting use of the term "have," if I say so myself. Just today, before I even realized I wanted to write about negative numbers (which is the name Bret Easton Ellis uses for the doppelganger version of his first novel, Less Than Zero, in his later semi-autobiographical novel Lunar Park) I had a thought I've considered before: what is the practical application of multiplying and dividing negatives? You can't simply explain why multiplying a negative by a negative makes for a positive using money, can you? I'm not sure. I'm trying to figure it out now. Yeah, I had an idea but it didn't pan out. Look at the past tense--I no longer have an idea about that just like I no longer have the coronavirus.

I say "no longer" as if I had COVID, which I guess I didn't. This brings us to the subtitle of this blog post. After her husband died, Joan Didion wrote about her grief in the memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking. She found that if she really investigated the feelings she had, they were often based on irrational expectations; she calls this, poetically, "magical thinking." (I like this choice, because I even hesitated to use the word "irrational" before. I believe that the word "rational" is often used simply to tell people that what they feel is wrong and is rarely actually based on anything rational. I'm not sure why "rational thought" would often provide clear cut obvious answers, rather than just a general uncertainty and lack of any true knowledge. The old Socrates "I know nothing" bit.) I could be misremembering, but one of the examples I think Didion provides is that she didn't want to get rid of her husband's clothes but couldn't figure out why. Suddenly she realized that a part of her was holding onto the clothes, because what would her husband wear when he came back? Coming back from death... I've only had one thought like this that I can remember and I don't recall it clearly, but I do remember probably a few months after my grandfather died, thinking of something that I wanted to tell him and then having it hit me that he was gone. The memory is of my dad's father but it could have been of either, since I lost both grandfathers in 2002. The negative have returns: I no longer have a grandfather.

When I was in college and writing poetry on this blog, I was somewhat obsessed with the idea of mushrooms. I say the idea of them as a reference to the Augie principle from Friday's post, but also because I don't really know anything about mushrooms. I actually took a class on fungi in college and did really poorly in it. The way I look at mushrooms is the way liberal, drug-positive people look at quantum physics: I don't really know what I'm talking about and yet I think they are the answer to everything. Jeff Lemire and Scott Snyder, working off of concepts from Grant Morrison and Alan Moore, developed this duality of nature in DC Comics: the Red, the animal world, and the Green, the plant world (the creators and ideas are actually presented here respectively--Lemire uses Morrison's ideas to present the Red, Snyder revives Moore's concept of the Green). I actually think Lemire's Animal Man and Snyder's Swamp Thing are bad comics, but when I think of this consideration of nature I'm fascinated by both what it has and what it does not have. The negative have here is, you guessed it!, mushrooms! The purple, I thought, decomposers don't fit into the Red or the Green.In my poetry, this obsession showed in the ongoing use of "mycelium in my brain" or a similar concept. I don't have mushrooms in my brain, but I did have fungus on my mind 🤣. That said, the idea recurs now as I can't explain why I have felt like I've had a headache for so long. It's not much of a headache; a dull pain, unnoticeable at times, even. "Do I have a headache?" I keep asking myself. Something does seem off though.

What do I have? I'm not sure. I don't really think of myself as a hypochondriac, probably in large part because I've lived a sheltered and largely healthy life, no thanks to myself. I've been lucky--even though I've been overweight all my life, I've never experienced major medical concerns. Probably the most extensive experience I have had with doctors was in regards to a brief period of time when I experienced tinnitus. All this said, I am also young. I don't mean to seem like I am bragging, for fear in small part to the karma that such boasting might push my way. What I mean to say is that I feel like I can notice the nuance in how I feel because my health tends to be fairly standard. I'm pretty sure I'm repeating myself, but it was the novelty of my symptoms that led me to think I had the coronavirus. I have a mild headache and have had a sore throat (though that mostly seems gone now). I had a weird breathing episode waking up from a dream and some sense of shortness of breath while out for a walk. I might have had chills. It's a weird thing this "have" business. Chills is the best example. I have no idea if I had this symptom, so I can certainly say I didn't have an extreme version of it, but mild chills? I remember getting in my car to drive somewhere and the car being hot from the Florida heat and turning up the air conditioning and feeling, well, odd. I was literally uncomfortably warm, but I felt almost like my body was acting cold. Is that chills? Even if it is, this is after I feared I had the disease: it could have been psychosomatic.

Apophenia is like a form of paranoia where you think things are connected that aren't. You get a new neighbor and then a week later there is a killing down the street. You suspect Bill because he's new and you don't know him very well. I'm sure that's a horrible example and it's probably wrong to consider apophenia a type of paranoia anyway, but, as I have referenced before, "what I have written I have written," as Burgess quoted Pilate. Disparate events can cause symptoms that then look like a disease. What do I have? Perhaps I have a mild sunburn on my forehead. It is hard to determine where the pain is coming from; the brain or the skin? Perhaps I have a raw throat from a shouted argument or singing along to a song with the volume, way way up. Perhaps, as I rarely dust my room, I woke up having inhaled dust in such a way that I could not breathe as regularly as usual. I have since dusted my fan, but ironically the act of cleaning in this way also stirs up dust. It's like the episode of House where he makes the joke that cough drops can actually have the side effect of a cough, or something like that. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps. I think there are holes in all these possibilities, but what am I left with? Perhaps I do have the coronavirus. Ha!, a likely story. It's odd because sports associations are asking that their athletes get two negative tests before being found fit to play. Between the two tests, do they not have the coronavirus? We're back to Schrödinger's Cat. I think, to be honest with you, a part of me wanted to have the virus. Not in some Munchausen type way, but simply because then I would have been aware enough to have spotted it. That it would be so mild as to be unconsidered made it all the more desirable to be proven right. My grandfather, the one who I thought to talk to after he had died, went to the doctor once and was asked how he was recovering from his heart attack. "Heart attack?" He thought he'd had a bad case of indigestion. Thinking of this story, I don't know how much of it is true. My father told it to me and I may have enhanced it in memory. My grandfather could have expanded on it when he told his son and certainly my dad could have made it into a tall tale when he passed it onto me. We all have the same name; I'm actually the fourth. But do you keep your name after death? Does my grandfather have the same name as me? When his father passed, he stopped writing Jr. after his name, after all.

In a magical way, perhaps realizing I had the coronavirus based on the mild symptoms that young people in good health experience would be the poetic closing of the loop that started with my grandfather's heart attack. Perhaps my grandfather never had a heart attack and I've just remembered it wrong. I wonder if the week of magical thinking is over yet.