-- Wednesday, February 2, 2000 --

5:00 a.m. You know, if I could get just one day ahead ... and then when I find myself at the crack of dawn, just like now ... I'd have the great satisfaction of being ahead of the game instead of always being late. Late. Late.

But here we are. I've been working all night to finish a proposal that has to be ready for Kinko's by the middle of Thursday. I still have an awful lot to do, with the emphasis on awful. Lots of small details.

Lots of dragging stuff around and let me tell you -- is my opposable thumb sore. I have a Turbo mouse with a nice blue ball that is silky-smooth to the touch, and here's the odd part ... make of this what you will ... ever since I sat down to my first computer with a mouse attached, I've used my right hand to work the rodent.

The mouse was probably on the right side, and the long-forgotten person who first showed me through the various gooie pull-downs and clicks was probably right-handed. I, however, am left-handed.

But of course. And I mean really left-handed. I was in that last generation of kids who were threatened and coerced and otherwise encouraged by a right-handed teacher to get with the program. She hovered and fussed, but for whatever lucky reasons, I slipped through the cracks and I was able to write with the hand I preferred.

But when I face the machine these days, most of the extra-keyboard movements I make all day long are with my non-dominant right hand ... and oh, how this must mess with my mind. Are these words the product of a right-handed person?

Are my old manuscripts, the ones I wrote with my left hand, right brain ... are they ... different? If it wasn't 5:11 in the morning, and if I'd had even a few minutes of sleep this past night, I'd try to answer that, but for now I'm just going to let my thoughts slip and slide on the unwrinkled surface of the corpus callosum right down the middle of the old brain pan.

No depth charges. Just interesting tid bits. Julian Jaynes was a psychologist famous for one book: The Breakdown of Consciousness (yadda) and the (something) of the Bicameral Mind ... if you're a fan of things mental, you probably already know this book. I have it upstairs, and I could climb the weary stairs and find it and jot down the correct title, but ... no. When I go up there I'm going in one direction only -- I'm hitting the bed and I'm not coming back down.

Nonetheless, his premise is that there was a huge change in human consciousness between the time of the Iliad and the time of the Odyssey, based on the development of the aforementioned corpus callosum. That's the ridge that divides the two sides of the brain, and the humans who lived in the ages of the Iliad had less of it.

In fact, when they said the gods spoke to them directly, they really meant it. They heard the voices of their own id (thanks, Fiona!) right in their heads, clear as day. Once the brain ridge developed a bit more, the voices disappeared, never to be heard again, except by schizophrenics.

Homer lamented that the gods had abandoned us because he and his countrymen could no longer hear those voices. No more clear directives and strong pronouncements personally delivered right between your ears.

All we are left with now are the occasional hunches. That funny feeling ... the still small voice of that indistinct instinct. We are alone with each and every one of our decisions, blindly dependent on faith and totally deaf to the voice of God.

Sigh.

I think a sigh is as close as we can come these days to what God must sound like. Maybe.

Can't be sure ... but it feels about right. Or, what's left of right.