The Middle-Aged Genius’s Guide to Almost Everything 54 – ‘Depression’/Bummedness and Depression
June 30, 2020
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Why do people feel depressed when times are abundant and good in spite of the crap ongoing?
Rick Rosner: I am lucky and a little bit unlucky. I am not naturally depressed. It takes some serious fucking on my part or some other stuff to make me depressed. But not being easily depressed puts me on the path of laziness because I am content, since I am content, I am not as driven as I should be sometimes.
Today was a bummer today. Because I hate stuff that reminds me that I waste my life, fritter my life away. I ordered Carole a beautiful, elaborate micro-mosaic mirror from Belgium. This substantial mirror that probably weighs 15 pounds.
It arrived today. I opened it. It was one of the more expensive things I ever bought. The dealer who packed it padded it from the top and from the bottom. Not even from the fucking bottom, he put wood shreddings on top and this shelf underneath it.
Then more wood shreddings, I would assume, underneath it; the deal is: it was padded from the top and bottom, but not secured horizontally. This thing that weighs 15 pounds; every time the box – and there was nothing to say, “This side up,” or anything – was vertically oriented, this 15-pound this smashed into the side of the box.
So, a third of the mirror, not the mirror itself, but a third of the frame, which is the part that I bought it for was smashed. When a car is totalled, a reason a car is totalled is that the cost of repairing the car is more than the value of the car.
So, if you have a car worth less than $2,000, and if you get in a wreck and the airbags go off, then the car is totalled, even if there is relatively less damage otherwise because it costs $2,000 just to reset the airbags – even if there isn’t another scratch on it.
Similarly, I think this thing would be considered a total loss because it will take 60 to 80 hours – I don’t know – to put back the jigsaw puzzle that it now is. I think it must have been busted into 300 different pieces. These little micromosaic chunks of it and the borders between the chunks.
I am guessing 300 to 400 pieces. The cost to send it to a restorer. You could probably do it. But they would do a shit job. In the news, there’s been stories. Another minor masterpiece was destroyed by a master restorer last week, which always inspires joy to see the horrible final work compared to the initial work.
The cost or the hours that it would take, even if you could find one who would work for $25/hr, would be more than the value of the mirror before it was wrecked, but I am a good restorer. That means, I’ll restore it myself.
But I will waste 60+ hours that I should be spending on other stuff putting it back together. That’s depressing because it’s sucking up more of my time that would be better spent thinking about physics or writing.
There’s a principle of entropy, which doesn’t quite apply here but doesn’t quite not apply. Which is, to set something aright, to set something that has been disordered, you always use more energy, always create more entropy, in ordering something or correcting disorder.
In fixing this fucking mosaic, I’m going to be creating or starving other parts of my life, where I could be building order, which kind of bums me out. I made a nice chocolate coffee, then I put chocolate whip cream of top because… why not? Then I spilled it on the carpet.
My wife and I spent half of an hour cleaning that up, wetting the carpet. It, probably, won’t stay clean because a little residual stickiness is going to stay behind that will attract dirt. We wasted two people times half of an hour or an hour, which would have been better spent doing what we want to do. Which is, watching HBO.
There’s all this disorder in the world, where Trump and then COVID and, particularly Trump’s response to COVID is costing America. The world gets hammered that way too. It is costing the world what is more than a year of progress: scientific progress, making entertainment.
Stuff still goes forward, but not at the same rate. I’m hoping that medical progress, anti-aging progress, will happen in time to save me. I’ve only got roughly 20 years before I’m getting into the really, really fucked up years.
This COVID has cost medical progress a year. It was a bummer day, not a major bummer because nothing is a major bummer compared to the 128,000 Americans who have died largely unnecessarily – because of the crap COVID response.
The several years I’ve spent angrily tweeting about Trump. I’ve probably tweeted 40,000 times. I’m guessing that 1/5th of those are about Trump. 8,000 tweets could have been better spent on lame jokes are observations instead of Trump’s dumbness, cravenness, and COVID statistics.
[End of recorded material]
Authors[1]
American Television Writer
(Updated July 25, 2019)
*High range testing (HRT) should be taken with honest skepticism grounded in the limited empirical development of the field at present, even in spite of honest and sincere efforts. If a higher general intelligence score, then the greater the variability in, and margin of error in, the general intelligence scores because of the greater rarity in the population.*
According to some semi-reputable sources gathered in a listing here, Rick G. Rosner may have among America’s, North America’s, and the world’s highest measured IQs at or above 190 (S.D. 15)/196 (S.D. 16) based on several high range test performances created by Christopher Harding, Jason Betts, Paul Cooijmans, and Ronald Hoeflin. He earned 12 years of college credit in less than a year and graduated with the equivalent of 8 majors. He has received 8 Writers Guild Awards and Emmy nominations, and was titled 2013 North American Genius of the Year by The World Genius Directory with the main “Genius” listing here.
He has written for Remote Control, Crank Yankers, The Man Show, The Emmys, The Grammys, and Jimmy Kimmel Live!. He worked as a bouncer, a nude art model, a roller-skating waiter, and a stripper. In a television commercial, Domino’s Pizza named him the “World’s Smartest Man.” The commercial was taken off the air after Subway sandwiches issued a cease-and-desist. He was named “Best Bouncer” in the Denver Area, Colorado, by Westwood Magazine.
Rosner spent much of the late Disco Era as an undercover high school student. In addition, he spent 25 years as a bar bouncer and American fake ID-catcher, and 25+ years as a stripper, and nearly 30 years as a writer for more than 2,500 hours of network television. Errol Morris featured Rosner in the interview series entitled First Person, where some of this history was covered by Morris. He came in second, or lost, on Jeopardy!, sued Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? over a flawed question and lost the lawsuit. He won one game and lost one game on Are You Smarter Than a Drunk Person? (He was drunk). Finally, he spent 37+ years working on a time-invariant variation of the Big Bang Theory.
Currently, Rosner sits tweeting in a bathrobe (winter) or a towel (summer). He lives in Los Angeles, California with his wife, dog, and goldfish. He and his wife have a daughter. You can send him money or questions at LanceVersusRick@Gmail.Com, or a direct message via Twitter, or find him on LinkedIn, or see him on YouTube.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Founder, In-Sight Publishing
Footnotes
[1] Four format points for the session article:
- Bold text following “Scott Douglas Jacobsen:” or “Jacobsen:” is Scott Douglas Jacobsen & non-bold text following “Rick Rosner:” or “Rosner:” is Rick Rosner.
- Session article conducted, transcribed, edited, formatted, and published by Scott.
- Footnotes & in-text citations in the interview & references after the interview.
- This session article has been edited for clarity and readability.
For further information on the formatting guidelines incorporated into this document, please see the following documents:
- American Psychological Association. (2010). Citation Guide: APA. Retrieved from http://www.lib.sfu.ca/system/files/28281/APA6CitationGuideSFUv3.pdf.
- Humble, A. (n.d.). Guide to Transcribing. Retrieved from http://www.msvu.ca/site/media/msvu/Transcription%20Guide.pdf.
License and Copyright
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightjournal.com and www.rickrosner.org.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen, Rick Rosner, and In-Sight Publishing 2012-2020. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen, Rick Rosner, and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
Rick Rosner 