Parkinson's and creativity: What Choice do You Have?

Not long ago there was a burst of items on the Web reporting a link between the start of dopamine therapy for Parkinon's Disease and a flowering of creative energy. This interested me because of the "creative roll" that I have been on since my diagnosis ten years ago.

As this streak continued to unfold I began to wonder if it was an artifact of the treatment. If so, was the treatment merely bringing me up to my baseline creativity, or was I being "artificially enhanced", like a ballplayer hopped up on steroids? I worried and wondered for awhile, and then it hit me: What difference does it make? What is important is what you can and do accomplish. The other stuff just isn't measurable.

Parkinson's is at work in our bodies long before the first tremor betrays its presence. When that first tremor does show, it means that 70-80% of the dopamine-brewing cells in your substantia nigra are no longer in the dopamine manufacturing biz. The fact that one can skate so long with such impairment is truly amazing, and I have grown to find it comforting. But again I pondered, what had Parkinson's stolen from me before we caught it red-handed? It is the inverse of the first question, and just as useless to worry over.

Parkinson's Disease itself is fiendishly creative. It reshapes personalities, habits and even physical characteristics. It demands a creative response. One has to rethink how life can be approached, from the simple act of walking to the complexity of spousal relationships. And because Parkinson's Disease is always on the move, we must stay on the alert for new ways to cope as old strategies lose their efficacy. As our capabilities diminish, we must incorporate new ideas of who we are into our notions of ourselves.

This is a form of creativity that can't be measured in the number of drawings executed or the number of sonnets written. It is the process of building meaning from the pile of jackstraws that we become following the diagnosis of PD.  It entails loss and bereavement. It's hard to accept. But to go on, you have to re-imagine yourself in ways you never would have without the challenge of this disease. This is the creativity demanded of all of us who have Parkinson's Disease. So far, it remains unmeasured.

Exiled from my comfort zone

Here is my University of Alaska Anchorage talk, with links galore. I am posting it here underscore the point that life continues even after a diagnosis of Parkinson's Disease. My aim here is to make the case and that growth is not only possible, it may come as a beneficial side effect of trying just to maintain your place.

How one cartoonist was forced into picking
the locks that restrain creativity

Speaking in an academic setting is a little outside my normal turf, but I’ll try to talk in long sentences and use big complicated words so you can understand me.

Last time I remember speaking here, I had the pleasure of introducing Mike Carey at a dinner celebrating the honorary doctorate he was awarded several years ago.

That event was a personal triumph for me as well, as I was able to work of the great underground cartoonist R. Crumb into my remarks, which I’ll bet was a first for a U. A. A. academic ceremony.

Not long after I was diagnosed in early 2002 with Parkinson's Disease, an old friend paid me a visit. A person of warmth and intelligence he predicted a fruitful, if difficult time, a prediction based on experience with others who had faced severe illness. I appreciated the comfort offered, but deep down, and for that matter, from right below the surface, I filed this under "Yeah, right."

Seven years down the road my friend is looking clairvoyant. Since that diagnosis, I have been surfing my strongest creative roll, period.

If his prediction were more detailed it would have included these shocking developments...

The end of my indifference to computers as graphics tools and the shameless embrace of Photoshop, iMovie, Audacity, and Flash animation;

Production of numerous animations for the ADN Web site (as well as a series of personal projects) for which I wrote scripts, and music, did the drawing, and where I had to, supplied the voice and did the foley work;

The launch and maintenance one of the first interactive political cartoon caption contests anywhere, Name That'Toon;

The creation of both an ongoing blog on Parkinsons Disease (Off and On, The Alaska Parkinson's Rag,) and Frozen Grin; and...

Extensive Collaboration with Dr. David Heydrick, a neurologist with Parkinson's Disease on materials for his Web site and a DVD designed to help patients deal effectively with their disease.

All this while remembering to take my pills.

Such a description of my future would have seemed way too implausible for the "Yeah, right" file. It would have gone under under “No way” or possibly “Can I have some of what you’ve been smoking?” But it all happened.

I had no road map for the journey. I just booted up the computer and lit out for the country.

But first, I had to slam into a wall. For a creative person that's as good a start as any. As Rollo May observed, creativity is actually driven by limits. If you have no problems, you need no solutions. Luckily for me, I had problems aplenty.

Discomfort in a literal sense began to hedge me in. Repetitive strain problems that I have no doubt were Parkinson's driven arrived at the point where my resourceful and bright ergonomics doctor ran out of ideas that would keep me drawing.

This was a double blow, first because drawing has been a large part of my self identity since I was a second-grader. And second, it has always been my living. I wasn't ready to give it up to Parkinson's Disease.

I knew that there were electronic drawing pads that would enable me to approximate the correct posture of a typist while I was drawing. Using the pad, I can keep my elbows in a natural comfortable angle while holding my head level to look a computer screen, where drawings unfold in a way that is magical.

When I pitched this idea to my doctor, a look of relief crossed his face. He smiled, and replied that it would work. And so far, it does. And it did far more. It was almost like a time machine that transported me from the 19th Century into the 21st. Although it took me a while to realize that I should make the trip.

At the News I was producing cartoons in the same way that Thomas Nast did back in the days of the Civil War. Pen and ink. The lyric vitality of a spontaneously drawn line and its power to describe and suggest was what attracted me to drawing in the first place. I set about recreating that look with the electronic pad and stylus.

Drawing while watching the screen instead of your hands is no big trick. Art students are taught to draw while looking elsewhere. Mastering the program that allows you to draw on the screen (I use Photoshop) was a different story. But that is where I really got lucky. My wife is not only a Photoshop ace, she is also a patient teacher.

Whenever I got stuck, bewildered, frustrated or exhausted, Pam would sort things out.
Eventually I arrived at my goal of being able to produce work on the computer that was
indistinguishable from my pre-computer cartoons.

If you look closely at one of my old cartoons you will see that the gray tones are made up of fine lines. This is a technique that is called “hatching”. It is popular among newspaper cartoonists because the presses we have reproduce it well.
That was the look I worked to recapture on the computer. After much floundering, I finally nailed it.

When I arrived at that lofty peak, that desperately sought grail, that ultimate moment...(By the way, if some of you would start humming the theme from “Chariots of Fire here it will add greatly to the impact.)... that ultimate moment dearly bought with toil and frustration, that apex of mastery when I finally was able to reproduce the old style, I was rewarded with a moment of clarity.

I realized that recreating my old look was a stupid idea.

Take a two thousand dollar machine, equip it with some of the most sophisticated software available, and turn it into a fifty cent pen. Brilliant, wouldn't you agree? That's when I decided it was time I left the 19th Century.

Since then I have been on a full-scale creative bender, exploiting the color, texture and effects at the computer makes possible. I began exploring and picking up steam, incorporating graded tones, trying to work them in with my old style.

Progressing to a full marriage of old and new

Where to go from there? With my cartoons now appearing on the Web, it was on to color.

Meanwhile I was kicking around the idea of animations. The Mac comes loaded with a
movie program (iMovie, old version) that I realized I could turn into a primitive animation application, essentially by speeding up slide shows.

This led to a grandiose plan to webcast a weekly political satire program, only parts of which got off the ground.

Eventually the limitations of iMovie as an animation program pushed me to learning Flash. Flash can be daunting. It's like one of those amazing pipe organs with multiple sets of pipes, keyboards and pedals. The buzz among my fellow Civil War-era cartoonists was about how complex and difficult to master it is. When I sat down with the first tutorial in which the object is to make a simple ball shape roll across the screen the ball just squatted immobile, passive aggressive to the max.

But by now I had a grounding that made the prospect of tangling with flash less daunting. First, my experience with Photoshop convinced me I could learn this stuff. And by the way if I can, you can. Second I was building a critical mass of familiarity with approaches and techniques that seem to recur in these programs, stuff like time lines and layers begins to look familiar, and in the case of flash and Photoshop, both are made by the same company and share many common features. Third, and most important, what those cartoonists who had taken on flash already didn't mention was...( and if you're taking notes, write this down in all caps and highlight it with your boldest color...)

it is a blast.

Flash puts more potential and control over more facets of your creativity than anything I can think of. You can make up your own stories, import your own music, draw your own
images and bundle them all together.

And they come alive! (maniacal, sinister laughter here)

After some practice and some time studying a few books, I learned enough of my little
corner of that massive organ to play tunes I couldn't even have imagined without this
instrument.

I believe that one of the important jobs of a news organization is fostering a sense of
place. And when appropriate, celebrating it. Especially when that place is as vivid
and unique as Alaska.

This was what led me to this next piece for the paper’s Web site. It’s called “Susitna Story” The script is reincarnated from a We Alaskans project, think Charlie Daniels meets Robert Service in the Mat-Su area.

What liberated this eruption of creativity? I believe it was a combination of things. A feeling of exhilaration as my medications finally restored my old abilities, which the disease had been subtly and significantly stifling over a period of years. Along with that came a sense of urgency driven by my own circumstances and the crisis that was rapidly overtaking the media world. I was also intoxicated with the amazing potential that was now opened by the suite of programs that I had begun to use.

And did I mention fun?

Finally, there was the support of editors and the tradition of experimentation at the Daily News that goes back at least to the early 70’s when Publishers Kay and Larry Fanning set the swashbuckling tone that I found when I arrived at the paper in 1982.

Unfortunately, the reality of my progressing disease and the regressing newspaper
industry forced me to bail out.

But not to stop. On leaving the Daily News, I started my blog “Frozen Grin” where this
next piece appeared.

So what is the moral of this story? I was forced by circumstance out of my comfort zone. But I'll trade a certain of comfort for passion and excitement. Giving up the 19th Century to embrace the potential of the 21st made it possible to redefine myself from cartoonist to cartoonist/writer/musician/animator at a time when Parkinson’s Disease has been trying to define me as "disabled".

Imagine what it can do for you.

Shivering Penguins! This blog is a year old!

"Troubles Overcome are Good to Tell" -
Italian Proverb, from the writing of Primo Levi

Yikes, this blog is now just over a year old! The first post went up January 19, 2008. In the following time we've looked at everything from the Greatest Parkinson's Love Story Ever Told, to some of the dumbest things doctors say, when delivering a diagnosis of Parkinson's Disease.

Since I installed a hit counter about two weeks into the project, "Off and On" had a total of 2,695 visits (only half of which were me checking for comments) from 66 countries and territories all around the World. There have been visits from every continent but Antarctica, where the penguins are all in denial "Tremor? Nah, I'm just shivering, you idiot."

Here is a sample of visits from unexpected locales tallied for the year by my hit counter: Israel (8 visits), Malaysia (7 visits), Singapore (7 visits), Turkey (6 visits), China (4 visits), and let's not forget Iran, Bangladesh, Belarus and Jamaica, with one visit each.

Wow. Parkinson's Disease: Bringing the world together.

I hope, dear reader, that this has been valuable to you. It has certainly helped me to cope. Writing is a sort of deliberate thinking. It is a focused exploration which simultaneously creates ideas and reveals them. When I try to explain my thoughts and feelings to you, I come to understand them better myself. Or at least, it feels that way.

Just as important, your comments and even your silent visits, (which are currently running between 5-15 a day) tell me that there is solidarity and understanding out there that reaches around the Globe. That is heartening. I'm sorry that you who read this were dragged into the struggle, but it is good to know we do not struggle alone

What does the future hold? Dangerous question, but I can go at least this far: More trouble and more telling. Because not only are troubles overcome good to tell, telling is part of the overcoming.

Pete's Parkinson's Portraits #6: Vincent Price

Click to enlarge (if you dare.)

FLASH MOLASSES episode one

Tell Your Story

One of the maxims of the news biz is that everyone has at least one great story to tell.

Here's your chance, courtesy of the American Parkinson's Disease Association:

New APDA Young Parkinson’s Web Site

Submit Your Story
Could you be one of our new “Faces of Experience?” Have you been able to: effectively manage your symptoms, develop a particularly strong support system, participate in a clinical trial, become an advocate…? How did you do it? If you were diagnosed with PD at a young age, you and your family may be able to help others adjust to certain aspects of living with the disease by sharing your unique experience with them.
Stories received may be featured on www.youngparkinsons.org or in other APDA publications. Please submit all stories with the subject line “Story Submission” and email to: info@youngparkinsons.org

You can do more than you think you can

ABOVE: Homage to Sylvain Chomet

Alzheimer's is the forgetting disease, but there is something that Parkinson's keeps making me lose track of: The fact that I don't have to quit doing what I enjoy because of PD. It's true that lots of my old skills don't measure up to their former levels, But as G.K Chesterton said, "Anything worth doing is worth doing badly." This was a defense of amateurism, but by all that is shaky, it also applies to living with PD.

I love riding my bike, I used to do a regular 22 mile round trip commute on our wonderful network of Anchorage bike trails. When I was diagnosed with Parkinson's,I was especially glum about the prospect of losing my ability to balance. No balance, no bike. I kept at it for awhile, then had to sit out most of a rainy season. When the next season rolled around I talked myself into the idea that I couldn't ride anymore.

I was working at home one day a little while after I reached this dispiriting conclusion. My son had driven to school and Pam had taken the Jeep to work. The phone rang, and when I picked up, I was told by the head of security at my son's high school that we had "A Situation" with his car. She explained that a roving security guard had peered into our Subaru and spotted a weapon. Said guard had the car staked out and could not leave until I dealt with the situation.

Calling me to let the guard return to "roving" mode was actually plan "B". The original idea was to jerk my son out of the middle of his AP economics test and have him retrieve the forbidden implement of destruction. Sanity prevailed, in the form of an alert assistant principal who knew that this kid would not be a threat to the school if he had a bazooka in the car. (Come to think of it, the car itself was a bigger threat, but he can explain that to you himself here)

Which was how I ended up telling an extremely unhappy head of security that, having no car, I would walk right up and take care of things, but since I had Parkinson's Disease, it would be about 45 minutes. This naturally left her delirious with happiness. At least I think it was happiness.

I trudged into the gloom of the garage to put on my shoes and the dull gleam of the gold paint on a friend's road bike caught my eye. It seemed worth a shot. It was.

I rode uphill all the way to the school and confiscated the weapon. I know you've been wondering just what it was. Machete? Switchblade? Gravity knife? Nope. It was a tiny folding saw with a 6-inch blade and a bright yellow handle that my dad had given us in case we broke down in the middle of a forest and had to hack it down to get back to civilization, or, if we were feeling truly ambitious, use it to start a whole new civilization. Which seems like a better idea all the time.

My job done, I signed a few autographs kissed a few babies, rescued a treed cat and rode home, delirious with happiness. I was back on a bike.

Anybody seen my comfort zone? (part two)

Shortly after my initial diagnosis I got a visit from an old friend. A person of warmth and intelligence, he is someone whose judgment I trust. He predicted a fruitful, if difficult time, based on experience with others who had faced severe illness. I appreciated the comfort offered, but deep down, and for that matter, from right below the surface, I filed this under "Yeah, right."

Six years down the road my friend is looking damn clairvoyant. Since my diagnosis, I have been surfing my strongest creative roll, period.

But first, I had to slam into a wall. Discomfort in a literal sense began to hedge me in. Repetitive strain problems that I have no doubt were Parkinson's driven arrived at the point where my resourceful and bright ergonomics doctor ran out of ideas that would keep me drawing.,

This was a double blow, first because drawing has been a large part of my self identity since I was a second-grader. And second, it has been my living for 25 years. I wasn't ready to give it up to PD.

I had one last reed to grasp. At work we are badgered to sit in an ergonomically correct way- something that I slid by as the rare bird who didn't sit at a keyboard. I knew that there were electronic drawing pads that would enable me to approximate this platonic ideal of posture while drawing. Using the pad, I can keep my elbows in a natural comfortable angle while holding my head level to look a computer screen, where drawings unfold in a way that is magical.

When I pitched this idea to my doctor, a look of relief crossed his face. He smiled, and replied that the idea would work. And so far, it does.

Drawing while watching the screen instead of your hands is no big trick. When you take classes, you are taught to draw while looking elsewhere. Mastering the program that allows you to draw on the screen (I use Photoshop) was a different story. But that is where I really got lucky. My wife is not only a Photoshop ace, she is also a patient teacher.

Whenever I got stuck, bewildered, frustrated or exhausted, Pam would sort things out. Eventually I arrived at my goal of being able to produce work on the computer that was indistinguishable from my pre-computer cartoons.

When I arrived at that lofty peak, that dearly bought goal, that ultimate moment when I finally was able to reproduce the old style, I was rewarded with a moment of clarity. I realized that recreating my old look was was a stupid idea.

Take a two thousand dollar machine, equip it with some of the most sophisticated software available, and turn it into a fifty cent pen. Brilliant, wouldn't you agree?

Since then I have been on a full-scale creative bender, exploiting the color, texture and effects that the computer makes possible. In the past year I have even been able to add in sound and motion, thanks to the animation program, flash. To see for yourself, take a look at the animation posted below.

The world is accelerating while my body is braking. But at least my drawings can move.