Sailing to Byzantium

Government Mistakes

2009-12-31T11:33:00.004-05:00

I am totally mystified by the number of people who make mistakes – repeatedly – and are not apologetic or display and form of self-disapproval. One thing is apparent, if someone works for the government, you can expect them to screw up important, critical things as a matter of course.

Like the sequence of bozoesque screw-ups that led to a self-proclaimed terrorist boarding a plane for the US from Amsterdam with explosives sewn into his jockey shorts. It always happens; every time something happens where innocent people die, somebody in the government had their head up their ass and didn’t do their job.

Every year the world loses trillions of dollars worth of human productivity and spends tens of billions of dollars on airport security. I think Maureen Dowd of the New York Times captured the spirit of my frustration in her column on December the 29^th:

“We seemed to still be behind the curve and reactive, patting down grannies and 5-year-olds, confiscating snow globes and lip glosses. Instead of modernity, we have airports where security is so retro that taking away pillows and blankies and bathroom breaks counts as a great leap forward.

If we can’t catch a Nigerian with a powerful explosive powder in his oddly feminine-looking underpants and a syringe full of acid, a man whose own father had alerted the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria, a traveler whose ticket was paid for in cash and who didn’t check bags, whose visa renewal had been denied by the British, who had studied Arabic in Al Qaeda sanctuary Yemen, whose name was on a counterterrorism watch list, who can we catch?

We are headed toward the moment when screeners will watch watch-listers sashay through while we have to come to the airport in hospital gowns, flapping open in the back.”

I think Maureen has captured the spirit of the thing. Tens of millions of American travelers have to pull off half their clothes to get through airport security where we usually hear the TSA employees talking about some preceding passenger who they would like to “tap that ass.”

Listening to a high school drop out with petty authority try to persuade a paraplegic in a wheel chair to “move your legs or I won’t be able to check you.” Or rousting some 90 year old Anglo-Saxon woman and bossing her around: “Lift your arms.” Meanwhile, the Arabic looking 18 to 30 year old males stand around and glare at everyone daring them to make an allegation so they can sue someone for profiling.

Hurricane Katrina is a perfect example of the errors made by the class of people politics and government attract. The collapsing levee that will eventually cost the public trillions of dollars was totally avoidable if the city had spent the money to make the repairs the Corp of Engineers recommended. But, since Lousiana and New Orleans in particular is the epicenter of government corruption in the US, the politicians responsible for making the right decision were preoccupied with jockeying around with the budget money for portions of the skim. They were trying to pocket all the money allocated for levee repair and so it never happened.

In common parlance – that is media-speak – this would be referred to as a “mistake,” when in fact it is just another example of how human-nature (a euphemism for our species – ground dwelling life forms that have developed the ability to knowingly murder and pillage by will instead of by instinct) manifests itself in social environments. It is far more surprising when one person or a group of persons makes the right decision and avoids a problem or a calamity.

“Mistakes” are not just the prevue of the moderately intelligent; I deal with extremely bright people day in and day out and they are constantly screwing up. I hear – “I forgot” or, “I missed that,” or some such excuse. In my family, mistakes led to verbal castigation of a disarming magnitude. Expletives of every order were discharged in my general direction; and I was described as everything negative imaginable – none of which resembled a human.

I notice in some families, when a child makes a mistake, screws up, or acts stupidly irresponsible, the parent dismisses the event with a shrug or even a giggle or guffaw. “Oops, you fed Buffy the chocolate-onion soufflé with the arsenic that we were going to use to poison the rats? Well, we can get another dog.” Often, mistakes that are patently irresponsible or careless are followed by spontaneously laughter and knee-slapping forgiveness.

Many people I know laugh hysterically when they do something stupid – even if it costs others time and money and inconvenience. Their misdeeds amuse them and in no way reflect on their self-esteem or perception of themselves. Doing stupid, careless things is acceptable and an acknowledgement of their humanity. And, if some error they have made causes you pain or stress or inconvenience – they quickly forgive themselves and express compassion and empathy for their misdeed – to themselves.

What a wonderful life it must be to feel good about oneself irrespective of the number and magnitude of mistakes one makes and the effect those foibles have on others. I really do envy these people. By conditioning, I admonish myself fiercely for any error or oversight that causes anyone else the slightest inconvenience. I feel guilty for making errors and each instance elicits feelings of incompetence and inadequacy.

I work hard to avoid making mistakes so that I do not have to continuously reevaluate my perception of myself and create inane rationalizations and excuses that allow me to accept my incompetence or irresponsibility – or to bury it beneath some internal dialogue that revises the situation to escape culpability. Taking responsibility for one’s mistakes is a burden – an affliction that I would not wish upon anyone.

So, I make mistakes and punish myself accordingly. The idea of error is not as frustrating as the fact that more of them are performed in government institutions than in the private sector. Accountability has always been a major issue in the business world; if you make a dumb decision you may lose customers and sales and people may lose jobs. So errors are generally managed; problem identification and remediation is systemized.

So my advice is to be happy about doing stupid things that create problems for yourself and others. Giggle, guffaw, huzzah, chortle, snicker, tee-hee, hardy-har-har-har whenever you drop and break a priceless item (usually something that belongs to a friend), or forget to tell someone to avoid something that gets them injured.

Come on…give yourself a break. Never being on time, forgetting appointments, providing the wrong information, miscommunicating, accidentally hurting others…it’s no big deal. After all, you are a wonderful person and someone like you should be allowed to be imperfect. You are a perfect candidate for the TSA; government jobs were made for people like you.

The Meaning of Life: To Work?

2009-12-30T14:14:00.003-05:00

I would like to know the results of a survey that asked a cross-section of Americans why they wanted to live. Pretty simple question isn’t it; “Why do you want to continue to exist?”

Do you like the food? Having fun at the clubs and the casual sex is unbeatable? Your job is great and you don’t want to give up the fun you are having every day at work? Love your family and you don’t want to leave them? I think those are all legitimate reasons “to be.”

I’m guessing there are a large number of people who will not have a cogent, cohesive, sensible, rational, believable response to the question. They will stutter and stammer and affect body language that communicates that the question’s answer is so obvious that it is ridiculous to organize an answer.

A rough empirical review of the world’s citizenry and their living conditions compels me to believe that there are those who are continuing to live because the purposeful act required to end their lives is objectionable. The ending of a life – no matter how useless – seems unacceptable.

Therefore, my observation that many people are just hanging out doing stuff until it is time to die – is supportable observation. The chat forums that populate the internet give credence to that observation. Spending the day exchanging information with other Russell Crowe fans – discussing how great he is and how well he acted in this or that movie – well, it seems like an interesting way to spend time waiting to die.

The lucky people are the artists, the creators, the folks who convert their emotions into a palpable message that others can see – even though interpreting their creation may be a bit difficult – you know that they created something that says something about something.

Many people define themselves (find a reason to continue to exist) by their fondness for a sports team, or race car driver, or even an activity – like golf. I think most of the retirees that live around me would be swallowing their Glocks if they couldn’t play golf anymore. It’s not just the game, it’s the paraphernalia and the anecdotes and so forth. If you sit at the bar in the clubhouse, you hear endless chatter about all of this.

If you were from another planet, and had come to earth to evaluate whether or not to destroy it or leave it alone, I believe the aliens would vote for destruction. They would see a planet overwhelmed with poverty, conflict, self-interest, greed, superstition, injustice, irrationality, idleness, and purposeless thumb-twiddling.

The crap you see in movies like “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” where they aliens decide to leave the earth in tact because we have “feelings” and are capable of “great good,” would not hold up outside of a Hollywood cinema context. I think most aliens would think that we are a bunch of primitive hunter-gatherers burning through a lot of oxygen while we spend most of our time in meaningless self-indulgences.

If all the left-wing humanists were allowed to deploy their agendas, we would completely eliminate profiling (using patterns to make predictions) and the doors to all the asylums would be opened and their residents would soon be depopulating the planet. If you followed the history of clinical psychology, you would see substantial support for the case that there is no such thing as crazy people; they just have their own reality based on neural uniqueness.

A superior alien species would probably decide to eliminate both ends of the bell shaped curve – the third standard deviation of our demographic. After all, the bottom tier and the top are equally capable of saying and doing things that appear to be irrational and illogical when compared to the rest of our species.

When all is said and done, it appears the hedonists are making the most of a bad job. They drink and fornicate and overeat and oversleep and then repeat the sequence. While Uncle Ralph is down at the Ford Assembly Plant installing front seats – all day – everyday – all year – every year – until retirement, his nephew is smoking a joint and hitting up Uncle Ralph’s wife for a small loan.

Yes, it seems ludicrous that programmed automatons march tirelessly to their jobs day in and day out – encouraged by their programming that this is what life is all about and this is what Divine Providence created them to do. Work loyally and unceasingly at the GE Plant to ensure that the stockholders and GE’s owners make a profit. You’re a much better man or woman for working 60 hours a week than the German slackers that have 2 months of vacation a year and a 34 hour work week.

Then there are the useless libertines who have inherited several hundred million dollars and spend all their time traveling and spending and eating and drinking and buying and fornicating with elite bodies and hobnobbing with other high society libertines.

Yes, they may have all the money and all the fun but Uncle Ralph has the pride and self-satisfaction. What fun is yachting around the Mediterranean when you could be programming software in San Jose?

I Can't See Their Faces

2009-12-28T08:23:00.004-05:00

Tomorrow and the next day and then the next are going to be exciting. There will be dressing in a cold house and socks to run the ice cold floor to the coffee pot to have two cups to watch the news. Then stop to shower and dress to crank the car to drive the usual route to get to the office to see the people who pretend to tolerate each other amidst the undisclosed disputes and petty sarcasms.

Then a lunch break and the minimal excitement of an all too familiar substance with some time to talk with the disinterested about the uneventful. Stretching toward the break then round the horn towards preparations to leave and drive the maddeningly familiar route through predictable scenery.

Then predictable exchanges and new problems and the same food and mindless TV and vacuous small talk. Beneath it all the occasional dream of some grand personal singularity that hurls you into a new dimension where nothing of the past can corrupt the new experiences. A new country where no one knows your name and tries to program you with their petty expectations and projected limitations.

Perhaps a new world where you walk the boulevard in the morning in bright sunshine and warm, blue ocean breezes gently fanning the palms and hot coffee and almond croissants among the others who are excited about this new world. Then another walk towards who knows where for no reason with fried lobster and Champaign for lunch.

Strolling the streets at night amidst warm breezes and inquisitive strangers who themselves are uncertain about how to enjoy the warmth and novel world without cold and cars and offices and forced relationships. Only…”How are you today,” and “fine.” The breeze is warm off the desert 1000 miles south and the dates and fish are fresh.

I’m not going to the office anymore; I’m not going to ride in cold cars to work with software among the cold sandwiches and the predictable and imminent death of ridiculously soulless sameness and repetition.

I'm going where the sun keeps shining

Thru' the pouring rain
Going where the weather suits my clothes
Backing off of the North East wind
Sailing on summer breeze
And skipping over the ocean like a stone

Harry Nilsson

Christmas Past

2009-12-24T16:49:00.001-05:00

When I was in my 20s, my favorite thing to do was go to the Lenox Square Bookstore in Atlanta (at Lenox Square, an open air mall in the early 1960s) and browse through the books. I loved fiction in those days; I wanted to read everything. I was exploring the wonders of the world through literature. Christmas was the best time to go; the shopping center was packed with browsers and the book store equally so.

Inexplicably, at Christmas, I always gravitated toward Victorian English novels—A Christmas Carol, or anything by Dickens, Jane Austen, Thackery, Trollope—anything that called up images of London…snow…carriages, and foppishly dressed Londoners. Literature for me was an escape—from the past and from life’s realities that I was poorly equipped to confront.

I had a very provincial upbringing—we never went anywhere and my parents were uneducated. They had no interest in learning and never encouraged me to go to college; they wanted me to get a job. The college milieu potentiated my repressed curiosity about the world. Everywhere I turned there were new concepts, ideas—new unexplored worlds of knowledge.

I felt there were many unknown secrets and transforming insights that were hiding within the pages of books whose subjects I had heretofore never known existed. Philosophy, art, poetry, drama—I expected to find some great answer that would cause me to say, “So that’s the answer I have been seeking—the explanation for all things arcane and esoteric.”

Mysticism and psychology might provide me with a satisfactory explanation of my behavior and feelings—my neuroticism, feelings of alienation and loneliness. I searched and read, seeking the salvation and transcendence of a special discovery—the unmasking of a great secret that would answer the great questions I sought to answer.

I gravitated to literature; I liked fiction and the mystery of the poet’s inspiration—the possibility that the rhythmic cadence and cryptic phrasing of the poet’s art foretold a spiritual connection with the “source” that created all things. The muse, “the force that though the green fuse drives the flower” might actually drive my “green urge.”

Anything was possible, any book or a conversation with one of my college instructors might unveil the great truth for which I searched; I hurried through the world of ideas, scurrying and bustling among the stacks. I was impatient to find the epiphany that would make me whole, make me well—the Grail of knowledge that would arrange the chaos of my mind and emotions into a pattern that made sense.

Somerset Maugham’s book, The Razor’s Edge, is about Larry Darrell—a man who contradicts the pressures to conform to social norms in favor of a life-long search for answers about life’s meaning. The movie with Tyrone Power and Gene Tierney is particularly relevant and moving even 60 years after its production. I romanticized about his spiritual quest, his trips to Europe and India to explore and learn.

I had attempted to join the Peace Corp in 1961. I was interested in going to India (this was before I had read The Razor’s Edge). I was denied the opportunity. They were only taking college graduates and trades people at the time—picking and choosing from the best and brightest, neither word would have described or even remotely applied to me.

I continued to read fiction up until about 15 years ago, but had basically given up my passion for reading in my late 30s. My lack of enthusiasm coincided with the realization that most fiction writers were simply rehashing the ideas of others, and that not well. The symbolism and imagery of their narratives were poorly regurgitated Freudian clap-trap or their personal interpretations of other interpretations of philosophical clap-trap.

More precisely, they subordinated their metaphors and imagery to the phantoms of personal dysfunction that rattled around in their own neurotic psyches. Their characters, motivation, plots and denouements reflected their own eccentricities and were not inspired revelations emanating from some nether world of metaphysical inspiration.

Everybody else may have already known this, but when I discovered the truth it sparked a cynicism that has lasted ever since. My immature romanticism was bound to bust when I experienced the realities of life. So now I wander the book stores in search of that passion that inspired my youth, but it eludes me. I still love being in the presence of printed ideas in such great abundance. Nostalgia drives my return to the stacks, but I walk the aisles without the happy expectations of picking up a book and finding the answer to life’s great secrets.

But still, something inside drives me to wander and to wonder through the corridors of our unprepossessing reality. You go to the grocer, the restaurant…a store. Driving down the street you notice the houses and storefronts—the sidewalks and endless signs compelling you to buy and consume. A thought enters your head—a thought whose source has no author…no discernible cues, but it is there anyway. The thought that this is all very boring and that you would give everything…everything to discover some passion—some calling that consumed you and beckoned you like the biochemical ethos of a deeply romantic love.

Then, a moment passes and you make the turn into the grocery store and walk quietly and placidly into the store to get the things you get to prepare the things you eat to energize the things you do to make the money you need to keep it all moving along. It sounds worse than it lives but it leads me to believe that getting old is really just giving up.

The spirit of Christmas reawakens the mystique of life for me—the possibilities of mankind’s potential. Not for our survival; in 5 billion years the galaxy will be gone. But, our potential to do something of value during our time. Ayn Rand notwithstanding, the self-absorbed life does not promote the compassion required to distinguish ourselves from the dark energies of an endless universe.

Light breaks on secret lots
On tips of thought where thoughts smell in the rain;
When logics die,
The secret of the soil grows through the eye,
And blood jumps in the sun;
Above the waste allotments the dawn halts.

Dylan Thomas

Atlanta - Nos Quisnam Super Morior Tutus Vos

2009-12-10T10:37:00.011-05:00

Atlanta is the city where I was born, and around which I’ve spent 50+ years of my life. My mother and father’s families have been in the area since the late 1700s. They farmed land that is now occupied by one of the largest expressway interchanges in the city.

In the late 40s and 50s, Atlanta was a quaint town – filled with rural people who were experimenting with their social skills as they fought to get jobs in the city. They wanted to leave behind the drudgery of plowing and milking; they wanted to go to restaurants, and clubs; they wanted store-bought clothes instead of clothes made on a sewing machine at home.

Men put on suits and ties and women dressed up for Church – children played in their front yards and played hide-and-seek in the neighborhood. You could walk around the downtown area at night. Yes there was racial inequality; blacks and whites stayed in their own areas of town. The crime rate was low and you felt radiant in the benefits of a free country and a free society.

Now Atlanta is like a large game preserve; the average citizen roams cautiously within a jungle of criminals and perverts. Anyone with any sense does not go into downtown Atlanta at night – unless they are in a large group. Even then you may be robbed at gunpoint or savaged by one of the gangs that populate the inner city.

When it is dark in Atlanta, the prudent retire to the security of their homes – where arsenals of weapons provide an illusion of safety. That is, until the front door is kicked in by someone with an automatic weapon – something that happens frequently – even in the suburbs of the city.

At night the murders begin – the car jackings and rapes erupt as descent people scramble to get home – racing through unavoidable crime zones, praying their car will not break down making them vulnerable to the roaming predators that target the weak. Each stoplight or stop sign is a potential attack zone; you have to scan the area and anticipate an attack from behind a car or bush close by.

Children can’t walk to school by themselves; women are at-risk when shopping alone – day or night. The fools who attend conferences at Atlanta’s downtown hotels and venues often leave their hotels and never return again. The subway system is dangerous at night. It is only safe during business travel hours, and even then men and women are attacked while walking to their cars or murdered attempting to get to a nearby shopping center from the subway station.

Students from downtown universities are often robbed, raped and murdered on their campuses. The predators understand when their prey is vulnerable and hide behind bushes and cars – waiting for the out of town boy or girl from Iowa or Nebraska – some section of the United States that is normal – to walk by oblivious of the dangers that surround them.

The affluent areas of North Atlanta used to be relatively safe in the daytime and even at night. Then the subway system opened up stations close by and made the upscale malls and neighborhoods reachable from any part of Atlanta. Now if you are fortunate enough to be able to shop at Cartier, Saks, or Neiman-Marcus you must carefully avoid the African-American gangs of boys and girls who use the shopping centers as amusement parks on the weekends.

They strut and preen around the malls – talking loudly and screaming at each other to gain attention – in defiance of the social protocols of the broader culture; in defiance of the rules of civilized conduct. They sack the stores at night; the morning news often provides security camera pictures of gangs kinking in the doors and windows of upscale clothing stores and snatching and grabbing expensive clothes and jewelry.

In the 70s, Atlanta natives began to move out of the inner loop for the suburbs in a desperate (and it turns out futile) effort to find a place to raise their children where there was less danger. Historically, Atlantans did not leave the beautiful, graceful city of their birth; it was hard to get a man or woman to transfer to another city to work so strong was their attachment to the charms of the town.

The moral aura that Martin Luther King cast upon the city, the dignity of his crusade for human equality imbued Atlanta with a culture of humanism and compassion – a culture that infused citizens with pride in the nobility of his cause and in Atlanta as the source of his support and energy. The image of Atlanta as the incubator for equality and the dignity of all men encouraged emigration from around the United States – and in fact, from around the world.

And then they came; a great influx of African-Americans from the Northeast – from the cities where they had historically fled to escape the tyranny of racism which was an unfortunate part of southern heritage. Atlanta was under siege from not only returning African-American exiles, but from all the third world countries where prejudice and poverty defined their existence.

Now Atlanta is an international city. Fifty percent of the population was born somewhere else. Now the indigenous Anglo-Saxon, Protestant has been replaced by people of every race and religion. But, it is not a melting pot; it is a cauldron of disparate cultures, customs and beliefs thrown helter-skelter into a city that has become a large crime scene – a huge job market with prowling thugs and felons ambushing and defiling the innocent people and the values that once defined right conduct.

The Atlanta chamber of commerce doesn’t waste any ink telling prospective employers or the job seekers who flock to the city that they are moving to a crime-infested, overcrowded traffic jam where every car has a gun and every house has to have a security system and defensive weapons.

The slaughter is expanding as illegal immigrants from Latin America and Muslims from around the world flock to the land of freedom. Once here, they attempt to replace the prevailing culture with the one they escaped, so the mutilation and abuse of women and the bestial crimes born out of grinding poverty and abandonment escalate.

Gangs of every nationality populate the city - Mexicans, Afro-American, Viet Namese, oriental mixes, Easter European - every immigrant group is represented. Shoot-outs and drive-bys occur all over the city. Children and adults are randomly caught up in the cross-fire and killed or wounded. Executions are daily occurrences; instead of robbing a person on the street or in a convenience store, the ghouls take $2 or 3 and then shoot the victim.

The city and county governments are run by minority hirelings. Their insipidity is only exceeded by their taste for corruption. Mistakes are so numerous the cover-up stories are scripted. Millions of dollars goes missing and people die in their homes because the 911 operator falls asleep during the call.

The current political pandering to “political correctness” and the populist worship of every form of deviance is destructive. The cultural anthropologists and sociologists have successfully indoctrinated the weak-minded and the intellectuals into believing that bizarre, immoral and unethical behavior is acceptable because “it’s part of their culture.” So anyone who is not English, Irish, or Scots can act crazy as a shithouse rat and it is tolerated because everyone is afraid that corrective criticism will be perceived as “racist.”

Atlanta has become a madhouse where bizarre behavior is rewarded by tolerance; encouraged by misguided acceptance. The behavioral controls of social ostracism and peer disapproval don’t work and so inappropriate behavior at every level is escalating. The criminal are encouraged by this attitude of passive tolerance and continue to push limits. Any discipline and corrective word or action is considered an expression of “racial prejudice,” or “discrimination.”

Atlanta is a disturbed city – it is a dangerous psychiatric patient, like the boy at Virginia Tech, who everyone is afraid to deal with. You don’t want to infer that any of his behavior is crazy because you would be described as prejudiced, as discriminating against him because he is Korean. The fact that he is exhibiting the symptoms of a dangerous psychopath is secondary; you want to avoid being the object of an allegation that you are “profiling” him or “prejudiced” against him. So, you avoid him and let him behave inappropriately.

Atlanta is a criminal hell-hole where deviant behavior is escalating it into a penal colony. Crime and reverse racism are viral in Atlanta. Most people try to avoid driving through the city; you would have to be insane to move here willingly. I live 100 miles away in a gated community with a private security force, and I still have a gun in my nightstand.

States of Mind

2009-12-08T10:41:00.002-05:00

If you are one of those people who occasionally observes your own behavior, your thoughts and feelings – curiously – kind of looking at yourself like a bug and wondering why, then like me you are often befuddled by the twists and turns of your interests and attentions. That is – “why am I obsessively reexamining this or that aspect of my life or this or that range of experiences?

Altered states – brought about by drugs, alcohol, stress, unusual life-events – cause us to feel differently and we often view the differences with curiosity and wonder and try to incorporate them into our operating model – our understanding of “self.” Why does that music make me think about this person from long ago, and why do the accompanying sensations feel like pain – and longing? Why am I going through this phase of nostalgia – constantly thinking about people I knew and speculating about what might have been.

Remember the happy times? I don’t know what this question means; I never remember the happy times. Perhaps there are happy events; do you remember the happy events? For some reason, my memory does not encapsulate experiences into happy times; there are just nostalgic moments and events where I finally found release from the yoke of something I didn’t like.

For instance, I once worked in Canada for several months – flying in on Sunday nights and flying out late Thursday – for 6 months. On the last day of that consulting engagement, as I drove toward the Toronto airport, I experienced a profound sense of relief. Again, not because I encountered something wonderful, but because I escaped from working in the backwoods of Canada – I escaped from a place I didn’t want to be.

As I look at moments that I can categorize as great experiences, they are so selfish and superficial that listing them makes me appear devoid of depth and character. For instance, saying that a crowing moment was when I picked up my new Z06 Corvette. Or, the first date with some woman and the subsequent physical consummation of the relationship.

Public reports from most people about the most important moments in their lives usually surround events like – “when my sons and daughters were born,” or when “Bobby started his first game of…” You never hear anyone say “when I finally nailed Jane and had her bent over an armchair in her house while her parents were at the mall.”

I do remember one particular moment that can be described without danger of incarceration. I met a girl in Dublin, Ireland – she worked at the gift shop in Fitzpatrick Castle – a hotel close to the city. She was one of the most gorgeous women I’ve ever seen. We went out that night and danced a slow dance at a Dublin disco (this was 30 years ago) and spontaneously kissed on the dance floor. The romantic intensity of that moment is incalculable relative to the uneventful boredom of everyday life.

I organize life into periods of contentment (a relative term of course) and periods of great stress and worry. If you have financial problems, a foundering personal relationship, and a job you hate – well, that’s what I call a stressful period – and, I’ve been there more than once. The reverse of that is what I would call a period of contentment.

I’m pretty sure that theistic folks exacerbate themselves into blissful euphoria quite frequently, while those of us who are non-theistic are left to ruminate about ourselves and our existence in more naturalistic terms. Reality bites if you don’t have a God to look up to; I mean if man qua man is as good as it gets – well, that doesn’t exactly encourage hope for our future does it?

I think a lot of people define happiness as “staying busy” – that is staying in motion so that you don’t have too much time to introspect – moving from one task to another rapidly and keeping cognitive self-evaluation to a minimum. Other folks seem to have a lot of mental time, but they don’t use it for anything; kind of like Forrest Gump looking out into space – zoning out instead of looking inward.

What does all this mean; that question is irrelevant. Meaning is the value and purpose you attach to your behavior and accomplishments. If you don’t assign any, then it ain’t there. You can do a lot of living without doing anything “meaningful.” You may be one, who like me looks back and sees that you’ve done a whole lot of stuff; maybe even some is interesting and good fodder for anecdotes.

Many people’s lives appear to be a journey which follows a definite sequence of events; they start out to achieve something and they do so. Their life story is about how they achieved the steps and benchmarks of their journey toward prescribed objectives. Other lives (like mine) appear to be non-linear – events and circumstances bouncing you back and forth – sometimes forming a central tendency or theme, and at other times appearing random and chaotic.

Teachers and authority figures tend to favor the planned life, and they try to push us in that direction early on. Parents and teachers want us to have life-objectives – be a doctor, lawyer, fireman, or whatever. Structure the direction your life is going to take; take charge of your future. I think that is good advice.

Unfortunately, when authority figures give advice to neurotic, rebellious kids who have no ability to delay gratification and the availability of booze and recreational substances – well, advisory imprecations may go unheeded. So instead of becoming a zipper head, you become a meth-head and don’t sing in the choir.

Your level of contentment is probably a function of how you assess your achievements relative to your potential; “did I live up to my own expectations for myself?” or “did I do the best with what I had?” In other words, did you piss your life away for some reason? It is easy to blame someone for not taking advantage of their apparent talents; if you are looking from the inside out, you get a different perspective.

I believe that many of us are incapable of “happiness” in the traditional sense; that genetics and cerebral architecture disable that capability and render us semi-satisfied with events and circumstances that those with opposite foundations and architecture respond to with joyous exuberance. Tony Robbins notwithstanding, most of us are not very changeable – at least the interior hardwiring is extremely resistant.

We may change our behavior based on changing contingencies in the social environment, but our ability to “have fun” and experience joy is limited. Emotional reconditioning is not easily achieved, so if you are a Grinch you better look for medication. The joy of prescription pain pills is substituting for the ineffable experience of happiness for many.

What’s it all mean; as the header of this blog clearly states, to make sense of this blog means to read them all and put together the disparate musings into a complete profile. Even the cumulative mosaic may seem inexplicable, but that’s my point.

Knowledge Among the Ruins

2009-12-05T13:17:00.001-05:00

What is the source of your information? Where did you collect the content from whence you proffer forth to those around you arguments and opinions – the earnest assumptions that form the core of your ideology and beliefs? The old homily to “believe half of what you see and nothing that you read,” continues to gain stature for me as good advice.

It takes a long time for some of us to realize that almost everything we read from journalists has errors and bias. The media is a circus of fabrication and entertainment-directed spin. Occasionally you get the opportunity to compare a media report of some event or situation about which you have direct knowledge against their reporting; it is astounding how many errors they are comfortable in promulgating.

It’s a sorry state of affairs because it feeds one’s cynicism and constantly evolving perspective that our species is defined by aggression and greed interspersed with intermittent acts of kindness. The excrementatious pollution of our idealism begins early in life and it is often referred to as a “loss of innocence.” And, if we are not careful, the overwhelming assurance that we are not destined to evolve beyond our current level of moral vacuity may lead us to believe that those who perform good acts are suffering from the Pollyanna Syndrome.

Once you are convinced that the media is bullshit and that most people spin, exaggerate, and outright lie for a multitude of reasons, your cynicism becomes viral. The acumen that evolves from sentient beings as they analyze and process their experiences encourages a hedonistic perspective. Believers tend to have static perspectives – and good for them I say. Who needs the angst and ennui produced by a non-theistic world view?

If you believe that man defines himself (or herself) within this cosmic void, then you are partial to movie themes that have aliens visiting our planet to annihilate our species – to cleanse the earth of a self-destructive plague of complex organisms. We don’t need a cleansing from without; we can do the job ourselves. I don’t think we have anything to worry about if we can manage to fortress ourselves in gated communities and carry 47 Magnum revolvers in a leg holster.

On a more positive note, we may graciously save the aliens a long trip and a lot of trouble by offing ourselves driven by the proclivities accentuated by the exigencies of our evolution. I try to maintain a noble positivity and keep my nose above the stench of our dilemma, but everywhere I turn the evidence of man’s ignobility surfaces to dispute my best intentions.

Last night, I was reading about the Irish Potato Famine; one million of the Irish starved in a large part because the British refused to help – while profiting from the export of crops the Irish themselves could not afford to purchase. If you Google the Famine, you will quickly wonder if the British government was already fully staffed with Nazi Schutzstaffel.

As advancing decrepitude accelerates my search for a moral algorithm that will sustain me, I continue to encounter barriers in the guise of documented human behavior that substantiates that the Nazi’s only surpass other barbarian murders by a slender margin. I am frankly amazed by the number of humans who are proud of their species; my guess is that they keep their head in the sand in order to achieve a perspective more conducive to a happy, carefree life.

Aging is particularly difficult because it encourages self-examination and a search for meaning; both courses are fraught with dangerous obstacles for truth seekers and those attempting to evolve towards some modicum of self-respect as a being among our species. Perhaps it is not advisable to ruminate over one’s past indiscretions; I cannot escape responsibility for my past behavior, although I’ve never behaved badly by some standards.

How much better to be young and in that cocoon of protection against past mistakes have them before you.

Voice of the Season

2009-12-04T14:17:00.004-05:00

Oh, ye Dead! oh, ye Dead! whom we know by the light you give
From your cold gleaming eyes, though you move like men who live.
Why leave you thus your graves,
In far off fields and waves,
Where the worm and the sea-bird only know your bed,
To haunt this spot where all
Those eyes that wept your fall,
And the hearts that wail'd you, like your own, lie dead?

It is true, it is true, we are shadows cold and wan;
And the fair and the brave whom we lov'd on earth are gone,
But still thus even in death
So sweet the living breath
Of the fields and the flow'rs in our youth we wandered oer
That ere, condemn'd, we go
To freeze mid Hecla's snow,
We would taste it awhile, and think we live once more!

Thomas Moore

The Lass of Aughrim

Well if you be the Lass of Aughrim
As I suppose you to be
Come give me the last token
Between you and me

Ah Gregory don't you remember
That night on the hill
When we swapped rings off each other's hands
Surely against my will

Mine was of the beaten gold
Yours but black tin
Yes mine was of the beaten gold
Yours but black tin

The rain falls on my yellow locks
And the dew it wets my skin;
My babe lies cold within my arms;
Lord Gregory, let me in

Donal Óg (Perhaps 8th Century; From the Old Irish)

2009-11-18T17:28:00.005-05:00

It is late last night the dog was speaking of you;
the snipe was speaking of you in her deep marsh.
It is you are the lonely bird through the woods;
and that you may be without a mate until you find me.

You promised me, and you said a lie to me,
that you would be before me where the sheep are flocked;
I gave a whistle and three hundred cries to you,
and I found nothing there but a bleating lamb.

You promised me a thing that was hard for you,
a ship of gold under a silver mast;
twelve towns with a market in all of them,
and a fine white court by the side of the sea.

You promised me a thing that is not possible,
that you would give me gloves of the skin of a fish;
that you would give me shoes of the skin of a bird;
and a suit of the dearest silk in Ireland.

When I go by myself to the Well of Loneliness,
I sit down and I go through my trouble;
when I see the world and do not see my boy,
he that has an amber shade in his hair.

It was on that Sunday I gave my love to you;
the Sunday that is last before Easter Sunday.
And myself on my knees reading the Passion;
and my two eyes giving love to you for ever.

My mother said to me not to be talking with you today,
or tomorrow, or on the Sunday;
it was a bad time she took for telling me that;
it was shutting the door after the house was robbed.

My heart is as black as the blackness of the sloe,
or as the black coal that is on the smith's forge;
or as the sole of a shoe left in white halls;
it was you that put that darkness over my life.

You have taken the east from me; you have taken the west from me;
you have taken what is before me and what is behind me;
you have taken the moon, you have taken the sun from me;
and my fear is great that you have taken God from me!

by Isabella Augusta, Lady Gregory

For a wonderful recitation, you might want to go here.

Carol Sorrow, Melanie Johnson, Deborah Long, and Others

2009-11-02T15:33:00.002-05:00

Carol Sorrow grew up in Sylvan Heights, Atlanta, Georgia. Melanie Johnson attended Augusta College in Augusta, Georgia and became a Delta Flight Attendant. Deborah Long worked for Harris-Teeter’s real estate in Charlotte, North Carolina; then, went into commercial real estate in Charlotte

If you know them (they all have married names I’m sure), tell them to send an email to jerry.pounds@plantationcable.net. I have not seen Carol in about 45 years; Melanie in 30 years; Deborah in 25 years.

Why do I want to talk to them now? Any reason I would articulate would appear to be irrational. Closure is a word that describes what I would like to achieve. But, I would also like to hear about their lives – in hopes that they have lived happily.

I’ve been looking for an old friend – James Dean originally from Felsenthal, Arkansas. We went to school together in Tampa, Florida in 1960. And, Wayne Messer, a friend of ours that joined the Marines in Tampa – then vanished.

If you know LeCroy Melton of Dublin, Georgia. Point him toward this blog.

If anyone knows Ralph Willis of Nahunta, Georgia please ask him to drop me a line. I worked with him at Gulf Oil Company on Peachtree Street in Atlanta in 1963. I know he moved on to Ford and then I lost track of him.

Please send any of them my way if you know them or there whereabouts.

The Strangeness of Aging

2009-11-01T13:21:00.004-05:00

One of the worst things about aging is creeping ennui – more and more things begin to bore you. I can’t watch local Atlanta news because it’s the same thing every day – rape, robbery, murder, and traffic jams.

Network news resembles reality-based soap opera more than facts about what’s happening in the world. I’ve become more and more particular about my likes and dislike; tired of eating out – tired of eating in.

It’s easy to see that by the time you are old enough to die – you’re indifferent to it; death? – so what. You say yeah but there is still plenty to do. Yes, it’s easy to find time consuming “things” to do. Stay busy till you croak.

Growing old is like having been at a really great party and watching everybody go home. I think people experience aging very differently. There is always some oldster on television touting their enjoyable life and talking about how much fun they are having.

I admire the people who feel like they have lived well – met their expectations for themselves; didn’t care about money or material things and feel like making $50,000 a year was just fine. Or even more, I envy the people who like to “stay busy.” They like working even if the job is some mind-numbing repetitive set of tasks.

I think work is way over-rated. There are millions of people around the world who have inherited incredible fortunes and spend their lives finding novel ways to spend money and occupy their time. You don’t find many of them crying about not having jobs and a boss.

The “stay busy” wealthy often position themselves into worthwhile enterprises. Their energy and industrious natures allow them to contribute in “meaningful” ways. Living things seem to be compelled to evolve, to learn, to move to the next level.

One light year is 5,865,696,000,000 miles. Two merging galaxies that the Hubble telescope photographed, NGC 2207 and IC 2163, are 114,000,000 light years away. According to physicists, about 14 billion years ago all of this was compressed into a space the size of an atom; at 10⁻³⁷ seconds after the “big bang” the expansion took place and we obtained the distances of the two galaxies. How do I explain this to the ladies down at the Waffle House?

Yah see; expansion is part of our nature. We’ve been doing it since before 10^−37. Getting older in a universe that is 14,000,000,000 years old is pretty strange. I wonder what the universe will be like when it is 14,000,000,000,000 years old.

The earth and our solar system will have long since expired – our sun becoming a white dwarf – cooling over a few billion years. Yes, when you realize you will expire, the concept of infinity becomes interesting. The mind is capable of positing very elaborate scenarios explaining our origin and purpose. Yet we will never have a means of validating any of it.

In the grand scheme of things, knowing that we are an insignificant anomaly, one still marvels at who we are and the beauty of this place that bore us. Best not to think on these things. Go back to your hobby, your garden, or your crossword puzzle; stay busy.

The Land of Might-Have-Been

2009-10-03T10:45:00.002-04:00

I took a course in graduate statistics about 35 years ago; within 2 months I had forgotten everything I learned. Whether or not you can figure the probabilities of events or outcomes using the appropriate formulae, we all have an innate understanding of chance—most of us are its victims.

The randomosity of fortune is apparent as we track our circumstances against those of others. The Bell Curve exists for all populations, so inevitably there is a top, middle and a bottom. Most of us want to be in the upper part of the distribution of wealthy individuals. Bill Gates is on top. Somebody in India or Africa probably has the dubious distinction of being the poorest.

It is easier to whine about our misfortunes than to see ourselves as failures – as someone who could not do as well as others. Fate has been cruel to many on our planet, but we most likely overlook the Thanksgiving imprecation to count our blessings; we often prefer to carp about what could have been.

It is particularly hard to accept that someone we know who we think compares poorly to us in terms of intelligence, ethics, or common sense has somehow managed to become very affluent. All of us know some dumbass that was at the right place at the right time and stumbled into a piece of luck.

No, it was not drive, ambition, energy, persistence, or creativity that made them those millions; their uncle gave them 2000 shares of IBM 25 years ago.

A superficial review of the biographies of the mega-wealthy quickly reveals the benefits of having “flexible” ethics. It irks us that being a good person can easily wind up putting you in the poor house as quickly as being indolent or sleazy. Being good, kind, and helpful can get you an Eagle Scout badge and a job bagging groceries at the Publix.

The media has pandered to our increased interests in the biographies of the rich and famous, so we understand that along with wealth and celebrity there are many temptations and moral potholes. It appears that too much, too fast leads to dissipation, drug abuse, alcoholism, promiscuity, and excessive partying. Does that sound good or bad?

I have schemed and thought and puzzled and engineered and created many opportunities or pseudo-opportunities to become wealthy. All the while, others I know who have done nothing but trudge along have happened upon a chance encounter with good luck. Almost against their will they have been blessed with success and wealth.

The cruelest fate awaits those who want material things but can find no way to acquire them. Some people appear to have no particular interest in wealth; their goal in life is to have an interesting job and live within their means. I envy those people.

It is unenviable to believe that your position in life is under your control – a product of your drive, initiative, competence, creativity, or tolerance for risk. If you hold yourself responsible for your lot in life, you cannot avoid the self-recriminations and personal accountability. You have to admit that you did not have what it took.

Yes, you may see others that walked into success or inherited considerable wealth; you may try to assuage your guilt and the role that self-management played in your own mediocre performance. But, it provides you with little comfort. In your own eyes, you failed.

Cognitive psychology differentiates between those of us who are “High I,” and those who are “High E.” The “High I” folks see themselves as in control of events and outcomes around them; they see themselves as the “captain of their fates.”

Psychologists refer to the principle as “Locus of Control.”

Locus of control refers to the extent to which individuals believe that they can control events that affect them. Individuals with a high internal locus of control believe that events result primarily from their own behavior and actions. Those with a high external locus of control believe that powerful others, fate, or chance primarily determine events. Those with a high internal locus of control have better control of their behavior, tend to exhibit more political behaviors, and are more likely to attempt to influence other people than those with a high external locus of control; they are more likely to assume that their efforts will be successful. They are more active in seeking information and knowledge concerning their situation.

Wikipedia

I envy the “E” people; I wish I had a good rationalization for not having an apartment in Cannes or a flat in London.

Reminds me of a song:

The Land of Might-Have-Been
Lyrics: Edward Moore

Somewhere there's another land
different from this world below,
far more mercifully planned
than the cruel place we know.
Innocence and peace are there--
all is good that is desired.
Faces there are always fair;
love grows never old nor tired.

We shall never find that lovely
land of might-have-been.
I can never be your king nor
you can be my queen.
Days may pass and years may pass
and seas may lie between--
We shall never find that lovely
land of might-have-been.

Sometimes on the rarest nights
comes the vision calm and clear,
gleaming with unearthly lights
on our path of doubt and fear.
Winds from that far land are blown, whispering with secret breath--
hope that plays a tune alone,
love that conquers pain and death.

Shall we ever find that lovely
land of might-have-been?
Will I ever be your king or you
at last my queen?
Days may pass and years may pass
and seas may lie between--
Shall we ever find that lovely
land of might-have-been?

The Edge of Sanity

2009-09-15T16:51:00.001-04:00

Psychologists give psychology a bad name. An astronaut goes nuts and does something completely incompatible with her history. The media attempts to drive advertising dollars by hyping the situation ad nauseum. What drove her to do something so bizarre? How do you explain this?

They consult a psychologist—usually someone who fits the visual stereotype we have come to admire in this profession. Beard, mutton chops, Van Gogh, sideburns, moustache, long hair, groomed eyebrows—sometimes just geeky to the 3^rd power—but altogether resembling the mental image of a 21^st Century witchdoctor.

On the today show this morning, they showed a clip of just such a psychologist presenting his version of the astronaut’s causal conundrum. Psychobabble about insecurities (deep seated of course) that are part of an obsessive personality—blah, blah, blah. Language without meaning. Words without referents.

The only way we might really know what has happened with the poor woman is to have pre-episode brain scan data (either EEG, CAT, PET, MRI or MEG) combined with biochemical profiles, hormonal measures, behavioral observations and situation stress analyses. If we compare this with her post-episode measures, then we know something about corresponding correlates concurrent with her insanity. So what!

Psychologists are our big “why” boys—psychiatrists too—don’t want to leave out all the voodoo brokers. They try to explain the whole people-snapping-and-doing-something-crazy-as-hell phenomenon in terms they have adopted from thought leaders in their particular brand of explanatory illusion. They pontificate with authority and are given patronizing obeisance by their interviewers.

When you have bio-chemistry, hormonal, electrical-chemical neural activity, molecular, structural and functional anomalies, diseases, trauma, and permutations of dozens of variables interacting emergently, causal complexity makes it probable that we will never know “why” a person suddenly acts in ways incompatible with their history.

The truth is we love the insane. The antics of criminals and celebrities represent 50% of the news. The other 50% are the insane religious cult wars and politician-driven military actions. The news is about insanity. Why is immaterial. Insanity is entertainment.

Normal people (the ones with lives like ours—quiet desperation and such; brew and a sitcom; Jack Daniels and potato chips watching the Travel Channel; boring, uninteresting, redundant) are not interesting. Normal people want peace, security, safety, health care and high school football.

Our species wants power, territory, fame, wealth, sex and control (see—it sounds good even to normal people). The romantic unattainables. When Paris Hilton is on TV, you hear negative comments from everyone in the room. Harlot! Lush! Skank! Exhibitionist! But everybody still watches and can’t wait to hear the latest bit of gossip about her promiscuity. Debauched, degraded and defiled—that’s what we want to see.

Why? Who gives a damn why? What good would it do if we could figure it out? Then Big Brother could intervene and we could structure a society where there were no over-the-top personalities with their obstreperous behavior. Just how boring do you want life to be?

Some of the weirdest, maladjusted people I know are psychologists. They need drugs and electroshock more than most of the patients in the psychiatric hospitals where I’ve worked.

The most extraordinary thing is that there are so few people who do snap. If you have never been really down—lost everything; no money, rejected by wife, husband or lover; no job and no future expectations—then you have no way of understanding what a thin edge the path of sanity provides.

Can We Handle the Truth?

2009-09-03T11:10:00.002-04:00

Funerals are probably a good thing—for the family of the deceased. When the deceased was as Gordon Liddy so sensitively put it, “not worth the cost of a 9mm round to blow him away,” the rent-a-preacher has to work hard to make the deceased sound worthy of a ceremony.

A lot of preachers use the deceased as a straw man to promote themselves through a sermon that they think is germane to some point. If not a point about the dearly departed, then a point about how everybody attending the sermon needs to get right with God.

I always thought it was so sad that people are willing to say such wonderful things about a deceased family member or friend—things they never told them when they were alive. You have to die to get people to fess up about you. That’s why I’m recommending that we start celebrating people’s lives while they are still alive.

Why not? Think about how inspiring it would be to attend an event entitled, “A Celebration of (your name)’s life. Friends, relatives, old acquaintances, work colleagues—the people in your life—could get together around food, dance and drink; they could take turns sharing things about you that they liked, found humorous, or inspiring or interesting.

Think how happy your life would be after that—talk about a boost to the self-esteem! Many of us have no idea how the people in our lives—past and present—see us. We assume, based on inference and anecdotal information that we are thought of in this way or that. We most often have no corroboration—no validation of our worth as others see us. Think of the sheer joy of hearing those important in our lives say wonderful things about us.

For truth seekers—people who would really like to know how they are perceived in order to make changes in their behavior—it would be useful to get several of your closest friends in a room and have them talk about you without knowing that you could hear them. I think each of us would be startled by the insights and epiphanies we would experience.

I think you would need both of these experiences to grow—to make real progress toward whatever potential you might have. I think we see ourselves “through a glass darkly,” and, through trial and error—hamstrung by the bondage of emotional conditioning and obstructive biases—try to make the best of a bad show.

I have met and known many people who are perfectly satisfied to ignore any disconnects between their self-perceptions and the way others perceive them. They are not even aware that the self-concept that serves as the foundation for self evaluation is myopic and inaccurate. The discrepancy between the way you see yourself and the way others see you is where the potential for personal growth dwells.

This Is No Game!

2009-08-25T10:35:00.003-04:00

This is straight out of the New Yorker magazine, and if you think it's funny please let me know. This is the only man who makes me laugh until I cry, but not everyone digs this type of humor.

by Jack Handey January 9, 2006

This is no game. You might think this is a game, but, trust me, this is no game.

This is not something where rock beats scissors or paper covers rock or rock wraps itself up in paper and gives itself as a present to scissors. This isn’t anything like that. Or where paper types something on itself and sues scissors.

This isn’t something where you yell “Bingo!” and then it turns out you don’t have bingo after all, and what are the rules again? This isn’t that, my friend.

This isn’t something where you roll the dice and move your battleship around a board and land on a hotel and act like your battleship is having sex with the hotel.

This isn’t tiddlywinks, where you flip your tiddly over another player’s tiddly and an old man winks at you because he thought it was a good move. This isn’t that at all.

This isn’t something where you sink a birdie or hit a badminton birdie or do anything at all with birdies. Look, just forget birdies, O.K.?

Maybe you think this is all one big joke, like the farmer with the beautiful but promiscuous daughter. But what they don’t tell you is the farmer became so depressed that he eventually took his own life.

This is not some brightly colored, sugarcoated piece of candy that you can brush the ants off of and pop in your mouth.

This is not playtime or make-believe. This is real. It’s as real as a beggar squatting by the side of the road, begging, and then you realize, Uh-oh, he’s not begging.

This is as real as a baby deer calling out for his mother. But his mother won’t be coming home anytime soon, because she is drunk in a bar somewhere.

It’s as real as a mummy who still thinks he’s inside a pyramid, but he’s actually in a museum in Ohio.

This is not something where you can dress your kid up like a hobo and send him out trick-or-treating, because, first of all, your kid’s twenty-three, and, secondly, he really is a hobo.

All of this probably sounds oldfashioned and “square” to you. But if loving your wife, your country, your cats, your girlfriend, your girlfriend’s sister, and your girlfriend’s sister’s cat is “square,” then so be it.

You go skipping and prancing through life, skipping through a field of dandelions. But what you don’t see is that on each dandelion is a bee, and on each bee is an ant, and the ant is biting the bee and the bee is biting the flower, and if that shocks you then I’m sorry.

You have never had to struggle to put food on the table, let alone put food on a plate and try to balance it on a spoon until it gets to your mouth.

You will never know what it’s like to work on a farm until your hands are raw, just so people can have fresh marijuana. Or what it’s like to go to a factory and put in eight long hours and then go home and realize that you went to the wrong factory.

I don’t hate you; I pity you. You will never appreciate the magnificent beauty of a double rainbow, or the plainness of a regular rainbow.

You will never grasp the quiet joy of holding your own baby, or the quiet comedy of handing him back to his “father.”

I used to be like you. I would put my napkin in my lap, instead of folding it into a little tent over my plate, like I do now, with a door for the fork to go in.

I would go to parties and laugh—and laugh and laugh—every time somebody said something, in case it was supposed to be funny. I would walk in someplace and slap down a five-dollar bill and say, “Give me all you got,” and not even know what they had there. And whenever I found two of anything I would hold them up to my head like antlers, and then pretend that one “antler” fell off.

I went waltzing along, not caring where I stepped or if the other person even wanted to waltz.

Food seemed to taste better back then. Potatoes were more potatoey, and turnips less turnippy.

But then something happened, something that would make me understand that this is no game. I was walking past a building and I saw a man standing high up on a ledge. “Jump! Jump!” I started yelling. What happened next would haunt me for the rest of my days: the man came down from the building and beat the living daylights out of me. Ever since then, I’ve realized that this is no game.

Maybe one day it will be a game again. Maybe you’ll be able to run up and kick a pumpkin without people asking why you did that and if you’re going to pay for it.

Perhaps one day the Indian will put down his tomahawk and the white man will put down his gun, and the white man will pick up his gun again because, Ha-ha, sucker.

One day we’ll just sit by the fire, chew some tobacky, toast some marshmackies, and maybe strum a tune on the ole guitacky.

And maybe one day we’ll tip our hats to the mockingbird, not out of fear but out of friendliness.

If there’s one single idea I’d like you to take away from this, it is: This is no game. The other thing I’d like you to think about is, could I borrow five hundred dollars?

(Author’s Note: Since finishing this article, I have been informed that this is, in fact, a game. I would like to apologize for everything I said above. But please think about the five hundred dollars.)

Take a Bite of Peach

2009-08-11T11:29:00.003-04:00

Two Martinis

2009-07-12T07:10:00.002-04:00

I know why many writers – some of the greatest – drink; they drink to access their emotions and to access the aesthetic of being. Sound cryptic? Talk about “feeling” life always sounds somewhat cryptic…not solidly accessible to apprehension and perception.

Another person describes their experience of life and reality and being, and we puzzle our way through the words…hoping that some combination of those words corresponds to our personal experience…that the words simultaneously validate our sameness and distinguishes our uniqueness.

We know that those around us feel pain and pleasure and fear and anxiety; but for each of us, our experiences and unique neurological architecture and our emotional capability colors the words that describe how it feels for us. We think that, if we are fortunate enough, on some occasion someone will describe what they saw and what they did and how it felt and what it meant and we will say…yes…yes…that is exactly how I felt and what it meant to me.

We are not searching for soul mates; we are in a continual quest for validation…for corroboration…for emotional calibration. Often, we mistake sexual attraction and its accompanying biochemical riot of hormones as an emotional connection. Maybe our ultimate connection with another is the homologous resonance of two biochemical-electrical systems symmetrically singing…attuned to one another through some force that we do not understand.

When you have a couple of drinks (there are many other substances that will alter your experience in a similar way), the protective constructs of rational thought are subdued and we become less controlled and contrived. Our intentions and willingness to delay gratification are displaced by snatch and grab impulsivity (not that there’s anything wrong with that).

As evolutionary biologist and neurological psychologist and others continue to confirm, our feelings and behavior are well determined by genetic predisposition – a fact that provides us little succor against our description as animals. The neural pathways and cognitive constructs that compel us are difficult to elude. Behind it all lurks the sinister specter of Darwin and the hue and cry of natural selection (not that there’s anything wrong with that).

Subsequently, our genetic commandant’s iron-fisted authority cannot easily be distracted – without the introduction of experience-altering substances. There is an inexplicable conspiracy, a collusion among the spiritualist to incarcerate or brain-wash those of us who seek the comfort of altered states and euphoria. Euphoria in any form (except religious ecstasy) is discouraged – and that right strongly.

The ultra-conservation, anti-intellectual human factions eschew hedonism and appear to prefer authoritarian control of human frailties – the use of tobacco in all forms, alcohol, cannabis, cough syrup, pseudo-ephedrine, giggling, and so forth.

But many of us know that to be ultimately human – we need a drink. It releases us from our prisons of civility and sexual discretion; it unleashes the rapture of sentimentality, and we achieve maudlinistic bliss. And to quote Dorothy Parker, "I like to drink martinis, two at the most. Three I’m under the table, four I’m under the host.”

The Despair of Animal Mortality

2009-07-01T10:40:00.004-04:00

I don’t think anyone under the age of 65 will have the faintest idea what this blog is about. Predictably, every age has its psychological symptoms; when you are 19, you are always the smartest guy in the room and anyone over 25 is a target for your rebellious ire.

In your 20s, you are sorting through career and job and college and he and she stuff. Your 30s are about stabilization and family. All of these phases are superimposed upon a foundation of optimism and possibilities and opportunities and hope. You might be great; around the next corner fortune may favor your portfolio or you will distinguish yourself among your peers in some unanticipatable way.

Yet life tires of itself and plays out its string. Stimulus overload; the novel becomes predictably…well novel. I looked into the Grand Canyon…I saw Harrods at night…luminescent against the London mist. I’ve seen the California coast off Carmel and heard the seals barking commingled with the breaking waves off the rocky Pacific coast. I’ve seen America from Erie, Pennsylvania to Santa Barbara.

I’ve flown into Toronto on a clear night and seen the city – like an arrangement of sparkling jewels – glowing geometrically against the dark earth. I’ve been to Yellowknife in the Northwest Territory...a city of ice and cold isolated and solitary in a land of white and… more white.

I’ve seen the grinding poverty of Nigeria…the cement walls and AK 47s that guard the expats – the compounds…the guards…the gates…the cardboard shacks. I’ve been in Dammam on a day when the temperature was 119° F – in the shade and smoked Shisha amongst the revelry of Muslim camaraderie and boisterous sociability.

I’ve drunk Caipirinhas in cafes on the beach of Ipanema and smoked Marlboro cigarettes and watched the tall and tan and young and lovely people play volleyball and drink coconut water out of green coconuts…smelled the sizzling meats…the fragrant smell of red meat being barbecued at the tables.

I stood at the top of Christo Redemptor overlooking the city of Rio de Janeiro and enjoyed a view of perhaps the world’s most beautiful city. And, after about 2 minutes I was ready to go, to eat lunch, to move on. When you are 65, times winged chariot is tailgating you…almost pushing you toward your end…toward your undoing…the time when you will be undone…when you will be no one.

The question I ask myself as I am immersed in these unique environments…unusual and new to me…is this; what difference does any of this make? You’re going to die anyway…and that right soon – perhaps. All the diversity and beauty and horror and mystery and romance and banality of this reality will evaporate and…then…nothing.

As I write this, I can hear the groaning of others for whom these reflections appear to be cynical and jaded…the ennui unacceptable by the standards of their life perspective. The empirical and hedonistic tone of my comments seem cold and faithless…spiritually disquieting and devoid of the merry optimism of the sacred.

As E.O. Wilson says in his book, Consilience, which I referenced in the preceding blog; “The spirits our ancestors knew intimately first fled the rocks and trees, then the distant mountains. Now they are in the stars, where their final extinction is possible. But we cannot live without them. People need a sacred narrative. They must have a sense of larger purpose, in one form or other, however intellectualized. They will refuse to yield to the despair of animal mortality.”

At a certain age – which differs for each person – the decay is undeniable. The body disintegrates irrespective of any efforts to discourage its accelerating decrepitude. The fresh-fleshed and life-scented buoyancy of the young presides at every gathering and asserts its predominance over those of us who are vanishing.

Look at the old people dragging their disabilities and deteriorating carcasses around the world to get one last glimpse of all that is and all that can be – just before they cease to be. Being a part of that predicable and desperate mob is depressing. What does one hope to gain at this last moment; unique insights into what life could have been had you understood yourself and others more completely in your youth?

Is all this futile wandering in the service of moral development or to develop one’s aesthetic sensibility just in time to sit in a rocker and think about all the things you should have seen and appreciated but were to busy to enjoy? I’m not sure about the objective shared by this caravan of gray hair and arthritis…and I don’t care. Most of us seniors travel because we don’t have anything else to do and it gives us stories to share with others – people who are still immersed in purposeful lives – earning, spending, and supporting their families…advancing their noble career ambitions.

My point is that travel doesn’t mean much to me at this point in my life. I look around the various settings in which I find myself and ask, “Am I once again the oldest person in the room?” As I see the physical beauty of the world, I can’t help thinking how wonderful it would have been to see it when I was in my 30s. When I might have fantasized about actually moving to a location and living in a strange and wonderful other world from the one to which I have habituated.

At my age, I know that won’t happen. I will never live overlooking the beach at Ipanema. I will not work in Dubai or Abu Dhabi or London or Dublin and experience the otherness of cultures and people different from mine. Everything that I could have been and might have become, every possibility and dream and fantasy has cascaded and deflated into the now…the here…and the last end.

Putting It All Together

2009-06-30T09:33:00.002-04:00

There are many great books; the great book for you is one that “puts it all together.” E. O. Wilson’s book Consilience is the greatest book I’ve ever read. Firstly, it is written in the most beautiful prose I’ve ever seen. I’ve never read a book that I believe used language in a more elegant and evocative manner.

Secondly, the objective of the book is not to promote any particular idea or perspective, but to integrate all perspectives into a single vision of reality. If you buy it and read it, you will never be the same again because – even if you do not remember everything he says, you will be left with an overwhelming notion that all the things that appeared separate – are one.

This book will unify your conceptual world and allow you to see that “oneness” is not a religious concept as much as it is an intellectual pursuit.

A few quotes from E. O. Wilson collected during a recent interview.

One by one, the great questions of philosophy, including "Who are we?" and "Where did we come from?" are being answered to different degrees of solidity. So gradually, science is simply taking over the big questions created by philosophy. Philosophy consists largely of the history of failed models of the brain.

You are not a real scientist until you make a discovery. And if you make a great discovery, you're a great scientist. You can be a complete jerk and go the rest of your life just saying dumb things and never finding anything again, but you're still a great scientist.

If someone could actually prove scientifically that there is such a thing as a supernatural force, it would be one of the greatest discoveries in the history of science. So the notion that somehow scientists are resisting it is ludicrous.

The intelligent-design folks say, "You haven't explained everything." What they don't appreciate is that that's what biologists do for a living. And, one by one, the things that can't be explained are explained.

Between scientists, you can have high competitiveness and jealousy and petty nit-picking, because we are human. But once something is nailed, the person who did it usually gets the credit, and we move on.

Freud's place in history was to simply point out that a lot goes on in the brain that is not conscious thought. But then he should have gone back to the laboratory. Because what he did then was to dream up a whole series of scenarios about the subconscious, most of which turned out to be wrong.

Anyone who wants to know the history of American philosophical thought for the last half century should go through the pages of The New York Review of Books. See what the fashions were.

What makes humanity is not reason. Our emotions are what make us human.

Religion is a manifestation of deep emotion that will out, one way or the other. Either in an atheistic political ideology or an excessive fierceness in being secular. Or the Red Sox. In other words, we constantly seek a tribe that we feel is innately superior and has the great truths, and we want to identify with them. We shouldn't deny that.

I'm a very patriotic American. Pure reason would say, "Well, America is your tribe, and there are certain things you grew up with, were enculturated with, and that's why you're behaving the way you are." And then I say that's right. I repeat, I'm a very patriotic American. I want America to be the best. I want America to prevail -- not conquer but prevail. I want this country to be foremost in its qualities and its virtues and its accomplishments. And also, to stay together as a closely united country. And I know why I think that way. It's five million years of evolution. My brain is programmed to think that way. But that doesn't lessen my patriotism.

Let's be sensible, guys. We're not gonna tear off on Mars, and we're not gonna send off colonists to the nearest star system. We're gonna live here. This is what our bodies and our minds are adapted to.

I'll catch Wall-E when it goes on cable.

We have to get an entirely new mentality. Getting set for a long haul into the future. In which we grow. Not in numbers -- we'll probably shrink in numbers -- but we grow. In our understanding, in our happiness, in our harmony. Because we realize that there's no other way to survive as a species.

I think we're in the early stages of it now. Don't you?

I think we will make it. Because one quality people have -- certainly Americans have it -- is that they can adapt when they see necessity staring them in the face. What to avoid is what someone once called the definition of hell: truth realized too late.

The Blood and the Heat of the Blood

2009-06-24T15:47:00.003-04:00

He rode with the sun coppering his face and the red wind blowing out of the west. He turned south along the old war trail and he rode out to the crest of a low rise and dismounted and dropped the reins and walked out and stood like a man come to the end of something.

There was an old horseskull in the brush and he squatted and picked it up and turned it in his hands. Frail and brittle. Bleached paper white. He squatted in the long light holding it, the comicbook teeth loose in their sockets. The joints in the cranium like a ragged welding of the bone plates. The muted run of sand in the brainbox when he turned it.

What he loved in horses was what he loved in men, the blood and the heat of the blood that ran them. All his reverence and all his fondness and all the leanings of his life were for the ardenthearted and they would always be so and never be otherwise.

He rode back in the dark. The horse quickened its step. The last of the day's light fanned slowly upon the plain behind him and withdrew again down the edges of the world in a cooling blue of shadow and dusk and chill and a few last chitterings of birds sequestered in the dark and wiry brush. He crossed the old trace again and he must turn the pony up onto the plain and homeward but the warriors would ride on in that darkness they'd become, rattling past with their stone-age tools of war in default of all substance and singing softly in blood and longing south across the plains to Mexico.

Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Houses

The Beauty of Words

2009-06-23T10:11:00.002-04:00

we are flowers all a womans body yes that was one true thing he said in his life and the sun shines for you today yes that was why I liked him because I saw he understood or felt what a woman is and I knew I could always get round him and I gave him all the pleasure I could leading him on till he asked me to say yes and I wouldnt answer first only looked out over the sea and the sky I was thinking of so many things he didnt know of Mulvey and Mr Stanhope and Hester and father and old captain Groves and the sailors playing all birds fly and I say stoop and washing up dishes they called it on the pier and the sentry in front of the governors house with the thing round his white helmet poor devil half roasted and the Spanish girls laughing in their shawls and their tall combs and the auctions in the morning the Greeks and the jews and the Arabs and the devil knows who else from all the ends of Europe and Duke street and the fowl market all clucking outside Larby Sharons and the poor donkeys slipping half asleep and the vague fellows in the cloaks asleep in the shade on the steps and the big wheels of the carts of the bulls and the old castle thousands of years old yes and those handsome Moors all in white and turbans like kings asking you to sit down in their little bit of a shop and Ronda with the old windows of the posadas 2 glancing eyes a lattice hid for her lover to kiss the iron and the wineshops half open at night and the castanets and the night we missed the boat at Algeciras the watchman going about serene with his lamp and O that awful deepdown torrent O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and the pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

James Joyce, Trieste-Zurich-Paris 1914-1921

The Self as Sober

2009-05-11T08:23:00.004-04:00

Scotch and soda, mud in your eye. Baby, do I feel high, oh, me, oh, my. Do I feel high.
Dry martini, jigger of gin. Oh, what a spell you've got me in, oh, my. Do I feel high.

People won't believe me. They'll think that I'm just braggin'. But I could feel the way I do and still be on the wagon.
All I need is one of your smiles. Sunshine of your eyes, oh, me, oh, my. Do I feel high.

Give me lovin', baby. I feel high

Scotch and Soda: Lyrics by Kingston Trio

Its quarter to three, there’s no one in the place
Except you and me

So set ‘em up Joe, I got a little story
I think you should know

Were drinking my friend, to the end
Of a brief episode

Make it one for my baby
And one more for the road

One for My Baby One More for the Road: Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer

“Son, he said without preamble, never trust a man who doesn't drink because he's probably a self-righteous sort, a man who thinks he knows right from wrong all the time."

James Crumley, The Wrong Case.

I don’t know where you stand on the issue of “altered states,” but I tend to agree with the artsy crowd that the highly examined life tends to create the need for recreational relief. If you have researched global warming, pollution, political corruption and the CIA’s Black Ops activities—any sane human would want a drink.

The farmers who live in my county seem to be pretty sober, but then they spend their lives obsessed with milking schedules and hay. They do not pay any attention to what they eat nor do they watch the evening news—they have to get to bed early to get up at 2:30 AM.

Writers seem to drink a bit. There are numerous examples provided in this article by Joan Acocella in an article in The New Yorker.

Tom Dardis begins his book “The Thirsty Muse: Alcohol and the American Writer” (1989) by noting that of the seven native-born Americans awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature five were alcoholics: Sinclair Lewis, Eugene O’Neill, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and John Steinbeck. As for problem drinkers who didn’t get the Nobel Prize, Dardis assembles an impressive list, including Edna St. Vincent Millay, Hart Crane, Thomas Wolfe, Dorothy Parker, Ring Lardner, Djuna Barnes, John O’Hara, Tennessee Williams, John Berryman, Carson McCullers, James Jones, John Cheever, Jean Stafford, Truman Capote, Raymond Carver, and James Agee.

In an article for “The Washington Post,” Writers and Alcohol, Ann Waldron says,

Nancy J. Andreasen, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Iowa with a PhD in English, did a 15-year study of 30 creative writers on the faculty of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where students and faculty have included well-known writers Philip Roth, Kurt Vonnegut, John Irving, John Cheever, Robert Lowell and Flannery O'Connor. She found that 30 percent of the writers were alcoholics, compared with 7 percent in the comparison group of nonwriters, she wrote in the October 1987 issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry.

Andreasen had begun her investigation to study the correlation between schizophrenia and creativity. She found none. But she did find that 80 percent of the writers had had an episode of affective disorders, i.e. a major bout of depression including manic-depressive illness, compared with 30 percent in the control group.

My own humble opinion is that emotionally distressed people seek, and find, comfort in the solitary reflection and personal exploration that writing affords. Perhaps the primacy of internal dialogue and the examination of one's personal sentiments and feelings provide a vehicle for catharsis—that’s the way it works for me. I know very little about art, but from my perspective most artists seek emotional expression.

Being “in touch” with ones emotions may be different from emotionalizing life through symbols, images, metaphors, and analogies. Many of the most famous writers seemed to revel in expressing themselves through eccentric emotional behavior, in public and in print. I am not sure they were “in touch” enough to understand the effects of their actions on the feelings of others—which is a very different thing from understanding how to emotionalize the behavior of a fictional character.

Artists may just be neurotics that use their writing to control their symptoms. The practical, well-balanced John Waynes of the world eschew the emotionalism and sentiment that drives my obsessions. I once showed one of my favorite movies, “How Green Was My Valley,” to a friend who was a CPA. He thought it was disgustingly sentimental. I find it to be melodramatic, heart rending, and inspiring.

The business majors of the world, the captains of commerce, the utilitarians, pragmatist, realists, naturalists and other practical people have probably never cried at a movie, or when reading a poem. In which case, to rewrite or an old adage—I think the practical life is not worth living.

Life is a tragedy for those who feel, but a comedy to those who think.

Horace Walpole (1717–1797)

Blog from the Dead

2009-04-23T17:02:00.002-04:00

The following post was left to be shown 3 months after the writer - Theresa Duncan - committed suicide.

Basil Rathbone was entertaining a friend one night at his home in the Hollywood Hills. Both men were keenly interested in dogs and their breeding. His friend had brought with him two handsome specimens. As it got late, the two friends had a parting drink and called it a night. The friend and the canines got into the car and drove away. But, sadly, not very far.

As Rathbone turned to go back inside, he heard the screech of brakes and the sickening sounds of a ghastly car crash. His friend and the dogs were killed instantly.

In deep shock, and with the thought, “He was just standing here,” pounding in his aching head, Rathbone heard the damned phone begin ringing. Mechanically he picked it up and heard the voice of the MGM studio’s night switchboard operator. “Sorry, Mr. Rathbone but I have a woman on the line who simply must talk to you. She says it’s desperately, desperately important.” Probably some smitten fan, he thought as the operator said, “Sir, I’ve never heard anyone be so urgent. She hopes you’ll know what a certain message means.”

Rathbone, impatient and in a daze, snapped, “For Christ’s sake, put her on and be done with it!” The woman was calling from her home, located way to hell and gone on the far side of Los Angeles. She had a low and cultivated speaking voice and identified herself as a trance medium and clairvoyant. At that time the movie colony was going through one of its periodic infatuations with psychics, astrologers, table-tipping séances, Ouija boards and such. Rathbone scorned all such claptrap, but, he said, “the woman’s voice was so compelling.”

“I have for you, sir, what we term ‘a calling of urgency,’” she said. “It came to me with such impact that, although not knowing its meaning, I simply had to find you. The message is brief. Here it is in its entirety: ‘Traveling very fast. No time to say good-bye.’ And then, ‘There are no dogs here.’ ”

The next time I saw Rathbone (F.Y.I., he lived at 135 Central Park West), more years had gone by, and he was in the act of receiving a summons for letting his dog Ginger off the leash in Central Park. I thought he might have decided, looking back, that it had all been some sort of bizarre coincidence, or maybe a highly original prank. He said, “At the time, of course, I was quite shaken by it.” And now? “I am still shaken by it.”

Dreams

2009-04-06T15:15:00.002-04:00

Last night I dreamed a dreary dream,
From beyond the Isle of Skye,
I saw a dead man win a fight,
And I think that man was I.

James Douglas, 2nd Earl of Douglas

I don’t consider dreams to be mystic premonitions or symbolic messages from our psychological underbelly. I have not studied dreams or dream research—I’m sure there are hundreds of fully funded Ph.D. and M.D.s working through grant money as we speak.

I often dream that I am talking with my father or that he and I are engaged in some commonplace undertaking. He has been dead for over 20 years, but he appears in my dreams as if he is 40 years old.

In some dreams, I am aware that he has died, and I wonder why he is still walking about looking normal. Some of these dreams are extremely disquieting. I wake up in an emotional state.

Dreams are provided a special status by some people—keys to unleashing clinical symptoms or clues to the etiology of psychological symptoms. The lengthy psychoanalysis that many people undertake uses dream interpretation as one of its key clinical tools.

Woody Allen was in psychoanalysis for 30 years; sometimes he saw his psychoanalyst 3 times a week. That’s the kind of behavior that gives psychoanalysis a bad name. I think the old adage that “psychoanalysis is just paying for a friend” may have some merit. But, sometimes you need a friend you can talk to about everything that haunts you, and those types of friends are hard to find.

When they depict dream imagery in movies, it can be interesting, although, I think that flashbacks and images of important events or people in the character’s life are more compelling. In the movie, Islands in the Stream, named after Ernest Hemingway’s book of the same name, the main character (played by George C. Scott) has just been shot.

As he lies dying, we are allowed to see the final images flashing through his head. He sees his ex-wife, his children—standing and looking at him in a misty haze. They are smiling and waving to him. As he dies he sees them driving away in an open car looking back at him—waving and smiling—whereupon he says, “I now know that there is not one thing that is true. It is all true.”

Dreams take on a sinister value in the movie, Jacob’s Ladder. This movie is about a soldier dying on a table in Viet Nam who dreams that he is back home in the US. The movie moves back and forth between dream and reality. Click on my link and read about it—the movie is ominously surrealistic.

The people I have known come back to me in my dreams; they seem so real. Some of my close personal friends have died young and I see them in my dreams. We talk. These dreams make me aware of the loss that can be felt years later, when friends depart. I always wish I had done or said something that I did not-- that I had done something for them that I did not because I was so self-absorbed.

"O God, I could be bounded in a nut-shell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams."

Shakespeare, Hamlet

A Good Idea!

2009-03-13T16:49:00.002-04:00

I don' think that any invention of genius has ever been well received by the public - particularly not by competing thinkers - or doers. It is hard to discriminate genius from eccentricity and absurdity; the incidents that corroborate this observation are too obvious and numerous to deserve repetition.

The sum of this is that there is still hope for all of us; the idea you have for a product or a service - the creation you are compelled to make - the painting, sculpture, or the curious construct of novel ingenuity may make you the next Andy Warhol. If your friends think you are nuts, its a good sign you're on to something.