March 2007 Archives

The LA Times is sinking into oblivion.  Trying to be cool and compete with USA today, the paper references that movie, The Perfect Storm, in its title for an article, “Conditions for the Perfect Drought.” As I recollect everybody in that movie died though from an excess of water not a lack thereof.  In any case, the article reports that this last year produced some alarming conditions; not only were the portions of CA that send water to LA affect but so were areas in surrounding states upon which So Cal is dependent for water.  Very little rain, very little ice pack.  Adding to the alarm recent geological findings suggest So Cal and its water supplying environs underwent decades of drought between about 900 and 1300 AD.  A decade of drought would produce some pretty nasty conditions.

We had a drought—that lasted for six years maybe--in the late 80’s and early 90’s.  But then we still had those other parts of the state and parts of other states to supply us with water.  Still it was pretty nasty.  One did not flush as frequently as one was used to doing.  One installed a low flow toilet and also a low flow shower head, doing one’s civic duty.  Also water was no longer automatically served at a restaurant; one had to ask for it.  Lawns died out, and some people painted their front yards with green paint.  The very rich people in the adjoining “community” of Montecito (mostly drug dealers and captains of corporate corruption) had water tankered in to keep alive their acres of lawn.

People talked, if the drought refused to break, of tankering water in ships down from Canada; also proposed was breaking off a huge chunk of an ice-berg and parking it off shore.  The city did buy a desalinization plant towards the end of the drought, but never got it going as I recollect.  They moth balled it and then sold it to a country in the Middle East.

At the time I thought, Those Idiots!  Prudence dictated, as I thought, that we get the thing up and running and maybe even expand it, as long as the sale of the water took care of the upkeep (and couldn’t the water be bottled and sold to Tourists as real desalinated water from the Pacific—sort of a novelty item.)  But No!  So should another drought come we will have to go back to the ice berg idea, if any ice bergs are left by that time.

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Above is a picture of the UCSB penis or PHALLIC SYMBOL.  Every UC Campus has one.  They are called TOWERS, and as far as I am able to ascertain, they are the only completely non-functional or decorative pieces of architecture on any of the campuses.  What does it mean, I wonder, that the UCSB penis should be housed in a non-functional structure?

An odd ball day, alright.  I am preparing to drive down to see my elderly shrink when she calls to cancel the appointment saying she must go to the hospital because she just received a call about a friend who had to go to the emergency room.  She reassured me she was not the one sick and said she would get back in touch later in the day.  But she didn’t.

Then as I am pulling out of the Blockbuster Parking Lot I get a call from Brother Dave who has been contacted by hospital authorities saying that Joan wants to be resuscitated should she “code.”  But the doctors want her DoNotResuscitate because resuscitating her, in light of her overall condition, would probably kill her.  Talk about your experiential paradox!  When being saved is going to kill you, the end has probably come.

So I went through the Tingle family trust for what must be the 1000thnt time looking for language governing the situation.  I couldn’t find the material I needed, so I called Joan’s lawyer, and the lawyer’s secretary faxed the language to David and sister-in-law, Teresa.  This language appoints Brother David the guardian of Joan’s physical being, and in the document, signed by Joan and signed by the lawyer, she indicated that she did not want to be resuscitated.  So Teresa faxed these materials to the hospital authorities.  Have not heard about the response to that.

I called the hospital to speak with a doctor or a nurse about Joan’s condition.  I was transferred five times, and then the call got dropped.  With surprising calm I called again and this time get Joan’s nurse who can’t really tell me anything—I mean who knows what is happening exactly— but says Joan’s condition is the same as the day before.  Stable? I ask.  You could call it that, somewhat ambiguously she replied. 

 I spoke with Joan for seconds.  I could barely hear what she said.  I don’t think she knew who I was, but did know I was a relative.  She asked if Dan was walking yet.  This indicates she is aware something happened to Dan but really not what.  Then she complained at not having received some jello or something like that, something she was supposed to get to eat, but didn’t.  Then all was silence; then she started talking again, but about what I couldn’t tell since I believe she was talking with the nurse because the nurse came back on and I said goodbye to her.

Then Joan’s case worker called.  I had forgotten I had left a message for her.  She seemed like a nice person.  I said I wanted her to know that to a man—and we were all men—the Tingle brothers do not favor having Joan resuscitated especially if it would kill her.  I said I wanted her to know that, and she asked had I let the doctors know, and I said I had said it to everyone I had spoken with, and that my sister in law was faxing documents to that effect.

 Sort of pisses me off though to think that we must pay 100 day co-pay for the hospital room AND a hundred and fifty a day to reserve Joan’s room  at the place where she was before the hospital should she recover.  Damn I never thought it would cost so much just for a person to take up space.  And empty space at that.

Sister-in-law, Teresa, wife of Brother Dave, worked in hospitals in different capacities.  She and brother Dave visited Joan in the hospital just yesterday, I think.  Teresa writes via email:

She [Joan] has been getting some caddilac antibiotics that can only be given intravenously. She is having pleural fluid removed this afternoon; they insert a large needle in the back and remove the fluid. I think she will feel much better after this procedure. I just received a call from DR Chaun as I write, Joan’s procedure went well. The fluid was actually taken from inside the lungs because the CT of the chest showed the fluid to be "walled off." The DR was not seeing a consistent WBC (white blood count) it was up and down, so the decision was made to remove the fluid and culture it. DR believes Joan’s ability to swallow was impaired with the strokes causing her to aspirate when she eats. She literally inhales food. Joan has a drainage tube from the lung and the doctor said that may be removed tomorrow. No time given for discharge, I'm sure they'll have to wait to see low consistent WBC numbers. The culture on the fluid will be able to identify the organism causing the infection and what specific antibiotic will work the best.

I find this form of getting old utterly appalling, though I suppose if and when I get to this point, I will welcome whatever the doctors have to offer.  In any case, I am feeling death obsessed again, and when I am just sitting or driving around, have these images of little pieces of crap breaking off in my veins and going to my head and stroking me out.

Teresa worked for a a good while with a biotech firm.  They were making human skin there.  I would tell my students this story.  That they had made a piece of human skin as big as a footfall field.  Also were they to have a male child and have it circumcised (though I did not recommend doing that since doing so reduces the sensitivity of the head of the penis and thus one’s capacity for sexual pleasure) but if they should do it, they should be sure to ask for the foreskin, since the biotech firm my sister-in-law worked for used foreskins as the source skin for the skin they were making, so consequently they might be able to make some money off the foreskin.  Although the market was probably not all that good since the biotech firm had a huge number of frozen foreskins in a vault somewhere in Iowa.

I have no idea how much of this I made up.  But I think the foreskin part is accurate.

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When we bought our little condo back in '92, I think it was, we paid a bit more because it is an end unit, meaning we share a wall with only one neighbor, and in the back we look out unto a little golf course.  Back in '92 that didn't seem like such a big deal; there were open fields a couple of blocks away on all but the east side.  Now condo developments have filled in all the open area.  The little golf course is now a "green belt."  More importantly it's part of a flood plain that drains off into a lagoon nearby that drains into the Pacific. So it looks as if our little golf course (it's just nine holes) will remain a green belt into the foreseeable future. 

This morning I learn there was a screw up on the site; also the original date had been set for today, not yesterday, and they moved it back to yesterday for some unknown reason and my TA hadn’t gotten the word and that’s why his grades were late.

So what with all the screw ups and the site crashing, they extended the deadline for grades until 3 today.  So I stayed up late for no damn good reason at all.  I knew it was for no damn good reason at the time, but I couldn’t help myself.  Finally, I am at long last done officially with last quarter with four days till the next one starts.

Sometimes I forget we live less than a mile from the Pacific, but today I remembered.  So here are a couple of shots from Campus Point.

We have spent weeks and much online time over the last couple of months trying to determine if we needed to file an income tax form for Joan and the sale of the house.  Finally, today, after multiple tries, the lawyer who drew up the Tingle Family Trust for WB and Joan got back to us and said they strongly recommended that we file and get the sale of the house on record, to get the statue of limitations ticking.  If we don’t file and don’t get it ticking, who knows?  twenty years from now, when I am dead, the IRS may decide the Brothers Tingle owe back taxes on a house sold in 2006.

So Carol came with me and we made an appointment to go to H and R Block.  First we got lost, then we had to wait, after rushing around to get there because we were lost and were late.  And well—then, it had to be decided whether we were filing a trust form or an individual form.  So a call was made and it was decided that we do an individual form.  Turns out however that an individual form is actually a joint form, so we needed the social security numbers for both Joan and WB.  We had the former but not the latter, so we had to drive home and find the social security number and then phone back to H and R Block.  We then received multiple calls from H and R lady, plus we made calls to Brother Dave who was up north near Idlewild in a casino to gather information.  We learned WB and Joan paid 55K for the land and about 55K for the construction of the house in about 1980, which we sold for 575,000 in 2006.

So after the H and R lady ran all the numbers it seemed clear we didn’t owe anything tax wise and I guess we could not have filed, but if we hadn’t—who knows—we wouldn’t be on record, I guess.

Big Sky today in SB with winds gusting to 40 mph.

One may find, not twenty feet apart, these plagues located not far from the Waldorf Astoria (undergoing renovation) on the street facing the south end of Central Park.  So high culture and popular culture meet at street level. 

 

 
Since my last visit a huge pile of dirt—as well as big yellow tractors—has appeared in my former parking lot.

 

Brother Dan’s language ability continues to return.  He wrote the following interesting email:

El Bros-

I had an interesting view of the dreaming. From 6 O'clock I had a dream, it was nonsense in nature. I woke up when I screwed the bottle back on itself, and there was much fuzziness about that.

Brother Steve reports via email:

my head feels like a ton of bricks.....did not go to visit again at the hospital, what with coughing and sneezing all over the place....might have caught the cold in that freezing emergency room anyway.....so today I'm going to just rest as much as possible.....will have to go out sometime to buy chicken soup and some kind of cold remedy.....the good thing is I'm off work until Wednesday, so maybe I'll be better by then.....

That’s the Manhattan skyline from the freeway headed towards JFK.

So we left the hotel at 7 am ECT and arrived in SB at about 3 WCT. That’s a long travel day, about 11 hours by my reckoning but we had no untoward or extended delays.

This morning I woke wide awake at 5 am.  That would have been 8 am ECT.  Apparently my interior biological clock was in the process of resetting itself.  This interior clock is a pretty amazing thing; mine is very accurate.  I would like to know more about how it works.

While in Manhattan, received an email that Joan had to be removed from the Villas to the hospital.  The doctor thought stroke, but now they believe pneumonia.  Brother Steve reported via email:

went by and looked in on J.....nothing much new.....no test results back from the urine sample, but the nurse says there is some kind of infection obvious....she asked that I pass along info to the family, so that they don't get too many phone calls....J has a phone in her room, but they say she needs rest as much as anything....so she will be in Palomar for an unknown number of days, until her lungs are clear....and then back to the Villas, where her bed is being held for her.....she was more coherent today than yesterday, hence nastier today than yesterday.....in other words, not much new

Below the Manhattan skyline is hardly visible as an irregular black line at the very bottom of the snap.

Well, the talk is over, and it went well.  Last year, we—Len and Joanne Podis and I—had 30 to 35 people in the room and this year 50 to 55.  People were standing.  We have no idea why especially since we were up against the talk of the woman who wrote bastard out of Carolina.  Joanne thought maybe people came because we had one of a very few interesting titles for our talk…”Dude! Where’s My Voice: Identity, Language and the Working Class Writing Instructor.”  I think Len and Joanne had thought too that this would be the last time we presented together.  But in light of the surprising turnout we decided to think about putting together another panel for next year.  I am in charge of coming up with an idea.

 We had a lot of laughs in our session.  We want to keep the humor, the more personal approach and say something further about the working class teacher/student issues.

We ate way too much today.

 M n’ M’s seem to be taking over the Times Square area.

An absolutely atrociously awful five restless hours of sleep was followed by a good, late breakfast, at a place across the corner from the Hilton. The rest of the day was spent, until about an hour ago—hoofing and taking the subway.  We took the blue line down to the Brooklyn Bridge—which I believe America’s foremost architectural wonder.  Screw Frank Loyd Wright and his artsy-fartsy ilk.  The man build homes people could live in—that had leaky roofs and fireplaces that wouldn’t draw.  Give me a break.  Enough with the l’art pour l’art BS.  Roebling and his crew built a bridge that worked and still works.  Roebling studied with Hegel; I think the bridge imbued with the spirit of Transcendental Idealism and Speculative Reason.

Many died building the bridge.  The pilings were sunk so deep into and under the river that workers would get the “bends” when they came to the surface.  But they didn’t know what the bends were in those days.

I cannot believe it has been 20 years since Carol and I spent 6 weeks here up by Teacher’s College.  The town has been absolutely scrubbed since then.  The poor have been forced out of the area, as the town gentrified and I hear that Major shipped the homeless to New Jersey.

Spent the day on airplanes, to arrive, exhausted in NY, NY at about 5 east coast time.  It’s now ten east coast time but Carol and I are still in west coast time, so it’s just seven here.

We ate at Virgil’s Barbeque, excellent greens, cheese grits, macaroni and cheese—Carol had bbque brisket.  I had fried chicken. Turns out Virgil’s is just a half a block from Times Square. 

See picture.

Also they had a huge screen with a huge M and M on it, so I took a picture of that too.

 Tomorrow, I will truck over to the MOMA and observe some pictures.  And probably I’ll go walk across the Brooklyn Bridge. 

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They intend to replace my beloved parking lot, formally and formerly known as Lot 21, with this stinking little picture.

Actually they intend to replace it with what’s in this fruity little picture of some sort of hazy airbrushed reality.  Apparently, four buildings will go up, as far as I can tell, that might be called collectively the Education and Social Science Building.

Specifics are offically as follow:

Gevirtz Graduate School of Education - 4-story building, approximately 97,300 GSF of classrooms, faculty offices, meeting rooms and related staff support spaces. College of Letters and Sciences - 4-story building, approximately 96,700 GSF of classrooms, faculty offices, meeting rooms, film screening rooms and related staff support spaces. Center for Film, Television and New Media (CFTVNM)- 2 story, approximately 15,570 GSF theater building with 298 seats.

For a total cost of somewhat over 101 million dollars.

It is scheduled to open sometime in 2009.  Fat chance.

 

 

Hard hats are now necessary because of objects falling from the sky.

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Yesterday was the last day of class.  I always get bummed in the last week of class.  Maybe that’s when I most feel I have managed over ten weeks to move a pile of sand from one random spot to another.  Or could be I will miss seeing the students.  Each class is different, and UCSB is just big enough that chances are I won’t see a one of them again, unless they want something.

I was mildly amused at the image of Borat taking a dump in a planter box outside some building on a street in NY, NY.  Stupid rube!  I was back in the 70s watching some damn, boring German film about alienated youth who seemed, for some reason, to spend a lot of time driving along the border between East and West Germany, back when the two Germanies were split up, and out of nowhere for no particular reason, one of the guys gets out of the car and goes and squats on a sand dune and takes a dump.  I didn’t know what the point was, but I remember thinking that a person would have to be pretty relaxed or need to take a crap pretty bad to do it right there on camera like that, because no special effects were used in this instance.  I mean this dump was not digitally enhanced.

I see Nissan is putting out an SUV called the Armada.  Where is Sir Francis Drake when you need him.?

Some progress was made on the parking lot since Tuesday.  More of the blacktop has been moved away and earth is showing now, as well as dust when the tractor goes through.

The digital data projectors are stored in this room, along with cables and other odds and ends. I dropped off my cables and keys at audio visual place where one gets the audio visual stuff as I do at the end of each quarter.  Then I have to check them out again for next quarter.

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Yesterday, I got my car “smogged” as required by California law.  I was happy the old 86 Volvo passed, but sad to learn it churns out about 25% more pollutants than your average up to date car.  But I drive it less than 7000 miles a year so maybe that makes up for the pollution a little.  The smogging cost over 50 dollars; and the fee for the registration was over 50 dollars. 

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I recently read that in the 19^th hundreds in the US fifty percent of all children did not make it past the age of 10.  If a person turned 21 in the year 1900, there was a fifty per cent chance that one of that person’s parents was already dead.  The world wide average life expectancy doubled in the 20^th century from 30 to 60 years of age.  The average life expectancy however has risen in significant part not because people are living longer but because the infant mortality rate has been very significantly reduced.  There has been a 10% increase in life expectancy at the upper end.  Whatever that means.

 Women live longer than men, though men, in the industrial nations are catching up, and the affluent live longer than the poor.  Certainly the notion of class is a social construction, but is living a shorter amount of time because one is poor a social construction? 

This is an accidental photo.  I had just taken a few snaps of my parking lot and I must have failed to turn off the camera because when I loaded the files onto my computer, this photo showed up. 

I didn’t know it was there.

I feel dizzy looking at it because I know that shadow is my shadow and so I am looking at myself upside down.  I have no idea where the camera was pointing when I took this snap because I was not aware I had taken a snap, but it must have been pointing behind me.

Here I am right side up.  I feel less dizzy looking at it this way; though this way I certainly do look as if I had a pen head.

I like this accidental photo partly because it reminds me of a De Chirico painting.  I have liked his paintings for a long time.  They are sad and remind me of the passage of time.  Shadows play a big role in his paintings.  Usually they are very long—those shadows—suggesting, I believe, the end of the day.  In the picture below, the little girl rolling the hoop has a shadow behind her, but she seems herself painted in the same color as the shadow.

This is my parking lot.  Or this was my parking lot.  Now my parking lot is no more, just a bunch of chopped up blacktop.  But in this area my parking lot was once located.  It is no more.

I miss my parking lot.  I started parking in that lot in 1976.  So I parked in that lot for over 30 years.  The walk from my lot to my office is not that far.  But now because my parking lot is no more I must walk at least 4 times as far as I previously walked.

Moreover, I have to park in a strange lot with which I am unfamiliar.  I feel like an interloper in that lot.  That lot has a parking structure in the middle of it.  I do not like going into the parking structure because you drive and drive sometimes looking for a spot and you see one over there but because of the way the structure is constructed you know you won’t reach that spot in time because you will have to drive around to hell and back to get to that spot.

So I park in a spot past the parking structure, out in the open air, and to get to where I want to go I have to walk through the parking structure.  I have to cross two roadways that sometimes have cars whizzing by in search of a parking space.

I feel endangered in the parking structure.  And then I have to cross a bike path.

My old parking lot had a stand of eucalyptus right in the middle of it and trees all along the far side over by that white building.  But over Christmas break, they came in and cut all the trees down.  And then one day I drove up and there was a gate where I used to drive into my lot.

Life goes on, I guess, but without my familiar parking lot.  I hope I can adjust.

At one time I had a book on anxiety, a collection of different kinds of articles, semi-empirical on anxiety.  One, I remember, speculated on some kind of evolutionary connection between intelligence and anxiety.  The word, intelligence, as used in this context seemed to have less to do with intelligence as a thing penetrating the mysteries of the universe and more to do with military stuff.  The CIA for example is the central intelligence agency.  People who work in the organization, while not themselves necessarily intelligent, seek out intelligence.

Intelligence here would seem allied to a view of the world as engaged in conflict or as posing dangers, from another people, perhaps, or the elements, to one’s particular tribe and within that tribe to one’s self.  Intelligence, in this light, would seem integral to survival.  The more intelligence one might acquire of possible, potential looming disasters or attacks by known enemies, the more one might prepare to meet and greet these possible eventualities.

Anxiety appears—not as fear per se—but as a heightened awareness of possible things in the environment that one ought to fear or that might prove deserving of fear, depending upon one’s intelligence. In the tribe certain anxiety prone individuals might stand then as outposts or guards against threat from without.  Certainly, the best guard at night, the one least likely to doze off and thus pose a threat to the entire tribe, is the anxious fellow, the one a little jumpy even in what might appear to be “normal” non-threatening circumstances.

Such a fellow leans outward as it were, via the senses, into the environs.  He notices things that go bump in the night.  Over time, he might even notice patterns or signs that portend or seem to portend coming events.  The sound of a twig breaking in the dark makes him jump.  He is like that prairie dog seen on television, the one who sits high on top of a mound, constantly scanning the sky for signs of the hawk that might come swooping down at any second to carry off one of his kind. 

If the anxious scout gopher does gather intelligence on an incoming hawk, he lets out an alarm so that his fellow gophers may seek shelter or at least flatten themselves upon the ground. The behavior of this anxious gopher, by sitting so high up and out in the open himself, has been seen as a sign by some of the possibility of “altruistic” behavior in the animal kingdom.  Certainly this is not the case.  The anxious prairie dog seeks above all else to save his self and if others are also saved so be it.  The fact is the anxious prairie dog in light of his anxiety simply doesn’t trust anybody else to keep an eye out. 

The work of the anxious prairie dog is isolating because, anxious as he is, he knows threats may arise not only from without but also from within.

That my particular death thing may have a biochemical element doesn’t mean that there isn’t more generally some sort of death thing.  People die of course and I can’t help but see death as the central defining fact of what was called, when I was going to college, human experience, as contrasted with animal experience.

 I am fairly certain my cat is not haunted by its own morality or is in any way remotely aware of the fact that it will cease to be and is therefore unaware even that it exists.  I know my cat “is” but I don’t think she does.  

She might, if attacked, “fear for her life,” but I think really that she is instinctively afraid of damage that might come to her but not of the possibility of her non-being.  I think cats may grieve but not because something is dead but because something is gone or missing. That this missing thing, if dead, can never return just doesn’t figure into her calculations.

So death, the fact and the awareness of the fact, is something particularly human, perhaps even the central defining characteristic of what being human is.  If I may say that.  One’s death is always in the future, so death is bound up intimately with the capacity of the human brain to look into the future.  Or, let us say, since no one can look into the future, that because of an awareness of the future, human beings have long wished to look into it, to predict, by means of such things as astrology or palm reading or auguring from the guts of animals, what might be.

This awareness—that there is a future—is what has allowed human beings, not to predict it, or look into it, but to prepare, on the basis of memory, for it.  It is as if civilization or society, as a collective construction, is built to live past any particular human being and to represent in that way a transcendence of death of the individual.

We are perhaps not that different from the Egyptians.  We too build our pyramids in which to bury ourselves.

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My cat remains blissfully unaware that it exists. 

The year my death thing kicked in was not a good year.  That was the year my English teacher threatened to kick me out of his class because of the bad things I said and wrote about him.  That was the year too the coach asked me if I wanted to quit the basketball team because my attitude wasn’t right, he said.  I didn’t know anything was wrong with my attitude, and I didn’t know either that I stopped talking for most of that year until years later when one of the parents said something about it and said they were worried.

Now I wonder if that wasn’t the time my depression started to kick in too.  My death thing, as I said, was not some random cognition but an actual sensation of some sort.  I have read that the biochemistry of the adolescent brain is still in flux and I know that quite a number of types of mental illness kick in for males in their late teens and early twenties.  Prime time for schizophrenia.  So that sensation might have been some sort of biochemical shift, or blip, or glitch in the old brain.  What the connection between this blip or glitch was and the “death thing” I couldn’t say.  I doubt there’s any connection between a biochemical shift and an awareness of death.

I don’t recollect having thought of myself as depressed at the time.  But I didn’t have a word for that either.  People didn’t talk about depression much.  I guess I would say I felt lousy and the old lady would see me moping around and ask what was wrong, and I would say, Everything or Nothing.  That’s what it felt like too: everything or nothing. 

 I suppose I was lucky to have found Dostoevsky at that time.  All of his books are about death, dying, suicide, the threat of suicide, people that die, or should be dead because they are such goddamn crappy people.  Raskolnikov kills an old lady for no clear reason and goes around the rest of the book thinking about suicide.  Suicide or insanity—those seem to be his choices.  I do know that reading Crime and Punishment the first time made me feel as if I had been saved.  Not exactly that, I guess, but at least somewhere, some time, people had been who might have had an inkling of what was going on inside of me at the time in 1962.

And through Crime and Punishment I came upon the diverse existentialists who opened up a whole new world of death and misery that made me feel at home.  OK.  It was a bit of a stretch. Most of these people lived over in Europe and didn’t speak English.  I had to go abroad to feel at home, still that was better than nothing.  How could I not feel that “shock of recognition,” as I think Edmund Wilson called it, when I opened up The Rebel and found Camas saying the first and the most basic question for the philosopher was, “Should I kill myself?”

So what with the death thing and the “serious” novels I was starting to read around that time, I began to think I was profound or deep maybe or something like that, and other people of course were not.   So while they all went off to the prom, or got drunk and drove around in their cars doing whatever, I was at home in my room alone and thinking deep thoughts, while they were off doing the trivial things high school kids did back in 1962. That was a pretty good rationalization of my social ineptness—that word isn’t strong enough—though not good enough to keep me from feeling pretty damn out of it on occasion.

Not out of exactly, just lost.  I didn’t know enough about what I was missing in the form of a “normal” high school social life to feel out of it.  So I just trucked on with the death thing like a monkey on my back.  Sometimes, I figured, though this was later on, that I was born in the wrong century.  Maybe I should have been born back in the 19^th century when half of all kids didn’t make it past ten years old.  Or maybe even earlier than that, back during the Middle Ages, during the plague when people were dying all over the place.  Hell, I could have become a priest and fit right in.  I could have gone around giving sermons on the ever present presence of death and how this life was a veil of tears and soul making and so forth, and really gotten my heart and soul into it.

But in California in 1966, it didn’t look like anybody was dying.  I had at that time only met one dead person and that was my poor cousin that I didn’t like very much.  And since nobody was doing it, nobody was talking about it.  I don’t remember the topic popping up in any sort of casual conversation, as in, oh by the way, but isn’t death sort of terrible.  I couldn’t find a way to introduce my obsession into conversations about cars, sports, girls, and getting drunk.  There just wasn’t a niche anywhere in the social ecological system of high school for a kid who went around thinking about death all the time.  And since nobody was doing it—dying I mean—my bringing up the subject was likely to be taken as a conversational downer.

This is all mixed up with any manner of chicken and egg problems.  Did the death thing—since it really did exist, and I wasn’t faking it—keep me from fitting in?  Or was the death thing a kind of rationalization of my lack of fit.  Or maybe I really just didn’t fit in because I thought too much and was the only kid at my high school to have read Crime and Punishment and the death thing was a way of feeling there was something special or different in me that could justify my persistent sense of isolation.

That’s a picture of non-dead young people back in 1962 hanging out at the burger joint and looking as if they are auditioning for American Graffiti.

The death thing didn’t really hit me till high school, my sophomore year, I think.  Sure I was aware of death and had some inkling of what it meant.  The A-bomb scare had scared me plenty. But that might have been more the fear of being incinerated.  Actually, while I was aware of death, up until high school I think I felt it was something that mostly happened to other people.

But one day walking home from school, quite near it in fact, I am cutting across an empty lot to get to the road and I see this piece of glass on the ground and the sun hits it and makes a sparkle and out of nowhere I know that I am going to die.  Put the emphasis on the “I.”  I can still see the moment—though I can’t say when it was—in my mind’s eye, and the realization that I, one day, would not be didn’t fill me with fear or horror exactly but more with a sense of liberation. 

Freedom!  I felt there was a part of me, the part that died, that ultimately “they” could not get to.  This part—the part that went when I was gone—was inviolate and beyond damage by other hands.  I thought of this part as being microscopic.

This is a bit vague, I expect, and I bit strange considering I experienced by new aware of my death as a kind of liberation.  Maybe this was an occult form of presuicidal ideation; death was the way out, but a way with no way to get back.  Also, I want to stress, this was not some sort of feeble cognition, as in according to so and so, or feeble rumor has it: people die.  No, the awareness came with a distinct sensation; and it was not a sensation I could just call up through some ritualistic incantation. It had to come of its own accord, as it did four or five times in my first couple of years of high school.

And, then…it went away.  I have read about mystical experiences and perhaps this was a sort of inverted or perverted form of one of those—a mystical experience I mean.  If I experienced my self as safe and inviolate because microscopically small perhaps that’s because I was in touch with the horrendously large.  So according to Freud, I regressed at those moments to the oceanic feeling, itself evocative of a union with all, in the form of a return to the womb. 

This is all mixed up.  But I feel as if I summoned up a genie that I have never been able to get back in the bottle.  OK, the first few times felt strangely liberating; since then that has not been the case.  The genie now looks like a big, fat, smelly toad sitting in the middle of the room.  Every now and then, it burps to remind me of its gaseous presence.

So every day since that first time I think of death.  Sometimes more, sometimes less.  Lately.  More.

That’s a picture of the high school I went to.  It opened for business in 1962, the year of my mystical experience.  You can’t see it in the picture, but down by the road, off to the right was a field with weeds growing on it.  That’s where I had my first mystical experience.

As part of this last miserable 16-18 months, I include brother Dan’s stroke.  This happened just a month ago, out of the blue, as strokes do, I guess.  He is the baby-bro of the four of us, just 47 years old, 14 years younger than I, born in 1960, completely Californian born and raised.

I was going into one of those horrible meetings we have and my stupid cell phone rang and it was brother Dan to tell me that he wouldn’t be going down to San Diego as previously planned and wouldn’t be able to pick up the car that Carol’s mom was giving Carol, and oh by the way, I am in the hospital.  The connection wasn’t good, and there was noise all around from students going this way and that, and he didn’t want to talk about it.  So all I could gather was something significant had happened.

And I had to go to this meeting and so I called Carol and asked if she could find out what happened and went into the meeting, and later learned that brother Dan had been transferred to the down town hospital because they thought maybe he had a stroke and he was in for at least 24 hours of observation.  Well, it was a stroke as observation proved.  Funny, when he spoke with me right after he went to the hospital he was pretty clear but by the next day his language capacity had pretty much gone and the right side of his face, while not paralyzed exactly, was sagging.

This pretty much took the wind out of my sails and threw me for a loop.  I mean not like the loop he was thrown for of course, but my own particular loop.  Deep down we are tied I think to certain people around us.  Attached.  And what happens to them happens to us.  Not in the same way of course, but significantly.  My energy, after the first week or so of high anxiety, began to go in a way that I call depression.  I would wake up and feel overcome by the weight of the day ahead of me.  I still feel that way actually.

For me his condition reverberates most deeply with my death thing.  I have had a death thing long time.  I remember talking with my girl friend in college about it, saying I thought about death every day, and she looked at me kind of funny because she said she hardly ever thought about it.  But I think about it every day.  Call it a morbid fascination.  Maybe terror or just plain horror.  I just don’t get it.  The death thing I mean.

Or maybe consciously I think about death and deep down unconsciously I am really thinking about something else.  In any case, how a person feels or doesn’t feel about death is purely a psychological matter particular to the individual.  Maybe deep down I am feeling some sort of loss, deep, and as inexplicable as death itself.  Or maybe it’s that I use my brain all the time and death is just plain irrational.  It makes no sense at all—to be and then not to be.  I just don’t get it.  So the death thing is the fly in the ointment of trying to make sense of things using the brain. The brain just can’t explain it.

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That's a picture of brother Dan that he sent along via email to the brothers as a way of saying, hey, I am getting better and doing a-ok. 

So March—just about a year ago—things get stranger.  The boss says she will retire, and I am starting to feel overwhelmed, what with WB’s death, and Joan’s health, and the need to sell the house.  Really overwhelmed.  So I figured I needed to cut back some though there is not much to cut back on, but there is one thing.

So I let my colleagues on the Executive Board of AFT Local 2141 know that I will not be able to serve as the President of the local anymore and that they will have to get somebody else.  I had been President for three years I guess, and it hadn’t been that much work.  But I had to call meetings and get people together and I had to go to meetings over in the Administration building to talk about Lecturer workload and I had to fly up to Oakland to testify, I guess it was, at some sort of hearing.  I forget what that was about; but they had lawyers there and that made me nervous.  And I kept insisting that we turn out our local newsletter that we had been doing since the union began way back in 1985, I think it was.

Well I did a bit I guess, but really there wasn’t that much to do.  But still there was stuff to do, and I just didn’t feel I could do it anymore and feel I was doing it responsibly. So I quit being President of the Local; I thought I would keep going to meetings but stuff would come up about the time of the meeting and I even stopped going to those.  That was a bit strange because I had been going to meetings for about 8 years maybe.  Before that I had taken a few years off, and before that I had been at it about 5 years, having been one of two people to get the Local started at UCSB clear back in 1985.

Looking back, I think dropping out of the union like that—when it had been part of my almost daily work for years—was a pretty big thing to do and a sign of just had worn down I was getting to be about that time.

 I put up the sign in that picture when the we lecturers engaged in a couple of days of systematic labor unrest when our negotiations with the UC Administration completely stalled.