May 2007 Archives

I was wondering why I was thinking about brothers yesterday and remembered that after class, Tuesday afternoon, a student ask if she could interview me for a paper she had to write for “Family Communications” on siblings, and since I had mentioned somehow in class that I had siblings, she thought I would do.  Also she wanted she said to interview someone that was “old.”  So ditto—I fit the bill.

So she interviewed me for about 20 minutes; she seemed to want to track siblings’ degree of closeness or non-closeness over a life span.  She wanted to know whether I and my three brothers had been close and when.  I said I really didn’t know.  I had no point of reference.  What’s close?  What isn’t?  Well, if something bad were to befall you, where would you turn?  First to my wife I said, then to my shrink to talk it over, and then to my brothers.  I know that if my little condo were to be hit by a meteorite and Job like I were to lose everything, one my brothers would take me in at least for a while and let me sleep on the floor or possibly even a bed, were one available.

We have kept in touch over the years, sometimes more, sometimes less.  Curiously, we are all computer literate and so have used email a good deal over the last 6 or 7 years.  Before email, we did not call each other much over the phone, because I think we all have a phone aversion.  We have not loaned each other money over the years.  That’s a good thing, I think, but then we haven’t asked each other for money because we haven’t had to.

Talking to the student, I realized suddenly that we are all non-religious.  None of us belong to a church or attend regularly.   I don’t know where that comes from, exactly.  But as a group we are not into institutionalized religion.  I don’t know if they are atheists, as I am. I think Brother Dan may be.  Brother Dave possibly.  Brother Steve though must have a spiritual side because at one time, as I recollect, his career choices were minister and captain in the merchant marines.  But I don’t believe he has been to a church in years.  In times of stress, I know for a fact, he does not read the Bible but Stoic philosophers.  So maybe he is a Pagan.

I don’t know if my brothers vote or not.  I expect possibly they do.  And we are all relatively of the same political persuasion.  Mostly we hate and distrust all politicians and think the current administration stinks to high heaven.

There was the mini-series on HBO called Band of Brothers about guys fighting together WWII.  These guys would praise each other to the high heavens, especially if they were praising somebody who died in the war.  But once they got home, it was clear they had little or nothing in common, though over time they did start to attend reunions.  What they had holding them together were common memories of horrible experience.  I think that may be what holds my brothers and me together: common memories of a miserable experience.  Growing up in our parents’ house.

I have been visiting Brother Dan for the last few weeks after my guitar lessons on Friday.  So first I go to Dan, the guitar teacher, and then I get on the freeway for a little bit and visit Brother Dan.  He went back to work .50% about two weeks ago.  It’s hard to tell how he is doing or what he is doing for that matter.  But then, since he got into the computer game, I have never been sure exactly what he was doing.  But whatever it was he was successful at it; he kept moving up and getting paid more and more.

Generally, he seems to have been hired as a communicator.  He had some technical knowledge, I guess, and he would translate that technical knowledge into even less technical language so the sales staff would understand it.  He would be like, sell this and sell that and tell them what it was exactly they were selling and what it was worth.  At his old job this meant selling stuff of the kind that Cisco Systems makes, like enterprise multi-protocol routers.  Whatever the hell that is.

But after the big dot com crash, people all over the country were stuck with mounds and mounds of technical stuff that they couldn’t use.  The company he worked for—which he called a computer junk yard—bought up this stuff, sometimes for pennies on the dollar, and still in the original packaging, and would sell it again sometimes to small municipalities that wanted up to date stuff and sometimes overseas.  I seem to remember something about a connection in Rumania.

So he would be on the phone and make an offer, pennies on the dollar, for a bunch of stuff sitting in an abandoned office somewhere in Indiana, and the guy on the other end would be practically crying, like you can’t mean that.  And my brother would say, because it was true, I am sorry but that’s what it’s worth.  Like “Take it or Leave it.”

Maybe because he was in charge of making million dollar purchases of this stuff and was about the only person who knew what the stuff was and why they were buying it (because Brother Dan knew what was valuable and could be resold), he was put in charge of the company warehouses.  One of the warehouses—the biggest one I think—was in Dallas, TX.  So he would have to fly there from time to time and walk around the warehouse.

And that warehouse was a mess.  Nobody knew where anything was.  Valuable stuff would be piled over in a corner  unprocessed, other stuff would be mislabeled.  This was a pisser because you can’t sell stuff if you don’t know you have it, where it is, or what it is.  So he would go down there and give them a pep talk or tell them to concentrate on this and that, though he seemed to know whatever he did was going to be a lost cause, since the real problem was the company wasn’t paying its warehouse guys nearly enough to make them pay attention to any sort of details.

He worked for that place for a goodly amount of time.  God, could it have been ten years?  And before that he was at another computer place.  And before that he drove a beer delivery truck for 12 years. He was good at that too and I could understand what he was doing.

 I knew Walter A. Davis way back when.  He is now professor emeritus at Ohio State and continues in retirement to write books.  I wish I had his energy.  He published recently: Death’s Dream Kingdom: The American Psyche since 9-11.  I started poking about the book; I don’t read books anymore.  I poke about and came across the following passage while thinking about zombies:

Belief in the self is the American ideology. Next to surplus value the self is our most important product: the thing we constantly proclaim and reassure ourselves about in order to cover over the emptiness of that concept and the void it conceals. Nothing is shallower than the inwardness of the average American, a subjectivity composed of little but the incessant mimicking of "signs" of success and affects that through ceaseless happy talk confer no more than a phantom substantiality. Beneath that chatter the truth of its inner condition continues to work on the American psyche: the death of affect, the deepening of psychic numbing, and a collective flight from anything that causes the least anxiety.

A zombie is a zombie because his or her psyche or subjectivity has been hollowed out.  He has one thing on his mind; and he isn’t going to see a shrink about it.  Maybe that’s why they like to eat brains.  They are trying to make up symbolically for their lack of interiority.

            I can’t quite tell what the zombies in Romero’s Night of the Living Dead stand for.  Us, of course.  But us as what?  Since Romero had the nerve clear back in 1968 to make the protagonist of his movie a black man—a sane and decisive black man to boot; compared to which the whites in the movie are raving selfish lunatics—one thinks perhaps that the zombies represent the unthinking mob and its manifest prejudices and general idiocy.

             But in The Dawn of the Dead (1978, I think), Romero’s second and equally classic zombie flick, it’s pretty clear what the living dead stand for.  Consumers.  The living characters—to get clear for a while of the pressures of moving around in a completely zombified universe—hole up in a deserted mall.  It has everything they could possibly want, including mall music.  And one thing they don’t want.  Zombies... They are there milling about in the parking lot, pounding at the doors, drawn to the mall as if by an instinctual force.  So what if they can’t buy anything—they just want to be in that mall.

Consumer as zombie.  Were I in an arguing mood or had the strength for it, I would argue that nothing has contributed more to the disembodiment of subjectivity than the consumer society.  We carry our hearts on our sleeves now in the form of advertisement for Nike.  

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Above, please find a mall zombie from Dawn of the Dead. 

I suppose it was the reasonable thing to do.

After all I am 61 years old, and I have a very bad forty year old habit.  Smoking seems at least partially responsible for every ailment known to man.  And WB, my deceased father, had in his mid seventies his carotid arteries reamed out.  He was getting light headed or something, I forget.  But they checked him and found both of his carotids were pretty clogged up, and because he had a very good heart and low blood pressure, they experimented on him a bit with a then relatively new procedure that involved going into the arteries with a miniature rotor router that had some sort of vacuum attached to keep the particles that broke off from going direct to his brain.

And then of course my brother Dan has a stroke and they find one of his carotids is 100 percent clogged and the other is 50%.

I sort of hem and haw about it.  I mean what good will it do if I do find out something.  But finally I make an appointment with my primary care person and go in and tell her what’s happened and that I would like her to authorize a sonogram of both of my carotids.  She says, like no way, because everybody in the world has family with heart problems, and if they started giving sonograms to everybody that had family heart problems they would go bankrupt.

So I say how much would it cost if I paid for it, and she says thousands and then starts to talking about these places a person can go to have some sort of scan and you pay out of your own pocket to have diverse body parts scanned.  And I ask her where the nearest place might be to go to get scanned because, now that I am in the mood, I plan to go get one of those things done that very day if possible.

But she must have been thinking about something.  Because she like points to that bed thing they have in every one of those little rooms and says lie on your back and I do and she listens to my carotids having me breathe in and out and says, Wait a minute, and goes out with my whole stack of medical documents, and is gone 5 minutes and comes back, and says, You got it.

She says she spoke with the internist on duty and, when he heard my history, he says like, “This guy needs to have his arteries checked out.”

Well, OK.  I guess that is good.  But now I am good and scared.  I mean why that complete and sudden about face?  I have to wait till June 5 to go in and have what they call a “carotid duplex” sonogram which is a fancy way of saying, Do both of them.

I don’t want to go.  But I guess I will because it’s the reasonable thing to do.  I guess.

I am nearly putrid with anxiety.

In preparation for the zombie movie, I didn’t eat any lunch so I could get popcorn and a Pepsi.  They got me on the upgrade things.  I ordered a medium Pepsi; but for 5 cents more I could get the monster size so I did that.  I don’t know why but when I buy pop corn, I want to eat it during the movie.  So I just sat there while they plowed through a bunch of features of coming attractions before I would allow myself to touch the popcorn.  Which I did as soon as the movie started.

I must have drunk all that Pepsi.  Anyway, with about 20 minutes to go in the movie, I feel as if I have to pee real bad.  I sort of shift myself around in the seat thinking somehow that will help but of course it doesn’t.  So right when the climax is coming up, I just have to go pee, so I race out of the theatre and run in exactly the wrong direction.  When I bump into a wall I figure out to turn around and head back the other way, and relieve myself and get back just when the climax is over.

Which didn’t matter much, since I knew what it is going to be.  I could fill in the blank pretty easily; just one person whacking one of the zombies….

On my horror-meter, I would give this baby about a six on scale of one to ten, ten being best.  Good production values throughout—this has to be said about horror movies since many of them have awful production values.  Pretty tasteful gore, nothing outright sadistic.  Hitchcock jump cutting during the violence sequences added an effective note of chaos while blunting a bit gory details.

But overall it just wasn’t as good as the first one, 24 Days.  The plot line didn’t set up the characters in a way they might develop.  The reviewer for the LA Times said the movie was sort about the way government screws things up, a kind of post-Katrina commentary on bureaucratic indifference and generally bungling.  Actually, the government had a good plan for the particular situation; in case things get out of hand, kill everybody—which they did with guns, bombs, and poison gas.  I guess you could call this bureaucratic indifference.  But kill everybody is always a pretty good plan.

Oddly, the problem wasn’t with the plan, but with the way the people down on the ground screwed up the works.  The devil is in the details; and down at street level, details screw the plan.  For instance, the government has under lock and key a carrier of the disease; she is like a typhoid Jane and they have her locked away pretty good, except that one of the people who works for the government, who survived the first round of the virus, is the Husband of the Typhoid Jane.  So he manages to use this key he has to get in to visit his wife—whom he had previously abandoned when they had been under attack by the zombies—and of course all hell breaks lose.

So what’s screwed up here?  The government plan.  Or the idiotic things human beings do when motivated by such things as love or hate or guilt or anger—The movie has a bleak out ending—the kind I prefer actually, but not because the government screws up but because a sister loves and wants to save her brother….

So what’s the message: people are either bungling cold bureaucratic monsters or horribly bungling human beings?

Or Zombies.

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As the above shows, Zombies usually have really bad skin and bad oral hygiene. 

I was so depressed this weekend, I went to a movie at the movie house.  I go to a movie in the movie house maybe once every year or so.  Mostly I go alone.  I don’t know when but I got used to going to movies alone.  Carol doesn’t like the movies I go to.

For example, this time I decided I would go see 28 Weeks, the sequel to 28 Days Later.  28 Days was a zombie movie, my favorite sub-genre within the big genre called “horror flicks.”  There’s nothing like a zombie really for making a deep social or allegorical statement of some kind.  Zombies usually look a good deal like human beings except they are dead.  So if you get zombies, not only to look like human beings, but act like them, then you get the implication, symbollically, that we the living people are like the zombies and are ourselves among the living dead.

And if you think about that too much you might start to thinking—as I sometimes do—that this statement is more accurate than not..  But it’s hard to identify with a zombie completely not because it is dead but because it is living.  That’s the horror of the zombie, not that it is dead, but it came back from the dead.

People are just not supposed to come back from the dead.  That’s all there is to it. 

Why the zombies come back isn’t always that clear.  Myth has it the zombies come back because hell is full and can’t take anymore customers.  But sometimes they come back because of some environmental pollution.  Radiation maybe.  In 28 Days they come back because scientists were screwing around with some monkeys and developed this virus that turns the monkeys into raging beasts that want to do only one thing: kill whatever is right in front of it. 

Damn those scientists!  And there never ending screwing around!

So to be technical about it the zombies in 28 Days are not zombies because they don’t come back from the dead.  Rather people get infected by the virus and then they run around killing each other in mad monkey like mahem.  Indeed, for some reason, while they seem pretty intelligent, the infected like monkeys don’t use tools to kill each other—just their hands and then their teeth.

Like your regular zombies, these monkey virus zombies have only one thing on their minds: to kill.  And your regular zombie has only one thing on his or her mind: Eat Brains.  So in this way the monkey virus zombies and your regular orthodox zombie are alike; they both have one thing and one thing only on their minds.  They live to eat or at least to chew.  In this way too, they are like human beings.

I messed up the “gold mining” in the video game stuff.  The big game seems to be “World of WarCraft or Wow”; about 6 million people play it.  It’s a strange game—people don’t compete against each other.  It’s one of those games with levels; this one has 60 levels.  That’s how you develop a character, by going up levels.

But while the game is not about competing,  some sort of ego thing seems involved in character development.  Developing your character requires spending a lot of time online, and people with jobs have a hard time putting in the time.  So they pay people in China for the points—or whatever they are called—these people get while playing.  The people in China work in video game sweat shops; they get two or three dollars a day to play the game 12 hours a day.  Sometimes they live in dorms located in the sweatshop.  These are mostly young people happy for the 2 or 3 dollars a day.

So if you are a rich guy or gal living in the west you contact one of these sweatshops and send them money via PayPal, and they get one of their workers to pass points to you online because somehow it is possible for one character to walk up to another and give them virtual money online.

The owners of “WoW” are upset about this not because of the exploitation involved but because “WoW” is supposed to be a fantasy game and this gold mining stuff lets reality in through the back door.

A subculture has sprung up around WoW, involving T-shirt sales, music and such.  And on U-Tube you can video made about the game.   There’s even sort of a U Tube video show called pureponage (or something like that).  You can find a pretty good episode called WoW is a Feeling, about a guy who goes nuts playing the game.  And South Park did a good parody of the game.

If however you are looking for something more familiar and evocative of the days of your youth, you might want to check out the bits on pieces of Un Chien Andelou.

Like this is all totally strange to me.  I sit there listening to the students give their oral reports and I have no idea what they are talking about.  One guy is writing on these games because his younger brother became “addicted” and wouldn’t do anything but play the game.

I wish Borges were still alive so he might write some sort of story about all this.

Carol’s mom gave us a car since she can’t drive anymore.  Carol’s still driving the green Honda, and now I drive the new car, a Toyota because Carol drives a lot more than I and the Honda gets better mileage than the Toyota.  It’s a 2000 Sadona.  It’s not new but the closet thing to as new car I have ever driven since it only had 12000 miles on it.  Because it’s new and the paint isn’t all wretched and there aren’t cigarette burns all over the interior I have decided I have to keep the thing looking new.  I don’t like the pressure really.  I joked that if anybody wanted a ride in my old Volvo they had to get shots first because there was no telling what was living in it.  But I felt really comfortable in it and there was absolutely no upkeep pressure involved.

So I have only had this car a few months but I have taken it to this car wash place three times already.  It’s just a half a mile or so away located behind what was once a non-franchise hamburger place.  You drive around it and there are these big stalls with a hose hanging down from the ceiling of each.  You have to make sure you have quarters because you need 10 of them to get the machine going.  The little dial where you put the quarters has all sorts of settings on it like wash, rinse, and light rinse, and soap, and mop, and even wax.  It’s pretty confusing, so usually I just wash with soap and rinse and that’s it.

I had thought about washing the car but then when I was driving back from working out, I drove right passed the place.  Then I remembered and turned a U in the middle of the block and went back and realized I had only 2 dollar bills and started cursing, but then I felt in my pocket and I had like 10 quarters.  I don’t know how that happened.  So I pulled the car into the stall, and started pushing quarters into the machine.  But the machine would not take the quarter.  I flicked the quarter with my finger but it wouldn’t go in. Damn.  I thought maybe that particular machine was broken or maybe full up with quarters.

So I pulled out of that stall and drove into the one next to it, and started putting quarters into that machine and it wouldn’t take the quarter either.  Damn!  Then I looked at the machine and realized I was trying to put the quarters in the wrong slot.  The right slot was at the top of the machine.  You put the quarter in that and gravity pulls it down, but I was trying to put quarters into the bottom slot made for bent quarters to come out.  Damn!  I like just sort of scratched my head and thought maybe I was too tired to be out and about.  How the hell did I get the top and bottom slot confused?

Maybe I am getting aphasia like my brother Dan.  He had a stroke though.  As far as I know I haven’t had one of those.  But my powers of identification are excessive.  I was returning from one of those damn conferences once and watched the Rain Man on the flight, and by the time we landed I was damn certain I was autistic.

It was more of an adventure than I wanted it to be but I managed to wash the damn car without further mishap.

So I brought some songs along with me to my guitar lesson, and my teacher, Dan, politely informed me that in one song I had used the capo on the guitar (down two frets) and failed to move down two frets when I tried to back the whole thing up with the bass.  Dan agreed that it didn’t sound all that bad; but that’s not the way it’s conventionally done.  I didn’t even think to do it.

Dan also tried to show me how to do a fill (or little bass run) when I move between two chords, say G to C, but I don’t think I really got it at all.  And we listened to a bit of Paul McCarthy on Dear Prudence where he doesn’t hit single notes on the bass behind a G chord say, but plays the G chord scales.  I don’t know how to play the scales.  I don’t think I will ever learn the scales because I refuse to practice.

 This music stuff is really complicated.  I finally figured out how to find a C note on the piano and I can count from there to the other notes if I need to.

I was tired and worn out anyway and came away from this particular lesson feeling particularly stupid and wondering if I have the time left in my life to master any of this stuff.  I still can’t make a decent F chord on the guitar and I have been playing the thing for four years now regularly.  Of course my goal is not to learn the guitar exactly, but to write songs. 

 The last six or so songs have been a bit different.  More solidly constructed.  Dan says everybody now puts up his or her songs on MySpace.  Dylan has a MySpace.  So maybe this summer I will make a project out of getting some of my songs up on a MySpace Space.

I am pushing this music stuff too hard maybe because my shrink seems to feel that if I don’t have something to do should I live to retire that, after retirement, I will so go crazy and shot myself.  Preparing to retire emotionally for retirement is like preparing for a nervous breakdown.

My shrink was in her early 20’s a concert level pianist in France.  She’s 80 something now and still practices 3 hours a day.  For some reason, a while ago, see took to playing Bach; but Bach as I understand it did not write for piano, since they didn’t have pianos in his day.  She was playing Bach transcribed for piano.  But she wants to play him on the organ which is the proper way to play him.  So she made contact with the down town Presbyterian Church where they have a real, huge old organ, with 4 claviers she said.  So she is going to get to play Bach on the organ.  So that’s how she deals with retirement. Though come to think of it, she hasn’t really retired or she would not still be seeing me.

I don’t know what a clavier is really; but I think it’s the name for a keyboard.

One of the guys in the Writing Program reviewed the talk Len and Joanne Podis and I gave at the last College Conference on Composition and Communication for Kiaros (an online thing on writing and the digital age).  He wrote a really sweet review that does get some of the flavor of our talk. It can be found at.

I managed to find an envelope and a stamp.  Actually a pretty big effort required, and filled out a check for $80 and addressed a letter to Wilson Memorials on Greenville Highway 14 outside of Laurens SC.  The $80 is to get Joan’s departure date (April 10 2007) chiseled in after her entry date on the WB and Joan Tingle Stone in the graveyard of the Associate Reformed Presbyterian church in Ora, South Carolina.

Now I had better get the envelope in the mail.  I would like the dates to be chiseled in when we hold our little graveside ceremony for Joan.  Not having a departure date there would not contribute to a sense of closure.

The day we have set for the occasion, June 16^th, a Saturday, the day before father’s day, is still a month off.  But modern travel requires advanced arrangements, especially if one does not wish to get totally screwed with plane fare.  So emails have been flying hither and thither as the California Tingle Boys (more properly California Tingle Old Men) tried to make travel arrangements.

 It appears a veritable horde of Tingles—Brother Dave with sister-in-law Teresa; Nephew Brian, son of Brother Steve; Brother Steve; Brother Dan; along with me and Carol—will be descending around June 15 at the Days Inn in famous Clinton, SC.  I don’t think Clinton is famous; but as a kid in Ora, I remember hearing about a place called Clinton, and so it was sort of famous to me, though as I recollect we never went there even though it was maybe 15 minutes away by car. 

At first I was confused by references to this Day’s Inn.  I didn’t know what they were talking about when they mentioned Days Inn in their emails because I thought it was called Dave’s Inn since the last time we went back there, last June for WB’s burial, Brother Dave stayed in the Day’s Inn.  So while we were back there, I got to calling it, as a joke I guess, Dave’s Inn and I forgot that Dave’s Inn was really Day’s Inn.  I kept googling Dave's Inn and getting this place in Maine. Once I got that straightened out, things cleared up a bit.

At one point, I got the idea, from a too cursory reading of an email I guess, that Brother Steve was going to take the bus back to SC.  That sounded insane to me. I was preparing an email to strongly discourage him from the land route when I saw another email detailing his attempts—failed at that moment as I recollect—to get a seat on American Airlines.

The Days Inn says it has high speed internet access along with all sorts of other amenities.  But at about 50 bucks a night, one has to wonder.  But I base my idea of motel prices on Santa Barbara, which is the 10^th most popular travel or vacation spot in the World.  Ahead of Rome, if you can believe. 

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That's a picture of a bathroom in the Day's Inn in Clinton, SC.  At least that's what the web site says; it could be a picture of a bathroom in a Days Inn located anywhere.  I don't see anything in the picture that indicates its a bathroom in Clinton SC.  It does have one of those little coffee makers.  I wonder where those little packages of coffee I took from the last placed we stayed are. 

Learn something new everyday, or at least try to.

A couple of students are going to write research papers on Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOG’s).  These are much larger online versions of what once were called RPG’s.  Role Playing Games.  The new, huge, complicated games allow one to construct a character or persona out of an immense array of qualities, as well as magical powers, and of course weapons.

The purpose of these games is to win.  I find on MPogD.com—a clearing house page for a vast variety of games—the following “news flash”: “Round 7 of Worlds of War has now ended, many congratulations to Sean von Utopia (2:2) who made it to the top of the scoreboard.”  Sean von Utopia, probably not the name of the actual person, Won!  Pretty soon Round 8 of Worlds of War is scheduled to start up.

By winning and even if one doesn’t come out on the top, like Sean von Utopia, one scores points.  I believe some of these points may be carried over to the next version of a game, and of course the more points one scores during a game means more power to you in the course of a game.

This points business, as well as the creation of characters that become famous like Sean Von Utopia, has led to a strange practice called “gold mining.”  Youths, apparently located mostly in China, are paid something like 200 dollars a day to mine gold, to contact players, to offer them “real money”—if there is actually such a thing—for virtual points.  The virtual points are then resold (in exchange for “real money”--) to people who want points for the game in progress.

Even more money apparently can be made by the buying and selling of whole characters.  The real person who created Sean von Utophia may be approached by a buyer who wants to be Sean von Utophia and makes the creator of Sean von Utophia an offer he can’t refuse.

My student reports that he met people online who spent as much as a $1000 dollars a month to buy bits and pieces of virtual or imaginary reality for the purposes of game playing.  Most of the buying and trading was done on Ebay which has now however banned the sale of virtual reality on its site.  Too much possibility apparently of fraud when one is selling an object that doesn’t exist.

I find something vaguely and remotely disturbing about this.  I can’t say why exactly.  I think this has something to do with a theory I once had.  That our tools tend to generate conceptions of reality that may or may not be correct.  I believe the computer for example led for some time to a conceptualization of the human brain as computer like.  Decartes for example was in part led to conclude that others might not be people but machines because of clock work like machines made for royalty that mimicked the movements of “people.”  Tools do not simply manipulate a reality; they manifest one.  What is the world of MMOG’s manifesting.

Reading through the last batch of student papers, one student wrote something that made me think they were asserting that the Serpent in the Garden of Eden was the first or archetypical salesman.  I thought that was clever but looking back later over what I thought to be the paper, I couldn’t find a reference to the Serpent so I must have dreamed it up myself.

 Whether or not I read it or dreamed it up, I decided to check out Genesis to see if the Serpent did indeed qualify as a salesperson or early advertising executive.  Roughly the setup goes:  God says don’t eat this or you will die. But the serpent says, Ye shall not surely die.  For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.

 I suppose the Serpent could quality as an advertising executive because he is an outright liar.  But then comes the “pitch.”  A lie won’t really get buyers unless there is a pitch.  It runs:  if you eat this fruit you will become a god yourself.  This is a pretty simple argument; but one cogent to the world of advertising today.  Many advertisements do suggest that if one buys this object one will come to have god like powers.

The early ads for the Ipod, for example, showed simple images of music or representations of music, flowing and flowing into this tiny device, the Ipod.  The suggestion was that this device was somehow magical since it could contain so many songs.  Of course, songs are sounds and not physical objects.  But the representations of the song in the ad were solid and took up space.  So the Ipod was truly a magical object able to contain and hold in place many larger and fluid objects. 

Of course, having a magical device is not quite the same as being a God, but I think the parallel works.

In later ads, the Ipod continued magical but different.  These ads featured the featureless silhouettes, like card board cut outs, of lithe young figures moving rhythmically in an undefined or unparticularized space.  As they moved, they swung their Ipod about and it illuminated, as with a tale of fire, the space of the dancer and eventually the dancer his or her self.  Ultimately, the suggestion was that with an Ipod one illuminate the darkness.  This too has magical overtones.

So the Serpent was onto something.  And maybe his flat out lie too can be read in another way—as appealing to the grandiose self inside of everybody.  He is not just saying, don’t worry you won’t die, IF you eat this.  He is also saying, don’t worry, if you eat this, YOU won’t die.  Admittedly this is a bit slippery, but in sum: just do it, in either case you won’t die.

Of course, there is still the question with advertising, as with the Serpent, does any of this stuff really work?  Do people really respond to it?  In the case of the Serpent, one has to wonder; Eve doesn’t seem to buy into the idea that she will be a God.  The Bible suggests she thinks the fruit would be good eating.  According to Genesis: And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat.  True, the wise part is there, but first comes, good food and pleasant looking.  That’s a woman for you, of course.

As for Adam, [Eve] gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat.  Adam, for his part, resembles those men in the Carl Jr’s ads who can’t cook and try to make guacamole by tossing a whole avocado into a blender.  Idiots, in short.

In the Ego and the Id, Freud—if memory serves and it serves poorly lately—says in effect that the sense organ of the Ego is the skin.  Or to say the Ego is rooted in weight of the body; and the skin might be considered the parameters, all over, of the body—the boundaries as it were.  Of course, the Ego is not precisely the skin; rather the function of the Ego is to guard those parameters and boundaries, to make sure they are not inflicted with pain and, contra wise, to make sure they are generally as comfortable as possible (Pleasure).

So the Ego is the reality tester; reality being defined, in this instance, as more or less physicality.  Or the fact, as it was of physicality.  Descartes, when he concludes cogito ergo sum, enters into a world of utter unreality and shows himself totally unfit for survival.  Since he cannot be certain about any of the “knowledge” derived from the senses, he concludes that world of the senses is somehow unreal.  Descartes was no doubt a very bright man, but under this aspect, the aspect of the Ego, he is a complete idiot.

But what is reality testing.  In the most brute sense, it might mean sticking your hand in a fire to find it hurts, or stubbing your toe and concluding you would rather not do that again.  With enough instances of this kind one concludes that one does not have to hit one’s head with a hammer to know it would hurt.  This seems to me a fairly solid inference based on evidence as I know it.  

But once we step into the realm of inferences we have left the immediacy of the skin behind.  The ego’s function is more complicated than just kicking things.  If one is standing in line and feels for example, the sudden urge to pinch the behind of the woman standing in front of one, the Ego must ask what would happen if one did that, and if the Ego concludes that damage might be done to one’s own skin, it says “stop.”  The function of the Ego is completely non or unmoral.  It doesn’t stop because it is wrong to pinch the behind of female strangers, but because damage might befall one.

I am thinking about his issue because of that guy, Tim, at the club whom I previously mentioned, as the person engaged in an Ahab like conflict with Moby Gopher.  I was sitting in the steam room with Tim and a guy came in and asked Tim how hot the pool was that day, and Tim said it was 81 degrees and the Jacuzzi was 102 degrees and he knew that for a fact because he had used his own thermometer. So here is a guy that doesn’t believe the people who work at the club when they tell him that the pool is so and so degrees.  More than that, for some reason, he doesn’t even trust the thermometers the club uses and to which he has ready access.  Instead he brings his own thermometer. For some reason he trusts that thermometer; possibly because it’s his own.

I am not sure I want to think about this anymore.  But Tim’s thermometer is a reality tester for sure and he uses it to detect the temperature of the water against his skin.  Not however because he fears the heat or cold of the water, but because he doesn’t trust the word or even the tools of his fellow humans.  Perhaps I don’t want to think about this anymore because doing so might mean coming better than I do already to understand the reality testing of the paranoid.

Or: the Ego gone Mad.

So I saw my shrink yesterday.  As I believe I have mentoned, she was born and raised in France and immigrated to the US of A in the mid 50’s from North Africa.  She still has a strong French accent.  She has an excellent command of the English, though American slang is not her forte.

I told her I had written a song about my father kicking my mother when she fell on the floor.  I quoted myself:

The old lady fell flat on her back on the floor
The old man couldn’t pick her up no more
She lay there rolling round in her flab
When he walked by his leg she did grab

OOOO  what I irony is this
60 plus years of wedded bliss

Old man don’t you think probably it ain’t right
To be a kicking at your old fat wife
When she’s Down.

My shrink said, “That sounds sinister.”

This is not the first time she has used “sinister” in this way, and over time we have had some problems communicating when a word in English and in French overlap in sound and spelling but have slightly different inflections meaning wise.

The song might be dark, grim or bleak, as I far as I am concerned, but not sinister.

But in French sinister (sinistre) means: grim, deadly boring.  OK, I can go with grim.

But in English sinister means:

·  Suggesting or threatening evil: a sinister smile.

·  Presaging trouble; ominous: sinister storm clouds.

I don’t think the song suggests or threatens evil.  So in French the song is sinister, but in English it isn’t.

Both the French and the English come directly from the Latin.  In Latin sinister -tra –trum means: wrong, perverse; unfavorable, adverse.

So maybe in Latin the song is sinister too since it’s a little perverse.

Sinister, in Latin, also means “on the left hand.”  So left handed people are sinister or at least maybe that’s where we get the idea that left handed people are a little whacky.

I have noted that there are a heck of a lot of left handed actors, more than the norm in the general population.

Come to think of it, I don’t think the song is sinister at all.  I think it’s funny.   That could make me a bit sinister I suppose.

So I called the Reverand Roper—did I say that—and got him on his cell phone.  He was in his car, driving around somewhere in South Carolina, and found out that Joan’s ashes had arrived back there.  I said we would dig the hole.  The idea of somebody out in that heat, digging a hole for Joan, disturbed me.  But he said somebody back there would do it.  So we will be in Ora on the 16^th of June (knock on wood) having spent a few days in Charleston for R and R.  So it looks as if Brother Dave and sister-in-law Teresa, and Nephew Brian, maybe, and Brother Steve, and Carol and I and maybe some relatives from the area will be at the grave site.

I keep thinking about what epitath I might put on Joan’s stone were I to do such a thing and the phrase that keeps popping into my mind is something like:

Dear Lord, she couldn’t help herself.

That doesn’t sound so hot I guess, but, well, it’s the truth.  She really couldn’t.  She was miserable and had a knack for sharing her misery with others.  She really couldn’t do anything about it.

Maybe that’s what happens When Parents Die.  You say to yourself, well, that’s that.  C’est finie.  C’est tout, folks. That’s a wrap.  Elvis has left the building.  The show is over.  Because, when they do finally die, there is no possibility whatsoever that something might happen that might redeem the whole mess (whatever that might be).  Joan and Bill were true to themselves to the bitter end.  So that didn’t happen.  The redemption thing, I mean.

One finds one’s self thinking about them as unavoidable natural disasters, things that befell one.  Stuff that just happened, is all.  And it just couldn’t have been otherwise.  

Freedom lies, Hegel said, in the recognition of necessity.

Phooey…I am still pooped out.  Three nights now of less than satisfactory sleep.  And my standard for a satisfactory night’s sleep is pretty low.  I was insomniac for years.  I stopped being insomniac, in an extreme way, when I went on meds.  When I was first prescribed Prozac, I don’t know how many years ago, I was at first also given Xanax for anxiety.  That stuff was crap.  So I got myself switched to clonazepam.

.25 milligrams in the morning, and .50 milligrams at night.  If I am able to get to sleep at all, that’s the stuff that does it.  Over the years I managed to cut back by .25 because the stuff is an energy drainer, but even cutting back that .25 was rough.  Withdrawal produced some really, really dark feelings.  Every time I mention cutting back more my psychiatrist gets edgy and starts talking about how I must cut back VERY SLOWLY.  Now it seems they have a .25 tab that is water soluble.  So you can put the tab in a glass of water and drink a little less of the stuff over time.

The stuff is prescribed for epilepsy, anxiety, panic attacks and the notorious restless leg syndrome.  Somehow it makes the brain “less active,” whatever the hell that means.  But I guess I know because before I started taking the stuff I would just toss and turn hour after hour chewing on some thought.  

I have had only three or four true blue anxiety attacks.  Once I was eating and for some reason, my arm starting shaking and I couldn’t get the food to my mouth, and then I felt I couldn't breathe.  I went outside to walk around to calm myself, but that didn’t work.  I thought I was having a heart attack.  But then my reading in psychology came to my rescue and I concluded that I was having an anxiety attack, so I went back inside and took an extra tab of clonazepam and the attack went away in about half an hour—probably placebo effect plus the drug kicking in.

Damn, I depress myself just by thinking about myself.

Now critics of the consumer society and the drug industry say we take these meds just to take care of ordinary human unhappiness.  The implication is that we have lost our souls and want a happy pill for everything, like Huxley’s “soma,” or something.  Well, I don’t think not being able to sleep well for years upon years or going around thinking you are having a heart attack when you aren’t is ordinary human unhappiness.  And if it is, I think more allowances—in the form of extended vacations, reduced work days, more and more personal days, as well as institutionalized and socially accepted nap time on the job—ought to be made for those suffering from ordinary human unhappiness.

I am foggy in the head.

It got up to 85 degrees here out of nowhere and I wasn’t ready for it.  It was 81 degrees at about 10 pm.  I thought it would go down, but I didn’t open the windows full blast and remove all sheets and blankets till about 1 am.  So I didn’t sleep long or well.

Santa Barbara has a really, really mild climate.  It was a bit colder than usual this winter, but we turned the heat on only a couple of times.  During the summer it does get up to the 80s a number of times, but very, very rarely into the 90’s and I only remember one time, years ago, that it got over a 100.  So as I said, it’s really, really mild; and even more so where we are located, about a mile from the Pacific.  Having the ocean so close moderates the temperature even more.

The heat came with some winds off the ocean and so outside right now it’s bright and really, really clear.  The winds aggravated my sinuses though and I have this sort of ring of ache around both eyeballs.

While I am talking about eyeballs, maybe I should indicate too that I am very, very regular.  Daily regular.  If I miss a day, I get really upset and start to feel all stuffed up.  I am probably thinking about this because one time I visited a friend back in the 70’s who lived in Tucson, Arizona.  It was really, really hot there and I guess I got dehydrated or something, and was unable to relieve myself for a good four days.  I felt as if I was seriously ill and was going to die.

Damn, that was a while ago.  I remember now that we went to see Jaws; it had just come out.  So that was 1975.  So that episode of constipation must have really left its mark for me to remember it all this time.  Though, actually, that I would remember is probably also tied to my anal sense of humor.  Whatever that means? 

Damn, I just remembered a time back in college in the 60’s.  I can see it clear as day.  I was walking along and asked the guy—that I would see here and there—how he was and he said not good because he had not crapped in two weeks.  I started laughing because I couldn’t believe it.  That was sort of rude of me because I saw the guy was actually in pain.  He wasn’t kidding me.  He really hadn’t shat in two weeks.  I didn’t know something like that was even possible.  I still don’t know if such a think is possible but I am pretty sure the guy was not lying to me.  I left him with a new found respect.

McFadden—the guy’s name was McFadden.  I am pretty sure.  Where the hell did that come from.  He was a good guy.  He’s now a Professor of Chemistry at Boston College specializing in kinetics and dynamics of free radical and electron attachment reactions in the gas phase.  Cool. 

___________________________________________________________________________________

That's a pic of McFadden from the BC site.  He still looks like a good guy.  Wish I had that hair. 

Brother Dan had company today, so when I stopped by to say hello, I stayed for just a few minutes.  He has to go in for an echocardiogram on the 22^nd of this month.  At that time, the doctors will decide exactly what to do with the good carotid, and then they will do it.

I asked him how he has been, how he has felt over this time.  He says he doesn’t know.  I don’t think this is an evasion or that he is repressing something.  Sometimes when he is trying to express something, he uses his hands in a funny way.  He measures something in the air, in the way a person might do telling a fish story.  This time he made a big measure when he tried to recollect the first month after the stroke.  He said it was like nowhere, this space between his hands.  And I said, did he mean he had forgotten it.  He seemed to indicate no, more like there had just been a blank.

I think what he is experiencing really is beyond his comprehension.

Freud was probably wrong about infantile amnesia representing the repression of polymorphous perversity and all sorts of other nasty sexual stuff.  Well, he was not wrong either, but repression is not the whole story.  Representation is.  And thinking about Dan and infantile amnesia I have to wonder how much language is necessary to have a sense of having any kind of experience at all.  Dan’s language powers were affected by the stroke.  He did not have the words for it and I do not mean this in the sense that he lacked the philosophic depth to experience what he felt. Or that he had bumped up against some profound existential emptiness.  Rather he lacked words like “needle,” “bed,” “red light.”

Without being conscious of it, or needing to be conscious of it, we are always moving among named things.  Like cars, or trees, or bushes or under sky.  And as we do move among these named things a potential at least for an experience is present.  We don’t always have to have an experience; maybe nothing really happens.  But if something did, we would have in retrospect the materials (those named things) for the construction of a narrative or the sketchy outlines of an experience.

Car.  Red light.  Freeway on Ramp.  Freeway.  Stop

You could make a narrative out of that.  In fact I did just that after speaking with Brother
Dan and thinking about aphasia. I stopped at a red light located directly in front of the on ramp leading to the freeway on which I could see many cars passing by.

But this little narrative would not be available to me without the words to weave the experience together.  But what if, like an infant, one had no words.  Or no causal connections like: red light means stop.  I doubt one would remember much of anything…since the potential for memory would not exist.

Indeed some aphasia victims forget (actually that is not the right word) rather cease to grasp the connection between red light and stop.

Hmmmm…

I have taken a longer than usual break from the blog.  Not a break really.  More like being overwhelmed again.

These big winds kicked up off the ocean and stirred up all the dust and my sinuses started acting up and in addition to my usual gloom I started feeling pressure around the eyes and dripping slightly from around the eyeballs.

Anything like this seems right now to me a sign of my immanent departure from this orb.  Paranoia and the death thing—acting in concert.  I know what’s going on—sort of—I have an over identification right now with Brother Dan and his upcoming procedure and what may befall him or not. 

Freud says in “Mourning and Melancholy” that the living person becomes the dead person.  That’s what identification is. Not exactly the most emotionally healthful thing.  Different from empathy which implies some recognition of the person one empathizes with as a separate person.  But this is the kind of stuff—identity stuff—that goes on in a family (the family of my childhood) that was largely dysfunctional or maybe just really screwed up.

In any case, I have been overcome by identifications.  This applies also to my students.  I identify with them through my experiences as student, and the importance of being a student, and of education to me more generally.  For that reason perhaps I most especially hate grading.  I would hate to be a judge who identified with criminals.  Sentencing a person to death would be like executing yourself.

I really—and I mean really—have no Idea how students feel about having me (Nick) assign a grade to their writing or how they feel in general about being graded.  Maybe they don’t have any feelings about the act of being graded generally; they have known that all their lives, but are concerned only with the particular grade they receive. But I do know that every time I put a grade on a paper I feel as if I am grading myself.

Well, the grading is nearly done, and I am not dead.  Today I consider that an accomplishment.

Even though the Doctor who ordered it, Doctor Flaster, is now dead, the people at the clinic want me to go in today for that chest x-ray.  And after that I am to go up stairs and make an appointment to see another pulmonary person.  I don’t want to do it.

Also I am getting a cold.  At least I woke up at about 3 am pouring snot and hardly able to breathe.  Let me tell you sneezing inside a sleep apnea mask is not a pleasant experience.  In your normal sneeze the expelled matter just goes out into space, but when you sneeze in a sleep apnea mask the damn stuff comes right back into your face.

The sleep apnea mask I have is wearing out and the seal gets lose and makes noises as the air goes in and out.  That’s been waking me up, so Carol ordered another one for me.  It should have been here by now but it isn’t.

The sleep apnea mask looks pretty grotesque when one is wearing it.  It is attached to the sleep apnea tube that runs to or from the cpap or sleep apnea machine proper.  The machine that generates the air pressure.  I get all tangled up some nights in the sleep apnea tube.  On a couple of occasions, I wake up to find it wrapped all around my neck.  I don’t know how that happens.  It’s a wonder I ever get a night’s sleep; and don’t kill myself doing it.

I have a batch of student papers, 50 of them, starting to come in today.  I can’t tell you what I feel.  DREAD.  Maybe that would do.  If I had saved all the paper copies of all the student papers I have responded to since I started grading papers, I would not be able to get into my office.  I would open the door and masses of marked up student papers from over two decades of marking student papers would come sliding out. I would get a massive allergy attack from all the dust.

The papers will come in in dribs and drabs over the next three days.  I assign a date for the paper to come in and when that date comes I tell the students that they can take three more days to turn it in and not have it marked down.  They never believe me when I say this.  After class yesterday, a half dozen came up and said, now let me get this straight.  The paper is due tomorrow but I can turn it in as late as Friday with no mark down.  Yes, yes, yes, I say, over and over again.

I said how come nobody believes me. One student said, your approach is radical.

It’s not.  I have come to face the fact over the years that my writing classes rank at the bottom of students’ priority list of things to do.  All of their other classes come before my writing class.  I know this because I have handed out surveys asking them to list their classes in order of importance and my required writing class comes out last.  Every time.  So my flex date assignment approach is an attempt to allow them a little time that they might decide to apply in a productive way to the writing of the paper. 

But I say, the papers do have to be in by Friday (or whatever day) because my wife and I have plans for the weekend and she will get mad at me if I have to grade papers.  This is mostly a lie.  I do have a wife, but she wouldn’t get mad at me and usually we don’t have any big plans.