July 2007 Archives

Every now and then somebody writes a comment in response to one of the entries here.  But I don’t get many because this blog is sort of a soliloquy and doesn’t exactly promote dialogue.  So I don’t check to see if I get any comments or not except when I remember to do it, once a week or so. 

When I do check, the site will say I have like 70 comments or something, and I will know without checking that most of that is spam.  The subject line of the spam will say something like, “Great Site.  A work of Art.  Shakespeare would be jealous” or something to that effect.  Like they flatter your ass to make you click on the link and if I bother to click on the link—which I don’t anymore—it will turn out to be an advertisement for Rogaine or Propicia.  Those keyword searches work I guess because they have figured out I am old and losing my hair.  Of course, that might be easy to do since I have written about being old and losing my hair.

I also get ads saying Lipitor (which I take for high cholesterol) is bad for you and I should take vitamins instead.  And of course I get all sorts of ads for different anti-depression meds.  Also I get ones for Viagra and that other stuff, Celesta, or whatever that when you are in the mood one is called.  That stuff scares me.  They all warn about having an erection that lasts four hours and how you should go to a doctor if you have one of those.  I would be scared to death by a four hour erection.  I think it would probably kill me.  I can’t afford to have that much blood in one place.

And I get ads too for penis enlargement.  That’s sort of insulting in a way; I mean who are they to suggest my penis should be enlarged unless the assumption is that there is no such thing as a penis that is too big.  For years I didn’t know what this penis enlargement stuff was.  Back in the old days, back at the end of the sports section of the paper, you could find these little ads (not that I looked for them) advertising “Male Penile Enhancement.”  The male part seemed a little redundant since I don’t think there could be female penile enhancement.  I don’t even know if “penile” is a word.

I was too embarrassed to look up the stuff to figure out how they went about this enhancement stuff.  Once I was talking with my students about something, penises, I guess, and said, “How the hell do they enhance the penis.  I mean do they like hang a rock on the end of it and stretched it out or something.  Or do they have this little exercise machine that you stick your penis in to work it out a bit and give it like more muscle.”  I went on like this some time, acting all perplexed, and completely dead pan, and the students were like dumbfounded except for a couple of guys in the back who were about to piss themselves trying not to laugh.  Actually, this was one of my regular routines.  I say “was” because I don’t know if it’s appropriate for an old guy to talk about the penis or even to have one for that matter.  I always concluded, “Do any of you guys know what they do to enhance it.”

And nobody ever did.  So finally I looked it up and one thing at least that they do is operate on your damn penis.  I mean they take fat tissue from one part of your body and stick that fat tissue into your penis, to sort of bulk it up I guess.  I wonder if they use a local anesthetic for that.  I would want to be knocked out totally were someone to operate on my penis.  I don’t know if this is true or not, but I read it somewhere.

I have pretty ugly feet.  Possibly I exaggerate.  They are not that awful really.  And actually it’s mostly the left one that’s ugly.  The right one is pretty much a-ok.  Though, it too suffers from dry, chapped skin, and heavy duty callus buildup.  I don’t know what else to call it but callus buildup.  It’s not technically a “corn,” I think.  I am not sure what a “corn” is, but I am pretty sure it’s not one.

Just that on the inside of both of my big toes, one may locate a lot of what appears to be callus.  The buildup is the worse on the left foot, so if I am in bed trying to go to sleep and I lie on my right side, sometimes the inside of my left big toe presses against the bed, and after a while, sometimes, the corn or callus buildup starts to hurt.  Actually, the callus itself is pretty insensitive, but it starts to press on the sensitive tissues beneath it and they start to hurt.  The pain of the hurt—though not in the least extreme—is enough to keep me awake.

All I have to do to keep the pain away is to wear a sock on the left foot.  That’s enough to pad the callus a bit and keep it from hurting.  So sometimes, I go to bed wearing one sock and walk around in the morning with one sock.  Why I don’t wear two socks, I don’t know.  But it’s only the left foot that really needs it.  And I believe in airing out your feet whenever possible.

I believe in the airing out of feet because for years I had one whopper of a case of athlete’s foot.  I would try this or that to try to get rid of it and usually failed through lack of patience and perseverance, and hell I am a live and let live sort of guy.  But then they came out with this stuff—I forget what it’s called—but wham! That stuff really worked and all that really evil athletes’ foot between the toes went away.  But I just couldn’t get rid of the dry, scaling skin on different parts of my feet, especially the heels.

I figured that was a really tenacious form of athletes foot, since athletes foot is really a whole host of different sorts of fungi (?) or funguses (?) that the powerful lotion had not been able to kill off.  So when I was at the dermatologist I asked him if there was anything I could do for it. He sort of shrugged and said no; some people just get that stuff.  Could be virus, could be genetics.  Nobody knew for sure.  Then I said, what about this callus buildup on my left toe here.

Hmmm, he said, maybe I have some salve for that.  So he gave me a prescription for some salve to put on my left toe.  Carol picked it up from me and I got a bit freaked out when the label on the box said, “Urea Cream.”  I mean in my mind Urea had something to do, I was pretty sure, with Urine.  I didn’t really like the idea of putting urine on my toe.  So while I was complaining about it, Carol looked it up on the web for me and sure enough Urea is a central ingredient in Urine.  Turns out there are about 1200 medical applications for Urea.

I wonder if any other form of excrement has so many medical uses.  I also wonder where the urea I am using comes from.  Human Urine?  Horse Urine?  Elephant Urine.  Are there people out there who get paid to pee all day?  Or maybe it can be synthesized.

Sometimes just getting to the movie irritates me to death.  As soon as I put in the DVD I start hitting the menu button, but this little red thing comes up saying I can’t do it.  Like I just have to watch.  I watched a DVD lately that had this:  “This film has been formatted to fit this screen.”  Now, that’s irritating because I didn’t ask anybody to format the movie, and they act like they are doing me a favor.  And on top of that, how the hell do they know or could they know that the film is formatted to “this” screen.  Seems to me there must be thousands of different kinds and sizes of screens, and there is no way they could know whether or not it has been formatted to this screen.  I mean what are they really saying:  “This film won’t look the same way on your TV screen that it would look in the movie house had you bothered to pay to go see it.”  But I would assume any idiot would know that anyway.

And then comes on this long warning about not duplicating the movie or you could go to jail and they mention something about Interpol in the warning.  Interpol.  What the hell is that?  All of a sudden, I think I am being warned that I will be arrested by “The Man from Uncle.”  That was a TV show from the early 60’s I think with Robert Vaughn.  He was a spy and worked from an organization called Uncle.  Somehow Interpol does not scare me.

Then you have to watch these things that say the views of the diverse persons expressed in the completely unnecessary and useless interviews included on the DVD do not represent the views of this company or any of its subsidiaries.  As if I cared.  First I watch it in English and then I watch it in French.  I practice my French while watching it, and then lately after watching it in French, I watch it in Spanish.  I expect before I die that I will watch it in English, French, Spanish, and Chinese.

Then you get to the ratings part that just drives me nuts.  I saw one lately that said the film was rated such and such and included “cartoon violence.”  Cartoon violence?  I guess that’s the sort of violence you get in a cartoon.  Or maybe it’s “violence plus gore.”  That’s like French fries with ketchup I guess.  Yea, order me up some violence with plenty of gore.  And of course, there’s your classic “graphic violence.”  Leading me to wonder what ungraphic violence might be.   I wish they would get down to it with something like, “Unremitting, mind numbing violence featuring multiple decapitations and torture involving the testacies.”  Now that might explain something.

And then you get “Some language.”  It’s like they don’t know what language the movie is in:  like it’s some language or other, we don’t know.  But a language of some kind.  Or sometimes it just says, “Language.”  Well, duh!  I was pretty sure I was going to see a talkie.

“Adult themes”—what the hell is that and why would you have to be warned about it.  Adult themes plus some language and unremitting graphic violence.  I would like to see ratings “so graphic” and with “some language” that they themselves would have to be rated. 

My friend who had her ear cut off had at another time another ear problem.  I forget when but she had some ear infection and had to go on an airplane and went to a doctor to get something for the infection, so he gave her some powerful antibiotics that went and killed off the bacteria, I guess, but along with that bacteria some other strain of bacteria that lived down in her colon.  This set off an ecological crisis in her colon, but this bacterium had apparently made its living by feeding off another type of bacteria.  So when these bacteria died off, the other type just went crazy growing.

Then my friend began to have horrible dizzy moments and moments of occasional horribly frightening blindness.  Turns out the bacteria that were out of control were “s…t…g” up a storm and the feces from the bacteria was going to my friend’s brain.  So she was being “s…t” to death by bacteria.  To restore the ecological balance in her colon, the doctor said she had to eat nothing but protein for three months or something like that.  The idea was to starve the crazy bacterium back into submission because it lived on carbs not on protein.  I guess it worked because my friend got better.

I was thinking about this because I was watching the Jon Stewart show and they had some science guy on who said that in one centimeter of the colon one could find more bacteria than all the people on earth.  That’s nuts.  More than six billion bacteria in one centimeter.  It’s a strange thought to think or at least I find it strange to think that these bacteria that live in our colon see us and our colon as in the same way a beaver might see a river.  Our colon is an ecological niche; our colons and the bacteria that live in them have co-evolved over millions of plus years. Thank god for these bacteria since they are essential to helping us digest and utilize stuff particularly as I understand it vitamins and minerals. 

Let us take Michelangelo's David.  Well, that gives us a representation or depiction of the human body in space, but space only.  It’s a beautiful depiction I guess, but only an abstracted husk, as it were of the real thing, the thing as it exists in time.  If we could view the human body in time and also microscopically we would get an entirely different picture of the human body. 

First the surface area—the skin itself—would not be clearly define.  Instead, where the skin should be we would see this kind of haze or fog of bacteria and other microorganisms living on and just off the surface of our skin.  We would not even be able to see the features of the face clearly because of this haze and when the body breathed in and out there would be this sort of tidal ebb and flow of mouth bacteria.  Also occasionally big hunks of stuff—skin—would come flying off the surface.  As we moved along it would appear that we were in a constant state of disintegration. Then, in this time lapse picture, if we could see inside the body we would see blood and fluids sloshing all around and shooting this way and that and deep down there in the core a veritable volcano caldron of bacterial activity.

Which brings me to the question of the day?  I know that a bullet moves too fast for us to see it, and is it also true that a thing can move to slowly for us to see it.  I mean honestly, I have never seen a tree grow one iota.

I had a friend who was sociology major as an undergraduate, but grew to hate the discipline when he began to sense the sociological view of human beings.  It took me a while to figure out what he meant but the more one reads sociology the more one sees that human beings are herd animals.   That overall view is connected to the idea expressed by an early social thinker, Helveticas, who said that human beings are apes of each other.

I have been trying not to think about anything to do with teaching, education, and my job, but I thought about this when I notice an article on the first page of the LA Times: “Obesity is 'contagious,' study finds Friends help friends get fatter, a report in the New England Journal of Medicine indicates.”  Followed by:

Obesity can spread among a group of friends like a contagious disease, moving from one person to another in an epidemic of fat.

That's the finding of a novel study released Wednesday that reported that having close friends who are fat can nearly triple your risk of becoming obese.

First, I have to say, as I used to say, when I taught a research paper class on eating in America.  This idea that obesity is an epidemic—while it may serve to medicalize the problem—is pure nonsense and misleading because it makes it seem the whole thing is somehow a biological problem, which of course it is (and isn’t).  You simply don’t catch obesity like the flu.

What human beings do “catch” and depend on for their very existence is the behavior of other people.  We are in a loop of mimicry.  Don’t know what to do.  Well, do what that guy does.  That’s what we do all the time.  Society has stuff built into it that does our thinking for us. 

But we US citizens have a problem with this whole idea because we have been taught to think we are individuals who prize individuality.  This idea serves to cut us off from seeing the obvious.  We aren’t individuals.  We are not born individuals.  Maybe a very few people become individuals over a life time, but even that’s pretty rare.  Mostly we muck along unthinkingly via mimicry and herd behavior.

Any way this whole business is all tangled up.  When people start talking about individuals and individuality, they are usually talking about “responsibility.”  The importance of this study on obesity is that it suggests obesity is not a “personal problem.”  Which of course does not make it any less of a problem for the person who suffers from it.

For years, as a joke, when students came to my office and wanted to know how to get write an A paper, I would say, “Well, the best thing to do is go and find the people who write A papers and hang out with them—all the time—and after a while, not long really, you too will start to write A papers.”  Actually, this is not a joke.  It’s the truth.

Our cleanup proceeds apace though recently we have stalled a bit.  Now we are into the dinky stuff.  I wander around from here to there, pick up stuff, and put it in a pile with similar stuff that needs to be sorted through.  For example, a pile of manuals for different sorts of software we have acquired over the years.  So now we are starting to build up rather all over the place, on this book shelf, or that part of the floor, little anthills of junk for further sorting.

While investigating an anthill of junk that had fallen out of a shoebox, I came across this Roman coin (featured here pictorially) or more precisely this coin from Roman times.  I have had this coin for 30 plus years.  I was in downtown San Diego for some reason and while walking where ever it was that I was going I walked past this coin store and stared into the window.  Over in one corner was a little pile of coins labeled “Roman” or something to that effect.

I remember being startled to think that Roman coins were out there for sale.  I figured Roman coins were in museums or something.  But no, here was a pile of Roman coins apparently for sale to John Q. Public.  So I went in.  The coins seemed to be priced by their size and also by their possible historical significance.  They were sort of like baseball cards.  The more important the guy on the coin the more the coin was worth.  There were some pretty important guys on those coins.  I remember a Tiberius, the guy that came after Augustus, and a real pervert.  He went for quite a bit.

 I got this one for three dollars.  Remember this was 1973 or something, so three dollars was worth a lot more.  But I wanted a Roman coin, so I got this one.  Unfortunately I appear to have lost the little information card that came with the coin.  But the guy featured on this coin was a pretty nobody emperor.  He was from around 200 AD and didn’t last long as emperor.  He warranted a couple of lines in the Britannica and was described, I think, as “sickly.”

But while my emperor is not very significant, I have done a pretty good job over the years of not losing the coin.  That would be easy to do.  It’s about a half inch across and wafer thin.  Much lighter than a dime.  I have no idea what it was worth in Roman terms and adjusted for inflation.  I figure maybe you could have bought an orange with it.  But that is absolutely speculative.  Maybe part of an orange.

Any how, I am glad I found the coin. I could too easily have thrown it out.  Eventually I would have missed it had I done so and gotten perturbed.  But there it is.  I just find it interesting to hold between my fingers something that is pretty close to 2000 years old.  Now I have to stick it some place where I make sure I don’t lose it.

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The first picture shows the sickly emperor and the second shows the symbolic stuff on the back of the coin.

A quick web search indicates that there are a huge number of Roman coins out there that one might purchase. 

I remember as a callow youth looking down my nose at old people who sat around doing nothing but discussing their doctors, their diseases, and their operations.  Not that I was around your old people much, but when I was around them that’s all they seemed to want to talk about.  When there were many other things of greater importance, I thought, like war, world peace, and the state of the economy that one might be discussing.  Maybe I just envied them because, man, you could tell these people were really into what they were discussing, like you know when I had my hip removed, and they would go on savoring every detail even using occasional medical terms.

And then when the folks hit their late 60s it seemed like the big event of their week, whatever week it was, was to go to the doctor.  Well, what will you be doing, and it was like, well, on Tuesday I go to the eye doctor and I will be getting back the results of the blood test, and I have this corn that needs looking into.  And I though, Jesus, what kind of life is that when the high point of your week is to have your teeth cleaned.

Well, age humbles us all.  When we went down to visit Carol’s mom last, I called ahead and made a date with an old friend whom I have known since 1973. So I we met up and talked while Carol went to spend time with her mom.  We talked up and down over a thirty plus year period about this and that and what happened to whom, and so on, and what do you know but we had a good hour in there talking about our diseases. 

I described my colonoscopy and tried to talk her into getting hers, but I probably failed.  She has an ongoing problem.  Once she was swimming and felt a pain in her ear, and thought well it was a whopper case of swimmer’s ear, and went to the doctor, and he gave her antibiotics or something.  But the pain did not relent and so after two weeks she went to an ear expert and the expert said her eardrum had burst and what was worse a horrible infection had set in that eventually complete screwed up the little parts in there—the “hammer” is it called—and the other thing, so that she went deaf in the ear pretty much and began to suffer also from vertigo.

The vertigo thing sounds pretty terrible because there are no warning signs at all.  I mean none.  Just suddenly and for no clear reason you get vertigo and you start to lose your balance for no reason at all.  That must be awful.  Here you are one second taking a step forward and the next you are falling.  There doesn’t seem to be any cure for it.  They did an operation on the ear to try to get the hear back and put in plastic replacements for the broken parts, but they went out of whack and didn’t work.  To do that operation, they had to cut her entire ear off.  Of course, they sewed it back on.

So far I have avoided having my ear cut off.  In fact, no doctor has yet to make an incision in me.  Yesterday, the skin doctor blasted me in a couple of spots with liquid nitrogen to get rid of some pre-cancerous lesions.  And for the first time ever, he started fingering his way through what remains of my hair and blasted a couple of spots on my scalp too.  I have to face the fact that the skin up there has lost most of its natural covering and I better make sure to wear a hat.

Ray, the guy who looks after the Tingle Trust at Morgan Stanley (at least his secretary does), was in the locker room at the club on his way to the pool.  His face was all slathered up with sun block because he is fair like me and has a profusion of those so-called pre-cancerous lesions on his cheeks and especially forehead.  I told him he should get that chemical salve from the dermatologist.  

I did that because of my precancerous lesions.  I don’t know what was in that stuff but my forehead where the lesions were swelled up something fierce and then the swollen places popped and started draining so that once my head stuck to my pillow.  This went on for about six weeks and then the red stuff went away.  And my forehead has been free of those precancerous lesions ever since.   But Ray doesn’t like the sound of it and is afraid he will lose a client because the salve might make it appear he has some sort of violent and possibly contagious skin disease.

I guess I am thinking about skin disease because I have to go to the dermatologist today.  I got this notice from my primary care person practically ordering me to go see the guy because my dermatologist is a guy.  And because about 20 years ago I had an actual cancer cell growing in my upper lip and ever since then they have insisted I go.  So I have gone every year pretty faithfully because that cancer cell freaked me out. 

Yesterday, I went to the eye doctor.  Somehow I forgot my yearly visit to him too.  I found out when I went in to have the frames of my glasses readjusted because they were sitting all lopsided on my nose.  I guess I sat on the glasses or something—though I don’t know when—and they were really out of whack.  So while I was there they checked my records and said it had been 18 months or something since my last check up.

I go to a real eye doctor, an MD.  He has all the latest equipment. He has this thing called a retinal maper or something like that.  He charges $35 extra for that but I pay anyway because this thing is the best way to detect eye disease.  They get this really cool picture of the back of your eyeball, veins and all, and in his one some of my eye lashes too.  One time they emailed me the picture in an attachment.  But I have lost it.  Any way they said that looked good, and then I stared into another machine, and every time something moved on the little screen, I clicked a little clicker to indicate I had detected the movement.  I have no idea what this machine is for and I didn’t feel like asking.

Finally, I see the real MD guy and he is nice enough really.  Carol and I met him at the club though he has not been going to the club much this last year since his house burnt down.  He had a bad year.  And maybe for the nth time, I ask about contacts instead of glasses.  I don’t know why I bother.  I guess I expect some new break through in contact lenses, but again he says I am not a good candidate because one of my eyes is pretty good and the other really sucks, and that makes me a bad candidate I guess.

But I decided to order those lens that go dark out in the sun because I can’t for the life of me remember to carry a pair of shades with me.  I need to do that since a lot of sunlight is one of the things that cause macular degeneration.  WB had that.  But he worked out in the sun too every day and I don’t remember him ever wearing a pair of shades.  I wonder why.  He had all sorts of precancerous lesions too.  His arms didn’t look like normal skin but more like allegator hide.  They made him put that salve on every year.  I don’t know what good it did except to make it look like allegator hide with a skin disease.

Two times a year the college I went to—Occidental College, in LA—sends out a magazine with news about the college and class notes.  There are too many classes to have all the notes in each issue, so one time it is the odd numbered years and the next it is the even numbered years.  I am an even numbered year having been graduated in 1968.
 

Finally, I wrote a note, as part of that time, I think, when I was trying as I put it, to reconnect the dots between my present and my past.  Also somebody wrote a note wondering where I was along with a few other people.  I don’t remember what I wrote in that first note: fifty words about something.  But I wrote a couple others too and they were about getting older.  I remember I wrote about how I got really alarmed when one day I was combing my hair—no, that can’t be right, I never comb my hair—anyway I found this hair, whatever I was doing, about a foot long, growing right out of the top of my ear and it had got mixed in with all the other hairs.  So I wrote about this hair I remember and I wrote about having to buy tweezers to pluck the hairs that had started growing out of the top of my nose.

I got a call from the class notes lady for a class note a few weeks back because I guess the even numbered issue is about to come out, and, hell, I just stared at it and thought about what I might write, and didn’t think I could write that I felt like s…t because my father had died last year and my mother had died this year and my brother had a stroke and I caught pneumonia.  For some reason, in class notes, you don’t write like: “Life is hell and I can’t figure it out at all.  And every day I think about shooting myself.”  I guess that is just not polite or something.  Imagine a whole page of class notes with everybody just lamenting their asses off about the struggle of existing.

But then I got that picture from the classmate showing me and friends from that time.  So I sat down and wrote a note something like:  “My damn fecal sample tested positive and they practically ordered me to go in for that colon thing where they knock you out a little and stick the tube all the way up.  This scared me to death since I figured I was dying.  So there I was lying on this table with my bum sticking out in the air and I ask the nurse lady what could cause a positive.  And she says, Oh this test gives all sorts of false positives.  And I think, Oh Great! Sarcastically in my head.  After the doctor says I have a normal colon for a 61 year old man.  I guess this is good though it doesn’t sound so hot.  I guess my colon is just aging along like my face except I can’t see it.  Which is probably a good thing too.”

The next time the class notes come out I will be interested to see if the editor of the class notes includes mine.  Because so far nobody has written anything about having something stuck up his or her colon.

So we want to turn our big closet into a little office, and to do that we need to put in a window.  When we went to look at windows, the window people said we should put masking tape on the wall to help us visualize the window.

 

 

Yesterday was a rough day.  I didn’t sleep for crap and then I had a bad computer day.  I have one of those every six months or so.  Everything just goes whacky at once.  I couldn’t get the blog thing to work at all.  It took forever and when I tried to save what I had written, it wouldn’t save it and I would have to start all over again.  And another program I use wasn’t working, and I saw they were changing their server and I wondered if that was the problem.  But there was no way I could find out anything, because the blog is hosted on Yahoo, and trying to get in touch with anybody at Yahoo is like trying to get in contact with the Queen of England or something.  It takes like hours on the phone and you end up talking to somebody in India who knows real good English but nothing else.

And anyway you never know where the problem is: with them, or with your computer, or maybe with the web browser you are using to get in contact with them, and then I wondered if the Java script was screwed up because I saw a new download was ready for that.  So it was like a huge confluence of bad computer stuff, and I spent too much of the day obsessively trying to figure out the problem by clicking on this and that and trying to clean out the guts of my computer in case something had gotten stuck in there and was clogging up the works.  Of course, when you clean out stuff there’s always the chance you will take out something your computer needs and messing stuff up even further.

And then we had this guy come over to give us a bid about putting in a window because we want, as part of the general cleanup, to turn our large walk-in closet into a small office for me.  And then another person came to give an estimate from a place called California Closets that specializes in closets, as you might have guessed, to see what they might do to most efficiently organize the small space in the large closet.  So by mid afternoon, I am ready to shot myself because I just hate construction stuff and waiting on people to get their butts moving and then being anxious about whether they will do it right or not, and of course there’s the issue of money.

Later on I began to realize that part of my foul mood had to do with the fact that this whole closet thing is part of the preparation we are trying to make for my retirement.  So like when I do get to that point I will be able to have a more organized living space.  And deep down inside, I get to feeling that this preparing for my retirement is like digging my own damn grave.

The grave digging idea was like driven in with a hammer when just before retiring I checked and saw I had an email from a guy I knew in college and he had sent along a picture of a number of us from back in college asking me if I could identify a couple of people in the picture, since he couldn’t remember.  And there I was in the picture—all bearded on the far right and my girl friend next to me and other people I had known forty years ago.  . Emotionally, psychologically I was back then so really far out of it that I just don’t know if I was really capable of knowing another person.  And that made me sad thinking of all I may have missed because I was so busy just trying to keep myself from falling apart.

But what the hell?

I got an email yesterday morning saying the UC Regents were meeting at UCSB, where I work, and that the union to which I belong was going to be part of a rally protesting some of the things the Regents have been doing, like changing the pension plan for the worse, and continually allowing the costs of the medical plan to go up.  The pension plan is particularly irksome; they want to turn it into one of those two tier deals, with the guys in the second tier, newer hires, to get less than us old folks.  Also they want us all to start paying more straight out of our checks into the plan after years of not having as do so at all. 

They say the plan is in danger of going bankrupt.  Now you would think that maybe they would have known there was going to be some crisis with the retirement plan what with the multitude of baby boomers, such as myself, coming down the pike.  I don’t know what the hell they were thinking about.  Surely, prudence would have dictated that we pay in, though in lesser amounts, over the years to insure the security of the plan.  Nobody would have squawked. But the increase they now propose is enormous.  What the hell ever happened to prudence—an 18^th century virtue, I guess—and the Regents are all supposed to be big wigs with connections to business and money in all shapes and forms, and they didn’t know better. 

So I decided—well, ok—I would go over to the noon rally the union was supposed to be part of.  It was a long walk from the parking lot to the meeting place, and when I got there I couldn’t find any rally, so I wandered around the building, noticing as I did so cops every where, on the balconies, the stair wells, at every entrance to the hall where the Regents were meeting.  Eight or nine cops were hanging out at the main entrance to the hall; and I mean hanging out, just doing nothing.  So I went up to a group of them and asked if this is where the Regents were meeting.

They said yea, and did I want to go in since today was the public meeting.  Sure, why not, I said, and was directed around a little chain link barrier and before I knew it this guy was waving a metal detector all around me and making me empty every bit of metal from my pockets.  You would have thought I was a terrorist or something.  So I get into this huge hall, and the regents—there are sure a lot of them—were sitting there all suited up, and every one of them with a lap top in front of him or her—and they are jawing on about something to do with academic freedom, the UC system, and whether or not UC researchers have legally or illegally taken research money from tobacco interests.

This one guy goes on forever with some sort of vague and diffuse comment/question, and then this lawyer lady goes on forever with some vague and diffuse answer, and I doubt anybody understands any of it, since they are both talking legalese about some finding—I guess it was a finding—that a judge had made about academic freedom and doing business with tobacco companies.  So they talked and talked and some guy finally said maybe we should table this item, and move on to the next which was a report on the state budget for education.  I listened as long as I could stand it and left.

I was there—not that long I guess—maybe 30 minutes and never once heard the words “education” or “student” spoken.

I figure the topic of Michael Moore’s next mock-u-mentary will be called “Agony in the Air: Please Remain Seated!”  I don’t know how though he will be able to make himself out a representative of the little guy.  I mean the guy weighs 300 pounds; surely he flies first class.  If he doesn’t, he is a masochist.  But when normal every day newspapers and magazines start referring to air travel as an “excruciating ordeal” or “like Chinese water torture” you figure the topic is ripe for the plucking. 

When I didn’t have any money—which was mostly before 1980—I would occasionally take the Greyhound Bus to get somewhere.  I usually regretted it, but the buses always left on time and the seats were a lot more comfortable than airplane seats.  I would take the bus from college to the downtown LA Greyhound station; back in the 60’s that was one ugly station in a mean part of town.  Bums—I guess they would now be called street persons—were lined up all along the wall of the station; and when they saw me coming they all started moving at once like sharks smelling blood.

They knew a mark when they saw one.  And it’s true I guess.  I figure a person willing to walk up to a complete stranger and ask for money and take the risk of being berated or lectured at for doing so must be a person in need.  You might argue, well, they are all drunks or hopheads and don’t feel a thing.  Maybe.  Anyway, when I gave them money, I didn’t care what they did with it.  If booze was what they needed, so be it.  I figure they came honestly by their poverty.  After all, there’s no money in it.  Poverty, I mean.

Later on they built a brand new bus station and drove all the street people away.  They even installed pay crappers, not for the money so much, but as a way of keeping street people from going into one of the stalls and sleeping the day away on the pot there where it was warm.  Once I was there trying to get to see Carol when she was going to college in Riverside.  I forget what was going on.  Maybe it was the air controllers strike, but a film crew took pictures of people standing in line at the Greyhound depot.  That night I got a call from a friend back East saying he had seen me on national TV waiting in line for a bus at the Greyhound bus depot.  Later on, I saw the clip and sure enough there I was with my splendid head of auburn hair and beard of course—on national TV waiting for the Greyhound Bus.

Those days you could smoke in the back of the bus so that’s where I would head, and more than once on diverse trips around the state I ended up sitting next to some wizened guy with a brown paper bag with a bottle of wine or hard stuff in it.  And sure enough we would get to talking and the guy would want to know if I wanted a hit of his stuff, and I would say no, but he would keep at it—like, are you sure, now.  Cause there’s plenty where that came from—and so on and so forth, till continuing to refuse seem downright not polite.  So there I would be with the brown paper bag in my hand trying to figure out if the guy would be terribly offended if I wiped off the bottle where his mouth had been.  Usually I figured what the hell, since whatever was in that bottle could probably kill anything.

Usually after one drink the guy would leave you alone.  It wasn’t about sharing booze.  It was more just a social thing, like tipping your hat to say hello.  One tip was enough.

Come to think of it, though, if American Airlines was running the transporter service, I don’t think I would use it.  They can’t handle airplanes much less something as complicated as a transporter would be.  As it is, if you can drag your sorry ass to the airport at five AM when it is still pitch black to get your plane scheduled to leave at seven, there’s a big if as to whether it will leave at seven or if it has been rescheduled or if it has been cancelled completely.

And then after your have been x-rayed enough to cause cancer and you finally do get on the plane, there’s no telling how long you will sit there until they decide it’s time to go, and then when you finally taxi out to the run way, there’s no telling if they will announce that you have to go back to the gate because they forgot a flight attendant or one of the engines fell off, and then when you go back to the gate and then taxi back to the run way to wait your turn to take off you pretty much have to give up the idea that you will make your connection at Dallas or Atlanta or wherever the hell it is you are supposed to make a connection.

I mean if American Airlines was running the transporter service, I would sure as hell take out a lot of transporter insurance because there would be no telling whether they would transport me to the designated location in one piece or not.  Maybe part of me would end up in Dallas and another part in Atlanta, or all of me would end up somewhere in the middle of the frozen tundra in Alaska. And you could leave it to American Airlines not to have a secure transporter service, so weird hackers out there would be hacking into the transporter beam and stealing body parts for sale in South America, so you might end up in the middle of the frozen tundra without your liver or something.  Though transporting would still be 200% safer than driving which tells you something about how unsafe driving is.

And of course they would find some way to rip you off.  Like there would be first class and coach transporter service.  If you transport first class, you get your own private little shower area and a transporter booth with a curtain on it so nobody has to see you in your nakedness.  Oh, I forgot to say, you have to transport naked because there had been problems with people transporting with their clothes on; the fibers on their clothes got mixed up with their body hair, so some people ended up with like polyester body hair.  And at first as an added bonus extra, when they transported you, they did not transport like viruses and bad bacteria that might be in you.  But this was only if you paid first class.  But then the government said everybody had to be transported naked and have all their viruses not transported for fear of spreading a plague or something.

So if you transport coach, you end up naked in this like huge gym locker room sort of place with thousands and thousands of people all milling around naked and looking for the baggage claim area, and of course, there’s no telling if your baggage will arrive or not, or if when you get it, it will really be your baggage or if maybe your clothes all shrunk or expanded in the transport.  So, if your baggage doesn’t show up you can just stay there in the huge locker room and wait, or you can buy one of the plastic jump suits American Airlines will sell you for about 1000 times what it is worth. 

Of course if you transport first class, you have your own private little locker room and the plastic jump suit is free.  Anyway, I wouldn’t transport American Airlines for sure.

_____________________________________________________________________________

I added five minutes from one of the cassette tapes WB sent me.  The sound is not so hot but it's interesting to hear his voice. 

Carol had an itch to see her mom who recently had a stroke and has not been doing so well, so Thursday or Friday we decided to make a flying trip down to see her.  We hit the road around 8 Saturday morning because we simply will not drive through LA on a weekday.  That’s the real problem with the trip.  You have to drive through LA.  There’s just no way around LA; well there is a way around it but it takes forever.

Google maps says its 214 miles from where we live to where Carol’s mom lives—not that far from where Joan and WB used to live, but now do not.  On Friday, after we decided to go down there, I started feeling more than usually morose and it took me a while to realize I was unconsciously dealing with the fact that this trip would be the first time EVER that one of those two, Joan or WB, would not be there at the end of the line. 

I used to hate driving down there because one of them would be at the end of the line, so what the heck was I morose about.  I guess words like NEVER OR EVER pack a wallop.  I don’t know that I believe in a grieving process, but I think there are grieving events.  This trip down was one such, a sort of reminders of how things once were but will never be again.  So down in the unconscious I was turning that over and not far behind that the old “death thang” that has plagued me lo these many years.

I would like to see many places but for the getting there.  I wish they had developed that Transporter like they had on Star Trek; hell, I would pay twice the plane fare if I got to use one of those Transporters.  It would be worth it not to have to drive a car 214 miles through that hair raising traffic with nuts all around you in those monstrous vehicles people drive these days.  So not to feel utterly at the mercy of the situation, I drive too fast I guess.  I averaged over 70, closer to 75, going down and back making it both ways, both times in about 3 hours and 20 minutes.  Zoom!  With one pit stop down and one pit stop up. 

It takes bladder control and pre-bladder preparation to get through LA.  I mean you just don’t get off the freeway any old place going through LA to take a leak because you don’t have the faintest idea what you might be driving into.  One guy wrote an article about having a flat and pulling off the freeway to get it fixed, and his driving to six different places before he found somebody who spoke English.  By 2050, they say, 60 million people will live in California and it will be a multi-multi ethnic state. 

Anyhow we made it down and we made it back, and trying to go to sleep last night, I would start drifting off and then bump awake when I dreamed about a car come head on at me in my lane.

To say WB. Jr. and I didn’t cotton to each other doesn’t cover all the bases.  To say we didn’t see eye to eye doesn’t do the trick either.  And then when you stuck him together with Joan the situation would get impossible.  I would call and get Joan usually and then I would hear him start swearing in the background, maybe because Joan was on the phone too long, or maybe he wanted her to do something, or maybe she was hogging the phone, or maybe he was swearing up a storm because I didn’t call frequently enough.  The two were joined at the hip in some sort of hellish psychological dance macabre.

The same when we visited if only for a few hours or part of an afternoon.  Over the years I began to assume a distance in those visits.   There was no point in talking about anything meaningful since there was no telling where such a conversation might lead: to him swearing or Joan crying or most likely both.  But even the non-conversation visits didn’t work. Sure, there were no bizarre outbursts but afterwards I would still feel down, blue and murderous for a week or more.  It was as if being around them I caught a psychological flu.  Somewhere Freud speaks of a psychological contagion. That’s what it felt like.  A contagion.

I don’t know how many sessions I spent with my shrink going round and round about these visits and phone conversations.  I was trying to figure out what I was feeling and also really I was considering breaking off all connections to the two of them completely.  But my shrink said she had seen people do this and it hadn’t really helped.  It meant giving up all hope, and while, she said, I probably should have no hope that my parents would ever change breaking off all connections meant giving up even the possibility of hope.  Something like that.

Still, I worked at it.  WB would tell stories about his childhood.  They didn’t make much sense to tell the truth, but I wanted to find out what I could that made him tick and act the way he did, and maybe his childhood would shed some light on that.  Also I have always been interested in history and in the South, so I hit on this idea of having him tape record some of his stories for posterity as it were. I bought a little cassette tape recorder and took it down on one of the visits and said I would appreciate it if he talked into the machine now and then with some of his stories.

He seemed to like the idea, but nothing happened.  I didn’t hear back, and finally—I don’t know how long it was—it came out he had been unable to operate the buttons on the machine maybe because his sight was starting to go, and had gotten frustrated, as he easily did with mechanical things that he didn’t understand, and thrown it across the room and broken it to pieces.  And somehow or other Joan made it seem my fault that I had not gotten a machine he could work.  I could have said, well, screw it, but instead I went and bought a big machine with big buttons on it, and stuck a cassette in it, and I labeled the “play” button “push here.”  So when he pushed it, the tape would play and he would hear the instructions on the tape for how to operate the machine.

Finally I got maybe 40 minutes of tape out of him.  And going through papers, as part of our ongoing cleanup, I came across ten typed pages that I wrote 10 or more years ago describing WB’s childhood as he had described it on the tapes.  I don’t remember having written it, or what my intentions in writing it were exactly.  It’s just the sort of thing I do.

In any case, I scanned in the pages and have stuck them up on the Tingle Territory web page.  It’s an easy read and a bit interesting.

That’s the view from my freaking desk.  I mean if I turn my head to the left and slightly back from the spot where I am sitting at this moment (July 11, 2007; 739 am) that’s what I see.  Carol and I have been living a lie—the lie that we were somehow organized.  We are not organized and I am not sure we will ever be again.

Books—my god, so many books.  There’s one there you can just make out: Games Nations Play by John Spanier, 8^th edition.  I don’t know why that book is there or how it got there.  I remember it was the textbook for a class in “International Relations” called “USA-USSR Relations.”  That class is now defunct, dead as the dodo, because the Cold War is over and nobody cares enough about USA-USSR relations to devote a class to it.  In fact there is no USSR anymore.  That damn book is pre-end-of Cold War.  Maybe 1985 or something.

I think I will throw out, take it to the recycling place.  I hate to destroy a book, but I must.  Otherwise I will be buried under dusty books.  Under that book is another—that you can’t see—called American Government, 2^nd edition.  It’s a textbook that was used in a like introduction to American Government class.  I have it because, as with the USSR class, I taught a writing class that was linked to the American Government class.  For the writing class I went to all the lectures and read all the readings for the class my class was linked with—so I sat there and listened to lectures on American Government.  Damn, that was like 1989 or something…

I can’t remember, but I was the person mostly responsible for setting up the links classes.  I went around and sat outside professors offices during their office hours and waited till the students were gone and asked them if it would be OK with them if the Writing Program linked a writing class with their lecture class and mostly they just shrugged and said OK, when I made it clear that the writing class would in no way, shape, or form increase the work for their class.

That red thing sticking up to the left may be my flag of the Soviet Union.  When the USSR fell apart, I ordered the Soviet flag with its hammer and sickle and stuck it up on my office wall as an ambiguous sort of joke.  Or maybe I was being perverse.  But then I took it down when I saw that the damn flag scared some of my students from Viet Nam.  Back then we were getting students who had been “boat people.”

This one young woman had suffered a great deal.  She was terribly thin.  I think her ordeal had stunted her growth.  Pirates had boarded their boat and stole their food and valuables.  One of the pirates, she said, had picked up a baby and killed it by smashing its head against something.  So they all ended up on an island, just lying their starving to death until one day a UN Helicopter flew over.  Her eyes lit up remembering.  Like for her, the UN was God.

Damn, our condo is like some sort of archeological dig.  Ever layer is another layer of history.  I need to remember this stuff like a hole in the head.

I was out road testing the new seat for my bike when my neighbor, out walking her unhappy dog, motioned me over and said I might want to know that something terrible had just happened.  I got home to see the second of the Twin Towers go down.  I don’t know what I felt exactly.  I didn’t feel angry.  I just felt this was bad in and of itself and that it was probably going to be really, really bad in its long range repercussions.  I had some work to do at school and while there, still turning over inside what I had seen, I started fiddling around with my computer and made a flag like this one.

I ran it off on my computer on good photo paper and tacked it in the upper left corner of the message board right outside my office door.  I have not moved it.  It has been there ever since.

I am turning over emotional stuff right now what with WB’s death, February of last year, Joan’s death just this last April, Dan’s stroke, and a whole host of other lesser things all coming together in a big clot.  I guess when I start feeling maybe too much or something very strong I do as I did with 9/11.  I try to make or build something.  I think that’s why I have been working so much on what I call “Tingle Territory” when I am not cleaning out the garage.

I don’t think of this “making something” as necessarily therapeutic.  I am not sure what therapeutic means; if it means getting better or curing, I am not sure “making something” does that.  More as if, making something requires material for the making; and if you can make something out of that material, you give it a kind of shape or solidness that other stuff you make later on can build on.  It’s more a way of constructing a continuity or holding together and shaping a diffuse anxiety that might otherwise be overwhelming or get buried and fester down there somewhere just out of sight.  The anxiety is still there though and shows in my having become a bit obsessive about putting Tingle Territory together.

I think it’s important to make something out of the things we feel.  Most of the time, I think we do, not always beneficially though.  Still, maybe something powerful happens and you decide to lose weight, and actually do.  But that’s a pretty big thing to do.  Making something doesn’t have to be a big thing; maybe you just start parting your hair in a different way.  Making something is a way of accommodating change by recognizing it.

If you don’t make something out of the change you are just going to become more and more rigid and eventually the change will break you.  Hell, it will no matter what you do.  My shrink’s mother, in her dotage, went hay wire and took to collecting empty cans and yogurt cups and filling the drawers of her dresser with them.  Maybe the only difference is that if you try to make something out of the change when you open your dresser drawers, they won’t be full of empty things.

Oh, I have made a separate web page that gives access, in one place, to the various bits of Tingle Territory I have so far assembled.

I was feeling sort of washed out and blue yesterday, Saturday, maybe because Friday was a really social, perhaps excessively so, day for me.  I saw my regular shrink at 1 and had my guitar lesson at 300 and saw my psychiatrist at four thirty.  As you can see, my social life is so lame I have to pay people to talk with me.

I see the psychiatrist every four months for a med check.  He sees people at his house, so I have to go to this place up on the mountain that is worth maybe 8 million dollars.  He charges 100 buck per half hour.  I decided long ago not to stint when it comes to my mental health and my tendency to excessive moodiness, if you can call it that exactly.  So in the half hour I talk real fast and hit the high (or more precisely, low) points of the last four months. Maybe that’s what wore me out, recapping and re-remembering the hecticness of these last four months.  We decided to stay status quo on the drugs for now.  I don’t know much about him because he doesn’t say anything (that’s because he is not supposed to).  But I do know he was raised in Louisiana and his father owned a hardware store there; and I know he knows his stuff about meds.

My shrink told me a week or ago that she will be retiring at the end of this year.  She is 82 or 83, I forget which, and decided not to renew her license to practice, not so much because it costs to renew as because to renew you have to go to some stupid classes to show you are keeping up with the so-called “field.”  She is pretty much sick of those classes and is convinced the “field” is going down hill because of all the new rules and regs being generated by the state as the result of actions by insurance firms and lawyers. 

My shrink’s daughter is a shrink too and raised up under the new rules and regulations has been on her mother’s back (my shrink’s back) to stop seeing me for about five years now because she (the daughter) feels my relationship with her mother is probably illegal, seeing as how her mother talks to me in ways that could invite a law suit.  Also at the end of each session my shrink and I hug and that is probably grounds for a suit too.

So nothing is stable in this world not even your shrink.  Hell, I figured we would terminate when she died; maybe this retiring thing will be better and less dramatic.  Anyhow, she is crazy.  She has this thing for animals of all kinds and has had numerous cats in her house over the years.  She so dotes on the cats that she leaves her back door open a notch at night so the cat can do its thing, and right outside that door all around her patio she had constructed a chain link “cage,” like in a zoo or something, that allows the cats to go outside but not to run away or get eaten by ever more daring coyotes.  I am not paying much attention and get confused when, as she walks me to my car, she says that she woke up with a skunk walking around her bed. I think maybe she has begun to hallucinate till I remember the business with the cage and the back door.  Somehow the skunk is getting into the cage and then into the house and walking around my shrink’s bed.  She wakes to see this big fluffy white tale moving around in the darkness.

So far this has happened twice and she is rightfully worried that the skunk will get in, get upset by something, and let go its load of stink.

Carol and I enter our second week of trying to clean out the junk.  I wish we had never started.  But now there’s no way out from under it.  We can’t go back.  We are like those people marching to the South Pole.  Somehow in attempting to clean out the garage we also unleashed from inside the condo a deepening flood of junk.  Sort of like trying to pop a pimple and opening an artery in the process.

As we went along I tried to devise some throwing out rules.  Out it goes:

If you didn’t know you had it, till you saw it…
If you have not touched it in five years…
If you have not used or worn it in two years…
If you think it is possibly poisonous or toxic….

Exceptions being.  You can keep it:

If the thought of throwing it out makes you want to cry
If it might be useful for some legal reason (old, decaying taxes for example)
If it might have some sort of significant resale value (so far we haven’t come across anything like that)
If you are not certain what it is and so cannot determine if it is useless or not (electronic stuff, most especially).

Carol has clothes from high school and unfortunately too she has a memory and remembers when she bought the items or the special occasions on which she wore them.  She was having such a terrible time throwing stuff out that I volunteered to take pictures of the items and then she could put them in some sort of memory book.  When she said she was going to keep her prom dresses, I said sure and if you want we can dip them in plastic so they will last forever. 

I don’t have any memory so I don’t have many sentimental attachments except to pieces of paper upon which things are written.  While throwing out old pieces of paper, do not pause to read letters written by old advisors, bosses, editors, friends (that you no longer speak to), friends (period), parents or lovers.  Instead, go to Home Depot, buy some big plastic storage box, and stuff all the letters and old essays and short stories into those, and shove it all into a corner and do your best to forget it.  On the outside, stick a tag reading:  To Be Disposed of On the Occasion of My Death.

This picture of my toolbox serves to illustrate my idea of organizing junk.  A) I have no idea what's in this box and B) I don't know the function of half of the stuff.   

Brother Dan is mending.  He drove out my way to get out of the house I expect.  He is somewhat at loose ends, knocking around the house for the next month, before he can try to go back to work.  The cut from the operation is pretty visible along his neck but not so bad.  Also I think he is a bit worried.  He remembers as he woke from the anesthetic fog the doctor saying, “We did all we could for you.”  Well, he was too out of it to ask for clarification of that ambiguous phrase. Did the guy mean we did everything that it is possible for a human to do or we did everything that we could humanly do for you as a person?  

Anyhow that “could” is bugging him.  It would bug me because it makes me wonder how much they were able to clean out that artery.  Maybe not that much, maybe only all they could.  But he will have another scan of some kind in a few days and that should tell the tale.  Not that he wouldn’t have had to have had it done in any case.  But one would hope of course for the artery to be now 90% clear rather than 50% clear.

We talked a bit and drove around in the old Volvo that I will give to his son, my nephew, Dylan, if the kid wants it.  It’s hard to know what the kid wants these days though because he appears to be in a pretty severe I-don’t-want-to-do-a-damn-thing teenage, high school slump.  Maybe the idea of getting his license will get him unstuck a bit.

Dan started laughing when he got in the Volvo because it is really a mess inside.  The previous owner left the sun roof open; it rained and the interior roof sort of rotted out leaving little pieces of fabric hanging down here and there.  Also the exterior is not so hot.  But I got the car for 800 dollars from a professor.  I told him my Honda was giving out and he said he had this Volvo sitting in his driveway that he wanted to unload.  The damn Honda was actually pouring out black smoke.  Actually it only poured out for a couple of minutes, but that was enough for people to yell at me or give me the finger.  I would yell, it’s going away but they didn’t care.

I have had that Volvo for six years I guess and it has been a faithful car.  It’s an 86 with 175 thousand miles on it.  I wanted to get it up to 200 thousand.  I took it in faithfully for its 3000 mile check up and oil.  And, aside from having the front brakes redone, it hasn’t cost much to maintain these past three years.  I figure the car has another 50 thousand miles on it at least.  The engine and transmission are still in wonderful shape.  The battery gave out some years back and I had to look all over for the replacement.  Finally I found a place that sold them for 95 dollars a pop.  That’s a lot for a battery but the guy said those Volvo engines need plenty to turn them over since they are really redesigned tractor engines.

So I will give Dylan the car if he wants it, though as I said, it is hard to know what he wants these days.  But I have to get rid of it in a couple of weeks because each family in the condo complex is allowed only two cars.  We have three, now that Carol’s mom gave her a Toyota, so the Volvo has got to go.

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That's the old Volvo. 

Was it last week some time?  But I was at the club exercising and listening to the radio, and as I did so a commercial comes on saying: basically, buy our beer for the 4th of July because it’s the middle of a long hot summer.  And I go, what the hell.  How can it be the middle of the summer already?  So I had to look it up and in the USA at least summer begins on June 21^st or 22^nd, depending.  So how can it be the middle of the damn summer when it’s not even the 4^th of July yet.  Maybe they were just trying to freak people out, like, Oh! My God.  The summer is half over already and I have missed most of it, so I should get really drunk and drown my grief.

At the beginning of every summer, too, I look out the window think damn, but it’s still light outside and it’s like 830 pm or something.  But every summer I miss the solstice, the longest day of the year.  I will think, pay attention to the solstice.  That’s a special day.  But I miss it every time.  Usually, the day I look out the window and think, damn but it’s a long day, is the solstice, but I am unaware of the fact that it is the solstice.

Maybe that’s because the whole solstice thing confuses me.  It seems to me that the solstice shouldn’t be at the first of the summer, but right in the middle of it. But it’s not the middle and so I miss it every time.  It just doesn’t seem right that from the solstice on it’s all down hill into darkness.

Last night they set off fireworks at the nearby park.  They are so close by we don’t have to leave our place.  We go outside and set up folding chairs on the sidewalk around the main parking lot of the condo development.  Usually, I don’t go out to watch because it upsets my routine.  But last night I did.  Carol and I sat in our folding chairs with our neighbors, Joy and Bill, both in their seventies I think, and long retired.  Bill plays golf all the time and Joy does lots of volunteer work of different kinds. 

Another neigbhor came up and stood right next to me, and Joy and Bill were right there too, so I had to pay attention not to fart since I had pretty bad gas, and was sort of torn between getting up and going off somewhere to fart in private or just sitting there and watching the fireworks.  I decided to watch and after a bit the urge to fart went away.  Looking at the fireworks, I wondered what the big deal was and remembered they had been more of a big deal back when I would get stoned and watch them.  But I don’t do that anymore.  So I started feeling sort of sad and nostalgic looking at the fireworks.

This year they had pet friendly fireworks with not as many big bangers mixed in.  Those fireworks just drive the pets crazy.  Our neighbors a while back had a dog named Teddy.  One time when the fireworks went off, he shat and pissed himself all over the condo.  So every year when the fireworks came, they had to pack the dog up and move him out of the area.  That was one unhappy dog.

 I have added a couple more sections to Tingle Territory:

Early Tingles

William Berner Tingle, 1892-1946

Went to Costco yesterday because we needed some food items.  Costco is probably not so familiar to east coast people.  It’s a kind of food warehouse.  It looks like a warehouse and businesses come in before regular people hours and buy wholesale.  Everything comes in huge quantities—I think here of the food stuff.  Once I forgot to buy that little box of salt with the umbrella lady and rather than go back to the regular store I bought five pounds of salt at Costco for a few cents more than the umbrella lady salt.  I had salt up the wazoo; it put it in bottles and stuck it in the pantry.

So I bought some eggs for around three dollars and was informed at the counter that it was a two pack, not 18 eggs for three dollars, but 36 eggs.  They asked did I want the other pack of 18.  I said skip it.  I had plenty of eggs, but they acted like I was breaking store policy or something, so the lady went back and got me 18 more eggs.  On Sunday I went to the farmer’s market in the Costco shopping center and got 12 eggs for about three dollars.  These were brown eggs though.

As you can see from the pictures, the white Costco eggs look almost identical.  Indeed, all 36 eggs look as if they were perhaps deposited by the same chicken.  Or maybe by clones of the same chicken.  The brown eggs though are various.  One is bigger than the other and browner too.  There was even a bigger egg than that one but I ate it.  So the brown eggs are much more irregular and appear to come from different chickens or maybe the same chicken on a good day or a bad day.

When I was teaching a research paper class on what I called “Eating in America,” I began to realize how distant and detached we are from the sources of our food.  Take hamburger for example.  It comes all neatly packaged in a square box.  What the hell is the relation of that to a cow?  Or let’s say, that neat package makes it easy to forget that it came from a cow.  The irregular brown eggs tend to remind one of chickens.  The regular white ones could have been produced in some programmed egg factory.

Many of my students—I have polled them over the years—have never seen a live chicken, except maybe in a zoo, and they are not sure if that was a chicken or not.  But they remember having seen something chicken like.  I have seen chickens in the flesh.  I have stepped with bare feet in warm chicken poop that lets off quite a stick as it oozes between the toes.  I have taken eggs out of the nest still warm from the chicken sitting on them.

It’s odd to think how we have become so distant from our food.  Indeed sometimes we are very distant from it.  Some experts say the average piece of food travels about 1500 miles to get to your mouth.  These figures are probably a little distorted since Americans are eating more and more food from all around the world.  Take coffee, as an instance.  Experts are concerned about such things because of all the energy required to transport the stuff and in most cases to refrigerate it while in transit.

There’s a little Utube graphics show about this at.

Tingle Road is making me nuts.  I mean so what?  The Tingles have a road named after them.  No big deal.  After all it was named for them since it went right through their property.  The road was called Tingle because they owned it. I found a Tingle Bridge on the web.  Probably that’s because the Bridge is located on Tingle property.  It’s not like Tingle Road was named after a famous Tingle like all those Lincoln Roads all over the country are named after a famous Lincoln.  And hell, take a look at Tingle Road…It’s barely a road anymore.

 Still, for all that, I was upset to note, as I have previously said, that according to Google maps, Tingle Road is slowly disappearing.  It used to run from clear down around Blout up into Butts County.  I have a Monroe County map from 1988 that clearly shows that to be the case.  Now on Google maps at the south end only a little tiny bit of Tingle Road remains.  The big piece going north is now called Graham, maybe because some interloper named Graham now owns the property through which the road runs.  So be it.

But to the north, I have pictures taken in the 90’s that show actual road signs with the name Tingle on them.  One at the corner of Brownlee and Tingle Road and the other at the intersection of Tingle Road and High Falls.  Actual pictures.  BUT Google maps now say that end of Tingle Road is Teagle Road.  I got the feeling strange people were trying to wipe out any remnant or memory of Tingle Road maybe because there are no Tingles in the area that I know of to defend the memory of Tingle Road.

Yes, memories must be defended to.

Now I have concluded that Google is screwed up.  For while they call it Teagle Road at the north end, if you type in Tingle Road in Google maps, up comes a Tingle Road in Jackson that is pointing—you guessed it—to what they call Teagle Road.  From this I conclude somebody collecting the data wrote Teagle for Tingle and so it no longer appears on Google maps.

This makes me wonder about history in a general way.  How the hell accurate can people be?  People forget stuff all the time.  I can’t remember yesterday.  How could a person in his or her 80’s say such and such occurred on such and such a day with anything like accuracy?

Anyhow Tingle Road is driving me nuts.

So now I have four google picture sites:

 Tingle Road
Cemeteries and Churches
Grandma Tingle’s Place
Pappy Tingle’s House

All can be located at.  So take a jaunt through Tingle Territory.

Oh, I have tried to make a google map of Tingle Territory, but I am not so hot at maps yet. When you get to the google map page click on the tab for My Maps (those being my maps) and when that page comes up click on Tingle Territory.

Most of another day in the garage cleanup.  For Carol at least.  I am stuck and can’t do much more till the shredding gets done, and I upset her by bring out yet more paper junk from the condo.  She started feeling overwhelmed.  So I stopped doing that.

She finds it hard—and me too—going through all that crap.  The crap makes you think about your life and where you have been and what you have done and what you haven’t done over the years.  That’s probably one reason people don’t throw out stuff; they really don’t want to remember anything.

Take that bike there in the picture.  I don’t know how many years back I decided I would be eco conscious and get exercise by riding a bike.  It’s only a couple of miles to the university, so on top of that I would ride to the club or just out on a bike path that runs from the university to downtown so that I was averaging like 13 miles a day or better over about a three year period.

But then my neck gave out and I started having pains in the neck and pains going all down my shoulders to my hands.  The bad office chair I had then and the bike were both responsible.  I got a new chair but I had to stop riding the bike.  I had bags on it for my books and stuff, and a lights for at night in the front and the back and a speedometer so I could torture myself with how slowly I was going when all the younger people just whizzed by me.  It told me the number of miles I had gone too.  I would get pissed when it would lose the connection and not work because I wanted to keep track of how many miles I had gone.

So I had to park the bike.  But it still seemed like a good bike to me and I would take it out occasionally and ride over to this park on the ocean, but then the pedals started slipping, so I took it in for a tune up, and the guy took a look at it and said “no way.”  He said I had biked it to death.  The bike as far as I could calculate had about 10,000 miles on it.  Damn I thought a bike would last more than 10,000 miles.

So now I am throwing it out.  Once on a hill, I got going about 40 mph on that thing.

I worked on Tingle Territory a bit more.  I moved all the collection over to the Google site.  It’s pretty cool.  You can click on the slideshow and the captions come up too if you want or you can turn them off, and down on the lower left of the page is a Google map so you can mark where the pictures were taken.  So if you have Google earth on your computer you can click on the map, log on to Google earth, and look at the pot via satellite.  The only problem is I don’t think I have done a very accurate job of pin pointing things.

Though I do believe I have located the ARP in Ora and Grandma’s house a little down from that.

Carol and I spent most of yesterday working on our half garage.  We share our garage with our next door neighbor in the condo. Our half of the garage has always looked worse than the other half, though most of the time we have been here the other half belonged to the nuns who lived next door and they were like ultra neat people.  Still I would look at their half and then at our half and the half that was ours looked even more like a mess compared to theirs.  Now a young couple lives next door.  They have more stuff than we do, but it still looks neater.

Anyway we getting rid of years and years of carelessly disposed and stored junk.

Books, books, books, tapes of all kinds and paper—those are the dominant disposables.  Six filing cabinets of paper, plus several boxes of paper.

We went out and bought Carol a mega-shredder to shred the paper.  She is proud of her new shredder and says she feels like a man with his chain saw.  We have a basic philosophical difference about paper disposal.  She is worried about identify theft and wants to shred every piece of paper.  I think this identity theft thing is grossly exaggerated and so don’t understand why she needs to shred every piece of paper.  Or maybe I don’t care if somebody steals my identity.  I mean, here, take it.  I could use another one.

I took bags of dead batteries and ink cartridges and old cans of paint and paint thinner over to the toxic disposal site at the university.  The guy there said they get 10,000 pounds of toxic junk every weekend. We didn’t want to use up all of the space in the trash containers everybody in our three units use so later we drove over to trash dump place nearby and unloaded paper.  Then we went to Osh and bought some shelves to go next to the shelves we already have.

I believe people all over the USA are now overflowing with junk.  I saw a truck with “1-800-Got Junk?” on it, and I looked them up on the web.  They will pick up every thing practically but a corpse and dispose of it for you.  They say they are the nation’s foremost junk disposal company and have grown 500% over the last three years.

In the late afternoon I spent a little time working on Tingle Territory and put together some pictures of Cemeteries and Churches.  Rather than try to move these from the google site to my site on yahoo, I decided to use the google photo site instead and it looks pretty good.  You can check it out at: