September 2007 Archives

Boxeo!  HBO carries the fights.  Usually pretty good ones or at least they try.  You never know; as they say style makes the fight and sometimes you get two guys whose styles seem to negate each other and all they do is shuffle around or paw at each other or heaven forbid spend the whole evening clenching each other and end up doing a bear waltz in the center of the ring for the whole fight.  That’s no fun to watch.  

And it’s not any fun either to watch a guy who is clearly overmatched but refuses to go down getting his head beat up over and over the whole 12 rounds.  You think, Jesus Christ man, just fall down, OK.  Nobody would blame you.  Put yourself out of your misery.  And ours, will ya.  But some guys take a perverse pride in going the whole 12 rounds standing up even though they are getting their heads knocked off.

But last night HBO had a pretty good one between Jermain Taylor and Kelly Pavlik for the undisputed middle weight championship of the world.  Usualy, if the fight has potential they do back ground stuff on the fighters, so that they have a narrative to work during the fight and to get you to identify with the fighters in a more human way.  It works too.

I mean how can you not root for a guy who was abandoned by both of his parents at the age of five so that he had to live on the streets till he found out where his mother was when he was ten years old and he had to walk half way across a continent to find his mother, who told him to get lost when he finally got there, and then perchance, he took up boxing—possibly because he had plenty to be pissed off about—and now here is he in Madison Square Garden fighting for a million bucks.

What a world.

Jermaine Taylor is from Little Rock, Arkansas.  He had a real good chance to end up in bad trouble, but he met this guy who ran a gym.  For his day time job, the guy was a brick layer.  So the guy took Jermaine out to the job one day to show him what he did for a living—laying brick—and Jermaine decided hell he sure didn’t want to do that.  So he decided to go into a line of work where he could get his head knocked off.  Tells you something about brick laying I guess.

And the other guy was from Youngstown Ohio.  Nuff said.  I have actually been to Youngstown, Ohio, to a conference on working class studies.  You don’t want to be from there.  It is in the rust belt and the newest building I saw there was a huge state of the art prison that looked like some sort of weird-assed space ship that had landed in the middle of an empty and barren field.

!% of the US population is in prison.  But I won’t go into that.  But if you live in a part of the world where you have a good chance of being in that 1% or being a brick layer for the rest of your life.  Maybe you go into the boxing game.

But this was a good one.  Both were undefeated, both were bangers.  Pavlick went down early in the second, all wobbly kneed and jelly legged, but was well schooled and hung up and covered up and threw an occasional punch to let the ref know he was not out on his feet and to make Taylor think, hey, he might still be dangerous.

So there was that added drama and it was over in 7.

The tide at Ellwood was further out than I had ever seen it before.

Perhaps because it was (so far out, I mean) the shore life seemed pretty vigorous.

With all sorts of sea birds flying hither and thither and

 

Another view of same.. 

So yesterday, it was back to the classroom, and I was (am) not ready to start another year.  How many damn years now have I been going “back to school.”  I usually buy my new jeans at some sort of “back to school” bargain sale.

So it’s back to school.  I parked in a new parking structure that I hadn’t parked in before.  It is better than the last one, but to get to my office I had to walk from there down the central path—like the main freeway—that the students are taking—it was at the noon hour—to get wherever the hell it is they might be going.

So there I am dragging my stuff behind me in my little airport roller bag, and I have to cross two bike paths, and for some reason the bikes have the right of way so you have to wait and then lurch across the path.  Which I manage to do and then I am on the main path and it is completely congested.  Eight people across, milling along.  With a large number of the current generation having never learned apparently that you are supposed to walk to the right.

And then cutting through the current are skateboarders.  I hear one of them coming up behind me and I get nervous.  I know as the skateboarders say that skateboarding is not illegal.  That’s true.  But it is damn noisy and damn irritating if they are skateboarding though a milling mass of people, and I am thinking just these thoughts, when whap!  I am hit from behind by a skateboarder who grabs me by the shoulders, to steady his self, and laughingly apologies. 

I am not injured but I am damn annoyed because I have been doing all I can to stay out of their way, and I surprise myself when I say, “You fucking idiot!”—which I genuinely and sincerely feel—and I surprise myself again when I say it loud enough for him to hear it.  And he gives me a sort of chagrined looked—as well he might be—chagrined I mean—for nearly knocking an elderly person like myself over.  And if he is thinking anything else, he doesn’t say it probably because he sees I am about ready to call him a “fucking idiot” again and take a swing at him with my rolling book bag.

So I am not even at my office yet, and I am really, really wishing I was not there at all.  I am surrounded by the youth of today, and find myself completely repelled.  First of all they are young….which is one big strike against them, and then they are all talking away on their cells, and I don’t know why but it appears de rigueur for the dudes to wear t-shirts with shorts.  I mean I wore short pants as a child and then I stopped wearing them.  These guys look permanently retarded with their t-shirts and shorts and some form of Nike on the feet and those of them that can raise a beard seem to be into the I shave every three days look.

So there I am walking along in my new back to school jeans, wearing a Henley, one of those I bought when my gut was sticking out a mile, and I look down and I already have coffee stains on it.  And I am thinking my shrink is right, I have got to do or find something or I am going to turn into one hell of a bitter, nasty old man.

Given I have been thinking about memory lately, I found it coincidental perhaps to open the New Yorker and find an article by Oliver Sacks—who has long written on brain injuries—on one Clive Barnes, a British musician and musicologist, who has perhaps the worst case of amnesia on record.  He had a form of herpes encephalitis that in 1985 I believe reduced his short term memory to next to nothing and wiped out also all his memories before the date of the disease.

According to Sacks, Barnes has but to blink his eyes and he forgets what he has just seen.  Once he was found standing in a room opening and reopening his hand; in it was a piece of chocolate.  Barnes would exclaim each time he opened his hand, look it’s different, or it’s new, and how do they do that—thinking each time that it was a different piece of chocolate since he could not remember having seen it.  Somewhere between the closing and opening of his hand he had forgotten that he had previously seen it.

Barnes tried to keep a diary too.  Pages and pages of the same thing.  215…I just woke up.  230…I just woke up for the first time today.  245…clearly awake.  The diary was an attempt to impart some sense of continuity to his day; but instead it records a mind with no continuity at all.  Each time he wrote he thought he was waking up for the first time because he could not remember having really opened his eyes for the first time that day.  Funny, though, that writing the journal entry made him feel as if he was waking up (for the first time that day).

 Obviously though he had not forgotten how to write.  Sacks refers to something called the semantic memory.  People with amnesia sometimes retain that.  One man after a stroke forgot all the events of his life but could remember much of the scholarly information he had learned over the years and could also speak several languages.  Barnes retained that memory too.  His wife—they love each other—and have remained married all these years noticed one day that Barnes too had retained this form of memory.  He could remember the words of a song and sing them; and has since his disease conducted orchestras.  He knows what was sung and what is coming up.

Oddly too Barnes remembers his wife.  If asked he could not tell you what she looks like; if he walked by her in a crowd he would not recognize her; he cannot remember when she last visited him.  But when he is told that she is coming, when she enters the door, and he hears her voice, he runs to her, embraces her, and sometimes weeps.  When she returns home she finds messages from him asking her to visit him because it seems like ages since he has last seen her.  This ability to remember his wife, in some fundamental, way Sacks sees as evidence of something called “emotional memory,” perhaps the least understood and known of all forms of remembering.

This is a very interesting article and well worth reading should you happen to have a copy the September 24, 2007, New Yorker.

John and Juan came back last Thursday I think it was; they were supposed to come back Monday.  But were delayed.  We decided to go with John and Juan to fix up the closet into a small office since we did not like the plans the California Closet people came up with, and while what they might have done might have been purely functional, that’s all it would have been.  White all over, perfectly machined but not something one would want to look at or be around all that much.

In the back of my mind, all along I had the notion of “real wood.”  I have some sort of prejudice against “particle board.”  I know that technically it is made out of wood: like wood chips and saw dust.  But then some sort of chemical is used to fuse it all together.  Some contend that it is stronger than “real wood.” But no matter what you do to it, it doesn’t look like real wood.  Though of course you could put some wood veneer on it to make it look like wood.  But it would have to be a damn fine veneer to make it look like wood.

I, at John’s suggestion, went to this place downtown that must be patronized by all the carpenters in town.  I went to look at veneers because that had been John’s first suggestion.  I got there and all I could find was door knobs and hinges and stuff like that; two whole rooms of the stuff.  I was about to give up and wandered out back to find that there were several ramshackle buildings, all hooked together.  I went in there and began to find all sorts of things.

But I couldn’t find anybody to answer my questions.  They had guys back there that you could place orders with, but unless you were ordering something they wouldn’t look at you because the only people that were supposed to be back there were carpenters and contractors who knew the place and what they wanted and where to get it and not people like myself off the streets who cannot tell, when it comes to wood and working with it, shit from shinola.

 But I found this kid—who did not look depressed out of his mind—like the other couple of guys I saw there.  I mean these other guys had the classic signs.  No energy, lips that turned down at the corners, and big black rings under their eyes.  They were either terribly depressed or terribly hung-over.  But the kid in a ripped and torn t-shirt had some energy and didn’t mind talking to a wood illiterate like me and said maybe what I wanted was some plywood, and they had some “birch, paint ready, on one side” for a good price.

At first when he said plywood, I was skeptical.  This stuff, too, is not real wood, but thin sheets of real wood all glued together and the plywood I was used to seeing was crappy stuff with pieces missing.  You might use it for flooring, but you would cover it up with linoleum or something.  But when I looked at the sheets of birch, paint ready on one side, I was impressed because the paint ready side really did look like wood.

Not bad, I thought.  And birch too.  I liked the sound of birch.

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Above: a shelf box made by John and Juan out of plywood birch one side paint ready, plus trim. 

With all that’s been going on with Carol’s mother and the deaths over this last year, I have not thought consciously at least that much of Brother Dan’s stroke.  I have managed to see him nearly every week—not as frequently lately as school and getting ready for it approaches, but the other day he sent me some aphasia poetry. Because that’s what he has—though it is getting better—aphasia.  Anyway that made me remember; and realize too that I have not really forgotten about it.

I have had lately memory problems; the result I expect of no more than aging.  But I spoke with a colleague the other day whose mother, only in her mid seventies, is showing signs of Alzheimer.  He went to where she lives—for a while during the summer—to spell his father who was becoming worn out from tending his mother.  Amazing, to think, I think: of the memory just going.  Not just forgetting but not even knowing that one has forgotten.

I can’t imagine what that might be like: like drifting up in the clouds perhaps, unattached, with a bottomless pit right below.  Especially when the short term goes; you might wash your face over and over, forgetting as you blink your eyes, each time that you had forgotten. 

 I think this just incomprehensible: to lose your mind in this way; and not even know that you have lost it because the mind is just the brain in situ.  One might know, by means of the brain that one has lost one’s arm or one’s sight or that one is losing one’s strength.  But when the mind itself is being lost there is nothing to know the loss.

I get cold with fear thinking about it.  And wondering if that loss waits around the corner for me.

But this is what Brother Dan, in a different form, has been struggling with for eight months now.  Does he have problems with memory?  Maybe yes, maybe no. Certainly not of the short term kind, and if of the long term, I don’t know.  When he says something is 12,000 dollars and he meant 1200 dollars, did he forget that it was just 1200 or did his mind misspeak, mistaking 12000 for 1200.  I don’t know if he would know, or if I would know, for that matter, unless somebody had been there to say otherwise, because at times at least I don’t think he knows he has misspoken.

 They say the intelligence of the aphasiac is frequently unimpaired.  But how would one know.  How could you give a cat a test to see if it is going blind, since he cannot tell you want it sees. I think Dan’s intelligence is unimpaired.  But were he to take some sort of verbal comprehension test he would do poorly I think.

Here are a few lines of his aphasia poetry—that he titles “halo ended”--which he said was OK for me to put on the blog:

You can take it in your tung. Your effectiveness. Your dreams. I can hold it thus. Thus is mine. Mine. Do you want it to me yours? I will give it to you. My thoughts, my actions thus thus thusly for us. In my friend, my pozole, my poseque, my POS. We wait, we wait for a positive reaction to my heart. We wait for a plant operator selection system. We wait. Can we do it? Can my heart take it? My bubbles?

I have been trying to find out for some time where the consumer society came from.  People of course have been consuming since the beginning of time.  When I say consumer society I mean the flowering of that long standing consumer trend in the United States in the last 30 years or so.

Of course, I don’t think there is one cause for anything as complicated as the consumer society.  Lots of thing figure in.  Technology for example, the computer especially, played a role in the creation of the mounds of junk that it is now possible to buy.  I suppose too one might throw in the creation of the global market.  But being a materialist, I think these factors secondary to the primary one.  Money.

People would not be able to buy all this stuff if they did not have the money to buy it.  So where did they get all that money.  For some reason, the Arab Oil Crisis kept coming to my mind.  So I started reading around to see what I could learn about the Arab Oil Crisis, the one of 1973, not the one of 1978.  This was an amazing shock to the American economic system.  Since WWII, the US had known unparalleled, in all of human history, economic growth; then wham! the oil embargo hit.

This showed our economic vulnerability.  The prices for everything took off.  Hard to remember, but Nixon, who was a rabid capitalist if there ever was one, actually initiated, for a brief period, the absolutely socialist move of wage and price controls.  Talk about the government interfering with the free market.  Short of nationalizing the fast food industry, or something like that, it’s hard to think of a more anti-capitalistic measure.

But this raises a question.  It seems logical that if the price of everything was going up that people would end up buying less rather than more.  But of course—in what is called the inflationary spiral—wages went up too.  Because if they didn’t people wouldn’t be able to buy anything and the whole economy would go down the tiolet.

But something beside increased wages propelled that inflationary purchasing.  The extension of credit.  In his history of The Seventies, Bruce J. Shulman writes:

            In 1973, when Dee Hock, creator of the Visa card, installed his computerized authorization system, credit card spending totaled nearly $14 billion and growing at a brisk but not outlandish clip of about 3.5 billion a year.  But over the decade it roared ahead, reaching $66 billion by 1982, an almost fivefold increase.

Admittedly the origins of American’s reliance on credit are a bit murky.  But if one tracks the growth of the credit card “industry” I believe one could also track the growth of the consumer society and with it our very imprudent ways.

Carol has recently been in contact with her mother’s brother, Bernie.  Bernie and his wife now live in Los Vegas.  Before that they lived on Long Island.  I visited their house years and years ago.  It was a nice house and they had a pool too.  Bernie also had a bug zapper that sat near the pool.  Bernie counted the bugs as they flew into the zapper and got zapped.  The house was East Coast style, upstairs, downstairs, and dark.  Small windows protect against the cold I guess.  Now they have a lot of sun in Vegas.

Bernie is pretty religious and when he heard Carol did not have a Hebrew name he gave her one.  By what powers he did so, I don’t know.  I don’t care either.  Maybe the power of an Uncle.  That’s enough I think.

Anyway, Carol’s Hebrew name is Chayva which means “life.”  I felt left out and told Carol I wanted a Hebrew name too, so Bernie gave me one.  I am now Noah which means more or less “laws of humanity.”  It’s easier to have a Hebrew name as a gentile like me than it is to have one and be Jewish.  Apparently to be worthy of her Hebrew name a Jewish person must fulfill 613 Commandments.  That seems like a lot of Commandments to me.  I don’t even know how a person could keep track of them.  As a gentile to be worthy of a Hebrew name I have only to fulfill the seven Noahide Laws. Which are as follow:

* Idolatry is forbidden. Man is commanded to believe in the One G-d alone and worship only Him.

  * Incestuous and adulterous relations are forbidden. Human beings are not sexual objects, nor is pleasure the ultimate goal of life.

  * Murder is forbidden. The life of a human being, formed in G-d's image, is sacred.

  * Cursing the name of G-d is forbidden. Besides honoring and respecting G-d, we learn from this precept that our speech must be sanctified, as that is the distinctive sign which separated man from the animals.

  * Theft is forbidden. The world is not ours to do with as we please.

  * Eating the flesh of a living animal is forbidden. This teaches us to be sensitive to cruelty to animals. (This was commanded to Noah for the first time along with the permission of eating meat. The rest were already given to Adam in the Garden of Eden.)

·        Mankind is commanded to establish courts of justice and a just social order to enforce the first six laws and enact any other useful laws or customs

 Some of these are pretty easy.  No incest is pretty easy since I don’t have anybody to commit incest with.  I haven’t murdered—and don’t plan to—anybody.  Also I don’t steal.  But some of the others might give me trouble, especially the one about taking His name in vain.  But I suppose I could forgo His name and just say Jesus Christ, Sweet Jesus, or Jesus H. Christ  when I am pissed.  I don’t think Jewish people would mind.

Well, what do you know.  Entry 500.  That's a nice round number.

Carol and I braved possible bad weather and slogged through mud to the Ellwood cliffs. 

This is looking away from the ocean and back towards the mountains.

Trees and sky in light and dark.

That's a tree and sky from the golf course that is part of our path to Ellwood.  There's a tiny bit of moon up there.

The walk was worth it. 

The phone keeps ringing.

Carol gets calls from doctors, nurses, family.  Her mother was in the hospital at the beginning of the week because of difficulty breathing.  She has congestive heart failure and one of the effects of that is a build up of fluids around the lungs.  This happened about a month ago and at that time the doctors inserted a needle and withdrew some of the fluid manually.  This time though they were reluctant to do that.

The doctors call Carol because she is the medical person for her mother’s Trust.  So Carol is faced with hard decisions.  Actually the doctors do most of the decision making, but Carol had to decide something this time, and that was, at the beginning of the week, to send her mother back where she had been but this time in hospice care.

Hospice is the end of the line.  It means that all parties concerned and lucid enough to be concerned have agree that there is nothing now to be done for a person but to make that person as comfortable and pain free as possible in the final passage.  Hospice doesn’t even use antibiotics.  No breathing tube will be inserted.  Carol’s mom is now on a morphine drip.

Carol has asked the doctors and nurses not to use the word “hospice” around her mother.  She is concerned that her mother will become very afraid.

At ten last night Carol is responding to an email from the daughter of the man Carol’s mom married about ten years ago.  The daughter says her father called crying and distraught.  He is 95 years old.  He is getting the picture that his wife of 10 years will soon be dying.

Neither of us slept well.

This is just brutal. 

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We took a walk to Ellwood yesterday late and the sky was dramatic.  A storm was coming in.

I can’t say I paid much attention to the idea of prudence, if any at all, until I read Tom Jones, back in 1967, by Henry Fielding.  I didn’t pay much attention to it then, but while I thought the book was mostly about getting laid, I was told that it “really” was about the search for Wisdom, Sophia being the name of the character pursued by Tom, and Sophia means Wisdom, in Greek I think.

But I did notice Fielding used the word Prudence a lot; indeed he writes:

Prudence and circumspection are necessary even to the best of men. They are indeed, as it were, a guard to Virtue, without which she can never be safe. It is not enough that your designs, nay, that your actions, are intrinsically good; you must take care they shall appear so. If your inside be never so beautiful, you must preserve a fair outside also.

Fielding makes Prudence sound like some Machiavellian duty; sure you may be good inside, but in addition, you must appear good, so be prudent.  Of course he was referring mostly to sexual matters—since the book was “really” about getting laid—so it was sort of a warning to young ladies to not only be but also appear chaste at all times.  And he does make a larger point:  prudence is the Guard to Virtue.  More than that Prudence, according to some, is the mother of all virtues.

 Prudence comes from a Latin word, or maybe it’s Greek, that means “foresight.”  That gets to the core of it.  You can’t just let your virtues guide you; certainly they are the principles that must regulate one’s actions.  But you can’t just expect to be virtuous and have everything come out A-OK.  You also have to exercise foresight.  I think the idea of Prudence may have something to do with Kant’s Practical Reason.  Because prudence is about the practice of virtue.

Prudence is not for the young and the reckless.  Or perhaps the young necessarily are reckless and they have to learn prudence by being reckless.  That’s what Fielding seems to be saying: sure, get laid, but be prudent about it.  People don’t expect children to be prudent.  Children have to get up to walk around, then they fall down and hurt themselves or stick their hands in the fire and learn to be prudent.  If children were born with prudence none of them would ever learn to walk because, getting up and walking around, is damn imprudent.

I was thinking about Prudence because I was pissed off.  We seem to live in an age of imprudence.  I am pretty sure parents don’t lecture their children on the value of Prudence.  Today we praise “risk takers.”  That’s a bunch of bull; in fact we praise imprudence.  And what we get is bankers who loan people money without doing a background check to see if they have any money at all.  And we have people going out and buying homes when they know damn well that they don’t have any money.  And just yesterday, the Fed lowered the interest rates so that there will be more money out there to be imprudent with.  Thus the idiotic, reckless, risk taking morons on Wall Street were overjoyed.

The American dollar has hit a new low versus the Euro.  That means that Americans have to pay more dollars to get foreign goods or goods made in other countries.  So companies that buy foreign stuff to use in the making of pasta for example have to up their prices.  They are having a hard time.  Contrawise, companies in the USA that sell stuff over seas are having a good time since the price of US goods is dropping relative to other currencies.

But overall even though we are selling more abroad, our trade deficit is now 811 billion dollars, twice what it was in 2001.  In the last six years we have been buying foreign goods like crazy and not producing enough goods that other countries might want to buy.  It’s hard to remember, but there was a time when things were the other way around.  We were a producer nation; other nations bought far more of our stuff than we bought of their stuff.

That’s the funny thing with a service economy which we have now.  Services are not goods; they cannot be sold abroad, unless we start shipping Cox Cable Guys overseas or something to install Cable in Eastern Europe.  But there’s no sense in that.  Obviously, the guys in Eastern Europe have their own Cable Guys.

Call me a dope, but I think that if an economy is to prosper it has to have something to sell.  At one time, we made all the TVs in the world.  Now we don’t.  At one time, we made the only cars that really worked.  This last year Toyota became the number 1 car company in America.  At one time, we made clothes and shipped them to the rest of the world.  Now every piece of clothing I have is made in China.  We used to dominate the computer chip market; but as the first Bush said it doesn’t make any difference whether you sell computer chips or potato chips.  So now other countries make our computer chips and nobody is buying our potato chips.

Not only are we not producing the stuff we once did, we are also now buying like crazy, even though the price of foreign goods is going up relative to the dollar.  We are still able to spend like crazy because our banks seem willing to extend credit to anything that walks and has half a brain.  Take what is happening in real estate.  They were selling houses to people with no credit or background checks at all!  It was like, I want to buy a house, and they were going, here, buy this house and here’s the money to do it.  Hey, we will give you this special deal.  You don’t have to do anything but pay off the interest on this huge amount of money we are loaning you—for a while at least.

Is this fiscal responsibility?  How can anybody expect the American people to exercise fiscal responsibility when the banks don’t even seem to grasp the concept, of fiscal responsibility I mean.

Somebody is making money off all of this, and tell you what it ain’t Joan Blow or Joe Six-Pack.

The capitalists are crazy.

When you start talking a lot about how you wish to be disposed of, I guess you have hit one of those life phases.  

I talk fairly frequently with a woman where I work out.  If she is on one machine and I am on the one next to her we talk.  She had a friend, but 65 years of age, who died of cancer perhaps ten days ago.  He was not responding to any of the treatments, so it was best she thought that he had gone quickly.

He had a boat, so over the weekend, she, along with other friends, and members of his family went out in the boat and scattered his ashes.

I told Carol about it and she said firmly that she does not want to be scattered to the winds, but planted in the ground, though being cremated, and stuck in a bottle and stuck in the ground would be OK.  I mean she is not completely into the traditional corpse in the ground thing.

Carol has been looking for a place to put her mother who is at this very moment in the process of dying.  She had found a graveyard located near the ocean, and she got the literature from them.  1500 dollars for a little cremation plot with a view overlooking the ocean.  We started wondering: how do those cemeteries make money.  I mean this is prime ocean front property, and 1500 doesn’t seem like all that much, I mean not for a piece of property for all eternity.

I hazarded that maybe they get a lot of tax breaks for a graveyard.  I don’t know. But the upkeep really can’t be that great.  There’s not a whole lot of activity in a graveyard; it’s not like people are coming and going all that much. And I have to think having corpses planted on your property does not increase your property values.

I wonder if the smart investor is looking for an up tick in graveyard stocks.  Certainly over the next 20 years or so there’s going to be an increase in demand for graveyard property given that the supply of bodies will be rising.  

I read that the company—one of those evil companies associated with the family of Bushes— that did the clean up charged 12000 a body for bodies left behind by Katrina.  I remember reading about how the body collection had been farmed out to some company at the time.  I remember thinking now that is dirty work.  I wonder if the guy on Dirty Jobs has looked into body collection.

Anyhow I tried at the time to find out how much they were paying those guys out there in the sweltering sun to pick up the bodies.  I wrote a song about it.  But I forget the lyrics, something to do with picking up bodies at the minimum wage.  

If the capitalists could figure out a way to charge you for going to heaven, they surely would and make out like bandits too.

When rock stars start singing songs about being rock stars and comics start telling stories about being comics they cross some sort of perilous divide.  Such seems to be the case with Lewis Black.  I don’t know when I first became aware of him; three or four years ago maybe.  He’s a pretty funny guy in the social and political vein who swears a lot.  Some of the material is really solid in its own right but a good deal of the humor lies in his delivery.

He gets pissed and right there on stage looks as if he is going to suffer an apoplectic fit, this from a guy who recommends that kids distract themselves by whittling. Part of the deal—part that’s funny—is the impotence of his rage. He starts sticking out his hand with his finger out as if he is making points.  But the finger is crooked.

The last time I saw him on TV though he had started telling stories about being a comic.  Seems he had been invited to be the MC, I think it was, at some white house affair.  Now half of his bread and butter is attacking Bush and the current administration, so there he is in the white house, or some official white house place, standing right next to Chaney and Bush and he has agreed not to lambaste them.  Afterwards, his parents, whom he has invited to bask in his glory, will hardly speak to him.

So he acknowledges having made a mistake and goes on to tell the audience what a comic is.  A comic is a person who goes out into the audience with a flashlight and sneaks up behind every person who is there, and pulls down their pants, and shines the flashlight up the person’s asshole, and upon examination proclaims that the person’s asshole is shit free! 

This suggests that being a comic is pretty dirty work.  It also suggests that the purpose of comedy is to make people laugh and as they do so to feel, at least momentary, because they are in the know and can laugh at the idiots being mocked, that they have a clean conscience.  But of course Black implies, nobody really has a clean conscience.  So if we think, even momentarily, that we have clean consciences or assholes then we too are idiots. 

 We are just knowing idiots laughing at unknowing idiots.  What this means is that Black has grave doubts about the function of comedy, his role as a comic, and about the audience that he seeks to make laugh.  Maybe part of the problem is the material.  Any idiot can make jokes about Bush.  It’s almost too easy, since Bush has lowered the stupidity bar so damn far.  So people can yuck it up at Bush and feel momentarily superior to the moron and his moronic minions who are driving the country to rack and ruin.

Cheap laughs degrade comedy.

In any case, I am worried about Lewis.

Another first—that I wish hadn’t happened.  But I called an accountant for the first time in my life.  Actually I didn’t get the accountant; I got her “assistant.”  I had thought accountants just worked for large firms and there was no way to get a hold of one.  But I phoned the “assistant” for the guy at Morgan Stanley (another first—the Morgan Stanley account, I mean) who set up the CDs for the Tingle Family trust and she gave me the number for an accountant.  Apparently any Joe Blow can hire an accountant.

I had to do this because as far as I could figure out from the idiot lawyers who are doing the legal paper for the TFT that if I am ever going to be able to “disburse” the funds in the trust to my brothers, I have to file an income tax form for the deceased Joan for the period of her life in this tax year, 2007, and also a tax form for income generated by the trust, though I can figure out for the life of me how I am supposed to do that since I don’t know when the trust will be dissolved and thus don’t know how long the trust will continue to generate some interest.

So I am going to see an accountant.  I wonder how one dresses to see an accountant.  Not that I care, since I will dress the same as dress wherever I go—which is a t-shirt, plus jeans, and some form of footwear.  I have the feeling that maybe the accountant will be able to show that the trust is not going to generate enough income to be taxable; if this is the case, then I may be able to send the lawyers some official documentation of that fact and his legal mumbo-jumbo with the trust will be over.

But I am getting ahead of myself.

Meanwhile, the paralegal at the law office is doing a legal accounting of the monies in the trust based on information I sent him.  But then he sent an email saying that they, the lawyers, had not received paperwork—something called an Acknowledgement and something called a Receipt—from Brothers Dave and Steve.  So I called both of the guys and they said of course that they had sent in the paperwork.  Brother Dave, who knows about such things, had actually made copies of the documents he had signed and returned; and immediately faxed them off to the law office.

I don’t know what to make of a legal firm that loses paperwork like this.  This is not the first time either. I don’t know how Joan and WB found these particular incompetents.  But they have caused me no end of useless and needless anxiety due to their screw ups and in their inability to communicate with any clarity. 

But it’s all my fault I guess.  I could have had all the trust work done by a lawyer I found up here in SB, but the incompetents had set up the trust originally and had all the paper work so I figured it was best to go with them.

The next time my parents die I will make sure to hire the lawyer myself.

John came by yesterday morning without Juan to make some measurements in our big closet-someday-to-be-an-office space.  We were going to have a company called California Closets put in a couple of desktops, one at each end, and some shelving.  A woman from that company—Nicole, was her name—came by to draw up some plans; she emailed them to us and we didn’t like them because she had put a shelf right where we said there shouldn’t be a shelf, like she wasn’t  listening or something.

We had been pretty specific about where stuff should be since I got my chair.  I am actually embarrassed about this chair.  It cost a 1000 dollars.  I don’t feel morally that anybody should pay that much for a chair.  I grew up thinking chairs were supposed to be uncomfortable.  I always sat on hard wooden chairs and went to a church with pews that had been designed for insubstantial beings, like angels or something, but not for people.

So I had to go through all sorts of ethical, moral and self concept issues to buy this chair.  I had to face the fact also that my neck is in not such hot condition.  I could live with this OK but for the fact I sometimes spend hours in front of a computer and the effort to get my eyes focused properly through my trifocals (or whatever they are) causes me to do all sorts of odd things with my neck, and these odd things in turn cause my neck to ache and to spread an ache clear down my arms.

I know from having talked with people that neck stuff can be hard to fix.  You sure don’t want anybody operating on your neck (unless you know a disk has completely collapsed or something).  So I felt ethically the right thing to do was just to endure it.  But then I thought, “Sometimes I sort of enjoy whatever it is that I am doing at the computer and my enjoyment is lessened or ruined completely sometimes by the pain going down the neck.  So if I don’t do something about my neck the little enjoyment I am able to derive from working at the computer will be lessened.”

I hate to think it.  That I have become a hedonist in my old age, but that was the idea that swayed me.  Please note though I did say I got the chair to preserve a mild enjoyment (well, not even that, maybe more like minimal satisfaction) and not anything as radical as pleasure.  So if I was moved by hedonism it was pretty mild.

There’s even more to the emotional complications I went through to actually click the button on the computer that ordered that chair.  But I did it.  I admit.  And, well, if any chair is worth a 1000 dollars I guess this one is.  It’s called a Leap Chair and is made by a company called Steelcase that specializes in office furniture.  You can adjust it in like six different places maybe—up, down, backwards, forwards, the arms go up and go down and the back support can be adjusted in several ways.  This is one hell of a chair.

When John came to take the measurements he sat in it and wouldn’t get out of it.  But the thing is monstrous big.  It weighs 70 pounds.  I will probably hurt myself trying to move it around.  And once we actually saw it in the soon to be office space we realized we would have to make changes in our plans.

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Actually I got a Leap Stool, as depicted above, but in a much more sombre navy blue which will also help better to conceal the inevitable stains I will get on it. 

On second thought, I think my theology is off re: the Book of Judas.

The book begins sort of oddly:

One day he was with his disciples in Judea, and he found them gathered together and seated in pious observance. When he [approached] his disciples, [34] gathered together and seated and offering a prayer of thanksgiving over the bread, [he] laughed.

The disciples said to [him], “Master, why are you laughing at [our] prayer of

thanksgiving? We have done what is right.”

He answered and said to them, “I am not laughing at you. <You> are not doing this because of your own will but because it is through this that your god [will be] praised.”

They said, “Master, you are […] the son of our god.”

Jesus said to them, “How do you know me? Truly [I] say to you, no generation of the people that are among you will know me.”

THE DISCIPLES BECOME ANGRY

When his disciples heard this, they started getting angry and infuriated and began

blaspheming against him in their hearts.

I say “oddly” because I just don’t recollect Jesus laughing at his disciples in the Bible that I read growing up.  In fact I don’t remember him laughing at all.  Satan is the Joker, and Christ is pretty far from being a merry prankster.

Christ at the Sermon on the Mount:  “Ladies and Germs.  Take these fishes! Please!”

Christ to Lazarus:  “Be leavened and rise!”

He just doesn’t have the material.

And odd too because I don’t remember the Disciples blasheming Him in their hearts.

But as to the theology, I argued that the Book of Judas was not about a guy named Judas but an attempt to work out a theological issue about God being all-knowing.  I think that was wrong.  I think it has to do more with the issue of pre-destination.  Christ laughs because the disciples are all swollen up with the idea that they are praying; when in fact it’s God’s voice working through them.  Or as the Reverend Roper of the Ora, ARP said, God laid it all down in every detail at the foundations of the world before the Beginning of Time.

Sister in Law Teresa went to see the Dead Sea Scrolls that were passing through San Diego and found them fascinating.  This got me to thinking about all the new things archeologists are turning up using new imaging techniques.  Parchment was hard to come by and sometimes people would scrape off what was written on a piece of parchment and then write something new.  Now they have methods to see what was previously written.

I don’t think this was true of the Book of Judas.  But I started thinking that probably writing the Book of Judas was no small matter.  First you had to have the parchment and then you had to be able to write. I wonder how many people were literate in those days. 

But somebody must have felt some sort of commitment to writing the Book of Judas.  First I thought maybe Judas had some relative who was pissed off about the bad things that were being said about him and that this relative wanted to set straight things straight and clear his relative’s name.  But that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense because a person was not going to reach much of a mass audience with one piece of parchment.

Back then writing a book was sort of like sending a message in a bottle.  You wrote it and maybe someday, somebody, somewhere would find it and read it.  No publisher was going to pick it up and advertise like:  Exclusive!  Book of Judas!  The Real Story!  The Record Set Straight.  The author of the Book of Judas was not going to appear on talk shows and tell people why he or she had written it.

So I took a quick look at the Book, and it’s not really about a guy named Judas at all.  Rather, Judas is a sort of symbol that is part of a larger more theological issue that runs something like:  if Jesus was the son of God, wouldn’t he have known everything that was going to happen and if so how did Judas sneak up on him and betray him like that. So the Book really was an attempt to do some reasoning on a tricky issue.

The Book says that Jesus told Judas to betray him and that in asking Judas to perform this task Jesus was showing Judas a signal honor.  You, Judas, are worthy enough to betray me.  So Judas did it.  And in a way, he was a hero for doing it, since his good name was pretty well screwed for all eternity.

So that settles the theological issue.  Jesus did know what Judas was going to do since they ask him to do it.   Indeed, God was speaking through Judas.

The downside though is that Jesus comes off seeming like one hell of a PR man.  Reminds me of Edward Bernais.  The tobacco companies ask him back in the 1920’s to figure out how to sell cigarettes to women (because there was a social taboo against women smoking).  The suffragettes were having a parade and Bernais hired a group of socialites to march along and at one moment they all lit up together.  Bernais had press on hand and told the socialites to call cigarettes torches of freedom or independence.  It was all a set up but the event appeared in papers all over the country as real; consequently the sale of cigarettes to women soared.

Of course, Bernais was not crucified, though maybe he should have been.

the tomato, sugar and black pepper black eye pea accompaniment of which you speak is actually a rather delectable side dish properly called "stewed tomatoes".  It's actually a great "gravy" not only for any kind of peas or beans, but is also quite tasty on biscuits (which should first be covered with freshly stewed corn - a whole different story altogether)or rice or mashed potatoes or loaf bread (as opposed to "corn bread), or even boiled okra - yum . Of course, you can always just eat stewed tomatoes with a spoon right out of a bowl - that is, if the bowl isn't already filled with warm cornbread, black pepper, and sweet milk (as opposed to "butter" milk).

I do not remember having eaten cornbread with sweet milk from a bowl but I do occasionally have a hankering for stewed tomatoes warmed up and straight from the can.

I didn’t know but Brother Steve reports that he is also lactose intolerant and had to give up on cheese.

My niece Savannah, who just turned 13, had her hair cut last week for the first time in her life.

Brother Dave and Sister-in-Law Teresa went off for four days in their motor home to Dos Picos, a park not far from San Diego.

Carol went to visit some good friends in Dallas, who just moved there a few months back, and to do some networking at Dance Departments in colleges there.  She left last Wednesday, I think it was and was to return last night (Sunday) but freaky thunderstorms delayed planes and she has had to stay over another day.  She got a cheap rate from the airlines for a Super 8 not ten minutes from the airport near a part of Dallas called the Grapevine, an historic district, not bad to hand out.

She is booked to fly back to SB this evening.  But who knows, the reports are for more thunderstorms.  God I hate flying.

I think “sweet milk” is condensed milk that comes in a can.

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That's the Super 8 near Grapevine in Dallas.  Though it might be a Super 8 anywhere. 

I have been reading around more in Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.  It’s a pretty odd book, as I said, about the time he and the photographer Walker Evans stayed a month or so visiting off and on three sharecropper families (all white) in Hale County, Alabama in 1936.  Oddly, while there are people in the book—the members of these families—Agree spends a lot of time describing the objects that surrounded them, and not much at all of their actions, or feelings or attitudes.

There’s a whole section on overalls for example, what they look like, when they are new and when they are old and what they feel like when you wear them especially when it’s hot and you don’t wear a shirt under them.  And their shoes which the men sometimes slit open along the sides to get some air to their feet.  He also describes their houses.  There’s a good bit about what can be found under one of their porches.

There in the chilly and small dust which is beneath porches, the subtle funnels of doodlebugs whose teasing, of a broomstraw, is one of the patient absorptions of kneeling childhood, and there, in that dust and the damper dust and the dirt, dead twigs of living, swept from the urgent tree, signs, and relics: bent nails, withered and knobbed with rust; a bone button, its two eyes torn to one; the pierced back of an alarm clock, greasy to the touch; a torn fragment of pictured print; an emptied and flattened twenty-gauge shotgun shell, its metal green, let­tering still visible; the white tin eyelet of a summer shoe; and thinly scattered, the desiccated and the still soft excrement of hens, who stroll and dab and stand, shimmying, stabbing at their lice, and stroll out again into the sun as vacantly as they departed it.

Well, that brings back some memories since I diddled with those doodlebugs myself in the dust under Grandma Tingle’s backporch.  And as I recollect too it was a wonder to drag your fingers though the fine dust since you never knew what you might come up with: like a bottle cap maybe or a nail or bolt or something.

Once recently visiting back there, I took a Prince Albert can out from under the side of Grandma Tingle’s place as a keepsake.

Honestly, though, I don’t remember the chickens strolling under Grandma’s house.

Americans are getting really, really fat. Over in Italy, when an American walks by they say, There goes another big butt.  In Italian of course.  But screw them.  What do they know?  Damn Europeans.

But even some Americans say we have the fattest Army on Earth.

If the American people are getting fat (and personally I think that is the case) the reason is clear.  We have a really, really lot of food to eat, and we have people who sit around, called advertisers and merchants, who do all they can to figure out how to get more food down our throats.

Say what you will about people being responsible for their own eating habits.  Like nobody put a gun to your head and forced you to eat a Big Mac.  True, but human beings are animals like any others; if there’s a lot of food around they will eat as much as they can of it.

And Americans have an awful lot of food around.  In fact, the food industry produces about twice as many calories a day a person as a person can eat.  So if you eat 2000 calories a day, there are still 2000 calories a day out there for you if you want them.  In other words, there’s a dramatic surplus of calories and the food industry has had to figure out ways to get us to eat it so they can make money.

Whether or not people get all bloated and sickly and have a hard time moving around is of complete indifference to these people because they just want to make money.

This is America.  We are consumers.  If we didn’t consume our economy would just die like that.  So it is patriotic to consume and eat yourself into a state of high and listless hog-hood.

We have people who are paid a lot to sit in rooms to figure out how to sell sugar to children.  Personally, I believe such people should be punished.  Severely.  They should have a gun held to their heads and be forced to eat many, many sugary treats.

So some wise guy—and there is actually a history to this—came up with the super sizing gimmick.  For a few cents more, hey man, you can get yourself about 25% more calories.  They can do this and make money because given that twice as many calories are produced as can be eaten, calories are damn cheap.  So to get business, they threw in more calories for a few pennies more and still they could make money on the deal.

The CDC has a really interesting slide show that shows the growth of fat in this country since 1985.  It’s amazing to click through these slides and see the different states in the union get fatter and fatter and fatter.  So now a whole heap of states have 20% of their populations overweight or obese.  I use this slide show when I teach a writing class with the consumer society as its theme.  It’s really convincing.  We really are a nation of consumers in the most elementary sense.

So go to this site.  And click in the upper right corner on the power point presentation.

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End of mini-lecture.  I must be gearing up to go back into the classroom. 

So I don’t know when it was, maybe six or seven years back.  Somewhere in there, I wake up at about 1 in the morning with like a totally urgent need to go, if you know what I mean; so I make for the facilities, seat myself, and when nothing is immediately forth coming I give an assist.  And man nothing happens, but it hurts. It’s like something is stuck just on the other side of the exit.  I mean I have been known to evacuate but nothing of this proportion.  So I give another assist and it hurts even more.  I swear it’s like that horrible creature in Alien has decided to take an alternative route.

So I go back to bed and lie on my side in a fetal position.  Like waiting, and eventually I break a little wind though hardly worth its salt, and eventually the pain subsides and I slip off into sleep, and that’s that.  The hell you say! And you would be right because—I don’t know when exactly—but sometime after the first time, the second time occurs.  I wake up; it’s about one in the morning and it feels like the Alien is trying to take that alternative route again.

So I mention it to Carol, and I say like, I don’t know what it is.  But man twice lately I’ve had, I don’t know, these “hard farts.”  They are like farts but they won’t come out.  And we discuss it a bit, and I have recently had a physical and my blood checked out OK, my PSA, I mean.  The thing they check the prostate with.  So it’s probably not that, though the hurt extends down into that region. And there was no blood in the stool.

Then the third time comes along and for some reason I decide to chew some of those Tums, I think they are called, though they are not Tums since we get the generic kind.  Anyway, I chew these and what do you know, but pretty quickly, like the pain goes away.  Now I have a treatment, at least, though not a cure, because I have no idea what there is to cure.

I go on like that waking up now and then, not every week, or not even every month, but every so often with this pain and plenty of generic Tums on hand.  When bingo! I start to exercise my inductive powers—I think they are called—as opposed to deductive, and I begin to put two and two together.  During the time I have suffered these hard farts, I have also frequently of an afternoon had really noxious gas.  Usually this gas occurs in my office when I am at work and it’s so overwhelming I have to keep my door closed and hope nobody knocks while I turn on my little fan and open the window.  

I have been wondering why I have this gas, and I figure out it must have to do with the damn lunch I eat.  I am trying to eat healthfully and a little more lightly.  And I have been eating granny smith apples and string cheese.  Not a bad combination really, but with horrific effects in my case.  Because I induce—if that is a word—that I must be lactose intolerant.  I have read about this, but I never thought it would happen to me!

So now I have an hypothesis.  No cheese, no hard farts.  So I stop eating cheese completely, which is pretty hard actually, and what do you know, but no more “hard farts.”  So, what do you know but I diagnosed my complaint through my own powers of induction.

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At one point yesterday, as the sun went down, the waves were a metallic green.  I don't think I captured that in the pic. 

The grieving process is complicated.  Yesterday I started thinking about the things the departed Joan used to cook.  I would qualify her as a poor to middling cook.  I mean usually the stuff was not burned but she showed little imagination and didn’t take any real pleasure, that I could tell, in the preparation.  Though perhaps that was due to money restrictions as well as limitations imposed by WB’s particular and limited tastes—involving most especially things that had been fried.

Among the things I remember Joan cooking:

Rice goop as we affectionately called it.  This was a non-fried meal, involving rice, a couple of cans of chicken of mushroom soup, hamburger, all mixed together, and put in the oven and made into a casserole.  This was OK with butter melted on top, and I would put butter on bread and make a rice goop sandwich.

Also I recollect the notorious catsup stew which involved one of the lesser cuts of beef, rather flat, though wide, as I recollect and well fibered with fat, which was placed in a pan and covered with a whole bottle of catsup and then bake in the oven causing the meat to break down into chewable form and producing also a little sort of catsup stew gravy to be poured over rice.  I liked this too, though there never seemed to be enough of it.

I would list these among Joan’s specialiaties; not every body cooked them or would want to for that matter.  The rest—though I am probably forgetting something—was rather common fare: pork chops (once a week maybe) with rice; fried chicken (once a week maybe) with rice; a meatloaf (so called) with some form of potatoes, I think; an occasional tuna fish casserole, with a can of tuna or two dumped in a casserole bowl along with some noodles and more chicken of mushroom soup; also ham, fried of course, sometimes with fried or more precisely clumped potatoes, usually burn on one side and sort of congealed together. 

And of course for WB those damn black eyed peas to be covered with some sort of tomato sauce that had a lot of pepper and maybe two cups of sugar mixed into it.  I know I am forgetting stuff.  Oh, chicken fried steak with rice, of course, occasionally.  And on Friday evenings for some reason, WB would stop and buy a barbequed chicken at the local grocery.  These were always scrawny birds and not enough of it, so I would butter a couple of pieces of break, stick some chicken meat in between and have a white bread, butter, and chicken sandwich.

I have a strange food related memory.  Once we had fried ham, fried potatoes, and cabbage and as we ate a fire truck came up the hill, maybe because somebody had lit a trashcan at the elementary school on fire.  And the next time we had that—a couple of weeks, maybe a month later—the same thing happened.  A fire truck came up the hill.  The third time we had that I thought, hey, a fire truck is going to come up the hill.  But it didn’t.

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We had a bit of a heat wave for a couple of weeks with temps down where Steve lives near a hundred and up here in the 90's.  But it broke yesterday.  Above find "before heat wave snapped" and "heat wave snapping" pics. 

Since thinking of fried chicken livers yesterday, I must say I thought an inordinate amount about chicken livers yesterday.  But I don’t think I will yield to the craving any time soon.  I have put too much time, energy, and will power into changing my diet to renege on it any time soon.

Anyway, when I saw I had reached 202, I decided we were going to shift to salads.  I do the cooking, if you can call it that, and Carol was OK with the salad idea in any case.  So I got out these big bowls and threw a bunch of green material into them, along with onions, tomatoes and avocadoes.  And at Costco I found these cans of chicken and beef meat, and I would throw half a can of that into each bowl, not so much for the meat, because there wasn’t much of that but so that I would have to think I was going meatless.  A terrible thought.

And I began to loose some weight.  Come fall and the start of school and I got pneumonia.  You would think pneumonia would be a good way to lose weight.  But it wasn’t.  One of the few things I had the energy to do with pneumonia was eat, and of course with pneumonia I couldn’t exercise. 

That was the other thing I did to lose weight.  I exercised daily.  Of course, I have exercised daily for about 20 years.  But I had slacked off on the time put in.  One summer back in the 90’s probably, I exercised an hour and a half a day, every day for a whole summer.  I wasn’t trying to bulk up or anything.  But I did acquire a little upper body muscle mass.  The people who owned the club made me the exercise guy of the month, and there was a little picture of me in the monthly flier, as the exercise guy of the month, and I think they gave me a coupon for a free dinner, somewhere, that I didn’t use.

Also—since this losing weight stuff was serious business—I bought a scale.  The first one I had ever owned.  I went out looking for one of those scales I had seen in people’s bathrooms, a sort of metal contraption.  I couldn’t find anything like that, and ended up getting a new kind that runs on a battery.  Also it is supposed to check your body fat by sending some sort of electrical charge through you that can be fatal if you have a pace maker installed.

This scale is way too sensitive.  I prefer a more gross measurement.  If it’s not perfectly flat on the floor, it will add or subtract a pound or two, and I swear if you step on it in a way it doesn’t like it will add or subtract a pound or two, and then I found that it will give you a different weight at different times of day.  The old scales were better because they were not sensitive and a sort of gave you an approximation of your weight.  But this one drove me nuts.

I had the same problem with the new digital thermometer that I bought when I had the pneumonia.  With that thing my temperature was all over the place. Some days my temperature was lower than normal all day long, and that freaked me out as much as having it too high.  Some things I would just prefer not to know.

Last summer—let’s see that would be the summer of 2006—anyway last summer in June still just after we returned from burying WB back in SC I clocked in at 202 pounds.  That was the most I have ever weighed.  I guess it was all that Southern cuisine and all the emotional stuff surrounding WB’s death so I was just sort of eating a lot in general.  202 is not so bad for a guy who is six foot.  There are six footers in the NFL who weigh more than that.  But of course, they are all muscle.

But my additional weight was not muscle.  It was fat and fat in my case does not distribute itself evenly but collects right around my middle.  What they call trunk weight, because it’s on your trunk I guess.  Trunk weight is not good weight.  Men tend to get it; women can weigh more because it tends to be evenly distributed. But truck weight is apparently bad for the heart, not to mention the lower back. 

I didn’t like the look of it and before going to SC I had to buy some fat pant jeans at Costco for teaching.  For the first time since I don’t know when I couldn’t get into my traditional size 32 jeans.  Also since I cannot control my smoking, I do whatever else I can to increase my changes of surviving a few years.  That’s one reason I exercise daily, in addition to the exercise jump starting my brain.  So when I looked down at the scale and saw 202 I decided to do something.

I did not—and I emphasize that—go on a diet.  Diets are a crock.  You lose weight and then you gain it back, and usually more.  Though some diets seem to work.  I know people who have done very well with Weight Watchers.  I decided to change my diet and to do it gradually.  So I started cutting back on meat.

But I can say without shame or embarrassment that I love meat.  I mean, it’s true love.  In fact, when I ate meat—say a pork chop—first I would eat my salad because I always eat a salad since I can’t stand vegetables, and then I would eat a load of carbohydrates (mounds of rice) and I would save my piece of meat for last as a kind of desert.  In fact if I could order a pork chop for desert, I would.

I had noticed this tendency to save the piece of meat for desert so as part of changing my diet; I decided to integrate the eating of the meat right along with the eating of the other stuff.  Man, this was tough, and I still have trouble doing it.  But having a piece of meat for desert is not a good idea calorie-wise.  In addition to integrating the eating of meat into the eating of other stuff, I decided to cut back on the eating thereof as much as possible.  Which led to strange meat cravings. 

I am at the grocery store, and I suddenly have an urge to buy a package of chicken livers.  Man, I have not had chicken livers since I don’t know when.  And they are easy to cook.  You just roll them in flour with some salt and pepper and then fling the whole mess into a frying pan with hot oil, and bingo in a couple of minutes you have a mess of chicken livers.

For desert.  Damn, mouth-watering good.

Last week sometime I got these complicated instructions and sample sheets to assist me apparently in putting together the documentation for the final accounting for the Tingle Family Trust.  I should have known when I saw the word accounting that I was in trouble.  I mean I can add and subtract and I did OK in math in school; usually I would get points for having the right idea (when you had to write your answers out, as they used to say) but I wasn’t very good at the detail part like making sure that one plus one equaled two.

Doing this stuff has given me a slightly better idea about what accountants do and a new found respect for that.  Though I don’t know that I would have much respect for anybody who wanted to be an accountant.  Fiddling with numbers suggested how much a person might fiddle around.  I read somewhere about firms like Enron buying something or other that was projected to produce so and so much income in the coming years, and the accountants would figure what this income was supposed to be (even though they hadn’t gotten it yet) and claim it as part of assets on hand (though they really weren’t on hand at all) and those assets would be figured into the net worth of the company upon which other people based their gambling on the stock market.

Fiddling with these numbers was odd.  Going over Joan’s checking account and finding bills for such things as her last month in the home where she was living, or for having her cremated, or having the dates carved on her tombstone back in SC.  Or one for her last ride on earth—in an ambulance.  It seems to me that they should give you some sort of discount for your last ride on earth.  I think that would be a polite and human thing to do.  Like, hey, that was her last ride on earth; we should give a discount.  But no, we live in a capitalistic society.  If the capitalists knew this was your last ride on earth, they would probably say, hey, this is going to be your last ride on earth, and if you want to take it we are going to charge you double.  And you would probably pay it too, like they would have you over a barrel.

Or maybe you would say, screw it.  I am going to die right here.  I already took my last ride on earth.