November 2007 Archives

From a coffee can to a safe…this marks some sort of significant transition, but from what to what I couldn’t say.  You don’t get a safe not to put something in it.  But I don’t have much to put in it.  My birth certificate, if I knew where it was. Or my passport, if I had one.  Or maybe the death certificates for Joan and WB, if I knew where those were.

Actually I got if for Carol.  She inherited some jewelry from her mother; it’s not all hers, some is to go to her sister.  And I could see she was a little anxious about having this stuff just lying around.  We were going to put it in a safe deposit box at the bank, but the safe deposit box was way too small.  So I said let’s buy a safe.

Knowing Costco sells a little bit of everything I went on line and sure enough they had some safes, and then when I went to do my food shopping, I saw this safe for 100 dollars less than was advertised on line (say alleluia).  So I said to Carol, let’s go get it.

The damn thing weighs about 200 pounds, that’s good in a safe I guess.  But no way I was going to lift it, so we got an assist from the Costco assistants.  One guy helped us get it on the flat, and another guy helped us get in the car.  I have to admit I don’t have the muscle I once had.  Hell, I never had any muscle.  I was thin but wiry. I had more strength than it looked like.  But now I can’t get the lid off bottle of olives.  Well, I could get it off but I don’t want to hurt myself; so I stick a knife in the lid and the damn lid comes right off.

But the helper guys at Costco were polite, and didn’t say anything like, what’s wrong with you, you bony, decaying old man?  The kid lifted the safe like it was a leaf or something.

Carol and I together huffing and puffing rolled it up the stairs to the second floor of our condo.  There it sits slowly sinking into the mess around it.  We have got to figure out where to put it and how to set the lock.  You can do that with fingerprint detection, or with a pin number, or, god bless them, with a key.  So I guess you can set the machine to all three or maybe just use one of the ways.  I favor the key.  But we would have to be sure to put it some place where we won’t forget where it is.  So we are proceeding with caution.

 

I am not thinking too clearly.  I was thinking about something though.  Oh, yea.  Costco.

We have one of those just three blocks away in this big mall that was put in maybe 10 years ago.  Who knows?  Somewhere in there.

I had never been in a place like that till I went into the Costco.  Santa Barbara doesn’t have a Target or a Wal-Mart.  We do have a K-Mart right across the street from the Costco, but I swear I couldn’t find anything in there—the K-Mart, I mean—and I thought the goods a little shoddy, except for underwear.  That’s where I buy all my underwear.  Come to think of it, but I am due for underwear run considering the current state of my underwear, about which I will not go into detail here.

So Costco when I first went in there was sort of a revelation.  A consumer paradise in a warehouse.  Clearly Costco aims for a slightly more upscale consumer—middle to upper middle class.  It wouldn’t be a consumer paradise for your rich person.

I go there once a week to stock up on food mostly, produce, green stuff, lettuce, tomatoes, avocadoes, apples, bananas, and occasionally a big bag of lemons (because they only have big bags of everything), and maybe a big bag of purple onions, and recently I bought fifty pounds of kitty litter.

I am not a consumer though.  I am a shopper.  I go in there with a list.  I know what I want, I know where it is (unless they have moved it since my last visit), and my purpose is to get in and get out.  So I hate going in the place.  Here I am making a beeline for what I want and I keep bumping into consumers, who are just idling along as if they were taking a walk in the park, and leaving their carts unattended right out in the middle of the isle, or just cutting you off.  These guys don’t know the rules of the road.  And the Costco people seem to want to encourage this behavior because they are handing out samples of this or that at every corner further increasing the possibility for traffic jams.

I am impressed though by all the junk. They seem to have a little bit of everything, including furniture, and out front they sell cars!  Of course the variety is not great.  But the prices for the little bit of everything that they have is usually pretty low.  Hell, they even sell coffins.  And while I don’t know much about coffins, I must say they look pretty good, functional anyway—not that coffins have to do much of anything; as far as I can tell there have been few technological advances in coffins—and the price seems pretty low to me.

Ok.  Now I know why I was thinking about Costo.  I was doing my morning business and from where I was sitting I was able to see this safe Carol and I bought at Costco.  Carol was concerned the cat would get in the safe and somehow suffocate herself.  I don’t get it because the only way the cat could do that would be to go in and reach out her little paw and pull the safe door shut.  A) I don’t think she is physically capable of doing that and B) I won’t know why she would want to.

I had that Bosch picture of hell, part of tryptch called the Garden of Earthly Delights, on my wall for six or seven years, maybe more.  Sometimes when I was sitting in my hole under Joan and WB’s back deck I would just be sitting there in some sort of stupor, brought on by depression or by the thorazine I took to cure it, and find myself looking at that picture.  I looked at it a lot and was surpised, not always, but quite frequently to find something new in it.

They say Bosch is early Rennaisance.  Maybe but I think he is more middle ages.  When I look at his stuff I think Chaucer, not Shakespeare.

This is Leonardo’s “Last Supper.”  Also Rennaisance.  But as you can see this painting is highly controlled.  There’s nothing sprawling or digressive about it.  Perspective controls the whole thing.  Sure stuff is going on. But the whole thing is boxed.

But how the hell is Bosch’s hell organized.  The only general principle I can see is foreground in the bottom and background at the top.  And in between Lord knows what.

Anise is one of those non-indigenous species that came from the Old World, Greece probably,  and spread weed-like in the New World.  I call it anise weed and put it in the same category as eucalyptus, another non-indigenous import, this time from Australia.  I feel about anise much as I do about eucalyptus, which I have previously excoriated in these pages as a lethal weed that kills all around it and which in its natural state is a complete fire hazard being dry as hell and filled with oily material.  A eucalyptus goes up like a damn match.

I came to dislike anise and to call it a weed when we arrived in California and  the folks bought that three quarters of an acre at 10194 Ramona Drive.  The first third of that three quarters of an acre was more or less civilized, but the lower two thirds were another matter.  When we first arrived the fields around us were mostly open and full of weeds.  Occasionally a tumble weed would roll right on through.  And anise weed would spring up.

Somehow I had the yearly chore of cutting back the anise weed.  I did this with a hoe and I say cut back because that’s what I did.  The stuff was damn tenacious; you could cut it back to the root easily enough with a hoe, during which I always got blisters because I wouldn’t wear glove or maybe we didn’t have any.  But to really get the crap out, you had to get a shovel and pull up the root and it had, I may say, a very sturdy root system.  So even if you dug a bit, and didn’t get it all, it was sure to come back up again.

I never did defeat it.  But the environment changed.  Houses were built all around us; the fields disappeared and over time so did the anise weed.

Come to think of it a friend who had gone to Greece came back and gave me a bottle of Ouzo.  This is clear stuff; officially a product of the nation of Greece.  It’s called a liquor and it is flavored with anise.  I did not like the stuff much.  But I would take a hit of it now and then.  It was clear in the bottle, and sometimes I would just smell it to clear my nostrils.  I don’t know how long I had that bottle—years and years—and I swear the stuff never went bad.  If that bottle is still out there, you could probably take a hit and suffer no major damage aside from that produced by the Ouzo itself.

And finally anise is used as a flavoring in absinte, a notorious French liquor that was for a time outlawed in the 20^th century for its destructive effects.  But now is back in style. For a long time in my most depressed period, in the hole under WB and Joan’s house, I had on my wall this picture by Degas called the “Absinte Drinker”:

Also on my wall over my bed was Bosch’s Hell:

This may suggest my mood at the time.

That is the history of my association with anise, or more exactly, anise weed.

Carol and I took a long walk along the Elwood Bluffs as pictured below:

Here's the spot we usually sit looking in the general direction of SF.

 Here can see the path that leads down from the spot we usually sit to get to the sand.

More in the direction of SF; can't see the path any more.

I started the walk trying to track down a hawk, though this wasn't the one.

You'd have to know where to look to see the path to the beach now.

We have walked as far as we can go, to the edge of a golf course surrounded by barbed wire.

The End through anise weed. 

Damn but I am all morose and mopey.  I am frequiently morose and mopey but I usually can make a joke or something or get some distance by thinking about stuff.  But this damn cold, that started last Sunday, has been going full bore for almost a week now, and while no worse, shows no signs of remission.

Now my temperature won’t even get up to 98.6 and hovers somewhere around 98.2.  Also I have taken into taking my blood pressure, with this over the counter blood pressure machine I bought at Costco.  That’s always a bad sign. And not very helpful either, since I can’t seem to get the damn thing to work correctly; it shows anywhere on the high side from 137 which is not good to 120 which would be excellent were it the truth.

Also the Nyquil is altering my mood, and I don’t think it mixes all that well with all my other meds, those being primarily Trazadone, Wellbutrin, and Klonapin.  All nasty little items.  Did I say, I am trying to get off the Wellbutrin, and am switching over to the Trazadone because it’s supposed to be beneficial for sleep.  So I am going off one med and unto another.

Among the side effects listed for Trazadone are: nausea, dizziness, insomnia, agitation, tiredness, dry mouth, constipation, lightheadedness, headache, low blood pressure, blurred vision, and confusion.  When you read the stuff, you kind of wonder if the cure is worse than the disease.  And were this not a description of my normal state I might be more worried. 

But this baby does have one side effect that bothers me quite a bit: priapism.  This is the famous four hour erection that you might get if you take Viagra or one of those meds for ED (ED! Can you believe “erectile dysfunction”—another example of the social construction of something otherwise known as impotence.—but hey, that might be too graphic.)  So everything is all screwed up.  What was once a good thing, now becomes fraught with danger.  Should I sense any life in THAT area I become concerned that something untoward might occur.

I could end up in the damn hospital because some times the only cure for this painful condition is surgery.  My god, they must bleed the penis!  And sometimes, after, well, say goodbye to any life down below.

Which reminds me, I have got to call Jay and see how his surgery went for that prostate thing.

Damn! No wonder I am mopey.

I don’t know that Brother Steve has any big allergies.

Brother Dave though he has some strange ones that involve the swelling of body parts.  One time he woke up and there were these red stripes across his back that looked like he had been lashed to mast and whipped with a cat-o-nine tails.  These things are dangerous.  Once or twice or more his tongue has swollen up and his throat too, threatening his air supply.  Just recently he got from the doctor something to put adrenaline into himself in case of emergency.

Me, I have the spring hay fever stuff, with runny eyes, and stuff in the head that too frequently turns into stuff in the chest, and O of course that lactose intolerance I wrote about a while back involving incredibly stinky flatulence.

Now I suppose you could say “allergies” are socially constructed since through out most of human history “allergies” did not exist just people with runny noses and funny stripes on their backs that came out of nowhere.  Now we have a name for those things “allergies” and know something about the causes of these things and how also even to treat them, a little bit, so as to get rid of them.

I suppose the biggest social constructor of whatever has been science.  Sometimes of course they have been wrong.  I have wanted to make a list of now defunct diseases; diseases they said existed but in fact didn’t.  In Dostoevsky, the characters are all the time getting “brain” fever.  I think that’s a sort of historical disease.  And at one time, they thought that out there in outer space was something called “the ether.”  Turns out there are no ether, except the stuff that puts you to sleep.

Now, too, when people die and they write about it in the newspaper, if they say anything about why the person died, they say something like “died of cancer,” or “heart failure,” or “stroke.”  I can remember when a person died and they wrote of “natural causes.”  Nobody dies of “natural causes” anymore.  That’s sad really; it would be kind of comforting to die of natural causes.  The opposite of natural causes would be unnatural causes, like having a tree fall on you or somebody killing you.

But death itself is not a social construction.

 I have been sitting here for two hours in this impossible state.  Meanwhile back in South Hall 2112 where my class room is located, students sat, from 1- 250, watching a movie called Fight Club upon which they are going to write their final paper.  I told them I was sick and going back to the office to lie down and take a nap.  I pulled out my thermometer by way of a demonstration, not that they couldn’t tell from my hacking and sneezing, and took my temperature.  It was 98.  So now I am less than normal.

In my enervated state, I fell into a stupor and would look at the clock now and then and think, damn!  But time is passing slowly.  I began to feel bored.  I am hardly ever bored because I am too anxious to be bored, but now I am too exhausted to be anxious, so instead I am bored.  Watching the clock, I felt as if I were watching paint dry or a watched pot that never boils!  And I thought my God! How do the students stand it, how do they stand being locked in that boring old room with boring old me for an hour and fifty minutes at a time no less.

Maybe that’s what college ultimately teaches: boredom tolerance, i.e., being brain dead while performing some repetitious mindless act of something or other or standing behind a counter and waiting for idiot customers to walk up.  Or how to make a living by killing time.

So I started to thinking again for about the 1000thn time: why the hell is Writing 2 an hour and fifty minutes long especially when writing 109, also a writing class, is only an hour and fifteen minutes long.  I have been told that upper division classes, ones listed with three numbers like 1.0.9 are always an hour and fifteen minutes, but why is that I have to wonder.  If I rely on my memory, I think I was told that Writing 2 is longer because it is supposed to be a class with a lab attached.  The teacher was supposed to say something for a while and then the students were to write something for a while, because the only way to get them to write was to do it in class.

But that doesn’t fully explain the length.  Because I remember that at one time Writing Two was only an hour and forty minutes long and then out of nowhere it was an hour and fifty minutes long—a change I was told having to do with the people who schedule the rooms for the whole campus.

Anyway, to make a long story short, the reality of Writing 2 as a temporal entity is clearly socially constructed by a bunch of insane people who are all probably dead by now.

And really is there any way to calculate how long it takes to learn something.

Germs are real.  Quite true.  The way people react to a person infected by germs or how a person feels about getting germy—well, that’s a social construction of sickness.

I read a book on the social construction of the sickness of cancer and how if you look closely at the language used to describe this sickness, it seems to imply that people who get cancer are getting what they deserve.  Cancer as punishment for something one did, rather than, hell, just getting cancer.

Another book writes about the social construction of insanity, how in the middle ages the insane just roamed the population.  Maybe people threw rocks at them or something but they weren’t considered sick.  Come the 18^th century, and suddenly they start locking up the insane and treating them like sick people.  Think Bedlam—one of the first insane asylums.

And then those people, that Jack speaks of, who think being sick is all in a person’s head, as if they are lunatics who are imaging that they are sick, and if they just stopped imagining they were sick, then they wouldn’t be sick, as if not imagining snot running out of your nose would make the snot go away.

And then there’s being sick in the head.  As in nuts, insane, or simply depressed.  As far as I can remember in my particular branch of the Tingle family being sick in the head was simply not possible.  If you were sick in the head, something was wrong with you morally or ethically.

If you were sick in the head, you were just faking it and you should be as ashamed of yourself and just crawl in a hole or something—because you were so utterly vile.  Suck it up!  Suck it up!  What the hell does that mean?

I do think there is something called psychosomatic illness.  But this doesn’t mean you want to be sick; it means that deep down there in the unconscious you have a hell of a lot of conflict about something, some inner pain, that might actually affect the immune system and so you get sick.  After all we are constantly swimming with germs, and if the system goes down they get in.

So sickness sometimes can be a sign, as in, hey, dude, you are really really stressed out.  I made a joke some time back, “The Tingle idea of a vacation is getting sick.”

I have never heard of a salt sea wash.  I will check it out.

I don’t know if any of this makes sense.  I still got that cold and am hung over from Nyquil.

The gross measurement of the old fashioned mercury thermometer was true and remains true because it could not measure small fluctuations in a way that allowed a person at least to see them on the thermometer.

I bring this up to make a point about the so-called social construction of reality, as in duh! Have you had your brains in a freezer or something to make such a big deal about it?  Like at one point, in literary studies, it was like if you didn’t use the idea of the social construction of reality and talked instead about something called reality you were a naïve idiot.  I would say for my part that these guys are naïve idiots.

Duh!  Just think about it as I did years and years before people started talking about the so-called social construction of reality.  I don’t know how long I have been bothered by the fact that there are seven days in a week.  I could make neither hide nor hair of it or locate any reason why this should be the case.  In fact, given that the year is 365 days long, I think it would make more sense to divide by 5.  That works out to a nice even number of weeks in a year: 73.  But if you divide 7 into 365 you come out with this weird 52.21 weeks in a year. 

 So this is a sort of elemental demonstration of the social construction of reality.  A brief check into the history of the seven day week suggests nobody is quite sure why we have it.  But at one point the Romans took up the idea and pretty much forced it, since they were so powerful, on everybody since.

I wrote an article about being an academic from the working class and got attacked (and rejected) by a reader who over and over again accused of me being an idiot because I did not refer to the social construction of the working class and talked as if it actually existed.  Well, if it walks like a duck, and talks like a duck and so forth, it is damn well a duck if you ask me.  The seven day week is obviously no less real because it was socially constructed.

But the social construction fanatics seem to think that if you just think “this reality is socially constructed” it ceases to be a reality.  These folks are idealists of the kind Marx attacked when he said changing the way you think about the world is not changing the world.

When I started getting a fever yesterday and was sure I was on the fast track to certain death, I dug into my medical accessories drawer looking for a thermometer.  I found a bunch of old sleep apnea masks, plus tubing, and two blood pressure taking machines with those cuffs that expand around the upper arm and four thermometers.  Two were made by Vicks, but they were different models and the battery was dead in one; one from Walgreen’s and then one of those old mercury kinds.  I don’t know who made it.

So first I tried to take my temperature with the one that had the dead battery; I didn’t know it was dead till I tried it.  Then I tried the other Vicks one and it said 99.7 which freaked me out because that was nearly nine tenths of a degree higher than what it was supposed to me.  And then later it read 99.9 which freaked me out more, so I kept digging around in the drawer and came up with the one from Walgreen’s.  It read like 98.9, only three tenths of a degree high, and a few minutes later when I stuck it in under the other side of my tongue it read 99.

 In desperation I stuck the trusty old mercury in my mouth and waited and waited and waited.  Those digital ones work a lot faster for some reason.  The numbering on the mercury is tiny; I mean there’s no digital read out obviously and you have to hold it this way and not that or you won’t see the mercury at all.  It seemed to read closer to 99, confirming the reading of the Walgreen’s. But clearly with those tiny little lines and not actual specific numbers the results of the mercury seem to be a sort of approximation or gross number of whatever my temperature actually was.

I wanted to make a general point about technological advancement.  I am not sure it’s such advancement.  I expect those digital thermometers are more accurate than the old mercury job, but at the same time, they are way more delicate.  Exactly because they have the potential for greater accuracy, they also have the potential to be wrong more frequently.  But the mercury job because it has less possibility for being absolutely accurate also has less possibility of being completely wrong.

It’s sort of like that digital scale we bought a while back.  I expect it is very accurate, possibly way more accurate that the old-fashioned scale with weights where I work out.  But the more accurate one gives me vastly different readings from one moment to the next.  When I step off the old fashioned scale where I work out and then step back on, it gives me the same reading every time.  But if I move the digital scale from one square of tile to another on our bathroom floor it will sometimes give me different readings.  The more accurate scale—the digital one—is also the more delicate.  The tiles on the bathroom floor are irregular.  Some have a microscopic slant and the delicate scale responds more readily to changes in its weighing environment.

Technological advancement while aiming for greater and greater accuracy also gives us the potential to be wrong more and more frequently.  The same with the computer: the more then expand your so-called options for this or that, the more chance you have for screwing up.  Which in my case, is usually the case.

I still remain uncertain as to my exact temperature, but my explorations in this area have led me to believe that 98.6 as the so called “normal” temperature, is itself a gross sort of indicator at best because while I have been above it several times today and below it also several times, my temperature has never been exactly at 98.6.

I’ve got a cold.  Goddamn it.  Hit me full force like a ton of brinks yesterday.  Sneezing, weakness, slight fever, post nasal drip, and one of those nasty coughs that just plain hurts.  Damn it.  I was looking forward to the t-break to catch up on stuff; now I will lie around sneezing and feeling miserable.  And, damn it, I am in the middle of grading a batch of student papers.  Tired like this, my patience runs thin really, really fast.  Trying paying real attention to a five page paper of utter gobble-de-gok with your eyes dripping and your head aching…It’s almost a form of torture.

Damn it.

Also I am not good at being sick.  In fact, I am lousy at it.  Of course, I am not too good at being well.  I feel like crap even when I am well; but at least it’s healthy crap.  Being sick is like the same thing but sickly. 

I put the blame for my problems being sick directly where it belongs.  Yes, I blame my mother!  Damn it.  Joan didn’t have a nuturing bone in her body; she tried but it was like she was breaking all those bones in her body with the effort required even to try.

I was a sickly runt.  With strep through over and over again.  At one point I stopped growing and was truly runt like.  You would have thought that was my fault somehow and not the result of germs or freaking poor nutrition.  No, when I got sick, it was like:

What’s wrong with you?  Why do perversely keep getting sick?  I have done nothing wrong.  Why do you punish me?  What did I ever do to deserve this? What have I ever done to you but be a super excellent mother, that you should keep getting sick like this.  Are you trying to make me feel like a failure?  You devious, sickly, selfish, self-centered little runt. I told you!  I told you to wear your jacket and eat your peas. You despicable disobedient little runt.  I order you to stop being sick!

Do I exaggerate?  I know I exaggerate.  No, this is pretty accurate and captures pretty much Joan’s nurturing technique which was to make me feel that I was killing her by getting sick.  Hell, I know she had other things on her mind.  She made that abundantly obvious.  And being son number 1, well, this infant getting sick business and what to do about it was all new territory.  She had no so-called “role models” in this nurturing business.  So what?  That wasn’t my fault, but I paid for it.

So are the sins of the mother visited upon the son.  Damn it.  When I get sick, my rational mind says you have a cold asshole, but my unconscious is saying you deserve to die, asshole, for getting a cold.  And you will die a painful death because of the horrors you so selfishly inflicted upon your loving mother.

So as I said I am not good at getting sick.  In fact, I am really, really bad for getting sick.  I don’t know if it’s possible to have less than zero self-esteem.  But when I am sick I manage it.

I mean she at least got a trip back to Manhattan out of the cold.  But me, I didn’t get any trip, and on top of that while I should be looking forward to a little weekend release I won’t be getting much of that because I have a batch, as I call them, of student papers coming in.  Unfortunately, as a teacher of writing, it’s my duty to read the papers; I mean actually read them and not just rush through to see if students have made the right points, done the readings, and listened to me in lectures.  That’s what most writing is at the U-level: covert forms of test taking.

Students know what’s up, maybe unconsciously, and so they grind out these papers that cover all the points they are supposed to cover and don’t give a damn if point one is connected to point two and don’t give a damn about how it is written because the TA’s who read their papers don’t give a damn either, being overworked as they are.

So to get them to really write something, I have to unteach as well as teach.  In fact, in ten weeks about all I can do is unteach, and of course that confuses the students.  I have them read readings (which of course they don’t read) and I don’t lecture, and while there is a huge topic area for them to write about, I don’t give them specific questions, or prompts, as they have come to be called, but say, the most important aspect of writing is topic formation.  You will form a topic.  This requires that you to write and rewrite to form your topic, BECAUSE I don’t want you to repeat what you have read.  But of course they don’t rewrite because they don’t know that is and they just end up repeating using the five or six paragraph method.

All this is pretty damn frustrating, and since I have been teaching this way since about 1980, I have been pretty damn frustrated for about 27 years. 

So that’s what I am looking forward to this weekend, one paper after another filled with great baggy sentences and no clear topic and no organization either.  One paragraph is stuck next to the next as if writing a paper were the same thing as creating a collage.  Each paragraph makes a point and backs it up with mindless repetition from the readings or from something somebody said.

God and on top of this, I am getting a cold.

If I had saved all the student papers I have received over the years in paper form, I would not be able to get into my office.  I would open the door and mounds of dusty old paper would come tumbling out.  I don’t exaggerate.

I was back in the Cold War not so much pro-Soviet Union as I was anti-American.  I was a teen and scared to death of being nuked.  But I just couldn’t stand those bumper stickers that said “Better Dead than Red.”  First I thought they were just plain stupid; I would rather be alive under almost any conditions (excepting a few); so being Red didn’t seem all that bad to be if I wasn’t Dead.  And without knowing a single Russian person, I felt confident in believing that many of those reds preferred red to dead.

Also I had read a number of novels and short stories, admittedly mostly from the 19^th century, that convinced me that Russians were actually human beings and not some sort of moronic sub species.  Those books also convinced me that Russians were in some ways more spiritual than Americans.  They were not really into material things but were concerned with the big issues like dying and what it means to be a human being.  Of course, I also recognized they were not concerned with material things because they didn’t have any.

 Before the Revolution, the serfs lived in abject and utter poverty.  You have to remember too that legally speaking the Czar owned all of Russia.  Every bit of it.  So the idea of not having private property was not an alien concept when the commies came along and declared the end of private property.  As I see it the behavior of the Russian people has far less to do with Communism than it has to do with their very long history as a people.  Their history had pretty much prepped them for no property and autocratic rule by a corrupt few.  And that history now repeats itself:  the people have nothing and are rule by a few predatory, mafiaesque “capitalists.”

I remember a saying about Russian people that goes something like.  These two Russians.  One has a coat and the other with no coat is freezing to death.  So the one with the coat rips it in half and gives half to the freezing Russian.  A capitalist would say, screw you, I am keeping my coat.  I earned it by exploiting the labor power of my neighbor. You freezing guy are a lazy shiftless no good son-of-a-bitch.  The Russian solution, their idea of community, is to make sure everybody is equally miserable.

So they do have equality; the equality of misery. You could do worse than that and we have done so in these United States.  That doesn’t mean I am anti-American.  I am American to the bone.  I continue to believe in the ideals of this country, though daily it seems we move further and further from realizing them.  Who knows, though, maybe I should have been born in Russia.  I have a colleague whose wife is from Russia.  Sveta is her name.  I have given my colleague some CD’s of the songs I write, and he says Sveta loves my droning.

Over there, people write and sing songs about dying, depression, pessimism, despair and futility. And they like them.

I watched a movie called “Day Watch” made in Russia by a Russian director named Timur Bekmambetov, based on the best-selling sci-fi novels of Sergei Lukyanenko.  All the characters speak Russian.  The special effects are pretty good mostly because there seem to be a good number of buildings in Moscow being blown up (and recorded on film as they do so) and because your basic Russian stunt person is willing to risk his or her life for a buck.

But I actually thought about this movie a little after I watched it.  It has some elements of horror in it, though remarkably little blood and no gratuitous torture stuff like Hostel (though that was an OK horror film); but mostly I would call it fantasy.  The forces of light and dark are fighting it out for the soul of Russia.  Actually light and dark have a truce but they keep breaking it.  Sort of like the Cold War between the USA and the Soviet Union.  I would say in fact exactly like.

The forces of light seem to be the “Russian people” at their best.  If they weren’t characters in a fantasy movie, they would be good people like doctors, or teachers, or religious persons who believe, as all good Russians do, that life is suffering and all they want to do is get through it without hurting others too much.  The forces of dark look like decadent Euro-trash heavily influenced by Capitalism.  They want stuff and cheap thrills.

So unlike most of American horror film, this one is actually about something. 

Finally, I guess, the forces of light win.  This is not a Gnostic world.  But more old testament.  In the closing scene light and dark make a bet, just like God and The Devil in the Book of Job.  Light wins the bet and exclaims, “Your mama!” at the defeated force of dark.  This is not very Biblical, true, but maybe something was lost in translation.

Sadly this happy ending is clearly an act of wish fulfillment.  The main character, who has really screwed up, can only set things right by getting this piece of magic chalk that allows a person to correct a mistake previously made.  So the main character goes back to where he lived as a child and writes on the wall of the apartment, Het, which means in Russian, no.  He writes no because in this place many years before he said “yes” to his mother when she asked if he wanted to become one of the supernatural beings.  That was the mistake that set everything in motion that led eventually (in the film) to all of Moscow being laid waste by the forces of dark.

Interestingly, the year the character said yes and should have said no was 1992.  It says so right there on the screen.  1992.

Why 1992?  Well that’s the year Russia sold its soul to the Devil.  As I said though the movie is fantasy because its whole logic is informed by wish fulfillment.  There is no way to go back and say Het to 1992. 

Below according to one website here is all the stuff that happened in Russia in 1992.
 

In 1992 Russia acquired the former USSR's permanent seat on the UN Security Council as its defacto successor and also took over all Soviet properties and embassies abroad. In Jan. 1992 Russia became a founding member of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) following agreements reached in Nov. 1991 with Ukraine and Belarus. Also in Jan. 1992 Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar announced plans for price liberalization that resulted in rapid price increases while the central bank began to extend further credit to support industry and trade. Following Russia's initiative, which resulted from the effects of the common currency and each republics implementation of trade barriers to protect their industries and goods, the other CIS republics followed suit. Russia also imposed export quotas and taxes which resulted in exporters leaving their hard-currency earnings in foreign offshore banks while imports were also centralized. On March 31, 1992 the 18 of the 20 sovereign republics signed a federal treaty that established the Russian Federation, with Tartarstan endeavoring to gain a separate agreement with the federation and Checheno-Ingushetia announcing its independence. In June 1992 Pres. Yeltsin and Ukraine's Pres. Leonid Kravchuk reached an agreement over the former USSR's Black Sea Fleet in which command was to be withdrawn from the CIS, the point of contention and be placed under a joint Russian-Ukrainian command for three years. Also in June 1992 Russia recognized and sided with the Transdnistria republic separatists from Moldova. In July 1992 Russia signed high-level economic and military agreements with Belarus. In Sept. 1992 Russia and Georgia signed an agreement that recognized Abkhazia as a part of Georgia while the Russian Parliament under the speaker, Ruslan Khasbulatov threatened to annex South Ossetia, another conflict spot in Georgia. In Oct. 1992 Pres. Yeltsin banned the Parliament's (Supreme Soviet) private army following Khasbulatov's continual demands that the government be subordinate to it rather than the president. In Nov. 1992 the Constitutional Court ruled that the Communist Party ban was constitutional, following the Communists claims that the 1991 ban was unconstitutional. In Dec. 1992 Pres. Yeltsin made various deals including the slowdown of market reforms with the influential Civic Union, a center-right coalition of four groups, in an attempt to halt demands that the government resign. However, on Dec. 9, 1992 during a session of the Congress of the People's Deputies, Pres. Yeltsin and the Congress clashed over their failure to endorse Yegor Gaidar as Prime Minister with Pres. Yeltsin describing the congress as a "fortress of conservative and reactionary forces." On Dec. 12, 1992 Pres. Yeltsin and Ruslan Khasbulatov agreed to a national referendum on a new constitution to be held in April 1993, that many of Pres. Yeltsin's emergency powers be extended until the referendum, that the Congress could nominate and vote on its own choices for Prime Minister as well as the President's nomination and that it also had the right to reject the President's nominations for the Defense, Foreign Affairs, Interior and Security ministries. On Dec. 14, 1992 Pres. Yeltsin nominated Viktor Chernomyrdin as Prime Minister which the Congress confirmed. On Dec. 29, 1992 Russia and the US announced they had agreed on the terms for the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START II) pact which would reduce each country's nuclear arsenal by two-thirds. Also in 1992 Russia signed a bilateral treaty with Britain and Pres. Yeltsin pledged to abandon military support for North Korea following his visit to South Korea.

 Below: that’s cousin Jacks Tingle.  His son Jack sent me the picture.  Brother Steve and I as kiddlings played with Jacks and his Brother Rusty at holidays, especially down at Grandma Tingle’s place.  But once—it was a really big outing for us—we drove all the way up to Greenville and visited with them at their own place.

I used to hate it when Joan would say, you look just like so and so, or you have so and so’s mouth or cheekbones or something.  As far as I was concerned, that other person, whoever it was had MY mouth or cheekbones.

But there is a family resemblance here.  Jacks is clearly a Tingle guy.  First the complexion with its pinkish hue.  Then through the eyes, the mouth, and that big chin.  Well, I see parallels to my own face, though Jacks is more rounded than mine I think.

 

 

 

 A number of years back Carol bought me this little compass to carry around with me because at that time I was really suffering because I didn’t know what direction I was going.  Then I lost it, and yesterday I found it again, with a bit of Tabata’s—the dead cat’s hair stuck in it; I took out the hair and put it in a safe place and when I walked to the ocean I took it with me.  In the first pic below the compass is pointed at the ocean—directly at it and the compass points South pretty much.  But when I pointed it at the sun, mirabile dictu!—the compass said West.  So I was able to confirm where the sun was: in the west.  Which is where the sun is supposed to be when it goes down.

 Just got back from the sleep center (so-called) where I had another test for sleep apnea.  I have been dreading this for a week.  First, getting any sleep in a sleep center is pretty difficult.  You sleep on a bed that is not your bed, in strange surroundings, with wires coming out of your body, and somebody in another room monitoring the impulses from the wires. 

Also if you have to urinate, you have to call the tech person through one of the baby monitors to say you need to pee, and he comes in and unhooks you and you carry this bundle of wires with you into the bathroom.  If you are a male and need to pee, I recommend sitting down to do so because with all those wires you are holding in one hand, you have only one hand to conduct the flow and no hand to adjust the garments thus producing the strong possibility that you may pee upon yourself.

Carol, being the sweetheart she is, came along to keep me some company while I was getting hooked up, so she took these pictures.

I am pretending in the one below to be happy with all this crap; Carol told me to smile.  So I did so.  For sleepwear I employ sweats and a UC-AFT t-shirt.  Maybe 6 or 7 years back I was given a stack of these shirts to hand out to my fellow union members free of charge; I don’t why but I couldn’t get rid of them.  Maybe my fellow union members didn’t want to be seen in a UC-AFT t-shirt.  But I don’t mind so I copped the six or so I couldn’t give away, took them home and I have been using them for sleep and when I work out.  They are good t-shirts though they have grown somewhat faded.

 

In the pic below I am nearly completely hooked up.  The guy there is the tech person. He stays up all night watching monitors that monitor such things as oxygen level and activity in bed and levels of sleep, from 1 to REM (deep sleep).  His name is Abdullah; he is in this country from Pakistan but two years and will be getting married later this month.  He is 23.  He works two jobs; one at the sleep center and the other at a FedEx outlet.

Below I am pretending to sleep in my sleep center fake bedroom.  I did get some sleep but only because I overdosed on this new med I am using, Trazadone, which came out before Prozac and is thought to be good for producing sleep.  Right now I am all screwed up because I am going on one med, as I go off another, Wellbutrin.  I am exhausted and don’t know which end is up. 

Abdulla is new at the job, just two months, and wasn’t really able to interpret the results of all that monitoring.  But he seemed to think that I had very little apnea of the kind where you stop breathing entirely.  So maybe I am cured and will never, ever have to wear one of those evil masks again.  But maybe I am not and will have to look into the frightening prospect of a surgical de-uvulation.  Well, not “de” exactly but more a shortening of the uvula by surgical means.  I dread the prospect.  I must say I have never paid much attention to my uvula or had a particular fondness for it, but the idea of losing some of it freaks me out.

I hope these pictures provide a social service by serving to demystify the sleep apnea test experience. 

A few entries back, Brother Steve, who has a BA in philosophy, mentioned in response to an email from Brother Dan, William James’ philosophy or theory of attention. James lived at a time when people were becoming more and more aware of the person as a creature of stimulus as something pushed about and controlled by his or her environs.  This of course had a good deal to do with Darwin.  But with other scientific research of the day, also.

In many ways his whole philosophic endeavor circled around the attempt to find some space in the mechanism for free will.  While understanding and acknowledging the materialist argument that we are all creatures of the environment and nothing else, he developed the idea of attention as a possible circle, however tiny, of free will.

He wrote:

Attention, implying a degree of reactive spontaneity, would seem to break through the circle of pure receptivity which constitutes 'experience,' and hence must not be spoken of under penalty of interfering with the smoothness of the tale.

But the moment one thinks of the matter, one sees how false a notion of experience that is which would make it tantamount to the mere presence to the senses of an outward order. Millions of items of the outward order are present to my senses which never properly enter into my experience. Why? Because they have no interest for me. My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind - without selective interest, experience is an utter chaos. Interest alone gives accent and emphasis, light and shade, background and foreground - intelligible perspective, in a word. It varies in every [p. 403] creature, but without it the consciousness of every creature would be a gray chaotic indiscriminateness, impossible for us even to conceive.

Here he points to “attention” as a relatively spontaneous and also uncontrolled activity that serves to give shape to experience.  Were we not paying attention to something or other, we would have no experiences at all.  This though does not necessarily rescue freedom since this form of attention can and usually is shaped by the forces around us, beliefs we have absorbed perhaps, or habits, or social forces saying pay attention to this. I don’t agree with his claim in other words—at least as presented here—that “My experience is what I agree to attend to.”  In fact, that’s begging the question—to say that one can agree or not agree.

Still there’s a thin margin here for freedom.  One can will attention or pay or not pay attention.  One can shift one’s attention from this to that, and this that might be something relatively unknown or previously unnoticed and by shifting attention one may concentrate and give shape to the thing previously unnoticed or unknown.

Why would one do this?  Simple curiosity might suffice.

I am thinking here about how I so frequently fail to get students to pay attention.

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The same sunset using different settings or two sunsets? 

Brother Steve also mentioned in his recent comment on an entry a picture of me and others in the Occidental Mag, the one with the class notes in it.  And sure enough as I thumbed through it I come across a page called “Collective Enterprise” that really is an ad for a coffee table book with pictures of Oxy people and activities for about 100 years.  So there we are—me and other people I knew—in a picture right in the middle at the top of the page.

Sort of startled me.  Come to think of it I actually knew all these people.  Not that we formed a group or anything.  I didn’t belong to any groups.  But they were all people with whom I felt relatively comfortable.  If I had to label us I might call us proto-nerds.  Back then there were no nerds but we might have been the evolutionary precursor of the nerds.  We were known as people who studied, I think, and took the whole educational game pretty seriously.  Later on after Oxy I bumped into one of my class mates and she said I was a “turkey,” which meant gobbler of books.  But I didn’t feel back then that I was a social outcast, as nerds are frequently portrayed to be.  I was just an outsider.  If we were nerds we were tormented nerds, from the inside, not because we felt persecuted by the jocks.  But I don’t think of nerds as being particularly internally tormented.

I think our picture is at the top of the page because we are all seated in front of replica of the Star Ship Enterprise made out of beer kegs and cans.  Thus the title of the piece, Collective Enterprise.  I have no idea what I was doing that day or why I was there, but there I am. Sure, I liked Star Trek.  There hadn’t been any good science fiction TV shows on for a long time.  But I am surely not a Trekkie.

On the far left, that’s Jesus.  He is the one who submitted the picture to the collection.  He is a director for TV.  He did numerous shows for the different Star Treks and recently directed an episode of Criminal Intent now on USA.  Next to him is his wife to be, Gayla, though they separated a number of years back.  Next there’s Todd Bergesen; he was the best English Major in my class. I couldn’t keep up with him.  Then there’s JG.  She and I were like friends, if you know what I mean.  Then that’s me all bearded.  On the left below is Jim Miller.  I think he became a professor.  Then there’s Dave Miller who teaches tango in Oregon somewhere in his own private Tango Studio that he made built himself..  And then there’s my main man and good buddy Rex who grew up in Tulsa Oklahoma and got a PhD in Literature.

I get all wierded out looking at that picture.  It was so damn long ago, and I really truly regret that I never got to know JG, in a way I might today, because I was so twisted up in my internal misery I couldn’t see too far past the tip of my nose. I am pretty sure now she was an interesting person.

Damn.  Looking at that picture is too much like looking at a gravestone.

A while back Brother Steve wrote a comment on the blog:

Nick, did you get the latest Occidental mag? It has that picture with you and Rex in it.....and your enlighting colon remarks....from the guy whose Fang contribution was about farts, as I recall.

The Oxy mag, to which he refers, is this thing that comes out twice yearly with the class notes in it.  I had thrown it out but retrieved it from the trash when I read his comment.  I had thought they wouldn’t print my colon remarks.  I was in a bad mood when I wrote it:

So I tested positive on the fecal matter test and they practically forced me to go in for that colon thing where they knock you out a bit and stick the tube with the camera all the way up there.  I was sure I was dying.  So I was lying there with my bum in the cold air and asked the nurse lady plaintively what might cause blood in the stool, and she said the particular fecal matter test I had taken gives all sorts of false positives.  “Great!” I thought sacrastically.  Afterwards the doctor said I had a normal looking colon for a 61 year old man.  I guess that’s good.  So my colon is aging along just like my face, except that I can’t see it.  Which is good too I guess.

 Nobody writes a class note like I do: the other folks write about what they are doing or what job they have or how they bumped into each other on a trip to Hawaii.  I write about my colon.  I can’t help it.  I have an anal humor streak.  Sometimes I will be in the corridor with colleagues and get them into laughing and when I go into my anal humor mode, some of them actually just leave, more or less politely. Well, got to go now.

I am honestly befuddled.  I mean what’s so offensive about talking about farts and shit.  I mean anal humor—Swift did it all the time.  It’s positively Rabelaisian.  By which I intend to indicate that there is an honorable anal humor streak (or should I say skid mark) running throughout some of the greatest of Western literature.  Jeez, I am in a long line of analists.

Sometimes, people say, Please, Nick, not while I am eating.  I think this is absurd.  What better time to talk about anal matters since people are stuffing food into the tube from which turds will eventually come at the other end?

 Recently I was writing a song the punch line of which was:

We’re born in blood and feces; we die in our own shit.

Nobody ever said you have to like it…

Well, I do have to admit that song is not likely to reach a mass audience.

Brother Steve, in his comment refers to a little article I wrote for the college humor magazine.  It can be found in these pages at.

Second Cousin Jack wrote a comment on the blog entry about belongings that makes a connection between buying all this stuff and competition.  What’s the connection?  Well Thorstein Veblen way back at the turn of the 20^th century wrote a book called The Theory of the Leisure Class.  That’s where he developed his conspicuous consumption thesis; people pile up needlessly expensive stuff to show their place on the social ladder.  That’s about the time too that Andrew Carnegie wrote his books extolling the virtues of capitalism and the joys of wealth.  Andrew, having all the wealth he had, was one happy dude.

At a break in my class the other day, a student asked if he could bum a smoke.  I said sure, ok, but that I in no way advocate smoking since it will kill you.  So at the break I go out to this area outside the building to sneak a quick two puffs.  And there’s my student smoking away.  It’s a good place to smoke because it’s on the second floor on a walkway between two buildings that hardly anybody ever uses.  It’s out in the open and when there’s a little breeze, as there usually is, the smoke gets blown away quickly.

He suddenly starts talking about the stuff we were talking about in class, and says that all this buying of stuff is like a sickness.  The students, himself included, are very competitive he says; they all envy each other and are all the time checking each other out to see what kinds of stuff they are wearing.  Really, he said, we don’t like each other because we don’t trust each other, because everybody is judging everybody else by their stuff, and we have been taught it’ a dog eat dog world and every man for himself.  There’s an awful lot of lonely students out there he says.

So it would appear for him that there is some sort of link too between competition for the money it takes to conspicuously consume.  But I am out of it on this one.  When I think of conspicuous consumption I think of a Cadillac or maybe a mink coat, or something like that.  If students conspicously consume, I don’t see it because I have no idea what kind of jeans a student might be wearing or how much those jeans might have cost.  We are way past the time, when Jordache jeans had a big Jordache written across the butt.  That was early 80’s stuff.

Now the number and type of jeans is just plain astonishing.  At jeans.com I found listed the following brands: Joe’s jeans, Goldsign, Citizens of Humanity, Denim of Virtue, Stitch’s Jeans, Red Engine, Rock Revival, Iron Army, Vintage Rebel, and Marlow Jeans, and really that ain’t the half of it.

These jeans don’t have big logos written across the butt; sometimes they are marked by only a tiny metal insignia.  This doesn’t seem like conspicuous consumption to me, but who knows maybe all my students can recognize all these different types of jeans, see what statement the student is making by wearing them (I am a rebel, for example) and also know that jeans like this can cost upwards of 200 bucks a pair.

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The view from where I go to snag two puffs between classes. 

Well, I dragged my ass to classes and got through them somehow although I was teetering throughout on the brink of exhaustion.  One student though came up with a link to an almost archetypical ad—with the deep down message; if you want to be your real self, buy me.

It’s for a drink called Sobe and may be viewed on Utube.  Ads have gotten a lot more sophisticated in their pitch since the 80’s.  One student found an ad from the 80’s that is almost hysterical in the way it hits you over the head with its pitch.  It too can be viewed on Utube.

Free associating, somewhat, these ads make me think of a student in one of my classes who wrote a paper for me about how all her stuff was stolen over Halloween.  She went off to celebrate and left her friend and roomates in their place and she even instructed them, if they went out, to make sure the doors were locked and lights left on so nobody would think the house was abandoned.  She came home, went to classes the next day, and returned to find her computer, her money, her credit cards, her cell phone and her ipod stolen.  Her roommates had all their stuff stolen to and the windows of the car of one of the students were broken and bashed in and the inside of the car had been egged.  They contacted the police who were no help at all and even suggested that somehow they were at fault because they live in IV and such things just happen in IV.

Had I been a cop I suppose I might not have been too understanding either.  The roommates went out for Halloween, returned to their place drunk as skunks and were followed into the house by some strange guy who started to drink their booze and eat their food and would not leave until they screamed at him and threatened to call the cops.  Given their condition, it was easy for him—as he apparently did—to cop the keys of one of the roommates, the one who had her windows bashed in.  They were however so drunk out of their minds that they could muster no memory of what the guy looked like except that he was tall.

I know these details from the paper my student wrote.  I said she might write it hoping that it would help her to deal with her feelings.  Interestingly, she kept throughout referring to the objects she possessed as “belongings.”  I never use that word so I started thinking if her pain and sense of hurt came from her sense of losing the belongings that allowed her to belong as a student at UCSB.  I mean how can she belong as a student without a computer, a cell phone, and an ipod.  If this is the case then this is where consumer society becomes horribly manipulative, making people think that if they don’t have this or that, they do not and cannot truly belong to this or that group.

I tried to say in my response to her paper that her belongings are just objects.  They say nothing about her as a person, about her character, her ethics, or her intelligence.  As a person she damn well belongs.

Crap—I get up at seven and the first thing I go to do is upload comments students in my classes have written so I can use them in class today.  I asked them to find an ad or something online like a particular site for say Red Bull or one of the thousands of commercials on Utube and write something about what they see and include the URL if they find something on the web…and crap! My blog ain’t working.  I click this and than for almost an hour, give up, and phone Yahoo support.

I am on hold for 25 minutes and on comes this guy I can tell don’t know shit from shinola, and sure enough he doesn’t even know that Yahoo hosts blogs that use Movable Type.  That’s what I use Movable Type—I mean.  So he says he will go off to check something and while he goes off to do that somehow or other I get the blog to work, or maybe it just starts working of its own accord.  How the hell would I know?  So I make him stay on the line while I run through the whole thing again to make sure it works and as soon as I get off the line and try again—it has stopped working again.

I am fit to be tied.  I need this stuff for class.  We were going to look at ads and how they work, and now I don’t know what to do.  It’s like 930 by then and I realize I have, in my panic, forgotten to make my daily morning trip to the pot and if I don’t do that soon I am like going to burst.  So just as I am sitting down to do my business, I hear the answering machine go on in the room next door and it’s the guy at the lawyers who are handling the Tingle Family Trust, and I have to clamp off my process because I just got to take this call.

I mean I sent them the final paperwork 3 weeks ago and I have received no acknowledgement of their having received it and I get worried that maybe the paperwork didn’t get there for some reason because of the fire.  So with my sweat pants down around my ankles (I wear sweatpants for pjs) I rush to the room, almost fall down on some of the junk on the floor and answer the phone.

The guy is apologetic.  He has the paperwork right in front of him and swears it will be sent off today.  OK, I say, and am actually happy to hear it.  But I know in the last bill I receive from them, they will actually charge me for responding to the email I sent asking if they have received the paper work and for making the call because they have done this before and will do it again.  I swear if for some reason they had to piss on me they would charge me for the piss and the time spent pissing.  These lawyer guys are just amazing.

So on top of my ongoing nervous break down, I am having an early morning acute nervous breakdown as a person living in a society that seems to be going through a nervous breakdown.

Here’s the URL for the students’ blog so you can see if you want how they think these days and some of the ads they have found are interesting.

Wherewithal? What the hell is that?

But since his aphasia Brother Dan has started using this mysterious word with some regularity.  I will ask him like what he thinks he will do and he says, depends upon the wherewithal or if I have the wherewithal.

It’s not that I don’t know what it means—wherewithal; it means having the means (including financial) or the ability or the capacity to do something or other.  But he doesn’t say means, capacity, ability or skills.  He says “wherewithal.”  I think his use of this rather uncommon and archaic word means something else too.  “Wherewithal” doesn’t mean simply having the means; but in its mystery suggests also some concern about not only not having the means or skills or abilities but also some concern as to what these skills, abilities, capabilities and means might be.

To get from point A to point B one has various means at one’s disposal: a car, a bike, a motor scooter, or feet.  Wherewithal points to the mystery or variousness of the means.  I think Brother Dan’s use of the term did not just start after his aphasia but is in part an attempt to encapsulate his relationship to his aphasia or of his self to the aphasia.  He knows he once had the means to get his thoughts directly and clearly out; he took those means for granted as we all do.  And we all do because really we don’t know and nobody does the means by which a thought or a notion or an idea gets from the head out into the air and into another person’s ear.  Because he doesn’t know the means he cannot either choose between whatever various means there might be.

When it comes to a malfunction or the simple functioning of the brain, the question of whether the means justifies the ends or not makes no sense at all, because without the means the end simply cannot come into being.

I speculate and speculate only that perhaps Brother Dan’s aphasia involves a mix up or an altered connection between the sound of a word and what it might mean as a means of communication.  Some of his writing has lots of puns in it; I think here of the old “there,” “they’re,” “their”—the same sound for three meanings.  Not that his puns are this dull, but where he means “dispel” he writes “distell.”  There is some connection here too with the issue of rhyming.  Some aphasiacs are able to remember and sing right through a song that rhymes; but can’t talk out a free standing improvised sentence.  So rhythm—the stress of the words is important too.

A good deal more than the pure conveying of meaning is involved in speech.  There’s also sound and the overlapping or potential punnings in that sound, there is rhythm (that comes more to the fore in speech arising from emotion) and occasionally there is rhyme as establishing a pattern for speech (that may also act as an aid to memory).  And at the other extreme, there is something like what I am trying to write here.  Speech stripped of all the elements that make it speech.

 Actually DST makes no philosophic sense.  There is no way to save daylight or not to save it.  There’s as much daylight in a day as there is daylight in that day.  The US first put in DST to save light so people wouldn’t turn on their electric lights which consumed energy.  After WWI though DST was repealed; it came back again in WWII.  The rationale again being: energy savings. DST should be called EST (Energy Savings Time) But there seems to be no evidence that energy is actually saved, because in reality just as there is as much light in a given day as there is light, so there is as much dark.  So people who have to get up before the sun comes up still have to use electricity and energy with it.

I remember Nixon in trying to cope with Oil Embargo extended DST year round.  They thought that would bring a savings in oil.  Fat chance, the idiots.  Instead, kids had to go to school in the pitch dark.  I remember footage of disconsolate waifs trudging their way to school carrying flashlights.

You can probably relate the movement into universal DST for the USA directly to the growth of the consumer society.  Business interests favor DST because it has been shown for a fact that when it gets dark people shop less.  They stay home (thus saving energy from car use) or maybe they go out to a movie.  The Republicans forced another week of DST on the public this year, explicitly stating as their reason: people will buy more when it's light out. Banks, symbolically here, representing business interests, usually open at nine because when DST first started businesses were encouraged to open an hour later so people wouldn’t be fumbling about in the dark to get to the bank.

DST is a shell game favoring the forces that want us to consume, consume, consume.  It should be called BST or Business Savings Time.  If the supporters of BST could they would outlaw winter.

I hate it for political reasons and also because I have a very accurate inner clock.  It knows how long an hour is, but it can’t count or tell time.  For at least a week, maybe more, my interior clock will be stuck in either RT or DST and until the interior clock adjusts for a week or more I will go around not sure of what time it is.  My inner clock will tell me what time it is and that part of me that knows how to count (or more what numbers mean) will tell me that it’s another.

Carol and I have continued to walk to Ellwood most every day.  The sky has been active and I got some pics for a colorful sky.  I have been trying to upload bigger pics into a popup window and failed over and over either because I don't know what I am doing or because my blog program lacks the technical ability.  So I have tried again another way.

Below are smaller images of big pics that I hope you can get to by clicking on the BP (big picture) written in below the image.....Let's see...

BP 

 Click on image

 Click on image

Well, I got that to work at little, but I'll never do it again, not until, at least, I learn how to do it more efficiently. 

Well, this week has been too long already what with painters and plasterers coming and going, and today we are going to have to clear out of the place by nine when the rug cleaning people come and finally when they are through the repairs will be done and then we are going to have to start putting stuff back where it was and all the stuff I have unplugged I will have to plug in again and that’s not easy since I have become a computer freak with no end of cords to plug in again.  I sit there with a cord in my hand and think now where the hell does this mother go and sometimes I get it right and sometimes I don’t.

And this week as a supervisor I  had to visit three of the TAs I supervise and one fellow lecturer for the purposes of job review, with more to come, though I am nearly done.  I go sit in somebody’s class for an hour and watch them do what they do.  I do this because I am supposed to not because I want to or feel that it’s very useful.  Over the years I have learned that it’s pretty hard to help somebody improve as a teacher.  I visit one person and think, well, that person will improve and I visit another and think that person is dead in the water.  Some people learn from their teaching experience and others don’t.  The first won’t benefit from my trying to help and the latter, well, there’s really not much point in trying to help.

 In one of the classes I visited the teacher, a TA, was having her students do field work—observations and surveys—on the topic of the notorious IV Halloween bash.  I sat with a small group while they went through their questions.  The first question on one survey was something like, “Did you hook up over Halloween with a UCSB athlete?”  I said that “hook up” might be ambiguous; and later others agreed.  So the student changed the wording to something like, “Did you kiss, fondle, caress, excite or have sexual intercourse with a UCSB athlete?”

Now hooking up is not like having a date.  It’s a kind of random thing.  Like two people sort of bump into each other in a random sexual manner.  So later on in the survey was the question, “Did you know this person before you hooked up with him or her?” Or something to that effect.  Other surveys featured stuff like, “Did you do any drugs other than alcohol at Halloween.”  And: “If you wore a costume was it conservative or provocative and why?”

Man, did I feel old.  And stuff like this and stuff in my own classes has led me to feel increasingly alienated from the students I teach.  Hell, this stuff has made me not like them, as a group.  I really don’t like to be judgmental because being judgmental gets in the way of understanding and I want to understand.  But when you don’t or can’t understand, it gets to be too easy to be judgmental.  The first time I had sex I knew the person; we had spent considerable time together; and I was stone cold sober that first time and I am glad now that I was.  I can remember it.