December 2007 Archives

Still mulling Winnicott’s contention that one, while being careful not to locate a clock where one is not, creates one’s perception of a clock through conception and apperception.  No, that’s not quite correct. Or maybe it is.  In any case, I have been looking for an example and think I have found one in the DNA issue.

Watson and Crick are credited with having “discovered” the structure of DNA: the double helix.  The word “discovery” implies that the structure was already there—pre-existing Watson and Crick—to be discovered via perception.

 

 

But I think there’s a prior problem; one may perceive but not “know” what one perceives.

Why and how did Watson and Crick know what they were discovering?  Well, more or less digressively, they did not come to know it through the so called scientific method.  Rather, their piece in Nature with the picture of the double helix was a piece of rampant speculation arrived at, not my testing, hypothesis and so on, but by a synthesis of things previously known.

More specifically Watson, in The Double Helix, acknowledges the contributions of A) Erwin Chargaff.  He found out that the DNA in any cell has a 1:1 ratio of pyrimidine and purine bases and, more specifically, that the amount of guanine is equal to cytosine and the amount of adenine is equal to thymine. B) the work of Linus Pauling on amino acids (proteins), his discover of the function of the double helix in the structure of amino acids and by way of method his use of models to demonstrate the structures of amino acids.  And C) and most importantly, I think, the x-ray work of Rosalind Franklin.

Watson nearly pissed his pants when he saw one of Franklin’s x-rays.  This very one I think:

 

 

Franklin, however, for her own reasons I suppose did not see this as a picture of a double helix.  Clearly she perceived the structure in this x-ray.  But she did not know it.  Watson and Crick knew it because, following Winnicott’s strange claim, they brought to it conceptions, models, speculations, and imagination.  These led them to create what was already there: the structure of DNA.

So what’s the point?  Not much.  Except that what we know about a perception is not the same thing as the perception. Most of the time of course we do not create what we know.  Rather we have been socialized into knowing what we perceive.  A long schooling has taught me that a green light means I can go.

Creation, per se, is not perception, nor is it simply knowing what is perceived, but seeing or knowing something new about what is perceived.

So the question to my mind is not how depression, which appears maladaptive, proves through secondary gains adaptive for the individual gene carrier.  Rather how does the depression of the individual gene carrier contribute, not to his or her particular survival, but to the survival of the group as a whole?

Since I lack any scientific evidence for what I have to say I must engage in rampant speculation and attempt to imagine circumstances that suggest how depressed gene carriers might have been of benefit to the whole.  And since about the only think I really know is me—and not very well even there—I imagine myself in Pre Historic Times.  I am a very pasty white person and my knowledge of family genealogy suggests my particular genetic make up evolved in quite cold areas, like England, and possibly prior to that Denmark.

So I imagine a time and a world that, for certain periods of time was warm, and then for extended periods extremely cold.  What was one to do on those days but to sit in one’s cave, eat bits of bark and insects possibly, while trying not to freeze to death?  I think such circumstances might have depressed the hell out of anybody.  But this is situational depression, not genetic.  I am talking about the folks who are depressed even when it’s all warm and sunny.

One thing we know about depression today is that depressed people tend to lose their appetites and, in many cases, sleep way too much.  The tendency to not eat and to sleep excessively seems to be in the circumstances as described quite adaptive for the individual gene carrier since in those cold months in the cave there was very little to eat and little to do but sleep. 

Further these depressed people might have functioned for the whole as “role models.”  Even the more active and non-depressed types might have located in the behavior of the depressed a way to endure their terrible circumstances.  If I am not to go completely insane or stir crazy under these horrible circumstances perhaps I should mimic the behavior of my depressed colleagues who while perpetually miserable seem able to endure terrible circumstances.

The non depressed person, one knowing hope, might then have adapted the behavior of the depressed knowing that this too will pass and the sun will shine again.  The depressed persons would lack this consolation—that the sun will one day come out again and there will be plenty of berries and flightless birds to eat—and think, yes, this too will pass…when I die.  That for the depressed would seem to be the only end in sight and death one might say really is maladaptive.

I therefore conclude that the depressed, lying around moaning and groaning, began to try to imagine reasons for their maladaptive selves and so became the first philosophers and religious figures.  Why did this terrible thing happen?  Why did my infant die at birth or my spouse for no apparent reason?  Well, you know…the gods did it.  Thus the depressed became the first ideologues; people desperate to explain and somehow understand the unmitigated horror of their condition. In which case, I believe I can claim, that the depressed contributed mightily to the survival of the whole, and I say this without fear of contradiction because there is no way to prove me wrong, and for that matter to prove—thinking of those pseudo scientists—that individual gene carriers in Pre Historic times were ever depressed.
 

Recently a pseudo science of a sort has started to emerge called “evolutionary psychology.”  The basic premise seems to be that our emotions or psychology must have evolved at different times and in different situations as means or ways for individual gene carriers to survive in these different times and situations.  In other words, the premise says: emotions must serve an evolutionary adaptive purpose.  Take anger for example.  That clearly could serve adaptive purposes; surely it is closely related to the fight part of the deeply embedded (somewhere down on the back of the neck) fight/flight response.  Flight is of course related to fear.  If one did not feel it—at the appropriate moments—one might rather maladaptively be eaten, for example.

Since to their credit these speculative pseudo scientists do take what they do seriously they have been forced also to look at emotions that on the face of it seem maladaptive, one of the big ones of those being—you guessed it—depression.  Once again the depressed get the shaft; if one is depressed one must be maladapted and generally unfit for normal human functioning.  One pseudo scientists looking into this matter suggests that depression may produce what ordinary non-evolutionary psychologists call “secondary gains.”

Take for example you have a phobia about loud, sudden popping sounds.  Every time you hear a loud, sudden popping sound, you freak out, break into sweats and piss yourself.  Now the secondary gain here might be that you are rendered completely and recognizably unfit to serve in the military where loud, sudden popping sounds frequently occur.  So what appears maladative turns out to be adaptive in that one has less of a chance of being killed in some war. I am making a joke of course, but that’s roughly the reasoning.

The pseudo scientist concluded that depressed people back in cave person times may, as a result of their depression, have received extra attention—in the form of say, what the hell is wrong with you and can’t you get up off your butt—and resources.  Other people might for example feel the need to feed you (since you are their genetic extension or even one’s mate, carrying one’s genetic extension) or something.  The depressed person pays a heavy price for these secondary gains (that is, being depressed) but secondary gains make it worth it and thus evolutionarily adaptive, rather than maladaptive.

Now of course this theory is as sexist as hell since it is well known—and seemingly verified by the advertising of anti-depressants which universally are directed at women—that many, many more women are depressed than men. Accordingly one must conclude that women are depressed, evolutionary speaking, to manipulatively acquire those secondary gains.

But there’s another problem with this outlook.  It’s based on the idea—more or less—that each individual being is largely out for his own.  But what if this is not the case; what if what is most distinctive about human beings (and their ability to survive) is not the survival of the individual but the survival of the whole.

I think again of the nervous prairie dog about which I have previously written in these pages.  This is the prairie dog that STANDS on the top of the prairie dog hill keeping an eye out for predatory birds (that might eat his fellow prairie dogs).  Now let’s face it: standing on top of the hill seems maladaptive for that individual prairie dog since clearly and stupidly this prairie dog is putting itself at considerable risk from exactly those predators that it seeks to detect.

Maladaptive for that individual prairie dog, well yes, maybe; adaptive for the whole and the survival of it.  Conclusively.  Yes.

So I woke wretchedly at 6 AM.  I say wretchedly because when I wake at six that means I have only managed seven hours sleep; not enough for an aging male.  But I wake and can’t get back to sleep so I go into my closet office.  I check the weather on Yahoo, and it says the temp at 5:58 AM was 34 degrees.  It’s now 620 or so and the temp in my little office must be like 38.

I have this miserable little electric heater that I don’t like to use much because it is a wasteful mother and I wish I hadn’t bought it.  Also the cat has come in and sets to meowing.  I know what she wants.  She wants me to turn on the electric heater.  So I do, but given the narrow confines of my closet office, I end up pointing the heater at her and not at me.  I think about aiming it at me but when I see her so  blissed-out in front of the little heater I just don’t have the heart.  So she gets all warmed up and I don’t.

Neither the cat nor I am used to this cold.  It started last winter and it has come back this winter.  We have had at least three weeks of night time temps falling into the mid thirties, sometimes dropping to 32, sometimes rising to 38.  This is a relatively new thing—for years—afterall we live less than a mile from the ocean which tends to moderate temps—having the time fall into the 30’s was worthy of remark.  Like, oh my, we are going to freeze to death.  Now temps in the 30s have become ordinary.

No big deal…temps in the 30s; what sort of wimp are you?  But I should point out that we live in a Southern California condo.  I might as well be living in a tent.  These places weren’t built for inclement weather.  Especially places, like this one, built back in 1973.  No double paned windows back then; some insulation, I guess, but not much.  Also we don’t have any heat.  Well, we have it but it’s awful.

Back in 1973 the Atomic Energy Commission was pushing nuclear power plants as an unlimited source of electricity.  Consequently—and it must have seemed hip at the time—we have electrical heat by which I mean we have wires behind that plaster stuff on the ceiling.  Electricity goes into these tiny wires, resistance occurs and heat is generated.  The wires must be insulated since so far the roof has not caught on fire.

But maybe that was luck because we have turned on this so-called heat less than six times in the last 15 years.  Mostly because we haven’t needed it.  Now we need it, but don’t use it.  A) Because we are not sure it works anymore.  The last time we tried little heat was generated.  B) Because when it did work the heat produced was very, very dry.  The back of one’s throat became parched and one felt as if one were being slowly baked or broiled alive.

So there I was at 630 AM in the pitched dark, feeling just plain miserable, this being my usual miserable plus being cold misery, which is not just being cold misery but cold that also produces misery in my increasingly arthritic joints.  Also on yahoo I saw the high for the day was going to be 58.  When the sun came up, I saw only slate grey sky.

Carol and I decided something had to be done, so we took a 20% off coupon to Bed, Bath, and Beyond and bought a little electric heater that’s safe and pretty efficient (though I won’t want to see the electricity bill this month).  Now that the place has warmed up a little Carol and I have concluded, by way of contrast, that we have been living in somewhat unnatural state of coldness for at least two months.  We were pretty used to it; but today is/was over the top.

Freud who pretty much felt life was suffering at the best wrote mostly about mental illness and didn’t spend much time defining mental health.  He did say once when asked say something to the effect that mental health (as the lack of mental illness) goes along with the ability “to love and to work.”  Later psychoanalysts took a stab at conceptualizing mental health more positively (as something more than the absence of mental illness).

One of those later psychoanalysts was D.W. Winnicott.  He emphasized, as did Kohut and others, that part, perhaps even the backbone of mental health, is the capacity to be creative.  He didn’t mean by creativity painting, necessarily, or playing the piano, or such truck.  In any case it’s quite possible to do any one of these things and still not be creative.  One can find many highly proficient even brilliant pianists who are nothing but technicians without a creative bone in their ten fingers.

Winnicott thought a person could be creative concocting a recipe; and in this context he makes a strange comment about clocks (which is what I am still thinking about re: duration and spatial time):

The fact is we create what is already there, but the creativeness lies in the way we get at perception through conception and apperception.  So when I look at a clock, as I must do now, I create a clock, but am careful not see clocks except where I already know there is one.

Winnicott wrote like that: more suggestively and elliptically than discursively or systematically.  He must have felt this last thought particularly elliptical even for him because he concludes the paragraph by saying:

            Please do not turn down this piece of absurd unlogic—but look at it and use it.

Well, I don’t think Winnicott was an idiot, so I have in fact tried to look at this piece of “absurd unlogic” and use it.

I am still stumped.  I get the part about being careful not to see clocks where there are no clocks; otherwise one would necessarily be hallucinating clocks, not a good mental space to be in.  Now though I am thinking about clocks and wonder if his choice of the clock, rather than say a chair or a stool, was not, even if unconsciously selected for a particular reason. A clock is different from a chair; the former tells us something (the time); while the latter does not say “sit.”  So I want to think that perhaps the clock was not randomly selected as he sat there at this desk, as something he was aware of because he needed to finish this damn essay and get onto something else.

Could the clock as the teller of time represent that objective world (the one we find) that in telling us the time tells us what and when to do it?  I say “objective” because people don’t argue about what time it is—there isn’t anything to argue about—if they have clocks and those clocks are set to the same standard or can be adjusted mathematically (say by time zone).

This presents to my mind my odd question for the day: can we speak of an object world without it also being a real world.  Apparently…Yes…

Christmas morning, Carol and I took a walk along the beach.  I had never seen the tide so high before.  Places where we had sat, plus vegetation, had disappeared.  You can see how the ocean has cut into the sand, making a whole new beach.

The tide was too high for us to walk in our usual direction so we headed in the other direction and came to this spot where the ocean had broken through the beach and was feeding water into the lagoon.  

I looked back over the blog to see what I was thinking about on Christmas, 2006.  But I could find no entry for that day.  Then I remembered I had an awful day.  That was the day I decided not to watch the Lakers anymore because watching them play so pathetically made me want to throw the TV through the window; and later that day in some sort of fit, I banged my head into the wall, leaving a roundish indentation in the sheet rock.  Now that’s always embarrassing.

Looking back, I see I was going through withdrawal from that terrible effexor.  That was part of the problem, maybe the straw that broke the camel’s back.  But partly too, there was all that other stuff going on at the time.  Trying to sell Joan’s house being the big thing so we would have the money to pay for the place where she was staying.  We had made the deal for the house, but it hadn’t closed.  I was waiting and I hate that and I was still recovering from the pneumonia.  All and all, I felt like jumping out of my skin.

I can’t believe that was just one year ago; it feels like eons.  These last two years feel like eons.  How can that be? I wondered yesterday, I think, and remembered having read the French philosopher Bergson on something he called duration.  Scientifically or objectively speaking, last Christmas was 365 days ago.  How can 365 days feel like more than that?  That’s where duration may come in as the explanatory factor.  Bergson wrote:

When I follow with my eyes on the dial of a clock the movement of the hand which corresponds to the oscillations of the pendulum, I do not measure duration, as seems to be thought; I merely count simultaneities, which is very different. Outside of me, in space, there is never more than a single position of the hand and the pendulum, for nothing is left of the past positions. Within myself a process of organization or interpenetration of conscious states is going on, which constitutes true duration. It is because I endure in this way that I picture to myself what I call the past oscillations of the pendulum at the same time as I perceive the present oscillation. Now, let us withdraw for a moment the ego which thinks these so-called successive oscillations: there will never be more than a single oscillation, and indeed only a single position, of the pendulum, and hence no duration.

I don’t know if this explains anything or not, but to follow up on what Bergson says, we might imagine a year clock with 365 positions or ticks on it.  When we count these ticks, he seems to say, we are thinking of time in terms of the spaces between the ticks.  Each tick perceived in space is a single position with no past positions implied.  But in duration one endures and in that position, outside of space,  all the past ticks are summed up or implied in the previous ticks.  Something like that.

So perhaps this feeling: “I cannot believe last Christmas was only 365 days ago” arises from my immersal in “duration.”  From that perspective, the perspective of duration, all the days merge and flow indistinguishable into each other.  There is no such thing as 365 days ago.

This Christmas is not the tick to the tock of last Christmas.

Yesterday, I made up some chicken cacciatore which is pretty tasty and not all that fattening and pretty easy to make except for the chicken part but you need the chicken part if you are going to make chicken cacciatore.  At the store the chicken comes in all shapes and sizes.  You have your separate plastic wraps of chicken legs and chicken thighs and chicken breasts with or without the skin, and these are all packaged up in neat little rows, and separated out like that these pieces don’t really look like a chicken at all. 

I guess if you bought a bunch of chicken legs and chicken thighs and chicken breasts you could sort of assemble something that looked like a chicken.

They also have whole cut up chickens.  Plastic wraps that have two legs and two thighs and two breasts and sometimes the back.  Once I saw a mistake and the package had three legs in it and only one thigh, like the parts had come from a three legged chicken.  But, hell, I don’t know if those parts even come from the same chicken.  In this case, apparently not.
 

 

I bought some chicken scissors a while back.  Those help me out and I have knives too; so I have pretty much what I need to cut up a chicken.  First I clean out the stuff they stick inside the chicken—I wonder who the hell does that—the gizzard, the liver, and of course the neck, which in the chicken’s natural state is not inside the chicken but out there in front holding up the chicken head. 

Then I cut off the Pope’s or Pastor’s nose depending on how you look at it.  And then I go to work on the carcass per se.  First off comes the thighs with legs attached and then the wings, and then I separate the legs from the thighs and then I cut out the back and separate the breast into two breasts and then I skin the whole damn thing, so by the time it looks like half the chicken is going into the trash.

I don’t know.  It seems pretty wasteful, though sometimes I give in and fry up the liver.  But I don’t like the gizzard and neither of us eats the back or the neck, and every time I do it I feel like I am going to cut off one of my fingers in the process.  And this last time, the chicken was damn cold and I had to keep warming up my fingers while doing the job.

Like I said, chicken cacciatore is pretty easy except for the chicken part.  I could make it easier by just buying the whole cut up chicken, but that costs like twice as much.  But I don’t think that’s it.  It just seems—I don’t why—right to buy the whole, fully assembled chicken and then cut the sucker up myself.

My shrink has been warning me for five years at least that as I approach those “golden years” I should find some things that I do and want to do just for myself.  Otherwise she seems to suggest I will just dry up and become even more bitter and cranky than I already am.  It’s a life and death matter.  But I remain uncertain about what she means—what is this thing I want to do for myself.  I suppose she means something like a hobby, maybe, collecting stamps or bird watching.

But I remember—when was it? 15 years or so ago or maybe longer—she started hounding me at every session.  What do you want Neek (she is French so Nick comes out Neek); what is it exactly that you want?  This question just drove me crazy.  It pissed me off.  I understood the words, but not what they meant exactly or how they might apply to me in particular.  What I wanted, I had learned over my childhood, was not a matter of any significance.

I don’t remember my parents having ever been interested in what I wanted, except as in “what the hell do you want” and “stop bugging me” because you can’t have it since money doesn’t grow on trees and if wishes were horses beggars would ride.  If wants come f rom wishes I was pretty much horseless.  So to drag out the metaphor I became a foot soldier, one of those Roman Legionaries that just march along, do as they are told (because their lives depended on doing that) and took pride in wanting next to nothing.  Sure I needed a few things, that was a matter of survival; but wanting things, well, that was a damn luxury I could live without.

So when my shrink said Neek, what do you want, the question struck right at the heart of who I am—a person that might need some things, but want nothing.  I would rant and rave about how wanting stuff just got you screwed anyway.  Want stuff and you are going to have to live with the pain of not getting it.  You were going to fail.  And then I would go all Buddha on her and talk about how desire or want was just the road to suffering.   Or maybe existentialist and talk about how our beings are contingent and how wanting just led to increased anxiety in the face of a fluid and unpredictable future.

I was a tough nut to crack alright.  Fact was, while she was plenty smart, I was smarter and could pretty well thrown up an effective road block to anything she might say in this vexed area of Neek, what do you want?  But all unconsciously my brain went to work on the problem and finally I copped to the idea that maybe she wasn’t asking me about what I wanted in the future but what I wanted right now, at this instant.  I didn’t know what that was either, but gradually it dawned on me that maybe she wasn’t asking me what I wanted in some big way, like whether I wanted to live in the USA or Canada, but like, “right now I want to scratch my ass.” 

Time was I would go on this semi-rant with my students—to make some sort of point I guess—that we had all become such unnatural creatures that we no longer knew even when we wanted to sleep or when we wanted to eat or what we wanted to eat.  We ate by the clock, we slept by the clock, we move and breathe by the clock.  So all this thinking on wanting led me to the conclusion, that much of what I did was not the consequence of my wanting something but was the product of compulsion.
 

I was driven, but I did not drive.

I am sort of sad about the Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens thing.  How could Barry jump up and down like that when he hit that dinger that beat out Hammering Hank knowing he had gotten to the place where he could jump up and down like that because he had been using “performance enhancement drugs.”  As for Roger Clemens I never liked him much; seemed like a pretty surly number to me.

But maybe it’s not the guys so much as the system we live in these days.  Hell, you think you are the best and everybody is getting ahead of you and you know they are using those drugs, so why not use them yourself.  It’s the competition thing.

The LA Times re: the steroid scandal ran an article on brain enhancement drugs, all the things people are using these days to enhance the brain.  Corporate guys are using them, academics, guys who work a lot with computers, and of course students.  The favorite these days among students seems to be Adderall.  This is generally described as a sort of super compound of amphetamine salts.

The article in the LA Times says that these drugs make you smarter and, hey, who wants to be dumb?  So take the pills, I guess.  Certainly they do something, but I don’t think they increase intelligence, though they do help with concentration, whatever that might be.  They allow you to take whatever brains you have and use them more effectively and efficiently.  So you can do what you need to do without all those interior distractions that pop up and you can stay awake longer doing whatever it is you need to do.

So students take them all the time, especially getting prepped for finals.  They stay up a couple of days at a time, but I don’t think that means they learn anything exactly.  Back in 1968, the health center where I went to college, was just handing out Dexedrine because the guys were having a hard time, getting depressed and all about the idea of being drafted.  I went in and got some.

I had this class in modern philosophy; a whole hunk of the final was going to be about Wittgenstein’s Tractatus.  Honestly, I didn’t understand this at all; it was sort of mathematic philosophy related to symbolic logic and what later became known as analytic philosophy.  Because I couldn’t understand it, I just decided to memorize, and the Dexedrine helped along with the fact that the whole thing was mathematical, with one axiom leading to another and so on.  So when I got to the test I just looked inside my head and wrote down what was there—it was almost as if I were reading from pages engraved in my head.  As soon as I stepped out the door—I aced the test—the pages disappeared as if all the pages had been broken like glass.

Conclusion:  I didn’t learn a thing.  Extra added conclusion: when students use brain enhancement drugs—given that most of what they are tested on is stuff they have to memorize—they don’t learn anything either.  They just pass the test.  That's part of the competition thing.

Yesterday—that would be Tuesday, I guess—we did business going first to a broker who confused and perplexed the hell out of us with his talk of genni maes (whatever the hell those are) mars (whatever the hell those are), but Carol managed to get the money her mother her left divided up (between her and her sister) and then we went to a bank to make the wire transfers from another account Mrs. Press had there and as soon as I saw the three women in charge of what was going on I got up and left immediately because I just knew I couldn’t stand watching three incompetents make a wire transfer….and sure enough, when I came back, Carol said it had been hell and had she not been there to direct the three it would never have gotten done, but was done while I was sitting at a Starbucks tired out of my mind and about to scream at all those people screaming over their cell phones many of them in foreign tongues that I could not identify at all.

 

So finally we got to the little hotel in downtown SD where we planned to stay the night down by the water so we could walk down there and vacation a tiny bit, but—what do you know—their boiler had blown its top and they had no heat at all.  We checked out the room but you could have stored frozen food in there so they found another room for us at a Hampton Inn along an ugly strip of motels and fast food joints, right next to the damn railroad tracks.  So the room looks ok but the TV goes on and off of its own accord when ever the hell it feels like it as if a ghost is screwing with the remote.  So Carol calls down and finally Gustavo comes up, the TV guy for the building, and shows me how to unplug the TV to keep it from going on at night while we are sleeping because he says the TV picks up signals from cells and all manner of electronic apparatus.

 

 

So then later on after we had a good dinner at an Italian place, I plug the TV in but we can only get one channel.  I monkey around with the cords in the back so finally we get more than one channel but only half the ones we are supposed to get.  So Gustavo comes back up and checks it out  and decides the thing needs a whole new box and he goes down to get one and get it programmed at the front desk but I mess with some cords in the back because a connection seems bad and bingo we get all the channels though of course there is nothing at all worth watching, except for episodes of that purposefully disgusting Family Guy, which was pretty awful except for one inspired bit with the bloopers and outtakes of that Osama guy making a video tape threatening to take out the Western World.  And while we are watching the bad TV people keep trying to break into our room because they can't read numbers I guess and so they rattle the door knob when their key won't work, and then people come rapping at the door saying they are all looking for Mr. Kim and Carol says Mr. Kim is not in the room but they might try the door right next to ours because some really popular person seems to be in that room.  Lord Knows what Mr. Kim is up to but he is in high demand.

So all and all the trip served to confirm me in my opinion that the United States is falling apart right before my eyes, that things have become far too complex for anybody to manage properly, and that cell phones should be banned from any and all public places.  People using them outside of their cars and their homes should be forced to go stand in the places reserved for people who smoke.

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I got a strong vibe from that seagull right outside our hotel window, so I took a pic.

The second one is the fore mast of the Star of India an actual sailing ship in the SD museum of old ships.

The last one is the main mast of the Star.  I like all the lines. 

 Sister in Law Teresa baked a cake for me; the birthday song was sung; I blew out the candles and then we ate the cake

For the birthday song as sung click below.

Download file

Carol and I will be heading down to SD via aeroplane tomorrow about mid-morning, I guess.  We just don’t want to drive through LA ever again and especially not now at the Holidays, plus a new airline is flying out of SB that offers rates half as much as American Eagle was charging for there and back.  So we are going the elderly route and will sit on our butts up in the air for a mere 55 minutes before landing at old Lindberg field, named after the Lindberg who flew solo across the Atlantic in what I think was called the Spirit of Saint Louis, though it was mostly built in SD.

I am going along to keep Carol company while she does bank, accountant, broker stuff with her mother’s trust and so they can see me in the flesh and conclude I am not an active terrorist on the basis of my complexion and advanced years.  I don’t look forward to the trip, not for any particular reason maybe, except that I have too much mushroom in me and not like to have my environment changed that much. 

But I will get to see Brother Dave, and Brother Steve, and Sister in Law Teresa, along with their Boys, David and Stephen, and also Stephen’s two kids, Jake and Blake, and wife Julie tomorrow evening.  So we will sit and talk and eat and stay over at Brother Dave’s and head out early Tuesday morning to go up towards Escondido to visit banks and such.

Well, that safe we bought was a real crap out.  We got it bolted it to the floor, and I must say it is really bolted, but then Carol couldn’t get it to lock when she closed it.  So I closed it, with a bang, and it locked, and we unlocked it and Carol tried it again, and it didn’t work.  So I closed it with a bang and gave the handle a jerk, and the damn handle broke right off in my hand—some sort of composite plastic.  That shouldn’t have happened because I am like no Jack LaLanne or something to that effect.  So now we have this useless safe bolted to the floor just when I would like to throw the freaking thing out the window.

I was sorry to hear Cousin Janet has the pneumonia; I had that stuff last fall, I guess it was, and it is nasty and lingers and drains you of energy.  And at the holidays no less….though I must say I have real mixed feelings about the holidays, though I won’t go into that now.

BC sent us the most Christmassy card she could and I must say it is impressively Christmassy.  This picture makes the card seem like a picture in a magazine, but it isn’t—it’s one of those fold out cards with a complete multilayered Christmas scene.  That’s my finger over to the left so you can tell it’s a card because I am holding it and taking a picture of it at the same time, which pretty much maxes out my multi-tasking abilities.

 

 

 

So I have just returned from my birthday dinner.  On the way we stopped at an auto shop to get a new brake light for Carol’s Honda, since she had been cited for not having one.  I am bloated and somewhat groggy because we went to the nearby Sizzler that was held up by some crazy person a few months back.  I mean who would hold up a Sizzler:  hand over all your steak!

So far it’s been a good birthday because I have not hit anything or banged my head against the wall or thrown anything.  I haven’t even cursed out the TV.  But then I haven’t watched it yet.

Yesterday I started cursing out this while guy seated in my car.  I wanted to turn right as did all of the five cars in front of me.  But here comes this pedestrian and the first person in line being ultra polite I guess didn’t cut in front of the guy, so we had to all had to sit and watch this jerk amble, nay saunter, across the walk with an ipod wire sticking out of one ear and his cell phone plastered to the other yakking away as if there was nobody in the damn world other than his holiness.  And in the middle of the road he pauses to let fly a “snot rocket.”  Not only was he slow; he was damn disgusting.  I wanted to rip out his heart out and shove it down his throat!

But so far today, I have thrown no fits nor have I felt particularly fit to be tied.  I was annoyed at the club when the guy at the front desk, whom I don’t know from Adam (not like my student who works there) wished me a happy birthday because somehow when he typed in my ID number the computer told him it was my birthday—the personal impersonal touch you know—and so he said, happy birthday but without much conviction, I must say. 

And the only workout machine left was the oldest one of all and it doesn’t ask you your age or weight, so I didn’t get to punch in 62, as I had planned and was looking forward to doing.

At the Sizzler I said I was a senior and wanted to order off the senile menu which I did, getting a 6 ounce steak and a baked potato with every damn thing in the world on it, what with real butter and sour cream, and then there is the salad bar where I had real Thousand Island dressing on a salad with real bits of bacon sprinkled on top as well as some sort of macaroni.  I used to make my own Thousand Island dressing years ago, by throwing some real mayonnaise into a bowl and mixing in some catsup to get the right sort of color and then I would pour in sweet pickle juice and pepper it up a little.  Now I used your damn balsamic vinegar something or other, one serving of which is 15 calories.

When I ate my baked potato I also ate the skin.  I was told that the skin was the most nutritious part, so I always ate it and it helped to fill me up besides.  I don’t understand it when people don’t eat the skin of the potato.  That’s the best part.  And when I had my fried chicken leg—back in the old days—I would always eat that crunchy part at the end of the leg and then I would bite off the end of the leg and suck out the marrow—because I was told that was the best part and it helped to fill me up too.

But now I am all growed up and have my own money and go to the Sizzler and eat till I am bloated—my god they even have onion rings!—and all for 8.99 off the senior senile menu.

If I remembered any of my other birthdays—which I don’t—I would probably rank this one in the top five, I guess.

Thanks to all who have sent me birthday best wishes.  I appreciated them.

Thank you.

Tomorrow, if I go to work out, my workout machine will ask me, as it does every time I work out on it, how much I weigh.  I will punch in 165.  And then it will ask me how old I am and for the first time ever in my life, I will punch in 6 damn 2.  That’s 62.  So the Brothers are right in suggesting my birthday is this week; and Brother Dan was dead on when he said he thought it was December 14.

Yep, I was born—do the math—on December 14, 1945.  According to my calculations and something Joan said that I didn’t really need to do know I was probably conceived sometime in April in that year.

So I was cooking in the womb or just about to be around the time FDR died on April 12, 1945 and about the time that Hitler guy killed his ugly ass, April 20, 1945.  Of course, I was pretty much a primordial state of cellular development at that time, but it freaks me out to think even the gestational me was around when FDR walked and Hitler was down in his bunker doing whatever crazy shit he was doing at the time.

I am making no connection except chronological here and not at all suggesting that either FDR’s or Hitler’s spirits transmigrated to my developing being.

1945 just seems so damn long ago.  Even to me and I was there.  I can’t imagine how long ago it must seem to my students.  The damn dark ages, I guess….when the world was in black and white and before it got color or High Def.  WWII is pretty much Low Def and the sound isn’t too good either.

So let’s say the average student I teach was born—well, about 1987.  That means I was born about 42 years before most of my students saw the light of day.  And what the hell do I know about the world 42 years before I was born; damn, that would be 1903, I guess.  I think that other Roosevelt was President, Teddy.  But I don’t know who came after, right after. Was it Wilson?  No, there had to be somebody in between.  So I guess I really shouldn’t worry that much about what students don’t seem to know about the past.  Though I was a bit alarmed that one thought the Great Depression was in the 50’s.  And another thought the war to end all wars was WWII.

So tomorrow’s my birthday.

I have changed the Moody Guy page where I put up what I call songs; I have been revamping it and put up songs that I have tried to write over the last two years or so.  These songs are pretty depressing dealing as they do mostly with death.  Also they are not very musically appealing.  But I have been working on my software stuff, so I have stuck in a little drum.  And occasional effects, to lighten the load a little.  Also my voice is wearing out. I am working on another batch of songs.  Love songs!  Can you believe?  But if I sing them like I sing the ones I just put on the web these will be some pretty downer Love Songs. 

As I noted a while back, I went in for another sleep apnea test, all attached to cords and wires and stuff and had a terrible night’s sleep.  Yesterday finally I had my appointment with the pulmonary guy who specializes in apnea.  My blood pressure was up of course since being within ten feet of a doctor plunges me into an anxiety ridden state.

But hell this time the news was good I suppose. No more apnea, according to the test, so said the doctor.  All gone.  My sleep efficiency is sort of lower at 73%, meaning I had trouble getting to sleep and I may have returned to consciousness a few times during the night of that test, but I am no longer suffocating myself to death with my own tongue, soft palette and uvula attached.

 

 

 

That’s a relief—I can’t describe the hell I went through with those damn sleep apnea masks.  Burping, farting, hissing noises in the mask, lash marks across my face from trying to tighten the things so I wouldn’t hear those hissing noises.  And I would wake up sometimes with the tube attached to the masked wrapped clean around my neck.  But I stuck it out because clearly the apparatus helped to clear up the dark fatigue I was feeling at that time.

Then I began to lose weight.  I am convinced of course that the weight loss is due to some disease eating me up inside and that I am slowly wasting away, due either to that disease or pre-mature aging.  I got up to 202.  I was watching the protein, but not the carbs and I didn’t know the med I was on at the time, Effexor, was a known weight gain promoter.  Then I cut back on the carbs, started eating all kinds of green stuff, and got off the Effexor, and whap! Since spring of last year (2006) I dropped 40 pounds.  At least I was at 162 pounds yesterday (so that would be 40) though I have learned that weight can vary two pounds or better depending on one’s bowel movement cycle.

So the weight loss seems to have cleared the apnea issue. But that still leaves the snoring problem.  I wake Carol up with that snoring, so the doctor gave me a referral to see the ear, noise and throat people to see if they think cutting off some of my soft palette and my uvula would help with that.  I sure don’t like waking Carol up but swear and be damn if I am going to have them hack at my soft palette, which according to the doctor, goes “all the way back” in my case.  Where else is it supposed to go but all the way back I wondered?

Goddamn that soft palette that goes all the way back and that enormous uvula!

If it ain’t one thing it’s another.  And I am still dragging my ass from point A to point B possibly because as the doctor indicated—and I know anyway—depression is associated with fatigue.

So I am back to square one, but, happily, without a sleep apnea mask.  Now when I go through the air port security thing, I won’t have to led off to the side while they check to see if the cpap (that’s the machine that pumps the air into the tube that goes into the mask) is a bomb.

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Now does that look like a happy camper?  Or what? 

I have spent an inordinate amount of time over the years trying to understand the dialectic. There are different kinds of dialectic. Plato's for example. But I am thinking particular of Hegel's. He laid out the "structure" or "form" of the dialectic pretty clearly. Thesis; Antithesis; Synthesis. Usually this form if represented pictorially by a triangle:

 

This looks simple enough, I guess. It's the kind of things teachers like to draw and then stop talking about it. Because actually the whole damn thing is damn complicated. Hegel appears to claim for example that the synthesis does not represent a canceling out or answer to or something like that to the first two terms (thesis, antithesis) but that the first two terms are lifted up and preserved in the synthesis. He uses the word "aufhebung" frequently translated as sublated." Or to put it another way, nothing is lost in the process of the dialectic.

I have been interested in this partly because I am interested in the dialectic and partly because I am interested in the development of the psyche-soma. In the development of the psyche soma--nothing is cancelled out, everything is retained starting in the womb. Without the first primordial steps in the womb, none of the later steps in the development would be possible. Or for example, some people are concerned--whether they should be or not--when their child begins to walk and never crawls. Crawling is a prelude--and some thing necessary--for the next state of walking.

So in these diagrams I am trying...with great difficult..to fathom the notion of sublation. Yes, the primal steps are necessary. But more than that the steps that come later are not "higher" or "superior" stages of development--since all the steps in the development are necessary to the overall developmental process. It is hard to call the primal steps inferior when no steps would be possible without them.

The following represents my attempt to think about this critical issue of sublation (also related to the negation of the negation).

 

Here I plug some simple concepts into the dialectical triangle. Sometimes under thesis I have seen A and under antithesis I have see Not A. The synthesis would be then (A=not A). This suggests a pretty unstable configuration and one reason the more logically oriented have dismissed the dialectic entirely. How can A equal Not A? But here comes the negation of the negation (necessary to preserve the sublation as it appears in the synthesis). A is negated by Not A which turns out to be A in the synthesis as the negation of the negation (not A).

So I write in yes and then no which is the opposite of yes; and I arrive at Maybe--which preserves both the yes and the no--but in qualified form. The definitive yes and the definitive no are both cancelled out, yet preserved (I think) in "maybe."

Here's level two:

 

 

Here again, I attempt to preserve, sublate, all the terms so far encountered. The prior synthesis splits to become maybe yes or maybe no. Now things get even more tricky. Hegel's dialectic feels like it jumps; and people have complained about the transitions in the Phenomenology of Mind. Like, OK, I buy this, but how the hell do you get in the above diagram from maybe yes maybe no to Who Knows? Hell, it seems like a logical step to me...Maybe Yes, Maybe No..who knows? Also I think I am doing what Hegel does overall which is to move from the flat assertion of the truth of something--yes this is so, no this is not--to the role of the human subject in the construction of "knowledge."

Take the nature and nurture debate. Personally I consider this a completely sterile chicken-egg debate. Scientists have tried to study the subject statistically and come up with the surprising conclusion, hey, as far as we can tell it's 50% nature, 50% nurture. Freaking idiots. More alarmingly though as I see it is the fact that this question is viewed sub species aeternitatis (i.e. outside of and beyond time). Given this perspective, the subject (i.e. the person who is nurtured or natured) is completely left out of the equation BECAUSE the subject exists only in and by means of time. So there may be a sort of logic to my "who knows" because I am returning to and rooting the prior terms of my dialect in a subject, a who, that exists in time

OK...here comes level 3:

 

Well, I am not entirely satisfied with this third step. True, I have preserved the terms, all terms so far, in the thesis and then in the antithesis; but the synthesis strikes me as lame. Maybe I should drop that "can" and just go with "Who knows maybe yes, maybe no." Or perhaps I am getting at the idea or the question of whether or not it is possible to claim that one knows "confusion," or "conflict," or "contradiction," or "ambiguity" or "paradox." And perhaps also if one can claim to know "ambiguity" is one claming to know the unknowable as "ambiguity" and so in the process closing off the dialectic completely.

I don't know frankly. Frankly I don't know what it is even that I am trying to think. But this may say something about the dialectic generally; it's a bit of a trip; it can turn this way or that at any one of its hinges. The idea here--if there is an idea at all--Hegel would probably call it a notion, not an idea--is "knowable" only in its unfolding.

Enough unfolding for now. But I am pretty sure this idea of the dialectic is related to the bildung and the bildung in turn is related to a view of the education as developmental or as rooted in the development of the individual.

 

Brother Dan works for a software/service firm called Citrix.  I used one of their products a few years back before I knew they were located right here in town.  I subscribed to “Go to My PC.”  Windows comes with a lame-o version; go to Accessories, under that go to Communication; click on remote desktop and if you have all the right numbers you can hook up your home computer to say your computer at work, of if you are off traveling somewhere you can use it to hook up directly with your home computer.  And I do mean directly.  If you subscribe to Go to my PC it works real easily and once you get it to work, you can click on a spot and immediately up will come the screen of the PC you are trying to access, I mean the desktop and through that you can go directly into the distant PC as if it was sitting right there in front of you.  Say you need a document from your distant PC on the PC in front of you, you can go in, find the document, and email it to yourself to the PC in front of you.  They sell other more complicated services for business, and well, it’s a good product and they have been making money hand over fist.  If I were a traveling business man, I couldn’t live without it.

 
Brother Dan came by yesterday and he took me over to the new digs that Citrix is in the process of moving into—their corporate office.  Turns out it’s less than a mile from where I live, in a pack of buildings I hadn’t noticed before.

 

 

 

I have mixed feelings about everything.  I am sort of a master of ambivalence.  When my buddy and I were starting up the union and walking on thin ice with the administration and with our colleagues, sometimes—since he was more active in a daily way than I—he would come to me for a consult because he said I was the “conscience of the writing program.”  He was a funny guy and actually said things like that…

I felt sort of odd being the conscience of the writing program, because I didn’t know what that meant.  But he would have a bit of a dilemma about something; should we tell x what we had heard y say about z.  Or something to that effect.  Or should we hold a secret meeting to plan policy because d and e were disruptive.  And then I would say, well, I have mixed feelings, and go round and round looking at the question, all the time making the question less a matter of whether we should or not and more a matter of the nature of the question and what might be implied in it from a moral, ethical point of view, so in the end I wouldn’t be talking about the question at all, but about what it meant to be a human being, and the nature of decency, and the role of trust.  And he would listen and say, yes, you are right (not because I was right but because he knew he tended to think more in terms of strategy and power politics and I didn’t).

 

 

 

 I was doing the mixed feelings thing this morning at the club.  We had a tiny bit of rain last night, finally.  One guy said, “Well, that wasn’t much rain.”  He seemed to be condemning the tiny bit of rain for being tiny, so I said, “Yes, but maybe it’s the amount we need right now to get the green stuff growing a bit on the hills, so if the next rain is a big one we won’t have flooding.”  And another guy said, he had gone out to check his garden and the rain hadn’t gone down very far, and I said, “Yes, but I bet your garden is happy for the little bit it got.”  “You are certainly right about that,” he said.  So I said, “But of course the weeds will be happy too.”

 

I think I do this all the time and am not even aware I am doing it.  My favorite sentence construction must be “yes, but.”  A student says something and I say why yes of course that’s right, I can see that.  But..”  I think the “yes, but” comes from some sort of attempt on my part to get the whole picture into focus.  This can cause problems because you can come across internal contradictions in your own thinking, and if you are trying to look at the whole you have to admit there’s a contradiction.

This one old guy has been talking at me for several days about Global Warming.  So, he says, “If there is Global Warming, why are these people, especially liberals, going on about rebuilding New Orleans.  Shouldn’t we just close the whole thing down?”  I felt hoist on my own petard because I believe there is global warming, and if there is then he might be right.  Just shut down New Orleans.  Then as I was talking with him, the whole question switched to another level.  This guy doesn’t believe there is global warming or let’s say he believes in it but not as a byproduct of humanity’s destructive habits, but because the globe is simply warming up as we go out of an ice age.  For him the whole global warming thing is beyond human control (and human responsibility).  In the face of this implacable reality “New Orleans” should be closed down; this would be the logical and rational response to a change in nature.  But since I believe Global warming is at least partly the result of human activity, I don’t see the warming thing as being quite as implacable.  Thus save New Orleans because who knows, if we change our ways a bit, it might not just disappear under 20 feet of water. 

 The guy I was talking to is not into “yes, but” thinking, he is more either/or.

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We had a little bit of rain yesterday, but the clouds are still hanging out....as they go further north. 

JT reports that he saw Fight Club 9 times when it first came out in 1999.  The book came out in 1996.  I have gotten the dates confused.

 I lead students through several steps as they write their papers, and I always try to write little bit of the paper myself, to get a feeling for how tough it might be for students to do it, and to suggest that academic writing need not bore a person stiff.  So I wrote the following two paragraphs as a kind of model for an assignment asking students to write the first two two paragraphs of their papers.  Sometimes when I ask students to write the first two paragraphs of their papers, they think they are supposed to write about what they think they are going to write about.  My two paragraphs are intended also to say, hey, “Just Do It, Damn It” as follows:

Fight Club when originally released in 1999 was by no means a smash hit, no run away block buster (Wikipedia).  Nobody has even thought about Fight Club: The Sequel.  Still, and interestingly, Fight Club has become something of a cult classic.  At first thought, critics right and left attacked the film for its unstinting and relatively graphic violence.  This criticism though, as Ken Windrom suggests, seems misplaced (Reader 155).  As he points out, blood and guts spill over the screen of American cinema and nobody bats at eye.  Take the recent “300”; men on steroids beat the living crap out of each other for hours straight. And, hey, that was a hit. 

So the problem with Fight Club was not just the gore.  Rather, the problem was the people who do the gore, not escapees, like the Rock, from the World Wrestling Federation, but thirty year old, all American males, beating the tar out of each other BECAUSE they seem unhappy about something.  That “Because” is what irritated the critics. First that there was any “because” and second because the creators of Fight Club had the nuts—however misplaced—to suggest these guys were unhappy or somehow unfulfilled because modern day consumer capitalism is actually empty and soulless.  And even suggesting something like that, especially in this Dark Age after 9.11, seems down right unpatriotic.

I think that’s a little less boring than most academic writing, though I haven’t managed to get in those paragraphs to the core issue. I have pretty mixed feelings about Fight Club.  But the point I make in those paragraphs is more or less true b) Fight Club is now a cult classic and b) it is because of its criticisms of the materialism of consumer society.

The problem with the movie sort of as I see it is this:  is beating up on other guys the only way a man can prove he is a man (and not a mouse).  I wanted to dispute that argument and asked how many people in the class had been in a fist fight.  Curiously, very few, almost none.  One person said did beating up on your younger brother count, and one woman had defended her younger sister from a guy tormenting her.  When the guy hit my student in the face, she let the kid have it and knocked him flat because she was bigger, she said.  Two people said, yes, they had been in fist fights because the kids in their neighborhoods had been influenced by the film and would gather in somebody’s garage or rec. room and beat the crap out of each.  I really hope they didn’t hit each other in the face like the do in “Fight Club.”  Maybe they just wrestled around or something.

Today was the last day of class for the Fall Quarter, 2007.  Next time classes meet it will be 2008.

 

Here students read and discuss rough drafts of their final paper on the movie, "Fight Club."  That's Joseph waving.  I asked him had he heard of the story of Joseph and the Coat of Many Colors.  He said no and that he didn't think his coat had that many colors.  In front of Joesph, that Tracy's--she is reading Gina's paper on Gina's laptop that ran out of energy during class.  That's Gina in her uggs.  Back there between Gina and Tracey is Ben.  Ben always carries his rubics cube with him (visible here next to his arm).  We timed him one day and he cubed the cube in a minute and 10 seconds.  Pretty impressive.  I told him the cube was a fetish object that he used to ward off evil spirits because we had been discussing consumer objects as fetish objects intended to ward off evil spirits.

Nancy, sitting way in the back, with her head looking down sent me her paper and a link to a site were she "elfed" me.  Kind of cute, may take a second to load.
 

Here students pretend to wave hello/goodbye to me because I asked them to.  That's Eric toward the left back in a stocking cap.  He answers my questions about my new Mac.  Way to the right with half of her face visible--that's Mary.  She works mornings at the club where Carol and I go to work out.  Two people straight back from Mary is Matt who just yesterday became a US citizen.  He is now a citizen of the US and Spain.  He had to say the Pledge of Allegiance.
 
We had a pretty good time and then went home.  I told them that it was going to rain tomorrow and that they should dress accordingly.  

Brother Steve comments:

I always thought that Hegel was one of the more lucid amoung us.....and doesn't "Being and Nothingness" have that great line..."When a women walks down the boulevard, her behind belongs to the world"?

Thanks for the memories dude. 

I keep forgetting Brother Steve was a philosophy major and a damn good one I expect.  I probably would have been one of those myself.  But for the fact that I had decided to be an English major.  Come to think of it, the best paper I wrote in college was not in English but for a class in aesthetics.  I argued roughly that the aesthetic experience was not restricted to the experience of things like art.  Instead I argued that a person could have an aesthetic experience driving a motorcycle fast on a narrow mountain road, and that as far as I could tell you could have an aesthetic experience watching a Bob Hope movie. To hell with high art, in other words. The professor said he would recommend me to any graduate school in the country on the basis of that paper.  Sadly I don’t think there are any departments of aesthetics.

People argue that Hegel is very, very obscure.  But to read him you have to let yourself go and buckle up for a wild ride.  If you want little quotable points you aren’t going to find then. For me though Hegel is the Phenomenology of Spirit.  He takes you in one direction and you are fully convinced of that direction and then he drops the bottom right out from under you.  From Hegel I got one big idea:  if you had a huge scale and you put reality on one side and appearances on the other, they would weigh the same.

Sartre in Being and Nothing does go on a pretty long disquisition on the behinds of women.  Really though he doesn’t like them too much.  He talks about how they wiggle and flop about and he finds a sign in them of “contingency.”  I couldn’t say what contingency is right now though Sartre seems to associate it with gooeyness.

As a teacher at a university, I have the opportunity walking to my class or to my office to observe many behinds.  That’s not all I observe of course.  But it’s hard to miss all those behinds there being so many of them.  I must say from what I have observed that the style or styling of behinds changes.  The full or opulent behind seems to be on the out; instead narrow behinds are favored.  People with behinds are wearing jeans that do odd things to their behinds.  Some people sport jeans that seem to flatten and squash the lower part of the behind, where the curve of the behind might otherwise be visible.

Being old school, I guess, I don’t like this new styling of the behind.  Perhaps people with behinds these days are trying to shape or control their contingency.

Lately, I have been feeling brain dead.  I hate it when that happens. This morning when I sat down to write a blog entry, nothing came out at all, so I decided to write on that.  I tend to feel that my brain functioning is somehow related to my state of well-being.  When I have stuff pouring into my head—like song lyrics maybe—or something I want  to say in class, or like this open Letter to the Guv that I was composing in my head a few days back, I tend to feel that while I am far from a-ok I am at least not in agony.

And I have wondered for a long time why I have, at least in the past, actually received some relief, in moments of depression, by reading the abstruse and incomprehensible work of somebody like Hegel and feeling at least a momentary uplift at managing to noodle something out of it.  When depressed, I doubt few people would turn to Hegel as a pick-me-up or to JP Sartre’s Being and Nothingness which I noodled all the way through during my period many years ago of maximum depression. Along with of course Heidegger’s Being and Time, though that goes without saying.

Sometimes when I start expressing myself somewhat hatefully about Joan to my shrink, she sees fit to remind me that after all I did get something from here: brains genetically speaking.  Not that WB was un-smart.  But Joan had less of the practical brain and more of the speculative kind that might help a person do well in school.

 But I think there’s more to it than that.  The psychoanalyst, DW Winnicott speculates on the “mind as object.”  Since Freud at least psychoanalysts have been interested in what might be called the “varieties of thought” and the psychological purposes these might serve.  I do believe Freud felt philosophers tended to be very obsessive; and another psychoanalyst suggests that Descartes’ “I think therefore I am” was the utterance of a person suffering a major collapse in his “sense of reality.” Perhaps more technically “disassociation” and “de-personalization.”  In all likelihood Descartes was of the schzoid type and had, along these lines, a great deal in common with Robespierre.

Winnicott writes:  In one extreme type of case an intellectual overgrowth that is successful in accounting for maladaptation to need becomes of itself so important in the child’s economy that it (the mind) becomes the nursemaid that acts as mother-substitute and cares for the baby in the child’s self…. The result may be gratifying to teachers and parents who like cleverness.  Nonetheless the psychiatrist knows also of the dangers and unrealness of everything to an individual who has developed in such a way.

So Joan’s contribution to my particular powers of brain and my dependence upon those powers for a sense of well being may not be wholly genetic but the result of her perpetual absence as a mother.    

I had no idea what a precious commodity sleep would become.  Of course, I have had trouble sleeping for years and years what with extended bouts of insomnia and later and more recently that stuff with sleep apnea.  But youth conquers all.  Sure I had slept poorly but I had the energy to get through my days, relatively a-ok except of course for depression, daily doses of existential angst, and incessant rage.

But now at 61 things have changed.  I don’t have the angst and rage as much any more, mostly because I am too tired to have them.  At one time those things were a source of energy; nothing like being constantly pissed off to keep a fellow going. But now while being pissed off can give me an energy jolt it tends to deplete the overall energy supply, which is in pretty short supply.

At the club I asked the old guys about what they have heard about sleep and the need for it.  I am still considered, in that group, a youngish guy.  One guy, who just hit 80, says his doctor told him that 10 hours sleep a day was acceptable for a guy his age.  But he’s having trouble getting it.  His wife has sleep apnea and he is looking for another kind of bed—maybe the tempur-pedic like Carol and I have—or maybe that one with the numbers that inflates to meet a person’s particular sleep needs.

I told him that so far I like the tempur-pedic but because you sort of sink down into the foam, you don’t roll over as easily at night.  Sometimes I get stuck in one place too long and wake up with my right elbow killing me, or my left elbow, or sometimes my right knee.  And last night, I swear and be damned, but I felt an ache in my right big toe.  When I was young I didn’t have these joint ache and pain problems, the result of screwed up joints with arthritis setting in.

Last week I told my students that they should all buy excellent beds because sleep is a precious commodity and should not be taken for granted.  Get rid of those broken backed things and make sure your parents buy you a bed worth at least a 1000, and if they couldn’t afford that, they should just buy a firm futon and sleep on the floor for sufficient support.  And in a related joint issue, I also told the young men to cherish their erections because these too are a precious commodity and not to be taken for granted. And I told them too that the secret to a youthful appearance is good skin and that they should wear sun screen every damn day.  I usually conclude this mini-lecture by saying I am telling them all this because I don’t want them to be among the youth upon which, as GB Shaw put it, youth is wasted.

I am usually able to command their attention when I talk in this vein, though sometimes they look sort of stunned and sit their slack jawed with their mouths hanging open.

What the hell.  You don’t know what you got till it’s gone.

Thanks to Brother Steve for telling me there’s stuff in Joan’s old safety deposit box that I can put in the new safe.  I guess we will have to empty out that box sometime in the next few months.  The stuff for the Tingle Family Trust, except for what I expect to be a huge bill from the lawyers, is about wrapped up.  We have to keep Joan’s checking account open for a year after her death in case some bills come due.  Recently Brother Dave paid the City of Escondido for Joan’s last ride in an ambulance. 100 bucks.  But when a person has been dead for a year, you can ignore bills that come in after that by law.

Lawyers!  How did I put it?  If they peed on me, they would charge me both for the pee and the time taken peeing.  I will have to grit my teeth when I pay that final bill.

Brother Dave points out that, if the assistant at Costco could lift our new safe “like a leaf,” what kind of safe could that be.  He has a point.  But as usual I exaggerate.  He was a pretty hefty guy but he didn’t lift it like a leaf.  The thing weighs about 200 punds which is a step in the right direction safe-wise.  Also it comes with some stuff that bolts into the floor.  We have this guy who comes and does handy-person stuff for us.  He’s a nice guy; and we will get him to bolt it down and while he is at it put in a new faucet thing for the kitchen sink because it is leaking slightly.

I refuse to do any handy work around the condo.  I go to Home Depot and get lost; then I come back with the wrong part and have to go back again.  But our handy-guy knows his way around Home Depot. I can still change a light bulb but that’s about the extent of my remaining handy skills.

Went to see my psychiatrist yesterday for a drug consultation.  He lives in a part of SB called the Riviera; his house and all the houses around it must be worth up in the multiple millions.  This cherried-out out Chevy was parked in the place I usually park.  What year is it?  So I had park somewhere else and they don’t like you parking there.  I found a spot where there wasn’t a no parking sign, and one of the owners there coming out of his drive drove by me really, really slowly making sure I knew he had seen me and could identify me should I go into his house and try to steal something from his really huge safe.

 

But the psychiatrist visit was late, so Carol and I couldn’t walk to Elwood.