John Swinburn

You will, I believe, one day acknowledge me as the creator of a new emotion, one that combines the attractive friction of sandpaper with the slickness of fish oil on a wet pane of polished glass. This emotion, which I call contempathy^©®, will become the go-to emotion for conflicted people who find themselves simultaneously attracted to and repelled by another person. You’ll note that I have taken the unusual step of claiming both copyright and trademark protection for the new emotion, lest some highly creative yet utterly untoward huckster think he might snatch it away from me and sell it on the street. Such men, and their female counterparts who hold multi-level marketing house parties wherein they attempt to sell emotions that are not their own, are beneath my contempathy.

Unfortunately, Father Google tells me I am not the first to use the term contempathy, but I believe I am the first to apply it to an emotion that melds an experience associated with a common item found in wood-working shops with an attribute of an aquatic life-based nutritional lubricant. Therefore, I believe it is well within the realm of reason for me to assert ownership of the word in connection with describing its associated emotion.

Let me give you a practical example of the use of contempathy in just one convoluted paragraph:

“The restaurant, a five-star place with prices to match, oozed wealth and pretention. Self-satisfied men in Christian Dior suits and arrogant women in Carolina Herrera dresses sat eating Beluga caviar on toast points and drinking Dom Perignon out of Swarovski champagne flutes. When Loralee Smuckling spied the sculpted abdomen of the bare-chested man wearing a bathing suit seated at the bar, raw contempathy swept over her in a wave of lust and loathing.”

While we’re discussing Loralee Smuckling, though, I might as well give you an update on her ear surgery. As you’ll recall, if you remember, her left ear was ripped from her head from helix to lobe as she slid through a barbed wire fence on Tom Graham’s exotics ranch. Well, the reattachment surgery was a complete success except for one thing: the dyslexic surgeon sewed the thing back on upside down. The upshot is that she can hear people coming up behind her far better than before, but her appearance is a little unusual. This happened, of course, after she felt such contempathy at the restaurant. But, get this, apparently the restaurant episode got her addicted to that emotion. Now, wherever she goes, she looks for people behaving in ways she finds both disgusting and appealing. You watch her next time you see her at a party; if you see her face start to flush, that’s when she’s beginning to experience contempathy. When she’s full-on blushing in crimson hue, that’s raw contempathy.

The title of this post constitutes advice to myself. It’s an admonition that I too often fail to follow. But I take the exhortation seriously, because rooting about for answers about even “certainties” can rapidly lead to knowledge and, ultimately, wisdom.

The best way to start is to question yourself. Explore your own opinions, beliefs, and biases. Make arguments in opposition to your positions, seeking out the strongest challenges to your thinking that you can find.  Look, inside yourself, for faulty logic in support of your thinking; if you find it, remove and see if the superstructure supporting your beliefs collapses. And, then, replace that logic with something stronger, if you can find it.

Ask yourself about your strengths and weaknesses, too. Are your strengths hiding weaknesses beneath them? Do your weaknesses really reveal flaws or have you simply viewed certain of your attributes with a jaundiced eye?

It pays to remind myself to question everything from time to time. Otherwise, I can fall into the trap of accepting my own opinions as fact and my beliefs as reality. When I remind myself of those failings, I tend to more readily question what I hear from others, whether people I know, strangers, or the news media.

The impetus for this post arose from my reaction to an article I read in which the author argued that most proponents of universal healthcare coverage under a single-payer system do not understand how such a system would operate and, moreover, do not understand how much it would cost. My reaction was negative. My immediate response was to dismiss his comments as the words of someone who opposes universal healthcare, which he does. But I then asked myself what I know about the mechanics of a single payer system and how much it might cost. My answers: not much and I don’t know. That didn’t change my belief in the rectitude of universal healthcare, but it did remind me that I need to do more research to better understand what would be involved with bringing the idea to fruition.

I could write about dozens of instances in which I came head-to-head with circumstances that reminded me that I sometimes allow my opinions to be driven by emotion rather than intellect. There’s nothing inherently wrong in that, but it behooves me to understand that and to look for facts to support the legitimacy of my opinions.

Every time I question myself, I find chinks in my intellectual armor. And I realize I need to apply the same process to others’ beliefs and opinions and statements of “fact” that turn out to be less factual than fanciful. Question everything.

I thought I’d written about the relationship between the odor of coffee and the scent of skunk spray before, but a search of this blog turns up nothing. Perhaps I wrote about the link on another blog. Regardless, I’m writing about it now.

Occasionally, while my wife and I are out for a drive, we’ll smell the unmistakable odor of a skunk’s spray.  About fifty percent of the time that happens, perhaps even more, my mind instantly associates that odor with the aroma of coffee. My wife detects no connection whatsoever between the odors.

Some time ago, and again this morning, I came across a question posed in an online forum by a person who shares my association between the two odors; he asked whether there was a chemical similarity between the two because, he said, “sometime they smell alike.” A discussion of the phenomenon followed, including the reason for the similarity; skunk spray and the scent of coffee are related, chemically.  According to one of the participants in the online discussions, the chemical compound n-butyl mercaptan is present in very high concentrations in skunk spray, imparting the characteristic stench. The same person said
two mercaptans are found in coffee, methyl mercaptan and furfuryl mercaptan, also called 2-(mercaptomethyl) furan.  The fragrance industry uses the latter compound, she said, to recreate the aroma of roasted coffee. Another online forum discussed the relationship between skunk spray and coffee, claiming thiols, also known as mercaptans, to be responsible for skunk odors.

Having been duped before by internet “experts,” I decided to continue to explore the matter, hoping to find more concrete evidence that of the relationship between the fragrances. This morning, I came across something I found intriguing in an article entitled “Beating the High Price of Coffee,” from the July 1954 issue of Changing Times, The Kiplinger Magazine:

“A New York Company, Cargille Scientific, Inc., makes a synthetic mercaptan, which it sells for $105 a pound. It is powerful stuff, having to be kept under double seal because in concentrated form it gives the impression that there has been an explosion involving a skunk about the size of an A-bomb.”

From there, I thrashed about in the weeds of highly technical fragrance industry technical literature, coming upon a word with which I was unfamiliar, pudeur. The word, which one online dictionary defines as “modesty, especially in sexual matters” (but others do not even acknowledge as a word), in the perfume industry means, according to one blogger, “the desirable smell of sex and things a touch unclean.”

From there, I trudged through more technical literature, getting lost and confused in the process. I read that, in the fragrance industry, some of the most successful perfumes combine attractive and repellent scents to create ambivalent colognes that suggest both excitement and danger. In the U.S., the industry is regulated by the FDA, but because many of the ingredients in perfumes and colognes are claimed as trade secrets, the industry is not required to disclose them to the public. Essentially, the industry self-regulates by using ingredients that are classified as GRAS, or “generally regarded as safe.”

The Research Institute for Fragrance Materials is an industry group formed in 1966, according to its website, “to gather and analyze scientific data, engage in testing and evaluation, distribute information, cooperate with official agencies and to encourage uniform safety standards related to the use of fragrance ingredients.” I did not find any reference to mercaptan or skunk scent in the organization’s website, so I guess I’m out of luck getting hold of polecat perfume. Although, if I dab a little coffee on my neck, perhaps I could evoke that sweet scent.

And there, my friends, is where my early morning wanderings took me today. Between then and now, I’ve had several cups of coffee and sat down with my wife to enjoy a breakfast of poached eggs and Canadian bacon. Soon, I’ll shower and shave and get ready for my 10:15 appointment with a cardiologist. I haven’t seen a cardiologist in about three years, so I think it’s about time to get a check-up to ensure that all’s well with the perfusive pump.

I was reminded this evening that the measure of a person can be taken from his or her response to the opportunity to pull rank, as it were.  The older I get, the better I understand that the most talented actors are not the ones who need to trumpet their accomplishments or draw the spotlights to themselves. Aging actors who tie their worth to their roles are pitiful, indeed. And the ones who use their diminishing roles and consequent ebbing worth as cudgels are the most pitiful of all.