John Swinburn

The last time I left yellow roses here on my blog in memory of my mother’s birthday was on her birthday three years ago. I think the first time I left these roses here for her was two years prior to that. Yellow roses were her favorite flowers. I think the reason for her adoration of yellow roses was the song, The Yellow Rose of Texas. My mother was proud of her Texas heritage. That song spoke to her of that heritage and the civility and gentleness of “the old days.”

But, this morning, after listening to the song on a YouTube video, I decided to do some research on it. I learned that it can be traced back to a Philadelphia, Pennsylvania racist minstrel show from 1853. The lyrics at the time were (by today’s standards) patently offensive and coarse. The sheet music version, classified as an American folk song, was published in 1858 by Firth, Pond & Company. The lyrics changed over the years until it became a far more innocuous love song, the one I think my mother appreciated. I hope so.

At any rate, happy birthday, Mom. I’ve lived more than half my life so far in your absence, but there remains in my memory (as poor as it is and has always been) a place with you in it.

Another night of brief sleep, from midnight until 3:41. No dreams this time, though, that I recall. Instead, I spent many of the sleepless moments thinking about what the universe might be like if I had the wherewithal to recreate it.

The thoughts lacked detail. I did not, for example, ponder the composition of stars nor the processes whereby life forms might evolve from the combination of elements. My contemplations dealt more with concepts, like the relationships between time and thought. In the universe as we know it today, thought relies of what we already know; things we learned in the past. The concept of the universe that kept me awake is very different. Thought, in this very different universe, would absorb information from the future to create a past. Although it may sound like science fiction, this concept is rooted in neither science nor fiction. It is rooted in an entirely different framework of existence. The closest I can come to describing it is to portray it like this: information from a future that (obviously) has not yet occurred is processed to create a past that, also, has not yet occurred. Because neither has yet happened, they are independent of one another, but inextricably linked because, without each other, neither could exist.

And that is a possibility in this imaginary universe. Neither the future nor the past are necessarily givens. It is entirely possible, in this inside-out, upside-down universe, that time can both stand still and unwind, causing events to “unhappen.” That is not to say that events are erased; they simply are transformed into non-events. To understand that admittedly difficult to grasp concept, imagine a gust of wind on today’s planet Earth turning into a piece of pumice on a distant asteroid. Suddenly, there is no disturbance of molecules of air; the wind “unhappens,” replaced by evidence of a volcanic eruption. In this universe, the volcanic eruption may not have yet occurred; and it may not even occur in the same galaxy. Assuming, of course, there are galaxies. Distance, as you can tell, are just as irrelevant as time. Yet time must have relevance, in that a future is required if there is to be a past.

Emotions do not exist in this alternate universe. They cannot exist, because emotions depend on elements of time that are reversed in this new existence. Depending on one’s perspective in today’s universe, the absence of emotions could be either a terrible or a wonderful thing. Yet in this new universe, terrible and wonderful are meaningless concepts. Obviously, then, we lack the ability to comprehend existence as it might be in this new universe. Yet, here I am attempting to describe it. That is an exercise in futility. Futility, by the way, has no place in the new universe as I envision it.

Actually, the more I ponder this new universe of mine, the more I come to realize it is simply a structure within which reality plays out. It is not reality itself. Reality is what it is; it is not the framework within which it exists. But reality relies on that framework, doesn’t it? If reality had a different framework, it would be a different reality. Take, for example, kicking a football. In the framework that is today’s universe, kicking the football would send the football into the air in the same direction as the force of the foot that kicked it. But in the framework of my new universe, kicking the football would rely on events in the future (because, having kicked the football, the past would have been created); those events may be completely different from today’s universe. Kicking the football, then, could transform in this new universe into someone biting into a sandwich or a meteor striking a distant planet.

Would life exist in this new universe? I am not sure. Life introduces pain, so I am inclined to say it would not. But without life, what is the meaning (or, the purpose) of the universe? The same question may be asked today: with life, what is the meaning (or, the purpose) of the universe? I think the answer is the same. There is no purpose, per se. Purpose and meaning are artificial constructs humans use to justify their existence. But that may be too cynical. Perhaps all matter, both living and inanimate, has purpose. Even if that purpose is to take up space that otherwise would be vacant; or to interact with other matter to cause decay and regeneration; or to illustrate, by virtue of the appearance of the past, how the future will behave.

Meaning. Purpose. Even without humans, do those concepts exist? I’ve decided they will in my new universe. I just haven’t decided how they will be measured and how they will be justified in the absence of some overarching power that drives the universe to operate.

I wrote, in an as-yet-unpublished stream-of-consciousness screed, about celestial euthanasia.

Celestial euthanasia is a process that results in the death of all the stars in the universe—along with all matter associated with stars and their progeny—suddenly collapsing the universe into eternal cold emptiness.

My new universe would begin with that process. “Eternal,” though, may be taking things too far, although my new universe would be a replacement, so “eternal cold emptiness” should be fine. The concept of celestial euthanasia is useful only as a way to stage the introduction of a replacement universe. The concept is far broader than it need be; my original thought was not to euthanize the entire universe, but only the beings in it that are chiefly responsible for pain. That is, of course, human beings. I think I decided, ultimately, to just scrap the whole thing because getting rid of humans alone would leave plenty of pets and herds of cattle and horses and so forth in dire straits; wholly undeserved.

I could probably rattle on for hours about this. I’ll spare myself the indignity; I’ll stop here.

I do not recall a night like last night when my thoughts were so insistent on refusing to let me sleep. I did all the tricks I could think of, to no avail. No matter the approach, my mind flooded with worry, apprehension, and other unpleasant emotions. I was in bed before midnight and I fell asleep rather quickly, but I awoke soon thereafter and spent quite a bit of time in between fitful sleep and worried wakefulness. Around 3:30, I got up for a few minutes, then went back to bed to try to sleep. I suppose I slept, but it was restless and uneasy. Finally, sometime after 4:45, I drifted off. Between that time and 7:05 when I got up, I spent time in restless sleep and in an odd dream. I awoke at 7:05 from the dream; I made notes of it right away so I would etch it into my brain.

My wife sat next to me as I eased the car out of a dark, rain-drenched parking lot onto a multi-lane highway. Before we entered the roadway, though, I lathered my face and neck with shaving cream and began to shave, using my right hand to hold the razor. My left hand was on the wheel.

The night was pitch black and the few lights I could see were distorted by glare and heavy rain. I could not see the road well enough to drive, but I continued driving nonetheless. I set the razor down on the seat next to me and searched the dashboard and the turn signal stalk, looking for a switch to turn on the headlights. All I accomplished was to turn off the dash lights. When I turned them back on, I saw that the speedometer indicated I was traveling at 50 miles per hour, far too fast for the conditions, especially since I could not see the roadway nor any guiding stripes. Somehow, though, we managed to come upon a gas station and convenience store. I got out of the car and walked around front; it seemed, initially, that the lights might have been on, but I discovered the beams of light were just reflections. I went back into the car and began searching for the fuse box, assuming a fuse must have blown. I decided I should go inside the store before I pulled out a fuse, just to make sure the store carried fuses.

I walked across the parking lot, my face and neck still almost fully covered in shaving cream, holding my razor in my right hand. When I entered the store, I saw a stack of napkins near the counter and tried to reach around someone to get some napkins; I wanted to wipe my face clean. Before I could get my hands on a napkin, though, two police officers—highway patrol, I think—came in the door I had entered. They were drenched from the rain. They looked at me; instantly, I was gripped with fear, thinking they were going to assume I must be drunk because I was inside a convenience store, carrying a razor and covered in shaving cream. They did not seem to be phased, though, as they headed toward the restrooms. That’s when I woke up.

The entire dream, from the moment I pulled the car onto the highway until I woke up, I was terrified. I am not sure why were were driving in the rain, in the dark; I have no idea why I would have lathered my face in shaving cream and started to shave while driving in the dark. My beard is notoriously slow-growing and thin; I’m sure a shave could have waited a day or two. I was unfamiliar with the car. I think I had forgotten to turn on the lights before we started out on the highway. I don’t know. I was just afraid and my gut was twisted in a knot. My wife had very little to say during the dream; the only thing I remember was hearing her say “I think they are on,” referring to the lights that I then learned was an optical illusion, thanks to a reflection.

Even though I remembered quite a lot from the dream, I am certain some of it has dissolved into the mist. Would that I could record dreams in their entirety, then play them back. Or, perhaps, maybe I would not like that at all.

For the first time in quite a while, I knew by the time I touched the keyboard of my laptop computer than I would write and post two articles today. This is the first. Normally, I would have posted first about the topic on my mind when I awoke; for my own reasons, normal is not the order of the day.

Unless exposed to other cultures very early on, I think children assume their own cultural norms are “normal” and they do not think of, or even know about, the norms in other cultures. In most Western countries, with several notable exceptions, the custom is for women to assume their husbands’ surnames upon marriage. Children, when they encounter married women whose surnames differ from their husbands, think the concept of a woman retaining her maiden surname is odd. They do not necessarily consider the idea of calling a name “maiden” odd, though. It’s what their culture taught them, whether intentionally or coincidentally.

An online article on BBC.com, viewed on my Samsung phone, triggered thoughts on the matter. According to the article and several sources from which the article’s author got her information, 70 percent of women in the U.S. and almost 90 percent of British women adopt the surnames of their husbands upon marriage. Simon Duncan, a professor in family life at the University of Bradford, UK, is quoted as saying, “It is quite surprising… [so many women adopt the man’s name] since it comes from patriarchal history, from the idea that a woman, on marriage, became one of the man’s possessions.” He goes on to raise the question, “…is this just a harmless tradition, or is there some sort of meaning leaking from those times to now?”

This subject has interested me for many years. When my wife and I got married, she chose to retain her maiden name. I recall being more than a little proud of her for her independence. I remember, too, thinking the practice of adopting someone else’s name was evidence of subservience on some level. During the mid-1970s and early 1980s, I participated in a number of discussions with friends on the pros and cons of women adopting the surnames of their husbands. Ultimately, though I thought the practice was somewhat medieval, I came to accept that—in the U.S. and several other Western countries, at least—it was simply a cultural norm; a practice whose roots may have long since decayed, but whose fruit remained in full blossom.  Part of my thought process in accepting a practice I increasingly found patriarchal and subservient was based in learning about marriage naming practices in other countries. In Mexico, the naming convention is as follows: A person has two surnames; the first surname is the father’s first surname and the second surname is the mother’s first surname.  Marriage does not change the woman’s name. So, for example, here is a hypothetical example in practice: José Garcia López marries Luisa Pérez Garza (she retains her name); the full name of their child, whose given name is Estella, is Estella Garcia Pérez.

I think I have written before about naming conventions in some Scandinavian countries. In Iceland, for example, a child’s surname is created from the father’s given name, followed by “-son” or -dóttir (“daughter”). Again, marriage has no effect on a person’s names. As an interesting sidenote, though, in 2019, the laws governing Icelandic names were enacted which will no longer restrict given names by gender (a long story behind that, there is). Icelanders who are officially registered with non-binary gender are permitted to use the patro/matronymic suffix -bur (“child of”) instead of -son or -dóttir.

Strangely enough, I have gone off-track again. My intent was to explore the patriarchal nature in Western culture of women adopting their husbands’ surnames upon marriage (after doing so, I promptly revealed examples in which that is not the case). But it’s more common than not for women to give up their own names in favor of their husbands’ names. I think the cultural norms of a society are closely aligned with the political leanings of the society (or vice versa). For example, I would expect Republicans to be far more likely to oppose women retaining their names upon marriage because, in the Republican viewpoint (as I see it), to do so would be an affront to patriarchal culture; and that, my friends, is sacrosanct.

I have much more to say about this, but my focus has dissolved into a hazy mist. More when I am able to be more precise and persuasive. Next, my second post of the day. Eventually.

Fastidious cooks, I suspect, clean their ovens after each use, preserving the bright-as-new shine that looks, to me, like an oven has been ignored. But looks can be deceiving; those fastidious cooks apply more energy and time than I am willing to give, thereby ensuring a spotless shine worthy of showroom display.

Although I do not use the oven a great deal when I cook, when I use it the things I cook apparently emit oily vapors and flecks of fat or tissue or strings of vegetable protein and the like. The oven in my house is not hideous, but the glass door is deeply unattractive and the once-shiny interior surface of the oven is dull and mottled. If it were a dog’s coat, I would call it a hazy deviant brindle. Except this oven’s interior was a bright cobalt blue when purchased. Now, it is a rather odd brindle blue, not at all pleasing to the eye. I hope it will shine again, though. I decided last night that the oven needed cleaning, so I prepared to tackle the job. I set out a spray bottle of filtered water, a plastic scraper, a towel, and soft cloths. Then, this morning, I sprayed water according to directions and set the oven to “Easy-Clean.”  Ten minutes later, the sound of a bell signaled that the task was finished. I opened the oven and wiped up the water. An improvement, but not at all what I expected.

The directions suggested especially dirty ovens might require a second “Easy-Clean” cycle. Though this oven was not especially dirty (but what do I know about the relative dirtiness of ovens?), I decided to go through the process again. While that is happening, I am writing. Ach! There went the bell again! I will return here when I am older and wiser.

I am older, but not appreciably wiser. The second “Easy-Clean” process did little to improve the appearance of the oven. I wiped the oven surface, expected the shine to return. An almost imperceptible improvement; still, not clean. The next step, the instruction manual says, if the oven remains embarrassingly unattractive, should be “Self-Clean.” “Self-Clean” requires the kitchen to be vented, all accouterments removed from inside, outside, and near the oven, and a long time period without access to either the oven or the stove-top burners. Three settings, ranging from three to five hours, are available. Temperatures inside the oven reach upward of five hundred degrees during the process. I remember that either the installer or the salesperson suggested “Self-Clean” be avoided because the high temperatures could damage the appliance’s delicate computerized controls, rendering the oven and the stove-top useless and exceptionally expensive to repair. So, what to do?

The manual does not mention oven cleaner, but I have some of the stuff I use on internal elements of my smoker to clean up after brisket, ribs, turkey, pork loin, etc. Those meats, coupled with high temperatures and smoldering wood chips, leave black, hardened goo and layers of smoke and grease on the racks, drip pan, and door, not to mention the internal sides, top, and bottom. I use oven cleaner on some of those elements. And I decided to spot-clean the oven with the stuff. It’s working, I hope, as I write this. I shall see.

Dramatic improvement, but still not as clean as I’d like. So, I did another spot-clean. The down side of using Easy-Off is that the stuff has potent ingredients that cause me, if even a tiny whiff of the stuff gets in my lungs, to go into a fit of coughing that lasts several minutes. I suspect several layers of lung tissue are vaporized when one part per billion mixes with air that I breathe in. Thankfully, though, my pulmonary decay contributes to a shinier oven. The next time I go in to wipe the inside of the oven, perhaps I should try to hold my breath for the three or four minutes necessary to accomplish the task. I rather doubt I would be successful, inasmuch as it’s tough for me to hold my breath for ten seconds during CT scans of my chest.

The deed is done. It’s as clean as it’s going to be, I suspect. Though dull spots abound among the shiny blue surface, they are not spots of dirt. No, they are the scuffs and abrasions of food preparation. Those hazy areas amid the polished luster of sparkling cobalt offer evidence the oven has battled pork roasts and pizzas and chicken breasts and sausage & cheese balls and hundreds of other explorations into meal preparation.

It occurs to me that the oven (as well as the stove-top and the smoker and the grill) constitutes one element in the cycle involving the combination of heat and ingredients. The animals and plants we consume transform nutrients and fuel from the sun into their bodies and substance. We then apply heat to the flesh of those animals and plants, transforming them into our own bodies. Eventually, our bodies decay to form nutrients that finally may make their way back into nutrients. The only constant in the cycle is the sun; it is required for the heat and for unleashing the nutrients required for the next step in the cycle.  If I were more inventive and more energetic, I could skip the oven and the stove-top and the smoker and the grill. I could rely, instead, on the one constant. I could harness the power of the sun to cook my food. Hmm. I suppose that’s exactly what I’ve done heretofore, without even realizing it. The sun’s power must have been harnessed to allow for the creation of those cooking devices. While I’m not directly harnessing the sun’s power, I am the recipient of the efforts of others to do exactly that.

This is the sort of thing that happens when one cleans the oven and thinks about the process. It leads places that, initially, might have seemed utterly out of place in one’s brain. I just referred to “places,” as if there are locations in the brain associated with thoughts and ideas. I know that is theoretically correct. I wish I could control places in the brain, mine and others, that deny entry to anxiety and fear and doubt and discomfort and all the rest of the emotions that can make life seem to be the enemy. But I can’t. So, instead, I clean ovens and wash the deck and patch dings in walls that should have been patched years ago. That’s my attempt at therapy. That, and cooking. And writing.

Sometime within the last week or two, dictionary.com and thesaurus.com got new looks. I use both websites quite often, though I haven’t visited them for several days. This morning, as I clicked on my desktop link to dictionary.com, I noticed a different color scheme—with a brighter intensity—right away. When I clicked on a word (I had looked up “anxiety”) to find synonyms, I saw that the color of thesaurus.com, the other half of the website pair, had changed, as well. Their respective logos, too, were different. Yet, as often as I use both of them, I could not recall precisely what was different about them; I just knew “something” had changed. My inability to recall just what the two schemes looked like before this new look bothered me. How can it be that I could not recall details about something I view with some regularity? My powers of observation or, at least, my powers of remembering my observations, are low.

My curiosity grabbed me by the collar and forced me to explore what I had failed to remember. It has been years, literally, since I made us of the internet’s Wayback Machine, but I remembered it existed. I had to depend on a Google search to lead me to archive.org, where a quick search revealed examples of the “old” look of both websites.

Having piqued my interest in remembering the appearance of some other websites, the Wayback Machine took me to the website of Challenge Management, the company we operated until we decided to retire. And I looked at various versions of the website of my church. Before I got thoroughly lost in old websites, I came to my senses. While I am glad to have the resources of the Wayback Machine, looking back at what has been replaced has only so much value and no more. Peering back at the “old versions” of every website I have ever visited would be an enormous waste of time and energy. And, as I learned this morning, the Wayback Machine has the capacity of becoming an enormously distracting attention-grabber. I do not even clearly recall why I looked up the definition of “anxiety.”

The Wayback Machine cannot take a snapshot of my thoughts at any given time; that’s what my writing does, but not if I allow myself to get sidetracked by wild goose chases. I wonder about the etymology of the phrase, “wild goose chase.” I think I shall see what I can find. Ah, wouldn’t you know it? Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, though its earlier origin is unclear. And that little exploration revealed something else about “goose,” the meaning associated with “jab in the rear” and a bevy of related sexual slang.

I could drift through the history of language for hours if I allowed myself the freedom to do it. Instead, I’ll have breakfast and a shower and make my way to my morning “Window Talk,” the last one of this week.

Obituaries rarely capture my attention, but one I read this morning did. It was the death notice of the neighbor who died almost two weeks ago. The obituary told the story of his long life in a truly loving way, honoring his accomplishments, his interests, and his loves and passions, illustrating how they were so intricately intertwined with one another. I did not know the man as well as I would have liked; his obituary told me things about him, though, that reinforced my sense that he was a genuinely good person. Not just superficially good, but good deep down. The obit also caused me to reflect on my interests because this man’s interests were so varied: fly-fishing, playing pool, lapidary work, stained glass, silversmithing, woodworking, magic, woodcarving and golf. Each of those hobbies require both interest and discipline; a person has to be able to focus intensely on them to achieve a depth of skill that brings the level of satisfaction necessary to enjoy them. But maybe the skill is not the important thing; maybe it’s simply the satisfaction of doing something enjoyable.

I think the breadth of his interests illustrates the depth of his engagement with life. That concept is, for me, a bit hard to understand and explain; yet it’s so clear to me as I think on it. Adequate words to describe the idea elude me. The fact that this man earned his doctoral degree and taught at the college level for many years while spending time outside the classroom engaged in such diverse hobbies intrigues me. I appreciate what must have been the richness and intellectual range that such diversity suggests. Perhaps the intensity of focus required to attain a doctoral degree teaches one how to apply that same intensity to what, for me, would be a casual and short-lived interest.

My interests are just as broad as his, I think, but not as deep. And my discipline sometimes seems nonexistent.  For a short time, I was fascinated with welding and metal-working. I enjoyed it immensely. But my interest and involvement went only as far as the night class in metal arts that I took. Though I was extremely interested, I was unwilling (or, perhaps, unable) to invest in the equipment I would need to continue the hobby at home. The same thing is true of my interest in working with clay. I enjoyed pottery-making and mask-making for a couple of years or more, but when circumstances changed that prevented my free access to a studio at my leisure, I stopped. I was unwilling to invest the money to get kilns and pottery wheels and so forth. Ditto wood-working and painting.

I think I know why I have been unwilling to pursue hobbies that require investments. It has been because I know who I’m dealing with. He is the sort of person who is apt to lose interest when it becomes apparent his skills do not measure up to his expectations. Unfortunately, that is true of pretty much everything I have tried. Even engaging in interests that do not require significant investments soon reveal that I will not become a “master.” So I abandon them.

What is most frustrating to me is that I know I do not have to become a “master” at any of them. I simply have to enjoy them. That’s all it takes for a hobby or interest to be fulfilling. Or, at least, that’s all it should take. But for some reason that’s not all it takes for me. If I’m not good enough at whatever I try to satisfy myself, I’m not good enough to continue with it. No matter whether I enjoy it or not. My enjoyment begins to decline when it becomes apparent I will not achieve a greater level of skill. It’s like I want to reach the level of professional in everything I attempt; if I can’t, I stop trying. That’s not always true, though. I think I could have enjoyed metal-working and working with clay; the investments were the stumbling blocks. I have never wanted to fritter away money needlessly (though I do exactly that involving all kinds of other things).

I’m psychoanalyzing myself here. Doing a reasonably good job of it, too, if I say so myself. But I’m only recognizing the symptoms and identifying the disease; I cannot seem to find the cure. Maybe there isn’t one. Maybe it’s a chronic condition that must simply be managed, not cured. My way of managing it is to move on to the next interest, knowing it will be of limited duration.

Ed had it together. He achieved a long lifetime of accomplishments and he enjoyed a variety of interests outside his profession. I aspire to be more like him. Perhaps I will try stained glass next. I’ve had more than a superficial interest in working with stained glass for a very long time; just never explored it. Maybe now is the time. If only I can avoid thinking I need to achieve competence equal to the creator of the glass in the Chapel of Thanksgiving in Dallas or the glass in the Gran Hotel Ciudad de México in Mexico City. I try to convince myself that I must remember it’s the process, not the product. But I always forget. Ed must have known how to harness the attitude that what’s important is the process, not the product that emerges from it. I want to be like Ed.

Soon after I awoke this morning, I developed a craving for congee. My impatience kicked in at the same time, so I cobbled together many (but not all) of the ingredients for basic congee, threw them in the Instant Pot, and am now hoping for the best. I have not familiarized myself with the directions for using the Instant Pot, which is a mistake; I tend to avoid directions unless the outcome of avoiding them is almost cataclysmic. That’s not always true, but usually. Give me a chain saw and a radial arm saw and an oxy-acetylene torch and watch the fun begin. I hope the outcome of making congee is less dangerous than the prospective encounter with shop tools. I may know by the time I finish relieving my fingers of letters of the alphabet and other keyboard characters.

My SleepNumber app informs me I did not sleep well last night. I did not need the app to tell me that; I was well aware that I was restless all night and slept only in fits and starts. It failed to capture one of two trips to pee, though, so I am not sure I should believe all it tells me. But it says I did not fall asleep for an hour and twenty-two minutes after getting in bed and that sounds about right; I had a hell of a time getting to sleep. According to the app, that finally happened at 1:33 a.m. The subsequent “restful” sleep amounted to two hours and forty-two minutes of my five hours in bed. So, I was tossing and turning for roughly half the night. The app gave me a SleepNumber score of 15 for last night; I average 61 and my best ever was 92. I have work to do on making my sleep patterns restorative.

Regardless of how long it took and how restless it was, I finally awoke at 5:14 a.m. from a disturbing dream, in which I asked a burly and very unfriendly-looking guy blocking my old red car to move his jalopy of a car out of my way. Then I realized I had lost the keys to my red Ford, a late 1950s model, that was improperly parked in the driveway in front of a monstrous and horribly disorganized box store (I had been inside). My assumption is that I was in Mexico, in that all the people I encountered spoke Spanish. Somewhere in the dream I realized I was supposed to be somewhere soon, but I had no idea where, and I had no transportation, given my misplaced or lost keys. There was more, but it’s gone now. But, toward the end of the dream (I think), it occurred to me that I have to record an introduction for a church insight presenter mid-week and the timing of that recording could conflict with my wife’s visit to the wound center in town.  After I awoke, I consulted my calendar and discovered there is no conflict, so I tore that little shred of anxiety from my psyche and discarded it. God, dreams are bizarre! They wrap one in such convoluted fears and place the dreamer in circumstances that he would never encounter in the real world of consciousness.

I wonder whether our lives would be appreciably better if all we had to worry about was staying out of the reach of hungry predators, finding adequate sources of food every day, and securing a reasonably safe and comfortable place to sleep each night? If we could discard worries about overeating, asylum-seekers, Presidential elections, the Oxford comma, too much salt, mass extinctions, Supreme Court appointments, artificial international borders, drug cartels, military spending, etc., would the challenges of survival seem less onerous and more appealing?

I remember so very little about my carefree childhood; assuming, of course, it was carefree as I suppose most childhood is. I wish I did, though. I wish I remembered a time when I lived for the moment and worried about nothing. That must be among the most spectacular and attractive mental states available (or not) to human beings.  I envy people who can remember in great detail the joys of childhood. I cannot remember much about any phase of my life, up to and including retirement—it’s like my memory of books and movies; once I experience them, most of the detail vanishes into the mist.

Soul-crushing worry and subsequent regret, though, stick with me for years. Someone told me recently I should be in counseling/therapy. They may be right. Either that or the magic pill I wrote about not long ago. Not the one that makes me larger, nor the one that makes me small, nor the ones that mother gave me… Where the hell is Alice when you need her? Someone else, a person who periodically partakes of mood altering substances, says they are not as innocent and innocuous as some say and as I’ve believed since the 1970s. That’s another thing one might not need to worry about if predators, food, and shelter were the only things that really warranted one’s time and attention. It occurs to me that some people who go “off-grid” may be battling their demons, the ones comprising what we ironically call modern “civilization.”

Demons, I think, are the attributes of our society that needlessly drag us into caves and beat us bloody and senseless with truncheons originally designed to provide for our protection. Somewhere along the line the purpose of these devices, intended originally to bludgeon attacking wolves and tigers, morphed into tools of control and subjugation.

Wait… Is the congee ready? Indeed it is. This post, therefore, shall be abandoned to its own devices, whether truncheons, clubs, cudgels, sticks, blackjacks, or hammers.

Now that was worth waiting for, in my opinion.

As the pressure builds inside this bubble we call the United States, I suspect more and more people are beginning to develop a tiny shred of understanding of what it might be like to seek asylum in a country other than one’s own. A person—gripped by fear, possessing little or no money, and unable to speak the language of a place she hopes will be a refuge—puts her faith in humanity that someone will offer assistance; someone will help deliver her from the hellish nightmare that caused her to abandon everything and everyone she has ever known. How would she react, upon reaching her hoped-for refuge, to being detained and treated like a common criminal, rather than an economic or political refugee? How would I react? I can only imagine my fear would be magnified a thousand-fold and my faith in humankind would diminish dramatically.  As we witness the deconstruction of democracy in this country, can we imagine a time when we feel compelled to leave everything we have ever worked for, to leave our birth families and our friends, and seek asylum in Norway or Iceland or Canada or Chile?

I call this country a bubble because we are insulated from reality by what we read and watch and are told. While a free press is integral to a free democracy, the benefits of a free press (which increasingly is in peril here) are delivered only when the people partake of what the press makes available. And the press must not only be free to report facts, it must actively investigate and dig to find them. Today, the free press is under intense economic pressure because “the people” are choosing not to support the press financially. Subscriptions are declining and advertisers are investing in non-traditional channels to reach into the pocketbooks of their intended victims. The result is an underfunded press and an uneducated populace. We don’t know what we don’t know and we don’t seem to care.

With a handful of exceptions, I think what’s left of the free press in this country tends to accept what they are told; they report accordingly. They are complicit, therefore, in the massive misinformation and disinformation processes that are taking place in this country. They, and we, buy the BS being sold by our own government. They, and we, accept carefully orchestrated information campaigns designed to pacify us and remove from our reach the weapons of recourse. Somehow, suddenly, the voting process in this country has become a hotbed of malicious manipulation; it cannot be trusted. The postal service cannot be trusted. Voting machines can be hacked. Ballots can be snatched and magically reappear with votes cast for the “right” or the “wrong” candidate. As the press reports on all manner of accusations made about the voting process, I believe the accusers are planning actual rigging and manipulation; that will offer “proof” that the accusers have been right all along. We are being carefully led to slaughter and what’s left of the “free press” is busy exploring accusations about the illegitimacy of vice presidential candidates and other such smokescreen distractions. If the “free press” ever turns its attention to the facts, the public will fail to read or listen, because we will be glued to “news” being delivered by QAnon or AlterNet or 1600 Daily or Anti-Fascist News. Those sources are not “news;” they are mouthpieces designed to slant “facts” to support their political perspective.

One of the definitions of asylum is “an institution for the maintenance and care of the mentally ill, orphans, or other persons requiring specialized assistance.” Given our refusal to acknowledge what we are seeing take place before us, perhaps that is the asylum we seek. But it will not be available to us, no matter where we go; arguably, we cannot prove we are mentally ill or otherwise require specialized institutional assistance.  The asylum we might ultimately have to see is  “an inviolable refuge; sanctuary; the immunity afforded by refuge in such a place.” When I arrive in Norway or Iceland or Canada or Chile, will I be detained, strip-searched, and placed in a holding cell for months while the authorities decide whether I will be permitted to stay? Will I be shipped back to an authoritarian regime staffed by thugs hungry for blood and the thrill of the screams of the tortured?  I suspect it will be both. Like every country facing an influx of refugees and asylum-seekers, my countries of “choice” will be overwhelmed by the flood of people fleeing in fear for their lives. The remnants of the free press will attempt to report on the travesty, but they will be silenced “for the public good.”

It doesn’t have to be this way. If the corruption becomes so blatant (but how could it become more blatant than it is?) that the people can no longer tolerate it, they might start a revolution. While that could start another civil war, it might instead trigger an intense national (or global) introspection that leads to a cleansing.

But until the majority of us realize that what we are all seeking is “an inviolable refuge; sanctuary; the immunity afforded by refuge in such a place,” we will not recognize that the asylum we desire can be right here. Until we are willing to share that refuge with other asylum seekers who have no place else to go, we will not find the peace that asylum should provide.

I don’t have the energy to weave all the threads of this meandering diatribe together. They form a fabric, in my head, but my fingers are incapable of stitching them together in a way that shows the cloth clearly. Asylum. I weep for all the asylum seekers, including those of us who one day may have to adopt that description.

I spent too much time this morning writing a post that I dare not make public, lest I be accused of conspiracy to practice unlicensed surgery by excising the malignancy of a grotesque public hypocrite from the body politic. That having been said, I join many millions around the world in mourning the death of Ruth Bader Ginsberg. She has been called a trailblazer. She was that and much more. Her remarkable legacy will be long remembered and honored.

+++

Today began, in earnest, when I finally got out of bed at 6:42. I cannot believe I slept that late. The day is half gone and I have accomplished nothing. My Sleep Number app claims I went to bed at 1:14 and, with the exception of five short periods of restlessness, slept through the night. Until 6:42! The app says I had four hour and fifty-three minutes of restful sleep.  And, then, I awaken to a day half-consumed by emerging daylight and lost darkness.

+++

I have a Zoom meeting this morning to discuss a website. Though I suppose it’s an important matter for the church, nothing much seems particularly important to me of late. Churches, in general, are on my list of snarl-eliciting matters. In another church-related matter, I have made multiple calls to the local Catholic church and to a Baptist church, seeking a sliver of information about parking lot maintenance contractors; I have not received return calls. I think my mistake may have been saying I am a volunteer with the Unitarian Universalist church; in the tiny little minds of some people… I won’t go on. I’m angry at the world right now. There’s some evidence my little piece of the world may be improving, but there’s so much more evidence the rest of it is swirling into an already clogged sewage mistreatment plant. Jeez! Can’t I finish a single paragraph without diving into the darkness?

+++

Yesterday, or perhaps it was the day before, I went through a bunch of photos from the trip my wife and I took to Croatia, Bosnia and Herzogivina, Slovenia, and Montenegro. I selected several photos that showed my wife’s smile, saving the images to a dedicated folder. Looking at the photos was at once uplifting and painful; I want to see that smile again, here at home.  It’s hard to smile when confined to a little room and with rare opportunities to interact with loved ones except by phone and an occasional window visit. But those visits will become more common, at least for the next week. The facility agreed to let me visit her every day for a while; I hope those visits lift her spirits.

+++

It’s almost 8:30. I should make the bed, eat some breakfast, and shower. I feel like crawling back into bed, instead, but I won’t.

+++

Ten minutes later and I’m feeling more “up.” I called my wife and spoke to her for a few minutes. We talked about a painting in her room; two dogs with a singled stick in their mouths. The dogs look like they are smiling. I think my wife would like a big Labrador retriever to come to her room, put its head in her lap, and allow her to lavish affection by petting its head. I’m in favor of that.

I have only vague recollections of Buffy Sainte-Marie from the late 1970s and early 1980s, although I instantly recognize her name when I hear it. And I remember her fame emerged from her music, though I do not recall specific songs that I associate with her. Her name same to my attention again recently while listening to a SiriusXM station entitled North Americana, a mixture of music from the U.S. and Canada. The programming for the channel is described as “Today’s alternative country meets yesterday’s folk, rock & roots; everything from Tom Petty and Blue Rodeo to City and Colour.”

Wikipedia describes Sainte-Marie as an Indigenous Canadian-American. Wikipedia reminded me that she was a co-writer (with Jack Nitzche and Will Jennings) of “Up Where We Belong,” the Oscar-winning song from the Officer and a Gentleman sound track. I learned, from reading that article, that she married Sheldon Wolfchild, with whom she had a son; her son’s name is Dakota Starblanket Wolfchild. Starblanket was the maiden name of the wife of the son of the chief of the Piapot Cree band. I won’t go into the connection; suffice it to say there was one.

Why I was so fascinated when I stumbled across Buffy Sainte-Marie’s music is a mystery. It’s an even greater mystery why I was possessed to explore more about her background. And I do not entirely understand why I was enthralled by her son’s name: Dakota Starblanket Wolfchild, though I suspect my interest stems from something I wrote (outside of this blog; not published here) a few days ago. My words involved being wrapped in stars and witnessing the wild majesty of the universe beyond our planet and beyond our solar system. “Starblanket Wolfchild” seems to describe what was going through my mind when I put the words down.

I am sure it’s sheer coincidence, but strange coincidence can be twisted into evidence of spiritual connections. Coincidence can be rejected outright, replaced by belief that the “coincidence” was not coincidence at all but, in some mystic fashion, destiny. I dismiss such stuff as rubbish, but not everyone does. Some people thrive on such celestial connections. They build entire religions on frameworks of happenstance and accidents of time and proximity. Or, perhaps, they use the coincidence as fuel for their books and stories. Books and stories become mythology and legend. Humans’ ways of explaining the inexplicable or incomprehensible.

+++

I try to enmesh myself in writing and thinking to keep my mind off unpleasantness. It does not work. My thoughts get tangled. They create dreams that morph into nightmares that will not end. Last night, I dreamed of being in a two-car garage littered with small rattlesnakes that could strike double the distance of their outstretched bodies. The snakes could slither vertically up walls, too, and launch themselves across the width and breadth of the garage. The dream merged with another, somehow, in which people signed up to visit specific rooms in a house; someone had to accompany them to the rooms to protect them from the snakes as they made their way through the house.

My mind feels like it is wearing thin, as if my brain is made of thin cloth worn thinner by rubbing against a metal post. This thought reminds me of a time when, as a child wearing a new pair of slacks, I slid down the metal railing attached to a set of concrete steps leading from the sidewalk to the porch. The cloth of the new slacks wore through in the crotch until the fabric was almost transparent. That’s what my mind feels like; thin to the point of tearing.

Light is just now beginning to soak through the blackness of the sky, evidence that daylight is on its way. I hope the promise of light is not a false promise. I hope the brilliant light that illuminated my world returns to stay.

I spoke to the administrator and to the head nurse yesterday. And I spoke to my wife. The participants in the two former conversations seemed more interested in talking to me. My wife said she wanted to get on her computer; she said she would call me later in the day. She did not. I asked her to be sure to let me know when she had a few minutes so I could send her an invitation to a Zoom conversation. Nope. From the two others, I received apologies and explanations. And confirmation about a medical issue that probably is impacting my wife’s mood; and is, now, being treated. I can only wait to see what today brings.

+++

Work on painting the deck should be completed today, save for a few treated-lumber boards that will wait for several weeks to allow them to weather and dry. My hope to replace the spindles on the railing with welded grey (galvanized) hog wire was dashed when the preliminary quote came in: $4,000 to $4,500. So, I reluctantly will opt to paint the hideous spindles, covering the pealing brown paint with more paint; probably a charcoal, almost black, color. When remains to be seen.

+++

When I logged onto my blog account this morning, I noticed that I had assigned a category to only one of my most recent thirteen posts. That tells me my thoughts are jumbled and out of focus. I cannot direct my attention to a single category or topic (or even four or five topics), so I give up on attempting to assign a category to my posts. I’m probably the only person who has any interest in selecting a category and seeing what I’ve written on the subject, so the assignment of categories is not especially important. But to see “uncategorized” is maddening to me, for some reason. Yet when I go to an “uncategorized” blog post and attempt to assign a category, often I find it impossible to pick one. My thoughts while writing it must have ricocheted off of a thousand fleeting ideas; picking categories to fit the post would be an exercise in unnecessary complexity.  I’ve never counted the number of times I’ve used each category, but I know I’ve used some of them very, very rarely. I checked, for example, to see how many posts are labeled “mythology.” Two. Two! It’s hardly worth the effort of assigning a category if that’s the extent of my writing that touches on the topic.  Perhaps I should erase all existing categories, replacing them with “madness” or “confusion.” That should cover them all.

+++

I wonder, sometimes, whether other animals can hate the way humans can. We assume pet dogs love their loving masters, right? Can dogs loathe people who abuse them? Can dogs hate other dogs or cats or raccoons? I do not think we have universal agreements about the definitions of love and hate. Both are highly subjective, in my opinion, and highly personal. While I’m on the matter of love and hate, I wonder whether other animals can have feelings all along that spectrum. Can they “like” or “dislike” other creatures? Or is the emotional spectrum for animals more like a switch than a spectrum? On and off, versus varying degrees? Assuming there is an emotional spectrum, with love on one end and hate on the other, at what point does love become hate? Does it slide backward from love to like to dislike to hate? Perhaps love and hate, while antonyms on a linguistic scale, are not really related to one another in the way we tend to think. Maybe they emerge from different emotional roots in the brain. I’m sure someone has written at length about this, basing their writing on extensive, exhaustive research. Not I. I just think with my fingers and don’t bother to do my research. Especially not when I’m feeling lazy or depressed. I just ramble on, needlessly using up what must be a limited number of alphabet characters available to me in this lifetime.

+++

Without warning, my eyes brim with tears and I take in an involuntary breath, making a loud sound that surprises me. It happens too often. I don’t know why it happens; my thoughts cannot explain it. I believe my emotions sometimes diverge from what I am thinking, as if I become two people. I wrote about something like that, but not really about that, recently. Perhaps my writing foreshadowed my experience, but in a way that veered away from what I had been thinking when I wrote it. There’s bound to be an explanation. I just don’t know what it is.

At what point do I say “Enough!” and let my gut take over, demanding action in place of my fear of doing the wrong thing?

That is my dilemma this morning. And it has been my dilemma for days, if not weeks. My concern is that my wife’s incarceration—for that’s what it is—in a rehabilitation center is having the opposite of the intended effect. Rather than getting better, I fear she is getting worse. I am afraid she is becoming severely depressed after more than six weeks in a lonely, sterile hospital-like environment. Maybe she is improving physically. Maybe. But I am afraid the environment is harming her mentally. Does she feel like I’ve abandoned her? Does she see no end to the dullness of days subjected to “therapy” that seems to be having no impact?

The question in my mind is whether taking her out of the rehab facility will lead to improvement or deterioration. Would I be able to take care of her, even with help? Would coming home do any good, or would it accelerate her depression? I don’t even know who to ask. I do not want well-intentioned opinions; I want reasoned answers from someone trained and educated and knowledgeable in such matters, someone with current expertise.

I will not go into more details in this potentially public forum. The pain of this dilemma is almost unbearable for me. I can only imagine these circumstances must be a thousand times worse for my wife.

The director of nursing of the facility has thus far failed to respond to my emails and my voice mails about matters that I think could be exacerbating my wife’s condition. I am growing concerned that my wife is being targeted for mistreatment in some form, whether psychological or physical, in retribution for her complaints about non-responsiveness to her use of the call button. I am angry and growing more frightened and more enraged by the minute. I don’t know whether I am equipped to deal with my own frustration, much less give my wife the support necessary to ensure proper physical and mental care.

The last time I spoke to her was Sunday morning around 10:30. I have tried to reach her by phone and text many times since. I called the facility and spoke to a nurse last night; she said “she is okay, just tired.” This, apparently, is the same nurse who did not respond to my wife’s urgent use of the call button last Thursday night until I telephoned the nurse’s station (in response to my wife’s panicked call to me) and demanded someone go to her room and remove a patient who had wandered into my wife’s room in a wheelchair and could not figure out how to leave.

I am at wit’s end. But it’s not my wits I’m worried about. My wife is the one who has to live with whatever constraints they place on her. Should I just extract her from that situation and hope for the best at home? Solutions abound. The right ones, though, seem to be as rare as diamonds.

All life forms known to humankind are carbon-based. That does not mean all life forms are carbon-based; only those we know about. Despite a widespread assumption—that, if ever we encounter life outside our own planet, it also will be carbon-based—science does not guarantee the legitimacy of that hypothesis, a bias some call carbon chauvinism.

Regardless of the possibility that life might be based, in certain conditions, on other elements, the theory that all life we might encounter is also surely to be carbon-based is grounded in reality. One carbon atom can form bonds with up to four other atoms. Beside the fact that carbon atoms readily form bonds with other carbon atoms, this establishes the opportunity for building molecules that are almost immeasurably long and complex. In addition, the energy required to make or break a bond with a carbon atom is conducive to the requirements of life; it allows stable molecules to form and remain reactive, thereby permitting the molecules to be part of the complex, dynamic system that is a living organism.

Science fiction frequently paves the way for reality. I do not know whether minds creative in the application of ideas or minds creative in the formation of ideas should be given more credit for technological advances; clearly, though, reality often follows on the heels of fantasy fiction. I mention fantasy because science fiction has had something of a fixation with non-carbon life forms for a very long time. The latest (as far as I know) foray into non-carbon life assumes life can be based on silicon. Silicon, like carbon, can also form four valence bonds, and it also readily bonds to itself, although those bonds are structured differently from carbon bonds. Science fiction, as “correct” as it sometimes seems to be in its forecasts, is often wrong. For that reason, I am more interested in pure, hard science. But pure, hard science seems intent on limiting itself to carbon chauvinism. That bothers me. It’s like religions that refuse to permit observable facts to interfere with the insistence on basing all religious thought on the Bible; provincial and parochial and narrow-minded (what other synonyms can I use to express my disgust with such insular thinking?).

A central problem with my interest in exploring the possibility of life-forms based on elements other than carbon is my almost limitless ignorance of chemistry, organic and otherwise. I received the only “F” in a six-week grading period in a high school course in chemistry (I think the other lowest score I got was the rare “C”). I was absolutely lost and the teacher was utterly disinterested in helping me find my way; in fact, he seemed to take an intense dislike to me. I do not remember his name; I think I called him “The Bastard.” Ignorance and sloth are problems for me in so many areas that I find interesting. I am no sufficiently interested in overcoming my ignorance to invest the energy and time to learn. I want to know things, but apparently I am unwilling to have to experience the process of learning; I simply want to know.

Obviously, that presents a problem. That problem, though, is largely responsible for a theme that arises in my fiction from time to time: the combination of chemicals and electrical currents (both measured in nano-measurements on the order of the quadrillion level) introduced to the human brain to control centers of knowledge. For example (one of my favorites), I envision the possibility of injecting into the bloodstream an incredibly complicated mixture of fifty or more chemicals (but in incredibly small amounts) at the same time an enormously complex series of electrical pulses are delivered to the brain. The result, after a period of thirty minutes of a convoluted process of injection/shock/injection/shock/etc., the subject of the endeavor would speak fluent Spanish or would possess unmatched expertise in high-end mathematical theory. That sort of thing. I suspect this sort of thing is coming. Probably not in my lifetime nor in the lifetimes of your great-great-great-great grandchildren; but some day.

See, I explicitly said I was more interested in pure, hard science than in science fiction. And then, as predictably as the beat of a baby’s heart, I changed course and delved into science fiction. What the hell. Is it outside the realm of possibility that elements not presently found on Earth and, therefore, not included on the periodic table could behave in much the same way carbon does? Of course it’s possible. A carbon-like extraterrestrial element could well exist and it could have the capacity to bond with every other known and unknown element in impossibly long chains. Life in this dimension could express itself in a radically different way than life as we now know it expresses itself.

I would pay quite a lot of money (if I had it) to experience vast increases in my levels of knowledge: theoretical physics, mathematics, chemistry, multiple languages, medicine…the list of knowledge I would absorb by injection and electrical current is virtually endless. Imagine modifying one’s brain so that every letter on every page of all the works of Shakespeare were imprinted on one’s memory. The idea is intoxicating!

Unfortunately, no amount of money and ambition or raw desire can make those things happen. Living in a dream world, though, is sometimes better than living on the outskirts of a hydro-carbon village where oil is worshiped, while the sounds of souped-up pickup trucks and speed boats roar in the background. What? I think I slipped into someone else’s dream-world. I like mine better.

I have mixed feelings about inspirational speakers, motivational posters, and other forms of paid encouragement and fee-based reassurance. Saying “mixed feelings” is more polite than using the phrase, “deep, abiding skepticism.” Sometimes, though, I have to admit to myself that my bias against feel good advice is misplaced. My prejudice against what too often seems (to me) fraudulent power of positive thinking gibberish can get in the way of allowing positivity to impact events and circumstances.

I do not subscribe to the idea that obstacles are purposely placed in our way to guide us around them to find greater happiness along another path. However, I believe one’s response when confronting obstacles and agonizing over difficult decisions shapes outcomes. I watched a motivational video this morning, at Facebook’s insistence, that presented an utterly unrealistic set of circumstances in which a woman returned to her “calling” after a her promising career was cut short by downsizing. Though the set-up was obviously manufactured, it caused me to think about my own experiences. Thinking about them made me remember how important it is to view obstacles and negative challenges as simply unpleasant opportunities to find alternate paths.

Attitude is enormously important to one’s ability to cope with pressure. I know first hand how easy it is to become dejected and to believe that hopefulness is sheer folly. That attitude feeds its own self-fulfilling prophecy. While it is hard not to feel wounded and angry and anxious, adopting an attitude of insistent determination that one will survive and get beyond the problem is crucial to overcoming the assault on one’s mental well-being. That having been said, I do not possess a magic formula for successfully adopting an attitude of insistent determination. It may be that one has to recognize the importance of that attitude, even without having the mental capacity to adopt it, so that when a window of capacity opens, one is able to leap through it.

My recollections of serious challenges—job loss, potentially deadly illnesses, financial setbacks, etc.—remind me that, in every case, once I finally recognized it was up to me to act aggressively to overcome the obstacles before me, I was able to make headway. Even though I could not force someone to hire me, I could not cure my illness or my wife’s, and could not manufacture money or snatch it out of an empty box, I could direct my energies toward finding resources that could help solve the immediate problem. There was no assurance, of course, that the problems would suddenly vanish. And they never did, at least not suddenly and not without the expenditure of significant energy and mental reserves. The ultimate outcomes were not always what I hoped, but they always were better than they would have been had I simply given up and shriveled into a corner to waste away.

So, positive thinking can be an effective tool. But like an electric drill without a power source, it is useless without the mindset and the action necessary to put it to work. I am writing this post as an admonition to myself to get my butt in gear. Putting on a happy face is insufficient. Take assertive, aggressive action. The fight is in me.

In reading back on what I’ve written, it’s as if it was written in code intended only for someone who is privy to the translation keys for the code book. My apologies. I know the code and I know where the book is hidden. The only question is whether I will follow my own advice.

A nearby neighbor died night before last, ending a painful vigil for his family and ushering in a new reality for them. Transitions of such magnitude can leave loved ones awash in grief, even when the inevitable end is expected and, in some sense, is a welcome relief. I suspect that the relief comes with painful guilt, though that relief arises from the fact his suffering is over. I do not know they feel relief; experience, though, tells me the emotion is a likely accompaniment to his death. Even so, the guilt probably will never fully recede; it will remain, always causing them to wonder how one can feel relief in such painful circumstances. There is no salve to deaden the pain of that guilt; time is the closest thing to an anesthetic.

+++

Emotional pain is perhaps the most agonizing kind. It isn’t limited to a specific place on the body, a place centered on an illness or injury. Instead, it permeates every cell. It fills the chest full to the point it might explode. It inhabits every square millimetre of one’s head, replacing thought with immeasurable anguish. Time is only a slow-acting analgesic. Crying, unleashed from behind an emotional dam, can relieve some of the pressure. But when a solid emotional dam breaks, it can release a torrent of terrorizing sobs and tears so fierce almost everyone in its path sprints away, seeking safety from the flood. There’s a reason we tend to call such a stunning, unexpected emotional event by a descriptive name: emotional outburst. Emotional outbursts, especially those involving unstoppable tears and sobs that arise from deep within, can frighten people away. That’s why we try to stifle them. Even steadfast friends scatter in frantic attempts to save themselves from drowning when the dam breaks. Subsequently, the dam’s engineer and builder is judged weak and inadequate. It is a bit like finally crawling to shore, only to be crushed by a broken slab of the shattered barrier.

+++

A single pill that would deliver instant serenity. A pill that instantly soothes the tense muscles in one’s neck and shoulders and jaws. A tablet that, the moment it is swallowed, drains cares away. A capsule that transforms anxiety into peaceful contentment. That’s all I want. Even if several pills were required to alleviate all the symptoms, I would take them. And I would offer them to anyone else who would benefit from the magic of the medications. I know a few people who need those pills. I do. My wife does. And there are others. Even if their effects were short-lived, the respite they provide might be enough to let one’s normal defenses take over.

+++

I hear the sound of paper being torn. No, that the sound of a tear in the fabric of my thoughts.  It’s like my thoughts are being run through a paper shredder, but the blades of the shredder are dull. Instead of slicing my thoughts into cross-cut squares, the blades are tearing them into irregular strips. This cannot go on. I can make no sense of these misshapen fragments.

I have been in Japan twice; once when I changed planes at the Tokyo Narita Airport on the way to a conference in Beijing and once when I spent a night at the Hilton Tokyo Narita Airport on the way back home from China. That is to say, I’ve never really been “in” Japan. Fifteen hours, I think, is a good estimate of the time I spent there. But that was enough to spark an increase in my interest in Japanese culture.

Food being one of the chief motivators in my life, it was not unexpected that I would have invested some of my brief time there in trying a Japanese meal. Due to timing, dinner and breakfast were the only meals I ate at the Hilton. Strangely, I recall only that I chose a “typical” Japanese meal for dinner, though I recall nothing more about it. The next morning, I opted for a Japanese breakfast (which I’ve since attempted to replicate in my own kitchen) consisting of rice, a slice of broiled salmon, miso soup, and cucumber. I don’t recall precisely what was used to add color to the meal, but I have a vague recollection of splashes of bright green and red and yellow on the plates. The other interest in which I became modestly invested was the terminology used to describe political subdivisions. In particular, I was struck by the use of the term “prefecture” to describe what I equate with states or counties.

It saddens me to think speakers of the English language chose to use the word “county” to describe geographical administrative or political subdivisions. Examine the etymology of “county” and there’s an unmistakable linkage with the privilege and power of nobility over the common folk. Today’s county judge is a vestige of the lineage of nobility, similar to a viscount of days of old. The roots of privilege run deep through rotting soil. Most U.S. states use the term “county” to describe the inferior geographic subdivisions covering multiple municipalities and rural territories. Louisiana is an exception, opting to call those entities “parishes.” The Christian religious linkage in the use of that term is obvious; it, too, has roots in a power structure, though the power structure in “parish” relates to the church, rather than nobility. The roots of both terms are far more complex than I suggest here; I’m abbreviating hundreds, if not thousands, of years of history for the sake of sparing my fingers from arthritic paralysis.

“Prefect,” though also rooted in terminology referring to hierarchical structures, seems to me to be more representative of commoners. It has links to civilian or military administrative rankings of authority. Interestingly, in England the term is used to refer to senior pupils recruited to help maintain order in the school. I like “prefect.” And I like “prefecture.” If I could wield unchecked authority for a single day, I would decree that the use of “county” and “county judge” would be replaced by “prefecture” and “prefect,” respectively. (I recognize the irony in that decree; just move on.)

I recognize, of course, that large swaths of the U.S. population (less than 50%, but extremely loud and absolutely certain of their rectitude) would be up in arms about such a decree, claiming the language would lead us on the road to Asian authoritarianism, mask mandates, and tea houses replacing Starbucks. They would insist that the decree was a precursor to orders replacing the traditional American dishes of meatballs, tacos, and pizza with sushi, tempura, and yakitori. Eventually, they would get over it. I hope.

Were I in the business of serving as county judge, I would welcome a change in language; being called “prefect” would elevate my status, changing my image from local lackey to important manager. Referring to the territory under my control as prefect as a “prefecture” would spur the population to take greater care of the land. People would voluntarily clean up litter, tidy up cluttered yards, paint tired old buildings, trim trees, plant seedlings, embrace gardening with a passion, and otherwise take enormous pride in the people’s collective responsibilities. Littering and tagging with graffiti would stop. Crime would decline precipitously, requiring police chiefs to redeploy officers in community service as opposed to law enforcement roles. Members of gangs would reexamine their lives and would decide to redirect their energies toward worthwhile causes such as AmeriCorps and the Peace Corps. Top levels of the U.S. government would respond to the changes at the prefecture level with a sharp reduction in belligerence domestically and internationally. In short, the world would become a more peaceful, more pleasant, and more compassionate place. We all would be happier, healthier and more comfortable in our own skins. Decency would reign supreme.

All this, with a seemingly pointless linguistic adjustment. Words matter. Punctuation matters. As I noted yesterday, the switch in a single letter in a word can mean the difference between paying your bills and being dissected (autopsy versus autopay). You’ve probably seen the admonition, reminding us that punctuation matters:

“Let’s eat Gramma,” versus “Let’s eat, Gramma.”

Predictions about a new face of human society—if this pandemic ever ends—include hopeful prophecies that humankind will have learned a lesson about the significance of community. We will have learned, according to those wishful forecasts, to value time with one another more deeply and to place greater worth on relationships than on things. Would that it were so. I am not so optimistic. I have no doubt that many among us will fully embrace those lessons, but I fear many, if not most, will not. Already, I see evidence all around that suggests greed is in full bloom, even in the wake of monstrous human catastrophe. This is not new evidence; it’s just ongoing confirmation of a characteristic trait of an enormous wave of ego-driven people, a wave that continues to threaten to founder the ship of humanity, drowning civilization under the crushing weight of greed and insistent egocentricity.

While a significant minority of human beings are fundamentally good, caring, decent people whose empathy and compassion and selfless caring are beyond reproach, their numbers are insufficient to assure their attributes survive.  Many others, who are not innately moral creatures, have been molded and shaped by the finer elements of society, repressing their natural tendency toward greed and self-serving behavior at the expense of others. There have been times, I think, when religion successfully thwarted selfishness in those large, innately selfish, segments of society.

Those times are gone, though. Most religion today acts as an accomplice in camouflage, pretending to celebrate the ethic of reciprocity while surreptitiously enabling and encouraging exclusionary greed and selective judgment. Prosperity theology, an increasingly embraced apology and justification for economic inequality, is among the latest religious arguments that attempt to legitimize greed.

Few things would please me more than for my bleak assessment of the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic to be proven absolutely wrong.  I would love to see evidence of a resurgence of generosity, compassion, empathy, and kindness at the same time I witnessed a decline in selfishness and greed. For that to happen, though, a large-scale commitment to change hearts and minds would be necessary. Skepticism, like mine, would have to relax into hope. Wishes would have to transform into productive actions. A deep appreciation of community would have to replace the artificial happiness triggered by rampant consumption and selfish greed.  We collectively would need to recognize money for what it is, a transactional mechanism for assigning value to “things,” not life.

I do wish my mornings would begin in bursts of happiness, rather than muffled explosions of dread and disgust.

I was up before 4 again, thanks to a gut tied in knots and performing back flips. An hour later, I thought it all had been resolved, but as I sat at my desk, attempting to think coherent thoughts that might make sense on the computer screen, the knots tightened again and offered an encore of flips. I opted to avoid coffee this morning, choosing a big glass of cold water instead. That choice does not seem to have helped much. Cold water had no impact on the beads of sweat on my forehead. I climbed back in bed around 6:30 and stayed there, between off and on trips to the room next door, until about 9:40. I don’t think I’ve been in bed as late as 9:40 since my run-in with lung cancer. Shortly after rising, a friend who hosted a gathering a few nights ago delivered two cans of H.E.B. Boracho Beans, following up on a conversation we had that night about how much I like boracho beans. I may delay opening those cans until my gut’s back flip performance comes to an end. With that as an introduction, I will write whatever flows from my fingers; I suspect it will be short.

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Our brains fracture reality, subsequently piecing it back together in ways that blur the distinctions between experience and memory. Our recall is dependably erroneous, as if our minds consistently lie to us about who and where and why we are. But our minds are not telling us lies, not really. They are simply expressing our reality refracted through contextual prisms. I know, that sounds like distraction through verbal pretension; but it’s not. I think it’s the best way to describe how we often misinterpret our experiences, based on the filters and biases through which we see and experience events. If my filters interpret certain words or attitudes or responses as “conservative,” I classify an experience that includes those words or attitudes or responses as conservatively biased. Dispassionately “watching” ourselves go through an experience is, in my view, basically impossible. We frame the experience according to contextual cues. Before we even receive enough information to make an informed assessment, our minds have begun shaping our interpretation of the experience. We think we can be unbiased, nonjudgmental, and receptive to untainted reality; I doubt that. We may want to be able to be that android, but flesh and blood and tissue and cerebral interference refuse to allow it.

That is not to say we’re incapable of experiencing reality as it really is, it’s just a rarity. We learn so much and absorb such a vast amount of information that all the knowledge and processing of facts colors our view through that prism. When I realized Mrs Stephenson, my third grade teacher, had a glass eye, the experience taught me to always peer intently into the eyes of people I meet, checking to see whether one of the eyes is artificial. Once I satisfy myself that an eye either is or is not artificial, I continue about the business of deciding what this person is all about. That simple realization, as a kid, has altered my way of looking at, and interpreting, the world ever since. In the end, it makes no difference to me whether an eye is glass or vitreous jelly. But it does matter, doesn’t it? Somewhere, deep in the recesses of my brain, it makes a difference I cannot identify. If it did not, I would not notice it.

Ultimately, context makes us who we are. That answers a question I’ve asked myself for my entire life. Now that I have the answer, I wonder whether I’ll keep asking the question, thinking there must be some other, more appealing, answer.

There are no miracles. Sometimes, harsh realities scrape away the soft cosmetic maquillage of one’s life, revealing irreparable damage to sinews, feeble muscles, and brittle bones. Beneath artificial calm at the surface, turbid undercurrents claw at what’s left of an emotionally-drained skeleton, leaving a weakening, fragile structure incapable of withstanding the weight of heartache. The pressure of facing a dispassionate, unyielding universe bent on reducing everything to atoms is too much. The universe never loses the inevitable battle. Miracles do not emerge from the carnage.

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Time spent alone, essentially in solitary confinement, shackled to an imaginary master, can steal confidence, hope, and love. That time of abandonment replaces value and meaning and desire and joy with emptiness and rancor. Rage and distrust grows like mushrooms fueled by heat and moisture. Emptiness, once it takes hold, does not yield. Nothing can fill that hermetically sealed void, protected against intrusion by hardened steel walls.

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Darkness can fill a brightly-lit room. It can drench a desert without a single drop of rain. It can make the sun as dim as a new moon behind a shroud of thick black smoke. Darkness is suffocation and drowning and strangulation combined into a murderous cloud; it consumes air, converting oxygen to sarin gas.

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Hopelessness can feel like bullets piercing tenderness. Maybe they are not bullets. Instead, they could be pieces of shrapnel erupting from a suddenly shattered heart; the universe, turned into a transport vehicle for an explosive emotion designed to do maximum damage.

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The tether that binds us to each other and to life itself is gossamer thin. It sometimes seems to be made of steel; other times, it is as fragile as a single cotton fiber, severed just as easily by force as by fire.

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I prefer to think of smiles between human strangers as natural expressions of friendliness; automatic, nonthreatening responses to the presence of another human being. Wedged in there between amiable welcoming and symbolism of upturned corners of the mouth  suggesting the absence of threats, the smile is a visual sign of at least a touch of joy. That’s what I like to think.

A twenty-one-year-old article from Scientific American, though, offers a slightly less gushing assessment, based on both observation and research. Frank T. McAndrew, professor of psychology at Knox College in Galesburg, Ill., who was quoted in that article (How Did the “Smile” Become a Friendly Gesture in Humans?), has done extensive research on facial expressions. He observed that:

In a lot of human smiling, it is something you do in public, but it does not reflect true ‘friendly’ feelings–think of politicians smiling for photographers…What is especially interesting is that you do not have to learn to do any of this–it is preprogrammed behavior. Kids who are born blind never see anybody smile, but they show the same kinds of smiles under the same situations as sighted people.

I liked what McAndrews had to say, so I checked his credentials. He is still a professor at Knox College. He is known for his work in evolutionary psychology and has been cited in the literature 2995 times (the most recent count I could find; with this blog post, perhaps the number jumps to 2996).

My interest in smiles this morning arose unexpectedly and without any trigger that I can discern. Perhaps I wondered to myself how, in the ugly face of a poisonous president and a deadly pandemic, we find it within ourselves to continue to smile every day. The reason for my interest notwithstanding, I found myself intrigued by the very idea of smiles. So, I did what I always do when a question about which I have opinions but few facts arises: I did some superficial research that only barely touches the surface of what’s “out there” for me to learn. I won’t go into the gritty details of what I found, but suffice it to say the research into both smiles and their surly cousins, snarls, is extensive; almost overwhelming. Some of what I read suggested to me (that is, my mind interpreted what I read to mean) that smiles could be in a close race with snarls for the most common human expression. Nothing said so, explicitly, but some of the articles I skimmed (very superficially, I stress) made me wonder whether stressful news and even more stressful experiences may be erasing the emotions that prompt us to smile? That’s an enormously depressing thought, one that all by itself can wipe the smile from my face. Again, though, it’s my interpretation of language that may well have been intended to be read in a completely different way. Superficial research often yields superficial (and utterly unreliable) answers.

I admit I got a bit bogged down by McAndrews’ work. He remains active, it seems, and has published extensively in his field. Interestingly (and suspiciously, in my book), much of his published work can be found in popular magazines, newspapers, television, and radio like Psychology Today, The New Yorker, Time Magazine, the Wall Street Journal, Fox News, BBC, NPR, PBS, the Today Show, etc., etc. It’s probably an indefensible bias, but my trust of the depth of knowledge and quality of research of academicians tends to slide when I learn their academic exposure include extensive mass media outlets. So, McAndrews may be as reliable as my superficial research; but, at least, he’s a professional with credentials far beyond mine, so I’ll stick with him for the moment. To do otherwise would suggest I think my superficial interest has greater core value than does his substantially more expansive knowledge.

But I’ve drifted away from smiles and snarls, haven’t I? Let me close this trivial diversion by saying I hope I find occasion to smile a lot today and I hope I encounter others who smile a great deal. Smiles, whether our own or those of others, tend to elevate our moods and make us happier beings. Smiling tends to bring joy, however brief and however modest, to those around us. Therefore, I advocate that, at least for today and preferably for a lifetime, we endeavor to smile as genuinely and as much as we possibly can. And leave the snarls in sealed cardboard boxes.

Economists (and most of the rest of us) have long since dismissed as utopian rubbish the concept that societies could eliminate money, thereby eliminating the “evil” that grows from the roots of the awful stuff. Yet ideas continue to bubble up; why not eliminate money? I’ll admit to occasionally engaging in such delusional fancies. “Why don’t people just become utterly altruistic? If we would simply become morally better, we would not need money.” I used the word rubbish in the first sentence. Let me use it again. Rubbish!

Money is simply an abstract symbol (that can be in the form of paper currency, coins, beads, pieces of bamboo, or what have you) that represents stored value. That value can be used as a means of exchange (I will give you three pieces of bamboo if you will give me a slice of cantaloupe…and you can then exchange that bamboo for two glasses of orange juice). The “money” also can be used to represent a unit of account in exchange relationships (I will give you ninety pieces of bamboo; in return, I will expect to be able to get thirty slices of cantaloupe or sixty glasses of orange juice or forty-five purple onions).  Without money, I think we would have an incredibly hard time agreeing on and reconciling value. Value, not values. Values belong primarily in a different discussion, though they have a place in the discussion of money, as well.

Another argument in favor of money as an agreed abstract symbol representing value involves funding government. How would government function without the ability to levy taxes, in the form of money, to fund its services to the governed? I doubt the tax collector would be able to accept, in payment for services rendered, cows, sheep, bales of hay, boxes of turnips, tubs of milk, or promises that the recipient will paint government offices or keep the plumbing in government offices in working order.

Money is a convenient means by which we collectively agree to assign value to items of exchange. Without it, the barter economy (a perfectly legitimate means of exchange, in my view) would grow into an unworkable, chaotic mess. So, let me be clear: I understand and subscribe to the concept that money is a necessary abstraction. Every human society, to my knowledge, has some form of money; some more sophisticated than others, perhaps, but, still, they use money.

My appreciation for the need for money, though, does not necessarily translate into my endorsement of the way money has morphed into a symbol beyond economic value; I loathe the fact (and it is a fact) that money has been allowed to take on an almost magical aura within which it defines human value, human rights, and the power structures of human relationships. I think we humans need to consider whether we can harness the runaway beast and return it to its comfortable cage, where it can continue to live a long, abstractly satisfying eternity. The question is, how do we do that? I do not have an answer, but I suspect a workable answer could be found if: 1) we acknowledge that we have allowed money to take on far more value than the vast majority of us ever intended; 2) we commit to investing intellectual capital, worldwide, to discovering ways of putting the genie back in the bottle; and 3) we refuse to accept assertions that money has any business being involved in defining or marketing human value, human rights, or the power structures of human relationships.

In my opinion, money should be a simple abstraction, not a maddeningly convoluted multi-dimensional hologram bathed in layer upon layer of logarithmic complexity.  Entire industries have been created to extract monetary value from emptiness and invisible phantoms, thereby corrupting the concepts upon which money is based: derivatives, mortgage schemes (in which interest is presented in different ways, as if the mortgage holder sees the world through a special prism visible only to him), risk (as if risk, as a concept grounded on nothing but fear, has intrinsic value), etc., etc. To get back to the core functions of money (which are not to enrich manipulative bastards whose lifetime goals are to leave destitute as many people as humanly possible), the extremely complex financial schemes which have a history of crashing economies and ruining lives should be permanently dismantled and banned. Any efforts to resurrect them should be deemed criminal (I would go so far as to call such actions attempted capital murder) and the perpetrators, upon findings of guilt, should be swept into dungeons and forgotten. But I’m getting the cart before the horse. First, we must define legitimacy in the monetary sphere. Then, we must establish mechanisms to ensure that only legitimate monetary transactions (and processes) can take place. Only then should we track down and punish the culprits who wreck lives, replace freedoms with economic slavery, and consume, consume, consume!

So, that’s what is on my mind this morning. My mind may change. It often does.

Pouring my thoughts onto a receptive white screen almost every morning for fifteen years or so tends to capture themes I may have missed in the hubbub of daily existence. Reading what I have written, though, reveals those themes. Sometimes they are clear, like flawless glass. Sometimes, they are concealed beneath a smoky translucent film, a camouflage unwittingly designed to hide the frame of mind that led me to write the words. Either way, though, the themes emerge from the flood of words, over and over again, as if—drowning in murky language—they were trying to save themselves and the writer from sinking into impenetrable silence.

That may be overdramatizing, but not by much. Truly, often without even realizing it, my writing, both fiction and nonfiction, translates my state of mind into words and sentences and paragraphs. And those assemblies, collectively, capture distinct themes. And those themes describe the way I think, the way I see the world, and the way I see myself interacting with the world. I attempt to exercise some degree of control over it, but my writing suggests I feel like I am walking into a heavy headwind with occasional brutal crosscurrents. That does not mean “poor, pitiful me.” It simply means I recognize my attempts at control are essentially futile. The world I face is too complex and powerful and its inertia too immense to be shaped and molded by me. And I am not alone. Most of us recognize how insignificant and feeble we are in this immeasurably enormous universe. Yet we keep on trying, half expecting a magical transformation to take place in us, imbuing us with the ability to cause spectacular, positive change. That is to say, we’re all delusional. I know I am.

My themes are riddled with disillusionment and hope; grey dreariness and sparkling optimism. Fear and loneliness. A thirst for love in spite of an unlovable core. Goodness buried within a shell permeated with foulness. Perhaps no theme is as obvious in my writing as the theme of not knowing whether there is a “me” in there or whether I am an apparition created entirely by my context. A writer friend claims I attempt to create characters who are “good people who do bad things.” She says people who are good at their core simply do not do bad things, so my attempts to create such characters are doomed to fail because I attempt to create that which does not exist. I disagree, of course. But, then, I wonder whether our definitions of goodness and badness operate on two different levels; the superficial and the intrinsic. That gets at another theme common in my writing. And the idea of superficiality is important, too. My themes, even after all the years of writing (since I was a kid), are touched on briefly, but never sufficiently explored to yield any significant insights. Which gets to another theme: my interests and thoughts are wide and varied, but shallow and short-lived.

I do not need to re-read what I’ve written to know that many of the themes that find their way into my writing argue against themselves. Ideas about people, for example, that offer either inspiration or depression; bubbling enthusiasm versus crushing pessimism. My emotional themes almost always incorporate those opposites, as if I feel compelled to tell both sides of every story, whether the focus is positive or negative. In that sense, I tend to write as if I were a battery; one positive and one negative terminal.

I am going through this exercise of self-examination—again—with the idea that I might be better equipped to compile some of my writing into theme-based collections that could stand alone or as part of an aggregation of related writing. But I probably won’t finish the exercise. I never do. That’s a theme, too, both in my writing and my life.

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Another bizarre dream. I dreamed I was in a car that an older woman friend was driving. She somehow fell forward onto the very long floorboard as the car headed down a hill. I was able to slip past her and put my foot on the brake pedal, bringing the car to a stop. From there, three of us (the driver, someone in the back seat, and I) got out of the car and walked into an elaborate web of tunnels that stretched for miles. The tunnels were packed on both sides with businesses, most festooned with colorful banners, streamers, and cloth. The driver was trying to find a bank called the Tulsa Bank and Trust, which she said had a window where tickets to a Las Vegas show could be purchased. After a long walk through the tunnels, she stopped at a hotel registration desk to inquire as to whether this bank was located. The desk clerk told her it was unlikely the bank would have Las Vegas show tickets. Suddenly, I noticed the woman was gone; the clerk did not know which direction she took. So the other passenger (a man I do not know) and I attempted to make our way back to the tunnel entrance but we took a wrong turn someplace and found ourselves walking along a raised concrete walkway next to a body of water. When the walkway ended, the other guy jumped into the water at a point where a group of teenagers (but looking surly and closer to drinking age than youthful) were playing. I followed him. As we rounded a bend and found a place to climb out of the water, he said he was afraid of the teenagers; he had called the police, he said, and alerted the property owners. I was afraid and confused and felt like we had no hope of ever finding our way out. The dream ended about that point. Crappy way to end a dream, in my opinion.