Ruminations and Conversations with a Madman

Posted on July 29, 2019 by John Swinburn

The next New Moon will occur on Wednesday this week, coinciding with the next  Black Moon at the same time, 10:11 p.m. Central time. A New Moon occurs when the Sun and Moon are aligned, with the Sun and Earth on opposite sides of the Moon. A Black Moon has more than one definition, but the one which applies to the July 31 occurrence is this: the second New Moon in the same month. The first New Moon in July 2019 was recorded on July 2 at 2:16 pm. These facts, as well as numerous others of equal interest, are available to me because I occasionally visit timeanddate.com. Until this morning, though, I did not know that timeanddate.com (and its companion sites timeanddate.de (German) and timeanddate.no (Norwegian) is a product of Time and Date AS (“Aksjeselskap”), a private, limited liability company owned by its creator Steffen Thorsen, nor that it is based in Stavanger, Norway.

Unlike some other popular sites on the internet, timeanddate.com appears to exist to provide accurate information and not (at least not exclusively) to provide its founder with riches beyond his wildest dreams. I do not know how the company makes its money. The site says it accepts banner advertising, but I haven’t seen any on the site. I just hope its revenues warrant the site’s continuation; it has been around for twenty-one years, more or less, so I suppose it has found its niche in the world of internettery.

I’ve used the site, off and on, for many of its twenty-one years. I recall one of the first (maybe the very first) time I used it was to determine times in other parts of the world when planning for conference calls. I wanted to be sure to schedule the calls to be convenient to the majority of participants. So, for example, I checked to see what times people in Sweden, Russia, and Afghanistan would correspond with normal working hours. Timeanddate.com make the task simple.

Aside from the practical aspects of life that timeanddate.com address. the site prompts me (not necessarily by intention) to ponder the concept of time. Time, it seems to me, is an abstract human invention. Is the passing of hours and days even remotely relevant to creatures that do not live by the clock? Obviously, deer in the forest experience the cyclical nature of daylight and darkness, but do they conceive of the changes in light as corresponding to the passage of time? I’ll never know, of course, nor will anyone else. None of us can experience life from the perspective of a creature whose thought processes we can never truly understand. Even with the marvels of modern science, the best we can do is to make educated guesses about how the brains of other creatures work and how those creatures experience…their experiences. So we can’t know with certainty whether our abstract notion of time matters to them.

It’s interesting to ruminate about the fact that our concept of time is largely based on the relationship between Earth and the physical movement of the Sun and the Moon. I’m sure I’ve thought about, and probably have written about, how the concept of time would look utterly different to us if Earth were twice as far from the Sun. Days would be longer and nights, too, would go on and on and on. Would we age differently? Or would we simply adjust our understanding of the concept so that, for example, the average lifespan would be 40 instead of 80?

In times gone by, I think humans were more reverent of the Sun and Moon than we are today. Our species better understood, viscerally, the importance of those celestial bodies to our lives. We worshiped them, not in the way people worship a deity but, instead, in the sense that we felt an adoring reverence for them. We revered them, rightly or wrongly, as the givers of life.

I wonder why it gives me such satisfaction to think about such things? Why does it please me to explore questions that have no definitive answers? I think pondering the imponderable is a game in which there are no winners and losers. I like that in a game; an exercise not meant to lead to conquest but, instead, to a broadening of one’s perspectives. On the other hand, I sometimes get frustrated with discussions that, by their very nature, cannot lead to any conclusions. What’s the point, I wonder, when the outcome of conversation can only result in heat but no light? There must be a difference between those two fruitless endeavors, one of which is engaging and uplifting and the other which is disheartening and depressing. That’s another concept to explore one day, but not now, not this day.

This day. This period of light between darkness and darkness. This is a conversation I can have only with myself. I don’t think others would find this abstract exploration of ideas beyond understanding even remotely interesting. So I write to myself. I talk silently to myself. I record my thoughts with my fingers and let my tongue rest and, between thoughts, enjoy an occasional sip of coffee. And what about my fingers? What about the times they are not busy pounding on the keyboard? What enjoyment do they seek? That’s another idea worth exploring when my mood is right. I’ll examine, intellectually at least, whether individual body parts like fingers and toes and elbows and knees can experience pleasure they can experience pain. And, if so, I’ll attempt to define what pleasure means to the back of my knees or the bottom of my feet.

If people were to read what I write, they would know I’m crazy. It’s best that the audience for my blog is small and select. The fewer the number of people who know me, the lower the chances I’ll be caught and institutionalized. 😉

Posted in Just Thinking | Leave a comment

Depressed Hordes

Posted on July 28, 2019 by John Swinburn

I’m just too depressed to write anything other than depressing thoughts this morning. I don’t know the source of this bleakness, but I know writing will only make it worse. Writing tends to draw darkness out of me, though that outward flow doesn’t get filled with light; an endless flood of darkness creeps in to fill the void. I’ll stop writing and, in a couple of hours, will put on my happy face and go to church. There, I’ll pretend to enjoy the company of people who probably have done the same thing; they’ve put on a happy face in preparation for pretending to enjoy the company of people doing the same thing.

The sun is bright this morning, but the light looks muted. I hear birds singing, but they ar not in full throat. Even the leaves on the trees look sad and lonely, as if they are being ignored by all the other leaves around them. Hordes of depressed leaves and lonesome trees and light in the sky looking for a bright reflection but seeing only darkness drinking in the light.

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Into the Wind

Posted on July 27, 2019 by John Swinburn

We allow our histories to melt into nothing. We permit memories to dissolve and fade and disappear. I have evidence of such things. Let me explain.

The Sandpipers. Do you remember them? They constituted a trio that sang popular folk songs and ballads in the 1960s and 1970s. One of their popular tunes was Cast Your Fate to the Wind. The original instrumental was written by Vince Guaraldi and recorded by his trio, initially in 1962. Carel Werber (maiden name Rowe) later, in 1962 or 1963, wrote lyrics to accompany the music. Her then-husband, Frank Werber, was manager of the Kingston Trio. According to a radio interview by Carel Rowe, which I read about but haven’t heard, the lyrics were about Travis Edmonson. He was an American folksinger. The Sandpipers, among others, recorded the music, with Werber’s lyrics.

With that refresher on the music of the early 1960s, I’ll go on. We let facts get lost in the fog of time. Facts, for example, about the woman who wrote the lyrics to Cast Your Fate to the Wind. Despite the fact that I like Guaraldi’s instrumental version of the music quite a lot, I enjoy the lyrics, as written by Carel Werber:

A month of nights, a year of days
Octobers drifting into Mays
You set your sail when the tide comes in
And you cast your fate to the wind…

So, if the comments attributed to Carel Rowe in her radio interview are correct, we might fairly assume Ms. Rowe had a relationship of some sort with Travis Edmondson.  That’s all we know of Ms. Rowe/Mrs. Werber. A brief radio interview and not much else. I don’t know if she is alive or dead. I know essentially nothing about her. And, from what I can find on the internet, I know as much as anyone else. She wrote the lyrics for one tune, was married to Frank Werber for a time, and apparently had an earlier relationship with Travis Edmonson. And then, from all the evidence I could find, she just disappeared. Someone found her at some point later, as evidenced by her reported radio interview, but nothing else.

I wonder whether Ms. Rowe intentionally permitted her memories to dissolve and fade and disappear? And I wonder how to follow suit? Is it possible, in this era in which privacy is virtually impossible, to fade into a mist of anonymity? What would it take, for instance, for me to disappear? I would have to change my name, but I’d have to do it in a jurisdiction where no one would ever expect to find me; Aberdeen, South Dakota, perhaps. The name I select would be one I have never used—neither given name nor surname—in anything I’ve written. I could ask to take the name Scant McMurray. But now that I’ve used it here, it’s no longer available. I can’t share the name I’ll actually use. Once the name change has been made (but after I understand and have addressed the bureaucratic labyrinth associated with making changes to Social Security and Medicare), I’ll take up residence someplace unfamiliar to me; whether a small town or a large city or acreage far from any population center remains to be seen. So many complexities must be met and overcome when erasing one’s identity and taking on a new one.

It’s time, I suppose, to return to the real world. Another day of deck work, More sanding and scraping and painting. I bought a quart of paint yesterday to see how a dark grey rail would look against the light grey decking. The dark grey isn’t nearly as dark as the sample “chip” in the brochure, but it will do. Eventually, even the railing will be painted. I’ll be considerably older then, of course.

It’s obvious, then, we don’t ‘let’ our histories melt and our memories dissolve. In today’s world, we have to engage in Herculean efforts to make that happen. Even with effort, there is no assurance of success. Our identities are too tightly woven into the fabric of an invasive State. That is what we allow. We may as well accept having a tattoo of our national identification numbers placed on our foreheads. Erasure would involve disfigurement. But, then, isn’t that what the process is like today? We can’t just decide to be known by another name, can we? Try as we might, we cannot leave our histories behind like baggage at a railway station. Some well-meaning soul will come chasing after us, insisting that we mustn’t walk away from something so obviously important and valuable.

Why would we walk away? Might it be because we’re so utterly unhappy with what we have become? Could it be that the person behind the smiling mask doesn’t even know how to smile? So many questions. If I had answers, I might write about a person whose reasons for wanting to disappear and assume a new identity are sufficient to make the attempt worth the effort and the pain. I know how the story would end. In the end, after all the trouble of becoming someone new is history, this man will realize that his memories cannot be erased. He will come to understand that he can never become someone new because he knows who he was, and is.

I began quite some time ago to write a long short story (that I never finished) that required the main character to decide between an imminent death by disease and a new life that came at a high cost: if he elected the new life, all memory of him by all the people he had ever touched would be erased. Yet his memories would be intact. I couldn’t get beyond that point; he never made that decision. A number of other factors played into the matter: he was rich and would become poor, he was an accomplished lawyer and would become an administrative clerk, etc. But the issue of being completely forgotten was the central point. Yet that’s precisely what I’ve been writing about. Erasing one’s history by taking on a new identity. Not entirely parallel, but quite similar.

The process of disappearing would be far more inviting, I think, if the choice would involve others’ memories of oneself being erased. One’s disappearance would then inflict no pain. Except, possibly, on the disappeared. If only we could just disappear into the wind, without a trace of sorrow or regret. The story line of It’s a Wonderful Life notwithstanding, such an erasure might well leave the world a better place, if only microscopically so, given the impact a single life has on it.

Posted in History, Memories, Writing | Leave a comment

Muddling

Posted on July 26, 2019 by John Swinburn

My visit with my oncologist yesterday was not quite as cheery as I’d hoped, nor was it terrifying. She reviewed my latest CT scan with me, showing me on her notebook computer images that looked liked a tree’s roots or, perhaps, its sky-facing limbs. She pointed out that the area around the white “roots” was black; that’s what the lungs should look like in that image. The white “roots” I saw were fibrous expressions of my lung’s response to the radiation treatment I had received, she said. I think she called it “radiation fluff,” but I might have misunderstood. I couldn’t find that term when I looked it up last night. What I found, which I think describes what she described to me, was “RIF,” or radiation induced fibrosis. That condition, she suggested, might be responsible for my chronic cough.

She suggested that the condition might resolve itself over time, but she prescribed prednisone to accelerate the process; 4 pills daily for 5 days, 2 pills daily for 5 days, and 1 pill daily for 5 days.  I got the prescription filled and started taking the pills this morning.  After 15 days, I am to contact her if the cough has not resolved itself. If not, she may send me back to the radiologist. For what, I don’t know; I wasn’t thinking fast enough to ask her.

I wish the doctors would confer among themselves before they offer prospective solutions. I mentioned that I’d been given various and sundry pills by my primary care doctor and his nurse; neither “fixed” the problem. She listened but did not react. What the hell. Give it 15 days and we’ll see. I sure hope my cough can be resolved soon; it could well squash our planned vacation to the Adriatic in September, if not. My wife said she would be surprised if I were allowed on the plane if I were in the midst of one of my horrific coughing fits. And she’s probably right.

Yesterday’s Friends of the Coronado Center Library (FOCCL) presentations were okay. But it seems FOCCL did absolutely nothing to promote the event. Even the guy who was supposed to introduce us didn’t show. Authors whose past presentations our presenters made a point to attend did not show. Even one of our own readers did not all show. If not for my wife, my sister-in-law, and the people invited by my next door neighbors, we would have had essentially no audience. There was no marketing done with the Property Owners Association website/e-blast system, no article in the local newspaper…nothing. If we had not asked about the promised wine (which we told people to expect), I am sure it would not have come. And we’re supposed to have another group of our authors feature at the FOCCL August meeting. If it were up to me, I would instruct our folks to ignore it. I’m not planning to attend an event designed to support FOCCL if FOCCL itself won’t support it. Am I pissed? A little. That having been said, I appreciated the small audience that did show up. I have discovered, much to my surprise, that I like reading my writing in front of an audience. I’m just not sure an audience likes me to read my writing to them.

I chose to read one short story from the Writers’ Club anthology and one vignette I wrote more recently. Both were rather dark. That’s what I write; I tend to write the darkness of the human psyche. That’s probably why the audience isn’t especially fond of hearing me read. My more cheery stuff seems, to me, artificial. The flavor of synthetic joy spilling from my fingers is a little like chemically created strawberry soft drinks; sickeningly sweet and obviously unnatural.

After the FOCCL fiasco, my wife and her sister and I went out to an early dinner with our neighbors (the painter and the writer). We talked about going to La Dolce Vita, but when we got there, we discovered it was closed. So, we went outside the west gate to Village Hibachi, instead. Nice meal.

My efforts to think and feel positive at this moment are failing miserably. I’ll make progress for a moment or two, then go smashing down against the rocks, pushed by incomprehensibly powerful waves of melancholia. I may be overstating my doleful state, but maybe not. I don’t know whether I’m despondent or just dispirited. I suppose it, whatever it is, will pass. It always does, though I wonder whether the “up” cycle is any more attractive than the down. Neither draws me into a state of euphoria.

There are days, and this is shaping up at this early hour to be one of them, when I’d like to make my way to the nearest train station for an impromptu escape. The destination wouldn’t matter much; it’s the journey I’m after. A journey away from the thousand petty annoyances that I encounter every day. But, in reality, I know they would join me on the train, for they reside inside my head. Meditation, that’s the cure, instead of travel. Or medication. Mind-numbing medication that soften the hard edges of the thoughts and ideas that inhabit my brain.

I will muddle through the day. Perhaps, if I can get some work done on the deck, my mood will brighten. If I had a helper, the project would move along at a much faster pace. Alas, I don’t have a helper and I guess I won’t get one. So I’ll muddle through alone. Eventually, the project will be a distant, bitter memory, even without a helper.

 

Posted in Rant | Leave a comment

Busy

Posted on July 25, 2019 by John Swinburn

I’ve sanded and scraped and painted (with at least one coat of paint) roughly one half of the deck. Yesterday, I started late. I had forgotten I had arranged for a visit by the pest control guy. About the time I was ready to make breakfast, then head outside to work on the deck, my wife reminded me of it. She chides me for failing to look at the calendar first thing every morning. For good reason, I might add. More than once I’ve forgotten early dental appointments and such things; fortunately, she has rescued me with her snarls and expressions of annoyance at my failure to look at the calendar.  At any rate, I didn’t start working on the deck until after 10. I made breakfast before the pest control guy got here. Korean street toast, by the way, which I mentioned less than a week ago. I thought it was okay, but it needed a spice boost, so I flooded it with my jalapeño paste, which gave it the kick it needed.

ANYWAY, I ate, I watched the pest guy do his magic, and only then did I get out to begin working on the deck. Lots of sanding, a fair amount of scraping, and more than a little rest time in between. I finally began to paint sometime after lunch; maybe around 1:00 p.m.

I managed to get only one coat on the lower right-side deck (which I had scraped and sanded) by the time I cratered, around 3:15 p.m. I didn’t have the energy to lay on a second coat yesterday (and I doubt the first one would have been dry enough in time to allow it, anyway). Today I have commitments that will prevent me from painting:

  • A morning visit with my oncologist, who will review my latest CT scan and tell me, I hope, there is nothing new to report. I hope she will know that my cough continues unabated, but I doubt she pays any attention to my other medical records. I will tell her, anyway, I have an appointment to see an ENT specialist on August 12 in the hope he can figure out the reason for my cough and the cure.
  • Then, this afternoon I am scheduled to read some of my writing at an event organized by the Friends of the Coronado Center Library (FOCCL). Eight members of my writers’ club joined together to publish a short anthology of our work; we’ll hawk it to the tiny audience that comes to hear us and will read something and talk about writing. Not all of us; only 3-4 of us. And I won’t likely read out of the anthology; instead, I’ll read some vignettes from my blog. They are shorter.
  • But before all of this, I’ll go get a haircut. The barber opens at 7 and I plan to be there shortly after the doors open. I need a haircut. I needed a haircut a month ago. I need it more so now.

If the weather cooperates, I’ll awaken early Friday morning and will work on the deck again. The house cleaner comes at 11:00 a.m. tomorrow, but I suspect my deck work won’t matter to her, except when I need to come inside to breathe filtered air and get water to address my dehydration.  I hope the weather Friday morning will remain moderately comfortable for at least a while. I am no good with high heat and high humidity.

My hair will be more attractive, if all goes according to plan, by the time I read this afternoon.

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Twists and Turns

Posted on July 24, 2019 by John Swinburn

Yesterday, my wife and I went to Little Rock for lunch. We revised our intended destination, The Fold: Botanas & Bar, when we stopped for gas at a Kroger gas station. We both got out of the car and commented about how pleasant the air felt. Cool, but not too cool, and dry. That was a huge change from the recent wave of hot, humid days and nights. My wife suggested we revise our plans; instead of our originally planned lunch destination, she suggested we go to The Pantry. There, we could sit outside and enjoy a charcuterie board and a glass of wine. And that we did, except for the wine. I ordered a beer, instead. I regretted that decision, but only slightly. I think I would have enjoyed lunch more with a nice dry red wine, but it was just fine with a Founder’s All Day IPA.

We had errands to run while in Little Rock, such as buying groceries. And we made up a couple; we stopped at Mary’s greengrocer stand/shop to buy some fresh okra and we stopped at Colonial Liquor where my wife picked out a gin she had never tried and we selected a couple of bottles of wine.

All in all, the day was enjoyable. I commented to my wife as we sampled Hungarian sausage and smoked pork belly that the experience was considerably more enjoyable than scraping the deck and putting down a new coat of paint. But that chore, the deck rehabilitation, remains. And, so, today That, I will return to the reality of deck recovery.

I invited a friend from days gone by to come visit us recently and she accepted and offered up a couple of dates, but then our schedule went slightly awry with a remembrance service, including house guests who would attend. We’re back on track and I’ve suggested she come on down (she has a Winslow, AR address, but she lives out in the country, away from the few little towns in the area). We await her reply and plans. And our good friends in another part of the state will have returned home by now from a long (both in distance and in time) road trip, so we must try to see them when they recover from being away from home for two months or thereabouts. I look forward to seeing them. I’m almost giddy with excitement at the thought of spending time with her.

I didn’t realize how damn full our schedules are until I started looking at possible dates for getting togther. We have all manner of minor social and other obligations in the coming weeks, though skipping out on any or all of them would not spell the end of the world. But just seeing what we’ve committed to made me realize why I sometimes feel confined and rigidly circumscribed. I miss the freedom that comes with social isolation, I suppose.

That sense of imprisonment-by-calendar gets me cranky. Or that’s what I blame, at the moment, for my crankiness. Freedom from outside obligations is among the most joyous sensations. But I suppose the price of that freedom is the very social isolation that contributes to loneliness.

Loneliness. I wrote an essay about my loneliness a few days ago. I haven’t shared it and probably won’t. Despite my best efforts, I could not adequately describe how one can feel an intense sense of loneliness, even while engaged in a growing number of casual social relationships. It’s the casual nature of those relationships that allows loneliness to grow, I think. Superficial conversations that center on behaviors (what did you do yesterday?) rather than thoughts (how did that experience feel to you?) contribute to loneliness. That sentence seems superficial; lacking real substance. It’s not about how a person feels; it’s about how a person can share the way he thinks with someone who actually gives a shit about the way he thinks. Loneliness is much deeper than social isolation. Social engagement does not necessarily “cure” loneliness. Nor does social isolation bring it about. Loneliness arises, I think, from a lack of the sense that one’s existence is of significant consequence to someone else. Chatty conversations with a dozen people does not quell loneliness.

Holy crap, I really stumbled into a rabbit hole. Obviously, there’s a reason I probably won’t share that essay; its incoherence would be an embarrassment. That’s one of the risks of writing a lot and putting it out there for every passing stranger to see. Every fault, every wart, every blemish spills from the brain onto the keyboard and then to little screens all over the world. That spillage creates the misfortune to be seen without the protection of cosmetic stage makeup. Yet it is freeing, in a way, to expose one’s copious flaws and weaknesses before those defects are pointed out by someone else. It constitutes a public airing of one’s dirty laundry, I suppose. Although, as my decision not to post my essay about loneliness suggests, one’s fragility prevents airing the thread-bare clothing full of rips and tears.

I’m trying to incorporate yesterday’s admonition into my day today: Spending today complaining about yesterday won’t make tomorrow any better.  I’m not complaining. I’m just pointing out reality. And the reality, now, is that I need to prepare breakfast and, then, repair the deck.

 

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Making Life Better

Posted on July 23, 2019 by John Swinburn

Spending today complaining about yesterday won’t make tomorrow any better.

That aphorism, easy to dismiss as a frivolous adage, is absolutely true. And it applies not only to complaining about yesterday but about tomorrow and about our expectations for the foreseeable future. Complaining is, in general, a waste of precious time we could use to enjoy and be grateful for the good things in our lives.

Granted, complaining about poor service may result in getting better service, but the manner in which a complaint is lodged matters enormously. If a “complaint” is presented in a context of of grateful appreciation, it becomes a learning experience and an opportunity for positivity.

I hadn’t intended to begin today with “the power of positive thinking,” but I learned a lesson yesterday afternoon on this very subject and I thought I’d share it. My lesson improved my life and brightened my day a bit. I hope sharing it will do the same for someone else.

 

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

When Is It Wrong to Ask Questions and Express Opinions?

Posted on July 22, 2019 by John Swinburn

A dust-up occurred earlier this year among certain people of influence in the loosely-woven halls of power of a minor religious denomination that I choose not to name. The brouhaha erupted over publication of an essay that recounted a woman’s experience as she attempted to be supportive of her cisgender daughter’s close relationship with a person who was in the midst of transitioning from the male gender assigned at birth to the female gender. The writer apparently had always been a supportive ally of gays, bisexuals, transsexuals, etc., etc. The story is more complex, but I’ll try to simplify it by saying this: the writer expressed the difficulty she found in understanding and engaging in conversations about non-binary sexual identities. She was surprised to be told, when she asked questions to satisfy her curiosity about the journey between the gender a person had been assigned at birth to the gender with which the person identified, “You really can’t ask about that. The only thing you can ask is which pronoun someone prefers.”

The article raised the hackles of some influential people in the non-binary community within the denomination. The editor of the publication wrote, in an apology about the essay, that it became apparent after the fact that “Additionally, it was hurtful to put a straight, cisgender person’s experience in the foreground, especially as one of the first major articles in the magazine on this topic.”

I have read literally dozens of articles asserting it is absolutely wrong to expect Blacks to educate Whites about how to correct the legacy of slavery and racial prejudice (and I understand the legitimacy of that position).  I find it hard to comprehend why our position should be absolutely reversed for a different population (non-binary people). Why should we expect them to educate cisgender people about how to overcome the bigotry of sexual-identity superiority? While I concede that only non-binary people have the personal experience of facing that bigotry and, therefore, their personal experiences alone can lead to complete understanding, I believe the same is true for Blacks and Whites.  The perspective of the oppressors, who are trying to understand the facets of their behaviors that are offensive, can be just as educational, I think, to both parties. But perhaps my perspective as a cisgender male is invalid because…I am a cisgender male? Why, then, is my Whiteness not just as invalid when trying to change the racist behaviors of my fellow White males? Why, in that set of circumstances, must I take responsibility, but when it comes to my sexual orientation and identity, it is wrong for me to write an essay from my own personal perspective?

My confusion here is, I think, legitimate. Frankly, I cannot understand how an essay (an ESSAY, I say) written from the perspective of a cisgender woman who, from all outward  appearances appears to be an ally of non-binary people, can be viewed as hurtful. She wrote from her experience, from her perspective, and asked questions that I certainly understand her having. I would find an essay written by a transgender person about their perspectives in maneuvering a cisgender-biased world to be equally illuminating; and I would not find it hurtful to cisgender people. I would find it educational.

I read the original offending article and the responses by the editor, the church leader, the original essayist, and others (all of whom apologized). Even so, I could not understand why the original essay was considered hurtful. Instead, it seemed to me that the original essay upset some people whose upsets were simply accepted—not necessarily understood, but accepted—and treated as legitimate and deserving of apology. Though an apology is appropriate for an action that unintentional offended another person, I think a much more thorough explanation of the offense is required before simply saying “what we did was wrong.” Why was it wrong? Why is it wrong in this circumstance but not wrong in another circumstance that ultimately led to a civil war and hundreds of thousands of deaths? An automatic “mea culpa” is, in my view, just as damaging as an unintentional offense. An insufficiently explained apology tends to teach others that any offense by one person taken automatically leads to blame of another…even when no offense was intended and when the legitimacy of the offense is open for debate.

A reactive “we did wrong and therefore we apologize” is, in my view, an invitation to close discussion. Rather that acknowledging the very real questions and the legitimacy of dealing with an unfamiliar experience, it says “your perspective doesn’t matter—what matters is someone else’s perspective, so tread carefully…always vet your point of view to ensure that it is innocuous before sharing it.”

My reaction to the brouhaha would have been the same, I think, had the issue not been one of sexual identity but, instead, religious affiliation. I would argue that my questions about religious beliefs should be freely asked without concern that I might cause hurt to someone’s deeply-felt religious convictions. I realize religious convictions are choices, whereas sexual identity is not, of course. But matters about which one feels strongly tend to correspond to fragility. I should be conscious of the potential for fragility, but I should not bury my questions for fear I might crack something.

Finally, I do not advocate (nor do I accept for a moment) that questions on what can be delicate matters should be asked without regard for feelings. Sensitive issues should be approached with sensitivity and regard for the feelings of others. In the matter of the essay mentioned above, it seems to me those issues received ample consideration. Perhaps the honesty of the questions triggered the responses. One can be sensitive but at the end of the day some questions simply cannot be asked without being somewhat blunt. Bluntness should not be viewed as synonymous with insensitivity; it can and should be viewed as honesty on display.

Posted in Philosophy | 2 Comments

Certainty

Posted on July 21, 2019 by John Swinburn

Once a mind is made up, irrevocably, it becomes unbending and brittle. It becomes subject to irreversible rupture when irrefutable, contrary facts present themselves. When evidence—that an immutable decision was based on fallacy—is impossible to ignore, the mind shatters into  shards of sacrosanct debris, scraps of certainty strewn across the mindscape. The certainty that led to such an explosive eruption forever taints future decisions. Yet absolutes continue to grow in the rubble of that friable brain; evidence discordant with its unshakable confidence is ignored or mocked. Facts have no place in a mind crushed into a wet dust, laden with alternative truth. That muck soon becomes quicksand, sucking reality into bubbling pits that drown veracity in viscous pools of deceit and caustic myth.

Question everything. Believe nothing, least of all the stories you tell yourself. Your certainty scorches the thin layer of ice under your feet, that thin layer your only protection from the boiling cauldron of misjudgment beneath you.

Posted in Philosophy | Leave a comment

Incompatible with Life

Posted on July 19, 2019 by John Swinburn

Thinking deeply about matters thought cannot change constitutes either wasted energy or vital mental exercise or both. Yet even the assertion that thought cannot bring about change induces change. The contention that any thought is wasted spurs the mind to defend itself against allegations of inertia. That is not clear, is it? No, it is not. And that is precisely why thinking deeply is to be venerated. Not dismissed as an extravagant misuse of mental energy. Harboring ideas that conflict with one another strengthens one’s ability to understand the complexities of life. If not the ability to understand, at least the ability to tolerate. Tolerance is an ability. Like tightrope walking or sword swallowing or singing on key.

Lately, I’ve tried to reduce my distaste for ideas I find repugnant, just to learn whether those ideas can teach me something about the world or about myself that I otherwise would not know. Among those ideas is this: that decent human beings can find human slavery to be acceptable. Even the idea that I might be willing to explore that concept for a moment is abhorrent. It contradicts my beliefs about humanity in so fundamental a way that I question my own decency in being willing to consider it. Yet that is how we get through the odious task of identifying even the most monstrous among us as human. If we insist on seeing the world through the jaundiced eyes of others with whom we disagree at the most basic level, we have the chance of understanding how to change them.

Though I do not and will not accept that human slavery is ever acceptable, forcing myself to think about it did, indeed, lead me to a more complete understanding of the world in which I live. Or, at least, I think it did. My thoughts wandered through oceans of confusion and self-doubt, touching on things I doubt I would ever have considered had I not forced this loathsome task on myself. Somewhere along the line, my mind drifted from the humanity of owning and controlling another human being to owning and controlling another creature: a dog.

Working dogs—like the animals that help shepherds guide their flocks of sheep—are, as I understand it, treated well for several reasons. First among them, I think, is that the dogs provide a valuable service to the shepherds and, therefore, the shepherds want their dogs to be in top form so they can perform their duties as expected. The idea that these dogs are trained to be servants, against their will, probably never enters the shepherds’ minds. The idea that these dogs are not free to leave either doesn’t occur to the shepherds or, if it does occur to them, it doesn’t bother them because the dogs don’t know how much better their lives are than would be the case if they were “free” to forage for themselves. So, keeping the dogs in bondage is beneficial to the shepherd and to the dogs. The occasional dog that runs away is an aberration; its loss is an inconvenience, not a heart-rending experience.

A child who happens upon a sheep-dog during “off-duty” hours might develop an entirely different relationship with the animal. The no-nonsense working dog may become, to the child, a companion. Over a short period of time, the child and the dog can develop a close relationship that has no bearing on the dog’s working life. When the dog is required, on a cold and rainy day, to help corral sheep, the child feels sorry that the dog is suffering through the harshness of the frigid, wet experience. The child and the shepherd have entirely different perspectives about the sheep-dog. The shepherd views the dog as a working asset; the child see it as a friend. While the shepherd doesn’t see the dog as a friend, he treats the dog reasonably well so the dog can serve the shepherd. The child, though, considers it cruel to force the dog to work.

Now, back to slavery. I try to see the world through a slave-owner’s eyes. I can believe either that the slave-owner is fundamentally evil and is perfectly happy with that fact or that he adopts a mindset that protects him from seeing himself as a monster. In the latter case, he must convince himself that, by providing food and shelter to his slaves, he is providing for them in ways they could not provide for themselves. He must convince himself that the slaves are assets that must be cared for but also must be strictly controlled. He cannot permit himself to view slaves as humans like himself; instead, he must convince himself that they are, like sheepdogs, doing jobs they were bred to do.

Maybe the slave owner did not have to convince himself of anything. Perhaps he learned to see the world they way I described simply by growing up in an environment in which slave ownership was simply a natural way of life. I imagine that he learned, either by being taught or by watching what occurred around him, that slaves had to be corrected when they deviated from expectations because, otherwise, they would “lose their training” and become useless assets.

As I said, these thought processes did not change my mind about slavery, nor about the people who owned them. Well, maybe it did change my mind about the owners. The ones who became enlightened and came to understand the inhumanity of the practice of slavery may well have been decent people at their core. I think I may have come to understand some of the people who, even today, do not seem to be compassionate. They learned, somehow, that compassion is a trait reserved for the weak and, therefore, is not a characteristic to which one should aspire. They learned that people who are different from them are to be either hated or feared or ridiculed or otherwise categorized as threats. Perhaps they were taught that “those people,” whatever differences they exhibited, posed dangers to livelihoods and lifestyles. And, so it goes. People who are “different” may not be captured and used as slaves, but they are labeled and targeted for treatments that would be unacceptable is visited upon “my people.”

Now, the question is how to retrain people to be compassionate and to see other humans as simply other human? I haven’t the foggiest idea. My guess is that only time and death will rid us of inhumanity. And even time and death cannot overcome new generations taught to embrace the same old evils their forebears embraced. But maybe if we (the collective we, as in all of civil society) try to view bad behaviors as taught and not inbred, we might try to help others unlearn old ways and learn new ones. Maybe.

But my patience is waning. I’m growing increasingly unwilling to tolerate fear and skepticism and doubt, even though those very traits sometimes seem to guide my thoughts and emotions. Here I am trying to see the world through others’ eyes and, when I think I’ve done it, I have no patience with the brain that processes those other eyes’ visions.

Thinking deeply can result in drowning in conflicting ideas while being dashed against the rocks of an angry coastline. It is, sometimes, incompatible with life. Sometimes, we just have to feel and not think our way out of our anger.

Posted in Philosophy | Leave a comment

Another Birthday

Posted on July 18, 2019 by John Swinburn

If he were still alive, today would be my father’s 116th birthday. He reached only 81 of those 116 years before he died. “Only” 81 is an odd way of putting it. That’s more than a respectable age, though he should have achieved at least 90. His two-pack-a-day-habit of inhaling the smoke of unfiltered Pall Mall cigarettes snatched at least nine years from him, I figure. In the same way my similar volume of inhaling fumes from burning Merit cigarettes required the removal of a piece of my right lung. Dad wasn’t so lucky. His lung cancer was too advanced and too deadly when they diagnosed it. He lived with the knowledge that he had lung cancer for a rather short amount of time, as I recall. I don’t recall the actual length of his illness, but I recall its end. It was an awful, painful experience for him. And it was awful for those of us who watched him live through it in those final days.

I am sixteen years shy of his age when he died. Sixteen years is not a long time. Though, when my father died, sixteen years was half my life. Half a lifetime is a long time. But not so long, really.

I wonder what my father would think of today’s world if he were alive to see it. He would not be impressed, I suspect.

Posted in Family | Leave a comment

A Virtuous Exploration

Posted on July 18, 2019 by John Swinburn

I went to bed very early last night, around 9:00 p.m. I fell asleep almost immediately and slept soundly until around 1:00 a.m. Sleep came in fits and starts for the rest of the night; fifteen minutes here, ten minutes there, half an hour as the night wore on. I finally got up around 5:00 a.m. If I’d slept the entire night, it would have amounted to eight hours sleep. I never get eight hours sleep; apparently I don’t need that much. But I got less than I needed last night. I feel like I’m moving through thick molasses this morning. I’m slow and every move I make requires more energy than it should. If I felt more energetic, I would have gone to the gym. I would have been there when the doors opened at 6:00. But I didn’t feel energetic. And, so, I waded through the internet, my fingers struggling to direct the mouse across the screen. And here I am.

Three-quarters of my first cup of coffee are gone. The remaining quarter is cold and unappealing. As I look at the clutter on my desk, it occurs to me that this is the desk of a lazy, impossibly disorganized man. The only things missing that would complete the portrait of the desk of an idiot are ashtrays filled with cigarette butts and crumpled packs of cigarettes. Cigarettes. I find it hard to believe that, for a very long time, I smoked them. And I enjoyed them. Now, I find their odor rank and offensive. And though I try not to, I look at people who smoke as somehow lesser beings. That’s how people viewed me, I’m sure. Not sufficiently smart to realize what I was doing not only to myself, but to the people around me. Ugh!

People mistreat their bodies. I know I do. We eat foods that clog our arteries and pad our waistlines. We avoid getting the exercise that would keep our muscles firm and our cardiovascular systems healthy. We allow ourselves to get addicted to cigarettes and alcohol and drugs of all kinds. We jump out of airplanes and drive recklessly. Frankly, we’re too stupid to be allowed to live. Yet live we do. Just not as long as we otherwise might. And not as comfortably as we would had we just cared for ourselves better. And we don’t get enough sleep. Sleep replenishes us. It nourishes our brains and gives our bodies time to rest.

I think people would be more likely to treat themselves (that is, their bodies) with more respect if the results of proper care were more immediate. As a species, we’re impatient. When I go to the gym, I want to see immediate results; a narrower waist, firmer muscles, more stamina, and hungry stares by women who crave my body but will never have the good fortune to engage with it. Well, I never really want or expect those hungry stares, but the instantly firm muscles and narrow waist would be nice. When those results do not come after three or four sessions at the gym, the efforts seem wasted and pointless. Patience is a virtue, they say.

According to Aristotle, the highest virtue was intellectual contemplation. An additional twelve virtues he said, are:

  1. 1) Courage
  2. Temperance
  3. Liberality
  4. Magnificence
  5. Pride
  6. Honor
  7. Good Temper
  8. Friendliness
  9. Truthfulness
  10. Wit
  11. Friendship
  12. Justice

You’ll notice that patience is not on the list. But I did find patience on a list of forty virtues (40!!??). I think forty is an unrealistic number; I couldn’t even begin to name forty virtues. Of course, I couldn’t name Aristotle’s thirteen without the aid of Queen Mother Google, the fount of all knowledge and keeper of plenty of deceit. In that list of forty, I found Docility and Meekness; methinks some of the virtues were found in a Thesarus. I also found Prayerfulness: “being still, listening, and being willing to talk to God as a friend.” Uh huh.

“Hey, let me introduce you to my friend, God. Quite the baseball player, God is. And he cures cancer when he’s in the mood.”

I realize, when I sit at my computer and write, that I frequently pause and look up resources online to help me better understand and idea taking shape in my head. It’s as if my brain and the internet were beginning to merge with one another; I can’t think a fully by myself as I can when I am connected with the world wide web. Elon Musk, I read yesterday, intends to implant chips in human brains to create direct connections between humans and computers. I suspect he got the idea while contemplating what I’ve realized sitting here at my computer; I think more completely and with far more breadth and depth when I am equipped with the aid of a computer. The computer would be useless with me to use it and my brain would be less resourceful without access to the computer. It stands to reason, then, that a means of integrating the two would magnify the scope of their intellectual values. My brain power would expand exponentially if I could directly incorporate the reach of the internet into my thoughts.

My thoughts were interrupted by an odd noise outside. I went to explore and discovered my driveway repair guys are here. They are grinding the cracks in the driveway in preparation for filling them with concrete and aggregate. I am impressed with these folks; they are hard workers, very friendly, and knowledgeable about their specialities. They have the stamina and endurance I don’t.

Enough musing for now. I had better get on with the day.

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

A Happier Place

Posted on July 17, 2019 by John Swinburn

Gourmand: 1) person who is fond of good eating, often indiscriminatingly and to excess (dictionary.com); 2) a person who enjoys eating and drinking in large amounts (collinsdictionary.com); 3) one who is excessively fond of eating and drinking (merriam-webster.com).

I plead guilty on all counts.

The difference between a gourmand and a gourmet is that a gourmet is a connoisseur, an epicure, a refined and highly discriminating sampler of fine food, often paired with a side of pretention. Another difference, I think, is that a gourmand isn’t obsessed with food, though he may sometimes seem like he is; he just enjoys the hell out of it. A gourmet, on the other hand, in my view, is obsessive. He (or she) flaunts his discriminating palate as if it were a piece of fine jewelry he created from diamonds and gold he ripped from the earth with his own hands. Is my chauvinism showing?

All this is a prelude to my desire to express my desire to eat devilled kidney. I would prefer for it to be served to me at breakfast and for the kidney to have belonged to a lamb, but in a pinch I would accept a mid-afternoon snack crafted from organ meat previously owned by an adult sheep. Actually, I would be willing not to have it served to me but created by me and snatched off a freshly-plated  tray intended for dinner guests.

This afternoon diversion began early this morning as I read about and plotted to create and eat a certain Korean street food, Korean Breakfast Toast. The path between that earlier exploration and my temporary fixation on devilled lamb kidney is long and convoluted. I won’t go into it here for fear of never reaching the end of this post. Suffice it to say I wandered through a number of rabbit warrens, setting free dozens, if not hundreds, of bunnies in the process. The fact of the matter is this: I ended (at least for now) the process by reading about devilled kidneys and their popularity during the 19th and 20th centuries. I suspect, but am not sure, that their popularity has diminished during the first part of the 21st century, courtesy of a reduction in gustatory boldness and audacity.

Why is it that many people (dare I say most people?) seem unwilling to risk exposing unfamiliar flavors to their taste buds? Why are certain textures unappealing or even repelling? Does it not make sense that, if people in other cultures can tolerate and even enjoy “strange” foods, that we, too, can at least tolerate them? No? It’s “no” only if one subscribes to the erroneous belief that different “races” have different physical traits. Which is, in my obviously biased view, patently absurd. Such an idea is ugly and appalling and should be corrected by forced exposure to some of the “offending” culture’s more problematic differences. Here, I’m thinking of things like requiring a person to slay, skin, and cook a guinea pig; assuming, of course, this person found the idea objectionable. Peruvians eat guinnea pigs; cuyos is the word used by some indigenous people.

I think I’m veering off course again, though.

My intent, when I began this post, was to lament the fact that I find it so hard to identify other people who are willing to try unusual (to us) foods. I’m not looking for people who are obsessive about it; only for people who have a spirit of adventure and who are willing to try new things. Those people seem to be few and far between. We know a few. And we love them. But there should be more. Many more.

The world needs more gourmands. It would be a happier place.

Posted in Food | Leave a comment

Sesquipedalian

Posted on July 17, 2019 by John Swinburn

Sesquipedalian; 1) given to using long words; 2) containing many syllables.

I first encountered the word nine years ago on Facebook. Really. The word was included in a post on the Smith College Facebook page. Ah! That explains it. I did not know the word, so I looked it up. Of course, I did not recall the meaning of the word when I encountered it again today. That happens a lot. I come across words with which I am unfamiliar. I make a point of looking them up and then using them in some form or fashion; my hope is that by using them, I will remember them. Typically, it doesn’t work that way. I may remember the word and its definition for a week or a month, but not much longer. Except in those instances in which the word triggers some sort of physical reaction. Of course, I don’t recall words I learned in connection with a triggered physical reaction. But one day I will. And when I do I will attempt to commit them to memory. But, probably, I will fail. That’s just the way it is.

I try not to brag about my sesquipedalian vocabulary, which is easy to avoid inasmuch as I tend to use relatively short words and I am not much of an admirer of sesquipedalian language. I would never, for example, use supercalifragilisticexpialidocious in a sentence, whether I knew how to spell it correctly or not (although, as I understand it, it’s not really a word). But there are legitimate uses to which a sesquipedalian vocabularly can be put. In medicine, for example, each component of absurdly long words can convey important information. Naturally, I cannot think of any good examples or, for that matter, any poor examples.

This morning, I’m trying to use language as a crutch, a cane to prop up my mood and keep it from stumbling into the abyss. That’s where it was last night, even into the wee hours of the morning. Even as the dim light of day attempted to peek through the monstrously humid air this morning.

The air is drenched in fog or haze; a heated mist that turns everything grey and blurs the trees nearby. The trees farther away are abstract forms, almost hidden by nearly opaque vapor. This morning, as I attempt to delve into words to describe the slate air and dullness outside my window, memories of last night’s depression remain clear. That’s odd; clear memories of darkness, while the fuzzy air surrounding my house obscures the clarity of nature.

Last night, the smoke from gasoline fires and the aroma of cooked meat filled my nostrils; not literally, but the odors seemed real as I imagined setting the world aflame. Strangely, I did not feel the heat of the inferno. I smelled it, but the flames did not consume me, even as I walked through them. How is it that I think I smelled heat? Heat doesn’t have an aroma, does it? Heat, combined with other materials, results in odors, but the heat alone is neutral, I would think. Is it possible to smell the sun? I suppose it may be. The sun is super-heated hydrogen and helium and a few trace elements. But it’s those elements I might smell, not the temperature of the sun.

See? I’m using language to steer me away from doleful, cheerless despondency. That’s a bit redundant, I know, but I’m doing it to make a point. Words can serve as transportation out of a funk. Eye candy, too, can serve as a route out of dispiritedness; allow a pulchritudinous woman to cross my path and my mood tends to brighten. Although, I have to admit, that sesquipedalian word sounds descriptive of something one might find stopping up a toilet.

I’m tired of the funk. So, I shall beat it unmercifully with a platinum shovel until it bleeds into a brilliant rainbow of euphoria. There, in that multi-colored dazzle, I’ll see a woman who lives a life devoted chiefly to the pursuit of pleasure (that is, according to Merriam-Webster, a playgirl). And in that fantasyland, I’ll go by a new name: Pleasure. I’m so damn clever I can hardly stand it.

 

Posted in Emotion, Language | Leave a comment

Shame

Posted on July 16, 2019 by John Swinburn

I don’t know when I last felt so utterly hopeless. Tonight, I feel like I can do nothing to salvage the world. I can do nothing to prevent humanity’s slide into chaotic oblivion, punctuated by race wars and class wars and economic combat. We live in what would be described in history books, if they could be written, as the end times of decency. The only hope I can hold in my heart is an experience absolutely anathema to my beliefs: that is that every member of the Republican Party and all its adherents will be doused in gasoline and set afire. That would give me hope. But it would leave me with an enormous number of people who should have perished in the blaze. I would be left with artificially compassionate people who, the deeper I might dig, would be revealed as bereft of decency as the ones we’ve just incinerated. Eventually, if the cleansing continued, no one would be left. Not even me. We’re all just as guilty as the next one. Our guilt is, quite simply, clothed in different garments. We are bad to the core. We deserve to be eradicated like stinging insects. All of us. Every one of us. Even the good ones. The “good ones” have their faults, too. I’m a cynic. I’m not one to forgive, not tonight. I don’t know how to define sin, but I think we’re all guilty of it; the worst kind, the kind of sin that makes it impossible to achieve even a shred of forgiveness.

If I could vaporize the world in which we live, I would do it tonight. I would eliminate the ugliness that grows like mold on the edges of the human soul. I would torch the misery we inflict on people who don’t deserve it. I would inflict ruin upon this ugly blemish we have visited upon the planet.

I’m not explaining my mood. And I shall not explain it. It need no explanation other than this: I belong to the human race and for that I am eternally sorry and ashamed.

Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments

The Effects of Attention Deficit Bureaucracy on Linguistic Inquiry

Posted on July 15, 2019 by John Swinburn

This morning, for breakfast, we had toasted thin bagels topped with cream cheese, purple onion, capers, and smoked salmon. I had mine open-faced;  as in an open-faced sandwich. While I was eating my breakfast, I wondered aloud where the term “open-faced” came from. And I wondered why we don’t call sandwiches between two pieces of bread “closed-faced.” At least I don’t. My wife didn’t know, either. So, after breakfast, I began the exploration.

The first bit of information I came upon surprised me. According to the Merriam-Webster “time-traveler” online resource, the first recorded use in print of the term “open-faced,” with the meaning corresponding to its use with “sandwich,” occurred in 1917. In that same year, dozens and dozens of other words and terms enjoyed their print debut, according to Merriam-Webster. Those words include:

  • coldcock
  • extrovert
  • eyewear
  • macular degeneration
  • slinky

The “time-traveler” stipulates that each word or term first appeared in print associated with a specific definition. So, it’s certainly possible the words appeared earlier, but with different meanings.

The explanation of the etymology of “open-faced” was bare and insufficient, in my opinion, so I kept looking. According to the Collins Dictionary, the first usage appeared in 1787. However, Collins’s presentation suggests the term’s usage might have been in connection with a meaning unrelated to sandwiches. Interestingly, Collins says the term is used rarely; it is in the lower 50% of commonly-used words in the Collins Dictionary.

Still, I had no explanation of why “open-faced” would be used in connection with sandwiches and, moreover, why sandwiches whose contents were between two pieces of bread are not called “closed-face.” The search continued. And I discovered that the term “closed-face sandwich” is both used by and defined by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

The USDA defines a closed faced sandwich as (according to the Michigan state paper noted below):

Product must contain at least 35 percent cooked meat and no more than 50 percent bread. Sandwiches are not amendable [sic] to inspection. … Typical “closed-faced” sandwiches consisting of two slices of bread or the top and bottom sections of a sliced bun that enclose meat or poultry, are not amendable [sic] to the federal meat and poultry inspection laws. Therefore, they are not required to be inspected nor bear the marks of inspection when distributed in interstate commerce.

According to a Michigan State Universtiy College of Agriculture and Natural Resources paper written by Laura McCready, quoting a December 11, 2007 St. Petersburg Times article written by Bill Adair,

“New York Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton highlighted the difference of closed face sandwiches versus open-faced sandwiches during a speech, “A ham and cheese sandwich on one slice of bread is the responsibility of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which inspects manufacturers daily. But a ham and cheese sandwich on two slices of bread is the responsibility of the Food and Drug Administration, which inspects manufacturers about once every five years.”

Still, no explanation of why the terms are used. “Faced?” Sandwiches have faces? And what kind of bureaucratic madness leads to assignment for regulation of sandwiches to different agencies based purely on the presence or absence of a single slice of bread?!!

My interest in linguistic aberrations is waning, replaced by a burning desire to write an angry rant about the absurdities of governmental regulations. Of course, my insistence that my rant be factual rather than purely emotional would require me to verify that the regulations referenced by then-Senator Clinton were, indeed, as she said and, further, that they remain in effect. I’m not in the mood for research into a government that presently is in the process of being disassembled by an egotistical narcissist who should be, I fervently believe, physically removed from office and chained to a ten-thousand pound anchor that subsequently is dropped into the middle of the Atlantic Ocean and, after two hours, retrieved and put away. But I digress.

Consider the state of the English language if it were regulated by the U.S. Congress, subject to the approval or disapproval of a barely coherent ape in an orange jumpsuit. We all would be speaking in single syllable sentences no more than six words long; the definitions of the words would depend on whether the speaker and the audience were Democrat, Republican, Independent, or intelligent.

Not that it truly matters, but according to the Merriam-Webster time-traveler, a year before “open-faced” was first used in print to describe sandwiches, the term “snake oil” and the words “sociopathic” and “sanitorium”  were first used in print. I can’t help but think there’s more than coincidence at play here. Whenever I think of the weapon of mass ignorance occupying the White House, I receive signals from the universe that tell me, in not-so-cryptic language, that “attention must be paid.”

All of this from a simple question about descriptive language applied to food. Just imagine what might happen if I invested a great deal of time investigating serious questions about differences in intellectual dimensions of women versus men or Ethiopians versus Chileans. The end result could be an eighty-thousand word essay on the relationship between the Bible and modern-day video games.

Posted in Government, Language | Leave a comment

State of Flux

Posted on July 14, 2019 by John Swinburn

You know who I was, not who I am. I am in a state of flux, a man engaged in constant mutation from one form to another. Every breath I take in leaves a different person’s mouth. The change takes place quietly and without show, but snapshots of my psyche taken days apart could reveal stunning adjustments to my thought processes. On one day, I may be the picture of serenity, a calm and contented fixture in a stable and placid environment. But the next, the fury and fire inside me can consume planets—if the inferno doesn’t engulf me in an inextinguishable conflagration first.

If the energy storms that take place inside me were plotted on an oscillograph, the image would frighten even a seasoned psychic reader. The medium would see heat-driven tornadoes of molten rock incinerating entire galaxies. And then in the lull that followed, ice sheets a thousand frigid lives deep would preserve the seeds of the future, buried in the ashes of time.

The view looking in from outside does not reveal the changes; at least not so vividly. That external scene shows a man in the soft throes of fermentation, stooped a bit as he battles the inevitable decay that comes with age. As the years go by, the image changes in more obvious ways. Thinning, greying hair. A growing midsection, fueled by too much food and drink and too little exercise. Skin growing dry and soft. Sagging, empty sacks of skin that muscles once filled.

So, a contradiction exists between the exterior deterioration and the internal cyclic, saw-toothed, emotional whirlwind. It is in spite of and because of that contradiction that I am unknowable in the present. I can be accurately described only in the past; the present is far too turbulent for either words or understanding to capture. And the person I will become in the future is describable only to the extent that I will bear no resemblance to either the present or the past person I am or was.

Though I speak as if “you” were the one who finds it impossible to know who I am at this moment, that inability extends to me, as well. And the “I” of whom I speak probably describes you, too. We all are in transition from who we were to who we will be. We are never who we are for long enough to know ourselves in the present. Your internal oscillograph may not be as chaotic as mine, but I suspect the zenith and nadir of its cycles do not approximate a flat line, either.

If time would slow down for long enough, we might be able to examine the waves of the plotted lines in sufficient depth and detail to know who we really are; in the big picture, I mean. We might be able to adequately understand the emotional swings, from high to low and back, so we might better control them. But, then again, we might not.

Even in my periods of tranquility, passions of every kind course through me like whitewater rapids. Love, hate, lust, anger, rage, ardor. Those emotions power my life just as surely as food and water.  In various ways, they define who I am, even in those moments of calm and placidity. They shape the route my energy flows, too, when fury guides me across a terrain pockmarked with deep pits of anger.  I picture all these emotions as viscous fluids, each one a different color, spinning in different directions inside a massive vessel. The fluids never mix with one another, but they intersect in thin rivulets as they spin, creating illusions that they have merged into new colors. But when the spinning slows, the thin rivulets join with their uniquely colored flows and congeal into thick rivers.

Reading what I have written frightens me a bit; I can imagine a psychologist recommending institutionalization for a person with my thought patterns. But it would be a short stay, wouldn’t it? I mean, I will no longer be who I am in less than a moment’s time. So my deviance is a thing of the past, never the present.

Posted in Philosophy | Leave a comment

Learning from the Canadians

Posted on July 13, 2019 by John Swinburn

The concept seems solid:

“If you think about the composition of meat, it’s actually five things,” Ethan Brown says: “Amino acids, lipids, trace minerals, vitamins and water. All of that is available to us outside the animal. What animals do is take a tremendous amount of plant material and a lot of water and use their digestive system to convert that to muscle that we then harvest as meat. What we’re doing is starting with the same inputs—plants and water—and using heating, cooling and pressure to produce meat directly from plants. If we’re capable of pulling those amino acids, lipids, trace minerals and vitamins directly from plants, we should be able to successfully transition the human race from using animals to harvest meat.”

I mean, if we convert the raw materials of iron, chromium, nickel, manganese, copper, and carbon to stainless steel, we ought to be able to convert plant materials to meat. And we do. “We” meaning companies like Beyond Meat, of which Ethan Brown is founder, and Impossible Foods and probably dozens, if not hundreds, of other companies that are or will jump on the non-animal “meat” bandwagon.

I extracted Brown’s quote at the top of this post from an article in Maclean’s, Canada’s national affairs and news magazine. Much of the other information I obtained on the topic of meat substitutes came from the same article, so what I am writing here may be unique to Canada…but probably not.

The market for non-animal “meat” products is growing exponentially. And the beef and dairy industries in Canada are taking notice and responding defensively, as typically happens. Rather than confronting disruptive change with acknowledgement and appreciation, business reacts in fear, which in turn generates attacks against the threat. In Canada, the Quebec Cattle Producers Federation launched a complaint with the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, arguing that Beyond’s products should not include the word “meat.” “Meat” is defined, they say, as “carcass derived from an animal.” That’s a pretty weak argument, I think, inasmuch as the company suggests in its product names that its products are “beyond” that animal-based product.

The concept of converting naturally-occurring plant products into edible food that looks and tastes like meat fascinates me. While it’s intriguing, though, I am innately skeptical that the process of making those conversions is as gloriously good for the planet as some claim. How much energy/water/product is used in the process and how does it compare to naturally-occurring meat? And how much energy is actually saved (if any) by producing and transporting artificial meat compared to locally-raised grass-fed beef? Lots of questions. The questions notwithstanding, the topic intrigues me no end. And, having grilled and eaten a Beyond burger at home, I can attest to the fact that the substitute is damn near the real thing (though my wife disagrees with me).

I look forward to learning more as time goes by and as the “fake meat” industry grows. And, by the way, I also look forward to trying lab-grown meat that, unlike the substitutes, is the real deal, just not from a live animal. For now, though, I understand it’s out of my price range, at hundreds to thousands of dollars per pound.

***

I read something else in Maclean’s that grabbed my attention. Shannon Proudfoot, an Ottawa-based writer for the magazine, wrote a piece that appeared last October (2018). In it, she revealed the most “thunderous epiphanies” about truly mundane aspects of life that people shared with her. These epiphanies were embarrassing “aha!” moments when people realized they had misunderstood facets of life that made them feel stupid. But we’ve all been there. Some of my favorites:

  • Shannon finally realized that her mother, when she opened egg cartons in the grocery store and rolled each egg, was not counting eggs but was, instead, checking to ensure none were broken;
  • A guy “thought Arson was a guy.” The news would say “Arson is suspected.” And I was like, ‘Another one?!? They gotta catch this guy!’
  • A woman didn’t realize that Dr. Spock and Mr. Spock weren’t the same person until she was a grown woman. She was always baffled how a fictional Vulcan became the expert on raising real human babies;
  • Another woman thought the Wheel of Fortune host’s name was Patsy Jack until she was 19. Her roommate at the time informed her it’s actually Pat Sajak after she yelled at the TV screen “Yeah Patsy Jack!”
  • A man thought artichoke hearts were from an animal that he pictured as being similar to an armadillo. He thought it was disgusting that people would buy jars filled with animal parts.
  • Another man said, “I thought money laundering was physically washing the money and hanging it to dry to get cocaine residue off of it. A whole room of people silently stared at me after I announced this.”

I have my own such idiotic epiphany, though it was not so much an epiphany as a temporary failure of thought and logic. I was in a junior high school class when the teacher asked me to identify which word from a list was not real; which one was gibberish. I’m not sure what all the words were, but I think they may have included forearm, forehead, forenose, foreleg, and forefinger; the one I picked was “forehead,” because there’s no such thing as a forehead, right? Wrong. I realized soon after I made my pronouncement that I was mistaken. The rest of the class erupted in laughter and I turned beet-red at my faux pas.

Posted in New and Regained Knowledge | Leave a comment

Hope

Posted on July 12, 2019 by John Swinburn

We went to another World Tour of Wine dinner last night. The wines and menu were, so they said, Chilean. I can vouch for the wines, inasmuch as I saw the labels on the bottles and tasted their contents. I am not certain about the menu, but I suspect it was based at least loosely on Chilean fare.

Last night’s dinner was the first, we were told, that was not a sell-out. The crowd seemed a little sparse, though I imagine there were at least sixty or eighty in attendance. It’s possible that attendance is declining because we’ve begun revisiting countries’ wines. Chile was among the first countries whose wines we tasted; that earlier dinner is what prompted our group to start our own wine-specific gathering at one another’s homes, doing a blind-tasting of Malbec wines. We agreed last night to have another gathering early next month at the house of a couple who live close to us. Despite our decision last night to do that again, I have the sense that there’s not as much enthusiasm about these gatherings as there once was. And I’m not quite sure why that is.

There was quite a bit of enthusiasm last night when someone suggested the group should organize a trip on a California wine train. The idea appeals to me, but I suspect such trips are crowded. My ideal, of course, would involve a multi-day trip in a private train car, visits to multiple wineries (with tastings), and overnight stays at luxurious properties. The cost for such a dream excursion would be out of this world, I imagine. But one can dream, can’t one?

Two people who used to participate in our group, a brother and sister, have stopped because of his pulmonary illness. Coincidentally, I received an email from him this morning, responding to mine, suggesting that we might be able to get together sometime soon for happy hour at his sister’s house, where he’s been staying since his latest hospital visit. Apparently, from what I’ve been told, he is more than a little depressed because he is tethered to oxygen tanks and doesn’t have much energy to get up and about. I can only imagine what that must be like; I hope I can help boost his morale a bit when we visit.

Most of the members of our wine group have known each other for many years; in fact, that’s true of all the members except for Janine and me. We are the newcomers, the outsiders, the interlopers. We’re not treated that way, but I don’t feel truly part of the group because I don’t know the other members nearly as well as they know one another. I suppose it takes time, a lot of time, to feel truly engaged in such a tight-knit group. I’m much more relaxed with the group than I once was, but I can’t be completely comfortable with any of them in a one-on-one basis. That’s true of most people; I mean that’s the way I feel with most people. I can relax and open up in a group setting, but it takes me quite a long time to really relax. Maybe “quite a long time” actually means forever. I can’t even completely open up with myself, and I’ve known the person with whom I share mind and body for many year; still, I have secrets I won’t even share with me. It sounds like gibberish, but it’s not; not really.

***

I have an appointment with my primary care doctor’s nurse this morning. The objective of the appointment is to get a referral to an ENT doctor to see if that doctor can identify the cause(s) of my excessive phlegm/mucus and resulting cough; not only the cause, but the cure, I hope. My primary care doctor is on vacation. His prescription of a diuretic and potassium seemed to help for a few days, but then the symptoms came back with a vengeance.  My wife insists I do something about the cough; she says she wouldn’t let me get on an airplane with a cough like that. I think she was speaking as if she were the pilot or flight attendant. And she’s probably right. Even though I don’t think I have anything contagious, my cough probably would frighten an entire plane-load of passengers, who would fear exposure to the bubonic plague or something equally (or more) scary. We shall see what we shall see. I sure want this cough to disappear.

Aside from the cough, I have a pretty severe pain in my upper vertebrae. Today is the third day of it and I’m ready for it to end. I’ve skipped going to the gym since the pain started because I don’t want to exacerbate it.

This business of illness, pain, coughing, etc., etc. is interfering with my ability to enjoy daily living. This is not what I was planning for this July, nor for the remaining years of my life. Something’s gotta give. My hope is that all the nastiness will disappear into a quickly-fading memory. Let’s hope.

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Philosophy Degenerates into Dark Madness

Posted on July 11, 2019 by John Swinburn

Reality depends on one’s perspective. Summer runs from June through August for me. But for someone in Australia, summer starts is December through February. Both are real, but my reality’s context is sharply different from an Australian’s.

The physical differences between those two realities are easy to understand because the context in which those realities exist is easy to measure. The same cannot always be said for other realities. For instance, the viewpoints (the realities) of progressives and conservatives seem to be worlds apart, yet the contexts within which those viewpoints exist may seem to be identical. But, like the seasons in the northern versus southern hemisphere, their contexts are radically different. Unlike the contexts of the seasons, though, the contexts of one’s sociopolitical stance appear to be identical. Only by digging deeper is it possible to understand that contexts shift when seen through lenses formed by different surfaces of a prism. I could go on, attempting to explain how progressives and conservatives see the same world through different lenses, but I won’t. That’s been done enough by a sufficient number of people; suffice it to say psychology and socialization effectively “bend light” to produce different visions of the world. Instead, I’ll dwell on other contextual matters that color reality.

Let’s assume two people live on a long, narrow lake that is situated so that one end is east and the other end is west. The person who lives on the west end of the lake never takes his kayak out into the water because, he says, the sun’s glare blinds him.  The person on the east side of the lake takes his kayak out at first light and paddles halfway across the length of the lake, turning around just about the time the glare becomes tolerable as he heads back east.

We might assume the person who lives on the east end of the lake is simply more energetic and more inclined to enjoy the outdoors. But if we consider the matter more closely, we might come to realize that, if the person who lives on the western shore were to attempt to head east when the glare becomes tolerable, he might be able to paddle only a short distance before he would have to turn around, or else paddle home in darkness.

We might not consider, in our assessment of the situation, that the person who lives on the west end of the lake struggles with senesthesia, which causes him to taste the color of the waning light as he paddles homeward. To him, the dim grey and pink sky tastes like licorice, to which he is allergic. If he were to be paddling toward home and taste licorice, he might have dangerous reaction, causing him to puff up like a water balloon. The weight of the water balloon could cause his kayak to tip and capsize. The man can’t swim, especially when puffed up like a water balloon, so he would drown. And then how would we feel?

On the other hand, there’s a certain spirituality about melding with one’s environment in the way our water-logged drowning victim merged with his lake. For as written and content-edited in the Zen version of Genesis 3:19: “for water thou art, and unto water shalt thou return.” Robert Heinlein knew the future of water when he declared it sacred in Stranger in a Strange Land. Whether his Martian reverence for water was a prediction of the scarcity of water on earth I may never know, but I’ll always believe it was so.

Actually, the substitution of “water” for “dust” in the above Biblical misquote may be inextricably linked to Heinlein’s depiction of a future in which dust and water are, in effect, both real and symbolic antonyms. I think I’ll write my dissertation on the manner in which the relationship between dust and water provides the canvas upon which both the Bible and Stranger in a Strange Land were written.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this diatribe of madness, reality depends on one’s perspective. And in almost every case, reality is a reflection of the context within which experience plays out. Deep, deep, deep. As deep as the ocean is wet.

 

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Happier Thoughts

Posted on July 9, 2019 by John Swinburn

People in Western culture, I think (and I’m not alone), don’t really believe they’re going to die one day. They comprehend it on an intellectual level, but the end of existence is not a reality with which we can engage on an emotional level. We’ve seen other people die, but that’s other people. Not us. Or, at least, not us in a way that we can truly understand. There’s always tomorrow, the future. Even though we may accept that our lives might end before we reach, say, one hundred years, that final moment is always sometime in the future. And as we approach that point, we extend it even more; it becomes a little more distant, a little less immediate.

I read an article this morning about the “existential slap,” that moment when a person is faced with the immediacy of his or her death; that instant at which one’s impending death becomes real. The article squares with what I’ve thought for some time now; that the acceptance of the fact that we’re really going to die isn’t a state of mind we reach, even though we claim otherwise, until we have no other choice than to acknowledge it. Even then, we may not accept it.

I have no way of knowing this, of course. It’s just a sense that one’s own death seems always to be an as-yet-unwritten fiction that may well never be written. But, of course, ultimately it always is; and it becomes not fiction but fact.

This is morbid stuff that doesn’t appeal to me this morning. So, why am I writing it? It’s what’s on my mind. But now, I’ll go to the gym and attempt to build my stamina and think happier thoughts.

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

My Father was a Carnivorous Xylopolist: A Rambling Recollection

Posted on July 8, 2019 by John Swinburn

Yes, my father was a xylopolist. I did not know that until just a short while ago. Somehow, some way, I stumbled across the word online. I didn’t recognize it, so I looked it up. It wasn’t in the free online Merriam-Webster dictionary, nor on dictionary.com. But I found it in plenty of other places. And the definitions consistently corresponded with my father’s occupation, at least his last one. He was, indeed, a xylopolist. That is, a person who sells lumber. Depending on which definition one accepts, the term describes a person who sells fine timber, fine lumber, or who simply is a lumber merchant. They all describe my father.  Though he didn’t specialize in fine hardwoods, he sold his share of fine hardwood lumber. And he sold the highest quality redwood and cedar, lumber that today would be impossible to find and even more difficult to pay for. Of course, he sold plenty of yellow pine and larch and fir. He didn’t have the benefit of global communication and global research that today feeds us information about our endangered forests. And he spoke often about forest product management; the timber companies, he believed, were harvesting only timber that would be replaced by the companies’ timber farming practices. And it’s possible that was the case. But our appetite for lumber has outstripped our ability to replenish the supply of wood. That’s easy to see when you go to a lumberyard to find good lumber, heart wood with few if any knots. It’s just not there. Instead, warped, cupped boards filled with knots are in ample supply. I suppose there’s still high quality lumber to be found, but it is directed toward outlets that supply high-end architectural suppliers who serve businesses and individuals with limitless cash. The one-percenters, as it were.

The same people who can afford high-end lumber can afford prime steaks and the very best vegetables and the finest seafoods. You know, the stuff that is picked over by chefs from fine dining restaurants before it goes to high-end grocery stores. The leftovers go to mass market supermarkets and the dregs, then, go to those scarce markets that supply impoverished food deserts.

My mind seems always to bend and twist even the simplest subjects into the stuff of skeptical debates and cynical assessments of man’s inhumanity to mankind. I suppose it’s natural. Or, if one is a one-percenter, it’s the inevitable angry outpouring of the resentful common man. But let’s change the subject, shall we?

My father enjoyed steak and bacon and pork chops. He was an omnivore, not a carnivore. But he was carnivorous; he was an eater of flesh, as am I. I’m becoming less so in recent years, but I still enjoy a bloody steak. My father liked his meat cooked more “done” than do I, though truth be told, I can’t remember specifically how he liked his steaks. I think he liked them medium to medium-well, but that’s really a guess, based on faulty memory. After all, it’s been almost 35 years since he died; my memory of how he liked his food cooked has faded almost entirely. But I know he liked meat. He was especially fond of bacon. I remember (albeit vaguely) that he arose very early in the morning when I was a kid and he cooked a lot of bacon. He cooked it the way I liked it; cooked through, but still a bit limp. At least I think that’s how he cooked it. I’ve never much liked crispy bacon; it seems overcooked, almost burned, when it’s too crispy. I think I inherited the bacon appreciation gene from my father. And, the bacon-texture appreciation gene, too.

I may have inherited other traits from my father. Like a predisposition to lung cancer. My father died of lung cancer when he was 81 years old, after years of coping with a terrible cough. My cough, of late, reminds me of his; convulsive fits of coughing whose purpose seems designed to rid the bronchial tubes of mucus coatings.

Aside from these few attributes, and a few more I may one day write about, I am unlike my father. Our personalities, I think, grew from different roots. Although I sometimes think we’re more alike than I will admit. I wouldn’t begin to know how to write a character in a novel who would resemble my father. I don’t think I ever knew him well enough to write a character that even resembled him superficially, much less emotionally. My recollections of him are built, in no small part, on second-hand recollections of others. I suspect the same is true of my memories of my mother, though they are more vivid than my recollections of my father. This focus on early and not-so-early memories is, again, a reminder than I have only vague memories of much of my life into early adulthood. And, for that matter, from early adulthood to the present. It’s as if my life blurs as I live through it. The pages of my book of personal history are covered in thick layers of dust. When I brush the dust from the pages, the ink of the underlying letters smears and become almost illegible.

Recollections (or the lack thereof) of my early life almost always drift into melancholy. I’ve had enough melancholy for the day, so I’ll stop writing now.

 

Posted in Family, Memories | Leave a comment

Traverse City and Such

Posted on July 7, 2019 by John Swinburn

Some friends are spending a couple of weeks in Michigan on a house-sitting assignment. They are taking advantage of their time their to visit Saugatuck, Traverse City, and a flock of other cities and towns on and around Lake Michigan. I’ve been to Saugatuck, Holland, South Haven, and a sprinkling of towns on the eastern shore of Lake Michigan, but not to Traverse City. Traverse City sits at the lowest end of Grand Traverse Bay, a large body of water that is, I suppose, part of Lake Michigan but protected from some of the larger lake’s winter fierceness.

A Facebook friend I’ve never met in person lives there. From her posts, as well as other bits and pieces of information I’ve learned about Traverse City, I think I’d like to summer there. From what I’ve seen of Michigan (which is a fair amount, in that we wandered the state a good bit while we lived in Chicago for a few years), there’s a lot to like. Ann Arbor, though not on the water, is another place I think I might appreciate. As a college town, there’s a lot to see and do. And it has, I think, a progressive (politically) environment. Years ago, during a grand two-week tour around the lakes, when we visited Mackinac Island, I fell in love with upper Michigan. Simply by driving through virgin forests, I was convinced I would like to buy land there. My wife was not so easily swayed, so we didn’t. But I still think it would be nice to have a place “up north” to go to escape the suffocating heat of Arkansas or Texas or Mississippi or Tennessee or …

One of the attractions of places far removed from where I am is the distinct difference in culture. It’s not so much that I don’t like this culture or that one, but that I really enjoy experiencing different ones with different perspectives on the world in which we live.

As I wait for the appointed hour to leave for church this morning, I think “I don’t want to go to church—I want to go to Michigan or Ohio or Pennsylvania.” There was a time when I could act on a whim like that. Old age and doctor appointments and church commitments and the constraints of wanting and needing to satisfy one’s marriage partner makes spur of the moment escapes virtually impossible. The constraint used to be work: my clients and their requirements. Now, the constraints are the simple realities and complexities of life. Some days, I would like to be utterly free of commitments and obligations. I’d like to be able to just act on whims without regard to anything or anyone else. That’s selfish, I know, but the freedom to act, without external constraints, is incredibly appealing.  It’s probably not the romantic experience I imagine, though. With freedom comes loneliness and isolation and the realization that constraints encircle us. We’re wrapped in invisible cables that preclude real freedom, no matter that we might think we’re free.

I’m just daydreaming with my fingers here. Happiness is elusive and, perhaps, impossible. Or, it may be achievable but with a definition rooted in reality instead of fantasy. Enough of this. I’m off to church to hear ruminations about things that make me think.

Posted in Uncategorized | 6 Comments

Conversation with Myself

Posted on July 5, 2019 by John Swinburn

The U.S. Department of Agriculture first printed its “Special Report on Diseases of the Horse” in 1890. It was reprinted in 1896 and later revised and reprinted in 1903, 1908, 1911, and finally in 1916. The 1916 edition, and possibly the earlier ones, included this sentence: “In the mare the thickening of the walls of the bladder may be felt by introducing one finger through the urethra.”

I came upon this information while trying to find a sentence in which the word “bladder” is used to describe something like the rubber bag inside a football. Though I found a very few examples, none of them satisfied me. I was looking for an alternative to “balloon,” because I had used “balloon” in something I wrote last July 5 (in 2018, that is) to describe my head; empty, save for air, and lacking in creative ideas. It occurred to me that I could describe my brain as a hollow bladder instead of an empty balloon, hence the search for usage of “bladder” in a sentence. I wanted to be certain I wasn’t manufacturing definitions to suit my mood; I needed visual reassurance that my intended usage was proper. Instead, I found that my brain is similar to a vessel intended to contain horse urine.  But, as I suggested earlier, my vessel is empty and as far as I know has never contained horse urine. Perhaps my choice of “bladder” was unfortunate. Maybe I should have stayed with “balloon.”

The point I planned to make was that a year has passed since I wrote about the absence of ideas in my head and little has changed with respect to its contents. My head remains empty, vacant, uninhabited by creative thought. One might think that, on the day following Independence Day, my head would be filled with reflections on freedom or self-determination. But, no, such thoughts only create questions about whether freedom and self-determination truly exist or whether we delude ourselves into believing in ideals that have no basis in reality. So I choose vacancy, instead. Vacancy is preferable to clutter drenched in doubt, ambiguity, and skepticism.

Ideas twist and circle around themselves, meeting in the middle and moving along to recreate themselves again. Think of the symbol for infinity, the lemniscate (also called the lemniscate of Bernoulli). I once knew the word and, I believe, used it for some obscure reason but I don’t recall why or when and I can’t find a record of using it, at least not on this blog. That’s neither here nor there, though. My point is that ideas refresh themselves in a never-ending loop. Bladder or balloon; they’re the same thing with just a slight twist. There’s no appreciable difference between my brain and the urinary sac of a mare, if you believe the words of the “Special Report on Diseases of the Horse.”

Infinity, by the way, is not a number, according to something I read online. Yet the same scholarly explanation asserts the lemniscate symbol represents an infinitely large number. Later, it goes on to say, “Infinity is not a number. It does not represent a specific number, but an infinitely large quantity.” Methinks mathematicians may not be especially good with language. Of course, it could be that I am neither good with language nor capable of understanding mathematical logic.

Lest I leave lemniscate inadequately explained, let me incorporate a formal definition: “In geometry, the lemniscate of Bernoulli is a plane curve defined from two given points F₁ and F₂, known as foci, at distance 2a from each other as the locus of points P so that PF₁·PF₂ = a².”

Maybe my head isn’t empty. Maybe, instead, it is filled with shattered fragments of information I never fully understood, even when they were part of a whole. Perhaps the creativity I crave is there, but shredded with pieces missing. That might explain my affinity for infinity and why I want the use of the word “bladder” to matter.

If I let it, this conversation with myself could balloon into something infinitely large and impossibly complex.

Posted in Just Thinking | Leave a comment

Language Crimes

Posted on July 4, 2019 by John Swinburn

Go ahead, call me a Grammar Nazi. But, actually, t’s not grammar. It’s vocabulary. Here’s a heading for a story I read recently on CNN.com:

“Man breaks in to rob a Florida Wendy’s but stops to make himself dinner first.”

The heading, as well as some of the story’s content, just set me off. The guy did not “rob” Wendy’s. He burglarized it in the wee hours of the morning, when no one else was there. Robbery is defined in law as: “the felonious taking of the property of another from his or her person or in his or her immediate presence, against his or her will, by violence or intimidation.” Breaking into a fast-food joint after hours, when no one is present, is not robbery; it is burglary. It might be vandalism. But it is NOT robbery. Journalists who call such an act “robbery” should be summarily fired and their credentials snatched from them and publicly burned, along with their reputations.

Less than two weeks ago, a woman in Hot Springs Village posted an alert about a “robbery” that took place after hours at a local business. The “robber” was the only person present during his break-in and subsequent efforts to purloin goods from the business. Despite the woman’s lack (I assume) of a journalist’s credentials, my immediate response to her post was to want her ejected from the Village for commission of a language crime. I believe she should have been arrested and imprisoned for a period of no fewer than two months, during which she should be subjected to an intensive lexical intervention.

Despite my sensitivity to monstrous misuses of the English language, I realize I commit such blunders myself. But I do not believe my infractions are as serious as those that cause me such consternation. And my offenses tend to be typographical blunders, rather than ignorance of proper usage. Ignorance of the law of language is not an excuse.

I can’t say why some of these breaches cause me such distress. They do, though. They really set me off. I have little to no compassion for people who break certain rules out of illiteracy or its cousins. Assuming illiteracy has cousins.

My sensitivity to language misuse runs counter to my understanding that language is in a constant state of flux. Definitions evolve, spellings change, usage adjusts to changes in population, etc. I know these things. So my requirement that a certain set of rigid rules be followed is somewhat hypocritical. On the one hand, I defend the flexibility of language; on the other, I am intransigent in my insistence that my rules be followed. I laugh at myself, sometimes.

I make a mockery of linguistic integrity. I wonder if the sentence I just wrote has ever been written before? Well, if one assumes Mother Google knows everything, the sentence is unique to me. Finally, I’ve written something new! I make a mockery of linguistic integrity. I hereby chronicle my accomplishment. If I see those words in print again, in the same order, I will expect to be credited with the manner in which they were ordered.

Actually, I think it’s a crime to attempt to harness language for one’s personal benefit. That being said, novelists and poets could be considered criminals. If one assumes they exploit words for personal gain, that is. If their use of words is for the greater good of humankind, on the other hand, they may be benefactors. It’s all a matter of motive, isn’t it? The same might be said of an assassin. If the killer takes a certain politician’s life out of personal acrimony, the actor is a murderer. If he acts out of patriotic regard for his fellow countrymen, eliminating the politician’s treacherous march toward dictatorship, he may be called a hero. Yet is it the assassin’s motives that matter in this case, or is it the public’s perception of the consequences of the act?

***

I went to the gym this morning for the first time in approximately forever. My intent is to begin rebuilding my stamina and, then, rebuilding my strength. I spent only fifteen minutes on the treadmill, achieving only three-quarters of a mile at a speed of 3.2 miles per hour. I set the machine’s incline to one percent for about half the time and one-half of one percent for the remainder. By the time I’d spent fifteen minutes on the machine, I was beginning to sweat profusely. After I got home, I started coughing. And coughing. And coughing. I have a long way to go before returning to my “old self” in terms of stamina and endurance.

***

In honor of all the people trapped and caged at our southern border, I opted not to make a traditional American breakfast this morning. Instead, I made migas (Spanish for crumbs), a popular dish in the Mexican community in Texas. It’s a simple dish of scrambled eggs, fried strips of corn tortillas, cheese, jalapeños, onions, and crumbled bacon. I made a salsa to go with it; roasted tomatillos, onions, garlic, cilantro, and serranos, mixed at medium speed in a blender. Nice meal, if I say so myself.

 

 

Posted in Language | Leave a comment