Napkins
Posted on December 26, 2008 in Cats OCD
Sometimes I can observe my compulsive peculiarities. Let me preface this by telling you about a cat that I used to have as a companion. Ambrose liked to jump in the tub while there was still an inch or two of water in it. He would stroll from end to end, lifting a paw at each step, and shake it dry before putting it back in. It might take him two or three minutes to cross the tub, but he had to have his ritual.
Tonight I caught myself engaging in a similar observance using a pile of napkins. Lynn will attest that when we go to the local soup and salad bar, I like to take a bunch of napkins. As I eat, I wipe my mouth after every bite. That’s right, I take a bite, wipe, and take another bite. It’s automatic with me and I have learned to prep myself for it properly by ensuring that I have enough napkins for the task.
Aware as I am of the habit, I choose not to break it. I have never pressed the issue, but I suspect that if I did, I would feel very uncomfortable. I avoid the company of doctrinaire environmentalists and my mother for this reason. There’s no sense in putting myself between the anxieties.
Wet Christmas
Posted on December 24, 2008 in Festivals Video Weather
As of this writing, there is no wet Christmas. The 80% chance of rain is not materializing as the storm waits at the coast deciding whether it wants to come ashore.
Happy Holidays to All except Bill O’Really who won’t appreciate the gesture because he’s a sour old apple.
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The Quake of ’89
Posted on December 24, 2008 in Earthquakes Silicon Valley
I got asked to relate this by a friend on Twitter, so here is the tale.
In late October, 1989, I worked in one of those places that you don’t want to remember. It was a filthy place with equipment that should have been shot and buried in the mid-seventies. At the end of this one day, I got into my car and drove through the streets of East Palo Alto as quickly as I could.
I’ve never feared East Palo Alto like others have. So when the steering wheel on my car began to fight me, I sighed and pulled over to the side. Someone had sprinkled nails on the road, I reasoned. I had a flat tire, that was all. Just a flat tire.
The wobble worsened as I parked, so I concluded that two or three blowouts afflicted me. So I stopped the car at the curb and got out to inspect the damage.
The lengths to which I denied what was happening beneath my feet surprise me now. Three school-age children stood on the sidewalk, bawling. Oh dear, I thought. They think I’m a child molester come to kidnap them.
“I only have a flat tire,” I told them. “I’m not going to hurt you.”
Then I heard a truck horn honking. I looked over to see a man with Salvadoran colors on his pickup waving at me and calling to me in Spanish.”
Following his gestures, I looked up. The telephone poles were bending back and forth. For the first time, I noticed that the ground was vibrating something fierce.
Good God! It was an earthquake! For a moment in my life, I acted the part of a parent. I herded the children into the middle of the church parking lot where the guy in the pickup was. The shaking stopped in a few seconds. Everyone looked around. Then I told the kids that they needed to get home to tell their parents that they were all right.
“That does it,” one little boy vowed. “I’m never going over to see my friend again!”
I got in the car and drove straight home. All the traffic lights were either out or blinking red red red. When I got to the apartment complex, the entire courtyard was wet and the pool was half-empty. The landlady told me that as the earthquake hit, she’d instinctlvely run outside to check on her kids. All the water in the pool sloshed out, catching her in a four-foot tall wave.
Lynn came home with her own story which consisted of her being sitting in a bathroom stall — someone, she thought,
We took a walk past the stores along Middlefield Road. Cans, boxes, and other product such as books littered the floors. One store sold candles and batteries at the door, but no one was letting anyone in. Strangely, while most of Silicon Valley was without power, our complex was part of a six block island of light. It took until the next morning for word to reach us about the intensity of the quake and the extent of the damage — it had registered 6.9 on the Richter scale.
The next day I returned to work. After the quake, several employees tried to refuse to return into the plant until there was a complete inspection, but were told that they would be fired if they did not immediately resume operations. No one spoke about the cracks in the wall and management thought it was perfectly fine not to check the structual integrity of the building.
The event never faded from our minds. When we traveled outside of California, we could always stop conversation in a room by the mere mention of our experiences.
To this day, I am amazed at the intensity of the tremblor. I had felt it while driving and the telephone poles had bent over. Repeating that helps me get a fix on what I had lived through.
Math & The Mist of Untruth in My Life
Posted on December 22, 2008 in Childhood
I might have embraced music if some sadist hadn’t told me that there was math in it. Another told me the same was true of linguistics, so I lost my confidence that I should ever be good at languages. My fear of math drove me into a corner. I never got to enjoy the happier sides of mathematics due to the fear engendered in me by arithmetic and by cruel folks who liked to point out how my aspirations were all tied into my weakness. My family used to say, almost as one voice, that arithmetic was everything in the business world. The cruel irony of my working life was that I wrote and edited spreadsheets, a task that emiserated me.
I believe the voices of my youth all meant to encourage me to pay more attention to my arithmetic and my algebra. But they only managed to douse my fire, to spray it with a chaotic mist of untruth.
Dream
Posted on December 21, 2008 in Dreams
I wake from a dream in which I have sneaked my dog into England and need to get him out again, then eat some gigantic cookies. I find myself lying in bed near a window. There’s a tiny green telescope on the window sill. I look out it, then answer a phone call from my mother. I tell her that going back to graduate school is impossible but I have other ideas for my life. When I finish, I turn around and look at the room. I am lying on a mattress on the floor in a college dormroom. There’s a normal bed beside me. I get up and go looking for Lynn. I see her ((She has dark, middle-length hair)) arguing with the resident assistant down the hall and then running off. I run after her. She disappears into a doorway covered by a light East Indian blanket. I go back towards the room, then decide to go back because I know pot smokers live in that room. I have been such a pain that she has taken up toking. I go back to the room but have trouble finding it because the blanket is gone. When I open the right door, the guys inside tell me that she isn’t there and point off towards a closet. I find her crumpled inside. I pick her up and take her back to our room to recover, certain that a new, promising chapter in our lives together has begun.
Twisted Wood
Posted on December 20, 2008 in College Possessions
Objects arrive in your life and, once there, there’s no getting rid of them. I hold a few of these to be precious, such as the cane I bought twenty nine years ago [[Dikti|outside the Dictaen Cave in the mountains of Crete]]. There’s a picture of me in the Pomona College annual, the Metate, showing me holding it high backed by a herd of sheep. “The happy shepherd,” my classmates joked, “but did the sheep mind?”
That cane has served me well in recent weeks as my feet troubled me with swellings of the gout, a sprained ankle, and a deep cut from walking two miles in flip-flops. But what I have wanted most to do with a cane is to tap, to make a sound with it, to knock on doors, and to break glass. I fancy myself among the Luddites who made their points using sledgehammers — except I would do no damage.
There’s a story about the Emperor Norton. When he saw a cartoon of himself ingloriously dining at a saloon buffet accompanied by two mutts reputed to be his dogs pasted on a bistro’s window, he pulled out his walking stick and rapped at the glass until it cracked. “This will not do!” he asserted. His protestation went unheard, however, and the legend that he and the two dogs were of a unit persisted after his death ((For the facts of Norton’s relationship with Bummer and Lazarus, visit http://www.notfrisco.com/colmatales/norton/norton2.html)) . His collection of walking sticks, twisted or carved into fantastic shapes, vanished.
An online friend says that the consciousness of things endures whether we keep them or not. I disagree. The sense and the fact of loss would be ruinous if this artifact disappeared. My wife would not have it when her knees gave out or when we went on hikes. My eyes will not be able to linger upon it in remembrance of the short forests and winding roads of central Crete. What will I use to signal my rage, my wanting, or my disgust when a stroke has taken away my voice? For this reason, I do not lean hard on this treasure. I must have it there in my final moments when in dementia I decide that I, too, am an emperor rather than a shepherd.
Rick Warren
Posted on December 19, 2008 in Spirituality and Being Video
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Mega Church Spectacle, Mega Vapidity
Posted on December 19, 2008 in Folly Watch Myths & Mysticism
How much more simple could it be? Husband and pregnant wife must go to a strange town thanks to a Roman rule. Trouble is all the accomodations have been filled. They go from door to door but with no luck until one fellow says “You can sleep out in the stable.” And there the Christ child is born. Amen. Wazoo. End of the story.
But this isn’t good enough for modern Christians. Conditioned, perhaps, by Mel Gibson’s ((I almost write Mel Brooks here, apt because of the sick comedy)) Passion, they want special effects, action. No simple posada for them: they want to be comfortable in their chairs while they watch a spectacle. And the result, for one young woman, is this:
Keri Shryock, 23, of Sylvania, Ohio, joined the non-denominational megachurch in August. She was performing an aerial acrobatics routine with two other actors on the opening night of the production “Awaited,” a contemporary retelling of the Christmas story, when suddenly she plummeted from the rope into an aisle. She died this morning at University hospital.
The whole thing stings of that American pseudo-religion that pretends to be substance when it is merely theatrics. I doubt if any Christmas pageant will be cancelled because of this, but if they are, they are still missing the point. This has been building up ever since Christians came out from the sewers of Rome. Churches graduated from mere auditoriums to cathedrals with their great vaults that made worshippers feel they were witness to the glory of heaven.
American Protestants could not rest with Catholic architecture. Sure they tore the saints’ images off the wall. But in their place they introduced pageantry which was a sort of graven imagery of a more fleshy consistency.
“The Glory of Christmas” is the name of the production they put on at the [[Crystal Cathedral]]. Angels fly across the stage, blowing their horns. There’s a sound and light show. God isn’t a meek little baby born of destitute parents: He blasts his way into reality. The elders of the Reformed Church in America believe that they have advanced religion when what is true is that they have fallen into the same pagantry that Paul spoke out against at Ephesus.
The participants at this shows undoubtably come away dizzy with the imagery, but does a message get across other than “Gosh-gee-whiz-what-an-amazing-spectacle-that-was?” Religion is no longer something you take upon your shoulders to live by but something to be watched. The theater is the heady recreational drug of Bigger, Better, Faster that gets us exactly nowhere in our consciousness of where we stand in relation to others or to the world.
We only stop to think when someone is hurt and then we go on doing the same old things.
Hail Great Diana of Ephesus — er — Jesus.
This is the real war — not just against Christmas but against meaningful existence.
Life as A Kuiper Belt Object
Posted on December 19, 2008 in Bipolar Disorder Reflections
Scientists now believe that Pluto may be nothing more than a comet trapped in an especially broad orbit that gets no closer to the sun than inside the orbit of Neptune: hence no tail. Thus Clyde Tombaugh could not claim that he had discovered either the ninth planet or the first Kuiper Belt object. We’ve been noting Kuiper Belt objects in the form of comets for centuries.
My own revolutions have been much smaller than that of Pluto. I’ve been doing the round rounds for years. Every now and then, a little excitement comes into my life and I begin to glow a bit more than usual. I wouldn’t call these episodes of mania but exuberance. Mania is when I adopt a smaller, more frantic orbit. Exuberance is the understandable excitement of my mind that occurs naturally in a different kind of cycle.
I am a stranger comet when I am off meds. There’s a reasonable orbit of fertile and fallow which is sometimes substituted for by retreats into the darkest parts of my inner space where I can circle for months like Pluto or just stand still, not feeling pleasure in the least. Then, just as inexplicably, I go banzai, plunging perilously close to the sun, believing that I am the sun or near enough to it to be claimed as a solar flare — a kind of son of the loftiest of the local sky gods. Oh how great I feel!
It’s best to have a gentle wobble to one’s orbit than that of a comet, to be more like Pluto but at a closer distance to the star we call Sol. A suitably warm spot will do and it will help to be made of better stuff than the ice that floats in the reaches before the last of the gas giants.
Moveon Made Me Do This
Posted on December 18, 2008 in Insurance Video
MoveOn Made Me Do This on 12seconds.tv
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New Twitter Group for Bipolar Survivors
Posted on December 18, 2008 in Bipolar Disorder Micro-blogging
If you Twitter and you suffer from bipolar disorder, there’s a new group for you to join:
Book Review: The Sheltering Sky
Posted on December 15, 2008 in Reading
[amazonify]006083482X::text::::The Sheltering Sky[/amazonify] by Paul Bowles
My review
rating: 5 of 5 stars
To read this is to indulge in word-primed hashish, not laced in chocolate brownies to sweeten the bite, but hard and true. On every page I found myself in Africa, not the place where wildlife glide gently in game parks, but sere deserts and towns rough with human contact and flies. This is a novel about Americans abroad, not ugly Americans but clueless ones.
Bowles says that the traveler is someone who takes and leaves bits of culture as he goes. Here the two principle characters lose so much of what they are that they die in one instance and go insane in the other.
This a harsh book, a hallucinogenic book, one that should be read for its cold-walled telescope gazing upon the mottled, abrasive desert, the brusque, unfathomable natives and the souls of its protagonists. Do not expect a happy or a triumphant story, but enjoy an unfeigned one.
[amazonify]006083482X::text::::Buy The Sheltering Sky and make me rich[/amazonify]
