February 2002

I’m 62 today. Another milestone/millstone. Got up very late in my “I think I’ll go eat worms” mood/mode, and discovered a birthday card in my mailbox and a bottle of champagne in the refrigerator. Thank God for friends.

Women are the most thoughtful people. They’re always knitting the community together.

I’m hearing that doctors will not declare someone incompetent, like my older sister, no matter how loony they are. I guess they’re afraid of being sued, or they just don’t get it. So if you have an elderly relative suffering from dementia, good luck on getting them any help. Especially if they don’t have any money.

How do you help someone who doesn’t believe they need any help, and bitterly resents any “interference” in their affairs?  If you even ask questions that implies, in their mind, that you think they’re incompetent.  Which they are.

The system isn’t set up to deal with the mentally ill, especially with those with brain damage. It just wants to dump them back on the family, and most families can’t carry the load.

Even if you have insurance, there is a strong financial motive for a hospital to discharge you as soon as possible, and not deal with the underlying problems. Apparently they don’t see that as their job. Stabilize them and get them out. But if someone is too far gone to deal with doctors and keep their medical appointments, hospitalization is the only medical care they get.

This could eventually effect you, no matter how much money you make. Or someone close to you. Americans don’t want to understand that essential social systems are crumbling.

A lot of these systems – medical care, mental health treatment – just will not work if they are run for profit. Yet politicians have demonized government programs and will not fund them. And the voters keep electing them.

We regard almost everything in this country as private, and not much as public.

He believed people are by nature so cruel that a truly perceptive child would withdraw from human society. Somewhere along the way, Harold had made a decision to have nothing more to do with people. He lived and walked among them, but he was untouched by anything they said or did. – Floyd Kemske, The Virtual Boss

The whole point of our culture is to manipulate us into buying things. When did we officially become “consumers?”  It would be interesting to find out.  A turning point.

2002 is bound to be a good year, because it’s perfectly symmetrical.

I used to tell a manic-depressive friend, “It’s not real. I know you think it is, but it’s not.”

A woman I know said she picked her second husband partly because he was “metaphorical.”

Perhaps the greatest reason why Europeans are healthier than Americans is because they have reduced poverty, especially child poverty. The link between poverty and poorer health has long been proven. One survey reviewed more than 30 other studies on the relationship between class and health, and found that "class influences one's chances of staying alive. Almost without exception, the evidence shows that classes differ on mortality rates." (7) The American Journal of Epidemiology states that "a vast body of evidence has shown consistently that those in the lower classes have higher mortality, morbidity and disability rates" and these "are in part due to inadequate medical care services as well as to the impact of a toxic and hazardous physical environment." (8) – Steve Kangas

Is it generally true that the larger a predator the larger its hunting area?  How large an area would a human have needed, back when this country was wild?

 “How can you be in two places at once, when you’re not anywhere at all?” – Firesign Theater. Shucks, that’s no problem.

She is right to emphasize that poverty is something that needs to be addressed, not welfare, and though she did not say it outright, she implicates what most of us who are in need experience every day: that the poor are the most hated and discriminated people in this country. – Catherine Sullivan, Salon.com

I’m writing for people like myself, who don’t get out much.

“It’s a dangling conversation….” – Paul Simon

I wonder if anyone has studied child culture, how it is passed on, if it changes, etc.?

That work could be disciplined and organized for the purpose of supporting an enterprise was a strange notion in 1783….” – Floyd Kemske, Human Resources

If only we could go back to before we got organized.

As far as he had come to understand it, mankind had but one permanent institution: commerce. – Kemske

Kemske mentions “communicable insanity.” I wonder.  Maybe it’s just the time my job forces me to spend on late night buses, but there seem to be a lot of crazy people around.

Do people want to work because they need to feel useful? But so many of us end up just feeding the machine.

Memory is a way of collapsing time, integrating. All the years come together in my mind, places, people, meaning.

Law is harsh, they try to make you afraid.

Nearly 1 million discouraged Americans stopped looking for work in January, causing the nation’s unemployment rate to drop a surprising 0.2 percentage points, to 5.6 percent…. – The Oregonian, Feb. 4

Did you follow that? People give up on finding a job, stop looking, and are no longer counted as unemployed. Therefore the official unemployment rate goes down. What a scam.

Who are those consumers who are so confident?

The federal budget for the drug war next year (including advertising) is $19.2 billion. With that money, you could put 1.5 million students through a year of college (including tuition, room, board, books and expenses at a state school). You want to affect kids positively? Educate them. Don't insult them. – Peter Guither, Salon.com

Every three days, as many Americans die from tobacco-related diseases as died in the Sept. 11 attacks. I'd call that genocide on a grand scale. – Ray Sharp, Salon.com

I would like to read something intelligent about old age, a book that starts at the beginning, where I am now.

In my early 40s, about 20 years ago, I felt things changing and checked out a library book on middle age.  All I remember is, the author said no one is ever ready for it.

Political economics is almost a forbidden subject in America. We don’t talk, enough, about what the economy is doing to us.

No one should ever work. Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world. Almost any evil you’d care to name comes from working or from living in a world designed for work. In order to stop suffering, we have to stop working. – Bob Black,  “The Abolition of Work”

My older sister died this morning and I don’t know what to do, even though there’s nothing I can do. It’s over. A death in the family always seems sudden, even when I know it’s coming. It is impossible to believe that someone I’ve known for 62 years will die, until she’s gone. I always believe that dying will take longer, that I have time to visit before they go. My sister and I just ran out of time.

She was killed by tobacco.  I hate smoking. Dirty rotten killer. It steals old age from people.

We were all trying to save her, and now there’s nothing left to save – except ourselves.

The nuclear family as we know it is an inevitable adaptation to the division of labor imposed by modern wage-work. Like it or not, as things have been for the last century or two it is economically rational for the man to bring home the bacon, for the woman to do the shitwork to provide him with a haven in a heartless world, and for the children to be marched off to youth concentration camps called “schools,” primarily to keep them out of Mom’s hair but still under control, but incidentally to acquire the habits of obedience and punctuality so necessary for workers. – Bob Black

Politics is now personal. I’m now permanently dependant on the safety net. Anything that threatens the safety net threatens me.

Someone said if you get 20 leftists together in a room you would have 20 different ideas about what to do. It’s like herding cats.

It’s a problem running a political group when you can never reach a consensus about what to do. In one group I belong to we’ve settled on a do-your-own-thing approach, where each of us decides what to do and does it. I’ve never been comfortable with that, but maybe that’s the only way that works at all.

I guess this kind of organization is the opposite of, and maybe a reaction to, job organization. When we’re not forced to be organized, we refuse to do it.

Which leaves me going home from meetings feeling frustrated and weird, wondering why I do this. We will never reach the level of organization that allows us to win.

Except maybe the Greens. All they have to do is run a candidate for president who gets three percent of the vote in a close election and we can chop the head off the Democratic party.

The leftist taste for organizational chaos drives people toward personal action, because that’s the only way we can get any sense of control and satisfaction.

This is a personal society.  It’s not just the left. We are reflecting our culture and times. Rigidly organized and hierarchical on the job, everyone for themselves outside of it.

There is, I think, a place for labor-saving technology, but a modest place. The historical and pre-historical record is not encouraging. When productive technology went from hunting-gathering to agriculture and on to industry, work increased while skills and self-determination diminished. The further evolution of industrialism has accentuated what Harry Braverman called the degradation of work. – Black

I wonder why so many Americans feel that the penalties for losing in the game of life must be so severe? Do they need the risk?

People don’t like political business meetings because there is no real organization, nothing gets decided and little gets done. People get frustrated and just don’t want to play. Better to do whatever you can as an individual. So the group becomes a very loose network of people working individually towards a common goal. If only that worked.

In the late 1950’s, a French-based but international organization called the Situationist International … drew attention to the way the ‘spectacle’ of modern capitalism (including its Leninist variants), the organization of appearances, interposes itself between isolated and enervated “individuals” and a world which they produce by their activity but neither control nor comprehend. Mediation supplants direct experience as the fragmentation of daily life into so many standardized prefab roles produces individuals with a dazzling array of forced ‘choices’ but drained of effective autonomy by the loss of initiative to create their own lives. – Black

I’m always collecting bits of wisdom, trying to fit it all together so I can make some sense of life. Before it’s too late.

I’ve seen people die, still in a fog.

Sometimes wisdom is all you have.

I guess, in a science fiction sense, my sister still exists: in memory, as information.

My sister spent her life trying to get on top of things; I’ve spent mine trying to get to the bottom of things.

Last night I dreamed the family had gathered and was listening to a tape my sister had made in the convalescent home before she died. She said we should be sure to get out and do things.

Today my family scattered my sister’s ashes into a river in Washington. When I saw the box I said, “So this is what my sister has been reduced to.” My niece’s husband said, “Only the physical part.”

Also this morning a great grand nephew was born into the world. Balance.

Now I’m the oldest in my family. This is not an honor I sought.

Memo to younger folks: I’m getting older. Catch my act while I’m still here.

News flash for anyone who’s as dumb as I am: When someone is down to 86 pounds and spitting up blood they’re not going to last long. Visit them while you can.

Death keeps surprising me. Probably because I don’t want to look at it. I guess I’m as death phobic as my culture.

But also it’s normal – that is, common – to feel guilty when someone close to you dies. We can never have done enough for the dead.

Let’s just remember all they did for us.

Meanwhile, I’m still trying to act normal.

Why is grief abnormal? Socially inappropriate? Especially for men. We don’t want to depress others. We don’t want to be a burden. Boys don’t cry.

But I think women also feel the need, socially, to hide grief.

It’s like after a week or two you’re supposed to start feeling better.  But it takes months to years. It probably takes longer because we can’t express it.

I got so tired of spending time in hospitals. My sister kept bouncing in and out of them. That was about all the medical care she got, because her mind was too far gone, probably due to a stroke, to keep her doctor appointments. Hospitals are not set up to treat chronic illnesses. They just want to stabilize you and get you out of there as quickly as possible. What happens after that is not their problem.

Memo to my family: I’m next, okay? Because I’m the oldest. All family members will please refrain from dying before I do, because I can’t take any more of this.

I’m not into binary politics. Don’t tell me I have to vote for a Democrat so we won’t get a Republican. That leaves no room for change.

John Q: Most of the critics don’t like it, but it’s a good political movie. Not subtle no, but it makes its point.

Lately I’ve been reading that stress, too much for too long, causes depression. Rings true for me. It just wears you down.

A book usually feels like a richer experience than a movie. So much more content.

It just isn’t a fair trade: Our long lives and luxuries in exchange for all those years of work.

Crazy man wandering around the bus mall downtown, very angry, yelling at someone invisible.  What have we gained by shutting down the state hospitals and letting these people loose? 

I read a column in the Portland Tribune by a former state legislator. He said the state had to make huge budget cuts in the recession of 1981-82. Some state programs, he said, have never fully recovered, including mental health and special education.

Locally the mental health program is run by the county. In recent years it has been a scandal, under funded, fragmented, badly organized, services cut. A former friend, manic-depressive, had her weekly counseling session cut from one hour to half an hour. She needs all she can get, because when she gets upset and doesn’t know what’s real, she needs someone to talk her down. What she really needs is instant, anytime, telephone counseling, but that isn’t available. Her meds help, but they’re not enough.

The county is trying to reorganize its mental health program. At a party recently, a woman told me that the new guy in charge of the program is an “asshole”. I hope she’s wrong.

 … it’s impossible to get people to do what you want by just telling them to. The manager-subordinate relationship … is basically a situation in which one person tries to control another person, and the other person reacts by resisting, usually under a pretense of cooperation. – Floyd Kemske, The Virtual Boss

Like parents and children. I would like to find some way to structure society so that no adult has power over another adult.

If we really wanted society to be less coercive, there are ways we could do that. Is that what we want, or do we believe that people only respond to force?

More to the point, I guess, do we want to be controlled, freed from the responsibility of making decisions? I still think more people would choose freedom if there were a subsistence income safety net under us. We don’t want to risk sleeping under a bridge.

The most important thing about an idea is not whether it’s true, but whether it’s interesting

Men would probably be happier if we paid more attention to what women like.

I’m a utopian realist.

My younger sister just told me that Thomas Edison invented the electric chair, and that he was a maniac.

If I can’t be one of the people who make things work, I would like to be one of those who make things not work. Who causes problems.

Years ago a woman told me she had discovered that she could get stoned by herself.

A 65 year-old man told me recently that his prescriptions cost him $400 a month. And Medicare won’t cover prescriptions. So he’ll just keep on working.

Drift is like a doctor’s prescription.

A vegetarian friend told me that getting enough protein is not a problem for most people, even if they don’t eat meat, because so many foods contain protein. She said if you’re getting enough calories you’re getting enough protein. Good to know if you need to cut your food costs.

All through the 1970s and 1980s, American colleges and universities turned out ever larger numbers of MBAs, a process that coincided with the steady erosion of the country’s once-dominant manufacturing base. – Barlett & Steele, America: What Went Wrong?, 1992

I feel like I’m gone, and I don’t know when I’m coming back.

Loneliness is the curse of people in strange lands…. It is the lonely who are particularly vulnerable to television, to its personalities, its fragments of reality. – Theodore H. White, America in Search of Itself,, 1982

One way to deal with the frustration and alienation of leftist politics is to become an activist, to actually do something. Another is to see it as an intellectual challenge, and educate yourself.  See it as a story and look for the pattern: The left is most successful when it organizes large numbers of people whose self-interest coincides with ours, people who are left by necessity.

TV ad says with whatever car they’re selling, “You can impress people or avoid them altogether.” American values.

Conservatives want to let the market decide. The problem a lot of us have with that is, the decision will go against us.

In the 1950s, real income had gone up by 37 percent; in the 1960s, by 34 percent. But in the 1970s, growth of “real income” stalled. According to the AFL-CIO study, a real decrease began in the buying power of working men and women in 1977…. – White

The poor are mostly mute and rarely quotable. – White

Or maybe no one is listening.

I wish, when someone close to us dies, we were allowed to take paid time off from work. It’s not that I can’t work, it’s that I have to go to work and pretend to be normal.

When someone close to me dies it’s hard not to be angry at them for leaving. I think, if only they’d taken better care of themselves. But eventually we all leave.

I wonder if every death is a nightmare, for those left behind.

After people die you have to let them go. Forget all the bad things that happened and just remember the good. They did the best they could.

An excellent memory is not necessarily a good thing. There has to be a statute of limitations on the nasty things we do to each other, where you say to yourself, okay that was a long time ago. We’re different people now.

Yes I know what Shakespeare wrote, about the evil people do living after them and the good often being interred with the bones, but it should be the other way around.

If you pile too much stress on anyone for too long they’re going to get a little crazy. None of us are immune.

Substantial majorities believe the government should assist people in need, oppose increased Pentagon spending and budget-balancing that entails cuts for health and education…. So effectively has functioning civil society been dismantled, that Congress can now ram through programs opposed by large majorities who are left in fear, anger and hopelessness. – Noam Chomsky, in an essay on Independence Day, July 4

Politics is the shadow cast on society by big business – John Dewey, quoted by Chomsky

The central problem of human life is that everything we build eventually falls apart. So we might as well watch the squirrels.

The past is a trip. You have to learn to travel ahead of it, constantly creating a future.

I’m not sure I believe in life before death.

Recent studies suggest that consciousness is carcinogenic. – Bob Black, The Abolition of Work and Other Essays

There is no life after work. – Black

Leftism: Too many causes, not enough effects. – Black

Mort Sahl said, sometime in the 60s, that he didn’t want to be a Democrat or a Republican, he just wanted to stand on the outside and throw rocks.

Twenty years ago the Goodman brothers guessed that 5% of the labor then expended would meet minimum survival needs, a figure which must be lower today; obviously entire so-called industries serve nothing but the predatory purposes of commerce and coercion. – Black, 1982

Nowadays you have to be odd to get even. – Black

Bob Black is the ultimate outsider. In his view the American left reinforces the system by participating in it.

Progressive politics is about revenge.

…deploying the power of absurdity to expose and excise the absurdity of power. – Black

Lately I’m just too tired.

You know you’re low when alcohol is nothing but an anesthetic

My thinking is that by the time of the 1980 election, [Reagan vs. Carter] the pursuit of equality had created a system of interlocking dependencies, and the American people were persuaded that the cost of equality had come to crush the promise of opportunity. – White

I haven’t noticed any decline in taxes since 1980. Reagan spent vast amounts of money on “defense” and tax cuts for the wealthy. How about that burden?

I don’t ask for financial equality, just a fairer sharing of income and taxes. Working-class incomes have gone down and our taxes up.

Someone – F. Scott Fitzgerald? – said American lives have no third acts. I’m not sure what that means.

People one at a time are a lot more appetizing than you would think if you look at them all at once. – Thomas Perry, Dance for the Dead

Bob Black says the “affluent society” has “merely modernized poverty.”

Black rebels, as I do, against the concept of human beings as producers. As if our only role is to produce and consume. There is so much more to being human, but you can’t get to it if you’re too busy producing.

Try an experiment. Sit and watch the squirrels. So far I’m good for about 15 minutes before I get restless. I feel I should be doing something.

I want to cross the line between doing and being. I think there have been times, when I hadn’t been working for long enough, that this came naturally. The pressure seemed to lift, and I Drifted in a light trance.

I like squirrels because they don’t have jobs.

They don’t need coffee.

Paradoxically, my most productive time is leisure. That’s when the words start flowing through my brain.

Norman Mailer wrote one of his books on speed. He said it was a “forced march on the brain.” I’m tired of forced marches.

College struck me as a forced march through an intellectual museum. There wasn’t time to find out what I was interested in, because I was too busy memorizing what the professors were interested in. I doubt that it’s changed. A very conservative institution. They all are.

Drinking coffee to wake up reminds me of lab experiments where they use electricity to make a dead frog’s leg kick. Our whole culture reminds me of that. We will keep you going!

Our culture works so hard at colonizing the self that if you don’t defend it you won’t have one.

So it’s radical to just sit.

Creative culture has always been a product of leisure. The painter Jackson Pollock had a patron, a wealthy woman who gave him an allowance to live on, then took a percentage when his paintings were sold.

I suspect most of the baby boom thinks getting old won’t change them. They’re wrong.

A libertarian is just a Republican who takes drugs. – Black

If you spend most of your waking life taking orders or kissing ass, if you get habituated to hierarchy, you will become passive-aggressive, sadomasochistic, servile and stupefied, and you will carry that load into every aspect of the balance of your life. – Black

I get angry every time I have to go to work, no matter how much wine and coffee I consume first.

… prisons and factories came in at about the same time, and their operators consciously borrowed from each other’s control techniques. – Black

If you do boring, stupid monotonous work, chances are you’ll end up boring, stupid and monotonous. Work is a much better explanation for the creeping cretinization all around us than even such significant moronizing mechanisms as television and education. – Black

It has been very difficult to keep my mind alive while also working. I remember processing forms for the 1980 census and quitting, telling my supervisor, “I can feel the brain cells dying.”

If you ban guns, only cops will have guns.

People used to say that work is noble, but that’s a crock. If work were noble we would pay people more for doing it.