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January Necessity is the mother of politics. Some old movie, David Niven as a guy in his 60s in bed with his wife, she says, "You know they say at our age it’s use it or lose it.” And he, in his upper-class British accent, "Do they indeed?" Lord of the Rings: a fairy tale with a lot of sword fighting. Couldn't get into it. Enjoyed the book when I was a lot younger. "Everybody's in love with you." "Because you make them afraid to be alone." – James Ellroy, The Big Nowhere In books and movies I look for a connection to my own life, but it's hard to find. I think middle-class people believe they don't have to be political, that their economic interests will be protected regardless of who has power. I wonder if women are more optimistic than men?
We always run up against this problem: If two or more individuals’ interests are in conflict, what is the right thing to do? I'm glad the Internet didn't prove that profitable. More room for the small people. It bothers most of us to get old. It's all about time. About time we got old, and getting old is about time. Were chained to time. Interesting if we could be unchained. I've always wanted to live outside time. In an art gallery, say, or any bohemia. Webster’s Dictionary: Bohemia – 2. a district inhabited by persons whose behavior is characterized by a disregard for conventional rules. 3. the social circles where such behavior is prevalent. Bohemian – 3. (often l.c.) a person with real or pretended artistic or intellectual aspirations who lives and acts with disregard for conventional rules of behavior. Stoned: Returned from the grave he has. Yes. I’ve always believed that the majority is usually wrong. Not being a part of it. On the other hand, if it seems like you’re driving down the freeway and all of the sudden all the cars are coming at you and people are honking and waving their arms – perhaps you should give it some thought. For a lot of people retirement may be too much of an economic shift. They look at their Social Security check and say, “I can’t live on that.” The other thing is that people are so used to being protected by the job. Even if they hate it. It’s an anchor. We all need anchors, something we can depend on. Even negative anchors may be better than none. If everything is changing, all at once, it will probably make you sick. In my present job, taking care of a quadriplegic, I have to cook what he likes, the way he likes it. Complicated. I can see I’m somewhat cooking retarded. But my way takes less time and effort. I’m a minimalist. Don’t like to expend much time and energy on things that don’t interest me. I notice it’s the things that drive me crazy that make me write. Thinking back 20 some years, my late 30s, hanging around with people in their early 20s. What I remember is how good they were at playing. One summer they organized an innertube float down a river. Definitely an Oregon moment. I had never done that before. Or since. I guess what bothers me the most about the middle class is that they believe I shouldn’t be angry. My anger makes them uncomfortable. They get the feeling they may be responsible and might have to do something about it. A middle-age friend told me how she finally got her grown kids to leave home: she moved to a smaller place. She could never explain to Eddie how it was, the undercurrent
of tragedy that went with farming. And the hallelujahs of it too: the
straight, abundant rows, the corn tassels raised up like children who
all knew the answer. – Barbara Kingsolver, Prodigal Summer I heard about a woman in her early 50s who was happy with her boyfriend except for one big problem: he “only” made about $32,000 a year. She just didn’t think that was enough “for a man.” Old age is medical. Just clearing the land to grow soybeans and corn had killed about everything on half the world. Every cup of coffee equaled one dead songbird in the jungle somewhere, she’d read. – Kingsolver Sometimes all you can do is endure. All the research available shows that married men live longer, healthier lives than those who are single. Among women, those who never marry have fewer physical or emotional problems than their married sisters. – Lillian B. Rubin, Intimate Strangers, 1983 Boys and girls grow up in different worlds, but we think we’re in the same one, so we judge each other’s behavior by the standards of our own. – Doborah Tannen, You Just Don’t Understand, 1990 My theory about writing is that you have to let it be what it is. If you try to change it into something else it becomes false. I’m going through reassembly. Sometimes people on TV remind me of drunks on the bus: too much affect. The centers for Disease Control reports that nearly four out of five adults in America get almost no exercise at all. Possibly as a consequence of that, 40 percent of all Americans older than 75 are unable to walk even two blocks, according to the National Institute of Aging. – Harris McIlwain, M.D. and Debra Fulghum Bruce, The Osteoporosis Cure, 1998 Osteoporosis is a thinning of the bones, resulting in fractures and a miserable, painful old age. Scary stuff. The thinning starts as early as the 30s. In middle age it can be detected by a bone density test which is not invasive or painful, some kind of low intensity X-ray. It is preventable and treatable, so check it out. People talking on cell phones in public remind me of schizophrenics’ conversations with invisible people. Sort of like religion. I wonder if wisdom is fear. Several men commented to me that it is American men in particular who make friendly conversation into a contest. – Tannen A friend read that among the world’s religions, fundamentalism is the “default mode.” American wages in real terms peaked in 1973 and started to decline thereafter. – Eric Schlosser, author of Fast Food Nation, quoted in Willamette Week Sixty percent of the adults in America are overweight or obese. And the health costs of obesity now exceed the costs of smoking. – Schlosser I practice involuntary simplicity. As far as I can tell, life is mostly irrelevant. Sparse moments of meaning. When no one’s looking. You gotta sneak it in, because that’s not what you’re supposed to be doing. Exercises In Futility Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Sleep A Lot I have $10 in my wallet and $23 in my checking account. … no state will intervene militarily except in its own interest…. Individuals can act from high moral purpose – states never do, though always making that claim. – David McReynolds, Oregon Peace Worker Male testosterone levels, I’ve read, start declining around age 50. Now 61, I started noticing the difference in my late 50s. I’ve wondered if this is a curse or a blessing. The blessing would be the ability to finally think about something else. Sort of like retirement. In America the creative spirit flows into technology, business, entertainment. It hasn’t flowed into social change or government. He said that in France you would never talk about work in a social context. You’d never ask people what they do. It just isn’t done. – Cathy Newman, “Silicon Valley,” National Geographic, Dec. 2001 America would be a lot more interesting to me if social and political change were allowed, if more people were interested in it, talked about it. I’ve gone back to being who I was in the late 60s. What I want to tell people is that they can change society – if they are willing to join with other people and all do the same thing at the same time. It takes critical mass. One o’clock in the afternoon, sitting in the kitchen drinking my second cup of coffee, trying to achieve liftoff, watching snow sift down from a gray winter sky. Lately I’ve been sleeping ten or more hours a night, waking up in the morning unable to think of a good reason to get up. This morning I woke up thinking I would try to do something, singing, “Today’s the day the teddy bears have their picnic.” The second point is that law has always served two functions. One is to protect people from disorder – this meets a shared human need. But the other function of law is to maintain the ruling class – to prevent social change of a radical nature from occurring. – David McReynolds When I’m worried I think about the same thing, over and over. Rigid patterns. Loose patterns are more creative and make it easier to sleep. Most of my adventures have been mental. Experimental. A young artist showed me a few simple things on a computer. How to draw a ball. He said, “I can pretty much create anything I want.” I read something in a science magazine about lab experiments to create antigravity. A super conducting disk would somehow block gravity so that it wouldn’t exist above the disk. I imagine stepping onto the disk and slowly floating upwards. Like going to heaven. There have been proposals to run a cable from the earth to a satellite. Then an elevator would travel up and down the cable. Someone said you could drive to space in about two hours – if you could drive straight up. Each person’s life is lived as a series of conversations. – Deborah Tannen, You Just Don’t Understand We all know we are unique individuals, but we tend to see others as representatives of groups. It’s a natural tendency, since we must see the world in patterns to make sense of it…. In innumerable ways, every person is utterly unlike anyone else – including anyone else from many of the same categories. – Tannen That said, Tannen believes that we have to look at common differences in conversational style between men and women, because we keep tripping over them. She says that “boys and girls grow up in what are essentially different cultures, so talk between women and men is cross-cultural communication.” … studies have shown that married couples who live together spend less than half an hour a week talking to each other…. – Tannen For men, she says, “Life … is a contest, a struggle to preserve independence and avoid failure.” For women, “Life … is a community, a struggle to preserve intimacy and avoid isolation.” I like the female view of the world better, but most of the time I see life as a bitter struggle. I often envy the middle class their seemingly controlled lives. But when I talk to one of them I usually find they’ve got their troubles too. I understand that conduction along a nerve is both electrical and chemical. Strange to give an order and see my foot, over five feet away, move. I’m still here, still doing what I do. But what a long tough trip it’s been. There have been long periods when I didn’t do what I do. You know, what I do. Probably the same thing you do, when no one’s looking. Anyway, thank you all for coming here tonight…. You know the left is gaining power when you start to see the resistance, and the Greens have been seeing it for some time now, from the Democrats. Who hate us for being here, occupying ideological and electoral territory they thought was theirs. Even though they abandoned it. Like someone who leaves a mate and then gets jealous. I’m still amazed at novelists. It would be interesting to have a computerized novel you could ask questions. Or have a dialogue with one of the characters. At some point a novel will be more like creating a series of complex programmed characters, and turning them loose in virtual reality to interact and create stores. Like real people do. Real people could visit this world, travel around and watch all the stories being played out, but they’d be ghosts. I read about a guy with a website where he tortures artificial life. Hmm…. A man in Portland dug a “mystery hole” in his yard and now gives guided tours. He says the hole was always there, potentially, but he “discovered” it. You know those annoying people who talk nonstop for long periods of time? They call them “speakers.” As if every radio didn’t come with them built-in. Ideas are toys. “When gravity fails and negativity won’t see you through….” – Bob Dylan I remember three of us, men, driving somewhere to go backpacking, stoned and laughing, having a conversation and suddenly realizing we’d had that conversation before. One of our conversations was about taking psychedelics – LSD, mushrooms, peyote – and having to get past the “dragon at the gate” before we could get to the good stuff. The dragon we described variously as depression, meaninglessness, emptiness. All those bad feelings we’d been trying not to feel. It wouldn’t take too much, however, to turn it around. Something funny. I remember us sitting in a tent at night, somewhere in the Oregon Cascades, playing a card game where you draw a card and, without looking at the front, lick the back and stick it on your forehead. Then you bet based on what other people have stuck on their foreheads. We were playing for rocks. I kept losing but didn’t mind, since I could always go outside for more rocks. Very funny. The last time I took a psychedelic was in 1982, when I was 42. After that I gave it up. I was recovering from a divorce, and every time I took a psychedelic I got so depressed that it just wasn’t worth it anymore. This is a little-known fact: As long as you’re alive you can still get stoned. You see those old folks in the corner, talking and giggling? Funny how we talk about “losing” people. As if we had misplaced them. I think I’ve been misplaced. Wrong country. Maybe wrong planet. I want to live on Mars, where it’s quiet and the air is thin and chilly. The English have comedy that makes fun of rich people, right? Why don’t Americans do that? Instead we seem to have this sickly reverence for the rich. I wonder if anything good will come of the space station? Maybe at least as a symbol. Are you noticing that businesses are screwing up their customer services, such as billing? My theory is that they laid off most of their office help, and now there aren’t enough people to get the data into and out of the computers. Turns out we may be essential. Who knew? Politics has become a game of trying to keep things from happening. Instead of solving problems. Liberal Democrats just want to keep Republicans from being elected. It’s a purely defensive politics. “Would a Gore presidency have been better than a Bush presidency?” is not an interesting or intelligent question. Better for whom? Either would be bad for me. If all you’re going to offer me is the lesser of two evils, I’m not going to play. What freedom of speech is all about: annoying people. Watch out for anger. Too much can make you sick and drive you crazy. Some anger is necessary. It gears you up for self-defense. Just don’t let it get away from you. In an unjust society, it’s easy to become an emotional skeleton, held together with anger. Sometimes chronic anger is a way to avoid looking at ourselves. Look at the patterns in your life. If the same bad things are happening over and over, are you causing them? How will you set up the next disaster? National politics just keeps getting worse. We’re traveling down the Reagan road again: cut taxes for the rich, spend a lot on the military, go deeper in debt. No help for the people who need it. I have an idea, just a theory, that once men and women had much more similar lives and thoughts. Until the industrial revolution split us apart. Now men are forever trying to take care of business, and women are forever trying to get us to express ourselves. I think there was a time when there wasn’t so much that needed to be expressed. This, of course, from a chronic writer. A long time ago, in a college “group process” class, a woman said she could only figure out what I was feeling by listening to the content of what I said. My thought, unexpressed, was, then why not just listen to the content of what I’m saying? Sometimes I think women find verbal content irrelevant. Instead they watch for facial expressions, listen to tone of voice. If you’re not expressing, they think there is no content. And one of the things I love best in women is their expressiveness. The way their faces light up. Boy society is cutthroat competitive. It teaches us to not show feelings, because feelings make us vulnerable. Adult male society is not much better, just, usually, less physical. We compete for money, status, women. About 20 percent, the professional middle and upper class, rise to the top. The rest of us spend our lives taking orders and worrying about money. My advice to women who want to know what their men are thinking and feeling is, ask questions, and really listen to the answers. Ask follow-up questions. Don’t be critical. A lot of us will talk if we think it’s safe. I don’t know what to tell couples who’ve been married a long time and grown apart. Maybe people were not designed for long-term marriage. Especially in a culture where everyone is trying to reinvent themselves, find something new to do. Because we’re always dissatisfied with who we are. God works in mysterious ways, to screw us. We’ve made everything hard, and nothing soft. I don’t think people can live in that kind of world. The Democratic Party: There’s an old joke about hitting a mule over the head with a two by four. The punch line is, “First you’ve got to get their attention.” I’m not sure what the difference is between a mule and a donkey, but I’ll bet it’s not much. I don’t think you can help people who are drinking or smoking themselves to death. All you can do is wave goodbye. My sister now requires oxygen all the time and is spitting up blood. And still smoking. Tonight, while using oxygen and talking to me on the phone, she lit a cigarette and set herself on fire, burning her face and hands. Probably because she was doped up on morphine for severe back pain. A smoker literally cares more about smoking than they do for their own life. Very painful to watch someone you love slowly committing suicide. Yes I understand, at least intellectually, that it’s an addiction, and very hard to kick. But wouldn’t a sane person, at this point, get their nicotine from gum or a patch, instead of wrecking their lungs? I know prohibition doesn’t work, but anti-smoking advertising does. Shouldn’t we be putting more money into it? I’ve read that nine out of ten movies have smoking scenes. I wonder how the directors justify that? Have they seen their relatives dying from smoking? One thing I’ve learned is that there is no perfect situation. Sometimes it’s better to accept one set of problems than trade it for something worse. Near midnight, southwest Portland, just got
off from my job taking care of a quadriplegic, snowing, waiting for
a bus. Group of young people having a snowball fight, laughing. A young
woman says to a young man, “You’re so cute. I love you!”
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