February 2003

As I get older it gets harder to tolerate change, especially in finances or my living situation (in a house with three other people). I just want to be left alone. When I was younger I liked change a lot more. This shift comes from feeling more vulnerable as I age. I’m retired, have a very low income from Social Security, probably could not get a job or do it if I got one, and have a serious chronic illness – cancer, in remission.

So my life feels fragile. I can get along just fine if I can keep everything about the same, but the outside world keeps pressing in on me. The Oregon Health Plan (Medicaid), for example, is cutting back on its coverage, eliminating dental, mental, drug treatment and prescriptions. So I’m going to have to pay for my dental work, and I just hope I never need any expensive prescriptions. [After I wrote this OHP reinstated prescription coverage.]

This is not to say that old age necessarily shrinks your life. In some areas mine is expanding. I have more time, since I don’t have a job, so I do political work, some volunteer and a little paid. I’m getting to know more people.

I still have to persuade myself that getting out of bed in the morning is a good idea.

I don’t want any more negative surprises.

Today I’m 63. As always, I don’t know what I’m supposed to think about this. Is there an appropriate way for a 63 year-old man to act? Should I be more serious? No, if I were any more serious I’d be dead.

As much as I would like to “be here now,” it’s difficult when you don’t know where “here” is.

I am, however, gaining in knowledge and wisdom. Watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer the other night I learned that it was The Initiative that put the chip in Spike’s brain to make him harmless – he’s a vampire – to humans. But now the chip is acting up, and Spike is all “Aaagh!” And Buffy is all, “Spike, is your chip malfunctioning? We must get help!”

Baby boomers, I hear, are determined to continually redefine “old” as much older than they are. I wish them luck in their denial.

Sign at the local mall: “Think you’re an organ donor? Not if you haven’t told your family.” Family, I’m an organ donor. Although I’m not sure what anyone would want with a 63 year-old organ.

The older you get the more points they should give you, just for having survived.

Feels more like the reverse. I think we better rearrange our perceptions fast, because the baby boom is about to get old. Perhaps a turning point like that of feminism in the 60s. Someone will write a book called The Elderly Mistake.

And we’ll all go “Oh,” and rush right out and get a job.

The space shuttle blew up.  We have to keep trying.  The way things are going, the sooner we get off this planet the better.

Someone told me this one:

Q: How many martyrs does it take to change a light bulb?

A: Never mind, I’ll just sit here in the dark.

William Gibson at Powell’s bookstore: He says most science fiction doesn’t really describe the future but the present in which it’s written, disguised as the future. He says SF has a poor record of predicting the future. The present, he says, is “about to get weirder big time.” 

Cities “dream each other.”

Gibson said the novel was called that because when the form was invented it was novel. So establishing it as the major literary form is, he said, a contradiction in terms.

The crowd at Powell’s loved Gibson. If I were reading to an audience – dream on – I think I would want them to be a little uneasy.

Women:

Look for someone you can talk to. For hours.

Meeting a new interesting woman is like opening a new book, only better, because she’s alive, and might possibly go to bed with me at some unknown future date. A book can’t do that. Well, it could, but it’s not the same.

For me, one mark of a good woman is that she doesn’t mind when I get enthusiastic about ideas. Because she does too.

Women, especially older women, are the most attractive to me when they’re relaxed and being themselves, animated, expressive.

I would like to get married again. I’m tired of having to finish my own sentences.

I think married men live longer because their wives make them go to the doctor. The woman today who drew my blood for my regular cancer checkup – a treasure, never a bad stick – said her husband will go to the doctor if she tells him to, but not if it’s his idea (the reverse of usual male behavior). I said men think we’re supposed to be self-reliant. She said her husband would expire without her, he’s so helpless. He wants her to make his sandwiches, thinks he can’t do it. I said it seems male self-reliance is awfully selective.

On the other hand, I wonder if she was bragging. Maybe she reinforces his behavior by making his sandwiches. I also wonder what the husband does for a living.

Love is something that can’t be figured out. You don’t go to it, it comes to you. But still, you have to be out where it can find you.

With ageing the need for sex declines, at least in men, but the need for physical comfort, touching, company, friendship and romance does not. We need to push ourselves a little to reach out to other people. Being alone is bad for ourselves, but it’s also selfish. Other people need us.

The trouble is, as our circle of friends and lovers decreases, we get more alienated and isolated. Depression sets in. It’s a downward spiral. To combat that, those of us who are single need to reach out beyond our comfort zone.

Recently I spent several hours with a woman I met, talking and getting acquainted. When I told a female friend about it she was surprised that anyone could talk that long. I think the key is an honest interest in the other person, so that you want to know all about them. Given that, almost anyone is a bottomless well.

It also depends on a mutual willingness to trust and open up.

Sometimes it’s difficult to get people to talk about themselves. They think they’re boring. I have to show enough honest interest to convince them otherwise.

And I have to be in a sociable mood, relaxed, not behind on my sleep.

Social stress – politics, money pressure – increases our need for each other, but it also makes us more tense, so it’s harder to relate. I’ve reached the point, when I’m socializing, that I try to avoid politics – which is like avoiding the elephant in your living room – and just talk about personal stuff.

I sometimes wonder if the middle class cares about cuts to the safety net that serves the frequently laid off working class. If not, they should consider that whenever the safety net is cut, so are the programs – schools, jails – that primarily serve the middle class.

In America the poor, and to some extent the working class in general, now occupy the social space formerly reserved for blacks. We not only dare to be visible, but we actually cost you money. The ultimate sin.

Morris Berman, in  The Twilight of American Culture, says that one of the first things foreign visitors notice about American culture is its high energy level.  But he says that energy “masks a core of emptiness.”

We run around in circles and never feel satisfied.

American commercial and technical energy is a fever. We take it in because we don’t know what else to do.

After all, we’re not allowed to touch.

Everything is a substitute for love.

Women are often prisoners of their houses. They can’t do this or that because they have to fix up their houses. An extension of the self.

Last year’s Oregon state government sounded like a marriage: Republicans, in control of the legislature, complained that our introverted Democrat governor didn’t talk to them. Why would anyone want to talk to a Republican?

… it was [Ralph Waldo] Emerson’s habit of expressing himself in his journal, letters and poetry that saved him; he mourned in a torrent of words. – Richard Higgins, “Emerson’s Mirror,” UUWORLD

Lately I’ve been thinking well, racehorses are high strung too.

What is different now from the 60s resistance is that opposition to this war is world-wide, not just American, and coordinated through the Internet. Our communications are much better now than in the 60s, although we feel overwhelmed by it. The Internet is to now what “underground” newspapers were to the 60s.

February 18: Roses growing leaves, bulbs coming up, buds on hedges, a few fruit trees starting to bloom.

My mother used to say, “Don’t get your bowels in an uproar.”

As may be happening today, [the Dark Ages] was more a “Jungian” world than a world of cognitive understanding. The apprehension of the world … rested on myth and magic, and the prevalent mind-set was one of symbols, analogies, and images. – Berman

I wonder if we couldn’t learn to do both: think in “cognitive,” rational, logical, analytical, physical, scientific, evidence-based ways, and also be able to feel our way into magic.

From what Berman says, it took Christianity about 500 years to harden into dogma. “By 500, the monastic ideal included the notion that learning was incompatible with Christian culture.”

Every now and then in our lives there’s a sudden … shift. As if we were climbing stairs that suddenly stopped in mid air, the next section several feet to the side. Identity suddenly becomes diffuse, everything in question.

Usually when we’ve been kidding ourselves.

But maybe enlightenment would also be like that.

We skip to a new track.

I’m opposed to our culture, most of it, but also embedded in it.

So I oppose materialistic culture in materialistic terms: the working class isn’t getting its share.

What that translates to on the ground is families made dysfunctional by financial stress, people dying for lack of medical insurance, homelessness among people who have minimum wage jobs, and a whole lot of anger headed your way.

We hold these truths to be self-evident:

1.      People need a certain minimum amount of money to live.

2.      Sometimes it’s better to be stoned.

My main beef with Democratic middle-class liberalism is its unwillingness to deal with class and economics.

A long time ago I read about a literary critic who decided to stop reading for a while, to see if he had any thoughts of his own.

The Salton Sea: I liked the tweaker scenes, what people are like with their minds blasted on methamphetamines (speed, crank). Not that I would ever want to go there.

Meth dreams.

Otherwise this movie seemed like a 50s melodrama. Takes itself a bit too seriously. The message, I guess, was that tweakers – meth addicts – are hapless clowns, but the cookers and dealers are crazy nasties.

Unlike marijuana growers and dealers, who are mellow and harmless, as long as you leave them alone.

We Americans are famously ahistorical. We can barely be bothered to remember what happened last week, or last month, much less last year. – Molly Ivins

Two things I’ll give Clinton credit for:

1.      Raising taxes on the rich to achieve a budget surplus.

2.      Raising the earned income tax credit for poor people.

The most bizarre aspect of George Bush’s fundamentalism, real or pretended, is that we’re back to rerunning the Crusades. Yes folks, it’s the Christians vs. those nasty Muslims. I have no dog in this fight.

… utilitarianism is the real, and pervasive (if invisible) philosophy of American society, a society in which very little has value in and of itself. – Berman

My mother, before she died, felt useless. As if usefulness were the point of being human.

Human power over nature increased – we call this “progress” – but so did alienation from our environment and from the world of meaning and value. This alienation in turn, impelled us to seek more power, which led to more alienation, and so on. “Progress” finally becomes an exercise in frustration…. – Berman

We try to satisfy ourselves with consumption and it never works for long. What works, as Freud said, is “love and work,” where “work” is achievement, not some meaningless job. But most of us have forgotten how to make and love and work, well, work. Over consumption, the preoccupation with it, somehow blocks real satisfaction.

All those years I spent reading computer magazines. Because I thought that was the answer. Having forgotten the question.

No, the question was, how can I make a living? Also, I thought there was some magic in computers, science fiction actualized, the future is here at last!

For a zoned-out, stupefied populace, “democracy” will be nothing more than the right to shop, or to choose between Wendy’s and Burger King, or to stare at CNN and think that this managed infotainment is actually the news. – Berman

Berman, the very model of an old-school academic intellectual, is upset about the “dumbing-down” of the university, which now caters to students’ desire to avoid any difficult thought. I can appreciate his point of view. However, most of us did not want to be there, listening for hours to professors droning on about subjects we were not interested in, while avoiding all of our concerns about where America was gong. We were there because we were told we had to get a degree if we ever wanted to make a middle-class living. The professors would have been much better off, as practicing intellectuals, if they had many fewer students. But then there would have been many fewer professors.

“Higher” education should never have become a business, a way to make a living. Professors would have been better off working, like the rest of us, and teaching evening classes in their living rooms to small groups of interested students. Or, if leisure is required, as secular monks.

Then too, we wouldn’t have to tie up the energies of our brightest young people for years, sitting in institutions where they don’t belong.

Employers would have to find some other way of determining who to hire that just screening out everyone who doesn’t have a BA.

We are wasting vast amounts of private and public money on a boondoggle.

That said, Berman is right that if you want to actually understand anything, you have to get down to the details and exercise your mind. We have too many people sliding over the surface, exercising their emotions.

Or okay, keep the universities, but shrink them back down to small circles and a few students who are apprentice scholars. Use the community colleges for straight vocational education.

“Culture” is now mainly transmitted through books, magazines, the Internet, newspapers, occasionally movies (A Beautiful Mind, The Hours) and TV (PBS), radio (NPR, KBOO). Public lectures. Rallies. Chalk on the sidewalk. Posters on telephone poles. The trick is to get around the corporate reduction valve.

And to create your own culture. Culture should be a living, growing process, not simply received. A local nightclub, I read, has one evening a week where people get up on stage and tell a story. We have many public readings in Portland by local poets. We have Powell’s, which I’ve heard is the largest bookstore in the U.S. That’s where I found Berman’s book.

I also wonder where working-class culture fits into Berman’s world. Our abilities – to fix a car, hang drywall, plant a garden, take care of a baby, sew a quilt – isn’t that part of a culture? It’s the concrete foundation for everything else, and should be valued.

By the way, many working-class people have college degrees or have spent at least some time in college. Many of us also found that did not bring us prosperity. We were not at home in that world.

One of the stock news stories of the Northwest is people lost in the woods. “Teens survive frigid night.”

The real danger in old age is becoming a cliché.

Autistic child on The Guardian looking like he was permanently lost, somewhere else.

Oregon reminds me of Shirley Jackson’s short story “The Lottery.” Once a year the townspeople would get together for a neighborly picnic, draw lots and stone one of them to death. The victim, of course, would protest that it wasn’t supposed to be them, couldn’t possibly be them…. If the Oregon Health Plan suddenly falls out from under me, I won’t believe it either.

The best political strategy I can think of is to make the middle class aware of their own insecurity. Measured in the number of paychecks you could miss before landing on the street.

I would go on, but I know you can’t stand it. Neither can I.

We all have to identify with some group, even if it’s a largely theoretical one like “counterculture” or “American.”

Actually, theories are easier to come by than groups.

It’s important that your group reach critical mass, so it can compete with all the other groups.

Someone in every political group has to know how to run a meeting. I just wish it were someone else.

Today I put away one of the two digital clocks in my room, because every time the circuit breaker flips I have to reset the clocks. My eyes keep going to where it was. I had not idea I was so timed.

Oregon feels like one of those movie scenes, set in a foreign country overtaken by foreign invaders, probably us, and everyone is running and screaming….

I must stop.

But it is fascinating, don’t you think? Much more dramatic than O.J.’s murder trial or Clinton’s stain on the blue dress. And the cigar, how could we ever forget the cigar?

A book I read several years ago called The Retirement Myth said there would be plenty of part-time jobs for old people, because of the baby bust after the boom, but so far I don’t see anyone rushing to hire old people.

Nor have I heard of any shortage of young people, although I know the ratio of workers to retired people is declining – less of them, more of us. Not enough of them, at some point, to support us. But a lot of immigration, legal and illegal, also automation and jobs being exported to other countries.

I don’t think there are going to be a lot of jobs for old or young people. Both are screwed.

Next year I want to be a TV series.

Buried deep in the American subsconscious may be the belief that public life isn’t real. It’s a story, something you’d find on TV, invisible. Sort of like religion, for the nonreligious.

A milestone: I’ve just read my first obituary all the way through. A touching summary of someone’s life.

I don’t know if my sister had an obituary. If so it should have mentioned that she grew fine marijuana for the working-class trade for many years.

The Guardian: ah, the old brain injury, in-a-coma trick. Lulu is too pretty to die. Also, they haven’t gone to bed yet.

So much of what I hear from people boils down to, “I don’t want to think about that.” Hard for me to know how to respond. The most honest response would be, “I’m sorry, but you have to. Our world is dissolving under our feet.”

Someone posted an article on the Portland IndyMedia website about Bush’s plan to rain missiles on Baghdad. Someone else complained about the post and asked what was he supposed to do with it, discuss it with his children? My answer to him was, “You’re supposed to do something to stop it, you dumb shit!”

Let us not be good Germans.

Oh wait, they’re the good guys now. Must be something about a history of genocide that helps get your head on straight.

At Powell’s bookstore, John Horgan talks about his book, Rational Mysticism. He says that mysticism does not produce peace of mind, is often associated with mental illness. Professional gurus are as often sociopaths as saints. There is probably no connection between mysticism and morality. Mysticism offers some way of coping with our mortality, vulnerability. “Our solace comes not from God’s compassion but from ours.” Mysticism expresses the awe or wonder at being alive.

Mystical experiences:

·        Ineffable – can’t be expressed in words.

·        Blissful.

·        Reveal truth, “noetic,” confronting absolute reality.

·        Usually brief, transient.

·        Feel unity, union with all things.

“Religion is a blight on the earth. Religion is killing us.”

An article in the paper says Iraq may be “outsourcing” terrorism in the event of a U.S. attack, because they haven’t been very good at it.  Don’t you just love it?

Lulu would not have been as interesting a character in a coma. Very few actors can do coma well.

Ageing: You should not assume you know what you’re getting into. Nor should you assume I can tell you. I keep trying, pecking away at it. I’m a stranger here myself.

Old age is like insanity (as observed in others): you drift in and out of it.  It’s intermittent.

I’m feeling slightly haunted.

I notice a lot of people I know, sometimes me, thinking in circles. They’re unhappy about something, they don’t believe they can do anything about it, but they can’t get used to it either, it gnaws at them. Could be politics, creativity, relationships, making a living, anything. Round and round we go. What my sister used to call “squirrel cage thinking.” When you find yourself doing that, there are a couple of things you can do:

1.                 Try challenging your assumptions. How do you know? It’s so easy to sell ourselves a line of bullshit.

2.                 Come at it from a new angle. Break out of the pattern.

Americans want to simplify, avoid details, Maybe it’s all those years in school, being stuffed with mostly useless facts. Politics, in public, reduced to a cartoon. Intelligent people being willfully stupid.

It takes an awful lot of silence to keep my head on straight.

It’s hard to listen to anyone talk at me for very long. I can’t do that and space out too. Excuse me, I’m overdue in the other world. After a while my eyes narrow and glaze over, and I start drifting away.

The U.S. is once more running huge deficits and driving up the national debt. Again the two major parties see nothing wrong with this. Where is Ross Perot?

Republicans always accuse the Democrats of “tax and spend.” Seems the only part of that voters really care about is “tax.” If you cut their taxes you can spend as much as you want to.

At the end of January, Measure 28, an initiative to raise the state income tax for three years, has failed by about 10 points. So vital social services are being cut. But don’t worry, we’ll get used to it, we get used to anything.

The function of radicals is to raise the bar. While the right tries to pull it down and liberals struggle to keep it in the same place. We all have our jobs.

The right believes fiercely that they should be allowed to make as much money as possible, without any interference from government. That is, without making any concessions to the common good.

While enjoying extensive subsidies to business.

Does anyone else see George Bush as a nasty brat jumping up and down, shaking his fists and screaming, “I’m gonna fight”? Except this brat has the power to kill many thousands, perhaps millions, of people.

Bush is an angry guy in a suit.

I understand the Bush battle plan is to shower Baghdad, a city of five million, with missiles. He hasn’t ruled out nukes. [Later note: Maybe he was just trying to scare the “enemy.”]

Of course he can only do this because America itself is a brat.

This, according to what I read, is a time of ironic detachment. Since we can’t change things, we might as well make fun of them. And pretend we’re superior to all that. We’re rotting, but at least we know it.

Sometime in the mid 60s I read Betty Friedan’s book The Feminine Mystique, which introduced me to feminism. Someone should write a sequel called The Feminine Mistake, which is the belief that whatever you feel is reality.

The Masculine Mistake, which has the advantage of alliteration, is the belief that if you make a decent living someone will love you.

I’ve noticed that a lot of women are very attached to their homes. It’s how they express themselves.

How do men express themselves? Mostly we don’t.

Other people are not the problem. The problem is allowing myself to sometimes get into uncomfortable situations with other people. Not being able to say no, or not saying it soon enough. Not enforcing boundaries.

Of course, some people wouldn’t know a boundary if you marked it with a billboard. What part of “no” do they not understand?

Beware of “strong” personalities.

Maybe the problem is other people.

I don’t mean that everything you feel is not real, but for me to believe it, it has to make sense. Not just feelings. Any thought needs to be reality tested: how do I know this is true? One way I do that is to write it down.

Lately I’ve noticed people I know getting paranoid. Afraid to talk about marijuana. Thinking the government is going to come after us. I don’t want to hear it. But I know what’s underneath that: they don’t feel safe. Probably because of financial pressures.

Most of us are never going to feel safe.

And how does it feel, being a peasant in your own country, taking orders your whole life, where your free will is reduced to divorce and loneliness? I think half the population get divorced because it’s the only thing they have any control over.

By 1996, the [national] debt amounted to $5 trillion, and interest payments on this were eating up one-sixth of the national budget.

Of the 158 countries in the United Nations, the United States ranks forty-ninth in literacy. Roughly 60 percent of the adult population has never read a book of any kind, and only 6 percent reads as much as one book a year….

At root, there is a fear of any kind of involvement at all, for real friendships require risk and vulnerability, and more and more Americans feel that they lack the psychological strength for that. – Berman

Sometimes it just seems a whole lot easier not to put up with people.

I’m beginning to wish Republicans had succeeded in passing their balanced budget amendment a while back. Then they couldn’t fight their fucking wars.

Ageing feels like I’m very slowly drifting off into outer space. I figure I’m just above treetop level now, about the same height at which I fly in my dreams.

I’m an advance scout for the baby boomers. My advice: get out of debt, save money, walk.

I wonder what it would be like to live in a time where no one knows their age, where the calendar is a curiosity for scholars. To escape from time.

As was natural, this inordinate hope was followed by an excessive depression. – Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths, “The Library of Bold”

Where I sometimes part company with women is when they expect me to agree to an accusation against me that appears to be based on no logic.

It’s a familiar ritual, isn’t it, the female accusation followed by male stonewalling?

Leave us alone.

My totem animal is now the squirrel.  Squirrels, it should be noted, are not placid animals.

The mental disease of our time is fragmentation. I feel myself constantly in pieces, pulled in every direction at once.

Morris Berman, in The Twilight of American Culture, says the Internet leads our minds to spread out horizontally, following all those links, while we sink into a book “vertically,” finding more mental depth. I know what he means, but I’m a child of my times. Plus I’ve always been a generalist, wanting to know a little about a lot. Still I think I would do better intellectually with less Internet and more books.

I’m reading political essays on the Internet, on such progressive/liberal websites as Common Dreams. I find a lot of repetition. The essay as tribal ritual, meant to bring us all together.

How are we to relate to the sheer volume of our “culture?” People I know block out large parts of it. They stop reading newspapers, or rarely turn on TV or radio. Select one or two cultural channels and cut off the rest. Or they block by subject: “I hate politics!” Which is like hating an avalanche.

One woman I know says she gets her news entirely from articles her husband prints from the Internet and puts on their refrigerator door.

Email is a favorite medium to ignore. A friend refers to hers as “white noise.”

We are trying not to be overwhelmed. With too much input the self tends to disappear. Busyness does that too.

Sometimes I think writers keep themselves busy so they won’t have to write.

When the going gets rough, people get primitive. More defensive than aggressive. (Or remotely aggressive, as in the war with Iraq.) We look for a hole to hide in. Me too. I have to keep pushing back the walls of the cage.

When threatened, most of us shut up.

Don’t tell me what I can say.

I think I’m moving fast now. I want to get it all done before quitting time.

We keep having gaps, jumps in our history, as if we’re convulsively trying to become something else. What?

Politics is bad TV.

The Soviet Union fell of its own weight. The same could happen to us.

The baby boom will finally kill the government, and possibly themselves, by retiring.

Marijuana could be produced so cheaply if it were legal. I’m telling you, this could be a good thing! So we could fade out smiling.

Outside of love and having to go to the bathroom, it’s hard to think of any good reason to get up in the morning.

The problem started when the original cast of Saturday Night Live started to look very middle-aged.

We’ve had less than 200 years of modernism, right? Less than 100 years of automobiles. A little over 50 years of TV.

I wish I lived in a time when I could have said, with a straight face, “Let’s go look at the horseless carriage.”

Wonder how far back the player piano goes? (You pump the pedals while air blows through holes in a paper scroll, controlling the keys.)

This is one of those bleak winter days when nothing wants to happen. Just pass on today. A day to drift, a mental health day, like when I used to call in sick. Guilty freedom.

I understand the basic human need for a general anesthetic.

The central American problem is the concentration of too much power in too few hands. Corporate hands. The checks and balances are gone. Runaway capitalism. Or corporatism, which is not quite the same thing.  Corporatism is oversized, government subsidized capitalism.  Capitalism without competition.

The drift in the United States today is toward the submergence of the self into the Mass Mind…. – Berman

All societies have a built-in death wish. As things get worse, instead of trying to save the society people try to save themselves.

Or, worse, they just give up. Beyond a certain point it starts to feel like too much trouble.

Presence makes the heart grow fonder.

A Beautiful Mind(the movie): John Nash, a brilliant mathematician, suffers from elaborate paranoid schizophrenic hallucinations. Somehow he finds the strength of will to ignore the hallucinations and they gradually fade, although never entirely disappear. The ending made me cry. Reminds me of Shine, another movie a few years back about a pianist who recovers just enough from insanity to resume his career.

All of us with good minds and unstable brain chemistry can take heart.

Sometimes I think we’re so smart because we have unstable brain chemistry. I don’t know if there is enough research to support that, but a lot of famous people suffered from depression or manic depression. My feeling is that it can provide a special edge that allows you to see things other people don’t want to look at. Oddly enough, a gift for reality.

Along with a lot of pain and, for some, hallucinations.

My point of view will not be popular with the thought police.

All those people screaming on the street, wouldn’t we do that too, given present realities, if we could let go?

In Oregon, due to the state budget crunch, they’re kicking elderly people out of nursing homes, cutting off prescriptions people need to stay alive…. So who is crazy? More them, I think, than us.

In any case, whatever craziness I can muster is at your service.

God save us from what this culture calls sanity.

Still, if you’re one of us, I am sorry for your pain.

I would like to plead with people to use their minds to engage the world around them, the society they live in, not just job, family, TV and movies, shopping. Most of what I know comes from being on the bottom looking up.

How many times have we been told by movie villains, “pain is instructive.” When life becomes painful it forces us to snap out of our usual trance and see things in a more complex way.

Too much pain is deadening.

A touching scene in A Beautiful Mind is when Nash has to tell his imaginary friends that he can’t talk to them anymore.

I plan to become more obsessive.

Recently at a public political meeting another activist is going blah blah blah at me, and I’m trying to tell him that we have to understand the details. So many activists want to stay on the surface, be indignant, have “values,” and never really dig into the subject. I’m thinking, these people went to college?

George Will, not my favorite columnist, wrote that “we need people who’ve read the minutes of the last meeting.” But most radicals are skimming over the surface, fuzzy on details, operating on emotion.

We need fire in the belly and clarity in the brain.

The war with Iraq is projected to cost up to $2 billion. If George Bush is so afraid of Saddam Hussein, wouldn’t it be a lot cheaper if Bush would just see a therapist about his problem?

I’m not in any hurry because I don’t know where I’m going, or if I’ll like it when I get there.

Never start a conversation with a man about anything he’s an expert in. He’ll just love you, and he’ll drive you crazy.

Trying to explain ageing to someone less than your age is like trying to explain sex to a virgin.

People need people. The problem is that people are irritating.

I don’t think I can stand any more self-improvement. Leave me alone.