July 2003

We’re a nation that is always hungry.

A liberal is a progressive who has money.

9-11 by Noam Chomsky: Composed of excerpts from interviews, this small book will tell you all the stuff about U.S. foreign policy which our news media prefers to ignore.

I always think the town, even the building I live in is the end of the line, that I’ll die there. So far it never has been. My mother and older sister kept moving until they died. Change is our family drug.

There has been a lot of trouble in my family over the years, the kind of trouble that is common in working-class families without enough resources. When I’m in trouble, though, it’s my family I turn to.

One of my few virtues is brevity.

We should also remember that one exalted task of intellectuals is to proclaim every few years that we have “changed course,” the past is behind us and can be forgotten as we march on towards a glorious future. – Noam Chomsky, 9-11

Funny that intellectuals are thought to be leftists. As Chomsky points out, too often we have been cheerleaders for the government.

… we should not underestimate the capacity of well-run propaganda systems to drive people to irrational, murderous, and suicidal behavior. – Chomsky

He is referring, of course, to U.S. propaganda and behavior.

A college professor told us that the best way to ruin a friendship is to go into business together. The second best way is to live together.

Anarchism: I admit I don’t get the stylistic significance of not using the shift key.

Somewhere I read that “gomer” means “get out of my emergency room.” A doctors’ expression, referring to the poor.

The Portland area unemployment rate was 8.8 percent in June. I hate to think what this is doing to people, but it might be beneficial to me as a retired person. When I shop I’m competing with employed people. As a consumer, deflation would be in my favor.

On the other hand, bad times reduce income tax payments to the state, which can wreck safety net programs I depend on, like the Oregon Health Plan (Medicaid).

An article in the Portland Tribune says NAFTA, the 1994 free trade agreement between Canada, Mexico and the U.S., has destroyed hundreds of thousands of U.S. jobs, including over 20,000 in Oregon, almost 4,000 in the Portland area. No figures given on jobs created. Most of the lost jobs are in manufacturing, so blue-collar people have been the hardest hit.

The world’s oceans have lost 90 percent of large predatory fish.

…

… salmon farms consume more fish than they produce: it can take three pounds of fish meal to yield one pound of salmon. – Scientific American, July 2003

I wonder, though, how many pounds of fish it takes to make one pound of wild salmon. They’re predators.

Men and women don’t get along in close proximity because we play different emotional games. Women fuss and escalate when they can’t get a satisfactory resolution. They fear disconnection. Men disengage. We fear fuss, big emotional scenes. We want to be left alone.

Being poor is like drifting in a small boat in the open ocean.

Money is the main tool the middle class use to control  their lives. Lacking money, the poor also lack control. Money gives you options. Options for those without money in the U.S. are rapidly declining. The less money you have the more accidental your life.

Personalities can change past the age of 30; in most people, the degree of conscientiousness and agreeableness increased, whereas anxiousness, openness and extraversion declined. – Scientific American, July 2003

A freeway would make a really great ruin.

Easier to be calm than to feel calm.

I told a friend that I generally like women better than men because men are so competitive. She said women are very competitive, especially about their children. My kid is better than your kid.

I wonder if making up rules for men to follow makes women feel more secure.

Men’s nervous systems were not designed for constant relating and following rules. We were designed to sit quietly for long periods of time in the woods waiting for a large edible animal to wander by. Modern social density is hard on us. We can’t get away from it.

An Oregonian article says the present western dry cycle is expected to last several more decades, bad news for wildfires, farming and other water uses. There were several decades of wetter than normal conditions through the 1970s.

Another recent article says goats do a great job of chomping down forest brush, a big fire hazard. And they work for free.

I hate to say this, as a card-carrying progressive activist, but I think we’ve reached the limit on what we can get out of people. They’re withdrawing from society, as much as they can, and they won’t pay any more taxes.

I’ve read that a lot of people can’t stand intimacy. Never mind how well it works, they simply can’t stand that degree of closeness, being that exposed. It’s too threatening. I think it’s worse than that, a lot of people can’t stand friendship, community, any degree of closeness to people. Even though they need it. It’s like an animal exposing its jugular vein to the sharp teeth of another animal. In a competitive culture like ours, everyone’s teeth are sharp.

A friend lives alone. Outside of her work she has very little contact with people. Her main interests are mystical and religious, so I think of her as a monk. Staying away from people allows her to focus on her own growth and to go deeper into what is important to her. I’m wondering if maybe she has the right idea.

Most of what we call community is pretty superficial. Potlucks. It’s the idea that you can somehow relate to people as a group. Invite everyone over and discharge all your social obligations at once. See you again in six months. How efficient. Better than nothing, yes, but not quite real.

Real community is a place, like a small town or college campus, where people know each other, run into each other in the course of their normal activities, talk to each other, know each other’s business. It’s a network, where people all know and talk about each other. It’s not just a collection of one-to-one relationships.

Community and privacy are contradictory things. You can’t have both. A community is made up of everyone’s stories woven together. If you don’t contribute your story you’re not part of the community.

This is in defense of gossip.

Terminator 3 – another waste of time. He’s too old. Describes himself in the movie as an obsolete robot. [Now governor of California.]

At 63, I keep looking to my elders for clues about ageing. I’m not sure I’m getting any. They’re all different. Some of them seem slow to me, physically and mentally. Some don’t. Today at a potluck a very lively 80 year-old woman talked my arm off. She must have been something when she was young. She’s something now. A different something.

Last night I was feeling the old urge to escape from my life. I thought I should get a job, make a few thousand dollars, buy a van and travel, just live in it. Every month Social Security puts $561 in my checking account, and I could tap into it anywhere. Find free places to camp. But there are no jobs, at least not here.

I would like to get lost.

I’m methodically getting drunk on port wine and reading Sleep No More by Greg Isles, which I bought at Fred Meyers tonight after a potluck. Sometimes I just need to get away.

I’m tired of people having arguments with me that they should be having with themselves.

I’m fighting fatigue. I think it’s from the onset of old age, rather than sickness. Aside from my cancer, which is in remission and has no symptoms, I’m healthy. But I’m 63, and maybe this is what that means. It’s like your energy supply is limited, and you have to take that into account. Besides a money budget, there’s an energy budget. I don’t think I could hold down a full-time job now. But I’m also not ready to just sit. I would like to do something significant.

Packing up to move, I realize I’m surrounded by dead ideas, things I was once into and now am not: guitar, sculptures I made, a lot of computer books. Maybe if I get rid of this stuff I’ll feel lighter. That’s what I always do when I move.

I suspect my friendships have lasted a lot longer than my marriage because most of my friends have never lived with me.

In the mid 60s a college professor, discussing the rising divorce rate, said it’s the little things that get to you, “the way they butter their toast.”

Romance does still happen, even among “older” people. I have seen, with my own eyes, a recent case.

Unless you can do it as a career and get paid, activism is very thin soup. Financially, socially or in terms of satisfaction, it will not support you.

Wives complain of their husbands’ indifference, lack of interest in what the wives do, especially creative or mystical pursuits. They say their husbands go their own way, live in their own worlds. I wonder though if the husbands feel the same way, if they think their wives are not interested in them.

Maybe the men retreat because they’re tired of being criticized.

A lot of life decisions seem like six of one, a half dozen of the other. I could probably do just as well by flipping a coin. Either way, given my limited resources, things are probably not going to get a whole lot better.

I’m totally convinced that you can’t get there from here, but sometimes you can get somewhere else.

In America we all disapprove of each other.

A friend said that years ago this country needed poor people, and now it doesn’t. So it is willing to cut the poor people’s support system.

At other times, probably the late 60s, I don’t remember, it was more possible to be poor. You could get what you needed to keep going. Now it’s like if your income falls below a certain level, your survival is in doubt. Not enough to pay $450 a month, plus utilities, for a one bedroom apartment.

I’ve been turning around the lighter, trying to figure out which side to flick. Ah, must be the one with the little wheels.

Tom Tomorrow is the best political satirist I know of. You can read his cartoons free on the Working For Change website.

Even though I’m constantly taking in information, the way others overeat, I don’t notice any increase in mental density. I think I’ve reached a saturation point, where every time something new gets added something old is let go, thus maintaining equilibrium.

The issue in moving is, how much of this stuff can I live without?

Office Spaces: Video recommended by my nephew, good comedy about white-collar work and hating your job. Asshole bosses. Made me laugh, and that’s hard right now.

I wonder if anything has ever gone according to plan.

Older women would find it easier to hang onto their men if they would be less bossy. Older men still want companionship, we would like to share our lives with someone, but we are no longer consumed with lust, and have no compelling reason to put up with aggravation. Neither, I realize, do women, if they’re capable of supporting themselves.

We all need to stop trying to control other people and respect their right to be left alone.

In fact, most tumors are not masses of identical clones. On the contrary, closer examination has revealed amazing genetic diversity among their cells, some of which are so different from normal human cells (and from one another) that they might fairly be called new species. – W. Wayt Gibbs, “Untangling the Roots of Cancer,” Scientific American, July 2003

So perhaps cancer is an attempt at evolution.

I read that the average new U.S. car costs about $27,000. That is also the approximate cost of treating a heart attack.

… an estimated 25 percent or more of bottled water is really just tap water in a bottle – sometimes further treated, sometimes not. – Scientific American, July 2003

People keep calling about my leaving Portland. I notice I’m running out of jokes. This is hard. I feel like Portland is kicking me out, after nine years. My living situation went sour, I don’t want to try living in a house with other people again, and I can’t afford to rent an apartment. It costs too much to live here. So I’m moving to Eugene/Springfield.

(Some time passed.)

Staying with my sister near the northern edge of Springfield, not far from the McKenzie River. Today I walked to the river and found summer.