Along the Fern Ridge path, watching a dog run out of sheer exuberance.

Trying to be local. You have to dig in to a place before you’re really there.

Funny article about computer tech support in Salon, "We don't support that". Explains why you get such poor service. Their job isn’t to solve your problem, it’s to get you off the phone within 12 minutes. The idea is to tell you something, anything, to make you hang up.

An article in the Register-Guard says that “Second marriages in general have a divorce rate of about 60 percent, while first marriages break up about 50 percent of the time.” Hard to say, though, what the odds are for any particular couple.

Something I read recently, pure poetry, a woman said that giving birth was like “trying to shit a pumpkin.” But a woman I knew told me, when I asked how it was possible for a baby to pass through such a narrow space, that when she was giving birth everything “down there” became liquid and got out of the way. Another woman told me that having a baby made her really feel how she was an animal.

I should never read an essay that includes the words “could it be.”

I’ve seen all three of the Lord of the Rings movies. They struck me as being more about war than magic. It has been many years since I read the book, but what I mainly remember is the hobbits putting on their packs to set off on their long journey. That has always seemed romantic, that moment when you start the trip. I used to daydream about that a lot, often when I was working and wanted to escape.

Moving program about the writer James Baldwin on OPB tonight. I’ve never read any of his books, but now I feel I should.

If I live with people I don’t sing.

Sleep

Set the alarm, woke up early, still in the dream. Sunlight outside.

I’ve been going to sleep at 3 or 4 in the morning, getting up about that time in the afternoon, not seeing the sun. Decided I can’t live that way. So today I got up at – wait for it – 12 noon. I’ll keep pushing it back. So what if it’s a couple of hours before I’m really awake. What has being really awake ever done for me?

Hara Estroff Marano, “Night Life,” Psychology Today, Nov./Dec. 2003:

The 30-30 rule says you have insomnia if at least three times per week:

·        It takes you 30 minutes or more to fall asleep.

·        You’re awake for 30 minutes or more during the night.

Sleep deprivation “appears to be the single biggest trigger for depression.” Insomnia “often precedes … depression by about five weeks.”

Insomnia makes you vulnerable to irrational thought. So you worry more, which causes more insomnia. Your mind “learns … to associate the bedroom with wakefulness. You lie down to rest and your brain goes on high alert.”

Things that help in getting to sleep include exercise and a hot bath before bedtime (sharp drop in temperature, after the bath, triggers sleep). Main recommendation: set a sleep schedule and stick to it, no matter what. Eventually your body will sleep when it’s supposed to.

Turns out there’s no substitute for getting up in the morning.

Marano:

Americans now average seven hours in bed per night, and close to 60 percent now report they have trouble sleeping at least a few hours every week.

…

Child rearing is the number-one precipitant of insomnia.

…

… instead of helping to regulate mood, REM sleep [associated with dreaming] in the depressed actually worsens it.

…

One common problem in depression is awakening in the early morning. This may be the body’s attempt to reduce negative affect by interrupting the last (and normally the longest) cycle of REM sleep.

Aging

Tomorrow I’m 64. You can run but you can’t hide.

As I get older I see more things, writing for example, as analogous to the digestive system.

When you’re a child imagination adds to every experience. When you’re old, memory does the same.

Yes I’m right here, doing whatever it is that I do. And a lot of it. You can trust me to keep doing it. Please send more money for marijuana.

Mind

I’m fighting apathy, lethargy, midwinterness. Like being inside a fog. Difficulty concentrating, one of the symptoms of depression, but also one of the symptoms of wanting to do something else.

We haven’t paid enough attention to the Perversity Principle – our determination to subvert our lives through self-destructive behavior. For many of us, stability seems to be so toxic that we just can’t stand it. Not enough stimulation.

I’m reading Touched With Fire by Kay Redfield Jamison, 1993.

Jamison, in research on creative people, found that 90 percent said that very intense moods were necessary or important to their work, and the moods tended to precede the work.

Over their lifetimes, she writes, about one percent of the population will have manic-depressive illness, and about five percent a depressive illness.

Perhaps a little madness is conducive to creativity, because it breaks us free from our usual repetitive thought patterns.

Maybe the mind is like a sports car: the more highly tuned the engine, the more likely it is to break.

Kay Redfield Jamison:

The fiery aspects of thought and feeling that initially compel the artistic voyage – fierce energy, high mood, and quick intelligence; a sense of the visionary and the grand; a restless and feverish temperament – commonly carry with them the capacity for vastly darker moods, grimmer energies, and occasionally, bouts of “madness.”

…

… most people who have manic-depressive illness are, in fact, without symptoms (that is, they are psychologically normal) most of the time.

… most people who have the illness, in fact, never become insane.

…

[Manic-depression is] a singularly cyclic disease.

The creative mind by its nature … is restless and cluttered – constantly shifting in thought and action until it settles on something that can engage it for more than a few minutes. – Lisa Miscione, Angel Fire

But men are dark things, like windows boarded up to shut out the light. Like shadows. Like dark mists across the waters. – Theresa Williams, The Secret of Hurricanes

Dreams

Buy an old used car. Don’t get very far before it stops running. I get out and look at it and realize it’s in bad shape, not worth fixing, worthless. I’m unhappy with myself for not checking it out better before I bought it. Wasted my money. Later talking to someone, looking at a map, trying to figure out where I am. Somewhere in LA I think.

Old patterns: Not looking enough before I leap. Impatience. Getting lost. But also a lack of good options: whenever I’ve bought a car, a junker is all I could afford.

Strange to find myself in a dream with a fictional family, complete with memories. Perhaps the afterlife is fiction.

Politics

Politics is a group process. If you don’t have a group of people who really want to do something, nothing happens. Motivated groups are hard to come by, partly because our culture teaches political passivity, and mainly because the left keeps losing.

Measure 30 failed recently, a referral to the voters, by rightwing tax cutters, of the state legislature’s tax increase, designed to balance the budget and fund essential services. Will cost me my Oregon Health Plan (Medicaid) medical insurance by August. An activist I talked to on the phone today said we are all feeling “crunched.”

The left does sometimes win in Oregon – minimum wage increases, medical marijuana, doctor-assisted suicide – but it’s been a while. Hard to keep going.

Strange how Howard Dean has been attacked for being angry. You’re not supposed to be angry in America. Remember, whatever happens, DO NOT GET ANGRY! Or we will be very upset with you.

Okay Howard, you’ve stirred up some energy and raised some issues. Thank you, you can go now. Next up is John Kerry, who doesn’t seem to have done much lately, but boy does he look presidential.

John Kerry voted for the welfare reform act, NAFTA, the Patriot Act and war with Iraq. Favors repealing Bush’s tax cuts for the rich but continuing those for the middle class. Wars are okay as long as they’re multilateral – will kill foreigners with a little help from our friends. Another gray man. Clinton without the charm.

I’m reading The Roaring Nineties by Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel Price in Economics winner and chair of Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisors, 1993-97. About how investors got ripped off by an unregulated economic system which catered to business. Should be read by anyone who can afford to buy stocks.

Stiglitz says the lack of controls allowed all the big financial players to hide essential information from investors, such as that a company was worth a lot less than its public records indicated, allowing a huge bubble to develop. When the bubble burst, it caused the recession we’re in now.

So a lot of wealthy people got richer, and now there are no jobs for us.

“In retrospect,” Stiglitz says, the Clinton administration got carried away with deregulation of business. Having collected all that corporate cash for its election campaigns, he doesn’t say, Clinton’s people had to prove they were just as business friendly as the Republicans, maybe more so.

The Clinton administration, Stiglitz writes, tried to discard the liberal, big spender, big government label the Republicans had hung on them – instead of disputing their basic premises – by “deregulating as enthusiastically as any conservative, by cutting spending more ruthlessly than they had done.”

The Clinton administration, Stiglitz says, focused too much on getting the deficit under control, and not enough on the “investing in America” they had campaigned on – education, job training, healthcare, etc. In fact, the way Clinton governed had little to do with his campaign in ’92, and Democrats didn’t call him on it. We got “welfare reform” for poor people and deregulation and “free trade” for the corporations.

Yet judging from Clinton’s popularity, even in the midst of his sex scandal, most people were happy. We had jobs and the stock market kept going up. I remember articles in Internet magazines my employer subscribed to saying that the economy had gone through a fundamental change, thanks to technology, the business cycle was no more, and the boom would last forever.

Meanwhile family wage manufacturing jobs were disappearing, automated or sent to other countries, and being replaced by low wage service jobs. We were being set up for the traditional fall. Some of us fell a lot further than others. We’re the ones on the Oregon Health Plan.

Stiglitz writes well, conversationally illuminating what to me is a foreign world. I’ve never owned a stock in my life. That’s a middle and upper class world. He’s critical of the Clinton administration and its missed opportunities to bring the financial system under control. Not, I think, critical enough.

We also ought to ask ourselves why so many college educated middle class people bought the message from financial “professionals” and booster journalists, and “invested” their money in stocks, only to see it disappear when the bubble burst. Maybe they were so gullible because they don’t believe in history.

And trust too much in professionals, who may be dishonest and often don’t know what they’re talking about, so they just make something up. The game is rigged. Don’t expect that to change. The scandals will die down and everyone will go back to sleep.

So, would you like some more free trade? Fries with that?

Clinton increased taxes in 1993, but only for the upper two percent.

If you’re working-class, it just gets harder to justify putting out any effort at all. There are no rewards.

Joseph Stiglitz, The Roaring Nineties, 2003:

Those at the bottom saw their incomes actually fall in real terms during the two decades from 1973 to 1993.

…

The increasing share of income earned by the middle class has meant that the middle class will, in some way or another, have to contribute to addressing the problems of the poor….

…

… “labor market flexibility” – which has become almost a code word for saying lower wages and less job security.

…

While pontificating on how government so often wastes money, these “experts” had presided over a market system which had wasted more money than most governments could have imagined in their wildest dreams.

…

… by the mid-nineties, less than 14.1 percent of U.S. employment was in manufacturing.

Paul Osterman, etc., Working in America, 2002:

But collective bargaining’s coverage has shrunk to below 10 percent of the private-sector labor force, and access to it is so difficult and fraught with conflict, delays, and risks of job loss that few employees see it as a realistic alternative and few employers are disciplined by the threat of their employees’ organizing.

…

But with respect to labor and employment policy, government has been caught in a political gridlock for more than 20 years.

The Oregon Employment Department’s economists have found that there is a surplus, every year, of about 9,000 four-year college graduates above what Oregon’s labor market requires…. Approximately one out of five job openings in Oregon require a four-year, or more, college degree. – William Fouste, letter to The Oregonian, 2-14-04