June 2004

 

 

Mind

 

Sometimes I think we should go backwards, and call depression “melancholy.” Depression is a clinical term. It means a disease of the brain, not enough neurotransmitters. Melancholy is a more honest word. It means you’ve looked at the world, and it makes you very sad.

 

I’m always looking for a good idea.

 

Email: I must remember not to drink and type.

 

Creativity doesn’t come from the rigid top of society, or the gray middle, it comes from the bottom.

 

I know what I’ll do to sleep better: I’ll leave the faucet running all night.

 

We need to maintain a certain dramatic tension in our lives. Wouldn’t feel right without it. How can life be good if it’s not intense?

 

Autoimmune diseases: The immune system decides some part of you is an invader. “That’s not my colon. I would never have a thing like that!” The ultimate in self-criticism.

 

It’s more fun solving someone else’s problems.

 

Sometimes I’ll be working on a project for hours, determined to make it work, and I’ll suddenly realize there is no way to make it work.

 

When I get that feeling I’m banging my head against a brick wall, that’s when I need to back away from the wall. It will still be there later, when I return.

 

It is necessary to be thankful to keep the blessings coming. Everything good, if not sufficiently appreciated, goes away.

 

Life is sort of like brushing your teeth with a power toothbrush, you run the spinning head over and over your teeth, making a sort of grinding sound, possibly because the battery is running down, and … oh forget it.

 

In the complexity class I’m taking, taught by Alder Fuller, a woman asked if mind altering drugs drive the mind closer to the edge of chaos – the most creative space for a complex system. Fuller said he thinks it’s more like there are certain mental attractor states. (Potential stable states for complex systems.)

Mental ruts are also attractor states. This class helps me to get out of them.

One benefit of the class is that it gives us a place where it’s okay to be intellectual.

Sometime in the 60s I was talking to a college professor about being an intellectual. I didn’t think I was one, because I wasn’t interested in most of what interested professors. He said an intellectual is just someone who is interested in ideas. I thought oh well then, I guess I qualify.

 

Americans have become encapsulated. We each live in our own little bubble, and we don’t get out much.

 

… like every hard lesson, you have to get it wrong before you get it right. – Harlan Coben, Darkest Fear

 

Fuller talked about studying things for a while until suddenly a light bulb went on in his head. The “oh wow” experience.

 

It’s easy to say that someone – say, someone like me – lacks ambition, but you have to look at what ambition ever got them.

 

I get mad, and then I get into lost causes.

 

When I have to deal with people in their business capacity it’s like talking to manikins. People trying to be nicely businesslike. Imitation people. It’s their job. I should be glad I don’t have to deal with their real selves.

 

 

Books

 

Jimmy didn’t have a car but in those days you didn’t need one if you looked right, if you were in on the joke, in on the big idea they’d all just that summer discovered. 1969. You stood by the side of the road looking the way you looked and someone would stop and you’d go where you wanted to go, particularly if you didn’t much care where you went. – Dan Vining, The Quick

 

Now you’re telling me, you’re not nostalgic…. – Joan Baez, Diamonds And Rust, about Bob Dylan

 

I wish I’d gotten a degree in trash literature. What could be more American?

 

I love certain kinds of fantasy, especially science fiction perfection/destruction-of-the-world through-technology. Radical change, yea! But fantasy makes reality look bad.

Reality makes reality look bad.

In our cities we should have reality-free zones.

 

In David Brin’s The Kiln People, your standard mad scientist has created a sort of soul energy arc between two clay people faxes, also known as “dittos.” He’s trying to boost his own soul energy high enough to make him a god in some hyper-reality plane where souls are located according to affinity, instead of geography. Their souls see the common connection.

 

No one got power who didn’t want it, and no one kept it without undermining others’ attempts to steal it.

…

As a society, we have become all that we abhor.

…

Nothing is learned that isn’t experienced….

– Colin Harrison, Break and Enter

 

The richness of a novel depends on the author being willing to admit that people are no better than they are.

 

I’ve noticed with crime novels a big point is that the hero can stand up to authority.

 

Using this formula, I wrote the following blockbuster novel…. It’s fairly short now, but when I get a huge publishing contract, I’ll flesh it out to 100,000 words by adding sentences. – Dave Berry, Register-Guard

 

Some SF novel about a virtual world whose designer had programmed a version of himself into. The hero finds the designer’s software duplicate in the virtual world and tells him that he’s dead in the real world. The cyber-designer says, “No I’m not. And even if I were, I’ve built a pretty deep box in here.” The “box” being his cyberself.  Virtual immortality.

 

 

Aging

 

Sometimes I’ll be reading a book and suddenly not understand something because I’ve forgotten what happened earlier.

My mother, a constant reader, told me sometime in the last few years of her life that she would put down her book and immediately forget everything she’d read. Congestive heart failure, not enough blood to the brain.

Don’t know why I’m forgetting. Mild so far, not much of a problem. But as we get older we worry about memory.

Memory is identity.

Identity is an illusion. A package of stories.

I should try reading fewer books at the same time.

 

Not so much that we get bossier as we age, but that we get more particular. And we feel like we’ve waited long enough to have things our way. Which is why we shouldn’t live together.

 

Life is a continuing course in adult education – Bill Moyers, PBS

 

As we grow older we feel the need for more knowledge, understanding. Not just how to do something, but how does the world work?

 

I would find it harder to live without earplugs. The world has gotten too noisy.

 

Like many men in their early sixties, he had given up on understanding the problems of the world and had retreated to symbolic yet satisfying acts, such as trimming his hedges faithfully and growing exact, healthy rows of tomatoes each summer. – Colin Harrison, Break and Enter

 

Hassled yesterday in downtown Eugene by a street kid. He asked for change as I walked by. I ignored him, kept on walking. He said, “You’re old, you should die.” These kids remind me of a flock of crows.

 

It was so hard getting to this age that I wouldn’t want to go back.

 

In aging, the mind constantly lags behind the body. I’ve read that most people feel about ten years younger than their age.

 

When we’re young we have fantasies about aging gracefully. I don’t think that’s possible. Aging involves loss, and the best you can do is not freak out and gradually get used to it.

It may help to know that the mind can stay relatively quick after the body slows down. I offer these notes as evidence. The clerk will please mark them as Exhibit A.

 

 

Love

 

Women on average now spend more years of their adult lives single than married, and men are not far behind. -- Bella M. DePaulo, New York Times

 

People approach and then avoid each other in a mad dance, fearful of both too much isolation and too much intimacy. – David Brin, Kiln People

 

Fearful of being absorbed.

 

I think most of the older singles have barricaded themselves in, and they’re not coming out.

 

Perhaps love is just intense appreciation.

 

Does love require a strong sense of difference? If so, can that be maintained over long periods of time, after you know everything about another person (or think you do) and can complete their sentences? Just to be completely superficial, can you live with someone for decades without getting bored?

 

Romance is a perfection fantasy. And then we’re disappointed when it turns out, on further acquaintance, that they’re not perfect. They really do/don’t want sex every day.

 

In a true, committed partnership both partners learn and change – they coevolve. – Fritjof Capra, The Web of Life

 

A friend tells me that a marriage is complicated and can’t be understood by anyone outside of it. I said I hear patterns. She said no, it’s individual.

Probably it’s both.

 

Never cut in on that strange dance known as marital discourse. – Harlan Coben, Darkest Fear

 

Marriages aren’t successes or failures, they’re somewhere in between.

 

If your mate doesn’t understand you, maybe you’ve gotten too obscure.

 

Most often it’s not that men don’t understand women, it’s that we don’t agree.

 

Men tend to burrow into our lives, looking for a place to make a stand.

 

Remember “working on the relationship?”

 

Men get the illusion of freedom by leaving jobs, women by leaving men.

When a woman leaves a man, she quickly goes looking for another man to screw. It’s her way of closing the door, so she can never go back again.

 

He retreated, perhaps from shock, into the cold analysis that had stood him in such good stead and which had destroyed so much of his life. – Colin Harrison, Break and Enter

 

My experience is that we all spend a lot of time hiding.

 

His typical piggy male lust had been subjected to the most stringently purifying feminist inquisitions over the years, and had emerged unscathed. – Harrison

 

Erma Bombeck (1927-1996) wrote humorous columns and books about suburban life and the concerns of women.  One of her books was The Grass Is Always Greener Over the Septic Tank.

Most of her writing was like that, but I remember one very frank column in her later years where she described their generation’s married sex: “And if it was about as exciting as brushing our teeth, we didn’t know the difference.”

 

I think the main problem with love in our time is that we want love and independence.

 

I’m wondering if our idea of what is erotic changes as we get older, and if so, into what? I’m having trouble finding it.

I still find the college girls with their bare midriffs at Safeway inspiring, but also as if they live in a different world. Too remote to get excited about. Like Playboy photos.

So what is erotic in my world?

Yesterday I was at the Nader nominating convention in Portland, hot. Nader yelling into the mike, angry at all the Democrats’ dirty tricks, harsh sound system hard on my ears. Nader said something about entertainment media pumping out “low grade sensuality” to the masses. I said to a friend sitting beside me, “Actually I’m in favor of low-grade sensuality.” She laughed.

 

I’ve read that older bodies respond more slowly to sexual stimulation, so we need to slow down, do a lot of touching, and use lubrication. Similar to advice given to men when I was young. It was said then that young women’s bodies responded more slowly then men’s. In old age, apparently, it’s mutual.

 

Appearance-wise, aging takes place in jumps. There is a big jump in the late 50s when your face changes shape, mainly along the jaw line below the corners of your mouth. Hard to get used to looking like a different, older person, but time passes and you do. You settle down and think okay, this is what I look like now. Not bad, for my age.

We identify too much with our appearance.

The hardest part for me to get used to is that women my age are also looking old. It confuses me. Derails my erotic/romantic impulses.

I think it confuses women too.

What I’m trying to find out is if physical attraction can survive the change in appearance. And, if not, is romance still possible? Gut issues.

I know love can survive the changes, if it’s been maintained, but I think that’s with a couple who’ve been together since youth. I just don’t think we were designed to be dating at 64. Nevertheless, I have a date in a few days. I have no idea what she looks like.

I answered a personal ad recently. We exchanged emails and I sent her photos. Today we talked on the phone. She said she was surprised by the photos. She had a mental image of a much younger man. But she said she knows that’s silly, because she knew how old I am. She is 61.

Somehow, as we got older, we didn’t make the transition. Twenty-some years ago a woman said that she was trying to fit me into her fantasies. We’re still trying to do that, only we’re in our sixties and our fantasies are in their thirties.

One hopeful thing I’ve noticed is that as I spend more time with a woman, get to know her better and like her more, her looks also seem to improve. Or maybe it just seems to matter less. I start relating to the person rather than her appearance.

When I was young physical attraction always came before liking. Somewhere in middle age that seems to have reversed.

It’s funny I guess: older women are still worried about dating because they think they’ll have to fend off men who are only after sex. Meanwhile I’m worrying about whether I’ll feel sufficiently attracted to get involved with them.

Years ago I told my older sister that I thought the male sex drive declined as we got older. She said, “That has not been my experience.”

After you’ve been single for some years, the whole thing begins to seem highly theoretical. Like, didn’t I see a movie about that?

 

 

Science

 

It’s one thing to see death coming at the hands of your own creation. That’s part of the human epic tradition, after all. Oedipus and his father. Baron Frankenstein and his monster. William Henry Gates and Windows ’09. – Brin

 

A scientist said that Earth’s climate system is like an angry animal, and we’re poking it with a stick. Global warming.

 

 

Healthcare

 

PBS program on healthcare. People talking about how expensive the last bit of life is, and is it worth it, as a society?

But expensive care is not confined to keeping terminal people alive a little longer. We often need very expensive treatment long before we die.  It started for me at age 57. Eventually we will all need it. It’s too expensive to save up for. Insurance companies try to game the system by excluding those who need expensive treatment. But the whole point of insurance is to spread a risk you can’t otherwise prepare for, over a long period of time. Expensive treatment is a lifetime risk, not a special favor for old people. And yes, we might be able to cut the overall cost by dying sooner. Any volunteers?

People on the program said that our present healthcare system, especially how we pay for it, is an incoherent mess, a nonsystem that mostly just grew.

Healthcare in general is getting steadily more expensive. We need price controls of some kind, limits, not just whatever the traffic will bear in a sellers’ market. Free markets only work where there is significant competition. There is very little competition in medicine.

 

 

Movies

 

But you know this one time, at band camp…. – American Pie

 

I liked American Pie.  I recently tried to watch American Pie 2 on TV. Two stars. Gave up after it got more embarrassing than amusing.

The main point in AP2 seemed to be that the boys had successfully lost their virginity in #1, while in high school, so now what they needed was more practice. Skill issues. At that age, I read manuals. For whatever good that did. I think sex is mostly chemistry and imagination.

 

 

Locked

 

… paychecks for the bottom half of the nation’s workforce have been shrinking since the late 1970s. – Robert Reich, Locked in the Cabinet, 1997

 

Reich was Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Labor, apparently the resident liberal and social conscience of the administration. He got very frustrated and didn’t stick around for the second term. Reich supported the “investing in people” idea that Clinton ran on, then abandoned in favor of budget cutting, including cuts in safety net programs.

Reich is a humorous, intelligent, engaging writer. His book is a good inside look at what happened during Clinton’s first term.

 

For more than 15 years [1992] people in the bottom half of earnings distribution have lost ground. The middle class has been squeezed. The very poor have become even poorer. The wage gap is widening at an alarming speed. Most of this is due to two great changes that started in the late 1970s – the emergence of new technologies like computers, and the knitting together of all the world’s economies. – Reich

 

Well yeah, but he left out the war of American business against labor, which has wiped out much of our past gains. A war the Democrats have gone along with and helped promote.

Also population growth, women flooding into the job market, and immigration have created a labor surplus and put employers in the driver’s seat.

In Beth Shulman’s book The Betrayal of Work, I read that it is now almost impossible to unionize a private sector business if the employer resists. Employers often use illegal tactics like firing union organizers, but the laws are not enforced.

 

The main answer is to improve education and job skills. – Reich

 

No it’s not. The “good” jobs are not there to train people for. The answer according to Beth Shulman is to force employers to pay living wages, turning “bad” jobs into good ones.

 

Ninety-five percent of the growth in family incomes over the last decade and a half has been among the top fifth of families. – Reich, writing in 1992

 

Reich is a very short man. His wife is considerably taller. He says she sees past the surface. I wish I had learned to do that when I was young. I’ve never been attracted to women who weren’t pretty.

Of course Reich was also not bad looking, engaging, bright, accomplished, and found his way to the upper reaches of national power. Where he found that people were more concerned with having power than using it to do anything worthwhile.

 

 

Politics

 

Okay gang, there’s a contest on to find the most insulting article about John Kerry on the Internet. Sorry, Bush has been done.

I wonder how many of those people being polled are saying, “Oh well, Kerry, I guess.”

 

There is actually no bottom any more, only an outside.

…

Bad news on the labor market is regarded as a victory announcement on Wall Street.

 – German sociologist Ulrich Beck, “Brave New World of Work: The Political Economy of Insecurity,” Portland IndyMedia

 

I hated working for money. We should all just do volunteer work and get a government allowance at about the subsistence level. Those who wanted more could work more, and pay taxes. Imagine being rid of all that envy. That we don’t talk about.

 

Oregon data for 2002 indicate that a third of state income tax payers have adjusted gross incomes less than $18,850, the defined Portland area poverty level for a family of four. – Ray Wolfe, letter, Register-Guard

 

Most people are not going to pay any more taxes, for anything. To support essential government services, we have to shift taxes back towards business and the rich.

 

Americans are so aggressively disinterested in anything outside their routines. Hard on those of us who like ideas and want to change things.

 

As Peter got older, each President seemed less mythic, more pathetic. – Colin Harrison, Break and Enter

 

Politically, poor people have no friends. Which means we need to get the knife out.

 

Fully 95 percent of the House of Representatives seats are deemed non-competitive by both parties – that is, either the Democrats dominate totally or the Republicans dominate totally. That reduces the voters’ choice, essentially, to one…. – Ralph Nader, National Press Club, June 3, 2004

 

In other words, by carefully drawing the boundaries of House districts, Republicans and Democrats have divided up the country between them. So we have a one party system, it’s just a different party in different districts. People get elected and keep their seats as long as they want to.

 

The Greens just nominated an unknown for president, and Mr. Unknown will campaign only in “safe” states where there is no Bush-Kerry contest. The Greens have castrated themselves.

 

Here is my idea of a brief progressive/populist program:

·        Opposed to the two-party system. No compromise.

·        No wars except in direct self-defense.

·        Pro-labor. Repeal federal anti-labor laws.

·        Support and extend safety net programs.

·        Raise the minimum wage to a living wage.

·        Job contracts to promote job security.

·        Limit temp jobs to one month.

·        Expand unemployment insurance.

·        Universal health care.

·        Support rights of women and minorities.

·        Limit corporate power.

·        Protect civil liberties guaranteed by the Bill of Rights.

 

We’ve been trying to bribe our corporate masters to give us jobs for 30 years.

 

They started telling us in high school that socialism would never work, and I still believe it even though no one ever proved it to me. They teach you proper respect for big business.

 

I need to set challenges for myself. Like tomorrow I’ll try to actually read Kerry’s platform. [I didn’t.] Platforms are like insurance policies: you’re not supposed to read them.

 

The point of a ballot, they say, is to narrow your choices down to two, so you won’t get confused.

 

It has come to my attention, working on the Nader campaign, that the world does not want me to save it. The world knows it’s screwed, and it just wants me to go away and leave it alone.