I am watching Tom Coburn,  Republican of Oklahoma.

This guy is like a hawk fluffing up in front of some chipmunks.   He has them nervous; the timing changed and the yuppie royal pacing went to hell.  I think it was when he told one kid, who was venturing into believing he’s as smart in front of these old men as in front of the man in the mirror,   to quit assuming they’re ignorant, and it hit home because it was already home.  It was a zen thing, where the arrow has already hit the mark congruent with the release.

Now it goes back to Levin.  It’s like tag team wrestling.  Levin has a really big head and he needs it for the brain.  Coburn slapped them around and now they have a different look about them.  It must be hard for these guys to get millions in bonuses and not think they are actually smarter than people who make a half million.  I remember watching the Watergate hearings, and there was no theater on Broadway with a more entertaining lead and supporting cast.

Levin is like the king who is visiting his gold.  He is rich in evidence that these guys were taking care of the company and not their customers.  The idea is to make money, not to have any particular ethical relationship with the society or even the American economy.  It is all about the firm, and these guys are  in a corporation so large it has its own culture.  Watching these hearings is like going on a  safari through corporate culture.   I remember when they released the tapes of the Enron traders celebrating the cornering of the utilities market.   The first step is always hiring some ex cops and paying off the ones on the beat, whether it’s the neighborhood or the nation.

Tourre is getting his ass kicked.  He was in the structured products division.  In a way I empathize with him because he feels that if he can give more context it won’t sound so bad as it does the way Levin presents it.  I suppose that’s like kids trying to explain things at the door of the woodshed.

This is interesting, to have the television on the screen with the word processor.  I can tune in and out of it because anybody with a computer and internet can do the same thing I’m doing, and pull them up on the network website.  I’m watching them on MSNBC.  Sometime before I go to bed I’ll go to Comedy Central and watch Stewart and Colbert.  I not only don’t miss having television separated off from the computer, I’m wondering why I didn’t see the central issue sooner.   No matter how many channels or how big and pretty the picture it renders the viewer passive.

Move the television back into the computer and it is just one more program running.  That works the way I watch it anyway because mostly I am interested in things like these hearings, which I can monitor while doing something else simultaneously, like this … writing at the same time on a page beside the picture.  Colburn is working one of these guys over again.  He’s the bad cop.  When he’s smacked them a couple of times it passes back to Levin.  Good cop.  And very smart cop.

What I like about this is watching really good lawyers … actually I think Coburn is a doctor so I should say, interrogators … work without resorting to torture.  They don’t need it.   Sam Ervin was 76 when he chaired the Watergate hearings, and he took Nixon’s boys to the woodshed.  He was the patriarch, like Walter Brennan,  and James Baker was Luke.  Peppino?  That was Lindsey Graham.  There was not a Hatfield left standing.

Got to go to In N Out Burger now.

Sometimes I feel trapped in the story because I’ve heard it so many times, but on the other hand I can’t just tell him that, because at his age he might need to repeat these stories as a way to maintain the patterning function of his brain.  He does seem to maintain a relatively sharp mind.  It’s his feeling side that’s somewhat inexperienced, having found lodgings in his wife for more than sixty-three years.  He’s 92.

I recall Don Juan telling Carlos that he needed to find the  stories from his life which have a universal application.  I am wondering about the prostate cancer story.  It seems to lack universal application, and be more locked into memory because of the simultaneity of strong emotion:  fear.  I think of other stories which seem more worth saving, such as one in which he and a friend used trotlines to recover the body of a young girl who’d drowned in the Tennessee River, while the bread was being cast on the waters by larger boats.   They brought her up and  propped her upright in the boat, a snow white corpse, while they  rowed back to shore.  They had aboard with them a minister, who behaved as if he was afraid of putting his hands on the corpse.

Ministers often play a shadow role in his stories, when they appear, though there are also good ones.  He tells of his grandfather’s funeral.  In earlier days, he and the old man walked all around their little Tennessee town together,  dad packing the tools.  While great grandfather Euton  was a master carpenter, he couldn’t read, and his schoolteacher wife would read the paper to him in the mornings while he had his coffee.  He was a man who was not trifled with for fear of the consequences.  Dad loved him fiercely, and after he retired as a surveyor, dad returned to fine woodworking.

When the old man died, according to dad’s story, the Baptist preacher was there to preach the funeral, because the women in the family belonged to that church.  Dad’s father was Scottish Presbyterian.  But great grandfather did not go to church and had no interest in going.  So the minister called this to the attention of his family, and, sadly, informed them that as he was not a member of the Baptist church, Brother Euton would not be allowed into heaven.

There was a stunned silence, broken when dad asked the bearer of these bad tidings if he could have a private word with him on the porch.   He relives,  with great satisfaction, that moment, which is the climax of the story, when he said, “If you open your mouth I’ll kick your ass all the way back to whatever rock you crawled out from under, and if you ever see me again you cross to the other side of the street.”   Dad was prone to fits of violence after he came back from combat in the Pacific theater.

The ending of the story was that he went back inside and called on a retired minister and friend of the family to speak a few words over Grandpa Euton’s remains.  He wisely opined that the old man would make it into Paradise.

I don’t know for sure which of dad’s stories have universal application.  He has to choose his stories, as I have to choose mine.  If they are universal, then they are built over an archetypal pattern, and will hold energy when the vessel is gone.  One hopes so anyway.  Don Juan said that a sorcerer is an empty man except for this collection of stories, each with an archetypal core.

Sometimes he needs to talk about mother.  When he does I can feel the pain that’s in him.  It’s the pain that caused his breathing to go wrong and left him wheezing.  He spent two nights in the hospital last week, getting breathing treatments to clear his bronchial tubes and was sent home with supplementary oxygen.  He wears a nosepiece when he’s sleeping or driving or just sitting in his recliner.  Today he seemed much improved.  Maybe he’s over the worst body shock.

A friend told me that after her mother died she felt her there, very close, but that after awhile that feeling went away.   “Enjoy it while it’s there,” she advised.   What I feel now is less intense than last week, and it is still not painful.  It is more like process.  I don’t feel a need to hold on to anything.  I just experience how different it is to be in the house when she’s not there anymore.  Dad and I relate differently, because it’s just two men hanging out together.

When mom was there I had to pay attention all the time.  If I coughed she would pounce on it as a symptom of illness, and if I was going to drive home she would try to locate by what means I would be killed on the way.   “Aren’t you afraid it’s going to rain?”

“I fully expect it to rain, and the roads will become slick and dangerous.  Normally that would be okay but I am high and my reflexes are slow.”  And I would exaggerate it until all she could do was laugh at it.  And if I stayed overnight she would fret about how many blankets I might need.  Would I be too hot or too cold?

She wanted to take care of me, still, and me an old man.  She was a mother … my mother.  As dad said, “She’s the only mother you’ve got.”   Now I have no mother but I had one when I needed one, and long afterwards.  The neighbor who helped look after her didn’t approve of my often calling my mom by her first name.   It was a way to set Ruby free, so that she could find the rest of her story.  She and a sister  close to her in age seemed to be opposites, though in some way they were very much alike.  What was on the surface in one was often hidden beneath it in the other.   My older sister said that when mom died, she saw Ruth come to get her.  She saw Ruth’s face appear in mother’s face.  It was the return of what had been lost.  What was whole and was split apart was whole again.

There’s nothing to do, really, but accept the nature of things, and remember what Satchel Page said.  Don’t look back, something might be gaining on you.

He could see the spirit moving on the faces, some stricken, some observant, of those gathered to witness the return of the body to a hole in the ground.   There are silent watchers over the graveyard, and while some may be angels, skittering in and out of existence, one that never flies away is a backhoe.  It comes to life only when you maintain it, fuel it, and fire it up.  Then you have to develop a touch for making it an extension of your hand.   Scooping delicately beside the graveled trail through the old Pioneer Cemetery,  Preacher John gathered some dirt in his hand.  He put it on the casket and pronounced, “Ashes to ashes and dust to dust.”

He had checked with dad, first, to make sure there was no objection to his doing the closing ritual releasing dust back to dust.   Dad said, “That’s the way we always did it.  We had to lay the body on a cooling board and then dig a grave and bury it ourselves.”

You bury the body yourself so as to not let death get too far removed from the gravedigger.   Preacher John mentioned that we all have to pass this way, that he was eighty, and Ruby was eighty-eight.  Eight years behind the death on this day is Preacher John, who ritually tosses the earth onto the casket —  suspended there — above the grave.

The cemetery is small, and surrounded by a rock wall.  The two plots reserved for Ruby and George have a rock wall around them, about a foot and a half high.  The air smells fresh because it is the first clear day following a series of storms.  The sky is clear and slate blue.  The air is cool but the sun is warming it up.

Around a big black hearse there is a three man crew of funeral directors.  They are respectful and efficient, though a constant dealing with death strips it of the natural solemnity of rare events.  Death is not a rare event at the mortuary.

Around the grave there are flowers, in bunches and sprays.  Gradually the flowers will die and the containers will be thrown away.  The backhoe operator will come over and bury the casket.  And I will be at home, drinking wine, when the feelings I have held back are given permission to congregate freely.

What else was there?  And of course it was Ruby, but not old and enfeebled, looking around her in baffled wonder at those cheering her on toward nothing they could define, beyond another day like today.  It was Ruby younger and more filled with life.  I tried to explain what I was feeling, but Linda already understood it.  She lost her mother many years ago, when she was fairly young.  ”You get your mother back,” she said.  ”But the way she used to be, when she was young.”

One of my clients wrote that we all have to face death, and he asked if I am ready.  I said, “Sure; just let me use the bathroom first.”  And he wrote back he was serious, whereupon I replied so was I.   He wrote back with a quote from Woody Allen:  ”I’m not afraid to die, I just don’t want to be there when it happens.”

Amen to that.

Later in the afternoon dad wanted me to drive him over to see John Jenkins.  He wanted to give him a card with some money in it.  I knew he was needing to take care of things, stay busy with what needs to be done.  And when he’s done with the details he will open to find out what else is there.

(From “The Gates of the Forest,” by Elie Wiesel):

“the body has time; it moves slowly and prudently, step by step, in obedience to laws of gravity, but the soul brushes time and laws aside; it wants to push forward, regardless of the cost in pain, or intoxication or even madness.  that is the only way it has of raising itself to god.  on your way through life you’ll meet men who cling to reason, but reason gropes like a blind man with a white cane, stumbling over every pebble, and when it comes up against a wall it stops short, and tries to tear it down brick by brick, quite ineffectually, because an invisible hand builds it up again, higher and thicker than ever.  We on the other hand, believe in the power of faith and ecstasy, and no wall can stand against us; with our fists and our songs we bring it crashing down.  Gates do not frighten us.  because, my child, listen to this:  other people can open their eyes wide to see god but we close them.  yet these others attract darkness while while we laugh at it, until it follows rather than precedes us.”

We drove alongside the ghost of a good time,  past small houses,  to a mortuary which, dad said, had been fixed up and looked really good since the new owners took over.  The mortuary director was named Ben, and he was big enough to be half a defensive line all by himself.  He was showing us caskets, headstones, and packages.  He had just come from church, he said, and he provided his family bona fides in Camp Verde.

There really isn’t much you can do when somebody dies, other than handle it yourself, and bury the person within the time limit for non embalmed bodies, I think 24 hours, or turn it over to a funeral director.  Once it’s being handled by a funeral director it’s just a matter of choosing times and products and services:  working out the details so the director can make it work smoothly for you.

For example, Bueler showed dad the kind of stone, or brass, the Veteran’s Administration will provide for his grave, which he is quick to point out he’s in no hurry to get into.  “You see here where you can put the rank you achieved …”  He was showing how mom’s stone could be matched to it, and what would go in that space.

“I didn’t achieve much rank; I was in the guardhouse too much,” dad said.

“He was in the war,” one of my sisters offered.”

“A machine gunner,” I said, poking dad in the leg.  “A cleaner.”

The other sister said my name aloud, as if I needed to be called back from where I had ventured.  The moment passed.  But after we left and went to the local cafe for lunch, for the first time I heard him say out loud what Paul Harvey would call, “The rest of the story.”  He’d mentioned pieces of it.  Japanese troops put ashore at the wrong place.  Somebody made a mistake about where the Japanese line was.   And they were all blissfully unaware, on the beach, in the gunsights.  And they were all mowed down by machine gun fire, until the beach was a sea of corpses.  Now dad finally stepped into the scene as an actor and not an observer, describing how they had just started at the outer edges and worked inward.

It was something new for him to own what scared him so much when he was still worried about heaven and hell.  I think he’s past that now.  He’s showing emotion openly, there in the space where Ruby is missing.  It is a space which produces surprises.  For example, my older sister irritates the hell out of me with some of her lame jokes.  But as we were driving away from the mortuary I mentioned how big Ben Bueler is.  “Nobody’s gonna give him any grief,” she said.  It was brilliant.  What in the hell was going on?  Dad finally owning what had always weighed so heavily on his mind, and — even more astonishing — Pat making a joke I found brilliant?

Back at the house, I pulled out my guitar and began to play and sing a song without being self-conscious about it.  A black cloak slipped off my shoulders and onto the floor.  There it writhed around animated by whatever dark lord it calls master, then formed itself into a small black dog which went to the front door, sat down,  and looked back as if waiting to be let out.

]]> http://strayshot.com/wordpress/2010/03/the-empty-chair/feed/ 0 http://strayshot.com/wordpress/2010/03/an-american-death/ http://strayshot.com/wordpress/2010/03/an-american-death/#comments Sun, 07 Mar 2010 06:16:06 +0000 Dan Lee http://strayshot.com/wordpress/?p=525 The doctor was slender and very black, his accent suggested he is African.  He seemed hidden behind thick glasses and his doctor’s smock.  “I know you want to have her in the hospital for three days so medicare will pay for rehabilitation,” he said.  “If I can find something that qualifies under the Medicare guidelines I will admit her.”  But he didn’t find anything.  The old woman had been unable to get out of bed or stand so she was brought to the hospital.  Now she had to be carried back home and put in diapers.  It was a week after that when we realized she’d had a heart attack.  Somehow he missed that.  And the blood infection.  He missed that as well.

“I would like to admit her, but there’s nothing I can do under the Medicare guidelines.”

He seemed a nervous little doctor, and  spoke as if he was reciting, like a telephone solicitor who is told to stay to the script and not leave any air in the conversation for questions.  On his chest there was a tight grouping of .38s from my father’s eyes.  This was the same doctor who had tried to send her home because there was nothing wrong with her awhile back.  Another doctor came in, fortunately, and swabbed her nose.  She had a particularly virulent case of flu.  Now the nervous little man with the shifting eyes was once again sending her away, but there was nobody else on duty to countermand it this time.

The old woman being shuffled around was my mother, not an unwilling participant in the death process, her health having failed steadily since a stroke left her unable to walk without a walker about five years ago.  She took physical therapy and was almost walking again when she got the flu.  As she was recovering from the flu she was left in an examining room and told she could sit on the table.  She climbed up, on to the covering of slick paper, then she slid off, badly slashing her leg on a protruding metal part.  After that she was mostly confined to a wheelchair, watching reruns of Bonanza and Gunsmoke, or doing crossword puzzles.   “I’m just waiting to die, now,” she said, “but you can’t just make it happen.”

She died last night when no family was there.  The report was that she died peacefully, in her sleep.  My sister wondered aloud if they might have put something in the drip, like a muscle relaxant.  I had wondered the same thing.  A little valium maybe.  Just enough to ease the heart into stopping for the last time.  Maybe or maybe not, but we hope it is true that she passed peacefully, in her sleep, because that is how she wanted to go.

After my little sister arrived, we had a coffee at Starbucks, and shared our feelings of confusion and even guilt that we are not more upset by mother’s dying.  We both feel it was her time and she was ready and even eager to leave.  We are aware that others around us might find us unfeeling.  Her death is no tragedy for us, but what should be at this time.

Maybe we will feel differently later, at the funeral, when mother’s body is there, and we  have to say goodbye.  But now we both  feel curiously proud of her for living her life until it became untenable to sustain it, and then exiting in peace.  I saw what her body had become, the one that died.  It was in pain.  The lumbar spine was compressed and  her legs were in pain.   The heart was weak.  The skin was blotched and bruised from blood thinners.  Her upper back had humped outward.  The digestive system wasn’t working well.  And finally she was unable to stand, and had to wear diapers.

That was what died.

What remains is relieved of that leaky old vessel, and the spirit fills me at times with energetic memory of when she was young, and hopeful, and though she could not use  many of her gifts,  was limited by her status and gender,   she gave some of them to me for safekeeping.  She gave me a sense of joy and fun and irreverence.  I passed them along to my daughter.  What is denied in women is passed along to new generations of women.

I do not miss mother, because I do not find her missing.  If anything the escape from that broken body brought her more fully and delightfully into my awareness.  I am thinking of what my friend and client, Letticia, said on Thursday, after the doctor had called me and told me my mother was dying.  Lettie said, “I think of my dad every day, Dan.  And you know, I didn’t think of him every day when he was alive.  But now, I do.”  I started back on Friday morning.

While I was driving,  I talked to my dad and he said mom was doing better and had been talking and eating.  The crisis had passed he said, and she would be moving to a nursing home soon.  That was just four or five hours before he called me again and told me she passed away.  His voice was often overwhelmed by emotion.

Sometimes emotion comes which freezes me in time, waiting for enough composure to continue a thought.  I am in no hurry.  I will stay in that space so long as it holds me.  Interestingly, it was in that moment of knowing death had come, that life, also, asserted itself.  Linda and I spoke of the children and of the grandchildren.  We agreed that our son is amazing to us.  We both see him as having an extraordinary blend of qualities.

We spoke of each child, each grandchild, in turn, and we shared our joys and our fears as regards them.  It is a time of blessing, and one of those rare moment in which one can bless, and be blessed.  And above the blessing there is a spirit, now free.  We will ritually deal with the remains, and celebrate what is contained in a life, in its time.

I on the other hand was between two sisters, one four years older and one eight years younger.   I was protector of one and needed protection from the other.  It’s an interesting pattern, and like any other pattern, varying in presentation by the quality of the script and of the acting.  The patterns are the most obvious things in the world, because they are the archetypes, what everything else is built over.  But they are hard to see like water is hard for a fish to see.

For the friends who are at this time holding memorials for Brugh Joy, the gifts are beginning to come in.   Each one of us had a special relationship with him, and when I think of that, I recall his talking about his mother’s funeral.  Each of the children got up and gave a little talk at her memorial service, oldest to youngest.  Brugh was one of the youngest if not the youngest.  And as he listened he was wondering, “Who are they talking about?  That’s not my mother.”  And having the exceptional mind he had, Brugh grasped that none of them really knew the mother, and that none of us can ever really know our own mother.

I have been watching my mother get increasingly frail.  On Saturday morning she was taken to the hospital because she could not get out of bed.  The doctors could not admit her to the hospital because there was no diagnosis allowed by the insurance carrier which they could make, and she had already been in a wheelchair.  So she was taken back home where my older sister has come to look after her.

And of course I know that there is a pattern between my sister and her mother, and I know what it is, but I won’t say.  It’s none of my business.  Brugh got to a place where he realized he couldn’t just tell people what their patterns are, and watch the light lift them out of darkness.  We have to see it ourselves when it’s okay with us to look at it.

When I felt in the mood to write this evening, I was thinking of something Jung wrote and was wanting to find it again.  I could not get the quote fashioned in my head.  It was something to the effect that everything is balance, and he described the balance of structure and nonsense as the sweet spot.  I had already discovered that.

The Christmas before last, Derrick and Kierra bought me a coffee cup with a quote from Dr. Seuss on it:  ”I like nonsense; it wakes up the brain cells.”   They realized that about half of what I say is nonsense.  I think they are relieved to know that I know how much nonsense I speak.  It could be a worry if I did not.  Sometimes I make nonsense out of sense, and sometimes the other way around.

Of course it’s hard to find a quote when you don’t know approximately where it is, so I soon found myself scanning other things and thinking, “Yes, I agree with that.  Not Just because you’re Jung, but because  I’m convinced it really is all about balance and counter balance.”

Brugh  is a part of the Conscious Circle of Humanity. I miss having him around, even if we didn’t quite know what to do with each other sometimes.   He was a teacher, and some of his heirs have already been reminding everyone that anything he said is their intellectual property.  Maybe Rex Ranch will be like Graceland and there will be platinum records on the wall:   “Brugh’s Greatest Hits.”  Two thespians will act out the dispute between brothers at high noon.

That’s both logic and nonsense, or an oscillation between them.

When I opened the Red Book to begin looking for the quote playing around with my brain, I also paid attention to the page to which I actually turned, and to where  my attention first focused.  I read this:

“Believe me, it is no teaching or instruction that I give you.  On what basis should I presume to teach you?  I give you news of the way of this man, but not of your own way.  My path is not your path, therefore I cannot teach you.  The way is within us, but not in gods, nor in teachings, nor in laws …  We betide those who live by way of examples.  Life is not with them.  If you live according to an example, you thus live the life of that example, but who should live your own life if not yourself?”

I do not think of Brugh as an example, and I never did.  He was a particular and very individual man.  Sometimes I disagreed with him and it burned me that he simply acknowledged my not being able yet to bear to see it.   And yet it is the way with people that in what infuriated you about a man, also most humanized him and made him lovable.

His ability as a seer was astonishing.  I read that Jean-Martin Charcot was a seer.  He created the  field of neurology from where it was when he began his work:  ”crazy or not crazy.”  He would  have somebody brought into his office at Salpetriere, in Paris,  and left there while he worked.  After awhile he would have the one taken away and another  brought in.  He just observed the patients in this way.

At some point one of these patients would be standing there as usual and he would go, “I see.”  And he would see.  He would know the pattern behind the behavior.  All the cues coming from the person would be put together beneath the surface, and when the picture was complete, it would come to consciousness.  ”I see.”

Brugh had that gift.  Those of us who joined his seminars knew that he was seeing each of us, which was the good news and the bad news.  He could see us better than we could see ourselves.  By submitting ourselves to this process, we had a way to provide for ourselves an external, objective observer.

So I guess my Seer is coming back home.  He says, “You got no secrets,” and I say, “I do from people who mind their own business,” and he says, “I see.”  Because he knows I can’t argue with that.  All I can do is follow along the path between logic and nonsense, whistling past the graveyard.

We started out together but after standing outside a store for a half hour I decided to go off on my own and meet Linda back at the hotel.  I explored some of the art galleries — commercial ones — to see what is hot in this market.   I’ve already seen some of the contemporary Vietnamese painters, and wish I had the bucks to collect some of it.  But not really.  You don’t have to own it to enjoy it.

I stopped into a Starbucks for some tea and a rest, and bought a girlie magazine in a 7-11 as a gift for a friend who, when I asked what he wants from Asia, said something with long silky hair and big brown eyes.  I wrote back that I had found him, and he said I’m a wise ass.  So I found him at least pictures of what he dreams of.

I’ve realized that everywhere I go I mention how beautiful the people are, and I’ve concluded that the older I get the more  beautiful people are everywhere, with the possible exception of Philadelphia.  One reason I’m feeling so good is that it’s cool in Hong Kong, like San Francisco weather, and it’s the weather I like best.

Last night we welcomed the New Year at the club on the top floor of the Conrad, for which we’d make reservations at the end of January.  When we had to leave Singapore early yesterday morning to get back for it, we thought we made a mistake.  But we were wrong,  What a feast it was.  I’m not sure I’ve ever seen that many different kinds of food so well prepared, and all available for my greedy consumption.  Wines were good as well, and of course there was the entertainment …

We dined between seven and eight, when the fireworks began on Hong Kong Bay, spread below our window table.  They were spectacular while they were visible.  After awhile the smoke from them began to drift upward and toward the island, and gradually there was a mixture of dark smoke in which the lights continued to flash and the fiery explosions blossom.

Tonight is our last night in Hong Kong, and the last night of the Asia trip.  Too bad; I’m just getting accustomed to Hong Kong.  I celebrated the end of the trip in Soho with New Zealand Pinot Noir, prosciutto pizza, and a cute Chinese waitress.  I finally figured out my true calling in life.  I was supposed to be an ex-pat.  But most likely I was evil in a past life.  Come to think of it, I’ve been something of an asshole in this one.  Karma’s a bitch.

My first impression was based on walked through some expensive shopping areas, and predictably, it was a very flawed sample.  The designer goods and ridiculously expensive jewelry is to objectify the person, and objectified people behave according to rules of etiquette, which serve to keep anybody from moving up a class. There’s no point in being superior if you behave like a glad hander, so when the air is thick with that particular flavoring people are less likely to break into spontaneous song and dance.

Once I got away from the place where bank executives buy their luggage, things changed considerably.  My first impression of the people in Singapore as not obsequious was right; but they are friendly, open, and maybe the most democratic people on the face of the earth.  They just don’t need your money.  They have their own.  As the cab driver told me, begging or hustling money in Singapore is not allowed, and even though there are some poor people, nobody is desperate.  Everybody is provided food and shelter.

The people are very attractive, the population being composed of Chinese, Malaysians, Indians, Eurasians, and mixes thereof.  And my impression of order was correct, but maybe I assumed it had to be enforced order.  It is order secured by excellent planning for the future, and a public transportation system which keeps the traffic down.  On the bus I took around the city, there was a host who asked where I wanted to get off and informed me when I was at my stop.  Even people who stopped the bus mistakenly were treated with great courtesy and given information.

Singapore has a variety of religions, but there is very little tolerance for intolerance.  There was an article in the Sunday paper relating that a Christian evangelical minister had made some disparaging remarks about other religions and the entire community was upset.  He was apologizing, and there was a reminder that what makes Singapore such a wonderful place to live is that nobody judges anyone else.  People here, the paper reported, pay no negative attention to the habits, dress, or inclinations of others, and most don’t intend to change it.   Intolerance is divisive and stirs up trouble where there was none before.

Okay, I’m going to qualify the “very attractive” summation of the people here.  Some of them are drop dead gorgeous; and they are an advertisement for the benefits of democracy and elimination of gross poverty.  Singapore is so safe you can walk in the park at three in the morning without concern for your safety.  There was an article in the Sunday paper which gave me an idea of how little crime there is here.  The story, given a lot of space and with a photo, was about a man who came back to a public garage to get his car and found it on blocks, the wheels stolen.  This was so unusual as to cause a furor in the city, and grave concern.

Imagine a three column story in the New York Times about somebody’s wheels being stolen.  You can’t even get the police to take an interest in such a crime, not even if you know who did it and provide a name and address.   So my impression that so much order and absence of crime was accompanied by repression of some sort appears to be mistaken.  It seems people live this way because they like to have a clean, well ordered, prosperous and democratic society.  What a concept.  They don’t even pack heat in case somebody cuts them off in traffic.

And so we leave Singapore wishing we had planned a longer stay here.  On the other hand we can get here directly next time.  It’s worth renting a place and staying for awhile.

Our first contact was with the porter who shepherded us from the ship to a taxi.  At one point, when we were standing in line to have the bags put through security, he looked back at another porter, put his fingers to his mouth, and formed a huge smile.  I looked back to see who was the receiver of this message and he was glum indeed, paying no attention to the suggestion.  At Linda’s insistence I shamelessly overtipped him.   After the last two days with the naked and the dying, she’s giddy around healthy young dudes.  Actually I didn’t realize how well I tipped until arriving at the hotel in a taxi and realizing it was less than eight dollars for the fare.  Because Linda has collected so many credit card points, she is in the Hilton Diamond Club, so we checked into the Conrad, and were given a room on the top floor.  I move between some cultural extremes; I recently wrote about slumming at the Best Motel in Mohave, where I hid the cash before walking to the liquor store.  Here there’s free drinks at the Executive Club.  I like all of it … ; )

There are some really cool touches in the suite.  For example, you insert the card key in a slot inside the door to turn on the lights.  This means that when you leave you know where your key is, and, the lights go off shortly after you leave!  What a great idea.  There is a panel  beside the bed with control buttons; for example, one you push for privacy and another you push for service, so it eliminates the need to put a sign on the door.  Another great idea.  One need never get out of bed but for the changing of the sheets.

As long as i was overtipping I overtipped the porter who brought up the bags, as I had no small bills left.  The problem with doing that is you have a hard time stopping.  I’m thinking of getting a cigar to chew on and maybe a white linen sport coat and a big handkerchief with which to obsessively wipe the perspiration off my brow.  “Tha’ah you ah son; take the missus out and get her dampened.”

I’m going to walk around awhile and will continue later, when I have taken a look around the neighborhood, which is mostly a very expensive shopping area for the guests at the major hotels.

Ohhhhkayyyy …. I’m back … and my shirt is wet.  This is a jungle city, and the reason there’s not many people on the streets is that, like Hong Kong, the pedestrian traffic moves largely above the streets so that both people and cars — natural enemies — are separated as much as practical.  The walkways flow into shopping malls where, if your watch isn’t working, you can pick up another one for, say, fifty thousand dollars.  Not that you can’t get a ridiculously expensive Rolex in the states, but the sidewalk doesn’t move past it very often.  You don’t want a bunch of winos puking on your treasures.

I saw one watch so tricked out it looked like a clock on a strap.  Who buys this crap?  Not somebody concerned with what time it is.   Maybe somebody trying to get beat up?  I just  wear my Timex and a t-shirt that reads:  “My other watch is a Rolex.”  I knew a guy who wore a real Rolex.  Parked at a McDonald’s in a Rolls Royce.  He had a pistol in his ribs before he could say “Super size me.”  When you go slumming you ought to dress down.

The thing you notice about the people here is that while they are friendly, they are not obsequious.  The British were here and they left behind their signature export — other than unbridled materialism — a polite  reserve.  In Britain the mark of good breeding is to display no gestures which might suggest an emotional response radiating from the belly outward. One contains chaotic  impulses with the patterned brain.  A proper Englishman doesn’t  wave his hands and jump up and down on encountering an old friend, for example.  The corners of his mouth might turn up but if the eyes wrinkle,  it is decorously.  “Hello old fruit.  Shame about your wife.”

“One  copes old sod.  She did cross against the light.”  A slight movement at the corner of the mouth.

“Rather slow.”  A twitch under the left eye, and the hilarity has passed.

Maybe they are just cautious, here, because, in the immortal words of Bob Dylan, the cops don’t need you and man, they expect the same.  That’s what I’ve heard about Singapore, at least.  Don’t spit on the sidewalk because it’s illegal.  Don’t drop your cigarette butt on the sidewalk or piss on the wall or threaten somebody.  In general you want to contain yourself, the way the other people here contain themselves.  In exchange you get a spotless city with polite, efficient services and cab drivers who correct you if you try to pay too much.  I did overpay when we had to slip in the nearest air conditioned place to escape having a heat stroke, but that  was in O’Leary’s Bar, an American franchise.

We sat in O’Leary’s and studied some tours, deciding what we might want to see during the two days we have here.  Linda, being Linda, is reading reviews on the internet before committing.  She has downloaded some apps, such as a map of the city, and is fortified with a Singapore Sling, while I had something that won’t make me go blind:  a mimosa.

One copes.  A slight movement at the edge of the right eye, then in a bizarre and visually unpleasant episode  the right ear folds all the way forward and then flat against the skull in three full flexures.  Two policemen approach woodenly from behind a potted plant:  “Too much!  Too much!”

]]> http://strayshot.com/wordpress/2010/02/ashore-in-singapore/feed/ 0 http://strayshot.com/wordpress/2010/02/super-bowl-monday/ http://strayshot.com/wordpress/2010/02/super-bowl-monday/#comments Mon, 08 Feb 2010 09:49:06 +0000 Dan Lee http://strayshot.com/wordpress/?p=467 It’s Super Bowl Monday on the South China Sea, off the coast of Thailand.  I woke up at seven and stumbled to the Magellan Lounge, the Seabourn Pride’s theater, where the game was projected onto a huge movie screen, delivered by satellite feed live and gorgeous.  There were even hot dogs and beer along with coffee.

I have an enjoyment of the off kilter moment, but I have to say there are damned few of them aboard this ship.  Everybody I’ve talked to here says that Seabourn is the best cruise line in the world, and that the Pride is the finest ship in their fleet.  It’s hard to imagine how it could be improved.  If you want something you just ask, if you have time, because more often than not you are anticipated.  And there is at least one crew for every passenger.  We asked for the Super Bowl, and we got it on a screen right out of an old Palace Theater.

The only funny moment came shortly into the game.  We had arranged ourselves so that everybody had a full view of the screen, when a couple came in and went down to the front seats.  “Down in front!” Tevis called out.  The woman waved at him and sat down, taking a little chunk out of the bottom of the screen where the crawl runs.  I was pleased that New Orleans won.  They need all the morale boost they can get.

I slipped out to Veranda Cafe for eggs benedict and coffee during half time.  The Pride was slowly cruising toward Ko Kook Island, where a pristine beach was being prepared for our exclusive use by the crew.  By the time the tenders took us ashore the beach was set with umbrellas and seats, a bar was set up, and masseuses were waiting in grass huts to work their magic.

The beach was pure white sand and the water was warm and perfectly clear, the sand sloping gently out into the sea so that you can walk a long ways before the water comes up to your waist.   And of course the service was perfect, with pina coladas on serving trays to get things rolling.  A Thai Elvis Presley was singing the King’s songs from a makeshift stage while most of use lolled in the water, interrupted only by a skiff serving champagne and caviar out in the surf.  That drew a crowd.

On the beach there were serving tables with all kinds of food:  hamburgers, hot dogs, crab, shrimp, vegetables, thin roast sliced beef, ribs, lamb, ham, fish, and more, plus a range of desserts and three kinds of ice cream.  Crew even came around with sun screen, as well as ice water and, after the pina colada and champagne courses, a course of margaritas.  It was hard to tell whether people were sunburned or just dilated.

We are resting in the cabin, now, and later will go down to the restaurant to a dinner hosted by Rachael.  I can’t explain Rachael.  She’s just gorgeous, and she sings rock and roll and dances as well as working on the crew.  Linda said, “I accepted the invitation because I know you think she’s the hottest female on board.”

Well … yea …

The Captain’s name is Bjarne Larsen.  How Swede it is.  He said that should anyone go overboard we should throw into the water a life buoy or anything else  that floats.  It would be really embarrassing to make a mistake and throw something after a drowning person that proved not buoyant.  I amused myself with cartoons of my own making, which is a lifelong habit.  Had I learned to draw I’d connect the habit to something outside myself.  As it is, the habit just makes my sense of humor seem sometimes odd.

The cruise is expensive,   though in this economy the prices have been slashed to the point that it’s affordable to those not so rich.  Our first formal dinner at the cruise director’s table confirmed that  the favored subject of conversation among the passengers … at least the ones dining with us … is  travel.   And not just travel, but  expensive travel.

We struck a conversation with a couple of older people from Scotland, and our looking out at the Hong Kong high rises reminded the man of their having lived in a high rise once, though not very high, where the wind whipped around it because of convection currents.

Trying to be engaging I mentioned that when I moved to San Francisco in 1980 the winds used to blow freezing fog up the avenues off the ocean, but that in recent years it has been much milder.  “I have to tell you,” he said, “that we don’t buy this global warming thing.”   Even talking about the weather seems to have become socially perilous.

At our first dinner, we were seated with a couple from Los Angeles.  Roy made his money in air conditioning and his wife, I think her name was Lalla, but I’m not sure I heard it correctly,  spends at least some of it on jewelry.   I think jewelry is a throwback to a time when one wore one’s wealth, and it was contained in rare trinkets.  Manhattan Island was bought from the natives with beads, so I have heard.   My mental cartoonist furnished a caricature of a woman wearing earrings made out of American Express cards.

Our dinner with the cruise director and eight other people was pleasant but lacking excitement, as,  like I said, the conversation around me at least focused on sea cruises and expensive accommodations.   I recalled a conversation with Joseph Henderson in which I expressed some feelings of inadequacy around a situation I was in with a German intellectual I was dating.  I felt like a rube around her friends and wondered if I should break it off and find something more culturally comforable.

He said that what I was having trouble with was not being as knowledgeable about European culture as are Europeans, but that this is to be expected, and  they generally don’t know all that much about American culture, either.  “When I used to be at dinner with the Darwin family I felt the same way,” he said.  He married into the family; I think it was a granddaughter.  “They knew nothing about the Dakotas,” he said “so that gave me something to talk about.”

One of the people I especially liked was an American from Florida.  At first I felt pushed by him, as he was trying to get me interested in signing some kind of letter to the head of Seaborne, urging that we get the Super Bowl  beamed aboard the ship.  I didn’t really want to do that once I realized it would be about three in the morning here when it broadcasts.  I’m trying to shift my internal clock away from being awake in the middle of the night and I don’t intend to shift it back if I succeed, even for the Super Bowl.

The reason I liked him (his name was Tevis) was that his irreverence  was in perfect juxtaposition to the English conversation about hotels and high end travel.  After talking to Linda awhile he  turned toward me and asked, “You hear about the black boy who said, ‘I don’t want a rich woman; I just want one that works steady?”  It was so off kilter with the proper behavior of the English that I had to like him for providing the ballast.

“I know that guy,” I said.

Linda is certainly a different breed than the women of inherited leisure.  “She’s a woman who understands how to run a hot plant,” I said.  Later there was some conversation about San Francisco, and from those who aren’t in San Francisco it’s almost always something about gay people.  For those who live there it almost never is, and so it comes as a surprise.  The fish don’t pay much attention to the water.

“I think there’s something queer about gay people,” Tevis said.  I didn’t laugh because I wasn’t sure that it was a laugh line.  I almost said, “And something fairly odd about the rest of us when you scratch the surface,” but censored it.  I wasn’t sure my dinner guests found themselves odd at all, and the surface was for the most part expertly  lacquered to resist scratching.   But I was sorry I hadn’t laughed because the point isn’t to let people know what you think in such a situation, but to make them feel comfortable.

“That was a joke,” he said, “but it went over like a lead balloon.”

After dinner Linda told me that Tevis is eighty-five years old, and that he was speculating on whether the woman on my left, who was very attractive, was wearing a bra.   I would have guessed him at least ten years younger.   I hope when I’m his age, I’m that energetic.

The path to Hong Kong (where I am writing this)  by air from San Francisco, passes over vast, frozen tundra, giving way to a pattern of brown and white as the earth is exposed.  Then through a mist of clouds a sea of high rises appears below, like steel and concrete giants marching out of China toward the sea.

I am used to thinking of Asia as I knew it forty years ago, when I was afflicted with the thinking common to all untraveled people, a certainty that those of my color and beliefs were the heros, and the rest of the world character actors in my play.  I wasn’t nearly as bad as a lot of others because I had read extensively, even if I had not traveled.  I knew there was something not right about it when I heard another man heckle the actors on a foreign stage for discomfiting his expectations.

As I get older I hear the propensity in men to replay their stories, the kind ones improving on them and the others slathering them with tedious and undigestible  detail.  I have my stories of a year in Japan in my youth, of confrontations and assignations with foreign men and women.  In each story I am the viewpoint character, and never in their construction have I stepped outside the assumption that I was the leading actor, and the others supporting cast.

I suppose that is what, in essence,  Jung’s journey is all about:  the recognition that we begin as the actor in a play, and pass through a process of disintegration in order to encompass the play itself, to ultimately get a glimpse of the director and behind the director, the playwright.  The easy path is to simply do the lines and stay in character, collect your pay and hope for a long and successful run.

I am puzzled by the reaction to his work as religion, or by a profession of “believing him” or not.  I have no reasons to not accept that he faithfully recorded his experience, which is the best anyone can do.   He understood that it was the symbol which was the transformer of energy, and that before it passed through the symbol and gained emotional tone, it had no meaning.  So the symbols, or archetypes, are transformers.   Beyond them, outside the enclosure of them, energy is amorphous.  It doesn’t mean anything.  The only meaning is what we provide, or what is given to us by our culture.  And inside this meaning we are either protected or imprisoned, depending on our inclination to encompass or exclude what seems to be alien.

McCarthy is a western man.  He writes about the Mexican border, and about men who are self-sufficient and not particularly introspective.  If one of them asks the other if he believes in God his answer is most likely that he’s not thought on it all that much.  When one of his characters is shot in the leg he heats a pistol barrel in the fire until it’s glowing red and shoves it into the entrance and exit wounds to cauterize them.  He makes a lot of noise, but he doesn’t die of infection on the Mexican desert.  He does what he has to do to survive.

In, “The Crossing,” McCarthy writes:

“(The old man) said that men believe the blood of the slain to be of no consequence, but that the wolf knows better.  He said that the wolf is a being of great order and that it knows what men do not:  that there is not great order in the world save that which death has put there … between (men’s) acts and ceremonies lies the world and in this world the storms blow and the trees twist in the wind and all the animals that God has made go to and fro yet this world men do not see.  They see the acts of their own hands or they see that which they name and call out to one another but the world between is invisible to them … ‘You cannot touch the world.  You cannot hold it in your hand for it is made of breath only.’”

I am certainly imposing my own order on what I am reading to say that Jung and McCarthy  would agree on anything.  But in some alchemy unknown to me at a conscious level they are working together to shape something bigger than either by himself.  Jung writes about his dream presaging the first Great War, and of the behavior of men  and women (the shine on their eyes) as presaging human sacrifice.  They do not realize that they are eager for the blood letting, thinking it will be other people’s blood.  They believe the image of themselves as heroes.  It is the death of the hero in the man which begins the journey to maturity.  I recall Joseph Henderson asking me who the hero was slaying all those dragons to impress, and I realized the truth of it:  that it was for his mother, and until he could move beyond that, he was as a child.

One of McCarthy’s ranchers observes that when wolves kill cattle they mutilate them more than when they kill wild game, as if there is something in their existence, in the way they are not bred to survive, that makes the wolf need to mutilate them.  The reason is understood, if difficult to articulate.   It is part of the order imposed on the world by beings of great order.

The McCarthy novels I will savor until they are finished, like other westerns that transcend the genre:  “Lonesome Dove” and Pete Dexter’s “Deadwood” come to mind.  Then I will let the shift in cultures strip away what I can bear to do without, and maybe see with new eyes for awhile.  And I will get back into the rhythm of night and day, and not be writing in the early mornings, when, like McCarthy’s characters, I move back and forth across the southern border without papers and with only a vague idea of any purpose for the crossing.

It’s also a highway town, built along the east side of the highway, with the railroad tracks running along the west side.  Sometimes the wind blows hard enough it feels like it’s going to take off the roof, and other times it’s still until the train comes through, making the room rumble and shudder.

There was a sign on the door.  ”Office closed.”  And it gave a number to call if it was an emergency.  Well, I supposed my wanting my room at six o’clock wasn’t an emergency, but I didn’t know what was going on.  Maybe the Chinese couple that run the place were out to dinner with friends.  The Chinese man who used to run it left and opened a whorehouse, from what the new owner inferred.   I don’t care what he’s doing, he’s my friend.  I once left a roll of hundreds on the dresser in my room and he gave it back to me.  Come to think of it, that might have set him thinking about opening a whorehouse, seeing how much cash some old white men carry.

Now I’m well off enough I don’t ever have much cash in my pocket, in case you were thinking about hiding behind the fence  around which runs a path through the darkness to the liquor store next door to the motel.  I left the money in the room while I went to get some beer because I didn’t want to carry it on me.   And lest I remember it was there, I slipped it under the ice bucket.  Brilliant.

My first thought was to keep driving as it was relatively early.  But it was dark, and I wasn’t going to drive all the way to Prescott, so there wasn’t much point in going on to Barstow or Needles.  Besides, I like driving into the Mohave early in the morning with a cup of McDonald’s coffee and an aerodynamic egg on a muffin.  It’s part of the Mohave ritual.  So I decided to look around for someplace else to stay.  My only requirement was that it be no more than forty bucks.

I picked out the one that seemed to have a few extras, like HBO, and didn’t look like a set for a B horror flick.  The Indian man at the desk was pleasant enough, and the room itself was fine.  I was especially pleased with the tasteless decor, with clashing forms and colors testifying to a frugal budget.  A nice place would be suspicious for forty bucks.  The television was bigger than in the other place and the remote actually worked.  I pulled out my iPhone to get my email and was surprised to see that I had wireless internet.  It just worked, with no hassle or password.

The only problem was that it was cold in Mohave on Sunday night, and the room heater fan rumbled like a truck on jake brake.  With it on I had to jack up the volume to hear the television.  HBO had something sucky on,  so I was watching a movie on one of the testosterone channels:  Con Air, with Nickolas Cage, about some murderous convicts led by John Malkovich.  He murdered a few people before getting the bright idea of  ordering passenger Steve Buscemi, “The Marietta Mangler,” be freed from his outfit, which was the same one Hannibal the Cannibal wore when he was transported from one facility to another.  If you don’t know Buscemi, think of the skinny little  kidnapper in Fargo.  He’s a familiar face but maybe not a familiar name.

As you might imagine,  that airplane was a bad neighborhood with no exit.  Nick Cage managed to get a message to the U.S. Marshals Office by writing it on the chest of this guy whose body was stuck in the wheel well — which is why they couldn’t get the landing gear to come up all the way and were off schedule — so he he had to push him out over a city, and as a humorous aside there was this couple at a stop light complaining about a bug hitting the clean windshield … okay, you see where this is going …

I had put a half bottle of red wine, some pocket bread and pears in the back of the truck when I left San Francisco,  and I got them out and had a little repast while I watched the movie.  Another thing this other place had was a coffee maker, so yesterday morning I made a pot of coffee and watched the news before heading out into the desert, instead of going to McDonald’s.  Instead I stopped at the Starbuck’s in Barstow for an egg salad sandwich and latte as provisions for the drive to Needles.  You can drive forty or fifty  miles without seeing signs of civilization on that stretch of I-17.

There was an accident on the highway between Barstow and Needles, and the traffic on the Interstate was eerily sparse.  The electronic sign at Barstow said all eastbound lanes were blocked.   I figured by the time I got there they would have it cleared but they didn’t.   The only way around it was on side roads, including a stretch of Route 66.    I put on the genius and got a country playlist seeded off of “Close Up the Honky Tonks” by Dwight Yokum off his Dwight sings Buck album. Then I relaxed into a back road adventure.  It’s more kicks on 66.

Dan -

I was Googling statins and seizures and came across your blog.  Thank you for writing this!
I have been on and off statins for the past year.  Like you, I hate medication.  I won’t even take a tylenol (besides the fact that they make me dizzy!)
I don’t like putting anything in my body that’s not necessary.

I am a 56 year old healthy woman.  My cholesterol was 220 and my doctor gave me a statin to bring it down.  She first prescribed 40 mg a day!  Thank god I was home because after 2 days my living  room was spinning and I thought I would fall down. I had to lay down for 5 minutes.  I then cut the pills in half to 20 mg.  Still, minor headaches, muscle cramps and just an icky all over feeling that you can’t describe.   I then decided to quit all together.

After about 4 months I started up again, this time with 10mg every OTHER day.  Everything seemed to be okay with treatment.  My numbers dropped to 180.  Good !    On August 23 I had a dizzy spell.  Thank god my boyfriend was there to catch me as I fainted and blacked out for 30 seconds.   Five minutes later I had another fainting spell after feeling dizzy.  This time he wasn’t there and I hit my head on the bathroom tile floor resulting in a concussion.  The MRI  and all the tests at the ER were normal.   I am still experiencing lingering symptoms from that hard fall.

My doctor ordered an EEG.  The tests showed that a minor seizure had possibly occurred.  I have an appointment with a neurologist on Nov 3.  I know the side effects of the statins after much research and the effect they have on the brain.  I have thrown away the pills and am convinced they caused the fainting.  I am curious to see what the neurologist thinks about it.  Of course, they don’t have a lot of documented proof about things like this that patients can offer insight into, but he will get MY insight!

I have now decided to go on the Apple Cider Vinegar treatment.  It treats a multitude of ailments, including cholesterol.  At least it won’t affect my brain!

Thanks for listening and for your post!

Patty

Like Patty, I began to doubt that there was a connection between the statins and the seizure, and tried to take them again, this time choosing Lipitor.  I logged my experience so that I could try to be more specific when I talk to my doctor.  However, Patty is correct that this is very hard to put into words.  It really is a feeling of dread connected with what I can only describe as a loss of the feeling of well being connected with a hemispheric balance.  Here is what I wrote during the second try at taking statins:

reaction to Lipitor

The first time I tried a statin drug it was on the fourth day, in the evening, when I had a seizure.  This was the culmination of a progressively difficult four days, during which I had a “bad feeling.”  My doctor insisted there was no connection between the statins and the seizure.  It was following the seizure that I began to notice a difficulty in remembering facts and names which I normally would have at hand.  When I asked my doctor if she was reporting the seizure as connected to the statins she said there was no evidence of it.  I agreed to get extensive testing on my brain, which showed nothing unusual for my age.  There was still no reporting the connection between the statins and the seizure because there is no reporting of it in the literature.  And it obviously isn’t being reported because it isn’t in the literature.

Of course there is a Catch 22 there.

I tried taking statins again and this time was paying closer attention when I began having a bad reaction.  Before I was trying to recall what it felt like.  This time I tried to more specifically describe it as on the first evening I took Lipitor, there was nothing particularly bad except that I couldn’t sleep.  It seemed that my conscious mind was unable to relax sufficiently to allow sleep to come.  The second night I took another Lipitor, and it was less than half an hour later when the symptoms began, this time very strong.  I was at the dinner table and felt that I was extremely tired, and needed to lie down  I went downstairs to sit in a recliner, but the feeling of distress was so strong that I needed to go to bed, which I did, working with the symptoms by doing a progressive relaxation.  While I was able to relax somewhat, I realized I was so devoid of any physical energy I could only get out of the bed with great effort.  Again I could not sleep.  The next evening I did not take another statin, and was able to fall asleep.  I dreamed of a situation in which I was presenting an article idea to an editor and suddenly my mind was blank.  I had no ability to move information from where it was stored to conscious presentation.

But she didn’t really want to heart that. “That’s not his real name you know,” she said. Can I remember what she said is his real name? No I cannot. But I remember her referring to Obama as his stage name, as if he suddenly arrived in Chicago from St. Louis, putting on airs, when he was wanted for cheating at cards up and down the river.

And I thought, “Uh oh, there’s somebody locked in the cellar and she gets fed through a slit in the door.”

Even now when I remember it, I feel a little crazy. Funny how far an empathetic person will listen, politely, to drivel when it comes from somebody you really, really need to believe is on top of their game. You can almost watch the rats turn on each other as the cage shrinks. She dispatched Obama as a fraud and then began on the horror stories of Canadian health care. As if this wasn’t enough sideshow, she said that cholesterol doesn’t hurt anyone and no matter how high the numbers, not to worry.

I watched her without getting involved in her logic. It all grows very neatly from the source, which is generally some perceived authority figure, often as not crazy as bat shit. Some of them even have radio and television shows. Some of them are on the internet. Some of them are coming to a venue near you.

The first time I met her was at Cuppers coffee shop. I had looked on Craigslist to see if there were any groups here, so I could try to find some social connections. There was something listed having to do withWilhelm Reich. I thought that might be interesting because he was the dark child of Freud. As Jung moved to archetypes and Adler to power, Reich looked at sexual energy as a source of neurosis, or rather the blockage of it, and he located the source of the problem in the sacral muscles. It is adhesions in these muscles that creates neurosis, he believed, and full orgasm releases the sacrum and resets the system.

As it turned out the meeting was a search for investors in a rain making apparatus. When an investment opportunity requires the suspension of disbelief, I will pass.

Of course, there was a part of me that said, why not? It may be true. He’s about four, maybe five, I guess.

>I do not believe that anybody could get to be President of the United States and secretly be an illegal alien under an assumed name. I do not believe we can get more rain in town if we set up an orgone acccumulator, I don’t think cholesterol levels should be ignored, and I don’t think Dr. Deagle is good source material.

The lies and crazy talk picked up on cable television and the internet are proliferating viruses. They infect people and as a virus must they come to a stasis with the host so as to feed on it but not kill it. The ideas came out from a certainty that defines the anima possession. Jung famously described the animus possessed woman as saying, “I am, unfortunately, always right.” What appears to a woman in this state of possession as undisputed truth actually can have no foundation at all. It is just constructed in the air, of opinions mistaken for facts. (The corresponding state in a man is one in which he is defined by moods, inexplicable and often changing without any apparent outside cause. “He turned on me, just like that.” Finger snap.)

I recall reading a dream Joseph Henderson had, in Germany before the war. He was in a large hall, and there were only men. Women were not allowed in. On a stage there was a female figure who wore a triangular costume, split horizontally between red and black, as I recall. She moved in an oddly mechanical way, but the men loved it, and cheered wildly for her dance. The dream showed the collective in the possession of a pattern. They were essentially aligned to this negative anima, which would be dispelled by any actual femininity to expose the excitement it generates as based on nothing.

I recall when I was young interviewing a psychiatrist at what was then the Arizona State Hospital. My focus was on sociopathy, but we were also talking about schizophrenia, and he said one of the hardest things for people to realize is how easy it is to get caught up in a schizophrenic’s constructed reality. He said it was hard for him, and he’s trained to deal with it. The story line can pull you right in, and after awhile, you’re proof that crazy is contagious.

>My theory is that when Reagan closed all the public asylums and put the crazy people on the streets, it started an epidemic that has now reached critical mass. Soon we’ll all be rhinoceroses.

When I left the office I felt like I was in one of those movies, in which people have been taken over by some alien pods which seal off faculties, occupy nervous systems, and reprogram logical functions, until the host has been consumed and replaced by the invading virus. In the end, at least in the movies, resistance is futile.

I took Sammy the curious dog and he took me out for our morning hike over Thumb Butte. I was on a schedule because I was meeting Victoria, for whom I serve as a glass mule (I’ll explain later) to breakfast at the St. Michael Hotel at 9:30. I had an hour to get over the butte, but that’s plenty of time if I don’t let Sammy sniff the same bush for ten minutes. There was a ringing, or more specifically, a ring tone, in the bushes.