Month: January 2018

I read in passing about this large family that two parents kept locked away in some suburb in California.  Some were chained to their beds, and all were apparently chronically hungry.  The mother, when the deputies arrived, was unable to understand what the problem was.  The rescue was made after a 17 year old escaped and called police.

There are a number of pictures of them in public, one I believe from a trip to Disneyland.  There were, I believe, 13 of them, and not all were chained to their beds.  Most of them could have escaped at any time.  The oldest was 29.

What is interesting to me is that this was not a physical confinement, but a mental one.  This girl who escaped and alerted authorities may well have been told not to go by her siblings.  Perhaps she escaped after they were asleep.

Martin Seligman, in experiments that will never be repeated in this country, locked dogs into metal cages with electrified metal plates for the floor.  He shocked them until they gave up.  Then he put them in a cage with no door, or opened the cage door where they were.  Once they gave up, they would endure the shock indefinitely, even when freedom was five feet away.

This is of course called Learned Helplessness, and it is a very common concomitant of traumatic abuse committed by parents in the quest to make their children manageable.  What it feels like to me is that some part of me is ALWAYS working.  Most people work for a while, get tired, then rest.  A traumatized person can never rest.  Even when you are sitting in a chair, staring at the wall, you are working.  And what I think this means, to put it in dog terms, is that the very IDEA of escape becomes exhausting.  You go there, and there is a massive flash, a massive terror, and you either abandon the thought, or endure the unendurable again.

All these children were caged in their minds.  I get this.  I see this.  I feel kinship with them.  In my own family, we developed this elaborate pretending, this elaborate charade playing, so that we all seemed happy and normal.  But I was fully expected to surrender my sense of self, any personal ambition I may have had that led away from my parents, and the right to speak any unwanted truths.

I am slowly escaping my cage, but it is astonishing to contemplate how old I am, how long ago all this happened, and how it still haunts me.

And if you look at the parents, they, too, are caged.  The impulse to cage others springs from the experience of living in one yourself.  It can be rationalized in an infinite number of ways, although I think religion is likely the most common.

And this is why the word love feels so tainted to me.  It was, after a time, used at least by my mother.  But she has no idea what the outside world even feels like.  And she doesn’t know that she doesn’t know.

But I do think getting beyond the need to cage–which is to say to control–others is an important mile-marker for all people seeking emotional growth. And ponder all our politicians, our business leaders who want political control: all of them live, in some part of themselves, at the same level as these parents.  They are horrible, execrable.  But they exist on a continuum with all who seek to deny the liberty, the joy, the exultations of others. 

Whether one believes in demons or not, I think that it can be said with certainty that their principle manifestation, their principle practical effect, is fear. Even if they are artifacts of unconscious processes, unprocessed contents of our deep past and hidden wisdom, what “they” do is create fear.

And it seems to me that a great many of us deal all our lives with a sort of blackmail in the dark, in which the “agent” of some hidden suffering meets with the “agent” of our agentive consciousness in a back alley somewhere, and makes a deal where, if you–the decision making mind–engage in these self defeating behaviors, it–that part which knows what is hidden–will keep all these secrets from emerging.

And thus fear, and more importantly fear of fear, pushes us around forever.  It is only when you are willing to go deep inside and confront these things directly that you can begin to be free, which is to say, free to make decisions which are not conditioned by fear, and which are truly congruent with what is healthiest and best for you.

I visited Helen Keller’s childhood home in Tuscumbia, Alabama the week before last. I need to rewatch the Miracle Worker, but it was pretty amazing seeing the actual setting for so many famous scenes.  The Water Pump is, of course, a focal point.

The tour guide was telling us her IQ was tested at 160, and that she learned Braille in something like 4 or 5 other languages.

She was also a socialist, and here is the point I wanted to make.  Can anyone say that, as a blind and deaf person, she saw less of, or heard less from, American workers than the average socialist, than Karl Marx, than a typical academic?  As someone who was likely always willing to “listen”, she perhaps was more in touch than most of them.  In her era, socialism had still not failed decisively, so it was still possible then for intelligent, decent human beings to believe in it.  That obviously is not the case any more.

It is an astonishing fact that most of the Democrats who arrogate to themselves the right to speak for “the workers”, or for that matter “the blacks”, or “the Hispanics” or others–politicians who use identity politics in their daily schtick–don’t live in their neighborhoods.  They don’t have the rank and file over for dinner.  Their kids don’t go to their schools.  They don’t even visit, other than for occasional campaign stops, their neighborhoods.  They know virtually nothing about their lives, what they need, other than that if they say certain words, promise certain things, that they can usually get their votes.

And in power, they ignore them.  All Communist regimes have shit on the actual workers, outside of a core party cadre they needed to maintain power and discipline.  All the rhetoric–all the alleged REASON for their political activities in the first place–is not based, in nearly all cases, on actual people, but on abstractions which they use for their own benefit, and which never reference living, breathing, hurting dying working human beings.

So my last dream before I got up this morning, some Republican leader, at a bipartisan meeting of some sort, sparked up a “J”–a Mary J. Juana cigarette–and passed it to me.  Dan Quayle was sitting there, looking on in horror.  In my dream I was thinking of him as a Mormon, although on waking I don’t seem to recall he was.  I asked him if he had ever indulged, and he shook his head vigorously, and said no.  I said, “well, it’s probably better for your health, but it’s fun sometimes.”

In the dream, it was a political act, a calculated political act, and an intelligent one.  Wasn’t my idea, but I participated.

Here is the thing: I am hard pressed to say what Jeff Sessions has done right.  He refused to stop Mueller, he hasn’t fired Rod Rosenstein, he took over a year to launch an investigation into Crooked Hillary (if indeed it has been done now), he cost us a Senate seat, and now he has the colossal stupidity to launch a war not on marijuana, but on State’s Rights, which Republicans have been slowly making an issue of their own.  State’s rights is a return to honest Constitutionalism, which should be an issue that conservatives own.

I personally would like to see Mitch McConnell, on a visit to Washington or Colorado or California, spark up a big blunt.  It would get us the kind of publicity that wins elections.  Or so my unconscious seems to believe.

As far as myself, I have one bad habit already.  No need to replace it with what would likely, yes, be a slightly better one, but one that is still unhealthy.  I do think–and have said for a long time–that we should legalize EVERYTHING, allow States to determine what they are going to allow, and spend, like Portugal, all the money currently going to the DEA–which we disband–on treatment. I think neurofeedback would be great, as would job training programs, and anything that rebuilds something like a sense of belonging, of community.  Much useful research could be done, and much of it would apply to the larger “culture”–such that it is, which is our problem–as a whole.

I do, while on the topic, continue to be visited by what I will call demons. I was thinking last night that some people must have a lot of pleasant dreams, but I am not one of them.  There are variations, but usually I am sleeping in my own bed, or something like it, in a strange home, and something I can’t see which is close to the spirit of fear appears immediately above me in what feels very, very real.  It always feels like waking life, and being visited by an aggressive ghost.  Perhaps this is a distant memory of something that really happened.  I do think my mother screamed at me as a baby when I would cry in my crib.

But all of this gives me practice facing up to mainlined fear.  This is a difficult job, getting rid of the capacity for fear, from a place of having so much of it, but I am slowly doing it.  And this is a path–a long path, granted, but a path–to a much deeper peace than most people will ever have any chance of reaching.  My sleep is slowly improving.  My only sleep aids last night were Tart Cherry Juice and Black Walnuts, and overall it wasn’t bad.

Socialism is the politics of codependence.  It stems from an intrapersonally unhealthy place, fosters poor mental health generally, and being rooted in psychopathology, is unable to recognize its own economic inefficiency and abusiveness, which is to say that as a general rule, it promotes the opposite of what it claims to value.  Socialist policies promote poverty, inequality, injustice, and the absolute opposite of democracy.

I’ve said all this, of course, but perhaps not quite in this way.

I watched “Showboat” for the first time last night, and could not but but think that Ava Gardner was playing a semi-autobiographical role.  And I think I was right: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ava_Gardner

 “Nobody wanted to know Daddy when he was dying. He was so alone. He was scared. I could see the fear in his eyes when he was smiling. I went to see the preacher, the guy who’d baptized me. I begged him to come and visit Daddy, just to talk to him, you know? Give him a blessing or something. But he never did. He never came. God, I hated him. Cold-ass bastards like that ought to … I don’t know … they should be in some other racket, I know that. I had no time for religion after that. I never prayed. I never said another prayer.”

Her own death was preceded by a serious fall, after which she lay alone for some time until her housekeeper found her.  It does not say how long this was.  Her last words were: “I’m so tired.”  I can’t help but think the look in her fathers eyes haunted her all her life.  It was a vision of humanity, through the view of someone who felt abandoned by it.

I was feeling this energy already in Showboat.  Her character is a sad one, but she inhabited that role a bit too well.  If it is true that “your life is the only Bible some people will ever read”, many Christians have turned their backs on the Bible, ignored it, perverted it.  They would be more honest and more virtuous as chicken sacrificing “heathens” who never mouth the word love at all.  As I think about it, the likely reason that the preacher never came to see Gardner’s father was that he was a “nobody”, precisely the sort of person Jesus would have cared most for.

And I was watching all this, trying to decide who I am supposed to be.  I feel compassion sometimes, and certainly in the abstract.  Sometimes I am kind in person, although usually I am too afraid.  The feeling of being burned alive emotionally is something I am still trying to calm.

But I feel we are meant to feel love for one another, but in a paradoxical way not get stuck in the love. Feel love, but don’t identify with it.  Feel love, but allow its pain to dissolve in God somehow.  Most of what I feel are my most important insight come to me by the figurative corner of my eye.  I was not quite sure what I was feeling, but I have had the sense for some months that some subterranean growth is happening in me, something working which is above my ability to perceive.  Perhaps it might most usefully be called God’s Plan.

As you might expect, though, that soulful rendition of Old Man River affected me.

The Pentagon Papers only covered the period until 1968–when the fact is the war was won between 1968 and 1972, under Creighton Abrams–yet they have been used to justify for a half century, at least in part, our decision to abandon the South Vietnamese to an enemy they feared, an enemy which ripped millions of people from their homes and families, which killed outright several hundred thousand people, which physically and psychologically tortured most of the entire country in ways which no doubt continue to resonate in nearly home even today.

And the same policy which led us to abandon the South to their enemy caused us to abandon the entire region.  Not only South Vietnam suffered, but a case can readily be made that the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge would not have happened if we had remained staunch in our support of Lon Nol, rather than abandoning him, and his people, to a holocaust worse, proportionately, than that committed by the Nazis.  And not even the Nazis felt so morally superior that they felt the need to literally torture to death tens of thousands of people, electrocuting them in, oh I don’t know, the way John Kerry claimed, falsely, our own troops did.  They put electrodes on their genitals, but not to get information.  They simply shocked them over and over and over until they died.  Then they took their pictures.  If you look on the internet, and certainly relevant books, there are plenty of pictures of dead bodies.  They were proud of what they did, just as Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep, the media, and left wing lunatics everywhere are proud to justify the “heroic” decision to publish classified information in war time, in an effort to vitiate all the efforts of all our troops, and to surrender to the North.  Which is what happened.  They got what they wanted.

Fuck all these self righteous, ignorant pricks.  Fuck all these historically illiterate bastards and bitches.  Fuck all of the people who posture in front of us, but fail to read history, fail to learn from history, fail to admit their mistakes, and fail to realize the ROLE THEY HAVE PLAYED FOR HALF A CENTURY IN SUPPORTING HORRORS BEYOND IMAGINING.

I hate to do it, but I am going to throw out the 2 movies with Tom Hanks in them I own–Forrest Gump and Saving Private Ryan–and boycott him and Meryl Streep forever.  Fuck these people.  They may not realize it, certainly don’t want to realize it, but they have blood on their hands.  They are continuing the cover-up of what really happened in Vietnam, where nearly 60,000 brave Americans gave their lives, for nothing.  For absolutely nothing, and for nothing, because of the treasons of the Democrats, the Washington Post, and the anti-war Left, which is to say Communist patsies.  We KNOW from the published memoirs of the NVA Generals what happened.  The history is utterly unambiguous. 

Edit: I noticed Steven Spielberg was the Director.  I looked for movies of his too, but I don’t own any, other than Saving Private Ryan. He does pop films well enough, but has never created anything that was of more than passing interest to me.

Hollywood is really starting to disgust me at a visceral level.  Their complicity in violence, injustice, horror, and human misery is absolutely unbelievable. I like movies, but most of their output I can ignore easily enough.  They were not always completely batshit insane.  There are plenty of old movies I have yet to see, and a great many foreign movies as well.

Well, I made it through another Kieslowski film.  They are hard work for me.  I always wind up bawling my eyes out, and this one was no different.  I am going to take a long break.  They always hurt me, but I always feel like I have become more human in some way.

I’m sitting here drinking coffee, watching the rain, which it is my privilege to be able to do, while still paying my bills, and my mind wandered onto sex.  I’m far from hypersexualized, but I’m also normal. I  don’t like porn, in general, but I do own a few old Playboys.  It’s odd that we’ve reached a time where magazines full of pictures of naked women is old school, and even perhaps vaguely reactionary.

In any event, I was reading about some sex lab, I think at Indiana University, which is where I think Kinsey worked, and they have found that women can orgasm through any of five different nerve plexuses: the clitoris, the G Spot, the cervix, the nipples, and the earlobes.

As far as effective sex, the main advantage, then, of a very long penis, is the ability to stimulate the cervix.  There perhaps exists some sex toy you stuff up in there so shorter men can create that feeling.  I don’t know.  I’m no sex scholar.  But pretty much everyone can reach the G spot and clitoris.  The motion of the ocean is all about figuring out how to bring the right amount of pressure on these two spots.  This is perhaps obvious to everyone, but I don’t think so.  I think most–or in any event many–men, just do whatever worked for them the first time they gave a woman an orgasm.

Nipple stimulation, of course, I think everyone has figured out, but what I wanted to comment was that when you are copulating, there are logistical constraints.  What I was wondering, though, is if some sort of device could be created to stimulate the earlobes during sex.  Something like vibrating earrings.

To my mind, given women’s sexual capacity, the average man should aim not for one, but 2-3 orgasms in an average session, and this might help.  If you do that, she is not going to cheat on you–not most women, in any event.  And it is very likely she will be much warmer and kind, and more understanding when you fuck up, as all men do regularly.  And I don’t mean philandering, but forgetting her birthday, your anniversary, to bring home milk, to clean up, and all the other things couples fight about.

Edit: women could also use this for masturbation.  There’s nothing wrong with a happy smile on your face, and some stress relief.  We need to welcome and accept all the gifts God gave us.

I was watching cars racing by yesterday, thinking I’m in a modern, strange age, and it hit me that this is a very interesting time to exist.  I don’t have a fucking clue what will happen, but things like this have already happened.  There is a Buddhadharma which we know has been preached, and which we can study.

I am told continually in my Kum Nye teaching that even bad things can come to seem interesting, can come to seem enjoyable even, and I am slowly, slowly, slowly starting to feel it.

You can feel continual anxiety in the age of nukes (and biologicals, and AI, and some fucking powerful chemicals, and plenty of powerful psychopaths), but for moments–and moments can add to years, and even lifetimes–it is all very interesting.

Where is it all going?  If you can separate a need to know, and a need to be sure you will be OK (you won’t: you die.  Sorry), then it is fascinating.

I got stuck in a traffic jam tonight and found it interesting.  Surely this is good.

I will admit to having had 5-6 beers, but for me, this is good.  I have cut my drinking by at least 90%.  That is a good thing.  I won’t drink tomorrow.