Month: April 2019

The Japanese seem to have another similarity with the Germans: they have an uncanny knack for having words for complex phenomena.  Here, it is dying alone, and being unfound and unnoticed for a decent amount of time, between days and weeks.

I know for a fact my oldest once thought I had died.  I had recently had a surgery–my only of my life, for an umbilical hernia–and did in fact mix in a mild way the painkillers with booze.  I was alive, obviously, but I will never forget her opening my door and calling my name.  She was terrified.

I remember also a story a homicide cop acquaintance of mine told me, about finding a couple, one dead of natural causes, one dead of suicide, both a month or more old.  He dealt well with his job, but he said some smells would trigger things he had a hard time dealing with.

And I, I , I, I (it’s not good to begin paragraphs with I, especially repeatedly) think of Bukowski–who for some period of time also likely worried about dying alone–and his poem “Hell is a lonely place”.

he was 65, his wife was 66, had
Alzheimer’s disease.

he had cancer of the
mouth.
there were
operations, radiation
treatments
which decayed the bones in his
jaw
which then had to be
wired.

daily he put his wife in
rubber diapers
like a
baby.

unable to drive in his
condition
he had to take a taxi to
the medical
center,
had difficulty speaking,
had to
write the directions
down.

on his last visit
they informed him
there would be another
operation: a bit more
left
cheek and a bit more
tongue.

when he returned
he changed his wife’s
diapers
put on the tv
dinners, watched the
evening news
then went to the bedroom, got the
gun, put it to her
temple, fired.

she fell to the
left, he sat upon the
couch
put the gun into his
mouth, pulled the
trigger.

the shots didn’t arouse
the neighbors.

later
the burning tv dinners
did.

somebody arrived, pushed
the door open, saw
it.

soon
the police arrived and
went through their
routine, found
some items:

a closed savings
account and
a checkbook with a
balance of
$1.14
suicide, they
deduced.

in three weeks
there were two
new tenants:
a computer engineer
named
Ross
and his wife
Anatana
who studied
ballet.

they looked like another
upwardly mobile
pair. 


So, I have no point.  I am pointing to something real.  Life is a fascinating thing, with many textures.  We live many lives within our lives.


What is the solution?  One solution is me overcoming my hatred of Established Authority.  Wish me luck.  I feel like kicking most of these people in the balls.  That is not productive, though.  

You know, as I wake up, I realize I wasn’t so much abused, as starved.  The milk of human kindness was simply missing from my home.  There was no natural warmth.

And for me food bridged that gap.  I think it did for all of us.  We ate like a pack of wolves.  My father literally almost made one of my children sick at one point, watching him eat.

I really would argue that the ability to be kind to oneself, and the ability to calm oneself endogenously, are the two factors in maintaining a healthy weight.  All of the diets that lead to reduced consumption work, at least at weight loss.  I don’t think there is any serious dispute about this.  We all know what to do.  But we continue to get a new diet or diets every couple of years.  Keto is the current thing.  I don’t know what will replace it, but something will.

In the end, no quantity of information is sufficient if you find in food a comfort you cannot easily obtain anywhere else.  The problem has never been will power.  I think the problem is very much like the rats who got addicted to cocaine when they were left alone in their cages.  Put those rats in a place where they belong, and the cocaine is of no interest to them.  Put people where they feel safe to play, and to express, and being fat–and doing all the things that make you fat–loses all attraction.

Look around you: we do not live in a warm nation.  We love to take principles and apply them to all circumstances, and this can be a good thing, but no “compassion” springing from coldness can be anything of the sort.  This is Rousseau’s compassion, that led directly to the guillotine.  There are many guillotines in the hearts of many Americans right now.

My work continues.

It’s an old saw, an old idea–one based on the experience of the Greeks particularly–that once the people realize they can vote themselves other people’s money, the democracy is over.  This is what happened in Venezuela.  This is what happened in Greece.

This is the reason our Founders only wanted people who already HAD money to be allowed to vote.  If we consider that there are always vastly more people who have less than those who have more, then in any open contest, the many will outweigh the few, and the few, rather than endure impoverishment at the point of a gun, leave, or stop producing.  What they never do is gladly hand over everything to the mob.

This is why Venezuela is failing.  The smart ones got out.  The slow ones got caught and robbed blind, and now there is no one left who knows how to produce who is WILLING to produce.  You have masses of people looking to everyone else to allow them to live well for free, and it can’t be done.

What the Democrats are doing is IMPORTING people willing to vote themselves other people’s money.  Mexicans and others cross the border and go immediately on the dole.  They just need one legal child, and the child will get benefits that the parents then get access to as well.  They can go to school that other people’s taxes pay for, even universities.  We have lunatics like the whore Kamala Harris wanting to give our Social Security money–which is already badly underfunded due to long term abuse–to people who have paid in nothing.  Why?  For votes.  For power, and what power brings in its train.  For wealth.  For status.  For, in the end, personal gain at the expense of everyone else.

These people crossing the border are not “refugees”, but the Democrats are counseling them to say that.  Apparently our laws are so fucking stupid that if you just say those words you turn from being an illegal, to a court case, one which we cannot process fast enough presently to avoid setting these people free, never to be seen again (until they are arrested for a crime, at least).

The Democrats are supporting all this actively.  They are actively counseling and encouraging a mob of people who don’t even belong here to come here, so that they get votes.  But these votes are predicated on a process which history CLEARLY shows us will destroy our nation.  This is unambiguous.  There is no other sane interpretation.

Thus, our democracy–our Constitutional Republic, which is rapidly being eroded into a democracy–is not just for sale, but business is good.

Donald Trump is the only barrier to this.  Congress is not.  And no matter who wins the Democrat primary, this will be their goal too: destroying our country.

Ramble begin/

Tonight I went out to a local event.  I finished my book on luck, and she made a good point about “increasing the surface area of your luck”, which was a phrase I liked.  For me, it means getting out more.

So, through some combination of my inattention and poor communication on the part of the event sponsors, I went the wrong place.  It was raining.  I was annoyed for a minute, then I thought to myself, look around.  I knew where the right place was, so I just redirected myself.

And I watched all the people running around in the rain, with a wide variety of umbrellas.  And I thought: the city in the rain has a texture, a feeling tone.

And it took me back to what I believe is my favorite memory of my trip to New York with my kids: getting caught in the rain in Harlem.  I was trying to get to Columbia University, but the line I picked was too far east, so we wound up in the middle of Harlem.  Now, we were pretty much the only white faces around, but I’ve been around the block a time or two, and looking around, I didn’t see anything or anyone that concerned me.  Just a bunch of ordinary folks trying to get from here to there.

So I decided to walk the ten blocks west, or whatever it is.  Two blocks in, a torrential downpour hit, and we sheltered under a big wood construction awning of some sort with maybe 20 other people.  We just leaned against the wall, waited, and people watched.  And it was a lot of fun.  Again, we were the only white faces for a long time, until eventually some more appeared, but I wasn’t anxious because, again, I know what to look for.

[Side note: growing up white, as I did, the consensus everywhere was that Harlem was where you went if you wanted to get shot.  And in the 1970’s, that wasn’t too far off the truth, I don’t think]

Some white people scare me, most don’t.  Some black people scare me, most don’t.  Etc.

Anyway, we waited a while until it let up a bit, then set off again. I bought us some cheap umbrellas.  Then it started pouring again, and I thought hell we are already soaked, let’s just keep rolling.  Eventually we got to the stairs up to Morningside Heights.  There was a river rolling down those stairs.  I said to the kids, that looks like fun, but first let me take your picture standing in it, which I did.  They thought I was crazy, but that was my screen saver on my phone for many years.  I still love that picture.  They liked it too, and admitted later they had fun.

Different is often good.  You just never know where the best moments of your life will come from.

So anyway, I got to the right place, and the ticket lady gave me a free ticket.  Then the mayor (and his presumably armed bodyguard) walked in.  I had never seen him up close.  Like most people you see on TV, he was much shorter in person.  I’ve met a number of celebrities, and that is a common theme.  If you’re not the Rock or Arnold, you are probably 5’7″ if you are a man.

And the introductions, the we would like to thank, and thank, etc. had not even finished.  It all worked out.

There are patterns in life, there are rollers like they have in airports, where you move with no effort, that only appear when you let go and allow things to flow as they were flowing anyway, but without you seeing it.   That sentence almost but does not belong somewhere in Finnegan’s Wake. (did you know quarks were named after a line in that book?).

Ramble end/

The truth is that I have never had a healthy relationship with food.  Consciously losing weight will require establishing a new relationship with it, which means evolving some fundamental and very old aspect of myself. This is why nothing has been changing.  And this is why even if I lost 15-20 pounds–I have been 265 within the past year–I would most likely gain it back

My intent at the moment is simply to establish a habit of tracking, while trying to access this old, old part of me, and build a healthy relationship with it. 

I know what to do.  Everyone who needs to lose weight knows what to do.  My intent and task is to make doing the right thing feel good.  Hunger is not very painful, and frankly sometimes I feel better when I haven’t eaten in a while.  This is not a pain which prevents anyone from losing weight.

The pain is change, and the pain is risking releasing the emotional hurt which chronic overeating has served to mask.  As I’ve said, all addicts are in a relative state of homeostasis.  What they do keeps them going, so they keep doing it.  Dropping a crutch means risking a fall.  We all feel that, somewhere.  This is why continuing the same way feels so much less dangerous than trying something new, even if the same old way has its own pain, such as poor health.

This dialogue here is me beginning to become serious. I am asking the questions, interrogating my unconscious, my protective self.

I was listening to Bruce Springsteen’s first album, “Greetings from Asbury Park, NJ” last night, and I thought: this must have been remastered.  It doesn’t sound right.  Then I realized I was just REALLY listening, and what I noticed was how young he sounds on that album.  He was just a kid. 

There is an art to finding the new in the old.  The biggest part is, as countless gurus have put it, beginner’s mind.  It begins with curiosity.

As to my weight, I was studying sea turtles in the Galapagos for a couple days, but it was 288 this morning.  I was out of town for the cup, and I drank 3-4 beers, and half a bottle of vodka last night.  I woke up in a fantastic mood.  Seriously.  I feel good, and that good things are going to start happening for me.  The need for this drinking is going to fade away and soon.

Edited: It is a commonplace to speak of “finding meaning”, but I think with deep relaxation, it finds us. It expresses itself through us, if our birthright of happiness is not murdered continually by us as it tries to be born.

Let it be, and it will be.

One thing that is not being discussed yet is that, prior to being Chester the Molester he was best known for a long series of stunningly stupid statements.  He was the Gaffe master.  He’s the guy that whispered within earshot of the mike that “this is a big fucking deal”.  He was the one who told New Yorkers the subway was unsafe.  He’s the one who outed Seal Team Six as the ones who (allegedly, Seymour Hersh and others choose to disagree) killed Bin Laden.  It’s a long list that extends back his whole, long, career.  Trump will have a field day with him.

I just can’t help feeling all these lunatics are up to something.  I just can’t see what yet.  They can’t quit, and they know the Mueller coup failed. I don’t know what the next step is.

This popped into my head in the shower, thinking about millenials.  Pretty much every kid who was not parented by me or someone like me, who was born after this date has grown up/is growing up with an electronic device of one sort or another more or less surgically grafted to their dominant hand.

This will have huge cultural consequences.  What is being seen already is a huge uptick in anxiety disorders.  I think in important respects many of these kids are not going to become actual adults.

Every year, year after year, it seems, we extend adolescence just a little farther.  Every year, it seems, we demand less and less of our kids.

This of course fits the agenda of the Party of Less Freedom quite nicely.