I was naive enough to think that the country’s voters, when push actually came to shove-it, wouldn’t be over 50% stupid. I was wrong. I’ve never been patriotic as such, so I’m not going to worry about America’s descent into hell. If the country votes for this sacrificial idiocy, it gets what it deserves.

Also, since most everything in life and society is cyclical, if we can make it through the next 4 years without total disintegration, there will likely be some kind of rebound – possibly even a good one.

If I weren’t such a selfish person, I might try to use what talents I have to help fight back, to shine a light on reality, but I refuse to go on social media, which has proved to be the instigator of most of the shit of the last decade. Broadcasting invective while trying to help, I’d certainly make matters worse.

And I have to admit, this shitshow may prove a personal blessing. I’ve been having a hell of a time lately trying to focus on my writing, but now, with everything in the wider world lost to chaos, maybe I’ll be forced to spend these sad years catching up. Especially on finishing my Jenny novel.

I’ve never promoted my writing, so it has no following beyond a few friends. I want my work to read, of course, but it’s the work itself, not its reception, that matters most to me. The past week or two I’ve been sifting through the surprising heap of projects I’ve started over the years – novels, stories, even screenplays – but never pushed ahead with. There’s much there that I’m proud of… maybe as proud as I am of what I’ve already self-published, which I honestly believe is as good as any current fiction I’s aware of. And I don’t think that’s just hubris.

Yes, I worry about what my kids’ and grandkids’ lives will be like if the last traces of rationality dissolve, but they’re no longer “kids”; basically, I trust their personal and collective intelligence and survivability. They are far stronger than I ever was growing up.

As for all of you out there, thanks for putting up with me, and if, at any point, you find you can no longer do so, just ask me to drop you from my mailing list. No hard feelings whatsoever. 

On the other hand, if you’d be interested in reading any of my”finished” work (three novels and a short-story collection) but don’t want to shell out cash through Amazon on a maybe, I’d be delighted to to send you a free copy in the form of your choice: .doc, pdf, epub, or mobi (for Kindle). I don’t need or care about the money, just getting it read by a few adventurous souls.

OK, you can wake up! I plan to sound off on something more interesting, next go-round.

Do you find yourself lost in the hectic pace of modern life? Do you find yourself wondering – “Who am I, why am I here, what is the meaning of the way I live, why can I find no happiness in these surroundings, so rich with opportunities?”

Do you have the feeling that there is something much more important waiting for you, if you only knew how to reach for it?

If so, you are by no means alone. Every day, increasing numbers of people are finding that they are out place with their time, their age, the society they inhabit. Nothing they do, no act they take can alleviate the ever-mounting feeling of frustration and impotence in the face of the hectic world.

They have lost a sense of connection with the basic energy of life.

Other ages have also been destabilizing, and in even the most peaceful times there have been those who believed that the universe held the key to a far greater fulfillment than they found in their work-a-day lives. Yet of these few, only the most dedicated found the key to unlock the vast hidden energies, through the age-old principles of concentration and physical exercise.

The greatest of these masters established a system which, until the recent decades, was known only to the adepts practicing in India and the bordering countries of the East. Now, however, the leading spiritual master of the present day, the Maharechie Hashish Yogi, has brought these mysteries to the Western world, where you may (for a very reasonable introductory fee) learn to employ them on your own, through courses taught by the Maharechie and his devoted disciples.

The basis of this course of study is the doctrine and practice of Ompa Yoga, a specialized branch of the ancient health sciences which requires the student to learn the extended use of his muscles to direct himself toward a new goal of physical well-being.

Through intense yet careful stages, the budding yogi comes to master the highest degree of Ompa Yoga, which advances from initial increases in suppleness and dexterity, through to the ultimate level of bodily grace and agility. At last, the adept reaches the ultimate realm of fulfillment – he learns to suck his own cock!

This revelation reaches to the edge of understanding! Even as the dizzying pace of twenty-first-century life threatens to overwhelm, the yogi need only assume the Wilted Lotus Posture, enter the Kuntalingum Realm of Mind and Body Fusion. Within moments, you can achieve total peace and release.

Does this appear to be the answer for you? Then enroll now in the Maharechie Hashish Yogi’s introduction to

TRANSCENDENTAL MASTURBATION

and become one with your orgasm.

To learn more, visit the next Introductory Course and Free Eye-Opening Demonstration to be held in your area.

You limited life will never be the same.

About 15 years back, we visited an abandoned veal barn down the road. The tiny stalls where the calves had been kept still held the decaying restraints that had immobilized the young future dinners.

Why had the barn been abandoned? Because some time in the ’50s the owner had fallen into the feeding machine. Who became whose meal?

What are we willing to do to some other living thing to make a living? 

*    *    *    *

Change of pace: From a failed attempt to provide food carved from a living creature to a restaurant serving far smaller previously living creatures in a most unlikely setting.

I can’t recall the name of the couple who ran the Covered Bridge Restaurant, and it wasn’t on a covered bridge, just near the one that crossed the Loyalsock Creek at Sonestown.

After you parked in the lot out back, you entered a three-story cinderblock addition to what I guess was their house. Inside this tower, you walked up about a story and a half of steps,  past failed equipment of various types, sizes and shapes, and piles of unidentifiable material.

How did we come to be there the first time?  I don’t recall, but we immediately liked the “ambience” because we knew there couldn’t be another place quite like it. And we returned because it served the best seafood, especially scallops, that I ever expect to eat.

The room you entered was larger than you’d expect, with 4 or 5 longish tables and the open kitchen directly behind a counter. It also had several fine waitresses at different times, including perhaps the sexiest woman ever to serve a gin and tonic.

(I’ve mentioned her before, because she’s the one who always knew when you needed a refill; once I emptied my glass and made a personal bet that she would notice before I counted to 15. At my internal “13” her finger shot out, pointing at my glass.)

God, where those scallops magnificent. But the owner who made them was, well… beside the off-putting – to most folk – entrance setup, he wanted to turn the place into a ski lift. Besides his apparently never having raised the money, there was the problem of lack of elevation to ski from, just a half-hearted rise rather than a hunk of mountain.

The restaurant is no more, no idea what, if anything, followed it. It’s funny how you can find something unlikely, even borderline absurd, and wish it would last forever. But Sunday always turns into Monday.

*    *    *    *

What’s with the recent celebration of everything from the ‘80s – music, movies, books, even (god help us) Reagan?

You won’t get that kind of reverence from me, because I’ve never understood popular culture or dominant outlooks of any period, except perhaps the folk-music revival of the ‘60s.

And I don’t listen on Spotify because I don’t want to hear another song exactly like what I just listened to. I want  the next to be something as different as possible.

That was the way WXPN, the UPenn FM station, worked in the ‘80s, close to anarchic radio, where you might hear Beethoven followed by The Residents. In our car, we have about 3,000 “songs” from 2,000 years of music on shuffle on our iPod Mini – which I hope doesn’t break, because Apple no longer makes it.

*   *   *   *

Sometimes I wish I had the sustained push and energy to put together a serious, researched non-fiction volume. Like… a definitive profile of Genghis Khan, the most influential single human being of the last 2,000 (at least) years.

Alexander the Great? Hell, everybody in the Western world admires him (me included). Battled like a motherfucker, overran everything from Macedonia to the borders of India – all before dying at age 33. (Let’s see… at age 33 I was doing really crappy freelance carpentry.)

But Genghis Khan – He drew uncoordinated herdsmen across 3,000 miles into the most terrifying, effective force ever unleashed. He captured, controlled and organized the largest empire in the history of the world, from Mongolia to to Bagdad.

He was not a nice guy, he did not institute wonderful liberties, and he has the most horrific quotes attributed to him that I’ve ever read (though maybe they reflect the press of his day). On the other hand, he instituted perhaps the most efficient long-distant  communication system previous to the 20^th century.

*    *    *    *

To the tune of “I Wish I Was Single Again” (oh, c’mon, somebody out there has to know that song), inspired by a reminder from the lovely lady at the pharmacy that I still need to get a shingles shot (I told her I was also due for an aluminum-siding booster).

I think I have shingles, again, again

I think I have shingles again.

For when I have shingles,

My tummy it tingles,

So I think I have shingles again

*    *    *    *

Two Russians were walking down the road. One was an endangered species, the other was not. The one who was not an endangered species asked the one who was: “How is is that you are an endangered species?”

The other replied: “It is a harrowing tale. For five generations, we have been hunted throughout the countryside. My brother Boris was stuffed and placed on exhibit in the Moscow Museum of Natural History. My mother’s hide was made into a coat for a commissar, two mufflers, and a handbag. As the last of my line, I plan to travel to a distant cave and live the life of a hermit until my days are complete.” 

The first Russian hurled down his cap in rage: “The abominable behavior of man! I am ashamed for all humanity. Come join me at the tavern before you go, that you may not leave in total despair.” 

At the tavern they drank many liters of fine red wine and brooded on the depredations of mankind. As they prepared to leave, the two shook hands like old friends. The first Russian kissed the endangered species on both cheeks and said:

“You may be the last of your line, but also you are the best. It has been my privilege to know you for even this fleeting moment. Now go your way, but before you leave, I have one request. Once you have expired, may I cut off your ears to hang above my mantelpiece?”

[You should be happy to hear that this is the last of my “two-Russians” jokes created many decades ago. Unless I’m overtaken by a sudden Cossack Revival, the two Russians will not be accompanying you on your travels again.]

I fear an insidious transformation may be creeping up on me. I find myself spouting – shudder – philosophy. Such an abomination would lacerate a major tenet of my belief system.

Should you spot this happening, please find a way to stop me. Yes – it’s your responsibility.

*   *   *   *

Up here, in the pleasant PA boonies, Guthrie Healthcare serves almost all our medical needs, and they do it quite well, all things considered, with top-notch docs, nurses and receptionists. I don’t think Linda and I have ever had a negative in person experience with anyone at any office.

But there is one aspect of Guthrie that’s just plain dreadful: a system-wide failure of communication. I don’t mean direct interactions so much as seeming not to know what communication means or how it works. This can range from not placing signs at eye-level in waiting rooms to Linda returning home from hip-replacement surgery and not receiving a “how are you doing?” call or email.

Some examples:

• Linda had an appointment in orthopedics in Sayre, 40 miles up the pike, in the Guthrie main clinic. Once we tracked down the proper waiting room (many have no external signs indicating which specialty they cover), we went to the registration desk to find no one on duty. Turns out, registration that day was being taken in the office corridor 8 feet to the right. There was no sign on the registration desk to alert us; the only visible one was inside the doorway of the office corridor. So every time a new patient entered the waiting room, one of the seated waitees had to point them in the right direction.
• Phone calls reminding us of upcoming appointments arrive at 8:15 in the morning, when us retirees are barely astir, and those with a job are trying to bolt a quick breakfast. The robocall asks you to press 1 to accept the appointment. There is no other way to immediately acknowledge acceptance. And if the call goes to your answering machine or voicemail, it ends with a rapid-fire blast of phone numbers and extensions that you can’t possibly write down at that speed. And with no repetition to help you catch up.
• Through an email reminder, you can access a website to pre-register for your appointment. The purpose of this eludes me, since when you arrive at your appointment you still need to go to the registration desk to show you are actually there.
• Following Linda’s wrist fracture, she arranged for physical therapy near Guthrie’s satellite hospital in Towanda – woohoo! a mere 20-mile drive. We were told to take the first left past the hospital driveway, and given the numbered address of the building. Piece of cake. Alas, the cake was baked by Snow White’s evil stepma. We drove up the short residential street to a large parking lot on the left serving two… oh three… um four? buildings facing in different directions. None of these sported a sign giving building name or address. We recognized one structure where we’d both had physical therapy, so that must be it. No, inside we learned that this particular kind of therapy was held in the long 3-story building on the far side of the parking lot. We trotted over and found, Lord be praised!, a sign for all sorts of specialties housed within – but not the one we were there for. Next, we began our search for an entrance. Once we managed to find a door, we had the choice of stairs or a dwarf elevator off to the left. We chose the elevator, whose internal sign admonished that all medical facilities and practices were on the third floor. (For convenience, I’m sure.) Linda’s appointment went fine, as usual. On the way down in the grindingly slow elevator, which announced each floor with a sound somewhere between a “ding” and a mechanical slap, I thought, “I never want to know what’s on those first two floors.” That may be where Dr Frankenstein stores spare parts.
• Linda had another appointment in Sayre, that 40-mile drive, this time in one of Guthrie’s many outlying buildings. Once we tracked down the correct outlying building and she presented herself, she was told that her appointment had been cancelled two months ago and rescheduled for next year. Linda had received no notice of such rescheduling – and this appointment was itself a rescheduled one. The receptionist was cordial and helpful, setting up a new appointment for a couple weeks later, though she couldn’t fit Linda in before we drove our 40 miles back home. I definitely didn’t want to seem unappreciative, but I said, “Guthrie seems to have a difficulty with communication.” The receptionist’s response: “I agree with you, 100%.” So… it’s not just our imagination.

*   *   *   *

I wonder if the following has been considered legally, and if so with what response:

The note on almost any product this side of toilet paper warns you to “Read all instructions before using this product.”

As we all know by now, this is written not to protect the user, but to protect the manufacturer from being sued. Their lawyers can argue: “He cut off both arms because he did not read the instructions.”

But… If someone does not read the instructions because they did not read the instruction to read the instructions, what kind of legal tangle does this create – a verbal möbius strip?

*   *   *   *

I’m patiently waiting for someone to create a deepfake of Trump speaking logically. Or maybe quoting Aquinas.

*   *   *   *

“Meaning” is a term that has come to piss me off. I don’t want even its shadow over my life.

As I see it, there is no such thing as meaning, on any scale, absolute or personal. The search for meaning is a continually failing attempt to coordinate our assumptions of what should be – an amorphous glue that changes viscosity throughout life, without our registering the change. 

*   *   *   *

As a kid, I didn’t like condiments. Mayonnaise gave me the squirms, and I flat-out hated ketchup. The only item I’d slather ketchup on was scrapple, because scrapple was the worst supposedly edible substance on earth; anything, including demonic intervention, would improve it.

*   *   *   *

When and how did Keanu Reeves become thought of as an actual actor? Didn’t he started out as a joke?

A few of you might remember a question I posed sometime back: “Who is Joe Betz?”

My answer was, a high school classmate about whom I remembered absolutely nothing — not name, face or the fact that such a person existed in my Catholic high school class… but who insisted that we had been together on the school’s toothless and useless student council.

I can’t remember now how he tracked me down [or why], but Linda and I ended up having lunch with Joe and his wife at a restaurant in Media, PA, where he showed me pictures of us together in our high school yearbook that, I fear, he always carried with him. I didn’t recognize myself or him in the pix.

We had a nice time, good people, but it was all very puzzling. Since then we traded a few emails, in which I learned about his position as professor of philosophy at Haverford College, and his devoted work with education of prisoners. He seems, all in all, to have had a far more exemplary life than I can credit to myself.

Despite a couple tries to stop it, I’m still sent the glossy alumni letter from St. Thomas More 2 or 3 times a year. I ignore almost all of it but the necrology, just wondering how many of those from my class that I do remember might have blundered off this mortal coil. 

A few weeks back I idly wondered, “What if Joe Betz’s name shows up there?” Within about a week, I go the latest issue with its “departed list”: Joseph Betz, class of 1957. 

I’m sorry, Joe. I wish I’d had a more decent response to your selfless kindness.

*   *   *   *

All this reminds me, again, how unlike my childhood and teen years were to the norm you read about.

Will Eisner’s Sunday comic, “The Spirit,” Carl Barks’ uncredited work for Disney on Scrooge McDuck, and the radio all day: These, not people or “experience,” formed the basis of my childhood. 

Later, I had no typical teen years. 1953-1957 covered my sludge of high school. Weekdays, I came home from school, started the voluminous homework imposed by my Catholic education, and kept at it through to bedtime.

In those years, I never had a girlfriend or even a date. In fact, I’ve never had a dating period. My first real time with girls began after College. I had to be deeply attracted to a particular person before making any attempt at getting together, and the process of asking was agony.

Altogether, high school was a fairly hideous time, broken only by walking around parts of West Philly and Fairmount Park with two other class losers. I saw few movies, didn’t know of any theater that actually played Roger Corman movies, never saw any of them, never knew his name.

The few I did see were mostly at the wonderful downtown first-run theaters of the day, at $1.80 a pop. (Dover Books has put out an oversize photo paperback of them – those in Philly only). My greater good luck was that the other movies I saw were the leading European and Japanese masterpieces (Kurosawa, deSica, Rosallini, etc.), through my mother’s membership in a film club – a whole different worldview, not shared with anyone else I knew.

As a remarkably cringy example of my ignorance of the world and the effects of Catholic education, I never saw my SAT scores or even realized that I was supposed to. If they were sent home, I was never told. If sent to the school, given the usual mindset there, they were probably deliberately withheld, since they were royally pissed that I didn’t apply to any Catholic college.

I had never been told my scores on the annual diocesan test or on the IQ test we were given in senior year, so I simply assumed we were not supposed to know our standing anywhere outside our own classroom. 

*   *   *   *

Linda and I have a PO box in town, rather than a mailbox at the end of the drive, mostly to force us to exit our isolated home and visit the outer world.

Of late, roughly 80% of the mail addressed to us descends immediately into the recycle box under the sorting desk. Why? Because we donate annually [in two cases, monthly] to a variety of environmental and social causes.

The monthlies are syphoned from our bank account, the others are paid through websites, according to a schedule I’ve set up to spread the load throughout the year. 

Yet week after week, day after day, these outfits send me newsletters and pleas for more donations, each citing a “vital and immediate” need – something I resent to an admittedly rabid degree. And, as a registered Democrat, I’m also asked to finance politicians in states 1,000 miles from my home. 

The most obnoxious, to me, are the environmental groups who, in their efforts to save the planet and reduce pollution, each send me a couple pounds of crap mail a year. They also alert their “Save the Specked Wombat” buddies that I’m a mark, so they too should pile on the begging. In other words, half my donations are being used to print waste paper and pay postage! 

My temptation is to just stop supporting anybody, because it all seems largely pointless. But that would be childish, because at least some of my carefully calculated lucre gets used as intended.

At least I think so.

*   *   *   *

The argument flies back and forth about whether electric vehicles will save the environment or be just another high-cost outlay of hope. 

Well. If solar power can be used to charge these honking huge batteries, that’s a big gain [since solar power, ultimately, is the only “inexhaustible’ and non-polluting energy source]. But you still have the costs of production and getting whatever energy source to the cars.

But none of this is the core problem. The core problem is that lithium-ion batteries are not a solution, they’re a clunky stepping stone toward a solution. Lithium is a middle-stage, not an end-stage material. 

Mining lithium is environmentally ruinous, as is the mining of the rare-earth metals needed to make the batteries work. EVs won’t be practical or realistic until we develop a whole new type and structure of battery, probably based on principles we haven’t stumbled across yet. I don’t think I’ve heard a single commentator talk about this.

*   *   *   *

I’ve uncovered how JD Vance came up with his cat-devouring idiocy. He signed in to Pornhub and found out that some guys really like to eat pussy.

*   *   *   *

Last and definitely least:

Shouldn’t “blank” by the past tense, and “blunk” be the past participle of “blink”?

Listen: blink, blank, blunk. Doesn’t that excite your grammatical lobe?

The use of “they” as a single pronoun for trans kids, victims and crooks who are difficult to identify, or those who’d rather you didn’t know who they are, is something I find damned annoying, because it makes it difficult to read an article or story if I don’t know whether “they” refers to a single person or a group. 

[I tend to get on my grammatical high horse about such things, which is peculiar, because at the same time I love the idea of grammar being flexible enough to morph with time and need; after all, the nitpicky grammatical rules I grew up with sprang from snotty academic types in the 17th and 18th centuries.]

In fact, this particular dilution of the plural is a modern culmination of a long linguistic tradition.

“You” was originally plural, but became singular as well to help chase “thou” into oblivion – because “thou” became too tightly tied to romance and religion. [Much the same happened in French, where the informal singular “tu” was kept for friends, family or lovers, while “vous” became the “formal,” unweighted second-person singular.]

Yet, “you” in English remained plural as well as singular, and also has the possibly unique position of a third, indefinite function. Think of a sentence like, “This is what happens when you mix chlorine and ammonia… [Hey, don’t even think about it, it dissolves your lungs!]” “You,” in such cases, addresses the indefinite listener – “anyone” – so is neither singular or plural.

Who’d think that a puny three-letter pronoun from near the end of the alphabet would have such oomph?

But de-pluralization is happening with nouns as well, in part because almost nobody studies classical languages.

“Media,” a Latin plural, now almost universally takes a singular verb in English reporting, even when referring to a diverse group [“social media is responsible for the decline of civilization”]. And just about nobody uses “criterion” today, using the plural, “criteria,” as singular.

While it’s not surprising that “data” has become singular in conversation and reporting, it’s also begun to sneak into science. Similarly, “bacteria” has become so fuzzy that it’s now, in much research, become an indefinite noun, which is shameful.

Ah hell, it don’t mean shit. But I enjoy being bugged by it.

*   *   *   *

Interesting article about a major fossil collection discovered under a schoolyard in Los Angeles. It includes rare complete fossils of wee trilobites from 8.7 million years ago, when LA was at the bottom of the sea.

But then, the sea will soon make its return to LA, given current climate conditions.

*   *   *   *

I’ve been reading the daily comic strips since I was about 5. It’s one of my few positive connectors across the years. Way back then, they ran in the big, burly print newspapers – the Philadelphia Inquirer and Evening Bulletin [now defunct]. Today, I have to harvest them online.

As anyone with this odd avocation knows, there’s a wide set of themes that pop up regularly in the strips: Humpty-Dumpty on his wall, clowns, mimes, Eskimos and their igloos, Bigfoot, a fly in the soup, etc.

Over the last year, I’ve noticed that the Grim Reaper with his scythe has been very popular, pacing through various strips week after week.

These cartoonists may be telling us something.

*   *   *   *

I’m going to go off-course here to point to a recent success in which I take special pride – not for the success itself really, but for how I arrived at it.

Over the past two decades we’ve had a small propane heater on the wall just inside the back door, to help offset the cold breezes of winter as we zipped in and out our main entry. It was a non-vented heater, which meant it spewed its fried gases into the room

The pollutants didn’t amount to much; nonetheless, it was a bad heater for doing this, and we were bad heater parents for allowing it to.

We’d recently had a heat pump installed, which keeps the whole house properly toasty, so last week, when the propane service duo came to do annual maintenance on the larger, properly vented heaters in Linda’s potshop and my workshop, I asked them to remove our naughty little kid.

The friendly duo leader wasn’t sure his truck held the equipment to do this particular job, and when he inspected our model, he admitted he wasn’t quite sure how it was attached to the wall. But he noted 3 or 4 hefty screws coming through the back plate, so he said the unit had been attached from outside.

Well, I knew that the wall had 2×6 studs, because I’d built it, adding half-inch ply on the outside and hemlock siding on top of that. How could anyone have gotten at the hind-end of the heater without performing absurd convolutions of thought and material?

The service boss decided that the only way to detach the heater would be to slide the blade of a reciprocating saw behind the back panel to cut those screws – but I’d built a bookshelf next to the heater, so… shrug. He packed up and left me me to find my own complicated way to wangle it loose.

I do my best thinking when half asleep. Or if not the best, sometimes the most useful. So I laid back and pictured the whole set-up… the screws sticking through looked to me like sheet-metal screws. What if, rather than holding the heater against the wall, they attached the rear steel plate to the heater? If so, I should check for the heads of screws pointed in the other direction.

Next day, I found all sorts of sheet-metal screw heads. I loosened them all. Most cinched internal parts of the heater together, but eventually, yes, the heater sagged and I could pull it from the wall. It had been attached through the interior wallboard with a few plastic anchors.

There was nothing earth-shattering in my use of a screwdriver, so what am I proud of? That I’d figured the thing out, while lying on my back, using straight-forward logic. I mean, damn, my brain really is good for something, even without knowing how a propane heater is put together.

*   *   *   *

Now for the opposite: an evening of shame.

Last Friday, outside the town bar we love, after a fine meal, with no more alcohol in me than my usual two shots of Yukon Jack, I fell stumbled and collapsed on the sidewalk while trying to get into the car – Linda was driving back, as usual. There must have been something plus the drink involved, but nothing this vile had happened to me in over 60 years.

The people outside the bar, a wonderful bunch, helped prop me on my feet, and somehow, on my own, I got into the passenger seat.

At home, I fell asleep, then woke up to find a strange, wandering thing moving across my face. Five or ten seconds passed before I mushily realized that it was my left hand… but foreign and inexplicably alien; even once I knew what it had to be, I could not recognize it.

Maybe 20 minutes later, I started to write this bit, while weeping apologies and horror to Linda. By then, my left hand had become a friend again – or at least an acquaintance – though the fingers hitting the keys were typing gibberish.

Why am I including this note here, though I feel it disgraces me? Because sending it out solidifies my need to know what happened.

And knowledge is far more important than disgrace.

Linda and I were jawing along during and after dinner when I veered off, as I too often and annoyingly do, into my “unique” childhood… not so much that no one of earth has  ever had another like it, but that of anyone I’ve read, no one has recapitulated what I recall of being a child – of hating being a child, of feeling that I had no relation to a world – the world – that I could understand.

Somewhere into talking with Linda – always a revelation  – I started to realize that, through all these too many years, I’ve consistently viewed my childhood as having held no definable self; that this internal whatever had no reality that I could pin down to anything, to measure any thing or anyone else against. That I was a cypher, an absence.

But a bit later – lights out, on the edge of sleep over which I would not plunge – I suddenly decided that actually as a kid I had a huge sense of self – an almost monstrous one that obliterated or devoured the rest of the inscrutable world. No, I hadn’t just alienate the outer world to the side, as I’ve seen it for so long: I had actively negated it.

I had feared all external life, yes, but it was less a failure to accept the outer than a failure to believe in anything outside myself.

After this revelation [or whatever the hell it was], I realized how this fits with one of the main strains – what I think is the underlying yet overwhelming strain – of my current novel: that memory makes the self, that memory is the self, that anything I didn’t personally experience as a kid was non-self, because I was no one before my memory solidified, and that may be why I am still fettered by an obsession with memory.

It goes well beyond nostalgia or what someone else [not me, ever] might consider the trauma of my youth, but the understanding that without the constant play of memory, I would not exist as self.

[I’ve written previously about the most wonderful teacher I ever had, Robert Cantor, a grad student in math who taught a summer course in calculus, totally focused on every student learning every bit of what he had to teach.

[He later shot and killed one of his math profs and himself. One press report – only one that I recall – stated he was found with a handwritten note in his shirt pocket. It had to have been taken from the 3×5 spiral notebook he always held in his hand throughout the class. The note read, “I am not who I am.” The report may have been fancy, not truth, but I believe it without reservation. Robert Cantor is one of the great sorrows and losses of my life.]

If, in my own mind, I was not real, as I looked at the situation for so long, then there was nothing I could do to change or move forward, or become – no way to interact, since there was nothing to react with. Yet, had I alternately accepted that only I exist, that would have been far more malign, a massive negation of reality.

So how do I look at it today, when the terrors of childhood have returned, in lesser form, but as a possible second childhood of terror? Is there a way out of this self/non-self confusion? More important, should there by a way out?

If only I exist, then reality doesn’t matter, because reality is a glam within my mind; but if, as rationally tells me must be the case, that outlook is haywire, what’s left? Is anything left, should anything be left?

This confusion works so well with my novel that it’s mightily invigorating, though it may seem brutal and negative. For writing – and for living whatever years remain to me – it’s a relief. I doesn’t matter which side of the trail is true, or if neither is.

I’ve never wanted to die, even when things were at their most precipitous. It’s not so much a fear of death as a fear of the world continuing without me, a world I’ll never be able to know. But should there be no reality beyond myself, I have no reason to care. Alternately, if reality is real, it will chug along without me and without my need to monitor it.

Whoops! Tigger, my all-time wonderful, wise, and superlative cat, just sauntered in to devour his evening snack: a freshly snapped-up mouse. Now, I know Tigger is real – it’s simply impossible for Tigger to be other than real – so everything I’ve written above is beside the point, whatever I might have thought the point to be..

Good night. 

My favorite Guardian columnist, Arwa Mahdawi, went on a wonderfully controlled, funny rant about Elon Musk’s latest absurdity – riding the testosterone train, a favorite obsession of the social right. Apparently, loads to testosterone are supposed to make men better than women, and musclebound men brighter than wimpy intellectuals. 

Oh, who is Arwa Mahdawi? She’s a British Palestinian lesbian journalist living with her wife and baby in Philadelphia, which should be enough for anybody, even if she wasn’t also one hell of a writer. Wish I knew where in Philly she lived, because I’d love to meet her when I get down there to buy Indian snacks and Lebanese olive oil at the International Store on Walnut St.

But that’s just one of my side obsessions. What got me to writing this piece is that I think she, as well as Musk, have the wrong take on our animalistic nature. 

The basic assumption of most social commentary these days is that warfare, misogyny, tribal and racial animosity, and internecine conflict – all the woes of  the world – arise from social imbalance.

Unh uh. That’s secondary, at best. They arise from evolution.

We’re mammals, and as such we’re going to behave like mammals, to the good and the bad. As a species, we’re part of a genus (homo) that’s part of a larger family… that’s part of the animal kingdom, that’s part of, so far as it can be defined, “life.” We’re all and each creatures of evolution, trying to establish a concept of  morality that will support our particular warped assumptions.

We behave as we do because that’s what the world’s evolutionary program demands. We protect our young, our possessions, and our territory; we allow no one else to intrude without introduction and acceptance. Today, with the world on the edge of oblivion, we behave exactly as should be expected through evolution – we deny, we fight, we wield our weapons, and we cry “foul.” But it doesn’t arise from socially imposed foulness or antagonism. It’s simply who and what we are.

[My standard mea culpa here: I’ve said or suggested much of this section some time back.] Morality is a concept which differs for each individual human being. There’s no way you can define, codify or justify “morality” on a cosmic scale, yet on a lesser scale it becomes just mind games. It’s easy enough to say “the psychopath (or the ex-president) has no morality,” but likely the unhinged obsessions of the psychopath and the ex-president occupy pretty much the same realm of certainty for them as “morality” does for the religious or the secular righteous.

Humans invented the idea of morality and raised it to a higher plane than mere rutting mammalian behavior. It then appears obvious (to humans) that having a higher ideal makes us a higher order of being. But should someone – like me – not accept religious precepts as foreordained, the “moral” outlook can have no solid basis beyond mere acceptance. [In my case, that acceptance is pretty damned high: Wielding “authority” over others to their damage is to me as unforgivable as behavior gets. But how could I prove that my response is the better one or that it is “true”?]

It can’t be determined by any scientific measure, which I think is one reason many people these days don’t trust science – it can’t provide them with “truth” the way they want it delivered. They want “truth” to be beyond human definition, imposed by a higher source on a higher level of reality.

So, to take an honest stance, you have to dispose of “truth” altogether. If you, again like me, see science as providing the proper way of determining “what is,” then the hell with “truth.” Accept “what is,” and do your best to organize it for the greatest benefit of all – as if we’d all agree on what that benefit might be. 

But what would it look like if we could change the world through social exhortation and policy, could form ourselves into an anti-belligerent species? The world would not just be a different place, we would be a different “us.” We would no longer be human beings (animal – vertebrate – mammal – descendant of hunter gatherers); we would be a signally different form of life from anything that has ever been known on earth.

Now to take this discussion in a slightly different but dependent direction:

Humanity as it exists will not ultimately survive. Nor should it. We are not worthy, and there’s no way, again, to say what will make us worthy.

What makes “worth”? Whatever we, as humans, collectively define as being “worthy.” But why should we even yearn to take such a wacky tack? Because somewhere in a tumbledown part of our brains, a slithery side-effect of evolution has implanted something to which we’ve given the name “worth.” [Circular logic? You bet! That’s something we’re damned good at as a species.]

It isn’t that I don’t think the world (planet Earth) should survive, but that I see no way to expect it to continue as a place that can support life within the range of what’s possible today. Humanity will destroy the place for every lifeform.

As a living form, we have fucked up because we were evolutionarily programmed to fuck up. 8 billion of us – ignorant, uncontrolled, uncomprehending – have chosen to live from one generation to the next without interest in consequences, because that kind of ignorance is innate to all life.

In itself, I don’t think our planetary destruction matters much. There’s a lot of universe out there that has no concern for Earth’s existence. But if someone should fine a way around what seems to me an inescapable, catastrophic end game… maybe I might be delighted.

Nah, not likely. We’ve collapsed in exactly the way our brains have been programmed throughout evolution to collapse. It isn’t that we’ve failed, but that we’ve succeeded too well in a direction that can only lead to the world’s destruction. We’ve come to the end of the line, the only possible end; it’s not just inevitable but necessary. 

*   *   *   *

Come gather round, depressives,

And a story I will tell,

Of Pretty Boy Freud the doctor,

Vienna knew him well…

*   *   *   *

Despite the many years since the name change, I wish Top Ramen was still called Oodles of Noodles

Have you or anyone you know ever been congratulated by a mobile dog groomer on your 44th wedding anniversary?

It was kind of a complicated day for a “celebration.” The day before, two of our friends, a married couple, had been sentenced to jail. A little before dinner on the day itself, daughter Cait called to tell us about the excellent memorial she’d arranged for a friend of hers who had just died; it was moving and beautiful as she told it, but, following our friends’ debacle and during a marital milestone, there it was… death.

But to get on to planning our dinner celebration.

Should we choose a high-concept, expensive whirl with glitz and champaign? Is there such up here? And is that in any way us? We’d have to drive 50 miles to Williamsport; a hundred-mile round trip wasn’t quite what we felt in the mood for. 

We have 3-4 places we go for our weekly dinner, in no particular order, for no particular reason. On this special day we both leaned toward The Barn, outside Eagles Mere: a straight-forward bar setting with attached dining room that serves about 20. It can get rackety at times because of the ancient tin ceiling that reflects gayety, but it’s low-key, friendly, with good food and excellent service. The final selling point, for me: They cram every last drop of Yukon Jack into a way-oversize shot glass.

Since this was a Thursday, we figured it wouldn’t be crowded, but we were forgetting it was the first Thursday of the Fall Fair, which is a big deal up here. The dining room was filled solid, so we had to settle for a fairly isolated 2-seater near the bar.

That was just fine, still friendly and cheery, but how to get served? Would the waitress find us in this not-so-obvious corner, or were we supposed to order from the bar? Well, I solved that problem, as I almost always do, by sitting there waiting for something to happen. Eventually the very busy waitress did find us, and we ordered our simple but substantial meal of cheese steak and Barn Burger. And drinks.

We don’t usually tend to party or make a show of ourselves, but we did dress up a bit that night, with Linda wearing an amazing, high-sparkle green jacket that she’d put together for her character in a play last year.

We were really enjoying ourselves, reading the ad placemat – we love ad placemats – while waiting for our goodies to appear, when a strange but wonderful encounter took place.

A woman of 50 or so walked over from the bar, stopped, and asked us, “Are you on your first date?”

A couple thoughts came immediately: First, that’s an odd thing for any stranger to do or say at a bar. Second, she was saying this to an obvious codger and codgerette.

“Actually,” I said, “this is our 44^th anniversary.” [I’ve always been obsessed with exactitude in numbers.]

Neither Linda or I can recall her exact reply – probably “congratulations,” plus some general reason for the “date” comment. Then she went on to tell us that, yes, she was a mobile dog groomer [that is, one who drives a panel track around to service the hair and toenails of canines; as a matter of fact, we’d noticed her truck in town]. We then had a nice chat, telling her where we lived and her telling us that she knew our road and the two ponds, etc.

She smiled heartily and walked back to the bar. About 20 minutes later, Linda went over to get refills on our drinks. Half a minute later the bar burst out in loud cheering and clapping. It was obvious: “Congratulations on your anniversary.”

Somehow that tied the whole evening together into something unique and wonderful, in a setting that could have been anywhere from fine to indifferent. It was probably the best anniversary we’ve ever had.

Maybe it’s somehow natural, during our talk at the table, that we did not ask the dog-groomer’s name, and she did not ask ours. But the encounter did leave us with a few ponderables:

What would have led her to think we were on any kind of date, much less our first?

Was it something in Linda’s shiny, exuberant jacket? [I’m pretty much Every-Geezer in settings like this.]

Had she just thought us approachable but didn’t know quite what do say, so came up with something chipper but unlikely on the spur of the moment?

Does she collect or enumerate encounters with people in bars as an avocation [she didn’t seem the type]?

Are Linda and I so closely bonded that we broadcast an ineffable giddiness when together?

Was it because it was Thursday or that she’d groomed an especially lovable dog?

Whatever: Our thanks to her for making the evening one that we can genuinely cherish. And I’m pretty damned sure no on will ever again mistake our dining table as the stage setting for a first date.

Most of existence bugs me at one time or another, but this is something that really bugs me: how the existence of  the individual is systematically ignored when discussing the group.

In nearly all our attempts to define who we are as humans, we choose to look at what’s general, not at what’s specific to the individual. That is, the assumptions we make – in research, in politics, in social action, in most fiction writing, in what we look for when we wake in the morning – are based on searching for the median or average that will help tell us what is “true.” 

This comes from a species-wide acceptance that there is always a ’normal” an “accepted,” a “widely-agreed-upon.” Most of the time, by doing this, we lose track of the fact that each of us is a unique being with a unique construction.

A few examples:

#1: Both Biden and Trump were over the last year set upon for being “too old” to be president. If you look at them as individuals, at any age, it’s perfectly reasonable to ask, “Are you fit to be president?” But to start off, before any data have been collected, with the assumption that anyone over 75 is a doddering loon is not just obnoxious but ridiculous.

[OK, the particular loon writing this is 85; I’ve mixed up people’s names all my life, as has just about anyone I know. It has to do with brain storage mechanisms more than age.]

As it turns out, there is serious doubt about either Biden or Trump’s fitness to run a country. In Biden’s case, it looks like his response to aging has left him struggling. As for Trump, at no age would I have trusted him to take random samples of possum saliva. The man’s a cretin with the cognitive acumen of a crankshaft. 

#2: At the other end of the age spectrum, the socio-political crap-collectors are now lumping all younger folks in the country into random “generations,” arbitrarily bounded by dates that make little or no sense, then assuming that these non-groups all think and behave like bonded clones. Worse, these “generations” are slapped with randomly-assigned letters like Z and X or derogatory labels like “millennial” [which can makes them seem like adherents of the 1000-Year Reich].

I have far greater trust in the country’s young [especially the women] than in my own cohort of codgers, but even in this case, for me to label them a solid forefront of hope would do them immense injustice. Every individual of every generation is a unique entity with a specific genetic heritage, personal background and conglomeration of experiences. They are not massed emblems.

#3: My own childhood. [Yeah, I know you don’t want to hear any more about that, but you’re going to. There’s a point to it in this case.]

When I spend time [with regret] reading about childhood experiences, related by adults relying on their memory, teachers relying on their charges’ behavior, or experts relying on their narrowness of outlook, I’ve have not yet, ever read or heard a description that matches my experience of childhood.

That doesn’t make my wee years in any way extraordinary or whoop-de-doo horrific, it just makes them mine in a wholly individual sense. Despite a range of experiences that I surely shared with any young human, my childhood did not match the general indicators for “being a child.” 

Maybe it’s because of this later-in-life realization that I now consciously try to emphasize the individual ahead of the group in almost any situation – not because I like the individual more, but that I find thit a more spot-on entry to understanding the whyness of the universe. [“Thit” is not a typo, it’s my newly minted pronoun singular intended to conflate “he/him,” “she/her,” “it” and “they/them”; I could have chosen “shit,” so as to include the “s” from “she,” but that would suffer from conflict with established connotations.]

My choice of focus also comes from having always felt myself to be totally an individual – not a in a good or bad sense, but in the sense of feeling related to almost nothing. I don’t reject others, but that I am not of them. 

So, yes – connections exist, groups exist, trends exist, and there’s good reason to keep them in mind and to study their construction. But we also need to remember that every social “unit” is a conglomerate of individuals in constant change, even when the group appears settled.

All is temporary, whether using a short time scale or a long. 

Of course, in attempting to establish the underlying laws of the physical sciences, we definitely need to concentrate on the general. If the law of gravitation only worked on alternate Saturdays when he sun was shining from the northwest, it wouldn’t be useful in definition or prediction. The scientist wants to know how the mechanisms of the physical world can be described in every instance – or as close to that as possible, as determined through experiment.

As for the social sciences, they aren’t really science; in fact, I wish the term “social science” didn’t exist. It’s a congeries of rambling approximations and pretty-good guesses about how to quantify a collection of individual responses.

But since social scientists like to think they’re doing real science, they compile simple-minded questionnaires that try to focus on general trends, then pretend there’s a universal lurking behind the answers.

What happens with these questionnaires is that the questions actually do elicit individual responses, but not often ones available to the subject, who instead has to choose, from the three possibilities offered, the one they feel comes closest to their actual response [the available choices are often “yes,” “no” or “not certain”].

*   *   *

Now, thank your lucky your stars: Nothing that follows relates to anything above.

*   *   *

A lawn is no damned good to anybody. You mow it and the result lies as a big green flop, doing nothing. No flowers, no differentiation, as you assiduously lop off every last tassel that might look interesting.

Some people just love to cut grass. When astride a riding mower, they may even claim it as a form of meditation. So, for awhile I wondered if I was missing something; maybe mowing really is a relaxing form of Zen.

But then the truth struck me: I had the whole thing backwards: In practice, Zen is probably as big a pain in the ass as mowing.

*   *   *

Headline: “Babe Ruth’s ‘called shot’ jersey from 1932 World Series sells for record $24.1m”

Not only proof of the stupidity of the rich who buy useless shit by the walletload, but consider how many housing units that 24 mil could have provided. Instead, it provided absolutely nothing of real value.

*   *   *

Should the plural be “jack in the pulpits” or “jacks in the pulpit”? And why is there no jack off the pulpit?

*   *   *

Now and then I want to pound my head into the wall, hoping that both my head and the wall will disintegrate.

*   *   *

My father could wiggle his ears. No idea how he developed that kind of muscular control. 

Today is the first time I’ve thought of that in decades, though it certainly should have popped up in my mind over all those years. After all, it says something delightful about my father. Yet there are other things I do remember that say nothing about him, one way or the other.

Memory is as fickle as a fly’s flight.