Reflecting Dad and the Negligee

I came across this old photo. That is my dad there at the top and reflected in the mirror on the left. This was 1973 at some doctor’s thing, my dad being a doctor himself. The photo was torn but taped back together. Everyone is looking at the camera, everyone except the woman sitting to the left of my father – the one who thought it would be a perfect night to wear her negligee to the doctor’s thing.

Her! While she appears to be with the dude to her right, she’s looking across the table at

this guy. Who from this angle looks a bit too, what?, goofy? for the no doubt older negligee lady? I mean, she’s been around the block and that boy looks like he just fell off the turnip truck. But it’s a room with a mirror, so there are two images of each person, and we can see what she is looking at…

This. And it makes sense now. Doesn’t he look way cooler from this angle? Much better from her angle than from ours! Negligee lady’s right. This dude’s cool.

Here’s the whole pic.

That’s my mom – the person at the table furthest to the left in the neat sleeveless white number with the big broach.

Always the best dressed, best looking lady in the room. Now, I don’t want to be mean, but…

This lady is freaking me out. The lighting in that room was not kind to her countenance. Although that vest says outsider at this doctor’s thing so maybe she’s like a proto-Goth and hoping to go into the future in this one photo as the coolest alt chick in the place. Or maybe it’s the red hair… She’s quite beautiful, although not as beautiful as my mom. This, according to me.

What if it’s all because of glasses?

What if over the millions of years of evolution each of our eyesight had evolved to be what was best for each of us; the best eyesight for each of us to experience and see the world, to perceive what is happening, to respond, ergo, to survive?

But then we invented glasses and yes, we could all see better, but at the same time started to go just little bit crazy with our evolved eyesight decoupled from our evolved personalities? And with each generation that crazy gets just a little bit stronger?

And that’s what’s happening now? All because of stupid glasses?

Idle Hands

Percentage of eligible Americans who vote: 63
Of Hungarians: 71
Of Uruguayans: 95

I was paging through a Harpers Magazine on my desk to see if I’d already read it, which surprisingly, isn’t an exact science, as in, I just have to look at the words to see if I have already read it. It doesn’t work that way. How many of you have started a book and got dozens of pages into it and then realized that you’d already read the book? That’s what I’m talking about. I often read the letters in one month’s magazine about stories from a month or two back and can’t recall what on god’s green earth they’re lettering about.

It’s memory and attention and focus and all things I struggle with, and you probably struggle with, as we all struggle with the phones, the Internet, apps and the games and the movies, shows and the videos; blockbusters, podcasts and now, god damn it, AI and Chat GPT. That’s kicking a man when he’s down. It’s all too much and it’s evolving so fast. None of this was here when many of us were growing up and even adults. And it’s a firehose. No wonder we’re all barking at each other and fighting amongst ourselves about pointless issues – while the robber barons rob us bare, of course. Our phones and tablets scream at us, so we scream at one another. It’s about that simple.

And all of that distracts us from important things like voting.