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?

I Remember

I remember skitching cars in wintertime when I was a kid. We’d have a day with a deep, fresh, icy snow pack, and we’d crouch between two parked cars (near a stop sign) and when a car drove up and stopped (and there was not a car coming behind them), we’d crawl out, grab the bumper and slide along down the street. It was really stupid* and that we were. You’d think the first face full of 70s car exhaust would have dampened our spirits.** I lost an expensive ski glove that way, too, which might be kind of ironic. Or maybe not.

I wrote a drunk song called skitching in the snow many years ago. It’s bad but maybe funny.

*Don’t do it. Dangerous. And dumb, too.

**Or did it ginger up our spirits like only huffing gas can do?*

Funny how that works

The author, Edith Wharton, who has written ghost stories herself, once said: “No, I don’t believe in ghosts, but I’m afraid of them.”

Right? I’ve seen enough ghost chaser shows to know that there probably ain’t no ghosts. No one’s been able to properly photograph or record any sort of ghost-like phenomena, even in the ghostiest places. One doesn’t read about people being murdered by ghosts, just other people. So all actual evidence must lead one to believe that there are no ghosts.

Then how come I get scared by weird unexplainable sounds in my house? Why do I get all goosebumpy when someone tells me their own ghost story? Why did a huge flash of beautiful golden light fill the room the night my friend buried her mother? Not that we were afraid of the golden light, mind you, but we definitely got the goosebumps.

I suppose that, like being scared watching a horror movie, where we suspend our disbelief, we just might suspend some disbelief with ghosts, too? At some level, fear must feel good, although we’d need to define good in that particular statement.

Eddie Izzard

The first trans person I ever met was in about 1976 at Thomas Beach on Lake Calhoun in Minneapolis. This was all very new to me at 13. I was sitting on the curb waiting for my friend, Ben, to come back from wherever the hell he was. Up walked this very tall woman in a bikini but covered with a beach jacket of sorts. She sat down on a picnic table and looked out over the lake. Then she looked over at me, staring right back at her. She smiled.

Lovely day, she said.

It’s hot.

One day you’ll grow up into something hot, son.

I’m sure I blushed, but it was summer in 1976 and I spent every waking hour outside, sans sunscreen, but soaked in Coppertone oil, so I was already some dark shade of reddish brown that probably hid said blushing. Someone shouted and she stood up and waved. Enjoy the beach, she said and ran toward the person. I’d heard about “cross dressing” and some talk of people transitioning through surgery and hormones. I believe they had to go to The Netherlands or somewhere to get it done. But now I saw one and talked to one. That blew my mind.

Somewhat related, I was reading an article yesterday about Eddie Izzard and remembering when Ms. Izzard was in the news for coming out as transgender way back in the mid-eighties. She’s been busy, real busy over the last 40+ years as a comedian, stage and screen actor, pilot, very active in LGBTQ issues, and is now again running for Parliament in the UK. She’s also a crack athlete and has run hundreds of marathons (more than a hundred for charities). Here’s what really blew me away:

“It’s not just the sheer number of marathons that Izzard has run that’s impressive: it’s that she runs them one after another. In 2009, she ran 43 marathons in 51 days. In 2016, she ran 27 in 27 days. And in 2021, she ran 32 in 31 days.”

Got that? She ran 32 marathons in 31 days. Damn.

#eddieizzard

Real Dialogue

From the NYT.

I didn’t respect them.

But I did respect respect others. I respected many others that said the election was rigged.

My instincts are a big part of it.

That’s been the thing that’s gotten me to where I am, my instincts. But I also listen to people.

There are many lawyers. I could give you many books.

It was my decision. But I listened to some people.

A Biblical March and Two Babies Switched at Birth

Two fascinating articles from the New York Times yesterday, both of which stopped me in my tracks. The first is about the protests in Israel and how one woman – a particle physicist – has become the “face” of the protests. This paragraph is what surprised me:

“Dr. Bressler sealed her status as a symbol of the protest movement last month when she led a miles-long column of demonstrators on a multiday march to the hills of Jerusalem from coastal Tel Aviv. It evoked a biblical pilgrimage, and they picked up tens of thousands of supporters during the journey.”

If you look at the accompanying image (below), you cannot not be struck by how that is exactly what it looks like – a pilgrimage (with lots of flags), and what Jewish communities have been doing for millennia – walking, marching, traveling, in this case, to the capital city, to stand up to those intent on suppressing them and their freedoms.

The next story is two babies accidentally switched at birth. One baby was born of a French Canadian father and a mother who was Cree and French Canadian, a Métis. He was given the name Richard Beauvais. The other’s parents were the children of Ukrainian immigrants. They were prosperous farmers and also had a general store and post office in a town. That baby was named Eddie Ambrose.

So, the kid with Ukrainian ancestry was taken home with the Cree and French Canadian mother, and ended up on the reservation after the death of the other baby’s father. The child of the Metis mother ended up with the well-off Ukranian parents. They both came to figure this out recently after family members convinced them to do DNA testing while researching their respective family’s history.

It’s an amazing story all-around and destined for a movie, I would think, but I found it absolutely fascinating what the Ukrainian boy endured along with his family as a child and at the hands of the Canadian government. The article states:

Then, when he was 8 or 9, came what he called “the worst day” of his life. Government workers swooped into the log house to take custody of the children, who had been left by themselves.

Mr. Beauvais remembers hitting and kicking a worker who had slapped a sister, who was crying, then being thrown off a low roof. The children were eventually taken to a room with pink walls where, he said, they were picked “like puppies” by foster parents and he “was the last one to go.”

“There was no compassion,” Mr. Beauvais said. “If you were Native, the government workers didn’t care.”

But he was not Native, right? Or is he, for all intents, purposes and a lifetime of living, and being treated, as a Native? Fascinating! I won’t comment any more and allow you to read the stories, if you’re interested.

We think we know

Sentient beings need a brain, right? A nervous system to tell the body what to do in the world. It’s what we know. It’s all we know. But there’s a single-cell slime mold, sans any nervous system, that learns, passes knowledge to other molds, and repairs itself within minutes. No one knows even how to categorize this organism.

It’s been around for millions of years, but we have no idea what it is. Is it an animal? Is it a fungus? It’s capable of memory and adapts its behavior. It solves problems of moving around a labyrinth.

“The blob can navigate without eyes, limbs or wings. When researchers sliced up the organism and sprinkled them in a maze, the blob consolidated into its original form.” And get this: “After introducing the experiment to a new blob and allowing it to merge with another, the new super blob show incredible smarts. ‘Somehow during the merging process, the naive cells learned a behavior for a situation that they themselves had never experienced.'”

Crows taught to fear a particular human will give birth to baby crows that have never seen that human or know anything about it, but know to fear it. What do we know?

The people are woke and global, sorry fatheads

Hearing about Vladimir Putin’s attempts to keep his citizens in the dark about what he was planning and now, what he is doing, in Ukraine is laughable. How is it that these angry old guys really think they can keep information away from people in the age of the Internet? Russia is a modern country, their people are logged in and connected to everyone else logged in. Yes, the state media controlled their message and was telling them one thing but just how many modern educated Russians believe their official state television? Probably about as many Americans who watch Fox News and believe that. (Fox has about 1.5 million daily viewers or about .003 percent of the American population.)

Russians get their news from many sources as do educated and curious people all around the world. They get Russian news, BBC, German news, and on and on – the new perspective is global, which many powerful men and women disdain as it sucks life out of the power to which they cling like deer ticks. Unless Putin could somehow corral the entire world of media into playing along with his lies, or build a dome across his 11 time zones, he is absolutely screwed when it comes to controlling what his people see, hear and know. And we see now how badly he has failed. Brave Russians are protesting in the streets, which to us in America might not sound so amazing, but protesting in Russia is not, shall we say, encouraged by the State. Protesters put themselves and their families in real, sometimes mortal danger.

Even North Korea, a veritable desert of outside news, can’t stop it all. Defectors have reported various ways their citizens still find a way to get western information, usually entertainment, into the country. If the Kim’s can’t do it, no one can.

Here in our own nation, fatheads around the country are banning or trying to ban books, like it’s 1952. This is the absolute dumbest (and dumbing) move the said fatheads can attempt. First, tell a young person with even a modicum of smarts and self-respect not to read a book and they will find a way to read the book. Duh. Second, ban them where? Books are everywhere. You could work to ban it in a school but another school with have it, so will the library, and so will, ahem, Amazon. And third, kids have printers. Got it, fatheads? We know that what you’re doing is merely to make others like you happy to further your political careers, but you look so dumb doing it, that it can only backfire. It seems that you also should read those books, and many more, until you get it.

Young people are woke and global (as are many old people). Your attempts to turn back the clock, jam the toothpaste back in the tube, close the barn door after the cows all left reminds me of the old guy on the 70s television show “Soap” who would snap his fingers and think that he’d become invisible when all the people around him just kind of groaned and went on with their business. You’re ridiculous. You have zero respect for the modern world and for the intelligence of young people. They don’t need you telling them what they can and cannot read. They need you to get the hell out of the way so they can build a new world that recognizes reality, not the wishes of a washed up generation who is handing those same young people a planet that we continue to fuck up on a daily basis.

This is not to mention all of the misinformation perpetrated by these same people around COVID. That led to dead Americans and lots of them. For that, if Christianity is correct, you will all land in hell. Sorry. Well, not really.

Depression and anxiety symptoms linked to reduced information-seeking behavior

Depression and anxiety symptoms linked to reduced information-seeking behavior

Allow me to flip that on its head.

Reduced information-seeking behavior linked to depression and anxiety symptoms.

I was finally diagnosed with adult ADHD at 54 years of age. It explained so fucking much. I always jumped into everything head-first. I never wanted to learn anything officially. So I generally always sucked at things. I’m a drummer! Drum lessons? Nope. … Sell the drums. I’m a bass player, I’m a playwright, I’m a business owner, I’m an accountant, I’m a writer, I’m a social media guy… I was none of those things because I had no patience to really learn them. I just wanted to do them. And I got bored almost immediately. That is classic ADHD behavior.

As an adult I had awful depression and anxiety. From college on, I struggled with both and felt weak and pathetic for having them. I had no right. My life was fine. But the reason I did is because I never prepared for or really learned anything. So I just faked it and that led to serious anxiety; and as I failed, depression.

I never slept very well and so my doc thought I might be bipolar so I met with a psychiatrist. He asked me a bunch of questions and said, “You’re not bipolar, you’ve got classic ADHD.”

After a couple of days of testing, it was confirmed. I treated the ADHD, and the anxiety and depression went away. I was suddenly able to pay attention more, focus better, slow down, know my limitations and what is needed to succeed.

Poof – I’ve still had some anxiety but no depression for over a year. The lack of learning ( information seeking) led to the depression and anxiety. Now I’ve learned how to learn to be happier.