Facing loneliness to find love: a paradox of life

By Daniel Bartsch (danielbartsch ATTO ecomagic DOTTO org)

Loneliness and cosmic identity crisis, and self esteem, are the most underrated problems in life. The paradox is that to deal with them, one often must endure even more loneliness in order to improve the situation. After having various unfortunate events early in my life of loneliness, identity, and self esteem, I realized one day, that even the guys that had all the women, academic smarts, athletic ability, and looks, had to work at those things extremely hard for the most part. What they had, that I did not, that sustained them, as they worked hard, was self confidence and or love. I decided to get those things, even though I did not have the sustaining love. Then the love would come to me: women as well as other types of more transcendent love.

As far as the suckyness of the world, I was a lonely natural science, bookish introvert, who stumbled into the information of how bad things are, and then with no effect, railed and ranted to all of the denial masters around me who did not want to hear it. So I neither exercised my abilities in an effective way, nor had any useful internal or external purpose, nor did I receive much love. If there had been any route to painless suicide I might have gone for it. Despite my constant reading, I was an academic failure, due to a psychological crisis that intensified my lack of confidence in math and more loneliness every time I tried to study it. My career options seemed to evaporate, and so did jobs to fall back on when chronic problems with my feet flared up. Then the few remaining women were vaporware.

I also thought that I was genetically unable to have muscles. I am obviously still thin, but now I have muscles, and women have gone from complaining about what a bony wimp I was, to oohs and aaahs.

So my turning points were, when I quit hanging out with those (usually hippies) who were dumber than me, in order to feel better than someone. I decided that in order to win more in life, I would have to be with people who were smarter than me, and I set out to find them, even though this meant that I would be the inarticulate fool in every conversation, and watch helplessly as they got all of the women. Man, was it ever depressing.

But it worked, to suck it up, and go for it. Eventually I was able to ignore-distract (with occasional play) my inner desires for instant love, eroticism, appreciation and false purpose, for long enough of intervals to get some exercise, eat healthy, learn to communicate (as in the same way one learns to play chess better, you lose, lose and lose against those who are better). Wow, was all that ever depressing! But I got through it. What a relief!

I think that playfulness helped me somewhat, and also being able to logically see where I wanted to be.

Love

Daniel

5-HTP or ‘Better Living through Chemistry?’

(written 6/29/02)

(The author mentions, but does not advocate, use of pharmaceutical substances to mood-modify, especially when such use contravenes applicable state, federal, or universal karmic law.)

I first smoked weed in junior high school, wealthy Palo Alto community, sleepy university town before Silicon Valley Boom made our street into a bypass for the overcrowded Bayshore Freeway, geeky techno-nerds and droids commuting to jobs from cities as far as Manteca.

It was teen-time, me hanging around with parking lot smokers, buying oregano or even tobacco rolled into joints. Enjoyed getting high on the Real Thing, while listening to Pink Floyd (Echoes on Ummagumma was the most psychedelic) and games like hyperventilating, hold breath and blow hard, then stand up to go unconscious and fall (hopefully) into friends’ arms and wake up with throbbing head pulsing with purple grainy flashes as we listened to Derek and the Dominos, Layla, the squealing, crying embrace of that electric guitar….

Flash forward to high-school friend-at-the-time Mark Berkowitz stealing my ready-to-harvest sinsemilla, leaving me with nothing but a bag of yellowed leaves, which I refined into crappy hash oil on the last day of organic chemistry class at UC Santa Cruz. The next year.

This hash oil was certainly not enough inducement to get girls to sleep with me, social skills meaning something, although I did manage to get some tail eventually.

Second year at UCSC and I quit smoking to better focus on studies and to pursue Buddhist enlightenment through Aikido, taught by earnest blond Hultgren sisters, Linda studious with round wire-rimmed glasses and meticulous black hakama skirts, placing salt and sake into tiny cups on either side of a picture of Aikido founder Master Ueshiba (O’sensei) and a calligraphy by the charismatic and ever youthful Saotome-sensei. Linda learned the entire Norito, a Shinto chant and chanted gutteral plaintive cries on cermonial occasions, ritual underpinning the deeply spiritual nature of the study. Practicing with feminist lesbian and some straight but universally radical ladies in wood paneled octagonal martial arts studio overlooking Santa Cruz coastline, it was a paradise for awkward nerdy and wish-for-enlightenment me.

So I gave up smoking ’cause it impeded my studying, didn’t suit a spiritual path and at the end of my second year of Higher Education left with enough cash to spend six months in Japan, first at boot-camp environment dojo with the legendary 10th-degree-black-belt Hikitsuchi Sensei, thin sallow aging master with the military and manipulative authority of a man who could say the sky was red and his followers would agree.

I did find a teacher who taught mysticism-free Aikido, helped clean the shabby karate dojo where we taped bubble pack to the floor two nights a week in Asakusabashi, covered it with blue plastic tarps (now popular with the homeless for making shelters in public parks). Kuroiwa Sensei was a boxer who learned Aikido in his own way, skeptical that efficient movement skills could come from prayerful invoking of the mystical principle of Ki.

I still felt beat-up, sore after practice, 4 years in Japan eventually getting a black belt that I learned meant very little. And I didn’t like waking up sore. I found Life Dynamics, a relative of Life Spring and Werner Erhard’s Est, answer to my SNAG’ish longing for realizing my Inner Potential(tm) Finally (for the third time or so) I found IT(tm) GOD(tm) BABA(tm) TRUTH(tm) through an Indian spiritual group (religious group–would have hated that expression at the time) that preached soul- and God-consciousness a one-stop awareness path to transcend the impurities of all other spiritual paths and reach the highest level of human achievement.

Except that I didn’t. And ten years of celibacy (with some failures in the autoerotic arena), diet of vegetarian food without onions and garlic, refusing food cooked by the impure (meaning those who didn’t believe as our cult did, including my mother, who feared I was losing it) didn’t help me adapt socially, although I met people from around the world every year at the ashram in Rajastan, dry deserty northwest India, morning air filled with cooking fires that deforested and desertified huge areas. Visited our centers in Hong Kong, London, welcomed as family….

And I still had horrible dreams, awoke shaking, images of myself as impossibly fragmented, “You are a Pentagram!” said Mama, the mother of the institution, to me in a dream after such warmth and love from Brahma Baba, the father.

And desperately aroused by the scantily dressed young Japanese girls (and frankly almost any female) that I “happened to” push up against in crowded sauna-sweaty trains, approaching the cliff of sexual orgasm as hormones dumped into my bloodstream, to the extent that I could be set off by the friction of my clothes.

“Abstinence is the best aphrodisiac.” I think it’s still true, although sexual and emotional desperation makes it harder to find the free flowing friendship that leads to intimacy and healthy happy lovemaking.

It was great to fall in love again, great to discover a system of movement that is helping me become a competent swimmer and to enjoy the beginnings of musical experiments at 40, great to be able to eat meat without feeling guilty, to shit without feeling I have to take a bath to purify myself.

And visiting a Feldenkrais training program in New York, I knew I didn’t need herb in my life, so it shouldn’t hurt to take a toke.

I went INSANELY happy, enlightened, lucid, laughing from one toke. Impossibly happy, laughing continuously for about ten minutes, to the amazement of those around me, one of whom took photos.

I felt as though I’d become like Jesus Christ, so lucid, loving, happy, myself.

Of course it didn’t last forever. I left NY the next day. Got back into smoking, through a few tough relationships that included going through a red light on Oakland evening with a crazy smooth-talking Feldy on my 650 thumper. The black policemen who stopped me let my white ass off with a warning in front of a crowd of onlookers.

Years of smoking, daily ritual, necessary to connect with myself, my creativity, overcome gawky awkward social anxiety, and eventually becoming an obstacle to doing things, because every creative impulse needed a puff to follow through on, and puffing made for a short manic, easily distracted focus followed by a downturn that needed another puff, and if I feel so good why not read, why not wank, why not surf the web for a few minutes, motivation lost when the high dies down.

So I find myself in the same depressive, low-achieving funk, despite rocket skunk week white with THC glands and smelling like paint thinner from these natural secretions.

Somehow I choose to stop for a while, get clean. Two weeks of funk, heavy forehead, innaccessible to flights of fantasy, the avenues of possibilities, the hope and positive patient caution that helped me transcend obstacles to swimming comfortably, to solving computer problems, to immersing myself in the sensations of music and lovemaking.

Three days of 5-HTP, a serotonin precursor, and I seem to have more energy available, although this day half-gone in a funk. Maybe it was just placebo effect, but now energy to write these hundreds of words. I’d hoped for access to creative comfort socially, musically, without insisting on a roller-coaster of drug induced euphoria, without the tell-tale red glazed eyes, the strong smell on my breath, the manic approach to flowing that could ignore realities ready to bite me on the ass.

Bad dreams three mornings in a row. I won’t tell you about them, but I want you all to love me. Meaningful reflections of my present conflicts, totally in keeping with my mother’s terror of her father’s suicide, gunshot in the garage, when she was just five, or maybe eight. Guilty mother Frieda told her, ‘you’ve killed your father.’ And she believed it, lived life in terror, hallucinations and mental breakdown, time in a hospital, psyllocin prescribed by 60s doctor in Melbourne, Australia, she saw it all happen again in psychedelic technocolor, spent next month in a hospital.

That terror is in me. Hating my mother’s worrying, her self-comfort in truisms and platitudes, didn’t protect me from the epidemic of her neuroses. Nor my Dad’s anger, which I feel acutely in dreams of a violent psychotic break where I hit and hurt others.

Three days of 5-HTP and I can see into myself a bit more. Maybe a cold made me so heavy this morning, inert. Maybe the time-delayed cross-generational shock, this morning’s dreams of rapper’s fantasy knifings on hopeless gray city streets.

Bush Inc. killing millions worldwide through neglect, global resource harvesting enriching the few. A Nazi-scale holocaust of worldwide starvation while CEO’s cash in huge stock options, invest them in resource-intensive businesses only to make more. Millions and billions of humans shut into a poverty trap that our government finds congenial to good business.

Educated, they could solve many of mankinds problems. Deprived like Tantalus, yet craving the water that flows around him, only to see it all drain away the moment he tries to drink. Enslaved like Sisyphus, rolling the rock up a hill, straining every fiber and sinew, only to be driven back down by a cruel earthquake. It is no wonder they become suicide bombers and terrorists. Maybe not appropriate to be happy. Even though I find myself among the privileged few who can afford years of inaction, who can be turned around by an over-the-counter nutritional supplement with fewer side effects than Prozac or Paxil.

Sure I seek my happiness, but what a strange world where my own fulfillment is so deeply walled off from the world’s sorrows, where my mailbox is full of pleadings for money by organizations that sell me a the cycle of pledge letters, donations and more pledge letters–a cycle totally devoid of direct human relationships– to assuage my guilt, to satisfy my desire change the world. Email offering me herbs to enlarge my penis, uncollected judicial judgments, the ability to spy on anyone.

Or I could be a protester, offer myself to be beaten by police. Or ignore it all, take my 5-HTP, and learn salsa dancing.

Questions

Certain questions that occurred to me early on have remained with me my whole life. Seeking to answer them has helped crystallized my conceptual understanding of the human world–our economics, industry and politics–and how the human world fits into the larger scheme of things, which in my personal language is the thermodynamic behavior of our planetary system.

Although I have learned only the most rudimentary basics of thermodynamics, I understand that it is among the most stable, well-established branches of physics. Einstein himself stated that (as I recall reading) the premises of the field are so clear and sound that he believed it would never be overturned.

Since I am too lazy or ignorant to explain it all, here is a link to the applicableWikipedia article on thermodynamics.

The second law, which related to entropy, could be stated as saying that systems tend to decay over time, the energy degrades into less available forms, that there can be no perpetual motion, no free lunch.

Against this, the human reality of business that grows and grows and grows: the stock market, real estate prices, the money supply, population, jobs, technology, knowledge.

The first example of the law of entropy that I recall was a demonstration by Mr. Carey–my fifth-grade elementary teacher. He put a drop of perfume on a piece of paper in one corner of the room. In a few minutes, we could smell the perfume everywhere in the room. He then asked us if the perfume might go back to the piece of paper, and if not, why not. He acted as tho this were very significant. I know that I couldn’t see the mystery of it, although I couldn’t explain it either.

As I advanced into my teens, entropy seemed to describe the accumulation of clothes, books and other bric-a-brac on the floor of my room. Mrs. Smith came to clean our house once every two weeks, and so for that day it was our rule that my brother and I had to clean our rooms. My mother wouldn’t have old Mrs. Smith picking up after us. I didn’t know much about her, except that one day she sat down at the purply pink painted upright we had rented for my brother and played with astonishing force: turns out she had played in theaters during the silent movie era. That was the sound track in those days.

Science fiction writer Phillip K. Dick, in a novel that provided the story for the movie Bladerunner, coined a word for this accumulation of stuff, kreplah. Mankind was reduced in number in his bleak vision of the future, animals were rare and so precious that it was cheaper to have an android pet than a real one, yet apartments were in abundance, and they were all filled with junk.

In junior high school science class we received a more rigorous definition of entropy, that it was a measure of the disorder of the system. My brother, five years older than I, told me a definition of entropy that I haven’t seen anywhere since, that it was defined as the number of states immediately available to a system over the total number of states a system could occupy, thus a fraction, and involving the natural logarithm of the quantities. That led to a question ‘how do we decide how many states are available to a system, what the bounds of a system are, and what state the system is in now’ that later combined with items of my religious faith to coalesce into a convincing argument, a kind of mathematical demonstration of the existence of the human soul. Which I will get to, is important, even tho I am no longer convinced of those particular elements of faith.

Another important aspect of the law of entropy was that it only applied to non-living systems. Systems that were tinkered with by people might not necessarily show this constant increase of entropy. For example, our lives can remain beautifully ordered as long as we have a place to dump our garbage.

Around the time I was considering these issues and my partially formed questions, Rene Thom was developing his ideas of catastrophe theory, also called chaos theory, and Prigogine his theories about the spontaneous emergence of order in non-equilibrium systems through which energy flowed.

My clearest formulation of the issue was this: How is it that the sun shining day and night against a barren rocky planet could have caused it to erupt in a carpet of green covering its land areas? Questions of evolution and entropy in one question. Would it happen on other planets? Could it? What would day and night have to do with it? Or tides?

And I had another question: why would the laws of entropy be different depending on whether a person tinkers with the system or not? Our science teachers did their job, presenting the concept of the uncertainty principle, which my brother–a nerdy science guy–also tried to explain to me. The idea that light can be a wave or a particle, that it is affected by your attempt to determine which it is. Or that any attempt to measure a system will somehow perturb the state of that system so that you can never just look at it as it is. You are always disturbing by looking.

We see it in practical ways. That scientists contaminate the landscapes they investigate. Anthropologists affect the behavior of the natives they study. Even space, with its immense and endless vastness, we have polluted with orbiting bits of space junk to such an extent that any astronaut going out on a spacewalk is risking his life, is gambling that he won’t encounter one of the billions of paint chips floating around. Floating paint chips would be harmless enough, except that in space objects might be moving at relative speeds of several miles per second, and with an energy that goes up as the square of the velocity, a paint chip weighing only a couple of grams would have sufficient force to slice through space-age spacesuit fabrics used for bulletproof vests and tire carcasses on earth like a razor through aerogel.

I grew up in an era of scientific technological optimism: the human world faced grave and urgent problems–epidemics, famines, wars–yet somehow the greatest hope was that science and technology would somehow provide abundance for all. And science and technology fluorished in an open society such as the United States was blessed by our founding fathers and our history to possess. Paradoxically, many of our problems–pollution especially–seemed to be caused by science (or the engineering and industry based on science) and each new solution to mankind’s existing problems seemed to bring more of its own.

Over the years more questions crowded into my head. From the third grade I remember wondering why I was born into this epoch of history, and not, for example, during an age when pirates ruled the seas and people lived without electricity or running water.

Later I wondered why politicians always seem to speak the same way. Why are liberal politicians, labor activists and human rights activists always playing catch up? Why do the bad things have to happen before we can reflect and supposedly learn? Aren’t we able to forsee and prevent some catastrophes? And if not, why not?

Why do big machines like tractors and cars have to break down? Can’t we build them so they will last?

Why do we throw away so many things instead of fixing them?

Why with our democratic idealism and willingness to help the rest of the world, with all of our resources, why are our efforts so futile? Why will governments pay thousands of dollars for things that should cost hundreds, for example twenty dollars for a fuse for a spacecraft that I could go into a hardware store and buy for 15 cents. Mr. Carey said it was because that for a spacecraft, we needed to be sure it would function properly.

Why is it that when an earthquake happens somewhere it is so difficult to aid the victims? Why does the TV coverage focus on the drama to save a few tens or hundreds, while tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands are left to their own resources, rags and bits of junk, pieces of corrugated metal, the urgency of escaping the misery of cold and hunger?

Why when the use of antibiotics in livestock makes them ineffective against human diseases are they still used so widely? Why do people take them for viral infections that antibiotics can’t possibly help, such as colds and flu?

Why are we so addicted to the use of agricultural chemicals, pesticides and fertilizers, even tho these deplete the soil of minerals and microorganisms?

Why is it so important to people to wash their cars and mow their lawns? Why don’t we see people on TV who are dirty or poorly dressed or drunk or uncouth–or see them only rarely, briefly, or unknowingly, the escape of a drunken or drugged politician or actor into the spotlight inevitably followed by shameful apologies.

Why are we so concerned about sex appearing in movies and TV yet so unconcerned about violence? Why is violence an issue in videogames, but not in movies?

Why are we unable to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons? We can’t we agree to abolish them, or abolish war entirely? Why do the gun factories run day and night, exporting their wares to dangerous groups who seek to disrupt peaceful society?

Are political leaders who seem to be so stupid in the eyes of liberals or conservatives that criticize them really so stupid? Why is it that wisdom that could bring peace and harmony doesn’t ever seem to reach them?

Why do we always depend on and resort to military force? Why does our government attempt to pass laws that clearly contravene the Constitution and Bill of Rights? Why do politicians and law enforcement overstep their mandate? Why do prisons have to be violent and cruel? How come it is impossible to legislate the behavior of scientists, what research is safe and what isn’t? And why are these attempts at regulation so often misdirected?

Why must women fight so hard to get access to gynecological health services and birth control? Why does the medical pharmaceutical establishment develop drugs focusing on men and ignoring the effects on and suitability for women?

Why do government and industry representatives always lie when a scandal breaks, minimizing the scope of the disaster and hiding details? Why do governments misrepresent the ways that wars or epidemics develop?

Why do religions have such a hold on people’s imaginations? Why do some people assert that a small group of initiates, the Skull-and-Bones society or the Illuminati or the Jewish bankers secretly rule human society? Do they rule? Who does rule? Does anyone really know what is going on?

Why do the people who seemed most informed are typically disconnected from the process of public decision-making?

Why do we have large prison populations? Why do we have institutionized schooling?

Why do hospitals and medical care work the way they do? Why do surgeons botch surgeries so badly, and doctors prescribe the wrong drugs and pharmacists mistake the presciptions and patients misuse the drugs?

Why do we have such draconian penalties against the use of most mind-altering substances, while allowing several–notably alcohol and tobacco–which are known to be harful and highly addictive? Why do we have a double standard that fighter pilots may be allowed to use one form of speed–amphetamine–while someone in civil society using another form of speed such as crack or ice–loses their job, or has their children taken away from them?

Why can’t an institution provide as good quality care as a home?

Why do millions suffer from poor decisions of medical providers every year, yet people continue to trust and go to them? Why are auto mechanics so untrustworthy? Why are used car salesmen untrustworthy?

The list goes on and on, and I find myself infected with a desire to have a single explanation to integrate all of these issues–and others relating to spiritual advancement, personal learning, professional satisfaction and even sexual fulfillment.

My longtime friend Dave McLane, who’s motto is “Anything worth doing is worth overdoing,” Dave with whom I had many hours of discussion and probably hundreds of pages worth of email debates, is a spiritual techno-adept artist who says all questions in life are interlinked, their issues and solutions cannot be separated. He calls it The Subject(tm). All discussions eventually relate to The Subject.

How come science tends to deny miracles and religious experiences? Why do cars and other apparently innanimate mechanisms sometimes seem to be so stubborn, twisted. For example a car is a lemon: no matter if you replace every single part of the engine and suspension, it still won’t run right? Why do such machines someimes respond to encouragement or an old TV to a bang on the case near the channel selector?

I find myself today, tho I be struggling against the dark shadows of childhood traumas, to feel myself in proximity if not possession of a shining orb of certainty about the forces that guide the direction of the world, the nature of the mysteriously apparent “inevitability” of the confusing aggregate movement we call “progress.”

What are roads, and why are they important? Why is air travel so important? Why must people have their own house, car, washing machine and a computer that is personal to them, a personal computer?

Why will a person buy a new computer to replace a virus and spyware infected one when the old one can be restored by simply re-installing the operating system from a CD?

Since it isn’t fair to end this article with question marks, let me show an example that suggests that human behavior, thought to be voluntary and of free will, may in fact be subject to external influences in ways that our aggregate behavior is as predictable as that of electrons flowing in the filament of alightbulb or toaster.

If I draw a picture of a person, and she is without legs, someone might wonder why the legs aren’t shown. Aren’t they there? Are they unimportant? Am I, the artist, unconscious of them?

More questions. Well let’s look at the electrons that happen to be going through the filament releasing light and heat, ignoring the “legs” that is the source and sink of the electrons, which might be generator hundreds or maybe even thousands of miles away?

Why are government and industry leaders responsible for vast damage to society through eggregious mistakes that kill thousands let off scott-free or with a slap on the wrist, while a person who kills one other with a knife or gun spends their life in jail?

Look, using Monsanto’s Mighty Microscope (if you remember the Disneyland ride of that name) inside the wire. Electrons are rushing here and there, bumping into atoms and causing them to jiggle so much that they emit light and heat. On looking closer, we see that the electrons are going every which way. No flow at all is discernible. No flow at all is discernable. The variations in direction are dramatic. Only when we back off and look across a cross-section of the wire, and count the electrons crossing our imaginary slice section, how many crossing this way and how many that way over the course of a 1/60th of a second do we see that there are a million crossings one way and only 990,000 the other way. It is statistical measures that tell us there is a flow. We think of the voltage as a pressure pushing the electrons around, but looking at individual electrons we can find no sign of this at all! Each electron is completely free, unpredictable, creative, enjoying a whole universe of possibilities. So are all its neighbors. It is confusion, pandemonium, chaos. Yet from the effects we see on a larger scale, we conclude that a force field is present, an electric field that simply cannot be felt at the level of individuals is inarguably driving the aggregate.

Are there force fields that guide human behavior in an analogous way? Can we apply quantum principles of uncertainty, tunneling and entanglement to macro activity at a human scale? Could a single photon affect the course of humanity?

I will say here that I believe, Yes, there are fields of force that govern aggregate human behavior, and that can drive this behavior, circumventing even the most draconian and zealously enforced laws. When we recognize the forces that drive humanity, we can save our energy by choosing not to fight against the cascading river or exploding volcano.

Except that it is the optimism of the human to oppose and overcome even that which on a large scale appears to be inevitable. It is inevitable, and yet individuals’ enthusiasm and dedication make a differernce. Humanity and hope can prevail in at aleast a corner of the picture, dikes can keep the ocean waters out of the Netherlands. So the inevitability that I explain and argue for here, can still be reversed in small islands, if not in the totality. So my argument can be wrong while still being right. I think that is a sign of any great truth: it transcends questions of right or wrong.

Beneficial effects of stroke

I recently did a web search for ‘beneficial effects of stroke’. The only links that showed up, were for treatments and procedures to facilitate the person’s recovery.

So far as I can see, stroke has been portrayed as only having negative consequences. That has not been my experience. I spent the last three years helping to care for Sono, my mother-in-law, who died in November at age 95.

On one level, the stroke debilitated her. Not only was her left side paralyzed, she also lost such basic skills as chewing and swallowing food, and the ability to move her head and eyes to focus on something. Her right arm and leg, while not paralyzed, were highly over contracted. Her grip was surprisingly strong.

So it was a major, major stroke, that included a week in a comatose state. Actually there were two strokes, the first at home, when she began drooling out of the side of her mouth, the second a couple days later in the hospital.

It is a frightening thing when you see the doctor flash a light in a person’s eyes and the pupil is unresponsive: not even the reflex of narrowing the pupil was in order.

One subject, and a horrific one, is the hospital treatment for stroke. Doctors have few options for controlling one of the major causes of brain damage following a stroke: the swelling that occurs in the traumatized brain. In Sono’s case, the right side of her brain swelled massively to the point that the left side was compressed and damaged as well.

Although there are various therapies that have been developed to control this swelling, none are perfect. In Sono’s case, nothing special was done to control swelling, so it increased and subsided over the week of her coma. Beyond that, the hospital could hardly provide the resources need to support her self re-education process.

Many, many of the hospital procedures that Sono was subjected, while conducted in the name of health, were actually traumatizing, debilitating, and would have broken the spirit and hope of someone less vigorous.

After the stroke, Sono knew very little about her own body. Her sense of what and where her limbs were, how she could move her body and head, even how to use her eyes was gone. So she had to learn everything again.

This relearning was complicated by the fact that her body was incapacitated by various tubes. There was an IV in her chest, urine catheter in her wee-wee, and worst of all, a narrow tube up her nose and down her throat and into her stomach that dehumanized her appearance and made it extremely difficult to swallow.

I’ve written in another article (that I hope to publish soon) about how these tubes and the daily blood tests and other procedures mitigated against the process of rediscovery that ultimately gave her her life back.

Since the IV eliminated thirst, Sono had no motivation to learn to coordinate movements of drinking and swallowing. Since the IV eliminated hunger, she had no interest in eating. The strongest drives motivating human action were thus emasculated.

With no need to act, being satiated by sugar, and with movement limited by her being penetrated by foreign objects, Sono lost about 10% of her body weight. She went from 45 kg down to 39 kg. Her muscles wasted away during her two month hospital stay.

So why give her a sugar drip at all? She might as well have consumed her own muscles. A person can go without food for weeks with little lasting damage.

After two months in the hospital, having survived a life-endangering misdiagnosis and procedures that I can only describe as innocently brutal, Sono came home, where she learned to drink, sit up to eat for herself with chopsticks, and play catch with a ball, and many other skills.

But onto my main subject. The stroke was damaging in that she never did learn to stand or walk again. However it also had that remarkable effect of lifting a lifetime of burden and stress from her shoulders. She became like a child. The brilliant yet taciturn elderly Japanese woman because spontaneously communicative. Her chronically high blood pressure became normal. An ironic humor pervaded everything she said. The sound of her voice as she complained about being cold, or being in pain, or being hungry, was spoken with the wonder of a child at the miracle of making sound. Her voice was effortless, resonant, and served to comfort her at the same time it communicated to the world around.

She would tell stories for an hour or more. She would win every argument, finding a clever comeback to anything anyone would say. Teasing, chiding, expressing motherly concern.

She savored every word, tasting it. Every time a different shade of meaning.

She loved good food, loved talking about good food, like the sweet persimmons she remembers from a tree in her family’s garden in Kyushu.

Eating at the table was a time to socialize. After each mouthful of food or sip of tea, she would look up. She wanted to see what other people were eating, especially if it was something different from what was on her plate.

She might nod meaningfully, gesture dramatically with her chopsticks, ask for more food by way of tapping her dish, or wrinkle her face into a humorously taunting mask, teasing us in the same way she probably teased the boys at the elementary school seventy-some years ago where she was the cleverest, the most athletic, an outstanding singer, and well liked by all.

Life wasn’t always easy for her for those three years, yet she was reflective, philosophical, expressive, humorous, on occasion even severe, yet with never a hint of bitterness. There was a wondrous, loving essence that permeated everything she said or did.

Family and friends often marvelled at the dedication they saw in my wife and I as we cared for her. While there was some work in it, our times were filled with pleasure. We doted on her completely. She was beautiful in something like the way an infant is beautiful, in the totally unselfconscious expression of self.

When I’d met her before the stroke she was distant, reserved, taciturn. In contrast, the years after her stroke were completely liberated, as though she was receiving on Earth her reward for a life of giving, supporting her family, and listening to and helping many many others over the years, financially and otherwise, often when she had very little for her own family.

She was from a forward-thinking family, and belonged to a generation where she learned to assess a person’s character. She could judge a visitor’s personality after just a few minutes, teasing and praising those she took a liking to.

“I’ll be glad to help you doing anything,” she told me one day, “I can listen and give my advice, I have a little money if you need any help… just don’t ask me to do anything dishonest. I could never take anything that didn’t belong to me.”

You had to hear the way she said it.

Authority out of control

Although I have other pressing things to do with my life, I tend to peruse the Web soon after rising. I am attracted to browsing over other acts that might be more creative, such as writing, music practice, and the explorative exercises I do, Feldenkrais Awareness Through Movement(r).

Although convinced that my writing is probably boring and mediocre (despite believing that my ideas are great–c.f. Jack Kerouc’s rules for spontaneous writing No. 1: You’re a genius all the time) a couple of news items pop to my attention.

I get a lot of my leads from Reddit a social bookmarking site. Surveys of web use say that most people only visit a limited number of websites, less than ten, if I remember correctly. Reddit is good, then, because the stories it carries (as headlines with user comments) links to hundreds of sites that might not otherwise reach my attention.

Today’s look brought up these stories.Southwest nearly let’s patient die because he wouldn’t buy a 2nd ticket. Basically, the guy was bloated due to a failing liver. On his way to get a liver transplant, an airline agent said he needed to buy a second ticket because of his weight. Neither he nor his family could collect enough money, and contacts to the airline resulted in ass-covering transfers with no one taking the authority to act. The drama was resolved when a Southwest agent at another location agreed to pay for the second ticket out of her own pocket.

Oh cruel world!!

Here we see authority without compassion. “Question Authority” advised bumper stickers in the sixties and seventies.

Authority does some pretty awful things. I’ve seen a huge number of stories involving Tasers: people tortured or killed, pretty much arbitrarily.

In this story an agitated six-year-old was in the principal’s office of a Miami school. Cut and covered with blood, he refused to obey a policeman’s order to drop the glass. So the cop tasered him. Awful!

Another boy, a 14-year-old, was tasered after refusing to stop playing with his Nintendo Gameboy during class. He became violent when a school official and later police officers tried to physically control him. He’d been kidnapped by his stepmother, and hadn’t seen his mother in over a year.

These three stories barely scratch the surface of the thousands of incidents of seemingly arbitrary exercise of authority. Police shootings and beatings without cause are legion. In the run up to the Iraqi war, any and all mass demonstrations ended in beatings and arrests. Some demonstrators at a freeway onramp in Oakland were shot with a stun-gun: they were considered to have been impeding traffic. At the Republican national convention in New York, a wheelchair using demonstrator was tackled and thrown to the pavement. In any and all demonstrations at the various G8 meetings in various countries, violence was provoked by police, and then used as a cover for violent reprisals against demonstrators. Recently Italian prosecutors lost the molotov cocktails that were planted by police and were key evidence in the case against the police.

Paramilitary raids against homes are on the rise in the U.S. Here is a report by the Cato Institute that goes with the map in the previous link: “Overkill: The Rise of Paramilitary Police Raids in America”

Tasers are of interest statistically. Because they are considered “non-lethal,” social inhibitions against using them are far lower than guns: it seems unlikely that police would shoot a six-year-old holding a broken bottle (if that’s what he had.)

A second line of interest is this story about Canadians losing their citizenship. According to a law on the books between 1947 and 1977 law, Canadians who are out of the country for their 24th birthday may lose their citizenship unless they submit a form affirming their citizenship to the proper authorities. What happened was that people applying for a passport were informed that they were not Canadian citizens. Estimates are that 10 – 20,000 people are affected. One 70-year-old spoke of fears that she could lose her pension and access to health care.

This story seems kind of peripheral, but nevertheless contains the key elements of authority, its arbitrary exercise, and its victims.

Geometric patterns in salt caused by sound waves

This video shows interesting patterns that develop in salt when excited by sound. In general we are curious how patterns form in nature and human society. A big question….

Principles of the American Cargo Cult

This fellow sees some bizarre and disturbing principles embedded in big media representations of most subject matter. He considers them to resemble those of the New Guinea cargo cults, that believed by performing rituals imitating the practices of radio operators, that planes would land bringing food and supplies.

I’m not sure I agree entirely with his formulations, however, I do find many beliefs embedded in press reports. Many people, I think, choose whether to accept what they read (or see) based on whether the embedded beliefs suit their world view.

“Children should sleep with their parents until age five”

Here’s a Times Online article from May 14, 2006. Margot Sunderland, director of education at the Centre for Child Mental Health in London, cites (among other studies) one which demonstrated that children separated from their parents experience pain that is neurologically equivalent to physical pain. So she recommends “co-sleeping.”

Interesting that we now rely on experts to tell us what we used to learn from grandparents and great-grandparents and village elders, etc. Especially in that experts’ opinions are so fickle, influenced by fad and ideology. In many cultures, children have always slept with parents: to leave a child unattended would be risky in many many situations.

What are the biases that have caused the transition from extended family to nuclear family? And from co-sleeping to separate bedrooms for the children?

The loss of child-raising wisdom due to the advent of the nuclear family has brought a significant cost: it is estimated that one in three children has some significant movement learning disorder. Some parents are afraid to put their babies on their stomachs. Many do not know to support their infants’ head while holding them.

Chava Shelhav has developed programs for teaching people wanting to work with parents and their childrento support their children’s healthy development. It is not enough that children have healthy genes and a nourishing diet. Latest research indicates their is not a genetic program guiding motor and neurological development. A certain variety of activity and environment is needed for them to develop properly.

There are two paths of inquiry we can follow:

1. What is best for children?

2. What biases push parents to do what is not best for their children?

The latter question is central to this blog. We are especially interested in biases that are pervasive yet essentially unspoken.

Cassini photos

The Cassini spacecraft uses heat from the decay of plutonium to generate electric power, so that even tho far from the sun, it has sufficient electricity to run its instruments. I have seen many outstanding photos taken by Cassini. These give me an eerie sense of the reach of human consciousness out into the universe. Here is a page with just a few of these outstanding photos.

While I’m doing space media, here’s a link to a movie from the Huygen’s probe as it descends to the surface of Saturn’s moon Titan. The probe was released from Cassini.

“…and Men shall become as Gods”

By providing a way to convert the pressures of steam or combustion gases into mechanical work, engines–especially internal combustion engines–have fulfilled the Olympian gods’ horror at Prometheus’ gift of fire to humanity: that fire would make men as gods.

So here is a nice site with animations of how engines work.

How have men become “as gods”?? With the help of engines fueled by petroleum, humankind now surpasses nature–including all the world’s rivers–as movers of earth. We are also as gods, having created new elements, having transmuted elements, having brought into existence complex chemical pathways outside of biological and ecological systems. Would we expect these huge energy and chemical flows to influence the equilibrium of the Earth’s natural systems? I think we would be foolish to think that so much energy could be released without consequence, especially as our ways of releasing energy are engineered to maximize the consequences in certain directions.