January 31, 2019

The temperature when I awoke this morning was -14 F.  Even though I live in the northern tier of the United States this temperature coupled with the windchill and the duration of the low temperatures is a relatively rare occurrence.  Such cold is extreme, a once in a decade or maybe a once in a quarter century event. I have seen colder here but that was forty years ago.  

Because of the cold I have been off work for two days.  Have I done anything productive?  Well, no.  I have spent most of my time under the covers watching TV serials in binge fashion.  I have move a few books from one room to another. I have sorted out some bedclothes that should be donated to charity.  Still, my fascination with vampires and demons trapping over the television landscape has be at the forefront of my behaviors.

Currently I am being more productive than I have been in the past several days.  I have a load of general laundry going, I am tending the fire in the wood stove and I am listening for the dishwasher to finish.  As the dishwasher ends it cycle, I will put dishes away.  When the washer is done I will move the load to the dryer.  About every twenty minutes I will see if the fire needs the logs to be rearranged or the bellows need to be brought into play.

Hark, the washer has rattled to a stop.  Time to walk away from this.

Washing is now in the dryer.  The bed is made.  A box of “important” papers has been brought downstairs to review and sort.  The fire has again has been stoked.  Three pillowcases have been put on three pillows on the couch.  The couch has become the family nest over the past few days of this cold.  Now, I can get back to pounding on my little toy keyboard that is Bluetooth connected to my iPad.

What I said earlier about doing “nothing” productive is not exactly true.  I have been reading small bits of Simon Blackburn’s The Big Questions. I started out reading it on an Amazon Fire device.  On that device you can cut and paste text.  Then, I had shifted over to reading it on my iPad.  On that device you can only copy a link to the text but not the text itself.  Pain in the tail when you want to use a quote.  And I had really wanted to paste this quote from the text:

“Our theories about ourselves matter. If I believe that everyone is ultimately selfish, I will conduct my life differently, and may myself become selfish, untrusting and untrustworthy, and other people may follow suit. If I believe that our genes are our fate and that culture does not matter, I will not willingly pay taxes for schools or care what my children watch on television. A mistaken view of human nature may be the beginning of a downward spiral. So not only are these questions interesting in themselves, but they have a direct practical importance”.

I get this quote, I really do.  For years I have sat mostly passively and listened to people explain the arc of theirs lives to me.  Understand that with very few exceptions the arc of these people’s lives have been troubled at best, and quite often their path has been simply disastrous. So many of the folks I see feel that they weren’t given the break others were and the perceived slight has raised a bitterness inside each of them which has only grown over the years.  In addition, there is an almost complete distrust of any governmental or other overseeing authority. 

The two groups I see most often are males.  They are either relatively young, 25-30, white and with a high school education or middle aged 42-58 and established in a trade or profession.  The younger group are more angry but less bitter.  Mostly they think they had bad luck.  These people learned how to drink at university, after football practice, after the union iron workers finished up for the day. 

The older group however are more bitter and distrustful.  They are more likely to feel that everyone and everything is out to get them.  At some point in their lives there has been an event which they view as setting them on a skid.  Pick a trauma, they had practiced regulated drinking, but then it happened and their boundary lines vanished. Their control was disregarded.

I get psychological reports on these people.  Most of both groups rate their growing up experiences as a six out of scale of 1 to 10. Of the older, distrustful, stressed group there is usually an event such as a job loss, a divorce, the death of a spouse or a child that seems to be the catalyst (or they assert is the catalyst) for their descent into alcohol dependence.  

However, if you get a good report on their early life you will see signs there such as Dad was an alcoholic, or abusive, or Mom left at an early age that triggered distrust of pretty much everybody else in their lives forever. If these issues exist early on the odds are their adult relationships both familial and work have signs of strain. They may have played the game working with a facade of normality to move along in the world but they were hurting the whole time. 

Blackburn a bit after the above quote offers this thought as he tries to work through what defines us in our human nature:

“Perhaps what is constant is not a simple trait, such as being selfish or aggressive, but an association of environment and the trait, such as being selfish if brought up to be, or aggressive if surrounded by aggressive adults, just as what is constant about language learning is not that children learn French or learn Chinese, but that they learn whichever mother tongue surrounds them.”

Yeah, I kind of buy into the genes determine a great deal of who we are school.  But I am also a believer that genes are only the starting point for some traits.  The smart ass gene will result in only mild quips if surrounded by a family of loving and nurturing people.  However, if one is raised steeped in sarcasm and relentless verbal Bulding you get somebody like Denis Leary or Sam Kinison. I think that intoxicant issues are more tied to environment than not.  However, this is my anecdotal based view.

More later.

Loss

January 29, 2019

The cold winter has asserted itself in a brutal frontal assault.  The snow fell yesterday and the cold moved in today.  7 inches (17 2/3 cm) dropped over about 6 1/2 hours. Today the sun is out but the temperature is merely 11 degrees and the wind is blowing at 10-15 mph.  By nightfall the temperature will be below 0 F.  Yup, this is winter.

Yesterday my office closed because of the snow.  All the schools including the community college closed. My sons were headed for a dental visit but that did not occur because the dentist closed up shop at noon and went home. I am talking weather but I am thinking about life and death.

Day before yesterday one of my two remaining aunts died.  She had far outlived the prognosis the physicians had given her.  Through it all she seemed to approach life with joy.  Aunt Kitty was a happy person, the kind of person who saw the good not the bad in pretty much everyone.  She might have an aside but it was cautionary as opposed to character challenging.  

With as large a family as I come from it is wrong to imply that one or another aunt or uncle was a favorite.  What I will say is that she was one of three of my mother’s sisters who really was in my life and touched by life.  Aunt Kitty and Aunt Sugar were the two that really were kind of guideposts on living this life.  Aunt Sugar raised me for a number of years during the day so my mother could return to her work as a school teacher.  Aunt Kitty was the Aunt with whom my family socialized most frequently.  She was quiet, but joyful.  She tried to accommodate. She tried to nurture.

God what a hole in the fabric of the universe, of my universe, she will leave. I wish I could tell you some anecdotes or tales of family apocrypha involving Aunt Kitty but I can’t.  All I can tell you is that when I think of what a normal middle class woman of the late 20th century should have been, she was the archetype.  

Joyful Mental Exercise

“Wisdom is not a product of schooling but of the lifelong attempt to acquire it.”

-  Albert Einstein

 

Today I had lunch with my youngest son and my wife.  My son has struggled getting traction in his education pursuits.  This term he is at 12 credits.  He is taking a history course, a philosophy course (ethics) and a course in basic writing.  Thing is, this term seems different.  Both his history class and his philosophy class seem to engage him.  Unlike past sessions he wants to talk about what he is learning.  He wants to debate big ideas and pull at their loose strings.

From our conversation it seems that the ethics class has recently been studying the Greeks who felt that living a good life was to have a belly full and diversions enough to keep life entertaining.  The coursework has moved on to the school of thought where meaningful work or meaningful study has been added to the requirements for a good life.  As I sat dipping my French fry into a small paper cup of ketchup the lad was riffing on people for whom meaningful study produces nothing of empiric value.  Cue up the objective/subject evaluation debate. And we were all in on this discussion and he was responding to challenges to his ideas and assumptions with fervor.

Whatever he decides about the merit of these particular ideas, and wherever the class heads next, I don’t care.  What makes me happy is that this is real thought.  These debates are the kind of thing university is supposed to bring out in students.  No matter where you stand on the political spectrum or any other spectrum, the point of university is not just to pick up a trade.  The point of higher education is giving one the tools for reasoned and analytic evaluation of ideas and concepts.  The end result being good reasoned choices that bring about more good than bad.

A New Book

I find it easier to write letters instead of long detailed stories or papers. Most of the writing I do any more is for conversations between two or three people.  These are people that I have stayed in contact with over the decades. Once, every now and then, a new correspondent arises.

When I have drafted a letter, I frequently grasp the guts of what I set out and retool it to become a blog post like this one. As I have been engaging a friend on the topic of life with God I have gone running back to a philosophy texts.  I have landed on a new book. Right now, I am reading Blackburn's book called The Big Questions. In the section I am looking at he is working through what philosophy thinks about consciousness.

At the end of the 19th century, based on Descartes comments there were philosophers who thought our mental nature constituted the ghost in the machine. Our hands, eyes, etc., transmitted information the material brain which then relayed the information to our spirit, soul, ghost, whatever and then it relayed back to the body what to do. This is dualism at its most mystic/religious. What we mentally conceive of as who we are, our personality, our morality these philosophers said was to be found outside of corporeal being in an unknowable ethereal essence.

If there is no God or god or divine or spiritual river than this is nonsense. The question then becomes where do we draw any conception of right and wrong from? Is morality relative? Is morality a farce?

When you are looking up at those stars it is scary to go down these rabbit holes of thought. We want there to be very clearly defined right and wrong. We want existence to be defined and knowable. But we face so many examples of dubiously defined wrong, say Jean Valjean and the stolen loaves of bread taken for the starving children. How do we come to a base for a moral code without having to create a god to set the ultimate rules in place? You know those ultimate rules; do not steal, do not kill, do not fuck somebody else’s partner.

Moving beyond right and wrong the real frightening part is that we are merely an aggregation of molecules bound together for a very short period on the cosmic scale, that in span of eternal space and time we have no meaning whatsoever. Why is there life, why do we live if there is no purpose? If humanity is merely a fungus on a spare rock in the universe why do we struggle and strive, why is that force to accomplish something so strong within us.

I don’t know the answers to these questions and sometimes I feel so lost. Don’t read this to be defeatist or implying a sense of depression because neither is accurate. Up until my last breath I will keep trying to figure this stuff out. I swear.

A Quarter Century in the Ice and Snow

January 23, 2019

Time flies by. 25 years ago, my nephew was killed while visiting me here in Michigan. Sadly, I had urged him to come out to see what a wonderful place this was under snow. During his stay John had a great time. An ice storm on the way home took his life. Less than 30 miles from my house his vehicle rolled, and he was killed.


Mostly the nightmares have stopped now. For the first two decades after John’s death I would wake up at all times of the year sweating with anguish and guilt over what had happened. Without ceasing I have blamed myself for his passing, I shouldn’t have entreated him to come out in such questionable weather.


A quarter of a century, wow. Within that year, within six months of John’s death my wife’s father died and my mother died. Within 12 months of my nephew’s passing we were also facing the impossible, improbable prospect of parenthood as elderly first time parents. 1994 was a year that divided the experiences we would have in this mortal realm from the glassy happy go lucky ones of youth to the much harder edged ones of full on adulthood.


In these the latter years of my life, those after John’s accident I find my life’s experiences both more unifying with and isolating from others. Having dealt with those deaths and recently the deaths of several people who were integral to my life during different eras, I have found that the path I am traveling is one meant for me alone. I have also learned from the experiences I have had, cancer, special needs children, damaged relationships, agonizing years of public service learned that empathy is never to be held back. We are all alone on our paths, but we can reach out and touch those facing moments on the path like what we have experienced.

I remember my nephew’s smile. I remember my father in laws gruff but kind demeanor, I remember my mother’s love. These are things I savor when those late-night moments of terror and total isolation come over me.

1994 brought me one experience I will always cling to. On a February day in 1994 I found myself in Oslo at the site of the Olympic Games from 1954 (maybe 1950?). On an old bobsled run I went luging 7 or 8 times over the course of an afternoon. I had my late nephew’s hat in my pocket. As I flew down that hill on my back just two inches off the ground, I realized that life is about both the exhilaration and the pain. Steering with my feet I was for a few moments part of the most electric part of life I will ever touch.

Twenty-five years since the time of loss. Twenty-five years since that brief afternoon’s window into maximum exhilaration. Life is a mixed-up shook-up mess isn’t it?

Nostalgia and Reading

January 21, 2019 Monday

 

One thing about being an attorney, your work is never really done. Technically I had today off in celebration of the life of Martin Luther King, Jr. (Funny, I am old enough to remember the TV scroll at the bottom of the screen announcing he had been shot in Memphis. I was watching ABC television that night and my parents were out. I remember my father’s comment when I told them about the shooting as they returned home, “The cities are going to burn.”) Despite the holiday I still went to work half a day. From 8 a.m. to noon I reviewed upcoming cases. There was no way I was going to be outside. It was -11 when I went out to the car to come over to my office

The rest of my day was split between watching a Netflix teen sex dramedy called, “Sex Education,” and cleaning/sorting the corners of the house.  “Sex Education” was raunchy, but it had a heart that was in the right place. The gist was that sex complicates the process of growing into an adult. Duh. A great deal of time was spent on the simple in concept, but much more complex in practice, idea/goal of self-acceptance. there was also an ongoing theme of the need to have self-awareness of one’s own motivation. I would give it 7-1/2 stars to the production. It is somewhat higher than I might otherwise give it, but I really liked the performances of the two leads. They were 94% credible.

The rest of the time in the afternoon was spent sorting and packing. I note all sorts of emotions were stirred up by this purge of materials. One of the things I did was to sort out three large boxes of trade paperbacks that could be put up for yard sale. Some were books I can obtain easily and cheaply as a PDF on one of the book sites. Some were tomes that I purchased. with the best intention to read but never got around to. I felt sad that I had not committed to the reading that I should have. Bottom line though is that the books are heavy, and they are not making a move either to a condo or to Portugal. I am shamed, I should have been reading the works of several Nobel laureates but instead I was watching TruBlood.

Harder still was figuring out what pieces of paper to save from the first, second and third grade works of my two sons. A number of collages and mixed material projects have been stuffed into nooks and crannies over the years. In looking at these it surprised me how much more into these kinds of things my older son, the autistic one, was. He had trouble with fine motor skills, but his ideas were complex and colorful. I know these are just paper and not subject to real preservation, but I can remember every time one of these pieces came home.

Time flies by so quickly now. I am moved to very slight tears when I go through this stuff. A lump in my throats creeps up. My wife spent her childhood moving from place to place. Sometimes the moves were sudden and represented violent upheaval in her life. Her feeling on retaining this stuff is much different than mine. My childhood home was the same for 40 years of my life. My VBS (Vacation Bible School) paper mache projects were there in here house until we cleaned it after she died. I have a hard time letting go.

As I am typing today, I have hooked into Apple’s Classic Folk stations. Right now, the song that is playing is Gotta Travel On by the Au Go-Go Singers. “Laid around and played around this old town too long, Gotta travel on winter’s coming on...”. This song triggers such nostalgia in me. My brother Jerry used to sing this every time he left the house to head off to school, to go to the Army, to go to Vietnam, after a Thanksgiving weekend. I can hear his voice clearly, hear his wry chuckle and I can see so clearly that aw-shucks smile and the twinkle in his eye.  Dead a year and a quarter and I miss him so very much.

Last night I decided that I had watched too much trashy TV. I decided I needed to get refocused, re-centered. I picked up a copy of a book by Simon Blackburn. No real surprise there, eh? The volume was called The Big Questions. I downloaded a free sample of the first chapter and my read of it very quickly sold me on the purchase. In talking about the concept of what constitutes our “mind” Blackburn offered this, “The neurophysiologist, however far he probes, will not be able to hold up a fragment of brain and say, “Aha! Here we have a thought about the boulevards of Paris!” For, alas, the brain is gray but in my thoughts the boulevards are brightly colored. The bit of brain is small, but the boulevards are long and wide. The brain is soft tissue, while in my daydream the boulevards are hard pavement, and with traffic on them.” Yeah, I get that.

Tonight, no more than an hour of television.  Seems to me I have some reading to do.

Cold

01-22-19 Tuesday

The past 48 hours have been very tough weather wise.  Snow fell and then the temperatures fell.  When I went out to the automobile yesterday my smart phone told me that it was 11 below zero based on the Fahrenheit scale.  Very cold was the morn.  The daytime temperatures never really got above 5F or so.

I had taken Friday off because I wanted a four-day weekend, yesterday being the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King and a national holiday.  On Friday I worked, I had a project due.  Came in a little late, left a bit late.  The State of Michigan got a full eight hours out of me so I retracted the day off request.  Yesterday, in that I had to get up and get coffee and the like ready for my wife I got up and came in to prep for this week.  I spent about four hours getting four days’ worth of materials prepared for hearing.

Went home and thought I would spend it with my sons.  Nope, one went to campus to study.  The other went to campus to write.  Me I spent about two hours sorting things to yard sale and putting things in places where they out to be.  I think next weekend I will be doing more of that.  Everyone tells me that when you are thinking about heading out you really should start way in advance with the winnowing.