memoirs of a potential phsychopath

i watched this video last night and if ever i needed a reason for flying below the radar, this is it. freud didn't take in europe until everybody on the continent lost their social identity. in america he took off like gangbusters, since you couldn't figure out who and what your neighbors were in this free-floating society. not only that, i myself spent thousands on therapy, trying to identify myself. an interesting process, yet it never freed me from suicidal impulses. that took prozac. 

in his futuristic novel a philosophical investigation: a novel philip kerr poses the conjecture: a few years from now potential psychopathic killers can be spotted long before they do anything, simply through psychological testing. problem is, one guy gets hold of the secret files and starts killing those so identified, in order that the world may be saved from them. remember the detective in little abner who shot people before they could eat the poisoned beans, in order to save them? the comic strip way too prophetic,  for now that's what's done. 

true, the united states has always had trouble with crowd-control, the civil war a monumental example, or the riots of the sixties. in my coast guard reserve unit, alameda, california, were policemen on the front lines of anti-war demonstrations in oakland. they showed us films and expressed their fear of the mob. luckily, a no-draft military and loading students with debt prevents such a thing from happening again. 

actually, what i wanted to reveal much more personal. besides the prozac, i take welbutrin. the first acts on seritonin and the second on dopamine, which keeps you interested in the world, learning, searching and so on. for better or worse, i tried doubling the dose of welbutrin, and boy, did something start stealing over me, a cold and brutal anger. i could feel myself becoming the unfeeling manager of a concentration camp. chemicals can knock me for a loop, and i keep thinking of the people driven to suicide in ingmar bergmann's the serpent's egg, by experiments in 1920's germany. 

my body can change dramatically. stress. lack of food. all of it alters the blood and brain. so, i too, can be a lot of things. a lolly-gagging drunk, a happy stoner, a bitter old man. watch those chemicals, kid, they're way more important than talking psychology. 

on how to recover eternity

of course, the first question i ask myself is "where did eternity go?" when i was five years old, waiting three days for the circus to come to town was exactly that an eternity. what am i  looking for, renewed, over-the-top impatience? seems extremely doubtful.  i've rushed through my life at lightning-speed, fearing i wouldn't have time to experience everything. what if i had savored that sexual encounter more, enjoyed the boat-ride along the turkish coast in slow-motion? 

heartless questions, of course. i'd have had to be a different person. ah, not a bad idea. yet i cling to my identity like all the books in my storage locker, the poems i've written, old clothes, considering these carry the story of my journey. what folly! as lenny bruce said, when a man dies, all his precious possessions become junk. pretty obvious i left eternity in the lost and found somewhere, not knowing which city and having no ticket.

did world war 2 kill the object of my search? modernist literature before the war and starting with baudelaire carried a background of natural cycles. in virginia woolf's the waves, between stories she  describes waves crashing and spreading on the beach. in rilke's the notebooks of malte laurids brigge,  the hero hears a fellow boarder who can't stand up. his neighbor feels the turning of the earth too strongly. everywhere these cycles take the place of god's death, as nietszche put it, the eternal return. far from being a cry of despair these poems and novels allow what is to be replaced by something new, without wailing and beating their chests. 

odd, isn't it, since this literature considered down-beat! no, that had to wait til after the devastation. i've been punishing myself with lectures on hitler, a documentary on goebbels, the story of the man who created auschwitz, all in order to recover the currents of nature existing before their rise and fall. now i understand the historical context. awareness of the concentration camps makes me anxious, including the fact our family visited dachau in the fifties, before it was gussied-up and monumentalized, crude ditches for running blood,   ordinary cement rooms with scratches on the wall, a hatch in the ceiling for the dropping of xyclone b. 

every sort of person executed, i can't help think which category would have done me in: government worker, gypsy traveler, son of a protestant preacher, writer, theater director, lover of jewish women. every step of the way could have condemned me. and i suspect this is when eternity hid herself away, in order to make me suffer for our crimes. 

well, the answer to all my questions already stated. an awareness of nature and acceptance of the seasons - no, no, i wish for eternal summer, i've even thought of moving to los angeles! the ability to accept the trashing of my possessions, welcoming the thought others will live in this tower and do my job better when i'm gone. as jakusho kwong says, please enjoy your only life! yes, i could have tried having a family or joining a religion. alas, they would have simply taken away my process. all it takes to rejoin the universe is un-focus your eyes for a few moments and let everything in, instead of keeping a tight attention to food, sex, and danger. 

here are some others who have a different answer. look at the photos hang-glider heaven: http://www.pbase.com/wwp/hang a way to face the abyss and love it. 

cynicism, the last refuge of the romantic

last time i wrote, i feel i slipped into it. maybe not. i haven't re-read it. basically, i hope i said, books make us human. and oddly enough, the readers of them are the winners. alas, i seem hardly able to finish a volume, browsing, browsing, browsing. am i looking for the answer to my existence, why i only get one time at bat? hey, come on give me another chance! the echo of so many stories, so many poems. 

since language what i'm passing to the next generation, if i could just invent the perfect word, not yet known, the perfect phrase not yet written. our's is the age of artifice. or we're the generation waiting in the lost and found. unfortunately, only going viral on the internet would prove i've made my mark. 

i remember a lecture on science. the professor drew an amazing mathematical formula on the board and pointing to the very bottom, said, 'you'll be lucky to add one number, one letter, to the history of the subject." alas, i thought, i can't even figure out my income tax, and i've basically no income. that's why they invented the zero, for me. 

no, i don't really feel that bad about myself, and after i vanish i won't feel a thing, all ambition truly vanitas. on the other hand, i'd like to be cheerful. trying taking more prozac didn't work. i became unsteady on my feet, tumbled down the steps of the back deck and rammed my head into a tree. that did drive a bit of sense into me. i cut back on the anti-depressant. too bad, because it let me laugh more easily, speaking to people i didn't even know. 

what i've noticed: as folks grow older, they tend to project their own decay on the world. i think i finally succeeded in making pictures of this, i called them nostalgia. ah, if memories were enough, we'd all have some embalmed. 

nostalgia: http://www.pbase.com/wwp/nostalgia

dirty socks (what makes us human)

how did i come to this astonishing conclusion? empirical evidence. only the human species wears foot coverings. I could have said underwear or peaked caps. you catch my drift. only homo sapiens are ashamed of their bodies, with good reason.

let's not go there. maybe there is a chickadee making raincoats. I don't want the fact to blow my whole thesis. after all, the question of what makes us human matters to everyone who reads. and there's the first genuine gold clue. a chimpanzee wearing glasses might look like my neighbor (unquestionably). i still have yet to see one open the mail and burst into tears. chimps don't get bills. 

karma? does it matter? yes, not in the next lifetime but in this one. our deeds add up. and there's the platinum part of our answer to our question. we collect garbage. not only that, we create it generation after generation. we call the repositories books, formulae, science, libraries, porn stores - and the energy mounts. no one has to reinvent the hydrogen bomb. we've already got it.

symbolic language, the erring, inexhaustible source of history and the microwave oven. every generation adds more litter to our knowledge of the past. newborns soon learn to read old newspapers and begin writing new ones. the smelly laundry mounts, adding infamous fascination to the pile. i possess more lethal energy than a rattlesnake: my car. and i'm glad of it. even though my faith in my ability to control it far exceeds my ability to do so. 

look at these pictures of the fire burning near my tower, a kingdom lost by the lighting of a match. no, my own life completely out of whack. like unwashed dishes in the sink, i keep collecting my creations for future generations. ah, the poor kids.

the chips fire, expected to go to 32 thousand acres, now 16. http://www.pbase.com/wwp/chips

you can follow the progress of the conflagration here: http://inciweb.org/incident/3052/

anxieties of the red moon (fire and smoke)

i have a confession to make. four months ago i didn't even know what a nephrologist was. words like that only exist in games like scrabble, i thought. to my chagrin this identifies a specialist in kidneys. good gravy, i never considered them that much, never having had a kidney stone (i hear you want to die). yet, here it is, a high count of creatinine in my blood. does that make me a cretin? no surprises there!


my bladder looks like india, filling and emptying. little sparks of light flash as a new shot of urine enters. my kidneys do look like the beans. my prostate faint but enlarged. i roll over as the technician rubs me here and there with a cold electronic device. hyper-tension? the doctor, a wonderful woman from romania, says, "small for someone your size." now i curse all the anti-inflammatory pills i ingested recklessly over the years. "they curl up a bit a the ends. i'd say, working at half capacity."


at this point my blood-pressure does go up. she says, "it sounds worse than it is." consulting others, i find a friend's uncle lived sixty-five years on one kidney, and 70,000 transplants happen every year. still, i'm not the happy person i used to be. actually, i can feel the tension in my body. doesn't a poet/artist need the hot wires to create? i always considered it par for the course. the doctor encouraged me to get a blood-pressure indicator. 


let's see, i'll take it now. 134/76. okay, that's not bad. i have found the top number will drop into the 120's after i exercise. where it should be. unfortunately, it's often in the 140's which indicates anxiety. what else is new? isn't everyone in the modern world insane, so i'm normal? have you heard of black swans, a term coined by nassim teleb for the unexpected events which we can't predict and upset everybody's apple-cart?


for example, everytime i go to town for days off, i find out another friend has died. young, old, it doesn't seem to matter. if it happens next week, i'd better be glad it's not me. or take this case, i came back three days ago to find a major fire brewing on the forest. we've put out dozens of abandoned campfires this summer, and finally one gets away, a thousand plus acres and growing. nothing like a flight of black birds to get my blood boiling. 


thus motivated by intimations of mortality, i have scanned and posted my last travel photos, down the maya trail though mexico and guatemala. and thinking about evolution, i've put up pictures of patterns in rocks around the base of the lookout. yesterday, i clicked and clicked, the smoky sun and bloody moon, the towering clouds of smoke, fascinating. not exactly the end of the world, but why not? 

maya: http://www.pbase.com/wwp/trail

evol: http://www.pbase.com/wwp/evol

is living forever such a wise idea?

wise, i don't know. i wouldn't mind being a beta-tester, given certain conditions. for example, no wrinkles and back-aches. those are out. no diets, no skipping the salt and evening cocktail, definitely unlimited possibilities for arousal (and satisfaction), assuming children wouldn't be born and over-populate the planet. 


aii, there's the rub. i once read if no flies died, within six months they'd have covered the earth. i wouldn't be able to take a breath without sucking in a winged and rather nasty tasting creature. and if no human beings died, would their be enough barbers to keep up? and in the process, obviously only those with means would be able to afford the genetic methods necessary.


evidently the scientific progress in this direction will make such issues the talk of the town. of course, as the lower classes die off, robots building robots to farm the fields and take out the garbage could pick up the slack. on the other hand, a new buddha might show up to ask her daddy, 'why are those poor people getting old while we never do?' i suspect she might start a revolution. i mean, would us feeders on the bottom take this lying down?


advantages, i must consider the advantages. i could, should i live forever, take one of those exciting inter-stellar space-flights in the offing. so what if it takes twenty light years to reach the next star, i've got the time. and if everything can be genetically replaced, what about giving me more smarts? i haven't handled myself too well in this lifetime. damned if i can get the top number on the blood pressure calculator to go down. in this futuristic universe my physical condition wouldn't matter. gee, i could abuse every known substance. i wouldn't even have to get on a space-ship to take some pretty interesting trips.


there you have it, no answer. do the pros out-weigh the cons? perhaps. i've been worried my artist friend Peter Jodaitis' work will vanish for pennies at a yard sale. in an attempt to preserve his immortality, i've put photos of his work online. after all, maybe that's the solution. we can live forever, but not in our bodies? you say that's been thought of? well, nothing like re-inventing the wheel. 




Nudes by Peter Jodaitis: http://www.pbase.com/wwp/jpnudes


Peter Jodaitis: creating the Bestiary: http://www.pbase.com/wwp/jpsketch2


Peter Jodaitis: a sketchbook of nudes: http://www.pbase.com/wwp/jpsketch

how to get elected dog-catcher

in this year of a u.s. presidential election, i struggle with my own convictions, feelings, prejudices like jacob wrestling with the angel. personally, i have a tough time with people who spend their lives accumulating unnecessary luxuries. yet they might be fine citizens, generous donors to important causes, etc. I mean, that's america, everything is left up to the individual. that's why i have the illusion my vote important.


alas, it is significant, to me. i have to live with myself. and like most people, i can't help seeing myself as part of a group, and in an heightened political atmosphere, it's hard not to take sides. and so much of it is irrational. i'll accept any facts as true, if they support my position. specious logic on my side seems like the most obvious truth in the world. doled out by opponents, i find it false, ludicrous, and criminal. same facts, same world, different conclusions. remember, any paradigm can be proven true. 

for this reason, the life of human beings, amidst an expanding universe, mysterious. i'd like to believe, for example, science will eventually explain everything, that technology will get the species off the planet and spread around the galaxy, thus avoiding extinction. why should i care, though? i mean, really, i won't see it, unless i can come back as a doctor on a space-ship. 


certain people seemed doomed to feel responsibility for the cosmos and their neighborhood. some, like me, must look at the big picture and ask themselves, 'is this a tragedy or a comedy?' life like a drawing you can turn upside down, and instead of a beautiful lady it's an alligator! i'd like to believe i hold the keys to the kingdom. that must be what makes a democracy work (to a certain degree). if i feel i can stand up and shout, rocking the kingdom, i can lie back on my couch and feel completely satisfied.


somewhere i must have written about all this: 

http://www.pbase.com/wwp/the_written_word_galleries