On Compulsive Diarists, of Which I Seem To Be One

As of yesterday, I've been "keeping" a journal for 27 years now. I've probably missed writing something for a given day maybe 20 times, probably less. It is compulsive, and obviously a habit.

I've filled cheap spiral-bound lined notebooks - the cheapest I can find at a stationery store or supermarket - both sides of the page, with lots of lists of things in the top margin of the page, little bits of arithmetic.

I'll fill one up over 11 to 16 months, find a swatch of cheap masking tape and write the beginning and ending dates on it, then plaster the tape onto the cover of the notebook, then stash it away in a closet with the others.

Sounds kinda sick? Maybe. Sounds like something Prozac might help? Maybe. After a couple of years of doing it, I went on a kick of reading all of Gore Vidal: his historical novels, his quasi-surrealist "outrageous" novels (like Myra Breckinridge, but there are others), but - and Gore would've hated to see this - I think he was a better essayist than novelist. Even though I often vehemently disagree with Vidal - especially on the value of certain writers over others - I'm always impressed with his quite great ability as an essayist.

                            Gore Vidal, who half-jokingly asserted that diarists were dangerous.
                            When he was in his early twenties he lived with Anais Nin.

And one day I was reading an essay when the topic of diarists came up. Vidal thought - perhaps this was part arch-humor - that diarists were suspect. He linked assassins (like Arthur Bremer, for example) to their diaries. People who wrote only for themselves were suspect. It hurt, a little. But I kept on.

What the hell do I write? Well, the first few years I'd write a lot, every day. Because my life seemed exciting, and I wanted to remember it. Many years later I sat down and read the things I wrote in my early twenties...and it seems like I'm reading someone else's life. Frankly, I sound like a precocious 14 year old girl. "I fixed my bike!" Exclamation points. I'd like to think I'd been putting off re-packing the ball bearings, but I probably just fixed a flat and...was glad I was able to ride again. (!)

Now, I'll often note the mundane. I'll cover four days on one page. Whether I did yoga or not, stuff I ate, people I exchanged emails with. A particular interaction with a guitar student from the day. Oh-so quotidian, and I know you'd be bored to read it.

A reader may note I used the term "diarists" in the title of this blogspew, but when I talk to my friends, I say "journal." Because I've read many famous published diaries (Anais Nin, Samuel Pepys, Anne Frank, the usual suspects) and they seem like "literature" to me. We know Nin thought there would be readers of her diaries. Having an audience in mind greatly changes the content and tone, to put it mildly. Certainly there are entries among my logorrhea that seem fit to be read by others, but when I think about it, I'm one of those compulsive jotters who's really okay with them not being read after my death. What the hell? Page through them for a day or two, have a laff, learn something new and lurid about beastly-dead Michael, then fer crissakes: burn the things for warmth. Or light.

Or just to buy space in a closet.

Okay, some of you actually liked finding great-grandma-ma's diary from the late 19th century. I get it. Do I see myself as great grandma-ma? No. But perhaps I should...

Another reason I don't call myself a "diarist" is that I used to think it gendered: women keep diaries; men write in journals. I don't believe that anymore, but I'm okay with being stuck in my ways. Also: there's a sense in which the bulk of my dull recordings of my days seems almost more like a "log" and don't even deserve the same term as what Anne Frank did.

To return to Gore Vidal's riff - which he repeated a few times - I think he has a point. When Jodi Arias was arrested she wrote a memoir (apparently) in prison, "in case I become famous." Ted Kaczynski, rather famously, had a manifesto. Norwegian mass killer Anders Breivik, who killed 77 and left over 300 injured, gifted us with a 1500 page Facebook document in which he railed against immigrants, multiculturalism, how Western culture is dead, how he felt close to his "Viking" heritage, etc. He also dropped some of his charm onto YouTube, which I haven't seen. Breivik plagiarized from Kaczynski too. The unkindest cut.

Jared Lee Loughner, who shot Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and others, was found a paranoid schizophrenic concerned with the English language, alternative currencies, and a fear of mind control. He bequeathed something for us all on YouTube before heading down to the rally to shoot. (Understanding and representation of Loughner in my neural circuits are adjacent to Robert De Niro's character in Taxi Driver, Travis Bickle and secret service guys, and in a private moment, "Are you talkin' to me? And no wonder: Screenwriter Paul Schrader had Arthur Bremer in mind.)

The Virginia Tech killer, Seung-Hui Choi, sent an 1800 page statement to NBC, with a cache of personal videos and photos. He was inspired by Columbine. LAPD cop Chris Dorner, who was fired from the Ramparts division, left an 11 page manifesto about why he had to kill (it was a "necessary evil"), and he was pissed about the Rodney King incident and how he was treated by fellow cops. So he lost it. I remember watching that manhunt live on TV in Los Angeles. The cops looked about as ready to take Dorner alive as they were ready to take the SLA alive, once they were sure Patty Hearst wasn't in that safe-house in Los Angeles.

I could go on. And on and on. And you may say, "Yea, but you're talking about manifestoes and YouTube videos and Facebook rants." And I say, yea: I think social media has made a lot of people into diarists of a sort.

But really: the Vidal riff is too arch by half. Most of us do it for therapy or simply to ward off "real life" when it becomes a bit too intense. When I read a greatly abridged version of Pepys's diary a few years ago, I was struck by how often he went to the theatre and saw Shakespeare. He notes which play, and I think, "Gee, he saw Taming of the Shrew just a few months ago." But I'm like that with film noir. Read my...errr...journal and note how often I re-watched Double Indemnity or Out of the Past or The Killers or even Armored Car Robbery (saw this again two nights ago: lots of 1950 location shots near places in LA I used to live, and Charles McGraw may be the most hard-boiled actor in all of noir)...

The writer Sarah Manguso published a 93 page book about her 20+ years of compulsive diarizing, and I found this interview with Julie Beck interesting. I think Manguso's sickness (rare autoimmune disease that she wrote a book about) and middle class upbringing must have something to do with writing 800,000 words and counting. I have never counted words, not really caring. Manguso resonates with me about when she started: things in her life seemed momentous, and so much had happened to her, to her own mind. And she wanted to remember it. It is a way of dealing with mortality and memory, no doubt. She thinks keeping a diary will serve as a prevention against "living thoughtlessly." I can see that. But I'm too close to it all to be know to what extent it worked. It does provide solace amid anxiety. The word "graphomania" comes up.

For Manguso, pregnancy and its hormonal cataclysm changed her view of her compulsive diarizing: ordinary "reality" became as important as those "momentous" events, which usually, in hindsight were not so momentous. My favorite line from the interview:

Every exchange that I had with another person, everything I observed, every little throwaway moment I had on the subway observing this and that, the denseness of the experience just seemed unmanageable without writing it down.

For me, this is redolent of a Borges piece, or maybe something from Oliver Sacks.

Here's a huge difference between Manguso and me: I tend to want to "manage" my excitement over ideas I've read in books. Rarely have little impersonal moments with strangers made it into my log/journal/diary, unless they were exceptionally funny or wonderfully weird. I have witnessed verbal tiffs between friends and acquaintances and wrote what I could remember when I got home, in case anyone asks later. What did we do last Christmas? Hold on, I'll go look it up.

In the Beck interview Manguso comments on her diary book, Ongoingness: The End of a Diary, but also her other books. She says narrative, whether in reading or writing, doesn't come easy to her, hence her style. Then she adds, "and I don't need to read or re-read an entire book or re-watch an entire movie." But I love to re-read my favorite books. With each re-reading I'm able to see more and go deeper into that world. Same with films. But: I am not enamored with narrative either; I return to my books and films for mood, style, effects, form. Last night I saw Truffaut's Jules and Jim for maybe the eighth time. And still, it's only as the film nears the climax, that I'm reminded of the ending, which I remember being shocked by the first time. It's quite a climax...so why do I seem to only remember it hazily? I think because I watch it for the friendship of Jules and Jim, the depiction of countryside in France and Germany 1900-1930, French manners, the simmering mental illness of Catherine, the way they negotiate the menage, the accepted insanity of WWI and Jules and Jim being terrified they might kill each other, the interspersed file footage, the cuts and freeze frames and sheer beauty of Jeanne Moreau. The voice-over. Last night I noted that the first five minutes seem "new" to me (they're not, of course: my brain is blitzed by the romantic mood of the opening), and that the denouement seems to barely register for me.

I guess some relatively compartmentalized area of my self sees the climax, remembers the shock from my first viewing, sort of shrugs it off as "Of course you had to end a film like this that way for it to have the emotionally logical effect of such a plot, its syntax, the chaotic madness of the femme etc..." Then I quickly go back to being bathed in the incredible pathos of the film. (In truth I love Truffaut's 400 Blows even more.)

What actually happens to the characters at the end of Jules and Jim seems trivial to my emotional needs, apparently. I once worked with a librarian who could give a detailed chronological synopsis of what happens in a work of fiction, and I thought her simply marvelous for this display, so different was her mind from mine.

This apprehension of how individual nervous systems abstract signals from our environment and concentrate them: this otherness of other peoples' minds is what makes me love them. Because, somehow, perhaps my diarizing helped me in this appreciation, via personal feedback?

Finally, I put forth the idea that "social media" has made many of us diarizers. This may be part of why I don't "do" social media. I've yet to Tweet. I was on Facebook for one day. I've heard of "Snapchat" but I don't really know what it is, nor do I care.

However, I started blogging in order to see what I think about ideas, and maybe entertain certain strange minds that resonate with mine. If blogging of the OG sort can be considered social media, so be it: I do social media. But no doubt that rare handful of posts that are mostly about "me" must qualify as social media. And this post seems the most self-indulgent one I've done. I'll try to wait a long time before I write in such a personal way again. Some aspect of my nervous system seems to be pushing itself to the fore and saying "This wasn't an OG post!"

Oh, well.

Some Sources Read Just Before Writing This
"Poor Historians: Some Notes on the Medical Memoir," by Suzanne Koven
"The Pleasure of Keeping - and Re-reading - Diaries," by Elisa Segrave
"Personal Manifestos: Never A Good Sign"
Jia Tolentino's insightful review of Manguso's book about her diary

                                         ont bob campbell faire oeuvre graphique pour 
votre blog en demandant ici!

O! The Things I Don't Know! (Thomas Paine and Spinoza)

[A report on watching my memory systems work within the context of books/reading and all that reading we've done and have seemingly forgotten. What remains? All of this within the further context of historical ideas about economic redistribution and welfare, of mounting concern for me, in Unistat 2013. - OG]

I'd just finished a re-reading of Thomas Paine's pamphlet Agrarian Justice (c.1797), when a few lines jumped out at me: didn't someone else say almost the exact same thing at an earlier date? If so, who? One of the unconscious subroutines in my brain spat out an answer 20 minutes later, after I'd forgotten I'd asked the question: it wasn't another of the American fore-fathers. It wasn't Jefferson. (But what does my brain know? Maybe it was Jefferson. Parts of my brain have been known to delude and mislead me in the past. Hell: every day. But let me go find the passage from Paine...)

Ahh...Here 'tis:

When, therefore, a country becomes populous by the additional aids of cultivation, art, and science, there is a necessity of preserving things in that state; because, without it there cannot be sustenance for more, perhaps, than a tenth part of its inhabitants. The thing, therefore, now to be done is to remedy the evils and preserve the benefits that have arisen to society by passing from the natural to that which is called the civilized state. 

Agrarian Justice is Paine writing a proto-Henry George geolibertarianism argument after reading a sermon by one of God's men that He was Infinitely Wise in creating Rich and Poor. This pissed off Paine, who thought humans created advanced societies starting with agriculture, and this in turn created incredible wealth, but also: a squalor unseen in "native" populations, such as the North American native  peoples. "God" has nothing to do with the few rich and the many poor. Paine was outraged by this income inequality and proposed that everyone has an equal inheritance of land as a birthright, but only some have had the fortune to inherit (or sometimes, buy) enough land in which to make a decent living. And so: everyone - even the richest - should receive an annual payment, because we're all in this together. Most of us have been divested of our rightful inheritance of land. Paine says he's got nothing against the landed wealthy, but he is "shocked by extremes of wretchedness," and that "The most affluent and the most miserable of the human race are to be found in the countries that are called civilized." (Recall that Paine wrote this seven or eight years into the French Rev.)

I linked to the actual (very short) text in my first line. See what you make of it.

So, the lines quoted above seem like they could've been written by anyone. They seem like they were in the air among many of the Enlightenment revolutionaries and intellectuals. Was it Voltaire? I went looking through my Voltaire and nothing jumped out at me. He seems to agree, but whatever neurons fired in excitement when I read the Paine passage didn't evince a shock of recognition in Voltaire. I tried Rousseau and found a few pages that read as very proto-Marx, with a tinge of what Paine was getting at, but a bevy of neurological subsystems checked in: "That ain't it, chief." Having nothing better to do, I whiled away more of the better part of an early evening pulling books off shelves, collapsing on the couch, searching, getting diverted, going back on the trail, feeling foolish, cheering myself with Ezra Pound's line, something about true education having taken place "when one has forgotten which book..." But still: I mean, what's really the use of this search?

                                                     Thomas Paine

I guess I wanted to know if Paine had discernibly cribbed those lines from an earlier genius. At times I may be overly obsessed with the idea of origins. I happen to love Paine, seeing him as working class intellectual before the historical notion was formed. And he seized the time and rose to heroic levels.

I also get this similar feeling - "who did he steal this from? - when reading other authors, but rarely has it sent me on this Fool's Errand. Gawd, there was so much You Tube to watch. Films noir DVRed off of Turner Classic Movies. Internet porn. Bills to pay. Calls to return. Articles to write. "Real" reading to be done.

Some serious daydreaming was called for. I've been in similar spots before: have a vague feeling that there was some sort of connection to be documented, but the endeavor was like looking for a black cat in a coal cellar. But those subroutines had come through for me, countless times. And it always felt uncanny. What one must do - it seemed - was to "forget it" and go do something else. I took a long break and listened to Mussorgsky. Nothing.

Okay, okay, not a problem. There have been times when this took two weeks. Or so another set of subroutines seemed to say.

Then, just before I hit the hay, very late, after spending an evening reading unrelated books and topics (Born Losers by Sandage; Charles Fort: The Man Who Invented The Supernatural by Steinmeyer;  and Bruce McCall's Zany Afternoons, which is so funny I need only pull it off the shelf before I start laffing, if you must know)...a steering committee drawn up from more modest subroutines suddenly said, "Yo! About that Paine-similar passage problem? We're thinking Spinoza." This was probably 4AM.

Bleary-eyed and slightly buzzed from a monstrously "big" double IPA, I meandered with building excitement back to my shelves. When had I last read Spinoza? I had a copy of his Ethics in my Great Books collection I'd bought from a guy I was renting a room from when I was in my early 20s. I'd grappled and floundered in Spinoza off and on, but mostly I'd read articles on his necessary subterfuges in publishing and eluding authorities in Amsterdam, the "freest" part of Europe, where the local Jews turned on him...jeez I was tired. Some nutjob in the local Dutch jewish community tried to stab Spinoza for being a heretic, or something. Spinoza died from inhaling industrial waste...something like that. OSHA was way in the offing. He'd been up to Huge doings in 'Dam, but had to stay on the QT for persecution's purposes. His family had been chased out of...was it Portugal? by antisemites. They'd been hounded everywhere by goddamned Jew-haters, and the Dutch were the most tolerant around and still Spinoza got shit there. Why couldn't I just scribble "check Spinoza" in my notebook and go to sleep?

I'm embarrassed to answer that question. Let me elude it now, by lamely employing the mountain-climber's gambit: 'Cuz it's there! It's in my personal library. Maybe.

So I start paging through the volume Descartes/Spinoza, vol 31. I feel like an idiot. Did I really ever understand any of this? And what time is it? 4:15 AM? Jeez look: here's a Euclidean diagram and he's trying to prove God's existence or something. Spinoza probably actually "believed" all this, but with hindsight may have been compartmentalizing his ideas in an effort at self-preservation.

Einstein said at one time (to the public) that he believed in Spinoza's God, who revealed Himself in the "harmony of all Being" or some stuff like that. Pantheism. A way to be a mystical Atheist-radical at that time and not be killed by The State. Or to dodge very-real fellow Jews who feel the need to overcompensate to the Dutch, by showing they can take care of their own...

Then other subroutines kicked in, chiming, "Spinoza summarized his entire book at the end for the idiots like you." Oh...right! I quickly flipped to Appendix, which visually reminded me of some of Nietzsche's books. I started skimming like mad. And there, at number XVII, I got the much-sought recognition shock:

Men also are conquered by liberality, especially those who have not the means wherewith to procure what is necessary for the support of life. But to assist every one who is needy far surpasses the strength or profit of a private person, for the wealth of a private person is altogether insufficient to supply such wants. Besides, the power of any one man is too limited for him to be able to unite every one with himself in friendship. The care, therefore, of the poor is incumbent on the whole of society and concerns only the general profit.

That's it! But how could it be? Was Spinoza even read by the Anglo or American Enlightenment thinkers? Was he translated into English then? It turns out he was, and if you Google "Thomas Paine and Spinoza" you see some interesting stuff. Interesting to me, anyway. 'Cuz damn if I don't feel ignorant sometimes. Most of the time.

                                                  Baruch Spinoza

Now here's what's most interesting to me, and you may have noted it yourself: the two passages, when read back-to-back, may seem dissimilar enough that I may seem to be making connections when they're really quite loose, even superficial. Paine addresses cultivation, art, science. Spinoza talks about how a private person who has the dough can't be expected to bring up the poor. But both Paine and Spinoza thought the poor should be cared for by some power of "wholeness" which I think stuck in my brain. Or at least that's my best interpretation, as of today, of the Situation in my nervous system and my ideas about economic justice.

What I think happened was what I'll call my emotional brain had filed the two passages together, somewhere "deep" in there, in my grey-goo. Neural clusters that "knew" about ideas of economic justice as encountered in Paine and Spinoza were close enough that, when my reading of Paine fired one circuit, a message was sent: you have another circuit that is quite related but you consider the two authors as being separate (I think I see Spinoza as a Continental rationalist Jew-genius, much persecuted, but far removed from the American and French Revs. Which I find out, was erroneous), so...you might want to obtain some of that intellectual "integrity" you say you value so much, dude.

Well, I was satisfied. If you've read this far, thanks for the indulgence.

Drug Report: Matthew Gavin Frank's Pot Farm and Some Other Pot Books

So: if you're part of the "true" Stoned Literati, you've probably read Terry Southern's Red Dirt Marijuana, you're somewhat likely a Pynchonite and are pretty sure you read Vineland, but...that was back when some really good stuff came down from Mendocino or Humboldt; it seems like you read it. Zoyd? Oh yea! You've read scads of non-fiction books on pot, and the number of good ones has flowered over the last 12-15 years, with the Kulch (if not the Feds) becoming evermore accepting. I liked Martin Lee's  Smoke Signals and Julie Holland's The Pot Book is something I want on my shelf; I read it via public library and dug her research and style.

                                        Poet-novelist Professor Matthew Gavin Frank

Getting back to "fiction" (I'll explain the quotes in a bit), T. Coraghessan Boyle's Budding Prospects illustrated how hard it can be to cash in on America's biggest cash crop if you don't know what you're doing, have bad luck, and are kinda lame. That's some mordant stuff. Harsh, even. But the sentences flit like the tiny starry flame of a roach behind a barn in a Sonoma County pitch black night. Even better - to my poetic ears and eyes and oh hell entire nervous system - was Jonathan Lethem's Chronic City. Although it takes place on the East Coast, the novel, like Robert Anton Wilson's books, will always function as a reliable contact high if I don't have any of the sticky icky lying around. (Charitable friends give some to me every now and then - possibly for the entertainment value of the buzzed talking OG? - 'cuz I can't afford to buy it.) The allusions, the pop culture guru's bizarre contrarian yet learned opinions on everything, and his seeing of conspiracies everywhere...would be enough. But the influence of Philip K. Dick, coupled with Saul Bellow (!) and Hitchock's Vertigo...I'm feeling buzzed just writing about it.

                             photographer unknown, but looks like a pot farm to me

Alright: Pot Farm, by an assistant professor of creative writing at Northern Michigan University, had at first glance an enticing title, cool cover art...but it was thin (223 pages) (this seems a bit light, man!) and it was on U. of Nebraska Press, so I had my doubts. I was skeptical this stuff would be any good. I had never heard of Matthew Gavin Frank. I tried it anyway.

This one's a "creeper" as we said back in high school: it's filed under "fiction" in my library, but this was one book that could easily be given a Dewey Number and filed under non-fiction, say with Julie Holland's and Martin Lee's books; there's enough of the sociological/ethnographical this-is-what-it's-culturally-like-working-on-a-pot-farm-in Northern-California-ishness to it. In my eyes, the mixed approach in the novel makes it guerilla-ontological; the structure alternates subtly between poetry and ethnographic "facts" and I felt mentally disjointed, and I'm freak enough to admit I do enjoy that buzz.

And yet: it's filled with astonishingly great poetic writing, and Frank - an itinerate writer, who's worked in vineyards in Italy and restaurants in Key West and who knows what in New Mexico, married a Swedish girl who quit being a nun, is a Chicago boy, widely traveled and no stranger to living in tents - enchants with his poetic prose to the point where, despite the well-researched facts about the legal status of cannabis in California, how a large crop is cured, how any number of local/state/federal cops can do violent harm to you with impunity (including local "militias," something I didn't know), that farms employ spotters/snipers housed high up in redwoods to protect their interests, how pot farm owners gave many of the victims of Katrina good jobs, how the economy in Northern California changes overnight when the harvest is in (there's a surreal, carnivalesque chapter 10 about being on the scene in a small town in the cannabis-steeped economy of Mendocino County, waking up to the sudden smell of the pot harvest and money and the...uhhhhh..."free spirits" that attend this scene, mostly in the streets, and I found it contact-high-ish), this feels like poetry.

Just the ethnographic factual-ness of what it's like living on a large pot farm in Mendocino County...but I can see why librarians are filing it in fiction. Yea...(Why am I using ellipses there? Why the frag sentences? The commas above and not semicolons? Why?)

It's autobiographical, although Professor Frank is steeped in his postmodernism enough he uses the device of a baldly stated "I am an unreliable narrator" (because I was stoned/want to tell a good story/human memory is all-too fallible/my notes are illegible so I'll just say this/I can't remember if I dreamed this or if it really happened to tell you the truth, etc) throughout. That aspect alone may have turned librarians toward the fiction section. But - I think - it's all true! Hell: it may as well be. It harmonizes with my intuition well enough. (What does that even mean?)

(If it's not "true" - and I've read a few interviews with Frank - he's a better fake than Carlos Castaneda, no doubt!)

                   Fiercely secretive sphinx-like recluse Thomas Pynchon, on The Simpsons

And it's about loved ones dying and death, how your childhood bedroom mixes in with your adult life somehow, and how listening to your co-workers for their poetic minds' utterances can make life worth living, and the awkwardness of being an itinerate writer, wondering what "home" means, what it means to be with the chronically ailing and downtrodden. And yet, most delightful: the characters and then Frank's virtuoso phanopoeia! His melodious prose, his evocation of memories surrounding family and upbringing, his luminous details: read this book!

A few years ago, I read Michael Pollan's book The Botany of Desire, and there's some terrific non-fiction writing about cannabis in it. In one passage he discusses the findings of Israeli chemist Raphael Mechoulam, who discovered the structure of THC and that the body makes its own THC analogues, called the anandamides, and how both neurochemicals help us to forget, which is very important. (Or, this is what I remember Pollan writing about; I don't have the book on hand and I might be mixing it up with someone else?) We take forgetting for granted, but if we didn't have anandamides flowing through our exquisite little neurochemistry sets, we'd remember far too much trivial stuff! Who cares, what can it possibly matter, if the 97th car you passed on your way to work was a parked 1994 Toyota, red with a slight dent on the driver's side? There are millions of things we encounter every day, just puttering around the house, that are more than worth forgetting. Think about it.

Then forget it.

Of course, smoking pot tinkers with this set a bit, but many of us know it's worth it. I mean, if it wasn't for cannabis alleviating pain and making suffering more tolerable, while making food, music, colorful speech, jokes and sex even better than those things already "are" (and don't get me wrong: those things are "good" enough as they "are"), then the drug would be utterly worthless.

With that in mind, Pot Farm is worth reading if only for the gorgeous poetic prose, and the little instances of almost Pynchonesque whackiness, like the origins of Fred Flintstone's joyous "Yabba Dabba Do!" as the horn sounds for him to get off work. Trickster etymology, stoned, involving a Thai meth-like drug, the phenomenology of working a rough job, a Hanna-Barbera conspiracy theory, etc. (see pp.53-54)

Where was I? Oh yea: Mechoulam's findings and I was reading Pollan. I...oh yea!: followed up Pollan with a reading of Paul Krassner's One Hand Jerking: Reports From An Investigative Satirist. I know I did this because I made notes of it. Anyway, in a piece seemingly flung far from Pollan, about how politicians have evaded tough questions by saying they "forgot," Krassner cited from a passage in the neuroscience journal Neuron, about findings in memory and the hippocampus. Then, he quoted his old friend Wes "Scoop" Nisker's The Big Bang, The Buddha, and the Baby Boom - a book I'd happened to have read a year or so before:

"Recent research in molecular biology has given us a clue to the connection between THC, the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana, and the actual experience of getting high. It turns out that our own body produces its own version of THC and that the human brain and nervous system have a whole network of receptors for this cannabinoid-like substance. That means you've got a stash inside you right now, and nobody can even bust you for it. Our body's natural THC was discovered by Israeli neuro-scientists, who named it anandamide, from the Sanskrit word for 'inner bliss.' The scientists believe that our system produces this THC equivalent to aid in pain relief, for mild sedation, and also to help us forget, because if we remembered everything that registers in our senses from moment-to-moment, we would be flooded with memory and could not function. So anandamide helps us edit the input of the world by blocking or weakening our synaptic pathways, our memory lanes." (p.148 of Krassner's book. I don't recall the pagination from Nisker's book, largely because of anandamide or its analogues found in flowering plants. It does seem like Jorge Luis Borges foresaw or posited what a faulty anandamide system would look like when he wrote his immortal and literally unforgettable "Funes the Memorious.")

Sorry for the above being somewhat repetitious, but it's good for the memory. What goes around comes around?

I end with an apt passage from Pot Farm:

They both pronounce the word 'equivalent' as if they had invented it moments ago. In their mouths it seems so new, deserving of endless repetition. Of course, they're probably high. Of course, I am too. Who remembers? When a brain cell falls into the cerebral spinal fluid, and not a single of his compatriots is alive to hear it, does he, in attempting to recall the truth, make a sound?

From Living in a Dystopian Science Fiction Novel to Living in a Watergate-Era Paranoid Thriller in One Week

Those of my fellow intellectual paranoids with a taste for great mid-to-late 1970s Hollywood thrillers like 1975's Three Days of the Condor to Alan J. Pakula's rousing 1974 Parallax View to Pakula's 1976 All The President's Men...and from there my consciousness mind-melds with all the times I spent viewing and re-re-re-viewing, late at night, alone in the dark, The Conversation, Chinatown, Cutter's Way, 1940s films noir, later-than 1979 stuff like Silkwood and Blow Up...and combined with my readings of 20th century history, books on the CIA, Robert Anton Wilson and Philip K. Dick and Thomas Pynchon, JFK...I could go on ad nauseum. Anyway: if this tableau resonates, read on.

Okay, so the NSA is watching you read this right now. Let's try to forget that for a moment and go back to a simpler time, a time that the summer of 2013 is trying to rival but just can't. Not yet, at least. The summer of 1975? Let's go back there. I was too young to "get it" but years later I derived numerous garish intellectual paranoia-amphetamine-like thrills from reading about the almost daily national dispatches of what were then new(!) discoveries by the Church Committee (Sen. Frank Church of Idaho), about the history of the CIA, FBI, NSA, etc. Try to imagine a time when we thought the CIA only gathered "intelligence" and no one knew what "covert operations" were, and the long-hairs who had been telling us and writing about the CIA overthrowing democratically elected leaders and installing fascist dictators friendly to Yale Men and Wall Street were "fringe" or "lunatics." It all seems so quaint now, but remember: we're in the Summer of '75.

                                         see http://www.privacysos.org/church

Revelations about Hoover and the FBI's antidemocratic maneuvers appeared almost daily in things called "newspapers," which were actually made of paper, and people actually read them. Research tells us that it was quite common to have the "news" delivered via car, truck, or bicycling youngster, to one's own driveway, or even doorstep. Think of it like this: newspapers were like Internet, only you got ink stains on your fingers, and the national security apparatus only noted that you subscribed.

Nixon's resignation and Ford's pardon of Nixon were fresh in Unistatian minds. So was Vietnam, just ending. So were the SLA, the Weather Underground, a new consciousness about oil-rich Sheiks, and...

Everything was topsy-turvy and not like the America you were taught about in your compulsory schooling, and if you were somewhat educated and had a sense of justice, you realized the cops were on the side of The Man, and even if you were a cop (Serpico) or a CIA analyst (Three Days of the Condor), there were murderous, corrupt, unsavory characters you worked side-by-side with.

The Illuminatus! appeared and spread among the underground cognoscenti. It was the perfect thing to chase Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow with; it had more laffs.

The world was rapidly being taken over by the Military-Industrial-Entertainment-Banking-Organized Crime-Complex, and only intrepid seekers/reporters/wizened citizens could do anything about it. How to regain your wits in the face of it all - the news and the films - in 1975? How to retain some semblance of sanity?

Richard Hofstadter, a brilliant academic, had written the seminal rationalist's text on "the paranoid style" in Unistatian history. But the news seemed to be overtaking his thesis. Or maybe it was the drugs. Or maybe the news, the drugs, the films, the novels, and talking to your friends about all those things.

                                            Carl Oglesby, SDS spokesman and later
                                            professor of political science at MIT and 
                                            Dartmouth. A writer/musician/academic.
                                            His book The Yankee and Cowboy War
                                            is one of the great works in what Peter 
                                            Dale Scott calls "deep politics"

Then one of SDS's braintrustees, Carl Oglesby wrote an article for Ramparts in 1974, after Nixon resigned. Titled "In Defense of Paranoia," Oglesby argued, as Francis Wheen wrote in his difficult-to-set-down history of this period, Strange Days Indeed: The 1970s: The Golden Age of Paranoia:

"Instead of leading to political madness, the paranoid style might be the necessary prerequisite for retaining one's political sanity - an echo of the 'anti-psychiatry' popularised at the time by R.D. Laing, who held that schizophrenics and paranoids were the only people sane enough to see that the world is deranged. The Hofstadter paradigm was shattered, and has been irreparable ever since. 'Since the assassination of John F. Kennedy,' Norman Mailer wrote in 1992, 'we have been marooned in one of two equally intolerable spiritual states, apathy or paranoia.' The Illuminatus! Trilogy, that key to all mythologies of the early Seventies, features an anarchist sect called the Crazies whose political position is deliberately unintelligible but seems to encompass the worship of Bugs Bunny and study of the Tarot as well as 'mass orgies of pot smoking  and fucking on every street corner.' One of the Crazies explains: 'What the world calls sanity has led us to the present planetary crisis and insanity is the only viable alternative.'" (pp.16-17)

Violent Death of a Great Journalist
Which brings me to the death of Michael Hastings, a couple of days ago. Local Los Angeles TV news's coverage is HERE. David Sirota's obit at Salon. David Weigel, on Hastings, at Slate. Rachel Maddow, from her MSNBC show, HERE. 7 1/2 minutes from the Current TV show The Young Turks, where I felt like I got to "know" Hastings, HERE. Rolling Stone's obit, HERE.

Reading about his death jolted me back into the idiosyncrasies of watching something like Parallax View yet again, late at night, all's quiet, everyone asleep but me, looking for a paranoid fix. Warren Beatty is a radical reporter who only cares about getting to the truth.  It's Clinton or Bush43 or Obama in the White House, but I'm suddenly in the weltanschauung of artistic paranoid intellectuals circa late 1974. Why? Imprinting?

And then back again to my imagination of the crazy summer of 1975 (when, in truth, I was almost totally oblivious of all this ideation, being far too young to yet be warped by all this).

Hastings seemed to have been working on raising awareness of what he saw as the violation of free speech and persecution of another Enemy of the State, Barrett Brown, who was/is a spokesman for the Hacktivist group Anonymous. Here's Glenn Greenwald on the Brown situation. Here's a "Free Barrett Brown" site that includes Michael Hastings as a supporter.

Goddamn. This is all so...garish. To my nervous system...I don't like living in a dystopian science fiction novel. Nor do I enjoy living in a Watergate-era paranoid thriller-world. Or if I have to live in one of those, it feels like it's only fair for me to be able to shelve the book or stop the DVD, go outside and get some fresh air and sunshine, water the plants and exchange jokes with my neighbor, and I dunno...skip along whistling "Beth You Is My Woman Now"...?

I'm not saying rogue LAPD or some of Stanley McChrystal's men or some brutish operatives from the Republicans or Democrats (Hastings, being a rare True Journalist, had enemies in both parties) conspired to kill Hastings. His body was burned beyond recognition. Who knows what happened? Alcohol? Sleep-deprivation? It's probably Just One Of Those Things. (Yea...)

What I will admit is that I'm one of those who has meditated and analyzed and cogitated and fed my poetic faculty such a gawdawful amount of suspicion and paranoia about "official" stories, that it's only natural for me to suspect that just maybe...

And any of you who've been through a similar upbringing, are of a similar caste of mind, and possibly, of a similar mental age...will know exactly what I mean here. I will not spell it out. Just watch Parallax View after immersing yourself in "the news" for three hours a day for a week, reading Robert Anton Wilson in your "spare" time.

With Hastings's death, I experienced a "flashback" to a time I didn't experience when it occurred. It's my "historical imagination." I force-fed myself this stuff at a later date - of my own volition, I remind myself - when I had become "of age." By "stuff" I mean: probably the historical truth that most Unistatians can't face up to, or refuse to acknowledge. And, concomitant to all of this is the present-day world backdrop of confirmation of all the worst things we could have imagined from our own State, with its historically unprecedented technical apparatus to...well, know that you're reading this right where you are sitting now. And maybe you feel, lately, that you live in a particularly byzantine spy novel, given the knowledge. Or a Watergate-era Hollywood thriller. Or maybe you've read this far and you think this OG person is a loon and if so, bless you, blissful person...

I really don't mean to be glib or flippant about Hastings's death; I admired the guy. It's a huge loss for what I call the "truth."

 But maybe I'm so...damaged (?) that I noticed, in the hour or so after I began reading of his 4AM crash near Highland and Melrose...that somehow 1970s-era Robert Redford or Al Pacino or Warren Beatty might have known who was behind it. There are circuits in the brain that, if not paid attention to, can not distinguish between "reality" and "fiction." Or collective hallucination...Do I need to get back into therapy?

And...

Will the Summer of 2013 keep its momentum going and give the Summer of 1975 a run for its money? Stay tuned. (There is no one with even half the guts of Frank Church in congress today, except maybe...Ron Wyden?)

A friend asked me the other day, re: the NSA/Snowden fallout:
-Are you keeping up?

-(Me): Yea, but I'm not sure how much more I can hack for now; I'm reaching critical mass. Maybe I'm gettin' old, man. I need a break. Let's hike the redwoods all day, STAT!

The key, as I see it, is to find a ground between Mailer's apathy and paranoia, to be creative, have a good time, get high, do good for someone else, get paid, and get home in time for dinner.

Trailer for 1974's Parallax View:

Of Montaigne and Names

"Whatever variety of herbs there may be, the whole thing is included under the name of salad. Likewise, under the consideration of names, I am here going to whip up a hodgepodge of various items."

-Montaigne, "Of Names," Complete Works of Montaigne, trans. by Donald Frame

I'll take some of Montaigne's "items" and riff my own hodgepodge off of those. If you're gonna ride on another writer's coattails, you could do worse than ride on Montaigne's.

"Item, it is a trifling thing, but nevertheless worth remembering for its strangeness, and written down by an eyewitness, that Henry, duke of Normandy, son of Henry II, King of England, held a feast in France where the assembly of nobles was so great that when they divided up for sport into groups according to the similarity of names, in the first company, that of the Williams, there were seated at the table a hundred and ten knights bearing that name, without counting the ordinary gentlemen and servants."

Aye, and the Williams - in Unistat - are so very much with us. It comes in 4th, currently, among popular surnames. My own surname ranks just ahead of it. I have two very dear friends who live together and their last names are Williams and Brown. Oddly, there is no Smith that I can think of in our social circle, but no one's catching the Smiths in Unistat for awhile, as my surname, while doing pretty well in 2nd place, is still 500,000 behind the Smiths. You could empty New York, Los Angeles and Chicago (around 13 million people, according to a 2011 guess based on the 2010 census) and replace every citizen with only those people whose last names fit in Unistat's Top 10 (Smith, Johnson, Williams, Brown, Jones, Miller, Davis, Garcia, Rodriguez, and Wilson) and the number comes out to around 13 million.

                                                Robert Smith of The Cure

      

Now, I've always been envious of my friends with odd surnames, because my name has always felt too garden-variety. It's not a good writer's name. There were three of us with the same first and last name in my junior high school. Meanwhile, my best friend's last name was Hogshead, which really catches your eye, eh? Hogshead feels old-timey British and it's a unit of measurement: it's 63 gallons of wine, or 64 gallons of beer, which doesn't make sense to me, but there you go.

My name gets used in jokes as a stand-in for penis. "Richard Johnson" will receive gales of laughter from certain folk of adolescent mind. (I admit it: I laughed the first time too.) "Dick Johnson holds the best and biggest balls! Everyone wants to come." 

That kinda thing. 

Here's a short article on Big Data that deals with the current theme:

Beneath Every City Is A Labyrinth of Last Names

Back to Montaigne:

"Item, there is a saying that it is a good thing to have a good name, that is to say credit and reputation. But also, in truth, it is advantageous to have a handsome name and one that is easy to pronounce and maintain."

An article in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, linked to in this Wired article, suggests we're subconsciously affected by first names in all sorts of non-logical ways. Our brains favor information that is easy to use ("fluency"), which reminded me of my studies of the quantifications of beauty: pretty faces are easier to process, because of their symmetry, and we've evolved to like that which is easy. So even though, as that very cool old Fleetwood Mac song said, "I can't sing/I ain't pretty/And my legs are thin...," I probably shouldn't complain too much about having a "boring" last name. Or a boring first one, for that matter.

(Adam Gopnik wittily writes about his "lowly" name.)

Montaigne:

"I have observed that King Henry II could never call by his right name a gentleman from this part of Gascony; and to one of the queen's maids of honor he even proposed to give the general name of her family, because that of her father's house seemed to him too awkward." 

Freud had an ingenious (and probably over-complicated) theory about forgetting names. It's worth reading if only because of very recent neurobiological research on memory that suggests he may not have been that far off. But the best explanation I've seen about forgetting names is that we're just not paying attention. It's as if we don't care. People who are more interested in other people and relationships tend to not forget names as easily as most of us do. However, this business of meeting people at a party and instantly forgetting their names (and they yours) has always been a function - for me, at least - of information overload. I'm being introduced, hearing names but not listening because their faces or what they're wearing or the new social environment, the room, some painting, whatever...is capturing my attention. Information is flowing into me more strongly from those other sources than someone's name. Their immediate phenomenal presence/impression crowds out the name, all-too-often.

(David Carradine named his kid "I.P. Freely"? (Note 1) This somehow lends sense to the now-knowledge that Carradine was into autoerotic asphyxiation. What ever happened to "Grasshopper"? But I digress...)

Josh Foer in his book on becoming a memory champion, Moonwalking With Einstein, gives some hints about how to remember the names of an entire roomful of new people. It all starts with linking the name to something about the way the person looks.

Our good man Montaigne:

"And Socrates considers it worthy of a father's care to give his children attractive names."

Well then I'd hazard that Kim Kardashian and Kanye West - who reportedly want to name their forthcoming child "North" - haven't read Plato. But then Frank and Gail Zappa were no dummies and they (memorably?) named their kids Dweezil, Moon Unit, Ahmet Emuukha Rodan, and...just wow: "Diva Thin Muffin Pigeen." (Only Tom Robbins comes up with names like that, and they are for characters in his projected worlds.) David Bowie named a kid "Zowie." Googling this jit can land you links to all sorts of atrocities. Now, "experts" have said that naming your kids ultra-weirdly can harm them (even Ashley and Shannon for boys become a problem when adolescence hits).

I remember taking a Psychology class in college and the topic of names and how they affect people came up. With my faulty memory, I recall the Prof repeating what we now know to be an urban legend: that a family named Hogg had two daughters and named them Ima and Ura. Ima Hogg really existed (and she looks sorta hot in the pic that accompanies the Wiki), but there was no Ura.

However, there really is a Soleil Moon Frye, which conjurs up an image of the sun shooting out freakishly long tendrils of flares and scorching the moon (and I guess I'm watching it all from a spaceship). And my favorite NBA player's name, "Zaza Pachulia," actually exists.

Because my own name is easy and therefore pleasing, but dull and faceless to me, I think if I ever get published as a "real" writer (not some overweening dipshit blog-head), I might go with something really stand-out, like "Zaza Zappa Hogg."

                                     Dweezil Zappa, a fine guitar player in his own right

Addenda: Crapper and Titzling
Thomas Crapper did not invent the toilet, but he did exist and was a plumber and did help to popularize the toilet.

Otto Titzling, unfortunately, did not invent the bra and appears to have not even had existence. My mom told me Titzling invented the bra, and I believed her. Why? Because mom and dad together told me, laffingly, that Thomas Crapper invented the toilet and I didn't believe them, so I looked it up myself, age 12 or so. Danged if mom and dad weren't putting me on! (I found a dopey source that gave too much credit to Crapper.) So mom was probably telling me the truth - although laffing when she told me of Titzling - and I lazily accepted it for years. Why? It was a good little joke! It's too much fun to believe and it seems to do little harm to, when given the chance, promulgate the idea that a guy named "Titzling" invented the bra. At least it turns the conversation towards breasts; that's always fun. While it lasts. If you look at his first name - Otto - one of the "O" breasts is slightly bigger than the other, which is statistically normal for women. So you see, all in all, very convincing that "Otto Titzling" invented the bra.

Convincing if you're a 15 year old boy, maybe?

What's your favorite real or fake name?

Note 1: Better sources give his offspring's name as "Free" and not "I.P. Freely." Furthermore, Wikipedia tells me "Free" changed his name to "Tom." Free/Tom's mom is Barbara Hershey. Me suspects someone was being unkind to David, Free, or both with the "I.P." joke found on numerous websites.

Xmas-time and Memories of Warm Decembers in the Suburbs of Los Angeles

Almost everyone on our block had a swimming pool in their backyard, including us. You had to: the daily highs seem to average 90 Fahrenheit from June until September in the smoggy, endless East San Gabriel Valley sprawl near Los Angeles. 

But the few times the topic's come up with friends who didn't grow up in LA, they wondered if we ever went swimming in our pool on Christmas day, and the answer is no. (At least not that I recall.) Why? Because, starting around Halloween, Los Angeles becomes subject to hot, dry winds called "Santa Ana." And it's Fall, and when these incendiary winds sweep in from the Mojave Desert, your pool will become filled with leaves and palm fronds. If you were like me, and you were in charge of keeping the pool clean, you just covered the thing until April; it's not worth the work considering how little you'll use your pool on the shortened school-filled days of late Fall and throughout Winter.

Christmas was almost always presented to us through movies and TV as having a snowy backdrop. It had once snowed at our house, one Winter, during a freakish cold front moving down from Alaska, and our dichondra lawn was dusted with white, and this miraculous snow melted in an hour; that's as close as we came to the Madison Avenue/Currier and Ives/It's a Wonderful Life idea of how Christmas was supposed to look.

I believe I liked the idea of snow at Christmas, but knew I'd never get it, which was okay with me: I'd been cold before, when we stayed in the Sierras one time. I think by age 14 I had negotiated the "cozy" feeling of snowbanks and Christmas lights in the irreal reality of TV and film, but I knew we had it good when we went out to play with our new stuff on Christmas day in 75 degree temperature. Why? Because often, a week later, the Rose Parade in nearby Pasadena was shown all over the country, and famously, it would be sunny and warm and it made the real estate agents giddy: people in Iowa or Pennsylvania or some other place frozen over for months would see the parade on TV and would decide, once and for all, to settle down in Southern California. And could you blame them? 

So, Christmas comes and goes. In my dreamlike childhood and teenaged memories of balmy Christmas days in the quiet suburb of Los Angeles, none of us were truly "from here." Almost all of us had migrated a generation or two ago from somewhere else. Los Angeles itself had only really become a "city" in the 1880s. So, if your grandparents were all born in Los Angeles, your family was an exceedingly rare one. In fact, I personally knew no one who could claim that all four grandparents were from California. Often, mom and/or dad weren't even born in the state. My mother was born in Iowa, my father in Pasadena, but his father was from Michigan. This aspect of Southern California as destination led, I believe, to a permanent mode of psychological rootlessness, and it's part of what makes the state so wonderfully weird. 

Frank Lloyd Wright once said about this area of the world, "It is as if you tipped the United States up so all the commonplace people slid down there into Southern California." And the intellectual luminary, editor of The Nation and California historian Carey McWilliams answered back, "One of the reasons for this persistent impression of commonplaceness is, of course, that the newcomers have been stripped of their natural settings - their Vermont hills, their Kansas plains, their Iowa cornfields. Here their essential commonplaceness stands out garishly in the harsh illumination of the sun. Here every wart is revealed, every wrinkle underscored, every eccentricity emphasized."

                               snapshot of a small section of the San Gabriel Valley

What I remember most during the shortened December days of winter vacation from school was riding our bikes around town, listening to our new records, talking about girls at school, getting outside of ordinary feelings of time and schedules before the grind of school began again. 

Human Brains: Enchanted Looms, Electro-Colloidal Computers, Flying Lasagna, and Other Grey Matters

A Generalist trying to study and write about the human brain seems bound to tax attention: there's simply so much there to get all worked up over, especially since the 1990s "Decade of the Brain" and the resultant supernovae of imaging machines, knowledge of genes and epigenetics, experimental psychologies, and an ungainly amount of scientific data. No PhD in Neuroscience can keep up with all of it; one must specialize. We now have Neuroeconomics. Finally!

But the Generalist is at free play in the dense, massive fields.

I had wanted to do an entire blogspew on the materiality of the human brain, simply because I find descriptions of it so trippy. Full Disclosure: I have never held a human brain in my hands. But I've read and seen enough from people who have, or surgeons who have performed brain surgery, to palpably - in my imagination - "feel" the majesty of it all. But first: the human brain from another level: how we perceive or make "reality," and how tenuous it all seems.

Two Quotes From Disparate Recent Readings
We've learned a lot about how memory works in the last 20 years, but there's a lot left to learn. Just about any textbook minted in the last ten years will discuss how different declarative memory ("knowing that") works versus procedural memory ("knowing how"...like navigating a stairwell, riding a bike, or tying your shoes).

Discussing recent findings using imaging machines, Amiri, Lannon and Lewis write, "While explicit memory (basically: declarative- OG) is swift and capacious, a fallacious sense of accuracy attends its frequently erroneous returns. New scanning technologies show that perception activates the same brain area as imagination. Perhaps for this reason, the brain cannot reliably distinguish between recorded experience and internal fantasy." - A General Theory of Love, p.104

Before you go thinking about you and your friends and everyone you love here - not to mention how this might impact "personal responsibility" and the Law! - dig this quote from Douglas Rushkoff's Program Or Be Programmed: Ten Commands For The Digital Age:

"But the latest research into virtual worlds might suggests the lines between the two (digital models of reality and our own being-in-the-world models - OG) may be blurring. A Stanford scientist testing kids' memories of virtual reality experiences found that at least half the children cannot distinguish between what they really did and what they did in the computer simulation. Two weeks after donning headsets and swimming with virtual whales, half of the participants interviewed believed they had actually had the real world experience. Likewise, Philip Rosedale - the quite sane founder of the virtual reality community Second Life - told me he believes that by 2020, his online world will be indistinguishable from real life." - p.69

[Note: This all may dovetail mindblowingly with Nick Bostrom's ideas about humans being a computer simulation, which I touched on HERE, and this recent article, "Physicists May Have Evidence Universe Is A Computer Simulation". Caution: If you you're not familiar with these ideas yet and have wanted to do a psychedelic drug such as psilocybin mushrooms but can't find any, these ideas may prove an adequate substitute.]

Three Pound Universe: Dissection Witness
I liked Zoe Williams's brief article on her experience in the room with a neuropathologist and his "special chopping board and really sharp knife." I'll watch anything on the science channels on TV that are about the materiality of the brain, and I can't get enough of reading about the sacred object you're using now to decode what I'm trying to say. For us, it seems plausible that the brain is the most complex object in the universe. And when Williams describes it as "jaundiced pallor and pronounced bulge, like pickled eggs," it activates those circuits in my own brain that have to do with...surrealism.

Maybe that's just me.

Dr. Gentleman, who seems to love his job of slicing and dicing recently deceased brains, works for a UK brain bank devoted to researching Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, and Multiple Sclerosis, roughly in that order. He can use the naked eye to read the sorts of suffering the human underwent. It's always interesting to hear about something like, for example, strokes.

"'It's pot luck with strokes,' he explains at one point - you can have a stroke and not notice. Or you can have a stroke that leaves you with a cystic cavity, or what a layperson might call, a big hole in your head."

Gentleman cuts away in front of the journalist, pointing out, "that's the main event; personality, executive function, reason." I find the high number of errors interesting: people while living had been diagnosed with some brain disease - they and their loved ones were at least given a name for their malady - and far more often than I would've thought, it was wrong, judging by the visual evidence of the physical insults of the person's actual brain. Clearly, we have a long road to hoe here.

All this stuff not only puts me in the mood of surrealism, but concomitant to this, in encountering the actual material brain, a combination of dreamlike wonder juxtaposed with ghastly existential terror, back to dreamlike wonder. And quite often a dark humor suffuses the scene.

If you're still interested in this stuff, HERE's another: cutting through the deeply-buried pineal gland. You can thank me later.

                                                            Richard Brautigan

Richard Brautigan's Brains, "Literally"
You can make this stuff up, but you must have an eldritch, poetic mind. But this story is true: poet J.J. Phillips wanted to do research on the counterculture novelist/poet Richard Brautigan (have you read Trout Fishing in America?). Stephen Gerz tells the story in his edifying book blog Booktryst in a post "Novelist Richard Brautigan's Brains At Bancroft Library: A Grand Guignol Adventure," which you must read; I can't do it justice.

Maybe I should've posted this on Halloween.

I take some odd and demented delight in knowing most of the action here took place in my neighborhood. The owner of Serendipity Books, Peter Howard? His legend grows by the year. Did he know for sure that's why some of Brautigan's papers were so messy? Phillips had to call in a coroner to confirm. And what of the librarians at the UC Berkeley Bancroft Library? Phillips thought they were acting "squirrelly and obfuscatory." And I think Phillips has a point: what if Brautigan had had Mad Cow disease?

Being a fan of Codrescu, I can only imagine his reaction upon hearing the story. Wow.

Another Poet
I'd like to leave you with a link to "Brain," by C.K. Williams. Here the brain is traversed by the poet, a cavern, a maze of corridors...and where is a comforting soul?

Who knows what's real? All "I" - this is my brain speaking here - know is, I'm hungry and it's time for dinner, so I bid this spew adieu.

My Aurora, Colorado: Personal Reflections and the Radical Subjectivity of Memories

[This blog post, while prompted by the Aurora/Batman massacre, is more about the author's memory and imagination. It's autobiographical and reflects only superficially on the heinous crime of a few days ago. - the OG]

Yet Another All-American Crazed Shooting Prompts the OG's Memory
I recently read that Al Franken's childhood partner in comedy writing/performing, Tom Davis, died at age 59. They later went on to concoct some surrealistic-goofy-psychedelic-inspired bits for the early version of Saturday Night Live. I'd read Davis's memoir, Thirty-Nine Years of Short-Term Memory Loss. Davis said that, even before he'd begun his career as a heavy user of drugs, he'd had trouble remembering, and when he'd finished the first draft of the book (which came out in 2009), it was a total mess. Memory problems caused the jumble, or so I recall I inferred. So he and editors decided to order the book another way. I found a deep subtext in the book very sad, though it was written by a fairly cerebral comedian who mostly related anecdotes about people like Dan Ackroyd and Timothy Leary. I did learn that at least one of our 100 U.S. senators had done acid and liked it.

Tom Davis's many-year short-term memory problems: I'm a lot like that. I had a friend I've since lost contact with. He could recall where he was in just about any month and year. I'd say, "April of 1979?" and his eyes would slowly roll toward the ceiling, look off to the right a bit and he'd be silent for a few moments, then begin with where he lived, what he was doing (he was more than ten years older than me, but was a Fulbright Scholar), what events were happening around that time in his social world and then, world events.

My memory of childhood up to the time I began writing every day in a journal (September 1989), is totally unlike my friend's memory. My memory is dreamy, and I sometimes find myself encountering my brain throwing out odd snippets of memory from my childhood and I think, "Was that really me? Or am I imagining this happened?" "I think this happened before that happened, because of...wait...when did that happen? Or am I mixing up two different events?" This is one of the reasons I habitually chronicle my days now. But even logging the day's events and a few reflections in a journal - unless one writes a true diary, like Samuel Pepys or Anais Nin or other famous writers who wrote readable diaries - seems to miss the subjective chains of analog-feelings of that day. The gist, the poetic pith of experienced life at that time, is what I'm tryna say...As the years wag on, those earlier days seem so much more...fictional to me. But they weren't!

When my parents separated, my brothers and I were given the choice of staying with mom, in suburban Los Angeles, where we'd grown up, or relocating to Aurora, Colorado, where my dad had moved. I spent my 16th and 17th years in Aurora.

Reading About the Aurora Massacre and Trying To "Place" It All, Given My Fallible Memory
I'm an extreme owl, so I was wide awake when the news that the midnight showing of the new Batman flick in Aurora had witnessed an unspeakably horrific bloodbath, for "reasons" we're still trying to figure out.

I was working on a few other projects, but the idea of Aurora kept haunting me. Those years when I was 16 and 17, utterly lost, infused my consciousness. Disparate snippets of memory flitted through my mind, and those prompted others. One tries to make things cohere, without invention. I had not thought much about my time there. Why? I don't know. It seems like that kid was someone else. Yes, I admit some sort of quasi-depersonalization here. I guess I needed my dad at 16. I'd come from sunny smoggy temperate LA 'burbs to some section of the country I had no idea about, except Denver was a Big City, and it was a mile high, literally. And that it would snow, and I'd never lived anywhere it snowed.

I had very long hair and was, at 16, about 120 pounds and maybe 5 foot 9. (I was a very late bloomer who didn't max out at his present height of six feet until age 20.) All of my friends in California had long hair. All of them. Look at a picture of the guys in Aerosmith from around 1977: we all wanted to look that cool. We were desperate, delusional, suburban. In Aurora, I quickly found that you're either a Freak or a Jock. My hair meant immediately I was a Freak. It's not that the Jocks beat the shit out of us (although I'm sure that happened); it was more like they didn't even acknowledge our existence. A Jock doesn't want to be seen by other Jocks talking to a Freak. I remember them not making eye contact with me. (Although...<ahem> funny story: I was once arrested with a well-known Jock, but now is not the time to go into it.)

I remember the Jocks well. Sports is almost a religious pursuit in Aurora, and the Jocks all had buzz cuts or very short hair, and lifted weights, played on the teams. The girls could be cheerleaders, flag carriers, pom-pom girls, and members of about two or three other Jock-like groups. It was important for a kid to feel they belonged to the right group. The Jocks owned the school. I was not in their world, and Freaks and Jocks occupied entirely separate worlds. All in all I think, in my dim emotional memory of Aurora, that it was basically dominated by WASP-y rednecks. (I think the demographic has gotten much more African-American since I left.)

I had a best friend and few others. But then I'd always been the kind of kid who had one really close friend, and we spent almost all our time together. I remember we took a badminton class together at Aurora's Gateway High. When you go to high school in Aurora - or at least when I went there - the day's almost entirely indoors. I'd grown up spending a good part of all my school days outdoors, when it was sunny and warm year-round. How odd to go to a high school so overwhelmingly carpeted.

In this badminton class, one fine - probably snowy - day, my best friend and another Freak decided to slip away into the area of the gym between the outside and the inside: you leave the gym via heavy doors and enter a small, dark cramped space filled with chairs piled up, and gym equipment, folding tables, etc. Possibly a locked door leading to a box office. Another set of heavy doors lead to the outdoors. We thought this was a safe place to smoke some pot before we returned to hit the birdie with the Jocks and some pretty girls who'd have nothing to do with us because we were Freaks. A gym teacher - a former Mr. Canada winner in bodybuilding, a Mr Demski with a 50-inch chest - caught us and we were suspended for a week. Which was a relief. My dad knew it, too. And when it came down to it, I acquiesced to the vice-principle at Gateway High School, who thought I'd be better off in the "continuation" school across town. With all the other Freaks. So I did that.

Dream-like Memory and Psychogeography of Aurora
Often we'd skip school and play pinball all day at one of the two vast indoor shopping malls. The police would often kill an hour of their day by stopping us, asking what we were doing, why we weren't in school, where did we live, where are our parents, why do we look so strange, etc. They'd act like they were going to arrest us. On what charges? Minors, loitering, truancy, acting suspiciously and there had been some crime in the area we had nothing to do with. Now I realize we were a good way for them to kill some time. We didn't have cars and hitch-hiked almost anywhere. Often some adult that picked us up had pot to smoke, or wanted some of ours. We'd "thumb it" to Del Mar Park, and sit around on a picnic bench and smoke dope and listen to older hippies with names like "Pinky" (who was a legend, I can't remember why) regale us with tales and knowledge, things we couldn't possibly learn in school. I remember a lot of learned arguments about who were the better rock guitarists: David Gilmour, Ted Nugent, Frank Marino, Robin Trower, or Hendrix. I brought up Jimmy Page and got shot down as a novice, not a valid connoisseur of lead breaks. Van Halen would explode in a year or so; Pinky and his friends had never heard him at this point. Anyway...

The first day I had to go to the new giant high school (where you must be either a Freak or a Jock), I didn't know anyone. It was terrifying. A bus picked up the kids in the neighborhood and drove them the three or four miles to the school. But because the weather was fine and I didn't know anyone on the bus, I chose to walk. I even chose to walk home, though I'd gotten to know some kids in my neighborhood and they strongly urged me to take the bus with them. Walking was a way to be with my interiority. Then, a blizzard hit one day during school hours. I had on long underwear, jeans, two pairs of socks, and heavy boots, like all the kids. And a big down jacket and woolen hat. I thought I could make it home, no problem. I had never lived where it snowed.

Walking home, alone, in a blizzard? I got lost. I couldn't see the horizon. At the time, Aurora was filled with neighborhoods west of I-225, but east of it: vast stretches of flat fields, covered in what looked to me like wheat, but wasn't. I knew if I followed a main drag, Mississippi, I'd hit the big new middle school and its very large flat open fields of grass that surrounded it. I usually cut through the fields to get to my neighborhood. I was disoriented; in the white-out and blowing snow-cold I couldn't tell how far I'd been walking, and I couldn't see anything on the horizon. Few cars were on the road, and the road was covered in snow, so I at times wasn't sure I was even headed in the right direction. I began to panic. Oh, why didn't I get on the bus? I'd be home by now, in our brick house, warming up by the heat-vent, watching old re-runs of the 1950s Superman show with George Reeves, who died by gunshot at 45, officially a suicide, although some suspect murder or an accident. That show had the worst actors I'd ever seen on TV, so I was naturally fascinated.

I remember hearing the traffic for I-225, which was below a bridge that I walked over. Then, I happened onto the middle school. If I could just navigate through the blowing snow and wind across the field, I'd make it.

But the snow picked up. I was freezing, the snow was high and my walking very slow. You sink with every step in the piles of new snow. Every step is a minor digging out of the previous one before you take another step. I was starting to think I wouldn't make it. My face felt frozen, the wind was loud and swirling (as I remember it). In the field, I lost my way. I couldn't orient by sight. But I knew I had to keep walking or probably die. They say people fall asleep in the snow and cold and die peacefully, but I think my dad would be really upset if he had to tell my mom I'd died walking home from school in a blizzard. I was both scared and embarrassed at my naivete. All the other kids were wise to blizzards, having grown up with them. I had never thought a three or four mile walk could be so treacherous. Especially a flat walk.

There are very few hills in Aurora. The flatness was somehow menacing. In the many years since then, when I've thought of my years in Aurora, the flatness of it now seems like a distinctive feature that somehow relates to the meanness I encountered there, and the hardened sex-role stereotypes that the kids all adhered to. But I'm not sure why. Maybe it's just my nervous systems's groping to storify, to make sense of my past. But maybe flatness and vast tracts of open fields, as far as the eye can see, do effect the "character structure" or "local consciousness" of the populace and maybe the flatness and the six months or so of intermittent freeze-your-ass-off have something to do with the psychogeography I experienced. Or maybe it's certain gene pools that ended up there. Or all of the above and seventeen - thousand other things? (Then again, there were some awfully nice people. People who were nice even to a stick-figured and mentally ethereal 16 year old kid with a massive mop of hair. I do not wish to make things more simple than they need be.)

I remember seeing the houses lining Troy Street and knowing I was going to make it. When I got home, I felt euphoric. I remember taking my pants off and they were near-frozen; they began to stand up against the wall near the heater, then crumpled, as if exhausted.

Revisiting the Old Neighborhood(s) Using Google Street Scene Maps
Oh, my. I remember moving back to my hometown for my senior year in high school. My friends wanted to know what "Colorado" was like. They laughed when I told them that most kids there, when they found out I was from "California" immediately assumed all we did was surf all day.

I'm sure most of you have done something similar: after the Aurora shooting, with the concomitant cascade of memory shards flowing through my nervous system, I decided to look up my old address and "see" it via Google's street map thing, which, I can't get over it: is really trippy to me. I looked at my old house. I haven't been back there in nearly 30 years. It looked different, but pretty much how I remembered it. There were those gutters, so unlike the ones I grew up with in LA. I remember stepping into the gutters in the morning after a snow, and the ice would crack and you'd hear it continue to crack all the way down the street, punctuated with a few periods of silence. I "traveled" down the street via Google and took the route I would have if I walked to that high school (Gateway) that carried so many unpleasant memories for me. It's not far from where the shooting took place. What was staggering to me: all of those vast open wheat-like fields were now tract houses, Best Buy, Chuck-E-Cheese: the franchises that grow in suburban Unistat like bacteria in optimal, petri-dish conditions. No open space was left. It had been almost all open space, or as the capitalist mind says: "undeveloped." ("Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell." - Edward Abbey, if I remember correctly.) I tried to imagine how different my blizzard-walk-home would have been now. I found it hard to reconcile my longtime psychogeographic memories of the space between home and school, and what it looked like now. As I write this, I remember the feelings I had, using Google's amazing mapping technology in the hours after the shooting, and what a bygone era for Aurora I have, carrying around in circuits of neural pathways in my brain.

I can't say I was surprised about the development, intellectually. We all know this is What Happens. When I left Aurora for good, never to return, I recalled reading that it was the fastest-growing city in Unistat at the time. Indeed, it has doubled in population size since I lived there. There are now 325,000 or so. When I lived there, there were two high schools, but they were planning to build three more very quickly. And they have. They did. It's to be expected. And yet my perceptions were jarred. I had had "my" Aurora, one which I thought about fleetingly over the years, as if it were a dream. And in some sense, it may as well be a dream...

Late July and August in Aurora - this time of year - the weather is so beautiful! It'll be 74 degrees and dry and sunny and the Rockies are in 3-D, framing the western horizon, and you want to throw a frisbee in the park all day long and look at girls. And then an odd thing often happens: suddenly a carpet of high dark clouds appears off towards the Rockies. These clouds roll in, darken the sky, and it stays pleasantly warm at 4 in the afternoon, but it hails for 15 minutes, then almost as suddenly, the clouds have moved on, and the sun begins to set, and it's beautiful...the small hailstones now melted into the ground. I don't know if it only did this, sorta freakishly, when I lived there, but I do remember this as magical.

                     Here's a shot of the interior of Cinderella City, Englewood, Colorado.
                     It's near Littleton, and when I lived in Aurora, it was the largest 
                     indoor mall in the US. I ate some tainted cheese at their Taco Bueno
                     and got Salmonella Heidelberg, was in the hospital for nine days, 
                     and was discharged at 79 pounds, after nearly dying. Not that you'd
                     asked...

Littleton and Aurora and Colorado Springs: I Have No Analysis
A few blogs back, I wrote about the poet Noel Black. He'd gone to school and tried to "make it" in San Francisco and Brooklyn, but eventually made his way back to hometown Colorado Springs, where, poet-maverick that he is, is not only where he grew up, but where he'd still like to be, despite it being one of the most right-wing places in Unistat. He thinks the city needs people like him, and I think he's probably right. He faces animosity there, but he's a psychologically tough guy, having been raised by a lesbian mother and a father who died of AIDS. Black is made of sterner stuff than I; I grew up in a very conservative town in the sprawling 'burbs of Los Angeles and, though my father has since relocated back and lives there, I find it creepy to visit. They probably need people like me, but I am too cowardly to volunteer...What am I? Some sorta martyr? Not that I'm calling Noel Black a martyr...

Back to my memories of Aurora and Colorado.

My father was an outside salesman, which meant he drove a lot and took clients out to lunch, made deals. Once every couple of weeks - as I remember it - he had to drive to Colorado Springs. It was a long drive from Aurora. I remember him telling me I might have a rough time if I lived in Colorado Springs. This was around 30 years ago. I didn't understand immediately what he meant, but he implied they don't like skinny young guys with hair down past the middle of their back there. Now when I think of it, I find it hard to believe I was once so sheltered and naive. Apparently, Aurora was a nice place to weirdos like myself, compared to Colorado Springs.

When my parents were still together, in the suburbs near Pasadena, my brother and I knew two other boys that were our age. We shared baseball card collecting as a boyhood fascination. I remember their dad was a long-distance trucker who was gone for long periods. Eventually, they moved to Colorado, a year or two before my dad moved there. Five or so years later, when my brother and I moved to Aurora, my dad said he'd found where my childhood friends lived, in Littleton. He looked them up in the book, called their mom, and asked if it was okay if he brought us down to see her kids. A sort of reunion. My dad drove us to Littleton - not that far from Aurora - and dropped us off, saying he'd pick us up in a few hours. My memory of that day is hazy, but I do remember that the brothers seemed to be forcing it in embracing us and the memory of their old lives in California. They asked my brother and I if we wanted to go cruising. We said sure. They weren't old enough to drive, but they had a car, and somehow, they were driving.

We ended up sitting in the back seat while the two brothers of our childhood, and a friend of theirs, sat in front. They all scared me. Somehow these sweet brothers had, in five years, turned into some sort of white trash gangsters. I remember seeing a gun. I remember something about lots of undying animosity to the blacks in town. Our sweet boyhood friends had morphed into something I'd never encountered: juvenile delinquents with the potential for violence. We drove around the lower-middle class suburbs of Littleton, aimlessly, stopping every now and then so my old friends could talk to someone, without getting out of the car. I don't know if they were dealing. Maybe. I was too naive to understand what was going on. I remember wishing my dad had not contacted them. I was out of my element. I didn't even know how to fake being "cool" around these guys, who I can't believe I had known as such innocent, sweet, goofy, fun-loving kids only five years ago.

My dad, on the drive back, asked us if it was good to see our old friends, and I think I said yea, it was great. The way I remember this episode: I didn't have the language to tell my dad what I was feeling, so I let him know he'd been a good dad for reuniting us.

When Columbine happened, I was forced to think of that day again.

I have no decent analysis about my psychogeographic memories of Aurora and Littleton and their now-infamous massacres. All I can say is I don't understand why a citizen should be able to own an assault rifle. (And that, unfortunately, the NRA has far too much lobbying power in Unistat, a trivial observation at best.) All I feel I can predict with near-certainty is that We will finally have a serious national dialogue on guns and violence, until we forget about it in about six weeks, and then the next crazed shooter goes off, probably around Thanksgiving.

This is just one way some of my memory seems to work. Errr...how 'bout yours?

Here's Nobelist Daniel Kahneman, ostensibly talking about the cognitive "problem" of happiness, something we all want. I think he has some absolutely fascinating things to say about our experienced selves versus our remembered selves. It's 21 minutes, but, I think, "worth it" (<------that "time as money"metaphor yet again!), if you have the time: