Yesterday was a rough day…..

Yesterday was a rough day.  I didn’t sleep for crap and then I had a bad computer day.  I have one of those every six months or so.  Everything just goes whacky at once.  I couldn’t get the blog thing to work at all.  It took forever and when I tried to save what I had written, it wouldn’t save it and I would have to start all over again.  And another program I use wasn’t working, and I saw they were changing their server and I wondered if that was the problem.  But there was no way I could find out anything, because the blog is hosted on Yahoo, and trying to get in touch with anybody at Yahoo is like trying to get in contact with the Queen of England or something.  It takes like hours on the phone and you end up talking to somebody in India who knows real good English but nothing else.

 

everybodyserious

 

 

And anyway you never know where the problem is: with them, or with your computer, or maybe with the web browser you are using to get in contact with them, and then I wondered if the Java script was screwed up because I saw a new download was ready for that.  So it was like a huge confluence of bad computer stuff, and I spent too much of the day obsessively trying to figure out the problem by clicking on this and that and trying to clean out the guts of my computer in case something had gotten stuck in there and was clogging up the works.  Of course, when you clean out stuff there’s always the chance you will take out something your computer needs and messing stuff up even further.

And then we had this guy come over to give us a bid about putting in a window because we want, as part of the general cleanup, to turn our large walk-in closet into a small office for me.  And then another person came to give an estimate from a place called California Closets that specializes in closets, as you might have guessed, to see what they might do to most efficiently organize the small space in the large closet.  So by mid afternoon, I am ready to shot myself because I just hate construction stuff and waiting on people to get their butts moving and then being anxious about whether they will do it right or not, and of course there’s the issue of money.

Later on I began to realize that part of my foul mood had to do with the fact that this whole closet thing is part of the preparation we are trying to make for my retirement.  So like when I do get to that point I will be able to have a more organized living space.  And deep down inside, I get to feeling that this preparing for my retirement is like digging my own damn grave.

The grave digging idea was like driven in with a hammer when just before retiring I checked and saw I had an email from a guy I knew in college and he had sent along a picture of a number of us from back in college asking me if I could identify a couple of people in the picture, since he couldn’t remember.  And there I was in the picture—all bearded on the far right and my girl friend next to me and other people I had known forty years ago.  . Emotionally, psychologically I was back then so really far out of it that I just don’t know if I was really capable of knowing another person.  And that made me sad thinking of all I may have missed because I was so busy just trying to keep myself from falling apart.

But what the hell?

We don’t need no

I got an email yesterday morning saying the UC Regents were meeting at UCSB, where I work, and that the union to which I belong was going to be part of a rally protesting some of the things the Regents have been doing, like changing the pension plan for the worse, and continually allowing the costs of the medical plan to go up.  The pension plan is particularly irksome; they want to turn it into one of those two tier deals, with the guys in the second tier, newer hires, to get less than us old folks.  Also they want us all to start paying more straight out of our checks into the plan after years of not having as do so at all. 

 

lagoons

 

 

 

 

They say the plan is in danger of going bankrupt.  Now you would think that maybe they would have known there was going to be some crisis with the retirement plan what with the multitude of baby boomers, such as myself, coming down the pike.  I don’t know what the hell they were thinking about.  Surely, prudence would have dictated that we pay in, though in lesser amounts, over the years to insure the security of the plan.  Nobody would have squawked. But the increase they now propose is enormous.  What the hell ever happened to prudence—an 18th century virtue, I guess—and the Regents are all supposed to be big wigs with connections to business and money in all shapes and forms, and they didn’t know better. 

 

So I decided—well, ok—I would go over to the noon rally the union was supposed to be part of.  It was a long walk from the parking lot to the meeting place, and when I got there I couldn’t find any rally, so I wandered around the building, noticing as I did so cops every where, on the balconies, the stair wells, at every entrance to the hall where the Regents were meeting.  Eight or nine cops were hanging out at the main entrance to the hall; and I mean hanging out, just doing nothing.  So I went up to a group of them and asked if this is where the Regents were meeting.

 

They said yea, and did I want to go in since today was the public meeting.  Sure, why not, I said, and was directed around a little chain link barrier and before I knew it this guy was waving a metal detector all around me and making me empty every bit of metal from my pockets.  You would have thought I was a terrorist or something.  So I get into this huge hall, and the regents—there are sure a lot of them—were sitting there all suited up, and every one of them with a lap top in front of him or her—and they are jawing on about something to do with academic freedom, the UC system, and whether or not UC researchers have legally or illegally taken research money from tobacco interests.

 

This one guy goes on forever with some sort of vague and diffuse comment/question, and then this lawyer lady goes on forever with some vague and diffuse answer, and I doubt anybody understands any of it, since they are both talking legalese about some finding—I guess it was a finding—that a judge had made about academic freedom and doing business with tobacco companies.  So they talked and talked and some guy finally said maybe we should table this item, and move on to the next which was a report on the state budget for education.  I listened as long as I could stand it and left.

 

I was there—not that long I guess—maybe 30 minutes and never once heard the words “education” or “student” spoken.

Agony in the Air

I figure the topic of Michael Moore’s next mock-u-mentary will be called “Agony in the Air: Please Remain Seated!”  I don’t know how though he will be able to make himself out a representative of the little guy.  I mean the guy weighs 300 pounds; surely he flies first class.  If he doesn’t, he is a masochist.  But when normal every day newspapers and magazines start referring to air travel as an “excruciating ordeal” or “like Chinese water torture” you figure the topic is ripe for the plucking. 

When I didn’t have any money—which was mostly before 1980—I would occasionally take the Greyhound Bus to get somewhere.  I usually regretted it, but the buses always left on time and the seats were a lot more comfortable than airplane seats.  I would take the bus from college to the downtown LA Greyhound station; back in the 60’s that was one ugly station in a mean part of town.  Bums—I guess they would now be called street persons—were lined up all along the wall of the station; and when they saw me coming they all started moving at once like sharks smelling blood.

They knew a mark when they saw one.  And it’s true I guess.  I figure a person willing to walk up to a complete stranger and ask for money and take the risk of being berated or lectured at for doing so must be a person in need.  You might argue, well, they are all drunks or hopheads and don’t feel a thing.  Maybe.  Anyway, when I gave them money, I didn’t care what they did with it.  If booze was what they needed, so be it.  I figure they came honestly by their poverty.  After all, there’s no money in it.  Poverty, I mean.

Later on they built a brand new bus station and drove all the street people away.  They even installed pay crappers, not for the money so much, but as a way of keeping street people from going into one of the stalls and sleeping the day away on the pot there where it was warm.  Once I was there trying to get to see Carol when she was going to college in Riverside.  I forget what was going on.  Maybe it was the air controllers strike, but a film crew took pictures of people standing in line at the Greyhound depot.  That night I got a call from a friend back East saying he had seen me on national TV waiting in line for a bus at the Greyhound bus depot.  Later on, I saw the clip and sure enough there I was with my splendid head of auburn hair and beard of course—on national TV waiting for the Greyhound Bus.

Those days you could smoke in the back of the bus so that’s where I would head, and more than once on diverse trips around the state I ended up sitting next to some wizened guy with a brown paper bag with a bottle of wine or hard stuff in it.  And sure enough we would get to talking and the guy would want to know if I wanted a hit of his stuff, and I would say no, but he would keep at it—like, are you sure, now.  Cause there’s plenty where that came from—and so on and so forth, till continuing to refuse seem downright not polite.  So there I would be with the brown paper bag in my hand trying to figure out if the guy would be terribly offended if I wiped off the bottle where his mouth had been.  Usually I figured what the hell, since whatever was in that bottle could probably kill anything.

Usually after one drink the guy would leave you alone.  It wasn’t about sharing booze.  It was more just a social thing, like tipping your hat to say hello.  One tip was enough.

American Airlines Transporter Service

Come to think of it, though, if American Airlines was running the transporter service, I don’t think I would use it.  They can’t handle airplanes much less something as complicated as a transporter would be.  As it is, if you can drag your sorry ass to the airport at five AM when it is still pitch black to get your plane scheduled to leave at seven, there’s a big if as to whether it will leave at seven or if it has been rescheduled or if it has been cancelled completely.

And then after your have been x-rayed enough to cause cancer and you finally do get on the plane, there’s no telling how long you will sit there until they decide it’s time to go, and then when you finally taxi out to the run way, there’s no telling if they will announce that you have to go back to the gate because they forgot a flight attendant or one of the engines fell off, and then when you go back to the gate and then taxi back to the run way to wait your turn to take off you pretty much have to give up the idea that you will make your connection at Dallas or Atlanta or wherever the hell it is you are supposed to make a connection.

I mean if American Airlines was running the transporter service, I would sure as hell take out a lot of transporter insurance because there would be no telling whether they would transport me to the designated location in one piece or not.  Maybe part of me would end up in Dallas and another part in Atlanta, or all of me would end up somewhere in the middle of the frozen tundra in Alaska. And you could leave it to American Airlines not to have a secure transporter service, so weird hackers out there would be hacking into the transporter beam and stealing body parts for sale in South America, so you might end up in the middle of the frozen tundra without your liver or something.  Though transporting would still be 200% safer than driving which tells you something about how unsafe driving is.

And of course they would find some way to rip you off.  Like there would be first class and coach transporter service.  If you transport first class, you get your own private little shower area and a transporter booth with a curtain on it so nobody has to see you in your nakedness.  Oh, I forgot to say, you have to transport naked because there had been problems with people transporting with their clothes on; the fibers on their clothes got mixed up with their body hair, so some people ended up with like polyester body hair.  And at first as an added bonus extra, when they transported you, they did not transport like viruses and bad bacteria that might be in you.  But this was only if you paid first class.  But then the government said everybody had to be transported naked and have all their viruses not transported for fear of spreading a plague or something.

So if you transport coach, you end up naked in this like huge gym locker room sort of place with thousands and thousands of people all milling around naked and looking for the baggage claim area, and of course, there’s no telling if your baggage will arrive or not, or if when you get it, it will really be your baggage or if maybe your clothes all shrunk or expanded in the transport.  So, if your baggage doesn’t show up you can just stay there in the huge locker room and wait, or you can buy one of the plastic jump suits American Airlines will sell you for about 1000 times what it is worth. 

Of course if you transport first class, you have your own private little locker room and the plastic jump suit is free.  Anyway, I wouldn’t transport American Airlines for sure.

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I added five minutes from one of the cassette tapes WB sent me.  The sound is not so hot but it’s interesting to hear his voice. 

Never Ever

Carol had an itch to see her mom who recently had a stroke and has not been doing so well, so Thursday or Friday we decided to make a flying trip down to see her.  We hit the road around 8 Saturday morning because we simply will not drive through LA on a weekday.  That’s the real problem with the trip.  You have to drive through LA.  There’s just no way around LA; well there is a way around it but it takes forever.

sbescondido 

Google maps says its 214 miles from where we live to where Carol’s mom lives—not that far from where Joan and WB used to live, but now do not.  On Friday, after we decided to go down there, I started feeling more than usually morose and it took me a while to realize I was unconsciously dealing with the fact that this trip would be the first time EVER that one of those two, Joan or WB, would not be there at the end of the line. 

I used to hate driving down there because one of them would be at the end of the line, so what the heck was I morose about.  I guess words like NEVER OR EVER pack a wallop.  I don’t know that I believe in a grieving process, but I think there are grieving events.  This trip down was one such, a sort of reminders of how things once were but will never be again.  So down in the unconscious I was turning that over and not far behind that the old “death thang” that has plagued me lo these many years.

I would like to see many places but for the getting there.  I wish they had developed that Transporter like they had on Star Trek; hell, I would pay twice the plane fare if I got to use one of those Transporters.  It would be worth it not to have to drive a car 214 miles through that hair raising traffic with nuts all around you in those monstrous vehicles people drive these days.  So not to feel utterly at the mercy of the situation, I drive too fast I guess.  I averaged over 70, closer to 75, going down and back making it both ways, both times in about 3 hours and 20 minutes.  Zoom!  With one pit stop down and one pit stop up. 

It takes bladder control and pre-bladder preparation to get through LA.  I mean you just don’t get off the freeway any old place going through LA to take a leak because you don’t have the faintest idea what you might be driving into.  One guy wrote an article about having a flat and pulling off the freeway to get it fixed, and his driving to six different places before he found somebody who spoke English.  By 2050, they say, 60 million people will live in California and it will be a multi-multi ethnic state. 

Anyhow we made it down and we made it back, and trying to go to sleep last night, I would start drifting off and then bump awake when I dreamed about a car come head on at me in my lane.

Honor Thy Father

To say WB. Jr. and I didn’t cotton to each other doesn’t cover all the bases.  To say we didn’t see eye to eye doesn’t do the trick either.  And then when you stuck him together with Joan the situation would get impossible.  I would call and get Joan usually and then I would hear him start swearing in the background, maybe because Joan was on the phone too long, or maybe he wanted her to do something, or maybe she was hogging the phone, or maybe he was swearing up a storm because I didn’t call frequently enough.  The two were joined at the hip in some sort of hellish psychological dance macabre.

wbpic 

The same when we visited if only for a few hours or part of an afternoon.  Over the years I began to assume a distance in those visits.   There was no point in talking about anything meaningful since there was no telling where such a conversation might lead: to him swearing or Joan crying or most likely both.  But even the non-conversation visits didn’t work. Sure, there were no bizarre outbursts but afterwards I would still feel down, blue and murderous for a week or more.  It was as if being around them I caught a psychological flu.  Somewhere Freud speaks of a psychological contagion. That’s what it felt like.  A contagion.

I don’t know how many sessions I spent with my shrink going round and round about these visits and phone conversations.  I was trying to figure out what I was feeling and also really I was considering breaking off all connections to the two of them completely.  But my shrink said she had seen people do this and it hadn’t really helped.  It meant giving up all hope, and while, she said, I probably should have no hope that my parents would ever change breaking off all connections meant giving up even the possibility of hope.  Something like that.

Still, I worked at it.  WB would tell stories about his childhood.  They didn’t make much sense to tell the truth, but I wanted to find out what I could that made him tick and act the way he did, and maybe his childhood would shed some light on that.  Also I have always been interested in history and in the South, so I hit on this idea of having him tape record some of his stories for posterity as it were. I bought a little cassette tape recorder and took it down on one of the visits and said I would appreciate it if he talked into the machine now and then with some of his stories.

He seemed to like the idea, but nothing happened.  I didn’t hear back, and finally—I don’t know how long it was—it came out he had been unable to operate the buttons on the machine maybe because his sight was starting to go, and had gotten frustrated, as he easily did with mechanical things that he didn’t understand, and thrown it across the room and broken it to pieces.  And somehow or other Joan made it seem my fault that I had not gotten a machine he could work.  I could have said, well, screw it, but instead I went and bought a big machine with big buttons on it, and stuck a cassette in it, and I labeled the “play” button “push here.”  So when he pushed it, the tape would play and he would hear the instructions on the tape for how to operate the machine.

Finally I got maybe 40 minutes of tape out of him.  And going through papers, as part of our ongoing cleanup, I came across ten typed pages that I wrote 10 or more years ago describing WB’s childhood as he had described it on the tapes.  I don’t remember having written it, or what my intentions in writing it were exactly.  It’s just the sort of thing I do.

In any case, I scanned in the pages and have stuck them up on the Tingle Territory web page.  It’s an easy read and a bit interesting.

Dig

That’s the view from my freaking desk.  I mean if I turn my head to the left and slightly back from the spot where I am sitting at this moment (July 11, 2007; 739 am) that’s what I see.  Carol and I have been living a lie—the lie that we were somehow organized.  We are not organized and I am not sure we will ever be again.

 

closet

 

 

Books—my god, so many books.  There’s one there you can just make out: Games Nations Play by John Spanier, 8th edition.  I don’t know why that book is there or how it got there.  I remember it was the textbook for a class in “International Relations” called “USA-USSR Relations.”  That class is now defunct, dead as the dodo, because the Cold War is over and nobody cares enough about USA-USSR relations to devote a class to it.  In fact there is no USSR anymore.  That damn book is pre-end-of Cold War.  Maybe 1985 or something.

I think I will throw out, take it to the recycling place.  I hate to destroy a book, but I must.  Otherwise I will be buried under dusty books.  Under that book is another—that you can’t see—called American Government, 2nd edition.  It’s a textbook that was used in a like introduction to American Government class.  I have it because, as with the USSR class, I taught a writing class that was linked to the American Government class.  For the writing class I went to all the lectures and read all the readings for the class my class was linked with—so I sat there and listened to lectures on American Government.  Damn, that was like 1989 or something…

I can’t remember, but I was the person mostly responsible for setting up the links classes.  I went around and sat outside professors offices during their office hours and waited till the students were gone and asked them if it would be OK with them if the Writing Program linked a writing class with their lecture class and mostly they just shrugged and said OK, when I made it clear that the writing class would in no way, shape, or form increase the work for their class.

That red thing sticking up to the left may be my flag of the Soviet Union.  When the USSR fell apart, I ordered the Soviet flag with its hammer and sickle and stuck it up on my office wall as an ambiguous sort of joke.  Or maybe I was being perverse.  But then I took it down when I saw that the damn flag scared some of my students from Viet Nam.  Back then we were getting students who had been “boat people.”

This one young woman had suffered a great deal.  She was terribly thin.  I think her ordeal had stunted her growth.  Pirates had boarded their boat and stole their food and valuables.  One of the pirates, she said, had picked up a baby and killed it by smashing its head against something.  So they all ended up on an island, just lying their starving to death until one day a UN Helicopter flew over.  Her eyes lit up remembering.  Like for her, the UN was God.

Damn, our condo is like some sort of archeological dig.  Ever layer is another layer of history.  I need to remember this stuff like a hole in the head.

My Dotage

I was out road testing the new seat for my bike when my neighbor, out walking her unhappy dog, motioned me over and said I might want to know that something terrible had just happened.  I got home to see the second of the Twin Towers go down.  I don’t know what I felt exactly.  I didn’t feel angry.  I just felt this was bad in and of itself and that it was probably going to be really, really bad in its long range repercussions.  I had some work to do at school and while there, still turning over inside what I had seen, I started fiddling around with my computer and made a flag like this one.

911flag

 

I ran it off on my computer on good photo paper and tacked it in the upper left corner of the message board right outside my office door.  I have not moved it.  It has been there ever since.

I am turning over emotional stuff right now what with WB’s death, February of last year, Joan’s death just this last April, Dan’s stroke, and a whole host of other lesser things all coming together in a big clot.  I guess when I start feeling maybe too much or something very strong I do as I did with 9/11.  I try to make or build something.  I think that’s why I have been working so much on what I call “Tingle Territory” when I am not cleaning out the garage.

I don’t think of this “making something” as necessarily therapeutic.  I am not sure what therapeutic means; if it means getting better or curing, I am not sure “making something” does that.  More as if, making something requires material for the making; and if you can make something out of that material, you give it a kind of shape or solidness that other stuff you make later on can build on.  It’s more a way of constructing a continuity or holding together and shaping a diffuse anxiety that might otherwise be overwhelming or get buried and fester down there somewhere just out of sight.  The anxiety is still there though and shows in my having become a bit obsessive about putting Tingle Territory together.

I think it’s important to make something out of the things we feel.  Most of the time, I think we do, not always beneficially though.  Still, maybe something powerful happens and you decide to lose weight, and actually do.  But that’s a pretty big thing to do.  Making something doesn’t have to be a big thing; maybe you just start parting your hair in a different way.  Making something is a way of accommodating change by recognizing it.

If you don’t make something out of the change you are just going to become more and more rigid and eventually the change will break you.  Hell, it will no matter what you do.  My shrink’s mother, in her dotage, went hay wire and took to collecting empty cans and yogurt cups and filling the drawers of her dresser with them.  Maybe the only difference is that if you try to make something out of the change when you open your dresser drawers, they won’t be full of empty things.

Oh, I have made a separate web page that gives access, in one place, to the various bits of Tingle Territory I have so far assembled.

Washed Out

I was feeling sort of washed out and blue yesterday, Saturday, maybe because Friday was a really social, perhaps excessively so, day for me.  I saw my regular shrink at 1 and had my guitar lesson at 300 and saw my psychiatrist at four thirty.  As you can see, my social life is so lame I have to pay people to talk with me.

I see the psychiatrist every four months for a med check.  He sees people at his house, so I have to go to this place up on the mountain that is worth maybe 8 million dollars.  He charges 100 buck per half hour.  I decided long ago not to stint when it comes to my mental health and my tendency to excessive moodiness, if you can call it that exactly.  So in the half hour I talk real fast and hit the high (or more precisely, low) points of the last four months. Maybe that’s what wore me out, recapping and re-remembering the hecticness of these last four months.  We decided to stay status quo on the drugs for now.  I don’t know much about him because he doesn’t say anything (that’s because he is not supposed to).  But I do know he was raised in Louisiana and his father owned a hardware store there; and I know he knows his stuff about meds.

My shrink told me a week or ago that she will be retiring at the end of this year.  She is 82 or 83, I forget which, and decided not to renew her license to practice, not so much because it costs to renew as because to renew you have to go to some stupid classes to show you are keeping up with the so-called “field.”  She is pretty much sick of those classes and is convinced the “field” is going down hill because of all the new rules and regs being generated by the state as the result of actions by insurance firms and lawyers. 

My shrink’s daughter is a shrink too and raised up under the new rules and regulations has been on her mother’s back (my shrink’s back) to stop seeing me for about five years now because she (the daughter) feels my relationship with her mother is probably illegal, seeing as how her mother talks to me in ways that could invite a law suit.  Also at the end of each session my shrink and I hug and that is probably grounds for a suit too.

So nothing is stable in this world not even your shrink.  Hell, I figured we would terminate when she died; maybe this retiring thing will be better and less dramatic.  Anyhow, she is crazy.  She has this thing for animals of all kinds and has had numerous cats in her house over the years.  She so dotes on the cats that she leaves her back door open a notch at night so the cat can do its thing, and right outside that door all around her patio she had constructed a chain link “cage,” like in a zoo or something, that allows the cats to go outside but not to run away or get eaten by ever more daring coyotes.  I am not paying much attention and get confused when, as she walks me to my car, she says that she woke up with a skunk walking around her bed. I think maybe she has begun to hallucinate till I remember the business with the cage and the back door.  Somehow the skunk is getting into the cage and then into the house and walking around my shrink’s bed.  She wakes to see this big fluffy white tale moving around in the darkness.

So far this has happened twice and she is rightfully worried that the skunk will get in, get upset by something, and let go its load of stink.