Category Archives: Uncategorized

Bright Red Luggage

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Carol will be going soon to Santa Fe to participate in a conference called Madness and Creativity. Yesterday she was out and about and decided to buy some new luggage for the trip. Our stuff for travel is pretty old, ripped, torn and on the verge of falling apart. So she got this bright red, very light, state of the art luggage, and at one point in the evening she said I bet it will last twenty years.

She was thinking of how we tend to use something until it falls apart. I thought of something else and felt a little cold, stab in my heart.

In twenty years, I could easily be dead or in terrible shape in some “home.”

I have been pretty good lately at keeping the death stuff at arm’s length, but at that moment I was taken by surprise at the idea of luggage–bright red luggage–that could outlive me (in terms at least of its usefulness).

The LA Times runs an occasional feature in which a financial consultant looks at somebody’s finances and gives recommendations. Today I glanced at it and then read the whole article because the couple (they appear to have no children) roughly parallel in their financial situation Carol and me. The wife of the couple is 68, the husband, who looked slightly overweight in the picture, is 64, and the consultant’s advice was direct, unequivocal, and clear: RETIRE. And, oh, they should put less of their money in stocks and more in money market and bonds. But mostly it was RETIRE because you have the money to do it without worry and because you only have so much life and if you wait too long you may lose the health, the relative physical well-being, that will allow you to enjoy your “golden years.”

OK, so given our financial situation, I guess my thinking about retiring July of next year is sort of rational.

I know the financial consultant is right. I have enough experience at this point to know that, while one might have ten thousand interesting and enlivening things to do, if one doesn’t have the energy to do one damn thing these ten thousand things might as well not be at all.

So RETIRE while you still have the energy left–while your big outing of the week is NOT going to see the doctor–and use the money you have to enjoy yourself.

But the financial consultant didn’t have much advice about what to do to enjoy yourself. Travel, he said, and, oh, take up multiple hobbies.

Fine, I guess, but I don’t like thinking about this stuff. It feels odd to be making such a big decision based mostly on the fact you will be dead in 20 years.

Narrativity Types

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philosophybites.jpgI ordered a book on Hegel’s dialectic and yesterday I read some philosophy online. That’s a bad sign. I am probably getting depressed. But the news of the world drives me nuts, and I can’t read fiction anymore. So it’s best to concentrate on something utterly irrelevant, like philosophy. Though I do have trouble concentrating, or maybe that’s the point. If you are going to read philosophy at all you have to concentrate because it is so damn irrelevant.

In any case—I don’t know how–but I ran across an article by Galen Strawson called “Against Narrativity.”

He argues there are roughly two types of self experience as follows:

The basic form of Diachronic self-experience is that [D] one naturally figures oneself, considered as a self, as something that was there in the (further) past and will be there in the (further) future – something that has relatively long-term diachronic continuity, something that persists over a long stretch of time, perhaps for life. I take it that many people are naturally Diachronic, and that many who are Diachronic are also Narrative in their outlook on life.

If one is Episodic, by contrast, [E] one does not figure oneself, considered as a self, as something that was there in the (further) past and will be there in the (further) future.

Strawson suggests that the second form of self-experience has come to be overlooked with the recent fashionable emphasis upon self experience as narrative, and further that some have come to feel the experience of self as narrative is morally superior to that of the episodic. Or: one ought to be Diachronic and seeking to weave a narrative from one’s experience. The episodic type, with little sense of self as related to either past or future, appears, how to say, ethically immoral.

Interestingly, he describes this type as “happy go lucky” and goes further to suggest being “happy go lucky” does not indicate a moral deficit but is probably the expression of genetics and early childhood experience.

Strawson says he experiences himself as more like the episodic. And this poses a problem for me. I just don’t think of philosophers as particularly happy go lucky. Though it’s not impossible I suppose to be a happy go lucky philosopher.

I found reading Strawson a bit irritating. As a teacher, I have long subscribed to the notion of the bildun, of the development of self through time, and to have that I think one must feel that one existed in the past and will in the future (at least for a while). And I would suggest that having an episodic sense of self-experience does not necessarily make one happy to lucky. One can be damned depressed and have no sense of future or past selves.

In the course of kicking around Strawson, I came across a nice site called “Philosophy Bites” that features pod casts of living “philosophers” on their areas of specialization. If one wishes one can hear Strawson giving the basic outlines of his argument.

Anti-Cathexsis, Or, Withdrawal Continued

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I am fond of the word “cathexis,” perhaps because it is fun to say or appears sort of mysterious. As in what the hell does that mean? I associate it mostly with Freud though I don’t think he made it up.

Very roughly, he seemed to mean by it “the investment of psychological energy in an object” (person, place, thing, belief, idea, activity or basketball team).

Recently, I cathexed with the L.A. Lakers.

More recently, my cathexis has weakened, and not just with the Lakers, but sort of everything. Nothing seems of much interest.

I am used to–while in withdrawal–mysterious aches and pains, muscle contractions, dry mouth, skin outbreaks, but this anti-cathexis may be the worst of it.

After the Lakers took the championship, the LA Times produced an entire section devoted to the Lakers and their struggle towards victory. Time was, I would have devoured that section immediately. But now in anti-cathexsis, I just let the section lie there and I have since thrown it out.

No cathexsis.

I suppose more mundanely I could say that I feel as if I am walking around in the fog. Details are not distinct. Trying to make out what’s there is just too tiring.

I could say that, but I like the word “cathexis.”

Klonopin: .25 wafer

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Having made the mistake in the past of trying too rapidly to withdraw from a med, I am taking a very prudent approach this time around.

Turns out the .25 dose of Klonopin (clonazepam) comes in a wafer designed to dissolve upon the tongue, in case I guess, one is without water.

In water the wafer dissolves with the touch of a spoon. I have seen this happen.

Each day I measure out a cup of water. Exactly. Pour this in a regular cup and dissolve the wafer. Then I take out a tablespoon of water, and drink what’s left in the cup.

I have been doing this for some time now. I took out four tablespoons this morning.

There are 16 tablespoons in a cup.

I go down a tablespoon every forth day. So the way I figure it–though I am not good at math–I will be down to nothing in that cup towards the first of July.

So far…though I don’t think I am in the worst part yet–the going has not been too rough. Fatigue of course, in the later afternoon and early evening, plus some increased muscle tension in the pelvic floor, plus odd sensations in the feet and legs. Par for the course so far. Additional moroseness, of course. But not severe at this point.

Also while I am eliminating the .25, I will remain on the .5 dose at night to get to sleep. So at this point, I won’t be going through the worse of it. That being TOTAL withdrawal.

Instead, after I am done with the .25, I plan to start cutting back on the 75 milligrams of Wellburtin per day.

So as I have said, my project this summer, the core of it, is to withdraw if I can and see what’s there.

And, oh, the psoriasis around the borders of my nose has broken out. That happens with changes in meds.

University of CA Tuition

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I don’t expect I will be teaching much longer at UCSB. Retirement approaches. Maybe it’s a good time to be leaving, before the flood, as it were. Though really I would prefer to go more on an up note.

But the UC continues troubled. Once they charged students only “fees.” But now these “fees” have gotten so huge that it seems disingenuous to call them that. They are thinking now…well, maybe, we should be honest and call those fees what they are in fact: tuition.

What you call them, however, is not as important as the rapidity with which whatever-they-are have risen.

Here is a graphic representation:

uctuition.jpg

African Food

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Last night I had my first ever “African food.” At least I think it was African food having been prepared by Africans who said it was African food. The Africans are two students Carol befriended and I have come to know over the last year. One is from Ghana, the other Nigeria.

The meal consisted of rice, a heaping mound of it, covered with a thick tomato sauce containing chunks of beef and seasoned with garlic, black pepper, salt, and something called Maggi, the brand name for a kind of soy sauce, I think it was. And on the sides of the mound of rice slices of fried plantain.

Really a good and substantial meal, though it wreaked havoc with my dyspepsia. Significant gas, belly distention, and even now in the morning my stomach is still gurgling.

I can’t attribute this all to the meal however. The guys knew I am a Laker fan, and they invited us over to watch game 5 of the playoffs with them. They are however are rabid Celtic fans. So I had to sit abjectly as they crowed, the Lakers having gone down to ignominious defeat. That probably didn’t help my digestion either.

Damn Lakers!

Good food.
 

Bum Lyrics

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I lost my ipod so, while working out at the club, I listened to the radio on my original Sony Walkman. The back fell off that a while ago. The battery keeps falling out. But I found one in the back of my locker that still had some juice. Consequently I heard a cut off a new album by Stevie Miller. I couldn’t believe it. Maybe the guy needs some money. The cut was a dance tune and the lyrics ran partially and something like (this is not a direct quotation):

Don’t worry if you can’t find someone to dance
Just get up and shake your (Oh, no, Stevie!) pants.

Pants! My ass. That’s either a desperate or very lazy rhyme.

Followed closely by something like:

Just reach out and grab ahold
And squeeze till your blood runs cold.

That is not only lazy. It’s illogical. I mean blood running cold is what happens when you’re about to die.

Of course, Stevie also gave us the immortal:

Some people call me the space cowboy
Some call me the gangster of love
Some people call me Maurice
Cause I sing of the pomputus of love…

Actually, these are classic. But I swear there is no such word as “pomputus.” But I can understand making it up since “I sing of the pomposity of love” just doesn’t cut it.

Still these are little things compared to the downright disturbing lyrics I heard down in the locker room. They were piping in some satellite radio and I caught myself listening to the refrain three times to make sure that I was hearing what I was hearing:

I don’t care who you are
I don’t care where you’re from
I don’t cane what you did
As long as you love me…

This person is so desperate for love that he appears to have lost all his faculties. I mean is this a love song; or a song of self destruction.

It’s like I don’t care if your last name is Hitler, you come Texas, and you eat babies. As long as you love me?

This boggles the mind.