Unique?

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Is it embarrassing, or simply confirmation?  It used to be considered embarrassing to show up at an event dressed identically to someone else, if it wasn’t intentional.  It was considered, in some way, a slight on your personal expression.  This happened to me while still commuting when another employee and I had worn a very similar shirt for an event at work.  (He was more embarrassed than I was, for the record.)  What often feels more embarrassing to me is when I notice something I’ve never seen anybody else write about, get it all written up, and then discover that someone posted something similar on the internet someplace.  It has happened more than once—indeed, many times.  I feel embarrassed for not having known about the observation, no matter in how an obscure virtual a corner it was kept.

Perhaps these are just growing pains for the terminally curious.  Some of us constantly observe things we find curious, and start to connect the dots.  Someone else might’ve gone over this conundrum before, the way you pick up a waiting room magazine only to find the crossword puzzle already done.  What gives me hope in such circumstances are twofold facts: that someone else has spotted this confirms my observations, and that my interpretation is different from theirs.  My great fear, however, is that someone might think I’ve plagiarized.  This is a mortal sin for academics.  I would simply note that many of us read lots of stuff without noting where, and that I would remember if I intentionally lifted an idea from something somebody else pointed out.

I’m sure there are many examples of this on this blog.  Apart from posts that reflect an experience unique to yours truly, that is.  It’s getting tricky to say anything that hasn’t been said.  A recent newsworthy event occurred that called for comment from someone with my background.  By the time I’d scrawled a first sentence about it, others had written, and posted, full articles conveying what I would’ve had to say about the thing.  Embarrassing.  It has also made publishing much harder.  Even small, independent publishers in the non-academic sector only consider books sent from agents.  And agents are nothing if not aloof.  Too many submissions from too many wannabes.  Is there anything unusual, remarkable, here at all?  I’d say it’s my perspective.  Others can string words together.  Others can even buy the same cheap shirt that I purchase.  But they don’t see it from my angle.  Of that I’m certain.  Ask anybody else who’s made a similar observation.  They’ll confirm it.

Finding Poe

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A gift a friend gave me started me on an adventure.  The gift was a nice edition of Poe stories.  It’s divided up according to different collections, one being Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque.  This was originally the title of a collection of 25 stories selected by Poe himself in 1840.  I realized that much of my exposure to Poe was through collections selected by others such as Tales of Mystery and Terror, never published by Poe in that form.  I was curious to see what Poe himself saw as belonging together.  I write short stories and I’ve sent collections off several times, but with no success at getting them published.  I know, however, what it feels like to compile my own work and the impact that I hope it might have (if it ever gets published).  Now finding a complete edition of  Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque turned out to be more difficult than expected.

Amazon has copies, of course.  They are apparently all printed from a master PDF somewhere since they’re all missing one of the stories.  The second-to-last tale, “The Visionary,” is missing.  I searched many editions, using the “read sample” feature on Amazon.  They all default to the Kindle edition with the missing tale.  I even looked elsewhere (gasp!) and found that an edition published in 1980 contained all the stories.  I put its ISBN in Amazon’s system and the “read sample” button pulled up the same faulty PDF.  Considerable searching led me to a website that actually listed the full contents of the 1980 edition I’d searched out, and I discovered that, contrary to Amazon, the missing piece was there.  I tried to use ratiocination to figure it out.

I suspect that someone, back when ebooks became easy to make, hurried put together a copy of Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque.  They missed a piece, never stopping to count because Poe’s preface says “25” tales are included, but there were only 24.  Other hawkers (anyone may print and sell material in the public domain, and even AI can do it) simply made copies of the original faulty file and sold their own editions.  Amazon, assuming that the same title by the same author will have the same contents, and wishing to drive everyone to ebooks (specifically Kindle), offers its own version of what it thinks is the full content of the book.  This is more than buyer beware.  This is a snapshot of what our future looks like when AI takes over.  I ordered a used print copy of the original edition with the missing story.  At least when the AI apocalypse takes place I’ll have something to read.

Sleeping and Watching

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The older I get, the more flexible my idea of reality becomes.  I’m starting to notice things that may have been happening for decades, but the reflection of age throws into sharper focus.  I’ve mentioned before that a good night’s sleep casts the day in a different light.  Such nights are sometimes hard to come by and unrelenting capitalism doesn’t offer enough “sick days” to sit out the bad ones.  But it’s not only that.  I watch a lot of movies.  Since I’ve been writing books on movies that only makes sense.  Still, I’ve begun to notice how movies stay with you after the credits roll.  Sometimes they remain the whole day until a night’s reboot comes.  This can also happen with reading, but on a slower, and most likely more profound level.

In high school, reading existentialist plays (sometimes in German), I learned to remind myself that watching a play (or movie) is observing an illusion.  Now I’m beginning to question whether that’s entirely true or not.  What enters our minds becomes part of us.  Think of the vast majority of human lives throughout history.  People living out their lives by farming and/or hunting.  Spending every day on the many tasks it takes to stay alive.  No reading.  No watching.  Their daily lives constructed their reality.  How many of us could grow our own food or build adequate shelter?  And God help us if we need a doctor.  Our lives require many other people to ensure we keep on going.  Most of them people we don’t know.  People whose realities are different than mine.

My career trajectory misfired fairly early on, and my reality has been years of trying to make sense of what happened.  From the first days of hurt and confusion I began to cope by watching movies.  For ninety minutes, at least, I escaped reality.  Or did I?  Was I enhancing reality?  What of my existentialist outlook?  Perhaps I was doing what existentialists do best—creating my own meaning.  So if I get out of the wrong side of bed, and the day feels like it really isn’t welcoming me this time around, I await the reboot.  Or when I have a few moments to sit down and watch a movie, I get up from my chair with an alternative reality surrounding me.  Perhaps I have learned something by sleeping and watching.  Maybe I have learned that reality is more flexible than I’ve been inclined to believe.  Maybe somehow this all does make sense.  Or not.

Expectations

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Our minds are our most powerful tools.  Some of us wonder what reality is, and David Robson has written a very important book that the title explains: The Expectation Effect: How Your Mindset Can Change Your World.  Now, before your woo-woo meter goes off, Robson is a science writer and everything in his book is backed by evidence.  The basic idea is this: what we expect to happen often becomes our reality due to the “expectation effect.”  The brain, as Robson describes it, is a prediction machine.  And what it expects often takes place.  In other words, belief matters.  Probably the most famous example of this is the placebo.  We all know that patients treated with placebos often recover just as well as patients given the active ingredient.  That pill the doctor gives will heal them, and so it does.  The brain expects it, and it happens.  Belief.

This book also explores the nocebo response.  This is where you expect something bad, and it happens.  The most extreme examples of this, well documented, are when people are convinced an imaginary threat will kill them and they die of it.  In fact, the book opens with consideration of such an occurrence where a cultural expectation led to otherwise unexplainable deaths among healthy Hmong populations fearing a night demon.  Hysteria grew and so did the deaths.  Robson also explores how hysteria leads to expectations that our brains carry out.  He shows how training our expectations can help good self-fulfilling prophecies take place.  Athletes, for example, can seem to do the impossible.  Why?  Partially training, yes.  But also because of their mindsets.  Their expectations.  Their beliefs.

The implications of this are very broad.  Everything from our health, to how we handle stress, to how food benefits our bodies, to how we age as we expect to.  Robson is quick to point out that this isn’t a book to solve all our problems, but it is a book that demonstrates our minds do make things real.  Or at least they can.  It is filled with fascinating examples, backed with science, showing that even how a doctor or nurse introduces a shot “you’ll feel a bit of a sting” versus “you won’t feel a thing” can make a difference to how our body perceives it.  And our brains can make our worries, or our hopeful expectations, real.  Personally, I believe that there may be even more to this than Robson explores.  But then again, I enjoy a bit of mystery.  I believe in belief.  Regardless, this is a life-changing book and I hope, for your own sake, that you’ll read it.

A Touch of Poe

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One of the more somber aspects of our staycation in the Poconos occurred on our search for Tanners Falls.  It brought to mind a story by Edgar Allan Poe.  Here’s why:  Tanners Falls is not well signposted.  This is quite a rural area.  We were following our GPS when the signal died right after she said “arrived.”  The problem was there were no signs and although we tried a couple of tick-trails that ended up at a stream, nothing like a cataract was anywhere near.  Finally we realized that a tiny sign reading “Tanners Falls” was posted on a “Road Closed” barricade.  Since to road was actually open to the Falls, my wife brought the car but I wanted the exercise and went by foot. Walking along the way I found a roadside shrine and noted that in addition to the name Laura Lynne Ronning was a small plaque stating “Murdered July 27, 1991.”  Now, there was no signal out here, and I was alone on the road.  And I had no desire to bring my family down so I kept it to myself.

At the hotel (with wifi) I learned that Laura Ronning’s murder was never solved.  She was a counselor at a nearby camp walking to the waterfall on her day off when she was raped and shot and thrown into the woods.  The only suspect was a mentally unstable man (now since deceased) and the evidence was all circumstantial.  He was, unlike some known criminals of high profile, found not guilty.  The Ronning family moved out of the state, not wanting to be where someone could literally get away with murdering an innocent young woman.  This is where Poe came in.  His “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” is the first detective fiction based on a true case—Poe was often, figuratively, first on the scene.  The murder of Mary Cecilia Rogers, whose body was found in the Hudson, was never solved.  Poe tried his hand at the by then famous unsolved case.

The murder of a young woman was a tragedy that Poe felt deeply, I suspect.  I took some academic flak for including Poe’s observation that the death of a beautiful woman was the most poetic theme in Nightmares with the Bible.  I realize this is a masculinist thing to write, but the fact is that some men feel very protective of women.  I know there’s a psychological name for this, but it isn’t chauvinism.  It is a sense of sadness, for what Goethe tried to express by writing “Girls we love for what they are; young men for what they promise to be.”  On staycations I try to look for literary angles, even when they are, from time to time, sad.

Spirit Storm

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Some time ago, we experienced quite a windstorm.  More than wind, there was a dump of rain, thunder, hail, and all that.  My wife and I were attending a Tibetan singing bowls sound-bath with some others in the cancer support community.  I’ve described this practice before, here.  In any case, the meditation is held in a large room with a tin roof—the kind of place you don’t want to be during a tornado.  We’d just got inside when the gust front hit and knocked out the power.  The instructor still went through the meditation, but the storm sounds blended with those of the singing bowls.  Afterwards my wife asked about Job.  Specifically, God speaking from the whirlwind.  I told her that was God on a bad day, but I understood what she was getting at—there’s a spirituality to the weather.  (I was going to suggest Elijah instead, but “but the Lord was not in the wind.”  Alas.

I thought of Weathering the Psalms.  My contribution to biblical studies, had I been allowed to remain in academia, would’ve been further explorations of weather terminology in the Bible.  But the Lord was not in the wind.  I wrote that book because I noticed the juxtaposition of severe weather with daily chapel at Nashotah House.  We were required to attend, no matter what the weather.  (Such is life on a fully residential campus.)  We were reciting the Psalms one day when a storm blew the power out.  It may have happened more than once, since we’re getting on past two decades hence my memory’s a touch imprecise on the point.  In any case, the spirituality of the power of the storm fascinated me.

It still does.  The next morning, out for my jog, I marveled at the number of branches down.  Thousands in the Lehigh Valley were without power.  This is probably why the ancients considered the storm god chief of the rest.  The violence of nature is something that suggests divinity.  Other primates have been observed screeching back at the sky during thunderstorms.  It’s deep in our DNA.  That doesn’t make it any less spiritual.  There’s a lot of weather in the Bible.  I only explored a tiny piece of it by trying to tackle the Psalms.  The Good Book, however, doesn’t say much about the spirituality of weather.  It’s there nevertheless.  Anything that can snap a tree a foot in diameter like a toothpick has a spiritual message for us.  I mused on the way home—we had to take a detour because of downed trees—that had the storm claimed us as victims, dying while meditating is probably not the worst way to go.  Now I wonder, what might God’s nice words from the whirlwind be?

Powerful Belief

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Even someone who’s spent a lifetime studying religion can’t know every single sect.  People are far too creative in that regard, and some belief groups are fairly small.  I had never heard of Unarius, for example, before reading this book.  If I had, it simply washed over me, getting lost in the noise.  Part of the trouble with defining Unarius is that it calls itself a science.  Words can be slippery, and Christian Scientists also use that designation in a similar way.  The word “science,” etymologically speaking, denotes “knowledge.”  In our materialist culture we often suppose that means the physical sciences, grudgingly allowing it to be borrowed by the “social sciences.”  There is a science of religion, but this leads to its own set of discussion points.  Let’s look at Diana Tumminia’s title: When Prophecy Never Fails: Myth and Reality in a Flying Saucer Group.  That give you an idea. 

The “prophecy” part concerns a “failed” prediction, or two, of when the spaceships would land.  Being a sociologist, Tumminia’s real interest is what happens then.  And here’s where things get interesting.  Failed predictions generally don’t lead to true believers giving up their convictions.  History has played and replayed this for us—it’s happening around us this very second—and yet “rationality” supposes that when the ships don’t land, people simply move on.  The Millerites outlived “the Great Disappointment,” after all, when the world didn’t end as predicted.  Their heirs include a sizable Christian denomination.  All this talk of AI has muddled our thinking about what it means to be human.  We are emotional.  More than that, we are believing creatures.  Our society is living proof.

Perhaps the most important, and ill-studied facet of being human, is belief.  Belief (no matter what in) is a religious phenomenon.  This study of a fairly small group shows that convinced people cannot be dissuaded, no matter how many facts are presented to them.  One need not look far to find the same phenomenon surrounding Trump.  (I do not condone violence, but history can inform us if we allow it.)  Make no mistake—he is the center of a new religion.  Unarians have absolute belief that their system is right.  Mistaken predictions—even very public ones—will not convince true believers otherwise.  It seems to me that our society, our democracy, cannot survive without intensive study of belief and how it affects the way otherwise completely rational people think.  My study is full of books exploring various aspects of belief, but we are still no closer to any kind of definitive answer.  And voters, at least a great many of them, follow their beliefs.

Doing Without

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I’m a creature of habit.  Although I’m no internet junkie (I still read books made of paper), I’ve come to rely on it for how I start my day.  I get up early and do my writing and reading before work.  I generally check my email first thing, and that’s where something went wrong.  No internet.  We’ve been going through one of those popular heat waves, and a band of thunderstorms (tried to check on their progress so I could see if it’s okay to open the windows, but wait—I need the internet to do that) had rolled through three hours ago, at about midnight.  Maybe they’d knocked out power?  The phone was out too so I had to call our provider on my cell.  The robovoice cheerily told me there was a service outage and that for updates I could check their website.  Hmmm.

I can read and write without the internet.  I’m on Facebook for, literally, less than two minutes a day.  I stop long enough to post my blog entry and check my notices.  I hit what used to be Twitter a few times a day, but since people tend to communicate (if they do) via email, that’s how the day begins.  This morning I had no internet and I wondered how tech giants would live without it.  I’m no fan of AI.  I use technology and I believe it has many good points, but mistaking it for human—or thinking that human brains are biological computers—flies in the face of all the evidence.  Our brains evolved to help our biological bodies survive.  And more.  The older I get the more I’m certain that there’s a soul tucked in there somewhere too.  Call it a mind, a psyche, a spirit, a personality, or consciousness itself, it’s there.  And it’s not a computer.

Our brains rely on emotion as well as rationality.  How we feel affects our reality.  Our perspective can change a bad situation into a good one.  So I’m sitting here in my study, sweating since, well, heat wave.  It was storming just a few hours ago and I can’t check the radar to see if the system has cleared out or not.  What to do?  Open the windows.  I’ll feel better at any rate.  And in case the coffee hasn’t kicked in yet, “open the windows” is a metaphor as well as a literal act on my part.  And I don’t think AI gets metaphors.  At least not without being told directly.  And they call it “intelligence.”

Photo by Chris Barbalis on Unsplash

Or Plastic

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I’m no fan of plastic.  When looking for a house a non-negotiable with me was vinyl siding—nope.  In our neighborhood several houses have plastic fences pretending to be wood. I dislike materials pretending to be something else.  I was dead-set against such a thing, but our house came with a lot of neglected outdoor woodwork.  The fence was wood and had been stained, probably just before we moved in.  Then the carpenter bees arrived.  Local pest control will spray for them, but they come back each summer and unless we have the pest store on speed-dial the bees will find new things to damage.  See, the problem isn’t just the bees.  Woodpeckers, which as a kid always seemed exotic to me, love carpenter bee larvae.  I’ve watched a downy woodpecker hoping along the fence, knocking until it finds one, and then hopping a few feet further to repeat the process for another.  (If you’ve ever watched a woodpecker at work you’d not doubt animal intelligence.)

My wife and I talked it over.  The fence was in poor repair to begin with (another thing our house inspector missed).  I finally came around to seeing why plastic might be the best solution in our case.  Not for me, but for resale value.  The former owners had a thing for untreated outdoor wood.  They’d built a new back porch, but didn’t paint or stain it.  When the carpenter bees noticed, I painted it.  I couldn’t reach the ceiling, though, being short of stature.  Well, this year the carpenter bees have gone for the ceiling.  And the downy woodpeckers have followed them.  Now, when I hear knocking, I have to run downstairs to the back door to frighten off downy.  I will buy a paint sprayer to paint the ceiling, but the bees have had a head start this summer.

So I was in my office and I heard a tapping, as of a woodpecker gently rapping.  I ran downstairs and threw wide the door.  To my surprise, nobody was on the porch.  I went back to work.  Soon again I heard a tapping somewhat louder than before.  I followed my ears to the front door.  Yes, the tapping was from out front but daylight there, nothing more.  I stepped to the edge of the porch.  More tapping.  I leaned over the railing and looked down.  A rare, and large, pileated woodpecker was going at the fence post.  I was about as startled as she was.  My wife was out on an errand and when she returned home she found selfsame woodpecker working elsewhere on the fence.  I’ve learned my lesson.  While wood looks nice, and is natural, it will soon be paper thin if we don’t do something.  It’s a big fence.  And the only option to paper is, unfortunately, plastic.

Life After

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Robert T. Bigelow is wealthy enough to speak his mind.  A hotel and aerospace entrepreneur, Bigelow has made no bones about his belief that aliens are among us, for example.  After the death of his wife in 2020 he initiated a contest for essay writers to give their best proof that consciousness survives death.  The results took the form of a five-volume, twenty-eight essay collection that, according to those who’ve read all, is impressive.  Having spent my life studying religion, I can trace my motivation back to this basic concern.  As a child I was terrified of Hell—a fear that has never abandoned me—and consequently studied religion as a means of reassurance.  I’m not alone in this; the whole Methodist movement began because of John Wesley’s similar concern.  Most of us don’t have the money Bigelow has to attempt reassurance.

Having said that, some time ago, the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies—the organization behind the essay contest—offered $500,000 for the first place essay.  The second received $300,000 and the third $150,000.  Those who were selected for publication received a copy of the five-volume set.  Then, the Institute made an announcement: while supplies lasted, anyone with a legitimate interest in the subject could write to them for a free copy.  I’m not of the intellectual caliber of these essayists, but I have studied religion my entire life.  And I am quite interested in what the BICS is calling “absolute proof of life after death.”  All it cost was an email.  They even paid for shipping.

The set arrived yesterday.  The postal worker at the door seemed apologetic (I had to sign for it), noting the package was heavy.  Now, this is going to take some time to get through.  The five volumes are handsomely produced.  The hardcovers are printed in full color (I know from work this is quite costly).  They have gilt edges and ribbon markers.  And a wealth of thought within.  I guess you’ll need to stay tuned here to find out, after I finally finish, if the results are assuring.  Glancing through the table of contents, and having looked over the judges of the contest, I’m optimistic.  Although Robert Bigelow stands at the opposite end of the political spectrum to me, we both understand that deep-seated human need to know physical death is not the end of who we are.  Even the famous skeptic Harry Houdini wanted the answer to this question as he debunked mediums in search of someone legitimate.  In any case, I’ve got years of interesting reading ahead of me.

Passing Words

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I’ve never counted, but it must be dozens.  Maybe a hundred.  And they have very high memory requirements.  Especially for a guy who can’t recall why he walked into a room half the time.  I’m talking passwords.  The commandments go like this:

You can’t use the same password for more than one system/platform/device/account

You can’t tell anyone your password (duh!)

You can’t write it down

You can’t send your password to someone electronically (duh!)

You must logoff your device when it’s unattended

You will be held responsible for anything done under your login

The word of the Lord.

Now, how much more ageist can you get?  I’ve never counted the number of passwords I’ve had to generate for work alone but I can’t remember much without writing things down.  Even the chores after work.  I hear that there are “keychains” you can get that remember your passwords for you.  I suspect you need a password to access your passwords.  Replicate the commandments above.

I know internet security is serious business.  My objection is that you’re not supposed to write any of this down.  I carry a notebook around with me (it has no passwords, so please don’t try to steal it) to keep track of everything from doctors’ orders to how to call the plumber if there’s a leak.  I can’t remember all that stuff.  Some of it is personal information, but with everything you’re expected to keep in memory these days—at the same time we’re unleashing AI on the world—is madness.

A friend pointed out that AI books are written without authors.  If I remember correctly, my response was “AI has great potential, but let’s leave the humanities to humans.”  I hope I’m remembering that correctly, because I thought it clever at the time. I wish I’d written it down.  Those who make the rules about passwords aren’t as close to their expiration date as I am.  My grandmother was born before heavier-than-air flight took place and died after we’d landed on the moon.  Guys my age regale their kids (and some, their grandkids) by telling them telephones used to be attached to walls and you could walk away from technology at will.  Now it follows you.  Listens to you even when you’re not talking to it—our car frequently interjects itself into our conversations.  At least she isn’t asking for a password while I’m driving.  I couldn’t write it down.  Our love affair with technology is also driving.  More often than we suppose.  It’s driving me too… driving me crazy.

Discovering Ordinary

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I wasn’t quite sure what sense of ordinariness to expect from Robert J. Wicks’ The Tao of Ordinariness.  I would say as a whole it is about becoming ordinary you.  I found the whole interesting, but it was chapter four that really caught my attention.  It’s here that Wicks starts to address those whose damaged childhoods have created a false (and frequently re-affirmed) sense of our ordinary selves.  I’ve always known I have issues—it’s pretty obvious that I’m not quite like other people I know.  I often lack confidence and, thanks to my career and publishing history, have had that sense pounded in even as an adult.  (Poundedness is not a protected category, however, and it won’t get you any special consideration.)  Up until that chapter I was thinking, “This is nice, but it just doesn’t match my experience of things.”  Then I learned why.

It is possible to change your outlook, of course.  It’s not an easy thing to do.  Our culture isn’t set up to allow for it, what with 9-2-5s and all that.  You see, my personality really fit the teaching mode and lifestyle.  I loved the work, although it was hard.  And I loved the fact that if you had free time during the day you could, if you needed to, run an errand or two.  I guess I’ve never been one to invest in that capitalistic idea that your employer is buying your time.  For some jobs, yes.  In fact, my first employment experiences were of that sort.  I started at nine, did physical work until five, with a lunch break in the middle.  Now work begins early and doesn’t really end.  Days off are few and they fly by quickly.  Changing your outlook requires time to think.  That, it seems, is what’s missing.  It makes it difficult to find out what my ordinary is.

Wicks’ book is a hopeful one.  His optimism comes through page after page.  He gives practical advice.  The subtitle reveals why the book is important: Humility and Simplicity in a Narcissistic Age.  (That last adjective is so common now that spell-check completes it automatically.)  Politicians have frequently been narcissists, but Trump has made it into a high art—care only for yourself and tell people the lies they want to hear.  You can see the calculating cynicism in every glance and gesture.  And yet, here we are.  Books like this are important.  We need to be told that there’s another way.  If only it were also possible to get your horse to drink.

Sun Day

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Two holidays in a row!  Although today nobody gets off work because, well, two holidays in a row is too much.  People might come to expect a little more time off.  If you’re like most people, the summer solstice creeps up on you.  Its more somber sibling, six months from now, is more anticipated.  In December we’re light deprived (here in the northern hemisphere) but we’ve been soaking in the sun for some time already now.  Besides, nobody gets the four turns of the year off work.  Christmas is a gimme, but it comes three or four days after the solstice.  We figure Labor Day is close enough the the autumnal equinox, and thank God Easter is a Sunday, at least in the years when it’s near the vernal equinox, so nobody complains.  I feel at my most pagan these days.  Why not celebrate the turning of the wheel?

The other day I was catching up on the Vlog Brothers—John and Hank Green.  Last week they were talking about “Beef Days,” or how to reduce the amount of red meat they eat.  They proposed doing it by setting aside a few holidays a year where they would have it.  Their reason?  The biggest environmental threat to our planet is our dependence on beef.  It’s the reason rainforests are being clear cut.  It is a huge source of greenhouse gasses.  The one thing they didn’t mention, however, is the suffering of the animals themselves.  Industrial farming leads to horrible lives being raised to be consumed.  The conditions in which animals are kept is so bad that it is illegal in some states to reveal the conditions to the public.  You hide things that you’re ashamed of.  I became a vegetarian a quarter century ago, and a vegan coming up on a decade now.   I can’t live being the cause of the suffering of others.

Why not use the ancient holidays as days of some kind of indulgence?  I don’t recommend eating red meat—in fact, I agree with my Edinburgh friend that if you want to eat meat you should be required to kill it yourself.  (He’s not a vegetarian, note, but a wise man.)  In any case, although you may be stuck behind a desk at work, take a moment to ponder that light will be slowly fading from this day on until we reach that other pole that turns another year.  And we can dream of shortened work weeks, although that’s about as likely as being given the summer solstice off as a matter of course.  Speaking of which, work calls.

Life Course

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Curriculum vita.  The course of a life.  I see quite a few CVs, although I’m not on any search committees.  As I was examining one the other day I recollected how, when I first tried to put one together, I was told to leave high school and its achievements out of it.  Nobody’s really interested in that anymore.  Presumably college is an indication of choice whereas high school is a matter of where your parents live.  Or how much money they have.  College says something indicative about you.  Although many parents—not mine, to be clear—help bankroll college and may have a say in where you go, college is “your choice.”  Unbounded by geography, young people mostly old enough to take care of themselves, are given a really tremendous responsibility here.  And it was certainly influenced by high school.

Some choices are economic, and that also says something about a person.  Some are faith-based, which definitely says something about you.  Some are terribly ambitious, and those tend to get you the biggest head start on your life course.  Of course, some of us did not realize that.  Some of us, not sure if college would work or not, chose somewhere close to home.  Somewhere where escape, if needed, was possible.  And of course, your college shows up ever after on your CV.  I often wonder if things would’ve worked out differently if I’d gone somewhere else for college.  I needed somewhere understanding to shake me out of the false narrative I’d been told.  Had I gone somewhere more strident I might’ve retrenched in my pre-decided ideas.  Of course, those pre-decided ideas are what made me decide to go to college in the first place.

How can we possibly measure the course of a life?  From big event to big event?  So many of the meaningful bits occur in small spaces wedged in-between the large markers of who we are.  We can’t possibly know all the consequences of our choices, even as we attempt to select the right option at each step of the way.  And there’s no guarantee regarding the outcome.  Were it a feasible option I’d go back to college again—I would start at a different place this time—to test the results of my first decade of higher education.  For, I know, although a CV can reveal more than it might intend, it leaves much more unsaid than it can possibly say.

Stalking the Stalker

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You had to’ve seen this coming.  The Night Stalker introduced how Carl Kolchak, hard-nosed reporter, became a believer in the supernatural.  This highly-rated television film led to a sequel, The Night Strangler, which appeared the following year.  It also did well.  Ditching a third script by Richard Matheson, ABC decided on a series, Kolchak: The Night Stalker.  The subtitle was probably considered a necessary reminder that the movies had done very well.  It also transferred the stalker epithet onto Kolchak.  But I’m getting ahead of myself.  The Night Strangler shifts the action to Seattle where an elixir-of-youth-drinking monster is murdering young women to keep himself alive.  Once again the police and government officials cover up what’s really going on, for fear of losing tourist dollars.  There is a bit of social commentary here.


This movie reminded me of an In Search of… episode on Comte de Saint Germain, who, as a child, I assumed was a Catholic saint.  Saint Germain (just his assumed name) was an alchemist who claimed to be half a millennium old.  He seems to be, guessing from the number of books that treat him as an actual saint, just as popular now as he was in the seventies.  At least among a certain crowd.  And it was in the seventies that this movie was released.  Saint Germain’s enduring popularity all but assures no academic will touch him.  No matter, we have Kolchak to fill in the details.  And Richard Matheson was a smart man.  The Night Strangler does have a few pacing problems, but it certainly is a film worth seeing, even though it exists in that shadowy world of telinema (the combined forms of television and cinema).

Kolchak succeeds by believing in where the facts point, although the conclusions are supernatural.  In fact, watching The Night Stalker I couldn’t help but think of those who claim to have staked the Highgate Vampire.  That’s some strong conviction.  Indeed, the will to believe is more powerful than most people would like to admit.  Our minds contribute to our reality, but we insist that minds = brains, despite our inability to define consciousness.  That’s why I liked shows like In Search of…  As a teenager I couldn’t get enough of it.  I purchased all the accompanying Alan Landsburg books with my hard-earned summer income, skimping, as always, on the school clothes that I had to buy for myself.  Funny, it seems that my mindset hasn’t changed that much since the days of my youth.  Or maybe a sign of maturity is recognizing you were closer to the truth than you realized, back when you started the quest.