TAKE TWO ASPIRIN AND A LONG, LONG DRIVE

Blog number seventy-three                                 29 Jan. 2007

One day back in late fifties, Teresa and I suffered cramps.  Something we ate, probably.  On the way to the base to see the doctor, we had to stop several times because of the severity of the cramps.  I would feel fine and then all of a sudden, this excruciating pain.  Teresa commented something about my being a sissy, that she had menstruating cramps every month and she didn't carry on like I did.

When I saw the doctor I didn't have the cramps, so he just gave me a prescriptions for "anti-cramp" medicine.  Driving away from the doctor, I had another severe attack, so we went back.  The doctor kinda looked at me and gave me a note excusing me from work.  I got the idea that this was what he thought I was after, because I obviously wasn't suffering no cramps.

Back towards the gate away from the doctor, and I got another one, so back I came.  This time the doctor said he wasn't going to mess around with it any more and was going to put me in the hospital.  Just at that moment I had an attack and doubled over, letting out a long, "uuhhhhhh."  The doctor looked up from his writing and said, "You're joking, right?"  Just then I got another attack, but was able to grunt out, "no," They put me on a moving bed - like a stretcher with wheels and took me to where I would be admitted into the hospital.  Here I got diarrhea and vomiting both at the same time.

I spent the weekend in the hospital and come Monday morning, the nurse rousted us from our beds in order to change the sheets.  This was a pleasant experience for me which I couldn't understand until many years later I happened to remember my mother making us get out of bed in order to change the sheets.  The pleasant part of this experience was being so cold and sleepy and being able to crawl into clean sheets and go back to sleep.  When the nurse did this to me, I was reverting to a pleasant experience in my childhood.
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One time we took our two month old baby to the doctor late at night - probably three in the morning because it seemed like something was wrong with him.  He stopped acting as if something was wrong with him by the time we reached the doctor and after the doctor examined him, he said, "Next time make sure he's sick before you bring him in."

I thought, "You mean take him to a doctor before we take him to a doctor?" but I didn't say that.  We woke the guy up for nothing after all.  He was entitled to be a little grumpy.

WHERE HAVE ALL THE FLOWERS GONE?

Blog number seventy-two                                 28 Jan. 2007

I used to watch the Friday night fights religiously back in the fifties.  One of my favorite fighters was a guy named "Bobo Olson."  He was a young guy of course, but his hair was so short that under the lights he looked bald.  The announcers always commented upon it.  He became world middleweight champion.

IN 2002, I was walking to my favorite coffeehouse in Sacramento and a bum sitting on the sidewalk leaning against a building stopped me.  We talked a while and he told me that he was once the middleweight champion of the world.  I didn't pay the announcement any mind - he was a bum after all, and they do tell stories, but as I walked on I began to think that maybe he had been.  Champions have to be somewhere, why not where this guy was?  But I didn't go back and check.  I could have asked his name at least.  I wish now I had.  A few months later it was reported that a frequent patron of the Torch Club had died.  Yep, it was Bobo, my hero.

CAN YOU SEE MY NOSE FROM THERE?

Blog number seventy-one                                 26 Jan. 2007

So I'm sitting here at my computer and in the background Teresa has a movie on about two girls stuck in a snowed-in mountain cabin with a weird guy harassing them.  I can hear the girl trying to start the car and it turns over without starting.  I hear a guy yell out, "I think your battery's dead."

I ask Teresa if I heard right and she said, "Yeah - the guy disconnected the battery."

The girl keeps turning the engine over without starting and the guy says, I'll give you a jump."

He hooks up the cables and sure enough, the car starts.

Now what I'm thinking is that the writers, the directors, the producers may have chauffeurs and mechanics and thus no knowledge of dead batteries, but surely the electricians, the carpenters, SOMEBODY could have said, "Hey, that ain't right."  But Nooooooooo!  Horrywood.  Bah!

EAT LOTS OF FOOD AND PLENTY OF IT

Blog number seventy                                 22 Jan. 200
Watched Cops on the telly, they caught this woman in a car-thief sting where they have the car wired for sound and video.  She kept claiming, "I've never seen that car before," and "I wasn't even here."  Hah!  I couldn't stop laughing.

Another one, this teenager was videotaping his jumping a ramp with an ATV and he fell on his back and for a long time all you could hear was, "boo hoo, boo hoo."  Then you heard, "I wasn't crying.  Anybody would have cried, even though I wasn't crying."  Hah! again.  I love my TV.

I hate AOL.  Well, not really, but it always won't save what I write and just now it won't show me what the date is.  It'll show me the time, but that's it.  Hell, I can look at the clock over my shoulder for that.  But I can't look at a calendar and know what the date is.  Need one of those watches, huh?

When I first started on AOL, it was perfect.  It was AOL 3.1 and there was absolutely nothing wrong with it.  Then they started improving it and now it is somewhere in the AOL 10s and after every improvement, I lost the ability to do certain things.  But that's progress.

I don't hate politicians, but I don't have any respect for any of them, believing they are in the business primarily for the money and secondarily for the power.  Being greedy for those two things doesn't make for a very humanitarian human, and humanitarian humans top my list of national treasures.  Greedy humans are way down on my list.  Way, way down.  Useless bastards.  But I digress.

Thank God for babies.  This is a better digression.

I'm done.  Wrote out.  Gotta nap.  Watch TV.  Work on puzzle.  Read.

LOOK! UP IN THE SKY! IT'S A BIRD!

Blog number sixty-nine                                    12 Jan. 2006

Back in the early sixties I was looking out the front window and I saw a gray-backed bird with a white belly carrying a gray-backed bird with an orange belly up into a tree across the street.  I went out to see what was going on and the orange-breasted bird fell to the ground while the white-bellied one flew off.  "What the hell, " I thought.

I picked up the fallen bird and it was dead, but still warm.  I wondered if the other bird was a family member and was trying to help.  They were both the same size and similar looking - might be one was a male, the other female.

Both of these birds were common around there, but I had never seen this behavior before.

Years later, I don't remember now how it came about, but I realized that one bird was a shrike and had evidently just killed the other bird.  The tree that the shrike took his meal into was a mimosa tree, which has long sharp thorns and shrikes are known for impaling their prey on thorns for ease in eating and also as a storage place.

I knew about shrikes previous to this, but it never occurred to me that I would ever see one.  I had this kind of a blind spot where if I read about something in a book, it was not part of my world but more a part of the world of the book, if that makes sense to you.

In biology I studied amoebas.  I never ever expected to see any of these, for I did not expect them to exist outside of the text books, but one day in biology lab. I saw, under a microscope, an amoeba.  Wow!  Just like the pictures.

We studied hydras - which are animals that are nowhere more than two cells deep.  The cells which make up the lining of the stomach touch the cells which make up the lining of the skin of the animal. The head has several waving arms which gives it the name of the Hydra in Greek mythology.  The hydra walks by going end over end, like a slinky toy.

We lived in the mountains of Coastal California for a while.  We had two beautiful streams that cut through the property, and on some of the rocks in the stream, were these slimy things - like moss only slimier.  One day, kind of day dreaming, I was looking at things and I noticed a movement of the slime.  I looked closer, and I saw hydras!  My God, will wonders never cease?

It was on this stream that I saw Dipper birds.  These birds look like a thrush, gray in color, about the size of a robin.  They walk underwater!  Not swim - walk.

I also saw male and female worts - a kind of plant a little more along the evolution ladder than moss or lichens, but less than ferns.  I studied these in Biology too and never expected to see them.  The male and female don't look like the same plant.

When I was studying Abnormal Psychology, I always assumed we were talking about "Others" who projected, obsessed, delusioned, and it was only after undergoing psychoanalysis that I realized we ALL do ALL of those things, just in varying degrees.  A little bit and you're normal, more and you're eccentric, more and you're crazy.

I don't know why I separated worlds in books from worlds outside of books. Too much fiction reading maybe?

FROM STERN TO STEM

Blog number sixty-eight                                    11 Jan. 2006

I was waiting to get blood drawn at my local HMO and sitting two seats down, waiting to get blood drawn also, was a guy that looked EXACTLY like Howard Stern.  I pointed him out to the guy sitting next to me, but he seemed like he didn't want to embarrass the Howard Stern look-alike, but I figured that it was either Howard Stern or a guy that wanted to look like him, so what's the problem?

When my seat neighbor left, I turned to the guy and told him that he looked exactly like Howard Stern.  He said, "Who's he?"

Now what the hell.  If he WAS Howard Stern - which I sincerely doubted, because for one, he was in Sacramento and for two, he was too short.  Howard Stern is a tall lanky guy.  I saw his movie.  If he was Howard Stern, what's with the "who's he?"  If he wasn't Howard Stern, which I was pretty sure he wasn't, why try to look like him and then pretend you don't know who Howard Stern is?  And he DID look exactly like Mr. Stern.  Bushy curly hair, hook nose, the whole shtick.  The hair was the right length, the nose was humped correctly.  I mean, he had to work on his hair to get it to look like that.  Could it be a coincidence that it happened to turn out to look like a famous person's hairdo?  I don't think so.

We talked a bit after that, me telling him he was Howard's mirror image, things like that - me pretending I believed he didn't know who Howard was, although it seems as I remember it that he did let it slip that he knew who Howard was, but then I already knew that.

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When I was about seven years old, my friend Bud Cathewood showed me a condom and told me that men put them on when they went to bed so that if they peed during the night they wouldn't get the bed all wet.  He said his dad wore one every night.  Flash forward a few weeks. 

My mother and I were sitting on the porch on a warm summer twilight and walking down the middle of the street came this boy blowing a big balloon with a condom.  My mother turned to me and asked me if I knew what that was that the kid was blowing up and I said, "Yes."

In later years I understood that my mother thought I knew what condoms were used for at age seven, but she was mistaken.

DO YOU ALWAYS HAVE TO ACT LIKE AN ANIMAL?

Blog number sixty-seven                                    10 Jan. 2006

So I'm reading this book about first person accounts of fighter dogfights and one of the stories is about a guy flying an F-84 Thunderjet during the Korean War.  His oxygen mask malfunctions and his two wingmen see his plane doing some weird maneuvers.  At one point it took a hard turn to the right and went into a steep dive.

At first they think the pilot is practicing evasive action or something but then they see his head is leaning forward against the canopy.  Before they can call to him, they see him slump forward.  One of the pilots tells the other to put his wingtip under one wing and he would put his wingtip under the other wing without touching and they would use the flow of air over their wingtips to keep the unconscious pilot's plane level until they got to a lower altitude.  They got down to 13,000 feet and the pilot woke up with no memory of the fifteen minutes he had been unconscious, but with a severe headache.

Thinking outside the box, eh?
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I was watching a program on the telly (OTT) about gorillas.  The people doing the filming wanted to introduce an orphan baby gorilla to the pack, but they were afraid the adult gorilla might injure the infant.  Nervously, they approach the pack with the baby in hand.  As soon as they got close enough for the gorillas to smell the infant, the adults started acting nervous, huddling together as if conferencing and the baby started crying.  Suddenly the main gorilla - a hulking silverback, charged the guy carrying the baby gorilla and in slow motion later, it is seen that the silverback snatched the baby from the man and threw it into the bushes and then charged the man, teeth exposed.  The guy said he was sure he was gong to die, but the gorilla never touched him.

When the men backed off, the silverback approached the baby, picked it up, took it over to the packand last seen, all the group surrounded the baby, making a fuss over it, welcoming it into the group, it seemed to me. 

I was struck by how fearful the humans were about the expected reaction of the gorillas, thinking the gorillas might kill the baby, as opposed to the actual reaction. 

I had some years before become very aware of the intelligence and "humanity" that emanated from a zoo gorilla's eyes and was very touched by the experience.

Years later I saw a film about a boy that fell into a gorilla's cage.  One gorilla went over to the boy and very tenderly picked it up and took it to where the keepers could retrieve it.  The zoo keepers were kinda panic-stricken and rushed at the gorilla with water hoses trying to make it put the boy down.  I was sure, from previously seeing how they reacted to the baby gorilla, that the gorilla that picked up the boy knew he was injured and that he was human and wanted to give him to the humans to take care of.

The humans in this case reacted from fear of the gorilla injuring the boy just as the silverback had reacted to the humans carrying the baby gorilla out of fear of the humans hurting the baby gorilla.  How similar both experiences were, but from very different specie's viewpoint.

I once saw a series of pictures in Life Magazine where a crocodile had grabbed hold of an antelope by the stomach and there was a picture of a hippo charging toward the two -- one picture showing the hippo with all four feet off the ground.  The antelope got away from the croc and ran several feet away before it collapsed, but the croc was coming out of the water after it. The hippo got there in time to drive the croc back into the water, but by then the antelope was dead and the last picture showed the hippo with the antelopes head held tenderly in its mouth.

Amazing, no?

I once saw, again OTT,  a bull elephant chasing a group of people in an open jeep.  The people were obviously scared, but also laughing.  One of them said later that after viewing the film, he had no idea they were so close to being trampled.  Personally, I think the elephant just wanted to scare them away and had no intention of injuring them.  I think on one level, the humans knew this and in the moment responded to that knowledge with a scary thrill rather then a fearsome dread,

My daughter once told me about teasing a horse that belonged to her friend.  The two girls were stealing the hay from a pile the horse was eating.  At one point, my daughter told me later, the horse went after her with bared teeth and she was really scared the horse was going to injure her, but of course it didn't.  It just wanted to scare her and make her quit her behavior like sometimes we scare a dog if it is doing something we don't like.
                                              
I once saw OTT, a baby hippo walking on the heads of a packed bunch of huge crocodiles.  I wondered what kind of behavior the mother hippo took to teach those crocs to behave themselves like that.
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I once wanted to be a chemical engineer.  Since an engineering degree required drafting, I enrolled in a drafting class.  A few days into the course, a fellow student sidled up to me and advised that I would have to be neater in my work.  I looked at what I had done with "new eyes" and saw an ink-stained mess. I figured that if a student felt impelled to mentor poor me, I had better drop the class.  So I did.

LOOK ME IN THE EYE AND SAY THAT.

The past does not exist, neither does the future.  What does exist - the present, can never be perceived, for as soon as it is noticed, it is gone.

So the only time we know are the ones that don't exist.  The only time that does exist, eludes us.

We have no control over our past, nor over our future.  Yet we are where we are right now because of our past and our future.  We are controlled then, by things that don't exist and placed in a constantly disappearing world, temporally speaking.

Solid objects are not solid at all, but actually empty space.  If an object that has no solidity appears solid, isn't that the definition of an illusion?

We don't hear with our ears or see with our eyes, although it appears that we do.  Is that also an illusion?

I am not my name.  Is that an illusion then, that I am?

Something funny going on, man.