Vaccination Breakthrough

A rainy day in Atlanta today.  The big news, though, is I've scheduled an appointment for my second dose of the covid vaccine.

I got my first dose back on January 16 at the pharmacy of my local Krogers' supermarket.  However, they warned me then that they weren't taking appointments at that time for second doses, and that it would be up to me to make an appointment for myself.

They weren't sure of their supply, they explained, and didn't want to make appointments - in effect, a promise - that they couldn't keep.

Since my first dose, demand for a vaccination has far exceeded supply, and it's virtually impossible to schedule an appointment.  The Kroger web site for on-line scheduling is basically shut down, as is the site for their competitor, Publix (for some reason, you can only schedule on line). The Georgia DOH web site isn't much of a help either, as they're only taking appointments for first doses, not second. 

I see posts on social media from time to time that such-and-such pharmacy or clinic is taking appointments, but by the time I click over to their site, they're all booked up (probably because someone was spilling the beans on social media).

I was starting to wonder if I'd be able to get a second dose at all and if not, what then?  Wait a while and start over when supply is available and get a second "first" shot?  Just go with one dose and hope herd immunity protects me?  Lie and schedule another "first" dose for my second vaccination?  To add to my frustration, I couldn't find any reliable on-line guidance about what to do in my situation.

Then, this afternoon, I got an unsolicited, unexpected call from the Kroger pharmacy.  They said their records show I was due for my second dose on February 13 - would a 1:00 p.m. time slot work for me?  First, "yes," and second, "thank you." It's only logical that they would follow up - they have my records after all - but I hadn't expected logic or efficiency to be a factor in this process.

So one less thing to worry about.  I'm scheduled for my second dose and after that should be reasonably confident that I won't get seriously sick from the covid pandemic.

Seems Legit To Me

Insomnia

The Samskara Papers, Part 3

To recount, so far we've considered that samskara, or mental models, are sets of assumptions based on our prior experiences, as well as our prejudices and opinions, that help us understand the world.  We use it to make our communication more efficient - no point in explaining what we believe is tacitly understood - and we subconsciously use it to make decisions about the world around us.  It's also likely the origin of ego-consciousness - the Self exists because we constructed a mental model of a self separate from the rest of the world.

And then I read a random book I came across - Erich Fromm's The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness. I bought it in Portland, Oregon at Powell's Bookstore because I thought the title sounded cool and it looked like an intellectually challenging read (it was).  In fact,  couldn't even understand or follow large portions of it, but I came across a passage in Chapter 10 (Malignant Aggression: Premises) under the subtitle The Existential Needs of Man and the Various Character-Rooted Passions, and further sub-subtitled A Frame of Orientation and Devotion, that impressed upon me how deep samskara actually runs. 

"Man's capacity for self-awareness, reason, and imagination - new qualities that go beyond the capacity for instrumental thinking of even the cleverest animals - requires a picture of the world and of his place in it that is structured and has inner cohesion," Fromm writes.  "Man needs a map of his natural and social world, without which he would be confused and unable to act purposefully and consistently. He would have no way of orienting himself and of finding for himself a fixed point that permits him to organize all the impressions that impinge upon him."

That phrase, "all the impressions that impinge upon him," calls to mind the Buddha's description of the senses, which includes thought (the brain is a sense organ that perceives thoughts).  In this passage, we already have three of the Five Aggregates that make up the Self - Form (Man), Feeling ("all the impressions that impinge upon him"), and samskara, a mental map of the world and one's place in it.

"Whether he believed in sorcery and magic as final explanations of all events," Fromm continues, "or in the spirit of his ancestors as guiding his life and fate, or in an omnipotent god who will reward or punish him, or in the power of science to give answers to all human problems - from the standpoint of his need for a frame of orientation, it does not make any difference." 

"His world makes sense to him, and he feels certain about his ideas through the consensus with those around him. Even if the map is wrong, it fulfills its psychological function. But the map was never entirely wrong - nor has it ever been entirely right, either. It has always been enough of an approximation to the explanation of phenomena to serve the purpose of living."

Fromm found it impressive that he could find no culture in which there did not exist such a frame of orientation. Or any individual, either. "Often an individual may disclaim having any such overall picture and believe that he responds to the various phenomena and incidents of life from case to case, as his judgment guides him. But it can be easily demonstrated that he takes his own philosophy for granted, because to him it is only common sense, and he is unaware that all his concepts rest upon a commonly accepted frame of reference."

This was my basic point of disagreement with Stoic philosophers such as Epictetus, who maintained that we can control the passions of our emotions by simply observing the world and applying our faculty of logic.  But as we shall see, the way that we use our logic is already preconditioned by our frame of orientation, our mental maps of the world, our samskara.  We use our logic more to justify the decisions we've already made subconsciously based on our frame of orientation, than to reach a truly non-partisan, logical conclusion.

When a person who claims not to have such an overriding frame of reference is confronted with a fundamentally different total view of life, he judges it as "crazy" or "irrational" or "childish," even while he considers himself as being only logical. 

"The intensity of the need for a frame of orientation explains a fact that has puzzled many students of man, namely the ease with which people fall under the spell of irrational doctrines, either political or religious or of any other nature, when to the one who is not under their influence it seems obvious that they are worthless constructs. Part of the answer lies in the suggestive influence of leaders and in the suggestibility of man. But this does not seem to be the whole story. Man would probably not be so suggestive were it not that his need for a cohesive frame of orientation is so vital . The more an ideology pretends to give answers to all questions, the more attractive it is; here may lie the reason why irrational or even plainly insane thought systems can so easily attract the minds of men."

Fromm's "frame of reference" or "mental maps" are obviously the same as "mental models" or samskara. But in this one passage, Fromm shows how deeply rooted and fundamental they are to the human psyche.  It also suggests an answer to the question I've asked myself so many times: how can otherwise intelligent people believe such seemingly foolish things?  

I know well educated scientists and engineers how have fallen for the Trumpian brand of conservative politics, and I've marveled that they can't see what appears to me to be the shallowness and cynicism of those politics.  And how do you explain people's acceptance of the QAnon conspiracy  theories, other than dismissing them as "crazy" or "irrational" or "childish?"  Or for that matter, how can an erudite and successful attorney believe in a literal interpretation of the Bible, including Adam and Eve and Noah's Ark? And yet there are those who do.

Fromm suggests that looking from the perspective of an absolute right and an absolute wrong is a flawed approach.  It's merely that I have a different frame of reference than my colleagues.  From my  perspective, the world makes sense to me and I feel certain about my ideas through the consensus of  those around me.  But the same is also true for my colleagues.

Samskara, then, is much more than a fancy theory on the evolution of consciousness, or a semantic/linguistic technique for efficient communication, although it does include all those things and more. It is the context within which we perceive and understand the world; it is the very fabric of our psyche. 

It Really Do Be This Way Sometimes

 

"The best weapon against capitalism is uninterrupted meditation."

- Bartmoss Collective

Walking

On a nearly religious basis, I walk at least two miles a day.  My routine as of late is to get up and immediately walk three-quarters of a mile (three trips around the park) right away before morning coffee or any other alibi to put off walking.  

I might rack up another quarter mile or so just puttering around the house, looking for my eyeglasses or my cell phone.  But sometime in the afternoon, as the weather allows, I'll take an afternoon walk on a nearby portion of the Atlanta Beltline trail, covering just as much distance as necessary to complete my daily two-mile goal. My iPhone has a pedometer app that helps me keep track of my daily mileage, and records each days effort.

The walks give me a tad bit of easy exercise but more importantly get me outside and a chance to breathe some fresh air.  I maintain social distance and wear a paper mask while walking on the Beltline, but the walks also let me have a modicum of social interaction or at least visually see other human beings. 

Two miles a day isn't much (it's pretty easy) but consistency results in 14  miles a week, 56 miles a month, or 672 miles a year, which is sort of the equivalent of walking from here to Baltimore, Maryland.  

The Samskara Papers, Part 2

For the briefest but necessary recap, the last post asserted that the Buddha taught that samskara, or "mental formations," gave rise to consciousness, a necessary condition to the existence of the Ego-Self.  A couple Millenia later, Indian neurologist Dr. V.S. Ramachandran came to a similar conclusion, and stated that naturally occurring "mirror neurons" in the brain gave rise to mental models that let an observer put themselves into another person's shoes and look at the world from another's point of view. From there it was just a short step to turn that vison inward and create a mental model of yourself. This is the dawn of self-awareness, or consciousness.  So both the Buddha and modern neurology agree that the concept on an abiding, independent self is created from our own mental models, or sanskara as they call it in Sanskrit.  We exist because we assume we exist.

Okay, that's all fine and good for mystifying your neighbors at a cocktail party, and it should win you some approving nods from your friendly neighborhood guru.  But the next revelation came to me as independently as my chance reading of neurology was from my practice of Zen.  This time, I was reading about linguistics and the text referenced the concept of schema.  

Schema, for lack of a better definition, are sets of conventions or assumptions held by a society, that are understood and tacit between two people talking, such as there is no need to mention them.  "I had a tire blow out last night and I could barely control my car," someone might tell you.  What they don't have to tell you, because it's understood, that they were driving a gasoline-powered vehicle with an internal combustion engine and four tires - two in front and two in back - along a paved public road with other similar vehicles on it.  If anything were any different than that, they would have mentioned it, like they were on a motorcycle,  or a horse was pulling their car for some reason.

When they say, "I had a tire blow out last night and I could barely control my car," you immediately and subconsciously draw on your own experience with cars and tires and maybe even blow-outs and create your own mental image, a model if you will, which we call a schema.  Thus, schema equals mental model equals a form of samskara.  As you discuss this unfortunate event with your friend, they will pick up from your comments if your schema needs any fine tuning.  If you say, "That must have been scary late at night when no one was around to help," they will correct you if only happened at 6:00 pm, during the evening rush hour.  If you say, "good thing the cops weren't around to give you a DUI," they will counter that they were quite sober, and the cops did come by and assist.  

This is how we communicate.  It saves time and energy.  If your friend had to explain each and every aspect of the incident, like the make, model and description of the vehicle, the rules for driving, the existence of highways, and so on, it would take forever and they would never get to the point.

Here's my favorite example of how schema works.  A very short story:  "On her way to school, Mary was nervous about the math test."  End of story. Your mind, based on your own personal experience with school and getting there and math tests, had already made its own schema, a mental picture of Mary on her way and worrying about the math test.

But let me make the very short story just a tiny bit longer.  "On her way to school, Mary was nervous about the math test.  Yesterday, she was barely able to control her students."  Suddenly, your whole schema changes as your mind throws out one set of assumptions for another. 

I propose that much of our problem communicating and understanding one another, much of the reason that we are so polarized politically, socially and economically, is because we have very different schema from each other but don't realize it.  A so-called "Karen" sees three Black teenagers running in the parking lot of a mall, and her schema immediately perceives shoplifters evading the law.  A Black mother may see them as three children in trouble, escaping harassment, possibly requiring her intervention and protection.  A liberal progressive might see them as young men fleeing persecution or wrongful accusations.  A college football coach might see three potential first-round draft picks.  But when each reacts according to their own perception, according to the narrative they've constructed around the event, it conflicts with the perception and narratives of the other observers, and trouble ensues. 

This isn't a hypothetical situation.  Recently, on the NextDoor social media app, someone posted a story titled, "I Just Chased Three Blacks Running From Dick's Sporting Goods."  Many people immediately jumped on his case and called him "racist" - what difference does their skin color make?  He could more accurately have titled his post "I Just Chased Three Shoplifters Running From Dick's Sporting Goods."  But to the schema of the original poster, "Blacks Running From Dick's Sporting Goods" and  "shoplifters" meant the exact same thing - the words in his mind were virtually interchangeable. 

The original poster was shocked and deeply offended when people accused him of racism.  "I was just trying to give an accurate description," he claimed, "in case anyone else saw them."  He followed them in his car for several miles, even as the dispatcher on 911 was telling him to back off and stop. Fortunately for everyone involved, they (the alleged shoplifters) got away before any violent confrontation occurred.  The worst part of this story is that while he was pursuing another vehicle, calling 911 and heading toward some sort of potentially violent confrontation, his 9-year-old daughter was in the car with him.  

For the record, yes, the poster was being racist - assuming they were shoplifters based on the color of their skin, and then seeing and labeling them simply as "Blacks" (not even "Black men" or "Black teenagers") and not "suspects" or "shoplifters" is the very definition of racism.   But I digress.

We form schema based on our experience and on the society around us, our families and our upbringing, our reading, and our choice of news outlets. Our original poster's experience caused his schema to perceive the Black men as "shoplifters" as automatically and naturally as you first imagined that Mary was riding on a school bus. I don't mean to make excuses or justifications for his behavior, but our original poster was merely reacting to his hard-wired schema in the way that seemed natural and appropriate to him.  That those same actions seem reckless and wildly inappropriate to some is due to the schema of others.

Thinking this through and applying it widely, almost everyone is acting according with their own schema, their mental models, their samskara.  Sadly, though, some people have some really unfortunate sets of schema.  The bizarre person who takes off his clothes and sits down in the road during rush hour is merely reacting to some tragic schema that somehow got locked in his head.  The person who repeatedly lies and tells the American public that he didn't lose an election that he obviously and demonstrably lost is behaving in accordance with his own schema.  The alcoholic slowly killing herself with one more little drinkie, drink, drink is perfectly in accord with her own schema.

Samskara, then, is not only the mental model that gives rise to consciousness and imagines us as various different Ego-Selves separated from the rest of the world, but is also the set of assumptions we've received during life from society and the world around us. Sometimes, it's amusing and even refreshing to see someone react to a different set of schema, but more often its confusing and upsetting, and the source of much of the conflict in the world.

tl;dr: Mary's a lousy teacher.  

Oh, Why Not? Everyone Else Is Doing It!

Dr. Ramachandran

Oh, great, another TED Talk, and one from 10 years ago at that.  But this one is worth watching, as it's Dr. Ramachandran explaining mirror neurons and their effects on consciousness and empathy far better than I ever could.  I have posted other videos of Dr. R here before, but not this particular one.  

Back in 2009, I quoted Dr. Ramachandran saying, "One of the theories we put forward is that the mirror-neuron system is used for modelling someone else's behavior, putting yourself in another person's shoes, looking at the world from another person's point of view. This is called an allocentric view of the world, as opposed to the egocentric view. So I made the suggestion that at some point in evolution this system turned back and allowed you to create an allocentric view of yourself. This is," he claims, "the dawn of self-awareness," or consciousness.

This is explicitly tying mirror neurons to mental models, or "mental formations" as the Buddhists put it, and gives us more insight into samskara.  It is these mental models that give rise to consciousness and self-awareness, and validates a deeper examination of the role mental models play in our lives.

The Samskara Papers, Part 1

I wake up in the middle of the night unable to get back to sleep.  It's not because of anxiety, at least I don't think it is.  I try to roll over and go right back to sleep. I've found one good technique is that if I can remember even a fragment of whatever it was I was just dreaming about and I concentrate on that, sleep is more likely to come.  The worst thing that can happen at 4:30 am is my conscious voice, that pesky little narrator in my head, will start talking to me and telling me something - inevitably always something I already know because that voice is literally me -  and I can't go back to sleep while that voice prattles on and on.

One of that voice's favorite topics is this Grand Unifying Theory I think I've come up with.  At least the internal voice thinks it's a Grand Unifying Theory at 4:30 am.  It's convoluted as hell, a long, shaggy-dog-story of a theory, but that voice wants to keep going over it in a very linear manner. "First, Point A suggests the possibility of Point B, which logically leads to Point C" and so on and so forth to on beyond Point Z and to Points Theta and Gamma and, I don't know, Uma?

To possibly quiet that voice so I can sleep without its didactic lessons, I'm going to try and lay out the GUT in a series of posts here.  There's more than I can explain in one single posting - more than any rational person would be willing to read in one post - and much of it has been mentioned at one time or another in these very pages. But I feel compelled to put it all together for posterity.  

I know how it sounds, but you can call this my manifesto. I know how it sounds, but I'm writing my manifesto because the voice in my head is telling me to.  

Okay, on then, to Point A.  One of the early things one learns when studying Buddhism, right after the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path, is the lesson of the Five Aggregates.

The first step of the Eightfold Path is right understanding, and one of the first things to understand is the ephemeral nature of the Ego-Self.  The Buddha taught that what we call the "self" or the "ego" or "identity" or even "the soul" is impermanent and dependent upon the existence of other conditions.  The Ego-Self, for lack of a better term, is what naturally arises when five specific conditions come together.  Since the Ego-Self depends on the accumulation of these five conditions, and since if even one of these conditions is absent the Ego-Self ceases to exist, the Ego-Self can be thought of as an aggregate of these five conditions.  Therefore, the Buddha called these conditions the Five Aggregates.

What are they?  The first is Form - there must be some discernible physical entity present for everything else to come together.  The most common Form is the mind, or the physical brain, but other Forms are possible - a computer chip or some alternate biological form could suffice ("the mind of trees and grasses"), as long as the other four Aggregates are present. The "Hive Mind" of bees and ants is a good example of a Form other than the grey matter of a brain.

The second aggregate is Feeling.  For the Ego-Self to emerge, the Form has to be sensate - it has to receive sensory input from other phenomena around it.  Seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, and even thinking are all types of Feeling, and any one of them, if not all, are necessary for the arising of the Ego-Self.  

So far, then, a motion-activated spotlight would qualify. as a vehicle for an Ego-Self.  It has Form - the physical spotlight itself - and it has Feeling - the ability to perceive motion around it.   But an Ego-Self does not arise because it lacks the third aggregate - Thought.  The spotlight "sees" motion and switches on, but it doesn't think about it.  It doesn't decide whether to light up or not.  It's not sentient, it doesn't think, so an Ego-Self does not arise.  You can relax - your security devices aren't plotting to kill you.

For just a moment, we'll skip over the fourth aggregate, Impulse, to talk about the Fifth.  I promise we'll come back to Impulse - it's the whole point of this post.  But the Fifth Aggregate is Consciousness.  The Form has to be aware that it's sensing phenomena and that it is thinking. Like that motion-activated spotlight, Alexa, the AI in a so-called "smart speaker," has form, perceives sounds and light, but it can be argued that it also "thinks" about it's responses.  A high-end one can even "learn" based on its prior performance.   But without consciousness, without it being self-aware that its learning and thinking, no Ego-Self arises inside of that gizmo.

And why isn't it conscious?  The Buddha would maintain it isn't conscious because it lacks the Fourth Aggregate, Impulse, which gives rise to consciousness.  That was the one that always interested me the most, because I could never really understand it, and based on numerous Buddhist books I've read that failed to adequately explain it, I suspect that many others don't understand it either.

The first problem is that the term "Impulse" is a poor translation of the Sanskrit word for the Fourth Aggregate, samskara.  Samskara sounds like the familiar term samsara, the cycle of successive lives and rebirths, but it's a very different thing.  The Shambala Dictionary of Buddhism and Zen defines samskara as, literally, "impression" or "consequence," although it's usually translated as "impulse," "formations," or even "mental formational forces," whatever they are.  The noted Chinese translator Red Pine (Bill Porter) translates it as "memory."

Now what is it, I wondered, that they are talking about if it can be variably translated as "impulse," "mental formation" and even "memory"? Those sound like some very different things.  And if the only difference between my ego-self and an Alexa AI is the presence of samskara, ought I not to understand what it is?

My research into samskara, both academic (i.e., book reading) and contemplative (i.e., meditation), has lasted for several years.  It's still ongoing, and every couple of months or so I think I have an "Aha!" moment and go around telling everyone what I think it means, and posting messages about if here on this blog, but then a few months later I come to some other conclusion that negates the previous one.  After a few cycles of that, you begin to doubt any understanding you thought you had (which the Buddha would point out is the necessary first step to understanding anything, especially self nature).

My current understanding, the one that's stayed with me for at least five years now, came almost by accident during some totally unrelated reading on psychology and neurology.  I was reading about so-called mirror neurons, neurons in the brains of some primates, including humans, that light up when they see, rather that experience, a phenomenon, and react exactly the same way they would if they had directly experienced the phenomenon.

Here's an example - I was at a state office building several years ago reviewing some archived files for a project.  As I was leafing through a large folder of letters and correspondence, I suddenly got a paper cut on a fingertip.  It wasn't painful so much as startling, and I involuntarily twitched.  Just as I did, an office worker who happened to be walking by at that exact moment saw me twitch, instantly perceived why I had twitched, and involuntarily, she twitched, too.  "I felt that," she said, a total stranger to me.  

That was her mirror neurons firing. She saw my regular neurons fire in response to a painful sensation, and her mirror neurons fired up in the same way, as if she had experienced the sensation herself.  There's nothing supernatural about it, no "spooky action from a distance," it's just the way we're wired (I accidentally wrote that at first as "that's just the way we're weird," and actually, that works too). The reaction of mirror neurons is probably why horror movies are so frightening.  It's probably why pornography works too, but that's a whole other conversation.

I found this interesting, but never even considered associating it with samskara.  But then I read another article about an Indian neuroscientist, Dr. V.S. Ramachandran.  Dr. Ramachandran had observed the actions of mirror neurons in monkeys, and hypothesized that the mirror neurons may have been what lead to the creation of self-awareness as experienced by higher primates.  

Imagine a monkey sitting in a tree observing another monkey running across the jungle floor to gather some fallen fruit.  Suddenly, a leopard or other predator jumps out from nowhere and snatches the monkey on the ground. All the other monkeys in the trees shriek in horror as their mirror neurons fire. The incident has the monkeys' full attention, and their neurons are firing and adrenaline is coursing through their veins.  They could "feel" the other monkey's ambush, just like the office worker could "feel" my paper cut. As once, they feel like they are that interconnected with monkey on the ground and at the same time realize that they are separate and safely up a tree.  But it could just as easily have been them on the ground.

This, Dr. Ramachandran hypothesizes, gives rise to the creation of mental models that can predict the outcome of their actions and their own safety based on what they see happen to other monkeys.  The other monkeys are surrogates, if you will, for themselves, and if the surrogates are "others," than they must be separate "selves."  This is the origin, Dr. Ramachandran proposes, of the concept of a "self" and an "other," and therefore the evolutionary origin of the Ego-Self.  And it all happened because of mirror neurons.

That was an epiphany for me.  The Buddha taught that samskara gave rise to consciousness, and Dr. Ramachandran suggested that it was mental models gave rise to the Ego-Self.  What if they were both right?  In that case, samskara would equal "mental models," and suddenly the translations "formations," and even "mental formational forces" began to make sense.  

In order for an Ego-Self to arise, one needs Form, Feeling, Though, and Consciousness, as well as the concept, the mental model, that the Form is one thing and the rest of the universe another.  We are an Ego-Self because we've created the hypothesis that we are a self and everything else is other.  We, the Form, feel this, think that, and are consciously aware that we are feeling this and thinking that, and that awareness results in a hypothesis that we are a self separate from the things we feel and think about.  Thus is the origin of the Ego-Self arises. Or so I understand the Buddha to have taught.

This was just the start of my research into samskara.  It wasn't the end of my quest, just the identification of the subject of my quest.  Somehow, samskara seemed to hold the key to so much more, and I've followed it down several rabbit holes, some productive, some not so much.  I'll talk about it more and explain some of those other thoughts and observations, but I think this post has gone on long enough for now.  I'll pick it up again later in another, future post.

tl;dr: samskara are mental formations, or mental models, the most significant of which is that self and others are separate things.

Inauguration Day

I've said it before and I'll say it again - Joe Biden wasn't my first choice of candidate back at the start of the presidential campaign when something like 20 Democrats were running.  He wasn't my last choice, but he certainly wasn't in my Top 10.

But live and learn - as it turns out, he just might be the right man for the time.  We don't need another flamboyant barn-burner like the former president, but we could really use a genuinely compassionate person sincerely dedicated to unity and harmony.  It looks like that just might be Joe.

Today's inauguration, scaled down due to concerns about the covid pandemic and with intense security because of insurrection threats by white supremacists, was an elegant and moving ceremony, and I'm a cynic not often moved by ceremony and tradition.  But it feels like a great weight has been lifted off of the American people, and we no longer have to endure the bombastic and contentious speech of the former president.

To many people, myself very much included, the highlight of the ceremony was the reading by the young poet Amanda Gorman.  Her poem, "The Hill We Climb," was at once clear-eyed and realistic but also inspirational and deeply moving, and her delivery couldn't have been more assured and spot-on.  It says a lot about the future of America that President Biden (how I like the sound of that after four years of Trump) and his team selected her for the ceremony instead of some partisan firebrand or some anodyne motivational speaker.

We have many challenges ahead and there will be no shortage of controversy and scandal, I'm sure, but for one chilly but still sunny afternoon, America seemed back on track again.

Thank you, Amanda.

Home Maintenance

 

So remember around last Halloween when the remnants of Hurricane Zeta came tearing through Atlanta and dropped a huge tree on my house? Well, funny thing - despite my best, most valiant efforts, the repairs  didn't finally get started until today, some 10 weeks later.

It's not like I wasn't trying.  I was without power for three full days after the tree fell, but despite a lack of electricity, I still managed to file a claim with my insurer (Allstate), flag down a passing tree-contractor truck and convince them to remove the tree from my house and to put tarp up on my roof, all before the lights even came back on Halloween evening.

That's a lot of progress for three dark days, but things slowed down after that.  The problem was that the hurricane caused so much wide-spread damage, from the Louisiana coast into the Carolinas, that all of Allstate's claims adjusters were badly backlogged, inspecting claims all over the Southeast, and it took a full week (Week 1) before someone even so much as came over to look at the damage.

And then, because the guy who finally did come over was himself personally backlogged, it took another full week for him to determine the cost of the damage and send me a settlement payment (Week 2).

Now that I had a scope of work and a budget, my next step was to get a contractor who could do the repairs.  I contacted three different firms.  

The first was very prompt and timely, and quickly sent me a ridiculous contract that I wouldn't sign under any circumstance (it basically said they would do however much or as little as they wanted and I wouldn't question them, and if there was a disagreement I would waive my right to litigate in favor of third-party arbitration). It was also poorly written, as if they had asked a high-schooler to write it for them.  Even though it was so bad it probably wouldn't have held up in court, it's a telling sign that they never even followed up to ask if I was going to hire them and sign their daft contract.  In fact, after getting the contract, I never heard from them again.

The second firm was more professional but also slower to respond.  Their manager told me there had been a death in his family and he'd been out of state, but he eventually came by for his own inspection. Long story short,  for various mealy-mouthed reasons, they declined to take the job.  But thanks for playing, boys.

The third firm also wanted to send their own inspector over, but he was out of state doing inspections on all those other storm-damaged properties.  It took him three weeks to finally make it over here (Weeks 3, 4, and 5) while I was dealing with the other two firms.  But he finally did arrive, and was the first to notice that the damage to my house was far more extensive than the Allstate adjustor indicated, and that a new scope and budget would be needed.  However, he also insisted that I get an asbestos inspection performed before we proceeded any further.

By now, we were into Thanksgiving week, which slowed everything down as both my contractors and my insurer took time off to spread covid-19 among their families.  I got the asbestos testing done on December 7 (Week 6).  I passed the tests - no asbestos-containing materials in my house - but I didn't finally get the new scope and budget from the contractor and over to Allstate until December 16 (Week 7). 

Naturally, since the revised budget was three times higher than Allstate's original estimate, they had some questions and wanted more documentation. We went back and forth on Weeks 8 and 9, which included the Christmas and New Year's holidays, which slowed everything down.  But in early January (Week 10), I finally got approval and it wasn't until today that my contractor finally was available to start the job.

It was a long tedious process, and for 10 weeks my house was the neighborhood eyesore.  Every time I exited or entered the house, I had to duck under dangling rain gutters by the front door.  A neighbor told me he just assumed that I had grown accustomed to the damage, deciding to keep the settlement money for myself.  

But at least we're now finally started.  They're up on what's left of the roof right now, hammering away and scaring the cats.  It's kind of spooky and more than a little shocking to see my house without a roof (it's sitting there topless, exposed for the elements and all the world to see), but at least we're underway.  

Late Night Tales

So this is how it goes - I wake up in the middle of the night unable to get back to sleep.  My mind starts to dictate an essay, my own thoughts read aloud to me by my conscious mind.  There are some great ideas that I come up with at around 3:30 a.m., or so it seems at the time, and I resolve to record them here in the pages of Water Dissolves Water.

The problem is that some of my best ideas were already written down and sent off in my daily early-morning email to my Mom.  By the time I finally get around to sitting here to compose my daily blog post, I don't really want to rehash what I'd already written in the morning, and for some reason, cutting-and-pasting my morning email to recycle the contents feels like cheating.  

Worse, by the time I settle in and look at the blank composition screen of this blog, whatever brilliant insights I thought I had at 3:30 a.m. have suddenly vanished.  Or worse even still, don't appear as brilliant in the harsh light of day.  Or they're so long and convoluted, it would take me hours to write it all down, and even then the words probably wouldn't properly convey what I was trying to say.  "Well, write something," I tell myself.  "Anything."  

But nothing comes to mind and I wind up posting some random picture, cartoon, or meme merely for completeness' sake, so that I can say I posted "something" that day.

Sorry, dear reader, that you had to be the recipient of my mindlessness.

2021

 

Socialized Medicine

I got my covid-19 vaccination today!

I'm actually quite lucky.  Yesterday morning, I learned that the pharmacies in our local supermarket chains were distributing the vaccine, and I signed up on line.  Publix, my preferred and nearest supermarket, was unavailable, but Kroger's, the next closest, was.  I tried to make an appointment for that  day (yesterday) but they were full, so I made an appointment for today instead.  1:00 pm.  Easy as pie.

I showed up at my appointed hour, they took my Medicare card (gotta love socialized medicine!) and stuck me.  If not for the required 15-minute wait to make sure there was no adverse reaction, I would have been in and out in 5 minutes.

I got the Moderna vaccine (not that I had a choice).  I have to wait 28 days and get a second shot to be fully vaccinated.

I later learned how lucky I was to get an appointment on my first try.  All of my friends and neighbors have been trying all day, but over the past 24 or so hours, they keep getting a message that both Publix and Kroger's are fully booked.  But one of my more persistent neighbors found that on her 10th try, she was able to book an appointment for next Tuesday.  Apparently, you just have to keep trying until you get lucky.

Kroger's isn't taking appointments yet for the follow-on vaccination.  I'll have to try my luck again next month and see if I get as lucky then as I did yesterday, or if I'm patient and/or persistent enough to book a second shot.  We'll see.

But anyway, I'm vaccinated!  Maybe we're finally getting to the end of this long national nightmare.

Why Is Clarity So Confusing?

Thoughts while meditating after reading Philip Johnson-Laird's Mental Models:

Why is it that we cannot think everything at once but are forced to have one thought after the other? Our memories exist together, yet we cannot call them to mind all at once, but only one at a time.

Why are there silences when we think aloud?  Aren't we thinking at those moments, or are we unable to put our thoughts into words?  

And for that matter, why do we finish the sentences in our head?  We already know what we are going to say and we never surprise ourselves at the end of our thought sentences and say "Wow, I would never have guessed that I was going to think that!"

The Old Farmer's Almanac says only a fool tests the depth of the water with both feet.

After the recent posts here, this can't go by without mention.  As the headline says, Congress impeached Donald Trump today, a year after his previous impeachment ended with the Senate clearing him of charges.  With this in the books, Trump will surely go down in history as one of the worst presidents ever.

On his watch, nearly 400,000 Americans have died due to his mishandling of the covid pandemic. Republicans lost the majority in the House in 2018 and the Senate in 2020.  Georgia turned blue and gave Biden its Electoral votes, and then elected two Democratic Senators.  The country suffered its worst economic decline in history.  The nation was convulsed by riots and protests over police brutality and racial discrimination.  His term was nothing short of a disaster.  

After he lost the election in November, Trump made up baseless claims of widespread voter fraud, as everyone know he was going to do.  Not a shred of evidence was ever produced, although he repeated his lies so many times that soon an echo chamber developed on social media and Fox News, resulting in many people believing his claims, or at least doubting the legitimacy of the election.  "Well, there should at least be an investigation," some people said, even though there was nothing to investigate.  Each and every state went on record assuring the public that there was no evidence of voter fraud, and the Federal Election Commission declared it the least fraudulent election in modern history.  But Trump still maintained his lies, and a large number of Republicans believed him.

Trump next tried to litigate  to get the vote overturned.  But since there was no evidence (because there was no fraud), each and every case either got thrown out of court, or the judges quickly and decisively ruled against Trump.  Even the Supreme Court, packed with three Trump appointees, refused to hear his baseless case.

When litigation failed, Trump then tried strong-arming the states to just throw out or change the election results.  How many attempts he made is not know, but it is known that he called the Georgia Secretary of State and asked him to somehow "find" some 11,780 votes for him.  "Just say you recalculated," Trump advised and even threatened the SOS with "legal problems" if he didn't comply.  Like his other attempts, the strongarm attempt also failed.

So finally, on January 6, 2021, the day Congress was ceremonially validating the Electoral votes, Thump addressed a crowd of his supporters and told them to march to the Capital to protest the count.  He urged his supporters to "fight much harder" against "bad people," and to "show strength" at the Capitol. The crowd marched to the Capital as instructed, overran security, and ransacked the Capital.  At least five people, including a Capitol Police officer, died during the siege and in the immediate aftermath.

Congress has cited Trump for "incitement of insurrection," a crime, and 10 Republicans joined the Democrats in voting for the impeachment, a rare event in these polarized times.

It's no secret that the Politics Desk here at WDW doesn't like this so-called "president."  It shouldn't be a surprise that we're delighted with the second impeachment, and the permanent stain on Trump's already tarnished legacy.  Prior to Trump, only three presidents have been impeached in U.S. history - James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, and Bill Clinton (Nixon resigned before impeachment began).  

Trump is the only one to have been impeached twice, a record I suspect that will last for quite a while.  Couldn't have happened to a more corrupt thug.

 

Cruel World

This is true - Google it for yourself.  Someone in Florida carved the word "Trump" all in capital block letters into the back of a live manatee.  

I refuse to show a picture for the same reason that I didn't show the Capital insurgents.  Neither deserves any more publicity or fame.  

But anyway, if you need any further proof that the Trump following is a Death Cult based on cruelty - if the children in cages, ICE raids, extrajudicial police killings, and mistreatment of women wasn't enough - then consider that poor manatee.  A docile, gentle creature.  

You fucking people make me sick.

A real man would shave the word "Trump" onto the back of a live grizzly bear.  That would impress me. But not a manatee.  

it's All Fun and Games Until It Happens To You

 

Alert readers will recall that I've been an ardent defender of the computer game Cyberpunk 2077 despite all the media reports about it being so riddled with bugs that it is literally unplayable.  In addition to several posts here in these pages, I've argued my case in other on-line forums too, like Facebook and Reddit.

I'm not saying there aren't any bugs, I'm saying they're more amusing that annoying and certainly don't render the game unplayable.  But the longer I play (I'm now some 238 hours in), the buggier it's getting.  Some of that could just be the cumulative effect of so many hours - if you play for 10 hours, you might see 1 bug, but at that rate if you play for 100 hours, you will encounter 10 bugs, and so on).  

But although I haven't been keeping track, it seems that the bugs are becoming more frequent and more severe.  Rather than just having objects hover in space, the most frequent bug I've encountered (like the dead soldier above), bugs are now interfering with gameplay and story progression. 

The biggest and worst occurred this weekend.  There is one quest, an integral, main story-line quest, that starts by having a Non-Playing Character call you on your in-game cell phone.  It's been well over 40 in-game hours by now, and I'm just now realizing, "Girl, he's not going to call you" (I'm playing my second play-through as a female character).

He's not calling, and therefore there is no way I can start that integral, main story-line quest.   I've tried calling him but he doesn't pick up.  I've tried causing random mayhem in his neighborhood to get his attention - he's a "fixer," sort of a like your friendly neighborhood crime lord/contract procurer.  Need someone killed?  You contact a fixer and he or she will set you up with a suitable assassin. Need something stolen? Your fixer will procure a thief suitable for the gig.  But I can't get this particular fixer to call no matter what I do - for all I know, he could be dead.

The particular story line I'm stuck on has a fixer, Mr. Hands, who's supposed to call my character and ask me to break into a gang-infested former shopping mall for one of his clients and put a tracking chip on a high-end automobile.  Easy stealth job - I know this because I did it successfully in my first play- through.  I'm playing through a second time now so that I can make some different choices and experience a different ending - near the end of the game, you choose one of three different strategies to complete your ultimate mission, and all three end differently.  I've put in well over 100 hours investing in skill sets and developing my current character specifically for one of those alternative endings (I'm trying not to drop any spoilers here), but now, since Mr. Hands won't call, I can't complete that quest. And since I can't complete that integral, main story-line quest, I can't get to the quest after that and so on to the final quest.  In other words, I can't complete the game.  And since the game auto-deletes old save files, I have no saved games from back before all this started.

I've gone online and "Mr. Hands Won't Call" is definitely a thing, a bug, and no one has a working solution to it.  The "fixes" that were suggested all assume that you still have some other unfinished quests with Mr. Hands left to complete, but in those 40-plus in-game hours I've completed each and every last Mr. Hands quest.  Not only that, I've done every single thing possible in Mr.  Hands' neighborhood, even things that don't remotely involve him, including random drive-by shootings of innocent civilians to try and get his - or anybody's - attention. FYI, killing civilians only results in your character being killed by a police SWAT team - don't try this at home.  

So now I have to decide whether to start the whole game over again and build a new character and progress all over again to try and get to the Mr. Hands storyline, hoping that once finally there my experience will be like my successful first run and not this unsuccessful second.  

Or I can just delete the game and join the crowd of nay-sayers claiming the game is one big, buggy, unplayable mess.

Great, another binary choice to make.

Delusion

The Buddha famously explained that human suffering is due to clinging, which he described as a longing, a desire, for things to be different than they are.  Some of this clinging is a desire for our current state of being to last forever - for us not to grow old, for our children to be young and innocent forever, for the intoxicating pleasures of new-found love to not give way to the more mundane pleasures of familiarity and mere contentment.  

All these concepts are ultimately delusional - we are all subject to aging, sickness and death, children mature, grow and eventually die, and love in its initial form does not last forever.   But a particularly pernicious form of delusion is clinging not to the impermanent wishing that it was permanent but clinging to that which has never existed even in the first place.  

It's a difficult concept to come to grips with, but the Buddha taught that the concept of the ego-self, that an individual self exists separate from the rest of the world, is a delusion.  "Internally, I am me and external to that 'me' is the rest of the world," seems like a reasonable proposition, but one which the Buddha rejected.  Descarte's "I think, therefore I am," although considered an axiom of the European Enlightenment, is almost the polar opposite of the Buddha's enlightenment.

To the Buddha, clinging to the ego-self is clinging to a delusion and the source of much suffering.  A narcissist takes that clinging to a whole other level, and their suffering, expressed as a series of grievances, complaints, and cruelties, are the expression of that suffering. Racists, nationalists, the various forms of xenophobes, and chauvinists are all clinging to the delusion of an ego-self.

Enter one Donald Trump.  That he is clearly a narcissist, a malignant narcissist at that, almost goes without saying.  His narcissism leads him to reject those not like him, those of different nationalities, different races, different genders and sexual orientations, different political views.  This condition of his had led to much of the divisive politics of the past four years.  

One of the many problems with this kind of malignant narcissism is that if left unchecked, or in the case of Donald Trump, encouraged and abetted by enabling sycophants as well as celebrated by unquestioning followers, is that those considered to be unacceptable outsiders continually grows.  At first it was just Mexicans and the Chinese, but in the course of his presidency, it has grown to include others.  That it was always assumed Africans were considered unacceptable outsiders went without saying, and that view was confirmed with his reference to "shit-hole countries."  

But as his presidency continued and his behavior became more and more repugnant to more and more of the world, that list came to include many European countries and certainly their leaders (e.g., Angela Merkel).  It came to include, right here in American, the entire Democratic Party, liberal and progressive Americans who voted for Democratic candidates, and several American states in their entirety, as evidenced by his lack of concern about Californian wildfires.  His indifference to the covid-19 pandemic was due to a lack of empathy for those who contracted the disease or who, unlike him, did not have a small army of the country's best physicians to help him recover when he himself contracted the disease.

Now, in the waning days of his presidency, the circle of those similar enough to him to be considered acceptable has become alarmingly small.  He has turned against much of his own selected cabinet members and many of his White House advisors and counselors.  He has even turned against his long-faithful Vice President, and the recent insurgent crowd of his followers were heard chanting in the Capital, "Hang Mike Pence."  Nothing short of unquestioning and unwavering loyalty, as well as racial, linguistic, and behavioral similarity, is required to stay in his inner circle. I have no reason not to suspect that circle will continue to become ever smaller until it excludes even his own wife, children not named "Ivanka," and eventually even Ivanka herself.  

The man is suffering - suffering mightily due to clinging to the delusion of an outsized ego-self - and he takes out the pain of his suffering on a nation he is supposed to be protecting.  Mercy on this nation in his final days in office.

Let's Recap

What a week!  On Tuesday, the U.S. State of Georgia flipped blue and elected two Democratic Senators, the Rev. Raphael Warnock and the 33-year-old documentarian Jon Ossoff, in a special run-off election.  The two new Senators effectively create a Democratic majority in the Senate even though the head count is tied 50-50 between Democrats and Republicans, as Vice President-elect Kamala Harris (who also won the Georgia vote) will cast the tie-breaking vote.  The two new Senators effectively end the reign of obstructionist Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) as Senate Majority Leader, which will allow President-Elect Joe Biden the chance to pass his legislative agenda, appoint cabinet members and judges, etc. 

The current so-called "president," Donald Jackass Trump, refused to concede the election and spun unfounded and speculative myths about massive voter fraud and other electoral improprieties.  It all boiled over by last Wednesday, the day after Georgia's special election, when he incited a crowd of his most ardent followers to march on the Capital during the ceremonial count of the Electoral votes.  The mob broke into the Capital and ransacked and defaced both the Senate chambers and the House of Representatives.   Several people died, including at least one Capital policeman and two female Trump supporters.  Human feces were smeared on walls.  Generally speaking, the police offered little defense of the Capital, even as the Vice President, the Senate and the Congress hid in underground tunnels and other "undisclosed locations" from the rampaging mob.

The blowback from the vandalism, after it finally was brought under control, has been furious.  The vandals, who fancied themselves as "patriots" and "liberators" are being arrested as trespassers and vandals, and charges of sedition and treason may follow.  Congress is seriously talking about removing Trump from office pursuant to the 25th Amendment, or lacking that, a second impeachment, even though he has only two weeks left in office.  More damaging, at least from the point of view of the so-called "president," is the fact that his Twitter account has been permanently suspended as he has repeatedly violated the Terms of Service forbidding incitement of violence. He's been similarly banned from Facebook.

Let that sink in for a minute.  The so-called "president" of the United States has openly and blatantly tried to reverse the results of a free and fair election simply because he lost the campaign, and when that failed - he launched over 60 lawsuits and lost all but one (which only allowed observers of recount efforts to stand a few feet closer to the process) - he exhorted an angry mob to overrun the Capital and stop the certification of the Electoral votes.  

Sadly, some Republican Senators went along with Trump's delusions, even though they knew full well that his allegations of voter fraud were false.  Even as the mob broke down the doors of the Capital, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) was making a speech about why the ceremony should be delayed until he had a chance to "investigate" the obviously false charges of voter fraud. These cynical and unscrupulous politicians will be remembered for their treachery, and likely go down in historical shame along with Trump.

At the time of writing this, none of it is a secret and it's all well known of most Americans.  I'm recording it now for historical purposes.  This web log of my life, now in its 18th year, is my record of the times, and someday someone, maybe me, maybe someone else, will wonder what people were thinking back in 2021 and which side I was on.

For the record, I was with the good guys.

About Last Night . . .

Trump Insurrectionists Invade Capital

 

 

Carol of Words, Part One

(Stage notes from a theatrical reading of Walt Whitman's Carol of Words):

The house lights dim and the theater becomes dark.  The curtains are still drawn on the stage. Two performers, one masculine, the other feminine, walk onto the stage from opposite directions.   Dressed in street clothes, they stand in front of the curtains, each carrying a few sheets of paper.  

"Earth," the masculine one announces, reading from the paper,  "Round, rolling, compact."  Each word is carefully annunciated so that every consonant can be heard.  A brief moment of silence is allowed between each word.  The sound of the word is more important than its meaning.  "Suns, moons, animals," he continues, "All these are words to be said."

"Watery, vegetable, sauroid advances," the feminine performer announces in a similar tone.  "Beings, premonitions, lispings of the future.  Behold! These are vast words to be said." Emphasis is put on the word "vast."

In a more natural, conversational tone, the first performed asks the audience, "Were you thinking that those were the words - those upright lines? Those curves, angles, dots?"

"No," the second performer replies in an almost laughing tone, "Those are not the words." She explains, "The substantial words are in the ground and sea. They are in the air.  They are in you." The emphasis is on the word "you."

"Were you thinking that those were the words," asks the first performer.  "Those delicious sounds out of your friends' mouths?"

"No," answers performer two, "The real words are more delicious than they."

"Human bodies are words, myriads of words," says the first performer.  "In the best poems, re-appears the body, man's or woman's, well-shaped, natural, gay.  Every part able, active, receptive, without shame or the need of shame."

"Air, soil, water, fire," the second performer intones.  "These are words.  I myself am a word with them.  My qualities interpenetrate with theirs .  My name is nothing to them."

"Though it were told in the three thousand languages," asks the first performer, "What would air, soil, water, fire know of my name?"

"A healthy presence, a friendly or commanding gesture, are words, sayings, meanings," replies the second.  "The charms that go with the mere looks of some men and women are sayings and meanings also."

The curtains part, revealing a small ensemble of musicians.  It matters not matter what form of ensemble is presented - it could be a small chamber ensemble of strings, it could be a jazz combo, it could be rock musicians with electric guitars.  In whatever genre is presented, two microphones are on stands in front of the ensemble.  The two performers retreat from the front of the stage and each stands behind one of the microphones.  They continue the performance as the musicians provide a quiet drone beneath their words.   

The second part of the performance has begun.

Criminal Solicitation

After two recounts, including one hand audit, so-called "president" Donald January-Jones Trump has given up even pretending that the vote was off, and simply instructs Georgia's Secretary of State to go "find" 11,780 votes for him.  Trump advised him to just say that he "recalculated" the vote.

Obviously, this is a criminal act, a violation of Georgia Code OCGA 21-2-604 (Criminal Solicitation to Commit Election Fraud).  Obviously, no one will do anything about it, because the law apparently doesn't apply to the Donald.

Hall of Shame