Studio8 - Uniting the Arts

I haven't read the first link, but I sipped on the second this afternoon. I found that highly interesting. I had so much to say, for first thoughts. I can't recall all it stirred up. I do know my train of thought was on what it is that 'motivates' me. I'd went through that long stage of not giving a crap to even bother eating. What did I care?
Though, I've been one of the lucky ones to get my 'Oh Yeah!' moving again. I thought of how my teacher friend had rescued me lots of years ago. Maybe certain words trigger just like caffeine, or user names or inside jokes or monkeys..I could go on.

I'll keep thinking on it. I'm interested.
I'm hungry constantly now. But that could be because I eat celery for lunch and home-made popcorn.

The first link is just my weird sense of humor. This is it in a nut shell.

Bush makes debut as motivational speaker

I am hungry all the time too. I think it is because I do not get enough exercise. I think I am a god, disembodied reason. I need to take better care of this body.
Celery sounds good. I been eating jalepenos.

I like that science writer in the second link a lot. I read her stuff every chance I get.

Too tired to cut and paste going to post the whole article and cut and past it up later.
_____________________________________________




THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR Spring 2003
The Scientific Method
Do Straw Men Have DNA?
By Natalie Angier

Not long ago I was a panelist at a seminar with the chirpy title of
“Imagination Conversation” and an equally nebulous charge to
explore, in three hours without so much as a bathroom break, the
Nature of Imagination and How We Use It in Our Lives. I was
struggling desperately not to yawn, scowl, wriggle my wrist to steal
yet another glance at my watch (hey! I thought time was supposed to
be unidirectional!), or jump up and bark at the audience, “You paid
good money for this?” when the topic of the heritability of imagination
arose. Suddenly, I found myself flanked by innatalists, and the dreary
babbleoquium turned bracing.

As my five co-conversers saw it, a rich imagination is
something you either have or you don’t. You can’t learn it, you can’t
teach it, you can’t bid for it on eBay. The blessed few are the ones
who write the enduring masterpieces, perform the great one-woman
shows, or discover the genetic basis of a great imagination; the rest
of us are consigned in perpetuity, by the inherited topography of our
brains, to that poignant condition known as “having a flair for the
obvious.”

In other words, our audience members had bought an even
bigger piece of pyrite than anyone suspected. They were mostly
teachers and art educators who presumably had hoped to hear fresh
ideas about how to stimulate imaginative thinking in themselves, their
students, and the petty tyrants on their administrative boards. Yet up
on the lofty, microphonically enhanced mount, the consensus was,
very sorry, but it can’t be done.

Now, I may be a coward by nature—not to mention by years of
painstaking nurture—but at this idea I bristled, I bridled, and I spat.
Imagination is born, not brewed? How lazy to think so! I described
methods for spurring creativity that have proved surprisingly powerful.
I spoke of a report published in the journal Science, in which
researchers had developed a computer algorithm with instructions for
generating shrewd new advertisements. The researchers wrote a
subroutine to perform a “replacement matching template” in which
visual elements from two themes are mixed and matched to yield
novel combinations. By following the code, the computer ginned up
some impressively dexterous pitches. For example, when asked to
create an ad to boast of an airline’s on-time performance, the
algorithm produced a picture of a cuckoo clock with a tiny airplane
where the cuckoo would be. To portray the “user-friendliness” of an
Apple computer, the program conceived a desktop terminal with a
hand sticking out, proffering a bunch of flowers.

People, too, can be taught the replacement matching template
and similar mental subroutines. Gimmicky? Granted. But a Jackson
Pollock canvas is also a gimmick. A Cornell box is a gimmick.
Flowers and butterflies and an infant’s smile are gimmicks, all
designed to lure you in and make you fall in love and do the bidding
of the gimcrack gimmicker.

To say that a healthy imagination is a gift rather than a skill, I
growled on, is like saying you’re either good in math or you’re not,
which is the defense of every American kid who brings home a C in
algebra. I mentioned studies exploring the different reasons to which
Americans and Asians attribute success in math. Americans talk
about talent and an inborn knack for numbers. Asians talk about hard
work. Guess which group ends up acing the international
competitions?

At which a couple of my co-panelists retorted, oh, sure, Asians
do well in math—rote math, anyway. But when it comes to allowing
creativity and genius to flower, let’s face it, America rules. The Asian
educational system squashes innovation; we serenade it. Hooray for
our team! Give a hand to our genes! We are the Imagination Nation!

I admit it. That afternoon, I didn’t persuade anybody of the
power of plasticity or the mass marketability of the
imagination—including, I hasten to add, myself. Do I really believe
that anybody, given a clever creativity flowchart, a robust capacity for
work, and a full-fat sense of personal destiny, can be as imaginative
as Shakespeare, Leonardo, or George Eliot? No. As far as I’m
concerned, those “people,” those immortal something-or-others, are
authentic mutants. Members of their species may not have
prehensile tails or antenna buds sprouting from their eyebrows, but
they still behave like alien life forms, sitting down at the piano in
toddlerhood and composing minuets, or spending a college
interregnum discovering the universal laws of motion. These are not
normal behaviors. They’re once-in-tens-of-millions behaviors, and the
genotypes, phenotypes, archetypes, and stereotypes of which they
are constructed may have as much to reveal about human nature or
human nurture as Bill Gates’s net worth has to say about whether my
younger brother will ever pay back the money I loaned him.

So what happens if we clip the nethermost tails of the
distribution curve and ask of the bulging bell labeled “You’re
somewhere in here, bub” how much of this normal range of human
creativity can be accounted for by “Nature,” the category generally
considered to encompass genes, evolution, hormones, and other
aspects of “biology,” and therefore to be hardcore, real meat, no
refunds, no exchanges? And how much, contrariwise, is the result of
“Nurture,” a.k.a. the Environment, that glorious conceptual duffel bag
into which we stuff soft things like how you were treated by your
parents, peers, and the parish priest; whether anybody bothered to
hang a sixty-five-dollar Lamaze mobile over your crib; and whether
you spent your childhood summers canoeing in the Adirondacks or
sampling paint chips from the floor of your Bronx apartment? Do I
deny the importance of category A categorically? Am I one of those
blinkered Blank Slaters, an anti-evolution social constructivista who
thinks that even pit vipers, with proper rearing, could become happy
vegetarians? Or do I accept that genes count, that Charles Darwin
was a very smart guy, and that most of the quandaries of human
nature can be addressed through comparisons of identical twins
reared apart with fraternal twins forced to wear matching pajamas?

Oh, dear, I’m doing it again. I’m lampooning a large and
nuanced research enterprise that seeks to understand the biological
foundations of We the People. I must get a grip on my lip and uncurl
it. I must take a stand. I must choose a number. What percentage of
a behavior like creativity would I assign to alleles and cells, what to
whistles and bells? Which number is bigger? I mustn’t forget that we
are living in what has lately, and in many ways rightly, been called the
golden age of biology. This year is the fiftieth anniversary of the
celebrated paper by James Watson and Francis Crick that
announced their discovery of the double-helical structure of DNA. The
three billion or so subunits of human DNA have been all but spelled
out. Any day now we’ll know exactly how many genes are scattered
across those billions of bases, and what proteins are encoded by
those genes, and what tasks those proteins perform in the body.
You’ve read the news. You know that the human genome project is
important and exciting and a mecca for analogies: it’s the Holy Grail,
the book of life, a blueprint, a recipe, a fossil record, the Mall of All,
the semen stain on the blue dress for the entire human family.

With biology in the ascendance, one might be tempted to think
we were on the brink of a veritable revolution in the science of the
self. One might also think that experts have largely discarded fusty
old Margaret Meadian paeans to culture and now concur on the
supremacy of “biology” in dictating the contours of human nature.
One might be tempted to think such things, but the truth is (to
paraphrase our president), the children isn’t learning! Despite the
industriousness of our genome troops, and conceptual advances in
biology generally, we are scarcely closer to understanding the neurochemico-
genetico-cheerio infrastructure of our behavior today than
we were a century or a millennium ago. There are many hypotheses,
and many opinions spoken with mesmeric repetition and thunderous
conviction, but what is most noteworthy about fields like behavioral
genetics and evolutionary psychology is how often their results fail to
stand up to external verification or to the corrosive effects of plausible
alternative explanation. Among the nucleic characters to have faded
recently from page-one reveille to nonreplicable obscurity are genes
linked to novelty-seeking behavior, male sexual orientation, neurosis,
schizophrenia, manic-depressive illness, alcoholism, drug addiction,
attention-deficit disorder, violence, and the tendency to flash in public.

As for evolutionary psychology, what has this bold new
Darwinism done but reheat the chestnuts and verify the verities? To
wit: We don’t like cheats. We like high status. Children imitate their
peers. And we’ve been like this since we started chipping rocks into
sharp, dangerous objects, the better to poke holes into cheats, attain
high status, and have lots of kids that everybody else’s kids wanted to
imitate. Now, I adore evolutionary biology, and I have been writing on
the subject since I started my science-writing career in the early
1980s. Much of our behavior clearly has irrational components that
may well be the legacy of our prehistoric past—like the overwhelming
urge to eat every super-sized portion plunked in front of our face
because our wretched forebears might not have faced food again for
days.

Yet for all the intrinsic party-trick appeal of Darwinism,
evolutionary psychologists take the fun out of it by being bullies, and
self-pitying ones at that. If they come up with a premise about human
behavior and somebody disagrees or presents conflicting data,
evolutionary psychologists attack the critic as a flat-earther. David
Buss, one of the big spears in the business, took exactly this mature
approach last October when confronted with a report that
contradicted his beloved thesis on the differences between male and
female jealousy. Buss has long argued that a man gets jealous at the
thought of his mate cuckolding him—what fellow wants to support
another man’s bastard?—while a woman is comparatively more upset
by the thought of her man falling in love with another woman and thus
taking his resource-acquisition skills elsewhere. So how did Buss
respond to a study by researchers at Northeastern and Yale
universities that found no sex differences in jealousy, and an equal
tendency among men and women to find the thought of a partner
sleeping with somebody else more distressing than the thought of a
partner having an extracurricular crush? “People have always been
resistant to evolution,” he complained to my colleague at the New
York Times, Erica Goode. “We’re in the midst of a scientific revolution
in psychology.” And yet everywhere the benighted old guard resists.
Ah, but there are noble precedents for the suffering of Buss. “It took
the Catholic church four hundred years to forgive Galileo,” he sighed.
“Will it take longer for this?”

But what, exactly, is “this”? What sort of evolution does an
evolutionary psychologist believe in? Not cultural evolution, the
signature of our species. It doesn’t take a Galileo or his telescope to
see that human cultures evolve at a much brisker pace than does
genetic evolution. Languages evolve, economies evolve, religions,
shampoos, and toothpastes all evolve at a dizzying pace, while our
aggregate DNA can barely manage a single base pair substitution
every thousand years or so. Cultural evolution is something we do,
and that gets done to us, all the time, no matter how much we whinny
and pine for the past.

This is hardly a radical notion, yet it is almost entirely absent
from the literature of evolutionary psychology. Take one recent
example from the journal Human Nature, in which Spanish
researchers sought insight into the fundamental modules of mate
choice by analyzing personals ads in Spanish newspapers. Again,
some of the pet theories of evolutionary psychology failed to find
confirmation in the results. The researchers discovered that whereas
the older women who placed ads expressed a desire for a partner
with high socioeconomic status, the younger women were much more
concerned with a man’s looks than with his portfolio. How could this
be? Didn’t the younger women realize that the EP model says they
have an evolved need for a man of means, and that men are
supposed to be the ones demanding a pretty face, as well as an
acceptable waist-to-hip ratio? And didn’t the señoritas realize that this
finance fixation was thought to be sufficiently hammered into the
feminine genome as to rank as one of the intransigent universals?
The scientists had no choice. They had to go out on a limb. Perhaps
the fact that younger women are earning their own living and no
longer need or expect a man to provide for them “is changing their
mate choice focus,” they wrote. “Our hypothesis is that evolution
makes possible some behavioral plasticity of individuals for finetuning
their preferences in response to changes in their social and
economic circumstances.”

“Our hypothesis”? Or should I say “our hypothesis”? Can there
really be a theory of mind that does not allow for “some behavioral
plasticity” in response to changes in the environment, particularly
when it comes to choosing a mate? Isn’t the very concept of choice
contingent on having the capacity to weigh the pluses and minuses
among various options, and then going ahead and choosing?

I am back to thinking about the imagination and what it might
mean to say it is an innate trait and that some people have a lot more
than others and life isn’t fair, is it, woe, woe, woe. First is the obvious
problem of how we define and measure a “good imagination.” Is a
person who writes witty screenplays more or less imaginative than
the person who invented the ergonomically correct snow shovel? For
that matter, why did we evolve a comparatively florid imagination in
the first place—for business, for pleasure, to embarrass our parents?
Well, where do you think the trait came from? Use your imagination!
Failing that, ask an evolutionary psychologist.

Yet another problem with trying to divine the ultimate source of
imagination is its maddening unreliability. Some personal traits
appear to be shockingly stable over a lifetime. Cranky children grow
into grouchy adults, born optimists get taken to a hospice and start a
yoga class and a book club. But if you want to see an example of
extreme trait lability, just take a peek at a novelist working on the
follow-up to her critically acclaimed blockbuster. How blanched is her
mien, how paralyzed her fingers, how unblemished her computer
screen! Even our stock geniuses occasionally misplace the keys to
the kingdom, which is why a lot of Handel’s music sounds like a lot of
Handel’s other music, which in turn can sound disturbingly like the
music of his great English predecessor, Henry Purcell.

In sum, I have no idea what percentage of creativity can be
attributed to biology and what to environment, and if I hear a figure, I
will be deeply skeptical. I brood constantly over the more frustrating,
cruel, and self-destructive aspects of human nature: the thrill we get
from vicious gossip; the quickness with which we mount a soapbox to
hector others; the fact that so much human creativity throughout
history has been devoted to the design of weapons; the fact that
babies become children, children become teenagers, and then, just
as you’re ready to kill them, they abandon you first. I’m convinced
that science has something to say about the stained-glass shack of
the self, and we shouldn’t decry the whole enterprise simply because
it has been, to date, so disappointing. I’m confident that the tedious
old lawsuit of Nature v. Nurture will soon be tossed out of court with
the contempt it deserves. It’s a sham dichotomy and always has
been. Many scientists have been claiming as much for years, and the
good ones have meant it—and tried to be true interactionists, tried to
get beyond blathering about how everyone knows nature needs
nurture and to explore what that interaction means.

I’ll give a couple of examples of how we might begin to
understand the embrace between self and setting, the original helical
twist. Think, most simply, of the immune system. The immune system
is almost magical. Give it a new microbe, something it’s never
encountered before, something shaped like a star, a pentagon, a
soccer ball, a pinch of straw. No matter: the immune system will
within minutes design the right tool to attack it, an antibody that fits its
adversary as snugly as Baryshnikov fills his Lycra. We don’t have
enough genes to specify immune proteins to confront every rotten
rhinovirus with a Napoleon complex, and we don’t need those tens of
thousands of genes and their proteins. The immune system builds its
troops by cutting and pasting together a few starter proteins, short
chains and long chains, V chains and J chains. When a creation
works, when it fits the foe, the immune system makes more of that
combination, plumes of it. The immune system is evolution in
microcosm—manic diversity, let’s try anything and fast, followed by a
selection of the most successful motif and its mass amplification. The
immune system is designed to confront an ever-shifting environment.
That supreme flexibility and responsiveness, and that alone, is what
is “hardwired” into the genome.

As with the immune system, so with our behavior: a bon mot
here, a feather boa there, square your shoulders, slap on a smile and
take it for a test run. Discard if they jeer, amplify if they cheer. Do we
not behave like this? Do we not watch ourselves as we watch others
watching us, and do we not loop back and tweak the knobs, and
giggle and lurch forward or play poker, feign excitement, duck and
cover, all the while wishing we could act natural, be ourselves, but
getting very bored when nothing changes and resolving to be better
tomorrow? When you think about it, doesn’t every new social
encounter feel like an immune response: friend or foe,
histocompatible soul mate or sugar-coated parasite?

In fact, the border between outside and inside, you and
universe, is always porous, and always negotiating, haggling, wooing,
puckering up its lips. Here is an example from the order Rodentia.
Rats breed early and often, which means that soon after a mother rat
gives birth, while she is still suckling the pups, she goes out and gets
pregnant again. If the twelve or so young in the nest survive and keep
nursing, the next batch of pups to emerge will be a fairly even mix, six
males, six females. But should the mother lose some of the suckling
pups, her follow-up dozen will consist mostly of daughters. How is
this possible? If the rat is already pregnant when her nest is
harrowed, how can the embryos-in-waiting adjust themselves and
emerge as a murine sisterhood? The mother’s body, it turns out, is
like a giant whisker, absorbing what the world has to tell it. She
carries a few extra embryos. With the sensation of all teats fully
occupied, males as well as female embryos are given biochemical
leave to implant. But if some of the nipples go untugged for a while,
the mother’s body cuts off the blood supply to the male embryos, and
the extra females implant in their stead. Daughters, you see, are the
sex you want in troubled times. Daughters are the surer lash to the
future.

What counts most in this story is the precision with which its
steps have been mapped, the nodes noted, the cross-talk between
body and behavior transcribed and translated. Do such conversations
occur in the course of human conception or pregnancy? Do we bear
sons or daughters depending on signals like our health, the relative
muskiness of our husband’s sweat, or what the neighbors are doing?
I ask myself this every time I take my daughter to her bus stop and
observe that though her school is co-ed, every kid waiting with her
from the neighborhood is also a daughter. When the bus arrives, a
unisexual conga line of nine niñas bounds aboard. For whatever
reason, back in 1996 the women in my immediate neighborhood all
gave out a big blast of girls. Was it the water, the bagels, highpressure
fronts, the pressure of peers? Oh, probably not. Why bother
with nature-nurture narratives when plain blind luck will do?http://www.natalieangier.com/pdf/straw_men.pdf

I liked her writing, too. She's good at keeping my attention, which can be a difficult task. I'm no health nut, nor do I try hard to do all positives on my body, but I guess I do a little to keep it from crying out at me.

You know, I had to take on this diet, but I'm far from thrilled about it. I only do it cause my body can't tolerate it. I gotta make it to work everyday, so I've no time for tummy aches. I miss cheese, pizza, capachinos, mozzarella sticks, Chinese buffet and ice-cream. The dairy is the real deal menace, but gluten isn't always nice to me either. Once in a while I can cheat and have a sub on a roll, or something. I stay far from dairy always though.
Sigh. I'm again off topic and on me.

I don't think I ever have jalepenos on their ownsome.
Prolly in sumpin'. I like hot, but I don't love it.
Might be the troubles.
I love banana peppers and pepperoncini.

In fact, the border between outside and inside, you and
universe, is always porous, and always negotiating, haggling, wooing,
puckering up its lips. Here is an example from the order Rodentia.
Rats breed early and often, which means that soon after a mother rat
gives birth, while she is still suckling the pups, she goes out and gets
pregnant again. If the twelve or so young in the nest survive and keep
nursing, the next batch of pups to emerge will be a fairly even mix, six
males, six females. But should the mother lose some of the suckling
pups, her follow-up dozen will consist mostly of daughters. How is
this possible? If the rat is already pregnant when her nest is
harrowed, how can the embryos-in-waiting adjust themselves and
emerge as a murine sisterhood? The mother’s body, it turns out, is
like a giant whisker, absorbing what the world has to tell it. She
carries a few extra embryos. With the sensation of all teats fully
occupied, males as well as female embryos are given biochemical
leave to implant. But if some of the nipples go untugged for a while,
the mother’s body cuts off the blood supply to the male embryos, and
the extra females implant in their stead. Daughters, you see, are the
sex you want in troubled times. Daughters are the surer lash to the
future.

WOW to that bit of interesting knowledge.

I suppose it's believable that we're born with it or not. I doubt the ex had any amount of imagination, zero. It shocked me too. But, I do think that like anything, handed down from Grandma or not, it has to be developed to be at it's best?

I thought I gained mine through survival, making good use of it for escape purposes. It was my only only that no one could beat to death or bruise, it was mine and therefore I had control. Which I needed to gain and the imagination was all mine to do what I'd like of it. But, I had and have to continue to play with it. Otherwise it goes unnoticed, and I'll forget I've had it. I put it mostly to very good use and practice when I've nothing else to safely steer. If my life seems out of my wishes, that's when it intensifies. Because, then it's a need verses just for dabbling.

What says you on it? Born with it fully aware or born to develop it fully or ...

And lastly, another thought on imagination.
Isn't a lot of imagination considered an 'illness' too?
What makes me jump to this, is an earlier example. I'd went to that seminar about disorders. He told this story about a little girl. She wanted a swing set. Her parents finally bought one, set it up in the backyard, made a nice fuss, but the little girl refused to go out and play on it. She wandered the driveway, sidewalk, and out into the streets, but she'd not go to her new swing set.

The parents asked questions of this 'so so and so' psychologists, or whomever. Why wouldn't their little girl go play on it?
The psychologists had a session with the child, talked it over and found out the little girl had gone to church recently. She'd heard how the Devil would reach up and snag her. She then began avoiding the ground, envisioning his hand coming up and grasping her by the ankle. So, she'd only play on blacktop, gravel, etc. for safety from that fear.

After the seminar guy said this story, he then followed it up by saying that was Obsessive Compulsive Behavior. An illness.

To me, it was a vivid child's imagination. One, I too, entertained. I knew/know there are demons in the shadows. And, I'd had similar ideas as a child. Anyway, I'm traveling off topic by bringing it on to me. The point though, was I wanted to say, isn't then imagination also a form of disorders, illnesses, and such in some?

Interesting story. It seems to me that some people think that by putting a label on something they understand it.

Somebody wrote
"Language is a btich with an ice pick"

James Baldwin wrote

Every legend, moreover, contains its residuum of truth, and the root function of language is to control the universe by describing it.

http://classiclit.about.com/od/baldwinj ... inquot.htm

I have heard there is a fine line between madness and creativity, maybe there is no line at all.

I been googling 'quantum suicide"
which led me to this bit. Which probably nothing to do with all this but it interests me.

"Undoubtedly there is evolutionary survival value in our representing the world in terms of myth, metaphor, and scientific theory. We are evidently unique among species in our symbolic ability, and we are certainly unique in our modest ability to control the conditions of our existence by using these symbols. Our ability to represent and simulate reality implies that we can appropriate the order of existence and bring it to serve human purposes. A good simulation, be it a religious myth or scientific theory, gives us a sense of mastery over our experience. To represent something symbolically, as we do when we speak or write, is somehow to capture it, thus making it one's own. But with this appropriation comes the realization that we have denied the immediacy of reality and that in creating a substitute we have but spun another thread in the web of our grand illusion[s]."
Page 88, paragraph 2, by Heinz R. Pagels, in his The Dreams of Reason, Simon and Schuster, 1988

http://www.quantonics.com/A_Quantonics_ ... ation.html

Angels and demons and patriarchal gods and everything the human race has needed to believe in is still true. Whether it be myth meat or metaphor. I am nothing if not illogical and irrational.

Douglas Adams maybe not your cup of tea

"virtually everything the human race had ever chosen to believe in was true.[And]...that it continued to be true long after the human race particularly needed it to be true anymore. "---The Long Dark Tea Time of the Soul

Trucker, you're gonna get me here and keep me here cause of this topic. You've my utmost attention on it, for I'm fully interested or invested.

Labels make absolutely no sense to me, I can't picture it in such forms or simplicity. Though, I can totally wrap my mind around the madness when it's the thing not of sense.

In my Grandma's day, if a neighbor boy climbed on railings, flapped at his reflection in the window and cooed...the neighbor ladies would of went something like;

"Well, he won't even bother looking me in the eye. The night his Momma dropped him in her womb, was the very night of that full orange moon. She had her midwife up to her elbows in her abdomen . The midwife came out with the imprint of her on her forearms. I remember."
" Sally, that was the midwife, she, too, is crazy though. She's always off on her lonesome with her nose in a book down by Crouger pond. And I see her hanging out her bedroom window at odd hours of the night."
" Could have been her finger nails scratched that boy's temple, reaching up there to drag him out like she had..."
"His Momma seems normal enough, serves her husband dinner on the dot at 5, has the kids bathed and clean. Runs an orderly home and she makes good biscuits with gravy. But, I told her not to mess with Mother Nature."
" She should of held that child in longer, until the sun came out."

I can wrap my mind around that type of thing, better than Obsessive Compulsive, Bi-Polar, Depression and Eating Disorders.
Superstitions.
I'll take that and a side of old wives tales.
I'll take Mother Nature's humor and Angels kissing babies brows.
Give me Hawthorne and I'll know what it means,
but ordinary is some kind of puzzle. Logical isn't far from it.
Everyone has a unique finger print.
That makes perfect sense.

My whole childhood was small holy roller churches.
The devil was seen in every corner turned outside those doors.
And angels in the windows.
I think I may have been born on a whim on wrong timing.

They'd medicate me
and that'd rob me of my Grandma's spirit in my veins.
It'd take all my upbringing
my relatives
and all my deep roots.
They'd take my Nana too. And her ten older brothers. My Great Uncle Jim, Fred, Pete...She was the youngest and only daughter. Must have meant something that they'd finally had a daughter. The future must have needed her. I know I did.
(Thinking of it from that mouse episode)

Who'd I be if not me?

And to me, I'm what I've always known except now I'm in a strange time zone. All those relatives buried. They were ancient when I was just becoming to understand.
I'm more alone thinking about it.
They would see no disorder,
they'd see all the specialties. But, they're gone
and I'm out of place. My specialties would get me therapy and medicated. Such crap, but that's this age to live in.

I'll return.
Good topic, Jack.

I should add, I guess, that I do act as if someone has diagnosed me or convicted me or even hospitalized me, when none have. Prolly means I'm my biggest condemner. But, I hear so much about the topic, that inside I'm thinking.."Oh noes! They'll snatch me, too." Nobody has bothered locking me up, or medicating me, gratefully.

I have only been locked up twice once when I hit a cop in baltimore in 1954 and once when I did not lie to one in 1989.

... -

The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness. Joseph Conrad

Her greatest joy in life was just to see me eat. That spoon was her magic wand. She was my own personal Getrude Stein when I was growing up. She convinced me that a woman was a rose was a Jewess. I only dated nice Jewish girls. Later I learned that a woman is a woman is a rose. No matter who her mother was.



She was always watching over me so that none should put the evil eye on me.
I was a very clean child
She was always giving me baths.
We played this little piggy went to market with my toes.
And for a long time during my childhood I thought I had eleven toes

And she circumcised my heart

She convinced me that a woman was a rose was a Jewess. I only dated nice Jewish girls. Later I learned that a woman is a woman is a rose. No matter who her mother was.

LOL! It's so great when you say this stuff, cause it makes me smile. A woman is a woman is a ... always brings joy.

Women are just women just...
baking cakes
getting lost
rubbing freckles
and going to the river.

What would I do without our talks?
They've all left me. Sometimes I see you leaving too. It's as if I've an hour glass in my hand, pouring out sand.
Stay longer than.