Retro-Perspective

The beauty of growing older is that there are more memories to share.  But what is a memory? Can we "trust" our memories?  Can you trust any history to be told without omissions, additions, substitutions, or even outright lies?

I had a social studies teacher in grade 10 who we called Bonehead.  Bonehead said that to understand the true meaning of history, to know what really happened, we must follow the money.
Certainly that is good advice in any discussions of politics, religion or sex.

But what about the personal?   Haven't we been told that the personal is political?  Does it mean that to understand our own personal histories, we also need to 'follow the money'?

What is there was no money to follow?  What other currency can we trust, like In God We Trust?

To reanimate our life and memories, we must find perspective.  What did we see then, and how do we see that view now.  Don't forget to mind the gap.  The gap between the past and present, how reliable is our memory, just how do we choose to fill the gap.

But is any memory reliable?  Even one that just happened, we colour with our perspective of the present, which is now past.  Would an impartial observer have the same impression?

I have gone through a particularly dark few weeks, where I have been sifting through past memories, trying to gain a perspective, so that I may "file away these memories", to create a new understanding of what they mean to me now, and what I thought they meant then.

About half of you who are still reading this post, may have left me by now, while the other half acutely knows from which I speak.

"Someone left a cake out in the rain, and I don't think that I can take, because it took so long to bake it, and I may never have that recipe again."

As I look at the picture above, which was taken more than 30 years ago by Hans John Schneider, I see  a dark beauty to his perspective that captures an image of  me that I still find to be powerful, crippled and obsessive.  The eyes draw you in, but I particularly love the twisting of  my hands and the legs.  

  It is the same look that informs the drawing to the left that my wife did about 34 years ago.

I am reminded of the song FEAR by AKA:

"I feel I fear I feel I fear.

Fingers stroke against my neck.

Gotta get real.

I'm racked I'm wrecked.

I feel I fear I feel I fear....

Cut off my reality.   Cut off by reality.      Chop Chop Chop Chop."


What is the thread that ties my life together?  

From the young man with the burning glare to the present version?  

What is aging but the effects of oxidation, gravity, and the lovely thing they always use as an excuse for not paying someone- experience.  Don't complain about the money, you are gaining so much experience.   So if we follow the money, and there isn't any, do we follow the experience?

We can't go back.  We must go on.

As fragile as we may feel in the present, we have no way other way forward except the slow march to Neverland.   Except in the real Neverland, we can't remain children forever.

What is so good about being a child, anyway?  I never felt free or relaxed as a child.  I had the same dense intensity then as I feel today.   I remember sitting in my bedroom. I was around 8 years old.
I was angry, I was depressed and I didn't "fit" in. I knew instinctively that I was different.
At least, that was my perspective then.

Today here I am.  It is 48 years later, and I am still depressed angry and not fitting in.
But the experiences....
Let me tell you what happened:

Happy Father's Day

I was speaking with a friend who told me one night that the best birthday gift he had received this year was the following words from his daughter

"Dad. I need you."

Being needed is one of the most urgent reasons to live. My own daughter just turned twenty.  Two decades.  She will start her third year in university this fall, which is something I always wanted to do, that is to go to university.  I am proud of her accomplishments, but more to the point, I marvel at her growth and how smart and funny she is.

She has  a generous spirit, and strength of character and she is beauty inside and out.  I could say that she is perfect, but it comforts me in some way to note that her bedroom is a perfect mess.  Always has been.  Her mother once did an art piece showcasing the array of pink plastic that embodied the pre-teen years.

I have been in love with her since long before her birth.   She is my love child, born of a desire to create  an expression of  love.  She is my reason for believing in a future.  

When she was small, she would say to me, Dad, I demand a hug!  Those are the kind of demands that are acceptable to this management.

Mothers have a bond with their child that a father has to earn.   This creature did not come from inside my body.  So fathers have to earn that closeness.

I had to take  her to the emergency room at Children's Hospital when she was very young.  She was in pain, and I couldn't make it go away.  She needed me. And so a bond was forged; she looked into my eyes, trusting me.  She held on to me a little harder.  This was a feeling that I had never felt before in my life.  She was someone who needed me.  Someone who was placing their  faith in me to be there for them.

I still feel horrible about one time when I wasn't there.  I  remember taking her to the dentist, and telling her everything was going to be fine.  She was fearful of the dentist that day.  He told me he would have to pull a tooth.  I wanted to tell her first, but he thought it was better if  he pretended to take a look in, then pull without warning.  She screamed like I had not heard before.  I'm sure it was the shock of the extraction, but I felt it as the pain of having been told by her father that there was nothing to fear, and then being betrayed.I felt horrible.  I would not lie to her again.

One day we were on our way to school.  I was running late, but I told her I would get her there on time.
She made a sarcastic comment about being in a family of liars.   Ouch!  We were always late.  Then I made her get herself to school.  Funny thing, she wasn't late.  We joke about it now.



I have no idea where I am going with this post.
I just wanted to say to my daughter that I love you more than life itself.  You make me proud to be your Dad.

....the water was closer than the land.....

It was one of those days when the water was closer than the land.

Learning to love the questions and live with loss

To grieve means to bear a heavy burden.  To grieve is to live, for life brings us heavy burdens.  How does the ant move the boulder up the hill?  Only with the help of other ants, with community.  The ant moves the boulder one step at a time.  The ant must find the leverage, by which to position in such a way as to lessen the dead weight. 

The Hindu god Shiva dances the cosmic dance of creation and destruction, she teaches us that each act of destruction calls for an act of creation. We must absorb that thought into our grief so to teach us that we heal our loss through acts of creation. 

Why honor loss?  Grieving takes time. We owe it to ourselves and to each other to feel the pain, to feel the fear, to feel the anxiety and, ultimately, to live the questions until the answers begin to reveal themselves to us. 

The great German poet Rainer Marie Rilke said: Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves. Do not now seek the answers which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. (So) live the questions now....

Grieving takes us to the depths of hell on earth and makes us crawl through glass.  Grieving takes us to love and to loss We grieve for that which we have loved. Love and loss are intimately connected. Not only are we all going to die but every moment is changing and as it changes, it brings loss. All of us experience some level of loss in our everyday lives, from apparently minor situations to major loss such as the loss of a loved one, a job, a relationship, or a dream. Healing our grief is a step by step journey. This return to crawling in order to heal  In Good Grief, professional grief educator Deborah Morris Coryell describes grief as "the experience of not having anywhere to place our love, of losing a connection, an outlet for our emotion."  Is healing possible with grief?  In North America, we are expected to go to the funeral, or celebration of life, as we are now calling these events, be sad for two -three days and then get back to work.  Get over it.  Move on.   But to deal with grief, we have to learn how to continue to love in the face of loss. We have to live the questions. Another thought that comes to me is to critically think of what is loss? Loss is the removal of something, leaving a hole, a gap, a chasm that cannot but must be bridged.   I am reminded of the song Many Rivers to Cross, especially as sung by Nilsson and Lennon.  The raw emotions expressed in this song are visceral.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgzWqfZo8fY "Well I been ripped, washed up for years, and I nearly survived.... And this loneliness just won't leave me alone Its drag to be on your own My woman left me and she didn't say why And I guess I have to try. Many Rivers to cross and where to begin? " What is loss?  For to have loss, you must have had something to have lost.  You must have known love. Just because this person is gone, does not mean you no longer love them.  In fact, the love intensifies, as it always does when we perceive that we cannot "have" it.  But you still do have it- you still do have the love.  You still can talk everyday with your loss, but the conversation now goes in a different manner.  We can say the conversation is one-sided, but are we listening hard enough?  We know what the other person would have said, don't we?  We move into the terrain of imagination and memory.

A Certain Density

I was reading the Book section of the Sunday New York Times, drinking my third cup of coffee, and mentally making a list of what tasks I needed to accomplish on this day 2 of my weekend.  Should I should start on the vacuuming and floor cleaning, or check my work email, or make sure that I see the open house for a loft off Main street by 2:00 pm, or read one of the many books I have on the go, or have another coffee.

The day is approaching Timex time (1:50 pm), and my wife just informed me of an acquaintance who died from a massive heart attack this weekend.  Yesterday our realtor told us of her brother-in-law skiing on Whistler mountains, who just happened to be paired up with a doctor (not planned), and when he didn't show up at the bottom of the mountain, returned to find said brother-in-law apparently dead from a heart attack.  Being a doctor, he administered corrective actions, and the gentleman is in hospital.

News like this kind of puts my chore list in perspective.  Or does it?  I am approaching six years after my heart attack; now I am wondering why I first thought to write "my first heart attack."  Life is short, time is precious, blah blah blah- we all know this.  Yet what does it take for these truths to sink in?  Yes, I know I need to exercise, but when I say exercise, I don't mean to say exercise more. I mean that I need to make time to exercise at all.

So why don't I?  With all the many choices of what I could do on a sunny day, why was exercise not one of the first choices?  After all, this choice could mean life or death for me.

Choose your words carefully, my inner voices tell me.  But not only do I need to choose my words, but  I must choose which inner voices in my head in which to listen to.  There is the voice that says "one foot after the other, word by word, live life in the moment/now/present." This voice tends to dominate my inner conversations. Then  there is the "do everything in moderation- including moderation" voice.  Also the "forget tomorrow, live for today voice."  Even a Love Hard, Live Fast, and Die Young" voice that sounds a little like Elvis if truth be told.      

So many voices with so little to say.  

Then I hear a voice from when I was a younger man, and I was afraid to express my anger, feeling somehow that if I chose to let it rip, as my father often did, my temper would rule me, as his temper ruled him.  A volcano would be opened, spewing endless angry lavas.  Of course, the longer I bottled up my anger, the more the wine turned to vinegar, and it was not a good year for the roses, and explosions result when simmer becomes a rolling boil.  

The fear of rage morphed with age into a more primal fear, which is the fear of life itself.  What do I mean by fear of life; isn't it more natural to have a fear of death?  But death is not as fearful as life; death comes on its own terms.  Death has its own best before date.   But Life is made up of moments, and with each moment we have yet another choice to make. My choice has been to not become paralysed with thoughts of death, but to just live.   Just live each moment not like its my last, but live each moment just as it presents itself.  I am lousy with planning ahead.   It is not that I don't believe in the future as I once did as a younger man, but that I find it hard to conceive of a time that is not here, that may come, but may not. I have to give each performance my best, not because it may be my last, but because that is how I roll.

Today I read in the Sunday New York Times about essayist Phillip Lopate and his new collections of essays.  I had not heard of Mr. Lopate, and so I looked him up.   He is apparently quite well known in the circle of essayists, as a first class practitioner in the artform of choosing your words.  I was intrigued with this following excerpt from him: 

"How can you tell a first-rate essay? I am tempted to repeat what St. Augustine said about Time: "When no one asks what it is, I know what it is; if someone asks me, I don't know." 

He then goes on to say: 

All I can say is that I was looking for a certain density of thought. A living voice. A text that would surprise me and take me through a mental adventure."  

Lopate not only writes essays, but obviously reads them as well, as he has edited collections of some interesting essays from the Classical Era to the Present.  It seems that Mr. Lopate not only lives in the now; he is equally comfortable in ancient Greece, and Japan.

He quotes from Kenko, Essays in Idleness:

"You should never put the new antlers of a deer to your nose and smell them. They have little insects that crawl into the nose and devour the brain." 

Hmmmm.  Braineaters.  Or like I say, maggots love the meat. 

The original Japanese name for Essays in Idleness means "with nothing better to do."  Kenki employs the "random mode of composition known as zuihitsu (follow the brush) in Japanese. Zuihitsu was popular with  Japanese writers, who felt that it was perhaps less dishonest that creating fiction. The random nature of zuihitsu caused readers to take "pleasure not only in moving from one to another of the great variety of subjects, but in tracing subtle links joining the successive episodes."

For readers wanting to trace my subtle links, may I suggest the following choices to better "parse my weird."   

I possess not only what Phillip Lovate calls "a certain density", but what others have remarked as an undefinable "miltiness."  Oh milt, salty and sticky, sweet and sour, unctuous, ready-to-mix, no fuss-no muss, flavour enhancing, sometimes entrancing, slippery, rubbery, hopefully enchanting.  Milt fuels the ever changing choice of which of my inner voices will cause fingers to hit keys, causing words to form, gather, come together in paragraphs to express my thoughts.  This propulsive process yields some strange fiction, and an even stranger non-fiction.  

It is this certain density and this uncertain miltiness that makes me who I am, the man you know as Dense Milt. I never asked for this job.  But I do love this job more than any other.  When I am letting go, setting the inner voices free to speak to you through me.  On behalf of all of us, we hope this time you have just spent reading us has been a worthy use of your time.  There are no guarantees; every word is presented on an as-is basis.  That is the thing about free speech, you get what you pay for.  

    

  

   

Parsing People Based on Degree of Problematic Personalities

DENSE MILT'S PARSING OF PEOPLE BASED ON DEGREES OF PROBLEMATIC PERSONALITIES

"Psychologist Dr David Zald of Vanderbilt University in Nashville has identified a tiny part of the brain which he believes governs people's tendency to have regular bouts of irritability, anxiety or anger. The more active that part of the brain, the more likely someone is to suffer bad moods."

This is not rocket science.  Some people are just impossible.  The impossible are not only possible, but are now parsable. 

Age is definitely a factor.  Some infants are cranky; some teenagers uncontrollable.  Over fifty, hormones kick in and the curmudgeon gene is dominant.   People simply quit caring what other people think. 

asshole

Someone being arrogant, rude, obnoxious, or just a total dickhead. 

bitch

a malicious, unpleasant, selfish person, especially a woman.

crab

A quarrelsome, ill-tempered person. 

crank

A person who holds an unshakable belief that most of his or her contemporaries consider to be false; an ill-tempered individual or one who is in a bad mood; German krank has a modern meaning of "sick, ill", evolved from a former meaning "weak, small".

A crank is defined as a man who cannot be turned.— Nature, 8 Nov 1906, 25/2

cunt

A mean or obnoxious or contemptible person

curmudgeon

An ill-tempered (and frequently old) person full of stubborn ideas or opinions.

dickhead

A stupid, irritating, or ridiculous person, particularly a man.

geek

A person with an unusual or odd personality. A carnival performer who does disgusting acts.

grump

A cranky complaining person.  A surly or bad-tempered person

hater

A person that simply cannot be happy for another person's success. So rather than be happy they make a point of exposing a flaw in that person.

jerk

an unlikable person; especially : one who is cruel, rude, or small-minded

kook

A kook, Daddy-O, is a screwball who is 'gone' farther than most— Daily Mail, 22 Aug 1960, 4/5

misanthrope

A person who dislikes or distrusts other people or mankind in general

nutbar (also nutter, nutjob, nut, nutcake)

A person who is regarded as eccentric or mad

Parsing people on the basis of degree of their problematic personalities is not easy; this is a job for an expert, which is why Dense Milt has dedicated himself to this task, no matter how onerous.  

Do not believe for one minute that mere identification somehow excuses said behavior, or marginalizes such behaviour.  

Negative behaviour can become quite an artform in the right hands.  

This is not a private pursuit; there would be no need of psychiatry without negative behaviours.  There is actually an International Society of Curmudgeons.  They are very serious about what comprises acts of curmudgeonry, and do not take to unauthorized acts of curmudgeonry.

As such, they have supplied an incident report form if you witness said behaviours.

Unauthorized Curmudgeonry - Incident Report

If you have witnessed unauthorized grumpiness, grouchiness or curmudgeonry, we strongly encourage you to report it. The ISOC does not take unauthorized grumpiness lightly by unlicensed grouches. All reports will be thoroughly investigated. 

If after reading this, some of you may have comments.  Do you really think I care what you think? 

Really?  

Have you been reading this?

And you still think I care about what you think?

Impossible.

Tar

Like tar, we have memories that stick with us over time, above all other memories; it may seem odd that  these memories (or pictures in our mind) do not always have a particular significance that is easily discernible.
My first "memory" which is very hazy is falling down an outdoor  concrete stairwell entrance to a basement at the age of two, and losing a tooth.  But the memory is so vague, and perhaps planted in my mind by stories told to me by my mother as I was growing up.   At age four, I remember running naked into the street, and being spanked.  I remember punching a friend in the eye, and marvelling at my own power, but also struck by horror over my actions.  I remember walking in freshly laid concrete and getting into trouble for obviously ruining the setting of this concrete.  I remember walking alone down hills of snow in the winter on my way to my first year in school in Montana, the snow piled higher than me, each step I would sink sometimes up to my head.  I remember the bakery at the bottom of the hill that sold maple bars ( long rectangular donuts with maple sugar icing).  I remember singing songs to myself, making up melodies and lyrics at age 6, the embarrassment of soiling your pants on the way to school, and then having to sit there the rest of the day in shame.  I remember shoplifting candy, and kissing my first girl and playing with the Catholics next door, whose family of ten plus kids meant that there were always kids younger and older than my friend Kevin Sullivan, and how their whole house smelled like pee.  And I remember my friend Alan with the chapped lips, crew cut who always chewed on pencils, erasers and the glue that janitors made from horses ( or so we were told, as I remember).  And how I was surprised to learn that Alan kept gallon jars of his own urine under his bed, more than twenty gallon jars.  I don't remember why he kept them, but perhaps I was too shocked or embarrassed to ask.  I remember going on a day trip with friends of my parents in an early version of the SUV, perhaps a SCOUT, up the hills in Montana, and coming around the bend of a mountain only to find that half the road was no longer there, and trying to back up without having the vehicle fall off the cliff, and of course because I am here some fifty years later, successfully getting back down the mountain.  I remember playing in the giant moving wardrobe boxes, and getting up to change the channel, and being scolded to not sit so close to the television set, and listening to late night talk radio from KGO in San Francisco from Aberdeen Washington under the covers with my black transistor radio close to my ear, hoping noone would hear me up past my bedtime.   I remember going to a Cub Scouts function and seeing all these kids with physical defects, and mental defects, and one kid with water on his brain that caused his head to be about three times the size of a normal head.  And I remember the first time I saw a kid in the hallways with severe acne, pustules all over his back and face, all seemingly ready to pop at any moment.  And I remember walking to the center of town, and once getting mugged for my change by an older kid who threatened to beat me up if I told, and seeing in his face not only anger, but a strange kind of fear and fragility, as if this wasn't something that he had done before.   And I remember my father carrying me in his arms up the stairs to my bed, and how safe and warm that felt, and I remember crawling into my parents bed after a nightmare and being surprised that my father did not have his pyjama bottoms on, and how warm his body was.  Oh, he was my furnace my mother used to say.  And I remember seeing him after a man had broken his cheekbones and jaw, with his jaw wired and eating soup from a large straw, and knowing that my father was vulnerable, and breakable, and how that made me feel.  And falling off my bicycle and breaking my front tooth ( same tooth that I had lost as a baby falling down those stairs), and the tooth going through my upper lip and the lip swelling up five times the normal size, and my brothers calling me a Ubangi.   I remember all the men who came to visit my dad at our house who worked in the sawmills, men with half an arm, or only three fingers on their hand.   I remember my dad making rye and gingers, and my mother buying frozen creme pies, and frozen meat pies, and frozen fish sticks,and how we would have starved I think if we didn't have a freezer.  And I remember when my dad shot a deer, and the smell of the blood, and the taste of the venison that we ate all that winter, and how I hated the taste, which reminded me of the smell of the blood.
It is strange which memories stick with us.  Like tar.  Like the tar-baby and the five Chinese brothers, and the sad joke my dad made about pecan pie, and the word he used for mandarin oranges, or brazil nuts, words that we all knew were wrong, words that he knew were wrong, and yet repeated like a dirty joke in the schoolyard, furtive, with bravado soaked in shame.  These were the times I remember.  Some of the times, as I remember much more. And these memories come back to me at the strangest times, in a dream, or in the daylight, spurred on my a word or an image or a song.   Like my first boy-girl party I went to at my friend Johnny Mercer (Not that Johnny Mercer) where Johnny had a little suit on with a turtle neck, the epitome of the seven year old swinger, as we listened to the Beatles and danced.  And how ten years later dancing under the moonlight on a beach in Victoria, naked in the dark in the summer, young thin bodies running into the waves, fuelled on alcohol and teenage hormones.  And so I write them down to commit them to a written memory, so that when the actual memory fades or disappears, I will have them here, written down. And someone can read them to me.
And which ones will I remember? Which memories will stick with me like tar, unshakable, dark light black and white, forever stuck in my mind?