Mocking the Learning Disabled

Several times, I've seen a video on Facebook making fun of a female driver who repeatedly parks with the wrong side of her vehicle facing the gas pump until she finally gets it right. On YouTube, the video is titled "Stupid woman at gas station," and many comments on both YouTube and Facebook derisively echo the YouTube title.

But I don't feel like laughing. To me, the video appears to be a textbook depiction of nonverbal learning disorder, and this is a problem with which I have a frustrating lifetime of firsthand experience. Here is the comment I posted to Facebook and YouTube about it, and I hope some people take it to head and heart:

I don't laugh at videos like this, because I empathize with the driver. Like me, she may well have NLD--nonverbal learning disability--and, consequently, great difficulty seeing in her mind's eye how to get the proper side of her vehicle to face the gas pump. And the frustration she undoubtedly feels over her mistakes coupled with anxiety that people might be watching her struggle and laughing at her might well inhibit her reasoning faculties to the extent that she keeps impulsively repeating her mistakes instead of finding some way or other of collecting herself so that she can figure out how to do what she needs to do. She could be very intelligent in other ways. And even if she's not, I wish we would have more empathy and compassion for people who struggle to do things that we are fortunate not to struggle with.

My Friend is Married to the Shrew From Hell

A friend of mine has been living in a loveless marriage for years. But it's gotten even worse recently. His wife has long insisted that things be done her way with precise exactitude and that my friend jump to her every imperious command. But over the past couple of years, she's become the shrew from hell who not only stomps and yells like an insane person when she doesn't immediately get her way, but she even makes thinly veiled threats that if my friend doesn't do what she says, she'll kick him out of the house, and if he refuses to leave right then and there, she'll call the police and falsely accuse him of a serious crime, like the wife of someone I know may have done years ago when she accused him of molesting their young daughter, and he ended up going to prison and then being deported after he served his time.

I find it close to unfathomable that someone could treat her spouse or anyone else this way, no matter what the provocation. I find it even more so that my friend's wife could treat HIM that way. I've known my friend a long, long time, and he is the most mild-mannered and accommodating person I think I've ever known. He also doesn't lie and isn't prone to exaggeration, so I have no trace of belief that he's lying or exaggerating about his wife's behavior. If anything, he's probably understating just how bad it is!

I don't know how I would feel or what I would do if my wife treated me this way. I know that I'd get the hell away from her as soon as I could possibly manage it, because my vow to stay married "for better or worse" never extended THAT far. But I don't know how well I'd be able to hold my temper if she came at me with a hissy fit or with serious threats like my friend's wife does him. I'm not nearly as mild mannered or accommodating as he is. 

Thank God my wife is nothing like my friend's!

Doubts and Competing Interests

I am at something of a crossroads. I've spent most of my life arguing against Christianity online and off and wanting to write engaging books and articles sharing my counterapologetical efforts with the world. I used to think I could or, at least, might be able to do this by simply collecting all my best arguments and then presenting them as systematically and clearly as I could while finding some way to do it with a novel enough combination of comprehensiveness, clarity, eloquence, and idiosyncratic intimacy and charm that some nebulous albeit sizable segment of the public would go for it.

I say "nebulous" because I can't imagine that most fervent Christians would want to read anything I've written that argues against their beliefs, and I'm not sure that enough non-believers aren't already so saturated with counterapologetical arguments from existing sources or are interested enough in the subject to pursue it that there would be an appreciable market for my efforts no matter how good they might be.

But then there's also the question of how good my efforts could ever be for any audience. I am the veritable personification of the maxim that the more one learns, the more he realizes how ignorant he is. For not only have my fairly recent encounters with erudite and brilliant counterapologists such as William Lane Craig, J.P Moreland, and Peter Kreeft convinced me that I have so much more to learn and understand on a deeper level about Christian theology and apologetics than I've learned or understood so far or probably have enough time left in my life to learn and deeply understand, but I admit that I don't think I'm smart enough to learn it no matter how much time I might have left and no matter how hard I might try.

And then there's the even bigger and seemingly more insurmountable challenge of mastering counterarguments sufficiently powerful to rebut the most sophisticated apologetics. And let's face it. I don't want to bother arguing against the lowest common denominator of Christian beliefs and defenses of those beliefs, such as the biblical literalism of Noah's Ark or Jonah and the Whale. I want to be able to offer powerful arguments against the best apologetics of the leading figures I've already mentioned and more, and their apologetics go way beyond defending Noah's Ark. And these are just the evangelical theologians and apologists. What about the more liberal ones? How could I ever come to grips with and refute their apologetics? And really, when I come right down to it, why would I want to? If I think it's all nonsense to begin with, why spend time and energy trying like mad to refute it?

Not only this, but I'm interested in so many other things. I'm fascinated with the free will vs determinism issue. I'm increasingly interested in political philosophy and in developing a coherent view of the ideal society and type of government. I continue to be interested in spirituality, especially as viewed by Ken Wilber's integral model. I have an abiding fascination with the intersection of modernized stoicism and psychotherapy. I'm experiencing a revival of my interest in psychology and a growing one in neuroscience and cognitive science. I still want to learn more about the physical sciences, especially physics and cosmology. The list of my interests are proliferating like the weeds in my front and back lawns. And I feel myself pulled toward all of them, while, at the same time, I feel crushingly inadequate to even remotely satisfy any of them.

Part of me wants to drop counterapologetics and move on to my other interests which, despite the challenges they too pose, might be more accessible and fulfilling to me than further pursuit of evangelical Christian counterapologetics could ever be. Yet, I've acquired, at no small expense, so many books and other materials on Christianity, apologetics, and counterapologetics over the years, and have spent so much time and effort thinking about this stuff and discussing it that I feel like I can't just throw it all away.

I don't know what to do. But I need to figure something out. And, more importantly, I need to follow through with whatever decision I make, which is hard to do when you feel convinced that you can't succeed no matter what you decide.

Reaching Out to a Fellow Blogger

I've been reading an outstanding blog by a very smart young man for several years. He majors in physics at a Midwestern university and is wrapping up his coursework there while hoping to be admitted for postgraduate work to a top tier school such as MIT to complete his PhD in theoretical physics with a specialization in cosmology.

But, over the years, he's blogged brilliantly not only about his intense interest in theoretical physics and cosmology but also about areas and issues in philosophy, politics, religion, economics, international news, society and culture, and so on in addition to addressing very personal issues concerning his recurring bouts of depression and enduring alienation from mainstream society.

In his most recent blogpost, he expresses extreme displeasure over having to take humanities courses he despises--because they focus on rote memorization of trivial names, places, dates, and research paper style formats--and needing to earn A's in them so that he can maintain his perfect 4.0 GPA in order to have any chance of being accepted by a school like MIT, and he worries that if he isn't admitted to one of these preeminent universities, his hopes and dreams of contributing something of scientific substance to the world will be all but dashed, and, as soon as he can earn enough money from a second-rate teaching job at a second-rate college, he'll just want to melt away into the wilderness and be a hermit for the rest of his miserable life.

I feel saddened by this bright young man's reclusiveness and depressive outlook and wish that there were something I could do to help him. But then I'm in no position to help anyone grappling with challenges not so dissimilar in some respects to ones that have plagued and seemingly gotten the best of me for most of my life. However, I couldn't read his blogpost without trying to do something, and so I wrote the following comment on his blog. I hope it helps at least in some small measure.

I am very concerned about your proneness to depression, your disdain for ordinary human interaction, and your belief that if you can’t make it into MIT or its lofty equivalent, you essentially have nothing left to live for except being a disillusioned drone eking out a living until you can retire as a hermit living aimlessly in the wilderness.
And I say this as someone who, although he lacks your obvious brilliance in math and science, has always felt at odds with society and uncomfortable with much of what passes for socialization.
But, in my case, I’ve long been interested in many disciplines and issues, aided and abetted by my increasing appreciation of the interconnectedness of all phenomena and of all disciplines that study these phenomena, so that I’ve come to regard almost no academic subject as boring or worthless, and almost all learning, whether curricular or extracurricular, as potentially illuminating and enriching.
I won’t deny that I share your aversion to grinding, rote memorization of dates and places, but I’m guessing that there are other aspects of your humanities courses that are or at least could be fascinating to an open and curious mind, and that gifted and accomplished theoretical physicists from Einstein and Oppenheimer in the past to Ed Witten today have opened their minds and interest to disciplines and subjects far outside their own discipline and have probably been the happier for it.
Moreover, while I too prefer to discuss subjects and issues that most people would probably prefer to pass up in favor of “small” talk about their jobs, their families, their favorite sports team, or the latest insult from some politician or gossip about some celebrity, I have learned to take more pleasure in the company of others by looking for and appreciating the beauty that lies in almost everyone whether they’re talking about the sacred or the profane, the profound or the mundane.
I hope you make it into MIT and get to do the kind of work there that you heart longs to do, but I also hope that, whether you do or don’t, you’ll find life to be richer and more fulfilling than you seem to now, and that other people from all walks of life and levels of intelligence will come to occupy a more vital and pleasurable part of your life than they seem to now.In the meantime, I hope you keep on blogging about yourself and your experiences inside and outside academia, because your blog has been one of my longtime favorites, and it’s been a real pleasure to get to know you as well as I’d like to think I’ve come to know you and your beautiful search for truth.

What would you say to this young man if you could?

A Mind is a Terrible Thing to Lose

A dear friend of mine is sliding rapidly down the cognitive hill with diagnosed dementia. He used to fly airplanes, climb mountains, and study martial arts under a master who grew up with Bruce Lee and learned from Yip Man. Now he can't find his own way from the bathroom to the living room or make his way there without wobbling precariously. He used to speak intelligently and articulately about everything. Now his utterances are more like word salad. And he can scarcely dress himself or use the bathroom without help.

He's totally dependent on his dutiful wife to whom he clings like a drowning child to a lifeguard. About the only respite she gets from his near stranglehold is when I bring him here to the house to sit and talk and watch TV with me, when he's not napping, while she hangs out at the local Thai Buddhist temple with my wife and the other "temple ladies," as they call themselves.

Yet, he's not reached the point of being oblivious to his accelerating decline and dependency. In fact, he's acutely aware of them and magnifies this awful awareness with his predilection to ruminate interminably on his deterioration. His mind works like a needle on a beat up old phonograph record. The needle hops and skips all over the place producing scratchy, cacophonous noise or gets stuck in a deep groove repeating the same passage again and again until someone moves it. And there seems to be nothing anybody can do to reverse or even stall his precipitous descent into mental oblivion.

So what he tells me with increasing frequency that he wants to do about all this is to end his own life so that he won't continue to burden his wife or anyone else with his growing dependency and to wallow in a disintegrating, purposeless existence that brings him no pleasure much less joy. And I find myself unable to sincerely tell him anything that might reassure him or lift his spirits, because I can't think of anything reassuring and inspiring to say to him. And when I try to do it anyway, it comes out sounding pathetically awkward, hollow, and perfunctory and probably doesn't fool him, despite his compromised condition, any more than it does me.

The truth is, if I were in my friend's shoes, and someday I might very well be, I wouldn't want to go on either. So I can hardly blame him for feeling the way he does. Fortunately or unfortunately, I don't think he has the means to do anything about it except inexorably sink to his natural demise.

In the meantime, all I can do is hang in there with him and be the best friend to him I can be as his tragic dissolution continues unabated.

Savage Justice for Jared Fogle?

I just read that Jared Fogle, the former Subway pitchman recently sentenced to 16+ years in prison for possession of child pornography and paid sex with minors, has been having a difficult time behind bars. I posted about his sentencing immediately after it was imposed.

Well, to no one's surprise or, at least, not to mine, social media is aflame with posts from people who are thrilled over Mr. Fogle's prison tribulations and who are fervently hoping that he's being subjected to far worse than has been reported. You can well imagine what those fervent hopes entail.

So, in response to some of those comments, this is what I posted yesterday:

Maybe those of you who are so gleeful over the prospect of someone being relentlessly sexually abused might be a little less so if you were the victim or even the observer of such abuse. Of course, you'll reflexively counter that Fogle's getting back what he gave out. But even if that's true, and I'm not aware that we know that any of the children in the confiscated pornography or in his documented sexual encounters were endlessly, forcibly, and viciously sodomized, it doesn't legitimize the infliction of such grievous punitive abuse. What Fogle did was very wrong. And what you all are getting your jollies publicly fantasizing about is also very wrong. And just as a certain kind of sickness or defect undoubtedly causes people like Fogle to do what most of us never would because, thank goodness, we don't share that sickness or defect, so a certain kind of darkness lies at the heart of human nature that craves the kind of awful retribution we see condoned and celebrated here. We humans really are a sorry lot!

And in response to one particular person's comments urging that the same old same old be done to Mr. Fogle, I posted this:

no one deserves to be treated as a subhuman even if you, in your savage advocacy to the contrary, believe otherwise. Moreover, it could be argued that people such as yourself, in publicly urging that a fellow human being be essentially tortured to death, is guilty of worse than the person on whom he wants to see this torture inflicted. Yes, I would argue that all the people here, including yourself, who champion the "justice" of Mr. Fogle being raped and tortured for the rest of his days are more reprehensible in your conduct than Mr. Fogle was. And if I'm right, what do you advocates of savage justice suppose should be done to YOU?

Having written this, I realize that posting such comments won't change anyone's mind. If anything, it'll inflame those who disagree with them and further entrench them in their disagreement. So, I guess it's fair to say that I'm mostly just venting my frustration and disgust over human savagery, and it could be argued that this is, in its own right, a kind of savagery or, at least, verbal violence.

But I would also like to think that I'm publishing the truth, regardless of what effect the public conveyance of it has on those who read it. That is, wanting and publicly advocating that sick people be relentlessly sexually tortured and worse for their sick acts is horrendous and, arguably, worse than those sick acts themselves, and that such widespread embrace of this kind of "justice" speaks countless volumes for the essential and, perhaps, irremediable depravity of the human condition.

Sudden Death

I found out today that my wife's dentist "passed away" recently. That's how his receptionist phrased it in a manner that sounded distressed. I was very surprised by this. And saddened. He appeared to be no older than his late 30's or early 40's, and I got the impression that his death came about not by traumatic accident or protracted terminal illness but with unforeseen suddenness from "natural" causes.

Dr. Cheng seemed to be an excellent and dedicated dentist. He and his wife owned the practice and practiced together. They have or, rather, she has two kids. My heart goes out to her. She will now be my wife's dentist.

And I am left solemnly reflecting on the fact that if a guy that young can die out of the blue, a much older guy like me can too and that I need to get my act together while I still have the chance.

Did Jared Fogle Get What He Deserves?

Jared Fogle became the face of Subway after he reputedly lost an ungodly amount of weight on a Subway sandwich diet, and he was, for a time, arguably one of America's most beloved pitchmen. But now he's become America's boogeyman in the wake of a 15 years and 8 months prison sentence resulting from a plea deal for soliciting and paying to have sex with minors and for possessing and trading in child pornography.

As one might expect, people are alternately vilifying him and celebrating his judicial fate. But I take no more pleasure in Fogle's predicament than I do from contemplating the harm he's caused his family and the children he allegedly abused. For I believe that Fogle's actions were the result of a sickness he couldn't resist and that this makes him as much a victim of that sickness as are any of the children he may have molested.

Thus, I have grave misgivings about his harsh sentence if it was imposed for retributively punitive reasons, because it seems to me unfair and unjust to inflict retributive punishment on someone for doing something he couldn't help but do.

I also doubt that such a lengthy sentence is a significantly larger deterrent than a much lesser sentence would be. I wonder if any research has been done in the area of the comparative deterrent effect of various prison sentences for these kinds of crimes.

One thing that such a long sentence WILL accomplish is prevent Mr. Fogle from abusing any more children for the duration of his incarceration. But if it were possible to know with certainty that he wouldn't abuse more children after he got out, I'd support letting him out far sooner.

It's my understanding that federal sentences like this tend to be carried out to the full or nearly so, and, indeed, I've read that Fogle will have to serve a minimum of 13 years no matter how well he behaves himself behind bars. And then he may face an even sterner test upon release as he confronts extreme social ostracisim and feelings of profound shame as well as the severe residential restrictions, occupational limitations, and other monumental hardships that attend having to register as a sex offender for the rest of one's life.

So, I'm thinking that he has a tremendously difficult road ahead of him as a result of his sickness, and, again, I feel sorry for him as well as for the children he abused.

Why Don't More Christians Act Christian?

I have long maintained that the reason why so many champions of Christian teachings don't act nicely is that these teachings ring and very possibly are false and that there is probably no Holy Spirit to inspire the supposedly sanctified to exemplify the more salutary tenets of their faith.

That is, we're all only human, with very human urges to act badly at times, and there may well be no God within or without to help us override our human foibles.

Therefore, we might be well-advised to find the resources within ourselves and each other to override these foibles, and belief in highly dubious gods and religious worldviews might often be more of a hindrance than a help in this effort.

Ronda Rousey Is Human, and So Am I

Ronda Rousey finally lost. I didn't want her to. I'd hopped on her bandwagon a long time ago, and I wanted to hang on tight as I rode it all the way to her retirement from MMA as the undefeated champion she repeatedly boasted she would be.

Yet, poor Ronda not only lost, she was dominated, even more than I secretly feared she might be, in every way from the opening bell. Holly Holm made this heretofore MMA goddess and self-proclaimed and media-touted "greatest fighter in the world" look like a hapless novice. And just as Ronda took some concussive blows in the Octagon last Saturday night, so did my faith in idols.

I've had an almost lifelong tendency to single out certain athletes, musicians, intellectuals, and so forth and regard and revere them as idols who not only can do no wrong but are superhuman in their transcendent talents and skills.

I don't know why I've done this. Maybe I've just wanted the human equivalent of that "shining city on the hill" to serve as my glittering inspiration to aim higher, or to at least let me vicariously experience the glorious success and greatness I could never hope to achieve for myself but that the little boy inside me continued to crave.

But I may have difficulty doing this after what happened in Australia and what has happened on other fronts, and maybe it's for the best that I stop placing people on towering pedestals and start respecting myself as much as I do anybody and everybody else. Maybe when I stop worshiping other people as gods, I'll also stop feeling so feeble and inferior by comparison that I lack any motivation to cultivate my own talents, hone my own skills, and fulfill my own dreams.

I still like and respect Ronda Rousey, and I hope that she gets a rematch with Holly Holm and maybe even wins it. But I doubt that I'll ever see her or anyone else again the way I've seen her and other previous and recent idols of mine, and I think that's probably a good thing.

Yogi Berra and Me

I've been posting alleged quotes or "Yogi-isms" from Yogi Berra to Facebook every Thursday for months. But now I may stop, at least for awhile. Now that he's gone, my heart just isn't in it. I feel sad that he's gone, even though he played mostly before my time, I was never a Yankees fan, and I haven't cared much for baseball since I stopped being a kid.

It's just that there was something so endearing about the guy, even if a lot of what it was may have been modified, misattributed, or even fabricated. Beyond that, with each famous figure who dies old or young, I can't help but think more vividly than usual that my time, my mom's time, my wife's time, the times of all those who ever mattered or will matter to me will come.

Yet, a friend emailed me today about Yogi's passing, and I replied to his subject line "Bad News" that perhaps Mr. Berra was so old, frail, and sick that dying was the best thing that could happen to him. I read that his wife died fairly recently and that he'd been in an assisted living facility for several years. Was there anything left for him to live for?

I don't want to go on living when my quality of life is so irrevocably compromised that not only can I not enjoy it any longer but I require other people to attend to pretty much my every need. Unfortunately, for longer than I care to admit, I've done very little to compress my morbidity through the recommended means of good diet, exercise, sleep, socializing, spiritualizing, etc.

But I think this is about to change or is already changing as I write this. I'm watching a Great Course's series of lectures on "How to Stay Fit as You Age," and I'm really digging it. What's more, I'm really digging the way I feel when and after I take my walks and do my exercises that I've neglected for far too long.

If I follow the pretty professor's advice, I may just be able to significantly compress my own morbidity even at this relatively late date, and even if I'm very unlikely to live as long as Yogi, maybe I can live pretty well until whenever I draw my last breath.

I Don't Need No Stinkin' Cable!

When I canceled cable TV over two years ago, I was afraid I'd miss out on a lot. But it turns out that, with the help of my Roku boxes, I've watched more great TV series on streaming demand via Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu than I ever did or would have on cable, and I'm paying much, MUCH less for the privilege.

Here are some of the good to superlative series I've watched on my TVs in their entirety since cutting the cable: FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS, BATTLESTAR GALACTACA (remake), CAPRICA, THE BOOTH AT THE END, SIX FEET UNDER, DEXTER, DEADWOOD, BREAKING BAD, THE SOPRANOS, THE WIRE, MAD MEN, THE BRIDGE, and SONS OF ANARCHY. And I've watched five seasons of THE GOOD WIFE and JUSTIFIED this way, along with four seasons of HELL ON WHEELS, three seasons of LONGMIRE, two seasons of FALLING SKIES and RECTIFY, and a season of MANHATTAN, BOSCH, and MOZART IN THE JUNGLE. And I just began watching FARGO, look forward to watching, among other series, THE AMERICANS, HOUSE OF CARDS, ORANGE IS THE NEW BLACK, TRANSPARENT, THE WALKING DEAD, SENSE8, EXTANT, HANNIBAL, SEINFELD (never watched it on regular TV), and NARCOS, as well as to finishing the series I've already mentioned that haven't wrapped yet.

Who says you have to pay for expensive cable or satellite services or engage in illegal and cumbersome downloading to watch great television at relatively minimal expense and fuss?

My Fifteen Seconds of "Fame"

I don't know why it's taken me so long to post this. After all, it's not every day that I get interviewed by a television news station. In fact, I've never been interviewed before. But it happened last Tuesday afternoon.

I had posted comments on two local news stations' Facebook pages that morning about my close encounter with a wrong-way driver bound for tragedy the previous night. And just a couple of hours later, I received a voicemail from a female reporter at one of the stations asking if she could interview me about my experience. However, she seemed to believe that I had actually witnessed the fatal crash that occurred right after my near miss, so I thought I didn't have anything worthwhile to say to her and didn't call her back as she requested.

But that afternoon, a male reporter called from the same station, and this time I picked up the phone and talked to him. He too wanted to interview me. I told him I didn't see the accident, but he still wanted to interview me to "get the perspective" of someone who closely encountered the errant driver just moments before he died in a fiery crash that also killed two other people. So, I agreed to let him come to my house for an interview.

He and his cameraman arrived about fifteen minutes later, and I stepped out on the front porch for the interview. I felt nervous, but not as nervous as I was afraid I might be except for the fact that I was still nervous enough that my right leg involuntarily and disconcertingly jerked forward from below the knee numerous times as I stood there answering the reporter's routine questions about what I saw and felt the previous night and what I thought about it all in retrospect. The interview concluded very quickly and the reporter and cameraman thanked me for consenting to it.

That night, my wife and I tuned in to that station's ten o'clock newscast right after the penultimate telecast of the penultimate season of American Idol, and a short way into it they aired a story on the crash, and a snippet from my interview appeared. Since I no longer subscribe to cable, I didn't have a DVR to record it with, but my wife recorded it off the TV with her cellphone video camera. I haven't checked out the result. I wasn't sufficiently enamored with what I saw on TV to want to see it again.

Still, I'm glad I did the interview. It was an experience, short-lived as it was, that I'll be unlikely to forget, although more likely than the other guy they interviewed who saw the accident, tried in vain to help CHP officers pull the wrong-way driver from his pickup before it caught fire, and then stood by helplessly as the driver burned to death in front of him. That poor interviewee and the other witnesses to this tragedy will probably have nightmares for a long time about what they saw and heard that awful night.

I have only relief that I wasn't driving in the fast lane when I encountered the pickup; sadness for the people killed, for their families and friends, and for those who saw the victims die; and an iota of shallow gratification that I got to do something I've never done before and enjoy my fleeting moment of quasi-fame.

A Cool Brush With Catastrophe

I rarely post to this blog anymore. But something happened last night that I can't NOT post about.

I was driving home in lane #2 of the westbound lanes of I-80 from my bowling league after midnight and had just passed a big rig to my right when suddenly, in the fast lane next to me on my left, I saw the oncoming headlights of a pickup truck headed the wrong way eastbound, and the vehicle flew past me before I had time to do anything but register the almost surreal incident with numb incredulity.

I had my cellphone with me and thought about calling the police, but, since my cellphone won't connect with the car speaker my wife uses with her cellphone, I would have needed to extract my phone from the secure case attached to my belt, turn it on, locate, press, and hold the tiny "emergency call" icon at the bottom of the screen, and then call 911 while keeping at least one hand on the steering wheel and my eyes and concentration still mostly on the road, and I figured someone behind me would also see the pickup soon enough and call it in via a safer arrangement, and, hopefully, all would be well.

When I got home a few minutes later, I hastily posted the following to Facebook:

Tonight as I drove home from the bowling center after midnight in the westbound lanes of I-80, a pickup truck flew past me in the next lane going in the wrong direction. A monumental oops for whoever was driving, and lucky for me that I wasn't in that lane. Yikes!

I didn't give the matter much thought after that and, being as late as it was and as tired as I was, I bedded down and went right to sleep. But when my wife and I got up at 6 this morning, I told her about the incident and then turned on the local news. Soon after that, I saw mention of a fatal accident caused by a pickup driving the wrong way in the fast lane just east of where and moments after I had my encounter. 

A Ford-150 pickup collided head on with a Lexus sedan in the fast lane. The pickup immediately burst into flames and burned its driver beyond recognition of even his or her gender. The two male occupants of the horribly crumpled Lexus died at the scene, and the freeway was shut down for hours in that vicinity.

A normal person might well respond to this experience by solemnly banging out some platitudinous observance such as: "Times like these make me realize how precarious life is and how important it is to make every moment count and to kiss your loved one(s) before leaving and tell them you love them so that if these happen to be the last things you do and say to your loved one(s), they're the RIGHT things."

But since there's nothing normal about me, I'm not going to say this (even though I kinda just did). But I *am* going to reflect here on how I responded to what happened and try to draw some lessons from it.

This morning some of the local news channels posted the story of the accident to their Facebook pages, and I jumped in and commented on my experience last night. Someone responded immediately by leveling accusatory words at me to the effect that I hadn't even called the police to warn them about the wrong-way driver. 

Well, I never said this in my comment, but the commenter somehow drew that conclusion from what I wrote, and she was right. I hadn't called the police. I lied to her and said I didn't call because my cellphone was "inaccessible," and I went on to explain that the CHP had already been notified and that two CHP officers enroute to intercept the pickup saw the collision from the opposite side of the freeway just moments after the pickup passed me.

The fact is, even though my notifying the CHP would have made no difference in this instance, I didn't know this at the time and should have called in anyway on the off chance that it might have prevented a catastrophe. I *did* think about calling it in, but I reasoned that someone had probably done it already or would sooner and more safely than I could at the time, and that the pickup driver himself or herself would probably realize soon enough what was happening and take evasive action before anyone was hurt on the sparsely trafficked freeway on which I'd seen no one in the fast lane thus far.

But after that, I hardly gave it a second thought. I drove right on home without exiting the freeway at the next opportunity and stopping from where I could have safely called 911. And I didn't feel particular concern for any right-way drivers who might encounter the wrong-way driver behind me.

I'd like to pass this off not as a psychopathic lack of concern for my fellow "man" but as yet another instance of my typically poor judgement along with a psychologically protective kind of insulation from the needless distress of helpless concern. In other words, I cared about the drivers behind me but figured I couldn't do anything about it soon enough to make a difference and didn't want to stress myself with unproductive concern about it and reassured myself that everything would be okay.

But is this *really* why I didn't call in what I saw or give it much of an additional thought short of publishing my rather cursory post to Facebook before lying down and quickly departing the land of wakefulness?

I guess I don't know the definitive answer to this. Neither do I know why I don't feel the sense of profound relief that I was spared the fate of the two men in the Lexus. Should I feel it? Is there something wrong with me that I don't? Would most people feel it?

I won't launch into a pity party of saying (although, once again, I kinda just did) that I think my wife might be better off in the long run if that pickup had collided with me instead of with the Lexus and that the fact that it didn't is something I needn't celebrate with feelings and expressions of deep gratitude.

I'll just say instead that I take the following key lessons from all of this. First, be sure to do whatever I must to call in any road hazards--from wrong-way, persistently swerving, or alarmingly speeding or aggressive drivers to potentially dangerous road debris as soon as I can relatively safely manage it. And second, realize how precious and precarious life is and make damn sure that I kiss my wife and tell or show her I love her before I leave for bowling or other road travels, because one just never knows.

(You can access a multimedia account of the accident here.)

It's That Time Again

Another year has flown by and another "special day" greets me this morning.

I don't know how I've made it this far or how much further I'll be able to go. I say "I'll be able" rather than "have to" because I still want to keep going. You might wonder why considering that all my dreams now seem to end with the morning sun and my goals entail little more than getting through the day.

Gone are my hopes of writing my magnum opus on religion, free will, or anything else. I've come to the provisional conclusion that I have nothing to say that's worth saying and that people these days won't even read the words of those who do. Gone are my hopes of becoming the person I want to be. There's just too large a gulf between that person and the person I am and have always been.

No, today I live to love my wife, my cats, my family, and my friends. I live to enjoy the things I still can and to contribute what little I can to the enjoyment of others. That's it.

Do I sound depressed? I don't feel depressed. In fact, when I got up this morning and started seeing and replying to all the nice people wishing me Happy Birthday on Facebook, I felt happy. I still do. I'm blessed to have so many friends and acquaintances who care enough to send me birthday wishes. I've known some of them for over fifty years, and I feel a special sense of warmth and connection when I hear from one of them.

So, no, I'm not depressed. Just being realistic about who I am and what is left for me to do with a wasted life that's running out of time.

Yet, having said that, my mind is filled with things I could write even if nobody wants to read them. So maybe I was wrong to suggest that I don't even care to try. And if I were to try, just try, regardless of the result, maybe that would go a long way to bridging the aforementioned "gulf" between who I am and who I want to be.

Let's see what happens this year.

Goodbye Six Feet Under

I canceled cable TV almost two years ago and hardly miss it. In fact, I think I’m much better off for having done it. For not only have I saved thousands of dollars in fees, but I’ve also watched great series I probably wouldn’t have gotten around to otherwise, because I would have been aimlessly frittering away my TV-watching time on the talking headless and other inferior programming instead of enjoying on demand via Amazon Prime, Netflix streaming, and Hulu some of the finest programs ever to adorn the small screen.

Over these past two years, in addition to watching great series that haven’t ended such as The Good Wife and Justified and reveling in several seasons of series that have such as Deadwood and Sons of Anarchy, I’ve also watched all of Battlestar Galactica, Caprica, Friday Night Lights, Rome, Dexter, Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, and, just last night, I finished watching Six Feet Under.

Several years ago, a former friend of mine drunkenly raved about how great Six Feet Under is. He said it was a fantastically well-written, well-acted, and thought-provoking look at life and death and his favorite series ever by far. We watched the first episode together, although I think he passed out about halfway into it. Well, to be frank, I wasn’t quite as enamored with it then and subsequently as he was, but I still think it’s one of the finest TV dramas I’ve ever seen.

I guess what I disliked the most about Six Feet Under was that I often struggled not to despise almost every major character on the show. Almost every one of them, including all of the Fisher clan, seemed so incredibly neurotic, narcissistic, and callous to the needs and hurts of others, except to the extent that they saw them in terms of their own needs and hurts, that I often wanted to reach into the screen and slap them silly. I mean there were times when I virtually hated Nathan, Ruth, and Claire and recoiled from David’s whiny effeminacy.

But when all was said and done, I still cared about all of them, because, as all great TV series do, they were masterfully enacted as full-bodied, complex characters who took tentative steps forward and despairing ones backward along their developmental paths encountering life’s endless and sometimes overwhelming challenges, and there was so much poignancy mixed with delightfully dark humor in their travails, not to mention so many psychological, philosophical, and religious themes to contemplate along the way, that how could I not love the show and already miss it now that I’m caught in the melancholy wake of its majestic final episode? (You can see the final ten minutes of the finale below)

Well, now it’s on to what may well be the greatest show of them all--The Wire. What will I think of it and say about it after I’ve finished watching its finale? I should know in about three months.

Standing Up to North Korea

Was the North Korean government involved in the recent hacking attacks and threats against Sony Pictures? They say they weren’t. The U.S. government says they were. I’m not sure I consider either more credible than the other. But in this case, what difference does it make? Someone did it, and Sony Pictures indefinitely cancelled distribution of the ”The Interview” as a result. 

I can’t say that I blame Sony Pictures, but I hope they release the film later on. In the meantime, I applaud pugnacious Larry Flynt for pledging to release a pornographic parody of “The Interview” to thumb his nose at those responsible for the attacks. Moreover, President Obama has denounced the attacks and vowed to respond to them in a timely and appropriate fashion.

I have an idea of how he might do this. Why doesn’t the U.S. government pay Sony Pictures for the rights to the film and let one or more major networks broadcast it to the whole country for free? It could justify this as national defense against external intimidation and censorship, and many more people might end up seeing the film than ever would otherwise. I’d be one of them. The film looks like the kind of cinematic garbage I’d never see without good reason. But now I have the best of reasons.

Bring it on!  

Meditation or Philosophy?

"The gate to spiritual practice begins with the visceral insight that everything is going to vanish, including me." ~ Lewis Richmond, Soto Zen Priest

I just finished reading a Tricycle magazine interview with Lewis Richmond about using spiritual practice to make the most, or, depending on how you look at it, the least of aging. Lewis contends that the older we get, the more we tend to experience physical deterioration and psychological awareness of our impermanence that opens a door to serious spiritual practice that may have been closed earlier in life, and that while meditation and other spiritual practices don't stop us from aging, thinking about our mortality, and dying, they can attune us more deeply to our moment-to-moment experience so that we see and accept it for what it is without wishing it were something else. He goes on to say that meditation and other spiritual practices won't necessarily make life wonderful, but they can still "make a big difference" in our life. In this way, aging can be welcomed as an opportunity for positive change instead of perceived and dreaded as a curse.

Two things came primarily to mind as I read this. First of all, I wonder if I wasn't right when I wrote years ago that spiritual practice may be vastly overrated in terms of the benefits it can deliver to the practitioner and to those in his or her orbit.

Second, I wondered if there aren't psychologically or philosophically oriented practices that might generate more fulfilling bang for the buck than would sitting countless hours on a mediation cushion. Of course, one could do both, and this multifaceted approach to personal development is, indeed, part of what has been variously called "integral transformative practice" and "integral life practice." But might one be better off spending the time one would have spent meditating reading about and practicing CBT or stoicism instead? Or would meditation make CBT and/or stoicism work better and vice versa?

My inclination is to think that, at my age and given my temperament, my time would be better spent psychologizing and philosophizing my way to wherever it is I want to go than trying to mediate myself there. But what do I really know of such things, and what can I realistically hope to accomplish with any approach?

Mother's Day Musings

Yesterday was Mother's Day, and my Facebook news feed abounded with glowing tributes by my "friends" to their mothers, many of whom have passed on to the Great Beyond.

I too am grateful to my mom, who, at 76, is not only still around but very active and vital. I'm grateful not so much for her giving me life, which has been a mixed blessing, albeit through no fault of her own, but for what she's gone through and done along the way to help me have as good a life as I possibly can under the circumstances.

You see, I wasn't a normal kid and I've never been a normal adult, and I know she must have worried about me all along and that she still worries, especially, about what will become of me if she dies before I do.

Judging from my Facebook news feed, many of my peers paid their warm respects yesterday to moms who are no longer around, but I'm guessing that most of those moms had fewer worries or, at least, less reason to worry about their adult children than mine has had about me.

But as grateful as I am to my mom for the sacrifices she's made for me and for the help she's provided at crucial times in my life, and as touched as I truly am by the tributes that others paid their moms yesterday, the thing that strikes me most poignantly about it all is a very famous line from a very famous play:

Life is but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

I mean that I saw all these people posting about their moms who are either dying or dead, and I wondered, more even than I usually do, what it's all for. Girls being born, growing up, having children, working exhaustively hard to support and raise them, their children having children, aging into decrepitude, dying, and being honored on Mother's Day. "A tale told by an idiot."

I don't feel depressed as I write this. I'm just wondering, more than usual, what these cosmic eyeblinks of a lifetime of struggle, pain, moments of pleasure, and, if we're very fortunate, a modest sense of happiness or fulfillment toward the end of it all is all about.

I guess almost everybody finds a purpose or creates one of their own. Some people find it in just getting through the day, day after day. Many find it in embracing the doctrines and in carrying out the practices of their religion. Others find it in having kids, raising families, and being "productive members" of their society. Others, like myself, who live at society's fringes but aspire to do more than just live day to day, find it in reading, writing, thinking, learning, and connecting with others and trying to be helpful and good in any way that we can. And some probably find it in all these ways.

But, in the end, it still seems like a pointless process or, at least, one empty of substance or significance. Is it, or am I missing something?

Talking With a Jehovah's Witness at my Door

Two Jehovah's Witnesses came to my door a few days ago. I usually dismiss them with a polite but firm "Thanks but no thanks" kind of response. But this time it was two women, and one of them was a personable and extremely cute, young Asian woman. So, I ended up talking with her through the screen door for almost fifteen minutes while an African-American woman stood behind her and smiled.

Once upon a time, when my grandmother was still alive and I was her caregiver as she slid steadily into helpless senility, two Jehovah's Witness ladies came to my door, and I let them in for a discussion. They talked to me and to my grandmother. It turned out that both were registered nurses, and they ended up helping me tremendously in attending to my grandmother's growing needs until the end of her life. I will always be extremely grateful to them for that. I also agreed to embark upon a course of Bible study and discussion with two male Witnesses that continued over several weeks.

Of course, I had no intention of converting from profound non-belief in any kind of "personal" God to their religion, but I've always enjoyed talking about religion, and I was intellectually curious to learn more about their unconventional beliefs. I've since forgotten most of what I learned, but I remember coming away from the experience with those men and the two nurses feeling mystified over how these seemingly intelligent and thoughtful people could embrace such nonsense, but also feeling impressed that they all seemed to live their faith in devoted ways that most so-called religious people I've observed didn't. I had to hand it to them that they appeared to practice what they preached and that what they preached was, if bordering on insane in some of its elements, at least relatively harmless and even solidly beneficial to the people, such as my grandmother, whom these Witnesses helped in the community.

I told the Asian woman about the Witnesses I had observed, and she thanked me for the compliment to her faith. But I also told her I'd be extremely unlikely to ever believe what she believes. Yet, she still asked if it would be okay to leave some literature with me and, perhaps, for her to stop back by and discuss it with me sometime. If she had not been so pretty and friendly, I would have politely said no. But she was, and I said okay.

I've only read a couple of paragraphs from one of the two small pamphlets she gave me. I guess I better get to work.